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“In John Lewis, we are humbled to see a person of towering physical
and moral courage—a man who has accomplished what so many
others have feared to try.” —Senator Edward Kennedy

ACROSS
THAT
BRIDGE
Life Lessons and a Vision for Change
o

JOHN
LEWISUnited States Congressman
FOREWORD BY DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
A lthough it l|as been decades since
the historic social upheavals of the
1960s, Americans continue to look to the
Civil Rights Movement as the apotheosis
of political expression. With an engaged
electorate once again confronting ques¬
tions of social inequality, there’s no
better time to revisit the lessons of the
’60s and no better leader to learn from
than Congressman John Lewis.
In Across That Bridge, Congressman
Lewis draws from his experience as a
leader of the Civil Rights Movement to
offer timeless guidance to anyone seek¬
ing to live virtuously and transform the
world. His wisdom, poignant recollec¬
tions, and powerful ideas will inspire a
new generation to usher in a freer, more
peaceful society.
The Civil Rights Movement gave
rise to the protest culture we know today,
and the experiences of leaders like Con¬
gressman Lewis have never been more
relevant. Now, more than ever, this na¬
tion needs a strong and moral voice to
guide an engaged population through
visionary' change.
ANN ARBOR DISTRICT LIBRARY

31621210919901
ACROSS
THAT
BRIDGE
ACROSS
THAT
BRIDGE
Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

CONGRESSMAN

JOHN LEWIS
WITH BREN DA JONES

New Yor/{
Copyright © 2012 John Lewis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. Printed in the United
States of America. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York,
New York, 10011.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lewis, John, 1940 Feb. 21-

Across that bridge: life lessons and a vision for change/John Lewis.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4013-2411-7
1. Lewis, John, 1940 Feb. 21—Philosophy. 2. Conduct of life. 3. Legislators—
United States—Biography. 4. African American legislators—Biography.
5. United States. Congress. House—Biography. 6. Civil rights workers—United
States—Biography. 7. African American civil rights workers—Biography.
I. Title.
E840.8.L43A3 2012
328.73'092—dc23 2011050558

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contact the HarperCollins Special Markets Department in the New York office at
212-207-7528, fax 212-207-7222, or email [email protected].

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 To my wife, Lillian,

My parents, Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis,

and all the builders of the Beloved Community

i

•i
*
CONTENTS

Foreword ix

Introduction 1

CHAPTER 1

Faith 17

CHAPTER 2

Patience 41

CHAPTER 3

Study 67

CHAPTER 4

Truth 87
 Contents

CHAPTER 5

Peace 117

CHAPTER 6

Love 147

CHAPTER 7

Reconciliation 167

Acknowledgments 179

viii
 FOREWORD

by Douglas Brinkley

United States Representative John Lewis still has the scars

from the beatings he took for civil rights half a century ago.
But the more telling mark on the longtime congressman,
whose life traces the movement that brought America out of
those dark times, is in his undiminished capacity for hope,
faith, and love. He is our apostle of quiet strength. His eyebrow
raised or finger wagged carries more weight than a hundred
bombastic speeches or clever pontifications.

G. K. Chesterton, when contemplating Thomas Carlyle’s

heroes, wrote that true greatness emanates from “an ecstasy
 Foreword

of the ordinary.” That grandest of all human qualities—

authenticity of spirit—was on understated display in the late
summer of 2010 when John entered Our Lady of the Gulf
Church in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, shaking off the rain and
wiping his wet feet on the welcome mat, a humble pilgrim
come to pray. The occasion was the fifth anniversary of Hur¬
ricane Katrina, and a group of us had come to pay our re¬
spects to the lovely seaside community left ravaged by that

horrific storm. Flood waters gone, the Catholic shrine was

bathed in candlelight and the aroma of incense wafted on the
air. Like Lewis, Bay St. Louis still showed the scars of the
past, but both had survived and emerged stronger through a
mighty confluence of faith, hard work, and resilience. “This is
a beautiful, beautiful church,” John observed that day. “You
can get a sermon just by coming in here and sitting for a
while.”

That struck me, for as this small, reflective memoir dem¬

onstrates, you can get a lesson by just sitting for a while with
John too. Here is a gracious man who exudes the goodness
that his life has helped create. Every young person should

read this homily on civility, a welcome antidote to the noisy

clatter of self-indulgence exemplified by the surge of the me-
me-me social media in our lives.

Concerned that still-stricken hamlets had gone forgotten

x
 Foreword

in the national media’s focus on New Orleans’s recovery, John

had invited me (as the author of The Great Deluge, a chronicle
of Katrina’s devastation) to accompany him to Bay St. Louis
and Waveland, Mississippi, where he had long ago sought
schooling in civil disobedience, to reflect on the losses and re¬
vival of the region. We were also with Ruby Bridges, the
woman who had bravely integrated New Orleans’s William
Franz Elementary School in 1962 when she was only eight
years old.

Most of our group’s hosts in Mississippi were conservative

Republican admirers of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush,
but one wouldn’t have guessed it from the respect and affec¬
tion they lavished on a man considered one of the most liberal
members of Congress. John’s power, in the end, is that he
loved his hosts, regardless of skin color or party affiliation, no
matter the time or place. Nary a hint of partisan discord sur¬
faced as our delegation visited the Gulf Coast landmarks, ate
barbecue, and swapped stories with the locals. John showed
no interest in scoring points or ascribing blame for the han¬
dling of Katrina’s aftermath; he had brought his delegation to
Mississippi solely to continue the healing. All he asked of us
was to remember the miracles Katrina had wrought, and to
pursue that spirit. John served that day, as on so many through¬

out his career, as the embodiment of the power of forgiveness.

XI
 Foreword

That gently righteous aura attended John long before

Georgia’s Fifth District first elected him its U.S. congressman
in 1986. He grew up a poor sharecropper’s son in Troy, Ala¬
bama, toiling from dawn to dusk in cotton and corn fields.
The segregated South offered numerous visceral ways to
experience the horrors of institutional bigotry, not all of them
as obvious as the ubiquitous signs marking facilities “White”
or “Colored.” John’s color forbade him from checking books
out of the library, but it didn’t stop him from learning that
freedom demands sacrifice and fortitude. He realized he
would have to lay his body on the line for civil rights. Armed
with the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence, the most
impenetrable of shields, John became a warrior of love.
At the age of eighteen, John encountered the Reverend
Martin Luther King Jr., and took up the nonviolent resistance
that would fuel and sustain the battle for civil rights. The ig¬
norance and contradictions of Jim Crow were too much for
him to bear. John became a leader of the lunch counter sit-in

movement, and remained steadfast throughout a repetitive

cycle of appalling incidents. The day after John F. Kennedy
was elected president, he sat down to eat at the Krystal Diner
in Nashville, Tennessee. When the waitress refused him ser¬

vice, John persisted until she seemed to have relented—but

then she poured disinfectant down John’s back, and a pitcher

xii
 Foreword

of water over his food. The diner’s manager, meanwhile,

trained a fumigation sprayer on him, burning him as he would
a cockroach.

That level of violent humiliation would deter most people,

but John had launched himself to implement the U.S. Su¬
preme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
decision, which had ruled against “separate but equal” facili¬
ties for blacks and whites. John was not about to stop fighting
until the South’s system of Jim Crow laws was exposed and
eradicated once and for all.
In May 1961, he took part in the first of the storied Free¬
dom Rides that brought busloads of black and white civil
rights activists through Dixie, where protestors were routinely
and brutally attacked. The future congressman and his col¬
leagues were kicked, clubbed, and punched from Rock Hill,
South Carolina, to Montgomery, Alabama. They did not fight
back. Through John and his fellow protestors, the nonviolent
resistance that defined the Civil Rights Movement and gave it
its power became more than a willingness to bleed for the

idea that our time has come. It became the very symbol of the
power of faith to transform the destiny of a nation.
In 1963, John proudly accepted an invitation to speak at
the pivotal March on Washington in favor of what would be¬

come, one year later, the Civil Rights Act, and two years later

xiii
 Foreword

the Voting Rights Act. “As it now stands, the voting section of
this bill will not help the thousands of black people who want
to vote,” he intoned from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
“It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, or Alabama and
Georgia, who are qualified to vote but lack a sixth-grade edu¬
cation. ‘One man, one vote,’ is the African cry. It is ours too. It

must be ours.”
And so it was, because of John and his fellow foot soldiers
in the Civil Rights Movement: he and the other founders of
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The nonprofit’s mission—which John endorsed and defended
with undaunted courage—was racial equality. The SNCC

frequently found themselves beaten bloody on their crusade

against segregation. White mobs taunted and tormented them
simply for demanding their constitutional right to vote. John
and all his fellow saints held to their principles and their faith;
they refused to back down no matter how many blows rained
upon them at lunch counters and swimming pools and Laun¬
dromats. These decades later, those scars act as a reminder of

what John and others had to sacrifice.

As this book shows, Lewis did not emerge a beaten man.

Quite the contrary: every punch, every kick, every jeer made
him only more determined to love his fellow man. His life’s

XIV
 Foreword

goal remains dazzlingly audacious: no less than the creation

of the “Beloved Community” of America, where God is made
manifest, the exiled brought home.
Signs dividing “White” from “Colored” no longer stain
today’s South. America is better than that now, thanks to
those who endured so much to make it so. Back in the mid-
1960s, the South counted fewer than fifty black elected offi¬
cials. Now there are more than 6,000, and President Barack
Obama leads the free world. In 2009, even South Carolina’s
Elwin Wilson—a onetime white supremacist who punched
John during a Freedom Ride—apologized for his long-ago
hatred. Afterwards, John hugged the sixty-eight-year-old
Wilson like a brother. This reconciliation represents the per¬
fect expression of the twin pillars of John’s philosophy of for¬
giveness and redemption.
To John Lewis, social transformation starts from within.
To revolutionize America to be ever better, he says, we must
first revolutionize ourselves. And that means giving better
than we get. John himself has been brutalized, dehumanized,
hounded, whipped, and cursed many times and in many places,
and yet here he stands, his righteousness shining brighter than
ever. It comes as no surprise, at least to anyone who has read his
memoir, Walking with the Wind. As John explains, when he

XV
 Foreword

stood on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and steeled himself

for another clubbing, he felt no fear, for God’s light burned
inside him.
And so it does today. Even as the nonviolent movement
John helped lead in the 1960s retreats into grainy newsreel
images of protestors battered by water hoses in reruns of Eyes
on the Prize and annual news coverage of Martin Luther King
Jr. Days, the gentleman from Georgia continues to remind us
of how far we’ve come, and of how far we still have left to go.
He forges onward, that rarest of politicians who draws the
respect of every colleague, on both sides of the partisan aisle.
When he steps to the podium, people hush. Everyone wants
to hear the spirit of greatness. That is the fruit that John’s life
has borne. The John Lewis I’ve come to know, on pilgrimages
to Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, New Orleans, and Bay
St. Louis, is not done fighting for what is right. When some¬
body asks me whether I’m a Democrat or Republican, my
stock answer is: “I’m standing wherever John is standing.”
That August along the Mississippi Coast, after John spoke

at Our Lady of the Gulf, he led our delegation on a field trip

through the post-Katrina devastation. Once-elegant homes

and businesses were now, even five years later, still mounds of
rubble. But John asked us to alter our perceptions, to see not
broken bottles as debris but rather shards of light, each frag-

XVI
 Foreword

ment as beautiful as crystal. That afternoon in Bay St. Louis,

inspecting ruins in the rain, our delegation, under John’s lead,
became a sort of impromptu procession. He asked us to not
think of the Mississippi Coast like a broken place but as home
to God’s children. Just as he did in Selma in 1965, John was
teaching us how even natural violence could be processed in
such a way as to become a healing event.
We have in John Lewis a moral force for good. In this
book he presents a gift: the story of a living American hero,
and how we can become that too. Here is a snapshot of Lew¬
is’s faith in action. Whenever an Occupy protest pops up or
thousands of pro-democracy protestors swell city streets, let’s
hope this book will be passed around as a quick-read primer
on the efficacy of nonviolent tactics. For Lewis is a survivor
and eyewitness to the power of love in a world where hate
continues to march to a hydra-headed drummer. There is no
hyperbole or self-aggrandizement in these pages, just a man

of faith who has never let anybody turn him around.

XVII
 I

X
ACROSS
THAT
BRIDGE
 INTRODUCTION
“Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream
things that never were and say ‘Why not?’ ”

— Robert F. Kennedy

I have written these lessons on freedom and meditations on

change for the generations who will take us into the future,
for the dreamers young and ever young who should never get
lost in a sea of despair, but are faithfully readying themselves
for the next push for change. It is for the parents who want to
inspire their sons and daughters to build a more just society.
And, it’s for the sons and daughters who hear the call of a new
age.
This book is for the people. It is for the grassroots leaders
who will emerge not for the sake of fame or fortune, but with
a burning desire to do good. It is for all those willing to join
 Across That Bridge

in the human spirit’s age-old struggle to break free from the

bondage of concepts and structures that have lost their use. It
is for the masses of people who with each new day have the
chance to peel the scales from their eyes and remember it is
they alone who are the most powerful agents of change. It is for
anyone who wants to reform his or her existence or to fashion a
better life for the children. It’s for those who want to improve
their community or make their mark in history. This book is a
collection of a few of the truths that I have learned as one who
dreamed, worked, and struggled in America’s last revolution.
Some people have told me that I am a rare bird in the blue
sky of dreamers. I believed innocently and profoundly as a
child that the world could be a better place. Most visionaries
are born so ahead of their time, they must sequester them¬

selves in the world of poetry or philosophy to express what

they hope to see. I was a child with high ideals, lucky enough
to have been born in an age when the wave of social transfor¬
mation was about to culminate into the most powerful nonvio¬
lent movement for change in American history. I have survived

the worst aggression, all the attacks mounted against dreamers

to stamp out the light that they see. I have been rejected, hated,
oppressed, beaten, jailed, and have almost died only to live an¬

other day. I have witnessed betrayal, corruption, bombing, lu¬

nacy, conspiracy, and even assassination—and I have still kept

2
 Introduction

marching on. And despite every attempt to keep me down, I

have not been shaken. I held on to my mind and my faith so
that today I am blessed to actually see so many of the changes
in this world that we dreamed would take shape. And now
I can share what got me through, my guiding philosophy, so
that anyone feeling victimized by peers or impatient with our
government, offended by the inequities of our economy, or won¬
dering about the road to success, will be inspired.

We have come a great distance as a society, but we still have

a great distance to go. The progress we take for granted today
brought on by the successes of the modern-day Civil Rights
Movement is just one more step down a very long road to¬
ward the realization of our spiritual destiny as a nation of
“freedom and justice for all.” There is still much more work to
do. One movement will never offer all the growth humanity
needs to experience. To expect so is to build your hopes on a
puff of smoke, on a whispered breath; it is to anticipate an illu¬
sion. Remember how we thought the election of President
Obama meant we had finally created a postracial America, a
place where the problems that have haunted us for so long
were finally silenced? Nobody says that anymore. We no lon¬
ger dwell in that daydream. We were shaken to realism by the
harshness of what we have witnessed in the last few years—
the vilification of President Obama, the invisibility of the sick

3
 Across That Bridge

and the poor, murder at the Holocaust Museum, and the

shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords while she greeted constit¬

uents in a Safeway parking lot.

Political parties are on the hunt to search and destroy each
other, as though we were involved in some kind of enemy com¬
bat, rather than the work of statesmanship. Campaigns have
become a free-for-all of dirty tricks, scandalmongering, and
distracting negativity that obscures the people’s need to exam¬
ine a candidate’s voting record and see where he or she actually
stands on the issues. I find myself asking my colleagues today,
“Why do we have to be so mean? Is there something in the air
we breathe or the water we drink that incites us to bring one
another down, to violate one another with so much glee?”
The president of the United States was called a liar during
a joint session of Congress at a State of the Union Address. It
was probably the lowest point of decorum I have witnessed in
more than twenty years in the Congress. A campaign volun¬
teer aggressively subdued a woman and stomped on her head
prior to a 2010 senatorial debate in Kentucky. The woman, who

was holding a satirical sign, had approached the candidate she

opposed for a photo. The campaign volunteer said he acted

to protect the candidate, but commentators speculated that he

was enraged by the woman’s sign. Regardless of the cause, the

assault, which was caught on video, was shocking. Ironically,

4
r

Introduction

the abuser went on to demand an apology from the victim, say¬

ing, “I would like for her to apologize to me, to be honest with
you.

Even I, who has looked down the barrel of a gun with

only my faith to defend me, would say there is a unique hos¬
tility in these times that almost seems worse to me than what
we experienced in the 1960s. It is true, we were confronted
with state-sponsored brutality, and people died because of the
complicity of local government with fearmongering and ter¬
ror. Yet, in those days, we could look to federal authority as a
sympathetic referee in the struggle for civil rights and as an
advocate for the need to challenge injustice.

Today it seems there is no moral basis for anything we do

as a society. Even raising the idea of what is good or what is
best is seen as an irrelevant burden to any debate. There was a
time when politicians needed to be great orators because the
people themselves were grappling with the challenges of con¬
science, trying to perceive what is “right” and what is “wrong.”
But today, not only do wre miss the eloquence of public speak¬
ing, but the moral compass of so many leaders seems to be

skewed.
It’s taken a long time, but finally the people are awakening
to the truth: the truth of their responsibility for the demo¬
cratic process. Finally they are realizing they can never afford

5
 Across That Bridge

to relegate their power to representatives in a system that of¬

fers every citizen the power to vote. The Goliath has finally
remembered its strength and its duty. The people are gather¬

ing their forces, reengaging, and applying pressure.

I have seen this restlessness among the people before. It was
in another millennium, another decade, and at another time
in our history, but it pushed through America like a storm. In
ten short years, there was a tempest that transformed what the
American Revolution did not address, what the Constitution

and the Bill of Rights were afraid to confront, what the Civil
War could not unravel, what Reconstruction tried to mediate,

and Jim Crow did its best to retrench. This mighty wind made
a fundamental shift in the moral character of our nation that
has reached every sector of our society. And this history
lends us one very powerful reminder today: Nothing can
stop the power of a committed and determined people to
make a difference in our society. Why? Because human be¬
ings are the most dynamic link to the divine on this planet.
Governments and corporations do not live. They have no

power, no capacity in and of themselves. They are given life and

derive all their authority from their ability to assist, benefit, and

transform the lives of the people they touch. All authority

emanates from the consent of the governed and the satisfac¬
tion of the customer. Somehow it seems leaders have forgotten

6
 Introduction

this fundamental principle, and we must right ourselves before

the people withdraw their support.

As a disenfranchised citizen who yearned for change, as

a child born on the dark side of the American dream, I heard
the whispers of the spirit calling me to wrestle with the soul
of a nation. I could see a higher vision of what this nation could
be, and I can say to every leader who might be entangled
in the web of the status quo that when the people are ready,
this nation wall change. Whenever the people finally reject
the efforts to fragment their collective energies into warring
factions and remember their divine union with one another,
when they throw off material distractions and irrelevant neg¬
ativity and hear their souls speak with one voice, they will rise
up. And whatever is in their path will either transform or
transpire.
During the Civil Rights Movement, our struggle was not
about politics. It was about seeing a philosophy made mani¬
fest in our society that recognized the inextricable connection
we have to each other. Those ideals represent what is eternally
real and they are still true today, though they have receded
from the forefront of American imagination. Yes, the election
of Obama represents a significant step, but it is not an ending.
It is not even a beginning; it is one important act on a contin¬
uum of change. It is a major down payment on the fulfillment

7
 Across That Bridge

of a dream. It is another milestone on one nation’s road to

freedom. But we must accept one central truth and responsi¬
bility as participants in a democracy: Freedom is not a state; it
is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a
distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Free¬
dom is the continuous action we all must take, and each gen¬
eration must do its part to create an even more fair, more just
society. The work of love, peace, and justice will always be
necessary, until their realism and their imperative takes hold
of our imagination, crowds out any dream of hatred or re¬
venge, and fills up our existence with their power.
It is my hope the leaders of today will heed the warning the
people have so patiently tendered and shake off the shackles
of inertia. Let us remove the false burdens of partisanship, per¬
sonal ambition, and greed, and begin to do the work we were
all appointed to do to move this country forward. Let us ap¬
peal to our similarities, to the higher standards of integrity,
decency, and the common good, rather than to our differ¬

ences, be they age, gender, sexual preference, class, or color. If

not, the people will put aside the business of their lives and

turn their attention to the change they are determined to see,

just as the Occupy movement so adamantly demonstrates.
The international scope of the Occupy movement suggests

people are beginning to see that their relationship to one an-

8
 Introduction

other is greater than the differences of borders, culture, and

language. They are beginning to see that what happens in
Asia affects trading on Wall Street, and what breeds conflict
in Africa is a commentary on lifestyles in Europe, and what is
created in India or China is consumed by the people in Latin
America. They are beginning to awaken to an idea we gave
meaning to in the sixties: We are one people, one family, the
human family, and what affects one of us affects us all.
I will never forget the morning of the March on Washing¬
ton in August 1963. I, along with so many others, had had
enough. Our people had been waiting nearly four hundred
years and would not take no for an answer any longer. We were
going to do all we could to move our society to a place where
it recognized our inherent right to be counted.
Washington had been tense in preparation for the largest
convergence of black people the city had ever seen. So, before
we started, my colleagues and I, the “Big Six” leaders of the
Civil Rights Movement, paid a courtesy visit to Capitol Hill to
speak with members of Congress. There was great concern
about keeping order and peace during the march. But, when
our quick series of meetings with House and Senate leaders
was over, something amazing happened. We stepped outside
the congressional buildings into the light of day and saw
thousands in the streets. The people had started the march

9
 Across That Bridge

without us! They had heard the call to nonviolent action; they
had taken the reins and were on the move together, peacefully
making their point. We were technically the “leaders,” but our
duty at that moment was to follow. The people were marching
to the voice of one spirit that was uniting them to work for
change through the power of peace, and I couldn’t have been

more proud.
What is the purpose of a nation if not to empower human
beings to live better together than they could individually?
When government fails to meet the basic needs of humanity
for food, shelter, clothing, and even more important—the room
to grow and evolve—the people will begin to rely on one an¬
other, to pool their resources and rise above the artificial limi¬

tations of tradition or law. Each of us has something significant

to contribute to society be it physical, material, intellectual,
emotional, or spiritual. Each of us is born for a reason, to serve
a divine purpose. If the structures of our lives do not contrib¬
ute to that purpose or if they complicate our ability to live, to
be free and to be happy, or even worse, if they lead to the con¬

fines of oppression, then we seek change, sometimes radical

change, even revolution, to satisfy the yearning of our souls.
If we believe in the divine essence of all human life, then

we must allow that the same essential spirit rests at the core of

10
 Introduction

all our collective action, including the work of government, as

well as the action of protest. The collective power of the people
is not only a material, emotional, and economic resource, but
it is a spiritual force as well. As we look back on our national
story we can see many accounts of “man’s unending search for
freedom,” as President Lyndon Johnson once put it. It is a
struggle not only against the oppression imposed by human
beings on one another, but it is an inner struggle of the Amer¬
ican soul to free itself from the contradictions of its own fal¬
lacies about the nature of true democracy, freedom, and
equality. In our individual lives we grow through learning
from our mistakes. As a nation we evolve by contending with
the consequences of our decisions to reach that point where
the collective mind is not tempted by injustice. Those of my
philosophical framework call this process “building a Beloved
Community.” We defined it as a society based on simple justice
that values the dignity and the worth of every human being.
When we arrive at the place where we as a people live in the
light of that kind of consciousness, then we will have reached
a point where we can finally put down the burdens of hate,
violence, and division. Until that day, struggle is inevitable
because tension motivates the imperative to change.
The restless call for change blew constantly through my

//
 Across That Bridge

mind and disturbed my peace as a boy growing up in the

cotton fields of Alabama. I w*as like a little wisp of dust waft¬
ing in a sea of adversity, a black boy trying to get the kind of
education that would lead to better opportunity crashing

against the rock-hard heart of the Jim Crow South. That was
a bitter, harsh experience that made me feel as though the
world was set against me. I think that is how some people feel
today struggling against the worst economic odds we have
seen in eighty years, losing their homes, their jobs, and their
pensions. They can’t seem to get ahead. The deck seems per¬

sistently stacked against them.

I understand the sense of helplessness and hopelessness
that can surround a people who feel thwarted at every turn. I
could not have been farther away from the halls of Congress or
the chambers of the Supreme Court as a small boy in Alabama.
Back then I could not choose my seat on a bus or sit down at a
lunch counter to eat, and blacks certainly didn’t have the

access to vote. No provision had been made for me and oth¬

ers like me to communicate the dictates of our conscience to
the leadership of a nation. We had to build that road ourselves.

We made a way out of no way to free ourselves from oppression

and bring an American society one step closer to realizing its

pledge: “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

12
 Introduction

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable

of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.”
— Mohandas Gandhi

Each generation must continue to struggle and begin where

the last left off. The Occupy movement represents a growing
sense of discontent in America and around the world. These
human beings represent a growing feeling of dissatisfaction
that the community of nations is spending the people’s re¬
sources on more bombs, missiles, and guns and not enough
on human needs. People are crying out. They want to see the
governments of the world’s nations humanize their policies
and practices. They want to see business leaders and their
corporations be more humane and more concerned about the
problems that affect the whole of the world’s population, rather
than just the overrepresented rich.
The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring are part of
the same global action. They may not have begun as focused,
prepared, or organized as we were in the Civil Rights Move¬
ment, but they are getting there. Every successful movement
needs to have achievable goals to give the people involved some
victories. That keeps them focused, keeps them going.

*3
 Across That Bridge

I cannot predict what kind of change will come. I cannot

offer marching orders for a new band of liberators. But I can
boil down some of what I know into an essence that can be
molded into the structures that you will ultimately create. That
is why this little book is divided into a collection of truths that
I have discovered are fundamental to the inner transformation

that must be realized to affect lasting social change. I have

gleaned these ideas from my own formative experiences, from
time spent in the crucible that created a new America, and
from the challenges of today. I literally grew up sitting-in and
sitting down in protest, on the frontlines of the struggle for

social justice in America, and it is my hope that when you read

this, you will take away ideas that will encourage you to take

action in your own lives and in our world.

The most important lesson I have learned in the fifty years

I have spent working toward the building of a better world is

that the true work of social transformation starts within. It
begins inside your own heart and mind, because the battle¬
ground of human transformation is really, more than any

other thing, the struggle within the human consciousness to

believe and accept what is true. Thus to truly revolutionize
our society, we must first revolutionize ourselves. We must be

the change we seek if we are to effectively demand transfor-

14
 Introduction

mation from others. It is clear that the pot is being stirred

and people are beginning to breathe in the essences of change
that will lead the soul to act. Who will emerge at the fore¬
front of this struggle in the twenty-first century? Perhaps it
will be you.

!5
/

J
(

i.

' V
FAITH
 Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews ii:i

There is one question people ask me more than any other:

How did you do it? How did you hold to nonviolence when a
pounding wall of vicious hate was pushing through you like
waves of fire during the protests and sit-ins of the Civil Rights
Movement? How is it possible to be cracked on the head with
a nightstick, left bleeding and unconscious on the trampled
grass, and not raise your hand one time in self-defense? How
could you bear the clear hypocrisy of being arrested on
trumped-up charges and taken to jail for disturbing the peace
when you were the one who was attacked and abused? How
could you survive the unanswered threats, the bombings, and
murders of a lineage of people, like Medgar Evers, Jimmie Lee
Jackson, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael
 Across That Bridge

“Mickey” Schwerner, without holding any bitterness or anger?

The,answer is simple. Faith. Faith has the power to deliver us

all, even from the greatest harm.

Faith, to me, is knowing in the solid core of your soul that
the work is already done, even as an idea is being conceived
in your mind. It is being as sure as you are about your dreams as
you are about anything you know as a hard fact. For exam¬
ple, you are sure you know how to drive to your home from
your job. No one could make you doubt that you know the
way. You are sure that clouds drift in a light blue sky; you
know the date you were born. Faith is being so sure of what
the spirit has whispered in your heart that your belief in its

eventuality is unshakable. Nothing can make you doubt that

what you have heard will become a reality. Even if you do
not live to see it come to pass, you know without one doubt

that it will be. That is faith.

What Shakespeare wrote in As You Lif^e It is not only po¬
etic and beautiful, it also expresses a profound truth: “All the
world’s a stage,” he says, “and all the men and women merely
players.” Life is like a drama, and any person who is truly com¬

mitted to an ideal must believe in the authority of a divine plan.

Not a rigid, micromanagement of human behavior that pre¬
dicts every step of every individual, but a set of divine bound¬

aries that governs the present, the past, and the future—a set of

20
 Faith

principles humankind does not have the capacity to override,

no matter how far we attempt to stray from its dictates.

What we were communicating through nonviolent pro¬

test, what we were demonstrating by being willing to put
our bodies on the line, was that love had already overcome
hate, that the pages of Americas book had already been writ¬
ten, that this nation’s destiny was already sealed in the moment
it was founded, so every expression of evil, including segrega¬
tion, could never stand.
We were actors dramatizing our faith in the supremacy of
one truth that no law, no centuries-old tradition, no military
force, no material might, no matter how ferocious, could under¬
mine the dictates of the divine. We knew the risks, because
America had held so intensely to the false notion of inherent
inequality that we as a nation believed it was real, and people
believed their reality verified it as the truth. We knew people
would even kill rather than disrupt the notion of inherent in¬
equality. We knew we had to be prepared to accept the sacri¬
fices of beating, arrests, and jail. It was our faith, our knowing
with an iron-clad certainty, that held us in the midst of threats,
bombings, and even when we faced the deaths of cherished,

courageous, visionary members of the movement.

I had lived inside the irrationality of hatred and discrimi¬
nation, and I had seen that it made no sense. I saw the dignity

21
 Across That Bridge

of the most American of virtues displayed all around my

community in the actions of my family and friends. My par¬
ents, their parents before them, and my great-grandparents
were hardworking, honest, humble, family-centered people.
They had an innate intelligence that was unrecognized by
society, and they used an inspiring creativity to survive, even
thrive. They were good, plain and simple, undeserving of
hate. I witnessed the necessary human interaction between

blacks and whites—especially vital in farm life, which si¬

lently crossed those unreasonable social boundaries—where
shades of mutual respect were imparted but kept in the

dark out of fear.

Even as a boy I knew in my heart and soul that the equal¬
ity of all humankind was not just a dream. Children growing
up under inhumane conditions are not carefree. They sense

that something is wrong and embark on an inner search to

explain so much that is not in keeping with their hearts. At a
young age, I mourned for the experience of a more loving
world. My soul insisted there was a better way. Many of us

who joined the struggle of respect for human dignity, both

black and white, Protestant and jew, had been locked in cog¬
nitive dissonance for years. By the time we were seasoned free¬

dom fighters, it was more real to us than our own flesh and
blood, more real than our own lives, and more valuable than

22
 Faith

our own longevity. We believed that if we are all children of

the same Creator, then discrimination had to be an error, a
misconception based on faulty logic. The idea that some peo¬
ple were inherently better was a delusion of the human ego, a
distortion of the truth. We asserted our right to human dig¬
nity based on a solid faith in our divine heritage that linked
us to every other human being and all the rest of creation,
known and unknown, even to the heart and mind of God
and the highest celestial realms in the universe.
This unity was an intrinsic, inseparable aspect of our be¬
ing. We had nothing to prove. Our worth had already been
established before we were born. Our protests were an affir¬
mation of this faith, and our belief that we could never be
separated from this truth. It did not matter that hundreds of
years of unjust law and demeaning customs were tied to this
wrongheaded thinking, or that the history of an entire nation
had been shaped by this error in judgment. We believed that
if we were the children of an omniscient Creator and we took
a stand based on faith, that the forces of the universe would
come to our aid. No jail cell, no threat, no act of violence
could alter our power to overcome any adversary, if we did

not waver.
Your faith has the power to sustain you through the worst
that you can imagine. You may have heard this somewhere

23
 Across That Bridge

before in your life. Religious leaders teach about faith on holy

days. You might read about it in self-help books, pop psychol-
ogy, or spiritual literature. People pat you on the back when
they know you are going through a hard time and encourage
you to have faith as a way to comfort you. Few would dis¬
agree with the idea that faith has power, but often this
truth does not become meaningful to us until we are tested
by a challenge we think we may not survive. It is then that
we experience how transformative our capacity to believe
truly is.
Tragedy is the great equalizer, and no individual, regard¬
less of wealth or fame, can escape the challenge tragedy brings.
If one primary purpose in our lives is to cast off all illusions
and awaken to the eternal knowledge of what is truly real,
then tragedy can be viewed as an equal opportunity aid to our
development. The problems we face in the trials of our lives,
whether we are standing in protest against injustice or fight¬
ing cancer, battling addictions or bankruptcy, our problems
can help each of us grow beyond our personal limits. Our
problems initiate a struggle within our own souls that take us
to the brink of our own experience. As we command our spirit
to find a way to overcome these obstacles, we are forced to
break past any false trappings of the identity, and to focus in¬
tensely on what is real, and what is truly important.

24
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 NINETEENTH CHAPTER
NOREEN CARDINEGH, ENTERING A JAPANESE
HOUSE AT EVENTIDE, IS CONFRONTED BY THE
VISIBLE THOUGHT-FORM OF HER LOVER

Noreen Cardinegh buried her father alone. At least, those besides

herself who took any part in the last service for the famous
correspondent were only Japanese hired for the manual labor. To the
English who were still at the hotel, eager to assist the woman, and
charged to do so by Feeney, Finacune, and Trollope before they left,
the morning was sensational. In spite of the fact that scarcely any
one had been admitted to the Cardinegh room for the past two days,
Talliaferro and others had arranged for the funeral. They were
abroad at nine o’clock in the morning, and found the formality
over.... The Japanese clerk told them all. At her request, he had
made arrangements with a Tokyo director of such affairs. The body
had been taken out at dawn. Miss Cardinegh had followed in her
rickshaw. A place had been secured in the Kameido gardens—very
beautiful now in the cloud of cherry blossoms. She had preferred a
Buddhist to a Shinto priest; refusing the services of an American or
English missionary. The clerk explained that he was permitted to tell
these things now.... Possibly Miss Cardinegh would see one or two of
her friends at this time.... Yes, she was in her room.

“Come,” she said in a low trailing tone, in response to Talliaferro’s

knock.
Noreen was sitting by the window. The big room had been put in
order. The morning was very still. The woman was dry-eyed, but
white as a flower. She held out her hand to Talliaferro and tried to
smile.... Strangely, he thought of her that moment as one of the
queens of the elder drama—a queen of stirring destiny, whose
personal history was all interpenetrated with national life, and whom
some pretender had caused to be imprisoned in a tower. This was
like Talliaferro.
“We were all ready and so eager to help you, Miss Cardinegh,” he
began. “You know, some of the older of the British correspondents
have dared to feel a proprietary interest in all that concerns you.
Why did you disappoint us so?”
“I did not want anything done for him—that would be done on my
account,” she said slowly. “It was mine to do—as his heritage is
mine. I only ask you to think—not that anything can extenuate—but
I want you to think that it was not my father, but his madness.”
“We all understand that—even those who do not understand all that
happened.”
“The tragedy is the same.... Ah, God, how I wish all the fruits might
be mine—not Japan’s, not Russia’s!”
He started to speak, to uproot from her mind this crippling
conception, but she raised her hand.
“You cannot make me see it differently, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said
tensely. “I have had much time to think—to see it all! You are very
good—all of you. One thing, I pray you will do for me.”
“You have but to speak it, Miss Cardinegh.”
“When you take the field—all of you, wherever you go—watch and
listen for any word of Mr. Routledge.... He may be the last to hear
that he is vindicated. Follow any clue to find him. Tell him the truth—
tell him to come to me!”
Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur” accepted the mission, declaring that he
would faithfully impress it upon the others with the second army,
shortly to leave; as Feeney and Finacune certainly would do with the
first. And so he left her, one of the coldest and dryest men out of
London; and yet, just now, he carried himself under a stiff curb, lest
he forget his war....
“And that’s the end of the man who lowered the fluids in the British
barometer, like a typhoon in the China Sea,” he observed in solitude.
“And the Japanese buried him in the Kameido, in cherry-blossom
time—buried him for money—the man who opened the veins of their
Empire!”
The work all done, Noreen Cardinegh met the deluge. The elements
had been forming for three days. She had sensed them vaguely in
sudden shivers of dread. Her soul was bared now to the primal
terror, the psychic terror, of the outcast, against which seasoned
valor quails.... By the window, she sat dry-eyed, in the midst of her
father’s possessions! From the street, over the hotel-gardens, came
to her ears the screaming of children. Japanese schoolboys were
passing, a procession of them. They were playing soldier—marching
very erect and proudly, with sticks for guns.
“My father did this!”... Upon such a sentence the whole dreadful
structure was built. Thoughts of her childhood had their significance
in the breaking of this horrid storm of war. Aye, and the little house
in Tyrone before her coming! It was there that the black shadow,
falling upon his country, crept into the brain of Jerry Cardinegh. The
shadow grew, was identified with her earliest memories. Into her
father’s mortal wound, inflicted by the passing of the sweetest
woman, the shadow had sunk with all its Tartarean blackness. She
saw it all now—the sinister, mysterious passion which had rivalled
even his love for her. The wars had deepened, blackened it. The last
visit to Ireland had turned it into hideous, tossing night. And this
was the beating storm—babes with sticks for guns, companies of
soldiers in the Fukiage, the wailing “Banzai Niphon” from Shimbashi
station, where the regiments entrained for the southern ports of
mobilization; and on the lower floor of the hotel, where still were
gathering the war-experts from all the earth.... The strength ran
from her limbs, and her heart cried out.
Japan, which she had loved, became like a haunted house to her;
yet she could not hope to find Routledge without some word
concerning him, and Tokyo was the natural base of her search
operations. All the correspondents going out with the different
armies were pledged to communicate with her any word they might
receive regarding him. The correspondents, unsecured to any of the
four armies, and destined to work from the outside—at Chifu,
Newchwang, Chemulpo, Shanhaikwan or Shanghai—even these had
promised her a cable-flash at the sight of Routledge. Through an
agent in New York she learned that the name “Routledge” was not
attached for work in the Orient to any newspaper on the Atlantic
seaboard; still, by cable she subscribed for the chief American
newspapers. Tokyo was her address.
She could not stay longer at the Imperial, which had become a sort
of civilian war headquarters. All was war in its corridors. In the
Minimasacuma-cho of the Shiba district, she took a small house,
establishing herself in the native style, but she could not escape the
agony. Japan was burning with war-lust from end to end; whetted of
tooth, talon-fingered, blood-mad. Her fighting force, one of the most
formidable masses that ever formed on the planet’s curve, was
landing in Korea and Liaotung. What meant the battle of the Yalu to
her; the tragedy of the Petropavlovsk, sunk off the tip of the fortress
with Makaroff, the great Verestchagin, and five hundred officers and
men? Not a distant calamity of foreign powers, but Tyrone—Shubar
Khan—Cardinegh—madness—treachery. What meant the constant
tension of Tokyo, singing in her ears like wires stretched tight—like
the high-pitched, blood-hungry song of insects in the night? It
meant the work of her own blood, her own accursed heritage.... She
was called to the Imperial often for the mails, but she avoided the
Englishmen there, and admitted none to the little house in Shiba.
Always, when there were white men about, she fancied a whispering
behind her; as, indeed, there was—the whispers that are incited by
the passing of an exquisite woman.
In the early days following her father’s death, Noreen was besieged
by men who appeared suddenly, quietly—men unknown in Japan—
who demanded with seeming authority all the documents in her
father’s effects which pertained to the treachery in India. These
were agents of the great British secret service—men of mystery to
all save those who threatened England’s inner wall. Noreen gave all
that they asked, convinced them of her sincerity. They impressed
upon her the needs of utter secrecy, and assured her that the name
of Routledge was being purified to the farthest ends of the service.
It was intimated, however, that this would require much time; as,
indeed, it had to fix the crime upon him. These men worked but little
with cables and mails.
So the wire-ends held her to Tokyo through Yalu and Nanshan to the
middle of June. She was returning from the Imperial at early evening
with a bundle of American newspapers. She knew by the hushed
streets that another battle was in progress; and she felt with the
people the dreadful tension of waiting, as she hurried swiftly along
the wide, dirt-paved Shiba road. Tokyo was all awake and ominously
still. A rickshaw-coolie darted out from a dark corner with his cart,
and accosted her in a low, persistent way. He wheeled his cart in
front of her, as he would not have dared with a native or a male
foreigner—and all in a silent, alien fashion. She could not sit still to
ride—pushed the rickshaw aside and sped on in the dusk. She was
ill, her throat parched with waiting, her face white with waiting. The
founts of her life were dry, her heart thralled with famine. Where
was he for this new battle?... She passed knots of women in the
streets. They talked softly as she passed and laughed at her, held up
their boy-babes and laughed. She knew something of the language,
and caught their whispering—the laughing, child-like women of
Japan, in whom transient foreigners delight. They breathed world-
conquest into the ears of their men-children; and were more horrible
far in their whispering and laughing, to Noreen now, than tigresses
yammering in the jungle-dark.
She faltered before the door of her house, afraid. The servants had
not yet lighted the lamps, and within it was darker than the street....
There, among the densest shadows, he sat—there, by the covered
easel in a low chair. He was smiling at her, a white and a weary
smile. His long, thin hands were locked above his head; his lean
limbs stretched out in tired fashion, the puttee leggings worn dull
from the saddle fenders; his chest gaunt, the leather-belt pulled
tight.
Noreen sank to her knees before the empty chair, her face, her
arms, in the seat where the mist of a man had been!... How long
she remained there she never knew; but it was some time before
light when she was aroused by a far, faint roar beating toward her,
across the city. The roar quickened, broke into a great, throbbing,
coherent shout, and swept by like a hurricane, leaving a city awake
and thrown wide open to exultation. The battle of Telissu had been
won. Only defeats are mourned in Japan, not the slain of a victory.
Dawn broke, and Noreen looked out on an altered Tokyo—loathsome
to her as a gorging reptile.

“You are intensely psychic, Miss Cardinegh,” the English doctor said.
“This ‘vision,’ as you call it, means nothing in itself—that is, so far as
concerns the man you say you saw—but it signifies that you are on
the verge of a nervous break-down. You must cease all worry and
work, eat plenty of meat, and take long walks. It’s all nerves, just
nerves.”
“No, it does not mean that your lover is dead,” said Asia, through the
lips of the old Buddhist priest who had buried her father. “Such
things happen this way. He may have been sleeping, dreaming of
you, when the strength of your heart’s desire rose to the point of
calling his form-body to your house for an instant. It might have
happened before in the daylight, and you did not know—save that
you felt restless possibly, and filled with strange anguish. Had there
been light, you would not have seen him.”
“But,” she faltered, “I have heard at the moment of death—such
things happen——”
“Yes, but he did not need to die to be called to you.”
Yet she was deathly afraid. It had been the same after the night of
her dream in Cheer Street—the night that Routledge had slipped
from a noose in Madras. If Noreen had known that!... It is well that
she did not, for she could have borne but little more.
Further weeks ground by. Only in the sense that she did not die,
Noreen lived, moving about her little house, in daylight and lamp-
light, without words, but with many fears. She tried to paint a little
in those wonderful summer days—days of flashing light, and nights
all lit with divinity—but between her eyes and the canvas, films of
memory forever swung: Routledge-san in Cheer Street; in the
golden stillness of the Seville; the little Paris studio; in the carriage
from Bookstalls to Charing Cross; in the snowy twilight on the Bund
in Shanghai—yes, and the mist of the man here by the easel!...
Always he was with her, in her heart and in her mind.
Not a word concerning Routledge, from the least or greatest of the
men who had promised to watch for him! Often it came to her now
that he had either allied himself with the Russians or avoided the
war entirely. Could it be that he had already followed the prophecy
which Mr. Jasper had repeated for her, and gone to join Rawder a
last time in the Leper Valley?... No one in Japan had ever heard of
the Leper Valley.
There was little mercy in the thought of him being with the
Russians; and yet such a service might have appealed to a man who
desired to remain apart from the English. If he were in Liaoyang or
Mukden, there was no hope of reaching him, until winter closed the
campaign, at least. Only a few hundred miles away, as the crow
flies, and yet Mukden and Liaoyang could be approached only from
around the world. The valley between two armies is impassable,
indeed—unwired, untracked, and watched so that a beetle cannot
cross unseen.... The general receives a dispatch at dawn containing
the probable movements of the enemy for this day. One of his spies
in the hostile camp which faces him, less than two miles away, has
secured the information and sent it in—not across the impassable
valley, but around the world.... If Routledge had known that the
curse had been lifted from him, would he not have rushed back to
her? It seemed so, but with the Russians, he would have been last
to learn what had befallen.
Just once—and it marked the blackest hour of that black summer in
Japan—the thought flooded upon her that Routledge knew, but
purposely remained apart; that he was big enough to make the
great sacrifice for her, but not to return to the woman whose
heritage, in turn, was the Hate of London. That hour became a life-
long memory, even though the thought was whipped and shamed
and beaten away.
It was late in July when certain sentences in an American newspaper
rose with a thrilling welcome to her eyes. There was an intimate
familiarity, even in the heading, which he might not have written,
but which reflected the movement and color of his work. It was in
the World-News of New York, and signed “A. V. Weed.”... A rather
long feature cable dated at Chifu shortly after the battle of Nanshan.
A number of Russian prisoners had been taken by the Japanese, and
with them was a certain Major Volbars, said to be the premier
swordsman of the Russian Empire. The Japanese heard of his fame;
and, as it appears, became at once eager to learn if Russian
civilization produced sword-arms equal to those of her own Samurai.
The prisoner was asked to meet one Watanabe, a young infantry
captain, and of that meeting the World-News published the
following:
... Here was armistice, the nucleus of which was combat.
There was a smile upon the face of Watanabe, a snarling
smile, for his lips were drawn back, showing irregular
teeth, glistening white. His low brow was wrinkled and his
close-cropped, bristling hair looked dead-black in the vivid
noon. The hilt of his slim blade was polished like lacquer
from the nimble hands of his Samurai fathers. This was
Watanabe of Satsuma, whose wrist was a dynamo and
whose thrusts were sparks. The devil looked out from his
fighting-face.
Volbars compelled admiration—a conscienceless man,
from his eyes, but courageous. He was small, heavy-
shouldered, and quick of movement, with nervous eyes
and hands. His left cheek was slashed with many scars,
and his head inclined slightly to the right, through a
certain muscular contraction of the neck or shoulder. This
master of the archaic art had the love of his soldiers.
“In the name of God, let him take the attack, Major!”
Volbars’ second whispered. “His style may disconcert you.”
The Russian waved the man away, and faced the
Japanese swordsman. His head seemed to lie upon his
right shoulder, and his cruel, sun-darkened face shone
with joy. His thick, gleaming white arm was bare. His
blade, which had opened the veins of a half-hundred
Europeans, screamed like a witch as the master-hand tried
it in thin air.
The weapons touched. The styles of the antagonists were
different, but genius met genius on its own high ground.
Each blade was a quiver of arrows, each instant of survival
due to devilish cunning or the grace of God. In spite of his
warning, Volbars took the attack and forced it tigerishly.
Some demon purpose was in his brain, for he shot his
volleys high. A marvelous minute passed, and a fountain
of crimson welled from Watanabe, where his neck and
shoulder met. The heavy breathing of the Russian was
heard now back among his fellow prisoners. The
Japanese, sheeted with blood from his wound, defended
himself silently. He was younger, lighter, superbly
conditioned.
 The face of Volbars changed hideously. Sweat ran into his
eyes, where the desperation of fatigue was plain. His lips
were stiff white cords. Patches of grayish white shone in
his cheeks and temples.... For a second his shoulders
lifted; then an exultant gasp was heard from his dry
throat.
That which had been the left eye in the face of Watanabe
burst like a bubble and ran down. Yet not for the fraction
of a second did the Japanese lose his guard. Though a
window of his throne-room was broken, the kingdom of
his courage still endured. The Russian second heard his
man gasp, “I’m spent. I can’t kill him!”
The grin upon the awful face of the One-eyed became
more tense. He seized the aggressive, and the Japanese
lines greeted the change with a high-strung, ripping
shout. Watanabe bored in, stabbing like a viper, his head
twisted to spare his dark side. Volbars’ limbs were stricken
of power. He saw the end, as he was backed toward the
prisoners. A tuft of grass unsteadied him for a second—
and the Japanese lightning struck.
The sword of the Russian quivered to the earth and the
master fell upon it, his face against the ground, his naked
sword-arm shaking, the hand groping blindly for the
faithless hilt. Watanabe bowed to the prisoners, and
walked unassisted back to his own roaring lines. His
seconds followed closely, one of them wiping the sword of
the Samurai with a wisp of grass.... It appears that
Volbars had the audacity to attempt to blind his opponent
before killing him. It was like the battle of the Yalu.
Volbars, as did General Zassulitch, looked too lightly on
the foe....
“A. V. Weed”—what blessings fell upon the name that moment!... He
was not with the Russians! Not in the Leper Valley! A cable to the
World-News that night brought a reply the next day, to the effect
that “A. V. Weed” had never been in touch with the office; that he
was the freest of free lances, and brought his messages from time to
time to one of the free cables outside the war-zone.... The free cable
nearest to Liaoyang—already granted to be the next scene of conflict
—was at Shanhaikwan, at the end of the Great Wall. Noreen
arranged for mail and dispatches to follow her, and went down the
Tokaido, overtaking at Nagasaki a ship which had sailed from
Yokohama three days before she left.
 TWENTIETH CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE IS SEEN BY NOREEN CARDINEGH,
BUT AT AN EXCITING MOMENT IN WHICH SHE
DARE NOT CALL HIS NAME

Noreen breathed sweeter with the shores of Japan behind. The

Pacific liner, Manchu, was crossing the Yellow Sea for Shanghai. An
evening in early August, and the tropic breeze came over the moon-
flecked water, from the spicy archipelagoes below. It was late, and
she was sitting alone, forward on the promenade-deck. The thought
thralled, possessed her completely, that she was drawing nearer,
nearer her soul’s mate. Might it not be given to her to keep the
covenant—to find him, though all others had failed?... There was a
high light over Asia for her inner eye, this memorable night of her
romance. The crush of Japan was gone, and in the great hour of
emancipation her love for Routledge, hardiest of perennials, burst
into a delicate glory of blossoming—countless blooms of devotion,
pure white; and in all honor she could not deny—rare fragrant
flowerings of passional crimson....
At Shanghai she sought the office of the North China News, to learn
what the war had done during her three days at sea. The Japanese
armies were panting—inside the passes which had recently
protected Liaoyang. Any day might begin the battle with which
Japan intended forever to end Russia’s hold in Liaotung peninsula.
The News stated blithely that there was no doubt of the war being
over by September.... There was another story in the files of early
August, and in the silent office the woman bent long over the sheet,
huge as a luncheon-cover. This was an Indian exchange with a Simla
mark. An English correspondent, wandering somewhere in the Hills,
had run across a white man travelling with an old Hindu lama. A
weird mad pair, the story said, half-starving, but they asked no alms.
Whither they were going, they would not say, nor from whence they
had come. The natives seemed to understand the wanderers, and
possibly filled the lama’s bowl. The feet of the white man were bare
and travel-bruised, his clothing a motley of Hindu and Chinese
garments. The article intimated that he was a “gone-wrong
missionary,” but its whole purport and excuse was to point out the
menace to British India from unattached white men, mad or
apparently mad, moving where they willed, in and out of restless
States, especially at such a time as now, when the activity of foreign
agents, etc., etc....
The article was rock-tight and bitter with the Dead Sea bitterness.
The pressure of the whole senile East was in it. The woman quivered
from a pain the prints had given her, and moved out of the darkened
office into the strange road, thick and yellow with heat.... Could this
be Rawder and his Hindu master?... It occurred to her suddenly that
the men of the newspaper might be able to tell her of the Leper
Valley. She turned back to the office, was admitted to the editor....
No, he had not heard of the Leper Valley. There were leper colonies
scattered variously throughout the interior. It might be one of
them.... She thanked him and went away, leaving a problem to
mystify many sleepy, sultry days.... That night, Noreen engaged
passage in a coasting steamer for Tongu, and on the morning of the
third day thereafter boarded the Peking-Shanhaikwan train on the
Chinese Eastern.
Alone in a first-class compartment, she watched the snaky furrows
of maize throughout seven eternities of daylight, until her eyes stung
and her brain revolted at the desolate, fenceless levels of sun-
deadened brown. Out of a pent and restless doze, at last she found
that a twilight film had cooled the distance; she beheld the sea on
her right hand, and before her the Great Wall—that gray welt on the
Eastern world, conceived centuries before the Christ, rising into the
dim mountains and jutting down into the sea. In an inexplicable
moment of mental abstraction, as the train drew up to Shanhaikwan,
the soul of the weary woman whispered to her that she had seen it
all before.
At the Rest House, Noreen ventured to inquire of a certain agent of
a big British trading company if he knew any of the English or
American war-correspondents who had come recently to
Shanhaikwan to file their work on the uncensored cable. This man
was an unlovely Englishman poisoned by China and drink.... Oh, yes,
some of the men had come in from the field or from Wangcheng
with big stories, but had trouble getting back to their lines, it was
said.
“Have you heard—or do you know—if Mr. Routledge has been here?”
His face filled with an added inflammation, and he mumbled
something which had to do with Routledge and the treachery in
India.
“Do you mean to say,” she demanded hopelessly, “that you—that
Shanhaikwan has not heard that Mr. Routledge had nothing to do
with the treachery in India—that another, Cardinegh of the Witness,
confessed the crime on his death-bed?”
The Englishman had not heard. He bent toward her with a quick,
aroused look and wanted to know all, but she fled to her room.... It
was not strange if Routledge failed to hear of his vindication, when
this British agent had not.... By the open window she sat for hours
staring at the Great Wall in the moonlight. She saw it climb through
the white sheen which lay upon the mountains, and saw it dip into
the twinkling sea, like a monster that has crawled down to drink.
There were intervals when Shanhaikwan was still as the depths of
the ocean. The whole landscape frightened her with its intimate
reality. The thought came again that this had once been her country,
that she had seen the Mongol builders murdered by the lash and the
toil.
The purest substance of tragedy evolved in her brain. There had
been something abhorrent in contact with the Englishman below.
She had seen a hate for Routledge like that before—at the Army and
Navy reception! And then, the sinister narrative of the white man in
India, as it had been set down by the English correspondent!...
Could this be “their bravest man”? Was he, too, attracting hatred
and suspicion in India, as a result of the excitement into which her
father’s work had thrown the English? Could not poor Rawder,
barefoot, travel-bruised, and wearing a motley of native garments,
be free from this world-havoc which was her heritage?... That
instant in the supremacy of pain she could not feel in her heart that
Routledge wanted her—or that he was in the world!... Could he be
dead, or in the Leper Valley? Had his mind gone back to dust—
burned out by these terrible currents of hatred?...
The pictured thought drew forth a stifled scream. The lamp in her
room was turned low, and the still, windless night was a pitiless
oppression. Crossing the room to open the door, in agony for air, she
passed the mirror and saw a dim reflection—white arms, white
throat, white face. She turned the knob.
The clink of glasses on a tin-tray reached her from below, with the
soft tread of a native servant; then from farther, the clink of billiard-
balls and a man’s voice, low but insinuating, its very repression an
added vileness:
“Dam’ me, but she was a stunning woman, a ripping woman—and
out after——”
She crashed the door shut and bolted it against the pestilence....
Had the powers of evil this night consummated a heinous mockery
to test her soul, because her soul was strong?... In terror and agony,
she knelt by the open window. The Wall was still there, sleeping in
the moonlight—the biggest man-made thing in the world, and the
quietest. It steadied her, and the stuff of martyrs came back.

The man in charge of the cable-office in Shanhaikwan told her the

next morning that a correspondent who signed himself “A. V. Weed”
had brought in a long message for New York, just after the Yalu
battle, but had not tarried even a night in town. “A tall, haggard
stranger with a low voice,” the man described him.... There was little
more to be learned, but this was life to her, and the first tangible
word, that he lived, since her father’s death. Noreen spent the day
walking alone on the beaches and through the foreign concession.
From the top of the Wall in the afternoon, she stared down at the
little walled city which grew out of the great masonry. There she
could see a bit of living China—all its drones and workers and
sections and galleries, as in a glass bee-hive. Big thoughts took the
breath from her. Europe seemed young and tawdry beside this. She
picked up one of the loose stones—touched the hem of the Wall’s
garment, as it were—and again she had but to close her eyes and
look back centuries into the youth of time, when the Wall was
building, to see the Mongols swarming like ants over the raw, half-
done thing.... There was a little French garrison in the town; and the
Sikh infantry, at target-practice on the beach, brought India back.
The day was not without fascination to her relieved mind.
The evening train from Peking brought a white man who added to
the stability of Shanhaikwan—Talliaferro of the Commonwealth. The
dry little man was greatly disturbed in heart. He had deliberately
given up his place with Oku’s second army, choosing to miss the
smoky back-thresh of future actions in the field, in order to get what
he could out on the free cable. Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur,” credited
with acumen, flying and submarine, had broken under the Japanese
pressure.
“Have you seen or heard of Mr. Routledge?” she whispered at dinner.
“No,” he replied. “In the field we never got a whisper from him. The
Pan-Anglo man in Shanghai told me, however, that he thought
Routledge was playing the Chinese end—that is, living just outside
the war-zone and making sallies in, from time to time, when things
are piping hot. The reason he thought Routledge was working this
game was the fact that New York has sprung three or four great
stories which London has missed entirely. It’s all a guess, Miss
Cardinegh, but somebody is doing it, and it’s his kind of service—the
perilous, hard-riding kind. Nobody but a man on the Inside of Asia
would attempt it. There was an American, named Butzel, shot by the
Chinese on the Liao River ten days ago. He was not an accredited
correspondent, as I understand it, but was using the war for a living.
Butzel’s death was wired in from the interior somewhere, and they
had it back from New York in Shanghai when I was there. Did you
hear?”
“No.”
“It appears that Butzel planned to get into Liaoyang for the battle,”
Talliaferro went on, “whether the Japanese liked it or not. About the
place where the Taitse flows into the Liao, the river-pirates murdered
him——”
Talliaferro stopped, startled by the look in the face of the woman.
Her eyes were wide, almost electric with suffering, her face
colorless. The lamp-light heightened the effects; also her dress,
which was of black entire. Talliaferro noted such things. He always
remembered her hand that moment, as it was raised to check him,
white, fragile, emotional.
“What is it, Miss Cardinegh?” he asked quickly.
“I was thinking,” she replied steadily, “that Mr. Routledge is there in
all likelihood—‘playing the Chinese end,’ as you call it. I was thinking
that he might not have heard that he is vindicated—that he might be
murdered before he learned that my father had confessed.”
She hurried away before the dinner was half through, and Talliaferro
was left to dislike himself, for a short period, for bringing up the
Butzel murder.... Noreen sat again by the window in her room. The
story had frightened her, so that she felt the need of being alone to
think. The dreadfulness of the night before did not return,
however.... The moon rose high to find the Wall again—every part of
it, winding in the mountains.... Was it not possible that Talliaferro
was over-conscious of the dangers of the Chinese end? Routledge
had been up there, possibly since the Yalu battle, and he had proved
a master in these single-handed services of his.... She had heard of
Talliaferro’s capacity to command the highest price, heard of him as
an editorial dictator and of his fine grasp on international affairs, but
her father had once remarked that the Excalibur “did not relish
dangling his body in the dirty area between two firing lines.”... There
was hope in her heart, and she slept.
“Please don’t apologize, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said the next morning,
when he met her sorrowfully. “It is I who should apologize. For a
moment you made me see vividly the dangers up yonder, but I put it
all away and had a real rest. Tell me about the field and Oku.”
Talliaferro was inclined to talk very little, as a rule, but he had
brooded deeply upon his failure in this service, and it was rather a
relief to speak—with Noreen Cardinegh to listen.
“At least, we have added to the gaiety of nations with our silence in
the field,” he said. “It has been the silence of the Great Wall yonder.
We knew nothing even of the main strategy, which was familiar to all
outside who cared to follow the war. Japanese officers were assigned
to overhear what we said to one another. They even opened our
personal mail. The field-telegraph was hot day and night with the
war-business, so that our messages were hung up for days, even
with the life cut out of them. And then when Oku drove into action
we were always back with the reserves—not that I think a
correspondent can do a battle classic for his cable-editor, simply
because he mingles first hand with shrapnel; but we had only the
sun and stars to go by as to which was north and south. Think of it,
and the man who writes a war-classic must have a conception of the
whole land and sea array, and an inner force of his own, to make his
sentences shine——”
She smiled a little and straightened her shoulders to breathe deeply
the good sea air. They were walking out toward the Wall.
“But suppose he has the big conception, as you say, and then goes
into the heart of the thing”—her voice became tense—“where the
poor brave brutes are coming together to die?”
“He’ll unquestionably do it better,” said Talliaferro, regarding her
blowing hair with satisfaction to the artistic sense he cultivated.
“Physical heroism is cheap—the cheapest utility of the nations—but
it is not without inspiration to watch.... We had neither—neither facts
nor blood with Oku.”

Long and weary were those August days in Shanhaikwan. Noreen

lived for the end of the battle, and with a prayer that it would end
the war and bring in—all the correspondents. Over and over she
mapped the war-country in her mind, with a lone horseman shutting
out her view of armies. There were moments at night in which she
felt that Routledge-san was not far away—even Liaoyang was less
than three hundred miles away.... Those last days of the month—
only a woman can bear such terrors of tension. Each night-train now
brought vagrant sentences from the field, bearing upon the
unparalleled sacrifices of men by the Japanese. Throughout August
thirty-first, Shanhaikwan waited expectantly for a decision from the
battle, but when the night-train was in the Russians were still
holding. Late in the afternoon of September first, Talliaferro sought
Miss Cardinegh bringing an exciting rumor that the Japanese had
won the battle and the city.
“There’s another thing,” he added. “The English agent of the trading
company here—the man of whom you don’t approve—has heard
from Bingley. He will be in from Wangcheng to-night, and something
big is up. Bingley has called for a horse to meet him at the train—a
fast horse. I’ll wager there’s an American correspondent on the train,
Miss Cardinegh, and that the ‘Horse-killer’ plans to beat him to the
cable-office in the half-mile from the station. He wouldn’t wire for a
horse if he were alone. Another matter. Borden, the American
Combined Press man here, looks to have something big under cover.
Altogether, I think there’ll be great stuff on the cable to-night. The
chief trouble is, there won’t be any core—to Bingley’s apple.... I’ll
call for you in a half-hour—if I may—and we’ll walk down to the train
together.”
“Thank you. Of course,” she answered.... That half-hour pulled a big
tribute of nervous energy. Noreen did not know what to think, but
she fought back hope with all the strength which months of self-war
had given....
The train appeared at last through the gap in the Great Wall—
cleared torturingly slow in the twilight. Talliaferro directed her eyes
to two saddle-horses on the platform. Borden, the American, was in
touch with a China-boy who held a black stallion of notorious
prowess.... She hardly noted. The train held her eyes. Her throat
was dry—her heart stormed with emotion.... She did not scream.
Routledge hung far out from the platform—searching to locate his
mount. She covered her face in her parasol.... This was the end of a
race from the field with Bingley.... She choked back her heart’s cry,
lest it complicate.
Routledge sped past her—leaped with a laugh into the saddle of the
black stallion. His eye swept the crowd—but the yellow silk of the
parasol shielded her face. He spurred off toward the cable-office—
with Bingley thundering behind on a gray mount.... Not till then did
she dare to scream:
“Win! Ride to win, Routledge-san!”
Out of the shouting crowd, she ran after the horsemen—past the
Rest House, through the mud-huts of the native quarter.... On she
sped, the night filled with glory for her eyes.... Suddenly there was a
shot—then four more—from ahead. Fear bound her limbs, and she
struggled on—as in the horrid weights of an evil dream.
 TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE, BROODING UPON THE MIGHTY
SPECTACLE OF A JAPANESE BIVOUAC, TRACES
A WORLD-WAR TO THE LEAK IN ONE MAN’S
BRAIN

Parting from Noreen Cardinegh on the Bund at Shanghai, Routledge

walked back through the darkness to the German Inn far out on the
Hankow road. He was not conscious of the streets, nor of time
passed. Not a word he had spoken to the woman could he
remember, but all that she had said recurred again and again. He
was torn within. The wound was too deep for heavy pain at first—
that would come later with the drawing-together—but he was dazed,
weakened. He turned into the door of the hostelry and recalled that
he had nothing to do there. He had engaged passage on the
Sungkiang for Chifu that afternoon. His baggage was aboard, and
the ship lying on the water-front which he had left. He turned back,
without any particular emotion at his absentmindedness, but he
charged himself with an evil recklessness for tarrying on the Bund in
the afternoon.... Finacune had seen him, and Noreen....
Jerry Cardinegh was still alive—lost to wars, lost to friends, but still
alive. He was close to death, his brain probably already dead to big
things, and he had not told! Noreen would never know. Routledge
tried to be glad. All his praying, hiding, and suffering had been to
save her from knowing. His lips formed a meaningless declarative
sentence to the effect that he was glad; meaningless, because there
was no sanction in his heart. He was ill and very weary. He wished it
were time for the prophesied wound, and for Noreen to come to
him. He was not powerful enough that moment, walking back to the
Bund, to face the future, and hold the thought that he was to remain
an outcast....
“She will come to me when Jerry is dead,” he repeated, and for the
time he could not fight it.... He went aboard, forgetting dinner, and
dropped upon his berth. The Sungkiang put off, out into the river,
and long afterward lifted to the big swell in the offing. These were
but faint touches of consciousness. His mind held greater matters—
the strength of her hand, the breath, the fragrance, the vehemence,
the glory of the woman in the wintry dusk, as she rushed back to
her work—the tearing tragedy of parting; again the pitiless
mountains of separation....
Loose articles were banging about the floor; the pendent oil-lamp
creaked with the pitching of the ship. It was after midnight.
Routledge caught up the great frieze coat and went out on the main-
deck. It was a cold ruffian of a night, but it restored his strength.
She would keep her promise and come to him, when her father was
dead. He faced the thought now that she would never know the
truth; that Jerry Cardinegh would have spoken long since, if he
could.... In some deep dark place of the earth, she would find him;
and some British eye, ever keen, would see them together—the lady
and the outcast.... He would send her away—put on a martyrdom of
frost and steel—and send her away.... If he lied, saying that he
wanted no woman—she would go back.... But Noreen was to find
him wounded, fallen. Might he not, in delirium, utter the truth that
her father failed to confess? No, the human will could prevent that!
He would go down close to the very Gates with his lips locked.
“... I shall take care of your life for you—even in the Leper Valley!”
Routledge thought he must be mad to imagine those words. Her
face—as the words came to him—had been blotted out in the snow
and the dark; yet it was her voice, and the words rang through his
soul. She could not have seen Rawder nor the Hindu. They were lost
in Northern India. He knew nothing of Jasper having passed the hut
in Rydamphur that night, nor of his meeting with Noreen on ship-
board. The Leper Valley, hidden in the great mountains of Southern
China, was scarcely a name to the world. Could Noreen have heard
the name, and used it merely as a symbol of speech for the
uttermost parts of the earth? This was the only adjustment of the
mystery upon a material basis.
He fought it all out that night in the icy gale on the main-deck of the
Sungkiang, and entered upon the loneliest, harshest campaign and
the bleakest season of his life.... Often it came to him with a great,
almost an overpowering surge—the passion to look into the eyes of
Noreen Cardinegh again and to stand among men, but he fought it
with the grim, immutable fact that he had taken her father’s crime
and must keep it, stand by it, with his dearest efforts until the end.
If fate destined some time to lift the burden—that was resistless....
Except in bringing in his stories to the cables, he passed the spring
and summer in the deepest seclusion.
This he knew: if he were seen by any of his old friends among the
English, the word would be carried to Jerry Cardinegh, who, if still
alive, might be stirred to confession. To save Noreen from this was
the first point of his sacrifice. If her father were dead, unconfessed,
and word reached her that the outcast had been seen in a certain
part of Manchuria, she would come to share his hell-haunted-life—a
thought which his whole manhood shunned. Moreover, if he were
seen by the British, the sinister powerful fingers of the secret service
would stretch toward him; in which case, if nothing worse
happened, he would be driven from the terrain of war. Work was his
only boon—furious, unabating, world-rousing work. God so loved the
world that he gave unto poor forlorn man his work.... No more
loitering on Bunds or Foreign Concessions for Cosmo Routledge.
From various Chinese bases, he made flying incursions into the war-
belt for the World-News—a lonely, perilous, hard-shipping, and hard-
riding service, but astonishingly successful. It was his flash from
Chifu which told New York that the war was on before the
declaration. This was on the night of February eighth. A strong but
not a roaring west wind brought Togo’s firing across the gulf. He
chanced a message and verified it before dawn by an incoming
German ship, which had steamed past the fortress when the Russian
fleet was attacked.
Again, he was with the Russians at Wangcheng before the port was
closed, and got the story of the Yalu fight. This through John Milner,
the American consul at Wangcheng, in whom he made a staunch
and valued friend, regretting that it was necessary to do so under
the name of “A. V. Weed.” Milner was an old World-News editor, a
man of stirring energy, and strong in the graces of the Russians at
his post. He was ardent to serve all American interests, and the
World-News in particular. He presented Routledge to General
Borodoffsky, who told the story of the battle; and there was a fine
touch in the fact that the general wept as he related the Russian
defeat. The story proved more complete and accurate than any
which the correspondents with Kuroki managed to get through the
Japanese censor. Kuroki’s great losses by drowning were for the first
time brought out. Borodoffsky declared with tears that the future of
the war must not be judged by this battle, as the Russian defeat was
due entirely to an error of judgment. Routledge was leaving
Wangcheng with the story when two British correspondents arrived.
This prevented his return. The Borodoffsky story was filed in
Shanhaikwan.
In a sea-going junk, the third week of May, Routledge crossed the
Liaotung Gulf, hoping to get into Port Arthur, which was not yet
invested. Instead, he stumbled onto the Nanshan story. From the
northern promontory of Kinchow he caught a big and valuable
conception of this literatesque engagement of the land and sea
forces, and returned with it to Chifu for filing.
Back to lower Liaotung again, in early June. In spite of every
precaution, one of Togo’s gunboats ran him down in Society Bay, and
he was sent ashore under a guard. Great luck served him, inasmuch
as there were no English with the Japanese at this place, Pulatien,
where he was held for ten days, while the officers debated upon his
credentials. It was here that Routledge encountered the prettiest
feature-story of the war—the duel of Watanabe and Major Volbars, a
prisoner from Nanshan. The Japanese escorted him to his junk at
last, and he put off with orders from one of Togo’s ensigns to return
no more to Kwantung waters. The battle of Telissu was fought on
this day at sea, and he missed it entirely. With English now in
Wangcheng and Chifu, Routledge ordered his Chinese to sail north,
and to put him ashore at Yuenchen, a little port twenty miles to the
west of the Liao’s mouth.
It was only by a squeak that the order was carried out. That was a
night of furies on the yellow gulf. Bent in the hold, thigh-deep in
tossing water, Routledge recalled the hovel in Rydamphur with a
sorry smile. It did not seem at that moment that the storm would
ever permit him to be maimed on land—or a woman to come to him.
The old craft was beaten about under bare poles in a roaring black
that seemed to drop from chaos. The Chinese fought for life, but the
gray of death-fear was upon them. Bruised, almost strangled,
Routledge crouched in the musty hold, until his mind fell at last into
a strange abstraction, from which he aroused after an unknown
time. His physical weariness was extreme, but it did not seem
possible that he could have slept, standing in black, foaming water,
and with a demoniacal gale screeching outside. Yet certainly
something had gone from him and had taken his consciousness, or
the better part of it.... It was this night that Noreen Cardinegh had
entered at dusk her little house in Minimasacuma-cho and met by
the easel the visible thought-form of her lover.
Day broke with the wind lulled, and the old craft riding monster
seas, her poles still to the sky. The daylight sail brought him to
Yuenchen; from whence he made his way northward by land to
Pingyang. This town was but an hour’s saddle to the east of the
railroad and telegraph at Koupangtze—twenty miles west of the
junction of the Taitse and the Liao river, and fifty miles west of
Liaoyang. Here he established headquarters completely out of the
white man’s world, rested and wrote mail stories for several weeks.
Toward the end of July, he set out on a ten days’ saddle trip toward
Liaoyang, with the idea of becoming familiar with the topography of
the country, in preparation for the battle, already in sight. It was on
this trip that he was hailed one afternoon by an American, named
Butzel. This young man was sitting on the aft-gunnel of a river-junk,
rolling a cigarette, when Routledge turned his horse upon the Taitse
river-road, four or five miles to the east of the Liao. Routledge would
have avoided the meeting had he been given a chance, but Butzel
gaily ordered his Chinese to put ashore. The voice was that of a man
from the Middle States—and Routledge filled with yearning to take a
white hand. His only friend since he had left Rawder in India was
Consul Milner at Wangcheng.
Butzel had journeyed thus deep into the elder world—as natural an
explorer as ever left behind his nerves and his saving portion of fear.
He hadn’t any particular credentials, he said, and hadn’t played the
newspaper game very strongly up to now. The Japanese had refused
to permit him to go out with any of the armies; and he had tried to
get into Port Arthur with a junk, but Togo had driven him off. He had
very little money, and was tackling China to get to the Russian lines.
It was his idea for the Russians to capture him, and, incidentally, to
show him how they could defend Liaoyang. In a word, he was
eluding Japan, bluffing his way through the interior of China, and
about to enforce certain hospitality from the Russians. A great soul—
in this little man, Butzel.
Routledge delighted in him, but feared for his life. He himself was
playing a similar lone-hand, but he carried Red-beard insignia,
purchased at a big price; and when he had ventured into a river or
sea-junk, he had taken pains to arrange that his receipt for a certain
extortion was hung high on the foremast. Thus was he ever
approved by the fascinating brotherhood of junk pirates. These were
details entirely above the Butzel purse and inclination. The two men
parted in fine spirit after an hour, the adventurer urging his Chinese
up the Taitse toward the Russian lines. He was not so poor as he
had been, and he yelled back joyously to Routledge that there
wasn’t enough trails in this little piker of a planet to keep them from
meeting again.
His words proved true. Poor Butzel rode back in state that afternoon,
his head fallen against the tiller and a bullet hole in his breast. Even
his clothing had been taken. The junk was empty except for the
body. With a heavy heart, Routledge attended to the burial and
marked the spot. That night he rode to Koupangtze, and, by paying
the charges, succeeded in arranging for a brief message to be
cabled to the World-News; also a telegram to the American consul at
Shanghai.
So much is merely a suggestion of the work that told for his paper
that summer. For weeks at a time he was in the saddle, or junking it
by sea and river. Except when driven to the telegraph, he avoided
every port town and every main-travelled road. He was lean, light
but prodigiously strong. A trencherman of ordinary valor would have
dragged out a hateful existence of semi-starvation upon the rations
that sufficed for Routledge; and none but a man in whom a giant’s
strength was concentrated could have followed his travels. The old
Manchurian trails burned under his ponies; and, queerly enough, he
never ruined a mount. He had left Shanghai on the first of February,
ill from confinement, the crowds, and his long sojourn in the great
heat of India. The hard physical life at sea in the Liao gulf and afield
in Manchuria, and, possibly more than anything, his life apart from
the English, restored him to a health of the finest and toughest
texture.
China challenged him. He never could feel the tenderness of regard
for the Yellow Empire that India inspired, but it held an almost equal
fascination. China dwelt in a duller, more alien light to his eyes; the
people were more complicated, less placable and lovable, than
Hindus, but the same mysterious stillness, the same dust of ages, he
found in both interiors; and in both peoples the same imperturbable
patience and unfathomable capacity to suffer and be silent.
Routledge moved in towns almost as unknown to the world as the
Martian surfaces; learned enough of the confusion of tongues to
procure necessities; supplied himself with documents, bearing the
seals of certain dark fraternities, which appeared to pass him from
place to place without harm: and, with a luck that balanced the
handicap of an outcast, and an energy, mental and physical, utterly
impossible to a man with peace in his heart, he pushed through, up
to Liaoyang, an almost incredible season’s work.
More and more the thought was borne upon him during July and
August that the coming big battle would bring to him a change of
fortune—if only a change from one desolation to another. He felt
that his war-service was nearing its end. He did not believe that
Liaoyang was to end the war, but he thought it would close the
campaign for the year; and he planned to conclude his own
campaign with a vivid intimate portrait of the battle. Meanwhile he
hung afar from the Russian and Japanese lines, and little Pingyang
had a fire lit for him and a table spread when he rode in from his
reconnoissance.
Late in August, when the artillery began, Routledge crossed to the
south bank of the Taitse with a pair of good horses, and left them
about two miles to the west of the city with a Pingyang servant who
had proven trustworthy. On the dawn of the thirtieth he made a
wide detour behind Oku, nearly to Nodzu’s lines, and watched the
battle from Sha peak—one of the highest points of the range. He
had studied Liaoyang long through the intricate Chinese maps; and
as the heights had cleared the fighting-field for Bingley, so now did
Routledge grasp the topography from his eyrie during that first day
of the real battle. Similarly also, he hit upon Kuroki’s flank movement
as the likeliest strategy of the Japanese aggression, and he came to
regard it as a fact before starting for the free cable at Wangcheng
the following night.
This day netted nothing in so far as the real battle color was
considered. That night he closed up on Oku’s rear, crossing a big
valley and climbing a lesser range. Daylight found him in a densely
thicketed slope overlooking the city and the Japanese command. In
that hot red dawn, he beheld the bivouac of the Islanders—a
crowded valley stretching away miles to the east in the fast lifting
gloom; leagues of stirring men, the faint smell of wood-smoke and
trampled turf, the gray, silent city over the reddened hills, the slaty
coil of the river behind.
The mighty spectacle gripped the heart of the watcher; and there
came to him, with an awful but thrilling intensity, the whole story of
the years which had prepared this amphitheatre for blood on this
sweet last summer day.... Oppression in Tyrone; treachery in India;
the Anglo-Japanese alliance; the Russo-Japanese war—a logical line
of cause and effect running true as destiny, straight as a sunbeam
through all these huge and scattered events—holding all Asia in the
palm of history! Farther back, to the Kabul massacre, was to be
traced the red history of this day—the mad British colonel; Shubar
Khan!... And what did the future hold? If Russia called the French
and Germans to her aid, England, by treaty, was called to the aid of
Japan. America might be drawn by the needs of England, or for the
protection of her softening cluster of Philippine grapes. Famine in a
Tyrone town; a leak in one Tyrone patriot’s brain—and a world-
war!...
The click of a rifle jerked Routledge out of his musings. A Japanese
lieutenant and a non-commissioned officer were standing twenty
paces away. The enlisted man had him covered.
 TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE STRIKES A CONTRAST BETWEEN
THE JAPANESE EMPEROR AND THE JAPANESE
FIGHTING-MAN, WHILE OKU CHARGES INTO A
BLIZZARD OF STEEL

Queerly enough, Routledge’s first thought was that the moment of

the wound had come, but this was out of the question. These men
would not fire at him. They would send him to the rear under a
guard; or, worse, escort him to the command where the other
correspondents were held. The Englishmen would then suggest to
the Japanese that their captive had once proved a traitor to England,
and that it would be well to look deep into his present business, lest
he repeat.... He would miss the battle, be detained for a Russian spy
—and Noreen would hear.
Routledge was ordered to approach, and obeyed, swallowing Failure.
The lieutenant spoke English, but disdained to look at proffered
credentials. The sergeant gripped Routledge’s arm, and his superior
led the way down the slope through the lines of troops. Many of the
little soldiers of Oku were eating rice and drinking tea from bowls;
some were bathing their bodies, others cleansing their teeth with
great zeal, using soaps and pointed sticks. These meant to be
gathered unto their fathers that day with clean mouths. Down and
forward, the American was led, no word being spoken until they
were in the midst of Oku’s front. Here was the field headquarters of
some high officer of the left wing. Routledge breathed a hope that
action would be joined before he was ordered back. The unknown
commander stood in the centre of a thick protecting cordon of men.
Evidently he was too rushed at present to attend the case of the