Title: The Green God's Pavilion - A novel of the Philippines
Author: Martin, Mabel Wood
Language: English
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                            THE GREEN GOD'S
                                PAVILION

                               A NOVEL OF
                            THE PHILIPPINES


                                   BY
                           MABEL WOOD MARTIN


                                NEW YORK
                      FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
                               PUBLISHERS



            Copyright, 1920, by Frederick A. Stokes Company


                          All rights reserved,
                     including that of translation
                        into foreign languages.



                                   TO
                               MY HUSBAND



THE GREEN GOD'S PAVILION

CHAPTER I


Trembling in a fervor of joy the girl confronted it. Everybody in the
excitement of arrival was trying to crowd her away from the packed
railing of the vessel, but she managed to get her glimpse of that magic
reality--one of those golden far Eastern cities that she had dreamed
of all her life on the other side of the world. Its glittering towers
and domes, bursting out of the garden of the equator, pointed to a
sky clear enough to be heaven itself. Here long ago East and West
had first gloriously mingled; once this city of golden galleons had
commanded all the cities of the Pacific. To so many a conquistador
it had been the end of the rainbow! To the girl gazing out on its
fiercely sunlit walls it held the secret of the future.

In the launches skurrying up alongside the vessel, Julie saw the eager,
expectant faces straining for a glimpse of friends or kin. As she
looked down, this new universe seemed suddenly to sit on her head like
a red-hot ball. She felt a moment's stifling sense of its weight. This
was the world to which she had come, seeking a place. Those towers and
domes, piercing glittering space like swords and scimitars, appeared
suddenly to intimate that some special passport was needed to enter
this world. And she had not lived long enough in the universe to feel
at home anywhere she might be. Her detached existence under her uncle's
roof, always out of touching distance with the family, had engendered
that feeling of isolation. She had been a superfluous personality,
outside the magic circle, and had kept to the farthest retreat of
that unfriendly house of life--a vivid little hermit groping around
the walls of her own chamber for the fourth dimension. Hopelessly
rigid that old universe had been--and immutable--till one day it had
astonishingly crumbled, as if by some special decree.

Julie was here on this vessel, looking out in trepidation on a remote
and inconjecturable land, because her uncle's affairs, always quite
prosperous, had broken on the rocks of investments. Out of the wreck
she had emerged into a dizzy independence. It had devolved upon her to
take charge of herself somehow--the verdict of her life! The walls had
burst forever. To own one's self! To claim unhindered a whole patch
of the universe! Beyond there, in that city of pearl-circled walls,
a trans-section of existence was hers.

Crowds were now streaming all over the decks. The greetings of long
separations everywhere. Julie saw joyous laughter and frank tears. Some
of the men had come in from the wilderness where peril and disease were
daily fortune, and their white faces and emaciated forms startled their
womenfolk; others were strong and brown, and conquest and construction
hung upon their brows like a kind of fever. Julie looked carefully at
them all as at an index page of what lay before her. After having begun
to feel that she had come to the end of the earth, she took courage. It
was brought forcibly to her that America had come into the East to
do something actual--that she had raised her standards of democracy
among ancient kingdoms, and would stir them to their foundations.

As far back as she could remember Julie had felt the lure of Great
Adventures. In ardent lyric imaginings she had, from childhood up, seen
herself following always the rapture of unbeaten tracks. The Golden
Gate, with its shimmering allure opening upon the promise of strange
lands, had always been the biggest emotion in her life. The wind
that blew up from it had been a messenger summoning her across that
sparkling water to the freedom that lay beyond those ports of dreams.

Staring at the simplicity and the strength of these people of the New
World, she wondered if her slim credentials would hold among them. She
was not really what they wanted here--a trained artisan. Somehow
she had managed to slip by in the stress of the moment. It was her
own desperate determination to balk all efforts to keep her under
dominance at home that had brought her to this goal. It had developed
that she was fitted for nothing in an organized society. Her music,
her languages, her sense of existence were all too fragmentary to
negotiate.

But it had transpired that there was another world where matters of
existence were not so stringent--and since few had seemed inclined
to hazard them, Jepton's Teachers' Agency had let her pass on the
certificate of Miss Blossom's School, which had been good for nothing
else. In a breathless transport, she had signed herself to service
in our colonial possessions across the seas. There was a salary, of
course--ten per cent. of which for the first year went to Jepton's;
a rather inadequate stipend, it had been prophesied, for colonial
existence. But to the reality of this Julie had given no thought. She
was a woman at last--with an original face and a surprising faculty
for seeing splendor in everything. Just the kind of person whose
naïve encounter with the world makes history.

Two people who looked very nice indeed were standing off regarding
Julie with fixed earnestness; a stout and agreeable man with a
thin, transparently amber little lady. Could it be possible that
there were friends for her also on these strange shores? The lady
presented herself as Mrs. Calixter, and her husband as an old friend
of Mr. Dreschell's.

Julie recollected that when her uncle had been forced to recognize the
power of fate he had written to a friend in Manila who was Collector
of the Port, and asked the good offices of himself and his wife for
Julie. Mr. Calixter told her that he and her uncle had been college
friends--a long time ago; but that, in these pioneer days, she was
given to understand, was a tremendous bond. They informed Julie
hospitably that she should remain with them till she discovered what
was to become of her.

No one over here, Mrs. Calixter explained, had a definite idea of the
next moment. One's fortune lay in flux. Nothing had yet completely
taken shape. The great project unraveled daily out of destiny
and a few men's minds. Fighting was still going on in some of the
islands. The khaki-clad men coming aboard were from those distant,
disordered places, and one could see on their gaunt faces the shadow
of menace and loneliness. The men in plain white clothes had their
struggle too in the making of a civilization overnight.

An impression of precariousness and uncertainty was conveyed to Julie,
as if she were about to set foot upon a forming planet amid widespread
restlessness of soul. If she had dreamed of the improbable, it seemed
reasonable that it would transpire here. In such a place, amid such
conditions, ordinary ordered emotions dropped out of sight. The living
of men here was creative, and at high pressure.

The invitation of the Calixters was a godsend to Julie. She had
been completely vague as to what to do with herself. For the moment,
anyway, she was fixed among these mutabilities.

Launches carried them up the river, past the fort that once held
single-handed the white man's empire of the Pacific. The stream,
meandering to the sea with provoking deliberateness, carried on its
back a strange host, a fantastic floating humanity ceaselessly and
inconjecturably drifting in craft that looked like dolphins borne from
the sea of legends; upstanding boatmen in peaked hats prodding tiny
canopied boats like ivory toys against the stream, amid the gayeties
of the city; trading vessels south-bound for pearls or spices perhaps,
with swart crews, and Eurasian captains on the bridges.

They landed amid another motley of strange vehicles and stranger
races. The buildings along the wharf were blackened by smoke-stacks
from the Seven Seas. A sun-blistered race of beings, leaning
nonchalantly against pillars and posts, watched, with the deep
tolerance of the East, the influx from the West. This calm, which
was almost awful, gave Julie an uncanny sensation of human futility.

"One of our fine little mornings on the equator," Mr. Calixter
declared, remarking her wilted expression. "You'll get used to them."

As she followed the Calixters to their carriage, a dark-skinned female
in scant attire, smoking a cigar as long as a man's arm, crossed her
path. Julie gasped. So many unclothed creatures going unabashed about
their business staggered her. Eons of consecratedly covered ancestors
suffered violence before this exposure. Mr. Calixter, however, was
of the opinion, as he lifted his plump, perspiring person after her
into the carriage, that for apparel in this climate the human hide
was incomparable. But they should all be colored like Easter eggs,
to tell them apart; he could seldom distinguish one nude brown person
from another. It was just possible that we were dependent to a certain
extent on our clothes for individuality.

They drove up into the city through ancient streets blazoned with
sun-lit, vivid houses, quickened with picturesque and unfamiliar
activities, and flowing with a humanity that lived its whole life
open to the universe.

Ceaselessly, strangely, contrastingly, this amazing humanity throbbed
along the thoroughfares like creatures out of Arabian Nights' Tales:
carters with their carabaos--monstrous beasts of fearful calm,
drawing primitive stone wheels through the dust of ages; turbaned
East Indians with bushy beards, offering ivories and tapestries to
the fantastic houses; brown women in pineapple fabrics, balancing on
their heads baskets of Ylang-Ylang for the manufacture of perfume; a
dwarf negrito, enslaved from the forests of the north; water-carriers;
Chinese rice-peddlers; children playing with absurd, short-tailed
cats; babies taking in life at the curbstone from their mothers'
breasts. Down these streets in poverty, disease, and cheerful blindness
of soul, marched all the races of the East.

Julie gasped at what she saw. The riddle of the universe seemed to
be unfolding before her wondering gaze.

She turned from that strange stream of people with their enigma, their
insoluble mystery, to the houses: such startling houses, intoxicatedly
painted like the sunsets over in the sea, and decorated with all
manner of things--orchids pure as souls; crimson-crested parrots
screaming for the jungle; rain-bow glass; and little dragons' wings.

These were the state chambers of this existence: their chromatic
splendor was reserved for the ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death;
but it was down in the streets that these children of the sun lived
their lives.

There were flashes of queer open shops, cabinets of the curiosities
of the world; showers of wooden shoes suspended from the ceilings;
pink satin coffins; Chinese ginger jars painted with peacocks; brass
church-bells; unleavened bread, universal red pillows, ornamental
brooms that looked like Cleopatra's palm sunshade. Julie passed them
in ecstasy.

Farther on, she had a vision of old walls and moats, and little stone
gates with ancient coats-of-arms above them, and a surprisingly great
number of old stone churches. They were passing now, Mr. Calixter told
her, through the ancient walled city that Legaspi had built. She saw
the priests in their white robes, pacing their high airy galleries,
saying their prayers in the sunlight, above the world. She drew in
with a deep breath the fragrance of the sacred tree of India that
flowered in the monastic gardens.

Pensively, poetically, the conquistador atmosphere still hung over
the heart of the city. Priests and armored captains floated before
Julie's mind. In all the pagan hinterland of the East, this was the
single Christian citadel, attacked throughout the ages by land and
sea by all the savage hordes of darkness.

She stared at the tinted oriental domes rearing above this ancient
Christian city, and felt mingling with its priestly atmosphere the
Eleusinian mystery of the East, as if hidden in this city there were
still unconsecrated shrines.

They passed out of the Walled City with its dark buttresses, its
dungeons, its medievally barred doors, its intimations of eternal
age and impenetrable mystery, to the Calixters' home on the sea.

A rainbow scarf of tropical vegetation trailed over this part of
Manila, and Julie caught glimpses of gardens full of the perfume of
dreams, gardens for whose incredible blossoming all the light in the
sun must have been needed.

At luncheon, she cast her first attentive look at her host and
hostess. Beside the splendor of this new planet unrolling before her,
two individuals had not been compelling in interest.

Mrs. Calixter, it appeared, was a lady from whose being every particle
of flesh had been amazingly subtracted, save just enough to leave
her alive. She had stayed over here to keep Mr. Calixter company,
and in the process had parted ways with her youth. She was very kind,
but very, very tired. This fatigue, she told Julie, had gone down deep,
and would never rest out.

Her husband was plump, and would go good-natured to his grave. Against
such a temperament all climates are powerless. The tropics had
achieved only the rape of his hair. He was so astonishingly bald
that when he removed his hat the effect was one of almost indecent
exposure. The hair that refused to remain on his cranium displayed
itself in perfidious and capricious profusion in his eyebrows, which
locked bushily across his forehead.

Julie felt very jolly and very much at home. Mr. Calixter, during the
course of the meal, waved away the most charming salad of sea-green
cucumbers and curling lettuce leaves. He explained that a lettuce
leaf over here might be a death warrant, as cholera was more or less
present all the time--though that fact could never be impressed upon
the Chinese cook.

Cholera! Julie sat up with a start. In this fairy land could such
a terrible hydra stick up its head? Mr. Calixter told her about a
number of other things that flourished in the islands, things which
she had always categoried as traditions of the Middle Ages--small-pox,
leprosy on beggars' outstretched hands, all the dreadful medieval list!

"It is a hard uphill pull we have before us over here, and the top
of the mountain nowhere in sight." Mr. Calixter looked grave.

"And the natives are fighting us, all over the islands," Mrs. Calixter
remarked, "and doing it in a particularly barbarous and senseless way."

"Have you any idea as to where you are going?" Mr. Calixter demanded.

Julie moved restively: "No--but it all sounds rather awful."

"Well, we're aiming to--and will make this the finest colony
on earth. There are the men here to do it; men with the genius
for pioneering, and a glorious fever to break the wilderness. The
Department of Education is the greatest idea of all. You must remember
that. It is the only thing that will touch the soul of the people. All
the rest, just yet, seems to fall outside."

"There are hosts of interesting people here," said Mrs. Calixter,
smiling cryptically. "People with histories made over night, and
making history themselves splendidly, too. Perhaps you will stay in
Manila. At any rate, you will catch an unforgettable glimpse of--all
this, as you flit through. This afternoon, late, we will drive on the
Luneta, where you will see a cross section of the whole East. Later,
we are to go to a ball. All the empire-builders will be there. So
keep your young soul awake."

After luncheon everybody mysteriously disappeared. Julie was left
alone in the silent, hot, perfumed world. Not a sound came to her
from anywhere; existence seemed suspended. What had become of the
contents of the world?

She decided to open up her baggage--which, thanks to Mr. Calixter,
had already arrived--and lay out the dress she should need for the
evening. After five o'clock, Mrs. Calixter had said, Manila drove
forth in full dress to the Luneta. Julie gathered up a ball gown and
went over to the glass to appraise its relationship to herself. She
was enchanted with the maturity of the garment. Through it she and
the world met at last; it suggested the finally opened door of the
universe in which she was free to find her dreams. She whirled,
a gay dervish, in front of her mirror.

Suddenly she stopped, awed by the strange reflection she saw of
herself. Odd multiplied personages attenuated from it. She couldn't
begin to think that she knew them, though each at an angle offered
some startling familiarity. She had merely wished to exact from
the mirror reassurance of her woman's incontestable inheritance,
but these strange images carried her out of the background of the
glass into a boundless territory of conjecture.

Motionless now she beheld reflected a unique, youthful face framed
by silvery blond hair, with a pair of green eyes of unusual hue,
while flung upon the face, as upon a screen, was an abstraction
of personality like a superimposed self. This abstract personality
revealed itself tangibly, on occasions, in a transfiguration of light
disclosing something inscrutable, eternal, and absolute.

A cryptic sentence of her aunt's flashed through her mind. "There's
a singular thing that comes into your face--" which was followed
by another, "You think, you are strong. It will take many a road
to show you that you are not." That old subjection was over now,
forever. Julie shivered a little.

She went back to her unpacking; but as she drew out the airy charming
dresses a sudden dissatisfaction with them seized her. Their expensive
beauty was all wrong. She had seen at once that pioneer women garb
themselves very plainly for the day's work--and her work indubitably
was to be of the plainest.

For particulars concerning a suitable wardrobe, Julie had consulted
a schoolmate back home, the daughter of an army officer, who in her
eighteen years had never bought a garment of her own. The inspired
inventory they had worked out together Julie might, she now felt,
have to reckon with later as a force of fate. Her aunt having been
called away to the bedside of a sister, Julie, the reins quite off,
had gone in quest of clothes as if she were walking the Milky Way,
looking for free stars. She had selected and bought in a glory of
mood that beheld the world at her disposal. An exultant thing, this
wardrobe of rejoicing garments that fairly caroled the elated moods of
youth. Quite the wardrobe with which to set out to conquer the world.

Julie stared at it. The fatality of that delicate mass! Her uncle's
face, aghast at the riddle he appeared to confront in her, rose before
her. And the bitter complication of bills that could not be met,
huge heedless bills that he had told her in his desperation she must
somehow face. There wasn't a thing in the world he could do for her
any more. He would get somebody to lend her the money for the present;
which would amount to an actual mortgage upon her existence, with so
small a salary and with her agent's commission to pay. "Poor little
Argonaut," he had called her, "setting out with the intuition of a
nineteen-year-old girl as a divining rod of the world, ignorant of
the values of money or men!"

Julie closed the door rudely on the dresses, and slipped downstairs
to seek brighter diversion in the hot, fragrant world.

She passed admiringly the statue of the Godmother of the New World,
standing in her sweeping robes looking out across the sea to the
Spanish Main. Splendidly believing Isabel, whose faith in the vision
of a Genoese captain gave a new world to men!

Just beyond were two school houses. Julie wondered wistfully if she
would be assigned to one of them. It would be very lovely, in this
flower-scented spot, right under the shadow of the ancient stone
church across the street, to bring wisdom to this people. She smiled
at herself. How much of the world's wisdom had she, young, terribly
young thing that she was? She moved meditatively toward the church,
scents of tropical flowers on every side of her.

The church was of aged gray and battered stone, with the single
white effigy of a saint guarding the worn entrance. There was moss in
every crevice of its strong sides, which stood out like great gaunt
ribs. Near by, in a wild area of sun-dried grass, was the refectory,
ruthlessly severe in its economy of lumber. The resistless fecundity
of the tropics encroached upon all this grimness; vines were flowering
over the frowning vortices.

Julie stepped through the faded green door. At once the hot world
slipped behind her. In the dim shadowiness, she stood staring
wonderingly about. She had been in Catholic churches many times,
but this was like none of them. The gray pillars were painted with
the sunset colors of the East. The dome, full of stars and suns
and portraits of the Deity, suggested a rather crowded Mohammedan
Heaven. The altar, shining silver twenty feet high, was gorgeously
hand-carved, and upon it, in white brocaded satin and pearls, stood
Mary. In one of the smaller naves, there was a small statue of Christ,
terribly sweating blood.

Julie tiptoed across the bare stone flags. A couple of women were
kneeling in the silence, and one or two tragically old men, slowly
and painfully with wrinkled hands telling their beads. The women were
with child; the old men, their own concern done, prayed for the world.

To the right of the altar, she heard a soft murmur of sounds, where in
a side chapel a priest in a black cassock stood by a font administering
the baptismal service to a tiny brown baby in a very long pink satin
robe. The godmother held the baby, while the barefooted native mother
stood apart. Another Christian into the fold! Julie was struck by
the priest's face, the fine pity he turned upon the futile little
brown mite.

Julie moved on. As she was about to step out, the priest passed
her. She stopped him.

"May I ask the name of this church?" she faltered uncertainly. What
she wanted to ask was the significance of it all.

A tired shadow crossed the priest's face. "Saint Francis Xavier's,"
he said. Then he stood and looked about him, and the shadow grew.

"It is beautifully decorated," Julie ventured.

"It is one of the Christian churches of the Orient," he said. "Is
this the first one you have seen?"

"I only arrived to-day. I am stopping with the Calixters. I am a
teacher." She added this a little proudly.

His manner altered. "The Calixters are friends and parishioners of
mine. You are the young lady they told me they were expecting. I am
Father Hull."

Suddenly he made a gesture to the gorgeous mystery about him. "You are
not a Catholic? Then this can not break your heart. Did you expect,"
he asked, "to find a bonze in here dealing paper prayers?"

Then, with an abrupt change of manner, he asked her about her work. She
told him she had no idea where it would be. Everybody over here seemed
to be very busy; it would no doubt be real work and hard. She told
him naïvely about her old ambition to go as a nun to the Leper Islands.

He shook his head. "I hope," he said, regarding her with a sudden
keen penetration, "that you will not go very far away. I have been a
soldier, as well as a priest. I have tramped through the jungles of
many of the islands."

"Will you stay here all your life?" she asked in awe.

The priest looked at the blazing landscape. His shoulders
drooped. Finally he said, "Where on earth is the priest of God so
needed as in this wilderness of darkened souls? If I can ever serve
you, let me know." He turned toward the stark rectory.

Julie stood on the spot, and watched the black cassock disappear.

Rousing herself, she walked down the street, stopping to peep
wonderingly over the tops of old walls at the contents of gardens,
at gay dwellings gleaming like bright fruit or gorgeous birds' eggs
out of the giant foliage. Before one house, most orientally imposing
of them all, Julie stopped in amazement.

This dwelling was so extraordinarily different from her conception of
human habitations that her fancy coupled it with pillared pagodas. It
was painted in a number of strong colors, which, as in none other
of these strange houses, made a singularly stirring harmony, even
in the spectrum of startlingly tinted pillars supporting the great
galleries. Orchids--elfin, super-mundane faces, and air-plants, free
from the bondage of the earth, swung like stars in the soft evening
wind from the balconies.

Strange flowers, mysteriously unfolding in the treetops, showered the
coming twilight with a delirious fragrance. All about the boundaries of
the garden towered cocoanut palms, looking with their clean trunks like
magic beanstalks leading to higher regions; on the ground were large,
brown cocoanuts, their milk spilling over the earth. Ripe fruit hung
from many trees; bananas, like huge golden branches, and a strange
fruit that looked like little green hedgehogs hanging upside down in
the high foliage.

Over the garden the light of the lowering sun lay now like the glow of
Aladdin's lamp, illuminating it to supernatural dimensions. Over in one
end of it a little grizzled Malay dwarf, perfect in his proportions
even to his uplifted tiny hands, with the aid of a device on a long
pole, was cutting flowers from the tops of bushes and trees. Julie,
staring at the surprising little being and not perfectly sure what he
could be, saw him examine with intentness the insides of the flowers
as they fell, as though he might expect to find wrapped up in the
great blossoms another of his kind. A young monkey danced down a
tree-trunk, and commenced scattering the dwarf's store. The mannikin
pounced upon him, and whimsically thrust one of the golden bells of
blossoms upside down on the little furry head.

Of a surety this was a Caliph's mansion. Julie gazed in longingly,
venturing at last inside the gate. In a Chinese ginger-jar a little
yellow flower caught her eye. In this oriental and magic garden to
find so strange, so alien a thing as an English primrose blooming! It
was not a very robust primrose; indeed it was faint and small. Yet
clearly it was more carefully tended than anything else in the garden.

Out of a green and bronze lodge a keeper emerged to investigate
her. The sun of the East had burned him to all but a cinder. Humbly
respectful, he waited for her to speak. Julie explained in broken
Spanish that the garden was so beautiful that she had been tempted
to enter. She would like to know who lived in this little kingdom.

The queer old wrinkled creature looked quizzically at her, "Una hija
del pais," he answered.

"A daughter of the country!" What ever could the old man mean by this
cryptic reply? She looked about hesitatingly.

Just then from the indiscernible depths of the great house, an arm
decorated with a wide gold band thrust itself out of a cloud of long,
black hair, and pushed back the half-opened sliding shutter. A darkly
beautiful figure appeared up there. In response to a gesture from
it, the keeper strode toward the balcony. The figure spoke to him,
and he turned back to Julie.

"My Mistress says that the garden is at your disposal, and for you
to go where you please."

Julie moved curiously a few steps toward the balcony. The gold bands on
the arms of the princess up there glistened alluringly down at her. A
flashing brunette face came out of the shadow of the dense, splendid
sweep of hair. It looked down out of a startling and incongruous pair
of violet eyes. As this personality was not at all the setting for
them, Julie wondered how they had come about.

They played upon the girl with a flame of interest, but their possessor
did not speak. Conversation, Julie reflected, was not perhaps included
among the gifts of Eastern women. This woman, she felt, had more
subtle modes of expression. With her deep, understanding silence,
her flashing disclosures in gestures and glance, speech would no
doubt be a tardy revelation. Her sense of repose disquieted Julie,
reminding her in its singular quiescence of that human becalmment that
had at the first so disturbed her in this land. The blue eyes further
perturbed her with their interrogations--unanswerable questions: Why
she had come into this atmosphere, and what she dared to think she
would achieve in it. The Caliphess in the balcony managed to convey
an impression of proprietorship to this sphere, and to exact some
sort of explanation for Julie's appearance in it.

"I am a stranger--" Julie began "--it is all very wonderful to me";
she paused and looked around her with a sense of inadequateness.

"I knew that you did not belong here--"

The woman above spoke at last, using England's English, with once in
a while the flicker of some strange intonation, like the out-cropping
of a subconscious tone. "But where did you come from?"

"The States--San Francisco!" Julie replied.

A change flashed across the mobile twilight face.

"They keep coming! What," after a pause, "do you expect to find?"

Julie did not reply at once. Ah, that was asking the riddle! Her
gaze roamed over the wondrous garden and palace. The sphinx above
read the look.

"This garden," she informed Julie, "has been here for centuries--and
more."

"So of course it wouldn't do me any good to want it!" Julie laughed
outright. "And, you see, I am quite awfully poor."

"But you come to--take something--all of them do."

Julie sobered. "I came--but of course you wouldn't understand--I
came--" She sought for the articulation of the high and splendid
mission. Words came forth disjointedly when she sought to give form
to that inner fervor. The lady in the balcony listened, and as she
listened to the halting speech a change passed through her blue eyes
and vanished.

"How old are you?" she demanded.

Julie replied that she was nineteen.

A frown came between the splendid brows. "That is not young in the
East. We begin early to experience over here. We are not afraid of
life. We do not keep the young half their existence in swaddling
clothes. It is only too plain that you are not a woman, in spite
of your years--and the things that you are inconceivably set upon
doing. Perhaps you are married."

Julie flushed. "You see, I was considered still too young for that. I
was in school."

"Did you learn in that school to live life--here? Ah, I think not. And
you may go any place, and to any thing. You were not old enough
to be married or to live your own life--but you were old enough to
attempt--this fearful thing. My friend, go back to your home. You
are too young. It is written in your face."

"But I have no home anywhere. All this wonder is yours; how fortunate
above fortune you are!" Julie looked wistfully up at her from the
ground.

The lady receded a little from the balcony, and the shadows dropped
heavily on the twilight face. "Am I?"

Again she spoke. "What is your name? I want to see you again. One
does not see every day a little Atlas who is going to lift the world
on its back. You promise?"

"Indeed I do!"

Julie sped through the gold-tipped shadows. Mrs. Calixter was late
in her dressing, and Julie was so concerned over the low-necked gown
that she had been commanded to wear for the drive on the Luneta,
and so concerned later over what she saw when she got there, that
she forgot for the time to ask about the garden and its fair owner.

"The Luneta is an open-air reception in this one wonderful hour of
the day, my dear. Did you have a nice nap?"

Julie smiled. Naps at nineteen, when every moment counts!

Mrs. Calixter regarded pensively this freshness of the dawn. "May it
be the top of the morning to you always! Look at me." She pointed
to her bloodless face and sun-faded hair. "The East drinks you up
after a while, body and soul. We're dust that God needs to breathe
on again. Don't let it swallow you!"

"It's marvelous though, like a dream," Julie murmured. "I hope I'll
never wake up."

The Luneta proved to be an elliptical drive, picturesquely verging
upon the sea. The winds and the water at this hour contrived to make
it the single cool spot in the city.

A native band, led by a remarkable negro musician, played haunting
music of the sorrows and loves of the earth. The drone of the waves
lashing upon the rocks mingled with the melody. The sun setting
behind an island over in the sea, fantastically enkindled the city,
making it appear with its gleaming domes like some citadel of the
unbeliever reclaimed in this Crusaders' light. Julie had never seen
such deep and powerful colors. They stunned her mind, yet engendered
in her a strange exhilaration, a subtle invitation to plunge behind
those shadowy walls and follow their secret. The light shivered into
shadows; the falling night dropped enchantment over the city.

Carriages swept by with the races of the earth in them; quiet-faced
Englishmen staring pensively out to sea as if to discern in the
distance a certain blessed island that lay over there; Spaniards with
brooding, Moor-like faces, adventuring still in the East after their
country had withdrawn forever out of the New World; close-cropped,
investigatory Germans, eager traders all over the East; native families
of the better class, dressed stiffly in European costume--a concession
to the new age--and riding proudly behind American horses; Chinese
women in jade and brocade, beside their funereally garbed husbands;
East Indians, Japanese, Anamese, Koreans, Armenians--and faces that
belonged to no race or clime, intermediates of the white, dark and
yellow peoples, circling round the edges of this phantasmagoria like
will-o'-the-wisps. And last, there were feverishly alive Americans,
with an inexpressible urgency in their attitude--soldiers of the
empire, here to make their fortunes and the fortune of the land.

It was a little frightening, this hodge-podge of stranger peoples met
at a single point out of the world. Julie noticed how few American
women there were. The land was still too tumultuous for their
advent. She faced nervously the curiosity of so many men.

Every face was counted in Manila, Mrs. Calixter told her.

A great many carriages stopped to visit with Mrs. Calixter. Julie saw
one passing, which of all the procession claimed her attention. A tall
young man with a tawny head from which he had swept his hat rode in
it--his face turned to the sea winds.

Julie looked, and wondered. Who could he be? In this cavalcade that
vivid personality of power and strength blazed indelibly apart. When he
turned his face, a recollection of a child's highest dreams flashed
through her sensibilities in a single word--Excelsior! She could
not have explained how his youthful stirring face had recalled that
supreme childish fervor.

"Who is he?" she asked. It was so clear that he was somebody of note
in this world.

Mrs. Calixter followed her gaze. "A Prince of the East," she said
whimsically. "An Irish-American Haroun-al-Raschid, naïvely engaged in
the recrudescence of the East. We call him The Mayor of Manila. He
believes that it shall transcend all other cities of the earth; he
pours himself and his substance out over it. We are going to his home
to-night. He gives entertainments famous all over the Archipelago--and
is a bachelor."

"Barry McChord is one of the most striking of all the empire-builders,"
added Mr. Calixter. "He is determined to make this colony a gospel of
conviction to the East. We are the beacon, he believes, which has come
to light the darkness. We are to fire the dead ancient nations into
immortal life, and make the East one sublimated republic. You can
understand how a young and Quixotic man with such tremendous ideas
does remarkable things. He has a hand literally in everything--in
education, public health, illumination, public gardens, schemes for
first-class hotels to replace Eastern inns, the development of the
university, hospitals and theaters. Manila is the theater in which he
is staging his Far Eastern drama. When his play of sublimated Eastern
civilization is ready, he will summon all Asia to attend."

As they drove away, detaching themselves from the human caravansary,
Julie looked back upon the rough and struggling mass of humanity
which was wresting destiny out of the standardless East, and sensed
over all the exiles a pervading pensiveness, an air of waiting till
the stroke of fate should open the gate.



CHAPTER II


The Mayor of Manila lived in the Walled City, although most Americans
had chosen the space and coolness of the outside districts.

His house was very old, and stood close to the ancient walls,
overlooking the ocean. Its gardens lifted the graceful shadows of
trees over the tops of the high lichened walls and out into the
world. The house was in the ecclesiastical locality that had so
strangely impressed Julie that afternoon.

In company with the Calixters, she entered the inclosed estate and
found herself beneath the towering shadow of a great white house
rearing so high above the walls that the glow of light pouring from
the opened window spaces of the upper regions seemed almost to belong
to the starred canopy of the night.

These upper regions presented an appearance of spacious stately halls
with very high ceilings and brilliantly polished floors. Pieces of
handsomely carved Spanish furniture were disposed about the room,
and some huge darkened paintings of Spanish captains who had come
this way hung on the walls.

The people, however, made the atmosphere of these rooms. At first,
Julie thought she was in a dream. People from all the unheard-of places
of the earth seemed collected here. Such queer little brown women,
moving about on their fairy feet, in long gorgeous trains, like gay
little peacocks; and their men, mailed in European evening dress--as if
it were armor donned for the eternal triumph of civilization. Most of
them were painfully polite, Julie thought; with a touch of humility
in their politeness. Spain had not been very long gone, and even
mestizos and rich Filipinos had not figured in her social lists.

The Sultan of Sulu, temporarily absent from his own dominions,
appeared much satisfied with the stir he and his preposterous pearls
were creating. "Holy Mary! Such as the very gates of Heaven are made
of!" one dusky maiden exclaimed in rapture.

"An illiterate Malay, making an artistic collection of wives, and
deliberately decking himself out with those things as a decoy. He's
perfectly odious," Mrs. Calixter declared.

Julie saw diamonds as big as hen's eggs on these brown nabob's wives,
but the pearls dramatically obscured everything else.

"I'm very fond of Barry McChord," murmured Mrs. Calixter, "but I
don't subscribe to some of his guests."

Their host was discovered in the front room, a blond young man moving
around the room in a white mess jacket. He came across to greet them.

Julie looked up to the face she had seen on the Luneta, the gay,
young excelsior face with the vivid hair, through which he stressfully
rumpled his fingers as he talked.

He had an ardor of being that communicated itself electrically
to those around him. Julie felt suddenly on fire again. He looked
attentively at her, as if there were something about her that called
up some association. She wondered how he came to be so strong and so
magnificent, and to attain this golden blaze of power out of which
he shone like a prince.

They were separated before they could have anything to say to each
other. Mrs. Calixter wanted Julie to meet somebody "very special." As
that was precisely what she had been doing, Julie wondered why she
had to be led away.

Streams of fantastic people blocked their way. Refreshments made into
the most fanciful forms were proffered them from great nara wood
tables, such as might have served for a mediæval feast. Every one
was going about his own picturesque business; love-making was coming
into play down under the lanterns in the gardens, where the native
musicians were making music to draw one's heart out of one's breast.

In the midst of a sudden bursting triumphal strain, Julie stopped
to behold what she believed to be a queen, with her train--a woman
of such an opulent type of beauty, of such vivid tones of costume
and improbable profusion of jewels, that the eye for an instant was
overwhelmed. Mrs. Calixter whispered that this was the famous Isabel
Armistead, known all over the Orient as "The Empress of the East."

"Why," Julie exclaimed, staring at her amazed, "that's the lady
from the Caliph's garden!" She explained vividly her chance visit of
the afternoon.

"A caliphess indeed!" Mrs. Calixter agreed.

"And of course she would look like that," Julie declared. "Oh! tell
me about her."

"She is a strange creature, certainly," Mrs. Calixter said. "Her father
was an Englishman, I believe; her mother, one of those unanalyzable
mixtures of strains you find over here. I think they were married to
legitimatize Isabel, whose beauty and brilliance were remarkable. She
has had the best of education abroad, and is, without the shadow of
a doubt, the most deeply clever woman in the East--as well as one
of the richest; for from the submerged mother she received one of
the great insular fortunes. At seventeen she was married to Richard
Armistead, a middle-aged Englishman of first-rate family, who for
years held an important position as head of a bank here. He is in
England now, for his health; and there are very strong indications
that he will not come back. I imagine Isabel has a way of disposing
of inconveniences. That is not so difficult here."

"Why, what do you mean? She hasn't hurt anybody, has she?"

"Not that I know of. But when people are in the way over here, they
are just put out of it." Mrs. Calixter dropped her voice. "There's
a woman over there--quite beautiful, you see--with no sign about
her of being a daughter of the land, yet when she wanted another
husband she managed to bring it about. She and the man she wanted, so
Mrs. Roxas will tell you, the two of them, just did for poor Tony. He
was delicate, and they merely made him die somehow. Yet nobody ever
fastened anything on to them.

"This is the land of the new chance. Men and women who never
found their chance at home, or who debauched it, are seeking their
Eldorado here. Standards, social and moral, are easier here than
at home. There's a lawlessness of soul that hangs heavy in the
atmosphere. You are too young to see it yet. Even the girls are quite
vivid--and inimitably experienced. Whether it is so or not, they give
one the impression always of taking the most perilous chances."

She looked penetratingly into Julie's breathlessly intent face. "My
dear, you are neither old enough nor strong enough to encounter
Manila--a city three centuries old quickened by a new population--new
wine in old bottles! That's why I don't want you to remain over here."

"It's wonderful," Julie murmured with shining eyes "--like an Arabian
Nights' dream. I do so want to stay."

Mrs. Calixter's attention reverted to Isabel, who stood not far
away. She said that Isabel had been loved by many men of many races,
and like an empress of the East, she loved them royally for a day, and
then flung them aside. A woman whose blood was part of the East, part
of the West--nobody knew just where the division lay. Mrs. Calixter
stopped as she saw Isabel approaching. She was looking at Julie.

"Isn't this," she asked, greeting Mrs. Calixter, "my young acquaintance
of this afternoon? I feared when she walked out so radiantly into
the shadows that that might be the last of her that I should see."

Julie, looking across into the flashing face, concluded that she had
never seen anybody who intimated so many human possibilities--unless it
were the young host of this occasion. Isabel fascinated her, and made
her feel as if some queer Sybil of the Eastern bazaars were summoning
her down secret streets.

"You will like Manila very much," said Isabel, drawing nearer to Julie
as Mrs. Calixter turned to speak to some one else. "Perhaps you will
find what you are seeking--they all seek, whatever they say. But there
is always the joy of the day. You Americans are forever trying to steal
to-morrow. See that you get your share of the hours and minutes--and
come to my house again, as soon as you get your assignment. I know
the islands, every spot they could send you to. Do this," she urged,
with an insistence that captured Julie. Her train swept her onward.

Julie suddenly saw their host come out and accost Isabel in the
glowing spot under the central lamps. He bowed laughingly before her,
and Isabel's warm, enchanting face swept off in the dance, close to
his. Julie paused thoughtfully.

A handsome girl in shining blue gauze stepped up to her, and was
presented by Mrs. Calixter as Ellis Wilbur.

"Barry says that you have just arrived, and that I must tell you
about everything. I think he meant everybody. It must all be so
bewildering and strange, and so hard to catch up with. Leave her in
my hands,"--Ellis turned to Mrs. Calixter--"you couldn't for anything
say the things I'm going to, and I don't pretend that it won't be fun."

Reverting to Julie, with an air of light concern, she went on: "I
hope you are not going to any of those dreadful little islands where
they are sending such tragically unsuspecting teachers. Papa and I
have visited some particularly atrocious ones--the Mohammedan group,
away south, my dear, and so called because they live right up to the
worst tenets of the Prophet. Moros are a nerve-shattering experience,
they literally bristle with knives; and are always breaking out into
massacres. It's too big an emotion for me to seek the wilderness. But
over here the game seems usually to over-shadow the risk."

Miss Wilbur's gaze, which had roved to the dancers became suddenly
alert. "Ah," she commented, "Isabel blooming like the 'Song of
Songs'! Have I a terrible little inkling of what that might mean?"

"For whom does Isabel bloom?" Julie demanded curiously.

But the quaintly disclosive Miss Wilbur became unaccountably
reticent. She remarked carelessly: "Isabel cares transcendently for
that Ancient of Days, herself.

"If Leah Chamberlain," she went on in an unchanged tone, "would come
in skirts up to her knees, she would create a much more unlabored
effect than she is at present attempting with those classic black
silken limbs of hers."

For Julie's enlightenment, she pointed out a woman with flaming hair
and spectacular eyes, who seemed altogether too resplendent for the
ordinary purposes of life.

"Leah keeps the emotion of the Empire astir," Miss Wilbur
declared. "She is one of its phases. She lives in a flame always, and
transcends the bonds of mere husbands and other things. The husband,
a drab creature, lives in barracks out of town. Leah puts up at the
Oriente and spreads her splendid wings. What are the feelings of a
gold-tipped goddess anyway? Lovell is bent Burmese fashion before
her--Lovell is a bank-man in Hongkong who is about to come into a
big title. He aspires, at cross purposes, to power and to Leah."

A woman with dark hair drawn over a glistening pearl of a face passed
on the arm of a plump, florid man. "Another Woman of the Empire. That
Madonna face, my dear, has seen the floor of hell. That woman has
experienced the deepest brutality of the East. She was a little
New England factory girl, whom her profligate lover abandoned in a
Chinese port. In her Hegira, she found her way here, and became one
of the famous white hetirae of the city. That's what they amount to
here, and along the coast. When you see particularly handsome women
driving alone along the Luneta, don't ask who they are. Abernathy
came along and married her, right out of the district where they live,
and now she has a great house, with all the money in the world. But as
isolated as if she were in a cave. I went there once, and she took me
up on her high lonely roof, from which she said she could look out
over the city and watch it marching ahead. Her heart was breaking
with loneliness; the old days when she ruled men were gone, but she
wanted to see this thing through. Just another obscure sentinel who
is sticking to her post.

"I have an idea that Mrs. Calixter has been telling you things about
the women. She doesn't understand--her generation can't--that they've
got the chance, and the second chance, over here. They can do a lot
and get away with it--and no hair-lines drawn. But they have freedom of
choice--they can make or break themselves. A few, of course, are clear
outside--like Isabel, who has nobody to account to and to whom not even
the roughest rules apply. She is one of the laws here herself. Don't
try to measure her by rule of thumb, she hasn't any measure; Isabel has
more freedom of will than it is safe to think about. She is moreover
staggeringly rich--and helpful; and I see as much of her as she will
allow--although papa, who belongs to Mrs. Calixter's tiresome era,
is inclined to discourage this intimacy. Yet I have discovered,"
Miss Wilbur asserted calmly, "that he goes privately and takes tea
with her. He considers it a very dashing experience, no doubt. She
probably tells him a great deal about the Islands, which he believes
like gospel. That is he." Miss Wilbur gestured carelessly toward a
distinguished looking white-haired gentleman. "So diplomatic-looking,
everybody says! Papa has 'represented' at two courts, and he was
completely taken aback when they put him on a democratic job like
this. He's on the Commission. But he has caught the fire, like the
rest. He is having a very disconcerting second blooming. I used to
conceive of papa as a sort of ancient, delicate epigram, and behold,
he has come to life! That flower in his button-hole is what they call
here the 'Chain of Love.'"

A pleasant, worn-faced Englishman in a singular semi-uniform costume,
with a dark sash knotted around his waist, bowed to Miss Wilbur.

"That sash? Nobody knows what it means. Perhaps it's an emblem of
the Republic of the Sun--that's the fantastic name somebody has given
to the impossible Utopia that these men are trying to bring about in
the East, after Campanelli's or Plato's dream; I forgot which. They
believe the East is to awaken tremendously. Talk with Barry about
it. But this gentleman, Matfield-Barron, broods over the situation
with all the lonely passion of the expatriate; it's the last thing
left in his soul. Most of the others mean, like the Chinamen, to 'go
back' after the day is over, but Matfield-Barron will stay on. He was
an officer in the British army, and was cashiered out of the service
over in India--something about a woman, who is said to have used him
as a shield for another man. So he drifted here. I hope for his sake
they don't break the Scheme, back there in the States. I can't bear
to think of that homeless wanderer growing old in the East with no
Utopia to love. And I'm crazy about that absurd sash! It waves a
breezy, Anglo-Saxon defiance to the apathy of the East."

A blond, blunt man who looked like a shortened Hercules exchanged a
word with Julie's companion, and walked on.

"That's Holborne--organized the Constabulary; says he's an
Englishman--born in Malta, rather an interesting place to be born
in. I think that Holborne is a true soldier of fortune, and that
when a bigger fight comes up he will move on. Rumor has it that he is
bound up in Isabel's spokes; but so many men are that! It is written
in his steel eyes that no woman shall upset his universe.

"But of course the main force in this unseen republic is Barry
McChord. He is the Titan stoking this furnace. He is one of those
persons you want to have around--he makes the world so exciting to live
in! He has gone mad over this rough-and-tumble colony, and over the
whole East. He's in love with the torn-up landscape, the scaffoldings,
the skeleton bridges, and diverted rivers. Cleaning, rehabilitating,
straining--he is trying to carry the East on his back!

"And now I must relinquish this personally conducted tour," Miss
Wilbur concluded; "I see a circle of prospective partners frowning
at me for having hedged you in so long. It doesn't matter, however;
for the dancing is only just getting under way."

As Ellis Wilbur had implied, young men got themselves brought up,
and claimed Julie. Diffident, high-colored Englishmen, whimsically
satirical over the paradoxes of the East, or wearily skeptical; her own
countrymen, gloriously beginning and flushed with the enterprise. These
last had come to civilize Asia, and made one feel that they were
electrified with their job; they had the air of being engaged in a
national knight-errantcy. Their mood kept the air stirred. Julie was
bewildered by all they found to tell her--strange recitals that made
an Odyssey of the hopes and ambitions of many men. It set up in her
a fresh excitement.

Suddenly, looking up, she found her host before her.

"It has been quite impossible to get near you. I have sought you once
as my guest, again as the very newest lady, and several times after
that because I seem to have remembered you some place."

Julie laughed. "Perhaps that all comes of my being so new. To-morrow
I shall have dwindled back into proportion."

"Come and take a walk on the gallery," he invited; "I want to show
you the wall."

They passed through a doorway out to a high gallery that brought them
suddenly very close to the stars. Julie faced them as astonished as
if a corner of the sky had been unpinned.

"Do these belong to your garden?" she asked laughingly.

"To my Neighbor's Country." He smiled. "I don't transgress." He laid
his hand on a dark line of stones. "Here are the walls. They keep
the Pacific out of my estate."

A stone's throw over the walls Julie saw the purple stretches of the
ocean that used to come gloriously rushing through her gate of golden
dreams. She listened a moment to its roar rising above the music in
the garden. Then she stared over the city. Before her, mysterious,
shadowy, inexorable, the ancient ramparts rose, inclosing a black,
fantastic city with unearthly towers and domes. A city of fate!

The girl shivered with mingled ecstasy and fear.

"Why do you live here? You might have chosen other cities."

"So might you--but there was destiny. I chose Manila for many
reasons--some of them hardly definable. There was something from the
first that spoke out to me from it, that whispered from every one
of its old stones--an atmosphere of profound human struggle, as if
for centuries the place had been battling with forces that go back
into the dark borderland of human genesis. The human spirit at its
darkest, lowest ebb. It seems to me that is the curse that we have
come to lift--the curse of the whole East."

"Have you been here very long?"

"Almost since the beginning, the Year One with us--" He rested his
arm upon the surface of the wall, and looked across at the stretches
of singing waters just beyond.

"Would you like to hear how I came?"

Her eyes sparkled. "Everybody's been telling me to-night how they
happened to come, but most of all I want to hear about you."

"It was fate with me. I was shipwrecked off the coast of Mindanao in
a typhoon. I had been trading up and down the East, here and there,
with headquarters in China. I had been round the earth, and I had seen
most of the cities, but I had never seen the one that I believed was
my particular fate. I'd always had ideas of what I wanted to do in
the world, but I'd never gotten much nearer than dreaming them. Then
came the shipwreck and the whole New World for me. We were rescued
by the Moros and were traded round among them for a while. They
led us along the tops of stony mountains and told us every day when
the sun went down that that was the last of it we would ever see. A
couple of our men died. After we'd been led about for months and our
datto had made up his mind to kill us, his force was attacked by
another chieftain. We bolted straight into the jungle, and nearly
went crazy getting out. Finally in an open boat we gained the sea,
and just drifted until we reached a town where a commercial steamer
had put in. I got aboard, and came upon this city, and here in this
unexpected corner of the earth I found my countrymen engaged in the
biggest thing I'd ever seen.

"I knew right off that it was here that I belonged, and that this
city was my fate. A boat was going out for Shanghai with the captain
of it a friend of mine, and he wanted to take me on; my affairs had
been going well across the China Sea. But I told him good-by--I had
decided to take my chances along with the rest of my people.

"I started in with a trading company that knew my firm, and I showed
them what I'd learned about selling goods to the Chinese--you see I
knew all the big Chinese concerns. I got to be a partner and then I
bought the other fellows out--and so I came to do the things I'd set
my heart upon. I'm Irish, you see, Irish-American, and my heart had
burned with all sorts of things.

"And you?" he interrogated suddenly. "Did those green eyes lead
you East? They are like the jade of a temple god--the color of the
farthest reach of the sky."

Julie smiled dreamily. "When I was a child this same ocean used to
flow in from across the world and tell me stories of some of the
lands it touched. I knew a long time ago that I was to come."

"And how did you get to come?"

"I am to teach!" and she stopped, wondering within herself.

"Ah, there are simply no limits to that. Peaceful Penetration,
quickening beats in this great life. If we can get these white men and
women to stick to their out-posts, we'll win, in a few years. But to
give up life completely, and sit alone in the night among the palms
in a desolate bit of jungle with one's soul roving out over the world
and the stars in terrible longing--that is asking blood tribute,
as I know only too well!"

"And does it seem to you that it will count?"

"It will count inconceivably in that biggest of struggles--the powers
of light against the powers of darkness."

"But right now?" Julie queried.

"We're getting the East from this foothold--and the East, as you
will come to know, is too big, too monstrous a fact to have against
our cosmos. We think the moment has come when, by making clear our
ideals here, we can recast her at will."

"I see," said the girl slowly, "--and atoms count. Why," she broke
off, "does one feel the shadows so here, quite cold shadows and
pitiless? Mrs. Calixter seemed to make me feel that it was all a
vast tract of quicksands which finally at some point, would grip
one's feet."

"A society like this seems to offer no place to a young girl. You,"
he mused, "belong to my Neighbor's Country."

And thus out of this great big life pattern, this tremendous human
arabesque, he thrust her into the limbo of the inconjecturable--out of
the work in which he, with his quick vivid face, looking oddly white
and visionary in the moonlight, had a star part! Standing there among
the shadows of the universe, with the work of men's souls lifted out
of her participation, her heart dropped.

"I came," she said, trying to assert some title to this New World,
"because I wanted to give a little of my life--before I should grow
old and forget."

She looked up and found him staring at her with a strange intensity. He
appeared as startled as if she had just walked into his soul, a
visitant from the Neighbor's Country he had talked about. Julie was
leaning against the wall, and for an instant they deeply regarded
each other. It seemed to the girl that some powerful experience was
seizing possession of her--as if a flash of lightning illuminated
her being--deeper than she had ever dreamed. Just for a second she
felt, on unimaginable heights, a moment of mystery and wonder and
high enchantment.

Some one stepped out upon the gallery and the spell that had caught at
the stars broke. The girl quiveringly came back to her surroundings,
wondering what invisible places she had touched.

She heard her companion's voice saying hurriedly, "I'm called away--in
the midst of everything--on account of an outbreak of cholera in
one of the remote provinces. But I shall be back in a few days,
and I will see you then."

Her ear caught the definite promise and expectation the words
contained, the intimation that their lives had crossed by a stroke
of fate.

That night while she undressed with the light burning low, she
reviewed in her mind this first day in the East. She felt as if,
from a high seat in some fantastic houdah, she had seen pass a
great pageant. Incredibly exciting and splendidly adventurous it all
was! Compared to the wall-paper universe of her youth this phenomenal
flash of events was unbelievable. To live in a land where things
actually happened, where the hours were full, and where with every
breath one drew in a bewitching experience! Youth's playground with
its everlasting drama impending.

Julie leaned out into the scented darkness and looked around the
sky--a nightly custom of hers--a leave taking of God's world. But
this imminent heaven with its fearful host frightened her. Nothing
was familiar. Strange constellations had preëmpted the place of the
old ones. This was not God's world, but a world of many gods, and
she wondered, with a little shiver, which one she should propitiate.



CHAPTER III


The next morning Mrs. Calixter offered to drive Julie down to the
Ayuntamiento Building where she was to receive her instructions from
the Head of the Department of Education. When Julie came downstairs,
she found Father Hull sitting in the carriage, opposite Mrs. Calixter,
who had promised him a lift to the Observatory. He greeted Julie with
pleasure, and told her that he was on his way to see Father Algus,
who was perfecting a remarkable instrument for forecasting the typhoons
which periodically tore up the islands in these hazardous seas.

"Its success now seems certain," continued the priest, "thanks to Barry
McChord, who has been keenly interested in the invention and has sent
to Europe for many delicate appliances to assist the researches of
my venerable friend."

"He has so many things to be interested in," Julie commented with
sudden wistfulness.

The priest looked across at her: "I think I should say he has the
interest for so many things."

"Is it because I am a newcomer," the girl asked the priest, "that
things seem to move so bewilderingly fast here--like a dance whose
rhythm you can never catch up with?"

"These, my child," the priest replied, "are the Days of the
Empire. Those of us who have experienced them will remember them
always. Conquest and prowess of arms have put a dangerous fire in men's
veins. We are reaching out for more than human hands were meant to
grasp. When men are rich overnight, and women are scarce as queens,
the universe is not stable. Not but that there are some who walk
steadily in this fever--" He smiled at Mrs. Calixter.

"I don't count, I'm old," replied that lady.

"Are you challenging youth? Who in my camp fire colony, as I call it,
is so safe and sane as my friend Barry? We have worked alongside each
other for a long time--and it would be difficult for me to tell what
he has been to me."

"The natives call Barry El Mayor," Mrs. Calixter told Julie, "and
believe that in power he is infinitely above the Governor-General. In
so many incorrigible centers of rebellion he has somehow found an
effectual compromise."

"The natives reason that governor-generals may come and go--and
temporary officials of all sorts; but that Barry is with them for
good," Father Hull said. "I don't understand all his aims. Perhaps
they are too wide for me, who find my own are more than I can hope to
cope with--but what I am very sure of is that he is working always
for a better order of things in the world. I, too, am selfishly
concerned that he should not go away from here"--the priest laughed;
"I have planned that he and I shall grow old here together."

"And what will the ladies who admire him so much say to
that?" Mrs. Calixter demanded.

"There are plenty of others for them. If Barry were pinned to one
little circle how could he wander off to all the places he's sent to at
a moment's notice--like China, and India and Annam? If there were mumps
in his circle, how could he attend to cholera in the larger circles?"

"Well, we'll have to let you have him, I guess," Mrs. Calixter amusedly
remarked. She glanced at Julie's thoughtful face. "This young person
is on her way this minute to her fate, and I don't in the least like
it that a certain red-haired person has the settling of it. Maxwell
and George have had a difference--so we can't lift a hand."

The priest thought for a moment. "I should be only too glad to do
anything I could. I know Mr. Maxwell--but whether any word of mine
would count with him, I can't say. At least I can make the effort. If
you can wait a few moments I will go into Father Algus's office,
and write Mr. Maxwell a note."

When they had stopped in front of the Observatory, Father Hull bade
them good-morning, begging leave to send out the note on the plea of
his many pressing engagements.

After he had gone, Mrs. Calixter remarked with anxiety, "He doesn't
look well. He's been told again and again to take a trip home. He used
to be very strong, but he has gone through many ordeals and borne
the brunt of fearful hardship in this new place. His soul has never
wearied; it's on fire like all the others, but his body is showing
the strain."

She added: "While we were waiting for you to come out, he told me of
your meeting of yesterday, and he said that he thought you were too
young to follow the trail."

Julie waited in an outer room while the chief of education interviewed
personally a long stream of predecessors. These faces showed a great
deal of earnest purpose--the fervor of the empire builders, which
Julie had begun to recognize; and yet these people were not to remain
in Manila, but were to go out to the most distant, unsettled parts of
the Islands, to put into execution one of the most stupendous designs
ever launched by any government--to put a whole race simultaneously
to school.

Julie listened to the reports these people gave of themselves, and of
the wild unheard-of places they were accepting as their assignments,
and knew that the small salaries could not be the impetus that was
sending them, grave but uncomplaining, into far jungles. Of course
they yearned to remain in Manila. They had heard strange tales of
the provinces, and knew that more than one of the number trudging
their missionary way had been murdered; but they had cast in their
lot with the colony, and it was all in the day's work. A strange,
intangible spell had caught their souls, and it seemed that the fervor
of it must set things aflame.

When Julie's turn came, she found herself confronting an astonishingly
tall man with a huge florid head. The education of several millions
of beings was the present concern of that head, which gave evidence of
the magnitude of the problems confronting it. In times such as these,
men are often shot suddenly from commonplace experience into the most
enormous undertakings. In this case the call appeared to have been
too quick. The man was arrogant in his power, but flustered over
his responsibility. All day he had been dealing with a complexity
of human desires, which in almost every instance had conflicted with
his own. Julie stepped into the moment of greatest tension.

There was a great map on the wall, a scroll of fate to which the
Superintendent referred in making his assignments. There is nothing
alluring in a map ever, but this one seemed particularly bleak and
strange. The Superintendent frowned at it. "I haven't decided yet,
Miss Dreschell, just where I'll send you," he observed in an olympian
manner.

He juggled awhile with the fates, while Julie, considerably heartened,
decided to take advantage of this critical uncertainty to assist him
to a favorable decision.

"I should very much like Manila," she said pleasantly.

The Superintendent's negative mental state vanished
electrically. "Every person who has entered this room to-day has said
that same thing! You should have come here prepared to go where you
are sent."

Julie flushed. "The provinces are still in a state of insurrection,"
she declared spiritedly. "People are being killed there."

"Civilians are not," the Superintendent exclaimed exasperatedly. "We
are sending teachers out to the most remote parts, where there are no
troops at all, Miss Dreschell. You will go where I send you, as it is
your business to do; and your station," turning to the dreadful map,
"will be the small island known as Nahal, in the southern group."

He irately pointed it out, remote, isolated, the last before the Pagan
group. Julie stared at the outline, and her heart grew faint. It was
the end of the world!

"I shall be going farther South than any one else," she remarked with
a break in her voice. Suddenly she put her hand in her bag and drew
out the letter which she handed to him.

She watched him read it in curious wonder at the change that came
over her face. "This puts a different light on the matter," he
said coolly. "There is no favor that Father Hull could ask in the
Philippines that would not be granted at once. I shall endeavor to
assign you to the Ermita district in the city."

What, Julie wondered, was the strange power of Father Hull whose words
could in an instant revolutionize her fate? Her visionary green eyes
fixed speculatively on that spot on the map. "Father Hull said I was
to give you the letter," she said slowly, "but I think if you don't
mind, I will go where you assigned me."

The Superintendent was uncomfortable. There were other islands much
nearer than Nahal to which he might have sent her. He slid an elastic
band over a bunch of papers with an irritated snap. "Do as you like,
Miss Dreschell--but there is Solano"; he pointed suggestively to a
larger island farther north than Nahal. "Conditions are better there,
I should say."

"I think I will go where I was assigned," Julie reiterated--which
decision seemed considerably further to irritate the florid head. It
was clear that he was keenly eager to serve the writer of the letter.

But Julie rose with an air of finality. He stared at her with
annoyance; and when she did not alter her mind, he leaned over his desk
and jotted down a note. Julie knew somehow that it referred to her. She
caught a glimpse of the word Solano, and wondered if he intended
forcing her to go there. Evidently he did not, for as she stepped
through the door, he apologized perfunctorily for the difficulties
of the occasion, and bowed her out with great courtesy. But Julie,
looking up into his face, saw that he would never forget the person who
had challenged his power and caused him to be ashamed of himself. Some
time this incident would unfailingly bear fruit.

Mrs. Calixter was aghast. "He has banished you into exile!" she
exclaimed. "Could it be because he and George are at swords'
points? Did you give him Father Hull's letter?"

"I gave it to him, and he took everything back in a wink, and offered
me Manila; but while I sat there looking at my mysterious island,
I recalled the faces of some of those teachers, and the face of--a
person I met last night, and I asked myself why I should shirk just
exactly that which I had come over to do. Why," she added suddenly,
"did Father Hull's letter make such an impression? The Church over
here must be very powerful."

"The Church hasn't a thing to do with it. It's the man! He's a saint,
and the spiritual custodian of the colony. He came over here as
the Chaplain of the Twenty-fourth, and marched right alongside the
men into every danger. There wasn't a soldier in the regiment that
wouldn't have gone straight through Hell at his word. Yet I imagine he
found it harder to make them go the other way. He is known everywhere,
and by everybody. No one could deny him anything--it's the power of
one man's life."

"There seem to be so many over here like that!" Before Julie's
half-closed eyes a stream of faces rose. One preëminently stood
out, illuminated by moonlight, and fired with the undying fervor
of purpose. It was her sub-conscious being which, stirred by the
intimations received last night on the roof, had decided in a flash
for her in the Superintendent's office.

With the vision still about her and before her, she arrived at the
home of Isabel Armistead, the woman of Asian mystery.

The dwarf that she had seen before in the garden received her. She had
thought that he looked like a child, but she saw now that the queer
little creature was of a man's years. She could not resist speaking
to him, and the mannikin smiled at her out of his saddened, puckered
little face. He showed her upstairs into a sala so vast that it seemed
literally a sweep of space broken by transcendently carved pillars.

The house was more than a century old, and had come down to Isabel
through her inconjectural native connections. Its carvings belonged
to an era of Pharaonic hordes of labor, or slavery. The house and the
other vast properties of its owner had somehow come down unmolested
by official upheavals.

The family was a queer one of many strains; all the East was in its
veins. After her husband and her daughter had departed for England,
Isabel's mother, it was said, had gone up into a holy mountain to
practice witchcraft. At any rate, after a time, she had disappeared,
never, apparently, to be heard of again. The influence of this strange
mother, Mrs. Calixter had told Julie, was still perpetuated. One
native lady of her acquaintance had shown Mrs. Calixter one of the old
witch-mother's anting-antings, proclaiming that she always wore it,
and that it had astoundingly protected all her life, shielding her and
her family from all evil and lifting them above the common lot of men.

Julie thought of these strange rumors as she looked about her. The
walls were hung with a great many rich embroideries, brilliant
silks blooming with the unfamiliar flowers of far kingdoms. It
was like walking in a garden of Cathay. The room appeared to Julie
like a chamber of an Eastern palace in a rich pagodaed city: there
was furniture of teak-wood black as a Nubian, brought from distant
jungles by toiling elephants, all marvelously carved into scaled
monsters; there were ivory gods with sleeping faces; curtains strewn
with gold, hanging in dim recesses; rugs--that generations of men in
almost mythical retreats of the Himalayas had been a century or two
in weaving--lying like islands on the shining dark lacquered floor,
in which the shadows of the passer-by drowned to endless depths;
a pair of sentinel vases higher than a man--made a thousand years
ago for an emperor who had become a god--out of their tops a thin
ribbon of green smoke curling from hidden incense; and in one corner,
hung with flowers, a queer altar to whatever gods Isabel believed in.

Toward this niche Julie bent curious footsteps. The altar was in
the shape of a temple, a gilded fantastic thing, wrought in what
country it would have been impossible to say. A Green God, like the
monstrous genie of a lake, sat cross-legged in the nave of the shrine
staring at rows of grotesque faces carved in the walls. The artist had
exercised the art of a Leonardo da Vinci; in the face of the little
idol there was neither the dead marooned calm of the great Diabutz nor
the cruel evil of Mongolian gods. He was just a quiet little deity,
green as the far spaces of the skies, sitting thinking in his temple;
but there was in his oblivious, impersonal reflection something that
clutched at the heart.

Julie glanced up depressed, to find Isabel regarding her.

"What a terrible god!" exclaimed the girl with a shiver. "Is he yours?"

Isabel smiled. "He is the god who is 'on the job,' as you Americans
say it. The Great One is too great, the philosophers tell us, to have
anything to do with us. He has abstract names, and is too isolated
by infinity to be prayed to. But this little god, he knows, he knows!"

"Has he a name?" asked Julie, much puzzled by this blatant
paganism. The Islands were undoubtedly a very strange place.

"In different lands, we call him different things."

Julie turned from the niche, "I am going to the island of Nahal,"
she announced. "I have come to see what you can tell me about it."

Isabel's blue eyes widened. "It is far, very far! We shall never hear
of you again. It takes weeks to reach there, because no boats run
regularly. You can get to Solano in three or four days, if you are
lucky enough to catch a boat--from there once in a while a boat goes
down to Nahal. It is a small island; the people are Visayans. I really
do not know so much about it, you see. It is turbulent, I believe. Is
there a military garrison?"

Julie was not sure. A volunteer force had recently been withdrawn
from it; Mr. Calixter was trying to discover whether other troops
had replaced the volunteers.

"Most of the women have been ordered out of those dangerous places in
the South. Have you not heard the things that have been done there? You
are foolhardy to have come--some strange madness possesses you."

Julie's eyes took on an abstracted look. "It is a madness that
possesses others, too."

"I have not seen it."

Julie looked at her but remained silent. The two regarded each other;
Isabel out of her blue eyes, Julie out of her jade-green ones.

"Why do you go? It is not safe. There are places in these islands
where white women have never been seen."

Julie's eyes awoke. "I shall have something to do."

"Will you stay in the wilds till you have given the Nahal islanders
the higher education? Bah! Why do you wish to waste your youth at
such things? You are beautiful, and were made to be admired, not to
bury your youth in forgotten islands. You were made to taste life a
little richer in the fruit than the rest. And you who could win so
much renounce it all to be a spectacled ascetic hanging to the tails
of existence. No Spanish woman would dream of doing such a thing! You
have come half way round the world to do some vague thing you've
set your heart on. Set your heart on life--it owes you much; make it
magnificently pay! Did my Green God give you those eyes and that face
for the edification of small Malays? Stay in Manila and drink life
here where it sparkles and overflows the goblet. I would no more do
what you are doing! I might be a nun--that is picturesque and fiercely
renunciative. But to be a pedagogue to brown savages!--it is dull to
tears. Then,"--as a final overpowering fact--"there will be no men!"

Julie's eyes gleamed disapprobation. "The women of America have
many resources. They go along their real way until their real fate
overtakes them."

"A single fate! Is there such a thing?" Isabel seemed feverishly
to question herself. "I have made a long quest. I ought to know. No,
there is no such thing. It is a tradition they fasten in women's minds,
to make them become mothers.

"Look," she continued, turning toward the temple, "I will give you a
present, because I am so sorry for you with such a terrible future. You
are going out to be a little Atlas--to lift up the world. Tell me,
when you return, how much you have supported on your little back."

For an instant Julie was afraid that Isabel was going to present her
with the Green God, but she reached within the shrine and drew out,
not the God--to Julie's unspeakable relief--but an exquisite circle
of jade, clear and green like a tropical lake.

"A jewel from the Green God for you who have his stamp in your eyes."

Julie started. "Some one else told me that."

"Who was it?"

"Barry McChord."

Isabel's lids dropped over her blue eyes. "You know him, then?"

"I met him last night."

"And he noticed your eyes--that way?"

"But nobody will notice them now--" It was absurd to assume that there
was the faintest flicker of satisfaction in the other woman's look,
Julie thought.

Isabel slipped the bracelet over Julie's wrist. "It has belonged
to many women in many ages. Perhaps you will make more history for
it. What beautiful bones you have!" she exclaimed. "They are like
sculpture--even in your cheeks where the bones of the English go
wrong. And your flesh is flawless; an angel might use it to come down
to earth. Look at the difference."

She drew Julie's arm up beside her own to the light. "Yours is snowy,
way down to the depths; but the light stops under my skin, it can't
get down. That is the difference between you and me!" She loosed
Julie abruptly. "Ah, well--you are blind. Go hold up the world,
and break your poor little back, when you might be ruling the world,
like me. All the East, you know, is mine to work my will in."

Because Isabel was of that East, which she so fantastically claimed,
Julie took lightly all she said. To boast of swaying empires and of
taking kings out of their thrones was part of the inalienable imagery
of the East, as were the widely unreal, the impossibly beautiful things
in the old Chinese lyrics. Isabel implied that Julie had only to step
out of her insignificant profession to find herself ruling the world,
the world of to-day, which had such a marvelous capacity for ruling
itself. It was strange how something at other moments so exalted could,
under this woman's manipulation, become all at once so obscure. Julie,
turning to depart, thanked Isabel for the bracelet.

"Remember, I am your friend," Isabel said, "and I will help you at
any time you say so. Adios!"

Julie left her standing in the center of her magic chamber, its
splendor hovering about her, her dark face merging into its richness
like that of some forgotten goddess.

With his small powerful arms, the dwarf swung the gate open for
her. She looked back at the garden starred with strange flowers, at
the tiers of steps and bright pillars which made the house resemble a
Babylonian palace, at the light of the stained glass under the blaze
of sunlight: in that bizarre house had lived a woman who had gone
out to the tops of mountains searching for spells!

In those moments when Julie cogitated upon matters of human life
in connection with the Deity, she conceived Him rather vaguely as a
sort of sublime executive, who drew up--sometimes perforce a little
hurriedly perhaps--plans of eternal destiny for everybody. Dealing
liberally in catastrophe, disease, old age, poverty, and death, He
yet conceded, like allowances of candy to children, a certain amount
of impermanent happiness; and it was into this arrangement of things
that the race was privileged to enter.

She wondered, as she turned from Isabel's gate, who the little
Green God was; and whether he had any character by which he would
be recognized in the West. She who had started out with a nameless
exalted fervor, whose spirit had been skimming like an inspired comet
through space, had been suddenly halted before a strange house in which
she had encountered disquieting things--things which had brought the
comet down to a scented and blooming earth. So do the moods of youth
sway in the last wind blowing.

Still nothing caused Julie to change her intentions; not the troubled
counsel of Father Hull, given in his tired voice; nor the Calixters'
tales of the far, fearful South; nor the exotic arguments listened
to in the Babylonian house. She set sail for the South on the day
that had been set.



CHAPTER IV


Julie sat restively on the blistering deck of a small vessel in the
harbor of Solano. The Black Pearl, which had brought her from Manila,
had deposited her in this blazing city--which now lay before her like
a peeling off the sun--and had sailed on in the trail of the East
Indies. She had been forced to wait an incredible time for the rare
chance that would send a boat from Solano to her own world-forgotten
island. Even now she would not have been on her way, if a government
official had not appeared from Manila and, from Solano, demanded
transportation forthwith to Nahal.

It was getting late--late for a day when everybody rises at dawn, when
at last there walked across the gang-plank a young man in a Norfolk
khaki suit and a white helmet. He was followed by a procession of
natives carrying his luggage, which they had so lightly distributed
among themselves that it took some time for the column to transfer
itself from land to sea. It took more time, and a knowledge of the
coin of the land--which knowledge the young man seemed to have--to
compensate these individuals, who raised a protest over the glittering
new centavos. The young man was obliged to add to his payment,
whereupon the recipients protested more loudly than ever, and would not
subside. The captain in disgust contemptuously ordered the gang-plank
lifted with them still on it. Life in the East was too prolific anyway.

The young man, who had such a dark skin that Julie concluded that
he must be a Spaniard, came forward with his luggage, which he now
conveyed himself, replacing a dozen natives.

When he perceived Julie, he seemed much taken aback, and removed his
helmet, revealing a young assured face, a trifle heavy, and a pair
of very light blue eyes. Julie looked at him attentively.

He paused, holding his helmet in his hand. It was dear that he wanted
to speak. He had the same curious, almost incredulous expression of
those armies of men in Manila.

"I beg your pardon," he said, overcome by his desire to address her;
"I had no idea I was keeping any one waiting. I understood that I was
the only passenger for Nahal." All the time he was speaking his eyes
never swerved from her.

"It does not matter," Julie replied, "except for the heat."

The young man sat down not very far away from her, on a chair which
he had brought.

Julie leaned over the railing and watched the recession of
Solano. Somewhere far off in the sea was her own terrible little
island about which she wondered deeply; she remembered now acutely
that she need not have gone to that Robinson Crusoe fastness. Father
Hull had warned her, and so had every one else. Suddenly an image
rose before her, a great youthful frame with a rumpled head. For a
moment she seemed to be facing its high and inflexible resolve.

"We are surely bound for No Man's Land!" The young man at her side
was addressing her.

She nodded gravely.

The young man went on politely to say that a Spanish Mestizo general
was making himself troublesome on the island of Nahal. He was a great
bother to the Government, which was trying to bring strife to an end
in order to set up its great emancipation schemes.

"They are over-sentimentalizing the thing--think the bird can be caught
by putting salt on his tail. Government wants everybody to lay down
arms and listen to the gospel of democracy. Fancy that in the East!"

"It must be a fearful struggle when the people are so
unconvinced. There were guns going off all night in Solano!" Julie
reflected. "Are there any men and women on Nahal?"

"Oh! of course." The young man made a carelessly expansive
gesture. "There are natives everywhere."

"But I mean real people, white people, people that make things happen."

"Hope so. The natives are no good except for background; help along
with palms and things to fill up space."

Thereupon the young man introduced himself, and commenced to explain
to Julie that he was going to the island to act as Treasurer. He
had been a captain of volunteers, and appeared to deprecate his
present office. It served in his opinion, however, as a step to
higher things. A Filipino had been made governor of Nahal--matter of
government policy; but as he didn't count for much, Mr. Purcell--such
was the name the young man gave himself--had been sent down to bolster
things up. His father was a politician in Iowa, and would look out
for his son's advancement. His parents did not approve his roving,
oriental life, and wanted him to come home and settle down. He allowed
a considerable pause to ensue after this reflection.

For hours the only two persons on the tiny deck, they sat and watched
the sea. Later in the afternoon, the sky grew overcast, bringing
relief from the intolerable heat.

Finally, a dissolving cloud broke apart on the horizon, and the sun
lit up an island green and wild as a new-made world. Julie rose with
a cry at the beauty of it. That was Nahal! Mars itself could not
have looked more uninhabited. What subliminal, lonely wildness! It
called up to her the vision of the wild, moon-swept cliffs of Mindoro,
passed at night on the way down to Solano, with its mysterious jungle
and without even a light against its primal shores. This little island
had ridges of green cones, that looked in the distance like the domes
and spires of mosques, all clothed in quiet forests over which the
wind seemed scarcely to blow.

The vessel was making for the eastern coast, to a town called Dao,
where it was to drop mail. It would then continue to Guindulman,
whither both passengers were bound.

At Dao, the Captain said the passengers might go ashore; so Julie
and Mr. Purcell went with him in a leaky row-boat into a cove of
the harbor, which was bounded on both sides by long gleaming arms of
beach dotted with palm trees, their heads bent like pensive thinkers.

A small village barely peeped out from under the foliage of the great
tropical trees. A dusty primitive road ran down from the village to
the rude pier. They climbed up to it by means of a flight of slippery
green stairs, a heroic undertaking for Julie in her white clothes.

To her it appeared at once as an island of appalling silence. Even the
sea out there was not so still. A primitive, all-pervading hush--the
deepest she had ever known. A queer sensation came over her of having
reached a point in the universe where time was not.

A crowd of natives had commenced quietly to gather. Two white men
were approaching; one a young officer in a khaki uniform, with a
sword hooked to his belt; the other nondescriptly appareled in an
officer's blouse devoid of insignia, a pair of bleached trousers that
came considerably above his shoe tops, and a peaked straw hat.

As they drew near, these men looked at Julie in amazement. The
Captain presented the officer as Lieutenant Adams. Julie noticed at
once the deep shadow that rested upon his thin, troubled face. The
other strange-looking gentleman was the Doctor. Outside of these two,
the Captain remarked, there was only one white person on this side of
the island. At this allusion, Julie noticed strained glances exchanged.

When Purcell got the chance, he whispered to Julie that this third
person was the captain in command--perpetually drunk, and frequently
insane with delirium tremens. He had been a fearless soldier,
and had once performed a hazardous mission for the Government;
and he had been put off here, with a one-company command, in the
idea that he could do little harm. But this drink-maddened czar in
his times of dementia maintained a reign of terror over his small
domain that brought it always to the verge of mutiny. Only one thing
stood between his brutality and disaster. This was young Adams, who
interposed between the captain and his men--and who spent weeks in
arrest or confinement for his pains.

"What lives you regulars lead!" Purcell exclaimed to the Doctor. "Do
you think any volunteer organization would stand for that whiskey
king? They'd take him out and twist his head off."

Adams frowned. "Let go, before the natives, when the whole blooming
show is at stake over here? We're not just a company of infantry. We're
the Army! I'd have my own head twisted off first."

"If it were not for Adams," the Doctor said, shaking his head,
"there'd be a holocaust, all right. It frequently occurs to me to take
to the open sea. But I'd like Adams to go with me, and he keeps Nero so
peeved by his altruism that the old monster locks him up; so he can't
get away. Miss Dreschell," he continued, turning engagingly to her
in his quaintly deranged hat and incoherent costume, "you must really
pardon my clothes. As you may not have found it difficult to surmise,
I haven't any. I came here a thousand years ago, and never expected to
encounter a lady again. I have written to a tailor regularly, enclosing
at various times a roll of bills--impossible to send money orders,
there being no post-office on this island; but that evil one simply
disdains to reply. All the world, by some singular sort of erosion,
seems to have receded from us. I shall eventually be reduced to fig
leaves--though they are not indigenous to the island, and banana
leaves, while dressy and expansive, will not bear needle and thread,
nor glue together with any success.

"I hope," he said to her in a lower tone, "that you will talk
very nicely to Adams. There is no such thing as speech left in our
principality, nor mirth except the laughter of the monkeys in the
hills. Our brains are sucked out; never a new idea comes here--save
what that black son of Neptune purveys every two months. Give the lad
something to think about in the next cycle of years. And I am asking
you privately not to regard me too closely when we ascend the hill. You
happened upon me just before my monthly sewing day. There goes our
mail." He pointed to a loaded sack that a soldier was carrying up
the hill. "It reminds me that there is one thing you don't have to
worry about here--that's bills."

The Doctor waved his hand ahead of him. "Behold, the population of
Nahal is coming down from the hills to look at you. You are the first
white woman to land on this spot. Number this as an indelible day."

Julie was staring with all her eyes. Whereas a handful of people
had stood but a short time ago about the wharf, the road and the
surrounding vicinity were now black with natives surging in her
direction. They formed a solid staring girdle around her, their
unblinking eyes riveted upon her.

To them her blond fairness was miraculous. When the Doctor made her
take off her hat, and her singular silvery blond hair came forth to
view, lighting her dazzling skin, a deep quiet stir went through
the crowd. The girl stood abashed in the midst of it. Long, long
afterwards, when many others had paid tribute to her beauty, Julie
remembered that moment in a wild little spot out of the world.

One grimy little child crept up towards her, and, plucking at her
garments, demanded if she were not the Blessed Virgin. The men of
the lonely lives turned abruptly. The others followed after them up
the hill, Julie's native coterie trailing behind her. They picked
flowers for her, and offered her strange sweets.

"A queen for a day!" she laughed to Lieutenant Adams, who was walking
beside her. "I shall remember Dao until the end of my life."

"That's the strange part of the natives; they admire our type more
than their own. You are absolute beauty to them--very near a glimpse
of God. I am going to send your worshipers away now, and ask you to
take a walk with me; for you will be here only a couple of hours--two
hours out of eternity, and I must talk! It is a long time since I said
anything real. Let us waive the world, and consider that we are two
people met in outer space at the end of time, and that it does not
matter at all what we say." He looked up quickly into her wondering
face. "You think I'm mad. What else, in heaven's name could I be?"

She regarded the strained, urgent face, and felt a subtle appeal
being made to her--youth in hard straits, to youth.

They strolled down the main thoroughfare of the town. Knitted
closely together with foliage, it presented a weird aspect. Adams
explained that the Commandant liked this wild growth. They stepped
into a side street, and he indicated with a grimly significant nod
one house larger than the rest. Adams passed it quickly; but before
turning down the lane, Julie glanced back and beheld a great shape
at the window, bloated and distorted, the hair standing out all over
its head. The man creature up there was in the depth of one of his
worst debauches, when for a week he did not touch food but lived in
an alcoholic frenzy. He was scarcely human, and Julie, who had never
dreamed of the existence of such a thing, fled down the street with
a smothered cry. "What is the matter?" Adams demanded.

"He was at the window. Oh! how awful! How can you live here?" A deep
shame mantled the young man's grimness. "Isn't he a beast?"

Julie followed her guide up the hill, reflecting that strange lives
must be expected to make strange men. Adams pointed out a flat stone
for a seat, and, drawing a long breath, dropped down upon another.

"How long have you been here?" he began; "and where do you think you
are going? That's what we always want to know."

Julie explained the uncertainty she faced. He looked at her keenly.

"I used to be in Guindulman," he said. "It's one of the three
garrisons on the island, including this place and Tarlac--only a
battalion altogether."

She returned to him his question--the genesis of everything in the
East. "And you--how long?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Year and a half. I've lost all track
of time." He pointed to some pensively quiescent hills. "Could you
fasten time, or change to them? As it was in the beginning, so it
shall ever be, world without end. You get up in the morning and go
to bed at night, till your brain reels. I hate this eternity. I want
to live or I want to die."

"Why do they leave you? It's wicked!"

"Why do they send a mere child like you to Nahal? We're grist for the
mill. In order that big things shall come forth from it, the wheels
must grind exceeding fine. You and I are slated for powder.

"This is my private little hell. I've got to keep the old man from
running amuck and the men from breaking out. But what I want to tell
you right now--because we are going to be such awfully good friends--is
that I am sick of my job, and I'm afraid that I'm going to break out
too. I've lost my perspective. They might have let me go out for just
a little while. All the time, I'm in insurrection inside. I seem to
have slipped some vital moorings--and to be adrift."

"But you wouldn't yield now, after struggling so long?" Julie
pleaded. "Oh! I'm so sorry for you!"

He clutched his face in his hands, and looked out through the foliage
across the sea. "What is life, anyway? There must be more of existence
than what we manage to find. Sometimes I can feel whispers of it. Do
you think I'm mad, or just soul-sick of my kind of a world? You see
I'm only a poor devil in purgatory, trying--and not succeeding--to
fight my way out."

"You have been splendid," she said tremulously. "Does it mean anything
to you to know that I think that?"

He straightened quickly. "It means a lot. This hour has put something
into my veins."

Suddenly the boat whistled from the harbor. He took her hand,
and said with a feeling which he could ill conceal: "The Blessed
Virgin did not visit Purgatory for nothing this day." Then he added:
"I shall see you. Perhaps they will let me come to Guindulman--Ah,
anyway, I shall see you!"

Julie from the boat waved a farewell to the khaki-clad figure standing
on the pier, Mr. Purcell watching her intently all the while. "Military
gentlemen," he informed the universe in a meditatively resentful way,
"are always irresistible to women."



CHAPTER V


In darkness, rain, and perturbation, Julie landed at her destination. A
storm had blown up from the Sulu Sea, to which they were quite
close. Before the light had faded, however, the Captain had pointed out
as Guindulman a spot in the long, low stretch of gray green against
the gray sea, where a lonely torch light shot up in the dusk and was
gone. Julie's companion had managed to make the latter part of the
voyage somewhat too disturbingly intimate, and she hoped fervently
that their ways would soon part.

In a large house near the wharf, they found that a white woman,
a teacher, was quartered. She sent word that she would look out for
Julie. Mr. Purcell was directed to the Officers' Mess.

Miss Hope, a succinct person with the ineradicable stamp of pedagogical
command upon her, greeted Julie, and explained conditions while the
girl changed her drenched clothing. Of the two available intra-suelo
rooms rented from the prosperous native family above, one could be
turned over to Julie--the one, the girl noted, that was closest to
the malaria-soaked ground. Because of the military occupation, the
village was badly crowded.

"The General Superintendent must have known something about this
place," Julie reflected; "since he sent you."

"Oh, I know him very well," Miss Hope declared. "He is a very busy
man, and cannot be expected to know everything. This is the world's
end--but I came here on my own request. I have a project which obliges
me to teach in at least one remote island. My plan is to teach in
every country around the world, as far as I can get. In addition to
teaching in the States, I have already put in one term in Honolulu,
one in Yokohama, another in a girls' school in Pekin. From here,
I project India and Ceylon, a course of English in a Greek School,
ending up in a college in Madrid."

Everybody over here, Julie reminded herself, had a separate and
astonishing thing to do.

The rain had stopped when they set out to climb the hill to the Mess
for dinner. There was one general military mess where most of the
white colony ate, Miss Hope explained.

In the inky blackness Julie could form no impression of the town. There
was the usual plaza inevitable to every Spanish town, on a plateau
at the top of the hill. On a corner of the plaza loomed the large
house of the august Commandant.

Dinner was almost over when they arrived. Here in this one room,
closed against the elements like some Monte Cristo world, were nearly
all the white inhabitants of the place. A hush fell as the newcomer
stepped in among them.

In a community like this everybody was potential. The girl looked about
her, stirred at the encounter with these beings who were to become
the companions of her life; and when she was stirred the singular,
characteristic inner gleam came out and lighted her features. These
people, huddled together to keep their spirits alive in their neglected
corner of the world, woke up as if they had received a message from
their lost existence.

Major Landon, the Commandant, a tall, stern-looking man of swarthy
complexion, rose and greeted her, with the greatest possible
courtesy, Julie thought. He was in fact kind to her at once. That
this graciousness did not extend to every one, she soon learned. His
deep utterance rolled around in his throat like a growl, and seldom
got completely out. "You are the first American girl to visit Nahal,"
he rumbled. "We hope you'll stay!"

Miss Hope looked vexed, and resumed her introductions.

The Smiths were the only married couple. Theirs was a very recent
and spectacular marriage--any reference to which seemed excessively
to annoy the Major.

The two remaining members of the mess present were Lieutenants Dwight
and Brentwood, members temporarily, since they had lost their cook;
Bentwood, the Major's Adjutant, was a prosaically good-looking young
man who certainly tried his best to please the Major by purring
optimistically at him all the time, only to get snarled at for
his pains.

The very slimmest lady with the very yellowest hair Julie had ever
seen leaned across and whispered encouragingly: "Isn't he an ogre! I
came here, a bride, six months ago, and he frightened me to death. I
had come seven thousand miles to marry dear Marlborough--I hadn't
seen him since he was thirteen years old--and you can imagine!"

"Luella," Mr. Smith called from the door.

"Some time I'll tell you what the monster said." The slim lady
floated off.

Julie gave ear to Mr. Dwight on her left, whose attention had been so
persistently straying from his food to her that the Major's basilisk
eye had frequently to recall it. Dwight explained to Julie in lowered
tones--the Major was happily a little deaf--that the Commanding Officer
was a somber old file, of belated rank and defeated hopes. Even his
marriage had been a retarded affair--the lady had become middle-aged
waiting for him to propose, when suddenly she had discovered that he
had been making declarations to her for fifteen years, which, owing
to his unintelligible utterance, she had never understood. Since
the Major had been so deliberate in his own matrimonial concerns,
he regarded with disfavor the precipitate nuptials of the Smiths.

The next morning when they again climbed the hill, Julie saw the
village of Guindulman for the first time. Always thereafter it was
set apart in her memory as a shining village set upon a bluff above
the sea against an emerald tropical forest. Along its lone lines of
snow-white beach, palms waved in solitude. Over to the east a very
singular natural causeway united the island with a smaller one. To
Julie there was something very aloof and strange about this causeway
with the sea surging up on either side. The whole looked like Eden,
new, green, and expectant.

Nahal was in insurrection. A great proportion of its native men had
decamped for the hills, where under General Andegas they engaged in
outlawry of every sort, seizing the property of peaceful natives and
even killing them on the slightest suspicion that they were friendly
to the Americans.

The Major was an old soldier, and for all his brusquerie a good one;
but after a long sojourn in the subordinate grades he had lost youth's
sublime capacity for hazard. He knew that if he should employ the
measures essential to the pacification of the island, the measures
requisite for the obliteration of its chaos and disorder, he would end
up as an oblation on the altar of American conscience. There might be
others who could laugh in the teeth of the gods but the Major was too
old. So, high up in his great open room, he could be seen by his world
eternally walking about like a caged lion. There is no such bitter
spectacle as that of a strong man knowing and yet fearing his own mind.

Around the plaza was all the history Guindulman had ever had. The
church was very old, and was supposed to trace back to the activities
of the Legaspian missionaries. It had a three-storied stone tower,
in which there yawned three gaps for missing bells carried off by
Mohammedan pirates to their own terrible island--discernible on clear
days as a sinister shadow against the sea. The façade of the church
offered an entertaining exposition of the Book of Revelations. The
several different kinds of Horned Beasts roared sulphurously from its
brow, surreptitiously urged on from under the eaves by the Scarlet
Woman; an incensed angel in the center with militant wings and drawn
sword, gave them all battle, while under his feet a frightened saint
hugged the arms of Spain in desperation.

Outside the door of the church stood a slim, black-robed figure,
which, as the two women approached, turned upon them out of a somber
and lonely face the sudden fire of a pair of piercing black eyes.

"Good morning, Padre," Miss Hope essayed deferentially. "May I present
Miss Dreschell, who has come to take charge of the Boys' School?"

A change flashed through the priest's face, which was not suppressed
before Julie had looked into a hidden chamber of his personality. The
priest--he was young and had all the swift movements of youth--looked
at Julie quickly, and murmured a few Spanish words; then with an
inclination of the head, he moved away. A crowd of children on their
way to school came flocking about him.

Miss Hope said that he was a mestizo, the usual warring
half-and-half--all restless souls vainly seeking, between two races,
their destiny. James, the American teacher, who had visited him in
his convento, said that Father Herrero knew both Greek and Latin,
which in these parts was the same as saying that the Sultan of Jolo
could speak French.

The Ayuntamiento, or government building, seemed in its huge
concrete size, to overtop the village. It held all the offices of the
government, and streams of people were to be seen hurrying in and out.

In a wing of the building Julie saw a great upstairs gallery
where two hammocks were hung. These were the quarters, Miss Hope
thought, of the new Treasurer, the gentleman who had brought Julie
ashore. Troops quartered downstairs made this building eminently
safe. In a low-roofed building adjoining, prisoners stuck sociable
faces out between iron bars.

The bachelor officers lived on the corner opposite the Major, the
rest of the colony in intermediate houses. Thus the Major had his
whole domain under his eyes, and could even see when those of the
bachelors who messed separately across the plaza came to the table
in their shirt-sleeves.

As Miss Hope and Julie walked down the road toward the side street
where the two schools were located, the crowd of children who had been
following the Padre detached themselves with the inevitable inconstancy
of childhood, and formed a devoted train around the teachers, offering
them flowers. Julie, who was pretty and always popular with children,
fell into possession of most of these.

The priest, left alone, frowned slightly in her direction. Before
turning back into the church grounds he paused a moment at the gate,
and Julie saw a portentous shadow cross his face.

"He's the most powerful man on the island," Miss Hope remarked. "The
Padre, for that matter, always is. He is the mind of these people. Some
of the officers accuse him of all sorts of things. It's hard to tell
from his face what he is."

The boys' and the girls' schools stood opposite each other on a long,
wide side street, over-shadowed by great tropical trees, in which the
boys roosted out of hours among the mangoes and bananas. The buildings
were high and roomy, overlooking charming scenery of jungle and sea,
and were surrounded by the overgrown grounds that children love. This
street was their retreat; they lived in it nearly all the time, played
their games, mostly now those imported from America, and satisfied
their hungry appetites with the queer cheap candies and little sponge
cakes, made of very ancient eggs, that were purveyed in its stalls.

Julie turned into the Boys' School, now her responsibility, while Miss
Hope crossed the street. Miss Hope, Julie learned, had several native
teachers to help her; whereas one ex-soldier was the only assistant
she had with over a hundred boys. Brown boys of every age and stature
were filing past her up the stairs. The airy tropical structure rocked
to its foundation under the onsweeping surge of youth. Julie looked
out at the golden morning, and her thoughts glowed. She felt equal
to any enterprise in creation.

Mr. James was a well educated young man, who had come out to fight for
his country; and who had stayed behind like others of his countrymen
to experiment. He was not a regularly certificated teacher, but he
was a good instructor and had been making remarkable progress with
the older boys, with whom Julie could see he yearned to continue. The
younger ones were not advancing, James confessed; his one ambitious
idea having been to turn out candidates for scholarships in America.

Julie offered to take over the junior classes. Her sixty aspirantes
filled every nook and corner of the room; sixty funny little brown
creatures, fresh from their morning dip in the river, sitting like
wet little birds in quivering expectancy. Julie glanced over the rows
of brown heads:--the people that the Caravan in its long march had
left behind. The boys put their heads down on the desks, like little
setters, and stared. One hundred and twenty black beads peered up
at her. She was beginning to be disconcerted, when a delightful
little savage with hair standing up stiffly all over his head,
like a circular brush, detached himself from the brown mass, and,
moved by some aberrant impulse, strayed barefoot up to Julie's desk
and irrelevantly laid upon it a rooster's long, bedraggled tail
feather. Having consummated this act of tribute, Delphine, who was
to become his teacher's undying friend, stole back.

Seized by an idea, Julie drew a picture of the feather on the
board. The class sat up and inspected this feat. Having a knack with
a pencil, she elaborated the feather into a rooster. A murmur of
recognition and pure delight passed through the class. The bird on
the board was a national idol. Unwittingly and quite by chance she
had captured their interest.

In a few days they were chanting glibly of the rat and the cat and the
permanently unpleasant relations between the two, soaking in learning
by means of their incredible memories, and wrestling musically with
the dark, mystic bars of the Star Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn
of the Republic.

James taught mathematics, and almost nothing else. He had a passion
for numbers, which he taught dogmatically as the whole science of
life. His boys had been shot dazedly through fractions, and were now
halting awestruck before the heights of geometry. The fact and values
of the universe astounded their unaccustomed minds. Their island
had been their center of existence, and in this painful trepanning,
their brains gaped before the marvels and terrors of higher human
thought. These incipient philosophers, much perturbed, used to seek
Julie out to ask her to explain a little the metaphysical net in which
they found themselves fast. They were troubled terribly in their souls,
and Julie, ignoring geometry, and all the equations of men, would seek
with her fore-shortened philosophies to set these simple minds right;
but she could see that they were not quite satisfied. There was no
doubt about it that the boys, still unsettled in their minds, went
to the priest, who received a very garbled version of her explanations.

Julie's own little boys were in their seats an hour before
school opened, exhilarantly scratching their meager little life
experiences on their slates, or debating with one another in bragging
English. They loved the school, and lived in it in a state of expectant
excitement. Like little charmed birds they sat, while Julie explained
what became of the sun when it went away, and the wonderful journey
they were at that moment taking around it; whereupon the boys would
feel their desks for the barest fractions of the movement of this
celestial merry-go-round. They had an inordinate love of fairy tales,
and listened--poor little earth-grubs--with widened eyes to the
recounting of battles and heroes of far-away places of the world.

Julie never forgot those days. She could shut her eyes long afterwards
and see the monsoon bowing the banana trees and scattering to the
universe the golden host of the sacred tree of India, rushing with
its wild force to up-root their little tropical world. The boys
still sat in her memory in quivering wonder before the miracles of
the cosmos. The archipelago could never again be the limit of their
consciousness; it strayed now over the whole wide earth.

But it was hard work through hot long days for a boy and a girl, and
the minds they were pulling out of savagery caught half-way. To pull
them up to the tidal mark of civilization would take years, and it was
just this staggering task that these two confronted. With their buoyant
young shoulders heaving at the wheel, James would despairingly exclaim:
"It can't be done. The whole race is stuck right here."

Julie would set her teeth. "But they've got to go through! The rest
of humanity's done it. Remember they've had only a few hundred years,
and look at the eons back of us!"

"But we sweated into our own souls, and they make us sweat for
theirs. What were they doing in our eons of advancement? and who is
fighting their savagery for them? We are!"

Julie sighed. "They are so eager, so anxious. I get frightened
sometimes as I sit before them; they accept me so wholly as their
creed. It comes over me that twenty years from now sixty men will
be thinking my thoughts. Oh, we'll get them, sometime--and isn't it
the most splendid work anybody could engage in? To make a race! Why,
you and I are sowing the dragon's teeth, which shall spring up as
the generation of light."



CHAPTER VI


Julie now entered into a phase of existence that she had never
before experienced. She was important to quite an extensive number
of people, not in the school alone--that was a life apart--but in
the delightful world into which she had dropped. A young, trusting,
and joyous figure, she stirred Nahal. Even the Major, when she came
within his range, emerged from his Hamlet gloom and persuaded his
facial muscles into a grim smile. To all the others Nahal was exile;
to Julie among so many eagerly attentive people, a number of them
men and young, who made a queen of her, Nahal was life translated to
some glorious star. Her work seethed in her soul and kept her vivid;
all those keen brown boys who were to grow up some day were her star
dust, out of which she was to create worlds.

Life is the present, the philosophers have said. To the young men
Julie was the eternal feminine, while the magic of their youth stirred
hers. She was utterly unused to so much concentrated attention. The
earth was abundantly peopled with a kind race. She and her followers
spent the evenings on the Calcedos' balcony, in the midst of an
assortment of banjoes, rocking in native hammocks and keeping the night
alive. Nothing at all went to sleep, not even the birds irritatedly
rustling among the leaves, nor the fireflies, nor the timid Ghecko,
who too horrible to be seen by day, crept out of his mysterious retreat
and offered his harsh bass voice at very close range; nor Mike the
Major's monkey, across the road at Head-quarters, where he squealed
and begged abjectly to be let into the fun; nor the natives drifting
in their little boats out on the silver water, with their guitars
throbbing softly through the moonlight. Here they swung and strummed,
and defied the stars, and wondered--what after Nahal? though into this
speculation Julie never entered. She was unqualifiedly satisfied with
Nahal. It was a beautiful island, it was paradise, and in it a great
many remarkable things were to come to pass.

When she arose in the morning and drew into her nostrils the perfume
of the hills, when she came out into that early sunlight that seemed to
promise immortal things, when she had a real look into that mysterious
womb of nature, the jungle, she was electrified. Everywhere there
was so much light; it whetted the desire of living into a passion.

Thus Julie came into closer touch with native life. It revealed
itself more fully to her than to the rest of the colony. Through the
schools she saw just a little into the native's heart, the heart
of an imperfectly civilized child. She was also by her zeal and
indefatigable young strength impelled to go into the night-school
work. James had been struggling along with it alone. As she came in
out of the darkness, and gazed at that assemblage for the first time,
her throat went dry. Seventy-five of them huddled into a room that
had been built to accommodate half that number, men and women crowded
everywhere and lining the walls! There was something terrible about
such an assemblage, something that gripped the heart in a vise; for
almost none of them were young, many of them in fact were grizzled
and trembling into old age. Their hands were gnarled with hard work,
their faces blackened by the sun. Most of them were so poor that a
copper spelled existence; yet strangely, incomprehensibly, with some
blind hope in their darkened brains, they were here, and, with the
stupor of half-civilized drudges, were lifting up their eyes to the
emissary before them in fearful, blind appeal.

Julie put her hand over her eyes. "They are looking at me as if I
were God," she thought to herself.

Often when the session was over, James and Julie refrained from
meeting each other's discouraged eyes. All day and then at night,
they had struggled with all their young strength to drag a people
over a margin. Never-to-be-forgotten nights were those, with the dim
lamp flickering above the long rows of benches, and the dark trance
of souls groping blindly for the light. They were struggling against
forces of the universe that would not be impelled.

"It's no use!" James hopelessly declared one night. "They are too
old. You can only get at the young shoot."

"It can't be too late, as long as they aspire," Julie exclaimed, the
tears springing to her eyes. "Think!--after plowing all day in the
river bottoms, in mud up to their waists, they come here in the few
hours their poor souls own. It means something, I say. It's a poor,
twisted fragment of the thing that wrested Mind out of the Universe!"

"I've only one life to live," James declared, closing his books,
"and no more, Miss Dreschell, have you!"

"If only we could see it through!" Julie sighed.

She looked at the stars, as she walked home. Big shining worlds rolling
through space carrying the problem of Mind on into infinity. Such a
far journey man had yet to make. Isabel had told her to go out and
hold up the world. She was finding it glorious business.

Julie came out of the night with the star-light still in her
eyes. There was something stirring about her rapt, young presence,
as she ascended the stairs to the sala, that quickened the attention
of a tall young man who was rather hesitatingly awaiting her.

The young man stood in full view, and her attention was immediately
attracted to his dignity of height and his direct gaze. She liked his
indomitable head, with its rigidly youthful contour and surmounted
by its upright crest of hair that glittered under the hanging lamp
like metal. She decided that what was so striking about him was his
superlatively untarnished look.

He introduced himself as Lieutenant Calmiden. Julie understood then
that he was the Post Quartermaster, who had been absent, in Solano,
for supplies.

They talked about Nahal, and he told her how much he loathed it,
and all other conceivable islands of the seas.

"I've been wondering what you could have been thinking about as you
came up the stairs," he said. "You came in scattering light about you."

"Oh, I am only a glow-worm, who's apt to lose his little torch any
minute, however much I may wish to be an archangel of light."

"Angels are finished with experience; they are men who have been
sublimated to cold perfection. Don't you wish to live, to experience,
for yourself?" the young man demanded with intensity. Julie felt
rather unaccountably impelled to say that she did.

"I used to live in this house, myself," he declared. "It was bachelor
quarters till the Calcedos teased it back. There is a wonderful view
from the balcony; I used to sit and look at it by the hour. Come,
and let me show it to you."

They strolled out to the gallery. Calmiden pointed to the causeway,
a narrow strip of glistening land, looking in the moonlight like a
bridge flung between two worlds, with solid silver masses of water
on either side.

"What a strange roadway!" Julie said. "What is at the other end?"

"I don't know. Nobody ever goes over there. There is a mass of legends
about the causeway; one that in a great cholera plague, the angels
walking about the earth, lifted it out of the water in order to go
across. I imagine the volcano to the south--whose red glow you can
see on clear nights, against the sky, as if the sea were on fire--had
something to do with its origin. I love it---I feel as if it were to
have something to do with my fate."

"These are such strange nights," Julie reflected. "They are too
dramatic for sleeping; the universe comes out from behind its curtain;
they are nights for walking the causeway alone with one's soul."

The young man's straight gaze swerved quickly to her. Julie had on a
green gown, and the green bracelet, which rested on the railing of the
gallery. Of all the lovely shining things of the night, the young man
appeared to have decided, she was the loveliest, and the most charming.

"Do you wear that,"--he gestured toward the jade circle--"because of
your eyes?"

"I wear it because somebody gave it to me."

"Somebody!" the young man ejaculated in forcible disappointment.

"A very beautiful woman in Manila, who had a tiny temple with a Green
God in it--a pitiless little Green God--presented it to me as a gift
from him. I met such strange vivid people up there. They called the
woman who gave me the bracelet the Empress of the East. There were
others--too," she paused, struck silent by a recollection. "How
I should have loved," she continued, "to stay there! Evidently it
was meant that I should miss wonderful adventures. I can only be a
glow-worm on Nahal."

"There is something about you that suggests that you are to travel
far. Oh, I hope not, Miss Dreschell. Don't go any farther. Nahal
might become something remarkable."

As he said good night, and held her hand in his, Julie's thoughts
took a sudden unintelligible turn, as if they were never again to
follow the old course.



CHAPTER VII


While Julie was dealing, in a splendid glow, with the affairs of the
universe, her own mundane concerns, she was uneasily aware, were
urgently in need of attention. She retired one night to her room,
with the jungle closing up about it, and the jungle's wild creatures
rustling but a few feet away, to do some deep worldly thinking. From
her trunk she took the book in which she fitfully kept accounts, and
calculated furiously for some time, going over the inexorable figures.

Suddenly she dropped the pencil, and sank back in her chair, staring
somberly into the night. Its blackness swept up to the grated bars
of the windows, and peered in at the solitary, harassed figure in
the cell.

Not one dollar of the hundreds she owed Mrs. Morris had been
paid back. That very first, sacred responsibility her new life had
assumed! In Manila, money had unconsciously spent itself. Then, there
had been the expenses of the trip South. But bitterest fact of all,
the splendid wardrobe, the cause of all this trouble, had bit by bit,
impalpably and detestably, as if under an evil incantation, been giving
way. Dresses cracked explosively, at the touch, and silk stockings,
however prayerfully drawn on, disintegrated into an elemental snarl
of thread. What the elements did not demolish, the cockroaches,
nearly as big as mice and scrambling deftly all over the room,
voraciously devoured.

Julie sat and burned with dishonor over her affairs. She felt as abased
as if she had become the actual chattel of her far-away creditor. She
would have resorted to any expediency to keep this bondage from being
made public. The Dreschells had an unconscionable pride. Mr. Dreschell
had brought up his family on the theory that borrowing money was
only a shade less reprehensible than stealing it. This obligation
was the Debt of England to Julie's soul. With her small salary, how,
she pondered, was it to be worked out?

She had in her trunk one month's salary. Every bit should go to
the woman whose peon she had become. In forgetting her own further
necessity to exist, she was acting with characteristic feminine
recklessness. There being no post-office at Guindulman, Julie rolled
up the bills neatly, put them in an envelope, and addressed it to
Mrs. Morris. Thereupon her mental processes took quite a leap. She
arose with a shade even of self-satisfaction. It was splendid to be
an independent integer of the world--to handle your own destiny--to
say nothing of your own money--unafraid.

Into the midst of these cogitations came the Calcedos' muchacho,
to announce a young man.

"What young man?" Julie demanded particularly.

"El Teserero!" the muchacho declared.

Julie dropped back flatly in her seat. Since the uncomfortable and
startling moments on the boat, she had contrived never to meet the
Treasurer alone. She knew how dissatisfied with this he had been,
and that in the midst of his activities planned to supersede the
Governor in power, he had been lying in wait for his opportunity. She
could see no way out of the encounter, and fortified herself for it
as she ascended the stairs to the sala.

The Treasurer held her hand an instant and regarded her closely with
his odd light eyes. The surprisingly sun-burnt face wore a look that
sobered her. She indicated a chair.

Mr. Purcell demurred. "Let's go out on the balcony," he suggested,
regarding with disapproval the publicity of their surroundings.

"Oh, I think I should rather remain here," she replied lightly.

"You don't object to going out there with the others," he reproached.

"There are several of them," Julie explained.

"How about Calmiden, and--others," he probed with jealous meaning.

Julie started slightly. How had he managed to be so well informed
concerning her movements?

"Why do you avoid me?" he demanded. "Do you think all these men are
your friends? Wait and find out. Now, I am serious. I care for you
truly, as I told you on the boat. I asked you to marry me; and I mean
it still--in spite of your evasions."

"Please don't!" Julie begged. "You couldn't possibly have meant
it--after those few hours."

She recalled her refusal--so adroit and impersonal, in which her
altruistic aspirations and her inviolate determination not to marry
had been calculated to carry conviction. She had wanted to regard
the matter as settled, yet here he was more determinedly possessive
than ever.

"You did not dream that I had given up?" he demanded.

"I beg of you to do so! I refuse utterly!"

"Don't say anything you'll be sorry for later," he broke in. "Things
are all your way now, but wait till they turn--till you find out
none of those fellows mean anything, and the bottom falls out of your
air-castle. Then you won't say that."

Julie stared at him in resentful amazement. "Mr. Purcell," she
exclaimed, "I don't understand this conversation. You don't at all
love me. You have merely set your will upon me, and are trying to
frighten me. Please never reopen this subject." She rose. "It is,
so far as I am concerned, definitely and completely closed."

"You'll regret that!" he exclaimed agitatedly.

"Have you threatened me enough?" Julie was frantically angry now.

She was aghast at the purpose that gathered in his face as he replied:
"I do not wish to threaten you, but I have not given up."

He descended the staircase, leaving Julie with her breast heaving.

That wretched voyage! Had men gone mad in this queer land, that they
would ask a girl to marry them on a day's acquaintance, and to this
staggering casualness add the brigand intention to seize her if she
refused? According to this doggedly unpleasant young man, he had put
a mortgage upon her that he meant at some time to exact. How many
more people were to advance claims on her life?

To rid her mind of this uncomfortable visitor she turned, on going
downstairs, in the direction of Miss Hope's room. The cheerful light
shed through the partly open door drew her forward. As she climbed
the three steps that lifted the room from the ground, she caught a
glimpse of Mr. Brentwood's white starched back. She started to retreat,
but the young man, turning quickly at the sound of her footsteps,
caught sight of her.

"Why are you always out when I come to see you?" he reproached, smiling
with his white teeth through his carefully brushed mustache. "I tried
to call on you to-night."

"I wasn't out," Julie moodily replied, remembering how much she had
wished to be. "I was upstairs."

Mr. Brentwood directed upon Miss Hope a peculiar look. "Come in!" he
hospitably insisted. "I can still see you."

Julie's evil star beckoned her on. Miss Hope offered no remark as
she took a chair. Mr. Brentwood, promptly facing around to Julie,
proceeded to direct toward her the fullest extent of his charms,
and succeeded for once in being truly entertaining. Julie, eager to
forget her experience with Purcell, dropped gladly into a sprightly
discourse, and both of them forgot utterly the rigid figure of the
vestal virgin, which opposite them began to steam with wrath.

After they had laughed together for some time, Mr. Brentwood bade
Julie a lingering good-night, calling back a careless adieu to the
shape in the background.

Julie turned to Miss Hope, but stopped short before the spectacle of
that lady who, having come out of the shadows, was positively trembling
with inconjectural passion. Her indefinite features seemed to melt
into a boiling lava, which strangely her face appeared to be. Her blue
eyes vehemently shot flames. Julie watched, with interested daring,
the forthcoming eruption.

"Miss Dreschell," cried Miss Hope, bursting with wrath, "you will
seek quarters elsewhere. Do you suppose it is entertaining for me to
sit here all evening while you monopolize my friends! Mr. Brentwood
was my friend, Miss Dreschell,"--in rising crescendo--"until you
came. My room and the Calcedos' sala have other purposes than the
accommodation of the crowd of young men with which you seem to find
it necessary to surround yourself. Moreover, natives of the better
class have a sense of propriety, and it is not edifying to them to
watch your friends--and their caresses."

Julie stared incredulously. Then a realization of what Miss Hope
must mean flashed through her. Evidently she had seen in the dusk
under her window the wind-up of a gay tender little adventure with
Terry O'Brien before he returned to command his mountain fastness
at Tarlac. It was never, Julie knew, to come to anything, and had
involved only a shadowy caress.

"But the Calcedos haven't said anything of the kind!" Julie objected
with rising anger.

"They will say so. They have some cousins coming to visit them,"
Miss Hope declared, pointing positively in the direction of the
door. She closed it sharply on Julie's outraged back, leaving the
girl to grope her way through the dark. Julie got to the entrance,
and stood there staring indignantly into the night.

It was a charming night, all the worlds of the universe spinning
gayly up above her through the light of myriads of suns. It must
be really a very small concern to Uranus or to Neptune, where a
hundred years are as one, whether the atom called Miss Hope or the
atom called Purcell were angry or not. As for the atom called Julie
dancing headlong through space--was it even remotely possible that
somewhere, some place, any one atom tremendously counted? Was there
a law that held over those great worlds and their activities? And
must one conform to it? But how, with mystery on every side, were
you to find the law? Had she, because Purcell was not so pleasing
as the others, been intolerant of him? She had not been angry at the
sentimental intimations of the others. She had, in fact, poetically
enjoyed them. And Miss Hope--although she was, according to Julie,
terribly old, might she not still cling through a thousand yearning
desires to the magic garment of youth?

Julie was not sure concerning all these speculations. A strange
consciousness seemed to be speaking through her, a consciousness
that saw things from all angles, but which only occasionally broke
into utterance.

The approach of a tall, familiar figure put a stop to this metaphysical
trend of thought.

"I came once before," Calmiden announced; "but I heard you in there
with Miss Hope, so I decided to come back later. Come take a walk as
far as the steps of the convento."

"It's getting late," Julie demurred.

"What does it matter? Look at the night!"

Julie regarded it, and capitulated. They strolled up the road that led
to the upper part of the village. Street lights were sparse and dim
in Guindulman. The avenue was almost closed overhead by the prodigal
foliage of mango trees, and blackened with the soft, thick darkness
of the tropics; yet to-night it was meteorically lighted by myriads
of fire-flies shimmering in the branches.

Julie threw up her head in wonder at the transfiguration. Everything
had become unreal. The avenue was like a road in fairy-land. The
convento, white as driven snow in the moonlight, rose from its high
tier of steps above them, like an ancient temple.

To the left was the Major's ogre-like retreat. Mike, routed from his
roost in the trees by this intolerable illumination, was snarling
and lashing through the branches like an imp of darkness.

This little gargoyle had been deliberately installed in this tree
commanding the entrance to his office by the Major, and Hell itself
could not have been more ferociously guarded by Cerberus. Men could
come and men could go; but to the whole female race Mike stuck out his
whiskered jaw in challenge. He might be swinging by his tail, ever
so happy and carefree, in the branches, but let a daughter of Eve,
however secretly, steal up to the portal of the omnipotent Major,
and he was down upon her with a thud, wildly rending her garments.

"Wild little beast!" Julie disapprovingly declared, moving out
of range of his chain. The monkey, like some monster of elf-land,
thrust his grotesque little head out of a nimbus of fire-flies. He
scratched them out of his eyes, and securing them cunningly in his
wicked little paws, bolted them with rapt relish.

"Horrible!" Julie cried. "And they were lighting up the world!"

"He's rather handy to have round, though," Calmiden hardily
declared. "You see I am Quartermaster, and people want to bother one
with such a multitude of senseless things."

They mounted the terraced steps, which in a sheer drop fell from the
walls of the convento. "Look!" Julie pointed high above them. On the
aerial gallery of the convento, a black cassock loomed stark against
the night, a solitary brooding figure staring at the stars. Once it
bent intently to regard the two young persons.

"Poor fellow!" Calmiden exclaimed.

"Why?" At sight of the priest a cloud had come over Julie's mood.

"He's so solitary, by race and vocation. He's only half white, and
only half a man. He might as well be a magus up there in his tower,
for all the participation he has in human living. Wouldn't you be
lonely if the gates of your soul's territory were closed against
you, if you were forbidden to love--ever? He has fire in his eyes,
our padre. He wasn't made to tend altars on high mountains."

"It's my firm conviction," Julie declared, "that he tends very
assiduously the fires of the insurrection. He hates us; he hates all
white men."

"Because we are what but for a little slip of fate he might have
been. The tragedy, the wickedness of these racial Lucifers flung down
to a lower world!"

"Do you know," Julie said soberly, looking up at the Priest's tower,
"I fancy the padre doesn't like me. These people don't understand our
women--the woman who walks through the world alone. To them she is an
object of suspicion; to their mind her liberty signifies licence. For
instance, to-night I oughtn't to be here--and he's looking down on me."

"What does it matter what they think? So far as I am concerned they
don't exist. I am just serving my time,"--he closed his lips tightly;
"counting the moments till I can get out and go home."

A brooding distant look came into the girl's eyes.

"To pass in and pass out? What good can that do? One should put the
plow into the soil and not abandon it."

"I should think you'd want to get clear of the uncleanliness of this
territory of Baal. I've seen enough raw, bestial nature over here to
make my soul revolt. The standards civilization has fought for go by
the board here. One must be forever on the lookout in the heart of
half savage society to keep from relapsing."

"Just you wait till my boys grow up. Then there'll come a change."

"Good God! You don't purpose staying over here till then?"

The girl looked steadily into the night. "If I did the right thing
I'd stay. My little brown men lifted into the citizenship of the
world!" she murmured.

"Come down from your perch in the skies. What a dreamer you are--and
what a life to fling carelessly away! It belongs to somebody or other."

"Nobody gives up anything anymore," Julie went on. "The renunciation
that built up the world is going out of it. Upon whose shoulders,
if not upon ours, is the foundation of the New World to rest? Isabel
called me Atlas, and I have been so happy holding up my little end."

"It is terrible to speak of spending the years of your life
here. You don't at all know what you are talking about. You don't know
orientals. Wait till you see China, a half dead amoeba sprawling over
the earth. You will be overwhelmed by the spectacle of humanity getting
nowhere at all--just crawling along the surface of the globe, like
worms. Some day you will wrest yourself out from these sunken millions
in fearful prayer to get back to your own kind. Oh, don't you feel
the darkness, the despair of it? There will never be any renaissance
of the East--for to have a renaissance you must have a soul."

"But we are trying to make the start here--that the fire may travel."

"Among these inconsequential little swaggerers? Even China, with
her art and her senile one-man kind of learning, has them beaten
miles. My soul is sick of the whole debased East, I tell you; and I
despise this beastly hot-house of an archipelago that spawns existence
in such hideous profusion. I am no colonist, no pioneer, ever. I am
just a soldier, to restore order and pass on."

"And you don't care at all about the great struggle, that is
commencing, everywhere over here? Ah, I can feel it," she cried,
"--the powers of Light against the powers of Darkness!"

Calmiden regarded her with profound feeling. "You are terribly young
to be here alone."

"And already I have made two enemies," she said with a change of
mood. "The very first of my life!" she reflected ruefully.

He knitted his brows. "I don't like to think of your having enemies
in this country."

"They sprang up like a simoon in the desert. I was angry for a bit, but
I can't nurse a real good hatred in my soul for five minutes. It just
peters out, and of course that puts me at a frightful disadvantage."

A swift change came over the young man's face, an inflexible sheath
changing it into a mask of steel. "I can stay angry forever," he
said, frowning into the night. "I don't mean that I have merely a
bad temper. My mind simply will not expurgate an affront. I love and
I hate for good," he declared with concentrated passion.

Julie drew away a little.

"Oh, but why dwell on such things, you and I?" he went on. "All
this would not have come out if you had not stirred to the bottom,
where the truth dwells. I may be violent underneath, and hard with
those who injure me, but there are any number of things to which I am
inflexibly true. I am as inexorable one way as the other. I despise
weakness of all kinds, and it is weak to let people hurt you. I don't
care what anybody says, if you let a person hurt you lie will despise
you into the bargain. It's too bad, but I can't be changed--and I'm
glad somehow that I made a clean breast of it to you."

"You frighten me a little by the order that is all through you. Even
your sins appear to have unity, whereas I keep house topsy-turvily in
my innermost being. I have nothing filed there. I don't know what will
flash out at any moment. I am camping in the universe--and having for
the present a tremendous time. Some policeman will come along some
time and take me in because I haven't built a house in creation. But
just now there is adventure, and the glory of being alive under the
tents of Kedar."

She smiled up at the moon. "I wonder where I am heading?" she
exclaimed. Her glance dropped, she stopped talking, and her face lit
up softly; her attention claimed by something she seemed to see off
in dusky space. Calmiden watched her for some moments where she stood
on the step of the old convent with the moonlight flowing over her
like a timeless river.

"What are you seeing off there?" he asked.

"Faces! Faces--startling ones that I saw in Manila--made by the New
World. I often think and wonder about them--about one, more often!"

"A man's!" Calmiden echoed blankly.

"A god's--with the heart of all the world beating in his breast."

"And you think about him!" he exclaimed in gloomy dissatisfaction.

The girl roused herself. "It was only the encounter of an instant,"
she mused wistfully. "It would be very foolish to think of just one
moment out of one's life, would it not?"

She turned suddenly, for the thought had surged over her again that she
had not in any way heard from Manila since she had left it behind--that
in the busy, brilliant lives into which she had fluttered for an
instant she was not even a recollection. Apparently in these strenuous
times it was every man to his own road! She had chosen her road--but
she had never ceased to remember those beautiful days and nights.

"Good night," she told the young man. "I must go now."

Before she went to bed, she put out her light and, wrapped in the thick
darkness, stared out on the swaying groves. Far down the avenues her
gaze pierced, as if some message were stirring toward her from off
there. Soon she was asleep, close to the evil, perfumed earth.

As Julie went pondering along the golden dust-powdered road, she
was confronted at the convent steps by Anna Anastasia, the Priest's
mother, who accosted her with the freedom of manner that was part of
her efflorescent personality.

Once long ago Anna Anastasia had been pretty enough to ensnare the
attention of a rich young Spanish official. The Priest was the issue
of their irregular alliance, and against its consequences his soul
perpetually rebelled. This light, fluid creature had inexorably fixed
his fate. The desires of her soft little body had made him what he
must unchangeably remain. Far from being a Magdalene, however, Anna
Anastasia, as the mother of the Priest, occupied in this elastic
human community a position of almost religious eminence.

Nodding sociably at the girl, she said in Spanish: "I've been told
you seek accommodations."

Julie looked harassed. Had she not been everywhere unsuccessfully over
this crowded town and finally been advised amazingly by the Governor
to marry the Teserero in order to put an end to her troubles?

"It's maddening," she replied, pushing her damp blond hair from her
brow, "but there seems to be none to be had!"

The Señora smiled archly. "Quite true; there are none. It seems a shame
that so young and so charming a señorita should be distressed. I am
lonely!" she exclaimed. "It is not,"--she shrugged her shoulders--"the
pleasantest living in the world with Raoul. If he could become more
human--if he would find something to take his black thoughts off
himself, and off me! Would you believe it, Señorita, he keeps me a
close prisoner--me who am but thirty-eight? Many women marry, and have
lovers still, very suitably, at my age. Always he makes life hell by
demanding, 'Why did you do it?' Why indeed! It would be well for him
to see that it is not easy to resist. His father was a cavalier. You
can see it in Raoul, who is so tall and strong and beautiful, as you
are. Raoul is of a higher race.

"Come to live with me in the convento, and I will give you every
comfort. Things must be made easier for me, Señorita; truly they
must. I should love Raoul to go through purgatory--to learn that
outside his breviary there is a heaven and a hell."

Julie stood turning color under a mixture of violent emotions. This
impossible and monstrously unconcerned woman actually expected
an answer to her unthinkable proposal. But even in the midst of
suffocating emotions, Julie remembered that she must be careful of
giving offense to so powerful a person. "It is inconceivable!" she
exclaimed, drawing away.

"But why, Señorita? You like men. There are always many around
you. It was so too with me. Make Raoul eat the dust!" Her face set
into passionate lines of hatred.

Julie stared dumbfounded at the woman who claimed her as a sister
spirit. "This is horrible," she breathed.

"My son says you are beautiful, but that you are evil. The other
señorita, he says, is too old for sin. You see that he is very harsh."

Julie was trembling now. "Señora," she said, "it is too much." She
hurried back to her jungle room, clenching her hands, and letting
the angry tears flow.

That afternoon, Maria Tectos, the Old Maid of Guindulman, one of the
most noteworthy personages of the village, not only as the possessor
of considerable wealth but as the acknowledged leader among the women,
hailed Julie as the girl trudged by. She offered Julie a room in her
large house, which was the best and most unique mansion in the town.

It was distinctly a compliment, Julie understood, to be invited to
join this exclusive household. The Old Maid had been to a school
in Manila; moreover, with her ultra-modern, tremendous, iron-gray
pompadour shaking always like a tower with her laughter, she would be
a jolly companion. She believed, so she was always averring to Julie,
in the complete freedom of her sex; and she was constantly stirring the
women up to one thing or another; but this feministic progressiveness
unfortunately carried along with it the conservatism of old age. The
exactions the Old Maid imposed would leave Julie none of that liberty
the Old Maid extolled. Julie could see her young men friends only
under the Old Maid's eye; and it became clear that everything would
be done to discourage altogether their foolish visits. The Old Maid
pointed out her own successful single, elderly state as a contrast
to that of her companions.

After the sinister proposition of the morning, and the accompanying
insinuations, the Old Maid's invitation seemed a real elucidation of
her problem. The view of her entertained by Anna Anastasia and the
priest was peculiar to their own dark minds. The others knew that
she had come here to give all she could. But it was troublesome that
their appreciation of conventions so disproportionately exceeded
their realization of ethics. These people whose Atlas she had come
to be, might not at all understand her living alone, as she had been
thinking of doing, in a little house which she had discovered she could
rent. Perhaps, after all, since she had made this her particular task,
and was getting really to have quite a hold on some of the people,
she had better accept the Old Maid's stringent proffer. So with a
strange feeling that this decision would be ultimately critical,
she told the Old Maid that she would come.

When she returned from school at five o'clock, Calmiden stood waiting
outside the closed Headquarters.

"You're late," he exclaimed, coming toward her. "I've been waiting
some time."

Julie regarded him gravely. "I'm tired," she said. "Finding a roof
for one's head is harder than I thought it was. You know that Miss
Hope has made the Calcedos put me out. I've been everywhere, and had
the strangest things said to me--" She paused gloomily. "But I've
succeeded at last."

"Where are you going?" he demanded quickly.

"To Maria Tectos. She has offered to take me in. She is very powerful,
and I shall be very comfortable, but--"

"What?"

"She has made stipulations. She does not approve of my seeing men
alone, or walking out with them."

"Well, you told her you wouldn't go to her, of course."

"I told her I would."

Calmiden stopped short with a forcible exclamation. "Why, she
will never let us see each other! I say, you are not going to let
that happen? Do you want to give up life completely, sit up alone
night after night in the dusk among the palms in this desolate bit
of jungle? You don't know what it is, I tell you--this dark alien
land. Every atom of it makes you feel your abandonment. This country's
not for women anyway. It's for armed marching men. I can't think how
you dropped into it. How did you?"

Julie started. "I think--somebody said something to me once on a
roof top."

"Well, I am talking to you now from the ground floor. Life is short
enough anyway, and you propose to cut off all its possibilities by
burying yourself in the wilderness even more effectually than you
have done already. Why it's insulting the high gods who made you the
lovely being you are. Maria Tectos--and all the natives be dashed
when they try to dictate your mode of living!"

Julie stood looking soberly down into the dust of the sun-burnt
road. The life of a hermit on the island of Nahal! Could one even
for the most inexorable principles endure it?

"It's beginning to get awfully hard!" She sighed. "Sometimes I long
so to go back to Manila--I really had no idea of being so completely
put out of the world. I thought I should work very hard, and win my
certificate to title among the Builders. There appeared to be very
little real work left for me in Manila--and it didn't seem fair to
play safe over courses already won. But I really didn't expect to be
so cut adrift."

She straightened up, and smiled.



CHAPTER VIII


Calmiden pressed closer. "We couldn't walk in the dusk, ever any
more, Julie, among the mango trees, with the fire-flies all about us,
or sit on the wharf and watch the little boats."

Julie's gaze dropped again in heavy thought. Calmiden was looking at
her closely.

"What lovely hair you have! Oh! do be kind to yourself, and to all
the rest of us."

She lifted her head. "Why, anyway, should it make any difference in
the long run what I do about it?" she demanded of the universe.

"Then you won't go?" Calmiden exclaimed joyously.

Still Julie hesitated. But the instincts of youth and the joy of
living had won the struggle in her breast.

"No," she agreed.

When Julie went to the mess that evening, she found the Major scowling
heavily at the table cloth. He announced at last: "I've just received
an order from the Department which revokes commissary privileges
for civilians. This will of course deprive them of the privilege of
Army messes. I seldom make any comment upon my orders, but right
now this appears to be particularly unfortunate. We are a remote
and inaccessible unit of society, facing the roughest conditions;
and now some of us are about to be completely cut loose. Supplies
will have to be procured in Solano, from Shylocks who exact excessive
prices. They must be requisitioned at once, but until they arrive,
I shall, on my own responsibility, keep this mess open."

He looked at Julie as he spoke. From the first, he had made her
his special charge. The girl was aghast. For the purchase of large
supplies she had no money, having despatched it all to her creditor
across the ocean. She left the room heavily, and groped her way down
the road. There were no fire-flies to light the world to-night.

Suddenly some one stepped out from among the trees and softly spoke
her name. He made a quick sign for silence, and she suppressed the
incredulous cry that had sprung to her lips.

It was Adams, dropped down from the skies; for how else, with Dao on
the other side of the island, could he have gotten here?

"My hour came, and I bolted!" he said. "I've ridden without sleep
two days through a wilderness. The ogre wouldn't let me have a leave;
but I persuaded him to give me a three-day hunting pass to go after
deer in the mountains. Don't know how I ever got through; and if the
Major should find it out--or any of them--I'd be court-martialled and
chucked. There seems to be a path in this grove, which we can follow to
get out of the way of observation. I came, of course, to talk to you."

The path ran not far from the Old Maid's house, into the copse. It
brought them upon the deserted end of an estate, where a small house
could be seen deeply sheltered in the trees.

"That's a nice place--sort of a wild garden."

They settled themselves upon a log. The moon coming out from behind
clouds broke only fitfully into these woodland depths. All around them
was the soft still dusk, and a mysterious pensiveness in the night.

"I had to come," Adams declared. "I wanted to see human beings,
I wanted to talk to you. There's an appetite of the spirit that has
to be satisfied. I haven't had any dinner, nor what you might call
any lunch, but I don't care. I've run amuck to get here. I couldn't
stand living with the lower man any longer. Doc's gone, and there
were just the ogre and myself!" He rested his elbows on his knees,
and dropped his head heavily in his hands. "The men are sick and going
down. The falling white man drops till there is nothing white about
him but his skin! I won't be that. I won't go down with the rest! Oh,
I've a right to live!

"I fled over the mountains, I would have gone through blood for this
instant's reunion with the decencies of my kind. To-night with my
hat pulled over my eyes, I walked into the post when it was getting
dark. I left my horse outside the village, and as I passed every house,
I looked into it like a ghost. What a jolly little group! The Major
was in his window, his iron old face turned to the hills, planning,
I'll bet, red-hot campaigns that would put his honor at rest. Good,
decent old fellow, dressed in his stiff white. You ought to see how
we go to dinner in Dao--or rather, you shouldn't.

"There was old Bent, sewing on a button by the light of a lamp,
and Dwight, a few feet away, reading a paper in a hammock, with Mike
sitting on his head. Calmiden was out on the back gallery, with his
feet wound round his tilted chair, staring at the sunset or the island,
or something over there.

"Three of the fellows all together. I used to make the fourth. We
used to play cards, and read our letters out loud.

"Little Mrs. Smith, farther on, was bending over a photograph in the
dusk--that one of Marlborough taken in Cuba, I suppose. It made me
wish I'd had a romance.

"You are about the only girl I ever thought about. But think how
long it will be before I see you again! And then there are all these
men here--"

Time passed unnoticed by the two sitting on the log amid the silvery
lights and shadows, reviewing the experiences of youth and confiding
to each other its ideals. Those hours were printed forever on Julie's
memory. Long afterwards she could recall Adams as he had sat with the
moonlight playing about the shadow of his figure and his pondering
gaze bent upon the encroaching darkness, and the way he had said,
throwing out his arms, "Every time I stretch out my hand--it seems
to come up against an invisible wall!"

"Who's that?" he exclaimed suddenly.

A man in white was coming out of the house. He opened the gate in
front of them.

Julie hesitated. She had identified the secret residence.

"It is the house of Nemecia Victoria," she replied.

"The village Thaïs! That was an American. No native is so tall."

He rose soberly. "I must go back and sit on the lid of my little
hell. I'm all right now. I went wild, and have done a mad thing,
but it has set me right."

They strolled along close to the fence that cut the woods off from
the public road. They stopped at the dilapidated gate. He took her
hands in his. "Dear, little, unforgettable friend of a few hours! We
have both to stick to our outposts now, but these times can't last
forever. Till better days then, and don't let me pass out of your
thoughts! Good-by!" He bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

Then he struck off at once into the darkness of the thicket. Julie
watched motionlessly at the gate till the shadowy form disappeared. She
had been groping around in darkness for a hand, and suddenly, out
of another's extremity, one had come to meet her own. Adams and she
had both deeply become involved in a great struggle. They had both,
the girl subconsciously felt, been elected to the destiny of the
East. Between them there was a cemented bond. By himself "holding out,"
he had helped her across the ditch.

A sound close at hand caused her to look around quickly. The figure
of a man in white was turning down a side street, not a few yards
away. Julie recognized it as the same figure that she and Adams had
seen emerge from Nemecia Victoria's house.



CHAPTER IX


A few days later, the Major, who had sat throughout his dinner in
gloomy silence, said: "I've had a telegram from Templeton. He says
Adams left Dao five days ago on a three-day hunting pass, and he
hasn't returned. He says Adams has had it in his head all along to
visit Guindulman, and he is sure now that he must have tried to get
across, a mad man's undertaking! And of course he didn't make it, or
we should have heard from him. Brentwood," blaming the Adjutant, as he
always did when he was disturbed, "why hadn't Adams been transferred?"

"I can't recall your saying anything about it, sir," Brentwood
pacifically replied.

"If he tried to come here there's a reason for his being so long
on the way, and he'll be court-martialled for his pains. Even with
a map this wilderness is hard to wade through. But if he actually
went hunting, he has met with foul play. Hunting in this country
alone! What judgment Templeton ever had is dissolved in whiskey,
and Adams has gone stark mad."

"Adams has been in Dao for nearly two years, seeing only an occasional
Spanish launch captain, and a dipsomaniac," Mrs. Smith remarked.

The Major was too deeply worried to challenge this. "We have no way
of knowing what he did do. I have telegraphed O'Brien to take out
some men."

Julie who had sat listening, with staring eyes and a fevered face,
gazed in fright at the Major. Adams had enjoined absolute secrecy
concerning his dash in and out of Guindulman. If she were to disclose
his adventure, she would expose him to military trial. If she did not--
She gazed round the anxiety-weighted table, and tried with palpitating
heart to come to a decision.

After dinner, walking agonizedly down the hill, she tried again to
think what to do. Adams had said it might take him two or three days
to get back. If he should arrive back, safely, it might appear that he
had been lost on his deer hunt; how could she dare to subject him to
court-martial? How, on the other hand, could she dare risk his life
by another hour's loss of time in telling what she knew? His safety
came first of all.

She retraced her way, and knocked timidly at the Major's door.

He opened it himself, looking at her rather strangely, she thought.

"I want to speak to you, Major!" she faltered distressfully.

He flung away his cigar, and invited her in.

"If you weren't the Commanding Officer, it wouldn't be so hard. There
must be moments when you are not; couldn't I claim one of those?"

The Major deliberated. "Perhaps I'd better tell you that I have just
become acquainted with what I believe you have come to disclose."

"You mean about Mr. Adams?" she cried. "Oh, nobody knew that he was
here, but me--and I have not breathed it to a soul."

"One other person knew, for he has just reported to me the exact
time that Adams left the village, and with whom he spent his time
while here."

"He spent it with me," Julie doggedly declared. "He was lonely,
going mad under that monster at Dao. He wanted to see civilization
again. This was what meant civilization to him. Doesn't that seem
awful, after what he has stuck through?"

"But would he risk his life, to say nothing of his commission, for such
an impulse?" Some thought, some intimation that projected from the
mind of the unknown person who had seen Adams and herself, stretched
back of the Major's words. Julie's unpleasant experiences of late had
commenced to sharpen her wits. The Major's informant, it was clear,
had had something horrid to say. The kiss! The disappearing figure of
that man--who could he have been! She began to be frightened. Glancing
up, she saw that the Major perceived photographically all that was
in her mind.

She cast about desperately in her thought. The Major's conservatism
must be won over, if one of her spirit's company were to be saved
from disgrace. It was useless to try to penetrate the understanding of
this grim, practical man with the things Adams had poured out to her
on the log that evening in the thicket; idle to deal in symbols with
the soldier before her. Well, there was always the final, smashing
conventional fact!

"Mr. Adams and I," she faltered, groping for the word, "had an
understanding. It was for that that he risked his life--for me. I
met him at Dao, and we had corresponded. Oh, please try to find
him!" she cried.

"He has probably got on the wrong trail," the Major reassured her,
"and will turn up in Dao yet."

"And you will do nothing awful to him?" she pleaded.

"We will do the best we can within the scope of the regulations,
of course. He's had a tough time of it, and the fact of your being
here just swept him out of his senses, probably."

Julie walked dazedly to the door. There she paused, and asked almost
fiercely: "May I ask, Major, who your informant in this matter was?"

"I am sorry"--the Major appeared troubled--"but I promised not to say."

Adams's danger swept Julie's mind of every other thought. She was
aware, nevertheless, of how fearfully, on the spur of the moment,
she had complicated, the situation that she had attempted to save.

She knew very little about military trials, but she was sure that in
a time like this, actually one of war, an officer who had deliberately
left his post in violation of orders, or in wilful misconstruction of
permission, to travel through a hostile country, was in for a bad time
of it, and possibly for disgrace. Any extenuating circumstances that
she could advance it seemed her duty to offer, at whatever personal
cost. But what of their future relations--of a bond cemented like
this? In casting herself away, characteristically, on the instant,
to save Adams, she had never given a thought to the issue.

Terry with his detachment of men was sent out from Tarlac in search of
Adams. The Major also dispatched a force from his own garrison over the
route that Adams had probably taken on his return. The country was wild
and inaccessible, and it was hoped that he had merely gotten lost. For
several days nothing was heard from the searching parties. The Major's
suspense, together with that of the whole garrison, grew painful. It
was about the time of the atrocities in Negros and Samar, and the
Americans knew not what each dark day might bring forth.

Several days later both parties came into Guindulman bringing Terry,
dangerously wounded, and the body of Adams. He had been murdered in
the hills--had lost his life in the new country that he had served.

After turning the country upside down, Terry had discovered Adams's
horse in one of the dark little villages, and had forced the populace
to disclose what had become of Adams. He found that Adams had come
through the village very tired and hungry, and had asked for some
food and a place to sleep for a few hours. He had a fine horse, a good
pistol, and obviously some money; so the presidente had proffered him
a dinner of hot chicken and had led him to a room. While he slept
the presidente and his accomplices had strangled him with a rope,
and thrown his body in a hole on the river bank.

After administering summary justice to these villains, Terry had
started back, only to be caught himself in a bamboo trap laid in a
nipa hut, into which he had stepped after reading a placard on the
outside addressed to the Americans and promising that information of
value could be obtained inside. Terry had fallen through the false
floor which had been laid over sharpened bamboo poles planted below.

The priest refused to allow Adams's body even temporary sepulture
in the cemetery of Guindulman, declaring that, since he was not a
catholic, Adams could not be admitted to consecrated ground. The
Major refused to take the priest's objections seriously, and pointed
out the fact that, in default of sepulture tax, the bones of those
interred were unceremoniously thrown out of the graveyard. However
over-crowded the cemetery might be, room for the present, the Major
declared, must be made for the remains of the dead officer. It was
a note-worthy fact that in Nahal there had never been sufficient
accommodation for either the living or the dead.

The quarrel ended in the annexation to the cemetery of a bit of
outside territory. So it was in unconsecrated ground, in a lonely
corner of alien forests, that Adams was put to rest.

The sun beat down on the open grave, and on the rude box. A strange
hush lay over the tropical atmosphere. Adams's horse, with his
master's boots reversed against the saddle, stood arching his neck
with sad pride.

The Major read the burial service. His harsh voice broke as he spoke
of the good soldier Adams had been, and a tear stole down his stern
cheek. The men pulled their hats down over their eyes, while Julie
stole forward weeping and sprinkled flowers over the friend who had
stepped out forever from the problem of the East.



CHAPTER X


A desperate situation now confronted Julie. For two weeks she had been
exhausting her ingenuity trying to keep her household going. The wages
of Gregorio, the cook, were unpaid, and trifling with the pocket of a
desperado is never wise--for it was patent from his physiognomy that
Gregorio was an insurrecto, or about to become one. All of Julie's
affairs had been in suspense pending the arrival of her month's
salary. Then word had come that the boat carrying mail between Manila
and Solano had been wrecked and the teachers' checks lost. Cablegrams
sent to the chaotic Department in Manila evoked no response. Miss Hope,
the itinerant Croesus, did not seem embarrassed by the catastrophe;
duplicates would undoubtedly be sent in time. But Julie could not
wait another minute.

James brought hope into Julie's despair, however, by informing her
that Miss Hope had told him that the Treasurer was prepared to advance
officially temporary loans to straitened teachers. This was salvation
through the gate of purgatory; for Julie desperately hated to approach
Purcell in a capacity that would permit him to assume the aspect of
bestowing a favor upon her.

But her affairs had come to such a pass that there was no alternative
to be considered. She owed pressing debts around the town, to say
nothing of those in Solano; and they all hurt her prestige as a
teacher. She knew that she would have to go to him.

The evening after the burial of Adams, Calmiden appeared, to bid
Julie good-by before leaving the next morning to take the field. The
troops, with the exception of a small detachment for the protection
of the post, had been ordered out to punish the lawless elements
of the islands. Adams's death had uprooted the Major's last inner
reluctance. He was at last going to take the responsibility of acting.

Calmiden sat down on the steps and looked about him at the miserable
little house.

"It's horrible to think of your living here alone. There are three
of us together there across the plaza. I thought of course that some
one of those women would take you in. Aren't you afraid?"

"Perhaps--sometimes," the girl said slowly. "I have the musical clock,
though."

Julie stirred uncomfortably. "It sings when the night is long and
lonely--after the golden wine-bibbers, with their careless voices,
have passed on; it sings through that dead stop of the night when
people die on earth. Then I am afraid, until I hear--well, do you
ever hear strange things? Did you ever sit up and listen, and hear
the powers of the invisible universe sweep by? Some denizen down
deep in me responds to all this, and makes out it knows what is going
on. Otherwise it would be horrible!"

His face grew grave. "You should never have come here to undergo
such things! Ah, what do you think you are making of life amid such
hardships?"

"I don't know," Julie downcastly replied. "How can any one know
until the sum is finally cast up? I am still trying to cast up the
sum of Jack Adams's life, and make it come out right. The memory of
our brief poignant talks, with the moan of isolated forests in them,
comes back to me--" The girl's voice broke.

Calmiden glanced at her quickly. "You think a good deal about him,
don't you?" Then he added, as if to get away from the thought, "Poor
Jack! However did he come to do it? He seems to have lost his head
over there. The Major knows what happened, but he never says a word."

Julie leaned forward earnestly. "Do you think that Jack
understands--that it was worth while; that what he did over there
all counted in the project--in the whole big scheme? For you see,
he used to say we were grist for the mill--he and I; and I never
understood that. It seems sort of disquieting to recall it."

"Oh, can't you see that, even if the revolution, or evolution, you
talk about did come over here, you are too slight a fabric for such
a thing? You don't belong in it."

"You mean I'm not strong? My aunt said that, too," she pondered
sorrowfully.

"And if you were strong? Adams was strong, and he lost his life. If
you play for big stakes over here, sometime you've got to lose."

Julie sat very still. At last she drew a letter from her dress,
and held it before her in the dim light.

"This is such a strange letter," she murmured. "And it's so odd that
it came just at the time Adams was killed. It's from that beautiful
woman whom I told you they call the Empress of the East--and who,
when I left Manila of my own free will, said I was mad to throw away
my life. She is the only one I met there who has written to me. One
individual counts for so little there--you understand. Well, I did
not completely drop out of her mind, anyway! Listen to what she says:

"'Dear Atlas: The Green God has told me to write to you. I don't know
why--since he never gives reasons, nor answers questions. What has
happened to you? Has the earth begun to tremble and slip from those
white young shoulders? Or why does the Green God fear for the Shining
Apostle to the East, and direct me to recall myself to you and cause
you to bear in mind that there is always--Isabel?'"

Calmiden snatched the letter agitatedly. "Who is this Eastern
Witch? What on earth does she mean? What has her horrible God to do
with you? Promise me that you will never answer that letter, or go
near her again!"

"Indeed, I shall probably never see her again, since my destiny lies
down in jungles, and hers in the beautiful places of the world."

Calmiden dropped the letter, and regarded Julie with emotion. "And
so this was your choice? Indomitable little being, with the luminous
faith! Do you know that this island which I hated so with my whole
soul--where the days were but blank heat waves and the nights a
horrible hush--has become paradise since you walked into it?"

His tone took on a poignant wistfulness. "But your eyes seem to take
you always out of my reach.... Ah, do you, after all, belong to the
Green God?--you who say you have thrown in your lot with the East!"

Before Julie could reply, Brentwood came up the steps, and announced
that the Major wanted Calmiden at once. Calmiden went away with him,
throwing back of him a long glance.

The next day, Julie, gathering together the courage of necessity,
went to see the Treasurer about the projected loan to the teachers.

Her heart beat violently as she climbed the stone flights of the
Ayuntamiento, in the left wing of which the civil government offices
were located. Purcell was in the Treasury, seated at his desk. As
Julie appeared before him, a strange alteration flashed through his
light eyes; a swift omen, gone before it could be captured.

"Good morning!" he said, politely rising. "Is there anything I can
do for you?"

There was a preparedness in his attitude that cast the girl down more
than ever. That it should be to him that things had finally led! She
shrank from him almost visibly, and longed unutterably for retreat;
but consciousness of her disastrous concerns pressed like a red-hot
weight on her brain.

Purcell, never removing his eyes from her downcast face, waited. If
Julie by some chance had glanced up at that moment!--but that abysmal
ignorance concerning human nature which her uncle had deplored blinded
her to the subtleties in which she was about to become enmeshed.

She lifted her eyes with a terrible effort, and Purcell immediately
dropped his.

"Miss Hope says that you are advancing money out of the Treasury to
the teachers, till their salaries arrive."

Purcell made a sudden movement, but did not speak.

"I have come on that errand. When my money comes I will repay you
promptly."

Still studying the flushed, downcast face of the girl, Purcell
reached out his arm to the safe and began to move the knob of the
combination. "How much do you wish?" he asked in a low voice.

As little as was humanly possible to get along on, was Julie's
thought. It was torture to stand here and have money doled out to
her by this man. She hesitated and finally murmured, "Thirty dollars!"

He glanced up quickly from the safe, almost in disappointment, she
thought. He brought out a great roll of bills which he held before
the girl's eyes while he slowly counted out the sum she had asked for.

Julie took the money with a quivering word of gratitude. After all,
there was no such thing as hatred in the world!

Purcell, with an abrupt gesture, turned away.

Julie went home with the wherewithal to make the world turn a little
longer. Gregorio was paid, and thus enriched, lit out for the hills to
the solar plexis of the insurrection, where by virtue of his brigand
appearance he belonged.

The troops returned after a vigorous quest of the insurrectos, whom
they had been able to engage but once. Owing to the impenetrable
character of the country, the insurgents had managed everywhere to
hide themselves from conflict. Balked and baffled by the unabashed
desperados sitting unattainably upon their horrible hills, the
Major was in a furious frame of mind. With his limited facilities,
he seemed powerless to cope with the situation; and unless something
should intervene in his behalf, it seemed that these people, who,
as Delphine had expressed it "greatly enjoyed to insurrect," would
go on warring forever, through savage lust of the thing.

One morning shortly after the Major's return, Julie, on her way to
school, became aware of some deep agitation that was shaking the
village. From hut to hut, some tremendous portent had flashed as
if by racial telepathy, till every soul in the village was aware of
it. Julie, looking up at their windows where they were foregathered,
brown secret beings with terror in their gestures, was unable to get
any clew to the mystery.

Upon reaching the school house, she was handed a letter which she
read with much astonishment. It was from the Old Maid, and requested,
in the name of the mothers of the children, that school be suspended
that afternoon. Moreover, the Old Maid besought Julie with all the
fervor of the Spanish language to come to her house at two o'clock,
for an "asunto muy importante."

Julie learned a little later, to her further mystification, that the
girls' school would likewise be dismissed at twelve, for the day.

Returning home at the noon hour, Julie found the little houses on
stilts looking strangely deserted. Apprehension seized her. Had the
women too decamped for the hills?

Promptly at two o'clock, she walked down the hill to the Old Maid's
mansion, and found in that formidable vestal's extensive grounds
all the women of Guindulman, as well as those from the neighboring
districts, as far even as Loboc. Every dusky sister of them was in a
high state of consternation. As if that were not astounding enough,
they had attached indissolubly to their persons very nearly all the
children in the world--and these were shrieking in panic. As Julie
quickly recognized, the barren and the unwedded had appropriated as
their share the orphaned and deserted; and the orphaned and deserted
were howling in apparent rebellion at belonging to anybody at all. Even
the Old Maid had one wriggling little goddess of the dust--whom she
ordinarily smacked soundly for poaching on her premises--touchingly
tucked under her arm.

Delphine alone had been able to elude these theatrical adoptions,
and skipped satirically free among the leaves. The moment, however,
that he glimpsed his teacher, he ran up to her and stuck his head
docilely under her arm like a young ox under the yoke.

The women were all chattering hysterically. Suddenly the Old Maid
burst out oratorically to Julie. "Dios! What are we to do?"

"But what is happening?" Julie demanded.

"You have not heard? Christus!" She flung up her arms to heaven,
while a piercing wail broke like a dirge through the mango trees,
"Los Macabebes! Los Macabebes!"

Then Julie understood the meaning of the panic of weeping. From
the North was coming a band of those unique and redoubtable little
fighters, the Macabebe Scouts, of whose name every other tribe in the
Archipelago stood in awe. The Macabebes, for centuries the friends of
the white man and the enemies of all other tribes. There was no forest
retreat they could not ferret out and no danger that they feared.

In these far islands, they were a terrible legend. The people feared
them like the devil out of hell.

The women continued to sob, and to repeat, panic-stricken their
dreadful monotone, "Los Macabebes! Los Macabebes!"

The Old Maid commanded silence, and whirled upon Julie. "You must
think of a way to help us, you who have gone to school and have seen
the earth. All our men will be butchered. There will be no sons,
husbands or fathers left. The Macabebes are monsters out of hell. They
eat babies, and suck the blood of the dying. They will make ashes
of this island. There will not be one man left. Dios!"--she flung
herself down on her knees, and the others dropped with her, beating
their breasts--"if God made your brain better than ours, save us!"

"What can I do?" demanded Julie passionately. "I have no power
over such things? Has not the Comandante held out to your men every
opportunity to embrace order and peace, and have they not scorned them
all? Have they not preferred rather to listen to the one malcontent
who delights to sow discord between the two races to which he belongs?"

After this fearful piece of daring, she swept on:

"Hasn't the Comandante promised you peace and protection and a good
government for all? And do not your men continue to remain in the
hills from which the Macabebes, for whom he sent, will dislodge them
at last?"

"Come!" commanded the Old Maid. "Gather your children about you,
and go down on your knees to the Comandante, and don't rise till he
promises to order back those devils from the North. You, Maestra,
will lead us and speak for us!"

Julie glanced about her impotently. This desperately misguided swarm
of women had put themselves into her hands. She was terribly sorry
for them, for after all they were only women who, uninformed as to
the motives of the men in the hills, had through weary months held
their families together. A thought struck her. Her face lighted with
some inner vision. She halted the female mob. Was it possible to make
simple creatures like these revolutionary? The women looked at her,
and waited.

"It is useless to go to the Comandante empty-handed," she declared. "He
is angry over the death of his lieutenant. And many times your
men have promised to lay down their arms, only to break every time
their promise. On this island no crops are growing, no towns are
flourishing. Those of you who have property have had it seized by
outlaws, and those of you who are poor must continue to support alone
your children, and to endure your anxiety as well as the tax levied
by Andegas upon every soul of you. It has all grown worse and worse
until you can not bear it any longer.

"The new government does not extort; it protects the poorest among
you. It will give you liberty, schools, the right to accumulate
property without fearing any man. It seeks to make you a happy people,
and the most enlightened in the East.

"Make your choice between the two, you women. Deliver to the men your
ultimatum--that you have decided in favor of government instead of
anarchy. What! Cannot the women who, deserted and unprotected, have
borne the brunt of the war, take a stand alone? Each one of you has
power over one man who must himself already be weary of hardship and
separation. Rouse yourselves to act, for in this way and in this way
only can the Macabebes be kept away! Stop the war, the outlawry, and
the destruction of a beautiful island. Give your word to the Major--the
sworn word of the women of Nahal--that if he will countermand his order
for the Macabebes, the men will come in and deliver up their arms."

Into the silence that surrounded her she continued to exhort. "You,
Marianna Tectos!" addressing the Old Maid, "are rich and powerful. Many
men will listen to you, especially if you say that your purse will be
closed against them if they do not go over to the new government. You,
even, Nemecia Victoria who have power over many men, we ask you to
help. And Señora Pandilig, tell your nephews you will disinherit them
and give your money to the government if they do not come around. Oh,
you all have your lever, if you are courageous enough to apply it. Do
you agree?"

The women stood in thoughtful silence.

"We must defy our men for the government!" Señora Pandilig exclaimed.

"To save them from the Macabebes!" Nemecia Victoria reminded. The
dreaded name thrown into their thoughts with this argument by one of
their own number had deep effect. They stirred and moved under the sun,
and thought. An unaccustomed feat!

Julie glancing over the crowd, reading the faces in this moment of
stress, held that each brown woman was weighing just how much power
she could personally, in an issue like this, exert.

Comments ran down the lines: "The men will be angry!"

"They will be worse than angry, Mother of Jesus, when the Macabebes
tear out their hearts."

"What are we to do, Constancia?"

"What do you think, Celesta?"

"Ah, it is beyond us."

"And if we don't dare!"

Thus rippled their breathless fears and uncertainties. A concourse of
brown women facing a crucial decision which they could not absolutely
consummate, until the Old Maid hurdled them across with a leap. With
a daring excitement that for an instant lifted her above her world,
she cried, "We will tell the Comandante that we, the women of Nahal,
will undertake to bring in the men. We will go before him now!"

The procession started to surge forward, growing, as it drew near
Headquarters, more emotional at every step. Against this collective
femininity, Mike was powerless. It passed him in an oblivious white
heat, in an unassailable mood.

Calmiden, whose office was in the entresuelo, stuck his crest against
the grated bars of the window and stared in stupefaction.

Julie, bareheaded in the sun, her face reflecting unnameable emotions
towered aloft in the heart of the avalanche.

"Dear, dear! What's happening?" Calmiden demanded.

"Women! Oceans of 'em, overturning history! We want to see the Major."

"For heaven's sake, don't overturn anything here! He won't have
it. Tell them to go home, and you stay and talk to me, you exalted
green-eyed person."

"Calmiden!" roared the incensed Major from the upper regions. Clearly
he had perceived the onslaught from his window, to which the worsted
Mike had valiantly climbed for assistance. "What do you mean by
letting all those women past the door?"

Calmiden looked at Julie in comic despair. "Does he expect me to
wrestle individually with the feminine population of the island? What
are you all up to anyhow?"

"Tell them," yelled the Major, "that I refuse absolutely to see them."

But the dogged remnant who had not yet succeeded in getting inside the
building merely continued to push. Masses of agitated women driving up
the stairs and sweeping along with them in their advance a wondering
lieutenant, an indignant sergeant-major, two native clerks and an
interpreter! A flood of women inundating the furniture and bearing
down on one solitary figure that still withstood them. The Major, in
impregnable dignity, sat fast in his chair in rigid military fashion
while the excited Mike, picking up everything he could find, fired it
upon the advance. Women fundamentally annoyed the Major, and to have
all the women in the world surrounding him in an unescapable embrace
was too dreadful to sustain. He sat like Pharaoh in the midst of the
visitation of the plagues, sputtering under his breath.

The routed office force stood helpless, while the room rang with the
classic wail of "Los Macabebes! Los Macabebes!"

The Major addressed them. "Tell them," he said to the interpreter,
"that for two years I have exhausted every peaceful means to get
the men of this island to return to their homes. They take the
oath of allegiance only to gain access to the town and commit fresh
atrocities. This is one of the last islands to continue in a state
of outlawry and disorder. The Macabebes shall come!"

Calmiden and the Sergeant-Major exchanged unofficial glances of pure
delight. A hush of sheer fright closed the women's throats.

"You killed my Lieutenant," the Major accused. "Your men strangled him
in the night when he was defenselessly sleeping. You have bad leaders
who inoculate you with their passions. There have been wicked deeds
and murders. These things must end."

The women wept in terrible despair, helplessly wringing their brown
hands. Brown supplicating hands groping up out of the dark!

Julie, carried along by the throng, tried to speak. The Major was
right. Yet if Adams had lost his life, he had given it--to the
East. There could be no price set on blood so shed. The vision rose
before her of lonely Dao, and Adams guarding its destiny. She wriggled
forward through the women.

"Major," she said, "these women have come to offer you a proposal
of peace. If you will agree to delay the coming of the Macabebes,
they will promise to bring in their men."

The Major stared at her incredulously. "The women! What have they to
do with the insurrection?"

"As things stand now, a great deal. There are only women left in
the villages now--without food. The burden of such an existence has
become too much for them to endure. They will no longer furnish funds
for Andegas. Maria Tectos and Nemecia Victoria are rich women; so are
the Señoras Calextas and Pandilig. The women are the backbone of the
community, and they give you their sacred promise. They are weary of
war, and wish to embrace the Government of the United States."

The Major strode over to the window and turned his back on them. The
women stared tremulously at him--but Julie motioned them back. He
turned at last, frowning thoughtfully.

"Maria Tectos!" he said abruptly to the Old Maid, "Will you take the
oath of allegiance? And you, Nemecia? And the rest of you?"

"But I am a woman!"

"You are undertaking to make peace like a man!"

"And I swear before the High God?"

"That you will henceforth be a faithful adherent of the Government
of the United States. Put up your hands."

Maria and Nemecia Victoria lifted trembling brown arms. Dumbly the
concourse followed their example. Julie alone understood the valor
of those uplifted arms. All these women were imperiling their souls
before the Padre for this terrible oath. But the Major had agreed to
hold back the Macabebes, and for that they could perform this miracle.

Calmiden watched Julie closely, as they went out together.

"You put them up to this. What was the use?"

"If they do bring peace--"

"Utopian dreamer! It will be the first time it has happened that way."

"But I know these people a little. Maria will leave no stone
unturned. She did not need that perfectly valueless oath that the
Major imposed upon her to scare her into the truth."

"How can you be so interested in them?"

"This is my destiny," she said.

"Your destiny!" He looked soberly at her.

There with the tropical sunlight beating down upon them, they seemed
suddenly to face their deeper selves.



CHAPTER XI


Julie had received a note from Calmiden. "We will cross the causeway
to-night," it said.

She waved back the toiling future generations of light, and took the
note to the window. What did it mean? The few lines managed to convey
a message quite beyond their import. She read them over and over,
then gazed across the white winding road and the green banana trees,
to the causeway lying like a high thoroughfare between two worlds. Was
to-day to be the last of an old existence, which she was to shed like
a discarded garment? Would the footsteps that had followed strange
paths in the East turn about completely, and the dream that had burned
in her soul be left forever unfulfilled?

The breeze swayed the sacred tree of India beneath the window,
and its golden incense full of mystic and exhilarating intimations
showered upon the air. Julie was carried on the wave of its magic to
a roof garden in Manila and the hero who had first overwhelmed the
horizon of her youth. Often, looking out on this glowing landscape,
she had seen this image, but more and more as something lost in the
swift passage of life.

She, would not see him any more. Fate, that fate which ruled this
world had arranged it so. Her destiny lay along the beaten paths of the
world. She was too small an atom, as Calmiden had said, to survive the
great chances of the coming upheaval, or to dare ever, ever to achieve
a force like Barry McChord's. His spirit had lighted areas of her life
tremendously. Nobody ever had so stirred or quickened the pulse of her
soul. But that spirit was receding before the hard facts of existence
that Nahal had brought. It was getting too terribly hard, with so much
pressing upon her, to inhabit two spheres. And if anybody in the North
had given her a thought again, he had not taken the trouble to make
it known. She had dropped completely out of those great activities,
and not a reverberation of her life or its yearnings had reached the
far-off goal of her city of dreams. She herself shrinking to her real,
insignificant dimensions.

The tangle of her affairs complicated all her thought, and sent a chill
wave over her. The cold, hard, insuperable fact of her debts! She
owed the merchants in Solano, the small merchants of her village,
and still, after the lapse of many months, she owed Mrs. Morris a huge
obligation. Finally, and very nearly the worst of all, there was the
desperate debt in which Purcell was involved. A pauper and a gambler
with life! How else could a person who had managed to put herself
in everybody's debt be called? Clearly she had demonstrated that she
could not handle her own life, to say nothing of playing a part in that
complex organization to which she had had the assumption to aspire.

A great agitation came over her when in that one solemn final moment
she looked into her soul and bade good-by to all she had come to
do. Slowly she began to efface and obliterate the old orders of life,
and the transcendent consecration of the past. The East to which
she had come with a torch became a mere drear fact of over-powering
millions. Ages, and the tried souls of many men would be offered up
before the East found its freedom. What she did or did not do could
not weigh in the infinite balance.

Slowly she turned back to the room. The brown gnomes were sweating
terribly in the throes of composition, mining the realms of thought for
a few throttled ideas. Never anywhere were they so dearly born. Julie
stopped still to stare at them. "Poor little generation of light!" she
murmured.

Delphine glanced up at her with his quick brown eyes. He was the
barometer of the class--a youthful personality that had escaped the
general languor of the race. He watched the other boys, and interpreted
their needs. He seldom sat in his seat, but was, with his books under
his arm, almost always in a state of itinerant education. He had been a
devotee of the betel-nut, but at Julie's solicitation had given it up.

The children marched out at the end of the morning session. Julie
thrust her note in her pocket, and was following after them when
Delphine, trailing by a string a big bright red tropical beetle,
stopped her.

"You stay here always, Maestra? You never go away?" he urged earnestly.

Julie glanced at him absently. "Go home, Delphine," she said gently.

"Here," said the boy, "is a present for you of this beautiful bug--if
you will not go."

"No, thank you, Delphine. I know it would break your heart to give
up Balthazar, though he bites nasty welts all over you all the time."

But Delphine stuck along after her.

A quickening of her being took place as she came out into the
street. After all, she was in the golden possession of life. She
picked some heavily fragrant flowers and thrust them in her hair. She
was young, and Calmiden was young.

She moved along in the light like the heart of the golden day,
her shimmering head lifted to the perfume of the Ylang-Ylang, and
a hundred visions stirring in her brain. Behind her unperceived,
Delphine and the scarlet splendor of Balthazar desolately trailed.

In the evening she donned the green dress; but as she slipped the
green bracelet over her wrist, a sinister shadow swept for a moment
upon her mood.

A lithe white figure appeared in the road. She went out to meet it. She
had never seen Calmiden when he was so beautifully grave. She walked
along beside him. Neither of them spoke.

They went down to the beach, where leaving the village behind they
walked silently along the shore. The water washed darkly on clean
white sand with the beat and rhythm of a majestic poem of which their
emotions supplied the motive. They pressed on through the starlit
hush till the causeway lay directly before them.

Wonderful lighted bridge! Water from great distances bore up on either
bank, and in mighty rushes took itself off again into space. When the
moonlight sprinkled through the darkness, this narrow shining strip
stood aloft over the fretted world.

As they started to cross it, Julie said: "I feel as if I were suspended
between heaven and earth! I hope I won't drop."

"Are you afraid?"

They stopped short. With the turbulence of passion the water was
hurling darkly about them. The land appeared to be groups of mystic
shadows, and the stars were down almost within reach.

"It's all said around me," Calmiden declared in an unsteady voice. "I
have loved you from the first, and I shall always love you. Nothing
can change that."

An agitating vibration passed through Julie's body. Was this the hour
of fulfillment, toward which she had been moving like a star?

"Promise me," he urged, "that you will belong to me forever, that
you will go with me out of this poisonous East."

"Of course," she said; "of course," speaking like one in a dream. "Why,
are you too afraid that something might happen?"

"We could be married soon, and have done with all fears."

Julie started perceptibly. Her thoughts had never traveled that
far. Marriage seemed vaguely a sort of risk to her emotion.

"Why can't we go on for a while as we are--till you are ordered
away?" she queried nervously. "It is so perfect as it is."

"But my existence is so uncertain! And why should you continue to be
flung around in this whirlpool? Some one should look out for you."

"Because I am such a little fool that I can't look out for myself? Oh,
let us wait till the end of my term. I came out here, you see, really
to do something--and I am so soon to drop it all!" An unconscious
anguish crept into her voice.

"I believe this country has put a spell upon you, or you wouldn't be
putting me off."

They were walking now along the causeway. The island ahead of them lay
like a sable mesh of mystery, with midnight archways through its dense
foliage. Startling creepers, like multiform arms of an unseen body,
groped over the heart of the earth. A sad fragrance floated out to
them. Once or twice the moonlight making bold with the forest lit up
its stilly beautiful chambers.

Julie made a sudden startled movement. "There is somebody over
there! He is stirring along under the trees. He looks all black. He
is watching us! Come away!" She dragged frantically at Calmiden's hand.

He hesitated, his gaze strained into the darkness.

"Don't you see that you are only one man--with only one pistol? There
may be a lot of men in there." She pulled him back.

He yielded at last. "I've got you to look out for," he muttered.

They ran swiftly back over the causeway, a target they well knew for
any one who might wish to shoot.

"I was a fool to take you to such a place!" Calmiden exclaimed when
they had reached the other end in safety.

"I am sure it was the priest!" Julie panted. "Where rather than to
that Eleusian island would that dark spirit go? Those black trees
just ached with the hatred of that Lucifer soul. Over there, he plots
to stir up discord among men. There on that ground that he has made
forbidding with supernatural tales he plans insurrections."

"I wonder how many rifles he's got stored away over there," Calmiden
said.

Then he sighed. "We didn't get across the causeway, after all!"



CHAPTER XII


From his upper state chambers, the Major was beckoning to Julie
with as much excitement as that statuesque personality was capable
of manifesting.

"Come up a minute," he called. "I have great news for you!"

As Julie entered the room he greeted her with a smile that thawed
every line of his stony visage.

"The insurgents will surrender in Guindulman next Thursday," he told
her. "They will deliver up their arms, to a man, and will take the
oath of allegiance! This might be called the 'Peace of Women,' don't
you think so? They have carried the thing through. If it hadn't been
for you, young lady, those Macabebes would be down here right now. You
belong to work like this. The Island of Nahal ought to canonize you!"

Julie had never been so acutely stirred. After all, a part of the
Great Adventure was coming true!

The natives of Nahal entered into a state of inordinate rejoicing. On
the evening before the memorable Thursday they gave a ball of towering
magnificence. It was true that at the ending of the war almost every
one was bankrupt, but nothing so spectacular had ever happened in
Nahal. It would be in the Manila papers--it would be in the papers
of America that the redoubtable Nahalites, of their own free and
enlightened will, had come to peace.

Julie went to the ball with Calmiden, notwithstanding the fact that
Purcell, in a formal note, had claimed the privilege of escorting
her. Julie had been cruelly bewildered and apprehensive of the
consequences of her refusal, because the Treasurer was now the actual
head of civil affairs.

It was indeed a magnificent ball, but the Americans felt considerable
discomfiture upon finding their hosts still wearing arms, when they
had come unarmed.

And a breach occurred between Julie and Calmiden, because Julie
accepted the Insurgent General's invitation to dance. From Calmiden's
point of view the request was the next thing to an insult; but since
this was the culmination of the coup d'état which she herself had
instigated, the fear of jeopardizing it in the slightest degree had
her caught fast. Not until the next day were the insurgents to give
up their arms, and in case Andegas became incensed, a little thing
like a dance might overthrow the whole course of destiny. It was
perfectly possible for Andegas to stick a knife in her back, as a
signal for a general slaughter. Moreover there was something in the
perilous uncertainty of the moment that exhilarated her. She had
bent her soul upon a great adventure, and she thrilled to the dim
things it foreshadowed--things that swam before her stirred vision
like the pageant of the worlds in the night sky which she glimpsed
through the galleries.

When they left the ball, the Americans departing en masse for mutual
protection, Calmiden gave very clear expression to his displeasure.

"I can't understand you--the things you do. What came over you to
consent to dance with that half-breed? Imagine their getting up a
ball and coming bristling to the teeth with weapons, just to tease
us! That ought to be enough for you forever! What makes you act as
if you belonged to this hideous game?"

"I do," Julie under the fever of the night recklessly replied. "I
understood this particular thing, and I was going to see it through!"

"Even against my wishes? To dance with Malay cut-throats--you a star!"

"I would have danced with the devil under the same conditions."

"Julie, talk sense. However am I to understand you? Chasing chimeras
that will bring you nowhere--whereas you and I are all that count. Give
up these terrible notions. You don't know what you are about--what,
my God, all this may lead you to!"

They parted at Julie's door with a feeling of estrangement, like the
prick of pain.

The next day Calmiden left for Solano, to secure some supplies for
the garrison. He went on a boat which had come into Nahal harbor the
night before, bringing mail.

At school, Julie, who had not yet received her mail, learned that
salary checks had arrived for both James and Miss Hope. At noon she
hurried home, fluttering with anticipation and relief. The thirty
dollars was nearly all gone. At the thought of Purcell, she shivered.

With trembling fingers she opened her letters. One was from
Mrs. Calixter. She thrust it aside to hunt further for the check; but
her money had, inconceivably, not come. The disaster of the wrecked
boat had been rectified for everybody but her; all the others now
had their checks. What sinister design was back of this? Soon her
desperate situation would become known, and against such publicity
her pride forcibly rebelled.

She was facing a critical state of affairs. Although certain varieties
of food were cheap in the village, her resources would soon be unequal
to purchasing even these. She had been doing her own cooking--very
badly indeed; and suffering from it, as well as from a too rigid
economy of diet.

Moreover the school, which was the center of her life, was subtly, as
under an evil enchantment, disintegrating. Every day disclosed more
and more empty benches, the youthful occupants of which, in Julie's
dreams, were to have been shining pillars of the future. The girl's
efforts to locate the cause of the disaffection came up against a
dead wall. The secret psychology of the East confronted her. In vain,
after facing those deserted benches that struck like a blow at the very
roots of her spirit, had she appealed to the parents. The women were
silently sympathetic, the men were non-committal; but none reached
out a hand to her.

She guessed only too well whose power alone was great enough to deflect
the boys from their upward course. The souls of their parents were
throttled by their leader, at whose heels they would have gone to
the devil.

The priest had learned who had instigated peace--Maria Tectos having
hung in the terrible limbo of excommunication till full confession
had been forthcoming. His spiritual subjects had begun to show the
disquieting effects of revolutionary new thought, and he hastened to
stretch out inexorable arms over his dominion. A spiritual czar, whose
whole power in life lay in his compelling hold on the souls of men, he
did not intend that any of his chattels should escape their bonds. He
had an overweening sense of possession, but little real interest in his
creatures. Above everything conceivable, he hated the Americans. Since
he had laid his special curse upon Julie's establishment and had not
interfered with Miss Hope's school, it was perfectly clear upon whom
his ill-will was concentrated. With the vital structure of her work
shaking about her, she was in the worst possible straits.

Her money, or rather Purcell's, had come to an end. She was facing
starvation. There was no one whom she could bring herself to approach
for help. She summoned her last forces of resistance. Calmiden must
certainly be back within a few days, and the money from Manila could
not diabolically hold away much longer.

She picked up Mrs. Calixter's letter. It was full of explanations of
divers sorts, and threw light in multiple directions--belated light.

She and her husband had been to India on an extended official visit
with the Governor-General. She had meant to write sooner to Julie,
but on a trip like that, Julie would understand, a great many things
had been wiped out of mind.

"Barry McChord, whom you remember, I know, and who still holds himself
as your friend, told me on my return of his fruitless efforts to find
out what had become of you--and a very strange mix-up it was. I was
gone--and your Department gave your location as Solano. But when
Barry wrote there he received the answer, after an unconscionable
time, that there was no such person on duty there. The Department,
upon being again questioned, hazarded the theory that you might
have died or gone home--although it admitted that of such events it
should have a record. At any rate you were given up for lost. What
chaos inconceivable! And that red-headed schemer--who I suspect was to
blame for all this--is still away on a long rest in Japan! I believe
that wretch has been deliberately miscarrying you on his lists so that
upon investigation he could point to his magnanimity in assigning you
to the superior station of Solano. If you would, brave little Julie,
insist upon going to the dangers of Nahal, he may have argued, whatever
happened to you should not be set down to his account. If you wandered
off any place else, it was not his fault. But how you have received
your salary I can't think unless he has made it his own concern."

And was that why, Julie wondered, she was left in these straits;
and would be--until the red-headed man came back?

She read on:

"A little army woman whose husband is on leave here from your very spot
cleared up the mystery. She told Barry how much alive you were--ending
revolutions, and transforming the Malay race; and being proposed to
by the entire bachelor officer personnel of the battalion--one of
whom you were most certainly going to accept.

"Barry told me he could understand how you had forgotten your earlier
friends. I believe he is going to China, and perhaps he will not come
back. Each time he goes, he says he may not come back."

Julie put the letter down weakly. Ah, she was not at all successful,
as Mrs. Smith had said. Her school was almost gone--and to-day she
had had scarcely anything to eat.

When it was quite dark, she took a walk, staring into the palely lit
jungle as she passed. Overhead one brilliant constellation blazed. It
seemed to hang over a distant city far to the north, beyond these
troubled southern seas. She put out her arms to its light.



CHAPTER XIII


A day came when Julie knew what it was to go without food. She
reasoned, in the midst of a bad headache, that she was not the first
person to whom this had happened, and that to go a few days without
eating was not absolutely menacing to one's existence.

The next day she unearthed a wrinkled camote, and Delphine presented
her with a couple of chicos. Her giddy brain collapsed, however, over
the boys' arithmetic, which suddenly had become as incomprehensible
to her as Euclid. On the third morning, she was wholly incapacitated,
and before the school hour, dropped down on a couch, where she dozed
off from sheer weakness.

At ten o'clock she heard as from a great distance the whistle of the
boat. Calmiden had come! She dragged herself up and made an effort to
dress, but she, strangely, felt no interest in a world that seemed
to have receded immeasurably out of her actual experience. From
tense struggle in its atmosphere, she had floated off into sleepy
planets where dreams were real. She tumbled back on the couch and
went to sleep.

When she came back once more to mundane affairs, it was about three
o'clock. Everything was still and lonely. Calmiden had not yet
appeared. He was always busy, though, for hours with the unloading
of the boat. Perhaps he had expected her to come down to the wharf
to greet him, and she had been too dazed to think of it. She dressed
with closed eyes.

A knock on the door startled her senses into activity. She ran her
fingers hurriedly through her deranged hair and opened the door. Not
Calmiden, but Dwight confronted her, looking greatly perturbed.

"I want to talk to you--just a bit--" he hesitated, "if you don't
mind."

Julie led him in.

He dropped down on the bare edge of the chair that she motioned to,
and stared at her aghast. "Lord!" he exclaimed, "you look like a
ghost! Have you been ill?"

Julie shook her head. "What have you to tell me?"

He was clearly at a difficulty to reply. Finally he blurted out:

"Why didn't you come to me, Julie, and let me help you--I'd have
been only too proud to do so--instead of playing into the hands of
that blackguard?"

Julie paled. "Purcell!" she murmured in dismay.

"Then you know?"

Again she shook her head dumbly.

Dwight pursed his lips in a solemn whistle. "Gad! Some folks would
say it was none of my business, but I can't stand by and see you
facing the thing so pluckily and not lend a hand."

"What did Mr. Purcell do?" Julie demanded heavily.

"He's been taking his meals at the bachelors' mess lately--while
he had no cook. To-day at the lunch table he brought up your name,
and he meant to do it to death. But he was clever about it. He
didn't want any one to stop him before he'd let out his powder. He
began by saying that you were engaged to Adams. You bet that made
a stir--your being engaged all the while you were letting the rest
of us give you a rush! Purcell said that he had seen Adams here in
this town with you, that he had made that fatal ride to see you,
and that he himself had seen you kiss Jack Adams good-by. Moreover,
he declared, that when the anxiety about Adams was at its height you
informed the Major that Adams had been in Guindulman and confessed
your relation to him. That was a stagger for us--all right, Julie,
you'll admit. He said that the Major himself had told him all this.

"Now several of us had liked you, Julie, ever so much--and we got
rather excited at your way of playing the game. Purcell went on to
say that you had had an affair with him, and with Terry, who had also
kissed you--along with Adams and others. Seems he got the information
about Terry from Miss Hope. He also said you owed money to everybody,
and that the firms in Solano had written continuously to him about
it. But when the creature, quite gone with hatred and jealousy,
said that you had borrowed money from him, and that anybody could
have you for a sweet-heart, I kicked him out."

Dwight had not dared to look at her during this recital. Her head
was bent down over her two clenched hands which lay in her lap.

"Kenneth was not there!" she murmured, illimitable satisfaction in
her quivering voice.

"But he was there!" Dwight cried--only to regret the next moment that
he had spoken.

Julie had shot up out of her chair and was gazing at him with wide
eyes of horror. As she stood there staring out of her ghastly pale
face, and not speaking, a sense of fear for her rose in Dwight.

"I tell you, Julie, I'll stand by you through everything!" he vowed.

She clutched hard at the back of the chair for support. Her limbs
were weak; her soul was shaken to its uttermost depths, but she must
still make a stand against this falling world.

"I did borrow money," she said in a voice so faint it seemed to trail
after her thought like a thin curl of smoke, "not from Purcell, but
from the Treasury, as I supposed. I was in the direst need. None of us
had received our salaries for months. I hung out as long as I could,
for I was afraid of him. But I was simply driven to him at last. What
a horrible net he has built around me! Terry--himself--Adams, Ah! Yes,
I did kiss Adams good-by!"

"Were there any witnesses present when he gave you the money?"

Julie shook her head.

"You poor, unsophisticated infant! Don't you know that it would have
been a criminal offense for him to use government funds for his own
purposes? You stepped right into his trap. He was waiting for you,
the rascal, and knew perfectly well that you wouldn't know what you
were doing."

"No, clearly, I have not at any time known what I was about!" She
crumpled, stunned, into a chair.

Dwight rushed to her. "My God! Is it possible that you've been starving
yourself with all of us right around to help!"

"I guess I have--but it wasn't anything compared to this. And who are
all of you, who were ready to help--as you say?" the girl cried out in
anguished bitterness. "Didn't you all stand by and listen while that
man told his vile lies? You see now why I have no more pupils in the
school, why everything's gone to smash, and I'm hopelessly ruined,
as he meant I should be?"

"Be just to us, Julie! We were shocked at your light treatment
of Adams."

"Ah, I was never engaged to Jack Adams. That was a desperate, stupid
lie of mine, which I hoped would help him out of the scrape. As for
the other men that I thought to be my friends--Oh! this terrible
land--where we're all strangers to one another after all!"

"But this story must be put down. It's all over the town. You can do
that best yourself!"

"The story of my own infamy--I must put down!" She laughed
hysterically. "You see, Dwightie, it's so fun-ny--when I came offering
all I had!"

When the young man had left the house, Julie slipped suddenly and
insensibly to the floor.

It was dusk when she thoroughly came to herself. Her brain was
clearer, and into it faintly crept the hope that Calmiden might emerge
successfully out of the catastrophe. Betrayal on his part--however
odious Purcell had sought to represent her--was inconceivable.

Dwight had dispatched a boy with a mountain of viands, which she
barely touched. She was not hungry. This was no time for eating, when
all the issues of her life were at stake. With a heart that stopped
beating at every foot-fall upon the road outside, she sat unmoving
among the shadows. Every minute must bring him to her need. This day
could not end in this monstrous state of affairs.

But as dusk deepened into night and no sign of Calmiden appeared, a
bitter frenzy of anger stirred up in the wretched girl's heart. What
kind of a man after all was he who could stand by, without offering a
protest, while her enemies calumniated her? Here in her humbled pride
and disgrace, she was crouched waiting for a man who had so clearly
repudiated her that he did not even deign to proffer an explanation of
his conduct. From the affairs of this notorious nobody--her promiscuous
love affairs, and wholesale debts, he had contemptuously withdrawn
himself. Calmiden, she knew, had the conventional notions about the
impeccability of a woman's name. It was her whole duty, as he expressed
it, to keep it "unsullied." He made sharp, very sharp distinctions in
his standards for the sexes. All women were shooed into one corner
of the universe, from which he dared them on the direst penalties
to emerge, while the men gamboled in the rest of its wide areas in
a fashion which he tolerantly chose to ignore. And all the while he
sincerely believed himself the broadest minded man on earth. He had
frequently crushed Julie in their arguments with his towering Victorian
morality. Julie had attributed what she considered his charmingly
archaic habit of mind to the fact that he had derived his education
at West Point, a sort of Military Monastery where women were barred.

"Pooh!" Calmiden had replied to this, "girls come up there in shoals!"

"But you see them only on Dress Parade! What do you know about them
in their own environment, in the real phases of life that stretch
back of the Dress Parade?"

"It was nice to have them come!"

"Ah! I think that that is just a little of what is the matter with you,
Kenneth. You began your life with woman coming to you!"

Julie admitted, as she sat waiting for him, that she had committed some
intolerable foolishness. It was perfectly true that in order to afford
herself the thrill of conquest and satisfy at the same time an errant
poetic opulence in her nature, she had inconsiderately, joyously and,
as she had believed, inconsequentially, permitted most of the men to
make love to her. And that not singly but simultaneously--and now she
had been found out. Slowly began to awaken in her mind the significance
of every human act in the infinite chain of cause and effect. Every
one of these men had been humanly piqued and curious. That, perhaps,
accounted for their listening to Purcell. Concerning Jack Adams,
Julie felt her one justifying thrill. Her comrade at arms!

Perhaps she should have confessed this incident to Calmiden, she
thought, but she had never been able to bring herself to speak of
that adventure, now that Adams was "out of it." It seemed something
sealed forever between him and her.

Another hour passed and the girl's black resentments and outraged pride
rose into fresh tumult. The pride of the Dreschells was their dominant
trait. The world might hold Calmiden's position in life better than
hers, he might tower in immeasurable contempt over the sordid disaster
of her life, yet she had one bomb left to deliver. She would drive
him out of her life. He had forced his way into it. The world might go
hang! Purcell could make it believe what he would. But upon one person
the outrage to her dignity and pride should be indelibly branded,
so that never till the end of his life would he be able to forget.

His moment had come and passed--in the dark, terrible hours, when
frightened and half starved, she sat waiting for him to come and
set things right. Her brain had traveled the whole blistered course
of thought for extenuation, and now, roused to a fury of injury,
she determined to hurt Calmiden in the last way possible--to cast
him off finally and completely. That he had already accomplished
this repudiation beyond anything that lay in her power goaded her
to madness.

In a suffocation of emotions she wrote the letter. It was not what
she said in the letter but the way she found to say it, the white heat
of the words, that must later have seared a path through his brain.

"My vulgar debts repulsed you! The insinuations of that man were
preëminently revolting to your sense of pride. Not to speak! It was
an easy way out! There is another kind of Judas, it seems! You sat
and sold me away by your silence. You have done what I did not dream
it was possible for any living being to do. For such a betrayal there
can be no explanation ever. None is humanly possible."

She summoned Pablo Cherico from the other side of the house, and
told him to get Delphine, who lived not far away. The little boy,
roused out of his bed, came running. One person in this disheveled
world was always eager to serve her. She handed the letter to Delphine.

"Take it at once to Teniente Calmiden, at the Mess. Put it in his
hands!"

She stumbled back into the house, given over to the demons of darkness
and despair.

When Julie awoke next morning, she found a bundle of mail tied with a
string, lying on her doorstep. There were two official letters. Now
when disaster was quite complete and irretrievable, her money had
come--all the arrears of it. A week ago and her life would have
traveled into safe places. Now there was nothing left but the bleak
privilege of paying her debts.

Delphine, with the captive Balthazar grubbing along in the dust,
appeared. "I gave the letter into the hands of the Teniente, last
night, as you told me to do. He was already in bed. The house is very
ugly. No flowers on the table, no lace in the windows, like in the
beautiful residence of Mrs. Smeeth--nodding but banjoes."

"What did he say?" Julie cut in on him.

"Nodding at all. Maestra! He take the letter and read it, while I
wait. Then he turn away."

She turned heavily back into the house.

Ignoring school--she had now been absent two consecutive days from
that depleted institution--she grimly resolved to attend to her
own concerns. Miss Hope, of course, would not fail to take note of
this defection, but Julie, bitter over the careless methods of the
Department which had helped to bring about this débâcle, was reckless
of consequences.

First of all there was Purcell! She meant to tackle him
single-handed. Indeed there was no one that she could think of from
whom she could have derived support in this situation. If she had
been a man she might have knocked him down and settled the issue at
once. She wanted, she thought, to do something inexpressibly violent
to him.

She was brushing out her hair before putting it up to go out, when
a shadow loomed in the doorway. There stood Nemecia Victoria swaying
like a purple passion flower.

Usually Nemecia was clothed in silken variations of the spectrum, with
cob-web laces across her bosom. To-day with a winding-cloth bound round
the body, her beautiful bronze limbs bared, she looked like a statue.

Nemecia crossed the room. She took the silvery coif of Julie's hair
in her hands and caressed it. "My poor Señorita, with hair like this,
to live so meanly--at the mercy of men!"

An acute curiosity shot through Julie. This was the Nemecia who knew
the secret hearts of men. Just whose secrets? A temptation came to
her to get Nemecia to speak. But no, she would not lift that curtain.

"You wouldn't live as I live?" Julie queried.

"My mother did; she worked always," Nemecia brooded. "Her body grew to
be all bones. Then she was stolen by the Moros--to be a slave, till
she died. When the pirates came I hid in a hole in the ground. They
took my brother too."

Her voice commenced to choke. She broke off harshly. "Señorita,
have you heard the evil that man says of you?"

She lifted up her arms, beautiful soft arms, hardening as they rose
with a fury of passion that for the moment seemed to eclipse the
great golden calm of the morning world.

"Men I have known many, but that white one is a devil! I ha-a-te him,
and since I am afraid Hell will not get him--I shall kill him!"

To Julie's dumbfounded amazement she drew from her bosom a long,
thin, cruel strip of a blade and held it in her clenched fist before
her contorted face.

Julie knew these people too well to be panic-stricken.

"Put it away, Nemecia!" she ordered. "They would put you in the
calaboose and keep you there till you died, an old, old woman."

Nemecia's great eyes flashed fire. "Are you then cool over the things
he said of you all over the village? Will you allow him to insult
you to the world, you who brought about peace for Nahal? He seeks
to ruin you, as he sought to torture me. Let me go for us both," she
whispered tensely, "to-night, to the hammock in the gallery--and when
he sleeps--give two quick blows, one for you and the other for me!"

"Alas, Nemecia, the calaboose is dark and cold. In your little cell of
stone by yourself forever, you would never see the sun. You love the
sun, Nemecia. You love the praise of your pretty face. No one would
ever listen to the music of your ear hoops again. Just stillness and
dark, forever, as if you had died and hung by your hair in space!

"Come!" she seized Nemecia's arm, and the knife went clattering
to the floor. Julie's eyes shone with pleading. "Do this for me,
Nemecia! Let him go! Ah! What a wonderful revenge! To hold the option
of one's enemy's life in one's hand--and to toss it back to him. Give
me that power, Nemecia! Give me that strength!"

Nemecia sulkily picked up the knife. Then she stood erect facing
Julie. "My people owe you a debt which they have forgotten. Take then
as my share of it, this creature's life, for,"--in a fresh flare--"I
meant surely to kill him this very night!"

She turned indifferently out of the door.

Julie waited till she was out of sight. "I can go to him now!" she
cried to herself. She started forth for the Palacio. Fortunately it
was an hour when there would be many people in the building.

There were two Filipino clerks in the office with Purcell. Julie
advanced, with head uplifted, to the desk where he sat. He looked
at her an instant and in the flash of his expression, Julie saw how
thoroughly he knew he had done his work.

"I've come to pay you back your money!" She handed him several
checks. "You will please cash these. And you will give me a receipt."

The note of calm authority in her tone clearly puzzled him. He busied
himself in a slight confusion with the safe.

The transaction finished, Julie's spirits rose. There were dangerous
lights playing in her green eyes. "You have said some unspeakable
things about me, things that you knew to be utterly false! You are a
liar, of course, and you believe me incapable of defending myself. In
this country too, where as you know," she looked at him steadily,
"one can so cheaply buy one's revenge."

Purcell paled. She saw he had understood.

"I did not expect my remarks to be repeated broadcast. You did borrow
money from me--and as you must be well aware, the right sort of women
do not resort to such expedients."

The girl looked hard at him and at the thought he read in her mind,
a painful dark red dyed his face.

"Who is to blame for all this?" he exclaimed in a hoarse voice. "If
you had taken me, I would have stuck to you through thick and thin. I
wouldn't have cast you off like your friend Calmiden. He never intended
to marry you. You must know that. Didn't I warn you long ago?"

"And you saw to it that your evil prophecies came true. You have hurt
me in every way possible."

She turned and started to go.

Suddenly she felt that he had pressed up behind her. "If you'll still
say it isn't too late--I'll--"

Julie wrenched herself out of his detaining grasp. "You'll-- What
will you do?" she cried, turning savagely on him. "Having deliberately
ruined the whole compass of my life and brought to pass the worst that
was humanly possible, you still dare to think you have power over my
life? Listen to me! I have power over your life--at any moment. I held
it on the tip of my finger this morning, and balanced it there--and
if you lift your hand against me again--" She stopped in a wild sob
and ran from the room.

When she got to school, she found five boys huddled together awaiting
her, generaled thither by the faithful Delphine, who had gathered
them up outlaw fashion from the streets, and who was now oratorically
instructing them from the platform. Delphine announced to her that the
present gathering was the very best he could do, for--though he had
lain in wait for the former scholars from dawn--they contrived to get
down to the river, and from its inaccessible depths had defied him,
their heads bobbing along the surface like grimacing corks.

James, too, was furious and had been twice to see the Padre, who had
retreated to the sanctity of his lofty and impregnable convento to
avoid the emissary of education.

"I'm going to climb the bell tower and beat him," James declared in
heat, "if he doesn't call off this boycott."

Purcell's rumors, monstrously exaggerated and embroidered upon, had
swept through the village. Public opinion had pronounced judgment in
these empty rooms. In desperation, Julie went to the Major. He had
heard the reports, and as he had a particular sensibility for Julie,
who had been the means of cutting the Gordian Knot of his military
career, he offered to give Purcell a piece of his mind. It was an
extremely delicate thing for him to undertake; for, since Purcell
was actually the chief civil functionary on the island, it was the
Major's duty to remain on good terms with him.

Julie found in these trying moments that she had misjudged this man
who towered in his rigid rectitude of character over the life of the
colony. He was stern military metal, but every atom of that metal
rang true.

He assured Julie that the Americans understood the unfortunate
affair. The Filipino conception of it apparently did not trouble his
mind. The Padre to his deep regret was outside his jurisdiction.

The women of the colony defended Julie, as women if left to themselves
generally will defend their kind. One day when Julie was passing
Mrs. Smith's house, the little lady called out to her to come in. After
the girl had sunk dispiritedly into a cane chair, Mrs. Smith broke out:
"Julie, you're taking this wretched business too much to heart! Do
you for one instant think that we who know you would believe a thing
against you? Marlborough was at the Mess that day when all that trouble
rose and heard what passed--something about your having been engaged to
Adams, and your letting all the men kiss you. How many"--turning into
a tone of playful curiosity--"did, really? How fearfully interesting,
you little philanderer! I--there were a number in my history too. Just
heaps of 'em, in fact. Why shouldn't there be, when we're making the
Sentimental Journey of youth? These stupid men! They think they are
the only ones who can take the trip!

"What made Calmiden mad, of course, was your being engaged to Adams,
his class-mate, all the time you let him make love to you. That was
playing the game rather roughly, I admit!"

Julie explained wearily the embroilment about Adams. "He came down
here because he was lonely--and to see me, because, well, maybe I was
a sort of romantic ideal to him--who will ever know? We had made a
contract to help each other through--quite different, you understand,
from the other kind of contract."

"Does Calmiden know about this?"

Julie listlessly shook her head.

"But perhaps that's just what's the trouble! What would you have done
if you thought he were untrue? He has, moreover, a peculiar character,
as you know."

"Untrue? He is completely so!"

"What on earth has Calmiden done?"

"What has he done?" Julie cried trembling. "Didn't your husband
tell you the horrible things Purcell said against me--my character,
my integrity, shamelessly pulled apart before the whole mess?"

"Purcell did not make any serious attack upon your character while
my husband was present. He spoke, as I have said, of your engagement
to Adams, and of the fact that he had seen Adams kiss you--and some
others, I believe. What he said afterwards, Marlborough did not hear,
for, not finding the conversation to his taste, he got up and left,
and so did Calmiden!"

"Kenneth?" Julie cried wildly.

"Yes, he left the room, Marlborough said, white with rage. He was
furious at your double play."

"But Dwight said that Kenneth was there--and took no part."

"Who was following anybody's movements after such a disclosure? Don't
you see, nobody had dreamed that Adams had come to Guindulman! And
when you know Dwightie as well as I do, you'll discover that he never
sees anything clearly, poor dear, when he gets excited. Marlborough
says that when Purcell announced that the Major had told him that
you were engaged to Jack Adams and that that was why he set out on
his disastrous adventure, everything was in excitement, and Calmiden
rose straight off and left. Perhaps he should have said something when
Purcell spoke of your universal flirting--he made a mistake there,
but he was shocked and angry.

"There, I've handed you back a new lease of life, I see. Go immediately
and make your peace with Kenneth. Good-by!"

Julie never knew how she got across the parade ground; it seemed as if
on wings. The blood was spinning in her head. Once home she sat down
and composed a letter, of a kind that never in all her life was she
able to write again. It was written under the spur of renewed belief
in the universe. Until this wrong was righted the universe could not
properly balance, and not an instant must be lost in setting it right.

In this letter, Julie endeavored to make Calmiden understand that
there was nothing she would not do to show how fearfully sorry she was.

She made a full and free explanation concerning Adams. Very urgently
she tried to initiate Calmiden into the delicately intangible bond
that had existed between them. She explained that the disastrous
first letter had been written in one of her fatally uncontrollable
impulses, prompted by circumstances which at the time had distorted
her view. She would reveal those conditions when he came to her,
which she begged him to do at once.

Nothing could have been more consummately abject than this
letter. Julia again dispatched Delphine to Calmiden, with the strictest
injunctions for a swift return with the answer.

At last the swift soft pad of Delphine's feet in the dust of the
road! Then in another moment, breathing hard, for he had sensed the
super-importance of the errand and had flown through the streets,
the lad laid the envelope in her hand. Her name was inscribed on it
in Calmiden's handwriting.

Julie tore it open. Short, like a telegram, it burned through her
brain. "I can not come, now. Sometime you will hear from me."

That was all. A masterpiece of the enigmatic, meaning anything or
nothing at all. Julie sat down and studied it out for a shred of hope
or help it might contain; but at last, with tears of loneliness and
despair in her throat, she gave it up. Calmiden did not mean to come
back. Of that she was now convinced. She had injured him, and he had
told her over and over with unmistakable directness that he did not
forgive. From him this answer was inevitable. There was no appeal
from it. Not even her letter had weighed in the issue.

Time went mercilessly on. The term was drawing towards its end. There
were now only two pupils left in her once ardently conceived shrine of
uplift. One of these was of course Delphine--the other an undersized
youth who found it completely impossible to escape him.

She wondered how she had managed to be so happy once; or so independent
in her aims. Those aims had now become almost obscured. One can't go
on greatly believing when the edifices one has sought to raise to the
gods are smitten by lightning. Julie's once fervid spirit was becoming
becalmed. She couldn't understand anything at all--a dark veil seemed
to be stretched before her eyes. She longed, and yet dreaded to get
off the stage of this drama.

The bachelors had moved their establishment down the hill, to the
very house that Julie upon her introduction to Nahal had occupied. The
Plaza had become too congested, and the Reyes had rented their house
to the Military Government. Julie did not see Calmiden; he contrived
absolutely to keep out of her way.

Finally they passed each other one day on the street. Julie turned
white, and a spasm crossed Calmiden's grim, gray face. As their eyes
met, her blood congealed. For out of this brooding face nothing of
the old Kenneth looked. One hard passion had conquered that face and
turned it to stone. Right there the truth that she had paradoxically
refused to receive stared her in the eyes.

He did not speak, and neither did she. A ghastly encounter--the meeting
of their dead selves! Frightened and hopeless, Julie hurried on when
she saw that Calmiden was to make no sign. He had closed definitely
his strange soul.

Julie's reason was beginning to point out inexorably that Calmiden was
a great deal more to blame than she had thought. The questionableness
of his permitting Purcell to say in his presence anything whatever
about her--however shattering to his personal romance, or of his
allowing his anger and outraged pride to get the better of him before
he had demanded an explanation of her, had not at all balanced, in his
mind, the fact that in her blistering letter she had told him that he
was the worst possible conception of a cad. She knew that Calmiden
had sought out the Treasurer, and that they had fought brutally
in Purcell's quarters; but even there he had accorded her enemy,
however violently, the chance for a vindication that he would not
give her. Also she knew that, although he had fought her accuser,
belatedly, he still believed secretly a great deal of what that
accuser had had to say.

He had caused her to suffer a great deal. He had brutally broken her
pride, and had done it wilfully, hoping to make her contemptible to
herself. It came over her in a great moment of proud anger and relief
that she had never actually cared for him. He had succeeded in swerving
her out of her path, he had quenched her torch, and helped to place
her in the failure where she now found herself. Her soul, for a long
time to come, would scorch with the hurts he and Nahal had inflicted.

In the bitter days that followed, the girl felt hideously lonely and
abandoned. A sense of disgrace scorched her isolation. People believed
wicked, abominable things of her, and there was no way to change their
minds. The friend upon whose loyalty she had most depended had under
the severest conditions deserted. She cried a great deal at night,
till one day a letter came that brought a rebound.

For a minute or two it seemed hard to believe the reality of this
message. It read:


    "Your friends, the Calixters, have left the Islands. He was
    offered something better at home, and her health had failed.

    "She didn't have time to write you, but she did tell me what
    those people down there were trying to do to you. It is not my
    custom ever to stand by and see my friends hurt.

    "Father Hull and I are arranging your transfer to Manila. I beg
    you not to remain an hour longer in that awful spot.

    "Father Hull will meet you when you come north--as I am now
    leaving for China. I cannot say when. I shall be back, but I
    shall certainly see you again. Until then--


        "Barry McChord."



"Would he indeed come back!" Julie recalled what Mrs. Calixter had
said: "Each time he goes he says he may not."

There was another letter from Manila--from Isabel Armistead:


    "I saw the Calixters before they sailed. They said you were about
    to come north, out of your hermit wilds; and they intimated that
    things had not gone well with you. How could they indeed! The
    Green God and I are still your friends. We will show you a better
    fortune than you have ever found before.

    "I may be off on a journey when you arrive, but until my return
    you are to make yourself completely at home in my house."


The time came for Julie to put in her application for transportation
to Solano, where she would catch a boat for Manila. Calmiden being
Quartermaster, her application passed through his hands, and came
back to her signed by him. She stared grimly at his signature.

That same afternoon she met Mrs. Smith on a corner. "Have you heard
the news?" that lady exclaimed. "The Treasurer has been dismissed,
and is ordered to turn over his office and leave at once. Julie,"
she asked whimsically, "where is your pull?"

Julie shrugged her shoulders negatively.

"You can't think? How about that man in Manila who was so glad to
hear about you again? Couldn't he do almost anything?"

Julie's eyes opened. She had written to Mrs. Calixter and recounted
her troubles. Could that have been what Barry meant?

On that last day when she stood in the school which had once been the
temple of her faith, one solitary boy faced her, struggling with his
tears--the loyal Delphine.

"Maestra, take me with you!" he chokingly pleaded, clinging to her
skirts in appeal. The girl and the little brown boy clung to each
other weeping.

After leaving the school, she went to a spot outside the village and
gathered some flowers. She had made few farewells, but there was one
person to whom she must bid a positive good-by. It was a shining
morning. On just such a one had she embarked upon the renaissance
of Nahal.

The cemetery, as she entered it, was very still. Nobody ever appeared
to visit it, yet Adams's grave had a fresh look that startled Julie. It
was as if he had not completely given up his hold on life; as if he
were vaguely in part still present. Somewhere down there she might
reach the heart of a friend--a friend who had passed through the
limits of human tragedy.

It was the kiss he had given her that had really put her disaster in
motion; but it rose at this moment before her as the cementing seal
of a friendship of high deeds.

For a long time Julie sat over the grave, insensible to everything
but this sad communion. The sun, merciless creator, flung upon the
world the compulsion of his quickening rays, ruthlessly enforcing the
fiat of life. All the burning force of existence seemed to be beating
down upon her bared head like an intolerable weight; but she heeded
it not. To be human, and to be the plaything of unassailable forces;
to aspire, and to be defeated; to reach up like Prometheus for the fire
of Heaven, only to be dashed to pieces on the ground! In a paroxysm,
Julie flung her head down upon the grave. There was nothing in the
universe to answer anything!

When she lifted herself up a queer numbness had attacked her
limbs. Forked lightning seemed to be piercing her brain. Holding to
her head, as if there were a rift in it, she staggered out of the
cemetery. She was in the acutest pain. But beneath it, conquering
each convulsion was the indomitable resolve to leave Nahal. To-day
she should go out of this island forever!

From the wharf a row boat was to take her to the steamer out in the
bay. The vessel was to leave at two o'clock, the siesta hour. The
Major, with Mike scuffling along behind on a chain like an imp,
escorted her to the wharf. Almost blinded she got down the hill.

The Major seemed to be much moved, and unable to find words that
would put his feeling into expression. "It will be a long time hence
perhaps before you will reap any reward for what you've done," he
said. "I myself am under an undying obligation to you, and while my
appreciation is not much--" he stopped, and studied her face. "Go home,
my child," he urged. "Don't let the East crucify you!"

Julie shook the hand of the fine old soldier, and walked down the
wharf. There, a brand new camisa on his back, and the smallest
conceivable bundle in his hand, was Delphine.

"I go with you," he announced in a transport of determination. "My
oncle--he give me away, with the new shirt."

Even Balthazar was not missing! With his halter around his neck,
he was hanging investigatorily over the wharf by what appeared to be
the nub of his tail.

Delphine thrust into Julie's hand a crumpled sheet of paper written
over in very bad Spanish, and signed unmistakably by Pedro Bebong. In
this document he ceded over the body and soul of one Delphine.

The children of the East--bartered, sold, drowned by guardians who
were unable to cope with existence! Julie's heart had often ached over
the valuelessness of their poor little lives. It was for all these
poor crushed creatures that she had come overseas to offer her life.

But she was having much too desperate a time making her own way through
this new world to become responsible for another creature. Besides,
she had had one wormwood lesson in adoption. She gently shook her head.

The boy began to cry wildly, in an abandonment of despair. The tears
ran down the quaint little corsair face. The poor little starched
camisa, which had stuck out stiffly like armor in which to encounter
the world, fell limp under the rain. Even the little bare feet had
their appeal. They were willing to trudge the world over to find
a future.

The Fiscal came down to the wharf on business. Delphine appealed his
case to him, crying and clinging to his coat. The Fiscal said that
the note transferring Delphine was perfectly genuine and authentic;
that the boy's aunt and uncle found great difficulty in feeding their
own brood, and that if the boy did not go with the Maestra, he would
be apprenticed to a Chinaman who kept a tin-shop.

Into that den of filth and idolatry would go everything that Julie had
planted in the best of her boys. Did Delphine, frantically pleading,
dancing about in his grotesque little camisa, and weeping terribly
all over his droll face, dream anywhere in him of saving any of
those things?

Julie stood silent. Balthazar, emerging from under the side of the
wharf, scrambled towards her, and gave angry pecks at her shoe.

"The boy is dissatisfied with Nahal," the Fiscal said. "Now that the
yeast is in him, he wishes to rise. I was that way once; but a man,
as you know, Maestra, cannot push through a wall. Take him, if you
can. Do not leave his soul to die."

Julie gazed at the boy clutching now at her skirts. As she gazed
down into his face, the revelation came to her. Down there before
her, electing to follow her wherever she went, the new generation
knelt. Whatever the past and the East stood for, the new generation
had cast the ballot for her and the light. Defeat was turned into
victory--a victory that would grow and become universal. In the face
pleading up at her, she saw the curtain of darkness rent.

"Come, Delphine!" she said.

From the deck she watched the island recede, beautiful and paradisiac
as it had first looked. The scent of its golden flowers drifted out
upon the water. Quiet, green, and sun-touched, the island drifted
off like a dream.



CHAPTER XIV


Julie was entering again the Arabian Nights' city. It lay emblazoned
in the light of a blood red torrid sun fast sinking behind a towering
mountain that uprose out of wide stretching plains already shadowy
under the first sprinkling of dusk. Through the streets of the City,
the many races of the earth were moving in slow crooked currents. Back
in the charmed City to stay! Back in the midst of the Empire-builders
and the destiny of the enigmatic East!

Julie expected to go to one of the hostelries of the City. There
were a number of them, of which the Oriente was by far the best
known and most brilliant. It harbored under its palmy roof people
from all corners of the world, and was the stage for a great deal
of the drama of the East. There were Australians and New Zealanders,
come up to see what the Americans were making of things and to have
a bit of fun nearer than Europe; Hindoo rajahs with their trains,
who had unaccountably found their way here; Chinese and Japanese
officials bound, in silence, on their inconjectural errands. Manila
was glitteringly cosmopolitan. It was just now attracting the eye
of all the East, and picturesque people coursed in and out of it
like a strange spice. Almost all of this throng found refuge in the
Oriente. Not foreigners alone made lively this resort. There was
the City's own strange population; and exiles from the bosque were
there seeking nepenthe for their souls in the dancing and music of
its plaza, in its life and love. No old colonial of to-day can pass
the still gates of this closed pavilion of pleasure without a pang
for the vivid era of the past.

But this glittering khan Julie would be forced to pass by. Aside
from the prices, high in those prodigal days of the Empire, the great
hostelry, while respectable, held a much too vivid representation of
Anglo-Asian life for a solitary girl.

The ship was wharfing. Julie perceived a conspicuous equipage waiting
on the pier. Beside its white-liveried coachman sat an unbelievably
small figure which was turning its strange miniature individuality
about on the box. Isabel's queer dwarf! He must have seen Julie, for
in an instant he was burrowing his way through the travelers. Soon he
was standing before her, extending a letter and nodding his uncanny
little face up at her.

The note was from Isabel. She had written it just before setting out
on some enterprise, and as she had intimated before would not be at
home to receive Julie; but she had made all arrangements for Julie
to remain in her house.

The dwarf gesticulated towards the carriage with one of his elfin
hands. Delphine looking about him at all the wonder uttered an
exclamation. The dwarf, glancing at him quickly, spoke to him in the
same dialect. They began to chatter to each other.

The mannikin, Delphine excitedly informed Julie, had been born on
the Island of Nahal.

The village of Guindulman--did they know it? the dwarf asked. Julie
told him that she had lived there for some time. It was from there
that he had been stolen as a child, and made a slave.

Guindulman remained as a bright spot in his memory; his little nut
of a face transformed under the glow of reminiscences.

He and his mother and his sister had all been scattered in the raid
of a band of Moros, and he had never seen either of them again.

A recollection seized on Julie. "What was your sister's name?"

"Nemecia Victoria--she was a child."

"Oh!" Delphine joyously put in, "she is there now--a pretty lady;
and very rich--with so many friends!"

Julie gave Delphine an arresting look.

The dwarf trembled a little. "My sister is alive!--and well off!" he
murmured.

"Yes," Julie replied. To her relief, he did not ask any more questions.

"Will you then go back to her?"

The dwarf turned away. "What is to be, will be. I have been everywhere
with my mistress--even to England. I will not leave--" he muttered
to himself.

Julie drew Delphine aside, and cautioned him what he should say of
Nemecia. Delphine listened attentively under the shadow of a dreadfully
civilized little derby hat, which had evidently accompanied the new
camisa, and demanded permission to tell his new friend of the Peace
that had come about in Nahal and of the part his Maestra and Nemecia
had played in it.

Julie sat back comfortably in the carriage, with a feeling of gratitude
toward Isabel. The hotels other than the Oriente were neither good
nor picturesque, and from one of these Isabel had saved her. Her
reflections were cut short by the sight of an urgent face making its
way toward her through the crowd--though it was not until a black
habit appeared in conjunction with the face that Julie recognized
the painfully emaciated features of Father Hull.

"I'm late!" he exclaimed, extending his hand to her, and taking in
the carriage with a dissatisfied glance. "They misinformed me at the
steamship office as to the arrival of the boat.

"I had a carromata waiting for you," he suggested. "I have also
made arrangements with some Spanish-Mestizo friends of mine for
your lodging. Suitable accommodations are always hard to procure
in Manila, and I strongly advise you to take advantage of this
opportunity--especially as it is in the district to which you will
probably be assigned.

"Unfortunately," he added, knitting his brows at the carriage, "the
Reredos are not immediately prepared--and an unprepared Spaniard is
a serious thing. One cannot walk in and out of their households after
the fashion we have at home. They lack the quality of casualness.

"In the meantime, I know of a very good hotel where you can pass a
few days at a very reasonable rate."

Julie informed him that the carriage she was in belonged to
Mrs. Armistead, a friend of hers, who had invited her to remain in her
house till its owner returned from a trip. She believed it would be
ungracious not to accept the hospitality offered. Part of her baggage,
moreover, was installed in the carriage, and arrangements made for
the rest of it. Privately Julie had no desire to go to a cheap hotel
when a chance at that wonderful house was offered.

The priest appeared to consider, in troubled thought. Rather
reluctantly, Julie thought, he consented to the arrangement. He said
he would communicate later with her concerning the school. Then he
lifted his hat and moved away.

Julie had wanted to ask him about Barry, but had not found the
opportunity.

As the carriage drove away, the dwarf and Delphine--who was clutching
Balthazar, too stupefied from the trip to be troublesome--sat close
together, talking rapidly. The dwarf occasionally stole a shyly
appreciative glance at Julie.

Julie passed across the city, coursing through its dusky streets, in a
mood of subtle excitement. Everywhere she was met by the Change! Not
a change that assailed the physical senses, but one that transcended
them: a subtle, widespread intimation that quivered on some inner
receptivity. Not the altered streets, the new buildings, the material
renovation, gave it forth so much as the peculiar quickening of
the atmosphere through which the soul of these people seemed to
suspire. How can one trace the leaven in the bread or follow through
the far filaments of thought a psychic metamorphosis? Yet there it
was. The very stones of the pavement proclaimed it. The Resurrection
was stirring through the worn kingdoms of men, and the blood of the
Builders coursed beneath it all like the rivers of life!

Every moment Julie thrilled deeply to what she saw. The Builders were
beginning to fulfil. Here in this single corner the stagnant spirit
of the East was awaking to life. Wars might be fought in the future,
and races degraded and aggrandized, but the spreading influences of
this endeavor would reach far into the future of men.

Again she found herself in that perfumed garden before the sweep of
Babylonian pillars with the shimmering palace lifting like a jeweled
Taj Mahal out of the mystery of the thick, soft night--and the giant
trees and scented shadows, and the bamboo chanting to the forthcoming
stars. The mansion of the Caliph!

She stepped softly up the flights of stairs into the great lengths
of chambers, glowing under dim lights with the rich acquisitions
of strange lands. The house was all sheer beauty, exquisitely
compiled. The river came up to the verdant banks on its rear. Mystical,
shadow-banked, it set the senses quivering. The surroundings stirred
Julie like the confused beauty of Eastern music, and brought up dim,
poetic suggestions of Queens of Sheba and Scheherezades and the
unending dynasties of kings--of the poetry and the romance of old,
unchanging things.

She ate her dinner, a solitary figure, at a huge banquet table of
shining nara set forth with Indian silver, delicately carved with
the loves and conquests of maharajahs and goddesses. After dinner,
she wandered about fascinated. What a triumph Isabel had made of the
house. What a marvelous woman, indeed, she was!

She stopped short in a chamber of shining carvings, slow wrought
wonders of a land where hands were cheaper than tools, and life was the
cheapest of all. From the midst of the labor of these unvalued hands,
she caught the glimmer of a strange little figure with bent head,
shining stilly out of the dusk. The Green God! Beautiful, terrible,
Lord of the Eastern universe--to whom myriads of souls were fastened
in supreme faith. With what awful power he was invested by their
belief! She had walked upon him unawares, and now hurried to get away.

As she emerged disquieted into the main sala, a head thrust itself
softly, like a projected shadow, above the old Spanish balustrade
of the stairs. The body did not appear and the head paused only long
enough to startle Julie. A dark, aged human vision. In the fleeting
look she could not tell whether it was the face of a man or a woman;
but there had been a flash from the depths of that being that had
frightened the girl. It was gone, and she calmed again. After all, in
the East, all sorts of unexpected faces peer at one from odd corners.

Later Julie tried to question the dwarf. Who was the old being she
had seen? Did it pop in and out of people's houses at will? Did his
Mistress know anything about her? Dicky-Dicky, the dwarf, looked at
her with inscrutable eyes, and knew nothing. Julie decided to say no
more about it.

The next day Isabel appeared. Vividly beautiful like some bright houri,
she came smiling to the gallery where Julie was sitting. "I am happy
to see that you have found your way back to us!" She kissed Julie
with her perfumed lips. Then she stood back and regarded her. "Ah, my
poor little friend, you have changed! A hard time is written all over
you, and you are too thin for your clothes. Poor little dust-covered
Atlas! Tell me about it. I love all brave journeys. But first we will
have lunch. I am starved. I have had a long trip."

"From your letter, I thought you would be gone longer."

"I have been off on a secret glorious errand to a place of which
you shall never dream. You would have to have the East in you for
that. I have been building paradise to suit myself, bit by bit. The
kind of paradise you think of is made for every one, for all sorts
of people you couldn't get along with on earth--so why, I ask, repeat
the experiment in the courts of God?

"Nor is paradise for one alone, my friend. It is for the comrades of
our souls, scattered sometimes as far as the ends of the rainbow. There
are a few golden beings that in some eternal citadel we should hold
fast. Do you think--" she exclaimed suddenly--"that if I climbed to
the arch of Heaven by my nails I could capture the one great friend
of my soul?"

Her tone changed. "I came back. I hungered for Manila. It holds the
world for me."

"It is Scheherezade's city--full of wonderful adventures!" Julie
declared with shining eyes. "I wonder," she mused, "what it holds
for me?"

They seated themselves at the table before golden iced mangoes. The
huge silver bowl in the center was loaded with great scarlet blossoms
whose perfume saturated the Air. They seemed to faint under their
own fragrance, for Julie observed that while dewily fresh at the
commencement of the meal, they were all but dead at the close.

"Nothing here lives an hour after you pick it," Isabel dissatisfiedly
remarked. "But the quick new buds replace the blossoms almost in a
breath. I am glad I have no children, to crowd me out. I like the
flowers of Europe. You can wear them all day and then keep them on
in water. Life is longer over there. Here we have only our hour. But
such an hour! Take you and me at thirty-five! You will be young--a cold
storage sort of youth--and I, well, it is written in the stars and the
heart of the Green God where I shall be--but I shall have lived, oh,
very splendidly little Atlas, while you will only have drawn breath."

After luncheon she put on a négligé of lustrous silk and flung
herself on a couch, her splendid black Malay hair loosened about her,
a cigarette in her lips.

"There is a water carnival at the Palace to-morrow night, and the
question of your costume must be settled at once. It is late, and
all the tailors are over-crowded with orders. I am afraid too that I
may not be able to get you into a boat. I might take you in my float,
but that would necessitate darkening you up, and it would not do to
obscure your little ray of light.

"You might be gotten up as Saturn, with filmy rings. But the nebulæ
would prevent you from dancing. I have it! You shall be a Pleiad. I
have seen a picture of them leaning over the edge of the world, out
of the mists of the sky, and you look like that! You can be a Pleiad
quite conveniently, too, with folds of moonlight mist, some sandals,
and a star. It only involves buying a roll of gauze from an East
Indian. I have a star among my things, and we can find some sandals.

"And now--" she urged, laying lightly compelling fingers on Julie's
arm, "tell me about it! Tell me everything that took place down
there--and afterwards, forget it forever. There are no memories in
Scheherezade's city."

This was Julie's first opportunity to unburden her soul, and she was
still surcharged with what had happened. Some one else might be able to
understand; some one else might be able to make things clear. So under
the stimulus of Isabel's fragrant liqueur her innermost amazements
and hurts burst into speech.

Isabel's blue eyes lost their dreamy expression, and came acutely
awake, her cigarette burned unheeded, while Julie's sorrows,
perplexities, and final confoundment of soul passed in array before
her. When the girl had finished and had sunk back into the old stupid
questioning wonder, Isabel exclaimed:

"Great is the Green God! Never say he is not kind. Surely he led you
out of it. Don't regret the stone image that let you starve under
its eyes! There was more to come, little Atlas. You have something
different in you--something very nearly divine. I feel it at my
finger's ends; though I don't want it to come any nearer than that
poetical distance. It is bringing you some place, and it was not
meant that your destiny should halt where you perhaps believe it
should. I am a prophet, you see. If I were not Empress of the East,
as they say, I should travel as a prophetess through the land--like
my mother. You have heard of her--how she gave up her wealth to wander
and foretell? She too dreams of the Victorious East."

Julie regarded this magnificence of mood with wonder. All manner of
men, it was said, had loved Isabel; and in some peculiar way their
lives had seemed to be bound up in her colorful personality--as if
her sphinx-like spirit had devoured and assimilated their souls. Her
mood was always an extravagant expectation of more than could be
reasonably aspired to by any one person.

"Ah, what do you know about men?" Isabel suddenly exclaimed. "To
hear you is like listening to the forgotten primer of one's
childhood. Nevertheless, there was long ago just such another as
yourself, one as piteously credulous and blind."

Suddenly an alien Isabel rose before the girl, an apparition of which
the suppressed terribleness frightened her as if some strange phoenix
had risen from its ashes before her eyes.

"You have told me your story. Now I shall tell you one of mine--a
buried story of my old, old self. There are perhaps many turns yet
in the course, but long after I shall have forgotten everything else,
this one memory somehow shall remain.

"Maybe I had the promise of a soul then. I was a little Eurasian, with
the happy blood of both races charging gayly through my veins. And
I believed tremendously, Atlas, just like you. Ah--!

"I was born in this house of my ancestors. My father was a Scotchman,
of their best clan; my mother was of the East. All its bloods flowed
in her veins. I was taken young to England--and there," Isabel said
slowly, "my mother disappeared. I came to love my father's land. I
went to the schools there, and dreamed great things. Sometime I too
should play a fine part in the world. Every man, I thought, had his
destiny in his own hands.

"It was all a long time ago. Of the seasons I remember vividly only the
time when the primroses open and the English hedge-lark is aboard." A
fierce blue mist veiled the flashing eyes. "Life dies and resurrects
itself in England. Every year one is born anew.

"The man was an officer in an English regiment--fair as the
daylight. On my knees I used to worship him as a god. Nobody suspected
what I was, and I did not myself understand. He loved me, too--with
the kind of love the English understand. No fire, no poetry in it--the
love that is just strong enough to manufacture a few pink-cheeked
children for their tidy British homes. I loved him as we of the East
know how to love.

"In Europe one marries not merely a man, but a family. How
different from my mother's land, where mates find each other under
the sun! Yet they call it civilization over there. Well, his family
grew suspicious. They had heard tales of my father's wild youth in
strange parts of the world. It sometimes happens that one must pay
a very heavy price for one's father's youth.

"The only retort my father could make was a bigger dowry. But I was
different. I had then sublime ideas of honesty of soul. My lover, I
believed, would love me the more exaltedly for them. I acknowledged
my Malay blood--all the bloods of the East that ran through me. I
stood up against the wall and did it in a great splendor of mood.

"Ah! You know the rest. When they, when he--that European matrimonial
compound threw me off, I did everything that a woman of your race
would not have done. I threw myself in his path at every turn--offered
myself to him on any terms; for I knew now that never could I exact
terms at all.

"And he took me on the lowest. West--East; it is always the same. He
got himself ordered to India. That last night!" Isabel sat up
straight. "I crept along the brush of the lane into which he was to
turn. An Igorotte from the Mountains had taught me how to catch my
foe. I slid out when he came! I would have killed him, but the knife
was poor. I only wounded him. I had meant to kill us both, but--"
Isabel nonchalantly threw open the négligé, and exposed a large
scar--"we go on, do we not, Green God of the Universe?" She turned
her head toward the room where the preposterous idol lived.

To this narrative, told with oriental fervor, of things quite as
beyond her experience of existence as the pits of Erebus, Julie had
listened in a conflict of emotions.

"The priest will tell you many things about me--among them that
a young man killed himself here for me not long ago. Men may have
killed themselves because of me, but not Grahaeme. He killed himself,
not because he was in love with me, but because he couldn't alter the
universe to an Englishman's idea--because I was what I shall eternally
remain--an Eurasian, a mongrel! You see, your Englishman can gloriously
destroy himself, but he can't sacrifice his caste. Grahaeme was jaded
by the East, and he took me to die for. I would never again accept
low terms. A Ghengis Khan, perhaps--or--" She stopped short. "Yes,
I will be unchangeably I, till the end. It is so decreed. There is
something about you, though, that stirs me, and makes me wish that
one died like the English summer and came up anew with the spring."

Julie rose, and in a surge of feeling looked down upon the recumbent
figure. For a bare moment Isabel had opened the very secret gate and
let her glimpse in. The girl laid her hand on the olive shoulder.

"Those things--make no difference to me," she said diffidently. "We
will always be friends."

Isabel glanced up at her ironically. "Is that a covenant? Go away,
little friend, with your spring insistence! There is no resurrection
here. And Europe shall never see me again! Once I wrote quaint
lyrics, full, they said, of the magic and mystery of the East; now
I am preparing a volume that is not written on pages--of things that
must shortly stir the race of men. 'Waters dried up that the way of
the Kings of the East shall be prepared!' Alpha and Omega. Here the
struggle of man began, and here it will end! And 'he who shall come,
taking the peace from the earth, and making kings'! Great resurrected
Ghengis Khan! Where is he? In what recess of Asia is he making ready
to sweep the East to victory? Him my soul awaits. He will put the
sun and moon under my feet!

"Half of this world will not sleep forever. The sleepers of the East
will touch their bonds and find them rotten--the senile hold of their
foreign masters! Then there shall be such a conflagration as will
scatter the very stars."

Isabel coming suddenly back from her feverish flight, looked up at
Julie. "Are you ill?" she demanded.

Julie put her hands to her head and pressed it hard, her lids drawing
together with pain. "I had a sunstroke in Nahal, and ever since I've
had a headache. Sometimes it aches as if it would split my brain."

Isabel pointed to the adjoining room. "Go and lie down! When you get
up the sunlight will be dimmed, and you will be better."

Julie dropped down on a bed that was a mass of crawling teakwood
dragons. All over the walls, from queer prints etched as with a
single hair, gazed fantastic human apparitions wearing their limbs
and features in most extraordinary ways, all supremely triumphant
over space and perspective. Draperies of embroidered landscapes,
fine as old etchings, disclosed temples of woven gold, rivers as
fantastic as dreams, and blue mountains over which the mysticism of
the East hung like dew.

She drowsed, and presently the temples of gold threads expanded into
pavilions like the markets she had seen in the city, and millions of
people, thick as flies, passed in and out.

She awoke, and her eyes rested on Isabel, who had so agitated her
brain with strange prophecies and visions. The long hair, black as
the jungle at night, lay curved over her beautiful body; the blue
eyes that judged etchings and old prints were closed, curtained by
heavy lids. The soul seemed to be withdrawn to inaccessible retreats,
afar off perhaps beating its wings against inexorable walls. Only the
mask of the East looked out from the inert form. The Malay woman lay
there asleep--the woman that could track her enemy, and kill.



CHAPTER XV


Early the next morning, Julie received a note from Father Hull, in
which he informed her that her appointment to the Manila Department had
been arranged. Only one vacancy had existed--in the Tondo district,
a native section of the city. The Reredos, the prosperous mestizos
who were to accommodate her, had a large house within easy distance
of the school.

Isabel made a wry face over this prospect, and advised Julie to
remain with her as long as possible. Julie had agreed to remain for
the Carnival, but decided that she must go at once to investigate
her new surroundings, and that she must establish herself there the
following day.

Her salary, she learned, had not been increased, although this
prospect had been held out to the teachers for the beginning of
their second year of service. For a city like this, where high
salaried officials set the standard of Americanism, her stipend was
stupendously inadequate. Her financial affairs were in about the
same unsatisfactory state as when they had caused the dénouement in
Nahal. She had always to cripple herself by payments to Mrs. Morris,
and there was now Delphine.

Isabel, however, entered into her perplexities to some purpose. She
knew, she said, of a Spanish lawyer who wished to come abreast of the
times by learning English. As Julie's school hours were from eight
in the morning to one o'clock, she would have her afternoon free to
instruct Señor Sansillo, who was sure to pay well. He was, Isabel
said, a pure-blooded Spaniard of culture, married to an enormously
rich mestiza.

Julie set out after breakfast to examine the niche that had been made
for her in the city.

Tondo, at the other side of Manila, was very ancient and wholly
native. It was as flat and sun-bleached as a desert, and had for its
horizon on one side the sea, prognosticative of typhoons; on the other
a wall of high hills where the winds blew against heaven. On beyond
was holy Arayat, lifting its solitary head into space, and holding,
it was said, the Ark buried in its crypt forever beyond the reach of
man. The people of Tondo lived in the very frankness, of being. Up
beyond the ridges were savages who had once been a serious menace to
this part of the city, which lay outside the Christian walls. Julie
came to believe that the soul of this section lay likewise beyond
those Christian borders.

There was a green somnolent river crawling like a senile old serpent
through the District. People swarmed its muddy banks, fishing in it,
washing their bodies and their raiment in it, and scooping its awful
water into drinking jars. So universal was its utility, it might have
been the River of Life itself. Old stone bridges lent an undeserved
dignity to the vile, green thing, which, set as it was into the core
of the people's life, was bound to have its grain of the picturesque.

A few of the streets were broad and long, but packed with shops
of tarnished brilliancy of color that looked like pigeon holes
and illustrated all vocations from Abraham's time down to the
present. These booths made the streets look like dingy fragments of
some old rainbow discarded out of the skies. From the robin's egg blue
regions of an "Esquela de Baile," the abandoned notes of a Zingarella
tinkled forth in defiance of the feverish heat of the day, as if its
incantation would set the whole street to dancing like tarantulas.

The "Booth of Miraculous Refreshment" was yellow and blue, with
orange colored festoons, and before its dilapidated wooden tables
its patrons imbibed its elixir without any special demonstration of
exhilarance. In the "Peaceful Barberia" two natives were matching a
pair of ferocious cocks. The "Patriotic Clam" offered ice-cream as
the medium of its contact with the public. Next to the "Bar of the
Orient," in suggestive proximity, was the "Resigned Funeria," done
in apple-green and having on exhibition hosts of pink satin coffins
drowned in lace.

However ignominiously born, the native gets even with the universe
by going splendidly to his grave.

Beyond the row of Chinese rice shops, infants' baptismal robes in
waves of purple and cerise ruffles smote the eye. The tiny, vivid
gala company of elfin shells suggested the shapes of an unborn race
about to enter the colorful, enigmatic destiny of the East.

One street was marvelous in the energy and variety of its human
service. In a single square one could have one's teeth pulled by an
experienced Japanese, one's voice trained, through heaven knows what
agency of the East; one's toe nails pared, or one's self completely
mesmerized by a thrillingly bearded Hindoo, whose placarded likeness
gave forth sparks in every direction and guaranteed, in large print
to all patrons absolute irresistibility in love.

Agipito, from environs of violently stained glass, announced a
"brokerage," and advertised pearls from the Sulu. The riches of the
East passed across this pawn broker's palms. Perfecto Abbas was a
lawyer. Access to his conference room was gained through a small
swinging door, such as is characteristic of places of alcoholic
refreshment, and which possibly was here employed to stimulate
trade. Zee Woo, a lavendero of the first class with his mouth as
a sprinkler, was to be seen blowing water over the clothes he was
ironing. There were Chinamen everywhere, like djinn in goblin depths,
fingering abacuses, as if searching for the mystic equation of wealth.

The Street! The Street! Bartering and bargaining, following its
oriental, alien and inconjecturable way. Birth is accidental, death
inevitable, but the exchange of things that are mine and the things
that are thine will go on to eternity.

The native of the East takes his entrance into the universe
philosophically. He attaches to himself no importance and definitely
expects little, except death. He has even a graceful way of meeting
that. The native of the West refuses to allude to this common human
casualty, of which he has a horror. The Filipino, on the other hand,
nonchalantly displays and even takes pleasure in his colorful coffins,
and when the time comes acquiescently sinks into them; for he knows
that he is a poor creature with little to cling to, and he is humbly
grateful for his day in the sun.

His intransitoriness of soul extends throughout his whole existence. He
erects houses that the winds of the sea sweep away; he stores
no treasure on earth; he lives from day to day. To-morrow is so
inconceivable a mystery that he relegates to it everything that he
cannot comfortably compass to-day. By to-morrow he may have dropped
gracefully, unresistingly out of the problems of the world. As a race
he appears to cherish no ambition of permanency on the globe. Idling
in his shops, he wonderingly watches the gnarled Chinese water-carrier
go by, bowed under his load. It does not occur to him that the Chinaman
bites the dust, that his sons and his sons' sons may survive.

It was into this existence that Julie was coming to dwell.

The long street thinned out, fields intervened. Finally Julie saw
a house sitting back isolated among a great deal of foliage near
a bridge. It was of the old Spanish type and had once, probably,
harbored fine foreigners. All but buried under the great palms,
it looked remote, shaded, and cool after the dust of the sun-swept
street. She got out of her carromata, and finding the iron gate in the
stone wall that surrounded the estate open, walked in. The rhythmic
click of wooden slippers across a stone floor and the soft drip of
water caught Julie's ear.

A muchacho appeared in response to her knocks and led her upstairs to
a sala furnished with a piano, a marble-topped table, a heterogeneous
array of conch shells, and some startling looking portraits of
persons of extraordinarily blended race. Señora Reredo entered the
room, a tall woman with a slight stoop and a passive gentleness of
face. She was in native costume, all black. Genteel native women are
almost always dressed in mourning. She led Julie to a large airy room,
well furnished and over-looking the garden. She mentioned a sum which,
while not extravagant, was not completely gratifying.

When they returned to the sala the children came trooping in, quietly
sparkling little folk in European clothes. The Señora said that next
year they would sell the old house which she had inherited and go
back to Spain where the children could be educated. Her husband had
an apothecary business, which he would sell out.

The Señora said that she was going back to the land of her father's
people. His blood had sojourned afar long enough. Julie glanced up
at the human array on the wall, and wondered.

A shriek burst from the children, and simultaneously an energetic,
purposeful, round pink pig with an uplifted curl of a tail burst into
the room. He was looking for the children who had deserted him. He
clearly knew his way about, for he at once dashed behind the piano
where the youngest had hidden away from him, and gave forth squeals
of joyful discovery. The Señora ordered the children to take the
beast out. He went in the utmost rebellion.

Julie did not say anything about Delphine. She was distressfully at
sea concerning him. Isabel had offered to keep him, but for some not
clearly defined reason, Julie did not wish to leave him with her. She
left the Señora with his problem still unsolved.

Returning, she found Isabel in a disguise of costume so splendid it
thrilled one like a poem. She had a tower of jewels on her head. Her
body was incased in a kind of closely clinging filagree of shining
armor studded with great gems--which, however, left considerable of
the concrete, natural Isabel exposed. Her blue eyes sparkled like the
great head jewels of a goddess. She looked as if she had been looted
from some temple. Nobody, Julie decided, would be able to entertain a
pretension alongside her. Her own Pleiad mistiness seemed to dissolve
before this glory.

Yet Isabel came over to her and, flicking Julie's neck with the end
of her nail, exclaimed: "That white, white skin--fit for the mantle
of an archangel to come down to earth in! And that white fire back of
you! Have you an appointment with the millennium of the soul of man
that you can contrive to look like that? Take me along, Julie--take
me along!"

Isabel was obliged to leave early, but she had provided an escort
for Julie; no less a person than Governor Shell of the Mohammedan
Group. Julie had heard a lot about this strange, dark hermit of a man,
and wondered how he came to be attending such a function; but Isabel
explained that he was visiting the Governor-General, and couldn't
very well help himself.

"I don't believe he wanted to take me," Julie demurred. "He is said
to dislike women."

"Perhaps he didn't," Isabel declared, unabashed; "but when I told him
about your exile on an island not far from his own, his missionary
instinct was touched. You couldn't go with any one more distinguished."

When Governor Shell entered the room, Julie felt at once the force of
his somber, reticent personality. She observed that he did not look
very young, and that he had a strained sweated look as if he were
pushing himself always just beyond the margin of what a man might
reasonably do. It was a dark world in which he worked, in the hope
of stumbling on the formula that would transform the preternaturally
vicious psychologies of the Moros.

In their common experience of the far Southern Islands they found a
great deal to talk about. When they reached the Governor General's
mansion, the balconies were glittering with lights festooned like
fireflies against the darkness. The Palace sat in huge grounds, one
side of which touched the street Malacañang, while the other dropped
down to the Pasig, along which the gala boats were to appear.

Everybody was crowded onto the galleries in whimsies of costumes. Seats
had been reserved for Governor Shell, and he and Julie sat down near
the judges of the carnival. Almost all of these people were prominent
personages, unknown to Julie; so the Governor explained them to her.

The tall lady in the handsome native costume and the rope of pearls
was the wife of the Governor-General. Julie admired her graceful
dignity. Colonel Messenger, the man next to her, was one of the biggest
Americans in Manila; he had straightened out the land problem, which
the religious orders had engendered.

"He and his family are what you might call typical colonists," the
Governor said. "They have settled down on the soil. That young man
at his side is his eldest son--Chad."

"He scarcely seems as large a structure as his father," Julie
commented, "--but what a fury of dreaming he has in his face! Isn't
he the one Isabel told me of--who married a mestiza in order to serve
the East, and who believes we are in the process of remaking it?"

The Governor nodded. "He's a great friend of Barry's."

Julie seized the opportunity to ask the question that had been for
days on her lips, but which she had somehow refrained from putting
to Isabel.

"Is he back?"

"Yes. He got in on the Rohilla Maru yesterday. Brought a Chinaman
with him--a Sun Yat Sen Something, I think the name was. He likes to
show them what's going on here--and he's the one to do it. He has
not only had the experience, but he has the intuition which makes
him understand the life of the East. He has had a great deal more
than most people imagine, to do with the formation of the first
representative government over here. He and Caples make a strong team."

Governor Shell pointed out a tubby, deeply tanned, and patriarchally
bearded little man; and Julie remembered his name as that of the head
of the Commission and a well known scientist.

"Barry hasn't the training of Caples, and Caples hasn't Barry's
faith. Caples is ironic, and believes the Americans are going to
get tired, as they usually do, and quit, leaving the worst tangle
the East ever saw. Science and acute deductions take the faith out
of a man, and faith, I believe," the Governor said hesitatingly,
"is one of the great natural forces. It enables Barry to convince a
native quicker than any other white man in the East can do it."

The Governor took out his watch, as if he were in the habit of living
by it. "Not a float so far!" he complained. "That's always the way--you
wait and wait!"

"And the Moros never keep you waiting a minute?"

He smiled. "You mustn't think I'm not enjoying myself! Nobody ever
heard me talk so much in my life."

Julie who had been studying the face of the man who had married the
Eurasian--to save the East, demanded:

"What does Chad Messenger believe?"

"That things are very bad on the earth and need what he calls a Great
Change. He talks a lot about it."

"He looks," Julie reflected, "as if he had great expectations. What
do you think he expects?"

"Oh, some sort of metamorphosis in which the earth will break out of
its grub's existence into a winged thing. Wars--perhaps a lot of them,
plagues or earthquakes or even a big war which, like Noah's flood,
would wipe out part of the world and start the rest all over again."

"It sounds apocalyptical."

"He and Barry have a lot of these East Indian mystics for friends,
and they have a grand prophetical time together. I say the future is
a disease with them," the Governor grumbled.

Two men were entering the select group of judges. The more noticeable
of the two was tall and of that consumptive leanness frequent among
the scholarly type of Oriental. His pale yellow face was indicative
of a Mongolian infusion of blood--a face full of arresting attributes
which were yet unaccountably screened to the Occidental eye.

"Pablo Orcullu!" Shell remarked. "Recognized leader of the Filipino
people. Some think him very strong--but notice that stoop in the
shoulders, the scholars' stoop! That's Pablo's kismet. He may scheme
ever so splendidly, but when his moment comes that will hold him
back. His kind haven't learned to think largely and act largely
simultaneously.

"Orcullu," he added, "admires Barry. He owned a big dead old city down
South, and he sent for Barry to come down and help him build it over
in fine new cement. He says Barry is the biggest white man in the East.

"The sad little fat fellow? De Cadegas. They said in Europe, where
he studied, that he had one of the finest voices in the world. But
there was the Tobacco Factory which spelled the universe in dollars
to his parents; so the nightingale of the East counts tobacco leaves."

The first float now emerged into view upon the river, through
fantastically light foliage. It brought the Governor to his feet with
an exclamation. Crimson silken sails, like the enormous petals of a
flower outspread to the night, glided beneath them. In the boat stood a
conclave of Moro chieftains in their vivid costumes of coral red, tight
velvet trousers and jackets buttoned with gold coins, with turbans
and gorgeous serongs, and brightly cruel spears and curved swords.

Julie gave a little cry as she recognized one of the
figures--Dicky-Dicky, the dwarf of Isabel's household, in the
glittering regalia of a rajah, his small person redolent with princely
dignity.

"That scrap of a man was actually a Rajah once!" Governor Shell leaned
down to inform her. "It lasted only a few months, unfortunately for
history, for I hear he made a wise and progressive ruler. The real
Rajah, Bulai, was, by a queer chance, also a dwarf, and in appearance
very nearly the twin of the captured Visayan slave. Bulai was a timid
prince, afraid of his responsibilities; so between the two mannikins
it was cooked up that Dicky-Dicky should impersonate the Rajah.

"The tribe, however, found it out, and it was from a particularly
undesirable end that Dicky-Dicky was saved, through the medium of a
vast amount of gold, by our friend Isabel, who happened to be visiting
somewhere thereabouts."

"And so poor Dicky-Dicky will never reign again!"

"Oh, I don't know. He may break out again. He may have his kingdom
reëstablished by the government that Isabel plans."

Up the river now was coming a caricature of the Archipelago. Queen
Philippinitis in crown and robe with unstockinged feet and flapping
slippers cocked shockingly up before her, and smoking a dreadful cigar
a yard long. Under her arm she hugged a huge bespurred cock. She was
politely ignored by the official party, but was everywhere else hailed
with vociferous appreciation.

Then came the float that Julie had been waiting for--Isabel's marble
barge, carved and tinted with indigo, lit from stem to stern, and
crowded with Asiatic figures, from the steppes of the Tartar to the
borders of the Kurd. In the center of these human arabesques sat
Isabel enshrined. She had wonderfully contrived it all, and there
could be no doubt about the preëminence of the float.

Then quite suddenly the attention of the beholders was drawn to a
tall brown man who stood on top of the barge with a long propelling
pole in his hand. In the striking suggestion of his posture and the
occasional glimpses of his brown uplifted features, he managed to
convey a significance that transcended the glory below. There below
reposed the ancient, static, and unstable magnificence of the East;
but above--alert, upright, asking its question of the future and the
judgment of white men--was the Man-Soul of Asia. The boat drifted
off into the shadows, but that brown image remained, graven on the
brains of those who saw it.

"That was Barry!" Julie said half under her breath. She stared around
at this strange galaxy of people, whose background of the East gave
them a touch of fantasy. These days of the Empire, or creation--when
a fragment of the East was shaking under a stupendous renovation! And
back of it, these dauntless men and women who were stirringly pledged
to the resurrection! A new world must take shape under their will,
a world of the best ideals.

There was an exhilaration in the air, an elixir working upon an
ancient life. An intoxication came over Julie as she watched and
listened to the music. The faces melted into a phantasmagoria,
a marching host dedicated to the East and sweeping on to shape its
mighty fate. Visions and dreams pulsated to the music--strains of
India, Malaysia, of far Mongolia woven into its throbbing war-like
tones. There must be some place in the march for her! Some time in
the Experiment that place would unfold and give her a part in the
big things these men's brows portended. Hope quivered through her
like the life-giving warmth of the sun.

They arose from their seats, and started to mingle in the throng. Julie
felt some one seize her arm. It was Ellis Wilbur, the girl who had
pointed people out to her that first memorable night in Manila.

"How is the girl-hermit? I am so glad to see her back--though I wager
that Providence has taken no note of the things she has done."

Julie returned the greeting warmly.

"Did you see Barry McChord?" Ellis asked. "Isn't it just like him to
drive the things home with hammer and tongs?

"Do you feel at home in this Cataclysm here?" she demanded abruptly. "I
don't! Yet it makes my mind spring as if I had found another dimension
for it. A long time hence, no doubt, I shall look back upon it with
the thrill of some splendid adventure in which I ever so little
engaged. I'm not a participant. I don't care about the East, but I
do care very much about the courage of this attempt to disperse the
dust of ages; of which the smell is all over the East, in the hovels
of the poor and the decayed dwellings of kings."

As she started away, she remarked: "Isabel, I hear, has lost the
best one of her stupendous bracelets in the water, and is frightfully
cross. Don't let her quarrel with anybody."

A wild throb shot through Julie's pulses. There above the crowd was
again the Excelsior face--that fantastic name she had given it, oh,
so long ago! The tawny head was watchfully alert, as if it were used
to scanning great distances. The face, glowing and vital, had a desert
tan, and in it was a hint of the desert's awesome solitudes. His light,
vigorous frame seemed to have been built for heroic purposes. It
struck Julie that here was the real Atlas to hold the New World on
his unbending shoulders.

Julie watched him breathlessly. People stopped him everywhere to
talk. Still he was advancing in her direction. Her heart pumped so
that the blood seemed to be escaping all over her body. When he was
quite near, his eyes turned in her direction. He stared hard, and an
abrupt change came over his face.

"It can't be you!" he said before her, as if he expected her to
contradict him. Then he added: "Some time, of course, I knew you
would come back! But it's been such a long time. Something seemed to
swallow you up after that night--on the roof, you remember."

She did remember, and it was plain that he remembered too, just as
if many sorry months had not intervened. Very few people were like
that--capable of taking up, as if it had just been dropped, the mood
of the past. And they were back in it easily at once. It was only by
an extreme chance that she was here at all. In these improbable times,
where life shifted as upon a screen from day to day, any expectations
were preposterous. Yet he accepted her reappearance as something that
was bound to come about in chance. His certainty that they would meet
again seemed strange at first, and then the strangeness vanished.

"I was called out of the room--to the cholera situation in Leyte,
wasn't it?" he went on, looking intently at her. "I thought I'd be
back at once--that's the way over here. But when I did return, you
had disappeared completely--not a clew to you left."

Julie smiled grimly. "The East misled me for a while. Now that it
has found me again, I wonder--"

"It was thought that you had gone back to the States--but I knew
somehow that you had not. How did you happen to go so far away?"

"It was you who sent me, that night. You breathed the fire into me
that started me going. But I couldn't show you, or God, or anybody
a thing that I have done!"

His far-seeking, gold-colored eyes flamed through her. "That's the
idea that stalks us all. And we can't live an age or two to find out
what all this fine fever of our actions will boil down to. We can
only go on believing that our particular fire is unquenchable. I have
my misgivings, too. There are shadows lifting on the horizon at this
moment that may portend untold calamity. But I am perfectly positive
that victory--far along the road, perhaps--is ahead.

"As for my sending you away," he exclaimed swiftly, "one does not,
for all the causes that animate the earth, send persons like you
away. How could I--a being all star-dust and light?" He looked in
admiration upon her shining youth.

"I am a Pleiad!" Julie explained. "Don't ask me where the other six
are. There was no time for the human things--and a Pleiad was easy,
just a puff of light."

"I remember," he said, "how glad I was to have found you--only to
have you slip out, like a ship in a dream!"

He was regarding her deeply, as if he would search out the things
that were printed most indelibly on the plate of her mind.

"You have changed!" he decided abruptly.

"Not quite so young?" She laughed wryly. "Nahal helped to cure that
raw curse."

"Come out on the gallery, and let's talk!"

They walked to the end of the gallery overlooking the river, which,
like a current of silver, stretched down through the city.

"Of course," she told him, "when you were the means of sending me
forth, I went believing that I was going to work miracles. I lived
terribly stirred by that idea all the time!"

"And inevitably you must have performed them. It's the time for
miracles!"

"For you, yes." She looked up admiringly to his heroic height. "But
you see, I am only a village school-teacher and not a prince of the
East. It was my beloved island, though, down there, my own domain
I thought. I was to have done so much, but I really did nothing at
all. All my grand purposes came to nothing. I tried to bring peace,
and lift up a generation of light--that is, it always seems to me I
tried to do that--and they took the children all away from me."

The tears sprang to her eyes. "I can't get over it--or forget it. Right
there a fine sheath that enveloped me dropped to pieces. I was wholly
unhappy and unsuccessful. My friends died or ceased to believe in me;
my people that I was to have led to the Promised Land--Oh, don't,"
she cried, turning to him, "break your heart with a dream like that!"

His eyes, full of commiseration, flamed at her last words into
visionary light. "I dream," he declared, "of the whole darkened lengths
of the East! The better state is coming," he continued more gently,
"not to one land or one race but to the whole Humanity--and the East
must be in the Change, too. Up from the muddy Caliban that it is
there will rise a soul to fashion a new Asia after the ideals which we
brought across the sea from the greatest Republic of the world. Some
time not so far off, mark my words, common coolies," he exclaimed,
"shall stand in the Holy courts of the Forbidden City and in the Temple
of the Great Lama at Lhassa, the two most inviolate spots on earth,
and proclaim the equality of men!"

His face was afire. He thrust his strong nervous hands through his
rumpled hair.

"Some of us are daring to play a bigger game than that of this
archipelago. We are bidding for stakes that are far in the future. I
was in China for years before I came here--I am steeped in it, I'll
confess that, I have more than one iron in the fire. The times are
beginning to take point. As an old Brahmin priest I know says; the
souls of men are making ready all over the earth."

He tingled all over with a power that seemed to communicate itself
electrically to her. It was fine to be near him, to be in his
atmosphere. He made her transcend her human self for a while, bore
her forth on the crest of universal things.

"I want you to see the sort of things that I'm bound up in!" he
said. "I want you to enter a little into my beliefs. Though, after all,
we are floating on the waters of mystery."

"A big black enigma, it all seems to me!"

"You speak as if you do not expect a solution!" he exclaimed.

"Things will have to clear awfully for that--for me at least. I have
no expectations any more. Women are not heroic over here. The men
do the big things. I thought I was an apostle. I find I am only a
woman tramp through the East--who has lost her quest. I have made a
mistake. Perhaps I should turn back!"

"Ah! Don't talk that way. Be as wild as you please in your dreams,
this is the background for them. If you could see the extent of the
domain over which my aspirations dare to play! You'd think I was
truly an Arabian Nights' romancer."

"Tell me about this domain of dreams?"

His gaze traveled far, very far off, it seemed. "My territory of
the soul goes over Asia. I have stood on a tower of the Wall and
have looked over the stretches of the desert, towards the heights
of the Himalayas, beyond the reach of eyes. Below me lay the great
uncomprehending land across which men were moving in their bitter
inadequate fates. I wanted to march with them, soul to soul. I wanted
to stir them to struggle and revolt. I wanted them to find a new
vision. Those," he said, turning back to her, "are still my hopes!"

"I've never seen China," Julie said, after a pause. "I have always
wanted to."

"It will be the most staggering fact of the future. One scarcely dares
speculate upon it, it is so incalculably vast and undecipherable. Think
of the potentialities of three times our soul muster. Conceive of the
disaster to the world if by any accident in a generation or two this
human force arrayed itself on the wrong side! In the Boxer Rebellion,
the people were hitting blindly at the world, when in reality they
meant to strike at their own rotten government."

His voice dropped. "What some of us who love China want to do is to
put her on the right side of the bars--change the habit of mind of
centuries; wipe out those old ivory chess-men in Pekin, and set the
young China on her winged way. And for that we are willing to go to
almost any lengths."

"Aren't you trusting a stranger with secret affairs?"

"You were never a stranger!"

Under this bestowal of faith, Julie recalled the night on the roof.

"I want to thank you," she said with feeling, "for helping me in
Nahal. I was in sore straits."

"If I had known--" he said.

Finding no words with which to push away the obstacle of Nahal,
she swept on quickly: "Do you know what I might do with my Filipino
ward? He's a small brown creature for whom there doesn't seem to be a
place in the world. I'm not a capable Providence, I fear. He wouldn't
be left behind, so I just had to bring him along with me--though what I
was to do with an eleven-year-old Filipino boy, I couldn't think. But
you should have seen his little face that day looking across the
water toward the magic lands. I seldom know what to do with myself,
to say nothing of anybody else. What do you think I could do with him?"

"Give him to me. The boys in my house have their duties so confounded
that domestic activity has very nearly come to a halt. Delphine
who is just from the Provinces, and honest, can act as an official
tattle-tale and break the gang. Why should you be discouraged over
the nonconformity of the island of Nahal," he demanded, "when I cannot
evoke industry from a single native in my home?"

Julie pondered. "He ought to go to school," she said. "You see,
he's a very special person. He's caught the fire, too, and wants to
forge ahead."

"There is a school within a few squares of my house. We'll let him go
right on to school till he makes a destiny for himself, and some day
when he's president of the Philippine republic, he'll raise a statue
to you on the Luneta, as the Light of Ages."

"I think I must have stumbled on a fairy god-father!" Julie
smiled. "But they say you're that to everybody."

"That's not true. I've never been as nice to anybody as I've been to
you. Don't dream for a minute that I go round adopting stray children
that everybody has picked up."

Julie laughed. "Perhaps we'd better go and move about a bit."

They came near a group of people who seemed to have congregated in
a corner of a room. Julie heard the word "Independencia!" burst with
a little shock into the midst of them.

A man spoke up as if in answer to its challenge: "We are within the
walls of the East--where we were called by Fate--for issues greater
than we can to-day foresee."

Julie remembered the speaker, Matfield Barron, whom Ellis Wilbur had
described to her. She saw that he was addressing Isabel, who stood
smiling with quiet irony.

"Woman of the Cross-roads!" he went on whimsically, "who have the
East and the West in your veins--what do you think?"

Warring impulses rippled for a moment across Isabel's face. As she
stood there, torn by contentions of her race, her remarkable emotions
in play, Julie perceived how different she was from every other woman
in the room. Here was a woman who thought as deeply as any of them,
who certainly transcended all of them in beauty and gifts, and yet who,
nevertheless, belonged beyond the margin.

Some resentful flame burned through her discretion. "Under a master,
can personality be preserved?"

"But yet a little while we must tarry, to lay down the foundation
stones," Matfield explained.

"Seven times seven civilizations are buried under the soil of
Asia. Wait till you get as crowded as we are over here, till the
very oceans are disputed--then behold the earth running with blood,
and the seas on fire. You of the West struggle to expurgate from the
East its human passions. You strive to teach it to inhabit your high
altruistic plateau. But, you, yourselves, shall yet at some supreme
urge revert to the most stupendous of those human passions. In one
concentrated hour all your elevated mankind shall be at one another's
throats like wolves. You will do well to keep the East quiet then
while you tear out one another's hearts."

Barry alone after this explosion regarded Isabel with impartial
interest. "It's horrible, of course!" he told Julie in an undertone,
"but you know every time she talks like that, I almost believe
her. She sounds like St. John, and I've always had an inkling that
he was dead right. The Armageddon! Toppling thrones! But it won't
happen in my time!"

"You seem sorry!"

"Why shouldn't I want to take part in the renewing of the earth?"

"It exhilarates you and depresses me. This is struggle enough for
me. You see, I have ten million timid grandmothers back of me and it
is some task to give them all a jolt."

Isabel stepped nearer them.

"Was that the Yellow Peril you were talking about, Isabel?" Holborne
smiled into his mustache.

Her olive face flushed proudly. "The peril of a United East."

"And Ghengis Khan and his hordes will again overrun us?" he asked
ironically.

"Ah! If only he would arise! If only somebody strong, strong would
come!" Her gaze wandered desperately to the spot where Julie and
Barry stood.

"But you have another land!" Matfield Barren expostulated. "When
you lift those violet eyes of yours, I have visions of long rolling
uplands, with gray mist upon them, and of the sun, and thyme, and
quiet sheep." He came nearer, and spoke in a low, persuasive tone. "We
belong now to the East--the East that rejects no man; nevertheless,
let us drink to that other land."

He led her off to the punch bowl, but Julie saw that she refused the
cup he offered her. Some of these people seemed to have a great deal
shut up in their hearts. Julie remembered Ellis's warning, and made
a move toward Isabel; but just then somebody began to sing.

Julie thrilled with delight. The Arabian Nights' Tales to music! One
saw them all, Sindbad, Aladdin, Sheherazade, The Calenders and the
Kings float wondrously by in arabesques of inconceivable tints of
melody. Like magic the colorful splendor of Asian loves unfurled. The
voice had a divine aroma, as if weighted with the fragrance of the
gardens of Paradise.

Then it took on a new tone, and became intolerable in its play
upon the soul. The girl wanted to escape. It struck too deep. It
challenged the Judgment Day. Her gaze traveled around those groups
of faces. Barry's desert face looked as if he saw the veil lifted
and the world in full completion of his dreams. Isabel's twilight
face was tense with suppressed exultation. The enigmatic being,
Orcullu, did not appear to stir, but a fire was growing in his
eyes. Shell's somber face stared stonily into the night; Matfield
Barren's sash drooped forlornly at his side; Holborne looked into
his hard hands, as if to read over their story; Leah Chamberlain was
fluttering distressfully, like a bird whose wings had been caught;
Chad Messenger looked suddenly pinched and weary, while Ellis Wilbur
from the edge of the group caught Julie's eye as if to challenge her
to say that all this was not a dream.

The man who counted tobacco leaves left the piano.

The throng of guests gradually dissolved. While Isabel turned to speak
a final word to Orcullu, Barry bent to Julie from his great height.

"I'm coming to take you for a drive to-morrow, to show you what's
happened while you were away."

Their eyes caught in a moment of golden fire. The night on the
roof of his house came back to her with a rush of overpowering
recollections. Not until Isabel thrust herself between them, could she
bring herself back into the self out of which she had been transported.

Isabel seemed volcanically to drive them apart. She stood looking
from one to the other. Barry made a move toward the stairs. Isabel
stopped him, the blue fire of her eyes ravaging his face. Julie moved
away. As she walked down the steps, she glanced back and saw the two
figures still standing at the head of the stairs. Isabel's shadowy
face was lifted--the wide gold bands glittering on her arms. She
looked as she did in her moments of vision, as if her imagination
perceived and was holding up to Barry the power of which she dreamed.

Julie undressed in her ornate bed-chamber, but she did not attempt to
go to sleep. She leaned pensively against one of the carved bed posts,
and stared out into the night, where the moon's great searchlight,
exploring the cities of the earth, was turned full on this Eastern
one. A shining city, in the realms of darkness! Below lay the river
with the bowed sleeping foliage of its shores. Riding its smooth
current was a sliver of a boat, in it a solitary native caroling down
the stream. How often had she watched other little boats riding silver
waters in artless celebrativeness! Nahal, so far away! It would never
be anything but her unconquerable kingdom--the dead garden of her soul.

All around her here were big deeds. What was the accolade these men
possessed, and which she still had not found? Shell had ceded his
life to it. Because of it Barry grappled tirelessly with races of
men. Where among these architects of the future did she belong? She
had enrolled her spirit among them. She had been so sure that there was
a share for her in this splendid achievement. But the Great Adventure
had passed her over. She was not metal for its forging.

But it was a hard way--this way of these agents of the future. Could
one go on laboring forever in blind belief? The great structure these
men were rearing might fall to pieces like a house of cards at the
stroke of Isabel and Orcullu. If the Americans gave up the Islands,
as it appeared they might do--a puff of smoke in the cosmos, and that
would be the end of the whole thing.

She crept into bed, and dreamed of Barry as Atlas struggling to uphold
a world that was falling over her head.



CHAPTER XVI


Julie spent the morning after the carnival arranging the transfer of
her effects to the Tondo. Isabel remained in bed, and did not emerge
till Barry appeared at four o'clock.

Barry was driving a swift powerful horse hitched to a light
rubber-tired trap--a rather unusual combination for Manila. He greeted
them both in his radiant manner as he came up the stairs.

"I am going to take you to Father Hull's," he said to Julie. "He
asked me to bring you over." Then, with quick intuition, noticing the
bag in Julie's hand, "If that's your luggage, we'll land you at your
new home."

He swept the bag out of her grasp, and smiled down upon her. "I am
going to show you the miracle of Manila!"

Julie, turning to Isabel to bid her good-by, was startled by
the expression she surprised upon her face. Isabel was agitated
about something. Her mood had shot up for an instant like an angry
flame. Julie had a vague idea that she might be displeased with her
for not accepting her invitation to stay on with her. She renewed
her expressions of gratitude to Isabel, and said she would return
soon to see her.

Isabel said they should see each other often--quite often. She
kissed Julie, and advised her to keep out of the sun--"because of
the headaches," she added.

"I wish there were something to stop them," said Julie. "They rage
all through the heat of the day."

Isabel regarded her closely for a moment, then withdrew her eyes.

Quite unconscious of any disturbance of the ether, Barry passed his
arm through Julie's and together they descended the stairs. He assisted
her into the trap, and picked up the reins with vast satisfaction. "I
drive myself," he said, "because I can't bear to sit idle behind a
swift horse."

The powerful animal sprang through the streets, and whirred them across
towering iron bridges. They passed the skeleton of a huge new hospital,
the frameworks of a new school and other public buildings. Over one
vacant piece of ground, Barry drew up in fervor.

"Site of the new university!" he explained. "Rizal's dream. It's only
a few lines on paper so far--but it's on the way.

"These buildings cannot be shaken or blown down like paper; and
something more than a race of columbines must come to be born in them."

Julie peered up into his face. "I never saw anybody so filled with
a thing as you are with all this. I don't believe you have a soul
separate from it."

He smiled. "I wonder!" he said. "Well, I'm fearfully busy, and happy
as a lark. Oh, but I don't want them to shut down on all this!

"It's a nuisance to be finite," he declared; "one can't be in two or
three places at once. I can't leave here now, yet we've got to keep
the wheels of the Asiatic car of civilization on the tracks. Now that
the Assembly has cut loose, I'm holding my breath. It's a grand time
to be alive!" Barry declared, relapsing, as he occasionally did, into
Irish idiom. "Now, when the whole world is constructive. Once when I
was in Dublin, off my ship, an old woman looked in my palm and said,
'It's a great destruction that's coming!'

"'To me?' I asked.

"'To the whole earth,' she said.

"'But I didn't ask for the telling of the whole world's fortune,'
I said.

"'It's your fortune, and everyman's,' she answered. 'But after it's
blown off the globe, a glorious time will be coming.'

"'And what am I to be doing with myself until then?' I demanded.

"'Travel Eastward!' she said."

Julie looked at him curiously. In a flash she recalled the conversation
with Chad Messenger.

"What do you think is going to happen?" she asked.

"The shaking out of the old countries of the freedom of man; the
bringing down of a few wills, and the placing on top of the whole
will. A change in the destiny of man!"

"Well, if as much of a change can be realized as has been
already realized here in so short a time, I am ready to believe
in anything! Look hard at your city, and wonder at the magic that
has transformed a dirty, insanitary Malay city to--well, almost an
oriental City Beautiful."

Barry's face clouded. "It shall be the cleanest in the world when we
get through, but many a dark enemy lurks in our path. Look at those
stagnant moats, infested with pythons and myrmidons of death--and
at the drainage system! When will they attune their oriental ears to
the truths of sanitation? And the cholera-infected food they smuggle
in from the provinces! No, all is not well; and yet, help me Heaven,
they believe back home that we've finished--that these people should
now lead themselves!"

"But you are here to drive the unclean spirits out." Julie smiled
absently to herself. "I think so often of what you told me that first
night, about your coming upon this city which was to inspire your
whole life."

"It's true I never saw China really as she is to be until I saw her
in this new light. You see, I wasn't always an American. I guess
that's why all this impressed me so. You people over there take
your heritage too much for granted. I was born in Ireland--a racked,
wretched country, like those of the East--and of very poor people. My
father and his father's father, as far back as you can think, had
been at the eternally losing game of trying to make a living on this
earth off another man's land.

"It came over me when I was a lad"--Barry frowned out at the
land-scape--"that there was no hope whatever for me. My mother--who
was of good family, and had married beneath her, as they say--taught
me out of books, and stirred the urge in me. She was a wistful woman
and homesick for the world. So she wanted me to go out and get the
best luck of the gods. Mother and Father both died--" He stopped,
and seemed to have forgotten his narrative in his thoughts until
Julie said quietly:

"Please go on!"

"Then my Uncle James came along and took me by the shoulder, and said:
'Let's go find our own country, Lad!'

"We shipped on a vessel, and saw Russia and Germany, Italy and
France--where Uncle James said a man might live master of himself
but never at all could learn the tongue. We crossed the ocean, and
one night we saw against the sky a great burning torch lifted over
a new land.

"Back of that torch life began. Uncle James made money in truck
gardening, and sent me to school. But still, somehow, I hadn't found
my place. I followed the word of the old woman of Dublin, and finally
I struck this spot. And better than anything I had seen anywhere else,
I liked what the Americans were set about to do here."

Julie's eyes shone. "Another wanderer called!" she softly exclaimed.

"Many are called, but few are chosen," Barry meditated. "You saw
one side of the Colony last night. Father Hull could tell you about
the reverse side. Others chose mighty issues in this great time,
but Father Hull took as his charge the souls of his countrymen--to
keep them up to their high engagement. For this is a place and a
time taking crude strength to survive. Rough creatures like me are
in their element. The priest has many twisted destinies under his
charge, people who have suffered and fallen. He alone knows how to
deal with them. He alone in this great rough-shod, forward marching
colony stops to gather up those who drop behind.

"There was Blackstone! I helped Blackstone to get the contract for the
big Santa Cruz bridge--the big thing that was to bring the fortune
he had sought for fifteen years over the two Americas; to himself
and his wife, who had waited all those years for the Wheel to turn
so she could marry him.

"But it was Father Hull who managed to save him from a long sentence
in a native prison, when the scandal of the adulterated cement
broke forth. Blackstone's lawyer was the Old Judge--a drunkard and a
'Remittance Man,' but in spells a tremendous lawyer. Father Hull got
him on the case, made one derelict rise up to save another--as he did
in as splendid a court scene as I have ever witnessed. I don't know
whether Blackstone was guilty or not, neither does the Old Judge;
but Father Hull believes in him, and that's enough for all of us.

"Then the Old Judge, fearing the Blackstones would starve because
of the boycott put upon him, went to board with him. He suffers
torture from Mrs. Blackstone's cooking. I've stopped in there with
him occasionally, and after one frowning survey of the burnt, meal,
the Judge usually roars for the beer which he keeps on the ice in
quantities."

"But most of the Old Judge must be fine!" Julie exclaimed.

"Yes! He was long ago pensioned off by his wealthy wife, whose pride
he had outraged, and told to seek other climates. He has tried the
wild life of the Orient for some time, but now he is getting old
and tired and lonely. He has drunk the cup to the lees, and would
turn back except for the fact that once long ago he had a sentiment
for the woman who sent him out; and this contract with her he will
respect to the end. Oh, there are any number of others," he broke
off. "Ask Father Hull to tell you about them; he knows all about that
other side which I don't see so much of.

"Here we are! That's the Rectory just ahead. It's just the neglected
barren outer shell that you'd expect Father Hull's selfless spirit
to dwell in. Even the old housekeeper is a pick-up too, the relict
of a colonial who died from one of the swift illnesses of the East
and left her stranded on these shores a hopeless incompetent whom no
one else could make foot room for."

It was this person who led them up the stairs to Father Hull's
sala, where he rose out of a long chair to greet them. Julie was so
startled by the change in his appearance that she barely suppressed an
exclamation. In some strange way his personality seemed already to have
commenced to break its moorings. To Julie, who was particularly acute
to intimations, the shadow of death seemed already to lie upon him.

Two other callers came up on the porch, and Barry went out to join
them. Julie sank down in a chair and regarded the priest troubledly.

"I want to tell you how grateful I am to you for getting me a transfer
to Manila. I was so anxious to get away from Nahal! I am inclined to
believe you were right about--my not being exactly fitted for it."

"Things have been happening to you," he said.

Julie smiled painfully.

"My child," he said indulgently, "you are on one quest and you
think you are on another. Sometime, with some pain perhaps, it
will be straightened out. But it is people like you who help move
the world. Without such there would be no human history--just the
thoughts of scholars--and priests. You see, it takes deeper forces
than personal passions to carry forward the human pilgrimage. It took
the master passion--man's love for man--to lift humanity into a soul."

He broke off, and pointed to the glimpse of the ocean that could be
seen through the spaces of the vines. "It's a very beautiful sunny sea,
isn't it? And always I can see the ships on it--going out."

Julie who had been regarding him with emotion, exclaimed tremulously,
"Why don't you go home? You look so tired."

The great calm in which he had been enfolded suddenly broke. A fire
smoldered into life above his sunken cheeks, an alert look as at some
trumpet call. He squared wearied shoulders. "My place is here! Some
of us will never go back. We came to see it through. My camp-fire
colony, full of raw life, of struggle, of tragedy! I couldn't leave
it. Accoutered for the wilderness, we sit around the flames--faces
of failure, despair, and crime turned out of the shadow of the past
to the hope of the new land, where the slate is wiped clean. It is
this hour, my child, that must be watched over. A sea of struggling
humanity with heads stuck up out of the flood. In the New Chance,
the swimmer must be stronger than the current. I have been a soldier,"
he added; "I have followed hard trails. I couldn't turn back now.

"The Odyssey of the East!" he mused. "Life here has seethed down to
its elements. The passions of men are too dangerously on the surface,
and existence is wild, swift and sweet. Strong unbridled youth of men
and beauty in a land of no traditions or standards. Sudden wealth in
prodigal untried hands; princely Americans living so that the poor
native thinks that kings have come to dwell with him. Millions of
dollars from home to run the Treasure Islands! All magnificently,
gallantly American! In conditions like these ghosts begin to walk,
and I must be here to lay them.

"Just as you came in I was thinking of some of these people. There's
a lad in a bank I'm worried about. By virtue of his Americanism
he thought he was entitled to something better than a government
clerkship. Straining always toward the gilded doors of the Empire's
elect, he got himself made manager of this newly organized bank on
precisely the same salary he had before. But doors have opened to him,
and he spends like the rest. Some day not so far distant, I fear by the
haggard look in his face, the poor lad will vanish out of this place,
to be caught up by the secret service men in some great hostelry in
India or China to which his singed youth will gravitate. Then the long,
awful sentence in a Malay prison.

"There are some, you see, who were never to find fortune in El Dorado,
some who even a year ago walked these streets in high hope and to-day
lounge seedily with vacant, staring eyes, in native booths. Then there
is the ghost that is particular damnation--native wives. Not so long
ago Chad Messenger, one of those men out there--" He motioned toward
the door--"married Rosalie. It is already the tragedy it was bound
to be. Chad is a high dreamer, and he ruined his life in an epic
sort of way. Rosalie has gone back to her parents, but Chad remains
nevertheless her husband--"

"What is she like?" Julie interrupted.

"You can see her any morning on the Escolta, wandering eternally among
the shops. She is a great friend of your friend Isabel Armistead--and
of Orcullu. Then there was Jerome-- When he first crossed my path, he
was an Infantry officer up in the Bosque. He had drifted into playing
for high stakes--a thing prevalent over here. He was Quartermaster, and
became involved in his accounts. He would have been court-martialled if
old Vincente Busqua had not put a devil's bargain up to him. Vincente
said that if Jerome would marry Paula, his daughter, to whom Jerome
had paid some attention, he would make good the shortage, and Jerome
could quietly resign. Jerome took Paula to vindicate his Americanism;
he was never criminally guilty, I believe--some subordinate, it is
thought, took advantage of his carelessness.

"But good things happen once in a while--great things. Out of the lees,
a few completely emerge. A lady whom you will meet this afternoon was
one such, and her husband as well. She is coming to see me about a
charitable school she conducts. Two abandoned drunkards, they were--he
and she. Both came from very good families back home--that thought it
expedient to get them out of the way. Colonies are always martyred that
way. Ashby was a 'Remittance Man,' his wife when he ran across her was
a stenographer. She had taken to secret drinking long before, through a
romantic grief of her youth. Through mutual desperation they gravitated
to each other, and after their marriage they continued to go steadily,
awfully down. They became complete indigestibles in the social fabric,
and appeared to be whizzing straight through the damnation of the
East, when something happened, which I never completely understood. A
traveler through the East imbued them with some special enlightenment,
which they refer to as the 'incontrovertible truth.' They have tried
to explain this new insight, as they call it to me, but upon a man
reared and sustained on fixed tenets, it did not take hold. You see,"
he explained, "as I grow old in far strange places of the earth, I am
comforted by having fixed pillars to support my consciousness. Still
I should like to understand what it was that pulled these two, when
they seemed so completely out of reach, back into the safety zone."

Barry and Chad came in from the porch, bringing with them a man
whom they presented to Julie as Doctor Braithwaite, one of their
very close friends, Barry said. Following them came the housekeeper
conducting a tall woman of slender elegance of person, who Julie
was startled to learn was Mrs. Ashby, the derelict the priest had
just been telling her about. To connect the history she had heard
with this distinguished looking gentlewoman was at first glance too
preposterous to attempt. On closer view, however, the lines of the
past appeared on the face, like a visible under-stratum which was
gradually being eroded by the force of a new mode of existence. As
they shook hands, the woman looked very attentively at Julie, as if
there were something about her that she wanted to remember.

Mrs. Ashby engaged Barry in conversation, all having, so it seemed,
a great deal to do with the matter of babies. Barry promised to send
her quantities of condensed milk.

"We all beg from Barry," she explained to Julie. "But that is what
he was made for; you can't impoverish a spirit like his. You see,
there is always an epidemic of death among the babies over here. When
they can't be fed naturally at birth, they are stuffed with rice,
and of course they die. Mr. Ashby and I have a kind of school, if
one might dare to call it that, and the feeding of babies is one of
the things we are trying to teach."

A boy came in with a tray and passed cake and tea and glasses of a
light cordial.

"Do you realize," said Chad Messenger, speaking for the first time,
"that the first representative government that has been convened in
the East met in this city to-day and made its bow to the onlooking
Orient?" He held up his glass. "To the Philippine Assembly! May it
realize the fearful portents it holds in its hands."

Barry's brows knit with anxiety. "It is so taken up with its star part
on the Asian stage that it is forgetting distressing little facts like
the city's drainage system. A city with bad water and worse drainage
trying to lead the East!" He smiled dourly. "What is all our cleaning
and scouring to accomplish if we can not get it out of the Oriental
consciousness that their vile plagues are the will of God--Isabel's
Green God of fate!" He drew a long breath. "But we will triumph, if
only we're allowed the time--if only we're not halted in the thick
of the dust."

"I insist," Father Hull put in, "that the introduction of baseball into
the Islands has been Barry's greatest stroke. Though he come to wear
the crown of Asia, it shall not compare to the glory of revolutionizing
the native with clean universal sport. A new national passion that
is neither bloody nor bestial, and in which all the tribes can unite."

"It's the schools that are getting them," Barry declared. "Why, the
children do compound fractions for you before your face, sing the
grandest songs about liberty, and feed you ice-cream that they made
themselves in a freezer in the backyard. In the Straits Settlement,
when I looked for schools, they showed me usually an empty hut with a
dirt floor, in which there was no sign of pupils or teachers. That's
the lot of the tribute-paying East. Do you wonder these people think
a wonder has appeared in Asia?"

"It appears to me," Mrs. Ashby said thoughtfully, "that there is just
one thing that you have not sufficiently taken into account in your
plans for the Millennium, Barry--and that is human nature. Only when
the individual, each individual comes into a complete realization
of his highest estate, can the ultimate peace and happiness of the
world be secured. So few of us are conscious of our own mysterious
possibilities." Her glance dwelt upon Julie. "For example," she said,
"can Miss Dreschell interpret for us the unusual intimation in her own
face? There is something there of which she may be quite unconscious,
yet it is very significant."

Barry regarded Julie thoughtfully. "I noticed it--a year ago," he
said gravely, "but I find it indefinable. It seems to be something
that one merely feels."

Mrs. Ashby asked Julie if others had remarked this quality, and
Julie reluctantly admitted that others had. Isabel, for example,
who had called it spring magic, and the angel in the pillar of fire,
and other utterly unintelligible bits of Eastern imagery. Nobody had
ever said though, she reflected ruefully, that it would in any way
make her great.

"To me it appears," Mrs. Ashby said, "to be the reflection--or the
promise of great power."

Julie glancing up found Barry's eyes blazing upon her. His face wore
the look it had worn that night on the roof when he had told her about
finding his city. For a moment there seemed to be nobody but the two
of them in the room, which had suddenly taken on magic dimensions
and become the medium of a whole new existence.

The voices around her brought her back to her surroundings. She
became aware of Chad's observation fastened deeply upon her. When
his acute examination lifted, she overheard him say in an undertone
to Mrs. Ashby: "This quality you see in the young lady's face,
isn't it merely the transient magic of youth and sex? Aren't we,
particularly men, inclined to be dazzled by the mysteries we read
into a woman's form or face? She herself says she has failed in all
her enterprises. What is that a promise of?"

"It is neither youth nor sex, but something that is as far removed
from them as the stars," Mrs. Ashby replied.

Father Hull asked Barry and the other man to go across with him to
the church, to make an estimate on some repairs.

"Which means," Mrs. Ashby said smilingly to Julie, as the men went
away together, "that Barry will provide the lumber at no cost at all."

As she sat there watching Julie with her kindly keen eyes, she seemed
to throw a veil of friendship around the girl, which her senses
gratefully accepted. It seemed to Julie, whose head was aching and
who had commenced to feel depressed and dispirited, that she had
known Mrs. Ashby a long time and that they understood each other.

Mrs. Ashby asked her how old she was, and when Julie replied, she
said: "You are very young! I wonder if there is after all anything
quite so tragic as youth. It spends its golden years floundering
about trying to find land--such a lot of floundering it sometimes
does to no purpose. It perceives nothing clearly, but waits for
the universe to clear--like a mist. It searches in vain for the
coherence of existence that it was taught to believe in, and it comes
darkly to feel that everything on earth--and in the sky is a cruel
chance. It feels that it can't go on unless it can find the connection
throughout everything--and at last its poor sad little soul comes to
the conclusion that this mad chaos is not worth while.

"Governor Shell told me that he had spent thirty unproductive years
of youth groping for the light. And as for me, I had come to the end
of the cosmos, and was about to drop off. Why, when there was no clear
and perfect aim in life should I waste more time in fruitless seeking,
I argued. I became so sure that life was a collocation of meaningless
realities that I felt I might as well get myself out of it as fast
as I could.

"I didn't dream that a tireless Scheme would ceaselessly work me over
until the reluctant atoms in me would begin to work too to turn the
Wheel. Mine was a black existence, that only the worst wretches come
to know; but I don't regret an hour of it. Nor must you despair over
any experience that comes to you, for after this manner, my child,
do we work our way into the light.

"I was a slacker, an idle wastrel in creation where the Master-mind
and all His minute men all over all the worlds were battling toward
the goal. I was long in realizing it. Keep running, my friend, in
the footsteps of a striving God. That's what makes these men here so
strong. They are battling with chaos to bring law and harmony into
a part of the world. Consciously they don't know what great agents
they are, any more than the chrysalis understands why it breaks from
its shell. It's all a mighty subconscious unfoldment of life. This
business of the East has got to be straightened out on the earth."

Julie leaned forward, forgetful of her pain. "When you and Barry talk,
I step back into the old enchantment of mood. I'm afraid I am not
struggling any more. You see, I found that you can expend yourself
fruitlessly." Her voice shook. "My mind is chaotic--just like your
picture; and dark too, at times. Ever since I left the South my
convictions have been oozing out, like sands out of an hour-glass. I
meet life from moment to moment, and not in the least understanding
why it falls as it does. We are all just a lot of ships lurching
this way and that, at the wanton mercy of the ocean; and most of us,
I think, disastrously collide. The Pilot, whoever and whatever he may
be is always unchallengeable. Ah, when your most inspired efforts
have failed, when your life seems to toss beyond your control, do
you think you will find coherence in anything?"

Mrs. Ashby's clear eyes penetrated through her. "There is coherence
in the solar system, and in all the system beyond; comets, after a
thousand years reappear upon a calculated day. There is everywhere
coherence, my child, because there is everywhere law."

"But what good does this law and order do me if I can't find it? Down
here on this tiresome planet a being called Julie is doomed to struggle
and battle and hope, and gets nowhere at all. Oh, if only one could
get up from the Game, and turn one's self around for luck!"

"Since it is ordained that everything must get somewhere, you too
must arrive," said Mrs. Ashby. "Ah," she added gently, "if I could
give you the compass that would show you the direction!"

The men were returning. "Come and see me," she adjured. "Remember
that I shall always be glad to give you any assistance I can."

The priest looked white and weary as his guests took their leave. As
Chad went away in his calesa, Julie noticed that he cast a thoughtful
backward glance at her and Barry.

Barry drove through parts of the city she had never seen before,
and which she found not so pleasing as the others. "These are the
places we haven't been able to touch," he said. "Look at this." He
gestured up a narrow street into which they had suddenly veered,
and the aspect of which caused Julie to recoil.

"This alley is very nearly the worst abomination on
earth! Chinatown! We're trying to uproot it, but the denizens only
make more mischief when they disperse. I have no government job, or
I would have been on their necks long ago. I've never wanted to take
an official position. The Governor sends me here and there over the
islands on errands; but I want to be free--in case I'm needed across
the water. Then too, I need money all the time, for a million things;
and I have to be free to make it."

Julie's eyes gazed startled at the street they were following. "Is
China like this?" she demanded in horror.

"This isn't like China or Europe. It's an abortive thing of both. Men
become very vile when they take their vices underground," Barry
declared, with the resigned manner of a god before all the evil in
the world.

It was narrow, it was dirty, it was subterraneously vile, like pus
under the surface. White men and yellow men, men of all races went
here to hide their manhood in interims of bestiality.

"Animals sleep cleanly in holes," Barry remarked; "but these twists of
the thing called life bury themselves in the earth for their deeper
degradation. White women have been buried down there--live corpses;
and have come forth bleached lepers to the light. Such holes of
pestilential rats have, however, been closed up, so far as we know,
and now all this evil pollutes before the sun."

Julie's breath caught in a little sob before the faces she
saw. Somewhere she had dreamed of that monstrous array of human
masks; a cruel, incomprehensible evil such as one must transcend the
brute kingdom to find. It pressed a shadow down on the mind, like
a hangman's cap. The creatures looked at her with leers of the most
abominable intention. She sat up and stared with a white face up and
down the cursed street. And up and down it, in their yellow heads,
its subterranean minds were speculating upon her.

"What causes such a place?" she gasped. "There must be some accounting
for such a hideous blot."

"Opium, mostly; together with the incomprehensible in man. It's the
East at its vilest pitch, a hellish sub-consciousness in which murder
is the cleanest conception. White men end in such places--drug-takers
and drunkards, in violence usually. Chinese pirates form the nucleus
of these lees of the coast. I could tell you true tales of them that
would out-do Poe. When I first came to the East, it used to grip
at my consciousness like a black hand. I felt in those days that my
life was in peril all the time. It used to worry me--till the Moros
got me and led me with three other ragged beggars along the tops of
more sun-baked craters than there are in the moon, telling us every
morning as the sun rose that it was the last one we'd see. At first
my soul just clawed itself to pieces, but at last I walked right over
some unseen peak, and left the fear of death behind for good. That
was somehow the biggest victory I've ever won.

"We're out of the nightmare now," he said, as they turned in a new
direction. "Abandon hope, all ye who enter there. The Ashbys will
never cease to be a miracle to me. They wormed their way out of this
sort of thing. They used to come here to buy the cheapest whiskey,
just as others come for the dope; and Ashby, I imagine, knows the
ground floor of that hell!"

Julie pressed her nails into her hands.

"Is there any place you want to go?" Barry asked.

"Yes," she said, with a sudden feverish alertness. "Go by the markets
of this district. Did it ever occur to you that they are shaped like
pavilions--that they seem to represent one great pavilion--tented Asia,
with throngs always moving through?

"Do you know that though I try with my whole will, I can not go into
one of them? I pass them--and something always accuses me. Ah! Don't
go any nearer!" she breathed, as they approached a large market. "The
beggars in their rags always come sweeping out. How festering
with pestilence these throngs seem to be--gangrenous, leprous,
polluted. Even the heads of little children run with sores--everywhere
sores! A terrible Pavilion of mangy and vitiated humanity, shaking
with unnameable curses, and with eyes and noses eaten away. They fill
me with a sinking terror, those brown masks! They smile at me--and
stare at my clean whiteness like worms at a star. Oh! Why has the
East been forgotten, in her blindness and her monstrous sores? Think
of the wars of man against man--the great futile blood-lettings--and
what their cost might have done to banish this hobgoblinism from a
part of humanity! Nobody cares! I can't bear it! How can God move so
slowly? Can you see the East squatting in the dust, waiting blindly
through the ages for the Christ that shall come and stanch its
running sores?

"You must excuse me," she said agitatedly, "but I seem always to be
passing that Pavilion and, for all the horror of my pity, never able
to go in and touch their sores. Does it seem to you that we are like
cruelly idle and indifferent gods just looking on? Not you, but me. I
can't get down to their incomprehensible and unapproachable world. I
want to shove them all away out of my sight, yet all the while I'm
cursing that some one doesn't come along and save them. Look!" she
shuddered.

A leper stood in the pavilion-shaped market place, leaning like
some fearful decoration against one of its posts. Large pieces of
his flesh had been eaten away. Something in his appearance suggested
that he was yet young. A human Prometheus, plucked by the vultures
of a hideous fate. His eyes lifted to them in silent unbearable
entreaty. He stretched out his hand less, it seemed, for entreating
money than for asking the mercy of God. Barry tossed him a coin which
was instantly swept up by the supplicatory crowd.

Julie closed her eyes convulsively. "I'll always be seeing him in
the Pavilion beckoning to me--but I can't go--I just can't!"

She opened her eyes and met Barry's gaze in awed silence. It was as
if some unescapable burden lurked in there for their shoulders to take.

"We're in it," he said, "for good."

"I feel like a sleep-walker driven to the edge of a chasm."

"Don't be miserable," he said very gently. "We all live in night
mostly, helpless on our little hills, watching the eternal worlds
move by and wishing we could move our world. Look at this side of this
globe! In ten thousand years while the earth has sloughed its crust,
and deserts and gardens have changed places on it, man has undergone
little change. It's the same morass of human souls. Does it take ten
thousand years for the human glacier to move an inch?" He flicked
the reins restlessly, "Are we only picking at a cell with a pin?"

"And of all Asia's static human curse, China is the worst,"
Julie exclaimed, "slugs cumbering up the earth, repudiating every
metempsychosis."

"Ah! Personality is infinite in its range. I think you will find the
Chinaman adds a little to the compass of the human soul. Do you dream
that a people who chant their utterance have no imagination, or that,
because they have bowed so long to fantastic tyrannies, they have no
soul? I tell you that they are eating their chains through with their
teeth. I'd give my life and my soul if Asia would set up a republic
in the face of those worm-eaten kingdoms of Europe with their caste
gradations and degradations of men, and their empirical divisions
of the land of the earth. And there is a great hope upspringing,
I believe--I know!"

A pretty olive-faced woman leaned out of a passing vehicle and looked
at them. Barry raised his hat.

"Chad's wife, Rosalie," he explained.

"That was a big mistake, wasn't it?" Julie said.

Barry looked grave. "Poor Chad, in one of his most exalted moments of
national chivalry, thought he was making a cementing marriage with the
East. But, as it has turned out, it seems that there is nothing at all
that he can understand about Rosalie--with her display of adornments
to the world; her laxities at home, and her eternal super-abundance
of rice powder. He took his wife, as so many do in the East, under
a veil; and now she has grown intolerable to his Western man's soul."

They had come out onto the Luneta, where music was stirring through
the soft dusk. Throngs of smart carriages and vehicles of every sort
were moving in slow rhythm up and down. People were exchanging visits
in the beautiful twilight. They began to stop Barry to talk to him.

Ellis Wilbur, nodding to Julie from under a vivid red plume, had
her carriage brought up alongside of Barry's trap. A member of the
Assembly came along, and Barry got out and fell into deep discussion
with him on the walk.

"I'm triste to-night!" Ellis said. "The tragedy of the East has begun
to fasten on me. It's time to go! Do you know, as I watch the shadows
fall like slow tears over those old walls, I think what a city to
be unhappy in! A city of the East, the weight of ancient evil in
its stones. The dusk drops over it like a blackness of the heart,
an infinite hopelessness. The petals of every gay flower shrivel,
and the grass grows dim. All the forces of the night to contend
against. Ah, I am sorry for all of you who are to stay in it!"

She looked closely at Julie. "Never love in the East. One could be
sure of going completely mad in its terrible beautiful passions, in
its heavy night with the thick scents in them and the beat of black
hearts pulsing through them.

"Do you know, you and I are like Janus, at the crossroad, facing two
ways; not up to going forward, not willing to go back. And there
we stand like weather-vanes, and point no man a thoroughfare. I
confess that I am too selfish and too impatient to make an oblation of
myself. Therefore, I am definitely, but not without a certain shame,
you understand, about to turn back. We are going. Father's been given
another job--'in the courts of kings.' I was too weak to resist the
prospect"--she gave a short laugh--"of marrying some one princely
and distinguished on the other side of the world. And I promise you,
I shall not return here--like so many others. You've seen them in their
dramatic farewells, leaving the East forever--its corrugating problems,
its intolerable hardships. And then, after they're forgotten over
here, they turn up on a ship, and embrace everybody with the tears
streaming down their cheeks. It was no good, they tell you. They
had to come back, and get in the game. They still don't give a rip
about this part of the world, its ineffectualness and heat and hell;
but what they are supremely excited about is the Job! There wasn't
anything to compare with it back home. They wanted to help finish
it off before the curtain was drawn, and to help show the world how
successfully Asia was being vitalized."

Ellis turned her attention to Barry, and regarded him attentively
for some time. "Father is worried about Barry. He thinks he is trying
to break his ties here. It would be like him, of course, to move on
if he found something bigger; but he is needed here. He has a really
strong influence on the people. He seems to be the only white man they
really like. But he is always trailing off on strange errands all
over the Eastern seas, and the queerest people are always appearing
to visit him. Strange conferences are held in that house of his,
I'll wager. I tell him," Ellis laughed, "that he must be trying to
make himself Emperor of Asia."

She subsided into thought, out of which her voice broke quietly at
last. "Does Barry McChord stir your imagination as he does mine? It's
only too sure that there is nobody like him among the so-called
princes of men; but he has his way marked out for him--he must beat
his way alone through this black hinterland. Every bit of him is
needed for the work. They are all agreed, you see, that he will no
more be permitted personal passions than the Pope of Rome."

The sunset threw a golden light into the dusky cavalcade circling
about them, making it glow like a wondrous human allegory. Suddenly
solemn strains of music threw a hush over this vivid atmosphere.

Barry's head, Julie noticed, was uplifted to the down-coming
flag--which slowly descended, the symbol of infinite things.



CHAPTER XVII


"Who is your guest?" Julie demanded, as the carriage Barry had sent
after her drew up at the door of the Archibispo Street house, where
he stood waiting for her.

"It wasn't he I had in mind so much as myself," he said gravely,
assisting her out of the vehicle.

"Strictly speaking," he added, "the person I sent for you to meet is
a king."

"A king!" cried Julie with delight. "Where did you get him?"

"He's the white rajah of an island realm to the south--an Englishman,
and a fine chap. He's come to return a visit I paid him, and to find
out what we Americans are up to. Ellis snatched him away as soon as she
found out that he was a nobleman in England as well as a king in the
East Indies. That gave me the chance I wanted to have a talk with you."

Delphine, his corsair hair on end, came to greet Julie, at the top
of the stairs, and to announce that luncheon was served.

"There's to be just you and I," Barry said, "and the wife of a Spanish
lawyer friend of mine, who lives across the way and who blessedly
doesn't understand a word of English. Later Rajah Payne, and some
people who are dropping in to meet him, will come in for tea."

They seated themselves at a small table near windows filled with waving
ferns. When Señora Taliaferro, who was enamored of American cooking,
had become engrossed with the dishes served her, Barry leaned across
to Julie and said abruptly:

"Sun Yat Sen has gone! He is about to start on a long march across
China--on foot through Manchuria and Mongolia, preaching the gospel
of freedom--and revolt. He begged me to go with him."

"You'd get killed!"

"Not on a job like that. It's got to come to pass. It's written in
the stars. You don't think I'd trail carelessly off the earth and
leave my job undone? Until a long time from now--" he smiled--"until
I've done everything I want to do, I refuse to die.

"You see, I'm torn two ways. Sometime I shall join Sun Yat Sen. He
needs me. But I have fires to tend here. The flame over there
was lit from here. I'd go in a minute if I could only feel we'd
turned the trick here; but the newspapers from home are full of dire
forebodings. An enterprise like this must be made to sink as a fact
into the consciousness of the East.

"But time is passing--by the water clock of Canton that has kept time
for a thousand years!" he murmured to himself.

"Why," he demanded suddenly, "do I want to share all my secrets with
you? Is it because of the light of you, that shines like a lantern
in the dark of the world?"

Julie dropped her eyes. "China must be a dark world," she hazarded
confusedly.

"I used to think so! I was only a lad. The people weren't people
then. They were flies, hordes, multiple numbers in the universe! And
the faiths of their souls! Monstrous gods, with blood drooling out of
their man-eating jaws! Blood seemed a commonplace, like milk. Will
I ever be able to forget that large crude yard of the execution
grounds--running with blood that stifled the nostrils and caused me to
reel with illness--human blood, rivers of it, turning black? Terrible
was the human capitulation of that field! That submissively surrendered
stream showed the Chinaman in a new light; for not much of the blood
of the Execution Grounds was criminal. That kind could get away with
bribes. It was ferociously demanded blood of sacrifice--the blood
of gophers offered to that figment in Pekin. Why should these wet,
reasonless, red spots continue on the earth? You see that something
must happen over there soon.

"A flat, bare, yellow, ancient land!" he mused. "The saddest land I
have ever seen, with little vegetation to cover its old bones--just
the stark drear plains. Isn't nature brutal, to turn out millions
and millions of creatures to subsist on dead mountains and sand. And,
lifting like excrescences out of that land, the mud huts of the living
mingle with the mud tombs of the dead. Gophers in mud banks, living
and dead. Nowhere else does one ache so for man. And the intolerable
sensations one experiences at first over this monstrous dirt-like
cheapness of human life!"

"All our lives," Julie reflected, "we have looked upon ourselves as
a little less than God; but over here we are just rats crawling in
and out of the universe!" Her face contracted in a painful spasm.

"Don't put them too far down in the abyss of your pity, though
they were in the beginning a hideous phantom across the vision of
my ideals. Pekin, of course, was different. It was all that I had
dreamed of ancient and opulent Cathy: an oriental fantasy with its
great Chaldean towers, its temples and pagodas sparkling with sapphire
lights; with its marble courts, its flashing scarlet palaces; its
grottos on lotus lakes, its gay pailows with flapping banners, and its
millions of rainbow-hued boxes that are the dwellings of men. But,
over beyond the city, cut into the clay of the cliffs--the holes of
the gophers still!"

Barry's eyes had become abstracted under his memories.

"And the Forbidden City! No more to be penetrated than heaven
itself! From Coal Hill one gazed across at that shimmering Hearsay
among men, that Holy of Holies protected by walls as thick as
Babylon's. Over there amid legendary splendor, and unparalleled power
on earth, in high and inviolate courts to which no gopher ever crawled,
is harbored a will-o'-the-wisp--a myth, a spell, that governs millions
of gophers' fates.

"But"--he brought his hand heavily down on the table--"the gopher
down under the ground is eating away with his teeth the foundations
of those impenetrable places and you yet shall witness the day when
he will stand up, a man at last, in the forbidden courts of the earth."

"It all sounds a fantasy of mud-caked gophers, hobgoblins and
blood!" Julie said.

"Listen, for sometime you will see all I say come true," he
prophesied. "All over the world to-day as laborers, and down under
the earth in tin mines, Chinamen are slaving and groveling to make
the money to set China free. When the hour comes, that hoarded
treasure will flow forth to turn the tide. The gophers under the
ground are stirring to resurrection. To the day, Julie,"--he lifted
his glass--"when the gophers all over the world shall find the sky!"

Julie stared at him wistfully, and suddenly the tears rushed to
her eyes--tears of awe, envy, and humility. He was in the toils of
great undertakings, sweeping on to sacred achievements, while her
sole contribution was Nahal--Nahal of dismal failure and miscarried
efforts. What was the thing that he had, and that she would never have,
that brought him fulfillment--the thing that his friends wished to
conserve and to keep her out of?

"I like to think," she said at last, hiding her emotion, "that you
will be invulnerable to everything that can happen in the East."

"Why the East?"

"It has a separate, harder and more cruel fate."

"And presents greater gifts and will bring in the end greater
strength! Come!" He rose. "We have sat a long time, and I hear our
monarch arriving below."

"Tell me how to speak to him!"

"We call him Sir John. In his island kingdom they call him Rajah
John. He is the second of his dynasty. The people of the realm very
charmingly invited his father to rule over them. He lives in a stucco
palace of the most monstrous taste. He would prefer to live on his
estate in England, but one must rule a kingdom whether one wants to
or not."

"Is he married?"

"Aha!" He turned round upon her suddenly. "I see that I should not
have brought you here to-day. He is not, and it might take only the
tiniest twist of fate to-day to make you a queen in the East. But
please to remember that maybe some of the rest of us can win kingdoms,
too. I implore of you not to let that prophecy drop out of your mind."

Ellis Wilbur entered the sala with a pleasant faced, deeply browned
young Englishman. Upon being presented to Julie he looked at her
admiringly, which caused Ellis to cry out:

"King John has lived so long in polygamous countries that he has
imbibed their inspirations, I perceive. After assigning me first
chance at his kingdom, he is casting pleasantly encouraging glances
elsewhere!"

Isabel, Chad, Commissioner Caples and several young Englishmen that
Barry had asked to meet his guest strolled in. Commissioner Caples
demonstrated an unpleasantly prophetic mood. The business pulse, he
said, was the sure indication of what was going to transpire; the big
concerns were withdrawing their capital from the islands faster than
ever. People who had invested in the chimera would lose everything,
for Independence was imminent.

At this Julie saw Isabel's eyes blaze with ecstasy.

"Great pity!" Sir John commented. "I'll miss your Experiment to
the North. I was planning things myself--along the same lines. Tell
me,"--he turned to address Isabel--"what will happen to the poor tao,
lumbering after his carabao in the jungle, I say what will become of
him then?"

"He has just about as much brains as his carabao," Isabel
contemptuously flashed. "It isn't necessary to concern oneself with
a carabao's fate."

"Doesn't it strike you, Mrs. Armistead, that these dumb, blinded
creatures under the new impulse here have started out on a quest
for manhood?"

"The dumb and blind cannot lead a country. That will take a great
strength!"

"But do you, Mrs. Armistead, see that strength anywhere about you?"

For an instant Isabel looked to Julie like one who had stepped suddenly
into a dark room. Then the fire of her eyes flashed across the sala.

"Exactly," said Sir John in a whimsical undertone. He had followed
her glance to where it unconsciously alighted. "Why shouldn't there
be two white kings in the East?"

Isabel turned from him sharply.



CHAPTER XVIII


Julie moved quickly, to hide any appearance of having heard what had
so extraordinarily transpired. That flash of words and glances had
disturbed every cell of her mind. She was still quivering when Isabel
spoke at her elbow.

"Julie, I never saw any one who let herself be so eaten up by
things. You are as white as a ghost. Is it," she turned to look more
closely at Julie, "the head again?"

Julie looked back at her, troubled. "Oh, yes," she said, "it aches
all the time."

"And have you done nothing about it?"

The girl looked embarrassed. "The doctors might want to open me up,
to find out what is the matter. Besides, they charge what Father Hull
calls American prices."

"Better keep away from them," Isabel agreed, turning away.

Barry's guests, with their tea-cups in their hands, sauntered through
the rooms, examining his collections. The object of greatest interest
was a bright red chair gleaming like coals of fire, with in-set
golden dragons.

"The throne of the East!" Ellis explained. "Red lacquer, glazed all
over with poison, and as ancient as Solomon. Emperors have sat in
it, and the devil himself; and because of it execution grounds have
run red."

Observing Isabel staring intently at the chair, Commissioner Caples
playfully remarked: "Indeed and you'd look very pretty in it, my
dear--with a tower of jewels on your head and a fringe of pearls
hanging down over your eyes, so that nobody could have an inkling of
what you were about. We'd have another splendid Dowager."

The guests drifted out to the various engagements evening always
brought. Sir John went to his room to read his letters.

Barry beckoned to Julie. "There is something I want to show you!" All
afternoon there had been in his manner the intimation of showing his
things especially to her.

She followed him into a room, where he pointed out a large
framed picture of the Wall of China going over the mountains into
Manchuria. Instantly there sprang before her mind the vision of it
climbing in the evening light the steep foot-hills, up to the dark
tops of the mountains, where its splendid watch towers rose like a
crown against the sky.

"It's a segment of the human mind, in stone!" she breathed.

He pointed to a gate tower set high upon the Wall. "The Gate of the
World looking out upon Asia! It is far beyond there that Sun Yat
Sen is shortly to march afoot, secretly, on his mission--to shake
an empire. I'd give my soul to go! For what other life could offer
a thing like that?"

He turned on a light, and abruptly pulled out some camphor
chests. Opening them up, he tossed out their contents. Julie dropped
down on her knees and watched the rare fabrics flow forth: lustrous
brocades, and cobweb tissues, sparkling with jeweled lights. He
unlocked carved and scented ivory boxes, and chains of amethysts like
drops of wine trembled out in a thin stream; then came sapphires like
blue winking eyes of the night, and a little sack of pearls that took
Julie's breath wholly away.

"Am I in Ali Baba's treasure cave?" she exclaimed.

He smiled. "I have seen Ali Baba's treasure cave, in Ceylon. There
is a certain shop there which has been kept by generations of a
family. Indian princes go to Ali Sherif for their jewels. Lots of
these things I got there for prices unheard of in Europe. When I
passed through last, Ali Sherif was celebrating his son's marriage. I
fell to praising some of the jewels of the native prince, and,
stirred by the mood of the day, Ali invited me to go with him into
the underground vaults of his house. There on the floors of those
cellars were fabulous hills that blazed up under his torch into every
incredible kind of gleaming sun--all garnered and stored away there
by generations of jewel-smiths."

Julie picked up and held admiringly in her hand a dazzling medallion
of white jade with a single hieroglyphic carved upon it.

"That's supposed to be a whale of a charm!" Barry explained, observing
her fascination. "Belonged to the Imperial family. I got it at the same
time I got the chair. Caples always insists that nothing short of a
crime on my part could have brought either of them into my possession;
but fleeing princes will part with anything for a chance at life."

He drew a thin chain from one of the boxes, passed it through the
hole that was pierced in the piece of jade, and slipped it around her
neck. "There you have a charm from the Lama's Temple in Lhassa. And
there isn't a charm in Asia to beat its power. There's scarcely a
Mongolian that won't bow down to it. I'll have a catch fixed for it,
and send it to you."

Julie, seated among these riches, smiled up at him, to find his whole
being concentrated upon her in an intense look that lifted her out
of herself into a new personality so thrillingly comprehensive that
it seemed in touch with a world of vivid inspirations. Bonds seemed
momentarily to be cut behind her; she felt herself slipping on wings
into high areas. All about her, agitating her soul to its depths,
was this great wordless offering.

Chad and Isabel had not left. Chad, who had a poetic passion for
oriental art, had become absorbed in some rare vases which Barry
had recently received from China. Isabel, between moments of fitful
contemplation of the red chair, stirred restlessly about, contriving
in her movements to reconnoiter along the gallery into the adjoining
room. Turning her eyes back warily upon the preoccupied Chad, she
every now and then leaned around the wall between the two doors,
and obtained glimpses of what was taking place between Barry and
Julie. Her dark head, listening acutely, was stealthily thrust forward
and withdrawn like the head of some tropical serpent.

Chad uttered some remark, and she slipped quickly back. He glanced up,
and his gaze became transfixed with amazed repugnance. After all, the
creatures of the East were black-hearted bats, he thought. Rosalie
had been sufficiently disillusioning, but here was Isabel--who had
always stood to his mind as a racial justification--looking like the
root of all evil.

"Come here!" she persuaded.

He put down the vase and followed her, but the stealth in her
movements irritated him; and when she whispered tensely for him to look
through the door toward which she was drawing him, he was inclined
to rebel. But what he saw appeared wholly to chain his attention. He
stared in silence for a moment at the two figures beyond, then veered
back with a suppressed curse.

Isabel was breathing hard. "You know about those chests!" she
exclaimed. "They are a fancy of his. He has been filling them a long
time--for a woman--the woman! We did not want any woman to come,
did we, and overturn his existence?"

He scowled. "What do you mean?"

"I mean his destiny--his work," she cried passionately. "You know
what I mean. Nobody must get in his way!"

"You don't think that Barry--and that cobweb of a girl!" Then he
muttered fiercely. "Barry shan't throw himself away too!"

"And she's wrapped up in another man. She was about to be married to
him down South, but they quarreled."

"Barry's career has no place in it for any woman--least of all for
her." Chad seemed to be arguing with himself, or the universe. "Why
should this moonlit wraith come along and attempt to throw everything
into an eclipse? What would he amount to after she got into his
soul?" He appealed to Isabel: "Isn't there any way to get her out of
his path?"

Isabel's features set into a mask. "She's in the way!" she repeated
vehemently. She glanced at Chad sharply to fathom how deep his
meaning went.

"Resurrect the other man!" he hazarded desperately. "Barry shan't
be caught in this undertow! I've prayed like a Parsee that he would
keep out!"

At that moment Barry and Julie appeared in the doorway. The two gazed
at them, wondering.

"I'm going to drive Miss Dreschell home!" Chad suddenly announced. "She
never takes the trouble to talk to me, so I, am going to seize this
chance."

As they drove together through the twilight, it became clear to Julie
that Chad had set himself to some psychological investigation. She
was aware that in floating into his circle of life, she had aroused
in him some inexplicable distrust.

What he managed to evolve after a bit was that in order that Barry
should meet the peculiar hazards of his career, it was expedient for
him to remain single-hearted. Ellis Wilbur, Julie recalled, amid her
contending emotions, had said exactly the same thing. Was everybody
in the East a self-appointed guardian over Barry's emotions? It gave
her a feeling of being floated persistently away from his existence.

No, Barry must not be carried under by the current of stressful
emotions, as Chad painfully intimated he himself had been. He contrived
to make clear that what he chiefly resented in Julie was a certain
disturbingly inefficacious flame of being, which he took occasion to
compare to a light-house open to the winds of the seas.

He did not deny, now that she was under observation, the starry quality
of her substance, but he regarded it as nothing more than an accident
of soul. Nothing ever would come from it, and Barry, he pointed out,
would be led astray by it, would follow in its futile trail, a blind
lopped-off scrap of the sun.

"After a while," he continued, with the same extraordinary frankness,
"after you've dipped a finger in the pie, you will go right back to
the doing of endlessly inconsequential things and Barry, perhaps you
know, is committed to going on." Julie understood that he referred
to Barry's secret activities outside the islands.

She regarded him gloomily. "I think you are perfectly right in assuming
that nothing I shall ever do will bear fruit. Once I tried to pull
the fire down out of the skies to light a few little clods of earth,
but the creatures only thought it was to burn them up."

"I think you will find that you pulled down that fire to make a halo
for your own head. For all your hallowed way, you came into the East
hunting tremendous things for yourself."

Julie colored angrily. "I've seen for a long time that you don't like
me, but I find no justification for an insult!"

Chad's tone changed. "I am not trying to do that. It isn't that I
dislike you--but that I wish you hadn't happened." A tense earnestness
broke out on his harassed face. "How can I make you understand about
Barry! What is it that fills the atmosphere here? What do you feel
in the air?"

"Belief--burning belief in the work," Julie dejectedly replied.

"Yes, but mixed up with it, as there is mixed up in every high impulse
in man, you find the darker strain. Read the mood of this place,
and in it you will find expectation--human expectation, everywhere
high. Look at Isabel, for its greatest extravagance!"

"Yes," Julie agreed, "she looks and talks as if she lived in the
greatest expectation of an extraordinary climax for herself."

"And that's what in differing degrees they all expect. The high, clear
strain is working for the cause, and working hard, but the dark strain
is using this place as a training ground for personal power. Take
those people you met the other night at Isabel's: Holborne--he's a
prime fighter, but do you think he'll not desert the field when some
other background offers to set Holborne off to better advantage? And
Leah Chamberlain--what but a play-ground of the passions is this to
her? And to Ellis Wilbur, what but a rough struggle that she won't
engage in, for fear of getting hurt? I could name you a lot of
others to illustrate how this priceless and incorporeal endeavor,
this Republic of the Sun--which is a movement to take hold of the
heart of the East, and not a South African or Klondike gold-fields
rush serves solely for the aggrandizement of human personalities."

He paused, and looked at her keenly. "So when you see one simple,
splendid exception, you've just got to hang on to it by your
teeth! Outside of Father Hull, there is just one person in this whole
Archipelago who has sought nothing, absolutely nothing for himself. He
has never had a ruling prince's job, though the Government has often
to go and get him when it's in a pinch. Though he's the best known man
in the Islands, he's never dreamed of making himself into a political
power-- He's just the 'Mayor of Manila'--a wholly make-believe title,
since there's no such thing; but I know of no personality that by
scattering itself freely has come into such an accruement of power.

"That's what sets him apart. That's what through all contingencies
will cause him to survive--because neither fate nor God can get along
without an agency like that."

To hide her emotion Julie looked out into the dusk. Again Nahal,
with all its eternal futility, arose like a bar to the universe. In
vain she tried to push the vision off her horizon: there, she knew,
it would stand always as the total of her spirit's achievement.

Chad went on, but with less assurance now. "I have heard that there
is--that there might be another factor in this thing. Perhaps it
could happily be made the determining one. I refer to--the other
man. Couldn't he be hurried along? This is absolutely his moment. I
offer you my assistance in every way, to make it clear to him that
this is the time to step in."

Julie threw him a sharply amazed glance. "Why should Isabel have
repeated that? How can you talk about things you don't understand? I
needn't answer you, of course, but I will. The man you speak of
is never coming back. Nobody but Isabel would have dreamed of such
a thing."

"Then why sit in this dark thrall and wait for him?"

Julie drew away in fresh surprise. "Could it occur to you that this
probing might become painful?" She put her hands to her head. "But it's
because I don't blame you greatly that I reply at all." She lifted her
head, and looked at him with a great earnestness. "You found out that
I was--waiting; but you didn't know for what. I'll tell you now,"
she almost sobbed. "I wanted to be released from the dark, brutal
spell of failure--I wanted to recapture a last territory of my soul."

After he had left Julie at her gate, Chad drove to Isabel's
house. Isabel was one of Chad's best friends. Beautiful and seductive
as an houri, she was surrounded in both his mind and Barry's with
the romance and tragedy of an unappeased Kundry soul. Her fallen
ambitions among her father's race touched them. They were haunted
by the cruel fact that the East alone offered a destiny; and though
she was their antagonist, they courted and admired her. Her wild
aspirations they had credited to her natural mental opulence, and
her environment. Recent events, however, were tending to shake some
of their comfortable convictions.

The houses of the East are open, and there are no bells. Dicky-Dicky,
the dwarf, whose duty it was to stand on guard at the stair case, was
nowhere about when Chad arrived. He climbed the stairs and, completely
at home, sat down on the railing of the gallery, and looked at the
river, the view of which from this point was always enchanting.

A light burned in the sala, but the rest of the house appeared to be
in darkness. Isabel, no doubt, had not reached home. He would wait
for her.

Voices from somewhere back of him floated indistinctly at first across
his thoughts. Then, as the sounds became clearer, and arresting in
their significance, his attention focused. In his long sojourn in the
islands he had picked up the use of the Tagalog dialect. He heard an
exclamation, and recognized the voice as Isabel's.

"And so this pilgrimage of spells and charms, and working upon lives,
goes on, Witch of Arayat!"

Chad pricked up his ears instantly. The Witch of Arayat had been
a fantastic legend when he at first came to the islands. From the
obscurity of the years, Isabel had evidently raised to life her
spell-casting mother.

"The march is long," a fainter voice replied. "First I sought the
Covenant in the Golden Ark on the Sacred Mountain. Now I seek it all
over the earth. Why have you sent for me?"

"When one greatly needs, one sends for one's mother."

"I gave you all when I left."

"I sent for you to work a spell for me! I want Paradise, my Mother. But
my hands can not reach it. So I have sent for you to help me."

Isabel was capable of reverting to the superstition of her blood! To
win her aspirations, whatever they might be, she had resurrected the
Charm-Woman. They were all like that. Rosalie had told him that in
order to win his love she had steadily taken magic potions.

The voices died down for a moment. Chad sat wondering. He fancied he
saw a tremor in the curtains that screened Isabel's apartment. Two
words of the droning syllables back flared audible again.

"A medicine!"

Chad stirred uneasily. He did not wish to hear about any more
potions. Just then from the spot where he had seen the curtains
tremble, Dicky-Dicky the dwarf emerged hurriedly and passed without
seeing him.

"He's been listening!" Chad concluded. Eavesdropping was a common
oriental pastime; but the appearance of the dwarf indicated that
he had understood something in that interview beyond that Chad had
not. What mischief were Isabel and her mother up to? Some new political
scheming, perhaps.

Suddenly Isabel, her face like a spot of darkness against the lighted
room, appeared. Chad rose startled, as if some black whirlwind were
approaching him. Here was the passion of the Levant that he always
veiled--that dreadful ravening primeval force that assailed and
overthrew his ideals. Of course, innately, he had always expected
Isabel to be like this. He knew instinctively that she was a volcano
around which they had sat in false peace.

Something had shaken terribly Isabel's exotic universe. Some secret
word had come perhaps of the bursting of the bubble--hers and
Orcullu's. Whatever this emotion was, it broke from deeper sources
than he could divine. It took him several moments to open his mouth
in the face of it.

"I stopped to tell you that I have talked with the girl, and I fear
that there is no use trying to get that other man back."

He paused, finding it difficult to refer to the sensibilities of his
own race. They appeared to lift like inconsequential bubbles before
this inconceivable mood.

But that fierceness continued to make demand upon him. "It's too bad,"
he added. "The affair turns out to be merely a tryst with her own
soul. But--" He tried to get Barry's name out, and failed. What he
wanted to do was to reassure their mutual fears concerning Barry,
and to declare confidently that Barry would keep clear of the
complication. Instead, he found himself edging toward the stairs
while that gathering dreadfulness followed him.

He descended without looking behind him, but he could see through
the back of his head Isabel's image, while ahead of him Rosalie's
rice-powdered face seemed to wave across his path; and in that moment
he thanked God that he had never begotten children of the East.



CHAPTER XIX


In her school in the Tondo, Julie was required to supervise as well
as to teach. Her two native assistants, Mariana and Clarino, however,
were the two most sacerdotally devout worshipers before the Ark of
Education that she had ever seen.

Her own class consisted of boys and girls between the ages of fourteen
and sixteen--maturity for Malays. Reports of cholera were now steadily
coming from the provinces, and Julie made it her chief concern to
impress upon her pupils the precautions they should take to guard
themselves against it. She read aloud the ominous accounts of what
was transpiring in the provincial districts, and strove to move them
to active interest. Against the River--the lurking monster in their
lives--she warned them most passionately, and exhorted them to the
point of prayer against all manner of uncooked food.

The answer of the ages came back to her through the medium of these
young creatures. The River had been there always--since before
Abraham. It was God's own river, and it could not therefore do
harm. And the things of the soil--they grew at His will; would they
then poison the sons of men? Thereupon followed the fiat, old as time,
the fiat of the God of the Pavilion: "If we are to die, we will die!"

Julie's headaches had become a serious menace. In fact, in conjunction
with the devitalizing climate, they were, she saw with trepidation,
fast sucking out her strength. She was now spending five straight
hours in the school-room, beginning at eight in the morning; then,
after a short interim of rest, she went to Señor Sansillo's for the
afternoon. In order to defray her expenses and to meet her obligations,
she must inexorably keep going all the time. She could not afford to
be ill: she had not one cent to be ill with, or any one to turn to
in this great awful East. Barry, she felt, was the only creature she
could lean upon; but she had a pronounced aversion to appealing to him
or to any one else. Very vivid in her memory was the recollection of
a time when, in direst trouble, she had put out her hands and they
had closed on empty space. That experience had engendered in her a
bitter resolve to stand or fall on her own resources. Never again,
she felt, would she completely trust any one. Secretly and somberly
she believed in her heart that men would break any covenant, if they
could do so without incurring the judgment of the world.

For some time Julie had noticed standing either in the road or in the
stall of Pietro Poro opposite her window, an old woman, who always
stared into the distance as if she were stone--with that fashion of
patience these people had when they were waiting for something to
come to pass. She was withered and darkened, as if she had traveled
through endless hot winds. She always carried in front of her a flat
basket like a tray, which was supported by a cord bound round her head.

When Julie asked the native teachers what the old woman was waiting
for, Mariana, the more imaginative one, replied that she was not
waiting for any one, that she was "watching the world go by." Mariana
thought she was a caster of spells; but male common sense asserted
itself in Clarino, who explained that she was a herb-woman. Julie had
not before seen a vendor of this type, but she remembered odd little
bundles of dried leaves that had been sold as medicine in the fairs
of Nahal--for it was only at such celebrations that Guindulman had
displayed an open market. She recalled how Gregorio used to bring
these mysterious bundles home and munch at them as a remedy for
some impalpable disorganization which he professed to feel in his
gorilla-like frame. When one day she had asked him their utility, his
reply had been a vigorous pass across his vital organs and a gustatory
declaration, "Mucho bueno!" She also knew that most of the ladies of
the garrison had used a highly efficacious soapy bark for shampooing;
it had saved more than one head of hair.

One afternoon when Julie descended the steps, she found the old woman
at the door. She held up a small bundle, and murmured something to
Mariana and Clarino, who were behind Julie. She had said something to
the natives that put her goods in an adventurous light, and they bent
interestedly over her basket. While she flung monosyllables at them,
she looked keenly at Julie.

Something that flashed out of her glances startled Julie; a glimpse
of a myriad of human things leaped out of this herb-vendor's face
as out of a well--darknesses, cruelties, sublimities, and a kind of
burning thirst, as if this old thing were a traveler on the deserts
of the universe hunting for a spring.

Mariana and Clarino passed on, and the old woman, whose eyes were upon
Julie in their distant yet riveted gaze, spoke to her in Spanish. She
asked Julie very soberly if she knew where the Covenant could be found.

Julie was stupendously amazed, but before she could reply, the old
woman went on to say that she had sought the Covenant on the tops of
high mountains and across strange lands. She said that Julie had a
light in her face that would lead to it, and that if she would come
with her they would find it together.

A fantastic little thrill of exaltation shot through the girl. It
was the strangest, the most unaccountable, and the most preposterous
offer she had ever had made her. She smiled as she shook her head
a little pensively--the youth in her a little sad at refusing any
mystic adventure.

The old woman was watching her. Standing in the beating sun, her
brows had contracted spasmodically.

"You are bad in the head?"

Julie nodded. "The sun did it, some time ago."

The herb-woman caught up something which she opened to Julie in the
palm of her hand. "It will take away the headache." She pressed
the modicum upon the girl, in the insistent native way. "Try it,
Señorita. Never has it failed to stop pain."

Julie hesitated.

"Look--this I give to you to try. I give it without payment, knowing
that when you have tested it you will want more."

Julie's hand closed slowly over the gift. The old woman and her basket
dropped away.

On her way home, Julie passed through the Escolta, where Rosalie
Messenger invited her into her carriage. Julie had met Rosalie at
Isabel's; and in the Escolta she met her casually and often, because
Julie frequently took that route home from Señor Sansillo's, and
Rosalie was always flitting restlessly up and down the street like a
tired butterfly. Rosalie usually stopped her carriage to take Julie in,
then up and down, the narrow ancient thoroughfare they would move, in
the human current of new and old races, before Rosalie drove her home.

To-day Julie was more grateful than ever when Rosalie picked her up,
for the heat was fearfully oppressive. Julie dropped back in the seat,
and pressed her hands to her aching head, while Rosalie, a tropical
person who appeared to have passed through a magic immunity at birth,
craned her small head at the passers-by.

On a corner they caught a glimpse of Barry, his tall form lifted
energetically above the heated procession, the grasp of the colony in
his face. He was visualizing, Julie thought, far-off peoples marching
under many banners beneath the sun. As they passed him, a bitter look
flashed across Rosalie's oriental face.

Noticing Julie's attitude of discomfort, Rosalie withdrew her attention
from the street. "The headache still? You suffer from it always!"

Julie nodded. "It's getting so now it seldom stops. That horrible
sunstroke blistered my brain. Listen, Rosalie"--she sat up--"an old
woman has been coming to my school selling herbs. She has a medicine
that she says will stop my headaches. Do you think there is anything
in such remedies? I am getting desperate; for, you see, I'm not like
you who can drive around in a carriage all your life."

"What was the old woman like?" Rosalie asked.

"Oh, in the distance she's just any old woman, but up close not like
anybody at all. She seemed very anxious to have me try the medicine--in
fact, she gave me some of it to try. Do you believe in such things?"

The mestiza shifted in her seat, but did not at once reply. At last,
looking abstractedly at the horses' glistening backs, she said,
"There are wise old women--who effect cures."

"She says odd things." Julie hesitated. "She talked about a
Covenant--and a high mountain."

"Ah!" Rosalie breathed. Then she turned about abruptly. "And will
you try the medicine?"

"Have you ever known people to take such remedies?"

Rosalie nodded with conviction. "If you understood our people, you
would know that nearly all buy, and believe in them. I have known
these herb preparations to help greatly. Why shouldn't they? Most of
the specifics of the Pharmacopoeia grow wild here."

"It sounds interesting," Julie reflected. "I'll try her cure,
anyway. Then if I don't get better, I'll go to a doctor--and have
more debts to pay!"

A few days later, she stopped Rosalie's passing carriage and said to
her: "I have been taking some of the old woman's remedy. It really
helps me. One can learn a lot from the East."

Delphine appeared occasionally at the school, to see his Maestra;
always diplomatically choosing school hours for his visits. He
reported that he was getting on very well, that the Señor Barry had
bought him beautiful new clothes, and that Dicky-Dicky was his sworn
friend and guardian. He was teaching the dwarf English--out of the
very books which his Maestra had used with him. Dicky-Dicky learned
thirstily, because he believed that some day this knowledge would
help him out. They talked much, Delphine said, of Nahal, and the
dwarf always seemed troubled about the Maestra's treatment there,
and took great satisfaction in the thought that his sister had upheld
her in her trials.

The carelessly generous remuneration of her pupil, Señor Sansillo,
aroused in Julie the vision of paying off the debt with which she
had come saddled into the New World, and which had been the source
of so many of her misfortunes.

Señor Sansillo lived in one of the most pretentious mansions of the
Walled City. He was a lawyer of large interests; in fact, out of
sheer adventurousness, he was interested financially in almost every
large commercial enterprise in the islands. A large suite of rooms
in the entresuelo, or downstairs portion of his residence, served
as his offices. These were palatially furnished with the elaborate
acquisitions of many pilgrimages throughout the East.

He was of a splendid family in Spain, whose impoverishment had
driven him out to seek his fortune in the colonies. At some time or
other in his history, he had been attached to the court of a Spanish
princess of the royal family, and he had a manner in keeping with that
distinction. It was the fact of his having been forced to disclose the
existence of his mestiza wife that had kept him back, like so many
others, in the arms of the tolerant East. Señora Sansillo had been
one of the richest "hijas del pais," and it was upon the foundation
of her wealth that his great insular fortune had been reared.

In appearance he was the most carefully correct man Julie had ever
seen, his endless varieties of apparel all being obtained from a famous
tailor in Paris. He was tall, as sharply slender as the blade of a
knife; of almost ferocious activity, with a face on which emotions
seethed as in a hot lake. Among the crude, blunt, sweating figures
of the Colony, the Señor's personal exquisiteness stood strangely
forth. Why, in such unamenable surroundings, he should still care to
preserve this high fineness of existence, Julie often wondered. He
would step forth from his great carriage, with its jingling silver
harnessing, upon the pavement of the crowded, heterogeneous Luneta
precisely as he would have emerged upon his favorite Boulevard. He
carried this fastidious grace with him into his business, and
was actually noble in his refusal to lower even here his æsthetic
attitude. Rather than take off his coat of dignity and get down and
struggle in the dirt, however metaphorically, he would lose any amount
of money, and snap his Castilian fingers after it. That did not mean,
however, that he consistently lost in his enterprises. He was much
too brilliant and too versed in the refinements of mental strategy
for that.

He was, Julie soon discovered, inordinately fond of telling
"anecdotas." These recitals were usually of a delicate double meaning,
and Julie could hear his clients in the law office adjoining her room
constantly breaking into gales of laughter. The Señor would appear for
his lesson with the tears of appreciation standing in his eyes. While
wiping them reverently away with a large silk handkerchief, he would
assure Julie condolingly that she had the sense of humor of a Pilgrim
Father. When she could not understand his stories in Spanish, he turned
them, wickedly twinkling, into French; and when there, happily for her,
the point missed her, he would twirl his delicate fingers toward the
window and appear to beckon the whole world into the joke.

The Señor had the Latin's abysmal contempt for English--a clumsy
language, he declared it, without science or charm; and his lessons
were like so many brief, reluctant plunges into a cold bath, they
were really the last thing on earth that concerned him. English! Yes,
he was resolved to learn it, but any detestable time would answer. As
there were no suitable books that Julie could find for the instruction
of adults, she brought a few from school. It was the Señor's practice,
while she was trying to teach him and while he wanted to tell stories,
to pick up gingerly between thumb and forefinger an offending First
Reader that had been pored over by many a brownie, and, shaking its
leaves contemptuously, exclaim: "Is it within the limits of reason
as conceived in your admirable head that a grown man in complete
possession of his senses can endure a thing like this: 'The cat ate
the rat: Spell cat, rat, also bat, hat, and mat'--Bah!"

At four o'clock, in deference to her Anglo-Saxon nationality, tea
would be served. It was of such an extraordinarily reprehensible
character that Julie at first had to be told what it was. Nobody in
the Señor's house was familiar with tea-making, and least of all the
native cook. From what Julie could gather from the Señor, a handful
of tea-leaves was boiled, like spinach, to pulp and added to a mixture
of condensed milk and brown sugar. The Señor sipped his tiny glass of
cognac and watched in wonder while Julie heroically made away with the
concoction. "The English are an enigmatic race," he reflected. "The
Bank of England, the bank of the world, you understand, stops work
every day in the calendar in order that every soul in it may of this
fearful fluid imbibe."

Upstairs his family lived. Señora Sansillo was a sweet-faced woman of
the stout mestiza type; dressed when she went out in screaming brocades
and plumes, and when she stayed in scarcely dressed at all. Her husband
referred to her in a respectfully disinterested way as "Eustefa"
and as of "heavenly temperament." Why of her own free will she should
wish to be so good, he could not think. "As for me--I am a diablo!" he
would thoughtfully add, twirling his Mephistophelian mustaches.

His children were attractive and intelligent, but they had upon them
the indefinable Malay stamp. Alongside their father's sharply defined
frame, they looked as if they had somehow been cast in wax. Children
of the sun! Columbines of a tropical garden! Sometimes Julie would
see the Señor pick up the youngest, a little brown will-o'-the-wisp,
and after looking her over searchingly thrust her down with an
inarticulate exclamation.

In time, the herb-woman's medicine seemed to have proved for Julie to
be a veritable panacea. It helped her to work and to sleep. At night
when her whole body quivered with fatigue and rivers of weariness
coursed over her frame, it was an agency of relief. It was not only a
refuge from suffering, but it was also a reserve against over-strain;
it helped her to go through the second part of the day, which was
the intolerable part. Rising from inadequate rest with the dragging
sensation of coming up out of the water with the weight of the world
about her neck, and facing the compulsion of crossing the scorching
city to battle with the intractable Señor, she gained from the medicine
fresh spurts of strength. Sometimes, even, she seemed to come alive
to a new world, from which armies of doubts and despairs had fled,
and which was invested with the rosiest plans for her drab and clearly
indeterminate future. Sometimes she rose to a superb tolerance of
mood in which mere human happenings were but traceries on dust.

With hard work and increasing bad health, Julie gradually saw less of
the acquaintances she had made. Isabel and Ellis were the Empire's more
fortunate women, claiming its brilliant and leisurely phases, whereas
she was drifting farther and farther into insignificance. Father Hull
was in Hong Kong making an attempt to rehabilitate his health. Barry,
as things were drawing to a crisis for the Americans, was off over
the Islands everywhere, striving desperately to stir up sentiment
against evacuation and feverishly attempting to finish off some
projects before the end.

A building era had struck the centers of the Archipelago and he was
egging the natives on to materialize their aspirations. He always came
to see Julie at once upon his brief returns to Manila, bringing with
him some little trophy of the trip. They would sit together under the
fire-trees in the Reredos' garden, with the little flames of blossoms,
lying about them in the grass while he recounted his adventures. Other
cities beautiful, he said were springing up. Legaspi had a regular
citadel of imposing public edifices under way. San Fernando, Pampanga,
had voted a splendid public square of modern cement buildings. Solano,
sepulchered dust of the Conquistadores, was being rapidly lifted from
its tomb; an earthquake had come along and by spilling part of the
ancient city had greatly aided Orcullu in his attempt to rear a new
commercial port.

An earthquake had in fact shaken the whole archipelago; there was a
great eruptive attempt to join in the march of modern progress. The
Americans, Barry informed her, had made over waterways, harbors, and
cities, developed vast tracts of forest, established new trade routes,
roads, a railway, organized industries and, in a manner of godlike
benevolence never attempted at home, were supervising the health,
morals, education and welfare of the entire race. The big things were
chuggling through. One corner of the East anyway, after a great deal
of phenomenal pushing, was beginning to stir. Imperishable cities
were beginning to rear their heads, not alone at the instigation of
the Americans but at the incentive of the natives themselves, out of
whose local resources and exuberant good will, the new cities were
being built.

While Barry pondered expansively under the fire tree, starting up
sometimes to tread the grass as if it were springs, Julie sat quietly
rapt and listened. She loved terribly these big things in which she
could have no part. She would clasp and unclasp her hands in suppressed
emotion while this splendid, transported Odysseus, his desert face
glowing like furnace gold, his great youthful frame energizing the
dusk as he moved, recited the achievements of the Argonauts. Always
there was some burning agitation in his soul. As he walked and talked
he would stir his hair wildly in his characteristic fashion. Julie
loved to watch him in moments like this, for at such times only she
was completely happy. Her soul seemed to ask for nothing more, as if
for the moment it were filled with realized dreams.

"Ah!" she once exclaimed, in a glory of satisfaction. "You never could
get pinned down to the dust like the rest of us. You could stay in
this Lions' Den forever and come out unscathed."

"If I did get down, remember, Julie, I should look to you."

"Because I know so much about the earth--the hard ground floor
of it? It seems somehow to have a natural affinity for me." She
reflected ruefully.

He stared off a while at the starry horizon. "We're agents of the
inevitable. America, like Christianity, Julie, is one of the biggest
things in human history. The two of them are victories of the soul
of men."

"Even old China," he went on, "caught from America the reflection
of democracy. But what she gleaned sank down crosswise into her poor
old brain, and she broke out into a muddling chaotic geyser that she
misconceived as a revolt.

"But, howsoever muddlesomely, Asia has made a beginning. She has
kicked up, never afterwards really to settle down. The habit of
mind of ages has been thrown off. You think I am a wild prophet,
but I have read secret tumults in the souls of men that later shall
take sure shape. The underground fire will spread, and you will
some day see China break out through every crack of her blistered,
old surface. Then we shall be able to say that we have done our work!"

Barry's manner suddenly altered. The triumph of his mood faded. "Julie,
the end will come here though, if these people persist. They dare
to risk so soon the human republicanism we've sweated for. In this
black chaos of famine and plague they want to stand alone. Have they
forgotten the big brute bulks that shadow this horizon? the lions
and the panthers coming out of the dark to devour them? The work of
our hearts--in the dust!" He clenched his hands.

"Congress will pass the Bill. It will be lights out here before
long--our carefully trimmed lights. We will have to move to new beats
in the East."

He caught her hand and walked with her to the gate, where, turning
about to face her, he said with deep emotion: "The cities of my heart
may pass, the fires that my life has lighted die, but you will remain
in my soul the one eternally abiding thing."

Long after the gate had closed behind him, Julie, the light all about
her, stood pondering those words. Like a prophecy of fire, her soul
saw them--like a glowing handwriting on the walls of fate, burning
characters predicting a future--a future in which far desert peoples
were concerned, and shining human deeds. An immortal experience was
about to offer itself out of her frustrated land of dreams.

She felt, as she sat there alone in the moonlight, as if she had been
summoned off her futile earth to occupy a finer planet, of Asian
gardens, pervaded with an ineffable fragrance of soul. This planet
did not hold China, full of black blots; it had nothing to do with
the terrible Pavilion with leprous beggars leaning out of it. Julie
did not know what this land was or where, but it was full of the
accumulated and expurgated glories of the East.

However Barry might succeed or fail, if his projects collapsed at
his feet or if he won heroically, he alone was wonderful, splendid,
inspired; the Excelsior man struggling upward with the banner of
humanity. He burned upon Julie's dreams as everything bright and
fine. She recalled the night they had first shared their virginal
dreams--before the sinister obstacle had come. Why had they been
separated to take ever widening roads of destiny? Near him she felt a
sense of tingling peace, of vivid harmony with even the unconscious
stones, so contrasting with all the other gloomy emotions that had
warped her life. She could have gone on forever in the atmosphere
he created of fluid golden good-will. Where he was, was always
light. Even the dusk glowed preternaturally, with a promise hid. A
sense of him pervaded the garden now, its lighted lengths, its drifting
fragrance. His presence was still here, touching every pulse.

All about were the mates of the garden. She knew their little dramas:
the male Papaya Tree peering across in dark discomfiture at a private
little miracle--a comb of incandescent mites of blossoms that his
mate had proudly on display! The lovely lady Sun-Tree dancing like
an houri in the breeze, waving her delicate plumes and swinging
her gay bells with their hairs of tongues, while her coarse mate,
rooted by his heavy frame to the earth cursed and groaned. Haughty,
green women of the garden! They had things better than their human
sisters! Above her, pure as the heart of Mary, without ever an earthly
love in it, the white cadena trailed snowily along the walls, while
orchids quartered on fern trees watched the night with uncanny eyes;
and close at Julie's hand the glowing grail of the hybiscus sadly
held forth to a darkened world the blood of Christ.

Beautiful sacred garden! If only by some magic it could be carried on
to flower forever in all the cycles of her uncertain future! Here in
this never-to-be-forgotten garden, they two had sat with the alamanders
gleaming upon them like a galaxy of golden moons, and had proclaimed
the promise of a new earth.

For once the sense of her weakness, her inconsequence, left her--the
burdensome sense of herself as a bungling, unsuccessful instrument
of life was swept out of her consciousness by new visions. The very
night shimmered with great dreams. Glowing gates appeared to her
imagination, and vast still deserts with men waiting watchfully
beneath the stars. It was that watching and waiting that thrilled
through her, caused her to start up in wonder and awe, as if from
somewhere a summons had throbbed: a vision of far questioning places
and of waiting watching men over against the Wall that crowns Cathay.



CHAPTER XX


But if there were nights in a moonlight garden, there were also
broiling days in an equatorial city with streets hot under foot and an
atmosphere like waves of fire. Julie was moving dizzily and heavily
through life, sleeping badly, dreaming strangely, and forgetting her
food. She sat abstractedly over her meals, staring out beyond her.

"That is the way with you Americans!" Señor Reredo remarked. "You
burn yourselves out at once, forgetting that it must be a slow wick
and a long one that lasts in the hot winds."

"You are ill!" the Señora would declare. "All the fine little bones
in your face are beginning to show."

It was just as well, the girl thought, that the taste for food
had left her, since the fare of the Reredos was almost completely
unpalatable. Julie supplemented it at great expense in an American
restaurant. They sometimes served her carabao's milk, and besides,
during the meals, it was the habit of Chiquito, the pig, to whimper
around the table for titbits, sticking his fore-paws beseechingly on
the children's laps. Chiquito was a clean pig and a very clever one,
but Julie had her prejudices.

She was forced to walk great distances through the hot streets. Livery
carromatas were too dear, and she would not get into nondescript
Tondo vehicles. Once in desperation she had resolved to attempt one
of these conveyances that carried the undercurrent of the city's
life. The rat-like remnant of a horse, whose eyes begged for death,
had stopped its unsteady motion, and the coachman, the veriest dust
of the streets, was signaling the occupancy of the crazy coach,
when a dreadful unconcerned face with small-pox ulcers all over it,
and a cigar stuck in the corner of its mouth, thrust itself out at
her. Death abroad on a jaunt!

The streets with their unfathomable misery of life were an eternal
curiosity to her. It was incomprehensible that men would take
the trouble to go on breathing on such terms. Poor, tawdry, human
procession, with its occasional holiday of soul, when, like ants from
far trails, its units met and rubbed noses unintelligibly. It was good
not to be a gopher or an ant, but to be something that counted very
acutely in the universe. Gophers were born gophers, ants were born
ants--and Julies, by a comfortable decree, were born Julies. It had
all been arranged that way definitely and succinctly by thoughtful
forces and there was no use of aching over it. Gophers and ants must
go on nibbling around the careless feet of the gods. One single human
fleck of pity could not fan the East into life. It was all too big
a proposition for one ineffectual soul.

One day walking home by a new route, she saw in the aperture of a
broken wall, a forlorn old man sitting, looking out with half blind
eyes. Poor old hermit, pondering perhaps with all the hopelessness
of the East, on To-morrow. She stopped to speak a few words to him,
and saw stretching beyond her an alley of broken turns, between
lines of battered old walls. Moved to curiosity, she followed the
alley and came suddenly upon a savage fastness, at the edge of the
sea, a hideous retreat of tattered beggars, who at the sight of the
chance invader came leaping up out of the sand, where they had been
ferociously gambling and matching cocks, and closed about her--a
jeering, threatening crew, followed by a pack of horrible dogs. Out
of their filthy huts made of scraps of tin, boards, old rags,
nipa, more tatterdemalion creatures appeared. The dregs of the city
cornered here! On the shallows of the sea, lay a flotilla of blood-red
sails. What, horribly, did they catch in this nightmare retreat?

Never had she seen human existence in quite so grotesque and satirical
a setting. This was not a picture of the usual native, contentedly at
sea in the universe, nor of the gophers in their sad mud embankments,
nor yet the settled evil of Chinatown, but of a crooked, grimacing sort
of corner where the indigestibles of an Eastern city found haven. Human
grotesqueries! The ordinary panorama of the native's futile life was
disheartening enough, but this blur of savage hobgoblins jeering at
the sun, seizing like Macbeth's witches on the prey of the Alley was
terrifying. She ran precipitately back, tearing her garments from the
women's greedy clutches, with the howls of the Alley in her ears and
their blood-red sails burning on her brain. The horror of the East! The
Pavilion of unreclaimed human waste for which not even God cared!

Stumbling blindly home in the sun with an aching head, she felt that
this hot cosmos into which her life had fallen was a furnace that was
going to consume her altogether. But the medicine, she remembered,
would help this miasma and dull the sick weight of the world. She
climbed upstairs, picked up a box and took a powdery pellet from it.

On the table lay a long, official envelope. She picked it up
abstractedly and broke it open, wondering why the red-haired man
was moved to send out so many meaningless, uninspired messages. She
glanced it over, then suddenly for an instant not a thing stirred
in her. At last her breath broke out of her throat in a sob. Another
blow out of the East!

The Department was very brief about what it had to say. It gave no
specific reason, nor did it go deeply into explanations. It merely
announced that after the end of the current month her services would
no longer be required. It took not more than a line to intimate that
the failure of her efforts in the Southern Islands was responsible
for this decision. If she desired transportation to the States--the
Department was beautifully benevolent about this--it would arrange
it at an expense to her of one hundred and twenty-five dollars gold.

All such savings as she had made had gone at once to Mrs. Morris. She
had no money, so what did transportation to the States or to the moon
mean to her? When she had embarked for these Islands she had assumed
the complete responsibility of herself. But to be pushed out without
a hearing at court--or a cent to depend upon! The red-haired man had
bided his time. Miss Hope who was now in Manila had furnished him
with the weapons of retaliation for that scene in his office long ago.

The East was trying hard to cast her out--and she had asked only
to struggle along and fumble for the end of the rainbow. But never,
never, could one be secure here. In the East, one was like a nation
trembling always on the verge of war, quivering before a catastrophe
that would surely fall. But she would not leave it--till things had
happened. She would not be driven out before her time. She was not
beaten yet. She was not beaten yet. She would not beg, nor starve,
nor explain. If Nahal had done nothing else, it had stiffened her
pride. The Señor had several times spoken of how useful she would be
in his office in the morning to attend to the English aspects of his
practice. She could have employment from him for the whole day.

If they had not spoken of Nahal, if they had not employed that
particularly fatal word failure concerning the work of her heart, she
might have risen to give them battle. But the Department had touched
vitally and cruelly the quick of her soul's pride. Nahal--the single
sacred endeavor she had to her account in the New World--had betrayed
her finally and openly. Barry, the colossus, stood with his feet on
two soils; Shell held in his grasp a savage empire; and Chad, and
multitudes of others, struggled to shape the new existence; but she,
stripped of her pretensions was blowing like a scarecrow to the winds
of the East. Not for worlds would she have had Chad know that his
intuitions concerning her, his resentment of her in his universe, had
been justified. Nobody should ever know this final humiliation--that
she had been weighed in the scales and found wanting.

With that paper on the table her connection with the Builders in the
East had snapped like a cobweb to a star. The Great Experiment had
thrust her out. Henceforth hers was a separate lot, a mere grubbing
for existence. Julie laid her head down on the table and wept inspired
youth's disillusioned tears. The fragrance of the golden jessamine
floated up across the seas from that far, relinquished kingdom of
the soul. A poor, desolate and bewildered spirit mourned outside the
gates of its shining memories.

"My island!" The girl wept after its vanishing outline.

But Julie knew that, though she might bid Nahal farewell forever,
it would still remain an abiding obstacle of soul--a dark enigma
lying heavily across her life.

The Señor was completely satisfied with the new arrangement whereby
she gave her whole time to his service. He was the only person with
whom she was wholly candid concerning her break with the Educational
Department.

Barry, she found hard to satisfy with explanations on this score. She
confessed to him that for a long time she had owed a large debt which
had ridden her back like a nightmare, that expenses were too high
to save anything on her salary and that the Señor's emolument was
in excess of anything that she could expect elsewhere. He looked at
her hard but said nothing. His silence troubled Julie at night. She
knew that he was disturbed that she should have abandoned even her
small part of the Cause, which in these days was in urgent need of
the whole strength of its adherents.

His own business affairs she knew were disintegrating. People said
he had been losing money for some time. But he stuck to what now
commenced to appear as a losing cause. Julie thought miserably of
the time when he would cease to appear in the character of a prince
of the East. He was grappling now with tremendous forces at home and
abroad. The agitation for independence for the Islands surmounted for
the moment every other national concern. The natives awaited almost
hourly its promulgation.

"We're six thousand miles away--in the other half of the globe, and
they can't visualize our problems. They don't understand that they
must hold this thing off far a while. The whole course of history will
be changed. Oh, if they could have one 'look see' into the Pavilion,
Julie! or one glimpse at the holy foundations of the new Asia! I
tell you I can't bear to see this project cut adrift in the universe
alone. Ah, well, I'll be going to China soon, and I promise you I'll
raise every foot of its ancient dust."

Julie adored Barry in his spurts of white wrath, but he was wretched
now as well as angry.

"Cleopatra's barge will not stay afloat. It will sink with its Eurasian
captains in Eastern seas!" Julie prophesied.

He glanced up quickly. "Isabel!" he muttered. "She must be in a
fine frame of mind. Perhaps the grandiose title we gave her may yet
come true. Republics over here will be sadly unsteady things. A
strong hand can too easily twist them into the one-man power the
East understands. It's the effect on China I fear the most. She was
drawing life and encouragement from this experiment, and just at
the crucial moment the whole thing with its far reaching results,
is about to topple into dust!

"The day is near," he told her, "when we must pick tip our packs and
move on."

Julie tried to realize it, tried to plan toward such an eventuality,
but a spiritual as well as a physical inertia enveloped her like a
super-added sheath of being. She exerted herself to the utmost to
hide this new condition from his observation for she knew in what a
desperate struggle he was engaged for the life of the New East. More
than any personal emotion that could ever seize him, she believed,
this passion gripped his heart. And for one who had achieved nothing
in this issue, who had actually been flung out of all its purposes,
no legitimate appeal remained. Her dazed being still responded acutely
to all his problems--but the greatest of them all had left an agony
in her soul.

Once he looked at her very troubled. "What's the matter, Julie?" he
begged.

And Julie seeing that in that moment he had forgotten everything but
her, grew frightened in spite of her exultation.

"Oh, it's just the effects of the sunstroke!" she exclaimed, drawing
herself defensively up.

"I'll take you to see Braithwaite," he said. But he was summoned away
on another of his critical errands, and the visit to Dr. Braithwaite
did not take place.

Nevertheless Julie was stirred to concern by the abnormal agitations
within herself. She scrutinized herself in the glass one day, and
was startled by what she saw. The delicate outlines of her face,
which looked like sculptured crystal, reflected a disturbing inner
ravage. Under her lower lip a singular bluish shadow, which for some
time had been dimly suggested, had become definitely marked, as if
some menacing malady were revealing its first sign.

She was puzzled and a little alarmed. She resolved to go and see a
doctor, only to remember that in her present unstable state she dared
not risk the complication of the cost. She consoled herself with the
thought that if she were really ill more malevolent symptoms than
these would have declared themselves.

Her mind skirted lightly an under-current speculation concerning
the medicine she had been taking. Because it had become so
indispensable, she did not actually attempt closely to question
it. It was unquestionably, peculiarly and irregularly derived; but
it certainly was not poison, as her use of it had proved. And it did
work; it took pain away;--whatever abnormal after-agitations it might
produce--and just now that was what overwhelmingly counted. Back of
that fact she was not disposed to go. Rosalie had been perfectly right
when she said that a large part of the valuable drugs of the world
were to be found wild here. Julie herself had walked through pungent
jungles and forests and felt that she was traversing some universal
pharmacopoeia. The natives of Nahal through the use of herbs, which
were the only medicinal aids at their disposal, had learned how to
exist quite without doctors. Julie had a consciousness that clung to
any sort of panacea. She manifested always an inability to stand upon
her own spiritual powers. This particular panacea, she was however
aware, had caught upon some vital fiber. On blistering days when the
heat hung in the air like a stifling blanket and all the forces of her
being refused to go on, the old crone's nostrum dropped a soothing
veil over her blinded, quivering senses and freed her awhile from
her intolerable burden.

It helped also in another struggle, the struggle to keep from
understanding, as the days passed in the Señor's office, why her
services were so valuable to a pupil who paid so high a price to
make no progress at all. Subconsciously she had sensed for a long
time at what this artistically indirect method aimed. As the Señor's
vocabulary of gallantry began to come out more clearly from behind
its Spanish ambush, the girl sometimes felt as if she were hanging by
a hair over a precipice. She cursed devoutly her knowledge of French;
for though she pretended not to understand, the translation would too
often come out on her burning face. She dared not be angry; she could
not revolt: were not her last bridges cut behind her? Between her and
the most desperate extremity, this situation alone interposed. This
slow, creeping Spaniard was the rope on which she must balance
across the cataract. So when opulent emerald rings and rare rubies
were discovered lying casually upon her desk--for her to admire--and
were waved back silently upon her when she tried aghast, to return
them to their owner, she could only employ the foolish subtlety of
remarking how much Señora Sansillo would appreciate these intended
gifts of her thoughtful husband.

It was a silly strategy, executed by a crude man in the crudest
way. There was no spirit in it; the lovely stones stood for nothing
but an ignorant man's misapprehension of the human soul. It would
have been laughable to the girl had she been in other than a desperate
plight. Nor could she laugh at anything that caused her so to despise
herself, her own ignoble clinging to such a rope of life.

But she would not retreat from her individual stand. Barry alas,
had troubles enough now. And this place, which had monstrously and
unjustly, and without a hearing, cast her out, should receive no
appeals from her. One must make a final stand on one's own in this
shattering world--and not if she were to die to-morrow would she
come out and declare her failure. She was still desperately, so she
conceived, the mistress of her own fate.

Then at the climax of these over-head emotions, would come an
engulfing ennui, as if all this stir were but an eternal pouring
of water through a sieve. To keep alive in this fearful foreign
whirlpool, one had to struggle every instant. Something seemed to
be thrusting her gradually toward the edge of a dark and fatal pool,
and there was creeping over her an appalling weariness of life.

One day she received word that Isabel wished to see her. She had
not seen Isabel for some time. After having been discarded from the
real life of this colony and forced to her present anomalous mode of
livelihood, she shrank from encounter with the brilliantly successful
ones whose rival she had once essayed to be. As the outcast from the
Great Project that Chad had predicted she would become, her despair at
seeing those who had entered the race when she had, became sometimes
more than she could combat. The wretched queerness of her being lately
had made her morbidly acute.

Isabel most of all had seemed to press this superior fortune pitilessly
upon her, had even, so the girl thought, demonstrated a hint of
hatred on their meetings. This thought troubled Julie; but she could
not bring herself to ignore the summons, for not only had Isabel's
friendship more than once been turned to account, but Isabel sending
for her in this unexplained way, showed that she had something vital
to say. Out of this infinite restlessness Julie wondered, as she set
out for the house of the caliphs, what was to develop.

Everything appeared unchanged. The old keeper, with the withered face
like a Chinese nut, who had told her the first time she had seen the
place that this was the dwelling of a "daughter of the country," came
forth from his lodge and ushered Julie into Isabel's domain. Absolute
stillness pervaded the house. The dwarf, who had watched her acutely
as he conducted her up the stairs, disappeared. The pensiveness and
inertia of the tropical afternoon had fallen like a sad mood over the
exotic world. Julie looked about her and sighed. She felt a desire
to get out of this ageless Asian splendor down into the sun of the
street. To-day the teak wood called up visions of distant sweating
bodies. The shining dark floors stretched like black waters beneath
the feet; the heavy golden curtains stirred as under Indian magic;
and the ivory Buddhas dozed in a changeless Nirvana. Perfume hung in
the air: the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of ivory palaces,
mixed with the odors of dying flowers. Back in the next room, in a
corner where she could just glimpse it, was the gilt shrine of the
Green God, who from time immemorial had inspired in the hearts of
men the fear of fate.

Abruptly at an invisible warning, Julie's eyes swerved sharply. A
sinister brown face gleaming like an evil star from a chaotic mass
of black hair appeared half concealed among the potted palms. Julie
rose almost defensively.

"Isabel!" she exclaimed, with a tremulous voice. She did not wish this
changeling, who could assume at will the soul of either of two races,
to see how disturbed she was.

The Malay woman bore down upon her in stormy silence.

"I haven't seen you for a long time," Julie said, agitatedly
casting about her for a means to meet this mood. "I lead a hard,
busy life." She spoke of the difficulty of her existence as if the
fact of it might somehow appease Isabel, who drew nearer and fixed
upon Julie a gloomy concentration.

There was something almost thirst-like in this examination. Isabel
appeared to be straining for something that lay beyond the girl's
own consciousness. The sun had given Julie a glow of color, and when
she essayed to smile the old miracle of look transfigured her like
a sudden star lighting brightly the weariness of earth. Isabel waved
a demolishing hand before it.

"Futile, futile flame! I knew it would burn itself out. You want me to
believe," she went on fiercely, "that you are in a deep struggle--that
you are giving your soul to be ground up for some fine cause. But
you can't deceive me. I know that you are a malingerer--and that,
whoever's bones may be broken by the wheels, they will assuredly not be
yours. In the vigil, the peril, the anguish of this fool's dream, you
have had no part. You have sat and waited--like an imbecile sphinx--for
something to come along and solve your foolish riddle. The very stars
have sung in your ears, and you have not heard. Nothing has touched
you--nothing can!"

In sullen challenge, she swept on. "Why were you not content with your
little hillcock, and your wretch of a man-ant? Why have you to stretch
out your foolish disastrous hands to pull a world to pieces? You know,"
she rushed on, fiercely, "that our friend Barry along with the rest
of them--stands on the brink of complete catastrophe; that the great
structure he believed he had created is about to fall about his head;
you know too what the love of these things is to him--yet you thrust
yourself between him and a single saving chance; you who could blow
away out of the world like a feather, without consequence to any
one! It is always exasperatingly weak things like you who plant their
feet in the course of fate. I have sent for you to tell you that you
had better take yourself out of the way."

Julie stared with a beating heart at this being to whom she was as
a kindling to a flame.

"I don't know what you mean by my being in the way," she stammered
weakly. Isabel stood somberly glaring at her. What was in this woman's
mind? What was it all about? Her eyes turned to escape this dark
distorted vision, and ran along the wall's stream with an armory
of poisoned weapons, each of which was forged to deal death in a
particularly monstrous way.

Her mind struggling with its fears caught at the vague intimation of
hope for Barry in Isabel's wild utterances. "Oh, do you mean that
he could be saved--out of the wreck? You could do it, Isabel, of
course. Oh, don't," she pleaded desperately, "let him be driven out!"

"Do you think you have to plead with me, you little wastrel? The East
will requite those who truly give themselves to it. There will be a
place in it for Barry--but there will never be any place for you--that
is what I want you to understand. When the hour comes to requite him,
I warn you not to intervene."

Julie's spirit asserted itself. "What is going to happen to him?" she
demanded.

Isabel flung at her a contemptuous glance, and exclaimed in a sudden
abandon of revelation: "The finest thing that ever happened to a
white man in the East."

The girl's head sank. Upon her memory had flashed the new portentous
words exchanged in Barry's house between Isabel and the white Rajah
of Ramook. Her whole being felt suddenly borne down. Her lips slowly
paled; the light swept out of her face, leaving it a chill, ghastly
white.

Isabel strained forward, her eyes riveted on the blue blur which
stood out now under the girl's lips. "Ah!--" she said, and sank back,
while Julie moved unsteadily to the stairs.

She went through the down-dropping dusk of the garden, in utter
hopelessness of mood. The choice of the starry ways cut off forever.



CHAPTER XXI


Barry hurriedly presented himself one afternoon at the Señor's
offices. Father Hull was fatally ill, and Barry had come to get Julie.

Outside the priest's room, in the Military Hospital, they found a
hushed motley assemblage--officials of high standing, prominent
natives and poor ones, many of those Father Hull had called his
camp-fire colony, grouped there waiting for news. A nurse flitted
occasionally in and out; in those days of over-crowded hospitals,
nurses were forced to disseminate their administrations.

Barry and Julie stepped softly into the room where the priest's
emaciated form lay stretched upon a bed. They bent down, and
watched tremulously for his fluttering breath. The stern, make-shift
surroundings, the absence of any one near to him, brought the tears to
Julie's eyes. While she had been giving all her thoughts to herself and
her own vicissitudes, the priest had hung on his cross suffering. His
outstretched wasted arms seemed to be offering the final oblation of
life. He was going out after a hard march. The camp fires were dying,
and he who had urged the souls of men along rough trails was being
extinguished with them.

His eyes opened feebly and rested on the door. Some yet living sense
that stood on guard over his earthly mission must have affected this
flickering return. His lips moved urgently. Julie understood that
before he slipped out there was some token his spirit wished to pass
to his colonist children. She tiptoed to the door and summoned them in.

As they entered, the priest turned upon them the helpless solicitude
of a dying father. He was leaving in their faltering hands their
unguarded destinies. The old Judge grasped his inert hand in helpless
sadness, murmuring under his breath something about "giving it up for
good." The Blackstones, shabby and broken, held up a thin frightened
baby before his glazing eyes. Jerome's somber, worn, dissipated face
worked with emotion. Mrs. Abernathy wept softly at the foot of the bed.

But it was to the shining serenity of the Ashbys that the priest turned
for his last vision of life. He kept his eyes fixed upon them, as if,
in this final extremity, they helped.

Julie glanced curiously at Mrs. Ashby, who now stood beside
Father Hull holding one of his hands. Her lids, drooped downward,
appeared closed. By her blank outer aspect the girl knew that she was
withdrawn into some mammoth struggle. It seemed to vibrate about her
in excitations of the atmosphere, as if an atom sought to stir all
space. "She is trying to save him," Julie thought.

There should of course be a way to do it. Death was a mistake that had
crept into creation. That was shown by the fact that never yet in all
the eons had man accepted it naturally. Life itself, in its sundering
battles, had perhaps evolved this malevolence, which darkened the whole
universe. Never had she looked on this irremediable mystery without
experiencing an insensate revolt and an unaccountable conviction of
its unnecessariness. She looked around at this circle of wretched
human helplessness, at the supreme helplessness on the bed, and felt
unreasonably that they had still not turned the last stone.

She turned to Mrs. Ashby to see if she might unaccountably have
demonstrated an answer to the struggling things within her mind. But
she too had clearly only grazed the great secret--for the priest
suddenly was dead. Over the city that he had left forever, the sunset
gun boomed.

In a silence that weighed like lead, Julie and Barry rode home. Julie
broke it at last. "He should not have gone!" Then to the dusk she
murmured absently and fragmentarily: "The things I do--ye shall
do also!"

"What are you saying, Julie?"

"One Person solved the mystery, you see."

He stared at her blankly. Then she roused herself. "It's
unnecessary--this dying," she broke out.

"In this instance criminal. A filthy disease to conquer so great a
human force!" Barry declared with bitter passion. "If death didn't
break one's heart, it would make one insane with anger. He had good
doctors, too," he reflected gloomily.

"But doctors can only go so far. Then you strike the dark border
where unfathomable mystery lies; the door-step of the unknown,
where accident, chance, the turn of a hair--and, yes, miracle
intervenes. Nobody can penetrate there. If only one could!" She leaned
earnestly toward him, the light coming into her face.

"Yes," he meditated gently, "all life hangs on a miracle. Yet," he
exclaimed somberly, "I think he is to be envied in passing out before
the great débâcle. You couldn't have turned his footsteps from these
shores, and he couldn't have borne to sit among the ashes of such
big hopes."

Julie had never seen Barry look so worried, as if a blow had been
struck across a vital part of him. Other people were always weary
in spots, or altogether; but he had been undaunted in harness,
campaigning joyously against the obstacles of the East. Soul-stirring,
world-overturning Barry, who had set his tireless shoulder to every
load! His heart must not break!

Often lately in their evening drives over a moon-enchanted city,
a city with all her sad secrets hid and along the great ocean lying
like a sector of eternity against poetically silvered mortal shores,
she had seen him strain about and look over it all and sink back with
a bitter sigh. She had read all the heaviness that lay in his soul
at these times.

"I say, and I will continue to say to my last breath, that we were
winning Asia step by step. Over in China, they are beginning to strew
the dynamite that will blow the old order of things off the globe. It
makes me too angry to speak of it! And I ask you, Julie, if the Gods
have given me a square deal? Isabel's Green God will win the day,
curse him!"

Julie looked at him searchingly. "Isabel is a great friend of yours,
isn't she, Barry?"

"She works against me, and tries to upset everything I do; but she
still manages to convey the intimation that she means well toward me."

"But what do you think she finally does mean towards you?"

Barry glanced up wonderingly. "She is an old friend of mine, and does
not want, I imagine, the best of her friendships broken. In a way,
you can scarcely blame her for seeing things as she does."

"She is beautiful--very!" Julie added, with a trifle of severity
toward herself.

"She is justly the Queen of the East."

"Suppose," the girl broke out feverishly, "she should find something
splendid to offer you!"

"There is no splendor left to me here, that I can conceive of."

"But if you could still serve in the East--would you do it--at all
hazards?"

"I will serve the East till I die," he said between set teeth. "It may
revile me, trample on me, repudiate me altogether, but it shall not,
I say, utterly cast me out--as this place is about to do."

He looked at her in despair. "The cholera is in the city, Julie. A
just judgment on the blind. Lord God of Hosts, after our labor and
sweat, the eternal plague! It seems to have broken out in nearly
every province; and if it keeps on at this gait, it will rot the
Archipelago. It looks like a holocaust this time, to sweep away this
blind beggars' caravan.

"The Peste!" he muttered. "You haven't heard that wail of the lost
over the devastation of their little lives, as I have, nor walked
at sunset through the blood-red light into their poor hamlets and
found them dying darkly behind their rush walls, with the fiat of God
written on their foreheads, as they'd say. Isn't that the human soul of
it--conceiving the curse that its blindness has brought down upon it
to be a splendid decree of God? If a thousand years were as a day--as
they are to Him--we'd win over here. But look at these creatures now,
tearing everything away, and shouting out across the seas that they
can stand alone, their bewildered souls on their splendid feet!" Barry
relapsed into his native idiom, as he often did when he was greatly
stirred. "And here they are at last in the power of the Plague, with
their splendid feet a-fleeing, and their bewildered souls going out
to God, who never asked for them in such a hurry.

"That's the soul-splitting East! You may take its highways barefooted,
your veins bleeding all over them at every step, you may hand its
people from a high mountain the kingdom of God, but they'll never be
caring a bit. It's not in the nature of any of them to give thanks
to God or man. Sometime far hence, when I'm through with the East
and wish to go up into a cloud to rest my soul of it, they may try
to persuade me down with a mountain of gold, but I'll kick the whole
thing over and go on my way up."

He dropped his fervent fantasies, and fixed upon her a passion of
solicitude. "Take care of yourself, Julie, mind! You have a shining bit
of light on you that I never saw on another mortal woman--and which
will hold me through all the dark places I shall pass through. What
does it matter whom else they say you are waiting for! Never, to
the end of time, will I believe the soul of you stands waiting for
another man! In all these days, when my heart has been going out
to you, you've had this will-o'-the-wisp in your brain. It can't be
anything more--just a screen down the path, hiding for a little while
the light."

"Who," Julie asked, turning white in amazement, "told you that?"

"Chad and Isabel--my friends who do not see your fairy light. They
want me to let you pass on--as though I wouldn't go on following
after you across all the tracks of the universe!"

Often the portals of her spirit had started to spring--to loosen
her imprisoned emotion, but the conviction of her unworthiness,
the fear of mischievously or malignantly encroaching upon his life,
had dammed it back. Sometimes even in her despair, she had felt that
his eyes were looking for something the confines of her gates did
not contain. Now, almost overpoweringly the impulse to disregard
the consequences, to fling open her soul, to disemburden it to the
bottom on that instant of all the pain that had habitation there,
flared up in Julie. The very citadel of her soul had been struck.

Then sweeping over her again came all that Isabel had said--the
terrible, almost inconceivably terrible calamities she had
threatened. Once more she remembered the prophetic flash of look
between Isabel and the Rajah of Ramook--the king of Ramook! after
independence Barry was to have a high place--the highest they had
to give, perhaps. She swept out her hands distressfully, as if to
clear away this mammoth bewilderment. Suddenly she found resolve,
even with the suppressed tears choking her.

"Chad and Isabel are right!" she declared huskily. "I am not fit to
come in your path--not at all worthy of ideals and energies like
yours. Chad said I was a wastrel--and so did she. The woman who
should touch your life, Chad said, should be one of concentrated
fine forces. I have never concentrated anything. I have moments of
inspiration, moods of fervor, but never have they--never perhaps will
they knit into anything abiding. I tried in Nahal. I gave it the
best in the compass of my being. If anything was to be fulfilled,
it would have been fulfilled there. Nahal was my Chance. I can't
think why it turned out as it did--I wonder if I shall ever know. My
catastrophes there have made me stagnant. You see, everything mattered
so terribly then. I was red-hot iron to be struck to any shape of
the future. I couldn't make you understand--not even by opening up a
whole train of luckless experiences and abasing myself in the telling
of them. Sometime, perhaps, a reckoning will come.

"Why did I have to go South--after we had met that night on the
roof! That is when our spirits really met. But something took me on
and on in another direction. Perhaps I wouldn't have been--I--the
sum of me--without all that has come to pass. I don't know what
the answer is going to be. I won't be a marsh light to you, luring
you along false paths--but I can't bear, Barry, dear"--her voice
broke--"to have you desert me altogether. Go on holding me in your
thoughts!" she entreated with a little sob.

The sight of his bowed shoulders and hopeless face overwhelmed
her. Atlas crushed under his load, struggling tragically against
destruction.

"I'll do anything to save you, Barry!" she cried, clinging wildly to
him. "You mustn't drop down. Something is going to happen to you. Some
one is going to help you out!"

After he had left her at the Reredos' gate, the universe seemed to
have widened fatefully between them, leaving her alone--all alone,
in fearsome areas of space. She crept up the stairs to her room. But
not even the medicine brought her any sleep that night; never had her
being been so hideously disturbed. Isabel had promised mysteriously
tremendous things, for the fruition of which she had been ordered
out of the way. Everybody was ordering her out of the way. Out of the
vague plots that seemed everywhere about her, but one thing emerged,
but one thing counted--the possibility of a turn in Barry's fortune.

If the Islands should now become independent before they were prepared,
almost anything might come to pass. There was a leaven in men's
thoughts, Barry had said, that was bound to turn things frightfully
about. Humanity was urging on to the pass where it would accept the
most portentous challenges of fate: the old structure of its existence,
handed down through the ages, would no longer answer for the framework
of men's lives. Dissatisfied with the ancient edifice, it would
overthrow the world, and rear a new. "A new heaven and a new earth,
my dear, for these blind human bats is on the way," Barry was wont
to declare. Barry's enthusiastic fancy was fired by this magnificent
mood, which he claimed to discern all over the earth. There would
be an explosion, of course, to blow away a lot of mediæval rot--and
there would be loss of life: to get the message of the stars, one had
to bleed. They could have his life--oh, yes, a dozen of them. He had
flung away a dozen impossible lives with an indifferent Olympian wave.

Which all went to prove to Julie's mind that Isabel's speculations
might not prove so startling, after all. Well, if through the
instrument of Isabel's uncertain hands, his dream could be saved,
nobody at all must stand in the way--certainly not a mere Julie with
her knotted web of life. But how was one to make sure of the vivid,
veiled Isabel?

At dawn, Julie rose, and dressed feverishly. She summoned a carromata,
and set out in an agitation of anxieties for Santa Ana. Mrs. Ashby
had told her to seek her out when she was in trouble. Everybody was
in trouble now; not one in these stressful times knew where to turn;
Julie herself, least of all. Mrs. Ashby had managed to convey to her
the intimation of a certain exceptional strength, which she now felt
a desire to draw upon for extrication from her difficulties.

The Ashbys inhabited--that being a term for the state of life which
they shared under the same roof with a community of other people--a
large Spanish house not far from the river. The surrounding fields,
enriched by the stream, looked in the distance like the work of an
impressionistic artist rather than of an orderly nature. The house
stood alone, sunk in the lush depths of the rice fields, where workers
picturesquely clad in red in a seemingly jocose attempt to terrorize
the birds, were cutting the young rice to the music of a rough guitar
plied by a recumbent artist under a huge umbrella. The house itself,
painted green, jutted out of the surroundings, of a piece with them.

The institution was called the Free School of Practical Arts--the
words "free" and "arts" making a direct appeal to the native, whose
graceful inclination of mind construes freedom as leisure, and Art
as a casual expression of leisure.

The principal instruction was concerned with the habits of civilized
living and thinking. The male aspirants were taught to design
furniture and join it, to care properly for the universally abused
domestic animals, to farm, to tailor their own garments, to construct
simple nipa houses, and to practice sanitation. The girls and women
were taught to manipulate the native stove to better and more varied
methods of cooking, to do sewing, and to make fine embroidery--from
which industry, as well as from the bureau of domestic employment in
connection with which house servants were trained, was derived some
revenue. The care and feeding of infants, whose mortality in these
parts was startling, had also an important place in their instruction.

As Julie entered, she was struck by the happy and trustful atmosphere
of the place. Mr. Ashby's spectacled eyes lifted to her from the
planing of some boards. A flock of keen, merry-eyed boys, let loose
from concentration, burst argumentatively into English about the work
in hand. Just at the present moment back in the city, her own former
pupils, Julie well knew, were attempting to explain to Clarino--who
had sat up till midnight to discover it--the difference between the
reflexive and the passive verb forms.

Mr. Ashby led her on till they discovered Mrs. Ashby engaged, with
that air of glowing serenity, which had at the first caught Julie's
eyes, in her own peculiar bright activities.

Mrs. Ashby looked at her soberly. Something in the girl's appearance
held her thoughtful attention.

"I have come to see you--as you asked me to do," Julie told her.

She led the girl to a sunny sala overlooking the tinkling
fields. Julie, as she followed, was thinking that since Father Hull
had found in this woman a strength to die by, she might, in these
evil times, disclose a strength for living. She had pulled herself out
of very dark places. People who could so marvelously help themselves
must possess force for other lives.

As they sat down, Julie exclaimed: "You see, I am unhappy! And I have a
notion that I may be ill. Last night I scarcely slept at all. Something
in me is wrong, and certainly everything outside of me is. Things are
so black! Oh! What is to happen to all these people who have worked,
and hoped? I have worked and hoped too, but it hasn't counted--nothing
counts; I am very nearly sure of that. I've lost my position--though I
haven't told anybody that I was thrown out--because of Nahal. It was a
cut to the heart," she brooded. "Then--I am working for an odious man.

"And Barry," she went on restlessly. "What is to happen to him? I've
never seen him down before. It frightens me. Are we all going down
under some avalanche? Some of us have no place else to go. I don't
understand--but that's my eternal, foolish cry. I've blistered my soul
praying about everything. I thought you would understand. Oh! You
must, for I have come to you for light. You are not blind, you are
not floundering; you are safe and sure. What is it that makes your
life so strong?"

"Tell me," Mrs. Ashby said, bending toward her, "what you prayed for."

"For Barry's safety through the world!" Julie replied simply.

"And for nothing else?"

Julie started a trifle. "Well, for a number of things--at different
times."

Mrs. Ashby reflected a moment. "I used to pray when our money was
getting short that more would come so that we might buy a fresh
bottle."

Julie gave a shiver of repugnance.

"We were both, weren't we, praying at cross-purposes?"

Julie frowned slightly. "What I want to know is why I am rolling
always to disaster; why I can't call a halt--why I can't see clearly?"

"Do you know how hopeless I was--Dick and I, drowning together, in
this oriental maelstrom? We expected to finish in one of the hells of
the East. We knew that time was fast overtaking us. And there would
come to me, when I awoke sober in the night with the whole universe
clutching at my throat, the terror of those black pits.

"Many people tried to help us. I recall their futile efforts wafting
across our heedless lives. Then there came across our path the Little
Gray Woman, as we call her. I don't know what she was doing away over
here. She said she was just a joyous old traveler of the world. She
was not actually different from anyone else, you must understand, but
she found us blind things in her path calling out from the highways
for sight. It would be difficult to make you understand just how she
came to help us break the bondage of our flesh."

Mrs. Ashby paused thoughtfully, then went on. "You remember how,
in divine contempt, He picked up clay and, mixing it with spittle,
laid the bandage of the earth across the eyes of those who all their
lives had understood in terms of clay--and tearing it away, revealed
to them the miracle of sight. So it came to us. We were summoned,
poor Lazaruses, from our tombs, into the day."

Mrs. Ashby lowered her head. "This is a strange language to you, and
these are not revelations for a laughing world, but for those who are
going out in darkness--for men stricken in agony on the battlefield,
for all who like you are in the throes of terror and destruction. These
truths are the springs outside your reach across the thirsty desert.

"When you come at last upon the light, the grave-clothes the mind
has worn so long drop away; the false garment man has spread across
the face of things dissolves, and you find that you are not in the
world for a day, but that you are in the universe forever.

"Oh! If you only knew it, you could walk free through the earth,
fearing nothing. When I found that I was not thonged by crucified feet
to an inexorable world, that the world was only a snowdrop on the
face of the eternal, a mood of the universe; and that I was greater
than all of it, could shape it with my will, touch the widest reaches
with my thought--that of all creation, God and my kind alone could
will--then the light of Paul broke!

"The light of Paul, Julie! A golden light, beating on the soul,
revealing its far country, the kingdoms of the unseen whose invisible
marvels can be brought to our own threshold.

"It was in the knowledge that it was not death he was facing, but a
new direction in God's areas, that Father Hull passed out."

"Why did he die?" the girl asked abruptly. "I felt queerly to blame
for being so weak that I couldn't do anything. Doctors have told
me that they have had the same feeling, even when they have exerted
themselves to the utmost."

"Ah! There you are touching upon the kingdoms of the unseen. All
their powers can be brought to our threshold," she repeated, "as
Franklin brought the lightning out of the blank sky. We don't know
half the forces that move through the universe. Another generation
will understand. We are but poor jugglers tossing glass balls, when
we might be moving stars."

"But--you tried," the girl stammered.

Mrs. Ashby cast upon her a new look. "You saw that!" She brooded in
silence for some time. At last she said: "We are in mystery still. It
will take a long time. He did not understand, nor did I--enough. You
have to be very strong for that!"

The girl rose. "Alas! I am used to things as they seem. I see the
shapes and the obstacles of the world very plainly. I am traveling a
longer road than to Damascus, and I don't see the light. But I shall
always remember what you have said to-day.

"I can only grasp at the tail of your ideas; but that one
thought--that I am not of the world, but of the universe--that is
sweet and splendid. It carries me on wings into regions I've never
dreamed about. To be timeless, spaceless, to wear a garment of the
Indestructible, and to share its miracles!

"I was sick of the pettiness of this little earth, and hideously
afraid of the universe; afraid of its sinister unexpectedness, its
soullessness towards the microcosm Me, and its imminent threat to
break me so that I never could be put together again. You have made
it all seem different--and wonderful. Just as if I had found that
there were fairies again in the world, and that I was one of them,
instead of a trampled little atom not worth bothering about."

Julie went away shining in the new mood; but as she moved back into
the material, exotic world, she felt her glorious immunity wearing
away, and herself forced to battle to keep her conviction against
the old calamitous universe with its desperately insoluble problems.



CHAPTER XXII


On her way home Julie happened to pass her former school. The old
crone to whom she still came for medicine was standing outside the
stall. The girl stopped to speak to her.

The old creature passed her brown bones of fingers over her uncanny
face and, staring into the face of the sun, began to mutter strangely
again about the search for the Ark. A fantastic being, the girl
thought, trudging over the earth after a chimera.

Julie told her that the medicine drove the pain away, but that, because
of the heat, perhaps, she could not eat or sleep well, and that there
came to her the strangest dreams in the world. In them the earth
became transparent--she could see clearly through it. She could see
people grow, bit by bit, under her eyes; and the forest, by some deep
instinct, knew her, and the flowers laughed and cried like children.

The old woman said that all this was true; that in the old days when
she lived in the splendors of the world the jungle used to be very
hostile to her and would tear at her with its teeth and sprinkle her
with its poisons and set its reptiles against her; but now that she had
made friends with it she could go through the heart of it and never
be hurt. She described how she plucked her herbs, male and female
in equal proportion, out of jungles where no man's foot had touched,
when the benign forces of the air preponderated over the malign.

Julie said that the body was a stupid abiding place after these dreams,
which put upon her soul marvelous new moods, like a moon forever at
the full.

The old woman clutched at the wheel of the carromata and stared
at her with unfathomable eyes. "Why did you not come with me when
I asked you?" she entreated. "You and I could have freed ourselves
from the wickedness of the earth, which is a heavy black bundle tied
to the back of mortals. We would have searched for the lost Covenant
between God and Man."

For an instant a weird vision rose before the girl of the places those
footsteps would lead to, down dirty by-ways of the East, catching
one's food where one could, brushing skirts with lepers and thieves,
in hazes of furnace heat. Thank heaven, not all the incarnations of
the East could bring her to a thing like that! And yet for an instant
the preposterous invitation had sent an odd thrill through her. This
nondescript old woman had touched her soul.

She smiled sadly, and shook her head, and the witch, dropping back
from the wheel, moved away, muttering, "Adios!"

And that was the last of her that Julie ever saw.

A few days later, she returned this way from the Señor's, to obtain a
fresh supply of medicine. Only one pellet lay in the box at home. But
from the shack opposite the school, the old woman had disappeared,
without leaving a sign behind her. Because of the manner of her going,
the Stall-keeper was positive that she would never come back.

In frightened dismay, Julie inquired of Mariana and Clarino, both of
whom had secretly bought amulets of the old woman--Mariana, to enable
herself to withstand the attraction of an unusually eligible lover;
and Clarino, to become the principal of a school, to which honor he
fearfully aspired. But neither knew anything about her: she was a
wandering witch, no doubt, who had perhaps gone away on a broomstick
into the sky.

It was through Delphine she received the only light she ever had on
the old woman's going. Disturbed over her disappearance from school,
Delphine had sought her out at her quarters. She explained to him
that she had been ill, and mentioned that she had not been able to
procure any more of a medicine which had brought her great relief,
and which she had been in the habit of buying from an old charm-woman
near the school, who had mysteriously disappeared.

"Dicky-Dicky sent her away!" Delphine exclaimed excitedly. "I saw him
come out suddenly upon her, a few squares from the school, and tell
her over and over to go away--that danger threatened several people
if she were seen around any more."

What did the dwarf mean? Delphine did not know, he did not ask
Dicky-Dicky questions because he got severely slapped on the head
for such efforts.

Gone, taking her secret off with her! That was the way with these
people--always under your feet, until some day, at some mysterious
signal, they took themselves finally off! Julie thought with terror
of all that lay ahead of her, to face unrelieved--the relentless
hot season, her perilous hold on a disorganizing community, her bad
health. With the aid of the medicine, she had managed to endure and
to go unsteadily on, but the thought of trying to continue without
it caused her limbs to grow cold. There was not fire nor force
enough in her to fight the rest of the way. To her other trials it
was impossible to add ceaseless and grilling pain. In a few weeks
she might have to go out of this country--and the passage money was
nowhere in sight. Something might yet happen to turn her fate. Until
then she must find a way to get the medicine.

Old Kantz, the chemist on Calle Alean, had been in the East for forty
years. He would be bound to know what the medicine was and to be able
perhaps to get more of it. Julie preferred him to Señor Reredo whose
shop was not far distant. So when Señor Sansillo went to Los Baños
on business she seized the half holiday to go and see Kantz.

As she entered the Botica a native clerk slumbrously uprose behind
the counter. It was a hot day. Nobody was about in it but tired,
driven Americans who take account of neither day nor night. Julie
made clear to him, however, that she must see Kantz at once.

The old chemist was finishing his siesta upstairs, but as he was
accustomed to act as an emergency doctor to his neighborhood he came
down, clad in white trousers and an undershirt that covered his fat
person like his skin. This attire was not really unconventional in
a land where attire might follow almost any persuasion of the mind.

He adjusted his huge lenses and nodded professionally to the
girl. Julie, wondering at her own precipitancy and unable to set forth
any explanation of it to Kantz, began in an uncertain voice. "I have
a medicine here--that I have been taking for some time--for very bad
head-aches. I can't get any more of it and I want to see if you can."

"What is it then?" He poked the pellet with a fat finger.

"I--don't know!" she stammered uneasily. It seemed so foolish a reply
to make in the face of this array of bottles confronting her like so
many incontrovertible facts and to Kantz who looked like the biggest
bottle and the most absolute fact of all.

"Where did you get it?"

Unable to escape, Julie replied in a lowered voice, "It was given me
by--a--a herb woman who had helped people I know--of. She has gone
away. I can't find her. I need the medicine"--with rising spirit and
an attempt at dignity--"it's a native specific."

"Wait, I will try and analyze it." He turned into his tiny laboratory,
the pellet, the last one, stuck perilously on his moist thumb.

Julie sat down and studied respectfully the irrefutable bottles. The
clerk mixed himself a surreptitious drink behind the counter, and
fell into gentle extinction.

Finally Kantz's great shape moved in, and Julie, glancing up, found
him looking at her very hard--stare which even before he opened his
mouth, threw every cell in her into turmoil.

"Ach! I have lived in the East for forty years, and do you think I
do not know all the tricks of your kind?"

The girl tried to be sure that she was not confronting a maniac--but
he was so monstrously calm. "What do you mean?" she quavered in fright.

"That you will not get any more of that medicine, here or in any
other drug store unless the keeper wishes to go to Bilibid." [1]

He employed a threatening, familiar tone. Once she had heard a man
speak to a drunkard like that.

"What is the stuff?" she cried wildly. "Is it poison? Tell me at once."

He turned to his bottles. "These dope fiends!" he muttered exasperated,
to them.

"Dope fiends!" the girl repeated stupidly. "A drug! Oh, don't tell me,"
she cried agonizedly, "--it's--"

"Since the new laws, you will find opium impossible to get. So I tell
them all--and they go crazy!"

Julie stared with wildly dilated eyes, her bloodless lips parted as if
to protest. Then she fell against the counter. There was a dead hush
in the deserted place. Not even a fly buzzed through the scorching
silence. Julie tried to lift her paralyzed arms to ward something
off. She was dreaming. She had taken too much medicine. Things like
this didn't happen!

But there, blistering her, was the chemist's cynical gaze. Day by
day she had been moving towards this wall--a blind dupe. She had had
a sunstroke on Adams's grave, and an old woman had offered her some
medicine for it, and out of this simple sequence destruction had
appeared. The avalanche of final ruin swept over the girl's fevered
mind. She had been dragged down--clear down. The slow but inevitable
juggernaut of the East had pulled her under at last, "grist for the
mill--you and I," Adams had said long ago. Out of a clear sky had
fallen this final, cruel joke.

"What am I to do?" The piteous question seemed, to fall on rather
than be directed to the chemist.

"Why then did you begin?"

She repeated her story lamely, disjointedly and in tears, conscious
of its futility--Kantz was so fatally incredulous.

"After a time," he told the bottles, "they cannot tell the truth."

The girl looked at him with terrible despair.

"You do not believe me--nobody will believe me. Oh!" she caught at her
throat and stared at him with the eyes of a caged animal. She clutched
at his arms in frantic pleading. "You are as good as a doctor. Give
me something that will cure me. I would offer you a lot of money, but
I haven't any. I will not go on always wanting that horrible stuff!"

"It is a long hunger. Sometimes it lasts as long as life."

"I didn't mean to get into it--that must count. Help me! I am
afraid. You must believe me--I am not a liar! There is a cure for
everything--everything," she cried wildly. "Mrs. Ashby said so--Oh!"

Her head dropped on the counter and she wept uncontrollably.

The chemist stared down at her uncomfortably. "Just stop!" he
said. "There is no other way."

Julie lifted herself up with a dizzy lurch and plunged out of
the botica. A strange being in her form walked the streets, which
had become a phantasmagoria of horror. Black shapes of doom seemed
haunting the avenues of life--she, the blackest shape of all, groping
through under-hells for light. She belonged now to the East forever
and forever. It had set its stamp of hopelessness upon her. She moved
along staring with desperation and repugnance at this dark race with
whose fate she had become allied.

She walked without direction, on and on, not knowing where she
was going, goaded by an immeasurable despair. She wandered half way
across the city, hatless, the sun scorching her head; what goal could
there ever be again? All their lives even the few cured struggled,
Kantz had said. A cursed pilgrimage the world, to these Wandering
Jews of souls! And she wasn't made for struggle. For a fearful fight
like this in which she had only one small, slim chance--she knew in
her soul she had not the force. She might struggle a little while,
but it was not in her being to combat to the end. It was easier to
die--but one didn't die, that was the worst.

She stood still on a street corner staring blankly about her. There
was no use in going on. There was nothing ahead ever, however far
she went. She stood there dully and thought of one thing, the flaky
thing that had hung to Kantz's careless finger. Only that would
lift a little while this madness of sun, and pain and strangling
despair. As she gazed tormentedly about her, her mind suddenly made
clear the significance of her surroundings. All this wandering had
been a subconscious hunt upon which some dim urgent sense had been
leading her--to the one spot where there was a chance of getting what
she desired. Chinamen always had it.

The girl paused horror-struck. But against the visions she desperately
set up, visions of her youth's high quest, of a splendid new Empire
of Mankind--of a Prince of the East, a throbbing insistence that
had never been denied arose and claimed every atom of her being and
wiped out every thought. Dim, distant visions they were now. Not one
of them could help--or save her. The Hunger consumed every fiber.

Yet the anguish, the urge of her memories assailed her all the
while--visions that had stirred her spirit terribly accused; voices,
very dear voices pleaded with her wretched soul.

Once that lane had been for her the evilest channel in which she had
seen life move. Now her torment swept her onward into its currents. She
must get a little--secretly--ever so little, to help her through
the woods.

She moved like a sleep-walker, a glazed look on her haunted face, among
the little stalls, muttering what she wanted under her breath. Nobody
must see her on such an errand in such an unspeakable place. The yellow
half-shaven heads leered at her like grinning skulls, and pretended
not to know what she wanted. They were uncannily wily, exercising
their super-evil intuitions. The laws were very strict. They must
make sure of her.

She feared them terribly. The old shadow, like the hangman's cap,
pressed down over her mind as it had done before. She knew what
a welter of evil desires her youthful body evoked up and down the
street--but she had forgotten her body, everything but this goading
of the furies.

She pursued her way among the stalls. It was here and they should
not outwit her. The yellowed skulls thrust themselves upon her,
their fishy eyes intimating all the wickedness in the world. At one
shop the Chinaman appeared to understand. She had put a paper bill
upon the counter. He lifted the board that barricaded him behind the
counter, and beckoned her to follow. The rear of the shop was black
and musty. The Chinaman opened a trap door, and ducked down under the
ground. He emerged in a moment with a small package which he held out
to her. Julie started forward to get it. The creature's arm swung out
and clutched her. She screamed, but one of the yellow paws dropped
over her mouth. Her whole life seemed to go out of her in a final wave
of fright. She knew what would happen to her down in that black cavern.

She wrestled against him. He put his hand upon her throat. She could
feel to her spine the chill of those yellow fingers compressing her
throbbing breath. As she fought away from him, the jade medallion
jerked out of her dress. She could feel it on her bosom dancing about
wildly. The hold on her throat relaxed. The creature had caught at the
amulet with one hand. The girl took wild advantage of his distraction
to wrench herself out of his grasp. Diving under the counter she hurled
herself into the open street. Nobody was following her, but she fled,
with a sobbing cry, through the dust down the center of the street,
the denizens of the stalls thrusting out their heads like cobras to
stare after her.

She continued to run even after she had gotten into safe districts, on
and on like a mad thing. Natives stopped to stare at the white woman
run amuck. In her tumult of brain she saw but one vision. Down under
the floor of this city, where its black beating heart lay filled with
the monstrous passions of men, where a motley evil crew from all the
coasts of the East trafficked in human life and flesh, down there she
was fated to sink. She had seen her end written on every one of those
opium-devastated skulls. Even now she would have been hurled to a rung
below hell if the Chinese charm had not diverted her assailant. She
had not been saved by her own will nor yet even by an oriental fetish,
but by the emblem of one man's love. She remembered the things she
had swept aside to go into that horrible street. Nothing had weighed
in the madness of the moment--a moment of hideous impulse that had
twisted in devastation every fiber of her being and left it a wrecked
thing whose roots a tornado had splintered.

"They that go down to dust!" ran in her fevered brain.

She hurried along, her body shivering, though it was a hot
day. Suddenly she saw she was nearing her objective, and stopped to
run her feverish, trembling fingers through her pale hair. As she
stood in front of Señor Reredo's drug store her heart beat so loudly
she feared that he might suspect what was in it.

The Botica, after the native fashion, was broadly open. No barrier must
interpose between the native and his passion for the street. The Señor,
his slim legs, terminated by red slippered feet, curled around the
rungs of a high chair, was reading El Progresso, a native organ. He
rose when he saw Julie and asked how he could serve her.

She wanted some more of that lotion for tan that he had put up for
her. It was more efficacious than anything else she had ever used. She
complimented him upon his ability as a chemist; if he should go
into business in Spain that ability would be recognized. The Señor,
gratified, admitted that here among the "Indianos" was no sphere
for a man's brains. They expanded into a discussion of different
panaceas. Julie suddenly put her package down on the counter and
soberly regarded him.

"Señor, my friend Barry says that an epidemic of cholera is breaking
out in this city. He says it is spreading like wildfire and that it
will be the worst plague, perhaps, that the Islands have known."

"The plague we have with us always," the Señor replied. "The Americans
take it too seriously."

"It rages in the provinces and it has come heavily to many districts
here. Barry is greatly worried. He warned me vehemently--and I am
afraid. The water, the food, every mouthful, every swallow means
danger. More than anything conceivable I fear the Peste. One suffers
horribly and cannot die at once. If one could carry always with one
something to bring death quickly! I had a friend once who traveled
much on railroads where one is in danger of terrible accidents. Once
he was buried under the wreckage of a coach and there came an awful
time to him, when he feared they would not get him out. After that
he carried tied around his neck always a little sack--three grains
of morphine--and he was insured. If you would give me the means--to
go--quickly in case I were hopelessly stricken, I would not fear
any more."

The Señor stared disquietedly at the counter. "Perhaps, I should have
left sooner, I have many children!"

"A teacher who came over on the boat with me has just died of
it!" Julie shivered.

"I will tell Sofia!" he muttered, "that it is just as well to go at
once. Señor Barry knows."

"But I must stay, Señor," the girl pleaded, "in this terror I have
no place to go."

He meditated. "Well, if it makes you feel safe!" He turned to his
drawers. "Three grains! Yes," he reflected, "that should be right."

The girl picked up the little box nervously. "Thank you, Señor,"
she said.



CHAPTER XXIII


Julie walked back into her room, and stared heavily about this shell
of her old existence where day by day the rope had been tightening
inexorably around her throat. The room looked like a place she had
never seen.

On the bed, suggesting her own spent mortal frame stretched helplessly
prostrate, lay a worn evening gown. It brought the room back to
familiar proportions. The recollection swept over her that to-night
Isabel was going to have a party, and that she had put the dress there
this morning--a time which seemed now to have no connection with her
existence--to determine whether it could be made to hold together for
this one night. Isabel had sent her a note, begging her to forget their
last meeting and to come to the party. Nothing, of course, could change
that explosion of hatred. Yet this morning she had decided to go.

She stared out at her Asian garden. She seemed to see a quick-stepping
figure moving down there among the sighing trees. She turned away
wretchedly. That was over forever. Soon, when the Reredos went away,
the forsaken garden would revert to the jungle. Nobody would remember
it. Yes, her soul would find a way to come to this spot of beauty,
where the most splendid visions of her life had been evoked.

She began to gather up her belongings. They made just one
trunkful,--everything that, after nearly twenty-one years of sojourn
on the planet, she owned. She wondered if there were not something very
wrong with a person who could not accumulate more than that after such
a long time. The Señor had advanced her a week's salary, which must be
returned. She counted the money out of her purse, and laid it on the
table. Then she fumbled in her trunk for her letters. The first one she
came upon was the notification of dismissal from the Department. The
next, Adams's letter, still crying forth its bitter loneliness.

Then she sat down and wrote a letter to her uncle; and here at last
her dulled heart was able to bleed. She had tried very, very hard,
she told him. She was terribly sorry that things had turned out as
they had. But the East was like the Bank of Monte Carlo--with the
odds always against you. Of that final catastrophe that had come to
wipe out her last chance, she found it impossible to speak. To his
Western consciousness away off there, on the other side of the world,
in a secure and ordered scheme of life, such monstrous happenings would
be inconceivable. A pitiful, incoherent document, that accounted for
nothing really, splashed all over with Julie's tears.

She aroused herself feverishly, and examined the dress. The anger
of that last meeting with Isabel stood out forcibly before her
mind. Isabel hated her because of Barry. And Isabel did not hate
fruitlessly. All her emotions found vital expression.

Something kept welling up from the depths of the girl's
sub-consciousness--something that was like a wavering clew. Quite
without reason, a face rose before her vision--a face looking up
stealthily above Isabel's staircase. It turned, and revealed--the face
of the old medicine crone! Not till this moment had memory welded
these two associations. The old crone had some identification with
Isabel. In her bent shadowy shape, Isabel's hatred took form. Isabel
had wanted terribly to get her out of the way. She had not dared to
kill her, but she had selected a method of elimination too subtle for
its agency to be traced. And Dicky-Dicky, the Dwarf, who had had a
place in his heart that was called Nahal, had known, and because of
it had frightened the Old Woman away, and attempted to save her--too
late. Yes, it was clear enough now.

Chad and Rosalie had been her accomplices, no doubt. But though
Chad had been hostile, he had been openly so. Julie was reluctant
to accuse him of any complicity in so Oriental a plot as that Isabel
had woven. But against the whole white race, Rosalie would have lent
herself as an instrument of destruction. Julie could see how Isabel
would work upon the fury of her jealousy, set up before it everything
American that Rosalie might believe was responsible for the abstraction
of her husband's love.

Soon, they had planned, she would be nothing at all but a bundle of
flesh, with an appetite--a thing that no human passions could ever
reclaim. And when she was wiped out--the shame and horror of her--Barry
would be elevated to the place that Isabel was preparing for him. Julie
remembered the talk of a paradise. She began to cry again.

She had not seen Barry--for an eternity! She must see him--if only
to attempt to make clear to him the things that were in her soul. In
the urgency of this desire, everything else was swallowed up. After
all there was nothing more that Isabel could do to her. She would go
to the party.

While dressing, she studied herself in the glass. An image rose before
her--the image of herself that had confronted her on that distant,
transported day on the other side of the world, the day she had
stepped into life and had offered herself with such magnificence to
its designs. Who was to blame? If the Nahalites had had the grace of
God--if Isabel--the East--had not hunted her down!

As she was about to leave the room, she turned back, and laid on
the table an envelope with some money in it, addressed to Señora
Reredo. She picked up her uncle's letter to mail, and the money for
Señor Sansillo, glanced agitatedly around the room for an instant,
and hurried out of the house.

Señor Sansillo was upstairs when she reached his house, but he
came down immediately when he heard who it was that wished to see
him. Julie, pale and tense, stood waiting for him in the doorway of
his office.

"I've come to tell you that I shall not be here any more!" she said.

He gave a start. "But why?" he asked.

"Because," the girl flung out, "I am weary of earning my living
listening to questionable stories, and having horrible jewelry thrust
on me. Here is the money you advanced. Thank you!" She held a roll
of bills out to him.

An angry flush swept over his face. "You are suddenly independent,
Señorita Dreschell?" he satirically exclaimed.

"Yes, my independence came suddenly to me!" she agreed, "therefore
I shall never come again."

He darkened volcanically. "You must not--do that!" he commanded,
in a shaken voice.

He did not attempt to speak again for a moment, but broodingly studied
her face as if to find the key to his new behavior. He must have come
to realize the unalterable nature of this new purpose, for he said in
tones so strangely humble the girl could scarcely recognize them as
utterance of his: "If I promise that I will do these things no more,
will you stay?"

She shook her head.

"I beg of you to remain!" he insisted in a low voice. "I will ask
only that you sit at that window where you have always sat--only that,
no more."

She was startled to perceive that tears of emotion had gathered in
his eyes. Suddenly he burst into a torrent of speech, as he paced
agitatedly to and fro.

"Do you think then that I have had so much in life?" he demanded
turning round fiercely upon her. "Know then that I have been thwarted
in all that I ever desired! Fifteen years ago I came to these colonies,
penniless, alone. My family had lost everything in Spain. Like many
another Spanish youth, I set out with hopes that towered to the skies,
for I was young and full of hope. El Dorado would bring me my fortune,
I believed, just as you believed it would bring you yours.

"But I found myself a stranger without affiliations in a strange
land. My illustrious name counted for nothing in such a country. I
was a lawyer, but there were plenty more of my kind who were woven
into the network of the Blood, you understand. Shall I tell you how
I starved in this land, how my heart ached to breaking because of
it! One way of salvation opened to me, the way of most of my desperate
countrymen. It was a dark way to me, but it opened the closed gates
of the East. I, too, entered this freemasonry of blood. It was smooth
traveling after that, but"--he tore ferociously at his immaculate
waistcoat--"if the years could be swung back, and I could walk these
streets destitute--but free and a youth again--yes, for that. I would
toss Satan my soul!"

He put his hand up to his throat. "You came! I used to dream of one
like you on that old ship, I, a poor lad on the way to the East to
find my fortune: I have tried everything with you, I admit. I was a
devil, as you say--but am I not bound in a web whose threads are as
strong as the tentacles of the devil fish? This place will turn black
as hell after you are gone!"

He paused with hands appealingly outstretched. Another darkened
soul! A feeling of pity swept over the girl. She turned upon him a
commiserative face.

"I am sorry for you. I am sorry for all of us who sought fortune in
the East. We are a pitiable lot, Señor. Drive around the Escolta
any night, and you will see us in our several unhappy stages of
decay. Some of us were not big enough for our task. Oh, I, too,
would have given anything to have succeeded!"

"But what is to become of you?" he cried, in genuine solicitude. "You
are ill. You have no money and without money one cannot live one
instant in this terrible land. Reverse your mad decision, and stay
here. You shall have nothing to fear from me."

Julie shook her head speechlessly. She and her concerns had sunk
into a whirlpool of despair, but there remained the one passionate
satisfaction of being able to sweep her soul clean at last. So much,
much money that she had not earned--the thought of it burned like
fire. She put out her hand. "Good-by, Señor!"

Isabel's house twinkled from a distance with fiery lights. The strains
of the orchestra playing, like a band, loud chords of revel, tore open
the peace of the night. Julie ascended into an atmosphere in which
the note of triumph seemed everywhere proclaimed. Isabel had decorated
the place amazingly with palms and tropical flowers. Dark faces flowed
about in currents of festivity, wearing, Julie thought, an appalling
aspect of victory. Isabel conveyed this impression preëminently. She
appeared to be in the throes of some delirious celebration of soul. It
was as if there blazed forth from her personality the triumph of many
cities and multitudes of islands made glad. She terrified Julie.

All this exultation fell like the weight of doom on the girl's
aching spirit. She herself seemed to represent the living defeat
of her countrymen. Few of them were here to-night. Their absence
made a haunting void in the throng. The charge had gone out of
them, the force: almost as if something had taken God out of the
universe, and left it to stumble on by itself. Her weary mind dwelt
with a great effort for an instant on the tangled threads of their
disappointments. America wished to withdraw from her position in the
East; from all the potentialities of her presence there. The Eastern
problem was not, she held, her responsibility. Perhaps the corner of it
she had lifted appalled her. Perhaps she had attempted a too ambitious
job. No group of men--not even the dauntless ones who had grappled with
the tremendous difficulties here--could make over the East in a few
short experimental years. At any rate, after successive agitations,
the country, divided on the question of colonial possessions, seemed
now to have come to the point of relinquishment; and the unclosed
scaffoldings of the attempted structure of enlightened government in
the East would be left to rot before the gaze of the Orient. Julie
knew that that was what her countrymen hated--not the going, but the
failure left behind, the judgment pronounced upon them in the courts
of the world.

Julie was watching with every nerve for Barry. Once more to have
the old fire thrown over her. But after all this fearful waiting,
what would there be to say? Even if she poured forth the tale of her
wholly wretched situation, there was nothing ever, ever, that he could
do. If she had been before unfit for him, she was now utterly removed
from him. Certainly he could not move through life with such a thing
as it was fated she should become dragging around his neck. They had
been too near to each other for her to inflict upon him a brutality
like that. Fright at this picture of ruin for them both turned her
faint. Perhaps after all, she had better not wait.

Chad passed, his face pale and abstracted. He nodded at the spot
where Julie stood rooted. She gazed after him with a piteous
absence of ill-will. His had been such a tiny contributory force
to the avalanche. She forced herself to move on towards Isabel,
who intolerably radiant and shining, wavered across her path. Isabel
came down abruptly out of her glorified mood, and searched the girl's
broken and disintegrated being with a passionately curious gaze.

Julie knew that Isabel was waiting for the signal of complete
capitulation, and she struggled with all her force to withhold the
surrendering sign. As she looked on the triumph and terror of this
woman, one of the dark lusts of this land that had surged all about
her heretofore without touching her, suddenly took possession of
her. She wanted to strike Isabel, to beat her out of existence. She
had borne enough in this black land, and this woman was not only her
enemy, but her destroyer--the very symbol of the country which had
twisted and thwarted and wholly wrecked her life. She stumbled toward
Isabel, whose purple eyes must have fathomed some mad intent, for she
stepped warily back till the crowd interposed between them. Julie's
impulse failed--a poor avenging instrument she. As she wheeled away,
she saw Isabel's countenance assume an expression as if some godly
satisfaction had been handed down to her.

Her desperate eyes still searching in every direction, Julie rambled
unsteadily on. Everything looked strange, as if she had never belonged
to the pageant of human passions. Oh! To be back again in the rich
moving of human passions!

She came upon a group talking in hushed tones. The ejaculations of
dismay sounded an odd note in this hard festal blare. Major Holborne
was knitting his brows; Chad's face wore a queer arrested look;
a woman uttered a soft cry.

"When did you hear it?" somebody asked.

"This evening, while people were on the Luneta. The police telephoned
me to get her husband. He wouldn't go--so I went," Holborne said.

"What has happened?" Julie demanded.

Nobody replied at once, then Chad said heavily: "Leah Chamberlain threw
herself out of a window of the Oriente--and dashed out her brains."

"Ah!" The girl was still for a moment. "But why?" she demanded.

The men said nothing. Mrs. Burke, a little English woman drew her
aside. "It's never safe to ask why. Locroft was called home, he had
come into the title; and--well, I suppose it was all impossible!"

Another impasse! Leah, the will-o'-the-wisp--who, every one had said,
had never had a serious feeling in her gossamer existence--displaying
at last a supreme, deadly seriousness. It was inevitable that one who
had so completely held her life in her own hands should herself have
destroyed that life. Leah would never consent to live or die except
on her own terms.

Julie glanced up from where she stood frozenly considering Leah's fate,
to behold Barry coming in her direction. His invincibly lifted head
quickened her. Every human thing about him sent a thrill through her
deadened senses--the desert face full of visions, the ardor of life
that was in him. For an instant it seemed as though she were being
brought back into sanity and safety again, as if through his presence
a loop-hole of escape must open up.

But immediately following these sensations there rose before her brain
a vision of a horrible street with bleached faces thrust up out of the
bowels of the earth. Her fingers clutched the spot where the stolen
medallion had hung, the token of his spirit that had intervened between
her and a monstrous fate. The chain remained intact; she thrust it down
in her dress so that he might not notice that the medallion was gone.

"Julie!" he exclaimed coming quickly towards her.

She replied with an articulate sound of joy and terror.

He took both her hands in the joy of meeting and drew her out of
observation to the gallery.

"I've been sick for a sight of you--in a desert abandoned, choked
with sand!" The tone of his voice brought the tears smarting to her
eyes. "I used to have a thousand things in my life--a million--and
now all I've been thinking about is you!"

The blood came back into her face and life into her heart.

"What do I care for the world without you in it? I wouldn't walk the
sick old place without you." His voice broke. "You're still following
some disastrous mirage! Ah, Julie--when our souls have the same dreams
in them--and have beckoned each other across the world!"

He put his arms about her, and kissed her. She burst into agonized
tears and clung to him. "There," he said, "isn't that the miracle!" he
cried in radiant tenderness. "In this moment we've become endowed with
a hundred lives! Henceforth we'll take the rough paths together. China,
Julie, old China--the wonder of it. You and I and Sun Yat Sen, up
and down the plains and highways, touching the gophers into fire!"

"The gophers!" she shuddered away. "Oh! How can you bear to stay
in this brutal place? It hates so bitterly. It takes revenge so
monstrously! It has eaten up our dreams, torn our hopes from us,
and rolled our lives in the dust."

"But the wonder of it, Julie," he argued, with glowing eyes. "The
mystery of it, and the unending struggle beating about you like
wings of the invisible! The battle of light and darkness--God's own
dear battle. The human strain at its utmost, the heights and the
depths! Why, I'd be in it forever. I'd not miss it for anything. I
would keep on tramping in it with a sack at my back."

Julie's teeth bit at her white lips. "And the terror of it," she
cried fiercely; "the cruelty, the evil of it; the plagues that are
even now eating up the city of your hopes--Oh, the death that waits
in all its paths!" She leaned back weakly against a post.

"It's a hard path truly," he conceded. "Many's the time I've starved in
the East, and come close to its bottomless pools. It is only a short
while since, that I thought I was on the high places for good, with
the universe at my back; but I'm down on foot again in the dusty road,
along with the rest of the world. But I never think of those times--for
what cocoon remembers his worm's body? We are going on--to-morrow, or
next day. You haven't seen China. We're refugees, but she'll find us
our place. Nobody that has ever won a foot of the world turned back."

Her white face stared mutely at him for a moment.

"I'm not up to your--golden journeys, Barry," she said painfully,
her lips quivering. "I'd have to be made all over again for that! You
must go alone--or with some one that can help you. But--perhaps you
won't forget me, even if I was such a futile thing. When the sun
sinks on your deserts, call me up out of the mirage, and we'll plan
together--as we used to, the overthrow of the old order of things."

"We'll follow the road together!" he insisted vigorously, "and
sometime, a long while hence on the journey, I'll wake you one morning
with the shout that the Millennium has come; and you will come out,
trailing yourself in morning-glories, to welcome the world at your
gate!"

He drew back aghast at the look in her face.

Somebody back of them spoke Barry's name inquiringly, as if not sure,
in the dim light, that it was he. They turned around, and Isabel came
toward them, amazingly changed.

She had discarded her splendid raiment, and appeared in a short,
diaphanous garment that flared about her like bloody flames. Her
black hair swept like a wind-blown scarf to her firm white heels.

Julie slipped suddenly back into the shadows, while Barry stared at
Isabel in strange silence.

"I'm going to dance!" she announced. "You have often asked to see me,
so come. Ah; to-night I am mad for wings! I have something afterwards
to tell you--something of great importance."

She plucked Barry by the sleeve and drew him on. Barry put out his
hand to draw Julie along with him; but Isabel soon contrived in the
crowd, to separate from him the indeterminedly following girl.

One end of the sala had been thrown into a softly radiant dusk. Under
the streamers of one high lamp, Isabel stood and stretched out her
arms like radii of light. Then in a whirl like a sun tumbling through
the sky, she was in motion. Julie who had wandered up to the wide
crowded circle of onlookers stood feverishly watching. Every movement
of that mad, exultant whirl of limbs was an intolerable stab. Those
feet twinkling like pearls out of the wind of motion looked as though
they might kick down the stars. Julie herself had been one of the
obstacles they had kicked out of their path. Yet she could not take
her eyes away from this dusky sorceress spinning in fire this houri
of terrible loves and hates.

An emotional stir vibrated through the crowd. Eyes exchanged
messages. Julie looked around to find that a young Spaniard had
pressed in next to her and was regarding her with all the ardor of
his eyes. Through the wide open galleries the moonlit vision of an
intoxicating night appeared, and subtle vows seemed to whisper all down
the reaches of the tropical dusk. The young man's glance seemed to say,
"Let us go--and follow the night!"

When the palpitating circle broke, Julie crept away in search of
a small stair-case, which she remembered to have seen when she had
stopped with Isabel. It was quite impossible for her to escape unseen
by the main stair-case.

She came out upon a small gallery somewhere at the remote end of the
house. There were others upon this gallery. Their figures, very near
her, were clearly outlined in the silver tones of the moonlight.

Julie stared hard, then quickly dropped back into the shadow. She
waited stiller than the night itself, for she knew she had stepped
into a critical moment of a life so deeply allied to her own that
her being palpitated to every developing turn of it.

Long before Barry could have done so, Julie divined what was to happen.

The two were standing looking beyond the garden, that seemed to sing
in its creation, to the spires of the city frosted under the rising
moon. Isabel was pointing to it: "How can you bear to give it up?"

Julie, watching, saw the spasm that contracted Barry's tired features.

"I don't see how, exactly, we can help ourselves!" he replied. "I am
not a State, you see, I'm only an individual, very small after all."

"And thus ends the grand scheme to democratize the East."

"It looks that way."

"My poor friend," Isabel commiserated, "who tried to put a rope of sand
around eternity! But no dreams are lost--some time inevitably they take
form. Dreams are the souls of things that are about to happen. If only
we could make these particular ambitions take real shape, you and I!

"Orcullu and I have worked hard, and we are about to win. Arturo,
his brother in Washington, says it is sure. You can see that it will
be so. It is a dizzy moment that is coming our way; we have found
rapacious Eastern enemies not far off, where we expected to find
friends. We must not be swallowed up, just as we become free. An
American protectorate of some sort is at first imperative; we have
the wisdom to comprehend that--and, at the helm, an American--with
the power of that nation back of him--President of the first modern
republic in Asia.

"You are to be the Captain of that coming republic--the greatest honor
the East ever conferred upon a white man. We have decided it--Orcullu
and I--when the hour strikes. Our neighbor Japan will not dare touch
us then. You can go on, and do what you please. Ah, did you think I
would desert you?" she cried.

"Did you not give this land the bottomless devotion of your
heart? Well, then, the land will reward you, as it knows how to reward
all those who truly serve."

Julie fell back abruptly. Though in a measure she had dimly
comprehended something like this, the tremendousness, the reality of
it all overwhelmed her. Barry was to see fulfilled all that he had
wanted in his soul.

And she was wiped out utterly--so consummately had Isabel
contrived. There was something almost justifiable in the way
Isabel--and Fate--had gauged her quality, her triviality, and had
flung her aside. She had a blinding vision of herself as too weak and
purposeless to survive in this cosmos, where one's metal was tested
at every turn. Back there in the old world, she might have muddled
along; but here one must quickly win, or irretrievably lose--step on
or out. Ellis had dropped out, but she had tagged on in a struggle
for which she had in nowise been fitted.

And now, though she hated Isabel impotently, hopelessly, she saw
at last, as almost an inevitable thing, her own brutal removal from
all paths whatsoever. Even if she had not already been damned, she
could not have offered Barry, ever, anything so splendid as Isabel
had achieved. She acknowledged herself completely beaten.

She must get away--as hurriedly as possible. Groping her way back,
she found the small staircase she had started out to seek. In the
garden there was not a soul, just the stillness of impersonal space
closing cruelly around her. The whole tropical world quivered with
a passion of human futility. Pain, panic, despair, swept her on in
a current of darkness.

The old cinder of a gate-keeper held open the gate to let her
out. Gate-keepers, she thought, were fatal people; they were always
opening disastrous portals. As she passed out, she snatched up, with
the instinct for something to cling to, a blood-red hybiscus flower.

She stood and looked about her in hopeless uncertainty of soul,
debating which direction of the compass she should choose. A carromata
came drowsing along the street. The horse came to a halt before the
gate. The driver insinuated a somnolent head in her direction, but
without any real expectation in his manner.

Julie stared hard at the thing. There was one thing about a
carromata--it could keep on going. She climbed into the vehicle to
the cochero, who wanted to know where he should take the Señorita;
she replied, "Just drive!"

Familiar with the city's nocturnal habits, he nodded. If this
woman wished to ride in the night with her own soul, it was her own
concern. To see nothing, say nothing, and to keep on--that was the
code of the Manila Jehu.

Horse and driver moved in slumber through the moonlight. The city
passed by all silvered, like one of God's cities up in the skies. It
was perfectly still, as if there were no mortals in it any more.

Pedro, the cochero, drove semi-consciously over the endless bridges,
and streets--a great distance, clear to the moon, it seemed. He and
Disgusto, his horse, in their perpetual slow movement had gone several
times round the earth to be sure, but never had they gone so far in
one journey in the dead of the night, when the spirits were out.

Once he had looked round to see what his fare was doing, and had
discovered her looking very hard at something she held in the palm
of her hand. The other hand, he had noticed, grasped the fading
flower. She did not see him. She saw nothing at all. Her face wore a
strange, fixed look. It was not within Pedro's powers to fathom the
things that concentrated look contained. They had gone on roaming. Once
or twice into his inconsecutive dreaming a soft sound had broken, but
his subconsciousness had virtuously reminded itself of the cochero's
code, to mind one's, own concerns.

At last he sprang up out of his seat with a cry. Something had fallen
heavily against his sleeping back. Pedro was used to almost all the
startling developments of a vagabond's career. He could have told
strange tales of fares, but never before had one fallen dead in his
vehicle. He knew at once what had happened. For a couple of hours,
Disgusto had been carrying a dead fare over the city. Strange journey,
indeed!

Pedro was deeply perturbed. He did not at all want the police to get
after him, but he did urgently want to see what riches the lady had
had upon her when she died. He directed Disgusto to a dark corner of
the street, fastened up the rubber rain shield of the carromata, which
concealed the body very well, and also his investigating activities.

The woman had a face like a cold star. There were moments when, his eye
falling upon it, Pedro found it hard to prosecute his search. But she
had rich raiment, and a gold ring with a fine stone in it on the finger
of the hand from which hung downwards the red flower. Wasn't that like
a woman, Pedro thought, to drop dead with a flower in her hand? God had
stricken her right in this vehicle. Undoubtedly a very wicked woman,
though beautiful! Too bad one couldn't sell a creature as lovely as
this. Such splendid beings seldom rode in Pedro's cart. He passed his
dark paws over the body to see if there were anything more precious to
bring to light, and discovered the gold chain. This delighted him and
whetted his appetite for gain. He searched the carromata absorbedly,
and unearthed out of the corner of the seat a small round box such as
is used for medicine. It contained a number of small silver coins. His
fare! He emptied it greedily out into his palm, counted the silver
with devotion and slipped it into the pocket of his frayed cotton
trousers. Then he smelled speculatively the inside of the box, turning
it in every direction. His fare's indefiniteness as to direction came,
with a trail of suspicions, back to his mind. In matters like this,
Pedro, who had lived all his life in the dregs of existence, had quick
intuitions. This white creature had thrown herself away; nobody at
all wanted her; therefore she and all about her were legitimate loot.

He knew a place, providentially, not very far away, where he
might strike a good bargain. He propped the body up in the seat and
secured it there by means of ropes and a halter. It glistened in the
moonlight like an archangel, and made him afraid. He made the ragged
storm-curtain fast in front of it, and crossed himself. Never by
any chance would anybody at all know that he had a beautiful lady
back there, a dead lady who had killed herself in his carromata,
and whom he was going to sell in the place without a name where they
trafficked in all things under the sun, even the dead.

He stopped at a spot where some old walls joined. No opening could be
perceived in the darkness, but Pedro knew this spot better than the
world which passed the walls daily but never stopped to think what
might lodge back of them. He uttered a low whistle that pierced with
a peculiar cadence the stillness of the night. Soon a shadow and then
another shadow shot out from some invisible aperture. Pedro gestured
to the carromata, flinging upon them an ejaculation. The shadows
advanced stealthily to the cart, tore away the curtain with savage
haste, flung it about the body, with which in an instant they had
disappeared behind the darkness of the walls. Pedro, after having given
Disgusto an admonitory kick, flew after them down the narrow crooked
alley made by the turns of the broken walls. On the sandy beach not far
from a crooked row of distorted dwellings the body had been deposited,
and over it, the grease of their streaming candles falling upon it,
knelt a brutal crew sweeping over it heavy, appraising paws.

Pedro snatched up in his hands a strand of the long, shimmering hair,
and fingered it admiringly.

"She's through with the earth, this one--killed herself with poison;
but she must have had a fine time in the world, in this beautiful
body. There was another this evening, at the Hotel Oriente. Zip,
boom! Disgusto and I saw her come tumbling out of the air, her
brain splashing blood all over the pavement! Do white women sin
so terribly? This hair, we'll sell to the fair ones of Sampolac to
catch more game with. This one leave on the sand--and when the tide
comes up--

"Where is my price? That ring is worth much, the chain also--and even
the dress and shoes. I must have good money, hear you, to close the
mouths of the police, if anybody searches this far."

The creatures, without pausing in their work of hacking off the hair
in great streamers, made a muffled retort.

A bulk was projecting itself toward them from one of the hideous
huts. It came writhing across the sand; the ghouls, in furious dispute
now over the possession of the ring, stepped on its groping, shuddering
hands. Too weakened and blinded to move aside, it collapsed next to
the body of the girl. One of the spasmodic hands caught and clutched
in its hold the red flower that clung to her dress. Then with a long
shiver, this creature subsided in the sand.

Pedro stared at it with eyes of horrified apprehension. "My money,
quick!" he yelled.

The outlandish group derided him. "Get it from him!" they cried,
pointing to the dead man.

Without one backward glance, Pedro fled.



CHAPTER XXIV


Dark stretches of emptiness! The rush of chaos through endless
space! Nothing anywhere that knows.... An equation without a sign....

Off in dark Eternity, a gleam of light--dividing all space--where
minus changes to plus, is not to is. Towards it struggles, battling
with all its little strength, a mortal consciousness.

Up out of the void, voiceless utterances sweep, like the drone of
far-off, undiscovered seas: "Minus 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... Minus 3 ... 2
... 1.... Decimal point!... 9 ..."

Back around an infinite circle the Soul sweeps to strike again for
being beyond the Point!

"Minus--Point ... 5 ... 4 ... 3 ..." intones the judgment from
the deeps.

Over and over, the drifting consciousness hurls itself through
the wilderness of the Lost--and over and over, the awful voices
measure throughout infinity the losing fight. Swept to the pits of
zero--Eternal Silence--the Soul, with its last desperate knowing
force, sends through the terror of the wastes its agonized appeal:
"God, life!"

That other planet had been one of light--light that streamed over the
world, and into the faces of its beings. Here, in this ... sphere,
black animate shadows--possibly ... very doubtfully, human--crawled
in and out of the holes of the universe.

Again, in that unfathomable fashion, two worlds convulsively changed
places--and there was no clear mark between the real and the unreal.

Pushing at the mists did no good! One moment you were zero; the next,
you were minus.... The horror of it was too much to bear!

At last the pall of those dark, terrible outer places lifted. The
girl came fearfully back into consciousness, her being shaken to its
foundations by the terror of the thing it had passed through. It had
touched awful and unknown areas.

Memories broke through indistinctly, fragmentarily. She had
suffered--been fearfully ill: Something had been agonizedly sensible
of that. How many beings were there in her to be aware? She had known
things before her complete awakening--but had not known herself.

It was not an unpopulated world into which she had dropped: she knew
now, somehow, that dim, fearful people were in it--she had heard and
felt them ... their passing through the air ... and even the silences
that fell dreadfully down upon them.

Over and over her dim, sickened wits repudiated her mind's claim to
this self ... denied that anything that was she could find lodgment
in this ragged figurement. The personality offered for her acceptance
was distorted out of the slightest semblance of credibility. Some
time her real self would come back to her--all gathered together,
and decently clad.

Thirst obsessed her every faculty!

She dragged herself up, and found that, though so weak she could not
hold one idea long, she was not too ill to move. She felt that if she
could get her mind wholly to come back and to grip hard, her limbs
would not shake so.

She stared around her in astonishment, her mind fluctuating uncertainly
before what she looked out upon. Another chimera! A toppling crazy
world, patched together. She gave a mad little scream. How could
one live in a world in which there were so many holes? One would be
always falling out of them. What incredible kind of senses must one
have to exist in those moon-struck huts?

She fled unsteadily out of the hovel where she had found
herself. Before what confronted her, her mouth opened again to cry
out, but closed gulpingly without a sound. That crooked coast, that
retching mouth of a bay, those blood-red nets!

She pressed her hand across her head, as if to hold the recollections
that came flitting disjointedly through it, trying fearfully but
futilely to make coherent connections. A vision came suddenly shocking
before her--revolving, ribald human groups, clawing and jeering about
her, only to take flight.

It was indeed in an outrageous form and surroundings that she had
found life. They had looted her dress, her shoes, stockings--her hair,
which her groping fingers had been so long trying to find. Some one, in
saturnine mercy, had flung a filthy rag over her, which automatically
she clutched about her. Having picked her clean, it was inconceivable
why they had let her live!

Too stupefied to be afraid, she moved about in the nightmare. Strange
sounds came from the huts. She stopped and listened, and commenced
to tremble in fresh terror. She stumbled quickly away across the sand.

Suddenly her foot struck a bundle of rags. She stopped and gazed
down. Something ghastly lay there in the sand: a child struggling
hideously with its last pinch of strength--so futile an atom against
the forces of the universe! As she stooped closer and stared, horror
swept over her in a chill of ice. She knew now why there was no roar of
moving here, no devil's laughter; the place had been stricken with the
plague--the creatures were dying like rats in their trash-made huts.

She wanted to run, but in her terror could not command her muscles
to move. The child's head, crusted with sores, lay convulsed upon
the sand. She regarded it in horror, repugnance, and pity. Before her
shaking vision rose a Pavilion--an Eastern market-place, and from it
a leper stretched forth a supplicating hand.

Pestilence-stricken hordes, unstaunched running sores! Day by day she
had passed the Pavilion, had shuddered at the leper's bleached face
turned, empty of hope, to the pitiless sun, and had run away. In what
dream had she seen those tortured masks?--faces, praying for death--

Always before she had fled--there had come a moment of violent
contention with herself, when it had become inevitable that she
could not always go round, that sometime she must go through, clear
through. She had always run away--failed completely: the cycle of
those past failures seemed now to burn like one of their sores within
her. And now she was facing again this crisis--her soul finally would
no longer let her off. She closed her eyes and put forth trembling
fingers. The clutch of the leper closed chilly around them. The
circuit at last was complete.

The moment her eyes opened, she uttered a piercing cry. Locked
in her grasp lay the hand of the plague-stricken child. The
rigid fingers clutched around hers in a last hold upon slipping
life. Spasm after spasm of agony tore the puny frame. A great
throb of answering human pain shot through the girl's heart. She
sank down in the sand, deliriously clinging to this scrap of
life as if it were the last in the world. The child shivered into
stillness. Julie stared resentfully, indignantly about her into
hot space. Hopeless--hopeless! everywhere! She began to cry weakly,
dropping her head in the sand.

Her thirst was overwhelming. She gathered herself up, and crept
cautiously among the huts. It was early afternoon, and the denizens
of the place were either absent, ill or dying. A few men were fishing
out on the bay. Nobody in this hole of death cared anything about
her. She moved on, peering stealthily through the apertures of the
huts. What she saw staggered her, but she went doggedly on till she
came upon some blackened water vessels. She knelt down to drink--the
water was afloat with skating insects--joyous, horrible things,
dancing on the water of dying men!

She picked up one of the vessels, and went searching till in one empty
hut she found some matches and a pot of rice. With her spoils she
wandered down the sandy coast to the shelter of a great rock, where,
after much diffused effort, she contrived to make a fire of driftwood.

Drowsing upon the sand, she waited for her meal to cook. The thought of
leaving this ill-omened spot had already occurred to her, but vaguely
and accompanied by the presentiment of obstacles facing her. First, she
had no clothes; one could not walk out into the city in an underskirt
with a rag over one's head. Then, she could not reason out where she
was to go or what she was to do, if she did go out. Last, hidden in
the back of her brain, and not yet presenting itself fully to light,
was an insuperable obstacle. Some unknown fettering chain was binding
her--she knew that she could not go.

She drank thirstily of the hot boiled water, consumed a part of the
rice, and dropped asleep on the sand under the rock.

Again came the torture of the same dream, the hard wrenching out of
drift land; it was morning when she awoke--dim morning, before the
sun. The first thing her eye lighted on was the vessel of rice. She
reached out and ate heartily of it. Then she rose, and walked through
the gray shadows of her monstrous world.

Confronting her lay that sordid bit of doomed coast, those crazy
huddled huts shaken by the winds of devastation and hiding the terror
of death. Across her path a human body lay stark, like a dead fish on
the sand. The creature had died there in the night, and no one had
come to bury it. She was seized with the frantic impulse to get out
of this malevolent place as quickly as possible. She walked past the
huts, and heard again the moaning sounds. She stopped in despair. Why
had these people been abandoned to their destruction? Where was the
Board of Health? Nobody had come to help--nobody was coming.

She leaned back against the wall, beyond which she had meant to
escape. She understood now how far beyond control the plague had
swept. She gazed back at the thing on the sand, at the livid face,
and empty mask that fixed with its hopeless stare. Everywhere somebody
was staying to see it out.

Suddenly the complete chain of her life's circumstances came sweeping
back into her consciousness. She remembered why she was here--the
stupendous, ineffectual effort she had made to wrench herself
free. And here she was back once more in the old insoluble conditions,
with nothing changed--up against the same uncombatable odds, dumped
here on this spot by a leveling, inconjectural fate, lost among the
lost! Her constant use of that odious drug had insured her against
the full fatality of the morphine dose. She should have remembered
that she would need far more than any one else.

It did not occur to her to try again. The horror of that Outside
Struggle still darkened her mind. There was no chance in the world she
would not take rather than risk again those unnameable terrors. It had
been made absolute that she must go on--even though there was no hope:
to struggle and still struggle, to the end. She stood there against
the wall, and tried to face once more the relinquished battle.

The moment when resolution came engulfed the world.

Before it these creatures and their tragedy grew dim and the Plague
was wiped out. She shook away the tears that had fallen on her face,
and walked back to the huts.

A glance through the holes that answered for windows sufficed to
reveal the extremity her life had touched. But before the decision
at the wall, she had already embraced the plague; before reason had
found the courage, an inner self had already stretched forth her
hand. And thus began the sojourn in the Pavilion--among dying men.

In sheer surrender beyond belief the creatures gave up to die. The
girl did what she could: boiled water, cooked food, cared for the
sick, attempted to clean up the wretched community. The bodies were
buried along the shore, till Julie managed to get a frenzied appeal
through to the Board of Health.

Finally, native servants of the Board came and took charge of the
bodies, assisted half-heartedly in cleaning out the dirt, left
medicines and food, and promised a doctor--who never appeared. They
stood themselves in deadly fear of the cholera, and knew that in the
general panic they would scarcely be held to account for this wretched
spot. They told Julie that the cholera suddenly, like smoldering fire
fanned to flames, had broken out from end to end of the city. Always
in cycles of time the Plague had come to sweep them to destruction
but never before as now. Terrible was the will of God over his little
men. The Americans were taking it too, they said. There were not
doctors enough to cope with the pest; certainly--when honest men were
stricken--none were to spare for this rogues' nest. The Americana who
was so singularly situated--ought, they thought, to be looking out for
herself. It did not matter what happened to this spawn of Beelzebub,
to whom not even Mary in Heaven would stoop.

Julie's mind burned with the fierce rage of defeat--a pygmy battling
along the sands of creation, she seemed to herself. At times the
cold horror of it seemed about to crush her; a big, hideous game
where, in ceaseless opposition, she moved, and the Plague moved,
and the Plague took the pieces--a low, one-sided contest in which the
pieces had never a chance. They were trash, floatage on the current
of life, but they were human. They--who were in the possession of
the miracle of thought--to be swept away like straws by this filthy,
insentient thing! At times, she too dropped into their mood of apathy
and capitulation, but roused always to fight. She pressed into the
struggle her every faculty, conjured from passionate depths forces
that had never before seen light. Away back in Nahal, she had cast
her soul into the beginnings of this struggle, and it seemed as if
the old fervor had come to life and was being put to its crucial test.

Along with the Plague, she fought the Hunger. The fire of the old
desire burned often in wild spurts. Sometimes she would pace the sand,
crying and clenching her hands, hour after hour. When the delirium
of the Hunger was at its worst, she would run madly out into the
surf and let the water break over her. There was nothing to lean on,
nothing to help!

Then the Plague, with its monstrous fatality, would sweep over her
senses, and submerge her personal struggle. With so much misery
always before her eyes, she began to lose track of herself. The
Plague swallowed up everything; it came finally to stand as the
real antagonist of her existence, for it sought to rout the supreme
stand her spirit had taken. Deep in her consciousness she cherished
a dream of eventual conquest, of a time when inconceivably she should
win. Just to beat it back once! For so long it had snatched everything
from under her struggling hands. Of this she thought incessantly as
she made her rounds doggedly, combating each hopeless moment.

But her creatures continued to die as under a doom of God. Julie felt
as if she had come up against the wall of the universe, where against
its insensible strength her human will was being shattered.

Her charges, terribly broken, had accepted her as a partner of their
dark fate. They dug into their miserable stores, and those of them
who had still escaped the Plague went forth on errands of industry
or depredation, and returned to pour their spoils into the common
fund. What marvel of loyalty always brought them back to the accursed
spot, Julie could not fathom.

At night she would steal out in the street, to claim her own soul back
for a moment. The streets were the universe. Even the grotesqueries
had a way of stumbling out toward the open, as if at the last their
wretched beings sought egress to freer spaces. She would stand knitting
her brows at the darkness, as if trying to claim some solution
out of it. Some time she meant to go away--but where? The silent,
empty streets troubled her. Up and down them the gay light of the
sun had poured upon brightly passing people; the perfume of baskets
of flowers being borne to market before the dew was off the day; the
cheery grind of ox-carts milling the golden dust of earth; the lilt
of the water-carrier's song; the rhythmic beat of the washer-women's
bats upon the stones; the flash of paddles, and the swish of glad
little boats making down the river to the sea--all this had been
part of the immortal stir of life that had made this place for them
a paradise of the sun.

Terrible days these were! Sometimes peering out in the daylight,
she caught glimpses of the dejected funeral processions, the bearers
and mourners bowed down, as if the fate of man were too heavy to be
borne. The inconsequence of these lives made them more than ever
tragic: they were so humble; they never rebelled. Julie thought
that if God had been responsible for such things as these, man would
have rebelled against Him ages ago; but it was because man saw his
own ancestral mistakes made manifest that he bowed his head without
protest to their consequences.

There had been heavy toll taken in the Tondo district. In old
newspapers that drifted into her retreat, Julie had read familiar
names; and, as the black hearses had dragged wearily by, she knew that
they carried many of her old pupils. As she watched them pass, a vision
would rise before her of big boys in cheap drill suits and barefooted
maidens pondering at the blackboards--poor blundering things, eternally
wistful over the courtesies and the wisdoms of the West; Julie wept.

Then she would remember that Chad had called her the little lady
goddess of the East. Standing in her ragged camisa, gazing from her
walls across the streets, a desire would sweep over her to go and
reveal to Chad the heart of the East that she had found far from
his haunts.

Where was Barry? The query arose a thousand times in her mind. One
of the papers had reported that he had left the city. Isabel, too,
she gleaned, had taken herself away. Julie recalled the visit Isabel
had made to some secret Island, and the paradise she had conjured up.

Her own disappearance, Julie saw, had apparently not caused a ripple
of concern. In this hour of stress, her absence from her own world was
not noted. Who, after all, was there to remark it? From the Department,
from the Señor, from Barry even, she had cut herself adrift. She had
gone away from the Reredos without explanation: but not even had they
troubled themselves to discover what had become of her.

When the pain of her isolation struck too deep, she would steal back
behind the broken walls to the oblivion that inevitably lay there. Here
where the worms were being trodden out, one was forced to forget
one's own despair. Gradually she forgot everything but the desire
to find somewhere a power to conquer the Plague. In its struggle,
the girl's soul seemed to be reaching out toward something which,
though she could in no-wise define it, began to appear accessible.

One night, with the old sense of futility and wretched helplessness,
she was standing over the body of one of the poor creatures who was
taking too long to die. Through the tremendous stretches of space above
her great bolts of lightning intermittently flashed. Power! Everywhere,
great and invincible power. She wondered passionately what a man must
think or feel in his soul to touch the source of it.

The man's body before her commenced to take on its final repose. His
eyes lay open to the sky. Julie, bending over him stared in sudden
awe; for from under the dirt and grime of that abandoned thug, a
mystery was emerging. Suddenly the Veil pulled apart; down there in
the dust--the Common Soul! The Soul that was through all things. She
and the worm and God--in one unbreakable bond!



CHAPTER XXV


Supplies were becoming very hard to procure. Indeed, Julie had for some
time felt urged to go and seek assistance from the outside world. Not
the Plague alone, but starvation threatened what was left of these
people for whom she had been struggling. The time had come when she
must somehow face the outside world.

But how without rational clothing could she undertake such an
errand? It was forced upon her that she must first of all present
herself to the Reredos, and get her clothes. She remembered now, too,
that she had left a little money in the pocket of a dress,--not much,
but it loomed tremendously to her eyes. It was probably safe, since
she had hidden the key to her trunk among the cadena de amor trailing
the window-sill, where no muchacho would have dreamed of searching.

Looking herself desperately over, in the darkness, with full
appreciation of her fantastic appearance, Julie found it an almost
insuperable business to thrust herself beyond the walls. Quite
impossible, on the other hand, was it to remain here longer. Gathering
her courage, and consoling herself with the thought that nobody in the
city longer remembered her, or was concerned about her, she set forth,
her head covered by an old scarf against the terrors of the journey.

She was not really too tall to pass for a native woman, nor, in this
light, too white to be taken for a mestiza,--and Eurasians in native
costume were not uncommon; but there was in her movement a rhythm
that would have revealed her at once as an outsider to the curious
observer. Fortunately, few such were abroad; and by selecting a
round-about way through unfrequented streets, she contrived to pass
unmarked through the dusk, though every nerve was a-quiver when at
last she crossed the bridge near the isolated estate of the Reredos.

Approaching the huge iron gates, she saw that in no part of the house
within her vision was a light to be seen. She knew that there was
in the rear wall a breach, which the children had enlarged, by much
chipping and hacking, to enable Chiquito's increasing dimensions to
pass through. This aperture would serve her particularly well just
now, since she could not bring herself to appear in this fashion at
the front door.

She waded through the lush growth along the old stone walls, wormed
herself through Chiquito's egress, and hurried across the grounds
toward the house.

The garden had commenced to take on the covertly wild look of a thing
that no longer acknowledges a master. All its lovely blooms had,
with the waywardness of tropical foliage, betaken themselves to the
tops of walls or trees. The snowy cadena shone timidly in silvery
filagree high against Julie's old window.

The shell shutters were all closed fast; not a sound came from behind
them. The house was totally dark. Gaining courage, the girl tried
the door, knocked, and finally boldly shook the heavy framework.

Across the door sill and over the floor of the trellised porch,
sun-faded newspapers were broadly scattered. The Señor had taken his
family off to Spain, as he had said he would do. He had doubtless
gone hurriedly at the coming of the Plague to his district, without
stopping to give instructions concerning these Manila periodicals,
which the native carrier, with an increasingly divergent aim, had
continued to throw over the gate.

Julie stooped and rummaged among the papers on the sill. Stuck fast
under the door, she discovered a couple of letters. She pried them
forth, and, examining them in the moonlight at the edge of the porch,
found they were both addressed to her. She moved toward the seat
under the fire-tree, which she and Barry had so often occupied; the
full moon was now flooding the garden; she could read her letters
there. In a vague appetite for news of the world she caught up,
as she went, two or three of the papers from the walk.

Through curiosity she opened the unknown letter before her uncle's. She
wondered why little Mrs. Smith had taken it into her head to write,
after all this time.

The Smiths were now stationed in Solano, and Mrs. Smith rather
pathetically wished to know if any of the things that had happened
to Julie's old friends of Nahal were happening to Julie. She hoped
not--for the worst thing that could happen to anybody had happened
to her. She knew that the natives over here suffered from terrible
things, but she had never dreamed that anything so awful could befall
her. Those first cruel red spots on her white skin--looking as if
they had been branded on with a red hot iron; Marlborough's desperate
efforts to disprove them; the doctor's reticence; the nurse's gingerly
cautious attitude, had all only disclosed the unbearable truth. She
had caught the small pox in Nahal--though she was in Solano when it
developed. Where else than in that ill-omened island could one have
got such a thing! She could demonstrate to everybody how fatal a spot
to everybody Nahal had been.

She had not been anywhere near death, but rather than this thing
she would have prayed for any other conceivable, cruel curse of the
East--this East which had so many to give.

Marlborough had been a miracle of devotion, assuring her a thousand
times that it would never matter to him what she looked like. A girl
might believe all this--but to a woman whose heart was deeply versed
in the frailty of men it was all intolerable. It wasn't that she was
marked so badly--not really so much at all--but that she would never
again see in the glass her old self. Marlborough was going to take
her to Paris and have her skin peeled, but--she dared not believe.

Yes, certainly, there must have been a curse on that place! To
further prove it there was Calmiden. After Julie left, Calmiden had
been ordered to Dao to take Adams's place. "But, you know, Julie,
he was never Adams's metal, and I guess he rebelled utterly at being
put in Adams's shoes. Templeton goaded Calmiden to what he did--one
day he struck him. I can't imagine any one's striking Calmiden and
going on living, can you? Well--Templeton didn't, Julie, and that's
it! It's so hard to tell, but in the big fight they had--men lose
their balance so completely in places like this--Templeton somehow
dropped dead. Of course you understand that he was a rotten old shell
of a dipsomaniac that would cave in at the first few blows.

"They brought Calmiden over here for trial, and high-ranking officers
came down from Manila. I don't know what took place, but they say
his men stood around him in an invincible and impenetrable wall
of evidence, and he was acquitted. But he will never be the same
Kenneth again.

"Do you know, I think that somehow this place has recoiled on us,
Julie. We hated it and stood aloof from it. We despised the people
and made gods of ourselves. You remember I used always to call them
niggers--I thought I was showing the superiority of my birthright
that way; and not one throb of this life here ever touched Calmiden's
soul. Did any of us have any soul, particularly, in it? Weren't we the
dead wood on a mighty, struggling stream? I don't know about you--what
has happened to you; but I used to think there was something different
about you, for all your seeming to take no real interest in anything
here, save Calmiden--and Adams, a little.

"The regiment is soon to sail for home. Be sure to look us up, as we
come through."

Julie dropped the letter in her lap. She leaned forward on her knee,
and her mind went wandering over the stretches of the past. So this
was the message of Nahal--all there was ever to be; of that Nahal
which had caused her soul's difficulties. She pondered deeply the
whole immense problem. Had it been her individual problem, set for
her to solve--her fragment of eternal purposes to prove? How utterly
she had blundered and drifted along, evading the particular, crucial
nonconforming bit of the universe that she had perhaps come into life
to subdue. Even when aware of her flaming objective, she had dallied
weakly and wastefully in easy and uninspired areas of life. Stupidly
she had let her fire die out, and her being go to waste.

Once she had been offered the choice of her ideals or Calmiden,
and she had chosen Calmiden, though he was the antagonist of all her
stirring beliefs. For a passing whim of passion, she had flung her
sublimest convictions to the winds. That there were punishments for
such perfidies of spirit she had come tragically to comprehend. She
had halted and turned, given up--letting the things she had made a
Covenant with go back to fate unaccounted for.

None of these men she had known here would have turned back, at any
cost; as agents of the future, of the whole onmoving universe, nothing
had counted with them--not happiness, nor life, nor love; while she
had demanded insistently and supremely her human happiness, and,
failing to obtain it, had let go, like the rest of the derelicts of
life: and there the East had stepped in to capture her, as inevitably
it captured all of her mood.

With here and there little flashes of eternal verities overwhelming
her, she sat and thought more profoundly than ever she had thought
in her life. She wanted to probe to the bottom and release the last
vestige of the illusion of the past. Those few words of Mrs. Smith
stood out like flame against her brain: "This place has recoiled on
us--because we hated it, and stood aloof." Julie felt this sink into
some deep, almost inaccessible place, and come forth again.

That was the key to the long mystery. That was the key to her. She
remembered how contemptuous her friends in Nahal had all been of
the work in hand, how anxious they had been to be rid of it--except
her. She covered her face with her hands: all but her! She had clung
to Nahal as a glory for herself--as a universe for a small and
exhilarantly inflated ego to expand in. Her sincere energies had
borne fruit, but too often she had brushed aside all that had not
colored her adventurous fancy. Turned in upon herself, she had skimmed
fruitlessly this brown well of being. A psychological Alexander taking
by assault the soul of Asia. In what a halo of Eastern colors she
had planned to do that! She had chosen the East as a stage for her
personal grandeur. She had expected a superlative destiny somehow to
be handed out from it.

But from the East's dark face and blunted mind she had actually always
shrunk; and as that foolish little woman, in a moment of tremendous
wisdom, had pointed out, the East had recoiled upon her and pulled
her down with ruthless irony to its lowest levels. Mrs. Smith might
as well have said the universe, which demands atom for atom of energy,
ounce for ounce of force.

Then had come the inscrutable forces, which had taken up her life
and threshed it mercilessly to the point of death, and winnowed it
out. The Great Law had taken her in hand, broken her old self to bits,
and of the pieces transmuted a form to its ends. In order to come
truly into life, she had first to be destroyed! She felt a thrill of
the old exhilaration to have at last found the way.

She opened her uncle's letter, the moon falling in soft sheets
about her.

It was upon that letter that for a moment the new fate seemed to
hinge. He had written to say that his affairs were in better shape;
that he had, in fact, sold the factories, advantageously; that some
money of Julie's, which he had long ago invested for her, would now be
available for her. He urged her to come home; he was perfectly sure
that the East was no place for a girl alone. She need not live with
Mrs. Dreschell, if she did not choose to, but with more congenial
relatives.

The girl sank once more into thought. She sat a long time staring
at the moon-lit night, at the fire-flowers dropping through it like
soft sparks. Over her came at last the conviction that she would
never leave--that the gates of the East had indeed closed after her
for good. There would be no more turning. She was going straight on,
only struggle, everlasting struggle lying ahead. Things were moving
toward something over here, and rather than all the safe paths of the
world she would choose this vivid, perilous existence. That was what
the levels had done for her--taken out all fear. She remembered Barry's
high peak, where from him also fear had dropped. Here the Hunger had
been vanquished. Back in that forlorn spot, she had fought the Plague,
and lost; but the Plague had fought the Hunger, and won. There were big
forces over here, to fight with or against. Everything for her must
be created new. In the silence of the night, she recalled a vision
of waiting and watching that she had seen in this same garden. Yes,
she would go farther on.

She reached down for the papers, which had slipped to her feet. She
wanted to see if that stroke of fate--Independence, had come. The most
recent of the papers was two days old, and conveyed the information
that the bill had failed to pass the Congress of the United States.

There would be no Philippine Republic! The significance of this
stupendous fact did not penetrate her all at once. Oddly scattered,
different thoughts filtered through her mind.

Fate had decided aright. It would take these people awhile longer
to make ready to meet the future. And if Isabel were right in her
prophecies of the coming clash of the world, they would certainly
be best as they were--till the earth were made safe for such little
peoples as they.

Isabel's dreams then were fallen--and Barry's hopes were
realized. Slowly the full realization of the turn of events broke
upon her consciousness. The aims and hopes of Barry and Isabel could
never have been united--never in any case. She saw that now.

Where then was Barry? The question flashed through every atom of her.

Her eyes, which unconsciously had wandered down the columns of the
paper at which she was staring, rested on Barry's name--and the
monstrous, incredible thing printed with it!

A process of deadly ossification, starting with her feet and traveling
to her brain, seemed to be rooting her to this spot forever.

"He couldn't have it!" she murmured in stupid agony to the night.

The last blow out of the East! The uncombatable enemy! She flung out
her arms despairingly, and crumpled crushed on the seat.

Silent as was the garden, it had a myriad of conveyances. They urged
her to her feet, and on. She ran to the wall, thrust herself through
the crevice, and continued to run along the dusky street till she
came upon a carromata.

Now the carromata, by all the chances of the East, was driven by the
Pedro who had looted her body and who believed it at this moment to
be buried in the sea. Therefore when he saw Julie, from whose hacked
blond hair the wrap had slipped, Pedro, who had become too familiar
with her features to forget them, gave a cry, and tried frantically to
pass on. But Julie had Disgusto by the bit, and could not be dislodged.

"Drive me to Calle Arzobispo at once!" she commanded.

Pedro whimpering and shivering, sure now that the ghost of the
unfortunate Señorita had come back to haunt his carromata forever,
gave up resistance; and, when Julie had taken her seat, obeyed her
frenzied injunctions with a rattle of terror in his throat. He drove
at terrific speed, till Disgusto appeared ready to drop.

It would be this way, always, Pedro knew. This ghost whom he had
plundered in life would not only take complete possession of his
carromata, but would drive to death all the horses he could buy. So,
when upon nearing the vicinity of the cathedral, the ghost commanded
him to stop, leaped over the wheel, and shot forward without paying
the fare, Pedro, instead of summoning a policeman, hurled terrific
blows upon Disgusto and fled for all he was worth.

In the sacerdotal section of Arzobispo, with the monastic walls
rearing darkly around her and the shadowy trees looming above her
like super-human shapes, Julie paused. There was his house, lifting
out of the dark foliage. She went forward unsteadily. At every step
the world seemed to crumble under her tread, and death to claim all
that was left of her universe.

A native policeman emerged from the shadows as she crept up to the
gate. He surveyed her wonderingly.

"I must go in there!" she said.

"Women, women!" he exclaimed fussily. "The master of that house
will never think of women any more. There was another one here this
evening, crying as if this old earth were a cage and she were shut
in it. She was a beautiful lady, too, with great blue eyes; but not
a soul in that house, I tell you, stirred out to her. So at last
she went groping away in the blackness. You had better go too. I am
guarding the gate so that he shall die in peace. Besides," he added,
"there is no one to let you in. The servants ran away, being afraid of
the Plague--all but one boy. A young boy, a good boy; he is a Visayan,
as so am I. They will stand by when Tagalogs take to their heels."

A vivid intuition flashed through the girl's soul. Stepping past the
wordy policeman, she pressed her face close against the bars of the
gate. "Delphine!" she called, again and again through the night.

A window slid open above. She could distinguish a slight figure
standing in the aperture.

Tremulously she called again: "Delphine! It is I--your maestra."

The boy's wondering treble answered her: "Maestra!"

Tears of triumph rolled down her face.

"Come quickly, and open the gate!"

He was coming. She listened for every fall of his hurrying slippers.

At last a white camisa came fluttering through the darkness, the
brave white camisa of the poor little brown knight who had set out
so long ago for the grand adventure.

"Maestra, my Maestra!" he exclaimed softly and incredulously, staring
at her through the bars of the gate.

"Ah! You stayed with him!" was all she could say, the tears choking
her.

The boy opened the gate, and let Julie up into the ominous stillness
of the house. At the top of the staircase, he uttered a soft word,
and Doctor Braithwaite appeared, a tall gray wraith spent with much
struggle.

"My maestra has come back." Delphine quivered with simple pride.

The Doctor stared hard for several moments, while Julie made an
agitated effort to explain. At last he contrived to recover himself.

"Chad was right, then," he said. "He believed that Isabel had tried
to do away with you. After you had gone, she endeavored to make it
appear that you had gone to meet a man in the southern islands. If
I hadn't been over here so long--I think I might find you surprising.

"Barry was taken ill in the provinces," he went on. "Your boy brought
him back, and has stuck to him to the end. If you have never done
anything else here--"

He stopped short, his face contracted painfully. "I'm sorry it's
too late!"

She was pitiful enough anyway, this thin, spent little creature,
in her outlandish garments, and he winced at the effect of the blow
he had delivered.

"I must see him," she said, in a low voice.

He shook his head. "But that's impossible--with the Plague."

She gave a sobbing little laugh. "The Plague! Why that's where I've
been--with it all the time. I--" her head dropped--"watched them die."

His gray lips twitched. "Yes, we watch them die. Every doctor and
every nurse on double duty. Chad and I took care of Barry. Then Rosalie
took it, and Chad had to go to her. She's gone already." He paused.

"Barry's case has been different. Usually they go out like
lightning--but he wouldn't die! And he wouldn't go to San Lazarus. He
kept saying he was going to get over it quick. Said he had to be alive
in these times. I never saw a man fight so hard; he has fought with the
last artery and capillary. Doctor though I am, I really believed that
he would win over sheer matter. And I wanted to see him triumph--it
would have seemed like a victory for the race.

"He believed you would come back." The Doctor looked at her hard for
several moments of deep silence, then he said: "The East has made
you strong."

He sank heavily into a chair. "If you wish, you may watch. It is
good that you have come. I believe I could not have kept my eyes open
to-night--even for him! No sleep for nights--and nights!" he murmured.

"He's unconscious now--nothing more to do. Watch a while--and call
me--" Even as he spoke, the Doctor sank sleeping in his chair.

She turned down the hall, groping ahead of her as through gulfs of
darkness, her last plank shaking beneath her, scorching agony tearing
at her heart.

His door stood open. There was a very dim light in the room. From
the threshold, she could see the rumpled head, the quenched conquered
face. She stumbled to the bed; and, dropping down beside it, flung her
arms about him, as if to hold off with main desperate human strength
that last blow.

"You said you'd come back--wherever you were--if I called you!" she
cried in anguished despair.

She lifted her head, and looked about her in wild entreaty. Where
was He--in nights like these--who had walked human paths of
despair? Somewhere here He must still be fighting the battle of death!

She crouched down on the floor; the spectacle of that inert form was
insupportable. Suddenly she lifted her head. From out the soft wonder
of darkness, with its swinging worlds, Barry was coming toward her--all
alight, as of old--looking as he always looked when he had something
perfectly new to do. Then he passed on, and darkness dropped once more.

With all the appeal in her, she flung her spirit out upon the
night. Power, power--everywhere out there--tremendous; terrifying
power behind the illimitable stretches of space, behind the swinging
worlds, veining the universe like lightning to eternal depths. If
only she could force a foothold in its great conspiracy! She had
traveled far, gone deep to find it, and had more than once felt it
graze her being. Just around the corner, close it was--yet out of
touch. All that was in her soul, or would ever be, stretched after
it in this moment. She tore at her circumscribed human vision as at
some fatally binding bandage across her eyes. Just to see clear once!

Her consciousness in its search swept out of its surroundings, beyond
the barriers of flesh. The stillness of the night seemed charged
with the light and force of swift traveling stars. Struggling with
the legions of darkness and death, she stumbled suddenly into the
kingdoms of the unseen.

The Doctor bent, in the gray light, over the bed. Nobody had called
him; and, exhausted, he had slept throughout the night. He had come
hurriedly, and stooped down to investigate the outstretched form.

He picked up one of the hands, and counted the pulse intently. A change
passed over his face. He placed his ear to the heart. Then he slowly
straightened up, and stood staring before him, in a trance of thought.

The dawn came peeping into the room. He bent over, and studied
once more, without drawing breath, his patient's appearance in its
reflection. A stir near at hand caused him to turn sharply. He had
forgotten the girl.

He concentrated upon her a puzzled look.

"I think," he said, speaking slowly, as if groping through dazed
layers of thought, "that you had better get up. He has pulled back!"

She started, then slowly raised herself from the floor. For a moment,
she appeared to be stretching herself out of sleep; then he had an
utterly odd sensation that she was putting out her hands in the red
dawn toward some invisible thing.



                                THE END



NOTE


[1] Bilibid--Native prison.





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