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."