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."