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.