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.