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.