Julie spent the morning after the carnival arranging the transfer of
her effects to the Tondo. Isabel remained in bed, and did not emerge
till Barry appeared at four o'clock.
Barry was driving a swift powerful horse hitched to a light
rubber-tired trap--a rather unusual combination for Manila. He greeted
them both in his radiant manner as he came up the stairs.
"I am going to take you to Father Hull's," he said to Julie. "He
asked me to bring you over." Then, with quick intuition, noticing the
bag in Julie's hand, "If that's your luggage, we'll land you at your
new home."
He swept the bag out of her grasp, and smiled down upon her. "I am
going to show you the miracle of Manila!"
Julie, turning to Isabel to bid her good-by, was startled by
the expression she surprised upon her face. Isabel was agitated
about something. Her mood had shot up for an instant like an angry
flame. Julie had a vague idea that she might be displeased with her
for not accepting her invitation to stay on with her. She renewed
her expressions of gratitude to Isabel, and said she would return
soon to see her.
Isabel said they should see each other often--quite often. She
kissed Julie, and advised her to keep out of the sun--"because of
the headaches," she added.
"I wish there were something to stop them," said Julie. "They rage
all through the heat of the day."
Isabel regarded her closely for a moment, then withdrew her eyes.
Quite unconscious of any disturbance of the ether, Barry passed his
arm through Julie's and together they descended the stairs. He assisted
her into the trap, and picked up the reins with vast satisfaction. "I
drive myself," he said, "because I can't bear to sit idle behind a
swift horse."
The powerful animal sprang through the streets, and whirred them across
towering iron bridges. They passed the skeleton of a huge new hospital,
the frameworks of a new school and other public buildings. Over one
vacant piece of ground, Barry drew up in fervor.
"Site of the new university!" he explained. "Rizal's dream. It's only
a few lines on paper so far--but it's on the way.
"These buildings cannot be shaken or blown down like paper; and
something more than a race of columbines must come to be born in them."
Julie peered up into his face. "I never saw anybody so filled with
a thing as you are with all this. I don't believe you have a soul
separate from it."
He smiled. "I wonder!" he said. "Well, I'm fearfully busy, and happy
as a lark. Oh, but I don't want them to shut down on all this!
"It's a nuisance to be finite," he declared; "one can't be in two or
three places at once. I can't leave here now, yet we've got to keep
the wheels of the Asiatic car of civilization on the tracks. Now that
the Assembly has cut loose, I'm holding my breath. It's a grand time
to be alive!" Barry declared, relapsing, as he occasionally did, into
Irish idiom. "Now, when the whole world is constructive. Once when I
was in Dublin, off my ship, an old woman looked in my palm and said,
'It's a great destruction that's coming!'
"'To me?' I asked.
"'To the whole earth,' she said.
"'But I didn't ask for the telling of the whole world's fortune,'
I said.
"'It's your fortune, and everyman's,' she answered. 'But after it's
blown off the globe, a glorious time will be coming.'
"'And what am I to be doing with myself until then?' I demanded.
"'Travel Eastward!' she said."
Julie looked at him curiously. In a flash she recalled the conversation
with Chad Messenger.
"What do you think is going to happen?" she asked.
"The shaking out of the old countries of the freedom of man; the
bringing down of a few wills, and the placing on top of the whole
will. A change in the destiny of man!"
"Well, if as much of a change can be realized as has been
already realized here in so short a time, I am ready to believe
in anything! Look hard at your city, and wonder at the magic that
has transformed a dirty, insanitary Malay city to--well, almost an
oriental City Beautiful."
Barry's face clouded. "It shall be the cleanest in the world when we
get through, but many a dark enemy lurks in our path. Look at those
stagnant moats, infested with pythons and myrmidons of death--and
at the drainage system! When will they attune their oriental ears to
the truths of sanitation? And the cholera-infected food they smuggle
in from the provinces! No, all is not well; and yet, help me Heaven,
they believe back home that we've finished--that these people should
now lead themselves!"
"But you are here to drive the unclean spirits out." Julie smiled
absently to herself. "I think so often of what you told me that first
night, about your coming upon this city which was to inspire your
whole life."
"It's true I never saw China really as she is to be until I saw her
in this new light. You see, I wasn't always an American. I guess
that's why all this impressed me so. You people over there take
your heritage too much for granted. I was born in Ireland--a racked,
wretched country, like those of the East--and of very poor people. My
father and his father's father, as far back as you can think, had
been at the eternally losing game of trying to make a living on this
earth off another man's land.
"It came over me when I was a lad"--Barry frowned out at the
land-scape--"that there was no hope whatever for me. My mother--who
was of good family, and had married beneath her, as they say--taught
me out of books, and stirred the urge in me. She was a wistful woman
and homesick for the world. So she wanted me to go out and get the
best luck of the gods. Mother and Father both died--" He stopped,
and seemed to have forgotten his narrative in his thoughts until
Julie said quietly:
"Please go on!"
"Then my Uncle James came along and took me by the shoulder, and said:
'Let's go find our own country, Lad!'
"We shipped on a vessel, and saw Russia and Germany, Italy and
France--where Uncle James said a man might live master of himself
but never at all could learn the tongue. We crossed the ocean, and
one night we saw against the sky a great burning torch lifted over
a new land.
"Back of that torch life began. Uncle James made money in truck
gardening, and sent me to school. But still, somehow, I hadn't found
my place. I followed the word of the old woman of Dublin, and finally
I struck this spot. And better than anything I had seen anywhere else,
I liked what the Americans were set about to do here."
Julie's eyes shone. "Another wanderer called!" she softly exclaimed.
"Many are called, but few are chosen," Barry meditated. "You saw
one side of the Colony last night. Father Hull could tell you about
the reverse side. Others chose mighty issues in this great time,
but Father Hull took as his charge the souls of his countrymen--to
keep them up to their high engagement. For this is a place and a
time taking crude strength to survive. Rough creatures like me are
in their element. The priest has many twisted destinies under his
charge, people who have suffered and fallen. He alone knows how to
deal with them. He alone in this great rough-shod, forward marching
colony stops to gather up those who drop behind.
"There was Blackstone! I helped Blackstone to get the contract for the
big Santa Cruz bridge--the big thing that was to bring the fortune
he had sought for fifteen years over the two Americas; to himself
and his wife, who had waited all those years for the Wheel to turn
so she could marry him.
"But it was Father Hull who managed to save him from a long sentence
in a native prison, when the scandal of the adulterated cement
broke forth. Blackstone's lawyer was the Old Judge--a drunkard and a
'Remittance Man,' but in spells a tremendous lawyer. Father Hull got
him on the case, made one derelict rise up to save another--as he did
in as splendid a court scene as I have ever witnessed. I don't know
whether Blackstone was guilty or not, neither does the Old Judge;
but Father Hull believes in him, and that's enough for all of us.
"Then the Old Judge, fearing the Blackstones would starve because
of the boycott put upon him, went to board with him. He suffers
torture from Mrs. Blackstone's cooking. I've stopped in there with
him occasionally, and after one frowning survey of the burnt, meal,
the Judge usually roars for the beer which he keeps on the ice in
quantities."
"But most of the Old Judge must be fine!" Julie exclaimed.
"Yes! He was long ago pensioned off by his wealthy wife, whose pride
he had outraged, and told to seek other climates. He has tried the
wild life of the Orient for some time, but now he is getting old
and tired and lonely. He has drunk the cup to the lees, and would
turn back except for the fact that once long ago he had a sentiment
for the woman who sent him out; and this contract with her he will
respect to the end. Oh, there are any number of others," he broke
off. "Ask Father Hull to tell you about them; he knows all about that
other side which I don't see so much of.
"Here we are! That's the Rectory just ahead. It's just the neglected
barren outer shell that you'd expect Father Hull's selfless spirit
to dwell in. Even the old housekeeper is a pick-up too, the relict
of a colonial who died from one of the swift illnesses of the East
and left her stranded on these shores a hopeless incompetent whom no
one else could make foot room for."
It was this person who led them up the stairs to Father Hull's
sala, where he rose out of a long chair to greet them. Julie was so
startled by the change in his appearance that she barely suppressed an
exclamation. In some strange way his personality seemed already to have
commenced to break its moorings. To Julie, who was particularly acute
to intimations, the shadow of death seemed already to lie upon him.
Two other callers came up on the porch, and Barry went out to join
them. Julie sank down in a chair and regarded the priest troubledly.
"I want to tell you how grateful I am to you for getting me a transfer
to Manila. I was so anxious to get away from Nahal! I am inclined to
believe you were right about--my not being exactly fitted for it."
"Things have been happening to you," he said.
Julie smiled painfully.
"My child," he said indulgently, "you are on one quest and you
think you are on another. Sometime, with some pain perhaps, it
will be straightened out. But it is people like you who help move
the world. Without such there would be no human history--just the
thoughts of scholars--and priests. You see, it takes deeper forces
than personal passions to carry forward the human pilgrimage. It took
the master passion--man's love for man--to lift humanity into a soul."
He broke off, and pointed to the glimpse of the ocean that could be
seen through the spaces of the vines. "It's a very beautiful sunny sea,
isn't it? And always I can see the ships on it--going out."
Julie who had been regarding him with emotion, exclaimed tremulously,
"Why don't you go home? You look so tired."
The great calm in which he had been enfolded suddenly broke. A fire
smoldered into life above his sunken cheeks, an alert look as at some
trumpet call. He squared wearied shoulders. "My place is here! Some
of us will never go back. We came to see it through. My camp-fire
colony, full of raw life, of struggle, of tragedy! I couldn't leave
it. Accoutered for the wilderness, we sit around the flames--faces
of failure, despair, and crime turned out of the shadow of the past
to the hope of the new land, where the slate is wiped clean. It is
this hour, my child, that must be watched over. A sea of struggling
humanity with heads stuck up out of the flood. In the New Chance,
the swimmer must be stronger than the current. I have been a soldier,"
he added; "I have followed hard trails. I couldn't turn back now.
"The Odyssey of the East!" he mused. "Life here has seethed down to
its elements. The passions of men are too dangerously on the surface,
and existence is wild, swift and sweet. Strong unbridled youth of men
and beauty in a land of no traditions or standards. Sudden wealth in
prodigal untried hands; princely Americans living so that the poor
native thinks that kings have come to dwell with him. Millions of
dollars from home to run the Treasure Islands! All magnificently,
gallantly American! In conditions like these ghosts begin to walk,
and I must be here to lay them.
"Just as you came in I was thinking of some of these people. There's
a lad in a bank I'm worried about. By virtue of his Americanism
he thought he was entitled to something better than a government
clerkship. Straining always toward the gilded doors of the Empire's
elect, he got himself made manager of this newly organized bank on
precisely the same salary he had before. But doors have opened to him,
and he spends like the rest. Some day not so far distant, I fear by the
haggard look in his face, the poor lad will vanish out of this place,
to be caught up by the secret service men in some great hostelry in
India or China to which his singed youth will gravitate. Then the long,
awful sentence in a Malay prison.
"There are some, you see, who were never to find fortune in El Dorado,
some who even a year ago walked these streets in high hope and to-day
lounge seedily with vacant, staring eyes, in native booths. Then there
is the ghost that is particular damnation--native wives. Not so long
ago Chad Messenger, one of those men out there--" He motioned toward
the door--"married Rosalie. It is already the tragedy it was bound
to be. Chad is a high dreamer, and he ruined his life in an epic
sort of way. Rosalie has gone back to her parents, but Chad remains
nevertheless her husband--"
"What is she like?" Julie interrupted.
"You can see her any morning on the Escolta, wandering eternally among
the shops. She is a great friend of your friend Isabel Armistead--and
of Orcullu. Then there was Jerome-- When he first crossed my path, he
was an Infantry officer up in the Bosque. He had drifted into playing
for high stakes--a thing prevalent over here. He was Quartermaster, and
became involved in his accounts. He would have been court-martialled if
old Vincente Busqua had not put a devil's bargain up to him. Vincente
said that if Jerome would marry Paula, his daughter, to whom Jerome
had paid some attention, he would make good the shortage, and Jerome
could quietly resign. Jerome took Paula to vindicate his Americanism;
he was never criminally guilty, I believe--some subordinate, it is
thought, took advantage of his carelessness.
"But good things happen once in a while--great things. Out of the lees,
a few completely emerge. A lady whom you will meet this afternoon was
one such, and her husband as well. She is coming to see me about a
charitable school she conducts. Two abandoned drunkards, they were--he
and she. Both came from very good families back home--that thought it
expedient to get them out of the way. Colonies are always martyred that
way. Ashby was a 'Remittance Man,' his wife when he ran across her was
a stenographer. She had taken to secret drinking long before, through a
romantic grief of her youth. Through mutual desperation they gravitated
to each other, and after their marriage they continued to go steadily,
awfully down. They became complete indigestibles in the social fabric,
and appeared to be whizzing straight through the damnation of the
East, when something happened, which I never completely understood. A
traveler through the East imbued them with some special enlightenment,
which they refer to as the 'incontrovertible truth.' They have tried
to explain this new insight, as they call it to me, but upon a man
reared and sustained on fixed tenets, it did not take hold. You see,"
he explained, "as I grow old in far strange places of the earth, I am
comforted by having fixed pillars to support my consciousness. Still
I should like to understand what it was that pulled these two, when
they seemed so completely out of reach, back into the safety zone."
Barry and Chad came in from the porch, bringing with them a man
whom they presented to Julie as Doctor Braithwaite, one of their
very close friends, Barry said. Following them came the housekeeper
conducting a tall woman of slender elegance of person, who Julie
was startled to learn was Mrs. Ashby, the derelict the priest had
just been telling her about. To connect the history she had heard
with this distinguished looking gentlewoman was at first glance too
preposterous to attempt. On closer view, however, the lines of the
past appeared on the face, like a visible under-stratum which was
gradually being eroded by the force of a new mode of existence. As
they shook hands, the woman looked very attentively at Julie, as if
there were something about her that she wanted to remember.
Mrs. Ashby engaged Barry in conversation, all having, so it seemed,
a great deal to do with the matter of babies. Barry promised to send
her quantities of condensed milk.
"We all beg from Barry," she explained to Julie. "But that is what
he was made for; you can't impoverish a spirit like his. You see,
there is always an epidemic of death among the babies over here. When
they can't be fed naturally at birth, they are stuffed with rice,
and of course they die. Mr. Ashby and I have a kind of school, if
one might dare to call it that, and the feeding of babies is one of
the things we are trying to teach."
A boy came in with a tray and passed cake and tea and glasses of a
light cordial.
"Do you realize," said Chad Messenger, speaking for the first time,
"that the first representative government that has been convened in
the East met in this city to-day and made its bow to the onlooking
Orient?" He held up his glass. "To the Philippine Assembly! May it
realize the fearful portents it holds in its hands."
Barry's brows knit with anxiety. "It is so taken up with its star part
on the Asian stage that it is forgetting distressing little facts like
the city's drainage system. A city with bad water and worse drainage
trying to lead the East!" He smiled dourly. "What is all our cleaning
and scouring to accomplish if we can not get it out of the Oriental
consciousness that their vile plagues are the will of God--Isabel's
Green God of fate!" He drew a long breath. "But we will triumph, if
only we're allowed the time--if only we're not halted in the thick
of the dust."
"I insist," Father Hull put in, "that the introduction of baseball into
the Islands has been Barry's greatest stroke. Though he come to wear
the crown of Asia, it shall not compare to the glory of revolutionizing
the native with clean universal sport. A new national passion that
is neither bloody nor bestial, and in which all the tribes can unite."
"It's the schools that are getting them," Barry declared. "Why, the
children do compound fractions for you before your face, sing the
grandest songs about liberty, and feed you ice-cream that they made
themselves in a freezer in the backyard. In the Straits Settlement,
when I looked for schools, they showed me usually an empty hut with a
dirt floor, in which there was no sign of pupils or teachers. That's
the lot of the tribute-paying East. Do you wonder these people think
a wonder has appeared in Asia?"
"It appears to me," Mrs. Ashby said thoughtfully, "that there is just
one thing that you have not sufficiently taken into account in your
plans for the Millennium, Barry--and that is human nature. Only when
the individual, each individual comes into a complete realization
of his highest estate, can the ultimate peace and happiness of the
world be secured. So few of us are conscious of our own mysterious
possibilities." Her glance dwelt upon Julie. "For example," she said,
"can Miss Dreschell interpret for us the unusual intimation in her own
face? There is something there of which she may be quite unconscious,
yet it is very significant."
Barry regarded Julie thoughtfully. "I noticed it--a year ago," he
said gravely, "but I find it indefinable. It seems to be something
that one merely feels."
Mrs. Ashby asked Julie if others had remarked this quality, and
Julie reluctantly admitted that others had. Isabel, for example,
who had called it spring magic, and the angel in the pillar of fire,
and other utterly unintelligible bits of Eastern imagery. Nobody had
ever said though, she reflected ruefully, that it would in any way
make her great.
"To me it appears," Mrs. Ashby said, "to be the reflection--or the
promise of great power."
Julie glancing up found Barry's eyes blazing upon her. His face wore
the look it had worn that night on the roof when he had told her about
finding his city. For a moment there seemed to be nobody but the two
of them in the room, which had suddenly taken on magic dimensions
and become the medium of a whole new existence.
The voices around her brought her back to her surroundings. She
became aware of Chad's observation fastened deeply upon her. When
his acute examination lifted, she overheard him say in an undertone
to Mrs. Ashby: "This quality you see in the young lady's face,
isn't it merely the transient magic of youth and sex? Aren't we,
particularly men, inclined to be dazzled by the mysteries we read
into a woman's form or face? She herself says she has failed in all
her enterprises. What is that a promise of?"
"It is neither youth nor sex, but something that is as far removed
from them as the stars," Mrs. Ashby replied.
Father Hull asked Barry and the other man to go across with him to
the church, to make an estimate on some repairs.
"Which means," Mrs. Ashby said smilingly to Julie, as the men went
away together, "that Barry will provide the lumber at no cost at all."
As she sat there watching Julie with her kindly keen eyes, she seemed
to throw a veil of friendship around the girl, which her senses
gratefully accepted. It seemed to Julie, whose head was aching and
who had commenced to feel depressed and dispirited, that she had
known Mrs. Ashby a long time and that they understood each other.
Mrs. Ashby asked her how old she was, and when Julie replied, she
said: "You are very young! I wonder if there is after all anything
quite so tragic as youth. It spends its golden years floundering
about trying to find land--such a lot of floundering it sometimes
does to no purpose. It perceives nothing clearly, but waits for
the universe to clear--like a mist. It searches in vain for the
coherence of existence that it was taught to believe in, and it comes
darkly to feel that everything on earth--and in the sky is a cruel
chance. It feels that it can't go on unless it can find the connection
throughout everything--and at last its poor sad little soul comes to
the conclusion that this mad chaos is not worth while.
"Governor Shell told me that he had spent thirty unproductive years
of youth groping for the light. And as for me, I had come to the end
of the cosmos, and was about to drop off. Why, when there was no clear
and perfect aim in life should I waste more time in fruitless seeking,
I argued. I became so sure that life was a collocation of meaningless
realities that I felt I might as well get myself out of it as fast
as I could.
"I didn't dream that a tireless Scheme would ceaselessly work me over
until the reluctant atoms in me would begin to work too to turn the
Wheel. Mine was a black existence, that only the worst wretches come
to know; but I don't regret an hour of it. Nor must you despair over
any experience that comes to you, for after this manner, my child,
do we work our way into the light.
"I was a slacker, an idle wastrel in creation where the Master-mind
and all His minute men all over all the worlds were battling toward
the goal. I was long in realizing it. Keep running, my friend, in
the footsteps of a striving God. That's what makes these men here so
strong. They are battling with chaos to bring law and harmony into
a part of the world. Consciously they don't know what great agents
they are, any more than the chrysalis understands why it breaks from
its shell. It's all a mighty subconscious unfoldment of life. This
business of the East has got to be straightened out on the earth."
Julie leaned forward, forgetful of her pain. "When you and Barry talk,
I step back into the old enchantment of mood. I'm afraid I am not
struggling any more. You see, I found that you can expend yourself
fruitlessly." Her voice shook. "My mind is chaotic--just like your
picture; and dark too, at times. Ever since I left the South my
convictions have been oozing out, like sands out of an hour-glass. I
meet life from moment to moment, and not in the least understanding
why it falls as it does. We are all just a lot of ships lurching
this way and that, at the wanton mercy of the ocean; and most of us,
I think, disastrously collide. The Pilot, whoever and whatever he may
be is always unchallengeable. Ah, when your most inspired efforts
have failed, when your life seems to toss beyond your control, do
you think you will find coherence in anything?"
Mrs. Ashby's clear eyes penetrated through her. "There is coherence
in the solar system, and in all the system beyond; comets, after a
thousand years reappear upon a calculated day. There is everywhere
coherence, my child, because there is everywhere law."
"But what good does this law and order do me if I can't find it? Down
here on this tiresome planet a being called Julie is doomed to struggle
and battle and hope, and gets nowhere at all. Oh, if only one could
get up from the Game, and turn one's self around for luck!"
"Since it is ordained that everything must get somewhere, you too
must arrive," said Mrs. Ashby. "Ah," she added gently, "if I could
give you the compass that would show you the direction!"
The men were returning. "Come and see me," she adjured. "Remember
that I shall always be glad to give you any assistance I can."
The priest looked white and weary as his guests took their leave. As
Chad went away in his calesa, Julie noticed that he cast a thoughtful
backward glance at her and Barry.
Barry drove through parts of the city she had never seen before,
and which she found not so pleasing as the others. "These are the
places we haven't been able to touch," he said. "Look at this." He
gestured up a narrow street into which they had suddenly veered,
and the aspect of which caused Julie to recoil.
"This alley is very nearly the worst abomination on
earth! Chinatown! We're trying to uproot it, but the denizens only
make more mischief when they disperse. I have no government job, or
I would have been on their necks long ago. I've never wanted to take
an official position. The Governor sends me here and there over the
islands on errands; but I want to be free--in case I'm needed across
the water. Then too, I need money all the time, for a million things;
and I have to be free to make it."
Julie's eyes gazed startled at the street they were following. "Is
China like this?" she demanded in horror.
"This isn't like China or Europe. It's an abortive thing of both. Men
become very vile when they take their vices underground," Barry
declared, with the resigned manner of a god before all the evil in
the world.
It was narrow, it was dirty, it was subterraneously vile, like pus
under the surface. White men and yellow men, men of all races went
here to hide their manhood in interims of bestiality.
"Animals sleep cleanly in holes," Barry remarked; "but these twists of
the thing called life bury themselves in the earth for their deeper
degradation. White women have been buried down there--live corpses;
and have come forth bleached lepers to the light. Such holes of
pestilential rats have, however, been closed up, so far as we know,
and now all this evil pollutes before the sun."
Julie's breath caught in a little sob before the faces she
saw. Somewhere she had dreamed of that monstrous array of human
masks; a cruel, incomprehensible evil such as one must transcend the
brute kingdom to find. It pressed a shadow down on the mind, like
a hangman's cap. The creatures looked at her with leers of the most
abominable intention. She sat up and stared with a white face up and
down the cursed street. And up and down it, in their yellow heads,
its subterranean minds were speculating upon her.
"What causes such a place?" she gasped. "There must be some accounting
for such a hideous blot."
"Opium, mostly; together with the incomprehensible in man. It's the
East at its vilest pitch, a hellish sub-consciousness in which murder
is the cleanest conception. White men end in such places--drug-takers
and drunkards, in violence usually. Chinese pirates form the nucleus
of these lees of the coast. I could tell you true tales of them that
would out-do Poe. When I first came to the East, it used to grip
at my consciousness like a black hand. I felt in those days that my
life was in peril all the time. It used to worry me--till the Moros
got me and led me with three other ragged beggars along the tops of
more sun-baked craters than there are in the moon, telling us every
morning as the sun rose that it was the last one we'd see. At first
my soul just clawed itself to pieces, but at last I walked right over
some unseen peak, and left the fear of death behind for good. That
was somehow the biggest victory I've ever won.
"We're out of the nightmare now," he said, as they turned in a new
direction. "Abandon hope, all ye who enter there. The Ashbys will
never cease to be a miracle to me. They wormed their way out of this
sort of thing. They used to come here to buy the cheapest whiskey,
just as others come for the dope; and Ashby, I imagine, knows the
ground floor of that hell!"
Julie pressed her nails into her hands.
"Is there any place you want to go?" Barry asked.
"Yes," she said, with a sudden feverish alertness. "Go by the markets
of this district. Did it ever occur to you that they are shaped like
pavilions--that they seem to represent one great pavilion--tented Asia,
with throngs always moving through?
"Do you know that though I try with my whole will, I can not go into
one of them? I pass them--and something always accuses me. Ah! Don't
go any nearer!" she breathed, as they approached a large market. "The
beggars in their rags always come sweeping out. How festering
with pestilence these throngs seem to be--gangrenous, leprous,
polluted. Even the heads of little children run with sores--everywhere
sores! A terrible Pavilion of mangy and vitiated humanity, shaking
with unnameable curses, and with eyes and noses eaten away. They fill
me with a sinking terror, those brown masks! They smile at me--and
stare at my clean whiteness like worms at a star. Oh! Why has the
East been forgotten, in her blindness and her monstrous sores? Think
of the wars of man against man--the great futile blood-lettings--and
what their cost might have done to banish this hobgoblinism from a
part of humanity! Nobody cares! I can't bear it! How can God move so
slowly? Can you see the East squatting in the dust, waiting blindly
through the ages for the Christ that shall come and stanch its
running sores?
"You must excuse me," she said agitatedly, "but I seem always to be
passing that Pavilion and, for all the horror of my pity, never able
to go in and touch their sores. Does it seem to you that we are like
cruelly idle and indifferent gods just looking on? Not you, but me. I
can't get down to their incomprehensible and unapproachable world. I
want to shove them all away out of my sight, yet all the while I'm
cursing that some one doesn't come along and save them. Look!" she
shuddered.
A leper stood in the pavilion-shaped market place, leaning like
some fearful decoration against one of its posts. Large pieces of
his flesh had been eaten away. Something in his appearance suggested
that he was yet young. A human Prometheus, plucked by the vultures
of a hideous fate. His eyes lifted to them in silent unbearable
entreaty. He stretched out his hand less, it seemed, for entreating
money than for asking the mercy of God. Barry tossed him a coin which
was instantly swept up by the supplicatory crowd.
Julie closed her eyes convulsively. "I'll always be seeing him in
the Pavilion beckoning to me--but I can't go--I just can't!"
She opened her eyes and met Barry's gaze in awed silence. It was as
if some unescapable burden lurked in there for their shoulders to take.
"We're in it," he said, "for good."
"I feel like a sleep-walker driven to the edge of a chasm."
"Don't be miserable," he said very gently. "We all live in night
mostly, helpless on our little hills, watching the eternal worlds
move by and wishing we could move our world. Look at this side of this
globe! In ten thousand years while the earth has sloughed its crust,
and deserts and gardens have changed places on it, man has undergone
little change. It's the same morass of human souls. Does it take ten
thousand years for the human glacier to move an inch?" He flicked
the reins restlessly, "Are we only picking at a cell with a pin?"
"And of all Asia's static human curse, China is the worst,"
Julie exclaimed, "slugs cumbering up the earth, repudiating every
metempsychosis."
"Ah! Personality is infinite in its range. I think you will find the
Chinaman adds a little to the compass of the human soul. Do you dream
that a people who chant their utterance have no imagination, or that,
because they have bowed so long to fantastic tyrannies, they have no
soul? I tell you that they are eating their chains through with their
teeth. I'd give my life and my soul if Asia would set up a republic
in the face of those worm-eaten kingdoms of Europe with their caste
gradations and degradations of men, and their empirical divisions
of the land of the earth. And there is a great hope upspringing,
I believe--I know!"
A pretty olive-faced woman leaned out of a passing vehicle and looked
at them. Barry raised his hat.
"Chad's wife, Rosalie," he explained.
"That was a big mistake, wasn't it?" Julie said.
Barry looked grave. "Poor Chad, in one of his most exalted moments of
national chivalry, thought he was making a cementing marriage with the
East. But, as it has turned out, it seems that there is nothing at all
that he can understand about Rosalie--with her display of adornments
to the world; her laxities at home, and her eternal super-abundance
of rice powder. He took his wife, as so many do in the East, under
a veil; and now she has grown intolerable to his Western man's soul."
They had come out onto the Luneta, where music was stirring through
the soft dusk. Throngs of smart carriages and vehicles of every sort
were moving in slow rhythm up and down. People were exchanging visits
in the beautiful twilight. They began to stop Barry to talk to him.
Ellis Wilbur, nodding to Julie from under a vivid red plume, had
her carriage brought up alongside of Barry's trap. A member of the
Assembly came along, and Barry got out and fell into deep discussion
with him on the walk.
"I'm triste to-night!" Ellis said. "The tragedy of the East has begun
to fasten on me. It's time to go! Do you know, as I watch the shadows
fall like slow tears over those old walls, I think what a city to
be unhappy in! A city of the East, the weight of ancient evil in
its stones. The dusk drops over it like a blackness of the heart,
an infinite hopelessness. The petals of every gay flower shrivel,
and the grass grows dim. All the forces of the night to contend
against. Ah, I am sorry for all of you who are to stay in it!"
She looked closely at Julie. "Never love in the East. One could be
sure of going completely mad in its terrible beautiful passions, in
its heavy night with the thick scents in them and the beat of black
hearts pulsing through them.
"Do you know, you and I are like Janus, at the crossroad, facing two
ways; not up to going forward, not willing to go back. And there
we stand like weather-vanes, and point no man a thoroughfare. I
confess that I am too selfish and too impatient to make an oblation of
myself. Therefore, I am definitely, but not without a certain shame,
you understand, about to turn back. We are going. Father's been given
another job--'in the courts of kings.' I was too weak to resist the
prospect"--she gave a short laugh--"of marrying some one princely
and distinguished on the other side of the world. And I promise you,
I shall not return here--like so many others. You've seen them in their
dramatic farewells, leaving the East forever--its corrugating problems,
its intolerable hardships. And then, after they're forgotten over
here, they turn up on a ship, and embrace everybody with the tears
streaming down their cheeks. It was no good, they tell you. They
had to come back, and get in the game. They still don't give a rip
about this part of the world, its ineffectualness and heat and hell;
but what they are supremely excited about is the Job! There wasn't
anything to compare with it back home. They wanted to help finish
it off before the curtain was drawn, and to help show the world how
successfully Asia was being vitalized."
Ellis turned her attention to Barry, and regarded him attentively
for some time. "Father is worried about Barry. He thinks he is trying
to break his ties here. It would be like him, of course, to move on
if he found something bigger; but he is needed here. He has a really
strong influence on the people. He seems to be the only white man they
really like. But he is always trailing off on strange errands all
over the Eastern seas, and the queerest people are always appearing
to visit him. Strange conferences are held in that house of his,
I'll wager. I tell him," Ellis laughed, "that he must be trying to
make himself Emperor of Asia."
She subsided into thought, out of which her voice broke quietly at
last. "Does Barry McChord stir your imagination as he does mine? It's
only too sure that there is nobody like him among the so-called
princes of men; but he has his way marked out for him--he must beat
his way alone through this black hinterland. Every bit of him is
needed for the work. They are all agreed, you see, that he will no
more be permitted personal passions than the Pope of Rome."
The sunset threw a golden light into the dusky cavalcade circling
about them, making it glow like a wondrous human allegory. Suddenly
solemn strains of music threw a hush over this vivid atmosphere.
Barry's head, Julie noticed, was uplifted to the down-coming
flag--which slowly descended, the symbol of infinite things.