"Who is your guest?" Julie demanded, as the carriage Barry had sent
after her drew up at the door of the Archibispo Street house, where
he stood waiting for her.
"It wasn't he I had in mind so much as myself," he said gravely,
assisting her out of the vehicle.
"Strictly speaking," he added, "the person I sent for you to meet is
a king."
"A king!" cried Julie with delight. "Where did you get him?"
"He's the white rajah of an island realm to the south--an Englishman,
and a fine chap. He's come to return a visit I paid him, and to find
out what we Americans are up to. Ellis snatched him away as soon as she
found out that he was a nobleman in England as well as a king in the
East Indies. That gave me the chance I wanted to have a talk with you."
Delphine, his corsair hair on end, came to greet Julie, at the top
of the stairs, and to announce that luncheon was served.
"There's to be just you and I," Barry said, "and the wife of a Spanish
lawyer friend of mine, who lives across the way and who blessedly
doesn't understand a word of English. Later Rajah Payne, and some
people who are dropping in to meet him, will come in for tea."
They seated themselves at a small table near windows filled with waving
ferns. When Señora Taliaferro, who was enamored of American cooking,
had become engrossed with the dishes served her, Barry leaned across
to Julie and said abruptly:
"Sun Yat Sen has gone! He is about to start on a long march across
China--on foot through Manchuria and Mongolia, preaching the gospel
of freedom--and revolt. He begged me to go with him."
"You'd get killed!"
"Not on a job like that. It's got to come to pass. It's written in
the stars. You don't think I'd trail carelessly off the earth and
leave my job undone? Until a long time from now--" he smiled--"until
I've done everything I want to do, I refuse to die.
"You see, I'm torn two ways. Sometime I shall join Sun Yat Sen. He
needs me. But I have fires to tend here. The flame over there
was lit from here. I'd go in a minute if I could only feel we'd
turned the trick here; but the newspapers from home are full of dire
forebodings. An enterprise like this must be made to sink as a fact
into the consciousness of the East.
"But time is passing--by the water clock of Canton that has kept time
for a thousand years!" he murmured to himself.
"Why," he demanded suddenly, "do I want to share all my secrets with
you? Is it because of the light of you, that shines like a lantern
in the dark of the world?"
Julie dropped her eyes. "China must be a dark world," she hazarded
confusedly.
"I used to think so! I was only a lad. The people weren't people
then. They were flies, hordes, multiple numbers in the universe! And
the faiths of their souls! Monstrous gods, with blood drooling out of
their man-eating jaws! Blood seemed a commonplace, like milk. Will
I ever be able to forget that large crude yard of the execution
grounds--running with blood that stifled the nostrils and caused me to
reel with illness--human blood, rivers of it, turning black? Terrible
was the human capitulation of that field! That submissively surrendered
stream showed the Chinaman in a new light; for not much of the blood
of the Execution Grounds was criminal. That kind could get away with
bribes. It was ferociously demanded blood of sacrifice--the blood
of gophers offered to that figment in Pekin. Why should these wet,
reasonless, red spots continue on the earth? You see that something
must happen over there soon.
"A flat, bare, yellow, ancient land!" he mused. "The saddest land I
have ever seen, with little vegetation to cover its old bones--just
the stark drear plains. Isn't nature brutal, to turn out millions
and millions of creatures to subsist on dead mountains and sand. And,
lifting like excrescences out of that land, the mud huts of the living
mingle with the mud tombs of the dead. Gophers in mud banks, living
and dead. Nowhere else does one ache so for man. And the intolerable
sensations one experiences at first over this monstrous dirt-like
cheapness of human life!"
"All our lives," Julie reflected, "we have looked upon ourselves as
a little less than God; but over here we are just rats crawling in
and out of the universe!" Her face contracted in a painful spasm.
"Don't put them too far down in the abyss of your pity, though
they were in the beginning a hideous phantom across the vision of
my ideals. Pekin, of course, was different. It was all that I had
dreamed of ancient and opulent Cathy: an oriental fantasy with its
great Chaldean towers, its temples and pagodas sparkling with sapphire
lights; with its marble courts, its flashing scarlet palaces; its
grottos on lotus lakes, its gay pailows with flapping banners, and its
millions of rainbow-hued boxes that are the dwellings of men. But,
over beyond the city, cut into the clay of the cliffs--the holes of
the gophers still!"
Barry's eyes had become abstracted under his memories.
"And the Forbidden City! No more to be penetrated than heaven
itself! From Coal Hill one gazed across at that shimmering Hearsay
among men, that Holy of Holies protected by walls as thick as
Babylon's. Over there amid legendary splendor, and unparalleled power
on earth, in high and inviolate courts to which no gopher ever crawled,
is harbored a will-o'-the-wisp--a myth, a spell, that governs millions
of gophers' fates.
"But"--he brought his hand heavily down on the table--"the gopher
down under the ground is eating away with his teeth the foundations
of those impenetrable places and you yet shall witness the day when
he will stand up, a man at last, in the forbidden courts of the earth."
"It all sounds a fantasy of mud-caked gophers, hobgoblins and
blood!" Julie said.
"Listen, for sometime you will see all I say come true," he
prophesied. "All over the world to-day as laborers, and down under
the earth in tin mines, Chinamen are slaving and groveling to make
the money to set China free. When the hour comes, that hoarded
treasure will flow forth to turn the tide. The gophers under the
ground are stirring to resurrection. To the day, Julie,"--he lifted
his glass--"when the gophers all over the world shall find the sky!"
Julie stared at him wistfully, and suddenly the tears rushed to
her eyes--tears of awe, envy, and humility. He was in the toils of
great undertakings, sweeping on to sacred achievements, while her
sole contribution was Nahal--Nahal of dismal failure and miscarried
efforts. What was the thing that he had, and that she would never have,
that brought him fulfillment--the thing that his friends wished to
conserve and to keep her out of?
"I like to think," she said at last, hiding her emotion, "that you
will be invulnerable to everything that can happen in the East."
"Why the East?"
"It has a separate, harder and more cruel fate."
"And presents greater gifts and will bring in the end greater
strength! Come!" He rose. "We have sat a long time, and I hear our
monarch arriving below."
"Tell me how to speak to him!"
"We call him Sir John. In his island kingdom they call him Rajah
John. He is the second of his dynasty. The people of the realm very
charmingly invited his father to rule over them. He lives in a stucco
palace of the most monstrous taste. He would prefer to live on his
estate in England, but one must rule a kingdom whether one wants to
or not."
"Is he married?"
"Aha!" He turned round upon her suddenly. "I see that I should not
have brought you here to-day. He is not, and it might take only the
tiniest twist of fate to-day to make you a queen in the East. But
please to remember that maybe some of the rest of us can win kingdoms,
too. I implore of you not to let that prophecy drop out of your mind."
Ellis Wilbur entered the sala with a pleasant faced, deeply browned
young Englishman. Upon being presented to Julie he looked at her
admiringly, which caused Ellis to cry out:
"King John has lived so long in polygamous countries that he has
imbibed their inspirations, I perceive. After assigning me first
chance at his kingdom, he is casting pleasantly encouraging glances
elsewhere!"
Isabel, Chad, Commissioner Caples and several young Englishmen that
Barry had asked to meet his guest strolled in. Commissioner Caples
demonstrated an unpleasantly prophetic mood. The business pulse, he
said, was the sure indication of what was going to transpire; the big
concerns were withdrawing their capital from the islands faster than
ever. People who had invested in the chimera would lose everything,
for Independence was imminent.
At this Julie saw Isabel's eyes blaze with ecstasy.
"Great pity!" Sir John commented. "I'll miss your Experiment to
the North. I was planning things myself--along the same lines. Tell
me,"--he turned to address Isabel--"what will happen to the poor tao,
lumbering after his carabao in the jungle, I say what will become of
him then?"
"He has just about as much brains as his carabao," Isabel
contemptuously flashed. "It isn't necessary to concern oneself with
a carabao's fate."
"Doesn't it strike you, Mrs. Armistead, that these dumb, blinded
creatures under the new impulse here have started out on a quest
for manhood?"
"The dumb and blind cannot lead a country. That will take a great
strength!"
"But do you, Mrs. Armistead, see that strength anywhere about you?"
For an instant Isabel looked to Julie like one who had stepped suddenly
into a dark room. Then the fire of her eyes flashed across the sala.
"Exactly," said Sir John in a whimsical undertone. He had followed
her glance to where it unconsciously alighted. "Why shouldn't there
be two white kings in the East?"
Isabel turned from him sharply.