In her school in the Tondo, Julie was required to supervise as well
as to teach. Her two native assistants, Mariana and Clarino, however,
were the two most sacerdotally devout worshipers before the Ark of
Education that she had ever seen.
Her own class consisted of boys and girls between the ages of fourteen
and sixteen--maturity for Malays. Reports of cholera were now steadily
coming from the provinces, and Julie made it her chief concern to
impress upon her pupils the precautions they should take to guard
themselves against it. She read aloud the ominous accounts of what
was transpiring in the provincial districts, and strove to move them
to active interest. Against the River--the lurking monster in their
lives--she warned them most passionately, and exhorted them to the
point of prayer against all manner of uncooked food.
The answer of the ages came back to her through the medium of these
young creatures. The River had been there always--since before
Abraham. It was God's own river, and it could not therefore do
harm. And the things of the soil--they grew at His will; would they
then poison the sons of men? Thereupon followed the fiat, old as time,
the fiat of the God of the Pavilion: "If we are to die, we will die!"
Julie's headaches had become a serious menace. In fact, in conjunction
with the devitalizing climate, they were, she saw with trepidation,
fast sucking out her strength. She was now spending five straight
hours in the school-room, beginning at eight in the morning; then,
after a short interim of rest, she went to Señor Sansillo's for the
afternoon. In order to defray her expenses and to meet her obligations,
she must inexorably keep going all the time. She could not afford to
be ill: she had not one cent to be ill with, or any one to turn to
in this great awful East. Barry, she felt, was the only creature she
could lean upon; but she had a pronounced aversion to appealing to him
or to any one else. Very vivid in her memory was the recollection of
a time when, in direst trouble, she had put out her hands and they
had closed on empty space. That experience had engendered in her a
bitter resolve to stand or fall on her own resources. Never again,
she felt, would she completely trust any one. Secretly and somberly
she believed in her heart that men would break any covenant, if they
could do so without incurring the judgment of the world.
For some time Julie had noticed standing either in the road or in the
stall of Pietro Poro opposite her window, an old woman, who always
stared into the distance as if she were stone--with that fashion of
patience these people had when they were waiting for something to
come to pass. She was withered and darkened, as if she had traveled
through endless hot winds. She always carried in front of her a flat
basket like a tray, which was supported by a cord bound round her head.
When Julie asked the native teachers what the old woman was waiting
for, Mariana, the more imaginative one, replied that she was not
waiting for any one, that she was "watching the world go by." Mariana
thought she was a caster of spells; but male common sense asserted
itself in Clarino, who explained that she was a herb-woman. Julie had
not before seen a vendor of this type, but she remembered odd little
bundles of dried leaves that had been sold as medicine in the fairs
of Nahal--for it was only at such celebrations that Guindulman had
displayed an open market. She recalled how Gregorio used to bring
these mysterious bundles home and munch at them as a remedy for
some impalpable disorganization which he professed to feel in his
gorilla-like frame. When one day she had asked him their utility, his
reply had been a vigorous pass across his vital organs and a gustatory
declaration, "Mucho bueno!" She also knew that most of the ladies of
the garrison had used a highly efficacious soapy bark for shampooing;
it had saved more than one head of hair.
One afternoon when Julie descended the steps, she found the old woman
at the door. She held up a small bundle, and murmured something to
Mariana and Clarino, who were behind Julie. She had said something to
the natives that put her goods in an adventurous light, and they bent
interestedly over her basket. While she flung monosyllables at them,
she looked keenly at Julie.
Something that flashed out of her glances startled Julie; a glimpse
of a myriad of human things leaped out of this herb-vendor's face
as out of a well--darknesses, cruelties, sublimities, and a kind of
burning thirst, as if this old thing were a traveler on the deserts
of the universe hunting for a spring.
Mariana and Clarino passed on, and the old woman, whose eyes were upon
Julie in their distant yet riveted gaze, spoke to her in Spanish. She
asked Julie very soberly if she knew where the Covenant could be found.
Julie was stupendously amazed, but before she could reply, the old
woman went on to say that she had sought the Covenant on the tops of
high mountains and across strange lands. She said that Julie had a
light in her face that would lead to it, and that if she would come
with her they would find it together.
A fantastic little thrill of exaltation shot through the girl. It
was the strangest, the most unaccountable, and the most preposterous
offer she had ever had made her. She smiled as she shook her head
a little pensively--the youth in her a little sad at refusing any
mystic adventure.
The old woman was watching her. Standing in the beating sun, her
brows had contracted spasmodically.
"You are bad in the head?"
Julie nodded. "The sun did it, some time ago."
The herb-woman caught up something which she opened to Julie in the
palm of her hand. "It will take away the headache." She pressed
the modicum upon the girl, in the insistent native way. "Try it,
Señorita. Never has it failed to stop pain."
Julie hesitated.
"Look--this I give to you to try. I give it without payment, knowing
that when you have tested it you will want more."
Julie's hand closed slowly over the gift. The old woman and her basket
dropped away.
On her way home, Julie passed through the Escolta, where Rosalie
Messenger invited her into her carriage. Julie had met Rosalie at
Isabel's; and in the Escolta she met her casually and often, because
Julie frequently took that route home from Señor Sansillo's, and
Rosalie was always flitting restlessly up and down the street like a
tired butterfly. Rosalie usually stopped her carriage to take Julie in,
then up and down, the narrow ancient thoroughfare they would move, in
the human current of new and old races, before Rosalie drove her home.
To-day Julie was more grateful than ever when Rosalie picked her up,
for the heat was fearfully oppressive. Julie dropped back in the seat,
and pressed her hands to her aching head, while Rosalie, a tropical
person who appeared to have passed through a magic immunity at birth,
craned her small head at the passers-by.
On a corner they caught a glimpse of Barry, his tall form lifted
energetically above the heated procession, the grasp of the colony in
his face. He was visualizing, Julie thought, far-off peoples marching
under many banners beneath the sun. As they passed him, a bitter look
flashed across Rosalie's oriental face.
Noticing Julie's attitude of discomfort, Rosalie withdrew her attention
from the street. "The headache still? You suffer from it always!"
Julie nodded. "It's getting so now it seldom stops. That horrible
sunstroke blistered my brain. Listen, Rosalie"--she sat up--"an old
woman has been coming to my school selling herbs. She has a medicine
that she says will stop my headaches. Do you think there is anything
in such remedies? I am getting desperate; for, you see, I'm not like
you who can drive around in a carriage all your life."
"What was the old woman like?" Rosalie asked.
"Oh, in the distance she's just any old woman, but up close not like
anybody at all. She seemed very anxious to have me try the medicine--in
fact, she gave me some of it to try. Do you believe in such things?"
The mestiza shifted in her seat, but did not at once reply. At last,
looking abstractedly at the horses' glistening backs, she said,
"There are wise old women--who effect cures."
"She says odd things." Julie hesitated. "She talked about a
Covenant--and a high mountain."
"Ah!" Rosalie breathed. Then she turned about abruptly. "And will
you try the medicine?"
"Have you ever known people to take such remedies?"
Rosalie nodded with conviction. "If you understood our people, you
would know that nearly all buy, and believe in them. I have known
these herb preparations to help greatly. Why shouldn't they? Most of
the specifics of the Pharmacopoeia grow wild here."
"It sounds interesting," Julie reflected. "I'll try her cure,
anyway. Then if I don't get better, I'll go to a doctor--and have
more debts to pay!"
A few days later, she stopped Rosalie's passing carriage and said to
her: "I have been taking some of the old woman's remedy. It really
helps me. One can learn a lot from the East."
Delphine appeared occasionally at the school, to see his Maestra;
always diplomatically choosing school hours for his visits. He
reported that he was getting on very well, that the Señor Barry had
bought him beautiful new clothes, and that Dicky-Dicky was his sworn
friend and guardian. He was teaching the dwarf English--out of the
very books which his Maestra had used with him. Dicky-Dicky learned
thirstily, because he believed that some day this knowledge would
help him out. They talked much, Delphine said, of Nahal, and the
dwarf always seemed troubled about the Maestra's treatment there,
and took great satisfaction in the thought that his sister had upheld
her in her trials.
The carelessly generous remuneration of her pupil, Señor Sansillo,
aroused in Julie the vision of paying off the debt with which she
had come saddled into the New World, and which had been the source
of so many of her misfortunes.
Señor Sansillo lived in one of the most pretentious mansions of the
Walled City. He was a lawyer of large interests; in fact, out of
sheer adventurousness, he was interested financially in almost every
large commercial enterprise in the islands. A large suite of rooms
in the entresuelo, or downstairs portion of his residence, served
as his offices. These were palatially furnished with the elaborate
acquisitions of many pilgrimages throughout the East.
He was of a splendid family in Spain, whose impoverishment had
driven him out to seek his fortune in the colonies. At some time or
other in his history, he had been attached to the court of a Spanish
princess of the royal family, and he had a manner in keeping with that
distinction. It was the fact of his having been forced to disclose the
existence of his mestiza wife that had kept him back, like so many
others, in the arms of the tolerant East. Señora Sansillo had been
one of the richest "hijas del pais," and it was upon the foundation
of her wealth that his great insular fortune had been reared.
In appearance he was the most carefully correct man Julie had ever
seen, his endless varieties of apparel all being obtained from a famous
tailor in Paris. He was tall, as sharply slender as the blade of a
knife; of almost ferocious activity, with a face on which emotions
seethed as in a hot lake. Among the crude, blunt, sweating figures
of the Colony, the Señor's personal exquisiteness stood strangely
forth. Why, in such unamenable surroundings, he should still care to
preserve this high fineness of existence, Julie often wondered. He
would step forth from his great carriage, with its jingling silver
harnessing, upon the pavement of the crowded, heterogeneous Luneta
precisely as he would have emerged upon his favorite Boulevard. He
carried this fastidious grace with him into his business, and
was actually noble in his refusal to lower even here his æsthetic
attitude. Rather than take off his coat of dignity and get down and
struggle in the dirt, however metaphorically, he would lose any amount
of money, and snap his Castilian fingers after it. That did not mean,
however, that he consistently lost in his enterprises. He was much
too brilliant and too versed in the refinements of mental strategy
for that.
He was, Julie soon discovered, inordinately fond of telling
"anecdotas." These recitals were usually of a delicate double meaning,
and Julie could hear his clients in the law office adjoining her room
constantly breaking into gales of laughter. The Señor would appear for
his lesson with the tears of appreciation standing in his eyes. While
wiping them reverently away with a large silk handkerchief, he would
assure Julie condolingly that she had the sense of humor of a Pilgrim
Father. When she could not understand his stories in Spanish, he turned
them, wickedly twinkling, into French; and when there, happily for her,
the point missed her, he would twirl his delicate fingers toward the
window and appear to beckon the whole world into the joke.
The Señor had the Latin's abysmal contempt for English--a clumsy
language, he declared it, without science or charm; and his lessons
were like so many brief, reluctant plunges into a cold bath, they
were really the last thing on earth that concerned him. English! Yes,
he was resolved to learn it, but any detestable time would answer. As
there were no suitable books that Julie could find for the instruction
of adults, she brought a few from school. It was the Señor's practice,
while she was trying to teach him and while he wanted to tell stories,
to pick up gingerly between thumb and forefinger an offending First
Reader that had been pored over by many a brownie, and, shaking its
leaves contemptuously, exclaim: "Is it within the limits of reason
as conceived in your admirable head that a grown man in complete
possession of his senses can endure a thing like this: 'The cat ate
the rat: Spell cat, rat, also bat, hat, and mat'--Bah!"
At four o'clock, in deference to her Anglo-Saxon nationality, tea
would be served. It was of such an extraordinarily reprehensible
character that Julie at first had to be told what it was. Nobody in
the Señor's house was familiar with tea-making, and least of all the
native cook. From what Julie could gather from the Señor, a handful
of tea-leaves was boiled, like spinach, to pulp and added to a mixture
of condensed milk and brown sugar. The Señor sipped his tiny glass of
cognac and watched in wonder while Julie heroically made away with the
concoction. "The English are an enigmatic race," he reflected. "The
Bank of England, the bank of the world, you understand, stops work
every day in the calendar in order that every soul in it may of this
fearful fluid imbibe."
Upstairs his family lived. Señora Sansillo was a sweet-faced woman of
the stout mestiza type; dressed when she went out in screaming brocades
and plumes, and when she stayed in scarcely dressed at all. Her husband
referred to her in a respectfully disinterested way as "Eustefa"
and as of "heavenly temperament." Why of her own free will she should
wish to be so good, he could not think. "As for me--I am a diablo!" he
would thoughtfully add, twirling his Mephistophelian mustaches.
His children were attractive and intelligent, but they had upon them
the indefinable Malay stamp. Alongside their father's sharply defined
frame, they looked as if they had somehow been cast in wax. Children
of the sun! Columbines of a tropical garden! Sometimes Julie would
see the Señor pick up the youngest, a little brown will-o'-the-wisp,
and after looking her over searchingly thrust her down with an
inarticulate exclamation.
In time, the herb-woman's medicine seemed to have proved for Julie to
be a veritable panacea. It helped her to work and to sleep. At night
when her whole body quivered with fatigue and rivers of weariness
coursed over her frame, it was an agency of relief. It was not only a
refuge from suffering, but it was also a reserve against over-strain;
it helped her to go through the second part of the day, which was
the intolerable part. Rising from inadequate rest with the dragging
sensation of coming up out of the water with the weight of the world
about her neck, and facing the compulsion of crossing the scorching
city to battle with the intractable Señor, she gained from the medicine
fresh spurts of strength. Sometimes, even, she seemed to come alive
to a new world, from which armies of doubts and despairs had fled,
and which was invested with the rosiest plans for her drab and clearly
indeterminate future. Sometimes she rose to a superb tolerance of
mood in which mere human happenings were but traceries on dust.
With hard work and increasing bad health, Julie gradually saw less of
the acquaintances she had made. Isabel and Ellis were the Empire's more
fortunate women, claiming its brilliant and leisurely phases, whereas
she was drifting farther and farther into insignificance. Father Hull
was in Hong Kong making an attempt to rehabilitate his health. Barry,
as things were drawing to a crisis for the Americans, was off over
the Islands everywhere, striving desperately to stir up sentiment
against evacuation and feverishly attempting to finish off some
projects before the end.
A building era had struck the centers of the Archipelago and he was
egging the natives on to materialize their aspirations. He always came
to see Julie at once upon his brief returns to Manila, bringing with
him some little trophy of the trip. They would sit together under the
fire-trees in the Reredos' garden, with the little flames of blossoms,
lying about them in the grass while he recounted his adventures. Other
cities beautiful, he said were springing up. Legaspi had a regular
citadel of imposing public edifices under way. San Fernando, Pampanga,
had voted a splendid public square of modern cement buildings. Solano,
sepulchered dust of the Conquistadores, was being rapidly lifted from
its tomb; an earthquake had come along and by spilling part of the
ancient city had greatly aided Orcullu in his attempt to rear a new
commercial port.
An earthquake had in fact shaken the whole archipelago; there was a
great eruptive attempt to join in the march of modern progress. The
Americans, Barry informed her, had made over waterways, harbors, and
cities, developed vast tracts of forest, established new trade routes,
roads, a railway, organized industries and, in a manner of godlike
benevolence never attempted at home, were supervising the health,
morals, education and welfare of the entire race. The big things were
chuggling through. One corner of the East anyway, after a great deal
of phenomenal pushing, was beginning to stir. Imperishable cities
were beginning to rear their heads, not alone at the instigation of
the Americans but at the incentive of the natives themselves, out of
whose local resources and exuberant good will, the new cities were
being built.
While Barry pondered expansively under the fire tree, starting up
sometimes to tread the grass as if it were springs, Julie sat quietly
rapt and listened. She loved terribly these big things in which she
could have no part. She would clasp and unclasp her hands in suppressed
emotion while this splendid, transported Odysseus, his desert face
glowing like furnace gold, his great youthful frame energizing the
dusk as he moved, recited the achievements of the Argonauts. Always
there was some burning agitation in his soul. As he walked and talked
he would stir his hair wildly in his characteristic fashion. Julie
loved to watch him in moments like this, for at such times only she
was completely happy. Her soul seemed to ask for nothing more, as if
for the moment it were filled with realized dreams.
"Ah!" she once exclaimed, in a glory of satisfaction. "You never could
get pinned down to the dust like the rest of us. You could stay in
this Lions' Den forever and come out unscathed."
"If I did get down, remember, Julie, I should look to you."
"Because I know so much about the earth--the hard ground floor
of it? It seems somehow to have a natural affinity for me." She
reflected ruefully.
He stared off a while at the starry horizon. "We're agents of the
inevitable. America, like Christianity, Julie, is one of the biggest
things in human history. The two of them are victories of the soul
of men."
"Even old China," he went on, "caught from America the reflection
of democracy. But what she gleaned sank down crosswise into her poor
old brain, and she broke out into a muddling chaotic geyser that she
misconceived as a revolt.
"But, howsoever muddlesomely, Asia has made a beginning. She has
kicked up, never afterwards really to settle down. The habit of
mind of ages has been thrown off. You think I am a wild prophet,
but I have read secret tumults in the souls of men that later shall
take sure shape. The underground fire will spread, and you will
some day see China break out through every crack of her blistered,
old surface. Then we shall be able to say that we have done our work!"
Barry's manner suddenly altered. The triumph of his mood faded. "Julie,
the end will come here though, if these people persist. They dare
to risk so soon the human republicanism we've sweated for. In this
black chaos of famine and plague they want to stand alone. Have they
forgotten the big brute bulks that shadow this horizon? the lions
and the panthers coming out of the dark to devour them? The work of
our hearts--in the dust!" He clenched his hands.
"Congress will pass the Bill. It will be lights out here before
long--our carefully trimmed lights. We will have to move to new beats
in the East."
He caught her hand and walked with her to the gate, where, turning
about to face her, he said with deep emotion: "The cities of my heart
may pass, the fires that my life has lighted die, but you will remain
in my soul the one eternally abiding thing."
Long after the gate had closed behind him, Julie, the light all about
her, stood pondering those words. Like a prophecy of fire, her soul
saw them--like a glowing handwriting on the walls of fate, burning
characters predicting a future--a future in which far desert peoples
were concerned, and shining human deeds. An immortal experience was
about to offer itself out of her frustrated land of dreams.
She felt, as she sat there alone in the moonlight, as if she had been
summoned off her futile earth to occupy a finer planet, of Asian
gardens, pervaded with an ineffable fragrance of soul. This planet
did not hold China, full of black blots; it had nothing to do with
the terrible Pavilion with leprous beggars leaning out of it. Julie
did not know what this land was or where, but it was full of the
accumulated and expurgated glories of the East.
However Barry might succeed or fail, if his projects collapsed at
his feet or if he won heroically, he alone was wonderful, splendid,
inspired; the Excelsior man struggling upward with the banner of
humanity. He burned upon Julie's dreams as everything bright and
fine. She recalled the night they had first shared their virginal
dreams--before the sinister obstacle had come. Why had they been
separated to take ever widening roads of destiny? Near him she felt a
sense of tingling peace, of vivid harmony with even the unconscious
stones, so contrasting with all the other gloomy emotions that had
warped her life. She could have gone on forever in the atmosphere
he created of fluid golden good-will. Where he was, was always
light. Even the dusk glowed preternaturally, with a promise hid. A
sense of him pervaded the garden now, its lighted lengths, its drifting
fragrance. His presence was still here, touching every pulse.
All about were the mates of the garden. She knew their little dramas:
the male Papaya Tree peering across in dark discomfiture at a private
little miracle--a comb of incandescent mites of blossoms that his
mate had proudly on display! The lovely lady Sun-Tree dancing like
an houri in the breeze, waving her delicate plumes and swinging
her gay bells with their hairs of tongues, while her coarse mate,
rooted by his heavy frame to the earth cursed and groaned. Haughty,
green women of the garden! They had things better than their human
sisters! Above her, pure as the heart of Mary, without ever an earthly
love in it, the white cadena trailed snowily along the walls, while
orchids quartered on fern trees watched the night with uncanny eyes;
and close at Julie's hand the glowing grail of the hybiscus sadly
held forth to a darkened world the blood of Christ.
Beautiful sacred garden! If only by some magic it could be carried on
to flower forever in all the cycles of her uncertain future! Here in
this never-to-be-forgotten garden, they two had sat with the alamanders
gleaming upon them like a galaxy of golden moons, and had proclaimed
the promise of a new earth.
For once the sense of her weakness, her inconsequence, left her--the
burdensome sense of herself as a bungling, unsuccessful instrument
of life was swept out of her consciousness by new visions. The very
night shimmered with great dreams. Glowing gates appeared to her
imagination, and vast still deserts with men waiting watchfully
beneath the stars. It was that watching and waiting that thrilled
through her, caused her to start up in wonder and awe, as if from
somewhere a summons had throbbed: a vision of far questioning places
and of waiting watching men over against the Wall that crowns Cathay.