Barry hurriedly presented himself one afternoon at the Señor's
offices. Father Hull was fatally ill, and Barry had come to get Julie.
Outside the priest's room, in the Military Hospital, they found a
hushed motley assemblage--officials of high standing, prominent
natives and poor ones, many of those Father Hull had called his
camp-fire colony, grouped there waiting for news. A nurse flitted
occasionally in and out; in those days of over-crowded hospitals,
nurses were forced to disseminate their administrations.
Barry and Julie stepped softly into the room where the priest's
emaciated form lay stretched upon a bed. They bent down, and
watched tremulously for his fluttering breath. The stern, make-shift
surroundings, the absence of any one near to him, brought the tears to
Julie's eyes. While she had been giving all her thoughts to herself and
her own vicissitudes, the priest had hung on his cross suffering. His
outstretched wasted arms seemed to be offering the final oblation of
life. He was going out after a hard march. The camp fires were dying,
and he who had urged the souls of men along rough trails was being
extinguished with them.
His eyes opened feebly and rested on the door. Some yet living sense
that stood on guard over his earthly mission must have affected this
flickering return. His lips moved urgently. Julie understood that
before he slipped out there was some token his spirit wished to pass
to his colonist children. She tiptoed to the door and summoned them in.
As they entered, the priest turned upon them the helpless solicitude
of a dying father. He was leaving in their faltering hands their
unguarded destinies. The old Judge grasped his inert hand in helpless
sadness, murmuring under his breath something about "giving it up for
good." The Blackstones, shabby and broken, held up a thin frightened
baby before his glazing eyes. Jerome's somber, worn, dissipated face
worked with emotion. Mrs. Abernathy wept softly at the foot of the bed.
But it was to the shining serenity of the Ashbys that the priest turned
for his last vision of life. He kept his eyes fixed upon them, as if,
in this final extremity, they helped.
Julie glanced curiously at Mrs. Ashby, who now stood beside
Father Hull holding one of his hands. Her lids, drooped downward,
appeared closed. By her blank outer aspect the girl knew that she was
withdrawn into some mammoth struggle. It seemed to vibrate about her
in excitations of the atmosphere, as if an atom sought to stir all
space. "She is trying to save him," Julie thought.
There should of course be a way to do it. Death was a mistake that had
crept into creation. That was shown by the fact that never yet in all
the eons had man accepted it naturally. Life itself, in its sundering
battles, had perhaps evolved this malevolence, which darkened the whole
universe. Never had she looked on this irremediable mystery without
experiencing an insensate revolt and an unaccountable conviction of
its unnecessariness. She looked around at this circle of wretched
human helplessness, at the supreme helplessness on the bed, and felt
unreasonably that they had still not turned the last stone.
She turned to Mrs. Ashby to see if she might unaccountably have
demonstrated an answer to the struggling things within her mind. But
she too had clearly only grazed the great secret--for the priest
suddenly was dead. Over the city that he had left forever, the sunset
gun boomed.
In a silence that weighed like lead, Julie and Barry rode home. Julie
broke it at last. "He should not have gone!" Then to the dusk she
murmured absently and fragmentarily: "The things I do--ye shall
do also!"
"What are you saying, Julie?"
"One Person solved the mystery, you see."
He stared at her blankly. Then she roused herself. "It's
unnecessary--this dying," she broke out.
"In this instance criminal. A filthy disease to conquer so great a
human force!" Barry declared with bitter passion. "If death didn't
break one's heart, it would make one insane with anger. He had good
doctors, too," he reflected gloomily.
"But doctors can only go so far. Then you strike the dark border
where unfathomable mystery lies; the door-step of the unknown,
where accident, chance, the turn of a hair--and, yes, miracle
intervenes. Nobody can penetrate there. If only one could!" She leaned
earnestly toward him, the light coming into her face.
"Yes," he meditated gently, "all life hangs on a miracle. Yet," he
exclaimed somberly, "I think he is to be envied in passing out before
the great débâcle. You couldn't have turned his footsteps from these
shores, and he couldn't have borne to sit among the ashes of such
big hopes."
Julie had never seen Barry look so worried, as if a blow had been
struck across a vital part of him. Other people were always weary
in spots, or altogether; but he had been undaunted in harness,
campaigning joyously against the obstacles of the East. Soul-stirring,
world-overturning Barry, who had set his tireless shoulder to every
load! His heart must not break!
Often lately in their evening drives over a moon-enchanted city,
a city with all her sad secrets hid and along the great ocean lying
like a sector of eternity against poetically silvered mortal shores,
she had seen him strain about and look over it all and sink back with
a bitter sigh. She had read all the heaviness that lay in his soul
at these times.
"I say, and I will continue to say to my last breath, that we were
winning Asia step by step. Over in China, they are beginning to strew
the dynamite that will blow the old order of things off the globe. It
makes me too angry to speak of it! And I ask you, Julie, if the Gods
have given me a square deal? Isabel's Green God will win the day,
curse him!"
Julie looked at him searchingly. "Isabel is a great friend of yours,
isn't she, Barry?"
"She works against me, and tries to upset everything I do; but she
still manages to convey the intimation that she means well toward me."
"But what do you think she finally does mean towards you?"
Barry glanced up wonderingly. "She is an old friend of mine, and does
not want, I imagine, the best of her friendships broken. In a way,
you can scarcely blame her for seeing things as she does."
"She is beautiful--very!" Julie added, with a trifle of severity
toward herself.
"She is justly the Queen of the East."
"Suppose," the girl broke out feverishly, "she should find something
splendid to offer you!"
"There is no splendor left to me here, that I can conceive of."
"But if you could still serve in the East--would you do it--at all
hazards?"
"I will serve the East till I die," he said between set teeth. "It may
revile me, trample on me, repudiate me altogether, but it shall not,
I say, utterly cast me out--as this place is about to do."
He looked at her in despair. "The cholera is in the city, Julie. A
just judgment on the blind. Lord God of Hosts, after our labor and
sweat, the eternal plague! It seems to have broken out in nearly
every province; and if it keeps on at this gait, it will rot the
Archipelago. It looks like a holocaust this time, to sweep away this
blind beggars' caravan.
"The Peste!" he muttered. "You haven't heard that wail of the lost
over the devastation of their little lives, as I have, nor walked
at sunset through the blood-red light into their poor hamlets and
found them dying darkly behind their rush walls, with the fiat of God
written on their foreheads, as they'd say. Isn't that the human soul of
it--conceiving the curse that its blindness has brought down upon it
to be a splendid decree of God? If a thousand years were as a day--as
they are to Him--we'd win over here. But look at these creatures now,
tearing everything away, and shouting out across the seas that they
can stand alone, their bewildered souls on their splendid feet!" Barry
relapsed into his native idiom, as he often did when he was greatly
stirred. "And here they are at last in the power of the Plague, with
their splendid feet a-fleeing, and their bewildered souls going out
to God, who never asked for them in such a hurry.
"That's the soul-splitting East! You may take its highways barefooted,
your veins bleeding all over them at every step, you may hand its
people from a high mountain the kingdom of God, but they'll never be
caring a bit. It's not in the nature of any of them to give thanks
to God or man. Sometime far hence, when I'm through with the East
and wish to go up into a cloud to rest my soul of it, they may try
to persuade me down with a mountain of gold, but I'll kick the whole
thing over and go on my way up."
He dropped his fervent fantasies, and fixed upon her a passion of
solicitude. "Take care of yourself, Julie, mind! You have a shining bit
of light on you that I never saw on another mortal woman--and which
will hold me through all the dark places I shall pass through. What
does it matter whom else they say you are waiting for! Never, to
the end of time, will I believe the soul of you stands waiting for
another man! In all these days, when my heart has been going out
to you, you've had this will-o'-the-wisp in your brain. It can't be
anything more--just a screen down the path, hiding for a little while
the light."
"Who," Julie asked, turning white in amazement, "told you that?"
"Chad and Isabel--my friends who do not see your fairy light. They
want me to let you pass on--as though I wouldn't go on following
after you across all the tracks of the universe!"
Often the portals of her spirit had started to spring--to loosen
her imprisoned emotion, but the conviction of her unworthiness,
the fear of mischievously or malignantly encroaching upon his life,
had dammed it back. Sometimes even in her despair, she had felt that
his eyes were looking for something the confines of her gates did
not contain. Now, almost overpoweringly the impulse to disregard
the consequences, to fling open her soul, to disemburden it to the
bottom on that instant of all the pain that had habitation there,
flared up in Julie. The very citadel of her soul had been struck.
Then sweeping over her again came all that Isabel had said--the
terrible, almost inconceivably terrible calamities she had
threatened. Once more she remembered the prophetic flash of look
between Isabel and the Rajah of Ramook--the king of Ramook! after
independence Barry was to have a high place--the highest they had
to give, perhaps. She swept out her hands distressfully, as if to
clear away this mammoth bewilderment. Suddenly she found resolve,
even with the suppressed tears choking her.
"Chad and Isabel are right!" she declared huskily. "I am not fit to
come in your path--not at all worthy of ideals and energies like
yours. Chad said I was a wastrel--and so did she. The woman who
should touch your life, Chad said, should be one of concentrated
fine forces. I have never concentrated anything. I have moments of
inspiration, moods of fervor, but never have they--never perhaps will
they knit into anything abiding. I tried in Nahal. I gave it the
best in the compass of my being. If anything was to be fulfilled,
it would have been fulfilled there. Nahal was my Chance. I can't
think why it turned out as it did--I wonder if I shall ever know. My
catastrophes there have made me stagnant. You see, everything mattered
so terribly then. I was red-hot iron to be struck to any shape of
the future. I couldn't make you understand--not even by opening up a
whole train of luckless experiences and abasing myself in the telling
of them. Sometime, perhaps, a reckoning will come.
"Why did I have to go South--after we had met that night on the
roof! That is when our spirits really met. But something took me on
and on in another direction. Perhaps I wouldn't have been--I--the
sum of me--without all that has come to pass. I don't know what
the answer is going to be. I won't be a marsh light to you, luring
you along false paths--but I can't bear, Barry, dear"--her voice
broke--"to have you desert me altogether. Go on holding me in your
thoughts!" she entreated with a little sob.
The sight of his bowed shoulders and hopeless face overwhelmed
her. Atlas crushed under his load, struggling tragically against
destruction.
"I'll do anything to save you, Barry!" she cried, clinging wildly to
him. "You mustn't drop down. Something is going to happen to you. Some
one is going to help you out!"
After he had left her at the Reredos' gate, the universe seemed to
have widened fatefully between them, leaving her alone--all alone,
in fearsome areas of space. She crept up the stairs to her room. But
not even the medicine brought her any sleep that night; never had her
being been so hideously disturbed. Isabel had promised mysteriously
tremendous things, for the fruition of which she had been ordered
out of the way. Everybody was ordering her out of the way. Out of the
vague plots that seemed everywhere about her, but one thing emerged,
but one thing counted--the possibility of a turn in Barry's fortune.
If the Islands should now become independent before they were prepared,
almost anything might come to pass. There was a leaven in men's
thoughts, Barry had said, that was bound to turn things frightfully
about. Humanity was urging on to the pass where it would accept the
most portentous challenges of fate: the old structure of its existence,
handed down through the ages, would no longer answer for the framework
of men's lives. Dissatisfied with the ancient edifice, it would
overthrow the world, and rear a new. "A new heaven and a new earth,
my dear, for these blind human bats is on the way," Barry was wont
to declare. Barry's enthusiastic fancy was fired by this magnificent
mood, which he claimed to discern all over the earth. There would
be an explosion, of course, to blow away a lot of mediæval rot--and
there would be loss of life: to get the message of the stars, one had
to bleed. They could have his life--oh, yes, a dozen of them. He had
flung away a dozen impossible lives with an indifferent Olympian wave.
Which all went to prove to Julie's mind that Isabel's speculations
might not prove so startling, after all. Well, if through the
instrument of Isabel's uncertain hands, his dream could be saved,
nobody at all must stand in the way--certainly not a mere Julie with
her knotted web of life. But how was one to make sure of the vivid,
veiled Isabel?
At dawn, Julie rose, and dressed feverishly. She summoned a carromata,
and set out in an agitation of anxieties for Santa Ana. Mrs. Ashby
had told her to seek her out when she was in trouble. Everybody was
in trouble now; not one in these stressful times knew where to turn;
Julie herself, least of all. Mrs. Ashby had managed to convey to her
the intimation of a certain exceptional strength, which she now felt
a desire to draw upon for extrication from her difficulties.
The Ashbys inhabited--that being a term for the state of life which
they shared under the same roof with a community of other people--a
large Spanish house not far from the river. The surrounding fields,
enriched by the stream, looked in the distance like the work of an
impressionistic artist rather than of an orderly nature. The house
stood alone, sunk in the lush depths of the rice fields, where workers
picturesquely clad in red in a seemingly jocose attempt to terrorize
the birds, were cutting the young rice to the music of a rough guitar
plied by a recumbent artist under a huge umbrella. The house itself,
painted green, jutted out of the surroundings, of a piece with them.
The institution was called the Free School of Practical Arts--the
words "free" and "arts" making a direct appeal to the native, whose
graceful inclination of mind construes freedom as leisure, and Art
as a casual expression of leisure.
The principal instruction was concerned with the habits of civilized
living and thinking. The male aspirants were taught to design
furniture and join it, to care properly for the universally abused
domestic animals, to farm, to tailor their own garments, to construct
simple nipa houses, and to practice sanitation. The girls and women
were taught to manipulate the native stove to better and more varied
methods of cooking, to do sewing, and to make fine embroidery--from
which industry, as well as from the bureau of domestic employment in
connection with which house servants were trained, was derived some
revenue. The care and feeding of infants, whose mortality in these
parts was startling, had also an important place in their instruction.
As Julie entered, she was struck by the happy and trustful atmosphere
of the place. Mr. Ashby's spectacled eyes lifted to her from the
planing of some boards. A flock of keen, merry-eyed boys, let loose
from concentration, burst argumentatively into English about the work
in hand. Just at the present moment back in the city, her own former
pupils, Julie well knew, were attempting to explain to Clarino--who
had sat up till midnight to discover it--the difference between the
reflexive and the passive verb forms.
Mr. Ashby led her on till they discovered Mrs. Ashby engaged, with
that air of glowing serenity, which had at the first caught Julie's
eyes, in her own peculiar bright activities.
Mrs. Ashby looked at her soberly. Something in the girl's appearance
held her thoughtful attention.
"I have come to see you--as you asked me to do," Julie told her.
She led the girl to a sunny sala overlooking the tinkling
fields. Julie, as she followed, was thinking that since Father Hull
had found in this woman a strength to die by, she might, in these
evil times, disclose a strength for living. She had pulled herself out
of very dark places. People who could so marvelously help themselves
must possess force for other lives.
As they sat down, Julie exclaimed: "You see, I am unhappy! And I have a
notion that I may be ill. Last night I scarcely slept at all. Something
in me is wrong, and certainly everything outside of me is. Things are
so black! Oh! What is to happen to all these people who have worked,
and hoped? I have worked and hoped too, but it hasn't counted--nothing
counts; I am very nearly sure of that. I've lost my position--though I
haven't told anybody that I was thrown out--because of Nahal. It was a
cut to the heart," she brooded. "Then--I am working for an odious man.
"And Barry," she went on restlessly. "What is to happen to him? I've
never seen him down before. It frightens me. Are we all going down
under some avalanche? Some of us have no place else to go. I don't
understand--but that's my eternal, foolish cry. I've blistered my soul
praying about everything. I thought you would understand. Oh! You
must, for I have come to you for light. You are not blind, you are
not floundering; you are safe and sure. What is it that makes your
life so strong?"
"Tell me," Mrs. Ashby said, bending toward her, "what you prayed for."
"For Barry's safety through the world!" Julie replied simply.
"And for nothing else?"
Julie started a trifle. "Well, for a number of things--at different
times."
Mrs. Ashby reflected a moment. "I used to pray when our money was
getting short that more would come so that we might buy a fresh
bottle."
Julie gave a shiver of repugnance.
"We were both, weren't we, praying at cross-purposes?"
Julie frowned slightly. "What I want to know is why I am rolling
always to disaster; why I can't call a halt--why I can't see clearly?"
"Do you know how hopeless I was--Dick and I, drowning together, in
this oriental maelstrom? We expected to finish in one of the hells of
the East. We knew that time was fast overtaking us. And there would
come to me, when I awoke sober in the night with the whole universe
clutching at my throat, the terror of those black pits.
"Many people tried to help us. I recall their futile efforts wafting
across our heedless lives. Then there came across our path the Little
Gray Woman, as we call her. I don't know what she was doing away over
here. She said she was just a joyous old traveler of the world. She
was not actually different from anyone else, you must understand, but
she found us blind things in her path calling out from the highways
for sight. It would be difficult to make you understand just how she
came to help us break the bondage of our flesh."
Mrs. Ashby paused thoughtfully, then went on. "You remember how,
in divine contempt, He picked up clay and, mixing it with spittle,
laid the bandage of the earth across the eyes of those who all their
lives had understood in terms of clay--and tearing it away, revealed
to them the miracle of sight. So it came to us. We were summoned,
poor Lazaruses, from our tombs, into the day."
Mrs. Ashby lowered her head. "This is a strange language to you, and
these are not revelations for a laughing world, but for those who are
going out in darkness--for men stricken in agony on the battlefield,
for all who like you are in the throes of terror and destruction. These
truths are the springs outside your reach across the thirsty desert.
"When you come at last upon the light, the grave-clothes the mind
has worn so long drop away; the false garment man has spread across
the face of things dissolves, and you find that you are not in the
world for a day, but that you are in the universe forever.
"Oh! If you only knew it, you could walk free through the earth,
fearing nothing. When I found that I was not thonged by crucified feet
to an inexorable world, that the world was only a snowdrop on the
face of the eternal, a mood of the universe; and that I was greater
than all of it, could shape it with my will, touch the widest reaches
with my thought--that of all creation, God and my kind alone could
will--then the light of Paul broke!
"The light of Paul, Julie! A golden light, beating on the soul,
revealing its far country, the kingdoms of the unseen whose invisible
marvels can be brought to our own threshold.
"It was in the knowledge that it was not death he was facing, but a
new direction in God's areas, that Father Hull passed out."
"Why did he die?" the girl asked abruptly. "I felt queerly to blame
for being so weak that I couldn't do anything. Doctors have told
me that they have had the same feeling, even when they have exerted
themselves to the utmost."
"Ah! There you are touching upon the kingdoms of the unseen. All
their powers can be brought to our threshold," she repeated, "as
Franklin brought the lightning out of the blank sky. We don't know
half the forces that move through the universe. Another generation
will understand. We are but poor jugglers tossing glass balls, when
we might be moving stars."
"But--you tried," the girl stammered.
Mrs. Ashby cast upon her a new look. "You saw that!" She brooded in
silence for some time. At last she said: "We are in mystery still. It
will take a long time. He did not understand, nor did I--enough. You
have to be very strong for that!"
The girl rose. "Alas! I am used to things as they seem. I see the
shapes and the obstacles of the world very plainly. I am traveling a
longer road than to Damascus, and I don't see the light. But I shall
always remember what you have said to-day.
"I can only grasp at the tail of your ideas; but that one
thought--that I am not of the world, but of the universe--that is
sweet and splendid. It carries me on wings into regions I've never
dreamed about. To be timeless, spaceless, to wear a garment of the
Indestructible, and to share its miracles!
"I was sick of the pettiness of this little earth, and hideously
afraid of the universe; afraid of its sinister unexpectedness, its
soullessness towards the microcosm Me, and its imminent threat to
break me so that I never could be put together again. You have made
it all seem different--and wonderful. Just as if I had found that
there were fairies again in the world, and that I was one of them,
instead of a trampled little atom not worth bothering about."
Julie went away shining in the new mood; but as she moved back into
the material, exotic world, she felt her glorious immunity wearing
away, and herself forced to battle to keep her conviction against
the old calamitous universe with its desperately insoluble problems.