On her way home Julie happened to pass her former school. The old
crone to whom she still came for medicine was standing outside the
stall. The girl stopped to speak to her.
The old creature passed her brown bones of fingers over her uncanny
face and, staring into the face of the sun, began to mutter strangely
again about the search for the Ark. A fantastic being, the girl
thought, trudging over the earth after a chimera.
Julie told her that the medicine drove the pain away, but that, because
of the heat, perhaps, she could not eat or sleep well, and that there
came to her the strangest dreams in the world. In them the earth
became transparent--she could see clearly through it. She could see
people grow, bit by bit, under her eyes; and the forest, by some deep
instinct, knew her, and the flowers laughed and cried like children.
The old woman said that all this was true; that in the old days when
she lived in the splendors of the world the jungle used to be very
hostile to her and would tear at her with its teeth and sprinkle her
with its poisons and set its reptiles against her; but now that she had
made friends with it she could go through the heart of it and never
be hurt. She described how she plucked her herbs, male and female
in equal proportion, out of jungles where no man's foot had touched,
when the benign forces of the air preponderated over the malign.
Julie said that the body was a stupid abiding place after these dreams,
which put upon her soul marvelous new moods, like a moon forever at
the full.
The old woman clutched at the wheel of the carromata and stared
at her with unfathomable eyes. "Why did you not come with me when
I asked you?" she entreated. "You and I could have freed ourselves
from the wickedness of the earth, which is a heavy black bundle tied
to the back of mortals. We would have searched for the lost Covenant
between God and Man."
For an instant a weird vision rose before the girl of the places those
footsteps would lead to, down dirty by-ways of the East, catching
one's food where one could, brushing skirts with lepers and thieves,
in hazes of furnace heat. Thank heaven, not all the incarnations of
the East could bring her to a thing like that! And yet for an instant
the preposterous invitation had sent an odd thrill through her. This
nondescript old woman had touched her soul.
She smiled sadly, and shook her head, and the witch, dropping back
from the wheel, moved away, muttering, "Adios!"
And that was the last of her that Julie ever saw.
A few days later, she returned this way from the Señor's, to obtain a
fresh supply of medicine. Only one pellet lay in the box at home. But
from the shack opposite the school, the old woman had disappeared,
without leaving a sign behind her. Because of the manner of her going,
the Stall-keeper was positive that she would never come back.
In frightened dismay, Julie inquired of Mariana and Clarino, both of
whom had secretly bought amulets of the old woman--Mariana, to enable
herself to withstand the attraction of an unusually eligible lover;
and Clarino, to become the principal of a school, to which honor he
fearfully aspired. But neither knew anything about her: she was a
wandering witch, no doubt, who had perhaps gone away on a broomstick
into the sky.
It was through Delphine she received the only light she ever had on
the old woman's going. Disturbed over her disappearance from school,
Delphine had sought her out at her quarters. She explained to him
that she had been ill, and mentioned that she had not been able to
procure any more of a medicine which had brought her great relief,
and which she had been in the habit of buying from an old charm-woman
near the school, who had mysteriously disappeared.
"Dicky-Dicky sent her away!" Delphine exclaimed excitedly. "I saw him
come out suddenly upon her, a few squares from the school, and tell
her over and over to go away--that danger threatened several people
if she were seen around any more."
What did the dwarf mean? Delphine did not know, he did not ask
Dicky-Dicky questions because he got severely slapped on the head
for such efforts.
Gone, taking her secret off with her! That was the way with these
people--always under your feet, until some day, at some mysterious
signal, they took themselves finally off! Julie thought with terror
of all that lay ahead of her, to face unrelieved--the relentless
hot season, her perilous hold on a disorganizing community, her bad
health. With the aid of the medicine, she had managed to endure and
to go unsteadily on, but the thought of trying to continue without
it caused her limbs to grow cold. There was not fire nor force
enough in her to fight the rest of the way. To her other trials it
was impossible to add ceaseless and grilling pain. In a few weeks
she might have to go out of this country--and the passage money was
nowhere in sight. Something might yet happen to turn her fate. Until
then she must find a way to get the medicine.
Old Kantz, the chemist on Calle Alean, had been in the East for forty
years. He would be bound to know what the medicine was and to be able
perhaps to get more of it. Julie preferred him to Señor Reredo whose
shop was not far distant. So when Señor Sansillo went to Los Baños
on business she seized the half holiday to go and see Kantz.
As she entered the Botica a native clerk slumbrously uprose behind
the counter. It was a hot day. Nobody was about in it but tired,
driven Americans who take account of neither day nor night. Julie
made clear to him, however, that she must see Kantz at once.
The old chemist was finishing his siesta upstairs, but as he was
accustomed to act as an emergency doctor to his neighborhood he came
down, clad in white trousers and an undershirt that covered his fat
person like his skin. This attire was not really unconventional in
a land where attire might follow almost any persuasion of the mind.
He adjusted his huge lenses and nodded professionally to the
girl. Julie, wondering at her own precipitancy and unable to set forth
any explanation of it to Kantz, began in an uncertain voice. "I have
a medicine here--that I have been taking for some time--for very bad
head-aches. I can't get any more of it and I want to see if you can."
"What is it then?" He poked the pellet with a fat finger.
"I--don't know!" she stammered uneasily. It seemed so foolish a reply
to make in the face of this array of bottles confronting her like so
many incontrovertible facts and to Kantz who looked like the biggest
bottle and the most absolute fact of all.
"Where did you get it?"
Unable to escape, Julie replied in a lowered voice, "It was given me
by--a--a herb woman who had helped people I know--of. She has gone
away. I can't find her. I need the medicine"--with rising spirit and
an attempt at dignity--"it's a native specific."
"Wait, I will try and analyze it." He turned into his tiny laboratory,
the pellet, the last one, stuck perilously on his moist thumb.
Julie sat down and studied respectfully the irrefutable bottles. The
clerk mixed himself a surreptitious drink behind the counter, and
fell into gentle extinction.
Finally Kantz's great shape moved in, and Julie, glancing up, found
him looking at her very hard--stare which even before he opened his
mouth, threw every cell in her into turmoil.
"Ach! I have lived in the East for forty years, and do you think I
do not know all the tricks of your kind?"
The girl tried to be sure that she was not confronting a maniac--but
he was so monstrously calm. "What do you mean?" she quavered in fright.
"That you will not get any more of that medicine, here or in any
other drug store unless the keeper wishes to go to Bilibid." [1]
He employed a threatening, familiar tone. Once she had heard a man
speak to a drunkard like that.
"What is the stuff?" she cried wildly. "Is it poison? Tell me at once."
He turned to his bottles. "These dope fiends!" he muttered exasperated,
to them.
"Dope fiends!" the girl repeated stupidly. "A drug! Oh, don't tell me,"
she cried agonizedly, "--it's--"
"Since the new laws, you will find opium impossible to get. So I tell
them all--and they go crazy!"
Julie stared with wildly dilated eyes, her bloodless lips parted as if
to protest. Then she fell against the counter. There was a dead hush
in the deserted place. Not even a fly buzzed through the scorching
silence. Julie tried to lift her paralyzed arms to ward something
off. She was dreaming. She had taken too much medicine. Things like
this didn't happen!
But there, blistering her, was the chemist's cynical gaze. Day by
day she had been moving towards this wall--a blind dupe. She had had
a sunstroke on Adams's grave, and an old woman had offered her some
medicine for it, and out of this simple sequence destruction had
appeared. The avalanche of final ruin swept over the girl's fevered
mind. She had been dragged down--clear down. The slow but inevitable
juggernaut of the East had pulled her under at last, "grist for the
mill--you and I," Adams had said long ago. Out of a clear sky had
fallen this final, cruel joke.
"What am I to do?" The piteous question seemed, to fall on rather
than be directed to the chemist.
"Why then did you begin?"
She repeated her story lamely, disjointedly and in tears, conscious
of its futility--Kantz was so fatally incredulous.
"After a time," he told the bottles, "they cannot tell the truth."
The girl looked at him with terrible despair.
"You do not believe me--nobody will believe me. Oh!" she caught at her
throat and stared at him with the eyes of a caged animal. She clutched
at his arms in frantic pleading. "You are as good as a doctor. Give
me something that will cure me. I would offer you a lot of money, but
I haven't any. I will not go on always wanting that horrible stuff!"
"It is a long hunger. Sometimes it lasts as long as life."
"I didn't mean to get into it--that must count. Help me! I am
afraid. You must believe me--I am not a liar! There is a cure for
everything--everything," she cried wildly. "Mrs. Ashby said so--Oh!"
Her head dropped on the counter and she wept uncontrollably.
The chemist stared down at her uncomfortably. "Just stop!" he
said. "There is no other way."
Julie lifted herself up with a dizzy lurch and plunged out of
the botica. A strange being in her form walked the streets, which
had become a phantasmagoria of horror. Black shapes of doom seemed
haunting the avenues of life--she, the blackest shape of all, groping
through under-hells for light. She belonged now to the East forever
and forever. It had set its stamp of hopelessness upon her. She moved
along staring with desperation and repugnance at this dark race with
whose fate she had become allied.
She walked without direction, on and on, not knowing where she
was going, goaded by an immeasurable despair. She wandered half way
across the city, hatless, the sun scorching her head; what goal could
there ever be again? All their lives even the few cured struggled,
Kantz had said. A cursed pilgrimage the world, to these Wandering
Jews of souls! And she wasn't made for struggle. For a fearful fight
like this in which she had only one small, slim chance--she knew in
her soul she had not the force. She might struggle a little while,
but it was not in her being to combat to the end. It was easier to
die--but one didn't die, that was the worst.
She stood still on a street corner staring blankly about her. There
was no use in going on. There was nothing ahead ever, however far
she went. She stood there dully and thought of one thing, the flaky
thing that had hung to Kantz's careless finger. Only that would
lift a little while this madness of sun, and pain and strangling
despair. As she gazed tormentedly about her, her mind suddenly made
clear the significance of her surroundings. All this wandering had
been a subconscious hunt upon which some dim urgent sense had been
leading her--to the one spot where there was a chance of getting what
she desired. Chinamen always had it.
The girl paused horror-struck. But against the visions she desperately
set up, visions of her youth's high quest, of a splendid new Empire
of Mankind--of a Prince of the East, a throbbing insistence that
had never been denied arose and claimed every atom of her being and
wiped out every thought. Dim, distant visions they were now. Not one
of them could help--or save her. The Hunger consumed every fiber.
Yet the anguish, the urge of her memories assailed her all the
while--visions that had stirred her spirit terribly accused; voices,
very dear voices pleaded with her wretched soul.
Once that lane had been for her the evilest channel in which she had
seen life move. Now her torment swept her onward into its currents. She
must get a little--secretly--ever so little, to help her through
the woods.
She moved like a sleep-walker, a glazed look on her haunted face, among
the little stalls, muttering what she wanted under her breath. Nobody
must see her on such an errand in such an unspeakable place. The yellow
half-shaven heads leered at her like grinning skulls, and pretended
not to know what she wanted. They were uncannily wily, exercising
their super-evil intuitions. The laws were very strict. They must
make sure of her.
She feared them terribly. The old shadow, like the hangman's cap,
pressed down over her mind as it had done before. She knew what
a welter of evil desires her youthful body evoked up and down the
street--but she had forgotten her body, everything but this goading
of the furies.
She pursued her way among the stalls. It was here and they should
not outwit her. The yellowed skulls thrust themselves upon her,
their fishy eyes intimating all the wickedness in the world. At one
shop the Chinaman appeared to understand. She had put a paper bill
upon the counter. He lifted the board that barricaded him behind the
counter, and beckoned her to follow. The rear of the shop was black
and musty. The Chinaman opened a trap door, and ducked down under the
ground. He emerged in a moment with a small package which he held out
to her. Julie started forward to get it. The creature's arm swung out
and clutched her. She screamed, but one of the yellow paws dropped
over her mouth. Her whole life seemed to go out of her in a final wave
of fright. She knew what would happen to her down in that black cavern.
She wrestled against him. He put his hand upon her throat. She could
feel to her spine the chill of those yellow fingers compressing her
throbbing breath. As she fought away from him, the jade medallion
jerked out of her dress. She could feel it on her bosom dancing about
wildly. The hold on her throat relaxed. The creature had caught at the
amulet with one hand. The girl took wild advantage of his distraction
to wrench herself out of his grasp. Diving under the counter she hurled
herself into the open street. Nobody was following her, but she fled,
with a sobbing cry, through the dust down the center of the street,
the denizens of the stalls thrusting out their heads like cobras to
stare after her.
She continued to run even after she had gotten into safe districts, on
and on like a mad thing. Natives stopped to stare at the white woman
run amuck. In her tumult of brain she saw but one vision. Down under
the floor of this city, where its black beating heart lay filled with
the monstrous passions of men, where a motley evil crew from all the
coasts of the East trafficked in human life and flesh, down there she
was fated to sink. She had seen her end written on every one of those
opium-devastated skulls. Even now she would have been hurled to a rung
below hell if the Chinese charm had not diverted her assailant. She
had not been saved by her own will nor yet even by an oriental fetish,
but by the emblem of one man's love. She remembered the things she
had swept aside to go into that horrible street. Nothing had weighed
in the madness of the moment--a moment of hideous impulse that had
twisted in devastation every fiber of her being and left it a wrecked
thing whose roots a tornado had splintered.
"They that go down to dust!" ran in her fevered brain.
She hurried along, her body shivering, though it was a hot
day. Suddenly she saw she was nearing her objective, and stopped to
run her feverish, trembling fingers through her pale hair. As she
stood in front of Señor Reredo's drug store her heart beat so loudly
she feared that he might suspect what was in it.
The Botica, after the native fashion, was broadly open. No barrier must
interpose between the native and his passion for the street. The Señor,
his slim legs, terminated by red slippered feet, curled around the
rungs of a high chair, was reading El Progresso, a native organ. He
rose when he saw Julie and asked how he could serve her.
She wanted some more of that lotion for tan that he had put up for
her. It was more efficacious than anything else she had ever used. She
complimented him upon his ability as a chemist; if he should go
into business in Spain that ability would be recognized. The Señor,
gratified, admitted that here among the "Indianos" was no sphere
for a man's brains. They expanded into a discussion of different
panaceas. Julie suddenly put her package down on the counter and
soberly regarded him.
"Señor, my friend Barry says that an epidemic of cholera is breaking
out in this city. He says it is spreading like wildfire and that it
will be the worst plague, perhaps, that the Islands have known."
"The plague we have with us always," the Señor replied. "The Americans
take it too seriously."
"It rages in the provinces and it has come heavily to many districts
here. Barry is greatly worried. He warned me vehemently--and I am
afraid. The water, the food, every mouthful, every swallow means
danger. More than anything conceivable I fear the Peste. One suffers
horribly and cannot die at once. If one could carry always with one
something to bring death quickly! I had a friend once who traveled
much on railroads where one is in danger of terrible accidents. Once
he was buried under the wreckage of a coach and there came an awful
time to him, when he feared they would not get him out. After that
he carried tied around his neck always a little sack--three grains
of morphine--and he was insured. If you would give me the means--to
go--quickly in case I were hopelessly stricken, I would not fear
any more."
The Señor stared disquietedly at the counter. "Perhaps, I should have
left sooner, I have many children!"
"A teacher who came over on the boat with me has just died of
it!" Julie shivered.
"I will tell Sofia!" he muttered, "that it is just as well to go at
once. Señor Barry knows."
"But I must stay, Señor," the girl pleaded, "in this terror I have
no place to go."
He meditated. "Well, if it makes you feel safe!" He turned to his
drawers. "Three grains! Yes," he reflected, "that should be right."
The girl picked up the little box nervously. "Thank you, Señor,"
she said.