Julie walked back into her room, and stared heavily about this shell
of her old existence where day by day the rope had been tightening
inexorably around her throat. The room looked like a place she had
never seen.
On the bed, suggesting her own spent mortal frame stretched helplessly
prostrate, lay a worn evening gown. It brought the room back to
familiar proportions. The recollection swept over her that to-night
Isabel was going to have a party, and that she had put the dress there
this morning--a time which seemed now to have no connection with her
existence--to determine whether it could be made to hold together for
this one night. Isabel had sent her a note, begging her to forget their
last meeting and to come to the party. Nothing, of course, could change
that explosion of hatred. Yet this morning she had decided to go.
She stared out at her Asian garden. She seemed to see a quick-stepping
figure moving down there among the sighing trees. She turned away
wretchedly. That was over forever. Soon, when the Reredos went away,
the forsaken garden would revert to the jungle. Nobody would remember
it. Yes, her soul would find a way to come to this spot of beauty,
where the most splendid visions of her life had been evoked.
She began to gather up her belongings. They made just one
trunkful,--everything that, after nearly twenty-one years of sojourn
on the planet, she owned. She wondered if there were not something very
wrong with a person who could not accumulate more than that after such
a long time. The Señor had advanced her a week's salary, which must be
returned. She counted the money out of her purse, and laid it on the
table. Then she fumbled in her trunk for her letters. The first one she
came upon was the notification of dismissal from the Department. The
next, Adams's letter, still crying forth its bitter loneliness.
Then she sat down and wrote a letter to her uncle; and here at last
her dulled heart was able to bleed. She had tried very, very hard,
she told him. She was terribly sorry that things had turned out as
they had. But the East was like the Bank of Monte Carlo--with the
odds always against you. Of that final catastrophe that had come to
wipe out her last chance, she found it impossible to speak. To his
Western consciousness away off there, on the other side of the world,
in a secure and ordered scheme of life, such monstrous happenings would
be inconceivable. A pitiful, incoherent document, that accounted for
nothing really, splashed all over with Julie's tears.
She aroused herself feverishly, and examined the dress. The anger
of that last meeting with Isabel stood out forcibly before her
mind. Isabel hated her because of Barry. And Isabel did not hate
fruitlessly. All her emotions found vital expression.
Something kept welling up from the depths of the girl's
sub-consciousness--something that was like a wavering clew. Quite
without reason, a face rose before her vision--a face looking up
stealthily above Isabel's staircase. It turned, and revealed--the face
of the old medicine crone! Not till this moment had memory welded
these two associations. The old crone had some identification with
Isabel. In her bent shadowy shape, Isabel's hatred took form. Isabel
had wanted terribly to get her out of the way. She had not dared to
kill her, but she had selected a method of elimination too subtle for
its agency to be traced. And Dicky-Dicky, the Dwarf, who had had a
place in his heart that was called Nahal, had known, and because of
it had frightened the Old Woman away, and attempted to save her--too
late. Yes, it was clear enough now.
Chad and Rosalie had been her accomplices, no doubt. But though
Chad had been hostile, he had been openly so. Julie was reluctant
to accuse him of any complicity in so Oriental a plot as that Isabel
had woven. But against the whole white race, Rosalie would have lent
herself as an instrument of destruction. Julie could see how Isabel
would work upon the fury of her jealousy, set up before it everything
American that Rosalie might believe was responsible for the abstraction
of her husband's love.
Soon, they had planned, she would be nothing at all but a bundle of
flesh, with an appetite--a thing that no human passions could ever
reclaim. And when she was wiped out--the shame and horror of her--Barry
would be elevated to the place that Isabel was preparing for him. Julie
remembered the talk of a paradise. She began to cry again.
She had not seen Barry--for an eternity! She must see him--if only
to attempt to make clear to him the things that were in her soul. In
the urgency of this desire, everything else was swallowed up. After
all there was nothing more that Isabel could do to her. She would go
to the party.
While dressing, she studied herself in the glass. An image rose before
her--the image of herself that had confronted her on that distant,
transported day on the other side of the world, the day she had
stepped into life and had offered herself with such magnificence to
its designs. Who was to blame? If the Nahalites had had the grace of
God--if Isabel--the East--had not hunted her down!
As she was about to leave the room, she turned back, and laid on
the table an envelope with some money in it, addressed to Señora
Reredo. She picked up her uncle's letter to mail, and the money for
Señor Sansillo, glanced agitatedly around the room for an instant,
and hurried out of the house.
Señor Sansillo was upstairs when she reached his house, but he
came down immediately when he heard who it was that wished to see
him. Julie, pale and tense, stood waiting for him in the doorway of
his office.
"I've come to tell you that I shall not be here any more!" she said.
He gave a start. "But why?" he asked.
"Because," the girl flung out, "I am weary of earning my living
listening to questionable stories, and having horrible jewelry thrust
on me. Here is the money you advanced. Thank you!" She held a roll
of bills out to him.
An angry flush swept over his face. "You are suddenly independent,
Señorita Dreschell?" he satirically exclaimed.
"Yes, my independence came suddenly to me!" she agreed, "therefore
I shall never come again."
He darkened volcanically. "You must not--do that!" he commanded,
in a shaken voice.
He did not attempt to speak again for a moment, but broodingly studied
her face as if to find the key to his new behavior. He must have come
to realize the unalterable nature of this new purpose, for he said in
tones so strangely humble the girl could scarcely recognize them as
utterance of his: "If I promise that I will do these things no more,
will you stay?"
She shook her head.
"I beg of you to remain!" he insisted in a low voice. "I will ask
only that you sit at that window where you have always sat--only that,
no more."
She was startled to perceive that tears of emotion had gathered in
his eyes. Suddenly he burst into a torrent of speech, as he paced
agitatedly to and fro.
"Do you think then that I have had so much in life?" he demanded
turning round fiercely upon her. "Know then that I have been thwarted
in all that I ever desired! Fifteen years ago I came to these colonies,
penniless, alone. My family had lost everything in Spain. Like many
another Spanish youth, I set out with hopes that towered to the skies,
for I was young and full of hope. El Dorado would bring me my fortune,
I believed, just as you believed it would bring you yours.
"But I found myself a stranger without affiliations in a strange
land. My illustrious name counted for nothing in such a country. I
was a lawyer, but there were plenty more of my kind who were woven
into the network of the Blood, you understand. Shall I tell you how
I starved in this land, how my heart ached to breaking because of
it! One way of salvation opened to me, the way of most of my desperate
countrymen. It was a dark way to me, but it opened the closed gates
of the East. I, too, entered this freemasonry of blood. It was smooth
traveling after that, but"--he tore ferociously at his immaculate
waistcoat--"if the years could be swung back, and I could walk these
streets destitute--but free and a youth again--yes, for that. I would
toss Satan my soul!"
He put his hand up to his throat. "You came! I used to dream of one
like you on that old ship, I, a poor lad on the way to the East to
find my fortune: I have tried everything with you, I admit. I was a
devil, as you say--but am I not bound in a web whose threads are as
strong as the tentacles of the devil fish? This place will turn black
as hell after you are gone!"
He paused with hands appealingly outstretched. Another darkened
soul! A feeling of pity swept over the girl. She turned upon him a
commiserative face.
"I am sorry for you. I am sorry for all of us who sought fortune in
the East. We are a pitiable lot, Señor. Drive around the Escolta
any night, and you will see us in our several unhappy stages of
decay. Some of us were not big enough for our task. Oh, I, too,
would have given anything to have succeeded!"
"But what is to become of you?" he cried, in genuine solicitude. "You
are ill. You have no money and without money one cannot live one
instant in this terrible land. Reverse your mad decision, and stay
here. You shall have nothing to fear from me."
Julie shook her head speechlessly. She and her concerns had sunk
into a whirlpool of despair, but there remained the one passionate
satisfaction of being able to sweep her soul clean at last. So much,
much money that she had not earned--the thought of it burned like
fire. She put out her hand. "Good-by, Señor!"
Isabel's house twinkled from a distance with fiery lights. The strains
of the orchestra playing, like a band, loud chords of revel, tore open
the peace of the night. Julie ascended into an atmosphere in which
the note of triumph seemed everywhere proclaimed. Isabel had decorated
the place amazingly with palms and tropical flowers. Dark faces flowed
about in currents of festivity, wearing, Julie thought, an appalling
aspect of victory. Isabel conveyed this impression preëminently. She
appeared to be in the throes of some delirious celebration of soul. It
was as if there blazed forth from her personality the triumph of many
cities and multitudes of islands made glad. She terrified Julie.
All this exultation fell like the weight of doom on the girl's
aching spirit. She herself seemed to represent the living defeat
of her countrymen. Few of them were here to-night. Their absence
made a haunting void in the throng. The charge had gone out of
them, the force: almost as if something had taken God out of the
universe, and left it to stumble on by itself. Her weary mind dwelt
with a great effort for an instant on the tangled threads of their
disappointments. America wished to withdraw from her position in the
East; from all the potentialities of her presence there. The Eastern
problem was not, she held, her responsibility. Perhaps the corner of it
she had lifted appalled her. Perhaps she had attempted a too ambitious
job. No group of men--not even the dauntless ones who had grappled with
the tremendous difficulties here--could make over the East in a few
short experimental years. At any rate, after successive agitations,
the country, divided on the question of colonial possessions, seemed
now to have come to the point of relinquishment; and the unclosed
scaffoldings of the attempted structure of enlightened government in
the East would be left to rot before the gaze of the Orient. Julie
knew that that was what her countrymen hated--not the going, but the
failure left behind, the judgment pronounced upon them in the courts
of the world.
Julie was watching with every nerve for Barry. Once more to have
the old fire thrown over her. But after all this fearful waiting,
what would there be to say? Even if she poured forth the tale of her
wholly wretched situation, there was nothing ever, ever, that he could
do. If she had been before unfit for him, she was now utterly removed
from him. Certainly he could not move through life with such a thing
as it was fated she should become dragging around his neck. They had
been too near to each other for her to inflict upon him a brutality
like that. Fright at this picture of ruin for them both turned her
faint. Perhaps after all, she had better not wait.
Chad passed, his face pale and abstracted. He nodded at the spot
where Julie stood rooted. She gazed after him with a piteous
absence of ill-will. His had been such a tiny contributory force
to the avalanche. She forced herself to move on towards Isabel,
who intolerably radiant and shining, wavered across her path. Isabel
came down abruptly out of her glorified mood, and searched the girl's
broken and disintegrated being with a passionately curious gaze.
Julie knew that Isabel was waiting for the signal of complete
capitulation, and she struggled with all her force to withhold the
surrendering sign. As she looked on the triumph and terror of this
woman, one of the dark lusts of this land that had surged all about
her heretofore without touching her, suddenly took possession of
her. She wanted to strike Isabel, to beat her out of existence. She
had borne enough in this black land, and this woman was not only her
enemy, but her destroyer--the very symbol of the country which had
twisted and thwarted and wholly wrecked her life. She stumbled toward
Isabel, whose purple eyes must have fathomed some mad intent, for she
stepped warily back till the crowd interposed between them. Julie's
impulse failed--a poor avenging instrument she. As she wheeled away,
she saw Isabel's countenance assume an expression as if some godly
satisfaction had been handed down to her.
Her desperate eyes still searching in every direction, Julie rambled
unsteadily on. Everything looked strange, as if she had never belonged
to the pageant of human passions. Oh! To be back again in the rich
moving of human passions!
She came upon a group talking in hushed tones. The ejaculations of
dismay sounded an odd note in this hard festal blare. Major Holborne
was knitting his brows; Chad's face wore a queer arrested look;
a woman uttered a soft cry.
"When did you hear it?" somebody asked.
"This evening, while people were on the Luneta. The police telephoned
me to get her husband. He wouldn't go--so I went," Holborne said.
"What has happened?" Julie demanded.
Nobody replied at once, then Chad said heavily: "Leah Chamberlain threw
herself out of a window of the Oriente--and dashed out her brains."
"Ah!" The girl was still for a moment. "But why?" she demanded.
The men said nothing. Mrs. Burke, a little English woman drew her
aside. "It's never safe to ask why. Locroft was called home, he had
come into the title; and--well, I suppose it was all impossible!"
Another impasse! Leah, the will-o'-the-wisp--who, every one had said,
had never had a serious feeling in her gossamer existence--displaying
at last a supreme, deadly seriousness. It was inevitable that one who
had so completely held her life in her own hands should herself have
destroyed that life. Leah would never consent to live or die except
on her own terms.
Julie glanced up from where she stood frozenly considering Leah's fate,
to behold Barry coming in her direction. His invincibly lifted head
quickened her. Every human thing about him sent a thrill through her
deadened senses--the desert face full of visions, the ardor of life
that was in him. For an instant it seemed as though she were being
brought back into sanity and safety again, as if through his presence
a loop-hole of escape must open up.
But immediately following these sensations there rose before her brain
a vision of a horrible street with bleached faces thrust up out of the
bowels of the earth. Her fingers clutched the spot where the stolen
medallion had hung, the token of his spirit that had intervened between
her and a monstrous fate. The chain remained intact; she thrust it down
in her dress so that he might not notice that the medallion was gone.
"Julie!" he exclaimed coming quickly towards her.
She replied with an articulate sound of joy and terror.
He took both her hands in the joy of meeting and drew her out of
observation to the gallery.
"I've been sick for a sight of you--in a desert abandoned, choked
with sand!" The tone of his voice brought the tears smarting to her
eyes. "I used to have a thousand things in my life--a million--and
now all I've been thinking about is you!"
The blood came back into her face and life into her heart.
"What do I care for the world without you in it? I wouldn't walk the
sick old place without you." His voice broke. "You're still following
some disastrous mirage! Ah, Julie--when our souls have the same dreams
in them--and have beckoned each other across the world!"
He put his arms about her, and kissed her. She burst into agonized
tears and clung to him. "There," he said, "isn't that the miracle!" he
cried in radiant tenderness. "In this moment we've become endowed with
a hundred lives! Henceforth we'll take the rough paths together. China,
Julie, old China--the wonder of it. You and I and Sun Yat Sen, up
and down the plains and highways, touching the gophers into fire!"
"The gophers!" she shuddered away. "Oh! How can you bear to stay
in this brutal place? It hates so bitterly. It takes revenge so
monstrously! It has eaten up our dreams, torn our hopes from us,
and rolled our lives in the dust."
"But the wonder of it, Julie," he argued, with glowing eyes. "The
mystery of it, and the unending struggle beating about you like
wings of the invisible! The battle of light and darkness--God's own
dear battle. The human strain at its utmost, the heights and the
depths! Why, I'd be in it forever. I'd not miss it for anything. I
would keep on tramping in it with a sack at my back."
Julie's teeth bit at her white lips. "And the terror of it," she
cried fiercely; "the cruelty, the evil of it; the plagues that are
even now eating up the city of your hopes--Oh, the death that waits
in all its paths!" She leaned back weakly against a post.
"It's a hard path truly," he conceded. "Many's the time I've starved in
the East, and come close to its bottomless pools. It is only a short
while since, that I thought I was on the high places for good, with
the universe at my back; but I'm down on foot again in the dusty road,
along with the rest of the world. But I never think of those times--for
what cocoon remembers his worm's body? We are going on--to-morrow, or
next day. You haven't seen China. We're refugees, but she'll find us
our place. Nobody that has ever won a foot of the world turned back."
Her white face stared mutely at him for a moment.
"I'm not up to your--golden journeys, Barry," she said painfully,
her lips quivering. "I'd have to be made all over again for that! You
must go alone--or with some one that can help you. But--perhaps you
won't forget me, even if I was such a futile thing. When the sun
sinks on your deserts, call me up out of the mirage, and we'll plan
together--as we used to, the overthrow of the old order of things."
"We'll follow the road together!" he insisted vigorously, "and
sometime, a long while hence on the journey, I'll wake you one morning
with the shout that the Millennium has come; and you will come out,
trailing yourself in morning-glories, to welcome the world at your
gate!"
He drew back aghast at the look in her face.
Somebody back of them spoke Barry's name inquiringly, as if not sure,
in the dim light, that it was he. They turned around, and Isabel came
toward them, amazingly changed.
She had discarded her splendid raiment, and appeared in a short,
diaphanous garment that flared about her like bloody flames. Her
black hair swept like a wind-blown scarf to her firm white heels.
Julie slipped suddenly back into the shadows, while Barry stared at
Isabel in strange silence.
"I'm going to dance!" she announced. "You have often asked to see me,
so come. Ah; to-night I am mad for wings! I have something afterwards
to tell you--something of great importance."
She plucked Barry by the sleeve and drew him on. Barry put out his
hand to draw Julie along with him; but Isabel soon contrived in the
crowd, to separate from him the indeterminedly following girl.
One end of the sala had been thrown into a softly radiant dusk. Under
the streamers of one high lamp, Isabel stood and stretched out her
arms like radii of light. Then in a whirl like a sun tumbling through
the sky, she was in motion. Julie who had wandered up to the wide
crowded circle of onlookers stood feverishly watching. Every movement
of that mad, exultant whirl of limbs was an intolerable stab. Those
feet twinkling like pearls out of the wind of motion looked as though
they might kick down the stars. Julie herself had been one of the
obstacles they had kicked out of their path. Yet she could not take
her eyes away from this dusky sorceress spinning in fire this houri
of terrible loves and hates.
An emotional stir vibrated through the crowd. Eyes exchanged
messages. Julie looked around to find that a young Spaniard had
pressed in next to her and was regarding her with all the ardor of
his eyes. Through the wide open galleries the moonlit vision of an
intoxicating night appeared, and subtle vows seemed to whisper all down
the reaches of the tropical dusk. The young man's glance seemed to say,
"Let us go--and follow the night!"
When the palpitating circle broke, Julie crept away in search of
a small stair-case, which she remembered to have seen when she had
stopped with Isabel. It was quite impossible for her to escape unseen
by the main stair-case.
She came out upon a small gallery somewhere at the remote end of the
house. There were others upon this gallery. Their figures, very near
her, were clearly outlined in the silver tones of the moonlight.
Julie stared hard, then quickly dropped back into the shadow. She
waited stiller than the night itself, for she knew she had stepped
into a critical moment of a life so deeply allied to her own that
her being palpitated to every developing turn of it.
Long before Barry could have done so, Julie divined what was to happen.
The two were standing looking beyond the garden, that seemed to sing
in its creation, to the spires of the city frosted under the rising
moon. Isabel was pointing to it: "How can you bear to give it up?"
Julie, watching, saw the spasm that contracted Barry's tired features.
"I don't see how, exactly, we can help ourselves!" he replied. "I am
not a State, you see, I'm only an individual, very small after all."
"And thus ends the grand scheme to democratize the East."
"It looks that way."
"My poor friend," Isabel commiserated, "who tried to put a rope of sand
around eternity! But no dreams are lost--some time inevitably they take
form. Dreams are the souls of things that are about to happen. If only
we could make these particular ambitions take real shape, you and I!
"Orcullu and I have worked hard, and we are about to win. Arturo,
his brother in Washington, says it is sure. You can see that it will
be so. It is a dizzy moment that is coming our way; we have found
rapacious Eastern enemies not far off, where we expected to find
friends. We must not be swallowed up, just as we become free. An
American protectorate of some sort is at first imperative; we have
the wisdom to comprehend that--and, at the helm, an American--with
the power of that nation back of him--President of the first modern
republic in Asia.
"You are to be the Captain of that coming republic--the greatest honor
the East ever conferred upon a white man. We have decided it--Orcullu
and I--when the hour strikes. Our neighbor Japan will not dare touch
us then. You can go on, and do what you please. Ah, did you think I
would desert you?" she cried.
"Did you not give this land the bottomless devotion of your
heart? Well, then, the land will reward you, as it knows how to reward
all those who truly serve."
Julie fell back abruptly. Though in a measure she had dimly
comprehended something like this, the tremendousness, the reality of
it all overwhelmed her. Barry was to see fulfilled all that he had
wanted in his soul.
And she was wiped out utterly--so consummately had Isabel
contrived. There was something almost justifiable in the way
Isabel--and Fate--had gauged her quality, her triviality, and had
flung her aside. She had a blinding vision of herself as too weak and
purposeless to survive in this cosmos, where one's metal was tested
at every turn. Back there in the old world, she might have muddled
along; but here one must quickly win, or irretrievably lose--step on
or out. Ellis had dropped out, but she had tagged on in a struggle
for which she had in nowise been fitted.
And now, though she hated Isabel impotently, hopelessly, she saw
at last, as almost an inevitable thing, her own brutal removal from
all paths whatsoever. Even if she had not already been damned, she
could not have offered Barry, ever, anything so splendid as Isabel
had achieved. She acknowledged herself completely beaten.
She must get away--as hurriedly as possible. Groping her way back,
she found the small staircase she had started out to seek. In the
garden there was not a soul, just the stillness of impersonal space
closing cruelly around her. The whole tropical world quivered with
a passion of human futility. Pain, panic, despair, swept her on in
a current of darkness.
The old cinder of a gate-keeper held open the gate to let her
out. Gate-keepers, she thought, were fatal people; they were always
opening disastrous portals. As she passed out, she snatched up, with
the instinct for something to cling to, a blood-red hybiscus flower.
She stood and looked about her in hopeless uncertainty of soul,
debating which direction of the compass she should choose. A carromata
came drowsing along the street. The horse came to a halt before the
gate. The driver insinuated a somnolent head in her direction, but
without any real expectation in his manner.
Julie stared hard at the thing. There was one thing about a
carromata--it could keep on going. She climbed into the vehicle to
the cochero, who wanted to know where he should take the Señorita;
she replied, "Just drive!"
Familiar with the city's nocturnal habits, he nodded. If this
woman wished to ride in the night with her own soul, it was her own
concern. To see nothing, say nothing, and to keep on--that was the
code of the Manila Jehu.
Horse and driver moved in slumber through the moonlight. The city
passed by all silvered, like one of God's cities up in the skies. It
was perfectly still, as if there were no mortals in it any more.
Pedro, the cochero, drove semi-consciously over the endless bridges,
and streets--a great distance, clear to the moon, it seemed. He and
Disgusto, his horse, in their perpetual slow movement had gone several
times round the earth to be sure, but never had they gone so far in
one journey in the dead of the night, when the spirits were out.
Once he had looked round to see what his fare was doing, and had
discovered her looking very hard at something she held in the palm
of her hand. The other hand, he had noticed, grasped the fading
flower. She did not see him. She saw nothing at all. Her face wore a
strange, fixed look. It was not within Pedro's powers to fathom the
things that concentrated look contained. They had gone on roaming. Once
or twice into his inconsecutive dreaming a soft sound had broken, but
his subconsciousness had virtuously reminded itself of the cochero's
code, to mind one's, own concerns.
At last he sprang up out of his seat with a cry. Something had fallen
heavily against his sleeping back. Pedro was used to almost all the
startling developments of a vagabond's career. He could have told
strange tales of fares, but never before had one fallen dead in his
vehicle. He knew at once what had happened. For a couple of hours,
Disgusto had been carrying a dead fare over the city. Strange journey,
indeed!
Pedro was deeply perturbed. He did not at all want the police to get
after him, but he did urgently want to see what riches the lady had
had upon her when she died. He directed Disgusto to a dark corner of
the street, fastened up the rubber rain shield of the carromata, which
concealed the body very well, and also his investigating activities.
The woman had a face like a cold star. There were moments when, his eye
falling upon it, Pedro found it hard to prosecute his search. But she
had rich raiment, and a gold ring with a fine stone in it on the finger
of the hand from which hung downwards the red flower. Wasn't that like
a woman, Pedro thought, to drop dead with a flower in her hand? God had
stricken her right in this vehicle. Undoubtedly a very wicked woman,
though beautiful! Too bad one couldn't sell a creature as lovely as
this. Such splendid beings seldom rode in Pedro's cart. He passed his
dark paws over the body to see if there were anything more precious to
bring to light, and discovered the gold chain. This delighted him and
whetted his appetite for gain. He searched the carromata absorbedly,
and unearthed out of the corner of the seat a small round box such as
is used for medicine. It contained a number of small silver coins. His
fare! He emptied it greedily out into his palm, counted the silver
with devotion and slipped it into the pocket of his frayed cotton
trousers. Then he smelled speculatively the inside of the box, turning
it in every direction. His fare's indefiniteness as to direction came,
with a trail of suspicions, back to his mind. In matters like this,
Pedro, who had lived all his life in the dregs of existence, had quick
intuitions. This white creature had thrown herself away; nobody at
all wanted her; therefore she and all about her were legitimate loot.
He knew a place, providentially, not very far away, where he
might strike a good bargain. He propped the body up in the seat and
secured it there by means of ropes and a halter. It glistened in the
moonlight like an archangel, and made him afraid. He made the ragged
storm-curtain fast in front of it, and crossed himself. Never by
any chance would anybody at all know that he had a beautiful lady
back there, a dead lady who had killed herself in his carromata,
and whom he was going to sell in the place without a name where they
trafficked in all things under the sun, even the dead.
He stopped at a spot where some old walls joined. No opening could be
perceived in the darkness, but Pedro knew this spot better than the
world which passed the walls daily but never stopped to think what
might lodge back of them. He uttered a low whistle that pierced with
a peculiar cadence the stillness of the night. Soon a shadow and then
another shadow shot out from some invisible aperture. Pedro gestured
to the carromata, flinging upon them an ejaculation. The shadows
advanced stealthily to the cart, tore away the curtain with savage
haste, flung it about the body, with which in an instant they had
disappeared behind the darkness of the walls. Pedro, after having given
Disgusto an admonitory kick, flew after them down the narrow crooked
alley made by the turns of the broken walls. On the sandy beach not far
from a crooked row of distorted dwellings the body had been deposited,
and over it, the grease of their streaming candles falling upon it,
knelt a brutal crew sweeping over it heavy, appraising paws.
Pedro snatched up in his hands a strand of the long, shimmering hair,
and fingered it admiringly.
"She's through with the earth, this one--killed herself with poison;
but she must have had a fine time in the world, in this beautiful
body. There was another this evening, at the Hotel Oriente. Zip,
boom! Disgusto and I saw her come tumbling out of the air, her
brain splashing blood all over the pavement! Do white women sin
so terribly? This hair, we'll sell to the fair ones of Sampolac to
catch more game with. This one leave on the sand--and when the tide
comes up--
"Where is my price? That ring is worth much, the chain also--and even
the dress and shoes. I must have good money, hear you, to close the
mouths of the police, if anybody searches this far."
The creatures, without pausing in their work of hacking off the hair
in great streamers, made a muffled retort.
A bulk was projecting itself toward them from one of the hideous
huts. It came writhing across the sand; the ghouls, in furious dispute
now over the possession of the ring, stepped on its groping, shuddering
hands. Too weakened and blinded to move aside, it collapsed next to
the body of the girl. One of the spasmodic hands caught and clutched
in its hold the red flower that clung to her dress. Then with a long
shiver, this creature subsided in the sand.
Pedro stared at it with eyes of horrified apprehension. "My money,
quick!" he yelled.
The outlandish group derided him. "Get it from him!" they cried,
pointing to the dead man.
Without one backward glance, Pedro fled.