Dark stretches of emptiness! The rush of chaos through endless
space! Nothing anywhere that knows.... An equation without a sign....
Off in dark Eternity, a gleam of light--dividing all space--where
minus changes to plus, is not to is. Towards it struggles, battling
with all its little strength, a mortal consciousness.
Up out of the void, voiceless utterances sweep, like the drone of
far-off, undiscovered seas: "Minus 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... Minus 3 ... 2
... 1.... Decimal point!... 9 ..."
Back around an infinite circle the Soul sweeps to strike again for
being beyond the Point!
"Minus--Point ... 5 ... 4 ... 3 ..." intones the judgment from
the deeps.
Over and over, the drifting consciousness hurls itself through
the wilderness of the Lost--and over and over, the awful voices
measure throughout infinity the losing fight. Swept to the pits of
zero--Eternal Silence--the Soul, with its last desperate knowing
force, sends through the terror of the wastes its agonized appeal:
"God, life!"
That other planet had been one of light--light that streamed over the
world, and into the faces of its beings. Here, in this ... sphere,
black animate shadows--possibly ... very doubtfully, human--crawled
in and out of the holes of the universe.
Again, in that unfathomable fashion, two worlds convulsively changed
places--and there was no clear mark between the real and the unreal.
Pushing at the mists did no good! One moment you were zero; the next,
you were minus.... The horror of it was too much to bear!
At last the pall of those dark, terrible outer places lifted. The
girl came fearfully back into consciousness, her being shaken to its
foundations by the terror of the thing it had passed through. It had
touched awful and unknown areas.
Memories broke through indistinctly, fragmentarily. She had
suffered--been fearfully ill: Something had been agonizedly sensible
of that. How many beings were there in her to be aware? She had known
things before her complete awakening--but had not known herself.
It was not an unpopulated world into which she had dropped: she knew
now, somehow, that dim, fearful people were in it--she had heard and
felt them ... their passing through the air ... and even the silences
that fell dreadfully down upon them.
Over and over her dim, sickened wits repudiated her mind's claim to
this self ... denied that anything that was she could find lodgment
in this ragged figurement. The personality offered for her acceptance
was distorted out of the slightest semblance of credibility. Some
time her real self would come back to her--all gathered together,
and decently clad.
Thirst obsessed her every faculty!
She dragged herself up, and found that, though so weak she could not
hold one idea long, she was not too ill to move. She felt that if she
could get her mind wholly to come back and to grip hard, her limbs
would not shake so.
She stared around her in astonishment, her mind fluctuating uncertainly
before what she looked out upon. Another chimera! A toppling crazy
world, patched together. She gave a mad little scream. How could
one live in a world in which there were so many holes? One would be
always falling out of them. What incredible kind of senses must one
have to exist in those moon-struck huts?
She fled unsteadily out of the hovel where she had found
herself. Before what confronted her, her mouth opened again to cry
out, but closed gulpingly without a sound. That crooked coast, that
retching mouth of a bay, those blood-red nets!
She pressed her hand across her head, as if to hold the recollections
that came flitting disjointedly through it, trying fearfully but
futilely to make coherent connections. A vision came suddenly shocking
before her--revolving, ribald human groups, clawing and jeering about
her, only to take flight.
It was indeed in an outrageous form and surroundings that she had
found life. They had looted her dress, her shoes, stockings--her hair,
which her groping fingers had been so long trying to find. Some one, in
saturnine mercy, had flung a filthy rag over her, which automatically
she clutched about her. Having picked her clean, it was inconceivable
why they had let her live!
Too stupefied to be afraid, she moved about in the nightmare. Strange
sounds came from the huts. She stopped and listened, and commenced
to tremble in fresh terror. She stumbled quickly away across the sand.
Suddenly her foot struck a bundle of rags. She stopped and gazed
down. Something ghastly lay there in the sand: a child struggling
hideously with its last pinch of strength--so futile an atom against
the forces of the universe! As she stooped closer and stared, horror
swept over her in a chill of ice. She knew now why there was no roar of
moving here, no devil's laughter; the place had been stricken with the
plague--the creatures were dying like rats in their trash-made huts.
She wanted to run, but in her terror could not command her muscles
to move. The child's head, crusted with sores, lay convulsed upon
the sand. She regarded it in horror, repugnance, and pity. Before her
shaking vision rose a Pavilion--an Eastern market-place, and from it
a leper stretched forth a supplicating hand.
Pestilence-stricken hordes, unstaunched running sores! Day by day she
had passed the Pavilion, had shuddered at the leper's bleached face
turned, empty of hope, to the pitiless sun, and had run away. In what
dream had she seen those tortured masks?--faces, praying for death--
Always before she had fled--there had come a moment of violent
contention with herself, when it had become inevitable that she
could not always go round, that sometime she must go through, clear
through. She had always run away--failed completely: the cycle of
those past failures seemed now to burn like one of their sores within
her. And now she was facing again this crisis--her soul finally would
no longer let her off. She closed her eyes and put forth trembling
fingers. The clutch of the leper closed chilly around them. The
circuit at last was complete.
The moment her eyes opened, she uttered a piercing cry. Locked
in her grasp lay the hand of the plague-stricken child. The
rigid fingers clutched around hers in a last hold upon slipping
life. Spasm after spasm of agony tore the puny frame. A great
throb of answering human pain shot through the girl's heart. She
sank down in the sand, deliriously clinging to this scrap of
life as if it were the last in the world. The child shivered into
stillness. Julie stared resentfully, indignantly about her into
hot space. Hopeless--hopeless! everywhere! She began to cry weakly,
dropping her head in the sand.
Her thirst was overwhelming. She gathered herself up, and crept
cautiously among the huts. It was early afternoon, and the denizens
of the place were either absent, ill or dying. A few men were fishing
out on the bay. Nobody in this hole of death cared anything about
her. She moved on, peering stealthily through the apertures of the
huts. What she saw staggered her, but she went doggedly on till she
came upon some blackened water vessels. She knelt down to drink--the
water was afloat with skating insects--joyous, horrible things,
dancing on the water of dying men!
She picked up one of the vessels, and went searching till in one empty
hut she found some matches and a pot of rice. With her spoils she
wandered down the sandy coast to the shelter of a great rock, where,
after much diffused effort, she contrived to make a fire of driftwood.
Drowsing upon the sand, she waited for her meal to cook. The thought of
leaving this ill-omened spot had already occurred to her, but vaguely
and accompanied by the presentiment of obstacles facing her. First, she
had no clothes; one could not walk out into the city in an underskirt
with a rag over one's head. Then, she could not reason out where she
was to go or what she was to do, if she did go out. Last, hidden in
the back of her brain, and not yet presenting itself fully to light,
was an insuperable obstacle. Some unknown fettering chain was binding
her--she knew that she could not go.
She drank thirstily of the hot boiled water, consumed a part of the
rice, and dropped asleep on the sand under the rock.
Again came the torture of the same dream, the hard wrenching out of
drift land; it was morning when she awoke--dim morning, before the
sun. The first thing her eye lighted on was the vessel of rice. She
reached out and ate heartily of it. Then she rose, and walked through
the gray shadows of her monstrous world.
Confronting her lay that sordid bit of doomed coast, those crazy
huddled huts shaken by the winds of devastation and hiding the terror
of death. Across her path a human body lay stark, like a dead fish on
the sand. The creature had died there in the night, and no one had
come to bury it. She was seized with the frantic impulse to get out
of this malevolent place as quickly as possible. She walked past the
huts, and heard again the moaning sounds. She stopped in despair. Why
had these people been abandoned to their destruction? Where was the
Board of Health? Nobody had come to help--nobody was coming.
She leaned back against the wall, beyond which she had meant to
escape. She understood now how far beyond control the plague had
swept. She gazed back at the thing on the sand, at the livid face,
and empty mask that fixed with its hopeless stare. Everywhere somebody
was staying to see it out.
Suddenly the complete chain of her life's circumstances came sweeping
back into her consciousness. She remembered why she was here--the
stupendous, ineffectual effort she had made to wrench herself
free. And here she was back once more in the old insoluble conditions,
with nothing changed--up against the same uncombatable odds, dumped
here on this spot by a leveling, inconjectural fate, lost among the
lost! Her constant use of that odious drug had insured her against
the full fatality of the morphine dose. She should have remembered
that she would need far more than any one else.
It did not occur to her to try again. The horror of that Outside
Struggle still darkened her mind. There was no chance in the world she
would not take rather than risk again those unnameable terrors. It had
been made absolute that she must go on--even though there was no hope:
to struggle and still struggle, to the end. She stood there against
the wall, and tried to face once more the relinquished battle.
The moment when resolution came engulfed the world.
Before it these creatures and their tragedy grew dim and the Plague
was wiped out. She shook away the tears that had fallen on her face,
and walked back to the huts.
A glance through the holes that answered for windows sufficed to
reveal the extremity her life had touched. But before the decision
at the wall, she had already embraced the plague; before reason had
found the courage, an inner self had already stretched forth her
hand. And thus began the sojourn in the Pavilion--among dying men.
In sheer surrender beyond belief the creatures gave up to die. The
girl did what she could: boiled water, cooked food, cared for the
sick, attempted to clean up the wretched community. The bodies were
buried along the shore, till Julie managed to get a frenzied appeal
through to the Board of Health.
Finally, native servants of the Board came and took charge of the
bodies, assisted half-heartedly in cleaning out the dirt, left
medicines and food, and promised a doctor--who never appeared. They
stood themselves in deadly fear of the cholera, and knew that in the
general panic they would scarcely be held to account for this wretched
spot. They told Julie that the cholera suddenly, like smoldering fire
fanned to flames, had broken out from end to end of the city. Always
in cycles of time the Plague had come to sweep them to destruction
but never before as now. Terrible was the will of God over his little
men. The Americans were taking it too, they said. There were not
doctors enough to cope with the pest; certainly--when honest men were
stricken--none were to spare for this rogues' nest. The Americana who
was so singularly situated--ought, they thought, to be looking out for
herself. It did not matter what happened to this spawn of Beelzebub,
to whom not even Mary in Heaven would stoop.
Julie's mind burned with the fierce rage of defeat--a pygmy battling
along the sands of creation, she seemed to herself. At times the
cold horror of it seemed about to crush her; a big, hideous game
where, in ceaseless opposition, she moved, and the Plague moved,
and the Plague took the pieces--a low, one-sided contest in which the
pieces had never a chance. They were trash, floatage on the current
of life, but they were human. They--who were in the possession of
the miracle of thought--to be swept away like straws by this filthy,
insentient thing! At times, she too dropped into their mood of apathy
and capitulation, but roused always to fight. She pressed into the
struggle her every faculty, conjured from passionate depths forces
that had never before seen light. Away back in Nahal, she had cast
her soul into the beginnings of this struggle, and it seemed as if
the old fervor had come to life and was being put to its crucial test.
Along with the Plague, she fought the Hunger. The fire of the old
desire burned often in wild spurts. Sometimes she would pace the sand,
crying and clenching her hands, hour after hour. When the delirium
of the Hunger was at its worst, she would run madly out into the
surf and let the water break over her. There was nothing to lean on,
nothing to help!
Then the Plague, with its monstrous fatality, would sweep over her
senses, and submerge her personal struggle. With so much misery
always before her eyes, she began to lose track of herself. The
Plague swallowed up everything; it came finally to stand as the
real antagonist of her existence, for it sought to rout the supreme
stand her spirit had taken. Deep in her consciousness she cherished
a dream of eventual conquest, of a time when inconceivably she should
win. Just to beat it back once! For so long it had snatched everything
from under her struggling hands. Of this she thought incessantly as
she made her rounds doggedly, combating each hopeless moment.
But her creatures continued to die as under a doom of God. Julie felt
as if she had come up against the wall of the universe, where against
its insensible strength her human will was being shattered.
Her charges, terribly broken, had accepted her as a partner of their
dark fate. They dug into their miserable stores, and those of them
who had still escaped the Plague went forth on errands of industry
or depredation, and returned to pour their spoils into the common
fund. What marvel of loyalty always brought them back to the accursed
spot, Julie could not fathom.
At night she would steal out in the street, to claim her own soul back
for a moment. The streets were the universe. Even the grotesqueries
had a way of stumbling out toward the open, as if at the last their
wretched beings sought egress to freer spaces. She would stand knitting
her brows at the darkness, as if trying to claim some solution
out of it. Some time she meant to go away--but where? The silent,
empty streets troubled her. Up and down them the gay light of the
sun had poured upon brightly passing people; the perfume of baskets
of flowers being borne to market before the dew was off the day; the
cheery grind of ox-carts milling the golden dust of earth; the lilt
of the water-carrier's song; the rhythmic beat of the washer-women's
bats upon the stones; the flash of paddles, and the swish of glad
little boats making down the river to the sea--all this had been
part of the immortal stir of life that had made this place for them
a paradise of the sun.
Terrible days these were! Sometimes peering out in the daylight,
she caught glimpses of the dejected funeral processions, the bearers
and mourners bowed down, as if the fate of man were too heavy to be
borne. The inconsequence of these lives made them more than ever
tragic: they were so humble; they never rebelled. Julie thought
that if God had been responsible for such things as these, man would
have rebelled against Him ages ago; but it was because man saw his
own ancestral mistakes made manifest that he bowed his head without
protest to their consequences.
There had been heavy toll taken in the Tondo district. In old
newspapers that drifted into her retreat, Julie had read familiar
names; and, as the black hearses had dragged wearily by, she knew that
they carried many of her old pupils. As she watched them pass, a vision
would rise before her of big boys in cheap drill suits and barefooted
maidens pondering at the blackboards--poor blundering things, eternally
wistful over the courtesies and the wisdoms of the West; Julie wept.
Then she would remember that Chad had called her the little lady
goddess of the East. Standing in her ragged camisa, gazing from her
walls across the streets, a desire would sweep over her to go and
reveal to Chad the heart of the East that she had found far from
his haunts.
Where was Barry? The query arose a thousand times in her mind. One
of the papers had reported that he had left the city. Isabel, too,
she gleaned, had taken herself away. Julie recalled the visit Isabel
had made to some secret Island, and the paradise she had conjured up.
Her own disappearance, Julie saw, had apparently not caused a ripple
of concern. In this hour of stress, her absence from her own world was
not noted. Who, after all, was there to remark it? From the Department,
from the Señor, from Barry even, she had cut herself adrift. She had
gone away from the Reredos without explanation: but not even had they
troubled themselves to discover what had become of her.
When the pain of her isolation struck too deep, she would steal back
behind the broken walls to the oblivion that inevitably lay there. Here
where the worms were being trodden out, one was forced to forget
one's own despair. Gradually she forgot everything but the desire
to find somewhere a power to conquer the Plague. In its struggle,
the girl's soul seemed to be reaching out toward something which,
though she could in no-wise define it, began to appear accessible.
One night, with the old sense of futility and wretched helplessness,
she was standing over the body of one of the poor creatures who was
taking too long to die. Through the tremendous stretches of space above
her great bolts of lightning intermittently flashed. Power! Everywhere,
great and invincible power. She wondered passionately what a man must
think or feel in his soul to touch the source of it.
The man's body before her commenced to take on its final repose. His
eyes lay open to the sky. Julie, bending over him stared in sudden
awe; for from under the dirt and grime of that abandoned thug, a
mystery was emerging. Suddenly the Veil pulled apart; down there in
the dust--the Common Soul! The Soul that was through all things. She
and the worm and God--in one unbreakable bond!