Supplies were becoming very hard to procure. Indeed, Julie had for some
time felt urged to go and seek assistance from the outside world. Not
the Plague alone, but starvation threatened what was left of these
people for whom she had been struggling. The time had come when she
must somehow face the outside world.
But how without rational clothing could she undertake such an
errand? It was forced upon her that she must first of all present
herself to the Reredos, and get her clothes. She remembered now, too,
that she had left a little money in the pocket of a dress,--not much,
but it loomed tremendously to her eyes. It was probably safe, since
she had hidden the key to her trunk among the cadena de amor trailing
the window-sill, where no muchacho would have dreamed of searching.
Looking herself desperately over, in the darkness, with full
appreciation of her fantastic appearance, Julie found it an almost
insuperable business to thrust herself beyond the walls. Quite
impossible, on the other hand, was it to remain here longer. Gathering
her courage, and consoling herself with the thought that nobody in the
city longer remembered her, or was concerned about her, she set forth,
her head covered by an old scarf against the terrors of the journey.
She was not really too tall to pass for a native woman, nor, in this
light, too white to be taken for a mestiza,--and Eurasians in native
costume were not uncommon; but there was in her movement a rhythm
that would have revealed her at once as an outsider to the curious
observer. Fortunately, few such were abroad; and by selecting a
round-about way through unfrequented streets, she contrived to pass
unmarked through the dusk, though every nerve was a-quiver when at
last she crossed the bridge near the isolated estate of the Reredos.
Approaching the huge iron gates, she saw that in no part of the house
within her vision was a light to be seen. She knew that there was
in the rear wall a breach, which the children had enlarged, by much
chipping and hacking, to enable Chiquito's increasing dimensions to
pass through. This aperture would serve her particularly well just
now, since she could not bring herself to appear in this fashion at
the front door.
She waded through the lush growth along the old stone walls, wormed
herself through Chiquito's egress, and hurried across the grounds
toward the house.
The garden had commenced to take on the covertly wild look of a thing
that no longer acknowledges a master. All its lovely blooms had,
with the waywardness of tropical foliage, betaken themselves to the
tops of walls or trees. The snowy cadena shone timidly in silvery
filagree high against Julie's old window.
The shell shutters were all closed fast; not a sound came from behind
them. The house was totally dark. Gaining courage, the girl tried
the door, knocked, and finally boldly shook the heavy framework.
Across the door sill and over the floor of the trellised porch,
sun-faded newspapers were broadly scattered. The Señor had taken his
family off to Spain, as he had said he would do. He had doubtless
gone hurriedly at the coming of the Plague to his district, without
stopping to give instructions concerning these Manila periodicals,
which the native carrier, with an increasingly divergent aim, had
continued to throw over the gate.
Julie stooped and rummaged among the papers on the sill. Stuck fast
under the door, she discovered a couple of letters. She pried them
forth, and, examining them in the moonlight at the edge of the porch,
found they were both addressed to her. She moved toward the seat
under the fire-tree, which she and Barry had so often occupied; the
full moon was now flooding the garden; she could read her letters
there. In a vague appetite for news of the world she caught up,
as she went, two or three of the papers from the walk.
Through curiosity she opened the unknown letter before her uncle's. She
wondered why little Mrs. Smith had taken it into her head to write,
after all this time.
The Smiths were now stationed in Solano, and Mrs. Smith rather
pathetically wished to know if any of the things that had happened
to Julie's old friends of Nahal were happening to Julie. She hoped
not--for the worst thing that could happen to anybody had happened
to her. She knew that the natives over here suffered from terrible
things, but she had never dreamed that anything so awful could befall
her. Those first cruel red spots on her white skin--looking as if
they had been branded on with a red hot iron; Marlborough's desperate
efforts to disprove them; the doctor's reticence; the nurse's gingerly
cautious attitude, had all only disclosed the unbearable truth. She
had caught the small pox in Nahal--though she was in Solano when it
developed. Where else than in that ill-omened island could one have
got such a thing! She could demonstrate to everybody how fatal a spot
to everybody Nahal had been.
She had not been anywhere near death, but rather than this thing
she would have prayed for any other conceivable, cruel curse of the
East--this East which had so many to give.
Marlborough had been a miracle of devotion, assuring her a thousand
times that it would never matter to him what she looked like. A girl
might believe all this--but to a woman whose heart was deeply versed
in the frailty of men it was all intolerable. It wasn't that she was
marked so badly--not really so much at all--but that she would never
again see in the glass her old self. Marlborough was going to take
her to Paris and have her skin peeled, but--she dared not believe.
Yes, certainly, there must have been a curse on that place! To
further prove it there was Calmiden. After Julie left, Calmiden had
been ordered to Dao to take Adams's place. "But, you know, Julie,
he was never Adams's metal, and I guess he rebelled utterly at being
put in Adams's shoes. Templeton goaded Calmiden to what he did--one
day he struck him. I can't imagine any one's striking Calmiden and
going on living, can you? Well--Templeton didn't, Julie, and that's
it! It's so hard to tell, but in the big fight they had--men lose
their balance so completely in places like this--Templeton somehow
dropped dead. Of course you understand that he was a rotten old shell
of a dipsomaniac that would cave in at the first few blows.
"They brought Calmiden over here for trial, and high-ranking officers
came down from Manila. I don't know what took place, but they say
his men stood around him in an invincible and impenetrable wall
of evidence, and he was acquitted. But he will never be the same
Kenneth again.
"Do you know, I think that somehow this place has recoiled on us,
Julie. We hated it and stood aloof from it. We despised the people
and made gods of ourselves. You remember I used always to call them
niggers--I thought I was showing the superiority of my birthright
that way; and not one throb of this life here ever touched Calmiden's
soul. Did any of us have any soul, particularly, in it? Weren't we the
dead wood on a mighty, struggling stream? I don't know about you--what
has happened to you; but I used to think there was something different
about you, for all your seeming to take no real interest in anything
here, save Calmiden--and Adams, a little.
"The regiment is soon to sail for home. Be sure to look us up, as we
come through."
Julie dropped the letter in her lap. She leaned forward on her knee,
and her mind went wandering over the stretches of the past. So this
was the message of Nahal--all there was ever to be; of that Nahal
which had caused her soul's difficulties. She pondered deeply the
whole immense problem. Had it been her individual problem, set for
her to solve--her fragment of eternal purposes to prove? How utterly
she had blundered and drifted along, evading the particular, crucial
nonconforming bit of the universe that she had perhaps come into life
to subdue. Even when aware of her flaming objective, she had dallied
weakly and wastefully in easy and uninspired areas of life. Stupidly
she had let her fire die out, and her being go to waste.
Once she had been offered the choice of her ideals or Calmiden,
and she had chosen Calmiden, though he was the antagonist of all her
stirring beliefs. For a passing whim of passion, she had flung her
sublimest convictions to the winds. That there were punishments for
such perfidies of spirit she had come tragically to comprehend. She
had halted and turned, given up--letting the things she had made a
Covenant with go back to fate unaccounted for.
None of these men she had known here would have turned back, at any
cost; as agents of the future, of the whole onmoving universe, nothing
had counted with them--not happiness, nor life, nor love; while she
had demanded insistently and supremely her human happiness, and,
failing to obtain it, had let go, like the rest of the derelicts of
life: and there the East had stepped in to capture her, as inevitably
it captured all of her mood.
With here and there little flashes of eternal verities overwhelming
her, she sat and thought more profoundly than ever she had thought
in her life. She wanted to probe to the bottom and release the last
vestige of the illusion of the past. Those few words of Mrs. Smith
stood out like flame against her brain: "This place has recoiled on
us--because we hated it, and stood aloof." Julie felt this sink into
some deep, almost inaccessible place, and come forth again.
That was the key to the long mystery. That was the key to her. She
remembered how contemptuous her friends in Nahal had all been of
the work in hand, how anxious they had been to be rid of it--except
her. She covered her face with her hands: all but her! She had clung
to Nahal as a glory for herself--as a universe for a small and
exhilarantly inflated ego to expand in. Her sincere energies had
borne fruit, but too often she had brushed aside all that had not
colored her adventurous fancy. Turned in upon herself, she had skimmed
fruitlessly this brown well of being. A psychological Alexander taking
by assault the soul of Asia. In what a halo of Eastern colors she
had planned to do that! She had chosen the East as a stage for her
personal grandeur. She had expected a superlative destiny somehow to
be handed out from it.
But from the East's dark face and blunted mind she had actually always
shrunk; and as that foolish little woman, in a moment of tremendous
wisdom, had pointed out, the East had recoiled upon her and pulled
her down with ruthless irony to its lowest levels. Mrs. Smith might
as well have said the universe, which demands atom for atom of energy,
ounce for ounce of force.
Then had come the inscrutable forces, which had taken up her life
and threshed it mercilessly to the point of death, and winnowed it
out. The Great Law had taken her in hand, broken her old self to bits,
and of the pieces transmuted a form to its ends. In order to come
truly into life, she had first to be destroyed! She felt a thrill of
the old exhilaration to have at last found the way.
She opened her uncle's letter, the moon falling in soft sheets
about her.
It was upon that letter that for a moment the new fate seemed to
hinge. He had written to say that his affairs were in better shape;
that he had, in fact, sold the factories, advantageously; that some
money of Julie's, which he had long ago invested for her, would now be
available for her. He urged her to come home; he was perfectly sure
that the East was no place for a girl alone. She need not live with
Mrs. Dreschell, if she did not choose to, but with more congenial
relatives.
The girl sank once more into thought. She sat a long time staring
at the moon-lit night, at the fire-flowers dropping through it like
soft sparks. Over her came at last the conviction that she would
never leave--that the gates of the East had indeed closed after her
for good. There would be no more turning. She was going straight on,
only struggle, everlasting struggle lying ahead. Things were moving
toward something over here, and rather than all the safe paths of the
world she would choose this vivid, perilous existence. That was what
the levels had done for her--taken out all fear. She remembered Barry's
high peak, where from him also fear had dropped. Here the Hunger had
been vanquished. Back in that forlorn spot, she had fought the Plague,
and lost; but the Plague had fought the Hunger, and won. There were big
forces over here, to fight with or against. Everything for her must
be created new. In the silence of the night, she recalled a vision
of waiting and watching that she had seen in this same garden. Yes,
she would go farther on.
She reached down for the papers, which had slipped to her feet. She
wanted to see if that stroke of fate--Independence, had come. The most
recent of the papers was two days old, and conveyed the information
that the bill had failed to pass the Congress of the United States.
There would be no Philippine Republic! The significance of this
stupendous fact did not penetrate her all at once. Oddly scattered,
different thoughts filtered through her mind.
Fate had decided aright. It would take these people awhile longer
to make ready to meet the future. And if Isabel were right in her
prophecies of the coming clash of the world, they would certainly
be best as they were--till the earth were made safe for such little
peoples as they.
Isabel's dreams then were fallen--and Barry's hopes were
realized. Slowly the full realization of the turn of events broke
upon her consciousness. The aims and hopes of Barry and Isabel could
never have been united--never in any case. She saw that now.
Where then was Barry? The question flashed through every atom of her.
Her eyes, which unconsciously had wandered down the columns of the
paper at which she was staring, rested on Barry's name--and the
monstrous, incredible thing printed with it!
A process of deadly ossification, starting with her feet and traveling
to her brain, seemed to be rooting her to this spot forever.
"He couldn't have it!" she murmured in stupid agony to the night.
The last blow out of the East! The uncombatable enemy! She flung out
her arms despairingly, and crumpled crushed on the seat.
Silent as was the garden, it had a myriad of conveyances. They urged
her to her feet, and on. She ran to the wall, thrust herself through
the crevice, and continued to run along the dusky street till she
came upon a carromata.
Now the carromata, by all the chances of the East, was driven by the
Pedro who had looted her body and who believed it at this moment to
be buried in the sea. Therefore when he saw Julie, from whose hacked
blond hair the wrap had slipped, Pedro, who had become too familiar
with her features to forget them, gave a cry, and tried frantically to
pass on. But Julie had Disgusto by the bit, and could not be dislodged.
"Drive me to Calle Arzobispo at once!" she commanded.
Pedro whimpering and shivering, sure now that the ghost of the
unfortunate Señorita had come back to haunt his carromata forever,
gave up resistance; and, when Julie had taken her seat, obeyed her
frenzied injunctions with a rattle of terror in his throat. He drove
at terrific speed, till Disgusto appeared ready to drop.
It would be this way, always, Pedro knew. This ghost whom he had
plundered in life would not only take complete possession of his
carromata, but would drive to death all the horses he could buy. So,
when upon nearing the vicinity of the cathedral, the ghost commanded
him to stop, leaped over the wheel, and shot forward without paying
the fare, Pedro, instead of summoning a policeman, hurled terrific
blows upon Disgusto and fled for all he was worth.
In the sacerdotal section of Arzobispo, with the monastic walls
rearing darkly around her and the shadowy trees looming above her
like super-human shapes, Julie paused. There was his house, lifting
out of the dark foliage. She went forward unsteadily. At every step
the world seemed to crumble under her tread, and death to claim all
that was left of her universe.
A native policeman emerged from the shadows as she crept up to the
gate. He surveyed her wonderingly.
"I must go in there!" she said.
"Women, women!" he exclaimed fussily. "The master of that house
will never think of women any more. There was another one here this
evening, crying as if this old earth were a cage and she were shut
in it. She was a beautiful lady, too, with great blue eyes; but not
a soul in that house, I tell you, stirred out to her. So at last
she went groping away in the blackness. You had better go too. I am
guarding the gate so that he shall die in peace. Besides," he added,
"there is no one to let you in. The servants ran away, being afraid of
the Plague--all but one boy. A young boy, a good boy; he is a Visayan,
as so am I. They will stand by when Tagalogs take to their heels."
A vivid intuition flashed through the girl's soul. Stepping past the
wordy policeman, she pressed her face close against the bars of the
gate. "Delphine!" she called, again and again through the night.
A window slid open above. She could distinguish a slight figure
standing in the aperture.
Tremulously she called again: "Delphine! It is I--your maestra."
The boy's wondering treble answered her: "Maestra!"
Tears of triumph rolled down her face.
"Come quickly, and open the gate!"
He was coming. She listened for every fall of his hurrying slippers.
At last a white camisa came fluttering through the darkness, the
brave white camisa of the poor little brown knight who had set out
so long ago for the grand adventure.
"Maestra, my Maestra!" he exclaimed softly and incredulously, staring
at her through the bars of the gate.
"Ah! You stayed with him!" was all she could say, the tears choking
her.
The boy opened the gate, and let Julie up into the ominous stillness
of the house. At the top of the staircase, he uttered a soft word,
and Doctor Braithwaite appeared, a tall gray wraith spent with much
struggle.
"My maestra has come back." Delphine quivered with simple pride.
The Doctor stared hard for several moments, while Julie made an
agitated effort to explain. At last he contrived to recover himself.
"Chad was right, then," he said. "He believed that Isabel had tried
to do away with you. After you had gone, she endeavored to make it
appear that you had gone to meet a man in the southern islands. If
I hadn't been over here so long--I think I might find you surprising.
"Barry was taken ill in the provinces," he went on. "Your boy brought
him back, and has stuck to him to the end. If you have never done
anything else here--"
He stopped short, his face contracted painfully. "I'm sorry it's
too late!"
She was pitiful enough anyway, this thin, spent little creature,
in her outlandish garments, and he winced at the effect of the blow
he had delivered.
"I must see him," she said, in a low voice.
He shook his head. "But that's impossible--with the Plague."
She gave a sobbing little laugh. "The Plague! Why that's where I've
been--with it all the time. I--" her head dropped--"watched them die."
His gray lips twitched. "Yes, we watch them die. Every doctor and
every nurse on double duty. Chad and I took care of Barry. Then Rosalie
took it, and Chad had to go to her. She's gone already." He paused.
"Barry's case has been different. Usually they go out like
lightning--but he wouldn't die! And he wouldn't go to San Lazarus. He
kept saying he was going to get over it quick. Said he had to be alive
in these times. I never saw a man fight so hard; he has fought with the
last artery and capillary. Doctor though I am, I really believed that
he would win over sheer matter. And I wanted to see him triumph--it
would have seemed like a victory for the race.
"He believed you would come back." The Doctor looked at her hard for
several moments of deep silence, then he said: "The East has made
you strong."
He sank heavily into a chair. "If you wish, you may watch. It is
good that you have come. I believe I could not have kept my eyes open
to-night--even for him! No sleep for nights--and nights!" he murmured.
"He's unconscious now--nothing more to do. Watch a while--and call
me--" Even as he spoke, the Doctor sank sleeping in his chair.
She turned down the hall, groping ahead of her as through gulfs of
darkness, her last plank shaking beneath her, scorching agony tearing
at her heart.
His door stood open. There was a very dim light in the room. From
the threshold, she could see the rumpled head, the quenched conquered
face. She stumbled to the bed; and, dropping down beside it, flung her
arms about him, as if to hold off with main desperate human strength
that last blow.
"You said you'd come back--wherever you were--if I called you!" she
cried in anguished despair.
She lifted her head, and looked about her in wild entreaty. Where
was He--in nights like these--who had walked human paths of
despair? Somewhere here He must still be fighting the battle of death!
She crouched down on the floor; the spectacle of that inert form was
insupportable. Suddenly she lifted her head. From out the soft wonder
of darkness, with its swinging worlds, Barry was coming toward her--all
alight, as of old--looking as he always looked when he had something
perfectly new to do. Then he passed on, and darkness dropped once more.
With all the appeal in her, she flung her spirit out upon the
night. Power, power--everywhere out there--tremendous; terrifying
power behind the illimitable stretches of space, behind the swinging
worlds, veining the universe like lightning to eternal depths. If
only she could force a foothold in its great conspiracy! She had
traveled far, gone deep to find it, and had more than once felt it
graze her being. Just around the corner, close it was--yet out of
touch. All that was in her soul, or would ever be, stretched after
it in this moment. She tore at her circumscribed human vision as at
some fatally binding bandage across her eyes. Just to see clear once!
Her consciousness in its search swept out of its surroundings, beyond
the barriers of flesh. The stillness of the night seemed charged
with the light and force of swift traveling stars. Struggling with
the legions of darkness and death, she stumbled suddenly into the
kingdoms of the unseen.
The Doctor bent, in the gray light, over the bed. Nobody had called
him; and, exhausted, he had slept throughout the night. He had come
hurriedly, and stooped down to investigate the outstretched form.
He picked up one of the hands, and counted the pulse intently. A change
passed over his face. He placed his ear to the heart. Then he slowly
straightened up, and stood staring before him, in a trance of thought.
The dawn came peeping into the room. He bent over, and studied
once more, without drawing breath, his patient's appearance in its
reflection. A stir near at hand caused him to turn sharply. He had
forgotten the girl.
He concentrated upon her a puzzled look.
"I think," he said, speaking slowly, as if groping through dazed
layers of thought, "that you had better get up. He has pulled back!"
She started, then slowly raised herself from the floor. For a moment,
she appeared to be stretching herself out of sleep; then he had an
utterly odd sensation that she was putting out her hands in the red
dawn toward some invisible thing.
THE END
NOTE
[1] Bilibid--Native prison.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Green God's Pavilion, by Mabel Wood Martin