The Green God's Pavilion: A novel of the Philippines

by Mabel Wood Martin · English · Gutenberg #48928 · 567,368 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Green God's Pavilion: A novel of the Philippines

Author: Mabel Wood Martin

Release date: May 10, 2015 [eBook #48928]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREEN GOD'S PAVILION: A NOVEL OF THE PHILIPPINES ***

THE GREEN GOD'S
PAVILION

A NOVEL OF
THE PHILIPPINES

BY
MABEL WOOD MARTIN

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

TO
MY HUSBAND

THE GREEN GOD'S PAVILION

CHAPTER I

Trembling in a fervor of joy the girl confronted it. Everybody in the
excitement of arrival was trying to crowd her away from the packed
railing of the vessel, but she managed to get her glimpse of that magic
reality--one of those golden far Eastern cities that she had dreamed
of all her life on the other side of the world. Its glittering towers
and domes, bursting out of the garden of the equator, pointed to a
sky clear enough to be heaven itself. Here long ago East and West
had first gloriously mingled; once this city of golden galleons had
commanded all the cities of the Pacific. To so many a conquistador
it had been the end of the rainbow! To the girl gazing out on its
fiercely sunlit walls it held the secret of the future.

In the launches skurrying up alongside the vessel, Julie saw the eager,
expectant faces straining for a glimpse of friends or kin. As she
looked down, this new universe seemed suddenly to sit on her head like
a red-hot ball. She felt a moment's stifling sense of its weight. This
was the world to which she had come, seeking a place. Those towers and
domes, piercing glittering space like swords and scimitars, appeared
suddenly to intimate that some special passport was needed to enter
this world. And she had not lived long enough in the universe to feel
at home anywhere she might be. Her detached existence under her uncle's
roof, always out of touching distance with the family, had engendered
that feeling of isolation. She had been a superfluous personality,
outside the magic circle, and had kept to the farthest retreat of
that unfriendly house of life--a vivid little hermit groping around
the walls of her own chamber for the fourth dimension. Hopelessly
rigid that old universe had been--and immutable--till one day it had
astonishingly crumbled, as if by some special decree.

Julie was here on this vessel, looking out in trepidation on a remote
and inconjecturable land, because her uncle's affairs, always quite
prosperous, had broken on the rocks of investments. Out of the wreck
she had emerged into a dizzy independence. It had devolved upon her to
take charge of herself somehow--the verdict of her life! The walls had
burst forever. To own one's self! To claim unhindered a whole patch
of the universe! Beyond there, in that city of pearl-circled walls,
a trans-section of existence was hers.

Crowds were now streaming all over the decks. The greetings of long
separations everywhere. Julie saw joyous laughter and frank tears. Some
of the men had come in from the wilderness where peril and disease were
daily fortune, and their white faces and emaciated forms startled their
womenfolk; others were strong and brown, and conquest and construction
hung upon their brows like a kind of fever. Julie looked carefully at
them all as at an index page of what lay before her. After having begun
to feel that she had come to the end of the earth, she took courage. It
was brought forcibly to her that America had come into the East to
do something actual--that she had raised her standards of democracy
among ancient kingdoms, and would stir them to their foundations.

As far back as she could remember Julie had felt the lure of Great
Adventures. In ardent lyric imaginings she had, from childhood up, seen
herself following always the rapture of unbeaten tracks. The Golden
Gate, with its shimmering allure opening upon the promise of strange
lands, had always been the biggest emotion in her life. The wind
that blew up from it had been a messenger summoning her across that
sparkling water to the freedom that lay beyond those ports of dreams.

Staring at the simplicity and the strength of these people of the New
World, she wondered if her slim credentials would hold among them. She
was not really what they wanted here--a trained artisan. Somehow
she had managed to slip by in the stress of the moment. It was her
own desperate determination to balk all efforts to keep her under
dominance at home that had brought her to this goal. It had developed
that she was fitted for nothing in an organized society. Her music,
her languages, her sense of existence were all too fragmentary to
negotiate.

But it had transpired that there was another world where matters of
existence were not so stringent--and since few had seemed inclined
to hazard them, Jepton's Teachers' Agency had let her pass on the
certificate of Miss Blossom's School, which had been good for nothing
else. In a breathless transport, she had signed herself to service
in our colonial possessions across the seas. There was a salary, of
course--ten per cent. of which for the first year went to Jepton's;
a rather inadequate stipend, it had been prophesied, for colonial
existence. But to the reality of this Julie had given no thought. She
was a woman at last--with an original face and a surprising faculty
for seeing splendor in everything. Just the kind of person whose
naïve encounter with the world makes history.

Two people who looked very nice indeed were standing off regarding
Julie with fixed earnestness; a stout and agreeable man with a
thin, transparently amber little lady. Could it be possible that
there were friends for her also on these strange shores? The lady
presented herself as Mrs. Calixter, and her husband as an old friend
of Mr. Dreschell's.

Julie recollected that when her uncle had been forced to recognize the
power of fate he had written to a friend in Manila who was Collector
of the Port, and asked the good offices of himself and his wife for
Julie. Mr. Calixter told her that he and her uncle had been college
friends--a long time ago; but that, in these pioneer days, she was
given to understand, was a tremendous bond. They informed Julie
hospitably that she should remain with them till she discovered what
was to become of her.

No one over here, Mrs. Calixter explained, had a definite idea of the
next moment. One's fortune lay in flux. Nothing had yet completely
taken shape. The great project unraveled daily out of destiny
and a few men's minds. Fighting was still going on in some of the
islands. The khaki-clad men coming aboard were from those distant,
disordered places, and one could see on their gaunt faces the shadow
of menace and loneliness. The men in plain white clothes had their
struggle too in the making of a civilization overnight.

An impression of precariousness and uncertainty was conveyed to Julie,
as if she were about to set foot upon a forming planet amid widespread
restlessness of soul. If she had dreamed of the improbable, it seemed
reasonable that it would transpire here. In such a place, amid such
conditions, ordinary ordered emotions dropped out of sight. The living
of men here was creative, and at high pressure.

The invitation of the Calixters was a godsend to Julie. She had
been completely vague as to what to do with herself. For the moment,
anyway, she was fixed among these mutabilities.

Launches carried them up the river, past the fort that once held
single-handed the white man's empire of the Pacific. The stream,
meandering to the sea with provoking deliberateness, carried on its
back a strange host, a fantastic floating humanity ceaselessly and
inconjecturably drifting in craft that looked like dolphins borne from
the sea of legends; upstanding boatmen in peaked hats prodding tiny
canopied boats like ivory toys against the stream, amid the gayeties
of the city; trading vessels south-bound for pearls or spices perhaps,
with swart crews, and Eurasian captains on the bridges.

They landed amid another motley of strange vehicles and stranger
races. The buildings along the wharf were blackened by smoke-stacks
from the Seven Seas. A sun-blistered race of beings, leaning
nonchalantly against pillars and posts, watched, with the deep
tolerance of the East, the influx from the West. This calm, which
was almost awful, gave Julie an uncanny sensation of human futility.

"One of our fine little mornings on the equator," Mr. Calixter
declared, remarking her wilted expression. "You'll get used to them."

As she followed the Calixters to their carriage, a dark-skinned female
in scant attire, smoking a cigar as long as a man's arm, crossed her
path. Julie gasped. So many unclothed creatures going unabashed about
their business staggered her. Eons of consecratedly covered ancestors
suffered violence before this exposure. Mr. Calixter, however, was
of the opinion, as he lifted his plump, perspiring person after her
into the carriage, that for apparel in this climate the human hide
was incomparable. But they should all be colored like Easter eggs,
to tell them apart; he could seldom distinguish one nude brown person
from another. It was just possible that we were dependent to a certain
extent on our clothes for individuality.

They drove up into the city through ancient streets blazoned with
sun-lit, vivid houses, quickened with picturesque and unfamiliar
activities, and flowing with a humanity that lived its whole life
open to the universe.

Ceaselessly, strangely, contrastingly, this amazing humanity throbbed
along the thoroughfares like creatures out of Arabian Nights' Tales:
carters with their carabaos--monstrous beasts of fearful calm,
drawing primitive stone wheels through the dust of ages; turbaned
East Indians with bushy beards, offering ivories and tapestries to
the fantastic houses; brown women in pineapple fabrics, balancing on
their heads baskets of Ylang-Ylang for the manufacture of perfume; a
dwarf negrito, enslaved from the forests of the north; water-carriers;
Chinese rice-peddlers; children playing with absurd, short-tailed
cats; babies taking in life at the curbstone from their mothers'
breasts. Down these streets in poverty, disease, and cheerful blindness
of soul, marched all the races of the East.

Julie gasped at what she saw. The riddle of the universe seemed to
be unfolding before her wondering gaze.

She turned from that strange stream of people with their enigma, their
insoluble mystery, to the houses: such startling houses, intoxicatedly
painted like the sunsets over in the sea, and decorated with all
manner of things--orchids pure as souls; crimson-crested parrots
screaming for the jungle; rain-bow glass; and little dragons' wings.

These were the state chambers of this existence: their chromatic
splendor was reserved for the ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death;
but it was down in the streets that these children of the sun lived
their lives.

There were flashes of queer open shops, cabinets of the curiosities
of the world; showers of wooden shoes suspended from the ceilings;
pink satin coffins; Chinese ginger jars painted with peacocks; brass
church-bells; unleavened bread, universal red pillows, ornamental
brooms that looked like Cleopatra's palm sunshade. Julie passed them
in ecstasy.

Farther on, she had a vision of old walls and moats, and little stone
gates with ancient coats-of-arms above them, and a surprisingly great
number of old stone churches. They were passing now, Mr. Calixter told
her, through the ancient walled city that Legaspi had built. She saw
the priests in their white robes, pacing their high airy galleries,
saying their prayers in the sunlight, above the world. She drew in
with a deep breath the fragrance of the sacred tree of India that
flowered in the monastic gardens.

Pensively, poetically, the conquistador atmosphere still hung over
the heart of the city. Priests and armored captains floated before
Julie's mind. In all the pagan hinterland of the East, this was the
single Christian citadel, attacked throughout the ages by land and
sea by all the savage hordes of darkness.

She stared at the tinted oriental domes rearing above this ancient
Christian city, and felt mingling with its priestly atmosphere the
Eleusinian mystery of the East, as if hidden in this city there were
still unconsecrated shrines.

They passed out of the Walled City with its dark buttresses, its
dungeons, its medievally barred doors, its intimations of eternal
age and impenetrable mystery, to the Calixters' home on the sea.

A rainbow scarf of tropical vegetation trailed over this part of
Manila, and Julie caught glimpses of gardens full of the perfume of
dreams, gardens for whose incredible blossoming all the light in the
sun must have been needed.

At luncheon, she cast her first attentive look at her host and
hostess. Beside the splendor of this new planet unrolling before her,
two individuals had not been compelling in interest.

Mrs. Calixter, it appeared, was a lady from whose being every particle
of flesh had been amazingly subtracted, save just enough to leave
her alive. She had stayed over here to keep Mr. Calixter company,
and in the process had parted ways with her youth. She was very kind,
but very, very tired. This fatigue, she told Julie, had gone down deep,
and would never rest out.

Her husband was plump, and would go good-natured to his grave. Against
such a temperament all climates are powerless. The tropics had
achieved only the rape of his hair. He was so astonishingly bald
that when he removed his hat the effect was one of almost indecent
exposure. The hair that refused to remain on his cranium displayed
itself in perfidious and capricious profusion in his eyebrows, which
locked bushily across his forehead.

Julie felt very jolly and very much at home. Mr. Calixter, during the
course of the meal, waved away the most charming salad of sea-green
cucumbers and curling lettuce leaves. He explained that a lettuce
leaf over here might be a death warrant, as cholera was more or less
present all the time--though that fact could never be impressed upon
the Chinese cook.

Cholera! Julie sat up with a start. In this fairy land could such
a terrible hydra stick up its head? Mr. Calixter told her about a
number of other things that flourished in the islands, things which
she had always categoried as traditions of the Middle Ages--small-pox,
leprosy on beggars' outstretched hands, all the dreadful medieval list!

"It is a hard uphill pull we have before us over here, and the top
of the mountain nowhere in sight." Mr. Calixter looked grave.

"And the natives are fighting us, all over the islands," Mrs. Calixter
remarked, "and doing it in a particularly barbarous and senseless way."

"Have you any idea as to where you are going?" Mr. Calixter demanded.

Julie moved restively: "No--but it all sounds rather awful."

"Well, we're aiming to--and will make this the finest colony
on earth. There are the men here to do it; men with the genius
for pioneering, and a glorious fever to break the wilderness. The
Department of Education is the greatest idea of all. You must remember
that. It is the only thing that will touch the soul of the people. All
the rest, just yet, seems to fall outside."

"There are hosts of interesting people here," said Mrs. Calixter,
smiling cryptically. "People with histories made over night, and
making history themselves splendidly, too. Perhaps you will stay in
Manila. At any rate, you will catch an unforgettable glimpse of--all
this, as you flit through. This afternoon, late, we will drive on the
Luneta, where you will see a cross section of the whole East. Later,
we are to go to a ball. All the empire-builders will be there. So
keep your young soul awake."

After luncheon everybody mysteriously disappeared. Julie was left
alone in the silent, hot, perfumed world. Not a sound came to her
from anywhere; existence seemed suspended. What had become of the
contents of the world?

She decided to open up her baggage--which, thanks to Mr. Calixter,
had already arrived--and lay out the dress she should need for the
evening. After five o'clock, Mrs. Calixter had said, Manila drove
forth in full dress to the Luneta. Julie gathered up a ball gown and
went over to the glass to appraise its relationship to herself. She
was enchanted with the maturity of the garment. Through it she and
the world met at last; it suggested the finally opened door of the
universe in which she was free to find her dreams. She whirled,
a gay dervish, in front of her mirror.

Suddenly she stopped, awed by the strange reflection she saw of
herself. Odd multiplied personages attenuated from it. She couldn't
begin to think that she knew them, though each at an angle offered
some startling familiarity. She had merely wished to exact from
the mirror reassurance of her woman's incontestable inheritance,
but these strange images carried her out of the background of the
glass into a boundless territory of conjecture.

Motionless now she beheld reflected a unique, youthful face framed
by silvery blond hair, with a pair of green eyes of unusual hue,
while flung upon the face, as upon a screen, was an abstraction
of personality like a superimposed self. This abstract personality
revealed itself tangibly, on occasions, in a transfiguration of light
disclosing something inscrutable, eternal, and absolute.

A cryptic sentence of her aunt's flashed through her mind. "There's
a singular thing that comes into your face--" which was followed
by another, "You think, you are strong. It will take many a road
to show you that you are not." That old subjection was over now,
forever. Julie shivered a little.

She went back to her unpacking; but as she drew out the airy charming
dresses a sudden dissatisfaction with them seized her. Their expensive
beauty was all wrong. She had seen at once that pioneer women garb
themselves very plainly for the day's work--and her work indubitably
was to be of the plainest.

For particulars concerning a suitable wardrobe, Julie had consulted
a schoolmate back home, the daughter of an army officer, who in her
eighteen years had never bought a garment of her own. The inspired
inventory they had worked out together Julie might, she now felt,
have to reckon with later as a force of fate. Her aunt having been
called away to the bedside of a sister, Julie, the reins quite off,
had gone in quest of clothes as if she were walking the Milky Way,
looking for free stars. She had selected and bought in a glory of
mood that beheld the world at her disposal. An exultant thing, this
wardrobe of rejoicing garments that fairly caroled the elated moods of
youth. Quite the wardrobe with which to set out to conquer the world.

Julie stared at it. The fatality of that delicate mass! Her uncle's
face, aghast at the riddle he appeared to confront in her, rose before
her. And the bitter complication of bills that could not be met,
huge heedless bills that he had told her in his desperation she must
somehow face. There wasn't a thing in the world he could do for her
any more. He would get somebody to lend her the money for the present;
which would amount to an actual mortgage upon her existence, with so
small a salary and with her agent's commission to pay. "Poor little
Argonaut," he had called her, "setting out with the intuition of a
nineteen-year-old girl as a divining rod of the world, ignorant of
the values of money or men!"

Julie closed the door rudely on the dresses, and slipped downstairs
to seek brighter diversion in the hot, fragrant world.

She passed admiringly the statue of the Godmother of the New World,
standing in her sweeping robes looking out across the sea to the
Spanish Main. Splendidly believing Isabel, whose faith in the vision
of a Genoese captain gave a new world to men!

Just beyond were two school houses. Julie wondered wistfully if she
would be assigned to one of them. It would be very lovely, in this
flower-scented spot, right under the shadow of the ancient stone
church across the street, to bring wisdom to this people. She smiled
at herself. How much of the world's wisdom had she, young, terribly
young thing that she was? She moved meditatively toward the church,
scents of tropical flowers on every side of her.

The church was of aged gray and battered stone, with the single
white effigy of a saint guarding the worn entrance. There was moss in
every crevice of its strong sides, which stood out like great gaunt
ribs. Near by, in a wild area of sun-dried grass, was the refectory,
ruthlessly severe in its economy of lumber. The resistless fecundity
of the tropics encroached upon all this grimness; vines were flowering
over the frowning vortices.

Julie stepped through the faded green door. At once the hot world
slipped behind her. In the dim shadowiness, she stood staring
wonderingly about. She had been in Catholic churches many times,
but this was like none of them. The gray pillars were painted with
the sunset colors of the East. The dome, full of stars and suns
and portraits of the Deity, suggested a rather crowded Mohammedan
Heaven. The altar, shining silver twenty feet high, was gorgeously
hand-carved, and upon it, in white brocaded satin and pearls, stood
Mary. In one of the smaller naves, there was a small statue of Christ,
terribly sweating blood.

Julie tiptoed across the bare stone flags. A couple of women were
kneeling in the silence, and one or two tragically old men, slowly
and painfully with wrinkled hands telling their beads. The women were
with child; the old men, their own concern done, prayed for the world.

To the right of the altar, she heard a soft murmur of sounds, where in
a side chapel a priest in a black cassock stood by a font administering
the baptismal service to a tiny brown baby in a very long pink satin
robe. The godmother held the baby, while the barefooted native mother
stood apart. Another Christian into the fold! Julie was struck by
the priest's face, the fine pity he turned upon the futile little
brown mite.

Julie moved on. As she was about to step out, the priest passed
her. She stopped him.

"May I ask the name of this church?" she faltered uncertainly. What
she wanted to ask was the significance of it all.

A tired shadow crossed the priest's face. "Saint Francis Xavier's,"
he said. Then he stood and looked about him, and the shadow grew.

"It is beautifully decorated," Julie ventured.

"It is one of the Christian churches of the Orient," he said. "Is
this the first one you have seen?"

"I only arrived to-day. I am stopping with the Calixters. I am a
teacher." She added this a little proudly.

His manner altered. "The Calixters are friends and parishioners of
mine. You are the young lady they told me they were expecting. I am
Father Hull."

Suddenly he made a gesture to the gorgeous mystery about him. "You are
not a Catholic? Then this can not break your heart. Did you expect,"
he asked, "to find a bonze in here dealing paper prayers?"

Then, with an abrupt change of manner, he asked her about her work. She
told him she had no idea where it would be. Everybody over here seemed
to be very busy; it would no doubt be real work and hard. She told
him naïvely about her old ambition to go as a nun to the Leper Islands.

He shook his head. "I hope," he said, regarding her with a sudden
keen penetration, "that you will not go very far away. I have been a
soldier, as well as a priest. I have tramped through the jungles of
many of the islands."

"Will you stay here all your life?" she asked in awe.

The priest looked at the blazing landscape. His shoulders
drooped. Finally he said, "Where on earth is the priest of God so
needed as in this wilderness of darkened souls? If I can ever serve
you, let me know." He turned toward the stark rectory.

Julie stood on the spot, and watched the black cassock disappear.

Rousing herself, she walked down the street, stopping to peep
wonderingly over the tops of old walls at the contents of gardens,
at gay dwellings gleaming like bright fruit or gorgeous birds' eggs
out of the giant foliage. Before one house, most orientally imposing
of them all, Julie stopped in amazement.

This dwelling was so extraordinarily different from her conception of
human habitations that her fancy coupled it with pillared pagodas. It
was painted in a number of strong colors, which, as in none other
of these strange houses, made a singularly stirring harmony, even
in the spectrum of startlingly tinted pillars supporting the great
galleries. Orchids--elfin, super-mundane faces, and air-plants, free
from the bondage of the earth, swung like stars in the soft evening
wind from the balconies.

Strange flowers, mysteriously unfolding in the treetops, showered the
coming twilight with a delirious fragrance. All about the boundaries of
the garden towered cocoanut palms, looking with their clean trunks like
magic beanstalks leading to higher regions; on the ground were large,
brown cocoanuts, their milk spilling over the earth. Ripe fruit hung
from many trees; bananas, like huge golden branches, and a strange
fruit that looked like little green hedgehogs hanging upside down in
the high foliage.

Over the garden the light of the lowering sun lay now like the glow of
Aladdin's lamp, illuminating it to supernatural dimensions. Over in one
end of it a little grizzled Malay dwarf, perfect in his proportions
even to his uplifted tiny hands, with the aid of a device on a long
pole, was cutting flowers from the tops of bushes and trees. Julie,
staring at the surprising little being and not perfectly sure what he
could be, saw him examine with intentness the insides of the flowers
as they fell, as though he might expect to find wrapped up in the
great blossoms another of his kind. A young monkey danced down a
tree-trunk, and commenced scattering the dwarf's store. The mannikin
pounced upon him, and whimsically thrust one of the golden bells of
blossoms upside down on the little furry head.

Of a surety this was a Caliph's mansion. Julie gazed in longingly,
venturing at last inside the gate. In a Chinese ginger-jar a little
yellow flower caught her eye. In this oriental and magic garden to
find so strange, so alien a thing as an English primrose blooming! It
was not a very robust primrose; indeed it was faint and small. Yet
clearly it was more carefully tended than anything else in the garden.

Out of a green and bronze lodge a keeper emerged to investigate
her. The sun of the East had burned him to all but a cinder. Humbly
respectful, he waited for her to speak. Julie explained in broken
Spanish that the garden was so beautiful that she had been tempted
to enter. She would like to know who lived in this little kingdom.

The queer old wrinkled creature looked quizzically at her, "Una hija
del pais," he answered.

"A daughter of the country!" What ever could the old man mean by this
cryptic reply? She looked about hesitatingly.

Just then from the indiscernible depths of the great house, an arm
decorated with a wide gold band thrust itself out of a cloud of long,
black hair, and pushed back the half-opened sliding shutter. A darkly
beautiful figure appeared up there. In response to a gesture from
it, the keeper strode toward the balcony. The figure spoke to him,
and he turned back to Julie.

"My Mistress says that the garden is at your disposal, and for you
to go where you please."

Julie moved curiously a few steps toward the balcony. The gold bands on
the arms of the princess up there glistened alluringly down at her. A
flashing brunette face came out of the shadow of the dense, splendid
sweep of hair. It looked down out of a startling and incongruous pair
of violet eyes. As this personality was not at all the setting for
them, Julie wondered how they had come about.

They played upon the girl with a flame of interest, but their possessor
did not speak. Conversation, Julie reflected, was not perhaps included
among the gifts of Eastern women. This woman, she felt, had more
subtle modes of expression. With her deep, understanding silence,
her flashing disclosures in gestures and glance, speech would no
doubt be a tardy revelation. Her sense of repose disquieted Julie,
reminding her in its singular quiescence of that human becalmment that
had at the first so disturbed her in this land. The blue eyes further
perturbed her with their interrogations--unanswerable questions: Why
she had come into this atmosphere, and what she dared to think she
would achieve in it. The Caliphess in the balcony managed to convey
an impression of proprietorship to this sphere, and to exact some
sort of explanation for Julie's appearance in it.

"I am a stranger--" Julie began "--it is all very wonderful to me";
she paused and looked around her with a sense of inadequateness.

"I knew that you did not belong here--"

The woman above spoke at last, using England's English, with once in
a while the flicker of some strange intonation, like the out-cropping
of a subconscious tone. "But where did you come from?"

"The States--San Francisco!" Julie replied.

A change flashed across the mobile twilight face.

"They keep coming! What," after a pause, "do you expect to find?"

Julie did not reply at once. Ah, that was asking the riddle! Her
gaze roamed over the wondrous garden and palace. The sphinx above
read the look.

"This garden," she informed Julie, "has been here for centuries--and
more."

"So of course it wouldn't do me any good to want it!" Julie laughed
outright. "And, you see, I am quite awfully poor."

"But you come to--take something--all of them do."

Julie sobered. "I came--but of course you wouldn't understand--I
came--" She sought for the articulation of the high and splendid
mission. Words came forth disjointedly when she sought to give form
to that inner fervor. The lady in the balcony listened, and as she
listened to the halting speech a change passed through her blue eyes
and vanished.

"How old are you?" she demanded.

Julie replied that she was nineteen.

A frown came between the splendid brows. "That is not young in the
East. We begin early to experience over here. We are not afraid of
life. We do not keep the young half their existence in swaddling
clothes. It is only too plain that you are not a woman, in spite
of your years--and the things that you are inconceivably set upon
doing. Perhaps you are married."

Julie flushed. "You see, I was considered still too young for that. I
was in school."

"Did you learn in that school to live life--here? Ah, I think not. And
you may go any place, and to any thing. You were not old enough
to be married or to live your own life--but you were old enough to
attempt--this fearful thing. My friend, go back to your home. You
are too young. It is written in your face."

"But I have no home anywhere. All this wonder is yours; how fortunate
above fortune you are!" Julie looked wistfully up at her from the
ground.

The lady receded a little from the balcony, and the shadows dropped
heavily on the twilight face. "Am I?"

Again she spoke. "What is your name? I want to see you again. One
does not see every day a little Atlas who is going to lift the world
on its back. You promise?"

"Indeed I do!"

Julie sped through the gold-tipped shadows. Mrs. Calixter was late
in her dressing, and Julie was so concerned over the low-necked gown
that she had been commanded to wear for the drive on the Luneta,
and so concerned later over what she saw when she got there, that
she forgot for the time to ask about the garden and its fair owner.

"The Luneta is an open-air reception in this one wonderful hour of
the day, my dear. Did you have a nice nap?"

Julie smiled. Naps at nineteen, when every moment counts!

Mrs. Calixter regarded pensively this freshness of the dawn. "May it
be the top of the morning to you always! Look at me." She pointed
to her bloodless face and sun-faded hair. "The East drinks you up
after a while, body and soul. We're dust that God needs to breathe
on again. Don't let it swallow you!"

"It's marvelous though, like a dream," Julie murmured. "I hope I'll
never wake up."

The Luneta proved to be an elliptical drive, picturesquely verging
upon the sea. The winds and the water at this hour contrived to make
it the single cool spot in the city.

A native band, led by a remarkable negro musician, played haunting
music of the sorrows and loves of the earth. The drone of the waves
lashing upon the rocks mingled with the melody. The sun setting
behind an island over in the sea, fantastically enkindled the city,
making it appear with its gleaming domes like some citadel of the
unbeliever reclaimed in this Crusaders' light. Julie had never seen
such deep and powerful colors. They stunned her mind, yet engendered
in her a strange exhilaration, a subtle invitation to plunge behind
those shadowy walls and follow their secret. The light shivered into
shadows; the falling night dropped enchantment over the city.

Carriages swept by with the races of the earth in them; quiet-faced
Englishmen staring pensively out to sea as if to discern in the
distance a certain blessed island that lay over there; Spaniards with
brooding, Moor-like faces, adventuring still in the East after their
country had withdrawn forever out of the New World; close-cropped,
investigatory Germans, eager traders all over the East; native families
of the better class, dressed stiffly in European costume--a concession
to the new age--and riding proudly behind American horses; Chinese
women in jade and brocade, beside their funereally garbed husbands;
East Indians, Japanese, Anamese, Koreans, Armenians--and faces that
belonged to no race or clime, intermediates of the white, dark and
yellow peoples, circling round the edges of this phantasmagoria like
will-o'-the-wisps. And last, there were feverishly alive Americans,
with an inexpressible urgency in their attitude--soldiers of the
empire, here to make their fortunes and the fortune of the land.

It was a little frightening, this hodge-podge of stranger peoples met
at a single point out of the world. Julie noticed how few American
women there were. The land was still too tumultuous for their
advent. She faced nervously the curiosity of so many men.

Every face was counted in Manila, Mrs. Calixter told her.

A great many carriages stopped to visit with Mrs. Calixter. Julie saw
one passing, which of all the procession claimed her attention. A tall
young man with a tawny head from which he had swept his hat rode in
it--his face turned to the sea winds.

Julie looked, and wondered. Who could he be? In this cavalcade that
vivid personality of power and strength blazed indelibly apart. When he
turned his face, a recollection of a child's highest dreams flashed
through her sensibilities in a single word--Excelsior! She could
not have explained how his youthful stirring face had recalled that
supreme childish fervor.

"Who is he?" she asked. It was so clear that he was somebody of note
in this world.

Mrs. Calixter followed her gaze. "A Prince of the East," she said
whimsically. "An Irish-American Haroun-al-Raschid, naïvely engaged in
the recrudescence of the East. We call him The Mayor of Manila. He
believes that it shall transcend all other cities of the earth; he
pours himself and his substance out over it. We are going to his home
to-night. He gives entertainments famous all over the Archipelago--and
is a bachelor."

"Barry McChord is one of the most striking of all the empire-builders,"
added Mr. Calixter. "He is determined to make this colony a gospel of
conviction to the East. We are the beacon, he believes, which has come
to light the darkness. We are to fire the dead ancient nations into
immortal life, and make the East one sublimated republic. You can
understand how a young and Quixotic man with such tremendous ideas
does remarkable things. He has a hand literally in everything--in
education, public health, illumination, public gardens, schemes for
first-class hotels to replace Eastern inns, the development of the
university, hospitals and theaters. Manila is the theater in which he
is staging his Far Eastern drama. When his play of sublimated Eastern
civilization is ready, he will summon all Asia to attend."

As they drove away, detaching themselves from the human caravansary,
Julie looked back upon the rough and struggling mass of humanity
which was wresting destiny out of the standardless East, and sensed
over all the exiles a pervading pensiveness, an air of waiting till
the stroke of fate should open the gate.

CHAPTER II

The Mayor of Manila lived in the Walled City, although most Americans
had chosen the space and coolness of the outside districts.

His house was very old, and stood close to the ancient walls,
overlooking the ocean. Its gardens lifted the graceful shadows of
trees over the tops of the high lichened walls and out into the
world. The house was in the ecclesiastical locality that had so
strangely impressed Julie that afternoon.

In company with the Calixters, she entered the inclosed estate and
found herself beneath the towering shadow of a great white house
rearing so high above the walls that the glow of light pouring from
the opened window spaces of the upper regions seemed almost to belong
to the starred canopy of the night.

These upper regions presented an appearance of spacious stately halls
with very high ceilings and brilliantly polished floors. Pieces of
handsomely carved Spanish furniture were disposed about the room,
and some huge darkened paintings of Spanish captains who had come
this way hung on the walls.

The people, however, made the atmosphere of these rooms. At first,
Julie thought she was in a dream. People from all the unheard-of places
of the earth seemed collected here. Such queer little brown women,
moving about on their fairy feet, in long gorgeous trains, like gay
little peacocks; and their men, mailed in European evening dress--as if
it were armor donned for the eternal triumph of civilization. Most of
them were painfully polite, Julie thought; with a touch of humility
in their politeness. Spain had not been very long gone, and even
mestizos and rich Filipinos had not figured in her social lists.

The Sultan of Sulu, temporarily absent from his own dominions,
appeared much satisfied with the stir he and his preposterous pearls
were creating. "Holy Mary! Such as the very gates of Heaven are made
of!" one dusky maiden exclaimed in rapture.

"An illiterate Malay, making an artistic collection of wives, and
deliberately decking himself out with those things as a decoy. He's
perfectly odious," Mrs. Calixter declared.

Julie saw diamonds as big as hen's eggs on these brown nabob's wives,
but the pearls dramatically obscured everything else.

"I'm very fond of Barry McChord," murmured Mrs. Calixter, "but I
don't subscribe to some of his guests."

Their host was discovered in the front room, a blond young man moving
around the room in a white mess jacket. He came across to greet them.

Julie looked up to the face she had seen on the Luneta, the gay,
young excelsior face with the vivid hair, through which he stressfully
rumpled his fingers as he talked.

He had an ardor of being that communicated itself electrically
to those around him. Julie felt suddenly on fire again. He looked
attentively at her, as if there were something about her that called
up some association. She wondered how he came to be so strong and so
magnificent, and to attain this golden blaze of power out of which
he shone like a prince.

They were separated before they could have anything to say to each
other. Mrs. Calixter wanted Julie to meet somebody "very special." As
that was precisely what she had been doing, Julie wondered why she
had to be led away.

Streams of fantastic people blocked their way. Refreshments made into
the most fanciful forms were proffered them from great nara wood
tables, such as might have served for a mediæval feast. Every one
was going about his own picturesque business; love-making was coming
into play down under the lanterns in the gardens, where the native
musicians were making music to draw one's heart out of one's breast.

In the midst of a sudden bursting triumphal strain, Julie stopped
to behold what she believed to be a queen, with her train--a woman
of such an opulent type of beauty, of such vivid tones of costume
and improbable profusion of jewels, that the eye for an instant was
overwhelmed. Mrs. Calixter whispered that this was the famous Isabel
Armistead, known all over the Orient as "The Empress of the East."

"Why," Julie exclaimed, staring at her amazed, "that's the lady
from the Caliph's garden!" She explained vividly her chance visit of
the afternoon.

"A caliphess indeed!" Mrs. Calixter agreed.

"And of course she would look like that," Julie declared. "Oh! tell
me about her."

"She is a strange creature, certainly," Mrs. Calixter said. "Her father
was an Englishman, I believe; her mother, one of those unanalyzable
mixtures of strains you find over here. I think they were married to
legitimatize Isabel, whose beauty and brilliance were remarkable. She
has had the best of education abroad, and is, without the shadow of
a doubt, the most deeply clever woman in the East--as well as one
of the richest; for from the submerged mother she received one of
the great insular fortunes. At seventeen she was married to Richard
Armistead, a middle-aged Englishman of first-rate family, who for
years held an important position as head of a bank here. He is in
England now, for his health; and there are very strong indications
that he will not come back. I imagine Isabel has a way of disposing
of inconveniences. That is not so difficult here."

"Why, what do you mean? She hasn't hurt anybody, has she?"

"Not that I know of. But when people are in the way over here, they
are just put out of it." Mrs. Calixter dropped her voice. "There's
a woman over there--quite beautiful, you see--with no sign about
her of being a daughter of the land, yet when she wanted another
husband she managed to bring it about. She and the man she wanted, so
Mrs. Roxas will tell you, the two of them, just did for poor Tony. He
was delicate, and they merely made him die somehow. Yet nobody ever
fastened anything on to them.

"This is the land of the new chance. Men and women who never
found their chance at home, or who debauched it, are seeking their
Eldorado here. Standards, social and moral, are easier here than
at home. There's a lawlessness of soul that hangs heavy in the
atmosphere. You are too young to see it yet. Even the girls are quite
vivid--and inimitably experienced. Whether it is so or not, they give
one the impression always of taking the most perilous chances."

She looked penetratingly into Julie's breathlessly intent face. "My
dear, you are neither old enough nor strong enough to encounter
Manila--a city three centuries old quickened by a new population--new
wine in old bottles! That's why I don't want you to remain over here."

"It's wonderful," Julie murmured with shining eyes "--like an Arabian
Nights' dream. I do so want to stay."

Mrs. Calixter's attention reverted to Isabel, who stood not far
away. She said that Isabel had been loved by many men of many races,
and like an empress of the East, she loved them royally for a day, and
then flung them aside. A woman whose blood was part of the East, part
of the West--nobody knew just where the division lay. Mrs. Calixter
stopped as she saw Isabel approaching. She was looking at Julie.

"Isn't this," she asked, greeting Mrs. Calixter, "my young acquaintance
of this afternoon? I feared when she walked out so radiantly into
the shadows that that might be the last of her that I should see."

Julie, looking across into the flashing face, concluded that she had
never seen anybody who intimated so many human possibilities--unless it
were the young host of this occasion. Isabel fascinated her, and made
her feel as if some queer Sybil of the Eastern bazaars were summoning
her down secret streets.

"You will like Manila very much," said Isabel, drawing nearer to Julie
as Mrs. Calixter turned to speak to some one else. "Perhaps you will
find what you are seeking--they all seek, whatever they say. But there
is always the joy of the day. You Americans are forever trying to steal
to-morrow. See that you get your share of the hours and minutes--and
come to my house again, as soon as you get your assignment. I know
the islands, every spot they could send you to. Do this," she urged,
with an insistence that captured Julie. Her train swept her onward.

Julie suddenly saw their host come out and accost Isabel in the
glowing spot under the central lamps. He bowed laughingly before her,
and Isabel's warm, enchanting face swept off in the dance, close to
his. Julie paused thoughtfully.

A handsome girl in shining blue gauze stepped up to her, and was
presented by Mrs. Calixter as Ellis Wilbur.

"Barry says that you have just arrived, and that I must tell you
about everything. I think he meant everybody. It must all be so
bewildering and strange, and so hard to catch up with. Leave her in
my hands,"--Ellis turned to Mrs. Calixter--"you couldn't for anything
say the things I'm going to, and I don't pretend that it won't be fun."

Reverting to Julie, with an air of light concern, she went on: "I
hope you are not going to any of those dreadful little islands where
they are sending such tragically unsuspecting teachers. Papa and I
have visited some particularly atrocious ones--the Mohammedan group,
away south, my dear, and so called because they live right up to the
worst tenets of the Prophet. Moros are a nerve-shattering experience,
they literally bristle with knives; and are always breaking out into
massacres. It's too big an emotion for me to seek the wilderness. But
over here the game seems usually to over-shadow the risk."

Miss Wilbur's gaze, which had roved to the dancers became suddenly
alert. "Ah," she commented, "Isabel blooming like the 'Song of
Songs'! Have I a terrible little inkling of what that might mean?"

"For whom does Isabel bloom?" Julie demanded curiously.

But the quaintly disclosive Miss Wilbur became unaccountably
reticent. She remarked carelessly: "Isabel cares transcendently for
that Ancient of Days, herself.

"If Leah Chamberlain," she went on in an unchanged tone, "would come
in skirts up to her knees, she would create a much more unlabored
effect than she is at present attempting with those classic black
silken limbs of hers."

For Julie's enlightenment, she pointed out a woman with flaming hair
and spectacular eyes, who seemed altogether too resplendent for the
ordinary purposes of life.

"Leah keeps the emotion of the Empire astir," Miss Wilbur
declared. "She is one of its phases. She lives in a flame always, and
transcends the bonds of mere husbands and other things. The husband,
a drab creature, lives in barracks out of town. Leah puts up at the
Oriente and spreads her splendid wings. What are the feelings of a
gold-tipped goddess anyway? Lovell is bent Burmese fashion before
her--Lovell is a bank-man in Hongkong who is about to come into a
big title. He aspires, at cross purposes, to power and to Leah."

A woman with dark hair drawn over a glistening pearl of a face passed
on the arm of a plump, florid man. "Another Woman of the Empire. That
Madonna face, my dear, has seen the floor of hell. That woman has
experienced the deepest brutality of the East. She was a little
New England factory girl, whom her profligate lover abandoned in a
Chinese port. In her Hegira, she found her way here, and became one
of the famous white hetirae of the city. That's what they amount to
here, and along the coast. When you see particularly handsome women
driving alone along the Luneta, don't ask who they are. Abernathy
came along and married her, right out of the district where they live,
and now she has a great house, with all the money in the world. But as
isolated as if she were in a cave. I went there once, and she took me
up on her high lonely roof, from which she said she could look out
over the city and watch it marching ahead. Her heart was breaking
with loneliness; the old days when she ruled men were gone, but she
wanted to see this thing through. Just another obscure sentinel who
is sticking to her post.

"I have an idea that Mrs. Calixter has been telling you things about
the women. She doesn't understand--her generation can't--that they've
got the chance, and the second chance, over here. They can do a lot
and get away with it--and no hair-lines drawn. But they have freedom of
choice--they can make or break themselves. A few, of course, are clear
outside--like Isabel, who has nobody to account to and to whom not even
the roughest rules apply. She is one of the laws here herself. Don't
try to measure her by rule of thumb, she hasn't any measure; Isabel has
more freedom of will than it is safe to think about. She is moreover
staggeringly rich--and helpful; and I see as much of her as she will
allow--although papa, who belongs to Mrs. Calixter's tiresome era,
is inclined to discourage this intimacy. Yet I have discovered,"
Miss Wilbur asserted calmly, "that he goes privately and takes tea
with her. He considers it a very dashing experience, no doubt. She
probably tells him a great deal about the Islands, which he believes
like gospel. That is he." Miss Wilbur gestured carelessly toward a
distinguished looking white-haired gentleman. "So diplomatic-looking,
everybody says! Papa has 'represented' at two courts, and he was
completely taken aback when they put him on a democratic job like
this. He's on the Commission. But he has caught the fire, like the
rest. He is having a very disconcerting second blooming. I used to
conceive of papa as a sort of ancient, delicate epigram, and behold,
he has come to life! That flower in his button-hole is what they call
here the 'Chain of Love.'"

A pleasant, worn-faced Englishman in a singular semi-uniform costume,
with a dark sash knotted around his waist, bowed to Miss Wilbur.

"That sash? Nobody knows what it means. Perhaps it's an emblem of
the Republic of the Sun--that's the fantastic name somebody has given
to the impossible Utopia that these men are trying to bring about in
the East, after Campanelli's or Plato's dream; I forgot which. They
believe the East is to awaken tremendously. Talk with Barry about
it. But this gentleman, Matfield-Barron, broods over the situation
with all the lonely passion of the expatriate; it's the last thing
left in his soul. Most of the others mean, like the Chinamen, to 'go
back' after the day is over, but Matfield-Barron will stay on. He was
an officer in the British army, and was cashiered out of the service
over in India--something about a woman, who is said to have used him
as a shield for another man. So he drifted here. I hope for his sake
they don't break the Scheme, back there in the States. I can't bear
to think of that homeless wanderer growing old in the East with no
Utopia to love. And I'm crazy about that absurd sash! It waves a
breezy, Anglo-Saxon defiance to the apathy of the East."

A blond, blunt man who looked like a shortened Hercules exchanged a
word with Julie's companion, and walked on.

"That's Holborne--organized the Constabulary; says he's an
Englishman--born in Malta, rather an interesting place to be born
in. I think that Holborne is a true soldier of fortune, and that
when a bigger fight comes up he will move on. Rumor has it that he is
bound up in Isabel's spokes; but so many men are that! It is written
in his steel eyes that no woman shall upset his universe.

"But of course the main force in this unseen republic is Barry
McChord. He is the Titan stoking this furnace. He is one of those
persons you want to have around--he makes the world so exciting to live
in! He has gone mad over this rough-and-tumble colony, and over the
whole East. He's in love with the torn-up landscape, the scaffoldings,
the skeleton bridges, and diverted rivers. Cleaning, rehabilitating,
straining--he is trying to carry the East on his back!

"And now I must relinquish this personally conducted tour," Miss
Wilbur concluded; "I see a circle of prospective partners frowning
at me for having hedged you in so long. It doesn't matter, however;
for the dancing is only just getting under way."

As Ellis Wilbur had implied, young men got themselves brought up,
and claimed Julie. Diffident, high-colored Englishmen, whimsically
satirical over the paradoxes of the East, or wearily skeptical; her own
countrymen, gloriously beginning and flushed with the enterprise. These
last had come to civilize Asia, and made one feel that they were
electrified with their job; they had the air of being engaged in a
national knight-errantcy. Their mood kept the air stirred. Julie was
bewildered by all they found to tell her--strange recitals that made
an Odyssey of the hopes and ambitions of many men. It set up in her
a fresh excitement.

Suddenly, looking up, she found her host before her.

"It has been quite impossible to get near you. I have sought you once
as my guest, again as the very newest lady, and several times after
that because I seem to have remembered you some place."

Julie laughed. "Perhaps that all comes of my being so new. To-morrow
I shall have dwindled back into proportion."

"Come and take a walk on the gallery," he invited; "I want to show
you the wall."

They passed through a doorway out to a high gallery that brought them
suddenly very close to the stars. Julie faced them as astonished as
if a corner of the sky had been unpinned.

"Do these belong to your garden?" she asked laughingly.

"To my Neighbor's Country." He smiled. "I don't transgress." He laid
his hand on a dark line of stones. "Here are the walls. They keep
the Pacific out of my estate."

A stone's throw over the walls Julie saw the purple stretches of the
ocean that used to come gloriously rushing through her gate of golden
dreams. She listened a moment to its roar rising above the music in
the garden. Then she stared over the city. Before her, mysterious,
shadowy, inexorable, the ancient ramparts rose, inclosing a black,
fantastic city with unearthly towers and domes. A city of fate!

The girl shivered with mingled ecstasy and fear.

"Why do you live here? You might have chosen other cities."

"So might you--but there was destiny. I chose Manila for many
reasons--some of them hardly definable. There was something from the
first that spoke out to me from it, that whispered from every one
of its old stones--an atmosphere of profound human struggle, as if
for centuries the place had been battling with forces that go back
into the dark borderland of human genesis. The human spirit at its
darkest, lowest ebb. It seems to me that is the curse that we have
come to lift--the curse of the whole East."

"Have you been here very long?"

"Almost since the beginning, the Year One with us--" He rested his
arm upon the surface of the wall, and looked across at the stretches
of singing waters just beyond.

"Would you like to hear how I came?"

Her eyes sparkled. "Everybody's been telling me to-night how they
happened to come, but most of all I want to hear about you."

"It was fate with me. I was shipwrecked off the coast of Mindanao in
a typhoon. I had been trading up and down the East, here and there,
with headquarters in China. I had been round the earth, and I had seen
most of the cities, but I had never seen the one that I believed was
my particular fate. I'd always had ideas of what I wanted to do in
the world, but I'd never gotten much nearer than dreaming them. Then
came the shipwreck and the whole New World for me. We were rescued
by the Moros and were traded round among them for a while. They
led us along the tops of stony mountains and told us every day when
the sun went down that that was the last of it we would ever see. A
couple of our men died. After we'd been led about for months and our
datto had made up his mind to kill us, his force was attacked by
another chieftain. We bolted straight into the jungle, and nearly
went crazy getting out. Finally in an open boat we gained the sea,
and just drifted until we reached a town where a commercial steamer
had put in. I got aboard, and came upon this city, and here in this
unexpected corner of the earth I found my countrymen engaged in the
biggest thing I'd ever seen.

"I knew right off that it was here that I belonged, and that this
city was my fate. A boat was going out for Shanghai with the captain
of it a friend of mine, and he wanted to take me on; my affairs had
been going well across the China Sea. But I told him good-by--I had
decided to take my chances along with the rest of my people.

"I started in with a trading company that knew my firm, and I showed
them what I'd learned about selling goods to the Chinese--you see I
knew all the big Chinese concerns. I got to be a partner and then I
bought the other fellows out--and so I came to do the things I'd set
my heart upon. I'm Irish, you see, Irish-American, and my heart had
burned with all sorts of things.

"And you?" he interrogated suddenly. "Did those green eyes lead
you East? They are like the jade of a temple god--the color of the
farthest reach of the sky."

Julie smiled dreamily. "When I was a child this same ocean used to
flow in from across the world and tell me stories of some of the
lands it touched. I knew a long time ago that I was to come."

"And how did you get to come?"

"I am to teach!" and she stopped, wondering within herself.

"Ah, there are simply no limits to that. Peaceful Penetration,
quickening beats in this great life. If we can get these white men and
women to stick to their out-posts, we'll win, in a few years. But to
give up life completely, and sit alone in the night among the palms
in a desolate bit of jungle with one's soul roving out over the world
and the stars in terrible longing--that is asking blood tribute,
as I know only too well!"

"And does it seem to you that it will count?"

"It will count inconceivably in that biggest of struggles--the powers
of light against the powers of darkness."

"But right now?" Julie queried.

"We're getting the East from this foothold--and the East, as you
will come to know, is too big, too monstrous a fact to have against
our cosmos. We think the moment has come when, by making clear our
ideals here, we can recast her at will."

"I see," said the girl slowly, "--and atoms count. Why," she broke
off, "does one feel the shadows so here, quite cold shadows and
pitiless? Mrs. Calixter seemed to make me feel that it was all a
vast tract of quicksands which finally at some point, would grip
one's feet."

"A society like this seems to offer no place to a young girl. You,"
he mused, "belong to my Neighbor's Country."

And thus out of this great big life pattern, this tremendous human
arabesque, he thrust her into the limbo of the inconjecturable--out of
the work in which he, with his quick vivid face, looking oddly white
and visionary in the moonlight, had a star part! Standing there among
the shadows of the universe, with the work of men's souls lifted out
of her participation, her heart dropped.

"I came," she said, trying to assert some title to this New World,
"because I wanted to give a little of my life--before I should grow
old and forget."

She looked up and found him staring at her with a strange intensity. He
appeared as startled as if she had just walked into his soul, a
visitant from the Neighbor's Country he had talked about. Julie was
leaning against the wall, and for an instant they deeply regarded
each other. It seemed to the girl that some powerful experience was
seizing possession of her--as if a flash of lightning illuminated
her being--deeper than she had ever dreamed. Just for a second she
felt, on unimaginable heights, a moment of mystery and wonder and
high enchantment.

Some one stepped out upon the gallery and the spell that had caught at
the stars broke. The girl quiveringly came back to her surroundings,
wondering what invisible places she had touched.

She heard her companion's voice saying hurriedly, "I'm called away--in
the midst of everything--on account of an outbreak of cholera in
one of the remote provinces. But I shall be back in a few days,
and I will see you then."

Her ear caught the definite promise and expectation the words
contained, the intimation that their lives had crossed by a stroke
of fate.

That night while she undressed with the light burning low, she
reviewed in her mind this first day in the East. She felt as if,
from a high seat in some fantastic houdah, she had seen pass a
great pageant. Incredibly exciting and splendidly adventurous it all
was! Compared to the wall-paper universe of her youth this phenomenal
flash of events was unbelievable. To live in a land where things
actually happened, where the hours were full, and where with every
breath one drew in a bewitching experience! Youth's playground with
its everlasting drama impending.

Julie leaned out into the scented darkness and looked around the
sky--a nightly custom of hers--a leave taking of God's world. But
this imminent heaven with its fearful host frightened her. Nothing
was familiar. Strange constellations had preëmpted the place of the
old ones. This was not God's world, but a world of many gods, and
she wondered, with a little shiver, which one she should propitiate.

CHAPTER III

The next morning Mrs. Calixter offered to drive Julie down to the
Ayuntamiento Building where she was to receive her instructions from
the Head of the Department of Education. When Julie came downstairs,
she found Father Hull sitting in the carriage, opposite Mrs. Calixter,
who had promised him a lift to the Observatory. He greeted Julie with
pleasure, and told her that he was on his way to see Father Algus,
who was perfecting a remarkable instrument for forecasting the typhoons
which periodically tore up the islands in these hazardous seas.

"Its success now seems certain," continued the priest, "thanks to Barry
McChord, who has been keenly interested in the invention and has sent
to Europe for many delicate appliances to assist the researches of
my venerable friend."

"He has so many things to be interested in," Julie commented with
sudden wistfulness.

The priest looked across at her: "I think I should say he has the
interest for so many things."

"Is it because I am a newcomer," the girl asked the priest, "that
things seem to move so bewilderingly fast here--like a dance whose
rhythm you can never catch up with?"

"These, my child," the priest replied, "are the Days of the
Empire. Those of us who have experienced them will remember them
always. Conquest and prowess of arms have put a dangerous fire in men's
veins. We are reaching out for more than human hands were meant to
grasp. When men are rich overnight, and women are scarce as queens,
the universe is not stable. Not but that there are some who walk
steadily in this fever--" He smiled at Mrs. Calixter.

"I don't count, I'm old," replied that lady.

"Are you challenging youth? Who in my camp fire colony, as I call it,
is so safe and sane as my friend Barry? We have worked alongside each
other for a long time--and it would be difficult for me to tell what
he has been to me."

"The natives call Barry El Mayor," Mrs. Calixter told Julie, "and
believe that in power he is infinitely above the Governor-General. In
so many incorrigible centers of rebellion he has somehow found an
effectual compromise."

"The natives reason that governor-generals may come and go--and
temporary officials of all sorts; but that Barry is with them for
good," Father Hull said. "I don't understand all his aims. Perhaps
they are too wide for me, who find my own are more than I can hope to
cope with--but what I am very sure of is that he is working always
for a better order of things in the world. I, too, am selfishly
concerned that he should not go away from here"--the priest laughed;
"I have planned that he and I shall grow old here together."

"And what will the ladies who admire him so much say to
that?" Mrs. Calixter demanded.

"There are plenty of others for them. If Barry were pinned to one
little circle how could he wander off to all the places he's sent to at
a moment's notice--like China, and India and Annam? If there were mumps
in his circle, how could he attend to cholera in the larger circles?"

"Well, we'll have to let you have him, I guess," Mrs. Calixter amusedly
remarked. She glanced at Julie's thoughtful face. "This young person
is on her way this minute to her fate, and I don't in the least like
it that a certain red-haired person has the settling of it. Maxwell
and George have had a difference--so we can't lift a hand."

The priest thought for a moment. "I should be only too glad to do
anything I could. I know Mr. Maxwell--but whether any word of mine
would count with him, I can't say. At least I can make the effort. If
you can wait a few moments I will go into Father Algus's office,
and write Mr. Maxwell a note."

When they had stopped in front of the Observatory, Father Hull bade
them good-morning, begging leave to send out the note on the plea of
his many pressing engagements.

After he had gone, Mrs. Calixter remarked with anxiety, "He doesn't
look well. He's been told again and again to take a trip home. He used
to be very strong, but he has gone through many ordeals and borne
the brunt of fearful hardship in this new place. His soul has never
wearied; it's on fire like all the others, but his body is showing
the strain."

She added: "While we were waiting for you to come out, he told me of
your meeting of yesterday, and he said that he thought you were too
young to follow the trail."

Julie waited in an outer room while the chief of education interviewed
personally a long stream of predecessors. These faces showed a great
deal of earnest purpose--the fervor of the empire builders, which
Julie had begun to recognize; and yet these people were not to remain
in Manila, but were to go out to the most distant, unsettled parts of
the Islands, to put into execution one of the most stupendous designs
ever launched by any government--to put a whole race simultaneously
to school.

Julie listened to the reports these people gave of themselves, and of
the wild unheard-of places they were accepting as their assignments,
and knew that the small salaries could not be the impetus that was
sending them, grave but uncomplaining, into far jungles. Of course
they yearned to remain in Manila. They had heard strange tales of
the provinces, and knew that more than one of the number trudging
their missionary way had been murdered; but they had cast in their
lot with the colony, and it was all in the day's work. A strange,
intangible spell had caught their souls, and it seemed that the fervor
of it must set things aflame.

When Julie's turn came, she found herself confronting an astonishingly
tall man with a huge florid head. The education of several millions
of beings was the present concern of that head, which gave evidence of
the magnitude of the problems confronting it. In times such as these,
men are often shot suddenly from commonplace experience into the most
enormous undertakings. In this case the call appeared to have been
too quick. The man was arrogant in his power, but flustered over
his responsibility. All day he had been dealing with a complexity
of human desires, which in almost every instance had conflicted with
his own. Julie stepped into the moment of greatest tension.

There was a great map on the wall, a scroll of fate to which the
Superintendent referred in making his assignments. There is nothing
alluring in a map ever, but this one seemed particularly bleak and
strange. The Superintendent frowned at it. "I haven't decided yet,
Miss Dreschell, just where I'll send you," he observed in an olympian
manner.

He juggled awhile with the fates, while Julie, considerably heartened,
decided to take advantage of this critical uncertainty to assist him
to a favorable decision.

"I should very much like Manila," she said pleasantly.

The Superintendent's negative mental state vanished
electrically. "Every person who has entered this room to-day has said
that same thing! You should have come here prepared to go where you
are sent."

Julie flushed. "The provinces are still in a state of insurrection,"
she declared spiritedly. "People are being killed there."

"Civilians are not," the Superintendent exclaimed exasperatedly. "We
are sending teachers out to the most remote parts, where there are no
troops at all, Miss Dreschell. You will go where I send you, as it is
your business to do; and your station," turning to the dreadful map,
"will be the small island known as Nahal, in the southern group."

He irately pointed it out, remote, isolated, the last before the Pagan
group. Julie stared at the outline, and her heart grew faint. It was
the end of the world!

"I shall be going farther South than any one else," she remarked with
a break in her voice. Suddenly she put her hand in her bag and drew
out the letter which she handed to him.

She watched him read it in curious wonder at the change that came
over her face. "This puts a different light on the matter," he
said coolly. "There is no favor that Father Hull could ask in the
Philippines that would not be granted at once. I shall endeavor to
assign you to the Ermita district in the city."

What, Julie wondered, was the strange power of Father Hull whose words
could in an instant revolutionize her fate? Her visionary green eyes
fixed speculatively on that spot on the map. "Father Hull said I was
to give you the letter," she said slowly, "but I think if you don't
mind, I will go where you assigned me."

The Superintendent was uncomfortable. There were other islands much
nearer than Nahal to which he might have sent her. He slid an elastic
band over a bunch of papers with an irritated snap. "Do as you like,
Miss Dreschell--but there is Solano"; he pointed suggestively to a
larger island farther north than Nahal. "Conditions are better there,
I should say."

"I think I will go where I was assigned," Julie reiterated--which
decision seemed considerably further to irritate the florid head. It
was clear that he was keenly eager to serve the writer of the letter.

But Julie rose with an air of finality. He stared at her with
annoyance; and when she did not alter her mind, he leaned over his desk
and jotted down a note. Julie knew somehow that it referred to her. She
caught a glimpse of the word Solano, and wondered if he intended
forcing her to go there. Evidently he did not, for as she stepped
through the door, he apologized perfunctorily for the difficulties
of the occasion, and bowed her out with great courtesy. But Julie,
looking up into his face, saw that he would never forget the person who
had challenged his power and caused him to be ashamed of himself. Some
time this incident would unfailingly bear fruit.

Mrs. Calixter was aghast. "He has banished you into exile!" she
exclaimed. "Could it be because he and George are at swords'
points? Did you give him Father Hull's letter?"

"I gave it to him, and he took everything back in a wink, and offered
me Manila; but while I sat there looking at my mysterious island,
I recalled the faces of some of those teachers, and the face of--a
person I met last night, and I asked myself why I should shirk just
exactly that which I had come over to do. Why," she added suddenly,
"did Father Hull's letter make such an impression? The Church over
here must be very powerful."

"The Church hasn't a thing to do with it. It's the man! He's a saint,
and the spiritual custodian of the colony. He came over here as
the Chaplain of the Twenty-fourth, and marched right alongside the
men into every danger. There wasn't a soldier in the regiment that
wouldn't have gone straight through Hell at his word. Yet I imagine he
found it harder to make them go the other way. He is known everywhere,
and by everybody. No one could deny him anything--it's the power of
one man's life."

"There seem to be so many over here like that!" Before Julie's
half-closed eyes a stream of faces rose. One preëminently stood
out, illuminated by moonlight, and fired with the undying fervor
of purpose. It was her sub-conscious being which, stirred by the
intimations received last night on the roof, had decided in a flash
for her in the Superintendent's office.

With the vision still about her and before her, she arrived at the
home of Isabel Armistead, the woman of Asian mystery.

The dwarf that she had seen before in the garden received her. She had
thought that he looked like a child, but she saw now that the queer
little creature was of a man's years. She could not resist speaking
to him, and the mannikin smiled at her out of his saddened, puckered
little face. He showed her upstairs into a sala so vast that it seemed
literally a sweep of space broken by transcendently carved pillars.

The house was more than a century old, and had come down to Isabel
through her inconjectural native connections. Its carvings belonged
to an era of Pharaonic hordes of labor, or slavery. The house and the
other vast properties of its owner had somehow come down unmolested
by official upheavals.

The family was a queer one of many strains; all the East was in its
veins. After her husband and her daughter had departed for England,
Isabel's mother, it was said, had gone up into a holy mountain to
practice witchcraft. At any rate, after a time, she had disappeared,
never, apparently, to be heard of again. The influence of this strange
mother, Mrs. Calixter had told Julie, was still perpetuated. One
native lady of her acquaintance had shown Mrs. Calixter one of the old
witch-mother's anting-antings, proclaiming that she always wore it,
and that it had astoundingly protected all her life, shielding her and
her family from all evil and lifting them above the common lot of men.

Julie thought of these strange rumors as she looked about her. The
walls were hung with a great many rich embroideries, brilliant
silks blooming with the unfamiliar flowers of far kingdoms. It
was like walking in a garden of Cathay. The room appeared to Julie
like a chamber of an Eastern palace in a rich pagodaed city: there
was furniture of teak-wood black as a Nubian, brought from distant
jungles by toiling elephants, all marvelously carved into scaled
monsters; there were ivory gods with sleeping faces; curtains strewn
with gold, hanging in dim recesses; rugs--that generations of men in
almost mythical retreats of the Himalayas had been a century or two
in weaving--lying like islands on the shining dark lacquered floor,
in which the shadows of the passer-by drowned to endless depths;
a pair of sentinel vases higher than a man--made a thousand years
ago for an emperor who had become a god--out of their tops a thin
ribbon of green smoke curling from hidden incense; and in one corner,
hung with flowers, a queer altar to whatever gods Isabel believed in.

Toward this niche Julie bent curious footsteps. The altar was in
the shape of a temple, a gilded fantastic thing, wrought in what
country it would have been impossible to say. A Green God, like the
monstrous genie of a lake, sat cross-legged in the nave of the shrine
staring at rows of grotesque faces carved in the walls. The artist had
exercised the art of a Leonardo da Vinci; in the face of the little
idol there was neither the dead marooned calm of the great Diabutz nor
the cruel evil of Mongolian gods. He was just a quiet little deity,
green as the far spaces of the skies, sitting thinking in his temple;
but there was in his oblivious, impersonal reflection something that
clutched at the heart.

Julie glanced up depressed, to find Isabel regarding her.

"What a terrible god!" exclaimed the girl with a shiver. "Is he yours?"

Isabel smiled. "He is the god who is 'on the job,' as you Americans
say it. The Great One is too great, the philosophers tell us, to have
anything to do with us. He has abstract names, and is too isolated
by infinity to be prayed to. But this little god, he knows, he knows!"

"Has he a name?" asked Julie, much puzzled by this blatant
paganism. The Islands were undoubtedly a very strange place.

"In different lands, we call him different things."

Julie turned from the niche, "I am going to the island of Nahal,"
she announced. "I have come to see what you can tell me about it."

Isabel's blue eyes widened. "It is far, very far! We shall never hear
of you again. It takes weeks to reach there, because no boats run
regularly. You can get to Solano in three or four days, if you are
lucky enough to catch a boat--from there once in a while a boat goes
down to Nahal. It is a small island; the people are Visayans. I really
do not know so much about it, you see. It is turbulent, I believe. Is
there a military garrison?"

Julie was not sure. A volunteer force had recently been withdrawn
from it; Mr. Calixter was trying to discover whether other troops
had replaced the volunteers.

"Most of the women have been ordered out of those dangerous places in
the South. Have you not heard the things that have been done there? You
are foolhardy to have come--some strange madness possesses you."

Julie's eyes took on an abstracted look. "It is a madness that
possesses others, too."

"I have not seen it."

Julie looked at her but remained silent. The two regarded each other;
Isabel out of her blue eyes, Julie out of her jade-green ones.

"Why do you go? It is not safe. There are places in these islands
where white women have never been seen."

Julie's eyes awoke. "I shall have something to do."

"Will you stay in the wilds till you have given the Nahal islanders
the higher education? Bah! Why do you wish to waste your youth at
such things? You are beautiful, and were made to be admired, not to
bury your youth in forgotten islands. You were made to taste life a
little richer in the fruit than the rest. And you who could win so
much renounce it all to be a spectacled ascetic hanging to the tails
of existence. No Spanish woman would dream of doing such a thing! You
have come half way round the world to do some vague thing you've
set your heart on. Set your heart on life--it owes you much; make it
magnificently pay! Did my Green God give you those eyes and that face
for the edification of small Malays? Stay in Manila and drink life
here where it sparkles and overflows the goblet. I would no more do
what you are doing! I might be a nun--that is picturesque and fiercely
renunciative. But to be a pedagogue to brown savages!--it is dull to
tears. Then,"--as a final overpowering fact--"there will be no men!"

Julie's eyes gleamed disapprobation. "The women of America have
many resources. They go along their real way until their real fate
overtakes them."

"A single fate! Is there such a thing?" Isabel seemed feverishly
to question herself. "I have made a long quest. I ought to know. No,
there is no such thing. It is a tradition they fasten in women's minds,
to make them become mothers.

"Look," she continued, turning toward the temple, "I will give you a
present, because I am so sorry for you with such a terrible future. You
are going out to be a little Atlas--to lift up the world. Tell me,
when you return, how much you have supported on your little back."

For an instant Julie was afraid that Isabel was going to present her
with the Green God, but she reached within the shrine and drew out,
not the God--to Julie's unspeakable relief--but an exquisite circle
of jade, clear and green like a tropical lake.

"A jewel from the Green God for you who have his stamp in your eyes."

Julie started. "Some one else told me that."

"Who was it?"

"Barry McChord."

Isabel's lids dropped over her blue eyes. "You know him, then?"

"I met him last night."

"And he noticed your eyes--that way?"

"But nobody will notice them now--" It was absurd to assume that there
was the faintest flicker of satisfaction in the other woman's look,
Julie thought.

Isabel slipped the bracelet over Julie's wrist. "It has belonged
to many women in many ages. Perhaps you will make more history for
it. What beautiful bones you have!" she exclaimed. "They are like
sculpture--even in your cheeks where the bones of the English go
wrong. And your flesh is flawless; an angel might use it to come down
to earth. Look at the difference."

She drew Julie's arm up beside her own to the light. "Yours is snowy,
way down to the depths; but the light stops under my skin, it can't
get down. That is the difference between you and me!" She loosed
Julie abruptly. "Ah, well--you are blind. Go hold up the world,
and break your poor little back, when you might be ruling the world,
like me. All the East, you know, is mine to work my will in."

Because Isabel was of that East, which she so fantastically claimed,
Julie took lightly all she said. To boast of swaying empires and of
taking kings out of their thrones was part of the inalienable imagery
of the East, as were the widely unreal, the impossibly beautiful things
in the old Chinese lyrics. Isabel implied that Julie had only to step
out of her insignificant profession to find herself ruling the world,
the world of to-day, which had such a marvelous capacity for ruling
itself. It was strange how something at other moments so exalted could,
under this woman's manipulation, become all at once so obscure. Julie,
turning to depart, thanked Isabel for the bracelet.

"Remember, I am your friend," Isabel said, "and I will help you at
any time you say so. Adios!"

Julie left her standing in the center of her magic chamber, its
splendor hovering about her, her dark face merging into its richness
like that of some forgotten goddess.

With his small powerful arms, the dwarf swung the gate open for
her. She looked back at the garden starred with strange flowers, at
the tiers of steps and bright pillars which made the house resemble a
Babylonian palace, at the light of the stained glass under the blaze
of sunlight: in that bizarre house had lived a woman who had gone
out to the tops of mountains searching for spells!

In those moments when Julie cogitated upon matters of human life
in connection with the Deity, she conceived Him rather vaguely as a
sort of sublime executive, who drew up--sometimes perforce a little
hurriedly perhaps--plans of eternal destiny for everybody. Dealing
liberally in catastrophe, disease, old age, poverty, and death, He
yet conceded, like allowances of candy to children, a certain amount
of impermanent happiness; and it was into this arrangement of things
that the race was privileged to enter.

She wondered, as she turned from Isabel's gate, who the little
Green God was; and whether he had any character by which he would
be recognized in the West. She who had started out with a nameless
exalted fervor, whose spirit had been skimming like an inspired comet
through space, had been suddenly halted before a strange house in which
she had encountered disquieting things--things which had brought the
comet down to a scented and blooming earth. So do the moods of youth
sway in the last wind blowing.

Still nothing caused Julie to change her intentions; not the troubled
counsel of Father Hull, given in his tired voice; nor the Calixters'
tales of the far, fearful South; nor the exotic arguments listened
to in the Babylonian house. She set sail for the South on the day
that had been set.

CHAPTER IV

Julie sat restively on the blistering deck of a small vessel in the
harbor of Solano. The Black Pearl, which had brought her from Manila,
had deposited her in this blazing city--which now lay before her like
a peeling off the sun--and had sailed on in the trail of the East
Indies. She had been forced to wait an incredible time for the rare
chance that would send a boat from Solano to her own world-forgotten
island. Even now she would not have been on her way, if a government
official had not appeared from Manila and, from Solano, demanded
transportation forthwith to Nahal.

It was getting late--late for a day when everybody rises at dawn, when
at last there walked across the gang-plank a young man in a Norfolk
khaki suit and a white helmet. He was followed by a procession of
natives carrying his luggage, which they had so lightly distributed
among themselves that it took some time for the column to transfer
itself from land to sea. It took more time, and a knowledge of the
coin of the land--which knowledge the young man seemed to have--to
compensate these individuals, who raised a protest over the glittering
new centavos. The young man was obliged to add to his payment,
whereupon the recipients protested more loudly than ever, and would not
subside. The captain in disgust contemptuously ordered the gang-plank
lifted with them still on it. Life in the East was too prolific anyway.

The young man, who had such a dark skin that Julie concluded that
he must be a Spaniard, came forward with his luggage, which he now
conveyed himself, replacing a dozen natives.

When he perceived Julie, he seemed much taken aback, and removed his
helmet, revealing a young assured face, a trifle heavy, and a pair
of very light blue eyes. Julie looked at him attentively.

He paused, holding his helmet in his hand. It was dear that he wanted
to speak. He had the same curious, almost incredulous expression of
those armies of men in Manila.

"I beg your pardon," he said, overcome by his desire to address her;
"I had no idea I was keeping any one waiting. I understood that I was
the only passenger for Nahal." All the time he was speaking his eyes
never swerved from her.

"It does not matter," Julie replied, "except for the heat."

The young man sat down not very far away from her, on a chair which
he had brought.

Julie leaned over the railing and watched the recession of
Solano. Somewhere far off in the sea was her own terrible little
island about which she wondered deeply; she remembered now acutely
that she need not have gone to that Robinson Crusoe fastness. Father
Hull had warned her, and so had every one else. Suddenly an image
rose before her, a great youthful frame with a rumpled head. For a
moment she seemed to be facing its high and inflexible resolve.

"We are surely bound for No Man's Land!" The young man at her side
was addressing her.

She nodded gravely.

The young man went on politely to say that a Spanish Mestizo general
was making himself troublesome on the island of Nahal. He was a great
bother to the Government, which was trying to bring strife to an end
in order to set up its great emancipation schemes.

"They are over-sentimentalizing the thing--think the bird can be caught
by putting salt on his tail. Government wants everybody to lay down
arms and listen to the gospel of democracy. Fancy that in the East!"

"It must be a fearful struggle when the people are so
unconvinced. There were guns going off all night in Solano!" Julie
reflected. "Are there any men and women on Nahal?"

"Oh! of course." The young man made a carelessly expansive
gesture. "There are natives everywhere."

"But I mean real people, white people, people that make things happen."

"Hope so. The natives are no good except for background; help along
with palms and things to fill up space."

Thereupon the young man introduced himself, and commenced to explain
to Julie that he was going to the island to act as Treasurer. He
had been a captain of volunteers, and appeared to deprecate his
present office. It served in his opinion, however, as a step to
higher things. A Filipino had been made governor of Nahal--matter of
government policy; but as he didn't count for much, Mr. Purcell--such
was the name the young man gave himself--had been sent down to bolster
things up. His father was a politician in Iowa, and would look out
for his son's advancement. His parents did not approve his roving,
oriental life, and wanted him to come home and settle down. He allowed
a considerable pause to ensue after this reflection.

For hours the only two persons on the tiny deck, they sat and watched
the sea. Later in the afternoon, the sky grew overcast, bringing
relief from the intolerable heat.

Finally, a dissolving cloud broke apart on the horizon, and the sun
lit up an island green and wild as a new-made world. Julie rose with
a cry at the beauty of it. That was Nahal! Mars itself could not
have looked more uninhabited. What subliminal, lonely wildness! It
called up to her the vision of the wild, moon-swept cliffs of Mindoro,
passed at night on the way down to Solano, with its mysterious jungle
and without even a light against its primal shores. This little island
had ridges of green cones, that looked in the distance like the domes
and spires of mosques, all clothed in quiet forests over which the
wind seemed scarcely to blow.

The vessel was making for the eastern coast, to a town called Dao,
where it was to drop mail. It would then continue to Guindulman,
whither both passengers were bound.

At Dao, the Captain said the passengers might go ashore; so Julie
and Mr. Purcell went with him in a leaky row-boat into a cove of
the harbor, which was bounded on both sides by long gleaming arms of
beach dotted with palm trees, their heads bent like pensive thinkers.

A small village barely peeped out from under the foliage of the great
tropical trees. A dusty primitive road ran down from the village to
the rude pier. They climbed up to it by means of a flight of slippery
green stairs, a heroic undertaking for Julie in her white clothes.

To her it appeared at once as an island of appalling silence. Even the
sea out there was not so still. A primitive, all-pervading hush--the
deepest she had ever known. A queer sensation came over her of having
reached a point in the universe where time was not.

A crowd of natives had commenced quietly to gather. Two white men
were approaching; one a young officer in a khaki uniform, with a
sword hooked to his belt; the other nondescriptly appareled in an
officer's blouse devoid of insignia, a pair of bleached trousers that
came considerably above his shoe tops, and a peaked straw hat.

As they drew near, these men looked at Julie in amazement. The
Captain presented the officer as Lieutenant Adams. Julie noticed at
once the deep shadow that rested upon his thin, troubled face. The
other strange-looking gentleman was the Doctor. Outside of these two,
the Captain remarked, there was only one white person on this side of
the island. At this allusion, Julie noticed strained glances exchanged.

When Purcell got the chance, he whispered to Julie that this third
person was the captain in command--perpetually drunk, and frequently
insane with delirium tremens. He had been a fearless soldier,
and had once performed a hazardous mission for the Government;
and he had been put off here, with a one-company command, in the
idea that he could do little harm. But this drink-maddened czar in
his times of dementia maintained a reign of terror over his small
domain that brought it always to the verge of mutiny. Only one thing
stood between his brutality and disaster. This was young Adams, who
interposed between the captain and his men--and who spent weeks in
arrest or confinement for his pains.

"What lives you regulars lead!" Purcell exclaimed to the Doctor. "Do
you think any volunteer organization would stand for that whiskey
king? They'd take him out and twist his head off."

Adams frowned. "Let go, before the natives, when the whole blooming
show is at stake over here? We're not just a company of infantry. We're
the Army! I'd have my own head twisted off first."

"If it were not for Adams," the Doctor said, shaking his head,
"there'd be a holocaust, all right. It frequently occurs to me to take
to the open sea. But I'd like Adams to go with me, and he keeps Nero so
peeved by his altruism that the old monster locks him up; so he can't
get away. Miss Dreschell," he continued, turning engagingly to her
in his quaintly deranged hat and incoherent costume, "you must really
pardon my clothes. As you may not have found it difficult to surmise,
I haven't any. I came here a thousand years ago, and never expected to
encounter a lady again. I have written to a tailor regularly, enclosing
at various times a roll of bills--impossible to send money orders,
there being no post-office on this island; but that evil one simply
disdains to reply. All the world, by some singular sort of erosion,
seems to have receded from us. I shall eventually be reduced to fig
leaves--though they are not indigenous to the island, and banana
leaves, while dressy and expansive, will not bear needle and thread,
nor glue together with any success.

"I hope," he said to her in a lower tone, "that you will talk
very nicely to Adams. There is no such thing as speech left in our
principality, nor mirth except the laughter of the monkeys in the
hills. Our brains are sucked out; never a new idea comes here--save
what that black son of Neptune purveys every two months. Give the lad
something to think about in the next cycle of years. And I am asking
you privately not to regard me too closely when we ascend the hill. You
happened upon me just before my monthly sewing day. There goes our
mail." He pointed to a loaded sack that a soldier was carrying up
the hill. "It reminds me that there is one thing you don't have to
worry about here--that's bills."

The Doctor waved his hand ahead of him. "Behold, the population of
Nahal is coming down from the hills to look at you. You are the first
white woman to land on this spot. Number this as an indelible day."

Julie was staring with all her eyes. Whereas a handful of people
had stood but a short time ago about the wharf, the road and the
surrounding vicinity were now black with natives surging in her
direction. They formed a solid staring girdle around her, their
unblinking eyes riveted upon her.

To them her blond fairness was miraculous. When the Doctor made her
take off her hat, and her singular silvery blond hair came forth to
view, lighting her dazzling skin, a deep quiet stir went through
the crowd. The girl stood abashed in the midst of it. Long, long
afterwards, when many others had paid tribute to her beauty, Julie
remembered that moment in a wild little spot out of the world.

One grimy little child crept up towards her, and, plucking at her
garments, demanded if she were not the Blessed Virgin. The men of
the lonely lives turned abruptly. The others followed after them up
the hill, Julie's native coterie trailing behind her. They picked
flowers for her, and offered her strange sweets.

"A queen for a day!" she laughed to Lieutenant Adams, who was walking
beside her. "I shall remember Dao until the end of my life."

"That's the strange part of the natives; they admire our type more
than their own. You are absolute beauty to them--very near a glimpse
of God. I am going to send your worshipers away now, and ask you to
take a walk with me; for you will be here only a couple of hours--two
hours out of eternity, and I must talk! It is a long time since I said
anything real. Let us waive the world, and consider that we are two
people met in outer space at the end of time, and that it does not
matter at all what we say." He looked up quickly into her wondering
face. "You think I'm mad. What else, in heaven's name could I be?"

She regarded the strained, urgent face, and felt a subtle appeal
being made to her--youth in hard straits, to youth.

They strolled down the main thoroughfare of the town. Knitted
closely together with foliage, it presented a weird aspect. Adams
explained that the Commandant liked this wild growth. They stepped
into a side street, and he indicated with a grimly significant nod
one house larger than the rest. Adams passed it quickly; but before
turning down the lane, Julie glanced back and beheld a great shape
at the window, bloated and distorted, the hair standing out all over
its head. The man creature up there was in the depth of one of his
worst debauches, when for a week he did not touch food but lived in
an alcoholic frenzy. He was scarcely human, and Julie, who had never
dreamed of the existence of such a thing, fled down the street with
a smothered cry. "What is the matter?" Adams demanded.

"He was at the window. Oh! how awful! How can you live here?" A deep
shame mantled the young man's grimness. "Isn't he a beast?"

Julie followed her guide up the hill, reflecting that strange lives
must be expected to make strange men. Adams pointed out a flat stone
for a seat, and, drawing a long breath, dropped down upon another.

"How long have you been here?" he began; "and where do you think you
are going? That's what we always want to know."

Julie explained the uncertainty she faced. He looked at her keenly.

"I used to be in Guindulman," he said. "It's one of the three
garrisons on the island, including this place and Tarlac--only a
battalion altogether."

She returned to him his question--the genesis of everything in the
East. "And you--how long?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Year and a half. I've lost all track
of time." He pointed to some pensively quiescent hills. "Could you
fasten time, or change to them? As it was in the beginning, so it
shall ever be, world without end. You get up in the morning and go
to bed at night, till your brain reels. I hate this eternity. I want
to live or I want to die."

"Why do they leave you? It's wicked!"

"Why do they send a mere child like you to Nahal? We're grist for the
mill. In order that big things shall come forth from it, the wheels
must grind exceeding fine. You and I are slated for powder.

"This is my private little hell. I've got to keep the old man from
running amuck and the men from breaking out. But what I want to tell
you right now--because we are going to be such awfully good friends--is
that I am sick of my job, and I'm afraid that I'm going to break out
too. I've lost my perspective. They might have let me go out for just
a little while. All the time, I'm in insurrection inside. I seem to
have slipped some vital moorings--and to be adrift."

"But you wouldn't yield now, after struggling so long?" Julie
pleaded. "Oh! I'm so sorry for you!"

He clutched his face in his hands, and looked out through the foliage
across the sea. "What is life, anyway? There must be more of existence
than what we manage to find. Sometimes I can feel whispers of it. Do
you think I'm mad, or just soul-sick of my kind of a world? You see
I'm only a poor devil in purgatory, trying--and not succeeding--to
fight my way out."

"You have been splendid," she said tremulously. "Does it mean anything
to you to know that I think that?"

He straightened quickly. "It means a lot. This hour has put something
into my veins."

Suddenly the boat whistled from the harbor. He took her hand,
and said with a feeling which he could ill conceal: "The Blessed
Virgin did not visit Purgatory for nothing this day." Then he added:
"I shall see you. Perhaps they will let me come to Guindulman--Ah,
anyway, I shall see you!"

Julie from the boat waved a farewell to the khaki-clad figure standing
on the pier, Mr. Purcell watching her intently all the while. "Military
gentlemen," he informed the universe in a meditatively resentful way,
"are always irresistible to women."

CHAPTER V

In darkness, rain, and perturbation, Julie landed at her destination. A
storm had blown up from the Sulu Sea, to which they were quite
close. Before the light had faded, however, the Captain had pointed out
as Guindulman a spot in the long, low stretch of gray green against
the gray sea, where a lonely torch light shot up in the dusk and was
gone. Julie's companion had managed to make the latter part of the
voyage somewhat too disturbingly intimate, and she hoped fervently
that their ways would soon part.

In a large house near the wharf, they found that a white woman,
a teacher, was quartered. She sent word that she would look out for
Julie. Mr. Purcell was directed to the Officers' Mess.

Miss Hope, a succinct person with the ineradicable stamp of pedagogical
command upon her, greeted Julie, and explained conditions while the
girl changed her drenched clothing. Of the two available intra-suelo
rooms rented from the prosperous native family above, one could be
turned over to Julie--the one, the girl noted, that was closest to
the malaria-soaked ground. Because of the military occupation, the
village was badly crowded.

"The General Superintendent must have known something about this
place," Julie reflected; "since he sent you."

"Oh, I know him very well," Miss Hope declared. "He is a very busy
man, and cannot be expected to know everything. This is the world's
end--but I came here on my own request. I have a project which obliges
me to teach in at least one remote island. My plan is to teach in
every country around the world, as far as I can get. In addition to
teaching in the States, I have already put in one term in Honolulu,
one in Yokohama, another in a girls' school in Pekin. From here,
I project India and Ceylon, a course of English in a Greek School,
ending up in a college in Madrid."

Everybody over here, Julie reminded herself, had a separate and
astonishing thing to do.

The rain had stopped when they set out to climb the hill to the Mess
for dinner. There was one general military mess where most of the
white colony ate, Miss Hope explained.

In the inky blackness Julie could form no impression of the town. There
was the usual plaza inevitable to every Spanish town, on a plateau
at the top of the hill. On a corner of the plaza loomed the large
house of the august Commandant.

Dinner was almost over when they arrived. Here in this one room,
closed against the elements like some Monte Cristo world, were nearly
all the white inhabitants of the place. A hush fell as the newcomer
stepped in among them.

In a community like this everybody was potential. The girl looked about
her, stirred at the encounter with these beings who were to become
the companions of her life; and when she was stirred the singular,
characteristic inner gleam came out and lighted her features. These
people, huddled together to keep their spirits alive in their neglected
corner of the world, woke up as if they had received a message from
their lost existence.

Major Landon, the Commandant, a tall, stern-looking man of swarthy
complexion, rose and greeted her, with the greatest possible
courtesy, Julie thought. He was in fact kind to her at once. That
this graciousness did not extend to every one, she soon learned. His
deep utterance rolled around in his throat like a growl, and seldom
got completely out. "You are the first American girl to visit Nahal,"
he rumbled. "We hope you'll stay!"

Miss Hope looked vexed, and resumed her introductions.

The Smiths were the only married couple. Theirs was a very recent
and spectacular marriage--any reference to which seemed excessively
to annoy the Major.

The two remaining members of the mess present were Lieutenants Dwight
and Brentwood, members temporarily, since they had lost their cook;
Bentwood, the Major's Adjutant, was a prosaically good-looking young
man who certainly tried his best to please the Major by purring
optimistically at him all the time, only to get snarled at for
his pains.

The very slimmest lady with the very yellowest hair Julie had ever
seen leaned across and whispered encouragingly: "Isn't he an ogre! I
came here, a bride, six months ago, and he frightened me to death. I
had come seven thousand miles to marry dear Marlborough--I hadn't
seen him since he was thirteen years old--and you can imagine!"

"Luella," Mr. Smith called from the door.

"Some time I'll tell you what the monster said." The slim lady
floated off.

Julie gave ear to Mr. Dwight on her left, whose attention had been so
persistently straying from his food to her that the Major's basilisk
eye had frequently to recall it. Dwight explained to Julie in lowered
tones--the Major was happily a little deaf--that the Commanding Officer
was a somber old file, of belated rank and defeated hopes. Even his
marriage had been a retarded affair--the lady had become middle-aged
waiting for him to propose, when suddenly she had discovered that he
had been making declarations to her for fifteen years, which, owing
to his unintelligible utterance, she had never understood. Since
the Major had been so deliberate in his own matrimonial concerns,
he regarded with disfavor the precipitate nuptials of the Smiths.

The next morning when they again climbed the hill, Julie saw the
village of Guindulman for the first time. Always thereafter it was
set apart in her memory as a shining village set upon a bluff above
the sea against an emerald tropical forest. Along its lone lines of
snow-white beach, palms waved in solitude. Over to the east a very
singular natural causeway united the island with a smaller one. To
Julie there was something very aloof and strange about this causeway
with the sea surging up on either side. The whole looked like Eden,
new, green, and expectant.

Nahal was in insurrection. A great proportion of its native men had
decamped for the hills, where under General Andegas they engaged in
outlawry of every sort, seizing the property of peaceful natives and
even killing them on the slightest suspicion that they were friendly
to the Americans.

The Major was an old soldier, and for all his brusquerie a good one;
but after a long sojourn in the subordinate grades he had lost youth's
sublime capacity for hazard. He knew that if he should employ the
measures essential to the pacification of the island, the measures
requisite for the obliteration of its chaos and disorder, he would end
up as an oblation on the altar of American conscience. There might be
others who could laugh in the teeth of the gods but the Major was too
old. So, high up in his great open room, he could be seen by his world
eternally walking about like a caged lion. There is no such bitter
spectacle as that of a strong man knowing and yet fearing his own mind.

Around the plaza was all the history Guindulman had ever had. The
church was very old, and was supposed to trace back to the activities
of the Legaspian missionaries. It had a three-storied stone tower,
in which there yawned three gaps for missing bells carried off by
Mohammedan pirates to their own terrible island--discernible on clear
days as a sinister shadow against the sea. The façade of the church
offered an entertaining exposition of the Book of Revelations. The
several different kinds of Horned Beasts roared sulphurously from its
brow, surreptitiously urged on from under the eaves by the Scarlet
Woman; an incensed angel in the center with militant wings and drawn
sword, gave them all battle, while under his feet a frightened saint
hugged the arms of Spain in desperation.

Outside the door of the church stood a slim, black-robed figure,
which, as the two women approached, turned upon them out of a somber
and lonely face the sudden fire of a pair of piercing black eyes.

"Good morning, Padre," Miss Hope essayed deferentially. "May I present
Miss Dreschell, who has come to take charge of the Boys' School?"

A change flashed through the priest's face, which was not suppressed
before Julie had looked into a hidden chamber of his personality. The
priest--he was young and had all the swift movements of youth--looked
at Julie quickly, and murmured a few Spanish words; then with an
inclination of the head, he moved away. A crowd of children on their
way to school came flocking about him.

Miss Hope said that he was a mestizo, the usual warring
half-and-half--all restless souls vainly seeking, between two races,
their destiny. James, the American teacher, who had visited him in
his convento, said that Father Herrero knew both Greek and Latin,
which in these parts was the same as saying that the Sultan of Jolo
could speak French.

The Ayuntamiento, or government building, seemed in its huge
concrete size, to overtop the village. It held all the offices of the
government, and streams of people were to be seen hurrying in and out.

In a wing of the building Julie saw a great upstairs gallery
where two hammocks were hung. These were the quarters, Miss Hope
thought, of the new Treasurer, the gentleman who had brought Julie
ashore. Troops quartered downstairs made this building eminently
safe. In a low-roofed building adjoining, prisoners stuck sociable
faces out between iron bars.

The bachelor officers lived on the corner opposite the Major, the
rest of the colony in intermediate houses. Thus the Major had his
whole domain under his eyes, and could even see when those of the
bachelors who messed separately across the plaza came to the table
in their shirt-sleeves.

As Miss Hope and Julie walked down the road toward the side street
where the two schools were located, the crowd of children who had been
following the Padre detached themselves with the inevitable inconstancy
of childhood, and formed a devoted train around the teachers, offering
them flowers. Julie, who was pretty and always popular with children,
fell into possession of most of these.

The priest, left alone, frowned slightly in her direction. Before
turning back into the church grounds he paused a moment at the gate,
and Julie saw a portentous shadow cross his face.

"He's the most powerful man on the island," Miss Hope remarked. "The
Padre, for that matter, always is. He is the mind of these people. Some
of the officers accuse him of all sorts of things. It's hard to tell
from his face what he is."

The boys' and the girls' schools stood opposite each other on a long,
wide side street, over-shadowed by great tropical trees, in which the
boys roosted out of hours among the mangoes and bananas. The buildings
were high and roomy, overlooking charming scenery of jungle and sea,
and were surrounded by the overgrown grounds that children love. This
street was their retreat; they lived in it nearly all the time, played
their games, mostly now those imported from America, and satisfied
their hungry appetites with the queer cheap candies and little sponge
cakes, made of very ancient eggs, that were purveyed in its stalls.

Julie turned into the Boys' School, now her responsibility, while Miss
Hope crossed the street. Miss Hope, Julie learned, had several native
teachers to help her; whereas one ex-soldier was the only assistant
she had with over a hundred boys. Brown boys of every age and stature
were filing past her up the stairs. The airy tropical structure rocked
to its foundation under the onsweeping surge of youth. Julie looked
out at the golden morning, and her thoughts glowed. She felt equal
to any enterprise in creation.

Mr. James was a well educated young man, who had come out to fight for
his country; and who had stayed behind like others of his countrymen
to experiment. He was not a regularly certificated teacher, but he
was a good instructor and had been making remarkable progress with
the older boys, with whom Julie could see he yearned to continue. The
younger ones were not advancing, James confessed; his one ambitious
idea having been to turn out candidates for scholarships in America.

Julie offered to take over the junior classes. Her sixty aspirantes
filled every nook and corner of the room; sixty funny little brown
creatures, fresh from their morning dip in the river, sitting like
wet little birds in quivering expectancy. Julie glanced over the rows
of brown heads:--the people that the Caravan in its long march had
left behind. The boys put their heads down on the desks, like little
setters, and stared. One hundred and twenty black beads peered up
at her. She was beginning to be disconcerted, when a delightful
little savage with hair standing up stiffly all over his head,
like a circular brush, detached himself from the brown mass, and,
moved by some aberrant impulse, strayed barefoot up to Julie's desk
and irrelevantly laid upon it a rooster's long, bedraggled tail
feather. Having consummated this act of tribute, Delphine, who was
to become his teacher's undying friend, stole back.

Seized by an idea, Julie drew a picture of the feather on the
board. The class sat up and inspected this feat. Having a knack with
a pencil, she elaborated the feather into a rooster. A murmur of
recognition and pure delight passed through the class. The bird on
the board was a national idol. Unwittingly and quite by chance she
had captured their interest.

In a few days they were chanting glibly of the rat and the cat and the
permanently unpleasant relations between the two, soaking in learning
by means of their incredible memories, and wrestling musically with
the dark, mystic bars of the Star Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn
of the Republic.

James taught mathematics, and almost nothing else. He had a passion
for numbers, which he taught dogmatically as the whole science of
life. His boys had been shot dazedly through fractions, and were now
halting awestruck before the heights of geometry. The fact and values
of the universe astounded their unaccustomed minds. Their island
had been their center of existence, and in this painful trepanning,
their brains gaped before the marvels and terrors of higher human
thought. These incipient philosophers, much perturbed, used to seek
Julie out to ask her to explain a little the metaphysical net in which
they found themselves fast. They were troubled terribly in their souls,
and Julie, ignoring geometry, and all the equations of men, would seek
with her fore-shortened philosophies to set these simple minds right;
but she could see that they were not quite satisfied. There was no
doubt about it that the boys, still unsettled in their minds, went
to the priest, who received a very garbled version of her explanations.

Julie's own little boys were in their seats an hour before
school opened, exhilarantly scratching their meager little life
experiences on their slates, or debating with one another in bragging
English. They loved the school, and lived in it in a state of expectant
excitement. Like little charmed birds they sat, while Julie explained
what became of the sun when it went away, and the wonderful journey
they were at that moment taking around it; whereupon the boys would
feel their desks for the barest fractions of the movement of this
celestial merry-go-round. They had an inordinate love of fairy tales,
and listened--poor little earth-grubs--with widened eyes to the
recounting of battles and heroes of far-away places of the world.

Julie never forgot those days. She could shut her eyes long afterwards
and see the monsoon bowing the banana trees and scattering to the
universe the golden host of the sacred tree of India, rushing with
its wild force to up-root their little tropical world. The boys
still sat in her memory in quivering wonder before the miracles of
the cosmos. The archipelago could never again be the limit of their
consciousness; it strayed now over the whole wide earth.

But it was hard work through hot long days for a boy and a girl, and
the minds they were pulling out of savagery caught half-way. To pull
them up to the tidal mark of civilization would take years, and it was
just this staggering task that these two confronted. With their buoyant
young shoulders heaving at the wheel, James would despairingly exclaim:
"It can't be done. The whole race is stuck right here."

Julie would set her teeth. "But they've got to go through! The rest
of humanity's done it. Remember they've had only a few hundred years,
and look at the eons back of us!"

"But we sweated into our own souls, and they make us sweat for
theirs. What were they doing in our eons of advancement? and who is
fighting their savagery for them? We are!"

Julie sighed. "They are so eager, so anxious. I get frightened
sometimes as I sit before them; they accept me so wholly as their
creed. It comes over me that twenty years from now sixty men will
be thinking my thoughts. Oh, we'll get them, sometime--and isn't it
the most splendid work anybody could engage in? To make a race! Why,
you and I are sowing the dragon's teeth, which shall spring up as
the generation of light."

CHAPTER VI

Julie now entered into a phase of existence that she had never
before experienced. She was important to quite an extensive number
of people, not in the school alone--that was a life apart--but in
the delightful world into which she had dropped. A young, trusting,
and joyous figure, she stirred Nahal. Even the Major, when she came
within his range, emerged from his Hamlet gloom and persuaded his
facial muscles into a grim smile. To all the others Nahal was exile;
to Julie among so many eagerly attentive people, a number of them
men and young, who made a queen of her, Nahal was life translated to
some glorious star. Her work seethed in her soul and kept her vivid;
all those keen brown boys who were to grow up some day were her star
dust, out of which she was to create worlds.

Life is the present, the philosophers have said. To the young men
Julie was the eternal feminine, while the magic of their youth stirred
hers. She was utterly unused to so much concentrated attention. The
earth was abundantly peopled with a kind race. She and her followers
spent the evenings on the Calcedos' balcony, in the midst of an
assortment of banjoes, rocking in native hammocks and keeping the night
alive. Nothing at all went to sleep, not even the birds irritatedly
rustling among the leaves, nor the fireflies, nor the timid Ghecko,
who too horrible to be seen by day, crept out of his mysterious retreat
and offered his harsh bass voice at very close range; nor Mike the
Major's monkey, across the road at Head-quarters, where he squealed
and begged abjectly to be let into the fun; nor the natives drifting
in their little boats out on the silver water, with their guitars
throbbing softly through the moonlight. Here they swung and strummed,
and defied the stars, and wondered--what after Nahal? though into this
speculation Julie never entered. She was unqualifiedly satisfied with
Nahal. It was a beautiful island, it was paradise, and in it a great
many remarkable things were to come to pass.

When she arose in the morning and drew into her nostrils the perfume
of the hills, when she came out into that early sunlight that seemed to
promise immortal things, when she had a real look into that mysterious
womb of nature, the jungle, she was electrified. Everywhere there
was so much light; it whetted the desire of living into a passion.

Thus Julie came into closer touch with native life. It revealed
itself more fully to her than to the rest of the colony. Through the
schools she saw just a little into the native's heart, the heart
of an imperfectly civilized child. She was also by her zeal and
indefatigable young strength impelled to go into the night-school
work. James had been struggling along with it alone. As she came in
out of the darkness, and gazed at that assemblage for the first time,
her throat went dry. Seventy-five of them huddled into a room that
had been built to accommodate half that number, men and women crowded
everywhere and lining the walls! There was something terrible about
such an assemblage, something that gripped the heart in a vise; for
almost none of them were young, many of them in fact were grizzled
and trembling into old age. Their hands were gnarled with hard work,
their faces blackened by the sun. Most of them were so poor that a
copper spelled existence; yet strangely, incomprehensibly, with some
blind hope in their darkened brains, they were here, and, with the
stupor of half-civilized drudges, were lifting up their eyes to the
emissary before them in fearful, blind appeal.

Julie put her hand over her eyes. "They are looking at me as if I
were God," she thought to herself.

Often when the session was over, James and Julie refrained from
meeting each other's discouraged eyes. All day and then at night,
they had struggled with all their young strength to drag a people
over a margin. Never-to-be-forgotten nights were those, with the dim
lamp flickering above the long rows of benches, and the dark trance
of souls groping blindly for the light. They were struggling against
forces of the universe that would not be impelled.

"It's no use!" James hopelessly declared one night. "They are too
old. You can only get at the young shoot."

"It can't be too late, as long as they aspire," Julie exclaimed, the
tears springing to her eyes. "Think!--after plowing all day in the
river bottoms, in mud up to their waists, they come here in the few
hours their poor souls own. It means something, I say. It's a poor,
twisted fragment of the thing that wrested Mind out of the Universe!"

"I've only one life to live," James declared, closing his books,
"and no more, Miss Dreschell, have you!"

"If only we could see it through!" Julie sighed.

She looked at the stars, as she walked home. Big shining worlds rolling
through space carrying the problem of Mind on into infinity. Such a
far journey man had yet to make. Isabel had told her to go out and
hold up the world. She was finding it glorious business.

Julie came out of the night with the star-light still in her
eyes. There was something stirring about her rapt, young presence,
as she ascended the stairs to the sala, that quickened the attention
of a tall young man who was rather hesitatingly awaiting her.

The young man stood in full view, and her attention was immediately
attracted to his dignity of height and his direct gaze. She liked his
indomitable head, with its rigidly youthful contour and surmounted
by its upright crest of hair that glittered under the hanging lamp
like metal. She decided that what was so striking about him was his
superlatively untarnished look.

He introduced himself as Lieutenant Calmiden. Julie understood then
that he was the Post Quartermaster, who had been absent, in Solano,
for supplies.

They talked about Nahal, and he told her how much he loathed it,
and all other conceivable islands of the seas.

"I've been wondering what you could have been thinking about as you
came up the stairs," he said. "You came in scattering light about you."

"Oh, I am only a glow-worm, who's apt to lose his little torch any
minute, however much I may wish to be an archangel of light."

"Angels are finished with experience; they are men who have been
sublimated to cold perfection. Don't you wish to live, to experience,
for yourself?" the young man demanded with intensity. Julie felt
rather unaccountably impelled to say that she did.

"I used to live in this house, myself," he declared. "It was bachelor
quarters till the Calcedos teased it back. There is a wonderful view
from the balcony; I used to sit and look at it by the hour. Come,
and let me show it to you."

They strolled out to the gallery. Calmiden pointed to the causeway,
a narrow strip of glistening land, looking in the moonlight like a
bridge flung between two worlds, with solid silver masses of water
on either side.

"What a strange roadway!" Julie said. "What is at the other end?"

"I don't know. Nobody ever goes over there. There is a mass of legends
about the causeway; one that in a great cholera plague, the angels
walking about the earth, lifted it out of the water in order to go
across. I imagine the volcano to the south--whose red glow you can
see on clear nights, against the sky, as if the sea were on fire--had
something to do with its origin. I love it---I feel as if it were to
have something to do with my fate."

"These are such strange nights," Julie reflected. "They are too
dramatic for sleeping; the universe comes out from behind its curtain;
they are nights for walking the causeway alone with one's soul."

The young man's straight gaze swerved quickly to her. Julie had on a
green gown, and the green bracelet, which rested on the railing of the
gallery. Of all the lovely shining things of the night, the young man
appeared to have decided, she was the loveliest, and the most charming.

"Do you wear that,"--he gestured toward the jade circle--"because of
your eyes?"

"I wear it because somebody gave it to me."

"Somebody!" the young man ejaculated in forcible disappointment.

"A very beautiful woman in Manila, who had a tiny temple with a Green
God in it--a pitiless little Green God--presented it to me as a gift
from him. I met such strange vivid people up there. They called the
woman who gave me the bracelet the Empress of the East. There were
others--too," she paused, struck silent by a recollection. "How
I should have loved," she continued, "to stay there! Evidently it
was meant that I should miss wonderful adventures. I can only be a
glow-worm on Nahal."

"There is something about you that suggests that you are to travel
far. Oh, I hope not, Miss Dreschell. Don't go any farther. Nahal
might become something remarkable."

As he said good night, and held her hand in his, Julie's thoughts
took a sudden unintelligible turn, as if they were never again to
follow the old course.

CHAPTER VII

While Julie was dealing, in a splendid glow, with the affairs of the
universe, her own mundane concerns, she was uneasily aware, were
urgently in need of attention. She retired one night to her room,
with the jungle closing up about it, and the jungle's wild creatures
rustling but a few feet away, to do some deep worldly thinking. From
her trunk she took the book in which she fitfully kept accounts, and
calculated furiously for some time, going over the inexorable figures.

Suddenly she dropped the pencil, and sank back in her chair, staring
somberly into the night. Its blackness swept up to the grated bars
of the windows, and peered in at the solitary, harassed figure in
the cell.

Not one dollar of the hundreds she owed Mrs. Morris had been
paid back. That very first, sacred responsibility her new life had
assumed! In Manila, money had unconsciously spent itself. Then, there
had been the expenses of the trip South. But bitterest fact of all,
the splendid wardrobe, the cause of all this trouble, had bit by bit,
impalpably and detestably, as if under an evil incantation, been giving
way. Dresses cracked explosively, at the touch, and silk stockings,
however prayerfully drawn on, disintegrated into an elemental snarl
of thread. What the elements did not demolish, the cockroaches,
nearly as big as mice and scrambling deftly all over the room,
voraciously devoured.

Julie sat and burned with dishonor over her affairs. She felt as abased
as if she had become the actual chattel of her far-away creditor. She
would have resorted to any expediency to keep this bondage from being
made public. The Dreschells had an unconscionable pride. Mr. Dreschell
had brought up his family on the theory that borrowing money was
only a shade less reprehensible than stealing it. This obligation
was the Debt of England to Julie's soul. With her small salary, how,
she pondered, was it to be worked out?

She had in her trunk one month's salary. Every bit should go to
the woman whose peon she had become. In forgetting her own further
necessity to exist, she was acting with characteristic feminine
recklessness. There being no post-office at Guindulman, Julie rolled
up the bills neatly, put them in an envelope, and addressed it to
Mrs. Morris. Thereupon her mental processes took quite a leap. She
arose with a shade even of self-satisfaction. It was splendid to be
an independent integer of the world--to handle your own destiny--to
say nothing of your own money--unafraid.

Into the midst of these cogitations came the Calcedos' muchacho,
to announce a young man.

"What young man?" Julie demanded particularly.

"El Teserero!" the muchacho declared.

Julie dropped back flatly in her seat. Since the uncomfortable and
startling moments on the boat, she had contrived never to meet the
Treasurer alone. She knew how dissatisfied with this he had been,
and that in the midst of his activities planned to supersede the
Governor in power, he had been lying in wait for his opportunity. She
could see no way out of the encounter, and fortified herself for it
as she ascended the stairs to the sala.

The Treasurer held her hand an instant and regarded her closely with
his odd light eyes. The surprisingly sun-burnt face wore a look that
sobered her. She indicated a chair.

Mr. Purcell demurred. "Let's go out on the balcony," he suggested,
regarding with disapproval the publicity of their surroundings.

"Oh, I think I should rather remain here," she replied lightly.

"You don't object to going out there with the others," he reproached.

"There are several of them," Julie explained.

"How about Calmiden, and--others," he probed with jealous meaning.

Julie started slightly. How had he managed to be so well informed
concerning her movements?

"Why do you avoid me?" he demanded. "Do you think all these men are
your friends? Wait and find out. Now, I am serious. I care for you
truly, as I told you on the boat. I asked you to marry me; and I mean
it still--in spite of your evasions."

"Please don't!" Julie begged. "You couldn't possibly have meant
it--after those few hours."

She recalled her refusal--so adroit and impersonal, in which her
altruistic aspirations and her inviolate determination not to marry
had been calculated to carry conviction. She had wanted to regard
the matter as settled, yet here he was more determinedly possessive
than ever.

"You did not dream that I had given up?" he demanded.

"I beg of you to do so! I refuse utterly!"

"Don't say anything you'll be sorry for later," he broke in. "Things
are all your way now, but wait till they turn--till you find out
none of those fellows mean anything, and the bottom falls out of your
air-castle. Then you won't say that."

Julie stared at him in resentful amazement. "Mr. Purcell," she
exclaimed, "I don't understand this conversation. You don't at all
love me. You have merely set your will upon me, and are trying to
frighten me. Please never reopen this subject." She rose. "It is,
so far as I am concerned, definitely and completely closed."

"You'll regret that!" he exclaimed agitatedly.

"Have you threatened me enough?" Julie was frantically angry now.

She was aghast at the purpose that gathered in his face as he replied:
"I do not wish to threaten you, but I have not given up."

He descended the staircase, leaving Julie with her breast heaving.

That wretched voyage! Had men gone mad in this queer land, that they
would ask a girl to marry them on a day's acquaintance, and to this
staggering casualness add the brigand intention to seize her if she
refused? According to this doggedly unpleasant young man, he had put
a mortgage upon her that he meant at some time to exact. How many
more people were to advance claims on her life?

To rid her mind of this uncomfortable visitor she turned, on going
downstairs, in the direction of Miss Hope's room. The cheerful light
shed through the partly open door drew her forward. As she climbed
the three steps that lifted the room from the ground, she caught a
glimpse of Mr. Brentwood's white starched back. She started to retreat,
but the young man, turning quickly at the sound of her footsteps,
caught sight of her.

"Why are you always out when I come to see you?" he reproached, smiling
with his white teeth through his carefully brushed mustache. "I tried
to call on you to-night."

"I wasn't out," Julie moodily replied, remembering how much she had
wished to be. "I was upstairs."

Mr. Brentwood directed upon Miss Hope a peculiar look. "Come in!" he
hospitably insisted. "I can still see you."

Julie's evil star beckoned her on. Miss Hope offered no remark as
she took a chair. Mr. Brentwood, promptly facing around to Julie,
proceeded to direct toward her the fullest extent of his charms,
and succeeded for once in being truly entertaining. Julie, eager to
forget her experience with Purcell, dropped gladly into a sprightly
discourse, and both of them forgot utterly the rigid figure of the
vestal virgin, which opposite them began to steam with wrath.

After they had laughed together for some time, Mr. Brentwood bade
Julie a lingering good-night, calling back a careless adieu to the
shape in the background.

Julie turned to Miss Hope, but stopped short before the spectacle of
that lady who, having come out of the shadows, was positively trembling
with inconjectural passion. Her indefinite features seemed to melt
into a boiling lava, which strangely her face appeared to be. Her blue
eyes vehemently shot flames. Julie watched, with interested daring,
the forthcoming eruption.

"Miss Dreschell," cried Miss Hope, bursting with wrath, "you will
seek quarters elsewhere. Do you suppose it is entertaining for me to
sit here all evening while you monopolize my friends! Mr. Brentwood
was my friend, Miss Dreschell,"--in rising crescendo--"until you
came. My room and the Calcedos' sala have other purposes than the
accommodation of the crowd of young men with which you seem to find
it necessary to surround yourself. Moreover, natives of the better
class have a sense of propriety, and it is not edifying to them to
watch your friends--and their caresses."

Julie stared incredulously. Then a realization of what Miss Hope
must mean flashed through her. Evidently she had seen in the dusk
under her window the wind-up of a gay tender little adventure with
Terry O'Brien before he returned to command his mountain fastness
at Tarlac. It was never, Julie knew, to come to anything, and had
involved only a shadowy caress.

"But the Calcedos haven't said anything of the kind!" Julie objected
with rising anger.

"They will say so. They have some cousins coming to visit them,"
Miss Hope declared, pointing positively in the direction of the
door. She closed it sharply on Julie's outraged back, leaving the
girl to grope her way through the dark. Julie got to the entrance,
and stood there staring indignantly into the night.

It was a charming night, all the worlds of the universe spinning
gayly up above her through the light of myriads of suns. It must
be really a very small concern to Uranus or to Neptune, where a
hundred years are as one, whether the atom called Miss Hope or the
atom called Purcell were angry or not. As for the atom called Julie
dancing headlong through space--was it even remotely possible that
somewhere, some place, any one atom tremendously counted? Was there
a law that held over those great worlds and their activities? And
must one conform to it? But how, with mystery on every side, were
you to find the law? Had she, because Purcell was not so pleasing
as the others, been intolerant of him? She had not been angry at the
sentimental intimations of the others. She had, in fact, poetically
enjoyed them. And Miss Hope--although she was, according to Julie,
terribly old, might she not still cling through a thousand yearning
desires to the magic garment of youth?

Julie was not sure concerning all these speculations. A strange
consciousness seemed to be speaking through her, a consciousness
that saw things from all angles, but which only occasionally broke
into utterance.

The approach of a tall, familiar figure put a stop to this metaphysical
trend of thought.

"I came once before," Calmiden announced; "but I heard you in there
with Miss Hope, so I decided to come back later. Come take a walk as
far as the steps of the convento."

"It's getting late," Julie demurred.

"What does it matter? Look at the night!"

Julie regarded it, and capitulated. They strolled up the road that led
to the upper part of the village. Street lights were sparse and dim
in Guindulman. The avenue was almost closed overhead by the prodigal
foliage of mango trees, and blackened with the soft, thick darkness
of the tropics; yet to-night it was meteorically lighted by myriads
of fire-flies shimmering in the branches.

Julie threw up her head in wonder at the transfiguration. Everything
had become unreal. The avenue was like a road in fairy-land. The
convento, white as driven snow in the moonlight, rose from its high
tier of steps above them, like an ancient temple.

To the left was the Major's ogre-like retreat. Mike, routed from his
roost in the trees by this intolerable illumination, was snarling
and lashing through the branches like an imp of darkness.

This little gargoyle had been deliberately installed in this tree
commanding the entrance to his office by the Major, and Hell itself
could not have been more ferociously guarded by Cerberus. Men could
come and men could go; but to the whole female race Mike stuck out his
whiskered jaw in challenge. He might be swinging by his tail, ever
so happy and carefree, in the branches, but let a daughter of Eve,
however secretly, steal up to the portal of the omnipotent Major,
and he was down upon her with a thud, wildly rending her garments.

"Wild little beast!" Julie disapprovingly declared, moving out
of range of his chain. The monkey, like some monster of elf-land,
thrust his grotesque little head out of a nimbus of fire-flies. He
scratched them out of his eyes, and securing them cunningly in his
wicked little paws, bolted them with rapt relish.

"Horrible!" Julie cried. "And they were lighting up the world!"

"He's rather handy to have round, though," Calmiden hardily
declared. "You see I am Quartermaster, and people want to bother one
with such a multitude of senseless things."

They mounted the terraced steps, which in a sheer drop fell from the
walls of the convento. "Look!" Julie pointed high above them. On the
aerial gallery of the convento, a black cassock loomed stark against
the night, a solitary brooding figure staring at the stars. Once it
bent intently to regard the two young persons.

"Poor fellow!" Calmiden exclaimed.

"Why?" At sight of the priest a cloud had come over Julie's mood.

"He's so solitary, by race and vocation. He's only half white, and
only half a man. He might as well be a magus up there in his tower,
for all the participation he has in human living. Wouldn't you be
lonely if the gates of your soul's territory were closed against
you, if you were forbidden to love--ever? He has fire in his eyes,
our padre. He wasn't made to tend altars on high mountains."

"It's my firm conviction," Julie declared, "that he tends very
assiduously the fires of the insurrection. He hates us; he hates all
white men."

"Because we are what but for a little slip of fate he might have
been. The tragedy, the wickedness of these racial Lucifers flung down
to a lower world!"

"Do you know," Julie said soberly, looking up at the Priest's tower,
"I fancy the padre doesn't like me. These people don't understand our
women--the woman who walks through the world alone. To them she is an
object of suspicion; to their mind her liberty signifies licence. For
instance, to-night I oughtn't to be here--and he's looking down on me."

"What does it matter what they think? So far as I am concerned they
don't exist. I am just serving my time,"--he closed his lips tightly;
"counting the moments till I can get out and go home."

A brooding distant look came into the girl's eyes.

"To pass in and pass out? What good can that do? One should put the
plow into the soil and not abandon it."

"I should think you'd want to get clear of the uncleanliness of this
territory of Baal. I've seen enough raw, bestial nature over here to
make my soul revolt. The standards civilization has fought for go by
the board here. One must be forever on the lookout in the heart of
half savage society to keep from relapsing."

"Just you wait till my boys grow up. Then there'll come a change."

"Good God! You don't purpose staying over here till then?"

The girl looked steadily into the night. "If I did the right thing
I'd stay. My little brown men lifted into the citizenship of the
world!" she murmured.

"Come down from your perch in the skies. What a dreamer you are--and
what a life to fling carelessly away! It belongs to somebody or other."

"Nobody gives up anything anymore," Julie went on. "The renunciation
that built up the world is going out of it. Upon whose shoulders,
if not upon ours, is the foundation of the New World to rest? Isabel
called me Atlas, and I have been so happy holding up my little end."

"It is terrible to speak of spending the years of your life
here. You don't at all know what you are talking about. You don't know
orientals. Wait till you see China, a half dead amoeba sprawling over
the earth. You will be overwhelmed by the spectacle of humanity getting
nowhere at all--just crawling along the surface of the globe, like
worms. Some day you will wrest yourself out from these sunken millions
in fearful prayer to get back to your own kind. Oh, don't you feel
the darkness, the despair of it? There will never be any renaissance
of the East--for to have a renaissance you must have a soul."

"But we are trying to make the start here--that the fire may travel."

"Among these inconsequential little swaggerers? Even China, with
her art and her senile one-man kind of learning, has them beaten
miles. My soul is sick of the whole debased East, I tell you; and I
despise this beastly hot-house of an archipelago that spawns existence
in such hideous profusion. I am no colonist, no pioneer, ever. I am
just a soldier, to restore order and pass on."

"And you don't care at all about the great struggle, that is
commencing, everywhere over here? Ah, I can feel it," she cried,
"--the powers of Light against the powers of Darkness!"

Calmiden regarded her with profound feeling. "You are terribly young
to be here alone."

"And already I have made two enemies," she said with a change of
mood. "The very first of my life!" she reflected ruefully.

He knitted his brows. "I don't like to think of your having enemies
in this country."

"They sprang up like a simoon in the desert. I was angry for a bit, but
I can't nurse a real good hatred in my soul for five minutes. It just
peters out, and of course that puts me at a frightful disadvantage."

A swift change came over the young man's face, an inflexible sheath
changing it into a mask of steel. "I can stay angry forever," he
said, frowning into the night. "I don't mean that I have merely a
bad temper. My mind simply will not expurgate an affront. I love and
I hate for good," he declared with concentrated passion.

Julie drew away a little.

"Oh, but why dwell on such things, you and I?" he went on. "All
this would not have come out if you had not stirred to the bottom,
where the truth dwells. I may be violent underneath, and hard with
those who injure me, but there are any number of things to which I am
inflexibly true. I am as inexorable one way as the other. I despise
weakness of all kinds, and it is weak to let people hurt you. I don't
care what anybody says, if you let a person hurt you lie will despise
you into the bargain. It's too bad, but I can't be changed--and I'm
glad somehow that I made a clean breast of it to you."

"You frighten me a little by the order that is all through you. Even
your sins appear to have unity, whereas I keep house topsy-turvily in
my innermost being. I have nothing filed there. I don't know what will
flash out at any moment. I am camping in the universe--and having for
the present a tremendous time. Some policeman will come along some
time and take me in because I haven't built a house in creation. But
just now there is adventure, and the glory of being alive under the
tents of Kedar."

She smiled up at the moon. "I wonder where I am heading?" she
exclaimed. Her glance dropped, she stopped talking, and her face lit
up softly; her attention claimed by something she seemed to see off
in dusky space. Calmiden watched her for some moments where she stood
on the step of the old convent with the moonlight flowing over her
like a timeless river.

"What are you seeing off there?" he asked.

"Faces! Faces--startling ones that I saw in Manila--made by the New
World. I often think and wonder about them--about one, more often!"

"A man's!" Calmiden echoed blankly.

"A god's--with the heart of all the world beating in his breast."

"And you think about him!" he exclaimed in gloomy dissatisfaction.

The girl roused herself. "It was only the encounter of an instant,"
she mused wistfully. "It would be very foolish to think of just one
moment out of one's life, would it not?"

She turned suddenly, for the thought had surged over her again that she
had not in any way heard from Manila since she had left it behind--that
in the busy, brilliant lives into which she had fluttered for an
instant she was not even a recollection. Apparently in these strenuous
times it was every man to his own road! She had chosen her road--but
she had never ceased to remember those beautiful days and nights.

"Good night," she told the young man. "I must go now."

Before she went to bed, she put out her light and, wrapped in the thick
darkness, stared out on the swaying groves. Far down the avenues her
gaze pierced, as if some message were stirring toward her from off
there. Soon she was asleep, close to the evil, perfumed earth.

As Julie went pondering along the golden dust-powdered road, she
was confronted at the convent steps by Anna Anastasia, the Priest's
mother, who accosted her with the freedom of manner that was part of
her efflorescent personality.

Once long ago Anna Anastasia had been pretty enough to ensnare the
attention of a rich young Spanish official. The Priest was the issue
of their irregular alliance, and against its consequences his soul
perpetually rebelled. This light, fluid creature had inexorably fixed
his fate. The desires of her soft little body had made him what he
must unchangeably remain. Far from being a Magdalene, however, Anna
Anastasia, as the mother of the Priest, occupied in this elastic
human community a position of almost religious eminence.

Nodding sociably at the girl, she said in Spanish: "I've been told
you seek accommodations."

Julie looked harassed. Had she not been everywhere unsuccessfully over
this crowded town and finally been advised amazingly by the Governor
to marry the Teserero in order to put an end to her troubles?

"It's maddening," she replied, pushing her damp blond hair from her
brow, "but there seems to be none to be had!"

The Señora smiled archly. "Quite true; there are none. It seems a shame
that so young and so charming a señorita should be distressed. I am
lonely!" she exclaimed. "It is not,"--she shrugged her shoulders--"the
pleasantest living in the world with Raoul. If he could become more
human--if he would find something to take his black thoughts off
himself, and off me! Would you believe it, Señorita, he keeps me a
close prisoner--me who am but thirty-eight? Many women marry, and have
lovers still, very suitably, at my age. Always he makes life hell by
demanding, 'Why did you do it?' Why indeed! It would be well for him
to see that it is not easy to resist. His father was a cavalier. You
can see it in Raoul, who is so tall and strong and beautiful, as you
are. Raoul is of a higher race.

"Come to live with me in the convento, and I will give you every
comfort. Things must be made easier for me, Señorita; truly they
must. I should love Raoul to go through purgatory--to learn that
outside his breviary there is a heaven and a hell."

Julie stood turning color under a mixture of violent emotions. This
impossible and monstrously unconcerned woman actually expected
an answer to her unthinkable proposal. But even in the midst of
suffocating emotions, Julie remembered that she must be careful of
giving offense to so powerful a person. "It is inconceivable!" she
exclaimed, drawing away.

"But why, Señorita? You like men. There are always many around
you. It was so too with me. Make Raoul eat the dust!" Her face set
into passionate lines of hatred.

Julie stared dumbfounded at the woman who claimed her as a sister
spirit. "This is horrible," she breathed.

"My son says you are beautiful, but that you are evil. The other
señorita, he says, is too old for sin. You see that he is very harsh."

Julie was trembling now. "Señora," she said, "it is too much." She
hurried back to her jungle room, clenching her hands, and letting
the angry tears flow.

That afternoon, Maria Tectos, the Old Maid of Guindulman, one of the
most noteworthy personages of the village, not only as the possessor
of considerable wealth but as the acknowledged leader among the women,
hailed Julie as the girl trudged by. She offered Julie a room in her
large house, which was the best and most unique mansion in the town.

It was distinctly a compliment, Julie understood, to be invited to
join this exclusive household. The Old Maid had been to a school
in Manila; moreover, with her ultra-modern, tremendous, iron-gray
pompadour shaking always like a tower with her laughter, she would be
a jolly companion. She believed, so she was always averring to Julie,
in the complete freedom of her sex; and she was constantly stirring the
women up to one thing or another; but this feministic progressiveness
unfortunately carried along with it the conservatism of old age. The
exactions the Old Maid imposed would leave Julie none of that liberty
the Old Maid extolled. Julie could see her young men friends only
under the Old Maid's eye; and it became clear that everything would
be done to discourage altogether their foolish visits. The Old Maid
pointed out her own successful single, elderly state as a contrast
to that of her companions.

After the sinister proposition of the morning, and the accompanying
insinuations, the Old Maid's invitation seemed a real elucidation of
her problem. The view of her entertained by Anna Anastasia and the
priest was peculiar to their own dark minds. The others knew that
she had come here to give all she could. But it was troublesome that
their appreciation of conventions so disproportionately exceeded
their realization of ethics. These people whose Atlas she had come
to be, might not at all understand her living alone, as she had been
thinking of doing, in a little house which she had discovered she could
rent. Perhaps, after all, since she had made this her particular task,
and was getting really to have quite a hold on some of the people,
she had better accept the Old Maid's stringent proffer. So with a
strange feeling that this decision would be ultimately critical,
she told the Old Maid that she would come.

When she returned from school at five o'clock, Calmiden stood waiting
outside the closed Headquarters.

"You're late," he exclaimed, coming toward her. "I've been waiting
some time."

Julie regarded him gravely. "I'm tired," she said. "Finding a roof
for one's head is harder than I thought it was. You know that Miss
Hope has made the Calcedos put me out. I've been everywhere, and had
the strangest things said to me--" She paused gloomily. "But I've
succeeded at last."

"Where are you going?" he demanded quickly.

"To Maria Tectos. She has offered to take me in. She is very powerful,
and I shall be very comfortable, but--"

"What?"

"She has made stipulations. She does not approve of my seeing men
alone, or walking out with them."

"Well, you told her you wouldn't go to her, of course."

"I told her I would."

Calmiden stopped short with a forcible exclamation. "Why, she
will never let us see each other! I say, you are not going to let
that happen? Do you want to give up life completely, sit up alone
night after night in the dusk among the palms in this desolate bit
of jungle? You don't know what it is, I tell you--this dark alien
land. Every atom of it makes you feel your abandonment. This country's
not for women anyway. It's for armed marching men. I can't think how
you dropped into it. How did you?"

Julie started. "I think--somebody said something to me once on a
roof top."

"Well, I am talking to you now from the ground floor. Life is short
enough anyway, and you propose to cut off all its possibilities by
burying yourself in the wilderness even more effectually than you
have done already. Why it's insulting the high gods who made you the
lovely being you are. Maria Tectos--and all the natives be dashed
when they try to dictate your mode of living!"

Julie stood looking soberly down into the dust of the sun-burnt
road. The life of a hermit on the island of Nahal! Could one even
for the most inexorable principles endure it?

"It's beginning to get awfully hard!" She sighed. "Sometimes I long
so to go back to Manila--I really had no idea of being so completely
put out of the world. I thought I should work very hard, and win my
certificate to title among the Builders. There appeared to be very
little real work left for me in Manila--and it didn't seem fair to
play safe over courses already won. But I really didn't expect to be
so cut adrift."

She straightened up, and smiled.

CHAPTER VIII

Calmiden pressed closer. "We couldn't walk in the dusk, ever any
more, Julie, among the mango trees, with the fire-flies all about us,
or sit on the wharf and watch the little boats."

Julie's gaze dropped again in heavy thought. Calmiden was looking at
her closely.

"What lovely hair you have! Oh! do be kind to yourself, and to all
the rest of us."

She lifted her head. "Why, anyway, should it make any difference in
the long run what I do about it?" she demanded of the universe.

"Then you won't go?" Calmiden exclaimed joyously.

Still Julie hesitated. But the instincts of youth and the joy of
living had won the struggle in her breast.

"No," she agreed.

When Julie went to the mess that evening, she found the Major scowling
heavily at the table cloth. He announced at last: "I've just received
an order from the Department which revokes commissary privileges
for civilians. This will of course deprive them of the privilege of
Army messes. I seldom make any comment upon my orders, but right
now this appears to be particularly unfortunate. We are a remote
and inaccessible unit of society, facing the roughest conditions;
and now some of us are about to be completely cut loose. Supplies
will have to be procured in Solano, from Shylocks who exact excessive
prices. They must be requisitioned at once, but until they arrive,
I shall, on my own responsibility, keep this mess open."

He looked at Julie as he spoke. From the first, he had made her
his special charge. The girl was aghast. For the purchase of large
supplies she had no money, having despatched it all to her creditor
across the ocean. She left the room heavily, and groped her way down
the road. There were no fire-flies to light the world to-night.

Suddenly some one stepped out from among the trees and softly spoke
her name. He made a quick sign for silence, and she suppressed the
incredulous cry that had sprung to her lips.

It was Adams, dropped down from the skies; for how else, with Dao on
the other side of the island, could he have gotten here?

"My hour came, and I bolted!" he said. "I've ridden without sleep
two days through a wilderness. The ogre wouldn't let me have a leave;
but I persuaded him to give me a three-day hunting pass to go after
deer in the mountains. Don't know how I ever got through; and if the
Major should find it out--or any of them--I'd be court-martialled and
chucked. There seems to be a path in this grove, which we can follow to
get out of the way of observation. I came, of course, to talk to you."

The path ran not far from the Old Maid's house, into the copse. It
brought them upon the deserted end of an estate, where a small house
could be seen deeply sheltered in the trees.

"That's a nice place--sort of a wild garden."

They settled themselves upon a log. The moon coming out from behind
clouds broke only fitfully into these woodland depths. All around them
was the soft still dusk, and a mysterious pensiveness in the night.

"I had to come," Adams declared. "I wanted to see human beings,
I wanted to talk to you. There's an appetite of the spirit that has
to be satisfied. I haven't had any dinner, nor what you might call
any lunch, but I don't care. I've run amuck to get here. I couldn't
stand living with the lower man any longer. Doc's gone, and there
were just the ogre and myself!" He rested his elbows on his knees,
and dropped his head heavily in his hands. "The men are sick and going
down. The falling white man drops till there is nothing white about
him but his skin! I won't be that. I won't go down with the rest! Oh,
I've a right to live!

"I fled over the mountains, I would have gone through blood for this
instant's reunion with the decencies of my kind. To-night with my
hat pulled over my eyes, I walked into the post when it was getting
dark. I left my horse outside the village, and as I passed every house,
I looked into it like a ghost. What a jolly little group! The Major
was in his window, his iron old face turned to the hills, planning,
I'll bet, red-hot campaigns that would put his honor at rest. Good,
decent old fellow, dressed in his stiff white. You ought to see how
we go to dinner in Dao--or rather, you shouldn't.

"There was old Bent, sewing on a button by the light of a lamp,
and Dwight, a few feet away, reading a paper in a hammock, with Mike
sitting on his head. Calmiden was out on the back gallery, with his
feet wound round his tilted chair, staring at the sunset or the island,
or something over there.

"Three of the fellows all together. I used to make the fourth. We
used to play cards, and read our letters out loud.

"Little Mrs. Smith, farther on, was bending over a photograph in the
dusk--that one of Marlborough taken in Cuba, I suppose. It made me
wish I'd had a romance.

"You are about the only girl I ever thought about. But think how
long it will be before I see you again! And then there are all these
men here--"

Time passed unnoticed by the two sitting on the log amid the silvery
lights and shadows, reviewing the experiences of youth and confiding
to each other its ideals. Those hours were printed forever on Julie's
memory. Long afterwards she could recall Adams as he had sat with the
moonlight playing about the shadow of his figure and his pondering
gaze bent upon the encroaching darkness, and the way he had said,
throwing out his arms, "Every time I stretch out my hand--it seems
to come up against an invisible wall!"

"Who's that?" he exclaimed suddenly.

A man in white was coming out of the house. He opened the gate in
front of them.

Julie hesitated. She had identified the secret residence.

"It is the house of Nemecia Victoria," she replied.

"The village Thaïs! That was an American. No native is so tall."

He rose soberly. "I must go back and sit on the lid of my little
hell. I'm all right now. I went wild, and have done a mad thing,
but it has set me right."

They strolled along close to the fence that cut the woods off from
the public road. They stopped at the dilapidated gate. He took her
hands in his. "Dear, little, unforgettable friend of a few hours! We
have both to stick to our outposts now, but these times can't last
forever. Till better days then, and don't let me pass out of your
thoughts! Good-by!" He bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

Then he struck off at once into the darkness of the thicket. Julie
watched motionlessly at the gate till the shadowy form disappeared. She
had been groping around in darkness for a hand, and suddenly, out
of another's extremity, one had come to meet her own. Adams and she
had both deeply become involved in a great struggle. They had both,
the girl subconsciously felt, been elected to the destiny of the
East. Between them there was a cemented bond. By himself "holding out,"
he had helped her across the ditch.

A sound close at hand caused her to look around quickly. The figure
of a man in white was turning down a side street, not a few yards
away. Julie recognized it as the same figure that she and Adams had
seen emerge from Nemecia Victoria's house.

CHAPTER IX

A few days later, the Major, who had sat throughout his dinner in
gloomy silence, said: "I've had a telegram from Templeton. He says
Adams left Dao five days ago on a three-day hunting pass, and he
hasn't returned. He says Adams has had it in his head all along to
visit Guindulman, and he is sure now that he must have tried to get
across, a mad man's undertaking! And of course he didn't make it, or
we should have heard from him. Brentwood," blaming the Adjutant, as he
always did when he was disturbed, "why hadn't Adams been transferred?"

"I can't recall your saying anything about it, sir," Brentwood
pacifically replied.

"If he tried to come here there's a reason for his being so long
on the way, and he'll be court-martialled for his pains. Even with
a map this wilderness is hard to wade through. But if he actually
went hunting, he has met with foul play. Hunting in this country
alone! What judgment Templeton ever had is dissolved in whiskey,
and Adams has gone stark mad."

"Adams has been in Dao for nearly two years, seeing only an occasional
Spanish launch captain, and a dipsomaniac," Mrs. Smith remarked.

The Major was too deeply worried to challenge this. "We have no way
of knowing what he did do. I have telegraphed O'Brien to take out
some men."

Julie who had sat listening, with staring eyes and a fevered face,
gazed in fright at the Major. Adams had enjoined absolute secrecy
concerning his dash in and out of Guindulman. If she were to disclose
his adventure, she would expose him to military trial. If she did not--
She gazed round the anxiety-weighted table, and tried with palpitating
heart to come to a decision.

After dinner, walking agonizedly down the hill, she tried again to
think what to do. Adams had said it might take him two or three days
to get back. If he should arrive back, safely, it might appear that he
had been lost on his deer hunt; how could she dare to subject him to
court-martial? How, on the other hand, could she dare risk his life
by another hour's loss of time in telling what she knew? His safety
came first of all.

She retraced her way, and knocked timidly at the Major's door.

He opened it himself, looking at her rather strangely, she thought.

"I want to speak to you, Major!" she faltered distressfully.

He flung away his cigar, and invited her in.

"If you weren't the Commanding Officer, it wouldn't be so hard. There
must be moments when you are not; couldn't I claim one of those?"

The Major deliberated. "Perhaps I'd better tell you that I have just
become acquainted with what I believe you have come to disclose."

"You mean about Mr. Adams?" she cried. "Oh, nobody knew that he was
here, but me--and I have not breathed it to a soul."

"One other person knew, for he has just reported to me the exact
time that Adams left the village, and with whom he spent his time
while here."

"He spent it with me," Julie doggedly declared. "He was lonely,
going mad under that monster at Dao. He wanted to see civilization
again. This was what meant civilization to him. Doesn't that seem
awful, after what he has stuck through?"

"But would he risk his life, to say nothing of his commission, for such
an impulse?" Some thought, some intimation that projected from the
mind of the unknown person who had seen Adams and herself, stretched
back of the Major's words. Julie's unpleasant experiences of late had
commenced to sharpen her wits. The Major's informant, it was clear,
had had something horrid to say. The kiss! The disappearing figure of
that man--who could he have been! She began to be frightened. Glancing
up, she saw that the Major perceived photographically all that was
in her mind.

She cast about desperately in her thought. The Major's conservatism
must be won over, if one of her spirit's company were to be saved
from disgrace. It was useless to try to penetrate the understanding of
this grim, practical man with the things Adams had poured out to her
on the log that evening in the thicket; idle to deal in symbols with
the soldier before her. Well, there was always the final, smashing
conventional fact!

"Mr. Adams and I," she faltered, groping for the word, "had an
understanding. It was for that that he risked his life--for me. I
met him at Dao, and we had corresponded. Oh, please try to find
him!" she cried.

"He has probably got on the wrong trail," the Major reassured her,
"and will turn up in Dao yet."

"And you will do nothing awful to him?" she pleaded.

"We will do the best we can within the scope of the regulations,
of course. He's had a tough time of it, and the fact of your being
here just swept him out of his senses, probably."

Julie walked dazedly to the door. There she paused, and asked almost
fiercely: "May I ask, Major, who your informant in this matter was?"

"I am sorry"--the Major appeared troubled--"but I promised not to say."

Adams's danger swept Julie's mind of every other thought. She was
aware, nevertheless, of how fearfully, on the spur of the moment,
she had complicated, the situation that she had attempted to save.

She knew very little about military trials, but she was sure that in
a time like this, actually one of war, an officer who had deliberately
left his post in violation of orders, or in wilful misconstruction of
permission, to travel through a hostile country, was in for a bad time
of it, and possibly for disgrace. Any extenuating circumstances that
she could advance it seemed her duty to offer, at whatever personal
cost. But what of their future relations--of a bond cemented like
this? In casting herself away, characteristically, on the instant,
to save Adams, she had never given a thought to the issue.

Terry with his detachment of men was sent out from Tarlac in search of
Adams. The Major also dispatched a force from his own garrison over the
route that Adams had probably taken on his return. The country was wild
and inaccessible, and it was hoped that he had merely gotten lost. For
several days nothing was heard from the searching parties. The Major's
suspense, together with that of the whole garrison, grew painful. It
was about the time of the atrocities in Negros and Samar, and the
Americans knew not what each dark day might bring forth.

Several days later both parties came into Guindulman bringing Terry,
dangerously wounded, and the body of Adams. He had been murdered in
the hills--had lost his life in the new country that he had served.

After turning the country upside down, Terry had discovered Adams's
horse in one of the dark little villages, and had forced the populace
to disclose what had become of Adams. He found that Adams had come
through the village very tired and hungry, and had asked for some
food and a place to sleep for a few hours. He had a fine horse, a good
pistol, and obviously some money; so the presidente had proffered him
a dinner of hot chicken and had led him to a room. While he slept
the presidente and his accomplices had strangled him with a rope,
and thrown his body in a hole on the river bank.

After administering summary justice to these villains, Terry had
started back, only to be caught himself in a bamboo trap laid in a
nipa hut, into which he had stepped after reading a placard on the
outside addressed to the Americans and promising that information of
value could be obtained inside. Terry had fallen through the false
floor which had been laid over sharpened bamboo poles planted below.

The priest refused to allow Adams's body even temporary sepulture
in the cemetery of Guindulman, declaring that, since he was not a
catholic, Adams could not be admitted to consecrated ground. The
Major refused to take the priest's objections seriously, and pointed
out the fact that, in default of sepulture tax, the bones of those
interred were unceremoniously thrown out of the graveyard. However
over-crowded the cemetery might be, room for the present, the Major
declared, must be made for the remains of the dead officer. It was
a note-worthy fact that in Nahal there had never been sufficient
accommodation for either the living or the dead.

The quarrel ended in the annexation to the cemetery of a bit of
outside territory. So it was in unconsecrated ground, in a lonely
corner of alien forests, that Adams was put to rest.

The sun beat down on the open grave, and on the rude box. A strange
hush lay over the tropical atmosphere. Adams's horse, with his
master's boots reversed against the saddle, stood arching his neck
with sad pride.

The Major read the burial service. His harsh voice broke as he spoke
of the good soldier Adams had been, and a tear stole down his stern
cheek. The men pulled their hats down over their eyes, while Julie
stole forward weeping and sprinkled flowers over the friend who had
stepped out forever from the problem of the East.

CHAPTER X

A desperate situation now confronted Julie. For two weeks she had been
exhausting her ingenuity trying to keep her household going. The wages
of Gregorio, the cook, were unpaid, and trifling with the pocket of a
desperado is never wise--for it was patent from his physiognomy that
Gregorio was an insurrecto, or about to become one. All of Julie's
affairs had been in suspense pending the arrival of her month's
salary. Then word had come that the boat carrying mail between Manila
and Solano had been wrecked and the teachers' checks lost. Cablegrams
sent to the chaotic Department in Manila evoked no response. Miss Hope,
the itinerant Croesus, did not seem embarrassed by the catastrophe;
duplicates would undoubtedly be sent in time. But Julie could not
wait another minute.

James brought hope into Julie's despair, however, by informing her
that Miss Hope had told him that the Treasurer was prepared to advance
officially temporary loans to straitened teachers. This was salvation
through the gate of purgatory; for Julie desperately hated to approach
Purcell in a capacity that would permit him to assume the aspect of
bestowing a favor upon her.

But her affairs had come to such a pass that there was no alternative
to be considered. She owed pressing debts around the town, to say
nothing of those in Solano; and they all hurt her prestige as a
teacher. She knew that she would have to go to him.

The evening after the burial of Adams, Calmiden appeared, to bid
Julie good-by before leaving the next morning to take the field. The
troops, with the exception of a small detachment for the protection
of the post, had been ordered out to punish the lawless elements
of the islands. Adams's death had uprooted the Major's last inner
reluctance. He was at last going to take the responsibility of acting.

Calmiden sat down on the steps and looked about him at the miserable
little house.

"It's horrible to think of your living here alone. There are three
of us together there across the plaza. I thought of course that some
one of those women would take you in. Aren't you afraid?"

"Perhaps--sometimes," the girl said slowly. "I have the musical clock,
though."

Julie stirred uncomfortably. "It sings when the night is long and
lonely--after the golden wine-bibbers, with their careless voices,
have passed on; it sings through that dead stop of the night when
people die on earth. Then I am afraid, until I hear--well, do you
ever hear strange things? Did you ever sit up and listen, and hear
the powers of the invisible universe sweep by? Some denizen down
deep in me responds to all this, and makes out it knows what is going
on. Otherwise it would be horrible!"

His face grew grave. "You should never have come here to undergo
such things! Ah, what do you think you are making of life amid such
hardships?"

"I don't know," Julie downcastly replied. "How can any one know
until the sum is finally cast up? I am still trying to cast up the
sum of Jack Adams's life, and make it come out right. The memory of
our brief poignant talks, with the moan of isolated forests in them,
comes back to me--" The girl's voice broke.

Calmiden glanced at her quickly. "You think a good deal about him,
don't you?" Then he added, as if to get away from the thought, "Poor
Jack! However did he come to do it? He seems to have lost his head
over there. The Major knows what happened, but he never says a word."

Julie leaned forward earnestly. "Do you think that Jack
understands--that it was worth while; that what he did over there
all counted in the project--in the whole big scheme? For you see,
he used to say we were grist for the mill--he and I; and I never
understood that. It seems sort of disquieting to recall it."

"Oh, can't you see that, even if the revolution, or evolution, you
talk about did come over here, you are too slight a fabric for such
a thing? You don't belong in it."

"You mean I'm not strong? My aunt said that, too," she pondered
sorrowfully.

"And if you were strong? Adams was strong, and he lost his life. If
you play for big stakes over here, sometime you've got to lose."

Julie sat very still. At last she drew a letter from her dress,
and held it before her in the dim light.

"This is such a strange letter," she murmured. "And it's so odd that
it came just at the time Adams was killed. It's from that beautiful
woman whom I told you they call the Empress of the East--and who,
when I left Manila of my own free will, said I was mad to throw away
my life. She is the only one I met there who has written to me. One
individual counts for so little there--you understand. Well, I did
not completely drop out of her mind, anyway! Listen to what she says:

"'Dear Atlas: The Green God has told me to write to you. I don't know
why--since he never gives reasons, nor answers questions. What has
happened to you? Has the earth begun to tremble and slip from those
white young shoulders? Or why does the Green God fear for the Shining
Apostle to the East, and direct me to recall myself to you and cause
you to bear in mind that there is always--Isabel?'"

Calmiden snatched the letter agitatedly. "Who is this Eastern
Witch? What on earth does she mean? What has her horrible God to do
with you? Promise me that you will never answer that letter, or go
near her again!"

"Indeed, I shall probably never see her again, since my destiny lies
down in jungles, and hers in the beautiful places of the world."

Calmiden dropped the letter, and regarded Julie with emotion. "And
so this was your choice? Indomitable little being, with the luminous
faith! Do you know that this island which I hated so with my whole
soul--where the days were but blank heat waves and the nights a
horrible hush--has become paradise since you walked into it?"

His tone took on a poignant wistfulness. "But your eyes seem to take
you always out of my reach.... Ah, do you, after all, belong to the
Green God?--you who say you have thrown in your lot with the East!"

Before Julie could reply, Brentwood came up the steps, and announced
that the Major wanted Calmiden at once. Calmiden went away with him,
throwing back of him a long glance.

The next day, Julie, gathering together the courage of necessity,
went to see the Treasurer about the projected loan to the teachers.

Her heart beat violently as she climbed the stone flights of the
Ayuntamiento, in the left wing of which the civil government offices
were located. Purcell was in the Treasury, seated at his desk. As
Julie appeared before him, a strange alteration flashed through his
light eyes; a swift omen, gone before it could be captured.

"Good morning!" he said, politely rising. "Is there anything I can
do for you?"

There was a preparedness in his attitude that cast the girl down more
than ever. That it should be to him that things had finally led! She
shrank from him almost visibly, and longed unutterably for retreat;
but consciousness of her disastrous concerns pressed like a red-hot
weight on her brain.

Purcell, never removing his eyes from her downcast face, waited. If
Julie by some chance had glanced up at that moment!--but that abysmal
ignorance concerning human nature which her uncle had deplored blinded
her to the subtleties in which she was about to become enmeshed.

She lifted her eyes with a terrible effort, and Purcell immediately
dropped his.

"Miss Hope says that you are advancing money out of the Treasury to
the teachers, till their salaries arrive."

Purcell made a sudden movement, but did not speak.

"I have come on that errand. When my money comes I will repay you
promptly."

Still studying the flushed, downcast face of the girl, Purcell
reached out his arm to the safe and began to move the knob of the
combination. "How much do you wish?" he asked in a low voice.

As little as was humanly possible to get along on, was Julie's
thought. It was torture to stand here and have money doled out to
her by this man. She hesitated and finally murmured, "Thirty dollars!"

He glanced up quickly from the safe, almost in disappointment, she
thought. He brought out a great roll of bills which he held before
the girl's eyes while he slowly counted out the sum she had asked for.

Julie took the money with a quivering word of gratitude. After all,
there was no such thing as hatred in the world!

Purcell, with an abrupt gesture, turned away.

Julie went home with the wherewithal to make the world turn a little
longer. Gregorio was paid, and thus enriched, lit out for the hills to
the solar plexis of the insurrection, where by virtue of his brigand
appearance he belonged.

The troops returned after a vigorous quest of the insurrectos, whom
they had been able to engage but once. Owing to the impenetrable
character of the country, the insurgents had managed everywhere to
hide themselves from conflict. Balked and baffled by the unabashed
desperados sitting unattainably upon their horrible hills, the
Major was in a furious frame of mind. With his limited facilities,
he seemed powerless to cope with the situation; and unless something
should intervene in his behalf, it seemed that these people, who,
as Delphine had expressed it "greatly enjoyed to insurrect," would
go on warring forever, through savage lust of the thing.

One morning shortly after the Major's return, Julie, on her way to
school, became aware of some deep agitation that was shaking the
village. From hut to hut, some tremendous portent had flashed as
if by racial telepathy, till every soul in the village was aware of
it. Julie, looking up at their windows where they were foregathered,
brown secret beings with terror in their gestures, was unable to get
any clew to the mystery.

Upon reaching the school house, she was handed a letter which she
read with much astonishment. It was from the Old Maid, and requested,
in the name of the mothers of the children, that school be suspended
that afternoon. Moreover, the Old Maid besought Julie with all the
fervor of the Spanish language to come to her house at two o'clock,
for an "asunto muy importante."

Julie learned a little later, to her further mystification, that the
girls' school would likewise be dismissed at twelve, for the day.

Returning home at the noon hour, Julie found the little houses on
stilts looking strangely deserted. Apprehension seized her. Had the
women too decamped for the hills?

Promptly at two o'clock, she walked down the hill to the Old Maid's
mansion, and found in that formidable vestal's extensive grounds
all the women of Guindulman, as well as those from the neighboring
districts, as far even as Loboc. Every dusky sister of them was in a
high state of consternation. As if that were not astounding enough,
they had attached indissolubly to their persons very nearly all the
children in the world--and these were shrieking in panic. As Julie
quickly recognized, the barren and the unwedded had appropriated as
their share the orphaned and deserted; and the orphaned and deserted
were howling in apparent rebellion at belonging to anybody at all. Even
the Old Maid had one wriggling little goddess of the dust--whom she
ordinarily smacked soundly for poaching on her premises--touchingly
tucked under her arm.

Delphine alone had been able to elude these theatrical adoptions,
and skipped satirically free among the leaves. The moment, however,
that he glimpsed his teacher, he ran up to her and stuck his head
docilely under her arm like a young ox under the yoke.

The women were all chattering hysterically. Suddenly the Old Maid
burst out oratorically to Julie. "Dios! What are we to do?"

"But what is happening?" Julie demanded.

"You have not heard? Christus!" She flung up her arms to heaven,
while a piercing wail broke like a dirge through the mango trees,
"Los Macabebes! Los Macabebes!"

Then Julie understood the meaning of the panic of weeping. From
the North was coming a band of those unique and redoubtable little
fighters, the Macabebe Scouts, of whose name every other tribe in the
Archipelago stood in awe. The Macabebes, for centuries the friends of
the white man and the enemies of all other tribes. There was no forest
retreat they could not ferret out and no danger that they feared.

In these far islands, they were a terrible legend. The people feared
them like the devil out of hell.

The women continued to sob, and to repeat, panic-stricken their
dreadful monotone, "Los Macabebes! Los Macabebes!"

The Old Maid commanded silence, and whirled upon Julie. "You must
think of a way to help us, you who have gone to school and have seen
the earth. All our men will be butchered. There will be no sons,
husbands or fathers left. The Macabebes are monsters out of hell. They
eat babies, and suck the blood of the dying. They will make ashes
of this island. There will not be one man left. Dios!"--she flung
herself down on her knees, and the others dropped with her, beating
their breasts--"if God made your brain better than ours, save us!"

"What can I do?" demanded Julie passionately. "I have no power
over such things? Has not the Comandante held out to your men every
opportunity to embrace order and peace, and have they not scorned them
all? Have they not preferred rather to listen to the one malcontent
who delights to sow discord between the two races to which he belongs?"

After this fearful piece of daring, she swept on:

"Hasn't the Comandante promised you peace and protection and a good
government for all? And do not your men continue to remain in the
hills from which the Macabebes, for whom he sent, will dislodge them
at last?"

"Come!" commanded the Old Maid. "Gather your children about you,
and go down on your knees to the Comandante, and don't rise till he
promises to order back those devils from the North. You, Maestra,
will lead us and speak for us!"

Julie glanced about her impotently. This desperately misguided swarm
of women had put themselves into her hands. She was terribly sorry
for them, for after all they were only women who, uninformed as to
the motives of the men in the hills, had through weary months held
their families together. A thought struck her. Her face lighted with
some inner vision. She halted the female mob. Was it possible to make
simple creatures like these revolutionary? The women looked at her,
and waited.

"It is useless to go to the Comandante empty-handed," she declared. "He
is angry over the death of his lieutenant. And many times your
men have promised to lay down their arms, only to break every time
their promise. On this island no crops are growing, no towns are
flourishing. Those of you who have property have had it seized by
outlaws, and those of you who are poor must continue to support alone
your children, and to endure your anxiety as well as the tax levied
by Andegas upon every soul of you. It has all grown worse and worse
until you can not bear it any longer.

"The new government does not extort; it protects the poorest among
you. It will give you liberty, schools, the right to accumulate
property without fearing any man. It seeks to make you a happy people,
and the most enlightened in the East.

"Make your choice between the two, you women. Deliver to the men your
ultimatum--that you have decided in favor of government instead of
anarchy. What! Cannot the women who, deserted and unprotected, have
borne the brunt of the war, take a stand alone? Each one of you has
power over one man who must himself already be weary of hardship and
separation. Rouse yourselves to act, for in this way and in this way
only can the Macabebes be kept away! Stop the war, the outlawry, and
the destruction of a beautiful island. Give your word to the Major--the
sworn word of the women of Nahal--that if he will countermand his order
for the Macabebes, the men will come in and deliver up their arms."

Into the silence that surrounded her she continued to exhort. "You,
Marianna Tectos!" addressing the Old Maid, "are rich and powerful. Many
men will listen to you, especially if you say that your purse will be
closed against them if they do not go over to the new government. You,
even, Nemecia Victoria who have power over many men, we ask you to
help. And Señora Pandilig, tell your nephews you will disinherit them
and give your money to the government if they do not come around. Oh,
you all have your lever, if you are courageous enough to apply it. Do
you agree?"

The women stood in thoughtful silence.

"We must defy our men for the government!" Señora Pandilig exclaimed.

"To save them from the Macabebes!" Nemecia Victoria reminded. The
dreaded name thrown into their thoughts with this argument by one of
their own number had deep effect. They stirred and moved under the sun,
and thought. An unaccustomed feat!

Julie glancing over the crowd, reading the faces in this moment of
stress, held that each brown woman was weighing just how much power
she could personally, in an issue like this, exert.

Comments ran down the lines: "The men will be angry!"

"They will be worse than angry, Mother of Jesus, when the Macabebes
tear out their hearts."

"What are we to do, Constancia?"

"What do you think, Celesta?"

"Ah, it is beyond us."

"And if we don't dare!"

Thus rippled their breathless fears and uncertainties. A concourse of
brown women facing a crucial decision which they could not absolutely
consummate, until the Old Maid hurdled them across with a leap. With
a daring excitement that for an instant lifted her above her world,
she cried, "We will tell the Comandante that we, the women of Nahal,
will undertake to bring in the men. We will go before him now!"

The procession started to surge forward, growing, as it drew near
Headquarters, more emotional at every step. Against this collective
femininity, Mike was powerless. It passed him in an oblivious white
heat, in an unassailable mood.

Calmiden, whose office was in the entresuelo, stuck his crest against
the grated bars of the window and stared in stupefaction.

Julie, bareheaded in the sun, her face reflecting unnameable emotions
towered aloft in the heart of the avalanche.

"Dear, dear! What's happening?" Calmiden demanded.

"Women! Oceans of 'em, overturning history! We want to see the Major."

"For heaven's sake, don't overturn anything here! He won't have
it. Tell them to go home, and you stay and talk to me, you exalted
green-eyed person."

"Calmiden!" roared the incensed Major from the upper regions. Clearly
he had perceived the onslaught from his window, to which the worsted
Mike had valiantly climbed for assistance. "What do you mean by
letting all those women past the door?"

Calmiden looked at Julie in comic despair. "Does he expect me to
wrestle individually with the feminine population of the island? What
are you all up to anyhow?"

"Tell them," yelled the Major, "that I refuse absolutely to see them."

But the dogged remnant who had not yet succeeded in getting inside the
building merely continued to push. Masses of agitated women driving up
the stairs and sweeping along with them in their advance a wondering
lieutenant, an indignant sergeant-major, two native clerks and an
interpreter! A flood of women inundating the furniture and bearing
down on one solitary figure that still withstood them. The Major, in
impregnable dignity, sat fast in his chair in rigid military fashion
while the excited Mike, picking up everything he could find, fired it
upon the advance. Women fundamentally annoyed the Major, and to have
all the women in the world surrounding him in an unescapable embrace
was too dreadful to sustain. He sat like Pharaoh in the midst of the
visitation of the plagues, sputtering under his breath.

The routed office force stood helpless, while the room rang with the
classic wail of "Los Macabebes! Los Macabebes!"

The Major addressed them. "Tell them," he said to the interpreter,
"that for two years I have exhausted every peaceful means to get
the men of this island to return to their homes. They take the
oath of allegiance only to gain access to the town and commit fresh
atrocities. This is one of the last islands to continue in a state
of outlawry and disorder. The Macabebes shall come!"

Calmiden and the Sergeant-Major exchanged unofficial glances of pure
delight. A hush of sheer fright closed the women's throats.

"You killed my Lieutenant," the Major accused. "Your men strangled him
in the night when he was defenselessly sleeping. You have bad leaders
who inoculate you with their passions. There have been wicked deeds
and murders. These things must end."

The women wept in terrible despair, helplessly wringing their brown
hands. Brown supplicating hands groping up out of the dark!

Julie, carried along by the throng, tried to speak. The Major was
right. Yet if Adams had lost his life, he had given it--to the
East. There could be no price set on blood so shed. The vision rose
before her of lonely Dao, and Adams guarding its destiny. She wriggled
forward through the women.

"Major," she said, "these women have come to offer you a proposal
of peace. If you will agree to delay the coming of the Macabebes,
they will promise to bring in their men."

The Major stared at her incredulously. "The women! What have they to
do with the insurrection?"

"As things stand now, a great deal. There are only women left in
the villages now--without food. The burden of such an existence has
become too much for them to endure. They will no longer furnish funds
for Andegas. Maria Tectos and Nemecia Victoria are rich women; so are
the Señoras Calextas and Pandilig. The women are the backbone of the
community, and they give you their sacred promise. They are weary of
war, and wish to embrace the Government of the United States."

The Major strode over to the window and turned his back on them. The
women stared tremulously at him--but Julie motioned them back. He
turned at last, frowning thoughtfully.

"Maria Tectos!" he said abruptly to the Old Maid, "Will you take the
oath of allegiance? And you, Nemecia? And the rest of you?"

"But I am a woman!"

"You are undertaking to make peace like a man!"

"And I swear before the High God?"

"That you will henceforth be a faithful adherent of the Government
of the United States. Put up your hands."

Maria and Nemecia Victoria lifted trembling brown arms. Dumbly the
concourse followed their example. Julie alone understood the valor
of those uplifted arms. All these women were imperiling their souls
before the Padre for this terrible oath. But the Major had agreed to
hold back the Macabebes, and for that they could perform this miracle.

Calmiden watched Julie closely, as they went out together.

"You put them up to this. What was the use?"

"If they do bring peace--"

"Utopian dreamer! It will be the first time it has happened that way."

"But I know these people a little. Maria will leave no stone
unturned. She did not need that perfectly valueless oath that the
Major imposed upon her to scare her into the truth."

"How can you be so interested in them?"

"This is my destiny," she said.

"Your destiny!" He looked soberly at her.

There with the tropical sunlight beating down upon them, they seemed
suddenly to face their deeper selves.

CHAPTER XI

Julie had received a note from Calmiden. "We will cross the causeway
to-night," it said.

She waved back the toiling future generations of light, and took the
note to the window. What did it mean? The few lines managed to convey
a message quite beyond their import. She read them over and over,
then gazed across the white winding road and the green banana trees,
to the causeway lying like a high thoroughfare between two worlds. Was
to-day to be the last of an old existence, which she was to shed like
a discarded garment? Would the footsteps that had followed strange
paths in the East turn about completely, and the dream that had burned
in her soul be left forever unfulfilled?

The breeze swayed the sacred tree of India beneath the window,
and its golden incense full of mystic and exhilarating intimations
showered upon the air. Julie was carried on the wave of its magic to
a roof garden in Manila and the hero who had first overwhelmed the
horizon of her youth. Often, looking out on this glowing landscape,
she had seen this image, but more and more as something lost in the
swift passage of life.

She, would not see him any more. Fate, that fate which ruled this
world had arranged it so. Her destiny lay along the beaten paths of the
world. She was too small an atom, as Calmiden had said, to survive the
great chances of the coming upheaval, or to dare ever, ever to achieve
a force like Barry McChord's. His spirit had lighted areas of her life
tremendously. Nobody ever had so stirred or quickened the pulse of her
soul. But that spirit was receding before the hard facts of existence
that Nahal had brought. It was getting too terribly hard, with so much
pressing upon her, to inhabit two spheres. And if anybody in the North
had given her a thought again, he had not taken the trouble to make
it known. She had dropped completely out of those great activities,
and not a reverberation of her life or its yearnings had reached the
far-off goal of her city of dreams. She herself shrinking to her real,
insignificant dimensions.

The tangle of her affairs complicated all her thought, and sent a chill
wave over her. The cold, hard, insuperable fact of her debts! She
owed the merchants in Solano, the small merchants of her village,
and still, after the lapse of many months, she owed Mrs. Morris a huge
obligation. Finally, and very nearly the worst of all, there was the
desperate debt in which Purcell was involved. A pauper and a gambler
with life! How else could a person who had managed to put herself
in everybody's debt be called? Clearly she had demonstrated that she
could not handle her own life, to say nothing of playing a part in that
complex organization to which she had had the assumption to aspire.

A great agitation came over her when in that one solemn final moment
she looked into her soul and bade good-by to all she had come to
do. Slowly she began to efface and obliterate the old orders of life,
and the transcendent consecration of the past. The East to which
she had come with a torch became a mere drear fact of over-powering
millions. Ages, and the tried souls of many men would be offered up
before the East found its freedom. What she did or did not do could
not weigh in the infinite balance.

Slowly she turned back to the room. The brown gnomes were sweating
terribly in the throes of composition, mining the realms of thought for
a few throttled ideas. Never anywhere were they so dearly born. Julie
stopped still to stare at them. "Poor little generation of light!" she
murmured.

Delphine glanced up at her with his quick brown eyes. He was the
barometer of the class--a youthful personality that had escaped the
general languor of the race. He watched the other boys, and interpreted
their needs. He seldom sat in his seat, but was, with his books under
his arm, almost always in a state of itinerant education. He had been a
devotee of the betel-nut, but at Julie's solicitation had given it up.

The children marched out at the end of the morning session. Julie
thrust her note in her pocket, and was following after them when
Delphine, trailing by a string a big bright red tropical beetle,
stopped her.

"You stay here always, Maestra? You never go away?" he urged earnestly.

Julie glanced at him absently. "Go home, Delphine," she said gently.

"Here," said the boy, "is a present for you of this beautiful bug--if
you will not go."

"No, thank you, Delphine. I know it would break your heart to give
up Balthazar, though he bites nasty welts all over you all the time."

But Delphine stuck along after her.

A quickening of her being took place as she came out into the
street. After all, she was in the golden possession of life. She
picked some heavily fragrant flowers and thrust them in her hair. She
was young, and Calmiden was young.

She moved along in the light like the heart of the golden day,
her shimmering head lifted to the perfume of the Ylang-Ylang, and
a hundred visions stirring in her brain. Behind her unperceived,
Delphine and the scarlet splendor of Balthazar desolately trailed.

In the evening she donned the green dress; but as she slipped the
green bracelet over her wrist, a sinister shadow swept for a moment
upon her mood.

A lithe white figure appeared in the road. She went out to meet it. She
had never seen Calmiden when he was so beautifully grave. She walked
along beside him. Neither of them spoke.

They went down to the beach, where leaving the village behind they
walked silently along the shore. The water washed darkly on clean
white sand with the beat and rhythm of a majestic poem of which their
emotions supplied the motive. They pressed on through the starlit
hush till the causeway lay directly before them.

Wonderful lighted bridge! Water from great distances bore up on either
bank, and in mighty rushes took itself off again into space. When the
moonlight sprinkled through the darkness, this narrow shining strip
stood aloft over the fretted world.

As they started to cross it, Julie said: "I feel as if I were suspended
between heaven and earth! I hope I won't drop."

"Are you afraid?"

They stopped short. With the turbulence of passion the water was
hurling darkly about them. The land appeared to be groups of mystic
shadows, and the stars were down almost within reach.

"It's all said around me," Calmiden declared in an unsteady voice. "I
have loved you from the first, and I shall always love you. Noth

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