Читать книгу The Green God's Pavilion - Mabel Wood Martin - Страница 8

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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.