The tears sprang to her eyes. “I can’t get over it—or forget it. Right there a fine sheath that enveloped me dropped to pieces. I was wholly unhappy and unsuccessful. My friends died or ceased to believe in me; my people that I was to have led to the Promised Land—Oh, don’t,” she cried, turning to him, “break your heart with a dream like that!”
His eyes, full of commiseration, flamed at her last words into visionary light. “I dream,” he declared, “of the whole darkened lengths of the East! The better state is coming,” he continued more gently, “not to one land or one race but to the whole Humanity—and the East must be in the Change, too. Up from the muddy Caliban that it is there will rise a soul to fashion a new Asia after the ideals which we brought across the sea from the greatest Republic of the world. Some time not so far off, mark my words, common coolies,” he exclaimed, “shall stand in the Holy courts of the Forbidden City and in the Temple of the Great Lama at Lhassa, the two most inviolate spots on earth, and proclaim the equality of men!”
His face was afire. He thrust his strong nervous hands through his rumpled hair.
“Some of us are daring to play a bigger game than that of this archipelago. We are bidding for stakes that are far in the future. I was in China for years before I came here—I am steeped in it, I’ll confess that, I have more than one iron in the fire. The times are beginning to take point. As an old Brahmin priest I know says; the souls of men are making ready all over the earth.”
He tingled all over with a power that seemed to communicate itself electrically to her. It was fine to be near him, to be in his atmosphere. He made her transcend her human self for a while, bore her forth on the crest of universal things.
“I want you to see the sort of things that I’m bound up in!” he said. “I want you to enter a little into my beliefs. Though, after all, we are floating on the waters of mystery.”
“A big black enigma, it all seems to me!”
“You speak as if you do not expect a solution!” he exclaimed.
“Things will have to clear awfully for that—for me at least. I have no expectations any more. Women are not heroic over here. The men do the big things. I thought I was an apostle. I find I am only a woman tramp through the East—who has lost her quest. I have made a mistake. Perhaps I should turn back!”
“Ah! Don’t talk that way. Be as wild as you please in your dreams, this is the background for them. If you could see the extent of the domain over which my aspirations dare to play! You’d think I was truly an Arabian Nights’ romancer.”