“Just as you came in I was thinking of some of these people. There’s a lad in a bank I’m worried about. By virtue of his Americanism he thought he was entitled to something better than a government clerkship. Straining always toward the gilded doors of the Empire’s elect, he got himself made manager of this newly organized bank on precisely the same salary he had before. But doors have opened to him, and he spends like the rest. Some day not so far distant, I fear by the haggard look in his face, the poor lad will vanish out of this place, to be caught up by the secret service men in some great hostelry in India or China to which his singed youth will gravitate. Then the long, awful sentence in a Malay prison.
“There are some, you see, who were never to find fortune in El Dorado, some who even a year ago walked these streets in high hope and to-day lounge seedily with vacant, staring eyes, in native booths. Then there is the ghost that is particular damnation—native wives. Not so long ago Chad Messenger, one of those men out there—” He motioned toward the door—“married Rosalie. It is already the tragedy it was bound to be. Chad is a high dreamer, and he ruined his life in an epic sort of way. Rosalie has gone back to her parents, but Chad remains nevertheless her husband—”
“What is she like?” Julie interrupted.
“You can see her any morning on the Escolta, wandering eternally among the shops. She is a great friend of your friend Isabel Armistead—and of Orcullu. Then there was Jerome— When he first crossed my path, he was an Infantry officer up in the Bosque. He had drifted into playing for high stakes—a thing prevalent over here. He was Quartermaster, and became involved in his accounts. He would have been court-martialled if old Vincente Busqua had not put a devil’s bargain up to him. Vincente said that if Jerome would marry Paula, his daughter, to whom Jerome had paid some attention, he would make good the shortage, and Jerome could quietly resign. Jerome took Paula to vindicate his Americanism; he was never criminally guilty, I believe—some subordinate, it is thought, took advantage of his carelessness.
“But good things happen once in a while—great things. Out of the lees, a few completely emerge. A lady whom you will meet this afternoon was one such, and her husband as well. She is coming to see me about a charitable school she conducts. Two abandoned drunkards, they were—he and she. Both came from very good families back home—that thought it expedient to get them out of the way. Colonies are always martyred that way. Ashby was a ‘Remittance Man,’ his wife when he ran across her was a stenographer. She had taken to secret drinking long before, through a romantic grief of her youth. Through mutual desperation they gravitated to each other, and after their marriage they continued to go steadily, awfully down. They became complete indigestibles in the social fabric, and appeared to be whizzing straight through the damnation of the East, when something happened, which I never completely understood. A traveler through the East imbued them with some special enlightenment, which they refer to as the ‘incontrovertible truth.’ They have tried to explain this new insight, as they call it to me, but upon a man reared and sustained on fixed tenets, it did not take hold. You see,” he explained, “as I grow old in far strange places of the earth, I am comforted by having fixed pillars to support my consciousness. Still I should like to understand what it was that pulled these two, when they seemed so completely out of reach, back into the safety zone.”
Barry and Chad came in from the porch, bringing with them a man whom they presented to Julie as Doctor Braithwaite, one of their very close friends, Barry said. Following them came the housekeeper conducting a tall woman of slender elegance of person, who Julie was startled to learn was Mrs. Ashby, the derelict the priest had just been telling her about. To connect the history she had heard with this distinguished looking gentlewoman was at first glance too preposterous to attempt. On closer view, however, the lines of the past appeared on the face, like a visible under-stratum which was gradually being eroded by the force of a new mode of existence. As they shook hands, the woman looked very attentively at Julie, as if there were something about her that she wanted to remember.
Mrs. Ashby engaged Barry in conversation, all having, so it seemed, a great deal to do with the matter of babies. Barry promised to send her quantities of condensed milk.
“We all beg from Barry,” she explained to Julie. “But that is what he was made for; you can’t impoverish a spirit like his. You see, there is always an epidemic of death among the babies over here. When they can’t be fed naturally at birth, they are stuffed with rice, and of course they die. Mr. Ashby and I have a kind of school, if one might dare to call it that, and the feeding of babies is one of the things we are trying to teach.”
A boy came in with a tray and passed cake and tea and glasses of a light cordial.
“Do you realize,” said Chad Messenger, speaking for the first time, “that the first representative government that has been convened in the East met in this city to-day and made its bow to the onlooking Orient?” He held up his glass. “To the Philippine Assembly! May it realize the fearful portents it holds in its hands.”