“Since it is ordained that everything must get somewhere, you too must arrive,” said Mrs. Ashby. “Ah,” she added gently, “if I could give you the compass that would show you the direction!”
The men were returning. “Come and see me,” she adjured. “Remember that I shall always be glad to give you any assistance I can.”
The priest looked white and weary as his guests took their leave. As Chad went away in his calesa, Julie noticed that he cast a thoughtful backward glance at her and Barry.
Barry drove through parts of the city she had never seen before, and which she found not so pleasing as the others. “These are the places we haven’t been able to touch,” he said. “Look at this.” He gestured up a narrow street into which they had suddenly veered, and the aspect of which caused Julie to recoil.
“This alley is very nearly the worst abomination on earth! Chinatown! We’re trying to uproot it, but the denizens only make more mischief when they disperse. I have no government job, or I would have been on their necks long ago. I’ve never wanted to take an official position. The Governor sends me here and there over the islands on errands; but I want to be free—in case I’m needed across the water. Then too, I need money all the time, for a million things; and I have to be free to make it.”
Julie’s eyes gazed startled at the street they were following. “Is China like this?” she demanded in horror.
“This isn’t like China or Europe. It’s an abortive thing of both. Men become very vile when they take their vices underground,” Barry declared, with the resigned manner of a god before all the evil in the world.
It was narrow, it was dirty, it was subterraneously vile, like pus under the surface. White men and yellow men, men of all races went here to hide their manhood in interims of bestiality.
“Animals sleep cleanly in holes,” Barry remarked; “but these twists of the thing called life bury themselves in the earth for their deeper degradation. White women have been buried down there—live corpses; and have come forth bleached lepers to the light. Such holes of pestilential rats have, however, been closed up, so far as we know, and now all this evil pollutes before the sun.”
Julie’s breath caught in a little sob before the faces she saw. Somewhere she had dreamed of that monstrous array of human masks; a cruel, incomprehensible evil such as one must transcend the brute kingdom to find. It pressed a shadow down on the mind, like a hangman’s cap. The creatures looked at her with leers of the most abominable intention. She sat up and stared with a white face up and down the cursed street. And up and down it, in their yellow heads, its subterranean minds were speculating upon her.