“What causes such a place?” she gasped. “There must be some accounting for such a hideous blot.”
“Opium, mostly; together with the incomprehensible in man. It’s the East at its vilest pitch, a hellish sub-consciousness in which murder is the cleanest conception. White men end in such places—drug-takers and drunkards, in violence usually. Chinese pirates form the nucleus of these lees of the coast. I could tell you true tales of them that would out-do Poe. When I first came to the East, it used to grip at my consciousness like a black hand. I felt in those days that my life was in peril all the time. It used to worry me—till the Moros got me and led me with three other ragged beggars along the tops of more sun-baked craters than there are in the moon, telling us every morning as the sun rose that it was the last one we’d see. At first my soul just clawed itself to pieces, but at last I walked right over some unseen peak, and left the fear of death behind for good. That was somehow the biggest victory I’ve ever won.
“We’re out of the nightmare now,” he said, as they turned in a new direction. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter there. The Ashbys will never cease to be a miracle to me. They wormed their way out of this sort of thing. They used to come here to buy the cheapest whiskey, just as others come for the dope; and Ashby, I imagine, knows the ground floor of that hell!”
Julie pressed her nails into her hands.
“Is there any place you want to go?” Barry asked.
“Yes,” she said, with a sudden feverish alertness. “Go by the markets of this district. Did it ever occur to you that they are shaped like pavilions—that they seem to represent one great pavilion—tented Asia, with throngs always moving through?
“Do you know that though I try with my whole will, I can not go into one of them? I pass them—and something always accuses me. Ah! Don’t go any nearer!” she breathed, as they approached a large market. “The beggars in their rags always come sweeping out. How festering with pestilence these throngs seem to be—gangrenous, leprous, polluted. Even the heads of little children run with sores—everywhere sores! A terrible Pavilion of mangy and vitiated humanity, shaking with unnameable curses, and with eyes and noses eaten away. They fill me with a sinking terror, those brown masks! They smile at me—and stare at my clean whiteness like worms at a star. Oh! Why has the East been forgotten, in her blindness and her monstrous sores? Think of the wars of man against man—the great futile blood-lettings—and what their cost might have done to banish this hobgoblinism from a part of humanity! Nobody cares! I can’t bear it! How can God move so slowly? Can you see the East squatting in the dust, waiting blindly through the ages for the Christ that shall come and stanch its running sores?
“You must excuse me,” she said agitatedly, “but I seem always to be passing that Pavilion and, for all the horror of my pity, never able to go in and touch their sores. Does it seem to you that we are like cruelly idle and indifferent gods just looking on? Not you, but me. I can’t get down to their incomprehensible and unapproachable world. I want to shove them all away out of my sight, yet all the while I’m cursing that some one doesn’t come along and save them. Look!” she shuddered.
A leper stood in the pavilion-shaped market place, leaning like some fearful decoration against one of its posts. Large pieces of his flesh had been eaten away. Something in his appearance suggested that he was yet young. A human Prometheus, plucked by the vultures of a hideous fate. His eyes lifted to them in silent unbearable entreaty. He stretched out his hand less, it seemed, for entreating money than for asking the mercy of God. Barry tossed him a coin which was instantly swept up by the supplicatory crowd.
Julie closed her eyes convulsively. “I’ll always be seeing him in the Pavilion beckoning to me—but I can’t go—I just can’t!”