They had come out onto the Luneta, where music was stirring through the soft dusk. Throngs of smart carriages and vehicles of every sort were moving in slow rhythm up and down. People were exchanging visits in the beautiful twilight. They began to stop Barry to talk to him.
Ellis Wilbur, nodding to Julie from under a vivid red plume, had her carriage brought up alongside of Barry’s trap. A member of the Assembly came along, and Barry got out and fell into deep discussion with him on the walk.
“I’m triste to-night!” Ellis said. “The tragedy of the East has begun to fasten on me. It’s time to go! Do you know, as I watch the shadows fall like slow tears over those old walls, I think what a city to be unhappy in! A city of the East, the weight of ancient evil in its stones. The dusk drops over it like a blackness of the heart, an infinite hopelessness. The petals of every gay flower shrivel, and the grass grows dim. All the forces of the night to contend against. Ah, I am sorry for all of you who are to stay in it!”
She looked closely at Julie. “Never love in the East. One could be sure of going completely mad in its terrible beautiful passions, in its heavy night with the thick scents in them and the beat of black hearts pulsing through them.
“Do you know, you and I are like Janus, at the crossroad, facing two ways; not up to going forward, not willing to go back. And there we stand like weather-vanes, and point no man a thoroughfare. I confess that I am too selfish and too impatient to make an oblation of myself. Therefore, I am definitely, but not without a certain shame, you understand, about to turn back. We are going. Father’s been given another job—‘in the courts of kings.’ I was too weak to resist the prospect”—she gave a short laugh—“of marrying some one princely and distinguished on the other side of the world. And I promise you, I shall not return here—like so many others. You’ve seen them in their dramatic farewells, leaving the East forever—its corrugating problems, its intolerable hardships. And then, after they’re forgotten over here, they turn up on a ship, and embrace everybody with the tears streaming down their cheeks. It was no good, they tell you. They had to come back, and get in the game. They still don’t give a rip about this part of the world, its ineffectualness and heat and hell; but what they are supremely excited about is the Job! There wasn’t anything to compare with it back home. They wanted to help finish it off before the curtain was drawn, and to help show the world how successfully Asia was being vitalized.”
Ellis turned her attention to Barry, and regarded him attentively for some time. “Father is worried about Barry. He thinks he is trying to break his ties here. It would be like him, of course, to move on if he found something bigger; but he is needed here. He has a really strong influence on the people. He seems to be the only white man they really like. But he is always trailing off on strange errands all over the Eastern seas, and the queerest people are always appearing to visit him. Strange conferences are held in that house of his, I’ll wager. I tell him,” Ellis laughed, “that he must be trying to make himself Emperor of Asia.”
She subsided into thought, out of which her voice broke quietly at last. “Does Barry McChord stir your imagination as he does mine? It’s only too sure that there is nobody like him among the so-called princes of men; but he has his way marked out for him—he must beat his way alone through this black hinterland. Every bit of him is needed for the work. They are all agreed, you see, that he will no more be permitted personal passions than the Pope of Rome.”
The sunset threw a golden light into the dusky cavalcade circling about them, making it glow like a wondrous human allegory. Suddenly solemn strains of music threw a hush over this vivid atmosphere.
Barry’s head, Julie noticed, was uplifted to the down-coming flag—which slowly descended, the symbol of infinite things.