Barry’s eyes had become abstracted under his memories.
“And the Forbidden City! No more to be penetrated than heaven itself! From Coal Hill one gazed across at that shimmering Hearsay among men, that Holy of Holies protected by walls as thick as Babylon’s. Over there amid legendary splendor, and unparalleled power on earth, in high and inviolate courts to which no gopher ever crawled, is harbored a will-o’-the-wisp—a myth, a spell, that governs millions of gophers’ fates.
“But”—he brought his hand heavily down on the table—“the gopher down under the ground is eating away with his teeth the foundations of those impenetrable places and you yet shall witness the day when he will stand up, a man at last, in the forbidden courts of the earth.”
“It all sounds a fantasy of mud-caked gophers, hobgoblins and blood!” Julie said.
“Listen, for sometime you will see all I say come true,” he prophesied. “All over the world to-day as laborers, and down under the earth in tin mines, Chinamen are slaving and groveling to make the money to set China free. When the hour comes, that hoarded treasure will flow forth to turn the tide. The gophers under the ground are stirring to resurrection. To the day, Julie,”—he lifted his glass—“when the gophers all over the world shall find the sky!”
Julie stared at him wistfully, and suddenly the tears rushed to her eyes—tears of awe, envy, and humility. He was in the toils of great undertakings, sweeping on to sacred achievements, while her sole contribution was Nahal—Nahal of dismal failure and miscarried efforts. What was the thing that he had, and that she would never have, that brought him fulfillment—the thing that his friends wished to conserve and to keep her out of?
“I like to think,” she said at last, hiding her emotion, “that you will be invulnerable to everything that can happen in the East.”
“Why the East?”
“It has a separate, harder and more cruel fate.”
“And presents greater gifts and will bring in the end greater strength! Come!” He rose. “We have sat a long time, and I hear our monarch arriving below.”