“I stopped to tell you that I have talked with the girl, and I fear that there is no use trying to get that other man back.”
He paused, finding it difficult to refer to the sensibilities of his own race. They appeared to lift like inconsequential bubbles before this inconceivable mood.
But that fierceness continued to make demand upon him. “It’s too bad,” he added. “The affair turns out to be merely a tryst with her own soul. But—” He tried to get Barry’s name out, and failed. What he wanted to do was to reassure their mutual fears concerning Barry, and to declare confidently that Barry would keep clear of the complication. Instead, he found himself edging toward the stairs while that gathering dreadfulness followed him.
He descended without looking behind him, but he could see through the back of his head Isabel’s image, while ahead of him Rosalie’s rice-powdered face seemed to wave across his path; and in that moment he thanked God that he had never begotten children of the East.
CHAPTER XIX
In her school in the Tondo, Julie was required to supervise as well as to teach. Her two native assistants, Mariana and Clarino, however, were the two most sacerdotally devout worshipers before the Ark of Education that she had ever seen.
Her own class consisted of boys and girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen—maturity for Malays. Reports of cholera were now steadily coming from the provinces, and Julie made it her chief concern to impress upon her pupils the precautions they should take to guard themselves against it. She read aloud the ominous accounts of what was transpiring in the provincial districts, and strove to move them to active interest. Against the River—the lurking monster in their lives—she warned them most passionately, and exhorted them to the point of prayer against all manner of uncooked food.
The answer of the ages came back to her through the medium of these young creatures. The River had been there always—since before Abraham. It was God’s own river, and it could not therefore do harm. And the things of the soil—they grew at His will; would they then poison the sons of men? Thereupon followed the fiat, old as time, the fiat of the God of the Pavilion: “If we are to die, we will die!”
Julie’s headaches had become a serious menace. In fact, in conjunction with the devitalizing climate, they were, she saw with trepidation, fast sucking out her strength. She was now spending five straight hours in the school-room, beginning at eight in the morning; then, after a short interim of rest, she went to Señor Sansillo’s for the afternoon. In order to defray her expenses and to meet her obligations, she must inexorably keep going all the time. She could not afford to be ill: she had not one cent to be ill with, or any one to turn to in this great awful East. Barry, she felt, was the only creature she could lean upon; but she had a pronounced aversion to appealing to him or to any one else. Very vivid in her memory was the recollection of a time when, in direst trouble, she had put out her hands and they had closed on empty space. That experience had engendered in her a bitter resolve to stand or fall on her own resources. Never again, she felt, would she completely trust any one. Secretly and somberly she believed in her heart that men would break any covenant, if they could do so without incurring the judgment of the world.