“Congress will pass the Bill. It will be lights out here before long—our carefully trimmed lights. We will have to move to new beats in the East.”
He caught her hand and walked with her to the gate, where, turning about to face her, he said with deep emotion: “The cities of my heart may pass, the fires that my life has lighted die, but you will remain in my soul the one eternally abiding thing.”
Long after the gate had closed behind him, Julie, the light all about her, stood pondering those words. Like a prophecy of fire, her soul saw them—like a glowing handwriting on the walls of fate, burning characters predicting a future—a future in which far desert peoples were concerned, and shining human deeds. An immortal experience was about to offer itself out of her frustrated land of dreams.
She felt, as she sat there alone in the moonlight, as if she had been summoned off her futile earth to occupy a finer planet, of Asian gardens, pervaded with an ineffable fragrance of soul. This planet did not hold China, full of black blots; it had nothing to do with the terrible Pavilion with leprous beggars leaning out of it. Julie did not know what this land was or where, but it was full of the accumulated and expurgated glories of the East.
However Barry might succeed or fail, if his projects collapsed at his feet or if he won heroically, he alone was wonderful, splendid, inspired; the Excelsior man struggling upward with the banner of humanity. He burned upon Julie’s dreams as everything bright and fine. She recalled the night they had first shared their virginal dreams—before the sinister obstacle had come. Why had they been separated to take ever widening roads of destiny? Near him she felt a sense of tingling peace, of vivid harmony with even the unconscious stones, so contrasting with all the other gloomy emotions that had warped her life. She could have gone on forever in the atmosphere he created of fluid golden good-will. Where he was, was always light. Even the dusk glowed preternaturally, with a promise hid. A sense of him pervaded the garden now, its lighted lengths, its drifting fragrance. His presence was still here, touching every pulse.
All about were the mates of the garden. She knew their little dramas: the male Papaya Tree peering across in dark discomfiture at a private little miracle—a comb of incandescent mites of blossoms that his mate had proudly on display! The lovely lady Sun-Tree dancing like an houri in the breeze, waving her delicate plumes and swinging her gay bells with their hairs of tongues, while her coarse mate, rooted by his heavy frame to the earth cursed and groaned. Haughty, green women of the garden! They had things better than their human sisters! Above her, pure as the heart of Mary, without ever an earthly love in it, the white cadena trailed snowily along the walls, while orchids quartered on fern trees watched the night with uncanny eyes; and close at Julie’s hand the glowing grail of the hybiscus sadly held forth to a darkened world the blood of Christ.
Beautiful sacred garden! If only by some magic it could be carried on to flower forever in all the cycles of her uncertain future! Here in this never-to-be-forgotten garden, they two had sat with the alamanders gleaming upon them like a galaxy of golden moons, and had proclaimed the promise of a new earth.
For once the sense of her weakness, her inconsequence, left her—the burdensome sense of herself as a bungling, unsuccessful instrument of life was swept out of her consciousness by new visions. The very night shimmered with great dreams. Glowing gates appeared to her imagination, and vast still deserts with men waiting watchfully beneath the stars. It was that watching and waiting that thrilled through her, caused her to start up in wonder and awe, as if from somewhere a summons had throbbed: a vision of far questioning places and of waiting watching men over against the Wall that crowns Cathay.