But if there were nights in a moonlight garden, there were also broiling days in an equatorial city with streets hot under foot and an atmosphere like waves of fire. Julie was moving dizzily and heavily through life, sleeping badly, dreaming strangely, and forgetting her food. She sat abstractedly over her meals, staring out beyond her.
“That is the way with you Americans!” Señor Reredo remarked. “You burn yourselves out at once, forgetting that it must be a slow wick and a long one that lasts in the hot winds.”
“You are ill!” the Señora would declare. “All the fine little bones in your face are beginning to show.”
It was just as well, the girl thought, that the taste for food had left her, since the fare of the Reredos was almost completely unpalatable. Julie supplemented it at great expense in an American restaurant. They sometimes served her carabao’s milk, and besides, during the meals, it was the habit of Chiquito, the pig, to whimper around the table for titbits, sticking his fore-paws beseechingly on the children’s laps. Chiquito was a clean pig and a very clever one, but Julie had her prejudices.
She was forced to walk great distances through the hot streets. Livery carromatas were too dear, and she would not get into nondescript Tondo vehicles. Once in desperation she had resolved to attempt one of these conveyances that carried the undercurrent of the city’s life. The rat-like remnant of a horse, whose eyes begged for death, had stopped its unsteady motion, and the coachman, the veriest dust of the streets, was signaling the occupancy of the crazy coach, when a dreadful unconcerned face with small-pox ulcers all over it, and a cigar stuck in the corner of its mouth, thrust itself out at her. Death abroad on a jaunt!
The streets with their unfathomable misery of life were an eternal curiosity to her. It was incomprehensible that men would take the trouble to go on breathing on such terms. Poor, tawdry, human procession, with its occasional holiday of soul, when, like ants from far trails, its units met and rubbed noses unintelligibly. It was good not to be a gopher or an ant, but to be something that counted very acutely in the universe. Gophers were born gophers, ants were born ants—and Julies, by a comfortable decree, were born Julies. It had all been arranged that way definitely and succinctly by thoughtful forces and there was no use of aching over it. Gophers and ants must go on nibbling around the careless feet of the gods. One single human fleck of pity could not fan the East into life. It was all too big a proposition for one ineffectual soul.
One day walking home by a new route, she saw in the aperture of a broken wall, a forlorn old man sitting, looking out with half blind eyes. Poor old hermit, pondering perhaps with all the hopelessness of the East, on To-morrow. She stopped to speak a few words to him, and saw stretching beyond her an alley of broken turns, between lines of battered old walls. Moved to curiosity, she followed the alley and came suddenly upon a savage fastness, at the edge of the sea, a hideous retreat of tattered beggars, who at the sight of the chance invader came leaping up out of the sand, where they had been ferociously gambling and matching cocks, and closed about her—a jeering, threatening crew, followed by a pack of horrible dogs. Out of their filthy huts made of scraps of tin, boards, old rags, nipa, more tatterdemalion creatures appeared. The dregs of the city cornered here! On the shallows of the sea, lay a flotilla of blood-red sails. What, horribly, did they catch in this nightmare retreat?
Never had she seen human existence in quite so grotesque and satirical a setting. This was not a picture of the usual native, contentedly at sea in the universe, nor of the gophers in their sad mud embankments, nor yet the settled evil of Chinatown, but of a crooked, grimacing sort of corner where the indigestibles of an Eastern city found haven. Human grotesqueries! The ordinary panorama of the native’s futile life was disheartening enough, but this blur of savage hobgoblins jeering at the sun, seizing like Macbeth’s witches on the prey of the Alley was terrifying. She ran precipitately back, tearing her garments from the women’s greedy clutches, with the howls of the Alley in her ears and their blood-red sails burning on her brain. The horror of the East! The Pavilion of unreclaimed human waste for which not even God cared!
Stumbling blindly home in the sun with an aching head, she felt that this hot cosmos into which her life had fallen was a furnace that was going to consume her altogether. But the medicine, she remembered, would help this miasma and dull the sick weight of the world. She climbed upstairs, picked up a box and took a powdery pellet from it.
On the table lay a long, official envelope. She picked it up abstractedly and broke it open, wondering why the red-haired man was moved to send out so many meaningless, uninspired messages. She glanced it over, then suddenly for an instant not a thing stirred in her. At last her breath broke out of her throat in a sob. Another blow out of the East!