She replied with an articulate sound of joy and terror.
He took both her hands in the joy of meeting and drew her out of observation to the gallery.
“I’ve been sick for a sight of you—in a desert abandoned, choked with sand!” The tone of his voice brought the tears smarting to her eyes. “I used to have a thousand things in my life—a million—and now all I’ve been thinking about is you!”
The blood came back into her face and life into her heart.
“What do I care for the world without you in it? I wouldn’t walk the sick old place without you.” His voice broke. “You’re still following some disastrous mirage! Ah, Julie—when our souls have the same dreams in them—and have beckoned each other across the world!”
He put his arms about her, and kissed her. She burst into agonized tears and clung to him. “There,” he said, “isn’t that the miracle!” he cried in radiant tenderness. “In this moment we’ve become endowed with a hundred lives! Henceforth we’ll take the rough paths together. China, Julie, old China—the wonder of it. You and I and Sun Yat Sen, up and down the plains and highways, touching the gophers into fire!”
“The gophers!” she shuddered away. “Oh! How can you bear to stay in this brutal place? It hates so bitterly. It takes revenge so monstrously! It has eaten up our dreams, torn our hopes from us, and rolled our lives in the dust.”
“But the wonder of it, Julie,” he argued, with glowing eyes. “The mystery of it, and the unending struggle beating about you like wings of the invisible! The battle of light and darkness—God’s own dear battle. The human strain at its utmost, the heights and the depths! Why, I’d be in it forever. I’d not miss it for anything. I would keep on tramping in it with a sack at my back.”
Julie’s teeth bit at her white lips. “And the terror of it,” she cried fiercely; “the cruelty, the evil of it; the plagues that are even now eating up the city of your hopes—Oh, the death that waits in all its paths!” She leaned back weakly against a post.
“It’s a hard path truly,” he conceded. “Many’s the time I’ve starved in the East, and come close to its bottomless pools. It is only a short while since, that I thought I was on the high places for good, with the universe at my back; but I’m down on foot again in the dusty road, along with the rest of the world. But I never think of those times—for what cocoon remembers his worm’s body? We are going on—to-morrow, or next day. You haven’t seen China. We’re refugees, but she’ll find us our place. Nobody that has ever won a foot of the world turned back.”