“Leah keeps the emotion of the Empire astir,” Miss Wilbur declared. “She is one of its phases. She lives in a flame always, and transcends the bonds of mere husbands and other things. The husband, a drab creature, lives in barracks out of town. Leah puts up at the Oriente and spreads her splendid wings. What are the feelings of a gold-tipped goddess anyway? Lovell is bent Burmese fashion before her—Lovell is a bank-man in Hongkong who is about to come into a big title. He aspires, at cross purposes, to power and to Leah.”
A woman with dark hair drawn over a glistening pearl of a face passed on the arm of a plump, florid man. “Another Woman of the Empire. That Madonna face, my dear, has seen the floor of hell. That woman has experienced the deepest brutality of the East. She was a little New England factory girl, whom her profligate lover abandoned in a Chinese port. In her Hegira, she found her way here, and became one of the famous white hetirae of the city. That’s what they amount to here, and along the coast. When you see particularly handsome women driving alone along the Luneta, don’t ask who they are. Abernathy came along and married her, right out of the district where they live, and now she has a great house, with all the money in the world. But as isolated as if she were in a cave. I went there once, and she took me up on her high lonely roof, from which she said she could look out over the city and watch it marching ahead. Her heart was breaking with loneliness; the old days when she ruled men were gone, but she wanted to see this thing through. Just another obscure sentinel who is sticking to her post.
“I have an idea that Mrs. Calixter has been telling you things about the women. She doesn’t understand—her generation can’t—that they’ve got the chance, and the second chance, over here. They can do a lot and get away with it—and no hair-lines drawn. But they have freedom of choice—they can make or break themselves. A few, of course, are clear outside—like Isabel, who has nobody to account to and to whom not even the roughest rules apply. She is one of the laws here herself. Don’t try to measure her by rule of thumb, she hasn’t any measure; Isabel has more freedom of will than it is safe to think about. She is moreover staggeringly rich—and helpful; and I see as much of her as she will allow—although papa, who belongs to Mrs. Calixter’s tiresome era, is inclined to discourage this intimacy. Yet I have discovered,” Miss Wilbur asserted calmly, “that he goes privately and takes tea with her. He considers it a very dashing experience, no doubt. She probably tells him a great deal about the Islands, which he believes like gospel. That is he.” Miss Wilbur gestured carelessly toward a distinguished looking white-haired gentleman. “So diplomatic-looking, everybody says! Papa has ‘represented’ at two courts, and he was completely taken aback when they put him on a democratic job like this. He’s on the Commission. But he has caught the fire, like the rest. He is having a very disconcerting second blooming. I used to conceive of papa as a sort of ancient, delicate epigram, and behold, he has come to life! That flower in his button-hole is what they call here the ‘Chain of Love.’”
A pleasant, worn-faced Englishman in a singular semi-uniform costume, with a dark sash knotted around his waist, bowed to Miss Wilbur.
“That sash? Nobody knows what it means. Perhaps it’s an emblem of the Republic of the Sun—that’s the fantastic name somebody has given to the impossible Utopia that these men are trying to bring about in the East, after Campanelli’s or Plato’s dream; I forgot which. They believe the East is to awaken tremendously. Talk with Barry about it. But this gentleman, Matfield-Barron, broods over the situation with all the lonely passion of the expatriate; it’s the last thing left in his soul. Most of the others mean, like the Chinamen, to ‘go back’ after the day is over, but Matfield-Barron will stay on. He was an officer in the British army, and was cashiered out of the service over in India—something about a woman, who is said to have used him as a shield for another man. So he drifted here. I hope for his sake they don’t break the Scheme, back there in the States. I can’t bear to think of that homeless wanderer growing old in the East with no Utopia to love. And I’m crazy about that absurd sash! It waves a breezy, Anglo-Saxon defiance to the apathy of the East.”
A blond, blunt man who looked like a shortened Hercules exchanged a word with Julie’s companion, and walked on.
“That’s Holborne—organized the Constabulary; says he’s an Englishman—born in Malta, rather an interesting place to be born in. I think that Holborne is a true soldier of fortune, and that when a bigger fight comes up he will move on. Rumor has it that he is bound up in Isabel’s spokes; but so many men are that! It is written in his steel eyes that no woman shall upset his universe.
“But of course the main force in this unseen republic is Barry McChord. He is the Titan stoking this furnace. He is one of those persons you want to have around—he makes the world so exciting to live in! He has gone mad over this rough-and-tumble colony, and over the whole East. He’s in love with the torn-up landscape, the scaffoldings, the skeleton bridges, and diverted rivers. Cleaning, rehabilitating, straining—he is trying to carry the East on his back!
“And now I must relinquish this personally conducted tour,” Miss Wilbur concluded; “I see a circle of prospective partners frowning at me for having hedged you in so long. It doesn’t matter, however; for the dancing is only just getting under way.”
As Ellis Wilbur had implied, young men got themselves brought up, and claimed Julie. Diffident, high-colored Englishmen, whimsically satirical over the paradoxes of the East, or wearily skeptical; her own countrymen, gloriously beginning and flushed with the enterprise. These last had come to civilize Asia, and made one feel that they were electrified with their job; they had the air of being engaged in a national knight-errantcy. Their mood kept the air stirred. Julie was bewildered by all they found to tell her—strange recitals that made an Odyssey of the hopes and ambitions of many men. It set up in her a fresh excitement.