Suddenly her foot struck a bundle of rags. She stopped and gazed down. Something ghastly lay there in the sand: a child struggling hideously with its last pinch of strength—so futile an atom against the forces of the universe! As she stooped closer and stared, horror swept over her in a chill of ice. She knew now why there was no roar of moving here, no devil’s laughter; the place had been stricken with the plague—the creatures were dying like rats in their trash-made huts.
She wanted to run, but in her terror could not command her muscles to move. The child’s head, crusted with sores, lay convulsed upon the sand. She regarded it in horror, repugnance, and pity. Before her shaking vision rose a Pavilion—an Eastern market-place, and from it a leper stretched forth a supplicating hand.
Pestilence-stricken hordes, unstaunched running sores! Day by day she had passed the Pavilion, had shuddered at the leper’s bleached face turned, empty of hope, to the pitiless sun, and had run away. In what dream had she seen those tortured masks?—faces, praying for death—
Always before she had fled—there had come a moment of violent contention with herself, when it had become inevitable that she could not always go round, that sometime she must go through, clear through. She had always run away—failed completely: the cycle of those past failures seemed now to burn like one of their sores within her. And now she was facing again this crisis—her soul finally would no longer let her off. She closed her eyes and put forth trembling fingers. The clutch of the leper closed chilly around them. The circuit at last was complete.
The moment her eyes opened, she uttered a piercing cry. Locked in her grasp lay the hand of the plague-stricken child. The rigid fingers clutched around hers in a last hold upon slipping life. Spasm after spasm of agony tore the puny frame. A great throb of answering human pain shot through the girl’s heart. She sank down in the sand, deliriously clinging to this scrap of life as if it were the last in the world. The child shivered into stillness. Julie stared resentfully, indignantly about her into hot space. Hopeless—hopeless! everywhere! She began to cry weakly, dropping her head in the sand.
Her thirst was overwhelming. She gathered herself up, and crept cautiously among the huts. It was early afternoon, and the denizens of the place were either absent, ill or dying. A few men were fishing out on the bay. Nobody in this hole of death cared anything about her. She moved on, peering stealthily through the apertures of the huts. What she saw staggered her, but she went doggedly on till she came upon some blackened water vessels. She knelt down to drink—the water was afloat with skating insects—joyous, horrible things, dancing on the water of dying men!
She picked up one of the vessels, and went searching till in one empty hut she found some matches and a pot of rice. With her spoils she wandered down the sandy coast to the shelter of a great rock, where, after much diffused effort, she contrived to make a fire of driftwood.
Drowsing upon the sand, she waited for her meal to cook. The thought of leaving this ill-omened spot had already occurred to her, but vaguely and accompanied by the presentiment of obstacles facing her. First, she had no clothes; one could not walk out into the city in an underskirt with a rag over one’s head. Then, she could not reason out where she was to go or what she was to do, if she did go out. Last, hidden in the back of her brain, and not yet presenting itself fully to light, was an insuperable obstacle. Some unknown fettering chain was binding her—she knew that she could not go.
She drank thirstily of the hot boiled water, consumed a part of the rice, and dropped asleep on the sand under the rock.
Again came the torture of the same dream, the hard wrenching out of drift land; it was morning when she awoke—dim morning, before the sun. The first thing her eye lighted on was the vessel of rice. She reached out and ate heartily of it. Then she rose, and walked through the gray shadows of her monstrous world.