Confronting her lay that sordid bit of doomed coast, those crazy huddled huts shaken by the winds of devastation and hiding the terror of death. Across her path a human body lay stark, like a dead fish on the sand. The creature had died there in the night, and no one had come to bury it. She was seized with the frantic impulse to get out of this malevolent place as quickly as possible. She walked past the huts, and heard again the moaning sounds. She stopped in despair. Why had these people been abandoned to their destruction? Where was the Board of Health? Nobody had come to help—nobody was coming.
She leaned back against the wall, beyond which she had meant to escape. She understood now how far beyond control the plague had swept. She gazed back at the thing on the sand, at the livid face, and empty mask that fixed with its hopeless stare. Everywhere somebody was staying to see it out.
Suddenly the complete chain of her life’s circumstances came sweeping back into her consciousness. She remembered why she was here—the stupendous, ineffectual effort she had made to wrench herself free. And here she was back once more in the old insoluble conditions, with nothing changed—up against the same uncombatable odds, dumped here on this spot by a leveling, inconjectural fate, lost among the lost! Her constant use of that odious drug had insured her against the full fatality of the morphine dose. She should have remembered that she would need far more than any one else.
It did not occur to her to try again. The horror of that Outside Struggle still darkened her mind. There was no chance in the world she would not take rather than risk again those unnameable terrors. It had been made absolute that she must go on—even though there was no hope: to struggle and still struggle, to the end. She stood there against the wall, and tried to face once more the relinquished battle.
The moment when resolution came engulfed the world.
Before it these creatures and their tragedy grew dim and the Plague was wiped out. She shook away the tears that had fallen on her face, and walked back to the huts.
A glance through the holes that answered for windows sufficed to reveal the extremity her life had touched. But before the decision at the wall, she had already embraced the plague; before reason had found the courage, an inner self had already stretched forth her hand. And thus began the sojourn in the Pavilion—among dying men.
In sheer surrender beyond belief the creatures gave up to die. The girl did what she could: boiled water, cooked food, cared for the sick, attempted to clean up the wretched community. The bodies were buried along the shore, till Julie managed to get a frenzied appeal through to the Board of Health.
Finally, native servants of the Board came and took charge of the bodies, assisted half-heartedly in cleaning out the dirt, left medicines and food, and promised a doctor—who never appeared. They stood themselves in deadly fear of the cholera, and knew that in the general panic they would scarcely be held to account for this wretched spot. They told Julie that the cholera suddenly, like smoldering fire fanned to flames, had broken out from end to end of the city. Always in cycles of time the Plague had come to sweep them to destruction but never before as now. Terrible was the will of God over his little men. The Americans were taking it too, they said. There were not doctors enough to cope with the pest; certainly—when honest men were stricken—none were to spare for this rogues’ nest. The Americana who was so singularly situated—ought, they thought, to be looking out for herself. It did not matter what happened to this spawn of Beelzebub, to whom not even Mary in Heaven would stoop.
Julie’s mind burned with the fierce rage of defeat—a pygmy battling along the sands of creation, she seemed to herself. At times the cold horror of it seemed about to crush her; a big, hideous game where, in ceaseless opposition, she moved, and the Plague moved, and the Plague took the pieces—a low, one-sided contest in which the pieces had never a chance. They were trash, floatage on the current of life, but they were human. They—who were in the possession of the miracle of thought—to be swept away like straws by this filthy, insentient thing! At times, she too dropped into their mood of apathy and capitulation, but roused always to fight. She pressed into the struggle her every faculty, conjured from passionate depths forces that had never before seen light. Away back in Nahal, she had cast her soul into the beginnings of this struggle, and it seemed as if the old fervor had come to life and was being put to its crucial test.