Along with the Plague, she fought the Hunger. The fire of the old desire burned often in wild spurts. Sometimes she would pace the sand, crying and clenching her hands, hour after hour. When the delirium of the Hunger was at its worst, she would run madly out into the surf and let the water break over her. There was nothing to lean on, nothing to help!
Then the Plague, with its monstrous fatality, would sweep over her senses, and submerge her personal struggle. With so much misery always before her eyes, she began to lose track of herself. The Plague swallowed up everything; it came finally to stand as the real antagonist of her existence, for it sought to rout the supreme stand her spirit had taken. Deep in her consciousness she cherished a dream of eventual conquest, of a time when inconceivably she should win. Just to beat it back once! For so long it had snatched everything from under her struggling hands. Of this she thought incessantly as she made her rounds doggedly, combating each hopeless moment.
But her creatures continued to die as under a doom of God. Julie felt as if she had come up against the wall of the universe, where against its insensible strength her human will was being shattered.
Her charges, terribly broken, had accepted her as a partner of their dark fate. They dug into their miserable stores, and those of them who had still escaped the Plague went forth on errands of industry or depredation, and returned to pour their spoils into the common fund. What marvel of loyalty always brought them back to the accursed spot, Julie could not fathom.
At night she would steal out in the street, to claim her own soul back for a moment. The streets were the universe. Even the grotesqueries had a way of stumbling out toward the open, as if at the last their wretched beings sought egress to freer spaces. She would stand knitting her brows at the darkness, as if trying to claim some solution out of it. Some time she meant to go away—but where? The silent, empty streets troubled her. Up and down them the gay light of the sun had poured upon brightly passing people; the perfume of baskets of flowers being borne to market before the dew was off the day; the cheery grind of ox-carts milling the golden dust of earth; the lilt of the water-carrier’s song; the rhythmic beat of the washer-women’s bats upon the stones; the flash of paddles, and the swish of glad little boats making down the river to the sea—all this had been part of the immortal stir of life that had made this place for them a paradise of the sun.
Terrible days these were! Sometimes peering out in the daylight, she caught glimpses of the dejected funeral processions, the bearers and mourners bowed down, as if the fate of man were too heavy to be borne. The inconsequence of these lives made them more than ever tragic: they were so humble; they never rebelled. Julie thought that if God had been responsible for such things as these, man would have rebelled against Him ages ago; but it was because man saw his own ancestral mistakes made manifest that he bowed his head without protest to their consequences.
There had been heavy toll taken in the Tondo district. In old newspapers that drifted into her retreat, Julie had read familiar names; and, as the black hearses had dragged wearily by, she knew that they carried many of her old pupils. As she watched them pass, a vision would rise before her of big boys in cheap drill suits and barefooted maidens pondering at the blackboards—poor blundering things, eternally wistful over the courtesies and the wisdoms of the West; Julie wept.
Then she would remember that Chad had called her the little lady goddess of the East. Standing in her ragged camisa, gazing from her walls across the streets, a desire would sweep over her to go and reveal to Chad the heart of the East that she had found far from his haunts.
Where was Barry? The query arose a thousand times in her mind. One of the papers had reported that he had left the city. Isabel, too, she gleaned, had taken herself away. Julie recalled the visit Isabel had made to some secret Island, and the paradise she had conjured up.
Her own disappearance, Julie saw, had apparently not caused a ripple of concern. In this hour of stress, her absence from her own world was not noted. Who, after all, was there to remark it? From the Department, from the Señor, from Barry even, she had cut herself adrift. She had gone away from the Reredos without explanation: but not even had they troubled themselves to discover what had become of her.