“They brought Calmiden over here for trial, and high-ranking officers came down from Manila. I don’t know what took place, but they say his men stood around him in an invincible and impenetrable wall of evidence, and he was acquitted. But he will never be the same Kenneth again.
“Do you know, I think that somehow this place has recoiled on us, Julie. We hated it and stood aloof from it. We despised the people and made gods of ourselves. You remember I used always to call them niggers—I thought I was showing the superiority of my birthright that way; and not one throb of this life here ever touched Calmiden’s soul. Did any of us have any soul, particularly, in it? Weren’t we the dead wood on a mighty, struggling stream? I don’t know about you—what has happened to you; but I used to think there was something different about you, for all your seeming to take no real interest in anything here, save Calmiden—and Adams, a little.
“The regiment is soon to sail for home. Be sure to look us up, as we come through.”
Julie dropped the letter in her lap. She leaned forward on her knee, and her mind went wandering over the stretches of the past. So this was the message of Nahal—all there was ever to be; of that Nahal which had caused her soul’s difficulties. She pondered deeply the whole immense problem. Had it been her individual problem, set for her to solve—her fragment of eternal purposes to prove? How utterly she had blundered and drifted along, evading the particular, crucial nonconforming bit of the universe that she had perhaps come into life to subdue. Even when aware of her flaming objective, she had dallied weakly and wastefully in easy and uninspired areas of life. Stupidly she had let her fire die out, and her being go to waste.
Once she had been offered the choice of her ideals or Calmiden, and she had chosen Calmiden, though he was the antagonist of all her stirring beliefs. For a passing whim of passion, she had flung her sublimest convictions to the winds. That there were punishments for such perfidies of spirit she had come tragically to comprehend. She had halted and turned, given up—letting the things she had made a Covenant with go back to fate unaccounted for.
None of these men she had known here would have turned back, at any cost; as agents of the future, of the whole onmoving universe, nothing had counted with them—not happiness, nor life, nor love; while she had demanded insistently and supremely her human happiness, and, failing to obtain it, had let go, like the rest of the derelicts of life: and there the East had stepped in to capture her, as inevitably it captured all of her mood.
With here and there little flashes of eternal verities overwhelming her, she sat and thought more profoundly than ever she had thought in her life. She wanted to probe to the bottom and release the last vestige of the illusion of the past. Those few words of Mrs. Smith stood out like flame against her brain: “This place has recoiled on us—because we hated it, and stood aloof.” Julie felt this sink into some deep, almost inaccessible place, and come forth again.
That was the key to the long mystery. That was the key to her. She remembered how contemptuous her friends in Nahal had all been of the work in hand, how anxious they had been to be rid of it—except her. She covered her face with her hands: all but her! She had clung to Nahal as a glory for herself—as a universe for a small and exhilarantly inflated ego to expand in. Her sincere energies had borne fruit, but too often she had brushed aside all that had not colored her adventurous fancy. Turned in upon herself, she had skimmed fruitlessly this brown well of being. A psychological Alexander taking by assault the soul of Asia. In what a halo of Eastern colors she had planned to do that! She had chosen the East as a stage for her personal grandeur. She had expected a superlative destiny somehow to be handed out from it.
But from the East’s dark face and blunted mind she had actually always shrunk; and as that foolish little woman, in a moment of tremendous wisdom, had pointed out, the East had recoiled upon her and pulled her down with ruthless irony to its lowest levels. Mrs. Smith might as well have said the universe, which demands atom for atom of energy, ounce for ounce of force.
Then had come the inscrutable forces, which had taken up her life and threshed it mercilessly to the point of death, and winnowed it out. The Great Law had taken her in hand, broken her old self to bits, and of the pieces transmuted a form to its ends. In order to come truly into life, she had first to be destroyed! She felt a thrill of the old exhilaration to have at last found the way.