“So might you—but there was destiny. I chose Manila for many reasons—some of them hardly definable. There was something from the first that spoke out to me from it, that whispered from every one of its old stones—an atmosphere of profound human struggle, as if for centuries the place had been battling with forces that go back into the dark borderland of human genesis. The human spirit at its darkest, lowest ebb. It seems to me that is the curse that we have come to lift—the curse of the whole East.”
“Have you been here very long?”
“Almost since the beginning, the Year One with us—” He rested his arm upon the surface of the wall, and looked across at the stretches of singing waters just beyond.
“Would you like to hear how I came?”
Her eyes sparkled. “Everybody’s been telling me to-night how they happened to come, but most of all I want to hear about you.”
“It was fate with me. I was shipwrecked off the coast of Mindanao in a typhoon. I had been trading up and down the East, here and there, with headquarters in China. I had been round the earth, and I had seen most of the cities, but I had never seen the one that I believed was my particular fate. I’d always had ideas of what I wanted to do in the world, but I’d never gotten much nearer than dreaming them. Then came the shipwreck and the whole New World for me. We were rescued by the Moros and were traded round among them for a while. They led us along the tops of stony mountains and told us every day when the sun went down that that was the last of it we would ever see. A couple of our men died. After we’d been led about for months and our datto had made up his mind to kill us, his force was attacked by another chieftain. We bolted straight into the jungle, and nearly went crazy getting out. Finally in an open boat we gained the sea, and just drifted until we reached a town where a commercial steamer had put in. I got aboard, and came upon this city, and here in this unexpected corner of the earth I found my countrymen engaged in the biggest thing I’d ever seen.
“I knew right off that it was here that I belonged, and that this city was my fate. A boat was going out for Shanghai with the captain of it a friend of mine, and he wanted to take me on; my affairs had been going well across the China Sea. But I told him good-by—I had decided to take my chances along with the rest of my people.
“I started in with a trading company that knew my firm, and I showed them what I’d learned about selling goods to the Chinese—you see I knew all the big Chinese concerns. I got to be a partner and then I bought the other fellows out—and so I came to do the things I’d set my heart upon. I’m Irish, you see, Irish-American, and my heart had burned with all sorts of things.
“And you?” he interrogated suddenly. “Did those green eyes lead you East? They are like the jade of a temple god—the color of the farthest reach of the sky.”
Julie smiled dreamily. “When I was a child this same ocean used to flow in from across the world and tell me stories of some of the lands it touched. I knew a long time ago that I was to come.”