“There are plenty of others for them. If Barry were pinned to one little circle how could he wander off to all the places he’s sent to at a moment’s notice—like China, and India and Annam? If there were mumps in his circle, how could he attend to cholera in the larger circles?”
“Well, we’ll have to let you have him, I guess,” Mrs. Calixter amusedly remarked. She glanced at Julie’s thoughtful face. “This young person is on her way this minute to her fate, and I don’t in the least like it that a certain red-haired person has the settling of it. Maxwell and George have had a difference—so we can’t lift a hand.”
The priest thought for a moment. “I should be only too glad to do anything I could. I know Mr. Maxwell—but whether any word of mine would count with him, I can’t say. At least I can make the effort. If you can wait a few moments I will go into Father Algus’s office, and write Mr. Maxwell a note.”
When they had stopped in front of the Observatory, Father Hull bade them good-morning, begging leave to send out the note on the plea of his many pressing engagements.
After he had gone, Mrs. Calixter remarked with anxiety, “He doesn’t look well. He’s been told again and again to take a trip home. He used to be very strong, but he has gone through many ordeals and borne the brunt of fearful hardship in this new place. His soul has never wearied; it’s on fire like all the others, but his body is showing the strain.”
She added: “While we were waiting for you to come out, he told me of your meeting of yesterday, and he said that he thought you were too young to follow the trail.”
Julie waited in an outer room while the chief of education interviewed personally a long stream of predecessors. These faces showed a great deal of earnest purpose—the fervor of the empire builders, which Julie had begun to recognize; and yet these people were not to remain in Manila, but were to go out to the most distant, unsettled parts of the Islands, to put into execution one of the most stupendous designs ever launched by any government—to put a whole race simultaneously to school.
Julie listened to the reports these people gave of themselves, and of the wild unheard-of places they were accepting as their assignments, and knew that the small salaries could not be the impetus that was sending them, grave but uncomplaining, into far jungles. Of course they yearned to remain in Manila. They had heard strange tales of the provinces, and knew that more than one of the number trudging their missionary way had been murdered; but they had cast in their lot with the colony, and it was all in the day’s work. A strange, intangible spell had caught their souls, and it seemed that the fervor of it must set things aflame.
When Julie’s turn came, she found herself confronting an astonishingly tall man with a huge florid head. The education of several millions of beings was the present concern of that head, which gave evidence of the magnitude of the problems confronting it. In times such as these, men are often shot suddenly from commonplace experience into the most enormous undertakings. In this case the call appeared to have been too quick. The man was arrogant in his power, but flustered over his responsibility. All day he had been dealing with a complexity of human desires, which in almost every instance had conflicted with his own. Julie stepped into the moment of greatest tension.
There was a great map on the wall, a scroll of fate to which the Superintendent referred in making his assignments. There is nothing alluring in a map ever, but this one seemed particularly bleak and strange. The Superintendent frowned at it. “I haven’t decided yet, Miss Dreschell, just where I’ll send you,” he observed in an olympian manner.