Crowds were now streaming all over the decks. The greetings of long separations everywhere. Julie saw joyous laughter and frank tears. Some of the men had come in from the wilderness where peril and disease were daily fortune, and their white faces and emaciated forms startled their womenfolk; others were strong and brown, and conquest and construction hung upon their brows like a kind of fever. Julie looked carefully at them all as at an index page of what lay before her. After having begun to feel that she had come to the end of the earth, she took courage. It was brought forcibly to her that America had come into the East to do something actual—that she had raised her standards of democracy among ancient kingdoms, and would stir them to their foundations.
As far back as she could remember Julie had felt the lure of Great Adventures. In ardent lyric imaginings she had, from childhood up, seen herself following always the rapture of unbeaten tracks. The Golden Gate, with its shimmering allure opening upon the promise of strange lands, had always been the biggest emotion in her life. The wind that blew up from it had been a messenger summoning her across that sparkling water to the freedom that lay beyond those ports of dreams.
Staring at the simplicity and the strength of these people of the New World, she wondered if her slim credentials would hold among them. She was not really what they wanted here—a trained artisan. Somehow she had managed to slip by in the stress of the moment. It was her own desperate determination to balk all efforts to keep her under dominance at home that had brought her to this goal. It had developed that she was fitted for nothing in an organized society. Her music, her languages, her sense of existence were all too fragmentary to negotiate.
But it had transpired that there was another world where matters of existence were not so stringent—and since few had seemed inclined to hazard them, Jepton’s Teachers’ Agency had let her pass on the certificate of Miss Blossom’s School, which had been good for nothing else. In a breathless transport, she had signed herself to service in our colonial possessions across the seas. There was a salary, of course—ten per cent. of which for the first year went to Jepton’s; a rather inadequate stipend, it had been prophesied, for colonial existence. But to the reality of this Julie had given no thought. She was a woman at last—with an original face and a surprising faculty for seeing splendor in everything. Just the kind of person whose naïve encounter with the world makes history.
Two people who looked very nice indeed were standing off regarding Julie with fixed earnestness; a stout and agreeable man with a thin, transparently amber little lady. Could it be possible that there were friends for her also on these strange shores? The lady presented herself as Mrs. Calixter, and her husband as an old friend of Mr. Dreschell’s.
Julie recollected that when her uncle had been forced to recognize the power of fate he had written to a friend in Manila who was Collector of the Port, and asked the good offices of himself and his wife for Julie. Mr. Calixter told her that he and her uncle had been college friends—a long time ago; but that, in these pioneer days, she was given to understand, was a tremendous bond. They informed Julie hospitably that she should remain with them till she discovered what was to become of her.
No one over here, Mrs. Calixter explained, had a definite idea of the next moment. One’s fortune lay in flux. Nothing had yet completely taken shape. The great project unraveled daily out of destiny and a few men’s minds. Fighting was still going on in some of the islands. The khaki-clad men coming aboard were from those distant, disordered places, and one could see on their gaunt faces the shadow of menace and loneliness. The men in plain white clothes had their struggle too in the making of a civilization overnight.
An impression of precariousness and uncertainty was conveyed to Julie, as if she were about to set foot upon a forming planet amid widespread restlessness of soul. If she had dreamed of the improbable, it seemed reasonable that it would transpire here. In such a place, amid such conditions, ordinary ordered emotions dropped out of sight. The living of men here was creative, and at high pressure.
The invitation of the Calixters was a godsend to Julie. She had been completely vague as to what to do with herself. For the moment, anyway, she was fixed among these mutabilities.
Launches carried them up the river, past the fort that once held single-handed the white man’s empire of the Pacific. The stream, meandering to the sea with provoking deliberateness, carried on its back a strange host, a fantastic floating humanity ceaselessly and inconjecturably drifting in craft that looked like dolphins borne from the sea of legends; upstanding boatmen in peaked hats prodding tiny canopied boats like ivory toys against the stream, amid the gayeties of the city; trading vessels south-bound for pearls or spices perhaps, with swart crews, and Eurasian captains on the bridges.