Julie turned into the Boys’ School, now her responsibility, while Miss Hope crossed the street. Miss Hope, Julie learned, had several native teachers to help her; whereas one ex-soldier was the only assistant she had with over a hundred boys. Brown boys of every age and stature were filing past her up the stairs. The airy tropical structure rocked to its foundation under the onsweeping surge of youth. Julie looked out at the golden morning, and her thoughts glowed. She felt equal to any enterprise in creation.
Mr. James was a well educated young man, who had come out to fight for his country; and who had stayed behind like others of his countrymen to experiment. He was not a regularly certificated teacher, but he was a good instructor and had been making remarkable progress with the older boys, with whom Julie could see he yearned to continue. The younger ones were not advancing, James confessed; his one ambitious idea having been to turn out candidates for scholarships in America.
Julie offered to take over the junior classes. Her sixty aspirantes filled every nook and corner of the room; sixty funny little brown creatures, fresh from their morning dip in the river, sitting like wet little birds in quivering expectancy. Julie glanced over the rows of brown heads:—the people that the Caravan in its long march had left behind. The boys put their heads down on the desks, like little setters, and stared. One hundred and twenty black beads peered up at her. She was beginning to be disconcerted, when a delightful little savage with hair standing up stiffly all over his head, like a circular brush, detached himself from the brown mass, and, moved by some aberrant impulse, strayed barefoot up to Julie’s desk and irrelevantly laid upon it a rooster’s long, bedraggled tail feather. Having consummated this act of tribute, Delphine, who was to become his teacher’s undying friend, stole back.
Seized by an idea, Julie drew a picture of the feather on the board. The class sat up and inspected this feat. Having a knack with a pencil, she elaborated the feather into a rooster. A murmur of recognition and pure delight passed through the class. The bird on the board was a national idol. Unwittingly and quite by chance she had captured their interest.
In a few days they were chanting glibly of the rat and the cat and the permanently unpleasant relations between the two, soaking in learning by means of their incredible memories, and wrestling musically with the dark, mystic bars of the Star Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
James taught mathematics, and almost nothing else. He had a passion for numbers, which he taught dogmatically as the whole science of life. His boys had been shot dazedly through fractions, and were now halting awestruck before the heights of geometry. The fact and values of the universe astounded their unaccustomed minds. Their island had been their center of existence, and in this painful trepanning, their brains gaped before the marvels and terrors of higher human thought. These incipient philosophers, much perturbed, used to seek Julie out to ask her to explain a little the metaphysical net in which they found themselves fast. They were troubled terribly in their souls, and Julie, ignoring geometry, and all the equations of men, would seek with her fore-shortened philosophies to set these simple minds right; but she could see that they were not quite satisfied. There was no doubt about it that the boys, still unsettled in their minds, went to the priest, who received a very garbled version of her explanations.
Julie’s own little boys were in their seats an hour before school opened, exhilarantly scratching their meager little life experiences on their slates, or debating with one another in bragging English. They loved the school, and lived in it in a state of expectant excitement. Like little charmed birds they sat, while Julie explained what became of the sun when it went away, and the wonderful journey they were at that moment taking around it; whereupon the boys would feel their desks for the barest fractions of the movement of this celestial merry-go-round. They had an inordinate love of fairy tales, and listened—poor little earth-grubs—with widened eyes to the recounting of battles and heroes of far-away places of the world.
Julie never forgot those days. She could shut her eyes long afterwards and see the monsoon bowing the banana trees and scattering to the universe the golden host of the sacred tree of India, rushing with its wild force to up-root their little tropical world. The boys still sat in her memory in quivering wonder before the miracles of the cosmos. The archipelago could never again be the limit of their consciousness; it strayed now over the whole wide earth.
But it was hard work through hot long days for a boy and a girl, and the minds they were pulling out of savagery caught half-way. To pull them up to the tidal mark of civilization would take years, and it was just this staggering task that these two confronted. With their buoyant young shoulders heaving at the wheel, James would despairingly exclaim: “It can’t be done. The whole race is stuck right here.”
Julie would set her teeth. “But they’ve got to go through! The rest of humanity’s done it. Remember they’ve had only a few hundred years, and look at the eons back of us!”