“But we sweated into our own souls, and they make us sweat for theirs. What were they doing in our eons of advancement? and who is fighting their savagery for them? We are!”
Julie sighed. “They are so eager, so anxious. I get frightened sometimes as I sit before them; they accept me so wholly as their creed. It comes over me that twenty years from now sixty men will be thinking my thoughts. Oh, we’ll get them, sometime—and isn’t it the most splendid work anybody could engage in? To make a race! Why, you and I are sowing the dragon’s teeth, which shall spring up as the generation of light.”
CHAPTER VI
Julie now entered into a phase of existence that she had never before experienced. She was important to quite an extensive number of people, not in the school alone—that was a life apart—but in the delightful world into which she had dropped. A young, trusting, and joyous figure, she stirred Nahal. Even the Major, when she came within his range, emerged from his Hamlet gloom and persuaded his facial muscles into a grim smile. To all the others Nahal was exile; to Julie among so many eagerly attentive people, a number of them men and young, who made a queen of her, Nahal was life translated to some glorious star. Her work seethed in her soul and kept her vivid; all those keen brown boys who were to grow up some day were her star dust, out of which she was to create worlds.
Life is the present, the philosophers have said. To the young men Julie was the eternal feminine, while the magic of their youth stirred hers. She was utterly unused to so much concentrated attention. The earth was abundantly peopled with a kind race. She and her followers spent the evenings on the Calcedos’ balcony, in the midst of an assortment of banjoes, rocking in native hammocks and keeping the night alive. Nothing at all went to sleep, not even the birds irritatedly rustling among the leaves, nor the fireflies, nor the timid Ghecko, who too horrible to be seen by day, crept out of his mysterious retreat and offered his harsh bass voice at very close range; nor Mike the Major’s monkey, across the road at Head-quarters, where he squealed and begged abjectly to be let into the fun; nor the natives drifting in their little boats out on the silver water, with their guitars throbbing softly through the moonlight. Here they swung and strummed, and defied the stars, and wondered—what after Nahal? though into this speculation Julie never entered. She was unqualifiedly satisfied with Nahal. It was a beautiful island, it was paradise, and in it a great many remarkable things were to come to pass.
When she arose in the morning and drew into her nostrils the perfume of the hills, when she came out into that early sunlight that seemed to promise immortal things, when she had a real look into that mysterious womb of nature, the jungle, she was electrified. Everywhere there was so much light; it whetted the desire of living into a passion.
Thus Julie came into closer touch with native life. It revealed itself more fully to her than to the rest of the colony. Through the schools she saw just a little into the native’s heart, the heart of an imperfectly civilized child. She was also by her zeal and indefatigable young strength impelled to go into the night-school work. James had been struggling along with it alone. As she came in out of the darkness, and gazed at that assemblage for the first time, her throat went dry. Seventy-five of them huddled into a room that had been built to accommodate half that number, men and women crowded everywhere and lining the walls! There was something terrible about such an assemblage, something that gripped the heart in a vise; for almost none of them were young, many of them in fact were grizzled and trembling into old age. Their hands were gnarled with hard work, their faces blackened by the sun. Most of them were so poor that a copper spelled existence; yet strangely, incomprehensibly, with some blind hope in their darkened brains, they were here, and, with the stupor of half-civilized drudges, were lifting up their eyes to the emissary before them in fearful, blind appeal.
Julie put her hand over her eyes. “They are looking at me as if I were God,” she thought to herself.
Often when the session was over, James and Julie refrained from meeting each other’s discouraged eyes. All day and then at night, they had struggled with all their young strength to drag a people over a margin. Never-to-be-forgotten nights were those, with the dim lamp flickering above the long rows of benches, and the dark trance of souls groping blindly for the light. They were struggling against forces of the universe that would not be impelled.