She went back to her unpacking; but as she drew out the airy charming dresses a sudden dissatisfaction with them seized her. Their expensive beauty was all wrong. She had seen at once that pioneer women garb themselves very plainly for the day’s work—and her work indubitably was to be of the plainest.
For particulars concerning a suitable wardrobe, Julie had consulted a schoolmate back home, the daughter of an army officer, who in her eighteen years had never bought a garment of her own. The inspired inventory they had worked out together Julie might, she now felt, have to reckon with later as a force of fate. Her aunt having been called away to the bedside of a sister, Julie, the reins quite off, had gone in quest of clothes as if she were walking the Milky Way, looking for free stars. She had selected and bought in a glory of mood that beheld the world at her disposal. An exultant thing, this wardrobe of rejoicing garments that fairly caroled the elated moods of youth. Quite the wardrobe with which to set out to conquer the world.
Julie stared at it. The fatality of that delicate mass! Her uncle’s face, aghast at the riddle he appeared to confront in her, rose before her. And the bitter complication of bills that could not be met, huge heedless bills that he had told her in his desperation she must somehow face. There wasn’t a thing in the world he could do for her any more. He would get somebody to lend her the money for the present; which would amount to an actual mortgage upon her existence, with so small a salary and with her agent’s commission to pay. “Poor little Argonaut,” he had called her, “setting out with the intuition of a nineteen-year-old girl as a divining rod of the world, ignorant of the values of money or men!”
Julie closed the door rudely on the dresses, and slipped downstairs to seek brighter diversion in the hot, fragrant world.
She passed admiringly the statue of the Godmother of the New World, standing in her sweeping robes looking out across the sea to the Spanish Main. Splendidly believing Isabel, whose faith in the vision of a Genoese captain gave a new world to men!
Just beyond were two school houses. Julie wondered wistfully if she would be assigned to one of them. It would be very lovely, in this flower-scented spot, right under the shadow of the ancient stone church across the street, to bring wisdom to this people. She smiled at herself. How much of the world’s wisdom had she, young, terribly young thing that she was? She moved meditatively toward the church, scents of tropical flowers on every side of her.
The church was of aged gray and battered stone, with the single white effigy of a saint guarding the worn entrance. There was moss in every crevice of its strong sides, which stood out like great gaunt ribs. Near by, in a wild area of sun-dried grass, was the refectory, ruthlessly severe in its economy of lumber. The resistless fecundity of the tropics encroached upon all this grimness; vines were flowering over the frowning vortices.
Julie stepped through the faded green door. At once the hot world slipped behind her. In the dim shadowiness, she stood staring wonderingly about. She had been in Catholic churches many times, but this was like none of them. The gray pillars were painted with the sunset colors of the East. The dome, full of stars and suns and portraits of the Deity, suggested a rather crowded Mohammedan Heaven. The altar, shining silver twenty feet high, was gorgeously hand-carved, and upon it, in white brocaded satin and pearls, stood Mary. In one of the smaller naves, there was a small statue of Christ, terribly sweating blood.
Julie tiptoed across the bare stone flags. A couple of women were kneeling in the silence, and one or two tragically old men, slowly and painfully with wrinkled hands telling their beads. The women were with child; the old men, their own concern done, prayed for the world.
To the right of the altar, she heard a soft murmur of sounds, where in a side chapel a priest in a black cassock stood by a font administering the baptismal service to a tiny brown baby in a very long pink satin robe. The godmother held the baby, while the barefooted native mother stood apart. Another Christian into the fold! Julie was struck by the priest’s face, the fine pity he turned upon the futile little brown mite.