He defies those eyes. He says: “Both have dark hair, but Avanel’s is straight like that of the Japanese, and yours is a storm cloud about your head.
“But how do we differ? You need not deny you have studied that girl like a book. I have seen you watching her as though she were a growing scorpion, looking her over and over, at the Gordon Craig Theatre.
“She is no scorpion, but an artless child. Her eyes are blue. Your eyes are black. Avanel’s skin is white and rose. You are more golden than any coin, or any sunrise. That is the difference.” And he smiles with an air of mock finality.
But there is more difference and my American soul fights my Malay body and mind, as I apprehend this distinction, while they argue of other matters. I find torturing the very depths of me, that which loves Avanel, though I lie in this Malay grave. Yet the comparison is not all to the advantage of the daughter of Boone.
Avanel follows the most conventional of Vanity Fair and Vogue fashion plates, when not a marching, dancing priestess or an equestrienne in white. The Kling beauty is in her library or in her palanquin wrapped in endless easy swathings of green silk from breast to knee. Her bare shoulders and knees and feet and hands are her father’s pride. He thinks there is nothing like their slender modelling in all the west. She is a singer with the Borneo harp. Avanel in her life as a religious dancer and leader of maiden cavalry and of the Horseshoe Brotherhood, is an unmaidenly horror to Mara, who prides herself on her seclusion. Avanel’s omnipresence on the streets, as the town heroine, seems to Mara America’s most complete scandal.
Yet Mara has often been out in her palanquin, behind that of her father, ostensibly to please him, but actually to see if by chance this hated Avanel will go by. And she has brooded in seclusion over Avanel as much as such a gentle nature can.
Finally, and chiefly, that rare mask, the face of Mara is the same her father wears, and so is half a world away from the open countenance of the lady who carries Daniel Boone’s direct ancestral dagger. Yet there are things readable in the Singaporian countenances. The sincere passion for jungle beauty revealed in the face of Mara can be discerned. The Asiatic necromancy, the instinct for intrigue, is hidden by the innocence of the experiences of her sheltered days, and also, as in the face of her really wicked father, it is hidden by that University air of submitting absolutely to the open finalities of scholarship. And so they will often submit, where Singapore is not concerned. But one would say all Mara’s scholars are poets to her, and of her father all his scholars are statesmen. Each is the other’s flattering image. Each is disarmed in the presence of the other, artless and fond and kind.
She continues this evening by talking frankly with her father about her suitors. I am as a well worn article of furniture. My ears do not trouble her. Are we not all members of the order that has sworn in a great whisper to conquer the world in the name of the holy green glass image that dwells in the temple on the far off Raffles plain?
She asks her father which man will be of the greater service to Our Lord of Cocaine? Will it be the son of Slick Slack Kopensky, Crawling Jim:—or Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, who thinks he has converted my good mistress to Mary of Bethlehem and all the saints of the western heaven. Shall she do lip service to his faith, when he is present, till the day of all days when Singapore ceases to whisper and comes roaring against the world? Or shall she take Crawling Jim for all time?
She is remarkably interested in both men. I am all curiosity over her tenderness for Jim. She calls him James. To be sure, he has undertaken a perilous thing for a son of Springfield. He has already discarded the wearing of anything white.