He is overwhelmed at Jim’s assurance and vital power. But Jim is one of those whom love makes a man for an hour in a lifetime. As I open the door for the exquisite Michael, I divine Mara’s pity for him. But what can a woman do? No proud Singaporian can have mercy on an unmagnetic fool. It is not a conspiracy against the loser. It is an elemental contest. This red oriental heart is for the man who wins this doorstep fight. Religion and destiny wait. And J. B. Michael, the Third, of his own weakness goes out the door in defeat.
But Mara, having, without an uttered word, chosen this James Kopensky for what she can make of him, turns at once to the cocaine Buddha around the corner of the hall. Religion comes next.
The triumphant Jim follows her thought. He takes a candle from the table. He holds it in front of the august image, that seems to him more like green air than glass. He bows, the complete devotee before that ironical god whose doctrines are absurd, even to me, though I am for a season in a Malay mind. But what doctrines are not absurd to that soul that refuses to receive them?
Jim blows out the candle, and with it his former life, and, in intention, every western desire, and all for the glory of the holy islands of southeast Asia. He relights the candle at a taller one that is burning in front of the image.
Just then a telegram comes. Later I am reproved for letting the boy make the turn in the hall that enables him to see Crawling Jim light the candle. It is a real telegram, that has to do with an out-of-town lecture to be given by the Man from Singapore, on “The Republic of Letters.” And so the lord of the house comes in for it, reads it, and signs. The boy is not hustled to the door. He lingers. Our little ceremony is quite interrupted.
At last the slow youth goes. He is the son of a Japanese Industrial Commissioner to the World’s Fair. It seems that this man and the Chinese Commissioner are sufficiently Asiatic to understand my master, and their subterranean feud with him and his ally, Old Montague Rock, never has an end. The Man from Singapore says: “They must have had their spy at the party tonight. And this telegram has been delayed as part of their game.”
And so, soon after, the flustered Jim bids his lady a devout good evening.
July 8:—Mara has been nervous about the Springfield fortunes of her accepted suitor all day, but he reports this evening that there is no cause for apprehension, that he has not noted one more fluttering eyelid than usual today. He is still in place, in Springfield.
Then Mara makes ardent haste to talk with Jim of the religion into which he took a decisive, if interrupted, first step last evening. There is a bit of a suppressed strain and the harshness of argument in her voice, as though she were debating with all Springfield, though Springfield is not here. She is showing Jim that the Singaporian aversion to white, colorless things, is in no way unreasonable, since the religion was born in a sweet shadowed jungle. The whitest thing to be found in such a woods is the patch of dried grass in the opening of the trees under the blasting rays of the noonday sun. The living creature who lingers there must die. The prophet had talked so long to the religious beasts that he learned the inner wisdom of this fear. By listening long to their stories and their teachings, white came to mean the death of the soul to him. When he returned to Singapore and preached his first sermon that shadowy evening on the Raffles plain, proclaiming the religion of night, the religion of prowling, of rich wines and sweeping hanging moss, he gave them the Holy Green Glass Idol, and extended the doctrine of the fear of whiteness. It was there revealed to him, as he spoke with inspiration, that the whiter the silver, the whiter the horse, the whiter the armor, the whiter the plume, the more dangerous the foe. And so Mara assures Jim that all the deadliest enemies of the faith will come in the open noonday, dressed in white. If Singapore conquers all things white, and all the noonday races of men it will win the world. If once it falls before an army in white, it will be utterly annihilated, and the Holy Religion of Cocaine will perish from the earth.
Mara asks Crawling Jim if this is not perfectly reasonable, as doctrine and as prophecy. He falls before her. He embraces her golden knees with his crazy arms. He says it is perfectly reasonable, as doctrine and as prophecy.