Part 8 (2/2)

From the heap of rags my foot had struck, came moans, and, by the sound of it, awful curses. It was a handless leper. I saw the stumps as they flew at me. Sick with horror, I fled and found an open place.

The light still beckoned. The way was heavy with high, drifted sand. The courage of despair goaded me to the utmost effort.

Forced to pause for breath, I found and leaned against a post. It was a telegraph pole. In all the blackness and immeasurable loneliness, it was the solitary sign of an inhabited world. And the only sound was the wind, as it sang through the taut wires in the unspeakable sadness of minor chords. A camel caravan came by, soft-footed, silent and inscrutable. I waited till it pa.s.sed out to the mysteries of the desert beyond the range of hills.

I began again to climb the path. It was lighter when I crept through a broken wall and found myself in a stone courtyard, with gilded shrines and grinning Buddhas. One image more hideous than the rest, with eyes like glow-worms, untangled its legs and came towards me. I shook with fright. But it was only the dwarf priest--a monstrosity of flesh and blood, who kept the temple. I pointed to the light which seemed to be hanging to the side of the rocks above. He slowly shook his head, then rested it on his hands and closed his eyes. I pushed him aside and painfully crawled up the shallow stone stairs, and found a door at the top. I opened it. Lying on a stone bed was Jack, white and still. A woman leaned over him with her hand on his wrist. Her face was heavily lined with a long life of sorrow. On her head was a crown of snow-white hair. She raised her hand for silence. I fell at her feet a shaking lump of misery.

I could not live through it again, Mate--those remaining hours of agony, when every second seemed the last for Jack. But morning dawned, and with the miracle of a new-born day came the magic gift of life. When Jack opened his eyes and feebly stretched out his hand to me, my singing heart gave thanks to G.o.d.

And so the crisis was safely pa.s.sed. And the hateful science I believed was taking Jack from me, in the skilful hands of a good woman, gave him back to me.

The one comfort left me in the humiliation of my petty, unreasoning jealousy--yes, I had been jealous--was to tell her.

And she, whose name was Edith Bowden, opened to me the door of her secret garden, wherein lay the sweet and holy memories of her lover, dead in the long ago.

For forty long and lonesome years she had unfalteringly held before her the vision of her young sweetheart and his work, and through them she had toiled to make real his ideals.

I take it all back, Mate. A career that makes such women as this is a beautiful and awesome thing.

In spite of all my pleadings to come with us, Miss Bowden started once again on her lonely way across the wind-swept plains, back to Europe and her work, leaving me with a never-to-be-forgotten humility of spirit and an homage in my heart that never before have I paid a woman.

I am too polite to say it, but I have had a taste of the place you spell with four letters. Also of Heaven. Just now, with Jack's thin hand safely in mine, I am hovering around the doors of Paradise in the house of the boys in Kalgan. If you could see the dusty little Chinese-Mongolian village, hanging on the upper lip of the mouth of the Gobi Desert, you would think it a strange place to find bliss. But joy can beautify sand and Sodom.

Yesterday my hosts made me take a ride out into the Desert. Oh, Mate, in spots these glittering golden sands are sublime. My heart was so light and the air so rare, it was like flying through sunlit s.p.a.ce on a legless horse.

Life, or what answers to it, has been going on in the same way since thousands of years before Pharaoh went on that wild lark to the Red Sea. Every minute I expected to see Abraham and Sarah trailing along with their flocks and their families, hunting a place to stake out a claim, and Noah somewhere on a near-by sand-hill, taking in tickets for the Ark Museum, while the ”two by two's” fed below. I never heard of these friends being in this part of the country, but you can never tell what a wandering spirit will do.

Jack is getting fat laughing at me. But Jack never was a lady and does not know what havoc imagination and the spell of the East can play with a loving but lonesome wife. And take it from me, beloved, he never will. Nothing gained in exposing all your follies. He sends love to you. So do I--from the joyful heart of a woman whose most terrible troubles never happened.

PEKING, February, 1912.

_Mate_:

I do not know whether I can write you sanely or not. But write you I must. It is my one outlet in these days of anxious waiting. I have just cabled Billy Milton, in Nebraska, to come by the first steamer. I have not an idea what he will do when he gets to j.a.pan, or how I will help him; but he is my one hope.

Yesterday, on our arrival here, I found a desperate letter from Sada San, written hurriedly and sent secretly. She finds that the man Hara, whom her uncle has promised she shall marry, has a wife and three children!

The man, on the flimsiest pretest, has sent the woman home to clear his establishment for the new wife. And, Mate, can you believe it, he has kept the children--the youngest a nursing baby, just three months old!

One of the geisha girls in the tea-house slipped in one night and told Sada. She went at once to Uncle and asked him if it was true.

He said that it was, and that Sada should consider herself very lucky to be wanted by such a man. Upon Sada telling him she would die before she would marry the man, he laughed at her. Since then she has not been permitted to leave her room.

The lucky day for marriage has been found and set. Thank goodness, it is seventeen days from now, and if Billy races across by Vancouver he can make it. In the meantime Nebraska seems a million miles away. I know the heartbeats of the fellow who is riding to the place of execution, with a reprieve. But seventeen days is a deadly slow nag.

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