upon julia’s return to england in april of 1906 she was greeted with the news of the destruction of san francisco by earthquake and fire. nigel, to whom it had occurred to her to send a telegram from flushing, met her at queenboro’, and, his imagination fired by the great physical drama, it was the first piece of news he imparted. julia, although she was looking straight into a pair of ardent handsome eyes (nigel had recovered his looks, and the subtle marks of time enhanced them), sent her mind on a flight of seven thousand miles to centre about the young american friend that she had so nearly forgotten.
“he must be—let me see—five- or six-and-twenty,” she announced.
“who?” nigel’s eyes flashed.
“a californian i met when he was a boy—mrs. bode’s brother. you can’t mean that everybody was killed.”
“let us hope not. first reports are always exaggerated. but the californians in london are frantic—can’t get a penny on their letters of credit, either. indeed, nothing outside of our own bailiwick has excited us as much as this in many a long day.”
“i felt some big earthquakes in india—”
“oh, nothing like this,” said nigel, who would brook no cheapening of the magnificent panorama in his mind. “with the possible exception of the eruption of mont pelée, this is the most dramatic thing that nature has done in our time. think of it! not a second’s warning. the most important city on the pacific coast and its half million people wiped out. the earth rocking miles of blazing buildings for hours. precipices along the coast plunging into the sea! the hills rolling like grain. jupiter! what a sight from an airship! would that i had been there to see.”
“i don’t fancy you would have seen much from an airship, if there was any smoke with the fire. have you reconstructed all that from bald cablegrams?”
“the bald facts are enough—”
“to have made your imagination happy. i have always said that you would satisfy it yet with a work of pure romance. but i don’t mean to joke. it is too awful. i heard only a confused rumor on the train yesterday. poor dan! but i feel sure that he could take care of himself, and of a good many others—if there was any chance at all.”
“possibly. but enough of horrors. i want to look at you.” (they had a compartment to themselves.) “you must have enjoyed yourself quite as well as you meant to do. i never saw any one so—well—improved, although that sounds banal. it never occurred to me that you could be prettier than when you first came to london, but you are. your eyes—what is it?”
“oh, my eyes have seen things. i have done a good deal more than enjoy myself.”
“have you come back to be the high priestess of some cult?”
“not i. i have sat at the feet of wise men in benares and in persia, and learned—a little. we occidentals are never initiated into the deeper mysteries. they despise—or fear—us too much for that. but even a little of the wisdom of the east must widen our vision and prove an everlasting antidote to the modern spirit of unrest—about nothing.”
“and enable you to forget your friends for four years? we have each had three letters from you and three or four times as many post cards.”
“one secret of enjoying the east is to forget the west. and for at least a year i was intoxicated—drunk is more expressive—with its enchantments. the spell broke in calcutta, where i spent a winter in society. then i went to benares to study.”
“you could have told me as much in a cablegram. what took you to acca?”
“i went to see abdul baha abbas, and investigate the new religion. my master told me of it in india, and i found that in persia, after losing some twenty-five thousand by massacre, it had got the best of its enemies by converting the government. even the women are receiving the higher education. so i went on to headquarters. not that any religion could make a personal appeal to me, but i had an idea about this one. the idea proved to be reasonable, and, accordingly, i have brought you the bahai religion as a present.”
“brought me? what should i do with it?”
“make use of it to your own glory and the benefit of the race. we have always agreed that socialism would never prevail until it acquired a soul. that admirably constructed but unappealing machine needs the bahai religion to give it light and fire; and the bahai religion, sane and practical as it is, needs a good working medium. combined, they will sweep the world. with your skill and enthusiasm, you will find the task congenial and not too difficult. like socialism, the new and practical sort, bahaism must begin at the top and filter down, for it makes its appeal to the brain, to the advanced thinker, to those that feel the need of a religion, but have long since outgrown all the silly old dogmas, with their bathos and sentimentalities, primarily intended only for the ignorant. unity in rights. freedom of the political as well as the spiritual conscience. in other words, the elimination of all that provokes war; which means universal peace. peace. peace. peace. that is the keynote of the bahai religion, as love was intended to be of christianity. all the best principles of the five prevailing religions are incorporated in this, all the barriers between them razed, and all the nonsense and narrow-mindedness left out. and the keynote of all this? knowledge. true knowledge, intellectual as well as spiritual. the universal spread of science and the development of the arts, to war in men’s minds—the real battleground—against the greed of money which makes man so stunted, uninteresting, and miserable to-day. one language, one people, one faith. no hierarchy. good morals and charitable deeds as a matter of course. the worship of one god, and the universal peace, to be founded in the centre of the civilized world. unity and peace! then we are promised that the earthly world shall become heavenly. not in our time. but it will be interesting to help start the ball rolling, and to watch it roll. every man is supposed to have a latent desire for perfection. there is your cue. there lies the brain of this religion. what a subtle appeal to vanity, man’s primal and deathless weakness! even greed only ministers to it. if i wrote fiction i should take this cue myself, but as it is i have brought it to you. go to acca, get it all at first hand, and write your immortal book.”
“so you did think of me that far?” nigel stared at her, fascinated, but with his man’s ardor checked. in spite of her frank delight in greeting him, the spontaneous friendliness of her manner, she seemed to him incredibly remote. the eyes that looked straight into his had new and unfathomable depths, and he wondered if she had not learned more of eastern lore than she had any intention of admitting.
“of course,” she said, smiling. “and i have speculated a great deal about you. all i know is that you won the n?bel peace prize—a wonderful book! i read it—and your last—in the colonial edition. but i know nothing else about you. have you fallen in love with any one else?”
“no, i have not,” said nigel, crossly, “and i am not so sure that i am still in love with you. i only know that you haunt my imagination and make all other women seem flat.”
“ah! we could be the ideal friends. but hasn’t anything happened to you besides merely writing books and becoming a peer of the realm?”
“oh, yes, i have been discovered by the united states of america.”
“they were long enough about it. but they always get hold of the little men first.”
“well, i might be one of the little ones, judging by the fuss they are making over me. reams of stuff in magazines and the sunday newspapers—all about my ‘great’ works; in which i find myself credited with an assortment of philosophies no two men could carry; at least a hundred attitudes toward life; and incredible designs upon the peace of the world—although still others maintain that i am merely a dilettante aristocrat playing with picturesque material. i am so bewildered that i hardly know what i am myself. some of the adverse criticisms are so good that i forget the writer doesn’t in the least know what he is writing about. the only thing clear to me is that my income is trebled, and that i am offered unheard-of sums (from the modest european point of view) to write for their magazines and newspapers. i have even been invited to go over and lecture, and am promised a unique advertisement: ‘the peer among authors.’ fancy trying to be original after that! i believe i have also a cult—and am making hay while the sun shines; for i am given to understand that crazes don’t last long over there. each of us, as discovered,—sometimes a few of us at once,—is the ‘greatest of modern english authors.’ i should think their own authors would combine, capture the press, and train their guns on us, and their eloquence on their public: it would appear that the american public, in art matters, believes everything it is told long enough and loud enough. far be it from me, however, to complain. it has enabled me to put a new roof on my old castle—as good as an american wife, without the bother—and buy a villa on the riviera—which i am hoping you will consent to occupy with me.”
“not i. you go to acca, and i to my work here. if it hadn’t haunted me, assisted by indignant letters from bridgit, i doubt if i ever should have left the east. but if the east is in my blood, some magnet in the west directed at my brain cells dragged me home. besides, what have i developed myself for? now is the time to find out.”
nigel sighed. “the old order changeth. you women are not far off from getting all you want, no doubt about that, but you will lose more than you gain.”
“from your point of view. it is not what you want. we shall get what we want, which is more to the point.”
“well, i can’t blame you,” said nigel, honestly. “man was bound to have his day of reckoning. for my part i hardly care, being a lover of change, and wanting to see all of this world’s progress it shall be possible to crowd into my own little span. and although you are far from all the old ideals, it would be the more interesting to live with you. i have always had a sneaking preference for polygamy—one wife for children and solid comfort, and one for companionship—to keep a man from roving abroad.”
to his surprise julia colored and a look of distress and apprehension routed the bright composure of her face.
“i should like children!” she exclaimed. “they would not interfere with my work, either. why should they?” then she darted off the track of self. “tell me of ishbel. she is happy, i feel sure, and she has two dear little babies. i am the godmother of the first.”
“yes, but she haunts that shop. it was running to seed without her, and she had no sooner taken hold again than the work microbe woke up. dark doesn’t fancy it, but says there’s nothing for a sensible man to do these days but take woman as he finds her and chew his little cud in silence. he doesn’t forget how both ishbel and bridgit calmly shuffled off their husbands when they had no further use for them.”
“work. i fancy that was the real magnet that brought me back. i revelled—revelled—but the reaction set in like a rising tide, and at last was quite as irresistible. i should have come back before this, but i wanted to remain in acca until i was convinced that the bahai religion was all it attempted to be. go there at once. abdul baha has promised that you shall live in his house. moreover, they want a big author to exploit it in the west before it has been misrepresented and cheapened by the swarm of little writers, always in search of what they call ‘copy.’?”
“i should feel like a bally hypocrite. i’ve no more religion in me than you have. if god is in man, and self is god, then that atom we call self is what is given us to lean on without asking for more. to demand help outside of ourselves is a confession of failure.”
“of course. but how many have penetrated the secrets that far? the majority must have a religion to talk about and lean on. when they get the right one, the world will be a far more comfortable place to live in. that, to my mind, is the whole point. you and i have useful brains, and it is our business to help the world along. in my inmost soul, i don’t care any more for the cause of woman or the rights of the working-class—save in so far as it gives me the horrors to think of any one being cold and hungry—than you care about religion; but i shall work just as hard for both as if i never had had a thought for anything else. now tell me about bridgit.”
