HOW AS A MALAY I WITNESS THE CONVERSION OF YOUNG KOPENSKY TO THE COCAINE BUDDHA, LATER WHEN I AM MY AMERICAN SELF THE THIBETAN BOY TAKES ME BEYOND THE NORTH STAR AND SHOWS ME THE TRUE BUDDHA.  
July 6, 2018:—This afternoon Mara sends me to find Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, and report once more. I discover that he has been at work according to his pledge, and with a bricklaying machine. There are more than enough, both of machines and Springfield workers to complete the Street of Past History on time.
And so, this evening, the Kling beauty dawdles through her black wine and cigarettes looking at her father with an indulgent and patronizing squint, completely at ease in the possession of his heart. Though with so many other strains of ancestry, the Malay manner predominates tonight, in her as in him, an outer appearance of super languor, a suggestion of nerve force accumulating 244through long seasons, to be discharged in one day of supreme achievement, or of “running amuck.”
Suddenly Mara asks her father, as though to plague him all she dares and startle him from his languor: “How do I differ from Avanel Boone? We are, for instance, the same age.” He answers without a quiver: “She is a worthy daughter of Black Hawk Boone, except that she will not dye her left hand or wear her hair on her shoulders, and you are a worthy daughter of your father, except that you like to quiz.”
And she opens her eyes and they seem the wide gates of his Prophet’s heaven. And they have, to him, all the dewiness of honest youth. She asks with earnestness:—
“But how do we differ?”
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. 245Avanel’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.
246Yet 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 247am 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.
July 7:—There are not many other Singaporians in the city, and tonight comes an all-Caucasian party except for servants, host and hostess. My amazement about Mara’s attitude 248toward James now ceases. In this company he is a new creature.
The ladies and gentlemen who come in for initiation into that curiosity, a Sumatra chess game are many of them Jim’s most devoted henchmen in Jim’s presumably highly democratic and now triumphant Robin Redbreast Aviation Club. They were deft enough to capture the club for him. They are people of breeding and assurance. As long as it existed, at the house of the Mythical Velaska the most famous yellow dance hall, they set the pace. Tonight they talk openly of their jolly little lynching of Surto Hurdenburg. They talk of how to bring back to town all the malcontents who have left because of the suppression of the Yellow Halls. They speak of them as martyrs and heroes. And then they talk as though they will leave also. With scarcely an exception they belong to Springfield’s senior families, many of whom have been here as long as the Boones, and some of them before the Michaels. Scions of the house of Montague Rock are among them, including Montague Rock, Junior.
By their voices and a thousand impalpable signs I know that, with scarcely an exception, they have been educated out of town at male 249and female finishing schools, on funds or power secured by the secret sale of their hereditary buried gold and buried alcohol. These schools are, obviously, the last stand of American plutocracy, that has grown most subtle in what appears to be its final battle. Here, at this party among friends, with no spies, and in perfect confidence, they use with an exaggerated freedom all the secret codes, passwords, and hints of manner that indicate the hidden masters of the land, the tribes with buried gold and buried alcohol.
They are well grounded in the main books of plutocratic and alcoholic apologetics, one of which has been written by a fellow townsman, and it appears today, in Coe’s Book Store:—“The Graces of Bacchus and Mammon” by Doctor Mayo Sims. Every poet, architect, artist, or musician who in any fine indirect way licks the boots of money, or sings sweetly of strong drink, has their approval. Many such craftsmen have been induced by gentle means to drop a delicate word for Singapore as the ultimate land of real aristocracy, and dangerous but marvelously inspiring cocaine.
Mara’s guests have been taught in these out of town schools to hate our educational 250system from the World’s Fair of our University down to the first grade, ward school. They are taught in their male and female finishing schools that the whole city of Springfield and all such cities are infamously democratic. These children are taught they must not let one tone of voice indicate anything more than a suffering tolerance of that system of which, in this city, Black Hawk Boone is the official head.
As the evening progresses, all this crowd gaily says that Jim’s luck in aviation holds in Sumatra chess, and the ladies whisper in their delicate fashion that they hope he stays lucky when it comes to love.
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, enters late. He says he is tired from bricklaying and slumps into the most conspicuous chair like a second rate actor’s idea of a martyr to patriotism. Michael, the Third, will not play Sumatra or any other chess. He will not bet on any other man’s chess playing. He glares at the merry Jim, or in his general direction. He stalks around, like a stork at a dinner of foxes.
The crowd thins out, and at length the two men are left with Mara, because J. B. Michael, the Third, has not sense enough to go. She 251has given Jim Kopensky every sign and Michael, the Third, no signs at all.
She wants this exquisite scion of the Blacksmith clan to play the game, and take his chance. But he is more at ease in his patriotic overalls, laying bricks to hurry up the final official opening of the Fair, and the Street of Past History.
So she helps Kopensky to back Michael to the door, which is done by a simple process of walking toward him with a certain air.
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.
252The 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 253to 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 254talked 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 prowli............