  Located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), SXP214 is an X-ray pulsar in a
high mass X-ray binary system with a Be-star companion. A recent survey of the
SMC under a Chandra X-ray Visionary program found the source in a transition
when the X-ray flux was on a steady rise. The Lomb-Scargle periodogram revealed
a pulse period of 211.49 +/- 0.42 s, which is significantly (>5sigma) shorter
than the previous measurements with XMM-Newton and RXTE. This implies that the
system has gone through sudden spin-up episodes recently. The pulse profile
shows a sharp eclipse-like feature with a modulation amplitude of >95%. The
linear rise of the observed X-ray luminosity from <~2x to 7x10^35 erg s^-1 is
correlated with steady softening of the X-ray spectrum, which can be described
by the changes in the local absorption from N_H ~ 10^24 to <~10^20 cm^-2 for an
absorbed power-law model. The soft X-ray emission below 2 keV was absent in the
early part of the observation when only the pulsating hard X-ray component was
observed, whereas at later times both soft and hard X-ray components were
observed pulsating. A likely explanation is that the neutron star was initially
hidden in the circumstellar disk of the companion, and later came out of the
disk with the accreted material that continued fueling the observed pulsation.
