THE GREEN GOD'S
PAVILION
A NOVEL OF
THE PHILIPPINES
BY
MABEL WOOD MARTIN
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1920, by Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved,
including that of translation
into foreign languages.
TO
MY HUSBAND
THE GREEN GOD'S PAVILION
CHAPTER I
Trembling in a fervor of joy the girl confronted it. Everybody in the
excitement of arrival was trying to crowd her away from the packed
railing of the vessel, but she managed to get her glimpse of that magic
reality--one of those golden far Eastern cities that she had dreamed
of all her life on the other side of the world. Its glittering towers
and domes, bursting out of the garden of the equator, pointed to a
sky clear enough to be heaven itself. Here long ago East and West
had first gloriously mingled; once this city of golden galleons had
commanded all the cities of the Pacific. To so many a conquistador
it had been the end of the rainbow! To the girl gazing out on its
fiercely sunlit walls it held the secret of the future.
In the launches skurrying up alongside the vessel, Julie saw the eager,
expectant faces straining for a glimpse of friends or kin. As she
looked down, this new universe seemed suddenly to sit on her head like
a red-hot ball. She felt a moment's stifling sense of its weight. This
was the world to which she had come, seeking a place. Those towers and
domes, piercing glittering space like swords and scimitars, appeared
suddenly to intimate that some special passport was needed to enter
this world. And she had not lived long enough in the universe to feel
at home anywhere she might be. Her detached existence under her uncle's
roof, always out of touching distance with the family, had engendered
that feeling of isolation. She had been a superfluous personality,
outside the magic circle, and had kept to the farthest retreat of
that unfriendly house of life--a vivid little hermit groping around
the walls of her own chamber for the fourth dimension. Hopelessly
rigid that old universe had been--and immutable--till one day it had
astonishingly crumbled, as if by some special decree.
Julie was here on this vessel, looking out in trepidation on a remote
and inconjecturable land, because her uncle's affairs, always quite
prosperous, had broken on the rocks of investments. Out of the wreck
she had emerged into a dizzy independence. It had devolved upon her to
take charge of herself somehow--the verdict of her life! The walls had
burst forever. To own one's self! To claim unhindered a whole patch
of the universe! Beyond there, in that city of pearl-circled walls,
a trans-section of existence was hers.
Crowds were now streaming all over the decks. The greetings of long
separations everywhere. Julie saw joyous laughter and frank tears. Some
of the men had come in from the wilderness where peril and disease were
daily fortune, and their white faces and emaciated forms startled their
womenfolk; others were strong and brown, and conquest and construction
hung upon their brows like a kind of fever. Julie looked carefully at
them all as at an index page of what lay before her. After having begun
to feel that she had come to the end of the earth, she took courage. It
was brought forcibly to her that America had come into the East to
do something actual--that she had raised her standards of democracy
among ancient kingdoms, and would stir them to their foundations.
As far back as she could remember Julie had felt the lure of Great
Adventures. In ardent lyric imaginings she had, from childhood up, seen
herself following always the rapture of unbeaten tracks. The Golden
Gate, with its shimmering allure opening upon the promise of strange
lands, had always been the biggest emotion in her life. The wind
that blew up from it had been a messenger summoning her across that
sparkling water to the freedom that lay beyond those ports of dreams.
Staring at the simplicity and the strength of these people of the New
World, she wondered if her slim credentials would hold among them. She
was not really what they wanted here--a trained artisan. Somehow
she had managed to slip by in the stress of the moment. It was her
own desperate determination to balk all efforts to keep her under
dominance at home that had brought her to this goal. It had developed
that she was fitted for nothing in an organized society. Her music,
her languages, her sense of existence were all too fragmentary to
negotiate.
But it had transpired that there was another world where matters of
existence were not so stringent--and since few had seemed inclined
to hazard them, Jepton's Teachers' Agency had let her pass on the
certificate of Miss Blossom's School, which had been good for nothing
else. In a breathless transport, she had signed herself to service
in our colonial possessions across the seas. There was a salary, of
course--ten per cent. of which for the first year went to Jepton's;
a rather inadequate stipend, it had been prophesied, for colonial
existence. But to the reality of this Julie had given no thought. She
was a woman at last--with an original face and a surprising faculty
for seeing splendor in everything. Just the kind of person whose
naïve encounter with the world makes history.
Two people who looked very nice indeed were standing off regarding
Julie with fixed earnestness; a stout and agreeable man with a
thin, transparently amber little lady. Could it be possible that
there were friends for her also on these strange shores? The lady
presented herself as Mrs. Calixter, and her husband as an old friend
of Mr. Dreschell's.
Julie recollected that when her uncle had been forced to recognize the
power of fate he had written to a friend in Manila who was Collector
of the Port, and asked the good offices of himself and his wife for
Julie. Mr. Calixter told her that he and her uncle had been college
friends--a long time ago; but that, in these pioneer days, she was
given to understand, was a tremendous bond. They informed Julie
hospitably that she should remain with them till she discovered what
was to become of her.
No one over here, Mrs. Calixter explained, had a definite idea of the
next moment. One's fortune lay in flux. Nothing had yet completely
taken shape. The great project unraveled daily out of destiny
and a few men's minds. Fighting was still going on in some of the
islands. The khaki-clad men coming aboard were from those distant,
disordered places, and one could see on their gaunt faces the shadow
of menace and loneliness. The men in plain white clothes had their
struggle too in the making of a civilization overnight.
An impression of precariousness and uncertainty was conveyed to Julie,
as if she were about to set foot upon a forming planet amid widespread
restlessness of soul. If she had dreamed of the improbable, it seemed
reasonable that it would transpire here. In such a place, amid such
conditions, ordinary ordered emotions dropped out of sight. The living
of men here was creative, and at high pressure.
The invitation of the Calixters was a godsend to Julie. She had
been completely vague as to what to do with herself. For the moment,
anyway, she was fixed among these mutabilities.
Launches carried them up the river, past the fort that once held
single-handed the white man's empire of the Pacific. The stream,
meandering to the sea with provoking deliberateness, carried on its
back a strange host, a fantastic floating humanity ceaselessly and
inconjecturably drifting in craft that looked like dolphins borne from
the sea of legends; upstanding boatmen in peaked hats prodding tiny
canopied boats like ivory toys against the stream, amid the gayeties
of the city; trading vessels south-bound for pearls or spices perhaps,
with swart crews, and Eurasian captains on the bridges.
They landed amid another motley of strange vehicles and stranger
races. The buildings along the wharf were blackened by smoke-stacks
from the Seven Seas. A sun-blistered race of beings, leaning
nonchalantly against pillars and posts, watched, with the deep
tolerance of the East, the influx from the West. This calm, which
was almost awful, gave Julie an uncanny sensation of human futility.
"One of our fine little mornings on the equator," Mr. Calixter
declared, remarking her wilted expression. "You'll get used to them."
As she followed the Calixters to their carriage, a dark-skinned female
in scant attire, smoking a cigar as long as a man's arm, crossed her
path. Julie gasped. So many unclothed creatures going unabashed about
their business staggered her. Eons of consecratedly covered ancestors
suffered violence before this exposure. Mr. Calixter, however, was
of the opinion, as he lifted his plump, perspiring person after her
into the carriage, that for apparel in this climate the human hide
was incomparable. But they should all be colored like Easter eggs,
to tell them apart; he could seldom distinguish one nude brown person
from another. It was just possible that we were dependent to a certain
extent on our clothes for individuality.
They drove up into the city through ancient streets blazoned with
sun-lit, vivid houses, quickened with picturesque and unfamiliar
activities, and flowing with a humanity that lived its whole life
open to the universe.
Ceaselessly, strangely, contrastingly, this amazing humanity throbbed
along the thoroughfares like creatures out of Arabian Nights' Tales:
carters with their carabaos--monstrous beasts of fearful calm,
drawing primitive stone wheels through the dust of ages; turbaned
East Indians with bushy beards, offering ivories and tapestries to
the fantastic houses; brown women in pineapple fabrics, balancing on
their heads baskets of Ylang-Ylang for the manufacture of perfume; a
dwarf negrito, enslaved from the forests of the north; water-carriers;
Chinese rice-peddlers; children playing with absurd, short-tailed
cats; babies taking in life at the curbstone from their mothers'
breasts. Down these streets in poverty, disease, and cheerful blindness
of soul, marched all the races of the East.
Julie gasped at what she saw. The riddle of the universe seemed to
be unfolding before her wondering gaze.
She turned from that strange stream of people with their enigma, their
insoluble mystery, to the houses: such startling houses, intoxicatedly
painted like the sunsets over in the sea, and decorated with all
manner of things--orchids pure as souls; crimson-crested parrots
screaming for the jungle; rain-bow glass; and little dragons' wings.
These were the state chambers of this existence: their chromatic
splendor was reserved for the ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death;
but it was down in the streets that these children of the sun lived
their lives.
There were flashes of queer open shops, cabinets of the curiosities
of the world; showers of wooden shoes suspended from the ceilings;
pink satin coffins; Chinese ginger jars painted with peacocks; brass
church-bells; unleavened bread, universal red pillows, ornamental
brooms that looked like Cleopatra's palm sunshade. Julie passed them
in ecstasy.
Farther on, she had a vision of old walls and moats, and little stone
gates with ancient coats-of-arms above them, and a surprisingly great
number of old stone churches. They were passing now, Mr. Calixter told
her, through the ancient walled city that Legaspi had built. She saw
the priests in their white robes, pacing their high airy galleries,
saying their prayers in the sunlight, above the world. She drew in
with a deep breath the fragrance of the sacred tree of India that
flowered in the monastic gardens.
Pensively, poetically, the conquistador atmosphere still hung over
the heart of the city. Priests and armored captains floated before
Julie's mind. In all the pagan hinterland of the East, this was the
single Christian citadel, attacked throughout the ages by land and
sea by all the savage hordes of darkness.
She stared at the tinted oriental domes rearing above this ancient
Christian city, and felt mingling with its priestly atmosphere the
Eleusinian mystery of the East, as if hidden in this city there were
still unconsecrated shrines.
They passed out of the Walled City with its dark buttresses, its
dungeons, its medievally barred doors, its intimations of eternal
age and impenetrable mystery, to the Calixters' home on the sea.
A rainbow scarf of tropical vegetation trailed over this part of
Manila, and Julie caught glimpses of gardens full of the perfume of
dreams, gardens for whose incredible blossoming all the light in the
sun must have been needed.
At luncheon, she cast her first attentive look at her host and
hostess. Beside the splendor of this new planet unrolling before her,
two individuals had not been compelling in interest.
Mrs. Calixter, it appeared, was a lady from whose being every particle
of flesh had been amazingly subtracted, save just enough to leave
her alive. She had stayed over here to keep Mr. Calixter company,
and in the process had parted ways with her youth. She was very kind,
but very, very tired. This fatigue, she told Julie, had gone down deep,
and would never rest out.
Her husband was plump, and would go good-natured to his grave. Against
such a temperament all climates are powerless. The tropics had
achieved only the rape of his hair. He was so astonishingly bald
that when he removed his hat the effect was one of almost indecent
exposure. The hair that refused to remain on his cranium displayed
itself in perfidious and capricious profusion in his eyebrows, which
locked bushily across his forehead.
Julie felt very jolly and very much at home. Mr. Calixter, during the
course of the meal, waved away the most charming salad of sea-green
cucumbers and curling lettuce leaves. He explained that a lettuce
leaf over here might be a death warrant, as cholera was more or less
present all the time--though that fact could never be impressed upon
the Chinese cook.
Cholera! Julie sat up with a start. In this fairy land could such
a terrible hydra stick up its head? Mr. Calixter told her about a
number of other things that flourished in the islands, things which
she had always categoried as traditions of the Middle Ages--small-pox,
leprosy on beggars' outstretched hands, all the dreadful medieval list!
"It is a hard uphill pull we have before us over here, and the top
of the mountain nowhere in sight." Mr. Calixter looked grave.
"And the natives are fighting us, all over the islands," Mrs. Calixter
remarked, "and doing it in a particularly barbarous and senseless way."
"Have you any idea as to where you are going?" Mr. Calixter demanded.
Julie moved restively: "No--but it all sounds rather awful."
"Well, we're aiming to--and will make this the finest colony
on earth. There are the men here to do it; men with the genius
for pioneering, and a glorious fever to break the wilderness. The
Department of Education is the greatest idea of all. You must remember
that. It is the only thing that will touch the soul of the people. All
the rest, just yet, seems to fall outside."
"There are hosts of interesting people here," said Mrs. Calixter,
smiling cryptically. "People with histories made over night, and
making history themselves splendidly, too. Perhaps you will stay in
Manila. At any rate, you will catch an unforgettable glimpse of--all
this, as you flit through. This afternoon, late, we will drive on the
Luneta, where you will see a cross section of the whole East. Later,
we are to go to a ball. All the empire-builders will be there. So
keep your young soul awake."
After luncheon everybody mysteriously disappeared. Julie was left
alone in the silent, hot, perfumed world. Not a sound came to her
from anywhere; existence seemed suspended. What had become of the
contents of the world?
She decided to open up her baggage--which, thanks to Mr. Calixter,
had already arrived--and lay out the dress she should need for the
evening. After five o'clock, Mrs. Calixter had said, Manila drove
forth in full dress to the Luneta. Julie gathered up a ball gown and
went over to the glass to appraise its relationship to herself. She
was enchanted with the maturity of the garment. Through it she and
the world met at last; it suggested the finally opened door of the
universe in which she was free to find her dreams. She whirled,
a gay dervish, in front of her mirror.
Suddenly she stopped, awed by the strange reflection she saw of
herself. Odd multiplied personages attenuated from it. She couldn't
begin to think that she knew them, though each at an angle offered
some startling familiarity. She had merely wished to exact from
the mirror reassurance of her woman's incontestable inheritance,
but these strange images carried her out of the background of the
glass into a boundless territory of conjecture.
Motionless now she beheld reflected a unique, youthful face framed
by silvery blond hair, with a pair of green eyes of unusual hue,
while flung upon the face, as upon a screen, was an abstraction
of personality like a superimposed self. This abstract personality
revealed itself tangibly, on occasions, in a transfiguration of light
disclosing something inscrutable, eternal, and absolute.
A cryptic sentence of her aunt's flashed through her mind. "There's
a singular thing that comes into your face--" which was followed
by another, "You think, you are strong. It will take many a road
to show you that you are not." That old subjection was over now,
forever. Julie shivered a little.
She went back to her unpacking; but as she drew out the airy charming
dresses a sudden dissatisfaction with them seized her. Their expensive
beauty was all wrong. She had seen at once that pioneer women garb
themselves very plainly for the day's work--and her work indubitably
was to be of the plainest.
For particulars concerning a suitable wardrobe, Julie had consulted
a schoolmate back home, the daughter of an army officer, who in her
eighteen years had never bought a garment of her own. The inspired
inventory they had worked out together Julie might, she now felt,
have to reckon with later as a force of fate. Her aunt having been
called away to the bedside of a sister, Julie, the reins quite off,
had gone in quest of clothes as if she were walking the Milky Way,
looking for free stars. She had selected and bought in a glory of
mood that beheld the world at her disposal. An exultant thing, this
wardrobe of rejoicing garments that fairly caroled the elated moods of
youth. Quite the wardrobe with which to set out to conquer the world.
Julie stared at it. The fatality of that delicate mass! Her uncle's
face, aghast at the riddle he appeared to confront in her, rose before
her. And the bitter complication of bills that could not be met,
huge heedless bills that he had told her in his desperation she must
somehow face. There wasn't a thing in the world he could do for her
any more. He would get somebody to lend her the money for the present;
which would amount to an actual mortgage upon her existence, with so
small a salary and with her agent's commission to pay. "Poor little
Argonaut," he had called her, "setting out with the intuition of a
nineteen-year-old girl as a divining rod of the world, ignorant of
the values of money or men!"
Julie closed the door rudely on the dresses, and slipped downstairs
to seek brighter diversion in the hot, fragrant world.
She passed admiringly the statue of the Godmother of the New World,
standing in her sweeping robes looking out across the sea to the
Spanish Main. Splendidly believing Isabel, whose faith in the vision
of a Genoese captain gave a new world to men!
Just beyond were two school houses. Julie wondered wistfully if she
would be assigned to one of them. It would be very lovely, in this
flower-scented spot, right under the shadow of the ancient stone
church across the street, to bring wisdom to this people. She smiled
at herself. How much of the world's wisdom had she, young, terribly
young thing that she was? She moved meditatively toward the church,
scents of tropical flowers on every side of her.
The church was of aged gray and battered stone, with the single
white effigy of a saint guarding the worn entrance. There was moss in
every crevice of its strong sides, which stood out like great gaunt
ribs. Near by, in a wild area of sun-dried grass, was the refectory,
ruthlessly severe in its economy of lumber. The resistless fecundity
of the tropics encroached upon all this grimness; vines were flowering
over the frowning vortices.
Julie stepped through the faded green door. At once the hot world
slipped behind her. In the dim shadowiness, she stood staring
wonderingly about. She had been in Catholic churches many times,
but this was like none of them. The gray pillars were painted with
the sunset colors of the East. The dome, full of stars and suns
and portraits of the Deity, suggested a rather crowded Mohammedan
Heaven. The altar, shining silver twenty feet high, was gorgeously
hand-carved, and upon it, in white brocaded satin and pearls, stood
Mary. In one of the smaller naves, there was a small statue of Christ,
terribly sweating blood.
Julie tiptoed across the bare stone flags. A couple of women were
kneeling in the silence, and one or two tragically old men, slowly
and painfully with wrinkled hands telling their beads. The women were
with child; the old men, their own concern done, prayed for the world.
To the right of the altar, she heard a soft murmur of sounds, where in
a side chapel a priest in a black cassock stood by a font administering
the baptismal service to a tiny brown baby in a very long pink satin
robe. The godmother held the baby, while the barefooted native mother
stood apart. Another Christian into the fold! Julie was struck by
the priest's face, the fine pity he turned upon the futile little
brown mite.
Julie moved on. As she was about to step out, the priest passed
her. She stopped him.
"May I ask the name of this church?" she faltered uncertainly. What
she wanted to ask was the significance of it all.
A tired shadow crossed the priest's face. "Saint Francis Xavier's,"
he said. Then he stood and looked about him, and the shadow grew.
"It is beautifully decorated," Julie ventured.
"It is one of the Christian churches of the Orient," he said. "Is
this the first one you have seen?"
"I only arrived to-day. I am stopping with the Calixters. I am a
teacher." She added this a little proudly.
His manner altered. "The Calixters are friends and parishioners of
mine. You are the young lady they told me they were expecting. I am
Father Hull."
Suddenly he made a gesture to the gorgeous mystery about him. "You are
not a Catholic? Then this can not break your heart. Did you expect,"
he asked, "to find a bonze in here dealing paper prayers?"
Then, with an abrupt change of manner, he asked her about her work. She
told him she had no idea where it would be. Everybody over here seemed
to be very busy; it would no doubt be real work and hard. She told
him naïvely about her old ambition to go as a nun to the Leper Islands.
He shook his head. "I hope," he said, regarding her with a sudden
keen penetration, "that you will not go very far away. I have been a
soldier, as well as a priest. I have tramped through the jungles of
many of the islands."
"Will you stay here all your life?" she asked in awe.
The priest looked at the blazing landscape. His shoulders
drooped. Finally he said, "Where on earth is the priest of God so
needed as in this wilderness of darkened souls? If I can ever serve
you, let me know." He turned toward the stark rectory.
Julie stood on the spot, and watched the black cassock disappear.
Rousing herself, she walked down the street, stopping to peep
wonderingly over the tops of old walls at the contents of gardens,
at gay dwellings gleaming like bright fruit or gorgeous birds' eggs
out of the giant foliage. Before one house, most orientally imposing
of them all, Julie stopped in amazement.
This dwelling was so extraordinarily different from her conception of
human habitations that her fancy coupled it with pillared pagodas. It
was painted in a number of strong colors, which, as in none other
of these strange houses, made a singularly stirring harmony, even
in the spectrum of startlingly tinted pillars supporting the great
galleries. Orchids--elfin, super-mundane faces, and air-plants, free
from the bondage of the earth, swung like stars in the soft evening
wind from the balconies.
Strange flowers, mysteriously unfolding in the treetops, showered the
coming twilight with a delirious fragrance. All about the boundaries of
the garden towered cocoanut palms, looking with their clean trunks like
magic beanstalks leading to higher regions; on the ground were large,
brown cocoanuts, their milk spilling over the earth. Ripe fruit hung
from many trees; bananas, like huge golden branches, and a strange
fruit that looked like little green hedgehogs hanging upside down in
the high foliage.
Over the garden the light of the lowering sun lay now like the glow of
Aladdin's lamp, illuminating it to supernatural dimensions. Over in one
end of it a little grizzled Malay dwarf, perfect in his proportions
even to his uplifted tiny hands, with the aid of a device on a long
pole, was cutting flowers from the tops of bushes and trees. Julie,
staring at the surprising little being and not perfectly sure what he
could be, saw him examine with intentness the insides of the flowers
as they fell, as though he might expect to find wrapped up in the
great blossoms another of his kind. A young monkey danced down a
tree-trunk, and commenced scattering the dwarf's store. The mannikin
pounced upon him, and whimsically thrust one of the golden bells of
blossoms upside down on the little furry head.
Of a surety this was a Caliph's mansion. Julie gazed in longingly,
venturing at last inside the gate. In a Chinese ginger-jar a little
yellow flower caught her eye. In this oriental and magic garden to
find so strange, so alien a thing as an English primrose blooming! It
was not a very robust primrose; indeed it was faint and small. Yet
clearly it was more carefully tended than anything else in the garden.
Out of a green and bronze lodge a keeper emerged to investigate
her. The sun of the East had burned him to all but a cinder. Humbly
respectful, he waited for her to speak. Julie explained in broken
Spanish that the garden was so beautiful that she had been tempted
to enter. She would like to know who lived in this little kingdom.
The queer old wrinkled creature looked quizzically at her, "Una hija
del pais," he answered.
"A daughter of the country!" What ever could the old man mean by this
cryptic reply? She looked about hesitatingly.
Just then from the indiscernible depths of the great house, an arm
decorated with a wide gold band thrust itself out of a cloud of long,
black hair, and pushed back the half-opened sliding shutter. A darkly
beautiful figure appeared up there. In response to a gesture from
it, the keeper strode toward the balcony. The figure spoke to him,
and he turned back to Julie.
"My Mistress says that the garden is at your disposal, and for you
to go where you please."
Julie moved curiously a few steps toward the balcony. The gold bands on
the arms of the princess up there glistened alluringly down at her. A
flashing brunette face came out of the shadow of the dense, splendid
sweep of hair. It looked down out of a startling and incongruous pair
of violet eyes. As this personality was not at all the setting for
them, Julie wondered how they had come about.
They played upon the girl with a flame of interest, but their possessor
did not speak. Conversation, Julie reflected, was not perhaps included
among the gifts of Eastern women. This woman, she felt, had more
subtle modes of expression. With her deep, understanding silence,
her flashing disclosures in gestures and glance, speech would no
doubt be a tardy revelation. Her sense of repose disquieted Julie,
reminding her in its singular quiescence of that human becalmment that
had at the first so disturbed her in this land. The blue eyes further
perturbed her with their interrogations--unanswerable questions: Why
she had come into this atmosphere, and what she dared to think she
would achieve in it. The Caliphess in the balcony managed to convey
an impression of proprietorship to this sphere, and to exact some
sort of explanation for Julie's appearance in it.
"I am a stranger--" Julie began "--it is all very wonderful to me";
she paused and looked around her with a sense of inadequateness.
"I knew that you did not belong here--"
The woman above spoke at last, using England's English, with once in
a while the flicker of some strange intonation, like the out-cropping
of a subconscious tone. "But where did you come from?"
"The States--San Francisco!" Julie replied.
A change flashed across the mobile twilight face.
"They keep coming! What," after a pause, "do you expect to find?"
Julie did not reply at once. Ah, that was asking the riddle! Her
gaze roamed over the wondrous garden and palace. The sphinx above
read the look.
"This garden," she informed Julie, "has been here for centuries--and
more."
"So of course it wouldn't do me any good to want it!" Julie laughed
outright. "And, you see, I am quite awfully poor."
"But you come to--take something--all of them do."
Julie sobered. "I came--but of course you wouldn't understand--I
came--" She sought for the articulation of the high and splendid
mission. Words came forth disjointedly when she sought to give form
to that inner fervor. The lady in the balcony listened, and as she
listened to the halting speech a change passed through her blue eyes
and vanished.
"How old are you?" she demanded.
Julie replied that she was nineteen.
A frown came between the splendid brows. "That is not young in the
East. We begin early to experience over here. We are not afraid of
life. We do not keep the young half their existence in swaddling
clothes. It is only too plain that you are not a woman, in spite
of your years--and the things that you are inconceivably set upon
doing. Perhaps you are married."
Julie flushed. "You see, I was considered still too young for that. I
was in school."
"Did you learn in that school to live life--here? Ah, I think not. And
you may go any place, and to any thing. You were not old enough
to be married or to live your own life--but you were old enough to
attempt--this fearful thing. My friend, go back to your home. You
are too young. It is written in your face."
"But I have no home anywhere. All this wonder is yours; how fortunate
above fortune you are!" Julie looked wistfully up at her from the
ground.
The lady receded a little from the balcony, and the shadows dropped
heavily on the twilight face. "Am I?"
Again she spoke. "What is your name? I want to see you again. One
does not see every day a little Atlas who is going to lift the world
on its back. You promise?"
"Indeed I do!"
Julie sped through the gold-tipped shadows. Mrs. Calixter was late
in her dressing, and Julie was so concerned over the low-necked gown
that she had been commanded to wear for the drive on the Luneta,
and so concerned later over what she saw when she got there, that
she forgot for the time to ask about the garden and its fair owner.
"The Luneta is an open-air reception in this one wonderful hour of
the day, my dear. Did you have a nice nap?"
Julie smiled. Naps at nineteen, when every moment counts!
Mrs. Calixter regarded pensively this freshness of the dawn. "May it
be the top of the morning to you always! Look at me." She pointed
to her bloodless face and sun-faded hair. "The East drinks you up
after a while, body and soul. We're dust that God needs to breathe
on again. Don't let it swallow you!"
"It's marvelous though, like a dream," Julie murmured. "I hope I'll
never wake up."
The Luneta proved to be an elliptical drive, picturesquely verging
upon the sea. The winds and the water at this hour contrived to make
it the single cool spot in the city.
A native band, led by a remarkable negro musician, played haunting
music of the sorrows and loves of the earth. The drone of the waves
lashing upon the rocks mingled with the melody. The sun setting
behind an island over in the sea, fantastically enkindled the city,
making it appear with its gleaming domes like some citadel of the
unbeliever reclaimed in this Crusaders' light. Julie had never seen
such deep and powerful colors. They stunned her mind, yet engendered
in her a strange exhilaration, a subtle invitation to plunge behind
those shadowy walls and follow their secret. The light shivered into
shadows; the falling night dropped enchantment over the city.
Carriages swept by with the races of the earth in them; quiet-faced
Englishmen staring pensively out to sea as if to discern in the
distance a certain blessed island that lay over there; Spaniards with
brooding, Moor-like faces, adventuring still in the East after their
country had withdrawn forever out of the New World; close-cropped,
investigatory Germans, eager traders all over the East; native families
of the better class, dressed stiffly in European costume--a concession
to the new age--and riding proudly behind American horses; Chinese
women in jade and brocade, beside their funereally garbed husbands;
East Indians, Japanese, Anamese, Koreans, Armenians--and faces that
belonged to no race or clime, intermediates of the white, dark and
yellow peoples, circling round the edges of this phantasmagoria like
will-o'-the-wisps. And last, there were feverishly alive Americans,
with an inexpressible urgency in their attitude--soldiers of the
empire, here to make their fortunes and the fortune of the land.
It was a little frightening, this hodge-podge of stranger peoples met
at a single point out of the world. Julie noticed how few American
women there were. The land was still too tumultuous for their
advent. She faced nervously the curiosity of so many men.
Every face was counted in Manila, Mrs. Calixter told her.
A great many carriages stopped to visit with Mrs. Calixter. Julie saw
one passing, which of all the procession claimed her attention. A tall
young man with a tawny head from which he had swept his hat rode in
it--his face turned to the sea winds.
Julie looked, and wondered. Who could he be? In this cavalcade that
vivid personality of power and strength blazed indelibly apart. When he
turned his face, a recollection of a child's highest dreams flashed
through her sensibilities in a single word--Excelsior! She could
not have explained how his youthful stirring face had recalled that
supreme childish fervor.
"Who is he?" she asked. It was so clear that he was somebody of note
in this world.
Mrs. Calixter followed her gaze. "A Prince of the East," she said
whimsically. "An Irish-American Haroun-al-Raschid, naïvely engaged in
the recrudescence of the East. We call him The Mayor of Manila. He
believes that it shall transcend all other cities of the earth; he
pours himself and his substance out over it. We are going to his home
to-night. He gives entertainments famous all over the Archipelago--and
is a bachelor."
"Barry McChord is one of the most striking of all the empire-builders,"
added Mr. Calixter. "He is determined to make this colony a gospel of
conviction to the East. We are the beacon, he believes, which has come
to light the darkness. We are to fire the dead ancient nations into
immortal life, and make the East one sublimated republic. You can
understand how a young and Quixotic man with such tremendous ideas
does remarkable things. He has a hand literally in everything--in
education, public health, illumination, public gardens, schemes for
first-class hotels to replace Eastern inns, the development of the
university, hospitals and theaters. Manila is the theater in which he
is staging his Far Eastern drama. When his play of sublimated Eastern
civilization is ready, he will summon all Asia to attend."
As they drove away, detaching themselves from the human caravansary,
Julie looked back upon the rough and struggling mass of humanity
which was wresting destiny out of the standardless East, and sensed
over all the exiles a pervading pensiveness, an air of waiting till
the stroke of fate should open the gate.