The Green God's Pavilion: A novel of the Philippines

THE GREEN GOD’S PAVILION

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.

CHAPTER II

The Mayor of Manila lived in the Walled City, although most Americans had chosen the space and coolness of the outside districts.

His house was very old, and stood close to the ancient walls, overlooking the ocean. Its gardens lifted the graceful shadows of trees over the tops of the high lichened walls and out into the world. The house was in the ecclesiastical locality that had so strangely impressed Julie that afternoon.

In company with the Calixters, she entered the inclosed estate and found herself beneath the towering shadow of a great white house rearing so high above the walls that the glow of light pouring from the opened window spaces of the upper regions seemed almost to belong to the starred canopy of the night.

These upper regions presented an appearance of spacious stately halls with very high ceilings and brilliantly polished floors. Pieces of handsomely carved Spanish furniture were disposed about the room, and some huge darkened paintings of Spanish captains who had come this way hung on the walls.

The people, however, made the atmosphere of these rooms. At first, Julie thought she was in a dream. People from all the unheard-of places of the earth seemed collected here. Such queer little brown women, moving about on their fairy feet, in long gorgeous trains, like gay little peacocks; and their men, mailed in European evening dress—as if it were armor donned for the eternal triumph of civilization. Most of them were painfully polite, Julie thought; with a touch of humility in their politeness. Spain had not been very long gone, and even mestizos and rich Filipinos had not figured in her social lists.

The Sultan of Sulu, temporarily absent from his own dominions, appeared much satisfied with the stir he and his preposterous pearls were creating. “Holy Mary! Such as the very gates of Heaven are made of!” one dusky maiden exclaimed in rapture.

“An illiterate Malay, making an artistic collection of wives, and deliberately decking himself out with those things as a decoy. He’s perfectly odious,” Mrs. Calixter declared.

Julie saw diamonds as big as hen’s eggs on these brown nabob’s wives, but the pearls dramatically obscured everything else.

“I’m very fond of Barry McChord,” murmured Mrs. Calixter, “but I don’t subscribe to some of his guests.”

Their host was discovered in the front room, a blond young man moving around the room in a white mess jacket. He came across to greet them.

Julie looked up to the face she had seen on the Luneta, the gay, young excelsior face with the vivid hair, through which he stressfully rumpled his fingers as he talked.

He had an ardor of being that communicated itself electrically to those around him. Julie felt suddenly on fire again. He looked attentively at her, as if there were something about her that called up some association. She wondered how he came to be so strong and so magnificent, and to attain this golden blaze of power out of which he shone like a prince.

They were separated before they could have anything to say to each other. Mrs. Calixter wanted Julie to meet somebody “very special.” As that was precisely what she had been doing, Julie wondered why she had to be led away.

Streams of fantastic people blocked their way. Refreshments made into the most fanciful forms were proffered them from great nara wood tables, such as might have served for a mediæval feast. Every one was going about his own picturesque business; love-making was coming into play down under the lanterns in the gardens, where the native musicians were making music to draw one’s heart out of one’s breast.

In the midst of a sudden bursting triumphal strain, Julie stopped to behold what she believed to be a queen, with her train—a woman of such an opulent type of beauty, of such vivid tones of costume and improbable profusion of jewels, that the eye for an instant was overwhelmed. Mrs. Calixter whispered that this was the famous Isabel Armistead, known all over the Orient as “The Empress of the East.”

“Why,” Julie exclaimed, staring at her amazed, “that’s the lady from the Caliph’s garden!” She explained vividly her chance visit of the afternoon.

“A caliphess indeed!” Mrs. Calixter agreed.

“And of course she would look like that,” Julie declared. “Oh! tell me about her.”

“She is a strange creature, certainly,” Mrs. Calixter said. “Her father was an Englishman, I believe; her mother, one of those unanalyzable mixtures of strains you find over here. I think they were married to legitimatize Isabel, whose beauty and brilliance were remarkable. She has had the best of education abroad, and is, without the shadow of a doubt, the most deeply clever woman in the East—as well as one of the richest; for from the submerged mother she received one of the great insular fortunes. At seventeen she was married to Richard Armistead, a middle-aged Englishman of first-rate family, who for years held an important position as head of a bank here. He is in England now, for his health; and there are very strong indications that he will not come back. I imagine Isabel has a way of disposing of inconveniences. That is not so difficult here.”

“Why, what do you mean? She hasn’t hurt anybody, has she?”

“Not that I know of. But when people are in the way over here, they are just put out of it.” Mrs. Calixter dropped her voice. “There’s a woman over there—quite beautiful, you see—with no sign about her of being a daughter of the land, yet when she wanted another husband she managed to bring it about. She and the man she wanted, so Mrs. Roxas will tell you, the two of them, just did for poor Tony. He was delicate, and they merely made him die somehow. Yet nobody ever fastened anything on to them.

“This is the land of the new chance. Men and women who never found their chance at home, or who debauched it, are seeking their Eldorado here. Standards, social and moral, are easier here than at home. There’s a lawlessness of soul that hangs heavy in the atmosphere. You are too young to see it yet. Even the girls are quite vivid—and inimitably experienced. Whether it is so or not, they give one the impression always of taking the most perilous chances.”

She looked penetratingly into Julie’s breathlessly intent face. “My dear, you are neither old enough nor strong enough to encounter Manila—a city three centuries old quickened by a new population—new wine in old bottles! That’s why I don’t want you to remain over here.”

“It’s wonderful,” Julie murmured with shining eyes “—like an Arabian Nights’ dream. I do so want to stay.”

Mrs. Calixter’s attention reverted to Isabel, who stood not far away. She said that Isabel had been loved by many men of many races, and like an empress of the East, she loved them royally for a day, and then flung them aside. A woman whose blood was part of the East, part of the West—nobody knew just where the division lay. Mrs. Calixter stopped as she saw Isabel approaching. She was looking at Julie.

“Isn’t this,” she asked, greeting Mrs. Calixter, “my young acquaintance of this afternoon? I feared when she walked out so radiantly into the shadows that that might be the last of her that I should see.”

Julie, looking across into the flashing face, concluded that she had never seen anybody who intimated so many human possibilities—unless it were the young host of this occasion. Isabel fascinated her, and made her feel as if some queer Sybil of the Eastern bazaars were summoning her down secret streets.

“You will like Manila very much,” said Isabel, drawing nearer to Julie as Mrs. Calixter turned to speak to some one else. “Perhaps you will find what you are seeking—they all seek, whatever they say. But there is always the joy of the day. You Americans are forever trying to steal to-morrow. See that you get your share of the hours and minutes—and come to my house again, as soon as you get your assignment. I know the islands, every spot they could send you to. Do this,” she urged, with an insistence that captured Julie. Her train swept her onward.

Julie suddenly saw their host come out and accost Isabel in the glowing spot under the central lamps. He bowed laughingly before her, and Isabel’s warm, enchanting face swept off in the dance, close to his. Julie paused thoughtfully.

A handsome girl in shining blue gauze stepped up to her, and was presented by Mrs. Calixter as Ellis Wilbur.

“Barry says that you have just arrived, and that I must tell you about everything. I think he meant everybody. It must all be so bewildering and strange, and so hard to catch up with. Leave her in my hands,”—Ellis turned to Mrs. Calixter—“you couldn’t for anything say the things I’m going to, and I don’t pretend that it won’t be fun.”

Reverting to Julie, with an air of light concern, she went on: “I hope you are not going to any of those dreadful little islands where they are sending such tragically unsuspecting teachers. Papa and I have visited some particularly atrocious ones—the Mohammedan group, away south, my dear, and so called because they live right up to the worst tenets of the Prophet. Moros are a nerve-shattering experience, they literally bristle with knives; and are always breaking out into massacres. It’s too big an emotion for me to seek the wilderness. But over here the game seems usually to over-shadow the risk.”

Miss Wilbur’s gaze, which had roved to the dancers became suddenly alert. “Ah,” she commented, “Isabel blooming like the ‘Song of Songs’! Have I a terrible little inkling of what that might mean?”

“For whom does Isabel bloom?” Julie demanded curiously.

But the quaintly disclosive Miss Wilbur became unaccountably reticent. She remarked carelessly: “Isabel cares transcendently for that Ancient of Days, herself.

“If Leah Chamberlain,” she went on in an unchanged tone, “would come in skirts up to her knees, she would create a much more unlabored effect than she is at present attempting with those classic black silken limbs of hers.”

For Julie’s enlightenment, she pointed out a woman with flaming hair and spectacular eyes, who seemed altogether too resplendent for the ordinary purposes of life.

“Leah keeps the emotion of the Empire astir,” Miss Wilbur declared. “She is one of its phases. She lives in a flame always, and transcends the bonds of mere husbands and other things. The husband, a drab creature, lives in barracks out of town. Leah puts up at the Oriente and spreads her splendid wings. What are the feelings of a gold-tipped goddess anyway? Lovell is bent Burmese fashion before her—Lovell is a bank-man in Hongkong who is about to come into a big title. He aspires, at cross purposes, to power and to Leah.”

A woman with dark hair drawn over a glistening pearl of a face passed on the arm of a plump, florid man. “Another Woman of the Empire. That Madonna face, my dear, has seen the floor of hell. That woman has experienced the deepest brutality of the East. She was a little New England factory girl, whom her profligate lover abandoned in a Chinese port. In her Hegira, she found her way here, and became one of the famous white hetirae of the city. That’s what they amount to here, and along the coast. When you see particularly handsome women driving alone along the Luneta, don’t ask who they are. Abernathy came along and married her, right out of the district where they live, and now she has a great house, with all the money in the world. But as isolated as if she were in a cave. I went there once, and she took me up on her high lonely roof, from which she said she could look out over the city and watch it marching ahead. Her heart was breaking with loneliness; the old days when she ruled men were gone, but she wanted to see this thing through. Just another obscure sentinel who is sticking to her post.

“I have an idea that Mrs. Calixter has been telling you things about the women. She doesn’t understand—her generation can’t—that they’ve got the chance, and the second chance, over here. They can do a lot and get away with it—and no hair-lines drawn. But they have freedom of choice—they can make or break themselves. A few, of course, are clear outside—like Isabel, who has nobody to account to and to whom not even the roughest rules apply. She is one of the laws here herself. Don’t try to measure her by rule of thumb, she hasn’t any measure; Isabel has more freedom of will than it is safe to think about. She is moreover staggeringly rich—and helpful; and I see as much of her as she will allow—although papa, who belongs to Mrs. Calixter’s tiresome era, is inclined to discourage this intimacy. Yet I have discovered,” Miss Wilbur asserted calmly, “that he goes privately and takes tea with her. He considers it a very dashing experience, no doubt. She probably tells him a great deal about the Islands, which he believes like gospel. That is he.” Miss Wilbur gestured carelessly toward a distinguished looking white-haired gentleman. “So diplomatic-looking, everybody says! Papa has ‘represented’ at two courts, and he was completely taken aback when they put him on a democratic job like this. He’s on the Commission. But he has caught the fire, like the rest. He is having a very disconcerting second blooming. I used to conceive of papa as a sort of ancient, delicate epigram, and behold, he has come to life! That flower in his button-hole is what they call here the ‘Chain of Love.’”

A pleasant, worn-faced Englishman in a singular semi-uniform costume, with a dark sash knotted around his waist, bowed to Miss Wilbur.

“That sash? Nobody knows what it means. Perhaps it’s an emblem of the Republic of the Sun—that’s the fantastic name somebody has given to the impossible Utopia that these men are trying to bring about in the East, after Campanelli’s or Plato’s dream; I forgot which. They believe the East is to awaken tremendously. Talk with Barry about it. But this gentleman, Matfield-Barron, broods over the situation with all the lonely passion of the expatriate; it’s the last thing left in his soul. Most of the others mean, like the Chinamen, to ‘go back’ after the day is over, but Matfield-Barron will stay on. He was an officer in the British army, and was cashiered out of the service over in India—something about a woman, who is said to have used him as a shield for another man. So he drifted here. I hope for his sake they don’t break the Scheme, back there in the States. I can’t bear to think of that homeless wanderer growing old in the East with no Utopia to love. And I’m crazy about that absurd sash! It waves a breezy, Anglo-Saxon defiance to the apathy of the East.”

A blond, blunt man who looked like a shortened Hercules exchanged a word with Julie’s companion, and walked on.

“That’s Holborne—organized the Constabulary; says he’s an Englishman—born in Malta, rather an interesting place to be born in. I think that Holborne is a true soldier of fortune, and that when a bigger fight comes up he will move on. Rumor has it that he is bound up in Isabel’s spokes; but so many men are that! It is written in his steel eyes that no woman shall upset his universe.

“But of course the main force in this unseen republic is Barry McChord. He is the Titan stoking this furnace. He is one of those persons you want to have around—he makes the world so exciting to live in! He has gone mad over this rough-and-tumble colony, and over the whole East. He’s in love with the torn-up landscape, the scaffoldings, the skeleton bridges, and diverted rivers. Cleaning, rehabilitating, straining—he is trying to carry the East on his back!

“And now I must relinquish this personally conducted tour,” Miss Wilbur concluded; “I see a circle of prospective partners frowning at me for having hedged you in so long. It doesn’t matter, however; for the dancing is only just getting under way.”

As Ellis Wilbur had implied, young men got themselves brought up, and claimed Julie. Diffident, high-colored Englishmen, whimsically satirical over the paradoxes of the East, or wearily skeptical; her own countrymen, gloriously beginning and flushed with the enterprise. These last had come to civilize Asia, and made one feel that they were electrified with their job; they had the air of being engaged in a national knight-errantcy. Their mood kept the air stirred. Julie was bewildered by all they found to tell her—strange recitals that made an Odyssey of the hopes and ambitions of many men. It set up in her a fresh excitement.

Suddenly, looking up, she found her host before her.

“It has been quite impossible to get near you. I have sought you once as my guest, again as the very newest lady, and several times after that because I seem to have remembered you some place.”

Julie laughed. “Perhaps that all comes of my being so new. To-morrow I shall have dwindled back into proportion.”

“Come and take a walk on the gallery,” he invited; “I want to show you the wall.”

They passed through a doorway out to a high gallery that brought them suddenly very close to the stars. Julie faced them as astonished as if a corner of the sky had been unpinned.

“Do these belong to your garden?” she asked laughingly.

“To my Neighbor’s Country.” He smiled. “I don’t transgress.” He laid his hand on a dark line of stones. “Here are the walls. They keep the Pacific out of my estate.”

A stone’s throw over the walls Julie saw the purple stretches of the ocean that used to come gloriously rushing through her gate of golden dreams. She listened a moment to its roar rising above the music in the garden. Then she stared over the city. Before her, mysterious, shadowy, inexorable, the ancient ramparts rose, inclosing a black, fantastic city with unearthly towers and domes. A city of fate!

The girl shivered with mingled ecstasy and fear.

“Why do you live here? You might have chosen other cities.”

“So might you—but there was destiny. I chose Manila for many reasons—some of them hardly definable. There was something from the first that spoke out to me from it, that whispered from every one of its old stones—an atmosphere of profound human struggle, as if for centuries the place had been battling with forces that go back into the dark borderland of human genesis. The human spirit at its darkest, lowest ebb. It seems to me that is the curse that we have come to lift—the curse of the whole East.”

“Have you been here very long?”

“Almost since the beginning, the Year One with us—” He rested his arm upon the surface of the wall, and looked across at the stretches of singing waters just beyond.

“Would you like to hear how I came?”

Her eyes sparkled. “Everybody’s been telling me to-night how they happened to come, but most of all I want to hear about you.”

“It was fate with me. I was shipwrecked off the coast of Mindanao in a typhoon. I had been trading up and down the East, here and there, with headquarters in China. I had been round the earth, and I had seen most of the cities, but I had never seen the one that I believed was my particular fate. I’d always had ideas of what I wanted to do in the world, but I’d never gotten much nearer than dreaming them. Then came the shipwreck and the whole New World for me. We were rescued by the Moros and were traded round among them for a while. They led us along the tops of stony mountains and told us every day when the sun went down that that was the last of it we would ever see. A couple of our men died. After we’d been led about for months and our datto had made up his mind to kill us, his force was attacked by another chieftain. We bolted straight into the jungle, and nearly went crazy getting out. Finally in an open boat we gained the sea, and just drifted until we reached a town where a commercial steamer had put in. I got aboard, and came upon this city, and here in this unexpected corner of the earth I found my countrymen engaged in the biggest thing I’d ever seen.

“I knew right off that it was here that I belonged, and that this city was my fate. A boat was going out for Shanghai with the captain of it a friend of mine, and he wanted to take me on; my affairs had been going well across the China Sea. But I told him good-by—I had decided to take my chances along with the rest of my people.

“I started in with a trading company that knew my firm, and I showed them what I’d learned about selling goods to the Chinese—you see I knew all the big Chinese concerns. I got to be a partner and then I bought the other fellows out—and so I came to do the things I’d set my heart upon. I’m Irish, you see, Irish-American, and my heart had burned with all sorts of things.

“And you?” he interrogated suddenly. “Did those green eyes lead you East? They are like the jade of a temple god—the color of the farthest reach of the sky.”

Julie smiled dreamily. “When I was a child this same ocean used to flow in from across the world and tell me stories of some of the lands it touched. I knew a long time ago that I was to come.”

“And how did you get to come?”

“I am to teach!” and she stopped, wondering within herself.

“Ah, there are simply no limits to that. Peaceful Penetration, quickening beats in this great life. If we can get these white men and women to stick to their out-posts, we’ll win, in a few years. But to give up life completely, and sit alone in the night among the palms in a desolate bit of jungle with one’s soul roving out over the world and the stars in terrible longing—that is asking blood tribute, as I know only too well!”

“And does it seem to you that it will count?”

“It will count inconceivably in that biggest of struggles—the powers of light against the powers of darkness.”

“But right now?” Julie queried.

“We’re getting the East from this foothold—and the East, as you will come to know, is too big, too monstrous a fact to have against our cosmos. We think the moment has come when, by making clear our ideals here, we can recast her at will.”

“I see,” said the girl slowly, “—and atoms count. Why,” she broke off, “does one feel the shadows so here, quite cold shadows and pitiless? Mrs. Calixter seemed to make me feel that it was all a vast tract of quicksands which finally at some point, would grip one’s feet.”

“A society like this seems to offer no place to a young girl. You,” he mused, “belong to my Neighbor’s Country.”

And thus out of this great big life pattern, this tremendous human arabesque, he thrust her into the limbo of the inconjecturable—out of the work in which he, with his quick vivid face, looking oddly white and visionary in the moonlight, had a star part! Standing there among the shadows of the universe, with the work of men’s souls lifted out of her participation, her heart dropped.

“I came,” she said, trying to assert some title to this New World, “because I wanted to give a little of my life—before I should grow old and forget.”

She looked up and found him staring at her with a strange intensity. He appeared as startled as if she had just walked into his soul, a visitant from the Neighbor’s Country he had talked about. Julie was leaning against the wall, and for an instant they deeply regarded each other. It seemed to the girl that some powerful experience was seizing possession of her—as if a flash of lightning illuminated her being—deeper than she had ever dreamed. Just for a second she felt, on unimaginable heights, a moment of mystery and wonder and high enchantment.

Some one stepped out upon the gallery and the spell that had caught at the stars broke. The girl quiveringly came back to her surroundings, wondering what invisible places she had touched.

She heard her companion’s voice saying hurriedly, “I’m called away—in the midst of everything—on account of an outbreak of cholera in one of the remote provinces. But I shall be back in a few days, and I will see you then.”

Her ear caught the definite promise and expectation the words contained, the intimation that their lives had crossed by a stroke of fate.

That night while she undressed with the light burning low, she reviewed in her mind this first day in the East. She felt as if, from a high seat in some fantastic houdah, she had seen pass a great pageant. Incredibly exciting and splendidly adventurous it all was! Compared to the wall-paper universe of her youth this phenomenal flash of events was unbelievable. To live in a land where things actually happened, where the hours were full, and where with every breath one drew in a bewitching experience! Youth’s playground with its everlasting drama impending.

Julie leaned out into the scented darkness and looked around the sky—a nightly custom of hers—a leave taking of God’s world. But this imminent heaven with its fearful host frightened her. Nothing was familiar. Strange constellations had preëmpted the place of the old ones. This was not God’s world, but a world of many gods, and she wondered, with a little shiver, which one she should propitiate.

CHAPTER III

The next morning Mrs. Calixter offered to drive Julie down to the Ayuntamiento Building where she was to receive her instructions from the Head of the Department of Education. When Julie came downstairs, she found Father Hull sitting in the carriage, opposite Mrs. Calixter, who had promised him a lift to the Observatory. He greeted Julie with pleasure, and told her that he was on his way to see Father Algus, who was perfecting a remarkable instrument for forecasting the typhoons which periodically tore up the islands in these hazardous seas.

“Its success now seems certain,” continued the priest, “thanks to Barry McChord, who has been keenly interested in the invention and has sent to Europe for many delicate appliances to assist the researches of my venerable friend.”

“He has so many things to be interested in,” Julie commented with sudden wistfulness.

The priest looked across at her: “I think I should say he has the interest for so many things.”

“Is it because I am a newcomer,” the girl asked the priest, “that things seem to move so bewilderingly fast here—like a dance whose rhythm you can never catch up with?”

“These, my child,” the priest replied, “are the Days of the Empire. Those of us who have experienced them will remember them always. Conquest and prowess of arms have put a dangerous fire in men’s veins. We are reaching out for more than human hands were meant to grasp. When men are rich overnight, and women are scarce as queens, the universe is not stable. Not but that there are some who walk steadily in this fever—” He smiled at Mrs. Calixter.

“I don’t count, I’m old,” replied that lady.

“Are you challenging youth? Who in my camp fire colony, as I call it, is so safe and sane as my friend Barry? We have worked alongside each other for a long time—and it would be difficult for me to tell what he has been to me.”

“The natives call Barry El Mayor,” Mrs. Calixter told Julie, “and believe that in power he is infinitely above the Governor-General. In so many incorrigible centers of rebellion he has somehow found an effectual compromise.”

“The natives reason that governor-generals may come and go—and temporary officials of all sorts; but that Barry is with them for good,” Father Hull said. “I don’t understand all his aims. Perhaps they are too wide for me, who find my own are more than I can hope to cope with—but what I am very sure of is that he is working always for a better order of things in the world. I, too, am selfishly concerned that he should not go away from here”—the priest laughed; “I have planned that he and I shall grow old here together.”

“And what will the ladies who admire him so much say to that?” Mrs. Calixter demanded.

“There are plenty of others for them. If Barry were pinned to one little circle how could he wander off to all the places he’s sent to at a moment’s notice—like China, and India and Annam? If there were mumps in his circle, how could he attend to cholera in the larger circles?”

“Well, we’ll have to let you have him, I guess,” Mrs. Calixter amusedly remarked. She glanced at Julie’s thoughtful face. “This young person is on her way this minute to her fate, and I don’t in the least like it that a certain red-haired person has the settling of it. Maxwell and George have had a difference—so we can’t lift a hand.”

The priest thought for a moment. “I should be only too glad to do anything I could. I know Mr. Maxwell—but whether any word of mine would count with him, I can’t say. At least I can make the effort. If you can wait a few moments I will go into Father Algus’s office, and write Mr. Maxwell a note.”

When they had stopped in front of the Observatory, Father Hull bade them good-morning, begging leave to send out the note on the plea of his many pressing engagements.

After he had gone, Mrs. Calixter remarked with anxiety, “He doesn’t look well. He’s been told again and again to take a trip home. He used to be very strong, but he has gone through many ordeals and borne the brunt of fearful hardship in this new place. His soul has never wearied; it’s on fire like all the others, but his body is showing the strain.”

She added: “While we were waiting for you to come out, he told me of your meeting of yesterday, and he said that he thought you were too young to follow the trail.”

Julie waited in an outer room while the chief of education interviewed personally a long stream of predecessors. These faces showed a great deal of earnest purpose—the fervor of the empire builders, which Julie had begun to recognize; and yet these people were not to remain in Manila, but were to go out to the most distant, unsettled parts of the Islands, to put into execution one of the most stupendous designs ever launched by any government—to put a whole race simultaneously to school.

Julie listened to the reports these people gave of themselves, and of the wild unheard-of places they were accepting as their assignments, and knew that the small salaries could not be the impetus that was sending them, grave but uncomplaining, into far jungles. Of course they yearned to remain in Manila. They had heard strange tales of the provinces, and knew that more than one of the number trudging their missionary way had been murdered; but they had cast in their lot with the colony, and it was all in the day’s work. A strange, intangible spell had caught their souls, and it seemed that the fervor of it must set things aflame.

When Julie’s turn came, she found herself confronting an astonishingly tall man with a huge florid head. The education of several millions of beings was the present concern of that head, which gave evidence of the magnitude of the problems confronting it. In times such as these, men are often shot suddenly from commonplace experience into the most enormous undertakings. In this case the call appeared to have been too quick. The man was arrogant in his power, but flustered over his responsibility. All day he had been dealing with a complexity of human desires, which in almost every instance had conflicted with his own. Julie stepped into the moment of greatest tension.

There was a great map on the wall, a scroll of fate to which the Superintendent referred in making his assignments. There is nothing alluring in a map ever, but this one seemed particularly bleak and strange. The Superintendent frowned at it. “I haven’t decided yet, Miss Dreschell, just where I’ll send you,” he observed in an olympian manner.

He juggled awhile with the fates, while Julie, considerably heartened, decided to take advantage of this critical uncertainty to assist him to a favorable decision.

“I should very much like Manila,” she said pleasantly.

The Superintendent’s negative mental state vanished electrically. “Every person who has entered this room to-day has said that same thing! You should have come here prepared to go where you are sent.”

Julie flushed. “The provinces are still in a state of insurrection,” she declared spiritedly. “People are being killed there.”

“Civilians are not,” the Superintendent exclaimed exasperatedly. “We are sending teachers out to the most remote parts, where there are no troops at all, Miss Dreschell. You will go where I send you, as it is your business to do; and your station,” turning to the dreadful map, “will be the small island known as Nahal, in the southern group.”

He irately pointed it out, remote, isolated, the last before the Pagan group. Julie stared at the outline, and her heart grew faint. It was the end of the world!

“I shall be going farther South than any one else,” she remarked with a break in her voice. Suddenly she put her hand in her bag and drew out the letter which she handed to him.

She watched him read it in curious wonder at the change that came over her face. “This puts a different light on the matter,” he said coolly. “There is no favor that Father Hull could ask in the Philippines that would not be granted at once. I shall endeavor to assign you to the Ermita district in the city.”

What, Julie wondered, was the strange power of Father Hull whose words could in an instant revolutionize her fate? Her visionary green eyes fixed speculatively on that spot on the map. “Father Hull said I was to give you the letter,” she said slowly, “but I think if you don’t mind, I will go where you assigned me.”

The Superintendent was uncomfortable. There were other islands much nearer than Nahal to which he might have sent her. He slid an elastic band over a bunch of papers with an irritated snap. “Do as you like, Miss Dreschell—but there is Solano”; he pointed suggestively to a larger island farther north than Nahal. “Conditions are better there, I should say.”

“I think I will go where I was assigned,” Julie reiterated—which decision seemed considerably further to irritate the florid head. It was clear that he was keenly eager to serve the writer of the letter.

But Julie rose with an air of finality. He stared at her with annoyance; and when she did not alter her mind, he leaned over his desk and jotted down a note. Julie knew somehow that it referred to her. She caught a glimpse of the word Solano, and wondered if he intended forcing her to go there. Evidently he did not, for as she stepped through the door, he apologized perfunctorily for the difficulties of the occasion, and bowed her out with great courtesy. But Julie, looking up into his face, saw that he would never forget the person who had challenged his power and caused him to be ashamed of himself. Some time this incident would unfailingly bear fruit.

Mrs. Calixter was aghast. “He has banished you into exile!” she exclaimed. “Could it be because he and George are at swords’ points? Did you give him Father Hull’s letter?”

“I gave it to him, and he took everything back in a wink, and offered me Manila; but while I sat there looking at my mysterious island, I recalled the faces of some of those teachers, and the face of—a person I met last night, and I asked myself why I should shirk just exactly that which I had come over to do. Why,” she added suddenly, “did Father Hull’s letter make such an impression? The Church over here must be very powerful.”

“The Church hasn’t a thing to do with it. It’s the man! He’s a saint, and the spiritual custodian of the colony. He came over here as the Chaplain of the Twenty-fourth, and marched right alongside the men into every danger. There wasn’t a soldier in the regiment that wouldn’t have gone straight through Hell at his word. Yet I imagine he found it harder to make them go the other way. He is known everywhere, and by everybody. No one could deny him anything—it’s the power of one man’s life.”

“There seem to be so many over here like that!” Before Julie’s half-closed eyes a stream of faces rose. One preëminently stood out, illuminated by moonlight, and fired with the undying fervor of purpose. It was her sub-conscious being which, stirred by the intimations received last night on the roof, had decided in a flash for her in the Superintendent’s office.

With the vision still about her and before her, she arrived at the home of Isabel Armistead, the woman of Asian mystery.

The dwarf that she had seen before in the garden received her. She had thought that he looked like a child, but she saw now that the queer little creature was of a man’s years. She could not resist speaking to him, and the mannikin smiled at her out of his saddened, puckered little face. He showed her upstairs into a sala so vast that it seemed literally a sweep of space broken by transcendently carved pillars.

The house was more than a century old, and had come down to Isabel through her inconjectural native connections. Its carvings belonged to an era of Pharaonic hordes of labor, or slavery. The house and the other vast properties of its owner had somehow come down unmolested by official upheavals.

The family was a queer one of many strains; all the East was in its veins. After her husband and her daughter had departed for England, Isabel’s mother, it was said, had gone up into a holy mountain to practice witchcraft. At any rate, after a time, she had disappeared, never, apparently, to be heard of again. The influence of this strange mother, Mrs. Calixter had told Julie, was still perpetuated. One native lady of her acquaintance had shown Mrs. Calixter one of the old witch-mother’s anting-antings, proclaiming that she always wore it, and that it had astoundingly protected all her life, shielding her and her family from all evil and lifting them above the common lot of men.

Julie thought of these strange rumors as she looked about her. The walls were hung with a great many rich embroideries, brilliant silks blooming with the unfamiliar flowers of far kingdoms. It was like walking in a garden of Cathay. The room appeared to Julie like a chamber of an Eastern palace in a rich pagodaed city: there was furniture of teak-wood black as a Nubian, brought from distant jungles by toiling elephants, all marvelously carved into scaled monsters; there were ivory gods with sleeping faces; curtains strewn with gold, hanging in dim recesses; rugs—that generations of men in almost mythical retreats of the Himalayas had been a century or two in weaving—lying like islands on the shining dark lacquered floor, in which the shadows of the passer-by drowned to endless depths; a pair of sentinel vases higher than a man—made a thousand years ago for an emperor who had become a god—out of their tops a thin ribbon of green smoke curling from hidden incense; and in one corner, hung with flowers, a queer altar to whatever gods Isabel believed in.

Toward this niche Julie bent curious footsteps. The altar was in the shape of a temple, a gilded fantastic thing, wrought in what country it would have been impossible to say. A Green God, like the monstrous genie of a lake, sat cross-legged in the nave of the shrine staring at rows of grotesque faces carved in the walls. The artist had exercised the art of a Leonardo da Vinci; in the face of the little idol there was neither the dead marooned calm of the great Diabutz nor the cruel evil of Mongolian gods. He was just a quiet little deity, green as the far spaces of the skies, sitting thinking in his temple; but there was in his oblivious, impersonal reflection something that clutched at the heart.

Julie glanced up depressed, to find Isabel regarding her.

“What a terrible god!” exclaimed the girl with a shiver. “Is he yours?”

Isabel smiled. “He is the god who is ‘on the job,’ as you Americans say it. The Great One is too great, the philosophers tell us, to have anything to do with us. He has abstract names, and is too isolated by infinity to be prayed to. But this little god, he knows, he knows!”

“Has he a name?” asked Julie, much puzzled by this blatant paganism. The Islands were undoubtedly a very strange place.

“In different lands, we call him different things.”

Julie turned from the niche, “I am going to the island of Nahal,” she announced. “I have come to see what you can tell me about it.”

Isabel’s blue eyes widened. “It is far, very far! We shall never hear of you again. It takes weeks to reach there, because no boats run regularly. You can get to Solano in three or four days, if you are lucky enough to catch a boat—from there once in a while a boat goes down to Nahal. It is a small island; the people are Visayans. I really do not know so much about it, you see. It is turbulent, I believe. Is there a military garrison?”

Julie was not sure. A volunteer force had recently been withdrawn from it; Mr. Calixter was trying to discover whether other troops had replaced the volunteers.

“Most of the women have been ordered out of those dangerous places in the South. Have you not heard the things that have been done there? You are foolhardy to have come—some strange madness possesses you.”

Julie’s eyes took on an abstracted look. “It is a madness that possesses others, too.”

“I have not seen it.”

Julie looked at her but remained silent. The two regarded each other; Isabel out of her blue eyes, Julie out of her jade-green ones.

“Why do you go? It is not safe. There are places in these islands where white women have never been seen.”

Julie’s eyes awoke. “I shall have something to do.”

“Will you stay in the wilds till you have given the Nahal islanders the higher education? Bah! Why do you wish to waste your youth at such things? You are beautiful, and were made to be admired, not to bury your youth in forgotten islands. You were made to taste life a little richer in the fruit than the rest. And you who could win so much renounce it all to be a spectacled ascetic hanging to the tails of existence. No Spanish woman would dream of doing such a thing! You have come half way round the world to do some vague thing you’ve set your heart on. Set your heart on life—it owes you much; make it magnificently pay! Did my Green God give you those eyes and that face for the edification of small Malays? Stay in Manila and drink life here where it sparkles and overflows the goblet. I would no more do what you are doing! I might be a nun—that is picturesque and fiercely renunciative. But to be a pedagogue to brown savages!—it is dull to tears. Then,”—as a final overpowering fact—“there will be no men!”

Julie’s eyes gleamed disapprobation. “The women of America have many resources. They go along their real way until their real fate overtakes them.”

“A single fate! Is there such a thing?” Isabel seemed feverishly to question herself. “I have made a long quest. I ought to know. No, there is no such thing. It is a tradition they fasten in women’s minds, to make them become mothers.

“Look,” she continued, turning toward the temple, “I will give you a present, because I am so sorry for you with such a terrible future. You are going out to be a little Atlas—to lift up the world. Tell me, when you return, how much you have supported on your little back.”

For an instant Julie was afraid that Isabel was going to present her with the Green God, but she reached within the shrine and drew out, not the God—to Julie’s unspeakable relief—but an exquisite circle of jade, clear and green like a tropical lake.

“A jewel from the Green God for you who have his stamp in your eyes.”

Julie started. “Some one else told me that.”

“Who was it?”

“Barry McChord.”

Isabel’s lids dropped over her blue eyes. “You know him, then?”

“I met him last night.”

“And he noticed your eyes—that way?”

“But nobody will notice them now—” It was absurd to assume that there was the faintest flicker of satisfaction in the other woman’s look, Julie thought.

Isabel slipped the bracelet over Julie’s wrist. “It has belonged to many women in many ages. Perhaps you will make more history for it. What beautiful bones you have!” she exclaimed. “They are like sculpture—even in your cheeks where the bones of the English go wrong. And your flesh is flawless; an angel might use it to come down to earth. Look at the difference.”

She drew Julie’s arm up beside her own to the light. “Yours is snowy, way down to the depths; but the light stops under my skin, it can’t get down. That is the difference between you and me!” She loosed Julie abruptly. “Ah, well—you are blind. Go hold up the world, and break your poor little back, when you might be ruling the world, like me. All the East, you know, is mine to work my will in.”

Because Isabel was of that East, which she so fantastically claimed, Julie took lightly all she said. To boast of swaying empires and of taking kings out of their thrones was part of the inalienable imagery of the East, as were the widely unreal, the impossibly beautiful things in the old Chinese lyrics. Isabel implied that Julie had only to step out of her insignificant profession to find herself ruling the world, the world of to-day, which had such a marvelous capacity for ruling itself. It was strange how something at other moments so exalted could, under this woman’s manipulation, become all at once so obscure. Julie, turning to depart, thanked Isabel for the bracelet.

“Remember, I am your friend,” Isabel said, “and I will help you at any time you say so. Adios!”

Julie left her standing in the center of her magic chamber, its splendor hovering about her, her dark face merging into its richness like that of some forgotten goddess.

With his small powerful arms, the dwarf swung the gate open for her. She looked back at the garden starred with strange flowers, at the tiers of steps and bright pillars which made the house resemble a Babylonian palace, at the light of the stained glass under the blaze of sunlight: in that bizarre house had lived a woman who had gone out to the tops of mountains searching for spells!

In those moments when Julie cogitated upon matters of human life in connection with the Deity, she conceived Him rather vaguely as a sort of sublime executive, who drew up—sometimes perforce a little hurriedly perhaps—plans of eternal destiny for everybody. Dealing liberally in catastrophe, disease, old age, poverty, and death, He yet conceded, like allowances of candy to children, a certain amount of impermanent happiness; and it was into this arrangement of things that the race was privileged to enter.

She wondered, as she turned from Isabel’s gate, who the little Green God was; and whether he had any character by which he would be recognized in the West. She who had started out with a nameless exalted fervor, whose spirit had been skimming like an inspired comet through space, had been suddenly halted before a strange house in which she had encountered disquieting things—things which had brought the comet down to a scented and blooming earth. So do the moods of youth sway in the last wind blowing.

Still nothing caused Julie to change her intentions; not the troubled counsel of Father Hull, given in his tired voice; nor the Calixters’ tales of the far, fearful South; nor the exotic arguments listened to in the Babylonian house. She set sail for the South on the day that had been set.

CHAPTER IV