Читать книгу The Green God's Pavilion - Mabel Wood Martin - Страница 4

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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.