Читать книгу The Green God's Pavilion - Mabel Wood Martin - Страница 5

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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.