Читать книгу The Green God's Pavilion - Mabel Wood Martin - Страница 7

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In darkness, rain, and perturbation, Julie landed at her destination. A storm had blown up from the Sulu Sea, to which they were quite close. Before the light had faded, however, the Captain had pointed out as Guindulman a spot in the long, low stretch of gray green against the gray sea, where a lonely torch light shot up in the dusk and was gone. Julie’s companion had managed to make the latter part of the voyage somewhat too disturbingly intimate, and she hoped fervently that their ways would soon part.

In a large house near the wharf, they found that a white woman, a teacher, was quartered. She sent word that she would look out for Julie. Mr. Purcell was directed to the Officers’ Mess.

Miss Hope, a succinct person with the ineradicable stamp of pedagogical command upon her, greeted Julie, and explained conditions while the girl changed her drenched clothing. Of the two available intra-suelo rooms rented from the prosperous native family above, one could be turned over to Julie—the one, the girl noted, that was closest to the malaria-soaked ground. Because of the military occupation, the village was badly crowded.

“The General Superintendent must have known something about this place,” Julie reflected; “since he sent you.”

“Oh, I know him very well,” Miss Hope declared. “He is a very busy man, and cannot be expected to know everything. This is the world’s end—but I came here on my own request. I have a project which obliges me to teach in at least one remote island. My plan is to teach in every country around the world, as far as I can get. In addition to teaching in the States, I have already put in one term in Honolulu, one in Yokohama, another in a girls’ school in Pekin. From here, I project India and Ceylon, a course of English in a Greek School, ending up in a college in Madrid.”

Everybody over here, Julie reminded herself, had a separate and astonishing thing to do.

The rain had stopped when they set out to climb the hill to the Mess for dinner. There was one general military mess where most of the white colony ate, Miss Hope explained.

In the inky blackness Julie could form no impression of the town. There was the usual plaza inevitable to every Spanish town, on a plateau at the top of the hill. On a corner of the plaza loomed the large house of the august Commandant.

Dinner was almost over when they arrived. Here in this one room, closed against the elements like some Monte Cristo world, were nearly all the white inhabitants of the place. A hush fell as the newcomer stepped in among them.

In a community like this everybody was potential. The girl looked about her, stirred at the encounter with these beings who were to become the companions of her life; and when she was stirred the singular, characteristic inner gleam came out and lighted her features. These people, huddled together to keep their spirits alive in their neglected corner of the world, woke up as if they had received a message from their lost existence.

Major Landon, the Commandant, a tall, stern-looking man of swarthy complexion, rose and greeted her, with the greatest possible courtesy, Julie thought. He was in fact kind to her at once. That this graciousness did not extend to every one, she soon learned. His deep utterance rolled around in his throat like a growl, and seldom got completely out. “You are the first American girl to visit Nahal,” he rumbled. “We hope you’ll stay!”

Miss Hope looked vexed, and resumed her introductions.

The Smiths were the only married couple. Theirs was a very recent and spectacular marriage—any reference to which seemed excessively to annoy the Major.

The two remaining members of the mess present were Lieutenants Dwight and Brentwood, members temporarily, since they had lost their cook; Bentwood, the Major’s Adjutant, was a prosaically good-looking young man who certainly tried his best to please the Major by purring optimistically at him all the time, only to get snarled at for his pains.

The very slimmest lady with the very yellowest hair Julie had ever seen leaned across and whispered encouragingly: “Isn’t he an ogre! I came here, a bride, six months ago, and he frightened me to death. I had come seven thousand miles to marry dear Marlborough—I hadn’t seen him since he was thirteen years old—and you can imagine!”

“Luella,” Mr. Smith called from the door.

“Some time I’ll tell you what the monster said.” The slim lady floated off.

Julie gave ear to Mr. Dwight on her left, whose attention had been so persistently straying from his food to her that the Major’s basilisk eye had frequently to recall it. Dwight explained to Julie in lowered tones—the Major was happily a little deaf—that the Commanding Officer was a somber old file, of belated rank and defeated hopes. Even his marriage had been a retarded affair—the lady had become middle-aged waiting for him to propose, when suddenly she had discovered that he had been making declarations to her for fifteen years, which, owing to his unintelligible utterance, she had never understood. Since the Major had been so deliberate in his own matrimonial concerns, he regarded with disfavor the precipitate nuptials of the Smiths.

The next morning when they again climbed the hill, Julie saw the village of Guindulman for the first time. Always thereafter it was set apart in her memory as a shining village set upon a bluff above the sea against an emerald tropical forest. Along its lone lines of snow-white beach, palms waved in solitude. Over to the east a very singular natural causeway united the island with a smaller one. To Julie there was something very aloof and strange about this causeway with the sea surging up on either side. The whole looked like Eden, new, green, and expectant.

Nahal was in insurrection. A great proportion of its native men had decamped for the hills, where under General Andegas they engaged in outlawry of every sort, seizing the property of peaceful natives and even killing them on the slightest suspicion that they were friendly to the Americans.

The Major was an old soldier, and for all his brusquerie a good one; but after a long sojourn in the subordinate grades he had lost youth’s sublime capacity for hazard. He knew that if he should employ the measures essential to the pacification of the island, the measures requisite for the obliteration of its chaos and disorder, he would end up as an oblation on the altar of American conscience. There might be others who could laugh in the teeth of the gods but the Major was too old. So, high up in his great open room, he could be seen by his world eternally walking about like a caged lion. There is no such bitter spectacle as that of a strong man knowing and yet fearing his own mind.

Around the plaza was all the history Guindulman had ever had. The church was very old, and was supposed to trace back to the activities of the Legaspian missionaries. It had a three-storied stone tower, in which there yawned three gaps for missing bells carried off by Mohammedan pirates to their own terrible island—discernible on clear days as a sinister shadow against the sea. The façade of the church offered an entertaining exposition of the Book of Revelations. The several different kinds of Horned Beasts roared sulphurously from its brow, surreptitiously urged on from under the eaves by the Scarlet Woman; an incensed angel in the center with militant wings and drawn sword, gave them all battle, while under his feet a frightened saint hugged the arms of Spain in desperation.

Outside the door of the church stood a slim, black-robed figure, which, as the two women approached, turned upon them out of a somber and lonely face the sudden fire of a pair of piercing black eyes.

“Good morning, Padre,” Miss Hope essayed deferentially. “May I present Miss Dreschell, who has come to take charge of the Boys’ School?”

A change flashed through the priest’s face, which was not suppressed before Julie had looked into a hidden chamber of his personality. The priest—he was young and had all the swift movements of youth—looked at Julie quickly, and murmured a few Spanish words; then with an inclination of the head, he moved away. A crowd of children on their way to school came flocking about him.

Miss Hope said that he was a mestizo, the usual warring half-and-half—all restless souls vainly seeking, between two races, their destiny. James, the American teacher, who had visited him in his convento, said that Father Herrero knew both Greek and Latin, which in these parts was the same as saying that the Sultan of Jolo could speak French.

The Ayuntamiento, or government building, seemed in its huge concrete size, to overtop the village. It held all the offices of the government, and streams of people were to be seen hurrying in and out.

In a wing of the building Julie saw a great upstairs gallery where two hammocks were hung. These were the quarters, Miss Hope thought, of the new Treasurer, the gentleman who had brought Julie ashore. Troops quartered downstairs made this building eminently safe. In a low-roofed building adjoining, prisoners stuck sociable faces out between iron bars.

The bachelor officers lived on the corner opposite the Major, the rest of the colony in intermediate houses. Thus the Major had his whole domain under his eyes, and could even see when those of the bachelors who messed separately across the plaza came to the table in their shirt-sleeves.

As Miss Hope and Julie walked down the road toward the side street where the two schools were located, the crowd of children who had been following the Padre detached themselves with the inevitable inconstancy of childhood, and formed a devoted train around the teachers, offering them flowers. Julie, who was pretty and always popular with children, fell into possession of most of these.

The priest, left alone, frowned slightly in her direction. Before turning back into the church grounds he paused a moment at the gate, and Julie saw a portentous shadow cross his face.

“He’s the most powerful man on the island,” Miss Hope remarked. “The Padre, for that matter, always is. He is the mind of these people. Some of the officers accuse him of all sorts of things. It’s hard to tell from his face what he is.”

The boys’ and the girls’ schools stood opposite each other on a long, wide side street, over-shadowed by great tropical trees, in which the boys roosted out of hours among the mangoes and bananas. The buildings were high and roomy, overlooking charming scenery of jungle and sea, and were surrounded by the overgrown grounds that children love. This street was their retreat; they lived in it nearly all the time, played their games, mostly now those imported from America, and satisfied their hungry appetites with the queer cheap candies and little sponge cakes, made of very ancient eggs, that were purveyed in its stalls.

Julie turned into the Boys’ School, now her responsibility, while Miss Hope crossed the street. Miss Hope, Julie learned, had several native teachers to help her; whereas one ex-soldier was the only assistant she had with over a hundred boys. Brown boys of every age and stature were filing past her up the stairs. The airy tropical structure rocked to its foundation under the onsweeping surge of youth. Julie looked out at the golden morning, and her thoughts glowed. She felt equal to any enterprise in creation.

Mr. James was a well educated young man, who had come out to fight for his country; and who had stayed behind like others of his countrymen to experiment. He was not a regularly certificated teacher, but he was a good instructor and had been making remarkable progress with the older boys, with whom Julie could see he yearned to continue. The younger ones were not advancing, James confessed; his one ambitious idea having been to turn out candidates for scholarships in America.

Julie offered to take over the junior classes. Her sixty aspirantes filled every nook and corner of the room; sixty funny little brown creatures, fresh from their morning dip in the river, sitting like wet little birds in quivering expectancy. Julie glanced over the rows of brown heads:—the people that the Caravan in its long march had left behind. The boys put their heads down on the desks, like little setters, and stared. One hundred and twenty black beads peered up at her. She was beginning to be disconcerted, when a delightful little savage with hair standing up stiffly all over his head, like a circular brush, detached himself from the brown mass, and, moved by some aberrant impulse, strayed barefoot up to Julie’s desk and irrelevantly laid upon it a rooster’s long, bedraggled tail feather. Having consummated this act of tribute, Delphine, who was to become his teacher’s undying friend, stole back.

Seized by an idea, Julie drew a picture of the feather on the board. The class sat up and inspected this feat. Having a knack with a pencil, she elaborated the feather into a rooster. A murmur of recognition and pure delight passed through the class. The bird on the board was a national idol. Unwittingly and quite by chance she had captured their interest.

In a few days they were chanting glibly of the rat and the cat and the permanently unpleasant relations between the two, soaking in learning by means of their incredible memories, and wrestling musically with the dark, mystic bars of the Star Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

James taught mathematics, and almost nothing else. He had a passion for numbers, which he taught dogmatically as the whole science of life. His boys had been shot dazedly through fractions, and were now halting awestruck before the heights of geometry. The fact and values of the universe astounded their unaccustomed minds. Their island had been their center of existence, and in this painful trepanning, their brains gaped before the marvels and terrors of higher human thought. These incipient philosophers, much perturbed, used to seek Julie out to ask her to explain a little the metaphysical net in which they found themselves fast. They were troubled terribly in their souls, and Julie, ignoring geometry, and all the equations of men, would seek with her fore-shortened philosophies to set these simple minds right; but she could see that they were not quite satisfied. There was no doubt about it that the boys, still unsettled in their minds, went to the priest, who received a very garbled version of her explanations.

Julie’s own little boys were in their seats an hour before school opened, exhilarantly scratching their meager little life experiences on their slates, or debating with one another in bragging English. They loved the school, and lived in it in a state of expectant excitement. Like little charmed birds they sat, while Julie explained what became of the sun when it went away, and the wonderful journey they were at that moment taking around it; whereupon the boys would feel their desks for the barest fractions of the movement of this celestial merry-go-round. They had an inordinate love of fairy tales, and listened—poor little earth-grubs—with widened eyes to the recounting of battles and heroes of far-away places of the world.

Julie never forgot those days. She could shut her eyes long afterwards and see the monsoon bowing the banana trees and scattering to the universe the golden host of the sacred tree of India, rushing with its wild force to up-root their little tropical world. The boys still sat in her memory in quivering wonder before the miracles of the cosmos. The archipelago could never again be the limit of their consciousness; it strayed now over the whole wide earth.

But it was hard work through hot long days for a boy and a girl, and the minds they were pulling out of savagery caught half-way. To pull them up to the tidal mark of civilization would take years, and it was just this staggering task that these two confronted. With their buoyant young shoulders heaving at the wheel, James would despairingly exclaim: “It can’t be done. The whole race is stuck right here.”

Julie would set her teeth. “But they’ve got to go through! The rest of humanity’s done it. Remember they’ve had only a few hundred years, and look at the eons back of us!”

“But we sweated into our own souls, and they make us sweat for theirs. What were they doing in our eons of advancement? and who is fighting their savagery for them? We are!”

Julie sighed. “They are so eager, so anxious. I get frightened sometimes as I sit before them; they accept me so wholly as their creed. It comes over me that twenty years from now sixty men will be thinking my thoughts. Oh, we’ll get them, sometime—and isn’t it the most splendid work anybody could engage in? To make a race! Why, you and I are sowing the dragon’s teeth, which shall spring up as the generation of light.”