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

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.