Isabel made a wry face over this prospect, and advised Julie to remain with her as long as possible. Julie had agreed to remain for the Carnival, but decided that she must go at once to investigate her new surroundings, and that she must establish herself there the following day.
Her salary, she learned, had not been increased, although this prospect had been held out to the teachers for the beginning of their second year of service. For a city like this, where high salaried officials set the standard of Americanism, her stipend was stupendously inadequate. Her financial affairs were in about the same unsatisfactory state as when they had caused the dénouement in Nahal. She had always to cripple herself by payments to Mrs. Morris, and there was now Delphine.
Isabel, however, entered into her perplexities to some purpose. She knew, she said, of a Spanish lawyer who wished to come abreast of the times by learning English. As Julie’s school hours were from eight in the morning to one o’clock, she would have her afternoon free to instruct Señor Sansillo, who was sure to pay well. He was, Isabel said, a pure-blooded Spaniard of culture, married to an enormously rich mestiza.
Julie set out after breakfast to examine the niche that had been made for her in the city.
Tondo, at the other side of Manila, was very ancient and wholly native. It was as flat and sun-bleached as a desert, and had for its horizon on one side the sea, prognosticative of typhoons; on the other a wall of high hills where the winds blew against heaven. On beyond was holy Arayat, lifting its solitary head into space, and holding, it was said, the Ark buried in its crypt forever beyond the reach of man. The people of Tondo lived in the very frankness, of being. Up beyond the ridges were savages who had once been a serious menace to this part of the city, which lay outside the Christian walls. Julie came to believe that the soul of this section lay likewise beyond those Christian borders.
There was a green somnolent river crawling like a senile old serpent through the District. People swarmed its muddy banks, fishing in it, washing their bodies and their raiment in it, and scooping its awful water into drinking jars. So universal was its utility, it might have been the River of Life itself. Old stone bridges lent an undeserved dignity to the vile, green thing, which, set as it was into the core of the people’s life, was bound to have its grain of the picturesque.
A few of the streets were broad and long, but packed with shops of tarnished brilliancy of color that looked like pigeon holes and illustrated all vocations from Abraham’s time down to the present. These booths made the streets look like dingy fragments of some old rainbow discarded out of the skies. From the robin’s egg blue regions of an “Esquela de Baile,” the abandoned notes of a Zingarella tinkled forth in defiance of the feverish heat of the day, as if its incantation would set the whole street to dancing like tarantulas.
The “Booth of Miraculous Refreshment” was yellow and blue, with orange colored festoons, and before its dilapidated wooden tables its patrons imbibed its elixir without any special demonstration of exhilarance. In the “Peaceful Barberia” two natives were matching a pair of ferocious cocks. The “Patriotic Clam” offered ice-cream as the medium of its contact with the public. Next to the “Bar of the Orient,” in suggestive proximity, was the “Resigned Funeria,” done in apple-green and having on exhibition hosts of pink satin coffins drowned in lace.
However ignominiously born, the native gets even with the universe by going splendidly to his grave.
Beyond the row of Chinese rice shops, infants’ baptismal robes in waves of purple and cerise ruffles smote the eye. The tiny, vivid gala company of elfin shells suggested the shapes of an unborn race about to enter the colorful, enigmatic destiny of the East.