Señor Sansillo lived in one of the most pretentious mansions of the Walled City. He was a lawyer of large interests; in fact, out of sheer adventurousness, he was interested financially in almost every large commercial enterprise in the islands. A large suite of rooms in the entresuelo, or downstairs portion of his residence, served as his offices. These were palatially furnished with the elaborate acquisitions of many pilgrimages throughout the East.
He was of a splendid family in Spain, whose impoverishment had driven him out to seek his fortune in the colonies. At some time or other in his history, he had been attached to the court of a Spanish princess of the royal family, and he had a manner in keeping with that distinction. It was the fact of his having been forced to disclose the existence of his mestiza wife that had kept him back, like so many others, in the arms of the tolerant East. Señora Sansillo had been one of the richest “hijas del pais,” and it was upon the foundation of her wealth that his great insular fortune had been reared.
In appearance he was the most carefully correct man Julie had ever seen, his endless varieties of apparel all being obtained from a famous tailor in Paris. He was tall, as sharply slender as the blade of a knife; of almost ferocious activity, with a face on which emotions seethed as in a hot lake. Among the crude, blunt, sweating figures of the Colony, the Señor’s personal exquisiteness stood strangely forth. Why, in such unamenable surroundings, he should still care to preserve this high fineness of existence, Julie often wondered. He would step forth from his great carriage, with its jingling silver harnessing, upon the pavement of the crowded, heterogeneous Luneta precisely as he would have emerged upon his favorite Boulevard. He carried this fastidious grace with him into his business, and was actually noble in his refusal to lower even here his æsthetic attitude. Rather than take off his coat of dignity and get down and struggle in the dirt, however metaphorically, he would lose any amount of money, and snap his Castilian fingers after it. That did not mean, however, that he consistently lost in his enterprises. He was much too brilliant and too versed in the refinements of mental strategy for that.
He was, Julie soon discovered, inordinately fond of telling “anecdotas.” These recitals were usually of a delicate double meaning, and Julie could hear his clients in the law office adjoining her room constantly breaking into gales of laughter. The Señor would appear for his lesson with the tears of appreciation standing in his eyes. While wiping them reverently away with a large silk handkerchief, he would assure Julie condolingly that she had the sense of humor of a Pilgrim Father. When she could not understand his stories in Spanish, he turned them, wickedly twinkling, into French; and when there, happily for her, the point missed her, he would twirl his delicate fingers toward the window and appear to beckon the whole world into the joke.
The Señor had the Latin’s abysmal contempt for English—a clumsy language, he declared it, without science or charm; and his lessons were like so many brief, reluctant plunges into a cold bath, they were really the last thing on earth that concerned him. English! Yes, he was resolved to learn it, but any detestable time would answer. As there were no suitable books that Julie could find for the instruction of adults, she brought a few from school. It was the Señor’s practice, while she was trying to teach him and while he wanted to tell stories, to pick up gingerly between thumb and forefinger an offending First Reader that had been pored over by many a brownie, and, shaking its leaves contemptuously, exclaim: “Is it within the limits of reason as conceived in your admirable head that a grown man in complete possession of his senses can endure a thing like this: ‘The cat ate the rat: Spell cat, rat, also bat, hat, and mat’—Bah!”
At four o’clock, in deference to her Anglo-Saxon nationality, tea would be served. It was of such an extraordinarily reprehensible character that Julie at first had to be told what it was. Nobody in the Señor’s house was familiar with tea-making, and least of all the native cook. From what Julie could gather from the Señor, a handful of tea-leaves was boiled, like spinach, to pulp and added to a mixture of condensed milk and brown sugar. The Señor sipped his tiny glass of cognac and watched in wonder while Julie heroically made away with the concoction. “The English are an enigmatic race,” he reflected. “The Bank of England, the bank of the world, you understand, stops work every day in the calendar in order that every soul in it may of this fearful fluid imbibe.”
Upstairs his family lived. Señora Sansillo was a sweet-faced woman of the stout mestiza type; dressed when she went out in screaming brocades and plumes, and when she stayed in scarcely dressed at all. Her husband referred to her in a respectfully disinterested way as “Eustefa” and as of “heavenly temperament.” Why of her own free will she should wish to be so good, he could not think. “As for me—I am a diablo!” he would thoughtfully add, twirling his Mephistophelian mustaches.
His children were attractive and intelligent, but they had upon them the indefinable Malay stamp. Alongside their father’s sharply defined frame, they looked as if they had somehow been cast in wax. Children of the sun! Columbines of a tropical garden! Sometimes Julie would see the Señor pick up the youngest, a little brown will-o’-the-wisp, and after looking her over searchingly thrust her down with an inarticulate exclamation.
In time, the herb-woman’s medicine seemed to have proved for Julie to be a veritable panacea. It helped her to work and to sleep. At night when her whole body quivered with fatigue and rivers of weariness coursed over her frame, it was an agency of relief. It was not only a refuge from suffering, but it was also a reserve against over-strain; it helped her to go through the second part of the day, which was the intolerable part. Rising from inadequate rest with the dragging sensation of coming up out of the water with the weight of the world about her neck, and facing the compulsion of crossing the scorching city to battle with the intractable Señor, she gained from the medicine fresh spurts of strength. Sometimes, even, she seemed to come alive to a new world, from which armies of doubts and despairs had fled, and which was invested with the rosiest plans for her drab and clearly indeterminate future. Sometimes she rose to a superb tolerance of mood in which mere human happenings were but traceries on dust.
With hard work and increasing bad health, Julie gradually saw less of the acquaintances she had made. Isabel and Ellis were the Empire’s more fortunate women, claiming its brilliant and leisurely phases, whereas she was drifting farther and farther into insignificance. Father Hull was in Hong Kong making an attempt to rehabilitate his health. Barry, as things were drawing to a crisis for the Americans, was off over the Islands everywhere, striving desperately to stir up sentiment against evacuation and feverishly attempting to finish off some projects before the end.