Copyright, 1920, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages.
THE GREEN GOD’S PAVILION
CHAPTER I
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.