Pensively, poetically, the conquistador atmosphere still hung over the heart of the city. Priests and armored captains floated before Julie’s mind. In all the pagan hinterland of the East, this was the single Christian citadel, attacked throughout the ages by land and sea by all the savage hordes of darkness.
She stared at the tinted oriental domes rearing above this ancient Christian city, and felt mingling with its priestly atmosphere the Eleusinian mystery of the East, as if hidden in this city there were still unconsecrated shrines.
They passed out of the Walled City with its dark buttresses, its dungeons, its medievally barred doors, its intimations of eternal age and impenetrable mystery, to the Calixters’ home on the sea.
A rainbow scarf of tropical vegetation trailed over this part of Manila, and Julie caught glimpses of gardens full of the perfume of dreams, gardens for whose incredible blossoming all the light in the sun must have been needed.
At luncheon, she cast her first attentive look at her host and hostess. Beside the splendor of this new planet unrolling before her, two individuals had not been compelling in interest.
Mrs. Calixter, it appeared, was a lady from whose being every particle of flesh had been amazingly subtracted, save just enough to leave her alive. She had stayed over here to keep Mr. Calixter company, and in the process had parted ways with her youth. She was very kind, but very, very tired. This fatigue, she told Julie, had gone down deep, and would never rest out.
Her husband was plump, and would go good-natured to his grave. Against such a temperament all climates are powerless. The tropics had achieved only the rape of his hair. He was so astonishingly bald that when he removed his hat the effect was one of almost indecent exposure. The hair that refused to remain on his cranium displayed itself in perfidious and capricious profusion in his eyebrows, which locked bushily across his forehead.
Julie felt very jolly and very much at home. Mr. Calixter, during the course of the meal, waved away the most charming salad of sea-green cucumbers and curling lettuce leaves. He explained that a lettuce leaf over here might be a death warrant, as cholera was more or less present all the time—though that fact could never be impressed upon the Chinese cook.
Cholera! Julie sat up with a start. In this fairy land could such a terrible hydra stick up its head? Mr. Calixter told her about a number of other things that flourished in the islands, things which she had always categoried as traditions of the Middle Ages—small-pox, leprosy on beggars’ outstretched hands, all the dreadful medieval list!
“It is a hard uphill pull we have before us over here, and the top of the mountain nowhere in sight.” Mr. Calixter looked grave.