the Philippine treasury at a ratio of two pesos Conant to one dollar U.S. The importation of “Mex” is no longer permitted, and we rejoice in a stable currency once more.
We provincials followed the newspaper talk about the new system with no small interest. When our treasurer informed us that he had received a consignment of the new currency, and that our next salary cheques would be paid in “Conant,” we were delighted. My cheque, by some accident, got in ahead of those of the other employees, and was the first presented for payment.
The beautifully made, bright new silver coins had an engaging appearance after the tarnished mongrel coins to which we were accustomed. When the Treasurer had counted out all my hard-earned money except ten pesos, he produced two bags of pennies, and announced that I should have to take that sum in small coin in order to get the pennies into circulation. They were of beautiful workmanship, yellow as gold and heavy as lead. I called in the aid of a small boy to help me lug home my three bags of coin.
I had been at home only a few minutes when in came the regular vender of eggs and chickens, who called at my house three times a week. He squatted on the floor and I sat in front of him in a rocking-chair, watching my little maid drop the eggs into water to test their freshness. After we had chaffered the usual time and had come to an agreement, I went into my room and brought out the bags of new coin. I had bought about seventy-five cents worth from him, and I first gave him three of the new silver pesetas, which he admired greatly. There were still fifteen cents due him; and when I reached my hand into the penny bag and hauled out a handful of gleaming copper, the maid said, “Jesus!” under her breath, and the man, “Dios mio!” He received his fifteen centavos with an attempt to conceal his satisfaction. The maid requested permission to look inside the bag, and when she had done so merely grinned up at me with a look that said, “My! You’re rich, aren’t you?”
It was Saturday morning, and I went on busying myself about things at home. Pretty soon there came a deprecatory cough from the stairway–the local method of announcing a visitor. Outside of Manila knocking or ringing does not seem to appeal to the Filipinos. In the provinces the educated classes come to the foot of the stairway and call “Permiso!” and the lower-class people come to the head of the stairway and cough to attact attention. My chicken man had returned. Was it possible that he had heard aright when he had understood the Senora to say that twenty of the new gold pieces went to one peseta? The Senora explained that he had made no mistake. Then, said the old rascal, with bows and smirks, since the lady had so many of them–bags full of them–had he not seen with his own eyes?–would she have the kindness to take back those gleaming new pesetas, which were indeed beautiful, and give him gold in their stead? The lady assured him that the new money was the same metal used in the old “dacold” and that in time it would become as dark and ugly, but his Filipino habit of relying on his own eyes was in full command of him. The man thought that I had got hold of gold without knowing it, and supposed that he was getting the best of me. I changed one peseta into coppers for him, and had difficulty in getting him to leave the house. Ten minutes after he had left, a woman came in to sell me some more chickens. I told her that I had just bought, but she put such a price on chickens as had never before come under my ken. Ten cents was acceptable for a full-grown laying hen, the ordinary value of which was forty or fifty cents. I suspected her of having had some information from the old man, and, in order to find out, I gave her the price of the five chickens, which I agreed to take, in the old “Mex” media-pesetas. Then there was an explosion. She reached for her precious chickens and broke that bargain then and there. Her chickens would sell for ten cents gold, but for no media-peseta. I asked her how she knew I had gold, and she said that did not matter–I had some “diutang-a-dacolds” (little dacolds), and she was willing to sell hens for ten “diutang-a-dacolds” _gold_, but not for media-pesetas. So I counted her out fifty new coppers and we both rejoiced in our bargain. I told her that the media-peseta was worth ten dacolds, but she wanted the bright new money.
For the next two hours I was persecuted with truck-sellers. Ordinarily the fishermen were unwilling to stop and sell in the streets or in private houses, preferring to do all their business in the market, but that morning, I could have had the pick of half the catch. Finally came a woman who had had a straight tale from the first woman. Woman number two had nothing to sell, but, after a minute, she pulled out a jagged old media-peseta and said that she had heard that I said that a media-peseta was worth ten of the new gold pieces. If I was as good as my word, why not change her media-peseta for gold? I said that I would do it if she would give me the new media-peseta, but that I could not do it for the old. When she wanted to know where she could get a new media-peseta, and I told her the Treasurer would redeem old silver at the government ratio, she went off to get a new media-peseta, but it was plain that she distrusted me. The people flocked to my house all day trying to get me to buy something and to pay them in the new coins.
It was remarkable how easily and quickly one circulating medium disappeared and another took its place. At first there was some trouble about getting the poor people to recognize the copper on a basis of a hundred to a peso. They were willing enough to receive change on that basis, but, in giving it, tried to treat the new centavo as a dacold, eighty to the peso. I had to have one Chinese baker arrested for persistently giving short change to my _muchacha_, and the Treasurer had a long line of delinquents before him each morning admonishing them that they could not play tricks with Uncle Sam’s legal tender. But on the whole the change went off quickly and without much friction.
This morning I asked my maid, an elderly woman, if she remembered the old money we had four years ago. She struck her forehead with her hand, and thought a long time. Finally her face lit up. She remembered those Iggorote dacolds and a silver five-cent piece–“muy, muy chiquitin” (very, very small). She said that the Tagalogs called the dacolds “Christinas” after the mother of the Queen-mother. But the difference between a stable and a fluctuating medium meant nothing to her, and probably many of her countrymen have almost forgotten that there was ever any other than Conant in the land.
CHAPTER XIII
Typhoons and Earthquakes
How Typhoons Assert Themselves–Our First Typhoon–Six Weeks’ Mail Brought by the _General Blanco_–Her Narrow Escape From Wreck:–A Weird Journey on a Still Smaller Steamer–Another Typhoon–Rescue of Captain B—- –Havoc Wrought by the Typhoon.
In the month of November two more American women teachers arrived at Capiz, one of whom joined me, and our society was still more increased by two army officers’ wives, and the wives of the provincial Treasurer and the Supervisor. This made nine women in all, and we began to give dinners and card parties, and assume quite metropolitan airs.
Miss C—- and I, from our central positions on the plaza, saw and heard most of what was going on, and we heartily concurred in the gossip of the day that there was always something doing in Capiz. About the middle of the month there was a lively earthquake that shook up our old house most viciously; and just before Thanksgiving we met our first typhoon.
Typhoons have various ways of asserting themselves, but there is one predominating form of which this particular typhoon happens to be an example. The beginning of all things is usually a casual remark dropped by a caller that the first typhoon signal is up. Then the weather thickens, and a fine drizzling rain sets in. It stops by and by, and you have no sort of opinion of typhoons. Then the rain begins again with a steady downpour, which makes you wonder if there will be any left for next year. Again it stops, almost leads you to think it intends to clear. Then a little vagrant sigh of wind wafts back the deluge. A few minutes later nature sighs again with more tears. Each gust is stronger than the one before it, and at the end of eight or ten hours the blasts are terrific, and the rain is driven like spikes before them. It may keep this up twelve hours or fifty-six. It may increase to an absolute hurricane, levelling all before it with great loss of life, or it may content itself with an exhibition of what it could do if it really desired.
At the end of the first day of our typhoon I went to bed wondering how long the ant-eaten supports of our house could hold out against the violent wrenchings and shakings it was getting. I had poor rest, for the howling of the wind, the noise of boards torn loose, and the clatter of wrenched galvanized iron roofing made sleep almost impossible. When I went out into the kitchen next morning, my heart sank into my boots. The nipa roof had been torn away piece by piece. The whole place was soaked, the stove was rusted, and rivulets were running outside and inside of the pipe. Romoldo clucked his glee in this devastation, and opined that the outlook for breakfast was poor. It was certainly no poorer than breakfast when it came.
I dressed myself for the weather and went to school in a mackintosh and rubber boots. The costume seemed to afford no small excitement to the Filipinos who beheld. They had hitherto considered mackintoshes and rubber boots as the exclusive property of men. Had I appeared in a pair of pantaloons, I should not have created more sensation. Nobody came to school, of course, but I had to go through the form of reporting there twice anyway. We lunched on gingersnaps and water, and had a dinner composed chiefly of tinned things.
After dinner, to our immense surprise, we had callers in spite of the storm. Lieutenant and Mrs. C—- came over to ask us to Thanksgiving dinner, and a couple of men from the officers’ mess dropped in. One of these, Captain R—-, was in command of the launch kept at Capiz by the military Government. She was about sixty feet long, and having been built at Shanghai, rejoiced in a Chinese name–the _Yuen Hung_. But as something was the matter with her engines, which coughed and wheezed most disgracefully, the flippant Americans had rechristened her the _One Lung_, much to the chagrin of her skipper.
A barkentine, loaded with molave timber and carrying native passengers, had been driven ashore at the port that day, and the _One Lung_ had gone to the rescue and taken off the passengers. Fortunately the little craft did not have to brave the full force of the sea, as the arms of the bay broke the fury. But even in the bay Captain R—- said the waves were frightful, and he thanked his stars that they had gotten back alive.
While we were still talking of the storm, there came a shout from the tribunal next door, and the noise and rattle of the four-horse escort wagon starting down to Libas. That could mean but one thing–States mail, the which, as we had seen none of it for six weeks, was particularly welcome. But we wondered what boat had come in in such a storm, and, the unexpected always happening, were not wholly unprepared to learn that that disreputable old tub the _General Blanco_ had made harbor safe and sound. It took till nearly midnight to get the mail up and distributed, but we stayed up for it. There were actually eight sacks of mail for our little colony, and we went over to the tribunal and watched the mail sacks opened, and seized on our share with avidity, while we alternately blessed and despised the skipper of the _Blanco_ for getting caught out in the tempest.
This was not the last feat the _Blanco_ was destined to achieve during my stay in Capiz. She had a habit of dropping into port in weather that it seemed no boat could live in. Once she came in about two P.M. in a tremendous sea, bringing a single American passenger–a girl of twenty-one, a Baptist missionary. As the _Blanco_ had no cabins, the captain was forced to lock his native passengers in the engine room, where no doubt they contributed much to the enjoyment of the engineer and his aids. He had the deck chair of this girl carried up on his bridge and lashed, and she was lashed to the chair. There they two rode out the storm. The captain said that from eleven o’clock till two, when he made the shelter of Batan Bay, he expected his boat to be swamped any instant, and he expressed his unqualified admiration for the way in which this girl faced her possible doom. He concluded with a favorite Filipino ejaculation, “Abao las Americanas,” which in this case may be freely translated as “What women the Americans are!”
The _Blanco_ is still skipping defiantly over the high seas between Iloilo and Capiz, though after all her hairbreadth escapes she came near ending herself in a typical way. She started out one night from Capiz for Iloilo, a heavenly calm night, bright moonlight, and a sea smooth as a floor. Two or three miles from the port, a large island called Olatayan lies off the coast–a single mountain rising out of the sea. Everybody on the _Blanco_, including the watch and the steersman, thought it a good night for sleep, and left the _General_ to steer her own course. The _General_ made straight for Olatayan, and ran her nose up on the beach. She stayed there two weeks, and was beaten up by bad weather, and assistance had to be sent to get her off. Then she had to be pretty well rebuilt, and repainted. At the time of all these happenings I was in Iloilo, whither I had gone for treatment of an abscess of the middle ear, and as I depended on the _Blanco_ for getting back, felt personally injured by her antics. I went several times to the office of her agents, one of the big English trading firms, to inquire how the wreck was getting along, and what the prospect was for a return to Capiz before Christmas. The man at the desk did not look characteristically English, and on my first appearance I addressed him tentatively in Spanish. He answered in that language, and we continued to use it. On one of the later visits this gentleman was not visible, but in his place a red-headed, freckled youth, with the map of Scotland outlined on his rugged countenance, presided over the collection of inkstands and ledgers. Naturally, I accosted him in English, whereupon the shape of my former interlocutor rose up from behind a screen and remarked, “By Jove, I thought you were Spanish, don’t you know? and have been talking to you all this time in Spanish. What a sell!”
Failing the _Blanco_, I took passage for Capiz on the _Fritz_, a craft one or two degrees smaller and rustier than the old _General_. Of all the weird experiences I ever had, that twenty-four hours was the weirdest. They cleared out a sort of pantry or lazaretto just back of the deck engine-house for me to use as a stateroom, and I slept on the pantry shelf. Some kind of steam pipes must have passed under it, for it grew so hot that several times I had to vacate and get down on the floor. Then we met a little wind as we rounded the north coast, and I was sick. A family of Filipino aristocrats came on board at Estancia, and the ladies elected to share my retreat. They had several servants and one or two babies and other necessaries of life, and they left me only a corner of the pantry shelf, against which I propped my weary and seasick frame. We made Capiz just at dusk, and never was a wanderer more eager to see home. There on the bank were two of my friends, who said they were invited out to dinner and were to bring me if I arrived in time. So we went to that cheery American home with its spotless linen, its silver and china. For six weeks I had been living on Spanish “chow,” and the contrast made me serenely happy. It was almost worth enduring–the six weeks of chow and the _Fritz_, I mean–to enjoy the change.
But to return to typhoons. We had several more that year, and I began to feel that typhoons were terribly exaggerated in books. But in 1903 we had an object lesson that I do not care to repeat. We went through all the usual preliminaries of typhoon signals, drizzle and gust. It was, I believe, the tenth of June. I stayed up late that night, working, and noticed that the gusts were increasing. Just at midnight I laid down my pen and started to go to bed, when there came a blast that shook the house like an earthquake and made me decide to wait a while. For the next three hours the storm raged in a very orgy of gladness. It slapped over nipa shacks with a single roar. It ripped up iron roofing and sent it hurtling about the air. The nipa of my roof was torn off bit by bit, and the rain came in torrents. I used my mackintosh to cover up the books, and put a heavy woollen blanket over the piano. Then I held an umbrella over the lamp to keep the rain from breaking the chimney, and sat huddling my pet monkey, which was crazed with fear. The houses on either side were taller than mine, and for this little hollow it seemed as if all the iron roofing of the town had steered a direct course. The pieces came down, borne by the shrieking wind, and landed with rattle and bang. My house swayed at every gust. It seemed that the cross-beams in the roof moved at least a foot each way. The little lanterns that burn in front of the houses were blown out by the wind, and when I peered out there was nothing but the inky darkness, the howling of the wind, the thrashing of the cocoanut trees, and the thud of falling nuts. From my side window I could see the native family next door to me all on their knees in front of an image of the Virgin, and once, in a lull, caught the sound of their prayers.
The storm reached its greatest violence by half past one and subsided by about three, at which time I went to bed and slept till morning. In spite of my fear I could not help laughing at my two Filipino girl servants. They slept undisturbed through the earlier gusts, but when the roof went and the water came in, they awoke–disgusted. The oldest one said, “Mucho aguacero” (a heavy shower) and cast about for a dry spot. She didn’t find any at first, but she finally concluded that the corner where my bed stood was highest; lifting the valence, they disappeared.
Next morning Capiz presented a pitiful sight. Many of the great almond trees on the plaza were uprooted and the others dismembered. The little nipa houses were flat on the ground or drunkenly sprawling at every slant and angle. Even the best houses had suffered. The constabulary cuartel was absolutely wrecked. The Supervisor’s kitchen was gone, and his wife mourned for her dishes, which were scattered up and down the length of the street. The home of the scout officer was jruined. He and his wife had taken shelter under a stone wall, and been drenched for three or four hours. The young mangoes had been strewn on the ground, and there was no hope of that crop. Many of the cocoanut trees were broken off, and where this was not the case, the nuts had been whipped off. The banana trees were entirely destroyed. Altogether it was a sorry sight, and we all got out and walked about and viewed the ruins, just as we do for a cyclone at home.
The storm had an aftermath in the rescue of an Englishman, Captain B—-, a pearl fisher. He was anchored under the lee of a small island in the sea between Panay and Masbate. He was in a small lorcha, or sailing vessel, with no barometer, his glass having been left on a lorcha of larger tonnage, which was at another point. The heavy wind caught them without warning almost, and its impact soon pressed the lorcha over. Captain B—- found himself struggling in the water–able to swim, but drowning, as he expressed it, with the spindrift which was hurtling into his face. He kept one arm going, and partially protected his face with the other. Then in the inky dark he touched a human body. It was the leg of one of his crew, four of whom were clinging to one of the lorcha’s boats. It kept turning over and over, and they had to go with it each time. Captain B—- hung to the prow, so his circuit was not so wide as that of the others, but his body–arms, legs, and chest–was literally ploughed by the rough usage. Once he let go and lost the prow as it came up, and the fright of this was enough to strengthen his hold. They were in the water clinging to this all the rest of the night, the next day, and the next night. One man died of exhaustion, and one went mad and let go. On the second morning they succeeded in bailing it out by means of an undershirt, which Captain B—- had been wearing, and which, though torn to ribbons across the front, was whole in the back. They remained in the boat all day, beaten on by the tropical sun, having been thirty hours in the water without food or drink.
Captain B—- said they were all a little mad. They saw the _Sam Shui_–the boat of the commanding officer of the Visayas–in the distance, but were too low to be sighted by her. They wore their finger ends down, tearing a plank off the side to use for an oar. Meanwhile the current carried them down closer to the Panay coast, and on the third day they were close enough to fall in with one of the big fishing _paraos._ This carried them into Panay, a town five or six miles east of Capiz. Captain B—- had just strength to write a line or two and sign his name. This was brought down to Capiz, and the constabulary officer on duty there went out immediately with a launch and brought him in. He was in the military hospital a long time. His attending physician said that between salt water and sun he had been literally flayed, and the flesh torn into ribbons and gouged by the impact of the boat.
The storm did frightful havoc all through the Visayas, and many lives were lost and vessels wrecked. The _Blanco_ as usual made harbor all right, but another little Capiz boat, the _Josefina_, went ashore, and her captain and several others were lost. The adventurous _One Lung_ was at Iloilo, and it was reported that she started out of the river without consulting her pilot, creating thereby general consternation among her sister craft.
We accustomed ourselves at last to typhoons and earthquakes, and, on the whole, decided that they were less fearful than tornadoes at home. Meanwhile we rather luxuriated in the sensations of romance inspired by living in a town surrounded by a hostile population and protected by soldiery. It was very, very new, and we made the best of it.
CHAPTER XIV
War Alarms and the Suffering Poor
A Surprise Party of Bolo-Men–Forty_ _Insurrectos_ _Arrive in Our Neighborhood–Anecdotes of Encounters with Insurgents–Anxiety Because of Treachery of the Natives–A False Alarm–Five Hundred Starving Persons–Great Lack of Institutions for the Poor–Smallpox Patient in the School Building–The Newspaper a Creator of Hysteria.
As I said before, Capiz had never been a warlike province, and there had been comparatively little resistance to the American occupation. Antique province to the west of us had fought stubbornly and was still infested by _ladrones_, or guerilla troops. One engagement took place at Ibajay, a town on the north coast close to the western border of Capiz, quite worthy of description.
There was a small American garrison at Ibajay–about seventy-five or a hundred–and the Filipinos planned to surprise and massacre them just at day-break when the reveille was sounded. But the bugler was an astute youth, with an observing mind, and as he made his morning promenade, it seemed to him that there were far too many ladies squatting about on the plaza. So he got as close to quarters as he could, and instead of blowing reveille, blew the call to arms with all his soul, and then ran for his life. The American troops swarmed out in their underdrawers and cartridge belts, and that surprise party turned right about face. The squatting women on the plaza, who were bolo-men in disguise, left for the hills with the yelling undergarmented in pursuit. A Filipino girl who saw it all described the affair to me, and said, “Abao,” as she recalled the shouts of enjoyment with which the Americans returned after the fray. They seemed to regard the episode as planned to relieve the monotony of life in quarters and to give them a hearty breakfast appetite.
I had been little more than a month in Capiz when the rumor went abroad that a parao with forty insurrectos from Samar had landed at Panay, just east of us, and the occupants had scattered themselves out between Panay and Pontevedra. Pontevedra was supposed to be an insurrecto town, thirsting for American gore.
As we at Capiz were protected by a company of the Sixth Infantry and one of the Tenth Cavalry, and the Islands were theoretically at peace, we were not very much alarmed by this. But it gave us something to talk about, and we enjoyed it just as we do telling ghost stories on winter nights, when the fire is low, and there is plenty of company in case the ghosts materialize. Shortly after, however, came the shocking details of the affair at Balangiga, and we–I speak of the feminine portion of our colony–did not feel so secure by any means. The Supervisor’s wife insisted upon having a guard at her house, and when any two American women got together they discussed what they would do in case of a sudden alarm.
I am certain that there is no braver soldiery in all the world than ours. But I am equally certain that when war is a man’s profession, on which all his chances of honor, pay, and promotion hinge directly or indirectly, the wish in his mind is father to the thought, and unconsciously he scents danger because he wants danger. Of an officer it may be said, as of Thisbe’s lion, that his trade is blood, and “a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing,” But nothing pleased me more than to hear the officers tell tales of the old campaign and speculate on the possibilities of a new one.
Our Supervisor had been a captain of volunteers in a Minnesota regiment. He was a thoroughly interesting talker, and an inimitable story-teller, a man who did not lose his sense of humor when the joke turned on himself. I heard him tell one or two stories well worth repeating.
Our valorous Supervisor was stationed in Antique province, while in Capiz was a detachment of the regular army. And in full sight of both on the top of a precipice, an insurrecto flag flaunted its impertinent message.
The Supervisor said he waited a decent length of time to give the regulars a chance to pull down the flag, as it lay in their province, but when they failed to act, he went out, full of hope and good United States commissary valor, to destroy the insurrecto stronghold and to give an object lesson in guerilla warfare to the regulars. His men hacked and hewed their way through the jungle and cogon grass, with never a shot from the insurrectos. Then at the last they came to a clear slope, and when they were about half-way up this, the insurrectos opened fire, not only with rifles but with great boulders. The Supervisor said it took them over two hours to get up, and they went down in less than twenty minutes. One little Dutch private was in so much of a hurry that he punched him (the officer) in the back with a gun butt and said, “Hurry up! get out of the way.” Most of the shots flew high, however. The flag came down later, but it required four hundred men and a battery of artillery to bring it down.
On another occasion the Supervisor, his wife, a constabulary lieutenant, and I were out on the _playa_ (beach) when we came to a little hollow almost hidden by grass, so that I stumbled in crossing it. This started the two men into retrospect of a day’s fight over on the beach of the west coast. The insurrectos at last took to flight, and the Supervisor started after one whom he had noticed, on account of the beautiful kris, or fluted bolo, which he carried. As they ran, the Supervisor stumbled over such a grass-hidden hollow, and without his perceiving it, his revolver flew out of its holster. He kept on gaining slightly on his quarry, who glanced apprehensively over his shoulder now and then, expecting to see the big Colt come out. At last, when he thought the range was good, the officer reached for his revolver. He described the sort of desperate grin with which the Filipino glanced back expecting the end, and the rapid change to satisfaction and triumphant ferocity as pursuer and pursued realized what had happened. Then the race changed. It was the Supervisor who panted wearily back toward his scattered fellows, and it was the Filipino with a kris to whose muscles hope of victory lent fresh energy. Fortunately, this young constabulary lieutenant, who had been a non-commissioned officer of volunteers, saw what was going on, and picked off the Filipino with a long range shot from his rifle. The kris was secured, and its beautiful blade and tortoise-shell scabbard, inlaid with silver, went as a present to Mrs. Wright when she visited the province.
Somewhere in his “Rulers of the South” Marion Crawford speaks of the wonderful rapidity with which news flies among the native population in warfare, and he cites as an illustration that “when Sir Louis Cavagnari was murdered in Cabul, in 1879, the news was told in the bazaar at Allahabad before the English authorities received it by telegraph, which then covered more than half the whole distance between the two places.” This same condition beset the American officers in the Philippines. Secretly as they might act, they found the news of their movements always in advance of them, and the crafty native hard to surprise.
Among the leaders in Panay a certain Quentin Salas who operated both in Antique and Iloilo provinces was noted for his daring and cruelty. The American troops spent much time in pursuit of him, and among others the doughty Captain of volunteers. The Captain said that Salas made his headquarters in a certain pueblo, and often word was brought that the insurrecto would be found there on a certain day. The Captain tried all devices, forced marches, and feints on other pueblos, but to no purpose. He always arrived to find his quarry gone, but breakfast waiting for him (the American) at the _convento_, or priest’s house. The table was laid for just the right number of persons, and the priest was always affable and amused. The Captain grew desperate. He gave out false marching orders, and tried all the tricks he knew of. Finally, he let it be known that he intended to march on Salas’s pueblo the next morning, and he did so, and actually arrived unexpectedly, or at least so nearly so that breakfast was not ready. The Filipinos had assumed that his announcement cloaked some other invention, and had expected him to branch off at the eleventh hour.
The Captain searched the town from garret to cellar, but no Quentin Salas. He unearthed, however, the usual score of paupers and invalids. One of these was a man humped up with rheumatism, as only a Filipino decrepit can be. The Americans finally departed, leaving this ruin staring after them from the window of a nipa shack. Months afterward, when peace had been declared, the officer heard his name called in the government building at Iloilo, and saw a keen-eyed Filipino holding out his hand. The Filipino introduced himself as Quentin Salas, and owned that he possessed a slight advantage in having viewed the officer _in propria persona_, while he, Salas, was in disguise. He confessed that the American had caught him napping on that day, and that he had been forced to assume hurriedly the garb and mien of an aged pauper. The American owned himself outwitted, and shakes his head to this day to think how near he came to victory.
We lived in a maze of war talk all that autumn. I doubt not that, to the officer commanding, much that was mere excitement to us was deadly reality and anxiety, for although peace was declared, the treachery of the natives had been demonstrated at Balangiga, and there was no certainty that the affair would not be repeated elsewhere. The American people have little conception of the burdens laid upon the army. These were to hold a people in subjection while denying that they were in subjection; to assume the belief of peace and yet momentarily to expect war; to rule without the semblance of rule; to accomplish when all the recognized tools of accomplishment were removed; to be feared and yet to be ready to bear cheerfully all blame if that fear expressed itself in complaint. I cannot but feel that the army had much to bear in those early days, and bore it well.
One little incident will serve to illustrate how lightly and yet how seriously the circumstances of life were viewed at that time. The open sea beach, or playa, two miles north of the town, was the favorite afternoon drive, and one day Miss C—-, who lived with me, was invited by the wife of Dr. D—- to share her victoria. They left for the playa about half-past four, the Doctor accompanying them on his bicycle. He never permitted his wife to leave the borders of the town unaccompanied.
Mrs. D—- was in poor health and found long drives unendurable, so when seven o’clock came and Miss C—- had not returned, I concluded that she was going to dine at Dr. D—-‘s. However, before sitting down without her, I sent Romoldo up to the Doctor’s to inquire if she was there. He came back saying that the D—-s had not returned, and that their servants were quite upset, as such a thing had never happened before. I waited till eight and sent Romoldo again for news. Again he brought back word that the D—-s had not appeared. I thereupon went over to Lieutenant C—-‘s house, who instantly picked up his hat and left to talk the matter over with the officer of the day. Thence it was reported to Captain M—-, who ordered out searching parties for each of the three main roads leading out of Capiz. Just as the men were ready to start, the victoria and bicycle appeared. Our friends had stopped at a Filipino house where a saint’s day celebration was in full swing, and had found it impossible to leave. The Filipino hosts had brought up ice all the way from Iloilo to make ice-cream, but as they were not adepts, it didn’t freeze properly, and they would hear of no guest leaving until the ice-cream had been served. Miss C—- said they were worried and tried to get away, but I declined to believe her. Ice-cream, I insisted, might excuse four times the delay, and I flatly refused to be convinced that they had intended to turn their backs on it after a compulsory fast of seven months.
The troops bundled themselves back to quarters, and it all ended in a laugh. Only the commanding officer leaned out of his window to chuckle at me.
“Well, did you get your chicken?” and I went home and vowed that Miss C—- should perish four times over before I would stir up an excitement about her again.
If we lived in a slightly hysterical state as concerns the possibilities of war and bloodshed, we soon learned to be phlegmatic enough about disease and pestilence. Nearly five hundred starving people had gathered in Capiz, and their emaciated bodies and cavernous eyes mocked all talk of the brotherhood of man. This condition did not represent the normal one of the whole province,–but rather these people represented the aggregate of starvation. Of course, following the war, there was a short crop and no little distress. But a certain Capiz politician with his eyes on the future caused word to be sent out through the province that if the needy would come into Capiz he would see that they were fed. Of course he did no such thing. They came and starved to death; but meanwhile the report of his generosity was spread abroad, and nobody took any pains to tell the story of how the miserable wretches had been cheated. So the politician profited and the poor died.
No one whose life has been passed in American rural prosperity can wholly realize one’s helplessness in the face of these conditions. Capiz was a town of twenty-five thousand people rejoicing in many commodious and luxurious homes and a fine old church. It would seem a small affair to tide over the distress of so small a number as five hundred starving. But the greatest obstacle was the fact that they were not temporarily starving. They represented a portion of the inhabitants who either from voluntary or involuntary helplessness would always need assistance, and the people of the town did not see a clear way of assuming the burden.
I confess in my unsophistication I went out among them consuming with fine altruistic zeal. A woman with a starving child in her arms begged of me in the plaza. Instantly my purse was out, and instantly I was mobbed by the howling, filthy crowd. My purse was almost torn out of my hand, my hat was knocked over my eyes, and a hundred eager claws tugged and pulled at my garments. I had fairly to fight my way out of the mob, and learned to bestow no more alms in public. Then I took to throwing pennies out of the window, and found as a consequence that there was no rest day or night from the wailing and howling in the street. Little by little the fountain of my philanthropy dried up, and I contented myself with giving what I could to the Church to be bestowed in regular channels.
At that time there was not a single hospital (American military hospital excepted) in the Philippine Islands outside of the city of Manila, and with the exception of one or two missionary establishments, no poorhouses, no orphan asylums,–in short, no properly organized eleemosynary institutions conducted by the State. The result was one at which we Americans were first appalled, then indignant, then, through sheer helplessness, indifferent. We simply became hardened to sights and sounds which in our own land would stir up a blaze of excitement and bring forth wagon-loads of provisions.
Between the two stone schoolhouses at Capiz was a connecting house of nipa where in ante-insurrection days the native teachers had their quarters. At first the horde of beggars were allowed to make their headquarters in this; but on the arrival of the Division Superintendent, he protested against sowing the seeds of disease among school children in that way. So the paupers were driven forth and found shelter wherever they could, in barns and unused houses.
In the following June a part of the older pupils were separated from the others and placed in a room in the tribunal, as the nucleus of an intermediate school. I was in charge of them, and noticed one day a heap of rags lying on a pile of boards underneath the opposite wing of the building. Presently the rag heap began to twist and turn and throw arms about and then to scream. I went over to investigate, and found a girl of fourteen or fifteen nearly dead. Her skeleton body was covered with sores, her eyes seemed sightless, and the flies had settled in clouds around them and her nostrils. She would lie on the hard boards a few minutes until the torment grew unendurable, and then break into screams and lamentations. The rooms of all the municipal officers were about her, she was in full sight of the police, and yet there she lay and suffered with no human being to help her. Naturally I went to the Mayor, or Presidente. He wanted to know, with some irritation, what was to be expected when the School Superintendent refused to let the school building be used by the poor. After some talk the girl was removed to a house and assistance given her. She was past the need of food, and died in less than twenty-four hours.
The aforementioned nipa house between the two schoolhouses was utilized for janitors’ quarters, and the arrangement was such that pupils leaving the room temporarily passed through it. One day one of the children casually remarked that some one was sick in there with _viruela_ (smallpox). I went in and found a child apparently in the worst stages of confluent smallpox. Now in our own dear America this would have meant almost hysteria. There would have been head lines an inch deep in the local papers, the school would have been closed for two weeks, a general vaccination furor would have set in, and many mammas and little children would have dreamed of confluent smallpox for weeks to come. But we did none of these things in the Philippines. We merely requested the authorities to remove the smallpox patient, and ordered the janitor to scrub the room with soap and water. Nobody quitted school; nobody got the smallpox; and the whole thing was only an incident.
Later I was destined to pass through the cholera epidemic of 1902-03, and I realized how great a factor a daily paper is in creating public hysteria. Part of the time I was in Manila, where the disease was under much better control than it ever was in the provinces (where it was not under control at all), and there was about five or six times as much worry, talk, and excitement in Manila as ever prevailed outside,
I have lived in towns with newspapers and in towns without them, and have come to believe with Gilbert Chesterton that the newspaper is used chiefly for the suppression of truth, and am inclined to add, on my own account, the propagation of hysteria.
CHAPTER XV
The Filipino’s Christmas Festivities and His Religion
Autumn Weather–Winter Weather–A Christmas Tree for Filipino Children–A Christmas Eve Ball–Early Mass on Christmas–Visitors–Attitude of the Filipino to Religion–His Ideas of the Fine Arts Formed by the Church–Joys and Sorrows Carried to Church–Religion Not a Source of Party Animosity–Filipinos More Likely to Become Rationalists than Protestants.
What with typhoons, earthquakes, talk of insurrection, the novelty of military life about us, and the effort to comprehend the native, the days sped quickly by at Capiz. October and November came and went in alternate stages of storm and sunshine. For days at a time the fine rain drove like a snow storm before a northeast wind, and it was difficult to realize that the deluge was the remnant of a great blizzard which, starting on the vast frozen plains of Siberia, had swept southward, till crossing the China Sea it gathered up a warm flood and inundated us with it. We spoke of its being autumn at home, but we could not realize the fact. When clear days came, they were so warm, so glinting with sunlight, that it seemed all the world must be bathed in glory. It would rain steadily for a week or ten days, and then there would come one of those clear days when every breath of vapor was blown out of the sky, the heavens were a field of turquoise, and the mountain chains were printed against them in softest purple.
With the month of December the weather changed, the rain ceased, and the dry chill winter of the tropics set in. The nights were so cold that one was glad to nestle into bed under a blanket. The northeast wind still blew, but fresh and cool from the sea, and hardly a cloud floated in the sky. We drove often out to the open beach where the surf came in gloriously, and the great mountain island of Sibullian, away to the north, hung half cloud, half land in the sky.
Christmas was near at hand, and we began to think of turkey and other essentials. Presents to home folk had to be mailed early in November, and after that an apathy came on us. Thanks to Mrs. C—-, the energetic wife of a military man of private fortune, Christmas was destined to wear, after all, an Anglo-Saxon hue.
The Filipinos do not understand Santa Claus or the Christmas Tree. The giving of presents is by no means a universal custom of theirs, and such as are given are given on the festival of _Tres Reyes_, or The Three Kings, some six or eight days after Christmas. Mrs. C—- decided to give a Christmas festival to certain Filipino children, and she actually managed to disinter, from the Chinese shops, a box of tiny candles, and the little devices for fastening them to the tree. No Christmas pine could be found, but she got a lemon tree, glossy of foliage. With the candles and strings of popcorn and colored paper flowers, this was converted into quite the natural article. She invited several of us to dinner on Christmas Eve, and we went early to see the celebration.
By half-past six o’clock, when the tropical dusk had closed down, the little guests began to arrive, each in charge of a servant. There were twenty-five twinkling, berry-eyed babelets with their satiny black down hanging like bangs over their eyes, and their tubby little stomachs covered with fine garments and bound about with gorgeous sashes. They squatted on their little heels and sucked their little thumbs, and waited in wondering patience for this strange mystery to occur. As many American children would have made the air noisy for a block around.
The windows of the house were thrown wide open, and the sliding doors which pull back all around the base boards were open too, so that the whole interior was visible from the street below. There a great crowd had gathered, men, women, and children, beggars, and many of the elder brothers and sisters of the favored guests within. Nearly every child was displaying a toy that seems to be the special evidence of Christmas in the Philippines–some sort of animal made of tissue paper and mounted on wheels. It is lighted within like a paper lantern, and can be dragged about. Great is the pride in these transparencies, and great the ambition displayed in the construction. Pigs, dogs, cats, birds, elephants, and tigers, of most weird and imposing proportions they are, and no few feuds and jealousies grew out of their possession.
When the coverings were drawn off the tree, and the candles were lighted, the crowd in the street waxed quite vociferous, but the babies merely uttered little ecstatic sighs. They took their presents and turned the toys over gravely, and sucked gingerly at the sweets. Then one by one they marched out to join their relatives and the transparencies.
We had a good dinner and drank to the homeland and a merry Christmas. Afterwards Captain C—- leaned out of the window and cried to us to look at the snow. The moon was just overhead, ringed round with a field of cirrus clouds. They were piled one on top of another, glistening and cool, with the sheen of real snow by moonlight. I have never seen such an effect in our own land, and only once subsequently here.
There was a ball that night, and we were all going. While we were at dinner, the waits came in and sang in the hallway just as in merry England they sing under the window. But if the English waits sing as badly as the Filipino ones, then the poetry of the wait songs is gone from me forever. These of ours were provided with tambourines, and they sang an old Latin chant with such throaty voices that it sounded as if the tones were being dragged out by the roots.
By half-past nine the local band, or one of them–for most Filipino towns rejoice in half a dozen–came round to escort us to the hall. This attention was, as President Harper always declared of the many donations to the University of Chicago, “utterly unsolicited on our part,” and was the result of a hope of largesse, and of a high Filipino conception of doing honor to the stranger. Preceded by the band and surrounded by a motley assembly of several hundred people, the children dragging their transparencies with them, we strolled up the quarter of a mile of street intervening between the Lieutenant and Mrs. C—-‘s house and the Filipino mansion where the ball was held. When we entered, the guests all rose to do us honor, and shortly thereafter the rigadon was called.
The ball differed little in its essential features from other balls, save that, owing to its being Christmas Eve, the Filipino men, in accordance with some local tradition, discarded the usual black evening dress, and wore white trousers, high-colored undershirts, and camisas, or outside Chino shirts, of gauzy pina or _sinamay_. This is the ordinary garb of a workingman, and corresponds to the national or peasant costume of European countries; and its use signifies a tribute to nationality.
At midnight the church bells began to toll, and the three or four hundred ball guests adjourned _en masse_ to the church. This building is larger than any I can remember in America, except the churches of Chicago and New York, and was packed with a dense throng. It was lighted with perhaps two thousand candles, and was decked from lantern to chapel with newly made paper flowers. The high altar had a front of solid silver, and the great silver candlesticks were glistening in the light.
The usual choir of men had given place to the waits with their tambourines, though the pipe organ was occasionally used. The mass was long and tedious, and I was chiefly interested in what I think was intended to represent the Star of Bethlehem. This was a great five-pointed star of red and yellow tissue paper, with a tail like a comet. It was ingeniously fastened to a pulley on a wire which extended from a niche directly behind the high altar to the organ loft at the rear of the church. The star made schedule trips between the altar and the loft, running over our heads with a dolorous rattle. The gentleman who moved the mechanism was a sacristan in red cotton drawers and a lace cassock, who sat in full view in the niche behind the high altar. There seemed to be a spirited rivalry between him and the tambourine artists as to which could contribute the most noise, and I think a fair judge would have granted it a drawn battle.
Mass was over at one, and we went back to our ball, and the supper which was awaiting us. I shall speak hereafter of feasts, so will give no time to this particular one. Dancing was resumed by half-past two, and shortly afterwards I gave up and went home. Sleep was about to visit my weary eyelids when that outrageous band swept by, welcoming the dawn by what it fancied was patriotic music–“There’ll be a Hot Time,” “Just One Girl,” “After the Ball,” etc. It passed, and I was once more yielding to slumber, when the church bells began, and some enterprising Chinese let off fire crackers. I gave up the attempt to rest, and rose and dressed. Then the sacristan from the church appeared in his scarlet trousers and cassock. He carried a silver dish, which looked like a card receiver surmounted by a Maltese cross and a bell. The sacristan rang this bell, which was most melodious, went down on one knee, and I deposited a peso in the dish. He uttered a benediction and disappeared. After him came the procession of common people, adults and children, shyly uttering their _Buenas Pascuas_. We had, forewarned by the sagacious Romoldo, laid in a store of candy, cigarettes, cakes, and wine. So to the children a sweet, and to the parents a cigarette and a drink of wine,–thus was our Christmas cheer dispensed. Later we ate our Christmas dinner with chicken in lieu of turkey, and cranberry sauce and plum pudding from the commissary. The Filipinos honored the day by decorating their house-fronts with flags and bunting, and at night by illuminating them with candles in glass shades stuck along the window sills.
The church in the provinces is at once the place of worship, the theatre, the dispenser of music and art, the place where rich and poor meet, if not on the plane of equality, in relations that bridge the gulf of material prosperity with the dignity of their common faith.
So far as the provincial Filipino conceives of palaces and architectural triumphs, the conception takes the form of a church. There are no art galleries, no palaces, no magnificent public buildings in the Philippines, but there are hundreds of beautiful churches, of Byzantine and Early Renaissance architecture. You may find them in the coast towns and sometimes even in the mountainous interior, their simple and beautiful lines facing the plaza, their interiors rich with black and white tiling and with colored glass. The silver facings of the altars and their melodious bell chimes are the most patent links which bind the Philippines to an older civilization.
As far as he has ever come in contact with beautiful music, the provincial Filipino has met it in the church. Nearly every one boasts its pipe organ imported from Europe, and in the choir lofts you may find the great vellum-leaved folios of manuscript music, with their three-cornered, square, and diamond-shaped notes. They know little of the masses of Mozart, Gounod, or more modern composers, but they know the Gregorian chants, and the later compositions of the Middle Ages. Often badly rendered–for nowhere are voices more misused than in the Philippines,–their music is nevertheless grand and inspiring.
On the walls of churches and conventos too are found pictures in oil, often gloomy, full of tortures and death, as Spanish paintings incline to be, yet essentially true art–pictures which it is to be hoped will survive the inundation of American commercial energy. The extract-of-beef advertisements and the varied “girls” of all pursuits have found their way into the Philippines; and the Filipino, to our sorrow be it said, takes kindly to them.
So far as the Filipino knows pageantry, it is the pageantry of the Church. He knows no civic processions, no industrial pomp, such as exploits itself in the Mardi Gras at New Orleans, or the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis. He is even a stranger to the torchlight procession of politics, and the military displays of our civil holidays. Neither the Masons, nor the Knights Templars, nor the Knights of Pythias, nor the Ancient Order of Hibernians, with their plumes and banners, have any perceptible foothold in the Philippines. But in Holy Week and certain other great festival or penitential seasons of the Church, the great religious processions take place–floats sheathed in bunting and decked with innumerable candles in crystal shades, carrying either the altar of the Virgin or some of the many groups of figures picturing events in the life and passion of the Saviour. Almost every provincial family of wealth owns one of these cars, and the wooden figures surmounted by wax heads, which constitute the group. At the proper seasons the figures are clothed in gorgeous raiment decked with jewels, and the car is put at the service of the Church for use in the procession. The floats are placed about a hundred yards apart, and between them the people form in two parallel lines, one on each side of the street, every person carrying a lighted candle. When there are twenty or thirty floats, and half as many bands, the glitter and brilliancy of it all strikes even our satiated minds. What must it be to the untravelled child of the soil?
When the Filipinos win a fight or an election, or fall heirs to any particular luck, they do not express their enthusiasm as we do in fire crackers, noise, and trades processions. They go sedately to church and sing the Te Deum. And as we enjoy the theatre, not merely for the play, but for the audience and its suggestions of a people who have put care behind them and have met to exhibit their material prosperity in silks and jewels, so do the Filipinos enjoy the splendor of the congregation on feast days. The women are robed as for balls in silken skirts of every hue–azure, rose, apple-green, violet, and orange. Their filmy camisas and panuelos are painted in sprays of blossoms or embroidered in silks and seed pearls. On their gold-columned necks are diamond necklaces, and ropes of pearls half as big as bird’s eggs; while the black lace mantillas are fastened to their dusky heads by jewelled birds, and butterflies of emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds.
The first time I went to church in Capiz and looked down from the choir loft on the congregation, I could think of nothing but a kaleidoscope, and the colored motes that fall continually into new forms and shapes. When the results of the war had made themselves felt, and the cholera had ravaged the province, this variety of color was lost, and the congregation appeared a veritable house of mourning. This was not, however, due to the appalling mortality, but to the Filipinos’ punctilious habit of putting on mourning. When death visits a family, rich or poor, even the most distant relatives go into mourning, and they cling to it for the required time.
If the reader will take into consideration all that I have said about the part played by the Church in Filipino life, and at the same time consider their insular isolation, their lack of familiarity either through literature or travel with other civilizations, he will readily perceive that religion means a totally different thing in the Philippines from what it does in America, even in Roman Catholic America.
To the complacent Protestant evangelist who smacks his lips in anticipation of the future conquest of these Islands, I would say frankly that there is no room for Protestantism in the Philippines. The introspective quality which is inherent in true Protestantism is not in the Filipino temperament. Neither are the vein of simplicity and the dogmatic spirit which made the strength of the Reformation. Protestantism will, of course, make some progress so long as the fire is artificially fanned. There will always be found a few who cling ardently to it. But most Americans with whom I have talked (and their name is legion) have agreed with me in thinking that it will never be strong here.
The attitude of the Filipino Catholic is at once tolerant and positive. It is positive because without any research into theological disputes the ordinary Filipino is emotionally loyal to his Church and satisfied with the very positive promises which that Church gives him. It ministers not only to his spiritual but to his material needs on earth, and it promises him in no circumlocutory terms salvation or damnation. It either gives him or denies him absolution. He believes in it with the implicit faith of one who has never investigated. On the other hand, he is tolerant with the tolerance of one who has in his blood none of the acrimony begotten by an ancestry alternately conquerors and victims through their faith. The Filipino Catholic is far more tolerant than the Irish or German Catholic. But the Philippines have known no battle of the Boyne, no Thirty Years’ War. When the abuses of the friars here led to revolt and insurrection, the ultimate outcome of the struggle would have been probably a religious secession from Rome, as well as political severance from Spain, had not the accident of the Spanish-American War precipitated us upon the scene, and settled the matter by the immediate expulsion of the Spanish Government. The only real point of infection left to create a sore in the new body Filipino–the friar lands–was fortunately so treated by Secretary Taft that it ceased to menace the State or threaten to mingle religion with government.
The Filipinos are tolerant of Protestantism because to them it is still a purely religious and not a civil influence. They have not killed or been killed for religion; for it they have not burnt the homes of others, nor seen their own roof trees blaze; they have not gained power or office through religion; they have neither won nor lost elections through it. They have the same tolerance in religious matters that they have in regard to the Copernican Theory or Kepler’s Laws. Religion, as pure religion, unrelated to land or land titles, property or office, is no more the source of party animosity to them than to us. Secretary Taft was wise enough to see that, and eliminated the cause that threatened to make religion a vital question.
But if religion is not consciously vital to the Filipinos, as they themselves would conceive and act on it (and I make the assertion in the assumption that the reader understands as I do by _consciously vital_ that for which the individual or the race is willing to die singly or collectively), the unprejudiced observer must admit that it is vital to their ultimate evolution, vital in just the sense that any function is vital to one who is in need of it. As I said before, they are not essentially a religious people; but the early Spanish discoverers prescribed religion as a doctor prescribes a missing ingredient in the food of an invalid, and the Filipinos have benefited thereby, Roman Catholicism is just what the Filipino needs. He has no zest for morbid introspection, he does not feel the need of bearing testimony to cosmic truth, and in his lack of feeling that need is just as helpless as the man whose system cannot manufacture the necessary amount of digestive juices or red blood corpuscles; he is an invalid, who must be supplied artificially with what his system lacks.
I am quite sure that the Catholic clergy, as represented by the American Archbishop, bishops, and priests, are certain that Protestantism holds no threats for the Church in the Philippines other than that it may be the opening wedge in a schism which will send the Filipino not only out of the Church, but to rationalism of the most Voltairian hue. When danger really threatens the Church in the Philippines, it will be no half-way danger. The Filipino will be orthodox as he is now, formally, positively orthodox, or he will be cynically heterodox. As God made him, he might in time have arrived at the philosophy of Omar, “Drink, for ye know not why or when,” or the identical philosophy of Epicurus, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” But the Church found him, and recognizing his peculiarities artfully substituted her own phrase, “Eat and drink in peace, for to-morrow you die in the full knowledge that pertains to your salvation.” Let no proselyting evangelist delude himself with the idea that the Filipino has the mental bias which leads him to think, “Let me neither eat nor drink till I know whence I came and whither I go.” That is the spirit of true Protestantism, which discovers a new light on faith every decade and still is seeking, seeking for the perfect light.
But if the Church in the Philippines is in no real danger from Protestantism, it is in more or less imminent danger from two sources–the necessity for reform in the Church itself, and the growing national sense of the Filipinos, which leads them to demand their own clergy, and to resent to the point of secession a too firm hold by the new American clergy.
CHAPTER XVI
My Gold-Hunting Expedition
Word of an Abandoned Gold Mine near Manila–I Arise Before Three A.M. and Find the Town Asleep–Our Trip down the River–Scenery and Sights by the Way–Three Buffaloes Are Brought to Drag Us over the Mud–Digging for Gold–I Fail As an Overseer of Diggers–Results of the Digging Unsatisfactory–The Homeward Trip.
After Christmas we settled down to humdrum work, and barring my gold-hunting experience there was little to relieve the daily monotony of existence. I wrote an account of the gold-hunting expedition as one of a series of newspaper articles published in _The Manila Times_, With the consent of the editors, I now transcribe it bodily here, for, without any gleam of romance or adventure, the experience was one typical of the land and of our life here, which I believe the generous reader will be willing to accept without any attempt on my part to embellish it with excitement and lurid writing.
Our Supervisor had gotten hold of a legend of an abandoned mine in a mountain some four or five miles from town. According to the native story, half a century or more before this period the mine was worked, and considerable quantities of gold were taken out of it. But dissensions arose between the _barrios_ that supplied the labor, and finally the native priests ordered the shaft to be filled and closed, and all work to cease, lest it bring a curse upon the people. They obeyed, and the mining interests thereabouts fell into oblivion.
The Supervisor had, with native assistance, located the spot, and made a few crude washings in which he found “color.” Then he came back to make a sluice box, and, together with a young lieutenant of constabulary, intended to pass the Sabbath day in further investigation of the mine’s possibilities.
The occasion was too tempting. I promptly laid siege to the Supervisor’s wife, pleading that she induce her liege to let us accompany him. As he was good-natured and the trip was short and easy, he consented. We were to leave town in a _baroto_ at three A.M. to get the benefit of the tide. At half-past nine the night before, the lunch basket containing my contribution to the commissary department was packed and suspended from the ceiling by a rope, protected by a petroleum-soaked rag, and I went to bed to dream of gold mines, country houses, yachts, and European travel. It was ten minutes to three when I scrambled out in a great fright lest I should be late and keep the others waiting. I lighted the alcohol lamp to boil the coffee, and flew into my garments. But I dressed and ate and still they came not. So I poked my head out of the window into the sad radiance of a setting moon.
It was a town sleeping peacefully, and yet with every hint of warlike preparation that scattered itself along the river. In front of the officers’ quarters a sentry clanked up and down the pavement. From the military jail came a sound of voices and the creaking of benches, as the guard turned on the hard bamboo seats, mingled also with a steady tramp. More sentries could be seen across the river, where the troop barracks loomed up and almost hid the hills which gloomed over the town. The bridge was in shadow, but now and then a tall figure, gun on shoulder, emerged at its farthest end into a pale little dash of moonlight. The lanterns which the Filipinos hang out ol their front windows in lieu of street lamps burned spectrally, because they were clogged with lamp black. And the brooding and hush of night were disturbed only by the rhythmic footfalls, or by the occasional slap of a wave against the bridge rests, or by a long shrill police whistle which told that the municipal police were awake and complying with the regulation to blow their whistles at stated intervals for the purpose of testifying to the same. It was all full of charm and suggestion, singularly like and singularly unlike an American village under the same conditions of light and temperature.
The moon sank so low that the mists caught it and turned its sheen into a surly red. Presently a sentry challenged up by the jail, and then the glint of white clothing grew distinct. I unhooked the lunch basket and prowled my way out of the house, seeking to disturb nobody and feeling quite adventurous.
Our baroto with six native oarsmen was waiting at the stone stairway in the shadow of the bridge, and as the tide was beginning to turn we lost no time in bestowing ourselves and our provisions. The middle of the baroto, for a distance of about six feet, was floored and canopied. Mr. L—- took the far corner, his wife pushed herself and a couple of pillows up against him; then I braced myself and my pillows against her; and the unfortunate lieutenant fell heir to the fate of an obliging young gentleman and was stowed away at the end, supported (or incommoded) by the lunch baskets and an unsympathetic soap-box filled with water bottles. The men unslung their revolvers, and we disposed ourselves so as to secure a proper equilibrium to our tippy craft, and were off.
We slipped down the river, aided by the tide, and in a few minutes were far away from the last house, the last gleam of light, and the least sound of human life. Save for the soft dip of oars, not a sound broke the night. Yet it was not silence so much as the sense of deep respiration, as if the earth slept and sent up an invocation to the watching heavens. The banks were thickly weeded at the water’s edge with nipa, and behind that were knolls of bamboo with here and there a gnarled and tortured tree shape silhouetted against the faint sky. Occasionally we came to a convention of fireflies in that tree which they so much affect, the name of which is unknown to me, but which in size and outline resembles a wild cherry. Millions of them starred its branches, and in the surrounding gloom it winked and sparkled like a fairy Christmas tree.
We talked little, and were content to drink in the silence and the strangeness, till by and by the wind fell cooler and we knew the dawn was at hand. It seemed to come suddenly, bursting out of the east in a white glare, without the pearly tints and soft gray lights that mark our northern day births. Then the white glare changed to red, to a crimson glow that painted the world with its glory, and dying, left little nebulous masses floating in the azure, tinted with pink, gold, and purple.
With the first touch of light we turned out of the main river, which was now a broad estuary as it neared the sea, and fled down a water lane not over fifteen or twenty feet wide, absolutely walled with impenetrable nipa growths. From this we emerged just as the day played its last spectacular effects, and found ourselves in a deep oval indentation, glassy as an inland lake, whose bosom caught the changing cloud tints like a mirror, and whose deep cool green borders were alive with myriads of delighted birds, skimming, chattering, calling. Half a mile away, at its farther end, the surf leaped frothily over a bar, and beyond that the open sea tumbled and flashed in the first sun-rays. It was idyllic–and on our left a mere stone’s throw, it seemed, behind the embowering forest, the mountain of our quest thrust a treeless, grassy shoulder into the blue.
Mr. L—-, however, warned us that our way was still long and circuitous. We crossed the lagoon and went wandering off down a green, silent waterway which rejoiced in the appellation of “kut-i-kut” and proved itself unworthy of the same. The tide was going out rapidly, and the water mark oh the tree trunks was growing high. Sometimes we met a baroto on its way to market with a cargo of three chickens, five cocoanuts, two bunches of bananas, one head of the family, four children, and several women unaccounted for. The freight was heaped at one end, and the passengers all squatted in that perfect, uncommunicative equilibrium which a Filipino can maintain for hours at a time. Sometimes we came out where there were almost a hundred square yards of ground and two or three houses and the stir of morning life. Ladies with a single garment looped under their arm pits were pouring water over themselves from cocoanut shells, and whole colonies of game-cocks were tethered out on the end of three feet of twine, cursing each other and challenging each other to fights. The male population almost to a man was engaged in the process of stroking the legs of these jewels, to make them strong, and some of the children were helping.
As a rule, our advent generally disturbed these morning devotions, for American women were still comparatively new and few in the province at that time. A shout, “Americanas!” usually brought the whole village to the waterside, where they bowed and smiled and stared, proffering hospitality, and exchanging repartee with the lieutenant, who used the vernacular.
Meanwhile the tide went out and out, and we sank lower and lower in kut-i-kut till we were in a slimy ditch with four feet of bank on each side. The turns and twists grew narrower, and the difficulty of steering our long baroto around these grew greater. The men got but and waded, pushing the baroto lightly over the soft ooze. But finally this failed. It was eight o’clock, the sun climbing higher and burning fiercer, when we stuck ignominiously in the mud of kut-i-kut.
After a short consultation the lieutenant sighed, cast a glance at the mud and his clean leather puttees, then went overboard, taking a man with him. They disappeared in the nipa swamps, but came back in half an hour with three carabaos, their owners, and an army of volunteers.
Our motive power, being hitched tandem, now extended round a couple of bends, and there ensued the wildest confusion in an endeavor to get them all started at the same time. Apparently it couldn’t be done, and we wasted a half-hour, in which every native in the swamp seemed to be giving orders, and the overwhelming desire of the carabaos was to swarm up the bank and get out, without regard to the effect on the baroto. The lieutenant had come aboard and was sitting on the high prow dangling his muddy leggins ahead. To him Mr. L—- in disgust suggested that the _taos_ were making little real effort and that he “stir ’em up,” Soothe lieutenant drew his revolver and at a season of discord aimed it carefully in the high distance and fired.
The effect on the humans was just what he desired, but he did not allow for the nervousness of the carabaos on hearing a revolver shot in a locality where it is distinctly not native. The unanimity thait had so long been sought swept like an epidemic into our lumbering steeds, and our baroto started ahead with a firmness of purpose that sent the author of this book flying into the mud, and bumped us all up most gloriously as we lunged round the corner. The good work once begun was not allowed to fall slack, however. The lieutenant caught up and climbed aboard, and we swept through the three miles of kut-i-kut in a wild cavalcade, rolling like a ship in a storm. At its end we struck upon water, and parted from our long-horned _ayudantes_.
A short row up a narrowing stream brought us to the place of disembarkation, an open grassy field which swept down from a cleft between the mountains. We walked across this till we came to a brook purling out of cool green shadows, and after following it in a rather stiff climb for about forty-five minutes, came to the scene of investigation.
There, the week before, the men had built a dam, and had thrown a rough framework and shelter across the bed of the stream. This they now covered with freshly cut boughs and leaves, and Mrs. L—- and I were only too glad to spread our pillows and lie down for a few minutes in the cool shade with the water bubbling and murmuring underneath. I was pretty well done with the heat and the unaccustomed exercise, but was soon rested and helped to make the coffee. That was a good meal, spiced with waiting, and immediately after we went at the business at hand.
The men set up the sluice box, which the _taos_ had brought along with labor and disgust, and giving me a revolver, commissioned me to see that the excavating department kept busy. So I sat on the edge of a twenty-foot bank clasping the Colt, and hanging my feet into vacancy. I hadn’t felt so close to childhood for many a long year.
For an hour or so all went well, and the cheerful _tao_ dug and delved and carried without murmur. Then his diligence subsided and there was a talk of “siesta.” Somebody down at the sluice box shouted, “Keep busy up there”; so, after one or two efforts to hurry up our minions, I pointed the pistol carefully into the ground and fired. They all jumped prodigiously and looked around. But I couldn’t play the part. I didn’t look stern, and I simply sat there grinning fatuously with the sense of my own valor, whereupon the _taos_ burst into a shout of laughter and seemed to think a bond of friendship had been established between us. They got lazier and lazier and smiled at me more and more openly, and made what I judged to be remarks about my personal appearance. So at another convenient opportunity I let off another shot, which was a worse fizzle than the first. One old fellow whose back was glistening with sweat turned and winked at me, and another pretended to hunt for imaginary wounds.
Recognizing that I was an ignominious failure in the public works department, I left it to manage itself and strolled over to add my inexperience and ignorance to the sluicing agency.
Mrs. L—- had anticipated me and was already advising the willing workers when I appeared. On the whole, they were pretty patient about it all, and let us ask innumerable questions and make suggestions (which, however, they never observed) _ad libitum_.
But however little I knew about gold-mining, I have shared one thing with the real prospector–the eager, fascinated, breathless suspense of staring into a fold of blanket for “color.” When we really saw a vagrant glint here and there, what delight!–delight easily quenched by Mr. L—-, however, who declared the yield too small for a paying basis.
All that hot summer day, we dug and washed and watched, but with unsatisfactory results. In the long-shadowed afternoon we packed traps and set off down the valley. The egrets, camping by dozens on feeding carabao, flapped away as we approached; we found our baroto as we had left it, rising gently on the incoming tide in the shade of a clump of bamboo.
The homeward journey, if not one of resignation to the will of Providence, had its compensation in the loveliness of afternoon lights and the cool, peaceful silence of the forests. We avoided the insidious snares of kut-i-kut, but found our lagoon just bestowed for the night, snug, glassy, with the dusk creeping on and on. Thence we passed into the open sea, were cradled gently into our own bay, and saw the coastguard station at the inlet send ruddy gleams across the water, beneath the lowering form of the hill. Once in the river, we fairly flew along, bathed in moonlight. We neared home, heard bands playing in the distance, and, with sudden remembrance that it was a native fiesta, turned the bend and saw a fairy city aglow with lanterns, where eighteen hours before had been silence and stealth. All the craft in the river were hung with multicolored lights, and the people were out promenading, while a crowd of school children, sitting on the river bank, were singing “Old Kentucky Home” in four parts.
It was a happy day, one of those photographic experiences to be treasured forever, but the dream of yachts and country houses never has become a reality. If an energetic prospector wishes to try, he will find in a cleft between two tall mountains an abandoned shaft and the remains of a dam spanning a mountain stream. But let him not taste of the babbling water. I did, and put in six weeks of illness therefor.
CHAPTER XVII
An Unpleasant Vacation
The Inspector’s Nightly Bonfires–Our Vacation in Manila and in Quarantine–After Our Return to Capiz Cholera Breaks Out–Record of Our Experiences During the Epidemic.
School closed in March, and Miss C—- and I decided to spend our vacation in Manila. We were to leave Capiz on the small army transport _Indianapolis_ and go to Iloilo, thence by the _Compania Maritima’s_ boat to Manila.
The _Indianapolis_ was carrying an inspector around the island, which gave us a four days’ trip to Iloilo. The sea was perfectly smooth and the nights brilliant moonlight. We ran from town to town wherever a military detachment was stationed, and the inspector went ashore and inspected. This rite usually culminated in a huge bonfire on the beach, in which old stoves, chairs, harnesses, bath towels, and typewriters were indiscriminately heaped. I remarked once with civilian density that this seemed a most extravagant custom. If the army did not want these things longer, why not let them fall into the hands of others who could patch them up and make use of them? The captain of the transport explained to me that all condemned articles must be irretrievably destroyed to prevent fraud in subsequent quartermasters’ accounts. For example, if a quartermaster has a condemned stove which is not destroyed, he can sell a perfectly new stove, and on the next visit of the inspector present again the condemned article to be recondemned, and continue to follow this practice till he has robbed the Government of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course it was plain enough after the explanation, and I wondered at my stupidity.
Our four days’ trip around the island was uneventful save for the nightly bonfires of the inspector. Once at San Joaquin a fine military band came down to the beach and played for an hour in the silver moonlight. I enjoyed immensely the music, the bonfire (which was burning enthusiastically), the wonderful light, the tranquil expanse of the China Sea, and the delicate spire of the village church, rising in the ethereal distance from glinting palm fronds. Nothing is more beautiful than the glisten of moonlight on palms.
Arrived at Iloilo, I was taken ill almost immediately with the prevailing tropical evil, dysentery, presumably the result of drinking spring water on the gold hunt. At the same time there came down the report that cholera was epidemic in Manila. Nevertheless, when I was able to travel, to Manila I went, and there loathed myself, for it was blistering hot. I was staying at a hotel in the Walled City, and the great yellow placards announcing cholera were to be found on houses of almost all streets in the vicinity. But when I was ready to leave, the full evil of a cholera epidemic made itself apparent. There was no getting out of Manila without putting in five days’ quarantine in the bay.
We went aboard on the twenty-seventh of May. The steamer pulled out into the bay and dropped anchor. We were paying five pesos a day subsistence during this detention, and yet we were supplied with no ice and no fresh meat. We consumed the inevitable goat, chicken, and garbanzos, the cheese, bananas, and guava jelly, and the same lukewarm coffee and lady-fingers for breakfast. Owing to the heat, and the lack of fans, the staterooms were practically impossible, and everybody slept on deck either on a steamer chair or on an army cot. The men took one side of the deck, and the women the other. By day we yawned, slept, read, perspired, and looked longingly out at Manila dozing in the heat haze. There were several Englishmen aboard, and they were supplied with a spirit kettle, a package of tea, some tins of biscuits, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of Cadbury’s sweets, which they dispensed generously every afternoon. They had also a ping-pong outfit, and played.
Every day the doctor’s launch came out to see that none of us had escaped or developed cholera, and it brought us mail. Decoration Day was heralded by the big guns from Fort Santiago and the fleet at Cavite, and as I recalled all the other Decoration Days of my memory, the unnaturalness of a Decoration Day in the Philippines became more and more apparent.
Our quarantine was up on Sunday morning, but at the eleventh hour it was noised about that we should not leave, because a lorcha which we had to tow had failed to get her clearance papers. Our spirits descended into abysmal infinity. We felt that we could not endure another twenty-four hours of inaction.
The lorcha was a dismasted hull, no more, with a Filipino family and one or two men aboard to steer. We had a Scotch engineer who might have been the original of Kipling’s McFee. I spoke to him about the rumor as he leaned over the side staring at the lorcha, and he gave vent to his feelings in a description of the general appearance of the lorcha in language too technically nautical for me to transcribe. At the end he waxed mildly profane, and threatened to “pull the dom nose out of her” when once he got her outside of Corregidor.
The rumor proved a _canard_, however, and we lined up at eleven o’clock, while the doctor counted us to see that we were all alive and well. Then up anchor and away, with the breeze born of motion cooling off the ship.
The engineer was not able to keep his dire threat about the lorcha’s nose, but it is only just to say that he tried to. We met a heavy sea outside of Corregidor, and never have I seen anything more dizzy and drunken and pathetic than the rolls and heaves of the lorcha.
At Iloilo we met the army transport _McClellan_, and continued our voyage upon her to Capiz. We bade farewell to her with regret, and consumed in an anticipatory passion of renunciation our last meal with ice water, fresh butter, and fresh beef. The _McClellan_ took away the troops of the Sixth Infantry and the Tenth Cavalry, and left us, in their stead, a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry, which remained perhaps two months, and was then stationed at Iloilo, leaving us with nothing but a troop of native _voluntarios_, or scouts, officered by Americans, and a small detachment of native constabulary. We had barely accustomed ourselves to this, and ceased to predict insurrection and massacre, when the cholera, which we had hoped to avoid, descended upon us.
I am sorry that I can relate no deeds of personal heroism or of self-sacrifice in the epidemic. There didn’t seem to be any place for them, and I am not certain that I knew how to be heroic and self-sacrificing. I was not, however, so nervous about the cholera as some Americans were, and I like to convince myself that if any of my friends had sickened with it and needed me, I should have gone unhesitatingly and nursed them. Fortunately (or unfortunately for the proof of my valor) this was not the case. The scourge stayed with us between two and three months. The highest mortality was between a hundred and a hundred and fifty deaths a day, and by its ravages Capiz was reduced from a first-class city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants to a second-class city of less than twenty thousand. I kept a brief record, however, of our experiences during that time, and once again, by permission of _The Times_, insert them here.
_September 8._ Miss P—-, Dr. B—-, and I were out for a long walk this afternoon. They left me at my door just as Mrs. L—- and Mrs. T—- drove up in the latter’s victoria. Both ladies were much excited by the news that a parao had landed at the playa with one dead man and a case of cholera still living. The other people of the parao had scattered before the health officers got hold of the matter.
_September 9._ The story about the parao has been confirmed. We had hoped to escape the epidemic, but are in for it now, for certain.
_September 10._ It is rumored that two cases of cholera developed yesterday. Dr. B—- denies it, says they are nothing but acute dysentery. Dr. S—- thinks they are cholera.
_September 11._ Whatever this illness be, it kills people in a very short time. A little public-school boy was taken sick last night, and died in three or four hours. Natives are terribly frightened, and we Americans are far from comfortable.
_September 12._ Several more deaths. Dr. S—- says cholera. Dr. B—- says if there has been a case of cholera in town he will eat his hat. They are making every effort to find out what it is, but the bacillus is shy, and refuses to respond to the searchings of the microscope.
_September 13._ Cholera increasing. Dr. B—- has given in at last. A scout died, and they made an examination of the stomach and bowels. Found the bacillus. Dr. B—- says if I will come around to the hospital, he will show me one.
_September 14._ Have seen the comma bacillus. It is certainly an insignificant microbe to be raising so much trouble. Got hold of a report from the Board of Health, saying that, if the epidemic grew worse, the public school buildings should be converted into hospitals. Took it over to the Deputy Division Superintendent to protest. Schoolhouses are scarce here. Cannot afford to infect them.
_September 15._ The schools are closed to-day, the number of deaths having passed ten _per diem_. As I am the only householder, the other teachers are to have their meals with me till the epidemic is over.
_September 16._ The house smells to high heaven! The provincial Supervisor came in this morning with a quart of crude carbolic acid, about half a bushel of chloride of lime, and a lot of camphor. I immediately put the camphor in my trunks, having wanted some for quite a little time, and devoted the rest of the stuff to its proper uses. Put the lime over the stone flagging below, with a large heap at the foot of the stairs, so that everybody coming in must walk through it. The floors and stairs are frightfully tramped up. Ciriaco, much to his disgust, had to wash off all the furniture with _agua finecada_ (diluted carbolic acid). Bought a new kettle in which to boil the drinking-water. Bought yards and yards of new tea towelling, and gave orders that, after being once used, the dish towel is to be boiled before using again.
_September 18._ Dr. S—- says get nothing out of the market. Dr. B—- says he eats cucumbers three times a day. What the doctor can risk surely the layman can chance. I buy cucumbers still. On being brought into the house they are washed in diluted carbolic acid, and rinsed in boiled rain water. Then the servant washes her hands in bichloride solution, peels the cucumber, slices it and lets it stand in vinegar till meal time. Dr. B—- says the vinegar is sure death to the shy bacillus.
_September 19._ All the change is deposited in _agua finecada_ when the servant comes in from market. What could we do without cucumbers? How weary we are of the canned stuff from the commissary! It is rumored that Dr. S—- and wife will not eat butter, because it must stand too long. Mrs. S—- bakes her own bread, and, it is reported, locks her cook up at night for fear he may escape and visit among his kindred. He is not allowed to leave the premises by day.
Miss P—- tells me that at Mrs. T—-‘s the visitor is requested to scrape his feet in the chloride of lime at the foot of the stairs, and, on arriving at the top, is presented with a bowl of _agua finecada_, wherein to wash his hands. The towel has been boiled, and, of course, a fresh one is provided for each person. This is not so extravagant as it sounds. We Americans are few in number, and do but little visiting these days.
_October 3._ Saw four cholera patients carried past to-day. The new cholera hospital is now open, and a credit to the town. Deaths average about fifty per day. The town is unutterably sad. Houses are closed at dusk, and not a gleam of light shines forth where there used to issue laughter and song. The church, which used to resemble a kaleidoscope with the bright-hued raiment of the women, is now filled with kneeling figures in black. So far, the sickness has not touched the _principales_. Only the poor people are dying. There is a San Roque procession every night. Fifty or a hundred natives get a lot of transparencies and parade in front of the altars of the Virgin and San Roque. A detachment of the church choir accompanies, caterwauling abominably. It is all weird and barbaric and revolting–especially the “principal” in a dress suit, who pays the expenses, and, with a candle three feet long, paces between the two altars. I always set three or four candles in my windows, which seems to please the people.
_October 6._ Mr. S—-, being a member of the Board of Health, has been engaged in inspecting wells. The natives are now saying that he poisoned them. He is indignant, and we are all a little uneasy. We are a handful of Americans–fifteen at the most. We have little confidence in the native scouts, though their officers insist on their loyalty. We are twenty-four hours from Iloilo by steamer, and forty-eight from Manila, and are without a launch at this port. In case of violent animosity against us, the situation might become serious.
_October 7._ At dinner last night, Mr. S—- said there had been an anti-American demonstration in the market, and that a scout had cried, “Abajo los Americanos!” That settled me. I lost my nerve completely, and went up and asked Dr. and Mrs. S—- to let me spend the night at their house. They were lovely about it, and salved over my mortification by saying that they wondered how I had been able to stand it so long, alone in the native quarter. Slept badly in the strange house, and am afraid I gave much trouble.
_October 8._ Got some command of my nerves last night, and stayed at home, though I asked the officer commanding the constabulary for a guard. He was most accommodating and outwardly civil, though it was apparent he thought I was making a goose of myself. The guard came, in all the glory of khaki, red-shoulder-straps, 45-calibre revolver, and rifle–don’t know whether it was a Krag or a Springfield. At any rate, he was most imposing, and, as he unrolled his petate on the dining-room floor, assured me in broken Spanish that he would protect me to the last. I bolted my door and went to bed. Slept wretchedly, being, it must be confessed, about as much afraid of the guard as of the possible anti-Americanos.
_October 9._ Last night, decided that I had yielded to my nerves long enough. Stayed at home, and didn’t ask for a guard either. Being much exhausted by two nights of wakefulness, slept soundly all night. To-day the world looks bright and fresh, and my late terrors inexplicable.
_October 12._ Poor M—- has the cholera. His duties as a road overseer have taken him into the province, and he has been forced to eat native food. He got a bottle of chlorodyne and seemed to feel that it would save him.
But to-day he is down. Mr, S—- brought the news when he came by to take me for an afternoon walk. We met the inspector and the padre, coming from M—-‘s house. Extreme unction had been given him and all hope of recovery was gone, though both American physicians had been with him all day and were making every effort to save him. He asked for Mr. S—-, so the latter left me to go to his bedside.
At seven o’clock Mr. S—- went by in the dusk, and called to me from the street to send his dinner up to his house. Poor M—- had just died. Mr. S—- held his hand to the last, and was on his way home to burn his shoes and clothing and to take a bath in bichloride.
Most of the American men went in to see M—-. I am glad of it. It may not be sanitary, but it is revolting to think of an American dying alone in a Filipino hut.
M—- was buried to-night. I saw the funeral go by. First came the body in the native coffin, smeared with quicklime. The escort wagon loomed up behind in the starlight, full of American men, and then came the scout officer and his wife in the spring wagon. M—- was once a private in the Eighteenth Infantry.
Just after this mournful little procession went by with its queer muffled noises, the big church bell boomed ten, and the constabulary bugles from the other end of the town blew taps. The sound came faintly clear on the still night air, and the tall cocoanut tree that I love to watch from my window drooped its dim outline as if it mourned.
_October 15._ The weather remains bright and hot in spite of our continual prayers for rain. The natives say a heavy rain and wind will “blow the cholera away.” The deaths have now swelled to more than a hundred a day, though the disease remains largely among the poor. Yesterday I saw a man stricken in the street. He lay on his back quite still, but breathing in a horrible way. The bearers came at last and carried him away on a stretcher. Two cases were taken out of the house next door to me.
_October 16._ Ceferiana professed to be ill this morning, and I was alarmed. I dosed her with the medicine which Dr. S—- had given me when the epidemic first appeared, and sent for the Doctor himself. But I discovered, before he came, that she had gotten too close a whiff of the chloride-of-lime bag, and it nauseated her. She is more afraid of the disinfectants than of the disease.
_October 20._ Have had to chastise Tomas, and have thus violated Governor Taft’s standards for American treatment of our brown friends. Tomas is about forty and the father of a small boy, and Mr. S—-, who contemplates setting up a bachelor’s establishment when the epidemic is over, fondly dreams that Tomas embodies the essentials of a cook. So Mr. S—- brought Tomas down, accompanied by his son, a child of twelve, with the request that I train them for him. I set them first to washing dishes, and had a struggle of a week or so’s duration in trying to adjust Tomas’s conception of that labor to my own. I particularly ordered that no refuse was to be thrown in the yard or under the house. This rule was violated several times, and my patience pretty well exhausted. I stepped into the kitchen this morning just in time to see Tomas doubling over, and poking the coffee grounds down between the bamboo slats of the flooring. The American broom was handy, and the angle of Tomas’s inclination was sufficient to expose a large area of resisting surface. So I promptly “swatted” Tomas with the broom with such energy that the coffeepot flew up in the air and he tumbled over head foremost. His small boy sent up a wail of terror; and Billy Buster, the monkey, who was discussing a chicken bone, fled up to the thatch, where he remained all day until coaxed down by the tinkle of a spoon in a toddy glass. Tomas was out of breath, but not so much so that he could not ejaculate, “Sus! Maria Santisima, Senorita!” in injured tones. Ciriaco, the cook, lay down on the floor and laughed. Later I heard him and Ceferiana agreeing that I was “_muy valiente_”
_October 25._ In spite of the agua finecada and the boiled towel, Mrs. T—-‘s cook has developed cholera. Though I speak of it lightly, I am truly sorry for them, for Mrs. T—- is exceedingly nervous, and they have a little child to care for.
There is a slight diminution in the death rate, and we begin to hope the worst is over.
_October 28._ The death rate is still decreasing. When will the rain come?
To-day I discovered that all the elaborate boilings of dish cloths and towels that have been carried out here since the epidemic began have been a mere farce. Every day for a week I went out and superintended the operation till I thought Ceferiana had mastered it. She had, indeed, caught the details, but quite missed the idea. She found the process of suspending the dish towel on a long stick till it was cool enough to wring out, a tedious one, so she set her fertile brain to work to find an expedient in the way of a bucket of cool well water, into which she dropped them. Well water! All but pure cholera! We had a hearty laugh over it at dinner to-night, though Mr. C—- looked grave. His official dignity sits heavily upon him.
Tomas dodges me when he passes. I find it impossible to restore his confidence.
_November 2._ The rains have come, and whether they have anything to do with it or not, the epidemic is subsiding. Two days ago, when the first shower broke after an inconceivably sultry morning, the bearers were passing with a couple of cholera patients on stretchers. They were at first minded to set them down in the rain, but thought better of it, and carried them into my lower hall. The shower lasted only a few minutes, and then they went on their way, and Ciriaco and I descended and sprinkled the floor all over with chloride of lime. While they were there, I was nervously dreading the sounds of the great suffering which accompanies cholera. But the patients were very quiet.
To-night at dinner Mr. C—- tasted his coffee and looked suspicious. In my capacity of boarding-house keeper, I was instantly alarmed and tasted mine. It seemed to have been made with _agua finecada_. Miss P—- said plaintively that she had as lief die of cholera as of carbolic acid poison. Neither Ciriaco nor Ceferiana could explain. They conceded that the _agua finecada_ was there, but could not say how. They were not much concerned, and seemed to regard it as a pleasing sleight-of-hand performance on their part.
_November 5._ Only eighteen deaths to-day! If the decrease continue steady, we shall open school in a few days. It will be a relief after the long tension of these two months–for it was a tension in spite of our refusal to discuss its more serious aspects. We have taken all legitimate precautions, and laughed at each other’s oddities, knowing that it is better to laugh than to cry. But had sickness come to any of us as in the case of poor M—-, everybody stood ready to chance all things to aid. But we come out unscathed with the exception of that one poor fellow.
_November 14._ School will begin to-morrow! Have had to discharge Tomas. He went to Baliwagan, a barrio where the cholera is still raging, last night, and Mr. S—- was properly incensed. As a parting benediction, Tomas stole a lamp of mine, but I haven’t the energy to go after him. Besides, I have a guilty conscience, and if Tomas feels our account is square, I am willing to accept his terms.
_November 15._ Began work again to-day. The school is much fallen off. Many pupils are dead, and the rest have lost relatives. It is a gloomy school, but the worst is over.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Aristocracy, the Poor, and American Women
Aristocracy and “Caciquism” in the Philippines–Poverty of the Filipino Poor–Happiness in Spite of Poverty–Virtual Slavery of the Rustics–Their Loyalty to Their Employers–Wages in Manila and in the Provinces–Many Resources Possessed by the Upper Classes–Chaffering for All Kinds of Produce–Happiness Within the Reach of American Women if Employed–American Women Safe in the Philippines–After a Visit to America I Am Glad to Return to the islands.
To an American of analytical tendencies a few years in the Philippines present not only an interesting study of Filipino life, but a novel consciousness of our own. The affairs of these people are so simple where ours are complex, so complex where ours are simple, that one’s angle of view is considerably enlarged.
The general construction of society is mediaeval and aristocratic. The aristocracy, with the exception of a few wealthy brewers and cigar manufacturers of Manila, is a land-holding one. There is practically no bourgeoisie–no commercial class–between the rich and the poor. In Manila and all the large coast towns trade is largely in the hands of foreigners, chiefly Chinese, some few of whom have become converted to the Catholic faith, and established themselves permanently in the country;–all of whom have found Filipino helpmates, either with or without the sanction of the Church, and have added their contingent of half-breeds, or _mestizos_, to the population.
The land-owning aristocracy, though it must have been in possession of its advantages for several generations, seems deficient in jealous exclusiveness on the score of birth. I do not remember to have heard once here the expression “of good family,” as we hear it in America, and especially in the South. But I have heard “He is a rich man” so used as to indicate that this good fortune carried with it unquestioned social prerogative. Yet there must be some clannishness based upon birth, for your true Filipino never repudiates his poor relations or apologizes for them. At every social function there is a crowd of them in all stages of modest apparel, and with manners born of social obscurity, asserting their right to be considered among the elect. I am inclined to think that Filipinos concern themselves with the present rather than the past, and that the _parvenu_ finds it even easier to win his way with them than with us. Even under Spanish rule poor men had a chance, and sometimes rose to the top. I remember the case, in particular, of one family which claimed and held social leadership in Capiz. Its head was a long-headed, cautious, shrewd old fellow, with so many Yankee traits that I sometimes almost forgot, and addressed him in English. My landlady, who was an heiress in her own right, and the last of a family of former repute, told me that the old financier came to Capiz “poor as wood.” She did not use that homely simile, however, but the typical Filipino statement that his pantaloons were torn. She took me behind a door to tell me, and imparted the information in a whisper, as if she were afraid of condign punishment if overheard.
“Money talks” in the Philippines just as blatantly as it does in the United States. In addition to the social halo imparted by its possession, there is a condition grown out of it, known locally as “caciquism.” Caciquism is the social and political prestige exercised by a local man or family. There are examples in America, where every village owns its leading citizen’s and its leading citizen’s wife’s influence. Booth Tarkington has pictured an American cacique in “The Conquest of Canaan.” Judge Pike is a cacique. His power, however, is vested in his capacity to deceive his fellowmen, in the American’s natural love for what he regards as an eminent personality, and his clinging to an ideal.
A Filipino cacique is quite a different being. He owes his prestige to fear–material fear of the consequences which his wealth and power can bring down on those that cross him. He does not have to play a hypocritical role. He need neither assume to be, nor be, a saint in his private or public life. He must simply be in control of enough resources to attach to him a large body of relatives and friends whose financial interests are tied up with his. Under the Spanish regime he had to stand in by bribery with the local governor. Under the American regime, with its illusions of democracy, he simply points to his _clientele_ and puts forward the plea that he is the natural voice of the people. The American Government, helpless in its great ignorance of people, language, and customs, is eager to find the people’s voice, and probably takes him at his word. Fortified by Government backing, he starts in to run his province independently of law or justice, and succeeds in doing so. There are no newspapers, there is no real knowledge among the people of what popular rights consist in, and no idea with which to combat his usurpations. The men whom he squeezes howl, but not over the principle. They simply wait the day of revolution. Even where there is a real public sentiment which condemns the tyrant, it is half the time afraid to assert itself, for the tyrant’s first defence is that they oppose him because he is a friend of the American Government. Local justice of the peace courts are simply farcical, and most of the cacique’s violations of right keep him clear at least of the courts of first instance, where the judiciary, Filipino or American, is reliable. Thus our Government, in its first attempts to introduce democratic institutions, finds itself struggling with the very worst evil of democracy long before it can make the virtues apparent.
The poor people among the Filipinos live in a poverty, a misery, and a happiness inconceivable to our people who have not seen it. Their poverty is real–not only relative. Their houses are barely a covering from rain or sun. A single rude bamboo bedstead and a stool or two constitute their furniture. There is an earthen water jar, another earthen pot for cooking rice, a bolo for cutting, one or two wooden spoons, and a cup made of cocoanut shells. The stove consists of three stones laid under the house, or back of it, where a rice-pot may be balanced over the fire laid between. There are no tables, no linen, no dishes, no towels. The family eat with their fingers while sitting about on the ground with some broken banana leaves for plates. Coffee, tea, and chocolate are unknown luxuries to them. Fish and rice, with lumps of salt and sometimes a bit of fruit, constitute their only diet. In the babies this mass of undigested half-cooked rice remains in the abdomen and produces what is called “rice belly.” In the adults it brings beriberi, from which they die quickly. They suffer from boils and impure blood and many skin diseases. Consumption is rife, and rheumatism attacks old and young alike. They are tormented by gnats and mosquitoes, and frequently to rid themselves of the pests build fires under the house and sleep away the hot tropical night in the smoke. While the upper classes are abstemious, the lower orders drink much of the native _vino_, which is made from the sap of cocoanut and nipa trees, and the men are often brutal to women and children.
I think the most hopeful person must admit that this is an enumeration of real and not fancied evils, that the old saw about happiness and prosperity being relative terms is not applicable. The Filipino laborer is still far below even the lowest step of the relative degree of prosperity and happiness. Yet in spite of these ills he is happy because he has not developed enough to achieve either self-pity or self-analysis. He bears his pain, when it comes, as a dumb animal does, and forgets it as quickly when it goes. When the hour of death descends, he meets it stoically, partly because physical pain dulls his senses, partly because the instinct of fatalism is there in spite of his Catholicism.
Of course this poverty-stricken condition is largely his own fault. He has apparently an ineradicable repugnance to continued labor. He does not look forward to the future. Fathers and mothers will sit the whole day playing the guitar and singing or talking, after the fashion of the country, with not a bite of food in the house. When their own desires begin to reinforce the clamors of the children, they will start out at the eleventh hour to find an errand or an odd bit of work. There may be a single squash on the roof vine waiting to be plucked and to yield its few centavos, or they can go out to the beach and dig a few cents’ worth of clams.
The more intelligent of the laboring class attach themselves as _cliente_ to the rich land-holding families. They are by no means slaves in law, but they are in fact; and they like it. The men are agricultural laborers; the women, seamstresses, house servants, and wet nurses, and they also do the beautiful embroideries, the hat-plaiting, the weaving of pina, sinamay, and jusi, and the other local industries which are carried on by the upper class. The poor themselves have nothing to do with commerce; that is in the hands of the well-to-do.
As the children of the _clientele_ grow up, they are scattered out among the different branches of the ruling family as maids and valets. In a well-to-do Filipino family of ten or twelve children, there will be a child servant for every child in the house. The little servants are ill-fed creatures (for the Filipinos themselves are merciless in what they exact and parsimonious in what they give), trained at seven or eight years of age to look after the room, the clothing, and to be at the beck and call of another child, usually a little older, but ofttimes younger than themselves. They go to school with their little masters and mistresses, carry their books, and play with them. For this they receive the scantiest dole of food on which they can live, a few cast-off garments, and a stipend of a medio-peso (twenty-five cents cents U.S. currency) per annum, which their parents collect and spend. Parents and child are satisfied, because, little as they get, it is certain. Parents especially are satisfied, because thus do they evade the duties and responsibilities of parenthood.
It was at first a source of wonder to me how the rich man came out even on his scores of retainers, owing to their idleness and the demands for fiestas which he is compelled to grant. But he does succeed in getting enough out of them to pay for the unhulled rice he gives them, and he more than evens up on the children. If ever there was a land where legislation on the subject of child labor is needed, it is here. Children are overworked from infancy. They do much of the work of the Islands, and the last drop of energy and vitality is gone before they reach manhood or womanhood. Indeed, the first privilege of manhood to them is to quit work.
The feeling between these poor Filipinos and their so-called employers is just what the feeling used to be between Southerners and their negroes. The lower-class man is proud of his connection with the great family. He guards its secrets and is loyal to it. He will fight for it, if ordered, and desist when ordered.
The second house I lived in in Capiz was smaller than the first, and had on the lower floor a Filipino family in one room. I demanded that they be ejected if I rented the house, but the owner begged me to reconsider. They were, she said, old-time servants of hers to whom she felt it her duty to give shelter. They had always looked after her house and would look after me.
I yielded to her insistence, but doubtingly. In six weeks I was perfectly convinced of her wisdom and my foolishness. Did it rain, Basilio came flying up to see if the roof leaked. If a window stuck and would not slide, I called Basilio. For the modest reward of two pesos a month (one dollar gold) he skated my floors till they shone like mirrors. He ran errands for a penny or two. His wife would embroider for me, or wash a garment if I needed it in a hurry. If I had an errand which took me out nights, Basilio lit up an old lantern, unsolicited, and went ahead with the light and a bolo. If a heavy rain came up when I was at school, he appeared with my mackintosh and rubbers. And while a great many small coins went from me to him, I could never see that the pay was proportional to his care. Yet there was no difficulty in comprehending it. Pilar (my landlady) had told him to take care of me, and he was obeying orders. If she had told him to come up and bolo me as I slept, he would have done it unhesitatingly.
The result of American occupation has been a rise in the price of agricultural labor, and in the city of Manila in all labor. But in the provinces the needle-woman, the weaver, and the house servant work still for inconceivably small prices, while there has been a decided rise in the price of local manufactures. Jusi, which cost three dollars gold a pattern in 1901, now costs six and nine dollars. Exquisite embroideries on pina, which is thinner than bolting cloth, have quadrupled their prices, but the provincial women servants, who weave the jusi and do the embroidering, still work for a few cents a day and two scanty meals.
When I arrived here a seamstress worked nine hours a day for twenty cents gold and her dinner. Now in Manila a seamstress working for Americans receives fifty cents gold and sometimes seventy-five cents and her dinner, though the Spanish, Filipinos, and Chinese pay less. In the province of Capiz twelve and a half cents gold per day for a seamstress is the recognized price for an American to pay–natives get one for less. A provincial Filipino pays his coachman two and a half dollars gold a month, and a cook one dollar and a half. An American for the same labor must pay from four to eight dollars for the cook and three to six dollars for the coachman. As before stated, the subordinate servants in a Filipino house cost next to nothing, because of the utilization of child labor.
A provincial Filipino can support quite an establishment, and keep a carriage on an income of forty dollars gold a month where to an American it would cost sixty or eighty dollars. This is due partly to our own consumption of high-priced tinned foods, partly to the better price paid for labor, but chiefly to our desire to feed our servants into good healthy condition. We not only see that they have more food, but we look more closely to its variety and nutritious qualities. We employ adults and demand more labor, because our housekeeping is more complex than Filipino housekeeping, and we expect to employ fewer servants than Filipinos do.
The Filipinos, the Spanish, and even the English who are settled here cling to mediaeval European ideas in the matter of service. If they have any snobbish weakness for display, it is in the number of retainers they can muster. Just as in our country rural prosperity is evinced by the upkeep of fences and buildings, the spic and span new paint, and the garish furnishings, here it is written in the number of servants and hangers-on. The great foreign trading firms like to boast of the tremendous length of their pay rolls. They would rather employ four hundred underworked mediocrities at twenty pesos a month than half a hundred abilities at four times that amount. The land-holders