"AND THE SUN COMES UP LIKE THUNDER."
Up till midnight Manila was at play. In mediæval Luzon they had not
then lost the sportive instinct of the healthy animal or been lost
in the chase of the dollar. The shops were closed, but the places of
amusement were open. The Lunita, outside the city wall, was thronged
with carriages, and at each end of the Plaza de Gotta a band was
playing. Spanish grandees and beautiful donnas were driving or
promenading there. Inside the wall churches and theatres were open,
the churches being first visited and then the play houses. In the
amphitheater, built up of bamboo, a crowd of the poorer people were
gathered, and while the braver battles were not in progress at this
time, cock fighting was attracting the attention of many. Under the
walls of the old city, the city that best represented the ancient
order, the city of this story, in cloisters arched over where stock
was being housed, groups of men were throwing dice or playing cards. It
was like a picture of the middle ages projected into the closing days
of April, 1898.
What an anomaly it was! Walls of the middle ages, surrounded by a
great moat, and within a cosmopolitan group, including Spaniards,
Chinese and natives of the Northern islands; yet adjoining it to
the east lay a modern city; and Cavite, eight miles to the west,
was a fort manned by modern guns. Yellow clay houses of one and two
stories roofed with red tile, some with courts in the center, here
in old Manila, and to the east modern places of business and houses
well plumbed, lighted with electricity. Churches and cathedrals,
conventos and nunneries everywhere here, and beyond the Passig river
modern amusement places and Protestant churches.
In the magnificent harbor that lay north of Manila, small crafts
of many kinds were grouped at the piers, and in the distance the
modern fleet of Spain lay at anchor. It was the one portion of the
old order that yet remained; and the world was pressing upon it,
and change was near.
Ambrosia Lonzello, the Friar's Daughter, stood at the gate in front
of her mother's home, gazing down the street, dreaming the dreams of
oriental maidenhood. She had inherited the symmetry of proportion that
belonged to her mother's tribe in Cebu, and from her father, Bishop
Lonzello, had the Spaniard's dark eyes and charming vivacity. It had
been twenty years since Friar Lonzello, a young priest then located
in Cebu, had met the young native woman who became Ambrosia's mother;
and though it was forbidden priests to marry, Lonzello yet supported
the woman he had then loved and the daughter that had been born to
them. If it was a strange thing to a European, it was rather the
rule than the exception in that oriental, mediaeval country, and as
the daughter of the Bishop, Ambrosia was one of the prominent young
women of the walled city. She stood, gazing down the street and up
at the stars, dreaming her own dreams, a girl without experience in
the ways of the world, when she heard a voice at her side:
"Ambrosia! Buenos dias!" [1]
Ambrosia started. She knew the voice. But she supposed the possessor,
Camillo Saguanaldo, was across the bay in China. A few months before
he had been banished because of leading an insurrection against the
friars, who were practically the rulers of the Philippines, and his
return involved great danger for him. So Ambrosia said:
"I thought you were in China, Camillo. Do you not know it is dangerous
for you to be in Luzon?"
"My duty calls me here, Ambrosia, and here I must be," replied the
youth. "It is not so dangerous now as it has been in the past. At
last our prayers are to be answered and America, the great land that
loves liberty, is to give us a chance to secure our freedom. If we do
our part we shall be free. When I was in China I talked with Admiral
Rainey, of the American fleet that was anchored there, and he told
me that the United States was about to go to war with Spain solely
to secure liberty for the Cubans; and when I told him how it was in
the Philippines, that we had been struggling for liberty for three
hundred years, he said that it might be that Uncle Sam would do for
us what he meant to do for the reconcentrados of Cuba. So I came over
in advance to help when the only chance the Filipinos ever had shall
come to them."
"I wish it might be, Camillo," replied the girl. "But if my father
hears you have returned, he will kill you, and nothing can appease
his wrath now."
It might be mentioned that when the insurrection led by Saguanaldo
had failed and his banishment was decreed, Bishop Lonzello, at the
intercession of Ambrosia, had procured for him an allowance of $20,000
on which to live in China. Ambrosia had intended it as a kindness
to him, and the bishop regarded it as a bribe, but now that he had
returned there was no doubt that Lonzello would prosecute him and if
possible secure his death.
"I shall be safe." replied the youth. "I used that $20,000 in buying
guns and ammunition, and have already a stronger force than I ever
had. My troops are near at hand even now, and Manila is not so peaceful
as she seems."
"You do not know. The heavy guns of the battleships have been mounted
at Corregidor and Caney, and the 160,000 Spanish troops in the city
laugh at the idea of America ever being able to take it."
"Yet America will take it. The American fleet will be here and
will win, and then they will give us freedom. Within a few months
the Filipinos will be free, and then Ambrosia Lonzello will become
Ambrosia de Saguanaldo."
The young girl flushed with combined embarrassment and pleasure.
"It can not be," she said. "I am not worthy of you. I shall seek with
you the freedom of the Filipinos and then I shall die and leave you
free to marry a woman who has a name."
"Fie, Ambrosia. I will give you my name, and there will be none in
Luzon more honored than that. Many have tried for the good that now
we shall attain. It must come. The very fact that we have waited for
it so long proves that it must be near. Luz de mi vida [2], it is so."
"I wish," the girl began wistfully, then stopped abruptly. "Father
is so bitter against you. I always wish you with me, yet you never
come but I am anxious you should go, lest staying mean your death."
"Fear not, Ambrosia," said the youth. "They call me the Fox of Luzon,
and I find my way where they do not suspect. I was with your father
yesterday and he never knew."
"Oh, take no risk," plead the girl, throwing herself in his arms. "Te
amo con todo el corazon. [3] You must, you must be careful. Oh, it
is sad, so sad. If they would only let us have a chance the people
might be so happy. Luzon is a beautiful island. It seems to me like
Paradise, the garden of the Lord; and yet for us it is purgatory."
"Some day we shall be released from purgatory, chuleta [4]. The
prayers of our forefathers will prevail."
"Camillo, come inside, or they will see you."
She drew the young man into the shadows, and into the house. There
the lovers talked undisturbed. They talked of things that to them
were the most momentous--their own loves and their individual plans,
the hope and future of the island which had been their home all their
lives. Little did they know that time was working for them and through
them more momentous changes that should affect continents and end
completely the feudal in the capitalistic.
On the following morning Manila was awakened by the roar of
artillery. It was still dark save for the star light, yet quickly the
streets were in turmoil. Some grasped the things they most valued and
rushed to most ridiculous places for safety. One man took to the woods
with a fighting cock under his arm. A few of the bravest mounted to
the roofs of the dwellings and the towers of the churches in order to
view the fight that had been anticipated, but which had come sooner
than expected. From these vantage points they looked on a scene such
as falls to the lot of man to observe only once in a thousand lives.
In answer to the challenge of Cavite the American fleet was forming in
battle array. In single file, as if in gala parade, they came, like
actors entering from the wings of a great stage or circus performers
from the dressing room, crawling over the white bay like living
things. The dawn had come, suddenly as in the tropics, come with the
roar of artillery. For once it had literally realized Kipling's line--
"Dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay."
At last the fleet, the tool of the new order of capitalism, was
ready. The command had gone forth from Admiral Rainey: "You may
fire when you are ready." The American flag ship shot a line of
fire, and from the smoke that arose a great roar resounded. Boom,
boom! Fire and shell and smoke and action swept from consciousness
the peace of nature and thought of the world of life. Now and then
the white veil of smoke would lift, and the watcher on the towers
could see in those intervals splintered masts and laboring vessels,
specks that were men struggling in the waves, and wrecks that lined
the shore. It did not seem possible that all those specks were men,
with hopes and plans and families, and hearts and bodies that suffered;
the watchers on the towers could not know that decks of vessels were
slippery from blood, and that nerves were racked with pain and hearts
were sore from loss. The American vessels, crawling like water mites
over the white mirror spread below them, circled together about first
one and then another of the Spanish ships; and ever as they moved
flashes like fiery legs stretched from their sides. This red venom of
death touched the Spanish ships that appeared to wither and consume
before it. Here a Spanish ship ran to shore, as though a living,
wounded thing, seeking a place to die, and, trembling, sank beneath
the waves. There a vessel lay under the pitiless pelting of fire,
till there was a heavy explosion, and the ship was torn to shreds
that sprinkled the water, while dots that represented men struggled
in the waves. Yonder a vessel was on fire, and as it bore to shore
specks that were men dived into the water to save themselves, and
the red flames licked life from the redder decks.
With what precision the stranger ships came on, circling, and
pouring death into the helpless vessels whose wooden hulks graft
had left exposed to shell! How aimlessly and helplessly the Spanish
vessels floundered, unable to fight, and finding no escape! It was
war, glorious and terrible. In Spain a thousand widows and orphans
would weep and miss forever that which had been taken from them in a
quarrel in which the fighters had no interest. In America a million
would scream for joy and tingle with the glory of slaughter and the
thought of being splendid fighters. Within half an hour nearly four
hundred able-bodied men perished and twenty million dollars' worth of
property that should have been used to make life happier and better
was destroyed. It was a great drama, in a splendid amphitheatre,
with the lifting curtains of night to show it forth, enacted for the
few in the towers. Ambrosia had seen and understood and was silenced
by the grandeur and horror of it. She felt for the dying, and could
hardly restrain herself from crying out in agony when the American
fleet ceased firing and calmly moved away to prepare, within sight of
the wrecks and the sacrifice, breakfast for the living, after their
hour's toil.
"Oh, God, but this is horrible," she muttered, faint with her
feelings. As she spoke, once again she was startled with a voice at
her side. She turned to behold an old man with a long beard, but she
knew the voice, the voice of Saguanaldo, and it said:
"Ambrosia, chuleta, it is the dawn, not only of a new day, but also
of a new era."