but kept more or less to the ever-amusing suburbs of native huts,
which literally swarm with human beings, to every one of whom there is
apparently an allowance of about six babies of under one year old, and on
the roofs are cocks and hens clinging to the steep thatch; while under
the hut lives the family _carabao_ (a big grey water-buffalo) in his
mudhole, along with stray dogs and wild pigs which eat up the refuse.
The number of children, very young children, is something astounding,
but, according to statistics, I learn that 60 per cent. of the children
born in the Philippines die under one year old, so that must help to keep
the numbers of grown-up people down a bit. They are miserable little
languid scraps, thin and solemn, but so supremely fortunate as to wear
no clothes whatever, till they are about six, when a short muslin jacket
is put on, which is more for adornment than anything else. The tiny ones
ride astride the mother’s hip, with little thin legs dangling, and round
black head wobbling about, looking so uncomfortable, poor little souls.
They are fed on rice, which they eat till their little bodies swell up
to a certain tightness, when the food is taken away, and they are not
allowed more till they have “gone down” again. This process results in
a permanent “rice-tummy,” which makes the babies look like air-balloons
set on drumsticks; but, somehow, they lose that as they get older, and if
they live, are generally very slender and well made.
There is a great fuss made now about this waste of infant life, much of
which is ascribed to the horrible and unhuman practices and superstitions
attending the birth of a Filipino child; but I imagine from the
appearance of the children themselves, that the whole question is merely
an example of the Survival of the Fittest, for of so many children born
in such a delicate race there must be numbers who are unable and unfit
to live. They are not a hardy people, these Filipinos, and the heat,
fevers, and plagues of the country affect them even more than they do the
white races, oddly enough. I believe that in the wild parts the natives
are stronger, and sometimes live to a great age; but there the life is
simpler; the cross-breeding less frequent; in the absence of civilisation
of any kind the great Darwinian Law operates even more rigorously;
and the young who are sickly stand no chance at all of growing up and
transmitting their weakness. The skin of these people is not a healthy
skin, not a warm brown, but of a greeny-yellowy brown; their fingers are
delicate and weak, and their eyes not clear or bright, but like little
bits of dull plum-brown jelly.
LETTER IX.
TARIFFS—INSECTS
ILOILO, _January 16, 1905_.
The day has come round for me to catch the mail, but I feel that I can
hardly write calmly, as I am barely sane upon the subject I wish to tell
you about, which is the Customs. I told you about the opening of our
cases, and how we took them out of bond, as they were valued at £30?
Well, a day or two ago the bill came in, and when we saw it we nearly
fainted away, for the amount of duty came to 698 _pesos_—£70.
Of course we thought some mistake had been made, so C—— went off to the
Customs officer and asked him what it meant. All the consolation we
got was that they were very sorry for us, but the Appraiser had made a
mistake, and classed some of our things under Class B instead of Class A.
So C—— said he could not afford this sum, which was far more than the
whole of the contents of the cases were worth if they had been new. Of
course it was impossible to send them back to Hong Kong, as we had taken
them out of bond; but after a lot of talk, the officer said we could
“abandon the goods” if we liked, which means refuse to pay the duty, when
the things would be seized by the Customs and sold by auction to pay the
Government; but we should be unable, by law, to buy them in ourselves.
This seemed to be the only alternative open to us, and C—— came back
and asked me what I thought of it, and asked the other Englishmen their
opinion. They were full of sympathy and very kind, and at last one of
them hit upon an excellent idea, which was to attend the sale and buy
our things in for us as cheaply as possible. This, then, was arranged,
but—“Oh no!” said the Customs, “you won’t gain anything by that, because
if goods, when put up for sale, do not fetch the price at which the
Customs House has valued them, they are publicly burned.”
So that is the end of our story. We have paid more than their value
for our wedding-presents, which seems to me the meanest and cruellest
imposition I ever heard of. But I won’t say any more, for the subject can
only be as painful to you as it is to us. We must just grin and bear it,
I suppose, but good-bye to a pony and trap for a longer time than ever,
and good-bye to any little jaunts in the hot season.
I must try instead to be more pleasant, and the only thing I can think of
is a little lizard I have been looking at for the last ten minutes, while
my thoughts roamed gloomily over each one of those seventy good golden
sovereigns that have gone to help to teach the Filipino that he is my
equal. A worthy cause, no doubt, but one that does not appeal to me—at
any rate to the extent of 698 _pesos_.
This little lizard, which lives in the cornice above my writing-desk,
has just come down on to the window beside me and nipped up a fly in the
smartest manner. This is his hunting-ground, for the windows in the house
only have sliding shutters, such as I described to you, like all the
houses here. Glass windows are almost unknown, but this house happens to
have them along the S.-W. front, where some former occupant has put in
doors on to the balcony, with glass in the upper panels, because in the
rainy season the Monsoon drives in on this side.
In all the houses here these little grey lizards abound, living in the
cornices and corners of the ceilings, and feeding on flies, mosquitoes,
and any little toothsome creature they can pick up. They must have plenty
of supplies and wide variety, for one seems to come across some new sort
of insect every hour of the day—and night. No fleas, however, I don’t
mean that, for Filipinos are clean and fleas are rare; but all sorts of
queer insects crawl and fly and sit about, all of which I suppose the
lizards enjoy; and I imagine they, in their turn, are having a good meal
off some other still tinier creature.
The ceilings are made of bulges of canvas or matting painted white,
pale blue, or green; or, in some of the old houses, with patterns, as
in Italy. In one house in Jaro, a big building with long, wide-open
window-spaces, there is a ceiling that is covered with some sort of
shiny oilcloth stuff, drawn up by buttons at intervals, so that it looks
like the seat of some giant padded leather chair—a most fearful looking
contrivance, but, no doubt, a source of much pride to the Filipino who
owns it. There is a wide space above these ceilings, for the corrugated
iron roofs are very deep, and here live rats, mice, cats, cockroaches,
snakes, all sorts of beasts, which come down into the house for plunder.
The nicest are these dear, clean, bright-eyed little lizards, which make
a funny and very pretty note, a sort of clear, musical chuck-chuck.
Sometimes, but very rarely, one of these lizards is found with a
forked tail, and this the natives look upon as an emblem of the most
extraordinary luck, and they do all they can to catch the lizard and try
to take off his forked tail, which they dry and wear for _anting-anting_.
Any kind of luck, or lucky emblem, is _anting-anting_, and the mystical
emblems, observances, and relics of Roman Catholicism, which appeal to
the Filipinos with irresistible force, have but added to their original
stock of superstitions.
In some of the houses there is a very _anting-anting_ lizard, of a
large size, which makes a loud, clear double note like a cuckoo, that
can be heard a long way off. I have never seen a “Philippine cuckoo,”
as they are called, but have often heard them, and the houses that have
this _anting-anting_ are well known. There is one in the old belfry at
Jaro, another in a house the other side of the Plaza there, and one in a
certain bamboo clump on the road to Molo, and so on, all over the place.
A very general belief prevails that in the roof of each house there
lives a big snake, which has a terrific meal of rats every now and then,
and sleeps the rest of his time, coming down very rarely for water.
I can quite credit this story, for the space between the roofs must
be the very place for a snake, and many people tell me they have seen
these creatures, but I don’t suppose they are really in all the houses.
Curiously enough, I thought there was a snake overhead before I had ever
been told about such a thing, for one day, when I was sitting in the
_sala_, I heard a most extraordinary noise in the roof overhead—a sort
of heavy, dragging sound, and then a thump, and then the dragging sound
again—and, somehow, the thought of a snake instantly came into my mind.
When I spoke about it to some friends, half jokingly, they replied quite
seriously that it probably was a snake I had heard, and then told me how
they live in the roofs.
Talking of noises, one of the most curious sounds here is made by the
crickets, the _cicadas_, which shrill night and day, ceaselessly and for
ever. The ear becomes accustomed to the aggregate sound of their high,
thin note, though I, for one, never get to like it, and sometimes it gets
horribly on my nerves, so that I feel I must go anywhere to get away from
it. At first when I heard it I was always having a curious impression of
being in a Swiss field in the summer; but now that has worn off, and I
think if I ever go into the Swiss fields again I shall think of nothing
but Iloilo. When one of these _cicadas_ gets very near the house, it
drives you nearly mad, and when, as happened a few evenings ago, one is
actually in the house, everything must be searched for the beast before
anyone can expect sanity or sleep. This one that got in, stowed itself
away in the writing-table, and we had an awful time, standing almost on
our heads and streaming from every pore, before we found it in a tiny
corner where one of the drawers does not run quite into place. When we
fished the _cicada_ out at last, or rather when one of the servants came
in and took up the hunt for us and caught it, we found the disturber
of our peace to be an ugly little browny-black creature, with a narrow
waist, and the silly thing refused to give a single chirrup to show us
how it was done.
Talking of insects, one of the things we are most fortunate about in
this house is that we have very few of the black or red ants, which are
a fearful plague in these Islands, so much so that one has to stand
the furniture with its feet in small enamel bowls filled with water or
paraffine to prevent the ants crawling up, for they eat everything; and
besides that, they look particularly nasty when dead in jam or butter, or
floating in tea or coffee. Some of these ants are a good size, but the
common sort are very small, and many of the most destructive are simply
red specks that run like lightning. They are terrible destroyers, and I
can’t think why ant-eaters don’t start living in the roof menageries,
for they would get on splendidly if they did not die of over-eating.
However, the ants do scavenge to a certain extent, and the way a busy
little mob can carry off a huge dead cockroach is a lesson in natural
history.
The cockroaches, by-the-bye, are the size of mice. They are the most evil
brutes I ever saw, besides being a constant source of terror and worry.
You will hardly believe this, for you know that I never mind touching any
animal—mice, worms, toads, slugs, earwigs—and how I have so often been
laughed at, and even sniffed at, as rather an unpleasant young person,
because I have no repugnance to taking them up in my bare hand, for,
after all, they are only poor animals, and infinitely nicer to touch than
many perfectly respectable human beings. Do you remember those people at
Karnak who screamed when I brought them that lovely little toad with a
speckled stomach? And the good folk at home who shudder if you pick up a
poor slug out of a dusty road? Well, when it comes to these cockroaches,
I confess that I have a genuine horror of the great red, evil-smelling
brutes, with their horrible bulgy eyes and their long moving red antennæ.
I can’t tell you what it is about them—but I am not alone in this, for
everyone has a horror of them. They breed in the cesspits, and prefer
manure to any other diet, but will gladly supplement their _menu_ with
any form of food, as well as leather, paper, books, or clothes. The
houses, the shops, and the steamers are full of them, and in the evenings
they come out of their holes and run about. Ugh! they make one shudder.
And every now and then they take it into their heads to fly about or into
the lighted rooms, and I have even seen men who have been here for years
turn quite sick when a cockroach lights on them, and as for the average
woman, she screams outright, and many white women faint.
These horrible brutes are the curse of housekeeping, necessitating
everything being kept in glass jars or tins, and cupboards and drawers
being overhauled and searched every week or so. I must say, though, that
we have not had so much trouble with them as most people, and so far
I have never had one amongst the linen or clothes, and I believe this
is because I hang cakes of naphthaline in the rooms, and put balls of
it in all boxes, drawers, and cupboards, and they don’t seem to like
naphthaline, though they would come a thousand miles to eat ordinary
insect powder, which is, apparently, just the very thing on which to
bring up a nice little family of forty or fifty young cockroaches.
There are some pleasing spiders too, one of which I saw the other day,
with a body nearly the size of the palm of my hand, sitting in a huge,
tough web like a hammock, and looking exactly like those in Doré’s
picture of the Guest Chamber in the Castle Inn, in Croque Mitaine.
I said there were very few fleas, but the mosquitoes make up for any
biting that has to be done. I am beginning to get more accustomed to
their venom now, but at first I was quite ill and feverish from it,
and many people suffer so that it amounts to an illness, and white men
frequently have to be invalided home for nothing but mosquitoes. Nothing
I have ever seen in any place round the Mediterranean approaches the
Philippine mosquito for venom or ferocity, and here, too, their efforts
are not confined to the night-season when lucky mortals are stowed under
nets with no rents in them, but they bite relentlessly all day as well.
Well, I tried to leave harrowing subjects and tell you something more
cheerful than the Customs woes, but I seem to have drifted into other
griefs, and as my spirits are evidently damped beyond hope to-day, I had
better leave off writing and end my letter.
LETTER X.
A FILIPINO THEATRE—_CARABAOS_
ILOILO, _January 22, 1905_.
We went a night or two ago to a performance at the theatre—a Filipino
performance in a Filipino theatre. I daresay it sounds strange to you
to hear of a theatre in Iloilo, but you see this is really a very large
town, and then all the people are musical, and they have plenty of time
to rehearse. They get together little dramatic clubs, the chief one of
which is not far from here, “as the crow flies,” though I think he would
be a very keen crow for theatricals if he flew there as straight as he
could. We heard this performance, an operetta, being rehearsed night
and day before the performers considered it ready for the theatre. The
rehearsals that went on until the early hours of the morning were those
we cared least about; but we were really interested to hear them going on
all day as well, for no one in the Dramatic Club apparently had any other
occupation in life. At least, this seemed to me strange till I had become
better acquainted with the Filipino character.
To get to this show, we set off after dinner, driving in a hired
_quielez_ with a disturbing cockroach somewhere about it, and soon came
to a squash of all sorts of carriages and carts in one of the broader
streets of the town—and a squash of vehicles driven by Filipinos is
something no human mind can imagine without experience. We escaped
alive, and went in at a big gateway into a courtyard, passing several
stalls lighted with flaring naphtha, where native women sat behind flat
rush trays containing cakes and sweetmeats, tumblers of coloured drinks,
and ordinary ginger-beer and lemonade bottles. This, though I did not
know it at the time, was the buffet.
Inside the courtyard another high gate, decorated at the sides with palms
and paper roses, and very dimly lighted, led to the door of the theatre,
a big, crazy-looking building, and here stood two inconceivably stupid
and self-satisfied natives bullying everyone, and making a hopeless and
baffling muddle of the tickets. Why they did this I can’t think, as
everyone passed into the place alike, whatever their ticket was, and
scrambled up a broad wooden staircase, very steep and rickety, or else
went about the ground-floor, every man looking for his own seat, and
getting turned out of it by the next comer.
The “boxes” were little pens railed off, containing six chairs with
no room for your knees, and in and out of these and up and down the
precipitous staircase jostled a crowd of Filipinos, _Mestizos_, Chinamen,
and Spaniards, with little dark women in gaudy _camisas_, wearing
flowers in their hair and diamond brooches. Here and there an American
was patiently and persistently trying to gather information in his own
language, while he took some female relation in a white cotton dress
upstairs and then down again, to keep her quiet.
I was so amused by these proceedings that I really felt as if it did not
matter whether that was all we saw, but, nevertheless, we toiled up the
staircase at the promptings of an obliging Filipino with one eye, very
soon found our box, and settled down to wait for the friends who were to
join us.
In about two minutes, however, we were engaged in an endless discussion
with a little mob of “brown brothers,” who declared quite politely that
we had no right there, as the box was theirs. So we moved off and tried
the ground-floor again; found another box with our number on it, empty;
sat down again, put fans and programmes on the opposite chairs, and began
to look about.
But we were shifted again, so this time we tackled a native selling
programmes, and asked him where our box was, and why the little pens all
seemed to have the same number; and he, in very broken Spanish, at last
made us understand that the numbers were repeated six times, once on each
side upstairs and down. This was a wonderful effort of lucidity for a
Filipino, and really helped us a good deal. So we toiled upstairs again,
feeling sure that we knew all about the theatre now, and determined on
a shot at the sides. On the way there we were delighted to see that the
people who had turned us out of our first box were being ousted in their
turn, but by this time we had begun to giggle, and were too helpless with
heat and laughter to take much notice of anything. At last we got into
a box from which we were never evicted during the rest of the evening,
though some people did come along with a programme-seller to back their
claim, but we showed fight, and they went away again.
The theatre, a long, wooden building, appeared even more ramshackle from
the inside than it had from the outside, and infinitely more dangerous,
for the electric light was supplemented by Japanese paper lanterns, which
looked the last word in incendiarism; and, when one considered the packed
mass of faces all round, it was wiser not to let the imagination dwell on
that steep wooden stairway, which was all there was between us and the
next world.
The floor of the building was arranged with rows of chairs facing
squarely, by way of stalls, surrounded by a row of the boxes I have
described, where the chairs went sideways. Above jutted out a broad
balcony with a similar row of boxes, and above that again, jammed under
the ceiling, was a dense crowd of poor people, standing on what was
really only a ledge with an iron rail; and they looked positively more
like huge black and white flies clinging to the ceiling than anything
else.
Everything looked as if it must fall down or break up, but no one seemed
to be worrying about their doom, in fact all the faces were remarkably
pleasant and jolly.
The stage was a fairly large one, with a row of electric footlights,
which waxed and waned and waxed again at their own sweet will, and quite
regardless of the needs of the performance. In front of the stage, on
the floor-level, was an orchestra of natives who really played very well
indeed, and they and all the men in the audience were in white, which
looks very quaint until one’s eye is accustomed to it.
The piece performed was an operetta called “La Indiana,” a rather
confused story about some old _Mestizo_ with a white beard, whose son
had secretly married an Indian, which is the word the Spaniards use for
the Filipinos, and is employed by the Filipinos themselves as well, when
talking Spanish. Well, the old father informed his son, an appalling,
gawky, young _Mestizo_ in a black morning coat, pepper and salt tweed
trousers, and a very bright blue tie, that he must marry a white
(_Mestiza_) girl of his, the father’s choosing. On hearing which, the
hero sang a song to the effect that he would abandon the _Indiana_, and
had a long duet with that personage to explain that they would just say
nothing at all about being married. Then all the chorus came in again,
the old father blessed the hero and the “white” girl, whereupon the
_Indiana_, a frightfully ugly Filipina with a fine voice, sang a long and
frenzied solo with her hair down—and then the curtain fell.
I thought there must be another act, and was very much surprised to
find that was the conclusion of the story. But evidently, to the native
imagination, the plot was complete and the ends of poetic justice
satisfied. They did not really act and sing as badly as I had expected,
though, when one came to think of “La Indiana” as a public performance in
a theatre, it really verged on audacity. No attempt at scenery or dress
was made, the whole action taking place in a bare, worn, old “set” of a
room, the usual stage room, unlike anything else on earth, and the only
attempt at costume was the substitution of very ugly old European blouses
for the _camisa_, which was a fatal mistake.
We left after the first piece, though there were to be two more of the
same sort, for it was very dull and depressing. There is nothing in these
Filipinos, you see, for they have not the melodious voices of negroes,
nor the faultless ear of Spaniards, nor the fine physique of Chinese, nor
the taste of Japanese—they are simply dull, blunt, limited intelligences,
with the ineffable conceit of such a character all over the world, and
when they break out into a display such as “La Indiana,” all these
deplorable qualities show up in the glare of the white light that beats
even upon an Iloilo stage.
Yesterday we went for a delightful drive out along the Jaro road, off
which we turned a little way beyond the town, and went down a rough,
sandy track to the banks of a broad, half-dried-up river, not the Iloilo
river, but another parallel to it, or a branch.
[Illustration: RIDING A CARABAO.
_To face page 78._]
There we got out and walked down the steep bank on to the sandy bed,
where we strolled about for a long time, watching strings of _carabaos_
coming up from being watered, each herd led by a small boy, riding on one
of the big old grey cows with a calf running alongside. They looked very
picturesque, with the shallow river all the colours of the sunset, and
the tall palms on the opposite bank standing in black silhouette against
an orange-crimson sky.