was the Gibson Girl, of whom there were several specimens to be seen
strutting about. All Americans, men and women, as I have noticed at
home and on the Continent, have something of this type about them, and
I often wonder whether Dana Gibson has discovered the essentials of the
American type, or whether he has invented a model which they admire and
try to copy. Whichever it is, when it is natural it is pretty enough in
moderation, but some of them have, as they would express it, “got right
there,” and they may be picked out of any crowd of ordinary human shapes
at a glance. Of course no human being really could have the proportions
of the Gibson Girl as she is on paper, for no living thing ever had such
length of leg and neck but a giraffe; only so many Americans have that
type of face, with a low, pretty square forehead, thick, round nose,
heavy jaw, and arched eyebrows. Corsets and high hair-pads can help
towards the rest of the design. I can’t think how anyone wants to be a
Gibson Girl, unless for twenty guineas a week at a theatre, as the pose
and the untidy hair is inexpressibly common and shop-girlish. Moreover, I
don’t see how anyone can expect to ape anything and avoid being vulgar.
The Gibson Girl does not escape this latter calamity. She “gets right
there just every time.”
After watching the dancing for a good while, I was taken round the
grounds and given refreshment at one of the little buffets in the garden.
A most amusing episode occurred at the chief of these buffets, where a
big bowl of punch was being administered by the Chinese servants, who
opened everything they could lay hands on—whisky, port, claret, soda,
liqueurs, brandy, champagne—and poured it all into the punch. You can
imagine what ludicrous stories were afloat about people who had taken
one sip of this fire-water, and were reported to have been carried off
half-dying, and shipped home down the river.
About half-past ten the crowds began to thin, and we left the palace,
getting upon our launch again at the same place where we had landed.
There was no more moon, but the stars made quite a bright light, and the
air was so fresh upon the water at that hour that one could actually
stand the extra warmth of a chiffon scarf across one’s bare shoulders.
_March 4._
I found myself very tired yesterday after the _fête_, so I stayed in the
house all day, except for a drive in the evening to the Escolta, which
is the principal street of shops. When we came here in November, fresh
from palatial Hong Kong, I thought this town the most shoddy and hideous
place I had ever seen, but now I find it really difficult to recall my
first impressions, for it seems a gay and handsome metropolis to the
provincial from Iloilo!
At Iloilo our streets consist of ruins hastily patched up, and great
fire-blackened gaps in the rows of houses, but in Manila, though there
has been apparently just as much hasty patching, there are comparatively
few ruins to be seen, and perhaps a trifle less string used in the
harnesses of the horses. White women and _Mestizas_ go about in hats too,
which is a superfluity we do not affect in the provinces, and after so
many weeks of not wearing a hat, I find it very irksome and hot to have
to put one on. However, in Manila one must do as Manila does, I suppose,
though the fashion, which did not obtain in the Spanish days, seems a
foolish and unnecessary one, and the people who were here under the old
_régime_ rail helplessly against the innovation. Certainly it is no gain
to the coloured ladies to hide their nice, thick black hair with the
frightful “Parisian” confections which appeal to their exotic taste; but,
of course, it would never do for them not to follow the fashions set by
their American equals. They have, however, that strange and subtle way of
the Oriental all the world over, of setting a seal of their own upon even
the most slavish imitations. One feels in this, as in everything else in
Manila, that if the American influence were withdrawn, in twenty-four
hours all trace of that busy, kind-hearted, bustling, incongruous people
would begin to melt steadily away, and in a month would be wiped clean
out.
There are big, or comparatively big, shops, with a great display in the
windows, and huge signs, and hurry-up-its-your-only-chance notices, and
conversational advertisements in the American fashion. But when you get
inside the shops there is the familiar barrenness, and there are the
same half-asleep or half-drugged Filipinos and yellow _Mestizos_ yawning
and trimming their nails with the same vague indifference, and nothing
to sell that any human being ever wants. And the prices of the things
you buy, instead of what you wanted, are enough to make your hair turn
snow-white on the spot.
[Illustration: MANILA.
The Escolta.
_To face page 126._]
One fact, striking fact about the shops in this country is that the
largest and most important are those of the jewellers, and the reason
of this is that the Filipinos and Eurasians have a mistrust of banks
and investments for their spare cash, with which they buy jewels partly
for love of the glittering ornaments, and partly from some muddled idea
of having their money safe in a portable form. I was talking about this
to a very civil Frenchman in one of the biggest jeweller’s here this
morning, while I was waiting for a ring they had been repairing, and he
was very interested to hear I had come from Iloilo, for he told me he had
travelled all about Panay selling jewellery a year or more ago, and that
he knew that island quite well. I asked him if he had done well there,
and he said yes, very good business indeed; and when I asked him what
sort of things he sold, he showed me beautiful diamonds set in rather red
gold, and said I would be astonished if I saw the “_types_” who could buy
such ornaments. He said he rode a horse, as the roads were only rough
tracks with broken bridges, but I don’t suppose he really did go all over
the island, and fancy he must rather have gone in coasting steamers and
ridden about the suburbs of the towns, for there are no inland towns in
the Philippines, and no market, even for the best diamonds.
Talking of _Mestizos_ reminds me of an account I heard, from a friend
at the reception, of an English-_Mestizo_ wedding, which may amuse you,
and is extraordinarily characteristic of these people. The bridal party
assembled in church in the orthodox fashion, but the bride’s Filipino and
Eurasian relations, instead of remaining in their pews, all crowded up to
the altar and stood in a mass amongst the wedding-group and bridesmaids;
and after this astonishing ceremony, the happy couple marched down the
aisle to the strains of “The Washington Post.”
LETTER XVI.
MANILA AND ITS INHABITANTS
MANILA, _March 5, 1905_.
I wrote in the morning yesterday, and after the heat of the day we drove
outside the town to a nursery garden. To get there we passed through long
streets of untidy suburbs, not of palm-thatch huts and bamboo groves like
those in Iloilo, but very broad and treeless, with mean, low houses at
intervals, and bits of waste ground strewn with lean dogs and rubbish.
There are not scavenger pariahs here as in Turkey and the Near East,
and I suppose they could not exist in such a climate, where the rubbish
would be too putrid even for their savoury taste. There are a good many
hawks about, but they don’t scavenge either, like the hawks in Egypt;
all they seem to do is to hover over poultry, and every now and then get
away with a young fowl or chicken. When we were driving round between
Molo and Jaro a week or two ago, near the village of Mindoriao, we heard
a great squawking and a scream, and looked round in time to see a hawk
rise up from near a _nipa_ hut with a fair-sized hen in his claws. The
people rushed about the plantation and sang out, and the hawk staggered
once or twice, and nearly fell with the hen, which was very big and heavy
for him; but he got away at last, and the people were left gazing after
him into the sky, like in the picture of “Robert with his Red Umbrella”
in _Struwwelpeter_. But the scavenging is, or should be, done by the
half-wild pigs with which the native quarters teem—lean, rough, black and
white animals, generally very mangy, and with long legs and snouts.
[Illustration: A STREET IN MANILA.
Showing Electric Tram.
_To face page 129._]
A great deal of the way to the nursery we followed the route of a new
electric tram, which is to be opened in the course of a few weeks, and
is to connect all the suburbs with the main town. Manila is immensely
proud of this tram, which is such a token of progress that it somehow
or other makes up for the lack of paving and other primary symbols
of civilisation. There is a railway here too, the only one in the
Philippines, which goes about 150 miles inland to a place called Dugupan.
There is constant talk of railways to be built all over the islands,
the concessions for which are being granted, of course, to American
speculators; but those who know the islands well say the railways will
not benefit anyone, even the speculators, for what are wanted besides
labourers are roads, just good traffic roads, kept in good repair.
However, it sounds imposing to talk of so many millions of dollars to
be spent on railways “to open up the Philippines,” and a great deal of
philanthropic energy is, somehow, inferred.
The entrance to the nursery garden was up a narrow, sandy lane, where a
lot of little, half-clad, brown children ran out after us and offered
small, tousled bunches of faded flowers. Queer little souls, these
Filipino children, with thin limbs and fluttering muslin garments.
On each side of the sandy lane was a field planted with rose bushes;
in the garden itself nothing appeared but rows and rows of flower-pots
containing green plants and ferns—the sort of plants and ferns one
only sees in conservatories at home. The garden was laid out in formal
earthen paths, bordered with tiles, but the gardener was anything but
formal—a huge, fat, old native with Chinese eyes, got up airily in white
bathing-drawers and a muslin _camisa_.
We went about, and my friend chose ferns and plants, some of which were
lovely, and I very much wished I could have taken some home with me to
Iloilo, but for the difficulty of transporting them by the _Butuan_.
There was a charming old grey stone well in the garden, with steps
leading up to it, some of them formed of beautiful old blue and green
Chinese tiles, the whole shaded by big, drooping trees, which made that
corner of the garden quite dark. Overhead, along the greater part of the
paths, was a pergola of orchids, while all sorts of orchids grew from
bundles of what looked like dried sticks tied to the posts. The sight of
the orchids made me realise once again the temperature we live in, for I
thought of how, on a summer’s day at home, one would find the outside air
quite cold after an orchid house. It also occurred to me that it sounds
all very fine to think of orchids in cheapness and profusion, but I have
never yet seen an orchid that could compare as an object of beauty with a
dog-rose out of a hedge.
On the way back we halted to hear some jolly tunes played by the band
on the Luneta. Again there was the blue dusk; the orange and saffron
horizon; and the moving crowds in white on the bright green grass plots
round the bandstand. We stayed in the carriage, which moved slowly round
with hundreds of others, all going in the same direction. I believe the
only carriage that has the privilege of moving the other way is that of
the Governor.
Going in and out of the crowd, everywhere, were two little American
girls, seated astride on a bare-backed pony, with their hair floating
loose behind, and tied with an immense bow of ribbon on one side of the
forehead in American fashion; their thin little legs dangling side by
side on each flank of the pony. They looked very happy and solemn, and
the way they stuck on was simply wonderful.
[Illustration: MANILA.
The Luneta.
_To face page 130._]
The Luneta is a pretty sight in the evening, and even amusing, but I must
confess I was very much disappointed in it, because I have read so much
about Manila in American magazines, in which the Luneta is described as
“an evening assemblage where all the nations of the world jostle one
another”;—or phrases, more lurid, to that effect; followed by “word
pictures” of Jew and Moor, Chinaman and Turk, Cingalee, Slav, and Hindu,
all rubbing shoulders in their respective national costumes. So I looked
out for this sight particularly, but have never seen anything but men of
varying degrees of white and Malay in linen suits, and women and Gibson
Girls in the last scream of Paris-Manila fashions. I have asked people
about it too, in case I should have been to the Luneta only on days when
the Jews, Moors, etc., were unavoidably absent; but I only got laughed
at for imagining such nonsense, and when I said, I had read accounts by
American eye-witnesses, my friends only laughed the more.
_March 6._
I am afraid I am not seeing as much of Manila as I had hoped, after all,
for I find I am not well enough to go about a great deal, but what I do
see I try to remember in order to tell you. Having these letters to write
is an amusement in the long, hot hours in the house, so don’t think that
I am giving up delirious joys to find time to write to you! All the same,
if I did go out more into Manila Society, I should not have any more to
tell you, for there would be nothing to describe but Bridge. That is
the only thing anyone ever does. Manila was pictured to me as a very
gay place, in fact the Manila papers even go so far as to label it the
“Gayest City of the Orient”; but it is really a dreadfully dull little
town, with a very occasional dance to enliven the interminable round of
dinner and Bridge parties, and those curious and costly luncheon parties
which American women give to each other. So much I had already inferred
from the Society Columns of the Manila papers, which come to us in Iloilo
as a breath from the wide world! When I arrived here and saw the place,
and asked some questions, I found my worst fears realised, and that
far from being the gayest city of the Orient—think of Cairo, Calcutta,
Colombo!—Manila is probably the dullest spot of the East or West, and any
gaiety or intellect it might have is choked and strangled by Bridge and
Euchre. In a country like this, where there is little or no housekeeping
and no shopping to fill the minds and time of the average women,
card-playing seems to attain colossal proportions, for they actually go
out of their houses at eight in the morning to meet and play cards till
lunch (the Americans do not use the word tiffin), and after a siesta they
begin again, go home to dinner, or out to a dinner party, and probably
play half the night.
The Americans in Iloilo are just as keen, however, and the first question
they ask you is if you play Bridge; and if you don’t they take no further
interest in you, and never dream of inviting you to their houses.
The Americans are fearfully down on the Filipino national game of
_Monte_ about which the natives are infatuated, and over which they ruin
themselves, but the indignation of the ruling race carries very little
weight, as it is all precept and no example.
I went for a little drive yesterday evening, through the old Spanish
Intramuros, the Walled City, within the high old walls, which stand in
a neglected moat, and are all covered with moss and grass and trailing
weeds. The narrow streets are cobbled, and the quaint houses, with deep,
barred basement windows, have a delightful air of repose, after the
half-finished, skin-deep, hustling modernity of Americanised Manila. The
whole quarter seems a far more appropriate setting than the rest of the
town for the “mild-eyed lotus eaters,” which the Filipinos really are by
choice, nature, and instinct. I think that if I lived in Manila (which
heaven forbid should ever be my fate!) I should like to live in the
Walled City—that is, if I survived the awful smells—and imagine myself in
an East where there were no arc-lights, no electric trams, no drinking
saloons, ice-cream sodas, “Hiawatha,” or Bridge, and where the natives
would be humble, civil, prosperous, and happy.
There are some fine old gates to the Walled City, but the Americans whose
idiosyncrasy it is not to reverence antiquity unless it has cost fabulous
sums at Drouot’s or Christie’s, are pulling them down for no reason at
all.
A great many natives bustle about American Manila in European or white
linen suits, and it is a very exhausting place; but one can’t quite
see the good of it all. I asked an American official (what they call
“a prominent citizen”), whom I met at dinner the other night, how the
Filipinos were to profit by all this bustle and book-learning.
“Why,” he said, “I guess they will learn to appreciate our civilisation
and then want it, and want all the things that civilisation entails,
so there will be a demand, and trade will come right along, and these
islands will wake up _and_ flourish.”
I wanted to argue, however, so I said: “But why should the Filipinos
wake up? Why not give the poor creatures lots of cheap food. If they
have a little rice, and a banana patch, and a _nipa_ hut, and no priests
to bother them, that is all they want, and there will always be an
inexhaustible market for the produce of the islands. It seems such a pity
to daze their poor brains, and hurry them about like this.” But he said
it was no good trying to talk about this to me, as I evidently could not
understand the American Ideal.
So I dropped the subject, for when it comes to the American Ideal, I
am hopelessly at variance, and think it better to say no more. The
Ideal is this, you see, that every people in the world should have
self-government and equal rights. This means, when reduced from windy
oratory to common-sense, that they consider these Malay half-breeds to
be capable, after six years of school-teaching by the type of master I
described to you (about which type, by-the-bye, experience has given me
no reason to change my mind), of understanding the motives, and profiting
by the institutions which it has taken the highest white races two or
three thousand years to evolve. They are supposed to be so wonderful,
these flat-faced little chaps, because they have shown a sudden aptitude
for the gramophone and imitation European clothes, a free and abusive
press, and unlimited talk—endless talk. But it seems to me that these are
the traits one is accustomed to in the emancipated coloured person all
the world over. In fact, when I come to think of it, America with this
funny little possession of hers is like a mother with her first child,
who has never noticed anyone else’s children, and thinks her own bantling
something entirely without parallel or precedent; quotes it as a miracle
when it shows the most elementary symptoms of existence, and tries to
bring it up on some fad of her own because it is so much more precious
and more wonderful than any other child any one else ever had.
_March 7._
Yesterday we went to buy prison-made goods at Bilibid, which is the big
jail of Manila, and of the whole Philippine Islands. When anyone has
committed a serious crime, he is sent up to Bilibid to eke out the period
that has to elapse before he is carted back to his original island to
be executed. The prison is a mass of half-finished-looking grey stone
buildings, where prisoners in yellow-striped jerseys, like gigantic
wasps, were going about behind iron railings.
We went into a huge stone hall, where there were quantities of all sorts
of basket-work furniture on show; a row of carriages, all prison-made;
and at the farther end a white man standing behind some glass-covered
tables containing little objects for sale. I wanted to get some small
souvenirs to send home, and examined carefully all the little trifles
and curios in black wood, bone, and silver, with which the cases were
filled; but I could not see anything that was uncommon or characteristic,
or even worth buying at all. All the things looked to me as if someone
had been to Naples or Colombo, and come back and told the Filipinos what
to make, for here were souvenir teaspoons, paper knives of black wood,
bone hairpins, and so on, and not one of them of a pattern one has not
seen prepared for the traveller in every city of the world. I hunted
all through the cases, and amongst the furniture in the hall, but could
find nothing distinctive—everything was well made, but utterly _banal_.
However, this did not concern me much, as what I had really come for was
ordinary furniture, and this I managed to get to my satisfaction, and a
little cheaper than in the Chinamen’s shops in Iloilo, which is to say
exactly double the prices of Hong Kong.
Amongst a great many things stored in a corresponding hall upstairs
were some basket chairs of an uncommon pattern, with a back like a huge
spreading peacock’s tail; but, though they were pretty, these chairs did
not strike me as characteristic of a people living in _nipa_ huts, but
much more like the suggestion of a wandering admirer of _l’art nouveau_.
Besides the chairs, I noticed some small columns of hard Filipino
woods, intended for flower stands, but the price asked for them was 10
_pesos_ (one guinea) each, which I thought ridiculous for plain, flat,
polished wood. It appeared that they were derelict from the St Louis
Exhibition, or, as it is called, “Exposition,” and on each was resting,
temporarily, a little figure carved in wood and painted in bright
colours, representing a Filipino man or woman—the woman in red skirt
(not _sarong_) and _camisa_, and the men with their shirts outside, and
carrying a fighting cock under one arm. By-the-bye, there is fierce
indignation and terrible offence taken by the Filipinos about that
same “Exposition,” as the Philippine section was got up attractively
barbarous, with too much of the savage element, wild-men-of-the-woods in
fantastic hovels, and so forth, to please the educated and high-class
natives and _Mestizos_, who want independence, and think _they_ are more
likely to get it than the prehistoric savage.
On the way out here I met a German who had been to St Louis, and
who told me that the two chief exhibits were the Boer War and the
Philippine section, and that the latter was nearly all savages in huts,
with fish-_corrals_ in artificial ponds, and all that sort of thing.
I remember he was quite surprised to hear that there was any other
town than Manila, or any civilisation in the Philippines except the
marvellous dawn that rose with the Stars and Stripes. I believe that
was very largely the impression produced in America, and not quite
ingenuously—that the inhabitants of these islands were a race of naked
cannibals and savages who were suddenly being transformed into the
educated _Mestizo_, who goes to college in America and returns here
to write seditious articles and talk his head off. Well, whatever the
impression desired or produced, the way it was brought about has caused
endless anger amongst those Islanders who would rather be thought
civilised than picturesque.
_March 8._
I have been out shopping this morning, going out at such an unusual hour
because heavy rain had fallen in the night, and the air was fresh in the
morning. It is nice to have a fresh morning, for the early part of the
day here is heavy, and day dawns thick and foggy. At least, the mornings
are thick and foggy in comparison with the exquisite clearness of the
dawn and early hours of the day in Iloilo. Talking of that, I am much
struck by the colour of the sky here—all over the Philippines, I mean, or
rather, all over where I have been—for though it is very blue, it is a
whity-blue, a thick sort of colour, not a bit transparent like the sky of
Southern Europe or North Africa. I can’t quite describe it, but when one
looks up at the zenith one does not seem to be looking into illimitable
spaces of transparency, and the thick white of the horizon stretches far
upwards.
On this shopping expedition I went to buy some things for the house that
I thought I might be able to get cheaper and better here than in Iloilo.
The principal street of shops is, as I told you, the Escolta, and the
next in importance is the Calla Rosario, where the shops are kept by
Chinamen and one or two Japanese.