Children’s Games—The Conquest of Fires
Children’s Games—How Moonlight Nights Are Enjoyed—The Popularity of Baseball Among the Filipinos—My Domestics Play the Game—The Difficulty of Putting Out Fires—Need of Water-Storage for the Dry Season—Apathy of the Public at Fires—Examples Showing the Loyalty and Devotion of Servants When Fires Occur.
Filipino children are not so active as the children of our own race, and their games incline to the sedentary order. Like their elders, they gamble; and like all children, the world over, they have a certain routine in which games succeed one another. At one season in the year the youngsters are absorbed in what must be a second cousin to “craps.” Every child has some sort of tin can filled with small spotted seashells. They throw these like dice; they slap their hands together with the raking gesture of the crap-player, and utter ejaculations in which numeral adjectives predominate, and which must be similar to “lucky six” and kindred expressions.
Following the crap game there is usually a season of devotion to a kind of solitaire which is played with shells on a circular board, scooped out into a series of little cup-like depressions. They will amuse themselves with this for hours at a time. The shells are moved from cup to cup, and other shells are thrown like dice to determine how the shells are to progress.
The commonest form of child gambling, however, is that of pitching coppers on the head and tail plan. You may see twenty or more games of this sort at any time around a primary school. Sometimes the game ends in a fight. Sometimes the biggest urchin gathers up everything in sight and escapes on the ringing of the bell, leaving his howling victims behind.
Not unnaturally, in consideration of the heat, there is comparatively little enthusiasm for rough sport. The only very active play in which little boys and girls engage, is leap frog, which differs slightly from the game in our own country.
Two children sit upon the ground and clasp their right hands. A leader starts out, clears this barrier, and all the rest of the players follow. Then one of the sitting children clasps his unoccupied left hand upon the upraised thumb of his companion, thus raising the height of the barrier by the width of the palm. The line starts again and all jump this. Then the second sitter adds his palm and thumb to the barrier, and the line of players attack this. It is more than likely that some one will fail to clear this last barrier, and the one who does so squats down, pressing close to the other two, and puts in his grimy little paw and thumb. So they continue to raise the height of the barrier till, at last, nobody can jump it.
When they play drop the handkerchief, Filipino children squat upon their heels in a circle instead of standing. They have also the familiar “King William was King James’s Son”; I do not know whether the words in the vernacular which they use are the equivalent of ours or not. The air, at least, is the one with which we are all familiar.
They have one more game which seems to be something like our hop-scotch but more complicated. The diagram, which is roughly scratched out on the ground, is quite an extensive one. The player is blindfolded, and hops about, kicking at his bit of stone and placing it in accordance with some mysterious rule which I have vainly sought to acquire. The children play this in the cool, long-shadowed afternoons, when they have returned from school, have doffed their white canvas shoes and short socks, and have reverted to the single slip of the country.
Sunset over Manila Bay
There is a local game of football which is played with a hollow ball or basket of twisted rattan fibres. The players stand in a ring, and when the ball approaches one, he swings on one heel till his back is turned, and, glancing over his shoulder, gives it a queer backward kick with the heel of his unoccupied foot. It requires some art to do this, yet the ball will be kept sometimes in motion for two or three minutes without once falling to the ground.
On moonlight nights the Filipinos make the best of their beautiful world. The aristocrats stroll about in groups of twenty, or even thirty, the young people snatching at the opportunity to slip into private conversation and enjoy a little solitude à deux while their elders are engrossed in more serious topics. The common people enjoy a wholesome romp in a game which seems to be a combination of “tag” and “prisoner’s base.” Groups of serenaders stroll about with guitars and mandolins, and altogether a most sweet and wholesome domesticity pervades the village.
At present the nearest real bond between American and Filipino is baseball—“playball” the Filipinos call it, having learned to associate these words with it from the enthusiastic shouts of American onlookers. Baseball has taken firm hold, and is here to stay. In Manila every plot of green is given over to its devotees. Every secondary school in the country has its nine and its school colors and yell, and the pupils go out and “root” as enthusiastically as did ever freshmen of old Yale or Harvard. No Fourth of July can pass without its baseball game.
We had a good baseball team at Capiz as early as 1903, and played matches with school teams from neighboring towns. I did not realize, however, how popular the game had become until one warm afternoon, when I was vainly trying to get a nap.
The noise under my window was deafening. Thuds, shrieks, a babble of native words, and familiar English terms floated in and disturbed my rest. Finally I got up and went to the window.
The street was not over twenty-five feet wide, the houses, after native custom, being flush with the gutter. In this narrow space my servants had started a game of ball. They had the diamond all marked out, and one player on each base. There was Ceferiana, the cook, a maid of seventeen, with her hair twisted into a Sappho knot at the back with one wisp hanging out like a horse’s tail. Her petticoat was wrapped tightly around her slim body and its back fulness tucked in at the waist. She was barefooted, and her toes, wide apart as they always are when shoes have never been worn, worked with excitement. There was Manuel, who skated the floors, an anæmic youth of fifteen or sixteen, dressed in a pair of dirty white underdrawers with the ankle strings dragging, and in an orange and black knit undershirt. There was Rosario, the little maid who waited on me and went to school. She was third base and umpire. A neighbor’s boy, about eight years old, was first base. Manuel was second base and pitcher combined. Ceferiana was at the bat, while behind her her youngest brother—he whose engaging smile occupied so much of my attention at the funeral of the lavandero aforementioned—was spread out in the attitude of a professional catcher. His plump, rounded little legs were stretched so far apart that he could with difficulty retain his balance. He scowled, smacked his lips, and at intervals thumped the back of his pudgy, clenched fist into the hollowed palm of the other hand with the gesture of a man who wears the catcher’s mitt. Had a professional baseball team from the States ever caught sight of that baby, they would have secured him as a mascot at any price.
The ball was one of those huge green oranges which the English call pomeloes, about twice the size of an American grape-fruit. Being green, and having a skin an inch thick; it withstood the resounding thwacks of the bat quite remarkably. It was fortunate that the diamond was so small, for it would have taken more strength than any of the players possessed to send that plaything any distance. Catching it was only the art of embracing. It had to be guided and hugged to the breast, for it was too big to hold in the hands. The valorous catcher, in spite of his fiercely professional air, invariably dodged it and then pursued it.
The bat was a board about eight inches wide, wrenched from the lid of a Batoum oil case and roughly cut down at one end for a handle. With the size of the ball, and the width of the bat, missing was an impossibility. It was only a question of how far the strength of the batter could send the ball. When it was struck, everybody ran to the next base, and seemed to feel if he got there before the ball hit ground, he had scored something.
Rosario, as I said, was both third base and umpire (after a run they always reverted to their original positions). Her voice rang out in a symphony like this: “Wan stri’! Wan ball! Fou’ ball! Ilapog! ilapog sa acon! Hindi! Ilapog sa firs’ base! Fou’ ball.”
At times when somebody on a base made a feint of stealing a run (for they were acting out everything as they had seen it done at the last public match), Manuel threatened all points of the compass with his four-inch projectile, and again the voice of Rosario soared, “Ilapog—Ilapog sa firs’ base—Hindi! sa Ceferiana! ah (ow-ut)!” while an enthusiastic onlooker who had set down a bamboo pipe filled with tuba dulce (the unfermented sap of the nipa palm or the cocoanut tree) added his lungs to the uproar in probably the only two English words he knew—“Play ball! play ball!”
Thus are the beginnings of great movements in small things. Those children got more real Americanism out of that corrupted ball game than they did from singing “My Country, ’tis of Thee” every morning.
From a baseball game to a fire is a far cry, but fire in the Philippines has such distinctive features that I cannot pass it without a word. The lack of all facilities for combating it makes it an ever present menace. The combustible materials of which houses are built, and their close crowding together, tend to spread it rapidly; while the thatched roofs make even the burning of an isolated house a danger to the entire community.
Manila has an up-to-date American fire department, but even there, with water mains and a signal-box system for alarms, a fire once started in a nipa district in the dry season can seldom be checked until the neighborhood is clean swept. In the provinces, where there is not so much as a bucket brigade, the first alarm sends everybody’s heart into his mouth.
The chief trouble is the lack of water for putting out a fire in its incipiency. Never was there a land in which water was more abundant or more scarce than it is in the Philippines. For five months of every year the skies let down a deluge, but nothing appreciable of all the downfall is saved. The rich—the haughty, ostentatious rich—have great masonry tanks walled up at the ends of their houses, capable of holding two or three thousand gallons of water. With the contents of these tanks the rich people supply themselves with drinking water during the dry season, and net a considerable income from its sale to their less fortunate neighbors. The merely well-to-do people content themselves with a galvanized iron tank, which may store from two to six hundred gallons, which is seldom enough to last out the dry season. In this case they buy water from the mountaineers, who fill their tinajas, or twenty-gallon earthenware jars, with water from mountain springs, and bring them to the nearest towns in bancas.
The poor people have no way whatever of storing rain-water, and either beg a few quarts each day from the rich people to whom they are feudally attached, or else they fall back upon the ground wells, or pozos, which, even they know, breed fevers and dysentery.
By no means every house has its well. Sometimes there are only two or three to a block. Sometimes the well is merely a shallow hole, uncemented, to catch the seepage of the upper strata. Sometimes it is a very deep stone-walled cavity. Rarely is there a pump or a windlass or any other fixed aid for raising the water.
When a fire starts, therefore, with such an inadequate water supply, nothing can be done except to tear down communicating houses or roofs. Enterprising natives who live even at a considerable distance, usually mount their ridge-poles and wet down their roofs if they can get the water with which to do it.
In the immediate vicinity of the fire itself tumult reigns. Filipino womankind, who are so alluringly feminine, are also femininely helpless in a crisis, and if there be no men around to direct and sustain them, often lose their heads entirely. They give way to lamentations, gather up their babies, and flee to the homes of their nearest relatives. Often they forget even their jewels and ready money, which are locked in a wardrobe.
Meanwhile, if there be men folks about, they make a more systematic effort to save things, and as all relatives and connections who are out of danger themselves rush in at the first alarm, quite a little may be rescued. The things which are traditional with us as showing how people lose their heads at a fire are just as evident here as in our own land. They throw dishes, glassware, and fine furniture out of the windows, and carry down iron pots and pillows. The poor gather their little store of clothing in sheets, release the tethered goats, puppies, game-cocks, and monkeys, which are always abundant about their shacks, and toddle off with their doll trunks in their arms. The sight is a pitiful one, especially when the old and decrepit, of which almost every house yields up one or more, are carried out in hammocks or chairs. Yet in a few hours all will have found shelter with friends, and probably the suffering consequent upon a fire is less than in our own country, where people have more to lose and where the rigor of climate is a factor not to be overlooked.
There is very little use in combating fire under such circumstances, and perhaps long experience has contributed to the apathy with which such disasters are treated. The American constabulary and military officials generally turn out their men, and lend every effort themselves to quell the flames. Here and there individual Filipinos, such as governors or presidentes, who feel the pressure of official responsibility, display considerable activity; but, on the whole, the aristocratic, or governing, class rather demonstrates its weakness at such times. The men whose property is not threatened seldom exert themselves, but stand in groups and chatter about how this could be done or that. Everybody is full of suggestions for somebody else to execute, but nobody does anything. The municipal police nose about in the crowd, and at intervals seize upon some obscure and inoffensive citizen, propelling him violently in the direction of the conflagration with orders to “work.” He half-heartedly picks up an old five-gallon petroleum can or a bamboo water-pipe, and starts off to the nearest well, but as soon as he is out of range of the policeman’s eye he drops the article, shuffles back into the gazing crowd, and does no more work.
At such time the loyalty and devotion of servants are put to a severe test. Two incidents came under my notice which it is a pleasure to describe. During my third year at Capiz our own home (I was “messing” with another American woman teacher) was threatened by fire one night, and all our household goods were carried out and saved by American men. The house was on fire more than once, but they managed to extinguish the fire each time.
Mention has previously been made of my little maid, Ceferiana. At the first alarm that night, she rushed into my room, and, spreading out a sheet, began to throw clothes into it from my drawers and wardrobe. When she had gathered up a full bundle, she rushed off to a place of safety, deposited it and came back for more. Meanwhile I had gathered up some silver and other valuables, and locked them in a trunk. Ceferiana helped me to carry this out, and as we were returning, the sweep of the flames seemed to be almost engulfing our house. For the first time Ceferiana gave a thought to her own possessions. With a wail—“Ah, Dios mio, mi ropa!” (“Oh, my God! my clothes!”)—she sank down on her knees, beating her breast, and bewailing the loss of a wardrobe made up chiefly from my cast-off garments, but even then far richer than that of most girls of her class.
About this time the American men began to arrive on the scene, and though they would not permit us to return to the house, they chivalrously rescued Ceferiana’s possessions as well as mine.
The lady who lived with me had some time before discharged a servant for a cause which we others considered not very just. She was timid, and as her husband was away, she was unwilling to permit the servant to leave the premises for even a brief time. Filipino servants simply cannot be handled in that way. A certain amount of time for recreation and pleasure is their just due, and they will have it. Adolphus, robbed of his paseo, reported that his grandmother was dying, and demanded an evening off to visit her. His mistress happened to take a walk that evening and beheld Adolphus the perfidious, not sitting by a dying grandmother, but tripping the light fantastic in a nipa shack, eight by twelve. She forthwith discharged Adolphus, and even levied on the services of a friendly constabulary officer to thrash him with a stingaree, or sting ray cane. Adolphus retaliated by forging her husband’s name to some chits for liquors. She had him arrested, prosecuted, and jailed. He had just finished his sentence when the fire came. He was almost the first person to appear, and worked like a Trojan for two hours, his services being of no mean value. I think the reader will agree with me that Adolphus showed a Christian and forgiving spirit.
The End