There can be no manner of doubt that these were the ideas that controlled him when Terrero “advised” him to depart, and none that in the next few years his views on these subjects contracted as he looked more searchingly upon the troglodyte methods of the Spanish rulers. He was the less reluctant to leave the Philippines because his private life, apart from his career of service, had been darkened by the catastrophe of his love-affair; he had come home to find Leonora married. Two other impulses concurred to urge him away. The success of “Noli Me Tangere” (despite so many and powerful measures taken to suppress the book) and the manifest effect of it upon the Filipino mind must have strongly reminded him of that sequel he had vaguely intended when he completed the last chapters of his novel. He could not hope to accomplish any such work at home; he could not hope, even if he should write it there, to find a publisher for it in the Islands nor to smuggle out the manuscript. To write it he must be abroad. Next, he had seen much of Europe but nothing of that American Republic about which Jagor’s prophecy had so inflamed his youthful mind. Here, by Jagor’s logic, was the power destined some day to transform all the regions bordering upon the Pacific, and he had never seen it. This was also the country whose history and spirit he had glimpsed in the “Lives of the Presidents” that he so eagerly read and returned to. In that country farmers’ boys, canal-boat drivers, tailors’ apprentices, rail-splitters, journeyman printers, any son of the plain people could [[152]]rise to any place, even the highest. It was a country that conspicuously had won to freedom and independence out of a gross tyranny. Therefore, it had a peculiar claim to his attention. As he must go somewhere, he planned to return to Europe by way of the United States.
He was relieved of all anxiety about his mother. The eyesight of her youth had been restored to her.
This time there was no difficulty about his passport and no need that he should, like an escaping criminal, steal at night from the city. The responsible powers were but too glad to have him go. He sailed from Manila on February 28, 1888, going first to Hong-Kong. There and in the neighboring city of Macao he visited and talked with many refugees and exiles of 1872, annus hystericus in Philippine history. By deportation or flight that year the islands had lost hundreds of their best minds and ablest servitors. That many of these were afterward proved to have had nothing to do with the uprising for which they were banished or hunted is superfluous evidence of the mad psychology of the time. In most of these cases there were no trials, no investigations, no queries. Some one frenzied with fear imagined the man across the street to be behaving in a way that indicated conspiracy; to the Ladrones with him! Some one else saw two men in the street salute each other with suspicious gravity; the next morning both were on their way to the Carolines.[16] The Herrara family had maintained a back yard quarrel with the Venturas. Mr. Ventura [[153]]was denounced and spent the rest of his life in loneliness at Macao. It was the Lion’s Mouth and the cachets of the Bastile, revived for the astonished instruction of the age of steam. Cases are in the records of men that were seen carrying home bundles—fish, maybe, or steak. “Bombs!” cried the officers, under the sway of emotion, and that night haled the unfortunate householder from his bed. Sometimes the intended victims of these maniacal manifestations received friendly hints before the blow fell and had time to flee to the woods, whence they made their way out of the country, to live, very likely, in the utmost poverty.
Such was the lot, in fact, of most of the men deported. One of them, a learned lawyer, the ornament of the Philippine bar, as innocent of the conspiracy as the premier of Spain himself, was twenty years later picking up the crumbs of a living by trying to practise a little Spanish law in London.[17]
It is to be assumed that conversation with such men did nothing to soften Rizal’s spirit or to cool his ardor of service. They were the living monuments to the hopeless incapacity of the existing System to govern or to advance. From his days and nights in their company he passed to Japan, where in the space of one month he achieved the almost incredible feat of mastering the Japanese language. But for the testimony of the facts the hardiest biographer would scarce dare the assertion. Rizal came to Japan with scarce a word of Japanese; he remained but one month; before he departed he was speaking it so well that the natives [[154]]thought he was a countryman of theirs, and he was acting as their interpreter. Thereafter he could speak and write Japanese as readily as English or German.
At Hong-Kong he had been somewhat surprised to find himself invited to the Spanish consulate and urged to abide there.[18] At Tokio this experience was repeated, the Spanish legation offering him its hospitality and even suggesting employment as a translator. The purposes of these advances were clear enough. He was one that the Government willed, after its custom, to have always under surveillance; to have him beneath a legation roof was easier and cheaper than to hire secret service men.
From Yokohama he sailed for San Francisco, astonishing his fellow-travelers by conversing with all the aliens in their own tongues, whatever these might be. Among them was a Japanese that knew not a word of English. Rizal attached himself to this unfortunate and acted as his interpreter all the way to London.
When he landed at San Francisco, April 28, 1888, his first experiences under the American flag were hardly calculated to swell his enthusiasm for the republic. It happened to be a time when a terror of epidemics was afoot, and he might have reminded himself from what he saw that sporadic hysteria is not the exclusive possession of the Spaniards nor of anybody else. What a whisper of insurrection meant to a Spanish government officer in Manila, a vision of a cholera-germ might signify to a health-officer in America. The health authorities of San Francisco were then busily [[155]]quarantining everything that came into the port. To them the fact that Rizal’s steamer carried a clean bill of health meant nothing, nor that she had been properly inspected and cleared at Yokohama, nor that no disease had developed among her people on the way over. Who knew what horrent microbes might be lurking in her woodwork or snugging in the coal-hole? Therefore, authority decreed to hold her day after day in quarantine while the passengers chafed and fidgeted and the British among them complained to their consul and threatened an international scandal.[19]
Rizal seems to have endured the affliction with his customary philosophy. From the deck he made sketches of the new country that thus slammed its doors in his face—among them a reproduction of the revenue flag, with its eagle and perpendicular bars, which he thought was a novel and taking design. He did not fail to observe, however, that while the human beings on the steamer were rigidly quarantined the cargo was unloaded, and he wondered how infection could be carried by the passengers and not by the freight. When he was released, he went to the old Palace Hotel in San Francisco and spent several days observing the strange life of the city. Thence, by train over the mountains, noting with astonishment how great an area of the country through which he passed was uninhabited, and apparently being rather entertained than enraged by the horrors of the American sleeping-car. Two things of much greater moment [[156]]impressed him sadly. One was the race prejudice against the Chinese in San Francisco (then at its height), and the other the race prejudice against the Negro, manifested in some other parts of the country.
Afterward he wrote this summary of his swallow flight across the continent: