Yesterdays in the Philippines

by Joseph Earle Stevens

It seems to be a custom to start the year by calling on all the married ladies of the colony, who make their guests loquacious with sundry little cocktails that stand ready prepared on the front verandas. Everybody makes calls, till he forgets where anything but his head is situated, and then brings up at the club out by the river-bank more or less the worse for wear. In honor of the day, the menu was most attractive, but many of the party were in no condition to partake, and spent the first day of the new calendar in suffering from the effects of their morning visits.

With the new year came the dance, which we bachelor members of the club gave to the English ladies in particular and to Manila society in general, as a small return for hospitality received, and it was declared a huge success. The club-house was decorated from top to toe. Two or three hundred invitations were sent out, and the crême de la crême of the European population were on hand, including General Blanco, the governor of the islands.

The English club rarely gives a dance more than once in five years, and when the engraved invitations first appeared there was much talk and hobnobbing among the Spaniards to see who had and who had not been invited. All the greedy Dons who had ever met any of the clubmen expected to be asked, and considered it an insult not to receive an invitation. One high official, who had himself been invited, wrote to the committee seeking an invitation for some friends. As, of course, only a limited number could be accommodated at the club-house, the invitations were strictly limited, and a reply was sent to the Spanish gentleman in question, stating that there were no more invitations to be had.

“Do you mean to insult me and my friends?” he wrote, “by saying that there are no more invitations left for them? Do you mean to say that my friends are not gentlemen, and so you won’t ask them? I must insist on an explanation, or satisfaction.”

For several days before the party one might have heard young women and girls who walked up and down the Luneta talking nothing but dance, and the Spanish society seemed to be divided up into two distinct cliques, the chosen and the uninvited.

The chosen proceeded at once to starve themselves and use what superfluous dollars they could collect in buying new gowns at the large Parisian shops on the Escolta. Most of the Spanish women in Manila can well afford to be abstemious and devote the surplus thus obtained to the ornamentation of their persons, since they are so fairly stout that the fires of their appetite can be kept going some time after actual daily food-supplies have been cut off. The men, however, seem to be as slender as the women are robust, and they, poor creatures, cannot endure a long fast. Nevertheless, the cash-drawers of the Paris shops got fat as the husbands of the wives who bought new gowns there grew more slender; and just before the ball came off these merchant princes of the Philippines actually offered to contribute five hundred dollars if another dance should be given within a short time, so great had been the rush of patrons to their attractive counters.

To make a long story short, after a lot of squabbles and wranglings among those who were invited and those who were not, the night of the party came, and only those who held the coveted cards were permitted by the giants at the door to enter Paradise.

Japanese lanterns lighted the road which led from the main highway to the club, and the old rambling structure was aglow with a thousand colored cup-lights that made it look like fairyland. Within and without were dozens of palms and all sorts of tropical shrubs, and the entrance-way was one huge bower-like fernery. Around the lower entrance-room colored flags grouped themselves artistically, and below a huge mass of bunting at the farther end rose the grand staircase that led above. Upstairs, the ladies’ dressing-room was most gorgeous, and the walls were hung with costly, golden-wove tapestries from Japan. The main parlor formed one of the dancing-rooms and opened into two huge adjoining bed-chambers which were thrown together in one suite. All around the walls and ceilings were garlands and long festoons and wreaths, and everywhere were bowers of plants, borrowed mirrors, and lights.

Out on the veranda, overhanging the river, were clusters of small tables, glowing under fairy lamps, and the railings were a mass of verdure.

The orchestra consisted of twenty-five natives, dressed in white shirts whose tails were not tucked in, hidden behind a forest of plants, and as the clock struck ten they began to coax from their instruments a dreamy waltz. The guests began to pour in—Spanish dons with their corpulent wives, and strapping Englishmen with their leaner better halves. The Spaniards, sniffing the air, all looked longingly toward the supper-rooms, while the ladies who came with them ambled toward the powder and paint boxes in the boudoir. I suppose about two hundred people in all were on hand, and the sight was indeed gay. After every one had become duly hot from dancing or duly hungry from waiting, supper was served, and there was almost a panic as the Spanish element with one accord made for the large room at the extreme other end of the building, where dozens of small tables glistened below candelabra with red shades, and improvised benches groaned under the weight of a great variety of refreshments.