Yesterdays in the Philippines

by Joseph Earle Stevens

The whisperings of a restlessness among the natives continue, and it is hard to see why indeed they do not rise up against their persecutors, the tax-gatherers and the guardia civil. Ten per cent. of their average earnings have to go to pay their poll-taxes, and if they cannot produce the receipted bills from their very pockets on any avenue or street-corner, to the challenge of the veterana, they are hustled off to the cuartel, and you are minus your dinner or your coachman. Once in the hands of the law, they are then drafted into the native regiments for operations against those old enemies, the Moros, in the fever-stricken districts of Mindanao, and their wives or families are left to swallow Spanish reglamientos. They have not forgotten their brothers, who, dragged down from the north, went to the bottom in the typhoon which pushed the Gravina down. They have not forgotten the execution in the public square. They remember that the Spaniards address them with the servile pronoun “tu,” not “usted,” and some day they may remember not to forget. They are not quarrelsome, but they are treacherous; they are not fighters, but when they run amuck they kill right and left. They do not seem to have many wants save to be left alone, to be able to shake a cocoanut from the palm for their morning’s meal, or to collect the shakings from a thousand trees and ship them to Manila; to collect the few strands of fibre to sew the nipa thatch to the frame of their bamboo roof, or to gather enough to fill a schooner for the capital; in fact, to be able to work or not to work, and to know that the results of their labor are to be theirs, not somebody else’s.

But what has all this got to do with our hegira? These last days have been replete with the labors attendant on breaking camp before the long march. Clearings out of furniture, selling one’s ponies and carriages, closing up of books, shipping of one’s cases and curios on those hemp-ships that are to start on the long 20,000-mile voyage to Boston, and trying to think of the things that have been left undone, or ought to be done, have all gone to make the season a busy one.

Now that it has come down to actually leaving Manila, I begin to feel the home sickness that comes from tearing one’s self away from the midst of friends and a congenial life. I shall miss the hearty Englishmen with whom I rowed or played tennis or went into the country. I shall miss the servants who got so little for making life the easier. I shall miss the ponies, the dogs with the black tongues, and the cats with the crooks in their tails; the big fire-engine which we used to run, and which has now been varnished over to save trouble in cleaning; the Luneta, with its soft breezes and good music; the walks out on to the long breakwater to see the sunset, and the hobnobbing with the old salts from the ships in the bay, who called our office the little American oasis in the midst of a great desert of foreign houses. But the clock has struck, and the Esmeralda ought early next month to start us on the forty-day voyage back to God’s country.

October 22d.

Is this sleep, or not sleep? Is it reality or fancy? Am I laboring under a hallucination, a weird phantasmagoria, or are my powers of appreciation, my efferent nerve-centres and their connecting links, my sum total of receptive faculties, doing their duty? I feel hypnotized. I kick myself to see if this is real, and am only led to conclude it is by looking into my sewing-kit, where the needles are rusty, the thread gone, and the depleted stock of suspender-buttons wrongly shoved into the partition labelled “piping-cord.” I never did know what piping-cord was. My socks are holy, my handkerchiefs have burst in tears, and my lingerie in general looks as if it had been used for a Chinese ensign on one of the ships that fought in the naval battle of the Yalu. For two years those garments have held together under the peculiar processes of Philippine laundering, but now that barbarians have once more got hold of them and subjected them to modern treatment, they recognize the enemy and go to pieces. And so the condition of my clothes leads me to believe I am awake, although everything else suggests the dream.

Actually away from Manila, actually eating food that is food once more, actually sleeping on springs and mattresses, putting on heavier clothes, talking the English language, meeting civilized people, and realizing what it means to be homeward bound! It seems unreal after those two years of Manila life that was so different, so divorced from the busy life of the western world; much more unreal than did the new Philippine environment appear two years ago, after jumping into it fresh from God’s country, as the Captain called it.

Here we are, eight days out from Manila, steaming up through that far-famed inland sea of Japan, on the good ship Coptic, bound for San Francisco; and for the life of me those twenty-four moons just passed all seem to huddle into yesterday. Surely it was only the day before that the China was taking me and my trunks the other way. And so it takes but eight short days of new experiences, new food, new air, to efface completely the effect of seven hundred yesterdays in the Philippines. Those whole seven hundred seem now as but one, and when I think of all the housekeeping, the bookkeeping, the hemp-pressing, and the cheerful putting up with all sorts of things, they all seem to be playing leapfrog with each other in the dream of a night, and I wake up to find the pines of Japan lending a certain cordial to the air that is very grateful. We never knew what we were missing in Manila in the slight matter of eating alone until we got over to Hong Kong again, and it is perhaps just as well we didn’t. To think of the “dead hen,” as they call it, and rice, the daily couple of eggs, the fried potatoes, and the banana-fritters on which we have tried to fatten our frames, and then look at the bill of fare on the Coptic! We exiles from Manila have gained over five pounds in these eight days, and would almost go through another two years in the haunts of heathendom for the sake of again living through a sundry few days like the past eight, in which the inner man wakes up to see his opportunities, and makes up for lost time on soups that are not all rice and water, on fish that is not fishy, on chickens that are not boiled almost alive, on roasts that taste not of garlic, on vegetables that are something more than potatoes, on butter that is not axle-grease, and on puddings and pies that are not made of chopped blotting paper and flavored with pomatum sauces.

Captain Tayler, the Genial Skipper of the Esmeralda.

See page [227].