A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

The atmosphere was close and muggy, and now and then a shower pattered down on us. Suddenly, through the strange desolation of this alien landscape, the familiar thump of guitars and mandolins assailed the stillness. The music carried me back to half-forgotten experiences—red sunsets between the cathedral bluffs of the Mississippi, and sad-eyed negroes twanging the strings on the forward deck of a nosing steamboat; crisp July afternoons on the Straits of Mackinac when the wind swept in from froth-capped blue Huron, and the little excursion steamer from St. Ignace rollicked her way homeward to the cottage-crowned heights of the island.

I shut my eyes and tried to “make believe” that they would open on far-off, familiar scenes. Nothing could have been more weird and incongruous than the American air with this alien soil and people. It was “Hiawatha,” and to the inspiring strains of “Let the women do the work, let the men take it easy,” our forgotten baroto swept into sight in the easy water under the opposite bank. We made a herculean effort, inspired by envy, and got away. Space forbids me to enumerate the hairbreadth escapes of that journey. We put men ashore when the banks permitted and were towed like a canal boat. Once we were swept into mid-stream, where the poles were useless on account of the great depth, and had to drift back till the water shoaled again. In late afternoon we took on a supply of sugar cane, and chewed affably all the rest of the way.

At first I had been nervous, but my native friends were quite unconcerned. So remembering that Heaven protects the insane and the imbecile, and regarding them as the former and myself as the latter, I ceased to speculate on the probabilities of another incarnation.

We consumed six hours in a journey normally accomplished in two, and night overtook us in a labyrinth of water lanes above whose forested swamps the outlines of a stern old church were magnified in the gloom. One by one the stars sprang mysteriously into view in the soft void overhead, and somehow—marvellously—we found our destination. A group of friends and servants flared their torches on the bank, and we dragged our stiffened limbs to them. It was too dark to see where we were going, until we stumbled almost into a lighted doorway and found the company awaiting us. Owing to the delay in our arrival, the wedding was deferred till the next morning, but the ball was about to open.

Food was given us, and after a freshening up and a change of raiment we joined the reunion, which was in full swing. The prospective husband and wife were enjoying their usual state of effacement, but I discovered them finally. I talked with the insurrecto and found him a man of ability.

I left the ball, exhausted, at one o’clock, but those indefatigable people kept it up all night. I awoke at dawn to find the floor occupied by about twenty yawning maidens who were merely resting, for there was no time for a nap. We dressed in the cool dawn breeze and went out in time to see the morning mists rise from a broad oval of rice and maize fields, and hang themselves in ever-changing folds on the sides of the purple mountains beyond.

But for the character of the vegetation that rimmed the arable land, and the bare green shoulders of the hills, streaked here and there with pink clayey ravines, it might have been a peaceful sunrise in middle America. The homelike atmosphere was accentuated by the roofs of a town and by a church spire, still silvered with mist, half a mile away. We tramped across the fields to our objective point. As madrina, I walked with the bride, but conversation did not thrive because she spoke little Spanish, and I less Visayan.

Carabaos sniffed at us as we passed, and people crowded their windows to look. We crossed a slough upon a bridge of quaint and ancient architecture on the thither side of which were a grassy plaza and the stern lines of the church. The wedding bells broke forth in a furious joy and flung their notes to the distant hill flanks, which in turn flung them back to the blue, sparkling sea.

The church was tiled in black and white marble, and inhabited by a lusty family of goats. Their innate perversity and an apparent curiosity led them to resent exclusion; but after a lively pursuit they were ejected, and the bride and I sat on a bench to rest. The bridegroom took a last smoke, and the strangers deciphered obituary notices on the mural tombstones.

The padre came along finally, smelling of a matutinal appetizer, and they distributed pillows and candles to the madrinas and padrinos. As evidence of change of heart in the late insurrecto, the pillows were some of red, some of white, and some of blue cloth.