There was considerable liberty of conscience displayed in the costumes of the guests, some of the American men being in soiled white day suits, conducting female relations in high cotton blouses; while others were got up in full evening dress. One handsome woman, who I heard was the wife of an officer in Camp Josman, was so much in evening dress, possibly to make up for the others in the blouses, that she was instantly nick-named The Mermaid. Her finely shaped head was dressed very low, and set off by classic bands of gold, with huge bunches of flowers and ribbons over each ear, and I heard a man near me suggest to another that someone should go and ask her to take some of the ornaments out of her coiffure and put them round her bodice. But no one had the courage to do this thing, so the little Mestiza ladies stared and giggled, and as for the few Orientals present, they looked at the Mermaid as if they thought Equality was going to be great fun.
When we were just about to fall on some beef à la mode which had at last, after incredible pertinacity on the part of C——, been placed before us, a man at one of the tables behind us suddenly got up and began to make a speech. Everyone slewed their heads round to see him, and forgot the beef, which the waiters instantly fell upon and swept away beyond recall.
The speechmaker proposed a health, which we drank in very good red or white wine provided for us, and then he made a speech, and someone—one of the visiting party, I think—got up and replied.
After him, another got up. But many people listened to him and still held on to their helping of turkey, which they tried to eat as noiselessly as possible; a most amusing sight.
Then another; and another; popping up in all sorts of places, with the interpreter appearing suddenly beside them like a harlequin. Some of the speeches, in spite of the halting of the translation, were very good, and very interesting; for the speakers did not mince matters much—the natives saying things very plainly, and the Americans replying with equal frankness.
Next me at table sat a Filipino swell in European evening dress, with splendid diamonds on his hands and in his embroidered shirt front, who turned his chair round when the speeches began, and sat astride, leaning on the back. He cleared his throat, and spat on the floor in such a dreadful manner that I felt sick, and at last I turned quite faint, and had to get up and move to an empty place further on. There I was not so well off, as far as hearing went, for the head of the next table was occupied by a cheery party of “prominent citizens,” Senators, and officers, who were drinking champagne and making a horrible noise.
I moved again, this time to a doorway at the upper end of the hall, where a polite young Mestizo offered me his chair; so I ended in being very well off as to a place, and heard and saw very well.
An old Senator with a venerable beard was making a long speech on the subject of freedom and the folly of race-distinction. In defence of the latter theory, he rather rashly quoted Tennyson, repeating the lines about “Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,” which could not be applied in the remotest way to either Americans or Filipinos and came out pure gibberish in the translation.
To him replied the editor of one of the Iloilo papers, a small, full-blooded Filipino, with sharp, clever features. He made a most fiery and eloquent speech, in which, with angry brown face, and clenched fists thumping the back of the chair on which he leant, he declared that the Philippine Islands had been discovered as long as America, and that the Filipinos had the same spirit as that which had caused the Americans to revolt from England.
He got fearfully excited, and called God to witness that his people were only asking for their rights in wishing to have this foreign burden removed; he and they demanded, insisted on, their Independence! When he sat down, the waiters and the band, and the Filipino spectators who had strolled in, all applauded frantically.