The Luneta.
The Luneta is a pretty sight in the evening, and even amusing, but I must confess I was very much disappointed in it, because I have read so much about Manila in American magazines, in which the Luneta is described as “an evening assemblage where all the nations of the world jostle one another”;—or phrases, more lurid, to that effect; followed by “word pictures” of Jew and Moor, Chinaman and Turk, Cingalee, Slav, and Hindu, all rubbing shoulders in their respective national costumes. So I looked out for this sight particularly, but have never seen anything but men of varying degrees of white and Malay in linen suits, and women and Gibson Girls in the last scream of Paris-Manila fashions. I have asked people about it too, in case I should have been to the Luneta only on days when the Jews, Moors, etc., were unavoidably absent; but I only got laughed at for imagining such nonsense, and when I said, I had read accounts by American eye-witnesses, my friends only laughed the more.
March 6.
I am afraid I am not seeing as much of Manila as I had hoped, after all, for I find I am not well enough to go about a great deal, but what I do see I try to remember in order to tell you. Having these letters to write is an amusement in the long, hot hours in the house, so don’t think that I am giving up delirious joys to find time to write to you! All the same, if I did go out more into Manila Society, I should not have any more to tell you, for there would be nothing to describe but Bridge. That is the only thing anyone ever does. Manila was pictured to me as a very gay place, in fact the Manila papers even go so far as to label it the “Gayest City of the Orient”; but it is really a dreadfully dull little town, with a very occasional dance to enliven the interminable round of dinner and Bridge parties, and those curious and costly luncheon parties which American women give to each other. So much I had already inferred from the Society Columns of the Manila papers, which come to us in Iloilo as a breath from the wide world! When I arrived here and saw the place, and asked some questions, I found my worst fears realised, and that far from being the gayest city of the Orient—think of Cairo, Calcutta, Colombo!—Manila is probably the dullest spot of the East or West, and any gaiety or intellect it might have is choked and strangled by Bridge and Euchre. In a country like this, where there is little or no housekeeping and no shopping to fill the minds and time of the average women, card-playing seems to attain colossal proportions, for they actually go out of their houses at eight in the morning to meet and play cards till lunch (the Americans do not use the word tiffin), and after a siesta they begin again, go home to dinner, or out to a dinner party, and probably play half the night.
The Americans in Iloilo are just as keen, however, and the first question they ask you is if you play Bridge; and if you don’t they take no further interest in you, and never dream of inviting you to their houses.
The Americans are fearfully down on the Filipino national game of Monte about which the natives are infatuated, and over which they ruin themselves, but the indignation of the ruling race carries very little weight, as it is all precept and no example.
I went for a little drive yesterday evening, through the old Spanish Intramuros, the Walled City, within the high old walls, which stand in a neglected moat, and are all covered with moss and grass and trailing weeds. The narrow streets are cobbled, and the quaint houses, with deep, barred basement windows, have a delightful air of repose, after the half-finished, skin-deep, hustling modernity of Americanised Manila. The whole quarter seems a far more appropriate setting than the rest of the town for the “mild-eyed lotus eaters,” which the Filipinos really are by choice, nature, and instinct. I think that if I lived in Manila (which heaven forbid should ever be my fate!) I should like to live in the Walled City—that is, if I survived the awful smells—and imagine myself in an East where there were no arc-lights, no electric trams, no drinking saloons, ice-cream sodas, “Hiawatha,” or Bridge, and where the natives would be humble, civil, prosperous, and happy.
There are some fine old gates to the Walled City, but the Americans whose idiosyncrasy it is not to reverence antiquity unless it has cost fabulous sums at Drouot’s or Christie’s, are pulling them down for no reason at all.