“You seem to pay a lot to the padre,” I said.
“Ah,” she answered, “for my mother’s soul.” (Por el alma di mi madre.) “One must get to heaven.”
“But the missionaries tell you that you need not pay money to go to heaven.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But with them one is certain to get to hell.”
If my cabin mate was a swell, she was completely eclipsed by the brilliant appearance of the fat little Mestiza, who came up on deck and leaned over the rail not far from us with a really heroic effort to appear unconscious of her gorgeous clothes. Her husband was very waxed about the moustache, and thin and pointed about the boots, and he kept shifting his sombrero with a fat hand, which displayed one very long little finger nail and a huge diamond ring. The Filipino schoolboys were got up in all sorts of suits, some in tweeds, some in linen, and one in bright blue striped silk, which had shrunk a good deal, and a straw hat with the brim made in a pattern like an ornamental cane chair-back. The little chaps were showing each other their clothes, and the older boys, of fifteen and sixteen (or that was the age they looked), were fearfully busy and important, smoking cigarettes, giving orders, and switching their legs with little walking sticks.[5]
About six o’clock the Sanidad came and gave us pratique, though I think if he had come before the deck-washing he must have put us all in quarantine for the plague. Apparently, too, there was no objection raised to the number of passengers in proportion to the accommodation, so we got ashore. Long before this the company’s launch had come fussing down the river and out to the Butuan, with C—— standing in the bows; and as soon as the doctor’s tour was over, I was conducted across the Sanidad launch into the other, and we went straight to the wharf, and home in a quilez, leaving my luggage for the shipping agent to tackle.
When I arrived at our house, old Tuyay flung herself down the staircase into the road with screams and yells of joy, wagging not only her tail but her whole body; and when I got into the hall there was the cat from downstairs squeaking, and telling me some long story about all she had noticed while I was away, and following me from room to room.
This cat has established herself with us for the last few weeks, and now thinks it her right, not to say her duty, to smell everything that comes into the house. She was fearfully agitated about the furniture I brought from Manila, and while it was being rigged up, and other things shifted, and so on, the poor pussy went nearly wild with excitement and curiosity, to say nothing of laying herself out to be tumbled over and half killed.