LETTER XIX.
A BAILE—A NEW COOK AND AMERICAN METHODS
Iloilo, March 20, 1905.
I am sure you will be glad to hear that I feel much better for my Manila trip, and able to go for our evening walks again, which we still enjoy very much, though the season is getting rather hot for moving about with much comfort.
While I was away, there was an outburst of Carnival gaiety, and C—— went to a ball at the Spanish Club, which seems to have been a very good one. It was fancy dress, many of the costumes were beautiful, and there was a big supper laid out at little tables in the open air, with decorations and paper lanterns. They danced till five in the morning, when the more enduring and merry spirits drove round the town in open carriages; so they seem to have had a very gay time, and I was rather sorry I had missed it, as a fancy dress ball in Iloilo must be a rare and precious experience.
So Lent has begun, but apparently it is not going to be made too strict, for last night we were bidden to an amateur theatrical performance at the Santa Cecilia (the Filipino) Club, which was a very festive affair. The big room of the Santa Cecilia, which is upstairs, like the Spanish one, but with a stage at one end, was very gay with festoons of pink and white muslin, and chains made of little hoops covered with tinsel paper. Nearly the whole audience consisted of Filipino women, in skirts of screaming reds, blues, greens, and yellows, set off by bewildering camisas, their black glossy hair adorned with many combs, and everywhere whiffs of penetrating cheap scent.
The hall is so large that the two or three hundred people present did not nearly fill it, though little groups of men hung about the side that opened, with spaces between columns, on to the staircase and outer hall.
We sat for a long time past the normal hour for beginning, staring at the drop-scene, which displayed a large picture of Saint Cecilia playing on a piano, and looking up to heaven; and had plenty of time to take in the paintings all round the room of Magellan, Rizal, Washington, and other heroes, which were stuck high up in frames, or frescoed on each side of the stage, while the band gave us waltzes, Sousa, and “Hiawatha.” This latter tune seems to have become a sort of Filipino National Anthem, for no entertainment of any sort can come off without it, and even a banda de musica, playing in the street in the evening, won’t go away, even after they had received money, before they have gone through “Hiawatha.” I don’t think I ever described to you a launch party we went one evening, on the occasion of a despedida (farewell), to a departing American official? We were a large party, English and Americans mixed, and filled up the bows of a fair-sized launch, while abaft the engines a Filipino string band clung on and played as best they could as the launch rolled about in a choppy little sea off Guimaras. As we left the Muelle (the quay) these musicians struck up “Hiawatha,” and when they had got through it they began again, and again, and again—and I have no doubt they would have played that air contentedly the whole way out and back, and probably fully intended to do so, if they had not been implored to stop. It is not a bad tune, though, and went remarkably well with the clicking of the launch’s machinery and the motion of the waves.
But, to get back to this theatrical performance—though I don’t think there is much to say about it, for it was a very ordinary amateur show, and except that the skins of the performers were naturally darkened and not artificially white, and the language they spoke was Spanish, it was indistinguishable from the same sort of thing at a charity bazaar at home. Not musical, like the performance I told you about at the theatre, but a playlet of a strangely exotic type that must have been rather unintelligible to most of the brown brothers and sisters, for it was a sort of French farce about a man and his wife living in a flat below another couple, with the usual complications that apparently inevitably result from such a dangerous experiment in Paris. One man acted well, and was now and then really funny; but the humour was not the most refined fooling I have ever heard, as you may judge when I tell you that the chief source of jokes was that one of the husbands was represented as insinuating himself into the other household by pretending to be a doctor, and there was no bowdlerising of his interviews with his lady patients. The few things he left unsaid were reserved for another character, who came in as a house-agent with the most extraordinary fund of questions imaginable. But the entertainment hit the popular taste, evidently, for the more broad the remarks, with no attempt at wit, the more the “little brown sisters” laughed, in true Oriental manner.
I got very bored and tired, but did not like to go out till the first playlet was finished, for fear of hurting our hosts’ feelings. We afterwards heard from a friend that when the second piece was over, the floor was cleared for a baile, which was kept up till quite the early hours of the morning. In the middle of this dance, however, “a strange thing happened,” as a certain number of the hosts suddenly appeared with little plates to collect money for the expenses of the production. This manœuvre, as our friend expressed it to us, “knocked many of the guests completely out of time,” for the average person does not take much money to a dance. Some wrote little vales; but our friend was rather sharp, for when a girl held out a plate to him, he bowed very politely and took it from her, saying, “Pray let me help you,” and so became a collector instead of a contributor.
We went a new walk through the town a few evenings ago, on a lovely night, when the grey streets were all black and white in the moonlight, but the shadows quite luminous and the sky a real blue, dark and velvety. We strolled down one or two streets and through a group of native huts by the shore; but that part of the shore is some way from here, as, you see, we were walking across the spit of land formed by the estuary and the open sea.