Music comes natural to the Filipinos. Their instruments are violins, guitars, and flutes. The boys make flutes of young bamboo-stalks which are very accurate, and give out a peculiar mellow tone.
Fiesta-days and Sundays are the great events in Filipinia. On Sunday morning the young girls, in their white veils and clean dresses, go to mass, and, making the sign of the cross before the church, kneel down upon the bare tiles while the service is performed. The church to them is the magnificent abode of saints and angels. The wax images and altar paintings are the only things they have in art except the cheap prints of the saints and Virgin, which they hang conspicuously in their homes. Pascua, or Christmas week, is a great holiday, but it is very different from the Christmas that we know. The children going to the convent school are taught to sing the Spanish Christmas carols, and on Christmas eve they go outdoors and sing them on the streets in the bright starlight. Their voices, although untrained, are very delicate and sweet. The native music, which they often sing, like all the music of the southern isles, is very melancholy, often rising to a hopeless wail. On the last day of school the padre will distribute raisins, nuts, and figs, which are the only Christmas presents that the boys and girls receive. At the parochial schools they are taught to do their studying aloud, and always to commit the text to memory. If memory should fail them in a crisis, they would be extremely liable to have their ears pulled by the priest, or to be made to kneel upon the floor with outstretched arms, thus making the recitation somewhat of a tragedy; but there are also prizes for the meritorious. One book includes the whole curriculum—religion, table manners, grammar, “numbers,” and geography—arranged in catechisms of convenient length. The boys are separated from the girls in school and church, and I have very seldom seen them play together in their homes. During the long vacation they must spend most of their time at work out in the rice-fields under the hot sun. So they would rather go to school than have vacation.
With the new schools and the American schoolteachers a great opportunity has come to the young people of the Philippines. New books with beautiful illustrations have been introduced, new songs, and a new way of studying. It would amuse you if you were to hear them read. “I do not see the pretty bird” they would pronounce, “Ee doa noat say day freety brud.” The roll-call also sounds a good deal different from that in our own schools, where we have our Williams, Johns, and Henrys; but the Filipino names are very pretty (mostly names of Spanish saints), Juan, Mariano, Maximo, Benito, and Torribio for boys; Carnation, Bernarda, and Adela for the girls. The boys especially are very bright, and they are learning rapidly, not only grammar and arithmetic, but how to play baseball and tag and other games that make the child-life of America so pleasant.
Chapter X.
Christmas in Filipinia.
While you are in a land of starlight, frost, and sleighbells, here the cool wind brushes through the palms and the blue sea sparkles in the sun. “In every Christian kind of place” it is the time of Christmas bells and Christmas masses. Even at the Aloran convent—about the last outpost of civilization (only a little way beyond live the wild mountain folk—sun-worshipers and the Mohammedans) the padre has prepared a treat of nuts and raisins for the boys and girls—somewhat of a Christmas cheer even so far across the sea. They have been practicing their Christmas songs, Ave Maria and the “Oratorio,” which they will sing around the streets on Christmas eve. The schoolboys have received their presents—dictionaries, sugared crackers, and perfumed soap—and now that their vacation has begun, their little brown heads can be seen bobbing up and down in the blue sea. Their Christmas-tree will be the royal palm; and nipa boughs their mistletoe.
Last Christmas in the provinces I spent in Iloilo at a hostel kept by a barefooted Spanish landlady, slovenly in a loose morning-gown and with disheveled hair, who stored the eggs in her own bedroom and presided over the untidy staff of house-boys. As she usually slept late, we breakfasted without eggs, being limited to chocolate and cakes. The only option was a glass of lukewarm coffee thinned to rather sickening proportions with condensed milk. Dinner, however, was a more elaborate affair, consisting of a dozen courses, which began with soup and ended with bananas or the customary cheese and guava. The several meat and chicken courses, the “balenciona”—boiled rice mixed with chicken giblets and red peppers—and the bread, baked hard and eaten without butter, was washed down with a generous glass of tinto wine. A pile of rather moist plates stood in front of you, and as you finished one course an untidy thumb removed the topmost plate, thus gradually diminishing the pile.
The dining-room was very interesting. A pretentious mirror in a tarnished gilt frame was the piece de resistance. The faded chromos of the royal family, the Saints, and the Enfanta were relieved by the brilliant lithographs presenting brewers’ advertisements. A majestic chandelier, considerably fly-specked, but elaborately ornamented with glass prisms, dropped from the frescoed ceiling, and a cabinet containing miscellaneous seashells, family photographs, and starfish occupied one corner of the room.
There was a Christmas eve reception at the home of the “Dramatic Club,” where the refreshments of cigars and anisette and bock beer were distributed with liberal hand. The Filipino always does things lavishly. The evening was devoted to band concerts—the municipal band in the pavilion rendering the Mexican waltzes, “Over the Waves,” “The Dove,” and other favorites, while the “upper ten” paraded in the moonlight under the mimosa-trees—serenades under the Spanish balconies, and carol-singing to the strumming of guitars. The houses were illumined with square tissue paper lanterns of soft colors. The public market was a fairyland of light. The girls at the tobacco booths offered a special cigarette tied with blue ribbon as a souvenir of the December holidays. A mass at midnight was conducted in the venerable church. As the big bronze bells up in the belfry tolled the hour the auditorium was filled with worshipers—women in flapping slippers and black veils; girls smelling of cheap perfumery and cocoanut-oil, in their stiff gauze dresses with the butterfly sleeves; barefooted boys and young men redolent of cigarettes and musk. A burst of music from the organ in the loft commenced the services, which were concluded with the passing of the Host and a selection by the band. The priest on this occasion wore his gold-embroidered chasuble; the acolytes, red surplices and lace.