Chapter XV: Letter XIII: Some Influences of Climate, Scenery, and Religion

ILOILO, _February 18, 1905_.

You must excuse my writing still being rather bad, as my illness has left me so weak that I shall not be out of bed for some days longer, in fact I am beginning to be fearfully afraid that I may not be well enough to go to Manila on the 28th after all. However, I have ten days to get well in, which gives me hope, and my progress so far has been simply wonderful, which is due to the extraordinary luck I have had in finding such good doctors and such a charming and clever nurse.

I am much disappointed in having missed the visit of a U.S.A. man-of-war, the _Rainbow_, which is on a cruise through the Islands, and has come here for a couple of days. She is the flagship of the squadron the Americans keep in the China seas, and a very fine ship, I believe.

Last night her crew gave a sing-song in the theatre, to which I persuaded C—— to go, and was very glad I had done so, as he enjoyed it immensely, and says it was a very good sort of Christy Minstrel “show.” It ended with a small play, done by real “American Negroes,” as they are called. The _Rainbow_ gave the same entertainment in Hong Kong, just before we arrived, and I heard then how good it was. This afternoon we have been invited to a reception to be held on board, but, of course, that also is out of the question for me, and C—— will be busy at the office till very late.

There is a great deal of work at the office now, as the chief business in this island is sugar, and this is the height of the “season,” when great loads of thousands of sacks go out every day to be put into steamers and sailing vessels off the estuary. They have a rough factory here where the cane is crushed, and the stuff exported is a thick, brown sort of sand (_don’t_ make a joke about sand and sugar!), a great deal of which goes to Europe and America, but most to Hong Kong, where it is refined in great factories. The refined sugar that comes back from Hong Kong is what we buy here; and, though an English company has started a sugar refinery in Manila, they find that the conditions of trade in the Philippines are such that they can only _just_ compete with the stuff refined elsewhere and imported subject to the export tax and the enormous duties.

I think I am very lucky in having such a nice room to be ill in. It is very large and shady, with three windows and two doors, and I look out on a bright garden belonging to the house opposite, and a green field and trees, which is charming. Through the trees are glimpses of the grey backs of the houses in the street parallel to this, and then a thick, high belt of palms, which hides the open sea.

This is the S.-W. side of the house. The back, to the N.-E., looks out across a rough garden of fresh, thick grass to half a mile or so of shallows, where the tide fluctuates, and beyond is the strip of blue river, which looks so narrow seen from here that the big steamers which go by seem to be sailing on dry land. Beyond, again, comes a fringe of bright green palms, and then the open sea—a stretch of darkest blue—and a bit of hilly, verdant Guimaras.

I think one of the great beauties of the views here is that the sky is never quite cloudless—there are always very white clouds somewhere in the dome of intense blue, which give relief and value to all the colours below.

On days when the Monsoon is not too high, we open the shutters looking towards the river, but these open wooden slats keep the houses quite cool, even when the shutters are closed. I wish there were something like the _tatties_ of India; but no one out here has ever heard of such a thing. The open shutters are very nice though, and the view framed in the dark opening which faces us at table is like looking at a large, bright picture. Sometimes the tide is right up to the garden wall, the sky cloudy, and the water like slate. At other times, when it is far out, the shallows turn into mud-flats, with groups of native women wading about in their bright red clothes, looking for mysterious fish which Filipinos alone dare eat and live.

Some friends from Manila were looking out of the hall window a little time ago, and said, “What a lovely view. I should never tire of that.” I said we never did, which was quite true.

When I am well again, and if C—— can get away, I hope to be able to go beyond the roads to Jaro and Molo, though they are beautiful and inexhaustible. With all the beauty, however, I begin to have the same sort of feeling about this country that that old friend of ours, General R——, had about the girl at the Aldershot ball. You remember the story he told us of how he saw her exquisite face across the ball-room, and insisted on a common friend introducing him to her? And when he and the friend had got half way across the ball-room, the old general said: “Stop! Take me away. Get me out of it. Her face has never changed and never can change. It isn’t a face. It’s a mask, sir, a mask! It is not a human being. Come away!”

Well, I feel like that about Philippine scenery, which can be dark or light according to the reflections thrown on it, but it has never changed, and even if there is a slight change, when that has passed it will always and for ever be the same greens and the same blue. No alternation to red and yellow autumn, no brown and purple winter, no delicate spring—nothing but perpetual, chromo-lithograph mid-summer, which has always seemed to me the least beautiful season of the year.

When the wet Monsoon blows, I believe that season is counted as a sort of spring, for various trees then come into bloom, but, for the great part, everything just goes on growing and dying, and growing and dying in dull routine, like the natives. In fact I often think the much-abused Filipino is only a prototype, as it were, a sort of reflection, of his country. It seems as if this were so, too, for those who go away to Hong Kong or Japan to be educated, and come back full of civilisation and enthusiasms, soon cast off their energy like a slough and return to the shiftless, slouching habits of the land where it is “always afternoon.” For them such habits are natural, and perhaps necessary, but a worse effect is that white men get like that too, in time, and though they may work well enough at the business by which they live, they become indifferent, shiftless, careless about dress and the niceties of our civilisation; everything is too much trouble, and they just jog along in a half-animal routine. The young ones still fret for the world they have left, which remains fresh in their memories; but this life takes hold on men, and they become so rooted in its ways that they deteriorate and can never live happily anywhere else again—in the same way that a mind deteriorates on the slip-shod mental fare of magazine-reading, and cannot be happy with anything that requires more effort to assimilate. This, then, I find is the secret of that “nameless” fascination of the Far East that one hears and reads so much about—it is the secret of deterioration which is so easy, and elevation which is so hard, so useless, so unnecessary—let us lie in a long chair and drink one whisky peg after the other—who cares what the home papers say—what rot it is to bother about anything but poker and shooting, or why old Wing Chang bought Brown’s pony.

And when you think of the _real_ meaning of “Ship me somewhere east of Suez”—well, you can’t think of it till you live there yourself for a month or two. My refrain is, “Ship me somewhere west of Suez,” where there is health for body and soul—the west of the exquisite thrush and the lilac bush, instead of the empty, gaudy parrot and the flaming, scentless canna.

Heavens! What a tirade!

_One_ woman have I met who likes the Philippines; though many, as I know, love India, and the Straits, and Ceylon. But then those are generally people who go away to “hills” and so on, or take trips home. Here there are no “hills,” and a trip home is a serious life-problem. Just so, this one woman who has been found to like the Philippines happens to be the wife of a missionary, so, of course, she goes every hot season for a “nice long holiday” to Japan.

It occurs to me that you may imagine we have savages here when I speak of missionaries, but that is not the case, in this island at any rate, for these good people are here—oh such a lot of them!—to convert the Filipinos from Roman Catholicism. This is really a work of supererogation, for, though the Spanish priests did ill-treat the Filipinos, the natives are free now from that terror, and this religion, with its mysteries and pomp, appeals to them, and suits their dispositions perfectly.

I am afraid the unbiassed observer would find the missionaries far more convincing in their enthusiasm, if it led them to give up the beautiful houses and comfortable carriages they enjoy here, their tea-parties, lectures, and so on, and go and rough it in some of the other islands, where there are plenty of savages, Mahommedans, devil-worshippers, cannibals, and all sorts of unreclaimed sheep.

Before I left home, I remember a very enthusiastic but woefully ignorant old lady being filled with excitement when she heard I was going to the Philippine Islands, and showing me missionary journals with a great deal written in them about “the good work” being done out here. At first I very naturally thought it was the savages who were being tackled, but—“Oh dear no!” she cried, quite shocked. “The poor Filipinos are being saved from the dreadful influence of the Roman Catholics.”

I said: “But surely they are also the followers of Christ? Only they do not interpret His sayings quite as we do ourselves.”

“No, _no_, they are _wicked_ people! The Filipinos _must_ be saved! Do, _do_, when you are out there, interest yourself in this noble work. I will send you little books——”

Strange, isn’t it? And of course about the people, the laws, the climate, she knew less than nothing, though I am sure the poor old soul gave many a shilling out of her miserable income towards the fund that gives the missionary’s well-dressed wife a “nice little holiday in Japan.”

In these civilised (?) parts of the Philippines there is a good deal of religious trouble and dissension already, without missionary enterprise to stir it up, as a very determined patriot of the name of Aglipay has cut himself adrift from the authority of Rome and started a church called La Iglesia Filipina Independiente, which title, I am sure, needs no translating. His followers are numerous, in fact it is generally believed that they now out-number the orthodox; and the whole movement is known to be the outward and visible sign of inward and hidden fires of Insurrection and Independence. The _Aglipayanos_, as these independent thinkers are usually styled, have churches of their own, and processions and ceremonies almost indistinguishable from those of the Papists. Do you remember a procession I described to you when we were in Manila? The bringing down of the Virgin of Antipolo? I now learn that that was all to do with this quarrel amongst the followers of the gentle Christ, though to which side the Virgin of Antipolo belonged, and who was to be galvanised into loyalty by the contemplation of her journey, I am not quite clear, and do not much care, for the fate of the little old wooden doll is uninteresting—it is only the people who are ready to fly at each other’s throats about it who are remarkable. What poor “worms that bite and sting in the dust!”