A Woman's Impression Of The Philippines Part 11

To an American of a.n.a.lytical tendencies a few years in the Philippines present not only an interesting study of Filipino life, but a novel consciousness of our own. The affairs of these people are so simple where ours are complex, so complex where ours are simple, that one's angle of view is considerably enlarged.

The general construction of society is mediaeval and aristocratic. The aristocracy, with the exception of a few wealthy brewers and cigar manufacturers of Manila, is a land-holding one. There is practically no bourgeoisie--no commercial cla.s.s--between the rich and the poor. In Manila and all the large coast towns trade is largely in the hands of foreigners, chiefly Chinese, some few of whom have become converted to the Catholic faith, and established themselves permanently in the country;--all of whom have found Filipino helpmates, either with or without the sanction of the Church, and have added their contingent of half-breeds, or _mestizos_, to the population.

The land-owning aristocracy, though it must have been in possession of its advantages for several generations, seems deficient in jealous exclusiveness on the score of birth. I do not remember to have heard once here the expression "of good family," as we hear it in America, and especially in the South. But I have heard "He is a rich man" so used as to indicate that this good fortune carried with it unquestioned social prerogative. Yet there must be some clannishness based upon birth, for your true Filipino never repudiates his poor relations or apologizes for them. At every social function there is a crowd of them in all stages of modest apparel, and with manners born of social obscurity, a.s.serting their right to be considered among the elect. I am inclined to think that Filipinos concern themselves with the present rather than the past, and that the _parvenu_ finds it even easier to win his way with them than with us. Even under Spanish rule poor men had a chance, and sometimes rose to the top. I remember the case, in particular, of one family which claimed and held social leadership in Capiz. Its head was a long-headed, cautious, shrewd old fellow, with so many Yankee traits that I sometimes almost forgot, and addressed him in English. My landlady, who was an heiress in her own right, and the last of a family of former repute, told me that the old financier came to Capiz "poor as wood." She did not use that homely simile, however, but the typical Filipino statement that his pantaloons were torn. She took me behind a door to tell me, and imparted the information in a whisper, as if she were afraid of condign punishment if overheard.

"Money talks" in the Philippines just as blatantly as it does in the United States. In addition to the social halo imparted by its possession, there is a condition grown out of it, known locally as "caciquism." Caciquism is the social and political prestige exercised by a local man or family. There are examples in America, where every village owns its leading citizen's and its leading citizen's wife's influence. Booth Tarkington has pictured an American cacique in "The Conquest of Canaan." Judge Pike is a cacique. His power, however, is vested in his capacity to deceive his fellowmen, in the American's natural love for what he regards as an eminent personality, and his clinging to an ideal.

A Filipino cacique is quite a different being. He owes his prestige to fear--material fear of the consequences which his wealth and power can bring down on those that cross him. He does not have to play a hypocritical role. He need neither a.s.sume to be, nor be, a saint in his private or public life. He must simply be in control of enough resources to attach to him a large body of relatives and friends whose financial interests are tied up with his. Under the Spanish regime he had to stand in by bribery with the local governor. Under the American regime, with its illusions of democracy, he simply points to his _clientele_ and puts forward the plea that he is the natural voice of the people. The American Government, helpless in its great ignorance of people, language, and customs, is eager to find the people's voice, and probably takes him at his word. Fortified by Government backing, he starts in to run his province independently of law or justice, and succeeds in doing so. There are no newspapers, there is no real knowledge among the people of what popular rights consist in, and no idea with which to combat his usurpations. The men whom he squeezes howl, but not over the principle. They simply wait the day of revolution. Even where there is a real public sentiment which condemns the tyrant, it is half the time afraid to a.s.sert itself, for the tyrant's first defence is that they oppose him because he is a friend of the American Government. Local justice of the peace courts are simply farcical, and most of the cacique's violations of right keep him clear at least of the courts of first instance, where the judiciary, Filipino or American, is reliable. Thus our Government, in its first attempts to introduce democratic inst.i.tutions, finds itself struggling with the very worst evil of democracy long before it can make the virtues apparent.

The poor people among the Filipinos live in a poverty, a misery, and a happiness inconceivable to our people who have not seen it. Their poverty is real--not only relative. Their houses are barely a covering from rain or sun. A single rude bamboo bedstead and a stool or two const.i.tute their furniture. There is an earthen water jar, another earthen pot for cooking rice, a bolo for cutting, one or two wooden spoons, and a cup made of cocoanut sh.e.l.ls. The stove consists of three stones laid under the house, or back of it, where a rice-pot may be balanced over the fire laid between. There are no tables, no linen, no dishes, no towels. The family eat with their fingers while sitting about on the ground with some broken banana leaves for plates. Coffee, tea, and chocolate are unknown luxuries to them. Fish and rice, with lumps of salt and sometimes a bit of fruit, const.i.tute their only diet. In the babies this ma.s.s of undigested half-cooked rice remains in the abdomen and produces what is called "rice belly." In the adults it brings beriberi, from which they die quickly. They suffer from boils and impure blood and many skin diseases. Consumption is rife, and rheumatism attacks old and young alike. They are tormented by gnats and mosquitoes, and frequently to rid themselves of the pests build fires under the house and sleep away the hot tropical night in the smoke. While the upper cla.s.ses are abstemious, the lower orders drink much of the native _vino_, which is made from the sap of cocoanut and nipa trees, and the men are often brutal to women and children.

I think the most hopeful person must admit that this is an enumeration of real and not fancied evils, that the old saw about happiness and prosperity being relative terms is not applicable. The Filipino laborer is still far below even the lowest step of the relative degree of prosperity and happiness. Yet in spite of these ills he is happy because he has not developed enough to achieve either self-pity or self-a.n.a.lysis. He bears his pain, when it comes, as a dumb animal does, and forgets it as quickly when it goes. When the hour of death descends, he meets it stoically, partly because physical pain dulls his senses, partly because the instinct of fatalism is there in spite of his Catholicism.

Of course this poverty-stricken condition is largely his own fault. He has apparently an ineradicable repugnance to continued labor. He does not look forward to the future. Fathers and mothers will sit the whole day playing the guitar and singing or talking, after the fashion of the country, with not a bite of food in the house. When their own desires begin to reinforce the clamors of the children, they will start out at the eleventh hour to find an errand or an odd bit of work. There may be a single squash on the roof vine waiting to be plucked and to yield its few centavos, or they can go out to the beach and dig a few cents' worth of clams.

The more intelligent of the laboring cla.s.s attach themselves as _cliente_ to the rich land-holding families. They are by no means slaves in law, but they are in fact; and they like it. The men are agricultural laborers; the women, seamstresses, house servants, and wet nurses, and they also do the beautiful embroideries, the hat-plaiting, the weaving of pina, sinamay, and jusi, and the other local industries which are carried on by the upper cla.s.s. The poor themselves have nothing to do with commerce; that is in the hands of the well-to-do.

As the children of the _clientele_ grow up, they are scattered out among the different branches of the ruling family as maids and valets. In a well-to-do Filipino family of ten or twelve children, there will be a child servant for every child in the house. The little servants are ill-fed creatures (for the Filipinos themselves are merciless in what they exact and parsimonious in what they give), trained at seven or eight years of age to look after the room, the clothing, and to be at the beck and call of another child, usually a little older, but ofttimes younger than themselves. They go to school with their little masters and mistresses, carry their books, and play with them. For this they receive the scantiest dole of food on which they can live, a few cast-off garments, and a stipend of a medio-peso (twenty-five cents cents U.S. currency) per annum, which their parents collect and spend. Parents and child are satisfied, because, little as they get, it is certain. Parents especially are satisfied, because thus do they evade the duties and responsibilities of parenthood.

It was at first a source of wonder to me how the rich man came out even on his scores of retainers, owing to their idleness and the demands for fiestas which he is compelled to grant. But he does succeed in getting enough out of them to pay for the unhulled rice he gives them, and he more than evens up on the children. If ever there was a land where legislation on the subject of child labor is needed, it is here. Children are overworked from infancy. They do much of the work of the Islands, and the last drop of energy and vitality is gone before they reach manhood or womanhood. Indeed, the first privilege of manhood to them is to quit work.

The feeling between these poor Filipinos and their so-called employers is just what the feeling used to be between Southerners and their negroes. The lower-cla.s.s man is proud of his connection with the great family. He guards its secrets and is loyal to it. He will fight for it, if ordered, and desist when ordered.

The second house I lived in in Capiz was smaller than the first, and had on the lower floor a Filipino family in one room. I demanded that they be ejected if I rented the house, but the owner begged me to reconsider. They were, she said, old-time servants of hers to whom she felt it her duty to give shelter. They had always looked after her house and would look after me.

I yielded to her insistence, but doubtingly. In six weeks I was perfectly convinced of her wisdom and my foolishness. Did it rain, Basilio came flying up to see if the roof leaked. If a window stuck and would not slide, I called Basilio. For the modest reward of two pesos a month (one dollar gold) he skated my floors till they shone like mirrors. He ran errands for a penny or two. His wife would embroider for me, or wash a garment if I needed it in a hurry. If I had an errand which took me out nights, Basilio lit up an old lantern, unsolicited, and went ahead with the light and a bolo. If a heavy rain came up when I was at school, he appeared with my mackintosh and rubbers. And while a great many small coins went from me to him, I could never see that the pay was proportional to his care. Yet there was no difficulty in comprehending it. Pilar (my landlady) had told him to take care of me, and he was obeying orders. If she had told him to come up and bolo me as I slept, he would have done it unhesitatingly.

The result of American occupation has been a rise in the price of agricultural labor, and in the city of Manila in all labor. But in the provinces the needle-woman, the weaver, and the house servant work still for inconceivably small prices, while there has been a decided rise in the price of local manufactures. Jusi, which cost three dollars gold a pattern in 1901, now costs six and nine dollars. Exquisite embroideries on pina, which is thinner than bolting cloth, have quadrupled their prices, but the provincial women servants, who weave the jusi and do the embroidering, still work for a few cents a day and two scanty meals.

When I arrived here a seamstress worked nine hours a day for twenty cents gold and her dinner. Now in Manila a seamstress working for Americans receives fifty cents gold and sometimes seventy-five cents and her dinner, though the Spanish, Filipinos, and Chinese pay less. In the province of Capiz twelve and a half cents gold per day for a seamstress is the recognized price for an American to pay--natives get one for less. A provincial Filipino pays his coachman two and a half dollars gold a month, and a cook one dollar and a half. An American for the same labor must pay from four to eight dollars for the cook and three to six dollars for the coachman. As before stated, the subordinate servants in a Filipino house cost next to nothing, because of the utilization of child labor.

A provincial Filipino can support quite an establishment, and keep a carriage on an income of forty dollars gold a month where to an American it would cost sixty or eighty dollars. This is due partly to our own consumption of high-priced tinned foods, partly to the better price paid for labor, but chiefly to our desire to feed our servants into good healthy condition. We not only see that they have more food, but we look more closely to its variety and nutritious qualities. We employ adults and demand more labor, because our housekeeping is more complex than Filipino housekeeping, and we expect to employ fewer servants than Filipinos do.

The Filipinos, the Spanish, and even the English who are settled here cling to mediaeval European ideas in the matter of service. If they have any sn.o.bbish weakness for display, it is in the number of retainers they can muster. Just as in our country rural prosperity is evinced by the upkeep of fences and buildings, the spic and span new paint, and the garish furnishings, here it is written in the number of servants and hangers-on. The great foreign trading firms like to boast of the tremendous length of their pay rolls. They would rather employ four hundred underworked mediocrities at twenty pesos a month than half a hundred abilities at four times that amount. The land-holders like to think of the mouths they are responsible for feeding so very poorly, and the busy housewife jingles her keys from weaving-room to embroidery frame, from the little _tienda_ on the ground floor, where she sells _vino_, cigars, and betel-nut, to the extemporized bakery in the kitchen, where they are making rice cakes and taffy candy, which an old woman will presently hawk about the streets for her.

One of the curious things here is the multiplicity of resource which the rich cla.s.ses possess. A rich land-holder will have his rice fields, sugar mill, vino factory, and cocoanut and hemp plantations. He will own a fish corral or two, and be one of the backers of a deep-sea fishing outfit. He speculates a little in rice, and he may have some interest in pearl fisheries. On a bit of land not good for much else he has the palm tree, which yields _buri_ for making mats and sugar bags. His wife has a little shop, keeps several weavers at work, and an embroidery woman or two. If she goes on a visit to Manila, the day after her return her servants are abroad, hawking novelties in the way of fans, knick-knacks, bits of lace, combs, and other things which she has picked up to earn an honest penny. If a steamer drops in with a cargo of Batangas oranges, she invests twenty or thirty pesos, and has her servants about carrying the trays of fruit for sale. According to her lights, which are not hygienic, she is a good housekeeper and a genuine helpmeet. She keeps every ounce of food under lock and key, and measures each crumb that is used in cooking. She keeps the housekeeping accounts, handles the money, never pries into her husband's affairs, bears him a child every year, and is content, in return for all this devotion, with an ample supply of pretty clothes and her jewels. She herself does not work, busy as she is, and it speaks well for the faith and honor of the Filipino people that she can secure labor in plenty to do all these things for her, to handle moneys and give a faithful account of them. It is pitiful to see how little the Filipino laboring cla.s.s can do for itself, how dependent it is upon the head of its superiors, and how content it is to go on piling up wealth for them on a mere starvation dole.

As before said, the laboring man who attaches himself to a great family does so because it gives him security. He is nearly always in debt to it, but if he is sick and unable to work he knows his rice will come in just the same. Under the old Spanish system, a servant in debt could not quit his employer's service till the debt was paid. The object of an employer was to get a man in debt and keep him so, in which case he was actually, although not nominally, a slave. While this law is no longer in force, probably not ten per cent of the laboring population realize it. They know that an American cannot hold them in his employ against their will, but they do not know that this is true of Filipinos and Spaniards. Nor is the upper cla.s.s anxious to have them informed. The poor frequently offer their children or their younger brothers and sisters to work out their debts.

Children are sold here also. Twice in my first year at Capiz, I refused to buy small children who were offered for sale by their parents lest the worse evil of starvation should befall them; and once, on my going into a friend's house, she showed me a child of three or four years that she had bought for five pesos. She remarked that it was a pity to let the child starve, and that in a year or two its labor would more than pay for its keep.

Filipinos who have capital enough all keep one or more pigs. These are yard scavengers, and, as sanitary measures are little observed by this race, have access to filth that makes the thought of eating their flesh exceedingly repulsive. When the owners are ready to kill, however, the pig is brought upstairs into the kitchen, where it lives luxuriously on boiled rice, is bathed once a day, and prepared for slaughter like a sacrificial victim. If you are personally acquainted with a pig of this sort and know the day set for his decease, you may send your servant out to buy fresh pork; otherwise you had better stick to chicken and fish.

Before the Insurrection, when the rinderpest had not yet destroyed the herds, beef cattle were plenty, and meat was cheap enough for even the poorest to enjoy. A live goat, full grown, was not worth more than a peso (fifty cents gold). Now there are practically no beef cattle at all, so the only meat available is goats' flesh, which is sold at from twenty to sixty cents a pound (ten to thirty cents gold). Americans living in the provinces rely largely upon chicken, though in the coast towns there is always plenty of delicious fish. There are also oysters (not very good), clams, crabs, shrimps, and crayfish.

One of the most irritating features of housekeeping here is the lack of any fixed value, especially for market produce. There are no grocery stores, every article must be chaffered over, and is valued according to the owner's pressing needs, his antipathy for Americans, or his determination to get everything he can.

You may be driving in the country and see a flock of chickens feeding under or near a house. You ask the price. The owner has just dined. There is still enough _palay_ (unhulled rice) to furnish the evening meal. He has no pressing need of money, and he doesn't want to disturb himself to run down chickens. His fowls simply soar as to price. They are worth anywhere from seventy-five cents to a dollar apiece. The current price of chickens varies according to size and season from twenty to fifty cents. You may offer the latter price and be refused. The next day the very same man may appear at your home, offering for twenty or thirty cents the fowls for which the day before he refused fifty.

Except in the cold storage and the Chino grocery shops of Manila, nothing can be bought without chaffering. The Filipinos love this; they realize that we are impatient and seldom can hold out long at it, and in many cases they overcharge us from sheer race hatred. Also they have the idea, as they would express it, that our money is two times as much as theirs, and that therefore we should pay two prices. Often they put a price from sheer caprice or effrontery and hang to it from obstinacy. In the same market I have found mangoes of the same quality ranging all the way from thirty cents to a dollar and fifty cents a dozen.

In the provinces market produce is very limited. In fresh foods there is nothing but sweet potatoes, several varieties of squash, a kind of string bean, lima beans, lettuce, radishes, cuc.u.mbers (in season), spinach, and field corn. Potatoes and onions can be procured only from Manila, bought by the crate. If there be no local commissary, tinned foods must be sent in bulk from Manila. The housekeeper's task is no easy one, and the lack of fresh beef, ice, fresh b.u.t.ter, and milk wears hard on a dainty appet.i.te. The Philippines are no place for women or men who cannot thrive and be happy on plain food, plenty of work, and isolation. Nor is there any sadder lot than that of the American married woman in the provinces who is unemployed. Her housekeeping takes very little time, for the cheapness of native servants obviates the necessity of all labor but that of supervision. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to talk about. She has nothing to do but to lie in a steamer chair and to think of home. Most women break down under it very quickly; they lose appet.i.te and flesh and grow fretful or melancholy. But to a woman who loves her home and is employed, provincial life here is a boon. Remember that for an expenditure of forty or fifty dollars a month the single woman can maintain an establishment of her own--a genuine home--where after a day's toil she can find order and peace and idleness awaiting her. Filipino servants are not ideal, but any woman with a capacity for organization can soon train them into keeping her house in the outward semblance at least of order and cleanliness. She had better investigate it pretty closely on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays; if she does so, she can leave it to run itself very well during the five days of her labor. And what a joy it is--I speak in the bitter remembrance of a long line of hotels and boarding-houses--to go back to one's home after a day's labor instead of to a hall bedroom; to sit at one's own well-ordered if simple table, and escape the chatter of twenty or thirty people who have no reason for a.s.sociation except their economic necessities!

In the six years I have lived in these Islands, I have never heard of indignity or disrespect shown to American women. [1] They are perfectly safe, and if they choose to exercise any common sense, need not be nervous. Housebreaking outside of Manila is unknown. I myself lived for four years in a provincial town, the greater part of the time quite removed from the neighborhood of other Americans, with only two little girls in the house with me. I remember one evening having a couple of civil engineers, who had been fellow pa.s.sengers on the transport and were temporarily in town, to dinner. When they were ready to leave, at half-past ten, the little girls had both gone to sleep, so I went downstairs to let them out and bar the door after them. One burst out laughing and remarked that my bolting the door was a formality, and that I must have confidence in the honesty of the natives. The door was of bamboo, tied on with strips of rattan in place of hinges, which any one could have cut with a knife. I admitted that the man was right, but the closed door was the symbol that my house was my castle, and I had no fear of Filipino thieves. The only time I was ever really afraid was when there were two or three disreputable Americans in town.

The two girls from Radcliffe were in a town in Negros where there was no other American, man or woman, and held their position for over a year; nor were they once affrighted in all that time.

After five years of this peace and security in the "wilds," I went back to the United States and met the pitying e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of the community on my exile. Well, there was a difference. I noted it first on the dining-car of the Canadian-Pacific Railroad, where one's plate was surrounded by a host of little dishes, where the clatter of service was deafening (so different from the noiselessness of the Oriental), and the gentleman who filled my water gla.s.s held it about three feet from the water bottle, and manipulated both in sympathetic curves which expressed his entire mastery of the art. I found it again on the Northwestern, where the colored porter, observing some Chinese coins in my purse when I tipped him, said, "Le's see," with a confidence born of democracy, and sat down on the arm of the Pullman seat to get a better view of them.

But it was in Chicago--the busy, noisy, dusty, hustling Chicago--that all the joys of civilization fell on me at once. It seemed to be in a state of siege with house thieves, a.s.sa.s.sins, and "hold-ups." There had been several murders of women, so revolting that the newspapers would not print the details. I found my brother's flat equipped with special bolts on all outside doors, so that they could be opened for an inch or two without giving anybody an opportunity to push in. Once when a police officer called at the door to ask for subscriptions for the sufferers of the San Francisco disaster, I locked him out on the back porch while I did some telephoning to see if it was all right. Women were afraid to be on the streets in the early dusk. Extra policemen had been sworn in, preachers had delivered sermons on the frightful condition of the city.

At night I locked my bedroom door, and dreamed of masked burglars standing over me threatening with drawn revolver. For the thirty days I remained there, I knew more of nervousness and terror than the whole time I spent in the Philippines, and I came back to resume the old life where there is security in all things, barring a very remote insurrection and the possibility of hearing the roar of j.a.panese guns some fine morning. And through and through a grateful system I felt the lifting of the tremendous pressure, the agonizing strain, compet.i.tion, and tumult of American life. Thank Heaven! there is still a manana country--a fair, sunny land, where rapid transportation and sky-sc.r.a.pers do not exist.

CHAPTER XIX

Weddings in Town and Country

Filipino Brides, Their Weddings and Wedding Suppers--River Trip to a Rural Wedding--Our Late Arrival Delays the Ceremony Until Next Morning--The Ball--We Tramp Across the Fields to the Church--After the Marriage, Feasting and Dancing.

The composure with which a Filipino girl enters matrimony is astounding. There are no tears, no self-conscious blushes, none of the charming shyness that encompa.s.ses an American girl as a garment. It is a contradictory state of affairs, I must admit, for this same American girl is a self-reliant creature, accustomed to the widest range of action and liberty, while the matter-of-fact, self-possessed Filipina has been reared to find it impossible to step across the street without attendance. But the free, liberty-loving American yields shyly to her captor, while the sedateness of the prospective matron has already taken possession of the dusky sister.

Filipino marriages, among the upper cla.s.s, are accompanied by receptions and feasts like our own, but differ greatly in the comparatively insignificant part played by the contracting parties. Whereas, in an American wedding, the whole object of calling all these people together seems to be a desire to silhouette the bride and groom against the festive background, one comes away from a Filipino celebration with a feeling that an excuse was needed for a.s.sembling a mult.i.tude and permitting them to enjoy themselves, and that the bridal pair unselfishly lent themselves to the occasion.

Most weddings take place about half-past six or seven in the evening; and immediately after the religious ceremony in the church, all the invited guests adjourn to the home of a relative (usually, but not necessarily, the nearest kinsman of the bride), where supper is served and is followed by a ball.

On these occasions, except for the candles on the altar, the church is unlighted, and in its cavernous darkness the footfalls of a gathering crowd ring on the stone floor, and the hum of voices rolls up into the arching gloom of the roof.

There are no pews, but two rows of benches, facing each other, up the middle length of the edifice, offer seats to the upper-cla.s.s people, who seem chiefly interested in preserving the spotlessness of their gala attire. No attempt at exclusiveness is made, and a horde of babbling, gesticulating, lower-cla.s.s natives surges to and fro at the rear, awaiting the bride.

Presently, to the clangor of half a dozen huge bells, she sweeps in, accompanied by her _madrina_, or chief witness. They take station at the back between the baptismal fonts and just in front of the overhanging choir gallery. Instantly they are hemmed in, mobbed, by that swarm of _pobres_, some speculating on the motive of the match and its probable outcome. Meanwhile the bridegroom is smoking a cigarette at one side, and chatting with a group of bachelor friends who are faithful to the last.

Just as one begins to wonder how much longer these unfortunate women can endure the position, the barefooted acolytes shuffle in, bearing six-foot silver candlesticks, and preceding the padre, who is carrying his illumination with him--or rather, having it carried in front of him. The bridegroom throws away his cigarette, and shouldering his way through the press, takes his position at the side of the bride. The mob closes in again, not infrequently incommoding the padre, who is peering at his half-lighted missal. The aristocrats on the benches pay no attention and continue to guard their _ropa_ and converse on chance topics.

To one standing on the edge of that wriggling throng with the yellow flare just lighting the impa.s.sive countenances of its chief personages, and hearing a low monotone, broken only by the clink of metal as gold pieces fall into the plate, it is difficult to believe that this is a wedding, just like those pictured and tableau effects that one is treated to at home.

At last the voice stops, the mob and the smoky candles surge forward to the altar, where the benediction is said. Another impeded progress to the rear (everybody gets up without waiting for the bride and bridegroom to pa.s.s), the sorely tried couple step into a waiting victoria, and we troop after them, getting our felicitations ready.

On arriving at the house we are received by the groom and some female relative of his, or, perchance, the bride's papa. No opportunity of formally congratulating the young couple is offered. The bride retires into an inner room, where she removes her veil, and receives such of her lady friends as desire to kiss her on both cheeks. But by and by she comes out, self-possessed and unsmiling, to distribute the fragments of her artificial orange blossom wreath to her aspiring girl friends. This is a parallel to the distribution of wedding cake, which the American girl puts under her pillow and dreams upon.

By this time the orchestra has arrived and is playing triumphantly under the windows. Though engaged beforehand, it always accomplishes its appearance with a casual and unpremeditated air. The musicians are then (per contract) invited to enter, and strike up a rigadon. Generally, but not always, the most important man present invites the bride for this dance. But I have known brides to sit it out, for lack of a partner. The bridegroom chooseth as he listeth; when American women are present, the fathers of the bride and groom usually request the honor of leading them out.

After this first dance supper is served. If an important native official be present, it is a point of etiquette that he take the bride. Only a few men of high rank sit at the first table, which is given over to women. The service is not left to servants, but all male relatives of the family vie with each other in antic.i.p.ating the wants of the guests.

It is a feast of solid and satisfying excellence. It begins usually with vermicelli soup (made from a lard stock) which is more than likely to have been dished a half-hour and to be stone cold. But Filipinos are not critical in this regard; and Americans, in view of all that is coming, may dispense with this one dish.