Читать книгу An Englishwoman in the Philippines - Mrs. Campbell Dauncey - Страница 14

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Iloilo, January 16, 1905.

The day has come round for me to catch the mail, but I feel that I can hardly write calmly, as I am barely sane upon the subject I wish to tell you about, which is the Customs. I told you about the opening of our cases, and how we took them out of bond, as they were valued at £30? Well, a day or two ago the bill came in, and when we saw it we nearly fainted away, for the amount of duty came to 698 pesos—£70.

Of course we thought some mistake had been made, so C—— went off to the Customs officer and asked him what it meant. All the consolation we got was that they were very sorry for us, but the Appraiser had made a mistake, and classed some of our things under Class B instead of Class A.

So C—— said he could not afford this sum, which was far more than the whole of the contents of the cases were worth if they had been new. Of course it was impossible to send them back to Hong Kong, as we had taken them out of bond; but after a lot of talk, the officer said we could “abandon the goods” if we liked, which means refuse to pay the duty, when the things would be seized by the Customs and sold by auction to pay the Government; but we should be unable, by law, to buy them in ourselves. This seemed to be the only alternative open to us, and C—— came back and asked me what I thought of it, and asked the other Englishmen their opinion. They were full of sympathy and very kind, and at last one of them hit upon an excellent idea, which was to attend the sale and buy our things in for us as cheaply as possible. This, then, was arranged, but—“Oh no!” said the Customs, “you won’t gain anything by that, because if goods, when put up for sale, do not fetch the price at which the Customs House has valued them, they are publicly burned.”

So that is the end of our story. We have paid more than their value for our wedding-presents, which seems to me the meanest and cruellest imposition I ever heard of. But I won’t say any more, for the subject can only be as painful to you as it is to us. We must just grin and bear it, I suppose, but good-bye to a pony and trap for a longer time than ever, and good-bye to any little jaunts in the hot season.

I must try instead to be more pleasant, and the only thing I can think of is a little lizard I have been looking at for the last ten minutes, while my thoughts roamed gloomily over each one of those seventy good golden sovereigns that have gone to help to teach the Filipino that he is my equal. A worthy cause, no doubt, but one that does not appeal to me—at any rate to the extent of 698 pesos.

This little lizard, which lives in the cornice above my writing-desk, has just come down on to the window beside me and nipped up a fly in the smartest manner. This is his hunting-ground, for the windows in the house only have sliding shutters, such as I described to you, like all the houses here. Glass windows are almost unknown, but this house happens to have them along the S.-W. front, where some former occupant has put in doors on to the balcony, with glass in the upper panels, because in the rainy season the Monsoon drives in on this side.

In all the houses here these little grey lizards abound, living in the cornices and corners of the ceilings, and feeding on flies, mosquitoes, and any little toothsome creature they can pick up. They must have plenty of supplies and wide variety, for one seems to come across some new sort of insect every hour of the day—and night. No fleas, however, I don’t mean that, for Filipinos are clean and fleas are rare; but all sorts of queer insects crawl and fly and sit about, all of which I suppose the lizards enjoy; and I imagine they, in their turn, are having a good meal off some other still tinier creature.

The ceilings are made of bulges of canvas or matting painted white, pale blue, or green; or, in some of the old houses, with patterns, as in Italy. In one house in Jaro, a big building with long, wide-open window-spaces, there is a ceiling that is covered with some sort of shiny oilcloth stuff, drawn up by buttons at intervals, so that it looks like the seat of some giant padded leather chair—a most fearful looking contrivance, but, no doubt, a source of much pride to the Filipino who owns it. There is a wide space above these ceilings, for the corrugated iron roofs are very deep, and here live rats, mice, cats, cockroaches, snakes, all sorts of beasts, which come down into the house for plunder. The nicest are these dear, clean, bright-eyed little lizards, which make a funny and very pretty note, a sort of clear, musical chuck-chuck. Sometimes, but very rarely, one of these lizards is found with a forked tail, and this the natives look upon as an emblem of the most extraordinary luck, and they do all they can to catch the lizard and try to take off his forked tail, which they dry and wear for anting-anting. Any kind of luck, or lucky emblem, is anting-anting, and the mystical emblems, observances, and relics of Roman Catholicism, which appeal to the Filipinos with irresistible force, have but added to their original stock of superstitions.

In some of the houses there is a very anting-anting lizard, of a large size, which makes a loud, clear double note like a cuckoo, that can be heard a long way off. I have never seen a “Philippine cuckoo,” as they are called, but have often heard them, and the houses that have this anting-anting are well known. There is one in the old belfry at Jaro, another in a house the other side of the Plaza there, and one in a certain bamboo clump on the road to Molo, and so on, all over the place.

A very general belief prevails that in the roof of each house there lives a big snake, which has a terrific meal of rats every now and then, and sleeps the rest of his time, coming down very rarely for water. I can quite credit this story, for the space between the roofs must be the very place for a snake, and many people tell me they have seen these creatures, but I don’t suppose they are really in all the houses. Curiously enough, I thought there was a snake overhead before I had ever been told about such a thing, for one day, when I was sitting in the sala, I heard a most extraordinary noise in the roof overhead—a sort of heavy, dragging sound, and then a thump, and then the dragging sound again—and, somehow, the thought of a snake instantly came into my mind. When I spoke about it to some friends, half jokingly, they replied quite seriously that it probably was a snake I had heard, and then told me how they live in the roofs.

Talking of noises, one of the most curious sounds here is made by the crickets, the cicadas, which shrill night and day, ceaselessly and for ever. The ear becomes accustomed to the aggregate sound of their high, thin note, though I, for one, never get to like it, and sometimes it gets horribly on my nerves, so that I feel I must go anywhere to get away from it. At first when I heard it I was always having a curious impression of being in a Swiss field in the summer; but now that has worn off, and I think if I ever go into the Swiss fields again I shall think of nothing but Iloilo. When one of these cicadas gets very near the house, it drives you nearly mad, and when, as happened a few evenings ago, one is actually in the house, everything must be searched for the beast before anyone can expect sanity or sleep. This one that got in, stowed itself away in the writing-table, and we had an awful time, standing almost on our heads and streaming from every pore, before we found it in a tiny corner where one of the drawers does not run quite into place. When we fished the cicada out at last, or rather when one of the servants came in and took up the hunt for us and caught it, we found the disturber of our peace to be an ugly little browny-black creature, with a narrow waist, and the silly thing refused to give a single chirrup to show us how it was done.

Talking of insects, one of the things we are most fortunate about in this house is that we have very few of the black or red ants, which are a fearful plague in these Islands, so much so that one has to stand the furniture with its feet in small enamel bowls filled with water or paraffine to prevent the ants crawling up, for they eat everything; and besides that, they look particularly nasty when dead in jam or butter, or floating in tea or coffee. Some of these ants are a good size, but the common sort are very small, and many of the most destructive are simply red specks that run like lightning. They are terrible destroyers, and I can’t think why ant-eaters don’t start living in the roof menageries, for they would get on splendidly if they did not die of over-eating. However, the ants do scavenge to a certain extent, and the way a busy little mob can carry off a huge dead cockroach is a lesson in natural history.

The cockroaches, by-the-bye, are the size of mice. They are the most evil brutes I ever saw, besides being a constant source of terror and worry. You will hardly believe this, for you know that I never mind touching any animal—mice, worms, toads, slugs, earwigs—and how I have so often been laughed at, and even sniffed at, as rather an unpleasant young person, because I have no repugnance to taking them up in my bare hand, for, after all, they are only poor animals, and infinitely nicer to touch than many perfectly respectable human beings. Do you remember those people at Karnak who screamed when I brought them that lovely little toad with a speckled stomach? And the good folk at home who shudder if you pick up a poor slug out of a dusty road? Well, when it comes to these cockroaches, I confess that I have a genuine horror of the great red, evil-smelling brutes, with their horrible bulgy eyes and their long moving red antennæ. I can’t tell you what it is about them—but I am not alone in this, for everyone has a horror of them. They breed in the cesspits, and prefer manure to any other diet, but will gladly supplement their menu with any form of food, as well as leather, paper, books, or clothes. The houses, the shops, and the steamers are full of them, and in the evenings they come out of their holes and run about. Ugh! they make one shudder. And every now and then they take it into their heads to fly about or into the lighted rooms, and I have even seen men who have been here for years turn quite sick when a cockroach lights on them, and as for the average woman, she screams outright, and many white women faint.

These horrible brutes are the curse of housekeeping, necessitating everything being kept in glass jars or tins, and cupboards and drawers being overhauled and searched every week or so. I must say, though, that we have not had so much trouble with them as most people, and so far I have never had one amongst the linen or clothes, and I believe this is because I hang cakes of naphthaline in the rooms, and put balls of it in all boxes, drawers, and cupboards, and they don’t seem to like naphthaline, though they would come a thousand miles to eat ordinary insect powder, which is, apparently, just the very thing on which to bring up a nice little family of forty or fifty young cockroaches.

There are some pleasing spiders too, one of which I saw the other day, with a body nearly the size of the palm of my hand, sitting in a huge, tough web like a hammock, and looking exactly like those in Doré’s picture of the Guest Chamber in the Castle Inn, in Croque Mitaine.

I said there were very few fleas, but the mosquitoes make up for any biting that has to be done. I am beginning to get more accustomed to their venom now, but at first I was quite ill and feverish from it, and many people suffer so that it amounts to an illness, and white men frequently have to be invalided home for nothing but mosquitoes. Nothing I have ever seen in any place round the Mediterranean approaches the Philippine mosquito for venom or ferocity, and here, too, their efforts are not confined to the night-season when lucky mortals are stowed under nets with no rents in them, but they bite relentlessly all day as well.

Well, I tried to leave harrowing subjects and tell you something more cheerful than the Customs woes, but I seem to have drifted into other griefs, and as my spirits are evidently damped beyond hope to-day, I had better leave off writing and end my letter.