Mrs. Hannah Smith, NurseThe red eye of the lighthouse on Corregidor Island blazed out through the darkness as a Pacific steamer felt her way cautiously into Manila harbour.Although it was nearly midnight, a woman—one of the passengers on the steamer—was still on deck, and standing well up toward the bow of the boat was peering into the darkness before her as if she could not wait to see the strange new land to which she was coming. Surely it would be a strange land to her, who, until a few weeks before had scarcely in all her life been outside of the New England town in which she had been born.People who had seen her on the steamer had wondered sometimes that a woman of her age—for she was not young—should have chosen to go to the Philippine Islands as a nurse, as she told them she was going. Sometimes, at first, they smiled at some of her questions, but any who happened to beill on the voyage, or in trouble, forgot to do that, for in the touch of her hand and in her words there was shown a skill and a nobleness of nature which won respect.The colonel of a regiment stationed near Manila was sitting in his headquarters. An orderly came to the door and saluted.“A woman to see you, sir,” he said.“A woman? What kind of a woman?”“A white woman, sir. Looks about fifty years old. Talks American. Says she has only just come here. Says her name is Smith.”“Show her in.”The man went out. In a few minutes he came back again, and with him the woman that had stayed out on the deck of the Pacific steamer when the boat came past the light of Corregidor.The Colonel gave his visitor a seat. “What can I do for you?” he said.“Can I speak to you alone?”“We are alone now.”“Can’t that man out there hear?” motioning toward a soldier pacing back and forth before the door.“No,” said the officer. “We are quite alone.”The woman unfolded a sheet of paper which she had been holding, and looked at it a moment. Then she looked at the officer. “I want to see Heber Smith, of Company F, of your regiment,” she said. “Can you tell me where he is?”In spite of himself—in spite of the self possession which he would have said his campaigning experience had given him, the Colonel started.“Are you his—?” he began to say. But he changed the question to, “Was he a relative of yours?”“I am his mother,” the woman said, as if she had completed the officer’s first question in her mind and answered it.“I have a letter from him, here,” she went on. “The last one I have had. It is dated three months ago.Itis not very long.” Sheheld up a half sheet of paper, written over on one side with a lead pencil; but she did not offer to let the officer read what was written.“He tells me in this letter,” the woman said, “that he has disgraced himself, been a coward, run away from some danger which he ought to have faced; and that he can’t stand the shame of it.” “He says,” the woman’s voice faltered for the first time, and instead of looking the Colonel in the face, as she had been doing, her eyes were fixed on the floor—“he says that heisn’tgoing to try to stay here any longer, and that he is going over to the enemy. Is this true? Did he do that?”“Yes,” said the officer slowly. “It is true.”“He says here,” the woman went on, holding up the letter again, “that I shall never hear from him again, or see him. I want you to help me to find him.”“I would be glad to help you if I could,” the man said, “but I cannot. No one knows where the man went to, except that he disappeared from the camp and from the city.Besides I have not the right. He was a coward, and now he is a deserter. If he came back now he would have to stand trial, and he might be shot.”“He is not a coward.” The woman’s cheeks flamed red. “Some men shut their eyes and cringe when there comes a flash of lightning. But that don’t make them cowards. He might have been frightened at the time, and not known what he was doing, but he is not a coward. I guess I know that as well as anybody can tell me. He is my boy—my only child. I’ve come out here to find him, and I’m going to do it. I don’t expect I’ll find him quick or easy, perhaps. I’ve let out our farm for a year, with the privilege of renewing the trade when the year is up; and I’m going to stay as long as need be. I’m not going to sit still and hold my hands while I’m waiting, either. I’m going to be a nurse. I know how to take care of the sick and maimed all right, and I guess from what I hear since I’ve been here you need all the help of that kind you can get. All I want ofyou is to get me a chance to work nursing just as close to the front as I can go, and then do all you can to help me find out where Heber is, and then let me have as many as you can of these heathen prisoners the men bring in here to take care of, so I can ask them if they have seen Heber. My boy isn’t a coward, and if he has got scared and run away, he’s got to come back and face the music. Thank goodness none of the folks at home know anything about it, and they won’t if I can help it.”The woman folded the letter, and putting it back into its envelope sat waiting. It was evident that she did not conceive of the possibility even of her request not being granted.The officer hesitated.“You will have to see the General, Mrs. Smith,” he said at last, glad that it need not be his duty to tell her how hopeless her errand was. “I will arrange for you to see him. I will take you to him myself. I wish I could do more to help you.”“How soon can I see him?”“Tomorrow, I think. I will find out and let you know.”“Thank you,” said the woman, as she rose to go. “I don’t want to lose any time. I want to get right to work.”The next day the young soldier’s mother saw the General and told her story to him. In the mean time, apprised by the Colonel of the regiment of the woman’s errand, the General had had a report of the case brought to him. Heber Smith had been sent out with a small scouting party. They had been ambushed, and instead of trying to fight, he had left the men and had run back to cover.“But that don’t necessarily make him a coward,” the young man’s mother pleaded with the General. “A coward is a man who plans to run away. He lost his head that time. Wasn’t that the first time he had been put in such a place?”The officer admitted that it was.“Well, then he can live it down. He has got to, for the sake of his father’s reputation as well as his own. His father was a soldier,too,” she said proudly. “He was in the Union army four years, and had a medal given to him for bravery, and every spring since he died the members of his Grand Army Post have decorated his grave. When Heber comes to think of that, I know he will come back.”The General was not an old man;—that is he was not so old but that, back in her prairie home in a western state, there was a mother to whom he wrote letters, a mother whom he knew to value above his life itself his reputation. The thought of her came to him now.“I will do what I can, Mrs. Smith” he said, “to help you find your boy. I fear I cannot give you any hope, though, and if he should be found I cannot promise you anything as to his future.”“Thank you,” said the woman. “That is all I can ask.”And so it came about that Mrs. Hannah Smith was enrolled as a nurse, and assigned to duty as near the front in the island of Luzon as any nurse could go.Six months passed, and then another six came near to their end. Mrs. Smith renewed the lease of the farm back among the New England hills for another year, and wrote to a neighbor’s wife to see that her woolen clothes and furs were aired and then packed away with a fresh supply of camphor to keep the moths out of them.In this year’s time Mrs. Smith had picked up a wonderful smattering of the Spanish and Tagalog languages for a woman who had lived the life she had before she came to the East. The reason for this, so her companions said, was her being “just possessed to talk with those native prisoners who are brought wounded to the hospital.” The other nurses liked her. She not only was willing to take the cases they liked least—the natives—but asked for them.And sometime in the course of their hospital experience, all Mrs. Smith’s native patients—if they did not die before they got able to talk coherently—had to go through the same catechism:Was there a white man among the people from whom they had come; a white man who had come there from the American army?Was he a tall young man with light hair and a smooth face?Did he have a three-cornered white scar on one side of his chin, where a steer had hooked him when he was a boy?Did he look like this picture? (A photograph was shown the patient)From no one, though, did she get the answer that her heart craved. Some of the prisoners knew white men that had come among the Tagalog natives, but no one knew a man who answered to this description.One day a native prisoner who had been brought in more than a week before, terribly wounded, opened his eyes to consciousness for the first time, after days and nights of stupor. He was one of these who naturally fell, now, to “Mrs. Smith’s lot,” as the surgeons called them. As soon as the nurse’s watchful eyes saw the change in the man she came to him and bent over his cot.“Water, please,” he murmuredThe woman brought the water, her two natures struggling to decide what she should do after she had given it to him. As nurse, she knew the man ought not to be allowed to talk then. As mother, she was impatient to ask him where he had learned to speak English, and to inquire if he knew her boy.The nurse conquered. The patient drank the water and was allowed to go to sleep again undisturbed.In time, though, he was stronger, and then, one day, the mother’s questions were asked for the hundredth time; and the last.Yes, the prisoner patient knew just such a man. He had come among the people of the tribe many months ago. He was a tall, fair young man, and he had such a scar as the “señora,” described. He was a fine young man. Once, when this man’s father had been sick, the white man had doctored him and made him well. It was this white man, the patient said, who had taught him the little English that he knew.“Yes,” when he saw the photograph of Heber Smith, “that is the man. He has a picture, too,” the patient said, “two pictures, little ones, set in a little gold box which hangs on his watch chain.”The hospital nurse unclasped a big cameo breast pin from the throat of her gown and held it down so that the man in bed could see adaguerreotypeset in the back of the pin.“Was one of the pictures like that?” she asked.The Tagalog looked at the picture, a likeness of a middle-aged man wearing the coat and hat of the Grand Army of the Republic. In the picture a medal pinned on to the breast of the man’s coat showed.“Yes,” said he, “one of the pictures is like that.”Then he looked up curiously at the woman sitting beside his bed. “The other picture is that of a woman,” he went on, “and—yes—” still studying her face, “I think it must be you. Only,” he added, “it doesn’t look very much like you.”“No,” said the woman, with a grim smile, “it doesn’t. It was taken a good many years ago, when I was younger than I am now, and when I hadn’t been baked for a year in this heathen climate. It’s me, though.”In time, Juan, that was the man’s name, was so far recovered of his wound that he was to be discharged from the hospital and placed with the other able-bodied prisoners. The hospital at that time occupied an old convent. The day before Juan was to be discharged, Mrs. Smith managed her cases so that for a time no one else was left in one of the rooms with her but this man.“Juan,” she said, when she was sure they were alone, and that no one was anywhere within hearing, “do you feel that I have done anything to help you to get well?”The man reached down, and taking one of the nurse’s hands in his own bent over and kissed it.“Señora,” he said, “I owe my life to you.”“Will you do something for me, then?Something which I want done more than anything else in the world?”“My life is theseñora’s. I would that I had ten lives to give her.”The woman pulled a letter from out the folds of her nurse’s dress. The envelope was not sealed, and before she fastened it she took the letter which was in it out and read it over for one last time. Then, pulling from her waist a little red, white and blue badge pin—one of those patriotic emblems which so many people wear at times—she dropped this into the letter, sealed the envelope, and handed it to the Tagalog. The envelope bore no address.“I hav’n’t put the name of the place on it you said you came from,” she told the man, “because goodness only knows how it is spelled; I don’t. Besides that, it isn’t necessary. You know the place, and you know the man; the man who has got my picture and his father’s in a gold locket on his watch chain. I want you to give this letter into his own hands. I expect it will be rather a ticklishjob for you to get away from here and get through the lines, but I guess you can do it if you try. Other men have. Don’t start until you are well enough so you will have strength to make the whole trip.”A week or so after that, one of the surgeons making his daily visit reported that Juan had made his escape the previous night, and up to that time had not been brought back.“What a shame!” said one of the other nurses. “After all the care you gave that man, Mrs. Smith. It does seem as if he might have had a little more gratitude.”Mrs. Smith said nothing aloud. But to herself, when she was alone, she said: “Well, I suppose some folks would say that I wasn’t acting right, but I guess I’ve saved the lives of enough of those men since I’ve been here so that I’m entitled to one of them if I want him.”Then she went on with her work, and waited; and the waiting was harder than the work.An American expedition was slowly toiling across the island of Luzon to locate and occupy a post in the north. Four companies of men marched in advance, with a guard in the rear. Between them were the mule teams with the camp luggage and the ever present hospital corps. No trace of the enemy had been seen in that part of the island for weeks. Scouts who had gone on in advance had reported the way to be clear, and the force was being hurried up to get through a ravine which it was approaching, so it could go into camp for the night on high, level ground just beyond the valley.Suddenly a man’s voice rang out upon the hot air; an English, speaking voice, strong and clear, and coming, so it seemed at first to the troops when they heard it, from the air above them:“Halt! Halt!” the voice cried.“Go back! There is an ambush on both sides! Save yourselves! Be—”The warning was unfinished. Those of the Americans who had located the sound of thewords and had looked in the direction from which they came, had seen a white man standing on the rocky side of the ravine above them and in front of them. They had seen him throw up his arms and fall backward out of sight, leaving his last sentence unfinished. Then there had come the report of a gun, and then an attack, with scores of shouting Tagalogs swarming down the sides of the ravine.The skirmish was over, though, almost as soon as it had begun, and with little harm to any of the Americans except to such of the scouts as had been cut off in advance. The warning had come in time—had come before the advancing column had marched between the forces hidden on both sides of the ravine. The Tagalogs could not face the fire with which the Americans met them. They fled up the ravine, and up both sides of the gorge, into the shelter of the forest, and were gone. The Americans, satisfied at length that the way was clear, moved forward and went into camp on the ground which had previously been chosen, throwing out advance lines ofpickets, and taking extra precautions to be prepared against a night attack.Early in the evening shots were heard on the outer picket line, and a little later two men came to the commanding officers tent bringing with them a native.“He was trying to come through our lines and get into the camp, sir,” they reported. “Two men fired at him, but missed him.”“Think he’s a spy?” the commander asked of another officer who was with him.“No,Señor, I am not a spy,” the prisoner said, surprising all the men by speaking in English.“I have left my people, I want to be sent to Manila, to the American camp there.”“He’s a deserter,” said one of the officers. Then to the men who held the prisoner, “Better search him.”From out the prisoner’s blouse one of the soldiers brought a paper, a sheet torn from a note book, folded, and fastened only by a red, white and blue badge pin stuck through the paper.The officer to whom the soldier had handed the paper pulled out the pin which had kept it folded, and started to open it, when he saw there was something written on the side through which the pin had been thrust. Bending down to where the camp light fell upon the writing, he saw that it was an address, scrawled in lead pencil:“Mrs. Hannah Smith; Nurse.”“Do you know the woman to whom this letter is sent? he asked in amazement of the Tagalog from whom it had been taken.“YesSeñor.”“Do you know where she is now?”“Yes,Señor. She is in a hospital not far from Manila. She is a good woman. My life is hers. I was there once for many, many days, shot through here,” he placed his hand on his side, “and she made me well again.”“Do you know who sent this letter to her?”“Yes,Señor.”“Who was it?”The man hesitated.“Who was it? Answer. It is for her good I want to know.”“It was her son,Señor.”“Was he the man who gave us warning of the ambush today?”“Yes,Señor.”The officer folded the paper, unread, and thrust the pin back through the folds. The enamel on the badge glistened in the camp light.“Keep the Tagalog here,” he said to the men, “until I come back;” and walked across the camp to where the hospital tents had been set up.“Where is Mrs. Smith?” he asked of the surgeon in charge.“Taking care of the men who were wounded this afternoon.”“Will you tell her that I want to see her alone in your tent, here, and then see that no one else comes in?”“Mrs. Smith,” he said, when the nurse came in, “I have something here for you—a letter. It has just been brought into camp, by a nativewho did not know that you were here and who wanted to be sent to Manila to find you. It is not very strongly sealed, but no one has read it since it was brought into camp.”He gave the bit of paper to the nurse, and then turned away to stand in the door of the tent, that he might not look at her while she read it. Enough of the nurse’s story was known in the army now so that the officer could guess something of what this message might mean to her.A sound in the tent behind the officer made him turn. The woman had sunk down on the ground beneath the surgeon’s light, and resting her arms upon a camp stool had hid her face.A moment later she raised her head, her face wet with tears and wearing an expression of mingled grief and joy, and held out the letter to the officer.“Read it!” she said. “Thank God!” and then, “My boy! My boy!” and hid her face again.“Dear mother,” the scrawled note read.“I got your letter. I’m glad you wrote it. It made things plain I hadn’t seen before. My chance has come—quicker than I had expected. I wish I might have seen you again, but I shan’t. A column of our men are coming up the valley just below here, marching straight into an ambush. I have tried to get word to them, but I can’t, because the Tagalogs watch me so close. They never have trusted me. The only way for me is to rush out when the men get near enough, and shout to them, and that will be the end of it all for me. I don’t care, only that I wish I could see you again. Juan will take this letter to you. When you get it, and the men come back, if I save them, I think perhaps they will clear my name. Then you can go home.“The men are almost here. Mother, dear, good by.—Your Boy.”“I wish I might have seen him,” the woman said, a little later.“But I won’t complain. What I most prayed God for has been granted me.”“They’ll let the charge against him drop, now, won’t they? Don’t you think he has earned it?”“I think he surely has. No braver deed has been done in all this war.”“Don’t try to come, now, Mrs Smith,” as the nurse rose to her feet. “Stay here, and I will send one of the women to you.”When he had done this the officer went back to where the men were still holding Juan between them.“Your journey is shorter than you thought,” the officer said to the Tagalog. “Mrs. Smith is in this camp, and I have given the letter to her.”“May I see her?” exclaimed the man.“Not now. In the morning you may. Have you seen this man, her son, since he was shot?”“No,Señor. He gave me the note and told me to slip into the forest as soon as the fight began, so as to get away without any one seeing me. Then I was to stay out of the way until I could get into this camp.”“Do you know where he stood when he was shot?”“Yes,Señor.”“Can you take a party of men there tonight?”“Yes,Señor; most gladly.”Afterward, when it came to be known that Heber Smith would live, in spite of his wounds and the hours that he had lain there in the bushes unconscious and uncared for, there was the greatest diversity of opinion as to what had really saved his life.The surgeons said it was partly their skill, and partly the superb constitution that years of work on a New England farm had given to the young man. His mother believed that he had been spared for her sake. Heber Smith himself always said it was his mother’s care that saved his life, while Juan never had the least doubt that the young soldier had been protected solely by a marvellous “anting-anting” which he himself had slipped unsuspected into theAmericansoldier’s blouse thatday, before he had left him. As soon as she knew that her son would live, Mrs. Smith started for Washington, carrying with her papers which made it possible for her to be allowed to plead her case there as she had pleaded it in Manila. A pardon was sent back, as fast as wire and steamer and wire again could convey it. Heber Smith wears the uniform of a second lieutenant, now, won for bravery in action since he went back into the service; and every one who knew her in the Philippines, cherishes the memory of Mrs. Hannah Smith; Nurse.The Fifteenth WifeMateo, my Filipino servant, was helping me sort over specimens one day under the thatched roof of a shed which I had hired to use for such work while I was on the island of Culion, when I was startled to see him suddenly drop the bird skin he had been working on, and fall upon his knees, bending his body forward, his face turned toward the road, until his forehead touched the floor.At first I thought he must be having some new kind of a fit, peculiar to the Philippine Islands, until I happened to glance up the road toward the town, from which my house was a little distance removed, and saw coming toward us a most remarkable procession.Four native soldiers walked in front, two carrying long spears, and two carrying antiquated seven-foot muskets, relics of a former era in fire arms. After the soldiers came four Visayan slaves, bearing on their shoulders a sort of platform covered with rugs and cushions, on which a woman reclined. Onone side of the litter walked another slave, holding a huge umbrella so as to keep the sun’s rays off the woman’s face. Two more soldiers walked behind.Mateo might have been a statue, or a dead man, for all the attention he paid to my questions until after the procession had passed the house. Then, resuming a perpendicular position once more, he said, “That was the Sultana Ahmeya, the Sultana.”Then he went on to explain that there were thirteen other sultanas, of assorted colors, who helped make home happy for the Sultan of Culion, who after all, well supplied as he might at first seem to be, was only a sort of fourth-class sovereign, so far as sultanas are concerned, since his fellow monarch on a neighboring larger island, the Sultan of Sulu, is said to have four hundred wives.Ahmeya, though, Mateo went on to inform me, was the only one of the fourteen who really counted. She was neither the oldest nor the youngest of the wives of the reigning ruler, but she had developed a mind of herown which had made her supreme in the palace, and besides, she was the only one of his wives who had borne a son to the monarch. For her own talents, and as the mother of the heir, the people did her willing homage.When I saw the royal cavalcade go past my door I had no idea I would ever have a chance to become more intimately acquainted with Her Majesty, but only a little while after that circumstances made it possible for me to see more of the royal family than had probably been the privilege of any other white man. How little thought I had, when the acquaintance began, of the strange experiences it would eventually lead to!At that time, in the course of collecting natural history specimens, most of my time for three years was spent in the island of Culion. Having a large stock of drugs, for use in my work, and quite a lot of medicines, I had doctored Mateo and two or three other fellows who had worked for me, when they had been ill, with the result that I found Ihad come to have a reputation for medical skill which sometimes was inconvenient. I had no idea how widely my fame had spread, though, until one morning Mateo came into my room and woke me, and with a face which expressed a good deal of anxiety, informed me that I was sent for to come to the palace.I confess I felt some concern myself, and should have felt more if I had had as much experience then as I had later, for one never knows what those three-quarters savage potentates may take it into their heads to do.When I found that I was sent for because the Sultan was ill,—ill unto death, the messenger had made Mateo believe,—and I was expected to doctor him, I did not feel much more comfortable, for I much doubted if my knowledge of diseases, and my assortment of medicines, were equal to coping with a serious case. If the Sultan died I would probably be beheaded, either for not keeping him alive, or for killing him.It was a great relief, then, when I reached the palace, and just before I entered the roomwhere the sick monarch was, to hear him swearing vigorously, in a combination of the native and Spanish languages which was as picturesque as it was expressive.I found the man suffering from an acute attack of neuralgia, although he did not know what was the matter with him. He had not been able to sleep for three days and nights, and the pain, all the way up and down one side of his face had been so intense that he thought he was going to die, and almost hoped that he was. His head was tied up in a lot of cloths, not over clean, in which a dozen native doctor’s charms had been folded, until the bundle was as big as four heads ought to be.As soon as I found out what was the matter I felt relieved, for I reckoned I could manage an attack of swelled head all right. I had doctored the natives enough, already, to find out that they had no respect for remedies which they could not feel, and so, going back to the house, I brought from there some extrastrong liniment, some tincture of red pepper and a few powerful morphine pills.I gave my patient one of the pills the first thing, administering it in a glass of water with enough of the cayenne added to it so that the mixture brought tears to his eyes, and then removing the layers of cloth from his head, and gathering in as I did so, for my collection of curiosities, the various charms which I uncovered, I gave his head a vigorous shampooing with the liniment, taking pains to see that the liquor occasionally ran down into the Sultan’s eyes. He squirmed a good deal, but I kept on until I thought it must be about time for the morphine to begin to take effect. I kept him on morphine and red pepper for three days, but when I let up on him he was cured, and my reputation was made.It would have been too great a nuisance to have been endured, had it not been that so high a degree of royal favor enabled me to pursue my work with a degree of success which otherwise I could never have hoped for.After that I used to see a good deal of the palace life. Although nominally Mohammedans in religion, the inhabitants of these more distant islands have little more than the name of the faith, and follow out few of its injunctions. As a result I was accorded a freedom about the palace which would have been impossible in such an establishment in almost any other country.One day the Sultan had invited me to dine with him. After the meal, while we were smoking, reclining in some cocoanut fibre hammocks swung in the shade of the palace court yard, I saw a man servant lead a dog through the square, and down a narrow passage way through the rear of the palace.“Would you like to see the ‘Green Devil’ eat?” my host asked.I have translated the native words he used by the term “green devil,” because that represents the idea of the original better than any other words I know of, I had not the slightest conception as to who or what the individual referred to might be; but I said at oncethat I would be very glad indeed to see him eat.My host swung out of the hammock,—he was a superbly strong and vigorous man, now that he was in health again,—and led the way through the passage. Following him I found myself in another court yard, larger than the first, and with more trees in it. Beneath one of these trees, in a stout cage of bamboo, was the biggest python I ever saw. He must have been fully twenty-five feet long. The cage was large enough to give the snake a chance to move about in it, and when we came in sight he was rolling from one end to the other with head erect, eyes glistening, and the light shimmering on his glossy scales in a way which made it easy to see why he had been given his name. I learned later that he had not been fed for a month, and that he would not be fed again until another month had passed. Like all of his kind he would touch none but live food.The wretched dog, who seemed to guess the fate in store for him, hung back in therope tied about his neck, and crouched flat to the ground, too frightened even to whine.The servant unlocked a door in the side of the cage and thrust the poor beast in. I am not ashamed to say that I turned my head away. It was only a dog, but it might have been a human being, so far as the reptile, or the half-savage man at my side, would have cared.When I looked again, the dog was only a crushed mass of bones and flesh, about which the snake was still winding and tightening coil after coil.“We need not wait,” the Sultan said. “It will be an hour before he will swallow the food. You can come out again.”I did as he suggested. It was a wonder to me, as it is to every one, how a snake’s throat can be distended enough to swallow whole an object so large as this dog, but in some way the reptile had accomplished the feat. The meal over, the huge creature had coiled down as still almost as if dead. He would lie in that way, now, they told me, for days.It was while I stood watching the snake that Ahmeya came through the square, leading her boy by the hand. The apartments of the royal wives were built around this inner yard. This was the first time I had seen the heir to the throne. He was a handsome boy, and looked like his mother. Ahmeya was tall, for a native woman, and carried herself with a dignity which showed that she felt the honor of her position. Mateo had told me that she had a decided will of her own, and, so the palace gossips said, ruled the establishment, and her associate sultanas, with an unbending hand.It was not very long after I had seen the green devil eat that Mateo told me there had been another wedding at the palace. Mateo was an indefatigable news-gatherer, and an incorrigible gossip. As the society papers would have expressed it, this wedding had been “a very quiet affair.” The Sultan had happened to see a Visayan girl of uncommon beauty, on one of the smaller islands, one day, had bought her of her father for two waterbuffalos, and had installed her at the palace as wife number fifteen.For the time being the new-comer was said to be the royal favorite, a condition of affairs which caused the other fourteen wives as little concern as their objections, if they had expressed any, would probably have caused their royal husband. So far as Ahmeya was concerned, she never minded a little thing like that, but included the last arrival in the same indifferent toleration which she had extended to her predecessors.I saw the new wife only once.—I mean,—yes I mean that.—I saw her as the king’s wife only once. She was a handsome woman, with a certain insolent disdain of those about her which indicated that she knew her own charms, and perhaps counted too much on their being permanent.That summer my work took me away from the island. I went to Manila, and eventually to America. When I finally returned to Culion a year had passed.I had engaged Mateo, before I left, to lookout for such property as I left behind, and had retained my old house. I found him waiting for me, and with everything in good order. That is one good thing to be said about the natives. An imagined wrong or insult may rankle in their minds for months, until they have a chance to stab you in the back. They will lie to you at times with the most unblushing nerve, often when the truth would have served their ends so much better that it seems as if they must have been doing mendacious gymnastics simply to keep themselves in practice; but they will hardly ever steal. If they do, it will be sometime when you are looking squarely at them, carrying a thing off from under your very nose with a cleverness which they seem to think, and you can hardly help feel yourself, makes them deserve praise instead of blame. I have repeatedly left much valuable property with them, as I did in this case with Mateo, and have come back to find every article just as I had left it.Mateo was glad to see me. “OhSeñor,” hebegan, before my clothes were fairly changed, and while he was settling my things in my bed room, “there is so much to tell you.”I knew he would be bursting with news of what had happened during my absence. “Such goings on,” he continued, folding my travelling clothes into a tin trunk, where the white ants could not get at them. “You never heard the likes of it.”I am translating very freely, for I have noticed that the thoughts expressed by the Philippine gossip are very similar to those of his fellow in America, or Europe, or anywhere else, no matter how much the words may differ.“The new Sultana, the handsome Visayan girl, has given birth to a son, and has so bewitched the Sultan by her good looks and craftiness that he has decreed her son, and not Ahmeya’s, to be the heir to the throne. She rules the palace now, and when her servants bear her through the streets the people bow down to her.” He added, with a look behind him to see that no one overheard, “Becausethey dare not do otherwise. In their hearts they love Ahmeya, and hate this vain woman.”“How does Ahmeya take it?” I asked.“Hardly, people think, although she makes no cry. She goes not through the streets of the town, now, but stays shut in her own rooms, with her women and the boy.”A furious beating against the bamboo walls of my sleeping room, and wild cries from some one on the ground outside, awoke me one morning when I had been back in Culion less than a week. The house in which I slept, like most of the native houses in the Philippines, was built on posts, several feet above the ground, for the sake of coolness and as a protection against snakes and such vermin.It was very early, not yet sunrise. A servant of the Sultan’s, gray with fright, was pounding on the walls of the house with a long spear to wake me, begging me, when I opened the lattice, to come to the palace at once.I thought the monarch must have had some terrible attack, and wondered what it could be, but while we were hurrying up the street the messenger managed to make me understand that the Sultan was not at the palace at all, but gone the day before on board the royal proa for a state visit to a neighboring island from which he exacted yearly tribute. Later I learned that he had tried to have the Visayan woman go with him, but that she had wilfully refused to go. What was the matter at the palace the ruler being gone, I could not make out. When I asked this of the man who had come for me, he fell into such a palsy of fear that he could say nothing. When I came to know, later, that he was the night guard at the palace, and remembered what he must have seen, I did not wonder.At the palace no one was astir. The man had come straight for me, stopping to rouse no one else. I had saved the Sultan’s life. At least he thought so. Might I not do even more?My guide took me straight through the firstcourt yard, and down the narrow passage into the inner yard, around which were built the apartments of the woman. Ahmeya, I knew, lived in the rooms at one end of the square. The man led me towards the opposite end of the enclosure. Beside an open door he stood aside for me to enter, saying, as he did so, “Señor, help us.”The sun had risen, now, and shining full upon a lattice in the upper wall, flooded the room with a soft clear light.The body of the Visayan woman, or rather what had been a body, lay on the floor in the center of the room, a shapeless mass of crushed bones and flesh. An enormous python lay coiled in one corner. His mottled skin glistened in the morning light, but he did not move, and his eyes were tight shut, as were those of the “green devil” after I had seen him feed.I looked backward, across the court yard. The door of the big bamboo cage beneath the trees was open. I turned to the room again and looked once more. I knew now why thenight guard’s face was ash-colored, and why he could not speak.For the child of the Visayan woman I could not see.
Mrs. Hannah Smith, NurseThe red eye of the lighthouse on Corregidor Island blazed out through the darkness as a Pacific steamer felt her way cautiously into Manila harbour.Although it was nearly midnight, a woman—one of the passengers on the steamer—was still on deck, and standing well up toward the bow of the boat was peering into the darkness before her as if she could not wait to see the strange new land to which she was coming. Surely it would be a strange land to her, who, until a few weeks before had scarcely in all her life been outside of the New England town in which she had been born.People who had seen her on the steamer had wondered sometimes that a woman of her age—for she was not young—should have chosen to go to the Philippine Islands as a nurse, as she told them she was going. Sometimes, at first, they smiled at some of her questions, but any who happened to beill on the voyage, or in trouble, forgot to do that, for in the touch of her hand and in her words there was shown a skill and a nobleness of nature which won respect.The colonel of a regiment stationed near Manila was sitting in his headquarters. An orderly came to the door and saluted.“A woman to see you, sir,” he said.“A woman? What kind of a woman?”“A white woman, sir. Looks about fifty years old. Talks American. Says she has only just come here. Says her name is Smith.”“Show her in.”The man went out. In a few minutes he came back again, and with him the woman that had stayed out on the deck of the Pacific steamer when the boat came past the light of Corregidor.The Colonel gave his visitor a seat. “What can I do for you?” he said.“Can I speak to you alone?”“We are alone now.”“Can’t that man out there hear?” motioning toward a soldier pacing back and forth before the door.“No,” said the officer. “We are quite alone.”The woman unfolded a sheet of paper which she had been holding, and looked at it a moment. Then she looked at the officer. “I want to see Heber Smith, of Company F, of your regiment,” she said. “Can you tell me where he is?”In spite of himself—in spite of the self possession which he would have said his campaigning experience had given him, the Colonel started.“Are you his—?” he began to say. But he changed the question to, “Was he a relative of yours?”“I am his mother,” the woman said, as if she had completed the officer’s first question in her mind and answered it.“I have a letter from him, here,” she went on. “The last one I have had. It is dated three months ago.Itis not very long.” Sheheld up a half sheet of paper, written over on one side with a lead pencil; but she did not offer to let the officer read what was written.“He tells me in this letter,” the woman said, “that he has disgraced himself, been a coward, run away from some danger which he ought to have faced; and that he can’t stand the shame of it.” “He says,” the woman’s voice faltered for the first time, and instead of looking the Colonel in the face, as she had been doing, her eyes were fixed on the floor—“he says that heisn’tgoing to try to stay here any longer, and that he is going over to the enemy. Is this true? Did he do that?”“Yes,” said the officer slowly. “It is true.”“He says here,” the woman went on, holding up the letter again, “that I shall never hear from him again, or see him. I want you to help me to find him.”“I would be glad to help you if I could,” the man said, “but I cannot. No one knows where the man went to, except that he disappeared from the camp and from the city.Besides I have not the right. He was a coward, and now he is a deserter. If he came back now he would have to stand trial, and he might be shot.”“He is not a coward.” The woman’s cheeks flamed red. “Some men shut their eyes and cringe when there comes a flash of lightning. But that don’t make them cowards. He might have been frightened at the time, and not known what he was doing, but he is not a coward. I guess I know that as well as anybody can tell me. He is my boy—my only child. I’ve come out here to find him, and I’m going to do it. I don’t expect I’ll find him quick or easy, perhaps. I’ve let out our farm for a year, with the privilege of renewing the trade when the year is up; and I’m going to stay as long as need be. I’m not going to sit still and hold my hands while I’m waiting, either. I’m going to be a nurse. I know how to take care of the sick and maimed all right, and I guess from what I hear since I’ve been here you need all the help of that kind you can get. All I want ofyou is to get me a chance to work nursing just as close to the front as I can go, and then do all you can to help me find out where Heber is, and then let me have as many as you can of these heathen prisoners the men bring in here to take care of, so I can ask them if they have seen Heber. My boy isn’t a coward, and if he has got scared and run away, he’s got to come back and face the music. Thank goodness none of the folks at home know anything about it, and they won’t if I can help it.”The woman folded the letter, and putting it back into its envelope sat waiting. It was evident that she did not conceive of the possibility even of her request not being granted.The officer hesitated.“You will have to see the General, Mrs. Smith,” he said at last, glad that it need not be his duty to tell her how hopeless her errand was. “I will arrange for you to see him. I will take you to him myself. I wish I could do more to help you.”“How soon can I see him?”“Tomorrow, I think. I will find out and let you know.”“Thank you,” said the woman, as she rose to go. “I don’t want to lose any time. I want to get right to work.”The next day the young soldier’s mother saw the General and told her story to him. In the mean time, apprised by the Colonel of the regiment of the woman’s errand, the General had had a report of the case brought to him. Heber Smith had been sent out with a small scouting party. They had been ambushed, and instead of trying to fight, he had left the men and had run back to cover.“But that don’t necessarily make him a coward,” the young man’s mother pleaded with the General. “A coward is a man who plans to run away. He lost his head that time. Wasn’t that the first time he had been put in such a place?”The officer admitted that it was.“Well, then he can live it down. He has got to, for the sake of his father’s reputation as well as his own. His father was a soldier,too,” she said proudly. “He was in the Union army four years, and had a medal given to him for bravery, and every spring since he died the members of his Grand Army Post have decorated his grave. When Heber comes to think of that, I know he will come back.”The General was not an old man;—that is he was not so old but that, back in her prairie home in a western state, there was a mother to whom he wrote letters, a mother whom he knew to value above his life itself his reputation. The thought of her came to him now.“I will do what I can, Mrs. Smith” he said, “to help you find your boy. I fear I cannot give you any hope, though, and if he should be found I cannot promise you anything as to his future.”“Thank you,” said the woman. “That is all I can ask.”And so it came about that Mrs. Hannah Smith was enrolled as a nurse, and assigned to duty as near the front in the island of Luzon as any nurse could go.Six months passed, and then another six came near to their end. Mrs. Smith renewed the lease of the farm back among the New England hills for another year, and wrote to a neighbor’s wife to see that her woolen clothes and furs were aired and then packed away with a fresh supply of camphor to keep the moths out of them.In this year’s time Mrs. Smith had picked up a wonderful smattering of the Spanish and Tagalog languages for a woman who had lived the life she had before she came to the East. The reason for this, so her companions said, was her being “just possessed to talk with those native prisoners who are brought wounded to the hospital.” The other nurses liked her. She not only was willing to take the cases they liked least—the natives—but asked for them.And sometime in the course of their hospital experience, all Mrs. Smith’s native patients—if they did not die before they got able to talk coherently—had to go through the same catechism:Was there a white man among the people from whom they had come; a white man who had come there from the American army?Was he a tall young man with light hair and a smooth face?Did he have a three-cornered white scar on one side of his chin, where a steer had hooked him when he was a boy?Did he look like this picture? (A photograph was shown the patient)From no one, though, did she get the answer that her heart craved. Some of the prisoners knew white men that had come among the Tagalog natives, but no one knew a man who answered to this description.One day a native prisoner who had been brought in more than a week before, terribly wounded, opened his eyes to consciousness for the first time, after days and nights of stupor. He was one of these who naturally fell, now, to “Mrs. Smith’s lot,” as the surgeons called them. As soon as the nurse’s watchful eyes saw the change in the man she came to him and bent over his cot.“Water, please,” he murmuredThe woman brought the water, her two natures struggling to decide what she should do after she had given it to him. As nurse, she knew the man ought not to be allowed to talk then. As mother, she was impatient to ask him where he had learned to speak English, and to inquire if he knew her boy.The nurse conquered. The patient drank the water and was allowed to go to sleep again undisturbed.In time, though, he was stronger, and then, one day, the mother’s questions were asked for the hundredth time; and the last.Yes, the prisoner patient knew just such a man. He had come among the people of the tribe many months ago. He was a tall, fair young man, and he had such a scar as the “señora,” described. He was a fine young man. Once, when this man’s father had been sick, the white man had doctored him and made him well. It was this white man, the patient said, who had taught him the little English that he knew.“Yes,” when he saw the photograph of Heber Smith, “that is the man. He has a picture, too,” the patient said, “two pictures, little ones, set in a little gold box which hangs on his watch chain.”The hospital nurse unclasped a big cameo breast pin from the throat of her gown and held it down so that the man in bed could see adaguerreotypeset in the back of the pin.“Was one of the pictures like that?” she asked.The Tagalog looked at the picture, a likeness of a middle-aged man wearing the coat and hat of the Grand Army of the Republic. In the picture a medal pinned on to the breast of the man’s coat showed.“Yes,” said he, “one of the pictures is like that.”Then he looked up curiously at the woman sitting beside his bed. “The other picture is that of a woman,” he went on, “and—yes—” still studying her face, “I think it must be you. Only,” he added, “it doesn’t look very much like you.”“No,” said the woman, with a grim smile, “it doesn’t. It was taken a good many years ago, when I was younger than I am now, and when I hadn’t been baked for a year in this heathen climate. It’s me, though.”In time, Juan, that was the man’s name, was so far recovered of his wound that he was to be discharged from the hospital and placed with the other able-bodied prisoners. The hospital at that time occupied an old convent. The day before Juan was to be discharged, Mrs. Smith managed her cases so that for a time no one else was left in one of the rooms with her but this man.“Juan,” she said, when she was sure they were alone, and that no one was anywhere within hearing, “do you feel that I have done anything to help you to get well?”The man reached down, and taking one of the nurse’s hands in his own bent over and kissed it.“Señora,” he said, “I owe my life to you.”“Will you do something for me, then?Something which I want done more than anything else in the world?”“My life is theseñora’s. I would that I had ten lives to give her.”The woman pulled a letter from out the folds of her nurse’s dress. The envelope was not sealed, and before she fastened it she took the letter which was in it out and read it over for one last time. Then, pulling from her waist a little red, white and blue badge pin—one of those patriotic emblems which so many people wear at times—she dropped this into the letter, sealed the envelope, and handed it to the Tagalog. The envelope bore no address.“I hav’n’t put the name of the place on it you said you came from,” she told the man, “because goodness only knows how it is spelled; I don’t. Besides that, it isn’t necessary. You know the place, and you know the man; the man who has got my picture and his father’s in a gold locket on his watch chain. I want you to give this letter into his own hands. I expect it will be rather a ticklishjob for you to get away from here and get through the lines, but I guess you can do it if you try. Other men have. Don’t start until you are well enough so you will have strength to make the whole trip.”A week or so after that, one of the surgeons making his daily visit reported that Juan had made his escape the previous night, and up to that time had not been brought back.“What a shame!” said one of the other nurses. “After all the care you gave that man, Mrs. Smith. It does seem as if he might have had a little more gratitude.”Mrs. Smith said nothing aloud. But to herself, when she was alone, she said: “Well, I suppose some folks would say that I wasn’t acting right, but I guess I’ve saved the lives of enough of those men since I’ve been here so that I’m entitled to one of them if I want him.”Then she went on with her work, and waited; and the waiting was harder than the work.An American expedition was slowly toiling across the island of Luzon to locate and occupy a post in the north. Four companies of men marched in advance, with a guard in the rear. Between them were the mule teams with the camp luggage and the ever present hospital corps. No trace of the enemy had been seen in that part of the island for weeks. Scouts who had gone on in advance had reported the way to be clear, and the force was being hurried up to get through a ravine which it was approaching, so it could go into camp for the night on high, level ground just beyond the valley.Suddenly a man’s voice rang out upon the hot air; an English, speaking voice, strong and clear, and coming, so it seemed at first to the troops when they heard it, from the air above them:“Halt! Halt!” the voice cried.“Go back! There is an ambush on both sides! Save yourselves! Be—”The warning was unfinished. Those of the Americans who had located the sound of thewords and had looked in the direction from which they came, had seen a white man standing on the rocky side of the ravine above them and in front of them. They had seen him throw up his arms and fall backward out of sight, leaving his last sentence unfinished. Then there had come the report of a gun, and then an attack, with scores of shouting Tagalogs swarming down the sides of the ravine.The skirmish was over, though, almost as soon as it had begun, and with little harm to any of the Americans except to such of the scouts as had been cut off in advance. The warning had come in time—had come before the advancing column had marched between the forces hidden on both sides of the ravine. The Tagalogs could not face the fire with which the Americans met them. They fled up the ravine, and up both sides of the gorge, into the shelter of the forest, and were gone. The Americans, satisfied at length that the way was clear, moved forward and went into camp on the ground which had previously been chosen, throwing out advance lines ofpickets, and taking extra precautions to be prepared against a night attack.Early in the evening shots were heard on the outer picket line, and a little later two men came to the commanding officers tent bringing with them a native.“He was trying to come through our lines and get into the camp, sir,” they reported. “Two men fired at him, but missed him.”“Think he’s a spy?” the commander asked of another officer who was with him.“No,Señor, I am not a spy,” the prisoner said, surprising all the men by speaking in English.“I have left my people, I want to be sent to Manila, to the American camp there.”“He’s a deserter,” said one of the officers. Then to the men who held the prisoner, “Better search him.”From out the prisoner’s blouse one of the soldiers brought a paper, a sheet torn from a note book, folded, and fastened only by a red, white and blue badge pin stuck through the paper.The officer to whom the soldier had handed the paper pulled out the pin which had kept it folded, and started to open it, when he saw there was something written on the side through which the pin had been thrust. Bending down to where the camp light fell upon the writing, he saw that it was an address, scrawled in lead pencil:“Mrs. Hannah Smith; Nurse.”“Do you know the woman to whom this letter is sent? he asked in amazement of the Tagalog from whom it had been taken.“YesSeñor.”“Do you know where she is now?”“Yes,Señor. She is in a hospital not far from Manila. She is a good woman. My life is hers. I was there once for many, many days, shot through here,” he placed his hand on his side, “and she made me well again.”“Do you know who sent this letter to her?”“Yes,Señor.”“Who was it?”The man hesitated.“Who was it? Answer. It is for her good I want to know.”“It was her son,Señor.”“Was he the man who gave us warning of the ambush today?”“Yes,Señor.”The officer folded the paper, unread, and thrust the pin back through the folds. The enamel on the badge glistened in the camp light.“Keep the Tagalog here,” he said to the men, “until I come back;” and walked across the camp to where the hospital tents had been set up.“Where is Mrs. Smith?” he asked of the surgeon in charge.“Taking care of the men who were wounded this afternoon.”“Will you tell her that I want to see her alone in your tent, here, and then see that no one else comes in?”“Mrs. Smith,” he said, when the nurse came in, “I have something here for you—a letter. It has just been brought into camp, by a nativewho did not know that you were here and who wanted to be sent to Manila to find you. It is not very strongly sealed, but no one has read it since it was brought into camp.”He gave the bit of paper to the nurse, and then turned away to stand in the door of the tent, that he might not look at her while she read it. Enough of the nurse’s story was known in the army now so that the officer could guess something of what this message might mean to her.A sound in the tent behind the officer made him turn. The woman had sunk down on the ground beneath the surgeon’s light, and resting her arms upon a camp stool had hid her face.A moment later she raised her head, her face wet with tears and wearing an expression of mingled grief and joy, and held out the letter to the officer.“Read it!” she said. “Thank God!” and then, “My boy! My boy!” and hid her face again.“Dear mother,” the scrawled note read.“I got your letter. I’m glad you wrote it. It made things plain I hadn’t seen before. My chance has come—quicker than I had expected. I wish I might have seen you again, but I shan’t. A column of our men are coming up the valley just below here, marching straight into an ambush. I have tried to get word to them, but I can’t, because the Tagalogs watch me so close. They never have trusted me. The only way for me is to rush out when the men get near enough, and shout to them, and that will be the end of it all for me. I don’t care, only that I wish I could see you again. Juan will take this letter to you. When you get it, and the men come back, if I save them, I think perhaps they will clear my name. Then you can go home.“The men are almost here. Mother, dear, good by.—Your Boy.”“I wish I might have seen him,” the woman said, a little later.“But I won’t complain. What I most prayed God for has been granted me.”“They’ll let the charge against him drop, now, won’t they? Don’t you think he has earned it?”“I think he surely has. No braver deed has been done in all this war.”“Don’t try to come, now, Mrs Smith,” as the nurse rose to her feet. “Stay here, and I will send one of the women to you.”When he had done this the officer went back to where the men were still holding Juan between them.“Your journey is shorter than you thought,” the officer said to the Tagalog. “Mrs. Smith is in this camp, and I have given the letter to her.”“May I see her?” exclaimed the man.“Not now. In the morning you may. Have you seen this man, her son, since he was shot?”“No,Señor. He gave me the note and told me to slip into the forest as soon as the fight began, so as to get away without any one seeing me. Then I was to stay out of the way until I could get into this camp.”“Do you know where he stood when he was shot?”“Yes,Señor.”“Can you take a party of men there tonight?”“Yes,Señor; most gladly.”Afterward, when it came to be known that Heber Smith would live, in spite of his wounds and the hours that he had lain there in the bushes unconscious and uncared for, there was the greatest diversity of opinion as to what had really saved his life.The surgeons said it was partly their skill, and partly the superb constitution that years of work on a New England farm had given to the young man. His mother believed that he had been spared for her sake. Heber Smith himself always said it was his mother’s care that saved his life, while Juan never had the least doubt that the young soldier had been protected solely by a marvellous “anting-anting” which he himself had slipped unsuspected into theAmericansoldier’s blouse thatday, before he had left him. As soon as she knew that her son would live, Mrs. Smith started for Washington, carrying with her papers which made it possible for her to be allowed to plead her case there as she had pleaded it in Manila. A pardon was sent back, as fast as wire and steamer and wire again could convey it. Heber Smith wears the uniform of a second lieutenant, now, won for bravery in action since he went back into the service; and every one who knew her in the Philippines, cherishes the memory of Mrs. Hannah Smith; Nurse.
The red eye of the lighthouse on Corregidor Island blazed out through the darkness as a Pacific steamer felt her way cautiously into Manila harbour.
Although it was nearly midnight, a woman—one of the passengers on the steamer—was still on deck, and standing well up toward the bow of the boat was peering into the darkness before her as if she could not wait to see the strange new land to which she was coming. Surely it would be a strange land to her, who, until a few weeks before had scarcely in all her life been outside of the New England town in which she had been born.
People who had seen her on the steamer had wondered sometimes that a woman of her age—for she was not young—should have chosen to go to the Philippine Islands as a nurse, as she told them she was going. Sometimes, at first, they smiled at some of her questions, but any who happened to beill on the voyage, or in trouble, forgot to do that, for in the touch of her hand and in her words there was shown a skill and a nobleness of nature which won respect.
The colonel of a regiment stationed near Manila was sitting in his headquarters. An orderly came to the door and saluted.
“A woman to see you, sir,” he said.
“A woman? What kind of a woman?”
“A white woman, sir. Looks about fifty years old. Talks American. Says she has only just come here. Says her name is Smith.”
“Show her in.”
The man went out. In a few minutes he came back again, and with him the woman that had stayed out on the deck of the Pacific steamer when the boat came past the light of Corregidor.
The Colonel gave his visitor a seat. “What can I do for you?” he said.
“Can I speak to you alone?”
“We are alone now.”
“Can’t that man out there hear?” motioning toward a soldier pacing back and forth before the door.
“No,” said the officer. “We are quite alone.”
The woman unfolded a sheet of paper which she had been holding, and looked at it a moment. Then she looked at the officer. “I want to see Heber Smith, of Company F, of your regiment,” she said. “Can you tell me where he is?”
In spite of himself—in spite of the self possession which he would have said his campaigning experience had given him, the Colonel started.
“Are you his—?” he began to say. But he changed the question to, “Was he a relative of yours?”
“I am his mother,” the woman said, as if she had completed the officer’s first question in her mind and answered it.
“I have a letter from him, here,” she went on. “The last one I have had. It is dated three months ago.Itis not very long.” Sheheld up a half sheet of paper, written over on one side with a lead pencil; but she did not offer to let the officer read what was written.
“He tells me in this letter,” the woman said, “that he has disgraced himself, been a coward, run away from some danger which he ought to have faced; and that he can’t stand the shame of it.” “He says,” the woman’s voice faltered for the first time, and instead of looking the Colonel in the face, as she had been doing, her eyes were fixed on the floor—“he says that heisn’tgoing to try to stay here any longer, and that he is going over to the enemy. Is this true? Did he do that?”
“Yes,” said the officer slowly. “It is true.”
“He says here,” the woman went on, holding up the letter again, “that I shall never hear from him again, or see him. I want you to help me to find him.”
“I would be glad to help you if I could,” the man said, “but I cannot. No one knows where the man went to, except that he disappeared from the camp and from the city.Besides I have not the right. He was a coward, and now he is a deserter. If he came back now he would have to stand trial, and he might be shot.”
“He is not a coward.” The woman’s cheeks flamed red. “Some men shut their eyes and cringe when there comes a flash of lightning. But that don’t make them cowards. He might have been frightened at the time, and not known what he was doing, but he is not a coward. I guess I know that as well as anybody can tell me. He is my boy—my only child. I’ve come out here to find him, and I’m going to do it. I don’t expect I’ll find him quick or easy, perhaps. I’ve let out our farm for a year, with the privilege of renewing the trade when the year is up; and I’m going to stay as long as need be. I’m not going to sit still and hold my hands while I’m waiting, either. I’m going to be a nurse. I know how to take care of the sick and maimed all right, and I guess from what I hear since I’ve been here you need all the help of that kind you can get. All I want ofyou is to get me a chance to work nursing just as close to the front as I can go, and then do all you can to help me find out where Heber is, and then let me have as many as you can of these heathen prisoners the men bring in here to take care of, so I can ask them if they have seen Heber. My boy isn’t a coward, and if he has got scared and run away, he’s got to come back and face the music. Thank goodness none of the folks at home know anything about it, and they won’t if I can help it.”
The woman folded the letter, and putting it back into its envelope sat waiting. It was evident that she did not conceive of the possibility even of her request not being granted.
The officer hesitated.
“You will have to see the General, Mrs. Smith,” he said at last, glad that it need not be his duty to tell her how hopeless her errand was. “I will arrange for you to see him. I will take you to him myself. I wish I could do more to help you.”
“How soon can I see him?”
“Tomorrow, I think. I will find out and let you know.”
“Thank you,” said the woman, as she rose to go. “I don’t want to lose any time. I want to get right to work.”
The next day the young soldier’s mother saw the General and told her story to him. In the mean time, apprised by the Colonel of the regiment of the woman’s errand, the General had had a report of the case brought to him. Heber Smith had been sent out with a small scouting party. They had been ambushed, and instead of trying to fight, he had left the men and had run back to cover.
“But that don’t necessarily make him a coward,” the young man’s mother pleaded with the General. “A coward is a man who plans to run away. He lost his head that time. Wasn’t that the first time he had been put in such a place?”
The officer admitted that it was.
“Well, then he can live it down. He has got to, for the sake of his father’s reputation as well as his own. His father was a soldier,too,” she said proudly. “He was in the Union army four years, and had a medal given to him for bravery, and every spring since he died the members of his Grand Army Post have decorated his grave. When Heber comes to think of that, I know he will come back.”
The General was not an old man;—that is he was not so old but that, back in her prairie home in a western state, there was a mother to whom he wrote letters, a mother whom he knew to value above his life itself his reputation. The thought of her came to him now.
“I will do what I can, Mrs. Smith” he said, “to help you find your boy. I fear I cannot give you any hope, though, and if he should be found I cannot promise you anything as to his future.”
“Thank you,” said the woman. “That is all I can ask.”
And so it came about that Mrs. Hannah Smith was enrolled as a nurse, and assigned to duty as near the front in the island of Luzon as any nurse could go.
Six months passed, and then another six came near to their end. Mrs. Smith renewed the lease of the farm back among the New England hills for another year, and wrote to a neighbor’s wife to see that her woolen clothes and furs were aired and then packed away with a fresh supply of camphor to keep the moths out of them.
In this year’s time Mrs. Smith had picked up a wonderful smattering of the Spanish and Tagalog languages for a woman who had lived the life she had before she came to the East. The reason for this, so her companions said, was her being “just possessed to talk with those native prisoners who are brought wounded to the hospital.” The other nurses liked her. She not only was willing to take the cases they liked least—the natives—but asked for them.
And sometime in the course of their hospital experience, all Mrs. Smith’s native patients—if they did not die before they got able to talk coherently—had to go through the same catechism:
Was there a white man among the people from whom they had come; a white man who had come there from the American army?
Was he a tall young man with light hair and a smooth face?
Did he have a three-cornered white scar on one side of his chin, where a steer had hooked him when he was a boy?
Did he look like this picture? (A photograph was shown the patient)
From no one, though, did she get the answer that her heart craved. Some of the prisoners knew white men that had come among the Tagalog natives, but no one knew a man who answered to this description.
One day a native prisoner who had been brought in more than a week before, terribly wounded, opened his eyes to consciousness for the first time, after days and nights of stupor. He was one of these who naturally fell, now, to “Mrs. Smith’s lot,” as the surgeons called them. As soon as the nurse’s watchful eyes saw the change in the man she came to him and bent over his cot.
“Water, please,” he murmured
The woman brought the water, her two natures struggling to decide what she should do after she had given it to him. As nurse, she knew the man ought not to be allowed to talk then. As mother, she was impatient to ask him where he had learned to speak English, and to inquire if he knew her boy.
The nurse conquered. The patient drank the water and was allowed to go to sleep again undisturbed.
In time, though, he was stronger, and then, one day, the mother’s questions were asked for the hundredth time; and the last.
Yes, the prisoner patient knew just such a man. He had come among the people of the tribe many months ago. He was a tall, fair young man, and he had such a scar as the “señora,” described. He was a fine young man. Once, when this man’s father had been sick, the white man had doctored him and made him well. It was this white man, the patient said, who had taught him the little English that he knew.
“Yes,” when he saw the photograph of Heber Smith, “that is the man. He has a picture, too,” the patient said, “two pictures, little ones, set in a little gold box which hangs on his watch chain.”
The hospital nurse unclasped a big cameo breast pin from the throat of her gown and held it down so that the man in bed could see adaguerreotypeset in the back of the pin.
“Was one of the pictures like that?” she asked.
The Tagalog looked at the picture, a likeness of a middle-aged man wearing the coat and hat of the Grand Army of the Republic. In the picture a medal pinned on to the breast of the man’s coat showed.
“Yes,” said he, “one of the pictures is like that.”
Then he looked up curiously at the woman sitting beside his bed. “The other picture is that of a woman,” he went on, “and—yes—” still studying her face, “I think it must be you. Only,” he added, “it doesn’t look very much like you.”
“No,” said the woman, with a grim smile, “it doesn’t. It was taken a good many years ago, when I was younger than I am now, and when I hadn’t been baked for a year in this heathen climate. It’s me, though.”
In time, Juan, that was the man’s name, was so far recovered of his wound that he was to be discharged from the hospital and placed with the other able-bodied prisoners. The hospital at that time occupied an old convent. The day before Juan was to be discharged, Mrs. Smith managed her cases so that for a time no one else was left in one of the rooms with her but this man.
“Juan,” she said, when she was sure they were alone, and that no one was anywhere within hearing, “do you feel that I have done anything to help you to get well?”
The man reached down, and taking one of the nurse’s hands in his own bent over and kissed it.
“Señora,” he said, “I owe my life to you.”
“Will you do something for me, then?Something which I want done more than anything else in the world?”
“My life is theseñora’s. I would that I had ten lives to give her.”
The woman pulled a letter from out the folds of her nurse’s dress. The envelope was not sealed, and before she fastened it she took the letter which was in it out and read it over for one last time. Then, pulling from her waist a little red, white and blue badge pin—one of those patriotic emblems which so many people wear at times—she dropped this into the letter, sealed the envelope, and handed it to the Tagalog. The envelope bore no address.
“I hav’n’t put the name of the place on it you said you came from,” she told the man, “because goodness only knows how it is spelled; I don’t. Besides that, it isn’t necessary. You know the place, and you know the man; the man who has got my picture and his father’s in a gold locket on his watch chain. I want you to give this letter into his own hands. I expect it will be rather a ticklishjob for you to get away from here and get through the lines, but I guess you can do it if you try. Other men have. Don’t start until you are well enough so you will have strength to make the whole trip.”
A week or so after that, one of the surgeons making his daily visit reported that Juan had made his escape the previous night, and up to that time had not been brought back.
“What a shame!” said one of the other nurses. “After all the care you gave that man, Mrs. Smith. It does seem as if he might have had a little more gratitude.”
Mrs. Smith said nothing aloud. But to herself, when she was alone, she said: “Well, I suppose some folks would say that I wasn’t acting right, but I guess I’ve saved the lives of enough of those men since I’ve been here so that I’m entitled to one of them if I want him.”
Then she went on with her work, and waited; and the waiting was harder than the work.
An American expedition was slowly toiling across the island of Luzon to locate and occupy a post in the north. Four companies of men marched in advance, with a guard in the rear. Between them were the mule teams with the camp luggage and the ever present hospital corps. No trace of the enemy had been seen in that part of the island for weeks. Scouts who had gone on in advance had reported the way to be clear, and the force was being hurried up to get through a ravine which it was approaching, so it could go into camp for the night on high, level ground just beyond the valley.
Suddenly a man’s voice rang out upon the hot air; an English, speaking voice, strong and clear, and coming, so it seemed at first to the troops when they heard it, from the air above them:
“Halt! Halt!” the voice cried.
“Go back! There is an ambush on both sides! Save yourselves! Be—”
The warning was unfinished. Those of the Americans who had located the sound of thewords and had looked in the direction from which they came, had seen a white man standing on the rocky side of the ravine above them and in front of them. They had seen him throw up his arms and fall backward out of sight, leaving his last sentence unfinished. Then there had come the report of a gun, and then an attack, with scores of shouting Tagalogs swarming down the sides of the ravine.
The skirmish was over, though, almost as soon as it had begun, and with little harm to any of the Americans except to such of the scouts as had been cut off in advance. The warning had come in time—had come before the advancing column had marched between the forces hidden on both sides of the ravine. The Tagalogs could not face the fire with which the Americans met them. They fled up the ravine, and up both sides of the gorge, into the shelter of the forest, and were gone. The Americans, satisfied at length that the way was clear, moved forward and went into camp on the ground which had previously been chosen, throwing out advance lines ofpickets, and taking extra precautions to be prepared against a night attack.
Early in the evening shots were heard on the outer picket line, and a little later two men came to the commanding officers tent bringing with them a native.
“He was trying to come through our lines and get into the camp, sir,” they reported. “Two men fired at him, but missed him.”
“Think he’s a spy?” the commander asked of another officer who was with him.
“No,Señor, I am not a spy,” the prisoner said, surprising all the men by speaking in English.“I have left my people, I want to be sent to Manila, to the American camp there.”
“He’s a deserter,” said one of the officers. Then to the men who held the prisoner, “Better search him.”
From out the prisoner’s blouse one of the soldiers brought a paper, a sheet torn from a note book, folded, and fastened only by a red, white and blue badge pin stuck through the paper.
The officer to whom the soldier had handed the paper pulled out the pin which had kept it folded, and started to open it, when he saw there was something written on the side through which the pin had been thrust. Bending down to where the camp light fell upon the writing, he saw that it was an address, scrawled in lead pencil:
“Mrs. Hannah Smith; Nurse.”
“Do you know the woman to whom this letter is sent? he asked in amazement of the Tagalog from whom it had been taken.
“YesSeñor.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
“Yes,Señor. She is in a hospital not far from Manila. She is a good woman. My life is hers. I was there once for many, many days, shot through here,” he placed his hand on his side, “and she made me well again.”
“Do you know who sent this letter to her?”
“Yes,Señor.”
“Who was it?”
The man hesitated.
“Who was it? Answer. It is for her good I want to know.”
“It was her son,Señor.”
“Was he the man who gave us warning of the ambush today?”
“Yes,Señor.”
The officer folded the paper, unread, and thrust the pin back through the folds. The enamel on the badge glistened in the camp light.
“Keep the Tagalog here,” he said to the men, “until I come back;” and walked across the camp to where the hospital tents had been set up.
“Where is Mrs. Smith?” he asked of the surgeon in charge.
“Taking care of the men who were wounded this afternoon.”
“Will you tell her that I want to see her alone in your tent, here, and then see that no one else comes in?”
“Mrs. Smith,” he said, when the nurse came in, “I have something here for you—a letter. It has just been brought into camp, by a nativewho did not know that you were here and who wanted to be sent to Manila to find you. It is not very strongly sealed, but no one has read it since it was brought into camp.”
He gave the bit of paper to the nurse, and then turned away to stand in the door of the tent, that he might not look at her while she read it. Enough of the nurse’s story was known in the army now so that the officer could guess something of what this message might mean to her.
A sound in the tent behind the officer made him turn. The woman had sunk down on the ground beneath the surgeon’s light, and resting her arms upon a camp stool had hid her face.
A moment later she raised her head, her face wet with tears and wearing an expression of mingled grief and joy, and held out the letter to the officer.
“Read it!” she said. “Thank God!” and then, “My boy! My boy!” and hid her face again.
“Dear mother,” the scrawled note read.
“I got your letter. I’m glad you wrote it. It made things plain I hadn’t seen before. My chance has come—quicker than I had expected. I wish I might have seen you again, but I shan’t. A column of our men are coming up the valley just below here, marching straight into an ambush. I have tried to get word to them, but I can’t, because the Tagalogs watch me so close. They never have trusted me. The only way for me is to rush out when the men get near enough, and shout to them, and that will be the end of it all for me. I don’t care, only that I wish I could see you again. Juan will take this letter to you. When you get it, and the men come back, if I save them, I think perhaps they will clear my name. Then you can go home.
“The men are almost here. Mother, dear, good by.—Your Boy.”
“I wish I might have seen him,” the woman said, a little later.“But I won’t complain. What I most prayed God for has been granted me.”
“They’ll let the charge against him drop, now, won’t they? Don’t you think he has earned it?”
“I think he surely has. No braver deed has been done in all this war.”
“Don’t try to come, now, Mrs Smith,” as the nurse rose to her feet. “Stay here, and I will send one of the women to you.”
When he had done this the officer went back to where the men were still holding Juan between them.
“Your journey is shorter than you thought,” the officer said to the Tagalog. “Mrs. Smith is in this camp, and I have given the letter to her.”
“May I see her?” exclaimed the man.
“Not now. In the morning you may. Have you seen this man, her son, since he was shot?”
“No,Señor. He gave me the note and told me to slip into the forest as soon as the fight began, so as to get away without any one seeing me. Then I was to stay out of the way until I could get into this camp.”
“Do you know where he stood when he was shot?”
“Yes,Señor.”
“Can you take a party of men there tonight?”
“Yes,Señor; most gladly.”
Afterward, when it came to be known that Heber Smith would live, in spite of his wounds and the hours that he had lain there in the bushes unconscious and uncared for, there was the greatest diversity of opinion as to what had really saved his life.
The surgeons said it was partly their skill, and partly the superb constitution that years of work on a New England farm had given to the young man. His mother believed that he had been spared for her sake. Heber Smith himself always said it was his mother’s care that saved his life, while Juan never had the least doubt that the young soldier had been protected solely by a marvellous “anting-anting” which he himself had slipped unsuspected into theAmericansoldier’s blouse thatday, before he had left him. As soon as she knew that her son would live, Mrs. Smith started for Washington, carrying with her papers which made it possible for her to be allowed to plead her case there as she had pleaded it in Manila. A pardon was sent back, as fast as wire and steamer and wire again could convey it. Heber Smith wears the uniform of a second lieutenant, now, won for bravery in action since he went back into the service; and every one who knew her in the Philippines, cherishes the memory of Mrs. Hannah Smith; Nurse.
The Fifteenth WifeMateo, my Filipino servant, was helping me sort over specimens one day under the thatched roof of a shed which I had hired to use for such work while I was on the island of Culion, when I was startled to see him suddenly drop the bird skin he had been working on, and fall upon his knees, bending his body forward, his face turned toward the road, until his forehead touched the floor.At first I thought he must be having some new kind of a fit, peculiar to the Philippine Islands, until I happened to glance up the road toward the town, from which my house was a little distance removed, and saw coming toward us a most remarkable procession.Four native soldiers walked in front, two carrying long spears, and two carrying antiquated seven-foot muskets, relics of a former era in fire arms. After the soldiers came four Visayan slaves, bearing on their shoulders a sort of platform covered with rugs and cushions, on which a woman reclined. Onone side of the litter walked another slave, holding a huge umbrella so as to keep the sun’s rays off the woman’s face. Two more soldiers walked behind.Mateo might have been a statue, or a dead man, for all the attention he paid to my questions until after the procession had passed the house. Then, resuming a perpendicular position once more, he said, “That was the Sultana Ahmeya, the Sultana.”Then he went on to explain that there were thirteen other sultanas, of assorted colors, who helped make home happy for the Sultan of Culion, who after all, well supplied as he might at first seem to be, was only a sort of fourth-class sovereign, so far as sultanas are concerned, since his fellow monarch on a neighboring larger island, the Sultan of Sulu, is said to have four hundred wives.Ahmeya, though, Mateo went on to inform me, was the only one of the fourteen who really counted. She was neither the oldest nor the youngest of the wives of the reigning ruler, but she had developed a mind of herown which had made her supreme in the palace, and besides, she was the only one of his wives who had borne a son to the monarch. For her own talents, and as the mother of the heir, the people did her willing homage.When I saw the royal cavalcade go past my door I had no idea I would ever have a chance to become more intimately acquainted with Her Majesty, but only a little while after that circumstances made it possible for me to see more of the royal family than had probably been the privilege of any other white man. How little thought I had, when the acquaintance began, of the strange experiences it would eventually lead to!At that time, in the course of collecting natural history specimens, most of my time for three years was spent in the island of Culion. Having a large stock of drugs, for use in my work, and quite a lot of medicines, I had doctored Mateo and two or three other fellows who had worked for me, when they had been ill, with the result that I found Ihad come to have a reputation for medical skill which sometimes was inconvenient. I had no idea how widely my fame had spread, though, until one morning Mateo came into my room and woke me, and with a face which expressed a good deal of anxiety, informed me that I was sent for to come to the palace.I confess I felt some concern myself, and should have felt more if I had had as much experience then as I had later, for one never knows what those three-quarters savage potentates may take it into their heads to do.When I found that I was sent for because the Sultan was ill,—ill unto death, the messenger had made Mateo believe,—and I was expected to doctor him, I did not feel much more comfortable, for I much doubted if my knowledge of diseases, and my assortment of medicines, were equal to coping with a serious case. If the Sultan died I would probably be beheaded, either for not keeping him alive, or for killing him.It was a great relief, then, when I reached the palace, and just before I entered the roomwhere the sick monarch was, to hear him swearing vigorously, in a combination of the native and Spanish languages which was as picturesque as it was expressive.I found the man suffering from an acute attack of neuralgia, although he did not know what was the matter with him. He had not been able to sleep for three days and nights, and the pain, all the way up and down one side of his face had been so intense that he thought he was going to die, and almost hoped that he was. His head was tied up in a lot of cloths, not over clean, in which a dozen native doctor’s charms had been folded, until the bundle was as big as four heads ought to be.As soon as I found out what was the matter I felt relieved, for I reckoned I could manage an attack of swelled head all right. I had doctored the natives enough, already, to find out that they had no respect for remedies which they could not feel, and so, going back to the house, I brought from there some extrastrong liniment, some tincture of red pepper and a few powerful morphine pills.I gave my patient one of the pills the first thing, administering it in a glass of water with enough of the cayenne added to it so that the mixture brought tears to his eyes, and then removing the layers of cloth from his head, and gathering in as I did so, for my collection of curiosities, the various charms which I uncovered, I gave his head a vigorous shampooing with the liniment, taking pains to see that the liquor occasionally ran down into the Sultan’s eyes. He squirmed a good deal, but I kept on until I thought it must be about time for the morphine to begin to take effect. I kept him on morphine and red pepper for three days, but when I let up on him he was cured, and my reputation was made.It would have been too great a nuisance to have been endured, had it not been that so high a degree of royal favor enabled me to pursue my work with a degree of success which otherwise I could never have hoped for.After that I used to see a good deal of the palace life. Although nominally Mohammedans in religion, the inhabitants of these more distant islands have little more than the name of the faith, and follow out few of its injunctions. As a result I was accorded a freedom about the palace which would have been impossible in such an establishment in almost any other country.One day the Sultan had invited me to dine with him. After the meal, while we were smoking, reclining in some cocoanut fibre hammocks swung in the shade of the palace court yard, I saw a man servant lead a dog through the square, and down a narrow passage way through the rear of the palace.“Would you like to see the ‘Green Devil’ eat?” my host asked.I have translated the native words he used by the term “green devil,” because that represents the idea of the original better than any other words I know of, I had not the slightest conception as to who or what the individual referred to might be; but I said at oncethat I would be very glad indeed to see him eat.My host swung out of the hammock,—he was a superbly strong and vigorous man, now that he was in health again,—and led the way through the passage. Following him I found myself in another court yard, larger than the first, and with more trees in it. Beneath one of these trees, in a stout cage of bamboo, was the biggest python I ever saw. He must have been fully twenty-five feet long. The cage was large enough to give the snake a chance to move about in it, and when we came in sight he was rolling from one end to the other with head erect, eyes glistening, and the light shimmering on his glossy scales in a way which made it easy to see why he had been given his name. I learned later that he had not been fed for a month, and that he would not be fed again until another month had passed. Like all of his kind he would touch none but live food.The wretched dog, who seemed to guess the fate in store for him, hung back in therope tied about his neck, and crouched flat to the ground, too frightened even to whine.The servant unlocked a door in the side of the cage and thrust the poor beast in. I am not ashamed to say that I turned my head away. It was only a dog, but it might have been a human being, so far as the reptile, or the half-savage man at my side, would have cared.When I looked again, the dog was only a crushed mass of bones and flesh, about which the snake was still winding and tightening coil after coil.“We need not wait,” the Sultan said. “It will be an hour before he will swallow the food. You can come out again.”I did as he suggested. It was a wonder to me, as it is to every one, how a snake’s throat can be distended enough to swallow whole an object so large as this dog, but in some way the reptile had accomplished the feat. The meal over, the huge creature had coiled down as still almost as if dead. He would lie in that way, now, they told me, for days.It was while I stood watching the snake that Ahmeya came through the square, leading her boy by the hand. The apartments of the royal wives were built around this inner yard. This was the first time I had seen the heir to the throne. He was a handsome boy, and looked like his mother. Ahmeya was tall, for a native woman, and carried herself with a dignity which showed that she felt the honor of her position. Mateo had told me that she had a decided will of her own, and, so the palace gossips said, ruled the establishment, and her associate sultanas, with an unbending hand.It was not very long after I had seen the green devil eat that Mateo told me there had been another wedding at the palace. Mateo was an indefatigable news-gatherer, and an incorrigible gossip. As the society papers would have expressed it, this wedding had been “a very quiet affair.” The Sultan had happened to see a Visayan girl of uncommon beauty, on one of the smaller islands, one day, had bought her of her father for two waterbuffalos, and had installed her at the palace as wife number fifteen.For the time being the new-comer was said to be the royal favorite, a condition of affairs which caused the other fourteen wives as little concern as their objections, if they had expressed any, would probably have caused their royal husband. So far as Ahmeya was concerned, she never minded a little thing like that, but included the last arrival in the same indifferent toleration which she had extended to her predecessors.I saw the new wife only once.—I mean,—yes I mean that.—I saw her as the king’s wife only once. She was a handsome woman, with a certain insolent disdain of those about her which indicated that she knew her own charms, and perhaps counted too much on their being permanent.That summer my work took me away from the island. I went to Manila, and eventually to America. When I finally returned to Culion a year had passed.I had engaged Mateo, before I left, to lookout for such property as I left behind, and had retained my old house. I found him waiting for me, and with everything in good order. That is one good thing to be said about the natives. An imagined wrong or insult may rankle in their minds for months, until they have a chance to stab you in the back. They will lie to you at times with the most unblushing nerve, often when the truth would have served their ends so much better that it seems as if they must have been doing mendacious gymnastics simply to keep themselves in practice; but they will hardly ever steal. If they do, it will be sometime when you are looking squarely at them, carrying a thing off from under your very nose with a cleverness which they seem to think, and you can hardly help feel yourself, makes them deserve praise instead of blame. I have repeatedly left much valuable property with them, as I did in this case with Mateo, and have come back to find every article just as I had left it.Mateo was glad to see me. “OhSeñor,” hebegan, before my clothes were fairly changed, and while he was settling my things in my bed room, “there is so much to tell you.”I knew he would be bursting with news of what had happened during my absence. “Such goings on,” he continued, folding my travelling clothes into a tin trunk, where the white ants could not get at them. “You never heard the likes of it.”I am translating very freely, for I have noticed that the thoughts expressed by the Philippine gossip are very similar to those of his fellow in America, or Europe, or anywhere else, no matter how much the words may differ.“The new Sultana, the handsome Visayan girl, has given birth to a son, and has so bewitched the Sultan by her good looks and craftiness that he has decreed her son, and not Ahmeya’s, to be the heir to the throne. She rules the palace now, and when her servants bear her through the streets the people bow down to her.” He added, with a look behind him to see that no one overheard, “Becausethey dare not do otherwise. In their hearts they love Ahmeya, and hate this vain woman.”“How does Ahmeya take it?” I asked.“Hardly, people think, although she makes no cry. She goes not through the streets of the town, now, but stays shut in her own rooms, with her women and the boy.”A furious beating against the bamboo walls of my sleeping room, and wild cries from some one on the ground outside, awoke me one morning when I had been back in Culion less than a week. The house in which I slept, like most of the native houses in the Philippines, was built on posts, several feet above the ground, for the sake of coolness and as a protection against snakes and such vermin.It was very early, not yet sunrise. A servant of the Sultan’s, gray with fright, was pounding on the walls of the house with a long spear to wake me, begging me, when I opened the lattice, to come to the palace at once.I thought the monarch must have had some terrible attack, and wondered what it could be, but while we were hurrying up the street the messenger managed to make me understand that the Sultan was not at the palace at all, but gone the day before on board the royal proa for a state visit to a neighboring island from which he exacted yearly tribute. Later I learned that he had tried to have the Visayan woman go with him, but that she had wilfully refused to go. What was the matter at the palace the ruler being gone, I could not make out. When I asked this of the man who had come for me, he fell into such a palsy of fear that he could say nothing. When I came to know, later, that he was the night guard at the palace, and remembered what he must have seen, I did not wonder.At the palace no one was astir. The man had come straight for me, stopping to rouse no one else. I had saved the Sultan’s life. At least he thought so. Might I not do even more?My guide took me straight through the firstcourt yard, and down the narrow passage into the inner yard, around which were built the apartments of the woman. Ahmeya, I knew, lived in the rooms at one end of the square. The man led me towards the opposite end of the enclosure. Beside an open door he stood aside for me to enter, saying, as he did so, “Señor, help us.”The sun had risen, now, and shining full upon a lattice in the upper wall, flooded the room with a soft clear light.The body of the Visayan woman, or rather what had been a body, lay on the floor in the center of the room, a shapeless mass of crushed bones and flesh. An enormous python lay coiled in one corner. His mottled skin glistened in the morning light, but he did not move, and his eyes were tight shut, as were those of the “green devil” after I had seen him feed.I looked backward, across the court yard. The door of the big bamboo cage beneath the trees was open. I turned to the room again and looked once more. I knew now why thenight guard’s face was ash-colored, and why he could not speak.For the child of the Visayan woman I could not see.
Mateo, my Filipino servant, was helping me sort over specimens one day under the thatched roof of a shed which I had hired to use for such work while I was on the island of Culion, when I was startled to see him suddenly drop the bird skin he had been working on, and fall upon his knees, bending his body forward, his face turned toward the road, until his forehead touched the floor.
At first I thought he must be having some new kind of a fit, peculiar to the Philippine Islands, until I happened to glance up the road toward the town, from which my house was a little distance removed, and saw coming toward us a most remarkable procession.
Four native soldiers walked in front, two carrying long spears, and two carrying antiquated seven-foot muskets, relics of a former era in fire arms. After the soldiers came four Visayan slaves, bearing on their shoulders a sort of platform covered with rugs and cushions, on which a woman reclined. Onone side of the litter walked another slave, holding a huge umbrella so as to keep the sun’s rays off the woman’s face. Two more soldiers walked behind.
Mateo might have been a statue, or a dead man, for all the attention he paid to my questions until after the procession had passed the house. Then, resuming a perpendicular position once more, he said, “That was the Sultana Ahmeya, the Sultana.”
Then he went on to explain that there were thirteen other sultanas, of assorted colors, who helped make home happy for the Sultan of Culion, who after all, well supplied as he might at first seem to be, was only a sort of fourth-class sovereign, so far as sultanas are concerned, since his fellow monarch on a neighboring larger island, the Sultan of Sulu, is said to have four hundred wives.
Ahmeya, though, Mateo went on to inform me, was the only one of the fourteen who really counted. She was neither the oldest nor the youngest of the wives of the reigning ruler, but she had developed a mind of herown which had made her supreme in the palace, and besides, she was the only one of his wives who had borne a son to the monarch. For her own talents, and as the mother of the heir, the people did her willing homage.
When I saw the royal cavalcade go past my door I had no idea I would ever have a chance to become more intimately acquainted with Her Majesty, but only a little while after that circumstances made it possible for me to see more of the royal family than had probably been the privilege of any other white man. How little thought I had, when the acquaintance began, of the strange experiences it would eventually lead to!
At that time, in the course of collecting natural history specimens, most of my time for three years was spent in the island of Culion. Having a large stock of drugs, for use in my work, and quite a lot of medicines, I had doctored Mateo and two or three other fellows who had worked for me, when they had been ill, with the result that I found Ihad come to have a reputation for medical skill which sometimes was inconvenient. I had no idea how widely my fame had spread, though, until one morning Mateo came into my room and woke me, and with a face which expressed a good deal of anxiety, informed me that I was sent for to come to the palace.
I confess I felt some concern myself, and should have felt more if I had had as much experience then as I had later, for one never knows what those three-quarters savage potentates may take it into their heads to do.
When I found that I was sent for because the Sultan was ill,—ill unto death, the messenger had made Mateo believe,—and I was expected to doctor him, I did not feel much more comfortable, for I much doubted if my knowledge of diseases, and my assortment of medicines, were equal to coping with a serious case. If the Sultan died I would probably be beheaded, either for not keeping him alive, or for killing him.
It was a great relief, then, when I reached the palace, and just before I entered the roomwhere the sick monarch was, to hear him swearing vigorously, in a combination of the native and Spanish languages which was as picturesque as it was expressive.
I found the man suffering from an acute attack of neuralgia, although he did not know what was the matter with him. He had not been able to sleep for three days and nights, and the pain, all the way up and down one side of his face had been so intense that he thought he was going to die, and almost hoped that he was. His head was tied up in a lot of cloths, not over clean, in which a dozen native doctor’s charms had been folded, until the bundle was as big as four heads ought to be.
As soon as I found out what was the matter I felt relieved, for I reckoned I could manage an attack of swelled head all right. I had doctored the natives enough, already, to find out that they had no respect for remedies which they could not feel, and so, going back to the house, I brought from there some extrastrong liniment, some tincture of red pepper and a few powerful morphine pills.
I gave my patient one of the pills the first thing, administering it in a glass of water with enough of the cayenne added to it so that the mixture brought tears to his eyes, and then removing the layers of cloth from his head, and gathering in as I did so, for my collection of curiosities, the various charms which I uncovered, I gave his head a vigorous shampooing with the liniment, taking pains to see that the liquor occasionally ran down into the Sultan’s eyes. He squirmed a good deal, but I kept on until I thought it must be about time for the morphine to begin to take effect. I kept him on morphine and red pepper for three days, but when I let up on him he was cured, and my reputation was made.
It would have been too great a nuisance to have been endured, had it not been that so high a degree of royal favor enabled me to pursue my work with a degree of success which otherwise I could never have hoped for.
After that I used to see a good deal of the palace life. Although nominally Mohammedans in religion, the inhabitants of these more distant islands have little more than the name of the faith, and follow out few of its injunctions. As a result I was accorded a freedom about the palace which would have been impossible in such an establishment in almost any other country.
One day the Sultan had invited me to dine with him. After the meal, while we were smoking, reclining in some cocoanut fibre hammocks swung in the shade of the palace court yard, I saw a man servant lead a dog through the square, and down a narrow passage way through the rear of the palace.
“Would you like to see the ‘Green Devil’ eat?” my host asked.
I have translated the native words he used by the term “green devil,” because that represents the idea of the original better than any other words I know of, I had not the slightest conception as to who or what the individual referred to might be; but I said at oncethat I would be very glad indeed to see him eat.
My host swung out of the hammock,—he was a superbly strong and vigorous man, now that he was in health again,—and led the way through the passage. Following him I found myself in another court yard, larger than the first, and with more trees in it. Beneath one of these trees, in a stout cage of bamboo, was the biggest python I ever saw. He must have been fully twenty-five feet long. The cage was large enough to give the snake a chance to move about in it, and when we came in sight he was rolling from one end to the other with head erect, eyes glistening, and the light shimmering on his glossy scales in a way which made it easy to see why he had been given his name. I learned later that he had not been fed for a month, and that he would not be fed again until another month had passed. Like all of his kind he would touch none but live food.
The wretched dog, who seemed to guess the fate in store for him, hung back in therope tied about his neck, and crouched flat to the ground, too frightened even to whine.
The servant unlocked a door in the side of the cage and thrust the poor beast in. I am not ashamed to say that I turned my head away. It was only a dog, but it might have been a human being, so far as the reptile, or the half-savage man at my side, would have cared.
When I looked again, the dog was only a crushed mass of bones and flesh, about which the snake was still winding and tightening coil after coil.
“We need not wait,” the Sultan said. “It will be an hour before he will swallow the food. You can come out again.”
I did as he suggested. It was a wonder to me, as it is to every one, how a snake’s throat can be distended enough to swallow whole an object so large as this dog, but in some way the reptile had accomplished the feat. The meal over, the huge creature had coiled down as still almost as if dead. He would lie in that way, now, they told me, for days.
It was while I stood watching the snake that Ahmeya came through the square, leading her boy by the hand. The apartments of the royal wives were built around this inner yard. This was the first time I had seen the heir to the throne. He was a handsome boy, and looked like his mother. Ahmeya was tall, for a native woman, and carried herself with a dignity which showed that she felt the honor of her position. Mateo had told me that she had a decided will of her own, and, so the palace gossips said, ruled the establishment, and her associate sultanas, with an unbending hand.
It was not very long after I had seen the green devil eat that Mateo told me there had been another wedding at the palace. Mateo was an indefatigable news-gatherer, and an incorrigible gossip. As the society papers would have expressed it, this wedding had been “a very quiet affair.” The Sultan had happened to see a Visayan girl of uncommon beauty, on one of the smaller islands, one day, had bought her of her father for two waterbuffalos, and had installed her at the palace as wife number fifteen.
For the time being the new-comer was said to be the royal favorite, a condition of affairs which caused the other fourteen wives as little concern as their objections, if they had expressed any, would probably have caused their royal husband. So far as Ahmeya was concerned, she never minded a little thing like that, but included the last arrival in the same indifferent toleration which she had extended to her predecessors.
I saw the new wife only once.—I mean,—yes I mean that.—I saw her as the king’s wife only once. She was a handsome woman, with a certain insolent disdain of those about her which indicated that she knew her own charms, and perhaps counted too much on their being permanent.
That summer my work took me away from the island. I went to Manila, and eventually to America. When I finally returned to Culion a year had passed.
I had engaged Mateo, before I left, to lookout for such property as I left behind, and had retained my old house. I found him waiting for me, and with everything in good order. That is one good thing to be said about the natives. An imagined wrong or insult may rankle in their minds for months, until they have a chance to stab you in the back. They will lie to you at times with the most unblushing nerve, often when the truth would have served their ends so much better that it seems as if they must have been doing mendacious gymnastics simply to keep themselves in practice; but they will hardly ever steal. If they do, it will be sometime when you are looking squarely at them, carrying a thing off from under your very nose with a cleverness which they seem to think, and you can hardly help feel yourself, makes them deserve praise instead of blame. I have repeatedly left much valuable property with them, as I did in this case with Mateo, and have come back to find every article just as I had left it.
Mateo was glad to see me. “OhSeñor,” hebegan, before my clothes were fairly changed, and while he was settling my things in my bed room, “there is so much to tell you.”
I knew he would be bursting with news of what had happened during my absence. “Such goings on,” he continued, folding my travelling clothes into a tin trunk, where the white ants could not get at them. “You never heard the likes of it.”
I am translating very freely, for I have noticed that the thoughts expressed by the Philippine gossip are very similar to those of his fellow in America, or Europe, or anywhere else, no matter how much the words may differ.
“The new Sultana, the handsome Visayan girl, has given birth to a son, and has so bewitched the Sultan by her good looks and craftiness that he has decreed her son, and not Ahmeya’s, to be the heir to the throne. She rules the palace now, and when her servants bear her through the streets the people bow down to her.” He added, with a look behind him to see that no one overheard, “Becausethey dare not do otherwise. In their hearts they love Ahmeya, and hate this vain woman.”
“How does Ahmeya take it?” I asked.
“Hardly, people think, although she makes no cry. She goes not through the streets of the town, now, but stays shut in her own rooms, with her women and the boy.”
A furious beating against the bamboo walls of my sleeping room, and wild cries from some one on the ground outside, awoke me one morning when I had been back in Culion less than a week. The house in which I slept, like most of the native houses in the Philippines, was built on posts, several feet above the ground, for the sake of coolness and as a protection against snakes and such vermin.
It was very early, not yet sunrise. A servant of the Sultan’s, gray with fright, was pounding on the walls of the house with a long spear to wake me, begging me, when I opened the lattice, to come to the palace at once.
I thought the monarch must have had some terrible attack, and wondered what it could be, but while we were hurrying up the street the messenger managed to make me understand that the Sultan was not at the palace at all, but gone the day before on board the royal proa for a state visit to a neighboring island from which he exacted yearly tribute. Later I learned that he had tried to have the Visayan woman go with him, but that she had wilfully refused to go. What was the matter at the palace the ruler being gone, I could not make out. When I asked this of the man who had come for me, he fell into such a palsy of fear that he could say nothing. When I came to know, later, that he was the night guard at the palace, and remembered what he must have seen, I did not wonder.
At the palace no one was astir. The man had come straight for me, stopping to rouse no one else. I had saved the Sultan’s life. At least he thought so. Might I not do even more?
My guide took me straight through the firstcourt yard, and down the narrow passage into the inner yard, around which were built the apartments of the woman. Ahmeya, I knew, lived in the rooms at one end of the square. The man led me towards the opposite end of the enclosure. Beside an open door he stood aside for me to enter, saying, as he did so, “Señor, help us.”
The sun had risen, now, and shining full upon a lattice in the upper wall, flooded the room with a soft clear light.
The body of the Visayan woman, or rather what had been a body, lay on the floor in the center of the room, a shapeless mass of crushed bones and flesh. An enormous python lay coiled in one corner. His mottled skin glistened in the morning light, but he did not move, and his eyes were tight shut, as were those of the “green devil” after I had seen him feed.
I looked backward, across the court yard. The door of the big bamboo cage beneath the trees was open. I turned to the room again and looked once more. I knew now why thenight guard’s face was ash-colored, and why he could not speak.
For the child of the Visayan woman I could not see.