Part 23 (1/2)
Yet the women, who did most of the selling, with their unkempt hair and their crude alien costumes, awoke to something universal under the game of barter they were here called upon to play crudely. Rummage-sales and carnivals, dog-shows and dances, likewise change the glitter of blue eyes and pink cheeks; and I smiled at the thought of Lao-tsze and Tolstoy, who between 650 B. C. and A. D. 1910 preached the ugliness of trade.
When the play of barter and exchange had stirred these primitive folk to a little more life, they quite naturally sought a way of giving it off again; but so foreign did a real bazaar seem to them that they entered the recreations with little zest. In these days of savage sedateness, with trade becoming more and more a feature and a pastime of life, it is not surprising that the natives attend with spirits in abeyance.
Following the great exchange of beads and oils and edible messes, the crowds moved out to a more open s.p.a.ce, under the clear sun. There, with the aid of a native band, under the conductors.h.i.+p of a Catholic priest, they made merry, with strange sounds and more familiar dances. But it all seemed perfunctory and not without a touch of sadness. The Fijian voice at its best is rich, deep, and stately. One cannot imagine it attuned to singing jazz or rag-time. It seems exclusively made for hymns. In consequence, the crowds could not rise to the occasion, and stood behind the entertainers like so many solemn j.a.panese in the presence of royalty.
3
But lest the little pig who stays at home may really starve to death, the world sometimes indulges him a little by letting the market go to him, and never have I seen a market more picturesque and more self-possessed than one of this sort that visited our steamer as she lay anch.o.r.ed in the harbor of Manila.
All about us during the night had crept Filipino lighters, their gunwales capped with low-arched mats. They hugged the steamer like a brood of younglings waiting for their food. They were to receive the cargo of boxes and canned goods from New York and other markets of the world.
It was still cool. A native Filipino woman squatted on the ridge of a lighter top between two men. She was enjoying her morning cigarette. As she caught my gaze her face beamed flirtatiously. Then and there I tried my tongue for the first time in the real use of Spanish, and failed. As the morning advanced, children crept from the darkness of the covered lighters; charcoal pails were fanned into a glow like that of the dawn; and roosters, tied to the boats by one leg with a string, crowed, their contempt, protest, or indifference to a gluttonous and unjust world.
As the hour of breakfast's needs arrived, a thin, long canoe came up, insinuating its way among the many more capacious crafts, quietly, slowly, like a thing just stirring with the new day. On its narrow bottom flopped dozens of little fish in agony, dying of too much air.
They looked like so many bars of silver when they lay dead. A basket of bananas and a few simple vegetables comprised the rest of the stock of these aquatic tradespeople, this man and his woman. She squatted comfortably, looking from side to side for customers, while he pushed the canoe along with easy strokes. They did not cry their wares, and handed their stores out as though known to all for fair dealing and fearless of compet.i.tion. Thus with the freshness of morning air they stimulated this little world to action.
By noon that day I was slipping through narrow streets, avoiding the moldy shops of the main street, seeking out the men and women who make life interesting. The coolness of the morning was gone, crowded out by steaming noon. The casual, gift-like manners of those two aquatic traders was now a thing not even to expect, for I was in the midst of civilized trade. Unexpectedly, I came upon the public market.
What a different world! The hand of the law was in evidence. Here, despite the general confused appearance, the concrete drains and stone tables gave an a.s.surance of at least periodical cleansing. Here the laws of barter held men tied to fair dealing, as the roosters were tied to those lighters. Venders make a mad dash for freedom through cheating, but were jerked back to honesty by the bargain-hunter who watches the scales and knows the laws. Values are measured by the size of the pupil or the intensity of the gaze; if eagerness is manifest, up goes the price.
A Buddhist, looking upon a market like this, if he were unaccustomed to pagan ways, would shrink from the sight as we would at a cannibal feast.
Here the world was calmly cruel. All the things we eat lay in their naked ghastliness,--the thin streams of blood, the bulging eyes of little creatures, the stiff inflexibility of limbs once quick and supple. And the men and women were unconsciously affected by the scene.
For nothing stimulates the snarling quarrelsomeness of human beings more than the sight of food or the fear of imposition. The appeals of the sellers were mingled with the bargainings and bickerings of the buyers, a compet.i.tion among both to best one another. Two women stood over a fish-bin engaged in a matching of wits that might well have been envied by filibustering senators. The debate was over a tray of tiny fish.
A white woman, firmly knit in body and in character, made her way through the many aisles, purchasing with a precision as clearly civilized as it was silent. A Spanish woman, dark and das.h.i.+ng, swung through the same aisles like a little whirlwind. There was brilliance in her eyes, and brilliancy in the gems on her fingers and in her ears. She was exceedingly well dressed, buxom, and attractive, but every purchase was made with a gust of austerity and command quite uncalled for. She bullied the fisherwoman, she bullied her hackman, she bullied the servant who had come to carry her purchases for her; and then she sat down at one of the little restaurant tables and ate the strange concoctions with a dexterity obviously native to her. She was a half-caste, but the Spanish vein was strong in her blood, and Spanish pa.s.sion actuated her. She got into her ancient-looking hackney-coach with flash and gusto; but not, however, before she had gained her point in the matter of an extra piece of fat upon which she was insisting. She was the little pig who had roast beef because she knew how to market economically.
4
But the little pig that has none, and the one who cries, _wee! wee!
wee!_ all the way home, in the Far East, is like the Greek about to be ostracized by the community in the agora. Indeed, he has been ostracized in j.a.pan for hundreds of years, and even modernization and imperial edict have changed his status but little. He is known as the _eta_. To him has been allotted the task of attending to dead animals, whether edible or not, and though his touch profanes the lowest cla.s.ses of j.a.pan, his labor keeps the country clean after a fas.h.i.+on. Much more. Not only do these outcasts remove dead carca.s.ses from a careless Oriental world, but in one place at least they have been given the sweetest of all professions,--that of selling flowers with which to decorate the _tokonoma_, the most honorable place in the j.a.panese home. And all through the day, if one is not too much engrossed in the marts of the foreign settlement, one will hear the voice of these flower-girls calling plaintively, ”_Hana! hana-i! hana-iro!_” Flowers are the things that stand between her and the degradation of her cla.s.s, because for years the shrine of a loyal servant of the neglected emperor who was struggling against a greater and more powerful group of disloyal j.a.panese had been kept fresh with flowers by these _eta_, or outcasts, who did not know whose grave they cherished.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIJIAN VILLAGE One is content with its peaceful aspects]
[Ill.u.s.tration: LITTLE FISH WENT TO THIS MARKET Before j.a.pan woke up Harper Brothers]
[Ill.u.s.tration: A FIJIAN BAZAR IS A RED LETTER DAY]
[Ill.u.s.tration: GOOD LUCK MUST ATTEND THESE TRADERS AT THE DOORS OF THE CATHEDRALS IN MANILA]
Otherwise the market in j.a.pan is in the hands of j.a.panese now in good social standing, men who before the opening of the country numbered among those not much above the outcasts. To be in trade was worse in j.a.pan than in England, and when one watches the behavior of men at markets, one is not surprised. One who takes the average trader at his word in j.a.pan--not the big concerns, to be sure--deserves to cry, _wee!
wee! wee!_ all the way home.
While all over the world woman goes to market, in j.a.pan the market goes to her. She has had to have most of her daily supplies brought to her door by the cobbler, the bean-curd-maker, or the fisherman. In consequence, except when she has servants, she has been deprived of the educational advantages of market gossip, and has been kept in her sphere more easily. She will be the last to come forward to freedom.
Not so the men. All the social advantages of barter and exchange are theirs. They communicate their experiences to one another at four o'clock in the morning over the fish-tub. They test their wits and their eyes with the auctioneer who starts them running in compet.i.tion with one another over an attractive specimen from the sea. Or the more imaginative resist confusion in the pit of the stock-market, where they keep in touch with their entire country and with the world. They are becoming, in consequence, more efficient and more practised in world-wide ethics of business.