# Recollections of Full Years/Chapter 5

The China Sea has an evil reputation. On its shores one hears much about the typhoon season and the changing monsoons, and bad sailors would, no doubt, like to have their sailing dates determined by the Weather Bureau; but this is not always possible.
The Kasuga Maru, on which we made the voyage from Yokohama to Manila, lay in Hongkong Harbour while one of the great mid-August storms tore up from the south and set skippers and seamen agog with fears of dreadful conditions we would have to meet on the trip across to Manila. In the China Sea there are cross-currents which make for bad going at the best of times, and when they are piled up by a typhoon into great, warring waves the result is likely to be extraordinary.
My husband cabled me to take a larger vessel, a United States army transport which left Hongkong about the same time we did, but I was comfortably located with my family on the little Kasuga Maru; the transfer of baggage was a troublesome task; and I figured that as long as the Kasuga Maru had been afloat in south seas for a good many years, she might be trusted to keep afloat for a few days longer.
We caught the calm between two storms. The sea had been beaten down by torrential rains; and while great, smooth waves rose under us and sent us rolling in a sickening zigzag all the way across, there was in them no threat of destruction, and I really began to feel that the China Sea had been maligned.
A feeling of intense curiosity got me out of my stateroom bright and early on the morning of our arrival in Manila.
To the northward lay a stretch of unbroken, mountain​ous shoreline; while we were headed for a narrow channel guarded in rock island against which the surf broke in clouds of spray.
"Corregidor," said the skipper, pointing to a high, green hill behind the rocks. Corregidor,—it was the first time I had ever heard the name which since has become synonymous, in so many minds, with Gibraltar. On the other side of the entrance to Manila Bay stood Meriveles, a beautiful mountain, sloping gently back from the sea and up into soft, white clouds. But Manila,—where was Manila? Cavite,—where was Cavite? And where did the Spanish ships lie, when Dewey sailed in past Corregidor not knowing what he would find? Questions, these, which everybody asked in those days. Manila was twenty miles ahead at the far end of the Bay, while Cavite, across on the south shore, in the nearer distance, lay flat and almost invisible under low-spreading trees.
Flat; that is the word which occurs to everybody who sails for the first time into Manila Bay. The city is built on the low-lands; low, as I afterward learned, to the point of being below sea-level in certain places, and subject to sudden floods in the big typhoons. But far behind the flats are towering ranges of blue and purple hills, with here and there a softly rounded mountain standing, seemingly, alone.
The hot sun beat down on the glassy surface of the Bay and sent back a blinding glare which brought an ache into eyes and nerves, but we were all too interested to seek shelter in the darkened cabin.
While our ship was still miles from shore we could see long lines of low, red roofs and the white gleam of many domes and spires; and off to the right we had pointed out to us the eloquent wrecks of some of the Spanish fleet whose masts and battered hulks rose high out of the shallow water in which they were sunk.
But for ourselves, for me, for Mrs. Wright, for Maria ​and the children, the most important thing in sight was a little fleet of harbour launches which came hurrying down the Bay to meet us. I saw my husband and General Wright standing in the bow of one of these long before they could pick us out in the crowd of passengers lining the rails of the Kasuga Maru.
Then came the happy welcomings which make absences worth while; excited children; everybody talking at once; explanations begun and never finished; interruptions by customs officials—American soldiers in those days; comments on the heat and the bright white light, and laughing assurances that it wasn't hot at all and that the climate was perfect; transferring baggage to the launch; glimpsing, occasionally, strange scenes and strange peoples; asking and answering a thousand questions; busy, bustling, delightfully confusing hours of landing in the farthest orient.
Our husbands turned themselves into willing "Baedekers" and instructed us on the way. We steamed up in our little launch to the mouth of the Pásig River, wide and deep and swift, and covered with what looked to me like millions of small, green cabbages.
"Carabao lettuce; the river's full of it," explained Mr. Taft, but I was much too occupied just then to stop and ask what "carabao lettuce" might be.
We came up past a bristling fort at the corner of a great, grey, many-bastioned and mediæval wall which stretched as far as I could see down the bay shore on one side and up the river on the other.
"The Old Walled City," said General Wright, and I knew at once that I should love the old Walled City.
"The oldest parts of the walls were built in the seventeenth century," continued our animated guide-book, "and the fort on the corner is Santiago. The big dome is the Cathedral and all the red tile roofs are convents and monasteries. The twentieth century hasn't reached here yet. ​To all intents and purposes the Walled City is still in the Middle Ages." The truth is that only part of the walls are really very old—some parts have been built within seventy years.
The river was full of strange craft; long, high-prowed, cumbersome looking boats, with rounded deck-houses roofed with straw matting and painted in every conceivable colour and pattern, which, we were told, were cascoes—cargo boats which ply the length of the Pásig and bring down the cocoanuts and sugar-cane and other products from the middle provinces. The only visible propelling power on these cascoes—and the only power they have—are natives, naked to the waist, armed with long bamboo poles upon which, having fixed them firmly in the mud at the bottom of the river, they push steadily as they walk the length of the narrow running beard along the outer edge of the deck. I should say they might make a mile in about two hours.
Then there were the curious little bancas; narrow canoes, hewn out of single logs and kept on an even keel, usually, by graceful outriggers of bamboo.
Across the river from the Walled City is the Custom House, and there, in a few moments, we drew up at a slippery, low, stone landing and climbed ashore. My feet, at last, were on Philippine soil.
If I had, for the time being, forgotten that a war was going on I was immediately reminded of it. The Custom House was in the hands of the Military Government and it was surrounded by khaki-clad guards who all stood stiffly at attention as my husband and General Wright passed. All our necessary luggage had been released and put into the hands of orderlies to be delivered, so we were free to start at once for home.
My husband had written me that the Philippine horses and the Philippine cockroaches were just about the same ​size, but I was hardly prepared for the diminutive turnout to which he proudly escorted me. Two little brown ponies, no higher than my shoulder, and with very shaggy manes and foretops, were hitched to a Victoria which had been built to fit them. When I stepped in and sat down, with Charlie on my lap, I felt twice my natural size and it seemed impossible to me that there was still ample room for Mr. Taft.
On the box were two stolid little men, dignified by the titles of coachman and footman. They each wore white linen trousers and thin shirts which hung outside, making them look as if they had forgotten a most important act in the process of dressing. Their bare feet were thrust into heelless red carpet-slippers, while on their heads were wide, flopping, shapeless straw hats which they did not trouble to take off at our approach.
The streets were full of such conveyances as ours, and others of varieties even more astonishing. Maria, with Robert and Helen, followed in a quilez—a miniature, one-horse omnibus affair into which the passengers climbed from the rear. Then there were calesas, caromatas, carretelas and carabao carts.
The carabao carts interested me particularly, and there seemed to be more of them than of anything else. The cart itself was nothing,—just a few planks nailed together and balanced upon a pair of heavy, broad, wooden wheels,—but the beast attached to it was really extraordinary. The first carabao I saw had horns at least six feet across. Indeed, they all have very long horns, and how they keep from obstructing traffic in the narrow streets I never did understand. They do obstruct traffic, as matter of fact, but not with their horns; only with their slow motions. Nobody can possibly know just what the word slow signifies until he has seen a carabao move. Great, grey, thick-skinned, hairless beast; his hide is always caked with mud, ​and he chews and walks at exactly the same pace while the half-naked, sleepy driver on the cart behind him gives an occasional jerk on the thin rope attached to the ring in his nose.
It was sometime before I came to know calesas, caromatas and carretelas apart, though their only likeness lies in the fact that each has two wheels and to each is attached one busy little bit of a horse. The calesa and caromata are the better class vehicles, while the carretela is a plebeian public carryall in which there always seems to be "room for one more." I saw dozens of these packed with Filipinos; the driver— always and inevitably smoking—sitting close up behind his horse and lashing it continually while it struggled sturdily along and looked every minute as if it would be lifted off its feet by the overbalancing weight behind it. It was something of a shock to see many women, in carretelas and on the street, smoking huge black cigars; while I noticed, immediately, that the men, as a rule, smoke only cigarettes.
I didn't look for speed from our little brown creatures, but I was yet to become acquainted with the Philippine pony. We started off over the rough cobblestones at a pace that was truly terrifying, and everybody else seemed to be going at about the same rate. I expected a collision every moment. Wheels passed wheels without an inch to spare, and without an instant's slackening of speed. My heart was in my mouth until we got through the maze of narrow streets in the wholesale district near the Custom House and came out into a wide plaza which my husband informed me was the end of the Escolta, the principal business street of the city. I was very glad we didn't have to drive through that; it was just about wide enough for two carriages to pass, but it had a street-car track right down the middle, and it was thronged. On the track was ​a jingling little horse-car which seemed to get very much tangled up with the rest of the traffic.
I got an impression of a great variety of colour in which red and yellow seemed to predominate. The soldiers were in khaki, the officers and civilians were in immaculate white linen, while the Filipino men and women of the ordinary class looked as if they had made a heavy draft on the world's supply of red and yellow muslin, to say nothing of many calicoes of extravagant hues and patterns.
We hurried on around the corner and came again to the banks of the river and the Bridge of Spain. Mr. Taft wanted me to know all about everything right away, so he kept on busily explaining things to me, but using so many unfamiliar words that I got only a hazy impression after all.
But here was the Bridge of Spain, originally built in sixteen hundred and something, the oldest monument to Spanish enterprise in the Islands. And across on the other side we came abreast of the inner wall of the city and whirled along awhile beside a wide, stagnant moat. From the inner side I got a better idea of what the Walled City was like, and I promised myself an early inspection of its mysteries. I wanted to walk across the old drawbridges and through the beautiful gateways which looked so ancient and were so suggestive of piratical and warlike history.
"Those are the Botanical Gardens," said Mr. Taft—"the man from Cook's"—making a general sort of gesture toward the other side of the street. What I saw was a small gravelled park with some avenues of fine palms, some other kinds of trees, and a few clumps of shrubbery. We were driving under the low-hanging branches of some magnificent old acacias, but everything looked neglected and run down, and there didn't seem to be a bit of grass anywhere; just scorching sand and clay. It was really a relief to rest one's eyes on the awful green scum on the surface ​of the moat. Manila in those days was not the beautiful, park-like, well-kept city that it has since become. There were soldiers everywhere, and it seemed to me we were being constantly saluted.
"And now we come to the far-famed Luneta," said Mr. Taft, quite proudly.
"Where?" I asked. I had heard much of the Luneta and expected it to be a beautiful spot.
"Why, here. You're on it now," he replied.
An oval drive, with a bandstand inside at either end,—not unlike a half-mile race track,—in an open space on the bay shore; glaringly open. Not a tree; not a sprig of anything except a few patches of unhappy looking grass. There were a few dusty benches around the bandstands, nothing else; and all burning in the white glare of the noonday sun.
"Why far-famed?" I asked.
Then he explained in a way which made me understand that the Luneta is not what it is, but rather what it stands for in the life of the community. He said that in the cool of the evening there were bands in the bandstands and that everybody in the world came and drove around and around the oval, exchanging greetings and gossip, while the children with their nurses played in the sand on the narrow beach. It didn't sound exciting to me, but I was afterward to learn that the Luneta is a unique and very delightful institution.
We tore on at a terrific rate and came, at last, into a narrow residence street where the rapid clatter of our ponies' feet awoke echoes from closely set houses which looked as if all their inhabitants were asleep. And they were, of course, it being the siesta hour.
A CARVED NARA OR PHILIPPINE MAHOGANY BED NOW IN MR. TAFT'S ROOM AT NEW HAVEN
hundreds of these inflammable huts were huddled together in "native quarters."
When the end of the street came in sight I began to wonder. It seemed to me we had driven many miles.
"Well, where do we live?" I asked. "Have you taken a house in the country?"
"Not quite," said Mr. Taft, "but nearly."
It was the last house in the street, surrounded by a very formidable looking, high stone wall. The first thing I knew we had whirled through a gateway and were driving past a row of soldiers who stood at attention, with their guns held stiffly in front of them. I knew our house had to be guarded, but it was something of a shock for a moment, just the same, to see the guardhouse and the trim soldiers with their business-like equipment.
If I had expected anything very fine or beautiful in the way of a tropical garden, I was disappointed. I don't know whether I did or not. The wonder to me now is how Americans ever did succeed in getting parks and gardens made. It only means that the Filipino has learned, or is learning how to work. He always was willing to work, a certain amount, but he didn't know how. My husband's description of how he got a bit of grading done is typical. The first conclusion he reached in Manila was that the people knew nothing about the value of time, and it must have been a strain on his temperate-zone nervous system to watch a squad of men at work in his garden.
They deposited the material–as usual–as far as they could from the spot where it was to be used; then, one after another, barelegged, bare bodied, incessantly smok​ing, they would take up small shovels full of earth, carry them all the way across the garden, resting once or twice on the way, dump the material somewhere in the vicinity of the place where it belonged, then drag slowly back and repeat the operation. This was the sort of thing which made Americans, in the early days, dance with impatience; the sort of thing which made Mr. Bryan's campaign talk about "cheap" Filipino labour invading the United States seem to us so utterly ridiculous. We knew that Filipino labour was the most expensive labour in the world; since it took ten men to do one American's work.
My husband had written me about the difficulty he had had in securing a suitable house, and had also explained that he was having a number of repairs and changes made which, he hoped, would put the place in good order by the time I arrived. The garden was large, but it boasted neither lawns nor flowers of any kind. A few patches of grass struggling with the hard white gravel and clay, and looking pretty hopeless, nothing else. Around a curving drive we swung up under a porte-cochère, over which hung a magnificent rubber tree, and, stepping from the undersized Victoria onto the finest of white marble steps, I found myself at home.
Our house was really the best that my husband could secure. When he first looked at it he was certain it wouldn't do at all. It belonged to Chief Justice Arellano, and the army officer who went with him to look for quarters assured him that it was the only thing in town that he could possibly live in; but he didn't believe it. It had been occupied by army officers and had been greatly abused. Its furniture was broken and piled in heaps; its walls were ragged; and its floors were scarred and dirty.
"I'll just have a look at some others," said Mr. Taft.
And he did. He went all over town, and he says that ​every house he looked at added some new, desirable aspect to the Arellano house, until, finally, it became in his eyes a sort of palace which needed only a touch here and there to make it quite perfect.
It backed directly on the Bay, and among the first things he did was to have a sea-wall built which he thought added safety to the top-heavy structure, but which, during the typhoon season, really cost him more than it was worth. Every time a big wind came and roughed up the Bay a little, a part of his wall went out. His first complaint to me was that he had been “holding that wall down” all summer, and that part of it was always sure to try to get away every time he found himself particularly occupied with harassing governmental difficulties.
He had had sod laid down between the house and the sea-wall, and had watched it for awhile with a faith which should have been rewarded, but the salt spray came dashing over it and he had to have it carefully taken up and moved around to the sheltered side of the house. Good sod was scarce in Manila in those days.
My husband was certainly glad to see me, and I don’t doubt that General Wright was just as glad to see his wife. The two of them had been “keeping house” together for three months under conditions wholly new to them, and I gathered that they found a bachelor existence rather complicated and, in certain details, annoying. In some ways, after the manner of men, they had permitted the house to run itself and I did not find it easy to break up the system which had been inaugurated.
The house was not perfect, by any means, but it was big and roomy and had what a woman knows as “great possibilities”; possibilities which I found had to be slowly developed with the assistance of a somewhat taciturn and not altogether willing ménage.
Coming in from the grand marble steps one passed up a ​short, but spacious hardwood stairway into a wide central hall which opened out on a tile floored verandah, overlooking the Bay and running the entire width of the house. This verandah was enclosed by sliding windows divided into panes about six inches square, not any two of which were the same colour. All the other windows in the house were made of beautiful, translucent pearl-shell in four inch sections—more like screens than windows—which let in the light and kept out the glare, but on the verandah the architect had tried to surpass himself, with the result that royal purple, orange, pink, bright blue and green glass disclosed to one a multi-coloured and distracting stretch of otherwise beautiful bay. The hard white light was a thousand times more bearable than such a kaleidoscope, and after I got home those windows were seldom closed.
On either side of the broad central hall were two large rooms; one the dining-room, the others commodious bedrooms; while over the porte-cochère was a small drawing-room. Downstairs were the baths and three large rooms and a duplicate of the upstairs verandah. This part of the house, which was dry and well-built, I forthwith turned over to the children.
Some of the furniture was very fine; big hardwood tables and old Spanish pieces made from the beautiful woods of the Islands, but everything was greatly in need of the polisher’s brush and chamois. The floors, alternating, broad, hand hewn planks of nara and ipil were as fine as any I ever saw, though they, too, needed long and painstaking attention. In the bedrooms were high canopied and mosquito-netted beds with cane bottoms, exactly like cane-bottomed chairs, and without mattresses. Everything else was wicker.
The thing which caught my attention first, however, were the fans. My husband had written me, with great pride and satisfaction, that he had put in electric fans, and that ​they had “saved his life.” I had some sentimental attachment for them on this account—until I saw them. But when I saw them I felt at once that everything else, to be in keeping, ought surely to be swathed in fly-specked pink gauze. The electric fans were of the variety associated in one’s mind with ice-cream “parlours”; two broad blades attached to the ceiling in the middle of the room. They had been installed in both the dining-room and sala—or sitting-room—and it was not possible in either room to see anything else. These fans were the subject of endless contention between Mr. Taft and me, but I gave in and left them to continue their mission of saving his life. He says yet that I often acknowledged on hot nights that he was right about them, but I never did.
My husband had secured his house staff in Hongkong, through the kind offices of Admiral Dewey’s servant, Ah Man, as I have already written, but being new to the ways of the Oriental, he was destined very quickly to gather some unique experience. There were four of them: the cook, the number one boy, the number two boy and the laundryman. The laundryman was Mr. Taft’s own inspiration. The Filipino laundryman, he had heard, takes the linen of his master’s household down to some stream, preferably the shallows of the Pásig, and hammers it into ribbons on smooth rocks which he uses for washboard purposes. Then he spreads the articles on the grass to dry, and the consequences were found, not infrequently, to be a bad outbreak on the master’s skin of what is known as “adobe itch,” a troublesome disease. So Mr. Taft had engaged a Chinese laundryman and had sent back to San Francisco for tubs and washboards and wringers and all the necessary paraphernalia, and had installed an up-to-date laundry in his own house, where the orders were to boil the clothes and hang them on a line. It worked perfectly, though it did take the Chinaman from the wilds of Shanghai some ​time to learn the uses of the various modern implements.
In Manila the marketing is usually done by the cook, but in our household this duty was delegated to the number one boy. One day the cook and the number two boy came to Mr. Taft with the announcement that they could not remain in the house with number one boy; that number one boy was a thief; that he smoked opium all the time he was supposed to be marketing; and that he was a bad Chinaman generally. Mr. Taft had always given number one boy the money with which to pay the other boys’ salaries and the cash market charges, so he said to the cook:
“Has number one always paid your wages?”
“Yes,” said the cook, with an eloquent shrug of his shoulders, “just my wages and nothing more.”
This meant, of course, that number one boy was committing the unforgivable sin of not dividing the “squeeze.”
There is no use going into what “squeeze” means in the Orient. It may come partly out of the master’s pocket and partly out of the pockets of the tradesmen; nobody knows. But the housekeeper soon learns that she gains. nothing by trying to circumvent the system in doing the marketing herself. The “squeeze” works, no matter who does the buying, and it soon comes to be recognised as a legitimate part of household expenses. The only thing that one can do is to make a complaint when it becomes too heavy.
It seems to have been very heavy in my husband’s establishment, and investigation proved to him that it was necessary to let number one go, so when I arrived there were just the two upstairs servants, the cook and number two, who had been promoted to the proud position of number one.
A TYPICAL PHILIPPINE RIVER SCENE AND SOME FILIPINO LAUNDRY WORK
It took me sometime to get used to this, but I came to value him highly, especially when I learned that he had, finely developed, one glorious characteristic of his kind. He could make something out of nothing. If Mr. Taft sent word at six o’clock, or even as late as seven, that he had invited four or five of his associates to dinner to continue a discussion begun earlier in the day, or for some other reason, I had only to tell Ah Sing that there would be seven or eight instead of three at dinner, and a perfect dinner would be served. Where he got his supplies with which to meet these sudden demands I never knew. I learned to accept the gifts of the gods without comment, which is the only thing to do in the East.
Ah Sing was particularly proud of his sweets. He loved to make puddings and pies with lavish decorations upon them, though none of the family cared much for such delicacies. One evening, shortly after my arrival, I was giving quite a formal dinner party; I had, as usual, given the cook a menu well thought out and, I believed, wholly appropriate to the occasion and the climate. For a sweet I had ordered an ice with some small cakes, and I was pleasantly surprised to see them duly served. But just as the party was about to rise from the table and go out ​on the verandah for coffee, in came Mr. Number One Boy with a ponderous, steaming bread-pudding, all covered with coloured ornaments, which he smilingly displayed for the benefit of the astonished party. It had to be served, of course, and I felt that my explanations regarding Ah Sing's eccentricities didn't make much of an impression.
Over none of the servants did I exercise the control I thought to be necessary, but this was due to the fact that for three months they had been obeying the master; the master had paid them their wages, and to the master they looked for all orders. It took me sometime to discover this, but when I did I began to handle household accounts without assistance.
It was about the end of the typhoon season and the predictions were that there would be no more heavy storms. But it began to rain and blow one day with rather more force than I had ever seen before, and I was told that we were in the midst of a typhoon. "Oh, well," I thought, "if this is all I don't see why there is so much talk about it.” It was just a very hard and very persistent storm. When I began to think it was about time for it to have blown itself out I was awakened one night by what seemed to me to be the bombardment of heavy artillery. My bed was shaking under me, the house was swaying, and the noise was terrifying. I jumped up with an instant idea of insurrectos, and a feeling that I must meet the situation on my feet; then I realised, at once, that it was the typhoon. It was as if all the winds that had blown for two days had gathered themselves together and were hurling themselves in one blast upon us. I reached for the electric switch, but there were no lights; I turned the button time and again; nothing happened. I fumbled for matches all over my room and could find none. My nerves were just at the crying out point when my door was thrown open and in rushed Maria, holding aloft a glimmering candle.
​She was shaking with fright.
"Nellie," she exclaimed, "I just can't stand it any longer! Do let's find everything there is to light and call Will and sit out in the sala. Heaven only knows what's going to happen!"
We searched around and found some more candles; then I went to call my husband. He was sleeping as soundly as if nothing at all were happening. I shook him and called him and shook him again. I thought he never would wake up, but finally he did, and just then I heard the crash of a tree blowing down in the garden, while the floor seemed to heave under my feet.
"What's the matter?" asked my sleepy husband.
"Will, there's an awful storm. Please come out in the sala and sit with Maria and me."
"All right," he said, and slowly got himself into an all-enveloping dressing gown.
We huddled ourselves in chairs in the big hallway and sat listening. Rain always comes with the wind in typhoons and the dash of water against the windows and the sides of the house was deafening. But the noise was suddenly punctuated by a gentle snore. Mr. Taft had settled himself back in his chair and gone quietly to sleep. Maria's nerves were on edge; without a word she jumped up and shook her tired-out brother-in-law most vigorously, crying above the roar of the storm:
"Will Taft, what do you think we waked you up for? You can't go back to sleep. We want you to stay awake and comfort us!"
"All right, Maria," said he, with the utmost good nature; whereupon he sat up, changed his position to one more comfortable, and proceeded to lapse again into peaceful slumber.
The next morning Maria and I drove down through the town to see the effects of the typhoon. Three trees were ​uprooted in our own garden, and across the street a house was flattened out. Groups of Filipinos stood here and there talking and gesticulating in their usual manner, but nobody seemed unduly excited. We saw many houses unroofed, and once in a while we met a native with a piece of nipa or tin roofing balanced on his head, quietly carrying it back where it belonged.
We drove down through the Escolta and into the crowded Tondo district beyond, and there we suddenly found ourselves hub-deep in a flood. The below-the-sea-level quarters were under several feet of water, and we got a sudden revelation as to why all the nipa houses are built on such high and unsightly stilts. Crowds of Filipinos were paddling through the flood, most of them carrying some part of a house, or other belonging, and nearly all of them playing and splashing like pleased children. Bancas―long canoes from the river—were plying from house to house as if it were an everyday affair and conditions were quite normal.
I had heard a great deal about the severity of typhoons, but as I had passed a whole season in the East and had crossed the China Sea during the typhoon season without encountering one, I began rather to scoff at the general fear of them. But I never did after that; when anybody said typhoon I knew exactly what it meant. The water subsided rapidly and in a day or two Manila showed few signs of the fury which had passed, but for several days the Commission continued to receive reports of the damage done and the lives lost throughout the surrounding country. It was the worst and the last storm of that year.
When we arrived in Manila we found the social atmosphere somewhat peculiar. Members of our own party, who had crossed the Pacific on the Hancock, welcomed us at once with dinners and teas and other kinds of parties; also a number of Army ladies called without delay, and our cir​cle broadened rapidly. But General MacArthur, who was the Military Governor and lived at Malacañan Palace, did not entertain anybody except a select military circle. He sent an aide with cards, of course, and he accepted our invitations to dinner, but that was all. Not that we minded, except that it made it rather awkward and added something to the "feeling" that all was not well between the Army and the new civil government.
The Commission had been for three months busily engaged in investigating conditions, as directed by the President, before they assumed any authority, and then they acted with no haste. We were impatiently awaiting news from America with regard to the Presidential election. It was thought to be futile to take any definite steps toward the establishment of local governments and the inauguration of far-reaching reforms until the status of American control should be settled. Mr. Bryan had promised political independence, and if Mr. Bryan were elected all the Commission's plans would go for naught.
The provincial and municipal codes were completed; certain important questions between the Church and the people were being considered, and many open sessions were held for discussion, with the purpose of advising the people that they would be listened to by a civil government. In the meantime the insurrectos were keeping things lively in a guerilla warfare with small squads of greatly harassed and very much disgusted American soldiers. There were occasional rumours about uprisings in Manila—when the guard at our gate would be doubled—but Mr. Taft assured us that Manila was as safe as New York or Chicago and we really had few fears.
General MacArthur continued to resent the coming of the Commission and to consider himself personally humiliated by their being appointed to divide his power. He was still in command of about seventy thousand men and had ​the general executive control of a large civil force, but this, apparently, was not enough. The tone he adopted in his correspondence with the Commission kept them in a constant state of controlled anger. They were very careful in return to observe every courtesy and to manifest an earnest desire for harmony and co-operation. They were tremendously interested in their problems and wanted much to succeed, but their efforts at conciliation did little good. The General objected to almost every suggestion put forward by them and did not hesitate to tell them in plain words that he did not welcome advice from them concerning military or any other matters. It was really a very difficult situation.
The Commission thought General MacArthur took an entirely erroneous view of the attitude of the Philippine people in general, and that in everything he did he moved with an exasperating slowness. They wanted a large native constabulary which they knew could successfully be organised and relied upon to render great assistance in the pacification of the Islands. He did not agree with them and held the matter up for many months. He was not in sympathy with any move they made, and his greatest cross was that he had no power to veto their legislation. He saw military dangers in all manner of things without being able to state just what they were, and he was always calling for more troops, while the Commission was entertaining hopes that it would not be a great length of time before a large part of the troops already there could be recalled. I find my husband writing at this time:
"General MacArthur, knowing that we differ from him as to the condition of things in the Islands, makes it a point to send me an account of each disaster as if it vindicated his view. This is not the spirit of a man who is likely to succeed in giving energy to a campaign which will bring about successful results, but the matters will solve them​selves in spite of his slowness of movement and lack of enthusiusm. . . .
“The minute the policy with respect to these Islands is settled by Bryan’s defeat and the election of McKinley, the leniency which has been almost too great towards ladrones and these murdering generals will have to be changed. They must be given an opportunity to come in and if they do not come in in a short time, they ought to be deported from the country and sent to Guam. This will have an effect so healthy that a short time will see accomplished what we desire. There will be a great awakening for some of these men who have come to rely on the supineness of the Americans, and who do not understand that we can be severe when we choose. . . .
“It was General Otis who inaugurated the plan of laughing at the insurrection, of capturing men and letting them go, and the result is that they have laughed at us, but with a little tightening of the reins their laugh will cease. . . .
“They dread deportation more than anything else and I have written to Secretary Root and asked him to have a prison constructed at Guam to which we may send those whom we think worthy of a less punishment than hanging. The insurrection must be suppressed for the benefit of the United States and, still more, for the benefit of the Filipino people. The lenient methods, having been tried for two years, must be changed to those more severe. . . .
“The insurrection, such as it is now, is nothing more than a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States sustained by murder and assassination of Filipinos by Filipinos. . . .
“MacArthur is drawing the reins a little tighter, though not as tight as we think he ought to draw them, and he has now imprisoned about fifteen hundred insurgents. There have been a great many arrests made in Manila, which has been the head centre of the insurrection in the ​way of raising money. I should think there have been fifty or sixty insurgent officers arrested in the city. . . .
"I sent a telegram to the Secretary of War on Sundaynight which was signed by Buencamino and other prominent Filipinos, about a dozen of them, in which they spoke out with emphasis about the continuation of the insurrection. They propose to organise what they call a counter-revolution; that is they mean they will organise a military movement among the Filipinos against Filipinos. They are getting very tired and weary of this murder and assassination policy without which the insurrection could not last a week. . . .
"You could hardly believe the closeness with which the Presidential matters are being watched by the Filipinos, and how they follow the speeches made against the Republican cause. General Smith, away down on the island of Negros, told me he had found speeches by Hoar and Bryan, and other anti-expansionists and anti-imperialists, in the most remote mountains of his district. . . .
"Every one is waiting and it is not impossible that should Bryan be elected there might be some riotous demonstration among the natives. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Señor Arellano, has made arrangements, should Bryan be elected, to leave the islands three days after the announcement. He is the ablest Filipino in the islands, by far the best lawyer and a man of the highest probity. He says that much as he is interested in the success and prosperity of his fellow-citizens, he knows that they are utterly incapable of self-government and should the guiding hand of the United States be withdrawn, chaos, conscription and corruption would follow inevitably. . . ."
I have taken these excerpts at random from my husband's letters to his brother during the months of September and October, 1900, and they serve to show the situation which existed and will illustrate the fact that we were living in ​interesting times. But they deal only with the insurrection, while the main body of his correspondence shows that the Commissioners were engaged upon legislative matters of the gravest import which would be rendered entirely superfluous should Mr. Bryan be elected and his announced policies be carried into effect. In that event they proposed immediately to turn matters back to the military government and withdraw, leaving Mr. Bryan to face the problems which they knew he would soon discover had to be dealt with from the standpoint of constructive statesmanship.
In the meantime the peace movement was rapidly gaining adherents among the people in spite of the still active insurrectos, or rather, because of them and their methods; while everybody seemed to welcome the change from a strictly military to a partially civil government.
The popularity of the Commission, as offering a change from the strictness of military rule, was becoming every day more marked. Juan de Juan, a Spaniard, and editor of the lively organ El Progreso, which was always in opposition to anything American, said that on the first of September when the Commission began to exercise its authority, he intended to devote the whole front page of his paper to just three words: "Gracias a Dios,"—Thanks to God! Juan de Juan was a good deal of a Bohemian and really cared little of what happened so long as he got a sensation out of it. September first came and went, and I don't remember whether he made good this extravagant threat or not. I presume he didn't for, though I had been in Manila less than a week, I surely would have remembered.
After the Commission had been in power for just a month, and while the excited interest in events in the United States was at its height, Juan de Juan broke out in a characteristic Spanish editorial, a translation of which has been preserved. We had entertained Juan de Juan at dinner, and he evi​dently was impressed. We made it a rule from the beginning that neither politics nor race should influence our hospitality in any way, and we came thus to have a very wide and diverse acquaintance. The editorial in El Progreso gives such a curious picture of attitude and conditions in general, as well as of my husband, my family and my home, that I think I must quote it,—at least in part. It is headed simply:
Señor Taft
The most uncompromising jingoes; the rabid partisans of militarism, as well as the men of democratic sentiments who consider the occupation of the Philippines as an odious Cæsarism, respect and venerate the President of the Civil Commission, whose surname serves as the caption of these lines. Uprightness and bon-hommie always demand recognition.
Before the Hancock, bearing this statesman, had anchored in Manila Bay, the echo of his reputation and the radiations of the brilliant aureole which his success in the judiciary of his country had imposed upon him—and we underline the word imposed because the characteristic trait of Mr. Taft is his modesty—had reached the Philippines. The Filipinos awaited him with the same pleasing curiosity with which a child opens a toy with a concealed surprise, and the foreigners as the incarnation of those American patriarchal, democratic ideas with which Castelar portrayed to his followers the country of Lincoln.
Behind that spacious brow of the thinker, between his liberal tendencies and the incomparable exactions of the enormous burdens which his country undertook in Paris, fierce struggles are waging. The President of the American Civil Commission has broad shoulders, but the weight of a people whom patriotism endows with the strength of a colossus is very great.
We must concede to all the leading authorities whom America has sent to the Philippines the trait of being industrious. We know that General Otis worked more than twelve hours a day; MacArthur, that Daban of the American Army through the rapidity of his advancement, follows the same course as his predecessor, and Mr. Taft leaves his house every morning at eight and, as unostentatiously as a clerk, proceeds to become a part of his chair in the Ayuntamiento. There his first occupation is glancing over ​the American press, and what is of interest in the Spanish papers.
Then the show begins. Paterno, Macabulos, Montenegro, some envoy from Cebu, for example, who come to sound him, as the slang saying goes, arrive. Mr. Taft has the same respectful smile for all, the same courtesy, and addresses them all in the same terms, which his athletic Secretary, Mr. Fergusson, repeats in Spanish with the gravity of a Sphinx and the fidelity of a phonograph. When the matter warrants it, Mr. Pepperman, the chief stenographer of the Commission, enters the office and proceeds to take notes of the interview.
In this way the Americans are forming a luminous record which, united to what were our archives, which they preserve through the terms of the Treaty of Paris, will guide them well in the administration of the Philippines.
Later Mr. Taft becomes engulfed in the examination of the bills which the other members of the Commission present for him to study; he discusses their text with his colleagues, listens to all their observations, and judging them by a standard most favorable to the interests of the Philippines, the most liberal within the instructions from Washington—it is proper to say that Mr. Taft is the most democratic element of the Commission—he expresses his opinion, generous, calm and noble, which assuredly, in view of his personal prestige, must carry great weight in the framing of the bills, whose execution is entrusted to the Military governor.
To dissipate the gloomy smoke of the conflagration, to still the groans of those who fall in this immense expoliarium into which fatality has converted the Philippine fields, is the mission which the men composing the American Commission desire to bring to a successful issue. To make peace. For this they came, and if fortune does not reserve for them the happy chance of accomplishing so beautiful an ideal, they will retire, and the factor they represent in the problem to be solved, with its distinguishing traits of civil moderation, will be substituted as a system that has failed, by another, wherein the martial power will prevail over political wisdom.
As General MacArthur undoubtedly spends many hours over maps the Philippines, Mr. Taft also often rests his gaze on a map covering one of the walls of his office, tracing, in mente, a railroad which, crossing the island, shall drown with the cheery whistle of the locomotive the moans of the victims of war. Thus would Mr. Taft like to pacify the Philippines.
It is now one o'clock p.m. and Mr. Taft is at home, where this personage stands out more boldly before us, since the trials through which the country is passing do not permit us yet to judge him politically.
The President of the Commission, in his private life, has many points of similarity with Count de Caspe, that stainless gentleman the Filipinos still recall with veneration. Excepting the brilliancy of those splendid entertainments with which he endeavoured to blot out all racial differences by mingling in fraternal embrace Filipinos and Spaniards at the Malacañan villa, there ordinarily reigned in the governor's mansion the placid silence of the home of a well-to-do retired merchant. The Countess, who on Thursdays did the honours of her salon with exquisite tact, was during the other days of the week a housekeeper who did not disdain to go to a grocery store to make purchases, or to look over the laundry list.
The same thing happens in the elegant chalet at Malate where Mr. Taft lives. This is a quiet and peaceful home, a temple erected to the affections, under whose roof Mr. Taft rests some hours after the efforts which his political work demands.
His table reflects his modest character. Four courses, two kinds of fruit, a dessert and sauterne compose the menu of the luncheon where Mr. Taft is always accompanied by some guest, either Filipino, American or Spanish. During the meal politics are banished; if the guest is a Filipino who speaks French Mrs. Taft interrogates him on the customs of the archipelago; if he is Spanish, as to the toilettes worn in Manila by the ladies at the most brilliant receptions held here; as to the favourite musical composer of the Hispano-Filipino society; and this conversation increases in attraction when Miss Herron, sister-in-law of Mr. Taft and the incarnation of the modern woman's education, takes part therein. Miss Herron speaks French correctly, has travelled much, and journeyed through Spain like an intelligent tourist. The architectural lace-work of the Alhambra charmed her, and she went into ecstasies over the orange blossoms growing along the banks of the Guadalquivir. With what Miss Herron was not in harmony, and she berates them like an unsubsidised journalist, were the Spanish railroads. Miss Herron is right.
The children, Robert, about eleven years old; Helen, a girl of nine, and Charles, a baby of three, who is the king of the household:—the McKinley, as it were, of this patriarchal republic—do not come to the table; they eat with the governess.
After the meal, in the fine gallery overlooking the sea, sipping the coffee, Mr. Taft talks of the education of his children, of the difficulties met in the Philippines in the solution of so interesting a problem; and his wife converses of the charitable work she expects to undertake when she shall have assumed a more permanent place in the Archipelago, which Magellan discovered for Spain, and which, through a horrible fatality, is no longer ours. Politics are also eschewed on the gallery.
Needless to say this extraordinary editorial afforded us all boundless amusement; we began to caution Mr. Taft frequently about the careful preservation of his "aureole" and Maria and I decided that we would have to walk warily indeed, if we were destined to be so minutely reported.