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 smoking, 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 seawall 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 seawall, 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 multicoloured 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 narra and ipil,
