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 Hong Kong, 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.
I went immediately to work to order my household as I always had been used to doing, and there’s where I began to get my experience of the Oriental character. My cook was a wrinkled old Chinaman who looked as if he had concealed behind his beady little eyes a full knowledge of all the mysteries of the East, to say nothing of its vague philosophies and opium visions. He called me “Missy” and was most polite, but in all the essentials he was a graven image. He was an unusually good cook, though he did exactly as he pleased, and seemed to look upon my feeble efforts at the direction of affairs with a tolerant sort of indifference. He would listen to my instructions most respectfully, carefully repeat after me the nice menus I devised, say, “yes, Missy,” then return to his kitchen and cook whatever suited his fancy.
It took me some time 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
