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.
VI
A Strange Environment
In the Far East one meets certain expressions the significance of which may be described as adamantine. Each represents a racial attitude against which it is useless to contend. In Japan it is the equivalent of it cannot be helped; a verbal shrug of the shoulders with which the Japanese tosses off all minor and many grave annoyances. “Masqui,” down the China coast, has the same import, but with the added meaning of “what difference does it make.” In the Philippines the phrase which must be met and which cannot be overcome by any system of reform is “el costumbre del pais”—the custom of the country.
If it is el costumbre del pais it has to be done and there is nothing more to be said about it. The manaña habit—putting everything off until tomorrow—is, perhaps, to Americans, the most annoying of all the costumbres del pais in the Philippines, but it yields to pressure much more readily than do many others, among which is the custom of accumulating parientes; that is, giving shelter on a master’s premises to every kind and degree of relative who has no other place to live. This is, I suppose, a survival of an old patriarchal arrangement whereby everybody with the remotest or vaguest claim upon a master of a household gathered upon that master’s doorstep, so to speak, and camped there for life.
In my first encounter with this peculiarity of my environment I thought there was a large party going on in my cochero’s quarters; and an indiscriminate sort of party it seemed to be. There were old men and old women, young men and young women, many small children and a few babes in arms. We had only Chinese servants in the house, but the stables were in charge of Filipinos and, as I soon discovered, the “party” was made up entirely of our stablemen’s parientes.
I had a pair of ponies and a Victoria; Mr. Taft had his two little brown horses and a Victoria; besides which there was an extra horse to be used in case of accident to one of the others, as well as a pony and calesa for the children. This rather formidable array was necessary because we found it impossible to take a horse out more than twice a day, and usually not more than once, on account of the sun. My ponies were taken out only in the early morning or the late evening, and those of Mr. Taft had all they could do to take him to the office and bring him home twice a day. Distances were long and there were no street cars which ran where anybody wanted to go.
This number of conveyances made a good many stablemen necessary and all of them, with their families, lived in quarters attached to the stables. These families consisted of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins near and far removed, wives, children, grandchildren, and a few intimate and needy friends with their family ramifications. Besides our three cocheros and the stable boys, there was a gardener with his parientes, so it is no wonder that on my first inspection of the lower premises I should have thought that some sort of festivity was in progress. I might have lived in Manila twenty years without being able to straighten out the relationships in this servant colony; it was not possible to learn who had and who had not a right to live on the place; and my protest was met with the simple statement that it was el costumbre del pais, so I, perforce, accepted the situation.
Filipino servants never live in the master’s residence; they never want to; they want the freedom of a house of their own, and these houses are, as a rule, built on the outer edges of the garden, or compound. I believe Americans now are learning to meet the pariente habit by having room for just as many people as they need, and no more. But those who live in the old places, with their ample quarters, still gather the clans and are permitted to enjoy a most expansive and patriarchal sensation.
My horses, when I first saw them, were a source of the greatest pride. A beautifully matched pair of coal-black, stylishly-paced and glossy little stallions, hardly larger than Shetland ponies, they looked as if they had been washed in some sort of shrinking soap and had come out in perfect condition except that they were several sizes smaller than they ought to have been. These Philippine ponies are doubtless descendants of the Arabian horses brought over by the Spaniards and have been reduced to their present size by
