Malacañan is old and rather damp and, in my time, some of it had not been furnished or finished according to modern ideas, but in size and dignity it leaves nothing to be desired, and it has historic associations which give it an atmosphere that I found to be quite thrilling. It contains many fine, old-world Spanish portraits, and there is one large canvas of especial interest which hangs at the head of the main stairway. It depicts the ceremony through which Magellan made peace with the natives of Cebu when he landed on that island in April, 1521. This consisted of drawing blood from the breasts of the principal parties to the contract, the one drinking that of the other. The Spaniards called it the Pacto de Sangre, or the Blood Pact, and so the picture is named. In our own day the Katipunan League, the strongest and most sinister of all the insurrectionary secret societies, are said to have adopted this ceremony in their rites of initiation, and members of the League could be identified by a peculiar scar on the breast.
The grounds at Malacañan contain, perhaps, twenty acres, and in those days there were fields and swamps in the enclosure as well as lawns and fountains, flowerbeds and kitchen gardens. There were five or six good-sized houses in the grounds for the use of secretaries and aides, and the stables were very large.
I would not care to hazard a guess as to the number of parientes we sheltered in the quarters of our employees. Mr. Taft called these quarters our “Filipino tenement” and “Calle Pariente,” but screened with shrubbery and spreading down the sides of a twenty-acre lot the colony did not seem as conspicuous as our huddled tribe had been in Malate.
The Palace is architecturally Spanish, yet it lacks the large patio, having two small courts instead. The lower floor, on a level with the ground, is really nothing more than a basement and has no usable spaces in it except some raised offices and cloak rooms. Frequently during bad typhoons I have seen water two and three feet deep in the entrance hall, but it always receded very rapidly and seldom gave us any inconvenience. The entrance, which is paved with marble, is very broad, and there is a wide and imposing staircase of polished hardwood leading to the reception hall above. The great living-rooms open one into another, giving a fine perspective, and they lead, through a dozen different doorways, on to a splendid, white-tiled verandah which runs out to the bank of the Pásig River. There is a picturesque, moss-covered river landing on the verandah below.
There are about twenty rooms on the one floor, all of them good sized and some of them enormous, and it took a great many servants to keep the place in order. The floors were all of beautiful hardwoods and it required a permanent force of six muchachos to keep them in a proper state of polish. The Filipino method of polishing floors is interesting. Your muchacho ties either banana leaves or some sort of bags on his bare feet, then he skates up and down, up and down, until the floors get so slick that he himself can hardly stand up on them. It is easy to imagine that six boys skating together in the spaciousness of the Palace might cut fancy figures and have a delightful time generally, if they thought they were unobserved. Filipinos of the muchacho class always play like children, no matter what they are doing, and they have to be treated like children.
The Palace furniture, which must have been very fine in Spanish days, was of red narra, or Philippine mahogany, handsomely carved and displaying on every piece the Spanish coat-of-arms. But during the changing Spanish regimes someone with a bizarre taste had covered all the beautiful wood with a heavy coat of black paint. The effect was depressingly sombre to me.
The porcelain, however, or what was left of it, was unusually good. The Spanish coat-of-arms in beautiful colours was reproduced on each plate against a background of a dark blue canopy. I must say there were quite as many reminders of Spanish authority as I could wish for and I frequently felt that some noble Don might walk in at any moment and catch me living in his house.
But, it didn’t take us long to get settled down in our new domain, and I soon ceased to regret the sea breezes and the salt baths of Malate. Malacañan enjoyed a clean sweep of air from the river and our open verandah was in many ways an improvement on the gaudily glazed one that we had gradually become accustomed to in the other house. The Malacañan verandah, being much of it roofless, was of little use in the daytime, but on clear evenings it was the most delightful spot I have ever seen. I began to love the tropical nights and to feel that I never before had known what nights can be like. The stars were so large and hung so low that they looked almost like raised silver figures on a dark blue field. And when the moon shone—but why try to write about tropical moonlight? The wonderful sunsets and the moonlit nights have tied more American hearts to Manila and the Philippines than all the country’s other charms combined. And they are both indescribable.
