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 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.