So we trailed on, rather despondent, and very thirsty, between the huts and boats, through the deep soft sand, which was unpleasant to walk on. We saw a big parao lying drawn up, hewn out of one vast tree-trunk, which is the original model of these long, narrow boats, and it looked like a huge baroto (canoe).
When we got to the house, Tuyay was greeted most enthusiastically by a little spaniel friend, and the caretakers were civil enough to us, but incredibly stupid about a request for coffee. At last C—— made them understand by talking to them in Visayan, but it is really very strange how very few of the people in the country know any Spanish, and the town’s-people can only say a few words or phrases at the best.
We took chairs out of the house, opened the sliding bamboo frames shutting off the balcony, and established ourselves out there in the cool shade. There we sat for an hour, munching maize, and watching three fowls and three brown babies picking up mysterious food on the rocks and in the shallow pools. One of the babies was an elderly person of five or six, who was “minding” the other two, and one could see that he was older and more important, as he had on a very short and entirely foolish white muslin shirt, but the other two were in nothing but fat brown skin. The tiniest was a very serious and bullet-headed little chap, with thin arms and legs, and a huge rice-tummy. All three mites were squatting about, very busy and solemn, finding some little shell-fish, which they cracked between stones and ate with the gestures of monkeys.
They were to us a source of absolute delight, and it was not till the elderly pastor in the muslin shirt led his flock off to fresh pools out of sight that we went into the house and drank the coffee which the woman had prepared for us. It was excellent black coffee, made in the native fashion by holding the grounds in a little bag at the end of a piece of bamboo in a coffee pot—simple, but effective. With it went large flat cakes of yellowish sugar, called caramelo, and she had also produced from somewhere four ship’s biscuits. The latter were rather a relief after the maize, and indeed we thought the meal a delicious feast, though I have no doubt we would not have looked at it over the other side of the Guimaras Channel.
After this, as it was about six o’clock, and the sun was going down, we walked down to the river mouth and got on board the good ship Valentino by crawling along another parao, which was beached in the shallower water further inshore, and thence by perilous ventures along those outriggers on which the sailors run about in a gale as if they were on firm land!
The sail back in the sunset was exquisite, all the mountains of Panay dark blue against an orange sky, a young moon overhead, and the air exquisitely fresh.
Altogether it was a most delightful trip, and I only wish we had had more such days, but with only one day a week to choose from it is often too hot, and sometimes too wet to go on the water. Most of the time, too, I have not been well enough for expeditions under the most favourable circumstances, and then, over and above all these reasons is the fact that one seldom has the inclination here to do anything or go anywhere. I think it must be owing to this latter phenomenon that there is no sort of “week-end resort” at Nagaba, for one can hardly understand how such an enterprising people as the Americans have neglected this golden opportunity for a business that, I believe, they understand so admirably—I mean sort of Simple Life Hotels. I remember an American whom I met at home once, in England, telling me a long story about some place in the Adirondaks, where people from New York (or was it Chicago?—no matter) go and live in tents; and millionaires catch food, and their priceless wives and daughters cook and sweep. The story came up à propos the daughter of a millionaire who had just married an English duke, as this personage had been roughing it in the next tent to my friend. I think I may have told you the story at the time. But I have read so much and heard so much about the American love of country life that I am astounded to see how they all sit grilling in Iloilo when they might have a hotel at Nagaba. The truth is, of course, that such an enterprise might be a doubtful undertaking, as every American I have ever yet met or seen, from the highest to the humblest, is simply saving money to get away from the Philippines and back to “God’s Country.”
We are still undecided about our departure, as the Sung-Kiang (the sister-ship of the Kai-Fong and the same Line) has come in before what the Americans call her “scheduled” time. That is a very queer word of theirs, by-the-bye, and they work the poor thing to death, making it do all sorts of unnatural gymnastics in place of good, ready, useful English. Probably we shall wait for the Kai-Fong, but whichever we decide for, we shall not miss the Taft party after all, which I am very pleased about, and we have put our names down for the banquet.
They are in Manila now, the first intimation of their arrival having been a telegram in the Iloilo El Tiempo, headed “Impresiones de Miss Alice Roosevelt”—who had not been an hour in the Philippines, if she had landed at all, when the impression was what newspaper language calls “voiced.”
Now we have The Manila Times of that and the following two days, which are “all Taft,” of course, set forth in the quaintest concoction of cheap picture-writing, bad grammar, and awkward, slapdash slang. Much about “Miss Alice,”—a whole column of an interesting description of that lady’s every gesture at a race-meeting—in fact she looms so large in the Philippine eye that it looks as if she were here for a very good reason; perhaps to take the fierce, white light off Mr Taft a little. They allude to the latter, by-the-bye, as “the Secwar,” which, when I first came across it, I took to be the name of some Indian chief, but it at last dawned upon me that the word was a contraction of Secretary of War, and I have since been told that it is his telegraphic address used as an affectionate nickname.