This will go out by the Hong Kong mail to-morrow, and I will catch the next one by writing as soon as I get home, and sending the letter by the Butuan when she returns.
LETTER XVIII.
THE RETURN VOYAGE AND MY COMPANIONS
S.S. “Butuan,” March 12, 1905.
I will begin a letter to you now, as I may not have much time for writing just after I get home. Not that there is really any fear of my letter to you coming off second best in any case! You say how much you like my letters, and what a pleasure they are to you, but they can’t be half such a treat as yours are to me. I can’t tell you what it is to hear all the home news, and about the frosty days, and the Christmas shops, and the cold, jolly winter, and all the things one longs for out here with a longing that is absolutely painful in this everlasting, sweltering heat.
Talking of heat, I don’t think I told you about a place above Manila away inland, called Benguet? It is nick-named the Simla of Manila because it is a cool region, high up in the mountains, where there are pine trees, and frost at night, and fireplaces in the houses. This resort is not much good to the average person, however, for it is three days’ journey from Manila by rail and road—when the said road is not swept away, which is its usual condition—and the trip costs more than to go to Japan. The governor and the whole administration move up en masse in the hot season, and they have very nice houses, but there is not much in the way of accommodation for mere mortals. This is the only attempt at “hills” in the Philippines, which is a great pity, but then there are no roads, and the places away from the big towns are not at all safe. Even round about Manila the country is infested with what are officially called Ladrones (robbers), who are really Insurgents, and quite recently the wife of a Filipino official was kidnapped, and there was a great fuss about it.
The Butuan is, on this trip, even less of a floating paradise than when I came in her, for, on arriving on board yesterday, I found to my horror that she was simply swarming with a Filipino boys’ school going on an Easter outing to Iloilo. I wonder if you can even faintly imagine what that means, or even dimly picture the condition of the ship, when I tell you that there are seven four-berth cabins and we carry seventy-two first-class passengers!
I consider myself fortunate in being in the best cabin again, with nothing worse to put up with than the company of a pleasant native and her little maidservant. She, the mistress, is a full-blooded Filipina, and fearfully indignant at any insinuations to the contrary; a fat, swarthy person, with a good-tempered, flat face that is probably handsome according to its standards, and she wears a costume reduced to the last limits of propriety, in the form of an untidy skirt, a spotlessly white loose linen jacket, and slippers—which, I must say, is a most enviable get-up in this temperature.
She tells me she was first married to a Spaniard, who left her very well off, and her present husband is a German-American in the coastguard service in Manila. She is now on a visit to her brother in the Island of Negros. I took this person to be about thirty; but she tells me she is forty-three, and that her good temper has kept her young looking, which I can quite believe, for she takes the most “unpleasant episodes” with the greatest amiability, and is really quite a charming companion. She says that her husband is of a worrying nature, so he looks forty——