WHAT I am about to say will be of interest only to persons who for one reason or another are on the verge of a first trip to Mexico, as it will have to do chiefly with bald facts about the conditions of travel in the republic—railway trains, luggage, cabs, hotels, restaurants (there aren’t any), baths, beds, bottled water, butter—anything indeed that occurs to me as relevant to the matter of travel. I know beforehand that my attempt to make a few practical, sensible remarks on the subject will prove unsatisfactory—perhaps exasperating. After one has lived in Mexico any length of time one completely forgets the point of view of persons who have never been there. So if I happen to leave out the one thing dear reader most wishes to be informed upon, I humbly hope I may be forgiven; for if I might choose between writing about such affairs and being broken on the wheel, I should immediately inquire the nearest way to the wheel. Suggestions as to routes of travel, excursions, and “sights,” I omit deliberately, as allthe Mexican railways publish attractive, illustrated folders that treat of these with much greater lucidity than I ever hope to attain.
Conventionally speaking, traveling in Mexico is uncomfortable. By this I don’t mean that a person in ordinary health is subjected to hardships, but merely that trains and hotels always lack the pleasing frills to which one is accustomed in the United States and Europe. A train is a means of transporting yourself and your belongings from one place to another and nothing else. Americans—and with reason—look upon their best trains as this and considerably more. The Mexican cars follow the American plan of a middle aisle with exits at either end, and, as in Europe, are usually of the first, second, and third class. A first-class car resembles in every respect what is known in the United States as “a coach” (as distinguished from a sleeping and a parlor car)—even to its squalor. Furthermore, as there are rarely enough of them they are almost always crowded. I have often noticed that Mexicans, generally speaking, either can afford to travel first class, or can’t afford to travel second. The second-class car is therefore sometimes comparatively empty and endurable when the other two are neither. Even after buying a first-class ticket I have morethan once found it worth while to sit in a second-class car; but naturally this is not always true. Second-class cars for some reason are gradually being abolished.
In many of the larger places—the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, Puebla, Vera Cruz—you can buy tickets at the railway’s city office and then at the station check luggage at any time. It is invariably a saving of good temper, anxiety, and comfort to do so, for the ticket window at the station (surrounded by a dense crowd of the unwashed) does not open until half an hour or twenty minutes before the train leaves, and it takes longer to check luggage in Mexico than in any country in which I have traveled. The system, in its final results, is precisely that of the United States; the things are weighed, one is charged for an excess of one hundred and fifty pounds on every first-class ticket, and given in some cases a separate cardboard check for every piece, and in others a printed, filled-in receipt for all of them on a slip of paper. But why so simple a process should take so much time I have not been able to learn. Recently in Vera Cruz it required at the station of the Interoceanico railway three quarters of an hour and the combined intellectual and physical efforts of two clerks and three cargadores(working hard all the time) to furnish me with checks for six trunks and several smaller pieces. Fortunately I had gone there long before train time and was the only passenger in the station. It is but fair to admit that there was a slight hitch in the proceedings—five or six minutes—when darkness overtook us before the electric light was turned on and some one had to rush out and buy a candle in order that work could be resumed (this in one of the great seaports of the world!), but all the rest of the time was consumed in checking the trunks. For each trunk they seem to write half a page of memoranda in a book, pausing now and then to lean back and look at the ceiling as if in the throes of composing a sonnet. All things considered, it is well in Mexico to allow yourself at the railway station what would seem in other countries a foolish amount of time.
In some of the towns most visited by tourists the trains are now met by English-speaking interpreters from the various hotels, who, by taking charge of the checks and baggage, make the arrival and departure of even persons who are new to the country and speak no Spanish a simple and painless matter. When this does not happen, however, you may put yourself with perfect confidence into the hands of alicensed cargador—a licensed cargador being a porter with a numbered brass tag suspended about his neck on a string. Outside of the City of Mexico I have never known a licensed cargador who was not, in at least the practice of his profession, entirely capable and honest. He will carry your hand bags to a cab, or in places where there are no cabs, to the street car that invariably passes near the best hotels, and a short time afterwards—if you have intrusted him with your checks—arrive at the hotel with your trunks. For carrying hand bags from the train to the cab or street, twenty-five centavos is ample. The charge for taking trunks from the station to the hotel is usually fifty centavos apiece. As a measure of absolute safety, although it is hardly necessary, you may remove a cargador’s tag from his neck and keep it as a hostage until you receive your trunks. A cargador with a license is for all reasons preferable to one without. Being licensed by the city government, he has a definite status which he hesitates to imperil. By retaining his tag, or noting and remembering his number, you have an infallible means of identifying him in case your trunks should fail to arrive. But they always do arrive.
Except in the City of Mexico you are rarely tempted to get into a cab; you prefer either to walkor to make use of the street cars which will always take you anywhere worth going to. In the capital, however, although the electric-car service is excellent, cabs seem to be a necessity. They are of two classes and the cost of riding in them is fixed by law, but unless you find out beforehand from some one who is informed upon the subject exactly how much you ought to pay, the cabman will demand several times his legal fare. On fête days and Sundays, and between the hours of midnight and six in the morning, the fare is double.
If your train leaves at an early hour in the morning, you cannot get breakfast at the hotels; coffee and rolls, or pan dulce—a slightly sweetened cross between bread and cake—is usually served somewhere in the station. There are no dining cars; the train instead stops at decent intervals at stations provided with clean and adequate Chinese restaurants. Even when the train is very late there is no need of being hungry; at almost every station women and girls walk up and down the platform selling fruit, pulque, and tortillas covered with strange, smeary condiments that taste much better than they look. One of these decorated tortillas and a glass of pulque may not exactly satisfy the appetite, but they effectually kill it. Pulque—a thin fluid resembling water that has been poured into a receptacle in which a little milk had been carelessly left—tastes like a kind of degenerate buttermilk, and in the middle of a hot journey is delicious and refreshing. It is derived from the sap of the maguey plant and is often spoken of as “the national drink.” This somehow strikes me as a misnomer. Pulque is certainly peculiar to Mexico and on the highlands it is drunk in enormous quantities. But in the tierra caliente and the tierra templada where maguey does not grow, what pulque there is has to be brought from a distance and is neither good nor very popular. In the lowlands fiery derivatives of the sugar cane are much more prevalent. Although I have had irrefutable ocular evidence to the effect that pulque, when drunk in sufficient quantities, is extremely intoxicating, it is difficult after only a glass or two to believe so. But I have drunk it only in the country, where it is fresh and comparatively pure. In towns it is invariably doctored and injurious.
If you are not too warm and too tired and too cross, a Mexican railway journey is infinitely more amusing than trips by rail elsewhere. In the first place smoking, except in sleeping cars, is nowhere prohibited, and smoking would tend to promote sociability even if Mexicans on trains were not always eager to talk at any hour of the day or night. In a crowded car the volume of conversation is at times appalling. It is not perhaps deeply interesting, but it is always amiable, vivacious, and incessant, and if you show the slightest desire to participate you are never made to feel unwelcome.
The Anglo-Saxon shibboleth of travel is, I should say, neatness and reserve. We do not keep on adding to our carefully calculated luggage after we have once settled ourselves in a train, and we are not inclined to forsake our book or our magazine for a casual acquaintance unless we have some reason to believe the exchange will be profitable. Mexicans, on the other hand, are in an engaging fashion the most slovenly and expansive little travelers imaginable. For laden though they be with all manner of flimsy baggage, they impulsively buy everything that is thrust at them—if it takes up enough room and is sufficiently useless—and talk to everyone in sight.
The train, for instance, stops at a lonely station in a vast dun-colored plain, planted everywhere in straight, never-ending lines of maguey. At the foot of the bare mountains in the distance, and seen through a faint haze of dust, is the high white inclosure around the buildings of an hacienda with the tiled dome and towers of its private church glittering in the sunlight. Two antique, high-hung carriages with dusty leather curtains, each drawn by a pair of mules, are at one side of the station, and standing near by a neat mozo, with a smart straw sombrero (a Mexican hat, more than other hats takes on something of the nature of its owner), and a narrowly folded red sarape reposing—Heaven knows how; I can’t carry one that way—on his left shoulder, is holding three saddle horses. The antique carriages—they look as if they dated from the time of Maximilian, and probably do—have brought the hacendado, his imposing wife, two babies, three older children, a nurse for each baby, and two dressy, hatless young ladies, from the house to the train. One of the horses was ridden by a mozo who is to accompany the family on its travels (he, however, goes second class), the second brought the mozo who is to lead back the horse of the first, while the third—a finer animal who objects to trains and whose head has been left tightly checked for the benefit of the passengers—carried a slender young man, presumably the son, who has come to see the others off. Mamma is not yet middle-aged, but her figure—her waist line—is but a reminiscence; has passed in fact into Mexican history. She wears a heavy brown woolen skirt (the thermometer stands at about 92°),a rebozo twisted around her arms and across her back as if she were a lady Laocoon, and a shirt waist of white cashmere covered with large crimson polka dots; the kind of material that makes one feel as if a very methodical person had had the nose-bleed. Papa has on skin-tight trousers of shepherd’s plaid, a “boiled” shirt with a turned-over collar (clean—but they wilted on the drive), a plain black jacket that extends only a few inches below his belt, a flowing silk necktie of the peculiarly beautiful shade of scarlet one usually sees in the neckties of rurales, a small but businesslike revolver in a holster at his hip, and a shaggy, gray beaver sombrero embroidered around the brim in gold and silver flowers, weighing about two pounds and costing at least seventy-five or a hundred pesos. The older children—little girls—and the two dressy, hatless young ladies are in what might be called the Franco-Mexican style of traveling costume; thin summer dresses of bright pink and yellow and blue and white materials made with many little tucks and frills and ruffles, and adorned with narrow bands of coarse white lace applied in a rather irrelevant fashion with here and there a knot of soiled white satin ribbon. Besides a goodly number of venerable valises they have brought with them the usual collection of cardboard hatboxes and tenates (a kind of flexible basket without handles, made of matting). Some of their effects are informally wrapped in bath towels of pleasing hues. It takes much time, a whirlwind of talk and all the remaining space in the car, to stow away everybody and everything; then as the train moves from the station there is a shrill chorus of good-bys and a prolonged wiggling of fingers through the windows at the son on the platform.
As it is only two o’clock in the afternoon, they undoubtedly were fortified by an elaborate midday meal about an hour and a half before, but at the next station oranges are offered for sale, so papa through the window buys a dozen oranges and everybody, maids and all—except the youngest baby—eats one. A few stations farther on we pass through a kind of an oasis where flowers are grown for the market. Short sections of the trunk of a banana tree, hollowed out, stopped at both ends and filled with gardenias, are held up to the window. Everyone exclaims, “Oh qué bonitas!” and as they have more things now than they can take care of, mamma buys one of them and, after a short mental struggle, the elder of the dressy young ladies buys another.
“How fragrant they are!” you murmur as the sweet, opaque scent of the gardenias begins to joinforces with the tobacco smoke and the lingering smell of the eleven oranges. Papa, delighted, at once picks out one of the largest flowers and hands it to you across the aisle. Your thanks are profuse and there is a moment of intensely interested silence while you smell it and put it in your button-hole. Then you ask mamma what they are called in Spanish, and after she tells you—repeating the name emphatically four or five times—she asks you if they grow in your country. You reply yes, but that they are expensive—costing in midwinter sometimes as much as a dollar gold apiece. This announcement creates a tremendous sensation on the part of everyone, as mamma didn’t pay a fifth of that sum for all of them. One of the dressy young ladies says she is going to count hers to see how much they would come to in the United States in midwinter; and now the bark of conversation having been successfully launched, you sail pleasantly along in it until the next station, where one of the three little girls interrupts with the exclamation that on the platform she sees some papayas. A papaya being a bulky, heavy fruit of irregular shape and the size of a large squash, papa naturally leans out of the window and acquires two—buying the second one, he explains, in case he should be disappointed in theflavor of the first. But before the opening of the papaya you excuse yourself and go into another car, for without a plate and a knife and a spoon, a papaya, like a mango, can be successfully managed only while naked in a bath tub. After it is all over, however, you return for more talk, and for days afterwards, if your destination happens to be the same, you and papa wriggle fingers at each other from passing cabs, and you and mamma and the two dressy young ladies (who still haven’t hats) bow as old friends. But about hotels——
They are, broadly speaking, of three kinds. First, the ordinary “best hotel” and next best hotel of the place, conducted by Mexicans who have gradually made concessions to progress until their establishments are equipped with electric lights, electric bells (sometimes), sanitary plumbing, wire-spring mattresses (or whatever they are called), some comfortable chairs in either the patio or the sala, and cooks whose dishes, although native in conception, are yet conservative in the matter of chile and lard. Secondly, there is the occasional hotel kept by an American family, whose advertisements emphasize the fact that here you will enjoy the delights of “American home cooking.” And, finally, there is what is known inMexico as a mesón: a combination of lodging house for man and stable for his horses and mules.
The ordinary best and second-best hotels in Mexican towns I have grown to regard as exceedingly creditable and satisfactory places in which to abide. They are not luxurious; tiled floors, with a strip of carpet or matting at the bedside, calcimined walls without pictures, just sufficient furniture, and high, austere ceilings, are not our idea of luxury. But as long as they preserve their distinctly Mexican characteristics they are, contrary to the conventional idea of the country, above all, clean. I have rarely been in a Mexican hotel where the chambermaids (who are usually men) did not all but drive me insane with their endless mopping and dusting and scouring and polishing of my ascetic bedroom. When, however, as sometimes happens, the proprietor of the “best” hotel becomes desirous of upholstered chairs and carpets, it is well, I think, to patronize the still Mexican second best. Few things are more lovable than carpets and upholstery worn shabby by those we care for, but nothing is more squalid and repulsive than the evidence of unknown contacts paid for by the day or week. The hotels, as a rule, are of two stories built around a tiled patio, full of flowers and plants, and opento the sky. The more expensive rooms have windows looking upon the street, and in cold or gloomy weather have the advantage of being lighter and warmer than the others. In very hot weather, however, the cheap rooms—dim, windowless, and opening only on the patio—are sometimes preferable. Prices vary slightly in different places and at different seasons, but at their highest they are never really exorbitant, outside of the Capital. Board and lodging costs anywhere from two and a half to five pesos a day, according to the situation of your room, and, unlike European hotels, this includes everything. There are none of the extra charges for light, attendance, “covers,” and so on, that in Europe so annoy the American traveler. At one hotel at Cuernavaca, during the tourist season, rooms and board are as high as six pesos a day, but this lasts only a short time, and is, after all, not so ruinous as it sounds when you think of it as three American dollars rather than six Mexican pesos. For a peso or so less you can, if you wish, take a room at a hotel without board; but unless you happen to have friends in town who keep house, and with whom you constantly lunch and dine, there is no advantage in doing so, as the best restaurant is invariably that of the best hotel.When I said that there were no restaurants in Mexico, I merely meant that while the various native fondas and cafés where meals are served are sometimes clean and adequate, they do not offer any of those attractions that in the cities of Europe, and a very few cities of the United States, tempt one from one’s ordinary existence. There is in Mexico no “restaurant life” (for want of a better term), no lavishly appointed interiors where you may go to watch well-dressed people spending a great deal of money, listening to music, and eating things they are unaccustomed to at home.
The meals in Mexican hotels are: Breakfast, from about seven to half past nine, consisting of coffee, chocolate, or tea, and pan dulce or rolls. Eggs and meat are extra. To a few teaspoonfuls of excessively strong coffee is added a cupful of boiling milk. Mexican coffee is excellent in itself, but the native habit of overroasting it makes its flavor harsh. As milk is almost always boiled in Mexico, cream is unknown. Chocolate is good everywhere, although it is difficult at first to reconcile yourself to the custom, in some places, of flavoring it with cinnamon. Persons who like tea for breakfast, or at any time, should travel with their own.
At dinner—from noon to about half past two—you are given soup, sometimes fish, eggs always (cooked in any way you please), meat (beefsteak or roast beef), chicken (or another kind of meat), with salad if you ask for it, frijoles (a paste of black beans), a dessert (preserves of some sort, rarely pastry), fruit, and coffee. All of which sounds rather better than it ever is. The dinner is served in courses, and in some hotels you are expected to use the same knife and fork throughout. You never have any desire to eat or, after the first day or so, to try everything. The soups are well flavored and nourishing, the eggs are always fresh, the frijoles preserve a certain standard throughout the country, which you appreciate if you like frijoles, either the chicken or one of the meats is as a rule possible—and after all, soup, eggs, frijoles, another vegetable, a meat, lettuce, and fruit ought to be enough. The hard rolls you get everywhere are of good quality and well baked. Butter, fortunately, is almost nonexistent, as it is very bad. The only edible butter in Mexico is made in Kansas, and can be bought in convenient one-pound packages at the leading grocery stores in the City of Mexico, and also in some of the smaller towns. There is no objection whatever toyour taking your own tea and butter, or anything else that contributes to your comfort, into the dining room of Mexican hotels. Except during the hours at which meals are served, you cannot get anything to eat. Persons who are accustomed to some form of refreshment before going to bed should keep it in their rooms.
Supper—from half past six until about nine o’clock—is, except for the omission of eggs, very much like dinner, although somewhat less elaborate in small places. (I employ the terms dinner and supper rather than luncheon and dinner, as they are the literal translations of the Spanish words comida and cena.)
“Don’t monkey with Mexican microbes! A stitch in time may save six weeks in the hospital! Let the other fellow run the risk of typhoid, if he wishes to!”—so runs, in part, the advertisement of a certain bottling company in Mexico. The fact that the advice is primarily intended to increase the sales of the firm in question does not render it the less sound. Mexicans are peculiarly ignorant of the principles of sanitation, and careless of them even when informed. Typhus, typhoid, and smallpox are prevalent in the City of Mexico all the year round, although, either through indifference or a reluctance to admit it, cases are not reported in the newspapers until the frequency of funerals begins to cast a universal gloom. Impure water may or may not have any bearing upon typhus and smallpox; upon typhoid, however, it has. In many of the smaller towns the water, brought as it is in pipes from a distance, is pure and healthful, but you cannot be sure of just what happens to it after it has arrived. It is far more prudent, unless you are keeping house and can boil water, to drink a pure, bottled mineral water. The most convenient—for the simple reason that it can be bought at almost any bar from end to end of the country—is the Tehuacan water (Agua Tehuacan) bottled at Tehuacan by several companies; the San Lorenzo, the Cruz Roja, and El Riego, the chemical analysis of all the waters being about the same. It is light, refreshing, absolutely pure, and bottled by machinery with every precaution. The water from the Cruz Roja spring, in fact, is not even exposed to the air from the time it enters a pipe underground to when it is forced, a moment later, into a bottle and sealed.
Few beds in Mexico have arrived at the sybaritic luxury of feather pillows. The national pillow is a narrow, long, unsympathetic contrivance tightlystuffed with hair, or something more unyielding. You should travel with your own pillow, and also with a blanket or a steamer rug. Also, few hotels have facilities for bathing. To take a bath, one goes out to a bathing establishment (there are always several), where hot and cold water, clean towels, and soap are plentiful and cheap. As the Anglo-Saxon cold bath has little relation to cleanliness, and is merely either an affectation on the part of persons who don’t enjoy it or a pleasant shock to the system on the part of those who do, it may be dispensed with or taken in a basin.
At night, hotels lock their massive front doors at ten or half past, but a porter sleeping on the floor just inside admits you at any hour. All over the world, servants like to be tipped, and the custom of tipping obtains in Mexico as elsewhere, but as yet it has remained within decent bounds. A mozo in a Mexican hotel is pleased, and sometimes surprised, by what his European or American equivalent would probably scorn.
To make a point of such trivial matters as matches, candles, keys, and door knobs will probably seem as if I were going out of my way, but in Mexico I have been the amused witness of so much real anguish occasioned by the presence orabsence of these prosaic implements that in regard to them I feel a certain responsibility. Almost everywhere there are incandescent lights in Mexican hotels, but in some places the power is turned off at midnight, or half an hour later, and, as happens in all countries, the lights, at inopportune moments now and then, go out. When they do go out, you grope helplessly in darkness, for it is not customary to foresee such emergencies and supply the bedrooms with matches and candles. A candle and a box of matches in your traveling bag may never be needed, but when they are needed they are needed instantly, and you will be glad you have them. Door knobs in Mexico, for absolutely no reason whatever, are placed so near the frame of the door that it is almost impossible to grasp them without pinching your fingers, and in order to lock or unlock a door the key, as a rule, must be inserted upside down, and then turned the wrong way.
The following notice (it hung, printed and framed, in the sala of a Mexican hotel) will, I feel sure, prove of interest to the student of language:
“It is not permitted for any whatsoever motive to use this saloon to eat, or for games of ball or others that could prejudice the tranquillity of thepassengers, or furthermore to remove the furnitures from their respective sites. At eleven of the clock the Administrador will usurp the right to order the extinguishment of the lamp without permitting of observations.”
The second kind of hotel (the hotel kept by an American) possesses the various defects of a Mexican establishment, with several others all its own. It is rarely as clean as a Mexican hotel, and the “home cooking” so insisted upon in the advertisements merely means that the cooking is of the kind the proprietress was accustomed to before her emigration—which does not necessarily recommend it. “American cooking” or “home cooking” is no better than any other kind of cooking when it is bad. You don’t eat through sentiment or patriotism, but through necessity. Among this class of hotel I feel it is only honest to except one at Cuernavaca, which has charming rooms, a most exquisite patio, and an “American table” about as good as that of the average New England summer boarding house.
Few Americans who are traveling for pleasure in Mexico will be likely to patronize what is known as a mesón. It would not have occurred to me to do so had I not slept in them in small towns off theline of the railway, where there is no place else to stay. When traveling on a horse or a mule, a night’s lodging for the steed is, of course, even more essential than for the rider, and the mesón, as I have said, is a combination of inn and stable. Primitive and comfortless as they often are, they have for me a fascination—the fascination of something read and thought of in childhood that in later life suddenly and unexpectedly comes true. A Mexican mesón, with its bare little bedrooms on one side of the great courtyard and its stalls for the animals on the other; with its clatter of arriving and departing mule trains, its neighing and braying and shoeing and currying, its litter of equipment and freight—saddles, bridles, preposterous spurs, pack saddles, saddle bags, saddle blankets, conical sugar loaves and casks of aguardiente from some sugar hacienda, boxes, bales, sacks of coffee—its stiff and weary travelers, its swearing, swaggering arrieros—it is the Spain of the story-books, the Spain of Don Quixote. You fall asleep at an early hour to the rhythmic crunching of mules’ teeth on cane leaves and corn, and you are awakened in the cold dark by the voice of your mozo slowly and solemnly proclaiming: “Señor, es de dia.” (It is day.)
I perhaps should not have mentioned the mesón if its attraction for me had not led me to try it in cities where there was no necessity to. Even in the cities and large towns it is still a primitive institution, but it is always inexpensive, and the rooms in those of the better class are clean. I have had a well-lighted room of ample size, with a comfortable bed, a washstand, a table, two chairs, a row of hooks to hang clothes on, and an attentive mozo usually within call, for seventy-five centavos (thirty-seven and a half cents) a day. There are no restaurants attached to these places, and absolutely no one in them speaks English.
In fact, although Mexicans are becoming more and more interested in English, and are everywhere studying the language, it is as yet not very coherently spoken by the natives with whom a traveler is likely to come in contact. A few sentences by a clerk in a shop, half a dozen disconnected words by a waiter in a hotel, are about the extent of what you hear among the working classes. And yet, with no knowledge of Spanish, you can, without mishap or difficulty, travel by rail almost anywhere in Mexico. The country is accustomed to travelers who do not speak its language, and more often than not knows instinctively and from habit whatthey want next. Of course, to be able to ask questions and understand the answers is both a convenience and a pleasure; but it is surprising how far a very few words of Spanish on the one hand and English on the other will carry you in comparative peace of mind. When the worst comes to the worst, as by an unforeseen combination of circumstances it sometimes does, and you are on the point of losing your reason or, what is much worse, your temper, the inevitable kind lady or kind gentleman, who is to be found in every country and who knows everything, always appears at the proper moment, asks if he can be of any assistance, and sends you on your way rejoicing. In any event, in provincial Mexico nothing unpleasant is likely to happen to you.
Just what is the attitude toward foreigners of the people in general it is difficult—impossible, even—to find out. A year or so ago, several weeks before the 16th of September (the anniversary of Hidalgo’s Declaration of Independence), it was widely announced in the newspapers of the United States that far-reaching plans had been laid by the lower classes in Mexico to observe the national festival by killing all foreigners. “Mexico for Mexicans” was to be the motto of the future. Thisquaint conceit—evolved, without doubt, by the pestiferous revolutionary junta in Saint Louis—was not much heard of by foreigners in Mexico; but then, in Mexico very little is heard of. A few timid persons remained at home during the day, but the day passed off without bloodshed, and the rumor was decided to have been only a rumor. That there was, however, more to it than was generally supposed (although how much more it would be impossible to find out) was evident from the fact that the Government quietly and inconspicuously took notice of it. In one place, where I have some American friends living on the edge of town—almost in the country—two rurales, heavily armed as usual, sauntered out to their houses at an early hour of the morning, and remained there all day and until late that night. As they spent the time in chatting and smoking with acquaintances who happened to pass by, it was not obvious that they were there for any especial purpose. But they were there, although they had never been there before and have never been there since. In another town a group of noisy hoodlums went at night to the house of one of the consuls (not the Spanish consul, by the way, which would have been more or less natural) with the intention of “doingsomething,” just what, they themselves apparently did not know. Here, also, were two rurales, and at sight of them the intentions of the little mob prudently underwent a collapse. The spokesman soon summoned sufficient courage to request that they please be allowed to break a few windows if they promised to go no farther, but the rurales replied that the first man who even stooped to pick up a stone would be shot. Whereupon the crowd retired. (It is irrelevant, but also amusing, to record that on the retreat the members of the gang got into a quarrel among themselves, during which two of them were stabbed and killed.) Beyond an admirable preparedness on the part of the Government, this proves little, as the consul in question was personally most unpopular with the people of the town. But it of course proves something—or the Government wouldn’t have been so prepared—although I find it difficult to see in it a proof of hostility toward foreigners on the part of the great mass of the Mexican people. If they do feel unkindly toward us, they are adepts in prolonged and continuous deception, for they are universally responsive to friendly overtures.
On the whole, I should not advise an invalid to go to Mexico, for I have met invalids there who,although they perhaps might not have been happy anywhere, struck me as being for many unavoidable reasons more unhappy in Mexico than they would have been had they sought a warm climate nearer home. There are a few enchanting places in Mexico where the weather is warm and reasonably equable all winter, but very few. And when Mexico is cold, it is dreary even for the robust. Its changes of temperature are sudden and penetrating, and, except in one or two hotels in the capital (an impossible place for invalids of any kind), artificial heat is practically unknown. The problem of simple, nourishing food is an insoluble problem unless you keep house; only by exercising self-restraint as regards Mexican cooking can well persons remain well. There are no hotels that in the slightest degree take into consideration the needs, the whims, the capricious hours, the endless exigencies of the sick, and anyone whose well-being is dependent upon warm rooms, good milk, quiet (the country is incessantly noisy with the noise of animals and bells and human beings), or upon all or any of the little, expensive niceties of modern civilization, had better indefinitely postpone his visit.
AFEW days ago a friend of mine in writing to me from home said in his letter: “I notice that now and then you refer casually to ‘an American man’ or ‘an English woman who lives here,’ and although I know there must be Americans and English living in Mexico as well as everywhere else, it always gives me a feeling of incredulity to hear that there are. I suppose I ought merely to consider the fact that you are there and then multiply you by a hundred or a thousand—or ten thousand perhaps; I have no idea, of course, how many. But to tell the truth I never altogether believe thatyougo to Mexico when you say you do. You go somewhere, but is it really Mexico? Whyshouldanyone go to Mexico? It seems such a perverse—such a positively morbid thing to do. And then, the address—that impossible address you leave behind you! Honestly, are there any Americans and English down there (or is it ‘up’ or ‘across’ or ‘over’—I literally have forgotten just where it is), and if so, why are theythere? What are they like? How do they amuse themselves?”
When I read his letter I recalled an evening several years ago at my brother’s coffee place—sixty miles from anywhere in particular. As it was in winter, or the “dry season,” it had been raining (I don’t exaggerate), with but one or two brief intermissions, for twenty-four days. In that part of the republic the chief difference between the dry season and the rainy lies in the fact that during the rainy season it rains with much regularity for a few hours every afternoon and during the dry season it rains with even greater regularity all the time. As the river was swollen and unfordable we had not been able for days to send to the village—an hour’s ride away—for provisions. Meat, of course, we did not have. In a tropical and iceless country, unless one can have fresh meat every day, one does not have it at all. We had run out of potatoes, we had run out of bread (baker’s bread in Mexico is good everywhere)—we had run out of flour. There were twenty-five or thirty chickens roosting on a convenient tree, but in our foolish, improvident way we had allowed ourselves to become fond of the chickens and I have an incorrigible prejudice against eating anything that has engaged my affections whenin life. So we dined on a tin of sardines, some chile verde and a pile of tortillas, which are not bad when patted thin and toasted to a crisp. Probably because there were forty thousand pounds of excellent coffee piled up in sacks on the piazza, we washed down this banquet with draughts of Sir Thomas Lipton’s mediocre tea. The evening was cold—as bitterly cold as it can be only in a thoroughly tropical country when the temperature drops to forty-three and a screaming wind is forcing the rain through spaces between the tiles overhead. We had also run out of petroleum, and the flames of the candles on the dinner table were more often than not blue and horizontal. But somehow we dined with great gayety and talked all the time. I remember how my brother summoned Concha the cook, and courteously attracted her attention to the fact that she had evidently dropped the teapot on the untiled kitchen floor—that the spout was clogged with mud and that it did not “wish to pour,” and how he again summoned her for the purpose of declaring that the three dead wasps he had just fished out of the chile no doubt accounted perfectly for its unusually delicious flavor. We had scarcely anything to eat, but socially the dinner was a great success. Immediately afterwards we both went to bed—each witha reading candle, a book and a hot-water bag. After half an hour’s silence my brother irrelevantly exclaimed:
“What very agreeable people one runs across in queer, out-of-the-way places!”
“Who on earth are you thinking of now?” I inquired.
“Why, I was thinking ofus!” he placidly replied, and went on with his reading.
Perhaps we had been agreeable. At any rate we were in a queer out-of-the-way place, that is if any place is queer and out of the way, which I am beginning rather to doubt. Since then I have often remembered that evening—how, just before it grew dark, the tattered banana trees writhed like gigantic seaweed in the wind, and the cold rain hissed from the spouts on the roof in graceful, crystal tubes. Here and there the light of a brazero in a laborer’s bamboo hut flared for an instant through the coffee trees. On the piazza, the tired Indians, shivering in their flimsy, cotton garments, had covered themselves with matting and empty coffee sacks and were trying to sleep. In the kitchen doorway a very old, white-bearded man was improvising poetry—sometimes sentimental, sometimes heroic, sometimes obscene—to a huddled and enthralled audience all big hats,crimson blankets, and beautiful eyes. Apart from this group, Saturnino was causing a jarana to throb in a most syncopated, minor, and emotional fashion. A jarana is a primitive guitar whose sounding board consists usually of an armadillo’s shell. (Poor Saturnino! He is now in indefinite solitary confinement for having, apropos of nothing except a slip of a girl, disemboweled one of his neighbors with a machete. And he was such a gentle, thoughtful creature! I don’t quite understand it.) During dinner we discussed, among other things, Tolstoi’s “War and Peace” which we had just finished, and while agreeing that it was the greatest novel we had ever read or ever expected to read (an opinion I still possess), we did not agree about Tolstoi’s characteristically cocksure remarks on the subject of predestination and freedom of the will. As neither of us had studied philosophy we were unable to command the special terminology—the specific jargon that always makes a philosophic discussion seem so profound, and our colloquial efforts to express ourselves were at times piquant. In the midst of it a tarantula slithered across the tablecloth and I squashed him with a candlestick as he was about to disappear over the table’s edge. Of course we disputed as to whether or not, in the original conception of the universe, God had sketched the career of the tarantula in its relation to that of the candlestick and mine, and—yes, on looking back, I feel sure we were both very agreeable.
But what I imagine I am trying to get at is that I have so often wonderingly contrasted the general scene with our being there at all, and then have remembered the simple, prosaic circumstances that had placed us in the midst of it. In a way, it is a pity onecanremember such things; the act renders it so impossible to pose to oneself as picturesque. And, furthermore, it tends to shake one’s belief in the picturesqueness of one’s American and English acquaintances. (Perhaps I mean “romance” rather than picturesqueness, for compared to the fatuity of importing picturesqueness into Mexico, the carrying of coals to Newcastle would be a stroke of commercial genius.) At first there seems to be something romantic about all of one’s compatriots who live in small Mexican towns, or on far-away ranches, plantations, fincas, haciendas—or whatever their property happens to be called. To the newly arrived there is a sort of thrill merely in the fashion in which they take their florid, pictorial environment for granted. I shall not forget my first New Year’s Day in Mexico.
Until the day before, I had never been in the country, and there was something ecstatic in the vividness of not only the day as a whole, but of every detail of color, form, temperature, personality, and conversation. It seemed as if everything in turn leaped out and seized hold of me, and now, long afterwards, I recall it as one of those marvelous days without either half tones or perspective, on which every separate fact is brilliant, and all are of equal importance. Only once since then has Mexico had just the same memorable effect upon me, and that was one night in the little plaza of Jalapa when, as the front doors of the cathedral swung open and the crowd within swarmed down the steps in the moonlight, the band abruptly crashed into the bullfightingest part of “Carmen.”
In the tepid, springlike afternoon I pushed back a five-barred gate, and through a pasture, where horses stopped grazing to snuff at me, over a wall of piled stones covered with heliotrope, I strolled up between banana trees to a yellow, stucco-covered house on the hillside. The way to the piazza was through a tunnel of pale-yellow roses with pink centers and on the piazza was an American lady, an American gentleman, a great many languorous-looking chairs, and two gallons of eggnog in a bowl ofIndian pottery. All of the small Anglo-Saxon colony and a few others had been asked to drop in during the afternoon, but I was the first to arrive, and I remember that the necessary interchange of commonplace civilities with my hosts, the talk of mutual acquaintances on the boat from New York and the answering of questions about weather and politics in the United States, seemed unspeakably shallow to one suddenly confronted by so exquisite and sublime a view. For the view from the piazza, I hasten to add by way of justifying two words so opposite in suggestion, was, I afterwards learned, characteristic of the mountainous, tropical parts of Mexico, and, like most of the views there, combined both the grandeur, the awfulness of space and height—of eternal, untrodden snows piercing the thin blue, with the soft velvet beauty of tropical verdure—the unimaginable delicacy and variety of color that glows and palpitates in vast areas of tropical foliage seen at different distances through haze and sunlight. Mountains usually have an elemental, geologic sex of some sort, and the sex of slumbering, jungle-covered, tropical mountains is female. There is a symmetry, a chaste volcanic elegance about them that render them the consorts and daughters of man-mountains like, say, the Alps, theRockies, the mountains of the Caucasus. At their cruelest they are rarely somber; their precipitous sides and overhanging crags are sheathed in vegetation of a depth that refines and softens, and the quivering lights and shadows that at times are apparently all their substance, are the lights and shadows of those excessively etherealized, vignetted engravings on the title pages of old gift books.
At the sloping pasture’s lower end the compact, tile-roofed, white-walled town glared in the January sunlight—a town in a garden, or, when one for a moment lost sight of the outlying orange groves, fields of green-gold sugar cane, patches of shimmering corn and clumps of banana trees—an all-pervasive garden in a town. For compact as the Oriental-looking little place was, green and purple, yellow and red sprang from its interstices everywhere as though they had welled up from the rich plantations below and overflowed. One gazed down upon the trees of tiny plazas, the dense dark foliage of walled gardens, into shady, flower-filled patios and sunny, luxuriant, neglected churchyards, and beyond, the mysterious valley melted away in vast and ever vaster distances—the illimitable valley of a dream—a vision—an allegory—slowly rising at last, in tier upon tier of faintly opalescent volcanoes,the texture of gauze. Up and up and up they lifted and swam and soared, until, as with a swift concerted escape into the blue and icy air of heaven, they culminated in the smooth, inaccessible, swan-like snow upon the peak of Orizaba. Mexico’s four, well-defined climates, from the blazing summer of the valley, to glittering winter only some thousands of feet above, were here, I realized, all the year round, visibly in full blast.
Then other guests began to push back the heavy gate and stroll up the long slope, and I found myself meeting them and hearing them all talk, with a thrill as keen—if of a different quality—as that with which I had gaped at the view. They seemed to me then quite as unreal. There was about them an impenetrable aura of fiction; they were the plain tales that Kipling would have lashed to the mast had his hills been Mexican—had Simla been Barranca.
There was the British consul—a quaint, kindly, charming little man—who while in the act of delightedly making one pun could scarcely conceal the eagerness and anxiety with which his mind grappled with the problem of how to introduce the next. The French consul, too, was of the gathering, and I don’t know why, but life, somehow, would not haveseemed what it was that day if the French consul had not been unmistakably a German. He had brought with him a bouquet of pretty daughters whose English accent and complexions (their mother was English) and French deportment made of them rather fascinating racial enigmas. Mrs. Belding liked the girls but confided to me that in general she considered the foreign manner all “French jeune filledlesticks.” Mrs. Hammerton, a tall, distinguished-looking, dark-haired English woman of thirty, was perishing—so Mrs. Belding almost at once informed me—for a cigar. She had an aged mother, had had a romance (of which no one spoke, declared Mrs. Belding as she spoke of it), and adored Mexican cigars. Almost immediately upon my meeting her she let me know in the prettiest, most cultivated of voices that Mrs. Belding was in the habit of getting tight.
There were two reasons for Mrs. Hammerton’s postponing just then the longed-for cigar. One was the Rev. Luke M. Hacket, and the other was his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Hacket, with an ever-growing band of little Hackets, had lived for years at Barranca at the expense of many worthy and unintelligent persons at home. They were there, all unconscious of their insolence, for the purpose of tryingto seduce Roman Catholics away from their belief and supplying them with another; of substituting a somewhat colorless and unmagnetic expression of the Christian idea for one that satisfies not only some of the Mexican’s alert senses, but his imagination as well. That these efforts at conversion met with scarcely any success except during a few weeks before Christmas (after which there was always an abrupt stampede to Rome), did not much concern them as long as Mrs. Hacket’s lectures in native costume in the basements of churches at home hypnotized the faithful into contributing to an institution for which the term “futile” is far too kind. As every child of the Rev. and Mrs. Luke Hacket received from the board a salary of its own, the worthy couple had not been idle, and in addition to this simple method of swelling their revenue, the good man did a tidy little business in vanilla—buying that fragrant bean at much less than its market value from the poor and ignorant Indians to whom he distributed tracts they could not read. Whenever another little Hacket arrived, he told the board, but the incredibly gullible body knew nothing of his interest in the vanilla market. As I was a stranger—he took me in. That is to say, he wished me a happy new year and “touched” me for five dollars—to go toward the purchase of a new organ for his Sunday school. I and my money were soon parted. Only afterwards did my hostess have a chance to tell me that among the colony the new organ was an old joke—that for many years tourists and visitors had contributed to its sweeter and, as yet, unheard melodies.
What was it? What is it? No one believed in his creed nor had the slightest interest in it. What lingering, reminiscent, perhaps in some instances atavistic misgiving and yearning to reverence, prompted these ill-assorted exiles to treat with a certain deference a person whom they really laughed at? There was an unsuspected pathos in it—the pathos of a world that involuntarily clutches at the straw it knows to be but yet a straw—the pathos of the exile who for the moment suffers even the distasteful if it in some way bridges the gulf between him and home. It was not politeness that restrained Mrs. Hammerton from smoking until the Hackets at last departed and that had caused our hostess, when she saw them coming, to discuss seriously with her husband whether or no she should temporarily banish the eggnog. What was it?
Mrs. Blythe, a slight, pretty woman prettily dressed had come in from her husband’s ranch theweek before for the holidays. In matter-of-fact tones she was giving her news to Mrs. Garvin, whose son was in charge of the town’s electric light plant.
“As a rule one doesn’t particularly mind calentura” (chills and fever), Mrs. Blythe was saying, “although it always leaves me rather weak. But what was so annoying this time, was the fact that Jack and I both had it at once and there wasn’t anybody to take care of us. Delfina, the cook, chose that moment, of all moments, to get bitten in the calf of her leg by a snake. Horrid woman, Delfina—I’m sure she did it on purpose. Of course she was much worse than useless, for I had to take care ofher—dose her with ammonia and cut live chickens in two and bind them on the place. You know—the hundred and fifty things onealwaysdoes when they get bitten by snakes. If Joaquin the mayordomo had been around, I shouldn’t have cared. He knows how to cook in a sort of way, and then, besides, I shouldn’t have been so worried about the coffee picking. But poor Joaquin was in jail for stabbing his wife—yes, she died—and the jefe wouldn’t let him out although I sent in a note saying how much we needed him for the next few weeks. It was deliberately disobliging of the jefe because we’ve hadhim to dinner several times and afterwards Jack always played cards with him and let him cheat. My temperature didn’t go above a hundred and two and a half, but Jack’s was a hundred and five off and on for three or four days, and when you pass the hundred mark, two and a half degrees make a great deal of difference. He was delirious a lot of the time and of course I couldn’t let him fuss about the kitchen stove. The worst part was having to crawl out of bed and drag over to the tanks every afternoon to measure the coffee when the pickers came in. With Joaquin gone, there was nobody left who could read the lists and record the amounts. Then just as the quinine gave out, the river rose and no one could go to the village for more. Coming at that time of year, it was all really very annoying,” she declared lightly and passed on to something else.
“Yes, that was how I caught this bad cold,” another woman—whose husband manufactured coffee sacks—was explaining to some one. “There was the worst kind of a norther that night; I would have been soaked to the skin even if I hadn’t slipped on a stone in the dark and fallen into the brook, and when I finally reached their hut I forgot the condition I was in. The poor little thing—she wasonly four—was absolutely rigid and having convulsion after convulsion. Her screams were frightful—it was impossible to control her—to get her to tell what the matter was, and nobody knew what had happened. She had simply given a shriek of terror and gone into convulsions. There was nothing to do—but nothing—nothing. At the end of an hour and a half she gave a final shriek and died, and when her poor little clenched fists relaxed, we found in one of them a dead scorpion. By that time I had begun to be very chilly and of course it ended in a bad cold. Two lumps please and no milk.”
A servant in a starched skirt of watermelon pink and a starched white upper garment like a dressing sack glided out to help with the tea and cakes. A blue rebozo was draped about her neck and shoulders, her black hair hung to within a foot and a half of the floor in two fat braids, and in it, behind her right ear, was a pink camelia the color of her skirt. Her bare feet were thrust into slippers without heels or backs and as she slipped about from chair to chair they made a slight dragging sound on the tiles. Everyone said good afternoon to her as she handed the teacups, at which she smiled and replied in a respectful fashion that was, however, perfectly self-possessed.
“Did you hear about those people named Jackson who were here for a few days last month?” Mrs. Belding asked of the party in general. “You know they ended up at Cuernavaca and took a furnished house there meaning to stay all winter. Well, they stayed five days and then left—furious at Mexico and everyone in it.” And she went on with considerable art and humor to sketch the brief career of the Jacksons. While they were at the hotel, before they took possession of their house, she told us, Mrs. Jackson had engaged servants—a mozo, two maids and a cook. The cook she stole from the Dressers. It wasn’t at all nice of her to steal the cook as Mrs. Dresser had gone through a lot of bother for her about the renting of the house and had helped her to get the other servants. But Mrs. Jackson offered the creature two dollars more a month, and although she had lived at the Dressers for six years, she deserted them with a low, glad cry. Poor Mrs. Dresser rushed over to the Moons and sobbed when she told about it.
“Don’t you worry, dear,” said Mrs. Moon. “Leave that Jackson viper to me; I’ll fix her. They move in this afternoon—I’m going up there to tea—and I promise you that you’ll have your wall-eyedold dish-smasher hovering over the brasero in your kitchen by noon to-morrow.”
Apparently Mrs. Moon did go to the Jacksons for tea and made herself most agreeable. “You may not believe it, but she really can once in a while,” Mrs. Belding interjected. And as Mrs. Jackson had been conducting a Mexican establishment for about two hours, Mrs. Moon gave her all kinds of advice on the way to get along with the servants, ending with: “Of course you mustneverlet the maids go out after dark even with their mothers, and it’sfatalto give them breakfast. We simply don’t do it in Mexico—not so much as a drop of coffee until noon. Breakfast always makes Mexicans insolent.” Then Mrs. Moon, feeling that she was perhaps overdoing it, left while she saw that Mrs. Jackson was drinking it in in great, death-dealing gulps.
It was bad enough that night, Mrs. Belding ran on, when the cook and one of the maids tried to go to the serenata in the plaza. On the strength of the extra two dollars the cook had bought a new rebozo and wanted to wear it, and as there was no reason on earth why they shouldn’t go to the serenata, they were mystified and angry at Mrs. Jackson’s serenely declaring “No, no,” and locking them in.But the great seal of the Jacksons’ fate was definitely affixed the next morning when Mrs. Jackson, up bright and early, with kind firmness, refused to let them make their coffee. Half an hour later Mrs. Moon experienced the bliss of seeing the mozo, the cook and the two maids wandering past her house—all weeping bitterly. Long before midday the cook was back at the Dressers; and from that moment Mrs. Jackson was blacklisted.
For five days she struggled to engage new servants, but she was believed to be a woman with a “bad heart.” No one would go to her. She surrendered and left.
I did not altogether believe this tale of Mrs. Belding’s, nor did I believe the man who casually told us that a few weeks before, the authorities had, just in time, interrupted a human sacrifice in an Indian village some twenty or thirty miles up from the coast. After nearly four hundred years of Christianity the Indians had, it seemed, dug up a large stone idol and attempted to revert. Then, too, the remark of a young girl who had been visiting in Vera Cruz struck me as rather incredible. “I was there for a month,” she said. “Yes, there was some yellow fever and a great deal of smallpox—but when you’re having a good time, who minds smallpox?” It was all so new to me in matter and manner, so sprinkled with easy references to objects, scenes, and conditions I had met with only in highfalutin stories lacking the ring of truth, so ornate with “meandering” (thank you, Robert Browning), Spanish words whose meaning I did not know. There was also among the men much coffee talk—a whole new world to one who has always taken for granted that coffee originates, roasted, ground and done up in five-pound tins on a grocer’s shelves. But it was all true even to the interrupted human sacrifice and the fact that some of the shrubs among the roses and heliotrope near the piazza were coffee trees. Had I never seen the little colony again I should always have remembered it as a picturesque, romantic and delightful thing. And how—I told myself as I sat there listening and looking—they must, away off here, depend upon one another for society, both in a formal and in an intimate sense! How they must come together and somewhat wistfully try to forget Mexico in talking of home in their own language! What it is, after all, to understand and be understood!—and all that sort of thing. If my first afternoon with foreigners in Mexico had been my last, I should have carried away with me a brave, bright colored little picture of much charm and somepathos. However, since then I have spent with my compatriots in this interesting land days innumerable.
I fear I am, for the delightful purposes of art, unfortunately unselective. First impressions have their value; they have, indeed, very great value, and of a kind quite their own. As my first impression of Americans in Mexico was the kind I have just been trying to give, and as it was to me wholly interesting and more agreeable than not, I ought, perhaps, to let it stand; but somehow I can’t. My inartistic impulse to keep on and tell all the little I know, instead of stopping at the right place, is too strong.
There are said to be about thirty thousand American residents in the Mexican Republic, and the men pursue vocations ranging from that of tramp to that of president of great and successful business ventures. There are American doctors and dentists, brakemen, locomotive engineers, Pullman-car conductors, civil engineers, mining engineers, “promoters,” grocers, hotel keepers, dealers in curios; there are American barkeepers, lawyers, stenographers, photographers, artists, clerks, electricians, and owners of ranches of one kind or another who grow cattle or coffee or vanilla or sugar or rubber.Many Americans are managers of some sort—they manage mines or plantations or railways, or the local interests of some manufacturing or business concern in the United States. One meets Americans—both men and women—on the streets, in hotels, in shops, strolling or sitting in the plaza—almost everywhere in the course of the day’s work, and in the course of the day’s play, one may drop in at the house of some acquaintance or friend and have a cup of tea, with the usual accompaniments, at four or half past. I am speaking now not of the City of Mexico, whose American colony as a colony I know solely through the “Society” notes of theMexican Herald. From that authentic source he who runs may read (or he who reads may run) that on almost any afternoon at the large entertainment given by Mrs. Brooks for her popular friend, Mrs. Crooks, punch was served at a refreshment table quaintly decorated with smilax by the ever-charming Mrs. Snooks. That there are agreeable Americans living in the city I am sure, because I have met some of them elsewhere. But of American society in general there I am only competent to suspect that, like society in most places, it is considerably less important and entrancing in reality than it is in print.
In the smaller places, even when there are residents of the United States in numbers sufficiently great to be regarded as a “colony,” there is absolutely nothing that by any stretch of imagination or spread of printer’s ink could be called “American society.” The New Year’s Day I have mentioned seems to me now a kind of freak of nature; I am at a loss to account for it. For since then my knowledge of Americans in the small towns has become considerable, and they are not in the least as I supposed they were. They do not depend upon one another; they do not come together to talk wistfully of home in the mother tongue; they donotunderstand one another, and by one another they arenotunderstood! There is at best about most of their exceedingly few relations an atmosphere of petty and ungenerous gossip, and at worst a fog—a positive sand storm of enmity and hatred through which it takes a really ludicrous amount of delicate navigation successfully to steer oneself. As a body they simply do not meet. There are, instead, groups of two, of three, of four, who have tea together (other forms of entertainment are rarely attempted) chiefly for the purpose of envitrioling the others. There are among them agreeable groups and truly charming individuals, but when they allow themselves to assimilate at all, it is usually in a most reluctant, acid, and malnutritious form (a singularly repulsive figure of speech, come to think of it) that does no one any good. It is not unamusing just at first to have a lady inform you with tremulous lips and in a tense, white voice that if you call on Mrs. X., you must not expect to call any longer onher; and I confess I have enjoyed learning in great detail just why this one is no longer speaking to that, and the train of events that led up to Mr. A.’s finally slapping the face of Mr. B. Yet there are well-defined limits to intellectual treats of this nature, and one quickly longs for entertainment at once less dramatic and more varied.
Among the Americans this is difficult to get, although, as I pause and recall with gratitude and affection some of my friends in Jalapa, for instance, I am tempted to retract this statement. The trouble lies, I feel sure, in the fact that, having come from widely dissimilar parts of the United States, and having had while there affiliations, in many instances, whose slight difference is still great enough to make a great difference, they have but little in common. And Mexican towns are utterly lacking in those diverse interests that at home supply the women of even very small communities with so many pleasant and harmless, if artificial, bonds. The Mexican theater is crude and impossible—even if the fractious ladies knew Spanish sufficiently well to follow rapid dialogue with enjoyment, which they rarely do. The occasional traveling opera company, with one wind-busted, middle-aged star who twenty-five years ago was rumored to have been well received in Rio de Janeiro, is a torture; there are no notable piano or song recitals, no King’s Daughters or other pet charities, no D. A. R.’s, no one to interpret the “Ring and the Book,” or the “Ring of the Niebelungen,” no one to give chafing-dish lectures or inspire enthusiasm for things like the etchings of Whistler and the economical cremation of garbage, the abolishment of child labor, and the encouragement of the backyard beautiful. Beyond the slight and monotonous cares of housekeeping on a small scale, there is little to occupy their time; there are, in a word, no varied outlets available for their normal socio-intellectual energies, and of course the distressing happens. Even the one or two common bonds they might have, most unfortunately act not as bonds at all. The “servant problem,” for instance, small as wages are, serves only to keep them farther apart, andapparently friendship between two families engaged in the same kind of enterprise is almost impossible. Very rarely have I seen two coffee-growers who were not virulently jealous of each other’s successes, and who would not, in a business way, cut each other’s throats without a qualm if by doing so they could come out a few dollars ahead.
Indeed, from the little I have seen and the great deal I have heard of my countrymen’s business coups in Mexico, I cannot believe that transplantation has a tendency to elevate one’s ethics. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to record that I know men in Mexico whose methods of business are fastidiously honorable with Mexican and compatriot alike, but they are extremely rare; far more rare than they are at home. If in Mexico I were forced to choose between trusting in a business matter to the representations of a Mexican whom I knew and liked and an American whom I knew and liked, I should, except in one or two cases, where I should be betting, so to speak, on a certainty, trust the Mexican.
An always interesting phase of the American in Mexico is the annual invasion of the country, from January to March, by immense parties of “personally conducted” tourists from the United States.In private cars—even in private trains—they descend every few days upon the cities and towns of chief pictorial and historic interest, and just as the American residents of England, Germany, Italy, and France shudder at the ancient and honorable name of “Thomas Cook and Sons,” do the Americans who have chosen Mexico as the land of their adoption shrug and laugh at the mention of “las turistas.” On general principles, to shrug and sneer—for in this laugh there always lurks a sneer—merely because a hundred and fifty amiable creatures have chosen to be herded from one end of a vast foreign country and back again in two weeks, would seem to be narrow and pointless. But I have grown to consider it, for principles quite specific, neither the one nor the other. The American resident’s sneer is unfortunately a helpless, ineffectual one, but he is without question sometimes entitled to it.
Somebody once wrote an article—perhaps it was a whole book—which he called “The Psychology of Crowds.” I did not read it, but many years ago, when it came out, the title imbedded itself in my mind as a wonderfully suggestive title that didn’t suggest to me anything at all. Since then I have had frequent occasion to excavate it, andwithout having read a word of the work, I am convinced that I know exactly what the author meant. Did he, I often wonder, ever study, in his study of crowds, a crowd of American tourists in Mexico? What a misfortune for his book if he neglected to! They are, it seems, composed of the most estimable units of which one can conceive; the sort of persons who make a “world’s fair” possible; the salt of the earth—“the backbone of the nation.” And yet when they unite and start out on their travels, a kind of madness now and then seizes upon them; not continuously, and sometimes not at all, but now and then. Young girls who, at home, could be trusted on every occasion to conduct themselves with a kind of provincial dignity; sensible, middle-aged fathers and mothers of grown-up families, and old women with white water-waves and gray lisle-thread gloves, will now and then, when on a tour in Mexico, go out of their way to do things that make the very peons blush. The great majority of tourists are, of course, quiet, well-behaved persons who take an intelligent interest in their travels. It is to the exception I am referring; the exception by whom the others, alas! are judged.
The least of their crimes is their suddenly acquired mania for being conspicuous. At home, in their city side streets, their humdrum suburbs, their placid villages, they have been content for thirty, fifty, seventy years to pursue their various decent ways, legitimately observed and clad appropriately to their means and station. But once arrived in the ancient capital of Montezuma, many of them are inspired in the most astounding fashion to attract attention to themselves. On Sunday afternoon, in the crowded Paseo, I have seen, for instance, in cabs, undoubtedly respectable women from my country with enormous straw sombreros on their heads, and about their shoulders those brilliant and hideous “Mexican” sarapes—woven for the tourist trade, it is said, in Germany. All the rest of the world was, of course, in its Paris best, and staring at them with amazed eyes. In Mexico the only possible circumstance under which a native woman of any position whatever would wear a peon hat would be a hot day in the depths of the country, were she forced to travel in an open vehicle or on horseback. As for sarapes, they, of course, are worn only by men. The effect these travelers produced upon the local mind was somewhat analogous to that which a party of Mexican ladies would produce upon the mind of New York should theydecide to drive up Fifth Avenue wearing policemen’s helmets and variegated trousers. Only Mexican women would never do the one, while American women frequently, from motives I am at a loss to account for, do the other.
Then, once in a small town to which large parties rarely go, I saw half a dozen men and women suddenly detach themselves from their crowd on being told that a certain middle-aged man, bidding good-by to some guests at his front door, was the governor of the state. At a distance of from ten to fifteen feet of him they deliberately focused their kodaks on the group and pressed the button. Afterwards I asked one of the men with whom the governor had been talking, if the governor had commented upon the matter. “Why, yes,” was the reply. “He said, with a shrug, ‘Obviously from the United States,’ and then went on with his conversation.”