At Tehuacan, one winter, the women in a party of between twenty and thirty, quite innocently (although most commonly) left behind them an odious impression that the few resident Americans who happened to be staying at the place were powerless to eradicate. The man in charge of them could not speak Spanish, and had with him an interpreter, aMexican boy of seventeen or eighteen who knew a moderate amount of English. He was a pretty-eyed, clever-looking little person, and the women of the party had come to treat him much as one might treat a pet animal of docile habits. They would stroke and ruffle his shock of black hair, pinch his cheeks, “hold hands” with him when walking through the long corridors, adjust his red cravat if it wasn’t straight, and coquettishly struggle with one another for the privilege of strolling with him in the garden. To me it meant no more than a disagreeably playful exhibition of bad taste, but the Mexicans in the hotel regarded a young man of eighteen, in his station of life, as being of a marriageable age, which, of course, he was, and they could not be made to see in the situation anything but that the American women were in love with him and unable to conceal it in public. Some of them with young daughters talked of appealing to the hotel proprietor to eject persons of this description. In the United States a party of Mexican women would under no circumstances hold hands with, say, a bellboy, or stroke the hair of a waiter.
In Puebla it is told that some American tourists ate their luncheon in the cathedral, threw orange peel and sardine tins on the floor, and upon leavingwashed their hands in the holy water. I don’t vouch for this story; I merely believe it. And by reason of such things and a hundred others, the American resident is entitled to his sneer. For he himself, in at least his relations with the natives, is accustomed to display something of their courtesy, their dignity. He resents not only the unfortunate and lasting impression many of his compatriots leave upon the populace, but its disastrous effect upon the populace itself. When American tourists, armed with penknives, cut out squares of Gobelin tapestry from the furniture of the President’s drawing-room, it is always a simple matter for the President to close Chapultepec to the public; but when they encourage “humorous” familiarities with well-mannered, unsophisticated servants and the lower classes generally, there is no remedy. Chiefly from constant contact with tourists, the cab drivers of the City of Mexico have become notoriously extortionate and insolent, and, for the same reason, Cuernavaca, one of the most beautiful little towns, not only in Mexico, but in the world, may soon—tourist-ridden as it is—be one of the least attractive. There, among the cabmen, the hotel employees, the guides, and the mozos who have horses for hire, the admirable native manner has lamentably deteriorated. Egged on by underbred Americans, many of them have themselves become common, impudent, and a bore. They no longer suggest Mexico. One might almost as well “see Naples and die.”
WHEN my first New Year’s party dispersed, I walked back to the center of the town with a man who had lived for many years in Mexico, who had been everywhere and had done everything, and who seemed to know something funny or tragic or scandalous about everybody in the world. He loved to talk, to describe, to recall; and while we had some drinks together at a café under the sky-blue portales, he aroused my interest in people I never had heard of and never should see. He told me, among other things, about the Trawnbeighs.
This, as nearly as I can remember, is what he told me about the Trawnbeighs:
The Trawnbeighs, he said, were the sort of people who “dressed for dinner,” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the house to dress for. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the Trawnbeighs were English. Indeed, on looking back, I often feel that to my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to addanything.For to one who knew Mr. and Mrs. Trawnbeigh, Edwina, Violet, Maud, and Cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their alpha and omega, together with all that went between. Not that the statementisflippant—far from it. There is in it a seriousness, a profundity, an immense philosophic import. At times it has almost moved me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reasons of state, or religion, or death.
This, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way I feel when I put on evening clothes myself, which I do at least twice out of my every three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. No born American could feel that way about his own dress coat. He sometimes thinks he does; he often—and isn’t it boresome!—pretends he does, but he really doesn’t. As a matter of unimportant fact, the born American may have “dressed” every evening of his grown-up life. But if he found himself on an isolated, played-out Mexican coffee and vanilla finca, with a wife, four children, a tiled roof that leaked whenever there was a “norther,” an unsealed sala through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for making any, no “prospects” and no cook—under these depressing circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an American dressing for dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of ghastly humor.
With the Trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony and humor had nothing to do. The Trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun (so, I feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of the nutritious potato family); but humor, when they didn’t recognize it, bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred when they did.
Trawnbeigh had come over to Mexico—“come out from England,” he would have expressed it—as a kind of secretary to his cousin, Sir Somebody Something, who was building a harbor or a railway or a canal (I don’t believe Trawnbeigh himself ever knew just what it was) for a British company down in the hot country. Mrs. Trawnbeigh, with her young, was to follow on the next steamer a month later; and as she was in mid-ocean when Sir Somebody suddenly died of yellow fever, she did not learn of this inopportune event until it was too late to turn back. Still I doubt whether she would have turned back if she could. For, as Trawnbeigh once explained to me, at a time when they literally hadn’t enough to eat (a hail stormhad not only destroyed his coffee crop, but had frozen the roots of most of his trees, and the price of vanilla had fallen from ten cents a bean to three and a half), leaving England at all, he explained, had necessitated “burning their bridges behind them.” He did not tell me the nature of their bridges, nor whether they had made much of a blaze. In fact, that one vague, inflammatory allusion was the nearest approach to a personal confidence Trawnbeigh was ever known to make in all his fifteen years of Mexican life.
The situation, when he met Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the children on the dock at Vera Cruz, was extremely dreary, and at the end of a month it had grown much worse, although the Trawnbeighs apparently didn’t think so. They even spoke and wrote as if their affairs were “looking up a bit.” For, after a few weeks of visiting among kindly compatriots at Vera Cruz and Rebozo, Mrs. Trawnbeigh became cook for some English engineers (there were seven of them) in a sizzling, mosquitoey, feverish mudhole on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The Trawnbeighs didn’t call it “cook,” neither did the seven engineers. I don’t believe the engineers even thought of it as cook. (What Mrs. Trawnbeigh thought of it will neverbe known.) Howcouldthey when that lady, after feeding the four little Trawnbeighs (or rather the four young Trawnbeighs; they had never been little) a meal I think they called “the nursery tea,” managed every afternoon, within the next two hours, first to create out of nothing a perfectly edible dinner for nine persons, and, secondly, to receive them all at seven forty-five in a red-striped, lemon satin ball gown (it looked like poisonous, wall paper), eleven silver bangles, a cameo necklace, and an ostrich tip sprouting from the top of her head. Trawnbeigh, too, was in evening clothes. And they didn’t call it cooking; they spoke of it as “looking after the mess” or “keeping an eye on the young chaps’ livers.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Trawnbeigh, daughter of the late the Honorable Cyril Cosby Godolphin Dundas and the late Clare Walpurga Emmeline Moate, cooked—and cooked hard—for almost a year; at the end of which time she was stricken with what she was pleased to refer to as “a bad go of fevah.”
Fortunately, they were spared having to pass around the hat, although it would have amounted to that if Trawnbeigh hadn’t, after the pleasant English fashion, come into some money. In the United States people know to a cent what they mayexpect to inherit, and then they sometimes don’t get it; but in England there seems to be an endless succession of retired and unmarried army officers who die every little while in Jermyn Street and leave two thousand pounds to a distant relative they have never met. Something like this happened to Trawnbeigh, and on the prospect of his legacy he was able to pull out of the Tehuantepec mudhole and restore his wife to her usual state of health in the pure and bracing air of Rebozo.
Various things can be done with two thousand pounds, but just whatshallbe done ought to depend very largely on whether they happen to be one’s first two thousand or one’s last. Trawnbeigh, however, invested his (“interred” would be a more accurate term) quite as if they never would be missed. The disposition to be a country gentleman was in Trawnbeigh’s blood. Indeed, the first impression one received from the family was that everything they did was in their blood. It never seemed to me that Trawnbeigh had immediately sunk the whole of his little fortune in an old, small, and dilapidated coffee place so much because he was dazzled by the glittering financial future the shameless owner (another Englishman, by the way) predicted for him, as because to own an estate andlive on it was, so to speak, his natural element. He had tried, while Mrs. Trawnbeigh was cooking on the Isthmus, to get “something to do.” But there was really nothing in Mexico hecoulddo. He was splendidly strong, and in the United States he very cheerfully, and with no loss of self-respect or point of view, would have temporarily shoveled wheat or coal, or driven a team, or worked on the street force, as many another Englishman of noble lineage has done before and since; but in the tropics an Anglo-Saxon cannot be a day laborer. He can’t because he can’t. And there was in Mexico no clerical position open to Trawnbeigh because he did not know Spanish. (It is significant that after fifteen consecutive years of residence in the country,noneof the Trawnbeighs knew Spanish.) To be, somehow and somewhere, an English country gentleman of a well-known, slightly old-fashioned type, was as much Trawnbeigh’s destiny as it is the destiny of, say, a polar bear to be a polar bear or a camel to be a camel. As soon as he got his two thousand pounds he became one.
When I first met them all he had been one for about ten years. I had recently settled in Trawnbeigh’s neighborhood, which in Mexico means that my ranch was a hard day-and-a-half ride from his,over roads that are not roads, but merely ditches full of liquefied mud on the level stretches, and ditches full of assorted boulders on the ascent. So, although we looked neighborly on a small map, I might not have had the joy of meeting the Trawnbeighs for years if my mule hadn’t gone lame one day when I was making the interminable trip to Rebozo. Trawnbeigh’s place was seven miles from the main road, and as I happened to be near the parting of the ways when the off hind leg of Catalina began to limp, I decided to leave her with my mozo at an Indian village until a pack train should pass by (there is always some one in a pack train who can remove a bad shoe), while I proceeded on the mozo’s mule to the Trawnbeighs’. My usual stopping place for the night was five miles farther on, and the Indian village was—well, it was an Indian village. Time and again I had been told of Trawnbeigh’s early adventures, and I felt sure he could “put me up” (as he would have said himself) for the night. He “put me up” not only that night, but as my mozo didn’t appear until late the next afternoon, a second night as well. And when I at last rode away, it was with the feeling of having learned from the Trawnbeighs a great lesson.
In the first place they couldn’t have expected me; they couldn’t possibly have expected anyone. And it was a hot afternoon. But as it was the hour at which people at “home” dropped in for tea, Mrs. Trawnbeigh and her three plain, heavy looking daughters were perfectly prepared to dispense hospitality to any number of mythical friends. They had on hideous but distinctly “dressy” dresses of amazingly stamped materials known, I believe, as “summer silks,” and they were all four tightly laced. Current fashion in Paris, London, and New York by no means insisted on small, smooth, round waists, but the Trawnbeigh women had them because (as it gradually dawned on me) to have had any other kind would have been a concession to anatomy and the weather. To anything so compressible as one’s anatomy, or as vulgarly impartial as the weather, the Trawnbeighs simply did not concede. I never could get over the feeling that they all secretly regarded weather in general as a kind of popular institution, of vital importance only to the middle class. Cyril, an extremely beautiful young person of twenty-two, who had been playing tennis (by himself) on the asoleadero, was in “flannels,” and Trawnbeigh admirably looked the part in gray, middle-aged riding things, although, as I discoveredbefore leaving, their stable at the time consisted of one senile burro with ingrowing hoofs.
From the first it all seemed too flawless to be true. I had never visited in England, but I doubt if there is another country whose literature gives one so definite and lasting an impression of its “home life.” Perhaps this is because the life of families of the class to which the Trawnbeighs belonged proceeds in England by such a series of definite and traditional episodes. In a household like theirs, the unexpected must have a devil of a time in finding a chance to happen. For, during my visit, absolutely nothing happened that I hadn’t long since chuckled over in making the acquaintance of Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope; not to mention Ouida (it was Cyril, of course, who from time to time struck the Ouida note), and the more laborious performances of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. They all of them did at every tick of the clock precisely what they ought to have done. They were a page, the least bit crumpled, torn from “Half Hours with the Best Authors,” and cast, dear Heaven! upon a hillside in darkest Mexico.
Of course we had tea in the garden. There wasn’t any garden, but we nevertheless had tea in it. The house would have been cooler, less glaring,and free from the venomous little rodadoras that stung the backs of my hands full of microscopic polka dots; but we all strolled out to a spot some fifty yards away where a bench, half a dozen shaky, homemade chairs, and a rustic table were most imperfectly shaded by three tattered banana trees.
“We love to drink tea in the dingle dangle,” Mrs. Trawnbeigh explained. How the tea tray itself got to the “dingle dangle,” I have only a general suspicion, for when we arrived it was already there, equipped with caddy, cozy, a plate of buttered toast, a pot of strawberry jam, and all the rest of it. But try as I might, I simply could not rid myself of the feeling that at least two footmen had arranged it all and then discreetly retired; a feeling that also sought to account for the tray’s subsequent removal, which took place while Trawnbeigh, Cyril, Edwina, and I walked over to inspect the asoleadero and washing tanks. I wanted to look back; but something (the fear, perhaps, of being turned into a pillar of salt) restrained me.
With most English-speaking persons in that part of the world, conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and—coffee. The Trawnbeighs, however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. While we sat on the low wall of the dilapidated little asoleadero we discussed pheasant shooting and the “best places” for haberdashery and “Gladstone bags.” Cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to make a seventh.” I never found out what this meant and didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“Bertie shoots the twelfth, doesn’t he?” Edwina here inquired.
To which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215, “Bertiealwaysshoots the twelfth.”
The best place for haberdashery in Mr. Trawnbeigh’s opinion was “the Stores.” But Cyril preferred a small shop in Bond Street, maintaining firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater” insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like one’s own.” Trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt obliged to stand up for the more economical “Stores,” but it was evident that he really admired Cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of them. Edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.
“I say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” The dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went. For Mr. Trawnbeigh, after looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. Then we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.
“I’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural nature. But there was also in the room a recently made-up cot with real sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. When Trawnbeigh spoke of this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” I knew I had indeed strayed from life into the realms of mid-Victorian romance.
The breeze Trawnbeigh had referred to developed in the violent Mexican way, while I was enjoying the bath tub, into an unmistakable norther. Water fell on the roof like so much lead and then sprang off (some of it did) in thick, round streams from the tin spouts; the wind screamed in and out of the tiles overhead, and through the “north wing’s” blurred windows the writhing banana trees of the “dingle dangle” looked like strange things one sees in anaquarium. As soon as I could get into my clothes again—a bath was as far as I was able to live up to the Trawnbeigh ideal—I went into the sala where the dinner table was already set with a really heart-rending attempt at splendor. I have said that nothing happened with which I had not a sort of literary acquaintance; but I was wrong. While I was standing there wondering how the Trawnbeighs had been able all those years to keep it up, a window in the next room blew open with a bang. I ran in to shut it; but before I reached it, I stopped short and, as hastily and quietly as I could, tiptoed back to the “wing.” For the next room was the kitchen and at one end of it Trawnbeigh, in a shabby but perfectly fitting dress-coat, his trousers rolled up halfway to his knees, was patiently holding an umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while she—bebangled, becameoed, beplumed, and stripped to the buff—masterfully cooked our dinner on the brasero.
To me it was all extremely wonderful, and the wonder of it did not lessen during the five years in which, on my way to and from Rebozo, I stopped over at the Trawnbeighs’ several times a year. For, although I knew that they were often financially all but down and out, the endless red tape of their dailylife never struck me as being merely a pathetic bluff. Their rising bells and dressing bells, their apparent dependence on all sorts of pleasant accessories that simply did not exist, their occupations (I mean those on which I did not have to turn a tactful back, such as “botanizing,” “crewel work,” painting horrible water colors and composing long lists of British-sounding things to be “sent out from the Stores”), the informality with which we waited on ourselves at luncheon and the stately, punctilious manner in which we did precisely the same thing at dinner, the preordained hour at which Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the girls each took a candle and said good night, leaving Trawnbeigh, Cyril, and me to smoke a pipe and “do a whisky peg” (Trawnbeigh had spent some years in India), the whole inflexibly insular scheme of their existence was more, infinitely more, than a bluff. It was a placid, tenacious clinging to the straw of their ideal in a great, deep sea of poverty, discomfort, and isolation. And it had its reward.
For after fourteen years of Mexican life, Cyril was almost exactly what he would have been had he never seen the place; and Cyril was the Trawnbeigh’s one asset of immense value. He was most agreeable to look at, he was both related to and connected with many of the most historical-sounding ladies and gentlemen in England, and he had just the limited, selfish, amiable outlook on the world in general that was sure (granting the other things) to impress Miss Irene Slapp of Pittsburg as the height of both breeding and distinction.
Irene Slapp had beauty and distinction of her own. Somehow, although they all “needed the money,” I don’t believe Cyril would have married her if she hadn’t. Anyhow, one evening in the City of Mexico he took her in to dinner at the British Legation where he had been asked to dine as a matter of course, and before the second entrée, Miss Slapp was slightly in love with him and very deeply in love with the scheme of life, the standard, the ideal, or whatever you choose to call it, he had inherited and had been brought up, under staggering difficulties, to represent.
“The young beggar has made a pot of money in the States,” Trawnbeigh gravely informed me after Cyril had spent seven weeks in Pittsburg—whither he had been persuaded to journey on the Slapp’s private train.
“And, you know I’ve decided to sell the old place,” he casually remarked a month or so later. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “the young people are beginning to leave us.” (I hadn’t noticed any signs of impending flight on the part of Edwina, Violet, and Maud.) “Mrs. Trawnbeigh and I want to end our days at home. Slapp believes there’s gold on the place—or would it be petroleum? He’s welcome to it. After all, I’ve never been fearfully keen on business.”
And I rode away pondering, as I always did, on the great lesson of the Trawnbeighs.
EARLY in the eighteenth century there went to Mexico from France a boy of sixteen named Joseph de la Borde. “By his fortunate mining ventures at Tlalpujahua, Tasco, and Zacatecas,” we read, “he made a fortune of forty million pesos.” One of these millions he spent in building a church at Tasco, and another he spent in building a garden at Cuernavaca. This is all I know about Joseph de la Borde, or, as he was called in Mexico, José de la Borda, except that he died in Cuernavaca at the age of seventy-nine and that his portrait—a funny old man in a white wig and black velvet—hangs among the portraits of other dead and eminent gentlemen in an obscure corridor of the National Museum. It might be interesting to learn what became of the remaining thirty-eight millions; but then again it might not. So I haven’t tried to find out. It is scarcely probable, however, that at a later date he expressed himself more notably than he did in the construction of El Jardin Borda.
It lies on a steep hillside behind Cuernavaca, andeven if it were not one of the most beautiful of tangled, neglected, ruined old gardens anywhere, it would be lovable for the manner in which it tried so hard to be a French garden and failed. Joseph, it is clear, had the French passion for formalizing the landscape—for putting Nature into a pretty strait-jacket; but although he spent much time and a million pesos in trying to do this at Cuernavaca, he rather wonderfully did not succeed. No doubt the result pleased him; it surely ought to have. But just as surely it was not the light, bright, definitely graceful result of which his French mind had conceived. It was always a little precious to speak of one thing in terms of another, but nevertheless there is about a perfect French garden something very musical. The Luxembourg garden is musical, so is the garden at Versailles; musical with the kind of music that is as deliberately academic as it is deliberately tuneful. There was every endeavor to make the Jardin Borda perform on a small scale with the same blithe elegance of Versailles and the garden of the Luxembourg; but it was Mexican at heart. Perhaps it foresaw Napoleon III. At any rate, although it tried to be French, it at the last refused.
The situation, the flora, and, absurd as it maysound, the technic of the stone masons who built the architectural features—the walls, the fountains, the summerhouses, the cascades, and the ponds—all combine to give the place an individuality, sometimes Spanish, sometimes Mexican, but French only in the same remote manner in which Shakespeare is Shakespeare when Madame Bernhardt, instead of exclaiming, “Go. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once,” liquidly burbles: “Allez, messieurs; allez immédiatement—sans cérémonie!” It hangs precipitously on the side of a ravine when it should have been level (one is so glad it is not), and the dense, southern trees—mangoes and sapotes and Indian laurel—with which it was planted, have long since outgrown the scale of the place, interlaced and roofed out the sky overhead with an opaque and somber canopy. They now are not, as they were intended to be, decorative features of the garden, they are the garden itself; one cannot see the trees for the forest. In its impermeable shade there are long, islanded tanks in which many numerous families of ducks and geese live a strangely secluded, dignified, aristocratic existence—arbors of roses and jasmine, and heavy, broken old fountains that no longer play and splash. In fact, all the masonry, and to retain itself on the hillside the place had to be a massof masonry, is heavy and simple, and except for the arbors there are no longer any flowers. Where in the days of Joseph there no doubt used to be a dazzling carpet of color, there is now only a tangle of coffee trees. But in Cuernavaca when the purple and red and pink of growing things under a pitiless sun become intolerable, the absence of color in the Jardin Borda, except for its dark and soothing green, is well worth frequently paying the twenty-five centavos the present owner charges as an admittance fee.
In seventy-five or a hundred years there will be many fine old formal gardens in the United States—finer than the Borda ever was. Under the pergolas of some of them there is much tea and pleasant conversation and one greatly admires their marble furniture imported from Italy—their careful riot of flowers. But at present it is difficult to forget that their prevailing color is wealth, and to forget it will take at least another century. If they have everything that Joseph’s garden lacks, they all lack the thing it has. For in its twilit arbors and all along its sad and silent terraces there is at any hour the same poetic mystery that even at the ages of eight and four sometimes used to affect Don Guillermo and me when we were turned loose to playand to pick daisies in the Borghese garden in Rome. The Borghese is extensive and the Borda is tiny, but history has strolled in both of them and they both seem to have beautiful, secret sorrows.
I am not like an American woman tourist in Cuernavaca (it was her first week in the country) who informed me that she sat in the hotel all day because she was so tired of seeing the streets full of Mexicans! “You know, we saw a great many Mexicans in Mexico City,” she added in the aggrieved tone of one who thinks it is high time for a procession of Swedes or Australians. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, there are mornings and afternoons when it is good to be out of range of the human voice and alone with trees, a sheet of water however small, and some animals.
Attached to the grounds is a house—a succession of cool rooms on one floor, and in passing the open doors and windows of the long, denuded sala as one begins to descend the main terrace, it is impossible not to remember for a moment that the place was lived in by Maximilian and Carlotta. It is impossible, too, especially if the white roses and jasmine of the arbor are in bloom, not to pay the unfortunate lady and gentleman the tribute of a sentimental pang. In Mexico one often finds oneself thinkingof Maximilian and Carlotta and, on the whole, with a kindliness springing, I am sure, chiefly from the facts that they were young and in love. For politically they were but a pair of stupid mistakes. History has been kind to Maximilian—far kinder than he deserved—but standard and respectable history is so timorous of leaving a wrong impression that it often fails to leave any impression at all. History to be interesting and valuable should be recorded by persons of talent and prejudice or by chambermaids who listen at keyholes.
As it is difficult to believe Maximilian a scoundrel, the other belief most open to one in view of his brief career, is that he was a dull, ignorant, and fatuous young man who thought it would prove more diverting to be a Mexican emperor than an Austrian archduke. His portrait, indeed (the famous one on horseback now in the National Palace), expresses just this with unconscious cruelty. History often speaks of him as handsome—an adjective that even the idealized portrait in question quite fails to justify. Without more chin than Maximilian ever had, one can be neither handsome nor a successful emperor. He was amiable and “well disposed,” but his fatuity revealed itself from the first in the mere fact of his being able to see in himself a logical claimant to thethrone of Mexico in the far-fetched and absurd reason that led Napoleon III and the Roman Catholic Church to select him. For he was chosen to adorn this precariously fictitious seat because Mexico had formerly been a Spanish possession and the house of which he was a representative had ruled in Spain before the accession of the Bourbons! Napoleon III naturally was not giving away empires to Bourbons, and Maximilian was supposed “to reunite the Mexico of 1863 with the monarchical Mexico of 1821.” To the party of intelligence, progress, and reform there was about the same amount of right and reason in this as the inhabitants of France would find in a sudden demand on my part to be made their chief executive because my name happens to be a French name.
Maximilian “accepted” the crown on two conditions. That he was pathetically ignorant of at least the subject on which he ought to have been best informed is clear from one of them, and that he was dull becomes almost as evident from the other. The first provided that he should be elected to the throne of Mexico by popular vote; and the second, that the Emperor Napoleon should give him armed aid as long as he required it. Now anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of Mexico knows that apopular election there is an impossibility and always has been. No one in Mexico is ever elected by popular vote, or ever really elected at all. It cannot be done at the present time (1908) any more than it could have been when Maximilian and Carlotta were crowned in the cathedral in 1864. The inhabitants of Mexico, incredible as it may sound, speak more than fifty totally different languages and many of them have never learned Spanish. Some of them in fact—the Yaquis in Sonora and the Mayas in Yucatan—do not even recognize the Mexican Government, are still at war with it and are being for this reason rapidly exterminated, although not as rapidly as would be the case if the military exterminators did not receive increased pay while engaged in the congenial pursuit of extermination. When one considers that two years before the proposed taking of the census in 1910, the Government is planning a gradual and elaborate campaign of enlightenment in the hope of allaying the suspicions of the superstitious lower classes and making a more or less accurate census possible, it is clear that not even a political dreamer could seriously consider the feasibility of a genuine popular election. From what I know of many of the inhabitants, from what I have seen of their complete indifference to anything outside of their villages and cornfields, I think it highly probable that many thousands of them tilled their land throughout the entire, futile “reign” altogether unaware of Maximilian’s existence. Maximilian was not elected Emperor of Mexico by popular vote, although before he learned something about his empire, he no doubt thought he had been.
As to the second condition—when Maximilian staked his entire hope of success upon a promise of Napoleon III, who had on various occasions somewhat conspicuously shown himself to be as dangerous an adventurer and as unscrupulous a liar as most of the other members of his offensive family, Maximilian did something that may be recorded as trusting and unfortunate, but that is only adequately described as dull. Fatuous, ignorant, and dull, he not only failed to pull out Napoleon’s chestnuts, he proceeded to fall into the fire. Except just at first, he was not wanted in Mexico even by the clerical party responsible for his being there; for his refusal to abolish the Reform Laws and restore the power of the Church bitterly disappointed the Church without, however, gaining for him adherents among those who had fought so long to establish a republic. Everything he did was preordained to be wrong. He went without a definite policy and was incapable ofevolving one after he arrived. His three years in Mexico were unproductive of anything except an enormous debt incurred largely by the silly magnificence of his court, a great deal of bloodshed and his own execution. He died bravely, one always reads, but so do hundreds of other persons every day. Before an audience composed of the entire civilized world, to die bravely ought not to be a particularly difficult feat. As Alphonse Daudet somewhere says of Frenchmen, “They can always be brave if there are enough people looking.” Life was not kind to the young Austrian, but history has been.
And yet, on the sad, silent terraces of the Jardin Borda one always thinks of Maximilian and Carlotta, and pays them the tribute of a sentimental pang.
TRAVELERS sometimes complain that “Mexican towns are exactly alike; if you see one you’ve seen them all,” and while I cannot agree with the bromidically couched observation I can understand why it is made. They are not alike, but they are so startlingly different from Northern towns that one is at first more impressed by this fundamental difference, in which they all naturally have a family resemblance, than by the less striking but delightful ways in which they often differ from one another. Without exception, they are, as art critics used to say of certain pictures, “painted in a high key,” and where the nature of the site permits, their rectangularity is positively Philadelphian. In their center is a public square with a garden, rather formal in intention but as a rule old enough and luxuriant enough to have lost its original stiffness. Here there are paths and benches, trees, fountains, flowers, and a flimsy looking iron and tin band stand one learns at last to like. At one side is the most important church; the otherthree are bounded by shops and arcades. This is the plaza. Every town has one, many of them have several. But there is always one that more than the others is a kind of pulsating, civic heart, and it is interesting to note how in their dimensions they observe the scale of their environment. Big towns have big plazas, small towns have small plazas, villages have tiny plazas. In addition to the plaza there is often, in a quieter, more distant quarter of the community, a park—a tangled, shady, bird-inhabited spot, with high and aged trees, massive seats of stone or cement, and a tranquillity that exerts a noticeably benign influence on all who go to walk or sit there. Whether the houses and buildings are built of stone or mortar or, as is customary in the smaller places of the plateau, of sun-dried mud bricks, their effect is the same, for they are all given a coat of smooth stucco and then calcimined white, or a pale shade of pink, blue, yellow, buff, or green. Rarely are they of more than two stories; most of them have balconies on the upper floor, all have long, heavily barred windows on the lower, and if it were not for their gayety of color, the perpetual fascination of their flower-filled patios of which the passer-by gets tantalizing glimpses through open doorways, and the intellectual interest of the signs on the shops—theiruniform height and the square simplicity of their design might be monotonous. As it is, a Mexican street, even when empty, is never monotonous.
Besides the plaza and the park, there is the market place—sometimes merely an open square in which the venders, under rectangular homemade parasols, spread their wares upon the ground, but more often an inclosure equipped with long counters and protected from sun and rain by a roof. Except in the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, and Merida, one is not conscious of “residence quarters.” The “best families” (a term almost as meaningless and as frequently employed in Mexico as in the United States) live where they please, and they please to live as deeply as possible in the thick of things. The largest and most elaborate houses are often scattered between shops and saloons along the busiest streets, and when one becomes intimate with the country and its inhabitants it seems natural and agreeable that they should be. For one cannot live in Mexico without consciously or unconsciously regarding the superficialities of life from something very like the local point of view. There is about it an infectious and inevitable quality, and I have often been both amused and depressed by the manner in which foreigners who accept the best of everything in Mexico—who grow strong, and revel in one of its several climates, who make a good living there, who enjoy its beauty and adopt many of its customs—stupidly deny its attraction for them, repudiate their sympathy with it. It is customary, almost a convention, to do so, and one is appalled by the tenacity of convention’s grasp upon the ordinary mind—by the impregnable dullness of the normal intellect. I know, for example, Americans who have lived happily in Mexico for many years. They have, among Mexicans, friends whom they both respect and admire. Almost all their interests in life are focused somewhere in the country, and when they are away from it they look forward with gladness to the time of their return. Yet, apparent as all this is to one who associates with them, they seem incapable of translating experience into consciousness and conversation. You see them leading contented and successful lives, at peace with their adopted land and almost everything in it; but when they undertake to discuss their environment, to formulate their opinions, their remarks are rarely valuable and never appreciative. Instead of simply trying to give one something of the Mexico they have day by day, month by month, and year by year met and succumbed to, they appear to take a pride in parading the old geography, guidebook and tourist dicta that in their cases, one sees at a glance, are not justified by facts.
“All Mexican servants are thieves and liars,” is the characteristic pronouncement of an American woman whose household for sixteen years has been admirably and economically run by the same devoted and honest cook.
“What a filthy lot they are!” exclaims her husband (who observes the good old custom of taking a bath every Saturday night whether he needs it or not), as we ride through a Yucatecan village in which most of the Indian inhabitants scrub from head to foot and put on clean clothes every day.
“I wouldn’t trust one of them with a cent,” declares some one else, who has in his office three Mexican clerks to whom he implicitly intrusts the handling of thousands of dollars.
“I look upon them just as I look upon niggers,” says a Southerner—who not only doesn’t, but who is gratified by the pleasant position he has achieved for himself in local, native society. And as such comments are made with neither malicious intent nor with the “feeling” that would accompany them were they final deductions from a long series of painful experiences, one marvels at the phonographic monotony with which they are endlessly reproduced.Almost always purely verbal, there is behind them neither thought nor emotion, and they are irritating in much the same way that checks are irritating when carelessly made out and signed by persons who have nothing in the bank. They are, I fancy, connected with a sense of patriotism that has grown habitual and perfunctory, and I mention them merely by way of illustrating half of my assertion to the effect that one absorbs something of Mexico both unconsciously and with deliberateness. A young Englishman of my acquaintance may well supply the other half.
It is not generally realized that the male inhabitants of Great Britain do not make a practice of wearing drawers, although such is the strange, dissembled fact. Now, while the possession of underclothes is not necessarily indicative of birth and wealth, I have always assumed, although perhaps with a certain apathy, that the possession of wealth and birth presupposed underclothes. This, in England at least, does not seem to be the case, for my young friend, whose name is ancient and whose purse is well filled, announced to me in Mexico not long ago, with the naïveté that so often astonishes one in thoroughly sophisticated persons of his race: “I’ve knocked about a good bit and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s usually something to be said for the peculiar habits of different peoples even if you don’t know exactly what it is. Since I’ve been in this country I’ve noticed that everybody seems to wear drawers—even the peons. There must be some reason for it—connected with the climate very likely—and I’ve taken to wearing them myself. I don’t particularly care for the things,” he hastened apologetically to add, “and I dare say they’re all rot, but I’m going to give them a try. Why don’t you!”
It is natural and agreeable in Mexico to have one’s house in what we call “the retail district,” for one soon learns to appreciate the Mexican’s combined love of seclusion and publicity. A dwelling sandwiched in between the town’s most popular drug and grocery shops is ideally situated. The nature of its construction—the Moors imposed it upon Spain and Spain passed it on—insures a fortresslike privacy, while the site insures the constant movement and color, the manifold, trivial, human and animal interests without which the life of a Mexican household would be somewhat empty. Those odd moments consumed by us with magazines and the book of the week, Mexicans devote to looking out of their sala windows, with a rarely misplaced confidence in their street’s potentialities. It never strikes me asstrange thatIcan pass so many hours in peering at sights so foreign to my race, if not any longer to my experience, but it is one of the pleasantly surprising traits of the inhabitants thattheirinterest is just as fresh and perhaps more insatiable. To me the love affair across the way—carried on as it is with much holding of hands in the excessive broadness of Mexican daylight, by a young woman of thirty-eight behind a barred window, and a young man of forty-two on the narrow sidewalk outside—to me, this public display of an emotion, ordinarily regarded as rather private, is most exciting; but even so, I am inclined to believe that after commenting on such a courtship every afternoon and evening for three and a half years it would begin to pall. On Mexicans it never seems to. They do not precisely stare at the spectacle, as a careful unawareness under the circumstances is considered the proper line to take. But their blind spots are not situated in the tails of their eyes. However, it does not necessitate such absorbing matters as affairs of the heart to retain their attention. They never weary at certain hours of the day of peering through the bars or leaning over the balconies in contemplation of just the street’s multifarious but always leisurely movement. It is not often a noisy movement. The collectiveMexican voice—the voice of a group or even a crowd is musical, and the click of donkey’s hoofs on cobblestones is a dainty, a positively prim form of commotion.
But should they wish to escape from even these sometimes distinctly soothing sounds, there is always the patio and the tranquil rooms around it. They are of all sizes, of all degrees of misery and splendor and of most shapes, these universal patios, but in the meanest of them there is an expressed yearning for color and adornment that, even when ill cared for and squalid, has been at least expressed. It takes the form, most fortunately, of flowers, with often a fountain in a circular basin of blue and white tiles. A Mexican patio, in fact, is considerably more than a courtyard. It is a flower garden surrounded by a house.
In Northern climates the most delightful hour of the day has always been that in which one comes in from the frosty dusk, lights the lamps, smashes a smoldering lump of coal into a bright, sudden blaze, draws the curtain and, in an atmosphere thick with warmth and quiet, sits down to read or write or rest. In tropical countries one often longs in vain for this hour. Its impossibility is, I think, a chief cause of homesickness, and it is long before one accepts with anything like the same sense—a sense of physical and mental well-being immune from gazes and intrusions—the Southern equivalent. The Southern equivalent is the hour in which the sun shines brightest and fiercest, when instead of seeking warmth one eludes it, half undressed, in dim, bare rooms, under awnings and behind light, thin screens.
Even when a street for the time being comparatively lacks moving figures there is for the foreigner a constant amusement in reading the signs over the doors of shops and more especially those that decorate the outer walls of pulque joints and cantinas. Their mere perusal, indeed, may throw a truer, more valuable light upon certain phases of the native humors and habits of thought than do many works less spontaneous and more profound. “Jack O’Grady, Sample Room,” or, “Otto Baumholzer, Saloon,” may or may not make an appeal. But even when it does it is not an appeal to the intellect and the imagination. In Mexico the proprietor of a saloon likes to advertise his wares, not so much with his name as with a sentiment, an allusion—a word or a phrase that poetically connotes. There are of course a great many serviceable designations of no particular relevance like the patriotic “Cinco de Mayo,” theinevitable “Estrella de Oro,” and the frequently met with and rather meaningless “Cometa de 1843.” They show respectively only a taste for the national, the brilliant, the surprising. The gift of fancy is not, after all, to everyone. Even when a foul little corner drunkery, calcimined sky-blue—with a life-sized lady reposing in a green bower, painted on its finger-marked exterior—is entitled “El Nido de Amor,” or when a pink hole in the wall that can be seen for a block and smelled for two, is named “Las Flores de Abril”—even then one does not appreciate quite to the full some of the quaint possibilities of just the ordinary Mexican mind. But a saloon called “El Destino,” another frankly advertising itself as “La Isla de Sacrificios,” still another with painted above its door “El Infiernito” (the little hell), a fourth that calls itself “Al Delirio”—there is in such names food, as one strolls about any Mexican community, for meditation. Less grim, but as suggestive and as apt, is “La Seductora.” “La Media Noche” and “Las Aves de la Noche” (the night birds) always strike a sympathetic chord, while “El Renacimiento,” “El Valor,” and “El Mensajero de los Dioses” (the messenger of the gods) gracefully hoist the whole matter into the realm of the ideal. The subtlest of them, and theone that never fails to make me laugh as I pass it, is “La Idea!” I regret now that the opportunity of entering and making the proprietor’s acquaintance has gone. A man who would name his saloon “La Idea!” ought to be worth knowing. The thing can be apperceived in so many ways and spoken in so many different tones of voice, starting, as at once suggests itself, with the intonation generally imparted to, “Why, the idea!”
One source of dissatisfaction to travelers for whom foreign travel has always meant Europe, is that there are so few “sights” in Mexican towns. By “sights” I mean the galleries of sculpture and painting, the palaces and the castles, the frescoes, the architectural fragments, the tombs, the relics, and the interminable museums crammed with a dead world’s junk, over which the conscientious may exhaust their necks and backs. European cities even as comparatively small as Stockholm and Copenhagen possess museums where, guidebook in hand, people remain for whole days examining ugly, labeled little implements fashioned in the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and every city has among other treasures a few miles of minute, Dutch masters before which to trudge, too weary to appreciate their marvelous skill or to realize theirbeauty. But in Mexican towns there are none of these things, and the traveler whose days have not been mapped out for him and who is not in the habit of strolling, of sitting in churches, of shamelessly idling in parks and plazas, is likely to complain of a lack of occupation. It is difficult for him to accept the fact that the most notable sight in Mexico is simply Mexico.
It is difficult, too, for him to reconcile the general outward conditions of the towns and cities with his preconceived ideas of them, which is always annoying. Instead of giving an impression of dirt and neglect, of the repulsive indifference to appearances, and general “shiftlessness” we are so accustomed to in the small communities of States like, for instance, Arkansas and Indiana, their best quarters always, and their more modest districts very often, are perpetually swept and sprinkled, dazzling with new calcimine and, for thoroughfares so aged, incredibly neat and gay. About drainage and water works—the invisible and important—there is still much to deplore, much to hope for, although improvement is everywhere on the way. But municipal “appearances” are rigidly maintained; maintained in some instances at the cost, unfortunately, of qualities that share the secret of the country’s charm. There isat the present time, for example, a rage—a madness rather—for renovating, for “doing over” the exteriors of churches, and in the last four years some of the most impressive examples of Spanish colonial church architecture have been scraped, punctured with pointed windows, supplied with gargoyles and porticoes and then whitewashed. To remember the cathedral at Jalapa as it was, and to see it now, a jaunty horror half clad in cheap, Gothic clothes that don’t fit, brings a lump to one’s throat.
The order and security that everywhere appear to reign both by day and by night are also bewildering in a country popularly supposed to be the modern fountain-head of lawlessness and melodrama. Besides the small but businesslike policemen with large, visible revolvers who seem to be on every corner and who materialize in swarms at the slightest infringement of the code, the highways are patrolled by that picturesque body of men known as rurales, of whom there are between four and five thousand. After the fall of Santa Anna, the organized troop of ranchmen (known as “cuerados” from the leather clothes they wore) became bandits and gained for themselves the name of “plateados,” it being their dashing custom heavily to ornament their garments with silver. In the time of Comonfort they were turnedfrom their evil ways (no doubt on the theory of its taking a thief to catch a thief) and transformed into rurales. Under President Diaz they have attained a high degree of efficiency, and while their practically limitless powers in isolated and inaccessible parts of the country are no doubt sometimes abused, their reputation for fearlessness, supplemented by a revolver, a carbine, and a saber, has a most chastening influence. One realizes something of the number of policemen at night, when they deposit their lighted lanterns in the middle of the streets and there is until dawn a ceaseless concert of their wailing whistles. You may become as drunk as you wish to in a cantina and, even with the doors open, talk as loud and as long as you are able, for cantinas were made to get drunk and talk loud in. But you must walk quite steadily when you come out—unless your wife or daughter is laughingly leading you home—or you will be arrested before you reel ten yards. Even chaperoned by your wife and unmistakably homeward bound, you will be escorted kindly, almost gently (when you show no resistance), to the police station if the city happens to need your services. The combination of quick temper and quicker drink is responsible for much violence in Mexico, but one rarely sees it. One rarely sees anyform of disorder, and over vice is draped a cloak of complete invisibility. In most places women of the town are not even permitted to appear on the streets except at certain hours and in a capacity sincerely unprofessional. The facility and dispatch with which one is arrested is conducive to a constant appearance of decorum. Only in a paternal despotism is such law and order possible. One evening I myself was arrested for an exceedingly slight and innocent misdemeanor.
“But why do you arrest me? Why don’t you arrest everybody else? I’m not the only one,” I protested to the policeman with a lightness I was beginning not to feel.
“You are a foreigner and a gentleman and you ought to set an example to the ignorant lower classes,” he replied without a smile. It was some time before I could induce him to let me go.
The frequency of the policemen is equaled (or exceeded, one sometimes feels) only by the frequency of the churches. And, as if there were not already thousands more than the souls of any people could possibly need, new ones are always being built. I was told not long ago of a wealthy man who, on recently acquiring a vast area of land which he contemplated turning into a sugar hacienda, beganthe construction of his “plant” with a thirty-thousand-dollar church. Their number and the manner in which they monopolize all the most conspicuous sites, as well as render conspicuous most of the others, now and then enables even a Roman Catholic to regard the Laws of Reform with a slightly less bilious eye. The countryside is dotted with them—the towns and cities crowded by them. It seems at times as if the streets were but so many convenient lanes through which to approach them—the shops and houses merely so many modest dependencies. Pictorially considered, they imbue the dreariest, most impersonal of landscapes, especially just after sunset, with a mild and lovely atmosphere of human pathos that one might journey far without seeing again. But even in Mexico the pictorial sense is subject to periods of suspended animation during which one’s attitude toward the churches, or perhaps I should say the Church, is curiously ill-defined. It is discomposing, on the one hand, to learn of a powerful bishop whose “wife” and large family of sons and daughters are complacently taken for granted by his entire diocese—to be warned by a devout Catholic never under any circumstances to allow one’s American maid servants to converse with a priest or to enter his house on any pretext whatever—to appreciate the extreme poverty of the people and to realize that the entire gigantic corporation is kept running chiefly by the hard-earned mites with which they hope to save their souls. In the church of San Miguel (not a particularly large church) at Orizaba, I once had the curiosity to count the various devices by which the faithful are hypnotized into leaving their money behind them, and as I made notes of the little alms boxes in front of all the chapels, at the doors, and scattered along the nave, many of them with a placard explaining the use to which the funds were supposed to be put, I could not but admire the unerring instinct with which the emotions of the race had been gauged. The system, assisted as it is by a fantastically dressed lay figure at every placarded box, has for the population of Orizaba (an excessively religious town) much the same fascination that is exercised upon me by a penny arcade. There were boxes for “The Monthly Mass of Jesus,” “For the Marble Cross,” “For the Sick,” “For the Sick of S. Vincent and S. Paul,” “For Mary Conceived without Sin,” “For Our Father Jesus Carrying the Cross,” “For Saint Michael,” “For the Blessed Souls,” “For the Blessed Virgin,” “For Our Lady of Carmen,” and then, as if the ground had not been tolerably wellcovered, there were two boxes, “For the Work of this Parish.” But these were literally less than half the total number. In addition to the twelve whose uses were revealed, there wereeighteen otherswhose uses were not, or thirty in all.
On the other hand, I cannot linger in Mexican churches day after day, as I have done, watching the Indians glide in, remove the leather bands from their foreheads, let their chitas slip gently to the pavement, and then, with straight backs and crossed hands, kneel in reverent ecstasy before their favorite images, without rejoicing that a profound human want can be so filled to overflowing. And I cannot but doubt that it could by any other way we know be filled at all. Three men in Indian white, who are returning from market to their homes in some distant village, stop to kneel for fully half an hour without moving before the chapel of St. Michael. St. Michael happens to be an almost life-sized female doll with pink silk socks, the stiff skirts of a ballet-dancer (actually), a pink satin bolero jacket, an imitation diamond necklace, a blond wig with long curls, and a tin helmet. The two women who accompany them pray before the figure of Mary Conceived without Sin—whose costume I prefer not to invite the accusation of sacrilege by recording. The men are straight-backed, motionless, enthralled. One of the women suddenly extends her arms with an all-embracing gesture, and rigidly holds them there—her hands palm upward, as if she expected to receive the stigmata. What are they all thinking about? But what earthly difference does it make—if there be a difference so heavenly? No doubt they are thinking of nothing; thought is not essential to bliss. Then they get up, and after dropping money in the little slot machines of Michael, and Mary Conceived without Sin, they proceed on their way, leaving me glad that for fully half an hour some one in the world has been happy. For beyond the possibility of a doubt they have been happy, and have deepened my conviction that the desire to undermine their faith in Michael and in Mary Conceived without Sin is at best misguided, and at worst, wicked. “Idolatry and superstition!” one hears groaned from end to end of Mexico. But why not? They appear to be very comforting, exalting things. It happens that personally I could derive no spiritual refreshment from remaining on my knees for half an hour in front of these dreadful dolls. But there is a statue or two in the Louvre, and several pictures in Florence, to whom—had Ibeen brought up to believe them capable of performing miracles—I should find it most agreeable and beneficial to say my prayers.
So one’s attitude toward the Church in Mexico becomes at the last curiously ill-defined. The Church is corrupt, grasping, resentful; but it unquestionably gives millions of people something without which they would be far more unhappy than they are—something that no other church could give them.
There are city parks and squares in other countries, but in none do they play the same intimate and important part in the national domestic life that they do in Mexico. To one accustomed to associate the “breathing spaces” with red-nosed tramps and collarless, unemployed men dejectedly reading wilted newspapers on shabby benches, it would be impossible to give an idea of what the plaza means to the people of Mexico—of how it is used by them. It strikes me always as a kind of open-air drawing-room, not only, as are our own public squares, free to all, but, unlike them, frequented by all. It is not easy to imagine one’s acquaintances in the United States putting on their best clothes for the purpose of strolling around and around the public square of even one of the smaller cities, to the effortsof a brass band, however good; but in Mexico one’s acquaintances take an indescribable amount of innocent pleasure in doing just this on three evenings a week and on Sunday afternoons as well. And with a simplicity—a democracy—that is a strange contradiction in a people who have inherited so much punctilio—such pride of position, they do it together with all the servants and laborers in town. In the smaller places the men at these concerts promenade in one direction, while the women, and the women accompanied by men, revolve in the other; a convenient arrangement that permits the men to apperceive the charms of the women, and the women to apperceive the charms of the men without effort or boldness on the part of either. And everyone is socially so at ease! There is among the rich and well dressed not the slightest trace of that “certain condescension” observable, I feel sure, when the duke and the duchess graciously pair off with the housekeeper and the butler, and among the lower classes—the maid and men servants, the stone-masons and carpenters, the cargadores, the clerks, the small shopkeepers—there is neither the aggressive sense of an equality that does not exist nor a suggestion of servility. The sons of, say, the governor of the state, and their companions, will stroll away the evening between two groups of sandaled Indians with blankets on their shoulders—his daughters in the midst of a phalanx of laundresses and cooks; the proximity being carried off with an engaging naturalness, an apparent unawareness of difference on the part of everyone that is the perfection of good manners. When such contacts happen with us it is invariably an experiment, never a matter of course. Our upper classes self-consciously regard themselves as doing something rather quaint—experiencing a new sensation, while the lower classes eye them with mixed emotions I have never been able satisfactorily to analyze.
But the serenatas are the least of it. The plaza is in constant use from morning until late at night. Ladies stop there on their way home from church, “dar una vuelta” (to take a turn), as they call it, and to see and be seen; gentlemen frequently interrupt the labors of the day by going there to meditate over a cigar; schoolboys find in it a shady, secluded bench and use it as a study; nurse maids use it as a nursery; children use its broad, outside walks as a playground; tired workmen use it as a place of rest. By eleven o’clock at night the whole town will, at various hours, have passed through it, strolled in it, played, sat, rested, talked, or thoughtin it. It is the place to go when in doubt as to what to do with oneself—the place to investigate, when in doubt as to where to find some one. The plaza is a kind of social clearing house—a resource—a solution. I know of nothing quite like it, and nothing as fertile in the possibilities of innocent diversion. Except during a downpour of rain, the plaza never disappoints.
I have grown rather tired of reading in magazines that “the City of Mexico resembles a bit of Paris”; but I have grown much more tired of the people who have also read it and repeat it as if they had evolved the comparison unaided—particularly as the City of Mexico doesn’t in the least resemble a bit of Paris. It resembles absolutely nothing in the world except itself. To criticise it as having most of the objectionable features and few of the attractions of a great city would be unfair; but first telling myself that Iamunfair, I always think of it in those terms. In truth it is a great and wonderful city, and it grows more wonderful every day; also, I am inclined to believe, more disagreeable. Unfortunately I did not see it until after I had spent six months in Mexico—in Vera Cruz, in Jalapa, in Orizaba, in Puebla, in the depths of the country—and when it finally burst upon me in all itsshallow brilliancy, I felt that I was no longer in Mexico, but without the compensation of seeming to be somewhere else. I certainly did not seem to be in Paris. The fact of going to a place for no reason other than to see what it is like, always stands between me and a proper appreciation of it. It does, I think, with everyone, although it is not generally realized and admitted. A certain amount of preoccupation while visiting a city is essential to receiving just impressions of it. The formation of judgments should be gradual and unconscious—should resemble the processes of digestion. I have been in the capital of the republic half a dozen times, but I have never, so to speak, digested it; I have merely looked without losing consciousness of the fact that I was looking, which is conducive to seeing too much on the one hand, and on the other, too little.
After the jungle and the smaller places, the city impressed me, on arriving at night, as wonderfully brilliant. There were asphalted streets, vistas of illuminated shop windows, enormous electric cars, the inviting glow of theater entrances, a frantic darting of cabs and automobiles, and swarms of people in a strangely un-Mexican hurry. The noises and the lights were the noises and the lightsof a metropolis. Even daylight did not, for the first morning and afternoon, have any appreciable effect upon the general sense of size and effulgence. But somewhere within forty-eight hours the place, to a mere observer, began to contract—its glitter became increasingly difficult to discern. It was not a disappointment exactly, but neither was it “just like a bit of Paris.” It remained extremely interesting—geographically, historically, architecturally—but it was oddly lacking in the one quality everybody is led to believe it has in a superlative degree. Without doubt I shall be thought trifling to mention it at all. In fact I don’t believe Icanmention it, as I don’t precisely know what it is, and the only way in which I can hope to make myself even partly clear will sound not only trifling but foolish. I mean—the City of Mexico lacks the indefinable quality that makes one either desirous of putting on one’s best clothes, or regretful that one has not better clothes to put on. To dear reader this may mean something or it may not. For me it instantly recreates an atmosphere, recalls certain streets at certain hours in New York, in Paris, in London—in a few of the less down-at-the-heel, Congoesque localities of Washington. One may or may not possess the garments in question. Onemight not take the trouble to put them on if one did. But the feeling, I am sure, is known to everyone; the feeling that in some places there is a pleasantly exacting standard in the amenities of appearance which one must either approximate, or remain an outsider. In the City of Mexico one is nowhere subject to such aspirations or misgivings, in spite of the “palatial residences,” the superb horses, the weekly display of beauty and fashion. For the place has upon one—it has at least upon me—the effect of something new and indeterminate and mongrel, which for a city founded in 1522 is a decidedly curious effect to exert.
It arises without doubt from the prosperity and growth of the place—the manner in which it is tearing down and building up and reaching out—gradually transforming whole streets of old Spanish and Mexican houses into buildings that are modern and heterogeneous. In its center, some five or six adjacent streets appear to have been almost wholly so converted, the final proof of it being that in front of the occasional elaborately carved old doorway or armorial-bearing façade and castellated top, one instinctively pauses as in the presence of a curiosity. Imbedded as they are in unusually unattractive quarters of purely native origin, these halfa dozen business streets suggest a small city in the heart of a large town. They might, one feels, be somewhere in Europe, although the multitude of American signs, of American products, and American residents, by which one is on all sides confronted, makes it impossible to decide where. There is a surprising transformation, too, on the left of the Paseo, along the line of the electric cars on the way to the castle of Chapultepec. (A lady in the throes of displaying an interest in Mexico exclaimed to me the other day: “There have been so many earthquakes in Mexico of late that I suppose Chapultepec isveryactive!”) The bare, flat territory is growing an enormous crop of detached dwellings that seek to superimpose Mexican characteristics upon an American suburban-villa foundation, with results not always felicitous. Outwardly, at least, much of the city is being de-Mexicanized, and whereas the traveler, to whom it has been a gate of entrance, has eyes and adjectives only for its age, its singularity, its picturesqueness (all of which are indisputably there), the traveler who sees it last—for whom it is an exit—is more inclined merely to be discomposed by its uncompleted modernity.
For, not unreasonably, he expects to find theresome of the frills of civilization; luxurious hotels, “smart” restaurants, an embarrassing choice of cafés and theaters. Such frills as there are, however, succeed for the most part in being only pretentious and ineffective, like those a woman tries to make at home after taking notes in front of a milliner’s window. The leading hotels are all bad—not in the sense of being uncomfortable, for they are comfortable enough, but in the sense of purporting to be something they are not. The four I have stayed in reminded me of a placard I once saw while endeavoring to find something edible at a railway “eating house” in one of our Western States. “Low Aim, not Failure is a Crime,” the thing declared with an almost audible snigger. Surrounded by the second-and third-rate magnificence of the capital’s best hotels, one longs for the clean, native simplicity of the provinces. The theaters—that is to say, what one hears and sees in them—are quite as primitive and tedious as they are elsewhere. A translated French play now and then proves a temptation, but as it is customary in Mexican theaters for the prompter to read everybody’s part, whether he needs assistance or not, in a voice as loud and often louder than those of the actors, the pleasure of illusion is out of the question. In fact, it is sucha matter of course for the prompter to yell through a whole play at the top of his lungs (often reading the linesafterthe actors instead of ahead of them), that when, as happens once in a long while, his services are dispensed with, the fact is proudly advertised! I have several times gleaned from the advance notices of traveling companies that on such and such a night Señorita So-and-So would take the leading part in the laughable comedy entitled “‘Thingumbob,’ sin auxilio de apuntador!” (without the aid of the prompter.) Nothing in connection with the theater in Mexico has seemed to me more entertaining than this, unless, perhaps, it is that at the Teatro Limón in Jalapa, “The management respectfully requests gentlemen not to bring their firearms to the performances.” Whether or not this plaintive plea is on the principle of the old “Don’t shoot the organist; he is doing his best,” I have never been able to learn.