The Trawnbeighs 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 add anything. 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 statement is flippant, 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 reason 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
unveiled _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 hailstorm had 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 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 never be known. How could they, 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, with 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 may expect 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 what shall
be 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 the
old, small, and dilapidated coffee _finca_ 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
and live 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 he could do. 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.
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 none of 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 bowlders on the ascents. 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.
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 any one. 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 discovered before 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 as 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 when 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.
Humphry 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, home
made 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: “Bertie always
shoots 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
window the writhing banana trees of the dingle-dangle looked like strange
things one sees in an aquarium.
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 heartrending 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 half way to his knees, was
patiently holding an umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while
she—be-bangled, be-cameoed, be-plumed, and stripped to the
buff—masterfully cooked our dinner on the _brassero_.
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 daily life 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 bedroom 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 desolation.
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 Trawnbeighs’ 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
Pittsburgh, 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
Pittsburgh—whither he had been persuaded to journey on the Slapps’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.
_Charles Macomb Flandrau_.