FIRST MEXICAN EXPERIENCE
The days that followed were punctuated by telegrams received from Rhoda.
"Arrived safely." That was the first one. It told nothing at all of her
mother's condition.
"Mother's condition very serious. Not much hope." That was the second
and the girls scarcely had the heart to go on with Adair MacKenzie's
party. Privately, they gave up hope entirely, but Adair tried to keep
their spirits up. "Never can tell about these things," he said after
reading the message.
"Some improvement. Pray. Love. Rhoda." The third one read, and everyone
felt better.
Then for two days, there was no word, and everyone's hope just dwindled
away to nothing. During these days, it was Walker Jamieson with his
knowledge of Mexico and its ways that put what life there was into the
party.
The eight hundred miles over the new Pan-American highway from Laredo
to Mexico City was through gorgeous tropical and mountain scenery, and
all the way Walker regaled the girls with stories and legends about
Mexico and its history.
He told bloody stories of bandits coming down out of the hills,
attacking travelers, kidnaping them and then robbing them, or holding
them for huge ransom. He told of warfare between the Mexicans and the
Indians back in the hills. He told of lost tribes who still worshipped
the Sun God, talked their native tongue, still lived in the way those
who had built the pyramids had lived.
Alice listened breathlessly to all he had to say. Nan and her friends
hung on his every word. Adair MacKenzie listened and grunted
noncommittally.
From Laredo to Monterey, he told these stories and from Monterey to
Villa Juarez until everyone, whether he would admit it or not, felt
deeply the spell of Mexico.
Then from Villa Juarez to Tamazunchale, across rivers that were bordered
by heavy tropical foliage, everyone except Adair MacKenzie was more or
less silent absorbing quietly the beauty about.
"Listen!" Nan had the temerity to interrupt one of Adair's outbursts
against their chauffeur. Surprised by the command, Adair chuckled and
kept quiet. Nan had heard the song of a tropical bird. Its call was
picked up by another on the other side of the road. The chauffeur slowed
down and then, at Adair's command, stopped.
For a few moments everyone listened, and then Nan pushed open the door
of the car and got out. The others followed. To the right and to the
left of them the luxuriant growth made the place like nothing else they
had ever seen before. The birds that flew out of the thicket were
gorgeous things in brilliant colors. The butterflies that drifted from
flower to flower were lovely too. But the biggest surprise of all was
the orchids.
"Why, they grow wild!" Bess was amazed. The only ones she had ever seen
before had been in the window of a florist's shop on Madison Avenue in
Chicago and in a shoulder corsage worn by Linda Riggs at a school ball.
This last had made Bess exceedingly envious, despite the fact that Linda
had been reprimanded afterwards, by Dr. Prescott, for wearing it. And
now, here they were growing all about her, wild! Bess could scarcely
believe her eyes.
Walker Jamieson laughed at her. "You like them?" he asked. "Didn't know,
did you, that they grew any place outside of a hothouse?"
Bess shook her head. It was the first time in her life that she had
ever really been moved by nature in any form. The others felt the same.
The air seemed quiet and heavy and yet full of all sorts of strange
noises too. Grace was timid in the face of all the strangeness and held
on to Nan's hand.
Nan's eyes were big and wondrous. It was like tropical jungles that she
had read about. It was like something she had never even dared hope to
see. She was quiet. Silently Adair MacKenzie watched her, and felt
pleased with himself that he had shown it to her. In regarding her, he
felt almost as though he himself had created it for her special benefit.
She caught his glance, looked up at him and grinned. "Wish I could take
a piece of it home with me," she said.
"You can." Walker Jamieson sounded as though that would be the simplest
thing in the world.
"How?" Nan asked in the tone of one who didn't believe a word of what
she heard.
"Easy." Jamieson's eyes twinkled, for he knew that she thought that this
was only another bit of his foolishness. "All you've got to do is get a
camera and take a picture. Then you'll have it for life."
"But I can't," Nan was serious too now.
"Why?"
"First, I've no camera and secondly, I don't know how to take pictures."
"Oh, we'll take care of that," Walker Jamieson waved these difficulties
aside as though they didn't amount to anything. "I've got a camera in
the car, and, if you want, I'll show you how to get the best results.
I'm in your debt anyway," he whispered.
"Do you mean that about the camera and everything?" Nan was incredulous.
"Mean it? It's a promise, isn't it?" Walker drew Alice into the
conversation.
She nodded her head happily. She knew, if Nan didn't, that Walker had
made a hobby of photography and just the year before, had won a prize in
a national show.
"We'll begin, just as soon as we get back in that car," Jamieson
promised further. "When we get to Mexico City, we'll buy some more films
and the camera is yours to do with as you will until we return to the
States."
So, because of an impulsive wish and an impulsive promise, Nan began
almost immediately to develop a hobby that, even before her Mexican
adventure was over, was going to have amazing consequences.
From Tamazunchale to Mexico City, the drive was quite another
experience. The road now was hewn out of sheer mountain rock. The car
climbed and climbed, until the girls' ears felt strange and Bess
declared that she could hardly breathe. She forgot this, however, when
they, upon Alice's insistence, this time, got out again. All around
them, huge mountain peaks rose to great heights making them all, except,
perhaps, Adair MacKenzie, feel small and insignificant.
Straight down below them they saw rivers and waterfalls that looked
small and white and unimportant, like a thread that some mighty hand had
dropped carelessly in the greenness. Then they got in the car, went down
the mountainside again, and they came to a lovely white village in a
fertile green valley.
Here they stopped and ate.
"Can't understand this jargon," Adair MacKenzie laid the menu that had
been given him down and looked utterly disgusted.
"No sense in their making it like this," he continued as though it was a
personal insult that anyone should presume to speak or write any other
language than English. "Can't see how they can understand it
themselves."
In the end, it was Walker Jamieson who did the ordering. "How about
some nice mode de guajolote?" he grinned at Nan and her friends as he
put the question. "It's turkey to you," he explained when they laughed,
"stuffed turkey to be exact and a choice bit here. With it, we'll have
tortillas, the Mexican substitute for bread, and frijoles, the favorite
Mexican bean. Sound all right?"
The girls nodded as they tried to find the items on their own menus. And
Adair MacKenzie grunted that he would take the same.
The meal wasn't entirely a success. Nan and her friends enjoyed it, but
Adair MacKenzie grumbled throughout despite all that Alice could do to
mollify him.
"Never mind, daddy," she said at last, "in a couple of more days we'll
be at the hacienda--"
"Yes, and that housekeeper of ours better be there, or I'll fire her."
Adair was off again.
Alice restrained a smile. For twenty years now, Adair had been firing
the housekeeper and for twenty years she had been running him and his
house just as she pleased. It was a joke that the motherly old lady and
Alice shared.
"She'll be there," Alice tried to reassure him, "and so will that
Chinese cook that we have heard so much about."
Nan and the rest looked up from their turkey, half expecting a story,
but Alice said nothing further. They finished the meal in silence and
followed Adair to the car.
Then, by way of Zimapan, an attractive hillside village, remembered
ever afterwards by the girls for its huge cacti, some more than
thirty-five feet high, they continued on toward Mexico City. They passed
through Tasquillo, and then over a sandy road between other tall cacti
to Ixmiquilpan, a picturesque town where native Indians were tending
sheep and spinning along the streets.
Here Nan took a picture, the first of many she was to take, of the girls
as they stood in a market where they had just bought some gayly woven
baskets. The sight of the Indians brought more stories to Walker's mind
and so, in the few miles that lay between them and their stopping place
for the night, he told more tales.
He told stories of buried treasure left by the Aztecs in deep
underground chambers, of turquoise and jade that was more lovely than
any the modern world has discovered. He told of gold so plentiful that
it had no value, of great temples that American Museums were spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild.
He knew all the stories, because, since his early childhood, spent in
California where Mexican labor was plentiful because it was cheap, he
had been interested in the country.
When, on the third day of their journey, they approached Mexico City,
Walker Jamieson was in a particularly expansive mood, one designed to
keep their minds off the question of what word they would find from
Rhoda in the capital.
"Below you, ladies and gentlemen," he said with a great sweep of his
arm, "you see Mexico City, the capital of this surprising republic of
Mexico. There you will find romance, adventure, everything."