with several handsome old coins, and an embroidered shawl, a _manta_,
white on pale saffron. This last is now hanging out on the little
oleander terrace to be sunned and aired, and the three coins have been
scrubbed. One was of him of the "Iron Horse," _Carolus IV 1792 Dei
gratia Hispan et Ind., Rex_, showing his receding forehead, aquiline
nose, and pleased, voluptuous Bourbon mouth; his ear is deeply stamped
with a counter-mark.
It appears these coins are still to be found throughout the Orient;
each banker through whose hands they passed would stamp his own little
mark on it. The other was more ancient and bore the date 1741 with the
device "_Utraque Unum_," showing the pillars of Hercules surmounted
each by a crown, and two hemispheres in between, joined by another
crown. This was Philip V.'s modest device. There was also a little
medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe, so defaced (I suppose it had been
worn around generations of necks) that I could scarcely see the date,
which appeared to be 1710.
All this seems very simple, but any foreigner living in Mexico would
know that I had had a "good" morning. How the objects came into the
possession of the _comerciante en objetos antiguos_ would be quite
another story.
Mexican numismatic history is as romantic as its mining history, and
bound up with it. Effigies of various rulers of the nation appear and
disappear with a dramatic but disconcerting rapidity. The Iturbide
coins are extremely rare, but I saw one the other day, and it is
on them that the eagle and the cactus first appear. On the other
side, around Iturbide's bold profile with projecting jaw, is graven
_Augustinus I Dei Providencia, 1822_. Now we have simply the eagle
and the cactus, and the redoubtable word "_Libertad_" stamped in the
Phrygian bonnet.
_July 7th._
To-day we picnicked at the Casa Blanca, out beyond San Angel. It belongs
to an Englishman, Mr. Morkill, now engaged in business in South America.
When we got there, in spite of explicit telephonings, there was no key
to be had. One person went to fetch the caretaker, who lived _quién
sabe_ where, and some one went to fetch _him_ and so on, an endless
chain. We must have been outside for nearly an hour, looking up at the
loveliest and pinkest of walls, above which showed tops of palm- and
fruit-trees and delicious known and unknown vines.
Finally, a very old woman and a very young boy appeared with the key
to the door of that especial paradise, and we went in, with a loud
sound of locking after us, and a "_Pués quién sabe?_" in a belated,
breathless masculine voice. The garden, as all unfrequented gardens in
Mexico are, was a riot of loveliness. We spent an hour wandering about
its enchantment, and some one quoted that lovely poem--
A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Fern'd grot--
The veriest school of peace--
interrupted at this line by appropriate and all too ready jibes about
peace in Mexico.
Within the larger garden was a sort of inner tabernacle, a sun-bathed,
inclosed fruit-garden--peach and quince growing with orange and
lemon and fig, and the little pathway was fringed with lilies. The
house showed the unmistakable quick results of inoccupancy here; the
doors sagged, the windows stuck, and it was dismantled of most of its
furniture.
We got out some tables and spread our luncheon in a little _mosquete_
and jasmine-blossoming porch, even with the ground, opening from one
of the salons. Continual whiffs of perfume came from the garden, and
the air was now damp with threatening rain or indescribably brilliant
as the clouds passed. Mrs. Wilson brought some especially good things
in the way of jellied chicken and one of the large cocoanut cakes for
which the Embassy is famed. Mr. Potter's motor we called "the cantina,"
for obvious and refreshing reasons.
Afterward, while we waited for the rain to pass, we went to the
_mirador_, built in a corner of the high wall of the bigger garden,
overlooking the maguey-fields, which stretched away to the lovely
hills, on which great, black shadows were lying between sunlit spaces.
When we came down we picked armfuls of flowers, and there were some
particularly beautiful trailing blackberry sprays with which we
innocently decorated ourselves, but which I have discovered left
indelible marks on our raiment. As we filled the motors with wet,
sweet, shiny flowers and leaves, we sighed that the owners of anything
so lovely should be so distant.
_July 15th._
The Schuylers have gone--a week ago--and N. is at the Embassy bright
and early these mornings. The ambassador is more and more pessimistic,
and there is a huge amount of work to be turned over every day.
The situation is heavy with responsibility for him, and the road thorny
and full of the unexpected. Am now waiting for Madame Lefaivre, to go
to the Red Cross.
Burnside has returned from the north, where he has been with General
Huerta's army. He says Huerta conducted a really brilliant campaign
against Orozco, in spite of illness among the troops, smallpox, typhus,
etc., and the difficulties of communication. The amiable _soldadera_
deputed to look after his morning coffee, with her nursing baby in her
arms, asked him, with unmistakable intent, the first day, if he would
have it with or without milk. Needless to record, he took it black.
_July 15th._
The French fêtes are beating their full at the Tivoli Eliseo. They seem
to celebrate the 14th of July from the 6th to the 20th. The Lefaivres
invisible, except to their colony. For the sake of _la nation amie_,
I put my head inside yesterday--and was met with a cloud of confetti
and swarms of _vendeuses_. Bands were playing, and there was dancing
at one end, and everywhere a lively selling of objects for the French
_œuvres de bienfaisance_ in Mexico. The celebrated Buen Tono
cigarette-manufactory had outdone itself in generosity, its booth being
the _clou_.
Last night there was a patriotic performance at the Teatro Colon.
Kilometers of tricolor and a very demonstrative colony filled the huge
place to overflowing.
We got there just as the Mexican national hymn was sounding, and the
President and his wife, with the Vice-President, were being ushered
into the great central loge, where Monsieur and Madame Lefaivre were
waiting to receive them bowered in red and white and blue flowers and
lights, with a great tricolor floating beneath.
After the last singing of the "Marseillaise" we went in to speak to
them and found the President saying to the minister: "_C'est Liberté,
Egalité, Fraternité que je voudrais voir dirigeant les destinées du
Mexique_," while a look as remote as the poles came into his eyes.
Monsieur Lefaivre, for the sake of the vast French interests to be
safeguarded, has always cultivated the friendliest relations with
Madero--hoping against hope that the situation may develop elements of
stability. Madero is obsessed by French political maxims, but without
any understanding of that very practical genius which enables the _doux
pays de France_ to turn ideas into actualities. The Encyclopedists,
however, are having quite a revival in "glorious gory Mexico." We came
home unconvinced, yet vaguely hopeful, under a blaze of constellations
set in wondrous relief against great black spaces.
_July 17th._
I have just closed George Moore's _Ave Atque Vale_. A new book by him
continues to be a delicious intellectual repast. I read it in rather
a miserly manner, knowing there cannot be many more, not tearing its
heart out as I so often do with books. He is nearing the inevitable
departure on that last journey--and he will not return to write
epigrams about it.
_July 19th._
I am scribbling this in the lovely old _patio_ of San Joaquin, out
beyond the hacienda of Morales, sitting on a comfortably slanted
grave--slab, on which I can just distinguish a bishop's miter and
a faint tracing of the date--17 something and _requiescat in pace_.
Delicate mosses, bits of cactus, and a tiny, vine-like, yellow flower
make it a thing of beauty.
Madame Lefaivre and Elsie S. are sketching; all is peaceful,
sun-flooded, with much singing of birds, and the trees are dropping
solid bits of gold through their dark branches. There is a fine old
five-belled belfry that pierces the perfect sky; the top bell and one
of the next lower pair are missing (in what vagary of Mexican history
they disappeared I know not).
This was once a Carmelite monastery, and still has a wonderful garden
and a celebrated peach and pear and chabacano orchard. The wall
inclosing the orchard is so high that scarcely anything green grows
tall enough to show above it, though the mirador has a few vines
twisting about it. The wall, however, is beautiful in itself--pink,
crumbling, sun-baked, with moss and flowers and bits of cactus clinging
to it, and a fruity odor was wafted over to us as we passed on the
broken, ditch-like road with the motor at an angle of forty-five
degrees.
There is a large space, planted with live-oaks, outside the _patio_
of the church with _its_ lovely, broadly scalloped pink wall. Once
through the carved door, one is as if in a bath of sun and beauty.
Before another time-worn, carved door leading into the church stand two
straight, black, immemorial cypresses. The inside wall of the _patio_
has, here and there, an old carved coat of arms cemented into it, and
colored growing things abound. The live-oaks outside bend above the
scalloping of the walls, on which are ancient numbers above flat-carved
symbols for the "Way of the Cross."
Elsie chose a corner inside, and Madame Lefaivre is sketching outside,
so I got the guardian, who is also the administrator of the orchard
and hacienda, to unlock the church. Several gilded _Churrigueresque_
altars still remain--intricately designed, time-softened, lovely, and
on the altar steps were some charming old candlesticks, five or six
feet high, in the same lovely style of gilding and twisting. How they
have remained there during a century of suburban vicissitudes I know
not. Various saints in ecstasy, San Joaquin in special, were portrayed,
almost life-size, their garments floating, falling, blowing about,
with the special unquiet but lovely _Churrigueresque_ touch. Winged,
open-mouthed cherubim and seraphim hold up the vaulting with its wealth
of lovely, conventional motifs; throughout Mexico, in churches where
everything else is gone, one finds the out-of-reach vaultings intact.
There is a school of a sort, held in what was once the seminary behind
the church; and some barefooted, bareheaded, and otherwise scantily
clad wrestlers with the "three R's" came out from one end of the church
and passed through, followed by their teacher, a shabby, bored-looking
young Mestizo of doubtful cleanliness and dubious competency.
Calle Humboldt, _Later_.
I left you in the _patio_ of San Joaquin. When I went to see how the
artists were progressing, I found them both looking miserable and
discouraged. No "fine frenzy" to the roll of their eyes, though they
_were_ "glancing from heaven to earth." The beauty here isn't one to
record on canvas, rather on memory and soul, which, having remarked to
them as gently as I could, they began to clean their palettes.
We took a last, regretful look at all the pinky loveliness, the tiled
dome, the silent belfry, the slender heads of the two straight,
coal-black cypresses, and the inexpressibly lovely wall, wrapped
ourselves about with the shining air, and bumped homewards. "Quick, thy
tablets, memory."
_July 20th._
We dined last night at the Ernesto Maderos' in their handsome house in
the Paseo, large enough to lose the six children in. Madame M. has been
in mourning (something that seems to happen to women oftener in Mexico
than in other places) and now is "out" again.
The official Mexicans spare no expense on the occasions when they open
their houses, but it is always with ceremony, without individuality;
_enfin_ Mexicans receiving foreigners. The Riedls were there, and the
Simons; I have an idea Mr. S. finds his task a big one. He rarely goes
out, but this, to the Secretary of the Treasury, was strictly within
his orbit. Madame Simon wore a beautiful black _pailletté_ gown, with
subtle touches of "point de Venise," recently out from Paris.
She has driven us all nearly crazy, anyway, with the ravishing
_croquis_ and _échantillons_ Drecoll and Doeuillet have been sending
her, and which lie, temptingly, among the latest French reviews and
newest books on her table.
I sat by Lascurain, talking pleasantly of things not political; that
ground is volcanic and no place for foreigners, even well-disposed. The
new Belgian chargé, Letellier, was on my other side.
A letter to-day from Madame de la G. from Châlons-sur-Marne, where
the Marquis is in command of the garrison. She will always be, to
me, typical of the _grandes dames de France_ as they have appeared
throughout the centuries--those highly born, highly placed, highly
cultured women with many natural gifts, whose wit and beauty are the
common heritage of us all.
I bear that picture of her in her armchair, so beautifully dressed,
especially in that white chiffon gown we liked so much, with a single
dusky rose at her slender waist, her dark hair so perfectly _coiffé_,
her charming welcoming smile, with its hint of suffering borne, remote
from miseries, yet knowing pain. I can see the background of bookcases;
near by her shining tea-table, and the little low table with its vase
of flowers and bibelots, and the latest book with a paper-cutter in it,
or some consoling volume whose pages were cut by other generations.[56]
[Illustration: MEXICAN NUNS GOING TO MASS
Photograph by Ravell]
With a change of costume, change of hours of visits and dinner, she
pictures to my imagination Madame de Sévigné writing to Madame de
Grignan, Madame de la Fayette talking to La Rochefoucauld--all that
flowering of an elegance of mind with its roots of culture, not alone
in books, but in the heart. Her mind is receptive, yet so giving,
her conversations so sparkling, with its _fond_ of philosophies and
politics, its richness of _nuance_, its elastic impersonality, yet
French, though dipped in a thousand dyes and run in a thousand molds.
Her three boys go into the army, and of Marguerite she says: "_Gretl
est vraiment mon ange gardien, ne me quittant jamais, et me soignant,
toujours gaie, toujours dévouée._"
"_Châlons étant à deux heures de Paris, les amis viennent facilement._"
She gave me news of the Paul Festetics, who had recently been
there--"_Fanny toujours l'esprit aussi alerte et aussi charmant_"; of
the De B.'s, to whom my heart goes out, "_Très-courageux, mais vous
pensez si c'est dur de continuer une route ainsi ravagée_"; and for
me "_Nos chemins se Croiseront-ils jamais à nouveau?_ It does not look
like it, _hélas_."
_July 21st._
This evening, from the hill of Tepeyac, I watched the sun go down
into a world of purple shadows rising from the mysterious plain of
Anahuac. The valley had been stretched out before us like a chart, the
hills in light and shadow. We could name each glistening road leading
from the great city, and yet, little by little, one succumbed to the
mysteriousness of it all--until the whole spectacle became an inner
rather than an outer thing.
No rain except for some silver clouds with strange, fugitive effects,
just before sunset, that sifted a diamond-like rain for a few minutes
over the face of the plain. No wind, but something like a great, cool
breathing was about us.
We passed by the richly tiled _Capilla del Pocito_ (Chapel of the
Well), of which he who drinks returns, and went up the romantic
old stone stairway leading to another chapel. Half-way up are the
celebrated "stone sails of Guadalupe," their origin dateless, the hands
that put them up unrecorded. They can be seen for miles about, and
near by they have a _belle patine_, and mosses and bits of cactus and
a flower or two grow from them. They commemorate the escape from sea
perils of Mexican mariners who had prayed the Virgin of Guadalupe to
bring them safely into port. When this had come about, tradition has it
that, continuing to believe _after_ they were safe in Vera Cruz, they
fulfilled their vow by bringing up on their shoulders the rigging of
their ship, afterward encasing it in a covering of stone.
There are hooded, shrine-like resting-places as one goes up the broad,
flat steps between the beautiful, high-scalloped wall, often a _Via
Dolorosa_, for a cemetery is on the very top behind the chapel that
was built on the spot where Juan Diego gathered the flowers, suddenly
springing up to be given as testimony to the unconvinced bishop.
A great wooden cross is in the little atrium, and we found an Indian
family sitting about it, eating their supper, wrapped in their colored
blankets, doubtless preparing to spend the night "at the foot of the
cross." There was once a temple to the Aztec Ceres, "Tonantzin, our
Mother," on this same spot.
In the cemetery lies buried the body of Santa Anna, he who led his
troops against ours.
There is a continual operative magic, some peculiar proportioning of
the subjective and the objective here, with correspondences between the
seen and the unseen forever making themselves felt.
The domes and spires of the city shone in the afternoon light.
Where one once saw the great aqueducts, and the still more ancient
canals, now rise the slender steel frames bearing the wires of the
light-and-power company, charged in Necaxa, a hundred miles away,
down in the Hot Country. The lakes were yellowish-silver mirrors, the
eternal hills swam in their strange translucence, the great volcanoes
pierced a lovely sky; all quite relatable, except just what it is that
pulls your soul out of you as you look upon the deathless beauty and
think of the dark, restless, passionate races whose heritage it is.
As we turned to descend the old stone way, the shining city afar was
as if suddenly dipped in purple, but the sky above was of such pure
and delicate tints--lemon, saffron, and pale pink--that we wondered
whence the "Tyrian" purple could have come. We drove silently home in
a many-colored twilight.
_July 23d._
Yesterday I found a curious book, "_par un citoyen de l'Amérique
méridionale_" ("by a citizen of South America") (vague enough not to
get him into trouble), called _Esquisse de la Révolution de l'Amérique
Espagnole_, Paris, 1817.
It is a saddening, mighty spectacle, the presentation of that immense
area in the throes of revolution. A few enlightened viceroys at Mexico,
Bogotá, Buenos Aires, might have saved the day. They were not ready
for self-government, but for Spain the hour had sounded when she was to
lose her great colonies; and Mexico, the dearest, the richest, the most
accessible, the most beautiful, was to enter on her century of horrors,
heroisms, sacrifices--and the end is not yet.
I feel at times as if I were behind the scenes of a mighty drama. I
have read so much that I know many of the _répliques_; have sorted some
of the red threads of the century-old plot, and, if I am not behind the
scenes really, I _am_ in a sort of _avant-scène_, where some of what
goes on behind the curtain can be surmised.
This is the second summer of books read to the pouring of
tropical rains. Mr. S. has brought me several volumes of Jean
Christophe--_l'Aube_, _La Révolte_--unread before and deeply relished.
With all his other gifts, Romain Rolland[57] has the international mind
and keeps his seat extremely well, _à cheval_ as he is, between France
and Germany. To-day I finished _Le Buisson Ardent_. During two strange,
restless afternoons, I followed Anna's story in the darkness of the
tropical downpour, an earthy freshness coming up from the flowers in
the _patio_, and a sound of heavy water falling from rain-spout and
roof.
_July 27th._
A lovely morning on the roof with E., drying our hair in matchless sun,
looking at the volcanoes and talking.
She said I reminded her of the _art nouveau_ inkstand, that for my
sins I won at bridge the other day, which has the hair drawn down
to the feet of the figure for the pen to rest on. _She_ looked as if
she had stepped out of some lovely old Persian tile with her masses
of dark hair standing out about her handsome head. There is a poet
brother, whose portrait of some years ago hangs in one of the rooms,
a large-eyed, straight-featured boy, with a speculative forehead and
remote eyes.
From what I gather, he is evidently a genius, not meant for harness,
feeling the world owes him a living (which it probably does), that he
may toss off a sonnet, when so impelled, or feel free to read Euripides
in some choice edition bought with his last dollar, in the completest
insouciance as to the date and amount of the next remittance. He used
to take long, lonely, timeless walks about these hills and valleys,
reappearing after hours or days, with a poem that he wouldn't show, or
a thought not convenient in family life.[58]
[54] Orozco was arrested with General Huerta by the United
States authorities on June 27, 1915. A few days later he
escaped his guard at El Paso, and shortly afterward was killed
during a raid on the border.
[55] A young mining engineer lately come out of Mexico on one
of the intermittent trains, over the once favorite northern
route, tells me that everywhere the stations are destroyed.
Overturned rolling-stock lies rotting in the ditches; at
one point where the fuel gave out the trainmen got down and
chopped up the seats remaining on what once had been a station
platform, and at another a Pullman car was smashed and fed to
the engine. What intending travelers and the stockholders in
the company think of Carranza's passion for reconstruction is
said to be too fierce for expression!--E. O'S., January, 1917.
[56] Marquis de la G., then military attaché at the French
Embassy in Berlin.
[57] _Et comment fera celui qui a reçu du sort le don superbe
et fatal de voir la vérité, et de ne pouvoir pas ne pas la
voir?_--ROMAIN ROLLAND, _Vie de Tolstoi_. (January, 1917.)
[58] Killed in battle at Belloy-en-Santerre, July, 1916.
A friend and companion of Alan Seeger's Harvard days, Pierre
Abreu, himself extraordinarily fitted for the understanding
of the "humanities" in every sense, told me of him one windy
twilight crossing to France on the _Espagne_ that autumn after
his death. I had just seen, in my _North American Review_,
that most charming of all his poems, "I Have a Rendezvous with
Death."
He was evidently a free, romantic being, Latinized in
temperament and mentality, receptive and creative. Abreu met
him first at a Sophocles course--he was a brilliant, original
classical scholar, with an elasticity of culture that made him
also able to translate a gem of Clément Marot, or Ronsard,
into perfect form at sight. For the impressionable years of
gifted adolescence, what more suggestive setting than that
magnetic valley of Mexico?
Now he lies in France. His high, adventurous spirit was meant
for wars and chances, doubtless in the old, romantic sense of
battle.
"Heroes battling with heroes and above them the wrathful
gods."
For this type there could be but one consummation. But it
seems to me all can be fulfilled as well at twenty-eight as at
threescore and ten, and the completion of no man's destiny is
dependent on his years.--E. O'S., January, 1917.
XXVI
Balls at the German Legation and at Madame Simon's--Necaxa--A
strange, gorge-like world of heat and light--Mexican
time-tables--The French trail
_August 17th._
Unwonted festivities here. For two nights running we have "tripped the
light fantastic." Night before last Madame Simon gave a big ball, and
last night there was one at the German Legation. The dancing world was
out in full swing, bumping into a varied assortment of wall-flowers,
tropical and temperate.
Handsome favors and elaborate suppers at both these _bailes de
confianza_, and the later it got, the wilder and more spirited became
the music. I gave the _coup de grâce_ to the pink velvet Buda-Pesth
court dress at von H.'s.
The Benoist d'Azy are here from Washington. It always adds to the
gaiety of nations to have _étrangers de distinction_ make their
appearance. They have all the interest of events. It isn't often the
capital sees two smart balls, one after the other.