out-of-the-way place, that is if any place is queer and out of the way,
which I am beginning rather to doubt. Since then I have often remembered
that evening--how, just before it grew dark, the tattered banana trees
writhed like gigantic seaweed in the wind, and the cold rain hissed from
the spouts on the roof in graceful, crystal tubes. Here and there the
light of a brazero in a laborer’s bamboo hut flared for an instant
through the coffee trees. On the piazza, the tired Indians, shivering in
their flimsy, cotton garments, had covered themselves with matting and
empty coffee sacks and were trying to sleep. In the kitchen doorway a
very old, white-bearded man was improvising poetry--sometimes
sentimental, sometimes heroic, sometimes obscene--to a huddled and
enthralled audience all big hats, crimson blankets, and beautiful eyes.
Apart from this group, Saturnino was causing a jarana to throb in a most
syncopated, minor, and emotional fashion. A jarana is a primitive guitar
whose sounding board consists usually of an armadillo’s shell. (Poor
Saturnino! He is now in indefinite solitary confinement for having,
apropos of nothing except a slip of a girl, disemboweled one of his
neighbors with a machete. And he was such a gentle, thoughtful creature!
I don’t quite understand it.) During dinner we discussed, among other
things, Tolstoi’s “War and Peace” which we had just finished, and while
agreeing that it was the greatest novel we had ever read or ever
expected to read (an opinion I still possess), we did not agree about
Tolstoi’s characteristically cocksure remarks on the subject of
predestination and freedom of the will. As neither of us had studied
philosophy we were unable to command the special terminology--the
specific jargon that always makes a philosophic discussion seem so
profound, and our colloquial efforts to express ourselves were at times
piquant. In the midst of it a tarantula slithered across the tablecloth
and I squashed him with a candlestick as he was about to disappear over
the table’s edge. Of course we disputed as to whether or not, in the
original conception of the universe, God had sketched the career of the
tarantula in its relation to that of the candlestick and mine, and--yes,
on looking back, I feel sure we were both very agreeable.
But what I imagine I am trying to get at is that I have so often
wonderingly contrasted the general scene with our being there at all,
and then have remembered the simple, prosaic circumstances that had
placed us in the midst of it. In a way, it is a pity one _can_ remember
such things; the act renders it so impossible to pose to oneself as
picturesque. And, furthermore, it tends to shake one’s belief in the
picturesqueness of one’s American and English acquaintances. (Perhaps I
mean “romance” rather than picturesqueness, for compared to the fatuity
of importing picturesqueness into Mexico, the carrying of coals to
Newcastle would be a stroke of commercial genius.) At first there seems
to be something romantic about all of one’s compatriots who live in
small Mexican towns, or on far-away ranches, plantations, fincas,
haciendas--or whatever their property happens to be called. To the newly
arrived there is a sort of thrill merely in the fashion in which they
take their florid, pictorial environment for granted. I shall not forget
my first New Year’s Day in Mexico.
Until the day before, I had never been in the country, and there was
something ecstatic in the vividness of not only the day as a whole, but
of every detail of color, form, temperature, personality, and
conversation. It seemed as if everything in turn leaped out and seized
hold of me, and now, long afterwards, I recall it as one of those
marvelous days without either half tones or perspective, on which every
separate fact is brilliant, and all are of equal importance. Only once
since then has Mexico had just the same memorable effect upon me, and
that was one night in the little plaza of Jalapa when, as the front
doors of the cathedral swung open and the crowd within swarmed down the
steps in the moonlight, the band abruptly crashed into the
bullfightingest part of “Carmen.”
In the tepid, springlike afternoon I pushed back a five-barred gate, and
through a pasture, where horses stopped grazing to snuff at me, over a
wall of piled stones covered with heliotrope, I strolled up between
banana trees to a yellow, stucco-covered house on the hillside. The way
to the piazza was through a tunnel of pale-yellow roses with pink
centers and on the piazza was an American lady, an American gentleman, a
great many languorous-looking chairs, and two gallons of eggnog in a
bowl of Indian pottery. All of the small Anglo-Saxon colony and a few
others had been asked to drop in during the afternoon, but I was the
first to arrive, and I remember that the necessary interchange of
commonplace civilities with my hosts, the talk of mutual acquaintances
on the boat from New York and the answering of questions about weather
and politics in the United States, seemed unspeakably shallow to one
suddenly confronted by so exquisite and sublime a view. For the view
from the piazza, I hasten to add by way of justifying two words so
opposite in suggestion, was, I afterwards learned, characteristic of the
mountainous, tropical parts of Mexico, and, like most of the views
there, combined both the grandeur, the awfulness of space and height--of
eternal, untrodden snows piercing the thin blue, with the soft velvet
beauty of tropical verdure--the unimaginable delicacy and variety of
color that glows and palpitates in vast areas of tropical foliage seen
at different distances through haze and sunlight. Mountains usually have
an elemental, geologic sex of some sort, and the sex of slumbering,
jungle-covered, tropical mountains is female. There is a symmetry, a
chaste volcanic elegance about them that render them the consorts and
daughters of man-mountains like, say, the Alps, the Rockies, the
mountains of the Caucasus. At their cruelest they are rarely somber;
their precipitous sides and overhanging crags are sheathed in vegetation
of a depth that refines and softens, and the quivering lights and
shadows that at times are apparently all their substance, are the lights
and shadows of those excessively etherealized, vignetted engravings on
the title pages of old gift books.
At the sloping pasture’s lower end the compact, tile-roofed,
white-walled town glared in the January sunlight--a town in a garden,
or, when one for a moment lost sight of the outlying orange groves,
fields of green-gold sugar cane, patches of shimmering corn and clumps
of banana trees--an all-pervasive garden in a town. For compact as the
Oriental-looking little place was, green and purple, yellow and red
sprang from its interstices everywhere as though they had welled up from
the rich plantations below and overflowed. One gazed down upon the trees
of tiny plazas, the dense dark foliage of walled gardens, into shady,
flower-filled patios and sunny, luxuriant, neglected churchyards, and
beyond, the mysterious valley melted away in vast and ever vaster
distances--the illimitable valley of a dream--a vision--an
allegory--slowly rising at last, in tier upon tier of faintly opalescent
volcanoes, the texture of gauze. Up and up and up they lifted and swam
and soared, until, as with a swift concerted escape into the blue and
icy air of heaven, they culminated in the smooth, inaccessible,
swan-like snow upon the peak of Orizaba. Mexico’s four, well-defined
climates, from the blazing summer of the valley, to glittering winter
only some thousands of feet above, were here, I realized, all the year
round, visibly in full blast.
Then other guests began to push back the heavy gate and stroll up the
long slope, and I found myself meeting them and hearing them all talk,
with a thrill as keen--if of a different quality--as that with which I
had gaped at the view. They seemed to me then quite as unreal. There was
about them an impenetrable aura of fiction; they were the plain tales
that Kipling would have lashed to the mast had his hills been
Mexican--had Simla been Barranca.
There was the British consul--a quaint, kindly, charming little man--who
while in the act of delightedly making one pun could scarcely conceal
the eagerness and anxiety with which his mind grappled with the problem
of how to introduce the next. The French consul, too, was of the
gathering, and I don’t know why, but life, somehow, would not have
seemed what it was that day if the French consul had not been
unmistakably a German. He had brought with him a bouquet of pretty
daughters whose English accent and complexions (their mother was
English) and French deportment made of them rather fascinating racial
enigmas. Mrs. Belding liked the girls but confided to me that in general
she considered the foreign manner all “French jeune filledlesticks.”
Mrs. Hammerton, a tall, distinguished-looking, dark-haired English woman
of thirty, was perishing--so Mrs. Belding almost at once informed
me--for a cigar. She had an aged mother, had had a romance (of which no
one spoke, declared Mrs. Belding as she spoke of it), and adored Mexican
cigars. Almost immediately upon my meeting her she let me know in the
prettiest, most cultivated of voices that Mrs. Belding was in the habit
of getting tight.
There were two reasons for Mrs. Hammerton’s postponing just then the
longed-for cigar. One was the Rev. Luke M. Hacket, and the other was his
wife. Mr. and Mrs. Hacket, with an ever-growing band of little Hackets,
had lived for years at Barranca at the expense of many worthy and
unintelligent persons at home. They were there, all unconscious of their
insolence, for the purpose of trying to seduce Roman Catholics away
from their belief and supplying them with another; of substituting a
somewhat colorless and unmagnetic expression of the Christian idea for
one that satisfies not only some of the Mexican’s alert senses, but his
imagination as well. That these efforts at conversion met with scarcely
any success except during a few weeks before Christmas (after which
there was always an abrupt stampede to Rome), did not much concern them
as long as Mrs. Hacket’s lectures in native costume in the basements of
churches at home hypnotized the faithful into contributing to an
institution for which the term “futile” is far too kind. As every child
of the Rev. and Mrs. Luke Hacket received from the board a salary of its
own, the worthy couple had not been idle, and in addition to this simple
method of swelling their revenue, the good man did a tidy little
business in vanilla--buying that fragrant bean at much less than its
market value from the poor and ignorant Indians to whom he distributed
tracts they could not read. Whenever another little Hacket arrived, he
told the board, but the incredibly gullible body knew nothing of his
interest in the vanilla market. As I was a stranger--he took me in. That
is to say, he wished me a happy new year and “touched” me for five
dollars--to go toward the purchase of a new organ for his Sunday school.
I and my money were soon parted. Only afterwards did my hostess have a
chance to tell me that among the colony the new organ was an old
joke--that for many years tourists and visitors had contributed to its
sweeter and, as yet, unheard melodies.
What was it? What is it? No one believed in his creed nor had the
slightest interest in it. What lingering, reminiscent, perhaps in some
instances atavistic misgiving and yearning to reverence, prompted these
ill-assorted exiles to treat with a certain deference a person whom they
really laughed at? There was an unsuspected pathos in it--the pathos of
a world that involuntarily clutches at the straw it knows to be but yet
a straw--the pathos of the exile who for the moment suffers even the
distasteful if it in some way bridges the gulf between him and home. It
was not politeness that restrained Mrs. Hammerton from smoking until the
Hackets at last departed and that had caused our hostess, when she saw
them coming, to discuss seriously with her husband whether or no she
should temporarily banish the eggnog. What was it?
Mrs. Blythe, a slight, pretty woman prettily dressed had come in from
her husband’s ranch the week before for the holidays. In matter-of-fact
tones she was giving her news to Mrs. Garvin, whose son was in charge of
the town’s electric light plant.
“As a rule one doesn’t particularly mind calentura” (chills and fever),
Mrs. Blythe was saying, “although it always leaves me rather weak. But
what was so annoying this time, was the fact that Jack and I both had it
at once and there wasn’t anybody to take care of us. Delfina, the cook,
chose that moment, of all moments, to get bitten in the calf of her leg
by a snake. Horrid woman, Delfina--I’m sure she did it on purpose. Of
course she was much worse than useless, for I had to take care of
_her_--dose her with ammonia and cut live chickens in two and bind them
on the place. You know--the hundred and fifty things one _always_ does
when they get bitten by snakes. If Joaquin the mayordomo had been
around, I shouldn’t have cared. He knows how to cook in a sort of way,
and then, besides, I shouldn’t have been so worried about the coffee
picking. But poor Joaquin was in jail for stabbing his wife--yes, she
died--and the jefe wouldn’t let him out although I sent in a note saying
how much we needed him for the next few weeks. It was deliberately
disobliging of the jefe because we’ve had him to dinner several times
and afterwards Jack always played cards with him and let him cheat. My
temperature didn’t go above a hundred and two and a half, but Jack’s was
a hundred and five off and on for three or four days, and when you pass
the hundred mark, two and a half degrees make a great deal of
difference. He was delirious a lot of the time and of course I couldn’t
let him fuss about the kitchen stove. The worst part was having to crawl
out of bed and drag over to the tanks every afternoon to measure the
coffee when the pickers came in. With Joaquin gone, there was nobody
left who could read the lists and record the amounts. Then just as the
quinine gave out, the river rose and no one could go to the village for
more. Coming at that time of year, it was all really very annoying,” she
declared lightly and passed on to something else.
“Yes, that was how I caught this bad cold,” another woman--whose husband
manufactured coffee sacks--was explaining to some one. “There was the
worst kind of a norther that night; I would have been soaked to the skin
even if I hadn’t slipped on a stone in the dark and fallen into the
brook, and when I finally reached their hut I forgot the condition I was
in. The poor little thing--she was only four--was absolutely rigid and
having convulsion after convulsion. Her screams were frightful--it was
impossible to control her--to get her to tell what the matter was, and
nobody knew what had happened. She had simply given a shriek of terror
and gone into convulsions. There was nothing to do--but
nothing--_nothing_. At the end of an hour and a half she gave a final
shriek and died, and when her poor little clenched fists relaxed, we
found in one of them a dead scorpion. By that time I had begun to be
very chilly and of course it ended in a bad cold. Two lumps please and
no milk.”
A servant in a starched skirt of watermelon pink and a starched white
upper garment like a dressing sack glided out to help with the tea and
cakes. A blue rebozo was draped about her neck and shoulders, her black
hair hung to within a foot and a half of the floor in two fat braids,
and in it, behind her right ear, was a pink camelia the color of her
skirt. Her bare feet were thrust into slippers without heels or backs
and as she slipped about from chair to chair they made a slight dragging
sound on the tiles. Everyone said good afternoon to her as she handed
the teacups, at which she smiled and replied in a respectful fashion
that was, however, perfectly self-possessed.
“Did you hear about those people named Jackson who were here for a few
days last month?” Mrs. Belding asked of the party in general. “You know
they ended up at Cuernavaca and took a furnished house there meaning to
stay all winter. Well, they stayed five days and then left--furious at
Mexico and everyone in it.” And she went on with considerable art and
humor to sketch the brief career of the Jacksons. While they were at the
hotel, before they took possession of their house, she told us, Mrs.
Jackson had engaged servants--a mozo, two maids and a cook. The cook she
stole from the Dressers. It wasn’t at all nice of her to steal the cook
as Mrs. Dresser had gone through a lot of bother for her about the
renting of the house and had helped her to get the other servants. But
Mrs. Jackson offered the creature two dollars more a month, and although
she had lived at the Dressers for six years, she deserted them with a
low, glad cry. Poor Mrs. Dresser rushed over to the Moons and sobbed
when she told about it.
“Don’t you worry, dear,” said Mrs. Moon. “Leave that Jackson viper to
me; I’ll fix her. They move in this afternoon--I’m going up there to
tea--and I promise you that you’ll have your wall-eyed old dish-smasher
hovering over the brasero in your kitchen by noon to-morrow.”
Apparently Mrs. Moon did go to the Jacksons for tea and made herself
most agreeable. “You may not believe it, but she really can once in a
while,” Mrs. Belding interjected. And as Mrs. Jackson had been
conducting a Mexican establishment for about two hours, Mrs. Moon gave
her all kinds of advice on the way to get along with the servants,
ending with: “Of course you must _never_ let the maids go out after dark
even with their mothers, and it’s _fatal_ to give them breakfast. We
simply don’t do it in Mexico--not so much as a drop of coffee until
noon. Breakfast always makes Mexicans insolent.” Then Mrs. Moon, feeling
that she was perhaps overdoing it, left while she saw that Mrs. Jackson
was drinking it in in great, death-dealing gulps.
It was bad enough that night, Mrs. Belding ran on, when the cook and one
of the maids tried to go to the serenata in the plaza. On the strength
of the extra two dollars the cook had bought a new rebozo and wanted to
wear it, and as there was no reason on earth why they shouldn’t go to
the serenata, they were mystified and angry at Mrs. Jackson’s serenely
declaring “No, no,” and locking them in. But the great seal of the
Jacksons’ fate was definitely affixed the next morning when Mrs.
Jackson, up bright and early, with kind firmness, refused to let them
make their coffee. Half an hour later Mrs. Moon experienced the bliss of
seeing the mozo, the cook and the two maids wandering past her
house--all weeping bitterly. Long before midday the cook was back at the
Dressers; and from that moment Mrs. Jackson was blacklisted.
For five days she struggled to engage new servants, but she was believed
to be a woman with a “bad heart.” No one would go to her. She
surrendered and left.
I did not altogether believe this tale of Mrs. Belding’s, nor did I
believe the man who casually told us that a few weeks before, the
authorities had, just in time, interrupted a human sacrifice in an
Indian village some twenty or thirty miles up from the coast. After
nearly four hundred years of Christianity the Indians had, it seemed,
dug up a large stone idol and attempted to revert. Then, too, the remark
of a young girl who had been visiting in Vera Cruz struck me as rather
incredible. “I was there for a month,” she said. “Yes, there was some
yellow fever and a great deal of smallpox--but when you’re having a good
time, who minds smallpox?” It was all so new to me in matter and
manner, so sprinkled with easy references to objects, scenes, and
conditions I had met with only in highfalutin stories lacking the ring
of truth, so ornate with “meandering” (thank you, Robert Browning),
Spanish words whose meaning I did not know. There was also among the men
much coffee talk--a whole new world to one who has always taken for
granted that coffee originates, roasted, ground and done up in
five-pound tins on a grocer’s shelves. But it was all true even to the
interrupted human sacrifice and the fact that some of the shrubs among
the roses and heliotrope near the piazza were coffee trees. Had I never
seen the little colony again I should always have remembered it as a
picturesque, romantic and delightful thing. And how--I told myself as I
sat there listening and looking--they must, away off here, depend upon
one another for society, both in a formal and in an intimate sense! How
they must come together and somewhat wistfully try to forget Mexico in
talking of home in their own language! What it is, after all, to
understand and be understood!--and all that sort of thing. If my first
afternoon with foreigners in Mexico had been my last, I should have
carried away with me a brave, bright colored little picture of much
charm and some pathos. However, since then I have spent with my
compatriots in this interesting land days innumerable.
I fear I am, for the delightful purposes of art, unfortunately
unselective. First impressions have their value; they have, indeed, very
great value, and of a kind quite their own. As my first impression of
Americans in Mexico was the kind I have just been trying to give, and as
it was to me wholly interesting and more agreeable than not, I ought,
perhaps, to let it stand; but somehow I can’t. My inartistic impulse to
keep on and tell all the little I know, instead of stopping at the right
place, is too strong.
There are said to be about thirty thousand American residents in the
Mexican Republic, and the men pursue vocations ranging from that of
tramp to that of president of great and successful business ventures.
There are American doctors and dentists, brakemen, locomotive engineers,
Pullman-car conductors, civil engineers, mining engineers, “promoters,”
grocers, hotel keepers, dealers in curios; there are American
barkeepers, lawyers, stenographers, photographers, artists, clerks,
electricians, and owners of ranches of one kind or another who grow
cattle or coffee or vanilla or sugar or rubber. Many Americans are
managers of some sort--they manage mines or plantations or railways, or
the local interests of some manufacturing or business concern in the
United States. One meets Americans--both men and women--on the streets,
in hotels, in shops, strolling or sitting in the plaza--almost
everywhere in the course of the day’s work, and in the course of the
day’s play, one may drop in at the house of some acquaintance or friend
and have a cup of tea, with the usual accompaniments, at four or half
past. I am speaking now not of the City of Mexico, whose American colony
as a colony I know solely through the “Society” notes of the _Mexican
Herald_. From that authentic source he who runs may read (or he who
reads may run) that on almost any afternoon at the large entertainment
given by Mrs. Brooks for her popular friend, Mrs. Crooks, punch was
served at a refreshment table quaintly decorated with smilax by the
ever-charming Mrs. Snooks. That there are agreeable Americans living in
the city I am sure, because I have met some of them elsewhere. But of
American society in general there I am only competent to suspect that,
like society in most places, it is considerably less important and
entrancing in reality than it is in print.