States in numbers sufficiently great to be regarded as a “colony,” there
is absolutely nothing that by any stretch of imagination or spread of
printer’s ink could be called “American society.” The New Year’s Day I
have mentioned seems to me now a kind of freak of nature; I am at a loss
to account for it. For since then my knowledge of Americans in the small
towns has become considerable, and they are not in the least as I
supposed they were. They do not depend upon one another; they do not
come together to talk wistfully of home in the mother tongue; they do
_not_ understand one another, and by one another they are _not_
understood! There is at best about most of their exceedingly few
relations an atmosphere of petty and ungenerous gossip, and at worst a
fog--a positive sand storm of enmity and hatred through which it takes a
really ludicrous amount of delicate navigation successfully to steer
oneself. As a body they simply do not meet. There are, instead, groups
of two, of three, of four, who have tea together (other forms of
entertainment are rarely attempted) chiefly for the purpose of
envitrioling the others. There are among them agreeable groups and truly
charming individuals, but when they allow themselves to assimilate at
all, it is usually in a most reluctant, acid, and malnutritious form (a
singularly repulsive figure of speech, come to think of it) that does no
one any good. It is not unamusing just at first to have a lady inform
you with tremulous lips and in a tense, white voice that if you call on
Mrs. X., you must not expect to call any longer on _her_; and I confess
I have enjoyed learning in great detail just why this one is no longer
speaking to that, and the train of events that led up to Mr. A.’s
finally slapping the face of Mr. B. Yet there are well-defined limits to
intellectual treats of this nature, and one quickly longs for
entertainment at once less dramatic and more varied.
Among the Americans this is difficult to get, although, as I pause and
recall with gratitude and affection some of my friends in Jalapa, for
instance, I am tempted to retract this statement. The trouble lies, I
feel sure, in the fact that, having come from widely dissimilar parts of
the United States, and having had while there affiliations, in many
instances, whose slight difference is still great enough to make a great
difference, they have but little in common. And Mexican towns are
utterly lacking in those diverse interests that at home supply the
women of even very small communities with so many pleasant and harmless,
if artificial, bonds. The Mexican theater is crude and impossible--even
if the fractious ladies knew Spanish sufficiently well to follow rapid
dialogue with enjoyment, which they rarely do. The occasional traveling
opera company, with one wind-busted, middle-aged star who twenty-five
years ago was rumored to have been well received in Rio de Janeiro, is a
torture; there are no notable piano or song recitals, no King’s
Daughters or other pet charities, no D. A. R.’s, no one to interpret the
“Ring and the Book,” or the “Ring of the Niebelungen,” no one to give
chafing-dish lectures or inspire enthusiasm for things like the etchings
of Whistler and the economical cremation of garbage, the abolishment of
child labor, and the encouragement of the backyard beautiful. Beyond the
slight and monotonous cares of housekeeping on a small scale, there is
little to occupy their time; there are, in a word, no varied outlets
available for their normal socio-intellectual energies, and of course
the distressing happens. Even the one or two common bonds they might
have, most unfortunately act not as bonds at all. The “servant problem,”
for instance, small as wages are, serves only to keep them farther
apart, and apparently friendship between two families engaged in the
same kind of enterprise is almost impossible. Very rarely have I seen
two coffee-growers who were not virulently jealous of each other’s
successes, and who would not, in a business way, cut each other’s
throats without a qualm if by doing so they could come out a few dollars
ahead.
Indeed, from the little I have seen and the great deal I have heard of
my countrymen’s business coups in Mexico, I cannot believe that
transplantation has a tendency to elevate one’s ethics. It is, perhaps,
unnecessary to record that I know men in Mexico whose methods of
business are fastidiously honorable with Mexican and compatriot alike,
but they are extremely rare; far more rare than they are at home. If in
Mexico I were forced to choose between trusting in a business matter to
the representations of a Mexican whom I knew and liked and an American
whom I knew and liked, I should, except in one or two cases, where I
should be betting, so to speak, on a certainty, trust the Mexican.
An always interesting phase of the American in Mexico is the annual
invasion of the country, from January to March, by immense parties of
“personally conducted” tourists from the United States. In private
cars--even in private trains--they descend every few days upon the
cities and towns of chief pictorial and historic interest, and just as
the American residents of England, Germany, Italy, and France shudder at
the ancient and honorable name of “Thomas Cook and Sons,” do the
Americans who have chosen Mexico as the land of their adoption shrug and
laugh at the mention of “las turistas.” On general principles, to shrug
and sneer--for in this laugh there always lurks a sneer--merely because
a hundred and fifty amiable creatures have chosen to be herded from one
end of a vast foreign country and back again in two weeks, would seem to
be narrow and pointless. But I have grown to consider it, for principles
quite specific, neither the one nor the other. The American resident’s
sneer is unfortunately a helpless, ineffectual one, but he is without
question sometimes entitled to it.
Somebody once wrote an article--perhaps it was a whole book--which he
called “The Psychology of Crowds.” I did not read it, but many years
ago, when it came out, the title imbedded itself in my mind as a
wonderfully suggestive title that didn’t suggest to me anything at all.
Since then I have had frequent occasion to excavate it, and without
having read a word of the work, I am convinced that I know exactly what
the author meant. Did he, I often wonder, ever study, in his study of
crowds, a crowd of American tourists in Mexico? What a misfortune for
his book if he neglected to! They are, it seems, composed of the most
estimable units of which one can conceive; the sort of persons who make
a “world’s fair” possible; the salt of the earth--“the backbone of the
nation.” And yet when they unite and start out on their travels, a kind
of madness now and then seizes upon them; not continuously, and
sometimes not at all, but now and then. Young girls who, at home, could
be trusted on every occasion to conduct themselves with a kind of
provincial dignity; sensible, middle-aged fathers and mothers of
grown-up families, and old women with white water-waves and gray
lisle-thread gloves, will now and then, when on a tour in Mexico, go out
of their way to do things that make the very peons blush. The great
majority of tourists are, of course, quiet, well-behaved persons who
take an intelligent interest in their travels. It is to the exception I
am referring; the exception by whom the others, alas! are judged.
The least of their crimes is their suddenly acquired mania for being
conspicuous. At home, in their city side streets, their humdrum suburbs,
their placid villages, they have been content for thirty, fifty, seventy
years to pursue their various decent ways, legitimately observed and
clad appropriately to their means and station. But once arrived in the
ancient capital of Montezuma, many of them are inspired in the most
astounding fashion to attract attention to themselves. On Sunday
afternoon, in the crowded Paseo, I have seen, for instance, in cabs,
undoubtedly respectable women from my country with enormous straw
sombreros on their heads, and about their shoulders those brilliant and
hideous “Mexican” sarapes--woven for the tourist trade, it is said, in
Germany. All the rest of the world was, of course, in its Paris best,
and staring at them with amazed eyes. In Mexico the only possible
circumstance under which a native woman of any position whatever would
wear a peon hat would be a hot day in the depths of the country, were
she forced to travel in an open vehicle or on horseback. As for sarapes,
they, of course, are worn only by men. The effect these travelers
produced upon the local mind was somewhat analogous to that which a
party of Mexican ladies would produce upon the mind of New York should
they decide to drive up Fifth Avenue wearing policemen’s helmets and
variegated trousers. Only Mexican women would never do the one, while
American women frequently, from motives I am at a loss to account for,
do the other.
Then, once in a small town to which large parties rarely go, I saw half
a dozen men and women suddenly detach themselves from their crowd on
being told that a certain middle-aged man, bidding good-by to some
guests at his front door, was the governor of the state. At a distance
of from ten to fifteen feet of him they deliberately focused their
kodaks on the group and pressed the button. Afterwards I asked one of
the men with whom the governor had been talking, if the governor had
commented upon the matter. “Why, yes,” was the reply. “He said, with a
shrug, ‘Obviously from the United States,’ and then went on with his
conversation.”
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, a
Mexican 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
leaving washed 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.”
XIII
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 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 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 storm 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, _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 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 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 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.