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
windows 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 heart-rending 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 halfway to his knees, was patiently holding an
umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while she--bebangled,
becameoed, beplumed, and stripped to the buff--masterfully cooked our
dinner on the brasero.
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 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 isolation. 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
Trawnbeigh’s 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 Pittsburg 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
Pittsburg--whither he had been persuaded to journey on the Slapp’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.
XIV
Early in the eighteenth century there went to Mexico from France a boy
of sixteen named Joseph de la Borde. “By his fortunate mining ventures
at Tlalpujahua, Tasco, and Zacatecas,” we read, “he made a fortune of
forty million pesos.” One of these millions he spent in building a
church at Tasco, and another he spent in building a garden at
Cuernavaca. This is all I know about Joseph de la Borde, or, as he was
called in Mexico, José de la Borda, except that he died in Cuernavaca at
the age of seventy-nine and that his portrait--a funny old man in a
white wig and black velvet--hangs among the portraits of other dead and
eminent gentlemen in an obscure corridor of the National Museum. It
might be interesting to learn what became of the remaining thirty-eight
millions; but then again it might not. So I haven’t tried to find out.
It is scarcely probable, however, that at a later date he expressed
himself more notably than he did in the construction of El Jardin Borda.
It lies on a steep hillside behind Cuernavaca, and even if it were not
one of the most beautiful of tangled, neglected, ruined old gardens
anywhere, it would be lovable for the manner in which it tried so hard
to be a French garden and failed. Joseph, it is clear, had the French
passion for formalizing the landscape--for putting Nature into a pretty
strait-jacket; but although he spent much time and a million pesos in
trying to do this at Cuernavaca, he rather wonderfully did not succeed.
No doubt the result pleased him; it surely ought to have. But just as
surely it was not the light, bright, definitely graceful result of which
his French mind had conceived. It was always a little precious to speak
of one thing in terms of another, but nevertheless there is about a
perfect French garden something very musical. The Luxembourg garden is
musical, so is the garden at Versailles; musical with the kind of music
that is as deliberately academic as it is deliberately tuneful. There
was every endeavor to make the Jardin Borda perform on a small scale
with the same blithe elegance of Versailles and the garden of the
Luxembourg; but it was Mexican at heart. Perhaps it foresaw Napoleon
III. At any rate, although it tried to be French, it at the last
refused.
The situation, the flora, and, absurd as it may sound, the technic of
the stone masons who built the architectural features--the walls, the
fountains, the summerhouses, the cascades, and the ponds--all combine to
give the place an individuality, sometimes Spanish, sometimes Mexican,
but French only in the same remote manner in which Shakespeare is
Shakespeare when Madame Bernhardt, instead of exclaiming, “Go. Stand not
upon the order of your going, but go at once,” liquidly burbles: “Allez,
messieurs; allez immédiatement--sans cérémonie!” It hangs precipitously
on the side of a ravine when it should have been level (one is so glad
it is not), and the dense, southern trees--mangoes and sapotes and
Indian laurel--with which it was planted, have long since outgrown the
scale of the place, interlaced and roofed out the sky overhead with an
opaque and somber canopy. They now are not, as they were intended to be,
decorative features of the garden, they are the garden itself; one
cannot see the trees for the forest. In its impermeable shade there are
long, islanded tanks in which many numerous families of ducks and geese
live a strangely secluded, dignified, aristocratic existence--arbors of
roses and jasmine, and heavy, broken old fountains that no longer play
and splash. In fact, all the masonry, and to retain itself on the
hillside the place had to be a mass of masonry, is heavy and simple,
and except for the arbors there are no longer any flowers. Where in the
days of Joseph there no doubt used to be a dazzling carpet of color,
there is now only a tangle of coffee trees. But in Cuernavaca when the
purple and red and pink of growing things under a pitiless sun become
intolerable, the absence of color in the Jardin Borda, except for its
dark and soothing green, is well worth frequently paying the twenty-five
centavos the present owner charges as an admittance fee.
In seventy-five or a hundred years there will be many fine old formal
gardens in the United States--finer than the Borda ever was. Under the
pergolas of some of them there is much tea and pleasant conversation and
one greatly admires their marble furniture imported from Italy--their
careful riot of flowers. But at present it is difficult to forget that
their prevailing color is wealth, and to forget it will take at least
another century. If they have everything that Joseph’s garden lacks,
they all lack the thing it has. For in its twilit arbors and all along
its sad and silent terraces there is at any hour the same poetic mystery
that even at the ages of eight and four sometimes used to affect Don
Guillermo and me when we were turned loose to play and to pick daisies
in the Borghese garden in Rome. The Borghese is extensive and the Borda
is tiny, but history has strolled in both of them and they both seem to
have beautiful, secret sorrows.
I am not like an American woman tourist in Cuernavaca (it was her first
week in the country) who informed me that she sat in the hotel all day
because she was so tired of seeing the streets full of Mexicans! “You
know, we saw a great many Mexicans in Mexico City,” she added in the
aggrieved tone of one who thinks it is high time for a procession of
Swedes or Australians. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, there are mornings
and afternoons when it is good to be out of range of the human voice and
alone with trees, a sheet of water however small, and some animals.
Attached to the grounds is a house--a succession of cool rooms on one
floor, and in passing the open doors and windows of the long, denuded
sala as one begins to descend the main terrace, it is impossible not to
remember for a moment that the place was lived in by Maximilian and
Carlotta. It is impossible, too, especially if the white roses and
jasmine of the arbor are in bloom, not to pay the unfortunate lady and
gentleman the tribute of a sentimental pang. In Mexico one often finds
oneself thinking of Maximilian and Carlotta and, on the whole, with a
kindliness springing, I am sure, chiefly from the facts that they were
young and in love. For politically they were but a pair of stupid
mistakes. History has been kind to Maximilian--far kinder than he
deserved--but standard and respectable history is so timorous of leaving
a wrong impression that it often fails to leave any impression at all.
History to be interesting and valuable should be recorded by persons of
talent and prejudice or by chambermaids who listen at keyholes.
As it is difficult to believe Maximilian a scoundrel, the other belief
most open to one in view of his brief career, is that he was a dull,
ignorant, and fatuous young man who thought it would prove more
diverting to be a Mexican emperor than an Austrian archduke. His
portrait, indeed (the famous one on horseback now in the National
Palace), expresses just this with unconscious cruelty. History often
speaks of him as handsome--an adjective that even the idealized portrait
in question quite fails to justify. Without more chin than Maximilian
ever had, one can be neither handsome nor a successful emperor. He was
amiable and “well disposed,” but his fatuity revealed itself from the
first in the mere fact of his being able to see in himself a logical
claimant to the throne of Mexico in the far-fetched and absurd reason
that led Napoleon III and the Roman Catholic Church to select him. For
he was chosen to adorn this precariously fictitious seat because Mexico
had formerly been a Spanish possession and the house of which he was a
representative had ruled in Spain before the accession of the Bourbons!
Napoleon III naturally was not giving away empires to Bourbons, and
Maximilian was supposed “to reunite the Mexico of 1863 with the
monarchical Mexico of 1821.” To the party of intelligence, progress, and
reform there was about the same amount of right and reason in this as
the inhabitants of France would find in a sudden demand on my part to be
made their chief executive because my name happens to be a French name.
Maximilian “accepted” the crown on two conditions. That he was
pathetically ignorant of at least the subject on which he ought to have
been best informed is clear from one of them, and that he was dull
becomes almost as evident from the other. The first provided that he
should be elected to the throne of Mexico by popular vote; and the
second, that the Emperor Napoleon should give him armed aid as long as
he required it. Now anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of Mexico
knows that a popular election there is an impossibility and always has
been. No one in Mexico is ever elected by popular vote, or ever really
elected at all. It cannot be done at the present time (1908) any more
than it could have been when Maximilian and Carlotta were crowned in the
cathedral in 1864. The inhabitants of Mexico, incredible as it may
sound, speak more than fifty totally different languages and many of
them have never learned Spanish. Some of them in fact--the Yaquis in
Sonora and the Mayas in Yucatan--do not even recognize the Mexican
Government, are still at war with it and are being for this reason
rapidly exterminated, although not as rapidly as would be the case if
the military exterminators did not receive increased pay while engaged
in the congenial pursuit of extermination. When one considers that two
years before the proposed taking of the census in 1910, the Government
is planning a gradual and elaborate campaign of enlightenment in the
hope of allaying the suspicions of the superstitious lower classes and
making a more or less accurate census possible, it is clear that not
even a political dreamer could seriously consider the feasibility of a
genuine popular election. From what I know of many of the inhabitants,
from what I have seen of their complete indifference to anything
outside of their villages and cornfields, I think it highly probable
that many thousands of them tilled their land throughout the entire,
futile “reign” altogether unaware of Maximilian’s existence. Maximilian
was not elected Emperor of Mexico by popular vote, although before he
learned something about his empire, he no doubt thought he had been.
As to the second condition--when Maximilian staked his entire hope of
success upon a promise of Napoleon III, who had on various occasions
somewhat conspicuously shown himself to be as dangerous an adventurer
and as unscrupulous a liar as most of the other members of his offensive
family, Maximilian did something that may be recorded as trusting and
unfortunate, but that is only adequately described as dull. Fatuous,
ignorant, and dull, he not only failed to pull out Napoleon’s chestnuts,
he proceeded to fall into the fire. Except just at first, he was not
wanted in Mexico even by the clerical party responsible for his being
there; for his refusal to abolish the Reform Laws and restore the power
of the Church bitterly disappointed the Church without, however, gaining
for him adherents among those who had fought so long to establish a
republic. Everything he did was preordained to be wrong. He went without
a definite policy and was incapable of evolving one after he arrived.
His three years in Mexico were unproductive of anything except an
enormous debt incurred largely by the silly magnificence of his court, a
great deal of bloodshed and his own execution. He died bravely, one
always reads, but so do hundreds of other persons every day. Before an
audience composed of the entire civilized world, to die bravely ought
not to be a particularly difficult feat. As Alphonse Daudet somewhere
says of Frenchmen, “They can always be brave if there are enough people
looking.” Life was not kind to the young Austrian, but history has been.
And yet, on the sad, silent terraces of the Jardin Borda one always
thinks of Maximilian and Carlotta, and pays them the tribute of a
sentimental pang.
XV
Travelers sometimes complain that “Mexican towns are exactly alike; if
you see one you’ve seen them all,” and while I cannot agree with the
bromidically couched observation I can understand why it is made. They
are not alike, but they are so startlingly different from Northern towns
that one is at first more impressed by this fundamental difference, in
which they all naturally have a family resemblance, than by the less
striking but delightful ways in which they often differ from one
another. Without exception, they are, as art critics used to say of
certain pictures, “painted in a high key,” and where the nature of the
site permits, their rectangularity is positively Philadelphian. In their
center is a public square with a garden, rather formal in intention but
as a rule old enough and luxuriant enough to have lost its original
stiffness. Here there are paths and benches, trees, fountains, flowers,
and a flimsy looking iron and tin band stand one learns at last to like.
At one side is the most important church; the other three are bounded
by shops and arcades. This is the plaza. Every town has one, many of
them have several. But there is always one that more than the others is
a kind of pulsating, civic heart, and it is interesting to note how in
their dimensions they observe the scale of their environment. Big towns
have big plazas, small towns have small plazas, villages have tiny
plazas. In addition to the plaza there is often, in a quieter, more
distant quarter of the community, a park--a tangled, shady,
bird-inhabited spot, with high and aged trees, massive seats of stone or
cement, and a tranquillity that exerts a noticeably benign influence on
all who go to walk or sit there. Whether the houses and buildings are
built of stone or mortar or, as is customary in the smaller places of
the plateau, of sun-dried mud bricks, their effect is the same, for they
are all given a coat of smooth stucco and then calcimined white, or a
pale shade of pink, blue, yellow, buff, or green. Rarely are they of
more than two stories; most of them have balconies on the upper floor,
all have long, heavily barred windows on the lower, and if it were not
for their gayety of color, the perpetual fascination of their
flower-filled patios of which the passer-by gets tantalizing glimpses
through open doorways, and the intellectual interest of the signs on the
shops--their uniform height and the square simplicity of their design
might be monotonous. As it is, a Mexican street, even when empty, is
never monotonous.
Besides the plaza and the park, there is the market place--sometimes
merely an open square in which the venders, under rectangular homemade
parasols, spread their wares upon the ground, but more often an
inclosure equipped with long counters and protected from sun and rain by
a roof. Except in the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, and Merida, one is
not conscious of “residence quarters.” The “best families” (a term
almost as meaningless and as frequently employed in Mexico as in the
United States) live where they please, and they please to live as deeply
as possible in the thick of things. The largest and most elaborate
houses are often scattered between shops and saloons along the busiest
streets, and when one becomes intimate with the country and its
inhabitants it seems natural and agreeable that they should be. For one
cannot live in Mexico without consciously or unconsciously regarding the
superficialities of life from something very like the local point of
view. There is about it an infectious and inevitable quality, and I have
often been both amused and depressed by the manner in which foreigners
who accept the best of everything in Mexico--who grow strong, and revel
in one of its several climates, who make a good living there, who enjoy
its beauty and adopt many of its customs--stupidly deny its attraction
for them, repudiate their sympathy with it. It is customary, almost a
convention, to do so, and one is appalled by the tenacity of
convention’s grasp upon the ordinary mind--by the impregnable dullness
of the normal intellect. I know, for example, Americans who have lived
happily in Mexico for many years. They have, among Mexicans, friends
whom they both respect and admire. Almost all their interests in life
are focused somewhere in the country, and when they are away from it
they look forward with gladness to the time of their return. Yet,
apparent as all this is to one who associates with them, they seem
incapable of translating experience into consciousness and conversation.
You see them leading contented and successful lives, at peace with their
adopted land and almost everything in it; but when they undertake to
discuss their environment, to formulate their opinions, their remarks
are rarely valuable and never appreciative. Instead of simply trying to
give one something of the Mexico they have day by day, month by month,
and year by year met and succumbed to, they appear to take a pride in
parading the old geography, guidebook and tourist dicta that in their
cases, one sees at a glance, are not justified by facts.
“All Mexican servants are thieves and liars,” is the characteristic
pronouncement of an American woman whose household for sixteen years has
been admirably and economically run by the same devoted and honest cook.