Part 8

The plain coffins, with or without palls (this had none), are placed in an open, sideless tramcar, sometimes with flowers, sometimes without. They have to pass the broad Avenida de los Insurgentes to get out to the Panteon de Dolores, the big, modern cemetery behind Chapultepec hill. There are agitations, from time to time, to prevent the carrying of these obviously not hermetically sealed coffins through the city, scattering germs and odors of mortality. Foreigners generally turn their heads and try not to breathe; but the Mexicans take off their hats and make the sign of the cross.

_July 29th._

I have spent several afternoons with Humboldt, quite intimately and cozily, to the sound of heavy water falling from the roof, and the room so darkened by the deluge that I have had my lights turned on. He says that Peñon I wrote of will, one day, destroy Mexico City. Will it be _Anno Domini_ 1911? I envy him his beautiful gift of accurate seeing. None of the marvels of Nature, none of her vagaries, showed themselves to him in vain; and he is astonishingly up to date.

I have begun to prowl about for "antiques." No one escapes the fever, and in its delirium I wandered this morning to the Monte de Piedad,[10] which is housed in an ancient building facing the cathedral. An old tablet over the door records that it was founded in 1775 by Terreros, Conde de Regla, one of the most romantic figures of the eighteenth century, as, by a lucky chance, he became the owner of the Real del Monte mines at Pachuca.

Among the people he was the subject of as many fables as Crœsus. When his children were baptized the procession walked upon bars of silver, and when he was made Conde de Regla he invited the King of Spain to visit his mine, assuring him that if he did so his feet should never touch the earth.

The Monte de Piedad was founded for the purpose of keeping the poor out of the clutches of the usurers. Going in on the ground floor, directly from the street, I found myself in a crowd of elbowing people of all classes, leaning over glass-inclosed show-cases, where jewels and silver and small objects of value are exposed. In the large space immediately back are samples of everything used by man except things that need to be fed.

After having fingered the greatest number of objects that, in my right mind, I would have no possible use for, I concentrated my energies on a pearl pin, the pearl really visible to the naked eye, and bought it for thirty dollars; but I expended more than thirty dollars' worth of time and energy, even as those things go here. It's a scarf-pin and, somehow, in its old, brilliant setting, it seemed to try to tell a tale. Perhaps it had held some viceroy's lace? I will send it to you for St. Augustine's Day.

[7] Recreation-ground of the Ancient Cat.

[8] The temple of Venus.

[9] _The Road to Rome_, Hilaire Belloc.

[10] National Pawn-shop.

VIII

Elim's fourth birthday party--Haggling over the prices of old Mexican frames--Zapata looms up--First glimpse of General Huerta--Romantic mining history of Mexico.

_August 3d._

Again it is the blessed anniversary. It seems but a moment of time since my arms received my son. He asked me, the first thing this morning, at what time he would be four years old. When I told him it had already happened he set up a dreadful howl. It appears he had expected to feel himself becoming four, as he informed me when he got his breath. I only send this line to you on this, his fourth mark on the shores of life. Now I must be up and doing. The sun is flooding the _patio_.

_Later._

His birthday party was sweet, but I was deathly homesick for you, when kind and friendly strangers came, bringing their gifts and good wishes. He had his cake, and the four candles for the years he had blessed my life. The two little Japanese, Madame Chermont's little boy, the two handsome children of the Casa Alvarado, the little Simon boy (too sweet, with his dark curls and big eyes), Dearing, Arnold, and Palmer, from the Embassy, came.

Von Hintze, who loves little children, dropped in late with a book of fairy tales. Mrs. Laughton brought Æsop's Fables, not many pictures in it, and as Elim opened it at a printed page he said, with shining eyes, "_Endlich habe ich ein Lesebuch_." He has spent a good deal of time, since, holding it upside down and asking not to be disturbed while reading. He and Jom Chermont had a clash of arms, and Bobo, the two-year-old little Jap, ran the whole show with singular competence.

An invading nostalgia possessed me all the afternoon, and I kept thinking of the beautiful word the Portuguese chargé, De Lima, taught me a few days ago at dinner--"_saudades_," meaning memory of dear and early scenes, or of loved ones, or of all these things together. I presented my son with two tortoises and a little green bird, a _clarine_, which can be kept on the oleander terrace, though he had asked for a monkey and a crocodile.

I see that Abbey is dead. The wonder of those reds of the "Parsifal" frieze in the Boston Library has followed me for years. _Tout a une fin_, but when an artist dies there is a double end. I have just come across most beautiful photographs of Mexico--gum-prints and callotypes, after some special process by an artist named Ravell, who has a remarkable eye for this beauty and evidently a soul to receive it.

_August 8th._

To-day was my usual Tuesday at home. Elim, in spotless white, played quietly under the tea-table most of the time with his little legs sticking out. Torrents of rain, and only a few callers, among them the German Consul-General, Rieloff, very musical, asking us for dinner, and Mrs. Cummings, handsome, competent, and warm-hearted, the wife of the head of the cable company, and a friend of Aunt Laura's since many years.

Lately I have bought several beautiful old Mexican or Spanish frames. Sometimes they are inlaid with mother-of-pearl, sometimes with ivory or bone. Sometimes they are old, sometimes only so cunningly arranged to deceive the eye and fancy that they give the same pleasure. To-day a short, stubby, insistent Mestizo, from the Calle Amargura, brought me a beautiful one, and I spent a most exciting hour haggling over the price. The four evangelists are carved in mother-of-pearl at the four corners, with a charming, simple device of diamond-shaped pieces in between. A beautiful Ravell photograph of the stone sails of Guadalupe just fitted into it, and it will hang above the bookcase by my sofa. The room has many friends whom I have put in Mexican frames; Elim and Sofka, Iswolsky, the Towers, Mr. Taft, Mr. Roosevelt. A sweet one of Gladys S., with her first-born in her arms, has a soft, yellow wood frame, with an old, irregular tracing in black and ivory.

I can't call Mexico a melting-pot exactly, as things don't melt here. But it is a strange place, with strange people and peculiar situations. Society here, blown together by the four winds of the earth, is a mixed affair, and various people have disappeared from the rolls since our arrival. Some come to seek, some, it would appear, because they are being sought, others still whose life demands a change of setting.

It now appears that a certain agreeable foreign couple, received by everybody, had never been joined in holy matrimony. It came out between the invitation and the dinner at the ---- Legation. It was not official enough for the minister to intimate to them that the dinner was off, but definite enough to make him most uncomfortable. Everybody behaved very well, however, and as he sat at the table, his eye glancing rather anxiously about the possible field of battle, I felt quite sorry for him; but I realized that though anybody has a right to the highways, in the narrow compass of the drawing-room all must, alack! be alike.

Peretti de la Rocca, the clever _conseiller_ of the French Embassy in Washington, took me out to dinner. It is he who married, when _en poste_ here, the handsome only daughter of the Suinagás', living in our street. It was very pleasant talking Washingtoniana, Mexicana, and politics.

Yesterday, Sunday, I spent the day at the Del Rios' at Tlalpan, on the first slopes of the Ajusco Mountains. Von. H., who confesses openly to homesickness, took me out with Elim, and we dropped N. for the usual Sunday golf at the Country Club as we passed by.

The Del Rios have a big, comfortable, modernized house, with a huge, unmodernized garden; and it is a favorite Sunday haunt of certain of the diplomats. In the tiny inner court there is still a gem of an old "rosace"-shaped fountain, with calla-lilies growing about it. Small bitter-orange trees, thickly hung with green and yellow fruit, adorn the corners, and masses of geranium-like vines mingle with the ivy which covers the house walls, pierced here and there with old grilled, arched windows.

On the plateau, familiar vines and fruit-trees grow willingly among so many things that don't flourish together in Europe. Tlalpan was once beloved of the viceroys; I think Revillagigedo first made it fashionable, though it was settled immediately after the Conquest, when the picturesque old church was erected.

Madame Calderon de la Barca, in whose time Tlalpan was known after the name of the church, San Agustin de las Cuevas,[11] gives a most amusing account of the great annual Whitsuntide gaming festival, and Del Rio tells me that _la Feria de Tlalpan_ still continues to be fittingly celebrated by the exchange of temporary possessions in various forms of gambling, and that it's not quite innocent of cock-fights.

However, we moderns repaired to the tennis-court on arriving, where we found a dozen or so people using it to play hockey, and others sitting about in comfortable chairs watching the proceedings. We went for lunch and tea, but stayed for supper, all scampering to the house at tea-time, when a single, well-timed shower deluged the scene.

Some played bridge, and some read. Del Rio is an agreeable, intellectual, bookish man, with degrees at several continental universities, and has a good library of new and old books. He also possesses some rather radical ideas, though his personal life, as is so often the case, plays itself out with conventionality on the highest of ethical planes. His wife, partly of German origin, is very pretty in a dark-eyed, unaffected, happy way.

When the rain passed we went out and sat in the _mirador_, a sort of summer-house built into a corner of the high stone wall, a feature of every Mexican garden, and watched the sun-glow slipping from the hills, which took on a vivid blue, though the volcanoes kept their light in their own exclusive, dazzling way for long after. A pale moon, arisen among the sunset clouds, was waiting for its chance. By the time we started home through a magical night in an open motor, packed with flowers, a lot of us together, the moon was flooding the world and had cut the whole plateau into great squares of black and white.

_August 10th._

I have just seen a list of the diplomatic shifts. Dear Mr. O'Brien goes to Rome, the Ridgely-Carters, after their pleasant, successful years of Europe, to the Argentine. The Jacksons have been appointed to Rumania. It was very nice having them "near," in Havana. Each must take his turn in the tropics, but we aren't any of us physically fitted for prolonged sojourns, and I suppose they are delighted to return to Europe, after their "cycle of Cathay."

Mr. Lloyd Bryce, so cultured and agreeable, has been appointed minister to Holland. With his beautiful wife and their gifts of fortune they will make a representation in a thousand.

Mexico seems to me the best of the Latin-American posts, the most important to the United States, the most interesting, the most accessible. We are lucky to have got it, though I didn't feel so on the night of the 10th of January, when the friendly porter of the Hotel Bristol (in Vienna), as I was coming down-stairs for one of the usual _petits soupers_, said to me: "So Madame is going to leave us?" When I asked, "Where?" he told me it was _Mexico_, having seen the Paris _Herald_ before we had! It was like hearing we had been transferred to the moon.

Penn Cresson, secretary at Lima, is passing through, _en route_ for Washington. He says Peru is far; but he brings some very attractive photographs of his abode there, and it all depends, anyway, on what you take to a place yourself--the heart and brain luggage--whether you like it or not.

Yesterday we started to call on Madame Bonilla, whom I had met at the Del Rios', and for whom Mr. Cresson had messages from the British consul-general and his wife in Lima, formerly in Mexico. Madame B. is an Englishwoman, and I had heard much of her great taste and the really good things she has picked up.

When, on going to the address I thought was hers, we got into a hall with a life-size negro in plaster-of-Paris, draped with a pale blue scarf, and holding out a gilt card-receiver, placed near the door, and to whom we almost spoke, I was a bit taken aback. An Indian servant somewhat stealthily showed us into a dull-red dadoed room with a waving, light-blue ceiling, and many enlarged family photographs in black frames hanging against the walls. I saw C.'s interest wane as to the giving of the message, and when, after ten minutes, a large magenta-robed, hastily dressed, startled-looking dark lady appeared, we could only make our excuses. After much courtesy on her part, murmurings of _à la disposición de usted_, and more excuses from us, we got the address next door, where we found the kind of interior we were expecting, drank the freshest of tea brought in immediately by an accustomed servant, and poured by a charming lady never surprised at five o'clock.

We fingered bits of silver, hearing just how they had been acquired, looked at the marks on the porcelain, admired some gorgeous seventeenth-century strips of brocade, all to the accompaniment of questions about mutual friends and the inexhaustible "Mexican situation." _Suum cuique._

_August 12th._

Last night, dinner at the Danish Legation, where things are well and carefully done. I again sat next the Acting Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Carbajal y Rosas, a huge man with a black beard, and intellectual in our sense of the word. He talked very interestingly about Mexico and affairs here in general. In regretting certain things, he gave me a quotation from Taine to the effect that it is _un pauvre patriotisme que celui qui s'imagine que l'on doit excuser les crimes de son pays, simplement parcequ'on en est un citoyen_.

He and President de la Barra are great friends; and he thinks that after this coming electoral term (six years) he should be President again--himself, I suppose, as Minister for Foreign Affairs. Now De la Barra, who is the candidate for the Vice-Presidency of the Catholic party, which is to be reorganized with a modern and republican program, could not be elected, even if he wished. The Madero wave sweeps everything else before it, though De la Barra is filling a very difficult situation with dignity and tact. He is called _el Presidente Blanco_ (the White President), for evident and creditable reasons.

As we sat about the handsome, methodically arranged rooms after dinner they seemed filled not alone with Scandinavian household gods, but with the atmosphere of the north, and as entirely detached from Mexico as a polar bear carried to southern seas on a block of ice. The portrait of Mr. L.'s father, the author, and other portraits of distinguished men of an unrelated race, watched us from the walls. Even the old pieces of silver and the bric-à-brac were but remotely connected with this present existence, and Mr. L.'s glass-doored bookcases were filled with Scandinavian literature. He is _à cheval_ between Mexico City and Havana, but in Havana they live in a hotel, keeping the "Saga" here.

F. Vasquez Gómez has announced himself as candidate for the coming presidential elections, but I expect it will end with the announcement.

In toying with the Encyclopedia Britannica on a watery afternoon I accidentally came across the name of "Elim." I expected to see some hero of Russian history, but lo! it said, "Elim, third king of Ireland, killed in battle." I builded better than I knew!

Assumption Day, _August 15th_.

Went to the cathedral this morning, walking down the broad streets through a glistening, dry air; this afternoon, however, hail, wind, and sheets of water are spoiling the holiday for the people.

A dinner here last night. Beautiful, ragged, yellow chrysanthemums, much smaller than ours, decorated the table and drawing-room. The German and Russian ministers, Penn Cresson, the McLarens, and others were the guests.

A letter comes from Demidoff. He is leaving Paris to join Sofka, who is now in Russia with her people. They go together to Taguil in the Ural Mountains, to inspect their platinum mines. He is just back from a trip to the Spanish Pyrenees with Célestin after chamois, which latter he says don't compare with their Transylvanian cousins. He rather loftily asks if N. enjoys most parrot-shooting or monkey-stalking. His letter is interlarded with little questions as to when we are going to annex the country.

He had been in charge for a month and had the excitement of a change of government and the Agadir incident during that time. At the Embassy, it would seem, they are one big, jolly family. It made me quite homesick.

He winds up with a postscript, saying he had just finished _The New Machiavelli_. He considers it a _chef d'œuvre_, but I read it only a few months ago, and no book whose atmosphere and intrigue you forget in as short a time is great.

I think of you and Sofka, standing in the station, as the train rolled out from Paris, that rainy Sunday, to Cherbourg, our first _étape_ to the tropics.

_August 17th._

All quiet in Mexico City, but we understand that to-day a battle is taking place at Cuernavaca between Zapata, our "foremost" brigand, with three thousand troops, and the Federals.

Those who know tell me that Zapata is atavistic in type, desirous of Mexico for the Indians, _à la_ a celebrated Indian chief of the Sierras de Alica. "Mexico for the Indians" really means a sponging out of everything between us and Montezuma, and decidedly "gives to think."

A few days ago, dining at Silvain's, the French restaurant in vogue here, we saw a General Huerta who seemed _muy hombre_, a broad-shouldered, flat-faced, restless-eyed Indian with big glasses, rather impressive, who was returning to Morelos to fight Zapata. I don't know if this was his battle or not.

The Russian minister is going on leave. I gave him a little green jade god, to take to Demidoff, sworn to me, in the name of various deities, to be what it appears to be, authentic. He is not handsome, but he has a delightful, smooth "feel" and something chic about him, in his own little Aztec way.

_August 18th._

The Finance Ministry, which was just opposite when we first came, where Limantour created and guided the infant steps of Mexican finance (_le premier pas qui coûte_), is now converted into the Police Bureau. There are always a lot of people--women, children, young men and old--all in some kind of trouble, standing or sitting on the curve in the most picturesque combinations. It makes the street very human, almost too human, when lawbreakers are brought to justice in the night hours.

_August 20th._

Two days ago N. met a man who knows all about your Avino mines, but nothing consoling. It is a splendid property, but had the misfortune to be exploited by one of the canniest of men. One, however, who didn't lie awake nights worrying about the investors, and who ruined it, as far as the investors are concerned, by always getting in new machinery, he taking the commissions on the machinery, which was easier and quicker than getting the ore out.

The mining history of Mexico is romantic in the way Eastern tales of gleaming treasure are--a simple rubbing of Aladdin's lamp in many cases--and certainly her national destinies have been molded by the precious stores that her mountains hold. Some of the historic mines were so rich that the veins could be worked by bars with a point at one end and a chisel at the other, simply prying out the silver, _sans autre forme de procès_! The famous Bueno Suceso Mine in Sonora was discovered by an Indian who swam across the river after a great flood and found the crest of an immense lode laid bare by the action of the water--a pure, massive hump sparkling in the rays of the sun.

I told you of the Conde de Regla's mine, the celebrated Real del Monte at Pachuca and the wealth beyond the dreams of avarice that it brought in. He began life as a _muletier_ by the name of Terreros, and ended by being able to lend the King of Spain a million _pesos_.

The mines of Catorce were discovered by a negro fiddler, who, caught out by the darkness on his way home over the mountain, built a fire on what happened to be a bare vein. The morning sun showed molten bits of pure silver glistening among the embers. It's all rather upsetting, collectively and individually.

Padre Flores, a poor priest in a little town in this same San Luis Potosí, bought, for a small sum, from some one still poorer, a mining claim. When exploring it he came upon a small cavern which he straightway named "the purse of God," for in it he found great heaps of ore in a state of decomposition!

The Morelos Mine was discovered by two Indians, brothers, so poor that the night before they could not even buy a little corn for tortillas. Any Indian could dream this dream going over any mountain.

There is the story of Almada, the owner of the celebrated Quintera Mine, who, on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter, lined the bridal chamber with silver and paved with silver the way which led from the house to the church. In fact, there is a vast bibliography of mining romance. Many of the lovely old churches in out-of-the-way places were built by the friars of the seventeenth century, who worked the mines solely to build churches and missions. Humboldt estimates that from its discovery up to his time (1803) Spanish America had sent nearly thirty milliards of piastres to Europe, an almost uncountable sum.

It's difficult to expect normal government from a people who, in some parts of their country, are nourished by the labor-saving banana and in other parts by tales of about one in every fifteen millions becoming, overnight, rich beyond imaginings. In the end it all must have some influence on the psychology of the inhabitants. Needless to add that _your_ mine doesn't seem to be one in fifteen millions! 'Twill be well to dream some other dream!

_August 27th._

Last night a large crowd, or rather mob, assembled at the station to meet Madero on his return to town. He did not come on the announced train and the multitude then marched through the town, a squad of mounted soldiers behind, to keep them in mind that the whole earth does not yet belong to them. We were sitting in the library, about 10.30, as they passed through Calle Humboldt, making all kinds of unearthly noises. Suddenly a little night-robed figure rushed in, saying, "_Ich will nicht getötet sein_." Elim had awakened and jumped out of bed at the noise, thinking the revolutionary fate he hears so much about was upon him.

The German minister gave a large dinner last night, and afterward I played bridge with Otto Scherer, the big _científico_ Jewish banker, a friend of the Speyers, the Schwalbachs, _et al._ He didn't draw his trumps out, and so lost the rubber. I didn't mind. It was so amusing to see a large financial light on his way to join the ten thousand English who are at Boulogne for the same reason.