Part 8
We stayed with our cousins, the Jerome Lawrences, at Rye, for the week end. It is on “the Sound.” We motored to the yacht club and lay on rocks in the sun, getting more and more burned. Dick, after paddling for some time, demanded to bathe. To my amazement, I was told that not only must he put on a bathing suit, but he must undress in the bathing house. Dick asked “why?” He is accustomed every year in England to be sunkissed, either in the sea or in the woods--whenever there is a warm enough sun. I have taken many photographs of him and Margaret naked on the hillside and among the flowers. There is nothing on earth more beautiful than the body of a child.
I recall my horror when a nun at Margaret’s Convent told her that she must never look at herself because the human body is “disgusting” (she used the term), and Margaret asked her, “Who made our bodies? and who made our clothes?” Such an attitude of mind in a nun is perhaps not unexpected, but one is surprised at the lack of simplicity in a great primitive country. But in the United States the Puritan origin has dominated over all other races with which it has eventually become amalgamated; stronger than the Latin is the Puritan--stronger than the German, the Dutch, the Irish, or the Jew. In this amazing country even the mature foreign element is bent, broken, molded, forced into an American! And in a very short space of time--it is this standardization that suppresses individuality. In this particular instance I suppose it is good that the masses should bathe in suits, it is good for the masses that the bathers should undress under cover, and so it goes on from little to larger things, from unimportant details to larger issues. Some day perhaps, when there is time to stop to take a breath a few individualities will be allowed to live among the standardized--at present those few slip off abroad, and live there! But I am not complaining, I am only wondering why with all its restrictions, I like living in it better than I like living in the freest country on earth--England!
On Sunday night I had one of the great surprises of my life. It will be as memorable as any of the big events that have come to me. We were sitting on the piazza at dusk, and I asked, pointing to the bushes: “Am I mad? What is that?” “That is a firefly.” I had heard vaguely of fire-flies, but no one had ever described to me what a June night in America could be like. W. B. Yeats has written of Ireland that “the night was full of the sound of linnets’ wings,” but I have not read the poet who has sung about the fireflies. As the night became darker, the world became full of small, twinkling, winking, dancing lights, from the highest tree-tops down to the grass. I ran upstairs. Dick was asleep. I hoisted him on to my back and carried him, still sleeping, out into the wild orchard across the road. Presently Dick lifted a sleepy head from my shoulder and looked around him. “It’s the Germans shootin’,” he said. “No,” I corrected, “it’s fairies.” He gave a little giggle of delight and exclaimed: “Fairies! To guard us?--” And as I walked towards the dark trees in the distance he clung around my neck. “Don’t let’s get lost in fairyland.” The crickets were making an unholy and flippant noise. It was all very merry and happy. There were darting lights all around us, in the long grass at our feet, in the bushes overhead, against the darkness of the distance, exactly like the scene of the treetops in Peter Pan. On our way home Dick said, “I don’t think they’re fairies, I think it’s the stars have come down to play.”
I looked up at the sky. It was full of stars--stable, serious, solemn stars. What star would not, if it could, drop down to earth and play hide and seek with the moon shadows and mischievously rouse all the crickets on a June night. Yes, I think I agree with Dick, they were young baby stars, making merry. In two minutes from the time his head touched the pillow Dick was fast asleep again. I went in search of Mary Brennan, the Irish maid, who is Dick’s friend. “Mary!” I said, “when you see Dick in the morning, remember he has been playing to-night with stars.” “Not with firebugs?” Mary answered with perfect understanding.
FRIDAY, JUNE 17. _New York._
My last night before sailing, and I was taken to dine on a roof in Brooklyn. It was the roof of a hotel, and it was very cleverly made to look like the deck of a ship. From that deck one had a most superb view of one bit of New York--a monumental group of buildings which included the Woolworth Tower and seemed to rise up out of the sea. In the distance was the Statue of Liberty holding up her torch for the ships at sea. We watched the sun set behind the tall buildings, and the lights and shadows seemed to produce a cubistic picture. But I was silenced by so much beauty. Is it my artist eyes, I wonder, that make me so appreciative of the world? How strange that the Earth is always beautiful, and Man’s buildings sometimes are, especially with surroundings and background of color and light and shade. It is only in the human mind and the human body that God seems to have failed sometimes.
SUNDAY, JUNE 19, 1921.
_S. S. Monterey. En route for Vera Cruz._
Dick and I are so happy. It is calm as a lake and gets better every hour.
The first day the color of the sea was a deep Prussian blue. The next day it was pure sapphire. To-day it has been the same color as the sky, so you could not tell where they met on the horizon. and so transparent that one could see the fishes deep down. There were flying fishes too. They rose up at our ship’s prow and skimmed over the sea surface like little silver aeroplanes!
The ship seems so small and the sea so large and we seem to be going so slowly, so leisurely, as if all the time in the world were at our disposal and we simply didn’t care where or when we fetched up.
Last night it was agreed that Dick should stay up late as a great treat. He wanted to see how night comes on the ocean. Almost as if it were for Dick’s appreciation, night played up in the most dramatic fashion. From behind a cloud bank there appeared a tiny speck of orange. It grew in as short a space as could be counted in seconds into a big round moon, a cloud that drooped over it was lit up like a human face by firelight. Dick asked: “Who is the figure in the sky?” It looked like a giant Destiny gazing into an orange crystal. The reflection made a golden rippling pathway straight across the sea to us. Dick, who was sitting on the ship’s bow with his legs dangling over and one arm tightly clinging round my neck, suddenly kissed me, fervently, which was exactly what I felt about it! On the opposite side there was a lightning display for our benefit. It came from one point, always from behind the same cloud bank. It turned the sky into the most perfect Valkyric background. When Dick asked me what the stars were like to touch: “Are they soft, or do they burn?” I had to tell him they were great big worlds like ours. Dick felt very small--we both did.
Whatever Mexico may or may not have in store for us, the journey alone is well worth while. The contrast after four bewildering months in New York is extreme. The peace and the beauty are reviving and one gets back one’s sense of judgment, which one is apt to lose in the crowd.
How unimportant it is, whether anyone thinks I am or am not Bolshevik, how little it matters if someone has turned their back on me at dinner, or unduly praised whatever work I’ve done. How completely nothing matters except to be on speaking terms with oneself, and one cannot be unless one is living one’s own life, and not playing a part. All of which sounds very pedantic. I believe one is apt to get pedantic if one is alone.
No one on board is the least interesting, but one young man has insisted on attaching himself. He is a Mexican architect, who has just graduated from the University at Philadelphia. He will be very useful at Vera Cruz with the luggage. There is a middle-aged American who inspires that unfailing American reliability. When I told him what I had heard of Mexico and Mexicans: “Forget it!” he said; and so I am facing my destination with a blank mind.
My feelings at leaving New York were conflicting. In a sort of way I felt I was leaving home. The compliment (for it should be a compliment) has two sides: Home of course is Home; but one is always rather pleased to get away. The U. S. is so conventional and comfortable, so proper and business-like, so well regulated, so absolutely just what it should be, it is like married life! To leave it, to launch out into the blue unknown is exciting and stimulating. It seems to me I belong to two rather prosaic countries. I, who love color, song, romance! There is no reason why one should have to choose between them, each supplies something the other lacks, and I might as well own them both. But _Old World_ and _tradition_ have become museum preserves. They are no longer working concerns; and the word “Imperialism” gives me a pain in my head. So much for my father’s land. In my mother’s country I find a heap of things that irritate me, but it’s a “live-world,” efficient, and infinitely large. There is space, without Imperialism, a new world, without decadence, and without tradition. Although it is reactionary and conservative on the surface, it is at heart young and progressive and opens wide areas to new ideas.
THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 1921.
We arrived in Havana and went ashore about 10 A.M. Not having so far made friends with anyone on board, Dick, I and Louise went off alone. From the tugboat that brought us off our ship we stumbled on the quay into the arms of a guide, who stood in wait. Unable to speak a word of Spanish, we allowed him to attach himself to us. We were to have his guideship and the services of a Ford car for three hours, $10 complete. They were suffocating hours. The sun beat down on the canvas hood of the little car which bumped and rattled through the uneven, narrow streets. The guide, true to type (it recalled old days in Italy!) was boring and garrulous. I wanted to get a general impression of Havana, and my contemplation was rudely broken into when the Y. M. C. A.‘s building was insistently pointed out to me, and similarly other buildings of no interest.
The Cathedral where Columbus was buried alone stands out in my memory as a thing of beauty, but we got no further than an inner courtyard--the Cathedral itself was closed for repairs. The town seemed to have innumerable, modern marble monuments, each one more in ill taste than the other and each Cuban patriot thus commemorated had to be described at length by our unshaven guide. As for the living Havanians, they seemed to me to be a people asleep. Everywhere they slept at full length on the ground in the squares; in the avenues or leaning in doorways--even our chauffeur was asleep in the car when we came out from stamping letters at the post office! People who walked in the street looked at us wonderingly and sleepily, open-mouthed and heavy-eyed. It may have been the siesta hour of the town. After lunching at the Hotel Ingleterra we made for the quay, and there chartering a motor boat explored the harbor before returning on board. That was the part Dick liked best. He had been very bored with the town, and was greatly relieved to hear that Havana was not Mexico, as he has great expectations of our ultimate destination.
A few new passengers joined the ship in the evening, a few old ones having left. Those that have been on board from New York, seem to have done the usual ship trick, which is to break up into couples and walk round the ship’s angles at dusk, arm round waist. One looks on almost cynically, the thing is so inevitable. My cynicism and aloofness makes me feel old. Dick, however, knows the whole ship--the youngest and the oldest passengers are his devoted friends; the officers, the stewards and the ship hands are his intimates. The captain, who teases him with great earnestness, is taken very seriously and more respected by Dick than loved. But the little girl passengers he treats with almost silent contempt!
The only friend I have on board is the “reliable American,” and he proves to be of the type that confirms all my views about American men. He just _is_ reliable, and thoughtful and infinitely kind. Nor is he a negligible personality. He is the president of an important company--and was arrested and condemned to death by Villa during one of the revolutions. Why he is alive to tell the tale is just a case of luck. He has the simplicity and the national pride of the usual American, but he can speak French, Spanish and Italian, and even read them. It is he, and not the young Mexican architect, who promises to be useful with the luggage at Vera Cruz!
We paused five miles out from Progresso, to unload some cargo and take on some new passengers, all of which was done with infinite labor by steam tug and barge. One of our fellow travelers is a Syrian Jew going ashore at Progresso and invited me to go with him to see the town, but the reliable American assured me the Syrian would delay me sightseeing until after the departure of our ship, and he thought my adventures need not begin quite so soon. Accordingly I remained on board.
I have learned something on the journey already, and that is, to appreciate the sallow ivory complexions of the South Americans; both in the men as in the women it seems to be infinitely more beautiful than the best admired pink and white to which one is accustomed. I noticed it particularly when a fresh fair complexioned man was talking with the olive-skinned Syrian, the fair man looked so pink in comparison, that one felt he had been skinned.
The journey has been perfect, only one night was it too hot, and I had to carry Dick on deck to sleep. For the rest it has been cool and calm, until about two hours from Vera Cruz when we ran into a storm. Then my beautiful jeweled sea became angry and white capped and opaque, and spat forth spray, but it had not long in which to do its worse, and at four P.M. on Monday, June 27th, we landed.
TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 1921. _Vera Cruz._
I find I am always justified in not fussing beforehand as to the ultimate unravelling of details. In Russia, wherever I needed help, the necessity of the occasion created a friend, and so it is this time: The reliable American, friend of a few days only, could not have done more for me if I had been his sister. He helped me through the customs with my baggage, was joined by his partner, another reliable American who, having known me not more than twenty minutes, gave up his room at the hotel to me, because there was not another to be had. If ever a poet were required to sing praises the American man deserves his poet.
The hotel bedroom was high, floor tiled and almost empty of furniture except for two double beds. Long windows opened on to a balcony overlooking the square, full of green tropical trees and flowering shrubs. A great gnarled fire-tree, with its scarlet blossom dominated all other trees, and in the background was the old Spanish Cathedral, its dome covered with buzzard birds, and its tower full of bells. I could have spent hours at my window, feasting my eyes on this scene. I had to share this one and only precious room with Louise and Dick. We had planned to stay for two nights. I have come to Mexico in the same frame of mind with which I went to Russia, prepared for every adventure and discomfort. At bedtime I said to Louise: “I suppose we ought to draw lots as to which sleeps with Dick, but I don’t mind telling you that you can have him!” (I have vivid recollections of the terrible kicks administered by Dick all through the only night I ever spent with him!) Louise replied that she would bear it and we went to bed congratulating ourselves that we had coincided with a storm at Vera Cruz, which was less unpleasant than being baked alive. I had not been long asleep, however, when the rain leaking through the roof over my bed waked me, I pushed my bed into another part of the room. No escape, however, before long the entire ceiling was dripping, and there was only one small dry corner of the room. Into this corner I pushed Dick and Louise. Then, barefooted, I paddled about on the streaming floor, rescuing luggage and clothes. Finally I retired to my damp bed, wrapped in my rug, and with an umbrella open over my head. It seemed but a few minutes before the dawn broke and with it, awakened all the buzzards and all the blackbirds in the square. They shrieked, they whistled, they sang shrill tunes like noisy canaries. It was as if one had one’s bed in the parrot house at the Zoo, and the parrot house leaked. Dick thoroughly awakened, got the giggles and my irritation accentuated the absurdity. What a night! No further sleep being possible, we dressed and went down to breakfast on the sidewalk under the arcade. Here native boys came hovering round with their shoe-shining paraphernalia, which is quite a flourishing trade. Vendors with baskets full of native wares, postcard sellers and newspaper boys; blind beggars and deformities, all were part of our kaleidescopic “entourage,” besides the sombrero’d Mexicans of every type, who walked by us in the street, as spectacular as any passing show.
At the neighboring and opposite tables, men stared glad-eyed and even signaled: one hardly dared to let one’s eyes rest anywhere except on the birds in the trees!
When the rain cleared we engaged a Ford car and told the driver we would start in a quarter of an hour; but when we were ready to start our car was surrounded by a crowd and a policeman arrested the driver and led him away. Another was substituted. My Spanish being nil, I was unable to ascertain what had happened. Our drive was rather like going across country, and for the first time in my life I realized the value of a Ford car. No other car could or would have driven through the ponds and streams, over the boulders and rocks and negotiated the bumps and ruts that we did! This native drove his car as though it were accustomed to go anywhere; in fact, there was no direction that one pointed to, that he was not prepared to go to, road or no road! No wonder we finally punctured a tire, but happily we were near home and so walked. At tea time the two reliable Americans fetched us and we went by tramway to the bathing beach. The waves were high and the sea was warm and only the Americans knew how to swim. Dick got wildly excited and almost panic-stricken as each big wave rose up and came towards him. That night, my bed being soaking wet from the drips that had fallen all day, I threw off the mattress and slept soundly wrapped in my rug on the bare wire springs; also it was cooler.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 1921. _Mexico City._
Those blighted birds in the square waked us again before 5 A.M., so I got up immediately, and we were down on the sidewalk at 5:30 having breakfast. Later we were joined by our Americans and together drove to the station for the 6:20 A.M. Mexican train. On arrival we were refused a ticket, being informed by the office that already more tickets had been sold than they had accommodations for. We pushed by the barrier, and boarded the train, it was obvious we must get there somehow. Many of our fellow shipmates were on the train and kindly offered to take turns, sharing their seats. Heaps of people were standing. The compartment was like a tramcar, even with the luxury of a seat it was not a 15-hour journey that promised any comfort. As the day grew hotter, I found the best place was to sit on the platform of the last coach and dangle my feet overboard. Dick and Louise joined me. Three or four men stood up behind us and on the steps of the platform right and left sat armed guards, rifle in hand. Rumor had it that the train had been known to be attacked by bandits in lonely places. Most of the time our armed guard slept, and one of them fell off, but run as he would he could not catch up the train. We climbed and climbed up through the mountains to a height of 10,000 feet until we were cloud enveloped--the train couldn’t go very fast, and some of the youths of the party did actually jump off and run behind.
During the first part of our journey we passed through a chaotic riot of tropical vegetation. Everything grew everywhere, under giant trees were dense bushes, and on the tree trunks and branches grew countless other species of plant, as though a gardener had grafted one onto another in profuse experiment. There were banana, cocoanut, coffee, maize and so many new and bright-colored flowers that I was bewildered. There is not a flower or a fruit of any color or shape that any Futurist could invent, that does not grow in Mexico. We stopped at wayside stations, where the villages were built of grass huts and the natives in bright colors were like flowers among the green. Mexicans on bucking ponies, over which they had perfect control, were all part of what seemed almost a stage scene. As we climbed higher, however, the luxuriant vegetation ceased, but the effects of sunlight and shadow as we looked down from the damp clouds onto the sunlit valleys below, really was grandiose. After that it became so cold we were forced to return inside the coach. For hours we endured closed windows, over-crowded seats, smoking and spitting, and eventually the smell of primitive oil lamps. Outside one looked for miles and hours onto plains covered with cactus. One’s back ached and one’s head was heavy, but no sleep was possible, and there was nowhere to rest one’s head. Dick sat on my knee, and was astonishingly good. I have, in fact, never known him so before. He seemed to realize that our nerves were as tense as possible. He stroked my cheek and said he could see by my eyes that I was tired, he was caressing and gentle.... Oh! those miles and miles of cactus, how one grew to hate them, and the Chinaman who would spit and the Mexican who would stare, and the baby who would cry, and the man who would smoke a cigar, and the woman who would close the last window! At 8:30 P.M. the lights of Mexico City proclaimed our journey ended, and just in time, for there comes at last a moment when one’s courage and sense of adventure just crumple and one has to cry. I was terribly near it, when our American friends came and joined us. I declare if there had been more room I would have laid my head on the shoulder of one. They were gallant to the end, and saw us safely installed in the Imperial Hotel, before saying good-bye, and then: We slept, we slept, we slept....
THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 1921. _Mexico City._
We awoke, very late, in a town that is wide avenued, full of motors, and disappointingly civilized. The civilization may be only skin deep, and may not extend beyond the town limits, who knows...? But for people who looked for and hoped for something primitive, disordered and tropical, to find order, dullness and coolness, is ridiculous. Louise and I, comparing notes as to our expectations and realizations, simply laugh. Vera Cruz wasn’t very civilized, and the journey yesterday was as primitive as one could look for, but Mexico City appears to be cosmopolitan and up to date. In the morning, on our way back from shopping, we passed through a very pretty little garden, called “Alameda,” and there a band was playing. “Who’d work?” said Louise, as we seated ourselves on comfortable chairs under an awning, with matting under our feet. Certainly the people could have worked, who preferred, like us, to loaf and listen! Dick sailed an improvised boat in a fountain pond. The man who sat opposite came and sat next to us, otherwise all was harmony.