Part 12

“Yes, that was how I caught this bad cold,” another woman--whose husband manufactured coffee sacks--was explaining to some one. “There was the worst kind of a norther that night; I would have been soaked to the skin even if I hadn’t slipped on a stone in the dark and fallen into the brook, and when I finally reached their hut I forgot the condition I was in. The poor little thing--she was only four--was absolutely rigid and having convulsion after convulsion. Her screams were frightful--it was impossible to control her--to get her to tell what the matter was, and nobody knew what had happened. She had simply given a shriek of terror and gone into convulsions. There was nothing to do--but nothing--_nothing_. At the end of an hour and a half she gave a final shriek and died, and when her poor little clenched fists relaxed, we found in one of them a dead scorpion. By that time I had begun to be very chilly and of course it ended in a bad cold. Two lumps please and no milk.”

A servant in a starched skirt of watermelon pink and a starched white upper garment like a dressing sack glided out to help with the tea and cakes. A blue rebozo was draped about her neck and shoulders, her black hair hung to within a foot and a half of the floor in two fat braids, and in it, behind her right ear, was a pink camelia the color of her skirt. Her bare feet were thrust into slippers without heels or backs and as she slipped about from chair to chair they made a slight dragging sound on the tiles. Everyone said good afternoon to her as she handed the teacups, at which she smiled and replied in a respectful fashion that was, however, perfectly self-possessed.

“Did you hear about those people named Jackson who were here for a few days last month?” Mrs. Belding asked of the party in general. “You know they ended up at Cuernavaca and took a furnished house there meaning to stay all winter. Well, they stayed five days and then left--furious at Mexico and everyone in it.” And she went on with considerable art and humor to sketch the brief career of the Jacksons. While they were at the hotel, before they took possession of their house, she told us, Mrs. Jackson had engaged servants--a mozo, two maids and a cook. The cook she stole from the Dressers. It wasn’t at all nice of her to steal the cook as Mrs. Dresser had gone through a lot of bother for her about the renting of the house and had helped her to get the other servants. But Mrs. Jackson offered the creature two dollars more a month, and although she had lived at the Dressers for six years, she deserted them with a low, glad cry. Poor Mrs. Dresser rushed over to the Moons and sobbed when she told about it.

“Don’t you worry, dear,” said Mrs. Moon. “Leave that Jackson viper to me; I’ll fix her. They move in this afternoon--I’m going up there to tea--and I promise you that you’ll have your wall-eyed old dish-smasher hovering over the brasero in your kitchen by noon to-morrow.”

Apparently Mrs. Moon did go to the Jacksons for tea and made herself most agreeable. “You may not believe it, but she really can once in a while,” Mrs. Belding interjected. And as Mrs. Jackson had been conducting a Mexican establishment for about two hours, Mrs. Moon gave her all kinds of advice on the way to get along with the servants, ending with: “Of course you must _never_ let the maids go out after dark even with their mothers, and it’s _fatal_ to give them breakfast. We simply don’t do it in Mexico--not so much as a drop of coffee until noon. Breakfast always makes Mexicans insolent.” Then Mrs. Moon, feeling that she was perhaps overdoing it, left while she saw that Mrs. Jackson was drinking it in in great, death-dealing gulps.

It was bad enough that night, Mrs. Belding ran on, when the cook and one of the maids tried to go to the serenata in the plaza. On the strength of the extra two dollars the cook had bought a new rebozo and wanted to wear it, and as there was no reason on earth why they shouldn’t go to the serenata, they were mystified and angry at Mrs. Jackson’s serenely declaring “No, no,” and locking them in. But the great seal of the Jacksons’ fate was definitely affixed the next morning when Mrs. Jackson, up bright and early, with kind firmness, refused to let them make their coffee. Half an hour later Mrs. Moon experienced the bliss of seeing the mozo, the cook and the two maids wandering past her house--all weeping bitterly. Long before midday the cook was back at the Dressers; and from that moment Mrs. Jackson was blacklisted.

For five days she struggled to engage new servants, but she was believed to be a woman with a “bad heart.” No one would go to her. She surrendered and left.

I did not altogether believe this tale of Mrs. Belding’s, nor did I believe the man who casually told us that a few weeks before, the authorities had, just in time, interrupted a human sacrifice in an Indian village some twenty or thirty miles up from the coast. After nearly four hundred years of Christianity the Indians had, it seemed, dug up a large stone idol and attempted to revert. Then, too, the remark of a young girl who had been visiting in Vera Cruz struck me as rather incredible. “I was there for a month,” she said. “Yes, there was some yellow fever and a great deal of smallpox--but when you’re having a good time, who minds smallpox?” It was all so new to me in matter and manner, so sprinkled with easy references to objects, scenes, and conditions I had met with only in highfalutin stories lacking the ring of truth, so ornate with “meandering” (thank you, Robert Browning), Spanish words whose meaning I did not know. There was also among the men much coffee talk--a whole new world to one who has always taken for granted that coffee originates, roasted, ground and done up in five-pound tins on a grocer’s shelves. But it was all true even to the interrupted human sacrifice and the fact that some of the shrubs among the roses and heliotrope near the piazza were coffee trees. Had I never seen the little colony again I should always have remembered it as a picturesque, romantic and delightful thing. And how--I told myself as I sat there listening and looking--they must, away off here, depend upon one another for society, both in a formal and in an intimate sense! How they must come together and somewhat wistfully try to forget Mexico in talking of home in their own language! What it is, after all, to understand and be understood!--and all that sort of thing. If my first afternoon with foreigners in Mexico had been my last, I should have carried away with me a brave, bright colored little picture of much charm and some pathos. However, since then I have spent with my compatriots in this interesting land days innumerable.

I fear I am, for the delightful purposes of art, unfortunately unselective. First impressions have their value; they have, indeed, very great value, and of a kind quite their own. As my first impression of Americans in Mexico was the kind I have just been trying to give, and as it was to me wholly interesting and more agreeable than not, I ought, perhaps, to let it stand; but somehow I can’t. My inartistic impulse to keep on and tell all the little I know, instead of stopping at the right place, is too strong.

There are said to be about thirty thousand American residents in the Mexican Republic, and the men pursue vocations ranging from that of tramp to that of president of great and successful business ventures. There are American doctors and dentists, brakemen, locomotive engineers, Pullman-car conductors, civil engineers, mining engineers, “promoters,” grocers, hotel keepers, dealers in curios; there are American barkeepers, lawyers, stenographers, photographers, artists, clerks, electricians, and owners of ranches of one kind or another who grow cattle or coffee or vanilla or sugar or rubber. Many Americans are managers of some sort--they manage mines or plantations or railways, or the local interests of some manufacturing or business concern in the United States. One meets Americans--both men and women--on the streets, in hotels, in shops, strolling or sitting in the plaza--almost everywhere in the course of the day’s work, and in the course of the day’s play, one may drop in at the house of some acquaintance or friend and have a cup of tea, with the usual accompaniments, at four or half past. I am speaking now not of the City of Mexico, whose American colony as a colony I know solely through the “Society” notes of the _Mexican Herald_. From that authentic source he who runs may read (or he who reads may run) that on almost any afternoon at the large entertainment given by Mrs. Brooks for her popular friend, Mrs. Crooks, punch was served at a refreshment table quaintly decorated with smilax by the ever-charming Mrs. Snooks. That there are agreeable Americans living in the city I am sure, because I have met some of them elsewhere. But of American society in general there I am only competent to suspect that, like society in most places, it is considerably less important and entrancing in reality than it is in print.

In the smaller places, even when there are residents of the United 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.