Part 19

A Cabinet meeting was hurriedly held in the Palace. Can the disaster be retrieved? is what foreigner and native alike have been asking themselves all day. I dare say a large proportion of the population are ready to turn "Orozquista" at the slightest further indication of fate. There's always a "military genius" here ready and generally able to upset whatever existing apple-cart there be.

Zapata looms large on the horizon, as he has chosen this auspicious moment to declare that he would descend upon the fold with his cohorts, not, however, gleaming in purple and gold. The beauteous morning sun revealed various notices to this effect pasted up during the night in the heart of the city by daring Zapatistas.

I haven't seen them, but a rumor is as good as a fact for unsettling the public. However, I did see that _La Perla_ and _La Esmeralda_ had their iron windows drawn down upon their glittering treasures, when I took a turn down the Avenida San Francisco a little while ago--and many other shops had done the same.

I have no doubt the population of the submerged-tenth quarter, through which Zapata would have to pass, coming in _via_ the Tlalpan and Country Club road, would enjoy rallying to his call. Our street seemed at one time already in the hands of _revolucionarios_ in the shape of hundreds of newspaper boys--babes who could scarcely hold their papers, but whose bright little eyes can distinguish the national currency at any distance, and big boys and old women.

They scented large editions from the offices of _La Prensa_, and there was much begging for centavitos right under my windows to buy copies with. Shrieks and howls mingled with cries of "_La Prensa!_" and "_Viva Orozco!_" The trolley-cars were blocked, and we seemed the focus of the Orozco victory as far as the capital was concerned. It was late when an adequate police force appeared on the scene and formed a cordon about the lower part of the street. Even as I write they are calling an extra, which I am sending down for. It has been an exciting day, and all exciting days in Mexico are blood-colored.

_March 31st._ Palm Sunday evening.

This morning I went to the Church of San Fernando. The sun was shining softly as I passed down the street of the Hombres Ilustres in through the little palm- and eucalyptus-planted plaza, in the middle of which, surrounded by the most peaceful of flower-beds, is the statue of Guerrero (shot in Oaxaca in 1831). His body lies in the old cemetery near by.

A soft, shining peace was over everything, and I felt inexpressibly happy and in accord with it. No hint came to me, as I walked along, of any bloody sacrifice of God or man. Little groups of Indians were waving their palms, kneeling at the door of the church, or walking about, and a few were selling elaborately plaited branches.

Though San Fernando is in a populous quarter, the tide has set to other shrines. Once it was the center of great activities, for from this church and the monastery and seminary adjoining were fitted out all the missions to the Californias. Padre Junipero Sierra and Padre Magin Catalá, and many other holy youths, burning with a zeal we don't even dimly comprehend, came from Spain to be trained here before starting out into unknown wildernesses, "for souls and for Spain." It's all so mysteriously suggestive.

The church has a pinkish-brown baroque façade, beautifully _patinée_, and the old doors are carved in a noble, conventional design. As I went in it seemed rather empty, a few Indians and a few _gente decente_ only, praying before the purple-draped altars. Dreary, immense, uninteresting paintings decorate the walls now; but its interior was once hallowed, dim, gleaming with the gold of Churrigueresque altars and retablos, carvings, embroideries, and beautiful silver and gilt candelabra and vases.

Afterward I went to the cemetery adjoining the church, known as that of the Hombres Ilustres, where a somnolent custodian let me in. The most prominent tomb is that of Juarez, dating from somewhere in the eighties. He is represented with his head lying in the lap of a weeping woman, symbolic of the sorrows of the nation (and tears enough to make a river have been shed by women here, since then). I asked myself, by his tomb, what has it availed to scatter the treasures of the church? All are poorer and none, alas, the wiser.

Guerrero, of the little flower-planted plaza, Comonfort, Zaragoza, lie near, all executed by the hand of some one momentarily stronger. Generals Mejía and Miramon, the companions in death of Maximilian[40] on the fatal morning of June 19, 1867, repose here too.

In Mexico it is difficult to live for your country without the certain prospect of dying for it, but I must confess that to me the readiness with which the men of Mexico give up their lives is impressive and affecting. It is at least removed from the conventionalities of other types of political men, where mostly each one intends to live comfortably by as well as for his country, until he dies of disease, or _Anno Domini_.

Inspired by the wonted passion for moving things, a huge new panthéon is being constructed near by, and some day all these tired bones must make another journey. I think the cemetery as it is would make a good school-room for the study of the history of Mexico since she began her struggle for "independence."

Later we went out to the Country Club, where there was a luncheon of the usual contingent, and spent the afternoon following various friendly golfing squads over the beauteous links, beginning with the ambassador, Mr. Parry, Mr. McCarthy, and N. The volcanoes, now in one aspect, now in another of their beauty, were as gracious to the foreigner as to the _indigène_. The short, wiry grass, something like the tough grass of Scotland, made the most luxurious of carpets as we strolled along, though now it is dried to the palest yellow--the greens kept green only by exhaustive efforts--a lot of Yankee push behind the hand that wields the hose. At sunset we drove home through a world of sifted gold. Such are the days of Mexico.

[39] This is the prince who was taken by Cortés on his Honduras expedition with the kings of Texcoco and Tacuba. As punishment for plotting to escape they were hanged head downward from a tree in the wilderness. Humboldt saw this represented in a hieroglyphic painting in the convent of San Felipe Neri, and even Bernal Diaz relates that the companions in arms of Cortés were "much shocked" at the occurrence.

Now Cuauhtemoc stands in gold and bronze in one of the _glorietas_ of the beautiful Paseo, high on a marble column, with Aztec devices on base and plinth, where he can keep watch on his hills and volcanoes and lakes. He sustained the siege of Mexico for seventy-nine days, and the inscription says, "to the memory of Cuauhtemoc and those warriors who fought heroically in defense of their country MDXXI." Diaz and his then Minister of Public Works, Riva Palacio, MDCCCLXXVII, ordered it to be erected, and later it was finished under Manuel Gonzalez and his Minister of Public Works, MDCCCLXXXII.

[40] The body of Maximilian lies with his kin in the imperial vault of the Capuchin church in Vienna.

XXI

Mexico's three civilizing, constructive processes--A typical Mexican family group--Holy Week--"La Catedral" on a "canvas" of white flowers--Reply of the Mexican government

_April 3d._

Yesterday Aunt L. received a telegram necessitating her immediate presence in San G. Things are getting lively there again. I saw her off in the hurrying, crowded station with a pang, and the house seemed quite empty when I got back....

I have begun a very interesting edition of the letters of Cortés by Archbishop Lorenzano, from the latter part of the eighteenth century. When all is said and done there have been three civilizing, constructive processes in Mexico. The Spanish conquerors, the Church, through the marvelous energies of friars and priests, _and_ invested foreign capital.

Every visible sign of civilization comes under one of those three heads, and is not to be blinked. Each has evolved inevitably out of the elements of the previous condition. Diaz, when he formally invited foreign capital and gave guarantees, was the expression of this last very concretely. He kept pace with events, or else ran ahead. I have discovered, however, that it is permitted to be malicious, stupid, selfish, a bore, vain, vicious, dull, hard-hearted, the oppressor of the poor; but it is an unpardonable sin to be ahead of one's time. To be behind it is an unassailable patent of respectability.

It seems to me, however, that he who looks forward to a change in the affairs of the world, rather than he who looks on them as changeless, is less likely to be mistaken; and great rulers have always sensed evolutions.

_April 4th_, Holy Thursday, evening.

The whole of Mexico seemed afield to-day, with a hint of Sunday best as they made the rounds of various churches for the visits to the Repository--the _gente decente_, as well as those _sin hechos y derechos_.[41]

I went through the shining Alameda, where again Indian life was beating its full around the little booths--preparing for the Resurrection morn. There is something simple and affecting about the way they regulate their commerce by these festivals of the year, this peaceful, almost rhythmic flooding in and out of the city. Now the booths are full of toy wagons, with screaming, harsh-sounding wheels, rattles of every description--in fact, any harsh combination of sounds which represents the breaking of the bones of Judas.

The Indian must have gods--and it is better to have him worshiping the image of one God, the God of gods, and His attributes, than sacrificing to Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and their like, in blood and terror, or wandering in the colorless and empty places of unbelief.

At San Juan de Dios I came upon a family group so charming and so artless that I could scarcely take my eyes from them. The mother, a straight-haired Indian woman, with the usual small, loose upper garment and the straight piece of cloth wrapped about her hips, had the sweetest little baby peeping out from the rebozo which bound it across her back. An old oil-can, filled with what I know not what, was by her side. The father carried a platter of dusty pink sweets, and a tribe of soft, bright-eyed, smiling children accompanied them. The next youngest to the baby was on the father's shoulder, who laid his hat before him with his platter, on the altar steps. His eyes were uplifted. All were silent and immobile, even the baby looking intently at the altar of the Repository, banked with flowers, ablaze with candle-light, and decorated with a few cages wherein were some small, bright-plumaged birds.

The church is part of an old chapel erected in the sixteenth century to Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados (Our Lady of the Forsaken Ones); but somehow that group fulfilling its destiny did not seem forsaken, but a part of the mysterious human fabric of which I myself was just as mysterious a bit. Before the beautiful recessed portal in the rich baroque façade, whose adjacent wall is ornamented in a Mauresque design, a remnant of the earliest colonial period, was a varied assortment of beggars--also not disinherited, it seemed to me--but called to partake of the sorrows of the _Madre de Dios_ whom they so loudly invoked as I passed in.

The feature of the church is the statue of St. Anthony of Padua, which once was among the group of _santos_ in the façade, but had been cast down during the anti-church riots of 1857. For many years it lay covered with mud and dust in a ditch by the Alameda. Now it is a mass of votive offerings--_milagros_ they are called--in the shape of hearts, limbs, etc., whatever organ had been damaged by the casualties of earthly existence. I espied an ingenious presentment of a liver in copper hanging in its proper anatomical place on the person of the _santo_. The Indians have the strange habit of making their offerings to this shrine in groupings of thirteen--thirteen candles, bouquets containing thirteen flowers etc.--commemorative of the death of San Antonio on the 13th of June (1531).

I can't see how the Indian is benefited by the suppression of religious ceremonies. Gods he _must_ have. And when one comes out into the Alameda, the sun shining on the belfries and domes of the many churches surrounding it, filtering through the lovely foliage of the park about which the Indian tides sweep, fixed as the laws that govern other tides, one feels the bounteousness of the natural world, and a desire to render thanks to _something_.

The long, narrow, flower-planted atrium of San Diego, from the early part of the sixteenth century, flanks the charming old house where the presses of the _Mexican Herald_ turn out world news on the site of the Aztec market-place, or _tinquiz_. But though the outer seeming of life is changed, I could but think me of the changelessness of the human heart.

_Good Friday Evening._

A sickening heat was in the air all day, with a something withering and nerve-disturbing about it, though, as the thermometer goes, the temperature was not high.

I went early to the little near-by church of Corpus Christi. The singing of "Dulce lignum" made me think of the great ceremonies at St. John Lateran, and much that is no more. I returned at 2.30, when a strange-faced priest with an "inner" look and a something burning in his voice, a Spaniard by his accent, was finishing the "Three Hours." Afterward, in company with Indians and black-rebozoed women, I followed the Stations of the Cross....

_Holy Saturday._

Mexico City is one vast "rattle," the most dreadful sounds everywhere to commemorate the holy, still day, and as for Judas, he is a legion in himself.

The Calle de Tacuba presented a strange sight. Stretched on wires or strings from one house to the other were bright-colored, hideous figures, representing the _maldito_[42] dangling in grotesque attitudes against the blue sky. On various street corners he is being burned in effigy. Firecrackers are exploding as I write, bells are ringing from every belfry. Grief is noisy in the tropics, even for the laying in the tomb of the Son of Man.

When I came out of the cathedral I stopped at the flower-market near by. It is a modern, ugly, round, iron-roofed affair, but the flowers, the bright birds in their bamboo cages, and, above all, the dazzling air, fling a charm about it. Every modern, ugly thing in Mexico seems easily transmuted. In the old days the Indians brought their flowers straight to the Plaza in canoes by the Viga Canal.

An Indian, with what I can only call a "canvas" of white flowers, on moss and wire, about two feet square, was putting in an outline of red and purple stocks. When I asked him what he was going to represent he answered, quite simply, with a look at the church, "_La catedral_." A very young Indian carrying a tiny white coffin on his head passed us, as I spoke to him, and he stopped his work and made the sign of the cross.

In the arcades several "Evangelistas," scribes, were surrounded by the unlettered and unwashed--and I found some tattered children, so easily made happy, looking at stands stocked with pink, syrupy drinks and cornucopias filled with ices. But mostly the attention of the crowd was concentrated on a huge magenta and blue Judas who was going up in a blaze of infamy on the corner.

A domestic tragedy awaited me when I returned home. One of the servants, while praying before the image of Nuestra Señora del Sagrario in the Church of Corpus Christi, had her pocket-book removed. In it were some coral ear-rings, a lottery ticket, and the remains of her month's wages, just received.

She seemed more disturbed by the loss of the lottery ticket than the other articles, and kept saying, "_Quién sabe, Señora?_" and that she had chosen the number 313, after a very precise dream of three white rabbits, one black cat (this latter the same, I fancy, that disturbs the slumbers of Calle Humboldt), followed up by the three children of her aunt, dressed in unaccustomed white. It was _almost_ convincing. As the door of the pantry opened when supper was being served the words "_Tres conejos_" (three rabbits) floated into the dining-room, with an accompanying "_Quién sabe?_"

Dia de Pascua, _April 7th_.

Happy Easter to my precious mother on this loveliest of Resurrection morns! San Felipe was crowded to suffocation--quite beautiful music in the rolling, gorgeous style, and everybody, even the beggars at the doors, with what they call here a _cara de Pascua_ (Easter face). This is only a word while waiting to motor out to Tlalpan to the Del Rios' for a _dia de campo_.

_April 10th._

To-day, luncheon here for Mlle. de Tréville, the singer, and her mother, who are the guests of the ambassador. We all miss dear Mrs. Wilson, who has returned suddenly to the States on account of the illness of her son, Warden, at Cornell. Rieloff was among the guests and we are to dine there on Saturday and have a musical evening afterward. He was consul-general in Hong-Kong when Von Hintze was out there as lieutenant on Prince Henry's staff. Now, what the Mexicans would call their _categoría_ is reversed.

_April 11th._

I do hope, though probably vainly, that Madame Madero doesn't see _all_ the dreadful caricatures appearing about her husband. _El Mañana_, edited by an extremely clever Porfirista, has apparently set out to grind him to powder, and there is one, _El Multicolor_, edited by a Spaniard, sometimes quite ribald, which I should say is preparing to bury the remains with scant ceremony.

There was a cartoon the other day, which I am sending, representing Madero being kicked down a long, broad flight of stairs in the palace on to a transatlantic liner bearing the fateful name _Ypiranga_,[43] the historic ship that bore Diaz across the bitter waters. The Latin-American mind is at its best in satire, and with the dart well poisoned they kill off their public men by the dozens.

_April 14th._

The Mexican government is decidedly upset to-day at the receipt of a notification from Washington to the effect that the United States will hold Mexico and the Mexican people responsible for illegal acts sacrificing or endangering American life or property. It is a simultaneous warning to both Madero and Orozco, and the _bon mot_ of the situation here is, "Is necessity the mother of in_ter_vention?"

_April 16th._

I am still numbed and dazed by the reading of the _Titanic_ catastrophe.

_April 17th._

The Mexican government replies to our notification of the 14th, first cousin to an ultimatum, in which we call categoric attention to the enormous destruction of American property, ever on the increase in Mexico, and the taking of American life, contrary to the usages of civilized nations.

The United States expects and demands that American life and property within the Republic of Mexico be justly and adequately protected, and will hold Mexico and the Mexicans responsible for all wanton and illegal acts sacrificing or endangering them.

We further insist that the rules and principles accepted by civilized nations as controlling their actions in time of war shall be observed. Any deviation from such a course, any maltreatment of any American citizen, will be deeply resented by the American government and people, and must be fully answered for by the Mexican people. The shooting of the unfortunate, misguided Thomas Fountain by Orozco (said T. F. was having a little fling seeing life, and death, too, with the Federal forces) is deplored. Orozco "answers back" that naturally he executed Fountain, who was "fighting in the enemy's army." Several Americans, employed on the Mexican railways, have also been murdered by the revolutionists.

The Mexican reply, drawn up by the long-headed, very prudent Don Pedro Lascurain, the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, says Mexico finds itself in the painful position of not recognizing the right of our government to make the various admonitions which are contained in the note, since these are not based on any incident chargeable to the Mexican government, or which could signify that it had departed from an observance of the principles and practices of international law.

The _Imparcial_ was very fierce this morning, considering us both rough and inconsiderate, and saying that Mexico has merited better treatment at our hands.

Mostly they seem to think that we ought to take things as we find them or depart. I don't think much can be done in Latin America by threats or menaces. It is either definite force or tactful coaxing; and, anyway, the Monroe Doctrine can never be anything but a sort of wolf in sheep's clothing to the Latin-American peoples.

_El País_, which is the official Catholic organ, says the note is "the first flash of lightning," and, without doubt, some gorgeous storm-clouds _are_ rolling up.

Don Porfirio is more completely vindicated than he could ever have hoped, or even wished.

[41] Without civil rights.

[42] Accursed one.

[43] This ship has played a rôle in the destinies of two of Mexico's rulers, for it not only bore Diaz into exile, but it was the ship containing the ammunition for Huerta, to prevent the delivery of which we thought we were obliged to seize Vera Cruz, April 21, 1914.

XXII

The home of President Madero's parents--Señor de la Barra returns from Europe--Zapatistas move on Cuernavaca--Strange disappearances in Mexico--Oil--The President and the railways

_April 23d._

Have been busy to-day looking over things and getting boxes and trunks off to be repaired. A feeling of migration is in the air. A lot of damage was done getting to Mexico. A locksmith asked fifteen francs to open that small trunk where I keep my papers and give me a new key. He took the fifteen francs, but brought no key until pressure was put on him, when he sent back a key that fitted, having, however, a large, ornamental wrought-iron handle from the viceregal period. I should say that takes up more room than all our other keys together. It would look better in a _vitrine_.

If the end comes suddenly, which I don't believe, we can get out comfortably and with the philosophy engendered by the fact that, after all, these are not our Lares and Penates.

We dine at the British Legation to-night. The Stronges are very comfortably and handsomely installed, though the drawing-room, with its pale-blue hangings, endless modern chairs and cabinets and small tables, sent out from England, make it less artistic, to my mind, than in its former spare furnishing with Hohler's lovely old things.

Just home from the Country Club, where I left N. starting out on a "foursome" with Susana Garcia Pimentel,[44] Señor Bernal, her brother-in-law, and an unknown fourth. On those beautiful links she seemed more beautiful than ever, with a tall slenderness, an exceeding and arresting straightness of feature, long, idealized "Hapsburg chin," and what we call a "complexion" not often seen here. She was Diana-like as she started off in a thin, extremely expensive, white, unmistakably French dress and an equally French flopping Leghorn hat, the little Indian caddy following with the _arrow-case_.