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.

I called on Madame Madero, senior, yesterday, and found more than a hint of the patriarchal—sons and daughters and grandchildren coming and going. They seem quiet, dignified people. The father came in as I was sitting there with various other visitors, and the two daughters rose and kissed his hand and called him papacito. The devotion of families and the permanence of ties here is quite remarkable, a decided contrast to the more airy conjugal relations in the United States.

After tea had been served we went into the big drawing-room, where I sat with some anonymous, silent, big-hatted, small-footed Mexican women, while Angela Madero sang charmingly and easily, without the tiresome urging so often necessary. She speaks of going abroad or to New York to study, when political affairs are quite settled. The house,[45] recently built in the handsome Colonia Juarez, Calle Berlin, is comfortable but banal, without the good things of the "old" families. Few books—in fact, like most of the modern Mexican houses.

As I came out the air was darkened by one of the great dust-storms that sometimes come up toward twilight at this time of the year. The strains of "The Rosary," which Angela twice sang with real feeling, followed me, together with thoughts of a family who, once rich, obscure, and happy, now find themselves perched on the dizzy, uncertain peak of Mexican politics. I wonder if the elder members don't sometimes sigh for the good old days.

April 24th.

Yesterday the ambassador gave a large musical in honor of Mlle. TrÉville, who is leaving soon, at which Mrs. Schuyler and I presided. The rooms were filled with Easter lilies. Miss de T. sang really beautifully the aria of "La Folie," from "OphÉlie," "Super vorreste," some songs of Mr. McDowell's, and, as her last encore, gave the ever-popular Mexican song of home and homesickness, "La Golondrina." Her voice has a beautiful, bird-like quality and her École of the best; she studied in Paris and Brussels.

Madame Madero came, looking a little thin, in a nice, black lace dress, over some shining white, with a sister resembling her, though without any suggestion of Madame Madero's banked fires; her two sisters-in-law, Angela and Mercedes, also accompanied her. Madame Ernesto Madero, always very pretty, with a bright, fresh look, in spite of her many children, was in black lace, with a large picture-hat. Indeed, I was fearful at one time that the unusually large assortment of black picture-hats, in conjunction with the Easter lilies, would make the room somewhat funereal in spots.

The whole Corps Diplomatique, which had not been out in force for some time, was there. The governor of the Federal District, Don Ignacio Rivero, now a great friend of N.'s and most useful in many ways, came with his wife, whom I hadn't met. The Guatemalan minister presented his handsome bride, the Cuban minister, General de Riba, who, it appears, is breaking hearts galore with his tenor voice and handsome face, was there; and Madame Simon, as always, sparkling and interested, surveyed the scene with her long lorgnette.

The clou of the occasion was the appearance of Mr. de la Barra, just back from Europe. He was amiable, tactful, and inscrutable, but I wonder what he really thinks of the slopes of Avernus, down which the government seems to be sliding, and not gently, either. He has taken a big house, quite ex-presidential-looking, in the Calle Hamburgo, and the largest of packing-boxes are being emptied in front of it. The Embassy staff were out in full force, of course—D'Antin, interpreter and legal adviser since many years; Palmer, now diplomatic secretary to the ambassador and very capable; Parker, first clerk; and others.

Mr. Potter and Mr. Butler came in late and stayed late, and we spoiled our dinners sitting around the dining-table, eating sandwiches and sweets and talking about the party. We screamed with laughter at Mr. Potter's cutting from one of the big New York dailies, which quite solemnly states that Zapata is a natural product of the Diaz rule, and is merely avenging the innocent and oppressed ones. We all had a conviction that they had rather be unavenged. What twaddle the people have to read, anyway. As for me, school begins with my first waking moment and continues without a recess till I pass from this land of the unexpected and unsuspected to that of dreams.

April 25th.

The newspapers have been having large head-lines the past two days regarding the Zapatistas, for "the Attila of the South" is moving on Cuernavaca from the north, and it seems but a question of time before the lovely town falls into his hands. The Federal garrison is estimated at only a few hundreds, while the Zapatistas have between four and five thousand men.

The inhabitants are anxious to be allowed to surrender, as Zapata has declared that if there is resistance he will sack and burn the town, "piously" leaving nothing standing but the cathedral, according to his solemn promise to the bishop. There was quite a tidy bit of warning at Huitzilac, when that town was stormed, as to what might happen to Cuernavaca, which is full of refugees from Guerrero and the southern part of Morelos. This most fertile and lovely state, wherein may be seen "all the vegetable kingdoms of the world in a moment of time," is practically in the hands of the Zapatistas, shading off into "Salgadistas" and endless other "istas," coloring the country-side independently. In all this the women and children seem the pity of it. At home or afield, they are continually being caught up into mysterious traps of destiny. Even here in my house there are, from time to time, curious disappearances.

Josefina, the silent, consumptive seamstress who comes to sew and mend, has one of those vanishing sorts of lives. She has wonderful hands, and can copy with her slender, tapering fingers the most complicated French clothes. In fact, if one were able to get the stuffs here, one couldn't tell the copy from the original, cut and all. She has just been copying that rather intricate Jeanne HallÉ purple-and-black blouse. Except for the inside waistband, whose origin is nameless, like Josefina, you can scarcely tell them apart, not a sixteenth of a centimeter's difference in length, breadth, or width.

She sits in the sun by an open window, and has egg and sherry at eleven and before she goes home, but the sands of her life are slipping fast. She lives in a room with three other consumptive sisters. The eldest went out one night to get some oil for their lamp. It is now ten days, and she has not returned. Is she working in the powder-mills, or what? Who will care, and who could if he would inform himself of her fate—just gone out into the night.

Madame Bonilla, from whom I got Josefina, has been an angel of mercy to her and her sisters, and tried unsuccessfully to rearrange their housing, inviting Josefina to live at her country place and supply her with work. But one can only battle so far with Indian situations. After a certain point everything seems to slip away into mystery, racial and individual.

Does not constitutional democracy seem a snare and a delusion if two-thirds of the population are composed of such? It brings a smile, but of despair, to the face. My very good Indian washer-woman, not long ago, left me. The usual excuse of an aunt or a grandmother, or some one being ill or dead, was not used. She just stood there with her three children, clutching the ends of her rebozo, that the last, fat little baby was rolled up in, and repeated that she must return at once to her pueblo whose Indian name I didn't catch. She had a sort of an antique, troubled look. I asked Cecilia if she knew what the matter was. She answered the usual "PuÉs quiÉn sabe, SeÑora?"

We got some things together for the children, and I gave her a few pesos, and she went off, out of my life, out of the security of food and lodging that was hers, to melt into the endless generations of Indians; I felt uncomfortable for long after.

Talking about housework, I wish some of the airy stipendiaries of other climes, or even the women of those sections of my native land where they don't have "help," could really know what it is here, where half the female energies of the nation are engaged in the grinding of corn. They don't do it occasionally, but every day, and hour after hour, or the nation would starve.

It's one of the most appalling things in Mexico, this grinding of the mother literally between the upper and nether stones. How can a nation advance when the greater part of the women pass their lives grinding corn, making tortillas, and bearing children? There is no time or strength left to sketch in the merest outline of home-making, let alone a personal life, or any of the rudiments of citizenship.

April 26th.

Yours about the catastrophe in the Bay of Tangier is received. My heart aches. To think of parents being brought back out of the darkness of death by drowning, to call for three children and find nothing! It is Greek, terrible. You remember them from Berlin days and those lovely little ones.

Last night we dined at Mr. Walker's with our military attachÉ and Mr. Knoblauch; they are all keeping bachelor quarters in Mr. W.'s handsome house next door to the British Legation, in his wife's absence. The talk turned on oil. Though the Aztecs used it for their temple floors, the Spaniards left it in the rich breast of Mother Earth. Now it looks as if it were going to be the center of foreign interests in Mexico, replacing in the inevitable evolution of things its romantic mining history.

Mr. Doheny, the pioneer of the industry, has had one of those careers only possible to the man of genius. He appeared on the scene of the future oil-drama (the state of Vera Cruz),[46] looked about him, installed a plant of many millions, and when he was ready, the oil gushed up—a sort of twentieth century striking of the rock—to say nothing of Moses.

Lord Cowdray's enterprise was not less spectacular nor less profitable. Nature did not, however, wait on his preparedness, for suddenly from his lands the greatest oil-well in the world, Las Dos Bocas, gushed out, and for months burned upward in a great column of smoke and fire, and flowed out to the sea, a burning waste of light and heat, before it could be capped.

Now that modern-sounding thing, an oleoduct, carries a vast stream from one of the other great wells (Potrero del Llano) to Tampico, to the sea, where navies and merchant-ships await it, and we have begun a new era in the mechanical activity of the world.

Mr. Walker enlivened it all with amusing tales of Indian laborers and their ways when driven by Anglo-Saxons who suffer not the word maÑana. Underneath it is the beat of world-passions and world-needs, and Mexico, lovely and uncertain, finds herself at once the stage of mighty interests—and their battle-ground.

After dinner we betook ourselves to the big living-room, where the phonograph was turned on, giving forth such national lyrics as "You Have Another Papa on the Salt Lake Line," and "My Wife's Gone to the Country, Hurray, Hurray!" The nearest we got to the classics was the air from "Martha."

Burnside drove us home, after a turn in the dim, mysterious park. The immense and splendid "Ship" was stretching low across the starry heavens, and there were great spaces of intensest black between the groupings of the constellations. These stars, under which I was not born, have a strange and quieting influence on me. One cannot look other than with stillness and awe on their luminous rhythm, compared to the restless and confused "who knows whence, whither, or what" of the Indian destinies they shine on. All that "vast and wondering dream of night" which "rolls on above our tears."

Mr. J. B. P. gives a big luncheon at the Villa des Roses to-day, and has sent me the list to seat. You see that we do move about, though somewhat warily, in these regions of political quicksands.

The ambassador has always had the gravest doubts as to Madero's competency. Nothing any of us have seen, up to now, has been encouraging. It is one thing to inflame a country by promises of everything to everybody; it's another thing to rebuild a state, as he set out to do, from ruins, or even to sustain law and order, as he knew it, and benefited by it, in his youth. That dreamy face of his makes me think of the school-boy's definition of an abstract noun, "something you can't see," and those hands, with their soft and kindly gestures, are so unfitted for grappling with this special Leviathan—and consequences are pitiless. Alas for the peu de politique et beaucoup d'administration of Diaz!

A BEAUTIFUL OLD MEXICAN CHURCH
Photograph by Ravell