Orozco and his troops flee toward the American border—A typical conversation with President Madero—Huerta's brilliant campaign in the north—The French fÊtes—San Joaquin

July 4th, 4 p.m.

Home from a motor trip and luncheon with Aunt L. at the Country Club, and now getting ready for a rather inexplicable reception at Chapultepec. In the evening there is to be a big theatrical representation to celebrate the glorious Fourth.

July 5th.

Orozco[54] and his troops are fleeing to the north toward the American border. When we got up to Chapultepec yesterday we found out that the fact that it was our "Fourth" had been overlooked in the governmental rejoicings. Finally, however, the situation cleared, and there were congratulations all around, everybody free and equal, we congratulating them because of the defeat of Orozco, they congratulating us on general and special principles. Bulletins had been coming in all day about Orozco's flight from the battle-field of Bachimba, with General Huerta in full pursuit. Madero appears still untroubled, but he has grown visibly older. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," even if it is in the clouds.

Refreshments were served at small tables on the great terrace, but the strangest wind came up, and everything was blown about, table-cloths flapping, vases overturned, and an uncanny, transient darkness falling. The immensely tall man, Adolfo Basso, Intendente del Palacio—"beber Toluca Ó no beber" we call him, looms high at every reception.

I was glad to see Madame de Palomo there. She is of the "other set," which appears sometimes for charity, but not for Maderista social happenings. She is the head of the Mexican Red Cross, and I have seen her in that way. She has an old house in the Colonia de San Rafael, Calle Icazbalceta, once fashionable, and some interesting old furniture and bric-À-brac. One very elaborate and beautifully carved confessional, in her family for generations, illustrates the history of St. John Nepomuk. In an artistic flight of fancy on the part of him who designed it, the head of the king is represented peeping in through a convenient aperture at the back, trying to hear what the queen confides while at confession. It's not very theological, but it's human and, from the point of view of the collector, quite unique.

Mrs. Wilson and I had rather a typical Mexican conversation with the President. It was À propos of Cuernavaca, which the Zapatista scares have always prevented me from visiting. To-day, as we stood talking with Mr. Madero, he said, "Order is now complete," and added that the Zapatistas were well in hand. We then said we were immensely relieved, as we wanted very much to motor to Cuernavaca. He assured us it was perfectly safe and wished us a pleasant journey.

I had barely got home when Carmona came over from the Foreign Office to say that the President begged the ladies of the American Embassy to postpone their trip, as it would be better not to run the risks of travel on unfrequented roads just now.[55]

To-day the soft-voiced Zambo that brings me objetos antiguos appeared with several handsome old coins, and an embroidered shawl, a manta, white on pale saffron. This last is now hanging out on the little oleander terrace to be sunned and aired, and the three coins have been scrubbed. One was of him of the "Iron Horse," Carolus IV 1792 Dei gratia Hispan et Ind., Rex, showing his receding forehead, aquiline nose, and pleased, voluptuous Bourbon mouth; his ear is deeply stamped with a counter-mark.

It appears these coins are still to be found throughout the Orient; each banker through whose hands they passed would stamp his own little mark on it. The other was more ancient and bore the date 1741 with the device "Utraque Unum," showing the pillars of Hercules surmounted each by a crown, and two hemispheres in between, joined by another crown. This was Philip V.'s modest device. There was also a little medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe, so defaced (I suppose it had been worn around generations of necks) that I could scarcely see the date, which appeared to be 1710.

All this seems very simple, but any foreigner living in Mexico would know that I had had a "good" morning. How the objects came into the possession of the comerciante en objetos antiguos would be quite another story.

Mexican numismatic history is as romantic as its mining history, and bound up with it. Effigies of various rulers of the nation appear and disappear with a dramatic but disconcerting rapidity. The Iturbide coins are extremely rare, but I saw one the other day, and it is on them that the eagle and the cactus first appear. On the other side, around Iturbide's bold profile with projecting jaw, is graven Augustinus I Dei Providencia, 1822. Now we have simply the eagle and the cactus, and the redoubtable word "Libertad" stamped in the Phrygian bonnet.

July 7th.

To-day we picnicked at the Casa Blanca, out beyond San Angel. It belongs to an Englishman, Mr. Morkill, now engaged in business in South America. When we got there, in spite of explicit telephonings, there was no key to be had. One person went to fetch the caretaker, who lived quiÉn sabe where, and some one went to fetch him and so on, an endless chain. We must have been outside for nearly an hour, looking up at the loveliest and pinkest of walls, above which showed tops of palm- and fruit-trees and delicious known and unknown vines.

Finally, a very old woman and a very young boy appeared with the key to the door of that especial paradise, and we went in, with a loud sound of locking after us, and a "PuÉs quiÉn sabe?" in a belated, breathless masculine voice. The garden, as all unfrequented gardens in Mexico are, was a riot of loveliness. We spent an hour wandering about its enchantment, and some one quoted that lovely poem—

interrupted at this line by appropriate and all too ready jibes about peace in Mexico.

Within the larger garden was a sort of inner tabernacle, a sun-bathed, inclosed fruit-garden—peach and quince growing with orange and lemon and fig, and the little pathway was fringed with lilies. The house showed the unmistakable quick results of inoccupancy here; the doors sagged, the windows stuck, and it was dismantled of most of its furniture.

We got out some tables and spread our luncheon in a little mosquete and jasmine-blossoming porch, even with the ground, opening from one of the salons. Continual whiffs of perfume came from the garden, and the air was now damp with threatening rain or indescribably brilliant as the clouds passed. Mrs. Wilson brought some especially good things in the way of jellied chicken and one of the large cocoanut cakes for which the Embassy is famed. Mr. Potter's motor we called "the cantina," for obvious and refreshing reasons.

Afterward, while we waited for the rain to pass, we went to the mirador, built in a corner of the high wall of the bigger garden, overlooking the maguey-fields, which stretched away to the lovely hills, on which great, black shadows were lying between sunlit spaces. When we came down we picked armfuls of flowers, and there were some particularly beautiful trailing blackberry sprays with which we innocently decorated ourselves, but which I have discovered left indelible marks on our raiment. As we filled the motors with wet, sweet, shiny flowers and leaves, we sighed that the owners of anything so lovely should be so distant.

July 15th.

The Schuylers have gone—a week ago—and N. is at the Embassy bright and early these mornings. The ambassador is more and more pessimistic, and there is a huge amount of work to be turned over every day.

The situation is heavy with responsibility for him, and the road thorny and full of the unexpected. Am now waiting for Madame Lefaivre, to go to the Red Cross.

Burnside has returned from the north, where he has been with General Huerta's army. He says Huerta conducted a really brilliant campaign against Orozco, in spite of illness among the troops, smallpox, typhus, etc., and the difficulties of communication. The amiable soldadera deputed to look after his morning coffee, with her nursing baby in her arms, asked him, with unmistakable intent, the first day, if he would have it with or without milk. Needless to record, he took it black.

July 15th.

The French fÊtes are beating their full at the Tivoli Eliseo. They seem to celebrate the 14th of July from the 6th to the 20th. The Lefaivres invisible, except to their colony. For the sake of la nation amie, I put my head inside yesterday—and was met with a cloud of confetti and swarms of vendeuses. Bands were playing, and there was dancing at one end, and everywhere a lively selling of objects for the French oeuvres de bienfaisance in Mexico. The celebrated Buen Tono cigarette-manufactory had outdone itself in generosity, its booth being the clou.

Last night there was a patriotic performance at the Teatro Colon. Kilometers of tricolor and a very demonstrative colony filled the huge place to overflowing.

We got there just as the Mexican national hymn was sounding, and the President and his wife, with the Vice-President, were being ushered into the great central loge, where Monsieur and Madame Lefaivre were waiting to receive them bowered in red and white and blue flowers and lights, with a great tricolor floating beneath.

After the last singing of the "Marseillaise" we went in to speak to them and found the President saying to the minister: "C'est LibertÉ, EgalitÉ, FraternitÉ que je voudrais voir dirigeant les destinÉes du Mexique," while a look as remote as the poles came into his eyes. Monsieur Lefaivre, for the sake of the vast French interests to be safeguarded, has always cultivated the friendliest relations with Madero—hoping against hope that the situation may develop elements of stability. Madero is obsessed by French political maxims, but without any understanding of that very practical genius which enables the doux pays de France to turn ideas into actualities. The Encyclopedists, however, are having quite a revival in "glorious gory Mexico." We came home unconvinced, yet vaguely hopeful, under a blaze of constellations set in wondrous relief against great black spaces.

July 17th.

I have just closed George Moore's Ave Atque Vale. A new book by him continues to be a delicious intellectual repast. I read it in rather a miserly manner, knowing there cannot be many more, not tearing its heart out as I so often do with books. He is nearing the inevitable departure on that last journey—and he will not return to write epigrams about it.

July 19th.

I am scribbling this in the lovely old patio of San Joaquin, out beyond the hacienda of Morales, sitting on a comfortably slanted grave—slab, on which I can just distinguish a bishop's miter and a faint tracing of the date—17 something and requiescat in pace. Delicate mosses, bits of cactus, and a tiny, vine-like, yellow flower make it a thing of beauty.

Madame Lefaivre and Elsie S. are sketching; all is peaceful, sun-flooded, with much singing of birds, and the trees are dropping solid bits of gold through their dark branches. There is a fine old five-belled belfry that pierces the perfect sky; the top bell and one of the next lower pair are missing (in what vagary of Mexican history they disappeared I know not).

This was once a Carmelite monastery, and still has a wonderful garden and a celebrated peach and pear and chabacano orchard. The wall inclosing the orchard is so high that scarcely anything green grows tall enough to show above it, though the mirador has a few vines twisting about it. The wall, however, is beautiful in itself—pink, crumbling, sun-baked, with moss and flowers and bits of cactus clinging to it, and a fruity odor was wafted over to us as we passed on the broken, ditch-like road with the motor at an angle of forty-five degrees.

There is a large space, planted with live-oaks, outside the patio of the church with its lovely, broadly scalloped pink wall. Once through the carved door, one is as if in a bath of sun and beauty. Before another time-worn, carved door leading into the church stand two straight, black, immemorial cypresses. The inside wall of the patio has, here and there, an old carved coat of arms cemented into it, and colored growing things abound. The live-oaks outside bend above the scalloping of the walls, on which are ancient numbers above flat-carved symbols for the "Way of the Cross."

Elsie chose a corner inside, and Madame Lefaivre is sketching outside, so I got the guardian, who is also the administrator of the orchard and hacienda, to unlock the church. Several gilded Churrigueresque altars still remain—intricately designed, time-softened, lovely, and on the altar steps were some charming old candlesticks, five or six feet high, in the same lovely style of gilding and twisting. How they have remained there during a century of suburban vicissitudes I know not. Various saints in ecstasy, San Joaquin in special, were portrayed, almost life-size, their garments floating, falling, blowing about, with the special unquiet but lovely Churrigueresque touch. Winged, open-mouthed cherubim and seraphim hold up the vaulting with its wealth of lovely, conventional motifs; throughout Mexico, in churches where everything else is gone, one finds the out-of-reach vaultings intact.

There is a school of a sort, held in what was once the seminary behind the church; and some barefooted, bareheaded, and otherwise scantily clad wrestlers with the "three R's" came out from one end of the church and passed through, followed by their teacher, a shabby, bored-looking young Mestizo of doubtful cleanliness and dubious competency.

Calle Humboldt, Later.

I left you in the patio of San Joaquin. When I went to see how the artists were progressing, I found them both looking miserable and discouraged. No "fine frenzy" to the roll of their eyes, though they were "glancing from heaven to earth." The beauty here isn't one to record on canvas, rather on memory and soul, which, having remarked to them as gently as I could, they began to clean their palettes.

We took a last, regretful look at all the pinky loveliness, the tiled dome, the silent belfry, the slender heads of the two straight, coal-black cypresses, and the inexpressibly lovely wall, wrapped ourselves about with the shining air, and bumped homewards. "Quick, thy tablets, memory."

July 20th.

We dined last night at the Ernesto Maderos' in their handsome house in the Paseo, large enough to lose the six children in. Madame M. has been in mourning (something that seems to happen to women oftener in Mexico than in other places) and now is "out" again.

The official Mexicans spare no expense on the occasions when they open their houses, but it is always with ceremony, without individuality; enfin Mexicans receiving foreigners. The Riedls were there, and the Simons; I have an idea Mr. S. finds his task a big one. He rarely goes out, but this, to the Secretary of the Treasury, was strictly within his orbit. Madame Simon wore a beautiful black paillettÉ gown, with subtle touches of "point de Venise," recently out from Paris.

She has driven us all nearly crazy, anyway, with the ravishing croquis and Échantillons Drecoll and Doeuillet have been sending her, and which lie, temptingly, among the latest French reviews and newest books on her table.

I sat by Lascurain, talking pleasantly of things not political; that ground is volcanic and no place for foreigners, even well-disposed. The new Belgian chargÉ, Letellier, was on my other side.

A letter to-day from Madame de la G. from ChÂlons-sur-Marne, where the Marquis is in command of the garrison. She will always be, to me, typical of the grandes dames de France as they have appeared throughout the centuries—those highly born, highly placed, highly cultured women with many natural gifts, whose wit and beauty are the common heritage of us all.

I bear that picture of her in her armchair, so beautifully dressed, especially in that white chiffon gown we liked so much, with a single dusky rose at her slender waist, her dark hair so perfectly coiffÉ, her charming welcoming smile, with its hint of suffering borne, remote from miseries, yet knowing pain. I can see the background of bookcases; near by her shining tea-table, and the little low table with its vase of flowers and bibelots, and the latest book with a paper-cutter in it, or some consoling volume whose pages were cut by other generations.[56]

With a change of costume, change of hours of visits and dinner, she pictures to my imagination Madame de SÉvignÉ writing to Madame de Grignan, Madame de la Fayette talking to La Rochefoucauld—all that flowering of an elegance of mind with its roots of culture, not alone in books, but in the heart. Her mind is receptive, yet so giving, her conversations so sparkling, with its fond of philosophies and politics, its richness of nuance, its elastic impersonality, yet French, though dipped in a thousand dyes and run in a thousand molds.

Her three boys go into the army, and of Marguerite she says: "Gretl est vraiment mon ange gardien, ne me quittant jamais, et me soignant, toujours gaie, toujours dÉvouÉe."

"ChÂlons Étant À deux heures de Paris, les amis viennent facilement." She gave me news of the Paul Festetics, who had recently been there—"Fanny toujours l'esprit aussi alerte et aussi charmant"; of the De B.'s, to whom my heart goes out, "TrÈs-courageux, mais vous pensez si c'est dur de continuer une route ainsi ravagÉe"; and for me "Nos chemins se Croiseront-ils jamais À nouveau? It does not look like it, hÉlas."

July 21st.

This evening, from the hill of Tepeyac, I watched the sun go down into a world of purple shadows rising from the mysterious plain of Anahuac. The valley had been stretched out before us like a chart, the hills in light and shadow. We could name each glistening road leading from the great city, and yet, little by little, one succumbed to the mysteriousness of it all—until the whole spectacle became an inner rather than an outer thing.

No rain except for some silver clouds with strange, fugitive effects, just before sunset, that sifted a diamond-like rain for a few minutes over the face of the plain. No wind, but something like a great, cool breathing was about us.

We passed by the richly tiled Capilla del Pocito (Chapel of the Well), of which he who drinks returns, and went up the romantic old stone stairway leading to another chapel. Half-way up are the celebrated "stone sails of Guadalupe," their origin dateless, the hands that put them up unrecorded. They can be seen for miles about, and near by they have a belle patine, and mosses and bits of cactus and a flower or two grow from them. They commemorate the escape from sea perils of Mexican mariners who had prayed the Virgin of Guadalupe to bring them safely into port. When this had come about, tradition has it that, continuing to believe after they were safe in Vera Cruz, they fulfilled their vow by bringing up on their shoulders the rigging of their ship, afterward encasing it in a covering of stone.

There are hooded, shrine-like resting-places as one goes up the broad, flat steps between the beautiful, high-scalloped wall, often a Via Dolorosa, for a cemetery is on the very top behind the chapel that was built on the spot where Juan Diego gathered the flowers, suddenly springing up to be given as testimony to the unconvinced bishop.

A great wooden cross is in the little atrium, and we found an Indian family sitting about it, eating their supper, wrapped in their colored blankets, doubtless preparing to spend the night "at the foot of the cross." There was once a temple to the Aztec Ceres, "Tonantzin, our Mother," on this same spot.

In the cemetery lies buried the body of Santa Anna, he who led his troops against ours.

There is a continual operative magic, some peculiar proportioning of the subjective and the objective here, with correspondences between the seen and the unseen forever making themselves felt.

The domes and spires of the city shone in the afternoon light. Where one once saw the great aqueducts, and the still more ancient canals, now rise the slender steel frames bearing the wires of the light-and-power company, charged in Necaxa, a hundred miles away, down in the Hot Country. The lakes were yellowish-silver mirrors, the eternal hills swam in their strange translucence, the great volcanoes pierced a lovely sky; all quite relatable, except just what it is that pulls your soul out of you as you look upon the deathless beauty and think of the dark, restless, passionate races whose heritage it is.

As we turned to descend the old stone way, the shining city afar was as if suddenly dipped in purple, but the sky above was of such pure and delicate tints—lemon, saffron, and pale pink—that we wondered whence the "Tyrian" purple could have come. We drove silently home in a many-colored twilight.

July 23d.

Yesterday I found a curious book, "par un citoyen de l'AmÉrique mÉridionale" ("by a citizen of South America") (vague enough not to get him into trouble), called Esquisse de la RÉvolution de l'AmÉrique Espagnole, Paris, 1817.

It is a saddening, mighty spectacle, the presentation of that immense area in the throes of revolution. A few enlightened viceroys at Mexico, BogotÁ, Buenos Aires, might have saved the day. They were not ready for self-government, but for Spain the hour had sounded when she was to lose her great colonies; and Mexico, the dearest, the richest, the most accessible, the most beautiful, was to enter on her century of horrors, heroisms, sacrifices—and the end is not yet.

I feel at times as if I were behind the scenes of a mighty drama. I have read so much that I know many of the rÉpliques; have sorted some of the red threads of the century-old plot, and, if I am not behind the scenes really, I am in a sort of avant-scÈne, where some of what goes on behind the curtain can be surmised.

This is the second summer of books read to the pouring of tropical rains. Mr. S. has brought me several volumes of Jean Christophe—l'Aube, La RÉvolte—unread before and deeply relished. With all his other gifts, Romain Rolland[57] has the international mind and keeps his seat extremely well, À cheval as he is, between France and Germany. To-day I finished Le Buisson Ardent. During two strange, restless afternoons, I followed Anna's story in the darkness of the tropical downpour, an earthy freshness coming up from the flowers in the patio, and a sound of heavy water falling from rain-spout and roof.

July 27th.

A lovely morning on the roof with E., drying our hair in matchless sun, looking at the volcanoes and talking.

She said I reminded her of the art nouveau inkstand, that for my sins I won at bridge the other day, which has the hair drawn down to the feet of the figure for the pen to rest on. She looked as if she had stepped out of some lovely old Persian tile with her masses of dark hair standing out about her handsome head. There is a poet brother, whose portrait of some years ago hangs in one of the rooms, a large-eyed, straight-featured boy, with a speculative forehead and remote eyes.

From what I gather, he is evidently a genius, not meant for harness, feeling the world owes him a living (which it probably does), that he may toss off a sonnet, when so impelled, or feel free to read Euripides in some choice edition bought with his last dollar, in the completest insouciance as to the date and amount of the next remittance. He used to take long, lonely, timeless walks about these hills and valleys, reappearing after hours or days, with a poem that he wouldn't show, or a thought not convenient in family life.[58]