IX
A week passed, and nothing happened.
Rumors flew thick and fast, however. Every one discussed the forthcoming revolution as a certainty. Now and then a peon would drop casually into the hotel to inquire in whispers whether the guests had any ammunition to sell. He never used the word “ammunition,” but resorted to harmless-sounding synonyms unintelligible except to the born conspirator.
One noticed that the men of the upper classes were more democratic than usual. Men of distinguished appearance would stop in the plaza to chat with the barefoot rabble whom they ordinarily passed without recognition. Politicians were now cultivating good will. They would soon need this rabble as cannon fodder.
It was said that Carías would start his insurrection on Christmas Eve. The government, as a precaution against the assembling of a crowd, forbade the holding of the usual midnight mass at the Cathedral. When I spoke English over the telephone the day before, in conversation with a member of the American colony, I was interrupted by the frantic voice of a censor, clamoring that I confine myself to Spanish, and shortly thereafter a police official waited upon me and put me through a courteous third degree.
A later report stated that the government had taken five hundred prisoners, and that the revolution was postponed. But an air of expectancy still hung over the Capital. Christmas Eve—La Noche Buena—was gloomy. A drizzle of rain fell intermittently. The street lamps, never very bright in Tegucigalpa, seemed unusually dim. The sidewalks were deserted save for patrols of soldiers, who stopped me at each corner to search for weapons.
SOLDIERS STOPPED A PEDESTRIAN AT EVERY CORNER TO SEARCH FOR WEAPONS
On the night before, all had been gayety. Over in Camyaguela, the suburb across the river, there had been a religious festival—la fiesta de la Concepción la Purísima—the festival of the Purest Conception. The Cathedral had been surrounded by improvised board shacks where booze was sold. At tables in the open, lighted by flaring torches, there had been roulette wheels and other gambling devices. There had been music in the plaza, and the belles of the town—all with white faces, but with tell-tale arms and necks varying in color from a creamy tint to a deep chocolate brown—had paraded around and around the park, while the young dandies fairly impaled themselves on the fence-pickets to watch them.
But to-night gayety stayed indoors. Through the open windows I could see an occasional tinsel-decked tree, but more frequently a navidad, the old Spanish Christmas decoration—a triangular stage in one corner of the parlor, covered with artificial grass, with a little cave at the rear, wherein reposed replicas of Mary and Jesus. Other figures filled the foreground, according to the family’s resources. There were the three wise men, mounted on toy burros. There were tin soldiers and paper soldiers, cardboard houses, cardboard trees, toy animals, toy railway trains—everything imaginable—until the humble manger was surrounded by all the creatures of the zoo and all the inventions of modern civilization. The whole display was decked with pine-boughs and thatches of banana leaf. Each family was very proud of its navidad, and if I paused to indulge a traveler’s curiosity by staring through the window—an impulse quite irresistible in these countries, where windows open directly upon the street, and are left unshuttered by a people whose greatest joy in life is to be looked at—the family would invite me inside, that I might examine the display at close range.
They were quietly happy, these people, yet they seemed listening always for the first boom of the cannon. Nothing happened, however. Nothing ever did happen in Latin America while I was present. From day to day I had heard what sounded like the rattle of musketry, and had rushed out to see the fighting, only to learn that the rattle came from the ungreased wheels of an ox-cart lumbering over the rough cobbles.
At the Consul’s Christmas dinner, attended by a dozen of the leading Americans in town, every one had had the same experience.
“There was a crowd gathering on the hill to-day,” some one remarked. “The police came up in a body and dispersed it.”
“Did you hear the shooting night before last?” another inquired. “There were several pistol shots, and then the burst of a machine-gun. I wonder how soon they will really start?”
But the American Minister, from the seat of honor at the right of the host, merely smiled.
“There will be no revolution,” he predicted.
“Do you mean the United States will intervene?”
He merely smiled again. Still, I felt that there was hope. The ox-carts were sounding more and more like musketry every day.