“Ah, they will some day,” he hopefully replied. And it was Father O’Neil also who told me that there were to-day between thirty and forty convents running full blast in the City of Mexico alone. That they are is against the law, but, after all, the channels through which they used to work great harm have been closed, and there are a number of persons in every community of human beings who are able to satisfy their temperamental needs—to enjoy life—only by walling themselves up with others similarly disposed and wearing garments of a particular shape and fabric. Once in so often the anti-clericals explode quite in the manner of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the United States, declare that these illicit survivals must go, that such things must not be, and compel the police to make a raid. But the police, it is said, never discover anything on these expeditions beyond some demure ladies in ordinary dress, who do not appear to understand the sudden intrusion and who declare the place to be a poor but honest boarding house. When the police retire, the ladies get their veils and habits from the cellar where they have hidden them, put them on, and proceed with the life meditative, as before. That they are never taken unawares, Father O’Neil assures me, is due to the piety of the Señora Carmen Rubio de Diaz, the President’s wife.
All of which helps one to believe that the President is a statesman and a diplomat—that he does not care if people swim, as long as they do not go too near the water. And that to be a successful president in Mexico is a task of considerable difficulty might be inferred from a trivial incident which took place some years ago. In receiving new envoys from foreign countries the President is invariably happy in the phrasing of his short speech of welcome—which, perhaps, does not seem altogether remarkable when one learns that he is always furnished with a copy of the newly arrived diplomat’s extemporaneous remarks a week before they are delivered. On one occasion a foreign minister misguidedly undertook to improve upon his discourse between the time it had been submitted and approved and the hour at which he was officially received. With the best intentions he inserted several things that the President, who is distinctly “onto his job,” would have quietly deleted had he seen them. The particular sentence that caused trouble was one in which the unsuspecting envoy invoked God to be prodigal of His blessings upon Don Porfirio’s distinguished head. The anticlerical element—it can scarcely be called a party—was immediately incensed. It has a strong prejudice against God, and of the fact that the President had, as it were, officially recognized Him, it endeavored to make a political issue. The President was much annoyed by the affair, and the diplomat horrified. It has not happened again.
Father O’Neil is an American by way (on the part of his grandparents) of Ireland; but for many years he has been a Roman Catholic priest in Mexico, and he is one of those baffling, rather fascinating Roman Catholic enigmas that I have grown accustomed to meeting in lonely, far-away places. He is forty years old; a person of education, cultivated tastes, and great charm of manner. For years he was priest of a fever-stricken parish on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec until at last he got yellow fever himself and was obliged, in order to remain alive, to seek a higher altitude. When I knew him he was filling (at a salary of three hundred dollars a year) a quaint position in an isolated spot with a queer little history.
In the seventeenth century some Spanish monks founded a monastery in a very beautiful part of the great Mexican plateau. The monastery lasted—as an institution—for just a hundred years, at the end of which time, for reasons that do not appear in the records of the place, all the monks, with the exception of one, set sail for Spain. Those who left divided the money among them; the one who remained received the buildings and the land. He, by the Pope’s dispensation, was permitted to marry, which he straightway did and begat a large family. His descendants have always owned the estate, and although the present members of the family do not live there, they still observe the wishes of the original owner by perpetually having a priest—a sort of family chaplain—in residence. When I met Father O’Neil, he was the chaplain. His entire duties consisted of saying eleven low masses a month (why eleven he did not know, except that this number had been stipulated for in the will of the late possessor) and taking care of the exquisite old vestments and gold service that dated from the place’s founding. Very few persons ever went to the masses, and he confided in me that when absolutely no one was present he did not even pretend to say them. An agreeable man, a man of ability, fond of conversation, companionship, and good living.
“What fanatical zeal he must have,” I at first thought, “in order to exile himself to a locality that, however beautiful, is absolutely deficient in everything he so greatly enjoys.” There were weeks at a stretch when he had no one to speak to but his mozo or the country folk who occasionally dropped in for the purpose of ascending the monastery’s sacred stairs on their knees. Although interested in books and an acute critic of them, he had literally none.
“On three hundred a year one’s library grows slowly,” he once remarked to me. But as I came to know him better I discovered with amazement that he was not only not a devout man—he was one of the most essentially, innately irreligious persons I have ever met. The religious temperament and point of view—especially the Christian-religious point of view—bored him indescribably, and he usually spoke to me of his activities as a priest as if they were some sort of a tedious necessity. I saw him every few days for a whole winter, and in his long, cool, bare sala, adorned only with some of the monastic relics and a portrait of the monk who had remained in Mexico and founded the family, we discussed many things—but I never could manage to maintain a satisfactory discussion on the subject of him. When, for instance he would, in the most casual tone imaginable, exclaim: “Oh, by the way, don’t write up any of those yarns I told you the other evening, as I got them all in the confessional,” there were several leading questions I could have asked. For the fact that he could be amusing with the secrets of the confessional jarred even on me. But I never did. Once when I inquired if something or other had not surprised him, he replied: “My dear boy, I have belonged to three exceedingly illuminating professions: journalism, the law, and the Church; I am never surprised.” Why had he left the first two, in either of which one could easily imagine him successful and happy, for the third, where he was neither one nor the other? And why was he buried alive in the interior of Mexico, endeavoring to exist on three hundred dollars a year, when he loved the world and candidly admitted that he enjoyed few things as much as he enjoyed spending money? I somehow hope I shall never find out.
Late one afternoon, when he was walking part of the way home with me, he stopped to have his hand kissed by an old Indian woman who kept a small cantina by the roadside. Doña Rosario invited us to have a drink at her expense, but insisted on serving it in a small inner room, rather than in the cantina proper, where half a dozen laborers were standing at the bar.
“I wouldn’t ask the padrecito to drink with such common persons,” she explained.
“But I don’t mind, Doña Rosario,” the priest assured her with a laugh. “We’re all made of the same clay.”
“So are cream pitchers and slop-jars; but they are not used for the same purposes,” Dona Rosario prettily replied.