At the sloping pasture’s lower end the compact, tile-roofed, white-walled town glared in the January sunlight—a town in a garden, or, when one for a moment lost sight of the outlying orange groves, fields of green-gold sugar cane, patches of shimmering corn and clumps of banana trees—an all-pervasive garden in a town. For compact as the Oriental-looking little place was, green and purple, yellow and red sprang from its interstices everywhere as though they had welled up from the rich plantations below and overflowed. One gazed down upon the trees of tiny plazas, the dense dark foliage of walled gardens, into shady, flower-filled patios and sunny, luxuriant, neglected churchyards, and beyond, the mysterious valley melted away in vast and ever vaster distances—the illimitable valley of a dream—a vision—an allegory—slowly rising at last, in tier upon tier of faintly opalescent volcanoes, the texture of gauze. Up and up and up they lifted and swam and soared, until, as with a swift concerted escape into the blue and icy air of heaven, they culminated in the smooth, inaccessible, swan-like snow upon the peak of Orizaba. Mexico’s four, well-defined climates, from the blazing summer of the valley, to glittering winter only some thousands of feet above, were here, I realized, all the year round, visibly in full blast.
Then other guests began to push back the heavy gate and stroll up the long slope, and I found myself meeting them and hearing them all talk, with a thrill as keen—if of a different quality—as that with which I had gaped at the view. They seemed to me then quite as unreal. There was about them an impenetrable aura of fiction; they were the plain tales that Kipling would have lashed to the mast had his hills been Mexican—had Simla been Barranca.
There was the British consul—a quaint, kindly, charming little man—who while in the act of delightedly making one pun could scarcely conceal the eagerness and anxiety with which his mind grappled with the problem of how to introduce the next. The French consul, too, was of the gathering, and I don’t know why, but life, somehow, would not have seemed what it was that day if the French consul had not been unmistakably a German. He had brought with him a bouquet of pretty daughters whose English accent and complexions (their mother was English) and French deportment made of them rather fascinating racial enigmas. Mrs. Belding liked the girls but confided to me that in general she considered the foreign manner all “French jeune filledlesticks.” Mrs. Hammerton, a tall, distinguished-looking, dark-haired English woman of thirty, was perishing—so Mrs. Belding almost at once informed me—for a cigar. She had an aged mother, had had a romance (of which no one spoke, declared Mrs. Belding as she spoke of it), and adored Mexican cigars. Almost immediately upon my meeting her she let me know in the prettiest, most cultivated of voices that Mrs. Belding was in the habit of getting tight.
There were two reasons for Mrs. Hammerton’s postponing just then the longed-for cigar. One was the Rev. Luke M. Hacket, and the other was his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Hacket, with an ever-growing band of little Hackets, had lived for years at Barranca at the expense of many worthy and unintelligent persons at home. They were there, all unconscious of their insolence, for the purpose of trying to seduce Roman Catholics away from their belief and supplying them with another; of substituting a somewhat colorless and unmagnetic expression of the Christian idea for one that satisfies not only some of the Mexican’s alert senses, but his imagination as well. That these efforts at conversion met with scarcely any success except during a few weeks before Christmas (after which there was always an abrupt stampede to Rome), did not much concern them as long as Mrs. Hacket’s lectures in native costume in the basements of churches at home hypnotized the faithful into contributing to an institution for which the term “futile” is far too kind. As every child of the Rev. and Mrs. Luke Hacket received from the board a salary of its own, the worthy couple had not been idle, and in addition to this simple method of swelling their revenue, the good man did a tidy little business in vanilla—buying that fragrant bean at much less than its market value from the poor and ignorant Indians to whom he distributed tracts they could not read. Whenever another little Hacket arrived, he told the board, but the incredibly gullible body knew nothing of his interest in the vanilla market. As I was a stranger—he took me in. That is to say, he wished me a happy new year and “touched” me for five dollars—to go toward the purchase of a new organ for his Sunday school. I and my money were soon parted. Only afterwards did my hostess have a chance to tell me that among the colony the new organ was an old joke—that for many years tourists and visitors had contributed to its sweeter and, as yet, unheard melodies.
What was it? What is it? No one believed in his creed nor had the slightest interest in it. What lingering, reminiscent, perhaps in some instances atavistic misgiving and yearning to reverence, prompted these ill-assorted exiles to treat with a certain deference a person whom they really laughed at? There was an unsuspected pathos in it—the pathos of a world that involuntarily clutches at the straw it knows to be but yet a straw—the pathos of the exile who for the moment suffers even the distasteful if it in some way bridges the gulf between him and home. It was not politeness that restrained Mrs. Hammerton from smoking until the Hackets at last departed and that had caused our hostess, when she saw them coming, to discuss seriously with her husband whether or no she should temporarily banish the eggnog. What was it?
Mrs. Blythe, a slight, pretty woman prettily dressed had come in from her husband’s ranch the week before for the holidays. In matter-of-fact tones she was giving her news to Mrs. Garvin, whose son was in charge of the town’s electric light plant.
“As a rule one doesn’t particularly mind calentura” (chills and fever), Mrs. Blythe was saying, “although it always leaves me rather weak. But what was so annoying this time, was the fact that Jack and I both had it at once and there wasn’t anybody to take care of us. Delfina, the cook, chose that moment, of all moments, to get bitten in the calf of her leg by a snake. Horrid woman, Delfina—I’m sure she did it on purpose. Of course she was much worse than useless, for I had to take care of her—dose her with ammonia and cut live chickens in two and bind them on the place. You know—the hundred and fifty things one always does when they get bitten by snakes. If Joaquin the mayordomo had been around, I shouldn’t have cared. He knows how to cook in a sort of way, and then, besides, I shouldn’t have been so worried about the coffee picking. But poor Joaquin was in jail for stabbing his wife—yes, she died—and the jefe wouldn’t let him out although I sent in a note saying how much we needed him for the next few weeks. It was deliberately disobliging of the jefe because we’ve had him to dinner several times and afterwards Jack always played cards with him and let him cheat. My temperature didn’t go above a hundred and two and a half, but Jack’s was a hundred and five off and on for three or four days, and when you pass the hundred mark, two and a half degrees make a great deal of difference. He was delirious a lot of the time and of course I couldn’t let him fuss about the kitchen stove. The worst part was having to crawl out of bed and drag over to the tanks every afternoon to measure the coffee when the pickers came in. With Joaquin gone, there was nobody left who could read the lists and record the amounts. Then just as the quinine gave out, the river rose and no one could go to the village for more. Coming at that time of year, it was all really very annoying,” she declared lightly and passed on to something else.
“Yes, that was how I caught this bad cold,” another woman—whose husband manufactured coffee sacks—was explaining to some one. “There was the worst kind of a norther that night; I would have been soaked to the skin even if I hadn’t slipped on a stone in the dark and fallen into the brook, and when I finally reached their hut I forgot the condition I was in. The poor little thing—she was only four—was absolutely rigid and having convulsion after convulsion. Her screams were frightful—it was impossible to control her—to get her to tell what the matter was, and nobody knew what had happened. She had simply given a shriek of terror and gone into convulsions. There was nothing to do—but nothing—nothing. At the end of an hour and a half she gave a final shriek and died, and when her poor little clenched fists relaxed, we found in one of them a dead scorpion. By that time I had begun to be very chilly and of course it ended in a bad cold. Two lumps please and no milk.”
A servant in a starched skirt of watermelon pink and a starched white upper garment like a dressing sack glided out to help with the tea and cakes. A blue rebozo was draped about her neck and shoulders, her black hair hung to within a foot and a half of the floor in two fat braids, and in it, behind her right ear, was a pink camelia the color of her skirt. Her bare feet were thrust into slippers without heels or backs and as she slipped about from chair to chair they made a slight dragging sound on the tiles. Everyone said good afternoon to her as she handed the teacups, at which she smiled and replied in a respectful fashion that was, however, perfectly self-possessed.
“Did you hear about those people named Jackson who were here for a few days last month?” Mrs. Belding asked of the party in general. “You know they ended up at Cuernavaca and took a furnished house there meaning to stay all winter. Well, they stayed five days and then left—furious at Mexico and everyone in it.” And she went on with considerable art and humor to sketch the brief career of the Jacksons. While they were at the hotel, before they took possession of their house, she told us, Mrs. Jackson had engaged servants—a mozo, two maids and a cook. The cook she stole from the Dressers. It wasn’t at all nice of her to steal the cook as Mrs. Dresser had gone through a lot of bother for her about the renting of the house and had helped her to get the other servants. But Mrs. Jackson offered the creature two dollars more a month, and although she had lived at the Dressers for six years, she deserted them with a low, glad cry. Poor Mrs. Dresser rushed over to the Moons and sobbed when she told about it.