“Don’t you worry, dear,” said Mrs. Moon. “Leave that Jackson viper to me; I’ll fix her. They move in this afternoon—I’m going up there to tea—and I promise you that you’ll have your wall-eyed old dish-smasher hovering over the brasero in your kitchen by noon to-morrow.”
Apparently Mrs. Moon did go to the Jacksons for tea and made herself most agreeable. “You may not believe it, but she really can once in a while,” Mrs. Belding interjected. And as Mrs. Jackson had been conducting a Mexican establishment for about two hours, Mrs. Moon gave her all kinds of advice on the way to get along with the servants, ending with: “Of course you must never let the maids go out after dark even with their mothers, and it’s fatal to give them breakfast. We simply don’t do it in Mexico—not so much as a drop of coffee until noon. Breakfast always makes Mexicans insolent.” Then Mrs. Moon, feeling that she was perhaps overdoing it, left while she saw that Mrs. Jackson was drinking it in in great, death-dealing gulps.
It was bad enough that night, Mrs. Belding ran on, when the cook and one of the maids tried to go to the serenata in the plaza. On the strength of the extra two dollars the cook had bought a new rebozo and wanted to wear it, and as there was no reason on earth why they shouldn’t go to the serenata, they were mystified and angry at Mrs. Jackson’s serenely declaring “No, no,” and locking them in. But the great seal of the Jacksons’ fate was definitely affixed the next morning when Mrs. Jackson, up bright and early, with kind firmness, refused to let them make their coffee. Half an hour later Mrs. Moon experienced the bliss of seeing the mozo, the cook and the two maids wandering past her house—all weeping bitterly. Long before midday the cook was back at the Dressers; and from that moment Mrs. Jackson was blacklisted.
For five days she struggled to engage new servants, but she was believed to be a woman with a “bad heart.” No one would go to her. She surrendered and left.
I did not altogether believe this tale of Mrs. Belding’s, nor did I believe the man who casually told us that a few weeks before, the authorities had, just in time, interrupted a human sacrifice in an Indian village some twenty or thirty miles up from the coast. After nearly four hundred years of Christianity the Indians had, it seemed, dug up a large stone idol and attempted to revert. Then, too, the remark of a young girl who had been visiting in Vera Cruz struck me as rather incredible. “I was there for a month,” she said. “Yes, there was some yellow fever and a great deal of smallpox—but when you’re having a good time, who minds smallpox?” It was all so new to me in matter and manner, so sprinkled with easy references to objects, scenes, and conditions I had met with only in highfalutin stories lacking the ring of truth, so ornate with “meandering” (thank you, Robert Browning), Spanish words whose meaning I did not know. There was also among the men much coffee talk—a whole new world to one who has always taken for granted that coffee originates, roasted, ground and done up in five-pound tins on a grocer’s shelves. But it was all true even to the interrupted human sacrifice and the fact that some of the shrubs among the roses and heliotrope near the piazza were coffee trees. Had I never seen the little colony again I should always have remembered it as a picturesque, romantic and delightful thing. And how—I told myself as I sat there listening and looking—they must, away off here, depend upon one another for society, both in a formal and in an intimate sense! How they must come together and somewhat wistfully try to forget Mexico in talking of home in their own language! What it is, after all, to understand and be understood!—and all that sort of thing. If my first afternoon with foreigners in Mexico had been my last, I should have carried away with me a brave, bright colored little picture of much charm and some pathos. However, since then I have spent with my compatriots in this interesting land days innumerable.
I fear I am, for the delightful purposes of art, unfortunately unselective. First impressions have their value; they have, indeed, very great value, and of a kind quite their own. As my first impression of Americans in Mexico was the kind I have just been trying to give, and as it was to me wholly interesting and more agreeable than not, I ought, perhaps, to let it stand; but somehow I can’t. My inartistic impulse to keep on and tell all the little I know, instead of stopping at the right place, is too strong.
There are said to be about thirty thousand American residents in the Mexican Republic, and the men pursue vocations ranging from that of tramp to that of president of great and successful business ventures. There are American doctors and dentists, brakemen, locomotive engineers, Pullman-car conductors, civil engineers, mining engineers, “promoters,” grocers, hotel keepers, dealers in curios; there are American barkeepers, lawyers, stenographers, photographers, artists, clerks, electricians, and owners of ranches of one kind or another who grow cattle or coffee or vanilla or sugar or rubber. Many Americans are managers of some sort—they manage mines or plantations or railways, or the local interests of some manufacturing or business concern in the United States. One meets Americans—both men and women—on the streets, in hotels, in shops, strolling or sitting in the plaza—almost everywhere in the course of the day’s work, and in the course of the day’s play, one may drop in at the house of some acquaintance or friend and have a cup of tea, with the usual accompaniments, at four or half past. I am speaking now not of the City of Mexico, whose American colony as a colony I know solely through the “Society” notes of the Mexican Herald. From that authentic source he who runs may read (or he who reads may run) that on almost any afternoon at the large entertainment given by Mrs. Brooks for her popular friend, Mrs. Crooks, punch was served at a refreshment table quaintly decorated with smilax by the ever-charming Mrs. Snooks. That there are agreeable Americans living in the city I am sure, because I have met some of them elsewhere. But of American society in general there I am only competent to suspect that, like society in most places, it is considerably less important and entrancing in reality than it is in print.
In the smaller places, even when there are residents of the United States in numbers sufficiently great to be regarded as a “colony,” there is absolutely nothing that by any stretch of imagination or spread of printer’s ink could be called “American society.” The New Year’s Day I have mentioned seems to me now a kind of freak of nature; I am at a loss to account for it. For since then my knowledge of Americans in the small towns has become considerable, and they are not in the least as I supposed they were. They do not depend upon one another; they do not come together to talk wistfully of home in the mother tongue; they do not understand one another, and by one another they are not understood! There is at best about most of their exceedingly few relations an atmosphere of petty and ungenerous gossip, and at worst a fog—a positive sand storm of enmity and hatred through which it takes a really ludicrous amount of delicate navigation successfully to steer oneself. As a body they simply do not meet. There are, instead, groups of two, of three, of four, who have tea together (other forms of entertainment are rarely attempted) chiefly for the purpose of envitrioling the others. There are among them agreeable groups and truly charming individuals, but when they allow themselves to assimilate at all, it is usually in a most reluctant, acid, and malnutritious form (a singularly repulsive figure of speech, come to think of it) that does no one any good. It is not unamusing just at first to have a lady inform you with tremulous lips and in a tense, white voice that if you call on Mrs. X., you must not expect to call any longer on her; and I confess I have enjoyed learning in great detail just why this one is no longer speaking to that, and the train of events that led up to Mr. A.’s finally slapping the face of Mr. B. Yet there are well-defined limits to intellectual treats of this nature, and one quickly longs for entertainment at once less dramatic and more varied.
Among the Americans this is difficult to get, although, as I pause and recall with gratitude and affection some of my friends in Jalapa, for instance, I am tempted to retract this statement. The trouble lies, I feel sure, in the fact that, having come from widely dissimilar parts of the United States, and having had while there affiliations, in many instances, whose slight difference is still great enough to make a great difference, they have but little in common. And Mexican towns are utterly lacking in those diverse interests that at home supply the women of even very small communities with so many pleasant and harmless, if artificial, bonds. The Mexican theater is crude and impossible—even if the fractious ladies knew Spanish sufficiently well to follow rapid dialogue with enjoyment, which they rarely do. The occasional traveling opera company, with one wind-busted, middle-aged star who twenty-five years ago was rumored to have been well received in Rio de Janeiro, is a torture; there are no notable piano or song recitals, no King’s Daughters or other pet charities, no D. A. R.’s, no one to interpret the “Ring and the Book,” or the “Ring of the Niebelungen,” no one to give chafing-dish lectures or inspire enthusiasm for things like the etchings of Whistler and the economical cremation of garbage, the abolishment of child labor, and the encouragement of the backyard beautiful. Beyond the slight and monotonous cares of housekeeping on a small scale, there is little to occupy their time; there are, in a word, no varied outlets available for their normal socio-intellectual energies, and of course the distressing happens. Even the one or two common bonds they might have, most unfortunately act not as bonds at all. The “servant problem,” for instance, small as wages are, serves only to keep them farther apart, and apparently friendship between two families engaged in the same kind of enterprise is almost impossible. Very rarely have I seen two coffee-growers who were not virulently jealous of each other’s successes, and who would not, in a business way, cut each other’s throats without a qualm if by doing so they could come out a few dollars ahead.
Indeed, from the little I have seen and the great deal I have heard of my countrymen’s business coups in Mexico, I cannot believe that transplantation has a tendency to elevate one’s ethics. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to record that I know men in Mexico whose methods of business are fastidiously honorable with Mexican and compatriot alike, but they are extremely rare; far more rare than they are at home. If in Mexico I were forced to choose between trusting in a business matter to the representations of a Mexican whom I knew and liked and an American whom I knew and liked, I should, except in one or two cases, where I should be betting, so to speak, on a certainty, trust the Mexican.