An always interesting phase of the American in Mexico is the annual invasion of the country, from January to March, by immense parties of “personally conducted” tourists from the United States. In private cars—even in private trains—they descend every few days upon the cities and towns of chief pictorial and historic interest, and just as the American residents of England, Germany, Italy, and France shudder at the ancient and honorable name of “Thomas Cook and Sons,” do the Americans who have chosen Mexico as the land of their adoption shrug and laugh at the mention of “las turistas.” On general principles, to shrug and sneer—for in this laugh there always lurks a sneer—merely because a hundred and fifty amiable creatures have chosen to be herded from one end of a vast foreign country and back again in two weeks, would seem to be narrow and pointless. But I have grown to consider it, for principles quite specific, neither the one nor the other. The American resident’s sneer is unfortunately a helpless, ineffectual one, but he is without question sometimes entitled to it.
Somebody once wrote an article—perhaps it was a whole book—which he called “The Psychology of Crowds.” I did not read it, but many years ago, when it came out, the title imbedded itself in my mind as a wonderfully suggestive title that didn’t suggest to me anything at all. Since then I have had frequent occasion to excavate it, and without having read a word of the work, I am convinced that I know exactly what the author meant. Did he, I often wonder, ever study, in his study of crowds, a crowd of American tourists in Mexico? What a misfortune for his book if he neglected to! They are, it seems, composed of the most estimable units of which one can conceive; the sort of persons who make a “world’s fair” possible; the salt of the earth—“the backbone of the nation.” And yet when they unite and start out on their travels, a kind of madness now and then seizes upon them; not continuously, and sometimes not at all, but now and then. Young girls who, at home, could be trusted on every occasion to conduct themselves with a kind of provincial dignity; sensible, middle-aged fathers and mothers of grown-up families, and old women with white water-waves and gray lisle-thread gloves, will now and then, when on a tour in Mexico, go out of their way to do things that make the very peons blush. The great majority of tourists are, of course, quiet, well-behaved persons who take an intelligent interest in their travels. It is to the exception I am referring; the exception by whom the others, alas! are judged.
The least of their crimes is their suddenly acquired mania for being conspicuous. At home, in their city side streets, their humdrum suburbs, their placid villages, they have been content for thirty, fifty, seventy years to pursue their various decent ways, legitimately observed and clad appropriately to their means and station. But once arrived in the ancient capital of Montezuma, many of them are inspired in the most astounding fashion to attract attention to themselves. On Sunday afternoon, in the crowded Paseo, I have seen, for instance, in cabs, undoubtedly respectable women from my country with enormous straw sombreros on their heads, and about their shoulders those brilliant and hideous “Mexican” sarapes—woven for the tourist trade, it is said, in Germany. All the rest of the world was, of course, in its Paris best, and staring at them with amazed eyes. In Mexico the only possible circumstance under which a native woman of any position whatever would wear a peon hat would be a hot day in the depths of the country, were she forced to travel in an open vehicle or on horseback. As for sarapes, they, of course, are worn only by men. The effect these travelers produced upon the local mind was somewhat analogous to that which a party of Mexican ladies would produce upon the mind of New York should they decide to drive up Fifth Avenue wearing policemen’s helmets and variegated trousers. Only Mexican women would never do the one, while American women frequently, from motives I am at a loss to account for, do the other.
Then, once in a small town to which large parties rarely go, I saw half a dozen men and women suddenly detach themselves from their crowd on being told that a certain middle-aged man, bidding good-by to some guests at his front door, was the governor of the state. At a distance of from ten to fifteen feet of him they deliberately focused their kodaks on the group and pressed the button. Afterwards I asked one of the men with whom the governor had been talking, if the governor had commented upon the matter. “Why, yes,” was the reply. “He said, with a shrug, ‘Obviously from the United States,’ and then went on with his conversation.”
At Tehuacan, one winter, the women in a party of between twenty and thirty, quite innocently (although most commonly) left behind them an odious impression that the few resident Americans who happened to be staying at the place were powerless to eradicate. The man in charge of them could not speak Spanish, and had with him an interpreter, a Mexican boy of seventeen or eighteen who knew a moderate amount of English. He was a pretty-eyed, clever-looking little person, and the women of the party had come to treat him much as one might treat a pet animal of docile habits. They would stroke and ruffle his shock of black hair, pinch his cheeks, “hold hands” with him when walking through the long corridors, adjust his red cravat if it wasn’t straight, and coquettishly struggle with one another for the privilege of strolling with him in the garden. To me it meant no more than a disagreeably playful exhibition of bad taste, but the Mexicans in the hotel regarded a young man of eighteen, in his station of life, as being of a marriageable age, which, of course, he was, and they could not be made to see in the situation anything but that the American women were in love with him and unable to conceal it in public. Some of them with young daughters talked of appealing to the hotel proprietor to eject persons of this description. In the United States a party of Mexican women would under no circumstances hold hands with, say, a bellboy, or stroke the hair of a waiter.
In Puebla it is told that some American tourists ate their luncheon in the cathedral, threw orange peel and sardine tins on the floor, and upon leaving washed their hands in the holy water. I don’t vouch for this story; I merely believe it. And by reason of such things and a hundred others, the American resident is entitled to his sneer. For he himself, in at least his relations with the natives, is accustomed to display something of their courtesy, their dignity. He resents not only the unfortunate and lasting impression many of his compatriots leave upon the populace, but its disastrous effect upon the populace itself. When American tourists, armed with penknives, cut out squares of Gobelin tapestry from the furniture of the President’s drawing-room, it is always a simple matter for the President to close Chapultepec to the public; but when they encourage “humorous” familiarities with well-mannered, unsophisticated servants and the lower classes generally, there is no remedy. Chiefly from constant contact with tourists, the cab drivers of the City of Mexico have become notoriously extortionate and insolent, and, for the same reason, Cuernavaca, one of the most beautiful little towns, not only in Mexico, but in the world, may soon—tourist-ridden as it is—be one of the least attractive. There, among the cabmen, the hotel employees, the guides, and the mozos who have horses for hire, the admirable native manner has lamentably deteriorated. Egged on by underbred Americans, many of them have themselves become common, impudent, and a bore. They no longer suggest Mexico. One might almost as well “see Naples and die.”
XIII
WHEN my first New Year’s party dispersed, I walked back to the center of the town with a man who had lived for many years in Mexico, who had been everywhere and had done everything, and who seemed to know something funny or tragic or scandalous about everybody in the world. He loved to talk, to describe, to recall; and while we had some drinks together at a café under the sky-blue portales, he aroused my interest in people I never had heard of and never should see. He told me, among other things, about the Trawnbeighs.
This, as nearly as I can remember, is what he told me about the Trawnbeighs:
The Trawnbeighs, he said, were the sort of people who “dressed for dinner,” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the house to dress for. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the Trawnbeighs were English. Indeed, on looking back, I often feel that to my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to add anything. For to one who knew Mr. and Mrs. Trawnbeigh, Edwina, Violet, Maud, and Cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their alpha and omega, together with all that went between. Not that the statement is flippant—far from it. There is in it a seriousness, a profundity, an immense philosophic import. At times it has almost moved me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reasons of state, or religion, or death.