Irene Slapp had beauty and distinction of her own. Somehow, although they all “needed the money,” I don’t believe Cyril would have married her if she hadn’t. Anyhow, one evening in the City of Mexico he took her in to dinner at the British Legation where he had been asked to dine as a matter of course, and before the second entrée, Miss Slapp was slightly in love with him and very deeply in love with the scheme of life, the standard, the ideal, or whatever you choose to call it, he had inherited and had been brought up, under staggering difficulties, to represent.
“The young beggar has made a pot of money in the States,” Trawnbeigh gravely informed me after Cyril had spent seven weeks in Pittsburg—whither he had been persuaded to journey on the Slapp’s private train.
“And, you know I’ve decided to sell the old place,” he casually remarked a month or so later. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “the young people are beginning to leave us.” (I hadn’t noticed any signs of impending flight on the part of Edwina, Violet, and Maud.) “Mrs. Trawnbeigh and I want to end our days at home. Slapp believes there’s gold on the place—or would it be petroleum? He’s welcome to it. After all, I’ve never been fearfully keen on business.”
And I rode away pondering, as I always did, on the great lesson of the Trawnbeighs.
XIV
EARLY in the eighteenth century there went to Mexico from France a boy of sixteen named Joseph de la Borde. “By his fortunate mining ventures at Tlalpujahua, Tasco, and Zacatecas,” we read, “he made a fortune of forty million pesos.” One of these millions he spent in building a church at Tasco, and another he spent in building a garden at Cuernavaca. This is all I know about Joseph de la Borde, or, as he was called in Mexico, José de la Borda, except that he died in Cuernavaca at the age of seventy-nine and that his portrait—a funny old man in a white wig and black velvet—hangs among the portraits of other dead and eminent gentlemen in an obscure corridor of the National Museum. It might be interesting to learn what became of the remaining thirty-eight millions; but then again it might not. So I haven’t tried to find out. It is scarcely probable, however, that at a later date he expressed himself more notably than he did in the construction of El Jardin Borda.
It lies on a steep hillside behind Cuernavaca, and even if it were not one of the most beautiful of tangled, neglected, ruined old gardens anywhere, it would be lovable for the manner in which it tried so hard to be a French garden and failed. Joseph, it is clear, had the French passion for formalizing the landscape—for putting Nature into a pretty strait-jacket; but although he spent much time and a million pesos in trying to do this at Cuernavaca, he rather wonderfully did not succeed. No doubt the result pleased him; it surely ought to have. But just as surely it was not the light, bright, definitely graceful result of which his French mind had conceived. It was always a little precious to speak of one thing in terms of another, but nevertheless there is about a perfect French garden something very musical. The Luxembourg garden is musical, so is the garden at Versailles; musical with the kind of music that is as deliberately academic as it is deliberately tuneful. There was every endeavor to make the Jardin Borda perform on a small scale with the same blithe elegance of Versailles and the garden of the Luxembourg; but it was Mexican at heart. Perhaps it foresaw Napoleon III. At any rate, although it tried to be French, it at the last refused.
The situation, the flora, and, absurd as it may sound, the technic of the stone masons who built the architectural features—the walls, the fountains, the summerhouses, the cascades, and the ponds—all combine to give the place an individuality, sometimes Spanish, sometimes Mexican, but French only in the same remote manner in which Shakespeare is Shakespeare when Madame Bernhardt, instead of exclaiming, “Go. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once,” liquidly burbles: “Allez, messieurs; allez immédiatement—sans cérémonie!” It hangs precipitously on the side of a ravine when it should have been level (one is so glad it is not), and the dense, southern trees—mangoes and sapotes and Indian laurel—with which it was planted, have long since outgrown the scale of the place, interlaced and roofed out the sky overhead with an opaque and somber canopy. They now are not, as they were intended to be, decorative features of the garden, they are the garden itself; one cannot see the trees for the forest. In its impermeable shade there are long, islanded tanks in which many numerous families of ducks and geese live a strangely secluded, dignified, aristocratic existence—arbors of roses and jasmine, and heavy, broken old fountains that no longer play and splash. In fact, all the masonry, and to retain itself on the hillside the place had to be a mass of masonry, is heavy and simple, and except for the arbors there are no longer any flowers. Where in the days of Joseph there no doubt used to be a dazzling carpet of color, there is now only a tangle of coffee trees. But in Cuernavaca when the purple and red and pink of growing things under a pitiless sun become intolerable, the absence of color in the Jardin Borda, except for its dark and soothing green, is well worth frequently paying the twenty-five centavos the present owner charges as an admittance fee.
In seventy-five or a hundred years there will be many fine old formal gardens in the United States—finer than the Borda ever was. Under the pergolas of some of them there is much tea and pleasant conversation and one greatly admires their marble furniture imported from Italy—their careful riot of flowers. But at present it is difficult to forget that their prevailing color is wealth, and to forget it will take at least another century. If they have everything that Joseph’s garden lacks, they all lack the thing it has. For in its twilit arbors and all along its sad and silent terraces there is at any hour the same poetic mystery that even at the ages of eight and four sometimes used to affect Don Guillermo and me when we were turned loose to play and to pick daisies in the Borghese garden in Rome. The Borghese is extensive and the Borda is tiny, but history has strolled in both of them and they both seem to have beautiful, secret sorrows.
I am not like an American woman tourist in Cuernavaca (it was her first week in the country) who informed me that she sat in the hotel all day because she was so tired of seeing the streets full of Mexicans! “You know, we saw a great many Mexicans in Mexico City,” she added in the aggrieved tone of one who thinks it is high time for a procession of Swedes or Australians. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, there are mornings and afternoons when it is good to be out of range of the human voice and alone with trees, a sheet of water however small, and some animals.