Saturday, July 30, 1921. Puebla.
We left Mexico City by the 5 P.M. train for Puebla. The train was full and the first class compartment resembled a dirty tramcar. (I qualify the tram car, because there are tramcars that are clean, but this was not.) A wedding party came to see off a honeymoon couple. They were a quiet and completely self-absorbed pair. I watched them rather unmercifully. It took us five hours to get to Puebla. Long before that time, the bride-groom, so smartly attired in frock coat, varnished button boots, and cloth cap, wearied of his collar and deposited it like a crown on his bride’s knees. He seemed happier so, and looked much more himself with a handkerchief round his neck. Towards the end of the journey, he seemed very impatient. Behind Dick and me sat a large cigar smoking man, who in a foreign accent asked if we were English. He was from Manchester, and had lived in Mexico 26 years! He told us what hotel to go at Puebla, (we had reserved no rooms). He insisted on buying lemonade and chicken for us at the wayside station. Finally he took possession of our luggage and said he would himself take us to our hotel in his car.
He was met on the platform by his son, and in his car sat his wife and his daughter. I tried to back out discreetly and take a taxi, but they were all very insistent, and kind. Finally, one hotel being full, he found us rooms in the second. I asked him his name. He was the British Vice Consul.
July 31, 1921.
Dick, who was sleeping with me, had an attack of croup so that I was awake most of the night. At dawn I was awakened by bugles of a regiment riding into town, besides the clanging of church bells, and the crowing of cocks! Shortly after that we got up.
Dick insisted on looking up some of his “ship friends” who live in the town. We found them, and left him in their back garden playing in their water tank. It was a great chance to see some of the churches, and drive round the town, and do the things that bore Dick.
The town is overburdened with churches, but their exteriors are so decorative that one is glad they exist. The domes are tiled, either with blue and white or yellow. They glisten in the sun like enamel. I went into one called “Of the Company” and happened upon a service with a cardinal. At least, I suppose he was a cardinal. He was dressed in the color of that name. This crimson melodramatic figure seemed to me emblematical of the inquisitorial Church of Spain. Sitting all over the floor were Indian women with their babies, and when the organ subsided, there was a real baby chorus.
The church entrances are the congregating places (as in Italy) of the most wretched beggars. I could not help wondering why a man with no legs submits to living his remaining life on a plank with four wheels; why old age with its skin wizened like a walnut can bear the degradation of extreme filth, and of asking charity on bended knee; and why a blind individual can roll sightless grey orbs and fix them on me while so doing. Why don’t they end life? Why is it endurable? But almost worse in my estimation, was the woman who passed me by, bent double by an enormous load on her back, and dragged down by a baby tied in a bundle to her breast. Must she bear both those burdens?
At midday, there was supposed to be a “battle of flowers.” I have seen the real thing on the Riviera, where the national temperament is joyous. But can people here have a real spontaneous out-burst, when the big sad-eyed Indian stands at the street corner, gaping and incapable of throwing off the melancholy of generations? A few dressed-up cars appeared, but there was no profuse flower throwing. Perhaps, like me, the Pueblans were economizing. Anyway, it was so dull and half-hearted that we took a train to San Francisco.
This is a church and garden on the outskirts of the city. Soon we rambled on, up and up, to a hill summit, from which one viewed the city in the plain, and Popocatapetl with its snow peak, emerging through a bank of cloud. It was beautiful on our hilltop, wild, deserted, peaceful, and the persistent Church bells came to us distantly. We had been told by Dick’s “ship friends,” that it was not possible to go outside the town without a man, and so we had Dick. He found a dew pond, and was perfectly happy.