After tea, music—the photograph fiends taking magnesium snap-shots of Señora Huerta and the dark-browed beauties clustering around, with an incidental head or arm of some near-by diplomat. Madame Ortega then got up to say good-by, and after making our adieux we passed out on to the beautiful flower- and palm-planted terrace. Again, in the dim light the memory of Madero and Pino Suarez assailed me rather reproachfully. It was a curious presentment of human destinies, played out on the stage of the mysterious valley of Anahuac, which seems often a strange astral emanation of a world, rather than actual hills and plains. A mysterious correspondence between things seen and unseen is always making itself felt, and now, in this space between two destinies, I felt more than ever the fathomlessness of events. Other “kings” were dead, and this one could not “long live.”
Afterward we played bridge at Madame Simon’s with the chicheria there assembled. It seemed very banal. All the guests, however, turned their handsome faces and rustled their handsome clothes as I entered, and in a detached sort of way asked how it had all gone off—this, the first official reception of their President.
To-day Congress opens, and N. does not attend. I am glad, in the interests of the dove of peace, that we went to the reception yesterday. The officials will realize there is nothing personal in to-day’s absence.
Last night there was a pleasant dinner at the Cardens’, who are now settled at the comfortable Legation. They are very nice to us, but I feel that Sir L. is naturally much chagrined at the unmeritedly adverse press comments he has had in the United States. We all shivered in our evening dresses, in spite of the rare joy of an open fire in the long drawing-room. There is a thin, penetrating, unsparing sort of chill in these November evenings, in houses meant only for warm weather. I should have enjoyed wearing my motor coat instead of the gray-and-silver Worth dress.
The British cruiser squadron under Admiral Cradock sailed last night for Vera Cruz, which is packed to overflowing with people from here. The prices, “twelve hours east and a mile and a half down,” are fabulous. One woman, so her husband told me, pays ten dollars a day at the Diligencias for a room separated only by a curtain from an electric pump, which goes day and night.
Villa has made a formal declaration that, owing to Carranza’s inactivity, he assumes the leadership of the rebellion, which is the first, but very significant, hint of two parties in the north: Huerta is very pleased, it appears, and is looking forward to seeing them eat each other up like the proverbial lions of the desert. A few “lost illusions” will doubtless stalk the Washington streets and knock at a door or two.
Well, another Sabbath has passed and we are still here. Burnside is up from Vera Cruz. He says we can’t back down, and war seems inevitable. It will take the United States one hundred years to make Mexico into what we call a civilized country, during which process most of its magnetic charm will go. The Spanish imprint left in the wonderful frame of Mexico is among the beauties of the universe. Every pink belfry against every blue hill reminds one of it; every fine old façade, unexpectedly met as one turns a quiet street corner; in fact, all the beauty in Mexico except that of the natural world—is the Spaniards’ and the Indians’. Poor Indians!
I have been reading accounts of the deportation of the Yaquis from Sonora to Yucatan, the wordless horrors of the march, the separation of families. I can’t go into it now; it is one of the long-existent abuses that Madero, at first, was eager to abate. Volumes could be written about it. Another crying shame is the condition of the prisons. Belem, here in town, is an old building erected toward the end of the seventeenth century, and used as an asylum of some kind ever since. Much flotsam and jetsam has been washed up at its doors, though I don’t know that the word “washed” is in any sense suitable. When one thinks that a few hundred pesos’ of bichloride of lime and some formaldehyde gas would clean up the vermin-infested corners and check the typhus epidemics, one can scarcely refrain from taking the stuff there oneself. It seems so simple, but it is all bound up so inextricably with the general laisser-aller of the nation. No one is in Belem three days without contracting an itching skin disease, and a large proportion of the prisoners there, as well as at Santiago, near by, are political, journalists, lawyers, et al., who are used to some measure of cleanliness. The Penitenciaría is their show prison, built on modern principles, and compares favorably with the best in the United States.
Yesterday we lunched with the Ösi-Sanz. He is an agreeable, clever, musical Hungarian, married to a handsome young Mexican, widow of an Iturbide. In their charming rooms are many Maximilian souvenirs that he has ferreted out here; big portraits of the emperor and Carlota look down from the blue walls of the very artistic salon, and a large copy of the picture of the deputation headed by Estrada, which went to Miramar to offer Maximilian the imperial and fatal crown. Vitrines are filled with Napoleon and Maximilian porcelain, and they have some beautiful old Chinese vases. In the viceregal days these were much prized, being brought up from the Pacific coast on the backs of Indian runners. Afterward, we had bridge at the Corcuera-Pimentels—another smart young Mexican ménage. Their house, too, is charming, full of choice things, beautifully and sparingly placed; the rooms would be lovely anywhere. Then home, where I looked over that depressing book, Barbarous Mexico.
In Huerta’s speech before Congress on the 20th, he makes use of the famous words of Napoleon—“The law is not violated if the country be saved.” We all wondered how he fished it up!