VII
Huerta visits the Jockey Club—Chihuahua falls—“The tragic ten days”—Exhibition of gunnery in the public streets—Mexico’s “potential Presidents”—“The Tiger of the North.”
December 6th.
The position here gets more curious every day. Public opinion, as we understand it, is non-existent in Mexico. It is always some despot who brings some sort of order out of chaos by means unknown (though they may be suspected) to the public, who judge his worth entirely by the degree of peace and prosperity that follows.
N. was sitting with some of the males of the “First Families” of Mexico, in the Jockey Club, this morning, when in sailed Huerta. He knew none of the jeunesse or viellesse dorée. He stood looking around him for a moment, blinking as he suddenly came into the light. N. espied him, went over to him, and then made the necessary presentations, Huerta hanging on his arm. After the first shock of his entrance there was a rallying around him. He doesn’t belong to the club, but that, of course, doesn’t make any difference to him; he feels himself President and superior in brain, will, and achievement. N. ordered copitas, and the visit went off with the snap peculiar to all of Huerta’s sorties. After all, he is their President.
I send you a copy of Life, with an editorial on Mexico. It remarks that, asking the Mexicans (13,000,000 being Indians) to elect a President by constitutional methods is “like asking the infant class to select a teacher.” There is no doubt that our ways don’t yet fit them. It’s like dressing sonny up in father’s clothes!
Another military train blown up. We were all hoping that the rumored shortage in dynamite among the rebels would make railway travel more attractive. Also stories of mutilations that cause one to shiver.
The reason some of the newspapers give for the almost groveling attitude of the Powers, and their acquiescence in our exclusive tutelage in Mexico, is that, according to international law, we will be responsible for the millions they are losing, and that, at the appointed hour, they intend to press Uncle Sam with the bill—the French, the English, the Germans, and the Spaniards.
Lunch to-day at the French Legation. Very pleasant, as always. I sat next to Corona, governor of the Federal District, a handsome, highly colored, dark-eyed man in the prime of life. His wife and daughter are in Paris. There is such a sense of the transitoriness of the officials in Mexico, here to-day and gone to-morrow, that intercourse seems very bootless; the sword of Damocles is not only hanging, but falling all the time. May was also there, as pessimistic and politically wrought up as usual.
My big salon begins to look very home-like. I have some lovely lamps made of single, big, brass-and-silver church candlesticks, many exquisite Ravell photographs of this marvelous land finally fitted into good old frames. I had the smart young Mexican set in for bridge to-day. They were asked for five, which is a little early for them, and they didn’t begin to arrive until six. Lovely young women with beautiful jewels and dresses to set off their dark beauty; Señora Bernal, Señora Amor, Señora Corcuera, Duquesa de Huette (her husband is a handsome, polo-playing Spaniard), Señora Cervantes, Señora Riba—two or three of them enceinte, as is usual. They made the rooms quite radiant. The Mexican men are often put in the shade by their handsome wives, who would be lovely anywhere. The difficulties of bringing up young boys here are, for obvious reasons, so great that both Mexicans and foreigners send their sons away at an early age. The men we know have most of them been at school in England (Beaumont, or Stonyhurst); and their English is as good as ours—sometimes better. There is a sort of resigned irritation, veiled by perfect courtesy and unfailing amiability, on the part of these people toward our policy, which seems to them cruel, stupid, and unwarranted. I can only hope it will soon bear testimony to itself, for this close watching of the means to an end—if it be an end—is very wearing.