There are Federal rumors of a split between Villa and Carranza, but, though they will inevitably fight, I don’t think the time is ripe for it, and they are some five hundred kilometers apart, which makes for patience and charity. Villa, whose latest name is the “Tiger of the North,” has made such daring and successful military moves that Carranza must put up with him. He has just married again, during the sacking of Torreon (a detail, of course, as was also his appearance at a ball in puris naturalibus—a shock to the guests, even in revolutionary Mexico!)
I only heard at luncheon at the Russian Legation that Count Peretti, conseiller of the French embassy in Washington, is leaving for Paris to-night, by the Navarre. He married when en poste here a handsome Mexican wife. This letter goes with him. On Saturday we dine at Lady Carden’s. The dinner is given for Colonel Gage, the handsome and agreeable British military attaché à cheval between Washington and Mexico City.
The fight around Tampico continues, the town being indeed “between the devils and the deep sea.” No one yet knows the outcome, except that the unoffending blood of the Mexican peon is reddening the soil. The Kronprinzessin Cecilie is down there to take off refugees; also the Logican, and we are sending the Tacoma and the Wheeling. I understand that, though some hundreds have been taken on board, about five hundred unfortunates are still waiting on the pier in the neutral zone.
I must begin to arrange my Christmas tree for the few friends remaining in this restless, distant land, with some little gift for each.
December 12th.
To-day is the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patroness of Mexico and of all the Lupes. For the last few days the mysterious Indian world has been hurrying to the shrine from far and near. I went out there this morning with dear Madame Lefaivre and Mr. de Soto. The crowd was immense, the same types, costumes, habits, language, gestures, even, that Cortés found on his arrival, unmodified (and unmodifiable, which Washington cannot understand) by four hundred years of surrounding civilization. Our motor gliding along the straight road was quite out of the note and picture. Many of the Indians were doing the distance between the city and Guadalupe, several kilometers, on their knees, with bowed heads and folded hands. Madame Lefaivre found it très-beau, but was glad that no voice told her that to save her soul, or, what is more important, her Paul’s soul, she would have to do likewise.
The plaza before the church was thronged with a brightly clad, motley crowd, venders of all sorts predominating, mostly selling candles and votive offerings of strange kinds. Hundreds of tortilleras were sitting on their haunches before their primitive braziers, piles of dough (masa, they call it) in their laps, molding the tortillas with a slapping noise of the palms—an old, inherited gesture, and pinching them into shape with their slender, graceful fingers. The church itself, as we pressed in, was crowded to suffocation, almost every one holding a candle of some length and thickness. The high altar was a blaze of light, the celebrated image above visible to all. It is the famous Imagen de la Virgen, stamped miraculously on the tilma (coarse cloth mantle) of a lowly Indian, Juan Diego, as the Virgin appeared to him passing the rock of Tepeyac on his way to Tlaltelolco, to receive instructions in the mysteries of the Faith. The sacred image is placed above the high altar in a gold frame, and there is a gleaming, solid silver stair-railing leading up both sides.
In the middle aisle were double files of young Indian girls, with bright-colored scarfs about their shoulders, and strange, high, picturesque-looking head-dresses, of gaudy tissue-paper, with trimmings of gold. They were chanting monotonous minor songs, accompanied by a swaying, dance-like movement of the hips—all most reverent. They had been there for hours and showed no sign of leaving. I hope I said a reverent prayer, but I felt a bit cheap in contrast to the rapt devotion on all sides. I was glad to get a breath of fresh air in the plaza, or rather, “fresher,” as it was almost as crowded as the church, and every dog in Mexico seemed to be there, scratching and shaking itself.
VILLA DE GUADALUPE