It seemed to me, as I looked around the table, that each minister had some strange, battered-looking female by him. They proved to be the wives of Cabinet Ministers, who change so fast that it is impossible to keep track of their better halves, produced only on this single occasion. Moheno, however, was able to produce a very pretty wife, smartly dressed, with magnificent pear-shaped emeralds dangling from her white ears, and a most lovely young daughter.
The President was preoccupied and vague, drank no healths, and his frock-coat seemed longer and looser than ever; indeed, the servants had just begun to pour the champagne when, his wine untasted, Huerta gave his arm to Mme. Lefaivre, with a gesture of putting the function behind him, and, the banquet almost untouched, we all filed out behind him. He was evidently terribly bored and thinking of other things. And, anyway, he isn’t the man to conduct things twice in the same way. He stopped as he was leaving the salon and told me he had muchas muy buenas cosas (many good things) to say of N. “Only good things, even in my absence.” With that, he left the festive scene and the affair rather fell to pieces. N. had a dinner at the club for Colonel Gage, who was at the reception in morning coat. He had purposely not brought his uniform, being wary at touching the official note, which might re-echo too loudly in Washington.
I went to the Simons’, who were having a dinner for the captain of the Condé and his staff lieutenant. They were big, good-looking Frenchmen, who had been at the reception in all their glory of gold braid and decorations. Through a motor trip and a punctured tire they had missed the audience arranged for them by their minister with Huerta, and to atone they had gone looking especially official.
Yesterday I went out to see Mother Semple at the American Convent of the Visitation. Until two years ago she had had a large and flourishing school at Tepexpam. There came a Zapatista scare, thirty or forty bandits dancing around the convent one night, shooting off pistols and screaming out ribaldries. Fortunately nothing precious was broken, but the nuns were ruined, as the parents withdrew their little darlings. Now they are trying to get the school together again in a house at Tacubaya, which, though very picturesque, with an old garden and a sunny patio, is not at all suited to the double purpose of community life and school. They have dreams of selling the big property at Tepexpam for a barracks. The government may get the barracks in these days of taking what one sees, but I doubt if the nuns will ever get the money.
December 19th.
Mexican calls all the afternoon. Mme. Bernal has a really lovely house, just done over, full of choice things. She herself is young and beautiful, in a dark-eyed, white-teethed, pallid way. Then I went to see Mercedes del Campo, whom I found, with her baby and an Indian nurse, in the palm- and eucalyptus-planted garden. She, like all the others, is young and handsome. Her husband was in the diplomatic service under Diaz, but since then has fought shy of the administration set. It’s a pity, as he would be an ornament to any service. Such beautiful English—such perfect French!
They are living in the house of their aunt, Madame Escandon, in the Puente de Alvarado, the street named after this most dashing of Cortés’ captains. It was near by that he made his famous leap in the retreat of the Noche Triste; the “dismal night,” when the Indians, witnessing his apparently miraculous escape, thought him a god. A little farther up from the Escandon house is the celebrated Palacio Bazaine or Casa de la Media Luna. It was presented, with all its luxurious furnishings, by the Emperor to Marshal Bazaine, on the day of his splendid nuptials with a beautiful Mexican. Here the Emperor and Carlota were often received, and it became the center of the fashionable life of the time. There are many stories of the extravagant and almost regal entertaining that went on there. Now all these splendors are, indeed, gone up in smoke; the stately mansion is a cigarette-factory. I never pass it without a thought of Maximilian and the “Ya es hora” of the guard who threw open the prison door of the Capuchin Convent in Querétaro on that fatal morning, and of Bazaine’s saddest of all sad ends.
The luncheon for Colonel Gage, who returns to Washington next week, went off very snappily. When I got to Chapultepec I found all my guests assembled on the veranda. I excused my lateness by saying that I had been waiting for N., who was with the President. “But the President is here!” they all cried. I said, “I wonder if he would lunch with us.” They all looked aghast, but delighted at my boldness.
I then saw Huerta approaching us through the large hall toward the veranda, with the governor of the Federal district, Corona, and a pale, dissipated, clever man—for the moment (which I imagine he is making golden) Minister of Communicaciones. I went forward with some élan, as to a charge, and invited the President to the fiesta. That small Indian hand of his waved very cordially. It is literally the velvet hand, whatever violent deeds it may have done. But he said that he had a junta of much importance; he would be delighted to accept another time, and so on. There was more shaking of velvet hands, and we went back to our expectant guests, who were decidedly disappointed. It was very pleasant, as always, on the broad veranda, looking toward the Castle, visible above the great branches of the century-old ahuehuetes.
N. had been driving with the President for an hour before lunch, and had asked him for the release of three Americans, long imprisoned here. Huerta assured him that they should all be set free, whether guilty or not, just to please him; and at six o’clock this evening the first instalment arrived at the Embassy, delivered into N.’s hands by two Federal officers. And so the work goes on. Huerta is very prime-sautier. Once before when N. had asked for the punishment of some soldiers, convicted of deeds of violence against some Americans, he responded promptly: “Who are they? Where are they? They shall all be killed!” N. protested, aghast at the possibly innocent untried sheep suffering with the guilty goats. Anything, however, to please N. in particular and the United States in general. There is really nothing that the United States couldn’t do with Huerta if they would. All concessions, all claims, pending through decades, could be satisfactorily adjusted. As it is, Huerta keeps on at his own gait, not allowing himself to be rushed or hustled by the more definite energy of the Republica del Norte, playing the game of masterly inaction and scoring, for the time being, on Washington. After all, you don’t get any “forwarder” by waving copies of the constitution in a dictator’s face. He ignores his relations with the United States, never mentioned us in his speech to Congress, and probably put the ultimatum into the waste-paper basket. I am beginning to think that, in the elegant phrasing of my native land, he is “some” dictator! The New York Sun speaks admiringly of the way in which he continues to treat Mr. O’Shaughnessy with a friendly and delicate consideration.