I shall never forget my first experience of Latin-American revolutions. It was a beautiful May afternoon, now nearly three years ago, when a howling mob of several thousands went through the streets, shouting “Death to Diaz!” finally collecting in the Zocalo under the windows of the apartment in the Palacio Nacional, where Diaz was lying with a badly ulcerated tooth and jaw. Two days later, in the wee, small hours, the once-feared, adored, all-powerful, great man of Mexico, with the immediate members of his family, was smuggled on board a train secretly provided by Mr. Brown, under the escort of Huerta, and was taken to Vera Cruz. From there he embarked on the Ypiranga, to join other kings in exile, having said good-by, probably forever, to the land of his triumphs and glories. It was touch and go with him during those days, and he had created modern Mexico out of blood and chaos.
When Madero is put out—in the almost automatic fashion by which governments are overthrown in Latin America—we refuse to recognize the man who, by armed force, put him out, as he himself got in. Put a revolution in the slot and out comes a President. We isolate Huerta; we cut him off completely from the help of other nations; we destroy his credit; we tell him he must go, because we tolerate no man coming to power through bloodshed. Huerta, it appears, was amusing but unquotable about the recognition of Peru, saying in part that both he and Benavides were military leaders, and that both executed a coup d’état resulting in the overthrow of the existing government. In Peru the révolution du palais cost the lives of eight functionaries, among them the Ministers of War and Marine, the exile of President Billinghurst, and ended in the setting up of a junta government. As for the Peruvians themselves, they are said to have had the vertigo, they were recognized so suddenly—and so unexpectedly.
You will remember that months ago we gave asylum for a week to Manuel Bonilla, and then conveyed him to Vera Cruz, under dramatic circumstances, on his promise not to join the rebels. Well, he joined the rebels as quickly as time and space would allow, and we read in this morning’s newspaper that he has now been jailed by Carranza for plotting against him. I suppose he got dissatisfied with what he was getting out of the rebels, and tried something subversive that looked promising. If Carranza gets any kind of proof against him—or probably without it—he will execute him some morning, in the dawn. Oh, the thousands of men who have walked out in the chilly, pale, Mexican dawn to render their last accounts!
March 17th.
Yesterday I did not write. Aunt L. arrived unexpectedly, at eight o’clock, and no one was at the station to meet her. However, all’s well that ends well, and she is now up in her red-carpeted, red-and-gold-papered, sun-flooded room, and I hope will take a good rest. By way of variety, not that I have much to choose from, I put Marius the Epicurean and The Passionate Friends on her night-table, with a single white rose. She has ridden her own situation so courageously and so wittily all these years, that I am thankful to have her here where she can turn that charming blue eye of hers, which so makes me think of yours, on my situation. When I looked into her face this morning, I quite understood why they call her the “Angel of the Isthmus.”
News from the north shows slow, but sure, disintegration of the rebel ranks. It is the old story of the house divided against itself. Also, Villa may be yielding to the Capuan-like delights of Chihuahua and hesitating to undertake a new, and perhaps inglorious, campaign against Torreon. Just how Mr. Lind takes the slump in rebels—for a slump there certainly has been—I don’t know. We are beginning to see the results of the long months of cabling his dreams to the President, who, I am sure, if he ever awakes to the real kind of bedfellows, that he has been dreaming with, will nearly die. The Washington cerebration doesn’t take in readily the kind of things that happen here. All is known about burglars, white-slave trade, wicked corporations, unfaithful stewards, defaulting Sunday-school superintendents, baseball cheats, and the like; but the murky, exotic passions that move Villa are entirely outside consciousness.
Poor, old, frightened Carranza must feel more than uneasy at the thought of that great, lowering brute in the flush of triumph, who is waiting for him on the raised dais in the government house at Chihuahua. His “cause” is dead if he listens to Villa—and he is dead if he doesn’t.
I had a call from the —— minister this morning, and a talk about the matters none of us can keep away from. He looks at politics without illusion and in a rather Bismarckian way. He says we Americans are in the act of destroying a people which is just becoming conscious of itself and could, in a few generations, become a nation; but that it never will do so, because we are going to strangle its first cry. He considers that it is a geographical and ethical necessity for us to have no armed nation between us and Panama, and if we can have the patience and the iron nerves to watch its dissolution on the lines we are now pursuing, it will be ours without a shot. But he adds that we will get nervous, as all moderns do, watching a people on the rack, and our policy will break. He added, with a smile, that nations are like women, nervous and inconsistent; and that, happily for the Mexicans and foreign Powers interested, we won’t be able to stand the strain of watching the horrors our policy would entail. I cried out against this parting shot, but he went off with an unconvinced gesture.
March 19th.
Yesterday we went to Chapultepec for the fiançailles of the second son of Huerta and the daughter of General Hernandez, now at the front. It was a large gathering, at which many elements of the old society were present. The powerful, wealthy, chic Rincon Gaillardo clan are playing the part in the Huerta government that the Escandons did in the Diaz régime—a work of amalgamation, though they consistently boycotted the Madero régime. Of course, there were many “curiosities.” The two spinster sisters of Huerta were there with their flat, strong Indian faces and thick, dark wigs or hair, naturally steered one of them toward old gold for a costume, and the other toward shot blue and red; but they were dignified and smiling. Señora Blanquet is another curiosity. Blanquet himself is one of the handsomest and most distingué-looking elderly men I have ever seen; but his wife, was squat, and flat-faced, and very dark, seeming to have come out of some long-hidden corner of his history. Madame Huerta looked very handsome and amiable in a good dress of white silk veiled with fine, black lace, the famous big, round diamond hung by a slender chain about her neck.