Mr. Doheny, the pioneer of the industry, has had one of those careers only possible to the man of genius. He appeared on the scene of the future oil-drama (the state of Vera Cruz),[46] looked about him, installed a plant of many millions, and when he was ready, the oil gushed up—a sort of twentieth century striking of the rock—to say nothing of Moses.
Lord Cowdray's enterprise was not less spectacular nor less profitable. Nature did not, however, wait on his preparedness, for suddenly from his lands the greatest oil-well in the world, Las Dos Bocas, gushed out, and for months burned upward in a great column of smoke and fire, and flowed out to the sea, a burning waste of light and heat, before it could be capped.
Now that modern-sounding thing, an oleoduct, carries a vast stream from one of the other great wells (Potrero del Llano) to Tampico, to the sea, where navies and merchant-ships await it, and we have begun a new era in the mechanical activity of the world.
Mr. Walker enlivened it all with amusing tales of Indian laborers and their ways when driven by Anglo-Saxons who suffer not the word mañana. Underneath it is the beat of world-passions and world-needs, and Mexico, lovely and uncertain, finds herself at once the stage of mighty interests—and their battle-ground.
After dinner we betook ourselves to the big living-room, where the phonograph was turned on, giving forth such national lyrics as "You Have Another Papa on the Salt Lake Line," and "My Wife's Gone to the Country, Hurray, Hurray!" The nearest we got to the classics was the air from "Martha."
Burnside drove us home, after a turn in the dim, mysterious park. The immense and splendid "Ship" was stretching low across the starry heavens, and there were great spaces of intensest black between the groupings of the constellations. These stars, under which I was not born, have a strange and quieting influence on me. One cannot look other than with stillness and awe on their luminous rhythm, compared to the restless and confused "who knows whence, whither, or what" of the Indian destinies they shine on. All that "vast and wondering dream of night" which "rolls on above our tears."
Mr. J. B. P. gives a big luncheon at the Villa des Roses to-day, and has sent me the list to seat. You see that we do move about, though somewhat warily, in these regions of political quicksands.
The ambassador has always had the gravest doubts as to Madero's competency. Nothing any of us have seen, up to now, has been encouraging. It is one thing to inflame a country by promises of everything to everybody; it's another thing to rebuild a state, as he set out to do, from ruins, or even to sustain law and order, as he knew it, and benefited by it, in his youth. That dreamy face of his makes me think of the school-boy's definition of an abstract noun, "something you can't see," and those hands, with their soft and kindly gestures, are so unfitted for grappling with this special Leviathan—and consequences are pitiless. Alas for the peu de politique et beaucoup d'administration of Diaz!
