October 5th.
This morning I went up to Chapultepec to say good-by to Madame Madero. As I drove up the winding way in the white morning the flowers were shining softly along the embankments, the trees were feathery, unsubstantial, the birds singing "like to burst their little throats." It might have been the road to Paradise instead of to the abode of care.
I went in through the great iron gate, the guard saluting, across the flat, stone terrace where some cadets were at drill, and got out at the glass doors leading up to the big stairway. The President was standing there as I drove up, his auto waiting to take him to the palace to a Cabinet meeting. I thought he looked slightly—very slightly—troubled, though I had a feeling that his head was still in the morning clouds of the dazzling day. He wished me a bon voyage and prompt retour and drove away. Our personal relations with them both have always been most friendly.[66]
I imagine there has been little or no change in his psychology along the lines of practical statecraft. His true habitat is the world of fancy, where he feels himself protected and led on by benign powers as definitely as was Tobias by the angel. A state of mind like that can be very compelling, and he may witness what the unkind say is his pet ambition—his own apotheosis.
The dim progression of Mexican events seems to have left his spirits untouched, though his fleshly being must be a mass of black-and-blue spots from the hard facts he bumps into. "One man with a dream at pleasure," but I felt like leaving him a pocket edition of Le Prince.
I thought Madame Madero showed the strain of that climb from obscurity and prison up the via triumphalis to the presidential peaks. The flood of morning light, as we sat on the terrace, did not spare her worn and anxious face. I have an idea that she is very practical, but it is not her practicality, but her husband's dreams, that brought them to Chapultepec. It's a situation to discourage common sense.
She was, as always, courteous and friendly, but a puzzled look was on her face, and I felt that there were questions that she would have liked to put to me, that the circumstances forbade. We spoke of the work she is just now especially interested in, for the amelioration of the Mexican woman's lot—the organizing of the lace and embroidery industry, à la Queen Elena, in Italy, several years ago. There is a really lovely product here, the drawn linen work—deshilados, it is called—introduced by the Spaniards and practised through generations in cloisters and religious schools.
She told me that in Puerto Rico one hundred thousand women had been organized, and she wanted to do the same here, asking me if I could not interest people in New York in the industry.
I felt how frail her body, but how determined her will as we embraced in the dazzling morning. About us was the perfume of the rare and lovely shrubs of the patio, the splash of the fountain, the singing of birds, the lustrous hills, the shining volcanoes; that crystal air enfolded us, closer than human touch, but beneath us was the restless city and the shifting will of the Mexican people.
On board the Mexico in Vera Cruz Harbor.
October 10th.