Mrs. Laughton, Mrs. Nuttall's daughter, gave us tea in a high-ceilinged, thick-walled room, filled with flowers and bric-à-brac, with a beautiful, very large, couple-of-centuries-old portrait of a nun Mrs. Nuttall had found in some convent looking down on us. As the poetry and beauty of that old civilization invaded me I thought, "This is what all of Mexico might be, and is not." Beautiful shell designs are over each door leading into rooms of romantic and unexpected proportions. Afterward we went down-stairs and passed through the courtyard, in one corner of which is an old well, overgrown with flowers, which has a history as dark as its depths. The body of Doña Catalina, the first wife of Cortés, is said by evilly disposed historians to have been thrown into it after a quarrel between herself and Cortés in the old near-by Palacio.
As we walked in the garden I felt some strange magic exhaling from it all, something possessing and almost imploring. There were such lights and shadows, such contours of cypress and eucalyptus, mingling with quince and pear trees. The old arbor in the carrefour is overgrown with white roses, and the rest of the garden is a mass of lilies of various kinds, heliotrope, and great tangles of trailing pink geranium and honeysuckle. Blue-flowered papyri were clustered about a microscopic, water-lilied lake, quite black in the late afternoon light. Around all was an old pink, vine-grown wall. It was the hortus inclusus of poets, and I perceived then in its fullness the dark, lovely imprint of Spain upon the lands she conquered. The English, German, French stamp on their colonies that I have seen is pale, effaceable, and doubtless would be lost immediately once the power is withdrawn. But this Spanish stamp has a deathless beauty, and in all the washings of all the generations it does not seem to come out or off.
I stay at home a good deal. It is so pleasant—and after so many years of the concurrences, of the displacements, the hastes and excitements of the great world, how I love this full leisure! After all, what is needed to make life interesting, I am discovering, is not action, but atmosphere, and that I have here.
The President is very ill. I am deeply disappointed that our audience has to be put off. I want to see the old régime, now decidedly tottering, in its accustomed setting. It appears he has an ulcerated tooth, and there can be no receptions, formal or informal, in the present state of affairs. Indeed, I have not seen "hide or hair" of any of the actual government. Doña Carmen, of whom I hear so many tales of goodness and tact, combined with the charming elegance of a woman of the world, seems adored by high and low, and is very Catholic. The not too drastic enforcement of the famous "Laws of Reform" is said to be due to her influence.
I have been looking into the history of Mexico since the "Independence"—to try to get some sort of a "line" on governmental psychology. So much bloodshed has always attended a change of government here.
First came men like the priest Hidalgo and Morelos, his disciple, men of burning hearts and flaming souls. Then appeared a set of what to-day we would call intellectuals: Comonfort, Lerdo, Juarez are types. The long reign of Diaz was preceded by all sorts of upheavals, in which any one who had anything to do with government lost his life.
However, all this concerned the Mexicans alone. But now, with disorders menacing huge foreign interests, a new element of discord and complication comes in. As the generations renew themselves with certainty and promptness, in the end the blow to things industrial is the most serious; and don't think me heartless for stating this simple, cruel truth. Diaz seems at last pushed to the wall, and, of course, with him many foreign interests, which I understand are vital to the life of the country. He has had much wisdom, but the gods seem to have withheld knowledge of the very practical recommendation of one of the old philosophers about succumbing in time. He is supposed, however, to have promised his resignation, if his conscience lets him. He fears anarchy, and, of course, he knows his people very, very well.
Even I, stranger and alien, have a sort of feeling that if this revolution proves successful the "liberties" of the Mexican people will, as usual, get lost in the mêlée. Giuseppe Garibaldi is said to have received the sword from old General Navarro, when he gave it up at Juarez. Can courtesy to foreigners be carried further? The Boston Evening Transcript had an amusing bit, particularly so to me, saying the difficulty of finding out what is happening in Mexico is that of telling which are the names of the generals and which those of the towns.
May 22d.
I am at home to-morrow, Tuesday, for the first time, to whomever it may concern, taking the day every other week, as seems the custom here. Besides getting settled I have begun laying siege to the Spanish language with my dictionary and my special system; I must learn to read it immediately. An old copy of De Solis is what I am "at" now, Historia de la Conquista de Mexico, printed in Amsterdam, beautifully bound in red leather with gold tooling, dedicated al Serenísimo Señor Maximiliano Emanuel Duque de las Dos Bavieras. I gloated over its title-page, and its "chaste and elegant style" makes easy reading.