Madero's expression this afternoon was extraordinary. There was a kind of illumination of the plain, indefinite features, and he seemed scarcely to be walking with the sons of men. He had a smile which, without being fixed, was always there, and he talked a great deal, and quite freely, to various receptive plenipotentiaries.
Madame Madero was simple and dignified, but under it all I fancy something passionate and resolute. The diplomats were out in force, but there was very little else to the reception. A few unlabeled outlying Mexican nondescripts came, and some of the Cabinet ministers. Carmona, chef du protocole, and Nervo, the Second Introducer of Ambassadors, did what they could; but it was only too apparent that various essential elements of the national body-politic were lacking.
Madame Madero had on some sort of somber brocade with a hint of jewel sparkling in her lace jabot, and received in the big Sala de los Embajadores. After greeting her, however, we went out to the terrace, where such wonders were going on in the heavens that man for the moment seemed indeed dust. Great bodies of clouds in the form of a vast rose-colored throng, which Madero ought properly to have been with, were taking their way across the western sky, and purple shadows began to come up from the valley, enveloping the city as we watched what I can only call the "orb of day" disappear behind the hills. Madero strikes me as being rather a type apart, not specially Mexican, but such a type as appears in strange moments of the history of the nation to which it belongs.
November 25th.
Waiting for lunch after a most delightful morning in the park with Baroness R. and the French and Belgian ministers. I don't know if it was Marina's[25] spirit, which, according to the Indian tradition, still slips among the cypresses, or other unrecorded ghosts; but as we walked through the Calzada de los Poetas and los Filósofos, the matchless sun filtering through the branches of the old ahuehuetes, their bronzy hue the only sign of winter one can note here, we all succumbed to some enchantment.
There is a moss-hung cypress near one of the little lakes, called the Arbol de Moctezuma. It, with the Noche Triste tree, witnessed the fall of the Aztec Empire. There still remains an old inscription on a walled-in spring, marking the terminus of the Aztec aqueduct which brought drinking-water to Montezuma's capital from Chapultepec. The inscription, which I have sometimes dallied by, says the aqueduct was renovated in 1571 by the fourth viceroy. It faces the dustiest of tramway lines now, but one is thankful for any writing on any wall that gives a clue to the past.
Near the great tree is "Montezuma's Bath," where the water still bubbles up, only now the sprucest and most modern of flower-beds encircle it. This is the special haunt of Marina, but it is said that when an Indian has seen her at the ahuehuete pond he himself is seen no more.
We sauntered about for a while listening to the music, and then the gentlemen proposed rowing Baroness R. and myself about in the tiny boats that are for hire. Once out from under the trees, one became modern and completely objective, and Mr. Lefaivre and I discussed European diplomatic appointments of his and my governments as we rowed about on the shallow, artificial lakes under the hottest of suns, between the made lands of the new section of the park.
But every time we passed under the little bridge into the dimness of the narrow, tree-and-vine-grown banks of the little stream leading from two sides of the duck-pond, even though the band played a waltz from "The Balkan Princess," and a selection of "Lohengrin," and children were shouting and motors coming and going, that magic fell upon us. I didn't know if it were Aztec or Spanish ghosts, or spirits of the heroes of 1847, who assailed me.
One thing is sure. Those old ahuehuetes keep everything that was ever confided to them and trap the unwary with it. At this season, too, one begins to see familiar migratory birds come to pass the cold season in Mexico, recalling with a note of homesickness the distant land of one's birth. A "ruby-crowned kinglet" was perched on a low branch by the water—and some kind of a "warbler" was warbling New England lays all over the ancient park.