This, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way I feel when I put on evening clothes myself, which I do at least twice out of my every three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. No born American could feel that way about his own dress coat. He sometimes thinks he does; he often—and isn’t it boresome?—pretends he does. But he really doesn’t. As a matter of unimportant fact, the born American may have “dressed” every evening of his grown up life. But if he found himself on an isolated, played out Mexican coffee and vanilla finca, with a wife, four children, a tiled roof that leaked whenever there was a norther, an unveiled sala, through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for making any, no prospects and no cook—under these depressing circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an American dressing for dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of ghastly humor.
With the Trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony and humor had nothing to do. The Trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun (so, I feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of the nutritious potato family), but humor, when they didn’t recognize it, bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred, when they did.
Trawnbeigh had come over to Mexico—“come out from England,” he would have expressed it—as a kind of secretary to his cousin, Sir Somebody Something, who was building a harbor or a railway or a canal (I don’t believe Trawnbeigh himself ever knew just what it was) for a British company down in the hot country.
Mrs. Trawnbeigh, with her young, was to follow on the next steamer a month later; and as she was in mid-ocean when Sir Somebody suddenly died of yellow fever, she did not learn of this inopportune event until it was too late to turn back. Still, I doubt whether she would have turned back if she could. For, as Trawnbeigh once explained to me, at a time when they literally hadn’t enough to eat (a hailstorm had not only destroyed his coffee crop but had frozen the roots of most of his trees, and the price of vanilla had fallen from ten cents a bean to three and a half), leaving England at all had necessitated “burning their bridges behind them.” He did not tell me the nature of their bridges nor whether they had made much of a blaze. In fact, that one, vague, inflammatory allusion was the nearest approach to a personal confidence Trawnbeigh was ever known to make in all his fifteen years of Mexican life.
The situation, when he met Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the children on the dock at Vera Cruz, was extremely dreary, and at the end of a month it had grown much worse, although the Trawnbeighs apparently didn’t think so. They even spoke and wrote as if their affairs were looking up a bit. For, after a few weeks of visiting among kindly compatriots at Vera Cruz and Rebozo, Mrs. Trawnbeigh became cook for some English engineers (there were seven of them) in a sizzling, mosquitoey, feverish mudhole on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
The Trawnbeighs didn’t call it cook! Neither did the seven engineers. I don’t believe the engineers even thought of it as cook. What Mrs. Trawnbeigh thought of it will never be known. How could they, when that lady, after feeding the four little Trawnbeighs (or rather the four young Trawnbeighs; they had never been little) a meal I think they called “the nursery tea,” managed every afternoon, within the next two hours, first, to create out of nothing a perfectly edible dinner for nine persons, and, secondly, to receive them all at seven forty-five, in a red-striped, lemon satin ball gown (it looked like poisonous wall paper), eleven silver bangles, a cameo necklace, with an ostrich tip sprouting from the top of her head?
Trawnbeigh, too, was in evening clothes; and they didn’t call it cooking; they spoke of it as “looking after the mess” or “keeping an eye on the young chaps’ livers.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Trawnbeigh, daughter of the late, the Honorable Cyril Cosby Godolphin Dundas and the late Clare Walpurga Emmeline Moate, cooked—and cooked hard—for almost a year; at the end of which time she was stricken with what she was pleased to refer to as “a bad go of fevah.”
Fortunately they were spared having to pass around the hat, although it would have amounted to that if Trawnbeigh hadn’t, after the pleasant English fashion, “come into some money.” In the United States, people know to a cent what they may expect to inherit; and then they sometimes don’t get it. But in England there seems to be an endless succession of retired and unmarried army officers who die every little while in Jermyn Street and leave two thousand pounds to a distant relative they have never met. Something like this happened to Trawnbeigh, and on the prospect of his legacy he was able to pull out of the Tehuantepec mudhole and restore his wife to her usual state of health in the pure and bracing air of Rebozo.
Various things can be done with two thousand pounds, but just what shall be done ought to depend very largely on whether they happen to be one’s first two thousand or one’s last. Trawnbeigh, however, invested his (“interred” would be a more accurate term) quite as if they never would be missed. The disposition to be a country gentleman was in Trawnbeigh’s blood. Indeed, the first impression one received from the family was that everything they did was in their blood. It never seemed to me that Trawnbeigh had immediately sunk the whole of his little fortune in the old, small, and dilapidated coffee finca so much because he was dazzled by the glittering financial future the shameless owner (another Englishman, by the way) predicted for him, as because to own an estate and live on it was, so to speak, his natural element.
He had tried, while Mrs. Trawnbeigh was cooking on the Isthmus, to get something to do. But there was really nothing in Mexico he could do. He was splendidly strong, and, in the United States, he very cheerfully and with no loss of self-respect or point of view would have temporarily shoveled wheat or coal, or driven a team, or worked on the street force, as many another Englishman of noble lineage has done before and since, but in the tropics an Anglo-Saxon cannot be a day laborer. He can’t because he can’t.