March 17th
Yesterday I did not write. Aunt L. arrived unexpectedly, at eight o’clock, and no one was at the station to meet her. However, all’s well that ends well, and she is now up in her red-carpeted, red-and-gold-papered, sun-flooded room, and I hope will take a good rest. By way of variety, not that I have much to choose from, I put Marius the Epicurean and The Passionate Friends on her night-table, with a single white rose. She has ridden her own situation so courageously and so wittily all these years, that I am thankful to have her here where she can turn that charming blue eye of hers, which so makes me think of yours, on my situation. When I looked into her face this morning, I quite understood why they call her the “Angel of the Isthmus.”
News from the north shows slow, but sure, disintegration of the rebel ranks. It is the old story of the house divided against itself. Also, Villa may be yielding to the Capuan-like delights of Chihuahua and hesitating to undertake a new, and perhaps inglorious, campaign against Torreon. Just how Mr. Lind takes the slump in rebels—for a slump there certainly has been—I don’t know. We are beginning to see the results of the long months of cabling his dreams to the President, who, I am sure, if he ever awakes to the real kind of bedfellows, that he has been dreaming with, will nearly die. The Washington cerebration doesn’t take in readily the kind of things that happen here. All is known about burglars, white-slave trade, wicked corporations, unfaithful stewards, defaulting Sunday-school superintendents, baseball cheats, and the like; but the murky, exotic passions that move Villa are entirely outside consciousness.
Poor, old, frightened Carranza must feel more than uneasy at the thought of that great, lowering brute in the flush of triumph, who is waiting for him on the raised dais in the government house at Chihuahua. His “cause” is dead if he listens to Villa—and he is dead if he doesn’t.
I had a call from the —— minister this morning, and a talk about the matters none of us can keep away from. He looks at politics without illusion and in a rather Bismarckian way. He says we Americans are in the act of destroying a people which is just becoming conscious of itself and could, in a few generations, become a nation; but that it never will do so, because we are going to strangle its first cry. He considers that it is a geographical and ethical necessity for us to have no armed nation between us and Panama, and if we can have the patience and the iron nerves to watch its dissolution on the lines we are now pursuing, it will be ours without a shot. But he adds that we will get nervous, as all moderns do, watching a people on the rack, and our policy will break. He added, with a smile, that nations are like women, nervous and inconsistent; and that, happily for the Mexicans and foreign Powers interested, we won’t be able to stand the strain of watching the horrors our policy would entail. I cried out against this parting shot, but he went off with an unconvinced gesture.