November 18th
To-morrow Huerta and his señora are to receive at Chapultepec, the first time they will have made use of the official presidential dwelling. They are moving from the rented house in the Calle Liverpool to one of their own, a simple enough affair in the Mexican style, one story with a patio, in an unfashionable quarter.
As we are still “accredited,” I think we ought to go, there being no reason why we should offer to Señora Huerta the disrespect of staying away.
When we arrived in Mexico, beautiful Doña Carmen Diaz was presiding; then came Señora de la Barra, newly married, sweet-faced, and smiling; followed by Señora Madero, earnest, pious, passionate. Now Señora Huerta is the “first lady”—all in two years and a half. The dynasties have a way of telescoping in these climes.
The invitation to the opening of Congress to-morrow has just come in—exactly as if the United States had not decided that no such Congress should be convened and its acts be considered null and void.
Elim told me to-day that all the children he plays with have gone away—“afraid of the revolution,” he added, in a matter-of-fact voice. He expects to die with me if “war” does come, and is quite satisfied with his fate.
The details of Garza Aldape’s demission have come in. His resignation was accepted by Huerta in the friendliest manner. He concluded the conversation, however, by telling Aldape the Espagne was sailing on Monday, and that he had better leave on Sunday morning, so as to be sure not to miss it. This being late Saturday evening, Garza Aldape demurred, saying his family had no trunks. The President assured him that he himself would see that he got all he needed. Subsequently he sent Aldape a number of large and handsome receptacles. Madame G. A. received a hand-bag with luxurious fittings, and 20,000 francs oro in it! The “old man” has a royal manner of doing things on some occasions; and then again he becomes the Indian, inscrutable, unfathomable to us, and violent and high-handed to his own people—whom he knows so very well.
The reception at Chapultepec, yesterday, was most interesting. As we drove through the Avenida de los Insurgentes up the Paseo toward the “Hill of the Grasshopper” the windows of the castle were a blaze of light high up against the darkening sky.
On our last visit to Chapultepec,5 Madero and Pino Suarez were there, and shades of the murdered ones began to accost me as I appeared on the terrace. One of the glittering presidential aides, however, sprang to give me his arm, and in a moment I was passing into the familiar Salon de Embajadores, to find Señora Huerta installed on the equally familiar gilt-and-pink brocaded sofa placed across the farther end. She has been a very handsome woman, with fine eyes and brow, and has now a quiet, dignified, and rather serious expression. She was dressed in a tight-fitting princess gown of red velvet, with white satin guimp and black glacé kid gloves. She has had thirteen children, most of whom seemed to be present on this, their first appearance in an official setting. The daughters, married and unmarried, and their friends receiving with them, made quite a gathering in themselves. As I looked around, after saluting Señora Huerta, the big room seemed almost entirely filled with small, thick-busted women, with black hair parted on one side over low, heavy brows, and held down by passementerie bandeaux; well-slippered, very tiny feet, were much in evidence. None of the “aristocrats” were there, but el Cuerpo, was out in full force.
The President came at about six o’clock, walking quickly into the room as the national air was played, and we all arose. It was the first time I had seen him. N. presented me, and we three stood talking, in the middle of the room, while everybody watched “America and Mexico.”
Huerta is a short, broad-shouldered man of strong Indian type, with an expression at once serious, amiable, and penetrating; he has restless, vigilant eyes, screened behind large glasses, and shows no signs of the much-talked-of alcoholism. Instead, he looked like a total abstainer. I was much impressed by a certain underlying force whose momentum may carry him to recognition—now the great end of all.
I felt myself a bit “quivery” at the thought of the war-cloud hanging over these people, and of how the man dominating the assembly took his life in his hands at his every appearance, and was apparently resolved to die rather than cede one iota to my country. After the usual greetings, “a los pies de Vd. señora” (“at your feet, señora”), etc., he remarked, with a smile, that he was sorry I should find things still a little strained on my return, but that he hoped for a way out of the very natural difficulties. I answered rather ambiguously, so far as he is concerned, that I loved Mexico and didn’t want to leave it. I felt my eyes fill over the potentialities of the situation, whereupon he answered, as any gentleman, anywhere in the world, might have done, that now that la señora had returned things might be arranged! After this he gave his arm to Madame Ortega, wife of the Guatemalan minister, the ranking wife of the Spanish minister being ill, and Madame Lefaivre not yet arrived. Señor Ortega gave me his arm, and we all filed out into the long, narrow gallery, la Vitrina, overlooking the city and the wondrous valley, where an elaborate tea was served. The President reached across the narrow table to me to touch my glass of champagne, as the usual saludes were beginning, and I found he was drinking to the health of the “Gran Nación del Norte.” Could I do less than answer “Viva Mexico”?
After tea, music—the photograph fiends taking magnesium snap-shots of Señora Huerta and the dark-browed beauties clustering around, with an incidental head or arm of some near-by diplomat. Madame Ortega then got up to say good-by, and after making our adieux we passed out on to the beautiful flower- and palm-planted terrace. Again, in the dim light the memory of Madero and Pino Suarez assailed me rather reproachfully. It was a curious presentment of human destinies, played out on the stage of the mysterious valley of Anahuac, which seems often a strange astral emanation of a world, rather than actual hills and plains. A mysterious correspondence between things seen and unseen is always making itself felt, and now, in this space between two destinies, I felt more than ever the fathomlessness of events. Other “kings” were dead, and this one could not “long live.”
Afterward we played bridge at Madame Simon’s with the chicheria there assembled. It seemed very banal. All the guests, however, turned their handsome faces and rustled their handsome clothes as I entered, and in a detached sort of way asked how it had all gone off—this, the first official reception of their President.
To-day Congress opens, and N. does not attend. I am glad, in the interests of the dove of peace, that we went to the reception yesterday. The officials will realize there is nothing personal in to-day’s absence.
Last night there was a pleasant dinner at the Cardens’, who are now settled at the comfortable Legation. They are very nice to us, but I feel that Sir L. is naturally much chagrined at the unmeritedly adverse press comments he has had in the United States. We all shivered in our evening dresses, in spite of the rare joy of an open fire in the long drawing-room. There is a thin, penetrating, unsparing sort of chill in these November evenings, in houses meant only for warm weather. I should have enjoyed wearing my motor coat instead of the gray-and-silver Worth dress.
The British cruiser squadron under Admiral Cradock sailed last night for Vera Cruz, which is packed to overflowing with people from here. The prices, “twelve hours east and a mile and a half down,” are fabulous. One woman, so her husband told me, pays ten dollars a day at the Diligencias for a room separated only by a curtain from an electric pump, which goes day and night.
Villa has made a formal declaration that, owing to Carranza’s inactivity, he assumes the leadership of the rebellion, which is the first, but very significant, hint of two parties in the north: Huerta is very pleased, it appears, and is looking forward to seeing them eat each other up like the proverbial lions of the desert. A few “lost illusions” will doubtless stalk the Washington streets and knock at a door or two.
Well, another Sabbath has passed and we are still here. Burnside is up from Vera Cruz. He says we can’t back down, and war seems inevitable. It will take the United States one hundred years to make Mexico into what we call a civilized country, during which process most of its magnetic charm will go. The Spanish imprint left in the wonderful frame of Mexico is among the beauties of the universe. Every pink belfry against every blue hill reminds one of it; every fine old façade, unexpectedly met as one turns a quiet street corner; in fact, all the beauty in Mexico except that of the natural world—is the Spaniards’ and the Indians’. Poor Indians!
I have been reading accounts of the deportation of the Yaquis from Sonora to Yucatan, the wordless horrors of the march, the separation of families. I can’t go into it now; it is one of the long-existent abuses that Madero, at first, was eager to abate. Volumes could be written about it. Another crying shame is the condition of the prisons. Belem, here in town, is an old building erected toward the end of the seventeenth century, and used as an asylum of some kind ever since. Much flotsam and jetsam has been washed up at its doors, though I don’t know that the word “washed” is in any sense suitable. When one thinks that a few hundred pesos’ of bichloride of lime and some formaldehyde gas would clean up the vermin-infested corners and check the typhus epidemics, one can scarcely refrain from taking the stuff there oneself. It seems so simple, but it is all bound up so inextricably with the general laisser-aller of the nation. No one is in Belem three days without contracting an itching skin disease, and a large proportion of the prisoners there, as well as at Santiago, near by, are political, journalists, lawyers, et al., who are used to some measure of cleanliness. The Penitenciaría is their show prison, built on modern principles, and compares favorably with the best in the United States.
Yesterday we lunched with the Ösi-Sanz. He is an agreeable, clever, musical Hungarian, married to a handsome young Mexican, widow of an Iturbide. In their charming rooms are many Maximilian souvenirs that he has ferreted out here; big portraits of the emperor and Carlota look down from the blue walls of the very artistic salon, and a large copy of the picture of the deputation headed by Estrada, which went to Miramar to offer Maximilian the imperial and fatal crown. Vitrines are filled with Napoleon and Maximilian porcelain, and they have some beautiful old Chinese vases. In the viceregal days these were much prized, being brought up from the Pacific coast on the backs of Indian runners. Afterward, we had bridge at the Corcuera-Pimentels—another smart young Mexican ménage. Their house, too, is charming, full of choice things, beautifully and sparingly placed; the rooms would be lovely anywhere. Then home, where I looked over that depressing book, Barbarous Mexico.
In Huerta’s speech before Congress on the 20th, he makes use of the famous words of Napoleon—“The law is not violated if the country be saved.” We all wondered how he fished it up!
There is a cartoon reproduced in The Literary Digest, which I am sending you. In it Uncle Sam is saying to President Wilson, “It’s no use, Woody; you can’t pet a porcupine,” the porcupine being Huerta, in the background, sitting near a bit of cactus. Some London papers call Huerta the “Mexican Cromwell.” His speech, putting patriotism and morality above expediency, evidently made a hit.