Chapter XII

A few days ago a friend of mine in writing to me from home said in his letter: “I notice that now and then you refer casually to ‘an American man’ or ‘an English woman who lives here,’ and although I know there must be Americans and English living in Mexico as well as everywhere else, it always gives me a feeling of incredulity to hear that there are. I suppose I ought merely to consider the fact that you are there and then multiply you by a hundred or a thousand--or ten thousand perhaps; I have no idea, of course, how many. But to tell the truth I never altogether believe that _you_ go to Mexico when you say you do. You go somewhere, but is it really Mexico? Why _should_ anyone go to Mexico? It seems such a perverse--such a positively morbid thing to do. And then, the address--that impossible address you leave behind you! Honestly, are there any Americans and English down there (or is it ‘up’ or ‘across’ or ‘over’--I literally have forgotten just where it is), and if so, why are they there? What are they like? How do they amuse themselves?”

When I read his letter I recalled an evening several years ago at my brother’s coffee place--sixty miles from anywhere in particular. As it was in winter, or the “dry season,” it had been raining (I don’t exaggerate), with but one or two brief intermissions, for twenty-four days. In that part of the republic the chief difference between the dry season and the rainy lies in the fact that during the rainy season it rains with much regularity for a few hours every afternoon and during the dry season it rains with even greater regularity all the time. As the river was swollen and unfordable we had not been able for days to send to the village--an hour’s ride away--for provisions. Meat, of course, we did not have. In a tropical and iceless country, unless one can have fresh meat every day, one does not have it at all. We had run out of potatoes, we had run out of bread (baker’s bread in Mexico is good everywhere)--we had run out of flour. There were twenty-five or thirty chickens roosting on a convenient tree, but in our foolish, improvident way we had allowed ourselves to become fond of the chickens and I have an incorrigible prejudice against eating anything that has engaged my affections when in life. So we dined on a tin of sardines, some chile verde and a pile of tortillas, which are not bad when patted thin and toasted to a crisp. Probably because there were forty thousand pounds of excellent coffee piled up in sacks on the piazza, we washed down this banquet with draughts of Sir Thomas Lipton’s mediocre tea. The evening was cold--as bitterly cold as it can be only in a thoroughly tropical country when the temperature drops to forty-three and a screaming wind is forcing the rain through spaces between the tiles overhead. We had also run out of petroleum, and the flames of the candles on the dinner table were more often than not blue and horizontal. But somehow we dined with great gayety and talked all the time. I remember how my brother summoned Concha the cook, and courteously attracted her attention to the fact that she had evidently dropped the teapot on the untiled kitchen floor--that the spout was clogged with mud and that it did not “wish to pour,” and how he again summoned her for the purpose of declaring that the three dead wasps he had just fished out of the chile no doubt accounted perfectly for its unusually delicious flavor. We had scarcely anything to eat, but socially the dinner was a great success. Immediately afterwards we both went to bed--each with a reading candle, a book and a hot-water bag. After half an hour’s silence my brother irrelevantly exclaimed:

“What very agreeable people one runs across in queer, out-of-the-way places!”

“Who on earth are you thinking of now?” I inquired.

“Why, I was thinking of _us_!” he placidly replied, and went on with his reading.

Perhaps we had been agreeable. At any rate we were in a queer out-of-the-way place, that is if any place is queer and out of the way, which I am beginning rather to doubt. Since then I have often remembered that evening--how, just before it grew dark, the tattered banana trees writhed like gigantic seaweed in the wind, and the cold rain hissed from the spouts on the roof in graceful, crystal tubes. Here and there the light of a brazero in a laborer’s bamboo hut flared for an instant through the coffee trees. On the piazza, the tired Indians, shivering in their flimsy, cotton garments, had covered themselves with matting and empty coffee sacks and were trying to sleep. In the kitchen doorway a very old, white-bearded man was improvising poetry--sometimes sentimental, sometimes heroic, sometimes obscene--to a huddled and enthralled audience all big hats, crimson blankets, and beautiful eyes. Apart from this group, Saturnino was causing a jarana to throb in a most syncopated, minor, and emotional fashion. A jarana is a primitive guitar whose sounding board consists usually of an armadillo’s shell. (Poor Saturnino! He is now in indefinite solitary confinement for having, apropos of nothing except a slip of a girl, disemboweled one of his neighbors with a machete. And he was such a gentle, thoughtful creature! I don’t quite understand it.) During dinner we discussed, among other things, Tolstoi’s “War and Peace” which we had just finished, and while agreeing that it was the greatest novel we had ever read or ever expected to read (an opinion I still possess), we did not agree about Tolstoi’s characteristically cocksure remarks on the subject of predestination and freedom of the will. As neither of us had studied philosophy we were unable to command the special terminology--the specific jargon that always makes a philosophic discussion seem so profound, and our colloquial efforts to express ourselves were at times piquant. In the midst of it a tarantula slithered across the tablecloth and I squashed him with a candlestick as he was about to disappear over the table’s edge. Of course we disputed as to whether or not, in the original conception of the universe, God had sketched the career of the tarantula in its relation to that of the candlestick and mine, and--yes, on looking back, I feel sure we were both very agreeable.

But what I imagine I am trying to get at is that I have so often wonderingly contrasted the general scene with our being there at all, and then have remembered the simple, prosaic circumstances that had placed us in the midst of it. In a way, it is a pity one _can_ remember such things; the act renders it so impossible to pose to oneself as picturesque. And, furthermore, it tends to shake one’s belief in the picturesqueness of one’s American and English acquaintances. (Perhaps I mean “romance” rather than picturesqueness, for compared to the fatuity of importing picturesqueness into Mexico, the carrying of coals to Newcastle would be a stroke of commercial genius.) At first there seems to be something romantic about all of one’s compatriots who live in small Mexican towns, or on far-away ranches, plantations, fincas, haciendas--or whatever their property happens to be called. To the newly arrived there is a sort of thrill merely in the fashion in which they take their florid, pictorial environment for granted. I shall not forget my first New Year’s Day in Mexico.

Until the day before, I had never been in the country, and there was something ecstatic in the vividness of not only the day as a whole, but of every detail of color, form, temperature, personality, and conversation. It seemed as if everything in turn leaped out and seized hold of me, and now, long afterwards, I recall it as one of those marvelous days without either half tones or perspective, on which every separate fact is brilliant, and all are of equal importance. Only once since then has Mexico had just the same memorable effect upon me, and that was one night in the little plaza of Jalapa when, as the front doors of the cathedral swung open and the crowd within swarmed down the steps in the moonlight, the band abruptly crashed into the bullfightingest part of “Carmen.”

In the tepid, springlike afternoon I pushed back a five-barred gate, and through a pasture, where horses stopped grazing to snuff at me, over a wall of piled stones covered with heliotrope, I strolled up between banana trees to a yellow, stucco-covered house on the hillside. The way to the piazza was through a tunnel of pale-yellow roses with pink centers and on the piazza was an American lady, an American gentleman, a great many languorous-looking chairs, and two gallons of eggnog in a bowl of Indian pottery. All of the small Anglo-Saxon colony and a few others had been asked to drop in during the afternoon, but I was the first to arrive, and I remember that the necessary interchange of commonplace civilities with my hosts, the talk of mutual acquaintances on the boat from New York and the answering of questions about weather and politics in the United States, seemed unspeakably shallow to one suddenly confronted by so exquisite and sublime a view. For the view from the piazza, I hasten to add by way of justifying two words so opposite in suggestion, was, I afterwards learned, characteristic of the mountainous, tropical parts of Mexico, and, like most of the views there, combined both the grandeur, the awfulness of space and height--of eternal, untrodden snows piercing the thin blue, with the soft velvet beauty of tropical verdure--the unimaginable delicacy and variety of color that glows and palpitates in vast areas of tropical foliage seen at different distances through haze and sunlight. Mountains usually have an elemental, geologic sex of some sort, and the sex of slumbering, jungle-covered, tropical mountains is female. There is a symmetry, a chaste volcanic elegance about them that render them the consorts and daughters of man-mountains like, say, the Alps, the Rockies, the mountains of the Caucasus. At their cruelest they are rarely somber; their precipitous sides and overhanging crags are sheathed in vegetation of a depth that refines and softens, and the quivering lights and shadows that at times are apparently all their substance, are the lights and shadows of those excessively etherealized, vignetted engravings on the title pages of old gift books.

At the sloping pasture’s lower end the compact, tile-roofed, white-walled town glared in the January sunlight--a town in a garden, or, when one for a moment lost sight of the outlying orange groves, fields of green-gold sugar cane, patches of shimmering corn and clumps of banana trees--an all-pervasive garden in a town. For compact as the Oriental-looking little place was, green and purple, yellow and red sprang from its interstices everywhere as though they had welled up from the rich plantations below and overflowed. One gazed down upon the trees of tiny plazas, the dense dark foliage of walled gardens, into shady, flower-filled patios and sunny, luxuriant, neglected churchyards, and beyond, the mysterious valley melted away in vast and ever vaster distances--the illimitable valley of a dream--a vision--an allegory--slowly rising at last, in tier upon tier of faintly opalescent volcanoes, the texture of gauze. Up and up and up they lifted and swam and soared, until, as with a swift concerted escape into the blue and icy air of heaven, they culminated in the smooth, inaccessible, swan-like snow upon the peak of Orizaba. Mexico’s four, well-defined climates, from the blazing summer of the valley, to glittering winter only some thousands of feet above, were here, I realized, all the year round, visibly in full blast.

Then other guests began to push back the heavy gate and stroll up the long slope, and I found myself meeting them and hearing them all talk, with a thrill as keen--if of a different quality--as that with which I had gaped at the view. They seemed to me then quite as unreal. There was about them an impenetrable aura of fiction; they were the plain tales that Kipling would have lashed to the mast had his hills been Mexican--had Simla been Barranca.

There was the British consul--a quaint, kindly, charming little man--who while in the act of delightedly making one pun could scarcely conceal the eagerness and anxiety with which his mind grappled with the problem of how to introduce the next. The French consul, too, was of the gathering, and I don’t know why, but life, somehow, would not have seemed what it was that day if the French consul had not been unmistakably a German. He had brought with him a bouquet of pretty daughters whose English accent and complexions (their mother was English) and French deportment made of them rather fascinating racial enigmas. Mrs. Belding liked the girls but confided to me that in general she considered the foreign manner all “French jeune filledlesticks.” Mrs. Hammerton, a tall, distinguished-looking, dark-haired English woman of thirty, was perishing--so Mrs. Belding almost at once informed me--for a cigar. She had an aged mother, had had a romance (of which no one spoke, declared Mrs. Belding as she spoke of it), and adored Mexican cigars. Almost immediately upon my meeting her she let me know in the prettiest, most cultivated of voices that Mrs. Belding was in the habit of getting tight.

There were two reasons for Mrs. Hammerton’s postponing just then the longed-for cigar. One was the Rev. Luke M. Hacket, and the other was his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Hacket, with an ever-growing band of little Hackets, had lived for years at Barranca at the expense of many worthy and unintelligent persons at home. They were there, all unconscious of their insolence, for the purpose of trying to seduce Roman Catholics away from their belief and supplying them with another; of substituting a somewhat colorless and unmagnetic expression of the Christian idea for one that satisfies not only some of the Mexican’s alert senses, but his imagination as well. That these efforts at conversion met with scarcely any success except during a few weeks before Christmas (after which there was always an abrupt stampede to Rome), did not much concern them as long as Mrs. Hacket’s lectures in native costume in the basements of churches at home hypnotized the faithful into contributing to an institution for which the term “futile” is far too kind. As every child of the Rev. and Mrs. Luke Hacket received from the board a salary of its own, the worthy couple had not been idle, and in addition to this simple method of swelling their revenue, the good man did a tidy little business in vanilla--buying that fragrant bean at much less than its market value from the poor and ignorant Indians to whom he distributed tracts they could not read. Whenever another little Hacket arrived, he told the board, but the incredibly gullible body knew nothing of his interest in the vanilla market. As I was a stranger--he took me in. That is to say, he wished me a happy new year and “touched” me for five dollars--to go toward the purchase of a new organ for his Sunday school. I and my money were soon parted. Only afterwards did my hostess have a chance to tell me that among the colony the new organ was an old joke--that for many years tourists and visitors had contributed to its sweeter and, as yet, unheard melodies.

What was it? What is it? No one believed in his creed nor had the slightest interest in it. What lingering, reminiscent, perhaps in some instances atavistic misgiving and yearning to reverence, prompted these ill-assorted exiles to treat with a certain deference a person whom they really laughed at? There was an unsuspected pathos in it--the pathos of a world that involuntarily clutches at the straw it knows to be but yet a straw--the pathos of the exile who for the moment suffers even the distasteful if it in some way bridges the gulf between him and home. It was not politeness that restrained Mrs. Hammerton from smoking until the Hackets at last departed and that had caused our hostess, when she saw them coming, to discuss seriously with her husband whether or no she should temporarily banish the eggnog. What was it?

Mrs. Blythe, a slight, pretty woman prettily dressed had come in from her husband’s ranch the week before for the holidays. In matter-of-fact tones she was giving her news to Mrs. Garvin, whose son was in charge of the town’s electric light plant.

“As a rule one doesn’t particularly mind calentura” (chills and fever), Mrs. Blythe was saying, “although it always leaves me rather weak. But what was so annoying this time, was the fact that Jack and I both had it at once and there wasn’t anybody to take care of us. Delfina, the cook, chose that moment, of all moments, to get bitten in the calf of her leg by a snake. Horrid woman, Delfina--I’m sure she did it on purpose. Of course she was much worse than useless, for I had to take care of _her_--dose her with ammonia and cut live chickens in two and bind them on the place. You know--the hundred and fifty things one _always_ does when they get bitten by snakes. If Joaquin the mayordomo had been around, I shouldn’t have cared. He knows how to cook in a sort of way, and then, besides, I shouldn’t have been so worried about the coffee picking. But poor Joaquin was in jail for stabbing his wife--yes, she died--and the jefe wouldn’t let him out although I sent in a note saying how much we needed him for the next few weeks. It was deliberately disobliging of the jefe because we’ve had him to dinner several times and afterwards Jack always played cards with him and let him cheat. My temperature didn’t go above a hundred and two and a half, but Jack’s was a hundred and five off and on for three or four days, and when you pass the hundred mark, two and a half degrees make a great deal of difference. He was delirious a lot of the time and of course I couldn’t let him fuss about the kitchen stove. The worst part was having to crawl out of bed and drag over to the tanks every afternoon to measure the coffee when the pickers came in. With Joaquin gone, there was nobody left who could read the lists and record the amounts. Then just as the quinine gave out, the river rose and no one could go to the village for more. Coming at that time of year, it was all really very annoying,” she declared lightly and passed on to something else.

“Yes, that was how I caught this bad cold,” another woman--whose husband manufactured coffee sacks--was explaining to some one. “There was the worst kind of a norther that night; I would have been soaked to the skin even if I hadn’t slipped on a stone in the dark and fallen into the brook, and when I finally reached their hut I forgot the condition I was in. The poor little thing--she was only four--was absolutely rigid and having convulsion after convulsion. Her screams were frightful--it was impossible to control her--to get her to tell what the matter was, and nobody knew what had happened. She had simply given a shriek of terror and gone into convulsions. There was nothing to do--but nothing--_nothing_. At the end of an hour and a half she gave a final shriek and died, and when her poor little clenched fists relaxed, we found in one of them a dead scorpion. By that time I had begun to be very chilly and of course it ended in a bad cold. Two lumps please and no milk.”

A servant in a starched skirt of watermelon pink and a starched white upper garment like a dressing sack glided out to help with the tea and cakes. A blue rebozo was draped about her neck and shoulders, her black hair hung to within a foot and a half of the floor in two fat braids, and in it, behind her right ear, was a pink camelia the color of her skirt. Her bare feet were thrust into slippers without heels or backs and as she slipped about from chair to chair they made a slight dragging sound on the tiles. Everyone said good afternoon to her as she handed the teacups, at which she smiled and replied in a respectful fashion that was, however, perfectly self-possessed.

“Did you hear about those people named Jackson who were here for a few days last month?” Mrs. Belding asked of the party in general. “You know they ended up at Cuernavaca and took a furnished house there meaning to stay all winter. Well, they stayed five days and then left--furious at Mexico and everyone in it.” And she went on with considerable art and humor to sketch the brief career of the Jacksons. While they were at the hotel, before they took possession of their house, she told us, Mrs. Jackson had engaged servants--a mozo, two maids and a cook. The cook she stole from the Dressers. It wasn’t at all nice of her to steal the cook as Mrs. Dresser had gone through a lot of bother for her about the renting of the house and had helped her to get the other servants. But Mrs. Jackson offered the creature two dollars more a month, and although she had lived at the Dressers for six years, she deserted them with a low, glad cry. Poor Mrs. Dresser rushed over to the Moons and sobbed when she told about it.

“Don’t you worry, dear,” said Mrs. Moon. “Leave that Jackson viper to me; I’ll fix her. They move in this afternoon--I’m going up there to tea--and I promise you that you’ll have your wall-eyed old dish-smasher hovering over the brasero in your kitchen by noon to-morrow.”

Apparently Mrs. Moon did go to the Jacksons for tea and made herself most agreeable. “You may not believe it, but she really can once in a while,” Mrs. Belding interjected. And as Mrs. Jackson had been conducting a Mexican establishment for about two hours, Mrs. Moon gave her all kinds of advice on the way to get along with the servants, ending with: “Of course you must _never_ let the maids go out after dark even with their mothers, and it’s _fatal_ to give them breakfast. We simply don’t do it in Mexico--not so much as a drop of coffee until noon. Breakfast always makes Mexicans insolent.” Then Mrs. Moon, feeling that she was perhaps overdoing it, left while she saw that Mrs. Jackson was drinking it in in great, death-dealing gulps.

It was bad enough that night, Mrs. Belding ran on, when the cook and one of the maids tried to go to the serenata in the plaza. On the strength of the extra two dollars the cook had bought a new rebozo and wanted to wear it, and as there was no reason on earth why they shouldn’t go to the serenata, they were mystified and angry at Mrs. Jackson’s serenely declaring “No, no,” and locking them in. But the great seal of the Jacksons’ fate was definitely affixed the next morning when Mrs. Jackson, up bright and early, with kind firmness, refused to let them make their coffee. Half an hour later Mrs. Moon experienced the bliss of seeing the mozo, the cook and the two maids wandering past her house--all weeping bitterly. Long before midday the cook was back at the Dressers; and from that moment Mrs. Jackson was blacklisted.

For five days she struggled to engage new servants, but she was believed to be a woman with a “bad heart.” No one would go to her. She surrendered and left.

I did not altogether believe this tale of Mrs. Belding’s, nor did I believe the man who casually told us that a few weeks before, the authorities had, just in time, interrupted a human sacrifice in an Indian village some twenty or thirty miles up from the coast. After nearly four hundred years of Christianity the Indians had, it seemed, dug up a large stone idol and attempted to revert. Then, too, the remark of a young girl who had been visiting in Vera Cruz struck me as rather incredible. “I was there for a month,” she said. “Yes, there was some yellow fever and a great deal of smallpox--but when you’re having a good time, who minds smallpox?” It was all so new to me in matter and manner, so sprinkled with easy references to objects, scenes, and conditions I had met with only in highfalutin stories lacking the ring of truth, so ornate with “meandering” (thank you, Robert Browning), Spanish words whose meaning I did not know. There was also among the men much coffee talk--a whole new world to one who has always taken for granted that coffee originates, roasted, ground and done up in five-pound tins on a grocer’s shelves. But it was all true even to the interrupted human sacrifice and the fact that some of the shrubs among the roses and heliotrope near the piazza were coffee trees. Had I never seen the little colony again I should always have remembered it as a picturesque, romantic and delightful thing. And how--I told myself as I sat there listening and looking--they must, away off here, depend upon one another for society, both in a formal and in an intimate sense! How they must come together and somewhat wistfully try to forget Mexico in talking of home in their own language! What it is, after all, to understand and be understood!--and all that sort of thing. If my first afternoon with foreigners in Mexico had been my last, I should have carried away with me a brave, bright colored little picture of much charm and some pathos. However, since then I have spent with my compatriots in this interesting land days innumerable.

I fear I am, for the delightful purposes of art, unfortunately unselective. First impressions have their value; they have, indeed, very great value, and of a kind quite their own. As my first impression of Americans in Mexico was the kind I have just been trying to give, and as it was to me wholly interesting and more agreeable than not, I ought, perhaps, to let it stand; but somehow I can’t. My inartistic impulse to keep on and tell all the little I know, instead of stopping at the right place, is too strong.

There are said to be about thirty thousand American residents in the Mexican Republic, and the men pursue vocations ranging from that of tramp to that of president of great and successful business ventures. There are American doctors and dentists, brakemen, locomotive engineers, Pullman-car conductors, civil engineers, mining engineers, “promoters,” grocers, hotel keepers, dealers in curios; there are American barkeepers, lawyers, stenographers, photographers, artists, clerks, electricians, and owners of ranches of one kind or another who grow cattle or coffee or vanilla or sugar or rubber. Many Americans are managers of some sort--they manage mines or plantations or railways, or the local interests of some manufacturing or business concern in the United States. One meets Americans--both men and women--on the streets, in hotels, in shops, strolling or sitting in the plaza--almost everywhere in the course of the day’s work, and in the course of the day’s play, one may drop in at the house of some acquaintance or friend and have a cup of tea, with the usual accompaniments, at four or half past. I am speaking now not of the City of Mexico, whose American colony as a colony I know solely through the “Society” notes of the _Mexican Herald_. From that authentic source he who runs may read (or he who reads may run) that on almost any afternoon at the large entertainment given by Mrs. Brooks for her popular friend, Mrs. Crooks, punch was served at a refreshment table quaintly decorated with smilax by the ever-charming Mrs. Snooks. That there are agreeable Americans living in the city I am sure, because I have met some of them elsewhere. But of American society in general there I am only competent to suspect that, like society in most places, it is considerably less important and entrancing in reality than it is in print.

In the smaller places, even when there are residents of the United States in numbers sufficiently great to be regarded as a “colony,” there is absolutely nothing that by any stretch of imagination or spread of printer’s ink could be called “American society.” The New Year’s Day I have mentioned seems to me now a kind of freak of nature; I am at a loss to account for it. For since then my knowledge of Americans in the small towns has become considerable, and they are not in the least as I supposed they were. They do not depend upon one another; they do not come together to talk wistfully of home in the mother tongue; they do _not_ understand one another, and by one another they are _not_ understood! There is at best about most of their exceedingly few relations an atmosphere of petty and ungenerous gossip, and at worst a fog--a positive sand storm of enmity and hatred through which it takes a really ludicrous amount of delicate navigation successfully to steer oneself. As a body they simply do not meet. There are, instead, groups of two, of three, of four, who have tea together (other forms of entertainment are rarely attempted) chiefly for the purpose of envitrioling the others. There are among them agreeable groups and truly charming individuals, but when they allow themselves to assimilate at all, it is usually in a most reluctant, acid, and malnutritious form (a singularly repulsive figure of speech, come to think of it) that does no one any good. It is not unamusing just at first to have a lady inform you with tremulous lips and in a tense, white voice that if you call on Mrs. X., you must not expect to call any longer on _her_; and I confess I have enjoyed learning in great detail just why this one is no longer speaking to that, and the train of events that led up to Mr. A.’s finally slapping the face of Mr. B. Yet there are well-defined limits to intellectual treats of this nature, and one quickly longs for entertainment at once less dramatic and more varied.

Among the Americans this is difficult to get, although, as I pause and recall with gratitude and affection some of my friends in Jalapa, for instance, I am tempted to retract this statement. The trouble lies, I feel sure, in the fact that, having come from widely dissimilar parts of the United States, and having had while there affiliations, in many instances, whose slight difference is still great enough to make a great difference, they have but little in common. And Mexican towns are utterly lacking in those diverse interests that at home supply the women of even very small communities with so many pleasant and harmless, if artificial, bonds. The Mexican theater is crude and impossible--even if the fractious ladies knew Spanish sufficiently well to follow rapid dialogue with enjoyment, which they rarely do. The occasional traveling opera company, with one wind-busted, middle-aged star who twenty-five years ago was rumored to have been well received in Rio de Janeiro, is a torture; there are no notable piano or song recitals, no King’s Daughters or other pet charities, no D. A. R.’s, no one to interpret the “Ring and the Book,” or the “Ring of the Niebelungen,” no one to give chafing-dish lectures or inspire enthusiasm for things like the etchings of Whistler and the economical cremation of garbage, the abolishment of child labor, and the encouragement of the backyard beautiful. Beyond the slight and monotonous cares of housekeeping on a small scale, there is little to occupy their time; there are, in a word, no varied outlets available for their normal socio-intellectual energies, and of course the distressing happens. Even the one or two common bonds they might have, most unfortunately act not as bonds at all. The “servant problem,” for instance, small as wages are, serves only to keep them farther apart, and apparently friendship between two families engaged in the same kind of enterprise is almost impossible. Very rarely have I seen two coffee-growers who were not virulently jealous of each other’s successes, and who would not, in a business way, cut each other’s throats without a qualm if by doing so they could come out a few dollars ahead.

Indeed, from the little I have seen and the great deal I have heard of my countrymen’s business coups in Mexico, I cannot believe that transplantation has a tendency to elevate one’s ethics. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to record that I know men in Mexico whose methods of business are fastidiously honorable with Mexican and compatriot alike, but they are extremely rare; far more rare than they are at home. If in Mexico I were forced to choose between trusting in a business matter to the representations of a Mexican whom I knew and liked and an American whom I knew and liked, I should, except in one or two cases, where I should be betting, so to speak, on a certainty, trust the Mexican.

An always interesting phase of the American in Mexico is the annual invasion of the country, from January to March, by immense parties of “personally conducted” tourists from the United States. In private cars--even in private trains--they descend every few days upon the cities and towns of chief pictorial and historic interest, and just as the American residents of England, Germany, Italy, and France shudder at the ancient and honorable name of “Thomas Cook and Sons,” do the Americans who have chosen Mexico as the land of their adoption shrug and laugh at the mention of “las turistas.” On general principles, to shrug and sneer--for in this laugh there always lurks a sneer--merely because a hundred and fifty amiable creatures have chosen to be herded from one end of a vast foreign country and back again in two weeks, would seem to be narrow and pointless. But I have grown to consider it, for principles quite specific, neither the one nor the other. The American resident’s sneer is unfortunately a helpless, ineffectual one, but he is without question sometimes entitled to it.

Somebody once wrote an article--perhaps it was a whole book--which he called “The Psychology of Crowds.” I did not read it, but many years ago, when it came out, the title imbedded itself in my mind as a wonderfully suggestive title that didn’t suggest to me anything at all. Since then I have had frequent occasion to excavate it, and without having read a word of the work, I am convinced that I know exactly what the author meant. Did he, I often wonder, ever study, in his study of crowds, a crowd of American tourists in Mexico? What a misfortune for his book if he neglected to! They are, it seems, composed of the most estimable units of which one can conceive; the sort of persons who make a “world’s fair” possible; the salt of the earth--“the backbone of the nation.” And yet when they unite and start out on their travels, a kind of madness now and then seizes upon them; not continuously, and sometimes not at all, but now and then. Young girls who, at home, could be trusted on every occasion to conduct themselves with a kind of provincial dignity; sensible, middle-aged fathers and mothers of grown-up families, and old women with white water-waves and gray lisle-thread gloves, will now and then, when on a tour in Mexico, go out of their way to do things that make the very peons blush. The great majority of tourists are, of course, quiet, well-behaved persons who take an intelligent interest in their travels. It is to the exception I am referring; the exception by whom the others, alas! are judged.

The least of their crimes is their suddenly acquired mania for being conspicuous. At home, in their city side streets, their humdrum suburbs, their placid villages, they have been content for thirty, fifty, seventy years to pursue their various decent ways, legitimately observed and clad appropriately to their means and station. But once arrived in the ancient capital of Montezuma, many of them are inspired in the most astounding fashion to attract attention to themselves. On Sunday afternoon, in the crowded Paseo, I have seen, for instance, in cabs, undoubtedly respectable women from my country with enormous straw sombreros on their heads, and about their shoulders those brilliant and hideous “Mexican” sarapes--woven for the tourist trade, it is said, in Germany. All the rest of the world was, of course, in its Paris best, and staring at them with amazed eyes. In Mexico the only possible circumstance under which a native woman of any position whatever would wear a peon hat would be a hot day in the depths of the country, were she forced to travel in an open vehicle or on horseback. As for sarapes, they, of course, are worn only by men. The effect these travelers produced upon the local mind was somewhat analogous to that which a party of Mexican ladies would produce upon the mind of New York should they decide to drive up Fifth Avenue wearing policemen’s helmets and variegated trousers. Only Mexican women would never do the one, while American women frequently, from motives I am at a loss to account for, do the other.

Then, once in a small town to which large parties rarely go, I saw half a dozen men and women suddenly detach themselves from their crowd on being told that a certain middle-aged man, bidding good-by to some guests at his front door, was the governor of the state. At a distance of from ten to fifteen feet of him they deliberately focused their kodaks on the group and pressed the button. Afterwards I asked one of the men with whom the governor had been talking, if the governor had commented upon the matter. “Why, yes,” was the reply. “He said, with a shrug, ‘Obviously from the United States,’ and then went on with his conversation.”

At Tehuacan, one winter, the women in a party of between twenty and thirty, quite innocently (although most commonly) left behind them an odious impression that the few resident Americans who happened to be staying at the place were powerless to eradicate. The man in charge of them could not speak Spanish, and had with him an interpreter, a Mexican boy of seventeen or eighteen who knew a moderate amount of English. He was a pretty-eyed, clever-looking little person, and the women of the party had come to treat him much as one might treat a pet animal of docile habits. They would stroke and ruffle his shock of black hair, pinch his cheeks, “hold hands” with him when walking through the long corridors, adjust his red cravat if it wasn’t straight, and coquettishly struggle with one another for the privilege of strolling with him in the garden. To me it meant no more than a disagreeably playful exhibition of bad taste, but the Mexicans in the hotel regarded a young man of eighteen, in his station of life, as being of a marriageable age, which, of course, he was, and they could not be made to see in the situation anything but that the American women were in love with him and unable to conceal it in public. Some of them with young daughters talked of appealing to the hotel proprietor to eject persons of this description. In the United States a party of Mexican women would under no circumstances hold hands with, say, a bellboy, or stroke the hair of a waiter.

In Puebla it is told that some American tourists ate their luncheon in the cathedral, threw orange peel and sardine tins on the floor, and upon leaving washed their hands in the holy water. I don’t vouch for this story; I merely believe it. And by reason of such things and a hundred others, the American resident is entitled to his sneer. For he himself, in at least his relations with the natives, is accustomed to display something of their courtesy, their dignity. He resents not only the unfortunate and lasting impression many of his compatriots leave upon the populace, but its disastrous effect upon the populace itself. When American tourists, armed with penknives, cut out squares of Gobelin tapestry from the furniture of the President’s drawing-room, it is always a simple matter for the President to close Chapultepec to the public; but when they encourage “humorous” familiarities with well-mannered, unsophisticated servants and the lower classes generally, there is no remedy. Chiefly from constant contact with tourists, the cab drivers of the City of Mexico have become notoriously extortionate and insolent, and, for the same reason, Cuernavaca, one of the most beautiful little towns, not only in Mexico, but in the world, may soon--tourist-ridden as it is--be one of the least attractive. There, among the cabmen, the hotel employees, the guides, and the mozos who have horses for hire, the admirable native manner has lamentably deteriorated. Egged on by underbred Americans, many of them have themselves become common, impudent, and a bore. They no longer suggest Mexico. One might almost as well “see Naples and die.”