Edith O'Shaughnessy

“ Corinne was repeating slowly. Her look was very oblique and distant, and her face was suddenly pale, though quite bright—as if consumed to pale, hot ashes in the look Pauli bent upon her, consumed to last resistance.
Between these two looks Frau Stacher was suddenly crushed; she could scarcely breathe, another intolerable distress came to join that pain in her chest.
Would they hold out, those two who loved each other so, hold out in the dark, grim city that now took heed of little save food? Would they build themselves a house without foundations, in a nameless street, above ruins? ”

“ At San Angel we wandered about in a deserted garden-like orchard. Roses, heliotrope, and lilies mingled with fig, quince, apricot, peach, apple, and pear trees, and soft crumbling pink walls inclosed them all. Beyond were more beautiful blue hills linked to those of the morning, and now swimming in the afternoon haze the volcanoes towering above in a splendor of mother-of-pearl.
These old Mexican gardens are beautiful beyond words, but I think one must feel the magic of them in the flesh—not out of it—to know the full enchantment. ”

“ Irma was continually taking off her glasses and wiping them on the piece of old linen she kept by her for that purpose. She knew her eyes were getting worse and sometimes she was very frightened. The light caught her big, capable hands, fell on the heap of white linen in her lap, glowed about the fringe of the little, red, three-cornered shawl crossed over her low, heavy breasts. She had brought it from Agram in those days that as the calendar ran were not so far away, but might have been, for all their resemblance to the present, of another century. ”

“ Driving back this evening toward a beautiful, clear, red sunset, up the Plateros between the rows of autos and carriages full of handsomely dressed people, the men standing along the edge of the pavement as they do in Rome on the Corso, it seemed impossible that I was looking at a people over whom a great national humiliation was hanging. The crowds become more and more Mexican every day, with fewer American faces. ”

“ In that city of misery, let a few more die in those black hours before dawn, without warmth or food or even a match to strike a light that those who loved them could see them go. He was losing, and was conscious of its slipping from him, that strong professional feeling of saving life, any life, just to save it, fulfilling a deep instinct, working according to habit that was as natural to him as breathing. Sometimes nothing mattered, not even Mizzi's lash-like tongue on his bare nerves. ”

“ These patios of Mexico are most attractive. One is forever peeking in through doorways of strange houses, where flowers, children, washing, mattresses, water-jars, dogs, sometimes a palm or a cypress, contrive to make something always alluring and mostly lovely. We lunched late in the auto, under the shade of some eucalyptus-trees, and then pressed on through the lovely hills and over meadow-bounded roads till we got to the little village of Magdalena, where an indescribable melancholy mingled with the slanting bronze afternoon light filtering through the shade of the old trees. ”

“ Every day, every hour one had to look out, or one was quite certainly blown over. But Pauli was away. Corinne, dear, lovely Corinne, she couldn't bear to think of her pale light flashing in through the door of that pawn shop in the Spiegelgasse, that fatal "Tante Dorothea's," whom the mention of in the good old days, had always raised that ill-considered laugh. Once or twice her thoughts had played glimmeringly about Fanny instead of "Tante Dorothea,"—to go out in a sudden, chilly little gust blowing from the terra ignota of Fanny's life. ”

“ Every arm-chair, sofa, and bed in the house was occupied last night, and many of the inmates lay on the floor. Constantly, in the distance, sounds the beautiful Mexican bugle-call. The brass summons is clear and noble, and the drums beat to the nation’s pulse—a poor thing, according to us, but Mexico’s own. Where will it all end? With the taking of Vera Cruz, through whose customs a full fourth of the total imports come, Huerta is out a million pesos a month, more or less. We are certainly isolating and weakening him at a great rate. ”

“ As we walked in the garden I felt some strange magic [29] exhaling from it all, something possessing and almost imploring. There were such lights and shadows, such contours of cypress and eucalyptus, mingling with quince and pear trees. The old arbor in the carrefour is overgrown with white roses, and the rest of the garden is a mass of lilies of various kinds, heliotrope, and great tangles of trailing pink geranium and honeysuckle. Blue-flowered papyri were clustered about a microscopic, water-lilied lake, quite black in the late afternoon light. Around all was an old pink, vine-grown wall. ”

“ So great was the majesty clothing the features of "poor, old Tante Ilde," that fear suddenly entered into Liesel's rippling, shallow soul, and she got confused, and afterwards, to her annoyance, she could only remember vaguely that everything was blue and that over the divan was a silken cover picked out in what seemed to be silver rose-buds. Donkey that she was, she hadn't noticed the jeweled elephants either, nor the rabbits of which she had heard so much. Otto couldn't help her out in the slightest,—no more than a blind man. ”

“ 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’. ”

“ Mexico can hold the fancy quite independent of the work of man. But when one adds the activities of that creative, potent, Spanish race, infinitely inspired by the background already perfect, with the building materials, tepetate and tezontle, white and pink, giving them what they wanted to place against green and blue, the beauty of the result, wrapped in the strange transparence of the plateau, is not to be wondered at. ”

“ Its color for a time has been washed out in the sombre waters of War and Peace; it has been trampled by the slow tread of cripples, its growth suspended in starvation. But another generation that has not seen these things and died of pity or hunger will arise, other "Flowers of Love" will blossom. The sagging portico of that stately pleasure-palace, Vienna, will be again upheld by Caryatides with glowing eyes, with bright cheeks, with thick, shining coils of dark hair, with full, soft figures and tireless, round, white arms. ”

“ The broad banana leaves take every possible glint, and the bayonet palms are swords of light. Everything is gorgeous—everything a splendid blaze.
At Orizaba orderly crowds cried “Viva Mexico!” “Mueran los Gringos!” and bared their heads, as the troop-cars attached to our train rolled out. I cannot keep my eyes from the beauties of this natural world through which we are journeying, conducted so royally by command of the “Grand Old Indian.” Nature is so generous here that she neither needs nor asks the co-operation of man in her giving. ”

“ It is the celebrated but ill-omened house [2] that Pedro de Alvarado, Cortés's beloved, hot-blooded, dashing lieutenant, built just after the Conquest, when Coyoacan was the favorite spot of the high-born and high-handed survivors. It has a most artistic façade, pink, with the pink of ages, and decorated with a lovely lozenge-shaped design.
One enters through a great carved wooden door, with an old shrine above it, into a beautiful courtyard with patches of sun and dark corners, and going up a broad flight of outside stairs one finds oneself on a wide Bougainvillea-hung veranda. ”

“ It was all symbolized to Frau Stacher in the ruin of her own life, epitomized in the blank, useless loneliness of her downlyings and her uprisings. Life, once dear life, had become quite simply a monster that threatened to devour her and then spit her into the grave.
One warm, golden January Sabbath set like a jewel in the silver of the Baden winter, Frau Stacher had sat hour after hour at her window in chill, stark dismay, watching without seeing the soft afternoon light sift through the bare, velvety branches of the chestnut tree in front of her door. She was waiting for Corinne ”

“ Huerta appears to care very little whom he shoots. He has small sentiment about human life (his own, or anybody’s else) , but he is a strong and astute man; and if he could get a few white blackbirds, in the shape of patriots, to work with him, and if the United States were not on his back, he might eventually bring peace to his country.
I am not yet reaccustomed to the extreme beauty of the Mexican morning; a dazzling, many-colored light that would dim the spectrum is filtering into my room, as I write, glorifying every object and corner. ”

“ A corner of the old refectory was sacrificed to do this modernizing, but we had the tea served at a table in the patio, and watched the patch of blue sky get pink and the colors of the flowers darken. When we finally turned homeward in an indigo-colored world it was to find the volcanoes like two great flaming torches, casting strange lights upon the dark-blue earth over which we sped. Nothing but night could have induced us to leave the beauty of it all for brick-and-plaster man-made dwellings. ”

“ But the extraordinary part about it all was that that good meal, instead of making her less hungry, seemed to engender an intolerable desire for another. She was just wild for more noodles and butter when night came, ready for a whole cutlet for herself. As they sat round the supper-table, the three hungry boys with their eyes on the soup-tureen, and Irma dipping the ladle in so carefully for Tante Ilde's share that the few bubbles of life-giving fat would not slip into it, yet so shallowly that none of the thick part came up, then Tante Ilde was, for once, not faint for food, not at all. ”

“ Everywhere brother is killing brother, and as for the sisters, they are often lassoed and captured as if they were stampeding cattle. Educated people, who have been prosperous all their lives, are now without food or shelter, knowing that strangers eat at their tables, sleep in their beds, and scatter their treasures. If only poor old Huerta could have begun in some other way than by riding into the capital in a path of blood spilled by himself and others, he would probably have been able, with recognition, to do as well as any one, and better than most. ”

“ The house is a very Mexican-looking affair, though not after the good old models. It is a reddish pink, with superfluous cupolas and bay windows, all lined with pale blue. Great vines of the magenta-colored Bougainvillea, "the glory of Mexico," hanging everywhere, further enliven it. The tiny triangular garden also has various obstreperous and violent-colored botanical specimens.
A little farther down the street, however, is the real gem, for there I perceived, in passing, storied Spanish-American life being enacted. ”

“ But now that love for Corinne had begun to waste him, to crumble his other interests and activities. His strength, his time were mostly spent madly, hotly hoping for something, anything, out of the void whence events come,—the void known to every longing heart. Pauli was temperamentally aware of the fluidity of life—for all except the very old, they were caught like fragile shells in the hard stratum of age. It was one of the reasons for his tenderness towards Tante Ilde, and his farewell had in it much of the love of a son, and the pity of the very strong for the very weak. ”

“ You have no need for the firm hand when you are looking out upon a valley swimming in a strange transparency, where the hills seem of purest mother-of-pearl, inevitably leading to golden streets, not black heaps of earth peopled by passionate, starving human beings.
Am now off to the Red Cross. It is temporarily stationed in a beautiful old Spanish house, with a garden, and a large patio and fountain in the middle, and doors opening on to it, in the Calle Alamo, a once fashionable part of town. ”

“ There was nothing to hope for, nothing to fight for except bread, bread, bread, in ever-diminishing quantities. More were going down in that battle in the windy city than before machine guns. Each street was a battle-field, heaped mostly with children's bodies or the bodies of the very old.
The Eberhardt's apartment was far, too, from the Hoher Markt, but not far like the Mariahilfer street, Frau Stacher kept reminding herself as she trudged along, her string bag full and her purse empty, and at the end of the walk there would be darling Kaethe and the lovely, hungry children. ”

“ I shall miss her very much. Besides being one of the most admirable women I have known in public life, she is a pearl of a chefesse.
I have dwelt much on my easy, pleasant days here, surrounded by new beauty and new interests, books, companions—on this experience of an unknown land with nothing of the "pace that kills," nothing of the wearing "concurrence" of the great cities. In fact, I am experiencing to the full, in Elliott's phrase, "the comforts of the tropics."
Elim has been enticed into the tiniest and darlingest of pajamas on the ground of being ready for the next earthquake. ”

“ As Frau Stacher got near the Bristol the flooding crowd seemed almost entirely made up of large, showily-dressed women and bright, alert, stout men, whose prosperity was immediate and inescapable. Before it her seventy years of gentility were swept up, a bit of dust, into her otherwise bare corner. What had she to do with that new princedom arisen from the ruins of the war, or it with her? Their ways, their gestures, their looks were alien, inimical to those of the Princes, Counts and Barons of that old world; that old world the pride and joy even of those not of it. ”

“ Night was near, though not yet fallen, and the sun had disappeared behind Chapultepec. In the changing light the stars shone in the heavens with a brilliancy I have scarcely ever seen in deepest night. They illuminated a pale-blue dome which had a sort of faded sunset lining. I looked up and saw the Southern Cross, the glory of these skies, hanging just above the horizon, and came home touched and quieted by the beauty of it all, to find my babe awake, in a gentle moisture, the fever gone. So often in Mexico the natural changes bring personal [234] help. ”

“ The women, except Tante Ilde, were blotted out. She felt the exhilaration, the immediate electrization of the air and sat up quite straight, her elbows elegantly pressed against her waist and began to smile her fine, sweet smile. Her presence lay about Pauli as a wreathing mist about a mountain on a sunny day. Again he was thankful to find her there.
Dutifully he gave Anna a robust but empty kiss on both cheeks, with a "Well, how goes it?" and the same to Hermine, standing close by her mother. He thought fleetingly for the thousandth time that it was a calamity for women to be ugly. ”

“ In this quiet, beauteous night, with the patio holding a thick, silver moonlight spilling over the square, dark roof, this gorgeous Indian world in strange unrest about me, and I myself far enough away to see, I can speak. Show him this some time when he is healed. What an adoring sister thought cannot hurt. I unite myself [200] with the millions who have had their loved ones hanging on the cross, who have heard their sitio. ”

“ Suddenly Frau Stacher's heart grew so big, so big with a desolate pity that she thought it would burst the thin walls of her aching chest. It was indeed the symbol, the living, cruel symbol of the misery of that wintry, starving city. It was all caught up into that wretched group, to which so soon that other, unwanted and unwanting, would be added, that child still safe in the womb.... She caught her breath stickingly, sharply.
Where did charity begin? She no longer knew. She had meant to take Irma the money Pauli had given her, that she might use it for those children of their own blood. ”

“ When Madame Madero called yesterday her rather halting remark that Orozco es muy leal (Orozco is very loyal) was unconvincing, but of course they must hope. She was in dark, rich garments, somewhat too heavy in cut and texture for her size, with a very imposing plume-loaded hat over her pale, tired face. She now wears a beautiful string of pearls. All the life is in her vigilant eyes, and if there is an iron hand in the family, it is hers. ”

“ She loved even Irma. Even Irma who on account of her nerves couldn't bear to see that fine, soft light in her sister-in-law's eyes. An unreasonable, unseasonable light given the fact that one child had been reft away and another might as easily be taken. She should properly have been creeping about with her spirit quenched, instead of looking almost happy. It struck Irma, who was inaccessible to metaphysical changes, even as unseemly, and she proceeded to extinguish it, somewhat as a wet finger on the flame of a candle.
"Corinne today, but who's taking you tomorrow?" ”

“ During the siege of the city the conquerors, watching from afar, are said to have sometimes seen their own captured comrades led up the great stairway to the stone on which they were placed, their chests opened with a special razor-like knife made of obsidian, the palpitating heart torn out, held for an instant toward the sun, this sun, and then flung at the feet of the god of war. ”

“ Those radiant years lay far behind, when a word, a thought would set his brain on fire, startling into instant action those secret springs of his talent; when the imponderable why and whence of man's being was the paramount interest of life. The ponderable things necessary to sustain that life came naturally, undisturbingly in the train of work. Now his gifts were useless; the world in which they had once functioned so easily, so shiningly, was in some chill, shadowy abeyance. ”