The American Egypt Part 21

Avarice is their besetting sin. Money is their G.o.d. There is a saying that "Jews cannot live in Yucatan." The sharpest Hebrew would come off second-best in a business deal with a Yucatecan. This is the characteristic of all ages and all ranks. The Yucatecan is always "on the make." It matters not if he is a multi-millionaire. The richest man in the city of Merida would not be in the least offended if you offered to buy the flowers from his patio or garden. He himself would cut what you wanted and drive a hard bargain with you. In a rich quarter of the capital a wealthy family make a practice every dry season of selling water at ten centavos a pail! A foreign resident, accustomed to buy eggs from the servants of one of the great land-owning families of Merida, called one day and found the housekeeper out. The little daughter of the house, ten years old, and ent.i.tled, on coming of age, to a million dollars in her own right, overheard the caller speaking to one of the maids, and came out to offer for six centavos one egg which her pet hen had laid. Three centavos is the price of an egg all the year through in Yucatan!

There are no poor Yucatecans. Small wonder: for not only do they lose no opportunity of raking in the shekels, but they openly boast that they never entertain or show hospitality, unless it pays them to do so. We can bear eloquent witness to this, for from end to end of our tour never once was so much as a cup of coffee offered us by a Yucatecan, with the single exception of the semi-official breakfast we earlier described. At the town of Tizimin, where we spent Christmas, though the Jefe and all the authorities of the town knew we were inhabiting a hovel dest.i.tute of everything except pegs in the walls on which to swing our hammocks, not a soul in that town of several hundreds of well-to-do people was found to come forward with the offer of a chair or a table, a basin to wash in, or the loan of a little kitchen crockery. No, if we needed such things we must buy them; and if we did not wish to do that, why then we must go without. We had gone to Yucatan intent on roughing it, and we did not mind dining with one of our baggage boxes for table, squatting Turk-fas.h.i.+on on the stone floor. We only mention it as typical of Yucatecan inhospitality, which really pa.s.ses all understanding.

But rich as the richest Yucatecans are, it is curious to see how little they know how to spend their money. A dozen shoddy rocking-chairs, a roll-top desk, a few Oriental rugs or mats, some painfully modern china, and the walls adorned (!) with a half-dozen hideous oleographs: there you have the typical room of the typical rich Yucatecan. They feel this lack of intelligence in using their enormous wealth, and it leads them into all kinds of bizarre extravagances. They can spend money when they like and when it adds, or they think it adds, to their comfort. One henequen lord went a few years ago to the St. Louis Exhibition. He hired a special steams.h.i.+p, and, on reaching New Orleans, ordered a special train, making the condition that it was to travel never quicker than fifteen miles an hour, and must stop at sunset, no matter how inconvenient this proved to the railway officials. This precious train cost him six hundred pounds; and his whole trip of thirty days cost sixty thousand dollars, or six thousand pounds.

As a people the Yucatecans are illiterate to a degree which is almost inconceivable. With wealth untold, they care nothing for books or learning. A man worth three millions sterling confessed to us that there was not a book in his house, and that he never read a paper. And he was certainly one of the most intelligent men in the country, and a man, too, who had travelled extensively in Europe. But if the men are supremely ignorant of everything except money-making, and uninterested in aught but the gross sensuality which is the be-all and the end-all of their worthless lives, the women are worse. It is really not their fault; for they are little better, if at all, than odalisques, leading in youth the lives of toys; in age spending their days in over-eating and over-sleeping. Of their colossal ignorance of facts within the knowledge of every National School child, the following is an amusing example. A young Yucatecan lady, daughter of one of the richest of the families in the State, was sent to New York for a trip for her health, and she was to go on to England. She suffered so much from seasickness on the voyage out that the doctors in America said that she must not undertake the longer voyage to England, but must return at once to Yucatan. Her married sister in Merida, talking of her return, said she would come back by land. The family are so enormously rich that it was quite possible for them to contemplate the great cost of the overland trip; but it was pointed out to the senora that the invalid would have many weeks of travel, and would have to make a very wide detour south, to avoid the swamps of Chiapas. "Oh no" sweetly replied the millionairess, "she is to come by diligence via Havana!"

The illiteracy of the wealthier cla.s.ses is reproduced in a grosser form among the ordinary Yucatecans. They have no thoughts beyond their food, their women, and their drinks. But there is much to be said for the _dolce far niente_ view of life, and one could easily forgive this race of sybarites if they were otherwise agreeable. Really it sounds like an exaggeration, but the Yucatecans seemed to us the most disagreeable folk in the world. They are avaricious to the degree of dishonesty. They will not actually steal, but they will cheat you every time and chortle over it. Quite a big man, a Jefe, who also kept a shop in one town we visited, again and again tried to cheat us out of odd centavos over some trifling purchase. It was incredible, but it was deliberate. They are entirely untrustworthy in business: they will give their word and break it without scruple if it suits their interests. A practical example of this came to our notice in the islands, where there is a good deal of trade with American ports such as Key West. An American skipper told us that he had, at the moment of speaking, no less than one hundred and sixty pairs of women's shoes on his hands, through the impertinent shuffling of his customers. They would ask him to bring them shoes from the States, give the number, and then if the shoes did not quite look what they thought they wanted, they said "_No quiero_" ("I do not want"), and the poor trader, having paid cash for the footgear, was "landed."

No Yucatecan will pay a debt unless you dun him _ad nauseam_. It is always "_manana_" (to-morrow), and, as the stranger in Yucatan learns to know only too well, manana never comes. If a Yucatecan owes you five dollars, he will pay you three. For themselves, they are the most remorseless dunners. If you have the misfortune to owe a few dollars, for, say, the hire of a volan, you will have the wretch literally before dawn at your door, beating at it and demanding the money, though he well knows you are stopping some days. It is not so much the demanding of the money, which is, after all, their right, as it is the grossly uncivil way they do it. We found this to be the experience of all foreigners resident in the country, so we were forced to acquit ourselves of having any especially dishonest look. An American told us that, owing a trifling sum to a wealthy woman, the latter came to the hotel and demanded the money with an insolence which was almost intolerable.

Our friend the American skipper, who had traded with the islands for more than ten years, told us that the insolence of the people in matters of trade was extreme. Knowing him to have boots or s.h.i.+rts to sell, they would call from their doors, "_Capitan, yo quiero_" ("I want"), whatever it was. "d.a.m.n 'em," said the little man, "let 'em come up to my store and choose. No, they want me to f.a.g things to their doors, literally put the boots on their feet." Another peculiarity of the people is that they do not recognise a difference of goods. They think the cheapest shoe or cloth should be the standard for all goods.

The Yucatecan women are, there is no denying it, very often extremely lovely. It is just that beauty which one instinctively a.s.sociates with a people who have brought s.e.xual relations to a fine art of absolute self-indulgence. By one of the only three Englishmen in the country we were told that the state of morality among the Yucatecans themselves, quite apart from the very sad side of the slavery question to which we have referred in the last chapter, beggars description. We can well believe it.

Marriages are contracted at very early ages, sometimes the bride's and groom's years totalling a good deal under thirty. Among the wealthier Yucatecans marriages are nearly always _de convenance_, and are arranged by the two families: the boy seldom, the girl never, having a say in the matter. Thereafter the child-wife pa.s.ses into a quasi-seraglio type of life. There are never any men visitors to the house, and such things as wholesome exercise are rigorously taboo to all upper-cla.s.s Yucatecan matrons. If the doctor orders exercise, the miserable little animated toy of the Yucatecan Croesus drives some miles out of the city, and then stops her carriage and solemnly walks up and down the dusty roadway for the allotted time. No Yucatecan woman of position must ever walk in public: that would be a social _faux pas_ far more serious than to have a child before marriage. The exalted women of Merida very rarely leave their homes till dark, when they drive round the plaza. Occasionally they go shopping, when they remain in their carriages, and the goods are brought out to them by obsequious shopmen. The life they lead is of the most empty and vapid nature. Surrounded by dozens of Indian servants, they loll all the day in their hammocks, listening to such gossip as their women friends or their servants can tell them. A curious result of this harem life they lead is the roaring trade done by Turkish pedlars who travel all over Yucatan. Hours are spent by the rich women examining their rolls of cloths and finery. Once a year the Paris milliners and modistes visit Merida and take the orders of the richer wives.

The women accept their lot in life very philosophically. It cannot be said of them, as Canning said of the Dutch traders, and as might only too truly be said of many English and American women, that "in matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch is giving too little and asking too much." They ask very little but the amorous attentions of their lords and masters, as long as their looks last; when they see themselves replaced with really complete apathy in those special functions. Not that even in their bridal years they have not already been well broken-in by a running fire of infidelities on the part of their menfolk. But they have long been used to that, when as children they have seen the fate of their little Indian girl playmates. Of the Yucatecan woman one might say only too truly, quoting the reported saying of the Empress Eugenie when her rather erratic Emperor brought up to introduce a countess, who was notorious as a royal mistress, and who on this particular evening appeared as "Queen of Hearts" with a large gold heart swinging some way below her corsage, "_Madame, vous portez votre cur tres bas_." She does, but she really is not to blame. She has been taught nothing better.

The Suffragette question has not yet invaded Yucatan, and lovely woman is content with the life of a lapdog. As well ask the Dudus and Haidees of a Turkish pasha's harem to rebel as these charming senoras, swinging in their hammocks and puffing at their cigarettes. As for housekeeping, they are contemptible in their uselessness. An American lady very kindly volunteered one day to show a Yucatecan lady how to make a cake to which she had taken a great fancy. While our friend was busy mixing the ingredients, she quite naturally said, "While I'm doing this, you beat up the eggs." A look of absolute horror came over the woman's face.

"Beat up eggs! Oh! I could not possibly do that. One of my Indian girls can do that for you." But as we have said, they fill the role of pretty toys to perfection; and they later prove excellent mothers. They are great breeders, these Yucatecans, and family life is of the closest, the big mansions of Merida often housing four generations. Curiously enough, despite the tropical climate, the Yucatecan woman retains her looks quite late into life very often. Our hostess at the breakfast was the mother of seven children, the eldest a girl of eleven, as tall as herself, and yet she certainly did not look more than twenty-two or three, and so girlish that it was difficult to believe she was a mother at all. But a far more remarkable case was that of a woman who was but forty-six and had had twenty-four sons! We did not see this latter-day Hecuba, but we were told that she was still quite comely.

There is very little rebellion among Yucatecan women at their fate, and we certainly heard nothing at all of divorce. We do not think it exists as an inst.i.tution, though it is possible that in this, as in all else, the men have their own way and, if they want to, can get rid of their wives. Among the less wealthy families, the marriages are less formal in their makings and the wives do more work: that is really the only difference. Re-marriage among the men is the rule. Most of the elder men appear to have been married at least three times, which rather suggests that the average life for males is longer than for females. This is possibly so. The Yucatecans certainly look a healthy people, though the superfluous fat which is noticeable even in the boys and girls scarcely suggests real const.i.tutional strength. What surprised us greatly was the terrible prevalence of leprosy among the richest cla.s.ses. It is not an exaggeration to say that you could scarcely find a wealthy family without this ghastly taint; and some of the greatest land-owners and their children are eaten up with it. No steps appear to be taken to isolate the cases, and just before our arrival in the country a young leper, enormously rich, had contracted a marriage with a lovely girl, though he was then in a moribund condition. He had died a few months after his wedding, and while we were in Merida the bride died of the loathsome disease. It is said to have been brought from Spain in the earliest days of the Conquest, and it has remained curiously restricted to the richer cla.s.ses. You see little or nothing of it among the lowlier Yucatecans, and it appears unknown among the Indians, who, as a rule, are wonderfully free of all skin troubles. The lepers or those threatened with the terrible curse were some of them men of advanced years, and their general health did not appear in any way affected. One old fellow had but just lost two brothers from it, but he himself had so far escaped, though his children certainly looked tainted. Like insanity, it often skips a generation. It was curious to see these sybaritical plutocrats, eager of life's "ecstasy's utmost to clutch at the core," living their apolaustic days out, haunted by this terrible shadow.

The Church! What can we say about the Church in Yucatan? Does the reader remember those spittoons in Merida Cathedral which we mentioned in an earlier chapter? Well, those ugly etceteras of an ugly habit are a fitting commentary upon the Church. It was in 1867 that President Benito Juarez disestablished the Church throughout the whole of the Republic of Mexico. The effect has been simply disastrous as far as Yucatan is concerned. Her Church is so discreditable that the Pope would be really only consulting the best interests of Catholicism if he abolished the priests altogether. As there is no State provision, the padres must "hold their private dripping-pans to catch the public grease"; and right skilfully they do this. A set of dirty unwashed rogues, men whose faces are enough to hang them, men whom no father would trust with his girl or boy the other side of a gla.s.s door, they are most of them "carpet-baggers," wastrels from Spain, many expelled for very excellent reasons from their colleges, who come into Yucatan to find a living.

Even the amiable Stephens, who looked at everything Yucatecan, except the garrapatas, through rose-tinted gla.s.ses, is obliged to confess that their morals were loose. But that was a long time ago. They are much looser now. The last inc.u.mbent of Tizimin was drunk every day, and kept twelve Indian girls in the parsonage. Even the Tiziminites rebelled at last, and this clerical Brigham Young had to go.

His place had been taken at the time of our arrival by a priest who had, it was said, means of his own, and had come from Spain especially to feed the "hungry sheep" of the poky little Yucatecan town. He was a little ratty man with a face suggestive of previous incarnations as a ferret and a money-lender. A blood-sucking, lecherous little thief: that is what the man looked, and we have good reason to believe we have done him no great injustice in this description. He was the hero of the "corner in candles" to which we referred in the chapter dealing with Tizimin. We had called in at the tienda to buy a candle by the light of which to eat our humble supper, but the storekeeper told us he had not got a candle left. To our astonishment he said that the padre had bought up every candle in the place: that, as it was fiesta week, all the Indians would buy candles to burn before the images of the Virgin and the saints; and that the wily curer of souls had, in short, made a corner in dips. The shopkeeper jubilantly announced that he himself had made a profit out of the deal of one hundred dollars, but that the priest would make at least three thousand dollars or three hundred pounds, enough for him to live on very comfortably for the rest of the year. There is evidently a great deal in candles in Yucatan.

The tienda-keeper a.s.sured us that the padre was a good man; but we had our doubts on this point. This cunning vicegerent of G.o.d had a young priest to help him in the duties, to whom he paid the handsome salary of a s.h.i.+lling a day, of course providing him with food and lodging. We saw the lad daily sitting at the window of the rectory, and it would be difficult to imagine a more saturnine, sensual face. The relations of these men to the girls and women are those of privileged lovers. They are in truth licensed libertines, whose "benefit of clergy" covers a mult.i.tude of sins venial and otherwise. It did not need great ac.u.men to guess at some of these latter. Six priests were recently deported from Merida on the gravest charges: no prosecution being contemplated because one of the boys was the son of a very prominent official.

The priests, who are not allowed to wear clerical attire in the streets, are on the best terms with the haciendados, and do their utmost, by trading on the superst.i.tion of the unfortunate Indians, to keep slavery in being. There is no appeal for the hacienda slave from the action of master backed up by a priest. Friendly with the local slave-owner, the padre can, and does, seduce what girls he pleases. It is most unlikely that the bishop would hear of it. The priests must look for monetary support from the land-owners, so they are cheek by jowl with them all the time. In the train one day we saw a band of young haciendados elaborately mocking the intoning of the Ma.s.s, while a priest who was with them was holding his sides with delighted laughter. All the Yucatecans will gladly join in a jest at the expense of Mother Church.

One night at a show in Merida where some very questionable cinematograph views were delighting the worthy townfolk and their children, the loudest guffaws and shrieks of joy were evoked by a view of a church in the course of repainting and cleaning. You first saw the worthy padre directing the workmen. Then the painter leaves a pot of black paint on the pedestal of a statue of the Virgin. Enter on the scene two ladies.

They approach the image, reverently cross themselves, and, mistaking the paint for a piscina, dip their fingers in what they think holy water, crossing their foreheads and then their faces. The fun comes in when they catch sight of each other. This mockery simply enchanted the Catholic audience.

Talking of piscinas, at the south door of the Tizimin church was one. In it was a chipped enamel bowl, half full of water with a suspicious sediment. We just touched the edge of the cup, and the sediment began to move about "on its own." The water was alive with myriads of small worms and magotty creatures! The man who had faith enough to believe that the touching of his forehead with that stinking compound was a short cut to salvation deserves his faith. There was another of these tadpole basins in the church at Izamal; and judging from reports that reached us, holy water with some "body" in it seemed quite the fas.h.i.+on in the Yucatecan churches. _Agua Sagrada_ indeed! _Agua podrida_ would certainly be a better name.

The spittoons in the cathedral at Merida had replicas, we found, in most of the churches. But the palm must surely be awarded to a "Don't Spit"

notice which we saw on an altar in one church. That the notice was there was no mere accident either, for we saw it in December, and when we returned through the town in the spring it was still there. Evidently that was the permanent position of this offensive decoration.

But at least the clergy can plead a very real necessity for the spittoons and such notices. It is not a pleasant subject, but any one who wrote of the Yucatecans without mentioning the absolutely universal habit would be a faulty chronicler. At all times, everywhere, everybody, young and old, of both s.e.xes, expectorate. They have not the excuse of smoking, for the children and young girls are as guilty of this horrible and unhealthy habit as their elders. The prevalence of the practice was so marked that we asked several Yucatecans to explain what seemed both climatically and physically inexplicable. They pleaded guilty to what really amounted to a racial custom, but they could not explain it. While we were being taken round the Museum of Merida, the eleven-year-old son of the curator spat the whole time on the floor. One day in the islands a baker-boy of about twelve came to our hut to sell us cakes. While we were looking in his basket, he spat on the floor by our hammock-side. He seemed absolutely amazed when we reproved him for it. Quite a gentlemanly ranchero who walked some miles with us one gloriously sunny day in Cozumel hawked and spat, not once or twice, but literally every half-minute till we wondered how his poor rasped throat stood the strain hour after hour. The queer thing was that the habit was not prevalent among the Indians. It seemed to be essentially a Yucatecan vice: it really amounted to that.

But to return to the Church. At the risk of appearing prejudiced, we must say that the Catholicism of the country is so decadent that its disgraceful services would be best done without. The drunken priest at Campeachy, with an unlighted cigarette in his hand, seated in a chair at the altar, his legs stuck up on the chancel rails, trying to take part in the intoning of Ma.s.s is not the exception he should be. Good padres there must be, men who would still deserve the high encomiums that Stephens found it possible to write of the Yucatecan clergy of his day.

We saw nothing of them. We saw the prost.i.tution of a great ecclesiastical inst.i.tution, which, with all its terribly b.l.o.o.d.y history, its soul-choking bigotry, has yet numbered among its servants some of the n.o.blest men who have ever lived. We saw Catholicism at its worst, and its worst is very bad indeed. n.o.body, not the veriest Non-conformist, could surely speak without reverence and admiration of the n.o.ble old man who to-day rules over the Church of Rome. He, a.s.suredly, would be the first to grieve over the decadence of his creed in this far-off corner of the Catholic world, as there can be no doubt he sorrows at the b.l.o.o.d.y past of a religion which has ever lived, and must ever live, on the ignorance--invincible in the case of the better educated--of its followers.

If graver charges lacked against Catholicism, there would always be the indelible blot on its teachings that they tend inevitably to encourage indifference and callousness, if not actually cruelty, towards the animal world. Everybody who has had the misfortune to visit the market of a French town, such as Dieppe or Havre, or has driven behind a Neapolitan cabman, knows more than he or she wishes of Latin cruelty. It is not really that they desire to inflict pain for the mere delight of inflicting it, though there are some fiends enough for that. No, their creed and whole upbringing rob them of that lively sympathy with G.o.d's creatures which He, but surely not for tyranny, has placed in our power.

This Catholic characteristic is very marked in Yucatan. The pleasantest Yucatecan families we met on our wanderings were living happily amid the victims of such cruelty as would keep an Englishman, if he were capable of it, awake at nights. These were the dogs. Every Yucatecan keeps--it is really absolutely euphemistic to use the word--not one or two, but a whole pack of a.s.sorted terriers and hunting dogs; but he never bothers to feed them. It is really a heartbreaking sight for a lover of animals to go into one of the huts or ranches and see the poor things. They hang round the doorways, sometimes so thin and weak that they cannot stand up. Some poor, halfbreed collie will raise its weary head to your knee-level and stare piteously up at you with eyes which are really hollow from starvation. In one ranch we counted a dozen of all sizes and ages and every one of them was a disgrace to their owner, who, as it happened, was quite a good fellow in other ways. No, he could not see why he should feed the dogs. They went out hunting with him, those at least that were not too weak, and then they got a square meal of peccary-guts or other offal. But the man could not see that the gaunt staring-eyed creatures, their ribs almost seeming to be on the point of piercing through their coats, their bellies one sorry flap of fur, were a real disgrace to him and his children. Wherever you go in Yucatan you see these spectres of dogs: they are really nothing else. As a witty fellow-traveller put it, they have to lean against a fence to bark and have to stand a long while to make a shadow.

This indifference towards animals is general among Yucatecans. There is no one to raise a protest against the barbarously cruel practice they have of plucking live fowls. The miserable birds, with their skins still bleeding, are hawked round the streets, carried always by their legs. It is enough to make any one sick. Brought up amid such callousness, it is not at all surprising that the children are usually brutal to every creature they have no reason to fear. On one of the islands we saw a very characteristic incident. We were on a pier, waiting for a boat.

Three boys were fis.h.i.+ng, the eldest perhaps thirteen. One of the smaller boys caught a fish. The eldest seized it from him, and, producing a knife, stuck the blade through the gills, thus pinning the struggling fish to the boards of the jetty. Two or three times he stabbed the fish, each time exclaiming "_More, more, more_" ("Die, die, die"). When the poor little creature had ceased to flutter its tail, the lad deliberately wiped the bloodstained knife on the bare brown calf of his smaller boy companion, who was lying on his stomach with his head over the jetty side. It was not so much the killing of the fish which struck us, though that was cruel enough, as the extraordinary exclamation. An English or American boy could have killed the fish just as cruelly; but neither of them would have been capable of that ferocious exhortation.

Nothing could have exceeded the savage joy in the power to kill which was expressed in the tone of the lad's voice as he uttered those three words.

Inquiring at a hut one day for a fowl, we were taken by a positive fairy of a little girl, perhaps nine, to the yard where, "regardless of their fate," the poultry were picking about. Our golden-haired guide (she was a beautiful specimen of the fair Latin) seized a dainty white hen and, swinging her by the legs, invited us to kill her there and then. It was really too much for our sensitiveness, and we bolted, only, half-way down the village, to hear some one running after us. Our fairy's do-a-deal-at-any-cost Yucatecan blood was up, and, thinking our sudden exit was due to a dissatisfaction with the price asked, she had brought after us another bird which she said could be sold cheaper. It was a perky little c.o.c.kerel, and as it sat in what should have been those tender child's arms, and looked up at us with its bright beady eyes, we really felt so ashamed that we could not look it in the face.

To have ordered its death would have been an impossibility, however ravenous we had been. We stroked its head and begged its untender little mistress to let it live a while longer.

But all this is due to a lack of sympathy with the animal world.

Unfortunately deliberate cruelty is also very common. A people who could find fun in watching pain deserve the name of savages. In Merida you can see a brute throw a poisoned crust of bread to a stray dog, and then be joined by a crowd of folks who form a laughing circle round the dying animal to gloat over its agonised writhings.

This terrible cruelty is a sad heritage of all Yucatecans. The Spaniard is naturally cruel, and there is no kind of doubt that the Mayans, like all the Indian races of the Americas, are so too. Thus the Yucatecans inherit this detestable trait from both their parents. One has to be very sharp with one's Indian servants to prevent cruelty. Stephens relates how his men found an iguana in one of the ruins in a crevice.

They pulled until the tail came off. "They then untied the ropes of their sandals," writes Stephens, "and fastening them above the hind legs, and pulling till the long body seemed parting like the tail, they at length pulled him out. They secured him by a gripe under the fore part of the body, cracked his spine, and broke the bones of his legs so that he could not run; prised his jaws open, fastening them apart with a sharp stick so that he could not bite, and then put him away in the shade. This refined cruelty was to avoid the necessity of killing him immediately, for if killed, in that hot climate he would soon be unfit for food; but mutilated and mangled as he was, he could be kept alive till night." The distinguished American does not tell us how it was that he was content to witness "this refined cruelty" without apparently making an attempt to stop such h.e.l.lish torturing. The Indians will do the same to-day: once or twice our men caught these poor reptiles, which they regard as a great delicacy; but we always insisted on their being killed outright.

Every village has its tienda or store where you buy the eternal black beans, peppers, rice, tortillas, and where usually an a.s.sortment of tinned American meats and fruits can be purchased by those tired of life. But there is nowhere such a thing as a butcher's shop. The cattle range the woods at will, only to be brought in occasionally to be freshly branded with the owner's mark. When one is to be killed it is "rounded up" and driven in to the pueblo. The method of slaughter is stabbing in the region of the heart, just above the left foreleg. In a large village fresh meat will be procurable perhaps thrice, but not more than once, a week in the hamlets. The richer villagers take it in turns to kill, and thus become butcher for the day only, usually flying a flag as a sign that fresh meat is to be bought. Nothing could be queerer than the effect of this co-operative butchering. The Jefe of a town will invite you into his drawing-room or the Yucatecan equivalent, and there you will find joints of blood-boltered pork and beef hanging from a clothes-line, with palm-leaves beneath to catch the gore. He is butcher for the day, that's all. Meat is never jointed, but cut into strips and carried home fastened to a string; cut just as it is wanted by the kilo, about two pounds. Joints such as we have are literally unknown in Yucatan, and for the very excellent reason that there are no means of cooking them.

Their culinary methods are typical of that indolence which is the chief characteristic of all Yucatecans. Their staple dishes are stews, boiled greasily: the sloven cook's way of throwing meat into a pot. When your host has put before you a great messy stew of fowl, onion, and potato swimming in fat, he gives you a cup of black coffee and the meal is over. Puddings and sweets are things for which he has no taste, and vegetables are never served, as with us, separately, or indeed many of them at all. This is not due to any lack of fruit or vegetable, because it was the case even where both abounded. Nothing short of a culinary earthquake would alter the prehistoric kitchen methods of the average Yucatecan family. Every day of the year, morning and evening, the housewife is at the _metate_ or stone tray crus.h.i.+ng the maize for the tortillas; and this despite the fact that American flour is coming into the country in ever-increasing quant.i.ty. Obstinate or conservative--you can call it which you like--they will take no advantage of an import which would mean that they could bake twice a week and get it over.

The average Yucatecan housewife is always at the _metate_ in season and out of season. For most Yucatecan families it is a hand-to-mouth existence, though they live in a land which, were they industrious, might be made to "smile with plenty." The Yucatecan is an easy-going creature, fond of drink, women, dancing, and his cigarette. He has no love of work, and will spend the few dollars he has earned in a reckless spirit, as if he had millions: afterwards living on his tortillas till luck comes his way again. In all this he is but a replica of his kinsmen in Mexico. This natural indolence is encouraged by the weakness of even Diaz's rule. He is just as much afraid of the people to-day as when first made President: he is afraid to tax rum or other spirits. He has to get his revenues out of the foreigners. People in Yucatan complain because labour is scarce. If machinery was imported to thresh corn, to take but one example, they would be able to sell the staple food of the land cheaper and pay higher wages. As it is, perfectly prohibitive duties are levied on all the machinery coming into all the Mexican ports. Thus throughout the whole Republic agriculture is practically where it was in the time of Moctezuma. The anomaly of all this is very patent in Yucatan, where the henequen lords have found an Eldorado in the cactus and are each year improving their "plant," while too stupid to see that if the same progressive methods were applied to the general cultivation of their country, they would soon be able to view without terror the abolition of that detestable slavery which is to-day essential to their fortune-building.

Fortunes are waiting to be picked like blackberries by the foreign "devil" who will teach the Yucatecan to use what bountiful Nature has given. Where is there better food than orange marmalade? Every garden almost in Yucatan swarms with the bitter-orange tree, and the fruit rots and falls, no one thinking it worth while, although sugar-cane grows almost wild, to bring the two together and make the delicious preserve.

In Merida we had to pay two s.h.i.+llings for a half-pound gla.s.s jar of French marmalade. Year after year the Yucatecan is content to pay seventy-five centavos (eighteen pence) for a tin of American preserved fruit, when he could get the same from Cozumel for five. It is the same with everything. They pay seventy-five for a kilo (two pounds) of salt or dried fish, when they could buy their own fish for twelve centavos a kilo and salt it themselves: or catch the fish themselves. This trade is entirely in the hands of the Cuban sailors. The Yucatecans, for the matter of that all Mexicans, hate foreign intrusion, but they will do nothing themselves. Fancy a country, the chief omnipresent difficulty of which is the density of its forests, importing timber! Yet that is what Yucatan is doing to-day. She buys American lumber; she allows her markets to be glutted with American fruits and meat when she could supply her own wants at an extraordinarily small cost of labour; and if there were deficiencies, Mexico possesses some of the finest cattle-raising land and fruit-soils as rich as California.

With the only pots and pans German-made and so heavily taxed that you have to give five s.h.i.+llings for a saucepan which in London would cost you a s.h.i.+lling or at most eighteen pence, it is no wonder that the culinary arrangements of Yucatan are as antediluvian as they are. If they do not stew, they grill over the burning wood. Time and time again birds we had shot were reduced to such a dried and mummified condition as to be quite uneatable. The simplicity of their cooking methods is only matched by the simplicity of their service. None but wealthy folk use knives or forks. The tortilla, doubled up, serves as spoon and fork, and a knife is not needed as the meat is cut up before it is cooked.

There is no such thing as a saltspoon in Yucatan. You are expected to shake the salt out or take it out with your fingers. Indeed the saltspoon seems unknown in Mexico too. There may be one, but we never saw it. Tables are rare, and most families squat round their food in true Indian fas.h.i.+on. As a rule women do not eat with the men; but they and the children have what is left after their husbands and brothers have finished. We found this often very embarra.s.sing; but our protests were greeted with as much ingrat.i.tude by the ladies as astonishment by the men.

We met and lived with all grades of Yucatecans; but perhaps it was on the coasting vessels that you saw most of general Yucatecan manners.

These are often curiously contradictory. They will tear ungainly pieces of meat to pieces with their fingers; but they religiously wash those fingers after each meal. They will use the edge of their white s.h.i.+fts as a handkerchief; but even the common sailors will clean their teeth after a meal. They will convert the gunwale of the boat into a _sedes stercoraria_, engaging you in "animated conversation" the while; yet nothing would induce them to undress before you and bathe. They will spit on the floor of your room; but they will not move an inch in your presence without a "_con permiso_." They are a frugal race, and you were expected to throw the broken remains of your tortillas into a pail provided for the purpose, though they do not appear again. Perhaps the women eat them.

We have written something earlier about Yucatecan music when describing the dance at Holboch. Nothing could well be more distressing than it is.

Every town of any size aspires to have a band. The worst German band which ever disgraced itself and murdered melody for filthy lucre in London's streets is a combination of the orchestras of Strauss and Sousa compared with a Yucatecan band. As one lies in one's hammock at night, forced to listen to the musical h.e.l.l it creates, one wonders why indignant citizens do not leap from their hammocks and make butchery in the plaza of its unscrupulous members. But the Yucatecans like it. The more noise the merrier for them. A most popular custom is what they call _la serenata_. At about two or three in the morning half a dozen young men make "rough music" (it is very rough) with drums and concertinas outside the home of some village belle. In the stillness of the darkness it is not without its weird charm, if it lasted a few minutes. But it often lasts an hour or more till you become suicidal. Their discordant music is matched by their singing voices. No Yucatecan knows the first principles of voice-production. A tiny, squeaky chant is the most they achieve. Indeed there is something very queer about the Yucatecan voice, even in talking: a curious whiny sing-song, beginning low and ending in an almost indescribable treble note.

The true Irish wake is a dearly prized inst.i.tution among the Yucatecans.

Every occasion is seized on for an indulgence in the habanero they so much love; and death itself cannot rob the liquid refreshment of its charm. The corpse is toasted till the mourners are incoherent; singing, dancing, and merrymaking going on often in the very room where the body lies. Burial follows within twenty-four hours owing to the climate, and in those many places which are only periodically visited by a priest there is no religious ceremony in the cemetery; its place being taken by the chief mourner "standing" a bottle of habanero, which is literally broached at the graveside and drunk instanter. By the richer folks a grave is bought but no grave is dug; the coffin rests on the level of the earth as a rule, owing to the rocky nature of the soil. At the head is placed a big stone, at the foot another. Then over the coffin is built a dome of cement. In some cemeteries bodies are buried in walls, the coffin on its end. Where a family is only rich enough to buy ground enough for one grave, on a second death the headstone is removed and the coffin is drawn out and the bones placed in the new coffin, the old one being burnt. In cases of the very poor the body is buried as far down as the nature of the soil permits, and at the end of a year the bones are dug up by the relatives and burnt there and then in the cemetery. The most prominent outward and visible sign of mourning is a long streamer of c.r.a.pe or black cloth, which is fastened to the door of the house and left there till it rots off. On the first anniversary, when the soul of the deceased is believed to revisit its old haunts, there is a second wake and much drinking.

Yucatan is a happy hunting ground for "Jacks in Office." The pomposity of this race of parvenus would be amusing if it were not that they have the power to wreck your plans. We have described our delightful encounter with the Jefe of Isla de Mujeres. We suffered many other annoyances from jumped-up officials who took a childish pleasure in exhibiting their authority. A delicious example of what the Mexican official is capable of when he puts his mind to it was afforded to us at Vera Cruz on our return. The British armoured cruiser "Euryalus" came over from Jamaica flying the flag of Rear-Admiral Inglefield. President Diaz seized the chance, the first since the King gave him the G.C.B., of paying a pretty compliment to England by sending down an invitation to the admiral and his officers to visit the capital. The "Euryalus,"

fearing to come into the harbour, which, even despite the splendid work of Sir Weetman Pearson, is still risky for vessels of such draught as a British man-of-war, anch.o.r.ed just outside the breakwater. To her, after the admiral had landed, went out the port pilot, for whom she had _not_ signalled, as she was not coming in. He asked the captain to move a little as, so he said, they were in the fairway. It was probably merely an excuse to show an authority which he had thought flouted. The British, with the utmost courtesy, at once got steam up and moved a few cables' lengths. Later in the day, to the natural astonishment of the commander, a bill for pilotage arrived--nineteen dollars! The British officers in charge refused to pay this absurd demand, and then the port authorities actually had the impudence to summon them to appear to show cause why they should not pay. This latter demand was ignored. But the beauty of the situation lay, of course, in the fact that while these Vera-Cruzian jackanapeses were dunning the huge battles.h.i.+p, Diaz and Mexico City were banqueting and cheering the admiral and his staff as guests of the nation. When we left Vera Cruz the truth about this heavenly incident had not leaked out. The port authorities must have had a very bad quarter of an hour indeed, if the relentless Diaz ever heard of it.

That is the Mexican all over; and the Yucatecan is, as is natural, worse because his authority is still pettier. The American traders with the islands feel the full force of it. A captain sailing from such a port as Key West to Cozumel must go to Ascension Bay, some eighty miles south of his destination, because none but a national boat can retail the goods to the islands. When he gets to Ascension Bay, he must, with his own labour (the Yucatecans will not supply men), unload and place his cargo on the beach. Then, when it has been tallied with the "manifest," the unfortunate trader has to reload, again at his own cost, in a native vessel: afterwards sailing his boat empty behind the other. Arrived at Cozumel he has to unload, again at his own cost, and then, and then only, is he ent.i.tled to meet his customers.

The tyranny of the Custom House officials is the tyranny of men who are intent on filling their own pockets. Here is an example. An American captain s.h.i.+pped a cargo of tomatoes, upon which no import duty is payable. At Ascension Bay it was found that he had on board one more barrel than was declared in his "manifest." This was quite an accident.

A barrel more or less on his final takings would not have amounted to more than a few coppers, and in any case the cargo was not dutiable. No matter: the officials fined him ten dollars on every barrel of tomatoes he had on board--fifty--making a fine of 50. Could greater injustice be conceived? He refused to pay, and his cargo was impounded. He appealed to Mexico City and the fine was immediately remitted. The blackguards at Ascension Bay knew it was not the law. They were simply going to pocket the fine. Another man's cargo of potatoes, because he had a sack or two _too little_, was left to rot on the beach because he refused to pay a ludicrous fine.

Of amus.e.m.e.nts the Yucatecans have none that could be called really national. They are happiest when they are loafing and drinking. They are all fond of gambling, and play the ordinary card games. All forms of lotteries are popular, and a State lottery is run from which the profit netted by a high official is said to be as much as twenty thousand dollars a month.

Matters theatrical in Merida were in rather a spring-cleaning condition when we were there, for the old theatre was dismantled and a really fine one was being built at a great cost. Meanwhile the bull-ring had been requisitioned and turned into a theatre. There we went one evening and witnessed a very second-rate play. The chief thing which struck us was the fact that between the acts the women all stood up in the stalls and gazed round at the people. It was so singularly un-European.

Bull-fights are still immensely popular throughout Yucatan; but a praiseworthy effort is being made by those in authority to discountenance them, though without much effect. At Merida there are several yearly, but it is a very decadent form of the Spanish sport.

Around the ring are small shelters into which the toreador can dodge when the bull charges. Thus there is little or no real courage demanded of the fighters. Nothing draws the people as a bull-fight will, and to those two or three towns where fights are annual fixtures thousands flock in from miles around. Tizimin is such a place. At the fiesta held while we were there no less than thirty thousand people collected. It is the love of blood which really attracts, and a fight is successful or not according to the number of animals slain. In the seven days at Tizimin fifty bulls died. It is really mere clumsy brutal slaughter, for the creatures are undersized steers as a rule, with about as much fight in them as an English cow. The young bloods of Yucatan are fond of improvising these bullock baitings; and one showed us with pride a scar on his wrist, a memento of a fight two or three days earlier. It was just such a scratch as a child would get while out blackberrying.