and waiting for circumstance to fill him up. Swept with an American
despair of having lived in vain, or of not having _really_ lived.
Having missed something. Which fearful misgiving would make him
rush like mechanical steel filings to a magnet, towards any crowd
in the street. And then all his poetry and philosophy gone with the
cigarette-end he threw away, he would stand craning his neck in one
more frantic effort to _see_--just to _see_. Whatever it was, he must
see it. Or he might miss something. And then, after he’d seen an old
ragged woman run over by a motor-car and bleeding on the floor, he’d
come back to Kate pale at the gills, sick, bewildered, daunted, and
yet, yes, glad he’d seen it. It was Life!
“Well,” said Kate, “I always thank God I’m not Argus. Two eyes are
often two too many for me, in all the horrors. I don’t feed myself on
street-accidents.”
At dinner they tried to talk of pleasanter things than bull-fights.
Villiers was neat and tidy and very nicely mannered, but she knew he
was keeping a little mocking laugh up his sleeve, because she could not
stomach the afternoon’s garbage. He himself had black rings under his
eyes, but that was because he had “lived.”
The climax came with the dessert. In walked the Pole and that Spaniard
who spoke American. The Pole was unhealthy and unclean-looking. She
heard him saying to Owen, who of course had risen with automatic
cordiality:
“We thought we’d come here to dinner. Well, how are you.”
Kate’s skin was already goose-flesh. But the next instant she heard
that dingy voice, that spoke so many languages dingily, assailing her
with familiarity:
“Ah, Miss Leslie, you missed the best part of it. You missed all the
fun! Oh, I say--”
Rage flew into her heart and fire into her eyes. She got up suddenly
from her chair, and faced the fellow behind her.
“Thank you!” she said. “I don’t want to hear. I don’t want you to speak
to me. I don’t want to know you.”
She looked at him once, then turned her back, sat down again, and took
a pitahaya from the fruit plate.
The fellow went green, and stood a moment speechless.
“Oh, all right!” he said mechanically, turning away to the Spaniard who
spoke American.
“Well--see you later!” said Owen rather hurriedly, and he went back to
his seat at Kate’s table.
The two strange fellows sat at another table. Kate ate her cactus
fruit in silence, and waited for her coffee. By this time she was not
so angry, she was quite calm. And even Villiers hid his joy in a new
sensation under a manner of complete quiet composure.
When coffee came she looked at the two men at the other table, and at
the two men at her own table.
“I’ve had enough of _canaille_, of any sort,” she said.
“Oh, I understand, perfectly,” said Owen.
After dinner, she went to her room. And through the night she could
not sleep, but lay listening to the noises of Mexico City, then to the
silence and the strange, grisly fear that so often creeps out on to
the darkness of a Mexican night. Away inside her, she loathed Mexico
City. She even feared it. In the daytime it had a certain spell--but at
night, the underneath grisliness and evil came forth.
In the morning Owen also announced that he had not slept at all.
“Oh, I never slept so well since I was in Mexico,” said Villiers, with
a triumphant look of a bird that has just pecked a good morsel from the
garbage-heap.
“Look at the frail aesthetic youth!” said Owen, in a hollow voice.
“His frailty and his aestheticism are both bad signs, to me,” said Kate
ominously.
“And the youth. Surely that’s another!” said Owen, with a dead laugh.
But Villiers only gave a little snort of cold, pleased amusement.
Someone was calling Miss Leslie on the telephone, said the Mexican
chambermaid. It was the only person Kate knew in the capital--or in
the Distrito Federal--a Mrs Norris, widow of an English embassador of
thirty years ago. She had a big, ponderous old house out in the village
of Tlacolula.
“Yes! Yes! This is Mrs Norris. How are you? That’s right, that’s
right. Now, Mrs Leslie, won’t you come out to tea this afternoon and
see the garden? I wish you would. Two friends are coming in to see me,
two Mexicans: Don Ramón Carrasco and General Viedma. They are both
_charming_ men, and Don Ramón is a great scholar. I assure you, they
are both entirely the exception among Mexicans. Oh, but _entirely_
the exception! So now, my _dear_ Mrs Leslie, won’t you come with your
cousin? I wish you would.”
Kate remembered the little general; he was a good deal smaller than
herself. She remembered his erect, alert little figure, something
bird-like, and the face with eyes slanting under arched eyebrows,
and the little black tuft of an imperial on the chin: a face with
a peculiar Chinese suggestion, without being Chinese in the least,
really. An odd, detached, yet cocky little man, a true little
Indian, speaking Oxford English in a rapid, low, musical voice, with
extraordinarily gentle intonation. Yet those black, inhuman eyes!
Till this minute she had not really been able to recall him to herself,
to get any sharp impression. Now she had it. He was an Indian pure
and simple. And in Mexico, she knew, there were more generals than
soldiers. There had been three generals in the Pullman coming down from
El Paso, two, more or less educated, in the “drawing-room,” and the
third, a real peasant Indian, travelling with a frizzy half-white woman
who looked as if she had fallen into a flour-sack, her face was so deep
in powder, and her frizzy hair and her brown silk dress so douched
with the white dust of it. Neither this “general” nor this woman had
ever been in a Pullman before. But the general was sharper than the
woman. He was a tall wiry fellow with a reddened pock-marked face and
sharp little black eyes. He followed Owen to the smoking room, and
watched with sharp eyes, to see how everything was done. And soon he
knew. And he would wipe his wash-bowl dry as neatly as anybody. There
was something of a real man about him. But the poor, half-white woman,
when she wanted the ladies’ toilet, got lost in the passage and wailed
aloud: _I don’t know where to go! No sé adonde! No sé adonde!_--until
the general sent the Pullman boy to direct her.
But it had annoyed Kate to see this general and this woman eating
chicken and asparagus and jelly in the Pullman, paying fifteen pesos
for a rather poor dinner, when for a peso-and-a-half apiece they could
have eaten a better meal, and real Mexican, at the meal-stop station.
And all the poor, barefoot people clamouring on the platform, while
the “general,” who was a man of their own sort, nobly swallowed his
asparagus on the other side of the window-pane.
But this is how they save the people, in Mexico and elsewhere. Some
tough individual scrambles up out of the squalor and proceeds to save
himself. Who pays for the asparagus and jelly and face-powder, nobody
asks, because everybody knows.
And so much for Mexican generals: as a rule, a class to be strictly
avoided.
Kate was aware of all this. She wasn’t much interested in any sort of
Mexican in office. There is so much in the world that one wants to
avoid, as one wants to avoid the lice that creep on the unwashed crowd.
Being rather late, Owen and Kate bumped out to Tlacolula in a Ford
taxi. It was a long way, a long way through the peculiar squalid
endings of the town, then along the straight road between trees, into
the valley. The sun of April was brilliant, there were piles of cloud
about the sky, where the volcanoes would be. The valley stretched away
to its sombre, atmospheric hills, in a flat dry bed, parched except
where there was some crop being irrigated. The soil seemed strange,
dry, blackish, artificially wetted, and old. The trees rose high, and
hung bare boughs, or withered shade. The buildings were either new and
alien, like the Country Club, or cracked and dilapidated, with all
the plaster falling off. The falling of thick plaster from cracked
buildings--one could almost hear it!
Yellow tram-cars rushed at express speed away down the fenced-in
car-lines, rushing round towards Xochimilco or Tlalpam. The asphalt
road ran outside these lines, and on the asphalt rushed incredibly
dilapidated Ford omnibuses, crowded with blank dark natives in dirty
cotton clothes and big straw hats. At the far edge of the road, on
the dust-tracks under the trees, little donkeys under huge loads
loitered towards the city, driven by men with blackened faces and
bare, blackened legs. Three-fold went the traffic; the roar of the
tram-trains, the clatter of the automobiles, the straggle of asses and
of outside-seeming individuals.
Occasional flowers would splash out in colour from a ruin of falling
plaster. Occasional women with strong, dark-brown arms would be washing
rags in a drain. An occasional horseman would ride across to the herd
of motionless black-and-white cattle on the field. Occasional maize
fields were already coming green. And the pillars that mark the water
conduits passed one by one.
They went through the tree-filled plaza of Tlacolula, where natives
were squatting on the ground, selling fruits or sweets, then down a
road between high walls. They pulled up at last at big gate-doors,
beyond which was a heavy pink-and-yellow house, and beyond the house,
high, dark cypress trees.
In the road two motor-cars were already standing. That meant other
visitors. Owen knocked on the studded fortress doors: there was an
imbecile barking of dogs. At last a little footman with a little black
moustache opened silently.
The square, inner patio, dark, with sun lying on the heavy arches of
one side, had pots of red and white flowers, but was ponderous, as if
dead for centuries. A certain dead, heavy strength and beauty seemed
there, unable to pass away, unable to liberate itself and decompose.
There was a stone basin of clear but motionless water, and the heavy
reddish-and-yellow arches went round the courtyard with warrior-like
fatality, their bases in dark shadow. Dead, massive house of the
Conquistadores, with a glimpse of tall-grown garden beyond, and further
Aztec cypresses rising to strange dark heights. And dead silence, like
the black, porous, absorptive lava rock. Save when the tram-cars
battered past outside the solid wall.
Kate went up the jet-like stone staircase, through the leather doors.
Mrs Norris came forward on the terrace of the upper patio to receive
her guests.
“I’m so glad, my dear, that you came. I should have rung you up before,
but I’ve had such trouble with my heart. And the doctor wanting to send
me down to a lower altitude! I said to him, I’ve no patience! If you’re
going to cure me, cure me at an altitude of seven thousand feet or
else admit your incompetence at once. Ridiculous, this rushing up and
down from one altitude to another. I’ve lived at this height all these
years. I simply refuse to be bundled down to Cuernavaca or some other
place where I don’t want to go. Well, my dear, and how are you?”
Mrs Norris was an elderly woman, rather like a conquistador herself
in her black silk dress and her little black shoulder-shawl of fine
cashmere, with a short silk fringe, and her ornaments of black enamel.
Her face had gone slightly grey, her nose was sharp and dusky, and
her voice hammered almost like metal, a slow, distinct, peculiar hard
music of its own. She was an archaeologist, and she had studied the
Aztec remains so long, that now some of the black-grey look of the lava
rock, and some of the experience of the Aztec idols, with sharp nose
and slightly prominent eyes and an expression of tomb-like mockery, had
passed into her face. A lonely daughter of culture, with a strong mind
and a dense will, she had browsed all her life on the hard stones of
archaeological remains, and at the same time she had retained a strong
sense of humanity, and a slightly fantastic humorous vision of her
fellow men.
From the first instant, Kate respected her for her isolation and her
dauntlessness. The world is made up of a mass of people and a few
individuals. Mrs Norris was one of the few individuals. True, she
played her social game all the time. But she was an odd number; and all
alone, she could give the even numbers a bad time.
“But come in. Do come in!” she said, after keeping her two guests out
on the terrace that was lined with black idols and dusty native baskets
and shields and arrows and tapa, like a museum.
In the dark sitting-room that opened on to the terrace were visitors:
an old man in a black morning coat and white hair and beard, and a
woman in black crêpe-de-chine, with the inevitable hat of her sort upon
her grey hair: a stiff satin turned up on three sides and with black
ospreys underneath. She had the baby face and the faded blue eyes and
the middle-west accent inevitable.
“Judge and Mrs Burlap.”
The third visitor was a youngish man, very correct and not quite sure.
He was Major Law, American military attaché at the moment.
The three people eyed the newcomers with cautious suspicion. They might
be shady. There are indeed so many shady people in Mexico that it is
taken for granted, if you arrive unannounced and unexpected in the
capital, that you are probably under an assumed name, and have some
dirty game up your sleeve.
“Been long in Mexico?” snapped the Judge; the police enquiry had begun.
“No!” said Owen, resonantly, his gorge rising. “About two weeks.”
“You are an American?”
“I,” said Owen, “am American. Mrs Leslie is English--or rather Irish.”
“Been in the club yet?”
“No,” said Owen, “I haven’t. American clubs aren’t much in my line.
Though Garfield Spence gave me a letter of introduction.”
“Who? Garfield Spence?” The Judge started as if he had been stung. “Why
the fellow’s nothing better than a bolshevist. Why he went to Russia!”
“I should rather like to go to Russia myself,” said Owen. “It is
probably the most interesting country in the world to-day.”
“But weren’t you telling me,” put in Mrs Norris, in her clear,
metal-musical voice, “that you loved China so much, Mr Rhys?”
“I _did_ like China _very_ much,” said Owen.
“And I’m sure you made some wonderful collections. Tell me now, what
was your particular fancy?”
“Perhaps, after all,” said Owen, “it was jade.”
“Ah jade! Yes! Jade! Jade is beautiful! Those wonderful little
fairy-lands they carve in jade!”
“And the stone itself! It was the delicate stone that fascinated me,”
said Owen. “The wonderful quality of it!”
“Ah wonderful, wonderful! Tell me now, dear Mrs Leslie, what you have
been doing since I saw you?”
“We went to a bull-fight, and hated it,” said Kate. “At least I did. We
sat in the Sun, near the ring, and it was all horrible.”
“Horrible, I am sure. I never went to a bull-fight in Mexico. Only in
Spain, where there is wonderful colour. Did you ever try a bull-fight,
Major?”
“Yes, I have been several times.”
“You have! Then you know all about it. And how are you liking Mexico,
Mrs Leslie?”
“Not much,” said Kate. “It strikes me as evil.”
“It does! It does!” said Mrs Norris. “Ah, if you had known it before!
Mexico before the revolution! It was different then. What is the latest
news, Major?”
“About the same,” said the Major. “There is a rumour that the new
President will be turned down by the army, a few days before he comes
into office. But you never know.”
“I think it would be a great shame not to let him have a try,” put in
Owen hotly. “He seems a sincere man, and just because he is honestly a
Labour man, they want to shut him out.”
“Ah, my dear Mr Rhys, they _all_ talk so nobly beforehand. If only
their deeds followed their words, Mexico would be heaven on earth.”
“Instead of hell on earth,” snapped the Judge.
A young man and his wife, also Americans, were introduced as Mr and Mrs
Henry. The young man was fresh and lively.
“We were talking about the new President,” said Mrs Norris.
“Well, why not!” said Mr Henry breezily. “I’m just back from Orizaba.
And do you know what they’ve got pasted up on the walls?--_Hosanna!
Hosanna! Hosanna! Viva el Jesús Cristo de Mexico, Socrates Tomas
Montes!_”
“Why, did you ever hear of such a thing!” said Mrs Norris.
“_Hosanna! Hosanna! Hosanna!_ To the new Labour President! I think it’s
rich,” said Henry.
The Judge stamped his stick on the ground in a speechless access of
irritability.
“They pasted on my luggage,” said the Major, “when I came through Vera
Cruz: _La degenerada media clasa, Será regenerada, por mi, Montes._ The
degenerate middle class shall be regenerated by me, Montes.”
“Poor Montes!” said Kate. “He seems to have got his work cut out.”
“He has indeed!” said Mrs Norris. “Poor man, I wish he might come in
peacefully and put a strong hand on the country. But there’s not much
hope, I’m afraid.”
There was a silence, during which Kate felt that bitter hopelessness
that comes over people who know Mexico well. A bitter barren
hopelessness.
“How can a man who comes in on a Labour vote, even a doctored one, put
a strong hand on a country!” snapped the Judge. “Why he came in on the
very cry of _Down with the strong hand!_” And again the old man stamped
his stick in an access of extreme irritability.
This was another characteristic of the old residents of the city: A
state of intense, though often suppressed irritation, an irritation
amounting almost to rabies.
“Oh, but mayn’t it be possible that he will change his views a little
on coming into power?” said Mrs Norris. “So many Presidents have done
so.”
“I should say very probable, if ever he gets into power,” said young
Henry. “He’ll have all his work cut out saving Socrates Tomas, he won’t
have much time left for saving Mexico.”
“He’s a dangerous fellow, and will turn out a scoundrel,” said the
Judge.
“Myself,” said Owen, “as far as I have followed him, I believe he is
sincere, and I admire him.”
“I thought it was so nice,” said Kate, “that they received him in New
York with loud music by the Street Sweepers’ Band. The Street Sweepers’
Band they sent to receive him from the ship!”
“You see,” said the Major, “no doubt the Labour people themselves
wished to send that particular band.”
“But to be President Elect, and to be received by the Street Sweepers’
Band!” said Kate. “No, I can’t believe it!”
“Oh, it actually was so,” said the Major. “But that is Labour hailing
Labour, surely.”
“The latest rumour,” said Henry, “is that the army will go over _en
bloc_ to General Angulo about the twenty-third, a week before the
inauguration.”
“But how is it possible?” said Kate, “when Montes is so popular?”
“Montes popular!” they all cried at once. “Why!” snapped the Judge,
“he’s the most unpopular man in Mexico.”
“Not with the Labour Party!” said Owen, almost at bay.
“The Labour Party!” the Judge fairly spat like a cat. “There is no such
thing. What is the Labour Party in Mexico? A bunch of isolated factory
hands here and there, mostly in the State of Vera Cruz. The Labour
Party! They’ve done what they could already. We know them.”
“That’s true,” said Henry. “The Labourites have tried every little game
possible. When I was in Orizaba they marched to the Hotel Francia to
shoot all the gringos and the Gachupines. The hotel manager had pluck
enough to harangue them, and they went off to the next hotel. When the
man came out there to talk to them, they shot him before he got a word
out. It’s funny, really! If you have to go to the Town Hall, and you’re
dressed in decent clothes, they let you sit on a hard bench for hours.
But if a street-sweeper comes in, or a fellow in dirty cotton drawers,
it is _Buenos Dios! Señor! Pase Usted! Quiere Usted algo?_--while you
sit there waiting their pleasure. Oh, it’s quite funny.”
The Judge trembled with irritation like an access of gout. The party
sat in gloomy silence, that sense of doom and despair overcoming them
as it seems to overcome all people who talk seriously about Mexico.
Even Owen was silent. He too had come through Vera Cruz, and had had
his fright; the porters had charged him twenty pesos to carry his
trunk from the ship to the train. Twenty pesos is ten dollars, for ten
minutes’ work. And when Owen had seen the man in front of him arrested
and actually sent to jail, a Mexican jail at that, for refusing to pay
the charge, “the legal charge,” he himself had stumped up without a
word.
“I walked into the National Museum the other day,” said the Major
quietly. “Just into that room on the patio where the stones are. It
was rather a cold morning, with a Norte blowing. I’d been there about
ten minutes when somebody suddenly poked me on the shoulder. I turned
round, and it was a lout in tight boots. _You spik English?_ I said
_yes!_ Then he motioned me to take my hat off: I’d got to take my hat
off. _What for?_ said I, and I turned away and went on looking at their
idols and things: ugliest set of stuff in the world, I believe. Then up
came the fellow with the attendant--the attendant of course wearing his
cap. They began gabbling that this was the National Museum, and I must
take off my hat to their national monuments. Imagine it: those dirty
stones! I laughed at them and jammed my hat on tighter and walked out.
They are really only monkeys, when it comes to nationalism.”
“Exactly!” cried Henry. “When they forget all about the Patria and
Mexico and all that stuff, they’re as nice a people as you’d find.
But as soon as they get national, they’re just monkeys. A man up from
Mixcoatl told me a nice story. Mixcoatl is a capital way in the South,
and they’ve got a sort of Labour bureau there. Well, the Indians come
in from the hills, as wild as rabbits. And they get them into that
bureau, and the Laboristas, the agitator fellows, say to them: _Now
Señores, have you anything to report from your native village? Haven’t
you anything for which you would like redress?_ Then of course the
Indians start complaining about one another, and the Secretary says:
_Wait a minute, gentlemen! Let me ring up the Governor and report
this._ So he goes to the telephone and starts ringing: ringing: _Ah!
Is that the Palace? Is the Governor in? Tell him Señor Fulano wants to
speak to him!_ The Indians sit gaping with open mouths. To them it’s
a miracle. _Ah! Is that you. Governor! Good morning! How are you! Can
I have your attention for a moment? Many thanks! Well I’ve got some
gentlemen here down from Apaxtle, in the hills: José Garcia, Jesus
Querido, etc.--and they wish to report so-and-so. Yes! Yes! That’s it!
Yes! What? You will see that justice is done and the thing is made
right? Ah señor, many thanks! In the name of these gentlemen from the
hills, from the village of Apaxtle, many thanks._
There sit the Indians staring as if heaven had opened and the Virgin
of Guadalupe was standing tiptoe on their chins. And what do you
expect? The telephone is a dummy. It isn’t connected with anywhere.
Isn’t that rich? But it’s Mexico.”
The moment’s fatal pause followed this funny story.
“Oh but!” said Kate, “it’s wicked! It _is_ wicked. I’m sure the Indians
would be all right, if they were left alone.”
“Well,” said Mrs Norris. “Mexico isn’t like any other place in the
world.”
But she spoke with fear and despair in her voice.
“They seem to _want_ to betray everything,” said Kate. “They seem to
_love_ criminals and ghastly things. They seem to want the ugly things.
They seem to _want_ the ugly things to come up to the top. All the
foulness that lies at the bottom, they want to stir up to the top. They
seem to enjoy it. To enjoy making everything fouler. Isn’t it curious!”
“It is curious,” said Mrs Norris.
“But that’s what it is,” said the Judge. “They want to turn the country
into one big crime. They don’t like anything else. They don’t like
honesty and decency and cleanliness. They want to foster lies and
crime. What they call liberty here is just freedom to commit crime.
That’s what Labour means, that’s what they all mean. Free crime,
nothing else.”
“I wonder all the foreigners don’t go away,” said Kate.
“They have their occupations here,” snapped the Judge.
“And the good people _are_ all going away. They have nearly all gone,
those that have anything left to go to,” said Mrs Norris. “Some of us,
who have our property here, and who have made our lives here, and who
know the country, we stay out of a kind of tenacity. But we know it’s
hopeless. The more it changes, the worse it is.--Ah, here is Don Ramón
and Don Cipriano. So pleased to see you. Let me introduce you.”
Don Ramón Carrasco was a tall, big, handsome man who gave the effect of
bigness. He was middle aged, with a large black moustache and large,
rather haughty eyes under straight brows. The General was in civilian
clothes, looking very small beside the other man, and very smartly
built, almost cocky.
“Come,” said Mrs Norris. “Let us go across and have tea.”
The Major excused himself, and took his departure.