The Plumed Serpent

Chapter II-2

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 Tomás 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.’