The Plumed Serpent

Chapter II-4

‘And does everything in Mexico oppress you?’ he added, almost shyly, but with a touch of mockery, looking at her with a troubled naïve face that had its age heavy and resistant beneath the surface.

‘Almost everything!’ she said. ‘It always makes my heart sink. Like the eyes of the men in the big hats—I call them the peons. Their eyes have no middle to them. Those big handsome men, under their big hats, they aren’t really there. They have no centre, no real I. Their middle is a raging black hole, like the middle of a maelstrom.’

She looked with her troubled grey eyes into the black, slanting, watchful, calculating eyes of the small man opposite her. He had a pained expression, puzzled, like a child. And at the same time something obstinate and mature, a demonish maturity, opposing her in an animal way.

‘You mean we aren’t real people, we have nothing of our own, except killing and death,’ he said, quite matter of fact.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, startled by his interpretation. ‘I only say how it makes me feel.’

‘You are very clever, Mrs Leslie,’ came Don Ramón’s quiet, but heavy teasing voice behind her. ‘It is quite true. Whenever a Mexican cries Viva! he ends up with Muera! When he says Viva! he really means Death for Somebody or Other! I think of all the Mexican revolutions, and I see a skeleton walking ahead of a great number of people, waving a black banner with Viva la Muerte! written in large white letters. Long live Death! Not Viva Cristo Rey! but Viva Muerte Rey! Vamos! Viva!’

Kate looked round. Don Ramón was flashing his knowing brown Spanish eyes, and a little sardonic smile lurked under his moustache. Instantly Kate and he, Europeans in essence, understood one another. He was waving his arm to the last Viva!

‘But,’ said Kate, ‘I don’t want to say Viva la Muerte!’

‘But when you are real Mexican—’ he said, teasing.

‘I never could be,’ she said hotly, and he laughed.

‘I’m afraid Viva la Muerte! hits the nail on the head,’ said Mrs Norris, rather stonily. ‘But won’t you come to tea! Do!’

She led the way in her black little shawl and neat grey hair, going ahead like a Conquistador herself, and turning to look with her Aztec eyes through her pince-nez, to see if the others were coming.

‘We are following,’ said Don Ramón in Spanish, teasing her. Stately in his black suit, he walked behind her on the narrow terrace, and Kate followed, with the small, strutting Don Cipriano, also in a black suit, lingering oddly near her.

‘Do I call you General or Don Cipriano?’ she asked, turning to him.

An amused little smile quickly lit his face, though his eyes did not smile. They looked at her with a black, sharp look.

‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘You know General is a term of disgrace in Mexico. Shall we say Don Cipriano?’

‘Yes, I like that much the best,’ she said.

And he seemed pleased.

It was a round tea-table, with shiny silver tea-service, and silver kettle with a little flame, and pink and white oleanders. The little neat young footman carried the tea-cups, in white cotton gloves. Mrs Norris poured tea and cut cakes with a heavy hand.

Don Ramón sat on her right hand, the Judge on her left. Kate was between the Judge and Mr Henry. Everybody except Don Ramón and the Judge was a little nervous. Mrs Norris always put her visitors uncomfortably at their ease, as if they were captives and she the chieftainess who had captured them. She rather enjoyed it, heavily, archaeologically queening at the head of the table. But it was evident that Don Ramón, by far the most impressive person present, liked her. Cipriano, on the other hand, remained mute and disciplined, perfectly familiar with the tea-table routine, superficially quite at ease, but underneath remote and unconnected. He glanced from time to time at Kate.

She was a beautiful woman, in her own unconventional way, and with a certain richness. She was going to be forty next week. Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement. She was never in any society: too Irish, too wise.

‘But of course nobody lives without hope,’ Mrs Norris was saying banteringly to Don Ramón. ‘If it’s only the hope of a real, to buy a litre of pulque.’

‘Ah, Mrs Norris!’ he replied in his quiet, yet curiously deep voice, like a violoncello: ‘If pulque is the highest happiness!’

‘Then we are fortunate, because a tostón will buy paradise,’ she said.

‘It is a bon mot, Señora mía,’ said Don Ramón, laughing and drinking his tea.

‘Now won’t you try these little native cakes with sesame seeds on them!’ said Mrs Norris to the table at large.’ My cook makes them, and her national feeling is flattered when anybody likes them. Mrs Leslie, do take one.’

‘I will,’ said Kate. ‘Does one say Open Sesame!’

‘If one wishes,’ said Mrs Norris.

‘Won’t you have one?’ said Kate, handing the plate to Judge Burlap.

‘Don’t want any,’ he snapped, turning his face away as if he had been offered a plate of Mexicans, and leaving Kate with the dish suspended.

Mrs Norris quickly but definitely took the plate, saying:

‘Judge Burlap is afraid of Sesame Seed, he prefers the cave shut.’ And she handed the dish quietly to Cipriano, who was watching the old man’s bad manners with black, snake-like eyes.

‘Did you see that article by Willis Rice Hope, in the Excelsior?’ suddenly snarled the Judge, to his hostess.

‘I did. I thought it very sensible.’

‘The only sensible thing that’s been said about these Agrarian Laws. Sensible! I should think so. Why Rice Hope came to me, and I put him up to a few things. But his article says everything, doesn’t miss an item of importance.’

‘Quite!’ said Mrs Norris, with rather stony attention. ‘If only saying would alter things, Judge Burlap.’

‘Saying the wrong thing has done all the mischief!’ snapped the Judge. ‘Fellows like Garfield Spence coming down here and talking a lot of criminal talk. Why the town’s full of Socialists and Sinvergüenzas from New York.’

Mrs Norris adjusted her pince-nez.

‘Fortunately,’ she said, ‘they don’t come out to Tlacolula, so we needn’t think about them. Mrs Henry, let me give you some more tea.’

‘Do you read Spanish?’ the Judge spat out, at Owen. Owen, in his big shell spectacles, was evidently a red rag to his irritable fellow-countryman.

‘No!’ said Owen, round as a cannon-shot.

Mrs Norris once more adjusted her eye-glasses.

‘It’s such a relief to hear someone who is altogether innocent of Spanish, and altogether unashamed,’ she said. ‘My father had us all speaking four languages by the time we were twelve, and we have none of us ever quite recovered. My stockings were all dyed blue for me before I put my hair up. By the way! How have you been for walking, Judge? You heard of the time I had with my ankle?’

‘Of course we heard!’ cried Mrs Burlap, seeing dry land at last. I’ve been trying so hard to get out to see you, to ask about it. We were so grieved about it.’

‘What happened?’ said Kate.

‘Why I foolishly slipped on a piece of orange peel in town—just at the corner of San Juan de Latrán and Madero. And I fell right down. And of course, the first thing I did when I got up was to push the piece of orange peel into the gutter. And would you believe it, that lot of Mex—’ she caught herself up—’that lot of fellows standing there at the corner laughed heartily at me, when they saw me doing it. They thought it an excellent joke.’

‘Of course they would,’ said the Judge. ‘They were waiting for the next person to come along and fall.’

‘Did nobody help you?’ asked Kate.

‘Oh no! If anyone has an accident in this country, you must never, never help. If you touch them even, you may be arrested for causing the accident.’

‘That’s the law!’ said the Judge. ‘If you touch them before the police arrive, you are arrested for complicity. Let them lie and bleed, is the motto.’

‘Is that true?’ said Kate to Don Ramón.

‘Fairly true,’ he replied. ‘Yes, it is true you must not touch the one who is hurt.’

‘How disgusting!’ said Kate.

‘Disgusting!’ cried the Judge. ‘A great deal is disgusting in this country, as you’ll learn if you stay here long. I nearly lost my life on a banana skin; lay in a darkened room for days, between life and death, and lame for life from it.’

‘How awful!’ said Kate. ‘What did you do when you fell?’

‘What did I do? Just smashed my hip.’

It had truly been a terrible accident, and the man had suffered bitterly.

‘You can hardly blame Mexico for a banana skin,’ said Owen, elated. ‘I fell on one in Lexington Avenue; but fortunately I only bruised myself on a soft spot.’

‘That wasn’t your head, was it?’ said Mrs Henry.

‘No,’ laughed Owen. ‘The other extreme.’

‘We’ve got to add banana skins to the list of public menaces,’ said young Henry. ‘I’m an American, and I may any day turn bolshevist, to save my pesos, so I can repeat what I heard a man saying yesterday. He said there are only two great diseases in the world to-day—Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.’

‘Who was he?’ snarled the Judge.

‘I forget,’ said Henry, wickedly.

‘One wonders,’ said Mrs Norris slowly, ‘what he meant by Americanism.’

‘He didn’t define it,’ said Henry. ‘Cult of the dollar, I suppose.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Norris. ‘The cult of the dollar, in my experience, is far more intense in the countries that haven’t got the dollar, than in the United States.’

Kate felt that the table was like a steel disc to which they were all, as victims, magnetized and bound.

‘Where is your garden, Mrs Norris?’ she asked.

They trooped out, gasping with relief, to the terrace. The Judge hobbled behind, and Kate had to linger sympathetically to keep him company.

They were on the little terrace.

‘Isn’t this strange stuff!’ said Kate, picking up one of the Aztec stone knives on the parapet. ‘Is it a sort of jade?’

‘Jade!’ snarled the Judge. ‘Jade’s green, not black. That’s obsidian.’

‘Jade can be black,’ said Kate. ‘I’ve got a lovely little black tortoise of jade from China.’

‘You can’t have. Jade’s bright green.’

‘But there’s white jade too. I know there is.’

The Judge was silent from exasperation for a few moments, then he snapped:

‘Jade’s bright green.’

Owen, who had the ears of a lynx, had heard.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Surely there’s more than green jade!’ said Kate.

‘What!’ cried Owen. ‘More! Why there’s every imaginable tint—white, rose, lavender—’

‘And black?’ said Kate.

‘Black? Oh yes, quite common. Why you should see my collection. The most beautiful range of colour! Only green jade! Ha-ha-ha!’—and he laughed a rather stage laugh.

They had come to the stairs, which were old stone, waxed and polished in some way till they were a glittering black.

‘I’ll catch hold of your arm down here,’ said the Judge to young Henry. ‘This staircase is a death-trap.’

Mrs Norris heard without comment. She only tilted her pince-nez on her sharp nose.

In the archway downstairs, Don Ramón and the General took their leave. The rest trailed on into the garden.

Evening was falling. The garden was drawn up tall, under the huge dark trees on the one side, and the tall, reddish-and-yellow house on the other. It was like being at the bottom of some dusky, flowering garden down in Hades. Hibiscus hung scarlet from the bushes, putting out yellow bristling tongues. Some roses were scattering scentless petals on the twilight, and lonely-looking carnations hung on weak stalks. From a huge dense bush the mysterious white bells of the datura were suspended, large and silent, like the very ghosts of sound. And the datura scent was moving thick and noiseless from the tree, into the little alleys.

Mrs Burlap had hitched herself on to Kate, and from her silly, social baby-face was emitting searching questions.

‘What hotel are you staying at?’

Kate told her.

‘I don’t know it. Where is it?’

‘In the Avenida del Peru. You wouldn’t know it, it is a little Italian hotel.’

‘Are you staying long?’

‘We aren’t certain.’

‘Is Mr Rhys on a newspaper?’

‘No, he’s a poet.’

‘Does he make a living by poetry?’

‘No, he doesn’t try to.’

It was the sort of secret service investigation one is submitted to, in the capital of shady people, particularly shady foreigners.

Mrs Norris was lingering by a flowering arch of little white flowers.

Already a firefly was sparking. It was already night.

‘Well, good-bye, Mrs Norris! Won’t you come and lunch with us? I don’t mean come out to our house. Only let me know, and lunch with me anywhere you like, in town.’

‘Thank you, my dear! Thank you so much! Well! I’ll see!

Mrs Norris was almost regal, stonily, Aztec-regal.

At last they had all made their adieus, and the great doors were shut behind them.

‘How did you come out?’ Mrs Burlap asked, impertinent.

‘In an old Ford taxi—but where is it?’ said Kate, peering into the dark. It should have been under the fresno trees opposite, but it wasn’t.

‘What a curious thing!’ said Owen, and he disappeared into the night.

‘Which way do you go?’ said Mrs Burlap.

‘To the Zócalo,’ said Kate.

‘We have to take a tram, the opposite way,’ said the baby-faced, withered woman from the Middle-West.

The Judge was hobbling along the pavement like a cat on hot bricks, to the corner. Across the road stood a group of natives in big hats and white calico clothes, all a little the worse for the pulque they had drunk. Nearer, on this side of the road, stood another little gang, of workmen in town clothes.

‘There you have them,’ said the Judge, flourishing his stick with utter vindictiveness. ‘There’s the two lots of ‘em.’

‘What two lots?’ said Kate, surprised.

‘Those peon fellows and those obreros, all drunk, the lot of them. The lot of them!’ And in a spasm of pure, frustrated hate, he turned his back on her.

At the same time they saw the lights of a tram-car rushing dragon-like up the dark road, between the high wall and the huge trees.

‘Here’s our car!’ said the Judge, beginning to scramble excitedly with his stick.

‘You go the other way,’ flung the baby-faced, faded woman in the three-cornered satin hat, also beginning to fluster as if she were going to swim off the pavement.

The couple clambered avidly into the brightly-lighted car, first class; hobbling up. The natives crowded into the second class.

Away whizzed the tren. The Burlap couple had not even said good night. They were terrified lest they might have to know somebody whom they might not want to know; whom it might not pay to know.

‘You common-place little woman!’ said Kate aloud, looking after the retreating tram-car. ‘You awful ill-bred little pair.’

She was a bit afraid of the natives, not quite sober, who were waiting for the car in the opposite direction. But stronger than her fear was a certain sympathy with these dark-faced silent men in their big straw hats and naïve little cotton blouses. Anyhow they had blood in their veins: they were columns of dark blood.

Whereas the other bloodless, acidulous couple from the Middle-West, with their nasty whiteness . . .!

She thought of the little tale the natives tell. When the Lord was making the first men, He made them of clay and put them into the oven to bake. They came out black. They’re baked too much! said the Lord. So He made another batch, and put them in. They came out white. They’re baked too little! He said. So He had a third try. These came out a good warm brown. They’re just right! said the Lord.

The couple from the Middle-West, that withered baby-face and that limping Judge, they weren’t baked. They were hardly baked at all.

Kate looked at the dark faces under the arc-lamp. They frightened her. They were a sort of menace to her. But she felt they were at least baked hot and to a certain satisfactory colour.

The taxi came lurching up, with Owen poking his head out and opening the door.

‘I found the man in a pulquería,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think he’s quite drunk. Will you risk driving back with him?’

‘The pulquería was called La Flor de un Día—the Flower of a Day,’ said Owen, with an apprehensive laugh.

Kate hesitated, looking at her man.

‘We may as well,’ she said.

Away gallivanted the Ford, full speed to Hell.

‘Do tell him not so fast,’ said Kate.

‘I don’t know how,’ said Owen.

He shouted in good English:

‘Hey! chauffeur! Not so fast! Don’t drive so fast.’

‘No presto. Troppo presto. Va troppo presto!’ said Kate.

The man looked at them with black, dilated eyes of fathomless incomprehension. Then he put his foot on the accelerator.

‘He’s only going faster!’ laughed Owen nervously.

‘Ah! Let him alone!’ said Kate, with utter weariness.

The fellow drove like a devil incarnate, as if he had the devil in his body. But also, he drove with the devil’s own nonchalant skill. There was nothing to do but let him rip.

‘Wasn’t that a ghastly tea-party!’ said Owen.

‘Ghastly!’ said Kate.