The Plumed Serpent

Chapter II-1

CHAPTER II

TEA-PARTY IN TLACOLULA

Owen came back to the hotel at about half-past six, tired, excited, a little guilty, and a good deal distressed at having let Kate go alone. And now the whole thing was over, rather dreary in spirit.

‘Oh, how did you get on?’ he cried, the moment he saw her, afraid almost like a boy of his own sin of omission.

‘I got on perfectly. Went to Sanborn’s for tea, and had strawberry shortcake—so good!’

‘Oh, good for you!’ he laughed in relief. ‘Then you weren’t too much overcome! I’m so glad. I had such awful qualms after I’d let you go. Imagined all the things that are supposed to happen in Mexico—chauffeur driving away with you into some horrible remote region, and robbing you and all that—but then I knew really you’d be all right. Oh, the time I had—the rain!—and the people throwing things at my bald patch—and those horses—wasn’t that horrible?—I wonder I’m still alive.’ And he laughed with tired excitement, putting his hand over his stomach and rolling his eyes.

‘Aren’t you drenched?’ she said.

‘Drenched!’ he replied. ‘Or at least I was. I’ve dried off quite a lot. My rain-coat is no good—I don’t know why I don’t buy another. Oh, but what a time! The rain streaming on my bald head, and the crowd behind throwing oranges at it. Then simply gored in my inside about letting you go alone. Yet it was the only bull-fight I shall ever see. I came then before it was over. Bud wouldn’t come. I suppose he’s still there.’

‘Was it as awful as the beginning?’ she asked.

‘No! No! It wasn’t. The first was worst—that horse-shambles. Oh, they killed two more horses. And five bulls! Yes, a regular butchery. But some of it was very neat work; those toreadors did some very pretty feats. One stood on his cloak while a bull charged him.’

‘I think,’ interrupted Kate, ‘if I knew that some of those toreadors were going to be tossed by the bull, I’d go to see another bull-fight. Ugh, how I detest them! The longer I live the more loathsome the human species becomes to me. How much nicer the bulls are!’

‘Oh, quite!’ said Owen vaguely. ‘Exactly. But still there was some very skilful work, very pretty. Really very plucky.’

‘Yah!’ snarled Kate. ‘Plucky! They with all their knives and their spears and cloaks and darts—and they know just how a bull will behave. It’s just a performance of human beings torturing animals, with those common fellows showing off, how smart they are at hurting a bull. Dirty little boys maiming flies—that’s what they are. Only grown-up, they are bastards, not boys. Oh, I wish I could be a bull, just for five minutes. Bastard, that’s what I call it!’

‘Well!’ laughed Owen uneasily, ‘it is rather.’

‘Call that manliness!’ cried Kate. ‘Then thank God a million times that I’m a woman, and know poltroonery and dirty-mindedness when I see it.’

Again Owen laughed uncomfortably.

‘Go upstairs and change,’ she said. ‘You’ll die.’

‘I think I’d better. I feel I might die any minute, as a matter of fact. Well, till dinner then. I’ll tap at your door in half an hour.’

Kate sat trying to sew, but her hand trembled. She could not get the bull-ring out of her mind, and something felt damaged in her inside.

She straightened herself, and sighed. She was really very angry, too, with Owen. He was naturally so sensitive, and so kind. But he had the insidious modern disease of tolerance. He must tolerate everything, even a thing that revolted him. He would call it Life! He would feel he had lived this afternoon. Greedy even for the most sordid sensations.

Whereas she felt as if she had eaten something which was giving her ptomaine poisoning. If that was life!

Ah men, men! They all had this soft rottenness of the soul, a strange perversity which made even the squalid, repulsive things seem part of life to them. Life! And what is life? A louse lying on its back and kicking? Ugh!

At about seven o’clock Villiers came tapping. He looked wan, peaked, but like a bird that had successfully pecked a bellyful of garbage.

‘Oh it was GREAT!’ he said, lounging on one hip. ‘GREAT! They killed seven BULLS.’

‘No calves, unfortunately,’ said Kate, suddenly furious again.

He paused to consider the point, then laughed. Her anger was another slight sensational amusement to him.

‘No, no calves,’ he said. ‘The calves have come home to be fattened. But several more horses after you’d gone.’

‘I don’t want to hear,’ she said coldly.

He laughed, feeling rather heroic. After all, one must be able to look on blood and bursten bowels calmly: even with a certain thrill. The young hero! But there were dark rings round his eyes, like a debauch.

‘Oh but!’ he began, making a rather coy face. ‘Don’t you want to hear what I did after! I went to the hotel of the chief toreador, and saw him lying on his bed all dressed up, smoking a fat cigar. Rather like a male Venus who is never undressed. So funny!’

‘Who took you there?’ she said.

‘That Pole, you remember?—and a Spaniard who talked English. The toreador was great, lying on his bed in all his get-up, except his shoes, and quite a crowd of men going over it all again—wawawawawa!—you never heard such a row!’

‘Aren’t you wet?’ said Kate.

‘No, not at all. I’m perfectly dry. You see I had my coat. Only my head, of course. My poor hair was all streaked down my face like streaks of dye.’ He wiped his thin hair across his head with rather self-conscious humour. ‘Hasn’t Owen come in?’ he asked.

‘Yes, he’s changing.’

‘Well I’ll go up. I suppose it’s nearly supper time. Oh yes, it’s after!’ At which discovery he brightened as if he’d received a gift.

‘Oh by the way, how did you get on? Rather mean of us to let you go all alone like that,’ he said, as he hung poised in the open doorway.

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘You wanted to stay. And I can look after myself, at my time of life.’

‘We-ell!’ he said, with an American drawl. ‘Maybe you can!’ Then he gave a little laugh. ‘But you should have seen all those men rehearsing in that bedroom, throwing their arms about, and the toreador lying on the bed like Venus with a fat cigar, listening to her lovers.’

‘I’m glad I didn’t,’ said Kate.

Villiers disappeared with a wicked little laugh. And as she sat her hands trembled with outrage and passion. A-moral! How could one be a-moral, or non-moral, when one’s soul was revolted! How could one be like these Americans, picking over the garbage of sensations, and gobbling it up like carrion birds! At the moment, both Owen and Villiers seemed to her like carrion birds, repulsive.

She felt, moreover, that they both hated her first because she was a woman. It was all right so long as she fell in with them in every way. But the moment she stood out against them in the least, they hated her mechanically for the very fact that she was a woman. They hated her womanness.

And in this Mexico, with its great under-drift of squalor and heavy reptile-like evil, it was hard for her to bear up.

She was really fond of Owen. But how could she respect him? So empty, 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 bullfights. 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 ambassador 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 birdlike, 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!