The Plumed Serpent

Chapter II-3

‘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 Tomás, 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 gringoes 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 dias! 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, Jesús 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.

Mrs Norris gathered her little shawl round her shoulders and led through a sombre antechamber to a little terrace, where creepers and flowers bloomed thick on the low walls. There was a bell-flower, red and velvety, like blood that is drying: and clusters of white roses: and tufts of bougainvillea, papery magenta colour.

‘How lovely it is here!’ said Kate. ‘Having the great dark trees beyond.’

But she stood in a kind of dread.

‘Yes it is beautiful,’ said Mrs Norris, with the gratification of a possessor. ‘I have such a time trying to keep these apart.’ And going across in her little black shawl, she pushed the bougainvillea away from the rust-scarlet bell-flowers, stroking the little white roses to make them intervene.

‘I think the two reds together interesting,’ said Owen.

‘Do you really!’ said Mrs Norris, automatically, paying no heed to such a remark.

The sky was blue overhead, but on the lower horizon was a thick, pearl haze. The clouds had gone.

‘One never sees Popocatepetl nor Ixtaccihuatl,’ said Kate, disappointed.

‘No, not at this season. But look, through the trees there, you see Ajusco!’

Kate looked at the sombre-seeming mountain, between the huge dark trees.

On the low stone parapet were Aztec things, obsidian knives, grimacing squatting idols in black lava, and a queer thickish stone stick, or bâton. Owen was balancing the latter: it felt murderous even to touch.

Kate turned to the General, who was near her, his face expressionless, yet alert.

‘Aztec things oppress me,’ she said.

‘They are oppressive,’ he answered, in his beautiful cultured English, that was nevertheless a tiny bit like a parrot talking.

‘There is no hope in them,’ she said.

‘Perhaps the Aztecs never asked for hope,’ he said, somewhat automatically.

‘Surely it is hope that keeps one going?’ she said.

‘You, maybe. But not the Aztec, nor the Indian to-day.’

He spoke like a man who has something in reserve, who is only half attending to what he hears, and even to his own answer.

‘What do they have, if they don’t have hope?’ she said.

‘They have some other strength, perhaps,’ he said evasively.

‘I would like to give them hope,’ she said. ‘If they had hope, they wouldn’t be so sad, and they would be cleaner, and not have vermin.’

‘That of course would be good,’ he said, with a little smile. ‘But I think they are not so very sad. They laugh a good deal and are gay.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘They oppress me, like a weight on my heart. They make me irritable, and I want to go away.’

‘From Mexico?’

‘Yes. I feel I want to go away from it and never, never see it again. It is so oppressive and gruesome.’

‘Try it a little longer,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will feel differently. But perhaps not,’ he ended vaguely, driftingly.

She could feel in him a sort of yearning towards her. As if a sort of appeal came to her from him, from his physical heart in his breast. As if the very heart gave out dark rays of seeking and yearning. She glimpsed this now for the first time, quite apart from the talking, and it made her shy.