Part 3

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 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.”