In Portfirio Diaz’ day, the Lake-side began to be the
Riviera of Mexico, and Orilla was to be the Nice, or at least,
the Mentone of the country. But revolutions started erupting
again, and in 1911 Don Portfirio fled to Paris with, it is
said, thirty million gold pesos in his pocket: a peso being
half a dollar, nearly half-a-crown. But we need not believe
all that is said, especially by a man’s enemies.
During the subsequent revolutions, Orilla, which had begun
to be a winter paradise for the Americans, lapsed back
into barbarism and broken brickwork. In 1921 a feeble new
start had been made.
The place belonged to a German-Mexican family, who
also owned the adjacent hacienda. They acquired the property
from the American Hotel Company, who had undertaken
to develop the lake-shore, and who had gone bankrupt
during the various revolutions.
The German-Mexican owners were not popular with the
natives. An angel from heaven would not have been popular,
these years, if he had been known as the owner of property.
However, in 1921 the hotel was very modestly
opened again, with an American manager.
Towards the end of the year, José, son of the German-Mexican
owner, came to stay with his wife and children in
the hotel, in the new wing. José was a bit of a fool, as most
foreigners are, after the first generation in Mexico. Having
business to settle, he went into Guadalajara to the bank and
returned with a thousand gold pesos in a bag, keeping the
matter, as he thought, a dead secret.
Everyone had just gone to bed, on a brilliant moonlight
night in winter, when two men appeared in the yard calling
for José: they had to speak to him. José, suspecting nothing,
left his wife and two children, and went down. In a
moment he called for the American manager. The manager,
thinking it was some bargaining to be done, also came down.
As he came out of the door, two men seized him by the arms,
and said: “Don’t make a noise!”
“What’s amiss?” said Bell, who had built up Orilla,
and had been twenty years on the lake.
Then he noticed that two other men had hold of José.
“Come,” they said.
There were five Mexicans—Indians, or half-Indians—and
the two captives. They went, the captives in slippers and
shirt-sleeves, to the little office away at the end of the other
part of the hotel, which had been the old ranch-house.
“What do you want?” said Bell.
“Give us the money,” said the bandits.
“Oh, all right,” said the American. There were a few
pesos only in the safe. He opened, showed them, and they
took the money.
“Now give us the rest,” they said.
“There is no more,” said the manager, in all sincerity;
for José had not confessed to the thousand pesos.
The five peons then began to search the poor little office.
They found a pile of red blankets—which they appropriated—and
a few bottles of red wine—which they drank.
“Now,” they said, “give us the money.”
“I can’t give you what there isn’t to give,” said the
manager.
“Good!” they said, and pulled out the hideous machetes,
the heavy knives of the Mexicans.
José, intimidated, produced the suit-case with the
thousand pesos. The money was wrapped up in the corner
of a blanket.
“Now, come with us,” said the bandits.
“Where to?” asked the manager, beginning at last to be
scared.
“Only out on to the hill, where we will leave you, so that
you cannot telephone to Ixtlahuacan before we have time to
get away,” said the Indians.
Outside, in the bright moon, the air was chill. The American
shivered, in his trousers and shirt and a pair of bedroom
slippers.
“Let me take a coat,” he said.
“Take a blanket,” said the tall Indian.
He took a blanket, and with two men holding his arms, he
followed José, who was likewise held captive, out of the
little gate, across the dust of the road, and up the steep
little round hill on which the organ cactus thrust up their
sinister clumps, like bunches of cruel fingers, in the moonlight.
The hill was stony and steep, the going, slow. José,
a fat young man of twenty-eight, protested in the feeble
manner of the well-to-do Mexicans.
At last they came to the top of the hill. Three men took
José apart, leaving Bell alone near a cactus clump. The
moon shone in a perfect Mexican heaven. Below, the big
lake glimmered faintly, stretching its length towards the
west. The air was so clear, the mountains across, thirty
miles away, stood sharp and still in the moonlight. And not
a sound nor a motion anywhere! At the foot of the hill
was the hacienda, with the peons asleep in their huts. But
what help was there in them?
José and the three men had gone behind a cactus tree that
stuck up straight like a great black bundle of poles, poised on
one central foot, and cast a sharp, iron shadow. The American
could hear the voices, talking low and rapidly, but
could not distinguish the words. His two guards drew away
from him a little, to hear what the others were saying, behind
the cactus.
And the American, who knew the ground he stood on and
the sky that hung over him, felt again the black vibration
of death in the air, the black thrill of the death-lust. Unmistakeable
he felt it seething in the air, as any man may
feel it, in Mexico. And the strange aboriginal fiendishness
awake now in the five bandits, communicated itself to his
blood.
Loosening his blanket, he listened tensely in the moonlight.
And came the thud! thud! thud! of a machete striking
with lust in a human body, then the strange voice of
José: “Perdoneme!—Forgive me!” the murdered man
cried as he fell.
The American waited for no more. Dropping his blanket
he jumped for the cactus cover, and stooping, took the downslope
like a rabbit. The pistol-shots rang out after him, but
the Mexicans don’t as a rule take good aim. His bedroom
slippers flew off, and barefoot, the man, thin and light
sped down over the stones and the cactus, down to the
hotel.
When he got down, he found everyone in the hotel awake
and shouting.
“They are killing José!” he said, and he rushed to the
telephone, expecting every moment the five bandits would
be on him.
The telephone was in the old ranch-building, in the dining-room.
There was no answer—no answer—no answer. In
her little bedroom over the kitchen, the cook-woman, the
traitress, was yelling. Across in the new wing, a little distance
away, José’s Mexican wife was screaming. One of the
servant boys appeared.
“Try and get the police in Ixtlahuacan,” said the American,
and he ran to the new wing, to get his gun and to barricade
the doors. His daughter, a motherless girl, was crying
with José’s wife.
There was no answer on the telephone. At dawn, the
cook, who said the bandits would not hurt a woman, went
across to the hacienda to fetch the peons. And when the
sun rose, a man was sent for the police.
They found the body of José, pierced with fourteen holes.
The American was carried to Ixtlahuacan, and kept in bed,
having cactus spines dug out of his feet by two native
women.
The bandits fled across the marshes. Months later, they
were identified by the stolen blankets, away in Michoacan;
and, pursued, one of them betrayed the others.
After this, the hotel was closed again, and had been re-opened
only three months, when Kate arrived.
But Villiers came with another story. Last year the peons
had murdered the manager of one of the estates across the
lake. They had stripped him and left him naked on his
back, with his sexual organs cut off and put into his mouth,
his nose slit and pinned back, the two halves, to his cheeks,
with long cactus spines.
“Tell me no more!” said Kate.
She felt there was doom written on the very sky, doom and
horror.
She wrote to Don Ramón in Sayula, saying she wanted to
go back to Europe. True, she herself had seen no horrors,
apart from the bull-fight. And she had had some exquisite
moments, as coming to this hotel in the boat. The natives
had a certain mystery and beauty, to her. But she could
not bear the unease, and the latest sense of horror.
True, the peons were poor. They used to work for twenty
cents, American, a day; and now the standard price was
fifty cents, or one peso. But then in the old days they received
their wage all the year round. Now, only at harvest
time or sowing time. No work, no pay. And in the long dry
season, it was mostly no work.
“Still,” said the German manager of the hotel, a man who
had run a rubber plantation in Tabasco, a sugar plantation
in the state of Vera Cruz, and a hacienda growing wheat,
maize, oranges, in Jalisco: “Still, it isn’t a question of
money with the peons. It doesn’t start with the peons. It
starts in Mexico City, with a lot of malcontents who want
to put their spoke in the wheel, and who lay hold of pious
catchwords, to catch the poor. There’s no more in it than
that. Then the agitators go round and infect the peons.
It is nothing but a sort of infectious disease, like syphilis, all
this revolution and socialism.”
“But why does no one oppose it,” said Kate. “Why
don’t the hacendados put up a fight, instead of caving in and
running away?”
“The Mexican hacendado!” The man’s German eyes
gave out a spark. “The Mexican gentleman is such a brave
man, that while the soldier is violating his wife on the bed,
he is hiding under the bed and holding his breath so they
shan’t find him. He’s as brave as that.”
Kate looked away uncomfortably.
“They all want the United States to intervene. They
hate the Americans; but they want the United States to intervene,
to save them their money and their property. That’s
how brave they are! They hate the Americans personally,
but they love them because they can look after money and
property. So they want the United States to annex Mexico,
the beloved patria; leaving the marvellous green and white
and red flag, and the eagle with the snake in its claws, for
the sake of appearances and honour! They’re simply bottled
full of honour; of that sort.”
Always the same violence of bitterness, Kate thought to
herself. And she was so weary of it. How, how weary she
was of politics, of the very words “Labour” and “Socialism!”
and all that sort! It suffocated her.
“Have you heard of the men of Quetzalcoatl?” asked
Kate.
“Quetzalcoatl!” exclaimed the manager, giving a little
click of the final ‘l,’ in a peculiar native fashion. “That’s
another try-on of the Bolshevists. They thought socialism
needed a god, so they’re going to fish him out of this lake.
He’ll do for another pious catchword in another revolution.”
The man went away, unable to stand any more.
“Oh dear!” thought Kate. “It really is hard to bear.”
But she wanted to hear more of Quetzalcoatl.
“Did you know,” she said to the man later, showing him
the little pot, “that they find those things in the lake?”
“They’re common enough!” he said. “They used to
throw them in, in the idolatrous days. May still do so, for
what I know. Then get them out again to sell to tourists.”
“They call them ollitas of Quetzalcoatl.”
“That’s a new invention.”
“Why, do you think?”
“They’re trying to start a new thing, that’s all. They’ve
got this society on the lake here, of the Men of Quetzalcoatl,
and they go round singing songs. It’s another dodge for
national-socialism, that’s all.”
“What do they do, the Men of Quetzalcoatl?”
“I can’t see they do anything, except talk and get excited
over their own importance.”
“But what’s the idea?”
“I couldn’t say. Don’t suppose they have any. But if
they have, they won’t let on to you. You’re a gringo—or a
gringita, at the best. And this is for pure Mexicans. For
los señores, the workmen, and los caballeros, the peons.
Every peon is a caballero nowadays, and every workman is
a señor. So I suppose they’re going to get themselves a
special god, to put the final feather in their caps.”
“Where did it start, the Quetzalcoatl thing?”
“Down in Sayula. They say Don Ramón Carrasco is at
the back of it. Maybe he wants to be the next President—or
maybe he’s aiming higher, and wants to be the first Mexican
Pharoah.”
Ah, how tired it made Kate feel; the hopelessness, the
ugliness, the cynicism, the emptiness. She felt she could
cry aloud, for the unknown gods to put the magic back into
her life, and to save her from the dry-rot of the world’s
sterility.
She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was
the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or
slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had
gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting,
but so without any mystery, any background. The younger
the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more
devoid of wonder.
No, she could not go back to Europe.
And no! She refused to take the hotel manager’s estimate
of Quetzalcoatl. How should a hotel manager judge?—even
if he was not really an hotel manager, but a ranch-overseer.
She had seen Ramón Carrasco, and Cipriano.
And they were men. They wanted something beyond. She
would believe in them. Anything, anything rather than this
sterility of nothingness which was the world, and into which
her life was drifting.
She would send Villiers away, too. He was nice, she liked
him. But he, too, was widdershins, unwinding the sensations
of disintegration and anti-life. No, she must send him away.
She must, she must free herself from these mechanical connections.
Every one of them, like Villiers, was like a cog-wheel in
contact with which all one’s workings were reversed. Everything
he said, everything he did, reversed her real life flow,
made her go against the sun.
And she did not want to go against the sun. After all,
in spite of the horrors latent in Mexico, when you got these
dark-faced people away from wrong contacts like agitators
and socialism, they made one feel that life was vast, if fearsome,
and death was fathomless.
Horrors might burst out of them. But something must
burst out, sometimes, if men are not machines.
No! no! no! no! no! she cried to her own soul. Let me
still believe in some human contact. Let it not be all cut
off for me!
But she made up her mind, to be alone, and to cut herself
off from all the mechanical widdershin contacts. Villiers
must go back to his United States. She would be alone in
her own milieu. Not to be touched by any, any of the
mechanical cog-wheel people. To be left alone, not to be
touched. To hide, and be hidden, and never really be
spoken to.
Yet at the same time, with her blood flowing softly sunwise,
to let the sunwise sympathy of unknown people steal
in to her. To shut doors of iron against the mechanical
world. But to let the sunwise world steal across to her, and
add its motion to her, the motion of the stress of life, with
the big sun and the stars like a tree holding out its
leaves.
She wanted an old Spanish house, with its inner patio of
flowers and water. Turned inwards, to the few flowers
walled in by shadow. To turn one’s back on the cog-wheel
world. Not to look out any more on to that horrible machine
of the world. To look at one’s own quiet little fountain and
one’s own little orange trees, with only heaven above.
So, having soothed her heart, she wrote Don Ramón
again, that she was coming to Sayula to look for a house.
She sent Villiers away. And the next day she set off with
a man-servant, in the old motor-boat of the hotel, down to
the village of Sayula.
It was thirty-five miles to travel, down the long lake. But
the moment she set off, she felt at peace. A tall dark-faced
fellow sat in the stern of the boat, steering and attending
to the motor. She sat on cushions in the middle. And the
young man-servant perched in the prow.
They started before sunrise, when the lake was bathed in
motionless light. Odd tufts of water-hyacinth were travelling
on the soft spermy water, holding up a green leaf like
a little sail of a boat, and nodding a delicate, mauve blue
flower.
Give me the mystery and let the world live again for me!
Kate cried to her own soul. And deliver me from man’s
automatism.
The sun rose, and a whiteness of light played on the tops
of the mountains. The boat hugged the north shore, turning
the promontory on which the villas had started so
jauntily, twenty years ago, but now were lapsing back to
wilderness. All was still and motionless in the light. Sometimes,
on the little bare patches high up on the dry hills were
white specks; birds? No, men in their white cotton, peons
hoeing. They were so tiny and so distinct, they looked like
white birds settled.
Round the bend were the hot springs, the church, the
inaccessible village of the pure Indians, who spoke no Spanish.
There were some green trees, under the precipitous,
dry mountain-side.
So on and on, the motor-boat chugging incessantly, the
man in the bows coiled up like a serpent, watching; the fish-milk
water gleaming and throwing off a dense light, so that
the mountains away across were fused out. And Kate, under
the awning, went into a kind of sleep.
They were passing the island, with its ruins of fortress and
prison. It was all rock and dryness, with great broken walls
and the shell of a church among its hurtful stones and its
dry grey herbage. For a long time the Indians had defended
it against the Spaniards. Then the Spaniards used the
island as a fortress against the Indians. Later, as a penal
settlement. And now the place was a ruin, repellant, full
of scorpions, and otherwise empty of life. Only one or two
fishermen lived in the tiny cove facing the mainland, and a
flock of goats, specks of life creeping among the rocks. And
an unhappy fellow put there by the Government to register
the weather.
No, Kate did not want to land. The place looked too
sinister. She took food from the basket, and ate a little
lunch, and dozed.
In this country, she was afraid. But it was her soul more
than her body that knew fear. She had realised, for the
first time, with finality and fatality, what was the illusion
she laboured under. She had thought that each individual
had a complete self, a complete soul, an accomplished I.
And now she realised as plainly as if she had turned into a
new being, that this was not so. Men and women had incomplete
selves, made up of bits assembled together loosely
and somewhat haphazard. Man was not created ready-made.
Men to-day were half-made, and women were half-made.
Creatures that existed and functioned with certain
regularity, but which ran off into a hopeless jumble of inconsequence.
Half-made, like insects that can run fast and be so busy
and suddenly grow wings, but which are only winged grubs
after all. A world full of half-made creatures on two legs,
eating food and degrading the one mystery left to them,
sex. Spinning a great lot of words, burying themselves inside
the cocoons of words and ideas that they spin round
themselves, and inside the cocoons, mostly perishing inert
and overwhelmed.
Half-made creatures, rarely more than half-responsible
and half-accountable, acting in terrible swarms, like locusts.
Awful thought! And with a collective insect-like will,
to avoid the responsibility of achieving any more perfected
being or identity. The queer, rabid hate of being urged on
into purer self. The morbid fanaticism of the non-integrate.
In the great seething light of the lake, with the terrible
blue-ribbed mountains of Mexico beyond, she seemed
swallowed by some grisly skeleton, in the cage of his death-anatomy.
She was afraid, mystically, of the man crouching
there in the bows with his smooth thighs and supple loins
like a snake, and his black eyes watching. A half-being,
with a will to disintegration and death. And the tall man
behind her at the tiller, he had the curious smoke-grey phosphorus
eyes under black lashes, sometimes met among the
Indians. Handsome, he was, and quiet and seemingly self-contained.
But with that peculiar devilish half-smile lurking
under his face, the half jeering look of a part-thing, which
knows its power to destroy the purer thing.
And yet, Kate told herself, both these men were manly
fellows. They would not molest her, unless she communicated
the thought to them, and by a certain cowardliness,
prompted them. Their souls were nascent, there was no
fixed evil in them, they could sway both ways.
So in her soul she cried aloud to the greater mystery, the
higher power that hovered in the interstices of the hot air,
rich and potent. It was as if she could lift her hands and
clutch the silent, stormless potency that roved everywhere,
waiting. “Come then!” she said, drawing a long slow
breath, and addressing the silent life-breath which hung
unrevealed in the atmosphere, waiting.
And as the boat ran on, and her fingers rustled in the
warm water of the lake, she felt the fulness descend into her
once more, the peace, and the power. The fulfilment filling
her soul like the fulness of ripe grapes. And she thought to
herself: “Ah, how wrong I have been, not to turn sooner
to the other presence, not to take the life-breath sooner!
How wrong to be afraid of these two men.”
She did what she had been half-afraid to do before; she
offered them the oranges and sandwiches still in the basket.
And each of the men looked at her, the smoke-grey eyes
looked her in the eyes, and the black eyes looked her in the
eyes. And the man with the smoke-grey eyes, who was
cunninger than the other man, but also prouder, said to her
with his eyes: We are living! I know your sex, and you
know mine. The mystery we are glad not to meddle with.
You leave me my natural honour, and I thank you for the
grace.
In his look; so quick and proud, and in his quiet Muchas
grazias! she heard the touch of male recognition, a man
glad to retain his honour, and to feel the communion of
grace. Perhaps it was the Spanish word Grazias! But in
her soul she was thinking of the communion of grace.
With the black-eyed man it was the same. He was
humbler. But as he peeled his orange and dropped the
yellow peel on the water, she could see the stillness, the
humility, and the pathos of grace in him; something very
beautiful and truly male, and very hard to find in a civilised
white man. It was not of the spirit. It was of the dark,
strong, unbroken blood, the flowering of the soul.
Then she thought to herself: After all, it is good to be here.
It is very good to be in this boat on this lake with these two
silent, semi-barbarous men. They can receive the gift of
grace, and we can share it like a communion, they and I.
I am very glad to be here. It is so much better than love:
the love I knew with Joachim. This is the fullness of the vine.
“Sayula!” said the man in the bows, pointing ahead.
She saw, away off, a place where there were green trees,
where the shore was flat, and a biggish building stood out.
“What is the building?” she asked.
“The railway station.”
She was suitably impressed, for it was a new-looking imposing
structure.
A little steamer was smoking, lying off from a wooden
jetty in the loneliness, and black, laden boats were poling out
to her, and merging back to shore. The vessel gave a hoot,
and slowly yet busily set off on the bosom of the water,
heading in a slanting line across the lake, to where the tiny
high white twin-towers of Tuliapan showed above the water-line,
tiny and far-off, on the other side.
They had passed the jetty, and rounding the shoal where
the willows grew, she could see Sayula; white fluted twin-towers
of the church, obelisk shaped above the pepper trees;
beyond, a mound of a hill standing alone, dotted with dry
bushes, distinct and Japanese looking; beyond this, the
corrugated, blue-ribbed, flat-flanked mountains of Mexico.
It looked peaceful, delicate, almost Japanese. As she
drew nearer she saw the beach with the washing spread on
the sand; the fleecy green willow trees and pepper-trees, and
the villas in foliage and flowers, hanging magenta curtains
of bougainvillea, red dots of hibiscus, pink abundance of
tall oleander trees; occasional palm-trees sticking out.
The boat was steering round a stone jetty, on which, in
black letters, was painted an advertisement for motor-car
tyres. There were a few seats, some deep fleecy trees growing
out of the sand, a booth for selling drinks, a little promenade,
and white boats on a sandy beach. A few women
sitting under parasols, a few bathers in the water, and trees
in front of the few villas deep in green or blazing scarlet
blossoms.
“This is very good,” thought Kate. “It is not too
savage, and not over civilised. It isn’t broken, but it is
rather out of repair. It is in contact with the world, but the
world has got a very weak grip on it.”
She went to the hotel, as Don Ramón had advised her.
“Do you come from Orilla? You are Mrs Leslie? Don
Ramón Carrasco sent us a letter about you.”
There was a house. Kate paid her boatmen and shook
hands with them. She was sorry to be cut off from them
again. And they looked at her with a touch of regret as they
left. She said to herself:
“There is something rich and alive in these people. They
want to be able to breathe the Great Breath. They are like
children, helpless. And then they’re like demons. But
somewhere, I believe, they want the breath of life and the
communion of the brave, more than anything.”
She was surprised at herself, suddenly using this language.
But her weariness and her sense of devastation had been so
complete, that the Other Breath in the air, and the bluish
dark power in the earth had become, almost suddenly, more
real to her than so-called reality. Concrete, jarring, exasperating
reality had melted away, and a soft world of
potency stood in its place, the velvety dark flux from the
earth, the delicate yet supreme life-breath in the inner air.
Behind the fierce sun the dark eyes of a deeper sun were
watching, and between the bluish ribs of the mountains a
powerful heart was secretly beating, the heart of the earth.
Her house was what she wanted; a low L-shaped, tiled
building with rough red floors and deep verandah, and the
other two sides of the patio completed by the thick, dark
little mango-forest outside the low wall. The square of the
patio, within the precincts of the house and the mango trees,
was gay with oleanders and hibiscus, and there was a basin
of water in the seedy grass. The flower-pots along the
verandah were full of flowering geranium and foreign
flowers. At the far end of the patio, the chickens were
scratching under the silent motionlessness of ragged banana
trees.
There she had it; her stone, cool, dark house, every room
opening on to the verandah; her deep, shady verandah,
or piazza, or corridor, looking out to the brilliant sun, the
sparkling flowers and the seed-grass, the still water and the
yellowing banana trees, the dark splendour of the shadow-dense
mango trees.
With the house went a Mexican Juana with two thick-haired
daughters and one son. This family lived in a den at
the back of the projecting bay of the dining-room. There,
half screened, was the well and the toilet, and a little kitchen
and a sleeping room where the family slept on mats on the
floor. There the paltry chickens paddled, and the banana
trees made a chitter as the wind came.
Kate had four bedrooms to choose from. She chose the
one whose low, barred window opened on the rough, grass
and cobble-stone street, closed her doors and windows, and
went to sleep, saying to herself as she lay down: Now I am
alone. And now I have only one thing to do; not to get
caught up into the world’s cog-wheels any more, and not to
lose my hold on the hidden greater thing.
She was tired with a strange weariness, feeling she could
make no further effort. She woke up at tea-time, but there
was no tea. Juana hastened off to the hotel to buy a bit.
Juana was a woman of about forty, rather short, with full
dark face, centreless dark eyes, untidy hair, and a limping
way of walking. She spoke rapidly, a rather plum-in-the-mouth
Spanish, adding “n” to all her words. Something of
a sloven, down to her speech.
“No, Niña, no hay masn”—masn instead of mas. And
calling Kate, in the old Mexican style, Niña, which means
child. It is the honourable title for a mistress.
Juana was going to be a bit of a trial. She was a widow
of doubtful antecedents, a creature with passion, but not
much control, strong with a certain indifference and looseness.
The hotel owner assured Kate that she was honest,
but that if Kate would rather find another criada, all well
and good.
There was a bit of a battle to be fought between the two
women. Juana was obstinate and reckless; she had not
been treated very well by the world. And there was a touch
of bottom-dog insolence about her.
But also, sudden touches of passionate warmth and the
peculiar selfless generosity of the natives. She would be
honest out of rough defiance and indifference, so long as
she was not in a state of antagonism.
As yet, however, she was cautiously watching her ground,
with that black-eyed touch of malice and wariness to be
expected. And Kate felt that the cry: Niña—child! by
which she was addressed, held in it a slight note of malevolent
mockery.
But there was nothing to do but to go ahead and trust the
dark-faced, centreless woman.
The second day, Kate had the energy to cast out one suite
of bent-wood and cane furniture from her salon, remove
pictures and little stands.
If there is one social instinct more dreary than all the other
social instincts in the world, it is the Mexican. In the centre
of Kate’s red-tiled salon were two crescents: a black bent-wood
cane settee flanked on each side by two black bent-wood
cane chairs, exactly facing a brown bent-wood cane
settee flanked on each side by two brown bent-wood cane
chairs. It was as if the two settees and the eight chairs
were occupied by the ghosts of all the Mexican banalties
ever uttered, sitting facing one another with their knees
towards one another, and their feet on the terrible piece of
green-with-red-roses carpet, in the weary centre of the salon.
The very sight of it was frightening.
Kate shattered this face-to-face symmetry, and had the
two girls, Maria and Concha, assisted by the ironic Juana,
carrying off the brown bent-wood chairs and the bamboo
stands into one of the spare bedrooms. Juana looked on
cynically, and assisted officiously. But when Kate had her
trunk, and fished out a couple of light rugs and a couple of
fine shawls and a few things to make the place human, the
criada began to exclaim:
“Que bonita! Que bonita, Niña! Mire que bonita!”
