Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/62

The young man listened with round eyes, going rather yellow in the face. At the end he lifted his shoulders and spread his hands in a pseudo-Mediterranean gesture.

“Well! It may be!” he said, with a certain jeering flippancy. “Perhaps you know everything. Maybe! Foreigners, they usually know everything about Mexico.” And he ended on a little cackling laugh.

“I know what I feel,” said Kate. “And now I want a taxi, and I want to go home. I don’t want to see any more stupid, ugly pictures.”

Off she drove back to the hotel, once more in a towering rage. She was amazed at herself. Usually she was so good-tempered and easy. But something about this country irritated her and put her into such a violent anger, she felt she would die. Burning, furious rage.

And perhaps, she thought to herself, the white and half-white Mexicans suffered some peculiar reaction in their blood which made them that they too were almost always in a state of suppressed irritation and anger, for which they must find a vent. They must spend their lives in a complicated game of frustration, frustration of life in its ebbing and flowing.

Perhaps something came out of the earth, the dragon of the earth, some effluence, some vibration which militated against the very composition of the blood and nerves in human beings. Perhaps it came from the volcanoes. Or perhaps even from the silent, serpent-like dark resistance of those masses of ponderous natives whose blood was principally the old, heavy, resistant Indian blood.

Who knows? But something there was, and something very potent. Kate lay on her bed and brooded her own organic rage. There was nothing to be done?

But young Garcia was really nice. He called in the afternoon and sent up his card. Kate, feeling sore, received him unwillingly.

“I came,” he said, with a little stiff dignity, like an ambassador on a mission, “to tell you that I, too, don’t like those caricatures. I, too, don’t like them. I don’t like the young people, boys and girls, no?—to be seeing them all the time. I, too, don’t like. But I think, also, that here in Mexico, we can’t help it. People are very bad, very greedy, no?—they only want to get money here, and