Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/92

But once he rose from his knees, he rose in the same strutting conceit of himself as before he knelt: with all his adoration in his pocket again. But he had a good deal of magnetic power. His education had not diminished it. His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness. For this reason, the things he said were hardly interesting at all. Only what he was. He made, the air around him seem darker, but richer and fuller. Sometimes his presence was extraordinarily grateful, like a healing of the blood. And sometimes he was an intolerable weight on her. She gasped to get away from him.

“You think a great deal of Don Ramón?” she said to him.

“Yes,” he said, his black eyes watching her. “He is a very fine man.”

How trivial the words sounded! That was another boring thing about him: his English seemed so trivial. He wasn’t really expressing himself. He was only flipping at the white oil that lay on his surface.

“You like him better than the Bishop, your god-father?”

He lifted his shoulders in a twisted, embarrassed shrug.

“The same!” he said. “I like him the same.”

Then he looked away into the distance, with a certain hauteur and insolence.

“Very different, no?” he said. “But in some ways, the same. He knows better what is Mexico. He knows better what I am. Bishop Severn did not know the real Mexico: how could he, he was a sincere Catholic! But Don Ramón knows the real Mexico, no?”

“And what is the real Mexico?” she asked.

“Well—you must ask Don Ramón. I can’t explain.”

She asked Cipriano about going to the lake.

“Yes!” he said. “You can go! You will like it. Go first to Orilla, no?—you take a ticket on the railway to Ixtlahuacan. And in Orilla is an hoted with a German manager. Then from Orilla you can go in a motor-boat, in a few hours, to Sayula. And there you will find a house to live in.”

He wanted her to do this, she could tell.

“How far is Don Ramón’s hacienda from Sayula?” she asked.

“Near! About an hour in a boat. He is there now. And