Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/99
sleep, uncombed, came from under the delapidated arches of the portales, and across the broken pavement, to fill their water-jars.
The tram stopped and they got down. The boy got down with the bags, and told them they must go to the river to take a boat.
They followed obediently down the smashed pavements, where every moment you might twist your ankle or break your leg. Everywhere the same weary indifference and brokenness, a sense of dirt and of helplessness, squalor of fargone indifference, under the perfect morning sky, in the pure sunshine and the pure Mexican air. The sense of life ebbing away, leaving dry ruin.
They came to the edge of the town, to a dusty, humped bridge, a broken wall, a pale-brown stream flowing full. Below the bridge a cluster of men.
Each one wanted her to hire his boat. She demanded a motor-boat: the boat from the hotel. They said there wasn’t one. She didn’t believe it. Then a dark-faced fellow with his black hair down his forehead, and a certain intensity in his eyes, said: Yes, yes; The Hotel had a boat, but it was broken. She must take a row-boat. In an hour and a half he would row her there.
“How long?” said Kate.
“An hour and a half.”
“And I am so hungry!?’ cried Kate. “How much do you charge?”
“Two pesos.” He held up two fingers.
Kate said yes, and he ran down to his boat. Then she noticed he was a cripple with inturned feet. But how quick and strong!
She climbed with Villiers down the broken bank to the river, and in a moment they were in the boat. Pale green willow trees fringed from the earthen banks to the fuller-flowing, pale-brown water. The river was not very wide, between deep banks. They slipped under the bridge, and past a funny high barge with rows of seats. The boatman said it went up the river to Jocotlan: and he waved his hand to show the direction. They were slipping down-stream, between lonely banks of willow-trees.
The crippled boatman was pulling hard, with great strength and energy. When she spoke to him in her bad