Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/42

 “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.”

"That’s true," said Henry. "The Labourites have tried every little game possible. When I was in Orizaba they marched to the Hotel Francia to shoot all the gringoes and the Gachupines. The hotel manager had pluck enough to harangue them, and they went off to the next hotel. When the man came out there to talk to them, they shot him before he got a word out. It’s funny, really! If you have to go to the Town Hall, and you’re dressed in decent clothes, they let you sit on a hard bench for hours. But if a street-sweeper comes in, or a fellow in dirty cotton drawers, it is —while you sit there waiting their pleasure. Oh, it’s quite funny.”

The Judge trembled with irritation like an access of gout. The party sat in gloomy silence, that sense of doom and despair overcoming them as it seems to overcome all people who talk seriously about Mexico. Even Owen was silent. He too had come through Vera Cruz, and had had his fright; the porters had charged him twenty pesos to carry his trunk from the ship to the train. Twenty pesos is ten dollars, for ten minutes’ work. And when Owen had seen the man in front of him arrested and actually sent to jail, a Mexican jail at that, for refusing to pay the charge, "the legal charge,” he himself had stumped up without a word.

"I walked into the National Museum the other day,” said