“We love to drink tea in the dingle dangle,” Mrs. Trawnbeigh explained. How the tea tray itself got to the “dingle dangle,” I have only a general suspicion, for when we arrived it was already there, equipped with caddy, cozy, a plate of buttered toast, a pot of strawberry jam, and all the rest of it. But try as I might, I simply could not rid myself of the feeling that at least two footmen had arranged it all and then discreetly retired; a feeling that also sought to account for the tray’s subsequent removal, which took place while Trawnbeigh, Cyril, Edwina, and I walked over to inspect the asoleadero and washing tanks. I wanted to look back; but something (the fear, perhaps, of being turned into a pillar of salt) restrained me.
With most English-speaking persons in that part of the world, conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and—coffee. The Trawnbeighs, however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. While we sat on the low wall of the dilapidated little asoleadero we discussed pheasant shooting and the “best places” for haberdashery and “Gladstone bags.” Cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to make a seventh.” I never found out what this meant and didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“Bertie shoots the twelfth, doesn’t he?” Edwina here inquired.
To which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215, “Bertie always shoots the twelfth.”
The best place for haberdashery in Mr. Trawnbeigh’s opinion was “the Stores.” But Cyril preferred a small shop in Bond Street, maintaining firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater” insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like one’s own.” Trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt obliged to stand up for the more economical “Stores,” but it was evident that he really admired Cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of them. Edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.
“I say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” The dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went. For Mr. Trawnbeigh, after looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. Then we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.
“I’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural nature. But there was also in the room a recently made-up cot with real sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. When Trawnbeigh spoke of this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” I knew I had indeed strayed from life into the realms of mid-Victorian romance.
The breeze Trawnbeigh had referred to developed in the violent Mexican way, while I was enjoying the bath tub, into an unmistakable norther. Water fell on the roof like so much lead and then sprang off (some of it did) in thick, round streams from the tin spouts; the wind screamed in and out of the tiles overhead, and through the “north wing’s” blurred windows the writhing banana trees of the “dingle dangle” looked like strange things one sees in an aquarium. As soon as I could get into my clothes again—a bath was as far as I was able to live up to the Trawnbeigh ideal—I went into the sala where the dinner table was already set with a really heart-rending attempt at splendor. I have said that nothing happened with which I had not a sort of literary acquaintance; but I was wrong. While I was standing there wondering how the Trawnbeighs had been able all those years to keep it up, a window in the next room blew open with a bang. I ran in to shut it; but before I reached it, I stopped short and, as hastily and quietly as I could, tiptoed back to the “wing.” For the next room was the kitchen and at one end of it Trawnbeigh, in a shabby but perfectly fitting dress-coat, his trousers rolled up halfway to his knees, was patiently holding an umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while she—bebangled, becameoed, beplumed, and stripped to the buff—masterfully cooked our dinner on the brasero.
To me it was all extremely wonderful, and the wonder of it did not lessen during the five years in which, on my way to and from Rebozo, I stopped over at the Trawnbeighs’ several times a year. For, although I knew that they were often financially all but down and out, the endless red tape of their daily life never struck me as being merely a pathetic bluff. Their rising bells and dressing bells, their apparent dependence on all sorts of pleasant accessories that simply did not exist, their occupations (I mean those on which I did not have to turn a tactful back, such as “botanizing,” “crewel work,” painting horrible water colors and composing long lists of British-sounding things to be “sent out from the Stores”), the informality with which we waited on ourselves at luncheon and the stately, punctilious manner in which we did precisely the same thing at dinner, the preordained hour at which Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the girls each took a candle and said good night, leaving Trawnbeigh, Cyril, and me to smoke a pipe and “do a whisky peg” (Trawnbeigh had spent some years in India), the whole inflexibly insular scheme of their existence was more, infinitely more, than a bluff. It was a placid, tenacious clinging to the straw of their ideal in a great, deep sea of poverty, discomfort, and isolation. And it had its reward.
For after fourteen years of Mexican life, Cyril was almost exactly what he would have been had he never seen the place; and Cyril was the Trawnbeigh’s one asset of immense value. He was most agreeable to look at, he was both related to and connected with many of the most historical-sounding ladies and gentlemen in England, and he had just the limited, selfish, amiable outlook on the world in general that was sure (granting the other things) to impress Miss Irene Slapp of Pittsburg as the height of both breeding and distinction.