“As you perceive, sir.” As he returned Seyd his phrase of a few minutes before not even a twinkle betrayed his knowledge of their ridiculous situation.
Nor was one needed to increase Billy’s anger. “Then why don’t you speak it?” he roughly blurted.
Ignoring the question, the man went on addressing Seyd. “In accordance with the foolish custom that aims to make poor foreigners out of good Mexicans I received my education at a boarding-school in the city of Manchester, England.”
Manchester, England! Center of the Lancashire cotton trade, inner shrine of commerce! Commercial essence exuded from the very name; it smelled to heaven of tin and rosin. Imagination faltered, nay, refused even to attempt to establish a relation between its prosiness and this romantic figure with a face cast in the image of the stone gods! Above all, a Manchester boarding-school! Seyd almost gasped. For to his knowledge of “fags” and “bullies,” “form rows,” “cribs and crams,” and education by external application, gained by the perusal of Tom Brown’s School Days, he had added the later, savagely impish realism of Kipling’s Stalky.
And he knew what a living hell the life must have been to a high-strung Mexican youth. “Well!” he breathed at last. “I don’t envy you the experience. I’m told that the English schoolboy isn’t particularly sensitive or nice in his—his treatment of—”
“—Half-castes. Don’t avoid the word. We Mexicans are proud of our Aztec blood. They did not love me, but I tell you, señor, that their dislike for me was as milk to fire compared with mine for them, and they left me alone after a couple had felt my knife. How I hated them—the conceited lackeys of masters as much as the bullocks of boys and their ox-like fathers. How they lectured me, the lackeys, for my ‘cowardice’ in using a knife—the cowardice of one small boy pitted against a hundred impish devils. But they were never able to blind me with their fustian ideals. Even then I could see through their sham morality, hypocritical humanity, insufferable conceit.
“‘England is the workshop of the world!’ They dinned it into us. In furtherance of the ideal they fouled the air with coal smoke, herded their men and women from the open farms into slums and brothels, and as they have done by their own so would they like to do for the world—make it one huge factory set in a slum.” He had spoken all through with great heat. Glancing for the first time at Billy, he finished, more quietly, “That is why I do not speak English—because I hate both them and their tongue.”
Now Billy’s conception of John Bull and his island had been principally formed on the perfervid “tail-twisting” of the common-school histories, and Seyd, whose views had been corrected by wider reading, had to smile at his emphatic indorsement. “I’m with you. No English, please, in mine.”
Even Sebastien smiled. “No, you are American—from our viewpoint, much worse. Just as sordid as the stupid English, you are quicker-witted, therefore more to be feared, and you stand forever at our gates, ready to force your commerce and ideas upon us. But much as we hate you, loath as we are to have you come among us, I would still have you to believe that this business was accidental. I, at least, did not plan your death.”
“Then you do not speak for them?” Seyd glanced at the muleteers, now crouching over a second small fire they had built for themselves.