There was in Mexico no clerical position open to Trawnbeigh, because he did not know Spanish. It is significant that after fifteen consecutive years of residence in the country none of the Trawnbeighs knew Spanish. To be, somehow and somewhere, an English country gentleman of a well-known, slightly old-fashioned type was as much Trawnbeigh’s destiny as it is the destiny of, say, a polar bear to be a polar bear, or a camel to be a camel. As soon as he got his two thousand pounds he became one.
When I first met them all he had been one for about ten years. I had recently settled in Trawnbeigh’s neighborhood, which in Mexico means that my ranch was a hard day-and-a-half ride from his, over roads that are not roads but merely ditches full of liquefied mud on the level stretches, and ditches full of assorted bowlders on the ascents. So, although we looked neighborly on a small map, I might not have had the joy of meeting the Trawnbeighs for years if my mule hadn’t gone lame one day when I was making the interminable trip to Rebozo.
Trawnbeigh’s place was seven miles from the main road, and as I happened to be near the parting of the ways when the off hind leg of Catalina began to limp, I decided to leave her with my mozo at an Indian village until a pack train should pass by (there is always some one in a pack train who can remove a bad shoe), while I proceeded on the mozo’s mule to the Trawnbeighs’. My usual stopping place for the night was five miles farther on, and the Indian village was—well, it was an Indian village.
He put me up not only that night, but as my mozo didn’t appear until late the next afternoon, a second night as well. And when I at last rode away, it was with the feeling of having learned from the Trawnbeighs a great lesson.
In the first place they couldn’t have expected me; they couldn’t possibly have expected any one. And it was a hot afternoon. But as it was the hour at which people at “home” dropped in for tea, Mrs. Trawnbeigh and her three plain, heavy looking daughters were perfectly prepared to dispense hospitality to any number of mythical friends.
They had on hideous, but distinctly “dressy” dresses of amazingly stamped materials known, I believe, as “summer silks,” and they were all four tightly laced. Current fashion in Paris, London and New York by no means insisted on small, smooth, round waists, but the Trawnbeigh women had them, because (as it gradually dawned on me) to have had any other kind would have been a concession to anatomy and the weather. To anything so compressible as one’s anatomy, or as vulgarly impartial as the weather, the Trawnbeighs simply did not concede. I never could get over the feeling that they all secretly regarded weather in general as a kind of popular institution, of vital importance only to the middle class.
Cyril, an extremely beautiful young person of twenty-two, who had been playing tennis (by himself) on the asoleadero, was in “flannels,” and Trawnbeigh admirably looked the part in gray, middle-aged riding things, although, as I discovered before leaving, their stable at the time consisted of one senile burro with ingrowing hoofs.
From the first, it all seemed too flawless to be true. I had never visited in England, but I doubt if there is another country whose literature gives one as definite and lasting an impression of its home life. Perhaps this is because the life of families of the class to which the Trawnbeighs belonged proceeds in England by such a series of definite and traditional episodes.
In a household like theirs, the unexpected must have a devil of a time in finding a chance to happen. For, during my visit, absolutely nothing happened that I hadn’t long since chuckled over when making the acquaintance of Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope; not to mention Ouida (it was Cyril, of course, who from time to time struck the Ouida note), and the more laborious performances of Mrs. Humphry Ward. They all of them did at every tick of the clock precisely what they ought to have done. They were a page, the least bit crumpled, torn from “Half Hours With the Best Authors,” and cast, dear Heaven! upon a hillside in darkest Mexico.
Of course we had tea in the garden. There wasn’t any garden, but we nevertheless had tea in it. The house would have been cooler, less glaring, and free from the venomous little rodadoras that stung the backs of my hands full of microscopic polka dots; but we all strolled out to a spot some fifty yards away where a bench, half a dozen shaky, home made chairs and a rustic table were most imperfectly shaded by three tattered banana trees.