Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [178]
One last time she sniffed at the skirt–sniffed and couldn’t be sure she had really smelled in it that intoxicating essence of the mountains. She gave it up. “I suppose not. It just came over me like a gust. For a second I knew exactly who I was: Mrs. Ward from Ditch Walk. I guess I’d better get ready to be the Wandering Jew again.”
“He’s immortal, isn’t he?” Oliver said. “He never gets to settle down. We’ll make it, sooner or later.”
“In Heaven, I expect.”
“Oh ye of little faith. Come on, Sue, we’ll make it. We’ll get that right job and that house and that yard and that attic. We really will.”
“It’s hard to see how, or when.”
“Mañana,” Oliver said. He gave her a pat on the hip and turned back to his notes and map. “Hadn’t you better get packing? We’ve got forty miles to ride tomorrow.”
She had to laugh. No sooner did the talk get around to settling down than it was time to go somewhere.
End of dream number three, which like the Santa Cruz dream was more hers than his. A short dream, but intense, it had briefly enchanted the artist as well as the wife. She put it aside, and did not mope, and made the most of the trip back. It is a commentary both on her personally and on the Genteel Female that she rode the two hundred and fifty miles to Mexico City in a little over five days, and on the way, literally writing and drawing in the saddle, made all the notes and some of the sketches for a third Century article.
She had the terrier temperament, and she was interested in everything that moved. Through the black silk face mask that Emelita had given her as protection against the muy fuerte Mexican sun, her eyes were very busy. Her pencil was always out.
They were four–she and Oliver, Simpson, and a villainous-looking colonel of cavalry, one of Diaz’s colonels, who rode a horse he called Napoleon Tercero and whom they suspected of having been a bandit before patriotism ennobled him. They accepted his company because there were many of his kind, un-ennobled, along the roads they must travel.
Behind the riders came the little train of two pack mules, two lead mules, and two spare horses, managed by six servants, the last of whom rode his mule very close to the tail, at the very end of the procession, and so far as they could see, did nothing but adjust the angle of his sombrero according to the angle of the sun.
Ahead of them by six hours rode a trusted servant of the house of Gutierrez who prepared their way at the great estancias where they rested in the afternoons or slept at night. Nothing could have appealed to Grandmother’s romantic medievalism more than those houses. They arrived like knights errant, a seneschal swung open the gates, at the inner gate the lord met them and made them welcome. Vassals led away the lady’s palfrey and unbuckled the knights’ spurs, demoiselles led the lady to her room. They dined at feudal boards with retainers clustered below the salt, while outside in courts lighted by torches there was minstrelsy on the guitar.
Fairyland, a storybook country of antique courtesy and feudal grandeur, with a passionate concentration of the picturesque on which Susan Ward throve. She left every great house with reluctance. As they jingled and shuffled along a road through some sun-baked high valley, their shoulders keeping the same motion, the cartridges clunking in the men’s carbines to the same rhythm, she may have thought that they owed it all to Don Pedro Gutierrez, and that if Oliver’s report were only going to be different, they might still become part of that world. I catch her, in the reminiscences, wondering wistfully if those estancias have managed to survive within sound of the train whistle, if there are still houses like Querendero and Tepitongo and Tepititlan, where their whole cavalcade of ten people, twelve horses, and four mules could be taken in on an hour’s notice and cause not a ripple except the friendly, grave stir of hospitality.
There is only one passage in her third Century