On the long train trip to Santa Fe they stopped in Chicago and Kansas City, and Ewart the whole way lugged along a large iron box he had brought with him from England which contained all the papers and documents he would need to write his regimental history. His travel attire consisted of a pair of army jodhpurs and khaki puttees topped with a vaguely military cap, and he carried a rucksack, more or less as if he had indeed undertaken a colonial adventure (the only thing missing was my pith helmet, but that wasn’t purchased until 1933, by my father, during a stopover of the ship Ciudad de Cádiz in Tunis). In Santa Fe his spirits improved a great deal as did his nearly paralyzed hands, and he was able to write around two thousand words a day, which — dear God — was not a particularly large output for him; he stayed at the home of the Cassidys, neighbors of Stephen and Rose; he bought a horse to go riding and took various excursions of a preeminently folkloric nature, during which he saw Navajo and Apache Indians (among the better-known tribes); the climate relaxed him and suited him well, his anguish was dissipating or perhaps was only deferred; there was greater coordination between his brain and his tongue. Then the Grahams announced that they were departing for Mexico, where they wanted to spend Christmas as the prologue to a stay of two or three months; their plan was to “follow in the footsteps of Hernán Cortés,” in preparation for a book Graham was working on about Spain (where he had spent time before embarking from Cádiz for America, and where he had been in contact with Jacobo FitzJames Stuart, undoubtedly a forerunner of the Jacobo Fitzjames Stuart I know, one of my more well-bred editors), the West Indies and Mexico, which he entitled In Quest of El Dorado, and dedicated “To the literary memory of my friend Wilfrid Ewart” in 1924.
It appears that the Grahams were (understandably enough) not desirous of Ewart’s company in Mexico, or Mr. Graham, at least, was not. As he tells it in his halfhearted biographical volume The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart, also dating from 1924, Graham tried to convince Ewart to take advantage of their absence from Santa Fe to finish his loyal history of the Scots Guards, because it was weighing too heavily on his mind, preventing him from starting on a new novel or, in general, making other plans. At first Ewart seemed to go along with this, but his restless spirit and the unusually cold winter that struck New Mexico that year made him change his mind a few days later and insist on accompanying the couple to Mexico. Still Graham tried to dissuade his former captain (clearly he didn’t want even to have to think of him during his time in Mexico), assuring him that the country was far too colorful and seditious for writing and that he wouldn’t progress by one line while there. So Ewart decided on New Orleans, and set out on December 15, sending his luggage ahead. Three days later, the Grahams left for Mexico City, secure in the illusion that they would not cross paths with Ewart again until the month of March, when they would pick him up in New Orleans on their way back from their Cortésbound pilgrimage. This was not to be. In El Paso, Ewart changed his mind once more and had his ticket validated for ten more days, resolving to “take a turn” through Mexico (no more than about four thousand additional miles, after all) before continuing on to Louisiana. Graham says that when a journalist from El Paso told them of this detour, he and his wife couldn’t help feeling some apprehension over the fate of their friend, travelling alone through a country still in the final throes of its Revolution and whose language, customs and grievances were unknown to him. The cloak room and safe deposit boxes of the El Paso train station were famous, apparently, for containing numerous items — jewels, money, suitcases, clothing — belonging to travellers who had paused there before making a brief excursion to Mexico and never returned to reclaim them. At least we can be sure that in those days there were mothballs.
In Chihuahua (a very wild city), Graham saw Ewart’s signature in a hotel register, made inquiries about his passage through the place and learned that he had left safe and sound. This gesture seems odd, more appropriate to a lone pursuer than a man going along his way, accompanied by his wife, with a slight, distant concern about another man’s irresponsible meanderings: no one goes around randomly flipping through hotel registers, just in case; you do that only when you’re looking to find someone whose tracks you are following. It was as if the Grahams were now on a Wilfrid-bound pilgrimage, once they learned that Wilfrid was to be found in Mexico. They were most upset to realize, the husband wrote, that if Ewart wanted to abide by his ticket’s new period of validity, he would have to leave Mexico City before they got there; they even took the trouble to calculate, railway timetable in hand, which train he would have to take in order to be in Laredo in time to make the Southern-Pacific connection that would take him to New Orleans, his original destination. On discovering that there was a station at which their train to Mexico City and the train coming from there on its way to Laredo would arrive at the same hour, they struggled to glimpse the friend they might have been coinciding with there among the nocturnal mass of thirsty passengers, Chinese stewards, Indians hawking German costume jewelry and raucous vendors of strawberries, melons and mangos. But Ewart wasn’t there; in fact, he hadn’t left Mexico City.
And the disproportionate and somewhat incomprehensible eagerness to locate him continued; first thing, the morning after their arrival, the Grahams passed by the Hotel Regis, much frequented by North Americans, where they imagined that Ewart, who always needed a room with a bath, might have stayed. He hadn’t set foot in the place, so they headed for the British Consulate in search of news, but he hadn’t made an appearance there either, nor had he been at the Hotel Cosmos or the Princesa. They conjectured that, pressed for time, he had departed for Laredo without delay. They were staying at the Hotel Iturbide, a place less frequented by tourists than by Mexicans, though they were tourists and busied themselves fulfilling that role during the following days.
On December 30, during one of their outings, they saw Wilfrid Ewart in the distance. At the corner of San Juan de Letrán and 16 de Septiembre, completely unmistakable in his eye-catching jodhpurs and puttees, he was standing on tiptoe peering up at the sky through his tortoise-shell spectacles. In his book, Stephen Graham underscores all too heavily the joy that “surged up in our bosoms,” as he puts it, on seeing him. Anything is possible. They all went off to have lunch in a restaurant and the former orderly immediately scolded his former captain for his “willfulness,” oddly enough, and not for his uncertain, vacillating nature, as would have seemed more appropriate. Ewart explained that he was captivated by Mexico and had decided to stay. The ticket would expire and his baggage was in New Orleans, but “I’ve been looking for a place like this all my life,” he said to Graham, who didn’t pay much attention but tried to make him uneasy with the idea that he was almost sure to lose the box of the Scots Guards’ regimental papers. Perhaps the matrimonial pair were simply overprotective, but they seem to have searched desperately for Ewart only to try and get rid of him as soon as they found him, to drive him out of Mexico for the duration of their Cortés-istical stay. Wilfrid wasn’t terribly concerned, he would have the box sent from New Orleans along with his clothing, he had only his rucksack and a cane with him, and he was a bit uncomfortable because he didn’t have so much as a change of clothes in Mexico City. But he had opened a bank account and calculated that he could spend the winter inexpensively in Chapultepec or San Angel, where this time without a doubt he would finish his regimental history. Then he would go to Veracruz, return to New York, and spend the summer travelling along the Canadian border, writing a series of articles on relations between that country (Canada) and the United States, truly a gripping subject if ever one existed, and no one knows why an interest in it suddenly seized him, so far in advance and so many miles away.