Title:      The Plumed Serpent (1926)
Author:     D. H. Lawrence
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Plumed Serpent (1926)
Author:     D. H. Lawrence





CONTENTS

I.  BEGINNINGS OF A BULL-FIGHT

II.  TEA-PARTY IN TLACOLULA

III.  FORTIETH BIRTHDAY

IV.  TO STAY OR NOT TO STAY

V.  THE LAKE

VI.  THE MOVE DOWN THE LAKE

VII.  THE PLAZA

VIII.  NIGHT IN THE HOUSE

IX.  CASA DE LAS CUENTAS

X.  DON RAMÓN AND DOÑA CARLOTA

XI.  LORDS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT

XII.  THE FIRST WATERS

XIII.  THE FIRST RAIN

XIV.  HOME TO SAYULA

XV.  THE WRITTEN HYMNS OF QUETZALCOATL

XVI.  CIPRIANO AND KATE

XVII.  FOURTH HYMN AND THE BISHOP

XVIII.  AUTO DA FE

XIX.  THE ATTACK ON JAMILTEPEC

XX.  MARRIAGE BY QUETZALCOATL

XXI.  THE OPENING OF THE CHURCH

XXII.  THE LIVING HUITZILOPOCHTLI

XXIII.  HUITZILOPOCHTLI'S NIGHT

XXIV.  MALINTZI

XXV.  TERESA

XXVI.  KATE IS A WIFE

XXVII.  HERE!




CHAPTER I

Beginnings of a Bull-fight


It was the Sunday after Easter, and the last bull-fight of the
season in Mexico City.  Four special bulls had been brought over
from Spain for the occasion, since Spanish bulls are more fiery
than Mexican.  Perhaps it is the altitude, perhaps just the spirit
of the western Continent which is to blame for the lack of 'pep',
as Owen put it, in the native animal.

Although Owen, who was a great socialist, disapproved of bull-
fights, 'We have never seen one.  We shall have to go,' he said.

'Oh yes, I think we must see it,' said Kate.

'And it's our last chance,' said Owen.

Away he rushed to the place where they sold tickets, to book seats,
and Kate went with him.  As she came into the street, her heart
sank.  It was as if some little person inside her were sulking and
resisting.  Neither she nor Owen spoke much Spanish, there was a
fluster at the ticket place, and an unpleasant individual came
forward to talk American for them.

It was obvious they ought to buy tickets for the 'Shade.'  But they
wanted to economize, and Owen said he preferred to sit among the
crowd, therefore, against the resistance of the ticket man and the
onlookers, they bought reserved seats in the 'Sun.'

The show was on Sunday afternoon.  All the tram-cars and the
frightful little Ford omnibuses called camions were labelled
Torero, and were surging away towards Chapultepec.  Kate felt that
sudden dark feeling, that she didn't want to go.

'I'm not very keen on going,' she said to Owen.

'Oh, but why not?  I don't believe in them on principle, but we've
never seen one, so we shall HAVE to go.'

Owen was an American, Kate was Irish.  'Never having seen one'
meant 'having to go.'  But it was American logic rather than Irish,
and Kate only let herself be overcome.

Villiers of course was keen.  But then he too was American, and he
too had never seen one, and being younger, more than anybody he HAD
to go.

They got into a Ford taxi and went.  The busted car careered away
down the wide dismal street of asphalt and stone and Sunday
dreariness.  Stone buildings in Mexico have a peculiar hard, dry
dreariness.

The taxi drew up in a side street under the big iron scaffolding of
the stadium.  In the gutters, rather lousy men were selling pulque
and sweets, cakes, fruit, and greasy food.  Crazy motorcars rushed
up and hobbled away.  Little soldiers in washed-out cotton
uniforms, pinky drab, hung around an entrance.  Above all loomed
the network iron frame of the huge, ugly stadium.

Kate felt she was going to prison.  But Owen excitedly surged to
the entrance that corresponded to his ticket.  In the depths of
him, he too didn't want to go.  But he was a born American, and if
anything was on show, he had to see it.  That was 'Life.'

The man who took the tickets at the entrance, suddenly, as they
were passing in, stood in front of Owen, put both his hands on
Owen's chest, and pawed down the front of Owen's body.  Owen
started, bridled, transfixed for a moment.  The fellow stood aside.
Kate remained petrified.

Then Owen jerked into a smiling composure as the man waved them on.
'Feeling for fire-arms!' he said, rolling his eyes with pleased
excitement at Kate.

But she had not got over the shock of horror, fearing the fellow
might paw her.

They emerged out of a tunnel in the hollow of the concrete-and-iron
amphitheatre.  A real gutter-lout came to look at their counterslips,
to see which seats they had booked.  He jerked his head downwards,
and slouched off.  Now Kate knew she was in a trap--a big concrete
beetle trap.

They dropped down the concrete steps till they were only three
tiers from the bottom.  That was their row.  They were to sit on
the concrete, with a loop of thick iron between each numbered seat.
This was a reserved place in the 'Sun.'

Kate sat gingerly between her two iron loops, and looked vaguely
around.

'I think it's thrilling!' she said.

Like most modern people, she had a will-to-happiness.

'Isn't it thrilling?' cried Owen, whose will-to-happiness was
almost a mania.  'Don't you think so, Bud?'

'Why, yes, I think it may be,' said Villiers, non-committal.

But then Villiers was young, he was only over twenty, while Owen
was over forty.  The younger generation calculates its 'happiness'
in a more business-like fashion.  Villiers was out after a thrill,
but he wasn't going to say he'd got one till he'd got it.  Kate and
Owen--Kate was also nearly forty--must enthuse a thrill, out of a
sort of politeness to the great Show-man, Providence.

'Look here!' said Owen.  'Supposing we try to protect our extremity
on this concrete--' and thoughtfully he folded his rain-coat and
laid it along the concrete ledge so that both he and Kate could sit
on it.

They sat and gazed around.  They were early.  Patches of people
mottled the concrete slope opposite, like eruptions.  The ring just
below was vacant, neatly sanded; and above the ring, on the
encircling concrete, great advertisements for hats, with a picture
of a city-man's straw hat, and advertisements for spectacles, with
pairs of spectacles supinely folded, glared and shouted.

'Where is the "Shade" then?' said Owen, twisting his neck.

At the top of the amphitheatre, near the sky, were concrete boxes.
This was the 'Shade', where anybody who was anything sat.

'Oh but,' said Kate, 'I don't want to be perched right up there, so
far away.'

'Why no!' said Owen.  'We're much better where we are, in our
"Sun", which isn't going to shine a great deal after all.'

The sky was cloudy, preparing for the rainy season.

It was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon, and the crowd was
filling in, but still only occupied patches of the bare concrete.
The lower tiers were reserved, so the bulk of the people sat in the
mid-way levels, and gentry like our trio were more or less
isolated.

But the audience was already a mob, mostly of fattish town men in
black tight suits and little straw hats, and a mixing-in of the
dark-faced labourers in big hats.  The men in black suits were
probably employees and clerks and factory hands.  Some had brought
their women, in sky-blue chiffon with brown chiffon hats and faces
powdered to look like white marshmallows.  Some were families with
two or three children.

The fun began.  The game was to snatch the hard straw hat off some
fellow's head, and send it skimming away down the slope of
humanity, where some smart bounder down below would catch it and
send it skimming across in another direction.  There were shouts of
jeering pleasure from the mass, which rose almost to a yell as
seven straw hats were skimming, meteor-like, at one moment across
the slope of people.

'Look at that!' said Owen.  'Isn't that fun!'

'No,' said Kate, her little alter ego speaking out for once, in
spite of her will-to-happiness.  'No, I don't like it.  I really
hate common people.'

As a socialist, Owen disapproved, and as a happy man, he was
disconcerted.  Because his own real self, as far as he had any
left, hated common rowdiness just as much as Kate did.

'It's awfully smart though!' he said, trying to laugh in sympathy
with the mob.  'There now, see that!'

'Yes, it's quite smart, but I'm glad it's not my hat,' said
Villiers.

'Oh, it's all in the game,' said Owen largely.

But he was uneasy.  He was wearing a big straw hat of native make,
conspicuous in the comparative isolation of the lower tiers.  After
a lot of fidgeting, he took off this hat and put it on his knees.
But unfortunately he had a very definitely bald spot on a sunburnt
head.

Behind, above, sat a dense patch of people in the unreserved
section.  Already they were throwing things.  Bum! came an orange,
aimed at Owen's bald spot, and hitting him on the shoulder.  He
glared round rather ineffectually through his big shell spectacles.

'I'd keep my hat on if I were you,' said the cold voice of
Villiers.

'Yes, I think perhaps it's wiser,' said Owen, with assumed
nonchalance, putting on his hat again.

Whereupon a banana skin rattled on Villiers' tidy and ladylike
little panama.  He glared round coldly, like a bird that would stab
with its beak if it got the chance, but which would fly away at the
first real menace.

'How I detest them!' said Kate.

A diversion was created by the entrance, opposite, of the military
bands, with their silver and brass instruments under their arms.
There were three sets.  The chief band climbed and sat on the
right, in the big bare tract of concrete reserved for the
Authorities.  These musicians wore dark grey uniforms trimmed with
rose colour, and made Kate feel almost reassured, as if it were
Italy and not Mexico City.  A silver band in pale buff uniforms sat
opposite our party, high up across the hollow distance, and still a
third 'música' threaded away to the left, on the remote scattered
hillside of the amphitheatre.  The newspapers had said that the
President would attend.  But the Presidents are scarce at bull-
fights in Mexico, nowadays.

There sat the bands, in as much pomp as they could muster, but they
did not begin to play.  Great crowds now patched the slopes, but
there were still bare tracts, especially in the Authorities'
section.  Only a little distance above Kate's row was a mass of
people, as it were impending; a very uncomfortable sensation.

It was three o'clock, and the crowds had a new diversion.  The
bands, due to strike up at three, still sat there in lordly
fashion, sounding not a note.

'La música!  La música!' shouted the mob, with the voice of mob
authority.  They were the People, and the revolutions had been
their revolutions, and they had won them all.  The bands were their
bands, present for their amusement.

But the bands were military bands, and it was the army which had
won all the revolutions.  So the revolutions were THEIR
revolutions, and they were present for their own glory alone.

Música pagada toca mal tono.

Spasmodically, the insolent yelling of the mob rose and subsided.
La música!  La música!  The shout became brutal and violent.  Kate
always remembered it.  La música!  The band peacocked its
nonchalance.  The shouting was a great yell: the degenerate mob of
Mexico City!

At length, at its own leisure, the bands in grey with dark rose
facings struck up: crisp, martial, smart.

'That's fine!' said Owen.  'But that's really good!  And it's the
first time I've heard a good band in Mexico, a band with any
backbone.'

The music was smart, but it was brief.  The band seemed scarcely to
have started, when the piece was over.  The musicians took their
instruments from their mouths with a gesture of dismissal.  They
played just to say they'd played, making it as short as possible.

Música pagada toca mal tono.

There was a ragged interval, then the silver band piped up.  And at
last it was half-past three, or more.

Whereupon, at some given signal, the masses in the middle,
unreserved seats suddenly burst and rushed down on to the lowest,
reserved seats.  It was a crash like a burst reservoir, and the
populace in black Sunday suits poured down round and about our
astonished, frightened trio.  And in two minutes it was over.
Without any pushing or shoving.  Everybody careful, as far as
possible, not to touch anybody else.  You don't elbow your
neighbour if he's got a pistol on his hip and a knife at his belly.
So all the seats in the lower tiers filled in one rush, like the
flowing of water.

Kate now sat among the crowd.  But her seat, fortunately, was above
one of the track-ways that went round the arena, so at least she
would not have anybody sitting between her knees.

Men went uneasily back and forth along this gangway past the feet,
wanting to get in next their friends, but never venturing to ask.
Three seats away, on the same row, sat a Polish bolshevist fellow
who had met Owen.  He leaned over and asked the Mexican next to
Owen if he might change seats with him.  'No,' said the Mexican.
'I'll sit in my own seat.'

'Muy bien, Señor, muy bien!' said the Pole.

The show did not begin, and men like lost mongrels still prowled
back and forth on the track that was next step down from Kate's
feet.  They began to take advantage of the ledge on which rested
the feet of our party, to squat there.

Down sat a heavy fellow, plumb between Owen's knees.

'I hope they won't sit on MY feet,' said Kate anxiously.

'We won't let them,' said Villiers, with bird-like decision.  'Why
don't you shove him off, Owen?  Shove him off?'

And Villiers glared at the Mexican fellow ensconced between Owen's
legs.  Owen flushed, and laughed uncomfortably.  He was not good at
shoving people off.  The Mexican began to look round at the three
angry white people.

And in another moment, another fat Mexican in a black suit and a
little black hat was lowering himself into Villiers' foot-space.
But Villiers was too quick for him.  He quickly brought his feet
together under the man's sinking posterior, so the individual
subsided uncomfortably on to a pair of boots, and at the same time
felt a hand shoving him quietly but determinedly on the shoulder.

'No!' Villiers was saying in good American.  'This place is for my
FEET!  Get off!  You get off!'

And he continued, quietly but very emphatically, to push the
Mexican's shoulder, to remove him.

The Mexican half raised himself, and looked round murderously at
Villiers.  Physical violence was being offered, and the only retort
was death.  But the young American's face was so cold and abstract,
only the eyes showing a primitive, bird-like fire, that the Mexican
was nonplussed.  And Kate's eyes were blazing with Irish contempt.

The fellow struggled with his Mexican city-bred inferiority
complex.  He muttered an explanation in Spanish that he was only
sitting there for a moment, till he could join his friends--waving
a hand towards a lower tier.  Villiers did not understand a word,
but he reiterated:

'I don't care what it is.  This place is for my FEET, and you don't
sit there.'

Oh, home of liberty!  Oh, land of the free!  Which of these two men
was to win in the struggle for conflicting liberty?  Was the fat
fellow free to sit between Villiers' feet, or was Villiers free to
keep his foot-space?

There are all sorts of inferiority complex, and the city Mexican
has a very strong sort, that makes him all the more aggressive,
once it is roused.  Therefore the intruder lowered his posterior
with a heavy, sudden bounce on Villiers' feet, and Villiers, out
of very distaste, had had to extricate his feet from such a
compression.  The young man's face went white at the nostrils, and
his eyes took on that bright abstract look of pure democratic
anger.  He pushed the fat shoulders more decisively, repeating:

'Go away!  Go away!  You're not to SIT there.'

The Mexican, on his own ground, and heavy on his own base, let
himself be shoved, oblivious.

'Insolence!' said Kate loudly.  'Insolence!'

She glared at the fat back in the shoddily-fitting black coat,
which looked as if a woman dressmaker had made it, with loathing.
How could any man's coat-collar look so homemade, so en famille!

Villiers remained with a fixed, abstract look on his thin face,
rather like a death's head.  All his American will was summoned up,
the bald eagle of the north bristling in every feather.  The fellow
SHOULD NOT sit there.--But how to remove him?

The young man sat tense with will to annihilate his beetle-like
intruder, and Kate used all her Irish malice to help him.

'Don't you wonder who was his tailor?' she asked, with a flicker in
her voice.

Villiers looked at the femalish black coat of the Mexican, and made
an arch grimace at Kate.

'I should say he hadn't one.  Perhaps did it himself.'

'Very likely!' Kate laughed venomously.

It was too much.  The man got up and betook himself, rather
diminished, to another spot.

'Triumph!' said Kate.  'Can't you do the same, Owen?'

Owen laughed uncomfortably, glancing down at the man between his
knees as he might glance at a dog with rabies, when it had its back
to him.

'Apparently not yet, unfortunately,' he said, with some constraint,
turning his nose away again from the Mexican, who was using him as
a sort of chair-back.

There was an exclamation.  Two horsemen in gay uniforms and bearing
long staffs had suddenly ridden into the ring.  They went round the
arena, then took up their posts, sentry-wise, on either side the
tunnel entrance through which they had come in.

In marched a little column of four toreadors wearing tight uniforms
plastered with silver embroidery.  They divided, and marched
smartly in opposite directions, two and two, around the ring, till
they came to the place facing the section of the Authorities, where
they made their salute.

So this was a bull-fight!  Kate already felt a chill of disgust.

In the seats of the Authorities were very few people, and certainly
no sparkling ladies in high tortoise-shell combs and lace
mantillas.  A few common-looking people, bourgeois with not much
taste, and a couple of officers in uniform.  The President had not
come.

There was no glamour, no charm.  A few commonplace people in an
expanse of concrete were the elect, and below, four grotesque and
effeminate-looking fellows in tight, ornate clothes were the
heroes.  With their rather fat posteriors and their squiffs of
pigtails and their clean-shaven faces, they looked like eunuchs, or
women in tight pants, these precious toreadors.

The last of Kate's illusions concerning bull-fights came down with
a flop.  These were the darlings of the mob!  These were the
gallant toreadors!  Gallant?  Just about as gallant as assistants
in a butcher's shop.  Lady-killers?  Ugh!

There was an Ah! of satisfaction from the mob.  Into the ring
suddenly rushed a smallish, dun-coloured bull with long flourishing
horns.  He ran out, blindly, as if from the dark, probably thinking
that now he was free.  Then he stopped short, seeing he was not
free, but surrounded in an unknown way.  He was utterly at a loss.

A toreador came forward and switched out a pink cloak like a fan
not far from the bull's nose.  The bull gave a playful little
prance, neat and pretty, and charged mildly on the cloak.  The
toreador switched the cloak over the animal's head, and the neat
little bull trotted on round the ring, looking for a way to get
out.

Seeing the wooden barrier around the arena, finding he was able to
look over it, he thought he might as well take the leap.  So over
he went into the corridor or passage-way which circled the ring,
and in which stood the servants of the arena.

Just as nimbly, these servants vaulted over the barrier into the
arena, that was now bull-less.

The bull in the gangway trotted inquiringly round till he came to
an opening on to the arena again.  So back he trotted into the
ring.

And back into the gangway vaulted the servants, where they stood
again to look on.

The bull trotted waveringly and somewhat irritated.  The toreadors
waved their cloaks at him, and he swerved on.  Till his vague
course took him to where one of the horsemen with lances sat
motionless on his horse.

Instantly, in a pang of alarm, Kate noticed that the horse was
thickly blindfolded with a black cloth.  Yes, and so was the horse
on which sat the other picador.

The bull trotted suspiciously up to the motionless horse bearing
the rider with the long pole; a lean old horse that would never
move till Doomsday, unless someone shoved it.

O shades of Don Quixote!  Oh four Spanish horsemen of the
Apocalypse!  This was surely one of them.

The picador pulled his feeble horse round slowly, to face the bull,
and slowly he leaned forward and shoved his lance-point into the
bull's shoulder.  The bull, as if the horse were a great wasp that
had stung him deep, suddenly lowered his head in a jerk of surprise
and lifted his horns straight up into the horse's abdomen.  And
without more ado, over went horse and rider, like a tottering
monument upset.

The rider scrambled from under the horse and went running away with
his lance.  The old horse, in complete dazed amazement, struggled
to rise, as if overcome with dumb incomprehension.  And the bull,
with a red place on his shoulder welling a trickle of dark blood,
stood looking around in equally hopeless amazement.

But the wound was hurting.  He saw the queer sight of the horse
half reared from the ground, trying to get to its feet.  And he
smelled blood and bowels.

So rather vaguely, as if not quite knowing what he ought to do, the
bull once more lowered his head and pushed his sharp, flourishing
horns in the horse's belly, working them up and down inside there
with a sort of vague satisfaction.

Kate had never been taken so completely by surprise in all her
life.  She had still cherished some idea of a gallant show.  And
before she knew where she was, she was watching a bull whose
shoulders trickled blood goring his horns up and down inside the
belly of a prostrate and feebly plunging old horse.

The shock almost overpowered her.  She had come for a gallant show.
This she had paid to see.  Human cowardice and beastliness, a smell
of blood, a nauseous whiff of bursten bowels!  She turned her face
away.

When she looked again, it was to see the horse feebly and dazedly
walking out of the ring, with a great ball of its own entrails
hanging out of its abdomen and swinging reddish against its own
legs as it automatically moved.

And once more, the shock of amazement almost made her lose
consciousness.  She heard the confused small applause of amusement
from the mob.  And that Pole, to whom Owen had introduced her,
leaned over and said to her, in horrible English:

'Now, Miss Leslie, you are seeing Life!  Now you will have
something to write about, in your letters to England.'

She looked at his unwholesome face in complete repulsion, and
wished Owen would not introduce her to such sordid individuals.

She looked at Owen.  His nose had a sharp look, like a little boy
who may make himself sick, but who is watching at the shambles with
all his eyes, knowing it is forbidden.

Villiers, the younger generation, looked intense and abstract,
getting the sensation.  He would not even feel sick.  He was just
getting the thrill of it, without emotion, coldly and scientifically,
but very intent.

And Kate felt a real pang of hatred against this Americanism which
is coldly and unscrupulously sensational.

'Why doesn't the horse move?  Why doesn't it run away from the
bull?' she asked in repelled amazement, of Owen.

Owen cleared his throat.

'Didn't you see?  It was blindfolded,' he said.

'But can't it SMELL the bull?' she asked.

'Apparently not.--They bring the old wrecks here to finish them
off.--I know it's awful, but it's part of the game.'

How Kate hated phrases like 'part of the game.'  What do they mean,
anyhow!  She felt utterly humiliated, crushed by a sense of human
indecency, cowardice of two-legged humanity.  In this 'brave' show
she felt nothing but reeking cowardice.  Her breeding and her
natural pride were outraged.

The ring servants had cleaned away the mess and spread new sand.
The toreadors were playing with the bull, unfurling their foolish
cloaks at arm's length.  And the animal, with the red sore running
on his shoulder, foolishly capered and ran from one rag to the
other, here and there.

For the first time, a bull seemed to her a fool.  She had always
been afraid of bulls, fear tempered with reverence of the great
Mithraic beast.  And now she saw how stupid he was, in spite of his
long horns and his massive maleness.  Blindly and stupidly he ran
at the rag, each time, and the toreadors skipped like fat-hipped
girls showing off.  Probably it needed skill and courage, but it
LOOKED silly.

Blindly and foolishly the bull ran ducking its horns each time at
the rag, just because the rag fluttered.

'Run at the MEN, idiot!' said Kate aloud, in her overwrought
impatience.  'Run at the men, not at the cloaks.'

'They never do, isn't it curious!' replied Villiers, with cool
scientific interest.  'They say no toreador will face a cow,
because a cow always goes for HIM instead of the cloak.  If a bull
did that there'd be no bull-fights.  Imagine it!'

She was bored now.  The nimbleness and the skipping tricks of the
toreadors bored her.  Even when one of the banderilleros reared
himself on tiptoe, his plump posterior much in evidence, and from
his erectness pushed two razor-sharp darts with frills at the top
into the bull's shoulder, neatly and smartly, Kate felt no
admiration.  One of the darts fell out, anyway, and the bull ran on
with the other swinging and waggling in another bleeding place.

The bull now wanted to get away, really.  He leaped the fence
again, quickly, into the attendants' gangway.  The attendants
vaulted over into the arena.  The bull trotted in the corridor,
then nicely leaped back.  The attendants vaulted once more into the
corridor.  The bull trotted round the arena, ignoring the
toreadors, and leaped once more into the gangway.  Over vaulted the
attendants.

Kate was beginning to be amused, now that the mongrel men were
skipping for safety.

The bull was in the ring again, running from cloak to cloak,
foolishly.  A banderillero was getting ready with two more darts.
But at first another picador put nobly forward on his blindfolded
old horse.  The bull ignored this little lot too, and trotted away
again, as if all the time looking for something, excitedly looking
for something.  He stood still and excitedly pawed the ground, as
if he wanted something.  A toreador advanced and swung a cloak.  Up
pranced the bull, tail in air, and with a prancing bound charged--
upon the rag, of course.  The toreador skipped round with a
ladylike skip, then tripped to another point.  Very pretty!

The bull, in the course of his trotting and prancing and pawing,
had once more come near the bold picador.  The bold picador shoved
forward his ancient steed, leaned forwards, and pushed the point of
his lance in the bull's shoulder.  The bull looked up, irritated
and arrested.  What the devil!

He saw the horse and rider.  The horse stood with that feeble
monumentality of a milk horse, patient as if between the shafts,
waiting while his master delivered the milk.  How strange it must
have been to him when the bull, giving a little bound like a dog,
ducked its head and dived its horns upwards into his belly, rolling
him over with his rider as one might push over a hat-stand.

The bull looked with irritable wonder at the incomprehensible
medley of horse and rider kicking on the ground a few yards away
from him.  He drew near to investigate.  The rider scrambled out
and bolted.  And the toreadors, running up with their cloaks, drew
off the bull.  He went caracoling round, charging at more silk-
lined rags.

Meanwhile an attendant had got the horse on its feet again, and was
leading it totteringly into the gangway and round to the exit,
under the Authorities.  The horse crawled slowly.  The bull,
running from pink cloak to red cloak, rag to rag, and never
catching anything, was getting excited, impatient of the rag game.
He jumped once more into the gangway and started running, alas, on
towards where the wounded horse was still limping its way to the
exit.

Kate knew what was coming.  Before she could look away, the bull
had charged on the limping horse from behind, the attendants had
fled, the horse was up-ended absurdly, one of the bull's horns
between his hind legs and deep in his inside.  Down went the horse,
collapsing in front, but his rear was still heaved up, with the
bull's horn working vigorously up and down inside him, while he lay
on his neck all twisted.  And a huge heap of bowels coming out.
And a nauseous stench.  And the cries of pleased amusement among
the crowd.

This pretty event took place on Kate's side of the ring, and not
far from where she sat, below her.  Most of the people were on
their feet craning to look down over the edge to watch the
conclusion of this delightful spectacle.

Kate knew if she saw any more she would go into hysterics.  She was
getting beside herself.

She looked swiftly at Owen, who looked like a guilty boy
spellbound.

'I'm going!' she said, rising.

'Going!' he cried, in wonder and dismay, his flushed face and his
bald flushed forehead a picture, looking up at her.

But she had already turned, and was hurrying away towards the mouth
of the exit-tunnel.

Owen came running after her, flustered, and drawn in all
directions.

'Really going!' he said in chagrin, as she came to the high,
vaulted exit-tunnel.

'I must.  I've got to get out,' she cried.  'Don't you come.'

'Really!' he echoed, torn all ways.

The scene was creating a very hostile attitude in the audience.  To
leave the bull-fight is a national insult.

'Don't come!  Really!  I shall take a tram-car,' she said
hurriedly.

'Really!  Do you think you'll be all right?'

'Perfectly.  You stay.  Good-bye!  I can't smell any more of this
stink.'

He turned like Orpheus looking back into hell, and wavering made
towards his seat again.

It was not so easy, because many people were now on their feet and
crowding to the exit vault.  The rain which had sputtered a few
drops suddenly fell in a downward splash.  People were crowding to
shelter; but Owen, unheeding, fought his way back to his seat, and
sat in his rain-coat with the rain pouring on his bald head.  He
was as nearly in hysterics as Kate.  But he was convinced that this
was life.  He was seeing LIFE, and what can an American do more!

'They might just as well sit and enjoy somebody else's diarrhoea'
was the thought that passed through Kate's distracted but still
Irish mind.

There she was in the great concrete archway under the stadium, with
the lousy press of the audience crowding in after her.  Facing
outwards, she saw the straight downpour of the rain, and a little
beyond, the great wooden gates that opened to the free street.  Oh
to be out, to be out of this, to be free!

But it was pouring tropical rain.  The little shoddy soldiers were
pressing back under the brick gateway, for shelter.  And the gates
were almost shut.  Perhaps they would not let her out.  Oh horror!

She stood hovering in front of the straight downpour.  She would
have dashed out, but for the restraining thought of what she would
look like when her thin gauze dress was plastered to her body by
drenching rain.  On the brink she hovered.

Behind her, from the inner end of the stadium tunnel, the people
were surging in in waves.  She stood horrified and alone, looking
always out to freedom.  The crowd was in a state of excitement, cut
off in its sport, on tenterhooks lest it should miss anything.
Thank goodness the bulk stayed near the inner end of the vault.
She hovered near the outer end, ready to bolt at any moment.

The rain crashed steadily down.

She waited on the outer verge, as far from the people as possible.
Her face had that drawn, blank look of a woman near hysterics.  She
could not get out of her eyes the last picture of the horse lying
twisted on its neck with its hindquarters hitched up and the horn
of the bull goring slowly and rhythmically in its vitals.  The
horse so utterly passive and grotesque.  And all its bowels
slipping on to the ground.

But a new terror was the throng inside the tunnel entrance.  The
big arched place was filling up, but still the crowd did not come
very near her.  They pressed towards the inner exit.

They were mostly loutish men in city clothes, the mongrel men of a
mongrel city.  Two men stood making water against the wall, in the
interval of their excitement.  One father had kindly brought his
little boys to the show, and stood in fat, sloppy, paternal
benevolence above them.  They were pale mites, the elder about ten
years old, highly dressed up in Sunday clothes.  And badly they
needed protecting from that paternal benevolence, for they were
oppressed, peaked, and a bit wan from the horrors.  To those
children at least bull-fights did not come natural, but would be an
acquired taste.  There were other children, however, and fat mammas
in black satin that was greasy and grey at the edges with an
overflow of face-powder.  These fat mammas had a pleased, excited
look in their eyes, almost sexual, and very distasteful in contrast
to their soft passive bodies.

Kate shivered a little in her thin frock, for the ponderous rain
had a touch of ice.  She stared through the curtain of water at the
big rickety gates of the enclosure surrounding the amphitheatre, at
the midget soldiers cowering in their shoddy, pink-white cotton
uniforms, and at the glimpse of the squalid street outside, now
running with dirty brown streams.  The vendors had all taken
refuge, in dirty-white clusters, in the pulque shops, one of which
was sinisterly named:  A Ver que Sale.

She was afraid more of the repulsiveness than of anything.  She had
been in many cities of the world, but Mexico had an underlying
ugliness, a sort of squalid evil, which made Naples seem debonair
in comparison.  She was afraid, she dreaded the thought that
anything might really touch her in this town, and give her the
contagion of its crawling sort of evil.  But she knew that the one
thing she must do was to keep her head.

A little officer in uniform, wearing a big, pale-blue cape, made
his way through the crowd.  He was short, dark, and had a little
black beard like an imperial.  He came through the people from the
inner entrance, and cleared his way with a quiet, silent
unobtrusiveness, yet with the peculiar heavy Indian momentum.  Even
touching the crowd delicately with his gloved hand, and murmuring
almost inaudibly the Con permiso! formula, he seemed to be keeping
himself miles away from contact.  He was brave too: because there
was just the chance some lout might shoot him because of his
uniform.  The people knew him too.  Kate could tell that by the
flicker of a jeering, self-conscious smile that passed across many
faces, and the exclamation:  'General Viedma!  Don Cipriano!'

He came towards Kate, saluting and bowing with a brittle shyness.

'I am General Viedma.  Did you wish to leave?  Let me get you an
automobile,' he said, in very English English, that sounded strange
from his dark face, and a little stiff on his soft tongue.

His eyes were dark, quick, with the glassy darkness that she found
so wearying.  But they were tilted up with a curious slant, under
arched black brows.  It gave him an odd look of detachment, as if
he looked at life with raised brows.  His manner was superficially
assured, underneath perhaps half-savage, shy and farouche, and
deprecating.

'Thank you so much,' she said.

He called to a soldier in the gateway.

'I will send you in the automobile of my friend,' he said.  'It
will be better than a taxi.  You don't like the bull-fight?'

'No!  Horrible!' said Kate.  'But do get me a yellow taxi.  That is
quite safe.'

'Well, the man has gone for the automobile.  You are English, yes?'

'Irish,' said Kate.

'Ah Irish!' he replied, with the flicker of a smile.

'You speak English awfully well,' she said.

'Yes!  I was educated there.  I was in England seven years.'

'Were you!  My name is Mrs Leslie.'

'Ah Leslie!  I knew James Leslie in Oxford.  He was killed in the
war.'

'Yes.  That was my husband's brother.'

'Oh really!'

'How small the world is!' said Kate.

'Yes indeed!' said the General.

There was a pause.

'And the gentlemen who are with you, they are--?'

'American,' said Kate.

'Ah Americans!  Ah yes!'

'The older one is my cousin--Owen Rhys.'

'Owen Rhys!  Ah yes!  I think I saw in the newspaper you were here
in town--visiting Mexico.'

He spoke in a peculiar quiet voice, rather suppressed, and his
quick eyes glanced at her, and at his surroundings, like those of a
man perpetually suspecting an ambush.  But his face had a certain
silent hostility, under his kindness.  He was saving his nation's
reputation.

'They did put in a not very complimentary note,' said Kate.  'I
think they don't like it that we stay in the Hotel San Remo.  It is
too poor and foreign.  But we are none of us rich, and we like it
better than those other places.'

'The Hotel San Remo?  Where is that?'

'In the Avenida del Peru.  Won't you come and see us there, and
meet my cousin and Mr Thompson?'

'Thank you!  Thank you!  I hardly ever go out.  But I will call if
I may, and then perhaps you will all come to see me at the house of
my friend, Señor Ramón Carrasco.'

'We should like to,' said Kate.

'Very well.  And shall I call, then?'

She told him a time, and added:

'You mustn't be surprised at the hotel.  It IS small, and nearly
all Italians.  But we tried some of the big ones, and there is such
a feeling of lowness about them, awful!  I can't stand the feeling
of prostitution.  And then the cheap insolence of the servants.
No, my little San Remo may be rough, but it's kindly and human, and
it's not rotten.  It is like Italy as I always knew it, decent, and
with a bit of human generosity.  I do think Mexico City is evil,
underneath.'

'Well,' he said, 'the hotels are bad.  It is unfortunate, but the
foreigners seem to make the Mexicans worse than they are naturally.
And Mexico, or something in it, certainly makes the foreigners
worse than they are at home.'

He spoke with a certain bitterness.

'Perhaps we should all stay away,' she said.

'Perhaps!' he said, lifting his shoulders a little.  'But I don't
think so.'

He relapsed into a slightly blank silence.  Peculiar how his
feelings flushed over him, anger, diffidence, wistfulness,
assurance, and an anger again, all in little flushes, and somewhat
naïve.

'It doesn't rain so much,' said Kate.  'When will the car come?'

'It is here now.  It has been waiting some time,' he replied.

'Then I'll go,' she said.

'Well,' he replied, looking at the sky.  'It is still raining, and
your dress is very thin.  You must take my cloak.'

'Oh!' she said, shrinking, 'it is only two yards.'

'It is still raining fairly fast.  Better either wait, or let me
lend you my cloak.'

He swung out of his cloak with a quick little movement, and held it
up to her.  Almost without realizing, she turned her shoulders to
him and he put the cape on her.  She caught it round her, and ran
out to the gate, as if escaping.  He followed, with a light yet
military stride.  The soldiers saluted rather slovenly, and he
responded briefly.

A not very new Fiat stood at the gate, with a chauffeur in a short
red-and-black check coat.  The chauffeur opened the door.  Kate
slipped off the cloak as she got in, and handed it back.  He stood
with it over his arm.

'Good-bye!' she said.  'Thank you ever so much.  And we shall see
you on Tuesday.  Do put your cape on.'

'On Tuesday, yes.  Hotel San Remo.  Calle de Peru,' he added to the
chauffeur.  Then turning again to Kate:  'The hotel, no?'

'Yes,' she said, and instantly changed.  'No, take me to Sanborn's,
where I can sit in a corner and drink tea to comfort me.'

'To comfort you after the bull-fight?' he said, with another quick
smile.  'To Sanborn's, Gonzalez.'

He saluted and bowed and closed the door.  The car started.

Kate sat back, breathing relief.  Relief to get away from that
beastly place.  Relief even to get away from that nice man.  He was
awfully nice.  But he made her feel she wanted to get away from him
too.  There was that heavy, black Mexican fatality about him, that
put a burden on her.  His quietness, and his peculiar assurance,
almost aggressive; and at the same time, a nervousness, an
uncertainty.  His heavy sort of gloom, and yet his quick, naïve,
childish smile.  Those black eyes, like black jewels, that you
couldn't look into, and which were so watchful; yet which, perhaps,
were waiting for some sign of recognition and of warmth!  Perhaps!

She felt again, as she felt before, that Mexico lay in her destiny
almost as a doom.  Something so heavy, so oppressive, like the
folds of some huge serpent that seemed as if it could hardly raise
itself.

She was glad to get to her corner in the tea-house, to feel herself
in the cosmopolitan world once more, to drink her tea and eat
strawberry shortcake and try to forget.



CHAPTER II

Tea-party in Tlacolula


Owen came back to the hotel at about half-past six, tired, excited,
a little guilty, and a good deal distressed at having let Kate go
alone.  And now the whole thing was over, rather dreary in spirit.

'Oh, how did you get on?' he cried, the moment he saw her, afraid
almost like a boy of his own sin of omission.

'I got on perfectly.  Went to Sanborn's for tea, and had strawberry
shortcake--so good!'

'Oh, good for you!' he laughed in relief.  'Then you weren't TOO
much overcome!  I'm so glad.  I had such awful qualms after I'd let
you go.  Imagined all the things that are supposed to happen in
Mexico--chauffeur driving away with you into some horrible remote
region, and robbing you and all that--but then I KNEW really you'd
be all right.  Oh, the time I had--the rain!--and the people
throwing things at my bald patch--and those horses--wasn't that
horrible?--I wonder I'm still alive.'  And he laughed with tired
excitement, putting his hand over his stomach and rolling his eyes.

'Aren't you drenched?' she said.

'Drenched!' he replied.  'Or at least I was.  I've dried off quite
a lot.  My rain-coat is no good--I don't know why I don't buy
another.  Oh, but what a time!  The rain STREAMING on my bald head,
and the crowd behind throwing oranges at it.  Then simply GORED in
my inside about letting you go alone.  Yet it was the only bull-
fight I shall EVER see.  I came then before it was over.  Bud
wouldn't come.  I suppose he's still there.'

'Was it as awful as the beginning?' she asked.

'No!  No!  It wasn't.  The first was worst--that horse-shambles.
Oh, they killed two more horses.  And FIVE bulls!  Yes, a regular
butchery.  But some of it was very neat work; those toreadors did
some very pretty feats.  One stood on his cloak while a bull
charged him.'

'I think,' interrupted Kate, 'if I knew that some of those
toreadors were going to be tossed by the bull, I'd go to see
another bull-fight.  Ugh, how I detest them!  The longer I live the
more loathsome the human species becomes to me.  HOW much nicer the
bulls are!'

'Oh, quite!' said Owen vaguely.  'Exactly.  But still there was
some very skilful work, very pretty.  Really very plucky.'

'Yah!' snarled Kate.  'Plucky!  They with all their knives and
their spears and cloaks and darts--and they know just how a bull
will behave.  It's just a performance of human beings torturing
animals, with those common fellows showing off, how smart they are
at hurting a bull.  Dirty little boys maiming flies--that's what
they are.  Only grown-up, they are bastards, not boys.  Oh, _I_
wish I could be a bull, just for five minutes.  Bastard, that's
what I call it!'

'Well!' laughed Owen uneasily, 'it is rather.'

'Call that manliness!' cried Kate.  'Then thank God a million times
that I'm a woman, and know poltroonery and dirty-mindedness when I
see it.'

Again Owen laughed uncomfortably.

'Go upstairs and change,' she said.  'You'll die.'

'I think I'd better.  I feel I might die any minute, as a matter of
fact.  Well, till dinner then.  I'll tap at your door in half an
hour.'

Kate sat trying to sew, but her hand trembled.  She could not get
the bull-ring out of her mind, and something felt damaged in her
inside.

She straightened herself, and sighed.  She was really very angry,
too, with Owen.  He was naturally so sensitive, and so kind.  But
he had the insidious modern disease of tolerance.  He must tolerate
everything, even a thing that revolted him.  He would call it Life!
He would feel he had LIVED this afternoon.  Greedy even for the
most sordid sensations.

Whereas SHE felt as if she had eaten something which was giving her
ptomaine poisoning.  If THAT was life!

Ah men, men!  They all had this soft rottenness of the soul, a
strange perversity which made even the squalid, repulsive things
seem part of LIFE to them.  Life!  And what is life?  A louse lying
on its back and kicking?  Ugh!

At about seven o'clock Villiers came tapping.  He looked wan,
peaked, but like a bird that had successfully pecked a bellyful of
garbage.

'Oh it was GREAT!' he said, lounging on one hip.  'GREAT!  They
killed SEVEN BULLS.'

'No calves, unfortunately,' said Kate, suddenly furious again.

He paused to consider the point, then laughed.  Her anger was
another slight sensational amusement to him.

'No, no calves,' he said.  'The calves have come home to be
fattened.  But several more horses after you'd gone.'

'I don't want to hear,' she said coldly.

He laughed, feeling rather heroic.  After all, one must be able to
look on blood and bursten bowels calmly: even with a certain
thrill.  The young hero!  But there were dark rings round his eyes,
like a debauch.

'Oh but!' he began, making a rather coy face.  'Don't you want to
hear what I did after!  I went to the hotel of the chief toreador,
and saw him lying on his bed all dressed up, smoking a fat cigar.
Rather like a male Venus who is never undressed.  So funny!'

'Who took you there?' she said.

'That Pole, you remember?--and a Spaniard who talked English.  The
toreador was great, lying on his bed in all his get-up, except his
shoes, and quite a crowd of men going over it all again--
wawawawawa!--you never heard such a row!'

'Aren't you wet?' said Kate.

'No, not at all.  I'm perfectly dry.  You see I had my coat.  Only
my head, of course.  My poor hair was all streaked down my face
like streaks of dye.'  He wiped his thin hair across his head with
rather self-conscious humour.  'Hasn't Owen come in?' he asked.

'Yes, he's changing.'

'Well I'll go up.  I suppose it's nearly supper time.  Oh yes, it's
AFTER!'  At which discovery he brightened as if he'd received a
gift.

'Oh by the way, how did you get on?  Rather mean of us to let you
go all alone like that,' he said, as he hung poised in the open
doorway.

'Not at all,' she said.  'You wanted to stay.  And I can look after
myself, at my time of life.'

'We-ell!' he said, with an American drawl.  'Maybe you can!'  Then
he gave a little laugh.  'But you SHOULD have seen all those men
rehearsing in that bedroom, throwing their arms about, and the
toreador lying on the bed like Venus with a fat cigar, listening to
her lovers.'

'I'm glad I didn't,' said Kate.

Villiers disappeared with a wicked little laugh.  And as she sat
her hands trembled with outrage and passion.  A-moral!  How could
one be a-moral, or non-moral, when one's soul was revolted!  How
could one be like these Americans, picking over the garbage of
sensations, and gobbling it up like carrion birds!  At the moment,
both Owen and Villiers seemed to her like carrion birds, repulsive.

She felt, moreover, that they both hated her first because she was
a woman.  It was all right so long as she fell in with them in
every way.  But the moment she stood out against them in the least,
they hated her mechanically for the very fact that she was a woman.
They hated her womanness.

And in this Mexico, with its great under-drift of squalor and heavy
reptile-like evil, it was hard for her to bear up.

She was really fond of Owen.  But how could she respect him?  So
empty, and waiting for circumstance to fill him up.  Swept with an
American despair of having lived in vain, or of not having REALLY
lived.  Having missed something.  Which fearful misgiving would
make him rush like mechanical steel filings to a magnet, towards
any crowd in the street.  And then all his poetry and philosophy
gone with the cigarette-end he threw away, he would stand craning
his neck in one more frantic effort to SEE--just to SEE.  Whatever
it was, he must see it.  Or he might miss something.  And then,
after he'd seen an old ragged woman run over by a motor-car and
bleeding on the floor, he'd come back to Kate pale at the gills,
sick, bewildered, daunted, and yet, yes, glad he'd seen it.  It was
Life!

'Well,' said Kate, 'I always thank God I'm not Argus.  Two eyes are
often two too many for me, in all the horrors.  I don't feed myself
on street-accidents.'

At dinner they tried to talk of pleasanter things than bullfights.
Villiers was neat and tidy and very nicely mannered, but she knew
he was keeping a little mocking laugh up his sleeve, because she
could not stomach the afternoon's garbage.  He himself had black
rings under his eyes, but that was because he had 'lived.'

The climax came with the dessert.  In walked the Pole and that
Spaniard who spoke American.  The Pole was unhealthy and unclean-
looking.  She heard him saying to Owen, who of course had risen
with automatic cordiality:

'We thought we'd come here to dinner.  Well, how are you?'

Kate's skin was already goose-flesh.  But the next instant she
heard that dingy voice, that spoke so many languages dingily,
assailing her with familiarity:

'Ah, Miss Leslie, you missed the best part of it.  You missed all
the fun!  Oh, I say--'

Rage flew into her heart and fire into her eyes.  She got up
suddenly from her chair, and faced the fellow behind her.

'Thank you!' she said.  'I don't want to hear.  I don't want you to
speak to me.  I don't want to know you.'

She looked at him once, then turned her back, sat down again, and
took a pitahaya from the fruit plate.

The fellow went green, and stood a moment speechless.

'Oh, all right!' he said mechanically, turning away to the Spaniard
who spoke American.

'Well--see you later!' said Owen rather hurriedly, and he went back
to his seat at Kate's table.

The two strange fellows sat at another table.  Kate ate her cactus
fruit in silence, and waited for her coffee.  By this time she was
not so angry, she was quite calm.  And even Villiers hid his joy in
a new sensation under a manner of complete quiet composure.

When coffee came she looked at the two men at the other table, and
at the two men at her own table.

'I've had enough of canaille, of any sort,' she said.

'Oh, I understand, perfectly,' said Owen.

After dinner, she went to her room, and through the night she could
not sleep, but lay listening to the noises of Mexico City, then to
the silence and the strange, grisly fear that so often creeps out
on to the darkness of a Mexican night.  Away inside her, she
loathed Mexico City.  She even feared it.  In the daytime it had a
certain spell--but at night, the underneath grisliness and evil
came forth.

In the morning Owen also announced that he had not slept at all.

'Oh, I never slept so well since I was in Mexico,' said Villiers,
with a triumphant look of a bird that has just pecked a good morsel
from the garbage-heap.

'Look at the frail aesthetic youth!' said Owen, in a hollow voice.

'His frailty and his aestheticism are both bad signs, to me,' said
Kate ominously.

'And the youth.  Surely that's another!' said Owen, with a dead
laugh.

But Villiers only gave a little snort of cold, pleased amusement.

Someone was calling Miss Leslie on the telephone, said the Mexican
chambermaid.  It was the only person Kate knew in the capital--or
in the Distrito Federal--a Mrs Norris, widow of an English
ambassador of thirty years ago.  She had a big, ponderous old house
out in the village of Tlacolula.

'Yes!  Yes!  This is Mrs Norris.  How are you?  That's right,
that's right.  Now, Mrs Leslie, won't you come out to tea this
afternoon and see the garden?  I wish you would.  Two friends are
coming in to see me, two Mexicans: Don Ramón Carrasco and General
Viedma.  They are both CHARMING men, and Don Ramón is a great
scholar.  I assure you, they are both entirely the exception among
Mexicans.  Oh, but ENTIRELY the exception!  So now, my DEAR Mrs
Leslie, won't you come with your cousin?  I wish you would.'

Kate remembered the little General; he was a good deal smaller than
herself.  She remembered his erect, alert little figure, something
birdlike, and the face with eyes slanting under arched eyebrows,
and the little black tuft of an imperial on the chin: a face with a
peculiar Chinese suggestion, without being Chinese in the least,
really.  An odd, detached, yet cocky little man, a true little
Indian, speaking Oxford English in a rapid, low, musical voice,
with extraordinarily gentle intonation.  Yet those black, inhuman
eyes!

Till this minute she had not really been able to recall him to
herself, to get any sharp impression.  Now she had it.  He was an
Indian pure and simple.  And in Mexico, she knew, there were more
generals than soldiers.  There had been three generals in the
Pullman coming down from El Paso, two, more or less educated, in
the 'drawing-room', and the third, a real peasant Indian,
travelling with a frizzy half-white woman who looked as if she had
fallen into a flour-sack, her face was so deep in powder, and her
frizzy hair and her brown silk dress so douched with the white dust
of it.  Neither this 'General' nor this woman had ever been in a
Pullman before.  But the General was sharper than the woman.  He
was a tall wiry fellow with a reddened pock-marked face and sharp
little black eyes.  He followed Owen to the smoking-room, and
watched with sharp eyes, to see how everything was done.  And soon
he knew.  And he would wipe his wash-bowl dry as neatly as anybody.
There was something of a real man about him.  But the poor, half-
white woman, when she wanted the ladies' toilet, got lost in the
passage and wailed aloud:  I don't know where to go!  No sé adonde!
No sé adonde!--until the General sent the Pullman boy to direct
her.

But it had annoyed Kate to see this General and this woman eating
chicken and asparagus and jelly in the Pullman, paying fifteen
pesos for a rather poor dinner, when for a peso-and-a-half apiece
they could have eaten a better meal, and real Mexican, at the meal-
stop station.  And all the poor, barefoot people clamouring on the
platform, while the 'General', who was a man of their own sort,
nobly swallowed his asparagus on the other side of the window-pane.

But this is how they save the people, in Mexico and elsewhere.
Some tough individual scrambles up out of the squalor and proceeds
to save himself.  Who pays for the asparagus and jelly and face-
powder, nobody asks, because everybody knows.

And so much for Mexican generals: as a rule, a class to be strictly
avoided.

Kate was aware of all this.  She wasn't much interested in any sort
of Mexican in office.  There is so much in the world that one wants
to avoid, as one wants to avoid the lice that creep on the unwashed
crowd.

Being rather late, Owen and Kate bumped out to Tlacolula in a Ford
taxi.  It was a long way, a long way through the peculiar squalid
endings of the town, then along the straight road between trees,
into the valley.  The sun of April was brilliant, there were piles
of cloud about the sky, where the volcanoes would be.  The valley
stretched away to its sombre, atmospheric hills, in a flat dry bed,
parched except where there was some crop being irrigated.  The soil
seemed strange, dry, blackish, artificially wetted, and old.  The
trees rose high, and hung bare boughs, or withered shade.  The
buildings were either new and alien, like the Country Club, or
cracked and dilapidated, with all the plaster falling off.  The
falling of thick plaster from cracked buildings--one could almost
hear it!

Yellow tram-cars rushed at express speed away down the fenced-in
car-lines, rushing round towards Xochimilco or Tlalpam.  The
asphalt road ran outside these lines, and on the asphalt rushed
incredibly dilapidated Ford omnibuses, crowded with blank dark
natives in dirty cotton clothes and big straw hats.  At the far
edge of the road, on the dust-tracks under the trees, little
donkeys under huge loads loitered towards the city, driven by men
with blackened faces and bare, blackened legs.  Three-fold went
the traffic; the roar of the tram-trains, the clatter of the 
automobiles, the straggle of asses and of outside-seeming
individuals.

Occasional flowers would splash out in colour from a ruin of
falling plaster.  Occasional women with strong, dark-brown arms
would be washing rags in a drain.  An occasional horseman would
ride across to the herd of motionless black-and-white cattle on the
field.  Occasional maize-fields were already coming green.  And the
pillars that mark the water conduits passed one by one.

They went through the tree-filled plaza of Tlacolula, where natives
were squatting on the ground, selling fruits or sweets, then down a
road between high walls.  They pulled up at last at big gate-doors,
beyond which was a heavy pink-and-yellow house, and beyond the
house, high, dark cypress trees.

In the road two motor-cars were already standing.  That meant other
visitors.  Owen knocked on the studded fortress doors: there was an
imbecile barking of dogs.  At last a little footman with a little
black moustache opened silently.

The square, inner patio, dark, with sun lying on the heavy arches
of one side, had pots of red and white flowers, but was ponderous,
as if dead for centuries.  A certain dead, heavy strength and
beauty seemed there, unable to pass away, unable to liberate itself
and decompose.  There was a stone basin of clear but motionless
water, and the heavy reddish-and-yellow arches went round the
courtyard with warrior-like fatality, their bases in dark shadow.
Dead, massive house of the Conquistadores, with a glimpse of tall-
grown garden beyond, and further Aztec cypresses rising to strange
dark heights.  And dead silence, like the black, porous, absorptive
lava rock.  Save when the tram-cars battered past outside the solid
wall.

Kate went up the jet-like stone staircase, through the leather
doors.  Mrs Norris came forward on the terrace of the upper patio
to receive her guests.

'I'm so glad, my dear, that you came.  I should have rung you up
before, but I've had such trouble with my heart.  And the doctor
wanting to send me down to a lower altitude!  I said to him, I've
no patience!  If you're going to cure me, cure me at an altitude of
seven thousand feet or else admit your incompetence at once.
Ridiculous, this rushing up and down from one altitude to another.
I've lived at this height all these years.  I simply refuse to be
bundled down to Cuernavaca or some other place where I don't want
to go.  Well, my dear, and how are you?'

Mrs Norris was an elderly woman, rather like a conquistador herself
in her black silk dress and her little black shoulder-shawl of fine
cashmere, with a short silk fringe, and her ornaments of black
enamel.  Her face had gone slightly grey, her nose was sharp and
dusky, and her voice hammered almost like metal, a slow, distinct,
peculiar hard music of its own.  She was an archaeologist, and she
had studied the Aztec remains so long, that now some of the black-
grey look of the lava rock, and some of the experience of the Aztec
idols, with sharp nose and slightly prominent eyes and an
expression of tomb-like mockery, had passed into her face.  A
lonely daughter of culture, with a strong mind and a dense will,
she had browsed all her life on the hard stones of archaeological
remains, and at the same time she had retained a strong sense of
humanity, and a slightly fantastic humorous vision of her fellow
men.

From the first instant, Kate respected her for her isolation and
her dauntlessness.  The world is made up of a mass of people and a
few individuals.  Mrs Norris was one of the few individuals.  True,
she played her social game all the time.  But she was an odd
number; and all alone, she could give the even numbers a bad time.

'But come in.  Do come in!' she said, after keeping her two guests
out on the terrace that was lined with black idols and dusty native
baskets and shields and arrows and tapa, like a museum.

In the dark sitting-room that opened on to the terrace were
visitors: an old man in a black morning coat and white hair and
beard, and a woman in black crêpe-de-chine, with the inevitable hat
of her sort upon her grey hair: a stiff satin turned up on three
sides and with black ospreys underneath.  She had the baby face and
the faded blue eyes and the middle-west accent inevitable.

'Judge and Mrs Burlap.'

The third visitor was a youngish man, very correct and not quite
sure.  He was Major Law, American military attaché at the moment.

The three people eyed the newcomers with cautious suspicion.  They
might be shady.  There are indeed so many shady people in Mexico
that it is taken for granted, if you arrive unannounced and
unexpected in the capital, that you are probably under an assumed
name, and have some dirty game up your sleeve.

'Been long in Mexico?' snapped the Judge; the police enquiry had
begun.

'No!' said Owen, resonantly, his gorge rising.  'About two weeks.'

'You are an American?'

'I,' said Owen, 'am American.  Mrs Leslie is English--or rather
Irish.'

'Been in the club yet?'

'No,' said Owen, 'I haven't.  American clubs aren't much in my
line.  Though Garfield Spence gave me a letter of introduction.'

'Who?  Garfield Spence?'  The judge started as if he had been
stung.  'Why the fellow's nothing better than a bolshevist.  Why he
went to Russia!'

'I should rather like to go to Russia myself,' said Owen.  'It is
probably the most interesting country in the world to-day.'

'But weren't you telling me,' put in Mrs Norris, in her clear,
metal-musical voice, 'that you loved China so much, Mr Rhys?'

'I DID like China VERY much,' said Owen.

'And I'm sure you made some wonderful collections.  Tell me now,
what was your particular fancy?'

'Perhaps, after all,' said Owen, 'it was jade.'

'Ah jade!  Yes!  Jade!  Jade is beautiful!  Those wonderful little
fairy-lands they carve in jade!'

'And the stone itself!  It was the delicate stone that fascinated
me,' said Owen.  'The wonderful quality of it!'

'Ah wonderful, wonderful!  Tell me now, dear Mrs Leslie, what you
have been doing since I saw you?'

'We went to a bull-fight, and hated it,' said Kate.  'At least I
did.  We sat in the Sun, near the ring, and it was all horrible.'

'Horrible, I am sure.  I never went to a bull-fight in Mexico.
Only in Spain, where there is wonderful colour.  Did you ever try a
bull-fight, Major?'

'Yes, I have been several times.'

'You have!  Then you know all about it.  And how are you liking
Mexico, Mrs Leslie?'

'Not much,' said Kate.  'It strikes me as evil.'

'It does!  It does!' said Mrs Norris.  'Ah, if you had known it
before!  Mexico before the revolution!  It was different then.
What is the latest news, Major?'

'About the same,' said the Major.  'There is a rumour that the new
President will be turned down by the army, a few days before he
comes into office.  But you never know.'

'I think it would be a great shame not to let him have a try,' put
in Owen hotly.  'He seems a sincere man, and just because he is
honestly a Labour man, they want to shut him out.'

'Ah, my dear Mr Rhys, they ALL talk so nobly beforehand.  If only
their deeds followed their words, Mexico would be heaven on earth.'

'Instead of hell on earth,' snapped the Judge.

A young man and his wife, also Americans, were introduced as Mr and
Mrs Henry.  The young man was fresh and lively.

'We were talking about the new President,' said Mrs. Norris.

'Well, why not!' said Mr Henry breezily.  'I'm just back from
Orizaba.  And do you know what they've got pasted up on the walls?--
Hosanna!  Hosanna!  Hosanna!  Viva el Jesús Cristo de Mexico,
Socrates Tomás Montes!'

'Why, did you ever hear of such a thing!' said Mrs. Norris.

'Hosanna!  Hosanna!  Hosanna!  To the new Labour President.  I
think it's rich,' said Henry.

The Judge stamped his stick on the ground in a speechless access of
irritability.

'They pasted on my luggage,' said the Major, 'when I came through
Vera Cruz:  La degenerada media clasa, Será regenerada, por mi,
Montes.  The degenerate middle class shall be regenerated by me,
Montes.'

'Poor Montes!' said Kate.  'He seems to have got his work cut out.'

'He has indeed!' said Mrs Norris.  'Poor man, I wish he might come
in peacefully and put a strong hand on the country.  But there's
not much hope, I'm afraid.'

There was a silence, during which Kate felt that bitter hopelessness
that comes over people who know Mexico well.  A bitter barren
hopelessness.

'How can a man who comes in on a Labour vote, even a doctored one,
put a strong hand on a country!' snapped the Judge.  'Why he came
in on the very cry of Down with the strong hand!'  And again the
old man stamped his stick in an access of extreme irritability.

This was another characteristic of the old residents of the city:
A state of intense, though often suppressed irritation, an
irritation amounting almost to rabies.

'Oh, but mayn't it be possible that he will change his views a
little on coming into power?' said Mrs Norris.  'So many Presidents
have done so.'

'I should say very probable, if ever he gets into power,' said
young Henry.  'He'll have all his work cut out saving Socrates
Tomás, he won't have much time left for saving Mexico.'

'He's a dangerous fellow, and will turn out a scoundrel,' said the
Judge.

'Myself,' said Owen, 'as far as I have followed him, I believe he
is sincere, and I admire him.'

'I thought it was so nice,' said Kate, 'that they received him in
New York with loud music by the Street Sweepers' Band.  The Street
Sweepers' Band they sent to receive him from the ship!'

'You see,' said the Major, 'no doubt the Labour people themselves
wished to send that particular band.'

'But to be President Elect, and to be received by the Street
Sweepers' Band!' said Kate.  'No, I can't believe it!'

'Oh, it actually was so,' said the Major.  'But that is Labour
hailing Labour, surely.'

'The latest rumour,' said Henry, 'is that the army will go over en
bloc to General Angulo about the twenty-third, a week before the
inauguration.'

'But how is it possible?' said Kate, 'when Montes is so popular?'

'Montes popular!' they all cried at once.  'Why!' snapped the
Judge, 'he's the most unpopular man in Mexico.'

'Not with the Labour Party!' said Owen, almost at bay.

'The Labour Party!' the Judge fairly spat like a cat.  'There is no
such thing.  What is the Labour Party in Mexico?  A bunch of
isolated factory hands here and there, mostly in the State of Vera
Cruz.  The Labour Party!  They've done what they could already.  We
know them.'

'That's true,' said Henry.  'The Labourites have tried every little
game possible.  When I was in Orizaba they marched to the Hotel
Francia to shoot all the gringoes and the Gachupines.  The hotel
manager had pluck enough to harangue them, and they went off to the
next hotel.  When the man came out there to talk to them, they shot
him before he got a word out.  It's funny, really!  If you have to
go to the Town Hall, and you're dressed in decent clothes, they let
you sit on a hard bench for hours.  But if a street-sweeper comes
in, or a fellow in dirty cotton drawers, it is Buenos dias! Señor!
Pase Usted!  Quiere Usted algo?--while you sit there waiting their
pleasure.  Oh, it's quite funny.'

The Judge trembled with irritation like an access of gout.  The
party sat in gloomy silence, that sense of doom and despair
overcoming them as it seems to overcome all people who talk
seriously about Mexico.  Even Owen was silent.  He too had come
through Vera Cruz, and had had his fright; the porters had charged
him twenty pesos to carry his trunk from the ship to the train.
Twenty pesos is ten dollars, for ten minutes' work.  And when Owen
had seen the man in front of him arrested and actually sent to
jail, a Mexican jail at that, for refusing to pay the charge, 'the
legal charge', he himself had stumped up without a word.

'I walked into the National Museum the other day,' said the Major
quietly.  'Just into that room on the patio where the stones are.
It was rather a cold morning, with a Norte blowing.  I'd been there
about ten minutes when somebody suddenly poked me on the shoulder.
I turned round, and it was a lout in tight boots.  You spik
English?  I said yes!  Then he motioned me to take my hat off: I'd
got to take my hat off.  What for? said I, and I turned away and
went on looking at their idols and things: ugliest set of stuff in
the world, I believe.  Then up came the fellow with the attendant--
the attendant of course wearing his cap.  They began gabbling that
this was the National Museum, and I must take off my hat to their
national monuments.  Imagine it: those dirty stones!  I laughed at
them and jammed my hat on tighter and walked out.  They are really
only monkeys when it comes to nationalism.'

'Exactly!' cried Henry.  'When they forget all about the Patria and
Mexico and all that stuff, they're as nice a people as you'd find.
But as soon as they get national, they're just monkeys.  A man up
from Mixcoatl told me a nice story.  Mixcoatl is a capital way in
the South, and they've got a sort of Labour bureau there.  Well,
the Indians come in from the hills, as wild as rabbits.  And they
get them into that bureau, and the Laboristas, the agitator
fellows, say to them:  Now, Señores, have you anything to report
from your native village?  Haven't you anything for which you would
like redress?  Then of course the Indians start complaining about
one another, and the Secretary says:  Wait a minute, gentlemen!
Let me ring up the Governor and report this.  So he goes to the
telephone and starts ringing: ringing:  Ah!  Is that the Palace?
Is the Governor in?  Tell him Señor Fulano wants to speak to him!
The Indians sit gaping with open mouths.  To them it's a miracle.
Ah!  Is that you, Governor!  Good morning!  How are you?  Can I
have your attention for a moment?  Many thanks!  Well I've got some
gentlemen here down from Apaxtle, in the hills: José Garcia, Jesús
Querido, etc.--and they wish to report so-and-so.  Yes!  Yes!
That's it!  Yes!  What?  You will see that justice is done and the
thing is made right?  Ah señor, many thanks!  In the name of these
gentlemen from the hills, from the village of Apaxtle, many thanks.

'There sit the Indians staring as if heaven had opened and the
Virgin of Guadalupe was standing tiptoe on their chins.  And what
do you expect?  The telephone is a dummy.  It isn't connected with
anywhere.  Isn't that rich?  But it's Mexico.'

The moment's fatal pause followed this funny story.

'Oh but!' said Kate, 'it's wicked!  It IS wicked.  I'm sure the
Indians would be all right, if they were left alone.'

'Well,' said Mrs Norris, 'Mexico isn't like any other place in the
world.'

But she spoke with fear and despair in her voice.

'They seem to WANT to betray everything,' said Kate.  'They seem to
LOVE criminals and ghastly things.  They seem to want the ugly
things.  They seem to WANT the ugly things to come up to the top.
All the foulness that lies at the bottom, they want to stir up to
the top.  They seem to enjoy it.  To enjoy making everything
fouler.  Isn't it curious!'

'It is curious,' said Mrs Norris.

'But that's what it is,' said the Judge.  'They want to turn the
country into one big crime.  They don't like anything else.  They
don't like honesty and decency and cleanliness.  They want to
foster lies and crime.  What they call liberty here is just freedom
to commit crime.  That's what Labour means, that's what they all
mean.  Free crime, nothing else.'

'I wonder all the foreigners don't go away,' said Kate.

'They have their occupations here,' snapped the Judge.

'And the good people ARE all going away.  They have nearly all
gone, those that have anything left to go to,' said Mrs Norris.
'Some of us, who have our property here, and who have made our
lives here, and who know the country, we stay out of a kind of
tenacity.  But we know it's hopeless.  The more it changes, the
worse it is.--Ah, here is Don Ramón and Don Cipriano.  So pleased
to see you.  Let me introduce you.'

Don Ramón Carrasco was a tall, big, handsome man who gave the
effect of bigness.  He was middle aged, with a large black
moustache and large, rather haughty eyes under straight brows.  The
General was in civilian clothes, looking very small beside the
other man, and very smartly built, almost cocky.

'Come,' said Mrs Norris.  'Let us go across and have tea.'

The Major excused himself, and took his departure.

Mrs Norris gathered her little shawl round her shoulders and led
through a sombre antechamber to a little terrace, where creepers
and flowers bloomed thick on the low walls.  There was a bell-
flower, red and velvety, like blood that is drying: and clusters of
white roses: and tufts of bougainvillea, papery magenta colour.

'How lovely it is here!' said Kate.  'Having the great dark trees
beyond.'

But she stood in a kind of dread.

'Yes it IS beautiful,' said Mrs Norris, with the gratification of a
possessor.  'I have such a time trying to keep these apart.'  And
going across in her little black shawl, she pushed the bougainvillea
away from the rust-scarlet bell-flowers, stroking the little white
roses to make them intervene.

'I think the two reds together interesting,' said Owen.

'Do you really!' said Mrs Norris, automatically, paying no heed to
such a remark.

The sky was blue overhead, but on the lower horizon was a thick,
pearl haze.  The clouds had gone.

'One never sees Popocatepetl nor Ixtaccihuatl,' said Kate,
disappointed.

'No, not at this season.  But look, through the trees there, you
see Ajusco!'

Kate looked at the sombre-seeming mountain, between the huge dark
trees.

On the low stone parapet were Aztec things, obsidian knives,
grimacing squatting idols in black lava, and a queer thickish stone
stick, or bâton.  Owen was balancing the latter: it felt murderous
even to touch.

Kate turned to the General, who was near her, his face expressionless,
yet alert.

'Aztec things oppress me,' she said.

'They ARE oppressive,' he answered, in his beautiful cultured
English, that was nevertheless a tiny bit like a parrot talking.

'There is no hope in them,' she said.

'Perhaps the Aztecs never asked for hope,' he said, somewhat
automatically.

'Surely it is hope that keeps one going?' she said.

'You, maybe.  But not the Aztec, nor the Indian to-day.'

He spoke like a man who has something in reserve, who is only half
attending to what he hears, and even to his own answer.

'What do they have, if they don't have hope?' she said.

'They have some other strength, perhaps,' he said evasively.

'I would like to give them hope,' she said.  'If they had hope,
they wouldn't be so sad, and they would be cleaner, and not have
vermin.'

'That of course would be good,' he said, with a little smile.  'But
I think they are not so very sad.  They laugh a good deal and are
gay.'

'No,' she said.  'They oppress me, like a weight on my heart.  They
make me irritable, and I want to go away.'

'From Mexico?'

'Yes.  I feel I want to go away from it and never, never see it
again.  It is so oppressive and gruesome.'

'Try it a little longer,' he said.  'Perhaps you will feel
differently.  But perhaps not,' he ended vaguely, driftingly.

She could feel in him a sort of yearning towards her.  As if a sort
of appeal came to her from him, from his physical heart in his
breast.  As if the very heart gave out dark rays of seeking and
yearning.  She glimpsed this now for the first time, quite apart
from the talking, and it made her shy.

'And does everything in Mexico oppress you?' he added, almost
shyly, but with a touch of mockery, looking at her with a troubled
naïve face that had its age heavy and resistant beneath the
surface.

'Almost everything!' she said.  'It ALWAYS makes my heart sink.
Like the eyes of the men in the big hats--I call them the peons.
Their eyes have no middle to them.  Those big handsome men, under
their big hats, they aren't really there.  They have no centre, no
real _I_.  Their middle is a raging black hole, like the middle of
a maelstrom.'

She looked with her troubled grey eyes into the black, slanting,
watchful, calculating eyes of the small man opposite her.  He had a
pained expression, puzzled, like a child.  And at the same time
something obstinate and mature, a demonish maturity, opposing her
in an animal way.

'You mean we aren't real people, we have nothing of our own, except
killing and death,' he said, quite matter of fact.

'I don't know,' she said, startled by his interpretation.  'I only
say how it makes me feel.'

'You are very clever, Mrs Leslie,' came Don Ramón's quiet, but
heavy teasing voice behind her.  'It is quite true.  Whenever a
Mexican cries Viva! he ends up with Muera!  When he says Viva! he
really means Death for Somebody or Other!  I think of all the
Mexican revolutions, and I see a skeleton walking ahead of a great
number of people, waving a black banner with Viva la Muerte!
written in large white letters.  Long live Death!  Not Viva Cristo
Rey! but Viva Muerte Rey!  Vamos!  Viva!'

Kate looked round.  Don Ramón was flashing his knowing brown
Spanish eyes, and a little sardonic smile lurked under his
moustache.  Instantly Kate and he, Europeans in essence, understood
one another.  He was waving his arm to the last Viva!

'But,' said Kate, 'I don't want to say Viva la Muerte!'

'But when you are real Mexican--' he said, teasing.

'I NEVER could be,' she said hotly, and he laughed.

'I'm afraid Viva la Muerte! hits the nail on the head,' said Mrs
Norris, rather stonily.  'But won't you come to tea!  Do!'

She led the way in her black little shawl and neat grey hair, going
ahead like a Conquistador herself, and turning to look with her
Aztec eyes through her pince-nez, to see if the others were coming.

'We are following,' said Don Ramón in Spanish, teasing her.
Stately in his black suit, he walked behind her on the narrow
terrace, and Kate followed, with the small, strutting Don Cipriano,
also in a black suit, lingering oddly near her.

'Do I call you General or Don Cipriano?' she asked, turning to him.

An amused little smile quickly lit his face, though his eyes did
not smile.  They looked at her with a black, sharp look.

'As you wish,' he said.  'You know General is a term of disgrace in
Mexico.  Shall we say Don Cipriano?'

'Yes, I like that much the best,' she said.

And he seemed pleased.

It was a round tea-table, with shiny silver tea-service, and silver
kettle with a little flame, and pink and white oleanders.  The
little neat young footman carried the tea-cups, in white cotton
gloves.  Mrs Norris poured tea and cut cakes with a heavy hand.

Don Ramón sat on her right hand, the Judge on her left.  Kate was
between the Judge and Mr Henry.  Everybody except Don Ramón and the
Judge was a little nervous.  Mrs Norris always put her visitors
uncomfortably at their ease, as if they were captives and she the
chieftainess who had captured them.  She rather enjoyed it,
heavily, archaeologically queening at the head of the table.  But
it was evident that Don Ramón, by far the most impressive person
present, liked her.  Cipriano, on the other hand, remained mute and
disciplined, perfectly familiar with the tea-table routine,
superficially quite at ease, but underneath remote and unconnected.
He glanced from time to time at Kate.

She was a beautiful woman, in her own unconventional way, and with
a certain richness.  She was going to be forty next week.  Used to
all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of
a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.  She was never IN
any society: too Irish, too wise.

'But of course nobody lives without hope,' Mrs Norris was saying
banteringly to Don Ramón.  'If it's only the hope of a real, to buy
a litre of pulque.'

'Ah, Mrs Norris!' he replied in his quiet, yet curiously deep
voice, like a violoncello:  'If pulque is the highest happiness!'

'Then we are fortunate, because a tostón will buy paradise,' she
said.

'It is a bon mot, Señora mía,' said Don Ramón, laughing and
drinking his tea.

'Now won't you try these little native cakes with sesame seeds on
them!' said Mrs Norris to the table at large.'  My cook makes them,
and her national feeling is flattered when anybody likes them.  Mrs
Leslie, do take one.'

'I will,' said Kate.  'Does one say Open Sesame!'

'If one wishes,' said Mrs Norris.

'Won't you have one?' said Kate, handing the plate to Judge Burlap.

'Don't want any,' he snapped, turning his face away as if he had
been offered a plate of Mexicans, and leaving Kate with the dish
suspended.

Mrs Norris quickly but definitely took the plate, saying:

'Judge Burlap is afraid of Sesame Seed, he prefers the cave shut.'
And she handed the dish quietly to Cipriano, who was watching the
old man's bad manners with black, snake-like eyes.

'Did you see that article by Willis Rice Hope, in the Excelsior?'
suddenly snarled the Judge, to his hostess.

'I did.  I thought it very sensible.'

'The only sensible thing that's been said about these Agrarian
Laws.  Sensible!  I should think so.  Why Rice Hope came to me, and
I put him up to a few things.  But his article says EVERYTHING,
doesn't miss an item of importance.'

'Quite!' said Mrs Norris, with rather stony attention.  'If only
SAYING would alter things, Judge Burlap.'

'Saying the wrong thing has done all the mischief!' snapped the
Judge.  'Fellows like Garfield Spence coming down here and talking
a lot of criminal talk.  Why the town's full of Socialists and
Sinvergüenzas from New York.'

Mrs Norris adjusted her pince-nez.

'Fortunately,' she said, 'they don't come out to Tlacolula, so we
needn't think about them.  Mrs Henry, let me give you some more
tea.'

'Do you read SPANISH?' the Judge spat out, at Owen.  Owen, in his
big shell spectacles, was evidently a red rag to his irritable
fellow-countryman.

'No!' said Owen, round as a cannon-shot.

Mrs Norris once more adjusted her eye-glasses.

'It's such a relief to hear someone who is altogether innocent of
Spanish, and altogether unashamed,' she said.  'My father had us
all speaking four languages by the time we were twelve, and we have
none of us ever quite recovered.  My stockings were all dyed blue
for me before I put my hair up.  By the way!  How have you been for
walking, Judge?  You heard of the time I had with my ankle?'

'Of course we heard!' cried Mrs Burlap, seeing dry land at last.
I've been trying SO hard to get out to see you, to ask about it.
We were so GRIEVED about it.'

'What happened?' said Kate.

'Why I foolishly slipped on a piece of orange peel in town--just at
the corner of San Juan de Latrán and Madero.  And I fell right
down.  And of course, the first thing I did when I got up was to
push the piece of orange peel into the gutter.  And would you
believe it, that lot of Mex--' she caught herself up--'that lot of
fellows standing there at the corner laughed heartily at me, when
they saw me doing it.  They thought it an excellent joke.'

'Of course they would,' said the Judge.  'They were waiting for the
next person to come along and fall.'

'Did nobody help you?' asked Kate.

'Oh no!  If anyone has an accident in this country, you must never,
NEVER help.  If you touch them even, you may be arrested for
causing the accident.'

'That's the law!' said the Judge.  'If you touch them before the
police arrive, you are arrested for complicity.  Let them lie and
bleed, is the motto.'

'Is that true?' said Kate to Don Ramón.

'Fairly true,' he replied.  'Yes, it is true you must not touch the
one who is hurt.'

'How disgusting!' said Kate.

'Disgusting!' cried the Judge.  'A great deal is disgusting in this
country, as you'll learn if you stay here long.  I nearly lost my
life on a banana skin; lay in a darkened room for days, between
life and death, and lame for life from it.'

'How awful!' said Kate.  'What did you do when you fell?'

'What did I do?  Just smashed my hip.'

It had truly been a terrible accident, and the man had suffered
bitterly.

'You can hardly blame Mexico for a banana skin,' said Owen, elated.
'I fell on one in Lexington Avenue; but fortunately I only bruised
myself on a soft spot.'

'That wasn't your head, was it?' said Mrs Henry.

'No,' laughed Owen.  'The other extreme.'

'We've got to add banana skins to the list of public menaces,' said
young Henry.  'I'm an American, and I may any day turn bolshevist,
to save my pesos, so I can repeat what I heard a man saying
yesterday.  He said there are only two great diseases in the world
to-day--Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of
the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your
business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.'

'Who was he?' snarled the Judge.

'I forget,' said Henry, wickedly.

'One wonders,' said Mrs Norris slowly, 'what he meant by
Americanism.'

'He didn't define it,' said Henry.  'Cult of the dollar, I
suppose.'

'Well,' said Mrs Norris.  'The cult of the dollar, in my
experience, is far more intense in the countries that haven't got
the dollar, than in the United States.'

Kate felt that the table was like a steel disc to which they were
all, as victims, magnetized and bound.

'Where IS your garden, Mrs Norris?' she asked.

They trooped out, gasping with relief, to the terrace.  The Judge
hobbled behind, and Kate had to linger sympathetically to keep him
company.

They were on the little terrace.

'Isn't this strange stuff!' said Kate, picking up one of the Aztec
stone knives on the parapet.  'Is it a sort of jade?'

'Jade!' snarled the Judge.  'Jade's GREEN, not black.  That's
obsidian.'

'Jade CAN be black,' said Kate.  'I've got a lovely little black
tortoise of jade from China.'

'You can't have.  Jade's bright green.'

'But there's white jade too.  I know there is.'

The Judge was silent from exasperation for a few moments, then he
snapped:

'Jade's bright green.'

Owen, who had the ears of a lynx, had heard.

'What's that?' he said.

'Surely there's more than green jade!' said Kate.

'What!' cried Owen.  'More!  Why there's every imaginable tint--
white, rose, lavender--'

'And black?' said Kate.

'Black?  Oh yes, quite common.  Why you should see my collection.
The most beautiful range of colour!  Only green jade!  Ha-ha-ha!'--
and he laughed a rather stage laugh.

They had come to the stairs, which were old stone, waxed and
polished in some way till they were a glittering black.

'I'll catch hold of your arm down here,' said the Judge to young
Henry.  'This staircase is a death-trap.'

Mrs Norris heard without comment.  She only tilted her pince-nez on
her sharp nose.

In the archway downstairs, Don Ramón and the General took their
leave.  The rest trailed on into the garden.

Evening was falling.  The garden was drawn up tall, under the huge
dark trees on the one side, and the tall, reddish-and-yellow house
on the other.  It was like being at the bottom of some dusky,
flowering garden down in Hades.  Hibiscus hung scarlet from the
bushes, putting out yellow bristling tongues.  Some roses were
scattering scentless petals on the twilight, and lonely-looking
carnations hung on weak stalks.  From a huge dense bush the
mysterious white bells of the datura were suspended, large and
silent, like the very ghosts of sound.  And the datura scent was
moving thick and noiseless from the tree, into the little alleys.

Mrs Burlap had hitched herself on to Kate, and from her silly,
social baby-face was emitting searching questions.

'What hotel are you staying at?'

Kate told her.

'I don't know it.  Where is it?'

'In the Avenida del Peru.  You wouldn't know it, it is a little
Italian hotel.'

'Are you staying long?'

'We aren't certain.'

'Is Mr Rhys on a newspaper?'

'No, he's a poet.'

'Does he make a living by poetry?'

'No, he doesn't try to.'

It was the sort of secret service investigation one is submitted
to, in the capital of shady people, particularly shady foreigners.

Mrs Norris was lingering by a flowering arch of little white
flowers.

Already a firefly was sparking.  It was already night.

'Well, good-bye, Mrs Norris!  WON'T you come and lunch with us?  I
don't mean come out to our house.  Only let me know, and lunch with
me ANYWHERE YOU LIKE, in town.'

'Thank you, my dear!  Thank you so much!  Well!  I'll see!

Mrs Norris was almost regal, stonily, Aztec-regal.

At last they had all made their adieus, and the great doors were
shut behind them.

'How did you come out?' Mrs Burlap asked, impertinent.

'In an old Ford taxi--but where is it?' said Kate, peering into the
dark.  It should have been under the fresno trees opposite, but it
wasn't.

'What a curious thing!' said Owen, and he disappeared into the
night.

'Which way do you go?' said Mrs Burlap.

'To the Zócalo,' said Kate.

'We have to take a tram, the opposite way,' said the baby-faced,
withered woman from the Middle-West.

The Judge was hobbling along the pavement like a cat on hot bricks,
to the corner.  Across the road stood a group of natives in big
hats and white calico clothes, all a little the worse for the
pulque they had drunk.  Nearer, on this side of the road, stood
another little gang, of workmen in town clothes.

'There you have them,' said the Judge, flourishing his stick with
utter vindictiveness.  'There's the two lots of 'em.'

'What two lots?' said Kate, surprised.

'Those peon fellows and those obreros, all drunk, the lot of them.
The lot of them!'  And in a spasm of pure, frustrated hate, he
turned his back on her.

At the same time they saw the lights of a tram-car rushing dragon-
like up the dark road, between the high wall and the huge trees.

'Here's our car!' said the Judge, beginning to scramble excitedly
with his stick.

'You go the other way,' flung the baby-faced, faded woman in the
three-cornered satin hat, also beginning to fluster as if she were
going to swim off the pavement.

The couple clambered avidly into the brightly-lighted car, first
class; hobbling up.  The natives crowded into the second class.

Away whizzed the tren.  The Burlap couple had not even said good
night.  They were terrified lest they might have to know somebody
whom they might not want to know; whom it might not PAY to know.

'You common-place little woman!' said Kate aloud, looking after the
retreating tram-car.  'You awful ill-bred little pair.'

She was a bit afraid of the natives, not quite sober, who were
waiting for the car in the opposite direction.  But stronger than
her fear was a certain sympathy with these dark-faced silent men in
their big straw hats and naïve little cotton blouses.  Anyhow they
had blood in their veins: they were columns of dark blood.

Whereas the other bloodless, acidulous couple from the Middle-West,
with their nasty whiteness . . . !

She thought of the little tale the natives tell.  When the Lord was
making the first men, He made them of clay and put them into the
oven to bake.  They came out black.  They're baked too much! said
the Lord.  So He made another batch, and put them in.  They came
out white.  They're baked too little!  He said.  So He had a third
try.  These came out a good warm brown.  They're just right! said
the Lord.

The couple from the Middle-West, that withered baby-face and that
limping Judge, they weren't baked.  They were hardly baked at all.

Kate looked at the dark faces under the arc-lamp.  They frightened
her.  They were a sort of menace to her.  But she felt they were at
least baked hot and to a certain satisfactory colour.

The taxi came lurching up, with Owen poking his head out and
opening the door.

'I found the man in a pulquería,' he said.  'But I don't think he's
QUITE drunk.  Will you risk driving back with him?'

'The pulquería was called La Flor de un Día--the Flower of a Day,'
said Owen, with an apprehensive laugh.

Kate hesitated, looking at her man.

'We may as well,' she said.

Away gallivanted the Ford, full speed to Hell.

'Do tell him not so fast,' said Kate.

'I don't know how,' said Owen.

He shouted in good English:

'Hey! chauffeur!  Not so fast!  Don't drive so fast.'

'No presto.  Troppo presto.  Va troppo presto!' said Kate.

The man looked at them with black, dilated eyes of fathomless
incomprehension.  Then he put his foot on the accelerator.

'He's only going faster!' laughed Owen nervously.

'Ah!  Let him alone!' said Kate, with utter weariness.

The fellow drove like a devil incarnate, as if he had the devil in
his body.  But also, he drove with the devil's own nonchalant
skill.  There was nothing to do but let him rip.

'Wasn't that a ghastly tea-party!' said Owen.

'Ghastly!' said Kate.



CHAPTER III

Fortieth Birthday


Kate woke up one morning, aged forty.  She did not hide the fact
from herself, but she kept it dark from the others.

It was a blow, really.  To be forty!  One had to cross a dividing
line.  On this side there was youth and spontaneity and 'happiness.'
On the other side something different: reserve, responsibility, a
certain standing back from 'fun.'

She was a widow, and a lonely woman now.  Having married young, her
two children were grown up.  The boy was twenty-one, and her
daughter nineteen.  They stayed chiefly with their father, from
whom she had been divorced ten years before, in order to marry
James Joachim Leslie.  Now Leslie was dead, and all that half of
life was over.

She climbed up to the flat roofs of the hotel.  It was a brilliant
morning, and for once, under the blue sky of the distance,
Popocatepetl stood aloof, a heavy giant presence under heaven, with
a cape of snow.  And rolling a long dark roll of smoke like a
serpent.

Ixtaccihuatl, the White Woman, glittered and seemed near, but the
other mountain, Popocatepetl, stood farther back, and in shadow, a
pure cone of atmospheric shadow, with glinting flashes of snow.
There they were, the two monsters, watching gigantically and
terribly over their lofty, bloody cradle of men, the Valley of
Mexico.  Alien, ponderous, the white-hung mountains seemed to emit
a deep purring sound, too deep for the ear to hear, and yet audible
on the blood, a sound of dread.  There was no soaring or uplift or
exaltation, as there is in the snowy mountains of Europe.  Rather a
ponderous, white-shouldered weight, pressing terribly on the earth,
and murmuring like two watchful lions.

Superficially, Mexico might be all right: with its suburbs of
villas, its central fine streets, its thousands of motor-cars, its
tennis, and its bridge-parties.  The sun shone brilliantly every
day, and big bright flowers stood out from the trees.  It was a
holiday.

Until you were alone with it.  And then the undertone was like the
low, angry, snarling purring of some jaguar spotted with night.
There was a ponderous, down-pressing weight upon the spirit: the
great folds of the dragon of the Aztecs, the dragon of the Toltecs
winding around one and weighing down the soul.  And on the bright
sunshine was a dark steam of an angry, impotent blood, and the
flowers seemed to have their roots in spilt blood.  The spirit of
place was cruel, down-dragging, destructive.

Kate could so well understand the Mexican who had said to her:  El
grito mexicano es siempre el grito del odio--The Mexican shout is
always a shout of hate.  The famous revolutions, as Don Ramón said,
began with Viva! but ended always with Muera!  Death to this, death
to the other; it was all death! death! death! as insistent as the
Aztec sacrifices.  Something for ever gruesome and macabre.

Why had she come to this high plateau of death?  As a woman, she
suffered even more than men suffer: and in the end, practically all
men go under.  Once, Mexico had had an elaborate ritual of death.
Now it has death, ragged, squalid, vulgar, without even the passion
of its own mystery.

She sat on a parapet of the old roof.  The street beyond was like a
black abyss, but around her was the rough glare of uneven flat
roofs, with loose telephone wires trailing across, and the sudden,
deep, dark wells of the patios, showing flowers blooming in shade.

Just behind was a huge old church, its barrel roof humping up like
some crouching animal, and its domes, like bubbles inflated,
glittering with yellow tiles, and blue and white tiles, against the
intense blue heaven.  Quiet native women in long skirts were moving
on the roofs, hanging out washing or spreading it on the stones.
Chickens perched here and there.  An occasional bird soared huge
overhead, trailing a shadow.  And not far away stood the brownish
tower-stumps of the Cathedral, the profound old bell trembling huge
and deep, so soft as to be almost inaudible, upon the air.

It ought to have been all gay, allegro, allegretto, in that sparkle
of bright air and old roof surfaces.  But no!  There was the dark
undertone, the black, serpent-like fatality all the time.

It was no good Kate's wondering why she had come.  Over in England,
in Ireland, in Europe, she had heard the consummatum est of her own
spirit.  It was finished, in a kind of death agony.  But still this
heavy continent of dark-souled death was more than she could bear.

She was forty: the first half of her life was over.  The bright
page with its flowers and its love and its stations of the Cross
ended with a grave.  Now she must turn over, and the page was
black, black and empty.

The first half of her life had been written on the bright, smooth
vellum of hope, with initial letters all gorgeous upon a field of
gold.  But the glamour had gone from station to station of the
Cross, and the last illumination was the tomb.

Now the bright page was turned, and the dark page lay before her.
How could one write on a page so profoundly black?

She went down, having promised to go and see the frescoes in the
university and schools.  Owen and Villiers and a young Mexican were
waiting for her.  They set off through the busy streets of the
town, where automobiles and the little omnibuses called camiones
run wild, and where the natives in white cotton clothes and sandals
and big hats linger like heavy ghosts in the street, among the
bourgeoisie, the young ladies in pale pink crêpe de chine and high
heels, the men in little shoes and American straw hats.  A
continual bustle in the glitter of sunshine.

Crossing the great shadeless plaza in front of the Cathedral, where
the tram-cars gather as in a corral, and slide away down their
various streets, Kate lingered again to look at the things spread
for sale on the pavement: the little toys, the painted gourd-
shells, brilliant in a kind of lacquer, the novedades from Germany,
the fruits, the flowers.  And the natives squatting with their
wares, large-limbed, silent, handsome men looking up with their
black, centreless eyes, speaking so softly, and lifting with small
sensitive brown hands the little toys they had so carefully made
and painted.  A strange gentle appeal and wistfulness, strange male
voices, so deep, yet so quiet and gentle.  Or the women, the small
quick women in their blue rebozos, looking up quickly with dark
eyes, and speaking in their quick, coaxing voices.  The man just
setting out his oranges, wiping them with a cloth so carefully,
almost tenderly, and piling them in bright tiny pyramids, all neat
and exquisite.  A certain sensitive tenderness of the heavy blood,
a certain chirping charm of the bird-like women, so still and
tender with a bud-like femininity.  And at the same time, the dirty
clothes, and the unwashed skin, the lice, and the peculiar hollow
glint of the black eyes, at once so fearsome and so appealing.

Kate knew the Italian fruit vendors, vigorously polishing their
oranges on their coat-sleeves.  Such a contrast, the big, handsome
Indian, sitting so soft and as it were lonely by the kerb, softly,
lingeringly polishing his yellow oranges to a clean gleam, and
lingeringly, delicately arranging the little piles, the pyramids
for two or three cents each.

Queer work, for a big, handsome, male-looking man.  But they seem
to prefer these childish jobs.

The University was a Spanish building that had been done up spick
and span, and given over to the young artists to decorate.  Since
the revolutions, nowhere had authority and tradition been so
finally overthrown as in the Mexican fields of science and art.
Science and art are the sport of the young.  Go ahead, my boys!

The boys had gone ahead.  But even then, the one artist of
distinction was no longer a boy, and he had served a long
apprenticeship in Europe.

Kate had seen the reproductions of some of Ribera's frescoes.  Now
she went round the patios of the University, looking at the
originals.  They were interesting: the man knew his craft.

But the impulse was the impulse of the artist's hate.  In the many
frescoes of the Indians there was sympathy with the Indian, but
always from the ideal, social point of view.  Never the spontaneous
answer of the blood.  These flat Indians were symbols in the great
script of modern socialism, they were figures of the pathos of the
victims of modern industry and capitalism.  That was all they were
used for: symbols in the weary script of socialism and anarchy.

Kate thought of the man polishing his oranges half-an-hour before:
his peculiar beauty, a certain richness of physical being, a
ponderous power of blood within him, and a helplessness, a profound
unbelief that was fatal and demonish.  And all the liberty, all the
progress, all the socialism in the world would not help him.  Nay,
it would only help further to destroy him.

On the corridors of the University, young misses in bobbed hair and
boys' jumpers were going around, their chins pushed forward with
the characteristic, deliberate youth-and-eagerness of our day.
Very much aware of their own youth and eagerness.  And very
American.  Young professors were passing in soft amiability, young
and apparently harmless.

The artists were at work on the frescoes, and Kate and Owen were
introduced to them.  But they were men--or boys--whose very
pigments seemed to exist only to épater le bourgeois.  And Kate was
weary of épatisme, just as much as of the bourgeoisie.  She wasn't
interested in épatant le bourgeois.  The épateurs were as boring as
the bourgeois, two halves of one dreariness.

The little party passed on to the old Jesuit convent, now used as a
secondary school.  Here were more frescoes.

But they were by another man.  And they were caricatures so crude
and so ugly that Kate was merely repelled.  They were meant to be
shocking, but perhaps the very deliberateness prevents them from
being so shocking as they might be.  But they were ugly and vulgar.
Strident caricatures of the Capitalist and the Church, and of the
Rich Woman, and of Mammon painted life-size and as violently as
possible, round the patios of the grey old building, where the
young people are educated.  To anyone with the spark of human
balance, the things are a misdemeanour.

'Oh, but how wonderful!' cried Owen.

His susceptibilities were shocked, therefore, as at the bull-fight,
he was rather pleased.  He thought it was novel and stimulating to
decorate your public buildings in this way.

The young Mexican who was accompanying the party was a professor in
the University too: a rather short, soft young fellow of twenty-
seven or eight, who wrote the inevitable poetry of sentiment, had
been in the Government, even as a member of the House of Deputies,
and was longing to go to New York.  There was something fresh and
soft, petulant about him.  Kate liked him.  He could laugh with
real hot young amusement, and he was no fool.

Until it came to these maniacal ideas of socialism, politics, and
La Patria.  Then he was as mechanical as a mousetrap.  Very
tedious.

'Oh no!' said Kate in front of the caricatures.  'They are too
ugly.  They defeat their own ends.'

'But they are meant to be ugly,' said young Garcia.  'They must be
ugly, no?  Because capitalism is ugly, and Mammon is ugly, and the
priest holding his hand to get the money from the poor Indians is
ugly.  No?'  He laughed rather unpleasantly.

'But,' said Kate, 'these caricatures are too intentional.  They are
like vulgar abuse, not art at all.'

'Isn't that true?' said Garcia, pointing to a hideous picture of a
fat female in a tight short dress, with hips and breasts as
protuberances, walking over the faces of the poor.

'That is how they are, no?'

'Who is like that?' said Kate.  'It bores me.  One must keep a
certain balance.'

'Not in Mexico!' said the young Mexican brightly, his plump cheeks
flushing.  'In Mexico you can't keep a balance, because things are
so bad.  In other countries, yes, perhaps you can remain balanced,
because things are not so bad as they are here.  But here they are
so very bad, you can't be human.  You have to be Mexican.  You have
to be more Mexican than human, no?  You can't do no other.  You
have to hate the capitalist, you have to, in Mexico, or nobody can
live.  We can't live.  Nobody can live.  If you are Mexican you
can't be human, it is impossible.  You have to be a socialist
Mexican, or you have to be a capitalist Mexican, and you hate.
What else is there to be done?  We hate the capitalist because he
ruins the country and the people.  We MUST hate him.'

'But after all,' said Kate, 'what about the twelve million poor--
mostly Indians--whom Montes talks about?  You can't make them all
rich, whatever you do.  And they don't understand the very words,
capital and socialism.  They are Mexico, really, and nobody ever
looks at them, except to make a casus belli of them.  Humanly, they
never exist for you.'

'Humanly they can't exist, they are too ignorant!' cried Garcia.
'But when we can kill all the capitalists, then--'

'You'll find somebody killing YOU,' said Kate.  'No, I don't like
it.  YOU aren't Mexico.  You aren't even Mexican, really.  You are
just half Spaniards full of European ideas, and you care for
asserting your own ideas and nothing else.  You have no real bowels
of compassion.  You are no good.'

The young man listened with round eyes, going rather yellow in the
face.  At the end he lifted his shoulders and spread his hands in a
pseudo-Mediterranean gesture.

'Well!  It may be!' he said, with a certain jeering flippancy.
'Perhaps you know everything.  Maybe!  Foreigners, they usually
know everything about Mexico.'  And he ended on a little cackling
laugh.

'I know what I FEEL,' said Kate.  'And now I want a taxi, and I
want to go home.  I don't want to see any more stupid, ugly
pictures.'

Off she drove back to the hotel, once more in a towering rage.  She
was amazed at herself.  Usually she was so good-tempered and easy.
But something about this country irritated her and put her into
such a violent anger, she felt she would die.  Burning, furious
rage.

And perhaps, she thought to herself, the white and half-white
Mexicans suffered some peculiar reaction in their blood which made
them that they too were almost always in a state of suppressed
irritation and anger, for which they MUST find a vent.  They MUST
spend their lives in a complicated game of frustration, frustration
of life in its ebbing and flowing.

Perhaps something came out of the earth, the dragon of the earth,
some effluence, some vibration which militated against the very
composition of the blood and nerves in human beings.  Perhaps it
came from the volcanoes.  Or perhaps even from the silent, serpent-
like dark resistance of those masses of ponderous natives whose
blood was principally the old, heavy, resistant Indian blood.

Who knows?  But something there was, and something very potent.
Kate lay on her bed and brooded on her own organic rage.  There was
nothing to be done!

But young Garcia was really nice.  He called in the afternoon and
sent up his card.  Kate, feeling sore, received him unwillingly.

'I came,' he said, with a little stiff dignity, like an ambassador
on a mission, 'to tell you that I, too, don't like those
caricatures.  I, too, don't like them.  I don't like the young
people, boys and girls, no?--to be seeing them all the time.  I,
too, don't like.  But I think, also, that here in Mexico we can't
help it.  People are very bad, very greedy, no?--they only want to
get money here, and they don't care.  So we must hate them.  Yes,
we must.  But I, too, I don't like it.'

He held his hat in his two hands, and twisted his shoulders in a
conflict of feelings.

Kate suddenly laughed, and he laughed too, with a certain pain and
confusion in his laughter.

'That's awfully nice of you to come and say so,' she said, warming
to him.

'No, not nice,' he said, frowning.  'But I don't know what to DO.
Perhaps you think I am--different--I am not the thing that I am.
And I don't want it.'

He flushed and was uncomfortable.  There was a curious naïve
sincerity about him, since he was being sincere.  If he had chosen
to play a game of sophistication, he could have played it better.
But with Kate he wanted to be sincere.

'I know, really,' laughed Kate, 'you feel a good deal like I do
about it.  I know you only pretend to be fierce and hard.'

'No!' he said, suddenly making solemn, flashing eyes.  'I do also
feel fierce.  I do hate these men who take, only take everything
from Mexico--money, and all--EVERYTHING!'  He spread his hands with
finality.  'I hate them because I MUST, no?  But also, I am sorry--
I am sorry I have to hate so much.  Yes, I think I am sorry.  I
think so.'

He knitted his brows rather tense.  And over his plump, young,
fresh face was a frown of resentment and hatred, quite sincere too.

Kate could see he wasn't really sorry.  Only the two moods, of
natural, soft, sensuous flow, and of heavy resentment and hate,
alternated inside him like shadow and shine on a cloudy day, in
swift, unavoidable succession.  What was nice about him was his
simplicity, in spite of the complication of his feelings, and the
fact that his resentments were not personal, but beyond persons,
even beyond himself.

She went out with him to tea, and while she was out, Don Ramón
called and left cards with the corners turned down, and an
invitation to dinner for her and Owen.  There seemed an almost old-
fashioned correctness in those cards.

Looking over the newspaper, she came on an odd little item.  She
could read Spanish without much difficulty.  The trouble lay in
talking it, when Italian got in her way and caused a continual
stumble.  She looked on the English page of the Excelsior or the
Universal for the news--if there was any.  Then she looked through
the Spanish pages for bits of interest.

This little item was among the Spanish information, and was headed:
The Gods of Antiquity Return to Mexico.


'There was a ferment in the village of Sayula, Jalisco, on the Lake
of Sayula, owing to an incident of more or less comic nature,
yesterday morning towards mid-day.  The women who inhabit the
shores of the lake are to be seen each day soon after sunrise
descending to the water's edge with large bundles.  They kneel on
the rocks and stones, and in little groups, like water-fowl, they
wash their dirty linen in the soft water of the lake, pausing at
times as an old canoa sails by with large single sail.  The scene
is little changed since the days of Montezuma, when the natives of
the lake worshipped the spirit of the waters, and threw in little
images and idols of baked clay, which the lake sometimes returns to
the descendants of the dead idolaters, to keep them in mind of
practices not yet altogether forgotten.

'As the hot sun rises in the sky, the women spread their washing on
the sand and pebbles of the shore, and retire to the shade of the
willow trees that grow so gracefully and retain their verdant hue
through the dryest season of the year.  While thus reposing after
their labours, these humble and superstitious women were astonished
to see a man of great stature rise naked from the lake and wade
towards the shore.  His face, they said, was dark and bearded, but
his body shone like gold.

'As if unaware of any watchful eyes, he advanced calmly and
majestically towards the shore.  There he stood a moment, and
selecting with his eye a pair of the loose cotton pants worn by the
peasants in the fields, that was spread whitening in the sun, he
stooped and proceeded to cover his nakedness with the said garment.

'The woman who thus saw her husband's apparel robbed beneath her
eye, rose, calling to the man and summoning the other women.
Whereupon the stranger turned his dark face upon them, and said in
a quiet voice:  "Why are you crying?  Be quiet!  It will be given
back to you.  Your gods are ready to return to you.  Quetzalcoatl
and Tlaloc, the old gods, are minded to come back to you.  Be
quiet, don't let them find you crying and complaining.  I have come
from out of the lake to tell you the gods are coming back to
Mexico, they are ready to return to their own home."

'Little comforted by this speech, the woman who had lost her
washing was overcome and said no more.  The stranger then
appropriated a cotton blouse, which he donned, and disappeared.

'After a while, the simple women gathered courage to return to
their humble dwellings.  The story thus reached the ears of the
police, who at once set out to search for the thief.

'The story, however, is not yet concluded.  The husband of the poor
woman of the lake-shore, returning from his labours in the field,
approached the gates of the village towards sunset, thinking, no
doubt, of nothing but repose and the evening meal.  A man in a
black serape stepped towards him, from the shadows of a broken
wall, and asked:  Are you afraid to come with me?  The labourer, a
man of spirit, promptly replied:  No, señor!  He therefore followed
the unknown man through the broken wall and through the bushes of a
deserted garden.  In a dark room, or cellar, a small light was
burning, revealing a great basin of gold, into which four little
men, smaller than children, were pouring sweet-scented water.  The
astounded peasant was now told to wash and put on clean clothes, to
be ready for the return of the gods.  He was seated in the golden
basin and washed with sweet-smelling soap, while the dwarfs poured
water over him.  This, they said, is the bath of Quetzalcoatl.  The
bath of fire is yet to come.  They gave him clean clothing of pure
white cotton, and a new hat with star embroidery, and sandals with
straps of white leather.  But beside this, a new blanket, white
with bars of blue and black, and flowers like stars at the centre,
and two pieces of silver money.  Go, he was told.  And when they
ask you, where did you get your blanket? answer that Quetzalcoatl
is young again.  The poor fellow went home in sore fear, lest the
police should arrest him for possessing stolen goods.

'The village is full of excitement, and Don Ramón Carrasco, our
eminent historian and archaeologist, whose hacienda lies in the
vicinity, has announced his intention of proceeding as soon as
possible to the spot to examine the origin of this new legend.
Meanwhile, the police are watching attentively the development of
affairs, without taking any steps for the moment.  Indeed, these
little fantasies create a pleasant diversion in the regular order
of banditry, murder, and outrage, which it is usually our duty to
report.'


Kate wondered what was at the back of this: if anything more than a
story.  Yet, strangely, a different light than the common light
seemed to gleam out of the words of even this newspaper paragraph.

She wanted to go to Sayula.  She wanted to see the big lake where
the gods had once lived, and whence they were due to emerge.  Amid
all the bitterness that Mexico produced in her spirit, there was
still a strange beam of wonder and mystery, almost like hope.  A
strange darkly-iridescent beam of wonder, of magic.

The name Quetzalcoatl, too, fascinated her.  She had read bits
about the god.  Quetzal is the name of a bird that lives high up in
the mists of tropical mountains, and has very beautiful tail-
feathers, precious to the Aztecs.  Coatl is a serpent.  Quetzalcoatl
is the Plumed Serpent, so hideous in the fanged, feathered,
writhing stone of the National Museum.

But Quetzalcoatl was, she vaguely remembered, a sort of fair-faced
bearded god; the wind, the breath of life, the eyes that see and
are unseen, like the stars by day.  The eyes that watch behind the
wind, as the stars beyond the blue of day.  And Quetzalcoatl must
depart from Mexico to merge again into the deep bath of life.  He
was old.  He had gone eastwards, perhaps into the sea, perhaps he
had sailed into heaven, like a meteor returning, from the top of
the Volcano of Orizaba: gone back as a peacock streaming into the
night, or as a bird of Paradise, its tail gleaming like the wake of
a meteor.  Quetzalcoatl!  Who knows what he meant to the dead
Aztecs, and to the older Indians, who knew him before the Aztecs
raised their deity to heights of horror and vindictiveness?

All a confusion of contradictory gleams of meaning, Quetzalcoatl.
But why not?  Her Irish spirit was weary to death of definite
meanings, and a God of one fixed purport.  Gods should be
iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm.  Man creates a God in
his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made
them.  But storms sway in heaven, and the god-stuff sways high and
angry over our heads.  Gods die with men who have conceived them.
But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a
sound to be heard.  Like the sea in storm, that beats against the
rocks of living, stiffened men, slowly to destroy them.  Or like
the sea of the glimmering, ethereal plasm of the world, that bathes
the feet and the knees of men as earth-sap bathes the roots of
trees.  Ye must be born again.  Even the gods must be born again.
We must be born again.

In her vague, woman's way, Kate knew this.  She had lived her life.
She had had her lovers, her two husbands.  She had her children.

Joachim Leslie, her dead husband, she had loved as much as a woman
can love a man: that is, to the bounds of human love.  Then she had
realized that human love has its limits, that there is a beyond.
And Joachim dead, willy nilly her spirit had passed the bounds.
She was no longer in love with love.  She no longer yearned for the
love of a man, or the love even of her children.  Joachim had gone
into eternity in death, and she had crossed with him into a certain
eternity in life.  There, the yearning for companionship and
sympathy and human love had left her.  Something infinitely
intangible but infinitely blessed took its place: a peace that
passes understanding.

At the same time, a wild and angry battle raged between her and the
thing that Owen called life: such as the bull-fight, the tea-party,
the enjoyments; like the arts in their modern aspect of hate
effusion.  The powerful, degenerate thing called life, wrapping one
or other of its tentacles round her.

And then, when she could escape into her true loneliness, the
influx of peace and soft, flower-like potency which was beyond
understanding.  It disappeared even if you thought about it, so
delicate, so fine.  And yet, the only reality.

Ye must be born again.  Out of the fight with the octopus of life,
the dragon of degenerate or of incomplete existence, one must win
this soft bloom of being, that is damaged by a touch.

No, she no longer wanted love, excitement, and something to fill
her life.  She was forty, and in the rare, lingering dawn of
maturity, the flower of her soul was opening.  Above all things,
she must preserve herself from worldly contacts.  Only she wanted
the silence of other unfolded souls around her, like a perfume.
The presence of that which is forever unsaid.

And in the horror and climax of death-rattles, which is Mexico, she
thought she could see it in the black eyes of the Indians.  She
felt that Don Ramón and Don Cipriano both had heard the soundless
call, across all the hideous choking.

Perhaps this had brought her to Mexico: away from England and her
mother, away from her children, away from everybody.  To be alone
with the unfolding flower of her own soul, in the delicate, chiming
silence that is at the midst of things.

The thing called 'Life' is just a mistake we have made in our own
minds.  Why persist in the mistake any further?

Owen was the mistake itself: so was Villiers: so was that Mexico
City.

She wanted to get out, to disentangle herself again.

They had promised to go out to dinner to the house of Don Ramón.
His wife was away in the United States with her two boys, one of
whom had been ill, not seriously, at his school in California.  But
Don Ramón's aunt would be hostess.

The house was out at Tlalpam.  It was May, the weather was hot, the
rains were not yet started.  The shower at the bullfight had been a
sort of accident.

'I wonder,' said Owen, 'whether I ought to put on a dinner-coat.
Really, I feel humiliated to the earth every time I put on evening
dress.'

'Then don't do it!' said Kate, who was impatient of Owen's kicking
at these very little social pricks, and swallowing the whole
porcupine.

She herself came down in a simple gown with a black velvet top and
a loose skirt of delicate brocaded chiffon, of a glimmering green
and yellow and black.  She also wore a long string of jade and
crystal.

It was a gift she had, of looking like an Ossianic goddess, a
certain feminine strength and softness glowing in the very material
of her dress.  But she was never 'smart.'

'Why you're dressed up to the eyes!' cried Owen in chagrin, pulling
at his soft collar.  'Bare shoulders notwithstanding!'

They went out to the distant suburb in the tram-car, swift in the
night, with big clear stars overhead, dropping and hanging with a
certain gleam of menace.  In Tlalpam there was a heavy scent of
nightflowers, a feeling of ponderous darkness, with a few sparks
of intermittent fireflies.  And always the heavy calling of
nightflower scents.  To Kate, there seemed a faint whiff of blood
in all tropical-scented flowers: of blood or sweat.

It was a hot night.  They banged on the iron doors of the entrance,
dogs barked, and a mozo opened to them, warily, closing fast again
the moment they had entered the dark garden of trees.

Don Ramón was in white, a white dinner-jacket: Don Cipriano the
same.  But there were other guests, young Garcia, another pale
young man called Mirabal, and an elderly man in a black cravat,
named Toussaint.  The only other woman was Doña Isabel, aunt to Don
Ramón.  She wore a black dress with a high collar of black lace,
and some strings of pearls, and seemed shy, frightened, absent as a
nun before all these men.  But to Kate she was very kind,
caressive, speaking English in a plaintive faded voice.  This
dinner was a sort of ordeal and ritual combined, to the cloistered,
elderly soul.

But it was soon evident that she was trembling with fearful joy.
She adored Ramón with an uncritical, nun-like adoration.  It was
obvious she hardly heard the things that were said.  Words skimmed
the surface of her consciousness without ever penetrating.
Underneath, she was trembling in nun-like awareness of so many men,
and in almost sacred excitement at facing Don Ramón as hostess.

The house was a fairly large villa, quietly and simply furnished,
with natural taste.

'Do you always live here?' said Kate to Don Ramón.  'Never at your
hacienda?'

'How do you know I have a hacienda?' he asked.

'I saw it in a newspaper--near Sayula.'

'Ah!' he said, laughing at her with his eyes.  'You saw about the
returning of the Gods of Antiquity.'

'Yes,' she said.  'Don't you think it is interesting?'

'I think so,' he said.

'I love the WORD Quetzalcoatl.'

'The WORD!' he repeated.

His eyes laughed at her teasingly all the time.

'What do you think, Mrs Leslie,' cried the pale-faced young
Mirabal, in curiously resonant English, with a French accent.
'Don't you think it would be wonderful if the gods came back to
Mexico? our own gods?'  He sat in intense expectation, his blue
eyes fixed on Kate's face, his soup-spoon suspended.

Kate's face was baffled with incomprehension.

'Not those Aztec horrors!' she said.

'The Aztec horrors!  The Aztec horrors!  Well, perhaps they were
not so horrible after all.  But if they were, it was because the
Aztecs were all tied up.  They were in a cul de sac, so they saw
nothing but death.  Don't you think so?'

'I don't know enough!' said Kate.

'Nobody knows any more.  But if you like the WORD Quetzalcoatl,
don't you think it would be wonderful if he came back again?  Ah,
the NAMES of the gods!  Don't you think the NAMES are like seeds,
so full of magic, of the unexplored magic?  Huitzilopochtli!--how
wonderful!  And Tlaloc!  Ah!  I love them!  I say them over and
over, like they say Mani padma Om! in Tibet.  I believe in the
fertility of sound.  Itzpapalotl--the Obsidian Butterfly!
Itzpapalotl!  But say it, and you will see it does good to your
soul.  Itzpapalotl!  Tezcatlipocá!  They were old when the
Spaniards came, they needed the bath of life again.  But now, re-
bathed in youth, how wonderful they must be!  Think of Jehovah!
Jehovah!  Think of Jesus Christ!  How thin and poor they sound!  Or
Jesús Cristo!  They are dead names, all the life withered out of
them.  Ah, it is time now for Jesus to go back to the place of the
death of the gods, and take the long bath of being made young
again.  He is an old-old young god, don't you think?'  He looked
long at Kate, then dived for his soup.

Kate widened her eyes in amazement at this torrent from the young
Mirabal.  Then she laughed.

'I think it's a bit overwhelming!' she said, non-committal.

'Ah!  Yes!  Exactly!  Exactly!  But how good to be overwhelmed!
How splendid if something will overwhelm me!  Ah, I am so glad!'

The last word came with a clapping French resonance, and the young
man dived for his soup again.  He was lean and pale, but burning
with an intense, crazy energy.

'You see,' said young Garcia, raising his full, bright dark eyes to
Kate, half aggressive and half bashful: 'we must do something for
Mexico.  If we don't, it will go under, no?  You say you don't like
socialism.  I don't think I do either.  But if there is nothing
else but socialism, we will have socialism.  If there is nothing
better.  But perhaps there is.'

'Why should Mexico go under?' said Kate.  'There are lots of
children everywhere.'

'Yes.  But the last census of Porfirio Diaz gave seventeen million
people in Mexico, and the census of last year gave only thirteen
millions.  Maybe the count was not quite right.  But you count four
million people fewer, in twenty years, then in sixty years there
will be no Mexicans: only foreigners, who don't die.'

'Oh, but figures always lie!' said Kate.  'Statistics are always
misleading.'

'Maybe two and two don't make four,' said Garcia.  'I don't know if
they do.  But I know, if you take two away from two, it leaves
none.'

'Do you think Mexico might die out?' she said to Don Ramón.

'Why!' he replied.  'It might.  Die out and become Americanized.'

'I quite see the danger of Americanization,' said Owen.  'That
WOULD be ghastly.  Almost better die out.'

Owen was so American, he invariably said these things.

'But!' said Kate.  'The Mexicans look so strong!'

'They are strong to carry heavy loads,' said Don Ramón.  'But they
die easily.  They eat all the wrong things, they drink the wrong
things, and they don't mind dying.  They have many children, and
they like their children very much.  But when the child dies, the
parents say:  Ah, he will be an angelito!  So they cheer up and
feel as if they had been given a present.  Sometimes I think they
enjoy it when their children die.  Sometimes I think they would
like to transfer Mexico en bloc into Paradise, or whatever lies
behind the walls of death.  It would be better there!'

There was a silence.

'But how sad you are!' said Kate, afraid.

Doña Isabel was giving hurried orders to the manservant.

'Whoever knows Mexico below the surface, is sad!' said Julio
Toussaint, rather sententiously, over his black cravat.

'Well,' said Owen, 'it seems to me, on the contrary, a gay country.
A country of gay, irresponsible children.  Or rather, they WOULD be
gay, if they were properly treated.  If they had comfortable homes,
and a sense of real freedom.  If they felt that they could control
their lives and their own country.  But being in the grip of
outsiders, as they have been for hundreds of years, life of course
seems hardly worth while to them.  Naturally, they don't care if
they live or die.  They don't feel FREE.'

'Free for what?' asked Toussaint.

'To make Mexico their own.  Not to be so poor and at the mercy of
outsiders.'

'They are at the mercy of something worse than outsiders,' said
Toussaint.  'Let me tell you.  They are at the mercy of their own
natures.  It is this way.  Fifty per cent of the people in Mexico
are pure Indian: more or less.  Of the rest, a small proportion are
foreigners or Spaniard.  You have then the mass which is on top, of
mixed blood, Indian and Spaniard mixed, chiefly.  These are the
Mexicans, those with the mixed blood.  Now, you take us at this
table.  Don Cipriano is pure Indian.  Don Ramón is almost pure
Spaniard, but most probably he has the blood of Tlaxcalan Indians
in his veins as well.  Señor Mirabal is mixed French and Spanish.
Señor Garcia most probably has a mixture of Indian blood with
Spanish.  I myself have French, Spanish, Austrian, and Indian
blood.  Very well!  Now you mix blood of the same race, and it may
be all right.  Europeans are all Aryan stock, the race is the same.
But when you mix European and American Indian, you mix different
blood races, and you produce the half-breed.  Now, the half-breed
is a calamity.  For why?  He is neither one thing nor another, he
is divided against himself.  His blood of one race tells him one
thing, his blood of another race tells him another.  He is an
unfortunate, a calamity to himself.  And it is hopeless.

'And this is Mexico.  The Mexicans of mixed blood are hopeless.
Well then!  There are only two things to be done.  All the
foreigners and the Mexicans clear out and leave the country to the
Indians, the pure-blooded Indians.  But already you have a
difficulty.  How can you distinguish the pure-blooded Indian, after
so many generations?  Or else the half-breed or mixed-blood
Mexicans who are all the time on top shall continue to destroy the
country till the Americans from the United States flood in.  We are
as California and New Mexico now are, swamped under the dead white
sea.

'But let me tell you something further.  I hope we are not
Puritans.  I hope I may say that it depends on the moment of
coition.  At the moment of coition, either the spirit of the father
fuses with the spirit of the mother, to create a new being with a
soul, or else nothing fuses but the germ of procreation.

'Now consider.  How have these Mexicans of mixed blood been
begotten, for centuries?  In what spirit?  What was the moment of
coition like?  Answer me that, and you have told me the reason for
this Mexico which makes us despair and which will go on making
everybody despair, till it destroys itself.  In what spirit have
the Spanish and other foreign fathers gotten children of the Indian
women?  What sort of spirit was it?  What sort of coition?  And
then, what sort of race do you expect?'

'But what sort of a spirit is there between white men and white
women!' said Kate.

'At least,' replied the didactic Toussaint, 'the blood is
homogeneous, so that consciousness automatically unrolls in
continuity.'

'I hate its unrolling in automatic continuity,' said Kate.

'Perhaps!  But it makes life possible.  Without developing
continuity in consciousness, you have chaos.  And this comes of
mixed blood.'

'And then,' said Kate, 'surely the Indian men are fond of their
women!  The men seem manly, and the women seem very lovable and
womanly.'

'It is possible that the Indian children are pure-blooded, and
there is the continuity of blood.  But the Indian consciousness is
swamped under the stagnant water of the white man's Dead Sea
consciousness.  Take a man like Benito Juarez, a pure Indian.  He
floods his old consciousness with the new white ideas, and there
springs up a whole forest of verbiage, new laws, new constitutions
and all the rest.  But it is a sudden weed.  It grows like a weed
on the surface, saps the strength of the Indian soil underneath,
and helps the process of ruin.  No, madam!  There is no hope for
Mexico short of a miracle.'

'Ah!' cried Mirabal, flourishing his wine-glass.  'Isn't that
wonderful, when only the miracle will save us!  When we must
produce the miracle?  WE!  WE!  We must make the miracle!'  He hit
his own breast emphatically.  'Ah, I think that is marvellous!'
And he returned to his turkey in black sauce.

'Look at the Mexicans!' Toussaint flared on.  'They don't care
about anything.  They eat food so hot with chili, it burns holes in
their insides.  And it has no nourishment.  They live in houses
that a dog would be ashamed of, and they lie and shiver with cold.
But they don't DO anything.  They could make, easily, easily, a bed
of maize leaves or similar leaves.  But they don't do it.  They
don't do anything.  They roll up in a thin serape and lie on a thin
mat on the bare ground, whether it is wet or dry.  And Mexican
nights are cold.  But they lie down like dogs, anyhow, as if they
lay down to die.  I say dogs!  But you will see the dogs looking
for a dry sheltered place.  The Mexicans, no!  Anywhere, nothing,
nothing!  And it is terrible.  It is terrible!  As if they wanted
to punish themselves for being alive!'

'But then, why do they have so many children?' said Kate.

'Why do they?  The same, because they don't care.  They don't care.
They don't care about money, they don't care about making anything,
they don't care about nothing, nothing, nothing.  Only they get an
excitement out of women, as they do out of chili.  They like to
feel the red pepper burning holes in their insides, and they like
to feel the other thing, the sex, burning holes in them too.  But
after the moment, they don't care.  They don't care a bit.

'And that is bad.  I tell you, excuse me, but all, everything,
depends on the moment of coition.  At that moment many things can
come to a crisis: all a man's hope, his honour, his faith, his
trust, his belief in life and creation and God, all these things
can come to a crisis in the moment of coition.  And these things
will be handed on in continuity to the child.  Believe me, I am a
crank on this idea, but it is true.  It is certainly absolutely
true.'

'I believe it is true,' said Kate, rather coldly.

'Ah! you do!  Well then!  Look at Mexico!  The only CONSCIOUS
people are half-breeds, people of mixed blood, begotten in greed
and selfish brutality.'

'Some people believe in the mixed blood,' said Kate.

'Ah!  They do, do they?  Who?'

'Some of your serious-minded men.  They say the half-breed is
better than the Indian.'

'Better!  Well!  The Indian has his hopelessness.  The moment of
coition is his moment of supreme hopelessness, when he throws
himself down the pit of despair.'

The Austrian, European blood, which fans into fire of conscious
understanding, died down again, leaving what was Mexican in Julio
Toussaint sunk in irredeemable gloom.

'It is true,' said Mirabal, out of the gloom.  'The Mexicans who
have any feeling always prostitute themselves, one way or another,
and so they can never DO anything.  And the Indians can never do
anything either, because they haven't got hope in anything.  But it
is always darkest before the dawn.  We must make the miracle come.
The miracle is superior even to the moment of coition.'

It seemed, however, as if he said it by an effort of will.

The dinner was ending in silence.  During the whirl of talk, or of
passionate declaration, the servants had carried round the food and
wine.  Doña Isabel, completely oblivious of the things that were
being said, watched and directed the servants with nervous anxiety
and excitement, her hands with their old jewellery trembling with
agitation.  Don Ramón had kept his eye on his guests' material
comfort, at the same time listening, as it were, from the back of
his head.  His big brown eyes were inscrutable, his face impassive.
But when he had anything to say, it was always with a light laugh
and a teasing accent.  And yet his eyes brooded and smouldered with
an incomprehensible, unyielding fire.

Kate felt she was in the presence of men.  Here were men face to
face not with death and self-sacrifice, but with the life-issue.
She felt, for the first time in her life, a pang almost like fear,
of men who were passing beyond what she knew, beyond her depth.

Cipriano, his rather short but intensely black, curved eyelashes
lowering over his dark eyes, watched his plate, only sometimes
looking up with a black, brilliant glance, either at whomsoever was
speaking, or at Don Ramón, or at Kate.  His face was changeless and
intensely serious, serious almost with a touch of childishness.
But the curious blackness of his eyelashes lifted so strangely,
with such intense unconscious maleness from his eyes, the movement
of his hand was so odd, quick, light as he ate, so easily a
movement of shooting, or of flashing a knife into the body of some
adversary, and his dark-coloured lips were so helplessly savage, as
he ate or briefly spoke, that her heart stood still.  There was
something undeveloped and intense in him, the intensity and the
crudity of the semi-savage.  She could well understand the potency
of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination.  Something
smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man suggested the heavy-
ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins.  That was what it was, the
heavy-ebbing blood of powerful reptiles, the dragon of Mexico.

So that unconsciously she shrank when his black, big, glittering
eyes turned on her for a moment.  They were not, like Don Ramón's,
DARK eyes.  They were black, as black as jewels into which one
could not look without a sensation of fear.  And her fascination
was tinged with fear.  She felt somewhat as the bird feels when the
snake is watching it.

She wondered almost that Don Ramón was not afraid.  Because she had
noticed that usually, when an Indian looked to a white man, both
men stood back from actual contact, from actual meeting of each
other's eyes.  They left a wide space of neutral territory between
them.  But Cipriano looked at Ramón with a curious intimacy,
glittering, steady, warrior-like, and at the same time betraying an
almost menacing trust in the other man.

Kate realized that Ramón had a good deal to stand up to.  But he
kept a little, foiling laugh on his face, and lowered his beautiful
head with the black hair touched with grey, as if he would put a
veil before his countenance.

'Do you think one can make this miracle come?' she asked of him.

'The miracle is always there,' he said, 'for the man who can pass
his hand through to it, to take it.'

They finished dinner, and went to sit out on the veranda, looking
into the garden where the light from the house fell uncannily on
the blossoming trees and the dark tufts of Yucca and the strange
great writhing trunks of the Laurel de India.

Cipriano had sat down next to her, smoking a cigarette.

'It is a strange darkness, the Mexican darkness!' she said.

'Do you like it?' he asked.

'I don't know yet,' she said.  'Do you?'

'Yes.  Very much.  I think I like best the time when the day is
falling and the night coming on like something else.  Then, one
feels more free, don't you think?  Like the flowers that send out
their scent at night, but in the daytime they look at the sun and
don't have any smell.'

'Perhaps the night here scares me,' she laughed.

'Yes.  But why not?  The smell of the flowers at night may make one
feel afraid, but it is a good fear.  One likes it, don't you
think?'

'I am afraid of fear,' she said.

He laughed shortly.

'You speak such English English,' she said.  'Nearly all the
Mexicans who speak English speak American English.  Even Don Ramón
does, rather.'

'Yes.  Don Ramón graduated in Columbia University.  But I was sent
to England, to school in London, and then to Oxford.'

'Who sent you?'

'My god-father.  He was an Englishman: Bishop Severn, Bishop of
Oaxaca.  You have heard of him?'

'No,' said Kate.

'He was a very well-known man.  He died only about ten years ago.
He was very rich, too, before the revolution.  He had a big
hacienda in Oaxaca, with a very fine library.  But they took it
away from him in the revolution, and they sold the things, or broke
them.  They didn't know the value of them, of course.'

'And did he adopt you?'

'Yes!  In a way.  My father was one of the overseers on the
hacienda.  When I was a little boy I came running to my father,
when the Bishop was there, with something in my hands--so!'--and he
made a cup of his hand.  'I don't remember.  This is what they tell
me.  I was a small child--three or four years of age--somewhere
there.  What I had in my hands' was a yellow scorpion, one of the
small ones, very poisonous, no?'

And he lifted the cup of his small, slender, dark hands, as if to
show Kate the creature.

'Well, the Bishop was talking to my father, and he saw what I had
got before my father did.  So he told me at once, to put the
scorpion in his hat--the Bishop's hat, no?  Of course I did what he
told me, and I put the scorpion in his hat, and it did not bite me.
If it had stung me I should have died, of course.  But I didn't
know, so I suppose the alacran was not interested.  The Bishop was
a very good man, very kind.  He liked my father, so he became my
god-father.  Then he always took an interest in me, and he sent me
to school, and then to England.  He hoped I should be a priest.  He
always said that the one hope for Mexico was if she had really fine
native priests.'  He ended rather wistfully.

'And didn't you want to become a priest?' said Kate.

'No!' he said sadly.  'No!'

'Not at all?' she asked.

'No!  When I was in England it was different from Mexico.  Even God
was different, and the Blessed Mary.  They were changed so much, I
felt I didn't know them any more.  Then I came to understand
better, and when I understood I didn't believe any more.  I used to
think it was the images of Jesus, and the Virgin, and the Saints,
that were doing everything in the world.  And the world seemed to
me so strange, no?  I couldn't see that it was bad, because it was
all so very strange and mysterious, when I was a child, in Mexico.
Only in England I learned about the laws of life, and some science.
And then when I knew why the sun rose and set, and how the world
really was, I felt quite different.'

'Was your god-father disappointed?'

'A little, perhaps.  But he asked me if I would rather be a
soldier, so I said I would.  Then when the revolution came, and I
was twenty-two years old, I had to come back to Mexico.'

'Did you like your god-father?'

'Yes, very much.  But the revolution carried everything away.  I
felt I must do what my god-father wished.  But I could see that
Mexico was not the Mexico he believed in.  It was different.  He
was too English, and too good to understand.  In the revolutions I
tried to help the man I believed was the best man.  So you see, I
have always been half a priest and half a soldier.'

'You never married?'

'No.  I couldn't marry, because I always felt my god-father was
there, and I felt I had promised him to be a priest--all those
things, you know.  When he died he told me to follow my own
conscience, and to remember that Mexico and all the Indians were in
the hands of God, and he made me promise never to take sides
against God.  He was an old man when he died, seventy-five.'

Kate could see the spell of the old Bishop's strong, rather
grandiose personality upon the impressionable Indian.  She could
see the curious recoil into chastity, perhaps characteristic of the
savage.  And at the same time she felt the intense masculine
yearning, coupled with a certain male ferocity, in the man's
breast.

'Your husband was James Joachim Leslie, the famous Irish leader?'
he asked her: and added:  'You had no children?'

'No.  I wanted Joachim's children so much, but I didn't have any.
But I have a boy and a girl from my first marriage.  My first
husband was a lawyer, and I was divorced from him for Joachim.'

'Did you like him--that first one?'

'Yes.  I liked him.  But I never felt anything very deep for him.
I married him when I was young, and he was a good deal older than
I.  I was fond of him, in a way.  But I--had never realized that
one could be more than fond of a man, till I knew Joachim.  I
thought that was all one could ever expect to feel--that you just
liked a man, and that he was in love with you.  It took me years to
understand that a woman CAN'T love a man--at least a woman like I
am can't--if he is only the sort of good, decent citizen.  With
Joachim I came to realize that a woman like me CAN only love a man
who is fighting to CHANGE the world, to make it freer, more alive.
Men like my first husband, who are good and trustworthy and who
work to keep the world going on well in the same state they found
it in, they let you down horribly, somewhere.  You feel so terribly
sold.  Everything is just a sell: it becomes so small.  A woman who
isn't quite ordinary herself can only love a man who is fighting
for something beyond the ordinary life.'

'And your husband fought for Ireland.'

'Yes--for Ireland, and for something he never quite realized.  He
ruined his health.  And when he was dying, he said to me:  Kate,
perhaps I've let you down.  Perhaps I haven't really helped
Ireland.  But I couldn't help myself.  I feel as if I'd brought you
to the doors of life, and was leaving you there.  Kate, don't be
disappointed in life because of me.  I didn't really get anywhere.
I haven't really got anywhere.  I feel as if I'd made a mistake.
But perhaps when I'm dead I shall be able to do more for you than I
have done while I was alive.  Say you'll never feel disappointed!'

There was a pause.  The memory of the dead man was coming over her
again, and all her grief.

'And I don't feel disappointed,' she went on, her voice beginning
to shake.  'But I loved him.  And it was bitter, that he had to
die, feeling he hadn't--hadn't.'

She put her hands before her face, and the bitter tears came
through her fingers.

Cipriano sat motionless as a statue.  But from his breast came that
dark surging passion of tenderness the Indians are capable of.
Perhaps it would pass, leaving him indifferent and fatalistic
again.  But at any rate for the moment he sat in a dark, fiery
cloud of passionate male tenderness.  He looked at her soft, wet
white hands over her face, and at the one big emerald on her
finger, in a sort of wonder.  The wonder, the mystery, the magic
that used to flood over him as a boy and a youth, when he kneeled
before the babyish figure of the Santa Maria de la Soledad, flooded
him again.  He was in the presence of the goddess, white-handed,
mysterious, gleaming with a moon-like power and the intense potency
of grief.

Then Kate hastily took her hands from her face and with head ducked
looked for her handkerchief.  Of course she hadn't got one.
Cipriano lent her his, nicely folded.  She took it without a word,
and rubbed her face and blew her nose.

'I want to go and look at the flowers,' she said in a strangled
voice.

And she dashed into the garden with his handkerchief in her hand.
He stood up and drew aside his chair, to let her pass, then stood a
moment looking at the garden, before he sat down again and lighted
a cigarette.



CHAPTER IV

To Stay or Not to Stay


Owen had to return to the United States, and he asked Kate whether
she wanted to stay on in Mexico.

This put her into a quandary.  It was not an easy country for a
woman to be alone in.  And she had been beating her wings in an
effort to get away.  She felt like a bird round whose body a snake
has coiled itself.  Mexico was the snake.

The curious influence of the country, pulling one down, pulling one
down.  She had heard an old American, who had been forty years in
the Republic, saying to Owen:  'No man who hasn't a strong moral
backbone should try to settle in Mexico.  If he does, he'll go to
pieces, morally and physically, as I've seen hundreds of young
Americans do.'

To pull one down.  It was what the country wanted to do all the
time, with a slow, reptilian insistence, to pull one down.  To
prevent the spirit from soaring.  To take away the free, soaring
sense of liberty.

'There is no such thing as liberty,' she heard the quiet, deep,
dangerous voice of Don Ramón repeating.  'There is no such thing as
liberty.  The greatest liberators are usually slaves of an idea.
The freest people are slaves to convention and public opinion, and
more still, slaves to the industrial machine.  There is no such
thing as liberty.  You only change one sort of domination for
another.  All we can do is to choose our master.'

'But surely that IS liberty--for the mass of people.'

'They don't choose.  They are tricked into a new form of servility,
no more.  They go from bad to worse.'

'You yourself--aren't you free?' she asked.

'I?' he laughed.  'I spent a long time trying to pretend.  I
thought I could have my own way.  Till I realized that having my
own way meant only running about smelling all the things in the
street, like a dog that will pick up something.  Of myself, I have
no way.  No man has any way in himself.  Every man who goes along a
way is led by one of three things: by an appetite--and I class
ambition among appetites; or by an idea; or by an inspiration.'

'I used to think my husband was inspired about Ireland,' said Kate
doubtfully.

'And now?'

'Yes!  Perhaps he put his wine in old, rotten bottles that wouldn't
hold it.  No!--Liberty is a rotten old wine-skin.  It won't hold
one's wine of inspiration or passion any more,' she said.

'And Mexico!' he said.  'Mexico is another Ireland.  Ah no, no man
can be his own master.  If I must serve, I will not serve an idea,
which cracks and leaks like an old wine-skin.  I will serve the God
that gives me my manhood.  There is no liberty for a man, apart
from the God of his manhood.  Free Mexico is a bully, and the old,
colonial, ecclesiastical Mexico was another sort of bully.  When
man has nothing but his WILL to assert--even his good-will--it is
always bullying.  Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism
another: and liberty is a change of chains.'

'Then what's to be done?' said Kate.  'Just nothing?'

And with her own will, she wanted nothing to be done.  Let the
skies fall!

'One is driven, at last, back to the far distance, to look for
God,' said Ramón uneasily.

'I rather hate this search-for-God business, and religiosity,' said
Kate.

'I know!' he said, with a laugh.  'I've suffered from would-be-
cocksure religion myself.'

'And you can't REALLY "find God"!' she said.  'It's a sort of
sentimentalism, and creeping back into old, hollow shells.'

'No!' he said slowly.  'I can't FIND GOD, in the old sense.  I know
it's a sentimentalism if I pretend to.  But I am nauseated with
humanity and the human will: even with my own will.  I have
realized that MY WILL, no matter how intelligent I am, is only
another nuisance on the face of the earth, once I start exerting
it.  And other people's WILLS are even worse.'

'Oh! isn't human life horrible!' she cried.  'Every human being
exerting his will all the time--over other people, and over
himself, and nearly always self-righteous!'

Ramón made a grimace of repulsion.

'To me,' he said, 'that is just the weariness of life!  For a time,
it can be amusing: exerting your own will, and resisting all the
other people's wills, that they try to put over you.  But at a
certain point a nausea sets in at the very middle of me: my SOUL is
nauseated.  My soul is nauseated, and there is nothing but death
ahead, unless I find something else.'

Kate listened in silence.  She knew the road he had gone, but she
herself had not yet come to the end of it.  As yet she was still
strong in the pride of her own--her very own WILL.

'Oh, people are repulsive!' she cried.

'My own will becomes even more repulsive at last,' he said.  'My
own will, merely as my own will, is even more distasteful to me
than other people's wills.  From being the god in my own machine, I
must either abdicate, or die of disgust--self-disgust, at that.'

'How amusing!' she cried.

'It is rather funny,' he said sardonically.

'And then?' she asked, looking at him with a certain malevolent
challenge.

He looked back at her slowly, with an ironical light in his eyes.

'Then!' he repeated.  'Then!--I ask, what else is there in the
world, besides human will, human appetite? because ideas and ideals
are only instruments of human will and appetite.'

'Not entirely,' said Kate.  'They may be disinterested.'

'May they?  If the appetite ISN'T interested, the will is.'

'Why not?' she mocked.  'We can't be mere detached blocks.'

'It nauseates me--I look for something else.'

'And what do you find?'

'My own manhood!'

'What does that mean?' she cried, jeering.

'If you looked, and found your own womanhood, you would know.'

'But I HAVE my own womanhood!' she cried.

'And then--when you find your own manhood--your womanhood,' he went
on, smiling faintly at her--'then you know it is not your own, to
do as you like with.  You don't have it of your own will.  It comes
from--from the middle--from the God.  Beyond me, at the middle, is
the God.  And the God gives me my manhood, then leaves me to it.  I
have nothing but my manhood.  The God gives it me, and leaves me to
do further.'

Kate would not hear any more.  She broke off into banalities.

The immediate question, for her, was whether she would stay in
Mexico or not.  She was not really concerned with Don Ramón's soul--
or even her own.  She was concerned with her immediate future.
Should she stay in Mexico?  Mexico meant the dark-faced men in
cotton clothes, big hats: the peasants, peons, pelados, Indians,
call them what you will.  The mere natives.

Those pale-faced Mexicans of the Capital, politicians, artists,
professionals, and business people, they did not interest her.
Neither did the hacendados and the ranch-owners, in their tight
trousers and weak, soft sensuality, pale victims of their own
emotional undiscipline.  Mexico still meant the mass of silent
peons, to her.  And she thought of them again, these silent, stiff-
backed men, driving their strings of asses along the country roads,
in the dust of Mexico's infinite dryness, past broken walls, broken
houses, broken haciendas, along the endless desolation left by the
revolutions; past the vast stretches of maguey, the huge cactus, or
aloe, with its gigantic rosette of upstarting, pointed leaves, that
in its iron rows covers miles and miles of ground in the Valley of
Mexico, cultivated for the making of that bad-smelling drink,
pulque.  The Mediterranean has the dark grape, old Europe has
malted beer, and China has opium from the white poppy.  But out of
the Mexican soil a bunch of black-tarnished swords bursts up, and a
great unfolded bud of the once-flowering monster begins to thrust
at the sky.  They cut the great phallic bud and crush out the
sperm-like juice for the pulque.  Agua miel!  Pulque!

But better pulque than the fiery white brandy distilled from the
maguey: mescal, tequila: or in the low lands, the hateful sugar-
cane brandy, aguardiente.

And the Mexican burns out his stomach with those beastly fire-
waters and cauterizes the hurt with red-hot chili.  Swallowing one
hell-fire to put out another.

Tall fields of wheat and maize.  Taller, more brilliant fields of
bright-green sugar-cane.  And threading in white cotton clothes,
with dark, half-visible face, the eternal peon of Mexico, his great
white calico drawers flopping round his ankles as he walks, or
rolled up over his dark, handsome legs.

The wild, sombre, erect men of the north!  The too-often degenerate
men of Mexico Valley, their heads through the middle of their
ponchos!  The big men in Tlascala, selling ice-cream or huge half-
sweetened buns and fancy bread!  The quick little Indians, quick as
spiders, down in Oaxaca!  The queer-looking half-Chinese natives
towards Vera Cruz!  The dark faces and the big black eyes on the
coast of Sinaloa!  The handsome men of Jalisco, with a scarlet
blanket folded on one shoulder!

They were of many tribes and many languages, and far more alien to
one another than Frenchmen, English, and Germans are.  Mexico!  It
is not really even the beginnings of a nation: hence the rabid
assertion of nationalism in the few.  And it is not a race.

Yet it is a people.  There is some Indian quality which pervades
the whole.  Whether it is men in blue overalls and a slouch, in
Mexico City, or men with handsome legs in skintight trousers, or
the floppy, white, cotton-clad labourers in the fields, there is
something mysteriously in common.  The erect, prancing walk,
stepping out from the base of the spine with lifted knees and short
steps.  The jaunty balancing of the huge hats.  The thrown-back
shoulders with a folded serape like a royal mantle.  And most of
them handsome, with dark, warm-bronze skin so smooth and living,
their proudly-held heads, whose black hair gleams like wild, rich
feathers.  Their big, bright black eyes that look at you
wonderingly, and have no centre to them.  Their sudden, charming
smile, when you smile first.  But the eyes unchanged.

Yes, and she had to remember, too, a fair proportion of smaller,
sometimes insignificant-looking men, some of them scaly with dirt,
who looked at you with a cold, mud-like antagonism as they stepped
cattishly past.  Poisonous, thin, stiff little men, cold and
unliving like scorpions, and as dangerous.

And then the truly terrible faces of some creatures in the city,
slightly swollen with the poison of tequila, and with black,
dimmed, swivel eyes swinging in pure evil.  Never had she seen such
faces of pure brutish evil, cold and insect-like, as in Mexico
City.

The country gave her a strange feeling of hopelessness and of
dauntlessness.  Unbroken, eternally resistant, it was a people that
lived without hope, and without care.  Gay even, and laughing with
indifferent carelessness.

They were something like her own Irish, but gone to a much greater
length.  And also, they did what the self-conscious and pretentious
Irish rarely do, they touched her bowels with a strange fire of
compassion.

At the same time, she feared them.  They would pull her down, pull
her down, to the dark depths of nothingness.

It was the same with the women.  In their full long skirts and bare
feet, and with the big dark-blue scarf or shawl called a rebozo
over their womanly small heads and tight round their shoulders,
they were images of wild submissiveness, the primitive womanliness
of the world, that is so touching and so alien.  Many women
kneeling in a dim church, all hooded in their dark-blue rebozos,
the pallor of their skirts on the floor, their heads and shoulders
wrapped dark and tight, as they swayed with devotion of fear and
ecstasy!  A churchful of dark-wrapped women sunk there in wild,
humble supplication of dread and of bliss filled Kate with
tenderness and revulsion.  They crouched like people not quite
created.

Their soft, untidy black hair, which they scratched for lice; the
round-eyed baby joggling like a pumpkin in the shawl slung over the
woman's shoulder, the never-washed feet and ankles, again somewhat
reptilian under the long, flounced, soiled cotton skirt; and then,
once more, the dark eyes of half-created women, soft, appealing,
yet with a queer void insolence!  Something lurking, where the
womanly centre should have been; lurking snake-like.  Fear!  The
fear of not being able to find full creation.  And the inevitable
mistrust and lurking insolence, insolent against a higher creation,
the same thing that is in the striking of a snake.

Kate, as a woman, feared the women more than the men.  The women
were little and insidious, the men were bigger and more reckless.
But in the eyes of each, the uncreated centre, where the evil and
the insolence lurked.

And sometimes she wondered whether America really was the great
death-continent, the great No! to the European and Asiatic, and
even African Yes!  Was it really the great melting-pot, where men
from the creative continents were smelted back again, not to a new
creation, but down into the homogeneity of death?  Was it the great
continent of the undoing, and all its peoples the agents of the
mystic destruction!  Plucking, plucking at the created soul in a
man, till at last it plucked out the growing germ, and left him a
creature of mechanism and automatic reaction, with only one
inspiration, the desire to pluck the quick out of every living
spontaneous creature.

Was that the clue to America? she sometimes wondered.  Was it the
great death-continent, the continent that destroyed again what the
other continents had built up?  The continent whose spirit of place
fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God?  Was that
America?

And all the people who went there, Europeans, Negroes, Japanese,
Chinese, all the colours and the races, were they the spent people,
in whom the God impulse had collapsed, so they crossed to the great
continent of the negation, where the human will declares itself
'free', to pull down the soul of the world?  Was it so?  And did
this account for the great drift to the New World, the drift of
spent souls passing over to the side of Godless democracy,
energetic negation?  The negation which is the life-breath of
materialism.  And would the great negative pull of the Americans at
last break the heart of the world?

This thought would come to her, time and again.

She herself, what had she come to America for?

Because the flow of her life had broken, and she knew she could not
re-start it in Europe.

These handsome natives!  Was it because they were death-
worshippers, Moloch-worshippers, that they were so uncowed and
handsome?  Their pure acknowledgment of death and their undaunted
admission of nothingness kept so erect and careless.

White men had had a soul, and lost it.  The pivot of fire had been
quenched in them, and their lives had started to spin in the
reversed direction, widdershins.  That reversed look which is in
the eyes of so many white people, the look of nullity, and life
wheeling in the reversed direction.  Widdershins.

But the dark-faced natives, with their strange soft flame of life
wheeling upon a dark void: were they centreless and widdershins
too, as so many white men now are?

The strange, soft flame of courage in the black Mexican eyes.  But
still it was not knit to a centre, that centre which is the soul of
a man in a man.

And all the efforts of white men to bring the soul of the dark men
of Mexico into final clinched being has resulted in nothing but the
collapse of the white man.  Against the soft, dark flow of the
Indian the white man at last collapses; with his God and his energy
he collapses.  In attempting to convert the dark man to the white
man's way of life, the white man has fallen helplessly down the
hole he wanted to fill up.  Seeking to save another man's soul, the
white man lost his own, and collapsed upon himself.

Mexico!  The great, precipitous, dry, savage country, with a
handsome church in every landscape, rising as it were out of
nothing.  A revolution-broken landscape, with lingering, tall,
handsome churches whose domes are like inflations that are going to
burst, and whose pinnacles and towers are like the trembling
pagodas of an unreal race.  Gorgeous churches waiting, above the
huts and straw hovels of the natives, like ghosts to be dismissed.

And noble ruined haciendas, with ruined avenues approaching their
broken splendour.

And the cities of Mexico, great and small, that the Spaniards
conjured up out of nothing.  Stones live and die with the spirit of
the builders.  And the spirit of Spaniards in Mexico dies, and the
very stones in the building die.  The natives drift into the centre
of the plazas again, and in unspeakable empty weariness the Spanish
buildings stand around, in a sort of dry exhaustion.

The conquered race!  Cortés came with his iron heel and his iron
will, a conqueror.  But a conquered race, unless grafted with a new
inspiration, slowly sucks the blood of the conquerors, in the
silence of a strange night and the heaviness of a hopeless will.
So that now, the race of the conquerors in Mexico is soft and
boneless, children crying in helpless hopelessness.

Was it the dark negation of the continent?

Kate could not look at the stones of the National Museum in Mexico
without depression and dread.  Snakes coiled like excrement, snakes
fanged and feathered beyond all dreams of dread.  And that was all.

The ponderous pyramids of San Juan Teotihuacan, the House of
Quetzalcoatl wreathed with the snake of all snakes, his huge fangs
white and pure to-day as in the lost centuries when his makers were
alive.  He has not died.  He is not so dead as the Spanish
churches, this all-enwreathing dragon of the horror of Mexico.

Cholula, with its church where the altar was!  And the same
ponderousness, the same unspeakable sense of weight and downward
pressure of the blunt pyramid.  Down-sinking pressure and
depression.  And the great market-place with its lingering dread
and fascination.

Mitla under its hills, in the parched valley where a wind blows the
dust and the dead souls of the vanished race in terrible gusts.
The carved courts of Mitla, with a hard, sharp-angled, intricate
fascination, but the fascination of fear and repellence.  Hard,
four-square, sharp-edged, cutting, zig-zagging Mitla, like
continual blows of a stone axe.  Without gentleness or grace or
charm.  Oh America, with your unspeakable hard lack of charm, what
then is your final meaning?  Is it forever the knife of sacrifice,
as you put out your tongue at the world?

Charmless America!  With your hard, vindictive beauty, are you
waiting forever to smite death?  Is the world your everlasting
victim?

So long as it will let itself be victimized.

But yet!  But yet!  The gentle voices of the natives.  The voice of
the boys, like birds twittering among the trees of the plaza of
Tehuacan!  The soft touch, the gentleness.  Was it the dark-
fingered quietness of death, and the music of the presence of death
in their voices?

She thought again of what Don Ramón had said to her.

'They pull you down!  Mexico pulls you down, the people pull you
down like a great weight!  But it may be they pull you down as the
earth's pull of gravitation does, that you can balance on your
feet.  Maybe they draw you down as the earth draws down the roots
of a tree, so that it may be clinched deep in soil.  Men are still
part of the Tree of Life, and the roots go down to the centre of
the earth.  Loose leaves, and aeroplanes, blow away on the wind, in
what they call freedom.  But the Tree of Life has fixed, deep,
gripping roots.

'It may be you need to be drawn down, down, till you send roots
into the deep places again.  Then you can send up the sap and the
leaves back to the sky, later.

'And to me, the men in Mexico are like trees, forests that the
white men felled in their coming.  But the roots of the trees are
deep and alive and forever sending up new shoots.

'And each new shoot that comes up overthrows a Spanish church or an
American factory.  And soon the dark forest will rise again, and
shake the Spanish buildings from the face of America.

'All that matters to me are the roots that reach down beyond all
destruction.  The roots and the life are there.  What else it needs
is the word, for the forest to begin to rise again.  And some man
among men must speak the word.'

The strange doom-like sound of the man's words!  But in spite of
the sense of doom on her heart, she would not go away yet.  She
would stay longer in Mexico.



CHAPTER V

The Lake


Owen left, Villiers stayed on a few days to escort Kate to the
lake.  If she liked it there, and could find a house, she could
stay by herself.  She knew sufficient people in Mexico and in
Guadalajara to prevent her from being lonely.  But she still shrank
from travelling alone in this country.

She wanted to leave the city.  The new President had come in
quietly enough, but there was an ugly feeling of uppishness in the
lower classes, the bottom dog clambering mangily to the top.  Kate
was no snob.  Man or woman, she cared nothing about the social
class.  But meanness, sordidness she hated.  She hated bottom dogs.
They all were mangy, they all were full of envy and malice, many
had the rabies.  Ah no, let us defend ourselves from the bottom
dog, with its mean growl and its yellow teeth.

She had tea with Cipriano before leaving.

'How do you get along with the Government?' she asked.

'I stand for the law and the constitution,' he said.  'They know I
don't want anything to do with cuartelazos or revolutions.  Don
Ramón is my chief.'

'In what way?'

'Later, you will see.'

He had a secret, important to himself, on which he was sitting
tight.  But he looked at her with shining eyes, as much as to say
that soon she would share the secret, and then he would be much
happier.

He watched her curiously, from under his wary black lashes.  She
was one of the rather plump Irishwomen, with soft brown hair
and hazel eyes, and a beautiful, rather distant repose.  Her
great charm was her soft repose, and her gentle, unconscious
inaccessibility.  She was taller and bigger than Cipriano: he was
almost boyishly small.  But he was all energy, and his eyebrows
tilted black and with a barbarian conceit, above his full, almost
insolent black eyes.

He watched her continually, with a kind of fascination: the same
spell that the absurd little figures of the doll Madonna had cast
over him as a boy.  She was the mystery, and he the adorer, under
the semi-ecstatic spell of the mystery.  But once he rose from his
knees, he rose in the same strutting conceit of himself as before
he knelt: with all his adoration in his pocket again.  But he had a
good deal of magnetic power.  His education had not diminished it.
His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his
barbarian consciousness.  For this reason, the things he said were
hardly interesting at all.  Only what he WAS.  He made the air
around him seem darker, but richer and fuller.  Sometimes his
presence was extraordinarily grateful, like a healing of the blood.
And sometimes he was an intolerable weight on her.  She gasped to
get away from him.

'You think a great deal of Don Ramón?' she said to him.

'Yes,' he said, his black eyes watching her.  'He is a very fine
man.'

How trivial the words sounded!  That was another boring thing about
him: his English seemed so trivial.  He wasn't really expressing
himself.  He was only flipping at the white oil that lay on his
surface.

'You like him better than the Bishop, your god-father?'

He lifted his shoulders in a twisted, embarrassed shrug.

'The same!' he said.  'I like him the same.'

Then he looked away into the distance, with a certain hauteur and
insolence.

'Very different, no?' he said.  'But in some ways, the same.  He
knows better what is Mexico.  He knows better what I am.  Bishop
Severn did not know the real Mexico: how could he, he was a sincere
Catholic!  But Don Ramón knows the real Mexico, no?'

'And what is the real Mexico?' she asked.

'Well--you must ask Don Ramón.  I can't explain.'

She asked Cipriano about going to the lake.

'Yes!' he said.  'You can go!  You will like it.  Go first to
Orilla, no?--you take a ticket on the railway to Ixtlahuacan.  And
in Orilla is an hotel with a German manager.  Then from Orilla you
can go in a motor-boat, in a few hours, to Sayula.  And there you
will find a house to live in.'

He wanted her to do this, she could tell.

'How far is Don Ramón's hacienda from Sayula?' she asked.

'Near!  About an hour in a boat.  He is there now.  And at the
beginning of the month I am going with my division to Guadalajara:
now there is a new Governor.  So I shall be quite near too.'

'That will be nice,' she said.

'You think so?' he asked quickly.

'Yes,' she said, on her guard, looking at him slowly.  'I should be
sorry to lose touch with Don Ramón and you.'

He had a little tension on his brow, haughty, unwilling, conceited,
and at the same time, yearning and desirous.

'You like Don Ramón very much?' he said.  'You want to know him
more?'

There was a peculiar anxiety in his voice.

'Yes,' she said.  'One knows so few people in the world nowadays,
that one can respect--and fear a little.  I am a little afraid of
Don Ramón: and I have the GREATEST respect for him--'  She ended on
a hot note of sincerity.

'It is good!' he said.  'It is very good.  You may respect him more
than any other man in the world.'

'Perhaps that is true,' she said, turning her eyes slowly to his.

'Yes!  Yes!' he cried impatiently.  'It is true.  You will find out
later.  And Ramón likes you.  He told me to ask you to come to the
lake.  When you come to Sayula, when you are coming, write to him,
and no doubt he can tell you about a house, and all those things.'

'Shall I?' she said, hesitant.

'Yes.  Yes! of course, we say what we mean.'

Curious little man, with his odd, inflammable hauteur and conceit,
something burning inside him, that gave him no peace.  He had an
almost childish faith in the other man.  And yet she was not sure
that he did not, in some corner of his soul, resent Ramón somewhat.

Kate set off by the night train for the west, with Villiers.  The
one Pullman coach was full: people going to Guadalajara and Colima
and the coast.  There were three military officers, rather shy in
their new uniforms, and rather swaggering at the same time, making
eyes at the empty air, as if they felt they were conspicuous, and
sitting quickly in their seats, as if to obliterate themselves.
There were two country farmers or ranchers, in tight trousers and
cartwheel hats stitched with silver.  One was a tall man with a big
moustache, the other was a smaller, grey man.  But they both had
the handsome, alive legs of the Mexicans, and the rather quenched
faces.  There was a widow buried in crape, accompanied by a criada,
a maid.  The rest were townsmen, Mexicans on business, at once shy
and fussy, unobtrusive and self-important.

The Pullman was clean and neat, with its hot green-plush seats.
But, full of people, it seemed empty compared with a Pullman in the
United States.  Everybody was very quiet, very soft and guarded.
The farmers folded their beautiful serapes and laid them carefully
on the seats, sitting as if their section were a lonely little
place.  The officers folded their cloaks and arranged dozens of
little parcels, little cardboard hatboxes and heterogeneous
bundles, under the seats and on the seats.  The business men had
the oddest luggage, canvas hold-alls embroidered in wool, with
long, touching mottoes.

And in all the crowd a sense of guardedness and softness and self-
effacement: a curious soft sensibilité, touched with fear.  It was
already a somewhat conspicuous thing to travel in the Pullman; you
had to be on your guard.

The evening for once was grey: the rainy season really approaching.
A sudden wind whirled dust and a few spots of rain.  The train drew
out of the formless, dry, dust-smitten areas fringing the city, and
wound mildly on for a few minutes, only to stop in the main street
of Tacubaya, the suburb-village.  In the grey approach of evening
the train halted heavily in the street, and Kate looked out at the
men who stood in groups, with their hats tilted against the wind
and their blankets folded over their shoulders and up to their
eyes, against the dust, motionless, standing like sombre ghosts,
only a glint of eyes showing between the dark serape and the big
hat-brim; while donkey-drivers in a dust-cloud ran frantically,
with uplifted arms like demons, uttering short, sharp cries to
prevent their donkeys from poking in between the coaches of the
train.  Silent dogs trotted in-and-out under the train, women,
their faces wrapped in their blue rebozos, came to offer tortillas
folded in a cloth to keep them warm, or pulque in an earthenware
mug, or pieces of chicken smothered in red, thick, oily sauce; or
oranges or bananas or pitahayas, anything.  And when few people
bought, because of the dust, the women put their wares under their
arm, under the blue rebozo, and covered their faces and motionless
watched the train.

It was about six o'clock.  The earth was utterly dry and stale.
Somebody was kindling charcoal in front of a house.  Men were
hurrying down the wind, balancing their great hats curiously.
Horsemen on quick, fine little horses, guns slung behind, trotted
up to the train, lingered, then trotted quickly away again into
nowhere.

Still the train stood in the street.  Kate and Villiers got down.
They watched the sparks blowing from the charcoal which a little
girl was kindling in the street, to cook tortillas.

The train had a second-class coach and a first-class.  The second
class was jam-full of peasants, Indians, piled in like chickens
with their bundles and baskets and bottles, endless things.  One
woman had a fine peacock under her arm.  She put it down and in
vain tried to suppress it beneath her voluminous skirts.  It
refused to be suppressed.  She took it up and balanced it on her
knee and looked round again over the medley of jars, baskets,
pumpkins, melons, guns, bundles, and human beings.

In the front was a steel car with a guard of little scrubby
soldiers in their dirty cotton uniforms.  Some soldiers were
mounted on top of the train with their guns: the look-out.

And the whole train, seething with life, was curiously still,
subdued.  Perhaps it is the perpetual sense of danger which makes
the people so hushed, without clamour or stridency.  And with an
odd, hushed politeness among them.  A sort of demon-world.

At last the train moved on.  If it had waited forever, no one would
have been deeply surprised.  For what might not be ahead?  Rebels,
bandits, bridges blown up--anything.

However, quietly, stealthily, the train moved out and along the
great weary valley.  The circling mountains, so relentless, were
invisible save near at hand.  In a few broken adobe huts a bit of
fire sparked red.  The adobe was grey-black, of the lava dust,
depressing.  Into the distance the fields spread dry, with here and
there patches of green irrigation.  There was a broken hacienda
with columns that supported nothing.  Darkness was coming, dust
still blew in the shadow; the valley seemed encompassed in a dry,
stale, weary gloom.

Then there came a heavy shower.  The train was passing a pulque
hacienda.  The rows of the giant maguey stretched bristling their
iron-black barbs in the gloom.

All at once, the lights came on, the Pullman attendant came swiftly
lowering the blinds, so that the brilliance of the windows should
attract no bullets from the dark outside.

There was a poor little meal at exorbitant prices, and when this
was cleared away, the attendant came with a clash to make the beds,
pulling down the upper berths.  It was only eight o'clock, and the
passengers looked up in resentment.  But no good.  The pug-faced
Mexican in charge, and his smallpox-pitted assistant, insolently
came in between the seats, inserted the key overhead, and brought
down the berth with a crash.  And the Mexican passengers humbly
crawled away to the smoking-room or the toilet, like whipped dogs.

At half-past eight everybody was silently and with intense
discretion going to bed.  None of the collar-stud-snapping bustle
and 'homely' familiarity of the United States.  Like subdued
animals they all crept in behind their green serge curtains.

Kate hated a Pullman, the discreet indiscretion, the horrible
nearness of other people, like so many larvae in so many sections,
behind the green serge curtains.  Above all, the horrible intimacy
of the noise of going to bed.  She hated to undress, struggling in
the oven of her berth, with her elbow butting into the stomach of
the attendant who was buttoning up the green curtain outside.

And yet, once she was in bed and could put out her light and raise
the window-blind, she had to admit it was better than a wagon-lit
in Europe: and perhaps the best that can be done for people who
must travel through the night in trains.

There was a rather cold wind, after the rain, up there on that high
plateau.  The moon had risen, the sky was clear.  Rocks, and tall
organ cactus, and more miles of maguey.  Then the train stopped at
a dark little station on the rim of the slope, where men swathed in
dark serapes held dusky, ruddy lanterns that lit up no faces at
all, only dark gaps.  Why did the train stay so long?  Was
something wrong?

At last they were going again.  Under the moon she saw beyond her a
long downslope of rocks and cactus, and in the distance below, the
lights of a town.  She lay in her berth watching the train wind
slowly down the wild, rugged slope.  Then she dozed.

To wake at a station that looked like a quiet inferno, with dark
faces coming near the windows, glittering eyes in the half-light,
women in their rebozos running along the train balancing dishes of
meat, tamales, tortillas on one hand, black-faced men with fruit
and sweets, and all calling in a subdued, intense, hushed hubbub.
Strange and glaring, she saw eyes at the dark screen of the
Pullman, sudden hands thrusting up something to sell.  In fear,
Kate dropped her window.  The wire screen was not enough.

The platform below the Pullman was all dark.  But at the back of
the train she could see the glare of the first-class windows, on
the dark station.  And a man selling sweet-meats--Cajetas!
Cajetas!  La de Celaya!

She was safe inside the Pullman, with nothing to do but to listen
to an occasional cough behind the green curtains, and to feel the
faint bristling apprehension of all the Mexicans in their dark
berths.  The dark Pullman was full of a subdued apprehension, fear
lest there might be some attack on the train.

She went to sleep and woke at a bright station: probably Queretaro.
The green trees looked theatrical in the electric light.  Opales!
she heard the men calling softly.  If Owen had been there he would
have got up in his pyjamas to buy opals.  The call would have been
too strong.

She slept fitfully, in the shaken saloon, vaguely aware of stations
and the deep night of the open country.  Then she started from a
complete sleep.  The train was dead still, no sound.  Then a
tremendous jerking as the Pullman was shunted.  It must be
Irapuato, where they branched to the west.

She would arrive at Ixtlahuacan soon after six in the morning.  The
man woke her at daybreak, before the sun had risen.  Dry country
with mesquite bushes, in the dawn: then green wheat alternating
with ripe wheat.  And men already in the pale, ripened wheat
reaping with sickles, cutting short little handfuls from the short
straw.  A bright sky, with a bluish shadow on earth.  Parched
slopes with ragged maize stubble.  Then a forlorn hacienda and a
man on horseback, in a blanket, driving a silent flock of cows,
sheep, bulls, goats, lambs, rippling a bit ghostly in the dawn,
from under a tottering archway.  A long canal beside the railway, a
long canal paved with bright green leaves from which poked the
mauve heads of the lirio, the water hyacinth.  The sun was lifting
up, red.  In a moment it was the full, dazzling gold of a Mexican
morning.

Kate was dressed and ready, sitting facing Villiers, when they came
to Ixtlahuacan.  The man carried out her bags.  The train drifted
in to a desert of a station.  They got down.  It was a new day.

In the powerful light of morning, under a turquoise-blue sky, she
gazed at the helpless-looking station, railway lines, some standing
trucks, and a remote lifelessness.  A boy seized their bags and ran
across the lines to the station yard, which was paved with
cobblestones, but overgrown with weeds.  At one side stood an old
tram-car with two mules, like a relic.  One or two men, swathed up
to the eyes in scarlet blankets, were crossing on silent white
legs.

'Adonde?' said the boy.

But Kate went to see her big luggage taken out.  It was all there.

'Orilla Hotel,' said Kate.

The boy said they must go in the tram-car, so in the tram-car they
went.  The driver whipped his mules, they rolled in the still,
heavy morning light away down an uneven cobbled road with holes in
it, between walls with falling mortar and low, black adobe houses,
in the peculiar VACUOUS depression of a helpless little Mexican
town, towards the plaza.  The strange emptiness, everything empty
of life!

Occasional men on horseback clattered suddenly by, occasional big
men in scarlet serapes went noiselessly on their own way, under the
big hats.  A boy on a high mule was delivering milk from red globe-
shaped jars slung on either side his mount.  The street was stony,
uneven, vacuous, sterile.  The stones seemed dead, the town seemed
made of dead stone.  The human life came with a slow, sterile
unwillingness, in spite of the low-hung power of the sun.

At length they were in the plaza, where brilliant trees flowered in
a blaze of pure scarlet, and some in pure lavender, around the
basins of milk-looking water.  Milky-dim the water bubbled up in
the basins, and women, bleary with sleep, uncombed, came from under
the dilapidated arches of the portales, and across the broken
pavement, to fill their water-jars.

The tram stopped and they got down.  The boy got down with the
bags, and told them they must go to the river to take a boat.

They followed obediently down the smashed pavements, where every
moment you might twist your ankle or break your leg.  Everywhere
the same weary indifference and brokenness, a sense of dirt and of
helplessness, squalor of far-gone indifference, under the perfect
morning sky, in the pure sunshine and the pure Mexican air.  The
sense of life ebbing away, leaving dry ruin.

They came to the edge of the town, to a dusty, humped bridge, a
broken wall, a pale-brown stream flowing full.  Below the bridge a
cluster of men.

Each one wanted her to hire his boat.  She demanded a motor-boat:
the boat from the hotel.  They said there wasn't one.  She didn't
believe it.  Then a dark-faced fellow with his black hair down his
forehead, and a certain intensity in his eyes, said:  Yes, yes; the
hotel had a boat, but it was broken.  She must take a row-boat.  In
an hour and a half he would row her there.

'How long?' said Kate.

'An hour and a half.'

'And I am so hungry!' cried Kate.  'How much do you charge?'

'Two pesos.'  He held up two fingers.

Kate said yes, and he ran down to his boat.  Then she noticed he
was a cripple with inturned feet.  But how quick and strong!

She climbed with Villiers down the broken bank to the river, and in
a moment they were in the boat.  Pale green willow-trees fringed
from the earthen banks to the fuller-flowing, pale-brown water.
The river was not very wide, between deep banks.  They slipped
under the bridge, and past a funny high barge with rows of seats.
The boatman said it went up the river to Jocotlan: and he waved his
hand to show the direction.  They were slipping down-stream,
between lonely banks of willow-trees.

The crippled boatman was pulling hard, with great strength and
energy.  When she spoke to him in her bad Spanish and he found it
hard to understand, he knitted his brow a little, anxiously.  And
when she laughed he smiled at her with such a beautiful gentleness,
sensitive, wistful, quick.  She felt he was naturally honest and
truthful, and generous.  There was a beauty in these men, a wistful
beauty and a great physical strength.  Why had she felt so bitterly
about the country?

Morning was still young on the pale buff river, between the silent
earthen banks.  There was a blue dimness in the lower air, and
black water-fowl ran swiftly, unconcernedly back and forth from the
river's edge, on the dry, baked banks that were treeless now, and
wider.  They had entered a wide river, from the narrow one.  The
blueness and moistness of the dissolved night seemed to linger
under the scattered pepper-trees of the far shore.

The boatman rowed short and hard upon the flimsy, soft, sperm-like
water, only pausing at moments swiftly to smear the sweat from his
face with an old rag he kept on the bench beside him.  The sweat
ran from his bronze-brown skin like water, and the black hair on
his high-domed, Indian head smoked with wetness.

'There is no hurry,' said Kate, smiling to him.

'What does the Señorita say?'

'There is no hurry,' she repeated.

He paused, smiling, breathing deeply, and explained that now he was
rowing against stream.  This wider river flowed out of the lake,
full and heavy.  See! even as he rested a moment, the boat began to
turn and drift!  He quickly took his oars.

The boat moved slowly, in the hush of departed night, upon the
soft, full-flowing buff water, that carried little tufts of
floating water-hyacinth.  Some willow-trees stood near the edge,
and some pepper-trees of most delicate green foliage.  Beyond the
trees and the level of the shores, big hills rose up to high, blunt
points, baked incredibly dry, like biscuit.  The blue sky settled
against them nakedly; they were leafless and lifeless save for the
iron-green shafts of the organ cactus, that glistened blackly, yet
atmospherically, in the ochreous aridity.  This was Mexico again,
stark-dry and luminous with powerful light, cruel and unreal.

On a flat near the river a peon, perched on the rump of his ass,
was slowly driving five luxurious cows towards the water to drink.
The big black-and-white animals stepped in a dream-pace past the
pepper-trees to the bank, like moving pieces of light-and-shade:
the dun cows trailed after, in the incredible silence and
brilliance of the morning.

Earth, air, water were all silent with new light, the last blue of
night dissolving like a breath.  No sound, even no life.  The great
light was stronger than life itself.  Only, up in the blue, some
turkey-buzzards were wheeling with dirty-edged wings, as everywhere
in Mexico.

'Don't hurry!' Kate said again to the boatman, who was again
mopping his face, while his black hair ran sweat.  'We can go
slowly.'

The man smiled deprecatingly.

'If the Señorita will sit in the back,' he said.

Kate did not understand his request at first.  He had rowed in
towards a bend in the right bank, to be out of the current.  On the
left bank Kate had noticed some men bathing: men whose wet skins
flashed with the beautiful brown-rose colour and glitter of the
naked natives, and one stout man with the curious creamy-biscuit
skin of the city Mexicans.  Low against the water across-stream she
watched the glitter of naked men, half-immersed in the river.

She rose to step back into the stern of the boat, where Villiers
was.  As she did so, she saw a dark head and the flashing ruddy
shoulders of a man swimming towards the boat.  She wavered--and as
she was sitting down, the man stood up in the water and was wading
near, the water washing at the loose little cloth he had round his
loins.  He was smooth and wet and of a lovely colour, with the rich
smooth-muscled physique of the Indians.  He was coming towards the
boat, pushing back his hair from his forehead.

The boatman watched him, transfixed, without surprise, a little
subtle half-smile, perhaps of mockery, round his nose.  As if he
had expected it!

'Where are you going?' asked the man in the water, the brown river
running softly at his strong thighs.

The boatman waited a moment for his patrons to answer, then, seeing
they were silent, replied in a low, unwilling tone:

'Orilla.'

The man in the water took hold of the stern of the boat, as the
boatman softly touched the water with the oars to keep her
straight, and he threw back his longish black hair with a certain
effrontery.

'Do you know whom the lake belongs to?' he asked, with the same
effrontery.

'What do you say?' asked Kate, haughtily.

'If you know whom the lake belongs to?' the young man in the water
repeated.

'To whom?' said Kate, flustered.

'To the old gods of Mexico,' the stranger said.  'You have to make
a tribute to Quetzalcoatl if you go on the lake.'

The strange calm effrontery of it!  But truly Mexican.

'How?' said Kate.

'You can give me something,' he said.

'But why should I give something to you, if it is a tribute to
Quetzalcoatl?' she stammered.

'I am Quetzalcoatl's man, I,' he replied, with calm effrontery.

'And if I don't give you anything?' she said.

He lifted his shoulders and spread his free hand, staggering a
little, losing his footing in the water as he did so.

'If you wish to make an enemy of the lake--' he said, coolly, as he
recovered his balance.

And then for the first time he looked straight at her.  And as he
did so, the demonish effrontery died down again, and the peculiar
American tension slackened and left him.

He gave a slight wave of dismissal with his free hand, and pushed
the boat gently forward.

'But it doesn't matter,' he said, with a slight insolent jerk of
his head sideways, and a faint, insolent smile.  'We will wait till
the Morning Star rises.'

The boatman softly but powerfully pulled the oars.  The man in the
water stood with the sun on his powerful chest, looking after the
boat in half-seeing abstraction.  His eyes had taken again the
peculiar gleaming far-awayness, suspended between the realities,
which, Kate suddenly realized, was the central look in the native
eyes.  The boatman, rowing away, was glancing back at the man who
stood in the water, and his face, too, had the abstracted,
transfigured look of a man perfectly suspended between the world's
two strenuous wings of energy.  A look of extraordinary, arresting
beauty, the silent, vulnerable centre of all life's quivering, like
the nucleus gleaming in tranquil suspense, within a cell.

'What does he mean,' said Kate, 'by "We will wait till the Morning
Star rises"?'

The man smiled slowly.

'It is a name,' he said.

And he seemed to know no more.  But the symbolism had evidently the
power to soothe and sustain him.

'Why did he come and speak to us?' asked Kate.

'He is one of those of the god Quetzalcoatl, Señorita.'

'And you? are you one too?'

'Who knows!' said the man, putting his head on one side.  Then he
added:  'I think so.  We are many.'

He watched Kate's face with that gleaming, intense semi-
abstraction, a gleam that hung unwavering in his black eyes, and
which suddenly reminded Kate of the morning star, or the evening
star, hanging perfect between night and the sun.

'You have the morning star in your eyes,' she said to the man.

He flashed her a smile of extraordinary beauty.

'The Señorita understands,' he said.

His face changed again to a dark-brown mask, like semi-transparent
stone, and he rowed with all his might.  Ahead, the river was
widening, the banks were growing lower, down to the water's level,
like shoals planted with willow-trees and with reeds.  Above the
willow-trees a square white sail was standing, as if erected on the
land.

'Is the lake so near?' said Kate.

The man hastily mopped his running wet face.

'Yes, Señorita!  The sailing-boats are waiting for the wind, to
come into the river.  We will pass by the canal.'

He indicated with a backward movement of the head a narrow,
twisting passage of water between deep reeds.  It made Kate think
of the little river Anapo: the same mystery unbroken.  The boatman,
with creases half of sadness and half of exaltation in his bronze,
still face, was pulling with all his might.  Water-fowl went
swimming into the reeds, or rose on wing and wheeled into the blue
air.  Some willow-trees hung a dripping, vivid green, in the stark
dry country.  The stream was narrow and winding.  With a nonchalant
motion, first of the right then of the left hand, Villiers was
guiding the boatman, to keep him from running aground in the
winding, narrow water-way.

And this put Villiers at his ease, to have something practical and
slightly mechanical to do and to assert.  He was striking the
American note once more, of mechanical dominance.

All the other business had left him incomprehending, and when he
asked Kate, she had pretended not to hear him.  She sensed a
certain delicate, tender mystery in the river, in the naked man in
the water, in the boatman, and she could not bear to have it
subjected to the tough American flippancy.  She was weary to death
of American automatism and American flippant toughness.  It gave
her a feeling of nausea.

'Quite a well-built fellow, that one who laid hold of the boat.
What did he want, anyway?' Villiers insisted.

'Nothing!' said Kate.

They were slipping out past the clay-coloured, loose stony edges of
the land, through a surge of ripples, into the wide white light of
the lake.  A breeze was coming from the east, out of the upright
morning, and the surface of the shallow, flimsy, dun-coloured water
was in motion.  Shoal-water rustled near at hand.  Out to the open,
large, square white sails were stepping gingerly forward, and
beyond the buff-coloured, pale desert of water rose far-away blue,
sharp hills of the other side, many miles away, pure pale blue with
distance, yet sharp-edged and clear in form.

'Now,' said the boatman, smiling to Kate, 'it is easier.  Now we
are out of the current.'

He pulled rhythmically through the frail-rippling, sperm-like
water, with a sense of peace.  And for the first time Kate felt she
had met the mystery of the natives, the strange and mysterious
gentleness between a scylla and a charybdis of violence; the small
poised, perfect body of the bird that waves wings of thunder and
wings of fire and night in its flight.  But central between the
flash of day and the black of night, between the flash of lightning
and the break of thunder, the still, soft body of the bird poised
and soaring, forever.  The mystery of the evening-star brilliant in
silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun
and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night.  The magnificence
of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and
the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites.

This kind of frail, pure sympathy, she felt at the moment between
herself and the boatman, between herself and the man who had spoken
from the water.  And she was not going to have it broken by
Villiers' American jokes.

There was a sound of breaking water.  The boatman drew away, and
pointed across to where a canoa, a native sailing-boat, was lying
at an angle.  She had run aground in a wind, and now must wait till
another wind would carry her off the submerged bank again.  Another
boat was coming down the breeze, steering cautiously among the
shoals, for the river outlet.  She was piled high with petates, the
native leaf mats, above her hollowed black sides.  And bare-legged
men with loose white drawers rolled up, and brown chests showing,
were running with poles as the shallows heaved up again, pushing
her off, and balancing their huge hats with small, bird-like shakes
of the head.

Beyond the boats, seawards, were rocks outcropping and strange
birds like pelicans standing in silhouette, motionless.

They had been crossing a bay of the lake-shore, and were nearing
the hotel.  It stood on a parched dry bank above the pale-brown
water, a long, low building amid a tender green of bananas and
pepper-trees.  Everywhere the shores rose up pale and cruelly dry,
dry to cruelty, and on the little hills the dark statues of the
organ cactus poised in nothingness.

There was a broken-down landing-place, and a boat-house in the
distance, and someone in white flannel trousers was standing on the
broken masonry.  Upon the filmy water ducks and black water-fowl
bobbed like corks.  The bottom was stony.  The boatman suddenly
backed the boat, and pulled round.  He pushed up his sleeve and
hung over the bows, reaching into the water.  With a quick motion
he grabbed something, and scrambled into the boat again.  He was
holding in the pale-skinned hollow of his palm a little earthenware
pot, crusted by the lake deposit.

'What is it?' she said.

'Ollita of the gods,' he said.  'Of the old dead gods.  Take it,
Señorita.'

'You must let me pay for it,' she said.

'No, Señorita.  It is yours,' said the man, with that sensitive,
masculine sincerity which comes sometimes so quickly from a native.

It was a little, rough round pot with protuberances.

'Look!' said the man, reaching again for the little pot.  He turned
it upside-down, and she saw cut-in eyes and the sticking-out ears
of an animal's head.

'A cat!' she exclaimed.  'It is a cat.'

'Or a coyote!'

'A coyote!'

'Let's look!' said Villiers.  'Why, how awfully interesting!  Do
you think it's old?'

'It is old?' Kate asked.

'The time of the old gods,' said the boatman.  Then with a sudden
smile:  'The dead gods don't eat much rice, they only want little
casseroles while they are bone under the water.'  And he looked her
in the eyes.

'While they are bone?' she repeated.  And she realized he meant the
skeletons of gods that cannot die.

They were at the landing-stage; or rather, at the heap of collapsed
masonry which had once been a landing-stage.  The boatman got out
and held the boat steady while Kate and Villiers landed.  Then he
scrambled up with the bags.

The man in white trousers, and a mozo appeared.  It was the hotel
manager.  Kate paid the boatman.

'Adiós, Señorita!' he said with a smile.  'May you go with
Quetzalcoatl.'

'Yes!' she cried.  'Good-bye!'

They went up the slope between the tattered bananas, whose ragged
leaves were making a hushed, distant patter in the breeze.  The
green fruit curved out its bristly-soft bunch, the purple flower-
bud depending stiffly.

The German manager came to talk to them: a young man of about
forty, with his blue eyes going opaque and stony behind his
spectacles, though the centres were keen.  Evidently a German who
had been many years out in Mexico--out in the lonely places.  The
rather stiff look, the slight look of fear in the SOUL--not
physical fear--and the look of defeat, characteristic of the
European who has long been subjected to the unbroken spirit of
place!  But the defeat was in the soul, not the will.

He showed Kate to her room in the unfinished quarter, and ordered
her breakfast.  The hotel consisted of an old low ranch-house with
a veranda--and this was the dining-room, lounge, kitchen, and
office.  Then there was a two-storey new wing, with a smart
bathroom between each two bedrooms, and almost up-to-date fittings:
very incongruous.

But the new wing was unfinished--had been unfinished for a dozen
years and more, the work abandoned when Porfirio Diaz fled.  Now it
would probably never be finished.

And this is Mexico.  Whatever pretentiousness and modern
improvements it may have, outside the capital, they are either
smashed or raw and unfinished, with rusty bones of iron girders
sticking out.

Kate washed her hands and went down to breakfast.  Before the long
veranda of the old ranch-house the green pepper-trees dropped like
green light, and small cardinal birds with scarlet bodies and
blazing impertinent heads like poppy-buds flashed among the pinkish
pepper-heads, closing their brown wings upon the audacity of their
glowing redness.  A train of geese passed in the glaring sun,
automatic, towards the eternal tremble of pale, earth-coloured
water beyond the stones.

It was a place with a strange atmosphere: stony, hard, broken, with
round cruel hills and the many-fluted bunches of the organ-cactus
behind the old house, and an ancient road trailing past, deep in
ancient dust.  A touch of mystery and cruelty, the stoniness of
fear, a lingering, cruel sacredness.

Kate loitered hungrily, and was glad when the Mexican in shirt-
sleeves and patched trousers, another lingering remnant of Don
Porfirio's day, brought her her eggs and coffee.

He was muted as everything about the place seemed muted, even the
very stones and the water.  Only those poppies on wing, the
cardinal birds, gave a sense of liveliness: and they were uncanny.

So swiftly one's moods changed!  In the boat she had glimpsed the
superb rich stillness of the morning-star, the poignant
intermediate flashing its quiet between the energies of the cosmos.
She had seen it in the black eyes of the natives, in the sunrise of
the man's rich, still body, Indian-warm.

And now again already the silence was of vacuity, arrest, and
cruelty: the uncanny empty unbearableness of many Mexican mornings.
Already she was uneasy, suffering from the malaise which tortures
one inwardly in that country of cactuses.

She went up to her room, pausing at the corridor window to look out
at the savage little hills that stood at the back of the hotel in
desiccated heaps, with the dark-green bulks of organ-cactus
sticking up mechanically and sinister, sombre in all the glare.
Grey ground-squirrels like rats slithered ceaselessly around.
Sinister, strangely dark and sinister, in the great glare of the
sun!

She went to her room to be alone.  Below her window, in the bricks
and fallen rubble of unfinished masonry, a huge white turkey-cock,
dim-white, strutted with his brown hens.  And sometimes he
stretched out his pink wattles and gave vent to fierce, powerful
turkey-yelps, like some strong dog yelping; or else he ruffled all
his feathers like a great, soiled white peony, and chuffed, hissing
here and there, raging the metal of his plumage.

Below him, the eternal tremble of pale-earth, unreal waters, far
beyond which rose the stiff resistance of mountains losing their
pristine blue.  Distinct, frail distances far off on the dry air,
dim-seeing, yet sharp and edged with menace.

Kate took her bath in the filmy water that was hardly like water at
all.  Then she went and sat on the collapsed masonry, in the shade
of the boat-house below.  Small white ducks bobbed about on the
shallow water below her, or dived, raising clouds of submarine
dust.  A canoe came paddling in; a lean fellow with sinewy brown
legs.  He answered Kate's nod with the aloof promptness of an
Indian, made fast his canoe inside the boat-house, and was gone,
stepping silent and barefoot over the bright green water-stones,
and leaving a shadow, cold as flint, on the air behind him.

No sound on the morning save a faint touching of water, and the
occasional powerful yelping of the turkey-cock.  Silence, an
aboriginal, empty silence, as of life WITHHELD.  The vacuity of a
Mexican morning.  Resounding sometimes to the turkey-cock.

And the great, lymphatic expanse of water, like a sea, trembling,
trembling, trembling to a far distance, to the mountains of
substantial nothingness.

Near at hand, a ragged shifting of banana-trees, bare hills with
immobile cactus, and to the left, an hacienda with peon's square
mud boxes of houses.  An occasional ranchero in skintight trousers
and big hat rode trotting through the dust on a small horse, or
peons on the rump of their asses, in floppy white cotton, going
like ghosts.

Always something ghostly.  The morning passing all of a piece,
empty, vacuous.  All sound withheld, all life withheld, everything
HOLDING BACK.  The land so dry as to have a quality of invisibility,
the water earth-filmy, hardly water at all.  The lymphatic milk
of fishes, somebody said.



CHAPTER VI

The Move Down the Lake


In Porfirio Diaz' day, the lake-side began to be the Riviera of
Mexico, and Orilla was to be the Nice, or at least the Mentone of
the country.  But revolutions started erupting again, and in 1911
Don Porfirio fled to Paris with, it is said, thirty million gold
pesos in his pocket: a peso being half a dollar, nearly half-a-
crown.  But we need not believe all that is said, especially by a
man's enemies.

During the subsequent revolutions, Orilla, which had begun to be a
winter paradise for the Americans, lapsed back into barbarism and
broken brickwork.  In 1921 a feeble new start had been made.

The place belonged to a German-Mexican family, who also owned the
adjacent hacienda.  They acquired the property from the American
Hotel Company, who had undertaken to develop the lake-shore, and
who had gone bankrupt during the various revolutions.

The German-Mexican owners were not popular with the natives.  An
angel from heaven would not have been popular, these years, if he
had been known as the owner of property.  However, in 1921 the
hotel was very modestly opened again, with an American manager.

Towards the end of the year, José, son of the German-Mexican owner,
came to stay with his wife and children in the hotel, in the new
wing.  José was a bit of a fool, as most foreigners are, after the
first generation in Mexico.  Having business to settle, he went
into Guadalajara to the bank and returned with a thousand gold
pesos in a bag, keeping the matter, as he thought, a dead secret.

Everyone had just gone to bed, on a brilliant moonlight night in
winter, when two men appeared in the yard calling for José: they
had to speak to him.  José, suspecting nothing, left his wife and
two children, and went down.  In a moment he called for the
American manager.  The manager, thinking it was some bargaining to
be done, also came down.  As he came out of the door, two men
seized him by the arms, and said:  'Don't make a noise!'

'What's amiss?' said Bell, who had built up Orilla, and had been
twenty years on the lake.

Then he noticed that two other men had hold of José.  'Come,' they
said.

There were five Mexicans--Indians, or half-Indians--and the two
captives.  They went, the captives in slippers and shirtsleeves, to
the little office away at the end of the other part of the hotel,
which had been the old ranch-house.

'What do you want?' asked Bell.

'Give us the money,' said the bandits.

'Oh, all right,' said the American.  There were a few pesos only in
the safe.  He opened, showed them, and they took the money.

'Now give us the rest,' they said.

'There is no more,' said the manager, in all sincerity; for José
had not confessed to the thousand pesos.

The five peons then began to search the poor little office.  They
found a pile of red blankets--which they appropriated--and a few
bottles of red wine--which they drank.

'Now,' they said, 'give us the money.'

'I can't give you what there isn't to give,' said the manager.

'Good!' they said, and pulled out the hideous machetes, the heavy
knives of the Mexicans.

José, intimidated, produced the suit-case with the thousand pesos.
The money was wrapped up in the corner of a blanket.

'Now, come with us,' said the bandits.

'Where to?' asked the manager, beginning at last to be scared.

'Only out on to the hill, where we will leave you, so that you
cannot telephone to Ixtlahuacan before we have time to get away,'
said the Indians.

Outside, in the bright moon, the air was chill.  The American
shivered, in his trousers and shirt and a pair of bedroom slippers.

'Let me take a coat,' he said.

'Take a blanket,' said the tall Indian.

He took a blanket, and with two men holding his arms, he followed
José, who was likewise held captive, out of the little gate, across
the dust of the road, and up the steep little round hill on which
the organ cactus thrust up their sinister clumps, like bunches of
cruel fingers, in the moonlight.  The hill was stony and steep, the
going slow.  José, a fat young man of twenty-eight, protested in
the feeble manner of the well-to-do Mexicans.

At last they came to the top of the hill.  Three men took José
apart, leaving Bell alone near a cactus clump.  The moon shone in a
perfect Mexican heaven.  Below, the big lake glimmered faintly,
stretching its length towards the west.  The air was so clear, the
mountains across, thirty miles away, stood sharp and still in the
moonlight.  And not a sound nor a motion anywhere!  At the foot of
the hill was the hacienda, with the peons asleep in their huts.
But what help was there in them?

José and the three men had gone behind a cactus-tree that stuck up
straight like a great black bundle of poles, poised on one central
foot, and cast a sharp, iron shadow.  The American could hear the
voices, talking low and rapidly, but could not distinguish the
words.  His two guards drew away from him a little, to hear what
the others were saying, behind the cactus.

And the American, who knew the ground he stood on and the sky that
hung over him, felt again the black vibration of death in the air,
the black thrill of the death-lust.  Unmistakable he felt it
seething in the air, as any man may feel it, in Mexico.  And the
strange aboriginal fiendishness, awake now in the five bandits,
communicated itself to his blood.

Loosening his blanket, he listened tensely in the moonlight.  And
came the thud! thud! thud! of a machete striking with lust in a
human body, then the strange voice of José:  'Perdóneme!--Forgive
me!' the murdered man cried as he fell.

The American waited for no more.  Dropping his blanket, he jumped
for the cactus cover, and stooping, took the down-slope like a
rabbit.  The pistol-shots rang out after him, but the Mexicans
don't as a rule take good aim.  His bedroom slippers flew off, and
barefoot, the man, thin and light, sped down over the stones and
the cactus, down to the hotel.

When he got down, he found everyone in the hotel awake and
shouting.

'They are killing José!' he said, and he rushed to the telephone,
expecting every moment the five bandits would be on him.

The telephone was in the old ranch-building, in the dining-room.
There was no answer--no answer--no answer.  In her little bedroom
over the kitchen, the cook-woman, the traitress, was yelling.
Across in the new wing, a little distance away, José's Mexican wife
was screaming.  One of the servant boys appeared.

'Try and get the police in Ixtlahuacan,' said the American, and he
ran to the new wing, to get his gun and to barricade the doors.
His daughter, a motherless girl, was crying with Jose's wife.

There was no answer on the telephone.  At dawn, the cook, who said
the bandits would not hurt a woman, went across to the hacienda to
fetch the peons.  And when the sun rose, a man was sent for the
police.

They found the body of José, pierced with fourteen holes.  The
American was carried to Ixtlahuacan, and kept in bed, having cactus
spines dug out of his feet by two native women.

The bandits fled across the marshes.  Months later, they were
identified by the stolen blankets, away in Michoacan; and, pursued,
one of them betrayed the others.

After this, the hotel was closed again, and had been reopened only
three months when Kate arrived.

But Villiers came with another story.  Last year the peons had
murdered the manager of one of the estates across the lake.  They
had stripped him and left him naked on his back, with his sexual
organs cut off and put into his mouth, his nose slit and pinned
back, the two halves, to his cheeks, with long cactus spines.

'Tell me no more!' said Kate.

She felt there was doom written on the very sky, doom and horror.

She wrote to Don Ramón in Sayula, saying she wanted to go back to
Europe.  True, she herself had seen no horrors, apart from the
bull-fight.  And she had had some exquisite moments, as coming to
this hotel in the boat.  The natives had a certain mystery and
beauty, to her.  But she could not bear the unease, and the latest
sense of horror.

True, the peons were poor.  They used to work for twenty cents,
American, a day; and now the standard price was fifty cents, or one
peso.  But then in the old days they received their wage all the
year round.  Now, only at harvest time or sowing time.  No work, no
pay.  And in the long dry season, it was mostly no work.

'Still,' said the German manager of the hotel, a man who had run a
rubber plantation in Tabasco, a sugar plantation in the state of
Vera Cruz, and an hacienda growing wheat, maize, oranges, in
Jalisco: 'still, it isn't a question of money with the peons.  It
doesn't start with the peons.  It starts in Mexico City, with a lot
of malcontents who want to put their spoke in the wheel, and who
lay hold of pious catchwords, to catch the poor.  There's no more
in it than that.  Then the agitators go round and infect the peons.
It is nothing but a sort of infectious disease, like syphilis, all
this revolution and socialism.'

'But why does no one oppose it,' said Kate.  'Why don't the
hacendados put up a fight, instead of caving in and running away?'

'The Mexican HACENDADO!'  The man's German eyes gave out a spark.
'The Mexican GENTLEMAN is such a brave man, that while the soldier
is violating his wife on the bed, he is hiding under the bed and
holding his breath so they shan't find him.  He's as brave as
that.'

Kate looked away uncomfortably.

'They all want the United States to intervene.  They hate the
Americans; but they want the United States to intervene, to save
them their money and their property.  That's how brave they are!
They hate the Americans personally, but they love them because they
can look after money and property.  So they want the United States
to annex Mexico, the beloved patria; leaving the marvellous green
and white and red flag, and the eagle with the snake in its claws,
for the sake of appearances and HONOUR!  They're simply bottled
full of honour; of that sort.'

Always the same violence of bitterness, Kate thought to-herself.
And she was so weary of it.  How, how weary she was of politics, of
the very words 'Labour' and 'SOCIALISM!' and all that sort!  It
suffocated her.

'Have you heard of the men of Quetzalcoatl?' asked Kate.

'Quetzalcoatl!' exclaimed the manager, giving a little click of the
final 'l', in a peculiar native fashion.  'That's another try-on of
the Bolshevists.  They thought socialism needed a god, so they're
going to fish him out of this lake.  He'll do for another pious
catchword in another revolution.'

The man went away, unable to stand any more.

'Oh dear!' thought Kate.  'It really is hard to bear.'

But she wanted to hear more of Quetzalcoatl.

'Did you know,' she said to the man later, showing him the little
pot, 'that they find those things in the lake?'

'They're common enough!' he said.  'They used to throw them in, in
the idolatrous days.  May still do so, for what I know.  Then get
them out again to sell to tourists.'

'They call them ollitas of Quetzalcoatl.'

'That's a new invention.'

'Why, do you think?'

'They're trying to start a new thing, that's all.  They've got this
society on the lake here, of the Men of Quetzalcoatl, and they go
round singing songs.  It's another dodge for national-socialism,
that's all.'

'What do they do, the Men of Quetzalcoatl?'

'I can't see they do anything, except talk and get excited over
their own importance.'

'But what's the idea?'

'I couldn't say.  Don't suppose they have any.  But if they have,
they won't let on to you.  You're a gringo--or a gringita, at the
best.  And this is for pure Mexicans.  For los señores, the
workmen, and los caballeros, the peons.  Every peon is a caballero
nowadays, and every workman is a señor.  So I suppose they're going
to get themselves a special god, to put the final feather in their
caps.'

'Where did it start, the Quetzalcoatl thing?'

'Down in Sayula.  They say Don Ramón Carrasco is at the back of it.
Maybe he wants to be the next President--or maybe he's aiming
higher, and wants to be the first Mexican Pharaoh.'

Ah, how tired it made Kate feel; the hopelessness, the ugliness,
the cynicism, the emptiness.  She felt she could cry aloud, for the
unknown gods to put the magic back into her life, and to save her
from the dry-rot of the world's sterility.

She thought again of going back to Europe.  But what was the good?
She knew it!  It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or
sordid spiritualism.  And the magic had gone.  The younger
generation, so smart and INTERESTING, but so without any mystery,
any background.  The younger the generation, the flatter and more
jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

No, she could not go back to Europe.

And no!  She refused to take the hotel manager's estimate of
Quetzalcoatl.  How should a hotel manager judge?--even if he was
not really an hotel manager, but a ranch-overseer.  She had see
Ramón Carrasco, and Cipriano.  And they were men.  They wanted
something beyond.  She would believe in them.  Anything, anything
rather than this sterility of nothingness which was the world, and
into which her life was drifting.

She would send Villiers away, too.  He was nice, she liked him.
But he, too, was widdershins, unwinding the sensations of
disintegration and anti-life.  No, she must send him away.  She
must, she must free herself from these mechanical connections.

Every one of them, like Villiers, was like a cog-wheel in contact
with which all one's workings were reversed.  Everything he said,
everything he did, reversed her real life-flow, made her go against
the sun.

And she did not want to go against the sun.  After all, in spite of
the horrors latent in Mexico, when you got these dark-faced people
away from wrong contacts like agitators and socialism, they made
one feel that life was vast, if fearsome, and death was fathomless.

Horrors might burst out of them.  But something must burst out,
sometimes, if men are not machines.

No! no! no! no! no! she cried to her own soul.  Let me still
believe in some human contact.  Let it not be all cut off for me!

But she made up her mind to be alone, and to cut herself off from
all the mechanical widdershin contacts.  Villiers must go back to
his United States.  She would be alone in her own milieu.  Not to
be touched by any, any of the mechanical cogwheel people.  To be
left alone, not to be touched.  To hide, and be hidden, and never
really be spoken to.

Yet, at the same time, with her blood flowing softly sunwise, to
let the sunwise sympathy of unknown people steal in to her.  To
shut doors of iron against the mechanical world.  But to let the
sunwise world steal across to her, and add its motion to her, the
motion of the stress of life, with the big sun and the stars like a
tree holding out its leaves.

She wanted an old Spanish house, with its inner patio of flowers
and water.  Turned inwards, to the few flowers walled in by shadow.
To turn one's back on the cog-wheel world.  Not to look out any
more on to that horrible machine of the world.  To look at one's
own quiet little fountain and one's own little orange-trees, with
only heaven above.

So, having soothed her heart, she wrote Don Ramón again, that she
was coming to Sayula to look for a house.  She sent Villiers away.
And the next day she set off with a man-servant, in the old motor-
boat of the hotel, down to the village of Sayula.

It was thirty-five miles to travel, down the long lake.  But the
moment she set off, she felt at peace.  A tall, dark-faced fellow
sat in the stern of the boat, steering and attending to the motor.
She sat on cushions in the middle.  And the young manservant
perched in the prow.

They started before sunrise, when the lake was bathed in motionless
light.  Odd tufts of water-hyacinth were travelling on the soft
spermy water, holding up a green leaf like a little sail of a boat,
and nodding a delicate, mauve-blue flower.

Give me the mystery and let the world live again for me! Kate cried
to her own soul.  And deliver me from man's automatism.

The sun rose, and a whiteness of light played on the tops of the
mountains.  The boat hugged the north shore, turning the promontory
on which the villas had started so jauntily, twenty years ago, but
now were lapsing back to wilderness.  All was still and motionless
in the light.  Sometimes on the little bare patches high up on the
dry hills were white specks; birds?  No, men in their white cotton,
peons hoeing.  They were so tiny and so distinct, they looked like
white birds settled.

Round the bend were the hot springs, the church, the inaccessible
village of the pure Indians, who spoke no Spanish.  There were some
green trees, under the precipitous, dry mountain-side.

So on and on, the motor-boat chugging incessantly, the man in the
bows coiled up like a serpent, watching; the fish-milk water
gleaming and throwing off a dense light, so that the mountains away
across were fused out.  And Kate, under the awning, went into a
kind of sleep.

They were passing the island, with its ruins of fortress and
prison.  It was all rock and dryness, with great broken walls and
the shell of a church among its hurtful stones and its dry grey
herbage.  For a long time the Indians had defended it against the
Spaniards.  Then the Spaniards used the island as a fortress
against the Indians.  Later, as a penal settlement.  And now the
place was a ruin, repellent, full of scorpions, and otherwise empty
of life.  Only one or two fishermen lived in the tiny cove facing
the mainland, and a flock of goats, specks of life creeping among
the rocks.  And an unhappy fellow put there by the Government to
register the weather.

No, Kate did not want to land.  The place looked too sinister.  She
took food from the basket, and ate a little lunch, and dozed.

In this country she was afraid.  But it was her soul more than her
body that knew fear.  She had realized, for the first time, with
finality and fatality, what was the illusion she laboured under.
She had thought that each individual had a complete self, a
complete soul, an accomplished I.  And now she realized as plainly
as if she had turned into a new being, that this was not so.  Men
and women had incomplete selves, made up of bits assembled together
loosely and somewhat haphazard.  Man was not created ready-made.
Men to-day were half-made, and women were half-made.  Creatures
that existed and functioned with certain regularity, but which ran
off into a hopeless jumble of inconsequence.

Half-made, like insects that can run fast and be so busy and
suddenly grow wings, but which are only winged grubs after all.  A
world full of half-made creatures on two legs, eating food and
degrading the one mystery left to them, sex.  Spinning a great lot
of words, burying themselves inside the cocoons of words and ideas
that they spin round themselves, and inside the cocoons, mostly
perishing inert and overwhelmed.

Half-made creatures, rarely more than half-responsible and half-
accountable, acting in terrible swarms, like locusts.

Awful thought!  And with a collective insect-like will, to avoid
the responsibility of achieving any more perfected being or
identity.  The queer, rabid hate of being urged on into purer self.
The morbid fanaticism of the non-integrate.

In the great seething light of the lake, with the terrible blue-
ribbed mountains of Mexico beyond, she seemed swallowed by some
grisly skeleton, in the cage of his death-anatomy.  She was afraid,
mystically, of the man crouching there in the bows with his smooth
thighs and supple loins like a snake, and his black eyes watching.
A half-being, with a will to disintegration and death.  And the
tall man behind her at the tiller, he had the curious smoke-grey
phosphorus eyes under black lashes sometimes met among the Indians.
Handsome, he was, and quiet and seemingly self-contained.  But with
that peculiar devilish half-smile lurking under his face, the half-
jeering look of a part-thing, which knows its power to destroy the
purer thing.

And yet, Kate told herself, both these men were manly fellows.
They would not molest her, unless she communicated the thought to
them, and by a certain cowardliness, prompted them.  Their souls
were nascent, there was no fixed evil in them, they could sway both
ways.

So in her soul she cried aloud to the greater mystery, the higher
power that hovered in the interstices of the hot air, rich and
potent.  It was as if she could lift her hands and clutch the
silent, stormless potency that roved everywhere, waiting.  'Come
then!' she said, drawing a long slow breath, and addressing the
silent life-breath which hung unrevealed in the atmosphere,
waiting.

And as the boat ran on, and her fingers rustled in the warm water
of the lake, she felt the fulness descend into her once more, the
peace, and the power.  The fulfilment filling her soul like the
fulness of ripe grapes.  And she thought to herself:  'Ah, how
wrong I have been, not to turn sooner to the other presence, not to
take the life-breath sooner!  How wrong to be afraid of these two
men.'

She did what she had been half-afraid to do before; she offered
them the oranges and sandwiches still in the basket.  And each of
the men looked at her, the smoke-grey eyes looked her in the eyes,
and the black eyes looked her in the eyes.  And the man with the
smoke-grey eyes, who was cunninger than the other man, but also
prouder, said to her with his eyes:  We are living!  I know your
sex, and you know mine.  The mystery we are glad not to meddle
with.  You leave me my natural honour, and I thank you for the
grace.

In his look, so quick and proud, and in his quiet Muchas gracias!
she heard the touch of male recognition, a man glad to retain his
honour, and to feel the communion of grace.  Perhaps it was the
Spanish word Gracias!  But in her soul she was thinking of the
communion of grace.

With the black-eyed man it was the same.  He was humbler.  But as
he peeled his orange and dropped the yellow peel on the water, she
could see the stillness, the humility, and the pathos of grace in
him; something very beautiful and truly male, and very hard to find
in a civilized white man.  It was not of the spirit.  It was of the
dark, strong, unbroken blood, the flowering of the soul.

Then she thought to herself:  After all, it is good to be here.  It
is very good to be in this boat on this lake with these two silent,
semi-barbarous men.  They can receive the gift of grace, and we can
share it like a communion, they and I.  I am very glad to be here.
It is so much better than love: the love I knew with Joachim.  This
is the fulness of the vine.

'Sayula!' said the man in the bows, pointing ahead.

She saw, away off, a place where there were green trees, where the
shore was flat, and a biggish building stood out.

'What is the building?' she asked.

'The railway station.'

She was suitably impressed, for it was a new-looking, imposing
structure.

A little steamer was smoking, lying off from a wooden jetty in the
loneliness, and black, laden boats were poling out to her, and
merging back to shore.  The vessel gave a hoot, and slowly yet
busily set off on the bosom of the water, heading in a slanting
line across the lake, to which the tiny high white twin-towers of
Tuliapán showed above the water-line, tiny and far-off, on the
other side.

They had passed the jetty, and rounding the shoal where the willows
grew, she could see Sayula; white fluted twin-towers of the church,
obelisk shaped above the pepper-trees; beyond, a mound of a hill
standing alone, dotted with dry bushes, distinct and Japanese-
looking; beyond this, the corrugated, blue-ribbed, flat-flanked
mountains of Mexico.

It looked peaceful, delicate, almost Japanese.  As she drew nearer
she saw the beach with the washing spread on the sand; the fleecy
green willow-trees and pepper-trees, and the villas in foliage and
flowers, hanging magenta curtains of bougainvillea, red dots of
hibiscus, pink abundance of tall oleander trees; occasional palm-
trees sticking out.

The boat was steering round a stone jetty, on which, in black
letters, was painted an advertisement for motor-car tyres.  There
were a few seats, some deep fleecy trees growing out of the sand, a
booth for selling drinks, a little promenade, and white boats on a
sandy beach.  A few women sitting under parasols, a few bathers in
the water, and trees in front of the few villas deep in green or
blazing scarlet blossoms.

'This is very good,' thought Kate.  'It is not too savage, and not
over-civilized.  It isn't broken, but it is rather out of repair.
It is in contact with the world, but the world has got a very weak
grip on it.'

She went to the hotel, as Don Ramón had advised her.

'Do you come from Orilla?  You are Mrs Leslie?  Don Ramón Carrasco
sent us a letter about you.'

There was a house.  Kate paid her boatmen and shook hands with
them.  She was sorry to be cut off from them again.  And they
looked at her with a touch of regret as they left.  She said to
herself:

'There is something rich and alive in these people.  They want to
be able to breathe the Great Breath.  They are like children,
helpless.  And then they're like demons.  But somewhere, I believe,
they want the breath of life and the communion of the brave, more
than anything.'

She was surprised at herself, suddenly using this language.  But
her weariness and her sense of devastation had been so complete,
that the Other Breath in the air, and the bluish dark power in the
earth had become, almost suddenly, more real to her than so-called
reality.  Concrete, jarring, exasperating reality had melted away,
and a soft world of potency stood in its place, the velvety dark
flux from the earth, the delicate yet supreme life-breath in the
inner air.  Behind the fierce sun the dark eyes of a deeper sun
were watching, and between the bluish ribs of the mountains a
powerful heart was secretly beating, the heart of the earth.

Her house was what she wanted; a low, L-shaped, tiled building with
rough red floors and deep veranda, and the other two sides of the
patio completed by the thick, dark little mango-forest outside the
low wall.  The square of the patio, within the precincts of the
house and the mango-trees, was gay with oleanders and hibiscus, and
there was a basin of water in the seedy grass.  The flower-pots
along the veranda were full of flowering geranium and foreign
flowers.  At the far end of the patio the chickens were scratching
under the silent motionlessness of ragged banana-trees.

There she had it; her stone, cool, dark house, every room opening
on to the veranda; her deep, shady veranda, or piazza, or corridor,
looking out to the brilliant sun, the sparkling flowers and the
seed-grass, the still water and the yellowing banana-trees, the
dark splendour of the shadow-dense mango-trees.

With the house went a Mexican Juana with two thick-haired daughters
and one son.  This family lived in a den at the back of the
projecting bay of the dining-room.  There, half screened, was the
well and the toilet, and a little kitchen and a sleeping-room where
the family slept on mats on the floor.  There the paltry chickens
paddled, and the banana-trees made a chitter as the wind came.

Kate had four bedrooms to choose from.  She chose the one whose
low, barred window opened on the rough, grass and cobble-stone
street, closed her doors and windows, and went to sleep, saying to
herself as she lay down:  Now I am alone.  And now I have only one
thing to do: not to get caught up into the world's cog-wheels any
more, and not to lose my hold on the hidden greater thing.

She was tired with a strange weariness, feeling she could make no
further effort.  She woke up at tea-time, but there was no tea.
Juana hastened off to the hotel to buy a bit.

Juana was a woman of about forty, rather short, with full dark
face, centreless dark eyes, untidy hair, and a limping way of
walking.  She spoke rapidly, a rather plum-in-the-mouth Spanish,
adding 'n' to all her words.  Something of a sloven, down to her
speech.

'No, Niña, no hay masn'--masn instead of mas.  And calling Kate, in
the old Mexican style, Niña, which means child.  It is the
honourable title for a mistress.

Juana was going to be a bit of a trial.  She was a widow of
doubtful antecedents, a creature with passion, but not much
control, strong with a certain indifference and looseness.  The
hotel owner assured Kate that she was honest, but that if Kate
would rather find another criada, all well and good.

There was a bit of a battle to be fought between the two women.
Juana was obstinate and reckless; she had not been treated very
well by the world.  And there was a touch of bottom-dog insolence
about her.

But also, sudden touches of passionate warmth and the peculiar
selfless generosity of the natives.  She would be honest out of
rough defiance and indifference, so long as she was not in a state
of antagonism.

As yet, however, she was cautiously watching her ground, with that
black-eyed touch of malice and wariness to be expected.  And Kate
felt that the cry:  Niña--child! by which she was addressed, held
in it a slight note of malevolent mockery.

But there was nothing to do but to go ahead and trust the dark-
faced, centreless woman.

The second day, Kate had the energy to cast out one suite of bent-
wood and cane furniture from her salon, remove pictures and little
stands.

If there is one social instinct more dreary than all the other
social instincts in the world, it is the Mexican.  In the centre of
Kate's red-tiled salon were two crescents: a black bent-wood cane
settee flanked on each side by two black bent-wood cane chairs,
exactly facing a brown bent-wood cane settee flanked on each side
by two brown bent-wood cane chairs.  It was as if the two settees
and the eight chairs were occupied by the ghosts of all the Mexican
banalities ever uttered, sitting facing one another with their
knees towards one another, and their feet on the terrible piece of
green-with-red-roses carpet, in the weary centre of the salon.  The
very sight of it was frightening.

Kate shattered this face-to-face symmetry, and had the two girls,
Maria and Concha, assisted by the ironic Juana, carrying off the
brown bent-wood chairs and the bamboo stands into one of the spare
bedrooms.  Juana looked on cynically, and assisted officiously.
But when Kate had her trunk, and fished out a couple of light rugs
and a couple of fine shawls and a few things to make the place
human, the criada began to exclaim:  'Qué bonita!  Qué bonita,
Niña!  Mire que bonita!'



CHAPTER VII

The Plaza


Sayula was a little lake resort; not for the idle rich, for Mexico
has few left; but for tradespeople from Guadalajara, and week-
enders.  Even of these, there were few.

Nevertheless, there were two hotels, left over, really, from the
safe quiet days of Don Porfirio, as were most of the villas.  The
outlying villas were shut up, some of them abandoned.  Those in the
village lived in a perpetual quake of fear.  There were many
terrors, but the two regnant were bandits and bolshevists.

Bandits are merely men who, in the outlying villages, having very
often no money, no work, and no prospects, take to robbery and
murder for a time--occasionally for a lifetime--as a profession.
They live in their wild villages until troops are sent after them,
when they retire into the savage mountains, or the marshes.

Bolshevists, somehow, seem to be born on the railway.  Wherever the
iron rails run, and passengers are hauled back and forth in railway
coaches, there the spirit of rootlessness, of transitoriness, of
first and second class in separate compartments, of envy and
malice, and of iron and demonish panting engines, seems to bring
forth the logical children of materialism, the bolshevists.

Sayula had her little branch of railway, her one train a day.  The
railway did not pay, and fought with extinction.  But it was
enough.

Sayula also had that real insanity of America, the automobile.  As
men used to want a horse and a sword, now they want a car.  As
women used to pine for a home and a box at the theatre, now it is a
'machine.'  And the poor follow the middle class.  There was a
perpetual rush of 'machines', motor-cars and motor-buses--called
camiónes--along the one forlorn road coming to Sayula from
Guadalajara.  One hope, one faith, one destiny; to ride in a
camión, to own a car.

There was a little bandit scare when Kate arrived in the village,
but she did not pay much heed.  At evening she went into the plaza,
to be with the people.  The plaza was a square with big trees and a
disused bandstand in the centre, a little promenade all round, and
then the cobbled streets where the donkeys and the camiónes passed.
There was a further little section of real market-place, on the
north side.

The band played no more in Sayula, and the elegancia strolled no
more on the inner pavement around the plaza, under the trees.  But
the pavement was still good, and the benches were still more-or-
less sound.  Oh Don Porfirio's day!  And now it was the peons and
Indians, in their blankets and white clothes, who filled the
benches and monopolized the square.  True, the law persisted that
the peons must wear trousers in the plaza, and not the loose great
floppy drawers of the fields.  But then the peons also WANTED to
wear trousers, instead of the drawers that were the garb of their
humble labour.

The plaza now belonged to the peons.  They sat thick on the
benches, or slowly strolled round in their sandals and blankets.
Across the cobbled road on the north side, the little booths
selling soup and hot food were crowded with men after six o'clock;
it was cheaper to eat out, at the end of a day's work.  The women
at home could eat tortillas, never mind the caldo, the soup or the
meat mess.  At the booths which sold tequila, men, women, and boys
sat on the benches with their elbows on the board.  There was a
mild gambling game, where the man in the centre turned the cards,
and the plaza rang to his voice:  Cinco de Spadas!  Rey de Copas!
A large, stout, imperturbable woman, with a cigarette on her lip
and danger in her lowering black eye, sat on into the night,
selling tequila.  The sweetmeat man stood by his board and sold
sweets at one centavo each.  And down on the pavement, small tin
torch-lamps flared upon tiny heaps of mangoes or nauseous tropical
red plums, two or three centavos the little heap, while the vendor,
a woman in the full wave of her skirt, or a man with curious
patient humility, squatted waiting for a purchaser, with that
strange fatal indifference and that gentle sort of patience so
puzzling to a stranger.  To have thirty cents' worth of little red
plums to sell; to pile them on the pavement in tiny pyramids, five
in a pyramid; and to wait all day and on into the night, squatting
on the pavement and looking up from the feet to the far-off face of
the passer-by and potential purchaser, this, apparently, is an
occupation and a living.  At night by the flare of the tin torch,
blowing its flame on the wind.

Usually there would be a couple of smallish young men with guitars
of different sizes, standing close up facing one another like two
fighting cocks that are uttering a long, endless swan-song, singing
in tense subdued voices the eternal ballads, not very musical,
mournful, endless, intense, audible only within close range;
keeping on and on till their throats were scraped.  And a few tall,
dark men in red blankets standing around, listening casually, and
rarely, very rarely making a contribution of one centavo.

In among the food-booths would be another trio, this time two
guitars and a fiddle, and two of the musicians blind; the blind
ones singing at a high pitch, full speed, yet not very audible.
The very singing seemed secretive, the singers pressing close in,
face to face, as if to keep the wild, melancholy ballad re-echoing
in their private breasts, their back to the world.

And the whole village was in the plaza, it was like a camp, with
the low, rapid sound of voices.  Rarely, very rarely, a voice rose
above the deep murmur of the men, the musical ripple of the women,
the twitter of children.  Rarely any quick movement; the slow
promenade of men in sandals, the sandals, called huaraches, making
a slight cockroach shuffle on the pavement.  Sometimes, darting
among the trees, barelegged boys went sky-larking in and out of the
shadow, in and out of the quiet people.  They were the irrepressible
boot-blacks, who swarm like tiresome flies in a barefooted country.

At the south end of the plaza, just across from the trees and
cornerwise to the hotel, was a struggling attempt at an outdoor
café, with little tables and chairs on the pavement.  Here, on
weekdays, the few who dared flaunt their prestige would sit and
drink a beer or a glass of tequila.  They were mostly strangers.
And the peons, sitting immobile on the seats in the background,
looked on with basilisk eyes from under the great hats.

But on Saturdays and Sundays there was something of a show.  Then
the camiónes and motor-cars came in lurching and hissing.  And,
like strange birds alighting, you had slim and charming girls in
organdie frocks and face-powder and bobbed hair, fluttering into
the plaza.  There they strolled, arm in arm, brilliant in red
organdie and blue chiffon and white muslin and pink and mauve and
tangerine frail stuffs, their black hair bobbed out, their dark
slim arms interlaced, their dark faces curiously macabre in the
heavy make-up; approximating to white, but the white of a clown or
a corpse.

In a world of big, handsome peon men, these flappers flapped with
butterfly brightness and an incongruous shrillness, manless.  The
supply of fifis, the male young elegants who are supposed to equate
the flappers, was small.  But still, fifis there were, in white
flannel trousers and white shoes, dark jackets, correct straw hats,
and canes.  Fifis far more ladylike than the reckless flappers; and
far more nervous, wincing.  But fifis none the less, gallant,
smoking a cigarette with an elegant flourish, talking elegant
Castilian, as near as possible, and looking as if they were going
to be sacrificed to some Mexican god within a twelvemonth; when
they were properly plumped and perfumed.  The sacrificial calves
being fattened.

On Saturday, the fifis and the flappers and the motor-car people
from town--only a forlorn few, after all--tried to be butterfly
gay, in sinister Mexico.  They hired the musicians with guitars and
fiddle, and the jazz music began to quaver, a little too tenderly,
without enough kick.

And on the pavement under the trees of the alameda--under the trees
of the plaza, just near the little tables and chairs of the café,
the young couples began to gyrate à la mode.  The red and the pink
and the yellow and the blue organdie frocks were turning sharply
with all the white flannel trousers available, and some of the
white flannel trousers had smart shoes, white with black strappings
or with tan brogue bands.  And some of the organdie frocks had
green legs and green feet, some had legs à la nature, and white
feet.  And the slim, dark arms went around the dark blue fifi
shoulders--or dark blue with a white thread.  And the immeasurably
soft faces of the males would smile with a self-conscious
fatherliness at the whitened, pretty, reckless little faces of the
females; soft, fatherly, sensuous smiles, suggestive of a victim's
luxuriousness.

But they were dancing on the pavement of the plaza, and on this
pavement the peons were slowly strolling, or standing in groups
watching with black, inscrutable eyes the uncanny butterfly
twitching of the dancers.  Who knows what they thought?--whether
they felt any admiration and envy at all, or only just a silent,
cold, dark-faced opposition?  Opposition there was.

The young peons in their little white blouses, and the scarlet
serape folded jauntily on one shoulder, strolled slowly on under
their big heavy, poised hats, with a will to ignore the dancers.
Slowly, with a heavy, calm balance, they moved irresistibly through
the dance, as if the dance did not exist.  And the fifis in white
trousers, with organdie in their arms, steered as best they might,
to avoid the heavy, relentless passage of the young peons, who went
on talking to one another, smiling and flashing powerful white
teeth, in a black, heavy sang-froid that settled like a blight even
on the music.  The dancers and the passing peons never touched,
never jostled.  In Mexico you do not run into people accidentally.
But the dance broke against the invisible opposition.

The Indians on the seats, they too watched the dancers for a while.
Then they turned against them the heavy negation of indifference,
like a stone on the spirit.  The mysterious faculty of the Indians,
as they sit there, so quiet and dense, for killing off any
ebullient life, for quenching any light and colourful effervescence.

There was indeed a little native dance-hall.  But it was shut apart
within four walls.  And the whole rhythm and meaning was different,
heavy, with a touch of violence.  And even there, the dancers were
artisans and mechanics or railway-porters, the half-urban people.
No peons at all--or practically none.

So, before very long, the organdie butterflies and the flannel-
trouser fifis gave in, succumbed, crushed once more beneath the
stone-heavy passivity of resistance in the demonish peons.

The curious, radical opposition of the Indians to the thing we call
the spirit.  It is spirit which makes the flapper flap her organdie
wings like a butterfly.  It is spirit which creases the white
flannel trousers of the fifi and makes him cut his rather pathetic
dash.  They try to talk the elegancies and flippancies of the
modern spirit.

But down on it all, like a weight of obsidian, comes the passive
negation of the Indian.  He understands soul, which is of the
blood.  But spirit, which is superior, and is the quality of our
civilization, this, in the mass, he darkly and barbarically
repudiates.  Not until he becomes an artisan or connected with
machinery does the modern spirit get him.

And perhaps it is this ponderous repudiation of the modern spirit
which makes Mexico what it is.

But perhaps the automobile will make roads even through the
inaccessible soul of the Indian.

Kate was rather sad, seeing the dance swamped.  She had been
sitting at a little table, with Juana for dueña, sipping a glass of
absinthe.

The motor-cars returning to town left early, in a little group.  If
bandits were out, they had best keep together.  Even the fifis had
a pistol on their hips.

But it was Saturday, so some of the young 'elegance' was staying
on, till the next day; to bathe and flutter in the sun.

It was Saturday, so the plaza was very full, and along the cobbled
streets stretching from the square many torches fluttered and
wavered upon the ground, illuminating a dark salesman and an array
of straw hats, or a heap of straw mats called petates, or pyramids
of oranges from across the lake.

It was Saturday, and Sunday morning was market.  So, as it were
suddenly, the life in the plaza was dense and heavy with potency.
The Indians had come in from all the villages, and from far across
the lake.  And with them they brought the curious heavy potency of
life which seems to hum deeper and deeper when they collect
together.

In the afternoon, with the wind from the south, the big canoas,
sailing-boats with black hulls and one huge sail, had come drifting
across the waters, bringing the market-produce and the natives to
their gathering ground.  All the white specks of villages on the
far shore, and on the far-off slopes, had sent their wild quota to
the throng.

It was Saturday, and the Indian instinct for living on into the
night, once they are gathered together, was now aroused.  The
people did not go home.  Though market would begin at dawn, men had
no thought of sleep.

At about nine o'clock, after the fifi dance was shattered, Kate
heard a new sound, the sound of a drum, or tom-tom, and saw a drift
of the peons away to the dark side of the plaza, where the side
market would open to-morrow.  Already places had been taken, and
little stalls set up, and huge egg-shaped baskets big enough to
hold two men were lolling against the wall.

There was a rippling and a pulse-like thudding of the drum,
strangely arresting on the night air, then the long note of a flute
playing a sort of wild, unemotional melody, with the drum for a
syncopated rhythm.  Kate, who had listened to the drums and the
wild singing of the Red Indians in Arizona and New Mexico,
instantly felt that timeless, primeval passion of the prehistoric
races, with their intense and complicated religious significance,
spreading on the air.

She looked inquiringly at Juana, and Juana's black eyes glanced
back at her furtively.

'What is it?' said Kate.

'Musicians, singers,' said Juana evasively.

'But it's DIFFERENT,' said Kate.

'Yes, it is new.'

'New?'

'Yes, it has only been coming for a short time.'

'Where does it come from?'

'Who knows!' said Juana, with an evasive shrug of her shoulders.

'I want to hear,' said Kate.

'It's purely men,' said Juana.

'Still, one can stand a little way off.'

Kate moved towards the dense, silent throng of men in big hats.
They all had their backs to her.

She stood on the step of one of the houses, and saw a little
clearing at the centre of the dense throng of men, under the stone
wall over which bougainvillea and plumbago flowers were hanging,
lit up by the small, brilliantly flaring torches of sweet-smelling
wood, which a boy held in his two hands.

The drum was in the centre of the clearing, the drummer standing
facing the crowd.  He was naked from the waist up, wore snow-white
cotton drawers, very full, held round the waist by a red sash, and
bound at the ankles with red cords.  Round his uncovered head was a
red cord, with three straight scarlet feathers rising from the back
of his head, and on his forehead a torquoise ornament, a circle of
blue with a round blue stone in the centre.  The flute-player was
also naked to the waist, but over his shoulder was folded a fine
white serape with blue-and-dark edges, and fringe.  Among the
crowd, men with naked shoulders were giving little leaflets to the
onlookers.  And all the time, high and pure, the queer clay flute
was repeating a savage, rather difficult melody, and the drum was
giving the blood-rhythm.

More and more men were drifting in from the plaza.  Kate stepped
from her perch and went rather shyly forward.  She wanted one of
the papers.  The man gave her one without looking at her.  And she
went into the light to read.  It was a sort of ballad, but without
rhyme, in Spanish.  At the top of the leaflet was a rough print of
an eagle within the ring of a serpent that had its tail in its
mouth; a curious deviation from the Mexican emblem, which is an
eagle standing on a nopal, a cactus with great flat leaves, and
holding in its beak and claws a writhing snake.

This eagle stood slim upon the serpent, within the circle of the
snake, that had black markings round its back, like short black
rays pointing inwards.  At a little distance, the emblem suggested
an eye.


     In the place of the west
     In peace, beyond the lashing of the sun's bright tail,
     In the stillness where waters are born
     Slept I, Quetzalcoatl.

     In the cave which is called Dark Eye,
     Behind the sun, looking through him as a window
     Is the place.  There the waters rise,
     There the winds are born.

     On the waters of the after-life
     I rose again, to see a star falling, and feel a breath on my face.
     The breath said:  Go!  And lo!
     I am coming.

     The star that was falling was fading, was dying.
     I heard the star singing like a dying bird;
     My name is Jesus, I am Mary's Son.
     I am coming home.
     My mother the Moon is dark.
     Oh brother, Quetzalcoatl
     Hold back the dragon of the sun,
     Bind him with shadow while I pass
     Homewards.  Let me come home.

     I bound the bright fangs of the Sun
     And held him while Jesus passed
     Into the lidless shade,
     Into the eye of the Father,
     Into the womb of refreshment.

     And the breath blew upon me again.
     So I took the sandals of the Saviour
     And started down the long slope
     Past the mount of the sun.
     Till I saw beneath me
     White breast-tips of my Mexico
     My bride.

     Jesus the Crucified
     Sleeps in the healing waters
     The long sleep.
     Sleep, sleep, my brother, sleep.
     My bride between the seas
     Is combing her dark hair,
     Saying to herself:  Quetzalcoatl.


There was a dense throng of men gathered now, and from the centre
the ruddy glow of ocote torches rose warm and strong, and the sweet
scent of the cedar-like resin was on the air.  Kate could see
nothing for the mass of men in big hats.

The flute had stopped its piping, and the drum was beating a slow,
regular thud, acting straight on the blood.  The incomprehensible
hollow barking of the drum was like a spell on the mind, making the
heart burst each stroke, and darkening the will.

The men in the crowd began to subside, sitting and squatting on the
ground, with their hats between their knees.  And now it was a
little sea of dark, proud heads leaning a little forward above the
soft, strong male shoulders.

Near the wall was a clear circle, with the drum in the centre.  The
drummer with the naked torso stood tilting his drum towards him,
his shoulders gleaming smooth and ruddy in the flare of light.
Beside him stood another man holding a banner that hung from a
light rod.  On the blue field of the banneret was the yellow sun
with a black centre, and between the four greater yellow rays, four
black rays emerging, so that the sun looked like a wheel spinning
with a dazzling motion.

The crowd having all sat down, the six men with naked torsos, who
had been giving out the leaflets and ordering the crowd, now came
back and sat down in a ring, of which the drummer, with the drum
tilted between his knees as he squatted on the ground, was the key.
On his right hand sat the banner-bearer, on his left the flautist.
They were nine men in the ring, the boy, who sat apart watching the
two ocote torches, which he had laid upon a stone supported on a
long cane tripod, being the tenth.

The night seemed to have gone still.  The curious seed-rattling hum
of voices that filled the plaza was hushed.  Under the trees, on
the pavements, people were still passing unconcerned, but they
looked curiously lonely, isolated figures drifting in the twilight
of the electric lamps, and going about some exceptional business.
They seemed outside the nucleus of life.

Away on the north side, the booths were still flaring, people were
buying and selling.  But this quarter, too, looked lonely, and
outside the actual reality, almost like memory.

When the men sat down, the women began to drift up shyly, and seat
themselves on the ground at the outer rim, their full cotton skirts
flowering out around them, and their dark rebozos drawn tight over
their small, round, shy heads, as they squatted on the ground.
Some, too shy to come right up, lingered on the nearest benches of
the plaza.  And some had gone away.  Indeed, a good many men and
women had disappeared as soon as the drum was heard.

So that the plaza was curiously void.  There was the dense clot of
people round the drum, and then the outer world, seeming empty and
hostile.  Only in the dark little street that gave on to the
darkness of the lake, people were standing like ghosts, half lit-
up, the men with their serapes over their faces, watching erect and
silent and concealed, from the shadow.

But Kate, standing back in the doorway, with Juana sitting on the
doorstep at her feet, was fascinated by the silent, half-naked ring
of men in the torchlight.  Their heads were black, their bodies
soft and ruddy with the peculiar Indian beauty that has at the same
time something terrible in it.  The soft, full, handsome torsos of
silent men with heads softly bent a little forward; the soft, easy
shoulders, that are yet so broad, and which balance upon so
powerful a backbone; shoulders drooping a little, with the
relaxation of slumbering, quiescent power; the beautiful ruddy
skin, gleaming with a dark fineness; the strong breasts, so male
and so deep, yet without the muscular hardening that belongs to
white men; and the dark, closed faces, closed upon a darkened
consciousness, the black moustaches and delicate beards framing the
closed silence of the mouth; all this was strangely impressive,
moving strange, frightening emotions in the soul.  Those men who
sat there in their dark, physical tenderness, so still and soft,
they looked at the same time frightening.  Something dark, heavy,
and reptilian in their silence and their softness.  Their very
naked torsos were clothed with a subtle shadow, a certain secret
obscurity.  White men sitting there would have been strong-muscled
and frank, with an openness in their very physique, a certain
ostensible presence.  But not so these men.  Their very nakedness
only revealed the soft, heavy depths of their natural secrecy,
their eternal invisibility.  They did not belong to the realm of
that which comes forth.

Everybody was quite still; the expectant hush deepened to a kind of
dead, night silence.  The naked-shouldered men sat motionless, sunk
into themselves, and listening with the dark ears of the blood.
The red sash went tight round their waists, the wide white
trousers, starched rather stiff, were bound round the ankles with
red cords, and the dark feet in the glare of the torch looked
almost black, in huaraches that had red thongs.  What did they want
then, in life, these men who sat so softly and without any
assertion, yet whose weight was so ponderous, arresting?

Kate was at once attracted and repelled.  She was attracted, almost
fascinated by the strange NUCLEAR power of the men in the circle.
It was like a darkly glowing, vivid nucleus of new life.  Repellent
the strange heaviness, the sinking of the spirit into the earth,
like dark water.  Repellent the silent, dense opposition to the
pale-faced spiritual direction.

Yet here, and here alone, it seemed to her, life burned with a
deep, new fire.  The rest of life, as she knew it, seemed wan,
bleached and sterile.  The pallid wanness and weariness of her
world!  And here, the dark ruddy figures in the glare of a torch,
like the centre of the everlasting fire, surely this was a new
kindling of mankind!

She knew it was so.  Yet she preferred to be on the fringe,
sufficiently out of contact.  She could not bear to come into
actual contact.

The man with the banner of the sun lifted his face as if he were
going to speak.  And yet he did not speak.  He was old; in his
sparse beard were grey hairs, grey hairs over his thick, dark
mouth.  And his face had the peculiar thickness, with a few deep-
scored lines, of the old among these people.  Yet his hair rose
vigorous and manly from his forehead, his body was smooth and
strong.  Only, perhaps, a little smoother, heavier, softer than the
shoulders of the younger men.

His black eyes gazed sightless for some time.  Perhaps he was
really blind; perhaps it was a heavy abstraction, a sort of heavy
memory working in him, which made his face seem sightless.

Then he began, in a slow, clear, far-off voice, that seemed
strangely to echo the vanished barking of the drum:

'Listen to me, men!  Listen to me, women of these men!  A long time
ago, the lake started calling for men, in the quiet of the night.
And there were no men.  The little charales were swimming round the
shore, looking for something, and the bágari and the other big fish
would jump out of the water, to look around.  But there were no
men.

'So one of the gods with hidden faces walked out of the water, and
climbed the hill'--he pointed with his hand in the night towards
the invisible round hill at the back of the village--'and looked
about.  He looked up at the sun, and through the sun he saw the
dark sun, the same that made the sun and the world, and will
swallow it again like a draught of water.

'He said:  Is it time?  And from behind the bright sun the four
dark arms of the greater sun shot out, and in the shadow men arose.
They could see the four dark arms of the sun in the sky.  And they
started walking.

'The man on the top of the hill, who was a god, looked at the
mountains and the flat places, and saw men very thirsty, their
tongues hanging out.  So he said to them:  Come!  Come here!  Here
is my sweet water!

'They came like dogs running with their tongues out, and kneeled on
the shore of the lake.  And the man on the top of the hill heard
them panting with having drunk much water.  He said to them:  Have
you drunk too much into yourselves?  Are your bones not dry enough?

'The men made houses on the shore, and the man on the hill, who was
a god, taught them to sow maize and beans, and build boats.  But he
said to them:  No boat will save you, when the dark sun ceases to
hold out his dark arms abroad in the sky.

'The man on the hill said:  I am Quetzalcoatl, who breathed
moisture on your dry mouths.  I filled your breasts with breath
from beyond the sun.  I am the wind that whirls from the heart of
the earth, the little winds that whirl like snakes round your feet
and your legs and your thighs, lifting up the head of the snake of
your body, in whom is your power.  When the snake of your body
lifts its head, beware!  It is I, Quetzalcoatl, rearing up in you,
rearing up and reaching beyond the bright day, to the sun of
darkness beyond, where is your home at last.  Save for the dark sun
at the back of the day-sun, save for the four dark arms in the
heavens, you were bone, and the stars were bone, and the moon an
empty sea-shell on a dry beach, and the yellow sun were an empty
cup, like the dry thin bone of a dead coyote's head.  So beware!

'Without me you are nothing.  Just as I, without the sun that is
back of the sun, am nothing.

'When the yellow sun is high in the sky, then say:  Quetzalcoatl
will lift his hand and screen me from this, else I shall burn out,
and the land will wither.

'For, say I, in the palm of my hand is the water of life, and on
the back of my hand is the shadow of death.  And when men forget
me, I lift the back of my hand, farewell!  Farewell, and the shadow
of death.

'But men forgot me.  Their bones were moist, their hearts weak.
When the snake of their body lifted its head, they said:  This is
the tame snake that does as we wish.  And when they could not bear
the fire of the sun, they said:  The sun is angry.  He wants to
drink us up.  Let us give him blood of victims.

'And so it was, the dark branches of shade were gone from heaven,
and Quetzalcoatl mourned and grew old, holding his hand before his
face, to hide his face from men.

'He mourned and said:  Let me go home.  I am old, I am almost bone.
Bone triumphs in me, my heart is a dry gourd.  I am weary in
Mexico.

'So he cried to the Master-Sun, the dark one, of the unuttered
name:  I am withering white like a perishing gourd-vine.  I am
turning to bone.  I am denied of these Mexicans.  I am waste and
weary and old.  Take me away.

'Then the dark sun reached an arm, and lifted Quetzalcoatl into the
sky.  And the dark sun beckoned with a finger, and brought white
men out of the east.  And they came with a dead god on the Cross,
saying:  Lo!  This is the Son of God!  He is dead, he is bone!  Lo,
your god is bled and dead, he is bone.  Kneel and sorrow for him,
and weep.  For your tears he will give you comfort again, from the
dead, and a place among the scentless rose-trees of the after-life,
when you are dead.

'Lo!  His mother weeps, and the waters of the world are in her
hands.  She will give you drink, and heal you, and lead you to the
land of God.  In the land of God you shall weep no more.  Beyond
the gates of death, when you have passed from the house of bone
into the garden of white roses.

'So the weeping Mother brought her Son who was dead on the Cross to
Mexico, to live in the temples.  And the people looked up no more,
saying:  The Mother weeps.  The Son of her womb is bone.  Let us
hope for the place of the west, where the dead have peace among the
scentless rose-trees, in the Paradise of God.

'For the priests would say:  It is beautiful beyond the grave.

'And then the priests grew old, and the tears of the Mother were
exhausted, and the Son on the Cross cried out to the dark sun far
beyond the sun:  What is this that is done to me?  Am I dead for
ever, and only dead?  Am I always and only dead, but bone on a
Cross of bone?

'So this cry was heard in the world, and beyond the stars of the
night, and beyond the sun of the day.

'Jesus said again:  Is it time?  My Mother is old like a sinking
moon, the old bone of her can weep no more.  Are we perished beyond
redeem?

'Then the greatest of the great suns spoke aloud from the back of
the sun:  I will take my Son to my bosom, I will take His Mother on
my lap.  Like a woman I will put them in my womb, like a mother I
will lay them to sleep, in mercy I will dip them in the bath of
forgetting and peace and renewal.

'That is all.  So hear now, you men, and you women of these men.

'Jesus is going home, to the Father, and Mary is going back, to
sleep in the belly of the Father.  And they both will recover from
death, during the long long sleep.

'But the Father will not leave us alone.  We are not abandoned.

'The Father has looked around, and has seen the Morning Star,
fearless between the rush of the oncoming yellow sun, and the
backward reel of the night.  So the Great One, whose name has never
been spoken, says:  Who art thou, bright watchman?  And the dawn-
star answering:  It is I, the Morning Star, who in Mexico was
Quetzalcoatl.  It is I, who look at the yellow sun from behind,
have my eye on the unseen side of the moon.  It is I, the star,
midway between the darkness and the rolling of the sun.  I, called
Quetzalcoatl, waiting in the strength of my days.

''The Father answered:  It is well.  It is well.  And again:  It is
time.

'Thus the big word was spoken behind the back of the world.  The
Nameless said:  It is time.

'Once more the word has been spoken:  It is time.

'Listen, men, and the women of men:  It is time.  Know now it is
time.  Those that left us are coming back.  Those that came are
leaving again.  Say welcome, and then farewell!

'Welcome!  Farewell!'

The old man ended with a strong, suppressed cry, as if really
calling to the gods:

'Bienvenido!  Bienvenido!  Adiós!  Adiós!'

Even Juana, seated at Kate's feet, cried out without knowing what
she did:

'Bienvenido!  Bienvenido!  Adiós!  Adiós!  Adiós-n!'

On the last adiós! she trailed out to a natural human 'n.'

The drum began to beat with an insistent, intensive rhythm, and the
flute, or whistle, lifted its odd, far-off calling voice.  It was
playing again and again the peculiar melody Kate had heard at
first.

Then one of the men in the circle lifted his voice, and began to
sing the hymn.  He sang in the fashion of the old Red Indians, with
intensity and restraint, singing inwardly, singing to his own soul,
not outward to the world, nor yet even upward to God, as the
Christians sing.  But with a sort of suppressed, tranced intensity,
singing to the inner mystery, singing not into space, but into the
other dimension of man's existence, where he finds himself in the
infinite room that lies inside the axis of our wheeling space.
Space, like the world, cannot but move.  And like the world, there
is an axis.  And the axis of our worldly space, when you enter, is
a vastness where even the trees come and go, and the soul is at
home in its own dream, noble and unquestioned.

The strange, inward pulse of the drum, and the singer singing
inwardly, swirled the soul back into the very centre of time, which
is older than age.  He began on a high, remote note, and holding
the voice at a distance, ran on in subtle, running rhythms,
apparently unmeasured, yet pulsed underneath by the drum, and
giving throbbing, three-fold lilts and lurches.  For a long time,
no melody at all was recognizable: it was just a lurching, running,
far-off crying, something like the distant faint howling of a
coyote.  It was really the music of the old American Indian.

There was no recognizable rhythm, no recognizable emotion, it was
hardly music.  Rather a far-off, perfect crying in the night.  But
it went straight through to the soul, the most ancient and
everlasting soul of all men, where alone can the human family
assemble in immediate contact.

Kate knew it at once, like a sort of fate.  It was no good
resisting.  There was neither urge nor effort, nor any speciality.
The sound sounded in the innermost far-off place of the human core,
the ever-present, where there is neither hope nor emotion, but
passion sits with folded wings on the nest, and faith is a tree of
shadow.

Like fate, like doom.  Faith is the Tree of Life itself,
inevitable, and the apples are upon us, like the apples of the eye,
the apples of the chin, the apple of the heart, the apples of the
breast, the apple of the belly, with its deep core, the apples of
the loins, the apples of the knees, the little, side-by-side apples
of the toes.  What do change and evolution matter?  We are the Tree
with the fruit forever upon it.  And we are faith forever.  Verbum
sat.

The one singer had finished, and only the drum kept on, touching
the sensitive membrane of the night subtly and knowingly.  Then a
voice in the circle rose again on the song, and like birds flying
from a tree, one after the other, the individual voices arose, till
there was a strong, intense, curiously weighty soaring and sweeping
of male voices, like a dark flock of birds flying and dipping in
unison.  And all the dark birds seemed to have launched out of the
heart, in the inner forest of the masculine chest.

And one by one, voices in the crowd broke free, like birds
launching and coming in from a distance, caught by the spell.  The
words did not matter.  Any verse, any words, no words, the song
remained the same: a strong, deep wind rushing from the caverns of
the breast, from the everlasting soul!  Kate herself was too shy
and wincing to sing: too blenched with disillusion.  But she heard
the answer away back in her soul, like a far-off mocking-bird at
night.  And Juana was singing in spite of herself, in a crooning
feminine voice, making up the words unconsciously.

The half-naked men began to reach for their serapes: white serapes,
with borders of blue and earth-brown bars, and dark fringe.  A man
rose from the crowd and went towards the lake.  He came back with
ocote and with faggots that a boat had brought over.  And he
started a little fire.  After a while, another man went for fuel,
and started another fire in the centre of the circle, in front of
the drum.  Then one of the women went off soft and bare-foot, in
her full cotton skirt.  And she made a little bonfire among the
women.

The air was bronze with the glow of flame, and sweet with smoke
like incense.  The song rose and fell, then died away.  Rose, and
died.  The drum ebbed on, faintly touching the dark membrane of the
night.  Then ebbed away.  In the absolute silence could be heard
the soundless stillness of the dark lake.

Then the drum started again, with a new, strong pulse.  One of the
seated men, in his white poncho with the dark blackish-and-blue
border, got up, taking off his sandals as he did so, and began
softly to dance the dance step.  Mindless, dancing heavily and with
a curious bird-like sensitiveness of the feet, he began to tread
the earth with his bare soles, as if treading himself deep into the
earth.  Alone, with a curious pendulum rhythm, leaning a little
forward from a powerful backbone, he trod to the drum beat, his
white knees lifting and lifting alternately against the dark fringe
of his blanket, with a queer dark splash.  And another man put his
huaraches into the centre of the ring, near the fire, and stood up
to dance.  The man at the drum lifted up his voice in a wild, blind
song.  The men were taking off their ponchos.  And soon, with the
firelight on their breasts and on their darkly abstracted faces,
they were all afoot, with bare torsos and bare feet, dancing the
savage bird-tread.

'Who sleeps shall wake!  Who sleeps shall wake!  Who treads down
the path of the snake in the dust shall arrive at the place; in the
path of the dust shall arrive at the place and be dressed in the
skin of the snake: shall be dressed in the skin of the snake of the
earth, that is father of stone; that is father of stone and the
timber of earth; of the silver and gold, of the iron, the timber of
earth from the bone of the father of earth, of the snake of the
world, of the heart of the world, that beats as a snake beats the
dust in its motion on earth, from the heart of the world.

'Who slee-eeps sha-all wake!  Who slee-eeps sha-all wake!  Who
sleeps sha-ll wake in the way of the snake of the dust of the
earth, of the stone of the earth, of the bone of the earth.'

The song seemed to take new wild flights, after it had sunk and
rustled to a last ebb.  It was like waves that rise out of the
invisible, and rear up into form and a flying, disappearing
whiteness and a rustle of extinction.  And the dancers, after
dancing in a circle in a slow, deep absorption, each man changeless
in his own place, treading the same dust with the soft churning of
bare feet, slowly, slowly began to revolve, till the circle was
slowly revolving round the fire, with always the same soft, down-
sinking, churning tread.  And the drum kept the changeless living
beat, like a heart, and the song rose and soared and fell, ebbed
and ebbed to a sort of extinction, then heaved up again.

Till the young peons could stand it no more.  They put off their
sandals and their hats and their blankets, and shyly, with inexpert
feet that yet knew the old echo of the tread, they stood behind the
wheeling dancers, and danced without changing place.  Till soon the
revolving circle had a fixed yet throbbing circle of men outside.

Then suddenly one of the naked-shouldered dancers from the inner
circle stepped back into the outer circle and with a slow leaning,
slowly started the outer circle revolving in the reverse direction
from the inner.  So now there were two wheels of the dance, one
within the other, and revolving in different directions.

They kept on and on, with the drum and the song, revolving like
wheels of shadow-shapes around the fire.  Till the fire died low,
and the drum suddenly stopped, and the men suddenly dispersed,
returning to their seats again.

There was silence, then the low hum of voices and the sound of
laughter.  Kate had thought, so often, that the laughter of the
peons broke from them in a sound almost like pain.  But now the
laughs came like little invisible flames, suddenly from the embers
of the talk.

Everybody was waiting, waiting.  Yet nobody moved at once, when the
thud of the drum struck again like a summons.  They sat still
talking, listening with a second consciousness.  Then a man arose
and threw off his blanket, and threw wood on the central fire.
Then he walked through the seated men to where the women clustered
in the fullness of their skirts.  There he waited, smiling with a
look of abstraction.  Till a girl rose and came with utmost shyness
towards him, holding her rebozo tight over her lowered head with
her right hand, and taking the hand of the man in her left.  It was
she who lifted the motionless hand of the man in her own, shyly,
with a sudden shy snatching.  He laughed, and led her through the
now risen men, towards the inner fire.  She went with dropped head,
hiding her face in confusion.  But side by side and loosely holding
hands, they began to tread the soft, heavy dance-step, forming the
first small segment of the inner, stationary circle.

And now all the men were standing facing outwards, waiting to be
chosen.  And the women quickly, their shawled heads hidden, were
slipping in and picking up the loose right hand of the man of their
choice.  The inner men with the naked shoulders were soon chosen.
The inner circle, of men and women in pairs, hand in hand, was
closing.

'Come, Niña, come!' said Juana, looking up at Kate with black,
gleaming eyes.

'I am afraid!' said Kate.  And she spoke the truth.

One of the bare-breasted men had come across the street, out of the
crowd, and was standing waiting, near the doorway in which Kate
stood, silently, with averted face.

'Look!  Niña!  This master is waiting for you.  Then come!  Oh,
Niña, come!'

The voice of the criada had sunk to the low, crooning, almost
magical appeal of the women of the people, and her black eyes
glistened strangely, watching Kate's face.  Kate, almost
mesmerized, took slow, reluctant steps forward, towards the man who
was standing with averted face.

'Do you mind?' she said in English, in great confusion.  And she
touched his fingers with her own.

His hand, warm and dark and savagely suave, loosely, almost with
indifference, and yet with the soft barbaric nearness, held her
fingers, and he led her to the circle.  She dropped her head, and
longed to be able to veil her face.  In her white dress and green
straw hat, she felt a virgin again, a young virgin.  This was the
quality these men had been able to give back to her.

Shyly, awkwardly, she tried to tread the dance-step.  But in her
shoes she felt inflexible, insulated, and the rhythm was not in
her.  She moved in confusion.

But the man beside her held her hand in the same light, soft grasp,
and the slow, pulsing pendulum of his body swayed untrammelled.  He
took no notice of her.  And yet he held her fingers in his soft,
light touch.

Juana had discarded her boots and stockings, and with her dark,
creased face like a mask of obsidian, her eyes gleaming with the
timeless female flame, dark and unquenchable, she was treading the
step of the dance.

'As the bird of the sun treads the earth at the dawn of the day
like a brown hen under his feet, like a hen and the branches of her
belly droop with the apples of birth, with the eggs of gold, with
the eggs that hide the globe of the sun in the waters of heaven, in
the purse of the shell of earth that is white from the fire of the
blood, tread the earth, and the earth will conceive like the hen
'neath the feet of the bird of the sun; 'neath the feet of the
heart, 'neath the heart's twin feet.  Tread the earth, tread the
earth that squats as a pullet with wings closed in--'

The circle began to shift, and Kate was slowly moving round between
two silent and absorbed men, whose arms touched her arms.  And the
one held her fingers softly, loosely, but with transcendent
nearness.  And the wild song rose again like a bird that has
alighted for a second, and the drum changed rhythm incomprehensibly.

The outer wheel was all men.  She seemed to feel the strange dark
glow of them upon her back.  Men, dark, collective men, non-
individual.  And herself woman, wheeling upon the great wheel of
womanhood.

Men and women alike danced with faces lowered and expressionless,
abstract, gone in the deep absorption of men into the greater
manhood, women into the great womanhood.  It was sex, but the
greater, not the lesser sex.  The waters over the earth wheeling
upon the waters under the earth, like an eagle silently wheeling
above its own shadow.

She felt her sex and her womanhood caught up and identified in the
slowly revolving ocean of nascent life, the dark sky of the men
lowering and wheeling above.  She was not herself, she was gone,
and her own desires were gone in the ocean of the great desire.  As
the man whose fingers touched hers was gone in the ocean that is
male, stooping over the face of the waters.

The slow, vast, soft-touching revolution of the ocean above upon
ocean below, with no vestige of rustling or foam.  Only the pure
sliding conjunction.  Herself gone into her greater self, her
womanhood consummated in the greater womanhood.  And where her
fingers touched the fingers of the man, the quiet spark, like the
dawn-star, shining between her and the greater manhood of men.

How strange, to be merged in desire beyond desire, to be gone in
the body beyond the individualism of the body, with the spark of
contact lingering like a morning star between her and the man, her
woman's greater self, and the greater self of man.  Even of the two
men next to her.  What a beautiful slow wheel of dance, two great
streams streaming in contact, in opposite directions.

She did not know the face of the man whose fingers she held.  Her
personal eyes had gone blind, his face was the face of dark heaven,
only the touch of his fingers a star that was both hers and his.

Her feet were feeling the way into the dance-step.  She was
beginning to learn softly to loosen her weight, to loosen the
uplift of all her life, and let it pour slowly, darkly, with an
ebbing gush, rhythmical in soft, rhythmic gushes from her feet into
the dark body of the earth.  Erect, strong like a staff of life,
yet to loosen all the sap of her strength and let it flow down into
the roots of the earth.

She had lost count of time.  But the dance of itself seemed to be
wheeling to a close, though the rhythm remained exactly the same to
the end.

The voice finished singing, only the drum kept on.  Suddenly the
drum gave a rapid little shudder, and there was silence.  And
immediately the hands were loosened, the dance broke up into
fragments.  The man gave her a quick, far-off smile and was gone.
She would never know him by sight.  But by presence she might know
him.

The women slipped apart, clutching their rebozos tight round their
shoulders.  The men hid themselves in their blankets.  And Kate
turned to the darkness of the lake.

'Already you are going, Niña?' came Juana's voice of mild, aloof
disappointment.

'I must go now,' said Kate hurriedly.

And she hastened towards the dark of the lake, Juana running behind
her with shoes and stockings in her hand.

Kate wanted to hurry home with her new secret, the strange secret
of her greater womanhood, that she could not get used to.  She
would have to sink into this mystery.

She hastened along the uneven path of the edge of the lake shore,
that lay dark in shadow, though the stars gave enough light to show
the dark bulks and masts of the sailing-canoes against the downy
obscurity of the water.  Night, timeless, hourless night!  She
would not look at her watch.  She would lay her watch face down, to
hide its phosphorus figures.  She would not be timed.

And as she sank into sleep, she could hear the drum again, like a
pulse inside a stone beating.



CHAPTER VIII

Night in the House


Over the gateway of Kate's house was a big tree called a cuenta
tree, because it dropped its fruits, that were little, round, hard
balls like little dark marbles, perfect in shape, for the natives
to gather up and string for beads, cuentas, or, more particularly,
for the Pater Noster beads of the rosary.  At night, the little
road outside was quite dark, and the dropping of the cuentas
startled the silence.

The nights, which at first had seemed perfectly friendly, began to
be full of terrors.  Fear had risen again.  A band of robbers had
gathered in one of the outlying villages on the lake, a village
where the men had bad characters, as being ready to turn bandit at
any moment.  And this gang, invisible in the daytime, consisting
during the day of lake fishermen and labourers on the land,
at night would set off on horseback to sack any lonely, or
insufficiently-protected house.

Then the fact that a gang of bandits was out always set the
isolated thieves and scoundrels in action.  Whatever happened, it
would be attributed to the bandits.  And so, many an unsuspected,
seemingly honest man, with the old lust in his soul, would steal
out by night with his machete and perhaps a pistol, to put his
fingers in the pie of the darkness.

And again Kate felt the terror clot and thicken in the black
silence of the Mexican night, till the sound of a cuenta falling
was terrible.  She would lie and listen to the thickening darkness.
A little way off would sound the long, shrill whistle of the police
watch.  And in a while, the police patrol, on horseback, would go
clattering lightly by.  But the police in most countries are never
present save where there is no trouble.

The rainy season was coming, and the night-wind rose from the lake,
making strange noises in the trees, and shaking the many loose
doors of the house.  The servants were away in their distant
recess.  And in Mexico, at night, each little distance isolates
itself absolutely, like a man in a black cloak turning his back.

In the morning, Juana would appear from the plaza, her eyes blob-
like and inky, and the old, weary, monkey look of subjection to
fear settled on her bronze face.  A race old in subjection to fear,
and unable to shake it off.  She would immediately begin to pour
forth to Kate, in a babbling, half-intelligent stream, some story
of a house broken into and a woman stabbed.  And she would say, the
owner of the hotel had sent word that it was not safe for Kate to
sleep alone in the house.  She must go to the hotel to sleep.

The whole village was in that state of curious, reptile
apprehension which comes over dark people.  A panic fear, a sense
of devilment and horror thick in the night air.  When blue morning
came they would cheer up.  But at night, like clotting blood the
air would begin to thicken again.

The fear, of course, was communicated from one person to another.
Kate was sure that if Juana and her family had not been huddled in
reptile terror away at the far end of the house, she herself would
have been unafraid.  As it was, Juana was like a terror-struck
lizard.

There was no man about the place.  Juana had two sons, Jesús, who
was about twenty, and Ezequiel, about seventeen.  But Jesús--she
pronounced it Hezoosn--ran the little gasoline motor for the
electric light, and he and Ezequiel slept together on the floor of
the little engine-house.  So that Juana huddled with her two girls,
Concha and Maria, in the den at the end of Kate's house, and seemed
to sweat a rank odour of fear.

The village was submerged.  Usually the plaza kept alive till ten
o'clock, with the charcoal fires burning and the ice-cream man
going round with his bucket on his head, endlessly crying:  Nieve!
Nieve! and the people gossiping on the streets or listening to the
young men with guitars.

Now, by nine o'clock, the place was deserted, curiously stony and
vacuous.  And the Jefe sent out the order that anybody in the
streets after ten o'clock would be arrested.

Kate hurried to her house and locked herself in.  It is not easy to
withstand the panic fear of a black-eyed, semi-barbaric people.
The thing communicates itself like some drug on the air, wringing
the heart and paralysing the soul with a sense of evil; black,
horrible evil.

She would lie in her bed in the absolute dark: the electric light
was cut off completely, everywhere, at ten o'clock, and primitive
darkness reigned.  And she could feel the demonish breath of evil
moving on the air in waves.

She thought of the grisly stories of the country, which she had
heard.  And she thought again of the people, outwardly so quiet, so
nice, with a gentle smile.  But even Humboldt had said of the
Mexicans, that few people had such a gentle smile, and at the same
time, such fierce eyes.  It was not that their eyes were exactly
fierce.  But their blackness was inchoate, with a dagger of white
light in it.  And in the inchoate blackness the blood-lust might
arise, out of the sediment of the uncreated past.

Uncreated, half-created, such a people was at the mercy of old
black influences that lay in a sediment at the bottom of them.
While they were quiet, they were gentle and kindly, with a sort of
limpid naïveté.  But when anything shook them at the depths, the
black clouds would arise, and they were gone again in the old
grisly passions of death, blood-lust, incarnate hate.  A people
incomplete, and at the mercy of old, upstarting lusts.

Somewhere at the bottom of their souls, she felt, was a fathomless
resentment, like a raw wound.  The heavy, bloody-eyed resentment of
men who have never been able to win a soul for themselves, never
been able to win themselves a nucleus, an individual integrity out
of the chaos of passions and potencies and death.  They are caught
in the toils of old lusts and old activities as in the folds of a
black serpent that strangles the heart.  The heavy, evil-smelling
weight of an unconquered past.

And under this weight they live and die, not really sorry to die.
Clogged and tangled in the elements, never able to extricate
themselves.  Blackened under a too-strong sun, surcharged with the
heavy sundering electricity of the Mexican air, and tormented by
the bubbling of volcanoes away below the feet.  The tremendous
potent elements of the American continent, that give men powerful
bodies, but which weigh the soul down and prevent its rising into
birth.  Or, if a man arrives with a soul, the maleficent elements
gradually break it, gradually, till he decomposes into ideas and
mechanistic activities, in a body full of mechanical energy, but
with his blood-soul dead and putrescent.

So, these men, unable to overcome the elements, men held down by
the serpent tangle of sun and electricity and volcanic emission,
they are subject to an ever-recurring, fathomless lust of
resentment, a demonish hatred of life itself.  Then, the in-
striking thud of a heavy knife, stabbing into a living body, this
is the best.  No lust of women can equal that lust.  The clutching
throb of gratification as the knife strikes in and the blood spurts
out!

It is the inevitable supreme gratification of a people entangled in
the past, and unable to extricate itself.  A people that has never
been redeemed, that has not known a Saviour.

For Jesus is no Saviour to the Mexicans.  He is a dead god in their
tomb.  As a miner who is entombed underground by the collapsing of
the earth in the gangways, so do whole nations become entombed
under the slow subsidence of their past.  Unless there comes some
Saviour, some Redeemer to drive a new way out, to the sun.

But the white men brought no salvation to Mexico.  On the contrary,
they find themselves at last shut in the tomb along with their dead
god and the conquered race.

Which is the status quo.

Kate lay and thought hard, in the black night.  At the same time,
she was listening intensely, with a clutch of horror.  She could
not control her heart.  It seemed wrenched out of place, and really
hurt her.  She was, as she had never been before, absolute
physically afraid, blood afraid.  Her blood was wrenched in a
paralysis of fear.

In England, in Ireland, during the war and the revolution she had
known SPIRITUAL fear.  The ghastly fear of the rabble; and during
the war, nations were nearly all rabble.  The terror of the rabble
that, mongrel-like, wanted to break the free SPIRIT in individual
men and women.  It was the cold, collective lust of millions of
people, to break the spirit in the outstanding individuals.  They
wanted to break this spirit, so that they could start the great
downhill rush back to old underworld levels, old gold-worship and
murder lust.  The rabble.

In those days Kate had known the agony of cold social fear, as if a
democracy were a huge, huge cold centipede which, if you resisted
it, would dig every claw into you.  And the flesh would mortify
around every claw.

That had been her worst agony of fear.  And she had survived.

Now she knew the real heart-wrench of blood fear.  Her heart seemed
pulled out of place, in a stretched pain.

She dozed, and wakened suddenly, at a small noise.  She sat up in
bed.  Her doors on to the veranda had shutters.  The doors
themselves were fastened, but the shutters were open for air,
leaving the upper space, like the window of the door, open.  And
against the dark grey of the night she saw what looked like a black
cat crouching on the bottom of the panel-space.

'What is that?' she said automatically.

Instantly, the thing moved, slid away, and she knew it was the arm
of a man that had been reaching inside to pull the bolt of the
door.  She lay for a second paralysed, prepared to scream.  There
was no movement.  So she leaned and lit a candle.

The curious panic fear was an agony to her.  It paralysed her and
wrenched her heart out of place.  She lay prostrate in the anguish
of night-terror.  The candle blazed duskily.  There was a far-off
mutter of thunder.  And the night was horrible, horrible.  Mexico
was ghastly to her beyond description.

She could not relax, she could not get her heart into place.
'Now,' she thought to herself, 'I am at the mercy of this thing,
and I have lost myself.'  And it was a terrible feeling, to be
lost, scattered, as it were, from herself in a horror of fear.

'What can I do?' she thought, summoning her spirit.  'How can I
help myself?'  She knew she was all alone.

For a long time she could do nothing.  Then a certain relief came
to her as she thought:  'I am believing in evil.  I mustn't believe
in evil.  Panic and murder never start unless the leading people
let slip the control.  I don't really believe in evil.  I don't
believe the old Pan can wrench us back into the old, evil forms of
consciousness, unless we wish it.  I do believe there is a greater
power, which will give us the greater strength, while we keep the
faith in it, and the spark of contact.  Even the man who wanted to
break in here, I don't think he really had the power.  He was just
trying to be mean and wicked, but something in him would have to
submit to a greater faith and a greater power.'

So she reassured herself, till she had the courage to get up and
fasten her door-shutters at the top.  After which she went from
room to room, to see that all was made fast.  And she was thankful
to realize that she was afraid of scorpions on the floor, as well
as of the panic horror.

Now she had seen that the five doors and the six windows of her
wing of communicating rooms were fast.  She was sealed inside the
darkness, with her candle.  To get to the other part of the house,
the dining-room and kitchen, she had to go outside on the veranda.

She grew quieter, shut up with the dusky glow of her candle.  And
her heart, still wrenched with the pain of fear, was thinking:
'Joachim said that evil was the lapsing back to old life-modes that
have been surpassed in us.  This brings murder and lust.  But the
drums of Saturday night are the old rhythm, and that dancing round
the drum is the old savage form of expression.  Consciously
reverting to the savage.  So perhaps it is evil.'

But then again her instinct to believe came up.

'No!  It's not a helpless, panic reversal.  It is conscious,
carefully chosen.  We must go back to pick up old threads.  We must
take up the old, broken impulse that will connect us with the
mystery of the cosmos again, now we are at the end of our own
tether.  We must do it.  Don Ramón is right.  He must be a great
man, really.  I thought there WERE no really great men any more:
only great financiers and great artists and so on, but no great
MEN.  He must be a great man.'

She was again infinitely reassured by this thought.

But again, just as she had blown out the candle, vivid flares of
white light spurted through all the window-cracks, and thunder
broke in great round balls, smashing down.  The bolts of thunder
seemed to fall on her heart.  She lay absolutely crushed, in a kind
of quiescent hysterics, tortured.  And the hysterics held her
listening and tense and abject, until dawn.  And then she was a
wreck.

In the morning came Juana, also looking like a dead insect, with
the conventional phrase:  'How have you passed the night, Niña?'

'Badly!' said Kate.  Then she told the story of the black cat, or
the man's arm.

'Mire!' said Juana, in a hushed voice.  'The poor innocent will be
murdered in her bed.  No, Niña, you must go and sleep in the hotel.
No, no, Niña, you can't leave your window shutter open.  No, no,
impossible.  See now, will you go to the hotel to sleep?  The other
señora does it.'

'I don't want to,' said Kate.

'You don't want to, Niña?  Ah!  Entonces!  Entonces, Niña, I will
tell Ezequiel to sleep here outside your door, with his pistol.  He
has a pistol, and he will sleep outside your door, and you can
leave your shutter open, for air in the hot night.  Ah, Niña, we
poor women, we need a man and a pistol.  We ought not to be left
alone all the night.  We are afraid, the children are afraid.  And
imagine it, that there was a robber trying to open the bolt of your
door!  Imagine it to yourself!  No, Niña, we will tell Ezequiel at
mid-day.'

Ezequiel came striding proudly in, at mid-day.  He was a wild, shy
youth, very erect and proud, and half savage.  His voice was
breaking, and had a queer resonance.

He stood shyly while the announcement was being made to him.  Then
he looked at Kate with flashing black eyes, very much the man to
the rescue.

'Yes! yes!' he said.  'I will sleep here on the corridor.  Don't
have any fear.  I shall have my pistol.'

He marched off, and returned with the pistol, an old long-barrelled
affair.

'It has five shots,' he said, showing the weapon.  'If you open the
door in the night, you must say a word to me first.  Because if I
see anything move, I shall fire five shots.  Pst!  Pst!'

She saw by the flash of his eyes WHAT satisfaction it would give
him to fire five shots at something moving in the night.  The
thought of shots being fired at HIM gave him not the least concern.

'And Niña,' said Juana, 'if you come home late, after the light is
out, you must call Ezequiel!  Because if not, Brumm!  Brumm!--and
who knows who will be killed!'

Ezequiel slept on a straw mat on the brick veranda outside Kate's
door, rolled up in his blanket, and with the pistol at his side.
So she could leave her shutter open for air.  And the first night
she was kept awake once more by his fierce snoring.  Never had she
heard such a tremendous resonant sound!  What a chest that boy must
have!  It was sound from some strange, savage other world.  The
noise kept her awake, but there was something in it which she
liked.  Some sort of wild strength.



CHAPTER IX

Casa de las Cuentas


Kate was soon fond of the limping, untidy Juana, and of the girls.
Concha was fourteen, a thick, heavy, barbaric girl with a mass of
black waving hair which she was always scratching.  Maria was
eleven, a shy, thin bird-like thing with big eyes that seemed
almost to absorb the light round her.

It was a reckless family.  Juana admitted a different father for
Jesús, but to judge from the rest, one would have suspected a
different father for each of them.  There was a basic, sardonic
carelessness in the face of life, in all the family.  They lived
from day to day, a stubborn, heavy, obstinate life of indifference,
careless about the past, careless about the present, careless about
the future.  They had even no interest in money.  Whatever they got
they spent in a minute, and forgot it again.

Without aim or purpose, they lived absolutely à terre, down on the
dark, volcanic earth.  They were not animals, because men and women
and their children CANNOT be animals.  It is not granted us.  Go,
for once gone, thou never canst return! says the great Urge, which
drives us creatively on.  When man tries brutally to return to the
older, previous levels of evolution, he does so in the spirit of
cruelty and misery.

So in the black eyes of the family, a certain vicious fear and
wonder and misery.  The misery of human beings who squat helpless
outside their own unbuilt selves, unable to win their souls out of
the chaos, and indifferent to all other victories.

White people are becoming soulless too.  But they have conquered
the lower worlds of metal and energy, so they whizz around in
machines, circling the void of their own emptiness.

To Kate, there was a great pathos in her family.  Also a certain
repulsiveness.

Juana and her children, once they accepted their Niña as their own,
were honest with intensity.  Point of honour, they were honest to
the least little plum in the fruit bowl.  And almost intensely
eager to serve.

Themselves indifferent to their surroundings, they would live in
squalor.  The earth was the great garbage-bowl.  Everything
discarded was flung on the earth and they did not care.  Almost
they liked to live in a milieu of fleas and old rags, bits of
paper, banana skins and mango stones.  Here's a piece torn off my
dress!  Earth, take it.  Here's the combings of my hair!  Earth,
take them!

But Kate could not bear it.  She cared.  And immediately, the
family were quite glad, thrilled that SHE cared.  They swept the
patio with the twig broom till they swept the very surface of the
earth away.  Fun!  The Niña had feelings about it.

She was a source of wonder and amusement to them.  But she was
never a class superior.  She was a half-incomprehensible, half-
amusing wonder-being.

The Niña wanted the aguador to bring two botes of hot water, quick,
from the hot springs, to wash herself all over every morning.  Fun!
Go, Maria, tell the aguador to RUN with the Niña's water.

Then they almost resented it that she shut herself off to have her
bath.  She was a sort of goddess to them, to provide them with fun
and wonder; but she ought always to be accessible.  And a god who
is forever accessible to human beings has an unenviable time of it,
Kate soon discovered.

No, it was no sinecure, being a Niña.  At dawn began the scrape-
scrape of the twig broom outside.  Kate stayed on in bed, doors
fastened but shutters open.  Flutter outside!  Somebody wanted to
sell two eggs.  Where is the Niña?  She is sleeping!  The visitor
does not go.  Continual flutter outside.

The aguador!  Ah, the water for the Niña's bath!  She is sleeping,
she is sleeping.'  No!' called Kate, slipping into a dressing-gown
and unbolting the door.  In come the children with the bath-tub, in
comes the aguador with the two square kerosene cans full of hot
water.  Twelve centavos!  Twelve centavos for the aguador!  No hay!
We haven't got twelve centavos.  Later!  Later!  Away trots the
aguador, pole over his shoulder.  Kate shuts her doors and shutters
and starts her bath.

'Niña?  Niña?'

'What do you want?'

'Eggs boiled or fried or rancheros?  Which do you want?'

'Boiled.'

'Coffee or chocolate?'

'Coffee.'

'Or do you want tea?'

'No, coffee.'

Bath proceeds.

'Nina?'

'Yes.'

'There is no coffee.  We are going to buy some.'

'I'll take tea.'

'No, Niña!  I am going.  Wait for me.'

'Go then.'

Kate comes out to breakfast on the veranda.  The table is set,
heaped with fruit and white bread and sweet buns.

'Good morning, Niña.  How have you passed the night?  Well!  Ah,
praised be God!  Maria, the coffee.  I'm going to put the eggs in
the water.  Oh, Niña, that they may not be boiled hard!--Look, what
feet of the Madonna!  Look!  Bonitos!'

And Juana stooped down, fascinated to touch with her black finger
Kate's white soft feet, that were thrust in light sandals, just a
thong across the foot.

The day had begun.  Juana looked upon herself as dedicated entirely
to Kate.  As soon as possible she shooed her girls away, to school.
Sometimes they went: mostly they didn't.  The Niña said they must
go to school.  Listen!  Listen now!  Says the Niña that you must go
to school!  Away!  Walk!

Juana would limp back and forth down the long veranda from kitchen
to the breakfast table, carrying away the dishes one by one.  Then,
with a great splash, she was washing up.

Morning!  Brilliant sun pouring into the patio, on the hibiscus
flowers and the fluttering yellow and green rags of the banana-
trees.  Birds swiftly coming and going, with tropical suddenness.
In the dense shadow of the mango-grove, white-clad Indians going
like ghosts.  The sense of fierce sun and, almost more impressive,
of dark, intense shadow.  A twitter of life, yet a certain heavy
weight of silence.  A dazzling flicker and brilliance of light, yet
the feeling of weight.

Kate would sit alone, rocking on her veranda, pretending to sew.
Silently appears an old man with one egg held up mysteriously, like
some symbol.  Would the patrona buy it for five centavos?  La Juana
only gives four centavos.  All right.  Where is Juana?

Juana appears from the plaza with more purchases.  The egg!  The
four centavos!  The account of the spendings.  Entonces!  Entonces!
Luego!  Luego!  Ah, Niña, no tengo memoria!  Juana could not read
nor write.  She scuffled off to the market with her pesos, bought
endless little things at one or two centavos each, every morning.
And every morning there was a reckoning up.  Ah!  Ah!  Where are
we?  I have no memory.  Well then--ah--yes--I bought ocote for
three centavos!  How much?  How much, Niña?  How much is it now?

It was a game which thrilled Juana to the marrow, reckoning up the
centavos to get it just right.  If she was a centavo short in the
change, she was paralysed.  Time after time she would reappear.
There is a centavo short, Niña!  Ah, how stupid I am!  But I will
give you one of mine!

'Don't bother,' said Kate.  'Don't think of it any more.'

'But yes.  But yes!' and away she limped in distraction.

Till an hour later, loud cry from the far end of the house.  Juana
waving a scrap of greenery.

'Mire!  Niña!  Compré perejil a un centavo--I bought parsley for
one cent.  Is it right?'

'It is right,' said Kate.

And life could proceed once more.

There were two kitchens, the one next the dining-room, belonging to
Kate, and the narrow little shed under the banana-trees, belonging
to the servants.  From her veranda Kate looked away down to Juana's
kitchen shed.  It had a black window-hole.

Clap!  Clap!  Clap!  Clap!  Why, I thought Concha was at school!
said Kate to herself.

No!--there, in the darkness of the window-hole, was Concha's
swarthy face and mane, peering out like some animal from a cave, as
she made the tortillas.  Tortillas are flat pancakes of maize
dough, baked dry on a flat earthenware plate over the fire.  And
the making consists of clapping a bit of new dough from the palm of
one hand to the other, till the tortilla is of the requisite
thinness, roundness, and so-called lightness.

Clap!  Clap!  Clap!  Clap!  Clap!  Clap!  Clap!  It was as
inevitable as the tick of some spider, the sound of Concha making
tortillas in the heat of the morning, peering out of her dark
window-hole.  And some time after mid-day, the smoke would be
coming out of the window-hole; Concha was throwing the raw
tortillas on the big earthen plate over the slow wood fire.

Then Ezequiel might or might not stride in, very much the man,
serape poised over one shoulder and big straw hat jauntily curled,
to eat the mid-day tortillas.  If he had work in the fields at any
distance, he would not appear till nightfall.  If he appeared, he
sat on the doorstep and the women served him his tortillas and
fetched him his drink of water as if he was a king, boy though he
might be.  And his rough, breaking voice was heard in quiet
command.

Command was the word.  Though he was quiet and gentle, and very
conscientious, there was calm, kingly command in his voice when he
spoke to his mother or sisters.  The old male prerogative.
Somehow, it made Kate want to ridicule him.

Came her own meal: one of her trials.  Hot, rather greasy soup.
Inevitable hot, greasy, rather peppery rice.  Inevitable meat in
hot, thick, rather greasy sauce.  Boiled calabacitas or egg-plant,
salad, perhaps some dulce made with milk--and the big basket of
fruit.  Overhead, the blazing tropical sun of late May.

Afternoon, and greater heat.  Juana set off with the girls and the
dishes.  They would do the washing up in the lake.  Squatting on
the stones, they would dabble the plates one by one, the spoons and
the forks one by one in the filmy water of the lake, then put them
in the sun to dry.  After which Juana might wash a couple of towels
in the lake and the girls might bathe.  Sauntering the day away--
sauntering the day away.

Jesús, the eldest son, a queer, heavy, greasy fellow, usually
appeared in the afternoon, to water the garden.  But he ate his
meals at the hotel, and really lived there, had his home there.
Not that he had any home, any more than a zopilote had a home.  But
he ran the planta, and did odd jobs about the hotel, and worked
every day in the year till half-past ten at night, earning twenty-
two pesos, eleven dollars, a month.  He wore a black shirt, and his
thick, massive black hair dropped over his low brow.  Very near to
an animal.  And though, to order, he wore a black Fascisti shirt,
he had the queer, animal jeering of the socialists, an instinct for
pulling things down.

His mother and he had a funny little intimacy of quiet and
indifferent mutual taunting of one another.  He would give her some
money if she were in a strait.  And there was a thin little thread
of blood-bondage between them.  Apart from that, complete
indifference.

Ezequiel was a finer type.  He was slender and so erect that he
almost curved backwards.  He was very shy, farouche.  Proud also,
and more responsible to his family.  He would not go to work in an
hotel.  No.  He was a worker in the fields, and he was proud of it.
A man's work.  No equivocal sort of half-service for him.

Though he was just a hired labourer, yet working on the land he
never felt he was working for a master.  It was the land he worked
for.  Somewhere inside himself he felt that the land was his, and
he belonged in a measure to it.  Perhaps a lingering feeling of
tribal, communal land-ownership and service.

When there was work, he was due to earn a peso a day.  There was
often no work: and often only seventy-five centavos a day for wage.
When the land was dry, he would try to get work on the road, though
this he did not like.  But he earned his peso a day.

Often, there was no work.  Often, for days, sometimes for weeks, he
would have to hang about, nothing to do, nothing to do.  Only, when
the Socialist Government had begun giving the peasants bits of
land, dividing up the big haciendas, Ezequiel had been allotted a
little piece outside the village.  He would go and gather the
stones together there, and prepare to build a little hut.  And he
would break the earth with a hoe, his only implement, as far as
possible.  But he had no blood connection with this square
allotment of unnatural earth, and he could not get himself into
relations with it.  He was fitful and diffident about it.  There
was no incentive, no urge.

On workdays he would come striding in about six o'clock, shyly
greeting Kate as he passed.  He was a gentleman in his barbarism.
Then, away in the far recess, he would rapidly fold tortilla after
tortilla, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, rapidly
eating the leathery things that taste of mortar, because the maize
is first boiled with lime to loosen the husk, and accepting another
little pile, served on a leaf, from the cook, Concha.  Juana, cook
for the Niña, would no longer condescend to cook for her own
family.  And sometimes there was a mess of meat and chile for
Ezequiel to scoop up out of the earthenware casserole, with his
tortillas.  And sometimes there was not.  But always, he ate with a
certain blind, rapid indifference, that also seems to be Mexican.
They seem to EAT even with a certain hostile reluctance, and have a
strange indifference to what or when they eat.

His supper finished, as a rule he was off again like a shot, to the
plaza, to be among men.  And the women would sit desultorily about,
on the ground.  Sometimes Kate would come in at nine o'clock to an
empty place--Ezequiel in the plaza, Juana and Maria disappeared
somewhere or other, and Choncha lying asleep like a heap of rags on
the gravel of the patio.  When Kate called her, she would raise her
head, stupefied and hopeless; then get up like a dog and crawl away
to the gate.  The strange stupor of boredom and hopelessness that
was always sinking upon them would make Kate's heart stand still
with dread.

The peculiar indifference to everything, even to one another.
Juana washed a cotton shirt and a pair of cotton trousers for each
of her sons, once a week, and there her maternal efforts ended.
She saw hardly anything of them, and was often completely unaware
of what Ezequiel was doing, where he was working, or at what.  He
had just gone off to work, no more.

Yet again, sometimes she had hot, fierce pangs of maternal
protectiveness, when the boy was unjustly treated, as he often was.
And if she thought he were ill, a black sort of fatalistic fear
came over her.  But Kate had to rouse her into getting some simple
medicine.

Like animals, yet not at all like animals.  For animals are
complete in their isolation and their insouciance.  With them it is
not indifference.  It is completeness in themselves.  But with the
family there was always a kind of bleeding of incompleteness, a
terrible stupor of boredom settling down.

The two girls could not be apart: they must always be running after
one another.  Yet Concha continually teased the big-eyed, naïve
simpleton of a Maria.  And Maria was always in tears.  Or the two
were suddenly throwing stones at one another.  But with no real aim
to hit.  And Juana was abusing them with sudden vehemence, that
flickered in a minute to complete indifference again.

Queer, the savage ferocity with which the girls would suddenly be
throwing stones at one another.  But queerer still, they always
aimed JUST TO MISS, Kate noticed the same in the savage attacks the
boys made on one another, on the beach; hurling large stones with
intense, terrible ferocity.  But almost always, aiming with a
curious cast in the eyes, just to miss.

But sometimes not.  Sometimes hitting with a sharp cut.  And then
the wounded one would drop right down, with a howl, as if dead.
And the other boys would edge away, in a silent kind of dread.  And
the wounded boy would be prostrate, not really much hurt, but as if
he was killed.

Then, maybe, suddenly he would be up, with a convulsion of murder
in his face, pursuing his adversary with a stone.  And the
adversary would abjectly flee.

Always the same thing among the young: a ceaseless, endless
taunting and tormenting.  The same as among the Red Indians.  But
the Pueblo Indians rarely lapsing from speech into violence.  The
Mexican boys almost always.  And almost always, one boy in
murderous rage, pursuing his taunter till he had hurt him: then an
abject collapse of the one hurt.  Then, usually, a revival of the
one hurt, the murderous frenzy transferred to him, and the first
attacker fleeing abjectly, in terror.  One or the other always
abject.

They were a strange puzzle to Kate.  She felt something must be
done.  She herself was inspired to help.  So she had the two girls
for an hour a day, teaching them to read, to sew, to draw.  Maria
wanted to learn to read: that she did want.  For the rest, they
began well.  But soon, the regularity and the slight insistence of
Kate on their attention made them take again that peculiar
invisible jeering tone, something peculiar to the American
Continent.  A quiet, invisible, malevolent mockery, a desire to
wound.  They would press upon her, trespassing upon her privacy,
and with a queer effrontery, doing all they could to walk over her.
With their ugly little wills, trying to pull her will down.

'No, don't lean on me, Concha.  Stand on your own feet.'

The slight grin of malevolence on Concha's face, as she stood on
her own feet.  Then:

'Do you have lice in your hair, Niña?'

The question asked with a peculiar, subtle, Indian insolence.

'No,' said Kate, suddenly angry.  'And now go!  Go!  Go away from
me!  Don't come near me.'

They slunk out, abject.  So much for educating them.

Kate had visitors from Guadalajara--great excitement.  But while
the visitors were drinking tea with Kate on the veranda, at the
other side of the patio, full in view, Juana, Concha, Maria and
Felipa, a cousin of about sixteen, squatted on the gravel with
their splendid black hair down their backs, displaying themselves
as they hunted in each other's hair for lice.  They wanted to be
full in view.  And they were it.  They wanted the basic fact of
lice to be thrust under the noses of those white people.

Kate strode down the veranda.

'If you must pick lice,' she said in a shaking voice to Juana,
shaking with anger, 'pick them there, in your own place, where you
can't be seen.'

One instant, Juana's black inchoate eyes gleamed with a malevolent
ridicule, meeting Kate's.  The next instant, humble and abject, the
four with their black hair down their backs slunk into the recess
out of sight.

But it pleased Juana that she had been able to make Kate's eyes
blaze with anger.  It pleased her.  She felt a certain low power in
herself.  True, she was a little afraid of that anger.  But that
was what she wanted.  She would have no use for a Niña of whom she
was not a bit afraid.  And she wanted to be able to provoke that
anger, of which she felt a certain abject twinge of fear.

Ah the dark races!  Kate's own Irish were near enough for her to
have glimpsed some of the mystery.  The dark races belong to a
bygone cycle of humanity.  They are left behind in a gulf out of
which they have never been able to climb.  And on to the particular
white man's levels they never will be able to climb.  They can only
follow as servants.

While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward
march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce.  But let the
white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the
dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old
gulfs.  To engulf him again.

Which is what is happening.  For the white man, let him bluster as
he may, is hollow with misgiving about his own supremacy.

Full speed ahead, then, for the débâcle.

But once Kate had been roused to a passion of revulsion from these
lice-picking, down-dragging people, they changed again, and served
her with a certain true wistfulness that could not but touch her.
Juana cared really about nothing.  But just that last thread of
relationship that connected her with Kate and the upper world of
daylight and fresh air, she didn't want to break.  No, no, she
didn't want finally to drive her Niña away.  No, no, the only one
thing she did want, ultimately, was to serve her Niña.

But at the same time, she cherished a deep malevolent grudge
against rich people, white people, superior people.  Perhaps the
white man has finally betrayed his own leadership.  Who knows!  But
it is a thing of the brave, on-marching soul, and perhaps this has
been betrayed already by the white man.  So that the dark are
rising upon him.

Juana would come to Kate, telling her stories from the past.
And the sinister mocking film would be on her black eyes, and her
lined copper face would take on its reptile mask as she would
continue: 'Usted sabe, Niña, los gringos, los gringuitos llevan
todo--you know, Niña, the gringos and the gringuitos take away
everything . . .'

The gringos are the Americans.  But Kate herself was included by
Juana in the gringuitos: the white foreigners.  The woman was
making another sliding, insolent attack.

'It is possible,' said Kate coldly.  'But tell me what I take away
from Mexico.'

'No, Niña, no!'  The subtle smile of satisfaction lurked under the
bronze tarnish of Juana's face.  She had been able to get at the
other woman, touch the raw.  'I don't speak of you, Niña!'  But
there was too much protest in it.

Almost, they wanted to drive her away: to insult her and drag her
down and make her want to go away.  They couldn't help it.  Like
the Irish, they could cut off their nose to spite their face.

The backward races!

At the same time there was a true pathos about them.  Ezequiel had
worked for a man for two months, building a house, when he was a
boy of fourteen, in order to get a serape.  At the end of the two
months, the man had put him off, and he had not got the serape: had
never got it.  A bitter disappointment.

But, then, Kate was not responsible for that.  And Juana seemed
almost to make her so.

A people without the energy of GETTING ON, how could they fail to
be hopelessly exploited.  They had been hopelessly and cruelly
exploited, for centuries.  And their backbones were locked in
malevolent resistance.

'But,' as Kate said to herself, 'I don't want to exploit them.  Not
a bit.  On the contrary, I am willing to give more than I get.  But
that nasty insinuating insultingness is not fair in the game.  I
never insult them.  I am so careful not to hurt them.  And then
they DELIBERATELY make these centipede attacks on me, and are
pleased when I am hurt.'

But she knew her own Irish at the game.  So she was able to put
Juana and the girls away from her, and isolate herself from them.
Once they were put away, their malevolence subsided and they
remembered what Kate wanted.  While she stayed amiable, they
forgot.  They forgot to sweep the patio, they forgot to keep
themselves clean.  Only when they were shoved back, into isolation,
did they remember again.

The boy, Ezequiel, seemed to her to have more honour than the
women.  He never made these insidious attacks.

And when her house was clean and quiet and the air seemed cleaned
again, the soul renewed, her old fondness for the family came back.
Their curious flitting, coming and going, like birds: the busy
clap--clap--clapping of tortillas, the excited scrunching of
tomatoes and chile on the metate, as Juana prepared sauce.  The
noise of the bucket in the well.  Jesús, come to water the garden.

The game, the game of it all!  Everything they did must be fun, or
they could not do it.  They could not abstract themselves to a
routine.  Never.  Everything must be fun, must be variable, must be
a bit of an adventure.  It was confusion, but after all, a living
confusion, not a dead, dreary thing.  Kate remembered her English
servants in the English kitchens: so mechanical and somehow
inhuman.  Well, this was the other extreme.

Here there was no discipline nor method at all.  Although Juana and
her brats really wanted to do the things Kate wished they must do
them their own way.  Sometimes Kate felt distracted: after all, the
mechanical lines are so much EASIER to follow.  But as far as
possible, she let the family be.  She had to get used, for example,
to the vagaries of her dining-table: a little round table that
always stood on the veranda.  At breakfast time it would be
discreetly set under the plantas by the salon; for dinner, at one
o'clock, it would have travelled way down the veranda; for tea it
might be under a little tree on the grass.  And then Juana would
decide that the Niña must take supper, two eggs, rancheros, in the
dining-room itself, isolated at the corner of the long dining-table
meant for fourteen people.

The same with the dishes.  Why they should, after washing up in the
big bowls in the kitchen for several days, suddenly struggle way
down to the lake with the unwashed pots in a basket on Concha's
shoulder, Kate never knew.  Except for the fun of the thing.

Children!  But, then, not at all children.  None of the wondering
insouciance of childhood.  Something dark and cognisant in their
souls all the time: some heavy weight of resistance.  They worked
in fits and starts, and could be very industrious; then came days
when they lay about on the ground like pigs.  At times they were
merry, seated round on the ground in groups, like Arabian nights,
and laughing away.  Then suddenly resisting even merriment in
themselves, relapsing into the numb gloom.  When they were busily
working, suddenly, for no reason, throwing away the tool, as if
resenting having given themselves.  Careless in their morals,
always changing their loves, the men at least resisted all the time
any real giving of themselves.  They didn't want the thing they
were pursuing.  It was the women who drew them on.  And a young man
and a girl going down the road from the lake in the dark, teasing
and poking each other in excitement, would startle Kate because of
their unusualness--the men and women never walked their sex abroad,
as white people do.  And the sudden, sexual laugh of the man, so
strange a sound of pain and desire, obstinate reluctance, and
helpless passion, a noise as if something tearing in his breast,
was a sound to remember.

Kate felt her household a burden.  In a sense, they were like
parasites, they wanted to live on her life, and pull her down, pull
her down.  Again, they were so generous with her, so good and
gentle, she felt they were wonderful.  And then once more she came
up against that unconscious, heavy, reptilian indifference in them,
indifference and resistance.

Her servants were the clue to all the native life, for her.  The
men always together, erect, handsome, balancing their great hats on
the top of their heads and sitting, standing, crouching with a
snake-like impassivity.  The women together separately, soft, and
as if HIDDEN, wrapped tight in their dark rebozos.  Men and women
seemed always to be turning their back on one another, as if they
didn't want to see one another.  No flirting, no courting.  Only an
occasional quick, dark look, the signal of a weapon-like desire,
given and taken.

The women seemed, on the whole, softly callous and determined to go
their own way: to change men if they wished.  And the men seemed
not to care very profoundly.  But it was the women who wanted the
men.

The native women, with their long black hair streaming down their
full, ruddy backs, would bathe at one end of the beach, usually
wearing their chemise, or a little skirt.  The men took absolutely
no notice.  They didn't even look the other way.  It was the women
bathing, that was all.  As if it were, like the charales swimming,
just a natural part of the lake life.  The men just left that part
of the lake to the women.  And the women sat in the shallows of the
lake, isolated in themselves like moor-fowl, pouring water over
their heads and over their ruddy arms from a gourd scoop.

The quiet, unobtrusive, but by no means down-trodden women of the
peon class.  They went their own way, enveloped in their rebozos as
in their own darkness.  They hurried nimbly along, their full
cotton skirts swinging, chirping and quick like birds.  Or they
sat in the lake with long hair streaming, pouring water over
themselves: again like birds.  Or they passed with a curious slow
inevitability up the lake-shore, with a heavy red jar of water
perched on one shoulder, one arm over the head, holding the rim of
the jar.  They had to carry all water from the lake to their
houses.  There was no town supply.  Or, especially on Sunday
afternoons, they sat in their doorways de-lousing one another.  The
most resplendent belles, with magnificent black wavy hair, were
most thoroughly de-loused.  It was as if it were a meritorious
public act.

The men were the obvious figures.  They assert themselves on the
air.  They are the dominant.  Usually they are in loose groups,
talking quietly, or silent: always standing or sitting apart,
rarely touching one another.  Often a single man would stand alone
at a street corner in his serape, motionless for hours, like some
powerful spectre.  Or a man would lie on the beach as if he had
been cast up dead from the waters.  Impassive, motionless, they
would sit side by side on the benches of the plaza, not exchanging
a word.  Each one isolated in his own fate, his eyes black and
quick like a snake's, and as blank.

It seemed to Kate that the highest thing this country might produce
would be some powerful relationship of man to man.  Marriage itself
would always be a casual thing.  Though the men seemed very gentle
and protective to the little children.  Then they forgot them.

But sex itself was a powerful, potent thing, not to be played with
or paraded.  The one mystery.  And a mystery greater than the
individual.  The individual hardly counted.

It was strange to Kate to see the Indian huts on the shore, little
holes built of straw or corn-stalks, with half-naked children
squatting on the naked earth floor, and a lousy woman-squalor
around, a litter of rags and bones, and a sharp smell of human
excrement.  The people have no noses.  And standing silent and
erect not far from the hole of the doorway, the man, handsome and
impassive.  How could it be, that such a fine-looking human male
should be so absolutely indifferent, content with such paltry
squalor?

But there he was, unconscious.  He seemed to have life and passion
in him.  And she knew he was strong.  No men in the world can carry
heavier loads on their backs, for longer distances, than these
Indians.  She had seen an Indian trotting down a street with a
piano on his back: holding it, also, by a band round his forehead.
From his forehead, and on his spine he carried it, trotting along.
The women carry with a band round the breast.

So there is strength.  And APPARENTLY, there is passionate life.
But no energy.  Nowhere in Mexico is there any sign of energy.
This is, as it were, switched off.

Even the new artisan class, though it imitates the artisan class of
the United States, has no real energy.  There are workmen's clubs.
The workmen dress up and parade a best girl on their arm.  But
somehow it seems what it is, only a weak imitation.

Kate's family was increased, without her expecting it.  One day
there arrived from Ocotlan a beautiful ox-eyed girl of about
fifteen, wrapped in her black cotton rebozo, and somewhat towny in
her Madonna-meekness: Maria del Carmen.  With her, Julio, a
straight and fierce young man of twenty-two.  They had just been
married, and had come to Sayula for a visit.  Julio was Juana's
cousin.

Might they sleep in the patio with herself and the girls, was
Juana's request.  They would stay only two days.

Kate was amazed.  Maria del Carmen must have had some Spanish
blood, her beauty was touched with Spain.  She seemed even refined
and superior.  Yet she was to sleep out on the ground like a dog,
with her young husband.  And he, so erect and proud-looking,
possessed nothing in the world but an old serape.

'There are three spare bedrooms,' said Kate.  'They may sleep in
one of those.'

The beds were single beds.  Would they need more blankets? she
asked Juana.

No!  They would manage with the one serape of Julio's.

The new family had arrived.  Julio was a bricklayer.  That is to
say, he worked building the adobe walls of the little houses.  He
belonged to Sayula, and had come back for a visit.

The visit continued.  Julio would come striding in at midday and at
evening; he was looking for work.  Maria del Carmen, in her one
black dress, would squat on the floor and pat tortillas.  She was
allowed to cook them in Juana's kitchen hole.  And she talked and
laughed with the girls.  At night, when Julio was home, he would
lie on the ground with his back to the wall, impassive, while Maria
del Carmen fondled his thick black hair.

They were in love.  But even now, he was not yielding to his love.

She wanted to go back to Ocotlan, where she was at home, and more a
señorita than here in Sayula.  But he refused.  There was no money:
the young ménage lived on about five American cents a day.

Kate was sewing.  Maria del Carmen, who didn't even know how to put
a chemise together, watched with great eyes.  Kate taught her, and
bought a length of cotton material.  Maria del Carmen was sewing
herself a dress!

Julio had got work at a peso a day.  The visit continued.  Kate
thought Julio wasn't very nice with Maria del Carmen: his quiet
voice was so overbearing in command when he spoke to her.  And
Maria del Carmen, who was a bit towny, did not take it well.  She
brooded a little.

The visit stretched into weeks.  And now Juana was getting a bit
tired of her relative.

But Julio had got a bit of money.  He had rented a little one-room
adobe house, at one peso fifty per week.  Maria del Carmen was
going to move into her own home.

Kate saw the new outfit got together.  It consisted of one straw
mat, three cooking-plates of earthenware, five bits of native
crockery, two wooden spoons, one knife and Julio's old blanket.
That was all.  But Maria del Carmen was moving in.

Kate presented her with a large old eiderdown, whose silk was
rather worn, a couple of bowls, and a few more bits of crockery.
Maria del Carmen was set up.  Good!  Good!  Oh good!  Kate heard
her voice down the patio.  I have got a coverlet!  I have got a
coverlet!

In the rainy season, the nights can be very cold, owing to
evaporation.  Then the natives lie through the small hours like
lizards, numb and prostrate with cold.  They are lying on the damp
earth on a thin straw mat, with a corner of an old blanket to cover
them.  And the same terrible inertia makes them endure it, without
trying to make any change.  They could carry in corn husks or dry
banana leaves for a bed.  They could even cover themselves with
banana leaves.

But no!  On a thin mat on damp cold earth they lie and tremble with
cold, night after night, night after night, night after night.

But Maria del Carmen was a bit towny.  Oh good!  Oh good!  I've got
a coverlet!



CHAPTER X

Don Ramón and Doña Carlota


Kate had been in Sayula ten days before she had any sign from Don
Ramón.  She had been out in a boat on the lake, and had seen his
house, round the bend of the western point.  It was a reddish-and-
yellow two-storey house with a little stone basin for the boats,
and a mango grove between it and the lake.  Among the trees, away
from the lake, were the black adobe huts, two rows, of the peons.

The hacienda had once been a large one.  But it had been irrigated
from the hills, and the revolutions had broken all the aqueducts.
Only a small supply of water was available.  Then Don Ramón had had
enemies in the Government.  So that a good deal of his land was
taken away to be divided among the peons.  Now, he had only some
three hundred acres.  The two hundred acres along the lake-shore
were mostly lost to him.  He worked a few acres of fruit land round
the house, and in a tiny valley just in the hills he raised sugar-
cane.  On the patches of the mountain slope little patches of maize
were to be seen.

But Doña Carlota had money.  She was from Torreon and drew still a
good income from the mines.

A mozo came with a note from Don Ramón: might he bring his wife to
call on Kate?

Doña Carlota was a thin, gentle, wide-eyed woman, with a slightly
startled expression, and soft, brownish hair.  She was pure
European in extraction, of a Spanish father and French mother: very
different from the usual stout, over-powdered, ox-like Mexican
matron.  Her face was pale, faded, and without any make-up at all.
Her thin, eager figure had something English about it, but her
strange, wide brown eyes were not English.  She spoke only Spanish--
or French.  But her Spanish was so slow and distinct and slightly
plaintive, that Kate understood her at once.

The two women understood one another quickly, but were a little
nervous of one another.  Doña Carlota was delicate and sensitive
like a Chihuahua dog, and with the same slightly prominent eyes.
Kate felt she had rarely met a woman with such a dog-like finesse
of gentleness.  And the two women talked.  Ramón, large and muted,
kept himself in reserve.  It was as if the two women rushed
together to unite against his silence and his powerful, different
significance.

Kate knew at once that Doña Carlota loved him, but with a love that
was now nearly all WILL.  She had worshipped him, and she had had
to leave off worshipping him.  She had had to question him.  And
she would never now cease from questioning.

So he sat apart, a little constrained, his handsome head hanging a
little, and his dark, sensitive hands dangling between his thighs.

'I had such a wonderful time!' Kate said suddenly to him.  'I
danced a dance round the drum with the Men of Quetzalcoatl.'

'I heard,' he said, with a rather stiff smile.

Doña Carlota understood English, though she would not speak it.

'You danced with the men of Quetzalcoatl!' she said in Spanish, in
a pained voice.  'But, Señora, why did you do such a thing?  Oh
why?'

'I was fascinated,' said Kate.

'No, you must not be fascinated.  No!  No!  It is not good.  I tell
you.  I am so SORRY my husband interests himself in this thing.  I
am so sorry.'

Juana was bringing a bottle of vermouth: all that Kate had to offer
her visitors, in the morning.

'You went to see your boys in the United States?' said Kate to Doña
Carlota.  'How were they?'

'Oh, better, thank you.  They are well; that is, the younger is
very delicate.'

'You didn't bring him home?'

'No!  No!  I think they are better at school.  Here--here--there
are so many things to trouble them.  No!  But they will come home
next month, for the vacation.'

'How nice!' said Kate.  'Then I shall see them.  They will be here,
won't they?--on the lake?'

'Well!--I am not sure.  Perhaps for a little while.  You see I am
so busy in Mexico with my Cuna.'

'What is a Cuna?' said Kate; she only knew it was the Spanish for
cradle.

It turned out to be a foundlings' home, run by a few obscure
Carmelite sisters.  And Doña Carlota was the director.  Kate
gathered that Don Ramón's wife was an intense, almost exalted
Catholic.  She exalted herself in the Church, and in her work for
the Cuna.

'There are so many children born in Mexico,' said Doña Carlota,
'and so many die.  If only we could save them, and equip them for
life.  We do a little, all we can.'

It seemed the waste, unwanted babies could be delivered in at the
door of the Cuna, like parcels.  The mother had only to knock, and
hand in the little living bundle.

'It saves so many mothers from neglecting their babies, and letting
them die,' said Doña Carlota.  'Then we do what we can.  If the
mother doesn't leave a name, I name the child.  Very often I do.
The mothers just hand over a little naked thing, sometimes without
a name or a rag to cover it.  And we never ask.'

The children were not all kept in the Home.  Only a small number.
Of the others, some decent Indian woman was paid a small sum to
take the child into her home.  Every month she must come with the
little one to the Cuna, to receive her wage.  The Indians are so
very rarely unkind to children.  Careless, yes.  But rarely, rarely
unkind.

In former days, Doña Carlota said, nearly every well-born lady in
Mexico would receive one or more of these foundlings into her home,
and have it brought up with the family.  It was the loose,
patriarchal generosity innate in the bosoms of the Spanish-
Mexicans.  But now, few children were adopted.  Instead, they were
taught as far as possible to be carpenters or gardeners, or house-
servants, or, among the girls, dressmakers, even school-teachers.

Kate listened with uneasy interest.  She felt there was so much
real human feeling in this Mexican charity: she was almost rebuked.
Perhaps what Doña Carlota was doing was the best that could be
done, in this half-wild, helpless country.  At the same time, it
was such a forlorn hope, it made one's heart sink.

And Doña Carlota, confident as she was in her good works, still had
just a bit the look of a victim; a gentle, sensitive, slightly
startled victim.  As if some secret enemy drained her blood.

Don Ramón sat there impassive, listening without heeding; solid and
unmoving AGAINST the charitable quiver of his wife's emotion.  He
let her do as she would.  But against her work and against her flow
he was in silent, heavy, unchanging opposition.  She knew this, and
trembled in her nervous eagerness, as she talked to Kate about the
Cuna, and won Kate's sympathy.  Till it seemed to her that there
was something cruel in Don Ramón's passive, masked poise.  An
impassive male cruelty, changeless as a stone idol.

'Now won't you come and spend the day with me while I am here with
Don Ramón?' said Doña Carlota.  'The house is very poor and rough.
It is no longer what it used to be.  But it is your house if you
will come.'

Kate accepted, and said she would prefer to walk out.  It was only
four miles, and surely she would be safe, with Juana.

'I will send a man to come with you,' said Don Ramón.  'It might
not be quite safe.'

'Where is General Viedma?' asked Kate.

'We shall try to get him out when you come,' replied Doña Carlota.
'I am so very fond of Don Cipriano, I have known him for many
years, and he is the godfather of my younger son.  But now he is in
command of the Guadalajara division, he is not very often able to
come out.'

'I wonder why he is a General?' said Kate.  'He seems to me too
human.'

'Oh, but he is very human too.  But he is a general; yes, yes, he
wants to be in command of the soldiers.  And I tell you, he is very
strong.  He has great power with his regiments.  They believe in
him, oh, they believe in him.  He has that power, you know, that
some of the higher types of Indians have, to make many others want
to follow them and fight for them.  You know?  Don Cipriano is like
that.  You can never change him.  But I think a woman might be
wonderful for him.  He has lived so without any woman in his life.
He won't care about them.'

'What does he care about?' asked Kate.

'Ah!'  Doña Carlota started as if stung.  Then she glanced quickly,
involuntarily at her husband, as she added:  'I don't know.
Really, I don't know.'

'The Men of Quetzalcoatl,' said Don Ramón heavily, with a little
smile.

But Doña Carlota seemed to be able to take all the ease and the
banter out of him.  He seemed stiff and a bit stupid.

'Ah, there!  There!  There you have it!  The Men of Quetzalcoatl--
that is a nice thing for him to care about!  A nice thing, I say,'
fluttered Doña Carlota, in her gentle, fragile, scolding way.  And
it was evident to Kate that she adored both the men, and trembled
in opposition to their wrongness, and would never give in to them.

To Ramón it was a terrible burden, his wife's quivering, absolute,
blind opposition, taken in conjunction with her helpless adoration.

A man-servant appeared at nine o'clock one morning, to accompany
Kate to the hacienda, which was called Jamiltepec.  He had a
basket, and had been shopping in the market.  An elderly man, with
grey in his moustache, he had bright young eyes and seemed full of
energy.  His bare feet in the huaraches were almost black with
exposure, but his clothes were brilliantly white.

Kate was glad to be walking.  The one depressing thing about life
in the villages was that one could not walk out into the country.
There was always the liability to be held up or attacked.  And she
had walked already, as far as possible, in every direction, in the
neighbourhood of the village, accompanied usually by Ezequiel.  Now
she was beginning to feel a prisoner.

She was glad, then, to be setting off.  The morning was clear and
hot, the pale brown lake quite still, like a phantom.  People were
moving on the beach, in the distance tiny, like dots of white:
white dots of men following the faint dust of donkeys.  She
wondered often why humanity was like specks in the Mexican
landscape; just specks of life.

They passed from the lake shore to the rough, dusty road going
west, between the steep slope of the hills and the bit of flat by
the lake.  For almost a mile there were villas, most of them shut
up fast, some of them smashed, with broken walls and smashed
windows.  Only flowers bloomed in masses above the rubble.

In the empty places were flimsy straw huts of the natives,
haphazard, as if blown there.  By the road under the hill were
black-grey adobe huts, like boxes, and fowls running about, and
brown pigs or grey pigs spotted with black careered and grunted,
and half-naked children, dark orange-brown, trotted or lay flat on
their faces in the road, their little naked posteriors hunched up,
fast asleep.  Already asleep again.

The houses were many of them being re-thatched, or the tiled roofs
were being patched by men who assumed a great air of importance at
having undertaken such a task.  They were pretending to hurry, too,
because the real rains might begin any day.  And in the little
stony levels by the lake, the land was being scratch-ploughed by a
pair of oxen and a lump of pointed wood.

But this part of the road Kate knew.  She knew the fine villa on
the knoll, with its tufts of palms, and the laid-out avenues that
were laid out, indeed, as the dead are, to crumble back again.  She
was glad to be past the villas, where the road came down to the
lake again, under big shady trees that had twisted, wriggly beans.
On the left was the water, the colour of turtledoves, lapping the
pale fawn stones.  At a water-hole of a stream in the beach, a
cluster of women were busily washing clothes.  In the shallows of
the lake itself two women sat bathing, their black hair hanging
dense and wet.  A little farther along a man was wading slowly,
stopping to throw his round net skilfully upon the water, then
slowly stooping and gathering it in, picking out the tiny, glittery
fish called charales.  Strangely silent and remote everything, in
the gleaming morning, as if it were some distant period of time.

A little breeze was coming from the lake, but the deep dust
underfoot was hot.  On the right the hill rose precipitous, baked
and yellowish, giving back the sun and the intense dryness, and
exhaling the faint, desiccated, peculiar smell of Mexico, that
smells as if the earth had sweated itself dry.

All the time strings of donkeys trotted laden through the dust,
their drivers stalking erect and rapid behind, watching with eyes
like black holes, but always answering Kate's salute with a
respectful Adiós!  And Juana echoed her laconic Adiósn!  She was
limping, and she thought it horrible of Kate to walk four miles,
when they might have struggled out in an old hired motor-car, or
gone in a boat, or even ridden donkey-back.

But to go on foot!  Kate could hear all her criada's feelings in
the drawled, sardonic Adiósn!  But the man behind strode bravely
and called cheerfully.  His pistol was prominent in his belt.

A bluff of yellow rock came jutting at the road.  The road wound
round it, and into a piece of flat open country.  There were fields
of dry stone, and hedges of dusty thorn and cactus.  To the left
the bright green of the willows by the lake-shore.  To the right
the hills swerved inland, to meet the sheer, fluted sides of dry
mountains.  Away ahead, the hills curved back at the shore, and a
queer little crack or niche showed.  This crack in the hills led
from Don Ramón's shore-property to the little valley where he grew
the sugar-cane.  And where the hills approached the lake again
there was a dark clustering of mango-trees, and the red upper
storey of the hacienda house.

'There it is!' cried the man behind.  'Jamiltepec, Señorita.  'La
hacienda de Don Ramón!'

And his eyes shone as he said the name.  He was a proud peon, and
he really seemed happy.

'Look!  How far!' cried Juana.

'Another time,' said Kate, 'I shall come alone, or with Ezequiel.'

'No, Niña!  Don't say so.  Only my foot hurts this morning.'

'Yes.  Better not to bring you.'

'No, Niña!  I like to come, very much!'

The tall windmill fan for drawing up water from the lake was
spinning gaily.  A little valley came down from the niche in the
hills, and at the bottom a little water running.  Towards the lake,
where this valley flattened out, was a grove of banana-plants,
screened a little from the lake breeze by a vivid row of willow-
trees.  And on the top of the slope, where the road ran into the
shade of mango-trees, were the two rows of adobe huts, like a
village, set a little back from the road.

Women were coming up between the trees, on the patch from the lake,
with jars of water on their shoulders; children were playing around
the doors, squatting with little naked posteriors in deep dust; and
here and there a goat was tethered.  Men in soiled white clothes
were lounging, with folded arms and one leg crossed in front of the
other, against the corner of a house, or crouching under the walls.
Not by any means dolce far niente.  They seemed to be waiting,
eternally waiting for something.

'That way, Señorita!' called the man with the basket, running to
her side and indicating the smoother road sloping down between some
big trees, towards the white gate of the hacienda.  'We are here!'

Always he spoke with pleased delight, as if the place were a
wonder-place to him.

The big doors of the zaguán, the entrance, stood open, and in the
shade of the entrance-way a couple of little soldiers were seated.
Across the cleared, straw-littered space in front of the gates two
peons were trotting, each with a big bunch of bananas on his head.
The soldiers said something, and the two peons halted in their
trotting, and slowly turned under their yellow-green load, to look
back at Kate and Juana and the man Martin, approaching down the
road.  Then they turned again and trotted into the courtyard,
barefoot.

The soldiers stood up.  Martin, trotting at Kate's side again,
ushered her into the arched entrance, where the ox-wagons rumbling
through had worn deep ruts.  Juana came behind, making a humble
noise.

Kate found herself in a big, barren yard, that seemed empty.  There
were high walls on the three sides, with sheds and stables.  The
fourth side, facing, was the house, with heavily-barred windows
looking on to the courtyard, but with no door.  Instead, there was
another zaguán, or passage with closed doors piercing the house.

Martin trotted ahead to knock on the closed doors.  Kate stood
looking round at the big yard.  In a shed in one corner, four half-
naked men were packing bunches of bananas.  A man in the shade was
sawing poles, and two men in the sun were unloading tiles from a
donkey.  In a corner was a bullock-wagon, and a pair of big black-
and-white oxen standing with heads pressed down, waiting.

The big doors opened, and Kate entered the second zaguán.  It was a
wide entrance way, with stairs going up on one side, and Kate
lingered to look through the open iron gates in front of her, down
a formal garden hemmed in with huge mango-trees, to the lake, with
its little artificial harbour where two boats were moored.  The
lake seemed to give off a great light, between the dark walls of
mango.

At the back of the new-comers the servant woman closed the big
doors on to the yard, then waved Kate to the stairs.

'Pass this way, Señorita.'

A bell tinkled above.  Kate climbed the stone stairs.  And there
above her was Doña Carlota, in white muslin and with white shoes
and stockings, her face looking curiously yellow and faded by
contrast.  Her soft brown hair was low over her ears, and she held
out her thin brownish arms with queer effusiveness.

'So you have come!  And you have walked, walked all the way?  Oh,
imagine walking in so much sun and dust!  Come, come in and rest.'

She took Kate's hands and led her across the open terrace at the
top of the stairs.

'It is beautiful here,' said Kate.

She stood on the terrace, looking out past the mango-trees at the
lake.  A distant sailing-canoe was going down the breeze, on the
pallid, unreal water.  Away across rose the bluish, grooved
mountains, with the white speck of a village: far away in the
morning it seemed, in another world, in another life, in another
mode of time.

'What is that village?' Kate asked.

'That one?  That one there?  It is San Ildefonso,' said Doña
Carlota, in her fluttering eagerness.

'But it is beautiful here!' Kate repeated.

'Hermoso--sí!  Sí, bonito!' quavered the other woman uneasily,
always answering in Spanish.

The house, reddish and yellow in colour, had two short wings
towards the lake.  The terrace, with green plants on the terrace
wall, went round the three sides, the roof above supported by big
square pillars that rose from the ground.  Down below, the pillars
made a sort of cloisters around the three sides, and in the little
stone court was a pool of water.  Beyond, the rather neglected
formal garden with strong sun and deep mango-shade.

'Come, you will need to rest!' said Doña Carlota.

'I would like to change my shoes,' said Kate.

She was shown into a high, simple, rather bare bedroom with red-
tiled floor.  There she changed into the shoes and stockings Juana
had carried, and rested a little.

As she lay resting, she heard the dulled thud-thud of the tom-tom
drum, but, save the crowing of a cock in the distance, no other
sound on the bright, yet curiously hollow Mexican morning.  And the
drum, thudding with its dulled, black insistence, made her uneasy.
It sounded like something coming over the horizon.

She rose, and went into the long, high salon where Doña Carlota was
sitting talking to a man in black.  The salon, with its three
window-doors open on to the terrace, its worn, red floor tiled with
old square bricks, its high walls colour-washed a faint green, and
the many-beamed ceiling whitewashed; and with its bareness of
furniture; seemed like part of the out-of-doors, like some garden-
arbour put for shade.  The sense, which houses have in hot
climates, of being just three walls wherein one lingers for a
moment, then goes away again.

As Kate entered the room, the man in black rose and shook hands
with Doña Carlota, bowing very low and deferential.  Then with a
deferential sideways sort of bow to Kate, he vanished out of doors.

'Come!' said Doña Carlota to Kate.  'Are you sure now you are
rested?'  And she pulled forward one of the cane rocking-chairs
that had poised itself in the room, en route to nowhere.

'Perfectly!' said Kate.  'How still it seems here!  Except for the
drum.  Perhaps it is the drum that makes it seem so still.  Though
I always think the lake MAKES a sort of silence.'

'Ah, the drum!' cried Doña Carlota, lifting her hand with a gesture
of nervous, spent exasperation.  'I cannot hear it.  No, I cannot,
I cannot bear to hear it.'

And she rocked herself in a sudden access of agitation.

'It does hit one rather below the belt,' said Kate.  'What is it?'

'Ah, do not ask me!  It is my husband.'

She made a gesture of despair, and rocked herself almost into
unconsciousness.

'Is Don Ramón drumming?'

'Drumming?'  Doña Carlota seemed to start.  'No!  Oh no!  He is not
drumming, himself.  He brought down two Indians from the north to
do that.'

'Did he!' said Kate, non-committal.

But Doña Carlota was rocking in a sort of semi-consciousness.  Then
she seemed to pull herself together.

'I MUST TALK to somebody, I must!' she said, suddenly straightening
herself in her chair, her face creamy and creased, her soft brown
hair sagging over her ears, her brown eyes oddly desperate.  'May I
talk to you?'

'Do!' said Kate, rather uneasy.

'You know what Ramón is doing?' she said, looking at Kate almost
furtively, suspiciously.

'Does he want to bring back the old gods?' said Kate vaguely.

'Ah!' cried Doña Carlota, again with that desperate, flying jerk of
her hand.  'As if it were POSSIBLE!  As if it were possible!  The
old gods!  Imagine it, Señora!  The old gods!  Why, what are they?
Nothing but dead illusions.  And ugly, repulsive illusions!  Ah!  I
always thought my husband such a clever man, so superior to me!
Ah, it is terrible to have to change one's idea!  This is such
NONSENSE.  How dare he!  How dare he take such nonsense seriously!
How does he dare!'

'Does he believe in it himself?' asked Kate.

'Himself?  But, Señora--' and Doña Carlota gave a pitiful, pitying
smile of contempt.  'How could he!  As if it were possible.  After
all, he is an educated man!  How could he believe in such
nonsense!'

'Then why does he do it?'

'Why?  Why?'  There was a tone of unspeakable weariness in Doña
Carlota's voice.  'I wish I knew.  I think he has gone insane, as
Mexicans do.  Insane like Francisco Villa, the bandit.'

Kate thought of the pug-faced notorious Pancho Villa in wonder,
unable to connect him with Don Ramón.

'All the Mexicans, as soon as they rise above themselves, go that
way,' said Doña Carlota.  'Their pride gets the better of them.
And then they understand nothing, nothing but their own foolish
will, their will to be very, very important.  It is just the male
vanity.  Don't you think, Señora, that the beginning and the end of
a man is his vanity?  Don't you think it was just against this
danger that Christ came, to teach men a proper humility?  To teach
them the sin of pride.  But that is why they hate Christ so much,
and His teaching.  First and last, they want their own vanity.'

Kate had often thought so herself.  Her own final conclusion about
men was that THEY were the vanity of vanities, nothing but vanity.
They must be flattered and made to feel great:  Nothing else.

'And now, my husband wants to go to the other extreme of Jesus.  He
wants to exalt pride and vanity higher than God.  Ah, it is
terrible, terrible!  And foolish like a little boy!  Ah, what is a
man but a little boy who needs a nurse and a mother!  Ah, Señora, I
can't bear it.'

Doña Carlota covered her face with her hand, as if swooning.

'But there is something wonderful, too, about Don Ramón,' said Kate
coaxingly: though at the moment she hated him.

'Wonderful!  Ah yes, he has gifts.  He has great gifts!  But what
are gifts to a man who perverts them!'

'Tell me what you think he really wants,' said Kate.

'Power!  Just power!  Just foolish, wicked power.  As if there had
not been enough horrible, wicked power let loose in this country.
But he--he--wants to be beyond them all.  He--he--he wants to be
worshipped.  To be worshipped!  To be worshipped!  A God!  He, whom
I've held, I've held in my arms!  He is a child, as all men are
children.  And now he wants--to be worshipped--!'  She went off
into a shrill, wild laughter, covering her face with her hands, and
laughing shrilly, her laughter punctuated by hollow, ghastly sobs.

Kate sat in absolute dismay, waiting for the other woman to recover
herself.  She felt cold against these hysterics, and exerted all
her heavy female will to stop them.

'After all,' she said, when Doña Carlota became quiet, her face in
her hands, 'it isn't your fault.  We can't be responsible, even for
our husbands.  I know THAT, since my husband died, and I couldn't
prevent him dying.  And then--then I learned that no matter how you
love another person, you can't really do anything, you are helpless
when it comes to the last things.  You have to leave them to
themselves, when they want to die: or when they want to do things
that seem foolish, so, so foolish, to a woman.'

Doña Carlota looked up at the other woman.

'You loved your husband very much--and he died?' she said softly.

'I DID love him.  And I shall never, never love another man.  I
couldn't.  I've lost the power.'

'And why did he die?'

'Ah, even that was really his own fault.  He broke his own soul and
spirit, in those Irish politics.  I knew it was wrong.  What does
Ireland matter, what does nationalism and all that rubbish matter,
really!  And revolutions!  They are so, so stupid and vieux jeu.
Ah!  It would have been SO much better if Joachim had been content
to live his life in peace, with me.  It could be so jolly, so
lovely.  And I tried and tried and tried with him.  But it was no
good.  He WANTED to kill himself with that beastly Irish business,
and I tried in vain to prevent him.'

Doña Carlota stared slowly at Kate.

'As a woman MUST try to prevent a man, when he is going wrong,' she
said.  'As I try to prevent Ramón.  As he will get himself killed,
as surely as they all do, down to Francisco Villa.  And when they
are dead, what good is it all?'

'When they ARE dead,' said Kate, 'then you KNOW it's no good.'

'You do!  Oh, Señora, if you think you can help me with Ramón, DO
help me, DO!  For it means the death either of me or him.  And _I_
shall die, though he is wrong.  Unless he gets killed.'

'Tell me what he wants to do,' said Kate.  'What does he THINK he
wants to do, anyhow?--Like my husband thought he wanted to make a
free Ireland and a great Irish people.  But I knew all the time,
the Irish aren't a great people any more, and you CAN'T make them
free.  They are only good at destroying--just mere stupid
destroying.  How can you make a people free, if they AREN'T free?
If something inside them compels them to go on destroying!'

'I know!  I know!  And that is Ramón.  He wants to destroy even
Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, for this people.  Imagine it!  To
destroy Jesus and the Blessed Virgin! the last thing they've got!'

'But what does he say himself, that he wants to do?'

'He says he wants to make a new connection between the people and
God.  He says himself, God is always God.  But man loses his
connection with God.  And then he can never recover it again,
unless some new Saviour comes to give him his new connection.  And
every new connection is different from the last, though God is
always God.  And now, Ramón says, the people have lost God.  And
the Saviour cannot lead them to Him any more.  There must be a new
Saviour with a new vision.  But ah, Señora, that is not true for
me.  God is love, and if Ramón would only submit to love, he would
know that he had found God.  But he is perverse.  Ah, if we could
be together, quietly loving, and enjoying the beautiful world, and
WAITING IN THE LOVE OF GOD!  Ah, Señora, WHY, why, why can't he see
it?  Oh, why can't he see it!  Instead of doing all these--'

The tears came to Doña Carlota's eyes, and spilled over her cheeks.
Kate also was in tears, mopping her face.

'It's no good!' she said, sobbing.  'I know it's no good, no matter
what we do.  They don't WANT to be happy and peaceful.  They WANT
this strife and these other false, horrible connections.  It's no
good whatever we do!  That's what's so bitter, so bitter!'

The two women sat in their bent-wood rocking-chairs and just
sobbed.  And as they sobbed, they heard a step coming along the
terrace, the faint swish of the sandals of the people.

It was Don Ramón, drawn unconsciously by the emotional disturbance
of the two women.

Doña Carlota hastily dabbed her eyes, and her sniffing nose, Kate
blew her nose like a trumpet, and Don Ramón stood in the doorway.

He was dressed in white, dazzling, in the costume of the peons, the
white blouse jacket and the white, wide pantaloon trousers.  But
the white was linen, slightly starched, and brilliant, almost
unnatural in its whiteness.  From under his blouse, in front, hung
the ends of a narrow woollen sash, white, with blue and black bars,
and a fringe of scarlet.  And on his naked feet were the plaited
huaraches, of blue and black strips of leather, with thick, red-
dyed soles.  His loose trousers were bound round the ankles with
blue, red, and black woollen braids.

Kate glanced at him as he stood in the sun, so dazzingly white,
that his black hair and dark face looked like a hole in the
atmosphere.  He came forward, the ends of his sash swinging against
his thighs, his sandals slightly swishing.

'I am pleased to see you,' he said, shaking hands with Kate.  'How
did you come?'

He dropped into a chair, and sat quite still.  The two women hung
their heads, hiding their faces.  The presence of the man seemed to
put their emotion out of joint.  He ignored all the signs of their
discomfort, overlooking it with a powerful will.  There was a
certain strength in his presence.  They all cheered up a bit.

'You didn't know my husband had become one of the people--a real
peon--a Señor Peon, like Count Tolstoy became a Señor Moujik?' said
Doña Carlota, with an attempt at raillery.

'Anyway it suits him,' said Kate.

'There!' said Don Ramón.  'Give the devil his dues.'

But there was something unyielding, unbending about him.  He
laughed and spoke to the women only from a surface self.
Underneath, powerful and inscrutable, he made no connection with
them.

So it was at lunch.  There was a flitting conversation, with
intervals of silence.  It was evident that Ramón was thinking in
another world, in the silence.  And the ponderous stillness of his
will, working in another sphere, made the women feel overshadowed.

'The Señora is like me, Ramón,' said Doña Carlota.  'She cannot
bear the sound of that drum.  Must it play any more this
afternoon?'

There was a moment's pause, before he answered:

'After four o'clock only.'

'MUST we have that noise to-day?' Carlota persisted.

'Why not to-day like other days!' he said.  But a certain darkness
was on his brow, and it was evident he wanted to leave the presence
of the two women.

'Because the Señora is here: and I am here: and we neither of us
like it.  And to-morrow the Señora will not be here, and I shall be
gone back to Mexico.  So why not spare us to-day!  Surely you can
show us this consideration.'

Ramón looked at her, and then at Kate.  There was anger in his
eyes.  And Kate could almost feel, in his powerful chest, the big
heart swelling with a suffocation of anger.  Both women kept mum.
But it pleased them, anyhow, that they could make him angry.

'Why not row with Mrs Leslie on the lake!' he said, with quiet
control.

But under his dark brows was a level, indignant anger.

'We may not want to,' said Carlota.

Then he did what Kate had not known anyone to do before.  He
withdrew his consciousness away from them as they all three sat at
table, leaving the two women, as it were, seated outside a closed
door, with nothing more happening.  Kate felt for the time startled
and forlorn, then a slow anger burned in her warm ivory cheek.

'Oh, yes,' she said.  'I can start home before then.'

'No!  No!' said Doña Carlota, with a Spanish wail.  'Don't leave
me.  Stay with me till evening, and help me to amuse Don Cipriano.
He is coming to supper.'



CHAPTER XI

Lords of the Day and Night


When lunch was over, Ramón went to his room, to sleep for an hour.
It was a hot, still afternoon.  Clouds were standing erect and
splendid, at the west end of the lake, like messengers.  Ramón went
into his room and closed the window-doors and the shutters, till it
was quite dark, save for yellow pencils of light that stood like
substance on the darkness, from the cracks of the shutters.

He took off his clothes, and in the darkness thrust his clenched
fists upwards above his head, in a terrible tension of stretched,
upright prayer.  In his eyes was only darkness, and slowly the
darkness revolved in his brain, too, till he was mindless.  Only a
powerful will stretched itself and quivered from his spine in an
immense tension of prayer.  Stretched the invisible bow of the body
in the darkness with inhuman tension, erect, till the arrows of the
soul, mindless, shot to the mark, and the prayer reached its goal.

Then, suddenly, the clenched and quivering arms dropped, the body
relaxed into softness.  The man had reached his strength again.  He
had broken the cords of the world, and was free in the other
strength.

Softly, delicately, taking great care not to think, not to remember,
not to disturb the poisonous snakes of mental consciousness, he
picked up a thin, fine blanket, wrapped it round him, and lay down
on the pile of mats on the floor.  In an instant he was asleep.

He slept in complete oblivion for about an hour.  Then suddenly he
opened his eyes wide.  He saw the velvety darkness, and the pencils
of light gone frail.  The sun had moved.  Listening, there seemed
not a sound in the world: there was no world.

Then he began to hear.  He heard the faint rumble of an ox-wagon:
then leaves in a wind: then a faint tapping noise: then the creak
of some bird calling.

He rose and quickly dressed in the dark, and threw open the doors.
It was mid-afternoon, with a hot wind blowing, and clouds reared up
dark and bronze in the west, the sun hidden.  But the rain would
not fall yet.  He took a big straw hat and balanced it on his head.
It had a round crest of black and white and blue feathers, like an
eye, or a sun, in front.  He heard the low sound of women talking.
Ah, the strange woman!  He had forgotten her.  And Carlota!
Carlota was here!  He thought of her for a moment, and of her
curious opposition.  Then, before he could be angry, he lifted his
breast again in the black, mindless prayer, his eyes went dark, and
the sense of opposition left him.

He went quickly, driftingly along the terrace to the stone stairs
that led down to the inner entrance-way.  Going through to the
courtyard, he saw two men packing bales of bananas upon donkeys,
under a shed.  The soldiers were sleeping in the zaguán.  Through
the open doors, up the avenue of trees, he could see an ox-wagon
slowly retreating.  Within the courtyard there was the sharp
ringing of metal hammered on an anvil.  It came from a corner where
was a smithy, where a man and a boy were working.  In another shed
a carpenter was planing wood.

Don Ramón stood a moment to look around.  This was his own world.
His own spirit was spread over it like a soft, nourishing shadow,
and the silence of his own power gave it peace.

The men working were almost instantly aware of his presence.  One
after the other the dark, hot faces glanced up at him, and glanced
away again.  They were men, and his presence was wonderful to them;
but they were afraid to approach him, even by staring at him.  They
worked the quicker for having seen him, as if it gave them new
life.

He went across to the smithy, where the boy was blowing the old-
fashioned bellows, and the man was hammering a piece of metal, with
quick, light blows.  The man worked on without lifting his head, as
the patrón drew near.

'It is the bird?' said Ramón, standing watching the piece of metal,
now cold upon the anvil.

'Yes, Patrón!  It is the bird.  Is it right?'  And the man looked
up with black, bright, waiting eyes.

The smith lifted with the tongs the black, flat, tongue-shaped
piece of metal, and Ramón looked at it a long time.

'I put the wings on after,' said the smith.

Ramón traced with his dark, sensitive hand an imaginary line,
outside the edge of the iron.  Three times he did it.  And the
movement fascinated the smith.

'A little more slender--so!' said Ramón.

'Yes, Patrón!  Yes!  Yes!  I understand,' said the man eagerly.

'And the rest?'

'Here it is!'  The man pointed to two hoops of iron, one smaller
than the other, and to some flat discs of iron, triangular in
shape.

'Lay them on the ground.'

The man put the hoops on the ground, one within the other.  Then,
taking the triangular discs, he placed them with quick, sensitive
hands, so that their bases were upon the outer circle, and their
apices touched the inner.  There were seven.  And thus they made a
seven-pointed sun of the space inside.

'Now the bird,' said Ramón.

The man quickly took the long piece of iron: it was the rudimentary
form of a bird, with two feet, but, as yet without wings.  He
placed it in the centre of the inner circle, so that the feet
touched the circle and the crest of the head touched opposite.

'So!  It fits,' said the man.

Ramón stood looking at the big iron symbol on the ground.  He heard
the doors of the inner entrance: Kate and Carlota walking across
the courtyard.

'I take it away?' asked the workman quickly.

'Never mind,' Ramón answered quietly.

Kate stood and stared at the great wreath of iron on the ground.

'What is it?' she asked brightly.

'The bird within the sun.'

'Is that a bird?'

'When it has wings.'

'Ah, yes!  When it has wings.  And what is it for?'

'For a symbol to the people.'

'It is pretty.'

'Yes.'

'Ramón!' said Doña Carlota, 'will you give me the key for the boat?
Martin will row us out.'

He produced the key from under his sash.

'Where did you get that beautiful sash?' asked Kate.

It was the white sash with blue and brown-black bars, and with a
heavy red fringe.

'This?' he said.  'We wove it here.'

'And did you make the sandals too?'

'Yes!  They were made by Manuel.  Later I will show you.'

'Oh, I should like to see!--They are beautiful, don't you think,
Doña Carlota?'

'Yes!  Yes!  It is true.  But whether beautiful things are wise
things, I don't know.  So much I don't know, Señora.  Ay, so much!--
And you, do you know what is wise?'

'I?' said Kate.  'I don't care very much.'

'Ah!  You don't care!--You think Ramón is wise, to wear the
peasants' clothes, and the huaraches?'  For once Doña Carlota was
speaking in slow English.

'Oh, yes!' cried Kate.  'He looks so handsome!--Men's clothes are
so hideous, and Don Ramón looks so handsome in those!'  With the
big hat poised on his head, he had a certain air of nobility and
authority.

'Ah!' cried Doña Carlota, looking at the other woman with
intelligent, half-scared eyes, and swinging the key of the boat.
'Shall we go to the lake?'

The two women departed.  Ramón, laughing to himself, went out of
the gate and across the outer yard, to where a big, barn-like
building stood near the trees.  He entered the barn, and gave a low
whistle.  It was answered from the loft above, and a trap-door
opened.  Don Ramón went up the steps, and found himself in a sort
of studio and carpenter's shop.  A fattish young man with curly
hair, wearing an artist's blouse, and with mallet and chisels in
his hand, greeted him.

'How is it going?' asked Ramón.

'Yes--well--'

The artist was working on a head, in wood.  It was larger than
life, conventionalized.  Yet under the conventional lines the
likeness to Ramón revealed itself.

'Sit for me for half an hour,' said the sculptor.

Ramón sat in silence, while the other man bent over his model,
working in silent concentration.  And all the time, Ramón sat
erect, almost motionless, with a great stillness of repose and
concentration, thinking about nothing, but throwing out the dark
aura of power, in the spell of which the artist worked.

'That is enough,' he said at last, quietly rising.

'But give me the pose before you go,' said the artist.

Ramón slowly took off his blouse-skirt, and stood with naked torso,
the sash with its blue and black bars tight round his naked waist.
For some moments he stood gathering himself together.  Then
suddenly, in a concentration of intense, proud prayer, he flung his
right arm up above his head, and stood transfixed, his left arm
hanging softly by his side, the fingers touching his thigh.  And on
his face that fixed, intense look of pride which was at once a
prayer.

The artist gazed with wonder, and with an appreciation touched with
fear.  The other man, large and intense, with big dark eyes staring
with intense pride, yet prayerful, beyond the natural horizons,
sent a thrill of dread and of joy through the artist.  He bowed his
head as he looked.

Don Ramón turned to him.

'Now you!' he said.

The artist was afraid.  He seemed to quail.  But he met Ramón's
eyes.  And instantly, that stillness of concentration came over
him, like a trance.  And then suddenly, out of the trance, he shot
his arm aloft, and his fat, pale face took on an expression of
peace, a noble, motionless transfiguration, the blue-grey eyes
calm, proud, reaching into the beyond, with prayer.  And though he
stood in his blouse, with a rather pudgy figure and curly hair, he
had the perfect stillness of nobility.

'It is good!' said Ramón, bowing his head.

The artist suddenly changed; Ramón held out his two hands; the
artist took them in his two hands.  Then he lifted Ramón's right
hand and placed the back of it on his brow.

'Adiós!' said Ramón, taking his blouse again.

'Adiós, Señor!' said the artist.

And with a proud, white look of joy in his face, he turned again to
his work.

Ramón visited the adobe house, its yard fenced with cane and
overshadowed by a great mango-tree, where Manuel and his wife and
children, and two assistants, were spinning and weaving.  Two
little girls were assiduously carding white wool and brown wool
under a cluster of banana-trees: the wife and a young maiden were
spinning fine, fine thread.  On the line hung dyed wool, red, and
blue, and green.  And under the shed stood Manuel and a youth,
weaving at two heavy hand-looms.

'How is it going?' called Don Ramón.

'Muy bien!  Muy bien!' answered Manuel, with that curious look of
transfiguration glistening in his black eyes and in the smile of
his face.  'It is going well, very well, Señor!'

Ramón paused to look at the fine white serape on the loom.  It had
a zig-zag border of natural black wool and blue, in little
diamonds, and the ends a complication of blackish and blue diamond-
pattern.  The man was just beginning to do the centre--called the
boca, the mouth: and he looked anxiously at the design that was
tacked to the loom.  But it was simple: the same as the iron symbol
the smith was making: a snake with his tail in his mouth, the black
triangles on his back being the outside of the circle: and in the
middle, a blue eagle standing erect, with slim wings touching the
belly of the snake with their tips, and slim feet upon the snake,
within the hoop.

Ramón went back to the house, to the upper terrace, and round to
the short wing where his room was.  He put a folded serape over his
shoulder, and went along the terrace.  At the end of this wing,
projecting to the lake, was a square terrace with a low, thick wall
and a tiled roof, and a coral-scarlet bignonia dangling from the
massive pillars.  The terrace, or loggia, was strewn with the
native palm-leaf mats, petates, and there was a drum in one corner,
with the drum-stick upon it.  At the far inner corner went down an
enclosed stone staircase, with an iron door at the bottom.

Ramón stood a while looking out at the lake.  The clouds were
dissolving again, the sheet of water gave off a whitish light.  In
the distance he could see the dancing speck of a boat, probably
Martin with the two women.

He took off his hat and his blouse, and stood motionless, naked to
the waist.  Then he lifted the drum-stick, and after waiting a
moment or two, to become still in soul, he sounded the rhythmic
summons, rather slow, yet with a curious urge in its strong-weak,
one-two rhythm.  He had got the old barbaric power into the drum.

For some time he stood alone, the drum, or tom-tom, lifted by its
thong against his legs, his right hand drumming, his face
expressionless.  A man entered, bareheaded, running from the inner
terrace.  He was in the white cotton clothes, snow white, but with
a dark serape folded on his shoulder, and he held a key in his
hand.  He saluted Ramón by putting the back of his right hand in
front of his eyes for a moment, then he went down the stone
stairway and opened the iron door.

Immediately men were coming up, all dressed alike, in the white
cotton clothes and the huaraches, each with a folded serape over
his shoulder.  But their sashes were all blue, and their sandals
blue and white.  The sculptor came too, and Mirabal was there, also
dressed in the cotton clothes.

There were seven men, besides Ramón.  At the top of the stairs, one
after another, they saluted.  Then they took their serapes, dark
brown, with blue eyes filled with white, along the edges, and threw
them down along the wall, their hats beside them.  Then they took
off their blouses, and flung them on their hats.

Ramón left the drum, and sat down on his own serape, that was white
with the blue and black bars, and the scarlet fringe.  The drummer
sat down and took the drum.  The circle of men sat cross-legged,
naked to the waist, silent.  Some were of a dark, ruddy coffee-
brown, two were white, Ramón was of a soft creamy brown.  They sat
in silence for a time, only the monotonous, hypnotic sound of the
drum pulsing, touching the inner air.  Then the drummer began to
sing, in the curious, small, inner voice, that hardly emerges from
the circle, singing in the ancient falsetto of the Indians:

'Who sleeps--shall wake!  Who sleeps--shall wake!  Who treads down
the path of the snake shall arrive at the place; in the path of the
dust shall arrive at the place and be dressed in the skin of the
snake--'

One by one the voices of the men joined in, till they were all
singing in the strange, blind infallible rhythm of the ancient
barbaric world.  And all in the small, inward voices, as if they
were singing from the oldest, darkest recess of the soul, not
outwards, but inwards, the soul singing back to herself.

They sang for a time in the peculiar unison like a flock of birds
that fly in one consciousness.  And when the drum shuddered for an
end, they all let their voices fade out, with the same broad,
clapping sound in the throat.

There was silence.  The men turned, speaking to one another,
laughing in a quiet way.  But their daytime voices, and their
daytime eyes had gone.

Then Ramón's voice was heard, and the men were suddenly silent,
listening with bent heads.  Ramón sat with his face lifted, looking
far away, in the pride of prayer.

'There is no Before and After, there is only Now,' he said,
speaking in a proud, but inward voice.

'The great Snake coils and uncoils the plasm of his folds, and
stars appear, and worlds fade out.  It is no more than the changing
and easing of the plasm.

'I always am, says his sleep.

'As a man in a deep sleep knows not, but is, so is the Snake of the
coiled cosmos, wearing its plasm.

'As a man in a deep sleep has no to-morrow, no yesterday, nor to-
day, but only IS, so is the limpid, far-reaching Snake of the
eternal Cosmos, Now, and forever Now.

'Now, and only Now, and forever Now.

'But dreams arise and fade in the sleep of the Snake.

'And worlds arise as dreams, and are gone as dreams.

'And man is a dream in the sleep of the Snake.

'And only the sleep that is dreamless breathes I Am!

'In the dreamless Now, I Am.

'Dreams arise as they must arise, and man is a dream arisen.

'But the dreamless plasm of the Snake is the plasm of a man, of his
body, his soul, and his spirit at one.

'And the perfect sleep of the Snake I Am is the plasm of a man, who
is whole.

'When the plasm of the body, and the plasm of the soul, and the
plasm of the spirit are at one, in the Snake I Am.

'I am Now.

'Was-not is a dream, and shall-be is a dream, like two separate,
heavy feet.

'But Now, I Am.

'The trees put forth their leaves in their sleep, and flowering
emerge out of dreams, into pure I Am.

'The birds forget the stress of their dreams, and sing aloud in the
Now, I Am!  I Am!

'For dreams have wings and feet, and journeys to take, and efforts
to make.

'But the glimmering Snake of the Now is wingless and footless, and
undivided, and perfectly coiled.

'It is thus the cat lies down, in the coil of Now, and the cow
curves round her nose to her belly, lying down.

'In the feet of a dream the hare runs uphill.  But when he pauses,
the dream has passed, he has entered the timeless Now, and his eyes
are the wide I Am.

'Only man dreams, dreams, and dreams, and changes from dream to
dream, like a man who tosses on his bed.

'With his eyes and his mouth he dreams, with his hands and his
feet, with phallos and heart and belly, with body and spirit and
soul, in a tempest of dreams.

'And rushes from dream to dream, in the hope of the perfect dream.

'But I, I say to you, there is no dream that is perfect, for every
dream has an ache and an urge, an urge and an ache.

'And nothing is perfect, save the dream pass out into the sleep, I
Am.

'When the dream of the eyes is darkened, and encompassed with Now.

'And the dream of the mouth resounds in the last I Am.

'And the dream of the hands is a sleep like a bird on the sea, that
sleeps and is lifted and shifted, and knows not.

'And the dreams of the feet and the toes touch the core of the
world, where the Serpent sleeps.

'And the dream of the phallos reaches the great I Know Not.

'And the dream of the body is the stillness of a flower in the
dark.

'And the dream of the soul is gone in the perfume of Now.

'And the dream of the spirit lapses, and lays down its head, and is
still with the Morning Star.

'For each dream starts out of Now, and is accomplished in Now.

'In the core of the flower, the glimmering, wakeless Snake.

'And what falls away is a dream, and what accrues is a dream.
There is always and only Now, Now and I Am.'

There was silence in the circle of men.  Outside, the sound of the
bullock-wagon could be heard, and from the lake, the faint knocking
of oars.  But the seven men sat with their heads bent, in the semi-
trance, listening inwardly.

Then the drum began softly to beat, as if of itself.  And a man
began to sing, in a small voice:


     The Lord of the Morning Star
     Stood between the day and the night:
     As a bird that lifts its wings, and stands
     With the bright wing on the right
     And the wing of the dark on the left,
     The Dawn Star stood into sight.

     Lo! I am always here!
     Far in the hollow of space
     I brush the wing of the day
     And put light on your face.
     The other wing brushes the dark.
     But I, I am always in place.

     Yea, I am always here.  I am Lord
     In every way.  And the lords among men
     See me through the flashing of wings.
     They see me and lose me again.
     But lo! I am always here
     Within ken.

     The multitudes see me not.
     They see only the waving of wings,
     The coming and going of things.
     The cold and the hot.

     But ye that perceive me between
     The tremors of night and the day,
     I make you the Lords of the
     Way Unseen.

     The path between gulfs of the dark and the steeps of the light;
     The path like a snake that is gone, like the length of a fuse
        to ignite
     The substance of shadow, that bursts and explodes into sight.

     I am here undeparting.  I sit tight
     Between wings of the endless flight,
     At the depths of the peace and the fight.

     Deep in the moistures of peace,
     And far down the muzzle of the fight
     You shall find me, who am neither increase
     Nor destruction, different quite.

     I am far beyond
     The horizons of love and strife.
     Like a star, like a pond
     That washes the lords of life.


'Listen!' said Ramón, in the stillness.  'We will be masters among
men, and lords among men.  But lords of men and masters of men we
will not be.  Listen!  We are lords of the night.  Lords of the day
and night.  Sons of the Morning Star, sons of the Evening Star.
Men of the Morning and the Evening Star.

'We are not lords of men: how can men make us lords?  Nor are we
masters of men, for men are not worth it.

'But I am the Morning and the Evening Star, and lord of the day and
the night.  By the power that is put in my left hand, and the power
that I grasp in my right, I am lord of the two ways.

'And my flower on earth is the jasmine flower, and in heaven the
flower Hesperus.

'I will not command you, nor serve you, for the snake goes crooked
to his own house.

'Yet I will be with you, so you depart not from yourselves.

'There is no giving, and no taking.  When the fingers that give
touch the fingers that receive, the Morning Star shines at once,
from the contact, and the jasmine gleams between the hands.  And
thus there is neither giving nor taking, nor hand that proffers nor
hand that receives, but the star between them is all, and the dark
hand and the light hand are invisible on each side.  The jasmine
takes the giving and the receiving in her cup, and the scent of the
oneness is fragrant on the air.

'Think neither to give nor to receive, only let the jasmine flower.

'Let nothing spill from you in excess, let nothing be reived from
you.

'And reive nothing away.  Not even the scent from the rose, nor the
juice from the pomegranate, nor the warmth from the fire.

'But say to the rose:  Lo! I take you away from your tree, and your
breath is in my nostrils, and my breath is warm in your depths.
Let it be a sacrament between us.

'And beware when you break the pomegranate; it is sunset you take
in your hands.  Say:  I am coming, come thou.  Let the Evening Star
stand between us.

'And when the fire burns up and the wind is cold and you spread
your hands to the blaze, listen to the flame saying:  Ah!  Is it
thou?  Comest thou to me?  Lo, I was going the longest journey,
down the path of the greatest snake.  But since thou comest to me,
I come to thee.  And where thou fallest into my hands, fall I into
thine, and jasmine flowers on the burning bush between us.  Our
meeting is the burning bush, whence the jasmine flowers.

'Reive nothing away, and let nothing be reived from you.  For
reiver and bereaved alike break the root of the jasmine flower, and
spit upon the Evening Star.

'Take nothing, to say:  I have it!  For you can possess nothing,
not even peace.

'Nought is possessible, neither gold, nor land, nor love, nor life,
nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation.

'Say of nothing:  It is mine.

'Say only:  It is with me.

'For the gold that is with thee lingers as a departing moon,
looking across space thy way, saying:  Lo!  We are beholden of each
other.  Lo! for this little while, to each other thou and I are
beholden.

'And thy land says to thee:  Ah, my child of a far-off father!
Come, lift me, lift me a little while, that poppies and wheat may
blow on the level wind that moves between my breast and thine!
Then sink with me, and we will make one mound.

'And listen to thy love saying:  Beloved!  I am mown by thy sword
like mown grass, and darkness is upon me, and the tremble of the
Evening Star.  And to me thou art darkness and nowhere.  Oh thou,
when thou risest up and goest thy way, speak to me, only say:  The
star rose between us.

'And say to thy life:  Am I thine?  Art thou mine?  Am I the blue
curve of day around thine uncurved night?  Are my eyes twilight of
neither of us, where the star hangs?  Is my upper lip the sunset
and my lower lip the dawn, does the star tremble inside my mouth?

'And say to thy peace:  Ah! risen, deathless star!  Already the
waters of dawn sweep over thee, and wash me away on the flood!

'And say to thy sorrow:  Axe, thou art cutting me down!

'Yet did a spark fly from out of thy edge and my wound!

'Cut then, while I cover my face, father of the Star.

'And say to thy strength:  Lo, the night is foaming up my feet and
my loins, day is foaming down from my eyes and my mouth to the sea
of my breast.  Lo, they meet!  My belly is a flood of power, that
races in down the sluice of bone at my back, and a star hangs low
on the flood, over a troubled dawn.

'And say to thy death:  Be it so!  I, and my soul, we come to thee,
Evening Star.  Flesh, go thou into the night.  Spirit, farewell,
'tis thy day.  Leave me now.  I go in last nakedness now to the
nakedest Star.'



CHAPTER XII

The First Waters


The men had risen and covered themselves, and put on their hats,
and covered their eyes for a second, in salute before Ramón, as
they departed down the stone stair.  And the iron door at the
bottom had clanged, the doorkeeper had returned with the key, laid
it on the drum, and softly, delicately departed.

Still Ramón sat on his serape, leaning his naked shoulders on the
wall, and closing his eyes.  He was tired, and in that state of
extreme separateness which makes it very hard to come back to the
world.  On the outside of his ears he could hear the noises of the
hacienda, even the tinkle of tea-spoons, and the low voice of
women, and later, the low, labouring sound of a motor-car
struggling over the uneven road, then swirling triumphantly into
the courtyard.

It was hard to come back to these things.  The noise of them
sounded on the outside of his ears, but inside them was the slow,
vast, inaudible roar of the cosmos, like in a sea-shell.  It was
hard to have to bear the contact of commonplace daily things, when
his soul and body were naked to the cosmos.

He wished they would leave him the veils of his isolation awhile.
But they would not: especially Carlota.  She wanted him to be
present to her: in familiar contact.

She was calling:  'Ramón!  Ramón!  Have you finished?  Cipriano is
here.'  And even so, in her voice was fear, and an overriding
temerity.

He pushed back his hair and rose, and very quickly went out, as he
was, with naked torso.  He didn't want to dress himself into
everyday familiarity, since his soul was unfamiliar.

They had a tea-table out on the terrace, and Cipriano, in uniform,
was there.  He got up quickly, and came down the terrace with
outstretched arms, his black eyes gleaming with an intensity almost
like pain, upon the face of the other man.  And Ramón looked back
at him with wide, seeing, yet unchanging eyes.

The two men embraced, breast to breast, and for a moment Cipriano
laid his little blackish hands on the naked shoulders of the bigger
man, and for a moment was perfectly still on his breast.  Then very
softly, he stood back and looked at him, saying not a word.

Ramón abstractedly laid his hand on Cipriano's shoulder, looking
down at him with a little smile.

'Qué tal?'' he said, from the edge of his lips.  'How goes it?'

''Bien!  Muy bien!' said Cipriano, still gazing into the other
man's face with black, wondering, childlike, searching eyes, as if
he, Cipriano, were searching for HIMSELF, in Ramón's face.  Ramón
looked back into Cipriano's black, Indian eyes with a faint, kind
smile of recognition, and Cipriano hung his head as if to hide his
face, the black hair, which he wore rather long and brushed
sideways, dropping over his forehead.

The women watched in absolute silence.  Then, as the two men began
slowly to come along the terrace to the tea-table, Carlota began to
pour tea.  But her hand trembled so much, the teapot wobbled as she
held it, and she had to put it down and clasp her hands in the lap
of her white muslin dress.

'You rowed on the lake?' said Ramón abstractedly, coming up.

'It was lovely!' said Kate.  'But hot when the sun came.'

Ramón smiled a little, then pushed his hand through his hair.
Then, leaning one hand on the parapet of the terrace wall, he
turned to look at the lake, and a sigh lifted his shoulders
unconsciously.

He stood thus, naked to the waist, his black hair ruffled and
splendid, his back to the women, looking out at the lake.  Cipriano
stood lingering beside him.

Kate saw the sigh lift the soft, quiescent, cream-brown shoulders.
The soft, cream-brown skin of his back, of a smooth PURE
sensuality, made her shudder.  The broad, square, rather high
shoulders, with neck and head rising steep, proudly.  The full-
fleshed, deep-chested, rich body of the man made her feel dizzy.
In spite of herself, she could not help imagining a knife stuck
between those pure, male shoulders.  If only to break the arrogance
of their remoteness.

That was it.  His nakedness was so aloof, far-off and intangible,
in another day.  So that to THINK of it was almost a violation,
even to look at it with prying eyes.  Kate's heart suddenly shrank
in her breast.  This was how Salome had looked at John.  And this
was the beauty of John, that he had had; like a pomegranate on a
dark tree in the distance, naked, but not undressed!  Forever still
and clothe-less, and with another light about it, of a richer day
than our paltry, prying, sneak-thieving day.

The moment Kate had imagined a knife between his shoulders her
heart shrank with grief and shame, and a great stillness came over
her.  Better to take the hush into one's heart, and the sharp,
prying beams out of one's eyes.  Better to lapse away from one's
own prying, assertive self, into the soft, untrespassing self, to
whom nakedness is neither shame nor excitement, but clothed like a
flower in its own deep, soft consciousness, beyond cheap awareness.

The evening breeze was blowing very faintly.  Sailing-boats were
advancing through the pearly atmosphere, far off, the sun above had
a golden quality.  The opposite shore, twenty miles away, was
distinct, and yet there seemed an opalescent, spume-like haze in
the air, the same quality as in the filmy water.  Kate could see
the white specks of the far-off church towers of Tuliapan.

Below, in the garden below the house, was a thick grove of mango-
trees.  Among the dark and reddish leaves of the mangos, scarlet
little birds were bustling, like suddenly-opening poppy-buds, and
pairs of yellow birds, yellow underneath as yellow butterflies, so
perfectly clear, went skimming past.  When they settled for a
moment and closed their wings, they disappeared, for they were grey
on top.  And when the cardinal birds settled, they too disappeared,
for the outside of their wings was brown, like a sheath.

'Birds in this country have all their colour below,' said Kate.

Ramón turned to her suddenly.

'They say the word Mexico means below this!' he said, smiling, and
sinking into a rocking-chair.

Doña Carlota had made a great effort over herself, and with eyes
fixed on the tea-cups, she poured out the tea.  She handed him his
cup without looking at him.  She did not trust herself to look at
him.  It made her tremble with a strange, hysterical anger: she,
who had been married to him for years, and knew him, ah, knew him:
and yet, and yet, had not got him at all.  None of him.

'Give me a piece of sugar, Carlota,' he said, in his quiet voice.

But at the sound of it, his wife stopped as if some hand had
suddenly grasped her.

'Sugar!  Sugar!' she repeated abstractedly to herself.

Ramón sat forward in his rocking-chair, holding his cup in his
hand, his breasts rising in relief.  And on his thighs the thin
linen seemed to reveal him almost more than his own dark nakedness
revealed him.  She understood why the cotton pantaloons were
forbidden on the plaza.  The living flesh seemed to emanate through
them.

He was handsome, almost horribly handsome, with his black head
poised as it were without weight, above his darkened, smooth neck.
A pure sensuality, with a powerful purity of its own, hostile to
her sort of purity.  With the blue sash round his waist, pressing a
fold in the flesh, and the thin linen seeming to gleam with the
life of his hips and his thighs, he emanated a fascination almost
like a narcotic, asserting his pure, fine sensuality against her.
The strange, soft, still sureness of him, as if he sat secure
within his own dark aura.  And as if this dark aura of his
militated against her presence, and against the presence of his
wife.  He emitted an effluence so powerful, that it seemed to
hamper her consciousness, to bind down her limbs.

And he was utterly still and quiescent, without desire, soft and
unroused, within his own ambiente.  Cipriano going the same, the
pair of them so quiet and dark and heavy, like a great weight
bearing the women down.

Kate knew now how Salome felt.  She knew now how John the Baptist
had been, with his terrible, aloof beauty, inaccessible, yet so
potent.

'Ah!' she said to herself.  'Let me close my eyes to him, and open
only my soul.  Let me close my prying, SEEING eyes, and sit in dark
stillness along with these two men.  They have got more than I,
they have a richness that I haven't got.  They have got rid of that
itching of the eye, and the desire that works through the eye.  The
itching, prurient, KNOWING, imagining eye, I am cursed with it, I
am hampered up in it.  It is my curse of curses, the curse of Eve.
The curse of Eve is upon me, my eyes are like hooks, my knowledge
is like a fish-hook through my gills, pulling me in spasmodic
desire.  Oh, who will free me from the grappling of my eyes, from
the impurity of sharp sight!  Daughter of Eve, of greedy vision,
why don't these men save me from the sharpness of my own eyes!'

She rose and went to the edge of the terrace.  Yellow as daffodils
underneath, two birds emerged out of their own invisibility.  In
the little shingle bay, with a small breakwater, where the boat was
pulled up and chained, two men were standing in the water, throwing
out a big, fine round net, catching the little silvery fish called
charales, which flicked out of the brownish water sometimes like
splinters of glass.

'Ramón!'  Kate heard Doña Carlota's voice.'  Won't you put
something on?'

The wife had been able to bear it no more.

'Yes!  Thank you for the tea,' said Ramón, rising.

Kate watched him go down the terrace, in his own peculiar silence,
his sandals making a faint swish on the tiles.

'Oh, Señora Caterina!' came the voice of Carlota.  'Come and drink
your tea.  Come!'

Kate returned to the table, saying:

'It seems so wonderfully peaceful here.'

'Peaceful!' echoed Carlota.  'Ah, I do not find it peaceful.  There
is a horrible stillness, which makes me afraid.'

'Do you come out very often?' said Kate to Cipriano.

'Yes.  Fairly often.  Once a week.  Or twice,' he replied, looking
at her with a secret consciousness which she could not understand
lurking in his black eyes.

These men wanted to take her WILL away from her, as if they wanted
to deny her the light of day.

'I must be going home now,' she said.  'The sun will be setting.'

'Ya va?' said Cipriano, in his soft, velvety Indian voice, with a
note of distant surprise and reproach.  'Will you go already?'

'Oh, no, Señora!' cried Carlota.  'Stay until to-morrow.  Oh, yes,
stay until to-morrow, with me.'

'They will expect us home,' she said, wavering.

'Ah, no!  I can send a boy to say you will come to-morrow.  Yes?
You will stay?  Ah, good, good!'

And she laid her hand caressively on Kate's arm, then rose to hurry
away to the servants.

Cipriano had taken out his cigarette-case.  He offered it to Kate.

'Shall I take one?' she said.  'It is my vice.'

'Do take one,' he said.  'It isn't good to be perfect.'

'It isn't, is it?' she laughed, puffing her cigarette.

'Now would you call it peace?' he asked with incomprehensible
irony.

'Why?' she cried.

'Why do white people always want peace?' he asked.

'Surely peace is natural!  Don't all people want it?  Don't you?'

'Peace is only the rest after war,' he said.  'So it is not more
natural than fighting: perhaps not so natural.'

'No, but there is another peace: the peace that passes all
understanding.  Don't you know that?'

'I don't think I do,' he said.

'What a pity!' she cried.

'Ah!' he said.  'You want to teach me!  But to me it is different.
Each man has two spirits in him.  The one is like the early morning
in the time of rain, very quiet, and sweet, moist, no?--with the
mocking-bird singing, and birds flying about, very fresh.  And the
other is like the dry season, the steady, strong hot light of the
day, which seems as if it will never change.'

'But you like the first better,' she cried.

'I don't know!' he replied.  'The other lasts longer.'

'I am sure you like the fresh morning better,' she said.

''I don't know!  I don't know!'  He smiled a crumpled sort of
smile, and she could tell he really did NOT know.  'In the first
time, you can feel the flowers on their stem, the stem very strong
and full of sap, no?--and the flower opening on top like a face
that has the perfume of desire.  And a woman might be like that.--
But this passes, and the sun begins to shine very strong, very hot,
no?  Then everything inside a man changes, goes dark, no?  And the
flowers crumple up, and the breast of a man becomes like a steel
mirror.  And he is all darkness inside, coiling and uncoiling like
a snake.  All the flowers withered up on shrunk stems, no?  And
then women don't exist for a man.  They disappear like the
flowers.'

'And then what does he want?' said Kate.

'I don't know.  Perhaps he wants to be a very big man, and master
all the people.'

'Then why doesn't he?' said Kate.

He lifted his shoulders.

'And you,' he said to her.  'You seem to me like that morning I
told you about.'

'I am just forty years old,' she laughed shakily.

Again he lifted his shoulders.

'It doesn't matter,' he said.  'It is the same.  Your body seems to
me like the stem of the flower I told you about, and in your face
it will always be morning, of the time of the rains.'

'Why do you say that to me?' she said, as an involuntary strange
shudder shook her.

'Why not say it!' he replied.  'You are like the cool morning, very
fresh.  In Mexico, we are the end of the hot dry day.'

He watched her, with a strange lingering desire in his black eyes,
and what seemed to her a curious, lurking sort of insolence.  She
dropped her head to hide from him, and rocked in her chair.

'I would like to marry you,' he said; 'if ever you will marry.  I
would like to marry you.'

'I don't think I shall EVER marry again,' she flashed, her bosom
heaving like suffocation, and a dark flush suffusing over her face,
against her will.

'Who knows!' said he.

Ramón was coming down the terrace, his fine white serape folded
over his naked shoulder, with its blue-and-dark pattern at the
borders, and its long scarlet fringe dangling and swaying as he
walked.  He leaned against one of the pillars of the terrace, and
looked down at Kate and Cipriano.  Cipriano glanced up with that
peculiar glance of primitive intimacy.

'I told the Señora Caterina,' he said, 'if ever she wanted to marry
a man, she should marry me.'

'It is plain talk,' said Ramón, glancing at Cipriano with the same
intimacy, and smiling.

Then he looked at Kate, with a slow smile in his brown eyes, and a
shadow of curious knowledge on his face.  He folded his arms over
his breast, as the natives do when it is cold and they are
protecting themselves; and the cream-brown flesh, like opium,
lifted the bosses of his breasts, full and smooth.

'Don Cipriano says that white people always want peace,' she said,
looking up at Ramón with haunted eyes.  'Don't you consider
yourselves white people?' she asked, with a slight, deliberate
impertinence.

'No whiter than we are,' smiled Ramón.  'Not lily-white, at least.'

'And don't you want peace?' she asked.

'I?  I shouldn't think of it.  The meek have inherited the earth,
according to prophecy.  But who am I, that I should envy them their
peace!  No, Señora.  Do I look like a gospel of peace?--or a gospel
of war either?  Life doesn't split down that division, for me.'

'I don't know what you want,' said she, looking up at him with
haunted eyes.

'We only half know ourselves,' he replied, smiling with changeful
eyes.  'Perhaps not so much as half.'

There was a certain vulnerable kindliness about him, which made her
wonder, startled, if she had ever realized what real fatherliness
meant.  The mystery, the nobility, the inaccessibility, and the
vulnerable compassion of man in his separate fatherhood.

'You don't like brown-skinned people?' he asked her gently.

'I think it is beautiful to look at,' she said.  'But'--with a
faint shudder--'I am glad I am white.'

'You feel there could be no contact?' he said, simply.

'Yes!' she said.  'I mean that.'

'It is as you feel,' he said.

And as he said it, she knew he was more beautiful to her than any
blond white man, and that, in a remote, far-off way, the contact
with him was more precious than any contact she had known.

But then, though he cast over her a certain shadow, he would never
encroach on her, he would never seek any close contact.  It was the
incompleteness in Cipriano that sought her out, and seemed to
trespass on her.

Hearing Ramón's voice, Carlota appeared uneasily in a doorway.
Hearing him speak English, she disappeared again, on a gust of
anger.  But after a little while, she came once more, with a little
vase containing the creamy-coloured, thick flowers that are
coloured like freesias, and that smell very sweet.

'Oh, how nice!' said Kate.  'They are temple flowers!  In Ceylon
the natives tiptoe into the little temples and lay one flower on
the table at the foot of the big Buddha statues.  And the tables of
offering are all covered with these flowers, all put so neatly.
The natives have that delicate oriental way of putting things
down.'

'Ah!' said Carlota, setting the vase on the table.  'I did not
bring them for any gods, especially strange ones.  I brought them
for you, Señora.  They smell so sweet.'

'Don't they!' said Kate.

The two men went away, Ramón laughing.

'Ah, Señora!' said Carlota, sitting down tense at the table.
'Could you follow Ramón?  Could YOU give up the Blessed Virgin?--
I could sooner die!'

'Ha!' said Kate, with a little weariness.  'Surely we don't want
any MORE gods.'

'More gods, Señora!' said Doña Carlota, shocked.  'But how is it
possible!--Don Ramón is in mortal sin.'

Kate was silent.

'And he wants to lead more and more people into the same,'
continued Carlota.  'It is the sin of pride.  Men wise in their own
conceit!--The cardinal sin of men.  Ah, I have told him.--And I am
so glad, Señora, that you feel as I feel.  I am so afraid of
American women, women like that.  They wish to have men's minds, so
they accept all the follies and wickedness of men.--You are
Catholic, Señora?'

'I was educated in a convent,' said Kate.

'Ah, of course!  Of course!--Ah, Señora, as if a woman who had ever
known the Blessed Virgin could ever part from her again.  Ah,
Señora, what woman would have the heart to put Christ back on the
Cross, to crucify him twice!  But men, men!  This Quetzalcoatl
business!  What buffoonery, Señora; if it were not horrible sin!
And two clever, well-educated men!  Wise in their own conceit!'

'Men usually are,' said Kate.

It was sunset, with a big level cloud like fur overhead, only the
sides of the horizon fairly clear.  The sun was not visible.  It
had gone down in a thick, rose-red fume behind the wavy ridge of
the mountains.  Now the hills stood up bluish, all the air was a
salmon-red flush, the fawn water had pinkish ripples.  Boys and
men, bathing a little way along the shore, were the colour of deep
flame.

Kate and Carlota had climbed up to the azotea, the flat roof, from
the stone stairway at the end of the terrace.  They could see the
world: the hacienda with its courtyard like a fortress, the road
between deep trees, the black mud huts near the broken highroad,
and little naked fires already twinkling outside the doors.  All
the air was pinkish, melting to a lavender blue, and the willows on
the shore, in the pink light, were apple-green and glowing.  The
hills behind rose abruptly, like mounds, dry and pinky.  Away in
the distance, down the lake, the two white obelisk towers of Sayula
glinted among the trees, and villas peeped out.  Boats were
creeping into the shadow, from the outer brightness of the lake.

And in one of these boats was Juana, being rowed, disconsolate,
home.



CHAPTER XIII

The First Rain


Ramón and Cipriano were out by the lake.  Cipriano also had changed
into the white clothes and sandals, and he looked better than when
in uniform.

'I had a talk with Montes when he came to Guadalajara,' Cipriano
said to Ramón.  Montes was the President of the Republic.

'And what did he say?'

'He is careful.  But he doesn't like his colleagues.  I think he
feels lonely.  I think he would like to know you better.'

'Why?'

'Perhaps that you could give him your moral support.  Perhaps that
you might be Secretary, and President when Montes' term is up.'

'I like Montes,' said Ramón.  'He is sincere and passionate.  Did
you like him?'

'Yes!' said Cipriano.  'More or less.  He is suspicious, and
jealous for fear anyone else might want to share in his power.  He
has the cravings of a dictator.  He wanted to find out if I would
stick to him.'

'You let him know you would?'

'I told him that all I cared for was for you and for Mexico.'

'What did he say?'

'Well, he is no fool.  He said:  "Don Ramón sees the world with
different eyes from mine.  Who knows which of us is right?  I want
to save my country from poverty and unenlightenment, he wants to
save its soul.  I say, a hungry and ignorant man has no place for a
soul.  An empty belly grinds upon itself, so does an empty mind,
and the soul doesn't exist.  Don Ramón says, if a man has no soul,
it doesn't matter whether he is hungry or ignorant.  Well, he can
go his way, and I mine.  We shall never hinder one another, I
believe.  I give you my word I won't have him interfered with.  He
sweeps the patio and I sweep the street."'

'Sensible!' said Ramón.  'And honest in his convictions.'

'Why should you not be Secretary in a few months' time?  And follow
to the Presidency?' said Cipriano.

'You know I don't want that.  I must stand in another world, and
act in another world.--Politics must go their own way, and society
must do as it will.  Leave me alone, Cipriano.  I know you want me
to be another Porfirio Diaz, or something like that.  But for me
that would be failure pure and simple.'

Cipriano was watching Ramón with black, guarded eyes, in which was
an element of love, and of fear, and of trust, but also
incomprehension, and the suspicion that goes with incomprehension.

'I don't understand, myself, WHAT you want,' he muttered.

'Yes, yes, you do.  Politics and all this SOCIAL religion that
Montes has got is like washing the outside of the egg, to make it
look clean.  But I, myself, I want to get inside the egg, right to
the middle, to start it growing into a new bird.  Ay! Cipriano!
Mexico is like an old, old egg that the bird of Time laid long ago;
and she has been sitting on it for centuries, till it looks foul in
the nest of the world.  But still, Cipriano, it is a good egg.  It
is not addled.  Only the spark of fire has never gone into the
middle of it, to start it.--Montes wants to clean the nest and wash
the egg.  But meanwhile, the egg will go cold and die.  The more
you save these people from poverty and ignorance, the quicker they
will die: like a dirty egg that you take from under the hen-eagle,
to wash it.  While you wash the egg, it chills and dies.  Poor old
Montes, all his ideas are American and European.  And the old Dove
of Europe will never hatch the egg of dark-skinned America.  The
United States can't die, because it isn't alive.  It is a nestful
of china eggs, made of pot.  So they can be kept clean.--But here,
Cipriano, here, let us hatch the chick before we start cleaning up
the nest.'

Cipriano hung his head.  He was always testing Ramón, to see if he
could change him.  When he found he couldn't, then he submitted,
and new little fires of joy sprang up in him.  But meanwhile, he
had to try, and try again.

'It is no good, trying to mix the two things.  At this stage of
affairs, at least, they won't mix.  We have to shut our eyes and
sink down, sink away from the surface, away, like shadows, down to
the bottom.  Like the pearl divers.  But you keep bobbing up like a
cork.'

Cipriano smiled subtly.  He knew well enough.

'We've got to open the oyster of the cosmos, and get our manhood
out of it.  Till we've got the pearl, we are only gnats on the
surface of the ocean,' said Ramón.

'My manhood is like a devil inside me,' said Cipriano.

'It's very true,' said Ramón.  'That's because the old oyster has
him shut up, like a black pearl.  You must let him walk out.'

'Ramón,' said Cipriano, 'wouldn't it be good to be a serpent, and
be big enough to wrap one's folds round the globe of the world, and
crush it like that egg?'

Ramón looked at him and laughed.

'I believe we could do that,' said Cipriano, a slow smile curling
round his mouth.  'And wouldn't it be good?'

Ramón shook his head, laughing.

'There would be ONE good moment, at least,' he said.

'Who asks for more!' said Cipriano.

A spark flashed out of Ramón's eyes too.  Then he checked himself,
and gathered himself together.

'What would be the good!' he said heavily.  'If the egg was
crushed, and we remained, what could we do but go howling down the
empty passages of darkness?  What's the good, Cipriano?'

Ramón got up and walked away.  The sun had set, the night was
falling.  And in his soul the great, writhing anger was alive
again.  Carlota provoked it into life: the two women seemed to
breathe life into the black monster of his inward rage, till it
began to lash again.  And Cipriano stirred it up till it howled
with desire.

'My manhood is like a demon howling inside me,' said Ramón to
himself, in Cipriano's words.

And he admitted the justice of the howling, his manhood being pent
up, humiliated, goaded with insult inside him.  And rage came over
him, against Carlota, against Cipriano, against his own people,
against all mankind, till he was filled with rage like the devil.

His people would betray him, he knew that.  Cipriano would betray
him.  Given one little vulnerable chink, they would pierce him.
They would leap at the place out of nowhere, like a tarantula, and
bite in the poison.

While ever there was one little vulnerable chink.  And what man can
be invulnerable?

He went upstairs by the outer stairway, through the iron door at
the side of the house, under the heavy trees, up to his room, and
sat on his bed.  The night was hot, heavy, and ominously still.

'The waters are coming,' he heard a servant say.  He shut the doors
of his room till it was black dark inside.  Then he threw aside his
clothing, saying:  I put off the world with my clothes.  And
standing nude and invisible in the centre of his room he thrust his
clenched fist upwards, with all his might, feeling he would break
the walls of his chest.  And his left hand hung loose, the fingers
softly curving downwards.

And tense like the gush of a soundless fountain, he thrust up and
reached down in the invisible dark, convulsed with passion.  Till
the black waves began to wash over his consciousness, over his
mind, waves of darkness broke over his memory over his being, like
an incoming tide, till at last it was full tide and he trembled,
and fell to rest.  Invisible in the darkness, he stood soft and
relaxed, staring with wide eyes at the dark, and feeling the dark
fecundity of the inner tide washing over his heart, over his belly,
his mind dissolved away in the greater, dark mind, which is
undisturbed by thoughts.

He covered his face with his hands, and stood still, in pure
unconsciousness, neither hearing nor feeling nor knowing, like a
dark sea-weed deep in the sea.  With no Time and no World, in the
deeps that are timeless and worldless.

Then when his heart and his belly were restored, his mind began to
flicker again softly, like a soft flame flowing without departing.

So he wiped his face with his hands, and put his serape over his
head, and, silent inside an aura of pain, he went out and took the
drum, carrying it downstairs.

Martin, the man who loved him, was hovering in the zaguán.

'Ya, Patrón?' he said.

'Ya!' said Ramón.

The man ran indoors, where a lamp was burning in the big, dark
kitchen, and ran out again with an armful of the woven straw mats.

'Where, Patrón?' he said.

Ramón hesitated in the centre of the courtyard, and looked at the
sky.

'Viene el agua?' he said.

'Creo que sí, Patrón.'

They went to the shed where the bananas had been packed and carried
away on donkeys.  There the man threw down the petates.  Ramón
arranged them.  Guisleno ran with canes.  He was going to make
lights, the simplest possible.  Three pieces of thick cane, tied at
the neck with a cord, stood up three-legged, waist high.  In the
three-pronged fork at the top he laid a piece of flat, slightly
hollow lava stone.  Then he came running from the house with a bit
of burning ocote wood.  Three or four bits of ocote, each bit no
bigger than a long finger, flickered and rose in quick flames from
the stone, and the courtyard danced with shadow.

Ramón took off his serape, folded it, and sat upon it.  Guisleno
lit another tripod-torch.  Ramón sat with his back to the wall, the
fire-light dancing on his dark brows, that were sunk in a sort of
frown.  His breast shone like gold in the flame.  He took the drum
and sounded the summons, slow, monotonous, rather sad.  In a moment
two or three men came running.  The drummer came, Ramón stood up
and handed him the drum.  He ran with it to the great outer
doorway, and out into the dark lane, and there sounded the summons,
quick, sharp.

Ramón put on his serape, whose scarlet fringe touched his knees,
and stood motionless, with ruffled hair.  Round his shoulders went
the woven snake, and his head was through the middle of the blue,
woven bird.

Cipriano came from the house.  He was wearing a serape all scarlet
and dark brown, a great scarlet sun at the centre, deep scarlet
zigzags at the borders, and dark brown fringe at his knees.  He
came and stood at Ramón's side, glancing up into Ramón's face.  But
the other man's brows were low, his eyes were fixed in the darkness
of the sheds away across the courtyard.  He was looking into the
heart of the world; because the faces of men, and the hearts of men
are helpless quicksands.  Only in the heart of the cosmos man can
look for strength.  And if he can keep his soul in touch with the
heart of the world, then from the heart of the world new blood will
beat in strength and stillness into him, fulfilling his manhood.

Cipriano turned his black eyes to the courtyard.  His soldiers had
drawn near, in a little group.  Three or four men were standing in
dark serapes, round the fire.  Cipriano stood brilliant like a
cardinal bird, next to Ramón.  Even his sandals were bright,
sealing-wax red, and his loose linen trousers were bound at the
ankles with red and black bands.  His face looked very dark and
ruddy in the firelight, his little black tuft of a beard hung odd
and devilish, his eyes were glittering sardonically.  But he caught
Ramón's hand in his small hand, and stood holding it.

The peons were coming through the entrance-way, balancing their big
hats.  Women were hurrying barefoot, swishing their full skirts,
carrying babies inside the dark wrap of their rebozos, children
running after.  They all clustered towards the flame-light, like
wild animals gazing in at the circle of men in dark serapes, Ramón,
magnificent in his white and blue and shadow, poising his beautiful
head, Cipriano at his side like a glittering cardinal bird.

Carlota and Kate emerged from the inner doorway of the house.  But
there Carlota remained, wrapped in a black silk shawl, seated on a
wooden bench where the soldiers usually sat, looking across at the
ruddy flare of light, the circle of dark men, the tall beauty of
her husband, the poppy-petal glitter of red, of Cipriano, the group
of little, dust-coloured soldiers, and the solid throng of peons
and women and children, standing gazing like animals.  While
through the gate men still came hurrying, and from outside, the
drum sounded, and a high voice sang again and again:


     Someone will enter between the gates,
       Now, at this moment, Ay!
     See the light on the man that waits.
       Shall you?  Shall I?

     Someone will come to the place of fire,
       Now, at this moment, Ay!
       And hark to the words of their heart's desire.
     Shall you?  Shall I?

     Someone will knock when the door is shut,
       Ay! in a moment, Ay!
     Hear a voice saying: I know you not!
       Shall you?  Shall I?


There was a queer, wild yell each time on the Ay! and like a bugle
refrain:  Shall you?  Shall I?  It made Carlota shiver.

Kate, wrapping her yellow shawl round her, walked slowly towards
the group.

The drum outside gave a rapid shudder, and was finished.  The
drummer came in, the great doors were shut and barred, the drummer
took his place in the ring of standing men.  A dead silence
supervened.

Ramón continued to gaze from under lowered brows, into space.  Then
in a quiet, inward voice, he said:

'As I take off this cover, I put away the day that is gone from
upon me.'

He took off his serape, and stood with it over his arm.  All the
men in the circle did the same, till they stood with naked breasts
and shoulders, Cipriano very dark and strong-looking, in his
smallness, beside Ramón.

'I put away the day that is gone,' Ramón continued, in the same
still, inward voice, 'and stand with my heart uncovered in the
night of the gods.'

Then he looked down at the ground.

'Serpent of the earth,' he said; 'snake that lies in the fire at
the heart of the world, come!  Come!  Snake of the fire of the
heart of the world, coil like gold round my ankles, and rise like
life around my knee, and lay your head against my thigh.  Come, put
your head in my hand, cradle your head in my fingers, snake of the
deeps.  Kiss my feet and my ankles with your mouth of gold, kiss my
knees and my inner thigh, snake branded with flame and shadow,
come! and rest your head in my finger-basket!  So!'

The voice was soft and hypnotic.  It died upon a stillness.  And it
seemed as if really a mysterious presence had entered unseen from
the underworld.  It seemed to the peons as if really they saw a
snake of brilliant gold and living blackness softly coiled around
Ramón's ankle and knee, and resting its head in his fingers,
licking his palm with forked tongue.

He looked out at the big, dilated, glittering eyes of his people,
and his own eyes were wide and uncanny.

'I tell you,' he said, 'and I tell you truly.  At the heart of this
earth sleeps a great serpent, in the midst of fire.  Those that go
down in mines feel the heat and the sweat of him, they feel him
move.  It is the living fire of the earth, for the earth is alive.
The snake of the world is huge, and the rocks are his scales, trees
grow between them.  I tell you the earth you dig is alive as a
snake that sleeps.  So vast a serpent you walk on, this lake lies
between his folds as a drop of rain in the folds of a sleeping
rattlesnake.  Yet he none the less lives.  The earth is alive.

'And if he died, we should all perish.  Only his living keeps the
soil sweet, that grows you maize.  From the roots of his scales we
dig silver and gold, and the trees have root in him, as the hair of
my face has root in my lips.

'The earth is alive.  But he is very big and we are very small,
smaller than dust.  But he is very big in his life, and sometimes
he is angry.  These people, smaller than dust, he says, they stamp
on me and say I am dead.  Even to their asses they speak, and shout
Harreh!  Burro!  But to me they speak no word.  Therefore I will
turn against them, like a woman who lies angry with her man in bed,
and eats away his spirit with her anger, turning her back to him.

'That is what the earth says to us.  He sends sorrow into our feet,
and depression into our loins.

'Because as an angry woman in the house can make a man heavy,
taking his life from him, so the earth can make us heavy, make our
souls cold, and our life dreary in our feet.

'Speak then to the snake of the heart of the world, put oil on your
fingers and lower your fingers for him to taste the oil of the
earth, and let him send life into your feet and ankles and knees,
like sap in the young maize pressing against the joint and making
the milk of the maize bud among its hair.

'From the heart of the earth man feels his manhood rise up in him,
like the maize that is proud, turning its green leaves outwards.
Be proud like the maize, and let your roots go deep, deep, for the
rains are here, and it is time for us to be growing in Mexico.'

Ramón ceased speaking, the drum softly pulsed.  All the men of the
ring were looking down at the earth and softly letting their left
hands hang.

Carlota, who had not been able to hear, drifted up to Kate's side,
spellbound by her husband.  Kate unconsciously glanced down at the
earth, and secretly let her fingers hang softly against her dress.
But then she was afraid of what might happen to her, and she caught
her hand up into her shawl.

Suddenly the drum began to give a very strong note, followed by a
weak: a strange, exciting thud.

Everybody looked up.  Ramón had flung his right arm tense into the
air, and was looking up at the black dark sky.  The men of the ring
did the same, and the naked arms were thrust aloft like so many
rockets.

'Up! up! up!' said a wild voice.

'Up! up!' cried the men of the ring, in a wild chorus.

And involuntarily the men in the crowd twitched, then shot their
arms upwards, turning their faces to the dark heavens.  Even some
of the women boldly thrust up their naked arms, and relief entered
their hearts as they did so.

But Kate would not lift her arm.

There was dead silence, even the drum was silent.  Then the voice
of Ramón was heard, speaking upwards to the black sky:

'Your big wings are dark, Bird, you are flying low to-night.  You
are flying low over Mexico, we shall soon feel the fan of your
wings on our face.

'Ay, Bird!  You fly about where you will.  You fly past the stars,
and you perch on the sun.  You fly out of sight, and are gone
beyond the white river of the sky.  But you come back like the
ducks of the north, looking for water and winter.

'You sit in the middle of the sun, and preen your feathers.  You
crouch in the rivers of stars, and make the star-dust rise around
you.  You fly away into the deepest hollow place of the sky, whence
there seems no return.

'You come back to us, and hover overhead, and we feel your wings
fanning our faces--'

Even as he spoke the wind rose, in sudden gusts, and a door could
be heard slamming in the house, with a shivering of glass, and the
trees gave off a tearing sound.

'Come then, Bird of the great sky!' Ramón called wildly.  'Come!
Oh Bird, settle a moment on my wrist, over my head, and give me
power of the sky, and wisdom.  Oh Bird!  Bird of all the wide
heavens, even if you drum your feathers in thunder, and drop the
white snake of fire from your beak back to the earth again, where
he can run in, deep down the rocks again, home: even if you come as
the Thunderer, come!  Settle on my wrist a moment, with the clutch
of the power of thunder, and arch your wings over my head, like a
shadow of clouds; and bend your breast to my brow, and bless me
with the sun.  Bird, roaming Bird of the Beyond, with thunder in
your pinions and the snake of lightning in your beak, with the blue
heaven in the socket of your wings and cloud in the arch of your
neck, with sun in the burnt feathers of your breast and power in
your feet, with terrible wisdom in your flight, swoop to me a
moment, swoop!'

Sudden gusts of wind tore at the little fires of flame, till they
could be heard to rustle, and the lake began to speak in a vast
hollow noise, beyond the tearing of trees.  Distant lightning was
beating far off, over the black hills.

Ramón dropped his arm, which had been bent over his head.  The drum
began to beat.  Then he said:

'Sit down a moment, before the Bird shakes water out of his wings.
It will come soon.  Sit down.'

There was a stir.  Men put their serapes over their faces, women
clutched their rebozos tighter, and all sat down on the ground.
Only Kate and Carlota remained standing, on the outer edge.  Gusts
of wind tore at the flames, the men put their hats on the ground in
front of them.

'The earth is alive, and the sky is alive,' said Ramón in his
natural voice, 'and between them, we live.  Earth has kissed my
knees, and put strength in my belly.  Sky has perched on my wrist,
and sent power into my breast.

'But as in the morning the Morning-star stands between earth and
sky, a star can rise in us, and stand between the heart and the
loins.

'That is the manhood of man, and for woman, her womanhood.

'You are not yet men.  And women, you are not yet women.

'You run about and toss about and die, and still you have not found
the star of your manhood rise within you, the stars of your
womanhood shine out serene between your breasts, women.

'I tell you, for him that wishes it, the star of his manhood shall
rise within him, and he shall be proud, and perfect even as the
Morning-star is perfect.

'And the star of a woman's womanhood can rise at last, from between
the heavy rim of the earth and the lost grey void of the sky.

'But how?  How shall we do it?  How shall it be?

'How shall we men become Men of the Morning Star?  And the women
the Dawn-Star Women?

'Lower your fingers to the caress of the Snake of the earth.

'Lift your wrist for a perch to the far-lying Bird.

'Have the courage of both, the courage of lightning and the
earthquake.

'And wisdom of both, the wisdom of the snake and the eagle.

'And the peace of both, the peace of the serpent and the sun.

'And the power of both, the power of the innermost earth and the
outermost heaven.

'But on your brow, Men! the undimmed Morning Star, that neither day
nor night, nor earth nor sky can swallow and put out.

'And between your breasts, Women! the Dawn-Star, that cannot be
dimmed.

'And your home at last is the Morning Star.  Neither heaven nor
earth shall swallow you up at the last, but you shall pass the
place beyond both, into the bright star that is lonely yet feels
itself never alone.

'The Morning Star is sending you a messenger, a god who died in
Mexico.  But he slept his sleep, and the invisible Ones washed his
body with water of resurrection.  So he has risen, and pushed the
stone from the mouth of the tomb, and has stretched himself.  And
now he is striding across the horizons even quicker than the great
stone from the tomb is tumbling back to the earth, to crush those
that rolled it up.

'The Son of the Star is coming back to the Sons of Men, with big,
bright strides.

'Prepare to receive him.  And wash yourselves, and put oil on your
hands and your feet, on your mouth and eyes and ears and nostrils,
on your breast and navel and on the secret places of your body,
that nothing of the dead days, no dust of skeletons and evil things
may pass into you and make you unclean.

'Do not look with the eyes of yesterday, nor like yesterday listen,
nor breathe, nor smell, nor taste, nor swallow food and drink.  Do
not kiss with the mouths of yesterday, nor touch with the hands,
nor walk with yesterday's feet.  And let your navel know nothing of
yesterday, and go into your women with a new body, enter the new
body in her.

'For yesterday's body is dead, and carrion, the Xopilote is
hovering above it.

'Put yesterday's body from off you, and have a new body.  Even as
your God who is coming.  Quetzalcoatl is coming with a new body,
like a star, from the shadows of death.

'Yes, even as you sit upon the earth this moment, with the round of
your body touching the round of the earth, say:  Earth!  Earth! you
are alive as the globes of my body are alive.  Breathe the kiss of
the inner earth upon me, even as I sit upon you.

'And so, it is said.  The earth is stirring beneath you, the sky is
rushing its wings above.  Go home to your homes, in front of the
waters that will fall and cut you off forever from your yesterdays.

'Go home, and hope to be Men of the Morning Star, Women of the Star
of Dawn.

'You are not yet men and women--'

He rose up and waved to the people to be gone.  And in a moment
they were on their feet, scurrying and hastening with the quiet
Mexican hurry, that seems to run low down upon the surface of the
earth.

The black wind was all loose in the sky, tearing with the thin
shriek of torn fabrics, in the mango-trees.  Men held their big
hats on their heads and ran with bent knees, their serapes blowing.
Women clutched their rebozos tighter and ran barefoot to the
zaguán.

The big doors were open, a soldier stood with a gun across his
back, holding a hurricane lamp.  And the people fled like ghosts
through the doors, and away up the black lane like bits of paper
veering away into nothingness, blown out of their line of flight.
In a moment, they had all silently gone.

Martin barred the great doors.  The soldier put down his lamp on
the wooden bench, and he and his comrades sat huddled in their dark
shawls, in a little bunch like toadstools in the dark cavern of the
zaguán.  Already one had curled himself up on the wooden bench,
wrapped like a snail in his blanket, head disappeared.

'The water is coming!' cried the servants excitedly, as Kate went
upstairs with Doña Carlota.

The lake was quite black, like a great pit.  The wind suddenly blew
with violence, with a strange ripping sound in the mango-trees, as
if some membrane in the air were being ripped.  The white-flowered
oleanders in the garden below leaned over quite flat, their white
flowers ghostly, going right down to the earth, in the pale beam of
the lamp--like a street lamp--that shone on the wall at the front
entrance.  A young palm-tree bent and spread its leaves on the
ground.  Some invisible juggernaut car rolling in the dark over the
outside world.

Away across the lake, south-west, lightning blazed and ran down the
sky like some portentous writing.  And soft, velvety thunder broke
inwardly, strangely.

'It frightens me!' cried Doña Carlota, putting her hand over her
eyes and hastening into a far corner of the bare salon.

Cipriano and Kate stood on the terrace, watching the coloured
flowers in the pots shake and fly to bits, disappearing up into the
void of darkness.  Kate clutched her shawl.  But the wind suddenly
got under Cipriano's blanket, and lifted it straight up into the
air, then dropped it in a scarlet flare over his head.  Kate
watched his deep, strong Indian chest lift as his arms quickly
fought to free his head.  How dark he was, and how primitively
physical, beautiful, and deep-breasted, with soft, full flesh!  But
all, as it were, for himself.  Nothing that came forth from him to
meet with one outside.  All oblivious of the outside, all for
himself.

'Ah! the water!' he cried, holding down his serape.

The first great drops were flying darkly at the flowers, like
arrows.  Kate stood back into the doorway of the salon.  A pure
blaze of lightning slipped three-fold above the black hills, seemed
to stand a moment, then slip back into the dark.

Down came the rain with a smash, as if some great vessel had
broken.  With it, came a waft of icy air.  And all the time, first
in one part of the sky, then in another, in quick succession the
blue lightning, very blue, broke out of heaven and lit up the air
for a blue, breathless moment, looming trees and ghost of a garden,
then was gone, while thunder dropped and exploded continually.

Kate watched the dropping masses of water in wonder.  Already, in
the blue moments of lightning, she saw the garden below a pond, the
walks were rushing rivers.  It was cold.  She turned indoors.

A servant was going round the rooms with a lantern, to look if
scorpions were coming out.  He found one scuttling across the floor
of Kate's room, and one fallen from the ceiling beams on to
Carlota's bed.

They sat in the salon in rocking-chairs, Carlota and Kate, and
rocked, smelling the good wetness, breathing the good, chilled air.
Kate had already forgotten what really chill air was like.  She
wrapped her shawl tighter round her.

'Ah, yes, you feel cold!  You must take care in the nights now.
Sometimes in the rainy season the nights are very cold.  You must
be ready with an extra blanket.  And the servants, poor things,
they just lie and shudder, and they get up in the morning like
corpses.--But the sun soon warms them again, and they seem to think
they must bear what comes.  So they complain sometimes, but still
they don't provide.'

The wind had gone, suddenly.  Kate was uneasy, uneasy, with the
smell of water, almost of ice, in her nostrils, and her blood still
hot and dark.  She got up and went again to the terrace.  Cipriano
was still standing there, motionless and inscrutable, like a
monument, in his red and dark serape.

The rain was abating.  Down below in the garden two barefooted
women-servants were running through the water, in the faint light
of the zaguán lamp, running across the garden and putting ollas and
square gasoline cans under the arching spouts of water that seethed
down from the roof, then darting away while they filled, then
struggling in with the frothy vessel.  It would save making trips
to the lake, for water.

'What do you think of us?' Cipriano said to her.

'It is strange to me,' she replied, wondering and a little awed by
the night.

'Good, no?' he said, in an exultant tone.

'A little scaring,' she replied, with a slight laugh.

'When you are used to it,' he said, 'it seems natural, no?  It
seems natural so--as it is.  And when you go to a country like
England, where all is so safe and ready-made, then you miss it.
You keep saying to yourself:  "What am I missing?  What is it that
is not here?"'

He seemed to be gloating in his native darkness.  It was curious,
that though he spoke such good English, it seemed always foreign to
her, more foreign than Doña Carlota's Spanish.

'I can't understand that people want to have everything, all life,
no?--so safe and ready-made as in England and America.  It is good
to be AWAKE.  On the qui vive, no?'

'Perhaps,' she said.

'So I like it,' he said, 'when Ramón tells the people the earth is
alive, and the sky has a big bird in it, that you don't see.  I
think it is true.  Certainly!  And it is good to know it, because
then one is on the qui vive, no?'

'But it's tiring to be always on the qui vive,' she said.

'Why?  Why tiring?  No, I think, on the contrary, it is refreshing.--
Ah, you should marry, and live in Mexico.  At last, I am sure, you
would like it.  You would keep waking up more and more to it.'

'Or else going more and more deadened,' she said.  'That is how
most foreigners go, it seems to me.'

'Why deadened?' he said to her.  'I don't understand.  Why
deadened?  Here you have a country where night is night, and rain
comes down and you know it.  And you have a people with whom you
must be on the qui vive all the time, all the time.  And that is
very good, no?  You don't go sleepy.  Like a pear!  Don't you say a
pear goes sleepy, no?--cuando se echa a perder?'

'Yes!' she said.

'And here you have also Ramón.  How does Ramón seem to you?'

'I don't know.  I don't want to say anything.  But I do think he is
almost too much: too far.--And I DON'T think he is Mexican.'

'Why not?  Why not Mexican?  He is Mexican.'

'Not as you are.'

'How not as I am?  He is Mexican.'

'He seems to me to belong to the old, old Europe,' she said.

'And he seems to me to belong to the old, old Mexico--and also to
the new,' he added quickly.

'But you don't believe in him.'

'How?'

'You--yourself.  You don't believe in him.  You think it is like
everything else, a sort of game.  Everything is a sort of game, a
put-up job, to you Mexicans.  You don't REALLY believe, in
anything.'

'How not believe?  I not believe in Ramón?--Well, perhaps not, in
that way of kneeling before him and spreading out my arms and
shedding tears on his feet.  But I--I believe in him, too.  Not in
your way, but in mine.  I tell you why.  Because he has the power
to compel me.  If he hadn't the power to COMPEL me, how should I
believe?'

'It is a queer sort of belief that is compelled,' she said.

'How else should one believe, except by being compelled?  I like
Ramón for that, that he can compel me.  When I grew up, and my
godfather could not compel me to believe, I was very unhappy.  It
made me very unhappy.--But Ramón COMPELS me, and that is very good.
It makes me very happy, when I know I can't escape.  It would make
you happy too.'

'To know I could not escape from Don Ramón?' she said ironically.

'Yes, that also.  And to know you could not escape from Mexico.
And even from such a man as me.'

She paused in the dark before she answered, sardonically:

'I don't think it would make me happy to feel I couldn't escape
from Mexico.  No, I feel, unless I was sure I could get out any
day, I couldn't bear to be here.'

In her mind she thought:  And perhaps Ramón is the only one I
couldn't quite escape from, because he really touches me somewhere
inside.  But from you, you little Cipriano, I should have no need
even to escape, because I could not be caught by you.

'Ah!' he said quickly.  'You think so.  But then you don't know.
You can only think with American thoughts, it is natural.  From
your education, you have only American thoughts, U.S.A. thoughts,
to think with.  Nearly all women are like that: even Mexican women
of the Spanish-Mexican class.  They are all thinking nothing but
U.S.A. thoughts, because those are the ones that go with the way
they dress their hair.  And so it is with you.  You think like a
modern woman, because you belong to the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic
world, and dress your hair in a certain way, and have money, and
are altogether free.--But you only think like this because you have
had these thoughts put in your head, just as in Mexico you spend
centavos and pesos, because that is the Mexican money you have put
in your pocket.  It's what they give you at the bank.--So when you
say you are free, you are NOT free.  You are compelled all the time
to be thinking U.S.A. thoughts--COMPELLED, I must say.  You have
not as much choice as a slave.  As the peons must eat tortillas,
tortillas, tortillas, because there is nothing else, you must think
these U.S.A. thoughts, about being a woman and being free.  Every
day you must eat those tortillas, tortillas.--Till you don't know
how you would like something else.'

'What else should I like?' she said, with a grimace at the
darkness.

'Other thoughts, other feelings.--You are afraid of such a man as
me, because you think I should not treat you à l'américaine.  You
are quite right.  I should not treat you as an American woman must
be treated.  Why should I?  I don't wish to.  It doesn't seem good
to me.'

'You would treat a woman like a real old Mexican, would you?  Keep
her ignorant, and shut her up?' said Kate sarcastically.

'I could not keep her ignorant if she did not start ignorant.  But
what more I had to teach her wouldn't be in the American style of
teaching.'

'What then?'

'Quién sabe!  Ça reste à voir.'

'Et continuera à y rester,' said Kate, laughing.



CHAPTER XIV

Home to Sayula


The morning came perfectly blue, with a freshness in the air and a
blue luminousness over the trees and the distant mountains, and
birds so bright, absolutely like new-opened buds sparking in the
air.

Cipriano was returning to Guadalajara in the automobile, and
Carlota was going with him.  Kate would be rowed home on the lake.

To Ramón, Carlota was still, at times, a torture.  She seemed to
have the power still to lacerate him, inside his bowels.  Not in
his mind or spirit, but in his old emotional, passional self: right
in the middle of his belly, to tear him and make him feel he bled
inwardly.

Because he had loved her, he had cared for her: for the affectionate,
passionate, whimsical, sometimes elfish creature she had been.  He
had made much of her, and spoiled her, for many years.

But all the while, gradually, his nature was changing inside him.
Not that he ceased to care for her, or wanted other women.  That
she could have understood.  But inside him was a slow, blind
imperative, urging him to cast his emotional and spiritual and
mental self into the slow furnace, and smelt them into a new, whole
being.

But he had Carlota to reckon with.  She loved him, and that, to
her, was the outstanding factor.  She loved him, emotionally.  And
spiritually, she loved mankind.  And mentally, she was sure she was
quite right.

Yet, as time went on, he had to change.  He had to cast that
emotional self, which she loved, into the furnace, to be smelted
down to another self.

And she felt she was robbed, cheated.  Why couldn't he go on being
gentle, good, and loving, and trying to make the whole world more
gentle, good, and loving?

He couldn't, because it was borne in upon him that the world had
gone as far as it could go in the good, gentle, and loving
direction, and anything farther in that line meant perversity.  So
the time had come for the slow, great change to something else--
what, he didn't know.

The emotion of love, and the greater emotion of liberty for mankind
seemed to go hard and congeal upon him, like the shell on a
chrysalis.  It was the old caterpillar stage of Christianity
evolving into something else.

But Carlota felt this was all she had, this emotion of love, for
her husband, her children, for her people, for the animals and
birds and trees of the world.  It was her all, her Christ, and her
Blessed Virgin.  How could she let it go?

So she continued to love him, and to love the world, steadily,
pathetically, obstinately, and devilishly.  She prayed for him, and
she engaged in works of charity.

But her love had turned from being the spontaneous flow, subject to
the unforeseen comings and goings of the Holy Ghost, and had turned
into will.  She loved now with her WILL: as the white world now
tends to do.  She became filled with charity: that cruel kindness.'

Her winsomeness and her elfishness departed from her, she began to
wither, she grew tense.  And she blamed him, and prayed for him.
Even as the spontaneous mystery died in her, the will hardened,
till she was nothing but a will: a lost will.

She soon succeeded in drawing the life of her young boys all to
herself, with her pathos and her subtle will.  Ramón was too proud
and angry to fight for them.  They were her children.  Let her have
them.

They were the children of his old body.  His new body had no
children: would probably never have any.

'But remember,' he said to her, with southern logic, 'you do not
love, save with your will.  I don't like the love you have for your
god: it is an assertion of your own will.  I don't like the love
you have for me: it is the same.  I don't like the love you have
for your children.  If ever I see in them a spark of desire to be
saved from it, I shall do my best to save them.  Meanwhile have
your love, have your will.  But you know I dislike it.  I dislike
your insistence.  I dislike your monopoly of one feeling, I dislike
your charity works.  I disapprove of the whole trend of your life.
You are weakening and vitiating the boys.  You do NOT love them,
you are only putting your love will over them.  One day they will
turn and hate you for it.  Remember I have said this to you.'

Doña Carlota had trembled in every fibre of her body, under the
shock of this.  But she went away to the chapel of the Annunciation
Convent, and prayed.  And, praying for his soul, she seemed to gain
a victory over him, in the odour of sanctity.  She came home in
frail, pure triumph, like a flower that blooms on a grave: his
grave.

And Ramón henceforth watched her in her beautiful, rather
fluttering, rather irritating gentleness, as he watched his closest
enemy.

Life had done its work on one more human being, quenched the
spontaneous life and left only the will.  Killed the god in the
woman, or the goddess, and left only charity, with a will.

'Carlota,' he had said to her, 'how happy you would be if you could
wear deep, deep mourning for me.--I shall not give you this
happiness.'

She gave him a strange look from her hazel-brown eyes.

'Even that is in the hands of God,' she had replied, as she hurried
away from him.

And now, on this morning after the first rains, she came to the
door of his room as he was sitting writing.  As yesterday, he was
naked to the waist, the blue-marked sash tied round his middle
confined the white linen, loose trousers--like big, wide pyjama
trousers crossed in front and tied round his waist.

'May I come in?' she said nervously.

'Do!' he replied, putting down his pen and rising.

There was only one chair--he was offering it her, but she sat down
on the unmade bed, as if asserting her natural right.  And in the
same way she glanced at his naked breast--as if asserting her
natural right.

'I am going with Cipriano after breakfast,' she said.

'Yes, so you said.'

'The boys will be home in three weeks.'

'Yes.'

'Don't you want to see them?'

'If they want to see me.'

'I am sure they do.'

'Then bring them here.'

'Do you think it is pleasant for me?' she said, clasping her hands.

'You do not make it pleasant for me, Carlota.'

'How can I?  You know I think you are wrong.  When I listened to
you last night--there is something so beautiful in it all--and yet
so monstrous.  So MONSTROUS!--Oh!  I think to myself:  What is this
man doing?  This man of all men, who might be such a blessing to
his country and mankind--'

'Well,' said Ramón.  'And what is he instead?'

'You know!  You know!  I can't bear it.--It ISN'T for you to save
Mexico, Ramón.  Christ has already saved it.'

'It seems to me not so.'

'He has!  He has!  And He made you the wonderful being that you
are, so that you should WORK OUT the salvation, in the name of
Christ and of love.  Instead of which--'

'Instead of which, Carlota, I try something else.--But believe me,
if the real Christ has not been able to save Mexico--and He hasn't--
then I am sure the white Anti-Christ of charity, and socialism,
and politics, and reform, will only succeed in finally destroying
her.  That, and that alone, makes me take my stand.--You, Carlota,
with your charity works and your PITY: and men like Benito Juarez,
with their Reform and their Liberty: and the rest of the benevolent
people, politicians and socialists and so forth, surcharged with
pity for living men, in their mouths, but really with hate--the
hate of the materialist HAVE-NOTS for the materialist HAVES: they
are the Anti-Christ.  The old world, that's just the world.  But
the new world, that wants to save the People, this is the Anti-
Christ.  This is Christ with real poison in the communion cup.--And
for this reason I step out of my ordinary privacy and individuality.
I don't want everybody poisoned.  About the great mass I don't care.
But I don't want everybody poisoned.'

'How can you be so sure that you yourself are not a poisoner of the
people?--I think you are.'

'Think it then.  I think of you, Carlota, merely that you have not
been able to come to your complete, final womanhood: which is a
different thing from the old womanhoods.'

'Womanhood is always the same.'

'Ah, no, it isn't!  Neither is manhood.'

'But what do you think you can do?  What do you think this
Quetzalcoatl nonsense amounts to?'

'Quetzalcoatl is just a living word, for these people, no more.
All I want them to do is to find the beginnings of the way to their
own manhood, their own womanhood.  Men are not yet men in full, and
women are not yet women.  They are all half and half, incoherent,
part horrible, part pathetic, part good creatures.  Half arrived.--
I mean you as well, Carlota.  I mean all the world.--But these
people don't assert any righteousness of their own, these Mexican
people of ours.  That makes me think that grace is still with them.
And so, having got hold of some kind of clue to my own whole
manhood, it is part of me now to try with them.'

'You will fail.'

'I shan't.  Whatever happens to me, there will be a new vibration,
a new call in the air, and a new answer inside some men.'

'They will betray you.--Do you know what even your friend Toussaint
said of you?--Ramón Carrasco's future is just the past of mankind.'

'A great deal of it is the past.  Naturally Toussaint sees that
part.'

'But the boys don't believe in you.  Instinctively, they
disbelieve.  Cyprian said to me, when I went to see him:  "Is
father doing any more of that silly talk about old gods coming
back, mother?  I wish he wouldn't.  It would be pretty nasty for us
if he got himself into the newspapers with it.'"

Ramón laughed.

'Little boys,' he said, 'are like little gramophones.  They only
talk according to the record that's put into them.'

'YOU don't believe out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,' said
Carlota bitterly.

'Why, Carlota, the babes and sucklings don't get much chance.
Their mothers and their teachers turn them into little gramophones
from the first, so what can they do, but say and feel according to
the record the mother and teacher puts into them?  Perhaps in the
time of Christ babes and sucklings were not so perfectly exploited
by their elders.'

Suddenly, however, the smile went off his face.  He rose up, and
pointed to the door.

'Go away,' he said in a low tone.  'Go away!  I have smelt the
smell of your spirit long enough.'

She sat on the bed, spell-bound, gazing at him with frightened, yet
obstinate, insolent eyes, wincing from his outstretched arm as if
he had threatened to strike her.

Then again the fire went out of his eyes, and his arm sank.  The
still, far-away look came on his face.

'What have I to do with it!' he murmured softly.

And taking up his blouse and his hat, he went silently out on to
the terrace, departing from her in body and in soul.  She heard the
soft swish of his sandals.  She heard the faint resonance of the
iron door to the terrace, to which he alone had access.  And she
sat like a heap of ash on his bed, ashes to ashes, burnt out, with
only the coals of her will still smouldering.

Her eyes were very bright, as she went to join Kate and Cipriano.

After breakfast, Kate was rowed home down the lake.  She felt a
curious depression at leaving the hacienda: as if, for her, life
now was there, and not anywhere else.

Her own house seemed empty, banal, vulgar.  For the first time in
her life, she felt the banality and emptiness even of her own
milieu.  Though the Casa de las Cuentas was not purely her own
milieu.

'Ah, Niña, how good!  How good that you have come!  Ay, in the
night, how much water!  Much!  Much!  But you were safe in the
hacienda, Niña.  Ah, how nice, that hacienda of Jamiltepec.  Such a
good man, Don Ramón--isn't he, Niña?  He cares a great deal for his
people.  And the Señora, ah, how sympathetic she is!'

Kate smiled and was pleasant.  But she felt more like going into
her room and saying:  For God's sake, leave me alone, with your
cheap rattle.

She suffered again from the servants.  Again that quiet,
subterranean insolence against life, which seems to belong to
modern life.  The unbearable note of flippant jeering, which is
underneath almost all modern utterance.  It was underneath Juana's
constant cry.--Niña!  Niña!

At meal-times Juana would seat herself on the ground at a little
distance from Kate, and talk, talk in her rapid mouthfuls of
conglomerate words with trailing, wistful endings: and all the time
watch her mistress with those black, unseeing eyes on which the
spark of light would stir with the peculiar slow, malevolent
jeering of the Indian.

Kate was not rich--she had only her moderate income.

'Ah, the rich people--!' Juana would say.

'I am not rich,' said Kate.

'You are not rich, Niña?' came the singing, caressive bird-like
voice:  'Then, you are poor?'--this was indescribable irony.

'No, I am not poor either.  I am not rich, and I am not poor,' said
Kate.

'You are not rich, and you are not poor, Niña!' repeated Juana, in
her bird-like voice, that covered the real bird's endless,
vindictive jeering.

For the words meant nothing to her.  To her, who had nothing, COULD
never have anything, Kate was one of that weird class, the rich.
And, Kate felt, in Mexico it was a crime to be rich, or to be
classed with the rich.  Not even a crime, really, so much as a
freak.  The rich class was a freak class, like dogs with two heads
or calves with five legs.  To be looked upon, not with envy, but
with the slow, undying antagonism and curiosity which 'normals'
have towards 'freaks.'  The slow, powerful, corrosive Indian
mockery, issuing from the lava-rock Indian nature, against anything
which strives to be above the grey, lava-rock level.

'Is it true, Niña, that your country is through there?' Juana
asked, jabbing her finger downward, towards the bowels of the
earth.

'Not quite!' said Kate.  'My country is more there--' and she
slanted her finger at the earth's surface.

'Ah--that way!' said Juana.  And she looked at Kate with a subtle
leer, as if to say: what could you expect from people who came out
of the earth sideways, like sprouts of camote!

'And is it true that over there, there are people with only one
eye--here!'  Juana punched herself in the middle of her forehead.

'No.  That isn't true.  That is just a story.'

'Ah!' said Juana.  'Isn't it true!  Do you know?  Have you been to
the country where they are, these people?'

'Yes,' said Kate.  'I have been to all the countries, and there are
no such people.'

'Verdad!  Verdad!' breathed Juana awestruck.  'You have been to all
the countries, and there are no such people!--But in your country,
they are all gringos?  Nothing but gringos?'

She meant, no real people and salt of the earth like her own
Mexican self.

'They are all people like me,' said Kate coldly.

'Like you, Niña?  And they all talk like you?'

'Yes!  Like me.'

'And there are many?'

'Many!  Many!'

'Look now!' breathed Juana, almost awestruck to think that there
could be whole worlds of these freak, mockable people.

And Concha, that young, belching savage, would stare through her
window-grating at the strange menagerie of the Niña and the Niña's
white visitors.  Concha, slapping tortillas, was real.

Kate walked down towards the kitchen.  Concha was slapping the
masa, the maize dough which she bought in the plaza at eight
centavos a kilo.

'Niña!' she called in her raucous voice.  'Do you eat tortillas?'

'Sometimes,' said Kate.

'Eh?' shouted the young savage.

'Sometimes.'

'Here!  Eat one now!'  And Concha thrust a brown paw with a pinkish
palm, and a dingy-looking tortilla, at Kate.

'Not now,' said Kate.

She disliked the heavy plasters that tasted of lime.

'Don't you want it?  Don't you eat it?' said Concha, with an
impudent, strident laugh.  And she flung the rejected tortilla on
the little pile.

She was one of those who won't eat bread: say they don't like it,
that it is not food.

Kate would sit and rock on her terrace, while the sun poured in the
green square of the garden, the palm-tree spread its great fans
translucent at the light, the hibiscus dangled great double-red
flowers, rosy red, from its very dark tree, and the dark green
oranges looked as if they were sweating as they grew.

Came lunch time, madly hot: and greasy hot soup, greasy rice,
splintery little fried fishes, bits of boiled meat and boiled egg-
plant vegetables, a big basket piled with mangoes, papayas,
zapotes--all the tropical fruits one did not want, in hot weather.

And the barefoot little Maria, in a limp, torn, faded red frock, to
wait at table.  She was the loving one.  She would stand by Juana
as Juana bubbled with talk, like dark bubbles in her mouth, and she
would stealthily touch Kate's white arm; stealthily touch her
again.  Not being rebuked, she would stealthily lay her thin little
black arm on Kate's shoulder, with the softest, lightest touch
imaginable, and her strange, wide black eyes would gleam with
ghostly black beatitude, very curious, and her childish, pock-
marked, slightly imbecile face would take on a black, arch,
beatitudinous look.  Then Kate would quickly remove the thin, dark,
pock-marked arm, the child would withdraw half a yard, the
beatitudinous look foiled, but her very black eyes still shining
exposed and absorbedly, in a rapt, reptilian sort of ecstasy.

Till Concha came to hit her with her elbow, making some brutal,
savage remark which Kate could not understand.  So the glozing
black eyes of the child would twitch, and Maria would break into
meaningless tears, Concha into a loud, brutal, mocking laugh, like
some violent bird.  And Juana interrupted her black and gluey flow
of words to glance at her daughters and throw out some ineffectual
remark.

The victim, the inevitable victim, and the inevitable victimizer.

The terrible, terrible hot emptiness of the Mexican mornings, the
weight of black ennui that hung in the air!  It made Kate feel as
if the bottom had fallen out of her soul.  She went out to the
lake, to escape that house, that family.

Since the rains, the trees in the broken gardens of the lake front
had flamed into scarlet, and poured themselves out into lavender
flowers.  Rose red, scarlet and lavender, quick, tropical flowers.
Wonderful splashes of colour.  But that was all: splashes!  They
made a splash, like fireworks.

And Kate thought of the blackthorn puffing white, in the early
year, in Ireland, and hawthorn with coral grains, in a damp still
morning in the lanes, and foxgloves by the bare rock, and tufts of
ling and heather, and a ravel of harebells.  And a terrible,
terrible longing for home came over her.  To escape from these
tropical brilliancies and meaninglessnesses.

In Mexico, the wind was a hard draught, the rain was a sluice of
water, to be avoided, and the sun hit down on one with hostility,
terrific and stunning.  Stiff, dry, unreal land, with sunshine
beating on it like metal.  Or blackness and lightning and crashing
violence of rain.

No lovely fusion, no communion.  No beautiful mingling of sun and
mist, no softness in the air, never.  Either hard heat or hard
chill.  Hard, straight lies and zigzags, wounding the breast.  No
soft, sweet smell of earth.  The smell of Mexico, however subtle,
suggested violence and things in chemical conflict.

And Kate felt herself filled with an anger of resentment.  She
would sit under a willow-tree by the lake, reading a Pío Baroja
novel that was angry and full of No! No! No!--ich bin der Geist der
stets verneint!  But she herself was so much angrier and fuller of
repudiation than Pío Baroja.  Spain cannot stand for No! as Mexico
can.

The tree hung fleecy above her.  She sat on the warm sand in the
shadow, careful not to let even her ankles lie in the biting shine
of the sun.  There was a faint, old smell of urine.  The lake was
so still and filmy as to be almost invisible.  In the near
distance, some dark women were kneeling on the edge of the lake,
dressed only in their long wet chemises in which they had bathed.
Some were washing garments, some were pouring water over
themselves, scooping it up in gourd scoops and pouring it over
their black heads and ruddy-dark shoulders, in the intense pressure
of the sunshine.  On her left were two big trees, and a cane fence,
and little straw huts of Indians.  There the beach itself ended,
and the little Indian plots of land went down to the lake-front.

Glancing around in the great light, she seemed to be sitting
isolated in a dark core of shadow, while the world moved in
inconsequential specks through the hollow glare.  She noticed a
dark urchin, nearly naked, marching with naked, manly solemnity
down to the water's edge.  He would be about four years old,
but more manly than an adult man.  With sex comes a certain
vulnerability which these round-faced, black-headed, stiff-backed
infant men have not got.  Kate knew the urchin.  She knew his
tattered rag of a red shirt, and the weird rags that were his
little man's white trousers.  She knew his black round head, his
stiff, sturdy march of a walk, his round eyes, and his swift,
scuttling run, like a bolting animal.

'What's the brat got?' she said to herself, gazing at the moving
little figure within the great light.

Dangling from his tiny outstretched arm, held by the webbed toe,
head down and feebly flapping its out-sinking wings, was a bird, a
water-fowl.  It was a black mud-chick with a white bar across the
under-wing, one of the many dark fowl that bobbed in little flocks
along the edge of the sun-stunned lake.

The urchin marched stiffly down to the water's edge, holding the
upside-down bird, that seemed big as an eagle in the tiny fist.
Another brat came scuttling after.  The two infant men paddled a
yard into the warm, lapping water, under the great light, and
gravely stooping, like old men, set the fowl on the water.  It
floated, but could hardly paddle.  The lift of the ripples moved
it.  The urchins dragged it in, like a rag, by a string tied to its
leg.

So quiet, so still, so dark, like tiny, chubby little infant men,
the two solemn figures with the rag of a bird!

Kate turned uneasily to her book, her nerves on edge.  She heard
the splash of a stone.  The bird was on the water, but apparently
the string that held it by the leg was tied to a stone.  It lay
wavering, a couple of yards out.  And the two little he-men, with
sober steadfastness and a quiet, dark lust, were picking up stones,
and throwing them with the fierce Indian aim at the feebly
fluttering bird: right down upon it.  Like a little warrior stood
the mite in the red rag, his arm upraised, to throw the stone with
all his might down on the tethered bird.

In a whiff, Kate was darting down the beach.

'Ugly boys!  Ugly children!  Go!  Go away, ugly children, ugly
boys!' she said on one breath, with quiet intensity.

The round-headed dot gave her one black glance from his manly eyes,
then the two of them scuttled up the beach into invisibility.

Kate went into the water, and lifted the wet, warm bird.  The bit
of coarse fibre-string hung from its limp, greenish, waterfowl's
ankle.  It feebly tried to bite her.

She rapidly stepped out of the water and stood in the sun to
unfasten the string.  The bird was about as big as a pigeon.  It
lay in her hand with the absolute motionlessness of a caught wild
thing.

Kate stooped and pulled off her shoes and stockings.  She looked
round.  No sign of life from the reed huts dark in the shadow of
the trees.  She lifted her skirts and staggered out barefoot in the
hot shallows of the water, almost falling on the cruel stones under
the water.  The lake-side was very shallow.  She staggered on and
on, in agony, holding up her skirts in one hand, holding the warm,
wet, motionless bird in the other.  Till at last she was up to her
knees.  Then she launched the greeny-black bird, and gave it a
little push to the uprearing expanse of filmy water, that was
almost dim, invisible with the glare of light.

It lay wet and draggled on the pale, moving sperm of the water,
like a buoyant rag.

'Swim then!  Swim!' she said, trying to urge it away into the lake.

Either it couldn't or wouldn't.  Anyhow it didn't.

But it was out of reach of those urchins.  Kate struggled back from
those stones, to her tree, to her shade, to her book, away from the
rage of the sun.  Silent with slow anger, she kept glancing up at
the floating bird, and sideways at the reed huts of the Indians in
the black shadow.

Yes, the bird was dipping its beak in the water, and shaking its
head.  It was coming to itself.  But it did not paddle.  It let
itself be lifted, lifted on the ripples, and the ripples would
drift it ashore.

'Fool of a thing!' said Kate nervously, using all her consciousness
to make it paddle away into the lake.

Two companions, two black dots with white specks of faces, were
coming out of the pale glare of the lake.  Two mud-chicks swam
busily forward.  The first swam up and poked its beak at the inert
bird, as if to say Hello!  What's up?  Then immediately it turned
away and paddled in complete oblivion to the shore, its companion
following.

Kate watched the rag of feathered misery anxiously.  Would it not
rouse itself? wouldn't it follow?

No!  There it lay, slowly, inertly drifting on the ripples, only
sometimes shaking its head.

The other two alert birds waded confidently, busily among the
stones.

Kate read a bit more.

When she looked again, she could not see her bird.  But the other
two were walking among the stones, jauntily.

She read a bit more.

The next thing was a rather loutish youth of eighteen or so, in
overall trousers, running with big strides towards the water, and
the stiff little man-brat scuttling after with determined bare
feet.  Her heart stood still.

The two busy mud-chicks rose in flight and went low over the water
into the blare of light.  Gone!

But the lout in the big hat and overall trousers and those stiff
Indian shoulders she sometimes hated so much was peering among the
stones.  She, however, was sure her bird had gone.

No!  Actually no!  The stiff-shoulder lout stooped and picked up
the damp thing.  It had let itself drift back.

He turned, dangling it like a rag from the end of one wing, and
handed it to the man-brat.  Then he stalked self-satisfied up the
shore.

Ugh! and that moment how Kate hated these people: their terrible
lowness, à terre, à terre.  Their stiff broad American shoulders,
and high chests, and above all, their walk, their prancing,
insentient walk.  As if some motor-engine drove them at the bottom
of their back.

Stooping rather forward and looking at the ground so that he could
turn his eyes sideways to her, without showing her his face, the
lout returned to the shadow of the huts.  And after him,
diminutive, the dot of a man marched stiffly, hurriedly, dangling
the wretched bird, that stirred very feebly, downwards from the tip
of one wing.  And from time to time turning his round, black-eyed
face in Kate's direction, vindictively, apprehensively, lest she
should swoop down on him again.  Black, apprehensive male defiance
of the great, white weird female.

Kate glared back from under her tree.

'If looks would kill you, brat, I'd kill you,' she said.  And the
urchin turned his face like clockwork at her from time to time, as
he strutted palpitating towards the gap in the cane hedge, into
which the youth had disappeared.

Kate debated whether to rescue the foolish bird again.  But what
was the good!

This country would have its victim.  America would have its victim.
As long as time lasts, it will be the continent divided between
Victims and Victimizers.  What is the good of trying to interfere!

She rose up in detestation of the flabby bird, and of the sulky-
faced brat turning his full moon on her in apprehension.

Lumps of women were by the water's edge.  Westwards, down the
glare, rose the broken-looking villas and the white twin towers of
the church, holding up its two fingers in mockery above the scarlet
flame-trees and the dark mangoes.  She saw the rather lousy shore,
and smelt the smell of Mexico come out in the hot sun after the
rains: excrement, human and animal dried in the sun on a dry, dry
earth; and dry leaves; and mango leaves; and pure air with a little
refuse-smoke in it.

'But the day will come when I shall go away,' she said to herself.

And sitting rocking once more on her veranda, hearing the clap-clap
of tortillas from the far end of the patio, the odd, metallic
noises of birds, and feeling the clouds already assembling in the
west, with a weight of unborn thunder upon them, she felt she could
bear it no more: the vacuity, and the pressure: the horrible
uncreate elementality, so uncouth, even sun and rain uncouth,
uncouth.

And she wondered over the black vision in the eyes of that urchin.
The curious void.

He could not see that the bird was a real living creature with a
life of its own.  This, his race had never seen.  With black eyes
they stared out on an elemental world, where the elements were
monstrous and cruel, as the sun was monstrous, and the cold,
crushing black water of the rain was monstrous, and the dry, dry,
cruel earth.

And among the monstrosity of the elements flickered and towered
other presences: terrible uncouth things called gringos, white
people, and dressed up monsters of rich people, with powers like
gods, but uncouth, demonish gods.  And uncouth things like birds
that could fly and snakes that could crawl and fish that could swim
and bite.  An uncouth, monstrous universe of monsters big and
little, in which man held his own by sheer resistance and
guardedness, never, never going forth from his own darkness.

And sometimes, it was good to have revenge on the monsters that
fluttered and strode.  The monsters big and the monsters little.
Even the monster of that bird, which had its own monstrous bird-
nature.  On this the mite could wreck the long human vengeance, and
for once be master.

Blind to the creature as a soft, struggling thing finding its own
fluttering way through life.  Seeing only another monster of the
outer void.

Walking forever through a menace of monsters, blind to the sympathy
in things, holding one's own, and not giving in, nor going forth.
Hence the lifted chests and the prancing walk.  Hence the stiff,
insentient spines, the rich physique, and the heavy, dreary
natures, heavy like the dark-grey mud-bricks, with a terrible
obstinate ponderosity and a dry sort of gloom.



CHAPTER XV

The Written Hymns of Quetzalcoatl


The electric light in Sayula was as inconstant as everything else.
It would come on at half-past six in the evening, and it MIGHT
bravely burn till ten at night, when the village went dark with a
click.  But usually it did no such thing.  Often it refused to
sputter into being till seven, or half-past, or even eight o'clock.
But its worst trick was that of popping out just in the middle of
supper, or just when you were writing a letter.  All of a sudden,
the black Mexican night came down on you with a thud.  And then
everybody running blindly for matches and candles, with a calling
of frightened voices.  Why were they always frightened?  Then the
electric light, like a wounded thing, would try to revive, and a
red glow would burn in the bulbs, sinister.  All held their breath--
was it coming or not?  Sometimes it expired for good, sometimes it
got its breath back and shone, rather dully, but better than
nothing.

Once the rainy season had set in, it was hopeless.  Night after
night it collapsed.  And Kate would sit with her weary, fluttering
candle, while blue lightning revealed the dark shapes of things in
the patio.  And half-seen people went swiftly down to Juana's end
of the patio, secretly.

On such a night Kate sat on her veranda facing the deepness of the
black night.  A candle shone in her desert salon.  Now and again
she saw the oleanders and the papaya in the patio garden, by the
blue gleam of lightning that fell with a noiseless splash into the
pitch darkness.  There was a distant noise of thunder, several
storms prowling round like hungry jaguars, above the lake.

And several times the gate clicked, and crunching steps came along
the gravel, someone passed on the gravel walk, saluting her, going
down to Juana's quarters, where the dull light of a floating oil-
wick shone through the grated window-hole.  Then there was a low,
monotonous sound of a voice, reciting or reading.  And as the wind
blew and the lightning alighted again like a blue bird among the
plants, there would come the sharp noise of the round cuentas
falling from the cuenta-tree.

Kate was uneasy and a bit forlorn.  She felt something was
happening down in the servants' corner, something secret in the
dark.  And she was stranded in her isolation on her terrace.

But, after all, it was her house, and she had a right to know what
her own people were up to.  She rose from her rocking-chair and
walked down the veranda and round the dining-room bay.  The dining-
room, which had its own two doors on the patio, was already locked
up.

In the far corner beyond the well she saw a group sitting on the
ground, outside the doorway of Juana's kitchen-hole.  Out of this
little kitchen-shed shone the light of the floating-wick lamp, and
a voice was slowly intoning, all the faces were looking into the
dim light, the women dark-hooded in rebozos, the men with their
hats on, their serapes over their shoulders.

When they heard Kate's footsteps, the faces looked her way, and a
voice murmured in warning.  Juana struggled to her feet.

'It is the Niña!' she said.  'Come, then, Niña, you poor innocent
all alone in the evening.'

The men in the group rose to their feet--she recognized the young
Ezequiel, taking his hat off to her.  And there was Maria del
Carmen, the bride.  And inside the little shed, with the wick lamp
on the floor, was Julio, the bridegroom of a few weeks ago.  Concha
and little Maria were there, and a couple of strangers.

'I could hear the voice--' said Kate.  'I didn't know it was you,
Julio.  How do you do?--And I wondered so much what it was.'

There was a moment's dead silence.  Then Juana plunged in.

'Yes, Niña!  Come!  It's very nice that you come.  Concha, the
chair for the Niña!'

Concha got up rather unwillingly, and fetched the little low chair
which formed Juana's sole article of furniture, save the one bed.

'I don't disturb you?' said Kate.

'No, Niña, you are a friend of Don Ramón, verdad?'

'Yes,' said Kate.

'And we--we are reading the Hymns.'

'Yes?' said Kate.

'The Hymns of Quetzalcoatl,' said Ezequiel, in his barking young
voice, with sudden bravado.

'Do go on!  May I listen!'

'You hear!  The Niña wants to listen.  Read, Julio, read!  Read
then.'

They all sat down once more on the ground, and Julio sat down by
the lamp, but he hung his head, hiding his face in the shadow of
his big hat.

'Entonces!--Read then,' said Juana.

'He is afraid,' murmured Maria del Carmen, laying her hand on the
young man's knee.  'However, read, Julio!  Because the Niña wants
to hear.'

And after a moment's struggle, Julio said in a muffled voice:

'Do I begin from the beginning.'

'Yes, from the beginning!  Read!' said Juana.

The young man took a sheet of paper, like an advertisement leaflet,
from under his blanket.  At the top it had the Quetzalcoatl symbol,
called the Eye, the ring with the bird-shape standing in the
middle.

He began to read in a rather muffled voice:

'I am Quetzalcoatl with the dark face, who lived in Mexico in other
days.

'Till there came a stranger from over the seas, and his face was
white, and he spoke with strange words.  He showed his hands and
his feet, that in both there were holes.  And he said:  "My name is
Jesus, and they called me Christ.  Men crucified me on a Cross till
I died.  But I rose up out of the place where they put me, and I
went up to heaven to my Father.  Now my Father has told me to come
to Mexico."

'Quetzalcoatl said:  You alone?

'Jesus said:  My mother is here.  She shed many tears for me,
seeing me crucify.  So she will hold the Sons of Mexico on her lap,
and soothe them when they suffer, and when the women of Mexico
weep, she will take them on her bosom and comfort them.  And when
she cries to the Father for her people, He will make everything
well.

'Quetzatlcoatl said:  That is well.  And Brother with the name
Jesus, what will you do in Mexico?

'Jesus said:  I will bring peace into Mexico.  And on the naked I
will put clothes, and food between the lips of the hungry, and
gifts in all men's hands, and peace and love in their hearts.

'Quetzalcoatl said:  It is very good.  I am old.  I could not do so
much.  I must go now.  Farewell, people of Mexico.  Farewell,
strange brother called Jesus.  Farewell, woman called Mary.  It is
time for me to go.

'So Quetzalcoatl looked at his people; and he embraced Jesus, the
Son of Heaven; and he embraced Maria, the Blessed Virgin, the Holy
Mother of Jesus, and he turned away.  Slowly he went.  But in his
ears was the sound of the tearing down of his temples in Mexico.
Nevertheless he went on slowly, being old, and weary with much
living.  He climbed the steep of the mountain, and over the white
snow of the volcano.  As he went, behind him rose a cry of people
dying, and a flame of places burning.  He said to himself:  Surely
those are Mexicans crying!  Yet I must not hear, for Jesus has come
to the land, and he will wipe the tears from all eyes, and his
Mother will make them all glad.

'He also said:  Surely that is Mexico burning.  But I must not
look, for all men will be brothers, now Jesus has come to the land,
and the women will sit by the blue skirts of Mary, smiling with
peace and with love.

'So the old god reached the top of the mountain, and looked up into
the blue of heaven.  And through a door in the blue wall he saw a
great darkness, and stars and a moon shining.  And beyond the
darkness he saw one great star, like a bright gateway.

'Then fire rose from the volcano around the old Quetzalcoatl, in
wings and glittering feathers.  And with the wings of fire and the
glitter of sparks Quetzalcoatl flew up, up, like a wafting fire,
like a glittering bird, up, into the space, and away to the white
steps of heaven, that lead to the blue walls, where is the door to
the dark.  So he entered in and was gone.

'Night fell, and Quetzalcoatl was gone, and men in the world saw
only a star travelling back into heaven, departing under the low
branches of darkness.

'Then men in Mexico said:  Quetzalcoatl has gone.  Even his star
has departed.  We must listen to this Jesus, who speaks in a
foreign tongue.

'So they learned a new speech from the priests that came from upon
the great waters to the east.  And they became Christians.'

Julio, who had become absorbed, ended abruptly, as the tale of the
leaflet was ended.

'It is beautiful,' said Kate.

'And it is true!' cried the sceptical Juana.

'It seems to me true,' said Kate.

'Señora!' yelled Concha.  'Is it true that heaven is up there, and
you come down steps like clouds to the edge of the sky, like the
steps from the mole into the lake?  Is it true that El Señor comes
and stands on the steps and looks down at us like we look down into
the lake to see the charales?'

Concha shoved up her fierce swarthy face, and shook her masses of
hair, glaring at Kate, waiting for an answer.

'I don't know everything,' laughed Kate.  'But it seems to me
true.'

'She believes it,' said Concha, turning her face to her mother.

'And is it true,' asked Juana, 'that El Señor, El Cristo del Mundo,
is a gringo, and that He comes from your country, with His Holy
Mother?'

'Not from my country, but from a country near.'

'Listen!' exclaimed Juana, awestruck.  'El Señor is a gringuito,
and His Holy Mother is a gringuita.  Yes, one really knows.  Look!
Look at the feet of the Niña!  Pure feet the Santísima!  Look!'
Kate was barefoot, wearing sandals with a simple strap across the
foot.  Juana touched one of the Niña's white feet, fascinated.
'Feet of the Santísima.  And She, the Holy Mary, is a gringuita.
She came over the sea, like you, Niña?'

'Yes, she came over the sea!'

'Ah!  You know it?'

'Yes.  We know that.'

'Think of it!  The Santísima is a gringuita, and She came over the
Sea like the Niña, from the countries of the Niña!'  Juana spoke in
a wicked wonder, horrified, delighted, mocking.

'And the Lord is a Gringuito--pure Gringuito?' barked Concha.

'And Niña--it was the gringos who killed El Señor?  It wasn't the
Mexicans?  It was those other gringos who put Him on the Cross?'

'Yes!' said Kate.  'It wasn't the Mexicans.'

'The gringos?'

'Yes, the gringos.'

'And He Himself was a Gringo?'

'Yes!' said Kate, not knowing what else to say.

'Look!' said Juana, in her hushed, awed, malevolent voice.  'He was
a Gringo, and the gringos put him on the Cross.'

'But a long time ago,' said Kate hastily.

'A long time ago, says the Niña,' echoed Juana, in her awed voice.

There was a moment of silence.  The dark faces of the girls and men
seated on the ground were turned up to Kate, watching her fixedly,
in the half light, counting every word.  In the outer air, thunder
muttered in different places.

'And now, Niña,' came the cool, clear voice of Maria del Carmen,
'El Señor is going back again to His Father, and our Quetzalcoatl
is coming back to us?'

'And the Santísima is leaving us?' put in the hurried voice of
Juana.  'Think of it!  The Santísima is leaving us, and this
Quetzalcoatl is coming!  He has no mother, he!'

'Perhaps he has a wife,' said Kate.

'Quién sabe!' murmured Juana.

'They say,' said the bold Concha, 'that in Paradise he has grown
young.'

'Who?' asked Juana.

'I don't know how they call him,' muttered Concha, ashamed to say
the word.

'Quetzalcoatl!' said Ezequiel, in his barking strong young voice.
'Yes, he is young.  He is a god in the flower of life, and finely
built.'

'They say so!  They say so!' murmured Juana.  'Think of it!'

'Here it says so!' cried Ezequiel.  'Here it is written.  In the
second Hymn.'

'Read it then, Julio.'

And Julio, now nothing loth, took out a second paper.

'I, Quetzalcoatl, of Mexico, I travelled the longest journey.

'Beyond the blue outer wall of heaven, beyond the bright place of
the Sun, across the plains of darkness where the stars spread out
like trees, like trees and bushes, far away to the heart of all the
worlds, low down like the Morning Star.

'And at the heart of all the worlds those were waiting whose faces
I could not see.  And in voices like bees they murmured among
themselves:  This is Quetzalcoatl whose hair is white with fanning
the fires of life.  He comes alone, and slowly.

'Then with hands I could not see, they took my hands, and in their
arms that I could not see, at last I died.

'But when I was dead, and bone, they cast not my bones away, they
did not give me up to the four winds, nor to the six.  No, not even
to the wind that blows down to the middle of earth, nor to him that
blows upward like a finger pointing, did they give me.

'He is dead, they said, but unrelinquished.

'So they took the oil of the darkness, and laid it on my brow and
my eyes, they put it in my ears and nostrils and my mouth, they put
it on the two-fold silence of my breasts, and on my sunken navel,
and on my secret places, before and behind: and in the palms of my
hands, and on the mounds of my knees, and under the tread of my
feet.

'Lastly, they anointed all my head with the oil that comes out of
the darkness.  They they said:  He is sealed up.  Lay him away.

'So they laid me in the fountain that bubbles darkly at the heart
of the worlds, far, far behind the sun, and there lay I,
Quetzalcoatl, in warm oblivion.

'I slept the great sleep, and dreamed not.

'Till a voice was calling:  Quetzalcoatl!

'I said:  Who is that?

'No one answered, but the voice said:  Quetzalcoatl!

'I said:  Where art thou?

'So! he said.  I am neither here nor there.  I am thyself.  Get up.

'Now all was very heavy upon me, like a tomb-stone of darkness.

'I said:  Am I not old?  How shall I roll this stone away?

'How art thou old, when I am new man?  I will roll away the stone.
Sit up!

'I sat up, and the stone went rolling, crashing down the gulfs of
space.

'I said to myself:  I am new man.  I am younger than the young and
older than the old.  Lo! I am unfolded on the stem of time like a
flower, I am at the midst of the flower of my manhood.  Neither do
I ache with desire, to tear, to burst the bud; neither do I yearn
away like a seed that floats into heaven.  The cup of my flowering
is unfolded, in its middle the stars float balanced with array.  My
stem is in the air, my roots are in all the dark, the sun is no
more than a cupful within me.

'Lo!  I am neither young nor old, I am the flower unfolded, I am
new.

'So I rose and stretched my limbs and looked around.  The sun was
below me in a daze of heat, like a hot humming-bird hovering at
mid-day over the worlds.  And his beak was long and very sharp, he
was like a dragon.

'And a faint star was hesitating wearily, waiting to pass.

'I called aloud, saying:  "Who is that?"


     My name is Jesus, I am Mary's son.
     I am coming home.
     My mother the Moon is dark.

     Brother, Quetzalcoatl,
     Hold back the wild hot sun.
     Bind him with shadow while I pass.
     Let me come home.


'I caught the sun and held him, and in my shade the faint star
slipped past, going slowly into the dark reaches beyond the burning
of the sun.  Then on the slope of silence he sat down and took off
his sandals, and I put them on.

'"How do they wear the wings of love, Jesus, the Mexican people?"

'"The souls of the Mexican people are heavy for the wings of love,
they have swallowed the stone of despair."

'"Where is your Lady Mother in the mantle of blue, she with comfort
in her lap?"

'"Her mantle faded in the dust of the world, she was weary without
sleep, for the voices of people cried night and day, and the knives
of the Mexican people were sharper than the pinions of love, and
their stubbornness was stronger than hope.  Lo! the fountain of
tears dries up in the eyes of the old, and the lap of the aged is
comfortless, they look for rest.  Quetzalcoatl, Sir, my mother went
even before me, to her still white bed in the moon."

'"She is gone, and thou art gone, Jesus, the Crucified.  Then what
of Mexico?"

'"The images stand in their churches, Oh Quetzalcoatl, they don't
know that I and my Mother have departed.  They are angry souls,
Brother, my Lord!  They vent their anger.  They broke my Churches,
they stole my strength, they withered the lips of the Virgin.  They
drove us away, and we crept away like a tottering old man and a
woman, tearless and bent double with age.  So we fled while they
were not looking.  And we seek but rest, to forget forever the
children of men who have swallowed the stone of despair."

'Then said I:  It is good, pass on.  I, Quetzalcoatl, will go down.
Sleep thou the sleep without dreams.  Farewell at the cross-roads,
Brother Jesus.

'He said:  Oh, Quetzalcoatl!  They have forgotten thee.  The
feathered snake!  The serpent--silent bird!  They are asking for
none of thee.

'I said:  Go thy way, for the dust of earth is in thy eyes and on
thy lips.  For me the serpent of middle-earth sleeps in my loins
and my belly, the bird of the outer air perches on my brow and
sweeps her bill across my breast.  But I, I am lord of two ways.  I
am master of up and down.  I am as a man who is a new man, with new
limbs and life, and the light of the Morning Star in his eyes.  Lo!
I am I!  The lord of both ways.  Thou wert lord of the one way.
Now it leads thee to the sleep.  Farewell!

'So Jesus went on towards the sleep.  And Mary the Mother of
Sorrows lay down on the bed of the white moon, weary beyond any
more tears.

'And I, I am on the threshold.  I am stepping across the border.  I
am Quetzalcoatl, lord of both ways, star between day and the dark.'

There was silence as the young man finished reading.



CHAPTER XVI

Cipriano and Kate


On Saturday afternoons the big black canoes with their large square
sails came slowly approaching out of the thin haze across the lake,
from the west, from Tlapaltepec, with big straw hats and with
blankets and earthenware stuff, from Ixtlahuacan and Jaramay and
Las Zemas with mats and timber and charcoal and oranges, from
Tuliapan and Cuxcueco and San Cristobal with boatloads of dark-
green, globular water-melons, and piles of red tomatoes, mangoes,
vegetables, oranges: and boat-loads of bricks and tiles, burnt red,
but rather friable; then more charcoal, more wood, from the stark
dry mountains over the lake.

Kate nearly always went out about five o'clock, on Saturdays, to
see the boats, flat-bottomed, drift up to the shallow shores, and
begin to unload in the glow of the evening.  It pleased her to see
the men running along the planks with the dark-green melons, and
piling them in a mound on the rough sand, melons dark-green like
creatures with pale bellies.  To see the tomatoes all poured out
into a shallow place in the lake, bobbing about while the women
washed them, a bobbing scarlet upon the water.

The long, heavy bricks were piled in heaps along the scrap of
demolished breakwater, and little gangs of asses came trotting down
the rough beach, to be laden, pressing their little feet in the
gravelly sand, and flopping their ears.

The cargadores were busy at the charcoal boats, carrying out the
rough sacks.

'Do you want charcoal, Niña?' shouted a grimy cargador, who had
carried the trunks from the station on his back.

'At how much?'

'Twenty-five reales the two sacks.'

'I pay twenty reales.'

'At twenty reales then, Señorita.  But you give me two reales for
the transport?'

'The owner pays the transport,' said Kate.  'But I will give you
twenty centavos.'

Away went the man, trotting barelegged, barefoot, over the stony
ground, with two large sacks of charcoal on his shoulders.  The men
carry huge weights, without seeming ever to think they are heavy.
Almost as if they liked to feel a huge weight crushing on their
iron spines, and to be able to resist it.

Baskets of spring guavas, baskets of sweet lemons called limas,
basket of tiny green and yellow lemons, big as walnuts; orange-red
and greenish mangoes, oranges, carrots, cactus fruits in great
abundance, a few knobbly potatoes, flat, pearl-white onions, little
calabazitas and speckled green calabazitas like frogs, camotes
cooked and raw--she loved to watch the baskets trotting up the
beach past the church.

Then, rather late as a rule, big red pots, bulging red ollas for
water-jars, earthenware casseroles and earthenware jugs with cream
and black scratched pattern in glaze, bowls, big flat earthenware
discs for cooking tortillas--much earthenware.

On the west shore, men were running up the beach wearing twelve
enormous hats at once, like a trotting pagoda.  Men trotting with
finely woven huaraches and rough strip sandals.  And men with a few
dark serapes, with gaudy rose-pink patterns, in a pile on their
shoulders.

It was fascinating.  But at the same time, there was a heavy,
almost sullen feeling on the air.  These people came to market to a
sort of battle.  They came, not for the joy of selling, but for the
sullen contest with those who wanted what they had got.  The
strange, black resentment always present.

By the time the church bells clanged for sunset, the market had
already begun.  On all the pavements round the plaza squatted the
Indians with their wares, pyramids of green watermelons, arrays of
rough earthenware, hats in piles, pairs of sandals side by side, a
great array of fruit, a spread of collar-studs and knick-knacks,
called novedades, little trays with sweets.  And people arriving
all the time out of the wild country, with laden asses.

Yet never a shout, hardly a voice to be heard.  None of the
animation and the frank wild clamour of a Mediterranean market.
Always the heavy friction of the will; always, always, grinding
upon the spirit, like the grey black grind of lava-rock.

When dark fell, the vendors lighted their tin torch-lamps, and the
flames wavered and streamed as the dark-faced men squatted on the
ground in their white clothes and big hats, waiting to sell.  They
never asked you to buy.  They never showed their wares.  They
didn't even look at you.  It was as if their static resentment and
indifference would hardly let them sell at all.

Kate sometimes felt the market cheerful and easy.  But more often
she felt an unutterable weight slowly, invisibly sinking on her
spirits.  And she wanted to run.  She wanted, above all, the
comfort of Don Ramón and the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl.  This seemed to
her the only escape from a world gone ghastly.

There was talk of revolution again, so the market was uneasy and
grinding the black grit into the spirit.  Foreign-looking soldiers
were about, with looped hats, and knives and pistols, and savage
northern faces: tall, rather thin figures.  They would loiter about
in pairs, talking in a strange northern speech, and seeming more
alien even than Kate herself.

The food-stalls were brilliantly lighted.  Rows of men sat at the
plank boards, drinking soup and eating hot food with their fingers.
The milkman rode in on horseback, his two big cans of milk slung
before him, and he made his way slowly through the people to the
food-stalls.  There, still sitting unmoved on horseback, he
delivered bowls of milk from the can in front of him, and then, on
horseback like a monument, took his supper, his bowl of soup, and
his plate of tamales, or of minced, fiery meat spread on tortillas.
The peons drifted slowly round.  Guitars were sounding, half-
secretly.  A motor-car worked its way in from the city, choked with
people, girls, young men, city papas, children, in a pile.

The rich press of life, above the flare of torches upon the ground!
The throng of white-clad, big-hatted men circulating slowly, the
women with dark rebozos slipping silently.  Dark trees overhead.
The doorway of the hotel bright with electricity.  Girls in
organdie frocks, white, cherry-red, blue, from the city.  Groups of
singers singing inwardly.  And all the noise subdued, suppressed.

The sense of strange, heavy suppression, the dead black power of
negation in the souls of the peons.  It was almost pitiful to see
the pretty, pretty slim girls from Guadalajara going round and
round, their naked arms linked together, so light in their gauzy,
scarlet, white, blue, orange dresses, looking for someone to look
at them, to take note of them.  And the peon men only emitting from
their souls the black vapour of negation, that perhaps was hate.
They seemed, the natives, to have the power of blighting the air
with their black, rock-bottom resistance.

Kate almost wept over the slim, eager girls, pretty as rather
papery flowers, eager for attention, but thrust away, victimized.

Suddenly there was a shot.  The market-place was on its feet in a
moment, scattering, pouring away into the streets and the shops.
Another shot!  Kate, from where she stood, saw across the rapidly-
emptying plaza a man sitting back on one of the benches, firing a
pistol into the air.  He was a lout from the city, and he was half
drunk.  The people knew what it was.  Yet any moment he might lower
the pistol and start firing at random.  Everybody hurried silently,
melting away, leaving the plaza void.

Two more shots, pap-pap! still into the air.  And at the same
moment a little officer in uniform darted out of the dark street
where the military station was, and where now the big hats were
piled on the ground; he rushed straight to the drunkard, who was
spreading his legs and waving the pistol: and before you could
breathe, slap! and again slap!  He had slapped the pistol-firer
first on one side of the face, then on the other, with slaps that
resounded almost like shots.  And in the same breath he seized the
arm that held the pistol and wrested the weapon away.

Two of the strange soldiers instantly rushed up and seized the man
by the arms.  The officer spoke two words, they saluted and marched
off their prisoner.

Instantly the crowd was ebbing back into the plaza, unconcerned.
Kate sat on a bench with her heart beating.  She saw the prisoner
pass under a lamp, streaks of blood on his cheek.  And Juana, who
had fled, now came scuttling back and took Kate's hand, saying:

'Look!  Niña!  It is the General!'

She rose startled to her feet.  The officer was saluting her.

'Don Cipriano!' she said.

'The same!' he replied.  'Did that drunken fellow frighten you?'

'Not much!  Only startled me.  I didn't FEEL any evil intention
behind it.'

'No, only drunk.'

'But I shall go home now.'

'Shall I walk with you?'

'Would you care to?'

He took his place at her side, and they turned down by the church,
to the lake shore.  There was a moon above the mountain and the air
was coming fresh, not too strong, from the west.  From the Pacific.
Little lights were burning ruddy by the boats at the water's edge,
some outside, and some inside, under the roof-tilt of the boat's
little inward shed.  Women were preparing a mouthful of food.

'But the night is beautiful,' said Kate, breathing deep.

'With the moon clipped away just a little,' he said.

Juana was following close on her heels: and behind, two soldiers in
slouched hats.

'Do the soldiers escort you?' she said.

'I suppose so,' said he.

'But the moon,' she said, 'isn't lovely and friendly as it is in
England or Italy.'

'It is the same planet,' he replied.

'But the moonshine in America isn't the same.  It doesn't make one
feel glad as it does in Europe.  One feels it would like to hurt
one.'

He was silent for some moments.  Then he said:

'Perhaps there is in you something European, which hurts our
Mexican Moon.'

'But I come in good faith.'

'European good faith.  Perhaps it is not the same as Mexican.'

Kate was silent, almost stunned.

'Fancy your Mexican moon objecting to me!' she laughed ironically.

'Fancy your objecting to our Mexican moon!' said he.

'I wasn't,' said she.

They came to the corner of Kate's road.  At the corner was a group
of trees, and under the trees, behind the hedge, several reed huts.
Kate often laughed at the donkey looking over the dry-stone low
wall, and at the black sheep with curved horns, tied to a bitten
tree, and at the lad, naked but for a bit of a shirt, fleeing into
the corner under the thorn screen.

Kate and Cipriano sat on the veranda of the House of the Cuentas.
She offered him vermouth, but he refused.

They were still.  There came the faint pip!-pip! from the little
electric plant just up the road, which Jesús tended.  Then a cock
from beyond the bananas crowed powerfully and hoarsely.

'But how absurd!' said Kate.  'Cocks don't crow at this hour.'

'Only in Mexico,' laughed Cipriano.

'Yes!  Only here!'

'He thinks your moon is the sun, no?' he said, teasing her.

The cock crowed powerfully, again and again.

'This is very nice, your house, your patio,' said Cipriano.

But Kate was silent.

'Or don't you like it?' he said.

'You see,' she answered, 'I have nothing to DO!  The servants won't
let me do anything.  If I sweep my room, they stand and say Qué
Niña!  Qué Niña!  As if I was standing on my head for their
benefit.  I sew, though I've no interest in sewing.--What is it,
for a life?'

'And you read!' he said, glancing at the magazines and books.

'Ah, it is all such stupid, lifeless stuff, in the books and
papers,' she said.

There was a silence.  After which he said:

'But what would you like to do?  As you say, you take no interest
in sewing.  You know the Navajo women, when they weave a blanket,
leave a little place for their soul to come out, at the end: not to
weave their soul int