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 violincello: “If pulque is the highest happiness!”
“Then we are fortunate, because a tostón will buy paradise,” she said.
“It is a _bon mot_, Señora mia,” 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 worst 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, magnetised 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 dattura were
suspended, large and silent, like the very ghosts of sound. And the
dattura 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, goodbye, 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 commonplace 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 _pulqueria_,” he said. “But I don’t think he’s
_quite_ drunk. Will you risk driving back with him?”
“The _pulqueria_ was called _La Flor de un Dia_--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.
CHAP: 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 further 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 Mexicano 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.