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 camions 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 Riberas’ 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 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 realised
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 bull-fight 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!”