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 Thibet. 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 Americanised.”
“I quite see the danger of Americanisation,” 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 man-servant.
“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 homogenous,
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 sarape 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 realised 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 verandah, 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 realised 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 realise 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 realised. 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.