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.
CHAP: 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 realised 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 appetite; 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 realised 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 cauterises 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 Tascala, 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 skin-tight 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 sarape 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! Cortes 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 repellance. Hard,
four-square, sharp-edged, cutting, zigzagging 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 victimised.
But yet! But yet! The gentle voices of the natives. The voices 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.
CHAP: 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.