passage of water between deep reeds. It made Kate think of the little
river Anapo: the same mystery unbroken. The boatman, with creases
half of sadness and half of exaltation in his bronze, still face, was
pulling with all his might. Water-fowl went swimming into the reeds, or
rose on wing and wheeled into the blue air. Some willow trees hung a
dripping, vivid green, in the stark dry country. The stream was narrow
and winding. With a nonchalant motion, first of the right then of the
left hand, Villiers was guiding the boatman, to keep him from running
aground in the winding, narrow water-way.
And this put Villiers at his ease, to have something practical and
slightly mechanical to do and to assert. He was striking the American
note once more, of mechanical dominance.
All the other business had left him incomprehending, and when he asked
Kate, she had pretended not to hear him. She sensed a certain delicate,
tender mystery in the river, in the naked man in the water, in the
boatman, and she could not bear to have it subjected to the tough
American flippancy. She was weary to death of American automatism and
American flippant toughness. It gave her a feeling of nausea.
“Quite a well-built fellow, that one who laid hold of the boat. What
did he want, anyway?” Villiers insisted.
“Nothing!” said Kate.
They were slipping out past the clay-coloured, loose stony edges of
the land, through a surge of ripples, into the wide white light of the
lake. A breeze was coming from the east, out of the upright morning,
and the surface of the shallow, flimsy, dun-coloured water was in
motion. Shoal-water rustled near at hand. Out to the open, large,
square white sails were stepping gingerly forward, and beyond the
buff-coloured, pale desert of water rose far-away blue, sharp hills
of the other side, many miles away, pure pale blue with distance, yet
sharp-edged and clear in form.
“Now,” said the boatman, smiling to Kate, “it is easier. Now we are out
of the current.”
He pulled rhythmically through the frail-rippling, sperm-like water,
with a sense of peace. And for the first time Kate felt she had met the
mystery of the natives, the strange and mysterious gentleness between
a scylla and a charybdis of violence; the small poised, perfect body
of the bird that waves wings of thunder and wings of fire and night,
in its flight. But central between the flash of day and the black of
night, between the flash of lightning and the break of thunder, the
still, soft body of the bird poised and soaring, forever. The mystery
of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the
downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of
inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that
watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two
opposites.
This kind of frail, pure sympathy she felt at the moment between
herself and the boatman, between herself and the man who had spoken
from the water. And she was not going to have it broken by Villiers’
American jokes.
There was a sound of breaking water. The boatman drew away, and pointed
across to where a _canoa_, a native sailing-boat, was lying at an
angle. She had run aground in a wind, and now must wait till another
wind would carry her off the submerged bank again. Another boat was
coming down the breeze, steering cautiously among the shoals, for the
river outlet. She was piled high with petates, the native leaf mats,
above her hollowed black sides. And bare-legged men with loose white
drawers rolled up, and brown chests showing, were running with poles as
the shallows heaved up again, pushing her off, and balancing their huge
hats with small, bird-like shakes of the head.
Beyond the boats, sea-wards, were rocks outcropping and strange birds
like pelicans standing in silhouette, motionless.
They had been crossing a bay of the lake-shore, and were nearing the
hotel. It stood on a parched dry bank above the pale-brown water, a
long, low building amid a tender green of bananas and pepper-trees.
Everywhere the shores rose up pale and cruelly dry, dry to cruelty,
and on the little hills the dark statues of the organ cactus poised in
nothingness.
There was a broken-down landing-place, and a boat-house in the
distance, and someone in white flannel trousers was standing on the
broken masonry. Upon the filmy water ducks and black water-fowl bobbed
like corks. The bottom was stony. The boatman suddenly backed the boat,
and pulled round. He pushed up his sleeve and hung over the bows,
reaching into the water. With a quick motion he grabbed something,
and scrambled into the boat again. He was holding in the pale-skinned
hollow of his palm a little earthenware pot, crusted by the lake
deposit.
“What is it?” she said.
“Ollitta of the gods,” he said. “Of the old dead gods. Take it,
Señorita.”
“You must let me pay for it,” she said.
“No, Señorita. It is yours,” said the man, with that sensitive,
masculine sincerity which comes sometimes so quickly from a native.
It was a little, rough round pot with protuberances.
“Look!” said the man, reaching again for the little pot. He turned it
upside-down, and she saw cut-in eyes and the sticking-out ears of an
animal’s head.
“A cat!” she exclaimed. “It is a cat.”
“Or a coyote!”
“A coyote!”
“Let’s look!” said Villiers. “Why how awfully interesting! Do you think
it’s old?”
“It is old?” Kate asked.
“The time of the old gods,” said the boatman. Then with a sudden smile:
“The dead gods don’t eat much rice, they only want little casseroles
while they are bone under the water.” And he looked her in the eyes.
“While they are bone?” she repeated. And she realised he meant the
skeletons of gods that cannot die.
They were at the landing stage; or rather, at the heap of collapsed
masonry which had once been a landing stage. The boatman got out and
held the boat steady while Kate and Villiers landed. Then he scrambled
up with the bags.
The man in white trousers, and a _mozo_ appeared. It was the hotel
manager. Kate paid the boatman.
“Adios, Señorita!” he said with a smile. “May you go with Quetzalcoatl.”
“Yes!” she cried. “Goodbye!”
They went up the slope between the tattered bananas, whose ragged
leaves were making a hushed, distant patter in the breeze. The green
fruit curved out its bristly-soft bunch, the purple flower-bud
depending stiffly.
The German manager came to talk to them: a young man of about forty,
with his blue eyes going opaque and stony behind his spectacles, though
the centres were keen. Evidently a German who had been many years out
in Mexico--out in the lonely places. The rather stiff look, the slight
look of fear in the _soul_--not physical fear--and the look of defeat,
characteristic of the European who has long been subjected to the
unbroken spirit of place! But the defeat was in the soul, not the will.
He showed Kate to her room in the unfinished quarter, and ordered
her breakfast. The hotel consisted of an old low ranch-house with a
verandah--and this was the dining-room, lounge, kitchen and office.
Then there was a two-storey new wing, with a smart bath-room between
each two bedrooms, and almost up-to-date fittings: very incongruous.
But the new wing was unfinished--had been unfinished for a dozen years
and more, the work abandoned when Porfirio Diaz fled. Now it would
probably never be finished.
And this is Mexico. Whatever pretentiousness and modern improvements
it may have, outside the capital, they are either smashed or raw and
unfinished, with rusty bones of iron girders sticking out.
Kate washed her hands and went down to breakfast. Before the long
verandah of the old ranch-house, the green pepper-trees dropped
like green light, and small cardinal birds with scarlet bodies and
blazing impertinent heads like poppy-buds flashed among the pinkish
pepper-heads, closing their brown wings upon the audacity of their
glowing redness. A train of geese passed in the glaring sun, automatic,
towards the eternal tremble of pale, earth-coloured water beyond the
stones.
It was a place with a strange atmosphere: stony, hard, broken, with
round cruel hills and the many-fluted bunches of the organ-cactus
behind the old house, and an ancient road trailing past, deep in
ancient dust. A touch of mystery and cruelty, the stonyness of fear, a
lingering, cruel sacredness.
Kate loitered hungrily, and was glad when the Mexican in shirt-sleeves
and patched trousers, another lingering remnant of Don Porfirio’s day,
brought her her eggs and coffee.
He was muted as everything about the place seemed muted, even the very
stones and the water. Only those poppies on wing, the cardinal birds,
gave a sense of liveliness: and they were uncanny.
So swiftly one’s moods changed! In the boat, she had glimpsed the
superb rich stillness of the morning-star, the poignant intermediate
flashing its quiet between the energies of the cosmos. She had seen it
in the black eyes of the natives, in the sunrise of the man’s rich,
still body, Indian-warm.
And now again already the silence was of vacuity, arrest, and cruelty:
the uncanny empty unbearableness of many Mexican mornings. Already she
was uneasy, suffering from the malaise which tortures one inwardly in
that country of cactuses.
She went up to her room, pausing at the corridor window to look
out at the savage little hills that stood at the back of the hotel
in dessicated heaps, with the dark-green bulks of organ-cactus
sticking up mechanically and sinister, sombre in all the glare. Grey
ground-squirrels like rats slithered ceaselessly around. Sinister,
strangely dark and sinister, in the great glare of the sun!
She went to her room to be alone. Below her window, in the bricks
and fallen rubble of unfinished masonry, a huge white turkey-cock,
dim-white, strutted with his brown hens. And sometimes he stretched out
his pink wattles and gave vent to fierce, powerful turkey-yelps, like
some strong dog yelping; or else he ruffled all his feathers like a
great, soiled white peony, and chuffed, hissing here and there, raging
the metal of his plumage.
Below him, the eternal tremble of pale-earth, unreal waters, far beyond
which rose the stiff resistance of mountains losing their pristine
blue. Distinct, frail distances far off on the dry air, dim-seeing, yet
sharp and edged with menace.
Kate took her bath in the filmy water that was hardly like water at
all. Then she went and sat on the collapsed masonry, in the shade of
the boat-house below. Small white ducks bobbed about on the shallow
water below her, or dived, raising clouds of submarine dust. A canoe
came paddling in; a lean fellow with sinewy brown legs. He answered
Kate’s nod with the aloof promptness of an Indian, made fast his canoe
inside the boat-house, and was gone, stepping silent and barefoot over
the bright green water-stones, and leaving a shadow, cold as flint, on
the air behind him.
No sound on the morning save a faint touching of water, and the
occasional powerful yelping of the turkey-cock. Silence, an aboriginal,
empty silence, as of life _withheld_. The vacuity of a Mexican morning.
Resounding sometimes to the turkey-cock.
And the great, lymphatic expanse of water, like a sea, trembling,
trembling, trembling to a far distance, to the mountains of substantial
nothingness.
Near at hand, a ragged shifting of banana trees, bare hills with
immobile cactus, and to the left, a hacienda with peon’s square mud
boxes of houses. An occasional ranchero in skin-tight trousers and big
hat, rode trotting through the dust on a small horse, or peons on the
rump of their asses, in floppy white cotton, going like ghosts.
Always something ghostly. The morning passing all of a piece, empty,
vacuous. All sound withheld, all life withheld, everything _holding
back_. The land so dry as to have a quality of invisibility, the
water earth-filmy, hardly water at all. The lymphatic milk of fishes,
somebody said.
CHAP: VI. THE MOVE DOWN THE LAKE.
In Portfirio Diaz’ day, the Lake-side began to be the Riviera of
Mexico, and Orilla was to be the Nice, or at least, the Mentone of
the country. But revolutions started erupting again, and in 1911 Don
Portfirio fled to Paris with, it is said, thirty million gold pesos in
his pocket: a peso being half a dollar, nearly half-a-crown. But we
need not believe all that is said, especially by a man’s enemies.
During the subsequent revolutions, Orilla, which had begun to be a
winter paradise for the Americans, lapsed back into barbarism and
broken brickwork. In 1921 a feeble new start had been made.
The place belonged to a German-Mexican family, who also owned the
adjacent hacienda. They acquired the property from the American Hotel
Company, who had undertaken to develop the lake-shore, and who had gone
bankrupt during the various revolutions.
The German-Mexican owners were not popular with the natives. An angel
from heaven would not have been popular, these years, if he had been
known as the owner of property. However, in 1921 the hotel was very
modestly opened again, with an American manager.
Towards the end of the year, José, son of the German-Mexican owner,
came to stay with his wife and children in the hotel, in the new
wing. José was a bit of a fool, as most foreigners are, after the
first generation in Mexico. Having business to settle, he went into
Guadalajara to the bank and returned with a thousand gold pesos in a
bag, keeping the matter, as he thought, a dead secret.
Everyone had just gone to bed, on a brilliant moonlight night in
winter, when two men appeared in the yard calling for José: they had to
speak to him. José, suspecting nothing, left his wife and two children,
and went down. In a moment he called for the American manager. The
manager, thinking it was some bargaining to be done, also came down.
As he came out of the door, two men seized him by the arms, and said:
“_Don’t make a noise!_”
“What’s amiss?” said Bell, who had built up Orilla, and had been twenty
years on the lake.
Then he noticed that two other men had hold of José. “Come,” they said.
There were five Mexicans--Indians, or half-Indians--and the two
captives. They went, the captives in slippers and shirt-sleeves, to the
little office away at the end of the other part of the hotel, which had
been the old ranch-house.
“What do you want?” said Bell.
“Give us the money,” said the bandits.
“Oh, all right,” said the American. There were a few pesos only in the
safe. He opened, showed them, and they took the money.
“Now give us the rest,” they said.
“There is no more,” said the manager, in all sincerity; for José had
not confessed to the thousand pesos.
The five peons then began to search the poor little office. They found
a pile of red blankets--which they appropriated--and a few bottles of
red wine--which they drank.
“Now,” they said, “give us the money.”
“I can’t give you what there isn’t to give,” said the manager.
“Good!” they said, and pulled out the hideous machetes, the heavy
knives of the Mexicans.
José, intimidated, produced the suit-case with the thousand pesos. The
money was wrapped up in the corner of a blanket.
“Now, come with us,” said the bandits.
“Where to?” asked the manager, beginning at last to be scared.
“Only out on to the hill, where we will leave you, so that you cannot
telephone to Ixtlahuacan before we have time to get away,” said the
Indians.
Outside, in the bright moon, the air was chill. The American shivered,
in his trousers and shirt and a pair of bedroom slippers.
“Let me take a coat,” he said.
“Take a blanket,” said the tall Indian.
He took a blanket, and with two men holding his arms, he followed José,
who was likewise held captive, out of the little gate, across the dust
of the road, and up the steep little round hill on which the organ
cactus thrust up their sinister clumps, like bunches of cruel fingers,
in the moonlight. The hill was stony and steep, the going, slow. José,
a fat young man of twenty-eight, protested in the feeble manner of the
well-to-do Mexicans.
At last they came to the top of the hill. Three men took José apart,
leaving Bell alone near a cactus clump. The moon shone in a perfect
Mexican heaven. Below, the big lake glimmered faintly, stretching its
length towards the west. The air was so clear, the mountains across,
thirty miles away, stood sharp and still in the moonlight. And not a
sound nor a motion anywhere! At the foot of the hill was the hacienda,
with the peons asleep in their huts. But what help was there in them?
José and the three men had gone behind a cactus tree that stuck up
straight like a great black bundle of poles, poised on one central
foot, and cast a sharp, iron shadow. The American could hear the
voices, talking low and rapidly, but could not distinguish the words.
His two guards drew away from him a little, to hear what the others
were saying, behind the cactus.
And the American, who knew the ground he stood on and the sky that
hung over him, felt again the black vibration of death in the air, the
black thrill of the death-lust. Unmistakeable he felt it seething in
the air, as any man may feel it, in Mexico. And the strange aboriginal
fiendishness awake now in the five bandits, communicated itself to his
blood.
Loosening his blanket, he listened tensely in the moonlight. And came
the _thud! thud! thud!_ of a machete striking with lust in a human
body, then the strange voice of José: “_Perdoneme!--Forgive me!_” the
murdered man cried as he fell.
The American waited for no more. Dropping his blanket he jumped for
the cactus cover, and stooping, took the downslope like a rabbit. The
pistol-shots rang out after him, but the Mexicans don’t as a rule take
good aim. His bedroom slippers flew off, and barefoot, the man, thin
and light sped down over the stones and the cactus, down to the hotel.
When he got down, he found everyone in the hotel awake and shouting.
“They are killing José!” he said, and he rushed to the telephone,
expecting every moment the five bandits would be on him.
The telephone was in the old ranch-building, in the dining-room. There
was no answer--no answer--no answer. In her little bedroom over the
kitchen, the cook-woman, the traitress, was yelling. Across in the new
wing, a little distance away, José’s Mexican wife was screaming. One of
the servant boys appeared.
“Try and get the police in Ixtlahuacan,” said the American, and he
ran to the new wing, to get his gun and to barricade the doors. His
daughter, a motherless girl, was crying with José’s wife.
There was no answer on the telephone. At dawn, the cook, who said the
bandits would not hurt a woman, went across to the hacienda to fetch
the peons. And when the sun rose, a man was sent for the police.
They found the body of José, pierced with fourteen holes. The American
was carried to Ixtlahuacan, and kept in bed, having cactus spines dug
out of his feet by two native women.
The bandits fled across the marshes. Months later, they were identified
by the stolen blankets, away in Michoacan; and, pursued, one of them
betrayed the others.
After this, the hotel was closed again, and had been re-opened only
three months, when Kate arrived.
But Villiers came with another story. Last year the peons had murdered
the manager of one of the estates across the lake. They had stripped
him and left him naked on his back, with his sexual organs cut off and
put into his mouth, his nose slit and pinned back, the two halves, to
his cheeks, with long cactus spines.
“Tell me no more!” said Kate.
She felt there was doom written on the very sky, doom and horror.
She wrote to Don Ramón in Sayula, saying she wanted to go back
to Europe. True, she herself had seen no horrors, apart from the
bull-fight. And she had had some exquisite moments, as coming to this
hotel in the boat. The natives had a certain mystery and beauty, to
her. But she could not bear the unease, and the latest sense of horror.
True, the peons were poor. They used to work for twenty cents,
American, a day; and now the standard price was fifty cents, or one
peso. But then in the old days they received their wage all the year
round. Now, only at harvest time or sowing time. No work, no pay. And
in the long dry season, it was mostly no work.
“Still,” said the German manager of the hotel, a man who had run a
rubber plantation in Tabasco, a sugar plantation in the state of Vera
Cruz, and a hacienda growing wheat, maize, oranges, in Jalisco: “Still,
it isn’t a question of money with the peons. It doesn’t start with the
peons. It starts in Mexico City, with a lot of malcontents who want to
put their spoke in the wheel, and who lay hold of pious catchwords, to
catch the poor. There’s no more in it than that. Then the agitators
go round and infect the peons. It is nothing but a sort of infectious
disease, like syphilis, all this revolution and socialism.”
“But why does no one oppose it,” said Kate. “Why don’t the hacendados
put up a fight, instead of caving in and running away?”
“The Mexican hacendado!” The man’s German eyes gave out a spark. “The
Mexican _gentleman_ is such a brave man, that while the soldier is
violating his wife on the bed, he is hiding under the bed and holding
his breath so they shan’t find him. He’s as brave as that.”
Kate looked away uncomfortably.
“They all want the United States to intervene. They hate the Americans;
but they want the United States to intervene, to save them their money
and their property. That’s how brave they are! They hate the Americans
personally, but they love them because they can look after money and
property. So they want the United States to annex Mexico, the beloved
patria; leaving the marvellous green and white and red flag, and the
eagle with the snake in its claws, for the sake of appearances and
_honour_! They’re simply bottled full of honour; of that sort.”
Always the same violence of bitterness, Kate thought to herself. And
she was so weary of it. How, how weary she was of politics, of the very
words “Labour” and “_Socialism_!” and all that sort! It suffocated her.
“Have you heard of the men of Quetzalcoatl?” asked Kate.
“Quetzalcoatl!” exclaimed the manager, giving a little click of the
final ‘l,’ in a peculiar native fashion. “That’s another try-on of the
Bolshevists. They thought socialism needed a god, so they’re going to
fish him out of this lake. He’ll do for another pious catchword in
another revolution.”
The man went away, unable to stand any more.
“Oh dear!” thought Kate. “It really is hard to bear.”
But she wanted to hear more of Quetzalcoatl.
“Did you know,” she said to the man later, showing him the little pot,
“that they find those things in the lake?”
“They’re common enough!” he said. “They used to throw them in, in the
idolatrous days. May still do so, for what I know. Then get them out
again to sell to tourists.”
“They call them ollitas of Quetzalcoatl.”
“That’s a new invention.”
“Why, do you think?”
“They’re trying to start a new thing, that’s all. They’ve got this
society on the lake here, of the Men of Quetzalcoatl, and they go round
singing songs. It’s another dodge for national-socialism, that’s all.”
“What do they do, the Men of Quetzalcoatl?”
“I can’t see they do anything, except talk and get excited over their
own importance.”
“But what’s the idea?”
“I couldn’t say. Don’t suppose they have any. But if they have, they
won’t let on to you. You’re a gringo--or a gringita, at the best.
And this is for pure Mexicans. For los señores, the workmen, and los
caballeros, the peons. Every peon is a caballero nowadays, and every
workman is a señor. So I suppose they’re going to get themselves a
special god, to put the final feather in their caps.”
“Where did it start, the Quetzalcoatl thing?”
“Down in Sayula. They say Don Ramón Carrasco is at the back of it.
Maybe he wants to be the next President--or maybe he’s aiming higher,
and wants to be the first Mexican Pharoah.”
Ah, how tired it made Kate feel; the hopelessness, the ugliness, the
cynicism, the emptiness. She felt she could cry aloud, for the unknown
gods to put the magic back into her life, and to save her from the
dry-rot of the world’s sterility.
She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was the good? She
knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid
spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart
and _interesting_, but so without any mystery, any background. The
younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more
devoid of wonder.