sensibly!”
They started as if the skies had opened, dropped their stones, and
crept very much diminished after the see-sawing bull-calf.
An ancient crone appeared at the window with a plate of chopped-up
young cactus leaves, for three centavos. Kate didn’t like cactus
vegetable, but she bought it. An old man was thrusting a young cockerel
through the window-bars.
“Go,” said Kate, “into the patio.”
And she shut her window on the street, for the invasion had begun.
But it had only changed doors.
“Niña! Niña!” came Juana’s voice. “Says the old man that you buy this
chicken?”
“At how much?” shouted Kate, slipping on a dressing gown.
“At ten reales.”
“Oh, No!” said Kate, flinging open her patio doors, and appearing in
her fresh wrap of pale pink cotton crêpe, embroidered with heavy white
flowers. “Not more than a peso!”
“A peso and ten centavos!” pleaded the old man, balancing the
staring-eyed red cock between his hands. “He is nice and fat, Señorita.
See!”
And he held out the cock for Kate to take it and balance it between her
hands, to try its weight. She motioned to him to hand it to Juana. The
red cock fluttered, and suddenly crowed in the transfer. Juana balanced
him, and made a grimace.
“No, only a peso!” said Kate.
The man gave a sudden gesture of assent, received the peso, and
disappeared like a shadow. Concha lurched up and took the cock, and
instantly she bawled in derision:
“Está muy flaco! He is very thin.”
“Put him in the pen,” said Kate. “We’ll let him grow.”
The patio was liquid with sunshine and shadows. Ezequiel had rolled
up his mattress and gone. Great rose-coloured hibiscus dangled from
the tips of their boughs, there was a faint scent from the half-wild,
creamy roses. The great mango trees were most sumptuous in the morning,
like cliffs, with their hard green fruits dropping like the organs of
some animal from the new bronze leaves, so curiously heavy with life.
“Está muy flaco!” the young Concha was bawling still in derision as she
bore off the young cock to the pen under the banana trees. “He’s very
scraggy.”
Everybody watched intent while the red cock was put in among the few
scraggy fowls. The grey cock, elder, retreated to the far end of the
pen, and eyed the newcomer with an eye of thunder. The red cock, _muy
flaco_, stood diminished in a dry corner. Then suddenly he stretched
himself and crowed shrilly, his red gills lifted like an aggressive
beard. And the grey cock stirred around, preparing the thunders of his
vengeance. The hens took not the slightest notice.
Kate laughed, and went back to her room to dress, in the powerful
newness of the morning. Outside her window the women were passing
quietly, the red water-jar on one shoulder, going to the lake for
water. They always put one arm over their head, and held the jar on the
other shoulder. It had a contorted look, different from the proud way
the women carried water in Sicily.
“Niña! Niña!” Juana was crying outside.
“Wait a minute,” said Kate.
It was another of the hymn-sheets, with a Hymn of Quetzalcoatl.
“See, Niña, the new hymn from last evening.”
Kate took the leaflet and sat upon her bed to read it.
Quetzalcoatl Looks Down on Mexico.
Jesus had gone far up the dark slope, when he looked back.
Quetzalcoatl, my brother! he called. Send me my images,
And the images of my mother, and the images of my saints.
Send me them by the swift way, the way of the sparks,
That I may hold them like memories in my arms when I go to sleep.
And Quetzalcoatl called back: I will do it.
Then he laughed, seeing the sun dart fiercely at him.
He put up his hand, and held back the sun with his shadow.
So he passed the yellow one, who lashed like a dragon in vain.
And having passed the yellow one, he saw the earth beneath.
And he saw Mexico lying like a dark woman with white breast-tips.
Wondering he stepped nearer, and looked at her,
At her trains, at her railways and her automobiles,
At her cities of stone and her huts of straw.
And he said: Surely this looks very curious!
He sat within the hollow of a cloud, and saw the men that worked
in the fields, with foreign overseers.
He saw the men that were blind, reeling with aguardiente.
He saw the women that were not clean.
He saw the hearts of them all, that were black, and heavy, with a
stone of anger at the bottom.
Surely, he said, this is a curious people I have found!
So leaning forward on his cloud, he said to himself:
I will call to them.
_Holá! Holá! Mexicanos! Glance away a moment towards me.
Just turn your eyes this way, Mexicanos!_
They turned not at all, they glanced not one his way.
_Holálá! Mexicanos! Holálá!_
They have gone stone deaf! he said.
So he blew down on them, to blow his breath in their faces.
But in the weight of their stupefaction, none of them knew.
_Holálá! What a pretty people!
All gone stupefied!_
A falling star was running like a white dog over a plain.
He whistled to it loudly, twice, till it fell to his hand.
In his hand it lay and went dark.
It was the Stone of Change.
This is the stone of change! he said.
So he tossed it awhile in his hand, and played with it.
Then suddenly he spied the old lake, and he threw it in.
It fell in.
And two men looked up.
_Holálá!_ he said. _Mexicanos!_
Are there two of you awake?
So he laughed, and one heard him laughing.
Why are you laughing? asked the first man of Quetzalcoatl.
I hear the voice of my First Man ask me why I am laughing?
_Holálá, Mexicanos!_ It is funny!
To see them so glum and so lumpish!
_Hey! First Man of my name! Hark here!_
Here is my sign.
Get a place ready for me.
Send Jesus his images back, Mary and the saints and all.
Wash yourself, and rub oil in your skin.
On the seventh day, let every man wash himself, and put oil on his
skin; let every woman.
Let him have no animal walk on his body, nor through the shadow of
his hair. Say the same to the women.
Tell them they all are fools, that I’m laughing at them.
The first thing I did when I saw them, was to laugh at the sight of
such fools.
Such lumps, such frogs with stones in their bellies.
Tell them they are like frogs with stones in their bellies, can’t
hop!
Tell them they must get the stones out of their bellies,
Get rid of their heaviness,
Their lumpishness,
Or I’ll smother them all.
I’ll shake the earth, and swallow them up, with their cities.
I’ll send fire and ashes upon them, and smother them all.
I’ll turn their blood like sour milk rotten with thunder,
They will bleed rotten blood, in pestilence.
Even their bones shall crumble.
Tell them so, First Man of my Name.
For the sun and the moon are alive, and watching with gleaming eyes.
And the earth is alive, and ready to shake off his fleas.
And the stars are ready with stones to throw in the faces of men.
And the air that blows good breath in the nostrils of people and
beasts
Is ready to blow bad breath upon them, to perish them all.
The stars and the earth and the sun and the moon and the winds
Are about to dance the war dance round you, men!
When I say the word, they will start.
For sun and stars and earth and the very rains are weary
Of tossing and rolling the substance of life to your lips.
They are saying to one another: Let us make an end
Of those ill-smelling tribes of men, these frogs that can’t jump,
These cocks that can’t crow
These pigs than can’t grunt
This flesh that smells
These words that are all flat
These money vermin.
These white men, and red men, and yellow men, and brown men, and
black men
That are neither white, nor red, nor yellow, nor brown, nor black
But everyone of them dirtyish.
Let us have a spring cleaning in the world.
For men upon the body of the earth are like lice,
Devouring the earth into sores.
This is what stars and sun and earth and moon and winds and rain
Are discussing with one another; they are making ready to start.
So tell the men I am coming to,
To make themselves clean, inside and out.
To roll the grave-stone off their souls, from the cave of their
bellies,
To prepare to be men.
Or else prepare for the other things.
Kate read this long leaflet again, and again, and a swift darkness
like a whirlwind seemed to envelop the morning. She drank her coffee
on the verandah, and the heavy papayas in their grouping seemed to be
oozing like great drops from the invisible spouting of the fountain of
non-human life. She seemed to see the great sprouting and urging of the
cosmos, moving into weird life. And men only like green-fly clustering
on the tender tips, an aberration there. So monstrous the rolling and
unfolding of the life of the cosmos, as if even iron could grow like
lichen deep in the earth, and cease growing, and prepare to perish.
Iron and stone render up their life, when the hour comes. And men are
less than the green-fly sucking the stems of the bush, so long as they
live by business and bread alone. Parasites on the face of the earth.
She strayed to the shore. The lake was blue in the morning light,
the opposite mountains pale and dry and ribbed like mountains in the
desert. Only at their feet, next the lake, the dark strip of trees and
white specks of villages.
Near her against the light five cows stood with their noses to the
water drinking. Women were kneeling on the stones, filling red jars. On
forked sticks stuck up on the foreshore, frail fishing nets were hung
out, drying, and on the nets a small bird sat facing the sun; he was
red as a drop of new blood, from the arteries of the air.
From the straw huts under the trees, her urchin of the mud-chick was
scuttling towards her, clutching something in his fist. He opened his
hand to her, and on the palm lay three of the tiny cooking-pots, the
ollitas which the natives had thrown into the water long ago, to the
gods.
“Muy chiquitas!” he said, in his brisk way, a little, fighting
tradesman; “do you buy them?”
“I have no money. To-morrow!” said Kate.
“To-morrow!” he said, like a pistol shot.
“To-morrow.”
He had forgiven her, but she had not forgiven him.
Somebody in the fresh Sunday morning was singing rather beautifully,
letting the sound, as it were, produce itself.
A boy was prowling with a sling, prowling like a cat, to get the little
birds. The red bird like a drop of new blood twittered upon the almost
invisible fish-nets, then in a flash was gone. The boy prowled under
the delicate green of the willow trees, stumbling over the great roots
in the sand.
Along the edge of the water flew four dark birds, their necks pushed
out, skimming silent near the silent surface of the lake, in a jagged
level rush.
Kate knew these mornings by the lake. They hypnotised her almost like
death. Scarlet birds like drops of blood, in very green willow trees.
The aquador trotting to her house with a pole over his shoulder, and
two heavy square gasoline cans, one at each end of the pole, filled
with hot water. He had been to the hot spring for her daily supply. Now
barefoot, with one bare leg, the young man trotted softly beneath the
load, his dark, handsome face sunk beneath the shadows of the big hat,
as he trotted in a silence, mindlessness that was like death.
Dark heads out on the water in little groups, like black water-fowl
bobbing. Were they birds? Were they heads? Was this human life, or
something intermediate, that lifted its orange, wet, glistening
shoulders a little out of the lake, beneath the dark head?
She knew so well what the day would be. Slowly the sun thickening and
intensifying in the air overhead. And slowly the electricity clotting
invisibly as afternoon approached. The beach in the blind heat, strewn
with refuse, smelling of refuse and the urine of creatures.
Everything going vague in the immense sunshine, as the air invisibly
thickened, and Kate could feel the electricity pressing like hot iron
on the back of her head. It stupefied her like morphine. Meanwhile
the clouds rose like white trees from behind the mountains, as the
afternoon swooned in silence, rose and spread black branches, quickly,
in the sky, from which the lightning stabbed like birds.
And in the midst of the siesta stupor, the sudden round bolts of
thunder, and the crash and the chill of rain.
Tea-time, and evening coming. The last sailing-boats making to depart,
waiting for the wind. The wind was from the west, the boats going east
and south had gone, their sails were lapsing far away on the lake.
But the boats towards the west were waiting, waiting, while the water
rattled under their black, flat keels.
The big boat from Tlapaltepec, bringing many people from the west,
waited on into the night. She was anchored a few yards out, and in the
early night her passengers came down the dark beach, weary of the day,
to go on board. They clustered in a group at the edge of the flapping
water.
The big, wide, flat-bottomed canoe, with her wooden awning and her one
straight mast lay black, a few yards out, in the dark night. A lamp was
burning under the wooden roof; one looked in, from the shore. And this
was home for the passengers.
A short man with trousers rolled up came to carry the people on board.
The men stood with their backs to him, legs apart. He suddenly dived at
them, ducked his head between the fork of their legs, and rose, with a
man on his shoulders. So he waded out through the water to the black
boat, and heaved his living load on board.
For a woman, he crouched down before her, and she sat on one of his
shoulders. He clasped her legs with his right arm, she clasped his dark
head. So he carried her to the ship, as if she were nothing.
Soon the boat was full of people. They sat on the mats of the floor,
with their backs to the sides of the vessel, baskets hanging from the
pent roof, swaying as the vessel swayed. Men spread their serapes and
curled up to sleep. The light of the lantern lit them up, as they sat
and lay, and slept, or talked in murmurs.
A little woman came up out of the darkness; then suddenly ran back
again. She had forgotten something. But the vessel would not sail
without her, for the wind would not change yet.
The tall mast stood high, the great sail lay in folds along the
roof, ready. Under the roof, the lantern swayed, the people slept
and stretched. Probably they would not sail till midnight. Then down
the lake to Tlapaltepec, with its reeds at the end of the lake, and
its dead, dead plaza, its dead dry houses of black adobe, its ruined
streets, its strange, buried silence, like Pompeii.
Kate knew it. So strange and deathlike, it frightened her, and
mystified her.
But to-day! To-day she would not loiter by the shore all morning. She
must go to Jamiltepec in a motor-boat, to see Ramón. To talk to him
even about marrying Cipriano.
Ah, how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to this death?
Take the weight of this darkness on her breast, the heaviness of this
strange gloom. Die before dying, and pass away whilst still beneath the
sun?
Ah no! Better to escape to the white men’s lands.
But she went to arrange with Alonso for the motor-boat.
CHAP: XVII. FOURTH HYMN AND THE BISHOP.
The President of the Republic, as a new broom, had been sweeping
perhaps a little too clean for the common liking, so there was a
“rebellion.” It was not a very large one. But it meant, of course,
banditry, robbery, and cowed villages.
Ramón was determined to keep free from the taint of politics. But
already the Church, and with the Church, the Knights of Cortes and a
certain “black” faction, was preparing against him. The priests began
to denounce him from the pulpits--but not very loudly--as an ambitious
Anti-Christ. With Cipriano beside him, however, and with Cipriano the
army of the west, he had not much to fear.
But it was possible Cipriano would have to march away in defence of the
government.
“Above all things,” said Ramón, “I don’t want to acquire a political
smell. I don’t want to be pushed in the direction of any party. Unless
I can stand uncontaminated, I had better abandon everything. But the
Church will push me over to the socialists--and the socialists will
betray me on the first opportunity. It is not myself. It is the new
spirit. The surest way to kill it--and it can be killed, like any other
living thing--is to get it connected with any political party.”
“Why don’t you see the Bishop?” said Cipriano. “I will see him too. Am
I to be chief of the division in the west, for nothing?”
“Yes,” said Ramón slowly. “I will see Jimenez. I have thought of it.
Yes, I intend to use every means in my power.--Montes will stand
for us, because he hates the Church and hates any hint of dictation
from outside. He sees the possibility of a ‘national’ church. Though
myself, I don’t care about national churches. Only one has to speak the
language of one’s own people. You know the priests are forbidding the
people to read the Hymns?”
“What does that matter?” said Cipriano. “These people are nothing if
not perverse, nowadays. They will read them all the more.”
“Maybe!--I shall take no notice. I’ll let my new legend, as they call
it, grow while the earth is moist. But we have to keep our eye very
close on all the little bunches of ‘interests’.”
“Ramón!” said Cipriano. “If you can turn Mexico entirely into a
Quetzalcoatl country, what then?”
“I shall be First Man of Quetzalcoatl--I know no more.”
“You won’t trouble about the rest of the world?”
Ramón smiled. Already he saw in Cipriano’s eye the gleam of a Holy War.
“I would like,” he said smiling, “to be one of the Initiates of the
Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country its own Saviour, Cipriano:
or every people its own Saviour. And the First Men of every people,
forming a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have aristocrats,
that we know. But natural ones, not artificial. And in some way
the world must be organically united: the world of man. But in the
concrete, not in the abstract. Leagues and Covenants and International
Programmes. Ah! Cipriano! it’s like an international pestilence. The
leaves of one great tree can’t hang on the boughs of another great
tree. The races of the earth are like trees, in the end they neither
mix nor mingle. They stand out of each other’s way, like trees. Or
else they crowd on one another, and their roots grapple, and it is the
fight to the death.--Only from the flowers there is commingling. And
the flowers of every race are the natural aristocrats of that race. And
the spirit of the world can fly from flower to flower, like a humming
bird, and slowly fertilise the great trees in their blossoms. Only the
Natural Aristocrats can rise above their nation; and even then they
do not rise beyond their race. Only the Natural Aristocrats of the
World can be international, or cosmopolitan, or cosmic. It has always
been so. The peoples are no more capable of it, than the leaves of
the mango tree are capable of attaching themselves to the pine.--So
if I want Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because
I want them to speak with the tongues of their own blood. I wish the
Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, and
the tree Igdrasil. And I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly,
that in the mistletoe is their mystery, and that they themselves are
the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should
come back to the Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and
Mithras again to Persia, and Brahma unbroken to India, and the oldest
of dragons to China. Then I, Cipriano, I, First Man of Quetzalcoatl,
with you, First Man of Huitzilopochtli, and perhaps your wife, First
Woman of Itzpapalotl, could we not meet, with sure souls, the other
great aristocrats of the world, the First Man of Wotan and the First
Woman of Freya, First Lord of Hermes, and the Lady of Astarte, the
Best-Born of Brahma, and the Son of the Greatest Dragon? I tell you,
Cipriano, then the earth might rejoice, when the First Lords of the
West met the First Lords of South and East, in the Valley of the Soul.
Ah, the earth has Valleys of the Soul, that are not cities of commerce
and industry. And the mystery is one mystery, but men must see it
differently. The hibiscus and the thistle and the gentian all flower
on the Tree of Life, but in the world they are far apart; and must be.
And I am hibiscus and you are a yucca flower, and your Caterina is a
wild daffodil, and my Carlota is a white pansy. Only four of us, yet
we make a curious bunch. So it is. The men and women of the earth are
not manufactured goods, to be interchangeable. But the Tree of Life is
one tree, as we know when our souls open in the last blossoming. We
can’t change ourselves, and we don’t want to. But when our souls open
out in the final blossoming, then as blossoms we share one mystery with
all blossoms, beyond the knowledge of any leaves and stems and roots:
something transcendent.
“But it doesn’t matter. At the present time I have to fight my way in
Mexico, and you have to fight yours. So let us go and do it.”
He went away to his workshops and his men who were labouring under
his directions, while Cipriano sat down to his correspondence, and
his military planning. They were both interrupted by the thudding of
a motor-boat entering the little bay. It was Kate, escorted by the
black-scarved Juana.
Ramón, in his white clothes with the blue-and-black figured sash, and
the big hat with the turquoise-inlaid Eye of Quetzalcoatl, went down to
meet her. She was in white, too, with a green hat and the shawl of pale
yellow silk.
“I was so glad to come again,” she said, holding out her hand to him.
“Jamiltepec has become a sort of Mecca to me, my inside yearns for it.”
“Then why don’t you come oftener? I wish you would come.”
“I am afraid of intruding.”
“No! You could help if you would.”
“Oh!” she said. “I am so frightened, and so sceptical of big
undertakings. I think it is because, at the very bottom of me, I
dislike the masses of people--anywhere. I’m afraid I rather despise
people; I don’t want them to touch me, and I don’t want to touch
them.--So how could I pretend to join any--any--any sort of Salvation
Army?--which is a horrid way of putting it.”
Don Ramón laughed.
“I do myself,” he said. “I detest and despise masses of people. But
these are my own people.”
“I, ever since I was a child, since I can remember.--They say of me,
when I was a little girl of four, and my parents were having a big
dinner party, they had the nurse bring me in to say good-night to all
the people they had there dressed up and eating and drinking. And I
suppose they all said nice things to me, as they do. I only answered:
_You are all monkeys!_ It was a great success!--But I felt it even as a
child, and I feel it now. People are all monkeys to me, performing in
different ways.”
“Even the people nearest you?”
Kate hesitated. Then she confessed, rather unwillingly:
“Yes! I’m afraid so. Both my husbands--even Joachim--they seemed,
somehow, so _obstinate_ in their little stupidities--rather like
monkeys. I felt a terrible revulsion from Joachim when he was dead. I
thought: What peaked monkey is that, that I have been losing my blood
about.--Do you think it’s rather awful?”
“I do! But then I think we _all_ feel like that, at moments. Or we
would if we dared. It’s only one of our moments.”
“Sometimes,” said she, “I think that is my _permanent_ feeling towards
people. I like the world, the sky and the earth and the greater mystery
beyond. But people--yes, they are all monkeys to me.”
He could see that, at the bottom of her soul, it was true.
“Puras monas!” he said to himself in Spanish. “Y lo que hacen, puras
monerias.”
“Pure monkeys! And the things they do, sheer monkeydom!” Then he added:
“Yet you have children!”
“Yes! Yes!” she said, struggling with herself. “My first husband’s
children.”
“And they?--_monas y no mas?_”
“No!” she said, frowning and looking angry with herself. “Only partly.”
“It is bad,” he said, shaking his head. “But then!” he added.--“What
are my own children to me, but little monkeys? And their mother--and
their mother--Ah, no! Señora Caterina! It is no good. One must be
able to disentangle oneself from persons, from people. If I go to a
rose-bush, to be intimate with it, it is a nasty thing that hurts me.
One must disentangle oneself from persons and personalities, and see
people as one sees the trees in the landscape. People in some way
_dominate_ you. In some way, humanity dominates your consciousness. So
you must hate people and humanity, and you want to escape. But there is
only one way of escape: to turn beyond them, to the greater life.”