absolutely alone in a cottage, doing all the work myself, and knowing
nobody at all, just living, and _feeling_ the greater thing all the
time; then I was free, I was happy.”
“But he?” said Ramón. “Was he free and happy?”
“He was _really_. But that’s where the monkeyishness comes in. He
wouldn’t let himself be content. He insisted on having _people_ and a
_cause_, just to torture himself with.”
“Then why didn’t you live in your cottage _quite_ alone, and without
him?” he said. “Why do you travel, and see people?”
She was silent, very angry. She knew she could not live quite alone.
The vacuity crushed her. She needed a man there, to stop the gap, and
to keep her balanced. But even when she had him, in her heart of hearts
she despised him, as she despised the dog and the cat. Between herself
and humanity there was the bond of subtle, helpless antagonism.
She was naturally quite free-handed and she left people their liberty.
Servants would get attached to her, and casual people all liked and
admired her. She had a strong life-flow of her own, and a certain
assertive _joie de vivre_.
But underneath it all was the unconquerable dislike, almost _disgust_
of people. More than hate, it was disgust. Whoever it was, wherever
it was, however it was, after a little while this disgust overcame
her. Her mother, her father, her sisters, her first husband, even
her children whom she loved, and Joachim, for whom she had felt such
passionate love, even these, being near her, filled her with a certain
disgust and repulsion after a little while, and she longed to fling
them down the great and final oubliette.
But there is no great and final oubliette: or at least, it is never
final, until one has flung _oneself_ down.
So it was with Kate. Till she flung herself down the last dark
oubliette of death, she would never escape from her deep, her
bottomless disgust with human beings. Brief contacts were all right,
thrilling even. But close contacts, or long contacts, were short and
long revulsions of violent disgust.
She and Ramón had sat down on a bench under the white-flowering
oleander of the garden downstairs. His face was impassive and still. In
the stillness, with a certain pain and nausea, he realised the state
she was in, and realised that his own state, as regards _personal_
people, was the same. Mere _personal_ contact, mere human contact
filled him, too, with disgust. Carlota disgusted him. Kate herself
disgusted him. Sometimes, Cipriano disgusted him.
But this was because, or when, he met them on a merely human, personal
plane. To do so was disaster; it filled him with disgust of them and
loathing of himself.
He had to meet them on another plane, where the contact was different;
intangible, remote, and without _intimacy_. His soul was concerned
elsewhere. So that the quick of him need not be bound to anybody. The
quick of a man must turn to God alone: in some way or other.
With Cipriano he was most sure. Cipriano and he, even when they
embraced each other with passion, when they met after an absence,
embraced in the recognition of each other’s eternal and abiding
loneliness; like the Morning Star.
But women would not have this. They wanted intimacy--and intimacy
means disgust. Carlota wanted to be eternally and closely identified
with Ramón, consequently she hated him and hated everything which she
thought drew him away from this eternal close identification with
herself. It was just a horror, and he knew it.
Men and women should know that they cannot, absolutely, meet on earth.
In the closest kiss, the dearest touch, there is the small gulf
which is none the less complete because it is so narrow, so _nearly_
non-existent. They must bow and submit in reverence, to the gulf. Even
though I eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, Christ is Christ
and I am I, and the gulf is impassable. Though a woman be dearer to a
man than his own life, yet he is he and she is she, and the gulf can
never close up. Any attempt to close it is a violation, and the crime
against the Holy Ghost.
That which we get from the beyond, we get it alone. The final me I
am, comes from the farthest off, from the Morning Star. The rest is
assembled. All that of me which is assembled from the mighty cosmos can
meet and touch all that is assembled in the beloved. But this is never
the quick. Never can be.
If we would meet in the quick, we must give up the assembled self,
the daily I, and putting off ourselves one after the other, meet
unconscious in the Morning Star. Body, soul and spirit can be
transfigured into the Morning Star. But without transfiguration we
shall never get there. We shall gnash at the leash.
Ramón knew what it was to gnash at his leashes. He had gnashed himself
almost to pieces, before he had found the way to pass out in himself,
in the quick of himself, to the Quick of all being and existence, which
he called the Morning Star, since men must give all things names. To
pass in the quick of himself, with transfiguration, to the Morning
Star, and there, there alone meet his fellow man.
He knew what it was to fail even now, and to keep on failing. With
Carlota he failed absolutely. She claimed him and he restrained himself
in resistance. Even his very naked breast, when Carlota was there, was
self-conscious and assertively naked. But then that was because she
claimed it as her property.
When men meet at the quick of all things, they are neither naked nor
clothed; in the transfiguration they are just complete, they are
not seen in part. The final perfect strength has also the power of
innocence.
Sitting on the seat beside Kate, Ramón was sad with the sense of
heaviness and inadequacy. His third Hymn was angry and bitter. Carlota
almost embittered his soul. In Mexico, turbulent fellows had caught at
his idea and burlesqued it. They had invaded one of the churches of
the city, thrown out the sacred images, and hung in their place the
grotesque papier-mâché Judas figures which the Mexicans explode at
Easter time. This of course made a scandal. And Cipriano, whenever he
was away on his own for some time, slipped back into the inevitable
Mexican General, fascinated by the opportunity for furthering his own
personal ambition and imposing his own personal will. Then came Kate,
with this centre of sheer repudiation deep in the middle of her, the
will to explode the world.
He felt his spirits sinking again, his limbs going like lead. There is
only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that
is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, and be alone there.
Then afterwards, in the Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy
the woman who has come the long way with him.
But to find the way, far, far along, to the bright Quick of all things,
this is difficult, and required all a man’s strength and courage, for
himself. If he breaks a trail alone, it is terrible. But if every hand
pulls at him, to stay him in the human places; if the hands of love
drag at his entrails and the hands of hate seize him by the hair, it
becomes almost impossible.
This was how Ramón felt at the moment:--I am attempting the impossible.
I had better either go and take my pleasure of life while it lasts,
hopeless of the pleasure which is beyond all pleasures. Or else I had
better go into the desert and take my way all alone, to the Star where
at last I have my wholeness, holiness. The way of the anchorites and
the men who went into the wilderness to pray. For surely my soul is
craving for her consummation, and I am weary of the thing men call
life. Living, I want to depart to where _I am_.
Yet, he said to himself, the woman that was with me in the Morning
Star, how glad I should be of her! And the man that was with me there,
what a delight his presence would be! Surely the Morning Star is a
meeting-ground for us, for the joy!
Sitting side by side on the bench, Ramón and Kate forgot one another,
she thinking back on the past, with the long disgust of it all, he
thinking on into his future, and trying to revive his heavy spirits.
In the silence, Cipriano came out on to the balcony above, looking
around. He almost started as he saw the two figures seated on the bench
below, under the white oleander tree, miles apart, worlds apart, in
their silence.
Ramón heard the step, and glanced up.
“We are coming up!” he called, rising and looking round at Kate. “Shall
we go upstairs? Will you drink something cool, tepache, or squeezed
oranges? There is no ice.”
“I would like orange juice and water,” she said.
He called to his servant and gave the order.
Cipriano was in the white pantaloons and blouse, like Ramón. But his
sash was scarlet, with black curves, something like the markings on a
snake.
“I heard you come. I thought perhaps you had gone away again,” he said,
looking at her with a certain black reproachfulness: an odd, hesitating
wistfulness of the barbarian, who feels himself at a loss. Then also a
certain resentment.
“Not yet,” she said.
Ramón laughed, and flung himself into a chair.
“The Señora Caterina thinks we are all monkeys, but perhaps this
particular monkey-show is the most amusing after all,” he said. “So she
will see a little more of it.”
Cipriano, a real Indian, was offended in his pride, and the little
black _imperial_ on his chin seemed to become portentous.
“That’s _rather_ an unfair way of putting it!” laughed Kate.
The black eyes of Cipriano glanced at her in hostility. He thought she
was laughing at him. And so, at the depths of her female soul, she was.
She was jeering at him inwardly. Which no man can stand, least of all a
dark-skinned man.
“No!” she said. “There’s something else besides that.”
“Ah!” said Ramón. “Take care! A little mercy is a dangerous thing.”
“No! Not mercy!” she said, flushing. “Why are you being horrid to me?”
“Monkeys always end by being horrid to the spectators,” said Ramón.
She looked up at him, and caught the flash of anger in his eyes.
“I came,” she said, “to hear about the Mexican pantheon. I was even
given to understand I might be admitted.”
“Ah, that is good!” laughed Ramón. “A rare specimen of the female
monkey has been added to the Ramón menagerie! I am sure you would be a
good draw. There have been some pretty goddesses, I assure you, in the
Aztec pantheon.”
“How horrid!” she said.
“Come! Come!” he cried. “Let us keep to the bedrock of things, Señora
mia. We are all monkeys. Monos somos.--Ihr seid alle Affen! Out of
the mouths of babes and sucklings was it spoken, as Carlota said. You
see that little male monkey, Cipriano. He had the monkey’s idea of
marrying you. Say the word. Marriage is a monkey’s game. Say the word.
He will let you go when you’ve had enough; and he’s had enough. He is
a _general_ and a very great _jefe_. He can make you monkey-queen of
monkey-Mexico, if it please you. And what should monkeys do, but amuse
themselves! _Vamos! Embobemonos!_ Shall I be priest? _Vamos! Vamos!_”
He rose with sudden volcanic violence, and rushed away.
Cipriano looked at Kate in wonder. She had gone pale.
“What have you been saying to him?” he asked.
“Nothing!” she said, rising. “I’d better go now.”
Juana was collected; and Alonso and Kate set off back down the lake.
She sat with a certain obstinate offendedness under the awning of the
boat. The sun was terrifically hot, and the water blinded her. She put
on black spectacles, in which she looked a monster.
“Mucho calor, Niña! Mucho calor!” Juana was repeating behind her. The
criada had evidently imbibed tepache.
On the pale-brown water little tufts of water-hyacinth were vaguely
sailing, holding up the hand of a leaf for a sail. Everywhere the lake
was dotted with these sailing tufts. The heavy rains had washed in
flood down the Lerma river into the lake, washing the acres of _Lirio_
loose from the marshy end of the waters, thirty miles away, and slowly
setting them travelling over all the expanse of the inland sea, till
the shores began to be piled, and the far-off Santiago river, which
flowed out of the lake, was choked.
That day Ramón wrote his Fourth Hymn.
What Quetzalcoatl Saw in Mexico.
_Who are these strange faces in Mexico?
Palefaces, yellowfaces, blackfaces? These are no Mexicans!
Where do they come from, and why?_
Lord of the Two Ways, these are the foreigners.
They come out of nowhere.
Sometimes they come to tell us things,
Mostly they are the greedy ones.
_What then do they want?_
They want gold, they want silver from the mountains.
And oil, much oil from the coast.
They take sugar from the tall tubes of the cane,
Wheat from the high lands, and maize;
Coffee from the bushes in the hot lands, even the juicy rubber.
They put up tall chimneys that smoke,
And in the biggest houses they keep their machines, that talk
And work iron elbows up and down,
And hold myriad threads from their claws!
Wonderful are the machines of the greedy ones!
_And you, Mexicans and peons, what do you do?_
We work with their machines, we work in their fields,
They give us pesos made of Mexican silver.
They are the clever ones.
_Do you love them then?_
We love them not, and never.
Their faces are ugly, yet they make wonderful things.
And their wills are like their machines of iron.
What can we do?
_I see dark things rushing across the country._
Yea, Lord! Even trains and camions and automobiles.
Trains and camions, automobiles and aeroplanes.
How nice! says the peon, to go rushing in a train!
How nice, to get in the camion, and for twenty centavos, to be gone!
How nice, in the great cities, where all things rush, and huge
lights flare bright, to wander and do nothing!
How nice to sit in the cine, where the picture of all the world
dances before the eyes!
How nice if we could take all these things away from the foreigners,
and possess them!
Take back our lands and silver and oil, take the trains and the
factories and the automobiles
And play with them all the time!
How nice!
Oh, fools! Mexicans and peons!
Who are you, to be masters of machines which you cannot make?
Which you can only break!
Those that can make are masters of these machines.
Not you, poor boobs.
How have these palefaces, yellowfaces crossed the waters of the
world?
Oh, fools! Mexicans and peons, with muddy hearts!
Did they do it by squatting on their hams?
You do nothing but squat on your hams, and stare with vacant eyes,
and drink fire-waters, and quarrel and stab.
And then run like surly dogs at the bidding of paleface masters.
Oh, dogs and fools, Mexicans and peons!
Watery-hearted, with wishy-washy knees.
Sulky in spirit, and inert.
What are you good for, but to be slaves, and rot away?
You are not worth a god!
Lo! the universe tangles its great dragons,
The dragons in the cosmos are stirring with anger again.
The dragon of the disappointed dead, that sleeps in the snow-white
north
Is lashing his tail in his sleep; the winds howl, the cold rocks
round.
The spirits of the cold dead whistle in the ears of the world.
Prepare for doom.
For I tell you, there are no dead dead, not even your dead.
There are dead that sleep in the waves of the Morning Star, with
freshening limbs.
There are dead that weep in bitter rains.
There are dead that cluster in the frozen north, shuddering and
chattering among the ice
And howling with hate.
There are dead that creep through the burning bowels of the earth,
Stirring the fires to acid of bitterness.
There are dead that sit under the trees, watching with ash-grey eyes
for their victims.
There are dead that attack the sun like swarms of black flies, to
suck his life.
There are dead that stand upon you, when you go in to your women,
And they dart to her womb, they fight for the chance to be born,
they struggle at the gate you have opened,
They gnash when it closes, and hate the one that got in, to be born
again,
Child of the living dead, the dead that live and are not refreshed.
I tell you, sorrow upon you; you shall all die.
And being dead, you shall not be refreshed.
There are no dead dead.
Being dead, you shall rove like dogs with broken haunches
Seeking the offal and garbage of life, in the invisible lanes of the
air.
The dead that have mastered fire live on, salamanders, in fire.
The dead of the water-lords rock and glimmer in the seas.
The dead of the steel machines go up in motion, _away_!
The dead of electric masters are electricity itself.
But the dead of those who have mastered nothing, nothing at all,
Crawl like masterless dogs in the back streets of the air,
Creeping for the garbage of life, and biting with venomous mouths.
Those that have mastered the forces of the world, die into the
forces, they have homes in death.
But you! what have you mastered, among the dragon hosts of the
cosmos?
There are dragons of sun and ice, dragons of the moon and the earth,
dragons of salty waters, dragons of thunder;
There is the spangled dragon of the stars at large.
And far at the centre, with one unblinking eye, the dragon of the
Morning Star.
Conquer! says the Morning Star. Pass the dragons, and pass on to me.
For I am sweet, I am the last and the best, the pool of new life.
But lo! you inert ones, I will set the dragons upon you.
They shall crunch your bones.
And even then they shall spit you out, as broken-haunched dogs,
You shall have nowhere to die into.
Lo! in the back streets of the air, dead ones are crawling like
curs!
Lo! I release the dragons! The great white one of the north,
Him of the disappointed dead, he is lashing and turning round.
He is breathing cold corruption upon you, you shall bleed in your
chests.
I am going to speak to the dragon of the inner fires,
He who housels the dead of the guns,
To withdraw his warmth from your feet, so your feet turn cold with
death.
I am about to tell the dragon of the waters to turn round on you
And spue out corrosion into your streams, on your rains.
And I wait for the final day, when the dragon of thunder, waking
under the spider-web nets
Which you’ve thrown upon him, shall suddenly shake with rage,
And dart his electric needles into your bones, and curdle your blood
like milk with electric venom.
Wait! Only wait! Little by little it all shall come upon you.
Ramón put on his black city clothes, and a black hat, and went himself
with this hymn to the printer in the city. The sign of Quetzalcoatl he
had printed in black and red, and the sign of the dragon, at the end,
in green and black and red. And the sheet was folded.
Six soldiers of Cipriano’s command took the bundles of hymns by train;
one to the capital, one to Puebla and Jalapa, one to Tampico and
Monterrey, one to Torreon and Chihuahua, one to Sinaloa and Sonora,
and one to the mines in Pachucha, Guanajuato, and the central region.
Each soldier took only a hundred sheets. But in every town there was a
recognised Reader of the Hymns; or two, or three, or four, or even ten
Readers in one city. And readers who went round to the villages.
Because there was a strange, submerged desire in the people for things
beyond the world. They were weary of events, and weary of news and the
newspapers, weary even of the things that are taught in education.
Weary is the spirit of man with man’s importunity. Of all things
human, and humanly invented, we have had enough, they seemed to say.
And though they took not much active notice of the Hymns, they craved
for them, as men crave for alcohol, as a relief from the weariness and
ennui of mankind’s man-made world.
Everywhere, in all the towns and villages, at night-time the little
flames would be seen flickering, a cluster of people was seen,
sometimes standing, sometimes sitting upon the ground, listening to the
slow voice of some Reader.
More rarely, in some small, out-of-the-way plaza, would sound the
sinister thud of the tom-tom, beating out of the hollow of the ages.
And there would be two men with white sarapes with the blue edges. Then
the singing of the Songs of Quetzalcoatl, and perhaps the slow round
dance, with the ancient rhythm of the feet on the earth, belonging to
aboriginal America.
For the old dances of the Aztecs and the Zapotecs, of all the submerged
Indian races, are based upon the old, sinking bird-step of the Red
Indians of the north. It is in the blood of the people; they cannot
quite forget it. It comes back to them, with a sense of fear, and joy,
and relief.
Of themselves, they dared not revive the old motion, nor stir the blood
in the old way. The spell of the past is too terrible. But in the Songs
and the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl, there spoke a new voice, the voice of a
master and authority. And though they were slow to trust, the slowest
and the most untrusting, they seized upon the new-old thrill, with a
certain fear, and joy, and relief.
The Men of Quetzalcoatl avoided the great market-places and centres
of activity. They took their stand in the little, side places. On the
rim of a fountain a man in a dark blanket with blue borders, or with
the sign of Quetzalcoatl in his hat, would sit down and begin to read
aloud. It was enough. The people lingered to listen. He would read to
the end, then say: “I have finished this reading of the Fourth Hymn of
Quetzalcoatl. Now I will begin again.”
In this way, by a sort of far-away note in the voice, and by the
slow monotony of repetition, the thing would drift darkly into the
consciousness of the listeners.
Already in the beginning there had been the scandal of the Judases.
Holy Week, in Mexico City, is, to all appearance, the great week of
Judas. Everywhere you see men carrying home in triumph the great,
gaudily-varnished dolls of papier-mâché. They are all men-dolls, more
or less lifelike grotesque. Most frequently it is a fat Mexican-Spanish
hacendado, landowner and big farmer, who is represented with his
tight trousers, sticking-out belly, and huge upturned moustaches.
The old-fashioned _patrón_. Some of the figures are like Punch, some
are like harlequin. But they all have rosy faces and the white man’s
get-up. You never see the dark-faced image of a native-blooded Mexican;
always a stiff, haughty grotesque of a white man.
And all these are Judases. Judas is the fun of the fair, the victim,
the big man of Holy Week, just as the Skeleton, and the skeleton on
horseback, is the idol of the first week in November, the days of the
dead and of all the saints.
On Easter Saturday the Judases are hung from the balconies, the string
is lighted, and at length, _bang_! Shrieks of joy, Judas has exploded
into nothingness, from a big cracker in the middle of him!--All the
town is popping with Judases.
There was the scandal of the Holy Images thrown out of one of the
churches in Mexico City, and these Judases put in their place. The
Church began to move.
But then the Church in Mexico has to move gingerly; it is not popular,
and its claws are cut. The priest may not ring the church bells for
more than three minutes. Neither priests nor monks may wear any habit
in the street, beyond the hideous black vest and white collar of the
Protestant clergy. So that the priest shows himself as little as
possible in the street, and practically never in the chief streets and
the chief plazas.
Nevertheless, he still has influence. Processions in the streets
are forbidden, but not sermons from the pulpit, nor advice from the
confessional. Montes, the President, had no love for the church, and
was meditating the expulsion of all foreign priests. The Archbishop
himself was an Italian. But he was also a fighter.
He gave orders to all the priests, to forbid the people from listening
to anything concerned with Quetzalcoatl, to destroy any hymn-sheet that
might fall into their hands, and to prevent as far as possible the
Hymns from being read, and the Songs from being sung, in the parishes.
But Montes had given orders to the police and the military to afford
such protection to the Men of Quetzalcoatl as was accorded to any other
law-abiding citizen.
Mexico is not Mexico for nothing, however, and already blood had been
shed on both sides. This Ramón particularly wanted to avoid, as he felt
that violent death was not so easily wiped out of the air and out of
the souls of men, as spilt blood was washed off the pavements.