himself bled, bled, bled by the subtle, hidden malevolence of the
Mexicans, and the ugly negation of the greedy, mechanical foreigners,
birds of prey forever alighting in the cosmopolitan capital.
While Ramón was away, Kate stayed with Teresa. The two women had this
in common, that they felt it was better to stand faithfully behind a
really brave man, than to push forward into the ranks of cheap and
obtrusive women. And this united them. A certain deep, ultimate
faithfulness in each woman, to her own man who needed her fidelity,
kept Kate and Teresa kindred to one another.
The rainy season had almost passed, though throughout September and
even in October occasional heavy downpours fell. But the wonderful
Mexican autumn, like a strange, inverted spring, was upon the land. The
waste places bloomed with pink and white cosmos, the strange wild trees
flowered in a ghostly way, forests of small sunflowers shone in the
sun, the sky was a pure, pure blue, the floods of sunshine lay tempered
on the land, that in part was flooded with water, from the heavy rains.
The lake was very full, strange and uneasy, and it had washed up a bank
of the wicked water-hyacinths along all its shores. The wild-fowl were
coming from the north, clouds of wild ducks like dust in the high air,
sprinkling the water like weeds. Many, many wild fowl, grebe, cranes,
and white gulls of the inland seas, so that the northern mystery seemed
to have blown so far south. There was a smell of water in the land, and
a sense of soothing. For Kate firmly believed that part of the horror
of the Mexican people came from the unsoothed dryness of the land
and the untempered crudity of the flat-edged sunshine. If only there
could be a softening of water in the air, and a haze above trees, the
unspoken and unspeakable malevolence would die out of the human hearts.
Kate rode out often with Teresa to see the fields. The sugar-cane in
the inner valley was vivid green, and rising tall, tall. The peons
were beginning to cut it with their sword-like machetes, filling the
bullock-wagons, to haul the cane to the factory in Sayula. On the dry
hill-slopes the spikey tequila plant--a sort of maguey--flourished in
its iron wickedness. Low wild cactuses put forth rose-like blossoms,
wonderful and beautiful for such sinister plants. The beans were
gathered from the bean-fields, some gourds and squashes still sprawled
their uncanny weight across the land. Red chiles hung on withering
plants, red tomatoes sank to the earth. Some maize still reared its
flags, there was still young corn to eat on the cob. The banana crop
was small, the children came in with the little wild yellow tejocote
apples, for making preserves. Teresa was making preserves, even with
the late figs and peaches. On the trees, the ponderous mango trees,
some fruit was again orange-yellow and ripe, but the most still hung in
strings, heavy and greenish and dropping like the testes of bulls.
It was autumn in Mexico, with wild duck on the waters, and hunters with
guns, and small wild doves in the trees. Autumn in Mexico, and the
coming of the dry season, with the sky going higher and higher, pure
pale blue, the sunset arriving with a strange flare of crystal yellow
light. With the coffee berries turning red on the struggling bushes
under the trees, and bougainvillea in the strong light glowing with a
glow of magenta colour so deep you could plunge your arms deep in it.
With a few hummingbirds in the sunshine, and the fish in the waters
gone wild, and the flies, that steamed black in the first rains, now
passing away again.
Teresa attended to everything, and Kate helped. Whether it was a sick
peon in one of the little houses, or the hosts of bees from the hives
under the mangoes, or the yellow, yellow bees-wax to be made into
little bowlfuls, or the preserves, or the garden, or the calves, or the
bit of butter and the little fresh cheeses made of strands of curd,
or the turkeys to be overlooked: she saw to it along with Teresa. And
she wondered at the steady, urgent, efficient _will_ which had to be
exerted all the time. Everything was kept going by a heavy exertion of
will. If once the will of the master broke, everything would break, and
ruin would overtake the place almost at once. No real relaxation, ever.
Always the sombre, insistent will.
Ramón arrived home one evening in November, from a long journey to
Sonora. He had come overland from Tepic, and twice had been stopped
by floods. The rains, so late, were very unusual. He was tired and
remote-seeming. Kate’s heart stood still a moment as she thought: He
goes so remote, as if he might go away altogether into death.
It was cloudy again, with lightning beating about on the horizons. But
all was very still. She said good-night early, and wandered down her
own side of the terrace, to the look-out at the end, which looked on
to the lake. Everything was dark, save for the intermittent pallor of
lightning.
And she was startled to see, in a gleam of lightning, Teresa sitting
with her back to the wall of the open terrace, Ramón lying with his
head in her lap, while she slowly pushed her fingers through his thick
black hair. They were as silent as the night.
Kate gave a startled murmur and said:
“I’m so sorry! I didn’t know you were here.”
“I wanted to be under the sky!” said Ramón, heaving himself to rise.
“Oh, _don’t_ move!” said Kate. “It was stupid of me to come here. You
are tired.”
“Yes,” he said, sinking again. “I am tired. These people make me feel I
have a hole in the middle of me. So I have come back to Teresa.”
“Yes!” said Kate. “One isn’t the Living Quetzalcoatl for nothing.
Of course they eat holes in you.--Really, is it worth it?--To give
yourself to be eaten away by them.”
“It must be so,” he said. “The change has to be made. And some man has
to make it. I sometimes wish it wasn’t I.”
“So do I wish it. So does Teresa. One wonders if it isn’t better to be
just a man,” said Kate.
But Teresa said nothing.
“One does what one must. And after all, one is always just a man,” he
said. “And if one has wounds--à la guerre comme à la guerre!”
His voice came out of the darkness like a ghost.
“Ah!” sighed Kate. “It makes one wonder what a man is, that he must
needs expose himself to the horrors of all the other people.”
There was silence for a moment.
“Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it,” he said. “And when the
voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.”
She went away to her room sadly, hearing the sound of infinite
exhaustion in his voice. As if he had a hole, a wound in the middle of
him. She could almost feel it, in her own bowels.
And if, with his efforts, he killed himself?--Then, she said, Cipriano
would come apart, and it would be all finished.
Ah, why should a man have to make these efforts on behalf of a beastly,
malevolent people who weren’t worth it! Better let the world come to an
end, if that was what it wanted.
She thought of Teresa soothing him, soothing him and saying nothing.
And him like a great helpless, wounded thing! It was rather horrible,
really. Herself, she would have to expostulate, she would have to try
to prevent him. Why should men damage themselves with this useless
struggling and fighting, and then come home to their women to be
restored!
To Kate, the fight simply wasn’t worth one wound. Let the beastly world
of man come to an end, if that was its destiny, as soon as possible.
Without lifting a finger to prevent it.--Live one’s own precious life,
that was given but once, and let the rest go its own hellish way.
She would have _had_ to try to prevent Ramón from giving himself
to destruction this way. She was willing for him to be ten Living
Quetzalcoatls. But not to expose himself to the devilish malevolence of
people.
Yet he would do it. Even as Joachim had done. And Teresa, with her
silence and her infinitely soft administering, she would heal him far
better than Kate, with her expostulation and her opposition.
“Ah!” said Kate to herself. “I’m glad Cipriano is a soldier, and
doesn’t get wounds in his _soul_.”
At the same time, she knew that without Ramón, Cipriano was just an
instrument, and not ultimately interesting to her.
In the morning, Teresa appeared alone to breakfast. She seemed very
calm, hiding her emotions in her odd, brown, proud little way.
“How is Ramón?” said Kate.
“He is sleeping,” said Teresa.
“Good! He seemed to me almost done up, last night.”
“Yes.”--The black eyes looked at Kate, wide with unshed tears and
courage, and a beautiful deep, remote light.
“I _don’t_ believe in a man’s sacrificing himself in this way,” said
Kate. “And I _don’t_.”
Teresa still looked her full in the eyes.
“Ah!” she said. “He doesn’t sacrifice himself. He feels he must do as
he does. And if he must, I must help him.”
“But then you are sacrificing yourself to _him_, and I don’t believe in
that either,” said Kate.
“Oh, no!” replied Teresa quickly, and a little flush burned in
her cheek, and her dark eyes flashed. “I am not sacrificing myself
to Ramón. If I can give him--sleep--when he needs it--that is not
sacrifice. It is--” She did not finish, but her eyes flashed, and the
flush burned darker.
“It is love, I know,” said Kate. “But it exhausts you too.”
“It is not simply love,” flashed Teresa proudly. “I might have loved
more than one man: many men are lovable. But Ramón!--My soul is with
Ramón.”--The tears rose to her eyes. “I do not want to talk about it,”
she said, rising. “But you must not touch me there, and judge me.”
She hurried out of the room, leaving Kate somewhat dismayed. Kate
sighed, thinking of going home.
But in an hour Teresa appeared again, putting her cool, soft,
snake-like little hand on Kate’s arm.
“I am sorry if I was rude,” she said.
“No,” said Kate. “Apparently it is I who am wrong.”
“Yes, I think you are,” said Teresa. “You think there is only love.
Love is only such a little bit.”
“And what is the rest?”
“How can I tell you if you do not know?--But do you think Ramón is no
more to me than a lover?”
“A husband!” said Kate.
“Ah!” Teresa put her head aside with an odd impatience. “Those little
words! Those little words! Nor either a husband.--He is my life.”
“Surely it is better for one to live one’s own life!”
“No! It is like seed. It is no good till it is given. I know. I kept
my own life for a long time. As you keep it longer, it dies. And I
tried to give it to God. But I couldn’t, quite. Then they told me, if
I married Ramón and had any part in the Quetzalcoatl heresy, my soul
would be damned.--But something made me know it was not true. I even
knew he needed my soul.--Ah, Señora--” a subtle smile came on Teresa’s
pale face--“I have lost my soul to Ramón.--What more can I say!”
“And what about his soul?”
“It comes home to me--_here_!” She put her hand over her womb.
Kate was silent for a time.
“And if he betrays you?” she said.
“Ah, Señora!” said Teresa. “Ramón is not just a lover. He is a brave
man, and he doesn’t betray his own blood. And it is his soul that comes
home to me.--And I would struggle to my last breath to give him sleep,
when he came home to me with his soul, and needed it,” she flashed.
Then she added, murmuring to herself: “No, thank God! I have not got a
life of my own! I have been able to give it to a man who is more than
a man, as they say in their Quetzalcoatl language. And now it needn’t
die inside me, like a bird in a cage.--Oh, yes, Señora! If he goes to
Sinaloa and the west coast, my soul goes with him and takes part in it
all. It does not let him go alone. And he does not forget that he has
my soul with him. I know it.--No, Señora! You must not criticise me or
pity me.”
“Still!” said Kate. “It still seems to me it would be better for each
one to keep her own soul, and be responsible for it.”
“If it were possible!” said Teresa. “But you can no more keep your own
soul inside you for yourself, without its dying, than you can keep
the seed of your womb. Until a man gives you his seed, the seed of
your womb is nothing. And the man’s seed is nothing to him.--And until
you give your soul to a man, and he takes it, your soul is nothing to
you.--And when a man has taken your whole soul.--Ah, do not talk to me
about betraying. A man only betrays because he has been given _a part_,
and not the whole. And a woman only betrays because only the part has
been taken from her, and not the whole. That is all about betrayal. I
know.--But when the whole is given, and taken, betrayal can’t exist.
What I am to Ramón, I am. And what he is to me, he is. I do not care
what he does. If he is away from me, he does as he wishes. So long as
he will always keep safe what I am to him.”
Kate did not like having to learn lessons from this little waif of a
Teresa. Kate was a woman of the world, handsome and experienced. She
was accustomed to homage. Other women usually had a slight fear of her,
for she was powerful and ruthless in her own way.
Teresa also feared her a little, as a woman of the world. But as an
intrinsic woman, not at all. Trenched inside her own fierce and proud
little soul, Teresa looked on Kate as on one of those women of the
outside world, who make a very splendid show, but who are not so sure
of the real secret of womanhood, and the innermost power. All Kate’s
handsome, ruthless female power was second-rate to Teresa, compared
with her own quiet, deep passion of connection with Ramón.
Yes, Kate was accustomed to looking on other women as inferiors.
But the tables were suddenly turned. Even as, in her soul, she knew
Ramón to be a greater man than Cipriano, suddenly she had to question
herself, whether Teresa was not a greater woman than she.
Teresa! A greater woman than Kate? What a blow! Surely it was
impossible!
Yet there it was. Ramón had wanted to marry Teresa, not Kate. And the
flame of his marriage with Teresa she saw both in his eyes and in
Teresa’s. A flame that was not in Kate’s eyes.
Kate’s marriage with Cipriano was curious and momentary. When Cipriano
was away, Kate was her old individual self. Only when Cipriano was
present, and then only sometimes, did the connection overwhelm her.
When Teresa turned and looked at her with this certain flame, touched
with indignation, Kate quailed. Perhaps for the first time in her life
she quailed and felt abashed: repentant.
Kate even knew that Teresa felt a little repugnance for her: for the
foreign white woman who talked as cleverly as a man and who never
gave her soul: who did not believe in giving her soul. All these
well-dressed, beautiful women from America or England, Europe, they all
kept their souls for themselves, in a sort of purse, as it were.
Teresa was determined that Kate should leave off treating her, very,
very indefinably, as an inferior. It was how all the foreign women
treated the Mexican women. Because the foreign women were their own
mistresses! They even tried to be condescending to Ramón.
But Ramón! He could look at them and make them feel small, feel really
nothing, in spite of all their money and their experience and their air
of belonging to the ruling races. The ruling races! Wait! Ramón was a
challenge to all that. Let those rule who can.
“You did not sleep?” Teresa said to Kate.
“Not very well,” said Kate.
“No, you look as if you had not slept very well.--Under your eyes.”
Kate smoothed the skin under her eyes, querulously.
“One gets that look in Mexico,” she said. “It’s not an easy country to
keep your youth in.--You are looking well.”
“Yes, I am very well.”
Teresa had a new, soft bloom on her dark skin, something frail and
tender, which she did not want to have to defend against another woman.
“I think I will go home now Ramón has come,” said Kate.
“Oh, why? Do you wish to?”
“I think I’d better.”
“Then I will go with you to Sayula. In the boat, no?”
Kate put her few things together. She had slept badly. The night had
been black, black, with something of horror in it. As when the bandits
had attacked Ramón. She could see the scar in his back, in the night.
And the drumming crash of falling water, menacing and horrible, seemed
to keep up for hours.
In her soul, Kate felt Teresa’s contempt for her way of wifehood.
“I have been married too,” Kate had said. “To a very exceptional man,
whom I _loved_.”
“Ah, yes!” said Teresa. “And he died.”
“He wanted to die.”
“Ah, yes! He wanted to die.”
“I did my level best to prevent him from wearing himself out.”
“Ah, yes, to prevent him.”
“What else could I have done?” flashed Kate in anger.
“If you could have given him your life, he would not even have wanted
to die.”
“I _did_ give him my life. I loved him--oh, you will never know.--But
he didn’t _want_ my soul. He believed I should keep a soul of my own.”
“Ah, yes, men are like that, when they are merely men. When a man is
_warm_ and brave--then he wants the woman to give him her soul, and he
keeps it in _his_ womb, so he is more than a mere man, a single man. I
know it. I know where my soul is. It is in Ramón’s womb, the womb of a
man, just as his seed is in my womb, the womb of a woman. He is a man,
and a column of blood. I am a woman, and a valley of blood. I shall not
contradict him. How can I? My soul is inside him, and I am far from
contradicting him when he is trying with all his might to do something
that _he_ knows about. He won’t die, and they won’t kill him. No! The
stream flows into him from the heart of the world: and from me.--I tell
you, because you saved his life, and therefore we belong to the same
thing, you and I and he--and Cipriano. But you should not misjudge me.
That other way of women, where a woman keeps her own soul--ah, what is
it but weariness!”
“And the men?”
“Ah! if there are men whose souls are warm and brave, how they comfort
one’s womb, Caterina!”
Kate hung her head, stubborn and angry at being put down from her
eminence.--The slave morale! she said to herself. The miserable old
trick of a woman living just for the sake of a man. Only living to send
her soul with him, inside his precious body. And to carry his precious
seed in her womb! Herself, apart from this, nothing.
Kate wanted to make her indignation thorough, but she did not quite
succeed. Somewhere, secretly and angrily, she envied Teresa her dark
eyes with the flame in them and their savage assurance. She envied
her her serpent-delicate fingers. And above all, she envied her, with
repining, the comfort of a living man permanent in her womb. And the
secret, savage indomitable pride in her own womanhood, that rose from
this.
In the warm morning after the rain, the frogs were whirring
frantically. Across the lake, the mountains were blue black, and little
pieces of white, fluffy vapour wandered low across the trees. Clouds
were along the mountain-tops, making a level sky-line of whitish
softness the whole length of the range. On the lonely, fawn-coloured
water, one sail was blowing.
“It is like Europe--like the Tyrol to-day,” said Kate wistfully.
“Do you love Europe very much?” asked Teresa.
“Yes, I think I love it.”
“And must you go back to it?”
“I think so. Soon! To my mother and my children.”
“Do they want you very much?”
“Yes!” said Kate, rather hesitant. Then she added: “Not _very_ much,
really. But I want them.”
“What for?--I mean,” Teresa added, “do you long for them?”
“Sometimes,” said Kate, the tears coming to her eyes.
The boat rowed on in silence.
“And Cipriano?” Teresa asked timidly.
“Ah!” said Kate shortly. “He is such a stranger to me.”
Teresa was silent for some moments.
“I think a man is always a stranger to a woman,” said Teresa. “Why
should it not be so?”
“But you,” said Kate, “haven’t any children.”
“Ramón has.--And he says: ‘I cast my bread upon the waters. It is my
children too. And if they return to me after many days, I shall be
glad.’--Is it not the same for you?”
“Not quite!” said Kate. “I am a woman, I am not a man.”
“I, if I have children,” said Teresa, “I shall try to cast my bread
upon the waters, so my children come to me that way. I hope I shall. I
hope I shall not try to fish them out of life for myself, with a net.
I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly
with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course.--Morning brings
more than love. And I want to be true to the morning.”
CHAP: XXVI. KATE IS A WIFE.
Kate was glad to get back to her own house, and to be more or less
alone. She felt a great change was being worked in her, and if it
worked too violently, she would die. It was the end of something, and
the beginning of something, far, far inside her: in her soul and womb.
The men, Ramón and Cipriano, caused the change, and Mexico. Because
the time had come.--Nevertheless if what was happening happened too
rapidly, or violently, she felt she would die. So, from time to time
she had to withdraw from contact, to be alone.
She would sit alone for hours on the shore, under a green willow tree
that hung its curtains of pale-green fronds, on the beach. The lake was
much fuller and higher up the shore, softer, more mysterious. There was
a smell of the piles of water-hyacinth decaying at the water’s edges.
Distance seemed farther away. The near conical hills were dotted with
green bushes, like a Japanese drawing. Bullock-wagons with solid wheels
came rolling to the village, high with sugar cane, drawn by eight oxen
with ponderous heads and slowly swinging horns, while a peon walked in
front, with the guiding-stick on the cross-beam of the yoke. So slow,
so massive, yet with such slight control!
She had a strange feeling, in Mexico, of the old prehistoric humanity,
the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, before the glacial
period. When the world was colder, and the seas emptier, and all the
land-formation was different. When the waters of the world were piled
in stupendous glaciers on the high places, and high, high upon the
poles. When great plains stretched away to the oceans, like Atlantis
and the lost continents of Polynesia, so that seas were only great
lakes, and the soft, dark-eyed people of that world could walk around
the globe. Then there was a mysterious, hot-blooded, soft-footed
humanity with a strange civilization of its own.
Till the glaciers melted, and drove the peoples to the high places,
like the lofty plateaux of Mexico, separated them into cut-off nations.
Sometimes, in America, the shadow of that old pre-Flood world was so
strong, that the day of historic humanity would melt out of Kate’s
consciousness, and she would begin to approximate to the old mode of
consciousness, the old, dark will, the unconcern for death, the subtle,
dark consciousness, non-cerebral, but vertebrate. When the mind and
the power of man was in his blood and his backbone, and there was the
strange, dark inter-communication between man and man and man and
beast, from the powerful spine.
The Mexicans were still this. That which is aboriginal in America
still belongs to the way of the world before the Flood, before the
mental-spiritual world came into being. In America, therefore, the
mental-spiritual life of white people suddenly flourishes like a great
weed let loose in virgin soil. Probably it will as quickly wither. A
great death come. And after that, the living result will be a new germ,
a new conception of human life, that will arise from the fusion of the
old blood-and-vertebrate consciousness with the white man’s present
mental-spiritual consciousness. The sinking of both beings, into a new
being.
Kate was more Irish than anything, and the almost deathly mysticism of
the aboriginal Celtic or Iberian people lay at the bottom of her soul.
It was a residue of memory, something that lives on from the pre-Flood
world, and cannot be killed. Something older, and more everlastingly
potent, than our would-be fair-and-square world.
She knew more or less what Ramón was trying to effect: this fusion! She
knew what it was that made Cipriano more significant to her than all
her past, her husbands and her children. It was the leap of the old,
antediluvian blood-male into unison with her. And for this, without her
knowing, her innermost blood had been thudding all the time.
Ireland would not and could not forget that other old, dark, sumptuous
living. The Tuatha De Danaan might be under the western sea. But they
are under the living blood, too, never quite to be silenced. Now they
have to come forth again, to a new connection. And the scientific,
fair-and-square Europe has to mate once more with the old giants.