suddenly, or it would rupture her and she would die. The old way
has its horror. The heavy-footed, _à terre_ spirit of aboriginal
Mexico could be so horrible to her, as to make her wicked. The slow,
indomitable kind of existing and persisting, without hope or élan,
which is in the aboriginal American, sometimes made her feel she would
go mad. The sullen will persisting over the slow, dark centuries,
counting the individual existence a trifle! A tenacity of demons, less
than human. And a sudden ferocity, a sudden lust of death rousing
incalculable and terrible.
People who never really changed. Men who were not faithful to life, to
the living actuality. Faithful to some dark necessity out of the past.
The actual present suddenly collapsing in the souls of the men and
the women, and the old, black, volcanic lava bursting up in violence,
followed by a lava-rock indifference.
The hope! The hope! Would it ever be possible to revive the hope in
these black souls, and achieve the marriage which is the only step to
the new world of man?
But meanwhile, a strange, almost torn nausea would come over Kate, and
she felt she must go away, to spare herself. The strange, reptilian
insistence of her very servants. _Blood is one blood. We are all of one
blood-stream._ Something aboriginal and tribal, and almost worse than
death to the white individual. Out of the dark eyes and the powerful
spines of these people, all the time the unknown assertion: _The blood
is one blood._ It was a strange, overbearing insistence, a claim of
blood-unison.
Kate was of a proud old family. She had been brought up with the
English-Germanic idea of the _intrinsic_ superiority of the hereditary
aristocrat. Her blood was different from the common blood, another,
finer fluid.
But in Mexico, none of this. Her criada Juana, the aquador who carried
the water, the boatman who rowed her on the lake, all looked at her
with one look in their eyes. _The blood is one blood. In the blood, you
and I are undifferentiated._ She saw it in their eyes, she heard it in
their words, it tinged their deference and their mockery. And sometimes
it made her feel physically sick: this overbearing blood-familiarity.
And sometimes, when she tried to hold herself up, in the proud old
assertion: _My blood is my own. Noli me tangere_, she would see the
terrible ancient hatred in their eyes, the hatred which leads them to
atrocities and fearful maimings.
They would defer to her spirit, her knowledge, her understanding. They
would give her deference, and a sort of grudging reverence for this.
She belonged to the ruling races, the clever ones. But back again they
demanded her acquiescence to the primeval assertion: _The blood is one
blood. We are one blood._ It was the assertion that swept away all
individualism, and left her immersed, drowned in the grand sea of the
living blood, in immediate contact with all these men and all these
women.
To this she must submit. Or they would persist in the slow revenge.
And she could not submit, off-hand. It had to be a slow, organic
process. Anything sudden or violent would destroy her.
Now she understood Ramón’s assertion: Man is a column of blood: Woman
is a valley of blood. It was the primeval oneness of mankind, the
opposite of the oneness of the spirit.
But Kate had always looked upon her blood as absolutely her own, her
individual own. Her spirit she shared, in the spirit she communed. But
her blood stayed by her in individuality.
Now she was confronted by the other great assertion: The blood is one
blood.--It meant a strange, marginless death of her individual self.
Now she understood why Ramón and Cipriano wore the white clothes and
the sandals, and were naked, or half-naked, as living gods. It was the
acquiescence in the primitive assertion. It was the renewal of the old,
terrible bond of the blood-unison of man, which made blood-sacrifice so
potent a factor of life. The blood of the individual is given back to
the great blood-being, the god, the nation, the tribe.
Now she understood the strange unison she could always feel between
Ramón and his men, and Cipriano and his men. It was the soft, quaking,
deep communion of blood-oneness. Sometimes it made her feel sick.
Sometimes it made her revolt. But it was the power she could not get
beyond.
Because, admitting his blood-unison, Ramón at the same time claimed a
supremacy, even a godliness. He was a man, as the lowest of his peons
was a man. At the same time, rising from the same pool of blood, from
the same roots of manhood as they, and being, as they were, a man of
the pulsing blood, he was still something more. Not in the blood nor in
the spirit lay his individuality and his supremacy, his godhead. But
in a star within him, an inexplicable star which rose out of the dark
sea and shone between the flood and the great sky. The mysterious star
which unites the vast universal blood with the universal breath of the
spirit, and shines between them both.
Not the rider on the white horse: nor the rider on the red. That which
is beyond the riders and the horses, the inexplicable mystery of the
star whence no horseman comes and to which no horseman can arrive. The
star which is a man’s innermost clue, which rules the power of the
blood on the one hand, and the power of the spirit on the other.
For this, the only thing which is supreme above all power in a man, and
at the same time, is power; which far transcends knowledge; the strange
star between the sky and the waters of the first cosmos: this is man’s
divinity.
And some men are not divine at all. They have only faculties. They are
slaves, or they should be slaves.
But many a man has his own spark of divinity, and has it quenched,
blown out by the winds of force or ground out of him by machines.
And when the spirit and the blood in man begin to go asunder, bringing
the great death, most stars die out.
Only the man of a great star, a great divinity, can bring the opposites
together again, in a new unison.
And this was Ramón, and this was his great effort: to bring the great
opposites into contact and into unison again. And this is the god-power
in man. By this power you shall know the god in man. By none other.
Ramón was a man as the least of his peons was a man, with the beating
heart and the secret loins and the lips closed on the same secret of
manhood. And he was human as Kate was human, with the same yearning of
the spirit, for pure knowledge and communion, the soul in the greatness
of its comprehending.
But only he had that starry power for bringing together the two great
human impulses to a point of fusion, for being the bird between the
vast wings of the dual-created power to which man has access and in
which man has his being. The Morning Star, between the breath of dawn
and the deeps of the dark.
Men had tried to murder him with knives. Carlota would have murdered
him with her spirit. Each half separately wanted to commit the murder
of him.
But he kept himself beyond. He was the living Quetzalcoatl, and the
tiny sparkle of a star was rising in his own men, in his own woman.
The star between the two wings of power: that alone was divinity in a
man, and final manhood.
Kate had a message from Cipriano to say he was coming out to stay in
the Villa Aragon. The Villa Aragon was the chief house on the lake, in
small but rather beautiful grounds with tufts of palm-trees and heavy
hedges of jasmine, a garden kept always green by constant watering.
The house was built rather like a little castle, absurd, yet its
deep, spacious verandahs opening on to the slopes and knolls of the
tree-clustered garden, above the lake, were pleasant.
Cipriano arrived very pleased, his black eyes shining with the boyish
look. He wanted Kate to marry him, go through the Mexican civil
marriage, and instal herself in the Villa Aragon. She hesitated. She
knew she must go back to Europe, to England and Ireland, very soon. The
necessity was imperative. The sense of menace that Mexico put over her,
and the feeling of inner nausea, was becoming too much to bear. She
felt she could not stand it, unless she went away to relax for a time.
This she told to Cipriano. And his face fell.
“It doesn’t matter to me very much whether I marry or not, before I
go,” she said. “But I must go soon--soon.”
“How soon?”
“By January.”
His face lightened again.
“Then marry me before you go,” he said. “Next week.”
She agreed, with curious indifference, and he, his eyes flashing again
like a boy’s, moved quickly, to make the necessary legal preparations.
She did not care whether she married or not. In one essential sense,
she had married Cipriano already. He was first and foremost a soldier,
swift to come to her, and swift to go. She would always be a good deal
alone.
And him alone, just as a man and a soldier, she could marry easily
enough. It was this terrible Mexico that frightened her with a sense of
doom.
The Quetzalcoatl movement had spread in the country, but sinisterly.
The Archbishop had declared against it, Ramón and Cipriano and their
adherents were excommunicated. An attempt had been made to assassinate
Montes.
The adherents of Quetzalcoatl in the capital had made the Church of
San Juan Bautisto, which was called the Church of the Black Saviour,
their Metropolitan House of Quetzalcoatl. The Archbishop, a choleric
man, had summoned his fervent followers to march in procession to this
Church of San Juan, now called the House of Quetzalcoatl, and seize it
and restore it to the Catholic Church. The government, knowing it would
have to fight sooner or later, arrested the Archbishop and broke up the
procession after some bloodshed.
Then a kind of war began. The Knights of Cortes brought out their
famous hidden stores of arms, not very impressive, after all, and a
clerical mob headed by a fanatical priest, surged into the Zócalo.
Montes had the guns turned on them. But it looked like the beginnings
of a religious war. In the streets the white and blue sarapes of
Quetzalcoatl and the scarlet and black sarapes of Huitzilopochtli
were seen in bands, marching to the sound of tom-toms, and holding up
the curious round banners, made of featherwork, of Quetzalcoatl, and
the tall scarlet signs of Huitzilopochtli, long poles with the soft
club of scarlet feathers at the top, tufted with a black point.--In
the churches, the priests were still inflaming the orthodox to a holy
war. In the streets, priests who had gone over to Quetzalcoatl were
haranguing the crowd.
It was a wild moment. In Zacatecas General Narciso Beltran had
declared against Montes and for the Church. But Cipriano with his
Huitzilopochtli soldiers had attacked with such swiftness and ferocity,
Beltran was taken and shot, his army disappeared.
Then Montes declared the old Church illegal in Mexico, and caused a
law to be passed, making the religion of Quetzalcoatl the national
religion of the Republic. All churches were closed. All priests were
compelled to take an oath of allegiance to the Republic, or condemned
to exile. The armies of Huitzilopochtli and the white and blue sarapes
of Quetzalcoatl appeared in all the towns and villages of the Republic.
Ramón laboured ceaselessly. Cipriano appeared in unexpected flashes, in
unexpected places. He managed to rouse the most discontented States,
Vera Cruz, Tamaulipas, Yucatan, to a sort of religious frenzy. Strange
baptisms took place in the sea, and a scarlet and black tower of
Huitzilopochtli rose along the shores.
The whole country was thrilling with a new thing, with a release of
new energy. But there was a sense of violence and crudity in it all, a
touch of horror.
The Archbishop was deported, no more priests were seen in the streets.
Only the white and blue and earth-coloured sarapes of Quetzalcoatl, and
the scarlet and black of Huitzilopochtli, were seen among the crowds.
There was a great sense of release, almost of exuberance.
This is why Cipriano came to Kate with those black, flashing, boyish
eyes. He was in strange state of triumph. Kate was frightened, and she
felt curiously hollow. Even the queer, new, flashing triumph and the
sense of a new thing on the face of the earth could not quite save her.
She belonged too much to the old world of Europe, she could not, could
not make herself over so quickly. But she felt that if she could go
back to Ireland, and let her life and her body _pause_ for a time, then
she could come back and take her share.
For it was not her spirit alone which was changing, it was her body,
and the constitution of her very blood. She could feel it, the terrible
katabolism and metabolism in her blood, changing her even as a
creature, changing her to another creature.
And if it went too fast, she would die.
So, she was legally married to Cipriano, and she went to live with him
in the Villa Aragon, for a month. After a month, she would sail away,
alone, to Ireland. He agreed too.
It was strange, to be married to him. He made her go all vague and
quiet, as if she sank away heavy and still, away from the surface of
life, and lay deep in the under-life.
The strange, heavy, _positive_ passivity. For the first time in her
life she felt absolutely at rest. And talk, and thought, had become
trivial, superficial to her: as the ripples on the surface of the lake
are as nothing, to the creatures that live away below in the unwavering
deeps.
In her soul, she was still and proud. If only the body had not suffered
the unbearable nausea of change. She had sunk to a final rest, within
a great, opened-out cosmos. The universe had opened out to her new and
vast, and she had sunk to the deep bed of pure rest. She had become
almost like Teresa in sureness.
Yet the process of change within her blood was terrible to her.
Cipriano was happy, in his curious Indian way. His eyes kept that
flashing, black, dilated look of a boy looking newly on a strange,
almost uncanny wonder of life. He did not look very definitely at Kate,
or even take much definite notice of her. He did not like talking to
her, in any serious way. When she wanted to talk seriously, he flashed
a cautious, dark look at her, and went away.
He was aware of things that she herself was hardly conscious of.
Chiefly, of the curious irritant quality of talk. And this he avoided.
Curious as it may seem, he made her aware of her own old desire for
frictional, irritant sensation. She realized how all her old love had
been frictional, charged with the fire of irritation and the spasms of
frictional voluptuousness.
Cipriano, curiously, by refusing to share any of this with her, made it
become external to her. Her strange seething feminine will and desire
subsided in her and swept away, leaving her soft and powerfully potent,
like the hot springs of water that gushed up so noiseless, so soft, yet
so powerful, with a sort of secret potency.
She realized, almost with wonder, the death in her of the Aphrodite of
the foam: the seething, frictional, ecstatic Aphrodite. By a swift dark
instinct, Cipriano drew away from this in her. When, in their love, it
came back on her, the seething electric female ecstasy, which knows
such spasms of delirium, he recoiled from her. It was what she used to
call her “satisfaction.” She had loved Joachim for this, that again,
and again, and again he could give her this orgiastic “satisfaction,”
in spasms that made her cry aloud.
But Cipriano would not. By a dark and powerful instinct he drew away
from her as soon as this desire rose again in her, for the white
ecstasy of frictional satisfaction, the throes of Aphrodite of the
foam. She could see that to him, it was repulsive. He just removed
himself, dark and unchangeable, away from her.
And she, as she lay, would realize the worthlessness of this
foam-effervescence, its strange externality to her. It seemed to come
upon her from without, not from within. And succeeding the first moment
of disappointment, when this sort of “satisfaction” was denied her,
came the knowledge that she did not really want it, that it was really
nauseous to her.
And he, in his dark, hot silence would bring her back to the new, soft,
heavy, hot flow, when she was like a fountain gushing noiseless and
with urgent softness from the volcanic deeps. Then she was open to him
soft and hot, yet gushing with a noiseless soft power. And there was
no such thing as conscious “satisfaction.” What happened was dark and
untellable. So different from the beak-like friction of Aphrodite of
the foam, the friction which flares out in circles of phosphorescent
ecstasy, to the last wild spasm which utters the involuntary cry, like
a death-cry, the final love-cry. This she had known, and known to the
end, with Joachim. And now this too was removed from her. What she had
with Cipriano was curiously beyond her knowing: so deep and hot and
flowing, as it were subterranean. She had to yield before it. She could
not grip it into one final spasm of white ecstasy which was like sheer
knowing.
And as it was in the love-act, so it was with him. She could not _know_
him. When she tried to know him, something went slack in her, and she
had to leave off. She had to let be. She had to leave him, dark and hot
and potent, along with the things that _are_, but are not known. The
presence. And the stranger. This he was always to her.
There was hardly anything to say to him. And there was no personal
intimacy. He kept his privacy round him like a cloak, and left her
immune within her own privacy. He was a stranger to her, she to him.
He accepted the fact absolutely, as if nothing else were possible. She,
sometimes, felt it strange. She had so craved for intimacy, _insisted_
on intimacy.
Now she found herself accepting him finally and forever as the stranger
in whose presence she lived. It was his impersonal presence which
enveloped her. She lived in his aura, and he, she knew, lived in hers,
with nothing said, and no personal or spiritual intimacy whatever. A
mindless communion of the blood.
Therefore, when he had to go away, it did not matter so very much. His
presence was something he left with her, and he took her presence along
with him. And somehow, there was no need for emotions.
He had to leave early one morning, for Mexico. The dawn came perfect
and clear. The sun was not yet on the lake, but it caught the mountains
beyond Tuliapan, and they shone magically distinct, as if some magic
light were focussed on them. The green furrows of the mountainsides
were as if in her own hand. Two white gulls, flying, suddenly got
the light, and glittered. But the full, soft, noiseless dun lake was
pallid, unlit.
She thought of the sea. The Pacific was not very far away. The sea
seemed to have retreated entirely out of her consciousness. Yet she
knew she needed its breath again.
Cipriano was going down to bathe. She saw him walk out on the masonry
of the square basin which was their own tiny harbour. He threw off
his wrap and stood dark in silhouette against the pale, unlit water.
How dark he was! Dark as a Malay. Curious that his body was as dark,
almost, as his face. And with that strange archaic fulness of physique,
with the full chest and the full, yet beautiful buttocks of men on old
Greek coins.
He dropped off the edge of masonry and waded out in the dim, soft,
uncanny water. And at that moment the light tipped over the edge of the
mountain and spilled gold upon the surface of the lake. And instantly
he was red as fire. The sunshine was not red, the sun was too high for
that. It was golden with morning. But as it flushed along the surface
of the lake it caught the body of Cipriano and he was red as fire, as a
piece of pure fire.
The Sons of the Morning! The column of blood! A Red Indian. She looked
at him in wonder, as he moved pure red and luminous further into the
lake, unconscious. As if on fire!
The Sons of the Morning! She let her effort at knowing slip away from
her once more, and remained without effort, within the communion.
It was his race, too. She had noticed before how the natives shone pure
red when morning or evening light caught them, rather level. As fires
they stood in the water. The Red Indian.
He went away, with his man, on horseback. And she watched him ride over
the brow of the road, sitting dark and still on his silky, roan horse.
He loved a red horse. And there was a curious motionlessness about him
as he rode horseback, an old, male pride, and at the same time the
half-ghostly, dark invisibility of the Indian, sitting close upon the
horse as if he and it belonged to one birth.
He was gone, and for a while she felt the old nostalgia for his
presence. Not for him, exactly. Not even to see him or touch him or
speak to him. Only to feel him about.
Then quickly she recovered. She adjusted herself to the presence he
left behind with her. As soon as he had _really_ gone, and the act of
going was over, his presence came back to her.
She walked a little while by the shore, beyond the breakwater wall. She
loved to be alone: a great deal alone, with a garden and the lake and
the morning.
“I am like Teresa, really,” she said to herself.
Suddenly before her she saw a long, dark soft rope, lying over a pale
boulder. But her soul was softly alert, at once. It was a snake, with a
subtle pattern along its soft dark back, lying there over a big stone,
with its head sunk down to earth.
It felt her presence, too, for suddenly, with incredible soft
quickness, it contracted itself down the boulder, and she saw it
entering a little gap in the bottom of the wall.
The hole was not very big. And as it entered it quickly looked back,
poising its little, dark, wicked, pointed head, and flickering a dark
tongue. Then it passed on, slowly easing its dark length into the hole.
When it had all gone in, Kate could see the last fold still, and the
flat little head resting on the fold, like the devil with his chin on
his arms, looking out of a loop-hole. So the wicked sparks of the eyes
looked out at her, from within the recess. Watching out of its own
invisibility.
So she wondered over it, as it lay in its hidden places. At all the
unseen things in the hidden places of the earth. And she wondered if it
was disappointed at not being able to rise higher in creation: to be
able to run on four feet, and not keep its belly on the ground.
Perhaps not! Perhaps it had its own peace. She felt a certain
reconciliation between herself and it.
CHAP: XXVII. HERE!
She and Teresa visited one another along the lake. There was a kinship
and a gentleness between them, especially now Kate was going away for a
while.
There was a certain autumnal purity and lull on the lake. The moisture
still lingered, the bushes on the wild hills were green in puffs.
Sunlight lay in a rich gleam on the mountains, and shadows were deep
and velvety. The green almost covered the rocks and the pinkish land.
Bright green the sugar cane, red the ploughed earth, dark the trees
with white specks of villages here and there. And over the wild places,
a sprinkle of bushes, then stark grey rock still coming out.
The sky was very high and pure. In the morning came the sound of drums,
and on the motionless, crystal air the cry for the pauses of the day.
And always the day seemed to be pausing and unfolding again to the
greater mystery. The universe seemed to have opened vast and soft and
delicate with life.
There was something curiously soothing even in the full, pale,
dove-brown water of the lake. A boat was coming over, with its sail
hollowed out like a shell, pearly white, and its sharp black canoe-beak
slipping past the water. It looked like the boat of Dionysos coming
with a message, and the vine sprouting.
Kate could hardly remember now the dry rigid pallor of the heat, when
the whole earth seemed to crepitate viciously with dry malevolence:
like memory gone dry and sterile, hellish.
Ramón and Teresa came along the lake, and rowed into the basin. It was
a morning when the shadows on the mountains were almost corn-flower
blue.
“Yet you must go away?” Ramón said to her.
“For a little while. You don’t think I am Lot’s wife, do you?”
“No!” laughed Ramón. “I think you’re Cipriano’s.”
“I am really. But I want to go back for a little while.”
“Ah yes! Better go, and then come again. Tell them in your Ireland to
do as we have done here.”
“But how?”
“Let them find themselves again, and their own universe, and their own
gods. Let them substantiate their own mysteries. The Irish have been
so wordy about their far-off heroes and green days of the heroic gods.
Now tell them to substantiate them, as we have tried to substantiate
Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli.”
“I will tell them,” she said. “If there is anybody to listen.”
“Yes!” he said.