Title:      The Plumed Serpent (1926)
Author:     D. H. Lawrence
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Plumed Serpent (1926)
Author:     D. H. Lawrence





CONTENTS

I.  BEGINNINGS OF A BULL-FIGHT

II.  TEA-PARTY IN TLACOLULA

III.  FORTIETH BIRTHDAY

IV.  TO STAY OR NOT TO STAY

V.  THE LAKE

VI.  THE MOVE DOWN THE LAKE

VII.  THE PLAZA

VIII.  NIGHT IN THE HOUSE

IX.  CASA DE LAS CUENTAS

X.  DON RAMÓN AND DOÑA CARLOTA

XI.  LORDS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT

XII.  THE FIRST WATERS

XIII.  THE FIRST RAIN

XIV.  HOME TO SAYULA

XV.  THE WRITTEN HYMNS OF QUETZALCOATL

XVI.  CIPRIANO AND KATE

XVII.  FOURTH HYMN AND THE BISHOP

XVIII.  AUTO DA FE

XIX.  THE ATTACK ON JAMILTEPEC

XX.  MARRIAGE BY QUETZALCOATL

XXI.  THE OPENING OF THE CHURCH

XXII.  THE LIVING HUITZILOPOCHTLI

XXIII.  HUITZILOPOCHTLI'S NIGHT

XXIV.  MALINTZI

XXV.  TERESA

XXVI.  KATE IS A WIFE

XXVII.  HERE!




CHAPTER I

Beginnings of a Bull-fight


It was the Sunday after Easter, and the last bull-fight of the
season in Mexico City.  Four special bulls had been brought over
from Spain for the occasion, since Spanish bulls are more fiery
than Mexican.  Perhaps it is the altitude, perhaps just the spirit
of the western Continent which is to blame for the lack of 'pep',
as Owen put it, in the native animal.

Although Owen, who was a great socialist, disapproved of bull-
fights, 'We have never seen one.  We shall have to go,' he said.

'Oh yes, I think we must see it,' said Kate.

'And it's our last chance,' said Owen.

Away he rushed to the place where they sold tickets, to book seats,
and Kate went with him.  As she came into the street, her heart
sank.  It was as if some little person inside her were sulking and
resisting.  Neither she nor Owen spoke much Spanish, there was a
fluster at the ticket place, and an unpleasant individual came
forward to talk American for them.

It was obvious they ought to buy tickets for the 'Shade.'  But they
wanted to economize, and Owen said he preferred to sit among the
crowd, therefore, against the resistance of the ticket man and the
onlookers, they bought reserved seats in the 'Sun.'

The show was on Sunday afternoon.  All the tram-cars and the
frightful little Ford omnibuses called camions were labelled
Torero, and were surging away towards Chapultepec.  Kate felt that
sudden dark feeling, that she didn't want to go.

'I'm not very keen on going,' she said to Owen.

'Oh, but why not?  I don't believe in them on principle, but we've
never seen one, so we shall HAVE to go.'

Owen was an American, Kate was Irish.  'Never having seen one'
meant 'having to go.'  But it was American logic rather than Irish,
and Kate only let herself be overcome.

Villiers of course was keen.  But then he too was American, and he
too had never seen one, and being younger, more than anybody he HAD
to go.

They got into a Ford taxi and went.  The busted car careered away
down the wide dismal street of asphalt and stone and Sunday
dreariness.  Stone buildings in Mexico have a peculiar hard, dry
dreariness.

The taxi drew up in a side street under the big iron scaffolding of
the stadium.  In the gutters, rather lousy men were selling pulque
and sweets, cakes, fruit, and greasy food.  Crazy motorcars rushed
up and hobbled away.  Little soldiers in washed-out cotton
uniforms, pinky drab, hung around an entrance.  Above all loomed
the network iron frame of the huge, ugly stadium.

Kate felt she was going to prison.  But Owen excitedly surged to
the entrance that corresponded to his ticket.  In the depths of
him, he too didn't want to go.  But he was a born American, and if
anything was on show, he had to see it.  That was 'Life.'

The man who took the tickets at the entrance, suddenly, as they
were passing in, stood in front of Owen, put both his hands on
Owen's chest, and pawed down the front of Owen's body.  Owen
started, bridled, transfixed for a moment.  The fellow stood aside.
Kate remained petrified.

Then Owen jerked into a smiling composure as the man waved them on.
'Feeling for fire-arms!' he said, rolling his eyes with pleased
excitement at Kate.

But she had not got over the shock of horror, fearing the fellow
might paw her.

They emerged out of a tunnel in the hollow of the concrete-and-iron
amphitheatre.  A real gutter-lout came to look at their counterslips,
to see which seats they had booked.  He jerked his head downwards,
and slouched off.  Now Kate knew she was in a trap--a big concrete
beetle trap.

They dropped down the concrete steps till they were only three
tiers from the bottom.  That was their row.  They were to sit on
the concrete, with a loop of thick iron between each numbered seat.
This was a reserved place in the 'Sun.'

Kate sat gingerly between her two iron loops, and looked vaguely
around.

'I think it's thrilling!' she said.

Like most modern people, she had a will-to-happiness.

'Isn't it thrilling?' cried Owen, whose will-to-happiness was
almost a mania.  'Don't you think so, Bud?'

'Why, yes, I think it may be,' said Villiers, non-committal.

But then Villiers was young, he was only over twenty, while Owen
was over forty.  The younger generation calculates its 'happiness'
in a more business-like fashion.  Villiers was out after a thrill,
but he wasn't going to say he'd got one till he'd got it.  Kate and
Owen--Kate was also nearly forty--must enthuse a thrill, out of a
sort of politeness to the great Show-man, Providence.

'Look here!' said Owen.  'Supposing we try to protect our extremity
on this concrete--' and thoughtfully he folded his rain-coat and
laid it along the concrete ledge so that both he and Kate could sit
on it.

They sat and gazed around.  They were early.  Patches of people
mottled the concrete slope opposite, like eruptions.  The ring just
below was vacant, neatly sanded; and above the ring, on the
encircling concrete, great advertisements for hats, with a picture
of a city-man's straw hat, and advertisements for spectacles, with
pairs of spectacles supinely folded, glared and shouted.

'Where is the "Shade" then?' said Owen, twisting his neck.

At the top of the amphitheatre, near the sky, were concrete boxes.
This was the 'Shade', where anybody who was anything sat.

'Oh but,' said Kate, 'I don't want to be perched right up there, so
far away.'

'Why no!' said Owen.  'We're much better where we are, in our
"Sun", which isn't going to shine a great deal after all.'

The sky was cloudy, preparing for the rainy season.

It was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon, and the crowd was
filling in, but still only occupied patches of the bare concrete.
The lower tiers were reserved, so the bulk of the people sat in the
mid-way levels, and gentry like our trio were more or less
isolated.

But the audience was already a mob, mostly of fattish town men in
black tight suits and little straw hats, and a mixing-in of the
dark-faced labourers in big hats.  The men in black suits were
probably employees and clerks and factory hands.  Some had brought
their women, in sky-blue chiffon with brown chiffon hats and faces
powdered to look like white marshmallows.  Some were families with
two or three children.

The fun began.  The game was to snatch the hard straw hat off some
fellow's head, and send it skimming away down the slope of
humanity, where some smart bounder down below would catch it and
send it skimming across in another direction.  There were shouts of
jeering pleasure from the mass, which rose almost to a yell as
seven straw hats were skimming, meteor-like, at one moment across
the slope of people.

'Look at that!' said Owen.  'Isn't that fun!'

'No,' said Kate, her little alter ego speaking out for once, in
spite of her will-to-happiness.  'No, I don't like it.  I really
hate common people.'

As a socialist, Owen disapproved, and as a happy man, he was
disconcerted.  Because his own real self, as far as he had any
left, hated common rowdiness just as much as Kate did.

'It's awfully smart though!' he said, trying to laugh in sympathy
with the mob.  'There now, see that!'

'Yes, it's quite smart, but I'm glad it's not my hat,' said
Villiers.

'Oh, it's all in the game,' said Owen largely.

But he was uneasy.  He was wearing a big straw hat of native make,
conspicuous in the comparative isolation of the lower tiers.  After
a lot of fidgeting, he took off this hat and put it on his knees.
But unfortunately he had a very definitely bald spot on a sunburnt
head.

Behind, above, sat a dense patch of people in the unreserved
section.  Already they were throwing things.  Bum! came an orange,
aimed at Owen's bald spot, and hitting him on the shoulder.  He
glared round rather ineffectually through his big shell spectacles.

'I'd keep my hat on if I were you,' said the cold voice of
Villiers.

'Yes, I think perhaps it's wiser,' said Owen, with assumed
nonchalance, putting on his hat again.

Whereupon a banana skin rattled on Villiers' tidy and ladylike
little panama.  He glared round coldly, like a bird that would stab
with its beak if it got the chance, but which would fly away at the
first real menace.

'How I detest them!' said Kate.

A diversion was created by the entrance, opposite, of the military
bands, with their silver and brass instruments under their arms.
There were three sets.  The chief band climbed and sat on the
right, in the big bare tract of concrete reserved for the
Authorities.  These musicians wore dark grey uniforms trimmed with
rose colour, and made Kate feel almost reassured, as if it were
Italy and not Mexico City.  A silver band in pale buff uniforms sat
opposite our party, high up across the hollow distance, and still a
third 'música' threaded away to the left, on the remote scattered
hillside of the amphitheatre.  The newspapers had said that the
President would attend.  But the Presidents are scarce at bull-
fights in Mexico, nowadays.

There sat the bands, in as much pomp as they could muster, but they
did not begin to play.  Great crowds now patched the slopes, but
there were still bare tracts, especially in the Authorities'
section.  Only a little distance above Kate's row was a mass of
people, as it were impending; a very uncomfortable sensation.

It was three o'clock, and the crowds had a new diversion.  The
bands, due to strike up at three, still sat there in lordly
fashion, sounding not a note.

'La música!  La música!' shouted the mob, with the voice of mob
authority.  They were the People, and the revolutions had been
their revolutions, and they had won them all.  The bands were their
bands, present for their amusement.

But the bands were military bands, and it was the army which had
won all the revolutions.  So the revolutions were THEIR
revolutions, and they were present for their own glory alone.

Música pagada toca mal tono.

Spasmodically, the insolent yelling of the mob rose and subsided.
La música!  La música!  The shout became brutal and violent.  Kate
always remembered it.  La música!  The band peacocked its
nonchalance.  The shouting was a great yell: the degenerate mob of
Mexico City!

At length, at its own leisure, the bands in grey with dark rose
facings struck up: crisp, martial, smart.

'That's fine!' said Owen.  'But that's really good!  And it's the
first time I've heard a good band in Mexico, a band with any
backbone.'

The music was smart, but it was brief.  The band seemed scarcely to
have started, when the piece was over.  The musicians took their
instruments from their mouths with a gesture of dismissal.  They
played just to say they'd played, making it as short as possible.

Música pagada toca mal tono.

There was a ragged interval, then the silver band piped up.  And at
last it was half-past three, or more.

Whereupon, at some given signal, the masses in the middle,
unreserved seats suddenly burst and rushed down on to the lowest,
reserved seats.  It was a crash like a burst reservoir, and the
populace in black Sunday suits poured down round and about our
astonished, frightened trio.  And in two minutes it was over.
Without any pushing or shoving.  Everybody careful, as far as
possible, not to touch anybody else.  You don't elbow your
neighbour if he's got a pistol on his hip and a knife at his belly.
So all the seats in the lower tiers filled in one rush, like the
flowing of water.

Kate now sat among the crowd.  But her seat, fortunately, was above
one of the track-ways that went round the arena, so at least she
would not have anybody sitting between her knees.

Men went uneasily back and forth along this gangway past the feet,
wanting to get in next their friends, but never venturing to ask.
Three seats away, on the same row, sat a Polish bolshevist fellow
who had met Owen.  He leaned over and asked the Mexican next to
Owen if he might change seats with him.  'No,' said the Mexican.
'I'll sit in my own seat.'

'Muy bien, Señor, muy bien!' said the Pole.

The show did not begin, and men like lost mongrels still prowled
back and forth on the track that was next step down from Kate's
feet.  They began to take advantage of the ledge on which rested
the feet of our party, to squat there.

Down sat a heavy fellow, plumb between Owen's knees.

'I hope they won't sit on MY feet,' said Kate anxiously.

'We won't let them,' said Villiers, with bird-like decision.  'Why
don't you shove him off, Owen?  Shove him off?'

And Villiers glared at the Mexican fellow ensconced between Owen's
legs.  Owen flushed, and laughed uncomfortably.  He was not good at
shoving people off.  The Mexican began to look round at the three
angry white people.

And in another moment, another fat Mexican in a black suit and a
little black hat was lowering himself into Villiers' foot-space.
But Villiers was too quick for him.  He quickly brought his feet
together under the man's sinking posterior, so the individual
subsided uncomfortably on to a pair of boots, and at the same time
felt a hand shoving him quietly but determinedly on the shoulder.

'No!' Villiers was saying in good American.  'This place is for my
FEET!  Get off!  You get off!'

And he continued, quietly but very emphatically, to push the
Mexican's shoulder, to remove him.

The Mexican half raised himself, and looked round murderously at
Villiers.  Physical violence was being offered, and the only retort
was death.  But the young American's face was so cold and abstract,
only the eyes showing a primitive, bird-like fire, that the Mexican
was nonplussed.  And Kate's eyes were blazing with Irish contempt.

The fellow struggled with his Mexican city-bred inferiority
complex.  He muttered an explanation in Spanish that he was only
sitting there for a moment, till he could join his friends--waving
a hand towards a lower tier.  Villiers did not understand a word,
but he reiterated:

'I don't care what it is.  This place is for my FEET, and you don't
sit there.'

Oh, home of liberty!  Oh, land of the free!  Which of these two men
was to win in the struggle for conflicting liberty?  Was the fat
fellow free to sit between Villiers' feet, or was Villiers free to
keep his foot-space?

There are all sorts of inferiority complex, and the city Mexican
has a very strong sort, that makes him all the more aggressive,
once it is roused.  Therefore the intruder lowered his posterior
with a heavy, sudden bounce on Villiers' feet, and Villiers, out
of very distaste, had had to extricate his feet from such a
compression.  The young man's face went white at the nostrils, and
his eyes took on that bright abstract look of pure democratic
anger.  He pushed the fat shoulders more decisively, repeating:

'Go away!  Go away!  You're not to SIT there.'

The Mexican, on his own ground, and heavy on his own base, let
himself be shoved, oblivious.

'Insolence!' said Kate loudly.  'Insolence!'

She glared at the fat back in the shoddily-fitting black coat,
which looked as if a woman dressmaker had made it, with loathing.
How could any man's coat-collar look so homemade, so en famille!

Villiers remained with a fixed, abstract look on his thin face,
rather like a death's head.  All his American will was summoned up,
the bald eagle of the north bristling in every feather.  The fellow
SHOULD NOT sit there.--But how to remove him?

The young man sat tense with will to annihilate his beetle-like
intruder, and Kate used all her Irish malice to help him.

'Don't you wonder who was his tailor?' she asked, with a flicker in
her voice.

Villiers looked at the femalish black coat of the Mexican, and made
an arch grimace at Kate.

'I should say he hadn't one.  Perhaps did it himself.'

'Very likely!' Kate laughed venomously.

It was too much.  The man got up and betook himself, rather
diminished, to another spot.

'Triumph!' said Kate.  'Can't you do the same, Owen?'

Owen laughed uncomfortably, glancing down at the man between his
knees as he might glance at a dog with rabies, when it had its back
to him.

'Apparently not yet, unfortunately,' he said, with some constraint,
turning his nose away again from the Mexican, who was using him as
a sort of chair-back.

There was an exclamation.  Two horsemen in gay uniforms and bearing
long staffs had suddenly ridden into the ring.  They went round the
arena, then took up their posts, sentry-wise, on either side the
tunnel entrance through which they had come in.

In marched a little column of four toreadors wearing tight uniforms
plastered with silver embroidery.  They divided, and marched
smartly in opposite directions, two and two, around the ring, till
they came to the place facing the section of the Authorities, where
they made their salute.

So this was a bull-fight!  Kate already felt a chill of disgust.

In the seats of the Authorities were very few people, and certainly
no sparkling ladies in high tortoise-shell combs and lace
mantillas.  A few common-looking people, bourgeois with not much
taste, and a couple of officers in uniform.  The President had not
come.

There was no glamour, no charm.  A few commonplace people in an
expanse of concrete were the elect, and below, four grotesque and
effeminate-looking fellows in tight, ornate clothes were the
heroes.  With their rather fat posteriors and their squiffs of
pigtails and their clean-shaven faces, they looked like eunuchs, or
women in tight pants, these precious toreadors.

The last of Kate's illusions concerning bull-fights came down with
a flop.  These were the darlings of the mob!  These were the
gallant toreadors!  Gallant?  Just about as gallant as assistants
in a butcher's shop.  Lady-killers?  Ugh!

There was an Ah! of satisfaction from the mob.  Into the ring
suddenly rushed a smallish, dun-coloured bull with long flourishing
horns.  He ran out, blindly, as if from the dark, probably thinking
that now he was free.  Then he stopped short, seeing he was not
free, but surrounded in an unknown way.  He was utterly at a loss.

A toreador came forward and switched out a pink cloak like a fan
not far from the bull's nose.  The bull gave a playful little
prance, neat and pretty, and charged mildly on the cloak.  The
toreador switched the cloak over the animal's head, and the neat
little bull trotted on round the ring, looking for a way to get
out.

Seeing the wooden barrier around the arena, finding he was able to
look over it, he thought he might as well take the leap.  So over
he went into the corridor or passage-way which circled the ring,
and in which stood the servants of the arena.

Just as nimbly, these servants vaulted over the barrier into the
arena, that was now bull-less.

The bull in the gangway trotted inquiringly round till he came to
an opening on to the arena again.  So back he trotted into the
ring.

And back into the gangway vaulted the servants, where they stood
again to look on.

The bull trotted waveringly and somewhat irritated.  The toreadors
waved their cloaks at him, and he swerved on.  Till his vague
course took him to where one of the horsemen with lances sat
motionless on his horse.

Instantly, in a pang of alarm, Kate noticed that the horse was
thickly blindfolded with a black cloth.  Yes, and so was the horse
on which sat the other picador.

The bull trotted suspiciously up to the motionless horse bearing
the rider with the long pole; a lean old horse that would never
move till Doomsday, unless someone shoved it.

O shades of Don Quixote!  Oh four Spanish horsemen of the
Apocalypse!  This was surely one of them.

The picador pulled his feeble horse round slowly, to face the bull,
and slowly he leaned forward and shoved his lance-point into the
bull's shoulder.  The bull, as if the horse were a great wasp that
had stung him deep, suddenly lowered his head in a jerk of surprise
and lifted his horns straight up into the horse's abdomen.  And
without more ado, over went horse and rider, like a tottering
monument upset.

The rider scrambled from under the horse and went running away with
his lance.  The old horse, in complete dazed amazement, struggled
to rise, as if overcome with dumb incomprehension.  And the bull,
with a red place on his shoulder welling a trickle of dark blood,
stood looking around in equally hopeless amazement.

But the wound was hurting.  He saw the queer sight of the horse
half reared from the ground, trying to get to its feet.  And he
smelled blood and bowels.

So rather vaguely, as if not quite knowing what he ought to do, the
bull once more lowered his head and pushed his sharp, flourishing
horns in the horse's belly, working them up and down inside there
with a sort of vague satisfaction.

Kate had never been taken so completely by surprise in all her
life.  She had still cherished some idea of a gallant show.  And
before she knew where she was, she was watching a bull whose
shoulders trickled blood goring his horns up and down inside the
belly of a prostrate and feebly plunging old horse.

The shock almost overpowered her.  She had come for a gallant show.
This she had paid to see.  Human cowardice and beastliness, a smell
of blood, a nauseous whiff of bursten bowels!  She turned her face
away.

When she looked again, it was to see the horse feebly and dazedly
walking out of the ring, with a great ball of its own entrails
hanging out of its abdomen and swinging reddish against its own
legs as it automatically moved.

And once more, the shock of amazement almost made her lose
consciousness.  She heard the confused small applause of amusement
from the mob.  And that Pole, to whom Owen had introduced her,
leaned over and said to her, in horrible English:

'Now, Miss Leslie, you are seeing Life!  Now you will have
something to write about, in your letters to England.'

She looked at his unwholesome face in complete repulsion, and
wished Owen would not introduce her to such sordid individuals.

She looked at Owen.  His nose had a sharp look, like a little boy
who may make himself sick, but who is watching at the shambles with
all his eyes, knowing it is forbidden.

Villiers, the younger generation, looked intense and abstract,
getting the sensation.  He would not even feel sick.  He was just
getting the thrill of it, without emotion, coldly and scientifically,
but very intent.

And Kate felt a real pang of hatred against this Americanism which
is coldly and unscrupulously sensational.

'Why doesn't the horse move?  Why doesn't it run away from the
bull?' she asked in repelled amazement, of Owen.

Owen cleared his throat.

'Didn't you see?  It was blindfolded,' he said.

'But can't it SMELL the bull?' she asked.

'Apparently not.--They bring the old wrecks here to finish them
off.--I know it's awful, but it's part of the game.'

How Kate hated phrases like 'part of the game.'  What do they mean,
anyhow!  She felt utterly humiliated, crushed by a sense of human
indecency, cowardice of two-legged humanity.  In this 'brave' show
she felt nothing but reeking cowardice.  Her breeding and her
natural pride were outraged.

The ring servants had cleaned away the mess and spread new sand.
The toreadors were playing with the bull, unfurling their foolish
cloaks at arm's length.  And the animal, with the red sore running
on his shoulder, foolishly capered and ran from one rag to the
other, here and there.

For the first time, a bull seemed to her a fool.  She had always
been afraid of bulls, fear tempered with reverence of the great
Mithraic beast.  And now she saw how stupid he was, in spite of his
long horns and his massive maleness.  Blindly and stupidly he ran
at the rag, each time, and the toreadors skipped like fat-hipped
girls showing off.  Probably it needed skill and courage, but it
LOOKED silly.

Blindly and foolishly the bull ran ducking its horns each time at
the rag, just because the rag fluttered.

'Run at the MEN, idiot!' said Kate aloud, in her overwrought
impatience.  'Run at the men, not at the cloaks.'

'They never do, isn't it curious!' replied Villiers, with cool
scientific interest.  'They say no toreador will face a cow,
because a cow always goes for HIM instead of the cloak.  If a bull
did that there'd be no bull-fights.  Imagine it!'

She was bored now.  The nimbleness and the skipping tricks of the
toreadors bored her.  Even when one of the banderilleros reared
himself on tiptoe, his plump posterior much in evidence, and from
his erectness pushed two razor-sharp darts with frills at the top
into the bull's shoulder, neatly and smartly, Kate felt no
admiration.  One of the darts fell out, anyway, and the bull ran on
with the other swinging and waggling in another bleeding place.

The bull now wanted to get away, really.  He leaped the fence
again, quickly, into the attendants' gangway.  The attendants
vaulted over into the arena.  The bull trotted in the corridor,
then nicely leaped back.  The attendants vaulted once more into the
corridor.  The bull trotted round the arena, ignoring the
toreadors, and leaped once more into the gangway.  Over vaulted the
attendants.

Kate was beginning to be amused, now that the mongrel men were
skipping for safety.

The bull was in the ring again, running from cloak to cloak,
foolishly.  A banderillero was getting ready with two more darts.
But at first another picador put nobly forward on his blindfolded
old horse.  The bull ignored this little lot too, and trotted away
again, as if all the time looking for something, excitedly looking
for something.  He stood still and excitedly pawed the ground, as
if he wanted something.  A toreador advanced and swung a cloak.  Up
pranced the bull, tail in air, and with a prancing bound charged--
upon the rag, of course.  The toreador skipped round with a
ladylike skip, then tripped to another point.  Very pretty!

The bull, in the course of his trotting and prancing and pawing,
had once more come near the bold picador.  The bold picador shoved
forward his ancient steed, leaned forwards, and pushed the point of
his lance in the bull's shoulder.  The bull looked up, irritated
and arrested.  What the devil!

He saw the horse and rider.  The horse stood with that feeble
monumentality of a milk horse, patient as if between the shafts,
waiting while his master delivered the milk.  How strange it must
have been to him when the bull, giving a little bound like a dog,
ducked its head and dived its horns upwards into his belly, rolling
him over with his rider as one might push over a hat-stand.

The bull looked with irritable wonder at the incomprehensible
medley of horse and rider kicking on the ground a few yards away
from him.  He drew near to investigate.  The rider scrambled out
and bolted.  And the toreadors, running up with their cloaks, drew
off the bull.  He went caracoling round, charging at more silk-
lined rags.

Meanwhile an attendant had got the horse on its feet again, and was
leading it totteringly into the gangway and round to the exit,
under the Authorities.  The horse crawled slowly.  The bull,
running from pink cloak to red cloak, rag to rag, and never
catching anything, was getting excited, impatient of the rag game.
He jumped once more into the gangway and started running, alas, on
towards where the wounded horse was still limping its way to the
exit.

Kate knew what was coming.  Before she could look away, the bull
had charged on the limping horse from behind, the attendants had
fled, the horse was up-ended absurdly, one of the bull's horns
between his hind legs and deep in his inside.  Down went the horse,
collapsing in front, but his rear was still heaved up, with the
bull's horn working vigorously up and down inside him, while he lay
on his neck all twisted.  And a huge heap of bowels coming out.
And a nauseous stench.  And the cries of pleased amusement among
the crowd.

This pretty event took place on Kate's side of the ring, and not
far from where she sat, below her.  Most of the people were on
their feet craning to look down over the edge to watch the
conclusion of this delightful spectacle.

Kate knew if she saw any more she would go into hysterics.  She was
getting beside herself.

She looked swiftly at Owen, who looked like a guilty boy
spellbound.

'I'm going!' she said, rising.

'Going!' he cried, in wonder and dismay, his flushed face and his
bald flushed forehead a picture, looking up at her.

But she had already turned, and was hurrying away towards the mouth
of the exit-tunnel.

Owen came running after her, flustered, and drawn in all
directions.

'Really going!' he said in chagrin, as she came to the high,
vaulted exit-tunnel.

'I must.  I've got to get out,' she cried.  'Don't you come.'

'Really!' he echoed, torn all ways.

The scene was creating a very hostile attitude in the audience.  To
leave the bull-fight is a national insult.

'Don't come!  Really!  I shall take a tram-car,' she said
hurriedly.

'Really!  Do you think you'll be all right?'

'Perfectly.  You stay.  Good-bye!  I can't smell any more of this
stink.'

He turned like Orpheus looking back into hell, and wavering made
towards his seat again.

It was not so easy, because many people were now on their feet and
crowding to the exit vault.  The rain which had sputtered a few
drops suddenly fell in a downward splash.  People were crowding to
shelter; but Owen, unheeding, fought his way back to his seat, and
sat in his rain-coat with the rain pouring on his bald head.  He
was as nearly in hysterics as Kate.  But he was convinced that this
was life.  He was seeing LIFE, and what can an American do more!

'They might just as well sit and enjoy somebody else's diarrhoea'
was the thought that passed through Kate's distracted but still
Irish mind.

There she was in the great concrete archway under the stadium, with
the lousy press of the audience crowding in after her.  Facing
outwards, she saw the straight downpour of the rain, and a little
beyond, the great wooden gates that opened to the free street.  Oh
to be out, to be out of this, to be free!

But it was pouring tropical rain.  The little shoddy soldiers were
pressing back under the brick gateway, for shelter.  And the gates
were almost shut.  Perhaps they would not let her out.  Oh horror!

She stood hovering in front of the straight downpour.  She would
have dashed out, but for the restraining thought of what she would
look like when her thin gauze dress was plastered to her body by
drenching rain.  On the brink she hovered.

Behind her, from the inner end of the stadium tunnel, the people
were surging in in waves.  She stood horrified and alone, looking
always out to freedom.  The crowd was in a state of excitement, cut
off in its sport, on tenterhooks lest it should miss anything.
Thank goodness the bulk stayed near the inner end of the vault.
She hovered near the outer end, ready to bolt at any moment.

The rain crashed steadily down.

She waited on the outer verge, as far from the people as possible.
Her face had that drawn, blank look of a woman near hysterics.  She
could not get out of her eyes the last picture of the horse lying
twisted on its neck with its hindquarters hitched up and the horn
of the bull goring slowly and rhythmically in its vitals.  The
horse so utterly passive and grotesque.  And all its bowels
slipping on to the ground.

But a new terror was the throng inside the tunnel entrance.  The
big arched place was filling up, but still the crowd did not come
very near her.  They pressed towards the inner exit.

They were mostly loutish men in city clothes, the mongrel men of a
mongrel city.  Two men stood making water against the wall, in the
interval of their excitement.  One father had kindly brought his
little boys to the show, and stood in fat, sloppy, paternal
benevolence above them.  They were pale mites, the elder about ten
years old, highly dressed up in Sunday clothes.  And badly they
needed protecting from that paternal benevolence, for they were
oppressed, peaked, and a bit wan from the horrors.  To those
children at least bull-fights did not come natural, but would be an
acquired taste.  There were other children, however, and fat mammas
in black satin that was greasy and grey at the edges with an
overflow of face-powder.  These fat mammas had a pleased, excited
look in their eyes, almost sexual, and very distasteful in contrast
to their soft passive bodies.

Kate shivered a little in her thin frock, for the ponderous rain
had a touch of ice.  She stared through the curtain of water at the
big rickety gates of the enclosure surrounding the amphitheatre, at
the midget soldiers cowering in their shoddy, pink-white cotton
uniforms, and at the glimpse of the squalid street outside, now
running with dirty brown streams.  The vendors had all taken
refuge, in dirty-white clusters, in the pulque shops, one of which
was sinisterly named:  A Ver que Sale.

She was afraid more of the repulsiveness than of anything.  She had
been in many cities of the world, but Mexico had an underlying
ugliness, a sort of squalid evil, which made Naples seem debonair
in comparison.  She was afraid, she dreaded the thought that
anything might really touch her in this town, and give her the
contagion of its crawling sort of evil.  But she knew that the one
thing she must do was to keep her head.

A little officer in uniform, wearing a big, pale-blue cape, made
his way through the crowd.  He was short, dark, and had a little
black beard like an imperial.  He came through the people from the
inner entrance, and cleared his way with a quiet, silent
unobtrusiveness, yet with the peculiar heavy Indian momentum.  Even
touching the crowd delicately with his gloved hand, and murmuring
almost inaudibly the Con permiso! formula, he seemed to be keeping
himself miles away from contact.  He was brave too: because there
was just the chance some lout might shoot him because of his
uniform.  The people knew him too.  Kate could tell that by the
flicker of a jeering, self-conscious smile that passed across many
faces, and the exclamation:  'General Viedma!  Don Cipriano!'

He came towards Kate, saluting and bowing with a brittle shyness.

'I am General Viedma.  Did you wish to leave?  Let me get you an
automobile,' he said, in very English English, that sounded strange
from his dark face, and a little stiff on his soft tongue.

His eyes were dark, quick, with the glassy darkness that she found
so wearying.  But they were tilted up with a curious slant, under
arched black brows.  It gave him an odd look of detachment, as if
he looked at life with raised brows.  His manner was superficially
assured, underneath perhaps half-savage, shy and farouche, and
deprecating.

'Thank you so much,' she said.

He called to a soldier in the gateway.

'I will send you in the automobile of my friend,' he said.  'It
will be better than a taxi.  You don't like the bull-fight?'

'No!  Horrible!' said Kate.  'But do get me a yellow taxi.  That is
quite safe.'

'Well, the man has gone for the automobile.  You are English, yes?'

'Irish,' said Kate.

'Ah Irish!' he replied, with the flicker of a smile.

'You speak English awfully well,' she said.

'Yes!  I was educated there.  I was in England seven years.'

'Were you!  My name is Mrs Leslie.'

'Ah Leslie!  I knew James Leslie in Oxford.  He was killed in the
war.'

'Yes.  That was my husband's brother.'

'Oh really!'

'How small the world is!' said Kate.

'Yes indeed!' said the General.

There was a pause.

'And the gentlemen who are with you, they are--?'

'American,' said Kate.

'Ah Americans!  Ah yes!'

'The older one is my cousin--Owen Rhys.'

'Owen Rhys!  Ah yes!  I think I saw in the newspaper you were here
in town--visiting Mexico.'

He spoke in a peculiar quiet voice, rather suppressed, and his
quick eyes glanced at her, and at his surroundings, like those of a
man perpetually suspecting an ambush.  But his face had a certain
silent hostility, under his kindness.  He was saving his nation's
reputation.

'They did put in a not very complimentary note,' said Kate.  'I
think they don't like it that we stay in the Hotel San Remo.  It is
too poor and foreign.  But we are none of us rich, and we like it
better than those other places.'

'The Hotel San Remo?  Where is that?'

'In the Avenida del Peru.  Won't you come and see us there, and
meet my cousin and Mr Thompson?'

'Thank you!  Thank you!  I hardly ever go out.  But I will call if
I may, and then perhaps you will all come to see me at the house of
my friend, Señor Ramón Carrasco.'

'We should like to,' said Kate.

'Very well.  And shall I call, then?'

She told him a time, and added:

'You mustn't be surprised at the hotel.  It IS small, and nearly
all Italians.  But we tried some of the big ones, and there is such
a feeling of lowness about them, awful!  I can't stand the feeling
of prostitution.  And then the cheap insolence of the servants.
No, my little San Remo may be rough, but it's kindly and human, and
it's not rotten.  It is like Italy as I always knew it, decent, and
with a bit of human generosity.  I do think Mexico City is evil,
underneath.'

'Well,' he said, 'the hotels are bad.  It is unfortunate, but the
foreigners seem to make the Mexicans worse than they are naturally.
And Mexico, or something in it, certainly makes the foreigners
worse than they are at home.'

He spoke with a certain bitterness.

'Perhaps we should all stay away,' she said.

'Perhaps!' he said, lifting his shoulders a little.  'But I don't
think so.'

He relapsed into a slightly blank silence.  Peculiar how his
feelings flushed over him, anger, diffidence, wistfulness,
assurance, and an anger again, all in little flushes, and somewhat
naïve.

'It doesn't rain so much,' said Kate.  'When will the car come?'

'It is here now.  It has been waiting some time,' he replied.

'Then I'll go,' she said.

'Well,' he replied, looking at the sky.  'It is still raining, and
your dress is very thin.  You must take my cloak.'

'Oh!' she said, shrinking, 'it is only two yards.'

'It is still raining fairly fast.  Better either wait, or let me
lend you my cloak.'

He swung out of his cloak with a quick little movement, and held it
up to her.  Almost without realizing, she turned her shoulders to
him and he put the cape on her.  She caught it round her, and ran
out to the gate, as if escaping.  He followed, with a light yet
military stride.  The soldiers saluted rather slovenly, and he
responded briefly.

A not very new Fiat stood at the gate, with a chauffeur in a short
red-and-black check coat.  The chauffeur opened the door.  Kate
slipped off the cloak as she got in, and handed it back.  He stood
with it over his arm.

'Good-bye!' she said.  'Thank you ever so much.  And we shall see
you on Tuesday.  Do put your cape on.'

'On Tuesday, yes.  Hotel San Remo.  Calle de Peru,' he added to the
chauffeur.  Then turning again to Kate:  'The hotel, no?'

'Yes,' she said, and instantly changed.  'No, take me to Sanborn's,
where I can sit in a corner and drink tea to comfort me.'

'To comfort you after the bull-fight?' he said, with another quick
smile.  'To Sanborn's, Gonzalez.'

He saluted and bowed and closed the door.  The car started.

Kate sat back, breathing relief.  Relief to get away from that
beastly place.  Relief even to get away from that nice man.  He was
awfully nice.  But he made her feel she wanted to get away from him
too.  There was that heavy, black Mexican fatality about him, that
put a burden on her.  His quietness, and his peculiar assurance,
almost aggressive; and at the same time, a nervousness, an
uncertainty.  His heavy sort of gloom, and yet his quick, naïve,
childish smile.  Those black eyes, like black jewels, that you
couldn't look into, and which were so watchful; yet which, perhaps,
were waiting for some sign of recognition and of warmth!  Perhaps!

She felt again, as she felt before, that Mexico lay in her destiny
almost as a doom.  Something so heavy, so oppressive, like the
folds of some huge serpent that seemed as if it could hardly raise
itself.

She was glad to get to her corner in the tea-house, to feel herself
in the cosmopolitan world once more, to drink her tea and eat
strawberry shortcake and try to forget.



CHAPTER II

Tea-party in Tlacolula


Owen came back to the hotel at about half-past six, tired, excited,
a little guilty, and a good deal distressed at having let Kate go
alone.  And now the whole thing was over, rather dreary in spirit.

'Oh, how did you get on?' he cried, the moment he saw her, afraid
almost like a boy of his own sin of omission.

'I got on perfectly.  Went to Sanborn's for tea, and had strawberry
shortcake--so good!'

'Oh, good for you!' he laughed in relief.  'Then you weren't TOO
much overcome!  I'm so glad.  I had such awful qualms after I'd let
you go.  Imagined all the things that are supposed to happen in
Mexico--chauffeur driving away with you into some horrible remote
region, and robbing you and all that--but then I KNEW really you'd
be all right.  Oh, the time I had--the rain!--and the people
throwing things at my bald patch--and those horses--wasn't that
horrible?--I wonder I'm still alive.'  And he laughed with tired
excitement, putting his hand over his stomach and rolling his eyes.

'Aren't you drenched?' she said.

'Drenched!' he replied.  'Or at least I was.  I've dried off quite
a lot.  My rain-coat is no good--I don't know why I don't buy
another.  Oh, but what a time!  The rain STREAMING on my bald head,
and the crowd behind throwing oranges at it.  Then simply GORED in
my inside about letting you go alone.  Yet it was the only bull-
fight I shall EVER see.  I came then before it was over.  Bud
wouldn't come.  I suppose he's still there.'

'Was it as awful as the beginning?' she asked.

'No!  No!  It wasn't.  The first was worst--that horse-shambles.
Oh, they killed two more horses.  And FIVE bulls!  Yes, a regular
butchery.  But some of it was very neat work; those toreadors did
some very pretty feats.  One stood on his cloak while a bull
charged him.'

'I think,' interrupted Kate, 'if I knew that some of those
toreadors were going to be tossed by the bull, I'd go to see
another bull-fight.  Ugh, how I detest them!  The longer I live the
more loathsome the human species becomes to me.  HOW much nicer the
bulls are!'

'Oh, quite!' said Owen vaguely.  'Exactly.  But still there was
some very skilful work, very pretty.  Really very plucky.'

'Yah!' snarled Kate.  'Plucky!  They with all their knives and
their spears and cloaks and darts--and they know just how a bull
will behave.  It's just a performance of human beings torturing
animals, with those common fellows showing off, how smart they are
at hurting a bull.  Dirty little boys maiming flies--that's what
they are.  Only grown-up, they are bastards, not boys.  Oh, _I_
wish I could be a bull, just for five minutes.  Bastard, that's
what I call it!'

'Well!' laughed Owen uneasily, 'it is rather.'

'Call that manliness!' cried Kate.  'Then thank God a million times
that I'm a woman, and know poltroonery and dirty-mindedness when I
see it.'

Again Owen laughed uncomfortably.

'Go upstairs and change,' she said.  'You'll die.'

'I think I'd better.  I feel I might die any minute, as a matter of
fact.  Well, till dinner then.  I'll tap at your door in half an
hour.'

Kate sat trying to sew, but her hand trembled.  She could not get
the bull-ring out of her mind, and something felt damaged in her
inside.

She straightened herself, and sighed.  She was really very angry,
too, with Owen.  He was naturally so sensitive, and so kind.  But
he had the insidious modern disease of tolerance.  He must tolerate
everything, even a thing that revolted him.  He would call it Life!
He would feel he had LIVED this afternoon.  Greedy even for the
most sordid sensations.

Whereas SHE felt as if she had eaten something which was giving her
ptomaine poisoning.  If THAT was life!

Ah men, men!  They all had this soft rottenness of the soul, a
strange perversity which made even the squalid, repulsive things
seem part of LIFE to them.  Life!  And what is life?  A louse lying
on its back and kicking?  Ugh!

At about seven o'clock Villiers came tapping.  He looked wan,
peaked, but like a bird that had successfully pecked a bellyful of
garbage.

'Oh it was GREAT!' he said, lounging on one hip.  'GREAT!  They
killed SEVEN BULLS.'

'No calves, unfortunately,' said Kate, suddenly furious again.

He paused to consider the point, then laughed.  Her anger was
another slight sensational amusement to him.

'No, no calves,' he said.  'The calves have come home to be
fattened.  But several more horses after you'd gone.'

'I don't want to hear,' she said coldly.

He laughed, feeling rather heroic.  After all, one must be able to
look on blood and bursten bowels calmly: even with a certain
thrill.  The young hero!  But there were dark rings round his eyes,
like a debauch.

'Oh but!' he began, making a rather coy face.  'Don't you want to
hear what I did after!  I went to the hotel of the chief toreador,
and saw him lying on his bed all dressed up, smoking a fat cigar.
Rather like a male Venus who is never undressed.  So funny!'

'Who took you there?' she said.

'That Pole, you remember?--and a Spaniard who talked English.  The
toreador was great, lying on his bed in all his get-up, except his
shoes, and quite a crowd of men going over it all again--
wawawawawa!--you never heard such a row!'

'Aren't you wet?' said Kate.

'No, not at all.  I'm perfectly dry.  You see I had my coat.  Only
my head, of course.  My poor hair was all streaked down my face
like streaks of dye.'  He wiped his thin hair across his head with
rather self-conscious humour.  'Hasn't Owen come in?' he asked.

'Yes, he's changing.'

'Well I'll go up.  I suppose it's nearly supper time.  Oh yes, it's
AFTER!'  At which discovery he brightened as if he'd received a
gift.

'Oh by the way, how did you get on?  Rather mean of us to let you
go all alone like that,' he said, as he hung poised in the open
doorway.

'Not at all,' she said.  'You wanted to stay.  And I can look after
myself, at my time of life.'

'We-ell!' he said, with an American drawl.  'Maybe you can!'  Then
he gave a little laugh.  'But you SHOULD have seen all those men
rehearsing in that bedroom, throwing their arms about, and the
toreador lying on the bed like Venus with a fat cigar, listening to
her lovers.'

'I'm glad I didn't,' said Kate.

Villiers disappeared with a wicked little laugh.  And as she sat
her hands trembled with outrage and passion.  A-moral!  How could
one be a-moral, or non-moral, when one's soul was revolted!  How
could one be like these Americans, picking over the garbage of
sensations, and gobbling it up like carrion birds!  At the moment,
both Owen and Villiers seemed to her like carrion birds, repulsive.

She felt, moreover, that they both hated her first because she was
a woman.  It was all right so long as she fell in with them in
every way.  But the moment she stood out against them in the least,
they hated her mechanically for the very fact that she was a woman.
They hated her womanness.

And in this Mexico, with its great under-drift of squalor and heavy
reptile-like evil, it was hard for her to bear up.

She was really fond of Owen.  But how could she respect him?  So
empty, and waiting for circumstance to fill him up.  Swept with an
American despair of having lived in vain, or of not having REALLY
lived.  Having missed something.  Which fearful misgiving would
make him rush like mechanical steel filings to a magnet, towards
any crowd in the street.  And then all his poetry and philosophy
gone with the cigarette-end he threw away, he would stand craning
his neck in one more frantic effort to SEE--just to SEE.  Whatever
it was, he must see it.  Or he might miss something.  And then,
after he'd seen an old ragged woman run over by a motor-car and
bleeding on the floor, he'd come back to Kate pale at the gills,
sick, bewildered, daunted, and yet, yes, glad he'd seen it.  It was
Life!

'Well,' said Kate, 'I always thank God I'm not Argus.  Two eyes are
often two too many for me, in all the horrors.  I don't feed myself
on street-accidents.'

At dinner they tried to talk of pleasanter things than bullfights.
Villiers was neat and tidy and very nicely mannered, but she knew
he was keeping a little mocking laugh up his sleeve, because she
could not stomach the afternoon's garbage.  He himself had black
rings under his eyes, but that was because he had 'lived.'

The climax came with the dessert.  In walked the Pole and that
Spaniard who spoke American.  The Pole was unhealthy and unclean-
looking.  She heard him saying to Owen, who of course had risen
with automatic cordiality:

'We thought we'd come here to dinner.  Well, how are you?'

Kate's skin was already goose-flesh.  But the next instant she
heard that dingy voice, that spoke so many languages dingily,
assailing her with familiarity:

'Ah, Miss Leslie, you missed the best part of it.  You missed all
the fun!  Oh, I say--'

Rage flew into her heart and fire into her eyes.  She got up
suddenly from her chair, and faced the fellow behind her.

'Thank you!' she said.  'I don't want to hear.  I don't want you to
speak to me.  I don't want to know you.'

She looked at him once, then turned her back, sat down again, and
took a pitahaya from the fruit plate.

The fellow went green, and stood a moment speechless.

'Oh, all right!' he said mechanically, turning away to the Spaniard
who spoke American.

'Well--see you later!' said Owen rather hurriedly, and he went back
to his seat at Kate's table.

The two strange fellows sat at another table.  Kate ate her cactus
fruit in silence, and waited for her coffee.  By this time she was
not so angry, she was quite calm.  And even Villiers hid his joy in
a new sensation under a manner of complete quiet composure.

When coffee came she looked at the two men at the other table, and
at the two men at her own table.

'I've had enough of canaille, of any sort,' she said.

'Oh, I understand, perfectly,' said Owen.

After dinner, she went to her room, and through the night she could
not sleep, but lay listening to the noises of Mexico City, then to
the silence and the strange, grisly fear that so often creeps out
on to the darkness of a Mexican night.  Away inside her, she
loathed Mexico City.  She even feared it.  In the daytime it had a
certain spell--but at night, the underneath grisliness and evil
came forth.

In the morning Owen also announced that he had not slept at all.

'Oh, I never slept so well since I was in Mexico,' said Villiers,
with a triumphant look of a bird that has just pecked a good morsel
from the garbage-heap.

'Look at the frail aesthetic youth!' said Owen, in a hollow voice.

'His frailty and his aestheticism are both bad signs, to me,' said
Kate ominously.

'And the youth.  Surely that's another!' said Owen, with a dead
laugh.

But Villiers only gave a little snort of cold, pleased amusement.

Someone was calling Miss Leslie on the telephone, said the Mexican
chambermaid.  It was the only person Kate knew in the capital--or
in the Distrito Federal--a Mrs Norris, widow of an English
ambassador of thirty years ago.  She had a big, ponderous old house
out in the village of Tlacolula.

'Yes!  Yes!  This is Mrs Norris.  How are you?  That's right,
that's right.  Now, Mrs Leslie, won't you come out to tea this
afternoon and see the garden?  I wish you would.  Two friends are
coming in to see me, two Mexicans: Don Ramón Carrasco and General
Viedma.  They are both CHARMING men, and Don Ramón is a great
scholar.  I assure you, they are both entirely the exception among
Mexicans.  Oh, but ENTIRELY the exception!  So now, my DEAR Mrs
Leslie, won't you come with your cousin?  I wish you would.'

Kate remembered the little General; he was a good deal smaller than
herself.  She remembered his erect, alert little figure, something
birdlike, and the face with eyes slanting under arched eyebrows,
and the little black tuft of an imperial on the chin: a face with a
peculiar Chinese suggestion, without being Chinese in the least,
really.  An odd, detached, yet cocky little man, a true little
Indian, speaking Oxford English in a rapid, low, musical voice,
with extraordinarily gentle intonation.  Yet those black, inhuman
eyes!

Till this minute she had not really been able to recall him to
herself, to get any sharp impression.  Now she had it.  He was an
Indian pure and simple.  And in Mexico, she knew, there were more
generals than soldiers.  There had been three generals in the
Pullman coming down from El Paso, two, more or less educated, in
the 'drawing-room', and the third, a real peasant Indian,
travelling with a frizzy half-white woman who looked as if she had
fallen into a flour-sack, her face was so deep in powder, and her
frizzy hair and her brown silk dress so douched with the white dust
of it.  Neither this 'General' nor this woman had ever been in a
Pullman before.  But the General was sharper than the woman.  He
was a tall wiry fellow with a reddened pock-marked face and sharp
little black eyes.  He followed Owen to the smoking-room, and
watched with sharp eyes, to see how everything was done.  And soon
he knew.  And he would wipe his wash-bowl dry as neatly as anybody.
There was something of a real man about him.  But the poor, half-
white woman, when she wanted the ladies' toilet, got lost in the
passage and wailed aloud:  I don't know where to go!  No sé adonde!
No sé adonde!--until the General sent the Pullman boy to direct
her.

But it had annoyed Kate to see this General and this woman eating
chicken and asparagus and jelly in the Pullman, paying fifteen
pesos for a rather poor dinner, when for a peso-and-a-half apiece
they could have eaten a better meal, and real Mexican, at the meal-
stop station.  And all the poor, barefoot people clamouring on the
platform, while the 'General', who was a man of their own sort,
nobly swallowed his asparagus on the other side of the window-pane.

But this is how they save the people, in Mexico and elsewhere.
Some tough individual scrambles up out of the squalor and proceeds
to save himself.  Who pays for the asparagus and jelly and face-
powder, nobody asks, because everybody knows.

And so much for Mexican generals: as a rule, a class to be strictly
avoided.

Kate was aware of all this.  She wasn't much interested in any sort
of Mexican in office.  There is so much in the world that one wants
to avoid, as one wants to avoid the lice that creep on the unwashed
crowd.

Being rather late, Owen and Kate bumped out to Tlacolula in a Ford
taxi.  It was a long way, a long way through the peculiar squalid
endings of the town, then along the straight road between trees,
into the valley.  The sun of April was brilliant, there were piles
of cloud about the sky, where the volcanoes would be.  The valley
stretched away to its sombre, atmospheric hills, in a flat dry bed,
parched except where there was some crop being irrigated.  The soil
seemed strange, dry, blackish, artificially wetted, and old.  The
trees rose high, and hung bare boughs, or withered shade.  The
buildings were either new and alien, like the Country Club, or
cracked and dilapidated, with all the plaster falling off.  The
falling of thick plaster from cracked buildings--one could almost
hear it!

Yellow tram-cars rushed at express speed away down the fenced-in
car-lines, rushing round towards Xochimilco or Tlalpam.  The
asphalt road ran outside these lines, and on the asphalt rushed
incredibly dilapidated Ford omnibuses, crowded with blank dark
natives in dirty cotton clothes and big straw hats.  At the far
edge of the road, on the dust-tracks under the trees, little
donkeys under huge loads loitered towards the city, driven by men
with blackened faces and bare, blackened legs.  Three-fold went
the traffic; the roar of the tram-trains, the clatter of the 
automobiles, the straggle of asses and of outside-seeming
individuals.

Occasional flowers would splash out in colour from a ruin of
falling plaster.  Occasional women with strong, dark-brown arms
would be washing rags in a drain.  An occasional horseman would
ride across to the herd of motionless black-and-white cattle on the
field.  Occasional maize-fields were already coming green.  And the
pillars that mark the water conduits passed one by one.

They went through the tree-filled plaza of Tlacolula, where natives
were squatting on the ground, selling fruits or sweets, then down a
road between high walls.  They pulled up at last at big gate-doors,
beyond which was a heavy pink-and-yellow house, and beyond the
house, high, dark cypress trees.

In the road two motor-cars were already standing.  That meant other
visitors.  Owen knocked on the studded fortress doors: there was an
imbecile barking of dogs.  At last a little footman with a little
black moustache opened silently.

The square, inner patio, dark, with sun lying on the heavy arches
of one side, had pots of red and white flowers, but was ponderous,
as if dead for centuries.  A certain dead, heavy strength and
beauty seemed there, unable to pass away, unable to liberate itself
and decompose.  There was a stone basin of clear but motionless
water, and the heavy reddish-and-yellow arches went round the
courtyard with warrior-like fatality, their bases in dark shadow.
Dead, massive house of the Conquistadores, with a glimpse of tall-
grown garden beyond, and further Aztec cypresses rising to strange
dark heights.  And dead silence, like the black, porous, absorptive
lava rock.  Save when the tram-cars battered past outside the solid
wall.

Kate went up the jet-like stone staircase, through the leather
doors.  Mrs Norris came forward on the terrace of the upper patio
to receive her guests.

'I'm so glad, my dear, that you came.  I should have rung you up
before, but I've had such trouble with my heart.  And the doctor
wanting to send me down to a lower altitude!  I said to him, I've
no patience!  If you're going to cure me, cure me at an altitude of
seven thousand feet or else admit your incompetence at once.
Ridiculous, this rushing up and down from one altitude to another.
I've lived at this height all these years.  I simply refuse to be
bundled down to Cuernavaca or some other place where I don't want
to go.  Well, my dear, and how are you?'

Mrs Norris was an elderly woman, rather like a conquistador herself
in her black silk dress and her little black shoulder-shawl of fine
cashmere, with a short silk fringe, and her ornaments of black
enamel.  Her face had gone slightly grey, her nose was sharp and
dusky, and her voice hammered almost like metal, a slow, distinct,
peculiar hard music of its own.  She was an archaeologist, and she
had studied the Aztec remains so long, that now some of the black-
grey look of the lava rock, and some of the experience of the Aztec
idols, with sharp nose and slightly prominent eyes and an
expression of tomb-like mockery, had passed into her face.  A
lonely daughter of culture, with a strong mind and a dense will,
she had browsed all her life on the hard stones of archaeological
remains, and at the same time she had retained a strong sense of
humanity, and a slightly fantastic humorous vision of her fellow
men.

From the first instant, Kate respected her for her isolation and
her dauntlessness.  The world is made up of a mass of people and a
few individuals.  Mrs Norris was one of the few individuals.  True,
she played her social game all the time.  But she was an odd
number; and all alone, she could give the even numbers a bad time.

'But come in.  Do come in!' she said, after keeping her two guests
out on the terrace that was lined with black idols and dusty native
baskets and shields and arrows and tapa, like a museum.

In the dark sitting-room that opened on to the terrace were
visitors: an old man in a black morning coat and white hair and
beard, and a woman in black crêpe-de-chine, with the inevitable hat
of her sort upon her grey hair: a stiff satin turned up on three
sides and with black ospreys underneath.  She had the baby face and
the faded blue eyes and the middle-west accent inevitable.

'Judge and Mrs Burlap.'

The third visitor was a youngish man, very correct and not quite
sure.  He was Major Law, American military attaché at the moment.

The three people eyed the newcomers with cautious suspicion.  They
might be shady.  There are indeed so many shady people in Mexico
that it is taken for granted, if you arrive unannounced and
unexpected in the capital, that you are probably under an assumed
name, and have some dirty game up your sleeve.

'Been long in Mexico?' snapped the Judge; the police enquiry had
begun.

'No!' said Owen, resonantly, his gorge rising.  'About two weeks.'

'You are an American?'

'I,' said Owen, 'am American.  Mrs Leslie is English--or rather
Irish.'

'Been in the club yet?'

'No,' said Owen, 'I haven't.  American clubs aren't much in my
line.  Though Garfield Spence gave me a letter of introduction.'

'Who?  Garfield Spence?'  The judge started as if he had been
stung.  'Why the fellow's nothing better than a bolshevist.  Why he
went to Russia!'

'I should rather like to go to Russia myself,' said Owen.  'It is
probably the most interesting country in the world to-day.'

'But weren't you telling me,' put in Mrs Norris, in her clear,
metal-musical voice, 'that you loved China so much, Mr Rhys?'

'I DID like China VERY much,' said Owen.

'And I'm sure you made some wonderful collections.  Tell me now,
what was your particular fancy?'

'Perhaps, after all,' said Owen, 'it was jade.'

'Ah jade!  Yes!  Jade!  Jade is beautiful!  Those wonderful little
fairy-lands they carve in jade!'

'And the stone itself!  It was the delicate stone that fascinated
me,' said Owen.  'The wonderful quality of it!'

'Ah wonderful, wonderful!  Tell me now, dear Mrs Leslie, what you
have been doing since I saw you?'

'We went to a bull-fight, and hated it,' said Kate.  'At least I
did.  We sat in the Sun, near the ring, and it was all horrible.'

'Horrible, I am sure.  I never went to a bull-fight in Mexico.
Only in Spain, where there is wonderful colour.  Did you ever try a
bull-fight, Major?'

'Yes, I have been several times.'

'You have!  Then you know all about it.  And how are you liking
Mexico, Mrs Leslie?'

'Not much,' said Kate.  'It strikes me as evil.'

'It does!  It does!' said Mrs Norris.  'Ah, if you had known it
before!  Mexico before the revolution!  It was different then.
What is the latest news, Major?'

'About the same,' said the Major.  'There is a rumour that the new
President will be turned down by the army, a few days before he
comes into office.  But you never know.'

'I think it would be a great shame not to let him have a try,' put
in Owen hotly.  'He seems a sincere man, and just because he is
honestly a Labour man, they want to shut him out.'

'Ah, my dear Mr Rhys, they ALL talk so nobly beforehand.  If only
their deeds followed their words, Mexico would be heaven on earth.'

'Instead of hell on earth,' snapped the Judge.

A young man and his wife, also Americans, were introduced as Mr and
Mrs Henry.  The young man was fresh and lively.

'We were talking about the new President,' said Mrs. Norris.

'Well, why not!' said Mr Henry breezily.  'I'm just back from
Orizaba.  And do you know what they've got pasted up on the walls?--
Hosanna!  Hosanna!  Hosanna!  Viva el Jesús Cristo de Mexico,
Socrates Tomás Montes!'

'Why, did you ever hear of such a thing!' said Mrs. Norris.

'Hosanna!  Hosanna!  Hosanna!  To the new Labour President.  I
think it's rich,' said Henry.

The Judge stamped his stick on the ground in a speechless access of
irritability.

'They pasted on my luggage,' said the Major, 'when I came through
Vera Cruz:  La degenerada media clasa, Será regenerada, por mi,
Montes.  The degenerate middle class shall be regenerated by me,
Montes.'

'Poor Montes!' said Kate.  'He seems to have got his work cut out.'

'He has indeed!' said Mrs Norris.  'Poor man, I wish he might come
in peacefully and put a strong hand on the country.  But there's
not much hope, I'm afraid.'

There was a silence, during which Kate felt that bitter hopelessness
that comes over people who know Mexico well.  A bitter barren
hopelessness.

'How can a man who comes in on a Labour vote, even a doctored one,
put a strong hand on a country!' snapped the Judge.  'Why he came
in on the very cry of Down with the strong hand!'  And again the
old man stamped his stick in an access of extreme irritability.

This was another characteristic of the old residents of the city:
A state of intense, though often suppressed irritation, an
irritation amounting almost to rabies.

'Oh, but mayn't it be possible that he will change his views a
little on coming into power?' said Mrs Norris.  'So many Presidents
have done so.'

'I should say very probable, if ever he gets into power,' said
young Henry.  'He'll have all his work cut out saving Socrates
Tomás, he won't have much time left for saving Mexico.'

'He's a dangerous fellow, and will turn out a scoundrel,' said the
Judge.

'Myself,' said Owen, 'as far as I have followed him, I believe he
is sincere, and I admire him.'

'I thought it was so nice,' said Kate, 'that they received him in
New York with loud music by the Street Sweepers' Band.  The Street
Sweepers' Band they sent to receive him from the ship!'

'You see,' said the Major, 'no doubt the Labour people themselves
wished to send that particular band.'

'But to be President Elect, and to be received by the Street
Sweepers' Band!' said Kate.  'No, I can't believe it!'

'Oh, it actually was so,' said the Major.  'But that is Labour
hailing Labour, surely.'

'The latest rumour,' said Henry, 'is that the army will go over en
bloc to General Angulo about the twenty-third, a week before the
inauguration.'

'But how is it possible?' said Kate, 'when Montes is so popular?'

'Montes popular!' they all cried at once.  'Why!' snapped the
Judge, 'he's the most unpopular man in Mexico.'

'Not with the Labour Party!' said Owen, almost at bay.

'The Labour Party!' the Judge fairly spat like a cat.  'There is no
such thing.  What is the Labour Party in Mexico?  A bunch of
isolated factory hands here and there, mostly in the State of Vera
Cruz.  The Labour Party!  They've done what they could already.  We
know them.'

'That's true,' said Henry.  'The Labourites have tried every little
game possible.  When I was in Orizaba they marched to the Hotel
Francia to shoot all the gringoes and the Gachupines.  The hotel
manager had pluck enough to harangue them, and they went off to the
next hotel.  When the man came out there to talk to them, they shot
him before he got a word out.  It's funny, really!  If you have to
go to the Town Hall, and you're dressed in decent clothes, they let
you sit on a hard bench for hours.  But if a street-sweeper comes
in, or a fellow in dirty cotton drawers, it is Buenos dias! Señor!
Pase Usted!  Quiere Usted algo?--while you sit there waiting their
pleasure.  Oh, it's quite funny.'

The Judge trembled with irritation like an access of gout.  The
party sat in gloomy silence, that sense of doom and despair
overcoming them as it seems to overcome all people who talk
seriously about Mexico.  Even Owen was silent.  He too had come
through Vera Cruz, and had had his fright; the porters had charged
him twenty pesos to carry his trunk from the ship to the train.
Twenty pesos is ten dollars, for ten minutes' work.  And when Owen
had seen the man in front of him arrested and actually sent to
jail, a Mexican jail at that, for refusing to pay the charge, 'the
legal charge', he himself had stumped up without a word.

'I walked into the National Museum the other day,' said the Major
quietly.  'Just into that room on the patio where the stones are.
It was rather a cold morning, with a Norte blowing.  I'd been there
about ten minutes when somebody suddenly poked me on the shoulder.
I turned round, and it was a lout in tight boots.  You spik
English?  I said yes!  Then he motioned me to take my hat off: I'd
got to take my hat off.  What for? said I, and I turned away and
went on looking at their idols and things: ugliest set of stuff in
the world, I believe.  Then up came the fellow with the attendant--
the attendant of course wearing his cap.  They began gabbling that
this was the National Museum, and I must take off my hat to their
national monuments.  Imagine it: those dirty stones!  I laughed at
them and jammed my hat on tighter and walked out.  They are really
only monkeys when it comes to nationalism.'

'Exactly!' cried Henry.  'When they forget all about the Patria and
Mexico and all that stuff, they're as nice a people as you'd find.
But as soon as they get national, they're just monkeys.  A man up
from Mixcoatl told me a nice story.  Mixcoatl is a capital way in
the South, and they've got a sort of Labour bureau there.  Well,
the Indians come in from the hills, as wild as rabbits.  And they
get them into that bureau, and the Laboristas, the agitator
fellows, say to them:  Now, Señores, have you anything to report
from your native village?  Haven't you anything for which you would
like redress?  Then of course the Indians start complaining about
one another, and the Secretary says:  Wait a minute, gentlemen!
Let me ring up the Governor and report this.  So he goes to the
telephone and starts ringing: ringing:  Ah!  Is that the Palace?
Is the Governor in?  Tell him Señor Fulano wants to speak to him!
The Indians sit gaping with open mouths.  To them it's a miracle.
Ah!  Is that you, Governor!  Good morning!  How are you?  Can I
have your attention for a moment?  Many thanks!  Well I've got some
gentlemen here down from Apaxtle, in the hills: José Garcia, Jesús
Querido, etc.--and they wish to report so-and-so.  Yes!  Yes!
That's it!  Yes!  What?  You will see that justice is done and the
thing is made right?  Ah señor, many thanks!  In the name of these
gentlemen from the hills, from the village of Apaxtle, many thanks.

'There sit the Indians staring as if heaven had opened and the
Virgin of Guadalupe was standing tiptoe on their chins.  And what
do you expect?  The telephone is a dummy.  It isn't connected with
anywhere.  Isn't that rich?  But it's Mexico.'

The moment's fatal pause followed this funny story.

'Oh but!' said Kate, 'it's wicked!  It IS wicked.  I'm sure the
Indians would be all right, if they were left alone.'

'Well,' said Mrs Norris, 'Mexico isn't like any other place in the
world.'

But she spoke with fear and despair in her voice.

'They seem to WANT to betray everything,' said Kate.  'They seem to
LOVE criminals and ghastly things.  They seem to want the ugly
things.  They seem to WANT the ugly things to come up to the top.
All the foulness that lies at the bottom, they want to stir up to
the top.  They seem to enjoy it.  To enjoy making everything
fouler.  Isn't it curious!'

'It is curious,' said Mrs Norris.

'But that's what it is,' said the Judge.  'They want to turn the
country into one big crime.  They don't like anything else.  They
don't like honesty and decency and cleanliness.  They want to
foster lies and crime.  What they call liberty here is just freedom
to commit crime.  That's what Labour means, that's what they all
mean.  Free crime, nothing else.'

'I wonder all the foreigners don't go away,' said Kate.

'They have their occupations here,' snapped the Judge.

'And the good people ARE all going away.  They have nearly all
gone, those that have anything left to go to,' said Mrs Norris.
'Some of us, who have our property here, and who have made our
lives here, and who know the country, we stay out of a kind of
tenacity.  But we know it's hopeless.  The more it changes, the
worse it is.--Ah, here is Don Ramón and Don Cipriano.  So pleased
to see you.  Let me introduce you.'

Don Ramón Carrasco was a tall, big, handsome man who gave the
effect of bigness.  He was middle aged, with a large black
moustache and large, rather haughty eyes under straight brows.  The
General was in civilian clothes, looking very small beside the
other man, and very smartly built, almost cocky.

'Come,' said Mrs Norris.  'Let us go across and have tea.'

The Major excused himself, and took his departure.

Mrs Norris gathered her little shawl round her shoulders and led
through a sombre antechamber to a little terrace, where creepers
and flowers bloomed thick on the low walls.  There was a bell-
flower, red and velvety, like blood that is drying: and clusters of
white roses: and tufts of bougainvillea, papery magenta colour.

'How lovely it is here!' said Kate.  'Having the great dark trees
beyond.'

But she stood in a kind of dread.

'Yes it IS beautiful,' said Mrs Norris, with the gratification of a
possessor.  'I have such a time trying to keep these apart.'  And
going across in her little black shawl, she pushed the bougainvillea
away from the rust-scarlet bell-flowers, stroking the little white
roses to make them intervene.

'I think the two reds together interesting,' said Owen.

'Do you really!' said Mrs Norris, automatically, paying no heed to
such a remark.

The sky was blue overhead, but on the lower horizon was a thick,
pearl haze.  The clouds had gone.

'One never sees Popocatepetl nor Ixtaccihuatl,' said Kate,
disappointed.

'No, not at this season.  But look, through the trees there, you
see Ajusco!'

Kate looked at the sombre-seeming mountain, between the huge dark
trees.

On the low stone parapet were Aztec things, obsidian knives,
grimacing squatting idols in black lava, and a queer thickish stone
stick, or bâton.  Owen was balancing the latter: it felt murderous
even to touch.

Kate turned to the General, who was near her, his face expressionless,
yet alert.

'Aztec things oppress me,' she said.

'They ARE oppressive,' he answered, in his beautiful cultured
English, that was nevertheless a tiny bit like a parrot talking.

'There is no hope in them,' she said.

'Perhaps the Aztecs never asked for hope,' he said, somewhat
automatically.

'Surely it is hope that keeps one going?' she said.

'You, maybe.  But not the Aztec, nor the Indian to-day.'

He spoke like a man who has something in reserve, who is only half
attending to what he hears, and even to his own answer.

'What do they have, if they don't have hope?' she said.

'They have some other strength, perhaps,' he said evasively.

'I would like to give them hope,' she said.  'If they had hope,
they wouldn't be so sad, and they would be cleaner, and not have
vermin.'

'That of course would be good,' he said, with a little smile.  'But
I think they are not so very sad.  They laugh a good deal and are
gay.'

'No,' she said.  'They oppress me, like a weight on my heart.  They
make me irritable, and I want to go away.'

'From Mexico?'

'Yes.  I feel I want to go away from it and never, never see it
again.  It is so oppressive and gruesome.'

'Try it a little longer,' he said.  'Perhaps you will feel
differently.  But perhaps not,' he ended vaguely, driftingly.

She could feel in him a sort of yearning towards her.  As if a sort
of appeal came to her from him, from his physical heart in his
breast.  As if the very heart gave out dark rays of seeking and
yearning.  She glimpsed this now for the first time, quite apart
from the talking, and it made her shy.

'And does everything in Mexico oppress you?' he added, almost
shyly, but with a touch of mockery, looking at her with a troubled
naïve face that had its age heavy and resistant beneath the
surface.

'Almost everything!' she said.  'It ALWAYS makes my heart sink.
Like the eyes of the men in the big hats--I call them the peons.
Their eyes have no middle to them.  Those big handsome men, under
their big hats, they aren't really there.  They have no centre, no
real _I_.  Their middle is a raging black hole, like the middle of
a maelstrom.'

She looked with her troubled grey eyes into the black, slanting,
watchful, calculating eyes of the small man opposite her.  He had a
pained expression, puzzled, like a child.  And at the same time
something obstinate and mature, a demonish maturity, opposing her
in an animal way.

'You mean we aren't real people, we have nothing of our own, except
killing and death,' he said, quite matter of fact.

'I don't know,' she said, startled by his interpretation.  'I only
say how it makes me feel.'

'You are very clever, Mrs Leslie,' came Don Ramón's quiet, but
heavy teasing voice behind her.  'It is quite true.  Whenever a
Mexican cries Viva! he ends up with Muera!  When he says Viva! he
really means Death for Somebody or Other!  I think of all the
Mexican revolutions, and I see a skeleton walking ahead of a great
number of people, waving a black banner with Viva la Muerte!
written in large white letters.  Long live Death!  Not Viva Cristo
Rey! but Viva Muerte Rey!  Vamos!  Viva!'

Kate looked round.  Don Ramón was flashing his knowing brown
Spanish eyes, and a little sardonic smile lurked under his
moustache.  Instantly Kate and he, Europeans in essence, understood
one another.  He was waving his arm to the last Viva!

'But,' said Kate, 'I don't want to say Viva la Muerte!'

'But when you are real Mexican--' he said, teasing.

'I NEVER could be,' she said hotly, and he laughed.

'I'm afraid Viva la Muerte! hits the nail on the head,' said Mrs
Norris, rather stonily.  'But won't you come to tea!  Do!'

She led the way in her black little shawl and neat grey hair, going
ahead like a Conquistador herself, and turning to look with her
Aztec eyes through her pince-nez, to see if the others were coming.

'We are following,' said Don Ramón in Spanish, teasing her.
Stately in his black suit, he walked behind her on the narrow
terrace, and Kate followed, with the small, strutting Don Cipriano,
also in a black suit, lingering oddly near her.

'Do I call you General or Don Cipriano?' she asked, turning to him.

An amused little smile quickly lit his face, though his eyes did
not smile.  They looked at her with a black, sharp look.

'As you wish,' he said.  'You know General is a term of disgrace in
Mexico.  Shall we say Don Cipriano?'

'Yes, I like that much the best,' she said.

And he seemed pleased.

It was a round tea-table, with shiny silver tea-service, and silver
kettle with a little flame, and pink and white oleanders.  The
little neat young footman carried the tea-cups, in white cotton
gloves.  Mrs Norris poured tea and cut cakes with a heavy hand.

Don Ramón sat on her right hand, the Judge on her left.  Kate was
between the Judge and Mr Henry.  Everybody except Don Ramón and the
Judge was a little nervous.  Mrs Norris always put her visitors
uncomfortably at their ease, as if they were captives and she the
chieftainess who had captured them.  She rather enjoyed it,
heavily, archaeologically queening at the head of the table.  But
it was evident that Don Ramón, by far the most impressive person
present, liked her.  Cipriano, on the other hand, remained mute and
disciplined, perfectly familiar with the tea-table routine,
superficially quite at ease, but underneath remote and unconnected.
He glanced from time to time at Kate.

She was a beautiful woman, in her own unconventional way, and with
a certain richness.  She was going to be forty next week.  Used to
all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of
a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.  She was never IN
any society: too Irish, too wise.

'But of course nobody lives without hope,' Mrs Norris was saying
banteringly to Don Ramón.  'If it's only the hope of a real, to buy
a litre of pulque.'

'Ah, Mrs Norris!' he replied in his quiet, yet curiously deep
voice, like a violoncello:  'If pulque is the highest happiness!'

'Then we are fortunate, because a tostón will buy paradise,' she
said.

'It is a bon mot, Señora mía,' said Don Ramón, laughing and
drinking his tea.

'Now won't you try these little native cakes with sesame seeds on
them!' said Mrs Norris to the table at large.'  My cook makes them,
and her national feeling is flattered when anybody likes them.  Mrs
Leslie, do take one.'

'I will,' said Kate.  'Does one say Open Sesame!'

'If one wishes,' said Mrs Norris.

'Won't you have one?' said Kate, handing the plate to Judge Burlap.

'Don't want any,' he snapped, turning his face away as if he had
been offered a plate of Mexicans, and leaving Kate with the dish
suspended.

Mrs Norris quickly but definitely took the plate, saying:

'Judge Burlap is afraid of Sesame Seed, he prefers the cave shut.'
And she handed the dish quietly to Cipriano, who was watching the
old man's bad manners with black, snake-like eyes.

'Did you see that article by Willis Rice Hope, in the Excelsior?'
suddenly snarled the Judge, to his hostess.

'I did.  I thought it very sensible.'

'The only sensible thing that's been said about these Agrarian
Laws.  Sensible!  I should think so.  Why Rice Hope came to me, and
I put him up to a few things.  But his article says EVERYTHING,
doesn't miss an item of importance.'

'Quite!' said Mrs Norris, with rather stony attention.  'If only
SAYING would alter things, Judge Burlap.'

'Saying the wrong thing has done all the mischief!' snapped the
Judge.  'Fellows like Garfield Spence coming down here and talking
a lot of criminal talk.  Why the town's full of Socialists and
Sinvergüenzas from New York.'

Mrs Norris adjusted her pince-nez.

'Fortunately,' she said, 'they don't come out to Tlacolula, so we
needn't think about them.  Mrs Henry, let me give you some more
tea.'

'Do you read SPANISH?' the Judge spat out, at Owen.  Owen, in his
big shell spectacles, was evidently a red rag to his irritable
fellow-countryman.

'No!' said Owen, round as a cannon-shot.

Mrs Norris once more adjusted her eye-glasses.

'It's such a relief to hear someone who is altogether innocent of
Spanish, and altogether unashamed,' she said.  'My father had us
all speaking four languages by the time we were twelve, and we have
none of us ever quite recovered.  My stockings were all dyed blue
for me before I put my hair up.  By the way!  How have you been for
walking, Judge?  You heard of the time I had with my ankle?'

'Of course we heard!' cried Mrs Burlap, seeing dry land at last.
I've been trying SO hard to get out to see you, to ask about it.
We were so GRIEVED about it.'

'What happened?' said Kate.

'Why I foolishly slipped on a piece of orange peel in town--just at
the corner of San Juan de Latrán and Madero.  And I fell right
down.  And of course, the first thing I did when I got up was to
push the piece of orange peel into the gutter.  And would you
believe it, that lot of Mex--' she caught herself up--'that lot of
fellows standing there at the corner laughed heartily at me, when
they saw me doing it.  They thought it an excellent joke.'

'Of course they would,' said the Judge.  'They were waiting for the
next person to come along and fall.'

'Did nobody help you?' asked Kate.

'Oh no!  If anyone has an accident in this country, you must never,
NEVER help.  If you touch them even, you may be arrested for
causing the accident.'

'That's the law!' said the Judge.  'If you touch them before the
police arrive, you are arrested for complicity.  Let them lie and
bleed, is the motto.'

'Is that true?' said Kate to Don Ramón.

'Fairly true,' he replied.  'Yes, it is true you must not touch the
one who is hurt.'

'How disgusting!' said Kate.

'Disgusting!' cried the Judge.  'A great deal is disgusting in this
country, as you'll learn if you stay here long.  I nearly lost my
life on a banana skin; lay in a darkened room for days, between
life and death, and lame for life from it.'

'How awful!' said Kate.  'What did you do when you fell?'

'What did I do?  Just smashed my hip.'

It had truly been a terrible accident, and the man had suffered
bitterly.

'You can hardly blame Mexico for a banana skin,' said Owen, elated.
'I fell on one in Lexington Avenue; but fortunately I only bruised
myself on a soft spot.'

'That wasn't your head, was it?' said Mrs Henry.

'No,' laughed Owen.  'The other extreme.'

'We've got to add banana skins to the list of public menaces,' said
young Henry.  'I'm an American, and I may any day turn bolshevist,
to save my pesos, so I can repeat what I heard a man saying
yesterday.  He said there are only two great diseases in the world
to-day--Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of
the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your
business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.'

'Who was he?' snarled the Judge.

'I forget,' said Henry, wickedly.

'One wonders,' said Mrs Norris slowly, 'what he meant by
Americanism.'

'He didn't define it,' said Henry.  'Cult of the dollar, I
suppose.'

'Well,' said Mrs Norris.  'The cult of the dollar, in my
experience, is far more intense in the countries that haven't got
the dollar, than in the United States.'

Kate felt that the table was like a steel disc to which they were
all, as victims, magnetized and bound.

'Where IS your garden, Mrs Norris?' she asked.

They trooped out, gasping with relief, to the terrace.  The Judge
hobbled behind, and Kate had to linger sympathetically to keep him
company.

They were on the little terrace.

'Isn't this strange stuff!' said Kate, picking up one of the Aztec
stone knives on the parapet.  'Is it a sort of jade?'

'Jade!' snarled the Judge.  'Jade's GREEN, not black.  That's
obsidian.'

'Jade CAN be black,' said Kate.  'I've got a lovely little black
tortoise of jade from China.'

'You can't have.  Jade's bright green.'

'But there's white jade too.  I know there is.'

The Judge was silent from exasperation for a few moments, then he
snapped:

'Jade's bright green.'

Owen, who had the ears of a lynx, had heard.

'What's that?' he said.

'Surely there's more than green jade!' said Kate.

'What!' cried Owen.  'More!  Why there's every imaginable tint--
white, rose, lavender--'

'And black?' said Kate.

'Black?  Oh yes, quite common.  Why you should see my collection.
The most beautiful range of colour!  Only green jade!  Ha-ha-ha!'--
and he laughed a rather stage laugh.

They had come to the stairs, which were old stone, waxed and
polished in some way till they were a glittering black.

'I'll catch hold of your arm down here,' said the Judge to young
Henry.  'This staircase is a death-trap.'

Mrs Norris heard without comment.  She only tilted her pince-nez on
her sharp nose.

In the archway downstairs, Don Ramón and the General took their
leave.  The rest trailed on into the garden.

Evening was falling.  The garden was drawn up tall, under the huge
dark trees on the one side, and the tall, reddish-and-yellow house
on the other.  It was like being at the bottom of some dusky,
flowering garden down in Hades.  Hibiscus hung scarlet from the
bushes, putting out yellow bristling tongues.  Some roses were
scattering scentless petals on the twilight, and lonely-looking
carnations hung on weak stalks.  From a huge dense bush the
mysterious white bells of the datura were suspended, large and
silent, like the very ghosts of sound.  And the datura scent was
moving thick and noiseless from the tree, into the little alleys.

Mrs Burlap had hitched herself on to Kate, and from her silly,
social baby-face was emitting searching questions.

'What hotel are you staying at?'

Kate told her.

'I don't know it.  Where is it?'

'In the Avenida del Peru.  You wouldn't know it, it is a little
Italian hotel.'

'Are you staying long?'

'We aren't certain.'

'Is Mr Rhys on a newspaper?'

'No, he's a poet.'

'Does he make a living by poetry?'

'No, he doesn't try to.'

It was the sort of secret service investigation one is submitted
to, in the capital of shady people, particularly shady foreigners.

Mrs Norris was lingering by a flowering arch of little white
flowers.

Already a firefly was sparking.  It was already night.

'Well, good-bye, Mrs Norris!  WON'T you come and lunch with us?  I
don't mean come out to our house.  Only let me know, and lunch with
me ANYWHERE YOU LIKE, in town.'

'Thank you, my dear!  Thank you so much!  Well!  I'll see!

Mrs Norris was almost regal, stonily, Aztec-regal.

At last they had all made their adieus, and the great doors were
shut behind them.

'How did you come out?' Mrs Burlap asked, impertinent.

'In an old Ford taxi--but where is it?' said Kate, peering into the
dark.  It should have been under the fresno trees opposite, but it
wasn't.

'What a curious thing!' said Owen, and he disappeared into the
night.

'Which way do you go?' said Mrs Burlap.

'To the Zócalo,' said Kate.

'We have to take a tram, the opposite way,' said the baby-faced,
withered woman from the Middle-West.

The Judge was hobbling along the pavement like a cat on hot bricks,
to the corner.  Across the road stood a group of natives in big
hats and white calico clothes, all a little the worse for the
pulque they had drunk.  Nearer, on this side of the road, stood
another little gang, of workmen in town clothes.

'There you have them,' said the Judge, flourishing his stick with
utter vindictiveness.  'There's the two lots of 'em.'

'What two lots?' said Kate, surprised.

'Those peon fellows and those obreros, all drunk, the lot of them.
The lot of them!'  And in a spasm of pure, frustrated hate, he
turned his back on her.

At the same time they saw the lights of a tram-car rushing dragon-
like up the dark road, between the high wall and the huge trees.

'Here's our car!' said the Judge, beginning to scramble excitedly
with his stick.

'You go the other way,' flung the baby-faced, faded woman in the
three-cornered satin hat, also beginning to fluster as if she were
going to swim off the pavement.

The couple clambered avidly into the brightly-lighted car, first
class; hobbling up.  The natives crowded into the second class.

Away whizzed the tren.  The Burlap couple had not even said good
night.  They were terrified lest they might have to know somebody
whom they might not want to know; whom it might not PAY to know.

'You common-place little woman!' said Kate aloud, looking after the
retreating tram-car.  'You awful ill-bred little pair.'

She was a bit afraid of the natives, not quite sober, who were
waiting for the car in the opposite direction.  But stronger than
her fear was a certain sympathy with these dark-faced silent men in
their big straw hats and naïve little cotton blouses.  Anyhow they
had blood in their veins: they were columns of dark blood.

Whereas the other bloodless, acidulous couple from the Middle-West,
with their nasty whiteness . . . !

She thought of the little tale the natives tell.  When the Lord was
making the first men, He made them of clay and put them into the
oven to bake.  They came out black.  They're baked too much! said
the Lord.  So He made another batch, and put them in.  They came
out white.  They're baked too little!  He said.  So He had a third
try.  These came out a good warm brown.  They're just right! said
the Lord.

The couple from the Middle-West, that withered baby-face and that
limping Judge, they weren't baked.  They were hardly baked at all.

Kate looked at the dark faces under the arc-lamp.  They frightened
her.  They were a sort of menace to her.  But she felt they were at
least baked hot and to a certain satisfactory colour.

The taxi came lurching up, with Owen poking his head out and
opening the door.

'I found the man in a pulquería,' he said.  'But I don't think he's
QUITE drunk.  Will you risk driving back with him?'

'The pulquería was called La Flor de un Día--the Flower of a Day,'
said Owen, with an apprehensive laugh.

Kate hesitated, looking at her man.

'We may as well,' she said.

Away gallivanted the Ford, full speed to Hell.

'Do tell him not so fast,' said Kate.

'I don't know how,' said Owen.

He shouted in good English:

'Hey! chauffeur!  Not so fast!  Don't drive so fast.'

'No presto.  Troppo presto.  Va troppo presto!' said Kate.

The man looked at them with black, dilated eyes of fathomless
incomprehension.  Then he put his foot on the accelerator.

'He's only going faster!' laughed Owen nervously.

'Ah!  Let him alone!' said Kate, with utter weariness.

The fellow drove like a devil incarnate, as if he had the devil in
his body.  But also, he drove with the devil's own nonchalant
skill.  There was nothing to do but let him rip.

'Wasn't that a ghastly tea-party!' said Owen.

'Ghastly!' said Kate.



CHAPTER III

Fortieth Birthday


Kate woke up one morning, aged forty.  She did not hide the fact
from herself, but she kept it dark from the others.

It was a blow, really.  To be forty!  One had to cross a dividing
line.  On this side there was youth and spontaneity and 'happiness.'
On the other side something different: reserve, responsibility, a
certain standing back from 'fun.'

She was a widow, and a lonely woman now.  Having married young, her
two children were grown up.  The boy was twenty-one, and her
daughter nineteen.  They stayed chiefly with their father, from
whom she had been divorced ten years before, in order to marry
James Joachim Leslie.  Now Leslie was dead, and all that half of
life was over.

She climbed up to the flat roofs of the hotel.  It was a brilliant
morning, and for once, under the blue sky of the distance,
Popocatepetl stood aloof, a heavy giant presence under heaven, with
a cape of snow.  And rolling a long dark roll of smoke like a
serpent.

Ixtaccihuatl, the White Woman, glittered and seemed near, but the
other mountain, Popocatepetl, stood farther back, and in shadow, a
pure cone of atmospheric shadow, with glinting flashes of snow.
There they were, the two monsters, watching gigantically and
terribly over their lofty, bloody cradle of men, the Valley of
Mexico.  Alien, ponderous, the white-hung mountains seemed to emit
a deep purring sound, too deep for the ear to hear, and yet audible
on the blood, a sound of dread.  There was no soaring or uplift or
exaltation, as there is in the snowy mountains of Europe.  Rather a
ponderous, white-shouldered weight, pressing terribly on the earth,
and murmuring like two watchful lions.

Superficially, Mexico might be all right: with its suburbs of
villas, its central fine streets, its thousands of motor-cars, its
tennis, and its bridge-parties.  The sun shone brilliantly every
day, and big bright flowers stood out from the trees.  It was a
holiday.

Until you were alone with it.  And then the undertone was like the
low, angry, snarling purring of some jaguar spotted with night.
There was a ponderous, down-pressing weight upon the spirit: the
great folds of the dragon of the Aztecs, the dragon of the Toltecs
winding around one and weighing down the soul.  And on the bright
sunshine was a dark steam of an angry, impotent blood, and the
flowers seemed to have their roots in spilt blood.  The spirit of
place was cruel, down-dragging, destructive.

Kate could so well understand the Mexican who had said to her:  El
grito mexicano es siempre el grito del odio--The Mexican shout is
always a shout of hate.  The famous revolutions, as Don Ramón said,
began with Viva! but ended always with Muera!  Death to this, death
to the other; it was all death! death! death! as insistent as the
Aztec sacrifices.  Something for ever gruesome and macabre.

Why had she come to this high plateau of death?  As a woman, she
suffered even more than men suffer: and in the end, practically all
men go under.  Once, Mexico had had an elaborate ritual of death.
Now it has death, ragged, squalid, vulgar, without even the passion
of its own mystery.

She sat on a parapet of the old roof.  The street beyond was like a
black abyss, but around her was the rough glare of uneven flat
roofs, with loose telephone wires trailing across, and the sudden,
deep, dark wells of the patios, showing flowers blooming in shade.

Just behind was a huge old church, its barrel roof humping up like
some crouching animal, and its domes, like bubbles inflated,
glittering with yellow tiles, and blue and white tiles, against the
intense blue heaven.  Quiet native women in long skirts were moving
on the roofs, hanging out washing or spreading it on the stones.
Chickens perched here and there.  An occasional bird soared huge
overhead, trailing a shadow.  And not far away stood the brownish
tower-stumps of the Cathedral, the profound old bell trembling huge
and deep, so soft as to be almost inaudible, upon the air.

It ought to have been all gay, allegro, allegretto, in that sparkle
of bright air and old roof surfaces.  But no!  There was the dark
undertone, the black, serpent-like fatality all the time.

It was no good Kate's wondering why she had come.  Over in England,
in Ireland, in Europe, she had heard the consummatum est of her own
spirit.  It was finished, in a kind of death agony.  But still this
heavy continent of dark-souled death was more than she could bear.

She was forty: the first half of her life was over.  The bright
page with its flowers and its love and its stations of the Cross
ended with a grave.  Now she must turn over, and the page was
black, black and empty.

The first half of her life had been written on the bright, smooth
vellum of hope, with initial letters all gorgeous upon a field of
gold.  But the glamour had gone from station to station of the
Cross, and the last illumination was the tomb.

Now the bright page was turned, and the dark page lay before her.
How could one write on a page so profoundly black?

She went down, having promised to go and see the frescoes in the
university and schools.  Owen and Villiers and a young Mexican were
waiting for her.  They set off through the busy streets of the
town, where automobiles and the little omnibuses called camiones
run wild, and where the natives in white cotton clothes and sandals
and big hats linger like heavy ghosts in the street, among the
bourgeoisie, the young ladies in pale pink crêpe de chine and high
heels, the men in little shoes and American straw hats.  A
continual bustle in the glitter of sunshine.

Crossing the great shadeless plaza in front of the Cathedral, where
the tram-cars gather as in a corral, and slide away down their
various streets, Kate lingered again to look at the things spread
for sale on the pavement: the little toys, the painted gourd-
shells, brilliant in a kind of lacquer, the novedades from Germany,
the fruits, the flowers.  And the natives squatting with their
wares, large-limbed, silent, handsome men looking up with their
black, centreless eyes, speaking so softly, and lifting with small
sensitive brown hands the little toys they had so carefully made
and painted.  A strange gentle appeal and wistfulness, strange male
voices, so deep, yet so quiet and gentle.  Or the women, the small
quick women in their blue rebozos, looking up quickly with dark
eyes, and speaking in their quick, coaxing voices.  The man just
setting out his oranges, wiping them with a cloth so carefully,
almost tenderly, and piling them in bright tiny pyramids, all neat
and exquisite.  A certain sensitive tenderness of the heavy blood,
a certain chirping charm of the bird-like women, so still and
tender with a bud-like femininity.  And at the same time, the dirty
clothes, and the unwashed skin, the lice, and the peculiar hollow
glint of the black eyes, at once so fearsome and so appealing.

Kate knew the Italian fruit vendors, vigorously polishing their
oranges on their coat-sleeves.  Such a contrast, the big, handsome
Indian, sitting so soft and as it were lonely by the kerb, softly,
lingeringly polishing his yellow oranges to a clean gleam, and
lingeringly, delicately arranging the little piles, the pyramids
for two or three cents each.

Queer work, for a big, handsome, male-looking man.  But they seem
to prefer these childish jobs.

The University was a Spanish building that had been done up spick
and span, and given over to the young artists to decorate.  Since
the revolutions, nowhere had authority and tradition been so
finally overthrown as in the Mexican fields of science and art.
Science and art are the sport of the young.  Go ahead, my boys!

The boys had gone ahead.  But even then, the one artist of
distinction was no longer a boy, and he had served a long
apprenticeship in Europe.

Kate had seen the reproductions of some of Ribera's frescoes.  Now
she went round the patios of the University, looking at the
originals.  They were interesting: the man knew his craft.

But the impulse was the impulse of the artist's hate.  In the many
frescoes of the Indians there was sympathy with the Indian, but
always from the ideal, social point of view.  Never the spontaneous
answer of the blood.  These flat Indians were symbols in the great
script of modern socialism, they were figures of the pathos of the
victims of modern industry and capitalism.  That was all they were
used for: symbols in the weary script of socialism and anarchy.

Kate thought of the man polishing his oranges half-an-hour before:
his peculiar beauty, a certain richness of physical being, a
ponderous power of blood within him, and a helplessness, a profound
unbelief that was fatal and demonish.  And all the liberty, all the
progress, all the socialism in the world would not help him.  Nay,
it would only help further to destroy him.

On the corridors of the University, young misses in bobbed hair and
boys' jumpers were going around, their chins pushed forward with
the characteristic, deliberate youth-and-eagerness of our day.
Very much aware of their own youth and eagerness.  And very
American.  Young professors were passing in soft amiability, young
and apparently harmless.

The artists were at work on the frescoes, and Kate and Owen were
introduced to them.  But they were men--or boys--whose very
pigments seemed to exist only to épater le bourgeois.  And Kate was
weary of épatisme, just as much as of the bourgeoisie.  She wasn't
interested in épatant le bourgeois.  The épateurs were as boring as
the bourgeois, two halves of one dreariness.

The little party passed on to the old Jesuit convent, now used as a
secondary school.  Here were more frescoes.

But they were by another man.  And they were caricatures so crude
and so ugly that Kate was merely repelled.  They were meant to be
shocking, but perhaps the very deliberateness prevents them from
being so shocking as they might be.  But they were ugly and vulgar.
Strident caricatures of the Capitalist and the Church, and of the
Rich Woman, and of Mammon painted life-size and as violently as
possible, round the patios of the grey old building, where the
young people are educated.  To anyone with the spark of human
balance, the things are a misdemeanour.

'Oh, but how wonderful!' cried Owen.

His susceptibilities were shocked, therefore, as at the bull-fight,
he was rather pleased.  He thought it was novel and stimulating to
decorate your public buildings in this way.

The young Mexican who was accompanying the party was a professor in
the University too: a rather short, soft young fellow of twenty-
seven or eight, who wrote the inevitable poetry of sentiment, had
been in the Government, even as a member of the House of Deputies,
and was longing to go to New York.  There was something fresh and
soft, petulant about him.  Kate liked him.  He could laugh with
real hot young amusement, and he was no fool.

Until it came to these maniacal ideas of socialism, politics, and
La Patria.  Then he was as mechanical as a mousetrap.  Very
tedious.

'Oh no!' said Kate in front of the caricatures.  'They are too
ugly.  They defeat their own ends.'

'But they are meant to be ugly,' said young Garcia.  'They must be
ugly, no?  Because capitalism is ugly, and Mammon is ugly, and the
priest holding his hand to get the money from the poor Indians is
ugly.  No?'  He laughed rather unpleasantly.

'But,' said Kate, 'these caricatures are too intentional.  They are
like vulgar abuse, not art at all.'

'Isn't that true?' said Garcia, pointing to a hideous picture of a
fat female in a tight short dress, with hips and breasts as
protuberances, walking over the faces of the poor.

'That is how they are, no?'

'Who is like that?' said Kate.  'It bores me.  One must keep a
certain balance.'

'Not in Mexico!' said the young Mexican brightly, his plump cheeks
flushing.  'In Mexico you can't keep a balance, because things are
so bad.  In other countries, yes, perhaps you can remain balanced,
because things are not so bad as they are here.  But here they are
so very bad, you can't be human.  You have to be Mexican.  You have
to be more Mexican than human, no?  You can't do no other.  You
have to hate the capitalist, you have to, in Mexico, or nobody can
live.  We can't live.  Nobody can live.  If you are Mexican you
can't be human, it is impossible.  You have to be a socialist
Mexican, or you have to be a capitalist Mexican, and you hate.
What else is there to be done?  We hate the capitalist because he
ruins the country and the people.  We MUST hate him.'

'But after all,' said Kate, 'what about the twelve million poor--
mostly Indians--whom Montes talks about?  You can't make them all
rich, whatever you do.  And they don't understand the very words,
capital and socialism.  They are Mexico, really, and nobody ever
looks at them, except to make a casus belli of them.  Humanly, they
never exist for you.'

'Humanly they can't exist, they are too ignorant!' cried Garcia.
'But when we can kill all the capitalists, then--'

'You'll find somebody killing YOU,' said Kate.  'No, I don't like
it.  YOU aren't Mexico.  You aren't even Mexican, really.  You are
just half Spaniards full of European ideas, and you care for
asserting your own ideas and nothing else.  You have no real bowels
of compassion.  You are no good.'

The young man listened with round eyes, going rather yellow in the
face.  At the end he lifted his shoulders and spread his hands in a
pseudo-Mediterranean gesture.

'Well!  It may be!' he said, with a certain jeering flippancy.
'Perhaps you know everything.  Maybe!  Foreigners, they usually
know everything about Mexico.'  And he ended on a little cackling
laugh.

'I know what I FEEL,' said Kate.  'And now I want a taxi, and I
want to go home.  I don't want to see any more stupid, ugly
pictures.'

Off she drove back to the hotel, once more in a towering rage.  She
was amazed at herself.  Usually she was so good-tempered and easy.
But something about this country irritated her and put her into
such a violent anger, she felt she would die.  Burning, furious
rage.

And perhaps, she thought to herself, the white and half-white
Mexicans suffered some peculiar reaction in their blood which made
them that they too were almost always in a state of suppressed
irritation and anger, for which they MUST find a vent.  They MUST
spend their lives in a complicated game of frustration, frustration
of life in its ebbing and flowing.

Perhaps something came out of the earth, the dragon of the earth,
some effluence, some vibration which militated against the very
composition of the blood and nerves in human beings.  Perhaps it
came from the volcanoes.  Or perhaps even from the silent, serpent-
like dark resistance of those masses of ponderous natives whose
blood was principally the old, heavy, resistant Indian blood.

Who knows?  But something there was, and something very potent.
Kate lay on her bed and brooded on her own organic rage.  There was
nothing to be done!

But young Garcia was really nice.  He called in the afternoon and
sent up his card.  Kate, feeling sore, received him unwillingly.

'I came,' he said, with a little stiff dignity, like an ambassador
on a mission, 'to tell you that I, too, don't like those
caricatures.  I, too, don't like them.  I don't like the young
people, boys and girls, no?--to be seeing them all the time.  I,
too, don't like.  But I think, also, that here in Mexico we can't
help it.  People are very bad, very greedy, no?--they only want to
get money here, and they don't care.  So we must hate them.  Yes,
we must.  But I, too, I don't like it.'

He held his hat in his two hands, and twisted his shoulders in a
conflict of feelings.

Kate suddenly laughed, and he laughed too, with a certain pain and
confusion in his laughter.

'That's awfully nice of you to come and say so,' she said, warming
to him.

'No, not nice,' he said, frowning.  'But I don't know what to DO.
Perhaps you think I am--different--I am not the thing that I am.
And I don't want it.'

He flushed and was uncomfortable.  There was a curious naïve
sincerity about him, since he was being sincere.  If he had chosen
to play a game of sophistication, he could have played it better.
But with Kate he wanted to be sincere.

'I know, really,' laughed Kate, 'you feel a good deal like I do
about it.  I know you only pretend to be fierce and hard.'

'No!' he said, suddenly making solemn, flashing eyes.  'I do also
feel fierce.  I do hate these men who take, only take everything
from Mexico--money, and all--EVERYTHING!'  He spread his hands with
finality.  'I hate them because I MUST, no?  But also, I am sorry--
I am sorry I have to hate so much.  Yes, I think I am sorry.  I
think so.'

He knitted his brows rather tense.  And over his plump, young,
fresh face was a frown of resentment and hatred, quite sincere too.

Kate could see he wasn't really sorry.  Only the two moods, of
natural, soft, sensuous flow, and of heavy resentment and hate,
alternated inside him like shadow and shine on a cloudy day, in
swift, unavoidable succession.  What was nice about him was his
simplicity, in spite of the complication of his feelings, and the
fact that his resentments were not personal, but beyond persons,
even beyond himself.

She went out with him to tea, and while she was out, Don Ramón
called and left cards with the corners turned down, and an
invitation to dinner for her and Owen.  There seemed an almost old-
fashioned correctness in those cards.

Looking over the newspaper, she came on an odd little item.  She
could read Spanish without much difficulty.  The trouble lay in
talking it, when Italian got in her way and caused a continual
stumble.  She looked on the English page of the Excelsior or the
Universal for the news--if there was any.  Then she looked through
the Spanish pages for bits of interest.

This little item was among the Spanish information, and was headed:
The Gods of Antiquity Return to Mexico.


'There was a ferment in the village of Sayula, Jalisco, on the Lake
of Sayula, owing to an incident of more or less comic nature,
yesterday morning towards mid-day.  The women who inhabit the
shores of the lake are to be seen each day soon after sunrise
descending to the water's edge with large bundles.  They kneel on
the rocks and stones, and in little groups, like water-fowl, they
wash their dirty linen in the soft water of the lake, pausing at
times as an old canoa sails by with large single sail.  The scene
is little changed since the days of Montezuma, when the natives of
the lake worshipped the spirit of the waters, and threw in little
images and idols of baked clay, which the lake sometimes returns to
the descendants of the dead idolaters, to keep them in mind of
practices not yet altogether forgotten.

'As the hot sun rises in the sky, the women spread their washing on
the sand and pebbles of the shore, and retire to the shade of the
willow trees that grow so gracefully and retain their verdant hue
through the dryest season of the year.  While thus reposing after
their labours, these humble and superstitious women were astonished
to see a man of great stature rise naked from the lake and wade
towards the shore.  His face, they said, was dark and bearded, but
his body shone like gold.

'As if unaware of any watchful eyes, he advanced calmly and
majestically towards the shore.  There he stood a moment, and
selecting with his eye a pair of the loose cotton pants worn by the
peasants in the fields, that was spread whitening in the sun, he
stooped and proceeded to cover his nakedness with the said garment.

'The woman who thus saw her husband's apparel robbed beneath her
eye, rose, calling to the man and summoning the other women.
Whereupon the stranger turned his dark face upon them, and said in
a quiet voice:  "Why are you crying?  Be quiet!  It will be given
back to you.  Your gods are ready to return to you.  Quetzalcoatl
and Tlaloc, the old gods, are minded to come back to you.  Be
quiet, don't let them find you crying and complaining.  I have come
from out of the lake to tell you the gods are coming back to
Mexico, they are ready to return to their own home."

'Little comforted by this speech, the woman who had lost her
washing was overcome and said no more.  The stranger then
appropriated a cotton blouse, which he donned, and disappeared.

'After a while, the simple women gathered courage to return to
their humble dwellings.  The story thus reached the ears of the
police, who at once set out to search for the thief.

'The story, however, is not yet concluded.  The husband of the poor
woman of the lake-shore, returning from his labours in the field,
approached the gates of the village towards sunset, thinking, no
doubt, of nothing but repose and the evening meal.  A man in a
black serape stepped towards him, from the shadows of a broken
wall, and asked:  Are you afraid to come with me?  The labourer, a
man of spirit, promptly replied:  No, señor!  He therefore followed
the unknown man through the broken wall and through the bushes of a
deserted garden.  In a dark room, or cellar, a small light was
burning, revealing a great basin of gold, into which four little
men, smaller than children, were pouring sweet-scented water.  The
astounded peasant was now told to wash and put on clean clothes, to
be ready for the return of the gods.  He was seated in the golden
basin and washed with sweet-smelling soap, while the dwarfs poured
water over him.  This, they said, is the bath of Quetzalcoatl.  The
bath of fire is yet to come.  They gave him clean clothing of pure
white cotton, and a new hat with star embroidery, and sandals with
straps of white leather.  But beside this, a new blanket, white
with bars of blue and black, and flowers like stars at the centre,
and two pieces of silver money.  Go, he was told.  And when they
ask you, where did you get your blanket? answer that Quetzalcoatl
is young again.  The poor fellow went home in sore fear, lest the
police should arrest him for possessing stolen goods.

'The village is full of excitement, and Don Ramón Carrasco, our
eminent historian and archaeologist, whose hacienda lies in the
vicinity, has announced his intention of proceeding as soon as
possible to the spot to examine the origin of this new legend.
Meanwhile, the police are watching attentively the development of
affairs, without taking any steps for the moment.  Indeed, these
little fantasies create a pleasant diversion in the regular order
of banditry, murder, and outrage, which it is usually our duty to
report.'


Kate wondered what was at the back of this: if anything more than a
story.  Yet, strangely, a different light than the common light
seemed to gleam out of the words of even this newspaper paragraph.

She wanted to go to Sayula.  She wanted to see the big lake where
the gods had once lived, and whence they were due to emerge.  Amid
all the bitterness that Mexico produced in her spirit, there was
still a strange beam of wonder and mystery, almost like hope.  A
strange darkly-iridescent beam of wonder, of magic.

The name Quetzalcoatl, too, fascinated her.  She had read bits
about the god.  Quetzal is the name of a bird that lives high up in
the mists of tropical mountains, and has very beautiful tail-
feathers, precious to the Aztecs.  Coatl is a serpent.  Quetzalcoatl
is the Plumed Serpent, so hideous in the fanged, feathered,
writhing stone of the National Museum.

But Quetzalcoatl was, she vaguely remembered, a sort of fair-faced
bearded god; the wind, the breath of life, the eyes that see and
are unseen, like the stars by day.  The eyes that watch behind the
wind, as the stars beyond the blue of day.  And Quetzalcoatl must
depart from Mexico to merge again into the deep bath of life.  He
was old.  He had gone eastwards, perhaps into the sea, perhaps he
had sailed into heaven, like a meteor returning, from the top of
the Volcano of Orizaba: gone back as a peacock streaming into the
night, or as a bird of Paradise, its tail gleaming like the wake of
a meteor.  Quetzalcoatl!  Who knows what he meant to the dead
Aztecs, and to the older Indians, who knew him before the Aztecs
raised their deity to heights of horror and vindictiveness?

All a confusion of contradictory gleams of meaning, Quetzalcoatl.
But why not?  Her Irish spirit was weary to death of definite
meanings, and a God of one fixed purport.  Gods should be
iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm.  Man creates a God in
his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made
them.  But storms sway in heaven, and the god-stuff sways high and
angry over our heads.  Gods die with men who have conceived them.
But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a
sound to be heard.  Like the sea in storm, that beats against the
rocks of living, stiffened men, slowly to destroy them.  Or like
the sea of the glimmering, ethereal plasm of the world, that bathes
the feet and the knees of men as earth-sap bathes the roots of
trees.  Ye must be born again.  Even the gods must be born again.
We must be born again.

In her vague, woman's way, Kate knew this.  She had lived her life.
She had had her lovers, her two husbands.  She had her children.

Joachim Leslie, her dead husband, she had loved as much as a woman
can love a man: that is, to the bounds of human love.  Then she had
realized that human love has its limits, that there is a beyond.
And Joachim dead, willy nilly her spirit had passed the bounds.
She was no longer in love with love.  She no longer yearned for the
love of a man, or the love even of her children.  Joachim had gone
into eternity in death, and she had crossed with him into a certain
eternity in life.  There, the yearning for companionship and
sympathy and human love had left her.  Something infinitely
intangible but infinitely blessed took its place: a peace that
passes understanding.

At the same time, a wild and angry battle raged between her and the
thing that Owen called life: such as the bull-fight, the tea-party,
the enjoyments; like the arts in their modern aspect of hate
effusion.  The powerful, degenerate thing called life, wrapping one
or other of its tentacles round her.

And then, when she could escape into her true loneliness, the
influx of peace and soft, flower-like potency which was beyond
understanding.  It disappeared even if you thought about it, so
delicate, so fine.  And yet, the only reality.

Ye must be born again.  Out of the fight with the octopus of life,
the dragon of degenerate or of incomplete existence, one must win
this soft bloom of being, that is damaged by a touch.

No, she no longer wanted love, excitement, and something to fill
her life.  She was forty, and in the rare, lingering dawn of
maturity, the flower of her soul was opening.  Above all things,
she must preserve herself from worldly contacts.  Only she wanted
the silence of other unfolded souls around her, like a perfume.
The presence of that which is forever unsaid.

And in the horror and climax of death-rattles, which is Mexico, she
thought she could see it in the black eyes of the Indians.  She
felt that Don Ramón and Don Cipriano both had heard the soundless
call, across all the hideous choking.

Perhaps this had brought her to Mexico: away from England and her
mother, away from her children, away from everybody.  To be alone
with the unfolding flower of her own soul, in the delicate, chiming
silence that is at the midst of things.

The thing called 'Life' is just a mistake we have made in our own
minds.  Why persist in the mistake any further?

Owen was the mistake itself: so was Villiers: so was that Mexico
City.

She wanted to get out, to disentangle herself again.

They had promised to go out to dinner to the house of Don Ramón.
His wife was away in the United States with her two boys, one of
whom had been ill, not seriously, at his school in California.  But
Don Ramón's aunt would be hostess.

The house was out at Tlalpam.  It was May, the weather was hot, the
rains were not yet started.  The shower at the bullfight had been a
sort of accident.

'I wonder,' said Owen, 'whether I ought to put on a dinner-coat.
Really, I feel humiliated to the earth every time I put on evening
dress.'

'Then don't do it!' said Kate, who was impatient of Owen's kicking
at these very little social pricks, and swallowing the whole
porcupine.

She herself came down in a simple gown with a black velvet top and
a loose skirt of delicate brocaded chiffon, of a glimmering green
and yellow and black.  She also wore a long string of jade and
crystal.

It was a gift she had, of looking like an Ossianic goddess, a
certain feminine strength and softness glowing in the very material
of her dress.  But she was never 'smart.'

'Why you're dressed up to the eyes!' cried Owen in chagrin, pulling
at his soft collar.  'Bare shoulders notwithstanding!'

They went out to the distant suburb in the tram-car, swift in the
night, with big clear stars overhead, dropping and hanging with a
certain gleam of menace.  In Tlalpam there was a heavy scent of
nightflowers, a feeling of ponderous darkness, with a few sparks
of intermittent fireflies.  And always the heavy calling of
nightflower scents.  To Kate, there seemed a faint whiff of blood
in all tropical-scented flowers: of blood or sweat.

It was a hot night.  They banged on the iron doors of the entrance,
dogs barked, and a mozo opened to them, warily, closing fast again
the moment they had entered the dark garden of trees.

Don Ramón was in white, a white dinner-jacket: Don Cipriano the
same.  But there were other guests, young Garcia, another pale
young man called Mirabal, and an elderly man in a black cravat,
named Toussaint.  The only other woman was Doña Isabel, aunt to Don
Ramón.  She wore a black dress with a high collar of black lace,
and some strings of pearls, and seemed shy, frightened, absent as a
nun before all these men.  But to Kate she was very kind,
caressive, speaking English in a plaintive faded voice.  This
dinner was a sort of ordeal and ritual combined, to the cloistered,
elderly soul.

But it was soon evident that she was trembling with fearful joy.
She adored Ramón with an uncritical, nun-like adoration.  It was
obvious she hardly heard the things that were said.  Words skimmed
the surface of her consciousness without ever penetrating.
Underneath, she was trembling in nun-like awareness of so many men,
and in almost sacred excitement at facing Don Ramón as hostess.

The house was a fairly large villa, quietly and simply furnished,
with natural taste.

'Do you always live here?' said Kate to Don Ramón.  'Never at your
hacienda?'

'How do you know I have a hacienda?' he asked.

'I saw it in a newspaper--near Sayula.'

'Ah!' he said, laughing at her with his eyes.  'You saw about the
returning of the Gods of Antiquity.'

'Yes,' she said.  'Don't you think it is interesting?'

'I think so,' he said.

'I love the WORD Quetzalcoatl.'

'The WORD!' he repeated.

His eyes laughed at her teasingly all the time.

'What do you think, Mrs Leslie,' cried the pale-faced young
Mirabal, in curiously resonant English, with a French accent.
'Don't you think it would be wonderful if the gods came back to
Mexico? our own gods?'  He sat in intense expectation, his blue
eyes fixed on Kate's face, his soup-spoon suspended.

Kate's face was baffled with incomprehension.

'Not those Aztec horrors!' she said.

'The Aztec horrors!  The Aztec horrors!  Well, perhaps they were
not so horrible after all.  But if they were, it was because the
Aztecs were all tied up.  They were in a cul de sac, so they saw
nothing but death.  Don't you think so?'

'I don't know enough!' said Kate.

'Nobody knows any more.  But if you like the WORD Quetzalcoatl,
don't you think it would be wonderful if he came back again?  Ah,
the NAMES of the gods!  Don't you think the NAMES are like seeds,
so full of magic, of the unexplored magic?  Huitzilopochtli!--how
wonderful!  And Tlaloc!  Ah!  I love them!  I say them over and
over, like they say Mani padma Om! in Tibet.  I believe in the
fertility of sound.  Itzpapalotl--the Obsidian Butterfly!
Itzpapalotl!  But say it, and you will see it does good to your
soul.  Itzpapalotl!  Tezcatlipocá!  They were old when the
Spaniards came, they needed the bath of life again.  But now, re-
bathed in youth, how wonderful they must be!  Think of Jehovah!
Jehovah!  Think of Jesus Christ!  How thin and poor they sound!  Or
Jesús Cristo!  They are dead names, all the life withered out of
them.  Ah, it is time now f