Part 37

He had glanced round the room, at the different attractive things from different parts of the world, and at the cigarette ends in the agate bowl: the rather weary luxury and disorder, and the touch of barrenness, of a woman living her own life.

She did not know what he was thinking. But to herself she thought: This is the man I defended on that roof. This is the man who lay with a hole in his back, naked and unconscious under the lamp. He didn’t look like a Sultan then.

Teresa must have divined something of her thought, for she said, looking at Ramón:

“Señora! But for you Ramón would have been killed. Always I think of it.”

“Don’t think of it,” said Kate. “Something else would have happened. Anyhow it wasn’t I, it was destiny.”

“Ah, but you were the destiny!” said Teresa.

“Now there is a hostess, won’t you come and stay some time at Jamiltepec?” said Ramón.

“Oh, do! Do come!” cried Teresa.

“But do you really want me?” said Kate, incredulous.

“Yes! Yes!” cried Teresa.

“She needs a woman-friend,” said Ramón gently.

“Yes, I do!” she cried. “I have never had a true, _true_ woman-friend: only when I was at school, and we were girls.”

Kate doubted very much her own capacity for being a true, true woman-friend to Teresa. She wondered what the two of them saw in her. As what did they see her?

“Yes, I should like to come for a few days,” she replied.

“Oh, yes!” cried Teresa. “When will you come?”

The day was agreed.

“And we will write the Song of Malintzi,” said Ramón.

“Don’t do that!” cried Kate quickly.

He looked at her, in his slow, wondering way. He could make her feel, at moments, as if she were a sort of child and as if he were a ghost.

Kate went to Jamiltepec, and before the two women knew it, almost, they were making dresses for Teresa, cutting up the pineapple-coloured muslin. Poor Teresa, for a bride she had a scanty wardrobe: nothing but her rather pathetic black dresses that somehow made her look poor, and a few old white dresses. She had lived for her father--who had a good library of Mexicana and was all his life writing a history of the State of Jalisco--and for the hacienda. And it was her proud boast that Las Yemas was the only hacienda, within a hundred miles range, which had not been smashed at all during the revolutions that followed the flight of Porfirio Diaz.

Teresa had a good deal of the nun in her. But that was because she was deeply passionate, and deep passion tends to hide within itself, rather than expose itself to vulgar contact.

So Kate pinned the muslin over the brown shoulders, wondering again at the strange, uncanny softness of the dark skin, the heaviness of the black hair. Teresa’s family, the Romeros, had been in Mexico since the early days of the Conquest.

Teresa wanted long sleeves.

“My arms are so thin!” she murmured, hiding her slender brown arms with a sort of shame. “They are not beautiful like yours.”

Kate was a strong, full-developed woman of forty, with round, strong white arms.

“No!” she said to Teresa. “Your arms are not thin: they are exactly right for your figure, and pretty and young and brown.”

“But make the sleeves long, to the wrist,” pleaded Teresa.

And Kate did so, realizing it became the other woman’s nature better.

“The men here don’t like little thin women,” said Teresa, wistfully.

“One doesn’t care what _the men_ like,” said Kate. “Do you think Don Ramón wishes you were a plump partridge?”

Teresa looked at her with a smile in her dark, big bright eyes, that were so quick, and in many ways so unseeing.

“Who knows!” she said. And in her quick, mischievous smile it was evident she would like also, sometimes, to be a plump partridge.

Kate now saw more of the hacienda life than she had done before. When Ramón was at home, he consulted his overseer, or administrator, every morning. But already Teresa was taking this work off his hands. She would see to the estate.

Ramón was a good deal absent, either in Mexico or in Guadalajara, or even away in Sonora. He was already famous and notorious throughout the country, his name was a name to conjure with. But underneath the rather ready hero-worship of the Mexicans, Kate somehow felt their latent grudging. Perhaps they took more satisfaction in ultimately destroying their heroes, than in temporarily raising them high. The real perfect moment was when the hero was downed.

And to Kate, sceptic as she was, it seemed much more likely that they were sharpening the machete to stick in Ramón’s heart, when he got a bit too big for them, than anything else. Though, to be sure, there was Cipriano to reckon with. And Cipriano was a little devil whom they quite rightly feared. And Cipriano, for once, was faithful. He was, to himself, Huitzilopochtli, and to this he would maintain a demonish faith. He was Huitzilopochtli, Ramón was Quetzalcoatl. To Cipriano this was a plain and living fact. And he kept his army keen as a knife. Even the President would not care to run counter to Cipriano. And the President was a brave man too.

“One day,” he said, “we will put Quetzalcoatl in Puebla Cathedral, and Huitzilopochtli in Mexico Cathedral and Malintzi in Guadalupe. The day will come, Ramón.”

“We will see that it comes,” Ramón replied.

But Ramón and Montes suffered alike from the deep, devilish animosity the country sent out in silence, against them. It was the same, whoever was in power: the Mexicans seemed to steam with invisible, grudging hate, the hate of demons foiled in their own souls, whose only motive is to foil everything, everybody, in the everlasting hell of cramped frustration.

This was the dragon of Mexico, that Ramón had to fight. Montes, the President, had it to fight the same. And it shattered his health. Cipriano also had it up against him. But he succeeded best. With his drums, with his dances round the fire, with his soldiers kept keen as knives he drew real support from his men. He grew stronger and more brilliant.

Ramón also, at home in his own district, felt the power flow into him from his people. He was their chief, and by his effort and his power he had almost overcome their ancient, fathomless resistance. Almost he had _awed_ them back into the soft mystery of living, awed them until the tension of their resistant, malevolent wills relaxed. At home, he would feel his strength upon him.

But away from home, and particularly in the city of Mexico, he felt himself bled, bled, bled by the subtle, hidden malevolence of the Mexicans, and the ugly negation of the greedy, mechanical foreigners, birds of prey forever alighting in the cosmopolitan capital.

While Ramón was away, Kate stayed with Teresa. The two women had this in common, that they felt it was better to stand faithfully behind a really brave man, than to push forward into the ranks of cheap and obtrusive women. And this united them. A certain deep, ultimate faithfulness in each woman, to her own man who needed her fidelity, kept Kate and Teresa kindred to one another.

The rainy season had almost passed, though throughout September and even in October occasional heavy downpours fell. But the wonderful Mexican autumn, like a strange, inverted spring, was upon the land. The waste places bloomed with pink and white cosmos, the strange wild trees flowered in a ghostly way, forests of small sunflowers shone in the sun, the sky was a pure, pure blue, the floods of sunshine lay tempered on the land, that in part was flooded with water, from the heavy rains.

The lake was very full, strange and uneasy, and it had washed up a bank of the wicked water-hyacinths along all its shores. The wild-fowl were coming from the north, clouds of wild ducks like dust in the high air, sprinkling the water like weeds. Many, many wild fowl, grebe, cranes, and white gulls of the inland seas, so that the northern mystery seemed to have blown so far south. There was a smell of water in the land, and a sense of soothing. For Kate firmly believed that part of the horror of the Mexican people came from the unsoothed dryness of the land and the untempered crudity of the flat-edged sunshine. If only there could be a softening of water in the air, and a haze above trees, the unspoken and unspeakable malevolence would die out of the human hearts.

Kate rode out often with Teresa to see the fields. The sugar-cane in the inner valley was vivid green, and rising tall, tall. The peons were beginning to cut it with their sword-like machetes, filling the bullock-wagons, to haul the cane to the factory in Sayula. On the dry hill-slopes the spikey tequila plant--a sort of maguey--flourished in its iron wickedness. Low wild cactuses put forth rose-like blossoms, wonderful and beautiful for such sinister plants. The beans were gathered from the bean-fields, some gourds and squashes still sprawled their uncanny weight across the land. Red chiles hung on withering plants, red tomatoes sank to the earth. Some maize still reared its flags, there was still young corn to eat on the cob. The banana crop was small, the children came in with the little wild yellow tejocote apples, for making preserves. Teresa was making preserves, even with the late figs and peaches. On the trees, the ponderous mango trees, some fruit was again orange-yellow and ripe, but the most still hung in strings, heavy and greenish and dropping like the testes of bulls.

It was autumn in Mexico, with wild duck on the waters, and hunters with guns, and small wild doves in the trees. Autumn in Mexico, and the coming of the dry season, with the sky going higher and higher, pure pale blue, the sunset arriving with a strange flare of crystal yellow light. With the coffee berries turning red on the struggling bushes under the trees, and bougainvillea in the strong light glowing with a glow of magenta colour so deep you could plunge your arms deep in it. With a few hummingbirds in the sunshine, and the fish in the waters gone wild, and the flies, that steamed black in the first rains, now passing away again.

Teresa attended to everything, and Kate helped. Whether it was a sick peon in one of the little houses, or the hosts of bees from the hives under the mangoes, or the yellow, yellow bees-wax to be made into little bowlfuls, or the preserves, or the garden, or the calves, or the bit of butter and the little fresh cheeses made of strands of curd, or the turkeys to be overlooked: she saw to it along with Teresa. And she wondered at the steady, urgent, efficient _will_ which had to be exerted all the time. Everything was kept going by a heavy exertion of will. If once the will of the master broke, everything would break, and ruin would overtake the place almost at once. No real relaxation, ever. Always the sombre, insistent will.

Ramón arrived home one evening in November, from a long journey to Sonora. He had come overland from Tepic, and twice had been stopped by floods. The rains, so late, were very unusual. He was tired and remote-seeming. Kate’s heart stood still a moment as she thought: He goes so remote, as if he might go away altogether into death.

It was cloudy again, with lightning beating about on the horizons. But all was very still. She said good-night early, and wandered down her own side of the terrace, to the look-out at the end, which looked on to the lake. Everything was dark, save for the intermittent pallor of lightning.

And she was startled to see, in a gleam of lightning, Teresa sitting with her back to the wall of the open terrace, Ramón lying with his head in her lap, while she slowly pushed her fingers through his thick black hair. They were as silent as the night.

Kate gave a startled murmur and said:

“I’m so sorry! I didn’t know you were here.”

“I wanted to be under the sky!” said Ramón, heaving himself to rise.

“Oh, _don’t_ move!” said Kate. “It was stupid of me to come here. You are tired.”

“Yes,” he said, sinking again. “I am tired. These people make me feel I have a hole in the middle of me. So I have come back to Teresa.”

“Yes!” said Kate. “One isn’t the Living Quetzalcoatl for nothing. Of course they eat holes in you.--Really, is it worth it?--To give yourself to be eaten away by them.”

“It must be so,” he said. “The change has to be made. And some man has to make it. I sometimes wish it wasn’t I.”

“So do I wish it. So does Teresa. One wonders if it isn’t better to be just a man,” said Kate.

But Teresa said nothing.

“One does what one must. And after all, one is always just a man,” he said. “And if one has wounds--à la guerre comme à la guerre!”

His voice came out of the darkness like a ghost.

“Ah!” sighed Kate. “It makes one wonder what a man is, that he must needs expose himself to the horrors of all the other people.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it,” he said. “And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.”

She went away to her room sadly, hearing the sound of infinite exhaustion in his voice. As if he had a hole, a wound in the middle of him. She could almost feel it, in her own bowels.

And if, with his efforts, he killed himself?--Then, she said, Cipriano would come apart, and it would be all finished.

Ah, why should a man have to make these efforts on behalf of a beastly, malevolent people who weren’t worth it! Better let the world come to an end, if that was what it wanted.

She thought of Teresa soothing him, soothing him and saying nothing. And him like a great helpless, wounded thing! It was rather horrible, really. Herself, she would have to expostulate, she would have to try to prevent him. Why should men damage themselves with this useless struggling and fighting, and then come home to their women to be restored!

To Kate, the fight simply wasn’t worth one wound. Let the beastly world of man come to an end, if that was its destiny, as soon as possible. Without lifting a finger to prevent it.--Live one’s own precious life, that was given but once, and let the rest go its own hellish way.

She would have _had_ to try to prevent Ramón from giving himself to destruction this way. She was willing for him to be ten Living Quetzalcoatls. But not to expose himself to the devilish malevolence of people.

Yet he would do it. Even as Joachim had done. And Teresa, with her silence and her infinitely soft administering, she would heal him far better than Kate, with her expostulation and her opposition.

“Ah!” said Kate to herself. “I’m glad Cipriano is a soldier, and doesn’t get wounds in his _soul_.”

At the same time, she knew that without Ramón, Cipriano was just an instrument, and not ultimately interesting to her.

In the morning, Teresa appeared alone to breakfast. She seemed very calm, hiding her emotions in her odd, brown, proud little way.

“How is Ramón?” said Kate.

“He is sleeping,” said Teresa.

“Good! He seemed to me almost done up, last night.”

“Yes.”--The black eyes looked at Kate, wide with unshed tears and courage, and a beautiful deep, remote light.

“I _don’t_ believe in a man’s sacrificing himself in this way,” said Kate. “And I _don’t_.”

Teresa still looked her full in the eyes.

“Ah!” she said. “He doesn’t sacrifice himself. He feels he must do as he does. And if he must, I must help him.”

“But then you are sacrificing yourself to _him_, and I don’t believe in that either,” said Kate.

“Oh, no!” replied Teresa quickly, and a little flush burned in her cheek, and her dark eyes flashed. “I am not sacrificing myself to Ramón. If I can give him--sleep--when he needs it--that is not sacrifice. It is--” She did not finish, but her eyes flashed, and the flush burned darker.

“It is love, I know,” said Kate. “But it exhausts you too.”

“It is not simply love,” flashed Teresa proudly. “I might have loved more than one man: many men are lovable. But Ramón!--My soul is with Ramón.”--The tears rose to her eyes. “I do not want to talk about it,” she said, rising. “But you must not touch me there, and judge me.”

She hurried out of the room, leaving Kate somewhat dismayed. Kate sighed, thinking of going home.

But in an hour Teresa appeared again, putting her cool, soft, snake-like little hand on Kate’s arm.

“I am sorry if I was rude,” she said.

“No,” said Kate. “Apparently it is I who am wrong.”

“Yes, I think you are,” said Teresa. “You think there is only love. Love is only such a little bit.”

“And what is the rest?”

“How can I tell you if you do not know?--But do you think Ramón is no more to me than a lover?”

“A husband!” said Kate.

“Ah!” Teresa put her head aside with an odd impatience. “Those little words! Those little words! Nor either a husband.--He is my life.”

“Surely it is better for one to live one’s own life!”

“No! It is like seed. It is no good till it is given. I know. I kept my own life for a long time. As you keep it longer, it dies. And I tried to give it to God. But I couldn’t, quite. Then they told me, if I married Ramón and had any part in the Quetzalcoatl heresy, my soul would be damned.--But something made me know it was not true. I even knew he needed my soul.--Ah, Señora--” a subtle smile came on Teresa’s pale face--“I have lost my soul to Ramón.--What more can I say!”

“And what about his soul?”

“It comes home to me--_here_!” She put her hand over her womb.

Kate was silent for a time.

“And if he betrays you?” she said.

“Ah, Señora!” said Teresa. “Ramón is not just a lover. He is a brave man, and he doesn’t betray his own blood. And it is his soul that comes home to me.--And I would struggle to my last breath to give him sleep, when he came home to me with his soul, and needed it,” she flashed. Then she added, murmuring to herself: “No, thank God! I have not got a life of my own! I have been able to give it to a man who is more than a man, as they say in their Quetzalcoatl language. And now it needn’t die inside me, like a bird in a cage.--Oh, yes, Señora! If he goes to Sinaloa and the west coast, my soul goes with him and takes part in it all. It does not let him go alone. And he does not forget that he has my soul with him. I know it.--No, Señora! You must not criticise me or pity me.”

“Still!” said Kate. “It still seems to me it would be better for each one to keep her own soul, and be responsible for it.”

“If it were possible!” said Teresa. “But you can no more keep your own soul inside you for yourself, without its dying, than you can keep the seed of your womb. Until a man gives you his seed, the seed of your womb is nothing. And the man’s seed is nothing to him.--And until you give your soul to a man, and he takes it, your soul is nothing to you.--And when a man has taken your whole soul.--Ah, do not talk to me about betraying. A man only betrays because he has been given _a part_, and not the whole. And a woman only betrays because only the part has been taken from her, and not the whole. That is all about betrayal. I know.--But when the whole is given, and taken, betrayal can’t exist. What I am to Ramón, I am. And what he is to me, he is. I do not care what he does. If he is away from me, he does as he wishes. So long as he will always keep safe what I am to him.”

Kate did not like having to learn lessons from this little waif of a Teresa. Kate was a woman of the world, handsome and experienced. She was accustomed to homage. Other women usually had a slight fear of her, for she was powerful and ruthless in her own way.

Teresa also feared her a little, as a woman of the world. But as an intrinsic woman, not at all. Trenched inside her own fierce and proud little soul, Teresa looked on Kate as on one of those women of the outside world, who make a very splendid show, but who are not so sure of the real secret of womanhood, and the innermost power. All Kate’s handsome, ruthless female power was second-rate to Teresa, compared with her own quiet, deep passion of connection with Ramón.

Yes, Kate was accustomed to looking on other women as inferiors. But the tables were suddenly turned. Even as, in her soul, she knew Ramón to be a greater man than Cipriano, suddenly she had to question herself, whether Teresa was not a greater woman than she.

Teresa! A greater woman than Kate? What a blow! Surely it was impossible!

Yet there it was. Ramón had wanted to marry Teresa, not Kate. And the flame of his marriage with Teresa she saw both in his eyes and in Teresa’s. A flame that was not in Kate’s eyes.

Kate’s marriage with Cipriano was curious and momentary. When Cipriano was away, Kate was her old individual self. Only when Cipriano was present, and then only sometimes, did the connection overwhelm her.

When Teresa turned and looked at her with this certain flame, touched with indignation, Kate quailed. Perhaps for the first time in her life she quailed and felt abashed: repentant.

Kate even knew that Teresa felt a little repugnance for her: for the foreign white woman who talked as cleverly as a man and who never gave her soul: who did not believe in giving her soul. All these well-dressed, beautiful women from America or England, Europe, they all kept their souls for themselves, in a sort of purse, as it were.

Teresa was determined that Kate should leave off treating her, very, very indefinably, as an inferior. It was how all the foreign women treated the Mexican women. Because the foreign women were their own mistresses! They even tried to be condescending to Ramón.

But Ramón! He could look at them and make them feel small, feel really nothing, in spite of all their money and their experience and their air of belonging to the ruling races. The ruling races! Wait! Ramón was a challenge to all that. Let those rule who can.

“You did not sleep?” Teresa said to Kate.

“Not very well,” said Kate.

“No, you look as if you had not slept very well.--Under your eyes.”

Kate smoothed the skin under her eyes, querulously.

“One gets that look in Mexico,” she said. “It’s not an easy country to keep your youth in.--You are looking well.”

“Yes, I am very well.”

Teresa had a new, soft bloom on her dark skin, something frail and tender, which she did not want to have to defend against another woman.

“I think I will go home now Ramón has come,” said Kate.

“Oh, why? Do you wish to?”

“I think I’d better.”

“Then I will go with you to Sayula. In the boat, no?”

Kate put her few things together. She had slept badly. The night had been black, black, with something of horror in it. As when the bandits had attacked Ramón. She could see the scar in his back, in the night. And the drumming crash of falling water, menacing and horrible, seemed to keep up for hours.

In her soul, Kate felt Teresa’s contempt for her way of wifehood.

“I have been married too,” Kate had said. “To a very exceptional man, whom I _loved_.”

“Ah, yes!” said Teresa. “And he died.”

“He wanted to die.”

“Ah, yes! He wanted to die.”

“I did my level best to prevent him from wearing himself out.”

“Ah, yes, to prevent him.”

“What else could I have done?” flashed Kate in anger.

“If you could have given him your life, he would not even have wanted to die.”

“I _did_ give him my life. I loved him--oh, you will never know.--But he didn’t _want_ my soul. He believed I should keep a soul of my own.”