Part 6

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 realised 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 bull-fight 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 Thibet. 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 for Jesus to go back to the place of the death of the gods, and take the long bath of being made young again. He is an old-old young god, don’t you think?” He looked long at Kate, then dived for his soup.

Kate widened her eyes in amazement at this torrent from the young Mirabal. Then she laughed.

“I think it’s a bit overwhelming!” she said, non-committal.

“Ah! Yes! Exactly! Exactly! But how good to be overwhelmed! How splendid if something will overwhelm me! Ah, I am so glad!”

The last word came with a clapping French resonance, and the young man dived for his soup again. He was lean and pale, but burning with an intense, crazy energy.

“You see,” said young Garcia, raising his full, bright dark eyes to Kate, half aggressive and half-bashful: “we must do something for Mexico. If we don’t, it will go under, no? You say you don’t like socialism. I don’t think I do either. But if there is nothing else but socialism, we will have socialism. If there is nothing better. But perhaps there is.”

“Why should Mexico go under?” said Kate. “There are lots of children everywhere.”

“Yes. But the last census of Porfirio Diaz gave seventeen million people in Mexico, and the census of last year gave only thirteen millions. Maybe the count was not quite right. But you count four million people fewer, in twenty years, then in sixty years there will be no Mexicans: only foreigners, who don’t die.”

“Oh, but figures always lie!” said Kate. “Statistics are always misleading.”

“Maybe two and two don’t make four,” said Garcia. “I don’t know if they do. But I know, if you take two away from two, it leaves none.”

“Do you think Mexico might die out?” she said to Don Ramón.

“Why!” he replied. “It might. Die out and become Americanised.”

“I quite see the danger of Americanisation,” said Owen. “That _would_ be ghastly. Almost better die out.”

Owen was so American, he invariably said these things.

“But!” said Kate. “The Mexicans look so strong!”

“They are strong to carry heavy loads,” said Don Ramón. “But they die easily. They eat all the wrong things, they drink the wrong things, and they don’t mind dying. They have many children, and they like their children very much. But when the child dies, the parents say: _Ah, he will be an angelito!_ So they cheer up and feel as if they had been given a present. Sometimes I think they enjoy it when their children die. Sometimes I think they would like to transfer Mexico _en bloc_ into Paradise, or whatever lies behind the walls of death. It would be better there!”

There was a silence.

“But how sad you are!” said Kate, afraid.

Doña Isabel was giving hurried orders to the man-servant.

“Whoever knows Mexico below the surface, is sad!” said Julio Toussaint, rather sententiously, over his black cravat.

“Well,” said Owen, “it seems to me, on the contrary, a gay country. A country of gay, irresponsible children. Or rather, they _would_ be gay, if they were properly treated. If they had comfortable homes, and a sense of real freedom. If they felt that they could control their lives and their own country. But being in the grip of outsiders, as they have been for hundreds of years, life of course seems hardly worth while to them. Naturally, they don’t care if they live or die. They don’t feel _free_.”

“Free for what?” asked Toussaint.

“To make Mexico their own. Not to be so poor and at the mercy of outsiders.”

“They are at the mercy of something worse than outsiders,” said Toussaint. “Let me tell you. They are at the mercy of their own natures. It is this way. Fifty per cent. of the people in Mexico are pure Indian: more or less. Of the rest, a small proportion are foreigners or Spaniard. You have then the mass which is on top, of mixed blood, Indian and Spaniard mixed, chiefly. These are the Mexicans, those with the mixed blood. Now, you take us at this table. Don Cipriano is pure Indian. Don Ramón is almost pure Spaniard, but most probably he has the blood of Tlaxcalan Indians in his veins as well. Señor Mirabal is mixed French and Spanish. Señor Garcia most probably has a mixture of Indian blood with Spanish. I myself, have French, Spanish, Austrian and Indian blood. Very well! Now you mix blood of the same race, and it may be all right. Europeans are all Aryan stock, the race is the same. But when you mix European and American Indian, you mix different blood races, and you produce the half-breed. Now, the half-breed is a calamity. For why? He is neither one thing nor another, he is divided against himself. His blood of one race tells him one thing, his blood of another race tells him another. He is an unfortunate, a calamity to himself. And it is hopeless.

“And this is Mexico. The Mexicans of mixed blood are hopeless. Well then! There are only two things to be done. All the foreigners and the Mexicans clear out and leave the country to the Indians, the pure-blooded Indians. But already you have a difficulty. How can you distinguish the pure-blooded Indian, after so many generations? Or else the half-breed or mixed-blood Mexicans who are all the time on top shall continue to destroy the country till the Americans from the United States flood in. We are as California and New Mexico now are, swamped under the dead white sea.

“But let me tell you something further. I hope we are not Puritans. I hope I may say that it depends on the moment of coition. At the moment of coition, either the spirit of the father fuses with the spirit of the mother, to create a new being with a soul, or else nothing fuses but the germ of procreation.

“Now consider. How have these Mexicans of mixed blood been begotten, for centuries? In what spirit? What was the moment of coition like? Answer me that, and you have told me the reason for this Mexico which makes us despair and which will go on making everybody despair, till it destroys itself. In what spirit have the Spanish and other foreign fathers gotten children of the Indian women? What sort of spirit was it? What sort of coition? And then, what sort of race do you expect?”

“But what sort of a spirit is there between white men and white women!” said Kate.

“At least,” replied the didactic Toussaint, “the blood is homogenous, so that consciousness automatically unrolls in continuity.”

“I hate its unrolling in automatic continuity,” said Kate.

“Perhaps! But it makes life possible. Without developing continuity in consciousness, you have chaos. And this comes of mixed blood.”

“And then,” said Kate, “surely the Indian men are fond of their women! The men seem manly, and the women seem very lovable and womanly.”

“It is possible that the Indian children are pure-blooded, and there is the continuity of blood. But the Indian consciousness is swamped under the stagnant water of the white man’s Dead Sea consciousness. Take a man like Benito Juarez, a pure Indian. He floods his old consciousness with the new white ideas, and there springs up a whole forest of verbiage, new laws, new constitutions and all the rest. But it is a sudden weed. It grows like a weed on the surface, saps the strength of the Indian soil underneath, and helps the process of ruin. No, madam! There is no hope for Mexico short of a miracle.”

“Ah!” cried Mirabal, flourishing his wine glass. “Isn’t that wonderful, when only the miracle will save us! When we must produce the miracle? _We! We!_ We must make the miracle!” He hit his own breast emphatically. “Ah, I think that is marvellous!” And he returned to his turkey in black sauce.

“Look at the Mexicans!” Toussaint flared on. “They don’t care about anything. They eat food so hot with chili, it burns holes in their insides. And it has no nourishment. They live in houses that a dog would be ashamed of, and they lie and shiver with cold. But they don’t do anything. They could make, easily, easily, a bed of maize leaves or similar leaves. But they don’t do it. They don’t do anything. They roll up in a thin sarape and lie on a thin mat on the bare ground, whether it is wet or dry. And Mexican nights are cold. But they lie down like dogs, anyhow, as if they lay down to die. I say dogs! But you will see the dogs looking for a dry sheltered place. The Mexicans, no! Anywhere, nothing, nothing! And it is terrible. It is terrible! As if they wanted to punish themselves for being alive!”

“But then, why do they have so many children?” said Kate.

“Why do they? The same, because they don’t care. They don’t care. They don’t care about money, they don’t care about making anything, they don’t care about nothing, nothing, nothing. Only they get an excitement out of women, as they do out of chili. They like to feel the red pepper burning holes in their insides, and they like to feel the other thing, the sex, burning holes in them too. But after the moment, they don’t care. They don’t care a bit.

“And that is bad. I tell you, excuse me, but all, everything, depends on the moment of coition. At that moment many things can come to a crisis: all a man’s hope, his honour, his faith, his trust, his belief in life and creation and God, all these things can come to a crisis in the moment of coition. And these things will be handed on in continuity to the child. Believe me, I am a crank on this idea, but it is true. It is certainly absolutely true.”

“I believe it is true,” said Kate, rather coldly.

“Ah! you do! Well then! Look at Mexico! The only _conscious_ people are half-breeds, people of mixed blood, begotten in greed and selfish brutality.”

“Some people believe in the mixed blood,” said Kate.

“Ah! They do, do they? Who?”

“Some of your serious-minded men. They say the half-breed is better than the Indian.”

“Better! Well! The Indian has his hopelessness. The moment of coition is his moment of supreme hopelessness, when he throws himself down the pit of despair.”

The Austrian, European blood, which fans into fire of conscious understanding, died down again, leaving what was Mexican in Julio Toussaint sunk in irredeemable gloom.

“It is true,” said Mirabal, out of the gloom. “The Mexicans who have any feeling always prostitute themselves, one way or another, and so they can never _do_ anything. And the Indians can never do anything either, because they haven’t got hope in anything. But it is always darkest before the dawn. We must make the miracle come. The miracle is superior even to the moment of coition.”

It seemed, however, as if he said it by an effort of will.

The dinner was ending in silence. During the whirl of talk, or of passionate declaration, the servants had carried round the food and wine. Doña Isabel, completely oblivious of the things that were being said, watched and directed the servants with nervous anxiety and excitement, her hands with their old jewellery trembling with agitation. Don Ramón had kept his eye on his guests’ material comfort, at the same time listening, as it were, from the back of his head. His big brown eyes were inscrutable, his face impassive. But when he had anything to say, it was always with a light laugh and a teasing accent. And yet his eyes brooded and smouldered with an incomprehensible, unyielding fire.

Kate felt she was in the presence of men. Here were men face to face not with death and self-sacrifice, but with the life-issue. She felt for the first time in her life, a pang almost like fear, of men who were passing beyond what she knew, beyond her depth.

Cipriano, his rather short but intensely black, curved eyelashes lowering over his dark eyes, watched his plate, only sometimes looking up with a black, brilliant glance, either at whomsoever was speaking, or at Don Ramón, or at Kate. His face was changeless and intensely serious, serious almost with a touch of childishness. But the curious blackness of his eyelashes lifted so strangely, with such intense unconscious maleness from his eyes, the movement of his hand was so odd, quick, light as he ate, so easily a movement of shooting, or of flashing a knife into the body of some adversary, and his dark-coloured lips were so helplessly savage, as he ate or briefly spoke, that her heart stood still. There was something undeveloped and intense in him, the intensity and the crudity of the semi-savage. She could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins. That was what it was, the heavy-ebbing blood of powerful reptiles, the dragon of Mexico.

So that unconsciously she shrank when his black, big, glittering eyes turned on her for a moment. They were not, like Don Ramón’s, _dark_ eyes. They were black, as black as jewels into which one could not look without a sensation of fear. And her fascination was tinged with fear. She felt somewhat as the bird feels when the snake is watching it.

She wondered almost that Don Ramón was not afraid. Because she had noticed that usually, when an Indian looked to a white man, both men stood back from actual contact, from actual meeting of each other’s eyes. They left a wide space of neutral territory between them. But Cipriano looked at Ramón with a curious intimacy, glittering, steady, warrior-like, and at the same time betraying an almost menacing trust in the other man.

Kate realised that Ramón had a good deal to stand up to. But he kept a little, foiling laugh on his face, and lowered his beautiful head with the black hair touched with grey, as if he would put a veil before his countenance.

“Do you think one can make this miracle come?” she asked of him.

“The miracle is always there,” he said, “for the man who can pass his hand through to it, to take it.”

They finished dinner, and went to sit out on the verandah, looking into the garden where the light from the house fell uncannily on the blossoming trees and the dark tufts of Yucca and the strange great writhing trunks of the Laurel de India.

Cipriano had sat down next to her, smoking a cigarette.

“It is a strange darkness, the Mexican darkness!” she said.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “Do you?”

“Yes. Very much. I think I like best the time when the day is falling and the night coming on like something else. Then, one feels more free, don’t you think? Like the flowers that send out their scent at night, but in the daytime they look at the sun and don’t have any smell.”

“Perhaps the night here scares me,” she laughed.

“Yes. But why not? The smell of the flowers at night may make one feel afraid, but it is a good fear. One likes it, don’t you think?”

“I am afraid of fear,” she said.

He laughed shortly.

“You speak such English English,” she said. “Nearly all the Mexicans who speak English speak American English. Even Don Ramón does, rather.”

“Yes. Don Ramón graduated in Columbia University. But I was sent to England, to school in London, and then to Oxford.”

“Who sent you?”

“My god-father. He was an Englishman: Bishop Severn, Bishop of Oaxaca. You have heard of him?”

“No,” said Kate.

“He was a very well-known man. He died only about ten years ago. He was very rich, too, before the revolution. He had a big hacienda in Oaxaca, with a very fine library. But they took it away from him in the revolution, and they sold the things, or broke them. They didn’t know the value of them, of course.”

“And did he adopt you?”