Part 35

In the afternoon there was a great dance of the _Welcome of Quetzalcoatl_, Kate could only see a little of it, in front of the church.

The drums beat vigorously all the time, the dance wound strangely to the water’s edge. Kate heard afterwards that the procession of women with baskets on their heads, filled with bread and fruits all wrapped in leaves, went down to the shore and loaded the boats. Then dancers and all got into the boats and _canoas_, and rowed to the island.

They made a feast on the island, and learned the dance of the _Welcome of Quetzalcoatl_, which they would dance every year on that day. And they learned the Song of the Welcome of Quetzalcoatl; which later on Cipriano brought to Kate, as she sat in that dim room with the unconscious woman, who made small, terrible, mechanical noises.

The doctor came hastening, and the priest came after a while. Neither could do anything. They came in the afternoon again, and Kate walked out and wandered on the half-deserted beach, looking at the flock of boats drawing near the island, and feeling that life was a more terrible issue even than death. One could die and have done. But living was never done, it could never be finished, and the responsibility could never be shifted.

She went back again to the sick-room, and with the aid of a woman she undressed poor Carlota and put a nightdress on her. Another doctor came from the city. But the sick woman was dying. And Kate was alone with her again.

The men, where were they?

The business of living? Were they really gone about the great business of living, abandoning her here to this business of dying?

It was nightfall before she heard the drums returning. And again that deep, full, almost martial singing of men, savage and remote, to the sound of the drum. Perhaps after all life would conquer again, and men would be men, so that women could be women. Till men are men indeed, women have no hope to be women. She knew that fatally enough.

Cipriano came to her, smelling of sun and sweat, his face darkly glowing, his eyes flashing. He glanced at the bed, at the unconscious woman, at the medicine bottles.

“What do they say?” he asked.

“The doctors think she may come round.”

“She will die,” he said.

Then he went with her to the window.

“See!” he said. “This is what they are singing.”

It was the Song-sheet of the _Welcome to Quetzalcoatl_.

Welcome to Quetzalcoatl.

We are not wasted. We are not left out. _Quetzalcoatl has come!_ There is nothing more to ask for. _Quetzalcoatl has come!_

He threw the Fish in the boat. The cock rose, and crew over the waters. The naked one climbed in. _Quetzalcoatl has come!_

Quetzalcoatl loves the shade of trees. Give him trees! Call back the trees! We are like trees, tall and rustling. _Quetzalcoatl is among the trees._

Do not tell me my face is shining. _Quetzalcoatl has come!_ Over my head his noiseless eagle Fans a flame.

Tie my spotted shoes for dancing, The snake has kissed my heel. Like a volcano my hips are moving With fire, and my throat is full.

Blue daylight sinks in my hair. The star comes out between the two Wonders, shines out of everywhere, Saying without speech: Look you!

Ah, Quetzalcoatl! Put sleep as black as beauty in the secret of my belly. Put star-oil over me. Call me a man.

Even as she read, she could hear the people outside singing it, as the reed-flutes unthreaded the melody time after time. This strange dumb people of Mexico was opening its voice at last. It was as if a stone had been rolled off them all, and she heard their voice for the first time, deep, wild, with a certain exultance and menace.

“The naked one climbed in. _Quetzalcoatl has come!_”

She could hear the curious defiance and exultance in the men’s voices. Then a woman’s voice, clear almost as a star itself, went up the road at the verse:

“Blue daylight sinks in my hair. The star comes out between the two Wonders....”

Strange! The people had opened hearts at last. They had rolled the stone of their heaviness away, a new world had begun. Kate was frightened. It was dusk. She laid her hand on Cipriano’s knee, lost. And he leaned and put his dark hand against her cheek, breathing silently.

“To-day,” he said softly, “we have done well.”

She felt for his hand. All was so dark. But oh, so deep, so deep and beyond her, the vast, soft, living heat! So beyond her!

“Put sleep so black as beauty in the secret of my belly. Put star-oil over me.”

She could almost feel her soul appealing to Cipriano for this sacrament.

They sat side by side in darkness, as the night fell, and he held his hand loosely on hers. Outside, the people were still singing. Some were dancing round the drum. On the church-towers, where the bells had been, there were fires flickering, and white forms of men, the noise of a heavy drum, then again, the chant. In the yard before the church doors a fire was blazing, and men of Huitzilopochtli stood watching two of their men, naked save for a breech-cloth and the scarlet feathers on their head, dancing the old spear-dance, whooping challenge in the firelight.

Ramón came in, in his white clothes. He pulled off his big hat, and stood looking down at Carlota. She no longer made noises, and her eyes were turned up horribly, showing the whites. Ramón closed his eyes a moment, and turned away, saying nothing. He came to the window, where Cipriano still sat in his impenetrable but living silence, that satisfied where all speech had failed, holding Kate’s hand loosely. Nor did he let go her hand.

Ramón looked out, at the fires in the church towers, the fire before the church doors, the little fires on the beach by the lake; and the figures of men in white, the figures of women in dark rebozos, with full white skirts, the two naked dancers, the standing crowd, the occasional scarlet serapes of Huitzilopochtli, the white and blue of Quetzalcoatl, the creeping away of a motor-car, the running of boys, the men clustering round the drum, to sing.

“It is life,” he said, “which is the mystery. Death is hardly mysterious in comparison.”

There was a knocking. The doctor had come again, and a sister to nurse the dying woman. Softly the sister paced round the room and bent over her charge.

Cipriano and Kate went away in a boat over the dark lake, away from all the fires and the noise, into the deep darkness of the lake beyond, to Jamiltepec. Kate felt she wanted to be covered with deep and living darkness, the deeps where Cipriano could lay her.

_Put sleep as black as beauty in the secret of my belly. Put star-oil over me._

And Cipriano, as he sat in the boat with her, felt the inward sun rise darkly in him, diffusing through him; and felt the mysterious flower of her woman’s femaleness slowly opening to him, as a sea-anemone opens deep under the sea, with infinite soft fleshliness. The hardness of self-will was gone, and the soft anemone of her deeps blossomed for him of itself, far down under the tides.

Ramón remained behind in the hotel, in the impenetrable sanctuary of his own stillness. Carlota remained unconscious. There was a consultation of doctors; to no effect. She died at dawn, before her boys could arrive from Mexico; as a _canoa_ was putting off from the shore with a little breeze, and the passengers were singing the Song of Welcome to Quetzalcoatl, unexpectedly, upon the pale water.

CHAP: XXII. THE LIVING HUITZILOPOCHTLI.

They buried Doña Carlota in Sayula, and Kate, though a woman, went also to the funeral. Don Ramón followed the coffin, in his white clothes and big hat with the Quetzalcoatl sign. His boys went with him; and there were many strangers, men, in black.

The boys looked odd young shoots, in their black suits with short breeches and bare knees. They were both round-faced and creamy brown in complexion, both had a touch of fairness. The elder, Pedro, was more like Don Ramón; but his hair was softer, more fluffy than his father’s, with a hint of brown. He was sulky and awkward, and kept his head ducked. The younger boy, Cyprian, had the fluffy, upstanding brown hair and the startled hazel eyes of his mother.

They had come in a motor-car with their aunt, from Guadalajara, and were returning straight to town. In her will, the mother had named guardians in place of the father, stating that the father would consent. And her considerable fortune she had left in trust for the boys. But the father was one of the trustees.

Ramón sat in his room in the hotel, overlooking the lake, and his two boys sat on the cane settee opposite him.

“What do you want to do, my sons?” said Ramón. “To go back with your Aunt Margarita, and return to school in the United States?”

The boys remained a while in sulky silence.

“Yes!” said Cyprian at last, his brown hair seeming to fluff up with indignation. “That is what our mother wished us to do. So, of course, we shall do it.”

“Very well!” said Ramón quietly. “But remember I am your father, and my door, and my arms, and my heart will always be open to you, when you come.”

The elder boy shuffled with his feet, and muttered, without looking up:

“We cannot come, papa!”

“Why not, child?”

The boy looked up at him with brown eyes as challenging as his own.

“You, papa, you call yourself The Living Quetzalcoatl?”

“Yes.”

“But, papa, our father is called Ramón Carrasco.”

“It is also true,” said Ramón, smiling.

“We,” said Pedro, rather heavily, “are not the children of the Living Quetzalcoatl, papa. We are Carrasco y de Lara.”

“Good names both,” said Ramón.

“Never,” said the young Cyprian, his eyes flashing, “never can we love you, papa. You are our enemy. You killed our mother.”

“No, no!” said Ramón. “That you must not say. Your mother sought her own death.”

“Mama loved you much, much, much!” cried Cyprian, the tears rising to his eyes. “Always she loved you and prayed for you--” He began to cry.

“And I, my son?” said Ramón.

“You hated her and killed her! Oh, mama! Mama! Oh, mama! I want my mother!” he wept.

“Come to me, little one!” said Ramón softly, holding out his hands.

“No!” cried Cyprian, stamping his foot and flashing his eyes through his tears. “No! No!”

The elder boy hung his head and was crying too. Ramón had the little, perplexed frown of pain on his brow. He looked from side to side, as if for some issue. Then he gathered himself together.

“Listen, my sons,” he said. “You also will be men; it will not be long. While you are little boys, you are neither men nor women. But soon, the change will come, and you will have to be men. And then you will know that a man must be a man. When his soul tells him to do a thing, he must do it. When you are men, you must listen carefully to your own souls, and be sure to be true. Be true to your own souls; there is nothing else for a man to do.”

“Je m’en fiche de ton âme, mon perè!” said Cyprian, with one of his flashes into French. It was a language he often spoke with his mother.

“That you may, my boy,” said Ramón. “But I may not.”

“Papa!” put in the elder boy. “Is your soul different from mama’s soul?”

“Who knows?” said Ramón. “I understand it differently.”

“Because mama always prayed for your soul.”

“And I, in my way, pray for hers, child. If her soul comes back to me, I will take it into my heart.”

“Mama’s soul,” said Cyprian, “will go straight into Paradise.”

“Who knows, child! Perhaps the Paradise for the souls of the dead is the hearts of the living.”

“I don’t understand what you say.”

“It is possible,” said Ramón, “that even now the only Paradise for the soul of your mother is in my heart.”

The two boys stared at him with open eyes.

“Never will I believe that,” said Cyprian.

“Or it may be in _thy_ heart,” said Ramón. “Hast thou a place in _thy_ heart for the soul of thy mother?”

The young Cyprian stared with bewildered hazel eyes.

“The soul of my mother goes direct to Paradise, because she is a saint,” he asserted flatly.

“Which Paradise, my son?”

“The only one. Where God is.”

“And where is that?”

There was a pause.

“In the sky,” said Cyprian, stubbornly.

“It is very far and very empty. But I believe, my son, that the hearts of living men are the very middle of the sky. And there God is; and Paradise; inside the hearts of living men and women. And there the souls of the dead come to rest, there, at the very centre, where the blood turns and returns; that is where the dead sleep best.”

There was a very blank pause.

“And wilt thou go on saying thou art the Living Quetzalcoatl?” said Cyprian.

“Surely! And when you are a little older, perhaps you will come to me and say it too.”

“Never! Thou hast killed our mother, and we shall hate thee. When we are men we ought to kill thee.”

“Nay, that is bombast, child! Why wilt thou listen only to servants and priests and people of that sort? Are they not thy inferiors, since thou art my son, and thy mother’s son? Why dost thou take the talk of servants and inferiors into thy mouth? Hast thou no room for the speech of brave men? Thou wilt not kill me, neither will thy brother. For I would not allow you, even if you wished it. And you do not wish it. Talk no more of this empty lackey-talk to me, Cyprian, for I will not hear it. Art thou already a little lackey, or a priest? Come, thou art vulgar. Thou art a little vulgarian. We had better speak English; or thy French. Castilian is too good a language to turn into this currish talk.”

Ramón rose and went to the window to look out at the lake. The drums on the church were sounding for mid-day, when every man should glance at the sun, and stand silent with a little prayer.

“The sun has climbed the hill, the day is on the downward slope. Between the morning and the afternoon, stand I here with my soul, and lift it up. My soul is heavy with sunshine, and steeped with strength. The sunbeams have filled me like a honeycomb, It is the moment of fulness, And the top of the morning.”

Ramón turned and repeated the Mid-day verse to his boys. They listened in confused silence.

“Come!” he said. “Why are you confused? If I talked to you about your new boots, or ten pesos, you would not be confused. But if I speak of the sun and your own souls filled from the sun like honeycombs, you sulk. You had better go back to your school in America, to learn to be business men. You had better say to everybody: Oh, no! we have no father! Our mother died, but we never had a father. We are children of an immaculate conception, so we should make excellent business men.”

“I shall be a priest,” said Cyprian.

“And I a doctor,” said Pedro.

“Very good! Very good! _Shall-be_ is far from _am_, and to-morrow is another day. Come to me when your heart tells you to come. You are my little boys, whatever you say, and I shall stroke your hair and laugh at you. Come! Come here!”

He looked at them, and they dared not refuse to obey, his power was so much greater than theirs.

He took his eldest son in his arms and stroked his head.

“There!” he said. “Thou art my eldest son, and I am thy father, who calls himself The Living Quetzalcoatl. When they say: ‘Is it thy father who calls himself The Living Quetzalcoatl?’--say to them: ‘Yes, he is my father.’ And when they ask you what you think of such a father, say: ‘I am young, and I do not understand him yet. But I do not judge my father without understanding him.’ Wilt thou say that, my boy, Pedro, my son?” And Ramón stroked the boy’s hair with the gentleness and tenderness which filled the child with a sort of awe.

“Yes, papa! I will say that,” said the boy, relieved.

“It is well,” said Ramón, laying his hand on the child’s head for a moment, like a blessing.

Then he turned to the younger son.

“Come then,” he said, “and let me stroke thy upstanding hair.”

“If I love thee, I cannot love mama!” said Cyprian.

“Nay, is thy heart so narrow? Love not at all, if it makes thee petty.”

“But I do not want to come to thee, papa.”

“Then stay away, my son, and come when thou dost want it.”

“I do not think thou lovest me, papa.”

“Nay, when thou art an obstinate monkey, I love thee not. But when thy real manhood comes upon thee, and thou art brave and daring, rather than rash and impudent, then thou wilt be lovable. How can I love thee if thou art not lovable?”

“Mama always loved me.”

“She called thee her own. I do not call thee mine own. Thou art thyself. When thou art lovable, I can love thee. When thou art rash and impudent, nay, I cannot. The mill will not spin when the wind does not blow.”

The boys went away. Ramón watched them as they stood in their black clothes and bare knees upon the jetty, and his heart yearned over them.

“Ah, the poor little devils!” he said to himself. And then:

“But I can do no more than keep my soul like a castle for them, to be a stronghold to them when they need it--if ever they do.”

These days Kate often sat by the lake shore, in the early light of the morning. Between the rains, the day came very clear, she could see every wrinkle in the great hills opposite, and the fold, or pass, through which a river came, away at Tuliapan, was so vivid to her she felt she had walked it. The red birds looked as if rains had freshened even their poppy-buds, and in the morning frogs were whirring.

But the world was somehow different; all different. No jingle of bells from the church, no striking of the clock. The clock was taken away.

And instead, the drums. At dawn, the heavy drum rolling its sound on the air. Then the sound of the Dawn-Verse chanted from the tower, in a strong man’s voice:

“The dark is dividing, the sun is coming past the wall. Day is at hand. Lift your hand, say Farewell! say Welcome! Then be silent. Let the darkness leave you, let the light come into you, Man in the twilight.”

The voice, and the great drum ceased. And in the dawn the men who had risen stood silent, with arm uplifted, in the moment of change, the women covered their faces and bent their heads. All was changeless still for the moment of change.

Then the light drum rattled swiftly, as the first sparkle of the bright sun flashed in sheer light from the crest of the great hills. The day had begun. People of the world moved on their way.

At about nine o’clock the light drum rattled quickly, and the voice in the tower cried:

“Half way! Half way up the slope of the morning!”

There was the heavy drum at noon, the light drum again at about three o’clock, with the cry:

“Half way! Half way down the slope of afternoon.”

And at sunset again, the great drum rolling, and the voice crying:

“Leave off! Leave off! Leave off! Lift your hand, say Farewell! say Welcome! Man in the twilight. The sun is in the outer porch, cry to him: Thanks! Oh, Thanks! Then be silent. You belong to the night.”

And again in the sunset everywhere men stood with lifted faces and hand, and women covered their faces and stood with bowed heads, all was changeless still for the moment of change.

Then the lighter drums suddenly beat, and people moved on into the night.

The world was different, different. The drums seemed to leave the air soft and vulnerable, as if it were alive. Above all, no clang of metal on metal, during the moments of change.

“Metal for resistance. Drums for the beating heart. The heart ceases not.”

This was one of Ramón’s little verses.

Strange, the change that was taking place in the world. Always the air had a softer, more velvety silence, it seemed alive. And there were no hours. Dawn and noon and sunset, mid-morning, or the up-slope middle, and mid-afternoon, or the downslope middle, this was the day, with the watches of the night. They began to call the four watches of the day the watch of the rabbit, the watch of the hawk, the watch of the turkey-buzzard and the watch of the deer. And the four quarters of the night were the watch of the frog, the watch of the firefly, the watch of the fish, the watch of the squirrel.

“I shall come for you,” wrote Cipriano to her, “when the deer is thrusting his last foot towards the forest.”

That meant, she knew, in the last quarter of the hours of the deer; something after five o’clock.

It was as if, from Ramón and Cipriano, from Jamiltepec and the lake region, a new world was unfolding, unrolling, as softly and subtly as twilight falling and removing the clutter of day. It was a soft, twilit newness slowly spreading and penetrating the world, even into the cities. Now, even in the cities the blue serapes of Quetzalcoatl were seen, and the drums were heard at the Hours, casting a strange mesh of twilight over the clash of bells and the clash of traffic. Even in the capital the big drum rolled again, and men, even men in city clothes, would stand still with uplifted faces and arm upstretched, listening for the noon-verse, which they knew in their hearts, and trying not to hear the clash of metal.

“Metal for resistance. Drums for the beating heart.”

But it was a world of metal, and a world of resistance. Cipriano, strangely powerful with the soldiers, in spite of the hatred he aroused in other officials, was for meeting metal with metal. For getting Montes to declare: The Religion of Quetzalcoatl is the religion of Mexico, official and declared.--Then backing up the declaration with the army.

But no! no! said Ramón. Let it spread of itself. And wait awhile, till you can be declared the living Huitzilopochtli, and your men can have the red and black blanket, with the snake-curve. Then perhaps we can have the open wedding with Caterina, and she will be a mother among the gods.

All the time, Ramón tried as far as possible to avoid arousing resistance and hate. He wrote open letters to the clergy, saying: