Part 7

“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?”

“Yes! In a way. My father was one of the overseers on the hacienda. When I was a little boy I came running to my father, when the Bishop was there, with something in my hands--so!”--and he made a cup of his hand. “I don’t remember. This is what they tell me. I was a small child--three or four years of age--somewhere there. What I had in my hands was a yellow scorpion, one of the small ones, very poisonous, no?”

And he lifted the cup of his small, slender, dark hands, as if to show Kate the creature.

“Well, the Bishop was talking to my father, and he saw what I had got before my father did. So he told me at once, to put the scorpion in his hat--the Bishop’s hat, no? Of course I did what he told me, and I put the scorpion in his hat, and it did not bite me. If it had stung me I should have died, of course. But I didn’t know, so I suppose the alacran was not interested. The Bishop was a very good man, very kind. He liked my father, so he became my god-father. Then he always took an interest in me, and he sent me to school, and then to England. He hoped I should be a priest. He always said that the one hope for Mexico was if she had really fine native priests.” He ended rather wistfully.

“And didn’t you want to become a priest?” said Kate.

“No!” he said sadly. “No!”

“Not at all?” she asked.

“No! When I was in England it was different from Mexico. Even God was different, and the Blessed Mary. They were changed so much, I felt I didn’t know them any more. Then I came to understand better, and when I understood I didn’t believe any more. I used to think it was the images of Jesus, and the Virgin, and the Saints, that were doing everything in the world. And the world seemed to me so strange, no? I couldn’t see that it was bad, because it was all so very strange and mysterious, when I was a child, in Mexico. Only in England I learned about the laws of life, and some science. And then when I knew why the sun rose and set, and how the world really was, I felt quite different.”

“Was your god-father disappointed?”

“A little, perhaps. But he asked me if I would rather be a soldier, so I said I would. Then when the revolution came, and I was twenty-two years old, I had to come back to Mexico.”

“Did you like your god-father?”

“Yes, very much. But the revolution carried everything away. I felt I must do what my god-father wished. But I could see that Mexico was not the Mexico he believed in. It was different. He was too English, and too good to understand. In the revolutions, I tried to help the man I believed was the best man. So you see, I have always been half a priest and half a soldier.”

“You never married?”

“No. I couldn’t marry, because I always felt my god-father was there, and I felt I had promised him to be a priest--all those things, you know. When he died he told me to follow my own conscience, and to remember that Mexico and all the Indians were in the hands of God, and he made me promise never to take sides against God. He was an old man when he died, seventy-five.”

Kate could see the spell of the old bishop’s strong, rather grandiose personality upon the impressionable Indian. She could see the curious recoil into chastity, perhaps characteristic of the savage. And at the same time she felt the intense masculine yearning, coupled with a certain male ferocity, in the man’s breast.

“Your husband was James Joachim Leslie, the famous Irish leader?” he asked her: and added:

“You had no children?”

“No. I wanted Joachim’s children so much, but I didn’t have any. But I have a boy and a girl from my first marriage. My first husband was a lawyer, and I was divorced from him for Joachim.”

“Did you like him--that first one?”

“Yes. I liked him. But I never felt anything very deep for him. I married him when I was young, and he was a good deal older than I. I was fond of him, in a way. But I had never realised that one could be more than fond of a man, till I knew Joachim. I thought that was all one could ever expect to feel--that you just liked a man, and that he was in love with you. It took me years to understand that a woman _can’t_ love a man--at least a woman like I am can’t--if he is only the sort of good, decent citizen. With Joachim I came to realise that a woman like me _can_ only love a man who is fighting to _change_ the world, to make it freer, more alive. Men like my first husband, who are good and trustworthy and who work to keep the world going on well in the same state they found it in, they let you down horribly, somewhere. You feel so terribly sold. Everything is just a sell: it becomes so small. A woman who isn’t quite ordinary herself can only love a man who is fighting for something beyond the ordinary life.”

“And your husband fought for Ireland.”

“Yes--for Ireland, and for something he never quite realised. He ruined his health. And when he was dying, he said to me: _Kate, perhaps I’ve let you down. Perhaps I haven’t really helped Ireland. But I couldn’t help myself. I feel as if I’d brought you to the doors of life, and was leaving you there. Kate, don’t be disappointed in life because of me. I didn’t really get anywhere. I haven’t really got anywhere. I feel as if I’d made a mistake. But perhaps when I’m dead I shall be able to do more for you than I have done while I was alive. Say you’ll never feel disappointed!_”

There was a pause. The memory of the dead man was coming over her again, and all her grief.

“And I don’t feel disappointed,” she went on, her voice beginning to shake. “But I loved him. And it was bitter, that he had to die, feeling he hadn’t--hadn’t.”

She put her hands before her face, and the bitter tears came through her fingers.

Cipriano sat motionless as a statue. But from his breast came that dark, surging passion of tenderness the Indians are capable of. Perhaps it would pass, leaving him indifferent and fatalistic again. But at any rate for the moment he sat in a dark, fiery cloud of passionate male tenderness. He looked at her soft, wet white hands over her face, and at the one big emerald on her finger, in a sort of wonder. The wonder, the mystery, the magic that used to flood over him as a boy and a youth, when he kneeled before the babyish figure of the Santa Maria de la Soledad, flooded him again. He was in the presence of the goddess, white-handed, mysterious, gleaming with a moon-like power and the intense potency of grief.

Then Kate hastily took her hands from her face and with head ducked looked for her handkerchief. Of course she hadn’t got one. Cipriano lent her his, nicely folded. She took it without a word, and rubbed her face and blew her nose.

“I want to go and look at the flowers,” she said in a strangled voice.

And she dashed into the garden with his handkerchief in her hand. He stood up and drew aside his chair, to let her pass, then stood a moment looking at the garden, before he sat down again and lighted a cigarette.

CHAP: IV. TO STAY OR NOT TO STAY.

Owen had to return to the United States, and he asked Kate whether she wanted to stay on in Mexico.

This put her into a quandary. It was not an easy country for a woman to be alone in. And she had been beating her wings in an effort to get away. She felt like a bird round whose body a snake has coiled itself. Mexico was the snake.

The curious influence of the country, pulling one down, pulling one down. She had heard an old American, who had been forty years in the Republic, saying to Owen: “No man who hasn’t a strong moral backbone should try to settle in Mexico. If he does, he’ll go to pieces, morally and physically, as I’ve seen hundreds of young Americans do.”

To pull one down. It was what the country wanted to do all the time, with a slow, reptilian insistence, to pull one down. To prevent the spirit from soaring. To take away the free, soaring sense of liberty.

“There is no such thing as liberty,” she heard the quiet, deep, dangerous voice of Don Ramón repeating. “There is no such thing as liberty. The greatest liberators are usually slaves of an idea. The freest people are slaves to convention and public opinion, and more still, slaves to the industrial machine. There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.”

“But surely that _is_ liberty--for the mass of people.”

“They don’t choose. They are tricked into a new form of servility, no more. They go from bad to worse.”

“You yourself--aren’t you free?” she asked.

“I?” he laughed. “I spent a long time trying to pretend. I thought I could have my own way. Till I realised that having my own way meant only running about smelling all the things in the street, like a dog that will pick up something. Of myself, I have no way. No man has any way in himself. Every man who goes along a way is led by one of three things: by an appetite--and I class ambition among appetite; or by an idea; or by an inspiration.”

“I used to think my husband was inspired about Ireland,” said Kate doubtfully.

“And now?”

“Yes! Perhaps he put his wine in old, rotten bottles that wouldn’t hold it. No!--Liberty is a rotten old wine-skin. It won’t hold one’s wine of inspiration or passion any more,” she said.

“And Mexico!” he said. “Mexico is another Ireland. Ah no, no man can be his own master. If I must serve, I will not serve an idea, which cracks and leaks like an old wine-skin. I will serve the God that gives me my manhood. There is no liberty for a man, apart from the God of his manhood. Free Mexico is a bully, and the old, colonial, ecclesiastical Mexico was another sort of bully. When man has nothing but his _will_ to assert--even his good-will--it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.”

“Then what’s to be done?” said Kate. “Just nothing?”

And with her own will, she wanted nothing to be done. Let the skies fall!

“One is driven, at last, back to the far distance, to look for God,” said Ramón uneasily.

“I rather hate this search-for-God business, and religiosity,” said Kate.

“I know!” he said, with a laugh. “I’ve suffered from would-be-cocksure religion myself.”

“And you can’t _really_ ‘find God’!” she said. “It’s a sort of sentimentalism, and creeping back into old, hollow shells.”

“No!” he said slowly. “I can’t _find God_, in the old sense. I know it’s a sentimentalism if I pretend to. But I am nauseated with humanity and the human will: even with my own will. I have realised that _my will_, no matter how intelligent I am, is only another nuisance on the face of the earth, once I start exerting it. And other people’s _wills_ are even worse.”

“Oh! isn’t human life horrible!” she cried. “Every human being exerting his will all the time--over other people, and over himself, and nearly always self-righteous!”

Ramón made a grimace of repulsion.

“To me,” he said, “that is just the weariness of life! For a time, it can be amusing: exerting your own will, and resisting all the other people’s wills, that they try to put over you. But at a certain point, a nausea sets in at the very middle of me: my _soul_ is nauseated. My soul is nauseated, and there is nothing but death ahead, unless I find something else.”

Kate listened in silence. She knew the road he had gone, but she herself had not yet come to the end of it. As yet she was still strong in the pride of her own--her very own _will_.

“Oh, people are repulsive!” she cried.

“My own will becomes even more repulsive at last,” he said. “My own will, merely as my own will, is even more distasteful to me than other people’s wills. From being the god in my own machine, I must either abdicate, or die of disgust--self-disgust, at that.”

“How amusing!” she cried.

“It is rather funny,” he said sardonically.

“And then?” she asked, looking at him with a certain malevolent challenge.

He looked back at her slowly, with an ironical light in his eyes.

“Then!” he repeated. “Then!--I ask, what else is there in the world, besides human will, human appetite? because ideas and ideals are only instruments of human will and appetite.”

“Not entirely,” said Kate. “They may be disinterested.”

“May they? If the appetite _isn’t_ interested, the will is.”

“Why not?” she mocked. “We can’t be mere detached blocks.”

“It nauseates me--I look for something else.”

“And what do you find?”

“My own manhood!”

“What does that mean?” she cried, jeering.

“If you looked, and found your own womanhood, you would know.”

“But I _have_ my own womanhood!” she cried.

“And then--when you find your own manhood--your womanhood,” he went on, smiling faintly at her--“then you know it is not your own, to do as you like with. You don’t have it of your own will. It comes from--from the middle--from the God. Beyond me, at the middle, is the God. And the God gives me my manhood, then leaves me to it. I have nothing but my manhood. The God gives it me, and leaves me to do further.”

Kate would not hear any more. She broke off into banalities.

The immediate question, for her, was whether she would stay in Mexico or not. She was not really concerned with Don Ramón’s soul--or even her own. She was concerned with her immediate future. Should she stay in Mexico? Mexico meant the dark-faced men in cotton clothes, big hats: the peasants, peons, pelados, Indians, call them what you will. The mere natives.

Those pale-faced Mexicans of the Capital, politicians, artists, professionals, and business people, they did not interest her. Neither did the hacendados and the ranch-owners, in their tight trousers and weak, soft sensuality, pale victims of their own emotional undiscipline. Mexico still meant the mass of silent peons, to her. And she thought of them again, these silent, stiff-backed men, driving their strings of asses along the country roads, in the dust of Mexico’s infinite dryness, past broken walls, broken houses, broken haciendas, along the endless desolation left by the revolutions; past the vast stretches of maguey, the huge cactus, or aloe, with its gigantic rosette of upstarting, pointed leaves, that in its iron rows covers miles and miles of ground in the Valley of Mexico, cultivated for the making of that bad-smelling drink, pulque. The Mediterranean has the dark grape, old Europe has malted beer, and China has opium from the white poppy. But out of the Mexican soil a bunch of black-tarnished swords bursts up, and a great unfolded bud of the once-flowering monster begins to thrust at the sky. They cut the great phallic bud and crush out the sperm-like juice for the pulque. _Agua miel! Pulque!_

But better pulque than the fiery white brandy distilled from the maguey: mescal, tequila: or in the low lands, the hateful sugar-cane brandy, aguardiente.

And the Mexican burns out his stomach with those beastly fire-waters and cauterises the hurt with red-hot chili. Swallowing one hell-fire to put out another.