The Plumed Serpent

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 economise, 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.”

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 further back, and in shadow, a pure cone of atmospheric shadow, with glinting flashes of snow.

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.

“Do you know whom the lake belongs to?” he asked, with the same effrontery.

“What do you say?” asked Kate, haughty.

“If you know whom the lake belongs to?” the young man in the water repeated.

“To whom?” said Kate, flustered.

“To the old gods of Mexico,” the stranger said. “You have to make a tribute to Quetzalcoatl, if you go on the lake.”

The strange calm effrontery of it! But truly Mexican.

“How?” said Kate.

“You can give me something,” he said.

“But why should I give something to you, if it is a tribute to Quetzalcoatl?” she stammered.

“I am Quetzalcoatl’s man, I,” he replied, with calm effrontery.

“And if I don’t give you anything?” she said.

He lifted his shoulders and spread his free hand, staggering a little, losing his footing in the water as he did so.

“If you wish to make an enemy of the lake!—” he said, coolly, as he recovered his balance.

And then for the first time he looked straight at her. And as he did so, the demonish effrontery died down again, and the peculiar American tension slackened and left him.

He gave a slight wave of dismissal with his free hand, and pushed the boat gently forward.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he said, with a slight insolent jerk of his head sideways, and a faint, insolent smile. “We will wait till the Morning Star rises.”

She dozed, and wakened suddenly, at a small noise. She sat up in bed. Her doors on to the verandah had shutters. The doors themselves were fastened, but the shutters were open for air, leaving the upper space, like the window of the door, open. And against the dark grey of the night she saw what looked like a black cat crouching on the bottom of the panel-space.

“What is that?” she said automatically.

Instantly, the thing moved, slid away, and she knew it was the arm of a man that had been reaching inside to pull the bolt of the door. She lay for a second paralysed, prepared to scream. There was no movement. So she leaned and lit a candle.

The curious panic fear was an agony to her. It paralysed her and wrenched her heart out of place. She lay prostrate in the anguish of night-terror. The candle blazed duskily. There was a far-off mutter of thunder. And the night was horrible, horrible, Mexico was ghastly to her beyond description.

She could not relax, she could not get her heart into place. “Now,” she thought to herself, “I am at the mercy of this thing, and I have lost myself.” And it was a terrible feeling, to be lost, scattered, as it were, from herself in a horror of fear.

“What can I do?” she thought, summoning her spirit. “How can I help myself?” She knew she was all alone.