The Plumed Serpent quotes

“I think it’s thrilling!” she said.

Like most modern people, she had a will-to-happiness.

“Isn’t it thrilling,” cried Owen, whose will-to-happiness was almost a mania. “Don’t you think so, Bud?”

But then Villiers was young, he was only over twenty, while Owen was over forty.

The younger generation calculates its “happiness” in a more business-like fashion.

Villiers was out after a thrill, but he wasn’t going to say he’d got one till he’d got it. Kate and Owen—Kate was also nearly forty—must enthuse a thrill, out of a sort of politeness to the great Show-man, Providence.

The scene was creating a very hostile attitude in the audience.

To leave the bull-fight is a national insult.

“Don’t come! Really! I shall take a tram-car,” she said hurriedly.

From the first instant, Kate respected her for her isolation and her dauntlessness.

The world is made up of a mass of people and a few individuals.

Mrs Norris was one of the few individuals. True, she played her social game all the time. But she was an odd number; and all alone, she could give the even numbers a bad time.

“Ah, my dear Mr Rhys, they all talk so nobly beforehand.

If only their deeds followed their words, Mexico would be heaven on earth.

”

She was a beautiful woman, in her own unconventional way, and with a certain richness. She was going to be forty next week. Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.

She was never in any society: too Irish, too wise.

“But of course nobody lives without hope,” Mrs Norris was saying banteringly to Don Ramón. “If it’s only the hope of a real, to buy a litre of pulque.”

Evening was falling. The garden was drawn up tall, under the huge dark trees on the one side, and the tall, reddish-and-yellow house on the other.

It was like being at the bottom of some dusky, flowering garden down in Hades.

Hibiscus hung scarlet from the bushes, putting out yellow bristling tongues. Some roses were scattering scentless petals on the twilight, and lonely-looking carnations hung on weak stalks.

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.”

And on the bright sunshine was a dark steam of an angry, impotent blood, and the flowers seemed to have their roots in spilt blood.

The spirit of place was cruel, down-dragging, destructive.

Kate could so well understand the Mexican who had said to her: El Grito mexicano es siempre el Grito del Odio—The Mexicano shout is always a shout of hate. The famous revolutions, as Don Ramón said, began with Viva! but ended always with Muera!

The first half of her life had been written on the bright, smooth vellum of hope, with initial letters all gorgeous upon a field of gold. But the glamour had gone from station to station of the Cross, and the last illumination was the tomb.

Now the bright page was turned, and the dark page lay before her. How could one write on a page so profoundly black?

She went down, having promised to go and see the frescoes in the university and schools. Owen and Villiers and a young Mexican were waiting for her.

But they were men—or boys—whose very pigments seemed to exist only to épater le bourgeois. And Kate was weary of épatisme, just as much as of the bourgeoisie. She wasn’t interested in épatant le bourgeois.

The épateurs were as boring as the bourgeois, two halves of one dreariness.

The little party passed on to the old Jesuit convent, now used as a secondary school. Here were more frescoes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

“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?”

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.

”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

”

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.”

“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.

”

And the cities of Mexico, great and small, that the Spaniards conjured up out of nothing.

Stones live and die with the spirit of the builders.

And the spirit of Spaniards in Mexico dies, and the very stones in the building die. The natives drift into the centre of the plazas again, and in unspeakable empty weariness the Spanish buildings stand around, in a sort of dry exhaustion.

Maybe they draw you down as the earth draws down the roots of a tree, so that it may be clinched deep in soil. Men are still part of the Tree of Life, and the roots go down to the centre of the earth.

Loose leaves, and aeroplanes, blow away on the wind, in what they call freedom. But the Tree of Life has fixed, deep, gripping roots.

“It may be you need to be drawn down, down, till you send roots into the deep places again. Then you can send up the sap and the leaves back to the sky; later.

“

All that matters to me are the roots that reach down beyond all destruction.

The roots and the life are there. What else it needs is the word, for the forest to begin to rise again. And some man among men must speak the word.”

Earth, air, water were all silent with new light, the last blue of night dissolving like a breath. No sound, even no life.

The great light was stronger than life itself.

Only, up in the blue, some turkey-buzzards were wheeling with dirty-edged wings, as everwhere in Mexico.

But what was the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting, but so without any mystery, any background.

The younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

No, she could not go back to Europe.

After all, in spite of the horrors latent in Mexico, when you got these dark-faced people away from wrong contacts like agitators and socialism, they made one feel that life was vast, if fearsome, and death was fathomless.

Horrors might burst out of them. But something must burst out, sometimes, if men are not machines.

No! no! no! no! no! she cried to her own soul. Let me still believe in some human contact. Let it not be all cut off for me!

And now she realised as plainly as if she had turned into a new being, that this was not so. Men and women had incomplete selves, made up of bits assembled together loosely and somewhat haphazard.

Man was not created ready-made.

Men to-day were half-made, and women were half-made. Creatures that existed and functioned with certain regularity, but which ran off into a hopeless jumble of inconsequence.

Concrete, jarring, exasperating reality had melted away, and a soft world of potency stood in its place, the velvety dark flux from the earth, the delicate yet supreme life-breath in the inner air.

Behind the fierce sun the dark eyes of a deeper sun were watching, and between the bluish ribs of the mountains a powerful heart was secretly beating, the heart of the earth.

Her house was what she wanted; a low L-shaped, tiled building with rough red floors and deep verandah, and the other two sides of the patio completed by the thick, dark little mango-forest outside the low wall.

… apples of the eye, the apples of the chin, the apple of the heart, the apples of the breast, the apple of the belly, with its deep core, the apples of the loins, the apples of the knees, the little, side-by-side apples of the toes.

What do change and evolution matter? We are the Tree with the fruit forever upon it.

And we are faith forever. Verbum Sat.

The voice finished singing, only the drum kept on. Suddenly the drum gave a rapid little shudder, and there was silence. And immediately the hands were loosened, the dance broke up into fragments. The man gave her a quick, far-off smile and was gone.

She would never know him by sight. But by presence she might know him.

The women slipped apart, clutching their rebozos tight round their shoulders. The men hid themselves in their blankets. And Kate turned to the darkness of the lake.

Night, timeless, hourless night! She would not look at her watch.

She would lay her watch face down, to hide its phosphorus figures. She would not be timed.

And as she sank into sleep, she could hear the drum again, like a pulse inside a stone beating.

She would lie and listen to the thickening darkness. A little way off would sound the long, shrill whistle of the police watch. And in a while, the police patrol, on horseback, would go clattering lightly by.

But the police in most countries are never present save where there is no trouble.

The rainy season was coming, and the night-wind rose from the lake, making strange noises in the trees, and shaking the many loose doors of the house. The servants were away in their distant recess.

The rainy season was coming, and the night-wind rose from the lake, making strange noises in the trees, and shaking the many loose doors of the house. The servants were away in their distant recess.

And in Mexico, at night, each little distance isolates itself absolutely, like a man in a black cloak turning his back.

In the morning, Juana would appear from the plaza, her eyes blob-like and inky, and the old, weary, monkey look of subjection to fear, settled on her bronze face. A race old in subjection to fear, and unable to shake it off.

Then they almost resented it that she shut herself off to have her bath. She was a sort of goddess to them, to provide them with fun and wonder; but she ought always to be accessible.

And a god who is forever accessible to human beings has an unenviable time of it, Kate soon discovered.

No, it was no sinecure, being a Niña. At dawn began the scrape-scrape of the twig broom outside. Kate stayed on in bed, doors fastened but shutters open. Flutter outside! Somebody wanted to sell two eggs. Where is the Niña. She is sleeping!

The game, the game of it all! Everything they did must be fun, or they could not do it. They could not abstract themselves to a routine. Never.

Everything must be fun, must be variable, must be a bit of an adventure.

It was confusion, but after all, a living confusion, not a dead, dreary thing. Kate remembered her English servants in the English kitchens: so mechanical and somehow inhuman. Well, this was the other extreme.

“Their pride gets the better of them. And then they understand nothing, nothing but their own foolish will, their will to be very, very important. It is just the male vanity.

Don’t you think, Señora, that the beginning and the end of a man is his vanity?

Don’t you think it was just against this danger that Christ came, to teach men a proper humility. To teach them the sin of pride. But that is why they hate Christ so much, and His teaching. First and last, they want their own vanity.”

When lunch was over, Ramón went to his room, to sleep for an hour. It was a hot, still afternoon.

Clouds were standing erect and splendid, at the west end of the lake, like messengers.

Ramón went into his room and closed the window-doors and the shutters, till it was quite dark, save for yellow pencils of light that stood like substance on the darkness, from the cracks of the shutters.

“

And worlds arise as dreams, and are gone as dreams.

“And man is a dream in the sleep of the Snake.

“

And man is a dream in the sleep of the Snake.

“And only the sleep that is dreamless breathes I Am!

“

And the dream of the body is the stillness of a flower in the dark.

“And the dream of the soul is gone in the perfume of Now.

“

Think neither to give nor to receive, only let the jasmine flower.

“Let nothing spill from you in excess, let nothing be reived from you.

“

Take nothing, to say: I have it! For you can possess nothing, not even peace.

“Nought is possessible, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation.

It was hard to come back to these things. The noise of them sounded on the outside of his ears, but inside them was the slow, vast, inaudible roar of the cosmos, like in a sea-shell.

It was hard to have to bear the contact of commonplace daily things, when his soul and body were naked to the cosmos.

He wished they would leave him the veils of his isolation awhile. But they would not: especially Carlota. She wanted him to be present to her: in familiar contact.

The moment Kate had imagined a knife between his shoulders, her heart shrank with grief and shame, and a great stillness came over her.

Better to take the hush into one’s heart, and the sharp, prying beams out of one’s eyes.

Better to lapse away from one’s own prying, assertive self, into the soft, untrespassing self, to whom nakedness is neither shame nor excitement, but clothed like a flower in its own deep, soft consciousness, beyond cheap awareness.

They have got rid of that itching of the eye, and the desire that works through the eye. The itching, prurient, knowing, imagining eye, I am cursed with it, I am hampered up in it. It is my curse of curses, the curse of Eve.

The curse of Eve is upon me, my eyes are like hooks, my knowledge is like a fish-hook through my gills, pulling me in spasmodic desire.

Oh, who will free me from the grappling of my eyes, from the impurity of sharp sight! Daughter of Eve, of greedy vision, why don’t these men save me from the sharpness of my own eyes!”

“Do take one,” he said. “

It isn’t good, to be perfect.

”

And a woman might be like that.—But this passes, and the sun begins to shine very strong, very hot, no? Then everything inside a man changes, goes dark, no!

And the flowers crumple up, and the breast of a man becomes like a steel mirror.

And he is all darkness inside, coiling and uncoiling like a snake. All the flowers withered up on shrunk stems, no? And then women don’t exist for a man. They disappear like the flowers.”

“Why not say it!” he replied. “

You are like the cool morning, very fresh. In Mexico, we are the end of the hot dry day.

”

While ever there was one little vulnerable chink.

And what man can be invulnerable?

He went upstairs by the outer stairway, through the iron door at the side of the house, under the heavy trees, up to his room, and sat on his bed. The night was hot, heavy, and ominously still.

But the other man’s brows were low, his eyes were fixed in the darkness of the sheds away across the courtyard. He was looking into the heart of the world; because the faces of men, and the hearts of men are helpless quicksands.

Only in the heart of the cosmos man can look for strength.

And if he can keep his soul in touch with the heart of the world, then from the heart of the world new blood will beat in strength and stillness into him, fulfilling his manhood.

A young palm-tree bent and spread its leaves on the ground. Some invisible juggernaut car rolling in the dark over the outside world.

Away across the lake, south-west, lightning blazed and ran down the sky like some portentous writing.

And soft, velvety thunder broke inwardly, strangely.

The first great drops were flying darkly at the flowers, like arrows. Kate stood back into the doorway of the salon. A pure blaze of lightning slipped three-fold above the black hills, seemed to stand a moment, then slip back into the dark.

Down came the rain with a smash, as if some great vessel had broken.

With it, came a waft of icy air.

“

How else should one believe, except by being compelled?

I like Ramón for that, that he can compel me. When I grew up, and my god-father could not compel me to believe, I was very unhappy. It made me very unhappy.—But Ramón compels me, and that is very good.

But her love had turned from being the spontaneous flow, subject to the unforseen comings and goings of the Holy Ghost, and had turned into will. She loved now with her will: as the white world now tends to do.

She became filled with charity: that cruel kindness.

Her winsomeness and her elvishness departed from her, she began to wither, she grew tense. And she blamed him, and prayed for him. Even as the spontaneous mystery died in her, the will hardened, till she was nothing but a will: a lost will.

And Ramón henceforth watched her in her beautiful, rather fluttering, rather irritating gentleness, as he watched his closest enemy.

Life had done its work on one more human being, quenched the spontaneous life and left only the will.

Killed the god in the woman, or the goddess, and left only charity, with a will.

But usually it did no such thing. Often it refused to sputter into being till seven, or half-past, or even eight o’clock. But its worst trick was that of popping out just in the middle of supper, or just when you were writing a letter.

All of a sudden, the black Mexican night came down on you with a thud.

And then everybody running blindly for matches and candles, with a calling of frightened voices. Why were they always frightened? Then the electric light, like a wounded thing, would try to revive, and a red glow would burn in the bulbs, sinister.

A candle shone in her desert salon. Now and again she saw the oleanders and the papaya in the patio garden, by the blue gleam of lightning that fell with a noiseless splash into the pitch darkness.

There was a distant noise of thunders, several storms prowling round like hungry jaguars, above the lake.

And several times the gate clicked, and crunching steps came along the gravel, someone passed on the gravel walk, saluting her, going down to Juana’s quarters, where the dull light of a floating oil wick shone through the grated window-hole.

As you say, you take no interest in sewing. You know the Navajo women, when they weave a blanket, leave a little place for their soul to come out, at the end: not to weave their soul into it.—

I always think England has woven her soul into her fabrics, into all the things she has made. And she never left a place for it to come out.

So now all her soul is in her goods, and nowhere else.”

“But what would you like to do? As you say, you take no interest in sewing.

You know the Navajo women, when they weave a blanket, leave a little place for their soul to come out, at the end: not to weave their soul into it.

—I always think England has woven her soul into her fabrics, into all the things she has made. And she never left a place for it to come out. So now all her soul is in her goods, and nowhere else.”

“Ah! You think so? I think not.

The soul is also a thing you make, like a pattern in a blanket.

It is very nice while all the wools are rolling their different threads and different colours, and the pattern is being made. But once it is finished—then finished it has no interest any more. Mexico hasn’t started to weave the pattern of her soul.

“Get used to it,” he said. “Get used to it that there must be a bit of fear, and a bit of horror in your life. And marry me, and you will find many things that are not horror.

The bit of horror is like the sesame seed in the nougat, it gives the sharp wild flavour.

It is good to have it there.”

Near her against the light five cows stood with their noses to the water drinking. Women were kneeling on the stones, filling red jars.

On forked sticks stuck up on the foreshore, frail fishing nets were hung out, drying, and on the nets a small bird sat facing the sun; he was red as a drop of new blood, from the arteries of the air.

From the straw huts under the trees, her urchin of the mud-chick was scuttling towards her, clutching something in his fist.

and must be. And I am hibiscus and you are a yucca flower, and your Caterina is a wild daffodil, and my Carlota is a white pansy. Only four of us, yet we make a curious bunch. So it is.

The men and women of the earth are not manufactured goods, to be interchangeable.

But the Tree of Life is one tree, as we know when our souls open in the last blossoming. We can’t change ourselves, and we don’t want to.

They wanted intimacy—and intimacy means disgust. Carlota wanted to be eternally and closely identified with Ramón, consequently she hated him and hated everything which she thought drew him away from this eternal close identification with herself. It was just a horror, and he knew it.

Men and women should know that they cannot, absolutely, meet on earth.

In the closest kiss, the dearest touch, there is the small gulf which is none the less complete because it is so narrow, so nearly non-existent. They must bow and submit in reverence, to the gulf.

Men and women should know that they cannot, absolutely, meet on earth.

In the closest kiss, the dearest touch, there is the small gulf which is none the less complete because it is so narrow, so nearly non-existent.

They must bow and submit in reverence, to the gulf. Even though I eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, Christ is Christ and I am I, and the gulf is impassable.

Though a woman be dearer to a man than his own life, yet he is he and she is she, and the gulf can never close up. Any attempt to close it is a violation, and the crime against the Holy Ghost.

That which we get from the beyond, we get it alone.

The final me I am, comes from the farthest off, from the Morning Star. The rest is assembled. All that of me which is assembled from the mighty cosmos can meet and touch all that is assembled in the beloved.

When men meet at the quick of all things, they are neither naked nor clothed; in the transfiguration they are just complete, they are not seen in part.

The final perfect strength has also the power of innocence.

Sitting on the seat beside Kate, Ramón was sad with the sense of heaviness and inadequacy. His third Hymn was angry and bitter. Carlota almost embittered his soul. In Mexico, turbulent fellows had caught at his idea and burlesqued it.

Because there was a strange, submerged desire in the people for things beyond the world. They were weary of events, and weary of news and the newspapers, weary even of the things that are taught in education.

Weary is the spirit of man with man’s importunity.

Of all things human, and humanly invented, we have had enough, they seemed to say.

“What is illegal in Mexico?” said Ramón. “

What is weak is illegal.

I will not be weak, My Lord.”

“Ah!” sighed Ramón. “It’s no good generalising.

It’s no good marrying anybody, unless there will be a real fusion somewhere.

”

“You are right,” he said. “Yet, in these matters, one never knows what is half-way, nor where it is.

A woman who just wants to be taken, and then to cling on, is a parasite. And a man who wants just to take, without giving, is a creature of prey.

”

“Who knows? If I err, it will be on that side. But you know, Señora, Quetzalcoatl is to me only the symbol of the best a man may be, in the next days.

The universe is a nest of dragons, with a perfectly unfathomable life-mystery at the centre of it.

If I call the mystery the Morning Star, surely it doesn’t matter! A man’s blood can’t beat in the abstract. And man is a creature who wins his own creation inch by inch from the nest of the cosmic dragons.

The universe is a nest of dragons, with a perfectly unfathomable life-mystery at the centre of it. If I call the mystery the Morning Star, surely it doesn’t matter!

A man’s blood can’t beat in the abstract.

And man is a creature who wins his own creation inch by inch from the nest of the cosmic dragons. Or else he loses it little by little, and goes to pieces. Now we are all losing it, in the ravishing and ravished disintegration.

In the end, the victims pull down their victimiser, like a pack of hyænas on an unwary lion. They know it.

Cursed are the falsely meek, for they are inheriting the earth.

On Sunday morning there was early mass at sunrise, another mass at seven o’clock, another at nine, another at eleven. Then there was a little band of violins and ’cellos, playing old-fashioned dance music;

Stir in the air, everybody enjoying those periodical shivers of fear! But for these shivers, everything much the same as usual. The church remained shut up, and dumb. The clock didn’t go.

Time suddenly fell off, the days walked naked and timeless, in the old, uncounted manner of the past.

The strange, old, uncounted, unregistered, unreckoning days of the ancient heathen world.

“Do you?” he laughed. “It wasn’t.

It’s never half so brave, to carry something off, and destroy it, as to set a new pulse beating.

”

Leaves and dust flew rattling on the terrace, there was a splash of lightning. Ramón’s body lay there uncovered and motionless, the bandage was already soaked with blood, under the darkening, leaping light of the lamp.

And again Kate saw, vividly, how the body is the flame of the soul, leaping and sinking upon the invisible wick of the soul.

And now the soul, like a wick, seemed spent, the body was a sinking, fading flame.

The soul! If only the soul in man, in woman, would speak to her, not always this strange, perverse materialism, or a distorted animalism.

If only people were souls, and their bodies were gestures from the soul!

If one could but forget both bodies and facts, and be present with strong, living souls!

She didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care. She didn’t even care about life any more.

There was no escaping her own complete indifference.

She felt indifferent to everything in the whole world, almost she felt indifferent to death.

Never had she been so alone, and so inert, and so utterly without desire; plunged in a wan indifference, like death.

Never had she passed her days so blindly, so unknowingly, in stretches of nothingness.

Sometimes, to get away from her household, she sat under a tree by the lake. And there, without knowing it, she let the sun scorch her foot and burn her face inflamed. Juana made a great outcry over her.

Juana made a great outcry over her. The foot blistered and swelled, her face was red and painful. But it all seemed to happen merely to her shell. And she was wearily, wanly indifferent.

Only at the very centre of her sometimes a little flame rose, and she knew that what she wanted was for her soul to live.

The life of days and facts and happenings was dead on her, and she was like a corpse. But away inside her a little light was burning, the light of her innermost soul. Sometimes it sank and seemed extinct. Then it was there again.

“Yes.

We die very easily. But we also come quickly back to life.

”

“

How can one know? Something happens inside you, and all your decisions are smoke.

—Let happen what will happen.”

She looked on like a child looking through a railing; rather wistful, and rather frightened.

Ah, the soul! The soul was always flashing and darkening into new shapes, each one strange to the other.

She had thought Ramón and she had looked into each other’s souls. And now, he was this pale, distant man, with a curious gleam, like a messenger from the beyond, in his soul. And he was remote, remote from any woman.

Then out into the sun and the grey-black dust, towards the grey-black, low huts of Jaramay, that lined the wide, desert road.

Jaramay was hot as a lava oven.

Black low hut-houses with tiled roofs lined the broken, long, delapidated street. Broken houses. Blazing sun. A brick pavement all smashed and sun-worn. A dog leading a blind man along the little black walls, on the broken pavement. A few goats. And unspeakable lifelessness, emptiness.

And Cipriano the master of fire. The Living Huitzilopochtli, he had called himself. The living firemaster. The god in the flame; the salamander.

One cannot have one’s own way, and the way of the gods. It has to be one or the other.

When she went out into the next room, he was sitting alone, waiting for her. He rose quickly, looking at her with black, flashing eyes from which dark flashes of light seemed to play upon her. And he took her hand, to touch her again.

She did not want to be talked to, and words addressed straight at her, without the curious soft veiling which these people knew how to put into their voices, speaking only to the unconcerned, third person in her, came at her like blows.

Ah, the ugly blows of direct, brutal speech!

She had suffered so much from them. Now she wanted this veiled elusiveness in herself, she wanted to be addressed in the third person.

Kate returned to her house, to her servants and her rocking-chair. Inside herself she kept very still and almost thoughtless, taking no count of time.

What was going to unfold must unfold of itself.

She no longer feared the nights, when she was shut alone in her darkness. But she feared the days a little. She shrank so mortally from contact.

Two drums were violently throbbing against one another. Then gradually they were slowing down, in a peculiar uneven rhythm, till at last there was only left one slow, continual, monotonous note, like a great drop of darkness falling heavily, continually, dripping in the bright morning.

The re-evoked past is frightening, and if it be re-evoked to overwhelm the present, it is fiendish.

Kate felt a real terror of the sound of a tom-tom. It seemed to beat straight on her solar plexus, to make her sick.

“

What is God, we shall never know!

” he said, in a strong voice, to all the people.

“

Fourfold is man. But the star is one star.

And one man is but one star.”

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.

“Who knows, child!

Perhaps the Paradise for the souls of the dead is the hearts of the living.

”

“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!”

“Nay, is thy heart so narrow?

Love not at all, if it makes thee petty.

”

“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 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.

“It is time to forget. It is time to put away the grudge and the pity.

No man was ever the better for being pitied, and every man is the worse for a grudge.

“We can do nothing with life, except live it.

“

We can do nothing with life, except live it.

“Let us seek life where it is to be found. And, having found it, life will solve the problems. But every time we deny the living life, in order to solve a problem, we cause ten problems to spring up where was one before.

“

But when we are deep in a bog, it is no use attempting to gallop.

We can only wade out with toil. And in our haste to have a child, it is no good tearing the babe from the womb.

“

That which is life is vulnerable, only metal is invulnerable.

Fight for the vulnerable unfolding of life. But for that, fight never to yield.”

“

Be very quiet. It is shy as a bird in a dark tree.

“Be very clean, clean in your bodies and your clothes. It is like a star, that will not shine in dirt.

He had the wild Indians from the north beat their drums in the barracks-yard, and start the old dances again.

The dance, the dance which has meaning, is a deep discipline in itself.

The old Indians of the north still have the secret of animistic dancing. They dance to gain power; power over the living forces or potencies of the earth. And these dances need intense dark concentration, and immense endurance.

Horrible, really, both Ramón and Cipriano. And they want to put it over me, with their high-flown bunk, and their Malintzi. Malintzi! I am Kate Forrester, really. I am neither Kate Leslie nor Kate Tylor.

I am sick of these men putting names over me.

I was born Kate Forrester, and I shall die Kate Forrester. I want to go home. Loathsome, really, to be called Malintzi.—I’ve had it put over me.”

“

You played with death, and it has sprung upon you.

”

At the same time, as is so often the case with any spell, it did not bind her completely.

She was spell-bound, but not utterly acquiescent.

In one corner of her soul was revulsion and a touch of nausea.

What else? To him there was nothing else.

The star! Don Ramón’s Morning Star was something that sprung between him and her and hung shining, the strange third thing that was both of them and neither of them, between his night and her day.

Was it true? Was she nothing, nothing, by herself? And he, alone, failing his last manhood, without her was he nothing, or next to nothing? As a fig tree which grows up, but never comes to flower.

When he came clothed in his own free flame, it was not will that clothed him. Let him be a general, an executioner, what he liked, in the world. The flame of their united lives was a naked bud of flame.

Their marriage was a young, vulnerable flame.

So he sat in silence on his throne, holding her hand in silence, till the years reeled away from her in fleeing circles, and she sat, as every real woman can sit, no matter at what age, a girl again, and for him, a virgin.

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.

“Yes, I think you are,” said Teresa. “You think there is only love.

Love is only such a little bit.

”

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.

Across the lake, the mountains were blue black, and little pieces of white, fluffy vapour wandered low across the trees. Clouds were along the mountain-tops, making a level sky-line of whitish softness the whole length of the range.

On the lonely, fawn-coloured water, one sail was blowing.

“It is like Europe—like the Tyrol to-day,” said Kate wistfully.

Teresa was silent for some moments.

“I think a man is always a stranger to a woman,” said Teresa. “Why should it not be so?”

“But you,” said Kate, “haven’t any children.”

I hope I shall. I hope I shall not try to fish them out of life for myself, with a net.

I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal.

Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course.—Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning.”

I hope I shall. I hope I shall not try to fish them out of life for myself, with a net. I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal.

Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course.—Morning brings more than love.

And I want to be true to the morning.”

The lake was much fuller and higher up the shore, softer, more mysterious. There was a smell of the piles of water-hyacinth decaying at the water’s edges.

Distance seemed farther away.

The near conical hills were dotted with green bushes, like a Japanese drawing.

And some men are not divine at all. They have only faculties. They are slaves, or they should be slaves.

But many a man has his own spark of divinity, and has it quenched, blown out by the winds of force or ground out of him by machines.

And when the spirit and the blood in man begin to go asunder, bringing the great death, most stars die out.

In her soul, she was still and proud. If only the body had not suffered the unbearable nausea of change. She had sunk to a final rest, within a great, opened-out cosmos.

The universe had opened out to her new and vast, and she had sunk to the deep bed of pure rest.

She had become almost like Teresa in sureness.

And as it was in the love-act, so it was with him. She could not know him. When she tried to know him, something went slack in her, and she had to leave off. She had to let be.

She had to leave him, dark and hot and potent, along with the things that are, but are not known.

The presence. And the stranger. This he was always to her.

Therefore, when he had to go away, it did not matter so very much.

His presence was something he left with her, and he took her presence along with him.

And somehow, there was no need for emotions.

The sun was not yet on the lake, but it caught the mountains beyond Tuliapan, and they shone magically distinct, as if some magic light were focussed on them. The green furrows of the mountainsides were as if in her own hand.

Two white gulls, flying, suddenly got the light, and glittered.

But the full, soft, noiseless dun lake was pallid, unlit.

He dropped off the edge of masonry and waded out in the dim, soft, uncanny water.

And at that moment the light tipped over the edge of the mountain and spilled gold upon the surface of the lake.

And instantly he was red as fire. The sunshine was not red, the sun was too high for that. It was golden with morning.

She walked a little while by the shore, beyond the breakwater wall.

She loved to be alone: a great deal alone, with a garden and the lake and the morning.

“I am like Teresa, really,” she said to herself.

The sky was very high and pure. In the morning came the sound of drums, and on the motionless, crystal air the cry for the pauses of the day. And always the day seemed to be pausing and unfolding again to the greater mystery.

The universe seemed to have opened vast and soft and delicate with life.

There was something curiously soothing even in the full, pale, dove-brown water of the lake. A boat was coming over, with its sail hollowed out like a shell, pearly white, and its sharp black canoe-beak slipping past the water.

“Why should anybody ever die?—even Carlota!”

“Can you set one’s hour as one sets an alarm clock?”

“And if you’re not sure of yourself, what are you sure of?” she challenged.

“But why?” she cried. “You are not ill?”

“I feel as if my soul were coming undone.”

“Then don’t let it,” she cried, in fear and repulsion.

“You should forget for a time,” she said gently, compassionately laying her hand on his. What was the good of trying to understand him or wrestle with him?

She was a woman. He was a man, and—and—and therefore not quite real.

Not true to life.