Kate was staring at the dead men. Three of them were handsome; one, the boatman, with a thin line of black beard framing his shapely face, was beautiful. But dead, with the mockery of death in his face. All of them men who had been in the flush of life. Yet dead, they did not even matter. They were gruesome, but it did not matter that they were dead men. They were vacant. Perhaps even in life there had been a certain vacancy, nothingness, in their handsome physique.

  For a pure moment, she wished for men who were not handsome as these dark natives were. Even their beauty was suddenly repulsive to her; the dark beauty of half-created, half-evolved things, left in the old, reptile-like smoothness. It made her shudder.

  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 went across the courtyard, that was littered with horse-droppings, to the car. The lieutenant was choosing the soldiers who should stay behind. The horse-soldiers would stay. A peon on a delicate speckled horse, a flea-bitten roan, came trotting past the soldiers in the zaguán. He had been to Sayula for doctor’s stuff, and to give messages to the Jefe.

  At last the car, with little soldiers clinging on to it all round, moved slowly out of the courtyard. The lieutenant sat beside Kate. He stopped the car again at the big white barn under the trees, to talk to two soldiers picketed there.

  Then they moved slowly on, under the wet trees, in the mud that crackled beneath the wheels, up the avenue to the highroad, where were the little black huts of the peons. Little fires were flapping in front of one or two huts, women were baking tortillas on the flat earthenware plates, upon the small wood fires. A woman was going to her hut with a blazing brand, like a torch, to kindle her fire. A few peons in dirty-white clothes squatted silent against the walls of their houses, utterly silent. As the motor-car turned its great glaring headlights upon the highroad, little sandy pigs with short, curly hair started up squealing, and faces and figures stood out blindly, as in a searchlight.

  There was a hut with a wide opening in the black wall, and a grey old man was standing inside. The car stopped for the lieutenant to call to the peons under the wall. They came to the car with their black eyes glaring and glittering apprehensively. They seemed very much abashed, and humble, answering the lieutenant.

  Meanwhile Kate watched a boy buy a drink for one centavo and a piece of rope for three centavos, from the grey old man at the dark hole, which was a shop.

  The car went on, the great lights glaring unnaturally upon the hedges of cactus and mesquite and palo blanco trees, and upon the great pools of water in the road. It was a slow progress.

  CHAPTER XX

  Marriage by Quetzalcoatl

  Kate hid in her own house, numbed. She could not bear to talk to people. She could not bear even Juana’s bubbling discourse. The common threads that bound her to humanity seemed to have snapped. The little human things didn’t interest her any more. Her eyes seemed to have gone dark, and blind to individuals. They were all just individuals, like leaves in the dark, making a noise. And she was alone under the trees.

  The egg-woman wanted six centavos for an egg.

  ‘And I said to her — I said to her — we buy them at five centavos!’ Juana went on.

  ‘Yes!’ said Kate. She didn’t care whether they were bought at five or fifty, or not bought at all.

  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.

  ‘Niña! Niña! Here is the man with the sandals! Look! Look how nicely he has made them for you, Niña! Look what Mexican huaraches the Niña is going to wear!’

  She tried them on. The man charged her too much. She looked at him with her remote, indifferent eyes. But she knew, in the world one must live, so she paid him less than he asked, though more than he really would have accepted.

  She sat down again in her rocking-chair in the shade of the room. Only to be alone! Only that no one should speak to her. Only that no one should come near her! Because in reality her soul and spirit were gone, departed into the middle of some desert, and the effort of reaching across to people to effect an apparent meeting, or contact, was almost more than she could bear.

  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. 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.

  Ramón had lighted it. And once it was lighted the world went hollow and dead, all the world-activities were empty weariness to her. Her soul! Her frail, innermost soul! She wanted to live its life, not her own life.

  The time would come again when she would see Ramón and Cipriano, and the soul that was guttering would kindle again in her, and feel strong. Meanwhile she only felt weak, weak, weak, weak as the dying. She felt that afternoon of bloodshed had blown all their souls into the twilight of death, for the time. But they would come back. They would come back. Nothing to do but to submit, and wait. Wait, with a soul almost dead, and hands and heart of uttermost inert heaviness, indifference.

  Ramón had lost much blood. And she, too, in other ways, had been drained of the blood of the body. She felt bloodless and powerless.

  But wait, wait, wait, the new blood would come.

  One day Cipriano came. She was rocking in her salon, in a cotton housedress, and her face red and rather swollen. She saw him, in uniform, pass by the window. He stood in the doorway on the terrace, a dark, grave, small, handsome man.

  ‘Do come in,’ she said with effort.

  Her eyelids felt burnt. He looked at her with his full black eyes, that always had in them so many things she did not understand. She felt she could not look back at him.

  ‘Have you chased all your rebels?’ she said.

  ‘For the present,’ he replied.

  He seemed to be watching, watching for something.

  ‘And you didn’t get hurt?’

  ‘No, I didn’t get hurt.’

  She looked away out of the door, having nothing to say in the world.

  ‘I went to Jamiltepec yesterday evening,’ he said.

  ‘How is Don Ramón?’

  ‘Yes, he is better.’

  ‘Quite better?’

  ‘No. Not quite better. But he walks a little.’

  ‘Wonderful how people heal.’

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

  ‘And you? Did you fight the rebels, or didn’t they want to fight?’

  ‘Yes, they wanted to. We fought once or twice; not very much.’

  ‘Men killed?’

  ‘Yes! Some! Not many, no? Perhaps a hundred. We can never tell, no? Maybe two hundred.’

  He waved his hand vaguely.

  ‘But you had the worst rebellion at Jamiltepec, no?’ he said suddenly, with heavy Indian gravity, gloom suddenly settling down.

  ‘It didn’t last long, but it was rather awful while it did.’

  ‘Rather awful, no? — If I had known! I said to Ramón, won’t you keep the soldiers? — the guard, no? He said they were not necessary. But here — you never know, no?’

  ‘Niña!’ cried Juana, from the terrace. ‘Niña! Don Antonio says he is coming to see you.’

  ‘Tell him to come to-morrow.’

  ‘Already he is on the way!’ cried Juana, in helplessness. Don Antonio was Kate’s fat landlord; and, of course, Juana’s permanent master, more important in her eyes, then, even than Kate.

  ‘Here he is!’ she cried, and fled.

  Kate leaned forward in her chair, to see the stout figure of her landlord on the walk outside the window, taking off his cloth cap and bowing low to her. A cloth cap! — She knew he was a great Fascista, the reactionary Knights of Cortés held him in great esteem.

  Kate bowed coldly.

  He bowed low again, with the cloth cap.

  Kate said not a word.

  He stood on one foot, then on the other, and then marched forward up the gravel walk, towards the kitchen quarters, as if he had not seen either Kate or General Viedma. In a few moments he marched back, as if he could not see either Kate or the General, through the open door.

  Cipriano looked at the passing stout figure of Don Antonio in a cloth cap as if it were the wind blowing.

  ‘It is my landlord!’ said Kate. ‘I expect he wants to know if I am taking on the house for another three months.’

  ‘Ramón wanted me to come and see you — to see how you are, no? — and to ask you to come to Jamiltepec. Will you come with me now? The car is here.’

  ‘Must I?’ said Kate, uneasily.

  ‘No. Not unless you wish. Ramón said, not unless you wished. He said, perhaps it would be painful to you, no? — to go to Jamiltepec again — so soon after — ’

  How curious Cipriano was! He stated things as if they were mere bare facts with no emotional content at all. As for its being painful to Kate to go to Jamiltepec, that meant nothing to him.

  ‘Lucky thing you were there that day, no?’ he said. ‘They might have killed him. Very likely they would! Very likely! Awful, no?’

  ‘They might have killed me too,’ she said.

  ‘Yes! Yes! They might!’ he acquiesced.

  Curious he was! With a sort of glaze of the ordinary world on top, and underneath a black volcano with hell knows what depths of lava. And talking half-abstractedly from his glazed, top self, the words came out small and quick, and he was always hesitating, and saying: No? It wasn’t himself at all talking.

  ‘What would you have done if they had killed Ramón?’ she said, tentatively.

  ‘I?’ — He looked up at her in a black flare of apprehension. The volcano was rousing. ‘If they had killed him? — ’ His eyes took on that fixed glare of ferocity, staring her down.

  ‘Would you have cared very much?’ she said.

  ‘I? Would I?’ he repeated, and the black suspicious look came into his Indian eyes.

  ‘Would it have meant very much to you?’

  He still watched her with a glare of ferocity and suspicion.

  ‘To me!’ he said, and he pressed his hand against the buttons of his tunic. ‘To me Ramón is more than life. More than life.’ His eyes seemed to glare and go sightless, as he said it, the ferocity melting in a strange blind, confiding glare, that seemed sightless, either looking inward, or out at the whole vast void of the cosmos, where no vision is left.

  ‘More than anything?’ she said.

  ‘Yes!’ he replied abstractedly, with a blind nod of the head.

  Then abruptly he looked at her and said:

  ‘You saved his life.’

  By this he meant that therefore — But she could not understand the therefore.

  She went to change, and they set off to Jamiltepec. Cipriano made her a little uneasy, sitting beside him. He made her physically aware of him, of his small but strong and assertive body, with its black currents and storms of desire. The range of him was very limited, really. The great part of his nature was just inert and heavy, unresponsive, limited as a snake or a lizard is limited. But within his own heavy, dark range he had a curious power. Almost she could see the black fume of power which he emitted, the dark, heavy vibration of his blood, which cast a spell over her.

  As they sat side by side in the motor-car, silent, swaying to the broken road, she could feel the curious tingling heat of his blood, and the heavy power of the will that lay unemerged in his blood. She could see again the skies go dark, and the phallic mystery rearing itself like a whirling dark cloud, to the zenith, till it pierced the sombre, twilit zenith; the old, supreme phallic mystery. And herself in the everlasting twilight, a sky above where the sun ran smokily, an earth below where the trees and creatures rose up in blackness, and man strode along naked, dark, half-visible, and suddenly whirled in supreme power, towering like a dark whirlwind column, whirling to pierce the very zenith.

  The mystery of the primeval world! She could feel it now in all its shadowy, furious magnificence. She knew now what was the black, glinting look in Cipriano’s eyes. She could understand marrying him, now. In the shadowy world where men were visionless, and winds of fury rose up from the earth, Cipriano was still a power. Once you entered his mystery the scale of all things changed, and he became a living male power, undefined, and unconfined. The smallness, the limitations ceased to exist. In his black, glinting eyes the power was limitless, and it was as if, from him, from his body of blood could rise up that pillar of cloud which swayed and swung, like a rearing serpent or a rising tree, till it swept the zenith, and all the earth below was dark and prone, and consummated. Those small hands, that little natural tuft of black goats’ beard hanging light from his chin, the tilt of his brows and the slight slant of his eyes, the domed Indian head with its thick black hair, they were like symbols to her, of another mystery, the mystery of the twilit, primitive world, where shapes that are small suddenly loom up huge, gigantic on the shadow, and a face like Cipriano’s is the face at once of a god and a devil, the undying Pan face. The bygone mystery, that has indeed gone by, but has not passed away. Never shall pass away.

  As he sat in silence, casting the old, twilit Pan-power over her, she felt herself submitting, succumbing. He was once more the old dominant male, shadowy, intangible, looming suddenly tall, and covering the sky, making a darkness that was himself and nothing but himself, the Pan male. And she was swooned prone beneath, perfect in her proneness.

  It was the ancient phallic mystery, the ancient god-devil of the male Pan. Cipriano unyielding forever, in the ancient twilight, keeping the ancient twilight around him. She understood now his power with his soldiers. He had the old gift of demon-power.

  He would never woo; she saw this. When the power of his blood rose in him, the dark aura streamed from him like a cloud pregnant with power, like thunder, and rose like a whirlwind that rises suddenly in the twilight and raises a great pliant column, swaying and leaning with power, clear between heaven and earth.

  Ah! and what a mystery of prone submission, on her part, this huge erection would imply! Submission absolute, like the earth under the sky. Beneath an over-arching absolute.

  Ah! what a marriage! How terrible! and how complete! With the finality of death, and yet more than death. The arms of the twilit Pan. And the awful, half-intelligible voice from the cloud.

  She could conceive now her marriage with Cipriano; the supreme passivity, like the earth below the twilight, consummate in living lifelessness, the sheer solid mystery of passivity. Ah, what an abandon, what an abandon, what an abandon! — of so many things she wanted to abandon.

  Cipriano put his hand, with its strange soft warmth and weight, upon her knee, and her soul melted like fused metal.

  ‘En poco tiempo, verdad?’ he said to her, looking into her eyes with the old, black, glinting look, of power about to consummate itself.

  ‘In a little while, no?’

  She looked back at him, wordless. Language had abandoned her, and she leaned silent and helpless in the vast, unspoken twilight of the Pan world. Her self had abandoned her, and all her day was gone. Only she said to herself:

  ‘My demon lover!’

  Her world could end in many ways, and this was one of them. Back to the twilight of the ancient Pan world, where the soul of woman was dumb, to be forever unspoken.

  The car had stopped, they had come to Jamiltepec. He looked at her again, as reluctantly he opened the door. And as he stepped out, she realized again his uniform, his small figure in uniform. She had lost it entirely. She had only known his face, the face of the supreme god-demon; with the arching brows and slightly slanting eyes, and the loose, light tuft of a goat-beard. The Master. The everlasting Pan.

  He was looking back at her again, using all his power to prevent her seeing in him the little General in uniform, in the worldly vision. And she avoided his eyes, and saw nothing.

  They found Ramón sitting in his white clothes in a long chair on the terrace. He was creamy-brown in his pallor.

  He saw at once the change in Kate. She had the face of one waking from the dead, curiously dipped in death, with a tenderness far more new and vulnerable than a child’s. He glanced at Cipriano. Cipriano’s face seemed darker than usual, with that secret hauteur and aloofness of the savage. He knew it well.

  ‘Are you better?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Very nearly!’ he said, looking up at her gently. ‘And you?’

  ‘Yes, I am all right.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. — I have felt myself all lost, since that day. Spiritually, I mean. Otherwise I am all right. Are you healing well?’

  ‘Oh, yes! I always heal quickly.’

  ‘Knives and bullets are horrible things.’

  ‘Yes — in the wrong place.’

  Kate felt rather as if she were coming to, from a swoon, as Ramón spoke to her and looked at her. His eyes, his voice seemed kind. Kind? The word suddenly was strange to her, she had to try to get its meaning.