The morning came perfectly blue, with a freshness in the
air and a blue luminousness over the trees and the distant
mountains, and birds so bright, absolutely like new-opened
buds sparking in the air.
Cipriano was returning to Guadalajara in the automobile,
and Carlota was going with him. Kate would be rowed
home on the lake.
To Ramón, Carlota was still, at times, a torture. She
seemed to have the power still to lacerate him, inside his
bowels. Not in his mind or spirit, but in his old emotional,
passional self: right in the middle of his belly, to tear him
and make him feel he bled inwardly.
Because he had loved her, he had cared for her: for the
affectionate, passionate, whimsical, sometimes elfish creature
she had been. He had made much of her, and spoiled her,
for many years.
But all the while, gradually, his nature was changing
inside him. Not that he ceased to care for her, or wanted
other women. That she could have understood. But inside
him was a slow, blind imperative, urging him to cast his
emotional and spiritual and mental self into the slow furnace,
and smelt them into a new, whole being.
But he had Carlota to reckon with. She loved him, and
that, to her, was the outstanding factor. She loved him,
emotionally. And spiritually, she loved mankind. And
mentally, she was sure she was quite right.
Yet as time went on, he had to change. He had to cast
that emotional self, which she loved, into the furnace, to be
smelted down to another self.
And she felt she was robbed, cheated. Why couldn’t he
go on being gentle, good, and loving, and trying to make the
whole world more gentle, good, and loving?
He couldn’t, because it was borne in upon him that the
world had gone as far as it could go in the good, gentle,
and loving direction, and anything further in that line
meant perversity. So the time had come for the slow, great
change to something else—what, he didn’t know.
The emotion of love, and the greater emotion of liberty
for mankind seemed to go hard and congeal upon him, like
the shell on a chrysalis. It was the old caterpillar stage
of Christianity evolving into something else.
But Carlota felt this was all she had, this emotion of
love, for her husband, her children, for her people, for
the animals and birds and trees of the world. It was her
all, her Christ, and her Blessed Virgin. How could she
let it go?
So she continued to love him, and to love the world,
steadily, pathetically, obstinately and devilishly. She
prayed for him, and she engaged in works of charity.
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.
She soon succeeded in drawing the life of her young boys
all to herself, with her pathos and her subtle will. Ramón
was too proud and angry to fight for them. They were her
children. Let her have them.
They were the children of his old body. His new body
had no children: would probably never have any.
“But remember,” he said to her, with southern logic,
“you do not love, save with your will. I don’t like the
love you have for your god: it is an assertion of your own
will. I don’t like the love you have for me: it is the same.
I don’t like the love you have for your children. If ever I
see in them a spark of desire to be saved from it, I shall
do my best to save them. Meanwhile have your love, have
your will. But you know I dislike it. I dislike your insistence.
I dislike your monopoly of one feeling, I dislike
your charity works. I disapprove of the whole trend of your
life. You are weakening and vitiating the boys. You do
not love them, you are only putting your love-will over
them. One day they will turn and hate you for it. Remember
I have said this to you.”
Doña Carlota had trembled in every fibre of her body,
under the shock of this. But she went away to the chapel
of the Annunciation Convent, and prayed. And, praying for
his soul, she seemed to gain a victory over him, in the odour
of sanctity. She came home in frail, pure triumph, like a
flower that blooms on a grave: his grave.
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.
“Carlota,” he had said to her, “how happy you would
be if you could wear deep, deep mourning for me.—I shall
not give you this happiness.”
She gave him a strange look from her hazel-brown eyes.
“Even that is in the hands of God,” she had replied,
as she hurried away from him.
And now, on this morning after the first rains, she came
to the door of his room as he was sitting writing. As
yesterday, he was naked to the waist, the blue-marked
sash tied round his middle confined the white linen, loose
trousers—like big, wide pyjama trousers crossed in front and
tied round his waist.
“May I come in?” she said nervously.
“Do!” he replied, putting down his pen and rising.
There was only one chair—he was offering it her, but she
sat down on the unmade bed, as if asserting her natural
right. And in the same way she glanced at his naked breast—as
if asserting her natural right.
“I am going with Cipriano after breakfast,” she said.
“Yes, so you said.”
“The boys will be home in three weeks.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you want to see them?”
“If they want to see me.”
“I am sure they do.”
“Then bring them here.”
“Do you think it is pleasant for me?” she said, clasping
her hands.
“You do not make it pleasant for me, Carlota.”
“How can I? You know I think you are wrong. When
I listened to you last night—there is something so beautiful
in it all—and yet so monstrous. So monstrous!—Oh! I
think to myself: What is this man doing? This man of all
men, who might be such a blessing to his country and
mankind—”
“Well,” said Ramón. “And what is he instead?”
“You know! You know! I can’t bear it.—It isn’t for
you to save Mexico, Ramón. Christ has already saved it.”
“It seems to me not so.”
“He has! He has! And He made you the wonderful
being that you are, so that you should work out the salvation,
in the name of Christ and of love. Instead of which—”
“Instead of which, Carlota, I try something else.—But
believe me, if the real Christ has not been able to save
Mexico,—and He hasn’t—then I am sure, the white Anti-Christ
of Charity, and socialism, and politics, and reform,
will only succeed in finally destroying her. That, and that
alone makes me take my stand.—You, Carlota, with your
charity works and your pity: and men like Benito Juarez,
with their Reform and their Liberty: and the rest of the
benevolent people, politicians and socialists and so forth,
surcharged with pity for living men, in their mouths, but
really with hate—the hate of the materialist have-nots for
the materialist haves: they are the Anti-Christ. The old
world, that’s just the world. But the new world, that
wants to save the People, this is the Anti-Christ. This is
Christ with real poison in the communion cup.—And for
this reason I step out of my ordinary privacy and individuality.
I don’t want everybody poisoned. About the
great mass I don’t care. But I don’t want everybody
poisoned.”
“How can you be so sure that you yourself are not a
poisoner of the people?—I think you are.”
“Think it then. I think of you, Carlota, merely that
you have not been able to come to your complete, final
womanhood: which is a different thing from the old womanhoods.”
“Womanhood is always the same.”
“Ah, no it isn’t! Neither is manhood.”
“But what do you think you can do? What do you
think this Quetzalcoatl nonsense amounts to?”
“Quetzalcoatl is just a living word, for these people, no
more. All I want them to do is to find the beginnings of
the way to their own manhood, their own womanhood.
Men are not yet men in full, and women are not yet women.
They are all half and half, incoherent, part horrible, part
pathetic, part good creatures. Half arrived.—I mean
you as well, Carlota. I mean all the world.—But these
people don’t assert any righteousness of their own, these
Mexican people of ours. That makes me think that grace
is still with them. And so, having got hold of some kind of
clue to my own whole manhood, it is part of me now to
try with them.”
“You will fail.”
“I shan’t. Whatever happens to me, there will be a new
vibration, a new call in the air, and a new answer inside
some men.”
“They will betray you.—Do you know what even your
friend Toussaint said of you?—Ramón Carrasco’s future is
just the past of mankind.”
“A great deal of it is the past. Naturally Toussaint sees
that part.”
“But the boys don’t believe in you. Instinctively, they
disbelieve. Cyprian said to me, when I went to see him:
‘Is father doing any more of that silly talk about old gods
coming back, mother? I wish he wouldn’t. It would be
pretty nasty for us if he got himself into the newspapers
with it.’”
Ramón laughed.
“Little boys,” he said, “are like little gramaphones.
They only talk according to the record that’s put into
them.”
“You don’t believe out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,”
said Carlota bitterly.
“Why Carlota, the babes and sucklings don’t get much
chance. Their mothers and their teachers turn them into
little gramaphones from the first, so what can they do, but
say and feel according to the record the mother and teacher
puts into them. Perhaps in the time of Christ, babes and
sucklings were not so perfectly exploited by their elders.”
Suddenly, however, the smile went off his face. He rose
up, and pointed to the door.
“Go away,” he said in a low tone. “Go away! I have
smelt the smell of your spirit long enough.”
She sat on the bed, spell-bound, gazing at him with
frightened, yet obstinate, insolent eyes, wincing from his
outstretched arm as if he had threatened to strike her.
Then again the fire went out of his eyes, and his arm sank.
The still, far-away look came on his face.
“What have I to do with it!” he murmured softly.
And taking up his blouse and his hat, he went silently out
on to the terrace, departing from her in body and in soul.
She heard the soft swish of his sandals. She heard the faint
resonance of the iron door to the terrace, to which he alone
had access. And she sat like a heap of ash on his bed, ashes
to ashes, burnt out, with only the coals of her will still
smouldering.
Her eyes were very bright, as she went to join Kate and
Cipriano.
After breakfast, Kate was rowed home down the lake.
She felt a curious depression at leaving the hacienda: as if,
for her, life now was there, and not anywhere else.
Her own house seemed empty, banal, vulgar. For the
first time in her life, she felt the banality and emptiness even
of her own milieu. Though the Casa de las Cuentas was
not purely her own milieu.
“Ah Niña, how good! How good that you have come!
Ay, in the night, how much water! Much! Much! But
you were safe in the hacienda, Niña. Ah, how nice, that
hacienda of Jamiltepec. Such a good man, Don Ramón—isn’t
he, Niña? He cares a great deal for his people. And
the Señora, ah, how sympathetic she is!”
Kate smiled and was pleasant. But she felt more like
going into her room and saying: For God’s sake, leave me
alone, with your cheap rattle.
She suffered again from the servants. Again that quiet,
subterranean insolence against life, which seems to belong to
modern life. The unbearable note of flippant jeering, which
is underneath almost all modern utterance. It was underneath
Juana’s constant cry.—Niña! Niña!
At meal-times Juana would seat herself on the ground at
a little distance from Kate, and talk, talk in her rapid
mouthfuls of conglomerate words with trailing, wistful endings:
and all the time watch her mistress with those black,
unseeing eyes on which the spark of light would stir with
the peculiar slow, malevolent jeering of the Indian.
Kate was not rich—she had only her moderate income.
“Ah, the rich people—!” Juana would say.
“I am not rich,” said Kate.
“You are not rich, Niña?” came the singing, caressive
bird-like voice: “Then, you are poor?”—this was indescribable
irony.
“No, I am not poor either. I am not rich, and I am
not poor,” said Kate.
“You are not rich, and you are not poor, Niña!” repeated
Juana, in her bird-like voice, that covered the real bird’s
endless, vindictive jeering.
For the words meant nothing to her. To her, who had
nothing, could never have anything, Kate was one of that
weird class, the rich. And, Kate felt, in Mexico it was
a crime to be rich, or to be classed with the rich. Not
even a crime, really, so much as a freak. The rich class
was a freak class, like dogs with two heads or calves with
five legs. To be looked upon, not with envy, but with the
slow, undying antagonism and curiosity which “normals”
have towards “freaks.” The slow, powerful, corrosive
Indian mockery, issuing from the lava-rock Indian nature,
against anything which strives to be above the grey, lava-rock
level.
“Is it true, Niña, that your country is through there?”
Juana asked, jabbing her finger downward, towards the
bowels of the earth.
“Not quite!” said Kate. “My country is more there—”
and she slanted her finger at the earth’s surface.
“Ah—that way!” said Juana. And she looked at Kate
with a subtle leer, as if to say: what could you expect from
people who came out of the earth sideways, like sprouts of
camote!
“And is it true, that over there, there are people with
only one eye—here!” Juana punched herself in the middle
of her forehead.
“No. That isn’t true. That is just a story.”
“Ah!” said Juana. “Isn’t it true! Do you know?
Have you been to the country where they are, these
people?”
“Yes,” said Kate. “I have been to all the countries,
and there are no such people.”
“Verdad! Verdad!” breathed Juana, awestruck. “You
have been to all the countries, and there are no such people!—But
in your country, they are all gringos? Nothing but
gringos?”
She meant, no real people and salt of the earth like her
own Mexican self.
“They are all people like me,” said Kate coldly.
“Like you, Niña? And they all talk like you?”
“Yes! Like me.”
“And there are many?”
“Many! Many!”
“Look now!” breathed Juana, almost awestruck to think
that there could be whole worlds of these freak, mockable
people.
And Concha, that young, belching savage, would stare
through her window-grating at the strange menagerie of the
Niña and the Niña’s white visitors. Concha, slapping
tortillas, was real.
Kate walked down towards the kitchen. Concha was
slapping the masa, the maize dough which she bought in the
plaza at eight centavos a kilo.
“Niña!” she called in her raucous voice. “Do you eat
tortillas?”
“Sometimes,” said Kate.
“Eh?” shouted the young savage.
“Sometimes.”
“Here! Eat one now!” And Concha thrust a brown
paw with a pinkish palm, and a dingy-looking tortilla, at
Kate.
“Not now,” said Kate.
She disliked the heavy plasters that tasted of lime.
“Don’t you want it? Don’t you eat it?” said Concha,
with an impudent, strident laugh. And she flung the rejected
tortilla on the little pile.
She was one of those who won’t eat bread: say they don’t
like it, that it is not food.
Kate would sit and rock on her terrace, while the sun
poured in the green square of the garden, the palm-tree
spread its great fans translucent at the light, the hibiscus
dangled great double-red flowers, rosy red, from its very
dark tree, and the dark green oranges looked as if they were
sweating as they grew.
Came lunch time, madly hot: and greasy hot soup, greasy
rice, splintery little fried fishes, bits of boiled meat and
boiled egg-plant vegetables, a big basket piled with mangoes,
papayas, zapotes—all the tropical fruits one did not want,
in hot weather.
And the barefoot little Maria, in a limp, torn, faded red
frock, to wait at table. She was the loving one. She would
stand by Juana as Juana bubbled with talk, like dark
bubbles in her mouth, and she would stealthily touch Kate’s
white arm; stealthily touch her again. Not being rebuked,
she would stealthily lay her thin little black arm on Kate’s
shoulder, with the softest, lightest touch imaginable, and
her strange, wide black eyes would gleam with ghostly black
beatitude, very curious, and her childish, pock-marked,
slightly imbecile face would take on a black, arch,
beatitudinous look. Then Kate would quickly remove the
thin, dark, pock-marked arm, the child would withdraw half
a yard, the beatitudinous look foiled, but her very black eyes
still shining exposed and absorbedly, in a rapt, reptilian sort
of ecstasy.
Till Concha came to hit her with her elbow, making some
brutal, savage remark which Kate could not understand. So
the glotzing black eyes of the child would twitch, and Maria
would break into meaningless tears, Concha into a loud,
brutal, mocking laugh, like some violent bird. And Juana
interrupted her black and gluey flow of words to glance at
her daughters and throw out some ineffectual remark.
The victim, the inevitable victim, and the inevitable
victimiser.
The terrible, terrible hot emptiness of the Mexican mornings,
the weight of black ennui that hung in the air! It made
Kate feel as if the bottom had fallen out of her soul. She
went out to the lake, to escape that house, that family.
Since the rains, the trees in the broken gardens of the
lake front had flamed into scarlet, and poured themselves
out into lavender flowers. Rose red, scarlet and lavender,
quick, tropical flowers. Wonderful splashes of colour. But
that was all: splashes! They made a splash, like fireworks.
And Kate thought of the black-thorn puffing white, in
the early year, in Ireland, and hawthorn with coral grains,
in a damp still morning in the lanes, and foxgloves by the
bare rock, and tufts of ling and heather, and a ravel of harebells.
And a terrible, terrible longing for home came over
her. To escape from these tropical brilliancies and meaninglessnesses.
In Mexico, the wind was a hard draught, the rain was a
sluice of water, to be avoided, and the sun hit down on one
with hostility, terrific and stunning. Stiff, dry, unreal
land, with sunshine beating on it like metal. Or blackness
and lightning and crashing violence of rain.
No lovely fusion, no communion. No beautiful mingling
of sun and mist, no softness in the air, never. Either hard
heat or hard chill. Hard, straight lies and zigzags, wounding
the breast. No soft, sweet smell of earth. The smell
of Mexico, however subtle, suggested violence and things
in chemical conflict.
And Kate felt herself filled with an anger of resentment.
She would sit under a willow tree by the lake, reading a Pio
Baroja novel that was angry and full of No! No! No!—ich
bin der Geist der stets verneint! But she herself was so
much angrier and fuller of repudiation than Pio Baroja.
Spain cannot stand for No! as Mexico can.
The tree hung fleecy above her. She sat on the warm
sand in the shadow, careful not to let even her ankles lie in
the biting shine of the sun. There was a faint, old smell
of urine. The lake was so still and filmy as to be almost
invisible. In the near distance, some dark women were
kneeling on the edge of the lake, dressed only in their long
wet chemises in which they had bathed. Some were washing
garments, some were pouring water over themselves,
scooping it up in gourd scoops and pouring it over their
black heads and ruddy-dark shoulders, in the intense pressure
of the sunshine. On her left were two big trees, and a
cane fence, and little straw huts of Indians. There the
beach itself ended, and the little Indian plots of land went
down to the lake-front.
Glancing around in the great light, she seemed to be
sitting isolated in a dark core of shadow, while the world
moved in inconsequential specks through the hollow glare.
She noticed a dark urchin, nearly naked, marching with
naked, manly solemnity down to the water’s edge. He
would be about four years’ old, but more manly than an
adult man. With sex comes a certain vulnerability which
these round-faced, black-headed, stiff-backed infant men
have not got. Kate knew the urchin. She knew his
tattered rag of a red shirt, and the weird rags that were his
little man’s white trousers. She knew his black round head,
his stiff, sturdy march of a walk, his round eyes, and his
swift, scuttling run, like a bolting animal.
“What’s the brat got,” she said to herself, gazing at the
moving little figure within the great light.
Dangling from his tiny outstretched arm, held by the
webbed toe, head down and feebly flapping its out-sinking
wings, was a bird, a water-fowl. It was a black mud-chick
with a white bar across the under-wing, one of the many dark
fowl that bobbed in little flocks along the edge of the sun-stunned
lake.
The urchin marched stiffly down to the water’s edge, holding
the upside-down bird, that seemed big as an eagle in
the tiny fist. Another brat came scuttling after. The
two infant men paddled a yard into the warm, lapping water,
under the great light, and gravely stooping, like old men,
set the fowl on the water. It floated, but could hardly
paddle. The lift of the ripples moved it. The urchins
dragged it in, like a rag, by a string tied to its leg.
So quiet, so still, so dark, like tiny, chubby little infant
men, the two solemn figures with the rag of a bird!
Kate turned uneasily to her book, her nerves on edge.
She heard the splash of a stone. The bird was on the
water, but apparently the string that held it by the leg was
tied to a stone. It lay wavering, a couple of yards out.
And the two little he-men, with sober steadfastness and a
quiet, dark lust, were picking up stones, and throwing them
with the fierce Indian aim at the feebly fluttering bird: right
down upon it. Like a little warrior stood the mite in the red
rag, his arm upraised, to throw the stone with all his might
down on the tethered bird.
In a whiff, Kate was darting down the beach.
“Ugly boys! Ugly children! Go! Go away, ugly children,
ugly boys!” she said on one breath, with quiet intensity.
The round-headed dot gave her one black glance from his
manly eyes, then the two of them scuttled up the beach into
invisibility.
Kate went into the water, and lifted the wet, warm bird.
The bit of coarse fibre-string hung from its limp, greenish,
water-fowl’s ankle. It feebly tried to bite her.
She rapidly stepped out of the water and stood in the sun
to unfasten the string. The bird was about as big as a
pigeon. It lay in her hand with the absolute motionlessness
of a caught wild thing.
Kate stooped and pulled off her shoes and stockings. She
looked round. No sign of life from the reed huts dark in
the shadow of the trees. She lifted her skirts and staggered
out barefoot in the hot shallows of the water, almost falling
on the cruel stones under the water. The lake-side was
very shallow. She staggered on and on, in agony, holding
up her skirts in one hand, holding the warm, wet, motionless
bird in the other. Till at last she was up to her knees.
Then she launched the greeny-black bird, and gave it a little
push to the uprearing expanse of filmy water, that was
almost dim, invisible with the glare of light.
It lay wet and draggled on the pale, moving sperm of
the water, like a buoyant rag.
“Swim then! Swim!” she said, trying to urge it away
into the lake.
Either it couldn’t or wouldn’t. Anyhow it didn’t.
But it was out of reach of those urchins. Kate struggled
back from those stones, to her tree, to her shade, to her
book, away from the rage of the sun. Silent with slow
anger, she kept glancing up at the floating bird, and sideways
at the reed huts of the Indians in the black shadow.
Yes, the bird was dipping its beak in the water, and
shaking its head. It was coming to itself. But it did
not paddle. It let itself be lifted, lifted on the ripples, and
the ripples would drift it ashore.
“Fool of a thing!” said Kate nervously, using all her
consciousness to make it paddle away into the lake.
Two companions, two black dots with white specks of
faces, were coming out of the pale glare of the lake. Two
mud-chicks swam busily forward. The first swam up and
poked its beak at the inert bird, as if to say Hello! What’s
up? Then immediately it turned away and paddled in
complete oblivion to the shore, its companion following.
Kate watched the rag of feathered misery anxiously.
Would it not rouse itself, wouldn’t it follow?
No! There it lay, slowly, inertly drifting on the ripples,
only sometimes shaking its head.
The other two alert birds waded confidently, busily
among the stones.
Kate read a bit more.
When she looked again, she could not see her bird. But
the other two were walking among the stones, jauntily.
She read a bit more.
The next thing was a rather loutish youth of eighteen or
so, in overall trousers, running with big strides towards the
water, and the stiff little man-brat scuttling after with
determined bare feet. Her heart stood still.
The two busy mud-chicks rose in flight and went low over
the water into the blare of light. Gone!
But the lout in the big hat and overall trousers and those
stiff Indian shoulders she sometimes hated so much, was
peering among the stones. She, however, was sure her bird
had gone.
No! Actually no! The stiff-shoulder lout stooped and
picked up the damp thing. It had let itself drift back.
He turned, dangling it like a rag from the end of one
wing, and handed it to the man-brat. Then he stalked
self-satisfied up the shore.
Ugh! and that moment how Kate hated these people:
their terrible lowness, à terre, à terre. Their stiff broad
American shoulders, and high chests, and above all, their
walk, their prancing, insentient walk. As if some motor-engine
drove them at the bottom of their back.
Stooping rather forward and looking at the ground so that
he could turn his eyes sideways to her, without showing her
his face, the lout returned to the shadow of the huts. And
after him, diminutive, the dot of a man marched stiffly,
hurriedly, dangling the wretched bird, that stirred very
feebly, downwards from the tip of one wing. And from
time to time turning his round, black-eyed face in Kate’s
direction, vindictively, apprehensively, lest she should
swoop down on him again. Black, apprehensive male
defiance of the great, white, weird female.
Kate glared back from under her tree.
“If looks would kill you, brat, I’d kill you,” she said.
And the urchin turned his face like clockwork at her from
time to time, as he strutted palpitating towards the gap in
the cane hedge, into which the youth had disappeared.
Kate debated whether to rescue the foolish bird again.
But what was the good!
This country would have its victim. America would
have its victim. As long as time lasts, it will be the
continent divided between Victims and Victimisers. What
is the good of trying to interfere!
She rose up in detestation of the flabby bird, and of the
sulky-faced brat turning his full moon on her in apprehension.
Lumps of women were by the water’s edge. Westwards,
down the glare, rose the broken-looking villas and the white
twin towers of the church, holding up its two fingers in
mockery above the scarlet flame-trees and the dark mangoes.
She saw the rather lousy shore, and smelt the smell of
Mexico, come out in the hot sun after the rains: excrement,
human and animal dried in the sun on a dry, dry earth; and
dry leaves; and mango leaves; and pure air with a little
refuse-smoke in it.
“But the day will come when I shall go away,” she said
to herself.
And sitting rocking once more on her verandah, hearing
the clap-clap of tortillas from the far end of the patio, the
odd, metallic noises of birds, and feeling the clouds already
assembling in the west, with a weight of unborn thunder
upon them, she felt she could bear it no more: the vacuity,
and the pressure: the horrible uncreate elementality, so
uncouth, even sun and rain uncouth, uncouth.
And she wondered over the black vision in the eyes of that
urchin. The curious void.
He could not see that the bird was a real living creature
with a life of its own. This, his race had never seen.
With black eyes they stared out on an elemental world,
where the elements were monstrous and cruel, as the sun
was monstrous, and the cold, crushing black water of the
rain was monstrous, and the dry, dry, cruel earth.
And among the monstrosity of the elements flickered and
towered other presences: terrible uncouth things called
gringos, white people, and dressed up monsters of rich
people, with powers like gods, but uncouth, demonish gods.
And uncouth things like birds that could fly and snakes
that could crawl and fish that could swim and bite. An
uncouth, monstrous universe of monsters big and little, in
which man held his own by sheer resistance and guardedness,
never, never going forth from his own darkness.
And sometimes, it was good to have revenge on the
monsters that fluttered and strode. The monsters big
and the monsters little. Even the monster of that bird,
which had its own monstrous bird-nature. On this the
mite could wreck the long human vengeance, and for once
be master.
Blind to the creature as a soft, struggling thing finding its
own fluttering way through life. Seeing only another
monster of the outer void.
Walking forever through a menace of monsters, blind to
the sympathy in things, holding one’s own, and not giving
in, nor going forth. Hence the lifted chests and the prancing
walk. Hence the stiff, insentient spines, the rich
physique, and the heavy, dreary natures, heavy like the
dark-grey mud-bricks, with a terrible obstinate ponderosity
and a dry sort of gloom.
