Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 458
As the canoa sailed back, the side of the lake, through filmy air, looked brownish and changeless. A cloud was rising in the south-west, from behind the dry, silent mountains, like a vast white tail, like the vast white fleecy tail of some squirrel, that had just dived out of sight behind the mountains. This wild white tail fleeced up and up, to the zenith, straight at the sun. And as the canoa spread her sail to tack back, already a delicate film of shadow was over the chalk-white lake.
Only on the low end of the isle of Scorpions, hot air still quivered.
Ramón returned in one of the motor-boats. Slowly the sky was clouding for the thunder and the rain. The canoa, unable to make her way across, was sailing for Tuliapan. The little boats hurried in silence.
They landed before the wind rose. Ramón went and locked the doors of the church.
The crowd scattered in the wind, rebozos waving wildly, leaves torn, dust racing. Sayula was empty of God, and, at heart, they were glad.
CHAPTER XIX
The Attack on Jamiltepec
Suddenly, nearly all the soldiers disappeared from the village, there was a ‘rebellion’ in Colima. A train had been held up, people killed. And somebody, Generals Fulano and Tulano, had ‘pronounced’ against the government.
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.
Kate felt a bit like a mermaid trying to swim in a wrong element. She was swept away in some silent tide, to the old, antediluvian silence, where things moved without contact. She moved and existed without contact. Even the striking of the hours had ceased. As a drowning person sees nothing but the waters, so Kate saw nothing but the face of the timeless waters.
So, of course, she clutched at her straw. She couldn’t bear it. She ordered an old, rickety Ford car, to take her bumping out to Jamiltepec, over the ruinous roads in the afternoon.
The country had gone strange and void, as it does when these ‘rebellions’ start. As if the life-spirit were sucked away, and only some empty, anti-life void remained in the wicked hollow countryside. Though it was not far to Jamiltepec, once outside the village, the chauffeur and his little attendant lad began to get frightened, and to go frog-like with fear.
There is something truly mysterious about the Mexican quality of fear. As if man and woman collapsed and lay wriggling on the ground like broken reptiles, unable to rise. Kate used all her will, against this cringing nonsense.
They arrived without ado at Jamiltepec. The place seemed quiet, but normal. An oxen wagon stood empty in the courtyard. There were no soldiers on guard. They had all been withdrawn, against the rebellion. But several peons were moving round, in a desultory fashion. The day was a fiesta, when not much work was doing. In the houses of the peons, the women were patting tortillas, and preparing hot chile sauce, grinding away on the metates. A fiesta! Only the windmill that pumped up water from the lake was spinning quickly, with a little noise.
Kate drove into the yard in silence, and two mozos with guns and belts of cartridges came to talk in low tones to the chauffeur.
‘Is Doña Carlota here?’ asked Kate.
‘No, Señora. The patrona is not here.’
‘Don Ramón?’
‘Sí, Señora! Está.’
Even as she hesitated, rather nervous, Ramón came out of the inner doorway of the courtyard, in his dazzling white clothes.
‘I came to see you,’ said Kate. ‘I don’t know if you’d rather I hadn’t. But I can go back in the motor-car.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am glad. I was feeling deserted, I don’t know why. Let us go upstairs.’
‘Patrón!’ said the chauffeur, in a low voice. ‘Must I stay?’
Ramón said a few words to him. The chauffeur was uneasy, and didn’t want to stay. He said he had to be back in Sayula at such and such a time. Excuses, anyhow. But it was evident he wanted to get away.
‘Then best let him go,’ said Ramón to Kate. ‘You do not mind going home in the boat?’
‘I don’t want to give you trouble.’
‘It is least trouble to let this fellow go, and you can leave by boat just whenever you wish to. So we shall all be more free.’
Kate paid the chauffeur, and the Ford started rattling. After rattling a while, it moved in a curve round the courtyard, and lurched through the zaguán, disappearing as fast as possible.
Ramón spoke to his two mozos with the guns. They went to the outer doorway, obediently.
‘Why do you have to have armed men?’ she said.
‘Oh, they’re afraid of bandits,’ he said. ‘Whenever there’s a rebellion anywhere, everybody is afraid of bandits. So of course that calls bandits into life.’
‘But where do they come from?’ said Kate, as they passed into the inner doorways.
‘From the villages,’ he said, closing the heavy door of that entrance behind him, and putting the heavy iron bars across, from wall to wall.
The inner archway was now a little prison, for the strong iron gates at the lake end of the passage were shut fast. She looked through, at the little round pond. It had some blue water-lilies on it. Beyond, the pallid lake seemed almost like a ghost, in the glare of the sun.
A servant was sent to the kitchen quarters, Ramón and Kate climbed the stone stairs to the upper terrace. How lonely, stonily lonesome and forlorn the hacienda could feel! The very stone walls could give off emptiness, loneliness, negation.
‘But which villages do the bandits come from?’ she insisted.
‘Any of them. Mostly, they say, from San Pablo or from Ahuajijic.’
‘Quite near!’ she cried.
‘Or from Sayula,’ he added. ‘Any of the ordinary men in big hats you see around the plaza may possibly be bandits, when banditry pays, as a profession, and isn’t punished with any particular severity.’
‘It is hard to believe!’ she said.
‘It is so obvious!’ he said, dropping into one of the rocking-chairs opposite her, and smiling across the onyx table.
‘I suppose it is!’ she said.
He clapped his hands, and his mozo Martin came up. Ramón ordered something, in a low, subdued tone. The man replied in an even lower, more subdued tone. Then the master and man nodded at one another, and the man departed, his huaraches swishing a little on the terrace.
Ramón had fallen into the low, crushed sort of voice so common in the country, as if everyone were afraid to speak aloud, so they murmured guardedly. This was unusual, and Kate noticed it in him with displeasure. She sat looking past the thick mango-trees, whose fruit was changing colour like something gradually growing hot, to the ruffled, pale-brown lake. The mountains of the opposite shore were very dark. Above them lay a heavy, but distant black cloud, out of which lightning flapped suddenly and uneasily.
‘Where is Don Cipriano?’ she asked.
‘Don Cipriano is very much General Viedma at the moment,’ he replied. ‘Chasing rebels in the State of Colima.’
‘Will they be very hard to chase?’
‘Probably not. Anyhow Cipriano will enjoy chasing them. He is Zapotee, and most of his men are Zapotecans, from the hills. They love chasing men who aren’t.’
‘I wondered why he wasn’t there on Sunday when you carried away the images,’ she said. ‘I think it was an awfully brave thing to do.’
‘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.’
‘But you have to destroy those old things, first.’
‘Those frowsty images — why, yes. But it’s no good until you’ve got something else moving, from the inside.’
‘And have you?’
‘I think I have. Don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, a little doubtful.
‘I think I have,’ he said. ‘I feel there’s a new thing moving inside me.’ He was laughing at her, for her hesitation. ‘Why don’t you come and join us?’ he added.
‘How?’ she said. ‘By being married off to Don Cipriano?’
‘Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Not necessarily by being married to anybody.’
‘What are you going to do next?’ she said.
‘I? I am going to re-open the church, for Quetzalcoatl to come in. But I don’t like lonely gods. There should be several of them, I think, for them to be happy together.’
‘Does one need gods?’ she said.
‘Why yes. One needs manifestations, it seems to me.’
Kate sat in unwilling silence.
‘One needs goddesses too. That is also a dilemma,’ he added, with a laugh.
‘How I would hate,’ said Kate, ‘to have to be a goddess for people.’
‘For the monkeys?’ he said, smiling.
‘Yes! Of course.’
At that moment, he sat erect, listening. There had been a shot, which Kate had heard, but which she had hardly noticed; to her ears, it might have been a motor-car back-firing, or even a motor-boat.
Suddenly, a sharp little volley of shots.
Ramón rose swiftly, swift as a great cat, and slammed to the iron door at the top of the stairway, shooting the bars.
‘Won’t you go into that room?’ he said to her, pointing to a dark doorway. ‘You will be all right there. Just stay a few minutes till I come back.’
As he spoke, there came a shriek from the courtyard at the back, and a man’s death-voice yelled Patrón!
Ramón’s eyes dilated with terrible anger, the anger of death. His face went pale and strange, as he looked at her without seeing her, the black flame filling his eyes. He had drawn a long-barrelled steel revolver from his hip.
Still without seeing her, he strode rapidly, soft and catlike, along the terrace, and leaped up the end staircase on to the roof. The soft, eternal passion of anger in his limbs.
Kate stood in the doorway of the room, transfixed. The light of day seemed to have darkened before her face.
‘Holá! You there!’ she heard his voice from the roof, in such anger it was almost a laugh, from far away.
For answer, a confused noise from the courtyard, and several shots. The slow, steady answer of shots!
She started as a rushing hiss broke on the air. In terror she waited. Then she saw it was a rocket bursting with a sound like a gun, high over the lake, and emitting a shower of red balls of light. A signal from Ramón!
Unable to go into the dark room, Kate waited as if smitten to death. Then something stirred deep in her, she flew along the terrace and up the steps to the roof. She realized that she didn’t mind dying so long as she died with that man. Not alone.
The roof was glaring with sunshine. It was flat, but its different levels were uneven. She ran straight out into the light, towards the parapet wall, and had nearly come in sight of the gateway of the courtyard below, when something gave a slight smack, and bits of plaster flew in her face and her hair. She turned and fled back like a bee to the stairway.
The stairs came up in a corner, where there was a little sort of stone turret, square, with stone seats. She sank on one of these seats, looking down in terror at the turn of the stairs. It was a narrow little stone stairway, between the solid stone walls.
She was almost paralysed with shock and with fear. Yet something within her was calm. Leaning and looking out across calm sunshine of the level roof, she could not believe in death.
She saw the white figure and the dark head of Ramón within one of the small square turrets across the roof. The little tower was open, and hardly higher than his head. He was standing in a corner, looking sideways down a loop-hole, perfectly motionless. Snap! went his revolver, deliberately. There was a muffled cry below, and a sudden volley of shots.
Ramón stood away from the loop-hole and took off his white blouse, so that it should not betray him. Above his sash was a belt of cartridges. In the shadow of the turret, his body looked curiously dark, rising from the white of his trousers. Again he took his stand quietly at the side of the long, narrow, slanting aperture. He lifted his revolver carefully, and the shots, one, two, three, slow and deliberate, startled her nerves. And again there was a volley of shots from below, and bits of stone and plaster smoking against the sky. Then again, silence, long silence. Kate pressed her hands against her body, as she sat.
The clouds had shifted, the sun shone yellowish. In the heavier light, the mountains beyond the parapet showed a fleece of young green, smoky and beautiful.
All was silent. Ramón in the shadow did not move, pressing himself against the wall, and looking down. He commanded, she knew, the big inner doors.
Suddenly, however, he shifted. With his revolver in his hand he stooped and ran, like some terrible cat, the sun gleaming on his naked back as he crouched under the shelter of the thick parapet wall, running along the roof to the corresponding front turret.
This turret was roofless, and it was nearer to Kate, as she sat spellbound, in a sort of eternity, on the stone seat at the head of the stairs, watching Ramón. He pressed himself against the wall, and lifted his revolver to the slit. And again, one, two, three, four, five, the shots exploded deliberately. Some voice below yelled Ay-ee! Ay-ee! Ay-ee! in yelps of animal pain. A voice was heard shouting command. Ramón kneeled on one knee, re-loading his revolver. Then he struck a match, and again Kate almost started out of her skin, as a rocket rushed ferociously up into the sky, exploded like a gun, and let fall the balls of red flame that lingered as if loth to die away, in the high, remote air.
She sighed, wondering what it all was. It was death, she knew. But so strange, so vacant. Just these noises of shots! And she could see nothing outside. She wanted to see what was in the courtyard.
Ramón was at his post, pressing himself close to the wall, looking down, with bent head, motionless. There were shots, and a spatter of lead from below. But he did not move. She could not see his face, only part of his back; the proud, heavy, creamy-brown shoulders, the black head bent a little forward, in concentration, the cartridge-belt dropping above his loins, over the white, floppy linen of the trousers. Still and soft in watchful concentration, almost like silence itself. Then with soft, diabolic swiftness in his movements, he changed his position, and took aim.
He was utterly unaware of her; even of her existence. Which was as it should be, no doubt. She sat motionless, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting, in that yellowish sunlight of eternity, with a certain changeless suspense of stillness inside her. Someone would come from the village. There would be an end. There would be an end.
At the same time, she started every time he fired, and looked at him. And she heard his voice saying: ‘One needs manifestations, it seems to me.’ Ah, how she hated the noise of shots.
Suddenly she gave a piercing shriek, and in one leap was out of her retreat. She had seen a black head turning the stairs.
Before she knew it, Ramón jumped past her like a great cat, and two men clashed in mid-air, as the unseen fellow leaped up from the stairs. Two men in a crash went down on the floor, a revolver went off, terrible limbs were writhing.
Ramón’s revolver was on the floor. But again there was a shot from the tangled men, and a redness of blood suddenly appearing out of nowhere, on the white cotton clothing, as the two men twisted and fought on the floor.
They were both big men. Struggling on the ground, they looked huge. Ramón had the bandit’s revolver-hand by the wrist. The bandit, with a ghastly black face with rolling eyes and sparse moustache, had got Ramón’s naked arm in his white teeth, and was hanging on, showing his red gums, while with his free hand he was feeling for his knife.
Kate could not believe that the black, ghastly face with the sightless eyes and biting mouth was conscious. Ramón had him clasped round the body. The bandit’s revolver fell, and the fellow’s loose black hand scrabbled on the concrete, feeling for it. Blood was flowing over his teeth. Yet some blind super-consciousness seemed to possess him, as if he were a devil, not a man.
His hand nearly touched Ramón’s revolver. In horror Kate ran and snatched the weapon from the warm concrete, running away as the bandit gave a heave, a great sudden heave of his body, under the body of Ramón. Kate raised the revolver. She hated that horrible devil under Ramón as she had never hated in her life. Yet she dared not fire.
Ramón shouted something, glancing at her. She could not understand. But she ran round, to be able to shoot the man under Ramón. Even as she ran, the bandit twisted with a great lunge of his body, heaved Ramón up, and with his short free hand got Ramón’s own knife from the belt at the groin, and stabbed.
Kate gave a cry! Oh, how she wanted to shoot! She saw the knife strike sideways, slanting in a short jab into Ramón’s back. At the same moment there was a stumble on the stairs, and another black-headed man was leaping on to the roof from the turret.
She stiffened her wrist and fired without looking, in a sudden second of pure control. The black head came crashing at her. She recoiled in horror, lifted the revolver and fired again, and missed. But even as it passed her, she saw red blood among the black hairs of that head. It crashed down, the buttocks of the body heaving up, the whole thing twitching and jerking along, the face seeming to grin in a mortal grin.
Glancing from horror to horror, she saw Ramón, his face still as death, blood running down his arm and his back, holding down the head of the bandit by the hair and stabbing him with short stabs in the throat, one, two, while blood shot out like a red projectile; there was a strange sound like a soda-syphon, a ghastly bubbling, one final terrible convulsion from the loins of the stricken man, throwing Ramón off, and Ramón lay twisted, still clutching the man’s hair in one hand, the bloody knife in the other, and gazing into the livid, distorted face, in which ferocity seemed to have gone frozen, with a steady, intent, inhuman gaze.
Then, without letting go his victim’s hair, he looked up, cautiously. To see Kate’s man, with black hair wet with blood, and blood running down into his glazed, awful eyes, slowly rising to his knees. It was the strangest face in the world; the high, domed head with blood-soddened hair, blood running in several streams down the narrow, corrugated brow and along the black eyebrows above the glazed, black, numb eyes, in which the last glazing was of ferocity, stranger even than wonder, the glazed and absolute ferocity which the man’s last consciousness showed.
