Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 474
Cipriano was going down to bathe. She saw him walk out on the masonry of the square basin which was their own tiny harbour. He threw off his wrap and stood dark in silhouette against the pale, unlit water. How dark he was! Dark as a Malay. Curious that his body was as dark, almost, as his face. And with that strange archaic fulness of physique, with the full chest and the full, yet beautiful buttocks of men on old Greek coins.
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. But as it flushed along the surface of the lake it caught the body of Cipriano and he was red as fire, as a piece of pure fire.
The Sons of the Morning! The column of blood! A Red Indian. She looked at him in wonder, as he moved pure red and luminous further into the lake, unconscious. As if on fire!
The Sons of the Morning! She let her effort at knowing slip away from her once more, and remained without effort, within the communion.
It was his race, too. She had noticed before how the natives shone pure red when morning or evening light caught them, rather level. As fires they stood in the water. The Red Indian.
He went away, with his man, on horseback. And she watched him ride over the brow of the road, sitting dark and still on his silky, roan horse. He loved a red horse. And there was a curious motionlessness about him as he rode horseback, an old, male pride, and at the same time the half-ghostly, dark invisibility of the Indian, sitting close upon the horse as if he and it belonged to one birth.
He was gone, and for a while she felt the old nostalgia for his presence. Not for him, exactly. Not even to see him or touch him or speak to him. Only to feel him about.
Then quickly she recovered. She adjusted herself to the presence he left behind with her. As soon as he had really gone, and the act of going was over, his presence came back to her.
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.
Suddenly before her she saw a long, dark soft rope, lying over a pale boulder. But her soul was softly alert, at once. It was a snake, with a subtle pattern along its soft dark back, lying there over a big stone, with its head sunk down to earth.
It felt her presence, too, for suddenly, with incredible soft quickness, it contracted itself down the boulder, and she saw it entering a little gap in the bottom of the wall.
The hole was not very big. And as it entered it quickly looked back, poising its little, dark, wicked, pointed head, and flickering a dark tongue. Then it passed on, slowly easing its dark length into the hole.
When it had all gone in, Kate could see the last fold still, and the flat little head resting on the fold, like the devil with his chin on his arms, looking out of a loop-hole. So the wicked sparks of the eyes looked out at her, from within the recess. Watching out of its own invisibility.
So she wondered over it, as it lay in its hidden places. At all the unseen things in the hidden places of the earth. And she wondered if it was disappointed at not being able to rise higher in creation: to be able to run on four feet, and not keep its belly on the ground.
Perhaps not! Perhaps it had its own peace. She felt a certain reconciliation between herself and it.
CHAPTER XXVII
Here!
She and Teresa visited one another along the lake. There was a kinship and a gentleness between them, especially now Kate was going away for a while.
There was a certain autumnal purity and lull on the lake. The moisture still lingered, the bushes on the wild hills were green in puffs. Sunlight lay in a rich gleam on the mountains, and shadows were deep and velvety. The green almost covered the rocks and the pinkish land. Bright green the sugar cane, red the ploughed earth, dark the trees with white specks of villages here and there. And over the wild places, a sprinkle of bushes, then stark grey rock still coming out.
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. It looked like the boat of Dionysos coming with a message, and the vine sprouting.
Kate could hardly remember now the dry rigid pallor of the heat, when the whole earth seemed to crepitate viciously with dry malevolence: like memory gone dry and sterile, hellish.
Ramón and Teresa came along the lake, and rowed into the basin. It was a morning when the shadows on the mountains were almost cornflower blue.
‘Yet you must go away?’ Ramón said to her.
‘For a little while. You don’t think I am Lot’s wife, do you?’
‘No!’ laughed Ramón. ‘I think you’re Cipriano’s.’
‘I am really. But I want to go back for a little while.’
‘Ah yes! Better go and then come again. Tell them in your Ireland to do as we have done here.’
‘But how?’
‘Let them find themselves again, and their own universe, and their own gods. Let them substantiate their own mysteries. The Irish have been so wordy about their far-off heroes and green days of the heroic gods. Now tell them to substantiate them, as we have tried to substantiate Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli.’
‘I will tell them,’ she said. ‘If there is anybody to listen.’
‘Yes!’ he said.
He watched the white sail blowing nearer.
‘But why do you go away?’ he asked her, after a silence.
‘You don’t care, do you?’ she said.
There was a dead pause.
‘Yes, I care,’ he said.
‘But why?’
Again it was some time before he answered.
‘You are one of us, we need you,’ he said.
‘Even when I don’t do anything? — and when I get a bit bored with living Quetzalcoatls — and the rest, and wish for a simple Don Ramón?’ she replied.
He laughed suddenly.
‘What is a simple Don Ramón?’ he said. ‘A simple Don Ramón has a living Quetzalcoatl inside him. But you help all the same.’
‘You go ahead so grandly, one would not think you needed help: especially from a mere woman who — who after all is only the wife of your friend.’
They were sitting on a bench under a red-flowering poinsettia whose huge scarlet petal-leaves spread out like sharp plumes.
‘The wife of my friend!’ he said. ‘What could you be better?’
‘Of course,’ she said, more than equivocal.
He was leaning his arms on his knees, and looking out to the lake, abstract, and remote. There was a certain worn look on his face, and the vulnerability which always caught at Kate’s heart. She realized again the isolation and the deadly strain his effort towards a new way of life put upon him. Yet he had to do it.
This again gave her a feeling of helplessness, a woman’s utter helplessness with a man who goes out to the beyond. She had to stifle her resentment, and her dislike of his ‘abstract’ efforts.
‘Do you feel awfully sure of yourself?’ she said.
‘Sure of myself?’ he re-echoed. ‘No! Any day I may die and disappear from the face of the earth. I not only know it, I feel it. So why should I be sure of myself?’
‘Why should you die?’ she said.
‘Why should anybody ever die? — even Carlota!’
‘Ah! — her hour had come!’
‘Can you set one’s hour as one sets an alarm clock?’
Kate paused.
‘And if you’re not sure of yourself, what are you sure of?’ she challenged.
He looked at her with dark eyes which she could not understand.
‘I am sure — sure — ’ he voice tailed off into vagueness, his face seemed to go grey and peaked, as a dead man’s, only his eyes watched her blackly, like a ghost’s. Again she was confronted with the suffering ghost of the man. And she was a woman, powerless before this suffering ghost which was still in the flesh.
‘You don’t think you are wrong, do you?’ she asked, in cold distress.
‘No! I am not wrong. Only maybe I can’t hold out,’ he said.
‘And then what?’ she said, coldly.
‘I shall go my way, alone.’ There seemed to be nothing left of him but the black, ghostly eyes that gazed on her. He began to speak Spanish.
‘It hurts me in my soul, as if I were dying,’ he said.
‘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.
But he only gazed with those fixed, blank eyes. A sudden deep stillness came over her; a sense of power in herself.
‘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.
He roused himself suddenly from her touch, as if he had come awake, and he looked at her with keen, proud eyes. Her motherly touch had roused him like a sting.
‘Yes!’ he said. ‘It is true!’
‘Of course it is!’ she replied. ‘If you want to be so — so abstract and Quetzalcoatlian, then bury your head sometimes, like an ostrich in the sand, and forget.’
‘So!’ he said, smiling. ‘You are angry again!’
‘It’s not so simple,’ she said. ‘There is a conflict in me. And you won’t let me go away for a time.’
‘We can’t even prevent you,’ he said.
‘Yes, but you are against my going — you don’t let me go in peace.’
‘Why must you go?’ he said.
‘I must,’ she said. ‘I must go back to my children, and my mother.’
‘It is a necessity in you?’ he said.
‘Yes!’
The moment she had admitted the necessity, she realized it was a certain duplicity in herself. It was as if she had two selves: one, a new one, which belonged to Cipriano and to Ramón, and which was her sensitive, desirous self: the other hard and finished, accomplished, belonging to her mother, her children, England, her whole past. This old accomplished self was curiously invulnerable and insentient, curiously hard and ‘free.’ In it, she was an individual and her own mistress. The other self was vulnerable, and organically connected with Cipriano, even with Ramón and Teresa, and so was not ‘free’ at all.
She was aware of a duality in herself, and she suffered from it. She could not definitely commit herself, either to the old way of life, or to the new. She reacted from both. The old was a prison, and she loathed it. But in the new way she was not her own mistress at all, and her egoistic will recoiled.
‘That’s just it!’ she said. ‘It is a necessity in me, and you want to prevent me.’
‘No! No!’ said Ramón. ‘I hope not.’
‘Yes! You put a weight on me, and paralyse me, to prevent me from going,’ she said.
‘We must not do that,’ he said. ‘We must leave you, and not come near you for a time, if you feel it is so.’
‘Why? Why can’t you be friendly? Why can’t you be with me in my going? Why can’t you want me to go, since I must go?’
He looked at her with dispassionate eyes.
‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe in your going. It is a turning back: there is something renegade in it. — But we are all complicated. And if you feel you must go back for a time, go! It isn’t terribly important. You have chosen, really. I am not afraid for you.’
It was a great relief to her to hear this: because she was terribly afraid for herself. She could never be sure, never be whole in her connection with Cipriano and Ramón. Yet she said, mocking slightly:
‘Why should you be afraid for me?’
‘Aren’t you sometimes afraid for yourself?’ he asked.
‘Never!’ she said. ‘I’m absolutely sure about myself.’
They had been sitting in the garden of the Villa Aragon, under the poinsettia tree with the huge scarlet petal-leaves, like soft red quill feathers. The morning was becoming hot. The lake had gone still, with the fallen wind. Everything was still. Save the long scarlet of the poinsettia.
Christmas was coming! The poinsettia reminded Kate of it.
Christmas! Holly-berries! England! Presents! Food! — If she hurried, she could be in England for Christmas. It felt so safe, so familiar, so normal, the thought of Christmas at home, in England, with her mother. And all the exciting things she could tell to the people at home! And all the exciting gossip she could hear! In the distance, it looked very attractive. — She still had a qualm as to what the actual return would be like.
‘One can have too much of a good thing,’ she said to Ramón.
‘What good thing in particular?’ he asked her.
‘Oh — Quetzalcoatl and all that!’ she said. ‘One can have too much of it.’
‘It may be,’ he said, rising and going quietly away; so quietly, he was gone before she knew. And when she realized he had gone like that, she flushed with anger. But she sat on under the poinsettia tree, in the hot, still November sun, looking with anger at the hedge of jasmine, with its pure white flowers, and its sere, withered flowers, and its pinkish buds among the dark leaves. Where had she heard something about jasmine? ‘And the jasmine flowers between us!’
Oh! how tired she was of all that!
Teresa came down the garden slope.
‘You are still sitting here?’ she exclaimed.
‘Where else should I be?’ Kate answered.
‘I don’t know. — Ramón has gone to Sayula, to see the Jefe. He wouldn’t wait for us, to come with us in the boat.’
‘I suppose he was in a hurry,’ said Kate.
‘How fine these Noche Buenas are!’ said Teresa, looking at the brilliant spread of the red poinsettias.
‘They are your Christmas flower, aren’t they?’ said Kate.
‘Yes — the flowers of the Noche Buena — ’
‘How awful, Christmas with hibiscus and poinsettia! It makes me long to see mistletoe among the oranges, in a fruiterer’s shop in Hampstead.’
‘Why that?’ laughed Teresa.
‘Oh!’ Kate sighed petulantly. ‘To get back to simple life. To see the buses rolling on the mud in Piccadilly, on Christmas Eve, and the wet pavements crowded with people under the brilliant shops.’
‘Is that life, to you?’ asked Teresa.
‘Yes! Without all this abstraction, and will. Life is good enough for me if I am allowed to live and be myself.’
‘It is time Cipriano should come home,’ said Teresa.
But this made Kate rise from her seat, with sudden impatience. She would not have this thing put over her! She would break free, and show them!
She went with Teresa to the village. The air seemed mysteriously alive, with a new Breath. But Kate felt out of it. The two women sat under a tree on the beach at Sayula, talking a little, and watching the full expanse of the dove-pale lake.
A black boat with a red-painted roof and a tall mast was moored to the low breakwater-wall, which rose about a yard high, from the shallow water. On the wall stood loose little groups of white-clad men, looking into the black belly of the ship. And perched immobile in silhouette against the lake, was a black-and-white cow, and a huge monolithic black-and-white bull. The whole silhouette frieze motionless, against the far water that was coloured brown like turtle doves.
It was near, yet seemed strange and remote. Two peons fixed a plank gangway up to the side of the boat. Then they began to shove the cow towards it. She pawed the new broad planks tentatively, then, with that slow Mexican indifference, she lumbered unwillingly on to the gangway. They edged her slowly to the end, where she looked down into the boat. And at last, she dropped neatly into the hold.
Now the group of men broke into motion, for the huge and spangled bull. A tall old Mexican, in fawn, skin-tight trousers and little leather jacket, and a huge felt hat heavily embroidered with silver, gently took the ring in the bull’s nose, gently lifted the wedge of the bull’s head, so the great soft throat was uplifted. A peon behind put his head down, and with all his might began shoving the mighty, living flanks of the bull. The slim-legged, high-hatted old Mexican pulled evenly at the nose-ring. And with a calm and weighty poise, the bull stepped along the crest of the wall, delicately and impassively, to the plank gangway. There he stopped.
The peons began to re-group. The one behind, with his red sash tied so determinedly over his white hips, ceased to shove, the slim-legged Mexican let go the ring.
Then two peons passed a rope loosely round the haunches of the bull. The high-hatted farmer stepped on to the planks, and took the nose-ring again, very gently. He pulled softly. The bull lifted its head, but held back. It struck the planks with an unwilling foot. Then it stood, spangled with black on its whiteness, like a piece of the sky, immobile.
The farmer pulled once more at the ring. Two men were pulling the rope, pressing in the flanks of the immoveable, passive, spangled monster. Two peons, at the back, with their heads down and their red-sashed, flexible loins thrust out behind, shoved with all their strength in the soft flanks of the mighty creature.
And all was utterly noiseless and changeless; against the fullness of the pale lake, this silent, monumental group of life.
Then the bull stepped slowly, imperturbably, yet against its will, on to the loose planks, and was edged slowly along, to the brink of the boat. There he waited.
