Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:The Plumed Serpent
.pdf
THE PLUMED SERPENT
‘He said: Oh, Quetzalcoatl! They have forgotten thee. The feathered snake! The serpent – silent bird! They are asking for none of
thee.
‘I said: Go thy way, for the dust of earth is in thy eyes and on thy
lips. For me the serpent of middle-earth sleeps in my loins and my
belly, the bird of the outer air perches on my brow and sweeps her
bill across my breast. But I, I am lord of two ways. I am master of up
and down. I am as a man who is a new man, with new limbs and life,
and the light of the Morning Star in his eyes. Lo! I am I! The lord of
both ways. Thou wert lord of the one way. Now it leads thee to the
sleep. Farewell!
‘So Jesus went on towards the sleep. And Mary the Mother of
Sorrows lay down on the bed of the white moon, weary beyond any
more tears.
‘And I, I am on the threshold. I am stepping across the border.
I am Quetzalcoatl, lord of both ways, star between day and the dark.’
There was silence as the young man fi nished reading.
CHAPTER XVI
CIPRIANO AND KATE
On Saturday afternoons the big black canoes with their large
square sails came slowly approaching out of the thin haze across the
lake, from the west, from Tlapaltepec, with big straw hats and with
blankets and earthenware stuff, from Ixtlahuacan and Jaramay and
Las Zemas with mats and timber and charcoal and oranges, from
Tuliapan and Cuxcueco and San Cristobal with boatloads of darkgreen, globular water-melons, and piles of red tomatoes, mangoes,
vegetables, oranges: and boat-loads of bricks and tiles, burnt red, but
rather friable; then more charcoal, more wood, from the stark dry
mountains over the lake.
Kate nearly always went out about fi ve o’clock, on Saturdays,
to see the boats, fl at-bottomed, drift up to the shallow shores, and
begin to unload in the glow of the evening. It pleased her to see
the men running along the planks with the dark-green melons, and
piling them in a mound on the rough sand, melons dark-green like
creatures with pale bellies. To see the tomatoes all poured out into
a shallow place in the lake, bobbing about while the women washed
them, a bobbing scarlet upon the water.
The long, heavy bricks were piled in heaps along the scrap of
demolished breakwater, and little gangs of asses came trotting down
the rough beach, to be laden, pressing their little feet in the gravelly
sand, and fl opping their ears.
292
THE PLUMED SERPENT
The cargadores were busy at the charcoal boats, carrying out the
rough sacks.
‘Do you want charcoal, Niña?’ shouted a grimy cargador, who
had carried the trunks from the station on his back.
‘At how much?’
‘Twenty-fi ve reales the two sacks.’
‘I pay twenty reales.’
‘At twenty reales then, Señorita. But you give me two reales for
the transport?’
‘The owner pays the transport,’ said Kate. ‘But I will give you
twenty centavos.’
Away went the man, trotting barelegged, barefoot, over the stony
ground, with two large sacks of charcoal on his shoulders. The men
carry huge weights, without seeming ever to think they are heavy.
Almost as if they liked to feel a huge weight crushing on their iron
spines, and to be able to resist it.
Baskets of spring guavas, baskets of sweet lemons called limas,
basket of tiny green and yellow lemons, big as walnuts; orange-red
and greenish mangoes, oranges, carrots, cactus fruits in great abundance, a few knobbly potatoes, fl at, pearl-white onions, little calabazitas and speckled green calabazitas like frogs, camotes cooked and
raw – she loved to watch the baskets trotting up the beach past the
church.
Then, rather late as a rule, big red pots, bulging red ollas for
water-jars, earthenware casseroles and earthenware jugs with cream
and black scratched pattern in glaze, bowls, big fl at earthenware
discs for cooking tortillas – much earthenware.
On the west shore, men were running up the beach wearing
twelve enormous hats at once, like a trotting pagoda. Men trotting
with fi nely woven huaraches and rough strip sandals. And men with
293
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
a few dark serapes, with gaudy rose-pink patterns, in a pile on their
shoulders.
It was fascinating. But at the same time, there was a heavy, almost sullen feeling on the air. These people came to market to a sort
of battle. They came, not for the joy of selling, but for the sullen contest with those who wanted what they had got. The strange, black
resentment always present.
By the time the church bells clanged for sunset, the market had
already begun. On all the pavements round the plaza squatted the
Indians with their wares, pyramids of green watermelons, arrays of
rough earthenware, hats in piles, pairs of sandals side by side, a great
array of fruit, a spread of collar-studs and knick-knacks, called novedades, little trays with sweets. And people arriving all the time out of
the wild country, with laden asses.
Yet never a shout, hardly a voice to be heard. None of the animation and the frank wild clamour of a Mediterranean market. Always the heavy friction of the will; always, always, grinding upon the
spirit, like the grey black grind of lava-rock.
When dark fell, the vendors lighted their tin torch-lamps, and
the fl ames wavered and streamed as the dark-faced men squatted on
the ground in their white clothes and big hats, waiting to sell. They
never asked you to buy. They never showed their wares. They didn’t
even look at you. It was as if their static resentment and indifference
would hardly let them sell at all.
Kate sometimes felt the market cheerful and easy. But more often she felt an unutterable weight slowly, invisibly sinking on her
spirits. And she wanted to run. She wanted, above all, the comfort of
Don Ramón and the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl. This seemed to her the
only escape from a world gone ghastly.
There was talk of revolution again, so the market was uneasy
and grinding the black grit into the spirit. Foreign-looking soldiers
294
THE PLUMED SERPENT
were about, with looped hats, and knives and pistols, and savage
northern faces: tall, rather thin fi gures. They would loiter about in
pairs, talking in a strange northern speech, and seeming more alien
even than Kate herself.
The food-stalls were brilliantly lighted. Rows of men sat at the
plank boards, drinking soup and eating hot food with their fi ngers.
The milkman rode in on horseback, his two big cans of milk slung
before him, and he made his way slowly through the people to the
food-stalls. There, still sitting unmoved on horseback, he delivered
bowls of milk from the can in front of him, and then, on horseback
like a monument, took his supper, his bowl of soup, and his plate
of tamales, or of minced, fi ery meat spread on tortillas. The peons
drifted slowly round. Guitars were sounding, half-secretly. A motorcar worked its way in from the city, choked with people, girls, young
men, city papas, children, in a pile.
The rich press of life, above the fl are of torches upon the ground!
The throng of white-clad, big-hatted men circulating slowly, the
women with dark rebozos slipping silently. Dark trees overhead.
The doorway of the hotel bright with electricity. Girls in organdie
frocks, white, cherry-red, blue, from the city. Groups of singers singing inwardly. And all the noise subdued, suppressed.
The sense of strange, heavy suppression, the dead black power
of negation in the souls of the peons. It was almost pitiful to see the
pretty, pretty slim girls from Guadalajara going round and round,
their naked arms linked together, so light in their gauzy, scarlet,
white, blue, orange dresses, looking for someone to look at them, to
take note of them. And the peon men only emitting from their souls
the black vapour of negation, that perhaps was hate. They seemed,
the natives, to have the power of blighting the air with their black,
rock-bottom resistance.
295
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
Kate almost wept over the slim, eager girls, pretty as rather papery fl owers, eager for attention, but thrust away, victimized.
Suddenly there was a shot. The market-place was on its feet in
a moment, scattering, pouring away into the streets and the shops.
Another shot! Kate, from where she stood, saw across the rapidlyemptying plaza a man sitting back on one of the benches, fi ring
a pistol into the air. He was a lout from the city, and he was half
drunk. The people knew what it was. Yet any moment he might lower the pistol and start fi ring at random. Everybody hurried silently,
melting away, leaving the plaza void.
Two more shots, pap-pap! still into the air. And at the same moment a little offi cer in uniform darted out of the dark street where
the military station was, and where now the big hats were piled on
the ground; he rushed straight to the drunkard, who was spreading
his legs and waving the pistol: and before you could breathe, slap!
and again slap! He had slapped the pistol-fi rer fi rst on one side of
the face, then on the other, with slaps that resounded almost like
shots. And in the same breath he seized the arm that held the pistol
and wrested the weapon away.
Two of the strange soldiers instantly rushed up and seized the
man by the arms. The offi cer spoke two words, they saluted and
marched off their prisoner.
Instantly the crowd was ebbing back into the plaza, unconcerned. Kate sat on a bench with her heart beating. She saw the prisoner pass under a lamp, streaks of blood on his cheek. And Juana,
who had fl ed, now came scuttling back and took Kate’s hand, saying:
‘Look! Niña! It is the General!’
She rose startled to her feet. The offi cer was saluting her.
‘Don Cipriano!’ she said.
‘The same!’ he replied. ‘Did that drunken fellow frighten you?’
296
THE PLUMED SERPENT
‘Not much! Only startled me. I didn’t FEEL any evil intention
behind it.’
‘No, only drunk.’
‘But I shall go home now.’
‘Shall I walk with you?’
‘Would you care to?’
He took his place at her side, and they turned down by the
church, to the lake shore. There was a moon above the mountain
and the air was coming fresh, not too strong, from the west. From the
Pacifi c. Little lights were burning ruddy by the boats at the water’s
edge, some outside, and some inside, under the roof-tilt of the boat’s
little inward shed. Women were preparing a mouthful of food.
‘But the night is beautiful,’ said Kate, breathing deep.
‘With the moon clipped away just a little,’ he said.
Juana was following close on her heels: and behind, two soldiers
in slouched hats.
‘Do the soldiers escort you?’ she said.
‘I suppose so,’ said he.
‘But the moon,’ she said, ‘isn’t lovely and friendly as it is in England or Italy.’
‘It is the same planet,’ he replied.
‘But the moonshine in America isn’t the same. It doesn’t make
one feel glad as it does in Europe. One feels it would like to hurt one.’
He was silent for some moments. Then he said:
‘Perhaps there is in you something European, which hurts our
Mexican Moon.’
‘But I come in good faith.’
‘European good faith. Perhaps it is not the same as Mexican.’
Kate was silent, almost stunned.
‘Fancy your Mexican moon objecting to me!’ she laughed ironically.
297
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
‘Fancy your objecting to our Mexican moon!’ said he.
‘I wasn’t,’ said she.
They came to the corner of Kate’s road. At the corner was a group
of trees, and under the trees, behind the hedge, several reed huts.
Kate often laughed at the donkey looking over the dry-stone low
wall, and at the black sheep with curved horns, tied to a bitten tree,
and at the lad, naked but for a bit of a shirt, fl eeing into the corner
under the thorn screen.
Kate and Cipriano sat on the veranda of the House of the Cuentas. She offered him vermouth, but he refused.
They were still. There came the faint pip!-pip! from the little
electric plant just up the road, which Jesús tended. Then a cock from
beyond the bananas crowed powerfully and hoarsely.
‘But how absurd!’ said Kate. ‘Cocks don’t crow at this hour.’
‘Only in Mexico,’ laughed Cipriano.
‘Yes! Only here!’
‘He thinks your moon is the sun, no?’ he said, teasing her.
The cock crowed powerfully, again and again.
‘This is very nice, your house, your patio,’ said Cipriano.
But Kate was silent.
‘Or don’t you like it?’ he said.
‘You see,’ she answered, ‘I have nothing to DO! The servants
won’t let me do anything. If I sweep my room, they stand and say
Qué Niña! Qué Niña! As if I was standing on my head for their benefi t. I sew, though I’ve no interest in sewing. – What is it, for a life?’
‘And you read!’ he said, glancing at the magazines and books.
‘Ah, it is all such stupid, lifeless stuff, in the books and papers,’
she said.
There was a silence. After which he said:
‘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 blan-
298
THE PLUMED SERPENT
ket, 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 Mexico HAS no soul,’ said Kate. ‘She’s swallowed the stone
of despair, as the hymn says.’
‘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 fi nished – then fi nished it has no interest
any more. Mexico hasn’t started to weave the pattern of her soul. Or
she is only just starting: with Ramón. Don’t you believe in Ramón?’
Kate hesitated before she answered.
‘Ramón, yes! I do! But whether it’s any good trying here in Mexico, as he is trying –’ she said slowly.
‘He IS in Mexico. HE tries here. Why should not you?’
‘I?’
‘Yes! You! Ramón doesn’t believe in womanless gods, he says.
Why should you not be the woman in the Quetzalcoatl pantheon?
If you will, the goddess!’
‘I, a goddess in the Mexican pantheon?’ cried Kate, with a burst
of startled laughter.
‘Why not?’ said he.
‘But I am not Mexican,’ said she.
‘You may easily be a goddess,’ said he, ‘in the same pantheon
with Don Ramón and me.’
A strange, inscrutable fl ame of desire seemed to be burning on
Cipriano’s face, as his eyes watched her glittering. Kate could not
help feeling that it was a sort of intense, blind AMBITION, of which
299
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
she was partly an object: a passionate object also: which kindled the
Indian to the hottest pitch of his being.
‘But I don’t feel like a goddess in a Mexican pantheon,’ she said.
‘Mexico is a bit horrible to me. Don Ramón is WONDERFUL: but
I’m so afraid they will destroy him.’
‘Come, and help to prevent it.’
‘How?’
‘You marry me. You complain you have nothing to do. Then
marry me. Marry me, and help Ramón and me. We need a woman,
Ramón says, to be with us. And you are the woman. There is a great
deal to do.’
‘But can’t I help without marrying anybody?’ said Kate.
‘How can you?’ he said simply.
And she knew it was true.
‘But you see,’ she said, ‘I have no IMPULSE to marry you, so how
can I?’
‘Why?’ he said.
‘You see, Mexico is REALLY a bit horrible to me. And the black
eyes of the people really make my heart contract, and my fl esh
shrink. There’s a bit of horror in it. And I don’t want horror in my
soul.’
He was silent and unfathomable. She did not know in the least
what he was thinking, only a black cloud seemed over him.
‘Why not?’ he said at last. ‘Horror is real. Why not a bit of horror,
as you say, among all the rest?’
He gazed at her with complete, glittering earnestness, something heavy upon her.
‘But –’ she stammered in amazement.
‘You feel a bit of horror for me too. – But why not? Perhaps I feel
a bit of horror for you too, for your light-coloured eyes and your
strong white hands. But that is good.’
300
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]