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THE PLUMED SERPENT
Kate knew these mornings by the lake. They hypnotized her
almost like death. Scarlet birds like drops of blood, in very green
willow-trees. The aguador trotting to her house with a pole over his
shoulder, and two heavy square gasoline cans, one at each end of
the pole, fi lled with hot water. He had been to the hot spring for her
daily supply. Now barefoot, with one bare leg, the young man trotted softly beneath the load, his dark, handsome face sunk beneath
the shadows of the big hat, as he trotted in a silence, mindlessness
that was like death.
Dark heads out on the water in little groups, like black waterfowl bobbing. Were they birds? Were they heads? Was this human
life, or something intermediate, that lifted its orange, wet, glistening
shoulders a little out of the lake, beneath the dark head?
She knew so well what the day would be. Slowly the sun thickening and intensifying in the air overhead. And slowly the electricity clotting invisibly as afternoon approached. The beach in the
blind heat, strewn with refuse, smelling of refuse and the urine of
creatures.
Everything going vague in the immense sunshine, as the air invisibly thickened, and Kate could feel the electricity pressing like hot
iron on the back of her head. It stupefi ed her like morphine. Meanwhile the clouds rose like white trees from behind the mountains, as
the afternoon swooned in silence, rose and spread black branches,
quickly, in the sky, from which the lightning stabbed like birds.
And in the midst of the siesta stupor, the sudden round bolts of
thunder, and the crash and the chill of rain.
Tea-time, and evening coming. The last sailing-boats making to
depart, waiting for the wind. The wind was from the west, the boats
going east and south had gone, their sails were lapsing far away on
the lake. But the boats towards the west were waiting, waiting, while
the water rattled under their black fl at keels.
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DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
The big boat from Tlapaltepec, bringing many people from the
west, waited on into the night. She was anchored a few yards out,
and in the early night her passengers came down the dark beach,
weary of the day, to go on board. They clustered in a group at the
edge of the fl apping water.
The big, wide, fl at-bottomed canoe, with her wooden awning
and her one straight mast, lay black, a few yards out, in the dark
night. A lamp was burning under the wooden roof; one looked in,
from the shore. And this was home for the passengers.
A short man with trousers rolled up came to carry the people on board. The men stood with their backs to him, legs apart.
He suddenly dived at them, ducked his head between the fork of
their legs and rose, with a man on his shoulders. So he waded out
through the water to the black boat, and heaved his living load on
board.
For a woman, he crouched down before her, and she sat on
one of his shoulders. He clasped her legs with his right arm, she
clasped his dark head. So he carried her to the ship, as if she were
nothing.
Soon the boat was full of people. They sat on the mats on the
fl oor, with their backs to the sides of the vessel, baskets hanging
from the pent roof, swaying as the vessel swayed. Men spread their
serapes and curled up to sleep. The light of the lantern lit them up,
as they sat and lay and slept, or talked in murmurs.
A little woman came up out of the darkness; then suddenly ran
back again. She had forgotten something. But the vessel would not
sail without her, for the wind would not change yet.
The tall mast stood high, the great sail lay in folds along the
roof, ready. Under the roof, the lantern swayed, the people slept and
stretched. Probably they would not sail till midnight. Then down
the lake to Tlapaltepec, with its reeds at the end of the lake, and
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THE PLUMED SERPENT
its dead, dead plaza, its dead dry houses of black adobe, its ruined
streets, its strange, buried silence, like Pompeii.
Kate knew it. So strange and deathlike, it frightened her, and
mystifi ed her.
But to-day! To-day she would not loiter by the shore all morning.
She must go to Jamiltepec in a motor-boat, to see Ramón. To talk to
him even about marrying Cipriano.
Ah, how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to this
death? Take the weight of this darkness on her breast, the heaviness
of this strange gloom? Die before dying, and pass away whilst still
beneath the sun?
Ah no! Better to escape to the white men’s lands.
But she went to arrange with Alonso for the motor-boat.
CHAPTER XVII
FOURTH HYMN
AND THE BISHOP
The President of the Republic, as a new broom, had been sweeping perhaps a little too clean for the common liking, so there was
a ‘rebellion.’ It was not a very large one. But it meant, of course, banditry, robbery, and cowed villages.
Ramón was determined to keep free from the taint of politics.
But already the Church, and with the Church the Knights of Cortés
and a certain ‘black’ faction, was preparing against him. The priests
began to denounce him from the pulpits – but not very loudly – as
an ambitious Anti-Christ. With Cipriano beside him, however, and
with Cipriano the army of the west, he had not much to fear.
But it was possible Cipriano would have to march away in defence of the Government.
‘Above all things,’ said Ramón, ‘I don’t want to acquire a political
smell. I don’t want to be pushed in the direction of any party. Unless
I can stand uncontaminated, I had better abandon everything. But
the Church will push me over to the socialists – and the socialists
will betray me on the fi rst opportunity. It is not myself. It is the new
spirit. The surest way to kill it – and it can be killed, like any other
living thing – is to get it connected with any political party.’
‘Why don’t you see the Bishop?’ said Cipriano. ‘I will see him too.
Am I to be chief of the division in the west for nothing?’
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THE PLUMED SERPENT
‘Yes,’ said Ramón slowly, ‘I will see Jimenez. I have thought of it.
Yes, I intend to use every means in my power. – Montes will stand
for us, because he hates the Church and hates any hint of dictation
from outside. He sees the possibility of a “national” church. Though
myself, I don’t care about national churches. Only one has to speak
the language of one’s own people. You know the priests are forbidding the people to read the Hymns?’
‘What does that matter?’ said Cipriano. ‘These people are nothing if not perverse, nowadays. They will read them all the more.’
‘Maybe! – I shall take no notice. I’ll let my new legend, as they
call it, grow while the earth is moist. But we have to keep our eye
very close on all the little bunches of “interests”.’
‘Ramón!’ said Cipriano. ‘If you can turn Mexico entirely into
a Quetzalcoatl country, what then?’
‘I shall be First Man of Quetzalcoatl – I know no more.’
‘You won’t trouble about the rest of the world?’
Ramón smiled. Already he saw in Cipriano’s eye the gleam of
a Holy War.
‘I would like,’ he said, smiling, ‘to be one of the Initiates of the
Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country its own Saviour, Cipriano:
or every people its own Saviour. And the First Men of every people,
forming a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have aristocrats, that we know. But natural ones, not artifi cial. And in some
way the world must be organically united: the world of man. But
in the concrete, not in the abstract. Leagues and Covenants and
International Programmes. Ah! Cipriano! it’s like an international
pestilence. The leaves of one great tree can’t hang on the boughs of
another great tree. The races of the earth are like trees; in the end
they neither mix nor mingle. They stand out of each other’s way, like
trees. Or else they crowd on one another, and their roots grapple,
and it is the fi ght to the death. – Only from the fl owers there is
315
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
commingling. And the fl owers of every race are the natural aristocrats of that race. And the spirit of the world can fl y from fl ower to
fl ower, like a humming-bird, and slowly fertilize the great trees in
their blossoms. Only the Natural Aristocrats can rise above their
nation; and even then they do not rise beyond their race. Only the
Natural Aristocrats of the World can be international, or cosmopolitan, or cosmic. It has always been so. The peoples are no more
capable of it than the leaves of the mango-tree are capable of attaching themselves to the pine. – So if I want Mexicans to learn the
name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because I want them to speak with the
tongues of their own blood. I wish the Teutonic world would once
more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, and the tree Igdrasil. And
I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is
their mystery, and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan,
alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should come back to the
Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and Mithras again
to Persia, and Brahma unbroken to India, and the oldest of dragons
to China. Then I, Cipriano, I, First Man of Quetzalcoatl, with you,
First Man of Huitzilopochtli, and perhaps your wife, First Woman of
Itzpapalotl, could we not meet, with sure souls, the other great aristocrats of the world, the First Man of Wotan and the First Woman of
Freya, First Lord of Hermes, and the Lady of Astarte, the Best-Born
of Brahma, and the Son of the Greatest Dragon? I tell you, Cipriano,
then the earth might rejoice, when the First Lords of the West met
the First Lords of South and East, in the Valley of the Soul. Ah, the
earth has Valleys of the Soul, that are not cities of commerce and
industry. And the mystery is one mystery, but men must see it differently. The hibiscus and the thistle and the gentian all fl ower on
the Tree of Life, but in the world they are far apart; and must be.
And I am hibiscus and you are a yucca fl ower, and your Caterina is
a wild daffodil, and my Carlota is a white pansy. Only four of us, yet
316
THE PLUMED SERPENT
we make a curious bunch. So it is. The men and women of the earth
are not manufactured goods, to be interchangeable. But the Tree of
Life is one tree, as we know when our souls open in the last blossoming. We can’t change ourselves, and we don’t want to. But when our
souls open out in the fi nal blossoming, then as blossoms we share
one mystery with all blossoms, beyond the knowledge of any leaves
and stems and roots: something transcendent.
‘But it doesn’t matter. At the present time I have to fi ght my way
in Mexico, and you have to fi ght yours. So let us go and do it.’
He went away to his workshops and his men who were labouring under his directions, while Cipriano sat down to his correspondence and his military planning.
They were both interrupted by the thudding of a motor-boat entering the little bay. It was Kate, escorted by the black-scarved Juana.
Ramón, in his white clothes, with the blue-and-black fi gured
sash and the big hat with the turquoise-inlaid Eye of Quetzalcoatl,
went down to meet her. She was in white, too, with a green hat and
the shawl of pale yellow silk.
‘I was so glad to come again,’ she said, holding out her hand to
him. ‘Jamiltepec has become a sort of Mecca to me, my inside yearns
for it.’
‘Then why don’t you come oftener? I wish you would come.’
‘I am afraid of intruding.’
‘No! You could help if you would.’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I am so frightened, and so sceptical of big undertakings. I think it is because, at the very bottom of me, I dislike the
masses of people – anywhere. I’m afraid I rather despise people;
I don’t want them to touch me, and I don’t want to touch them. – So
how could I pretend to join any – any – any sort of Salvation
Army? – which is a horrid way of putting it.’
Don Ramón laughed.
317
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
‘I do myself,’ he said. ‘I detest and despise masses of people. But
these are my own people.’
‘I, ever since I was a child, since I can remember. – They say of
me, when I was a little girl of four, and my parents were having a big
dinner-party, they had the nurse bring me in to say good night to all
the people they had there dressed up and eating and drinking. And
I suppose they all said nice things to me, as they do. I only answered:
You are all monkeys! It was a great success! – But I felt it even as
a child, and I feel it now. People are all monkeys to me, performing
in different ways.’
‘Even the people nearest you?’
Kate hesitated. Then she confessed, rather unwillingly:
‘Yes! I’m afraid so. Both my husbands – even Joachim – they
seemed, somehow, so OBSTINATE in their little stupidities – rather
like monkeys. I felt a terrible revulsion from Joachim when he was
dead. I thought: What peaked monkey is that, that I have been losing
my blood about. – Do you think it’s rather awful?’
‘I do! But then I think we ALL feel like that, at moments. Or we
would if we dared. It’s only one of our moments.’
‘Sometimes,’ said she, ‘I think that is my PERMANENT feeling
towards people. I like the world, the sky and the earth and the greater mystery beyond. But people – yes, they are all monkeys to me.’
He could see that, at the bottom of her soul, it was true.
‘Puros monos!’ he said to himself in Spanish. ‘Y lo que hacen,
puras monerías.’
‘Pure monkeys! And the things they do, sheer monkeydom!’
Then he added: ‘Yet you have children!’
‘Yes! Yes!’ she said, struggling with herself. ‘My fi rst husband’s
children.’
‘And they? – monos y no más?’
318
THE PLUMED SERPENT
‘No!’ she said, frowning and looking angry with herself. ‘Only
partly.’
‘It is bad,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But then!’ he added. – ‘What
are my own children to me, but little monkeys? And their mother – and their mother – Ah, no! Señora Caterina! It is no good. One
must be able to disentangle oneself from persons, from people. If
I go to a rose-bush, to be intimate with it, it is a nasty thing that
hurts me. One must disentangle oneself from persons and personalities, and see people as one sees the trees in the landscape. People
in some way DOMINATE you. In some way, humanity dominates
your consciousness. So you must hate people and humanity, and you
want to escape. But there is only one way of escape: to turn beyond
them, to the greater life.’
‘But I do!’ cried Kate. ‘I do nothing else. When I was with Joachim
absolutely alone in a cottage, doing all the work myself, and knowing nobody at all, just living, and FEELING the greater thing all the
time; then I was free, I was happy.’
‘But he?’ said Ramón. ‘Was he free and happy?’
‘He was REALLY. But that’s where the monkeyishness comes in.
He wouldn’t let himself be content. He insisted on having PEOPLE
and a CAUSE, just to torture himself with.’
‘Then why didn’t you live in your cottage QUITE alone, and
without him?’ he said. ‘Why do you travel and see people?’
She was silent, very angry. She knew she could not live quite
alone. The vacuity crushed her. She needed a man there, to stop the
gap, and to keep her balanced. But even when she had him, in her
heart of hearts she despised him, as she despised the dog and the cat.
Between herself and humanity there was the bond of subtle, helpless antagonism.
She was naturally quite free-handed and she left people their
liberty. Servants would get attached to her, and casual people all
319
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
liked and admired her. She had a strong life-fl ow of her own, and
a certain assertive joie de vivre.
But underneath it all was the unconquerable dislike, almost
DISGUST of people. More than hate, it was disgust. Whoever it
was, wherever it was, however it was, after a little while this disgust
overcame her. Her mother, her father, her sisters, her fi rst husband,
even her children whom she loved, and Joachim, for whom she had
felt such passionate love, even these, being near her, fi lled her with
a certain disgust and repulsion after a little while, and she longed to
fl ing them down the great and fi nal oubliette.
But there is no great and fi nal oubliette: or at least, it is never
fi nal, until one has fl ung ONESELF down.
So it was with Kate. Till she fl ung herself down the last dark oubliette of death, she would never escape from her deep, her bottomless disgust with human beings. Brief contacts were all right, thrilling even. But close contacts, or long contacts, were short and long
revulsions of violent disgust.
She and Ramón had sat down on a bench under the whitefl owering oleander of the garden downstairs. His face was impassive
and still. In the stillness, with a certain pain and nausea, he realized the state she was in, and realized that his own state, as regards
PERSONAL people, was the same. Mere PERSONAL contact, mere
human contact fi lled him, too, with disgust. Carlota disgusted him.
Kate herself disgusted him. Sometimes, Cipriano disgusted him.
But this was because, or when, he met them on a merely human,
personal plane. To do so was disaster: it fi lled him with disgust of
them and loathing of himself.
He had to meet them on another plane, where the contact was
different; intangible, remote, and without INTIMACY. His soul was
concerned elsewhere. So that the quick of him need not be bound to
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