Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/33

 Villiers disappeared with a wicked little laugh.

And as she sat her hands trembled with outrage and passion. A-moral! How could one be a-moral, or non-moral, when one’s soul was revolted! How could one be like these Americans, picking over the garbage of sensations, and gobbling it up like carrion birds. At the moment, both Owen and Villiers seemed to her like carrion birds, repulsive.

She felt, moreover, that they both hated her first because she was a woman. It was all right so long as she fell in with them in every way. But the moment she stood out against them in the least, they hated her mechanically for the very fact that she was a woman. They hated her womanness.

And in this Mexico, with its great under-drift of squalor and heavy reptile-like evil, it was hard for her to bear up.

She was really fond of Owen. But how could she respect him? So empty, and waiting for circumstance to fill him up. Swept with an American despair of having lived in vain, or of not having lived. Having missed something. Which fearful misgiving would make him rush like mechanical steel filings to a magnet, towards any crowd in the street. And then all his poetry and philosophy gone with the cigarette-end he threw away, he would stand craning his neck in one more frantic effort to —just to. Whatever it was, he must see it. Or he might miss something. And then, after he’d seen an old ragged woman run over by a motor-car and bleeding on the floor, he’d come back to Kate pale at the gills, sick, bewildered, daunted, and yet, yes, glad he’d seen it. It was Life!

"Well,” said Kate, "I always thank God I’m not Argus. Two eyes are often two too many for me, in all the horrors. I don’t feed myself on street-accidents.”

At dinner they tried to talk of pleasanter things than bull-fights. Villiers was neat and tidy and very nicely mannered, but she knew he was keeping a little mocking laugh up his sleeve, because she could not stomach the afternoon’s garbage. He himself had black rings under his eyes, but that was because he had "lived.”

The climax came with the dessert. In walked the Pole and that Spaniard who spoke American. The Pole was unhealthy and unclean-looking. She heard him saying to Owen, who of course had risen with automatic cordiality: