Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/46

 "Surely it is hope that keeps one going?" she said.

“You, maybe. But not the Aztec, nor the Indian to-day.

He spoke like a man who has something in reserve, who is only half attending to what he hears, and even to his own answer,

“What do they have, if they don’t have hope?" she said.

“They have some other strength, perhaps,” he said evasively.

“I would like to give them hope," she said. If they had hope, they wouldn’t be so sad, and they would be cleaner, and not have vermin.”’

"That of course would be good," he said, with a little smile. “But I think they are not so very sad. They laugh a good deal and are gay.”

"No,” she said. "They oppress me, like a weight on my heart. They make me irritable, and I want to go away.”

“From Mexico?"

“Yes. I feel I want to go away from it and never, never see it again. It is so oppressive and gruesome.”

“Try it a little longer,” he said. "Perhaps you will feel differently. But perhaps not,” he ended vaguely, driftngly.

She could feel in him a sort of yearning towards her. As if a sort of appeal came to her from him, from his physical heart in his breast. As if the very heart gave out dark rays of seeking and yearning. She glimpsed this now for the first time, quite apart from the talking, and it made her shy.

“And does everything in Mexico oppress you?" he added, almost shyly, but with a touch of mockery, looking at her with a troubled naive face that had its age heavy and resistant beneath the surface.

“Almost everything!" she said. It makes my heart sink. Like the eyes of the men in the big hats—I call them the peons. Their eyes have no middle to them. Those big handsome men, under their big hats, they aren’t really there. They have no centre, no real . Their middle is a raging black hole, like the middle of a maelstrom."

She looked with her troubled grey eyes into the black, slanting, watchful, calculating eyes of the small man opposite her. He had a pained expression, puzzled, like a child.