Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/153

CHAP: IX. CASA DE LA CUENTAS.

Kate was soon fond of the limping, untidy Juana, and of the girls. Concha was fourteen, a thick, heavy, barbaric girl with a mass of black waving hair which she was always scratching. Maria was eleven, a shy, thin bird-like thing with big eyes that seemed almost to absorb the light round her.

It was a reckless family. Jugna admitted a different father for Jesús, but to judge from the rest, one would have suspected a different father for each of them. There was a basic, sardonic carelessness in the face of life, in all the family. They lived from day to day, a stubborn, heavy, obstinate life of indifference, careless about the past, careless about present, the careless about the future. They had even no interest in money. Whatever they got they spent in a minute, and forgot it again.

Without aim or purpose, they lived à terre, on the dark, volcanic earth. They were not animals, because men women and their children cannot be animals. It is not granted us. Go, for once gone, thou never canst return! says the great Urge which drives us creatively on. When man tries brutally to return to the older, previous levels of he does so in the of cruelty and misery.

So in the black eyes of family, a certain vicious fear and wonder and misery. The misery of human beings who squat helpless outside their own unbuilt selves, unable to win their souls of the chaos, and indifferent to all victories.

White people are soulless too. But they have conquered the lower worlds of metal and energy, so they whizz around in machines, the void of their own emptiness.

To Kate, there was a great pathos in her family. Also a certain repulsiveness.

Juana and her children, once they accepted their Niña as their own, were honest with intensity. Point of honour, they were honest to the least little plum in the fruit bowl. And almost intensely eager to serve.

Themselves indifferent to their surroundings, they would