Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/164

English kitchens: so mechanical and somehow inhuman. Well, this was the other extreme.

Here there was no discipline nor method at all. Although Juana and her brats really wanted to do the things Kate wished, they must do them their own way. Sometimes Kate felt distracted: after all, the mechanical lines are so much easier to follow. But as far as possible, she let the family be. She had to get used, for example, to the vagaries of her dining table: a little round table that always stood on the verandah. At breakfast time it would be discreetly set under the plantas by the salon; for dinner, at one o’clock, it would have travelled way down the verandah; for tea it might be under a little tree on the grass. And then Juana would decide that the Niña must take supper, two eggs, rancheros, in the dining-room itself, isolated at the corner of the long dining-table meant for fourteen people.

The same with the dishes. Why they should, after washing up in the big bowls in the kitchen for several days, suddenly struggle way down to the lake with the unwashed pots in a basket on Concha’s shoulder, Kate never knew. Except for the fun of the thing.

Children! But then, not at all children. None of the wondering insouciance of childhood. Something dark and cognisant in their souls all the time: some heavy weight of resistance. They worked in fits and starts, and could be very industrious; then came days when they lay about on the ground like pigs. At times they were merry, seated round on the ground in groups, like Arabian nights, and laughing away. Then suddenly resisting even merriment in themselves, relapsing into the numb gloom. When they were busily working, suddenly for no reason, throwing away the tool, as if resenting having given themselves. Careless in their morals, always changing their loves, the men at least resisted all the time any real of themselves. They didn’t want the thing they were pursuing. It was the women who drew them on. And a young man and a girl going down the road from the lake in the dark, teasing and poking each other in excitement, would startle Kate because of their unusualness—men and women never walked their sex abroad, as white people do. And the sudden, sexual laugh of the man, so strange a sound of pain