Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/471

“Adios!” said Kate to him, lingeringly.

“Adios, Patrona!” he replied, suddenly lifting hand high, in the Quetzalcoatl salute.

She walked across the beach to the jetty, feeling the life surging vivid and resistant within her. “It is sex,” she said to herself. “How wonderful sex can be, when men keep it powerful and sacred, and it fills the world! Like sunshine through and through one!—But I’m not going to submit, even there. Why should one give in, to anything!”

Ramón was coming down towards the boat, the blue symbol of Quetzalcoatl in his hat. And at that moment the drums began to sound for mid-day, and there came the mid-day call, clear and distinct, from the tower. All the `men on the shore stood erect, and shot up their right hands to the sky. The women spread both palms to the light. Everything was motionless, save the moving animals.

Then Ramón went on to the boat, the men saluting him with the Quetzalcoatl salute as he came near.

“It is wonderful, really,” said Kate, as they rowed over the water, “how—how splendid one can feel in this country! As if one were still genuinely of the nobility.”

“Aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes, I am. But everyone else it is denied." Only here feels the full force of one’s nobility. The natives still worship it.”

“At moments,” said Ramón. “Later, they will murder you and violate you, for having worshipped you.”

“Is it inevitable?” she said flippantly.

“I think so,” he replied. “If you lived here alone in Sayula, and queened it for a time, you would get yourself murdered—or worse—by the people who had worshipped you.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“I know,” he replied.

“Why?’ she said, obstinate.

“Unless one gets one’s nobility from the gods and turns to the middle of the sky for one’s power, one will be murdered at last.”

“I do do get my nobility that way,” that she said.

But she did not quite believe it. And she made up mind still more definitely, to go away.