THE HIGH SEA
523
in love with you. It seems to me sad you must shut him out."
"Sad?" said Jenny. "No, that isn't exactly the word."
Mter a long time of lying still in the darkness, Jenny slept
and lived through again in her sleep something she had seen once
in broad day, but the end was different as if her memory had patched
together two or three unrelated bits and pieces to contrive a meaning
for the whole which the separate pieces lacked. During the first month
after she began to live with ·David, she had gone by bus from Mexico
City to Taxco, to look at a house there. At noon of the burning
bright day they had slowed down passing through a small Indian
village with the little thick walled windowless houses sitting along the
road, the bare earth swept before each door. The dust was bitter to
taste, the heat made her long for sleep in a cool place.
Half a dozen Indians, men and women, were standing quietly
together in the bare spot near one of the little houses, and they were
watching something very intently. As the bus rolled by, Jenny saw a
man and a woman, some distance from the group, locked in a death
battle. They swayed and staggered together in a strange embrace,
as if they supported each other; but in the man's right hand was a
knife, and the woman's breast and stomach were pierced. The blood
ran down her body and over her thighs, her skirts were sticking to
her legs with her own blood. With a jagged stone she was beating him
on the head and his features were veiled in rivulets of blood. They
were silent, and their faces had taken on a saintlike patience in suffer–
ing, abstract and purified of rage and hatred in their one holy purpose
to kill each other. Their flesh swayed together and clung, their left
arms were wound about each other's bodies as
if
in love. Their
weapons were raised again, but their heads lowered little by little,
until the woman's head rested upon his breast and his head was on
her shoulder, and holding thus, they both struck again.
It was a mere flash of vision, but in Jenny's memory it lived in
an ample eternal day illuminated by a cruel sun, full of the jolly sense–
less motion of the bus, the deep bright arch of the sky, the flooding
violet blue shadows of the mountains, her thirst, and the gentle peeping
of newly hatched chickens in a basket on the lap of the Indian boy
beside her.... She had not known how frightened she was until the
scene began repeating itself in her dream. And this latest time she
had been among the watchers, as if she were at a play, and the two
narrow figures were unreal as sculptured wood. Then she observed
that their features had changed entirely, the faces were David's and
her own, and suddenly she was looking up into David's face, a
bloody stone in her hand, and his knife was raised above her breast ...
