This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
FAITH.
HOPE.
CHARITY.
SUCCESS.
PROGRESS.
HIS PEOPLE.
A HATCHMENT.
THIRTEEN STORIES.
* * * * *
MOGREB EL ACKSA: A Journey in Morocco.
(_New Edition in Preparation_.)
* * * * *
BROUGHT FORWARD
* * * * *
BY
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM
* * * * *
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA ST., COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
* * * * *
_First Published_ 1916.
_Second Impression_ 1917.
* * * * *
_All rights reserved_.
* * * * *
TO
COMMANDER
CHARLES E. F. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM
R.N.
* * * * *
PREFACE
LUCKILY the war has made eggs too expensive for me to fear the public
will pelt me off the stage with them.
Still after years of writing one naturally dreads the cold potato and the
orange-peel.
I once in talking said to a celebrated dancer who was about to bid
farewell to her admirers and retire to private life, “Perhaps you will
take a benefit when you come back from finishing your last tour.” She
answered, “Yes . . .”; and then added, “or perhaps two.”
That is not my way, for all my life I have loved bread, bread, and wine,
wine, not caring for half-measures, like your true Scot, of whom it has
been said, “If he believes in Christianity he has no doubts, and if he is
a disbeliever he has none either.”
Once in the Sierra Madre, either near the Santa Rosa Mountains or in the
Bolson de Mápimi, I disremember which, out after horses that had strayed,
we came upon a little shelter made of withies, and covered with one of
those striped blankets woven by the Navajos.
A Texan who was with the party pointed to it, and said, “That is a
wickey-up, I guess.”
The little wigwam, shaped like a gipsy tent, stood close to a thicket of
huisaché trees in flower. Their round and ball-like blossoms filled the
air with a sweet scent. A stream ran gently tinkling over its pebbly
bed, and the tall prairie grasses flowed up to the lost little hut as if
they would engulf it like a sea.
On every side of the deep valley—for I forgot to say the hut stood in a
valley—towered hills with great, flat, rocky sides. On some of them the
Indian tribes had scratched rude pictures, records of their race.
In one of them—I remember it just as if now it was before my eyes—an
Indian chief, surrounded by his friends, was setting free his favourite
horse upon the prairies, either before his death or in reward of faithful
services. The little group of men cut in the stone, most probably with
an obsidian arrow-head, was life-like, though drawn without perspective,
which gave those figures of a vanished race an air of standing in the
clouds.
The chief stood with his bridle in his hand, his feather war-bonnet upon
his head, naked except the breech-clout. His bow was slung across his
shoulders and his quiver hung below his arm, and with the other hand he
kept the sun off from his face as he gazed upon his horse. All kinds of
hunting scenes were there displayed, and others, such as the burial of a
chief, a dance, and other ceremonials, no doubt as dear to those who drew
them as are the rites in a cathedral to other faithful. The flat rock
bore one more inscription, stating that Eusebio Leal passed by bearing
despatches, and the date, June the fifteenth, of the year 1687. But to
return again to the lone wickey-up.
We all sat looking at it: Eustaquio Gomez, Polibio Medina, Exaltacion
Garcia, the Texan, two Pueblo Indians, and I who write these lines.
Somehow it had an eerie look about it, standing so desolate, out in those
flowery wilds.
Inside it lay the body of a man, with the skin dry as parchment, and his
arms beside him, a Winchester, a bow and arrows, and a lance. Eustaquio,
taking up an arrow, after looking at it, said that the dead man was an
Apache of the Mescalero band, and then, looking upon the ground and
pointing out some marks, said, “He had let loose his horse before he
died, just as the chief did in the picture-writing.”
That was his epitaph, for how death overtook him none of us could
conjecture; but I liked the manner of his going off the stage.
’Tis meet and fitting to set free the horse or pen before death overtakes
you, or before the gentle public turns its thumbs down and yells, “Away
with him.”
Charles Lamb, when some one asked him something of his works, answered
that they were to be found in the South Sea House, and that they numbered
forty volumes, for he had laboured many years there, making his bricks
with the least possible modicum of straw,—just like the rest of us.
Mine, if you ask me, are to be found but in the trails I left in all the
years I galloped both on the prairies and the pampas of America.
Hold it not up to me for egotism, O gentle reader, for I would have you
know that hardly any of the horses that I rode had shoes on them, and
thus the tracks are faint.
_Vale_.
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. BROUGHT FORWARD 1
II. LOS PINGOS 11
III. FIDELITY 30
IV. “UNO DEI MILLE” 40
V. WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND 51
VI. ELYSIUM 60
VII. HEREDITY 66
VIII. EL TANGO ARGENTINO 81
IX. IN A BACKWATER 97
X. HIPPOMORPHOUS 106
XI. MUDEJAR 120
XII. A MINOR PROPHET 130
XIII. EL MASGAD 146
XIV. FEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR 164
XV. BOPICUÁ 185
I
BROUGHT FORWARD
THE workshop in Parkhead was not inspiriting. From one week’s end to
another, all throughout the year, life was the same, almost without an
incident. In the long days of the Scotch summer the men walked cheerily
to work, carrying their dinner in a little tin. In the dark winter
mornings they tramped in the black fog, coughing and spitting, through
the black mud of Glasgow streets, each with a woollen comforter, looking
like a stocking, round his neck.
Outside the dreary quarter of the town, its rows of dingy, smoke-grimed
streets and the mean houses, the one outstanding feature was Parkhead
Forge, with its tall chimneys belching smoke into the air all day, and
flames by night. Its glowing furnaces, its giant hammers, its little
railway trucks in which men ran the blocks of white-hot iron which poured
in streams out of the furnaces, flamed like the mouth of hell.
Inside the workshop the dusty atmosphere made a stranger cough on
entering the door. The benches with the rows of aproned men all bending
at their work, not standing upright, with their bare, hairy chests
exposed, after the fashion of the Vulcans at the neighbouring forge, gave
a half-air of domesticity to the close, stuffy room.
A semi-sedentary life quickened their intellect; for where men work
together they are bound to talk about the topics of the day, especially
in Scotland, where every man is a born politician and a controversialist.
At meal-times, when they ate their “piece” and drank their tea that they
had carried with them in tin flasks, each one was certain to draw out a
newspaper from the pocket of his coat, and, after studying it from the
Births, Deaths, and Marriages, down to the editor’s address on the last
page, fall a-disputing upon politics. “Man, a gran’ speech by Bonar Law
aboot Home Rule. They Irish, set them up, what do they make siccan a din
aboot? Ca’ ye it Home Rule? I juist ca’ it Rome Rule. A miserable,
priest-ridden crew, the hale rick-ma-tick o’ them.”
The reader then would pause and, looking round the shop, wait for the
answer that he was sure would not be long in coming from amongst such a
thrawn lot of commentators. Usually one or other of his mates would fold
his paper up, or perhaps point with an oil-stained finger to an article,
and with the head-break in the voice, characteristic of the Scot about to
plunge into an argument, ejaculate: “Bonar Law, ou aye, I kent him when
he was leader of the South Side Parliament. He always was a dreary body,
sort o’ dreich like; no that I’m saying the man is pairfectly illiterate,
as some are on his side o’ the Hoose there in Westminister. I read his
speech—the body is na blate, sort o’ quick at figures, but does na take
the pains to verify. Verification is the soul of mathematics. Bonar
Law, eh! Did ye see how Maister Asquith trippit him handily in his
tabulated figures on the jute business under Free Trade, showing that all
he had advanced about protective tariffs and the drawback system was fair
redeeklous . . . as well as several errors in the total sum?”
Then others would cut in and words be bandied to and fro, impugning the
good faith and honour of every section of the House of Commons, who, by
the showing of their own speeches, were held to be dishonourable rogues
aiming at power and place, without a thought for anything but their own
ends.
This charitable view of men and of affairs did not prevent any of the
disputants from firing up if his own party was impugned; for in their
heart of hearts the general denunciation was but a covert from which to
attack the other side.
In such an ambient the war was sure to be discussed; some held the German
Emperor was mad—“a daft-like thing to challenge the whole world, ye see;
maist inconsiderate, and shows that the man’s intellect is no weel
balanced . . . philosophy is whiles sort of unsettlin’ . . . the felly’s
mad, ye ken.”
Others saw method in his madness, and alleged that it was envy, “naething
but sheer envy that had brought on this tramplin’ upon natural rights,
but for all that he may be thought to get his own again, with they
indemnities.”
Those who had studied economics “were of opinion that his reasoning was
wrong, built on false premises, for there can never be a royal road to
wealth. Labour, ye see, is the sole creative element of riches.” At
once a Tory would rejoin, “And brains. Man, what an awfu’ thing to leave
out brains. Think of the marvellous creations of the human genius.” The
first would answer with, “I saw ye coming, man. I’ll no deny that brains
have their due place in the economic state; but build me one of your
Zeppelins and stick it in the middle of George Square without a crew to
manage it, and how far will it fly? I do not say that brains did not
devise it; but, after all, labour had to carry out the first design.”
This was a subject that opened up enormous vistas for discussion, and for
a time kept them from talking of the war.
Jimmy and Geordie, hammering away in one end of the room, took little
part in the debate. Good workmen both of them, and friends, perhaps
because of the difference of their temperaments, for Jimmy was the type
of red-haired, blue-eyed, tall, lithe Scot, he of the _perfervidum
ingenium_, and Geordie was a thick-set, black-haired, dour and silent
man.
Both of them read the war news, and Jimmy, when he read, commented
loudly, bringing down his fist upon the paper, exclaiming, “Weel done,
Gordons!” or “That was a richt gude charge upon the trenches by the
Sutherlands.” Geordie would answer shortly, “Aye, no sae bad,” and go on
hammering.
One morning, after a reverse, Jimmy did not appear, and Geordie sat alone
working away as usual, but if possible more dourly and more silently.
Towards midday it began to be whispered in the shop that Jimmy had
enlisted, and men turned to Geordie to ask if he knew anything about it,
and the silent workman, brushing the sweat off his brow with his
coat-sleeve, rejoined: “Aye, ou aye, I went wi’ him yestreen to the
headquarters o’ the Camerons; he’s joined the kilties richt eneugh. Ye
mind he was a sergeant in South Africa.” Then he bent over to his work
and did not join in the general conversation that ensued.
Days passed, and weeks, and his fellow-workmen, in the way men will,
occasionally bantered Geordie, asking him if he was going to enlist, and
whether he did not think shame to let his friend go off alone to fight.
Geordie was silent under abuse and banter, as he had always been under
the injustices of life, and by degrees withdrew into himself, and when he
read his newspaper during the dinner-hour made no remark, but folded it
and put it quietly into the pocket of his coat.
Weeks passed, weeks of suspense, of flaring headlines in the Press, of
noise of regiments passing down the streets, of newsboys yelling
hypothetic victories, and of the tension of the nerves of men who know
their country’s destiny is hanging in the scales. Rumours of losses, of
defeats, of victories, of checks and of advances, of naval battles, with
hints of dreadful slaughter filled the air. Women in black were seen
about, pale and with eyelids swollen with weeping, and people scanned the
reports of killed and wounded with dry throats and hearts constricted as
if they had been wrapped in whipcord, only relaxing when after a second
look they had assured themselves the name they feared to see was absent
from the list.
Long strings of Clydesdale horses ridden by men in ragged clothes, who
sat them uneasily, as if they felt their situation keenly, perched up in
the public view, passed through the streets. The massive caulkers on
their shoes struck fire occasionally upon the stones, and the great
beasts, taught to rely on man as on a god from the time they gambolled in
the fields, went to their doom unconsciously, the only mitigation of
their fate. Regiments of young recruits, some in plain clothes and some
in hastily-made uniforms, marched with as martial an air as three weeks’
training gave them, to the stations to entrain. Pale clerks, the elbows
of their jackets shiny with the slavery of the desk, strode beside men
whose hands were bent and scarred with gripping on the handles of the
plough in February gales or wielding sledges at the forge.
All of them were young and resolute, and each was confident that he at
least would come back safe to tell the tale. Men stopped and waved their
hats, cheering their passage, and girls and women stood with flushed
cheeks and straining eyes as they passed on for the first stage that took
them towards the front. Boys ran beside them, hatless and barefooted,
shouting out words that they had caught up on the drill-ground to the
men, who whistled as they marched a slow and grinding tune that sounded
like a hymn.
Traffic was drawn up close to the kerbstone, and from the top of
tram-cars and from carts men cheered, bringing a flush of pride to many a
pale cheek in the ranks. They passed on; men resumed the business of
their lives, few understanding that the half-trained, pale-faced regiment
that had vanished through the great station gates had gone to make that
business possible and safe.
Then came a time of waiting for the news, of contradictory paragraphs in
newspapers, and then a telegram, the “enemy is giving ground on the left
wing”; and instantly a feeling of relief that lightened every heart, as
if its owner had been fighting and had stopped to wipe his brow before he
started to pursue the flying enemy.
The workmen in the brassfitters’ shop came to their work as usual on the
day of the good news, and at the dinner-hour read out the accounts of the
great battle, clustering upon each other’s shoulders in their eagerness.
At last one turned to scan the list of casualties. Cameron, Campbell,
M’Alister, Jardine, they read, as they ran down the list, checking the
names off with a match. The reader stopped, and looked towards the
corner where Geordie still sat working silently.
All eyes were turned towards him, for the rest seemed to divine even
before they heard the name. “Geordie man, Jimmy’s killed,” the reader
said, and as he spoke Geordie laid down his hammer, and, reaching for his
coat, said, “Jimmy’s killed, is he? Well, some one’s got to account for
it.”
Then, opening the door, he walked out dourly, as if already he felt the
knapsack on his back and the avenging rifle in his hand.
II
LOS PINGOS
THE amphitheatre of wood enclosed a bay that ran so far into the land it
seemed a lake. The Uruguay flowed past, but the bay was so land-locked
and so well defended by an island lying at its mouth that the illusion
was complete, and the bay appeared to be cut off from all the world.
Upon the river twice a day passed steamboats, which at night-time gave an
air as of a section of a town that floated past the wilderness. Streams
of electric light from every cabin lit up the yellow, turgid river, and
the notes of a band occasionally floated across the water as the vessel
passed. Sometimes a searchlight falling on a herd of cattle, standing as
is their custom after nightfall upon a little hill, made them stampede
into the darkness, dashing through brushwood or floundering through a
marsh, till they had placed themselves in safety from this new terror of
the night.
Above the bay the ruins of a great building stood. Built scarcely fifty
years ago, and now deserted, the ruins had taken on an air as of a
castle, and from the walls sprang plants, whilst in the deserted
courtyard a tree had grown, amongst whose branches oven-birds had built
their hanging nests of mud. Cypresses towered above the primeval
hard-wood, which grew all gnarled and horny-looking, and nearly all had
kept their Indian names, as ñandubay, chañar, tala and sarandi, molle,
and many another name as crabbed as the trunks which, twisted and
distorted, looked like the limbs of giants growing from the ground.
Orange trees had run wild and shot up all unpruned, and apple trees had
reverted back to crabs. The trunks of all the fruit-trees in the
deserted garden round the ruined factory were rubbed shiny by the cattle,
for all the fences had long been destroyed or fallen into decay.
A group of roofless workmen’s cottages gave an air of desolation to the
valley in which the factory and its dependencies had stood. They too had
been invaded by the powerful sub-tropical plant life, and creepers
covered with bunches of bright flowers climbed up their walls. A
sluggish stream ran through the valley and joined the Uruguay, making a
little natural harbour. In it basked cat-fish, and now and then from off
the banks a tortoise dropped into the water like a stone. Right in the
middle of what once had been the square grew a ceiba tree, covered with
lilac flowers, hanging in clusters like gigantic grapes. Here and there
stood some old ombús, their dark metallic leaves affording an
impenetrable shade. Their gnarled and twisted roots, left half-exposed
by the fierce rains, gave an unearthly, prehistoric look to them that
chimed in well with the deserted air of the whole place. It seemed that
man for once had been subdued, and that victorious nature had resumed her
sway over a region wherein he had endeavoured to intrude, and had been
worsted in the fight.
Nature had so resumed her sway that buildings, planted trees, and paths
long overgrown with grass, seemed to have been decayed for centuries,
although scarce twenty years had passed since they had been deserted and
had fallen into decay.
They seemed to show the power of the recuperative force of the primeval
forest, and to call attention to the fact that man had suffered a defeat.
Only the grass in the deserted square was still triumphant, and grew
short and green, like an oasis in the rough natural grasses that flowed
nearly up to it, in the clearings of the woods.
The triumph of the older forces of the world had been so final and
complete that on the ruins there had grown no moss, but plants and bushes
with great tufts of grass had sprung from them, leaving the stones still
fresh as when the houses were first built. Nature in that part of the
New World enters into no compact with mankind, as she does over here in
Europe to touch his work kindly and almost with a reverent hand, and
blend it into something half compounded of herself. There bread is bread
and wine is wine, with no half-tints to make one body of the whole. The
one remaining evidence of the aggression of mankind, which still refused
to bow the knee to the overwhelming genius of the place, was a round
bunch of eucalyptus trees that stood up stark and unblushing, the colour
of the trunks and leaves so harshly different from all around them that
they looked almost vulgar, if such an epithet can be properly applied to
anything but man. Under their exiguous shade were spread saddles and
bridles, and on the ground sat men smoking and talking, whilst their
staked-out horses fed, fastened to picket-pins by raw-hide ropes. So far
away from everything the place appeared that the group of men looked like
a band of pioneers upon some frontier, to which the ruins only gave an
air of melancholy, but did nothing to dispel the loneliness.
As they sat idly talking, trying to pass, or, as they would have said,
trying to make time, suddenly in the distance the whistle of an
approaching steamer brought the outside world into the little, lonely
paradise. Oddly enough it sounded, in the hot, early morning air,
already heavy with the scent of the mimosas in full bloom. Butterflies
flitted to and fro or soared above the scrub, and now and then a wild
mare whinnied from the thickets, breaking the silence of the lone valley
through which the yellow, little stream ran to the Uruguay.
Catching their horses and rolling up the ropes, the men, who had been
sitting underneath the trees, mounted, and following a little cattle
trail, rode to a high bluff looking down the stream.
Panting and puffing, as she belched out a column of black smoke, some
half a mile away, a tug towing two lighters strove with the yellow flood.
The horsemen stood like statues with their horses’ heads stretched out
above the water thirty feet below.
Although the feet of several of the horses were but an inch or two from
the sheer limit, the men sat, some of them with one leg on their horses’
necks; others lit cigarettes, and one, with his horse sideways to the
cliff, leaned sideways, so that one of his feet was in the air. He
pointed to the advancing tug with a brown finger, and exclaimed, “These
are the lighters with the horses that must have started yesterday from
Gualeguaychú, and ought to have been here last night.” We had indeed
been waiting all the night for them, sleeping round a fire under the
eucalyptus grove, and rising often in the night to smoke and talk, to see
our horses did not get entangled in their stake ropes, and to listen for
the whistle of the tug.
The tug came on but slowly, fighting her way against the rapid current,
with the lighters towing behind her at some distance, looking like
portions of a pier that had somehow or another got adrift.
From where we sat upon our horses we could see the surface of the Uruguay
for miles, with its innumerable flat islands buried in vegetation,
cutting the river into channels; for the islands, having been formed
originally by masses of water-weeds and drift-wood, were but a foot or
two above the water, and all were elongated, forming great ribbons in the
stream.
Upon the right bank stretched the green prairies of the State of
Entre-Rios, bounded on either side by the Uruguay and Paraná. Much
flatter than the land upon the Uruguayan bank, it still was not a sea of
level grass as is the State of Buenos Aires, but undulating, and dotted
here and there with white estancia houses, all buried in great groves of
peach trees and of figs. On the left bank on which we stood, and three
leagues off, we could just see Fray Bentos, its houses dazzlingly white,
buried in vegetation, and in the distance like a thousand little towns in
Southern Italy and Spain, or even in Morocco, for the tower of the church
might in the distance just as well have been a minaret.
The tug-boat slowed a little, and a canoe was slowly paddled out to pilot
her into the little haven made by the brook that flowed down through the
valley to the Uruguay.
Sticking out like a fishing-rod, over the stem of the canoe was a long
cane, to sound with if it was required.
The group of horsemen on the bluff rode slowly down towards the river’s
edge to watch the evolutions of the tug, and to hold back the horses when
they should be disembarked. By this time she had got so near that we
could see the horses’ heads looking out wildly from the sparred sides of
the great decked lighters, and hear the thunderous noise their feet made
tramping on the decks. Passing the bay, into which ran the stream, by
about three hundred yards, the tug cast off one of the lighters she was
towing, in a backwater. There it remained, the current slowly bearing it
backwards, turning round upon itself. In the wild landscape, with
ourselves upon our horses forming the only human element, the gigantic
lighter with its freight of horses looked like the ark, as set forth in
some old-fashioned book on Palestine. Slowly the tug crept in, the
Indian-looking pilot squatted in his canoe sounding assiduously with his
long cane. As the tug drew about six feet of water and the lighter not
much more than three, the problem was to get the lighter near enough to
the bank, so that when the hawser was cast off she would come in by her
own way. Twice did the tug ground, and with furious shoutings and with
all the crew staving on poles, was she got off again. At last the pilot
found a little deeper channel, and coming to about some fifty feet away,
lying a length or two above the spot where the stream entered the great
river, she paid her hawser out, and as the lighter drifted shorewards,
cast it off, and the great ark, with all its freight, grounded quite
gently on the little sandy beach. The Italian captain of the tug, a
Genoese, with his grey hair as curly as the wool on a sheep’s back,
wearing a pale pink shirt, neatly set off with yellow horseshoes, and a
blue gauze necktie tied in a flowing bow, pushed off his dirty little
boat, rowed by a negro sailor and a Neapolitan, who dipped their oars
into the water without regard to one another, either as to time or
stroke.
The captain stepped ashore, mopping his face with a yellow
pocket-handkerchief, and in the jargon between Spanish and Italian that
men of his sort all affect out in the River Plate, saluted us, and cursed
the river for its sandbanks and its turns, and then having left it as
accursed as the Styx or Periphlegethon, he doubly cursed the Custom
House, which, as he said, was all composed of thieves, the sons of
thieves, who would be certainly begetters of the same. Then he calmed
down a little, and drawing out a long Virginia cigar, took out the straw
with seriousness and great dexterity, and then allowed about a quarter of
an inch of it to smoulder in a match, lighted it, and sending out a cloud
of smoke, sat down upon the grass, and fell a-cursing, with all the
ingenuity of his profession and his race, the country, the hot weather,
and the saints.
This done, and having seen the current was slowly bearing down the other
lighter past the sandy beach, with a last hearty curse upon God’s mother
and her Son, whose birth he hinted not obscurely was of the nature of a
mystery, in which he placed no credence, got back into his boat, and went
back to his tug, leaving us all amazed, both at his fluency and faith.
When he had gone and grappled with the other lighter which was slowly
drifting down the stream, two or three men came forward in the lighter
that was already in the little river’s mouth, about a yard or so distant
from the edge, and calling to us to be ready, for the horses had not
eaten for sixteen hours at least, slowly let down the wooden
landing-flap. At first the horses craned their necks and looked out on
the grass, but did not venture to go down the wooden landing-stage; then
a big roan, stepping out gingerly and snorting as he went, adventured,
and when he stood upon the grass, neighed shrilly and then rolled. In a
long string the others followed, the clattering of their unshod feet upon
the wood sounding like distant thunder.
Byrne, the Porteño, stout and high-coloured, dressed in great thigh boots
and baggy breeches, a black silk handkerchief tied loosely round his
neck, a black felt hat upon his head, and a great silver watch-chain,
with a snaffle-bridle in the middle of it, contrasting oddly with his
broad pistol belt, with its old silver dollars for a fastening, came
ashore, carrying his saddle on his back. Then followed Doherty, whose
name, quite unpronounceable to men of Latin race, was softened in their
speech to Duarte, making a good Castilian patronymic of it. He too was a
Porteño, {22} although of Irish stock. Tall, dark, and dressed in
semi-native clothes, he yet, like Byrne, always spoke Spanish when no
foreigners were present, and in his English that softening of the
consonants and broadening of the vowels was discernible that makes the
speech of men such as himself have in it something, as it were,
caressing, strangely at variance with their character. Two or three
peons of the usual Gaucho type came after them, all carrying saddles, and
walking much as an alligator waddles on the sand, or as the Medes whom
Xenophon describes, mincing upon their toes, in order not to blunt the
rowels of their spurs.
Our men, Garcia the innkeeper of Fray Bentos, with Pablo Suarez, whose
negro blood and crispy hair gave him a look as of a Roman emperor of the
degenerate times, with Pancho Arrellano and Miguel Paralelo, the Gaucho
dandy, swaying upon his horse with his toes just touching his heavy
silver stirrups with a crown underneath them, Velez and El Pampita, an
Indian who had been captured young on the south Pampa, were mounted ready
to round the horses up.
They did not want much care, for they were eating ravenously, and all we
had to do was to drive them a few hundred yards away to let the others
land.
By this time the Italian captain in his tug had gently brought the other
lighter to the beach, and from its side another string of horses came out
on to the grass. They too all rolled, and, seeing the other band, by
degrees mixed with it, so that four hundred horses soon were feeding
ravenously on the sweet grass just at the little river’s mouth that lay
between its banks and the thick belt of wood.
Though it was early, still the sun was hot, and for an hour we held the
horses back, keeping them from the water till they had eaten well.
The Italian tugmaster, having produced a bottle of trade gin (the Anchor
brand), and having drank our health, solemnly wiped the neck of the
bottle with his grimy hand and passed it round to us. We also drank to
his good health and voyage to the port, that he pronounced as if it were
written “Bono Airi,” adding, as it was war-time, “Avanti Savoia” to the
toast. He grinned, and with a gesture of his thick dirty hand, adorned
with two or three coppery-looking rings, as it were, embedded in the
flesh, pronounced an all-embracing curse on the Tedeschi, and went aboard
the tug.
When he had made the lighters fast, he turned down stream, saluting us
with three shrill blasts upon the whistle, and left us and our horses
thousands of miles away from steam and smoke, blaspheming skippers, and
the noise and push of modern life.
Humming-birds poised themselves before the purple bunches of the ceiba
{25} flowers, their tongues thrust into the calyx and their iridescent
wings whirring so rapidly, you could see the motion, but not mark the
movement, and from the yellow balls of the mimosas came a scent, heady
and comforting.
Flocks of green parroquets flew shrieking over the clearing in which the
horses fed, to their great nests, in which ten or a dozen seemed to
harbour, and hung suspended from them by their claws, or crawled into the
holes. Now and then a few locusts, wafted by the breeze, passed by upon
their way to spread destruction in the plantations of young poplars and
of orange trees in the green islands in the stream.
An air of peace gave a strange interest to this little corner of a world
plunged into strife and woe. The herders nodded on their horses, who for
their part hung down their heads, and now and then shifted their quarters
so as to bring their heads into the shade. The innkeeper, Garcia, in his
town clothes, and perched upon a tall grey horse, to use his own words,
“sweated blood and water like our Lord” in the fierce glare of the
ascending sun. Suarez and Paralelo pushed the ends of the red silk
handkerchiefs they wore tied loosely round their necks, with two points
like the wings of a great butterfly hanging upon their shoulders, under
their hats, and smoked innumerable cigarettes, the frontiersman’s
specific against heat or cold. Of all the little company only the Pampa
Indian showed no sign of being incommoded by the heat. When horses
strayed he galloped up to turn them, now striking at the passing
butterflies with his heavy-handled whip, or, letting himself fall down
from the saddle almost to the ground, drew his brown finger on the dust
for a few yards, and with a wriggle like a snake got back into his saddle
with a yell.
The hours passed slowly, till at last the horses, having filled
themselves with grass, stopped eating and looked towards the river, so we
allowed them slowly to stream along towards a shallow inlet on the beach.
There they stood drinking greedily, up to their knees, until at last
three or four of the outermost began to swim.
Only their heads appeared above the water, and occasionally their backs
emerging just as a porpoise comes to the surface in a tideway, gave them
an amphibious air, that linked them somehow or another with the classics
in that unclassic land.
Long did they swim and play, and then, coming out into the shallow water,
drink again, stamping their feet and swishing their long tails, rise up
and strike at one another with their feet.
As I sat on my horse upon a little knoll, coiling my lazo, which had got
uncoiled by catching in a bush, I heard a voice in the soft, drawling
accents of the inhabitants of Corrientes, say, “Pucha, Pingos.” {27}
Turning, I saw the speaker, a Gaucho of about thirty years of age,
dressed all in black in the old style of thirty years ago. His silver
knife, two feet or more in length, stuck in his sash, stuck out on both
sides of his body like a lateen.
Where he had come from I had no idea, for he appeared to have risen from
the scrub behind me. “Yes,” he said, “Puta, Pingos,” giving the phrase
in the more classic, if more unregenerate style, “how well they look,
just like the garden in the plaza at Fray Bentos in the sun.”
All shades were there, with every variegation and variety of colour,
white, and fern noses, chestnuts with a stocking on one leg up to the
stifle joint, horses with a ring of white right round their throats, or
with a star as clear as if it had been painted on the hip, and
“tuvianos,” that is, brown, black, and white, a colour justly prized in
Uruguay.
Turning half round and offering me a cigarette, the Correntino spoke
again. “It is a paradise for all those pingos here in this rincón: {28}
grass, water, everything that they can want, shade, and shelter from the
wind and sun.”
So it appeared to me—the swiftly flowing river with its green islands;
the Pampas grass along the stream; the ruined buildings, half-buried in
the orange trees run wild; grass, shade, and water: “Pucha, no . . .
Puta, Pingos, where are they now?”
III
FIDELITY
MY tall host knocked the ashes from his pipe, and crossing one leg over
the other looked into the fire.
Outside, the wind howled in the trees, and the rain beat upon the
window-panes. The firelight flickered on the grate, falling upon the
polished furniture of the low-roofed, old-fashioned library, with its
high Georgian overmantel, where in a deep recess there stood a clock,
shaped like a cross, with eighteenth-century cupids carved in ivory
fluttering round the base, and Time with a long scythe standing upon one
side.
In the room hung the scent of an old country-house, compounded of so many
samples that it is difficult to enumerate them all. Beeswax and
potpourri of roses, damp, and the scent of foreign woods in the old
cabinets, tobacco and wood smoke, with the all-pervading smell of age,
were some of them. The result was not unpleasant, and seemed the
complement of the well-bound Georgian books standing demure upon their
shelves, the blackening family portraits, and the skins of red deer and
of roe scattered about the room.
The conversation languished, and we both sat listening to the storm that
seemed to fill the world with noises strange and unearthly, for the house
was far from railways, and the avenues that lead to it were long and
dark. The solitude and the wild night seemed to have recreated the old
world, long lost, and changed, but still remembered in that district just
where the Highlands and the Lowlands meet.
At such times and in such houses the country really seems country once
again, and not the gardened, game-keepered mixture of shooting ground and
of fat fields tilled by machinery to which men now and then resort for
sport, or to gather in their rents, with which the whole world is
familiar to-day.
My host seemed to be struggling with himself to tell me something, and as
I looked at him, tall, strong, and upright, his face all mottled by the
weather, his homespun coat, patched on the shoulders with buckskin that
once had been white, but now was fawn-coloured with wet and from the
chafing of his gun, I felt the parturition of his speech would probably
cost him a shrewd throe. So I said nothing, and he, after having filled
his pipe, ramming the tobacco down with an old silver Indian seal, made
as he told me in Kurachi, and brought home by a great-uncle fifty years
ago, slowly began to speak, not looking at me, but as it were delivering
his thoughts aloud, almost unconsciously, looking now and then at me as
if he felt, rather than knew, that I was there. As he spoke, the tall,
stuffed hen-harrier; the little Neapolitan shrine in tortoiseshell and
coral, set thick with saints; the flying dragons from Ceylon, spread out
like butterflies in a glazed case; the “poor’s-box” on the shelf above
the books with its four silver sides adorned with texts; the rows of blue
books, and of Scott’s Novels (the Roxburgh edition), together with the
scent exuding from the Kingwood cabinet; the sprays of white Scotch rose,
outlined against the window blinds; and the sporting prints and family
tree, all neatly framed in oak, created the impression of being in a
world remote, besquired and cut off from the century in which we live by
more than fifty years. Upon the rug before the fire the sleeping spaniel
whined uneasily, as if, though sleeping, it still scented game, and all
the time the storm roared in the trees and whistled down the passages of
the lone country house. One saw in fancy, deep in the recesses of the
woods, the roe stand sheltering, and the capercailzie sitting on the
branches of the firs, wet and dejected, like chickens on a roost, and
little birds sent fluttering along, battling for life against the storm.
Upon such nights, in districts such as that in which the gaunt old house
was situated, there is a feeling of compassion for the wild things in the
woods that, stealing over one, bridges the gulf between them and
ourselves in a mysterious way. Their lot and sufferings, joys, loves,
and the epitome of their brief lives, come home to us with something
irresistible, making us feel that our superiority is an unreal thing, and
that in essentials we are one.
My host went on: “Some time ago I walked up to the little moor that
overlooks the Clyde, from which you see ships far off lying at the Tail
of the Bank, the smoke of Greenock and Port Glasgow, the estuary itself,
though miles away, looking like a sheet of frosted silver or dark-grey
steel, according to the season, and in the distance the range of hills
called Argyle’s Bowling Green, with the deep gap that marks the entrance
to the Holy Loch. Autumn had just begun to tinge the trees, birches were
golden, and rowans red, the bents were brown and dry. A few bog
asphodels still showed amongst the heather, and bilberries, dark as black
currants, grew here and there amongst the carpet of green sphagnum and
the stag’s-head moss. The heather was all rusty brown, but still there
was, as it were, a recollection of the summer in the air. Just the kind
of day you feel inclined to sit down on the lee side of a dry-stone dyke,
and smoke and look at some familiar self-sown birch that marks the flight
of time, as you remember that it was but a year or two ago that it had
first shot up above the grass.
“I remember two or three plants of tall hemp-agrimony still had their
flower heads withered on the stalk, giving them a look of wearing wigs,
and clumps of ragwort still had a few bees buzzing about them, rather
faintly, with a belated air. I saw all this—not that I am a botanist,
for you know I can hardly tell the difference between the Cruciferæ and
the Umbelliferæ, but because when you live in the country some of the
common plants seem to obtrude themselves upon you, and you have got to
notice them in spite of you. So I walked on till I came to a wrecked
plantation of spruce and of Scotch fir. A hurricane had struck it,
turning it over almost in rows, as it was planted. The trees had
withered in most cases, and in the open spaces round their upturned roots
hundreds of rabbits burrowed, and had marked the adjoining field with
little paths, just like the lines outside a railway-station.
“I saw all this, not because I looked at it, for if you look with the
idea of seeing everything, commonly everything escapes you, but because
the lovely afternoon induced a feeling of well-being and contentment, and
everything seemed to fall into its right proportion, so that you saw
first the harmonious whole, and then the salient points most worth the
looking at.
“I walked along feeling exhilarated with the autumn air and the fresh
breeze that blew up from the Clyde. I remember thinking I had hardly
ever felt greater content, and as I walked it seemed impossible the world
could be so full of rank injustice, or that the lot of three-fourths of
its population could really be so hard. A pack of grouse flew past,
skimming above the heather, as a shoal of flying-fish skims just above
the waves. I heard their quacking cries as they alighted on some stooks
of oats, and noticed that the last bird to settle was an old hen, and
that, even when all were down, I still could see her head, looking out
warily above the yellow grain. Beyond the ruined wood there came the
barking of a shepherd’s dog, faint and subdued, and almost musical.
“I sat so long, smoking and looking at the view, that when I turned to go
the sun was sinking and our long, northern twilight almost setting in.
“You know it,” said my host, and I, who often had read by its light in
summer and the early autumn, nodded assent, wondering to myself what he
was going to tell me, and he went on.
“It has the property of making all things look a little ghostly,
deepening the shadows and altering their values, so that all that you see
seems to acquire an extra significance, not so much to the eye as to the
mind. Slowly I retraced my steps, walking under the high wall of rough
piled stones till it ends, at the copse of willows, on the north side of
the little moor to which I had seen the pack of grouse fly after it had
left the stooks. I crossed into it, and began to walk towards home,
knee-deep in bent grass and dwarf willows, with here and there a patch of
heather and a patch of bilberries. The softness of the ground so dulled
my footsteps that I appeared to walk as lightly as a roe upon the spongy
surface of the moor. As I passed through a slight depression in which
the grass grew rankly, I heard a wild cry coming, as it seemed, from just
beneath my feet. Then came a rustling in the grass, and a large,
dark-grey bird sprang out, repeating the wild cry, and ran off swiftly,
trailing a broken wing.
“It paused upon a little hillock fifty yards away, repeating its strange
note, and looking round as if it sought for something that it was certain
was at hand. High in the air the cry, wilder and shriller, was repeated,
and a great grey bird that I saw was a whaup slowly descended in
decreasing circles, and settled down beside its mate.
“They seemed to talk, and then the wounded bird set off at a swift run,
its fellow circling above its head and uttering its cry as if it guided
it. I watched them disappear, feeling as if an iron belt was drawn tight
round my heart, their cries growing fainter as the deepening shadows
slowly closed upon the moor.”
My host stopped, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and turning to me,
said:—
“I watched them go to what of course must have been certain death for one
of them, furious, with the feelings of a murderer towards the man whose
thoughtless folly had been the cause of so much misery. Curse him! I
watched them, impotent to help, for as you know the curlew is perhaps the
wildest of our native birds; and even had I caught the wounded one to set
its wing, it would have pined and died. One thing I could have done, had
I but had a gun and had the light been better, I might have shot them
both, and had I done so I would have buried them beside each other.
“That’s what I had upon my mind to tell you. I think the storm and the
wild noises of the struggling trees outside have brought it back to me,
although it happened years ago. Sometimes, when people talk about
fidelity, saying it is not to be found upon the earth, I smile, for I
have seen it with my own eyes, and manifest, out on that little moor.”
He filled his pipe, and sitting down in an old leather chair, much worn
and rather greasy, silently gazed into the fire.
I, too, was silent, thinking upon the tragedy; then feeling that
something was expected of me, looked up and murmured, “Yes.”
IV
“UNO DEI MILLE”
A VEIL of mist, the colour of a spider’s web, rose from the oily river.
It met the mist that wrapped the palm-trees and the unsubstantial-looking
houses painted in light blue and yellow ochre, as it descended from the
hills. Now and then, through the pall of damp, as a light air was wafted
up the river from the sea, the bright red earth upon the hills showed
like a stain of blood; canoes, paddled by men who stood up, balancing
themselves with a slight movement of the hips, slipped in and out of
sight, now crossing just before the steamer’s bows and then appearing
underneath her stern in a mysterious way. From the long line of
tin-roofed sheds a ceaseless stream of snuff-and-butter-coloured men
trotted continuously, carrying bags of coffee to an elevator, which shot
them headlong down the steamer’s hold. Their naked feet pattered upon
the warm, wet concrete of the dock side, as it were stealthily, with a
sound almost alarming, so like their footfall seemed to that of a wild
animal.
The flat-roofed city, buried in sheets of rain, that spouted from the
eaves of the low houses on the unwary passers-by, was stirred unwontedly.
Men, who as a general rule lounged at the corners of the streets,
pressing their shoulders up against the houses as if they thought that
only by their own self-sacrifice the walls were kept from falling, now
walked up and down, regardless of the rain.