of Cabrál stands up in cheap Carrara marble, looking as if he felt
ashamed of his discovery, a sea of wet umbrellas surged to and fro,
forging towards the Italian Consulate. Squat Genoese and swarthy
Neapolitans, with sinewy Piedmontese, and men from every province of the
peninsula, all had left their work. They all discoursed in the same tone
of voice in which no doubt their ancestors talked in the Forum, even when
Cicero was speaking, until the lictors forced them to keep silence, for
their own eloquence is that which in all ages has had most charm for
them. The reedy voices of the Brazilian coloured men sounded a mere
twittering compared to their full-bodied tones. “Viva l’Italia” pealed
out from thousands of strong throats as the crowd streamed from the
square and filled the narrow streets; fireworks that fizzled miserably
were shot off in the mist, the sticks falling upon the umbrellas of the
crowd. A shift of wind cleared the mist off the river for a moment,
leaving an Italian liner full in view. From all her spars floated the
red and white and green, and on her decks and in the rigging, on bridges
and on the rail, men, all with bundles in their hands, clustered like
ants, and cheered incessantly. An answering cheer rose from the crowd
ashore of “Long live the Reservists! Viva l’Italia,” as the vessel
slowly swung into the stream. From every house excited men rushed out
and flung themselves and their belongings into boats, and scrambled up
the vessel’s sides as she began to move. Brown hands were stretched down
to them as they climbed on board. From every doorstep in the town women
with handkerchiefs about their heads came out, and with the tears falling
from their great, black eyes and running down their olive cheeks, waved
and called out, “Addio Giuseppe; addio Gian Battista, abbasso gli
Tedeschi,” and then turned back into their homes to weep. On every side
Italians stood and shouted, and still, from railway station and from the
river-side, hundreds poured out and gazed at the departing steamer with
its teeming freight of men.
Italians from the coffee plantations of São Paulo, from the mines of Ouro
Preto, from Goyaz, and from the far interior, all young and sun-burnt,
the flower of those Italian workmen who have built the railways of
Brazil, and by whose work the strong foundations of the prosperity of the
Republic have been laid, were out, to turn their backs upon the land in
which, for the first time, most of them had eaten a full meal. Factories
stood idle, the coasting schooners all were left unmanned, and had the
coffee harvest not been gathered in, it would have rotted on the hills.
The Consulate was unapproachable, and round it throngs of men struggled
to enter, all demanding to get home. No rain could damp their spirits,
and those who, after waiting hours, came out with tickets, had a look in
their eyes as if they just had won the chief prize in the lottery.
Their friends surrounded them, and strained them to their hearts, the
water from the umbrellas of the crowd trickling in rivulets upon the
embracer and the embraced.
Mulatto policemen cleared the path for carriages to pass, and, as they
came, the gap filled up again as if by magic, till the next carriage
passed. Suddenly a tremor ran through the crowd, moving it with a shiver
like the body of a snake. All the umbrellas which had seemed to move by
their own will, covering the crowd and hiding it from view, were shut
down suddenly. A mist-dimmed sun shone out, watery, but potent, and in
an instant gaining strength, it dried the streets and made a hot steam
rise up from the crowd. Slouched hats were raised up on one side, and
pocket handkerchiefs wrapped up in paper were unfolded and knotted
loosely round men’s necks, giving them a look as of domestic bandits as
they broke out into a patriotic song, which ceased with a long drawn-out
“Viva,” as the strains of an approaching band were heard and the
footsteps of men marching through the streets in military array.
The coloured policemen rode their horses through the throng, and the
streets, which till then had seemed impassable, were suddenly left clear.
Jangling and crashing out the Garibaldian hymn, the band debouched into
the square, dressed in a uniform half-German, half-Brazilian, with
truncated pickel-hauben on their heads, in which were stuck a plume of
gaudy feathers, apparently at the discretion of the wearer, making them
look like something in a comic opera; a tall mulatto, playing on a drum
with all the seriousness that only one of his colour and his race is able
to impart to futile actions, swaggered along beside a jet-black negro
playing on the flute. All the executants wore brass-handled swords of a
kind never seen in Europe for a hundred years. Those who played the
trombone and the ophicleide blew till their thick lips swelled, and
seemed to cover up the mouthpieces. Still they blew on, the perspiration
rolling down their cheeks, and a black boy or two brought up the rear,
clashing the cymbals when it seemed good to them, quite irrespective of
the rest. The noise was terrifying, and had it not been for the
enthusiasm of the crowd, the motley band of coloured men, arrayed like
popinjays, would have been ridiculous; but the dense ranks of hot,
perspiring men, all in the flower of youth, and every one of whom had
given up his work to cross the ocean at his country’s call, had something
in them that turned laughter into tears. The sons of peasants, who had
left their homes, driven out from Apulean plains or Lombard rice-fields
by the pinch of poverty, they now were going back to shed their blood for
the land that had denied them bread in their own homes. Twice did the
band march round the town whilst the procession was getting ready for a
start, and each time that it passed before the Consulate, the Consul came
out on the steps, bare-headed, and saluted with the flag.
Dressed in white drill, tall, grey-haired, and with the washed-out look
of one who has spent many years in a hot country, the Consul evidently
had been a soldier in his youth. He stood and watched the people
critically, with the appraising look of the old officer, so like to that
a grazier puts on at a cattle market as he surveys the beasts. “Good
stuff,” he muttered to himself, and then drawing his hand across his
eyes, as if he felt where most of the “good stuff” would lie in a few
months, he went back to the house.
A cheer at the far corner of the square showed that the ranks were
formed. A policeman on a scraggy horse, with a great rusty sabre banging
at its side, rode slowly down the streets to clear the way, and once
again the parti-coloured band passed by, playing the Garibaldian hymn.
Rank upon rank of men tramped after it, their friends running beside them
for a last embrace, and women rushing up with children for a farewell
kiss. Their merry faces set with determination, and their shoulders well
thrown back, three or four hundred men briskly stepped along, trying to
imitate the way the Bersaglieri march in Italy. A shout went up of “Long
live the Reservists,” as a contingent, drawn from every class of the
Italian colony, passed along the street. Dock-labourers and pale-faced
clerks in well-cut clothes and unsubstantial boots walked side by side.
Men burnt the colour of a brick by working at the harvest rubbed
shoulders with Sicilian emigrants landed a month or two ago, but who now
were going off to fight, as poor as when they left their native land, and
dressed in the same clothes. Neapolitans, gesticulating as they marched,
and putting out their tongues at the Brazilian negroes, chattered and
joked. To them life was a farce, no matter that the setting of the stage
on which they moved was narrow, the fare hard, and the remuneration
small. If things were adverse they still laughed on, and if the world
was kind they jeered at it and at themselves, disarming both the slings
of fortune and her more dangerous smiles with a grimace.
As they marched on, they now and then sketched out in pantomime the fate
of any German who might fall into their hands, so vividly that shouts of
laughter greeted them, which they acknowledged by putting out their
tongues. Square-shouldered Liguresi succeeded them, with Lombards,
Sicilians, and men of the strange negroid-looking race from the
Basilicata, almost as dark-skinned as the Brazilian loungers at the
corners of the streets.
They all passed on, laughing, and quite oblivious of what was in store
for most of them—laughing and smoking, and, for the first time in their
lives, the centre of a show. After them came another band; but this time
of Italians, well-dressed, and playing on well-cared-for instruments.
Behind them walked a little group of men, on whose appearance a hush fell
on the crowd. Two of them wore uniforms, and between them, supported by
silk handkerchiefs wrapped round his arms, there walked a man who was
welcomed with a scream of joy. Frail, and with trembling footsteps,
dressed in a faded old red shirt and knotted handkerchief, his parchment
cheeks lit up with a faint flush as the Veteran of Marsala passed like a
phantom of a glorious past. With him appeared to march the rest of his
companions who set sail from Genoa to call into existence that Italy for
which the young men all around him were prepared to sacrifice their
lives.
To the excited crowd he typified all that their fathers had endured to
drive the stranger from their land. The two Cairoli, Nino Bixio, and the
heroic figure, wrapped in his poncho, who rides in glory on the
Janiculum, visible from every point of Rome, seemed to march by the old
man’s side in the imagination of the crowd. Women rushed forward,
carrying flowers, and strewed them on the scant grey locks of the old
soldier; and children danced in front of him, like little Bacchanals.
All hats were off as the old man was borne along, a phantom of himself, a
symbol of a heroic past, and still a beacon, flickering but alight, to
show the way towards the goal which in his youth had seemed impossible to
reach.
Slowly the procession rolled along, surging against the houses as an
incoming tide swirls up a river, till it reached the Consulate. It
halted, and the old Garibaldian, drawing himself up, saluted the Italian
colours. The Consul, bare-headed and with tears running down his cheeks,
stood for a moment, the centre of all eyes, and then, advancing, tore the
flag from off its staff, and, after kissing it, wrapped it round the
frail shoulders of the veteran.
V
WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND
A NORTH-EAST haar had hung the city with a pall of grey. It gave an air
of hardness to the stone-built houses, blending them with the stone-paved
streets, till you could scarce see where the houses ended and the street
began. A thin grey dust hung in the air. It coloured everything, and
people’s faces all looked pinched with the first touch of autumn cold.
The wind, boisterous and gusty, whisked the soot-grimed city leaves about
in the high suburb at the foot of a long range of hills, making one think
it would be easy to have done with life on such an uncongenial day.
Tramways were packed with people of the working class, all of them of the
alert, quick-witted type only to be seen in the great city on the Clyde,
in all our Empire, and comparable alone to the dwellers in Chicago for
dry vivacity.
By the air they wore of chastened pleasure, all those who knew them saw
that they were intent upon a funeral. To serious-minded men such as are
they, for all their quickness, nothing is so soul-filling, for it is of
the nature of a fact that no one can deny. A wedding has its
possibilities, for it may lead to children, or divorce, but funerals are
in another category. At them the Scottish people is at its best, for
never more than then does the deep underlying tenderness peep through the
hardness of the rind. On foot and in the tramways, but most especially
on foot, converged long lines of men and women, though fewer women, for
the national prejudice that in years gone by thought it not decent for a
wife to follow to the grave her husband’s coffin, still holds a little in
the north. Yet there was something in the crowd that showed it was to
attend no common funeral, that they were “stepping west.” No one wore
black, except a minister or two, who looked a little like the belated
rook you sometimes see amongst a flock of seagulls, in that vast ocean of
grey tweed.
They tramped along, the whistling north-east wind pinching their
features, making their eyes run, and as they went, almost unconsciously
they fell into procession, for beyond the tramway line, a country lane
that had not quite put on the graces of a street, though straggling
houses were dotted here and there along it, received the crowd and
marshalled it, as it were mechanically, without volition of its own.
Kept in between the walls, and blocked in front by the hearse and long
procession of the mourning-coaches, the people slowly surged along. The
greater portion of the crowd were townsmen, but there were miners washed
and in their Sunday best. Their faces showed the blue marks of healed-up
scars into which coal dust or gunpowder had become tattooed, scars gained
in the battle of their lives down in the pits, remembrances of falls of
rock or of occasions when the mine had “fired upon them.”
Many had known Keir Hardie in his youth, had “wrocht wi’ him out-by,” at
Blantyre, at Hamilton, in Ayrshire, and all of them had heard him speak a
hundred times. Even to those who had not heard him, his name was as a
household word. Miners predominated, but men of every trade were there.
Many were members of that black-coated proletariat, whose narrow
circumstances and daily struggle for appearances make their life harder
to them than is the life of any working man before he has had to dye his
hair. Women tramped, too, for the dead leader had been a champion of
their sex. They all respected him, loving him with that
half-contemptuous gratitude that women often show to men who make the
“woman question” the object of their lives.
After the Scottish fashion at a funeral, greetings were freely passed,
and Reid, who hadna’ seen his friend Mackinder since the time of the
Mid-Lanark fight, greeted him with “Ye mind when first Keir Hardie was
puttin’ up for Parliament,” and wrung his hand, hardened in the mine,
with one as hardened, and instantly began to recall elections of the
past.
“Ye mind yon Wishaw meeting?”
“Aye, ou aye; ye mean when a’ they Irish wouldna’ hear John Ferguson.
Man, he almost grat after the meeting aboot it.”
“Aye, but they gied Hardie himself a maist respectful hearing . . . aye,
ou aye.”
Others remembered him a boy, and others in his home at Cumnock, but all
spoke of him with affection, holding him as something of their own, apart
from other politicians, almost apart from men.
Old comrades who had been with him either at this election or that
meeting, had helped or had intended to have helped at the crises of his
life, fought their old battles over, as they tramped along, all shivering
in the wind.
The procession reached a long dip in the road, and the head of it, full
half a mile away, could be seen gathered round the hearse, outside the
chapel of the crematorium, whose ominous tall chimney, through which the
ashes, and perchance the souls of thousands have escaped towards some
empyrean or another, towered up starkly. At last all had arrived, and
the small open space was crowded, the hearse and carriages appearing
stuck amongst the people, like raisins in a cake, so thick they pressed
upon them. The chapel, differing from the ordinary chapel of the faiths
as much as does a motor driver from a cabman, had an air as of modernity
about it, which contrasted strangely with the ordinary looking crowd, the
adjacent hills, the decent mourning coaches and the black-coated
undertakers who bore the coffin up the steps. Outside, the wind whistled
and swayed the soot-stained trees about; but inside the chapel the heat
was stifling.
When all was duly done, and long exordiums passed upon the man who in his
life had been the target for the abuse of press and pulpit, the coffin
slid away to its appointed place. One thought one heard the roaring of
the flames, and somehow missed the familiar lowering of the body . . .
earth to earth . . . to which the centuries of use and wont have made us
all familiar, though dust to dust in this case was the more appropriate.
In either case, the book is closed for ever, and the familiar face is
seen no more.
So, standing just outside the chapel in the cold, waiting till all the
usual greetings had been exchanged, I fell a-musing on the man whom I had
known so well. I saw him as he was thirty years ago, outlined against a
bing or standing in a quarry in some mining village, and heard his once
familiar address of “Men.” He used no other in those days, to the
immense disgust of legislators and other worthy but unimaginative men
whom he might chance to meet. About him seemed to stand a shadowy band,
most of whom now are dead or lost to view, or have gone under in the
fight.
John Ferguson was there, the old-time Irish leader, the friend of Davitt
and of Butt. Tall and erect he stood, dressed in his long frock-coat,
his roll of papers in one hand, and with the other stuck into his breast,
with all the air of being the last Roman left alive. Tom Mann, with his
black hair, his flashing eyes, and his tumultuous speech peppered with
expletives. Beside him, Sandy Haddow, of Parkhead, massive and Doric in
his speech, with a grey woollen comforter rolled round his neck, and
hands like panels of a door. Champion, pale, slight, and interesting,
still the artillery officer, in spite of Socialism. John Burns; and
Small, the miners’ agent, with his close brown beard and taste for
literature. Smillie stood near, he of the seven elections, and then
check-weigher at a pit, either at Cadzow or Larkhall. There, too, was
silver-tongued Shaw Maxwell and Chisholm Robertson, looking out darkly on
the world through tinted spectacles; with him Bruce Glasier, girt with a
red sash and with an aureole of fair curly hair around his head, half
poet and half revolutionary.
They were all young and ardent, and as I mused upon them and their fate,
and upon those of them who have gone down into the oblivion that waits
for those who live before their time, I shivered in the wind.
Had he, too, lived in vain, he whose scant ashes were no doubt by this
time all collected in an urn, and did they really represent all that
remained of him?
Standing amongst the band of shadowy comrades I had known, I saw him,
simple and yet with something of the prophet in his air, and something of
the seer. Effective and yet ineffectual, something there was about him
that attracted little children to him, and I should think lost dogs. He
made mistakes, but then those who make no mistakes seldom make anything.
His life was one long battle, so it seemed to me that it was fitting that
at his funeral the north-east wind should howl amongst the trees, tossing
and twisting them as he himself was twisted and storm-tossed in his
tempestuous passage through the world.
As the crowd moved away, and in the hearse and mourning-coaches the
spavined horses limped slowly down the road, a gleam of sunshine, such as
had shone too little in his life, lighted up everything.
The swaying trees and dark, grey houses of the ugly suburb of the town
were all transfigured for a moment. The chapel door was closed, and from
the chimney of the crematorium a faint blue smoke was issuing, which, by
degrees, faded into the atmosphere, just as the soul, for all I know, may
melt into the air.
When the last stragglers had gone, and bits of paper scurried uneasily
along before the wind, the world seemed empty, with nothing friendly in
it, but the shoulder of Ben Lomond peeping out shyly over the Kilpatrick
Hills.
VI
ELYSIUM
THE Triad came into my life as I walked underneath the arch by which the
sentinels sit in Olympian state upon their rather long-legged chargers,
receiving, as is their due, the silent homage of the passing
nurserymaids. The soldier in the middle was straight back from the front.
The mud of Flanders clung to his boots and clothes. It was “deeched”
into his skin, and round his eyes had left a stain so dark, it looked as
if he had been painted for a theatrical make-up. Upon his puttees it had
dried so thickly that you could scarcely see the folds. He bore upon his
back his knapsack, carried his rifle in his hand all done up in a case,
which gave it, as it seemed to me, a look of hidden power, making it more
terrible to think of than if it had shone brightly in the sun. His
water-bottle and a pack of some kind hung at his sides, and as he walked
kept time to every step. Under his elbow protruded the shaft of
something, perhaps an entrenching tool of some sort, or perhaps some
weapon strange to civilians accustomed to the use of stick or umbrella as
their only arm. In himself he seemed a walking arsenal, carrying his
weapons and his baggage on his back, after the fashion of a Roman
legionary. The man himself, before the hand of discipline had fashioned
him to number something or another, must have looked fresh and youthful,
not very different from a thousand others that in time of peace one sees
in early morning going to fulfil one of those avocations without which no
State can possibly endure, and yet are practically unknown to those who
live in the vast stucco hives either of Belgravia or Mayfair.
He may have been some five-and-twenty, and was a Londoner or a man from
the home counties lying round about. His sunburnt face was yet not
sunburnt as is the face of one accustomed to the weather all his life.
Recent exposure had made his skin all feverish, and his blue eyes were
fixed, as often are the eyes of sailors or frontiersmen after a long
watch.
The girls on either side of him clung to his arm with pride, and with an
air of evident affection, that left them quite unconscious of everything
but having got the beloved object of their care safe home again. Upon
the right side, holding fast to the warrior’s arm, and now and then
nestling close to his side, walked his sweetheart, a dark-haired girl,
dressed in the miserable cheap finery our poorer countrywomen wear,
instead of well-made plainer clothes that certainly would cost them less
and set them off a hundredfold the more. Now and again she pointed out
some feature of the town with pride, as when they climbed the steps under
the column on which stands the statue of the Duke of York. The soldier,
without looking, answered, “I know, Ethel, Dook of York,” and hitched his
pack a little higher on his back.
His sister, hanging on his left arm, never said anything, but walked
along as in a dream; and he, knowing that she was there and understood,
spoke little to her, except to murmur “Good old Gladys” now and then, and
press her to his side. As they passed by the stunted monument, on which
the crowd of little figures standing round a sledge commemorates the
Franklin Expedition, in a chill Arctic way, the girl upon the right
jerked her head towards it and said, “That’s Sir John Franklin, George,
he as laid down his life to find the North-West Passage, one of our
’eroes, you remember ’im.” To which he answered, “Oh yes, Frenklin”;
then looking over at the statue of Commander Scott, added, “’ee done his
bit too,” with an appreciative air. They gazed upon the Athenæum and the
other clubs with that air of detachment that all Englishmen affect when
they behold a building or a monument—taking it, as it seems to me, as
something they have no concern with, just as if it stood in Petrograd or
in Johannesburg.
The homing triad passed into Pall Mall, oblivious of the world, so lost
in happiness that they appeared the only living people in the street.
The sister, who had said so little, when she saw her brother shift his
knapsack, asked him to let her carry it. He smiled, and knowing what she
felt, handed his rifle to her, remarking, “’Old it the right side up, old
girl, or else it will go off.”
And so they took their way through the enchanted streets, not feeling
either the penetrating wind or the fine rain, for these are but material
things, and they were wrapped apart from the whole world. Officers of
all ranks passed by them, some young and smart, and others paunchy and
middle-aged; but they were non-existent to the soldier, who saw nothing
but the girls. Most of the officers looked straight before them, with an
indulgent air; but two young men with red bands round their caps were
scandalised, and muttering something as to the discipline of the New
Army, drew themselves up stiffly and strutted off, like angry game-cocks
when they eye each other in the ring.
The triad passed the Rag, and on the steps stood two old colonels, their
faces burnt the colour of a brick, and their moustaches stiff as the
bristles of a brush. They eyed the passing little show, and looking at
each other broke into a smile. They knew that they would never walk
oblivious of mankind, linked to a woman’s arm; but perhaps memories of
what they had done stirred in their hearts, for both of them at the same
moment ejaculated a modulated “Ha!” of sympathy. All this time I had
walked behind the three young people, unconsciously, as I was going the
same road, catching half phrases now and then, which I was half ashamed
to hear.
They reached the corner of St. James’s Square, and our paths separated.
Mine took me to the London Library to change a book, and theirs led
straight to Elysium, for five long days.
VII
HEREDITY
RIGHT along the frontier between Uruguay and Rio Grande, the southern
province of Brazil, the Spanish and the Portuguese sit face to face, as
they have sat for ages, looking at, but never understanding, one another,
both in the Old and the New World.
In Tuy and Valenza, Monzon and Salvatierra, at Poncho Verde and Don
Pedrito, Rivera and Santa Ana do Libramento, and far away above Cruz
Alta, where the two clumps of wood that mark old camps of the two people
are called O Matto Castelhano and O Matto Portuguez, the rivalry of
centuries is either actual or at least commemorated on the map.