Cross. So bright the stars shone out that one could see almost a mile
away; but yet all the perspective of the plains and woods was altered.
Hillocks were sometimes undistinguishable, at other times loomed up like
houses. Woods seemed to sway and heave, and by the sides of streams
bunches of Pampa grass stood stark as sentinels, their feathery tufts
looking like plumes upon an Indian’s lance.
The horses shook their bridles with a clear, ringing sound as they
stepped double, and their riders, swaying lightly in their seats, seemed
to form part and parcel of the animals they rode.
Now and then little owls flew noiselessly beside us, circling above our
heads, and then dropped noiselessly upon a bush. Eustaquio Medina, who
knew the district as a sailor knows the seas where he was born, rode in
the front of us. As his horse shied at a shadow on the grass or at the
bones of some dead animal, he swung his whip round ceaselessly, until the
moonlight playing on the silver-mounted stock seemed to transform it to
an aureole that flickered about his head. Now and then somebody
dismounted to tighten up his girth, his horse twisting and turning round
uneasily the while, and, when he raised his foot towards the stirrup,
starting off with a bound.
Time seemed to disappear and space be swallowed in the intoxicating
gallop, so that when Eustaquio Medina paused for an instant to strike the
crossing of a stream, we felt annoyed with him, although no hound that
follows a hot scent could have gone truer on his line.
Dogs barking close at hand warned us our ride was almost over, and as we
galloped up a rise Eustaquio Medina pulled up and turned to us.
“There is the house,” he said, “just at the bottom of the hollow, only
five squares away,” and as we saw the flicker of the lights, he struck
his palm upon his mouth after the Indian fashion, and raised a piercing
cry. Easing his hand, he drove his spurs into his horse, who started
with a bound into full speed, and as he galloped down the hill we
followed him, all yelling furiously.
Just at the hitching-post we drew up with a jerk, our horses snorting as
they edged off sideways from the black shadow that it cast upon the
ground. Horses stood about everywhere, some tied and others hobbled, and
from the house there came the strains of an accordion and the tinkling of
guitars.
Asking permission to dismount, we hailed the owner of the house, a tall,
old Gaucho, Frutos Barragán, as he stood waiting by the door, holding a
maté in his hand. He bade us welcome, telling us to tie our horses up,
not too far out of sight, for, as he said, “It is not good to give
facilities to rogues, if they should chance to be about.”
In the low, straw-thatched rancho, with its eaves blackened by the smoke,
three or four iron bowls, filled with mare’s fat, and with a cotton wick
that needed constant trimming, stuck upon iron cattle-brands, were
burning fitfully.
They cast deep shadows in the corners of the room, and when they
flickered up occasionally the light fell on the dark and sun-tanned faces
of the tall, wiry Gauchos and the light cotton dresses of the women as
they sat with their chairs tilted up against the wall. Some thick-set
Basques, an Englishman or two in riding breeches, and one or two Italians
made up the company. The floor was earth, stamped hard till it shone
like cement, and as the Gauchos walked upon it, their heavy spurs clinked
with a noise like fetters as they trailed them on the ground.
An old, blind Paraguayan played on the guitar, and a huge negro
accompanied him on an accordion. Their united efforts produced a music
which certainly was vigorous enough, and now and then, one or the other
of them broke into a song, high-pitched and melancholy, which, if you
listened to it long enough, forced you to try to imitate its wailing
melody and its strange intervals.
Fumes of tobacco and rum hung in the air, and of a strong and heady wine
from Catalonia, much favoured by the ladies, which they drank from a
tumbler, passing it to one another, after the fashion of a grace-cup at a
City dinner, with great gravity. At last the singing ceased, and the
orchestra struck up a Tango, slow, marked, and rhythmical.
Men rose, and, taking off their spurs, walked gravely to the corner of
the room where sat the women huddled together as if they sought
protection from each other, and with a compliment led them out upon the
floor. The flowing poncho and the loose chiripá, which served as
trousers, swung about just as the tartans of a Highlander swing as he
dances, giving an air of ease to all the movements of the Gauchos as they
revolved, their partners’ heads peeping above their shoulders, and their
hips moving to and fro.
At times they parted, and set to one another gravely, and then the man,
advancing, clasped his partner round the waist and seemed to push her
backwards, with her eyes half-closed and an expression of beatitude.
Gravity was the keynote of the scene, and though the movements of the
dance were as significant as it was possible for the dancers to achieve,
the effect was graceful, and the soft, gliding motion and the waving of
the parti-coloured clothes, wild and original, in the dim, flickering
light.
Rum flowed during the intervals. The dancers wiped the perspiration from
their brows, the men with the silk handkerchiefs they wore about their
necks, the women with their sleeves. Tangos, cielitos, and pericones
succeeded one another, and still the atmosphere grew thicker, and the
lights seemed to flicker through a haze, as the dust rose from the mud
floor. Still the old Paraguayan and the negro kept on playing with the
sweat running down their faces, smoking and drinking rum in their brief
intervals of rest, and when the music ceased for a moment, the wild
neighing of a horse tied in the moonlight to a post, sounded as if he
called his master to come out and gallop home again.
The night wore on, and still the negro and the Paraguayan stuck at their
instruments. Skirts swung and ponchos waved, whilst maté circulated
amongst the older men as they stood grouped about the door.
Then came a lull, and as men whispered in their partners’ ears, telling
them, after the fashion of the Gauchos, that they were lovely, their hair
like jet, their eyes bright as “las tres Marias,” and all the compliments
which in their case were stereotyped and handed down for generations,
loud voices rose, and in an instant two Gauchos bounded out upon the
floor.
Long silver-handled knives were in their hands, their ponchos wrapped
round their left arms served them as bucklers, and as they crouched, like
cats about to spring, they poured out blasphemies.
“Stop this!” cried Frutos Barragán; but even as he spoke, a knife-thrust
planted in the stomach stretched one upon the floor. Blood gushed out
from his mouth, his belly fell like a pricked bladder, and a dark stream
of blood trickled upon the ground as he lay writhing in his death agony.
The iron bowls were overturned, and in the dark girls screamed and the
men crowded to the door. When they emerged into the moonlight, leaving
the dying man upon the floor, the murderer was gone; and as they looked
at one another there came a voice shouting out, “Adios, Barragán. Thus
does Vicente Castro pay his debts when a man tries to steal his girl,”
and the faint footfalls of an unshod horse galloping far out upon the
plain.
I started, and the waiter standing by my side said, “Eighty centimes”;
and down the boulevard echoed the harsh cry, “_La Patrie_, achetez _La
Patrie_,” and the rolling of the cabs.
IX
IN A BACKWATER
“THIS ’ere war, now,” said the farmer, in the slow voice that tells of
life passed amongst comfortable surroundings into which haste has never
once intruded, “is a ’orrid business.”
He leaned upon a half-opened gate, keeping it swaying to and fro a little
with his foot. His waistcoat was unbuttoned, showing his greasy braces
and his checked blue shirt. His box-cloth gaiters, falling low down upon
his high-lows, left a gap between them and his baggy riding-breeches,
just below the knee. His flat-topped bowler hat was pushed back over the
fringe of straggling grey hair upon his neck. His face was burned a
brick-dust colour with the August sun, and now and then he mopped his
forehead with a red handkerchief.
His little holding, an oasis in the waste of modern scientific farming,
was run in the old-fashioned way, often to be seen in the home counties,
as if old methods linger longest where they are least expected, just as a
hunted fox sometimes takes refuge in a rectory.
His ideas seemed to have become unsettled with constant reading of
newspapers filled with accounts of horrors, and his speech, not fluent at
the best of times, was slower and more halting than his wont.
He told how he had just lost his wife, and felt more than a little put
about to get his dairy work done properly without her help.
“When a man’s lost his wife it leaves him, somehow, as if he were like a
’orse hitched on one side of the wagon-pole, a-pullin’ by hisself. Now
this ’ere war, comin’ as it does right on the top of my ’ome loss, sets
me a-thinkin’, especially when I’m alone in the ’ouse of night.”
The park-like English landscape, with its hedgerow trees and its lush
fields, that does not look like as if it really were the country, but
seems a series of pleasure-grounds cut off into convenient squares, was
at its time of greatest beauty and its greatest artificiality. Cows
swollen with grass till they looked like balloons lay in the fields and
chewed the cud. Geese cackled as they strayed upon the common, just as
they appear to cackle in a thousand water-colours. The hum of bees was
in the limes. Dragon-flies hawked swiftly over the oily waters of the
two slow-flowing rivers that made the farm almost an island in a suburban
Mesopotamia, scarce twenty miles away from Charing Cross. An air of
peace and of contentment, of long well-being and security, was evident in
everything. Trees flourished, though stag-headed, under which the
Roundhead troopers may have camped, or at the least, veterans from
Marlborough’s wars might have sat underneath their shade, and smoked as
they retold their fights.
A one-armed signboard, weathered, and with the lettering almost
illegible, pointed out the bridle-path to Ditchley, now little used,
except by lovers on a Sunday afternoon, but where the feet of horses for
generations in the past had trampled it, still showing clearly as it
wound through the fields.
In the standing corn the horses yoked to the reaping machine stood
resting, now and again shaking the tassels on their little netted
ear-covers. They, too, came of a breed long used to peace and plenty,
good food and treatment, and short hours of work. The kindly landscape
and the settled life of centuries had formed the kind of man of which the
farmer was a prototype,—slow-footed and slow-tongued, and with his mind
as bowed as were his shoulders with hard work, by the continual pressure
of the hierarchy of wealth and station, that had left him as much
adscript to them as any of his ancestors had been bound to their glebes.
He held the _Daily Mail_, his gospel and his _vade mecum_, crumpled in
his hand as if he feared to open it again to read more details of the
war. A simple soul, most likely just as oppressive to his labourers as
his superiors had always showed themselves to him, he could not bear to
read of violence, as all the tyranny that he had bent under had been
imposed so subtly that he could never see more than the shadow of the
hand that had oppressed him.
It pained him, above all things, to read about the wounded and dead
horses lying in the corn, especially as he had “’eard the ’arvest over
there in Belgium was going to be good.” The whirr of the machines
reaping the wheatfield sounded like the hum of some gigantic insect, and
as the binder ranged the sheaves in rows it seemed as if the golden age
had come upon the earth again, bringing with it peace and plenty, with
perhaps slightly stouter nymphs than those who once followed the
sickle-men in Arcady.
A man sat fishing in a punt just where the river broadened into a
backwater edged with willow trees. At times he threw out ground-bait,
and at times raised a stone bottle to his lips, keeping one eye the while
watchfully turned upon his float. School children strayed along the
road, as rosy and as flaxen-haired as those that Gregory the Great
thought fitting to be angels, though they had never been baptized.
Now and again the farmer stepped into his field to watch the harvesting,
and cast an eye of pride and of affection on his horses, and then, coming
back to the gate, he drew the paper from his pocket and read its columns,
much in the way an Arab reads a letter, murmuring the words aloud until
their meaning penetrated to his brain.
Chewing a straw, and slowly rubbing off the grains of an ear of wheat
into his hand, he gazed over his fields as if he feared to see in them
some of the horrors that he read. Again he muttered, with a puzzled air,
“’Orrible! ’undreds of men and ’orses lying in the corn. It seems a sad
thing to believe, doesn’t it now?” he said; and as he spoke soldiers on
motorcycles hurtled down the road, leaving a trail of dust that perhaps
looked like smoke to him after his reading in the _Daily Mail_.
“They tell me,” he remarked, after a vigorous application of his blue
handkerchief to his streaming face, “that these ’ere motorcycles ’ave a
gun fastened to them, over there in Belgium, where they are a-goin’ on at
it in such a way. The paper says, ‘Ranks upon ranks of ’em is just mowed
down like wheat.’ . . . ’Orrid, I call it, if it’s true, for now and
then I think those chaps only puts that kind of thing into their papers
to ’ave a sale for them.” He looked about him as if, like Pilate, he was
looking for an elusive truth not to be found on earth, and then walked
down the road till he came to the backwater where the man was fishing in
his punt. They looked at one another over a yard or two of muddy water,
and asked for news about the war, in the way that people do from others
who they must know are quite as ignorant as they are themselves. The
fisherman “’ad given up readin’ the war noos; it’s all a pack of lies,”
and pointing to the water, said in a cautious voice, “Some people says
they ’ears. I ain’t so sure about it; but, anyhow, it’s always best to
be on the safe side.” Then he addressed himself once more to the
business of the day, and in the contemplation of his float no doubt
became as much absorbed into the universal principle of nature as is an
Indian sitting continually with his eyes turned on his diaphragm.
Men passing down the road, each with a paper in his hand, looked up and
threw the farmer scraps of news, uncensored and spiced high with details
which had never happened, so that in after years their children will most
likely treasure as facts, which they have received from long-lost
parents, the wildest fairy tales.
The slanting sun and lengthening shadows brought the farmer no relief of
mind; and still men, coming home from work on shaky bicycles, plied him
with horrors as they passed by the gate, their knee-joints stiff with the
labours of the day, seeming in want of oil. A thin, white mist began to
creep along the backwater. Unmooring his punt, the fisherman came
unwillingly to shore, and as he threw the fragments of his lunch into the
water and gathered up his tackle, looked back upon the scene of his
unfruitful labours with an air as of a man who has been overthrown by
circumstances, but has preserved his honour and his faith inviolate.
Slinging his basket on his back, he trudged off homewards, and instantly
the fish began to rise. A line of cows was driven towards the farm,
their udders all so full of milk that they swayed to and fro, just as a
man sways wrapped in a Spanish cloak, and as majestically. The
dragon-flies had gone, and in their place ghost-moths flew here and there
across the meadows, and from the fields sounded the corncrake’s harsh,
metallic note.
The whirring of the reaper ceased, and when the horses were unyoked the
driver led them slowly from the field. As they passed by the farmer he
looked lovingly towards them, and muttered to himself, “Dead ’orses and
dead soldiers lying by ’undreds in the standing corn. . . . I wonder ’ow
the folks out there in Belgium will ’ave a relish for their bread next
year. This ’ere war’s a ’orrid business, coming as it does, too, on the
top of my own loss . . . dead ’orses in the corn. . . .”
He took the straw out of his mouth, and walking up to one of his own
sleek-sided carthorses, patted it lovingly, as if he wanted to make sure
that it was still alive.
X
HIPPOMORPHOUS
ON the 12th of October 1524, Cortes left Mexico on his celebrated
expedition to Honduras. The start from Mexico was made to the sound of
music, and all the population of the newly conquered city turned out to
escort him for a few miles upon his way.
The cavalcade must have been a curious spectacle enough. Cortes himself
and his chief officers rode partly dressed in armour, after the fashion
of the time. Then came the Spanish soldiers, mostly on foot and armed
with lances, swords, and bucklers, though there was a troop of
crossbowmen and harquebusiers to whom “after God” we owed the Conquest,
as an old chronicler has said when speaking of the Conquest of Peru. In
Mexico they did good service also, although it was the horsemen that in
that conquest played the greater part. Then came a force of three
thousand friendly Indians from Tlascala, and last of all a herd of swine
was driven slowly in the rear, for at that time neither sheep nor cattle
were known in the New World.
Guatimozin, the captive King of Mexico, graced his conquerors’ triumphal
march; and with the army went two falconers, Garci Caro and Alvaro
Montañes, together with a band of music, some acrobats, a juggler, and a
man “who vaulted well and played the Moorish pipe.”
Cortes rode the black horse which he had ridden at the siege of Mexico.
Fortune appeared to smile upon him. He had just added an enormous empire
to the Spanish crown, and proved himself one of the most consummate
generals of his age. Yet he was on the verge of the great misfortune of
his life, which at the same time was to prove him still a finer leader
than he had been, even in Mexico.
His black horse also was about to play the most extraordinary _rôle_ that
ever horse has played in the whole history of the world.
With varying fortunes, now climbing mountains, now floundering in swamps,
and again passing rivers over which they had to throw bridges, the
expedition came to an open country, well watered, and the home of
countless herds of deer. Villagutierre, in his _History of the Conquest
of the Province of Itza_ (Madrid, 1701), calls it the country of the
Maçotecas, which name Bernal Diaz del Castillo says means “deer” in the
language of those infidels. Fresh meat was scarce, and all the Spanish
horsemen of those days were experts with the lance. Instantly Cortes and
all his mounted officers set out to chase the deer. The weather was
extraordinarily hot, hotter, so Diaz says, than they had had it since
they left Mexico. The deer were all so tame that the horsemen speared
them as they chose (_los alancearon muy á su placer_), and soon the plain
was strewed with dying animals just as it used to be when the Indians
hunted buffalo thirty or forty years ago.
Diaz says that the reason for the tameness of the deer was that the
Maçotecas (here he applies the word to the Indians themselves) worshipped
them as gods. It appears that their Chief God had once appeared in the
image of a stag, and told the Indians not to hunt his fellow-gods, or
even frighten them. Little enough the Spaniards cared for any gods not
strong enough to defend themselves, for the deity that they adored was
the same God of Battles whom we adore to-day.
So they continued spearing the god-like beasts, regardless of the heat
and that their horses were in poor condition owing to their long march.
The horse of one Palacios Rubio, a relation of Cortes, fell dead,
overcome with the great heat; the grease inside him melted, Villagutierre
says. The black horse that was ridden by Cortes also was very ill,
although he did not die—though it perhaps had been better that he should
have died, for Villagutierre thinks “far less harm would have been done
than happened afterwards, as will be seen by those who read the tale.”
After the hunting all was over, the line of march led over stony hills,
and through a pass that Villagutierre calls “el Paso del Alabastro,” and
Diaz “La Sierra de los Pedernales” (flints). Here the horse that had
been ill, staked itself in a forefoot, and this, as Villagutierre says,
was the real reason that Cortes left him behind. He adds, “It does not
matter either way, whether he was left because his grease was melted with
the sun, or that his foot was staked.” This, of course, is true, and
anyhow the horse was reserved for a greater destiny than ever fell to any
of his race.
Cortes, in his fifth letter to the Emperor Charles V., says simply, “I
was obliged to leave my black horse (_mi caballo morzillo_) with a
splinter in his foot.” He takes no notice of the melting of the grease.
“The Chief promised to take care of him, but I do not know that he will
succeed or what he will do with him.”
He told the Chief that he would send to fetch the horse, for he was very
fond of him, and prized him very much. The Chief, no doubt, received the
strange and terrible animal with due respect, and Cortes went on upon his
way. That is all that Cortes says about the matter, and the mist of
history closed upon him and on his horse. Cortes died, worn-out and
broken-hearted, at the white little town of Castilleja de la Cuesta, not
far from Seville; but El Morzillo had a greater destiny in store. This
happened in the year 1525, and nothing more was heard of either the
Maçotecas or the horse, after that passage in the fifth letter of Cortes,
till 1697. In that year the Franciscans set out upon the gospel trail to
convert the Indians of Itza, attached to the expedition that Ursua led,
for the interior of Yucatan had never been subdued. They reached Itza,
having come down the River Tipu in canoes.
This river, Villagutierre informs us, is as large as any river in all
Spain. Moreover, it is endowed with certain properties, its water being
good and clear, so that in some respects it is superior to the water even
of the Tagus. It is separated into one hundred and ninety channels
(neither more nor less), and every one of these has its right Indian
name, that every Indian knows. Upon its banks grows much sarsaparilla,
and in its sand is gold.
Beyond all this it has a hidden virtue, which is that taken (fasting) it
cures the dropsy, and makes both sick and sound people eat heartily.
Besides this, after eating, when you have drunk its water you are
inclined to eat again.
At midday it is cold, and warm at night, so warm that a steam rises from
it, just as it does when a kettle boils on the fire. Other
particularities it has, which though they are not so remarkable, yet are
noteworthy.
Down this amazing river Ursua’s expedition navigated for twelve days in
their canoes till they came to a lake called Peten-Itza, in which there
was an island known as Tayasal. All unknown to themselves, they had
arrived close to the place where long ago Cortes had left his horse. Of
this they were in ignorance; the circumstance had been long forgotten,
and Cortes himself had become almost a hero of a bygone age even in
Mexico.
Fathers Orbieta and Fuensalida, monks of the Franciscan order, chosen
both for their zeal and for their knowledge of the Maya language, were
all agog to mark new sheep. The Indians amongst whom they found
themselves were “ignorant even of the knowledge of the true faith.”
Moreover, since the conquest they had had no dealings with Europeans, and
were as primitive as they were at the time when Cortes had passed, more
than a hundred years ago.