JUST where the River Plate, split by a hundred islands, forms a sort of
delta, a tract of marshy land in Entre Rios, known as the Rincones of the
Ibicuy, spreads out flat, cut by a thousand channels, heavily timbered,
shut in upon the landward side by a long range of hills of dazzling sand,
and buried everywhere in waving masses of tall grass.
Grass, grass, and yet more grass. Grass at all seasons of the year, so
that the half-wild horses never know the scarcity of pasture which in the
winter makes them lean and rough upon the outside plains. A district
shut by its sand-hills and the great river from the outer world. A
paradise for horses, cattle, tigers, myriads of birds, for capibaras,
nutrias, and for the stray Italians who now and then come from the cities
with a rotten boat, and miserable, cheap, Belgian gun, to slaughter
ducks.
The population, sparse and indolent, a hybrid breed between the Gauchos
and the Chanar Indians, who at the conquest retreated into the thickest
swamps and islands of the River Plate. But still a country where life
flows easily away amongst the cane-brakes, thickets of espinillo, tala
and ñandubay, and where from out the pajonales the half-wild horses bound
like antelopes, shaking their manes, their tails aloft like flags,
snorting and frisking in the pride of strength, and lighting up the
landscape with their variegated colours like a herd of fallow deer. A
land of vegetation so intense as to bedwarf mankind almost as absolutely
as we bedwarf ourselves with our machinery in a manufacturing town. Air
plants upon the trees; oven-birds’ earthen, gourd-like nests hanging from
boughs; great wasp nests in the hollows of the trunks; scarlet and
rose-pink flamingoes fishing in the shallow pools; nutrias floating down
the streams, their round and human-looking heads appearing just awash;
and the dark silent channels of the stagnant backwaters, so thickly grown
with water weeds that by throwing a few branches on the top a man may
cross his horse.
Commerce, that vivifying force, that bond of union between all the basest
instincts of the basest of mankind, that touch of lower human nature
which makes all the lowest natures of mankind akin, was quite unknown.
Cheating was elementary, and rarely did much harm but to the successful
cheat; at times a neighbour passed a leaden dollar on a friend, was soon
detected, and was branded as a thief; at times a man slaughtered a
neighbour’s cow, and sold the hide, stole a good horse, or perpetrated
some piece of petty villainy, sufficient by its transparent folly to
reassure the world that he was quite uncivilized, and not fit by his
exertions ever to grow rich.
Adultery and fornication were frequent, and, again, chiefly concerned the
principals, as there were no self-instituted censors, eager to carry
tales, and to revenge themselves upon the world for their own impotency.
All were apt lazoers, great with the bolas, and all rode as they had
issued from their mothers’ wombs mounted upon a foal, and grown together
with him, half horse, half man—quiet and almost blameless centaurs, and
as happy as it is possible for men to be who come into the world ready
baptized in tears.
So much for man in the Rincones of the Ibicuy, and let us leave him quiet
and indolent, fighting occasionally at the “Pulperia” for a quart of
wine, for jealousy, for politics, or any of the so-called reasons which
make men shed each other’s blood.
But commerce, holy commerce, thrice blessed nexus which makes the whole
world kin, reducing all men to the lowest common multiple; commerce that
curses equally both him who buys and him who sells, and not content with
catching all men in its ledgers, envies the animals their happy lives,
was on the watch. Throughout the boundaries of the River Plate, from
Corrientes to the bounds of Tucuman, San Luis de la Punta to San
Nicholas, and to the farthest limits of the stony southern plains,
nowhere were horses cheaper than in the close Rincones of the Ibicuy.
Three, four, or five, or at the most six dollars, bought the best,
especially if but half-tamed, and a convenient curve of the river allowed
a steamboat to discharge or to load goods, tied to a tree and moored
beside the bank.
Upon a day a steamer duly arrived, whistled, and anchored, and from her,
in a canoe, appeared a group of men who landed, and with the assistance
of a guide went to the chief estancia of the place. The owner, Cruz
Cabrera, called also Cruz el Narigudo, came to his door, welcomed them,
driving off his dogs, wondered, but still said nothing, as it is not
polite to ask a stranger what is the business that brings him to your
house. Maté went round, and gin served in a square-faced bottle, and
drank out of a solitary wine-glass, the stem long snapped in the middle,
and spliced by shrinking a piece of green cow-hide round a thin cane, and
fastening the cane into a disc of roughly-shaped soft wood. “Three
dollars by the cut, and I’ll take fifty.” “No, four and a half; my
horses are the best of the whole district.” And so the ignoble farce of
bargaining, which from the beginning of the world has been the touchstone
of the zero of the human heart, pursued its course.
At last the “higgling of the market”—God-descended phrase—dear to
economists and those who in their studies apart from life weave webs in
which mankind is caught, decreed that at four dollars the deal was to be
made. But at the moment of arrangement one of the strangers saw a fine
chestnut colt standing saddled at the door, and claimed him as a
“sweetener,” and to save talk his master let him go, and then, the money
counted over, the buyer, prepared to give a hand to catch the horses, and
to lead them singly to the boat. Plunging and snorting, sweating with
terror, and half dead with fear, kicked, cuffed, and pricked with knives,
horse after horse was forced aboard, and stood tied to a ring or
stanchion, the sweat falling in drops like rain from legs and bellies on
the deck. Only the chestnut stood looking uneasily about, and frightened
by the struggles and the sound of blows falling upon the backs of those
his once companions in the wild gallops through the forest glades, who
had been forced aboard.
Then Cruz Cabrera cursed his folly with an oath, and getting for the last
time on his back made him turn, passage, plunge, and started and checked
him suddenly, then getting off unsaddled him, and gave his halter to a
man to lead him to the ship. The horse resisted, terrified at the
strange unusual sight, and one of the strangers, raising his iron whip,
struck him across the nose, exclaiming with an oath, “I’ll show you what
it is to make a fuss, you damned four dollars’ worth, when once I get you
safe aboard the ship.” And Cruz Cabrera, gripping his long knife, was
grieved, and said much as to the chastity of the stranger’s mother, and
of his wife, but underneath his breath, not that he feared to cut a
“gringo’s” throat, but that the dollars kept him quiet, as they have
rendered dumb, priests, ministers of state, bishops and merchants,
princes and peasants, and have closed the mouths of three parts of
mankind, making them silent complices in all the villainies they see and
hate, and still dare not denounce, fearing the scourge of poverty, and
the smart lash which Don Dinero flourishes over the shoulders of all
those who venture even remotely to express their thoughts.
Quickly the Ibicuy melted into the mist, as the wheezy steamer grunted
and squattered like a wounded wild duck, down the yellow flood. Inside,
the horses, more dead than alive, panted with thirst, and yet were still
too timid to approach the water troughs. They slipped and struggled on
the deck, fell and plunged up again, and at each fall or plunge, the
blows fell on their backs, partly from folly, partly from the
satisfaction that some men feel in hurting anything which fate or
Providence has placed without the power of resistance in their hands.
Instinct and reason; the hypothetic difference which good weak men use as
an anæsthetic when their conscience pricks them for their sins of
omission and commission to their four-footed brethren. But a distinction
wholly without a difference, and a link in the long chain of fraud and
force with which we bind all living things, men, animals, and most of all
our reasoning selves, in one crass neutral-tinted slavery. Who that has
never put his bistouri upon the soul, and hitherto no vivisectionist (of
men or animals) can claim the feat, shall say who suffers most—the biped
or the four-footed animal? I know the cant of education, the higher
organism, and the dogmatics of the so-called scientists which bid so fair
to worthily replace those of the theologians, but who shall say if
animals, when suddenly removed from all that sanctifies their lives, do
not pass agonies far more intense than such endured by those whose
education or whose reason—what you will—still leaves them hope?
By the next morning the wheezy, wood-fired steamer was in the roads of
Buenos Ayres, the exiles of the Ibicuy with coats all starring, flanks
tucked up, hanging their heads, no more the lightsome creatures of but
yesterday.
Steam launches, pitching like porpoises in the shallow stream,
whale-boats manned by Italians girt with red sashes, and with yellow
shirts made beautiful with scarlet horse-shoes, and whose eyes glistened
like diamonds in their roguish, nut-coloured faces, came alongside the
ship. Lighters, after much expenditure of curses and vain reaches with
boat-hooks at the paddle-floats, hooked on, and dropped astern. The
donkey-engine started with a whirr, giving the unwilling passengers
another tremor of alarm, and then the work of lowering them into the
flat-bottomed lighters straight began. Kickings and strugglings, and one
by one, their coats all matted with the sweat of terror, they were
dropped into the boat. One or two slipped from the slings, and landed
with a broken leg, and then a dig with a “facon” ended their troubles,
and their bodies floated on the shallow waves, followed by flocks of
gulls. Puffing and pitching, the tug dragging the lighter reached the
ocean-steamer’s side. Again the donkey-engine rattled and whirred, and
once again the luckless animals were hoisted up, stowed on the lower deck
in rows in semi-darkness, and after a due interval the vessel put to sea.
“Who would not sell a farm and go to sea?” the sailor says, and turns his
quid remarking, “Go to sea for pleasure, yes, and to hell for fun.” The
smell of steam, confinement, the motion of the ship, monotony of days,
time marked but by the dinner-bell, a hell to passengers who in their
cabins curse the hours, and kill the time with cards, books, drink and
flirtation, and yet find every day a week. But to the exiles of the
Ibicuy, stricken with terror, too ill to eat, parching, and yet afraid to
drink, hopeless and fevered, sick at heart, slipping and falling, bruised
with each motion of the ship, beaten when restless, and perhaps in some
dim way conscious of having left their birthplace, and foreseeing nothing
but misery, who shall say what they endured during the passage, in the
hot days, the stifling nights, and in the final change to the dark skies
and chilling breezes of the north? Happiest those who died without the
knowledge of the London streets, and whose bruised carcasses were flung
into the sea, their coats matted with sweat and filth, legs swelled, and
heads hanging down limply as they trailed the bodies on the decks.
The docks, the dealer’s yard, the breaking in to harness, and the sale at
Aldridge’s, and one by one they were led out to meet no more; as
theologians who have blessed man with hell, allow no paradise to beasts.
Perhaps because their lives being innocent, they would have filled it up
so that no man could enter, for what saint in any calendar could for an
instant claim to be admitted if his life were compared to that of the
most humble of his four-footed brethren in the Lord? Docked duly, to
show that nature does not know how to make a horse, bitted and broken,
the chestnut colt, once Cruz Cabrera’s pride, started on cab work, and
for a time gave satisfaction to his owner, for, though not fast, he was
untiring, and, as his driver said, “yer couldn’t kill ’im, ’e was a
perfect glutton for ’ard work.”
Streets, streets, and yet more streets, endless and sewer-like, stony and
wood-paved, suburbs interminable, and joyless squares, gaunt stuccoed
crescents, “vales,” “groves,” “places,” a perfect wilderness of bricks,
he trotted through them all. Derbies and boat-races, football matches,
Hurlingham and the Welsh Harp, Plaistow and Finchley, Harrow-on-the-Hill,
the wait at theatres, the nightly crawl up Piccadilly watching for fares,
where men and women stop to talk; rain, snow, ice, frost, and the fury of
the spring east wind, he knew them all, struggled and shivered, baked,
shook with fatigue, and still resisted. But time, that comes upon us and
our horses, stealthily creeping like Indians creep upon the war trail
without a sign, loosening the sinews of our knees, thickening their wind,
and making both of us useless except for worms, began to tell. The
chronic cough, the groggy feet, the eye covered with a cloud, caused by a
flick inside the blinkers, and the staring coat, soon turned the
chestnut, from a cab with indiarubber tyres, celluloid fittings, and a
looking-glass upon each side (for fools to see how impossible it is that
they can ever have been made after God’s image), to a night hack, and
then the fall to a fish-hawker’s cart was not too long delayed.
Blows and short commons, sores from the collar, and continued overwork,
slipping upon the greasy streets, struggling with loads impossible to
move, finished the tragedy; and of the joyous colt who but a year or two
ago bounded through thickets scarcely brushing off the dew, nothing was
left but a gaunt, miserable, lame, wretched beast, a very bag of bones,
too thin for dog’s meat, and too valueless even to afford the mercy of
the knacker’s fee. So, struggling on upon his Via Crucis, Providence at
last remembered, and let him fall, and the shaft entering his side, his
blood coloured the pavement; his owner, after beating him till he was
tired, gave him a farewell kick or two; then he lay still, his eyes open
and staring, and white foam exuding from his mouth.
The scent of horse dung filled the fetid air, cabs rattled, and vans
jolted on the stones, and the dead horse, bloody and mud-stained, formed,
as it were, a sort of island, parting the traffic into separate streams,
as it surged onward roaring in the current of the streets.