BOYHOOD'S END
The book--The Saledero, or killing-grounds, and their smell--Walls
built of bullocks' skulls--A pestilential city--River water and Aljibe
water--Days of lassitude--Novel scenes--Home again--Typhus--My first
day out--Birthday reflections--What I asked of life--A boy's mind--A
brother's resolution--End of our thousand and one nights--A reading
spell--My boyhood ends in disaster.
This book has already run to a greater length than was intended;
nevertheless there must be yet another chapter or two to bring it to a
proper ending, which I can only find by skipping over three years of
my life, and so getting at once to the age of fifteen. For that was a
time of great events and serious changes, bodily and mental, which
practically brought the happy time of my boyhood to an end.
On looking back over the book, I find that on three or four occasions
I have placed some incident in the wrong chapter or group, thus making
it take place a year or so too soon or too late. These small errors of
memory are, however, not worth altering now: so long as the scene or
event is rightly remembered and pictured it doesn't matter much
whether I was six or seven, or eight years old at the time. I find,
too, that I have omitted many things which perhaps deserved a place in
the book--scenes and events which are vividly remembered, but which
unfortunately did not come up at the right moment, and so were left
out.
Of these scenes unconsciously omitted, I will now give one which
should have appeared in the chapter describing my first visit to
Buenos Ayres city: placed here it will serve very well as an
introduction to this last chapter.
In those days, and indeed down to the seventies of last century, the
south side of the capital was the site of the famous Saladero, or
killing-grounds, where the fat cattle, horses and sheep brought in
from all over the country were slaughtered every day, some to supply
the town with beef and mutton and to make _charque,_ or sun-dried
beef, for exportation to Brazil, where it was used to feed the slaves,
but the greater number of the animals, including all the horses, were
killed solely for their hides and tallow. The grounds covered a space
of three or four square miles, where there were cattle enclosures made
of upright posts placed close together, and some low buildings
scattered about To this spot were driven endless flocks of sheep, half
or wholly wild horses and dangerous-looking, long-horned cattle in
herds of a hundred or so to a thousand, each moving in its cloud of
dust, with noise of bellowings and bleatings and furious shouting of
the drovers as they galloped up and down, urging the doomed animals
on. When the beasts arrived in too great numbers to be dealt with in
the buildings, you could see hundreds of cattle being killed in the
open all over the grounds in the old barbarous way the gauchos use,
every animal being first lassoed, then hamstrung, then its throat cut
--a hideous and horrible spectacle, with a suitable accompaniment of
sounds in the wild shouts of the slaughterers and the awful bellowings
of the tortured beasts. Just where the animal was knocked down and
killed, it was stripped of its hide and the carcass cut up, a portion
of the flesh and the fat being removed and all the rest left on the
ground to be devoured by the pariah dogs, the carrion hawks, and a
multitude of screaming black-headed gulls always in attendance. The
blood so abundantly shed from day to day, mixing with the dust, had
formed a crust half a foot thick all over the open space: let the
reader try to imagine the smell of this crust and of tons of offal and
flesh and bones lying everywhere in heaps. But no, it cannot be
imagined. The most dreadful scenes, the worst in Dante's _Inferno_,
for example, can be visualized by the inner eye; and sounds, too, are
conveyed to us in a description so that they can be heard mentally;
but it is not so with smells. The reader can only take my word for it
that this smell was probably the worst ever known on the earth, unless
he accepts as true the story of Tobit and the "fishy fumes" by means
of which that ancient hero defended himself in his retreat from the
pursuing devil.
It was the smell of carrion, of putrifying flesh, and of that old and
ever-newly moistened crust of dust and coagulated blood. It was, or
seemed, a curiously substantial and stationary smell; travellers
approaching or leaving the capital by the great south road, which
skirted the killing-grounds, would hold their noses and ride a mile or
so at a furious gallop until they got out of the abominable stench.
One extraordinary feature of the private _quintas_ or orchards and
plantations in the vicinity of the Saladeros was the walls or hedges.
These were built entirely of cows' skulls, seven, eight, or nine deep,
placed evenly like stones, the horns projecting. Hundreds of thousands
of skulls had been thus used, and some of the old, very long walls,
crowned with green grass and with creepers and wild flowers growing
from the cavities in the bones, had a strangely picturesque but
somewhat uncanny appearance. As a rule there were rows of old Lombardy
poplars behind these strange walls or fences.
In those days bones were not utilized: they were thrown away, and
those who wanted walls in a stoneless land, where bricks and wood for
palings were dear to buy, found in the skulls a useful substitute.
The abomination I have described was but one of many--the principal
and sublime stench in a city of evil smells, a populous city built on
a plain without drainage and without water-supply beyond that which
was sold by watermen in buckets, each bucketful containing about half
a pound of red clay in solution. It is true that the best houses had
_algibes,_ or cisterns, under the courtyard, where the rainwater from
the flat roofs was deposited. I remember that water well: you always
had one or two to half-a-dozen scarlet wrigglers, the larvae of
mosquitoes, in a tumblerful, and you drank your water, quite calmly,
wrigglers and all!
All this will serve to give an idea of the condition of the city of
that time from the sanitary point of view, and this state of things
lasted down to the 'seventies of the last century, when Buenos Ayres
came to be the chief pestilential city of the globe and was obliged to
call in engineers from England to do something to save the inhabitants
from extinction.
When I was in my fifteenth year, before any changes had taken place
and the great outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever were yet to come,
I spent four or five weeks in the city, greatly enjoying the novel
scenes and new life. After about ten or twelve days I began to feel
tired and languid, and this feeling grew on me day by day until it
became almost painful to exert myself to visit even my most favoured
haunts--the great South Market, where cage-birds were to be seen in
hundreds, green paroquets, cardinals, and bishop-birds predominating;
or to the river front, where I spent much time fishing for little
silvery king-fishes from the rocks; or further away to the quintas and
gardens on the cliff, where I first feasted my eyes on the sight of
orange groves laden with golden fruit amidst the vivid green polished
foliage, and old olive trees with black egg-shaped fruit showing among
the grey leaves.
And through it all the feeling of lassitude continued, and was, I
thought, due to the fact that I was on foot instead of on horseback,
and walking on a stony pavement instead of on a green turf. It never
occurred to me that there might be another cause, that I was breathing
in a pestilential atmosphere and that the poison was working in me.
Leaving town I travelled by some conveyance to spend a night at a
friend's house, and next morning set out for home on horseback. I had
about twenty-seven miles across country to ride and never touched a
road, and I was no sooner on my way than my spirits revived; I was
well and unspeakably happy again, on horseback on the wide green
plain, drinking in the pure air like a draught of eternal life. It was
autumn, and the plain as far as one could see on every side a moist
brilliant green, with a crystal blue sky above, over which floated
shining white clouds. The healthy glad feeling lasted through my ride
and for a day or two after, during which I revisited my favourite
haunts in the grounds, rejoicing to be with my beloved birds and trees
once more.
Then the hateful town feeling of lassitude returned on me and all my
vigour was gone, all pleasure in life ended. Thereafter for a
fortnight I spent the time moping about the house; then there was a
spell of frosty weather with a bleak cutting wind to tell us that it
was winter, which even in those latitudes can be very cold. One day
after early dinner my mother and sisters went in the carriage to pay a
visit to a neighbouring estancia, and my brothers being out or absent
from home I was left alone. The verandah appeared to me the warmest
place I could find, as the sun shone on it warm and bright, and there
I settled down on a chair placed against the wall at the side of a
heap of sacks of meal or something which had been left there, and
formed a nice shelter from the wind.
The house was strangely quiet, and the westering sun shining full on
me made me feel quite comfortable, and in a little while I fell
asleep. The sun set and it grew bitterly cold, but I did not wake, and
when my mother returned and inquired for me I could not be found.
Finally the whole household turned out with lanterns and searched for
me up and down through the plantation, and the hunt was still going on
when, about ten o'clock at night, some one hurrying along the verandah
stumbled on me in my sheltered corner by the sacks, still in my chair
but unconscious and in a burning fever. It was the dread typhus, an
almost obsolete malady in Europe, and in fact in all civilized
countries, but not uncommon at that date in the pestilential city. It
was wonderful that I lived through it in a place where we were out of
reach of doctors and apothecaries, with only my mother's skill in
nursing and her knowledge of such drugs as were kept in the house to
save me. She nursed me day and night for the three weeks during which
the fever lasted, and when it left me, a mere shadow of my former
self, I was dumb-not even a little Yes or No could I articulate
however hard I tried, and it was at last concluded that I would never
speak again. However, after about a fortnight, the lost faculty came
back, to my mother's inexpressible joy.
Winter was nearing its end when one morning in late July I ventured
out of doors for the first time, though still but a skeleton, a shadow
of my former self. It was a windy day of brilliant sunshine, a day I
shall never forget, and the effect of the air and the sun and smell of
earth and early flowers, and the sounds of wild birds, with the sight
of the intensely green young grass and the vast crystal dome of heaven
above, was like deep draughts of some potent liquor that made the
blood dance in my veins. Oh what an inexpressible, immeasurable joy to
be alive and not dead, to have my feet still on the earth, and drink
in the wind and sunshine once more! But the pleasure was more than I
could endure in that feeble state; the chilly wind pierced me like
needles of ice, my senses swam, and I would have fallen to the ground
if my elder brother had not caught me in his arms and taken me back to
the house.
In spite of that fainting fit I was happy again with the old
happiness, and from day to day I regained strength, until one day in
early August I was suddenly reminded that it was my anniversary by my
brothers and sisters all coming to me with birthday presents, which
they had been careful to provide beforehand, and congratulations on my
recovery.
Fifteen years old! This was indeed the most memorable day of my life,
for on that evening I began to think about myself, and my thoughts
were strange and unhappy thoughts to me-what I was, what I was in the
world for, what I wanted, what destiny was going to make of me! Or was
it for me to do just what I wished, to shape my own destiny, as my
elder brothers had done? It was the first time such questions had come
to me, and I was startled at them. It was as though I had only just
become conscious; I doubt that I had ever been fully conscious before.
I had lived till now in a paradise of vivid sense-impressions in which
all thoughts came to me saturated with emotion, and in that mental
state reflection is well-nigh impossible. Even the idea of death,
which had come as a surprise, had not made me reflect. Death was a
person, a monstrous being who had sprung upon me in my flowery
paradise and had inflicted a wound with a poisoned dagger in my flesh.
Then had come the knowledge of immortality for the soul, and the wound
was healed, or partly so, for a time at all events; after which the
one thought that seriously troubled me was that I could not always
remain a boy. To pass from boyhood to manhood was not so bad as dying;
nevertheless it was a change painful to contemplate. That everlasting
delight and wonder, rising to rapture, which was in the child and boy
would wither away and vanish, and in its place there would be that
dull low kind of satisfaction which men have in the set task, the
daily and hourly intercourse with others of a like condition, and in
eating and drinking and sleeping. I could not, for example, think of
so advanced an age as fifteen without the keenest apprehension. And
now I was actually at that age-at that parting of the ways, as it
seemed to me.
What, then, did I want?-what did I ask to have? If the question had
been put to me then, and if I had been capable of expressing what was
in me, I should have replied: I want only to keep what I have; to rise
each morning and look out on the sky and the grassy dew-wet earth from
day to day, from year to year. To watch every June and July for
spring, to feel the same old sweet surprise and delight at the
appearance of each familiar flower, every new-born insect, every bird
returned once more from the north. To listen in a trance of delight to
the wild notes of the golden plover coming once more to the great
plain, flying, flying south, flock succeeding flock the whole day
long. Oh, those wild beautiful cries of the golden plover! I could
exclaim with Hafiz, with but one word changed: "If after a thousand
years that sound should float o'er my tomb, my bones uprising in their
gladness would dance in the sepulchre!" To climb trees and put my hand
down in the deep hot nest of the Biente-veo and feel the hot eggs--the
five long pointed cream-coloured eggs with chocolate spots and
splashes at the larger end. To lie on a grassy bank with the blue
water between me and beds of tall bulrushes, listening to the
mysterious sounds of the wind and of hidden rails and coots and
courlans conversing together in strange human-like tones; to let my
sight dwell and feast on the _camalote_ flower amid its floating
masses of moist vivid green leaves--the large alamanda-like flower of
a purest divine yellow that when plucked sheds its lovely petals, to
leave you with nothing but a green stem in your hand. To ride at noon
on the hottest days, when the whole earth is a-glitter with illusory
water, and see the cattle and horses in thousands, covering the plain
at their watering-places; to visit some haunt of large birds at that
still, hot hour and see storks, ibises, grey herons, egrets of a
dazzling whiteness, and rose-coloured spoonbills and flamingoes,
standing in the shallow water in which their motionless forms are
reflected. To lie on my back on the rust-brown grass in January and
gaze up at the wide hot whitey-blue sky, peopled with millions and
myriads of glistening balls of thistle-down, ever, ever floating by;
to gaze and gaze until they are to me living things and I, in an
ecstasy, am with them, floating in that immense shining void!
And now it seemed that I was about to lose it--this glad emotion which
had made the world what it was to me, an enchanted realm, a nature at
once natural and supernatural; it would fade and lessen imperceptibly
day by day, year by year, as I became more and more absorbed in the
dull business of life, until it would be lost as effectually as if I
had ceased to see and hear and palpitate, and my warm body had grown
cold and stiff in death, and, like the dead and the living, I should
be unconscious of my loss.
It was not a unique nor a singular feeling: it is known to other boys,
as I have read and heard; also I have occasionally met with one who,
in a rare moment of confidence, has confessed that he has been
troubled at times at the thought of all he would lose. But I doubt
that it was ever more keenly felt than in my case; I doubt, too, that
it is common or strong in English boys, considering the conditions in
which they exist. For restraint is irksome to all beings, from a
black-beetle or an earthworm to an eagle, or, to go higher still in
the scale, to an orang-u-tan or a man; it is felt most keenly by the
young, in our species at all events, and the British boy suffers the
greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the
instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks
eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will
be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.
To come back to my own case: I did not and could not know that it was
an exceptional case, that my feeling for nature was something more
than the sense of pleasure in sun and rain and wind and earth and
water and in liberty of motion, which is universal in children, but
was in part due to a faculty which is not universal or common. The
fear, then, was an idle one, but I had good reason for it when I
considered how it had been with my elder brothers, who had been as
little restrained as myself, especially that masterful adventurous
one, now in a distant country thousands of miles from home, who, at
about the age at which I had now arrived, had made himself his own
master, to do what he liked with his own life. I had seen him at his
parting of the ways, how resolutely he had abandoned his open-air
habits, everything in fact that had been his delight, to settle down
to sheer hard mental work, and this at our home on the pampas where
there were no masters, and even the books and instruments required for
his studies could only be procured with great difficulty and after
long delays. I remember one afternoon when we were gathered in the
dining-room for tea, he was reading, and my mother coming in looked
over his shoulder and said, "You are reading a novel: don't you think
all that romantic stuff will take your mind off your studies?"
Now he'll flare up, said I to myself; he's so confoundedly independent
and touchy no one can say a word to him. It surprised me when he
answered quietly, "Yes, mother, I know, but I must finish this book
now; it will be the last novel I shall read for some years." And so it
was, I believe.
His resolution impressed us even more in another matter. He had an
extraordinary talent for inventing stories, mostly of wars and wild
adventures with plenty of fighting in them, and whenever we boys were
all together, which was usually after we had gone to bed and put the
candle out, he would begin one of his wonderful tales and go on for
hours, we all wide awake, listening in breathless silence. At length
towards midnight the flow of the narrative would suddenly stop, and
after an interval we would all begin to cry out to him to go on. "Oh,
you are awake!" he would exclaim, with a chuckle of laughter. "Very
well, then, you know just where we are in our history, to be resumed
another day. Now you can go to sleep." On the following evening he
would take up the tale, which would often last an entire week, to be
followed by another just as long, then another, and so on-our thousand
and one nights. And this delightful yarn-spinning was also dropped as
he became more and more absorbed in his mathematical and other
studies.
To this day I can recall portions of those tales, especially those in
which birds and beasts instead of men were the actors, and so much did
we miss them that sometimes when we were all assembled of an afternoon
we would start begging him for a story---"just one more, and the
longer the better," we would say to tempt him. And he, a little
flattered at our keen appreciation of his talent as a yarn-spinner,
would appear inclined to yield. "Well, now, what story shall I tell
you?" he would say; and then, just when we were settling down to
listen, he would shout, "No, no, no more stories," and to put the
matter from him he would snatch up a book and order us to hold our
tongues or clear out of the room!
It was not for me to follow his lead; I had not the intellect or
strength of will for such tasks, and not only on that memorable
evening of my anniversary, but for days afterwards I continued in a
troubled state of mind, ashamed of my ignorance, my indolence, my
disinclination to any kind of mental work-ashamed even to think that
my delight in nature and wish for no other thing in life was merely
due to the fact that while the others were putting away childish
things as they grew up, I alone refused to part with them.
The result of all these deliberations was that I temporized: I would
not, I could not, give up the rides and rambles that took up most of
my time, but I would try to overcome my disinclination to serious
reading. There were plenty of books in the house-it was always a
puzzle to me how we came to have so many. I was familiar with their
appearance on the shelves-they had been before me since I first opened
my eyes---their shape, size, colour, even their titles, and that was
all I knew about them. A general Natural History and two little works
by James Ronnie on the habits and faculties of birds was all the
literature suited to my wants in the entire collection of three or
four hundred volumes. For the rest, I had read a few story-books and
novels: but we had no novels; when one came into the house it would be
read and lent to our next neighbour five or six miles away, and he in
turn would lend to another, twenty miles further on, and so on until
it disappeared in space.
I made a beginning with Rollin's _Ancient History_ in two huge quarto
volumes; I fancy it was the large clear type and numerous plates which
illustrated it that determined my choice. Rollin, the good old priest,
opened a new wonderful world to me, and instead of the tedious task I
had feared the reading would prove, it was as delightful as it had
formerly been to listen to my brother's endless histories of imaginary
heroes and their wars and adventures.
Still athirst for history, after finishing Rollin I began fingering
other works of that kind: there was Whiston's Josephus, too ponderous
a book to be held in the hands when read out of doors; and there was
Gibbon in six stately volumes. I was not yet able to appreciate the
lofty artificial style, and soon fell on something better suited to my
boyish taste in letters---a History of Christianity in, I think,
sixteen or eighteen volumes of a convenient size. The simple natural
diction attracted me, and I was soon convinced that I could not have
stumbled on more fascinating reading than the lives of the Fathers of
the Church included in some of the earlier volumes, especially that of
Augustine, the greatest of all: how beautiful and marvellous his life
was, and his mother Monica's! what wonderful books he wrote!-his
_Confessions and City of God_ from which long excerpts were given
in this volume.
These biographies sent me to another old book, _Leland on Revelation_,
which told me much I was curious to know about the mythologies and
systems of philosophy of the ancients--the innumerable false cults
which had flourished in a darkened world before the dawn of the true
religion.
Next came _Carlyle's French Revolution_ and at last Gibbon, and I was
still deep in the _Decline and Fall_ when disaster came to us: my
father was practically ruined, owing, as I have said in a former
chapter, to his childlike trust in his fellow-men, and we quitted the
home he had counted as a permanent one, which in due time would have
become his property had he but made his position secure by a proper
deed on first consenting to take over the place in its then ruinous
condition.
Thus ended, sadly enough, the enchanting years of my boyhood; and
here, too, the book should finish: but having gone so far, I will
venture a little further and give a brief account of what followed and
the life which, for several succeeding years, was to be mine--the
life, that is to say, of the mind and spirit.