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Luckily the war has made eggs tooexpensive for me to fear the public will pelt me off the stagewith them.

Still after years of writing one naturally dreads the coldpotato and the orange-peel.

I once in talking said to a celebrated dancer who was about tobid farewell to her admirers and retire to private life,“Perhaps you will take a benefit when you come back fromfinishing 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 trueScot, of whom it has been said, “If he believes inChristianity he has no doubts, and if he is a disbeliever he hasnone either.”

p.viiiOnce in the Sierra Madre, either near the Santa RosaMountains or in the Bolson de Mápimi, I disremember which,out after horses that had strayed, we came upon a little sheltermade of withies, and covered with one of those striped blanketswoven 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 athicket of huisaché trees in flower. Their round andball-like blossoms filled the air with a sweet scent. Astream ran gently tinkling over its pebbly bed, and the tallprairie grasses flowed up to the lost little hut as if they wouldengulf it like a sea.

On every side of the deep valley—for I forgot to say thehut stood in a valley—towered hills with great, flat, rockysides. On some of them the Indian tribes had scratched rudepictures, records of their race.

In one of them—I remember it just as if now it wasbefore my eyes—an Indian chief, surrounded by his friends,was setting free hisp. ixfavourite 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 anobsidian arrow-head, was life-like, though drawn withoutperspective, which gave those figures of a vanished race an airof standing in the clouds.

The chief stood with his bridle in his hand, his featherwar-bonnet upon his head, naked except the breech-clout. His bow was slung across his shoulders and his quiver hung belowhis arm, and with the other hand he kept the sun off from hisface as he gazed upon his horse. All kinds of huntingscenes were there displayed, and others, such as the burial of achief, a dance, and other ceremonials, no doubt as dear to thosewho drew them as are the rites in a cathedral to otherfaithful. The flat rock bore one more inscription, statingthat Eusebio Leal passed by bearing despatches, and the date,June the fifteenth, of the year 1687. But to return againto the lone wickey-up.

We all sat looking at it: Eustaquio Gomez,p. xPolibio Medina,Exaltacion Garcia, the Texan, two Pueblo Indians, and I who writethese 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 asparchment, and his arms beside him, a Winchester, a bow andarrows, and a lance. Eustaquio, taking up an arrow, afterlooking at it, said that the dead man was an Apache of theMescalero band, and then, looking upon the ground and pointingout some marks, said, “He had let loose his horse before hedied, just as the chief did in the picture-writing.”

That was his epitaph, for how death overtook him none of uscould conjecture; but I liked the manner of his going off thestage.

’Tis meet and fitting to set free the horse or penbefore death overtakes you, or before the gentle public turns itsthumbs down and yells, “Away with him.”

Charles Lamb, when some one asked himp. xisomething ofhis works, answered that they were to be found in the South SeaHouse, and that they numbered forty volumes, for he had labouredmany years there, making his bricks with the least possiblemodicum of straw,—just like the rest of us.

Mine, if you ask me, are to be found but in the trails I leftin all the years I galloped both on the prairies and the pampasof America.

Hold it not up to me for egotism, O gentle reader, for I wouldhave you know that hardly any of the horses that I rode had shoeson them, and thus the tracks are faint.

p.xiiiCONTENTS

p. 1I
BROUGHT FORWARD

The workshop in Parkhead was notinspiriting. From one week’s end to another, allthroughout the year, life was the same, almost without anincident. In the long days of the Scotch summer the menwalked cheerily to work, carrying their dinner in a littletin. In the dark winter mornings they tramped in the blackfog, coughing and spitting, through the black mud of Glasgowstreets, 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 outstandingfeature was Parkhead Forge, with its tall chimneys belching smokeinto the air all day, and flames by night. Its glowingfurnaces, its giant hammers, itsp. 2little railway trucks in which men ranthe blocks of white-hot iron which poured in streams out of thefurnaces, flamed like the mouth of hell.

Inside the workshop the dusty atmosphere made a stranger coughon entering the door. The benches with the rows of apronedmen all bending at their work, not standing upright, with theirbare, hairy chests exposed, after the fashion of the Vulcans atthe neighbouring forge, gave a half-air of domesticity to theclose, stuffy room.

A semi-sedentary life quickened their intellect; for where menwork together they are bound to talk about the topics of the day,especially in Scotland, where every man is a born politician anda controversialist. At meal-times, when they ate their“piece” and drank their tea that they had carriedwith them in tin flasks, each one was certain to draw out anewspaper from the pocket of his coat, and, after studying itfrom the Births, Deaths, and Marriages, down to theeditor’s address on the last page, fall a-disputing uponpolitics. “Man, a gran’ speech by Bonar Lawaboot Home Rule. They Irish, set them up, whatp. 3do they makesiccan a din aboot? Ca’ ye it Home Rule? Ijuist ca’ it Rome Rule. A miserable, priest-riddencrew, the hale rick-ma-tick o’ them.”

The reader then would pause and, looking round the shop, waitfor the answer that he was sure would not be long in coming fromamongst such a thrawn lot of commentators. Usually one orother of his mates would fold his paper up, or perhaps point withan oil-stained finger to an article, and with the head-break inthe voice, characteristic of the Scot about to plunge into anargument, ejaculate: “Bonar Law, ou aye, I kent him when hewas leader of the South Side Parliament. He always was adreary body, sort o’ dreich like; no that I’m sayingthe man is pairfectly illiterate, as some are on his sideo’ the Hoose there in Westminister. I read hisspeech—the body is na blate, sort o’ quick atfigures, but does na take the pains to verify. Verificationis the soul of mathematics. Bonar Law, eh! Did ye seehow Maister Asquith trippit him handily in his tabulated figureson the jute business under Free Trade, showing that all he hadadvanced about protective tariffs andp. 4the drawback system was fairredeeklous . . . as well as several errors in the totalsum?”

Then others would cut in and words be bandied to and fro,impugning the good faith and honour of every section of the Houseof Commons, who, by the showing of their own speeches, were heldto be dishonourable rogues aiming at power and place, without athought for anything but their own ends.

This charitable view of men and of affairs did not prevent anyof the disputants from firing up if his own party was impugned;for in their heart of hearts the general denunciation was but acovert from which to attack the other side.

In such an ambient the war was sure to be discussed; some heldthe German Emperor was mad—“a daft-like thing tochallenge the whole world, ye see; maist inconsiderate, and showsthat the man’s intellect is no weel balanced . . .philosophy is whiles sort of unsettlin’ . . . thefelly’s mad, ye ken.”

Others saw method in his madness, and alleged that it wasenvy, “naething but sheer envy that had brought on thistramplin’ upon natural rights, but for all that he may bep. 5thought toget his own again, with they indemnities.”

Those who had studied economics “were of opinion thathis reasoning was wrong, built on false premises, for there cannever be a royal road to wealth. Labour, ye see, is thesole creative element of riches.” At once a Torywould rejoin, “And brains. Man, what an awfu’thing to leave out brains. Think of the marvellouscreations of the human genius.” The first wouldanswer with, “I saw ye coming, man. I’ll nodeny that brains have their due place in the economic state; butbuild me one of your Zeppelins and stick it in the middle ofGeorge Square without a crew to manage it, and how far will itfly? I do not say that brains did not devise it; but, afterall, labour had to carry out the first design.” Thiswas a subject that opened up enormous vistas for discussion, andfor a time kept them from talking of the war.

Jimmy and Geordie, hammering away in one end of the room, tooklittle part in the debate. Good workmen both of them, andfriends, perhaps because of the difference of their temperaments,for Jimmy was the typep. 6of red-haired, blue-eyed, tall, litheScot, he of theperfervidum ingenium, and Geordie was athick-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 wasa richt gude charge upon the trenches by theSutherlands.” Geordie would answer shortly,“Aye, no sae bad,” and go on hammering.

One morning, after a reverse, Jimmy did not appear, andGeordie sat alone working away as usual, but if possible moredourly and more silently. Towards midday it began to bewhispered in the shop that Jimmy had enlisted, and men turned toGeordie to ask if he knew anything about it, and the silentworkman, brushing the sweat off his brow with his coat-sleeve,rejoined: “Aye, ou aye, I went wi’ him yestreen tothe headquarters o’ the Camerons; he’s joined thekilties richt eneugh. Ye mind he was a sergeant in SouthAfrica.” Then he bent over to his work and did notjoin in the general conversation that ensued.

Days passed, and weeks, and his fellow-workmen, in the way menwill, occasionallyp.7bantered Geordie, asking him if he was going to enlist,and whether he did not think shame to let his friend go off aloneto fight. Geordie was silent under abuse and banter, as hehad always been under the injustices of life, and by degreeswithdrew into himself, and when he read his newspaper during thedinner-hour made no remark, but folded it and put it quietly intothe pocket of his coat.

Weeks passed, weeks of suspense, of flaring headlines in thePress, of noise of regiments passing down the streets, ofnewsboys yelling hypothetic victories, and of the tension of thenerves of men who know their country’s destiny is hangingin the scales. Rumours of losses, of defeats, of victories,of checks and of advances, of naval battles, with hints ofdreadful slaughter filled the air. Women in black were seenabout, pale and with eyelids swollen with weeping, and peoplescanned the reports of killed and wounded with dry throats andhearts constricted as if they had been wrapped in whipcord, onlyrelaxing when after a second look they had assured themselves thename they feared to see was absent from the list.

Long strings of Clydesdale horses ridden byp. 8men in raggedclothes, who sat them uneasily, as if they felt their situationkeenly, perched up in the public view, passed through thestreets. The massive caulkers on their shoes struck fireoccasionally upon the stones, and the great beasts, taught torely on man as on a god from the time they gambolled in thefields, went to their doom unconsciously, the only mitigation oftheir fate. Regiments of young recruits, some in plainclothes and some in hastily-made uniforms, marched with asmartial an air as three weeks’ training gave them, to thestations to entrain. Pale clerks, the elbows of theirjackets shiny with the slavery of the desk, strode beside menwhose hands were bent and scarred with gripping on the handles ofthe plough in February gales or wielding sledges at theforge.

All of them were young and resolute, and each was confidentthat he at least would come back safe to tell the tale. Menstopped and waved their hats, cheering their passage, and girlsand women stood with flushed cheeks and straining eyes as theypassed on for the first stage that took them towards thefront. Boys ran beside them, hatless and barefooted,p. 9shouting outwords that they had caught up on the drill-ground to the men, whowhistled as they marched a slow and grinding tune that soundedlike a hymn.

Traffic was drawn up close to the kerbstone, and from the topof tram-cars and from carts men cheered, bringing a flush ofpride to many a pale cheek in the ranks. They passed on;men resumed the business of their lives, few understanding thatthe half-trained, pale-faced regiment that had vanished throughthe great station gates had gone to make that business possibleand safe.

Then came a time of waiting for the news, of contradictoryparagraphs in newspapers, and then a telegram, the “enemyis giving ground on the left wing”; and instantly a feelingof relief that lightened every heart, as if its owner had beenfighting and had stopped to wipe his brow before he started topursue the flying enemy.

The workmen in the brassfitters’ shop came to their workas usual on the day of the good news, and at the dinner-hour readout the accounts of the great battle, clustering upon eachother’s shoulders in their eagerness. Atp. 10last oneturned 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 workingsilently.

All eyes were turned towards him, for the rest seemed todivine even before they heard the name. “Geordie man,Jimmy’s killed,” the reader said, and as he spokeGeordie laid down his hammer, and, reaching for his coat, said,“Jimmy’s killed, is he? Well, some one’sgot to account for it.”

Then, opening the door, he walked out dourly, as if already hefelt the knapsack on his back and the avenging rifle in hishand.

p. 11II
LOS PINGOS

The amphitheatre of wood enclosed abay that ran so far into the land it seemed a lake. TheUruguay flowed past, but the bay was so land-locked and so welldefended by an island lying at its mouth that the illusion wascomplete, and the bay appeared to be cut off from all theworld.

Upon the river twice a day passed steamboats, which atnight-time gave an air as of a section of a town that floatedpast the wilderness. Streams of electric light from everycabin lit up the yellow, turgid river, and the notes of a bandoccasionally floated across the water as the vessel passed. Sometimes a searchlight falling on a herd of cattle, standing asis their custom after nightfall upon a little hill, made themstampede into the darkness,p. 12dashing through brushwood orfloundering through a marsh, till they had placed themselves insafety from this new terror of the night.

Above the bay the ruins of a great building stood. Builtscarcely fifty years ago, and now deserted, the ruins had takenon an air as of a castle, and from the walls sprang plants,whilst in the deserted courtyard a tree had grown, amongst whosebranches oven-birds had built their hanging nests of mud. Cypresses towered above the primeval hard-wood, which grew allgnarled and horny-looking, and nearly all had kept their Indiannames, 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 growingfrom the ground.

Orange trees had run wild and shot up all unpruned, and appletrees had reverted back to crabs. The trunks of all thefruit-trees in the deserted garden round the ruined factory wererubbed shiny by the cattle, for all the fences had long beendestroyed or fallen into decay.

A group of roofless workmen’s cottagesp. 13gave an airof desolation to the valley in which the factory and itsdependencies had stood. They too had been invaded by thepowerful sub-tropical plant life, and creepers covered withbunches of bright flowers climbed up their walls. Asluggish stream ran through the valley and joined the Uruguay,making a little natural harbour. In it basked cat-fish, andnow and then from off the banks a tortoise dropped into the waterlike a stone. Right in the middle of what once had been thesquare grew a ceiba tree, covered with lilac flowers, hanging inclusters like gigantic grapes. Here and there stood someold ombús, their dark metallic leaves affording animpenetrable shade. Their gnarled and twisted roots, lefthalf-exposed by the fierce rains, gave an unearthly, prehistoriclook to them that chimed in well with the deserted air of thewhole place. It seemed that man for once had been subdued,and that victorious nature had resumed her sway over a regionwherein he had endeavoured to intrude, and had been worsted inthe fight.

Nature had so resumed her sway thatp. 14buildings, planted trees, and pathslong overgrown with grass, seemed to have been decayed forcenturies, although scarce twenty years had passed since they hadbeen deserted and had fallen into decay.

They seemed to show the power of the recuperative force of theprimeval forest, and to call attention to the fact that man hadsuffered a defeat. Only the grass in the deserted squarewas still triumphant, and grew short and green, like an oasis inthe rough natural grasses that flowed nearly up to it, in theclearings of the woods.

The triumph of the older forces of the world had been so finaland complete that on the ruins there had grown no moss, butplants and bushes with great tufts of grass had sprung from them,leaving the stones still fresh as when the houses were firstbuilt. Nature in that part of the New World enters into nocompact with mankind, as she does over here in Europe to touchhis work kindly and almost with a reverent hand, and blend itinto something half compounded of herself. There bread isbread and wine is wine, with no half-tints to make one body ofthe whole. The onep. 15remaining evidence of the aggressionof mankind, which still refused to bow the knee to theoverwhelming genius of the place, was a round bunch of eucalyptustrees that stood up stark and unblushing, the colour of thetrunks and leaves so harshly different from all around them thatthey looked almost vulgar, if such an epithet can be properlyapplied to anything but man. Under their exiguous shadewere spread saddles and bridles, and on the ground sat mensmoking and talking, whilst their staked-out horses fed, fastenedto picket-pins by raw-hide ropes. So far away fromeverything the place appeared that the group of men looked like aband of pioneers upon some frontier, to which the ruins only gavean air of melancholy, but did nothing to dispel theloneliness.

As they sat idly talking, trying to pass, or, as they wouldhave said, trying to make time, suddenly in the distance thewhistle of an approaching steamer brought the outside world intothe little, lonely paradise. Oddly enough it sounded, inthe hot, early morning air, already heavy with the scent of themimosas in full bloom. Butterflies flitted to and frop. 16or soaredabove the scrub, and now and then a wild mare whinnied from thethickets, breaking the silence of the lone valley through whichthe yellow, little stream ran to the Uruguay.

Catching their horses and rolling up the ropes, the men, whohad been sitting underneath the trees, mounted, and following alittle cattle trail, rode to a high bluff looking down thestream.

Panting and puffing, as she belched out a column of blacksmoke, some half a mile away, a tug towing two lighters strovewith the yellow flood. The horsemen stood like statues withtheir horses’ heads stretched out above the water thirtyfeet below.

Although the feet of several of the horses were but an inch ortwo from the sheer limit, the men sat, some of them with one legon their horses’ necks; others lit cigarettes, and one,with his horse sideways to the cliff, leaned sideways, so thatone of his feet was in the air. He pointed to the advancingtug with a brown finger, and exclaimed, “These are thelighters with the horses that must have started yesterday fromGualeguaychú, and ought to have beenp. 17here lastnight.” We had indeed been waiting all the night forthem, sleeping round a fire under the eucalyptus grove, andrising often in the night to smoke and talk, to see our horsesdid not get entangled in their stake ropes, and to listen for thewhistle of the tug.

The tug came on but slowly, fighting her way against the rapidcurrent, with the lighters towing behind her at some distance,looking like portions of a pier that had somehow or another gotadrift.

From where we sat upon our horses we could see the surface ofthe Uruguay for miles, with its innumerable flat islands buriedin vegetation, cutting the river into channels; for the islands,having been formed originally by masses of water-weeds anddrift-wood, were but a foot or two above the water, and all wereelongated, forming great ribbons in the stream.

Upon the right bank stretched the green prairies of the Stateof Entre-Rios, bounded on either side by the Uruguay andParaná. Much flatter than the land upon theUruguayan bank, it still was not a sea of level grass as isp. 18the State ofBuenos Aires, but undulating, and dotted here and there withwhite estancia houses, all buried in great groves of peach treesand of figs. On the left bank on which we stood, and threeleagues off, we could just see Fray Bentos, its houses dazzlinglywhite, buried in vegetation, and in the distance like a thousandlittle towns in Southern Italy and Spain, or even in Morocco, forthe tower of the church might in the distance just as well havebeen a minaret.

The tug-boat slowed a little, and a canoe was slowly paddledout to pilot her into the little haven made by the brook thatflowed down through the valley to the Uruguay.

Sticking out like a fishing-rod, over the stem of the canoewas a long cane, to sound with if it was required.

The group of horsemen on the bluff rode slowly down towardsthe river’s edge to watch the evolutions of the tug, and tohold back the horses when they should be disembarked. Bythis time she had got so near that we could see the horses’heads looking out wildly from the sparred sides of the greatdecked lighters, and hear the thunderous noise theirp. 19feet madetramping on the decks. Passing the bay, into which ran thestream, by about three hundred yards, the tug cast off one of thelighters she was towing, in a backwater. There it remained,the current slowly bearing it backwards, turning round uponitself. In the wild landscape, with ourselves upon ourhorses forming the only human element, the gigantic lighter withits freight of horses looked like the ark, as set forth in someold-fashioned book on Palestine. Slowly the tug crept in,the Indian-looking pilot squatted in his canoe soundingassiduously with his long cane. As the tug drew about sixfeet of water and the lighter not much more than three, theproblem was to get the lighter near enough to the bank, so thatwhen the hawser was cast off she would come in by her ownway. Twice did the tug ground, and with furious shoutingsand with all the crew staving on poles, was she got offagain. At last the pilot found a little deeper channel, andcoming to about some fifty feet away, lying a length or two abovethe spot where the stream entered the great river, she paid herhawser out, and as the lighter drifted shorewards, cast it off,and the greatp.20ark, with all its freight, grounded quite gently on thelittle sandy beach. The Italian captain of the tug, aGenoese, with his grey hair as curly as the wool on asheep’s back, wearing a pale pink shirt, neatly set offwith yellow horseshoes, and a blue gauze necktie tied in aflowing bow, pushed off his dirty little boat, rowed by a negrosailor and a Neapolitan, who dipped their oars into the waterwithout regard to one another, either as to time or stroke.

The captain stepped ashore, mopping his face with a yellowpocket-handkerchief, and in the jargon between Spanish andItalian 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 orPeriphlegethon, he doubly cursed the Custom House, which, as hesaid, was all composed of thieves, the sons of thieves, who wouldbe certainly begetters of the same. Then he calmed down alittle, and drawing out a long Virginia cigar, took out the strawwith seriousness and great dexterity, and then allowed about aquarter of an inch of it to smoulder in a match, lighted it, andp. 21sendingout a cloud of smoke, sat down upon the grass, and fella-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 downthe other lighter past the sandy beach, with a last hearty curseupon God’s mother and her Son, whose birth he hinted notobscurely was of the nature of a mystery, in which he placed nocredence, 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 wasslowly drifting down the stream, two or three men came forward inthe lighter that was already in the little river’s mouth,about a yard or so distant from the edge, and calling to us to beready, for the horses had not eaten for sixteen hours at least,slowly let down the wooden landing-flap. At first thehorses craned their necks and looked out on the grass, but didnot venture to go down the wooden landing-stage; then a big roan,stepping out gingerly and snorting as hep. 22went,adventured, and when he stood upon the grass, neighed shrilly andthen rolled. In a long string the others followed, theclattering of their unshod feet upon the wood sounding likedistant thunder.

Byrne, the Porteño, stout and high-coloured, dressed ingreat thigh boots and baggy breeches, a black silk handkerchieftied loosely round his neck, a black felt hat upon his head, anda great silver watch-chain, with a snaffle-bridle in the middleof it, contrasting oddly with his broad pistol belt, with its oldsilver dollars for a fastening, came ashore, carrying his saddleon his back. Then followed Doherty, whose name, quiteunpronounceable to men of Latin race, was softened in theirspeech to Duarte, making a good Castilian patronymic of it. He too was a Porteño,[22] although of Irishstock. Tall, dark, and dressed in semi-native clothes, heyet, like Byrne, always spoke Spanish when no foreigners werepresent, and in his English that softening of the consonants andbroadening of the vowels was discernible that makes the speech ofmen such as himself havep. 23in it something, as it were,caressing, strangely at variance with their character. Twoor three peons of the usual Gaucho type came after them, allcarrying saddles, and walking much as an alligator waddles on thesand, or as the Medes whom Xenophon describes, mincing upon theirtoes, in order not to blunt the rowels of their spurs.

Our men, Garcia the innkeeper of Fray Bentos, with PabloSuarez, whose negro blood and crispy hair gave him a look as of aRoman emperor of the degenerate times, with Pancho Arrellano andMiguel Paralelo, the Gaucho dandy, swaying upon his horse withhis toes just touching his heavy silver stirrups with a crownunderneath them, Velez and El Pampita, an Indian who had beencaptured young on the south Pampa, were mounted ready to roundthe 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 awayto let the others land.

By this time the Italian captain in his tug had gently broughtthe other lighter to the beach, and from its side another stringof horsesp.24came out on to the grass. They too all rolled,and, seeing the other band, by degrees mixed with it, so thatfour hundred horses soon were feeding ravenously on the sweetgrass just at the little river’s mouth that lay between itsbanks and the thick belt of wood.

Though it was early, still the sun was hot, and for an hour weheld the horses back, keeping them from the water till they hadeaten well.

The Italian tugmaster, having produced a bottle of trade gin(the Anchor brand), and having drank our health, solemnly wipedthe neck of the bottle with his grimy hand and passed it round tous. We also drank to his good health and voyage to theport, that he pronounced as if it were written “BonoAiri,” adding, as it was war-time, “AvantiSavoia” to the toast. He grinned, and with a gestureof his thick dirty hand, adorned with two or threecoppery-looking rings, as it were, embedded in the flesh,pronounced an all-embracing curse on the Tedeschi, and wentaboard the tug.

When he had made the lighters fast, he turned down stream,saluting us with threep. 25shrill blasts upon the whistle, andleft us and our horses thousands of miles away from steam andsmoke, blaspheming skippers, and the noise and push of modernlife.

Humming-birds poised themselves before the purple bunches ofthe ceiba [25] flowers, their tongues thrust into thecalyx and their iridescent wings whirring so rapidly, you couldsee the motion, but not mark the movement, and from the yellowballs of the mimosas came a scent, heady and comforting.

Flocks of green parroquets flew shrieking over the clearing inwhich the horses fed, to their great nests, in which ten or adozen seemed to harbour, and hung suspended from them by theirclaws, or crawled into the holes. Now and then a fewlocusts, wafted by the breeze, passed by upon their way to spreaddestruction in the plantations of young poplars and of orangetrees in the green islands in the stream.

An air of peace gave a strange interest to this little cornerof a world plunged into strife and woe. The herders noddedon theirp.26horses, who for their part hung down their heads, andnow and then shifted their quarters so as to bring their headsinto 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 fierceglare of the ascending sun. Suarez and Paralelo pushed theends of the red silk handkerchiefs they wore tied loosely roundtheir necks, with two points like the wings of a great butterflyhanging upon their shoulders, under their hats, and smokedinnumerable cigarettes, the frontiersman’s specific againstheat or cold. Of all the little company only the PampaIndian showed no sign of being incommoded by the heat. Whenhorses strayed he galloped up to turn them, now striking at thepassing butterflies with his heavy-handled whip, or, lettinghimself fall down from the saddle almost to the ground, drew hisbrown finger on the dust for a few yards, and with a wriggle likea snake got back into his saddle with a yell.

The hours passed slowly, till at last the horses, havingfilled themselves with grass, stopped eating and looked towardsthe river,p.27so we allowed them slowly to stream along towards ashallow inlet on the beach. There they stood drinkinggreedily, up to their knees, until at last three or four of theoutermost began to swim.

Only their heads appeared above the water, and occasionallytheir backs emerging just as a porpoise comes to the surface in atideway, gave them an amphibious air, that linked them somehow oranother with the classics in that unclassic land.

Long did they swim and play, and then, coming out into theshallow water, drink again, stamping their feet and swishingtheir long tails, rise up and strike at one another with theirfeet.

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 inthe soft, drawling accents of the inhabitants of Corrientes, say,“Pucha, Pingos.”[27]

Turning, I saw the speaker, a Gaucho of about thirty years ofage, dressed all in black in the old style of thirty yearsago. His silverp. 28knife, two feet or more in length,stuck in his sash, stuck out on both sides of his body like alateen.

Where he had come from I had no idea, for he appeared to haverisen from the scrub behind me. “Yes,” he said,“Puta, Pingos,” giving the phrase in the moreclassic, if more unregenerate style, “how well they look,just like the garden in the plaza at Fray Bentos in thesun.”

All shades were there, with every variegation and variety ofcolour, white, and fern noses, chestnuts with a stocking on oneleg up to the stifle joint, horses with a ring of white rightround their throats, or with a star as clear as if it had beenpainted 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 Correntinospoke again. “It is a paradise for all those pingoshere in this rincón:[28] grass, water,everything that they can want, shade, and shelter from the windand sun.”

So it appeared to me—the swiftly flowingp. 29river withits green islands; the Pampas grass along the stream; the ruinedbuildings, half-buried in the orange trees run wild; grass,shade, and water: “Pucha, no . . . Puta, Pingos,where are they now?”

p. 30III
FIDELITY

My tall host knocked the ashes fromhis pipe, and crossing one leg over the other looked into thefire.

Outside, the wind howled in the trees, and the rain beat uponthe 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, wherein a deep recess there stood a clock, shaped like a cross, witheighteenth-century cupids carved in ivory fluttering round thebase, and Time with a long scythe standing upon one side.

In the room hung the scent of an old country-house, compoundedof so many samples that it is difficult to enumerate themall. Beeswax and potpourri of roses, damp, andp. 31the scent offoreign woods in the old cabinets, tobacco and wood smoke, withthe all-pervading smell of age, were some of them. Theresult was not unpleasant, and seemed the complement of thewell-bound Georgian books standing demure upon their shelves, theblackening family portraits, and the skins of red deer and of roescattered about the room.

The conversation languished, and we both sat listening to thestorm that seemed to fill the world with noises strange andunearthly, for the house was far from railways, and the avenuesthat lead to it were long and dark. The solitude and thewild night seemed to have recreated the old world, long lost, andchanged, but still remembered in that district just where theHighlands and the Lowlands meet.

At such times and in such houses the country really seemscountry once again, and not the gardened, game-keepered mixtureof shooting ground and of fat fields tilled by machinery to whichmen 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 mesomething, and as I lookedp. 32at him, tall, strong, and upright,his face all mottled by the weather, his homespun coat, patchedon the shoulders with buckskin that once had been white, but nowwas fawn-coloured with wet and from the chafing of his gun, Ifelt the parturition of his speech would probably cost him ashrewd throe. So I said nothing, and he, after havingfilled his pipe, ramming the tobacco down with an old silverIndian seal, made as he told me in Kurachi, and brought home by agreat-uncle fifty years ago, slowly began to speak, not lookingat me, but as it were delivering his thoughts aloud, almostunconsciously, looking now and then at me as if he felt, ratherthan knew, that I was there. As he spoke, the tall, stuffedhen-harrier; the little Neapolitan shrine in tortoiseshell andcoral, 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 withits four silver sides adorned with texts; the rows of blue books,and of Scott’s Novels (the Roxburgh edition), together withthe scent exuding from the Kingwood cabinet; the sprays of whiteScotch rose, outlined against the window blinds; andp. 33the sportingprints and family tree, all neatly framed in oak, created theimpression of being in a world remote, besquired and cut off fromthe century in which we live by more than fifty years. Uponthe rug before the fire the sleeping spaniel whined uneasily, asif, though sleeping, it still scented game, and all the time thestorm roared in the trees and whistled down the passages of thelone country house. One saw in fancy, deep in the recessesof the woods, the roe stand sheltering, and the capercailziesitting on the branches of the firs, wet and dejected, likechickens on a roost, and little birds sent fluttering along,battling for life against the storm. Upon such nights, indistricts such as that in which the gaunt old house was situated,there is a feeling of compassion for the wild things in the woodsthat, stealing over one, bridges the gulf between them andourselves in a mysterious way. Their lot and sufferings,joys, loves, and the epitome of their brief lives, come home tous with something irresistible, making us feel that oursuperiority is an unreal thing, and that in essentials we areone.

My host went on: “Some time ago Ip. 34walked up tothe little moor that overlooks the Clyde, from which you seeships far off lying at the Tail of the Bank, the smoke ofGreenock 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 hillscalled Argyle’s Bowling Green, with the deep gap that marksthe entrance to the Holy Loch. Autumn had just begun totinge the trees, birches were golden, and rowans red, the bentswere brown and dry. A few bog asphodels still showedamongst the heather, and bilberries, dark as black currants, grewhere and there amongst the carpet of green sphagnum and thestag’s-head moss. The heather was all rusty brown,but still there was, as it were, a recollection of the summer inthe air. Just the kind of day you feel inclined to sit downon the lee side of a dry-stone dyke, and smoke and look at somefamiliar self-sown birch that marks the flight of time, as youremember that it was but a year or two ago that it had first shotup above the grass.

“I remember two or three plants of tall hemp-agrimonystill had their flower headsp. 35withered on the stalk, giving them alook of wearing wigs, and clumps of ragwort still had a few beesbuzzing about them, rather faintly, with a belated air. Isaw all this—not that I am a botanist, for you know I canhardly tell the difference between the Cruciferæ and theUmbelliferæ, but because when you live in the country someof the common plants seem to obtrude themselves upon you, and youhave got to notice them in spite of you. So I walked ontill I came to a wrecked plantation of spruce and of Scotchfir. A hurricane had struck it, turning it over almost inrows, as it was planted. The trees had withered in mostcases, and in the open spaces round their upturned roots hundredsof rabbits burrowed, and had marked the adjoining field withlittle paths, just like the lines outside a railway-station.

“I saw all this, not because I looked at it, for if youlook with the idea of seeing everything, commonly everythingescapes you, but because the lovely afternoon induced a feelingof well-being and contentment, and everything seemed to fall intoits right proportion, so that you saw first the harmonious whole,andp. 36thenthe salient points most worth the looking at.

“I walked along feeling exhilarated with the autumn airand the fresh breeze that blew up from the Clyde. Iremember thinking I had hardly ever felt greater content, and asI walked it seemed impossible the world could be so full of rankinjustice, or that the lot of three-fourths of its populationcould really be so hard. A pack of grouse flew past,skimming above the heather, as a shoal of flying-fish skims justabove the waves. I heard their quacking cries as theyalighted on some stooks of oats, and noticed that the last birdto settle was an old hen, and that, even when all were down, Istill could see her head, looking out warily above the yellowgrain. Beyond the ruined wood there came the barking of ashepherd’s dog, faint and subdued, and almost musical.

“I sat so long, smoking and looking at the view, thatwhen I turned to go the sun was sinking and our long, northerntwilight almost setting in.

“You know it,” said my host, and I, who often hadread by its light in summer and thep. 37early autumn, nodded assent,wondering to myself what he was going to tell me, and he wenton.

“It has the property of making all things look a littleghostly, deepening the shadows and altering their values, so thatall that you see seems to acquire an extra significance, not somuch 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 towhich I had seen the pack of grouse fly after it had left thestooks. I crossed into it, and began to walk towards home,knee-deep in bent grass and dwarf willows, with here and there apatch of heather and a patch of bilberries. The softness ofthe ground so dulled my footsteps that I appeared to walk aslightly as a roe upon the spongy surface of the moor. As Ipassed through a slight depression in which the grass grewrankly, I heard a wild cry coming, as it seemed, from justbeneath my feet. Then came a rustling in the grass, and alarge, dark-grey bird sprang out, repeating the wild cry, and ranoff swiftly, trailing a broken wing.

p.38“It paused upon a little hillock fifty yards away,repeating its strange note, and looking round as if it sought forsomething that it was certain was at hand. High in the airthe cry, wilder and shriller, was repeated, and a great grey birdthat 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 offat a swift run, its fellow circling above its head and utteringits cry as if it guided it. I watched them disappear,feeling as if an iron belt was drawn tight round my heart, theircries growing fainter as the deepening shadows slowly closed uponthe moor.”

“I watched them go to what of course must have beencertain death for one of them, furious, with the feelings of amurderer towards the man whose thoughtless folly had been thecause of so much misery. Curse him! I watched them,impotent to help, for as you know the curlew is perhaps thewildest of our native birds; and even had I caught thep. 39wounded oneto set its wing, it would have pined and died. One thing Icould have done, had I but had a gun and had the light beenbetter, I might have shot them both, and had I done so I wouldhave 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 treesoutside have brought it back to me, although it happened yearsago. Sometimes, when people talk about fidelity, saying itis not to be found upon the earth, I smile, for I have seen itwith my own eyes, and manifest, out on that littlemoor.”

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 feelingthat something was expected of me, looked up and murmured,“Yes.”

p. 40IV
“UNO DEI MILLE”

Aveil of mist, the colour of aspider’s web, rose from the oily river. It met themist that wrapped the palm-trees and the unsubstantial-lookinghouses painted in light blue and yellow ochre, as it descendedfrom the hills. Now and then, through the pall of damp, asa light air was wafted up the river from the sea, the bright redearth upon the hills showed like a stain of blood; canoes,paddled by men who stood up, balancing themselves with a slightmovement of the hips, slipped in and out of sight, now crossingjust before the steamer’s bows and then appearingunderneath her stern in a mysterious way. From the longline of tin-roofed sheds a ceaseless stream ofsnuff-and-butter-coloured men trotted continuously, carrying bagsof coffee to an elevator, whichp. 41shot them headlong down thesteamer’s hold. Their naked feet pattered upon thewarm, wet concrete of the dock side, as it were stealthily, witha sound almost alarming, so like their footfall seemed to that ofa wild animal.

The flat-roofed city, buried in sheets of rain, that spoutedfrom the eaves of the low houses on the unwary passers-by, wasstirred unwontedly. Men, who as a general rule lounged atthe corners of the streets, pressing their shoulders up againstthe houses as if they thought that only by their ownself-sacrifice the walls were kept from falling, now walked upand down, regardless of the rain.

In the great oblong square, planted with cocoa-palms, in whichthe statue of Cabrál stands up in cheap Carrara marble,looking as if he felt ashamed of his discovery, a sea of wetumbrellas surged to and fro, forging towards the ItalianConsulate. Squat Genoese and swarthy Neapolitans, withsinewy Piedmontese, and men from every province of the peninsula,all had left their work. They all discoursed in the sametone of voice in which no doubt their ancestors talked in theForum, even when Cicero was speaking, until thep. 42lictorsforced them to keep silence, for their own eloquence is thatwhich in all ages has had most charm for them. The reedyvoices of the Brazilian coloured men sounded a mere twitteringcompared to their full-bodied tones. “Vival’Italia” pealed out from thousands of strong throatsas the crowd streamed from the square and filled the narrowstreets; fireworks that fizzled miserably were shot off in themist, the sticks falling upon the umbrellas of the crowd. Ashift of wind cleared the mist off the river for a moment,leaving an Italian liner full in view. From all her sparsfloated the red and white and green, and on her decks and in therigging, on bridges and on the rail, men, all with bundles intheir hands, clustered like ants, and cheered incessantly. An answering cheer rose from the crowd ashore of “Long livethe Reservists! Viva l’Italia,” as the vesselslowly swung into the stream. From every house excited menrushed out and flung themselves and their belongings into boats,and scrambled up the vessel’s sides as she began tomove. Brown hands were stretched down to them as theyclimbed on board. From every doorstep in the town womenwithp.43handkerchiefs about their heads came out, and with thetears falling from their great, black eyes and running down theirolive cheeks, waved and called out, “Addio Giuseppe; addioGian Battista, abbasso gli Tedeschi,” and then turned backinto their homes to weep. On every side Italians stood andshouted, and still, from railway station and from the river-side,hundreds poured out and gazed at the departing steamer with itsteeming freight of men.

Italians from the coffee plantations of São Paulo, fromthe mines of Ouro Preto, from Goyaz, and from the far interior,all young and sun-burnt, the flower of those Italian workmen whohave built the railways of Brazil, and by whose work the strongfoundations of the prosperity of the Republic have been laid,were out, to turn their backs upon the land in which, for thefirst time, most of them had eaten a full meal. Factoriesstood idle, the coasting schooners all were left unmanned, andhad the coffee harvest not been gathered in, it would have rottedon the hills. The Consulate was unapproachable, and roundit throngs of men struggled to enter, all demanding to gethome. No rain could damp theirp. 44spirits, and those who, after waitinghours, came out with tickets, had a look in their eyes as if theyjust had won the chief prize in the lottery.

Their friends surrounded them, and strained them to theirhearts, the water from the umbrellas of the crowd trickling inrivulets 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 thenext carriage passed. Suddenly a tremor ran through thecrowd, 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 downsuddenly. A mist-dimmed sun shone out, watery, but potent,and in an instant gaining strength, it dried the streets and madea hot steam rise up from the crowd. Slouched hats wereraised up on one side, and pocket handkerchiefs wrapped up inpaper were unfolded and knotted loosely round men’s necks,giving them a look as of domestic bandits as they broke out intoa patriotic song, which ceased with a long drawn-out“Viva,”p.45as the strains of an approaching band were heard and thefootsteps of men marching through the streets in militaryarray.

The coloured policemen rode their horses through the throng,and the streets, which till then had seemed impassable, weresuddenly left clear. Jangling and crashing out theGaribaldian hymn, the band debouched into the square, dressed ina uniform half-German, half-Brazilian, with truncatedpickel-hauben on their heads, in which were stuck a plume ofgaudy 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 hiscolour and his race is able to impart to futile actions,swaggered along beside a jet-black negro playing on theflute. All the executants wore brass-handled swords of akind never seen in Europe for a hundred years. Those whoplayed the trombone and the ophicleide blew till their thick lipsswelled, and seemed to cover up the mouthpieces. Still theyblew on, the perspiration rolling down their cheeks, and a blackboy or two brought up the rear, clashing the cymbals when itseemed good top.46them, quite irrespective of the rest. The noisewas terrifying, and had it not been for the enthusiasm of thecrowd, 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 whomhad given up his work to cross the ocean at his country’scall, had something in them that turned laughter intotears. The sons of peasants, who had left their homes,driven out from Apulean plains or Lombard rice-fields by thepinch of poverty, they now were going back to shed their bloodfor the land that had denied them bread in their own homes. Twice did the band march round the town whilst the procession wasgetting ready for a start, and each time that it passed beforethe Consulate, the Consul came out on the steps, bare-headed, andsaluted with the flag.

Dressed in white drill, tall, grey-haired, and with thewashed-out look of one who has spent many years in a hot country,the Consul evidently had been a soldier in his youth. Hestood and watched the people critically, with the appraising lookof the old officer, so likep. 47to that a grazier puts on at a cattlemarket as he surveys the beasts. “Good stuff,”he muttered to himself, and then drawing his hand across hiseyes, 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 rankswere formed. A policeman on a scraggy horse, with a greatrusty sabre banging at its side, rode slowly down the streets toclear the way, and once again the parti-coloured band passed by,playing the Garibaldian hymn. Rank upon rank of men trampedafter 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 shoulderswell thrown back, three or four hundred men briskly steppedalong, trying to imitate the way the Bersaglieri march inItaly. A shout went up of “Long live theReservists,” as a contingent, drawn from every class of theItalian colony, passed along the street. Dock-labourers andpale-faced clerks in well-cut clothes and unsubstantial bootswalked side by side. Men burnt the colourp. 48of a brick byworking at the harvest rubbed shoulders with Sicilian emigrantslanded 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 thesame clothes. Neapolitans, gesticulating as they marched,and putting out their tongues at the Brazilian negroes, chatteredand joked. To them life was a farce, no matter that thesetting of the stage on which they moved was narrow, the farehard, and the remuneration small. If things were adversethey still laughed on, and if the world was kind they jeered atit and at themselves, disarming both the slings of fortune andher more dangerous smiles with a grimace.

As they marched on, they now and then sketched out inpantomime the fate of any German who might fall into their hands,so vividly that shouts of laughter greeted them, which theyacknowledged by putting out their tongues. Square-shouldered Liguresi succeeded them, with Lombards,Sicilians, and men of the strange negroid-looking race from theBasilicata, almost as dark-skinned as the Brazilian loungers atthe corners of the streets.

p. 49Theyall passed on, laughing, and quite oblivious of what was in storefor most of them—laughing and smoking, and, for the firsttime in their lives, the centre of a show. After them cameanother band; but this time of Italians, well-dressed, andplaying on well-cared-for instruments. Behind them walked alittle group of men, on whose appearance a hush fell on thecrowd. Two of them wore uniforms, and between them,supported by silk handkerchiefs wrapped round his arms, therewalked a man who was welcomed with a scream of joy. Frail,and with trembling footsteps, dressed in a faded old red shirtand knotted handkerchief, his parchment cheeks lit up with afaint flush as the Veteran of Marsala passed like a phantom of aglorious past. With him appeared to march the rest of hiscompanions who set sail from Genoa to call into existence thatItaly for which the young men all around him were prepared tosacrifice their lives.

To the excited crowd he typified all that their fathers hadendured to drive the stranger from their land. The twoCairoli, Nino Bixio, and the heroic figure, wrapped in hisponcho,p.50who rides in glory on the Janiculum, visible from everypoint of Rome, seemed to march by the old man’s side in theimagination of the crowd. Women rushed forward, carryingflowers, and strewed them on the scant grey locks of the oldsoldier; and children danced in front of him, like littleBacchanals. All hats were off as the old man was bornealong, a phantom of himself, a symbol of a heroic past, and stilla beacon, flickering but alight, to show the way towards the goalwhich in his youth had seemed impossible to reach.

Slowly the procession rolled along, surging against the housesas an incoming tide swirls up a river, till it reached theConsulate. It halted, and the old Garibaldian, drawinghimself up, saluted the Italian colours. The Consul,bare-headed and with tears running down his cheeks, stood for amoment, the centre of all eyes, and then, advancing, tore theflag from off its staff, and, after kissing it, wrapped it roundthe frail shoulders of the veteran.

p. 51V
WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND

Anorth-east haar had hung the citywith a pall of grey. It gave an air of hardness to thestone-built houses, blending them with the stone-paved streets,till you could scarce see where the houses ended and the streetbegan. A thin grey dust hung in the air. It colouredeverything, and people’s faces all looked pinched with thefirst touch of autumn cold. The wind, boisterous and gusty,whisked the soot-grimed city leaves about in the high suburb atthe foot of a long range of hills, making one think it would beeasy to have done with life on such an uncongenial day. Tramways were packed with people of the working class, all ofthem of the alert, quick-witted type only to be seen in the greatcity on the Clyde, in all our Empire, and comparablep. 52alone to thedwellers in Chicago for dry vivacity.

By the air they wore of chastened pleasure, all those who knewthem saw that they were intent upon a funeral. Toserious-minded men such as are they, for all their quickness,nothing is so soul-filling, for it is of the nature of a factthat no one can deny. A wedding has its possibilities, forit may lead to children, or divorce, but funerals are in anothercategory. At them the Scottish people is at its best, fornever more than then does the deep underlying tenderness peepthrough the hardness of the rind. On foot and in thetramways, but most especially on foot, converged long lines ofmen and women, though fewer women, for the national prejudicethat in years gone by thought it not decent for a wife to followto the grave her husband’s coffin, still holds a little inthe north. Yet there was something in the crowd that showedit was to attend no common funeral, that they were“stepping west.” No one wore black, except aminister or two, who looked a little like the belated rook yousometimes see amongst a flock of seagulls, in that vast ocean ofgrey tweed.

p. 53Theytramped along, the whistling north-east wind pinching theirfeatures, making their eyes run, and as they went, almostunconsciously they fell into procession, for beyond the tramwayline, a country lane that had not quite put on the graces of astreet, though straggling houses were dotted here and there alongit, received the crowd and marshalled it, as it weremechanically, without volition of its own. Kept in betweenthe walls, and blocked in front by the hearse and long processionof the mourning-coaches, the people slowly surged along. The greater portion of the crowd were townsmen, but there wereminers washed and in their Sunday best. Their faces showedthe blue marks of healed-up scars into which coal dust orgunpowder had become tattooed, scars gained in the battle oftheir lives down in the pits, remembrances of falls of rock or ofoccasions when the mine had “fired upon them.”

Many had known Keir Hardie in his youth, had “wrochtwi’ him out-by,” at Blantyre, at Hamilton, inAyrshire, and all of them had heard him speak a hundredtimes. Even to those who had not heard him, his name wasp. 54as ahousehold word. Miners predominated, but men of every tradewere there. Many were members of that black-coatedproletariat, whose narrow circumstances and daily struggle forappearances make their life harder to them than is the life ofany working man before he has had to dye his hair. Womentramped, too, for the dead leader had been a champion of theirsex. They all respected him, loving him with thathalf-contemptuous gratitude that women often show to men who makethe “woman question” the object of their lives.

After the Scottish fashion at a funeral, greetings were freelypassed, and Reid, who hadna’ seen his friend Mackindersince the time of the Mid-Lanark fight, greeted him with“Ye mind when first Keir Hardie was puttin’ up forParliament,” and wrung his hand, hardened in the mine, withone as hardened, and instantly began to recall elections of thepast.

“Aye, ou aye; ye mean when a’ they Irishwouldna’ hear John Ferguson. Man, he almost gratafter the meeting aboot it.”

p.55“Aye, but they gied Hardie himself a maistrespectful hearing . . . aye, ou aye.”

Others remembered him a boy, and others in his home atCumnock, but all spoke of him with affection, holding him assomething of their own, apart from other politicians, almostapart from men.

Old comrades who had been with him either at this election orthat meeting, had helped or had intended to have helped at thecrises of his life, fought their old battles over, as theytramped along, all shivering in the wind.

The procession reached a long dip in the road, and the head ofit, full half a mile away, could be seen gathered round thehearse, outside the chapel of the crematorium, whose ominous tallchimney, through which the ashes, and perchance the souls ofthousands have escaped towards some empyrean or another, toweredup starkly. At last all had arrived, and the small openspace was crowded, the hearse and carriages appearing stuckamongst the people, like raisins in a cake, so thick they pressedupon them. The chapel, differing from the ordinary chapelof the faiths as much as does a motor driver from a cabman,p. 56had an air asof modernity about it, which contrasted strangely with theordinary looking crowd, the adjacent hills, the decent mourningcoaches and the black-coated undertakers who bore the coffin upthe steps. Outside, the wind whistled and swayed thesoot-stained trees about; but inside the chapel the heat wasstifling.

When all was duly done, and long exordiums passed upon the manwho in his life had been the target for the abuse of press andpulpit, the coffin slid away to its appointed place. Onethought one heard the roaring of the flames, and somehow missedthe familiar lowering of the body . . . earth to earth . . . towhich 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 familiarface is seen no more.

So, standing just outside the chapel in the cold, waiting tillall the usual greetings had been exchanged, I fell a-musing onthe man whom I had known so well. I saw him as he wasthirty years ago, outlined against a bing or standing in a quarryin some mining village,p. 57and heard his once familiar addressof “Men.” He used no other in those days, tothe immense disgust of legislators and other worthy butunimaginative men whom he might chance to meet. About himseemed to stand a shadowy band, most of whom now are dead or lostto view, or have gone under in the fight.

John Ferguson was there, the old-time Irish leader, the friendof Davitt and of Butt. Tall and erect he stood, dressed inhis long frock-coat, his roll of papers in one hand, and with theother stuck into his breast, with all the air of being the lastRoman left alive. Tom Mann, with his black hair, hisflashing eyes, and his tumultuous speech peppered withexpletives. Beside him, Sandy Haddow, of Parkhead, massiveand Doric in his speech, with a grey woollen comforter rolledround his neck, and hands like panels of a door. Champion,pale, slight, and interesting, still the artillery officer, inspite of Socialism. John Burns; and Small, theminers’ agent, with his close brown beard and taste forliterature. Smillie stood near, he of the seven elections,and then check-weigher at a pit, either at Cadzow orLarkhall. There, too, wasp. 58silver-tongued Shaw Maxwell andChisholm Robertson, looking out darkly on the world throughtinted spectacles; with him Bruce Glasier, girt with a red sashand with an aureole of fair curly hair around his head, half poetand half revolutionary.

They were all young and ardent, and as I mused upon them andtheir fate, and upon those of them who have gone down into theoblivion that waits for those who live before their time, Ishivered in the wind.

Had he, too, lived in vain, he whose scant ashes were no doubtby this time all collected in an urn, and did they reallyrepresent all that remained of him?

Standing amongst the band of shadowy comrades I had known, Isaw 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 tohim, and I should think lost dogs. He made mistakes, butthen those who make no mistakes seldom make anything. Hislife was one long battle, so it seemed to me that it was fittingthat at his funeral the north-east wind should howlp. 59amongst thetrees, tossing and twisting them as he himself was twisted andstorm-tossed in his tempestuous passage through the world.

As the crowd moved away, and in the hearse andmourning-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 ofthe town were all transfigured for a moment. The chapeldoor was closed, and from the chimney of the crematorium a faintblue smoke was issuing, which, by degrees, faded into theatmosphere, just as the soul, for all I know, may melt into theair.

When the last stragglers had gone, and bits of paper scurrieduneasily along before the wind, the world seemed empty, withnothing friendly in it, but the shoulder of Ben Lomond peepingout shyly over the Kilpatrick Hills.

p. 60VI
ELYSIUM

The Triad came into my life as Iwalked underneath the arch by which the sentinels sit in Olympianstate upon their rather long-legged chargers, receiving, as istheir due, the silent homage of the passing nurserymaids. Thesoldier in the middle was straight back from the front. Themud of Flanders clung to his boots and clothes. It was“deeched” into his skin, and round his eyes had lefta stain so dark, it looked as if he had been painted for atheatrical make-up. Upon his puttees it had dried sothickly that you could scarcely see the folds. He bore uponhis back his knapsack, carried his rifle in his hand all done upin a case, which gave it, as it seemed to me, a look of hiddenpower, making it more terrible to think of than if it had shonebrightly in thep.61sun. His water-bottle and a pack of some kind hungat his sides, and as he walked kept time to every step. Under his elbow protruded the shaft of something, perhaps anentrenching tool of some sort, or perhaps some weapon strange tocivilians accustomed to the use of stick or umbrella as theironly arm. In himself he seemed a walking arsenal, carryinghis weapons and his baggage on his back, after the fashion of aRoman legionary. The man himself, before the hand ofdiscipline had fashioned him to number something or another, musthave looked fresh and youthful, not very different from athousand others that in time of peace one sees in early morninggoing to fulfil one of those avocations without which no Statecan possibly endure, and yet are practically unknown to those wholive in the vast stucco hives either of Belgravia or Mayfair.

He may have been some five-and-twenty, and was a Londoner or aman from the home counties lying round about. His sunburntface was yet not sunburnt as is the face of one accustomed to theweather all his life. Recent exposure had made his skin allfeverish,p.62and his blue eyes were fixed, as often are the eyes ofsailors 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 quiteunconscious of everything but having got the beloved object oftheir care safe home again. Upon the right side, holdingfast to the warrior’s arm, and now and then nestling closeto his side, walked his sweetheart, a dark-haired girl, dressedin the miserable cheap finery our poorer countrywomen wear,instead of well-made plainer clothes that certainly would costthem less and set them off a hundredfold the more. Now andagain she pointed out some feature of the town with pride, aswhen they climbed the steps under the column on which stands thestatue of the Duke of York. The soldier, without looking,answered, “I know, Ethel, Dook of York,” and hitchedhis pack a little higher on his back.

His sister, hanging on his left arm, never said anything, butwalked along as in a dream; and he, knowing that she was thereand understood, spoke little to her, except to murmur “Goodold Gladys” now and then, and pressp. 63her to hisside. As they passed by the stunted monument, on which thecrowd of little figures standing round a sledge commemorates theFranklin Expedition, in a chill Arctic way, the girl upon theright jerked her head towards it and said, “That’sSir John Franklin, George, he as laid down his life to find theNorth-West Passage, one of our ’eroes, you remember’im.” To which he answered, “Oh yes,Frenklin”; then looking over at the statue of CommanderScott, added, “’ee done his bit too,” with anappreciative air. They gazed upon the Athenæum andthe other clubs with that air of detachment that all Englishmenaffect when they behold a building or a monument—taking it,as it seems to me, as something they have no concern with, justas if it stood in Petrograd or in Johannesburg.

The homing triad passed into Pall Mall, oblivious of theworld, so lost in happiness that they appeared the only livingpeople in the street. The sister, who had said so little,when she saw her brother shift his knapsack, asked him to let hercarry it. He smiled, and knowing what she felt, handed hisrifle to her,p.64remarking, “’Old it the right side up, oldgirl, or else it will go off.”

And so they took their way through the enchanted streets, notfeeling either the penetrating wind or the fine rain, for theseare but material things, and they were wrapped apart from thewhole world. Officers of all ranks passed by them, someyoung and smart, and others paunchy and middle-aged; but theywere non-existent to the soldier, who saw nothing but thegirls. Most of the officers looked straight before them,with an indulgent air; but two young men with red bands roundtheir caps were scandalised, and muttering something as to thediscipline of the New Army, drew themselves up stiffly andstrutted off, like angry game-cocks when they eye each other inthe ring.

The triad passed the Rag, and on the steps stood two oldcolonels, their faces burnt the colour of a brick, and theirmoustaches stiff as the bristles of a brush. They eyed thepassing little show, and looking at each other broke into asmile. They knew that they would never walk oblivious ofmankind, linked to a woman’s arm; but perhaps memories ofp. 65what theyhad done stirred in their hearts, for both of them at the samemoment ejaculated a modulated “Ha!” ofsympathy. All this time I had walked behind the three youngpeople, unconsciously, as I was going the same road, catchinghalf phrases now and then, which I was half ashamed to hear.

They reached the corner of St. James’s Square, and ourpaths separated. Mine took me to the London Library tochange a book, and theirs led straight to Elysium, for five longdays.

p. 66VII
HEREDITY

Right along the frontier betweenUruguay and Rio Grande, the southern province of Brazil, theSpanish and the Portuguese sit face to face, as they have sat forages, looking at, but never understanding, one another, both inthe Old and the New World.

In Tuy and Valenza, Monzon and Salvatierra, at Poncho Verdeand Don Pedrito, Rivera and Santa Ana do Libramento, and far awayabove Cruz Alta, where the two clumps of wood that mark old campsof the two people are called O Matto Castelhano and O MattoPortuguez, the rivalry of centuries is either actual or at leastcommemorated on the map.

The border-line that once made different peoples of thedwellers at Floriston andp. 67Gretna, still prevails in the littlecastellated towns, which snarl at one another across the Minho,just as they did of old.

“Those people in Valenza would steal thesacrament,” says the street urchin playing on the steps ofthe half fortalice, half church that is the cathedral of Tuy onthe Spanish side.

His fellow in Valenza spits towards Tuy and remarks,“From Spain come neither good marriages nor the wholesomewinds.”

So on to Salvatierra and Monzon, or any other of the villagesor towns upon the river, and in the current of the native speechthere still remains some saying of the kind, with its sharp edgesstill unworn after six centuries of use. Great is the powerof artificial barriers to restrain mankind. No proverb everpenned is more profound than that which sets out, “Fearguards the vineyard, not the fence around it.”

So Portuguese and Spaniards in their peninsula have fought andhated and fought and ridiculed each other after the fashion ofchildren that have quarrelled over a broken toy. Blood andan almost common speech,p. 68for both speak one Romance when allis said, have both been impotent against the custom-house, theflag, the foolish dynasty, for few countries in the world havehad more foolish kings than Spain and Portugal.

That this should be so in the Old World is natural enough, forthe dead hand still rules, and custom and tradition have morestrength than race and creed; but that the hatred should havebeen transplanted to America, and still continue, is a proof thatfolly never dies.

In the old towns on either side of the Minho the exterior lifeof the two peoples is the same.

In the stone-built, arcaded plazas women still gather roundthe fountain and fill their iron-hooped water-barrels throughlong tin pipes, shaped like the tin valences used inwine-stores. Donkeys stand at the doors, carrying charcoalin esparto baskets, whether in Portugal or Spain, and goatsparade the streets driven by goatherds, wearing shapeless,thickly-napped felt hats and leather overalls.

The water-carrier in both countries calls out“agua-a-a,” making it sound like Arabic,p. 69and longtrains of mules bring brushwood for the baker’s furnace(even as in Morocco), or great nets of close-chopped straw forhorses’ fodder.

At eventide the girls walk on the plaza, their mothers, aunts,or servants following them as closely as their shadows on a sunnyafternoon. In quiet streets lovers on both sides of theriver talk from a first-floor balcony to the street, or whisperthrough the window-bars on the ground floor. The littleshops under the low arches of the arcaded streets have yellowflannel drawers for men and petticoats of many colours hangingclose outside their doors, on whose steps sleep yellow dogs.

The jangling bells in the decaying lichen-grown old towers ofthe churches jangle and clang in the same key, and as appearswithout a touch ofodium theologicum. The full bassvoices boom from the choirs, in which the self-same organs intheir walnut cases have the same rows of golden trumpets stickingout into the aisle.

One faith, one speech, one mode of daily life, the same sharp“green” wine, the samep. 70bread made of maize and rye, and thesame heaps of red tomatoes and green peppers glistening in thesun in the same market-places, and yet a rivalry and a differenceas far apart as east from west still separates them.

In both their countries the axles of the bullock-carts, withsolid wheels and wattled hurdle sides, like those upon a Romancoin, still creak and whine to keep away the wolves.

In the soft landscape the maize fields wave in the richhollows on both sides of the Minho.

The pine woods mantle the rocky hills that overhang thedeep-sea lochs that burrow in both countries deep into theentrails of the land.

The women, with their many-coloured petticoats andhandkerchiefs, chaffer at the same fairs to which their husbandsride their ponies in their straw cloaks.

At “romerias” the peasantry dance to the bagpipeand the drum the self-same dances, and both climb the self-samesteep grey steps through the dark lanes, all overhung with gorseand broom, up to the Calvaries, where the three crosses take onthe self-same growthp. 71of lichen and of moss. Yet the“boyero” who walks before the placid oxen, with theircream-coloured flanks and liquid eyes of onyx, feels he isdifferent, right down to the last molecule of his being, from theman upon the other side.

So was it once, and perhaps is to-day, with those who dwell inLiddes or Bewcastle dales. Spaniard and Portuguese, as Scotand Englishman in older times, can never see one matter from thesame point of view. The Portuguese will say that theCastilian is a rogue, and the Castilian returns thecompliment. Neither have any reason to support their view,for who wants reason to support that which he feels is true.

It may be that the Spaniard is a little rougher and thePortuguese more cunning; but if it is the case or not, theantipathy remains, and has been taken to America.

From the Laguna de Merin to the Cuareim, that is to say, alonga frontier of two hundred leagues, the self-same feeling rulesupon both sides of the line. There, as in Portugal andSpain, although the country, whether in Uruguay or in Brazil, islittle different, yet itp. 72has suffered something indefinable bybeing occupied by members of the two races so near and yet sodifferent from one another.

Great rolling seas of waving grass, broken by a few stonyhills, are the chief features of the landscape of the frontiersin both republics. Estancia houses, dazzlingly white,buried in peach and fig groves, dot the plains, looking likeislands in the sea of grass. Great herds of cattle roamabout, and men on horseback, galloping like clockwork, sailacross the plains like ships upon a sea. Along theriver-banks grow strips of thorny trees, and as the frontier linetrends northward palm-trees appear, and monkeys chatter in thewoods. Herds of wild asses, shyer than antelopes, gaze atthe passing horsemen, scour off when he approaches, and are lostinto the haze. Stretches of purple borage, known as La FlorMorada, carpet the ground in spring and early summer, givingplace later on to red verbena; and on the edges of the streamsthe tufts of the tall Pampa grass recall the feathers on a PampaIndian’s spear.

Bands of grave ostriches feed quietly upon the tops of hills,and stride away whenp. 73frightened, down the wind, with wingsstretched out to catch the breeze.

Clothes are identical, or almost so; the poncho and the loosetrousers stuffed into high patent-leather boots, the hat kept inits place by a black ribbon with two tassels, are to be seen onboth sides of the frontier. Only in Brazil a sword stuckthrough the girth replaces the long knife of Uruguay. Perhaps in that one item all the differences between the racesmanifests itself, for the sword is, as it were, a symbol, for noone ever saw one drawn or used in any way but as anornament. It is, in fact, but a survival of old customs,which are cherished both by the Portuguese and the Brazilians asthe apple of the eye.

The vast extent of the territory of Brazil, itsinaccessibility, and the enormous distances to be travelled fromthe interior to the coast, and the sense of remoteness from theouter world, have kept alive a type of man not to be found in anyother country where the Christian faith prevails. Risingsof fanatics still are frequent; one is going on to-day inParaná, and that of the celebrated Antoniop. 74Concelheiro,twenty years ago, shook the whole country to its core. Slavery existed in the memory of people still alive. Womenin the remoter towns are still secluded almost as with theMoors. The men still retain something of the Middle Ages intheir love of show. All in the province of Rio Grande aregreat horsemen, and all use silver trappings on a black horse,and all have horses bitted so as to turn round in the air, justas a hawk turns on the wing.

The sons of men who have been slaves abound in all the littlefrontier towns, and old grey-headed negroes, who have been slavesthemselves, still hang about the great estates. Upon theother side, in Uruguay, the negro question was solved once andfor all in the Independence Wars, for then the negroes were allformed into battalions by themselves and set in the forefront ofthe battle, to die for liberty in a country where they all wereslaves the month before. War turned them into heroes, andsent them out to die.

When once their independence was assured, the Uruguayans fellinto line like magic with the modern trend of thought. Liberty top.75them meant absolute equality, for throughout the land nosnob is found to leave a slug’s trail on the face of man byhis subserviency.

Women were held free, that is, as free as it is possible forthem to be in any Latin-peopled land. Across the line, evento-day, a man may stay a week in a Brazilian country house andnever see a woman but a mulata girl or an old negro crone. Still he feels he is watched by eyes he never sees, listens tovoices singing or laughing, and a sense of mystery prevails.

Spaniards and Portuguese in the New World have blended just aslittle as they have done at home. Upon the frontier all thewilder spirits of Brazil and Uruguay have congregated. There they pursue the life, but little altered, that theirfathers led full fifty years ago. All carry arms, and usethem on small provocation, for if an accident takes place thefrontier shields the slayer, for to pursue him usually entails anational quarrel, and so the game goes on.

So Jango Chaves, feeling inclined for sport, or, as he mighthave said, to “brincar un bocadinho,” saddled up hishorse. Hep.76mounted, and, as his friends were looking on, ran itacross the plaza of the town, and, turning like a seagull in itsflight, came back to where his friends were standing, and stoppedit with a jerk.

His silver harness jingled, and his heavy spurs, hangingloosely on his high-heeled boots, clanked like fetters, as hisactive little horse bounded into the air and threw the sand up ina shower.

The rider, sitting him like a statue, with the far-off lookhorsemen of every land assume when riding a good horse and whenthey know they are observed, slackened his hand and let him fallinto a little measured trot, arching his neck and playing withthe bit, under which hung a silver eagle on a hinge. Wavinghis hand towards his friends, Jango rode slowly through thetown. He passed through sandy streets of flat-roofed,whitewashed houses, before whose doors stood hobbled horsesnodding in the sun.

He rode past orange gardens, surrounded by brown walls ofsun-baked bricks with the straw sticking in them, just as it haddried. In the waste the castor-oil bushes formed littlep. 77jungles, outof which peered cats, exactly as a tiger peers out of a realjungle in the woods.

The sun poured down, and was reverberated back from the whitehouses, and on the great gaunt building, where thecaptain-general lived, floated the green-and-yellow flag of therepublic, looking like a bandana handkerchief. He passedthe negro rancheria, without which no such town as Santa Anna doLibramento is complete, and might have marked, had he not beentoo much used to see them, the naked negro children playing inthe sand. Possibly, if he marked them, he referred to themas “cachorrinhos pretos,” for the old leaven of thedays of slavery is strongly rooted in Brazil. So he rodeon, a slight and graceful figure, bending to each movement of hishorse, his mobile, olive-coloured features looking like a bronzemasque in the fierce downpour of the sun.

As he rode on, his whip, held by a thong and dangling from hisfingers, swung against his horse’s flanks, keeping timerhythmically to its pace. He crossed the rivulet that flowsbetween the towns and came out on the little open plain thatseparates them. Fromp. 78habit, or because he felt himselfamongst unfriendly or uncomprehended people, he touched his knifeand his revolvers, hidden beneath his summer poncho, with hisright hand, and with his bridle arm held high, ready for alleventualities, passed into just such another sandy street as hehad left behind.

Save that all looked a little newer, and that the stores werebetter supplied with goods, and that there were no negro huts,the difference was slight between the towns. True that thegreen-and-yellow flag had given place to the barredblue-and-white of Uruguay. An armed policeman stood at thecorners of the main thoroughfares, and water-carts went up anddown at intervals. The garden in the plaza had awell-tended flower-garden.

A band was playing in the middle of it, and Jango could notfail to notice that Rivera was more prosperous than was hisnative town.

Whether that influenced him, or whether it was the glass ofcaña which he had at the first pulperia, is a moot point,or whether the old antipathy between the races brought by hisancestors from the peninsula; anyhow, he left his horse untied,and with thep.79reins thrown down before it as he got off to have hisdrink. When he came out, a policeman called to him tohobble it or tie it up.

Without a word he gathered up his reins, sprang at a boundupon his horse, and, drawing his mother-of-pearl-handled pistol,fired at the policeman almost as he sprang. The shot threwup a shower of sand just in the policeman’s face, andprobably saved Jango’s life. Drawing his pistol, theman fired back, but Jango, with a shout and pressure of hisheels, was off like lightning, firing as he rode, and zig-zaggingacross the street. The policeman’s shot went wide,and Jango, turning in the saddle, fired again and missed.

By this time men with pistols in their hands stood at thedoors of all the houses; but the Brazilian passed so rapidly,throwing himself alternately now on the near side, now on the offside of his horse, hanging by one foot across the croup andholding with the other to the mane, that he presented no mark forthem to hit.

As he passed by the “jefatura” where the alcaldeand his friends were sitting smokingp. 80just before the door, he fired withsuch good aim that a large piece of plaster just above theirheads fell, covering them with dust.

Drawing his second pistol and still firing as he went, hedashed out of the town, in spite of shots from every side, hishorse bounding like lightning as his great silver spurs plougheddeep into its sides. When he had crossed the little bit ofneutral ground, and just as a patrol of cavalry appeared, readyto gallop after him, a band of men from his own town came out tomeet him.

He stopped, and shouting out defiance to the Uruguayans, drewup his horse, and lit a cigarette. Then, safe beyond thefrontier, trotted on gently to meet his friends, his horseshaking white foam from off its bit, and little rivulets of blooddripping down from its sides into the sand.

p.81VIII
EL TANGO ARGENTINO

Motor-cars swept up to the coveredpassage of the front door of the hotel, one of thoseinternational caravansaries that pass their clients through asort of vulgarising process that blots out every type. Itmakes the Argentine, the French, the Englishman, and the Americanall alike before the power of wealth.

The cars surged up as silently as snow falls from a fir-treein a thaw, and with the same soft swishing noise. Tall,liveried porters opened the doors (although, of course, each carwas duly furnished with a footman) so nobly that any one of themwould have graced any situation in the State.

The ladies stepped down delicately, showing a fleeting visionof a leg in a transparent stocking, just for an instant, throughthep.82slashing of their skirts. They knew that everyman, their footman, driver, the giant watchers at the gate, andall who at the time were going into the hotel, saw and were movedby what they saw just for a moment; but the fact did not troublethem at all. It rather pleased them, for the most virtuousfeel a pleasurable emotion when they know that they excite. So it will be for ever, for thus and not by votes alone they showthat they are to the full men’s equals, let the law do itsworst.

Inside the hotel, heated by steam, and with an atmosphere ofscent and flesh that went straight to the head just as the fumesof whisky set a drinker’s nerves agog, were seated all thefinest flowers of the cosmopolitan society of the Frenchcapital.

Lesbos had sent its legions, and women looked at one anotherappreciatively, scanning each item of their neighbours’clothes, and with their colour heightening when by chance theireyes met those of another priestess of their sect.

Rich rastaquaoures, their hats too shiny, and their boots tootight, their coats fitting too closely, their sticks mounted withgreatp. 83goldknobs, walked about or sat at little tables, all talking strangevarieties of French.

Americans, the men apparently all run out of the same mould,the women apt as monkeys to imitate all that they saw in dress,in fashion and in style, and more adaptable than any other womenin the world from lack of all traditions, conversed in their highnasal tones. Spanish-Americans from every one of theRepublics were well represented, all talking about money: of howDoña Fulana Perez had given fifteen hundred francs for hernew hat, or Don Fulano had just scored a million on theBourse.

Jews and more Jews, and Jewesses and still more Jewesses, werethere, some of them married to Christians and turned Catholic,but betrayed by their Semitic type, although they talked ofLourdes and of the Holy Father with the best.

After the “five-o’clock,” turned to a heavymeal of toast and buns, of Hugel loaf, of sandwiches, and of hotcake, the scented throng, restored by the refection after theday’s hard work of shopping, of driving here and there likesouls in purgatory to call on people that they detested, andother labours of a likep. 84nature, slowly adjourned to a greathall in which a band was playing. As they walked throughthe passages, men pressed close up to women and murmured in theirears, telling them anecdotes that made them flush and giggle asthey protested in an unprotesting style. Those were thedays of the first advent of the Tango Argentino, the dance thatsince has circled the whole world, as it were, in a movement ofthe hips. Ladies pronounced it charming as they half closedtheir eyes and let a little shiver run across their lips. Men said it was the only dance that was worth dancing. Itwas so Spanish, so unconventional, and combined all theæsthetic movements of the figures on an Etruscan vase withthe strange grace of the Hungarian gipsies . . . it was so, asone may say, so . . . as you may say . . . you know.

When all were seated, the band, Hungarians, ofcourse,—oh, those dear gipsies!—struck out into arhythm, half rag-time, half habañera, canaille, butsensuous, and hands involuntarily, even the most aristocratichands—of ladies whose immediate progenitors had beenpork-packers in Chicago, or gambusinosp. 85who had struck it rich inZacatecas,—tapped delicately, but usually a little out oftime, upon the backs of chairs.

A tall young man, looking as if he had got a holiday from atailor’s fashion plate, his hair sleek, black, and stuckdown to his head with a cosmetic, his trousers so immaculatelycreased they seemed cut out of cardboard, led out a girl dressedin a skirt so tight that she could not have moved in it had itnot been cut open to the knee.

Standing so close that one well-creased trouser legdisappeared in the tight skirt, he clasped her round the waist,holding her hand almost before her face. They twirledabout, now bending low, now throwing out a leg, and then againrevolving, all with a movement of the hips that seemed to blendthe well-creased trouser and the half-open skirt into oneinharmonious whole. The music grew more furious and thesteps multiplied, till with a bound the girl threw herself for aninstant into the male dancer’s arms, who put her back againupon the ground with as much care as if she had been a new-laidegg, and the pair bowed and disappeared.

p.86Discreet applause broke forth, and exclamations such as“wonderful,” “what grace,” “Viventles Espagnoles,” for the discriminating audience took noheed of independence days, of mere political changes and thelike, and seemed to think that Buenos Aires was a part of Spain,never having heard of San Martin, Bolivar, Paez, and theirfellow-liberators.

Paris, London, and New York were to that fashionable crowd theworld, and anything outside—except, of course, theHungarian gipsies and the Tango dancers—barbarous andbeyond the pale.

After the Tango came “La MaxixeBrésilienne,” rather more languorous and morebefitting to the dwellers in the tropics than was its cousin fromthe plains. Again the discreet applause broke out, theaudience murmuring “charming,” that universaladjective that gives an air of being in a perpetualpastrycook’s when ladies signify delight. Smiles andsly glances at their friends showed that the dancers’efforts at indecency had been appreciated.

Slowly the hall and tea-rooms of the greatp. 87hotel emptiedthemselves, and in the corridors and passages the smell of scentstill lingered, just as stale incense lingers in a church.

Motor-cars took away the ladies and their friends, anddrivers, who had shivered in the cold whilst the crowd insidesweated in the central heating, exchanged the time of day withthe liveried doorkeepers, one of them asking anxiously,“Dis, Anatole, as-tu vu mes vaches?”

With the soft closing of a well-hung door the last car tookits perfumed freight away, leaving upon the steps a group of men,who remained talking over, or, as they would say, undressing, allthe ladies who had gone.

“Argentine Tango, eh?” I thought, after my friendshad left me all alone. Well, well, it has changeddevilishly upon its passage overseas, even discounting thedifference of the setting of the place where first I saw itdanced so many years ago. So, sauntering down, I took achair far back upon the terrace of the Café de la Paix, sothat the sellers ofLa Patrie, and the men who have somestrange new toy, or views of Paris in a long albump. 88like a brokenconcertina, should not tread upon my toes.

Over a Porto Blanc and a Brazilian cigarette, lulled by thenoise of Paris and the raucous cries of the street-vendors, Ifell into a doze.

Gradually the smell of petrol and of horse-dung, the two mostpotent perfumes in our modern life, seemed to be blownaway. Dyed heads and faces scraped till they looked blue asa baboon’s; young men who looked like girls, with paintedfaces and with mincing airs; the raddled women, ragged men, andhags huddled in knitted shawls, lame horses, and taxi-cab driverssitting nodding on their boxes—all faded into space, andfrom the nothing that is the past arose another scene.

I saw myself with Witham and his brother, whose name I haveforgotten, Eduardo Peña, Congreve, and Eustaquio Medina,on a small rancho in an elbow of the great River Yi. Therancho stood upon a little hill. A quarter of a mile or soaway the dense and thorny monté of hard-wood trees thatfringed the river seemed to roll up towards it like a sea. The house was built of yellow pine sent from the UnitedStates. The roof was shingled,p. 89and the rancho stood planked downupon the plain, looking exactly like a box. Some fiftyyards away stood a thatched hut that served as kitchen, and onits floor the cattle herders used to sleep upon their horse-gearwith their feet towards the fire.

The corrals for horses and for sheep were just a littlefarther off, and underneath a shed a horse stood saddled day in,day out, and perhaps does so yet, if the old rancho still resiststhe winds.

Four or five horses, saddled and bridled, stood tied to agreat post, for we were just about to mount to ride a league ortwo to a Baile, at the house of Frutos Barragán. Just after sunset we set out, as the sweet scent that the grassesof the plains send forth after a long day of heat perfumed theevening air.

The night was clear and starry, and above our heads was hungthe Southern Cross. So bright the stars shone out that onecould see almost a mile away; but yet all the perspective of theplains and woods was altered. Hillocks were sometimesundistinguishable, at other times loomed up like houses. Woods seemed to sway and heave, and by the sides of streamsp. 90bunches ofPampa grass stood stark as sentinels, their feathery tuftslooking like plumes upon an Indian’s lance.

The horses shook their bridles with a clear, ringing sound asthey stepped double, and their riders, swaying lightly in theirseats, seemed to form part and parcel of the animals theyrode.

Now and then little owls flew noiselessly beside us, circlingabove our heads, and then dropped noiselessly upon a bush. Eustaquio Medina, who knew the district as a sailor knows theseas where he was born, rode in the front of us. As hishorse shied at a shadow on the grass or at the bones of some deadanimal, he swung his whip round ceaselessly, until the moonlightplaying on the silver-mounted stock seemed to transform it to anaureole that flickered about his head. Now and thensomebody dismounted to tighten up his girth, his horse twistingand turning round uneasily the while, and, when he raised hisfoot towards the stirrup, starting off with a bound.

Time seemed to disappear and space be swallowed in theintoxicating gallop, so thatp. 91when Eustaquio Medina paused for aninstant to strike the crossing of a stream, we felt annoyed withhim, although no hound that follows a hot scent could have gonetruer 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 andturned to us.

“There is the house,” he said, “just at thebottom of the hollow, only five squares away,” and as wesaw the flicker of the lights, he struck his palm upon his mouthafter the Indian fashion, and raised a piercing cry. Easinghis hand, he drove his spurs into his horse, who started with abound into full speed, and as he galloped down the hill wefollowed him, all yelling furiously.

Just at the hitching-post we drew up with a jerk, our horsessnorting as they edged off sideways from the black shadow that itcast upon the ground. Horses stood about everywhere, sometied and others hobbled, and from the house there came thestrains of an accordion and the tinkling of guitars.

Asking permission to dismount, we hailedp. 92the owner ofthe house, a tall, old Gaucho, Frutos Barragán, as hestood waiting by the door, holding a maté in hishand. He bade us welcome, telling us to tie our horses up,not too far out of sight, for, as he said, “It is not goodto give facilities to rogues, if they should chance to beabout.”

In the low, straw-thatched rancho, with its eaves blackened bythe smoke, three or four iron bowls, filled with mare’sfat, and with a cotton wick that needed constant trimming, stuckupon iron cattle-brands, were burning fitfully.

They cast deep shadows in the corners of the room, and whenthey flickered up occasionally the light fell on the dark andsun-tanned faces of the tall, wiry Gauchos and the light cottondresses of the women as they sat with their chairs tilted upagainst the wall. Some thick-set Basques, an Englishman ortwo in riding breeches, and one or two Italians made up thecompany. The floor was earth, stamped hard till it shonelike cement, and as the Gauchos walked upon it, their heavy spursclinked with a noise like fetters as they trailed them on theground.

p. 93An old,blind Paraguayan played on the guitar, and a huge negroaccompanied him on an accordion. Their united effortsproduced a music which certainly was vigorous enough, and now andthen, one or the other of them broke into a song, high-pitchedand melancholy, which, if you listened to it long enough, forcedyou to try to imitate its wailing melody and its strangeintervals.

Fumes of tobacco and rum hung in the air, and of a strong andheady wine from Catalonia, much favoured by the ladies, whichthey drank from a tumbler, passing it to one another, after thefashion of a grace-cup at a City dinner, with greatgravity. At last the singing ceased, and the orchestrastruck up a Tango, slow, marked, and rhythmical.

Men rose, and, taking off their spurs, walked gravely to thecorner of the room where sat the women huddled together as ifthey sought protection from each other, and with a compliment ledthem out upon the floor. The flowing poncho and the loosechiripá, which served as trousers, swung about just as thetartans of a Highlander swing as he dances, giving an air of easeto all the movements ofp. 94the Gauchos as they revolved, theirpartners’ heads peeping above their shoulders, and theirhips moving to and fro.

At times they parted, and set to one another gravely, and thenthe man, advancing, clasped his partner round the waist andseemed to push her backwards, with her eyes half-closed and anexpression of beatitude. Gravity was the keynote of thescene, and though the movements of the dance were as significantas it was possible for the dancers to achieve, the effect wasgraceful, and the soft, gliding motion and the waving of theparti-coloured clothes, wild and original, in the dim, flickeringlight.

Rum flowed during the intervals. The dancers wiped theperspiration from their brows, the men with the silkhandkerchiefs they wore about their necks, the women with theirsleeves. Tangos, cielitos, and pericones succeeded oneanother, and still the atmosphere grew thicker, and the lightsseemed to flicker through a haze, as the dust rose from the mudfloor. Still the old Paraguayan and the negro kept onplaying with the sweat running down their faces, smoking anddrinking rum in their brief intervals of rest, and when the musicp. 95ceased fora moment, the wild neighing of a horse tied in the moonlight to apost, sounded as if he called his master to come out and gallophome again.

The night wore on, and still the negro and the Paraguayanstuck at their instruments. Skirts swung and ponchos waved,whilst maté circulated amongst the older men as they stoodgrouped about the door.

Then came a lull, and as men whispered in theirpartners’ ears, telling them, after the fashion of theGauchos, that they were lovely, their hair like jet, their eyesbright as “las tres Marias,” and all the complimentswhich in their case were stereotyped and handed down forgenerations, loud voices rose, and in an instant two Gauchosbounded out upon the floor.

Long silver-handled knives were in their hands, their ponchoswrapped round their left arms served them as bucklers, and asthey crouched, like cats about to spring, they poured outblasphemies.

“Stop this!” cried Frutos Barragán; buteven as he spoke, a knife-thrust planted in the stomach stretchedone upon the floor. Blood gushed out from his mouth, hisbelly fell likep.96a pricked bladder, and a dark stream of blood trickledupon the ground as he lay writhing in his death agony.

The iron bowls were overturned, and in the dark girls screamedand the men crowded to the door. When they emerged into themoonlight, leaving the dying man upon the floor, the murderer wasgone; and as they looked at one another there came a voiceshouting out, “Adios, Barragán. Thus doesVicente Castro pay his debts when a man tries to steal hisgirl,” and the faint footfalls of an unshod horse gallopingfar out upon the plain.

I started, and the waiter standing by my side said,“Eighty centimes”; and down the boulevard echoed theharsh cry, “La Patrie, achetezLaPatrie,” and the rolling of the cabs.

p. 97IX
IN A BACKWATER

“This ’ere war,now,” said the farmer, in the slow voice that tells of lifepassed amongst comfortable surroundings into which haste hasnever once intruded, “is a ’orridbusiness.”

He leaned upon a half-opened gate, keeping it swaying to andfro a little with his foot. His waistcoat was unbuttoned,showing his greasy braces and his checked blue shirt. Hisbox-cloth gaiters, falling low down upon his high-lows, left agap between them and his baggy riding-breeches, just below theknee. His flat-topped bowler hat was pushed back over thefringe of straggling grey hair upon his neck. His face wasburned a brick-dust colour with the August sun, and now and thenhe mopped his forehead with a red handkerchief.

p. 98Hislittle holding, an oasis in the waste of modern scientificfarming, was run in the old-fashioned way, often to be seen inthe home counties, as if old methods linger longest where theyare least expected, just as a hunted fox sometimes takes refugein a rectory.

His ideas seemed to have become unsettled with constantreading of newspapers filled with accounts of horrors, and hisspeech, not fluent at the best of times, was slower and morehalting than his wont.

He told how he had just lost his wife, and felt more than alittle put about to get his dairy work done properly without herhelp.

“When a man’s lost his wife it leaves him,somehow, as if he were like a ’orse hitched on one side ofthe 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 whenI’m alone in the ’ouse of night.”

The park-like English landscape, with its hedgerow trees andits lush fields, that does not look like as if it really were thecountry, but seems a series of pleasure-grounds cut off intoconvenient squares, was at its time of greatestp. 99beauty andits greatest artificiality. Cows swollen with grass tillthey looked like balloons lay in the fields and chewed thecud. Geese cackled as they strayed upon the common, just asthey appear to cackle in a thousand water-colours. The humof bees was in the limes. Dragon-flies hawked swiftly overthe oily waters of the two slow-flowing rivers that made the farmalmost an island in a suburban Mesopotamia, scarce twenty milesaway from Charing Cross. An air of peace and ofcontentment, of long well-being and security, was evident ineverything. Trees flourished, though stag-headed, underwhich the Roundhead troopers may have camped, or at the least,veterans from Marlborough’s wars might have sat underneaththeir shade, and smoked as they retold their fights.

A one-armed signboard, weathered, and with the letteringalmost illegible, pointed out the bridle-path to Ditchley, nowlittle used, except by lovers on a Sunday afternoon, but wherethe 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 top. 100the reapingmachine stood resting, now and again shaking the tassels on theirlittle netted ear-covers. They, too, came of a breed longused to peace and plenty, good food and treatment, and shorthours of work. The kindly landscape and the settled life ofcenturies had formed the kind of man of which the farmer was aprototype,—slow-footed and slow-tongued, and with his mindas bowed as were his shoulders with hard work, by the continualpressure of the hierarchy of wealth and station, that had lefthim as much adscript to them as any of his ancestors had beenbound to their glebes. He held theDaily Mail, hisgospel and hisvade mecum, crumpled in his hand as if hefeared to open it again to read more details of the war. Asimple soul, most likely just as oppressive to his labourers ashis superiors had always showed themselves to him, he could notbear to read of violence, as all the tyranny that he had bentunder had been imposed so subtly that he could never see morethan the shadow of the hand that had oppressed him.

It pained him, above all things, to read about the wounded anddead horses lying inp. 101the corn, especially as he had“’eard the ’arvest over there in Belgium wasgoing to be good.” The whirr of the machines reapingthe wheatfield sounded like the hum of some gigantic insect, andas the binder ranged the sheaves in rows it seemed as if thegolden age had come upon the earth again, bringing with it peaceand plenty, with perhaps slightly stouter nymphs than those whoonce followed the sickle-men in Arcady.

A man sat fishing in a punt just where the river broadenedinto a backwater edged with willow trees. At times he threwout 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 asflaxen-haired as those that Gregory the Great thought fitting tobe angels, though they had never been baptized.

Now and again the farmer stepped into his field to watch theharvesting, and cast an eye of pride and of affection on hishorses, and then, coming back to the gate, he drew the paper fromhis pocket and read its columns, much in the way an Arab reads aletter, murmuringp.102the words aloud until their meaning penetrated to hisbrain.

Chewing a straw, and slowly rubbing off the grains of an earof wheat into his hand, he gazed over his fields as if he fearedto see in them some of the horrors that he read. Again hemuttered, 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?” hesaid; and as he spoke soldiers on motorcycles hurtled down theroad, leaving a trail of dust that perhaps looked like smoke tohim after his reading in theDaily Mail.

“They tell me,” he remarked, after a vigorousapplication of his blue handkerchief to his streaming face,“that these ’ere motorcycles ’ave a gunfastened to them, over there in Belgium, where they area-goin’ on at it in such a way. The paper says,‘Ranks upon ranks of ’em is just mowed down likewheat.’ . . . ’Orrid, I call it, if it’strue, for now and then I think those chaps only puts that kind ofthing into their papers to ’ave a sale forthem.” He looked about him as if, like Pilate, he waslooking for an elusive truth not to be found on earth, and thenwalked down the road till hep. 103came to the backwater where the manwas fishing in his punt. They looked at one another over ayard or two of muddy water, and asked for news about the war, inthe way that people do from others who they must know are quiteas ignorant as they are themselves. The fisherman“’ad given up readin’ the war noos; it’sall a pack of lies,” and pointing to the water, said in acautious voice, “Some people says they ’ears. Iain’t so sure about it; but, anyhow, it’s always bestto be on the safe side.” Then he addressed himselfonce more to the business of the day, and in the contemplation ofhis float no doubt became as much absorbed into the universalprinciple of nature as is an Indian sitting continually with hiseyes 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 andspiced high with details which had never happened, so that inafter years their children will most likely treasure as facts,which they have received from long-lost parents, the wildestfairy tales.

The slanting sun and lengthening shadowsp. 104brought thefarmer no relief of mind; and still men, coming home from work onshaky bicycles, plied him with horrors as they passed by thegate, their knee-joints stiff with the labours of the day,seeming in want of oil. A thin, white mist began to creepalong the backwater. Unmooring his punt, the fisherman cameunwillingly to shore, and as he threw the fragments of his lunchinto the water and gathered up his tackle, looked back upon thescene of his unfruitful labours with an air as of a man who hasbeen overthrown by circumstances, but has preserved his honourand his faith inviolate.

Slinging his basket on his back, he trudged off homewards, andinstantly the fish began to rise. A line of cows was driventowards the farm, their udders all so full of milk that theyswayed to and fro, just as a man sways wrapped in a Spanishcloak, and as majestically. The dragon-flies had gone, andin their place ghost-moths flew here and there across themeadows, and from the fields sounded the corncrake’s harsh,metallic note.

The whirring of the reaper ceased, and when the horses wereunyoked the driver ledp. 105them slowly from the field. Asthey passed by the farmer he looked lovingly towards them, andmuttered to himself, “Dead ’orses and dead soldierslying by ’undreds in the standing corn. . . . Iwonder ’ow the folks out there in Belgium will ’ave arelish for their bread next year. This ’erewar’s a ’orrid business, coming as it does, too, onthe top of my own loss . . . dead ’orses in the corn. . ..”

He took the straw out of his mouth, and walking up to one ofhis own sleek-sided carthorses, patted it lovingly, as if hewanted to make sure that it was still alive.

p. 106X
HIPPOMORPHOUS

On the 12th of October 1524, Cortesleft Mexico on his celebrated expedition to Honduras. Thestart from Mexico was made to the sound of music, and all thepopulation of the newly conquered city turned out to escort himfor a few miles upon his way.

The cavalcade must have been a curious spectacle enough. Cortes himself and his chief officers rode partly dressed inarmour, after the fashion of the time. Then came theSpanish soldiers, mostly on foot and armed with lances, swords,and bucklers, though there was a troop of crossbowmen andharquebusiers to whom “after God” we owed theConquest, as an old chronicler has said when speaking of theConquest of Peru. In Mexico they did good service also,although it was the horsemenp. 107that in that conquest played thegreater part. Then came a force of three thousand friendlyIndians from Tlascala, and last of all a herd of swine was drivenslowly in the rear, for at that time neither sheep nor cattlewere known in the New World.

Guatimozin, the captive King of Mexico, graced hisconquerors’ triumphal march; and with the army went twofalconers, Garci Caro and Alvaro Montañes, together with aband of music, some acrobats, a juggler, and a man “whovaulted well and played the Moorish pipe.”

Cortes rode the black horse which he had ridden at the siegeof Mexico. Fortune appeared to smile upon him. He hadjust added an enormous empire to the Spanish crown, and provedhimself one of the most consummate generals of his age. Yethe was on the verge of the great misfortune of his life, which atthe same time was to prove him still a finer leader than he hadbeen, even in Mexico.

His black horse also was about to play the most extraordinaryrôle that ever horse has played in the whole historyof the world.

With varying fortunes, now climbingp. 108mountains,now floundering in swamps, and again passing rivers over whichthey had to throw bridges, the expedition came to an opencountry, well watered, and the home of countless herds ofdeer. Villagutierre, in hisHistory of the Conquest ofthe Province of Itza (Madrid, 1701), calls it the country ofthe Maçotecas, which name Bernal Diaz del Castillo saysmeans “deer” in the language of those infidels. Fresh meat was scarce, and all the Spanish horsemen of those dayswere experts with the lance. Instantly Cortes and all hismounted officers set out to chase the deer. The weather wasextraordinarily hot, hotter, so Diaz says, than they had had itsince they left Mexico. The deer were all so tame that thehorsemen speared them as they chose (los alancearon muyá su placer), and soon the plain was strewed withdying animals just as it used to be when the Indians huntedbuffalo thirty or forty years ago.

Diaz says that the reason for the tameness of the deer wasthat the Maçotecas (here he applies the word to theIndians themselves) worshipped them as gods. It appearsthat their Chief God had once appeared in thep. 109image of astag, and told the Indians not to hunt his fellow-gods, or evenfrighten them. Little enough the Spaniards cared for anygods not strong enough to defend themselves, for the deity thatthey adored was the same God of Battles whom we adore to-day.

So they continued spearing the god-like beasts, regardless ofthe heat and that their horses were in poor condition owing totheir long march. The horse of one Palacios Rubio, arelation of Cortes, fell dead, overcome with the great heat; thegrease inside him melted, Villagutierre says. The blackhorse that was ridden by Cortes also was very ill, although hedid not die—though it perhaps had been better that heshould have died, for Villagutierre thinks “far less harmwould have been done than happened afterwards, as will be seen bythose who read the tale.” After the hunting all wasover, the line of march led over stony hills, and through a passthat Villagutierre calls “el Paso del Alabastro,” andDiaz “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 Cortesleft him behind. Hep. 110adds, “It does not mattereither way, whether he was left because his grease was meltedwith the sun, or that his foot was staked.” This, ofcourse, is true, and anyhow the horse was reserved for a greaterdestiny than ever fell to any of his race.

Cortes, in his fifth letter to the Emperor Charles V., sayssimply, “I was obliged to leave my black horse (micaballo morzillo) with a splinter in his foot.” He takes no notice of the melting of the grease. “TheChief promised to take care of him, but I do not know that hewill succeed or what he will do with him.”

He told the Chief that he would send to fetch the horse, forhe was very fond of him, and prized him very much. TheChief, no doubt, received the strange and terrible animal withdue respect, and Cortes went on upon his way. That is allthat Cortes says about the matter, and the mist of history closedupon him and on his horse. Cortes died, worn-out andbroken-hearted, at the white little town of Castilleja de laCuesta, not far from Seville; but El Morzillo had a greaterdestiny in store. This happened in the year 1525, andnothingp.111more was heard of either the Maçotecas or thehorse, after that passage in the fifth letter of Cortes, till1697. In that year the Franciscans set out upon the gospeltrail to convert the Indians of Itza, attached to the expeditionthat Ursua led, for the interior of Yucatan had never beensubdued. They reached Itza, having come down the River Tipuin canoes.

This river, Villagutierre informs us, is as large as any riverin all Spain. Moreover, it is endowed with certainproperties, its water being good and clear, so that in somerespects it is superior to the water even of the Tagus. Itis separated into one hundred and ninety channels (neither morenor less), and every one of these has its right Indian name, thatevery 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 soundpeople eat heartily. Besides this, after eating, when youhave drunk its water you are inclined to eat again.

At midday it is cold, and warm at night, so warm that a steamrises from it, just as it does when a kettle boils on thefire. Otherp.112particularities it has, which though they are not soremarkable, yet are noteworthy.

Down this amazing river Ursua’s expedition navigated fortwelve days in their canoes till they came to a lake calledPeten-Itza, in which there was an island known as Tayasal. All unknown to themselves, they had arrived close to the placewhere long ago Cortes had left his horse. Of this they werein ignorance; the circumstance had been long forgotten, andCortes himself had become almost a hero of a bygone age even inMexico.

Fathers Orbieta and Fuensalida, monks of the Franciscan order,chosen both for their zeal and for their knowledge of the Mayalanguage, were all agog to mark new sheep. The Indiansamongst whom they found themselves were “ignorant even ofthe knowledge of the true faith.” Moreover, since theconquest they had had no dealings with Europeans, and were asprimitive as they were at the time when Cortes had passed, morethan a hundred years ago.

One of the Chiefs, a man known as Isquin, when he first saw ahorse, “almost ran mad with joy and withastonishment. Especiallyp. 113the evolutions and the leaps it madeinto the air moved him to admiration, and going down upon allfours he leaped about and neighed.” Then, tired withthis practical manifestation of his joy and his astonishment, heasked the Spanish name of the mysterious animal. When helearned that it was caballo, he forthwith renounced his name, andfrom that day this silly infidel was known as Caballito. Then when the soul-cleansing water had been poured upon his head,he took the name of Pedro, and to his dying day all the worldcalled him “Don Pedro Caballito, for he was born aChief.”

This curious and pathetic little circumstance, by means ofwhich a brand was snatched red-hot from the eternal flames,lighted for those who have deserved hell-fire by never havingheard of it, might, one would think, have shown the missionariesthat the poor Indians were but children, easier to lead thandrive.

It only fired their zeal, and yet all their solicitude to savethe Indians’ souls was unavailing, and the hard-heartedsavages, dead to the advantages that baptism has ever broughtwith it, clave to their images.

p. 114Thegood Franciscans made several more attempts to move thepeople’s hearts by preaching ceaselessly. All failed,and then they went to several islands in the lake, in one ofwhich Father Orbieta hardly had begun to preach, when, as LopezCogulludo [114a] tells us, an Indian seized him by thethroat and nearly strangled him, leaving him senseless on theground.

At times, seated in church listening to what the Elizabethanscalled “a painful preacher,” even the elect have feltan impulse to seize him by the throat. Still, it is usuallyrestrained; but these poor savages, undisciplined in body and inmind, were perhaps to be excused, for the full flavour of asermon had never reached them in their Eden by the lake. Moreover, after he was thus rudely cast from the pulpit to theground, Father Fuensalida, nothing daunted by his fate, steppedforward and took up his parable. He preached to them thistime in their own language, in which he was expert, with fervideloquence and great knowledge of the Scriptures,[114b] explaining top. 115them theholy mystery of the incarnation of the eternal Word.[115] The subject was well chosen fora first attempt upon their hearts; but it, too, provedunfruitful, and the two friars were forced to re-embark.

As the canoe in which they sat moved from the island andlaunched out into the lake, the infidels who stood and watchedthem paddling were moved to fury, and, rushing to the edge,stoned them whole-heartedly till they were out of reach.

It is a wise precaution, and one that the“conquistadores” usually observed, to have thespiritual well supported by the secular arm when missionaries,instinct with zeal and not weighed down with too much commonsense, preach for the first time to the infidel.

This first reverse was but an incident, and by degrees thefriars, this time accompanied by soldiers, explored more of theislands in the lake. At last they came to one calledTayasal, which was so full of idols that they took twelve hoursto burn and to destroy them all.

One island still remained to be explored,p. 116and in itwas a temple with an idol much reverenced by the Indians. At last they entered it, and on a platform about the height of atall man they saw the figure of a horse rudely carved out ofstone.

The horse was seated on the ground resting upon his quarters,his hind legs bent and his front feet stretched out. Thebarbarous infidels [116a] adored theabominable and monstrous beast under the name of Tziunchan, Godof the Thunder and the Lightning, and paid it reverence. Even the Spaniards, who, as a rule, were not much given toinquiring into the history of idols, but broke them instantly,ad majorem Dei gloriam, were interested and amazed. Little by little they learned the history of the hippomorphousgod, which had been carefully preserved. It appeared thatwhen Cortes had left his horse, so many years ago, the Indians,seeing he was ill, took him into a temple to take care ofhim. Thinking he was a reasoning animal,[116b] they placed before him fruit andchickens, with the result that the poor beast—who, ofcourse, wasp.117reasonable enough in his own way—eventuallydied.

The Indians, terrified and fearful that Cortes would takerevenge upon them for the death of the horse that he had left forthem to care for and to minister to all his wants, before theyburied him, carved a rude statue in his likeness and placed it ina temple in the lake.

The devil, who, as Villagutierre observes, is never slack totake advantage when he can, seeing the blindness and thesuperstition (which was great) of those abominable idolaters,induced them by degrees to make a God of the graven image theyhad made. Their veneration grew with time, just as badweeds grow up in corn, as Holy Writ sets forth for our example,and that abominable statue became the chiefest of their gods,though they had many others equally horrible.

As the first horses that they saw were ridden by the Spaniardsin the chase of the tame deer, and many shots were fired, theIndians not unnaturally connected the explosions and the flamesless with the rider than the horse. Thus in the course ofyears the evolution of the great god Tziunchan took place, and,asp. 118themissionaries said, these heathen steeped in ignorance adored thework of their own hands.

Father Orbieta, not stopping to reflect that all of us adorewhat we have made, but “filled with the spirit of the Lordand carried off with furious zeal for the honour of ourGod,”[118] seized a great stone and in an instantcast the idol down, then with a hammer he broke it into bits.

When Father Orbieta had finished his work and thus destroyedone of the most curious monuments of the New World, which oughtto have been preserved as carefully as if it had been carved byPraxiteles, “with the ineffable and holy joy that filledhim, his face shone with a light so spiritual that it wassomething to praise God for and to view withdelight.” Most foolish actions usually inspire theirperpetrators with delight, although their faces do not shine withspiritual joy when they have done them; so when one reads thefolly of this muddle-headed friar, it sets one hoping thatseveral of the stones went home upon his back as he sat paddlingthe canoe.

The Indians broke into lamentations,p. 119exclaiming,“Death to him, he has killed our God”; but wereprevented from avenging his demise by the Spanish soldiers whoprudently had accompanied the friar.

Thus was the mystery of the eternal Word made manifest amongstthe Maçotecas, and a deity destroyed who for a hundredyears and more had done no harm to any one on earth . . . a thingunusual amongst Gods.

p.120XI
MUDEJAR

Its proud traditions made it impossible for Zaragoza tocapitulate without a siege. As in the days of Soult, whenthe heroic maid, theartillera, as her countrymen call herwith pride, when Palafox held up the blood and orange banner inwhich float the lions and the castles of Castille, the cityanswered shot for shot.

Fire spurted from the Moorish walls, built by the Beni Hud,who reigned in Zaragoza, when still Sohail poured its protectingrays upon the land. The bluish wreaths of smoke curled onthe Ebro, running along the water and enveloping the Coso as ifin a mist.

A dropping rifle-fire crackled out from the ramparts, andabove the castle the red flagp. 121of the Intransigent-Republicshivered and fluttered in the breeze.

The Torre-Nueva sprang from the middle of the town, just as apalm tree rises from the desert sands. It was built at thetime when Moorish artisans, infidel dogs who yet preserved thesecrets of the East amongst the Christians (may dogs defile theirgraves), had spent their science and their love upon it.

Octagonal, and looking as if blown into the air by themagician’s art, it leaned a little to one side, and, as theadmiring inhabitants averred, drawing their right hands open overtheir left arms, laughed at its rival of Bologna and at everyother tower on earth.

No finer specimen of the art known as Mudejar existed in allSpain. Galleries cut it here and there; and ajimeces, thelittle horseshoe windows divided by a marble pillar, loved of theMoors, which tradition says they took from the rude openings intheir tents of camel’s hair, gave light to theinside. Stages of inclined planes led to the top, sogradual in their ascent that once a Queen of Spain had ridden upthem to admire the view over the Sierras upon her palfrey, or herdonkey, for all is onep. 122when treating of a queen, who of acertainty ennobles the animal she deigns to ride upon. Boldajaracas, the patterns proper to the style of architecture, stoodup in high relief upon its sides, and near the balustrade uponthe top a band of bluish tiles relieved the brownness of thebrickwork and sparkled in the sun. Sieges and time andstorms, rain, wind, and snow had spared it; even the neglect ofcenturies had left it unimpaired—erect and elegant as ayoung Arab maiden carrying water from the well. Architectssaid that it inclined a little more each year, and talked aboutsubsidences; but they were foreigners, unused to the things ofSpain, and no one marked them; and the tower continued to beloved and prized and to fall into disrepair. On thisoccasion riflemen lined the galleries, pouring a hot fire uponthe attacking forces of the Government.

Encamped upon the heights above Torero, the Governmental armyheld the banks of the canal that gives an air of Holland to thatpart of the adust and calcined landscape of Aragon.

The General’s quarters overlooked the town, and fromthem he could see Santap. 123Engracia, in whose crypt repose thebodies of the martyrs in an atmosphere of ice, standing aloneupon its little plaza, fringed by a belt of stunted and ill-grownacacia trees. The great cathedral, with its domes, in whichthe shrine of the tutelary Virgin of the Pilar, the Pilarica ofthe country folk, glittering with jewels and with silver plate,is venerated as befits the abiding place on earth of themiraculous figure sent direct from heaven, towered into thesky.

Churches and towers and convents, old castellated houses withtheir overhanging eaves and coats-of-arms upon the doors, jewelsof architecture, memorials of the past, formed as it were ajungle wrought in a warm brown stone. Beyond the citytowered the mountains that hang over Huesca of the Bell. Through them the Aragon has cut its roaring passages towardsSobrarbe to the south. Northwards they circle Jaca, thevirgin little city that beat off the Moors a thousand years ago,and still once every year commemorates her prowess outside thewalls, where Moors and Christians fight again the unequalcontest, into which St. James, mounted upon his milk-whitep. 124charger,had plunged and thrown the weight of his right arm. Thelight was so intense and African that on the mountain sides eachrock was visible, outlined as in a camera-lucida, and as theartillery played upon the tower the effects of every salvo showedup distinctly on the crumbling walls. All round theGovernment’s encampment stood groups of peasantry who hadbeen impressed together with their animals to bringprovisions. Wrapped in their brown and white checkedblankets, dressed in tight knee-breeches, short jackets, and greystockings, and shod with alpargatas—the canvas, hemp-soledsandals that are fastened round the ankles with bluecords—they stood and smoked, stolid as Moors, and asunfathomable as the deep mysterious corries of their hills.

When the artillery thundered and the breaches in the wallsgrew daily more apparent and more ominous, the country peoplemerely smiled, for they were sure the Pilarica would preserve thecity; and even if she did not, all Governments, republican orclerical, were the same to them.

All their ambition was to live quietly, eachp. 125in hisvillage, which to him was the hub round which the worldrevolved.

So one would say, as they stood watching the progress of thesiege: “Chiquio, the sciences advance a bestiality, theGovernment in the Madrids can hear each cannon-shot. Thesound goes on those wires that stretch upon the posts we tie ourdonkeys to when we come into town. . . .”

Little by little the forces of the Government advanced,crossing the Ebro at the bridge which spans it in the middle ofthe great double promenade called the Coso, and by degrees drewnear the walls.

The stubborn guerrilleros in the town contested every point ofvantage, fighting like wolves, throwing themselves with knivesand scythes stuck upright on long poles upon the troops.

So fought their grandfathers against the French, and so Strabodescribes their ancestors, adding, “The Spaniard is ataciturn, dark man, usually dressed in black; he fights with ashort sword, and always tries to come to close grips with ourlegionaries.”

As happens in all civil wars, when brotherp. 126findshimself opposed to brother, the strife was mortal, and he whofell received no mercy from the conqueror.

The riflemen upon the Torre Nueva poured in their fire,especially upon the Regiment of Pavia, whose Colonel, Don LuisMontoro, on several occasions gave orders to the artillerymen atany cost to spare the tower.

Officer after officer fell by his side, and soldiers in theranks cursed audibly, covering the saints with filth, as runs thephrase in Spanish, and wondering why their Colonel did notdislodge the riflemen who made such havoc in their files. Discipline told at last, and all the Intransigents were forcedinside the walls, leaving the moat with but a single plank tocross it by which to reach the town. Upon the plank thefire was concentrated from the walls, and the besiegers stood fora space appalled, sheltering themselves as best they could behindthe trees and inequalities of the ground.

Montoro called for volunteers, and one by one three grizzledsoldiers, who had grown grey in wars against the Moors, steppedforward and fell pierced with a dozen wounds.

p. 127Aftera pause there was a movement in the ranks, and with a sword inhis right hand, and in his left the colours of Castille, hisbrown stuff gown tucked up showing his hairy knees knotted andmuscular, out stepped a friar, and strode towards theplank. Taking the sword between his teeth he crossedhimself, and beckoning on the men, rushed forward in the thickestof the fire.

He crossed in safety, and then the regiment, with a hoarseshout of “Long live God,” dashed on behind him, somecarrying planks and others crossing upon bales of straw, whichthey had thrown into the moat. Under the walls they formedand rushed into the town, only to find each house a fortress andeach street blocked by a barricade. From every window darkfaces peered, and a continual fusillade was poured upon them,whilst from the house-tops the women showered down tiles.

Smoke filled the narrow streets, and from dark archways groupsof desperate men came rushing, armed with knives, only to fall inheaps before the troops who, with fixed bayonets, steadily pushedon.

p. 128Ashift of wind cleared off the smoke and showed the crimson flagstill floating from the citadel, ragged and torn by shots. Beyond the town appeared the mountains peeping out shyly throughthe smoke, as if they looked down on the follies of mankind witha contemptuous air.

Dead bodies strewed the streets, in attitudes half tragical,half ludicrous, some looking like mere bundles of old clothes,and some distorted with a stiff arm still pointing to thesky.

Right in the middle of a little square the friar lay shotthrough the forehead, his sword beside him, and with the flagclasped tightly to his breast.

His great brown eyes stared upwards, and as the soldierspassed him some of them crossed themselves, and an old sergeantspoke his epitaph: “This friar,” he said, “wasnot of those fit only for the Lord; he would have made a soldier,and a good one; may God have pardoned him.”

Driven into the middle plaza of the town, the Intransigentsfought till the last, selling their lives for more than they wereworth, and dying silently.

Bugles rang out from the other angle of the plaza; the Generaland his staff rode slowly forward to meet the Regiment of Paviaas it debouched into the square.

Colonel Montoro halted, and then, saluting, advanced towardshis chief. His General, turning to him, angrily exclaimed,“Tell me, why did you let those fellows in the tower do somuch damage, when a few shots from the field guns would have soonfinished them?”

Montoro hesitated, and recovering his sword once more salutedas his horse fretted on the curb, snorting and sidling from thedead bodies that were strewed upon the ground.

“My General,” he said, “not for all Spainand half the Indies would I have trained the cannon on the tower;it is Mudejar of the purest architecture.”

His General smiled at him a little grimly, and saying,“Well, after all, this is no time to ask accounts from anyman,” touched his horse with the spur and, followed by hisstaff, he disappeared into the town.

p.130XII
A MINOR PROPHET

The city sweltered in the Augustheat. No breath of air lifted the pall of haze that wrappedthe streets, the houses, and the dark group of Græco-Romanbuildings that stands up like a rock in the dull tide-way of thebrick-built tenements that compose the town.

Bells pealed at intervals, summoning the fractioned faithfulto their various centres of belief.

When they had ceased and all the congregations were assembledlistening to the exhortations of their spiritual advisers, andwere employed fumbling inside their purses, as they listened, forthe destined “threepenny,” that obolus which givesrespectability to alms, the silence was complete. Whitey-brown paper bags, dropped overnight, just stirredp.131occasionally as the air swelled their bellies, makingthem seem alive, or as alive as is a jelly-fish left stranded bythe tide.

Just as the faithful were assembled in their conventiclesadoring the same Deity, all filled with rancour against oneanother because their methods of interpretation of theCreator’s will were different, so did the politicians andthe cranks of every sort and sect turn out to push their methodsof salvation for mankind. In groups they gathered round thevarious speakers who discoursed from chairs and carts and pointsof vantage on the streets.

Above the speakers’ heads, banners, held up between twopoles, called on the audiences to vote for Liberal or for Tory,for Poor Law Reform, for Social Purity, and for Temperance. Orators, varying from well-dressed and glibly-educated hacks fromparty centres, to red-faced working-men, held forth perspiring,and occasionally bedewing those who listened to them with saliva,after an emphatic burst.

It seemed so easy after listening to them to redress allwrongs, smooth out all wrinkles, and instate each citizen in hisown shop where he could sell his sweated goods, with the bestp. 132advantageto himself and with the greatest modicum of disadvantage to hisneighbour, that one was left amazed at the dense apathy of thosewho did not fall in with the nostrums they had heard. Again, at other platforms, sleek men in broadcloth, who had neverseen a plough except at Agricultural Exhibitions, nor had got oncloser terms of friendship with a horse than to be bitten by himas they passed along a street, discoursed upon the land.

“My friends, I say, the land is a fixed quantity, youcan’t increase it, and without it, it’s impossible tolive. ’Ow is it, then, that all the land of Englandis in so few hands?” He paused and mopped his face,and looking round, began again: “Friends—you’llallow me to style you Friends, I know, Friends in the sycredcause of Liberty—the landed aristocracy is our enemy.

“I am not out for confiscation, why should I? I’ave my ’ome purchased with the fruits of my ownhhonest toil . . .”

Before he could conclude his sentence, a dock labourer,dressed in his Sunday suit of shoddy serge, check shirt, andblack silk handkerchief knotted loosely round his neck,p. 133looked up,and interjected: “’Ard work, too, mate, that’ere talkin’ in the sun is, that built your’ome. Beats coal whippin’.”

Just for an instant the orator was disconcerted as a laugh ranthrough the audience; but habit, joined to a natural gift ofpublic speaking, came to his aid, and he rejoined: “Brotherworking-men, I say ditto to what has fallen from our friend’ere upon my right. We all are working-men. Some of us, like our friend, work with their ’ands, andothers with their ’eds. In either case, the Land iswhat we ’ave to get at as an article of primenecessity.”

Rapidly he sketched a state of things in which a happypopulation, drawn from the slums, but all instinct withagricultural knowledge, would be settled on the land, each on hislittle farm, and all devoted to intensive culture in the mostmodern form. Trees would be all cut down, because they only“’arbour” birds that eat the corn. Hedgeswould all be extirpated, for it is known to every one that miceand rats and animals of every kind live under them, and that theyonly serve to shelter game. Each man would ownp. 134a gun andbe at liberty to kill a “rabbut” or a“’are”—“animals, as we say atcollege,feery naturrey, and placed by Providence upon theland.”

These noble sentiments evoked applause, which was a littlemitigated by an interjection from a man in gaiters, with asunburnt face, of: “Mister, if every one is to have a gunand shoot, ’ow long will these ’ere ’ares andrabbuts last?”

A little farther on, as thinly covered by his indecentlytransparent veil of reciprocity as a bare-footed dancer in herGrecian clothes, or a tall ostrich under an inch of sand, and yetas confident as either of them that the essential is concealed, astaunch Protectionist discoursed. With copious notes, towhich he turned at intervals, when he appealed to thosestatistics which can be made in any question to fit every side,he talked of loss of trade. “Friends, we must tax theforeigner. It is this way, you see, our working classeshave to compete with other nations, all of which enjoy protectiveduties. I ask you, is it reasonable that we should let aforeign article come into England?”

Here a dour-looking Scotsman almost spatp. 135out thewords: “Man, can ye no juist say Great Britain?” andreceived a bow and “Certainly, my friend, I am not here towound the sentiments of any man . . . as I was saying, is itreasonable that goods should come to England . . . I mean GreatBritain, duty free, and yet articles we manufacture have to payheavy duties in any foreign port?”

The speaker reddened, and resumed: “My friend, man dothnot live by bread alone; still, I understand the point. Alittle dooty upon corn, say five shillings in the quarter, wouldnot hurt any one. We’ve got to do it. Theforeigner is the enemy. I am a Christian; but yet,readin’ as I often do the Sermon on the Mount, I never sawwe had to lie down in the dust and let ourselves be trampledon.

“Who are to be the inheritors of the earth? OurLord says, ‘Blessed are the meek; they shall inheritit.’”

He paused, and was about to clinch his argument, when a tallIrishman, after expectorating judiciously upon a vacant spacebetween two listeners, shot in: “Shure, then,p. 136the Englishare the meekest of the lot, for they have got the greater part ofit.”

At other gatherings Socialists held forth under the redflag. “That banner, comrades, which ’as braveda ’undred fights, and the mere sight of which makes theCapitalistic bloodsucker tremble as he feels the time approachwhen Lybor shall come into its inheritance and the Proletariatshyke off its chaine and join ’ands all the world over,despizin’ ryce and creed and all the artificialobstructions that a designin’ Priest-’ood and ablood-stained Plutocracy ’ave placed between them todistract their attention from the great cause of Socialism, thegreat cause that mykes us comrades . . . ’ere, keep off my’oof, you blighter, with your ammunition wagons. . ..”

Religionists of various sects, all with long hair and dressedin shabby black, the Book either before them on a campaigninglectern or tucked beneath one arm, called upon Christian men todip their hands into the precious blood and drink from theeternal fountain of pure water that is to be found in theApocalypse. “Come to ’Im, come to ’Im, Isay, my friends, come straight; oh, it isp. 137joyful tobelong to Jesus. Don’t stop for anything, come to’Im now like little children. . . . Let us sing a’ymn. You know it, most of you; but brother’ere,” and as he spoke he turned towards a pale-facedyouth who held a bag to take the offertory, that sacrament thatmakes the whole world kin, “will lead it foryou.”

The acolyte cleared his throat raucously, and to a popular airstruck up the refrain of “Let us jump joyful on theroad.” Flat-breasted girls and pale-faced boys tookup the strain, and as it floated through the heavy air,reverberating from the pile of public buildings, gradually allthe crowd joined in; shyly at first and then whole-heartedly, andby degrees the vulgar tune and doggerel verses took on an air ofpower and dignity, and when the hymn was finished, the tearsstood in the eyes of grimy-looking women and of red-facedmen. Then, with his bag, the pale-faced hymn-leader wentthrough the crowd, reaping a plenteous harvest, all in copper,from those whose hearts had felt, but for a moment, the fullforce of sympathy.

Suffragist ladies discussed upon “thep.138Question,” shocking their hearers as they touchedon prostitution and divorce, and making even stolid policemen,who stood sweating in their thick blue uniforms, turn their eyesupon the ground.

After them, Suffragette girls bounded upon the cart,consigning fathers, brothers, and the whole male section ofmankind straight to perdition as they held forth upon the Vote,that all-heal of the female politician, who thinks by means of itto wipe out all those disabilities imposed upon her by anunreasonable Nature and a male Deity, who must have worked aloneup in the Empyrean without the humanising influence of awife.

Little by little the various groups dissolved, the speakersand their friends forcing their “literatoor” upon thepassers-by, who generally appeared to look into the air a foot ortwo above their heads, as they went homewards through thestreets.

The Anarchists were the last to leave, a faithful few stillcongregating around a youth in a red necktie who denounced theother speakers with impartiality, averring that they were“humbugs every one of them,” and, forp. 139his part,he believed only in dynamite, by means of which he hoped some dayto be able to devote “all the blood-suckers to destruction,and thus to bring about the reign of brotherhood.”

The little knot of the elect applauded loudly, and the youth,catching the policeman’s eye fixed on him, descendedhurriedly from off the chair on which he had been perorating,remarking that “it was time to be going home to have a bitof dinner, as he was due to speak at Salford in theevening.”

Slowly the square was emptied, the last group or two of peopledisappearing into the mouths of the incoming streets just as aRoman crowd must have been swallowed up in the vomitoria of anamphitheatre, after a show of gladiators.

Torn newspapers and ends of cigarettes were the sole result ofall the rhetoric that had been poured out so liberally upon theassembled thousands in the square.

Two or three street boys in their shirt-sleeves, bare-footedand bare-headed, their trousers held up by a piece of string,played about listlessly, after the fashion of their kindp. 140on Sundayin a manufacturing town, when the life of the streets is dead,and when men’s minds are fixed either upon the mysteries ofthe faith or upon beer, things in which children have but littleshare.

The usual Sabbath gloom was creeping on the town anddinner-time approaching, when from a corner of the squareappeared a man advancing rapidly. He glanced aboutinquiringly, and for a moment a look of disappointment crossedhis face. Mounting the steps that lead up to thesmoke-coated Areopagus, he stopped just for an instant, as if todraw his breath and gather his ideas. Decently dressed inshabby black, his trousers frayed a little above the heels of hiselastic-sided boots, his soft felt hat that covered long butscanty hair just touched with grey, he had an air as of a plasterfigure set in the middle of a pond, as he stood silhouettedagainst the background of the buildings, forlorn yetresolute.

The urchins, who had gathered round him, had a look upon theirfaces as of experienced critics at a play; that look ofexpectation and subconscious irony which characterises all theirkind at public spectacles.

p. 141Theirappearance, although calculated to appal a speaker broken to theplatform business, did not influence the man who stood upon thesteps. Taking off his battered hat, he placed it and hisumbrella carefully upon the ground. A light, as of theinterior fire that burned in the frail tenement of flesh sofiercely that it illuminated his whole being, shone in his mildblue eyes. Clearing his throat, and after running hisnervous hands through his thin hair, he pitched his voice wellforward, as if the deserted square had been packed full of peopleprepared to hang upon his words. His voice, a little hoarseand broken during his first sentences, gradually grew clearer,developing a strength quite incommensurate with the source fromwhich it came.

“My friends,” he said, causing the boys to grinand waking up the dozing policeman, “I have a doctrine toproclaim. Love only rules the world. The Greek wordcaritas in the New Testament should have been renderedlove. Love suffereth long. Love is not puffed up;love beareth all things. That is what the Apostle reallymeant to say. Often within this very square I have stoodlistening to thep.142speeches, and have weighed them in my mind. It isnot for me to criticise, only to advocate my own belief. Friends . . .”

As his voice had gathered strength, two or three working-men,attracted by the sight of a man speaking to the air, surroundedbut by the street boys and the nodding policeman on his beat, hadgathered round about. Dressed in their Sunday clothes; wellwashed, and with the look as of restraint that freedom from theiraccustomed toil often imparts to them on Sunday, they listenedstolidly, with that toleration that accepts all doctrines, fromthat of highest Toryism down to Anarchy, and acts on none ofthem. The speaker, spurred on by the unwonted sight oflisteners, for several draggled women had drawn near, and anice-cream seller had brought his donkey-cart up to the nearestcurb-stone, once more launched into his discourse.

“Friends, when I hear the acerbity of the address ofsome; when I hear doctrines setting forth the rights but leavingout the duties of the working class; when I hear men defend thesweater and run down the sweated, calling them thriftless, idle,and intemperate, whenp. 143often they are but unfortunate, Iask myself, what has become of Love? Who sees more clearlythan I do myself what the poor have to suffer? Do I notlive amongst them and share their difficulties? Who candivine better than one who has imagination—and in thatrespect I thank my stars I have not been left quiteunendowed—what are the difficulties of those high placed byfortune, who yet have got to strive to keep their place?

“Sweaters and sweated, the poor, the rich, men, women,children, all mankind, suffer from want of Love. I am nothere to say that natural laws will ever cease to operate, or thatthere will not be great inequalities, if not of fortune, yet ofendowments, to the end of Time. What the Great Power whosent us here intended, only He can tell. One thing Heplaced within the grasp of every one, capacity to love. Think, friends, what England might become under the reign ofuniversal love. The murky fumes that now defile thelandscape, the manufactories in which our thousands toil forothers, the rivers vile with refuse, the knotted bodies and thefaces scarcely human in their abject struggle for their dailybread,p.144would disappear. Bradford and Halifax and Leedswould once again be fair and clean. The ferns would growonce more in Shipley Glen, and in the valleys about Sheffield thescissor-grinders would ply their trade upon streams bright andsparkling, as they were of yore. In Halifax, the Romanroad, now black with coal-dust and with mud, would shine aswell-defined as it does where now and then it crops out from theling upon the moors, just as the Romans left it polished by theircaligulæ. Why, do you ask me? Because allsordid motives would be gone, and of their superfluity the richwould give to those less blessed by Providence. The poorwould grudge no one the gifts of fortune, and thus the need forgrinding toil would disappear, as the struggle and the strain fordaily bread would fade into the past.

“Picture to yourselves, my friends, an England once moregreen and merry, with the air fresh and not polluted by the smokeof foetid towns.

“’Tis pleasant, friends, on a spring morning tohear the village bells calling to church, even although they donot call you to attend. Itp. 145heals the soul to see thehoneysuckle and the eglantine and smell the new-mown hay. . ..

“Then comes a chill when on your vision rises theEngland of the manufacturing town, dark, dreary, and befouledwith smoke. How different it might be in the perpetual Maymorning I have sketched for you.

He paused, and, looking round, saw he was all alone. Theboys had stolen away, and the last workman’s sturdy backcould be just seen as it was vanishing towards thepublic-house.

The speaker sighed, and wiped the perspiration from hisforehead with a soiled handkerchief.

Then, picking up his hat and his umbrella, a far-off look cameinto his blue eyes as he walked homewards almost jauntily,conscious that the inner fire had got the better of the fleshlytenement, and that his work was done.

p.146XIII
EL MASGAD

The camp was pitched upon the northbank of the Wad Nefis, not far from Tamoshlacht. Above ittowered the Atlas, looking like a wall, with scarce a peak tobreak its grim monotony. A fringe of garden lands enclosedthe sanctuary, in which the great Sherif lived in patriarchalstyle; half saint, half warrior, but wholly a merchant at thebottom, as are so many Arabs; all his surroundings enjoyedpeculiar sanctity.

In the long avenue of cypresses the birds lived safely, for noone dared to frighten them, much less to fire a shot. Hisbaraka, that is the grace abounding, that distils from out theclothes, the person and each action of men such as the Sherif,who claim descent in apostolic continuity from the Blessed One,p.147Mohammed, Allah’s own messenger, protectedeverything. Of a mean presence, like the man who stood uponthe Areopagus and beckoned with his hand, before he cast thespell of his keen, humoristic speech upon the Greeks, the holyone was of a middle stature. His face was marked withsmallpox. His clothes were dirty, and his haik he sometimesmended with a thorn, doubling it, and thrusting one end through aslit to form a safety-pin. His shoes were never new, histurban like an old bath towel; yet in his belt he wore a daggerwith a gold hilt, for he was placed so far above the law, byvirtue of his blood, that though the Koran especially enjoins thefaithful not to wear gold, all that he did was good.

Though he drank nothing but pure water, or, for that matter,lapped it like a camel, clearing the scum off with his fingers ifon a journey, he might have drank champagne or brandy, or mixedthe two of them, for the Arabs are the most logical of men, andto them such a man as the Sherif is holy, not from anything hedoes, but because Allah has ordained it. An attitude ofmind as good asp.148any other, and one that, after all, makes a mantolerant of human frailties.

Allah gives courage, virtue, eloquence, or skill inhorsemanship. He gives or he withholds them for his goodpleasure; what he has written he has written, and therefore hewho is without these gifts is not held blamable. If heshould chance to be a saint, that is a true descendant, in themale line, from him who answered nobly when his foolish followersasked him if his young wife, Ayesha, should sit at his right handin paradise, “By Allah, not she; but old Kadijah, she whowhen all men mocked me, cherished and loved, she shall sit at myright hand,” that is enough for them.

So the Sherif was honoured, partly because he had great jarsstuffed with gold coin, the produce of his olive yards, and alsoof the tribute that the faithful brought him; partly because ofhis descent; and perhaps, more than all, on account of his greatstore of Arab lore on every subject upon earth. His famewas great, extending right through the Sus, the Draa, and down toTazaûelt, where it met the opposing current of the grace ofBashir-el-Biruk, Sherif of the Wad-Nun. He liked to talk top.149Europeans, partly to show his learning, and partly tohear about the devilries they had invented to complicate theirlives.

So when the evening prayer was called, and all was silent inhis house, the faithful duly prostrate on their faces beforeAllah, who seems to take as little heed of them as he does of theother warring sects, each with its doctrine of damnation fortheir brethren outside the pale, the Sherif, who seldom prayed,knowing that even if he did so he could neither make nor yetunmake himself in Allah’s sight, called for his mule, andwith two Arabs running by his side set out towards theunbeliever’s camp.

Though the Sherif paid no attention to it, the scene he rodethrough was like fairyland. The moonbeams falling on thedomes of house and mosque and sanctuary lit up the green andyellow tiles, making them sparkle like enamels. Longshadows of the cypresses cast great bands of darkness upon thered sand of the avenue. The croaking of the frogs soundedmetallic, and by degrees resolved itself into a continuoustinkle, soothing and musical, in the Atlas night. Camelslay ruminating, theirp. 150monstrous packs upon theirbacks. As the Sherif passed by them on his mule theysnarled and bubbled, and a faint odour as of a menagerie, mingledwith that of tar, with which the Arabs cure their girth andsaddle galls, floated towards him, although no doubt custom hadmade it so familiar that he never heeded it.

From the Arab huts that gather around every sanctuary, theirowners living on the baraka, a high-pitched voice to theaccompaniment of a two-stringed guitar played with a piece ofstiff palmetto leaf, and the monotonous Arab drum, that if youlisten to it long enough invades the soul, blots from the mindthe memory of towns, and makes the hearer long to cast his hatinto the sea and join the dwellers in the tents, blended soinextricably with the shrill cricket’s note and the vastorchestra of the insects that were praising Allah on that night,each after his own fashion, that it was difficult to say wherethe voice ended and the insects’ hum began.

Still, in despite of all, the singing Arab, croaking of thefrogs, and the shrill pæans of the insects, the nightseemed calm and silent, for all the voices were attuned so wellto thep.151surroundings that the serenity of the whole scene wasunimpaired.

The tents lay in the moonlight like gigantic mushrooms; therows of bottles cut in blue cloth with which the Arabs ornamentthem stood out upon the canvas as if in high relief. Thefirst light dew was falling, frosting the canvas as a piece ofice condenses air upon a glass. In a long line before thetents stood the pack animals munching their corn placed on acloth upon the ground.

A dark-grey horse, still with his saddle on for fear of thenight air, was tied near to the door of the chief tent, well inhis owner’s eye. Now and again he pawed the ground,looked up, and neighed, straining upon the hobbles that confinedhis feet fast to the picket line.

On a camp chair his owner sat and smoked, and now and thenhalf got up from his seat when the horse plunged or any of themules stepped on their shackles and nearly fell upon theground.

As the Sherif approached he rose to welcome him, listening toall the reiterated compliments and inquiries that noself-respecting Arab ever omits when he may chance to meet afriend.

p. 152Agood address, like mercy, is twice blest, both in the giver andin the recipient of it; but chiefly it is beneficial to thegiver, for in addition to the pleasure that he gives, he earnshis own respect. Well did both understand this aspect ofthe question, and so the compliments stretched out intoperspectives quite unknown in Europe, until the host, taking hisvisitor by the hand, led him inside the tent. “Ambassador,” said the Sherif, although he knew hisfriend was but a Consul, “my heart yearned towards thee, soI have come to talk with thee of many things, because I know thatthou art wise, not only in the learning of thy people, but inthat of our own.”

The Consul, not knowing what the real import of the visitmight portend, so to speak felt his adversary’s blade,telling him he was welcome, and that at all times his tent andhouse were at the disposition of his friend. Clapping hishands he called for tea, and when it came, the little floweredand gold-rimmed glasses, set neatly in a row, the red tin boxwith two compartments, one for the tea and one for the blocks ofsugar, the whole surrounding the small dome-shaped pewter teapot,all placedp.153in order on the heavy copper tray, he waved theequipage towards the Sherif, tacitly recognising his superiorityin the art of tea-making. Seated beside each other on amattress they drank the sacramental three cups of tea, and then,after the Consul had lit his cigarette, the Sherif having refusedone with a gesture of his hand and a half-murmured“Haram”—that is, “It isprohibited”—they then began to talk.

Much had they got to say about the price of barley and thedrought; of tribal fights; of where our Lord the Sultan was, andif he had reduced the rebels in the hills,—matters thatconstitute the small talk of the tents, just as the weather andthe fashionable divorce figure in drawing-rooms. Knowingwhat was expected of him, the Consul touched on Europeanpolitics, upon inventions, the progress that the French had madeupon the southern frontier of Algeria; and as he thus unpackedhis news with due prolixity, the Sherif now and again interjectedone or another of those pious phrases, such as “Allah ismerciful,” or “God’s ways are wonderful,”which at the same time show the interjector’s piety, andgive the manp.154who is discoursing time to collect himself, and toprepare another phrase.

After a little conversation languished, and the two men whoknew each other well sat listlessly, the Consul smoking and theSherif passing the beads of a cheap wooden rosary between thefingers of his right hand, whilst with his left he waved a cottonpocket handkerchief to keep away the flies.

Looking up at his companion, “Consul,” he said,for he had now dropped the Ambassador with which he first hadgreeted him, “you know us well, you speak our tongue; evenyou know Shillah, the language of the accursed Berbers, and havetranslated Sidi Hammo into the speech of Nazarenes-I beg yourpardon—of the Rumi,” for he had seen a flush rise onthe Consul’s cheek.

“You like our country, and have lived in it for morethan twenty years. I do not speak to you about our law, forevery man cleaves to his own, but of our daily life. Tellme now, which of the two makes a man happier, the law of SidnaAissa, or that of our Prophet, God’s ownMessenger?”

He stopped and waited courteously, playingp. 155with hisnaked toes, just as a European plays with his fingers in theintervals of speech.

The Consul sent a veritable solfatara of tobacco smoke out ofhis mouth and nostrils, and laying down his cigarette returned noanswer for a little while.

Perchance his thoughts were wandering towards the citiesbrilliant with light—the homes of science and of art. Cities of vain endeavour in which men pass their lives thinkingof the condition of their poorer brethren, but never making anymove to get down off their backs. He thought of London andof Paris and New York, the dwelling-places both of law and order,and the abodes of noise. He pondered on their materialadvancement: their tubes that burrow underneath the ground, inwhich run railways carrying their thousands all the day and farinto the night; upon their hospitals, their charitableinstitutions, their legislative assemblies, and their museums,with their picture-galleries, their theatres—on the vastsums bestowed to forward arts and sciences, and on the poor whoshiver in their streets and cower under railway arches in thedark winter nights.

p. 156As hesat with his cigarette smouldering beside him in a little brazenpan, the night breeze brought the heavy scent of orange blossoms,for it was spring, and all the gardens of the sanctuary each hadits orange grove. Never had they smelt sweeter, and neverhad the croaking of the frogs seemed more melodious, or thecricket’s chirp more soothing to the soul.

A death’s-head moth whirred through the tent, poisingitself, just as a humming-bird hangs stationary probing thepetals of a flower. The gentle murmur of its wings broughtback the Consul’s mind from its excursus in the regions ofreality, or unreality, for all is one according to the point ofview.

“Sherif,” he said, “what you have asked me Iwill answer to the best of my ability.

“Man’s destiny is so precarious that neither yourlaw nor our own appear to me to influence it, or at the best butslightly.

“One of your learned Talebs, or our men of science, asthey call themselves, with the due modesty of conscious worth, ispassing down a street, and from a house-top slips a tile andfalls upon his head. There he lies huddled up, an uglybundle of old clothes, inert andp. 157shapeless, whilst his immortal soulleaves his poor mortal body, without which all its divinity isincomplete; then perhaps after an hour comes back again, and theman staggering to his feet begins to talk about God’sattributes, or about carrying a line of railroad along aprecipice.”

The Sherif, who had been listening with the respect that everywell-bred Arab gives to the man who has possession of the word,said, “It was so written. The man could not have diedor never could have come to life again had it not beenAllah’s will.”

His friend smiled grimly and rejoined, “That is so; butas Allah never manifests his will, except in action, just as weact towards a swarm of ants, annihilating some and sparing othersas we pass, it does not matter very much what Allah thinks about,as it regards ourselves.”

“When I was young,” slowly said the Sherif,“whilst in the slave trade far away beyond the desert, Imet the pagan tribes.

“They had no God . . . like Christians. . . Pardonme, I know you know our phrase: nothing but images of wood.

p.158“Those infidels, who, by the way, were just asapt at a good bargain as if their fathers all had bowedthemselves in Christian temple or in mosque, when they receivedno answer to their prayers, would pull their accursed images downfrom their shrines, paint them jet black, and hang them from anail.

“Heathens they were, ignorant even of the name of God,finding their heaven and their hell here upon earth, just likethe animals, but . . . sometimes I have thought not quite bereftof reason, for they had not the difficulties you have about thewill of Allah and the way in which he works.

“They made their gods themselves, just as we do,”and as he spoke he lowered his voice and peered out of the tentdoor; “but wiser than ourselves they kept a tight hand onthem, and made their will, as far as possible, coincide withtheir own.

“How pleasantly the time passes away conversing withone’s friends”; and as he spoke he stood erect,turning towards Mecca, as mechanically as the needle turnstowards the pole.

p. 159Hiswhole appearance altered and his mean presence suffered a subtlechange. With eyes fixed upon space, and hands uplifted, hetestified to the existence of the one God, the Compassionate, theMerciful, the Bounteous, the Generous One, who alone givethvictory.

Then, sinking down, he laid his forehead on the ground,bringing his palms together. Three times he bowed himself,and then rising again upon his feet recited the confession of hisfaith.

The instant he had done he sat him down again; but gravely andwith the air of one who has performed an action, half courteous,half obligatory, but refreshing to the soul.

The Consul, who well knew his ways, and knew that probably heseldom prayed at home, and that the prayers he had just seen mostlikely were a sort of affirmation of his neutral attitude beforea stranger, yet was interested.

Then, when the conversation was renewed, he said to him,“Prayer seems to me, Sherif, to be the one great differencebetween the animals and man.

“As to the rest, we live and die, drink, eat, andpropagate our species, just as they do;p. 160but no oneever heard of any animal who had addressed himself toGod.”

A smile flitted across the pock-marked features of thedescendant of the Prophet, and looking gravely at hisfriend,—

“Consul,” he said, “Allah to you has givenmany things. He has endowed you with your fertile brains,that have searched into forces which had remained unknown innature since the sons of Adam first trod the surface of theearth. All that you touch you turn to gold, and as oursaying goes, ‘Gold builds a bridge across thesea.’

“Ships, aeroplanes, cannons of monstrous size, andlittle instruments by which you see minutest specks as if theywere great rocks; all these you have and yet you doubt Hispower.

“To us, the Arabs, we who came from the lands of fire inthe Hejaz and Hadramut. We who for centuries have remainedunchanged, driving our camels as our fathers drove them, eatingand drinking as our fathers ate and drank, and living face toface with God. . . . Consu’, you should not smile,for do we not live closer to Him than you do, under the starsp. 161at night,out in the sun by day, our lives almost as simple as the lives ofanimals? To us He has vouchsafed gifts that He either haswithheld from you, or that you have neglected in your pride.

“Thus we still keep our faith. . . . Faith in theGod who set the planets in their courses, bridled the tides, andcaused the palm to grow beside the river so that the travellermay rest beneath its shade, and resting, praise His name.

“You ask me, who ever heard of any animal that addressedhimself to God. He in His infinite power . . . be sure ofit . . . is He not merciful and compassionate, wonderful in Hisways, harder to follow than the track that a gazelle leaves inthe desert sands; it cannot be that He could have denied themaccess to His ear?

“Did not the lizard, Consul . . ., Hamed el Angri, therunner, the man who never can rest long in any place, but must beever tightening his belt and pulling up his slippers at the heelto make ready for the road . . ., did he not tell you of ElHokaitsallah, the little lizard who, being late upon the day whenp. 162Allahtook away speech from all the animals, ran on the beam in thegreat mosque at Mecca, and dumbly scratched hisprayer?”

The Consul nodded. “Hamed el Angri,” hesaid, “no doubt is still upon the road, by whose side hewill die one day of hunger or of thirst. . . . Yes; he toldme of it, and I wrote it in a book. . . .”

“Write this, then,” the Sherif went on,“Allah in his compassion, and in case the animals, bereftof speech, that is in Arabic, for each has his own tongue, shouldnot be certain of the direction of the Kiblah, has given thepower to a poor insect which we call El Masgad to pray for all ofthem. With its head turned to Mecca, as certainly as if hehad the needle of the mariners, he prays at El Magreb.

“All day he sits erect and watches for his prey. At eventide, just at the hour of El Magreb, when from the‘alminares’ of the Mosques the muezzin calls upon thefaithful for their prayers, he adds his testimony.

“Consu’, Allah rejects no prayer, however humble,and that the little creature knows. He knows that Allahdoes not answer every prayer;p. 163but yet the prayer remains; it isnot blotted out, and perhaps some day it may fructify, for it iswritten in the book.

“Therefore El Masgad prays each night for all theanimals, yet being but a little thing and simple, it has notstrength to testify at all the hours laid down in Mecca by ourLord Mohammed, he of the even teeth, the curling hair, and thegrave smile, that never left his face after he had communed withAllah in the cave.”

The Consul dropped his smoked-out cigarette, and, stretchingover to his friend, held out his hand to him.

“Sherif,” he said, “maybe El Masgad praysfor you and me, as well as for its kind?”

The answer came: “Consu’, doubt not; it is alittle animal of God, . . . we too are in His hand. . ..”

p.164XIV
FEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR

The great Capilla, the largest inthe Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay, was built round a huge square,almost a quarter of a mile across.

Upon three sides ran the low, continuous line of houses, likea “row” in a Scotch mining village or a phalansterydesigned by Prudhon or St. Simon in their treatises; but by thegrace of a kind providence never carried out, either in bricks orstone.

Each dwelling-place was of the same design and size as all therest. Rough tiles made in the Jesuit times, but nowweathered and broken, showing the rafters tied with raw hide inmany places, formed the long roof, that looked a little like thepent-house of a tennis court.

p. 165Adeep verandah ran in front, stretching from one end to the otherof the square, supported on great balks of wood, which, aftermore than two hundred years and the assaults of weather and theall-devouring ants, still showed the adze marks where they hadbeen dressed. The timber was so hard that you couldscarcely drive a nail into it, despite the flight of time sinceit was first set up. Rings fixed about six feet from theground were screwed into the pillars of the verandah, beforeevery door, to fasten horses to, exactly as they are in an oldSpanish town.

Against the wall of almost every house, just by the door, wasset a chair or two of heavy wood, with the seat formed by stripsof hide, on which the hair had formerly been left, but long agorubbed off by use, or eaten by the ants.

The owner of the house sat with the back of the strong chairtilted against the wall, dressed in a loose and pleated shirt,with a high turned-down collar open at the throat, and spotlesswhite duck trousers, that looked the whiter by their contrastwith his brown, naked feet.

His home-made palm-tree hat was placedp. 166upon theground beside him, and his cloak of coarse red baize was thrownback from his shoulders, as he sat smoking a cigarette rolled ina maize leaf, for in the Jesuit capillas only women smokedcigars.

At every angle of the square a sandy trail led out, either tothe river or the woods, the little patches planted with mandioca,or to the maze of paths that, like the points outside a junction,eventually joined in one main trail, that ran from Itapua on theParaná, up to Asuncion.

The church, built of wood cut in the neighbouring forest, hadtwo tall towers, and followed in its plan the pattern of all thechurches in the New World built by the Jesuits, from Californiadown to the smallest mission in the south. It filled thefourth side of the square, and on each side of it there rose twofeathery palms, known as the tallest in the Missions, whichserved as landmarks for travellers coming to the place, if theyhad missed their road. So large and well-proportioned wasthe church, it seemed impossible that it had been constructedsolely by the Indians themselves, under the direction of themissionaries.

p. 167Theoverhanging porch and flight of steps that ran down to the grassysward in the middle of the town gave it an air as of a cathedralreared to nature in the wilds, for the thick jungle flowed upbehind it and almost touched its walls.

Bells of great size, either cast upon the spot or brought atvast expense from Spain, hung in the towers. On this, thefeast day of the Blessed Virgin, the special patron of thesettlement, they jangled ceaselessly, the Indians taking turns tohaul upon the dried lianas that served instead of ropes. Though they pulled vigorously, the bells sounded a littlemuffled, as if they strove in vain against the vigorous naturethat rendered any work of man puny and insignificant in theParaguayan wilds.

Inside, the fane was dark, the images of saints were dusty,their paint was cracked, their gilding tarnished, making themlook a little like the figures in a New Zealand pah, as theyloomed through the darkness of the aisle. On the neglectedaltar, for at that time priests were a rarity in the Reductions,the Indians had placed great bunches of red flowers, and now andthen a humming-bird flitted in throughp. 168theglassless windows and hung poised above them; then darted outagain, with a soft, whirring sound. Over the whole capilla,in which at one time several thousand Indians had lived, but nowreduced to seventy or eighty at the most, there hung an air ofdesolation. It seemed as if man, in his long protractedstruggle with the forces of the woods, had been defeated, and hadaccepted his defeat, content to vegetate, forgotten by the world,in the vast sea of green.

On this particular day, the annual festival of the BlessedVirgin, there was an air of animation, for from far and near,from Jesuit capilla, from straw-thatched huts lost in theclearings of the primeval forest, from the few cattle ranchesthat then existed, and from the little town of Itapua, fiftymiles away, the scanty population had turned out to attend thefestival.

Upon the forest tracks, from earliest dawn, long lines ofwhite-clad women, barefooted, with their black hair cut squareacross the forehead and hanging down their backs, had marched assilently as ghosts. All of them smoked great, green cigars,and as theyp.169marched along, their leader carrying a torch, till thesun rose and jaguars went back to their lairs, they never talked;but if a woman in the rear of the long line wished to conversewith any comrade in the front she trotted forward till shereached her friend and whispered in her ear. When theyarrived at the crossing of the little river they bathed, or, atthe least, washed carefully, and gathering a bunch of flowers,stuck them into their hair. They crossed the stream, and onarriving at the plaza they set the baskets, which they hadcarried on their heads, upon the ground, and sitting down besidethem on the grass, spread out their merchandise. Orangesand bread, called “chipa,” made from mandioca flourand cheese, with vegetables and various homely sweetmeats, groundnuts, rolls of sugar done up in plaintain leaves, and known as“rapadura,” were the chief staples of theirtrade. Those who had asses let them loose to feed; and ifupon the forest trails the women had been silent, once in thesafety of the town no flight of parrots in a maize field couldhave chattered louder than they did as they sat waiting by theirwares. Soon the square filled, and menp. 170arrivingtied their horses in the shade, slackening their broad hidegirths, and piling up before them heaps of the leaves of the palmcalled “Pindó” in Guarani, till they were coolenough to eat their corn. Bands of boys, for in those daysmost of the men had been killed off in the past war, cametrooping in, accompanied by crowds of women and of girls, whocarried all their belongings, for there were thirteen women to aman, and the youngest boy was at a premium amongst the Indianwomen, who in the villages, where hardly any men were left,fought for male stragglers like unchained tigresses. A fewold men came riding in on some of the few native horses left, foralmost all the active, little, undersized breed of Paraguay hadbeen exhausted in the war. They, too, had bands of womentrotting by their sides, all of them anxious to unsaddle, to takethe horses down to bathe, or to perform any small office that themen required of them. All of them smoked continuously, andeach of them was ready with a fresh cigarette as soon as the oldman or boy whom they accompanied finished the stump he heldbetween his lips. The womenp. 171all were dressed in the long Indianshirt called a “tupoi,” cut rather low upon thebreast, and edged with coarse black cotton lace, which everyParaguayan woman wore. Their hair was as black as acrow’s back, and quite as shiny, and their white teeth sostrong that they could tear the ears of corn out of a maize coblike a horse munching at his corn.

Then a few Correntino gauchos next appeared, dressed in theirnational costume of loose black merino trousers, stuffed intolong boots, whose fronts were all embroidered in red silk. Their silver spurs, whose rowels were as large as saucers, justdangled off their heels, only retained in place by a flat chain,that met upon the instep, clasped with a lion’s head. Long hair and brown vicuna ponchos, soft black felt hats, and redsilk handkerchiefs tied loosely round their necks marked them asstrangers, though they spoke Guarani.

They sat upon their silver-mounted saddles, with their toesresting in their bell-shaped stirrups, swaying so easily withevery movement that the word riding somehow or other seemedinapplicable to men who, like the centaurs, formed one body withthe horse.

p. 172Asthey drew near the plaza they raised their hands and touchedtheir horses with the spur, and, rushing like a whirlwind rightto the middle of the square, drew up so suddenly that theirhorses seemed to have turned to statues for a moment, and then ata slow trot, that made their silver trappings jingle as theywent, slowly rode off into the shade.

The plaza filled up imperceptibly, and the short grass wascovered by a white-clad throng of Indians. The heatincreased, and all the time the bells rang out, pulled vigorouslyby relays of Indians, and at a given signal the people turned andtrooped towards the church, all carrying flowers in theirhands.

As there was no one to sing Mass, and as the organ long hadbeen neglected, the congregation listened to some prayers, readfrom a book of Hours by an old Indian, who pronounced the Latin,of which most likely he did not understand a word, as if it hadbeen Guarani. They sang “Las Flores áMaria” all in unison, but keeping such good time that at alittle distance from the church it sounded like waves breaking ona beach after a summer storm.

p. 173Inthe neglected church, where no priest ministered or clergyprayed, where all the stoops of holy water had for years beendry, and where the Mass had been well-nigh forgotten as a whole,the spirit lingered, and if it quickeneth upon that feast day inthe Paraguayan missions, that simple congregation were asuplifted by it as if the sacrifice had duly been fulfilled withcandles, incense, and the pomp and ceremony of Holy Mother Churchupon the Seven Hills.

As every one except the Correntinos went barefooted, the exitof the congregation made no noise except the sound of naked feet,slapping a little on the wooden steps, and so the people silentlyonce again filled the plaza, where a high wooden arch had beenerected in the middle, for the sport of running at the ring.

The vegetable sellers had now removed from the middle of thesquare, taking all their wares under the long verandah, andseveral pedlars had set up their booths and retailed cheapEuropean trifles such as no one in the world but a ParaguayanIndian could possibly require. Razors that would not cut,and little looking-glasses in pewter frames made inp. 174Thuringia,cheap clocks that human ingenuity was powerless to repair whenthey had run their course of six months’ intermittentticking, and gaudy pictures representing saints who had ascendedto the empyrean, as it appeared, with the clothes that they hadworn in life, and all bald-headed, as befits a saint, were setout side by side with handkerchiefs of the best China silk. Sales were concluded after long-continued chaffering—thathiggling of the market dear to old-time economists, for no onewould have bought the smallest article, even below cost price,had it been offered to him at the price the seller originallyasked.

Enrique Clerici, from Itapua, had transported all his pulperiabodily for the occasion of the feast. It had not wantedmore than a small wagon to contain his stock-in-trade. Twoor three dozen bottles of square-faced gin of the Anchor brand, adozen of heady red wine from Catalonia, a pile of sardine boxes,sweet biscuits, raisins from Malaga, esparto baskets full offigs, and sundry pecks of apricots dried in the sun and cut intothe shape of ears, and hence called “orejones,”completed all his store. He himself, tall andp. 175sunburnt,stood dressed in riding-boots and a broad hat, with his revolverin his belt, beside a pile of empty bottles, which he had alwaysready, to hurl at customers if there should be any attempt eitherat cheating or to rush his wares. He spoke the curiouslingo, half-Spanish, half-Italian, that so many of his countrymenuse in the River Plate; and all his conversation ran uponGaribaldi, with whom he had campaigned in youth, upon ItaliaIrredenta, and on the time when anarchy should sanctify mankindby blood, as he said, and bring about the reign of universalbrotherhood.

He did a roaring trade, despite the competition of a nativeParaguayan, who had brought three demi-johns of Caña, formen prefer the imported article the whole world over, though itis vile, to native manufactures, even when cheap and good.

Just about twelve o’clock, when the sun almost burned ahole into one’s head, the band got ready in the churchporch, playing upon old instruments, some of which may havesurvived from Jesuit times, or, at the least, been copied in theplace, as the originals decayed.

p.176Sackbuts and psalteries and shawms were there, withserpents, gigantic clarionets, and curiously twisted oboes, anddrums, whose canvas all hung slack and gave a muffled sound whenthey were beaten, and little fifes, ear-piercing and devilish,were represented in that band. It banged and crashed“La Palomita,” that tune of evil-sounding omen, forto its strains prisoners were always ushered out to execution inthe times of Lopez, and as it played the players slowly walkeddown the steps.

Behind them followed the alcalde, an aged Indian, dressed inlong cotton drawers, that at the knees were split into a fringethat hung down to his ankles, a spotless shirt much pleated, anda red cloak of fine merino cloth. In his right hand hecarried a long cane with a silver head—his badge ofoffice. Walking up to the door of his own house, by whichwas set a table covered with glasses and with homemade cakes, hegave the signal for the running at the ring.

The Correntino gauchos, two or three Paraguayans, and a Germanmarried to a Paraguayan wife, were all who entered for thep.177sport. The band struck up, and a young Paraguayanstarted the first course. Gripping his stirrups tightlybetween his naked toes, and seated on an old “recao,”surmounted by a sheepskin, he spurred his horse, a wall-eyedskewbald, with his great iron spurs, tied to his bare instepswith thin strips of hide. The skewbald, only half-tamed,reared once or twice and bounded off, switching its ragged tail,which had been half-eaten off by cows. The people yelled, a“mosqueador!”—that is, a“fly-flapper,” a grave fault in a horse in the eyesof Spanish Americans—as the Paraguayan steered the skewbaldwith the reins held high in his left hand, carrying the otherjust above the level of his eyes, armed with a piece of caneabout a foot in length.

As he approached the arch, in which the ring dangled from astring, his horse, either frightened by the shouting of the crowdor by the arch itself, swerved and plunged violently, carryingits rider through the thickest of the people, who separated likea flock of sheep when a dog runs through it, cursing himvolubly. The German came the next, dressed in his Sundayclothes, a slop-made suit of shoddyp. 178cloth, riding a horse that all hisspurring could not get into full speed. The rider’sround, fair face was burned a brick-dust colour, and as hespurred and plied his whip, made out of solid tapir hide, thesweat ran down in streams upon his coat. So intent was heon flogging, that as he neared the ring he dropped his piece ofcane, and his horse, stopping suddenly just underneath the arch,would have unseated him had he not clasped it round theneck. Shouts of delight greeted this feat of horsemanship,and one tall Correntino, taking his cigarette out of his mouth,said to his fellow sitting next to him upon his horse, “Thevery animals themselves despise the gringos. See how thatlittle white-nosed brute that he was riding knew that he was a‘maturango,’ and nearly had him off.”

Next came Hijinio Rojas, a Paraguayan of the better classes,sallow and Indian looking, dressed in clothes bought in Asuncion,his trousers tucked into his riding-boots. His small blackhat, with the brim flattened up against his head by the windcaused by the fury of the gallop of his active little roan withfour white feet, was kept upon his head by ap. 179blackribbon knotted underneath his chin. As he neared the archhis horse stepped double several times and fly jumped; but thatdid not disturb him in the least, and, aiming well he touched thering, making it fly into the air. A shout went up, partlyin Spanish, partly in Guarani, from the assembled people, andRojas, reining in his horse, stopped him in a few bounds, sosharply, that his unshod feet cut up the turf of the green plazaas a skate cuts the ice. He turned and trotted gently tothe arch, and then, putting his horse to its top speed, stoppedit again beside the other riders, amid the “Vivas” ofthe crowd. Then came the turn of the four Correntinos, whorode good horses from their native province, had silverhorse-gear and huge silver spurs, that dangled from theirheels. They were all gauchos, born, as the saying goes,“amongst the animals.” A dun with fiery eyesand a black stripe right down his back, and with black markingson both hocks, a chestnut skewbald, a “doradillo,”and a horse of that strange mealy bay with a fern-colouredmuzzle, that the gauchos call a “Pangaré,”carried them just as if their will and that of those whop. 180rode themwere identical. Without a signal, visible at least to anybut themselves, their horses started at full speed, reachingoccasionally at the bit, then dropping it again and bridling soeasy that one could ride them with a thread drawn from aspider’s web. Their riders sat up easily, not ridingas a European rides, with his eyes fixed upon each movement ofhis horse, but, as it were, divining them as soon as they weremade. Each of them took the ring, and all of them checkedtheir horses, as it were, by their volition, rather than the bit,making the silver horse-gear rattle and their great silver spursjingle upon their feet. Each waited for the other at thefar side of the arch, and then turning in a line they startedwith a shout, and as they passed right through the middle of thesquare at a wild gallop, they swung down sideways from theirsaddles and dragged their hands upon the ground. Swingingup, apparently without an effort, back into their seats, whenthey arrived at the point from where they had first started, theyreined up suddenly, making their horses plunge and rear, and thenby a light signal on the reins stand quietly in line, tossing thefoamp.181into the air. Hijinio Rojas and the four centaursall received a prize, and the alcalde, pouring out wineglassesfull of gin, handed them to the riders, who, with a compliment ortwo as to the order of their drinking, emptied them solemnly.

No other runners having come forward to compete, for in thosedays horses were scarce throughout the Paraguayan Missions, thesports were over, and the perspiring crowd went off to breakfastat tables spread under the long verandahs, and silence fell uponthe square.

The long, hot hours during the middle of the day were passedin sleeping. Some lay face downwards in the shade. Others swung in white cotton hammocks, keeping them in perpetualmotion, till they fell asleep, by pushing with a naked toe uponthe ground. At last the sun, the enemy, as the Arabs callhim, slowly declined, and white-robed women, with their“tupois” slipping half off their necks, began to comeout into the verandahs, slack and perspiring after the middaystruggle with the heat.

Then bands of girls sauntered down to thep. 182river, fromwhence soon came the sound of merry laughter as they splashedabout and bathed.

The Correntinos rode down to a pool and washed their horses,throwing the water on them with their two hands, as the animalsstood nervously shrinking from each splash, until they were quitewet through and running down, when they stood quietly, with theirtails tucked in between their legs.

Night came on, as it does in those latitudes, no twilightintervening, and from the rows of houses came the faint lights ofwicks burning in bowls of grease, whilst from beneath the orangetrees was heard the tinkling of guitars.

Enormous bats soared about noiselessly, and white-dressedcouples lingered about the corners of the streets, and men stoodtalking, pressed closely up against the wooden gratings of thewindows, to women hidden inside the room. The air was heavywith the languorous murmur of the tropic night, and gradually thelights one by one were extinguished, and the tinkling of theguitars was stilled. The moon came out, serene andglorious, showingp.183each stone upon the sandy trails as clearly as atmidday. Saddling their horses, the four Correntinossilently struck the trail to Itapua, and bands of women moved offalong the forest tracks towards their homes, walking in Indianfile. Hijinio Rojas, who had saddled up to put theCorrentinos on the right road, emerged into the moonlit plaza,his shadow outlined so sharply on the grass it seemed it had beendrawn, and then, entering a side street, disappeared into thenight. The shrill neighing of his horse appeared as if itbade farewell to its companions, now far away upon the Itapuatrail. Noises that rise at night from forests in thetropics sound mysteriously, deep in the woods. It seemed asif a population silent by day was active and on foot, and fromthe underwood a thick white mist arose, shrouding the sleepingtown.

Little by little, just as a rising tide covers a reef ofrocks, it submerged everything in its white, clingingfolds. The houses disappeared, leaving the plaza seethinglike a lake, and then the church was swallowed up, the towersstruggling, as it were, a little, just as a wreath of seaweed ona rock appears to fight againstp. 184the tide. Then they toodisappeared, and the conquering mist enveloped everything. All that was left above the sea of billowing white were the twotopmost tufts of the tall, feathery palms.

p.185XV
BOPICUÁ

The great corral at Bopicuáwas full of horses. Greys, browns, bays, blacks, duns,chestnuts, roans (both blue and red), skewbalds and piebalds,with claybanks, calicos, buckskins, and a hundred shades andmarkings, unknown in Europe, but each with its proper name inUruguay and Argentina, jostled each other, forming akaleidoscopic mass.

A thick dust rose from the corral and hung above theirheads. Sometimes the horses stood all huddled up, gazingwith wide distended eyes and nostrils towards a group of men thatlounged about the gate. At other times that panic fear thatseizes upon horses when they are crushed together in largenumbers, set them a-galloping. Through the dust-cloud theirfootfalls sounded muffled,p. 186and they themselves appeared likephantoms in a mist. When they had circled round a littlethey stopped, and those outside the throng, craning their headsdown nearly to the ground, snorted, and then ran back, archingtheir necks and carrying their tails like flags. Outsidethe great corral was set Parodi’s camp, below some Chinatrees, and formed of corrugated iron and hides, stuck on shortuprights, so that the hides and iron almost came down upon theground, in gipsy fashion. Upon the branches of the treeswere hung saddles, bridles, halters, hobbles, lazos, andboleadoras, and underneath were spread out saddle-cloths todry. Pieces of meat swung from the low gables of the hut,and under the low eaves was placed a “catre,” thecanvas scissor-bedstead of Spain and of her colonies in the NewWorld. Upon the catre was a heap of ponchos, airing in thesun, their bright and startling colours looking almost dingy inthe fierce light of a March afternoon in Uruguay. Close tothe camp stood several bullock-carts, their poles supported on acrutch, and their reed-covered tilts giving them an air of hutson wheels. p.187Men sat about on bullocks’ skulls, around asmouldering fire, whilst the “maté” circulatedround from man to man, after the fashion of a loving-cup. Parodi, the stiff-jointed son of Italian parents, a gaucho as toclothes and speech, but still half-European in his lack ofcomprehension of the ways of a wild horse. Arena, thecapataz from Entre-Rios, thin, slight, and nervous, a man whohad, as he said, in his youth known how to read and even guidethe pen; but now “things of this world had turned him quiteunlettered, and made him more familiar with the lazo and thespurs.” The mulatto Pablo Suarez, active andcat-like, a great race-rider and horse-tamer, short anddeep-chested, with eyes like those of a black cat, and toes,prehensile as a monkey’s, that clutched the stirrup when awild colt began to buck, so that it could not touch itsflanks. They and Miguel Paralelo, tall, dark, and handsome,the owner of some property, but drawn by the excitement of acowboy’s life to work for wages, so that he could enjoy therisk of venturing his neck each day on a“baguál,”[187] with other peonsasp. 188ElCorrentino and Venancio Baez, were grouped around the fire. With them were seated Martin el Madrileño, a Spanishhorse-coper, who had experienced the charm of gaucho life,together with Silvestre Ayres, a Brazilian, slight andolive-coloured, well-educated, but better known as a deadpistol-shot than as man of books. They waited for theirturn at maté, or ate great chunks of meat from a roastcooked upon a spit, over a fire of bones. Most of the menwere tall and sinewy, with that air of taciturnity andself-equilibrium that their isolated lives and Indian blood sooften stamp upon the faces of those centaurs of the plains. The camp, set on a little hill, dominated the country for mileson every side. Just underneath it, horses and more horsesgrazed. Towards the west it stretched out to the woods thatfringe the Uruguay, which, with its countless islands, flowedbetween great tracks of forest, and formed the frontier with theArgentine.

Between the camp and the corrals smouldered a fire of bonesand ñandubay, and by it, leaning up against a rail, wereset the branding-irons that had turned the horses in the corralp. 189into theproperty of the British Government. All round the herdenclosed, ran horses neighing, seeking their companions, who wereto graze no more at Bopicuá, but be sent off by train andship to the battlefields of Europe to die and suffer, for theyknew not what, leaving their pastures and their innocentcomradeship with one another till the judgment day. Then, Iam sure, for God must have some human feeling after all, thingswill be explained to them, light come into their semi-darkness,and they will feed in prairies where the grass fades not, andsprings are never dry, freed from the saddle, and with no cruelspur to urge them on they know not where or why.

For weeks we had been choosing out the doomed fivehundred. Riding, inspecting, and examining from dawn tillevening, till it appeared that not a single equine imperfectioncould have escaped our eyes. The gauchos, who all thinkthat they alone know anything about a horse, were all struck dumbwith sheer amazement. It seemed to them astonishing to takesuch pains to select horses that for the most part would bekilled in a few months. p. 190“These men,” they said,“certainly all are doctors at the job. They know eventhe least defect, can tell what a horse thinks about andwhy. Still, none of them can ride a horse if he but shakeshis ears. In their bag surely there is a cat shut up ofsome kind or another. If not, why do they bother so much inthe matter, when all that is required is something that can carryone into the thickest of the fight?”

The sun began to slant a little, and we had still threeleagues to drive the horses to the pasture where they had to passthe night for the last time in freedom, before they wereentrained. Our horses stood outside of the corral, tied tothe posts, some saddled with the “recado,”[190] its heads adorned with silver, somewith the English saddle, that out of England has such a strange,unserviceable look, much like a saucepan on a horse’sback. Just as we were about to mount, a man appeared,driving a point of horses, which, he said, “to leave wouldbe a crime against the sacrament.” “These areall pingos,” he exclaimed, “fit for the saddle of theLord on High, all of themp. 191are bitted in the Brazilian style,can turn upon a spread-out saddle-cloth, and all of them cangallop round a bullock’s head upon the ground, so that therider can keep his hand upon it all the time.” Thespeaker by his accent was a Brazilian. His face wasolive-coloured, his hair had the suspicion of a kink. Hishorse, a cream-colour, with black tail and mane, was evidentlyonly half-tamed, and snorted loudly as it bounded here and there,making its silver harness jingle and the rider’s ponchoflutter in the air. Although time pressed, the man’saddress was so persuasive, his appearance so much in characterwith his great silver spurs just hanging from his heel, hisjacket turned up underneath his elbow by the handle of his knife,and, to speak truth, the horses looked so good and in such highcondition that we determined to examine them, and told theirowner to drive them into a corral.

Once again we commenced the work that we had done so manytimes of mounting and examining. Once more we fought,trying to explain the mysteries of red tape to unsophisticatedminds, and once again our “domadores” sprang lightly,barebacked, upon the horsesp. 192they had never seen before, withvarying results. Some of the Brazilian’s horsesbucked like antelopes, El Correntino and the others of our mensitting them barebacked as easily as an ordinary man rides over asmall fence. To all our queries why they did not saddle upwe got one answer, “To ride with the recado is but apastime only fit for boys.” So they went on, pullingthe horses up in three short bounds, nostrils aflame and tailsand manes tossed wildly in the air, only a yard or two from thecorral. Then, slipping off, gave their opinion that theparticular “bayo,” “zaino,” or“gateao” was just the thing to mount a lancer on, andthat the speaker thought he could account for a good tale ofBoches if he were over there in the Great War. This samegreat war, which they called “barbarous,” taking asecret pleasure in the fact that it showed Europeans not a whitmore civilised than they themselves, appeared to them somethingin the way of a great pastime from which they were debarred.

Most of them, when they sold a horse, looked at him andremarked, “Pobrecito, you will go to the Great War,”just as a man looksp. 193at his son who is about to go, withfeelings of mixed admiration and regret.

After we had examined all the Brazilian’s“Tropilla” so carefully that he said, “BySatan’s death, your graces know far more about my horsesthan I myself, and all I wonder is that you do not ask me if allof them have not complied with all the duties of theChurch,” we found that about twenty of them were fit forthe Great War. Calling upon Parodi and the capataz ofBopicuá, who all the time had remained seated round thesmouldering fire and drinking maté, to prepare thebranding-irons, the peons led them off, our head man calling out“Artilleria” or “Caballeria,” accordingto their size. After the branding, either on the hip forcavalry and on the neck for the artillery, a peon cut their manesoff, making them as ugly as a mule, as their late owner said, andwe were once more ready for the road, after the payment had beenmade. This took a little time, either because the Braziliancould not count, or perhaps because of his great caution, for hewould not take payment except horse by horse. So, drivingout the horses one by one,p. 194we placed a roll of dollars in hishand as each one passed the gate. Even then each roll ofdollars had to be counted separately, for time is what men havethe most at their disposal in places such as Bopicuá.

Two hours of sunset still remained, with three long leagues tocover, for in those latitudes there is no twilight, nightsucceeding day, just as films follow one another in acinematograph. At last it all was over, and we were free tomount. Such sort of drives are of the nature of a sport inSouth America, and so the Brazilian drove off the horses that wehad rejected, half a mile away, leaving them with a negro boy toherd, remarking that the rejected were as good or better thanthose that we had bought, and after cinching up his horse,prepared to ride with us. Before we started, a young manrode up, dressed like an exaggerated gaucho, in loose blacktrousers, poncho, and a “golilla”[194a] round his neck, a lazo hanging fromthe saddle, a pair of boleadoras peeping beneath his“cojinillo,”[194b] and a longsilver knife stuck in his belt. It seemedp. 195he was theson of an estanciero who was studying law in Buenos Aires, buthad returned for his vacation, and hearing of our drive had cometo ride with us and help us in our task. No one on suchoccasions is to be despised, so, thanking him for his goodintentions, to which he answered that he was a “partizan ofthe Allies, lover of liberty and truth, and was well on in allhis studies, especially in International Law,” we mounted,the gauchos floating almost imperceptibly, without an effort, totheir seats, the European with that air of escalading aship’s side that differentiates us from man lesscivilised.

During the operations with the Brazilian, the horses had beenlet out of the corral to feed, and now were being held backenpastoreo, as it is called in Uruguay, that is to say, watchedat a little distance by mounted men. Nothing remained butto drive out of the corral the horses bought from the Brazilian,and let them join the larger herd. Out they came like astring of wild geese, neighing and looking round, and theninstinctively made towards the others that were feeding, and wereswallowed up amongst them. Slowly we rodep. 196towards theherd, sending on several well-mounted men upon its flanks, andwith precaution—for of all living animals tame horses mosteasily take fright upon the march and separate—we got theminto motion, on a well-marked trail that led towards the gate ofBopicuá.

At first they moved a little sullenly, and as ifsurprised. Then the contagion of emotion that spreads sorapidly amongst animals upon the march seemed to inspire them,and the whole herd broke into a light trot. That is themoment that a stampede may happen, and accordingly we pulled ourhorses to a walk, whilst the men riding on the flanks forgedslowly to the front, ready for anything that might occur. Gradually the trot slowed down, and we saw as it were a sea ofmanes and tails in front of us, emerging from a cloud of dust,from which shrill neighings and loud snortings rose. Theyreached a hollow, in which were several pools, and stopped todrink, all crowding into the shallow water, where they stoodpawing up the mud and drinking greedily. Time pressed, andas we knew that there was water in the pasture where they were tosleep, wep.197drove them back upon the trail, the water dripping fromtheir muzzles and their tails, and the black mud clinging to thehair upon their fetlocks, and in drops upon their backs. Again they broke into a trot, but this time, as they had got intocontrol, we did not check them, for there was still a mile toreach the gate.

Passing some smaller mud-holes, the body of a horse lay nearto one of them, horribly swollen, and with its stiff legs hoisteda little in the air by the distension of its flanks. Thepassing horses edged away from it in terror, and a young roansnorted and darted like an arrow from the herd. Quick aswas the dart he made, quicker still El Correntino wheeled hishorse on its hind legs and rushed to turn him back. Withhis whip whirling round his head he rode to head the truant, who,with tail floating in the air, had got a start of him of aboutfifty yards. We pressed instinctively upon the horses; butnot so closely as to frighten them, though still enough to beable to stop another of them from cutting out. TheCorrentino on a half-tamed grey, which he rode with a raw-hidethong bound roundp.198its lower jaw, for it was still unbitted, swaying withevery movement in his saddle, which he hardly seemed to grip, soperfect was his balance, rode at a slight angle to the runawayand gained at every stride. His hat blew back and kept inplace by a black ribbon underneath his chin, framed his head likean aureole. The red silk handkerchief tied loosely roundhis neck fluttered beneath it, and as he dashed along, his lazocoiled upon his horse’s croup, rising and falling with eachbound, his eyes fixed on the flying roan, he might have served asculptor as the model for a centaur, so much did he and the wildcolt he rode seem indivisible.

In a few seconds, which to us seemed minutes, for we fearedthe infection might have spread to the whole“caballada,” the Correntino headed and turned theroan, who came back at three-quarter speed, craning his neck outfirst to one side, then to the other, as if he still thought thata way lay open for escape.

By this time we had reached the gates of Bopicuá, andstill seven miles lay between us and our camping-ground, with afast-decliningp.199sun. As the horses passed the gate we countedthem, an operation of some difficulty when time presses and thecount is large. Nothing is easier than to miss animals,that is to say, for Europeans, however practised, but thelynx-eyed gauchos never are at fault. “Where is thelittle brown horse with a white face, and a bit broken out of hisnear forefoot?” they will say, and ten to one that horse ismissing, for what they do not know about the appearance of ahorse would not fill many books. Only a drove road laybetween Bopicuá and the great pasture, at whose farawayextremity the horses were to sleep. When the last animalhad passed and the great gates swung to, the young law studentrode up to my side, and, looking at the “greattropilla,” as he called it, said, “Morituri tesalutant. This is the last time they will feed inBopicuá.” We turned a moment, and the fallingsun lit up the undulating plain, gilding the cottony tufts of thelong grasses, falling upon the dark-green leaves of the low treesaround Parodi’s camp, glinting across the belt of wood thatfringed the Uruguay, and striking full upon a white estanciahouse inp.200Entre-Rios, making it appear quite close at hand,although four leagues away.

Two or three hundred yards from the great gateway stood alittle native hut, as unsophisticated, but for a telephone, aswere the gaucho’s huts in Uruguay, as I remember them fullthirty years ago. A wooden barrel on a sledge for bringingwater had been left close to the door, at which the occupant satdrinking maté, tapping with a long knife upon hisboot. Under a straw-thatched shelter stood a saddled horse,and a small boy upon a pony slowly drove up a flock ofsheep. A blue, fine smoke that rose from a few smoulderinglogs and bones, blended so completely with the air that one wasnot quite sure if it was really smoke or the reflection of thedistant Uruguay against the atmosphere.

Not far off lay the bones of a dead horse, with bits of hideadhering to them, shrivelled into mere parchment by thesun. All this I saw as in a camera-lucida, seated a littlesideways on my horse, and thinking sadly that I, too, had lookedmy last on Bopicuá. It is not given to all men aftera break of years to come back to the scenes of youth, and stillp. 201find inthem the same zest as of old. To return again to all thecares of life called civilised, with all its littlenesses, itsnewspapers all full of nothing, its sordid aims disguised underhigh-sounding nicknames, its hideous riches and its sordidpoverty, its want of human sympathy, and, above all, itsbarbarous war brought on it by the folly of its rulers, was notjust at that moment an alluring thought, as I felt the little“malacara”[201] that I rodetwitching his bridle, striving to be off. When I hadtouched him with the spur he bounded forward and soon overtookthe caballada, and the place which for so many months’ hadbeen part of my life sank out of sight, just as an island in theTropics fades from view as the ship leaves it, as it were, hulldown.

When we had passed into the great enclosure of La Pileta, andstill four or five miles remained to go, we pressed the caballadainto a long trot, certain that the danger of a stampede waspast. Wonderful and sad it was to ride behind so manyhorses, trampling knee-high through the wild grasses of thep. 202Camp,snorting and biting at each other, and all unconscious that theywould never more career across the plains. Strange andaffecting, too, to see how those who had known each other allkept together in the midst of the great herd, resenting allattempts of their companions to separate them.

A “tropilla”[202] that we had boughtfrom a Frenchman called Leon, composed of five brown horses, hadranged itself around its bell mare, a fine chestnut, like abodyguard. They fought off any of the other horses who camenear her, and seemed to look at her both with affection and withpride.

Two little bright bay horses, with white legs and noses, thatwere brothers, and what in Uruguay are known as“seguidores,” that is, one followed the otherwherever it might go, ran on the outskirts of the herd. When either of them stopped to eat, its companion turned its headand neighed to it, when it came galloping up. Arena, ourhead man, riding beside me on a skewbald, looked at them, and,after dashing forward to turn a runaway, wheeled round his horsealmost inp.203the air and stopped it in a bound, so suddenly that foran instant they stood poised like an equestrian statue, looked atthe “seguidores,” and remarked, “Patron, I hopeone shell will kill them both in the Great War if they have gotto die.” I did not answer, except to curse the Bocheswith all the intensity the Spanish tongue commands. Theyoung law-student added his testimony, and we rode on insilence.

A passing sleeve of locusts almost obscured the decliningsun. Some flew against our faces, reminding me of the fightCortes had with the Indians not far from Vera Cruz, which, BernalDiaz says, was obstructed for a moment by a flight of locuststhat came so thickly that many lost their lives by the neglect toraise their bucklers against what they thought were locusts, andin reality were arrows that the Indians shot. The effectwas curious as the insects flew against the horses, some clingingto their manes, and others making them bob up and down theirheads, just as a man does in a driving shower of hail. Wereached a narrow causeway that formed the passage through amarsh. On it the horsesp. 204crowded, making us hold our breathfor fear that they would push each other off into the mud, whichhad no bottom, upon either side. When we emerged andcantered up a little hill, a lake lay at the bottom of it, andbeyond it was a wood, close to a railway siding. Theevening now was closing in, but there was still a good half-hourof light. As often happens in South America just beforesundown, the wind dropped to a dead calm, and passing littleclouds of locusts, feeling the night approach, dropped into thelong grass just as a flying-fish drops into the waves, with aharsh whirring of their gauzy wings.

The horses smelt the water at the bottom of the hill, and thewhole five hundred broke into a gallop, manes flying, tailsraised high, and we, feeling somehow the gallop was the last,raced madly by their side until within a hundred yards or so ofthe great lake. They rushed into the water and all drankgreedily, the setting sun falling upon their many-coloured backs,and giving the whole herd the look of a vast tulip field. We kept away so as to let them drink their fill, and then,leading our horses to the margin of the lake, dismounted,p. 205and, takingout their bits, let them drink, with the air of one accomplishinga rite, no matter if they raised their heads a dozen times andthen began again.

Slowly Arena, El Correntino, Paralelo, Suarez, and the restdrove out the herd to pasture in the deep lush grass. Therest of us rode up some rising ground towards the wood. There we drew up, and looking back towards the plain on which thehorses seemed to have dwindled to the size of sheep in thehalf-light, some one, I think it was Arena, or perhaps PabloSuarez, spoke their elegy: “Eat well,” he said;“there is no grass like that of La Pileta, to where you goacross the sea. The grass in Europe all must smell ofblood.”

NOTES.

[22] Porteño, literallya man born in the port of Buenos Aires, but is also applied toany one born in the province of Buenos Aires.

[25] Benbax ceiba, a large treewith spongy, light wood, that has immense bunches of purpleflowers.

[194a] Golilla, whichoriginally meant a ruff, is now used for a handkerchief round theneck.

[201] Malacara, literallyBadface, is the name used for a white-faced horse. In olddays in England such a horse was called Baldfaced.

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		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 MariaMayor	164
XV.	Bopicuá	185

Movatterモバイル変換

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofBrought Forward

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

BROUGHT FORWARD

p.viiPREFACE

p.xiiiCONTENTS

p. 1I
BROUGHT FORWARD

p. 11II
LOS PINGOS

p. 30III
FIDELITY

p. 40IV
“UNO DEI MILLE”

p. 51V
WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND

p. 60VI
ELYSIUM

p. 66VII
HEREDITY

p.81VIII
EL TANGO ARGENTINO

p. 97IX
IN A BACKWATER

p. 106X
HIPPOMORPHOUS

p.120XI
MUDEJAR

p.130XII
A MINOR PROPHET

p.146XIII
EL MASGAD

p.164XIV
FEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR

p.185XV
BOPICUÁ

NOTES.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

Movatterモバイル変換

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofBrought Forward

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

BROUGHT FORWARD

p.viiPREFACE

p.xiiiCONTENTS

p. 1IBROUGHT FORWARD

p. 11IILOS PINGOS

p. 30IIIFIDELITY

p. 40IV“UNO DEI MILLE”

p. 51VWITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND

p. 60VIELYSIUM

p. 66VIIHEREDITY

p.81VIIIEL TANGO ARGENTINO

p. 97IXIN A BACKWATER

p. 106XHIPPOMORPHOUS

p.120XIMUDEJAR

p.130XIIA MINOR PROPHET

p.146XIIIEL MASGAD

p.164XIVFEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR

p.185XVBOPICUÁ

NOTES.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

p. 1I
BROUGHT FORWARD

p. 11II
LOS PINGOS

p. 30III
FIDELITY

p. 40IV
“UNO DEI MILLE”

p. 51V
WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND

p. 60VI
ELYSIUM

p. 66VII
HEREDITY

p.81VIII
EL TANGO ARGENTINO

p. 97IX
IN A BACKWATER

p. 106X
HIPPOMORPHOUS

p.120XI
MUDEJAR

p.130XII
A MINOR PROPHET

p.146XIII
EL MASGAD

p.164XIV
FEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR

p.185XV
BOPICUÁ