THE REAL ARGENTINE

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A Vanishing Figure

A “Gaucho” in full costume, wearing the “chiripá,” or loose over-trousers, and carrying the “bolas” around his waist.

Frontispiece.

THE REAL ARGENTINE

Notes and Impressions of a Year
in the Argentine and Uruguay

By
J. A. HAMMERTON

With Numerous Illustrations

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1915

Copyright, 1915
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

So many books have been written on South American countries within recent years that the addition of one more to the already formidable list calls for a word of explanation, if not apology.

So far as American writers on the Latin-American Republics are concerned, many of their works are based upon the statistical returns of the respective Governments, or on topographical and historical data, easily obtainable at the public libraries. Others, more popular, but perhaps less valuable, are the hasty records of fleeting visits. These latter are so apt to be informed by a spirit of indiscriminate admiration that they present misleading and untrue notions of the countries described.

The present writer may be stating what is already known to the reader, when he mentions that among both of these classes of books a considerable percentage—perhaps the greater number of those published in the United States and in England—have been subsidised by the governments of the respective republics of which they treat. Many are but glorified advertising pamphlets, put forth in the guise of serious books the better to fulfil their office of propaganda. To look to them for any dispassionate and well-studied view of the countries illustrated in their pages, would be as natural as to expect the advertisement writer of Somebody’s Soap to publish an entirely impartial opinion of the article he had been employed to advertise.

Several French and German authors have written admirable works on the Argentine, entirely free from bias, depicting the country as it is, alive to its merits and its demerits alike; free both from the charge of “log-rolling” and from that of hasty observation. But American or English writers of similar works are not many. Nay, due to the difficulties of ensuring the conditions essential to the impartial and open-minded study of the country, even writers of such international distinction as Viscount Bryce and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, with the best will in the world, are liable to give false impressions. Often have I seen the system at work, whereby “distinguished visitors” to South American capitals are so entirely taken in hand by Government, entertained royally, and shown only such things as Government particularly wish them to see, that it would be expecting too much of human nature to look to them for an unbiased opinion of the country. I have not read Lord Bryce’s book on South America, nor anything that Mr. Roosevelt may have written concerning his tour there, but both these eminent men so suffer from the disability of their eminence, and from the official hospitality showered upon them during their brief sojourns in South America, that, try they never so valiantly to speak nothing but the truth,—and I esteem them, different as they are in many ways, two of the frankest and most honourable of modern statesmen,—their impressions will be coloured by the peculiar conditions under which they were obtained; conditions of official tutelage; and tempered furthermore by reason of the warm hospitality extended to them by the respective Governments. As for the things they see in their rounds of inspection, it is notorious that they are shown only what official discretion would have them see. All this, mark you, in no depreciation of the brilliant work which these, and many less distinguished visitors to South America, are capable of doing, but merely to remind the reader that the conditions in which a work descriptive of any particular country has been evolved ought to be borne in mind in the reading of it.

The chief fault of most writers on the Argentine is the indiscriminate praise they shower around; their fulsome flattery of the country. Only two hours ago I received from Canada a newspaper with most of its front page devoted to an illustrated article entitled “Buenos Ayres—the Paris of the New World.” An estate agent, describing the attractions of some property for sale, would have been beggared for superlatives compared with the writer of this article who lets loose a veritable flood of uncritical “gush” on Buenos Ayres. He may have spent a week in the town, or he may never have seen it, but a more untruthful or misleading account of the city could not have been penned, though it is typical of many that have come to my notice. I feel that the influence of such writings is to create in the minds of the public who do not know the scenes nor the conditions described an impression entirely mischievous.

So thinking, I have set myself in the present work to make “a try at truth.” I have lived long enough on the River Plate to revise and correct my impressions. I mastered the language of the country, so that I came to converse in it as readily as in English. And during the whole of my stay I wrote not a single paragraph of this book, lest I should record impressions and ideas which in the end might be misleading. I deliberately refrained from note-taking, so that when, fully a year later, I came to the writing, I should be able to secure a truer perspective, only the things that mattered disengaging themselves from the multitude of impressions that crowd in on one during a year of active life in a strange land.

I have eschewed statistics, which bulk so largely in most other works on the Argentine, and can be made to prove whatever a writer most wishes to establish. What I have sought for rather, has been the human interest of these great cities of the River Plate; to present an honest picture of the life that is being lived in them to-day, and to convey, in as interesting a manner as I know how, some general notion of the Republics of Argentine and Uruguay as they really are. I carefully avoid the official point of view, having studiously refrained from putting myself at any time under any obligation that might tend to make me echo an official opinion instead of stating that which I had honestly formed from personal and independent study.

J. A. H.

THE REAL ARGENTINE

CHAPTER I
FROM LONDON TO LISBON

We set out from London on a raw and rainy day. It had been raining off and on for many weeks, and as enthusiasts of the car we had been grumbling, my wife and I, a good deal at the weather. But we were booked for the land of sunshine! And when we bade good-bye to the chauffeur at Charing Cross Station, rather nervously watched the old grey car roll away among the traffic and the drizzling rain, we comforted each other with simple words about the sunshine that awaited us far off by the River Plate.

Even Paris was dirty. I am an inveterate lover of Paris, and must have made some thirty different visits, but seldom out of season, so that I have rarely seen her draggle-tailed. But in that rainy March she looked as miserable as London, and next day only the luxurious accommodation of the Sud Express made the journey through a sodden France agreeable. Floods everywhere. In the neighbourhood of Orleans, the geography of the country seemed to have changed, and this land of few lakes was studded with sheets of water that more than rivalled those of Bouchet, or Gerardmer.

Entering Spain we suffered a change in railway accommodation which was to be typical of many things when changed into Spanish—a change for the worse. The carriages were no longer so princely in their appointments, they were smaller and not quite so clean; but we were still on the Sud Express, the train de luxe, and were (but guessed it not) more comfortable than we were to be again for many moons. So in the darkness through Northern Spain, awakening in the morning as we were nearing the borders of Portugal.

Thus far the journey had mostly covered ground long familiar to me, but Portugal was a new land, and romantically beautiful it appeared, with its stony uplands, its green mountains and leafy valleys, seen in the clear rain-washed air of that golden day that followed the passing of the floods. We were due in Lisbon at eleven o’clock at night; but, a bridge on the route having been washed away, the train had to make a long détour. We arrived at one o’clock in the morning; yet the town was as wide awake as if it had been no later than ten. It evidently goes to bed about three, as we soon found to our cost when we sought to sleep in one of the luxurious chambers of the Avenida Palace Hotel. And here again we were unconsciously bidding good-bye to genuine comfort, as we were never to see in any hotel of South America a room worthy to be slept in by comparison, though we were to pay three times the price charged at the Avenida Palace, which, at the time, seemed sufficiently high!

An interesting little incident on arrival at Lisbon threw a gleam of light on the manners of the degenerate Portuguese nobility, about which we were to learn much from a friend who had resided there since the flight of King Manuel. At the Gare d’Orsay in Paris, we noticed that the next compartment to ours was occupied by a tall and handsome lady and her little daughter. Elegantly dressed, her natural but waning beauty aided artificially, her hair of false gold, this painted lady offered a strong contrast to the group of relatives who had come to see her off. At best, one might have judged these to be ugly people of the artisan class; at worst, gentry who traded less honourably in the obscurer byways of Saint Lazarre or Montmartre. The lady showed no physical resemblance to any of them; she might have been a changeling daughter. Her own child was a charming little creature, despite her plain features, and it was clear the mother could command more cash than any of the shabby group of relatives who had wished them adieu and bon voyage.

All the way to Lisbon, the lady kept closely to her compartment, but the trixy little daughter made free of the car. On arrival at the Portuguese capital, one began to piece together the scraps of a typical modern “romance,” as the pair were met by an undersized, flabby and slightly deformed young gentleman, on whom the child gazed with all the interest of a first encounter. A great motor car was in waiting and conveyed them to our hotel, a distance of about two hundred yards! We were fated to see much of the curious trio on the voyage to Rio de Janeiro. The gentleman, a Portuguese nobleman, was evidently making for the safety of Brazil, and had planned to keep bright his memories of Parisian Nights in company of one of the pleasure-givers.

One meets queer ship-mates on the South American trip. It would be the height of indiscretion to inquire too closely into the relationship of many of the couples who sit with you at table. Somehow I always thought of “the distinguished member of the Jockey Club, with his niece, h’m, h’m!” in Tartarin sur les Alpes, when the Portuguese nobleman, with his lady, h’m, h’m, sat down at table with the rest of our oddly assorted company.

There is a brightness and a sense of gaiety about the picturesque and beautiful capital of Portugal that are most engaging to the fleeting visitor, but after a short time the foreign resident finds it one of the dullest of towns, and has a lurking sympathy with the old and fallen nobility who sought distraction in pursuits that drew only the poison from the pleasures of London and Paris, and eventually made of them the most corrupt aristocracy in Europe. From all one heard, the revolution did not come a day too soon, and seldom have there been a king and an aristocracy that more openly “asked for it” than Manuel and his effeminate nobles.

The mingling of the negro blood with the European, which is so marked a feature of the Portuguese, is doubtless responsible for the low ebb of morality in Lisbon. The Jewish type is very noticeable among the people one passes in the streets, and especially in the women. Altogether, I felt that the breath of the place was somewhat unwholesome, and Republicanism cannot possibly make matters worse, though national decay may have gone too far for any sort of government to re-vitalise the character of the people. Old Portugal’s adventurings abroad, which made her powerful for a time, brought to her the canker of luxury and the lowering of her virility, in the admixture of the blood of alien and vicious peoples, so that to-day in her decadence she is really paying her final debts of empire.

One of the Crowded Docks in the Port of Buenos Ayres.

Friends of Emigrants awaiting the Arrival of a Ship.

One sign there was of hope in what we saw—the admirably conducted orphanage that occupies the splendid buildings of the old monastery of Belem, hard by the memorial of Vasco da Gama, with its memories of Portugal’s golden age. Nowhere have I seen a finer institution of its kind, with better evidence of wise charity and tender care of the young. It was a good act that cleared out the droning monks and confiscated their building for its present humane and profitable use. The boys are taught all kinds of trades, including agriculture, and some of them to whom we spoke during their play-hour were much ahead of the scholars of any English orphanage in their knowledge of foreign languages. French was the favourite, although one of the lads, who had strong evidence of negro origin, spoke both French and English admirably, and told us he was studying German.

On the way to the monastery we spent some time examining the extraordinary collection of old royal carriages and sedan chairs, housed in a plain modern building. These relics of the gorgeous past are even more remarkable in their prodigal ostentation than those of the famous collection at Versailles, and will probably be guarded by the Republic as evidence that the spendthrift kings who so long oppressed the country went to sinful extremes in their love of ostentation and luxury, though all the same I would not swap a sixteen horse power car for the whole collection, if it were comfort I was after!

The driver of the motor car we had hired would have been kept in solitary confinement in any peaceful country, for he was a public danger, yet when we had loaded up with our luggage at the hotel we came near to missing the ship, as “something went wrong with the works,” and the reckless driver proved so incompetent a mechanic that we had eventually to transfer ourselves and our light luggage (the heavy having been shipped in England) to another taxi, and so reach the quay, where for a mere trifle of 2,000 reis ($2) two brawny rascals put our bags on board the tender, with more fuss than an English porter would have made over shifting a car-load.

In a few minutes more we were aboard the liner that was to carry us across the sunlit seas to that other America which is so different from the Northern Continent and of which Americans really know so little.

CHAPTER II
OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE

We had laughed at the story of some Englishmen in Lisbon, told us by a friend there. He overheard a group of typical John Bull tourists, who had been “doing” a fortnight in Portugal, discussing their experiences on their way to the boat. The weather had been superb all the time; they had been steeped in sunshine; yet the reflection which seemed to find most favour was the remark of a burly Yorkshireman: “Thank ’eaven, boys, no more of this damned glare for a while!”

But we were seekers of sunshine, prepared to accept all that came our way, so it was with light hearts we heard the engines throb and felt the vessel resume her voyage. The Franco-Portuguese couple with the little girl and ourselves were all who came aboard at Lisbon, which looked a veritable city of dream as we steamed out through the wide waters of the Tagus. Seen from the river, there are few finer prospects than the long and diversified coast line of Lisbon, culminating in the castled height of Cintra. A soft haze of heat blurred the outlines of the hills and touched them much in the manner of those feathery old landscape engravings that used to adorn the art books of fifty years ago.

There was a fairly large number of passengers aboard, but we soon discovered that the majority were only bound for Las Palmas, excluding the second class and some three hundred Spanish and Portuguese emigrants herded like cattle in the steerage. The dinner bell rang soon after we had settled in our new quarters, and for two weeks or so our days now slipped away, punctuated by the ship’s bells. This orderly division of time speedily produces a mental condition that makes for calm and good health. With nothing to do but engage in an occasional game of deck golf, or lounge in your canvas chair reading a novel, and be prompt to answer the summons of the bells that ring you to your meals, the days fade into each other, like the old-fashioned dissolving views, and with never a suggestion of weariness. Indeed, I often wondered if it might not be that a term of imprisonment would be almost as efficacious in bringing calm to the troubled spirit and health to the wearied body. Certainly a spell of monastic life would be as good a “rest cure.” But, on the whole, I felt the steamer chair had its advantages and although I had taken with me the notes for a book I had had in hand for years, intent on advancing that in my days of idleness, it was with a great content that I found it impossible to fix my mind on any thought of work in those serene days of sailing over sunny seas. Nothing seemed to matter, even the frequent ticking of the “wireless” was somewhat of an intrusion on our ocean peace.

In a voyage of so little incident, when the chief excitement is contrived by arranging sweepstakes on the day’s mileage of the vessel, there is plenty of time to study one’s fellow passengers, and for this a small company, such as we were after leaving Las Palmas, is probably more interesting than a large one. There were only some thirty saloon passengers and naturally there was much interchange of gossip, the ship’s officers proving especially companionable. A small company has the disadvantage, however, that the chronicler cannot well describe his companion voyagers with that easy frankness he may safely bestow upon a crowd. The possibilities of mutual identification are enormously increased.

Yet in the little handful of voyagers with whom we sailed there was a remarkable mingling of character: potentialities of tragedy and comedy, a microcosm of the social world. One could find much to say of them. I must content myself, however, with a few vague touches.

I found that one of the passengers who had made himself most eminent in the companionship of the saloon was an intimate of one of my oldest friends in a far-distant city—so tiny is this great world of ours. He was a gentleman in whom there survived something of the spirit of Mr. Pleydell in his Saturday evening “high jinks,” and maintained that character in the smoking room (where every night was Saturday) with a small but admiring audience whom he addressed as “my loyal subjects.” “Tell me,” he would say, “what thou would that we, of our royal will, might do this evening for our own and thy diversion.” And with varying qualities of the lamely jocular they would give their suggestions. It was all very pathetic to an onlooker: the frank and insatiable egotism of “Uncle” (as we dubbed this worthy of the ruddy visage), his determination to hear the beloved sound of his own voice in hoary anecdote and threadbare jest. I was very patient with him, as I shall ever be with one who has passed many years of his life in South America—he should be allowed a large charter of liberty for all that he has suffered of social hunger and intellectual thirst. At first I resented somewhat the obtrusive nature of this worthy Scot’s companionship, but, somehow, before the journey’s end we were good friends. I think a voyage of this kind teaches one tolerance, and it is surprising how the most apparently incompatible units may draw together by the practice of even a little toleration. As “Uncle” observed in his soft Scots voice: “Mun, I was even beginning to like Brixton,” naming a young man who joined us at Pernambuco, and who, by reason of a most pronounced tendency to “swank,” made a bad first impression.

Mention of this passenger, by the way, reminds me that his unfortunate habit of capping every story, going one better than everybody else, kept most of us at arm’s length for a day or two. If one said he had yellow fever, Brixton had had it twice; if another had made two voyages to Africa, Brixton had made five or six; if a third had shot a hare, Brixton had shot an elephant. Everywhere he had been he had met with hair-raising adventures. In Pernambuco, he had to use his revolver every night to scare away the burglars. How many had he killed? “I winged one of the devils anyhow!” And in proof he passed round his revolver. Yellow Jack was raging in the town when he left, he assured us; but somehow he had been allowed to come on board quietly and make us shiver with recital of the horrors he had escaped. Of course, we doubted every word that Brixton said and yet on many points I have since had occasion to test his statements and never once have I found that he lied. He told the truth as he saw it, and he was an entertaining and good-hearted Englishman, who had forgot in growing up to cast off certain habits of thought and talk which are delightful in Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns, but are apt to convey wrong impressions of handsome, well-groomed Mr. Brixtons!

Perhaps our quaintest voyager was an ugly Frenchman, who had been christened “Dr. Crippen,” before the ship had reached Lisbon. He certainly bore some resemblance to that misguided gentleman who stood so eminently in the world’s eye for a time, and the humour of the situation was that he had never heard of Crippen, and rather thought it was some sort of dimly conceived English compliment to him. He spoke no word of our barbaric tongue, and when “Uncle” presided at a mock trial of “Dr. Crippen” the prisoner was vastly amused, until he found himself condemned to an hour’s solitary confinement in a bathroom. He was much given to patronising the bar and passed the most of his days in a state of happy fuddle; yet I afterwards learned that his was one of the clearest brains that control a great and world-famous organisation in France and when he left us, it was a new and extremely sober “Dr. Crippen” who stepped ashore to carry out a very delicate and difficult business mission.

There was no American or English lady among the saloon passengers, but we had Scots, Irish, Danish, French, Spanish, and Peruvian. Of none that were ladies shall I speak, but two who were something else deserve a note. ’Tis ever thus; virtue is so lacking in the picturesque. As a connoisseur of dancing, I was interested to discover that we had aboard a famous danseuse, most charming of all the pupils of the great Loïe Fuller, who was on her way to the Casino at Buenos Ayres—a resort of dubious fame, according to current belief among our music-hall performers. But as I had many a time been charmed by the exquisite art of the said pupil of Loïe Fuller (whose name is as widely known as that of her teacher) I had no difficulty in deciding that the plain and vulgar Spanish contortionist who was going to stamp her heavy feet and twist her decidedly shapely body before the jovenes distinguidos of the Casino was merely trading in the name of a celebrity. Her luggage bore the famous name in huge letters, and I afterwards saw it “billed” widely in Buenos Ayres.

On the whole, the conduct of this Spanish dancer during the voyage was so openly without sense of shame that there was little one could object to! Sometimes she appeared in gorgeous raiment and an enormous “picture hat,” ready for the Bois or the Alameda; even, on one occasion, sporting a huge muff in the tropics! Again she would pass the day in bedroom slippers, her corsets put aside, her lithe body draped only in a dressing gown, and her golden hair of yesterday, completely doffed, leaving only a shabby little nob of faded brown. She entangled at least one of the male passengers, a Chilian who later found another flame in an attractive demi-mondaine of the second class, and it afforded us some amusement to watch the rivalry which now ensued, but there was little sympathy when the gay Lothario came to the end of his cash and attempted to borrow.

The First Familiar Landmark for the Visitor To Buenos Ayres.

Part of the Paseo Colón, with the Government House on the right, and the tallest of the new commercial buildings on the left.

The other “interesting lady” of the saloon was of quite a different type. A French chanteuse of the smaller café concerts, she was extremely plain by nature’s wish, but the art of make-up and some potent hair-dye effected a magical change the day she left us. She behaved herself modestly enough and passed most of her time with her crochet needle, sitting side by side with the honest women aboard, yet I was told that her songs would have brought a blush to the cheeks of a stevedore! She sang to us several dainty and harmless little French and Spanish verses in the familiar café chantant manner, and altogether left the impression of a poor woman laying out her small gifts to the best advantage.

There was little or no intercourse between the saloon passengers and those of the second class, although it seemed to me that among the latter were many worthy people and a good-hearted companionship. They certainly showed to advantage in the diverting ceremony observed when Father Neptune held court on crossing the line. Included among them were a number of minor “artistes” bound for the music-halls of Buenos Ayres, not to mention several young women with a still less attractive journey’s end in view.

We heard much from the old South Atlantic voyagers on board about the doings on other and more popular lines than that to which our vessel belonged. The “muck-raking” magazines might work up a spicy stew of scandal about life on the South American liners if they gave themselves to the task. Wealthy Argentines and Brazilians travelling with their wives in the saloon and two or three concubines in the second class, offer quite attractive material for the journalist in search of the spicy, while the traffic in “white slaves” has long provided a certain percentage of the passengers for these very profitable lines, in which, perchance, some dear old christian ladies have their investments. How difficult it is to keep one’s hands clean in this soiled world!

From all that I have been told, and also from personal observation, the perils of the deep may have a curious resemblance to the perils of “the Great White Way.” And even those who ought to be the protectors of innocence may prove to be its assailants. A young married lady, lately arrived from England, was under the pain of having to travel alone from Buenos Ayres to a Brazilian port where her husband was lying in hospital with typhoid, and her plain story of how the purser, under cloak of sympathy for her in her distress, first ingratiated himself by talking sentimental slop about his wife and bairns at home, getting her to go into his cabin to look at the treasured photographs of his “dear ones,” and there, without more ado, attempted to assail the honour of the young wife, whose mental sufferings at the time were, to my knowledge, almost beyond endurance, is one of the ugliest I have heard. This was an English officer, note you: none of your sensual Italians.

It is to be feared that much co-mingling with pimps and procurers may have tended somewhat to blunt the native honour of the Englishman in these southern latitudes, for, up to a day so recent that it seems but yesterday, nothing had been done to dam the foul stream that has flowed so long from the human sewers of Europe into the still more noisome mares stagnantes of Buenos Ayres. Now, there is at least some pretence of stemming it, and from time to time one reads in the Buenos Ayres papers about the latest raid on the “apaches,” who are deported, with much pomp and circumstance, or about the rejected of Paris, in the shape of womankind, who are refused admission to the city of good airs.

But to return to a pleasanter, if less piquant subject, our voyage deserves at least a few words of description. We seemed to be lying off Las Palmas before the beautiful picture of Lisbon in sunshine had quite faded from our vision, and at this distance of time I would not undertake to say whether it was two or three days that had passed between the two ports, so dreamy was our progress. The sight of Las Palmas, with its grateful greenness of hill and valley, and far southward, cloud-high in a gorgeous flood of sunshine, the mighty mass of Teneriffe, thrusting itself boldly into the sky from the heaving wilderness of water, gave to the beholder one of those rare moments of spiritual exaltation which a first sight of such natural grandeur must always awaken in the thinking mind.

St. Vincent was a different story. Fully two days more steaming brought us thither to that vile haunt of malaria and all things unlovely. The Cape Verde Islands, of which St. Vincent is the principal, dishonour the name they bear, as there is scarce a speck of verdure to be seen upon them. Presumably there must be some natural reason for the naming of the Cape itself on the African coast, off which, nearly five hundred miles northwestward, these scabby isles show their horrid heads above the blue Atlantic. They are of a dirty red colour, and at a distance resemble some humpy monsters of the deep wallowing in the sunshine. The port is useful as a coaling and cable station. A town of shanties, it swarms with negroes, and ships’ pedlars. Here a small colony of young Britons are marooned in the cable service. At first the young cable operator is no doubt delighted to find how much more picturesque he has become than he was at home. To have to wear white duck suits and a pith helmet, and look like Stanley on his way to discover Livingstone, is extremely attractive to the eye of youth! Even the gentleman who sells coals to the liners comes on board looking for all the world like a colonial governor, or the leader of a mission to Abyssinia. Then there is much card-playing and a good deal of hard-drinking among “the boys,” who talk of “the service and all that sort of thing, dontcher know,” to feed youth’s fondness for swagger. But when the debilitating effects of the climate and the life make themselves felt, when the novelty has gone, what a husk remains! Lucky are the young men who escape from these rusty isles before the rot of the place has eaten too deeply into their natures. The harbour swarms with sharks, but the negro boys who dive for the amusement of the passengers on the ships that put in there make light of the sharks for a sixpence, or even for a humble penny thrown into the water.

St. Vincent gave us our last glimpse of the Old World. Its very ugliness sent our thoughts zestfully forward to the undiscovered beauties of the New, then so full of promise, now—but that’s a later story. It was pleasant to hear again the long soft swish of the water running past the vessel’s sides as she resumed her tranquil voyage into the sunset. Now succeeded many days of idle lolling in the deck chair, watching through the binoculars the swarms of flying fish skimming over the surface of the ocean like tiniest aeroplanes.

Bird life in these ocean solitudes is rare, yet we not only saw several journeying on confident wing several hundred miles from land, but for two or three days we were forcibly reminded of “Nature red in tooth and claw,” by witnessing a little drama in feathers. One day out from St. Vincent a bird, about the size of a pigeon, gorgeously coloured and sporting a plume of orange-red, alighted on the rigging of the ship, pursued by a larger hawk-like bird. Evidently the pursuit had lasted for a long time, as both were land birds and seemed very exhausted, for we were now some hundreds of miles from the African coast, whence hunter and hunted had no doubt flown. For two or three days a strange game of cross purposes ensued, the hunted, with the skill of desperation, cleverly selecting different positions in the rigging or on the smoke-stacks, which offered no opportunity to the hunter to swoop down on him from above. There were violent chasings at times around the ship, when the essential cruelty of the Spanish emigrants was displayed in their efforts to strike the pursued bird with all sorts of objects hurled at it as it swept past the bows. Eventually the hawk gave up and disappeared and soon afterward the bird of brilliant plumage took wing away.

Seldom did we sight another vessel; now and again we signalled a tramp or a collier heading south with its cargo from Wales to be sold eventually in Buenos Ayres at some $20 or $25 per ton—it was during the time of the coal strike. One only of the old “wind-jammers” did we pass. In full sail, she looked, in the blue immensity of the tranquil sea, no bigger than a toy boat, and an object of such appropriate grace and beauty that it was sad to think a day would come when no ship that goes by spread of glistening sail would cross those far waters again.

Early on the sixth day out from St. Vincent, on going on deck before breakfast we were not a little surprised to find that we were steaming close to a long and narrow green island on which many signs of careful cultivation were evident. In a cove the white houses of a township showed clear and inviting in the morning air, the blue smoke curling from some of the chimneys giving one an intense pang of home hunger. With the binoculars it was easy to make out people going about their tasks in the fields, others walking towards what seemed to be a signalling station. The surprise at this sudden coming upon a bit of the habitated globe in what, for all we had supposed the night before, was still mid-ocean, sent us questioning to the officers of the ship. The island turned out to be Fernando de Noroña, notable chiefly as a Brazilian penal settlement. A Brazilian—the only one among our company—told me a story about Fernando de Noroña which, speaking in Spanish, he considered muy graciosa. An Englishman in Pernambuco killed a native in a quarrel and was sent to the penal isle, but in the course of a year or less he was granted his liberty, that being a matter of simple negotiation: a little influence and a modicum of money can always save a criminal in that happy clime. But, the Englishman, having long suffered a shrewish wife, found so much peace in prison that he refused to quit the island and there remains. Fernando de Noroña lies some two hundred miles off the north eastern shoulder of Brazil, and by that token we were soon to be touching at Pernambuco and hugging the Brazilian coast for the rest of our voyage.

One felt almost sorry that the sunny days of serene steaming over shoreless seas were coming to an end and that presently we would be picking up the coast of the new world. By now we had grown so used to the companionship of the boat that we began to look forward to leaving it with something of regret.

At Pernambuco we had our first sight of a South American town and I should be departing widely from the truth were I to say that the “Venice of Brazil” tugged at my heart-strings. It is a town of evil-smelling waterways, half-finished streets, at their best no better than a London byway, with cut-throat quarters that harbour all uncleanness. The task of going ashore, first being lowered into a bobbing dingy by means of a rope and basket, is attended with a sensation of nausea which the merry assurance of the old skipper by your side as to the water being a favourite haunt of sharks does little to counteract, especially when his trained eye enables him, a moment or two later, to point out several of these hunting for garbage around the ship. It is fair to say of Pernambuco that it is undergoing transformation: the “avenida” craze has taken root and at the time of our visit innumerable shanties were being demolished to make way for wide avenues and new buildings.

The first sensation of crossing a great sea and making land on its farther shore, once experienced—and it is a “thrill” that never comes again—we sank back into the half-indifferent contemplation of the long, indented coast line of this prodigious land of Brazil. For hundreds of miles it is unchanging in its character of palm-fringed shores, with great dim mountain masses inland, a soft blur of heat overhanging all. There is plenty to suggest mystery and romance, and yet somehow beauty is lacking. I mean the wild beauty of peak and crag which we find along the coasts of Scotland, where the conformation is continually changing. These mountains of Brazil have that volcanic sameness which only becomes magnificent when you can ascend to some commanding pinnacle and look down upon a veritable wilderness of mighty earth mounds, such as it was my good fortune once to look upon from the tower of the ancient castle of Polignac in the volcanic heart of France.

For many nights the tropical skies had been a revelation of stellar glory, and often though I have gazed at the friendly skies of home on “a beautiful clear night of stars” (to quote the haunting phrase of “R. L. S.”), little had I imagined the glories that awaited the beholder of the heavens in a clear tropical night. The stars appear much larger and incomparably more brilliant than I have ever seen them in our northern latitudes, nor do they “stud” the sky so much as hang dependent from the dense dark blue. I had many starlight talks with the old skipper who was travelling to a “shore job” (the dream of every sailor!) on the Pacific, and who spoke of the stars which had guided him so long on his voyages with that familiarity of the worthy old Scots minister “who, ye micht hae thought, had been born and brocht up among them.” Yet I have failed on many occasions since to rediscover the interesting relationships of the constellations which he so clearly explained to me. I confess, however, to a keen sense of disappointment in the much vaunted Southern Cross. It is a lop-sided and unimpressive group of four stars.

The sight of Bahía, about one day’s steam from Pernambuco, was peculiarly pleasing. It might have been a bit of the French or Italian Riviera, with its rich verdure and bosky hills, while the residential suburbs looked quite European as seen from the ship. We made no closer acquaintance than a stay of some three hours in the beautiful bay, but I could well believe that much that looked most alluring in the picturesque sea-front of the town did not bear too close inspection.

Two more days brought us to Rio de Janeiro, full of expectation and curiosity for the pearl of South America. The bay of Rio has been so often photographed, so fully described, that any one who has read much must have a good mental picture of the place, which fortunately squares very neatly with the actuality. The fantastic islands of volcanic origin which peep up through the broad waters of the bay, or impudently flaunt their grassy cones high above sea level, in the most unexpected places, give to Rio, as seen from the bay, an aspect that is unique. The town spreads itself out with picturesque irregularity among the gentle valleys that lie between the many hills, trending swiftly upward some little way inland from the shore, the noble height of Corcovado crowning the whole lively and diversified scene. These hills being mostly tropical in the richness and character of their vegetation, the art of man had no great task to transform the situation into one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

On the whole, man has here done his work well, although it has to be confessed that much of the architecture is paltry and all of the plaster variety. The marine drive will match almost anything of the kind in Europe, and the Avenida Central is admirably devised at once to beautify the town and drain the pressing traffic of the narrower side streets. The suburbs are also spacious and well planned, so that one could imagine life being very pleasant here—when the weather is a little cooler than the norm. Although the summer was supposed to be over at the time of our visit, the atmosphere was enervating in the extreme, and even on the breezy heights of Corcovado, to which we ascended by the funicular, and whence one of the grandest prospects man may look upon rewarded us, we perspired at every step. Everywhere there was the moist, oppressive smell of the hot-house, so that one could guess what it meant to be afoot in Rio in the summer time, if this were autumn.

The Narrow Streets of Buenos Ayres.

The left illustration shows Calle Florida, the busiest thoroughfare of Buenos Ayres; the right is a bird’s-eye view of Calle San Martín, looking towards the Plaza Hotel. These are typical main streets.

As for living here: when we were charged twelve milreis ($6.50) for a dish of fruit that might have cost a dollar in New York, at a very ordinary hotel, where all other charges were proportionately appalling, we had our doubts, even granted a change of weather. One of our party paid the equivalent of four dollars for a tooth-brush, a cake of soap, a small tube of lanoline, and some shaving powder!

Paying an uniformed madman, who was plying for hire with a motor car, a few thousand reis (a milreis or one thousand reis go to 54 cents, so that you part with them in tens of thousands in a forenoon), we drove all around the city and the Marina at fully thirty miles an hour, turning busy corners at that speed. I myself can claim some dexterity at the wheel; but I confess that I sat in terror in that maniac’s car as we sped wildly through the highways and byways of Rio. Yet he was perfectly sane as motorists are accounted sane in that town; his performance evoking no remark. The speed limit is, I believe, eight or ten miles an hour, but, like all the laws of Latin America, that is laid down merely to be ignored. The municipal authorities, however, use the bylaw as a supplementary tax, and regularly fine all the motorists of the town, in succession, for exceeding the limit. A well-known English resident who owns a speedy car told me he had been fined a month before for exceeding the limit on a certain date, when he had been on the high seas returning from Europe. He protested, lodged his plea, and was fined all the same, on the ground that if he did not exceed the limit that day, he had done so in all certainty before or after.

Altogether our impressions of Rio were favourable. Every prospect pleased us; only man was vile, and none viler than the scum that haunt the sea-front to plunder visitors by getting them aboard their small boats for conveyance to the liners in the bay, then, with sundry sinister threats, endeavour (too often successfully) to make their victims disgorge a payment large enough to purchase the boat. The gentry who ply this trade at Naples are mild and benevolent by comparison.

About noon of the day following our stop at Rio, we were steaming up the picturesque estuary of Santos. A Frenchman on board had promised me that here I should see something tout à fait original, and much though I had been charmed with the actual sight of Rio, so long familiar to me in picture, the approach to Santos proved even more interesting, due perhaps in some degree to the charm of the unknown and unexpected. There is also a touch of romance in slowly approaching a town that lies up a river, instead of coming upon it suddenly from the sea. A negro pilot took command of the ship up to Santos, somewhat to the disgust of our captain, who had never before stood by a “nigger” on the bridge and seemed none too sure of his pilot, for he never let go the telegraph handle until his vessel was berthed.

The country through which the river runs (it is more an arm of the sea than a river) is undoubtedly “original,” abounding in low volcanic hills, with abundance of verdure, broken now and then by palm groves, and swampy flats. Here one is conscious of being in a strange land, and it is easy to imagine with what tense interest and straining eyes the first bold adventurers sailed up this narrow and beautiful water-way to found the city that has become the second port of Brazil. The city itself stretches by the riverside around the foot of a great green hill, disfigured by a monstrous advertisement announcing to adventurers of a different kind and a later day that somebody’s biscuits are the best! A considerable part of the town lies on land that still looks suspiciously swampy and used to be an ideal haunt of Yellow Jack, though I was told that to-day it would be difficult to find a healthier spot. That may be so, but I think I could succeed if I tried very hard. As for the town itself, a short ramble revealed one of the deadest and most uninteresting cities it has been my lot to see, and I gladly returned to the friendly shelter of the ship and the livelier locality of the quayside, where were congregated many vessels from British, American, and Continental ports.

Two days more and we found ourselves at anchor in the roads outside Montevideo, which presents a most engaging picture from the sea, the town covering a lumpy tongue of land that juts seaward with a rocky short, rambling inland in many directions and along the bay, which culminates in the conical mass known as the Cerro, crowned by an antique fortress and a modern light-house. At night, when the myriad electric lamps are lit, the light-house on the Cerro throwing its broad and regular beams athwart the bay, innumerable red and green lights blinking on the buoys in the harbour, much flitting of motor launches and brightly illuminated liners lying at anchor, there is no scene I know that better suggests one’s juvenile fancies of Fairyland.

The town itself delighted us, seen in generous sunshine, with refreshing breezes blowing from the sea, which at first sight, as we pass along the streets, seems completely to enclose it. But as I shall have something to say of my later stay in the Uruguayan capital, I shall not occupy myself with it further at the moment.

We bade good-bye to the ship that had been our most pleasant abode for so many days and made our first acquaintance with things Argentine by transferring ourselves to a musty, ill-managed river-steamer, on which the crudest elements of courtesy had still to be acquired by officials and stewards, who were all too conscious of being employed by a firm which then monopolised the river trade.

Still, although we realised what a change for the worse we had made in transhipping, we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that to-morrow we should awaken in the port of Buenos Ayres; in that genial land of sunshine to which we had so long looked forward with eager anticipation. The passage up the river—which, seaward of Montevideo, is some 150 miles in width, narrowing suddenly to sixty opposite the city, and to the eye has no farther shore, so that only the discolouration of the water distinguishes river from sea—was made in the roughest weather we had experienced, the steamer tossing like a cork and its paddle wheels beating the waves with feeble irregularity.

It was an early autumn morning when we walked off the gangway at the Dársena Sud to endure the pain of getting our belongings through the customs, an operation apparently regulated by the shipping authorities after studying all the worst methods in vogue, selecting the worst features of each, and combining these into a system that is the acme of inefficiency. Moreover, the wind bit as shrewdly this autumn morning as on a midwinter’s day in New York, and, believing in this land of sunshine with a simple faith that had yet to suffer rudest shocks, we stood there an hour or more, clothed for summer, chattering with cold.

But we were actually in Buenos Ayres, and soon all the marvels of that wonderful city, that “Paris of South America,” as Argentines who have never been to Europe are fond of describing it, were to reveal themselves to us starveling voyagers who knew nothing better than the Paris of France.

Vamos a ver, as they say in Buenos Ayres.

CHAPTER III
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES

Our ship’s doctor, with whom I had passed many agreeable hours, and whose efforts to practise the Spanish speech added not a little to the gaiety of our voyage, was a plain-spoken young man, who assured me, when he heard I was bound for Buenos Ayres, that I was going to “the rottenest place in South America.” This was a blow that struck my puffed-up admiration of the place under the belt. I had read in the papers before leaving London that no fewer than fifteen stowaways from Glasgow had reached the sunshine city of the River Plate on a merchant liner, and of these thirteen were discovered on the same vessel when it was making its homeward trip. Now, Glasgow is noted for its rain, but it had rained in such an appalling manner all the time the vessel was discharging and loading at Buenos Ayres that these sodden thirteen were homesick for the milder rains that wash their native haunts! Doubtless, if the truth were known, the other two had stowed away too much of the vile liquid sold as “Eskotsh weeskee” in Buenos Ayres to be able to stow themselves away a second time, and remained to swell the ranks of the Scotch and Irish rascals who pester their fellow-countrymen for alms in Florida and San Martín—the streets where most of the Britishers may be encountered.

But I had made light of both the doctor’s dictum and the experience of the Glasgow stowaways. Nobody, nothing, was to rob me of my ideal city on the Silver River!

The dirty porter who conveyed our hand-bags to a dirtier coche, with a driver in the full regalia of “hobo” and two horses that ought to have been taken straightway to the knacker’s yard, did his best to rob me of five pesos (value $2.10) for a task which would have been well paid at a dime or a quarter and the money gratefully received. I had given him one peso only (42 cts.) and so loudly and volubly did he denounce me for a “mean, dirty German,” that I gave him one more for peace, and the sorry nags were whipped up and we drove away on our great adventure.

The coach, typical of many I was to see and not greatly inferior to scores it was to be my unhappy fate to ride in for many months, was of the “Victoria” style, so pleasantly familiar to the frequenter of Paris; but it was battered and tattered, the splash-boards broken, the mud-encrusted wheels repaired with odd spokes, the upholstering faded and torn, while the sight of the driver in his greasy rags and the poor worn horses with projecting ribs, broken kneed, and raw flesh showing in patches along their scraggy backs, mortified me that in such a manner I should enter the city of my dreams. Yet the description may stand as representative of a considerable percentage of the things then plying for hire in Buenos Ayres. The tattered ruffian on the box-seat lashed the moribund nags so unmercifully that I had to insist on his refraining, but then, and often afterwards, it was clear to me that only by thrashing could the hapless creatures be made to go.

And what a journey! The roadway reminded me of the Chinese saying, that in China the roads are good for ten years and bad for ten thousand. With a briefer history than China’s it may be said of Buenos Ayres that its roads are good for ten days and bad for ten years. We had evidently arrived on the eleventh day! Made of cobble stones, the road was as choppy as the river on a windy day, the tram lines now projecting half a foot above the level, now dipping into baked-mud hollows. Everywhere the cracking of whips, the clanging of bells, the shouting of drivers, the screeching of ungreased axles, and the slipping and straining of sweating horses, harnessed in threes and fours to uncouth and overladen wagons. A scene of brutal ugliness and sordid brute strife that filled one’s mind with horror. We had plunged into the hell of the horse and the mule. It was heart-rending to see the wretched creatures cut and bruised, with open sores and swollen fetlocks, the cruel chain traces at which they were straining often running in grooves which they had cut in the creature’s flesh and ever the relentless whips descending on the suffering backs with stings that would have touched the heart of any man of feeling. But in all that strange, noisy medley of man and brute there was no sign of feeling; nothing but a dull, blear-eyed urge forward. Forward to what? Ah, he were a bold man who answered that. But what I know and assert is that in a hundred thousand miles of world-travel, and observation, I have never witnessed such a scene of brute suffering as I did that autumn morning in our drive from the Dársena Sud, past the Aduana, by the Paseo Colón and the Paseo de Julio to our hotel.

As for my first impressions of the city, I comforted myself with the reflection that the neighbourhood of docks is in all great seaports the least favourable point of view. Everything that met one’s eyes was mean, or makeshift. The shops along the Paseo were of the lowest class; most of the buildings were crumbling plaster shanties. The people trafficking in them were the dredgings of a lower life than one sees in the region of the Bowery—incomparably more villainous in mien. It is true that the gardens, which adorn the Paseo Colón and the Paseo de Julio and make these appear (in a photograph) one of the pleasantest thoroughfares in all the world (the one is a continuation of the other), looked beautiful, yet none but foul Italians and Semitic scum were to be seen walking there.

It would be all right when we got into the city itself, for had we not feasted our eyes times out of number on alluring pictures of the imposing buildings of this wonder city sent broadcast to the ends of earth by official propagandists? A huge pink-painted plaster building, with the “sham” flaking off in places, showed its spacious back to the green palm-dotted gardens of the Paseo. Was it—could it be?—the famous Casa Rosada, the official home of the president? It was. A little cold shiver zig-zagged down my back, and I ticked off in my mind the Casa Rosada as one of my dream pictures of Buenos Ayres that had not come true.

Presently, up a side-street, crowded with struggling wagons, coaches and clamorous tram-cars, where small buildings were being torn down and large steel-frame ones were being stuck up, we came to our hotel.

The roadway in front was so narrow, the traffic so insistent, and the tramways so continuous, that the mere act of stopping our coach for a minute blocked the whole ill-regulated, restless mass. Nor in the hotel did we find peace. It was in the hands of repairers, who, as we afterwards learned, had been repairing it for three years, and in all that time did no more than could have been achieved in New York inside of a month. As to the moderation of this statement, not only can I vouch from a careful and intimate study of the work of those blundering incompetents through eight long months of residence there, but I could call a cloud of witnesses, whose fate it was to live through a considerable part of the weary years of alteration, as the discomforts we had to suffer were a frequent topic of the “stayers” in what, with all its faults, was at that time the most comfortable and reasonable hotel in Buenos Ayres. (I hear that it has since been much improved in its appointments.)

In the small and crowded lounge, where we humbly waited for the privilege of securing accommodation, there was a mingling of the coming and the parting guests. The former one could recognise at a glance by their creased clothing, the latter notably chiefly for their bucolic touches. The room was uninviting, the shabby wallpaper in pendulous bulges, mouldy with damp, every item worthy only of a small country hotel. The gentleman in the temporary office, who carried out his duties amidst plasterers’ ladders and plumbers’ tools, was willing to concede us a small room with a bath for twenty-six pesos ($11) per day, including “board” but excluding certain “extras.” The terms would be the same for a stay of one night or for a stay of one year. I accepted with a feeling of disappointment, after discovering that a bedroom and a sitting-room of the most ordinary description were to cost me seventeen dollars per day. And had I to stay again for eight whole months in Buenos Ayres I should most willingly return to the same conditions which at first I regarded with frank contempt. It is a sadder and a wiser man that writes these lines than he who stepped hopefully into the best-recommended hotel in Buenos Ayres that chill morning of autumn.

The window of our room looked upon a street so narrow that, when all the high buildings in process of erection are completed, no faint ray of sun will ever enter it. At the corner immediately opposite stood one of the old single-story structures of the colonial type, which in the centre of the city are giving way to the multi-storied edifices of steel and concrete. This old shanty-like building was a centre of swarming life—Turks, Greeks, Swedes, Syrians, Italians, in short, the off-scourings of all nations, were to be our neighbours, and their babel of tongues sounded from the little drinking den into which our window looked as though the brawlers were in the hotel itself. A nice quiet neighbourhood! Being so near the corner, we had the advantage of two sets of tramways, and with the windows open it was almost necessary to use a megaphone to make one’s voice heard in the bedroom. The narrow streets intensified all noises to an extraordinary degree. Bedlam must be peaceful compared to that corner—and that is but one of thousands similar.

“We must clear out of here as soon as possible,” said my wife. But a woman’s “must” dwindles into the meekest acquiescence when pitted against the “must” of Buenos Ayres. “There must be quieter places in the centre of the town, away from these cramped and crowded back streets,” she opined. Alas, there are no back streets in Buenos Ayres. Or rather, there are few other.

As soon as possible I went forth to find the great open avenues where, perchance, I could move at my ease and enjoy the spectacle of the myriad life of the great metropolis. I half hoped that we had entered the hotel by a back door and would find on turning the corner that it had a noble frontage to some spacious street. Vain hope of a “Gringo”—as the native dubs the foreigner in South America. I found myself in a buzzing thoroughfare, where there were no tramways, but where coaches and motor cars were dashing along in the most reckless manner and with quite superfluous speed, as at nearly every corner they had to pull up suddenly in muddled mobs to allow the streaming traffic of the cross-streets to pass. The street was lined with splendid shops, many displaying the most luxurious articles of furniture, jewellery, or wearing apparel, and reminding one of London’s Bond Street. It was about the width of Wall Street, New York City. It was the Calle Florida, the very core and pride of Buenos Ayres!

The Changing Heart of Buenos Ayres.

Plaza de Mayo, looking westward along the Avenida towards Congreso. The appearance of this square has recently been modified, and two great diagonal avenues are now in construction, the one starting from the right-hand corner of the square and running northwest, the other from the left-hand corner southwestward.

As I went along, stepping off the narrow sidewalk every few yards to pass any two people inconsiderate enough to walk side by side, I recalled the one spark of wit I had heard from a youth of the “Rube” variety who had been a shipmate of ours. We were having dinner on board the river steamer and had reached the fifth or sixth course of the weirdest mixtures, when he said, “I wonder when they are going to bring us something to eat.” In all these thoroughfares, I wondered when I was going to find a street. I had heard much of the famous Avenida. That at least would not disappoint me.

The sun was now strong and the temperature must have risen fifteen or twenty degrees since the bitterly cold morning. Horses were sweating and giving off an offensive odour—the result, I fancy, of their “alfalfa” feeding—and were covered with a thick white lather along the parts of their bodies where the harness rubbed. I, too, was perspiring, though I was conscious of a brisk buoyancy in the air, as I continued southwards towards the Avenida.

Near the end of Florida, I noticed among the throng an acquaintance of mine who lives a few streets from me and whom I had not seen at home for more than two years. He was only on a short visit to the country, but I was soon to find that New Yorkers and Londoners who have business anywhere in Argentina and may never see each other for years at home are certain to meet in Calle Florida, which is a sort of funnel through which the whole stream of Argentine traffic must pass.

The Avenida at last! Except where the narrow cross-streets debouched into it, every inch of the splendid roadway was boarded up and only the sidewalks, crowded with jostling humanity, remained. They were then making the underground railway from the Plaza Mayo to the Estacion Once. In this state for many months it continued, an eyesore and a source of illimitable dust and dirt to all the centre of the city. No more than a scrap of the dome of Congress, away to the west, was visible above the earthworks and barricades, while the Plaza Mayo, with the historic Independence Monument, was a scene of shapeless confusion.

I ventured along Maipú, where the ceaseless rattle of traffic is surely more disturbing than the battle whence it takes its name could have been. Longing for a quiet corner to rest, I regained my hotel, where my wife reminded me of a certain old Scotswoman who came to visit her daughter in London and was taken to Westminster Abbey. She had got as far as the choir and stood looking quietly at the massy columns and noble spring of the arches, the iridescent beauty of the windows, before she spoke, and then she said: “Weel, do ye ken, Jeenie, I’m awfu’ disappointed!”

The afternoon was unpleasantly hot and enervating, but the evening was cool with a fresh and pleasant breeze. We were in a Latin city—the Paris of South America, we had heard it called—we were both lovers of Paris, my wife and I; so we sauntered out after dinner to take our ease at “some café, somewhere, in one of the squares.” But all seemed dead. A mere handful of stragglers in Florida; in the Avenida a few soft-hatted loungers, who stared at my wife with rude animal interest; no café anywhere in any square, where we were tempted to linger for a moment. So a coche rattled us back as quickly as possible to the already friendly hotel, going by way of Esmeralda and Corrientes, where the bright exteriors of some cinemas and other places of amusement punctuated the dulness with points of brightness.

It was no later than half-past nine, and we thought once more of that old Scotswoman in Westminster Abbey.

CHAPTER IV
PICTURES OF STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES

It is a reasonable proposition that there are at least as many ways of studying a strange town as Mr. Kipling allows in the writing of tribal lays—“and every single one of them is right.” I claim no more than that for my own particular way.

My first concern is to gain a general impression, by wandering the streets and letting the spirit of the place “soak” into me, almost unconsciously. Later, I assume an attitude of mind more critical and less subjective, becoming an active observer, open-eyed for everything that is strange or unusual; finally I compare all that has especially appealed to my mind with impressions long since etched thereon by visits to other cities.

In this way I should probably describe the same town somewhat differently in the varying stages of my observation, and each would be a true description so far as I was able to convey any notion at all. But after passing from the impressionary stage to the critical and eventually to that of the comparative observer, it is difficult to recover the first impressions once these have been overlaid, like some palimpsest of the memory, with later records. In the preceding chapter I have made some slight attempt at this, simply because it seemed to me worth trying and the progress of my narrative suggested it. A book of first impressions, however, would be of small value, no matter how interesting it might prove, and I deliberately refrained throughout my stay of twelve months in the cities of the River Plate from keeping a diary, even from making notes, except on two subjects, to wit: the price of commodities, and cruelty to animals, which I shall discuss in special chapters. In what I now proceed to describe, I shall be guided by my last and abiding impressions of all that I saw or experienced, and for this purpose a continuous narrative is no longer feasible.

My way, then, in studying a foreign city is first to observe the panorama of its street-life so closely that I can ever after recall it in minute detail; then to store away finished pictures of its characteristic buildings in my memory; next to watch narrowly the ways of the people, as expressed in all forms of their social life and business activities, gleaning on every hand from others and exchanging opinions even with persons with whom I should hate to agree. In such wise, or as nearly as may be, I shall now continue.

Buenos Ayres in its planning is essentially North American. That is simplicity itself, but out of simplicity has come confusion. The buildings are in “blocks,” or cuadras (squares), as they call them in South America. These squares measure 150 yards each way. Thus a plan of the city looks like a monstrous checker board, with here and there a larger square, where two or more cuadras have been thrown into one to admit a little more air into the congested mass. For the streets are narrow beyond belief. The average width allows three coaches to stand abreast, with a clearance of some twelve inches between them. A walking stick and a half gives you the measure of the pavements. These are the standards for nearly all the thoroughfares in the older part of the town, and were the ample ideals of the Spanish colonisers, who required no more than single-story houses and a track between for their horses or their bullock wagons. Thus, in great measure, Buenos Ayres is an anachronism, and such it will long remain, as the abnormal development of the country and its capital city—the world’s most prodigious mushroom—has made this central part a veritable Eldorado of the landowner.

What served a century ago is to-day a legacy of evil, and these narrow colonial streets have made of central Buenos Ayres an inferno of human strife such as I hope exists nowhere else on our globe. For within these myriad squares of 150 yards there is no entrance or exit for wheeled traffic, and it is a pathetic sight to witness the unloading of goods on the narrow sidewalks in the early morning. Let the North American reader conceive a great department store, situated in a street no wider than Wall Street, utterly devoid of any back way for the entrance of a cart, with a pavement in front that measures a walking-stick and a half; and let him picture what it means to stock that great building with all sorts of goods, from massive suites of furniture to tons of shoes and neckties! If his imagination will stand the strain, let him further imagine what would happen if a trolley line were laid within two feet of the sidewalk in front of the door, and an endless stream of cars were passing, the bodies of them flush with the curbstone! Yet the Wanamakers and the Marshall Fields of Buenos Ayres have to stock their premises under these conditions. In this city of miracles, there is none more extraordinary than the task of moving goods from the street into the shop and it is small wonder that a large part of what one pays for any article in Buenos Ayres has been incurred in getting it into the place where it is bought. It is infinitely easier and cheaper to carry a piano from London to the port of Buenos Ayres than to take it from the ship a mile away to the shop where it will be sold!

Often have I marvelled at the patience and energy of the Italian peones, struggling with enormous cases of merchandise in the middle of the street, dodging them across the trolley lines, while a dozen drivers were clanging their bells for them to clear the way. And it is a daily incident to see wardrobes, suites of furniture, desks, sofas, mingled in the gutters with the fretting traffic, in front of the warehouse doors.

In almost every street there is a trolley line on one side, and all the traffic has perforce to move in one direction,—down this street, up the next,—for which purpose an arrow on the walls indicates the direction. To walk at ease along any one of these streets in the business hours is impossible, and progress afoot is only to the strong.

In such streets motor traffic is a folly, yet motor cars abound. It is a safe assertion that nine out of ten of them are used for no purpose other than ostentation. And your Argentine nouveau riche will have none of your modest 15-20 horse-power affairs. His mark is 40 horse-power, and the biggest, bulkiest, most cumbersome body money can buy. Thus, at certain hours of the day when the ladies go a-shopping, many of the streets are stuffed with monstrous cars, which have brought their owners a good mile or perhaps two, and while the ladies are about their diversion in the shops, the chauffeurs sit making filthy remarks about every woman who passes, and ogling the girls. These motor men, uniformed expensively, are one of the most offensive elements in the life of the city. Lazy, pampered loafers most of them; they deliberately place themselves in the near front seat of the car while waiting for their owners, the better to “amuse” themselves.

With a cautious municipal authority, the motor-car would be prohibited in the centre of Buenos Ayres. It is a century or so ahead of the town. In streets so narrow the horse carriage should suffice, and as a matter of fact the horse-driven traffic can move as quickly as the motor-driven, owing to the innumerable stops that have to be made in even the shortest journey. In the whole vast country of the Argentine there are not more than a hundred miles of really good motoring roads and automobile owners in Buenos Ayres seldom venture farther afield than the Tigre, an excursion of some sixteen miles. The road thither is the best in the country. It would rank as “bad” in the guidebook of any American or European touring club and it is the ruin of many a car. Yet vulgar ostentation insists upon the automobile, and almost every notable firm of motor-car makers in Europe or the United States is catering for the craze with branch establishments in or around the Calle Florida.

The papers abound in accounts of motor accidents and one seldom passes a car that does not bear some trace of a collision, many of the drivers being as reckless as they are unskilled. The motor-car is indeed one of the city’s problems and no effort is being made to solve it.

If the streets were only narrow, matters might not be so bad. But they are also villainously paved and continually out of repair. The pavements chiefly consist of slabs of rough-hewn stone, so badly laid that one is constantly tripping over their inequalities. Moreover, holes are merely covered by a piece of sheet iron laid loose over them, and in Florida alone (it is the universal custom in South America merely to give the name of a street, without adding the word calle) I have noted about a dozen old gas pipes left protruding some six inches above the pavement, a menace to all who do not walk with their eyes to the ground. As a New York lady visitor said to me: “If you don’t watch where you’re putting your feet, you’ll fall into a hole, or trip yourself, and if you do look out for your feet, you’ll get run over!”

The streets are laid variously with asphalt, wood, and cobbles. But no matter what material is used, the result is equally deplorable. Thanks to the excessively heavy traffic, borne in wagons with immense narrow wheels, an asphalted street is cut up into ruts in a few days after it is laid, wooden blocks are destroyed with amazing rapidity, and cobbles are daily dislodged in hundreds. Thus stones innumerable are lying in the cobbled streets, to the danger of all sorts of traffic; in the wood-paved thoroughfares there are ruts several inches deep alongside the tram lines, and the asphalt roads are cracked and broken as though some wandering earthquake had passed through them on its way from Chili. A paseo in a motor-car is an agony—there is no “rule of the road,” it is merely “devil take the hindmost”—a drive in a coach is little better, as the motor-cars make the progress of the horse vehicle a hazard of terrors.

In such narrow and congested thoroughfares, building operations are carried on with great difficulty. To me it was a source of constant interest and admiration to watch those in progress. And as there is no street where the builders are not busy, I had ample opportunity. In Florida, where a huge arcaded building was being constructed through to the next street, San Martín, the work of digging out the foundations went on all day, and all night long the dirt was removed when the street was quiet. The scaffolding fashioned for the purpose was the most ingenious and complicated I have ever seen. To the narrow street there was a barricade of corrugated iron (wood is too expensive to use for that purpose) and above towered a weird framework of timber, with “tips” or “chutes” projecting into the street. Seen from behind the corrugated iron, it was a magnificent spectacle of industry. Hundreds of labourers were digging down into the loamy earth some thirty or forty feet, and the material taken out was hoisted up by a lift and dumped near the tips, so that through the night great-wheeled wagons came along in fashionable Florida and were loaded up, leaving the street strewn with spilled earth next morning. I recall the night when some of this scaffolding collapsed and precipitated over thirty labourers into the excavations fifty or sixty feet below. Such accidents are very common, there being no intelligent supervision of building operations, and many labourers are sacrificed every year to the carelessness of their employers and their own ignorance.

Exterior and Interior of the “Casa Rosada.”

The upper illustration shows the façade of the Government House towards the gardens of the Paseo Colón; the lower, the vestibule entering from the main door in the Plaza de Mayo.

But, on the whole, it would be impossible to find more inspiring examples of human energy and ingenuity in the face of extraordinary difficulties than in the erection of these great buildings. To watch the low colonial house fall to the pick and shovel in a few days, the crazy scaffolding quickly reared for mining out the earth, the mighty steel uprights and girders arriving on huge wagons, each drawn by three or four sweating horses, the labourers swinging them into position, the frame of the ten- or twelve-story building presently disengaging itself where so recently stood the shanty, the bricklayers clothing it with their handiwork, the plasterers finishing its exterior with graceful decorative touches,—all this was to me a source of endless interest.

There is no evidence of an elementary regard for human life in the streaming streets of riotous traffic. Often have I seen buildings in course of demolition with no better guard against falling bricks and blocks of cement than some rough pack-sheet stretched in front. Sometimes not even that dubious courtesy is shown to the passer-by, and the demolishers stand aloft knocking down the walls inwards without the slightest protection against the fragments that rebound and land in the middle of the street. On several occasions I have escaped by half a yard or so a falling brick that might well have closed my account. Even when blasting with dynamite old foundation walls of brick and mortar, a few yards from the pavement, nothing will be done for the safety of the passer-by. The casualty columns of the daily papers are eloquent evidence of the risks the ignorant labourers run who are employed in this work of demolition.

In effecting repairs to the exteriors, painting, and the like, the workers are confronted with many difficulties, for the simple expedient of erecting ladders as in our cities is denied to them. A ladder would block the whole pavement. So they have to reverse the old order, and instead of placing the ladder firmly on the ground and leaning it against the wall, they plant the foot of it in the angle of the pavement and the wall and lean it away from the building, securing the upper and projecting end by ropes to a window. The worker on the ladder is thus between the ladder and the wall. And from this coign of vantage he drops paint or wet plaster on the passers-by with a cheerfulness and impartiality which must be seen to be duly appreciated.

Naturally the beautiful detail and the imposing appearance of many of the finest buildings in the city are completely lost for lack of space to see them. Hundreds of thousands of pounds may be said to be wasted in this way; for there is widespread effort to render the façades of the buildings artistic, the cement or plaster with which they are covered lending itself to all sorts of decorative treatment. But anything over two stories in height is above the line of sight in the narrow streets, and there are prodigalities of decoration, in the third and fourth and higher reaches of the new buildings which have never been noticed by anybody since the day they were uncovered. A barn-like structure would have served the purpose equally and given as good an effect—except in a photograph, taken from one of the upper stories on the opposite side of the street. Thus one has a curious feeling of disappointment on beholding many of the more notable buildings which he has first seen in photographs. The famous Jockey Club, for example. You are conscious that if you could get a hundred yards away from the front of it, you might find it a very handsome edifice. But the actual effect is that of a full-length photograph out of focus, in which the boots and the lower part of the legs dwarf all the rest.

I recall very vividly the impression of my first walks in those strange streets. The scarcity of women was very noticeable in the earlier part of the day. Such streets as Bartolomé Mitre, Cangallo, Sarmiento, Maipú, and San Martín, where the tide of business flows strongest, were crowded with men; the odd women who passed seemed out of place. But later in the day women and children may be seen in considerable numbers in Florida and the vicinity, though at no time are they ever relatively so numerous as in the streets of New York. And what never ceased to irritate me was the rudeness with which the passers-by stared at me and at each other. I was prepared for them feasting their eyes on the odd women, but man scrutinising man was new to me. They inspect your necktie, study the style of your hat, stare at your boots! They gape at you, so that you wonder if you have forgotten your collar or if your suspenders are hanging down! You are reassured, however, by their gaping at each other for no obvious reason. It is merely a vulgar habit, probably acquired by the gapers when first they arrived from the hill villages of Italy or the desert towns of Spain, when any person decently clothed was a novelty to them.

Some of the half-breed policemen at the street corners, trying to “control” the traffic, are a source of infinite joy. Armed with white batons, they wave these about in a way so bewildering that it is a puzzle to know whether they mean to hold up one of the streams of cross traffic or invite the two opposing processions to mutual destruction. On the whole, although some of these policemen, shamefully underpaid, indulge in a little robbery to keep the pot boiling—one, whom I had rather grown to like, mounted guard one Sunday while a gang of thieves, with carts and motor cars, plundered the newly-opened branch of Harrods’ London Stores in Florida!—I came to form a very favourable opinion of them, and many showed real courtesy and good sense in controlling the traffic, under the most trying circumstances, as every cochero and chauffeur looks upon them with contempt and pays a minimum of respect to their authority.

I have been told by old English residents of Buenos Ayres, who are prepared to perjure their souls on behalf of the city that has given them the opportunity to grow richer than they were ever likely to become at home, that “there are no poor and there are no beggars in Buenos Ayres.” Both statements are untrue. There are lots of poor, and there are some beggars. (Time was when the beggars went about on horseback, to the confusion of the old proverb.) It could not be otherwise in a vast metropolis, abnormally larger than the country behind it will warrant for many years to come, to which the poor of the poorest countries in Europe, Spain and Italy, are flocking in daily ship-loads. No poor in Buenos Ayres, forsooth! Thousands of poor are dumped down at the docks every month, and poor many of them remain forever—poor and criminal—though many more, with energy and application, escape from the ranks of poverty, and not a few grow rich.

Poor there are in abundance, and very much in evidence. Take a walk along the Paseo de Julio and you will see as many of the tattered army of Poverty as you will encounter in London, and in London you should see exactly five times as many, to maintain a proportion relative to the size of the cities. Beggars are less noticeable, chiefly, I fancy, because there is no room for them in the streets; yet I have often been asked for alms in Florida, while looking at a shop window—the only chance the beggar has of practising his (more often her) profession, as to stand in the gutter for more than a minute would be to invite a violent death. To Britishers, a saddening sight is presented by the gin-sodden Irishmen and abandoned Englishmen who pester their fellow-countrymen in Florida and San Martín, with the old familiar yarn about losing their job as ship’s carpenter and the certainty of getting a new start if they can only raise the money for a suit of clothes. Scores of times have I had to turn these British rascals away, and some of them became as familiar in my daily walks as old friends. If ever one saw a face that had been made repulsive by drink, a nose that was reddening with malt, it was invariably the guilty possession of a Britisher.

Mention of familiar faces reminds me of one of the most disagreeable features of the Buenos Ayres streets. In this matter I am a thoroughly prejudiced witness, so I must explain my attitude. To me, one of the abiding charms of London is that I can walk its dear familiar streets with their ever changing throngs, without having momently to raise my hat, or to stop every few yards to endure the idle chatter of some acquaintance. I love London for itself and I know where to find my friends when I want them. To have them bumping up against me at every corner would come between me and my London. It would destroy completely that feeling of immensity, that sobering sense of the greatness of humanity, which London imposes on the reflective mind. But in Buenos Ayres, if you have noticed a man in a railway train, if you have spoken to a passenger on the river boat, if you have been introduced to somebody at a Belgrano dinner-party, you will surely see them all in Florida next day. This parochial condition is the result of the central part of the town being confined to a few narrow streets. In all Latin countries there is also a sheep-like flocking to certain beaten tracks, as in Paris every boulevardier and almost any visitor is sure to be “spotted” if you but sit long enough at the Café de la Paix. Although the admirably planned and imposing Avenida de Mayo was opened some twenty years ago to give Buenos Ayres a new heart, it is still comparatively unpopular, while the congested Calle Florida is more congested than ever.

Other faces that grow familiar to one in the streets are those of the porters or changadores. Brawny Italians or Gallegos usually, these lazy and exigent vendors of unskilled labour stand in braces at the corners of many of the central streets, a nuisance to passers-by. They are armed with a rope or with a large piece of packing cloth folded and laid across their left shoulder. This is at once their instrument and their insignia. If you want anything removed, you send out for one of these gentry, and if he is feeling strong enough he may condescend to oblige you for a fee which would command a visit from a skilled medical man in New York. They will fuss and blow over a little job which should be no more than a mere incident in the day’s work. Once I was so fortunate as to get one to carry a box of books for me up three flights of stairs, for a trifle—five pesos, or two dollars—which he pocketed without a word of thanks. They must be prosperous villains these street porters and the malorganisation of labour gives them their opportunity, as nobody sending you any moderately heavy article will undertake to do more than leave it at the foot of the stairs. If you happen to require it three stairs up that is entirely your affair.

Turning from the people in the streets to the shops, one is struck by the extraordinary preponderance of chemists and druggists. Almost every other cornershop is a farmacia. And it is pretty certain to be a farmacia inglésa or francesa, or alemana, or italiana—rarely española! But all the same the “English chemist” may be an enterprising Argentine who knows no more than “zank you ver’ mooch,” which he will utter with a self-satisfied smile after you have conducted all your business in his own language. And he ought to “zank you” in half a dozen languages at once for what you have to give him in exchange for what you get. The farmacia is to Buenos Ayres, and indeed to the whole of the Argentine and Uruguay, what the public-house is to England—the “corner shop.” In the country towns it actually takes the place of the village inn and is the rendezvous of the local gossips. Magnificent establishments are these farmacias. New York has nothing to show in the line of artistic shops that will excel the best of them. Indeed, in no other great city have I seen drug-stores to be compared with certain of these in respect to the grandeur of their carved wood adornments and the completeness of their equipment. Their numerous assistants usually wear long white linen coats, after the style of hospital doctors, which give them a pleasant air of cleanliness they might otherwise lack.

With a drugshop at every corner, buzzing with customers, the unconscious liar who can speak no ill of Buenos Ayres will blandly tell you it is “the healthiest city in the world.” As a matter of undiluted fact, it is a paradise of the doctor and the patent-pill-man, largely due to its curiously trying climate. One often comments on the abundant evidence of the patent medicine seller in the United States—in the advertising columns of the newspapers, on the hoardings in the streets—but nothing we have amongst us in that respect equals the insistence with which you are reminded of your aching stomach at every turn in Buenos Ayres—if, by lucky chance, your stomach itself has forgotten for a moment to remind you of its troubles.

Statute of San Martín in the Plaza named after that Hero of the Republic.

On the left, the domes of the Art Gallery are to be seen, and on the right a portion of the Plaza Hotel.

Next in proportion to those offering the Argentino a myriad cures for his estómago, come the shops that are dedicated to cleaning his boots. Indeed, one might reasonably suppose this to be the national industry. The abundant energy devoted to this lowly calling if turned to other channels might go far to fortify the republic. Even in the Calle Florida, where land values and shop-rents rival the highest known on Fifth Avenue, one finds certain enviable positions occupied by nothing better than salones de lustrar, and in all the central streets such establishments—often employing upwards of a dozen men—abound. Nay, go where you will, even to the outer suburbs, you will never fail to find a druggist’s or a bootblack’s shop.

A real Argentine citizen must have his boots polished several times a day, else these multitudinous slaves of the blacking brush could not be kept so busy. The saloons are sometimes fitted up in quite a luxurious manner, with long platforms on which are raised padded chairs with high foot rests in front, and while you sit in this elevated position the polisher performs the most elaborate operation on your shoes, using a bewildering variety of pastes, brushes, and cloths. When you think he has done, he begins all over again and not until he has completed what must be the tenth or eleventh stage of the operation, which consists in taking a piece of silk from his trouser pocket, where it has been lodged to absorb the warmth of his body, and working it with furious friction over your shoes, are you free to step down. Meanwhile you have been listening to Caruso and Tetrazzini on the gramophone,—I have even heard a customer insist on a tune being stopped and his favourite substituted!—so that when you step out with shining feet you feel the threepence or fourpence you have paid has been well-earned. But you won’t have gone twenty paces along the street until a bawling door-man, shouting “Se lustra! se lustra!” will point to your feet and invite you into his shop, with “Shine, sir?”

Many of these boot-blacks run their prosperous business in conjunction with an agency for lottery tickets and most of them sell cigars and cigarettes as “sidelines.” The shops dedicated to the sale of lottery tickets present at first a very unusual sight to the visitor. Their name is legion. All the numerous money-changers deal in these tickets, which are spread out in their windows so that the passer-by may scrutinise the numbers and see if his lucky combination is among them. Many tobacconists also sell them, and there are numerous street-hawkers to offer you the chance of scores of thousands of dollars for fifty cents or so—a thirty-thousand-to-one chance. It is a study in Hope to watch a poor workman outside the window of one of these lottery-ticket vendor’s pointing out the particular ticket which he trusts may bring him a sudden fortune and take him home to Italy or Spain by the next steamer—the ultimate hope that flickers in all their breasts.

There is much parade of luxury in the barbers’ shops, which form a good third, in point of number, to the druggists and boot-blacks. Mirrors gleam along the walls and the basins and pipes for performing the mysteries of an Argentine’s “shave and haircut” are many and glittering. The assistants seem almost as numerous as the customers at any hour of the day and all wear the white jackets that cover a multitude of sins. A simple haircut in an establishment of just middling style—regular, no mas—costs you eighty centavos, leaving twenty out of the peso for the artist who has treated you. Forty-two cents for a mere haircut is moderately “stiff”; but have a shampoo, a singe and a shave at the same time, and you will find that, like Sampson, your strength has oozed away with your hair, when the barber names his price!

CHAPTER V
MORE SCENES FROM THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES

What fascinated me most in the streets of this motley town were the bookshops. Who says there is no culture in Buenos Ayres has to reckon with the evidence of these, for London itself has no more than you might count on the fingers of one hand that excel the librerías of the Argentine capital. Many pleasant hours have I passed inspecting their wonderfully varied stocks of books from all the countries of Europe where the art of printing flourishes, as well as from North and South America. In proportion to their populations, Buenos Ayres excels New York in the number and character of its bookshops.

It was very encouraging to a literary worker to note how every country has sent of its best (though Spain also of its worst) to keep alive the taste for letters in those whom the eternal quest for the elusive dollar has taken to far-away Argentina. There are many German bookshops, stocked with wonderful collections of the classic literature of the Fatherland and the latest works of its indefatigable authors of to-day in every branch of thought and activity. Several admirable French shops there are of which the same may be said; a few Italians—extremely few in proportion to the vast Italian population—and several well-known British shops, where cheap English and American fiction unfortunately outnumbers the books of serious value, though practically no new book of real note that saw the light in England or North America did not have at least a brief showing on the shelves of the British bookshops during my stay. There is even a bookshop where the strange literary products of the Turk and the Syrian are sold to the oriental community.

But the native bookshops have nothing to learn from the foreigners, unless it be a better taste in displaying their wares, which are usually thrown into the window with all the abandon of a country store. In point of variety, they are as richly stocked as any of their colleagues overseas, and it is clear from the most casual examination of their shelves that all the principal French and German publishers are vieing with each other in catering for this rich and ready market of golden South America. I could fill pages with lists of “libraries” which are being produced specially for Latin America (but chiefly for Buenos Ayres) by famous Continental houses, who publish Spanish translations of all their important new books, as well as of a bewildering number of old books that first found popularity in French or German. Spanish publishers lack enterprise, hence Buenos Ayres, where printing is excessively costly and is used almost exclusively for business propaganda, has to get its most worthy Spanish books by way of France or Germany.

I have said Spain also sends of its worst. Most of the trash comes from Barcelona and Madrid houses. It consists chiefly of atrocious translations of English and American detective tales of the crudest “penny blood” variety, badly printed, and stitched within a gaudy and often well-done coloured wrapper, with some preposterously sensational picture thereon. These are sold, not at a penny, but at fourpence (twenty centavos) and are read by young and old alike. There are many shops that show nothing in their windows but this gutter literature, while the kiosks on the Avenida—pale and shabby ghosts of the delightful Paris kiosks these!—are stocked with them, and also with translations of the pornographic French books which the shameless shopmen of the Palais Royal display for the concupiscent foreigner.

Of old bookshops, alas, there are none. To the literary man, a city without its dusty haunts of the bookworm lacks something that all the loads of “latest books” cannot quite replace. Old books there are to be found in the general bookshops, and they are usually offered at prices so excessive that when I set about the formation of a library of South American works, I was eventually forced to discontinue buying any but the most essential, as they are to be picked up in Paris at a fifth the price and with much less searching. I also found that I could secure in London more and better photographs of Buenos Ayres than in the city itself, and at less cost! One day, requiring urgently a photo of a certain aspect of the statue of San Martín, I had all the likely shops and photographers searched in vain, yet in London I could have got it immediately.

The English booksellers (who, of course, also cater for the small North American “colony”) have the habit of hanging out a notice when the English or North American mail has come to hand with its load of new books and the latest periodicals. And once a week the exiles from Old England or from the United States must feel a quickening of the pulse when they see the announcement in good bold letters “MAIL DAY” or “MAIL ARRIVED” at the doors of these thriving bookshops in the Calle Cangallo. But perhaps a time may come to the exile when his pulse is so scant of home-fed blood that he notes these signs with a dim unseeing eye and feels no flush of the old love for his native land arise in him.

If horseshoes brought luck, every exile might be a millionaire, for nowhere have I seen so many cast shoes in the streets. You could wager on filling a cart with them in one day! The workmanship of the smiths is evidently so crude or so little care is taken of the horses that their shoes are allowed to loosen and fall off without any serious attempt to preserve them. Whatever the reason, they are in all the streets like “common objects of the seashore.” But the electric bulb is to Buenos Ayres as the seaweed or the limpet to a rocky shore. Except along Broadway, no New Yorker ever looks on such prodigality of electric lamps. All the public buildings are permanently outlined with them, so often have they to use them on anniversaries or centenaries; for the Argentine dearly loves to celebrate the centenary of any old forgotten “battle” in his glorious history and the anniversaries of all the “epoch-making” events and great men’s birthdays, by illuminating his public buildings and getting some great living Argentine to declaim a type-written speech to an assembly of distinguidos. Even the Cathedral is garlanded with rows of electric bulbs, so that it may take its part with the public buildings and the retail shops in these extremely frequent electrical celebrations. No wonder the electricians love Buenos Ayres! And very beautiful is the city with its millions of little coloured lamps aglow. I saw it many times thus in eight months; but could have wished for some novelty after the fifth or sixth time.

While electricity is comparatively cheap, and the supply of glass lamps evidently inexhaustible, the plate-glass used for lighting underground warehouses from the sidewalk is evidently at a premium, as I noticed that whenever one of these pavement lights was broken it was not replaced by a piece of thick glass, but by wood covered with a layer of cement!

The Colón Theatre, Buenos Ayres.

A general view of this fine cement-covered building, where a short season of State-aided Opera is given each year.

Having thus far dealt with the streets of Buenos Ayres in general terms, let me now glance at certain of the more famous thoroughfares in particular. Florida must naturally come first, for Florida is a microcosm of Buenos Ayres. It is a tramless street, in so far as the electricos only cross it at every 150 yards. It is, moreover, a “two ways” street, traffic being allowed to pass along it in both directions. It is, as I have already indicated, an extremely narrow street. But it is the great highway of the city; its peculiar pride and joy. There throbs the great heart of el gran pueblo Argentino. On a dry day the motors churn up the dust and line the broken asphalt roadway with long tracks of oil, on which the horses “slither” and fall. On a moist day the dust is converted into a pasty coating, which makes progress on sidewalk or roadway a peril to quadrupeds and bipeds alike. On a really wet day—and often it rains in torrents for days on end—the windows of all the shops become obscured with mud and pedestrians are bespattered from head to heels. The habit of wearing waterproofs with hoods, which they flap over their hats, gives a curious aspect to the men on wet days. I had been told in London that the Anglo-Saxon was spotted in Buenos Ayres by his umbrella. My experience was that the first things a newcomer bought in the month of May or June were a waterproof and an umbrella, and it was comic to see the poor Italian and Spanish immigrants disembarking, each clutching a real old “gamp,” for which he was to find abundant use. The coches, being built for fair weather, offer little protection when it rains, a crude apron of leather being stretched in front of the “fare,” but leaving his head and shoulders exposed to the deluge. Yet one is lucky indeed to secure so much protection on a rainy night, and often have I had to walk to my quarters in the drenching rain after shivering for half an hour in a doorway in the vain hope of getting some condescending cochero to accept my patronage. At other times, when I have secured a coach, I have regretted I have not boldly footed it in the rain, as there would be a painful interlude on the journey while the driver struggled to raise up his fallen steeds. They tumble about on the slippery streets like beginners in a skating rink.

But let us look at Florida when the sun is shining. Its shops are full of interest to the curious. The jewellers are especially numerous, and vie with the best in London or Paris. And their contents are of the most beautiful, for the Argentines have taste in jewellery, even though they are inclined to display it with almost barbaric opulence. The furniture shops are equally prodigal in beautiful and unique wares, with perhaps too marked a tendency to the art nouveau, which has not yet grown old in Buenos Ayres. Comfortable chairs, luxurious lounges, no—their preference is for “style” rather than comfort. The milliners and modistas display the most tempting hats—I have seen one ticketed at 500 pesos—and dresses which are the last word in Parisian ingenuity. They have also a childish delight in grouping life-sized and very lifelike female figures arranged in these vanities in their windows. A waxen lady displaying her startling corsets and snowy underwear has a peculiar fascination not only for the women, but even for the men. One evening I overheard a little ragged urchin, who was standing before such a revelation, pressing his hands across his heart, like Caruso in a love scene, exclaiming to the wax idol of his adoration, “Ah, mi querida señorita!” They begin young in Buenos Ayres!

Florida is so much a Vanity Fair that the shops devoted to the more sober necessities of life seem out of place. Some of these still present a “Wild West” aspect in the motley assortment of their wares, cooking ranges, oil stoves, baths, cork-screws, infants’ foods, boots, bedsteads, and travelling trunks being mingled together in pleasing disorder. But such establishments are gradually being elbowed out by the pompous jeweller, the pianoforte-seller, whose chief business is in pianolas and musical boxes—crowds will stand around a shop door to listen to a musical box at work or an automatic organ, in the evening when the street has been closed to wheeled traffic—the furrier, the high-class stationer, the modista, the chemist, and the optician. Nowhere will you find such opticians. It may be that the syphilitic condition of the South American blood is responsible for the myopia of the Argentines, or it may be no more than a fashion, like the monocle with a certain type of Englishman; but the use of glasses is widespread. There is one establishment in Florida which is a veritable palace of optical appliances, employing many scores of assistants. A considerable part of this business is also associated with land-surveying and the most expensive instruments of that science may be seen for sale in many shop windows in Florida. A peculiarity of Buenos Ayres (and Montevideo also) is the public display of surgical appliances. Brilliantly lighted windows present you with the latest things in operating tables, glass service stands for the instruments, and all sorts of uncanny inventions for cutting you up.

The craftsmen of Florence send much of their marble handiwork to Florida, and some of the art shops are stocked with beautiful statues and bronzes, while every variety of gorgeous inkstands may be seen in them. The inkstand is an important item of the chic Argentine home. But the taste for graphic art is still undeveloped, and the pictures offered for sale compare very unfavourably with the sculptures. I recall in particular a hideous daub, which was alleged to represent two or three members of a certain familia distinguida (any family that can pay its way and afford a seat at the Opera is so described), being the centre of admiration in a Florida shop window for some days, while the newspapers gave reproductions of it. In London or Paris no art-dealer would have allowed it to be seen on his premises.

As I have already indicated, Florida has every day a brief surcease from the battle of motors and coaches. From four o’clock until seven no vehicles are allowed to pass along it, and only at the crossings is there any traffic. These are the hours of the evening paseo. Ladies and children are now at liberty to saunter along the pavements or in the roadway, while the gilded youth of the town struts by and gazes at them, or more often stands in stolid rows and admires. The ladies are perhaps a trifle too well dressed and the children mostly over-dressed. But this is their “life.” This paseo is what they live for, so they strive to appear at their best and to display their possessions of silks and satins, while the jovenes distinguidos have all had their boots polished to the nth degree just before they came into the street. And the scene is undeniably enchanting, when the electric lights blaze out. There are hundreds of projecting shops-signs, in which changing electric lights are now revealed and now occluded, and the great warehouses are all illuminated as though it were another centenario, news vendors are calling La Razon, El Diario, Caras y Caretas, or Fray Mocho, and the whole has the atmosphere of some brilliant bazaar, rather than of the highway of a great city. It is a feast of light, but not of gaiety, for the Argentines are not given to joyousness and are strangely lacking in humour; everybody is frightfully formal and all are obviously conscious of being well dressed. It is Vanity Fair with the fun left out!

Towards the river, the street of San Martín (inescapable national hero who pursues you everywhere in statue, in street and place-name, in “cocktails,” in every conceivable connection) runs parallel to Florida but bears no resemblance to it except in being equally narrow. It is essentially an earnest business thoroughfare, lined with many fine office buildings, and choking perpetually with traffic. But, by the way, many of these business buildings that look so “up-to-date” from the outside are antiquated within. It is a fact that up to so recently as a year ago builders were in the habit of erecting large tenements which they well knew would be utilised for nothing but offices, yet they built them deliberately for “flats,” or departamentos, as these are called, fitting each with its kitchen and bathroom and disposing the apartments as for bedrooms and salons. Thus you will find to-day hundreds of business firms using such modern flats as offices,—in some cases the bathrooms remaining, in others converted into “enquiry office,” or the like,—all extremely uncomfortable in conditions entirely foreign to their requirements. But San Martín contains several imposing blocks of real office buildings and will presently contain more, for the builders are busy here, as everywhere else, with their work of transformation. A friend of mine, when I called on him at the beginning of May, 1913, had just received notice to quit, by the demolishers arriving and starting to unroof his office! That was his first intimation that the landlord purposed clearing away his old property and putting up a great new business building. Argentine methods are not ours.

One “square” nearer the river runs Reconquista, dignified by the presence of the principal bank buildings, many of which are real ornaments of the town and all suggest a sense of opulence and financial solidity it would be hard to match even in New York or London. Yet the best of them, the richest and the most substantial, are no more than the branches of the Tree of English Gold which has its roots deep-struck in London City. It is a street of all nations this Reconquista. England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the rest have their banking houses here, and there is no more encouraging sight in this remorseless city than to witness the many ill-clad Spanish and Italian labourers going through the long and intricate operation of sending drafts home to those they have left in the old country. Many hundreds have I seen with eager, straining faces, scanning the pink or green slips of paper that would mean so much to some one far away in Lombardy or in Catalonia, and represented so much of the sweat of his brow to the poor sender.

The practice of keeping a bank account is very general, even among the labouring classes, as the poor peon has nowhere to hide his little hoard, living as he does in the most shameful conditions, where a square yard of living-room is more costly than a cottage would be in his native village, and among people who do not hesitate at murder to gain a few pitiful pesos. Thus you will often see a lean and hungry labourer, dressed no better than an English tramp, scrutinising his bank book in the corridor of one of the great banking houses, and the sight is a strange one to English eyes. Turks, Polish Jews, Norwegians, Russians, Cingalese, Swedes, Armenians, all the nations of the world are represented daily in the teeming throngs that flock to the banks in Reconquista, where the innumerable clerks are puffing steadily at cigarettes and attending to their clients with a charming ease that has in it a pleasant suggestion of eternity. For the simplest banking operation will eat away twenty minutes of your time, as your account is balanced whenever you withdraw or lodge any sum, and to secure a draft on London at ninety days, calls for the patience of Job and three-quarters of an hour. Much of this formality is the result of the system of issuing open checks, which makes swindling delightfully simple, and the bank always stands to lose, as there is extreme difficulty in bringing a swindler to book.

The last of the narrow streets riverward is Calle 25 de Mayo, so called from the day in the year 1810 when the movement for Independence began, although the actual date of the Declaration of Independence is 9th July, 1816. They have a curious habit of thinking in dates in Latin countries. Both Paris and Rome give us examples of famous dates as street names, but in South America dates are honoured to a degree that is comic. One of my friends in Montevideo has an office in 25 de Mayo, a show-room in 18 de Julio, and warehouses in 21 de Agosto and in 15 de Octubre! By some odd chance he always found what he needed most in one of the streets named after Uruguay’s historic dates. There was another such, 1 de Mayo, but it offered him no accommodation else he should have taken premises there also, just to complete the series. Calle 25 de Mayo in Buenos Ayres has long been one of the degenerate parts of the town, entirely unworthy of the historic event it commemorates. But it is being gradually reformed and may yet take on an aspect of decency. Near the Plaza de Mayo it contains some fine new buildings, but westward it is still the haunt of undesirables, although the English pro-cathedral stands there, a plain and not undignified structure with which I made no close acquaintance.

Exterior of the Jockey Club, Buenos Ayres.

A good photograph of this famous building cannot be made, the street being too narrow to admit of focus, even from the upper storeys opposite. In the right bottom corner part of a window-sill, or ledge of roof, on the opposite side of the street, appears in this photograph.

From 25 de Mayo the ground falls quickly, to the Paseo de Julio, the former street occupying the level of what, no doubt, was long ago the bank of the river. This is the only semblance of a hill in all the district. Inland for leagues, the city lies flat as the proverbial pancake, while below towards the river, the Paseo and the gardens beyond, with the buildings of the port in the further distance, occupy a lower level of land reclaimed from the river. If anybody wants an enemy “put out of the way” for a matter of twenty dollars or so, he will have no difficulty in finding a villain ready for the job somewhere along the arcaded haunts of the Paseo. In one respect the Paseo de Julio resembles Princess Street, Edinburgh, which, as the Irishman said, “is no more than half a strate, as it has only one side to it.” The Paseo has only one side to it, and it is a bad one. The second stories of the buildings that stand between the Paseo and 25 de Mayo are on the road level of the higher street. Thus it might be possible, for aught I know, to enter one of the low dens on the Paseo and mounting two or three floors within its evil and mysterious interior, emerge on the level of 25 de Mayo. The lower stories of these buildings on the Paseo side are arcaded, and these arcades are the haunt of “all things perverse, abominable.” According to the local press, after nightfall no man dare appear there wearing a collar, and any one who requires the aid of eye-glasses must not venture thither. Often have I wandered among the stinking peones and cosmopolitan criminals who throng the arcades by day, but I know not the Paseo by night. The shops are kept by all sorts of cheap clothiers, general dealers, and many cutlers, whose windows are exclusively given over to the display of long knives or daggers. Probably sixty per cent. of the frequenters of the arcades carry one of these dirks, like the old Scottish Highlander, and the other forty per cent. are armed with revolvers, of which hundreds are exposed for sale in the arcades. There is no lack of “cheap Jacks” with “special lines” to clear at a sacrifice. There are many filthy looking restaurants and provision shops; and more librerías, which expose nothing but the filth of the Continental press translated into Spanish and Italian. If you look at one of their windows for a minute, out pops the greasy owner, spiderlike, to enquire if by any chance you would like to inspect his more secret stock of fotografías muy curiosas, while youths will thrust under your nose an envelope of obscene photographs, with a particularly offensive one exposed. The whole atmosphere is vile. The cinematographs and raree shows that also abound in these arcades may be no more pernicious than many in the Bowery, but that is a matter on which no decent visitor can speak, as none such could risk the contamination of entering therein. It is a male crowd that is always circulating in the Paseo. Never have I seen a decent woman there, and indeed no more than a half-a-dozen hatless sluts are ever to be noticed under its arcades.

This abomination must pass. It exists merely because landowners have preferred to hold their old rotten properties, and allow them to be used by the scum of the population, until such time as it would pay them to sell out. The transformation has already begun; the pestiferous old buildings are giving way to modern ones, devoted to cleaner purposes. Some day the haunts of the criminals may be utterly wiped out and the Paseo de Julio become, what it might well be, one of the pleasantest thoroughfares of a great city.

Up the little hill from the Paseo, one gains the Plaza de Mayo, whence stretches for a mile and a half in the most approved Haussmannesque straightness the Avenida de Mayo, ending in the massive palace of Congreso. Lined with many handsome buildings, of six, eight, or even a dozen stories, whose shadows are falling athwart the broad and teeming roadway, while the westering sun is making iridescent the white marbles of the great domed Congreso in the far distance, here in the new land of South America is at least one fine city highway that may hold up its head among the world’s best. There is a suggestion of a Paris boulevard in the Avenida; a suggestion of form, but assuredly not of life nor of “atmosphere.” And there the rivalry between the two great Latin cities begins and ends!

The great Avenida Callao runs at right angles with the Avenida de Mayo from the Plaza Congreso. It is badly paved, but contains many attractive buildings of cement. Some day perhaps it may become the central thoroughfare of the city. There are those who believe it will, but in my judgment it will call for a greater revolution than they have ever known in Argentina to shift the centre of gravity from the Calles Maipú, Florida, and San Martín to Callao. Between Florida and Callao there are eleven parallel streets. All are incessantly busy from early morning till nightfall, while Maipú, Esmeralda, and Suipacha, in the order given parallel to Florida, are busy even through the night. All sorts of shops abound in these thoroughfares and business offices innumerable, as well as many places of entertainment, restaurants, and cafés. But, apart from Florida, all these streets that lie to the north of the Avenida de Mayo are so characterless that after many years of residence it would puzzle even those with an abnormal “bump of locality” to say in which street they found themselves if they stepped from a cab in any one of them without having noted some landmark on the way. In the suburbs it is even more difficult to realise at a glance where you may happen to be, and the policeman often cannot tell you the name of the street he is patrolling. I remember asking a policeman in a street near the Plaza Libertad for Frank Brown’s Circus (Brown is an American or an Englishman who has made and lost fortunes in circuses throughout South America). “Oh,” said he, “you are going the wrong way. It is at the corner of Florida and Córdoba.” Now, I knew that some eighteen months or two years before it had stood there, but was deliberately burned to the ground by the jingo youths of the city, who were offended by some quite innocent action of the unfortunate Brown. This policeman, some eight or ten squares away from the scene, had not yet heard the news, and meanwhile a magnificent pile of ferro-concrete architecture, the Centro Naval, had been reared on the spot! I found the new circus by describing to another policeman, who at first denied all knowledge of it, a big building to which thousands of people had been flocking for two or three nights past. Then a light dawned on his Indo-Spanish soul. “Entonces, señor,” said he, “se encuentra sin duda, a la esquina de esta misma calle, porque se ha concurrida mucha gente, por alla, estas ultimas noches.” It was even so, three squares away at the corner of the street in which I had speech with the policeman, I found the circus.

There is no end to what I might write about the streets of Buenos Ayres, but there must be speedily, if not already, to the interest of the reader. I who have tramped them, in fair weather and in foul, on busy week days and on the deadest of dull dead Sundays, mile upon mile, seeking for interest and finding but little, now discover many forgotten impressions coming up on the films of the mind, which, so to say, I have been putting into the developer, and though these amuse me, I doubt if they would equally entertain others.

CHAPTER VI
WHAT WE THOUGHT OF THE WEATHER AND THE MOSQUITOES

I cannot go further in the story of my stay in Buenos Ayres without saying something very definite about the weather. Passing references have already been made to that all-important topic; but it requires a chapter to itself, and it insists on having it here and now.

As I have said, we were seekers of sunshine. Well, we found it—and also some fine samples of most sorts of weather known between the Equator and the Poles.

We arrived early in April, which is the beginning of autumn in the Argentine. As the reader has heard, the morning of our arrival was a “perisher.” Next day I found my hands, for the first time since boyhood, sore and “chapped.” The cold wind was so keen that it had instantly roughened all exposed parts of the skin, and I had recourse to lanoline to soften my hands and to heal my cracked lips. But on the third day the sun came forth again and for nearly a fortnight the heat was almost as trying as in a New York summer. Everybody was mopping his forehead; men who, a day or two before, had been going about in great-coats, were walking the streets with handkerchiefs tucked inside their collars to absorb the sweat. And suddenly it would change to a bitter night; or perhaps one went forth in the sunny morning in summer clothes, and by noon the temperature had precipitately dropped fifteen or twenty degrees, so that one went shivering hotel-ward for lunch and a change of clothes.

Yet a Scotsman, long resident in Chile, told me that I would find Buenos Ayres had the finest climate in the world! I wonder where he will go to when he dies.

For eight months I had occasion to comment on the weather and seldom in terms of congratulation. The expatriated English and the few porteños of British parentage with whom I came into frequent contact were strangely prone to ask me what I thought of the weather, whenever it happened to be a really fine day.

“Compare this,” they would say, “with the weeks of fog in London when the gas has to be lighted all day long and one can’t breathe.”

“My dear sir,” (or “lady,” as the case more often was), I might timorously make answer, “you speak of what is as much a tradition as the red wig and beard for the part of Shylock, and moreover you speak to one who has seen as great variety of weather in Buenos Ayres as in London. Your memory is so short that you forget it rained monstrously for three days last week, and for the other four days there was a white chilling vapour over all the town, so that you could not see the length of two squares in the forenoon, and when the vapour had cleared it was as though you were walking on vaselined sidewalks.”

“Oh, but that was exceptional.”

“And so, it may be, are the fogs of London. But I’d much prefer a real old London ‘particler’ to this marrow-searching, flesh-chilling, white plague that comes up from the River Plate in your winter-time and gets one by the throat.”

That fine line of Tennyson’s,

All in a death-dumb, autumn-dripping gloom,

comes to mind in Buenos Ayres on one of these days, but, alas, the autumn dripping is not from branchy trees to fragrant, leaf-laden loam, nor is it “death-dumb.” It drips from gaunt iron frames, from broken plastered walls, from tram-cars, from horses’ harness. A billiard cue taken from the rack will feel as though it had been lying in the bath, and the boots which you have not been wearing for a few days will show patches of white and green mould.

But it is true that between April and November there may be many days of sunshine; nay, even weeks of it at a stretch. And these days are delicious. There is a tang of freshness in the air such as comes to one on a fine frosty autumn morning on the heights of uptown New York.

Then towards the end of November the sun begins his yearly revel and till the end of March Buenos Ayres swelters in the most oppressive heat imaginable. Not that the barometer ever attains a greater height than it frequently registers in New York City, but New York rarely experiences such long-sustained periods of heat, and the humidity—due to the mighty volume of the River Plate—makes the life of man and beast a burden. The nights bring no surcease. Horses die in the streets by the score every day, and you will see their carcasses in all parts of the town, awaiting removal. Lucky are the inhabitants who can escape to Mar del Plata, to Montevideo or to the Hills of Córdoba, but they are few compared with the myriads who must remain in the monstrous stew-pot. “Long drinks” and two or three cold shower baths are now the order of the day. But even the cold douche has its snares. I was once severely scalded by taking one, as the cistern was exposed to the sun and the water had been brought near to boiling point without the aid of a “geyser”! There is nobody in Buenos Ayres during the summer who attaches much importance to the scientific wiseacres who tell us the heat of the sun is diminishing.

There was no doubt about it—we had found the sunshine at last. And like so many of the quests on which mankind sets out, our find was no better than Dead Sea apples. What could we do with it? Why, we shut it out of our rooms by every means in our power; we wore smoked glasses so that we should not see it. We thought of the Kentucky nigger who was knocked down by an autumnal blast and got up and shook his fist at the invisible force, saying: “Wind, wheah wuz you dis time las’ July?”

The New Courts of Justice.

The “Tribunales” photographed just before the completion of the cement work on the top storey. In the foreground, the fine monument to General Lavalle, standing in the plaza named after him.

It will be gathered from what I have said that the Argentine has no lack of “weather,” wherein it resembles England, which Mark Twain alleged had only “samples” of climate. It has all the essentials of the finest climate in the world, but no wise Providence has blended these with any discretion. In the course of one short day you will pass through all the seasons of the year, and though it never snows, I have experienced cold in Buenos Ayres equal to a sharp frost in New York. Nay, I will roundly assert that no wind that sweeps across New York has a tooth so keen as the pampero. One has to be out in Buenos Ayres when the wind from the boundless pampas strikes the town to know how cold can rake through to the marrow. Over the thousands of leagues of plains it blows, direct from the snowy Andes, and stirring up the clammy effluvia of the River Plate it breathes rheumatism, bronchitis, consumption over the city—the hateful pampero!

Nor have the people learned how to combat their changeful weather. All their houses are built for summer. They are excellent for four months of the year, and uncomfortable for the best part of eight. The ceilings of the rooms are usually five feet or more higher than the American standard, which gives one a sporting chance of a breath of fresh air in the torrid season, but when the wind blows and the rain pours, such lofty rooms, tenanted by a myriad draughts, are veritable haunts of misery. For they have neither fireplaces like English houses, nor stoves like American, while steam heating is in its infancy. There are actually modern houses in which “dummy” fireplaces have been built for show, but a real genuine fireplace is a thing which most Argentines have only seen on a visit to Europe. A well-known steam-heating expert from New York, who was sent on a special mission of study to Buenos Ayres, told me that in many of the new departamento buildings which offer the attraction of calefacción central the steam heating installation is no more than make-believe for selling or letting purposes, but never calculated to supply the tenants with warmth. No, the Argentine either goes to bed earlier or puts on extra clothing in the cold weather, lounges about his house with an overcoat or a shawl above his winter suit, and tries to warm his toes at an oil stove. The ironmongers make great display of these stinking abominations at the first cold-snap, and the papers carry many advertisements of their merits, their “odourless” quality being insisted upon in every case. Electric stoves are largely and successfully used, and as electric current is cheap they form the best substitute for a coal fire—although the English believe there is no substitute in all the world for a fine glowing fire of coal.

“Weather” is indeed a staple of talk in the Argentine, just as at home. Indeed, to a greater degree does one hear people discussing the weather in Buenos Ayres even than in London, and with very good reason. The fortunes of all hinge on the state of the climate. Too much rain and the harvests are spoiled; too much heat and horses, cattle and sheep perish in their tens of thousands. And year after year the Argentine suffers either way. Tell an estanciero that you have seen two or three locusts flying about in the street and his face will blanch, his lip quiver, for already in imagination he sees the dreaded plague of these insects devastating his crops. He is ever in a state of nervous fear as to whether there is going to be too little rain or too much, and, poor man, he will tell you with glee when he meets you on the beastliest of rainy days that “it’s raining dollars.” If you meet him a fortnight later and it is still raining, there will be no smile on his face, for he fears it is to be the old, old story. “Last year and the year before the crops were nearly in the bags for putting on the rail and yet we lost them through the rain.” Raining dollars, forsooth! For a day or two that may be so, for a week, perhaps; but later on it rains bankruptcy. Que lindo país, as a dear old self-deluded lady used to say when telling me the most atrocious untruths about her adopted country. What a lovely country!

The uncertainty of the Argentine weather is really incredible to any one who has been fed on the pap of interested hack-writers. In the year 1911 the great national horse race at Palermo was three times postponed on account of the course being dangerously heavy from excessive rain, and in 1912 it was postponed once for the same reason, being run on the succeeding Sunday on a course that was still sloppy. Was the Derby ever postponed because of rain? I have no Derby lore, but I should be surprised to learn that such a thing had ever happened in rainy England.

It had been represented to me before I went to Buenos Ayres that, so reliable was the climate, one could make engagements for outdoor sports months ahead, with the certainty of weather conditions being favourable. During my stay there, numerous lawn tennis, golfing, boating and picnic engagements were postponed from time to time because of the rain.

In short, Argentine weather is either too much of a good thing or too much of a bad thing. The dear old lady already mentioned told me that she had to live in Buenos Ayres during the winter because the roads to her estancia were quite impassable whenever it rained, but it was lovely there for a few weeks in the spring, though she had to clear out as soon as summer came, as the place was so infested by flies and mosquitoes that the family had to live in darkness, never daring to raise the blinds! Buenos Ayres being equally obnoxious in summer, she went to the Hills of Córdoba, and came back to town with the autumn. Thus she was able to spend a few short weeks of each year at her home in the “Camp,” and the rest of the year, from a chair in the hotel drawing-room she sang the praises of the glorious Argentine weather and of the country that blossoms as the rose.

The final touch of unloveliness is the loss of the ruddy glory of the fall. In the province of Buenos Ayres especially, there is no gorgeous funeral for King Summer; no shimmering gold of hedge and bough. The leaves rot on the trees suddenly, wither into pale colourless things that to-morrow’s wind sweeps away and, behold, so many gaunt and shivering skeletons of trees. When man dies in Buenos Ayres, they coffin him and consign him to his corner of Chacarita within twenty-four hours. Summer dies and is buried with similar despatch, but Nature relatively provides less pomp at the funeral of Summer than the experts in pompas fúnebres supply for the average Argentine who yesterday was and to-day is not.

Insect life is, of course, conditioned by the weather. Yet the Argentine mosquito has a wonderful power of surviving into the winter. It is a worker. Its industry is unquestionable. I shall not readily forget how I was plagued by this small product of a great country. On various occasions I had to limp about my affairs with absurdly swollen feet, thanks to the attentions of these tiny pests. An afternoon siesta could only safely be indulged in under a mosquito net. Even as I write I still bear traces on my right foot of a particularly venomous bite that dates back more than six months!

“Haw, yes, the mosquitoes always get the Gringos,” said a pimply faced young Englishman to me, when I was mentioning my first experiences nearly a year later in Montevideo.

“How long have you been out here?” I inquired.

“Oh, nearly three years now,” said he.

“So that you are a three years’ Gringo, I suppose.”

The English youth makes haste to range himself with the “old timers” and will lie to you abominably to convey the impression that he is no longer a tenderfoot (though a Gringo he must ever be), and tell you that the mosquitoes never touch him, while you can see him scratching his latest bite! The fact is that some people are more subject than others to mosquito bite and there are many thousands of native-born who never outgrow the susceptibility. I sincerely sympathise with all such, as the mosquito has the power to make their lives a misery for at least six months of the year. Fleas and bugs (the loathsome bed-hunter) also abound in the City of Good Airs. A gentleman of my acquaintance who took lodgings in a native doctor’s house was told by the housekeeper, when he complained about the bugs in his bed, that she couldn’t help them—“they were natural.” That was his complaint; he would rather they had been artificial. The bicho colorado is another busy little fellow, the size of a pin-head. He haunts the grass and as you walk over that he removes his habitat to your foot, bores a hole in your skin, burrows merrily into your flesh and produces a sore which you will have cause to remember for many a day. The chemists do brisk business in selling innumerable “preventatives” and “cures” for the bites of mosquitoes and bichos colorados, but all that I tried were failures, until I discovered in that familiar product, liquid ammonia, a really effective banisher of the pain.

On the whole, I do not seem to have formed an extremely favourable opinion of the weather in Buenos Ayres. Like that famous little girl, “when it is good it is very, very good; but when it is bad it is horrid.” And I have a notion that the little girl in question was none too often “good.” As for the insects; well, Stalky’s pet aversions, the “bug-hunters,” can always be sure of a busy time in and around Buenos Ayres.

CHAPTER VII
A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM

“Of course we all work in sham,” remarked a prominent Argentine architect to me, one clear, still night, as we leant together over the rail of a river steamer, discussing the pros and cons of Buenos Ayres—a subject as infinitely interesting to River Platers as the weather to the Englishman.

The “of course” was a kindly concession to some criticism of mine and showed an open and liberal mind. The architect was no self-deluding porteño to whom Buenos Ayres was everything good, true and beautiful. He was prepared to admit the warts.

He were, indeed, the blindest and most incompetent of observers who failed to notice at the end of his first hour in Buenos Ayres that it is a city of “sham.”

Its buildings are of no distinctive value architecturally—nay, not even the most notable. Without exception they follow European models in exterior treatment, no matter how widely they may differ from them interiorly. That many of the public buildings are imposing, and at first glance look like “the real thing,” no one will deny. Besides, he who were foolish enough to deny this could be confronted with the evidence of the official photographs which have conveyed to an envious Europe the idea that Buenos Ayres eclipses her worn-out old cities in its architectural glories. A photograph makes lath and plaster to look like granite and porphyry. Through the camera the graceful buildings of the St. Louis “World’s Fair” appeared as permanent as the pyramids, though a few score labourers with picks and shovels wiped them out in less time than it took to put them up.

Buenos Ayres is truly a city of sham. Nor is this to its shame. For it costs more to erect its steel-frame and cement structures than it does in Washington or London to rear solid piles of masonry. The country is destitute of workable stone, and the bricks made in the Argentine are so unsightly and spongy that they can only serve as a base for plaster. Wood also is scarce and the gorgeous doors, without which no fine building in Buenos Ayres would be considered complete, have to be imported at great cost from Europe. Many of these are beautiful and in this one respect the city may be said to outvie Paris, whence comes this taste for the grandeur in gates.

It may be a mere old-world prejudice on my part, but I have never been able to look with real interest on a building that has not been made of brick or stone. In Europe, in the United States, also, we are accustomed to historic buildings that have been reared by competent workmen with the idea that they were to last forever, which, as Ruskin reminds us, is the only true way to build. To come to a new land and find that the most pretentious efforts of the builder’s craft are chiefly stucco copies of European stone-work, leaves the beholder cold.

The Congreso has been trying for some years to become the pride of the town. It is the great marble-veneer palace where the legislators sit—in a literal sense, for they deliver their speeches seated—and it is effectively situated at the western end of the spacious Avenida de Mayo. It has been many years in course of construction and I am afraid to say how many millions of money have been spent upon it. At least, it has cost more than three times the amount originally voted for it, and there are few senators or deputies who have not had some pickings out of the “job.” No man knows when it will be finished, for it is said that as much material as would have built two such palaces has gone in at the front door of the works and been mysteriously absorbed. The explanation is that many a fine residence for a legislator with a “pull” has been built of the said material, after it had gone out a backdoor! Meanwhile the gorgeous Palacio del Congreso presents a noble marble front to the great Plaza Congreso and stares eastward along the Avenida without a blush for its ulterior nakedness. It is like the noble savage, “whose untutored mind clothes him in front and leaves him bare behind”; for when you have turned the corners from the plaza you discover that only the front part has been covered with marble slabs; behind there is naught but dirty naked bricks. So it has been for three or four years and so it is like to remain for some years to come; but meanwhile a photograph of the front does good service for sending abroad as an evidence of the architectural grandeur of the capital city.

But all this notwithstanding, the Congreso, as seen from almost any point of the Avenida, is an imposing building. Dignity and elegance are combined in its graceful proportions, and its elongated dome soars above the surrounding buildings with a fine sense of confidence. The Corinthian column is used very effectively in the façade and there are many—rather too many—statuary groups, in which winged figures and ramping horses are prominent. Grand stairways sweep up to the central door and inclined planes make possible the near approach of carriages. But immediately one steps inside there is disappointment. The central hall is of mean proportions, and in a few minutes all is confusion, as there is no real dignity of treatment, and certain inner courtyards are actually built with painted iron pillars hopelessly out of harmony with the prevailing style of the building. The Chamber of Deputies, in the form of an ellipse, is businesslike and handsome, but no more imposing than some of the council chambers of the great provincial cities at home. The Senate is a smaller and more elegant chamber, richly furnished with ample seats of ease and commodious desks for each of its distinguished members. There is another luxurious room, dedicated to special ceremonies, and the deputies’ lounge is immense and well-appointed, much after the style of some of the big New York clubs. It is, indeed, at once a club and an exchange, for here many of the “deals” by which some men make money in the Argentine, and others lose it, are consummated.

On the first floor are ranged all the different ministerial offices and committee rooms, and I think there were only two of these to which I did not gain admission. But there was little of interest to note in them. The fact that the rooms devoted to the affairs of the Army and Navy were about one-tenth the size of those required for the department of Public Works was eloquent and reassuring. But although I explored the whole building, high and low, I find I have retained only a very blurred impression of the interior with its bewildering passages, through which liveried servants bearing trays of tea dishes were constantly passing, as the Argentine deputy is a firm believer in getting all he can out of his country in addition to his annual salary of 12,000 pesos ($5,040), feeding at public expense, not only himself, but as many relatives and friends as have the good sense to find important business to transact in the lobbies of Congress at meal times.

A very handsomely furnished library is a notable feature of the palace. It is small, but admirably designed for the enshrinement of many books. One of the proudest possessions of the library, pointed out to me with much satisfaction, is a complete set of the Hansard Debates of the British Parliament. There are standard works on all sorts of social subjects and books of statistics enough to give a mere literary man a headache. I noted most of the books had a suspicious air of newness. There was a deputy busy consulting a volume of Hansard, but no other thirster after knowledge in the library at the time of my visit.

“You may come here often,” said the official who was showing me over the building, “and you will seldom see more than two people using the library,—perhaps three.”

The restaurant is much more popular with the deputies, but there is no doubt that if any of them ever by chance should wish to “verify his references” he would find no difficulty in performing that most laudable and improbable task with the aid of this well-stocked and well-managed library.

On the whole, the impression of the Palacio de Congreso upon the visitor is of a piece with the capital city. It is all so new, and all so unfinished, and promises to be rather shoddy when eventually it is finished. As a tall strapping doorkeeper, who showed me over the great rooms in the basement of the building, where are stored in iron chambers many official records, said, “when they’ve finished the building they will have to start all over again repairing it.”

I went outside on a balcony at the back to examine the still uncovered brick-work. It is of a quality which would not be used for workmen’s cottages in England, but once it has been hidden under plaster, with thin slabs of marble imposed thereon, it will doubtless present a brave appearance for some years. But not for all time!

The Palatial Home of “La Prensa.”

Façade of the great newspaper office on the north side of the Avenida de Mayo. Different interior views of this building are given at pages 80 and 81.

At the eastern end of the Avenida stands the more historic “Pink House” (Casa rosada), or government building. It occupies the whole width of the Plaza de Mayo and extends backwards to the Paseo Colón beyond—a mighty pile of plastered brick. Lacking in distinction and of no established style, it is chiefly notable for its abundance of windows. I remember counting about one hundred and twenty in the east front alone, so that the whole building probably contains upwards of six hundred, and, with so many piercings in its walls, it will be understood that little opportunity was left for architectural ingenuity. An immense group of statuary surmounts the central part of the building, and this too is most likely a stucco masterpiece, for if it were solid stone it would surely bring down the roof. The whole exterior is painted pink and on a bright day its appearance is undeniably pleasing, if you are content to take it as a whole and some little distance off, for a too close inspection will reveal many shabby patches and innumerable corners that are calling aloud for plaster and paint. Indeed, so large is the Pink House, it would only be possible to give it a coat of paint that would be fresh all over by employing an army of workers, for, ordinarily treated, the paint on one side has become old ere the painters have reached the other.

The interior of the Government House, Casa de gobierno—which is the official designation of the Casa rosada—contains many fine apartments, richly furnished. The great ballroom where the President gives his grave and stately entertainments from time to time is of elegant proportion and beautifully decorated.

At the northwest corner of the Plaza de Mayo stands the Cathedral. Although I passed it daily for some eight months, I never mustered up sufficient interest to go inside—I who have spent so many months of my life among the musty old cathedrals and churches of France. I felt there was little historic about this common and defective imitation of a Grecian façade, vulgarised by wreaths of electric bulbs around its Corinthian columns. At first glance it suggests a stock exchange rather than a place of Christian worship. There is a dome of glazed tiles, so far away from the low and squat entrance colonnade—which faces due south—that it seems to have no relation to it. I do not remember noting the material of the building—so little did it attract me—but I fancy it consists of the usual plastered brick. One day I did seek to enter, but could find no door that was open and never do I remember to have seen the main door open on a week day. This is characteristic of the churches of South America, where one misses that generous invitation of the fine old fanes of France. Mainly, the Cathedral of Buenos Ayres will stay in my memory as a great stock exchange building gone wrong, or—illuminated on any of the numerous national feast days—as a municipal theatre on a noche de gala.

A stone-throw from the Cathedral stands the Municipal Building, or Intendencia, at the corner of the Avenida and the Plaza de Mayo. It is of no account, and does not compare in interest with the splendid palace of La Prensa adjoining it. I confess that as a journalist I had more desire to inspect the famous building of the great Buenos Ayres daily than any other sight in the city. During my stay I had frequent business with the management of La Prensa and was privileged to examine every corner of its wonderful home, on one occasion spending some hours in the building after midnight, when the sight of Buenos Ayres from the globe on which stands the Prensa’s Goddess of Light, who holds aloft her flaring torch over the restless city, is surely one that can be rarely equalled in the world. No doubt if one were to look at Paris by night from the apex of the dome over the Sacré Coeur, or London, say from the Clock Tower at Westminster, the sight would be more beautiful, but it could scarcely be more impressive, as the extraordinary flatness of Buenos Ayres permits the observer on the Prensa tower to survey the whole vast city to its utmost limits and even to distinguish the twinkling lights of La Plata, the provincial capital, twenty-four miles away. I shall not readily forget that starry night when, at two o’clock, I stood up there in the lookout beneath the Goddess of Light and saw the great noisy, cruel city as a prodigious map of stars. The prodigality of Buenos Ayres in electric light was evident even at that hour, for mile upon mile the eye could follow the main streets with their double lines of radiant dots, thinning gradually as they flickered into the boundless plain beyond, while on the fringes of the mighty metropolis appeared numerous constellations betokening the suburbs which the Federal Capital threatens to engulf.

The interior of the Prensa building would require a chapter to itself to describe it with any attempt at detail. That is not possible here and a mere glimpse of it must suffice. It is almost everything that our English ideas would expect a newspaper office not to be. If you enter from the front, there is nothing in the business department to strike your attention. There are many newspaper offices in the United States quite as imposing. Nor is there anything particularly worthy of note in the reportorial rooms, the library, or any of the workaday departments, though the note of luxury is probably more pronounced in the apartments of the editor and the editorial writers than in most American offices. The machine room is splendidly equipped. The overseer, I was told, was an Argentine, but I suspect he was of British or German parentage, for the native has little aptitude for mechanics. His assistant was a Britisher.

There is a series of “show” rooms which made it hard for one, like myself, whose life has been spent in newspaper offices at home amid the well-loved odour of printer’s ink, to imagine himself within a building devoted to the production of a daily newspaper. At two o’clock in the morning what a scene of hustle is a daily newspaper office in New York! Here everything was as quiet and orderly as in a museum when the visitors have gone! And in truth it reminded me not a little of a museum. There was a magnificent concert hall, superbly decorated, with painted panels for the doing of which artists had come especially from France. Here many of the most famous operatic stars who have visited Buenos Ayres have appeared before select audiences invited by the Prensa; celebrated actors have tried new plays and illustrious visitors from foreign lands have addressed privileged audiences in many different tongues. The value of such a hall to a newspaper is so obvious that it is surprising none of the New York journals has yet attempted anything of the kind. I think the Prensa salon accommodates an audience of some five hundred, and it is smaller than the very charming little theatre of Femina, the Paris ladies’ journal, in the Champs Élysées.

Then there is a suite of living-rooms, fronting to the Avenida, worthy of a prince. These have been placed at the disposition of distinguished visitors to the Argentine with a liberality that has not always been duly appreciated, for I was told that this very pleasant custom of honouring the country’s guests has more than once been abused by a visitor staying so long that he threatened to become a permanent boarder of the Prensa. Hence, it may be, that the custom is no longer to be maintained, and I can imagine the business side of the newspaper can make even better use of the space. A sports-room for the staff includes appliances for every variety of indoor sport and exercise, from billiards to fencing, nor need one ever be at a loss for a cooling bath in the hot summer days, as the bathrooms and lavatories are worthy of a first-class New York hotel. But, most curious of all, perhaps, are the medical and dental departments. The rooms for the physicians and surgeons on the staff of the Prensa are supplied with all the latest medical and surgical appliances, and readers of the paper can come here free of charge for advice and treatment. There is also a legal department, where skilled lawyers look into the troubles of the newspaper’s subscribers!

In short, the Prensa building is one of the most interesting sights of Buenos Ayres and a notable ornament of the Avenida. It is an epitome of Argentine progress, for less than fifty years ago the journal was a humble little four-page sheet, issued from some scrubby little shanty, while to-day it is one of the wealthiest, as it is one of the largest, newspapers in the world, housed in a palace that cost $1,500,000 to build. Its enterprising founder, the late Dr. José Paz, died at Nice a week or two before I left England and I was later present at the ceremony of receiving his remains in Buenos Ayres for interment at Recoleta, the last resting place of the Argentine’s aristocrats. He had built another palace for the whole Paz family in the Plaza San Martín, one of the most magnificent buildings in the city and one of the most princely private residences I have ever seen in any land, but he was not spared to see it occupied.

If we cross the Avenida and go some four squares down the Calle Defensa we shall come to one of the few historic buildings in the city—the church of Our Lady of the Rosary—Nuestra Señora del Rosario.

There is nothing worthy of note in its architecture, but in the tower which surmounts the front entrance—to the north—a number of cannon balls are embedded in the mortar of which the church is built. These are said to be relics of the British bombardment of 1806 and within are the flags which the Spanish viceroy, Liniers (a Frenchman, by the way), took from the British troops under General Carr Beresford when they were compelled to surrender to superior forces after their brief and ill-advised occupation of the citadel from June to August of that year. Liniers promised the flags of the conquered British to Nuestra Señora del Rosario before he went forth to engage Beresford on the 12th of August, and there they hang, objects of no small pride to the patriotic Argentine. (This on the authority of the native historian, Señor José Manuel Eizaguirre, though Mr. Cunninghame Graham states that the flags were taken from the incompetent General Whitelock in his disastrous attempt to retake the town in 1807, and that they hang in the Cathedral.)

There are indeed few churches in Buenos Ayres that will repay a visit. All are edifices of little note and, almost without exception, stuck rather shamefacedly among other buildings where you may pass a dozen times and never notice them once. Buenos Ayres has other business in hand than matters of the soul. No one could describe it as an aggressively religious city. The Jockey Club is more to its taste. It stands rather more than half-way along the Calle Florida, going from the Avenida towards the Plaza San Martín. That admirable English word of recent invention, “swank,” was surely coined by some one familiar with the Jockey Club of Buenos Ayres. But for the moment I shall not seek to illustrate this by attempting to describe the spirit that animates this bizarre and curious institution. In this chapter I am concerned only with its outward appearance. That is by no means unpleasing, though the façade of the building is constricted and the narrowness of the street prevents one from obtaining a satisfactory view of it. It is covered with an infinity of electric bulbs and no occasion to light these is ever allowed to pass unregarded. Often have I seen the building aglow like Aladdin’s Palace in a Drury Lane pantomime and scarce a soul within sight to feast his eyes on the outward magnificence of this great national institution which exists for the maintenance of the best breeds of man’s devoted servant, the horse (no me parece, as they say in Buenos Ayres, or “I don’t think,” as they say elsewhere).

Westward some six or seven squares from Florida one encounters in the Plaza Lavalle several noteworthy buildings. On the west side of that fine plaza the new Tribunales, or Law Courts, have just been completed, and Buenos Ayres has nothing finer in the way of architecture to show. Conceived on a massive scale and carried out with unusual thoroughness of detail, this is a magnificent palace for the housing of Justice, and as Justice is by no means blind in the Argentine she will find much in her palace to occupy her attention, even to distract it from those duties which in other lands she is supposed best to perform with shut eyes. Why a style that is reminiscent of Assyria and Byzantium should have been chosen, I know not, unless Argentine Justice is of Oriental origin; but the effect is undoubtedly imposing. The six massy columns of the central façade spring upwards to the height of five tall stories, with a large sense of strength and permanence, though it is true they begin in noble stone only to continue upward in concrete. The five entrances are generously inviting, but every Argentine knows that when he enters there to lodge a suit Heaven alone can guess how old he will be, how grey his hairs, when he comes out again with a verdict. Three more stories tower above the great plinth of the pillars, and over the entrance runs a fine, spacious colonnade of Ionic columns.

The building of the Tribunales is, in truth, one of the finest palaces of justice in any great city of the world, exceeded in sheer bulk, so far as I can remember, only by the Palais de Justice of Brussels, which is colossal beyond all reason. Even though a vast deal more cement than enduring stone has gone to its making, it will long remain the most noteworthy architectural effort in Buenos Ayres, and one cannot look upon it without feeling a certain reverence for the intentions of its builders. If Argentine Justice will only endeavour to “live up to” the dignity of her new home, the citizens of the great young republic will have reason to congratulate themselves.

A Princely Sanctum—Room of the “Prensa’s” Chief Editor.

A Corner of the Medical Consulting Room of the “Prensa.”

On the opposite side of the same ample plaza stands the Teatro Colón (Columbus Theatre), the home of the state-aided opera. The citizens are immensely proud of this fine building and with good reason. Always allowing for the difference between stone and cement, neither Paris nor London has anything finer than this palatial theatre. Admirably situated, it is no less admirably designed. It seems large enough to contain half a dozen opera houses, and indeed the theatre proper occupies less than half of the great building. Near the Colón rears its more modest head the Colegio Sarmiento. Sarmiento was one of the greatest men the Argentine or any other country has produced in modern times. No one did more than he for the advancement of his native land, and while I would have preferred to see the Colón dedicated to the memory and the educational ideals of the famous president, it is perhaps only in accord with the lessening ideals of our day that amusement and social pretentiousness should outvie the merely intellectual and useful.

The old Teatro de la Opera still stands and thrives under private management. No doubt when it was first built it was thought to represent the last word in architectural grandeur, but a glance at its rococo façade, wedged between two other buildings in the Calle Corrientes, after having looked at the Colón, will show how rapidly Argentine ideas have expanded in recent years.

It is scarcely possible to continue an orderly commentary on the public buildings of Buenos Ayres until one has passed them all in review. There are too many for that, and many are too similar. Others that I call to mind particularly at the moment, are the great offices of the Water Works (Aguas corrientes) and the Board of Education (Junta de education), both of which are fine examples of the stately manner in which the Argentine houses its public departments. The same cannot be said for the Art Gallery. I am willing to concede that in a young country the essential things, such as good drinking water and elementary education, should take precedence over the fine arts, but when so noble a building as the Colón could have been erected merely to provide society with a short season of social diversion each year (for we must frankly admit that it is more a society haunt than a temple of the muse), surely it might have been possible to do something worthier of the graphic arts! The art gallery occupies a commanding site on the northeast side of the Plaza San Martín, but the building is only a second-hand pavilion, bought from some exhibition (that of St. Louis, I was told) and re-erected here. It is a gimcrack affair of iron frame, wood and gaudy tiles. Although it looks quite attractive in a photograph, the shoddy workmanship, the great chunks of coloured glass, used as items of the decorative scheme, and the general air of temporariness inseparable from the purpose for which it was originally designed, leave one with the impression that the Argentines set a very low value on their art treasures. Yet there are several canvases in the collection that may be worth more than the building that houses them. The sooner this trashy pavilion is thrown on the scrap-heap and a worthy gallery erected, the better for the reputation of the country in respect to the fine arts.

One other public building there is that calls for note. It is known as the Casa de expósitos, and occupies an airy position on the great thoroughfare that runs through the district of Barracas—Montes de Oca. It is an immense building, larger than some of the great London workhouses, and seems to have an infinity of rooms within. There is no fanciful treatment of the exterior; all is plain, massive, substantial. The purpose of this institution is to rear the undesired children of Buenos Ayres. An expósito is a foundling, and this is the Foundling Hospital of Buenos Ayres. Unwilling mothers bring their offspring here, leave them at the door, where they are willingly received “and no questions asked.” The state does not despise this means of fostering the population, though it leaves many thousands of infants to die annually for lack of popular instruction on the rearing of the young and also by permitting the continuance of social conditions which make the survival of most children of the labouring class something of a miracle.

When the station of the Central Argentine Railway at Retiro has been completed, Buenos Ayres will possess one of the finest railway buildings in the world, but during my stay the termini of that railway and the B. A. P. were no better than some of the shabbier country stations in the United States, though the Southern, at Plaza Constitucion, has a handsome edifice, and the Western, at Plaza Once, quite a presentable railway station.

And talking of railway stations, I shall make this the end of my journey round the public buildings of Buenos Ayres—at least for the present. I have not sought to do more than to give the reader—as in the fleeting glimpses of a strange land from the window of a speeding train—a rapid outline of the material Buenos Ayres. This splendid city of sham! If I may not appear to have been deeply impressed with its beauties which have been so floridly pictured by more partial pens, that is probably because I have sought to bear in mind there are other great cities in the world. To the untravelled British provincial, who has shipped straight from some English port to the River Plate, I can well imagine the Argentine metropolis is the greatest wonder of the world. The most devoted admirer of Buenos Ayres that I met during my stay there was a gentleman from Kilmarnock, Scotland. He had never seen London; had never previously been out of his native Scotland; but his ten years in the Argentine capital had convinced him that it stood unique in the world and in all time as the most glorious example of the power of man in the making of cities. That renegade Scot, I quite believe, looks forward with satisfaction to living out his life there and being hurried one day, some twenty hours after he dies, to the sweet rest of Chacarita! But he is a type one may easily allow for (I always show a marked approval of their well-seasoned opinions) and pass on. The intelligent writer, however, who so often, from hasty observation or from interested motives, conveys a too flattering impression of a town does incomparably more harm than a whole wilderness of inexperienced and unobservant enthusiasts. So many such writers have already described the outward show of Buenos Ayres as a sun without spots, that my observations may at least restore the spots. They are set down in all honesty and with no desire to belittle the truly commendable things of Buenos Ayres, in appraising which I trust I shall not be held guilty of any niggard spirit. But, after all, the buildings of any city are no more than the husk, and though we must break the shell to come at the kernel, it is on the latter we have our mind in the progress of the operation. Thus I am in these chapters on the outward appearance of Buenos Ayres engaged in nothing more than the breaking of the shell—and perhaps a few well-established illusions at the same time.

CHAPTER VIII
SOME “PASEOS” IN AND ABOUT BUENOS AYRES

A paseo signifies no more than a stroll, a walk, a promenade. But the modern Argentine usually goes a-strolling in a coche or a motor-car. He has an ingrain horror of exercising his legs. The British resident soon falls into this modern manner, either out of a frank desire to ruffle it with the best of them or merely because one must eventually follow the line of least resistance. It demands a certain amount of will-power to walk when all the world’s on wheels. Thus, as there is but a single paseo where one can display one’s gorgeous motor-car, or hired carriage, all the world makes for that and stares at everybody else. Palermo! Oh, potent word to local minds! Palermo is the one paseo known to all. In that one word is summed up most of what the citizens of Buenos Ayres know of outdoor enjoyment. There are other paseos that do not call for a coche; where you don’t go merely to look at the crowd and be looked at; consequently these are left to the stray visitor or the Gringo, who knows no better.

But first let us talk of Palermo. It is as Hyde Park to London, as the Bois to Paris. And it is an infinitely greater source of pride to the Buenos-Ayrian than Hyde Park to the Londoner or the Bois to the Parisian. I met a young English lady who had been brought to the River Plate as a child and after growing to womanhood had returned to England for a year or two, but had now come back to Buenos Ayres again. “I just love Palermo,” she said ecstatically. “It is unique; there is nothing like it in all London.” I received the information with due humility.

Palermo consists of a mile or so of carriage driveway which is level and tarred (differing in these respects from every other bit of road in the Argentine), a pond or two, and some trees. Materially, that is all. But it is in the spirit of Palermo that lies its fascination, and it may truly be said of it that “for those who like this sort of thing it is just the sort of thing they will like,” as will presently appear when I endeavour to describe that spirit. No, outwardly there is nothing quite like it in London, nor in New York: the driveways in Hyde Park or in Central Park are immensely smoother, the lawns are incomparably more velvety, the trees more umbrageous, while a dozen or more Palermos could be cut out of a corner of the Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, without noticing the loss! But all that is by the way. Palermo is not to be sneered at as the lung of a stifling city. There are instances of people going along quite well with but one lung. The man with one lung, however, has scant reason for crowing over his normal fellow-creatures.

Palermo, taken at what it is and eschewing comparisons, is very fine and reflects the highest credit on the municipal authorities of Buenos Ayres. They have done wonders with the most unpromising material. Yet as it stands to-day it is nothing, I believe, to what it is likely to become.

To reach this haunt of River Plate fashion you will hire a coche (taking care to select one of the minority that are cleanly upholstered and well-horsed) or you may engage a motor-car, for there is an abundance of splendid automobiles to be hired by the hour, with nothing but the tell-tale taximeter to show that it is not a luxurious private car. Or you may take either train or trolley car. Nor is it any great distance to walk thither from the centre of the town. I have gone every way, for after a time it becomes “the only thing to do,” and when you have reached that stage you almost invariably take a coche. The favourite route is by way of the Plaza San Martín and the Avenida Alvear, the Fifth Avenue of Buenos Ayres. The district lying between the Plaza and Recoleta is the most fashionable residential quarter, and along the fine Avenida Alvear stand many of the most beautiful private mansions in Buenos Ayres. Here for the first time in wandering about the town one notes hardly any intermingling of the ostentatious and the mean. Everywhere else that strikes the observer most forcibly—the extraordinary way in which the palace is placed alongside the hovel, so that, separated only by a matter of two or three feet of distance and the thickness of a wall, may be a group of thieves discussing their affairs over drinks in an evil-smelling “dive” and a perfumed gathering of distinguidos. Time, of course, will cure this in the older quarters of the town, but the indifference to the nature of one’s neighbours is evidently deep-rooted, as in the Avenida Alvear itself there is at least one very common drinking saloon in the lower part of a handsome new building, and further out toward Palermo a fine new block of flats is disfigured by a noisy bar on the street level. On the whole, however, this district is so free from the lower class of trades people and the meaner sort of building that in this respect it reminds one of the aristocratic quarter of any great European town.

The Plaza San Martín is a noble square, plentifully studded with trees, flowering shrubs and flower beds. The grass is coarse and scraggy, the close-cropped, velvety lawn being here impossible of attainment owing to natural difficulties of soil and weather. In the centre of the plaza stands a splendid monument to the national hero. It is of the familiar equestrian type, showing San Martín, astride the usual prancing steed, pointing with his right hand to the path that leads to glory or the grave. The statue, a very spirited work, stands on a high pedestal of granite, in front of which a fine figure of a Roman warrior is seated holding aloft an oak branch, while four other bronze groups typifying military prowess and victory, each in itself a considerable monument, occupy granite pedestals at the extreme corners of the wide-spreading sculptured base. Inset in the main pedestal are battle groups in high relief and the lower parts of the stone-work are also enriched with many similar panels of smaller size, in which the stirring events of South America’s struggle for independence, so little known in North America or in Europe, are vigorously depicted. Withal, a very handsome and worthy memorial, of enduring stone and bronze. In art and craft it is French, having been transported from France with much ceremony and at no small cost. It is a noteworthy ornament of the city; a legitimate source of pride to the patriotic.

The sculpture mania has Buenos Ayres in its grip. The Latin peoples have ever been more partial to that art than the Anglo-Saxon, but the Argentines are in danger of touching an extreme that borders on the foolish. Here in the Plaza San Martín there are two more groups—in marble these—one being a very striking work indeed, entitled La Doute. It stands near the southeast corner of the plaza and is so shadowed by trees that it baffled all my efforts to secure a really good photograph of it. A little reminiscent of the Rodin manner—Rodin is one of the gods of the Buenos Ayrians—this work represents a great muscular young man, semi-nude, with perplexed brow, pondering a book, to which an old wizened figure points with skinny finger while he peers into the face of the young man. “Doubt” is writ large thereon; but whether the old man seeks to dispel the doubt or is the cause thereof I am myself in doubt. His old face always reminded me of the bust of Voltaire in the Louvre. Perhaps there’s a clue in that. The other group is called Los primeros fríos (The first cold winds) and represents a naked old man seated with a naked child at his knee. It always impressed me as a peculiarly stupid work, though technically good, and beyond reminding perspiring humanity in the suffocating summer time that there are occasions when the cold winds blow, I can imagine no good purpose that it serves.

Another feature of the plaza is an artificial rockery which, with another of the same, though somewhat higher, in the Plaza Constitucion, is the only thing in the shape of a mountain for scores of miles round about Buenos Ayres!

Bedroom of Distinguished Visitors’ Suite in “Prensa” Office.

The Gorgeously Decorated Salon in the “Prensa” Office.

Such is the Plaza San Martín—as handsome a public square as you will find in any great city. The pity is that it is frequented chiefly by riff-raff, and the footways being laid with tiny pebbles, one would fain don his golf-shoes to walk thereon. It is surrounded by a series of private palaces, notably those of Mihanovich, a millionaire whose life-story is a romance, and that of the Paz family, already mentioned.

We continue towards Palermo by the Avenida Alvear, noting the many mansions on the way in which good taste and vulgar ostentation often stand side by side, though, on the whole, good taste prevails. These gorgeous homes are frequently left to the care of a few servants for twelve months on end, as the wealthy Argentine says to his native town, “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not Paris more!” And while he does homage to his homeland by adorning the Avenida Alvear with a palatial residence, he spends most of his time in Paris—and I don’t blame him. The late Dr. Paz lived for twenty years on the Riviera and there he died. Good Americans, ’tis said, go to Paris when they die. Wealthy South Americans go to Paris when they live and are brought back to Buenos Ayres when they die!

The Avenida Alvear is wide and well paved with wooden sets. In the afternoons there is a continuous stream of vehicles, and on Sundays a more animated thoroughfare could not be imagined. Motor-cars innumerable go scudding along without a thought of speed limit, tinkling coches, splendid carriages and pairs, and the scrubbiest Victorias and the mangiest teams you ever set eyes on. Mounted police are stationed at different points, not so much to “direct” the traffic as to act as living landmarks for the drivers, all of whom seem bent on getting somewhere first, though there is not the least occasion for hurry, unless they are bound for the race-course, as in half an hour they will have gone the whole distance that can be covered in comfort. We two Gringos used to spend many pleasant hours sitting in the little green garden by the Palais de Glace, near Recoleta station, watching the varied throng go by, but that was not “the thing to do,” bless you, as our only companions were nursemaids and rough labouring men. On the south side of the Avenida, however, are other and much larger gardens, where those who are not ambitious to lucirse (or “show off”) at Palermo, are wont to sit or promenade. And very attractive are these gardens, with their winding walks, their lakelets, and shrubberies. Those at the Plaza Francia are particularly favoured by the toilers on Sunday afternoon, though the view across the Avenida to the waterworks is somewhat of an eyesore. In the Plaza Francia the French “colony” have erected a fine monument to the Argentine Republic, as a recuerdo of the centenary in 1910. At the back of the plaza is a long and substantial-looking balustrade. We thought this must lead to “somewhere beyond”—full of groves and tinkling fountains! We ascended one hot day, to find that it led nowhere, and was made of bricks and stucco, and although still unfinished it had already fallen into decay.

So we continue our paseo, be it in coche or afoot, along Alvear, passing, as we near Palermo, many shanty-like structures which must soon disappear and many unsightly remains of the Centennial Exhibition. This last was opened and closed in the year 1910, but at the end of 1912 numerous ruined pavilions still cumbered the ground. One place near here used to amuse me. It was a shabby pleasure resort named “Harmenonville.” Memories of that delightful bower in the Bois de Bologne always came back to me when I looked at this, “with laughter of gods in the background.” And now, we find ourselves at a great dusty meeting of wide roads. On the left is the entrance to the Zoological Gardens, to the right the woods of Palermo, with their pines and eucalyptus trees, suggestive of unfathomed forest within, while ahead the broad road continues, now noisy with tram-cars coming and going from the race-course and by the Avenida Sarmiento that runs southwest to the Plaza Italia.

The woods on the right invite us by their coolness and apparent depth. They prove, however, a mere strip of trees, and we seldom encounter decent-looking people among them. But there is no lack of promenade ground in the direction of the lakes, whither every vehicle of every kind is heading. And there, beyond the great tea-room, the Pabellón de los lagos, the real paseo begins. Along the driveway by the margin of the lakes there is, on Sunday afternoons especially, an extraordinary crowd of vehicles. All have to move at a snail’s pace, directed by many mounted police, who, posted in the middle of the roadway, keep the traffic into two orderly streams, one going, the other returning, while alongside the footpath stands a row of carriages, whose owners or hirers may either be seated within, staring at every other carriage that passes, or, greatly daring, may be venturing a few paces on foot beside the lakes, where sundry low Italians are enjoying themselves rowdily in the gondolas, and dreaming themselves back in Venice—if, perchance, they are strong in dreams.

This is Palermo. For this all the monstrous noise of motor “cut-outs” and every devilish variety of “hooter” along Alvear, all the brutal lashing of perspiring horses. For this! The dresses of the ladies in the carriages are la ultima palabra and their wearers sit as stiff and expressionless as the wax mannequins in the windows of the Florida modistas. They recognise their friends with a slight inclination of the neck, but show no sign of pleasure. The gilded youths in groups of threes or fours, with their boots polished to solar brilliancy, go by in hired motors or in coches (the latter have the merit of showing off the boots to advantage) and stare at the lindas muchachas whom they do not know, and doff their hats with profoundest bows to those they do know. And so it goes on for an hour or two, then towards five or half-past five, the throng begins to lessen, the returning vehicles continue townward at increased speed when they have come back for the last time to the beginning of the carriage-drive, and by six o’clock the fashionable throng has melted away, leaving Palermo to the prowlers and the stragglers once again. What strikes the spectator is the appalling respectability of it all, the gravity of the paseantes, the lack of vulgarity and gladness. It is all a pose, for I have seen these same charmingly dressed ladies who look so frightfully formal on Sunday afternoons, all smiles and merriment on the evenings of the Corso de flores, or the Battle of Flowers, which takes place at Palermo in aid of public charities in the month of November. It is “the thing” to be seen taking a paseo at Palermo and as there is nothing so serious in this strange life of ours than our social obligations, we must needs discharge them with due gravity. But what a comedy it all is for the spectator who has no obligations to local Society!

The paseo by the ponds (it is gross flattery to call them lagos, but estanque, which signifies “pond,” is not so pretty a word as lago) is by no means the end of Palermo’s possibilities to the wanderer in Buenos Ayres, though it is so to the residents. Near by is the Zoological Garden, which extends from the Avenida Alvear to the Plaza Italia, on the great highway of Santa Fé. But one does not visit this often. It contains a large and interesting collection of wild animals and is well laid out, but badly kept. In the summer months it is disagreeably dusty and on Sundays it is so crowded by low class Italians and the unwashed of all nations, that one feels all the wild animals are not in cages. I noticed many of the lions, tigers and larger beasts had ugly sores, the result of insect trouble, I was told, and one of the most abominable sights I have ever seen was witnessed here. In a large pound was a troup of poor worn old horses and ponies, wandering aimlessly about. A more ghastly collection of living creatures could not be conceived. These were the food for the lions and the tigers. Faugh!

Separated from the Zoological Garden by a spacious avenida—General Las Heras, if I remember correctly—and occupying a small triangular plot of ground extending townwards from the Plaza Italia is the Botanical Garden. It contains many specimens of American flora and has a few hothouses full of tropical plants; but it is of no real account botanically and is more useful as a place of grateful greenness and shade, retired a little from the dust and noise of the streets, where one may idle an hour away with pipe and book.

A Contrast in Public Buildings.

The upper illustration depicts the tawdry old exhibition pavilion which Buenos Ayres is content to use as an Art Gallery, and the lower the splendid offices of the Public Waterworks.

Then, of course, there is the great race-course or Hipódromo Argentino, only a little way beyond the Parque 3 de Febrero, as the whole park, of which Palermo proper is only a part, is named. The race-course is, I opine, one of the largest in the world. It is very pleasantly situated and maintained in admirable condition; but it has the defect of being so large, or so designed, that the race as a whole cannot be followed uninterruptedly from any of the “grandstands” or tribunas. These are well built and extremely commodious. There is a particularly gorgeous erection for the distinguished persons associated with the Jockey Club, and this is naturally alongside of the paddock. Next to it is a larger stand for the public who pay seven pesos a head, and beyond are the tribunas populares for the mob. As the Paris mutuel system, or “totalisator” is used for regulating the betting, the “bookie” is unknown here. There are many ticket offices, each bearing a number, and you merely go to the one that has the number of the horse you wish to “back,” buy as many tickets “for a win and a place” as your fancy or your pocket dictates, return to the stand, and await results! These offices are in different series: one series only issues tickets of ten pesos, another of five, and a third of two. After a race, if your horse has won or been “placed,” you go to a paying-out office, present your tickets and there receive your winnings at the rate which was announced on the large notice board near the grand-stand after the money on that particular race had been apportioned, which, being done by mechanical calculation, occupies very little time. You will almost certainly have a few hot words with the man at the box-office, as he will try to swindle you out of a portion of your gains, trusting to the confusion of the moment to cover up his fraud. On the whole, the system is about as good a way for losing one’s money as our Stock Exchange, and it does possess an element of “sport” which the latter seems to me to lack.