This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FAITH.

HOPE.

CHARITY.

SUCCESS.

PROGRESS.

HIS PEOPLE.

A HATCHMENT.

THIRTEEN STORIES.

MOGREB EL ACKSA: A Journey in Morocco.

(New Edition in Preparation.)

BROUGHT FORWARD

BY
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA ST., COVENT GARDEN, W.C.

First Published 1916.
Second Impression 1917.

All rights reserved.

TO
COMMANDER
CHARLES E. F. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM
R.N.

PREFACE

Luckily the war has made eggs too expensive for me to fear the public will pelt me off the stage with them.

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

I once in talking said to a celebrated dancer who was about to bid farewell to her admirers and retire to private life, “Perhaps you will take a benefit when you come back from finishing your last tour.” She answered, “Yes . . .”; and then added, “or perhaps two.”

That is not my way, for all my life I have loved bread, bread, and wine, wine, not caring for half-measures, like your true Scot, of whom it has been said, “If he believes in Christianity he has no doubts, and if he is a disbeliever he has none either.”

Once in the Sierra Madre, either near the Santa Rosa Mountains or in the Bolson de Mápimi, I disremember which, out after horses that had strayed, we came upon a little shelter made of withies, and covered with one of those striped blankets woven by the Navajos.

A Texan who was with the party pointed to it, and said, “That is a wickey-up, I guess.”

The little wigwam, shaped like a gipsy tent, stood close to a thicket of huisaché trees in flower. Their round and ball-like blossoms filled the air with a sweet scent. A stream ran gently tinkling over its pebbly bed, and the tall prairie grasses flowed up to the lost little hut as if they would engulf it like a sea.

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

In one of them—I remember it just as if now it was before my eyes—an Indian chief, surrounded by his friends, was setting free his favourite horse upon the prairies, either before his death or in reward of faithful services. The little group of men cut in the stone, most probably with an obsidian arrow-head, was life-like, though drawn without perspective, which gave those figures of a vanished race an air of standing in the clouds.

The chief stood with his bridle in his hand, his feather war-bonnet upon his head, naked except the breech-clout. His bow was slung across his shoulders and his quiver hung below his arm, and with the other hand he kept the sun off from his face as he gazed upon his horse. All kinds of hunting scenes were there displayed, and others, such as the burial of a chief, a dance, and other ceremonials, no doubt as dear to those who drew them as are the rites in a cathedral to other faithful. The flat rock bore one more inscription, stating that Eusebio Leal passed by bearing despatches, and the date, June the fifteenth, of the year 1687. But to return again to the lone wickey-up.

We all sat looking at it: Eustaquio Gomez, Polibio Medina, Exaltacion Garcia, the Texan, two Pueblo Indians, and I who write these lines.

Somehow it had an eerie look about it, standing so desolate, out in those flowery wilds.

Inside it lay the body of a man, with the skin dry as parchment, and his arms beside him, a Winchester, a bow and arrows, and a lance. Eustaquio, taking up an arrow, after looking at it, said that the dead man was an Apache of the Mescalero band, and then, looking upon the ground and pointing out some marks, said, “He had let loose his horse before he died, just as the chief did in the picture-writing.”

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

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

Charles Lamb, when some one asked him something of his works, answered that they were to be found in the South Sea House, and that they numbered forty volumes, for he had laboured many years there, making his bricks with the least possible modicum of straw,—just like the rest of us.

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

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

Vale.

R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.

CONTENTS

I
BROUGHT FORWARD

The workshop in Parkhead was not inspiriting. From one week’s end to another, all throughout the year, life was the same, almost without an incident. In the long days of the Scotch summer the men walked cheerily to work, carrying their dinner in a little tin. In the dark winter mornings they tramped in the black fog, coughing and spitting, through the black mud of Glasgow streets, each with a woollen comforter, looking like a stocking, round his neck.

Outside the dreary quarter of the town, its rows of dingy, smoke-grimed streets and the mean houses, the one outstanding feature was Parkhead Forge, with its tall chimneys belching smoke into the air all day, and flames by night. Its glowing furnaces, its giant hammers, its little railway trucks in which men ran the blocks of white-hot iron which poured in streams out of the furnaces, flamed like the mouth of hell.

Inside the workshop the dusty atmosphere made a stranger cough on entering the door. The benches with the rows of aproned men all bending at their work, not standing upright, with their bare, hairy chests exposed, after the fashion of the Vulcans at the neighbouring forge, gave a half-air of domesticity to the close, stuffy room.

A semi-sedentary life quickened their intellect; for where men work together they are bound to talk about the topics of the day, especially in Scotland, where every man is a born politician and a controversialist. At meal-times, when they ate their “piece” and drank their tea that they had carried with them in tin flasks, each one was certain to draw out a newspaper from the pocket of his coat, and, after studying it from the Births, Deaths, and Marriages, down to the editor’s address on the last page, fall a-disputing upon politics. “Man, a gran’ speech by Bonar Law aboot Home Rule. They Irish, set them up, what do they make siccan a din aboot? Ca’ ye it Home Rule? I juist ca’ it Rome Rule. A miserable, priest-ridden crew, the hale rick-ma-tick o’ them.”

The reader then would pause and, looking round the shop, wait for the answer that he was sure would not be long in coming from amongst such a thrawn lot of commentators. Usually one or other of his mates would fold his paper up, or perhaps point with an oil-stained finger to an article, and with the head-break in the voice, characteristic of the Scot about to plunge into an argument, ejaculate: “Bonar Law, ou aye, I kent him when he was leader of the South Side Parliament. He always was a dreary body, sort o’ dreich like; no that I’m saying the man is pairfectly illiterate, as some are on his side o’ the Hoose there in Westminister. I read his speech—the body is na blate, sort o’ quick at figures, but does na take the pains to verify. Verification is the soul of mathematics. Bonar Law, eh! Did ye see how Maister Asquith trippit him handily in his tabulated figures on the jute business under Free Trade, showing that all he had advanced about protective tariffs and the drawback system was fair redeeklous . . . as well as several errors in the total sum?”

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

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

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

Others saw method in his madness, and alleged that it was envy, “naething but sheer envy that had brought on this tramplin’ upon natural rights, but for all that he may be thought to get his own again, with they indemnities.”

Those who had studied economics “were of opinion that his reasoning was wrong, built on false premises, for there can never be a royal road to wealth. Labour, ye see, is the sole creative element of riches.” At once a Tory would rejoin, “And brains. Man, what an awfu’ thing to leave out brains. Think of the marvellous creations of the human genius.” The first would answer with, “I saw ye coming, man. I’ll no deny that brains have their due place in the economic state; but build me one of your Zeppelins and stick it in the middle of George Square without a crew to manage it, and how far will it fly? I do not say that brains did not devise it; but, after all, labour had to carry out the first design.” This was a subject that opened up enormous vistas for discussion, and for a time kept them from talking of the war.

Jimmy and Geordie, hammering away in one end of the room, took little part in the debate. Good workmen both of them, and friends, perhaps because of the difference of their temperaments, for Jimmy was the type of red-haired, blue-eyed, tall, lithe Scot, he of the perfervidum ingenium, and Geordie was a thick-set, black-haired, dour and silent man.

Both of them read the war news, and Jimmy, when he read, commented loudly, bringing down his fist upon the paper, exclaiming, “Weel done, Gordons!” or “That was a richt gude charge upon the trenches by the Sutherlands.” Geordie would answer shortly, “Aye, no sae bad,” and go on hammering.

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

Days passed, and weeks, and his fellow-workmen, in the way men will, occasionally bantered Geordie, asking him if he was going to enlist, and whether he did not think shame to let his friend go off alone to fight. Geordie was silent under abuse and banter, as he had always been under the injustices of life, and by degrees withdrew into himself, and when he read his newspaper during the dinner-hour made no remark, but folded it and put it quietly into the pocket of his coat.

Weeks passed, weeks of suspense, of flaring headlines in the Press, of noise of regiments passing down the streets, of newsboys yelling hypothetic victories, and of the tension of the nerves of men who know their country’s destiny is hanging in the scales. Rumours of losses, of defeats, of victories, of checks and of advances, of naval battles, with hints of dreadful slaughter filled the air. Women in black were seen about, pale and with eyelids swollen with weeping, and people scanned the reports of killed and wounded with dry throats and hearts constricted as if they had been wrapped in whipcord, only relaxing when after a second look they had assured themselves the name they feared to see was absent from the list.

Long strings of Clydesdale horses ridden by men in ragged clothes, who sat them uneasily, as if they felt their situation keenly, perched up in the public view, passed through the streets. The massive caulkers on their shoes struck fire occasionally upon the stones, and the great beasts, taught to rely on man as on a god from the time they gambolled in the fields, went to their doom unconsciously, the only mitigation of their fate. Regiments of young recruits, some in plain clothes and some in hastily-made uniforms, marched with as martial an air as three weeks’ training gave them, to the stations to entrain. Pale clerks, the elbows of their jackets shiny with the slavery of the desk, strode beside men whose hands were bent and scarred with gripping on the handles of the plough in February gales or wielding sledges at the forge.

All of them were young and resolute, and each was confident that he at least would come back safe to tell the tale. Men stopped and waved their hats, cheering their passage, and girls and women stood with flushed cheeks and straining eyes as they passed on for the first stage that took them towards the front. Boys ran beside them, hatless and barefooted, shouting out words that they had caught up on the drill-ground to the men, who whistled as they marched a slow and grinding tune that sounded like a hymn.

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

Then came a time of waiting for the news, of contradictory paragraphs in newspapers, and then a telegram, the “enemy is giving ground on the left wing”; and instantly a feeling of relief that lightened every heart, as if its owner had been fighting and had stopped to wipe his brow before he started to pursue the flying enemy.

The workmen in the brassfitters’ shop came to their work as usual on the day of the good news, and at the dinner-hour read out the accounts of the great battle, clustering upon each other’s shoulders in their eagerness. At last one turned to scan the list of casualties. Cameron, Campbell, M’Alister, Jardine, they read, as they ran down the list, checking the names off with a match. The reader stopped, and looked towards the corner where Geordie still sat working silently.

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

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

II
LOS PINGOS

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

Upon the river twice a day passed steamboats, which at night-time gave an air as of a section of a town that floated past the wilderness. Streams of electric light from every cabin lit up the yellow, turgid river, and the notes of a band occasionally floated across the water as the vessel passed. Sometimes a searchlight falling on a herd of cattle, standing as is their custom after nightfall upon a little hill, made them stampede into the darkness, dashing through brushwood or floundering through a marsh, till they had placed themselves in safety from this new terror of the night.

Above the bay the ruins of a great building stood. Built scarcely fifty years ago, and now deserted, the ruins had taken on an air as of a castle, and from the walls sprang plants, whilst in the deserted courtyard a tree had grown, amongst whose branches oven-birds had built their hanging nests of mud. Cypresses towered above the primeval hard-wood, which grew all gnarled and horny-looking, and nearly all had kept their Indian names, as ñandubay, chañar, tala and sarandi, molle, and many another name as crabbed as the trunks which, twisted and distorted, looked like the limbs of giants growing from the ground.

Orange trees had run wild and shot up all unpruned, and apple trees had reverted back to crabs. The trunks of all the fruit-trees in the deserted garden round the ruined factory were rubbed shiny by the cattle, for all the fences had long been destroyed or fallen into decay.

A group of roofless workmen’s cottages gave an air of desolation to the valley in which the factory and its dependencies had stood. They too had been invaded by the powerful sub-tropical plant life, and creepers covered with bunches of bright flowers climbed up their walls. A sluggish stream ran through the valley and joined the Uruguay, making a little natural harbour. In it basked cat-fish, and now and then from off the banks a tortoise dropped into the water like a stone. Right in the middle of what once had been the square grew a ceiba tree, covered with lilac flowers, hanging in clusters like gigantic grapes. Here and there stood some old ombús, their dark metallic leaves affording an impenetrable shade. Their gnarled and twisted roots, left half-exposed by the fierce rains, gave an unearthly, prehistoric look to them that chimed in well with the deserted air of the whole place. It seemed that man for once had been subdued, and that victorious nature had resumed her sway over a region wherein he had endeavoured to intrude, and had been worsted in the fight.

Nature had so resumed her sway that buildings, planted trees, and paths long overgrown with grass, seemed to have been decayed for centuries, although scarce twenty years had passed since they had been deserted and had fallen into decay.

They seemed to show the power of the recuperative force of the primeval forest, and to call attention to the fact that man had suffered a defeat. Only the grass in the deserted square was still triumphant, and grew short and green, like an oasis in the rough natural grasses that flowed nearly up to it, in the clearings of the woods.

The triumph of the older forces of the world had been so final and complete that on the ruins there had grown no moss, but plants and bushes with great tufts of grass had sprung from them, leaving the stones still fresh as when the houses were first built. Nature in that part of the New World enters into no compact with mankind, as she does over here in Europe to touch his work kindly and almost with a reverent hand, and blend it into something half compounded of herself. There bread is bread and wine is wine, with no half-tints to make one body of the whole. The one remaining evidence of the aggression of mankind, which still refused to bow the knee to the overwhelming genius of the place, was a round bunch of eucalyptus trees that stood up stark and unblushing, the colour of the trunks and leaves so harshly different from all around them that they looked almost vulgar, if such an epithet can be properly applied to anything but man. Under their exiguous shade were spread saddles and bridles, and on the ground sat men smoking and talking, whilst their staked-out horses fed, fastened to picket-pins by raw-hide ropes. So far away from everything the place appeared that the group of men looked like a band of pioneers upon some frontier, to which the ruins only gave an air of melancholy, but did nothing to dispel the loneliness.

As they sat idly talking, trying to pass, or, as they would have said, trying to make time, suddenly in the distance the whistle of an approaching steamer brought the outside world into the little, lonely paradise. Oddly enough it sounded, in the hot, early morning air, already heavy with the scent of the mimosas in full bloom. Butterflies flitted to and fro or soared above the scrub, and now and then a wild mare whinnied from the thickets, breaking the silence of the lone valley through which the yellow, little stream ran to the Uruguay.

Catching their horses and rolling up the ropes, the men, who had been sitting underneath the trees, mounted, and following a little cattle trail, rode to a high bluff looking down the stream.

Panting and puffing, as she belched out a column of black smoke, some half a mile away, a tug towing two lighters strove with the yellow flood. The horsemen stood like statues with their horses’ heads stretched out above the water thirty feet below.

Although the feet of several of the horses were but an inch or two from the sheer limit, the men sat, some of them with one leg on their horses’ necks; others lit cigarettes, and one, with his horse sideways to the cliff, leaned sideways, so that one of his feet was in the air. He pointed to the advancing tug with a brown finger, and exclaimed, “These are the lighters with the horses that must have started yesterday from Gualeguaychú, and ought to have been here last night.” We had indeed been waiting all the night for them, sleeping round a fire under the eucalyptus grove, and rising often in the night to smoke and talk, to see our horses did not get entangled in their stake ropes, and to listen for the whistle of the tug.

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

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

Upon the right bank stretched the green prairies of the State of Entre-Rios, bounded on either side by the Uruguay and Paraná. Much flatter than the land upon the Uruguayan bank, it still was not a sea of level grass as is the State of Buenos Aires, but undulating, and dotted here and there with white estancia houses, all buried in great groves of peach trees and of figs. On the left bank on which we stood, and three leagues off, we could just see Fray Bentos, its houses dazzlingly white, buried in vegetation, and in the distance like a thousand little towns in Southern Italy and Spain, or even in Morocco, for the tower of the church might in the distance just as well have been a minaret.

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

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

The group of horsemen on the bluff rode slowly down towards the river’s edge to watch the evolutions of the tug, and to hold back the horses when they should be disembarked. By this time she had got so near that we could see the horses’ heads looking out wildly from the sparred sides of the great decked lighters, and hear the thunderous noise their feet made tramping on the decks. Passing the bay, into which ran the stream, by about three hundred yards, the tug cast off one of the lighters she was towing, in a backwater. There it remained, the current slowly bearing it backwards, turning round upon itself. In the wild landscape, with ourselves upon our horses forming the only human element, the gigantic lighter with its freight of horses looked like the ark, as set forth in some old-fashioned book on Palestine. Slowly the tug crept in, the Indian-looking pilot squatted in his canoe sounding assiduously with his long cane. As the tug drew about six feet of water and the lighter not much more than three, the problem was to get the lighter near enough to the bank, so that when the hawser was cast off she would come in by her own way. Twice did the tug ground, and with furious shoutings and with all the crew staving on poles, was she got off again. At last the pilot found a little deeper channel, and coming to about some fifty feet away, lying a length or two above the spot where the stream entered the great river, she paid her hawser out, and as the lighter drifted shorewards, cast it off, and the great ark, with all its freight, grounded quite gently on the little sandy beach. The Italian captain of the tug, a Genoese, with his grey hair as curly as the wool on a sheep’s back, wearing a pale pink shirt, neatly set off with yellow horseshoes, and a blue gauze necktie tied in a flowing bow, pushed off his dirty little boat, rowed by a negro sailor and a Neapolitan, who dipped their oars into the water without regard to one another, either as to time or stroke.

The captain stepped ashore, mopping his face with a yellow pocket-handkerchief, and in the jargon between Spanish and Italian that men of his sort all affect out in the River Plate, saluted us, and cursed the river for its sandbanks and its turns, and then having left it as accursed as the Styx or Periphlegethon, he doubly cursed the Custom House, which, as he said, was all composed of thieves, the sons of thieves, who would be certainly begetters of the same. Then he calmed down a little, and drawing out a long Virginia cigar, took out the straw with seriousness and great dexterity, and then allowed about a quarter of an inch of it to smoulder in a match, lighted it, and sending out a cloud of smoke, sat down upon the grass, and fell a-cursing, with all the ingenuity of his profession and his race, the country, the hot weather, and the saints.

This done, and having seen the current was slowly bearing down the other lighter past the sandy beach, with a last hearty curse upon God’s mother and her Son, whose birth he hinted not obscurely was of the nature of a mystery, in which he placed no credence, got back into his boat, and went back to his tug, leaving us all amazed, both at his fluency and faith.

When he had gone and grappled with the other lighter which was slowly drifting down the stream, two or three men came forward in the lighter that was already in the little river’s mouth, about a yard or so distant from the edge, and calling to us to be ready, for the horses had not eaten for sixteen hours at least, slowly let down the wooden landing-flap. At first the horses craned their necks and looked out on the grass, but did not venture to go down the wooden landing-stage; then a big roan, stepping out gingerly and snorting as he went, adventured, and when he stood upon the grass, neighed shrilly and then rolled. In a long string the others followed, the clattering of their unshod feet upon the wood sounding like distant thunder.

Byrne, the Porteño, stout and high-coloured, dressed in great thigh boots and baggy breeches, a black silk handkerchief tied loosely round his neck, a black felt hat upon his head, and a great silver watch-chain, with a snaffle-bridle in the middle of it, contrasting oddly with his broad pistol belt, with its old silver dollars for a fastening, came ashore, carrying his saddle on his back. Then followed Doherty, whose name, quite unpronounceable to men of Latin race, was softened in their speech to Duarte, making a good Castilian patronymic of it. He too was a Porteño, [22] although of Irish stock. Tall, dark, and dressed in semi-native clothes, he yet, like Byrne, always spoke Spanish when no foreigners were present, and in his English that softening of the consonants and broadening of the vowels was discernible that makes the speech of men such as himself have in it something, as it were, caressing, strangely at variance with their character. Two or three peons of the usual Gaucho type came after them, all carrying saddles, and walking much as an alligator waddles on the sand, or as the Medes whom Xenophon describes, mincing upon their toes, in order not to blunt the rowels of their spurs.

Our men, Garcia the innkeeper of Fray Bentos, with Pablo Suarez, whose negro blood and crispy hair gave him a look as of a Roman emperor of the degenerate times, with Pancho Arrellano and Miguel Paralelo, the Gaucho dandy, swaying upon his horse with his toes just touching his heavy silver stirrups with a crown underneath them, Velez and El Pampita, an Indian who had been captured young on the south Pampa, were mounted ready to round the horses up.

They did not want much care, for they were eating ravenously, and all we had to do was to drive them a few hundred yards away to let the others land.

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

Though it was early, still the sun was hot, and for an hour we held the horses back, keeping them from the water till they had eaten well.

The Italian tugmaster, having produced a bottle of trade gin (the Anchor brand), and having drank our health, solemnly wiped the neck of the bottle with his grimy hand and passed it round to us. We also drank to his good health and voyage to the port, that he pronounced as if it were written “Bono Airi,” adding, as it was war-time, “Avanti Savoia” to the toast. He grinned, and with a gesture of his thick dirty hand, adorned with two or three coppery-looking rings, as it were, embedded in the flesh, pronounced an all-embracing curse on the Tedeschi, and went aboard the tug.

When he had made the lighters fast, he turned down stream, saluting us with three shrill blasts upon the whistle, and left us and our horses thousands of miles away from steam and smoke, blaspheming skippers, and the noise and push of modern life.

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

Flocks of green parroquets flew shrieking over the clearing in which the horses fed, to their great nests, in which ten or a dozen seemed to harbour, and hung suspended from them by their claws, or crawled into the holes. Now and then a few locusts, wafted by the breeze, passed by upon their way to spread destruction in the plantations of young poplars and of orange trees in the green islands in the stream.

An air of peace gave a strange interest to this little corner of a world plunged into strife and woe. The herders nodded on their horses, who for their part hung down their heads, and now and then shifted their quarters so as to bring their heads into the shade. The innkeeper, Garcia, in his town clothes, and perched upon a tall grey horse, to use his own words, “sweated blood and water like our Lord” in the fierce glare of the ascending sun. Suarez and Paralelo pushed the ends of the red silk handkerchiefs they wore tied loosely round their necks, with two points like the wings of a great butterfly hanging upon their shoulders, under their hats, and smoked innumerable cigarettes, the frontiersman’s specific against heat or cold. Of all the little company only the Pampa Indian showed no sign of being incommoded by the heat. When horses strayed he galloped up to turn them, now striking at the passing butterflies with his heavy-handled whip, or, letting himself fall down from the saddle almost to the ground, drew his brown finger on the dust for a few yards, and with a wriggle like a snake got back into his saddle with a yell.

The hours passed slowly, till at last the horses, having filled themselves with grass, stopped eating and looked towards the river, so we allowed them slowly to stream along towards a shallow inlet on the beach. There they stood drinking greedily, up to their knees, until at last three or four of the outermost began to swim.

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

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

As I sat on my horse upon a little knoll, coiling my lazo, which had got uncoiled by catching in a bush, I heard a voice in the soft, drawling accents of the inhabitants of Corrientes, say, “Pucha, Pingos.” [27]

Turning, I saw the speaker, a Gaucho of about thirty years of age, dressed all in black in the old style of thirty years ago. His silver knife, two feet or more in length, stuck in his sash, stuck out on both sides of his body like a lateen.

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

All shades were there, with every variegation and variety of colour, white, and fern noses, chestnuts with a stocking on one leg up to the stifle joint, horses with a ring of white right round their throats, or with a star as clear as if it had been painted on the hip, and “tuvianos,” that is, brown, black, and white, a colour justly prized in Uruguay.

Turning half round and offering me a cigarette, the Correntino spoke again. “It is a paradise for all those pingos here in this rincón: [28] grass, water, everything that they can want, shade, and shelter from the wind and sun.”

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

III
FIDELITY

My tall host knocked the ashes from his pipe, and crossing one leg over the other looked into the fire.

Outside, the wind howled in the trees, and the rain beat upon the window-panes. The firelight flickered on the grate, falling upon the polished furniture of the low-roofed, old-fashioned library, with its high Georgian overmantel, where in a deep recess there stood a clock, shaped like a cross, with eighteenth-century cupids carved in ivory fluttering round the base, and Time with a long scythe standing upon one side.

In the room hung the scent of an old country-house, compounded of so many samples that it is difficult to enumerate them all. Beeswax and potpourri of roses, damp, and the scent of foreign woods in the old cabinets, tobacco and wood smoke, with the all-pervading smell of age, were some of them. The result was not unpleasant, and seemed the complement of the well-bound Georgian books standing demure upon their shelves, the blackening family portraits, and the skins of red deer and of roe scattered about the room.

The conversation languished, and we both sat listening to the storm that seemed to fill the world with noises strange and unearthly, for the house was far from railways, and the avenues that lead to it were long and dark. The solitude and the wild night seemed to have recreated the old world, long lost, and changed, but still remembered in that district just where the Highlands and the Lowlands meet.

At such times and in such houses the country really seems country once again, and not the gardened, game-keepered mixture of shooting ground and of fat fields tilled by machinery to which men now and then resort for sport, or to gather in their rents, with which the whole world is familiar to-day.

My host seemed to be struggling with himself to tell me something, and as I looked at him, tall, strong, and upright, his face all mottled by the weather, his homespun coat, patched on the shoulders with buckskin that once had been white, but now was fawn-coloured with wet and from the chafing of his gun, I felt the parturition of his speech would probably cost him a shrewd throe. So I said nothing, and he, after having filled his pipe, ramming the tobacco down with an old silver Indian seal, made as he told me in Kurachi, and brought home by a great-uncle fifty years ago, slowly began to speak, not looking at me, but as it were delivering his thoughts aloud, almost unconsciously, looking now and then at me as if he felt, rather than knew, that I was there. As he spoke, the tall, stuffed hen-harrier; the little Neapolitan shrine in tortoiseshell and coral, set thick with saints; the flying dragons from Ceylon, spread out like butterflies in a glazed case; the “poor’s-box” on the shelf above the books with its four silver sides adorned with texts; the rows of blue books, and of Scott’s Novels (the Roxburgh edition), together with the scent exuding from the Kingwood cabinet; the sprays of white Scotch rose, outlined against the window blinds; and the sporting prints and family tree, all neatly framed in oak, created the impression of being in a world remote, besquired and cut off from the century in which we live by more than fifty years. Upon the rug before the fire the sleeping spaniel whined uneasily, as if, though sleeping, it still scented game, and all the time the storm roared in the trees and whistled down the passages of the lone country house. One saw in fancy, deep in the recesses of the woods, the roe stand sheltering, and the capercailzie sitting on the branches of the firs, wet and dejected, like chickens on a roost, and little birds sent fluttering along, battling for life against the storm. Upon such nights, in districts such as that in which the gaunt old house was situated, there is a feeling of compassion for the wild things in the woods that, stealing over one, bridges the gulf between them and ourselves in a mysterious way. Their lot and sufferings, joys, loves, and the epitome of their brief lives, come home to us with something irresistible, making us feel that our superiority is an unreal thing, and that in essentials we are one.

My host went on: “Some time ago I walked up to the little moor that overlooks the Clyde, from which you see ships far off lying at the Tail of the Bank, the smoke of Greenock and Port Glasgow, the estuary itself, though miles away, looking like a sheet of frosted silver or dark-grey steel, according to the season, and in the distance the range of hills called Argyle’s Bowling Green, with the deep gap that marks the entrance to the Holy Loch. Autumn had just begun to tinge the trees, birches were golden, and rowans red, the bents were brown and dry. A few bog asphodels still showed amongst the heather, and bilberries, dark as black currants, grew here and there amongst the carpet of green sphagnum and the stag’s-head moss. The heather was all rusty brown, but still there was, as it were, a recollection of the summer in the air. Just the kind of day you feel inclined to sit down on the lee side of a dry-stone dyke, and smoke and look at some familiar self-sown birch that marks the flight of time, as you remember that it was but a year or two ago that it had first shot up above the grass.

“I remember two or three plants of tall hemp-agrimony still had their flower heads withered on the stalk, giving them a look of wearing wigs, and clumps of ragwort still had a few bees buzzing about them, rather faintly, with a belated air. I saw all this—not that I am a botanist, for you know I can hardly tell the difference between the Cruciferæ and the Umbelliferæ, but because when you live in the country some of the common plants seem to obtrude themselves upon you, and you have got to notice them in spite of you. So I walked on till I came to a wrecked plantation of spruce and of Scotch fir. A hurricane had struck it, turning it over almost in rows, as it was planted. The trees had withered in most cases, and in the open spaces round their upturned roots hundreds of rabbits burrowed, and had marked the adjoining field with little paths, just like the lines outside a railway-station.

“I saw all this, not because I looked at it, for if you look with the idea of seeing everything, commonly everything escapes you, but because the lovely afternoon induced a feeling of well-being and contentment, and everything seemed to fall into its right proportion, so that you saw first the harmonious whole, and then the salient points most worth the looking at.

“I walked along feeling exhilarated with the autumn air and the fresh breeze that blew up from the Clyde. I remember thinking I had hardly ever felt greater content, and as I walked it seemed impossible the world could be so full of rank injustice, or that the lot of three-fourths of its population could really be so hard. A pack of grouse flew past, skimming above the heather, as a shoal of flying-fish skims just above the waves. I heard their quacking cries as they alighted on some stooks of oats, and noticed that the last bird to settle was an old hen, and that, even when all were down, I still could see her head, looking out warily above the yellow grain. Beyond the ruined wood there came the barking of a shepherd’s dog, faint and subdued, and almost musical.

“I sat so long, smoking and looking at the view, that when I turned to go the sun was sinking and our long, northern twilight almost setting in.

“You know it,” said my host, and I, who often had read by its light in summer and the early autumn, nodded assent, wondering to myself what he was going to tell me, and he went on.

“It has the property of making all things look a little ghostly, deepening the shadows and altering their values, so that all that you see seems to acquire an extra significance, not so much to the eye as to the mind. Slowly I retraced my steps, walking under the high wall of rough piled stones till it ends, at the copse of willows, on the north side of the little moor to which I had seen the pack of grouse fly after it had left the stooks. I crossed into it, and began to walk towards home, knee-deep in bent grass and dwarf willows, with here and there a patch of heather and a patch of bilberries. The softness of the ground so dulled my footsteps that I appeared to walk as lightly as a roe upon the spongy surface of the moor. As I passed through a slight depression in which the grass grew rankly, I heard a wild cry coming, as it seemed, from just beneath my feet. Then came a rustling in the grass, and a large, dark-grey bird sprang out, repeating the wild cry, and ran off swiftly, trailing a broken wing.

“It paused upon a little hillock fifty yards away, repeating its strange note, and looking round as if it sought for something that it was certain was at hand. High in the air the cry, wilder and shriller, was repeated, and a great grey bird that I saw was a whaup slowly descended in decreasing circles, and settled down beside its mate.

“They seemed to talk, and then the wounded bird set off at a swift run, its fellow circling above its head and uttering its cry as if it guided it. I watched them disappear, feeling as if an iron belt was drawn tight round my heart, their cries growing fainter as the deepening shadows slowly closed upon the moor.”

My host stopped, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and turning to me, said:—

“I watched them go to what of course must have been certain death for one of them, furious, with the feelings of a murderer towards the man whose thoughtless folly had been the cause of so much misery. Curse him! I watched them, impotent to help, for as you know the curlew is perhaps the wildest of our native birds; and even had I caught the wounded one to set its wing, it would have pined and died. One thing I could have done, had I but had a gun and had the light been better, I might have shot them both, and had I done so I would have buried them beside each other.

“That’s what I had upon my mind to tell you. I think the storm and the wild noises of the struggling trees outside have brought it back to me, although it happened years ago. Sometimes, when people talk about fidelity, saying it is not to be found upon the earth, I smile, for I have seen it with my own eyes, and manifest, out on that little moor.”

He filled his pipe, and sitting down in an old leather chair, much worn and rather greasy, silently gazed into the fire.

I, too, was silent, thinking upon the tragedy; then feeling that something was expected of me, looked up and murmured, “Yes.”

IV
“UNO DEI MILLE”

A veil of mist, the colour of a spider’s web, rose from the oily river. It met the mist that wrapped the palm-trees and the unsubstantial-looking houses painted in light blue and yellow ochre, as it descended from the hills. Now and then, through the pall of damp, as a light air was wafted up the river from the sea, the bright red earth upon the hills showed like a stain of blood; canoes, paddled by men who stood up, balancing themselves with a slight movement of the hips, slipped in and out of sight, now crossing just before the steamer’s bows and then appearing underneath her stern in a mysterious way. From the long line of tin-roofed sheds a ceaseless stream of snuff-and-butter-coloured men trotted continuously, carrying bags of coffee to an elevator, which shot them headlong down the steamer’s hold. Their naked feet pattered upon the warm, wet concrete of the dock side, as it were stealthily, with a sound almost alarming, so like their footfall seemed to that of a wild animal.

The flat-roofed city, buried in sheets of rain, that spouted from the eaves of the low houses on the unwary passers-by, was stirred unwontedly. Men, who as a general rule lounged at the corners of the streets, pressing their shoulders up against the houses as if they thought that only by their own self-sacrifice the walls were kept from falling, now walked up and down, regardless of the rain.

In the great oblong square, planted with cocoa-palms, in which the statue of Cabrál stands up in cheap Carrara marble, looking as if he felt ashamed of his discovery, a sea of wet umbrellas surged to and fro, forging towards the Italian Consulate. Squat Genoese and swarthy Neapolitans, with sinewy Piedmontese, and men from every province of the peninsula, all had left their work. They all discoursed in the same tone of voice in which no doubt their ancestors talked in the Forum, even when Cicero was speaking, until the lictors forced them to keep silence, for their own eloquence is that which in all ages has had most charm for them. The reedy voices of the Brazilian coloured men sounded a mere twittering compared to their full-bodied tones. “Viva l’Italia” pealed out from thousands of strong throats as the crowd streamed from the square and filled the narrow streets; fireworks that fizzled miserably were shot off in the mist, the sticks falling upon the umbrellas of the crowd. A shift of wind cleared the mist off the river for a moment, leaving an Italian liner full in view. From all her spars floated the red and white and green, and on her decks and in the rigging, on bridges and on the rail, men, all with bundles in their hands, clustered like ants, and cheered incessantly. An answering cheer rose from the crowd ashore of “Long live the Reservists! Viva l’Italia,” as the vessel slowly swung into the stream. From every house excited men rushed out and flung themselves and their belongings into boats, and scrambled up the vessel’s sides as she began to move. Brown hands were stretched down to them as they climbed on board. From every doorstep in the town women with handkerchiefs about their heads came out, and with the tears falling from their great, black eyes and running down their olive cheeks, waved and called out, “Addio Giuseppe; addio Gian Battista, abbasso gli Tedeschi,” and then turned back into their homes to weep. On every side Italians stood and shouted, and still, from railway station and from the river-side, hundreds poured out and gazed at the departing steamer with its teeming freight of men.

Italians from the coffee plantations of São Paulo, from the mines of Ouro Preto, from Goyaz, and from the far interior, all young and sun-burnt, the flower of those Italian workmen who have built the railways of Brazil, and by whose work the strong foundations of the prosperity of the Republic have been laid, were out, to turn their backs upon the land in which, for the first time, most of them had eaten a full meal. Factories stood idle, the coasting schooners all were left unmanned, and had the coffee harvest not been gathered in, it would have rotted on the hills. The Consulate was unapproachable, and round it throngs of men struggled to enter, all demanding to get home. No rain could damp their spirits, and those who, after waiting hours, came out with tickets, had a look in their eyes as if they just had won the chief prize in the lottery.

Their friends surrounded them, and strained them to their hearts, the water from the umbrellas of the crowd trickling in rivulets upon the embracer and the embraced.

Mulatto policemen cleared the path for carriages to pass, and, as they came, the gap filled up again as if by magic, till the next carriage passed. Suddenly a tremor ran through the crowd, moving it with a shiver like the body of a snake. All the umbrellas which had seemed to move by their own will, covering the crowd and hiding it from view, were shut down suddenly. A mist-dimmed sun shone out, watery, but potent, and in an instant gaining strength, it dried the streets and made a hot steam rise up from the crowd. Slouched hats were raised up on one side, and pocket handkerchiefs wrapped up in paper were unfolded and knotted loosely round men’s necks, giving them a look as of domestic bandits as they broke out into a patriotic song, which ceased with a long drawn-out “Viva,” as the strains of an approaching band were heard and the footsteps of men marching through the streets in military array.

The coloured policemen rode their horses through the throng, and the streets, which till then had seemed impassable, were suddenly left clear. Jangling and crashing out the Garibaldian hymn, the band debouched into the square, dressed in a uniform half-German, half-Brazilian, with truncated pickel-hauben on their heads, in which were stuck a plume of gaudy feathers, apparently at the discretion of the wearer, making them look like something in a comic opera; a tall mulatto, playing on a drum with all the seriousness that only one of his colour and his race is able to impart to futile actions, swaggered along beside a jet-black negro playing on the flute. All the executants wore brass-handled swords of a kind never seen in Europe for a hundred years. Those who played the trombone and the ophicleide blew till their thick lips swelled, and seemed to cover up the mouthpieces. Still they blew on, the perspiration rolling down their cheeks, and a black boy or two brought up the rear, clashing the cymbals when it seemed good to them, quite irrespective of the rest. The noise was terrifying, and had it not been for the enthusiasm of the crowd, the motley band of coloured men, arrayed like popinjays, would have been ridiculous; but the dense ranks of hot, perspiring men, all in the flower of youth, and every one of whom had given up his work to cross the ocean at his country’s call, had something in them that turned laughter into tears. The sons of peasants, who had left their homes, driven out from Apulean plains or Lombard rice-fields by the pinch of poverty, they now were going back to shed their blood for the land that had denied them bread in their own homes. Twice did the band march round the town whilst the procession was getting ready for a start, and each time that it passed before the Consulate, the Consul came out on the steps, bare-headed, and saluted with the flag.

Dressed in white drill, tall, grey-haired, and with the washed-out look of one who has spent many years in a hot country, the Consul evidently had been a soldier in his youth. He stood and watched the people critically, with the appraising look of the old officer, so like to that a grazier puts on at a cattle market as he surveys the beasts. “Good stuff,” he muttered to himself, and then drawing his hand across his eyes, as if he felt where most of the “good stuff” would lie in a few months, he went back to the house.

A cheer at the far corner of the square showed that the ranks were formed. A policeman on a scraggy horse, with a great rusty sabre banging at its side, rode slowly down the streets to clear the way, and once again the parti-coloured band passed by, playing the Garibaldian hymn. Rank upon rank of men tramped after it, their friends running beside them for a last embrace, and women rushing up with children for a farewell kiss. Their merry faces set with determination, and their shoulders well thrown back, three or four hundred men briskly stepped along, trying to imitate the way the Bersaglieri march in Italy. A shout went up of “Long live the Reservists,” as a contingent, drawn from every class of the Italian colony, passed along the street. Dock-labourers and pale-faced clerks in well-cut clothes and unsubstantial boots walked side by side. Men burnt the colour of a brick by working at the harvest rubbed shoulders with Sicilian emigrants landed a month or two ago, but who now were going off to fight, as poor as when they left their native land, and dressed in the same clothes. Neapolitans, gesticulating as they marched, and putting out their tongues at the Brazilian negroes, chattered and joked. To them life was a farce, no matter that the setting of the stage on which they moved was narrow, the fare hard, and the remuneration small. If things were adverse they still laughed on, and if the world was kind they jeered at it and at themselves, disarming both the slings of fortune and her more dangerous smiles with a grimace.

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

They all passed on, laughing, and quite oblivious of what was in store for most of them—laughing and smoking, and, for the first time in their lives, the centre of a show. After them came another band; but this time of Italians, well-dressed, and playing on well-cared-for instruments. Behind them walked a little group of men, on whose appearance a hush fell on the crowd. Two of them wore uniforms, and between them, supported by silk handkerchiefs wrapped round his arms, there walked a man who was welcomed with a scream of joy. Frail, and with trembling footsteps, dressed in a faded old red shirt and knotted handkerchief, his parchment cheeks lit up with a faint flush as the Veteran of Marsala passed like a phantom of a glorious past. With him appeared to march the rest of his companions who set sail from Genoa to call into existence that Italy for which the young men all around him were prepared to sacrifice their lives.

To the excited crowd he typified all that their fathers had endured to drive the stranger from their land. The two Cairoli, Nino Bixio, and the heroic figure, wrapped in his poncho, who rides in glory on the Janiculum, visible from every point of Rome, seemed to march by the old man’s side in the imagination of the crowd. Women rushed forward, carrying flowers, and strewed them on the scant grey locks of the old soldier; and children danced in front of him, like little Bacchanals. All hats were off as the old man was borne along, a phantom of himself, a symbol of a heroic past, and still a beacon, flickering but alight, to show the way towards the goal which in his youth had seemed impossible to reach.

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

V
WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND

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

By the air they wore of chastened pleasure, all those who knew them saw that they were intent upon a funeral. To serious-minded men such as are they, for all their quickness, nothing is so soul-filling, for it is of the nature of a fact that no one can deny. A wedding has its possibilities, for it may lead to children, or divorce, but funerals are in another category. At them the Scottish people is at its best, for never more than then does the deep underlying tenderness peep through the hardness of the rind. On foot and in the tramways, but most especially on foot, converged long lines of men and women, though fewer women, for the national prejudice that in years gone by thought it not decent for a wife to follow to the grave her husband’s coffin, still holds a little in the north. Yet there was something in the crowd that showed it was to attend no common funeral, that they were “stepping west.” No one wore black, except a minister or two, who looked a little like the belated rook you sometimes see amongst a flock of seagulls, in that vast ocean of grey tweed.

They tramped along, the whistling north-east wind pinching their features, making their eyes run, and as they went, almost unconsciously they fell into procession, for beyond the tramway line, a country lane that had not quite put on the graces of a street, though straggling houses were dotted here and there along it, received the crowd and marshalled it, as it were mechanically, without volition of its own. Kept in between the walls, and blocked in front by the hearse and long procession of the mourning-coaches, the people slowly surged along. The greater portion of the crowd were townsmen, but there were miners washed and in their Sunday best. Their faces showed the blue marks of healed-up scars into which coal dust or gunpowder had become tattooed, scars gained in the battle of their lives down in the pits, remembrances of falls of rock or of occasions when the mine had “fired upon them.”

Many had known Keir Hardie in his youth, had “wrocht wi’ him out-by,” at Blantyre, at Hamilton, in Ayrshire, and all of them had heard him speak a hundred times. Even to those who had not heard him, his name was as a household word. Miners predominated, but men of every trade were there. Many were members of that black-coated proletariat, whose narrow circumstances and daily struggle for appearances make their life harder to them than is the life of any working man before he has had to dye his hair. Women tramped, too, for the dead leader had been a champion of their sex. They all respected him, loving him with that half-contemptuous gratitude that women often show to men who make the “woman question” the object of their lives.

After the Scottish fashion at a funeral, greetings were freely passed, and Reid, who hadna’ seen his friend Mackinder since the time of the Mid-Lanark fight, greeted him with “Ye mind when first Keir Hardie was puttin’ up for Parliament,” and wrung his hand, hardened in the mine, with one as hardened, and instantly began to recall elections of the past.

“Ye mind yon Wishaw meeting?”

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

“Aye, but they gied Hardie himself a maist respectful hearing . . . aye, ou aye.”

Others remembered him a boy, and others in his home at Cumnock, but all spoke of him with affection, holding him as something of their own, apart from other politicians, almost apart from men.

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

The procession reached a long dip in the road, and the head of it, full half a mile away, could be seen gathered round the hearse, outside the chapel of the crematorium, whose ominous tall chimney, through which the ashes, and perchance the souls of thousands have escaped towards some empyrean or another, towered up starkly. At last all had arrived, and the small open space was crowded, the hearse and carriages appearing stuck amongst the people, like raisins in a cake, so thick they pressed upon them. The chapel, differing from the ordinary chapel of the faiths as much as does a motor driver from a cabman, had an air as of modernity about it, which contrasted strangely with the ordinary looking crowd, the adjacent hills, the decent mourning coaches and the black-coated undertakers who bore the coffin up the steps. Outside, the wind whistled and swayed the soot-stained trees about; but inside the chapel the heat was stifling.

When all was duly done, and long exordiums passed upon the man who in his life had been the target for the abuse of press and pulpit, the coffin slid away to its appointed place. One thought one heard the roaring of the flames, and somehow missed the familiar lowering of the body . . . earth to earth . . . to which the centuries of use and wont have made us all familiar, though dust to dust in this case was the more appropriate.

In either case, the book is closed for ever, and the familiar face is seen no more.

So, standing just outside the chapel in the cold, waiting till all the usual greetings had been exchanged, I fell a-musing on the man whom I had known so well. I saw him as he was thirty years ago, outlined against a bing or standing in a quarry in some mining village, and heard his once familiar address of “Men.” He used no other in those days, to the immense disgust of legislators and other worthy but unimaginative men whom he might chance to meet. About him seemed to stand a shadowy band, most of whom now are dead or lost to view, or have gone under in the fight.

John Ferguson was there, the old-time Irish leader, the friend of Davitt and of Butt. Tall and erect he stood, dressed in his long frock-coat, his roll of papers in one hand, and with the other stuck into his breast, with all the air of being the last Roman left alive. Tom Mann, with his black hair, his flashing eyes, and his tumultuous speech peppered with expletives. Beside him, Sandy Haddow, of Parkhead, massive and Doric in his speech, with a grey woollen comforter rolled round his neck, and hands like panels of a door. Champion, pale, slight, and interesting, still the artillery officer, in spite of Socialism. John Burns; and Small, the miners’ agent, with his close brown beard and taste for literature. Smillie stood near, he of the seven elections, and then check-weigher at a pit, either at Cadzow or Larkhall. There, too, was silver-tongued Shaw Maxwell and Chisholm Robertson, looking out darkly on the world through tinted spectacles; with him Bruce Glasier, girt with a red sash and with an aureole of fair curly hair around his head, half poet and half revolutionary.

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

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

Standing amongst the band of shadowy comrades I had known, I saw him, simple and yet with something of the prophet in his air, and something of the seer. Effective and yet ineffectual, something there was about him that attracted little children to him, and I should think lost dogs. He made mistakes, but then those who make no mistakes seldom make anything. His life was one long battle, so it seemed to me that it was fitting that at his funeral the north-east wind should howl amongst the trees, tossing and twisting them as he himself was twisted and storm-tossed in his tempestuous passage through the world.

As the crowd moved away, and in the hearse and mourning-coaches the spavined horses limped slowly down the road, a gleam of sunshine, such as had shone too little in his life, lighted up everything.

The swaying trees and dark, grey houses of the ugly suburb of the town were all transfigured for a moment. The chapel door was closed, and from the chimney of the crematorium a faint blue smoke was issuing, which, by degrees, faded into the atmosphere, just as the soul, for all I know, may melt into the air.

When the last stragglers had gone, and bits of paper scurried uneasily along before the wind, the world seemed empty, with nothing friendly in it, but the shoulder of Ben Lomond peeping out shyly over the Kilpatrick Hills.

VI
ELYSIUM

The Triad came into my life as I walked underneath the arch by which the sentinels sit in Olympian state upon their rather long-legged chargers, receiving, as is their due, the silent homage of the passing nurserymaids. The soldier in the middle was straight back from the front. The mud of Flanders clung to his boots and clothes. It was “deeched” into his skin, and round his eyes had left a stain so dark, it looked as if he had been painted for a theatrical make-up. Upon his puttees it had dried so thickly that you could scarcely see the folds. He bore upon his back his knapsack, carried his rifle in his hand all done up in a case, which gave it, as it seemed to me, a look of hidden power, making it more terrible to think of than if it had shone brightly in the sun. His water-bottle and a pack of some kind hung at his sides, and as he walked kept time to every step. Under his elbow protruded the shaft of something, perhaps an entrenching tool of some sort, or perhaps some weapon strange to civilians accustomed to the use of stick or umbrella as their only arm. In himself he seemed a walking arsenal, carrying his weapons and his baggage on his back, after the fashion of a Roman legionary. The man himself, before the hand of discipline had fashioned him to number something or another, must have looked fresh and youthful, not very different from a thousand others that in time of peace one sees in early morning going to fulfil one of those avocations without which no State can possibly endure, and yet are practically unknown to those who live in the vast stucco hives either of Belgravia or Mayfair.

He may have been some five-and-twenty, and was a Londoner or a man from the home counties lying round about. His sunburnt face was yet not sunburnt as is the face of one accustomed to the weather all his life. Recent exposure had made his skin all feverish, and his blue eyes were fixed, as often are the eyes of sailors or frontiersmen after a long watch.

The girls on either side of him clung to his arm with pride, and with an air of evident affection, that left them quite unconscious of everything but having got the beloved object of their care safe home again. Upon the right side, holding fast to the warrior’s arm, and now and then nestling close to his side, walked his sweetheart, a dark-haired girl, dressed in the miserable cheap finery our poorer countrywomen wear, instead of well-made plainer clothes that certainly would cost them less and set them off a hundredfold the more. Now and again she pointed out some feature of the town with pride, as when they climbed the steps under the column on which stands the statue of the Duke of York. The soldier, without looking, answered, “I know, Ethel, Dook of York,” and hitched his pack a little higher on his back.

His sister, hanging on his left arm, never said anything, but walked along as in a dream; and he, knowing that she was there and understood, spoke little to her, except to murmur “Good old Gladys” now and then, and press her to his side. As they passed by the stunted monument, on which the crowd of little figures standing round a sledge commemorates the Franklin Expedition, in a chill Arctic way, the girl upon the right jerked her head towards it and said, “That’s Sir John Franklin, George, he as laid down his life to find the North-West Passage, one of our ’eroes, you remember ’im.” To which he answered, “Oh yes, Frenklin”; then looking over at the statue of Commander Scott, added, “’ee done his bit too,” with an appreciative air. They gazed upon the Athenæum and the other clubs with that air of detachment that all Englishmen affect when they behold a building or a monument—taking it, as it seems to me, as something they have no concern with, just as if it stood in Petrograd or in Johannesburg.

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

And so they took their way through the enchanted streets, not feeling either the penetrating wind or the fine rain, for these are but material things, and they were wrapped apart from the whole world. Officers of all ranks passed by them, some young and smart, and others paunchy and middle-aged; but they were non-existent to the soldier, who saw nothing but the girls. Most of the officers looked straight before them, with an indulgent air; but two young men with red bands round their caps were scandalised, and muttering something as to the discipline of the New Army, drew themselves up stiffly and strutted off, like angry game-cocks when they eye each other in the ring.

The triad passed the Rag, and on the steps stood two old colonels, their faces burnt the colour of a brick, and their moustaches stiff as the bristles of a brush. They eyed the passing little show, and looking at each other broke into a smile. They knew that they would never walk oblivious of mankind, linked to a woman’s arm; but perhaps memories of what they had done stirred in their hearts, for both of them at the same moment ejaculated a modulated “Ha!” of sympathy. All this time I had walked behind the three young people, unconsciously, as I was going the same road, catching half phrases now and then, which I was half ashamed to hear.

They reached the corner of St. James’s Square, and our paths separated. Mine took me to the London Library to change a book, and theirs led straight to Elysium, for five long days.

VII
HEREDITY

Right along the frontier between Uruguay and Rio Grande, the southern province of Brazil, the Spanish and the Portuguese sit face to face, as they have sat for ages, looking at, but never understanding, one another, both in the Old and the New World.

In Tuy and Valenza, Monzon and Salvatierra, at Poncho Verde and Don Pedrito, Rivera and Santa Ana do Libramento, and far away above Cruz Alta, where the two clumps of wood that mark old camps of the two people are called O Matto Castelhano and O Matto Portuguez, the rivalry of centuries is either actual or at least commemorated on the map.

The border-line that once made different peoples of the dwellers at Floriston and Gretna, still prevails in the little castellated towns, which snarl at one another across the Minho, just as they did of old.

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

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

So on to Salvatierra and Monzon, or any other of the villages or towns upon the river, and in the current of the native speech there still remains some saying of the kind, with its sharp edges still unworn after six centuries of use. Great is the power of artificial barriers to restrain mankind. No proverb ever penned is more profound than that which sets out, “Fear guards the vineyard, not the fence around it.”

So Portuguese and Spaniards in their peninsula have fought and hated and fought and ridiculed each other after the fashion of children that have quarrelled over a broken toy. Blood and an almost common speech, for both speak one Romance when all is said, have both been impotent against the custom-house, the flag, the foolish dynasty, for few countries in the world have had more foolish kings than Spain and Portugal.

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

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

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

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

At eventide the girls walk on the plaza, their mothers, aunts, or servants following them as closely as their shadows on a sunny afternoon. In quiet streets lovers on both sides of the river talk from a first-floor balcony to the street, or whisper through the window-bars on the ground floor. The little shops under the low arches of the arcaded streets have yellow flannel drawers for men and petticoats of many colours hanging close outside their doors, on whose steps sleep yellow dogs.

The jangling bells in the decaying lichen-grown old towers of the churches jangle and clang in the same key, and as appears without a touch of odium theologicum. The full bass voices boom from the choirs, in which the self-same organs in their walnut cases have the same rows of golden trumpets sticking out into the aisle.

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

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

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

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

The women, with their many-coloured petticoats and handkerchiefs, chaffer at the same fairs to which their husbands ride their ponies in their straw cloaks.

At “romerias” the peasantry dance to the bagpipe and the drum the self-same dances, and both climb the self-same steep grey steps through the dark lanes, all overhung with gorse and broom, up to the Calvaries, where the three crosses take on the self-same growth of lichen and of moss. Yet the “boyero” who walks before the placid oxen, with their cream-coloured flanks and liquid eyes of onyx, feels he is different, right down to the last molecule of his being, from the man upon the other side.

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

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

From the Laguna de Merin to the Cuareim, that is to say, along a frontier of two hundred leagues, the self-same feeling rules upon both sides of the line. There, as in Portugal and Spain, although the country, whether in Uruguay or in Brazil, is little different, yet it has suffered something indefinable by being occupied by members of the two races so near and yet so different from one another.

Great rolling seas of waving grass, broken by a few stony hills, are the chief features of the landscape of the frontiers in both republics. Estancia houses, dazzlingly white, buried in peach and fig groves, dot the plains, looking like islands in the sea of grass. Great herds of cattle roam about, and men on horseback, galloping like clockwork, sail across the plains like ships upon a sea. Along the river-banks grow strips of thorny trees, and as the frontier line trends northward palm-trees appear, and monkeys chatter in the woods. Herds of wild asses, shyer than antelopes, gaze at the passing horsemen, scour off when he approaches, and are lost into the haze. Stretches of purple borage, known as La Flor Morada, carpet the ground in spring and early summer, giving place later on to red verbena; and on the edges of the streams the tufts of the tall Pampa grass recall the feathers on a Pampa Indian’s spear.

Bands of grave ostriches feed quietly upon the tops of hills, and stride away when frightened, down the wind, with wings stretched out to catch the breeze.

Clothes are identical, or almost so; the poncho and the loose trousers stuffed into high patent-leather boots, the hat kept in its place by a black ribbon with two tassels, are to be seen on both sides of the frontier. Only in Brazil a sword stuck through the girth replaces the long knife of Uruguay. Perhaps in that one item all the differences between the races manifests itself, for the sword is, as it were, a symbol, for no one ever saw one drawn or used in any way but as an ornament. It is, in fact, but a survival of old customs, which are cherished both by the Portuguese and the Brazilians as the apple of the eye.

The vast extent of the territory of Brazil, its inaccessibility, and the enormous distances to be travelled from the interior to the coast, and the sense of remoteness from the outer world, have kept alive a type of man not to be found in any other country where the Christian faith prevails. Risings of fanatics still are frequent; one is going on to-day in Paraná, and that of the celebrated Antonio Concelheiro, twenty years ago, shook the whole country to its core. Slavery existed in the memory of people still alive. Women in the remoter towns are still secluded almost as with the Moors. The men still retain something of the Middle Ages in their love of show. All in the province of Rio Grande are great horsemen, and all use silver trappings on a black horse, and all have horses bitted so as to turn round in the air, just as a hawk turns on the wing.

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

When once their independence was assured, the Uruguayans fell into line like magic with the modern trend of thought. Liberty to them meant absolute equality, for throughout the land no snob is found to leave a slug’s trail on the face of man by his subserviency.

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

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

So Jango Chaves, feeling inclined for sport, or, as he might have said, to “brincar un bocadinho,” saddled up his horse. He mounted, and, as his friends were looking on, ran it across the plaza of the town, and, turning like a seagull in its flight, came back to where his friends were standing, and stopped it with a jerk.

His silver harness jingled, and his heavy spurs, hanging loosely on his high-heeled boots, clanked like fetters, as his active little horse bounded into the air and threw the sand up in a shower.

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

He rode past orange gardens, surrounded by brown walls of sun-baked bricks with the straw sticking in them, just as it had dried. In the waste the castor-oil bushes formed little jungles, out of which peered cats, exactly as a tiger peers out of a real jungle in the woods.

The sun poured down, and was reverberated back from the white houses, and on the great gaunt building, where the captain-general lived, floated the green-and-yellow flag of the republic, looking like a bandana handkerchief. He passed the negro rancheria, without which no such town as Santa Anna do Libramento is complete, and might have marked, had he not been too much used to see them, the naked negro children playing in the sand. Possibly, if he marked them, he referred to them as “cachorrinhos pretos,” for the old leaven of the days of slavery is strongly rooted in Brazil. So he rode on, a slight and graceful figure, bending to each movement of his horse, his mobile, olive-coloured features looking like a bronze masque in the fierce downpour of the sun.

As he rode on, his whip, held by a thong and dangling from his fingers, swung against his horse’s flanks, keeping time rhythmically to its pace. He crossed the rivulet that flows between the towns and came out on the little open plain that separates them. From habit, or because he felt himself amongst unfriendly or uncomprehended people, he touched his knife and his revolvers, hidden beneath his summer poncho, with his right hand, and with his bridle arm held high, ready for all eventualities, passed into just such another sandy street as he had left behind.

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

A band was playing in the middle of it, and Jango could not fail to notice that Rivera was more prosperous than was his native town.

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

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

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

As he passed by the “jefatura” where the alcalde and his friends were sitting smoking just before the door, he fired with such good aim that a large piece of plaster just above their heads fell, covering them with dust.

Drawing his second pistol and still firing as he went, he dashed out of the town, in spite of shots from every side, his horse bounding like lightning as his great silver spurs ploughed deep into its sides. When he had crossed the little bit of neutral ground, and just as a patrol of cavalry appeared, ready to gallop after him, a band of men from his own town came out to meet him.

He stopped, and shouting out defiance to the Uruguayans, drew up his horse, and lit a cigarette. Then, safe beyond the frontier, trotted on gently to meet his friends, his horse shaking white foam from off its bit, and little rivulets of blood dripping down from its sides into the sand.

VIII
EL TANGO ARGENTINO

Motor-cars swept up to the covered passage of the front door of the hotel, one of those international caravansaries that pass their clients through a sort of vulgarising process that blots out every type. It makes the Argentine, the French, the Englishman, and the American all alike before the power of wealth.

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

The ladies stepped down delicately, showing a fleeting vision of a leg in a transparent stocking, just for an instant, through the slashing of their skirts. They knew that every man, their footman, driver, the giant watchers at the gate, and all who at the time were going into the hotel, saw and were moved by what they saw just for a moment; but the fact did not trouble them at all. It rather pleased them, for the most virtuous feel a pleasurable emotion when they know that they excite. So it will be for ever, for thus and not by votes alone they show that they are to the full men’s equals, let the law do its worst.

Inside the hotel, heated by steam, and with an atmosphere of scent and flesh that went straight to the head just as the fumes of whisky set a drinker’s nerves agog, were seated all the finest flowers of the cosmopolitan society of the French capital.

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

Rich rastaquaoures, their hats too shiny, and their boots too tight, their coats fitting too closely, their sticks mounted with great gold knobs, walked about or sat at little tables, all talking strange varieties of French.

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

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

After the “five-o’clock,” turned to a heavy meal of toast and buns, of Hugel loaf, of sandwiches, and of hot cake, the scented throng, restored by the refection after the day’s hard work of shopping, of driving here and there like souls in purgatory to call on people that they detested, and other labours of a like nature, slowly adjourned to a great hall in which a band was playing. As they walked through the passages, men pressed close up to women and murmured in their ears, telling them anecdotes that made them flush and giggle as they protested in an unprotesting style. Those were the days of the first advent of the Tango Argentino, the dance that since has circled the whole world, as it were, in a movement of the hips. Ladies pronounced it charming as they half closed their eyes and let a little shiver run across their lips. Men said it was the only dance that was worth dancing. It was so Spanish, so unconventional, and combined all the æsthetic movements of the figures on an Etruscan vase with the strange grace of the Hungarian gipsies . . . it was so, as one may say, so . . . as you may say . . . you know.

When all were seated, the band, Hungarians, of course,—oh, those dear gipsies!—struck out into a rhythm, half rag-time, half habañera, canaille, but sensuous, and hands involuntarily, even the most aristocratic hands—of ladies whose immediate progenitors had been pork-packers in Chicago, or gambusinos who had struck it rich in Zacatecas,—tapped delicately, but usually a little out of time, upon the backs of chairs.

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

Standing so close that one well-creased trouser leg disappeared in the tight skirt, he clasped her round the waist, holding her hand almost before her face. They twirled about, now bending low, now throwing out a leg, and then again revolving, all with a movement of the hips that seemed to blend the well-creased trouser and the half-open skirt into one inharmonious whole. The music grew more furious and the steps multiplied, till with a bound the girl threw herself for an instant into the male dancer’s arms, who put her back again upon the ground with as much care as if she had been a new-laid egg, and the pair bowed and disappeared.

Discreet applause broke forth, and exclamations such as “wonderful,” “what grace,” “Vivent les Espagnoles,” for the discriminating audience took no heed of independence days, of mere political changes and the like, and seemed to think that Buenos Aires was a part of Spain, never having heard of San Martin, Bolivar, Paez, and their fellow-liberators.

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

After the Tango came “La Maxixe Brésilienne,” rather more languorous and more befitting to the dwellers in the tropics than was its cousin from the plains. Again the discreet applause broke out, the audience murmuring “charming,” that universal adjective that gives an air of being in a perpetual pastrycook’s when ladies signify delight. Smiles and sly glances at their friends showed that the dancers’ efforts at indecency had been appreciated.

Slowly the hall and tea-rooms of the great hotel emptied themselves, and in the corridors and passages the smell of scent still lingered, just as stale incense lingers in a church.

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

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

“Argentine Tango, eh?” I thought, after my friends had left me all alone. Well, well, it has changed devilishly upon its passage overseas, even discounting the difference of the setting of the place where first I saw it danced so many years ago. So, sauntering down, I took a chair far back upon the terrace of the Café de la Paix, so that the sellers of La Patrie, and the men who have some strange new toy, or views of Paris in a long album like a broken concertina, should not tread upon my toes.

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

Gradually the smell of petrol and of horse-dung, the two most potent perfumes in our modern life, seemed to be blown away. Dyed heads and faces scraped till they looked blue as a baboon’s; young men who looked like girls, with painted faces and with mincing airs; the raddled women, ragged men, and hags huddled in knitted shawls, lame horses, and taxi-cab drivers sitting nodding on their boxes—all faded into space, and from the nothing that is the past arose another scene.

I saw myself with Witham and his brother, whose name I have forgotten, Eduardo Peña, Congreve, and Eustaquio Medina, on a small rancho in an elbow of the great River Yi. The rancho stood upon a little hill. A quarter of a mile or so away the dense and thorny monté of hard-wood trees that fringed the river seemed to roll up towards it like a sea. The house was built of yellow pine sent from the United States. The roof was shingled, and the rancho stood planked down upon the plain, looking exactly like a box. Some fifty yards away stood a thatched hut that served as kitchen, and on its floor the cattle herders used to sleep upon their horse-gear with their feet towards the fire.

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

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

The night was clear and starry, and above our heads was hung the Southern Cross. So bright the stars shone out that one could see almost a mile away; but yet all the perspective of the plains and woods was altered. Hillocks were sometimes undistinguishable, at other times loomed up like houses. Woods seemed to sway and heave, and by the sides of streams bunches of Pampa grass stood stark as sentinels, their feathery tufts looking like plumes upon an Indian’s lance.

The horses shook their bridles with a clear, ringing sound as they stepped double, and their riders, swaying lightly in their seats, seemed to form part and parcel of the animals they rode.

Now and then little owls flew noiselessly beside us, circling above our heads, and then dropped noiselessly upon a bush. Eustaquio Medina, who knew the district as a sailor knows the seas where he was born, rode in the front of us. As his horse shied at a shadow on the grass or at the bones of some dead animal, he swung his whip round ceaselessly, until the moonlight playing on the silver-mounted stock seemed to transform it to an aureole that flickered about his head. Now and then somebody dismounted to tighten up his girth, his horse twisting and turning round uneasily the while, and, when he raised his foot towards the stirrup, starting off with a bound.

Time seemed to disappear and space be swallowed in the intoxicating gallop, so that when Eustaquio Medina paused for an instant to strike the crossing of a stream, we felt annoyed with him, although no hound that follows a hot scent could have gone truer on his line.

Dogs barking close at hand warned us our ride was almost over, and as we galloped up a rise Eustaquio Medina pulled up and turned to us.

“There is the house,” he said, “just at the bottom of the hollow, only five squares away,” and as we saw the flicker of the lights, he struck his palm upon his mouth after the Indian fashion, and raised a piercing cry. Easing his hand, he drove his spurs into his horse, who started with a bound into full speed, and as he galloped down the hill we followed him, all yelling furiously.

Just at the hitching-post we drew up with a jerk, our horses snorting as they edged off sideways from the black shadow that it cast upon the ground. Horses stood about everywhere, some tied and others hobbled, and from the house there came the strains of an accordion and the tinkling of guitars.

Asking permission to dismount, we hailed the owner of the house, a tall, old Gaucho, Frutos Barragán, as he stood waiting by the door, holding a maté in his hand. He bade us welcome, telling us to tie our horses up, not too far out of sight, for, as he said, “It is not good to give facilities to rogues, if they should chance to be about.”

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

They cast deep shadows in the corners of the room, and when they flickered up occasionally the light fell on the dark and sun-tanned faces of the tall, wiry Gauchos and the light cotton dresses of the women as they sat with their chairs tilted up against the wall. Some thick-set Basques, an Englishman or two in riding breeches, and one or two Italians made up the company. The floor was earth, stamped hard till it shone like cement, and as the Gauchos walked upon it, their heavy spurs clinked with a noise like fetters as they trailed them on the ground.

An old, blind Paraguayan played on the guitar, and a huge negro accompanied him on an accordion. Their united efforts produced a music which certainly was vigorous enough, and now and then, one or the other of them broke into a song, high-pitched and melancholy, which, if you listened to it long enough, forced you to try to imitate its wailing melody and its strange intervals.

Fumes of tobacco and rum hung in the air, and of a strong and heady wine from Catalonia, much favoured by the ladies, which they drank from a tumbler, passing it to one another, after the fashion of a grace-cup at a City dinner, with great gravity. At last the singing ceased, and the orchestra struck up a Tango, slow, marked, and rhythmical.

Men rose, and, taking off their spurs, walked gravely to the corner of the room where sat the women huddled together as if they sought protection from each other, and with a compliment led them out upon the floor. The flowing poncho and the loose chiripá, which served as trousers, swung about just as the tartans of a Highlander swing as he dances, giving an air of ease to all the movements of the Gauchos as they revolved, their partners’ heads peeping above their shoulders, and their hips moving to and fro.

At times they parted, and set to one another gravely, and then the man, advancing, clasped his partner round the waist and seemed to push her backwards, with her eyes half-closed and an expression of beatitude. Gravity was the keynote of the scene, and though the movements of the dance were as significant as it was possible for the dancers to achieve, the effect was graceful, and the soft, gliding motion and the waving of the parti-coloured clothes, wild and original, in the dim, flickering light.

Rum flowed during the intervals. The dancers wiped the perspiration from their brows, the men with the silk handkerchiefs they wore about their necks, the women with their sleeves. Tangos, cielitos, and pericones succeeded one another, and still the atmosphere grew thicker, and the lights seemed to flicker through a haze, as the dust rose from the mud floor. Still the old Paraguayan and the negro kept on playing with the sweat running down their faces, smoking and drinking rum in their brief intervals of rest, and when the music ceased for a moment, the wild neighing of a horse tied in the moonlight to a post, sounded as if he called his master to come out and gallop home again.

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

Then came a lull, and as men whispered in their partners’ ears, telling them, after the fashion of the Gauchos, that they were lovely, their hair like jet, their eyes bright as “las tres Marias,” and all the compliments which in their case were stereotyped and handed down for generations, loud voices rose, and in an instant two Gauchos bounded out upon the floor.

Long silver-handled knives were in their hands, their ponchos wrapped round their left arms served them as bucklers, and as they crouched, like cats about to spring, they poured out blasphemies.

“Stop this!” cried Frutos Barragán; but even as he spoke, a knife-thrust planted in the stomach stretched one upon the floor. Blood gushed out from his mouth, his belly fell like a pricked bladder, and a dark stream of blood trickled upon the ground as he lay writhing in his death agony.

The iron bowls were overturned, and in the dark girls screamed and the men crowded to the door. When they emerged into the moonlight, leaving the dying man upon the floor, the murderer was gone; and as they looked at one another there came a voice shouting out, “Adios, Barragán. Thus does Vicente Castro pay his debts when a man tries to steal his girl,” and the faint footfalls of an unshod horse galloping far out upon the plain.

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

IX
IN A BACKWATER

“This ’ere war, now,” said the farmer, in the slow voice that tells of life passed amongst comfortable surroundings into which haste has never once intruded, “is a ’orrid business.”

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

His little holding, an oasis in the waste of modern scientific farming, was run in the old-fashioned way, often to be seen in the home counties, as if old methods linger longest where they are least expected, just as a hunted fox sometimes takes refuge in a rectory.

His ideas seemed to have become unsettled with constant reading of newspapers filled with accounts of horrors, and his speech, not fluent at the best of times, was slower and more halting than his wont.

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

“When a man’s lost his wife it leaves him, somehow, as if he were like a ’orse hitched on one side of the wagon-pole, a-pullin’ by hisself. Now this ’ere war, comin’ as it does right on the top of my ’ome loss, sets me a-thinkin’, especially when I’m alone in the ’ouse of night.”

The park-like English landscape, with its hedgerow trees and its lush fields, that does not look like as if it really were the country, but seems a series of pleasure-grounds cut off into convenient squares, was at its time of greatest beauty and its greatest artificiality. Cows swollen with grass till they looked like balloons lay in the fields and chewed the cud. Geese cackled as they strayed upon the common, just as they appear to cackle in a thousand water-colours. The hum of bees was in the limes. Dragon-flies hawked swiftly over the oily waters of the two slow-flowing rivers that made the farm almost an island in a suburban Mesopotamia, scarce twenty miles away from Charing Cross. An air of peace and of contentment, of long well-being and security, was evident in everything. Trees flourished, though stag-headed, under which the Roundhead troopers may have camped, or at the least, veterans from Marlborough’s wars might have sat underneath their shade, and smoked as they retold their fights.

A one-armed signboard, weathered, and with the lettering almost illegible, pointed out the bridle-path to Ditchley, now little used, except by lovers on a Sunday afternoon, but where the feet of horses for generations in the past had trampled it, still showing clearly as it wound through the fields.

In the standing corn the horses yoked to the reaping machine stood resting, now and again shaking the tassels on their little netted ear-covers. They, too, came of a breed long used to peace and plenty, good food and treatment, and short hours of work. The kindly landscape and the settled life of centuries had formed the kind of man of which the farmer was a prototype,—slow-footed and slow-tongued, and with his mind as bowed as were his shoulders with hard work, by the continual pressure of the hierarchy of wealth and station, that had left him as much adscript to them as any of his ancestors had been bound to their glebes. He held the Daily Mail, his gospel and his vade mecum, crumpled in his hand as if he feared to open it again to read more details of the war. A simple soul, most likely just as oppressive to his labourers as his superiors had always showed themselves to him, he could not bear to read of violence, as all the tyranny that he had bent under had been imposed so subtly that he could never see more than the shadow of the hand that had oppressed him.

It pained him, above all things, to read about the wounded and dead horses lying in the corn, especially as he had “’eard the ’arvest over there in Belgium was going to be good.” The whirr of the machines reaping the wheatfield sounded like the hum of some gigantic insect, and as the binder ranged the sheaves in rows it seemed as if the golden age had come upon the earth again, bringing with it peace and plenty, with perhaps slightly stouter nymphs than those who once followed the sickle-men in Arcady.

A man sat fishing in a punt just where the river broadened into a backwater edged with willow trees. At times he threw out ground-bait, and at times raised a stone bottle to his lips, keeping one eye the while watchfully turned upon his float. School children strayed along the road, as rosy and as flaxen-haired as those that Gregory the Great thought fitting to be angels, though they had never been baptized.

Now and again the farmer stepped into his field to watch the harvesting, and cast an eye of pride and of affection on his horses, and then, coming back to the gate, he drew the paper from his pocket and read its columns, much in the way an Arab reads a letter, murmuring the words aloud until their meaning penetrated to his brain.

Chewing a straw, and slowly rubbing off the grains of an ear of wheat into his hand, he gazed over his fields as if he feared to see in them some of the horrors that he read. Again he muttered, with a puzzled air, “’Orrible! ’undreds of men and ’orses lying in the corn. It seems a sad thing to believe, doesn’t it now?” he said; and as he spoke soldiers on motorcycles hurtled down the road, leaving a trail of dust that perhaps looked like smoke to him after his reading in the Daily Mail.

“They tell me,” he remarked, after a vigorous application of his blue handkerchief to his streaming face, “that these ’ere motorcycles ’ave a gun fastened to them, over there in Belgium, where they are a-goin’ on at it in such a way. The paper says, ‘Ranks upon ranks of ’em is just mowed down like wheat.’ . . . ’Orrid, I call it, if it’s true, for now and then I think those chaps only puts that kind of thing into their papers to ’ave a sale for them.” He looked about him as if, like Pilate, he was looking for an elusive truth not to be found on earth, and then walked down the road till he came to the backwater where the man was fishing in his punt. They looked at one another over a yard or two of muddy water, and asked for news about the war, in the way that people do from others who they must know are quite as ignorant as they are themselves. The fisherman “’ad given up readin’ the war noos; it’s all a pack of lies,” and pointing to the water, said in a cautious voice, “Some people says they ’ears. I ain’t so sure about it; but, anyhow, it’s always best to be on the safe side.” Then he addressed himself once more to the business of the day, and in the contemplation of his float no doubt became as much absorbed into the universal principle of nature as is an Indian sitting continually with his eyes turned on his diaphragm.

Men passing down the road, each with a paper in his hand, looked up and threw the farmer scraps of news, uncensored and spiced high with details which had never happened, so that in after years their children will most likely treasure as facts, which they have received from long-lost parents, the wildest fairy tales.

The slanting sun and lengthening shadows brought the farmer no relief of mind; and still men, coming home from work on shaky bicycles, plied him with horrors as they passed by the gate, their knee-joints stiff with the labours of the day, seeming in want of oil. A thin, white mist began to creep along the backwater. Unmooring his punt, the fisherman came unwillingly to shore, and as he threw the fragments of his lunch into the water and gathered up his tackle, looked back upon the scene of his unfruitful labours with an air as of a man who has been overthrown by circumstances, but has preserved his honour and his faith inviolate.

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

The whirring of the reaper ceased, and when the horses were unyoked the driver led them slowly from the field. As they passed by the farmer he looked lovingly towards them, and muttered to himself, “Dead ’orses and dead soldiers lying by ’undreds in the standing corn. . . . I wonder ’ow the folks out there in Belgium will ’ave a relish for their bread next year. This ’ere war’s a ’orrid business, coming as it does, too, on the top of my own loss . . . dead ’orses in the corn. . . .”

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

X
HIPPOMORPHOUS

On the 12th of October 1524, Cortes left Mexico on his celebrated expedition to Honduras. The start from Mexico was made to the sound of music, and all the population of the newly conquered city turned out to escort him for a few miles upon his way.

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

Guatimozin, the captive King of Mexico, graced his conquerors’ triumphal march; and with the army went two falconers, Garci Caro and Alvaro Montañes, together with a band of music, some acrobats, a juggler, and a man “who vaulted well and played the Moorish pipe.”

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

His black horse also was about to play the most extraordinary rôle that ever horse has played in the whole history of the world.

With varying fortunes, now climbing mountains, now floundering in swamps, and again passing rivers over which they had to throw bridges, the expedition came to an open country, well watered, and the home of countless herds of deer. Villagutierre, in his History of the Conquest of the Province of Itza (Madrid, 1701), calls it the country of the Maçotecas, which name Bernal Diaz del Castillo says means “deer” in the language of those infidels. Fresh meat was scarce, and all the Spanish horsemen of those days were experts with the lance. Instantly Cortes and all his mounted officers set out to chase the deer. The weather was extraordinarily hot, hotter, so Diaz says, than they had had it since they left Mexico. The deer were all so tame that the horsemen speared them as they chose (los alancearon muy á su placer), and soon the plain was strewed with dying animals just as it used to be when the Indians hunted buffalo thirty or forty years ago.

Diaz says that the reason for the tameness of the deer was that the Maçotecas (here he applies the word to the Indians themselves) worshipped them as gods. It appears that their Chief God had once appeared in the image of a stag, and told the Indians not to hunt his fellow-gods, or even frighten them. Little enough the Spaniards cared for any gods not strong enough to defend themselves, for the deity that they adored was the same God of Battles whom we adore to-day.

So they continued spearing the god-like beasts, regardless of the heat and that their horses were in poor condition owing to their long march. The horse of one Palacios Rubio, a relation of Cortes, fell dead, overcome with the great heat; the grease inside him melted, Villagutierre says. The black horse that was ridden by Cortes also was very ill, although he did not die—though it perhaps had been better that he should have died, for Villagutierre thinks “far less harm would have been done than happened afterwards, as will be seen by those who read the tale.” After the hunting all was over, the line of march led over stony hills, and through a pass that Villagutierre calls “el Paso del Alabastro,” and Diaz “La Sierra de los Pedernales” (flints). Here the horse that had been ill, staked itself in a forefoot, and this, as Villagutierre says, was the real reason that Cortes left him behind. He adds, “It does not matter either way, whether he was left because his grease was melted with the sun, or that his foot was staked.” This, of course, is true, and anyhow the horse was reserved for a greater destiny than ever fell to any of his race.

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

He told the Chief that he would send to fetch the horse, for he was very fond of him, and prized him very much. The Chief, no doubt, received the strange and terrible animal with due respect, and Cortes went on upon his way. That is all that Cortes says about the matter, and the mist of history closed upon him and on his horse. Cortes died, worn-out and broken-hearted, at the white little town of Castilleja de la Cuesta, not far from Seville; but El Morzillo had a greater destiny in store. This happened in the year 1525, and nothing more was heard of either the Maçotecas or the horse, after that passage in the fifth letter of Cortes, till 1697. In that year the Franciscans set out upon the gospel trail to convert the Indians of Itza, attached to the expedition that Ursua led, for the interior of Yucatan had never been subdued. They reached Itza, having come down the River Tipu in canoes.

This river, Villagutierre informs us, is as large as any river in all Spain. Moreover, it is endowed with certain properties, its water being good and clear, so that in some respects it is superior to the water even of the Tagus. It is separated into one hundred and ninety channels (neither more nor less), and every one of these has its right Indian name, that every Indian knows. Upon its banks grows much sarsaparilla, and in its sand is gold.

Beyond all this it has a hidden virtue, which is that taken (fasting) it cures the dropsy, and makes both sick and sound people eat heartily. Besides this, after eating, when you have drunk its water you are inclined to eat again.

At midday it is cold, and warm at night, so warm that a steam rises from it, just as it does when a kettle boils on the fire. Other particularities it has, which though they are not so remarkable, yet are noteworthy.

Down this amazing river Ursua’s expedition navigated for twelve days in their canoes till they came to a lake called Peten-Itza, in which there was an island known as Tayasal. All unknown to themselves, they had arrived close to the place where long ago Cortes had left his horse. Of this they were in ignorance; the circumstance had been long forgotten, and Cortes himself had become almost a hero of a bygone age even in Mexico.

Fathers Orbieta and Fuensalida, monks of the Franciscan order, chosen both for their zeal and for their knowledge of the Maya language, were all agog to mark new sheep. The Indians amongst whom they found themselves were “ignorant even of the knowledge of the true faith.” Moreover, since the conquest they had had no dealings with Europeans, and were as primitive as they were at the time when Cortes had passed, more than a hundred years ago.

One of the Chiefs, a man known as Isquin, when he first saw a horse, “almost ran mad with joy and with astonishment. Especially the evolutions and the leaps it made into the air moved him to admiration, and going down upon all fours he leaped about and neighed.” Then, tired with this practical manifestation of his joy and his astonishment, he asked the Spanish name of the mysterious animal. When he learned that it was caballo, he forthwith renounced his name, and from that day this silly infidel was known as Caballito. Then when the soul-cleansing water had been poured upon his head, he took the name of Pedro, and to his dying day all the world called him “Don Pedro Caballito, for he was born a Chief.”

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