Anorth-easthaar 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 comparablealone 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 wasas 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, wassilver-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 howlamongst 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.
TheTriad 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 thesun. 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 pressher 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 ofwhat 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.
Rightalong 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 andGretna, 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 ofodium 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 samebread 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 growthof 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 ithas 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 whenfrightened, 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 AntonioConcelheiro, 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 tothem 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. Hemounted, 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 littlejungles, 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. Fromhabit, 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 thereins 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 smokingjust 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.
Motor-carsswept 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 theslashing 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 greatgold 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 likenature, 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 gambusinoswho 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 greathotel 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 ofLa Patrie, and the men who have some strange new toy, or views of Paris in a long albumlike 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 streamsbunches 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 thatwhen 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 hailedthe 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 ofthe 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 musicceased 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 likea 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, achetezLa Patrie,” and the rolling of the cabs.
“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 greatestbeauty 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 tothe 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 theDaily Mail, his gospel and hisvade 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 inthe 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, murmuringthe 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 theDaily 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 hecame 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 shadowsbrought 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 ledthem 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.
Onthe 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 horsementhat 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 extraordinaryrôlethat ever horse has played in the whole history of the world.
With varying fortunes, now climbingmountains, 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 hisHistory 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 theimage 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. Headds, “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 nothingmore 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. Otherparticularities 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. Especiallythe 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.
It only fired their zeal, and yet all their solicitude to save the Indians’ souls was unavailing, and the hard-hearted savages, dead to the advantages that baptism has ever brought with it, clave to their images.
The good Franciscans made several more attempts to move the people’s hearts by preaching ceaselessly. All failed, and then they went to several islands in the lake, in one of which Father Orbieta hardly had begun to preach, when, as Lopez Cogulludo[114a]tells us, an Indian seized him by the throat and nearly strangled him, leaving him senseless on the ground.
At times, seated in church listening to what the Elizabethans called “a painful preacher,” even the elect have felt an impulse to seize him by the throat. Still, it is usually restrained; but these poor savages, undisciplined in body and in mind, were perhaps to be excused, for the full flavour of a sermon had never reached them in their Eden by the lake. Moreover, after he was thus rudely cast from the pulpit to the ground, Father Fuensalida, nothing daunted by his fate, stepped forward and took up his parable. He preached to them this time in their own language, in which he was expert, with fervid eloquence and great knowledge of the Scriptures,[114b]explaining tothem the holy mystery of the incarnation of the eternal Word.[115]The subject was well chosen for a first attempt upon their hearts; but it, too, proved unfruitful, and the two friars were forced to re-embark.
As the canoe in which they sat moved from the island and launched out into the lake, the infidels who stood and watched them paddling were moved to fury, and, rushing to the edge, stoned them whole-heartedly till they were out of reach.
It is a wise precaution, and one that the “conquistadores” usually observed, to have the spiritual well supported by the secular arm when missionaries, instinct with zeal and not weighed down with too much common sense, preach for the first time to the infidel.