So one day told, and may, for all I know, have certified another, but we recked little of them, riding into Cruz Alta now and then and eating cakes at the confectioner’s, drinking innumerable glasses of sweet Malaga, laying in stores of cigarettes, frequenting all the dances far and near, joining in cattle-markings, races, and anything in short which happened in the place.
Perhaps our greatest friend was one Luis, a slave, born in Angola, brought over quite “Bozal” (or muzzled, as the Brazilians say of negroes who can speak no Portuguese), then by degrees became “ladino,” was baptized, bought by our host Xavier, and had remained with him all the remainder of his life. Black, and not comely in the least, bowlegged from constant riding, nose flat, and ears like flappers, a row of teeth almost as strong as a young shark’s, flat feet, and crisp Angola wool which grew so thickly on his head that had you thrown a pin on it, it could not have reached the skin, he yet was honest and faithful to the verge of folly; but then, if heaven there be, it can be but inhabited by fools, for wise men, prudent folk, and those who thrive, have their reward like singers, quickly, and can look for nothing more. He spoke about himself half-pityingly under the style of “Luis o Captivo,” was pious, fervent in sacred song, instant in prayer (especially if work was to be done), notidle either, superstitious and affectionate with all the virtues of the most excellent Saint Bernard or Newfoundland dog, and with but little of the imperfections of a man except the power of speech. Often he had been with his master into Uruguay to purchase cattle, or to buy mules for the Brazilian market, and when I asked him if he did not know that he was free the instant that he stepped in Uruguay, said: “Yes, but here I was brought up when I first came from Africa; they have been kind to me, it is to me as the querencia[46]is to a horse, and were it not for that, small fear I should return, to remain here ‘feito captivo’; but then I love the place, and, as you know, ‘the mangy calf lived all the winter, and then died in the spring.’” He held the Christian faith in its entirety, doubting no dogma, being pleased with every saint, but yet still hankered after fetish, which he remembered as a child, and seemed to think not incompatible with Christianity, as rendering it more animistic and familiar, smoothing away its angularities, blotting whatever share of reason it may have away, and, above all, giving more scope, if possible, to faith, and thereby opening a larger field of possibilities to the believer’s mind.
So Luis with others of his kind, as Jango, Jico, and Manduco, became our friends, looking upon us with that respect mixed with contempt which is the attitude of those who see that you possess themysterious arts of reading and of writing, but cannot see a horse’s footprint on hard ground; or if you lose yourself, have to avail yourself of what Luis referred to as “the one-handed watch the sailors use, which points the way to go.”
Much did Xavier talk of the Indians of the woods, the “Bugres,” as the Brazilians call them; about the “Botocudos,” who wear a plug stuck in their lower lip, and shape their ears with heavy weights in youth, so that they hang upon their shoulders; and much about those “Infidel” who through a blowpipe direct a little arrow at the travelling “Christians” in the woods, whose smallest touch is death. It then appeared his father (fica agora na gloria) was a patriot, that is, ’twas he who extirpated the last of all the “Infidel” from the forests where they lived. Most graphically did he tell how the last Indians were hunted down with dogs, and in a pantomime he showed how they jumped up and fell when they received the shot, and putting out his tongue and writhing hideously, he imitated how they wriggled on the ground, explaining that they were worse to kill than is a tapir, and put his father and the other patriots to much unnecessary pain. And as he talked, the woods, the fields, the river and the plain bathed in the sun, which unlike that of Africa does not seem weary of its task, but shines unwearied, looking as it does on a new world and life, shimmered and blazed, great lizards drank its rays flatteningthemselves upon the stones in ecstasy, humming-birds quivered at the heart of every flower; above the stream the dragon-flies hung poised; only some “Infidel” whom the patriots had destroyed seemed wanting, and the landscape looked incomplete without a knot of them in their high feather crowns stealthily stealing round a corner of the woods.
In the uncomprehended future, incomprehensible and strange, and harder far to guess at than the remotest semi-comprehended past, surely the Spanish travellers and their writings will have a value quite apart from that of any other books. For then the world will hold no “Bugres”; not a “Botocudo” will be left, and those few Indian and Negro tribes who yet persist will be but mere travesties of the whites: their customs lost, their lore, such as it was, despised; and we have proved ourselves wiser than the Creator, who wasted so much time creating beings whom we judged unfit to live, and then, in mercy to ourselves and Him, destroyed, so that no evidence of His miscalculated plan should last to shame Him when He thought of His mistake. So to this end (unknowingly) the missionary works, and all the Jesuits, those who from Paraguay through the Chiquitos, and across the Uruguay, in the dark Moxos, and in the forests of the Andes, gave their lives to bring as they thought life everlasting to the Indians—all were fools. Better by far instead of Bibles, lives of saints, water ofbaptism, crucifixes, and all the tackle of their trade, that they had brought swords, lances, and a good cross-bow each, and gone to work in the true scientific way, and recognized that the right way with savages is to preach heaven to them and then despatch them to it, for it is barbarous to keep them standing waiting as it were, just at the portals of eternal bliss.
And as we lingered at Cruz Alta, Christmas drew near, and all the people began to make “pesebres,” with ox and ass, the three wise men, the star of Bethlehem, the Redeemer (not of the Botocudos and the Bugres) swaddled and laid in straw. Herdsmen and negroes dismounted at the door, fastened their half-wild mules or horses carefully to posts, removed their hats, drawing them down over their faces furtively, and then walked in on tiptoe, their heavy iron spurs clanking upon the ground, to see the Wondrous Child. They lounged about the room, speaking in whispers as he might awake, and then departed silently, murmuring that it was “fermosisimo,” and getting on their horses noiselessly were gone, and in a minute disappeared upon the plain. Then came the Novena with prayer and carols, the prayers read by Xavier himself out of a tattered book, all the assembled family joining with unction in the responses, and beating on their breasts. Luis and all the slaves joined in the carols lustily, especially in one sung in a minor key long-drawn-out as asailor’s shanty, or a forebitter sung in a calm whilst waiting for a breeze. After each verse there was a kind of chorus calling upon the sinner to repent, bidding him have no fear but still hold on, and thus exhorting him—
“Chegai, Chegai, pecador, áo pe da cruzFica nosso Senhor.”
“Chegai, Chegai, pecador, áo pe da cruzFica nosso Senhor.”
Christmas Day found us all at mass in the little church, horses and mules being tied outside the door to the trees in the plaza, and some left hobbled, and all waiting as if St. Hubert was about to issue forth and bless them.
Painfully and long, the preacher dwelt upon the glorious day, the country people listening as it were new to them, and as if all the events had happened on the plain hard by. In the evening rockets announced the joyful news, and the stars shone out over the woods and plains as on the evening when the bright particular star guided the three sheikhs to some such place as was the rancho of our host.
Christmas rejoicings over, a month sped past and found us still, so to speak, wind-bound in the little town. No one would buy our horses, some of which died bitten by snakes. It was impossible to think of going on, and to return equally difficult, so that there seemed a probability of being obliged to pass a lifetime in the place. People began to look at us half in a kindly, halfcontemptuous way, as people look in general upon those who fail, especially when they themselves have never tried to do anything at all but live, and having done it with considerable success look upon failure as a sort of minor crime, to be atoned for by humility, and to be reprobated after the fashion of adultery, with a half-deprecating laugh. Sometimes we borrowed ancient flint-lock guns and lay in wait for tapirs, but never saw them, as in the thick woods they move as silently as moles in sand, and leave as little trace. Luis told of how, mounted on a half-wild horse, he had long ago lassoed a tapir, and found himself and horse dragged slowly and invincibly towards a stream, the horse resisting terrified, the “gran besta”[51]apparently quite cool, so that at last he had to cut his lasso and escape from what he called the greatest peril of his life; he thought he was preserved partly by the interposition of the saints and partly by a “fetiço” which, in defiance of religion, he luckily had hanging round his neck.
Just when all hope was gone, and we thought seriously of leaving the horses to their fate, and pushing on with some of the best of them towards Rio, a man appeared upon the scene, and offered to buy them, half for money and half “a troco,” that is barter, for it appeared he was a pawnbroker and had a house full of silver horse-gear, whichhad never been redeemed. After much bargaining we closed for three hundred dollars and a lot of silver bridles, spurs, whips, and other stuff, after reserving four of the best horses for ourselves to make our journey back. At the head of so much capital our spirits rose, and we determined to push on to Paraguay, crossing the Uruguay and Parana, ride through the Misiones, and at Asuncion, where I had friends, take ship;aguas abajo, for the River Plate. We paid our debts and bid good-bye to Xavier, his wife and sallow daughters, and to all the slaves; gave Luis a silver-mounted whip, bought some provisions, put on our silver spurs, bridles, and as much as possible of the silver gear we had become possessed of, and at daybreak, mounted upon a cream-and-white piebald, the “Bayo Overo,” and a red bay known as the “Pateador,” leading a horse apiece, we passed out of Xavier’s “potrero,”[52]and started on the road.
During the last few days at Xavier’s we had taught the horses we intended to take to Paraguay to eat Indian corn, fastening them up without any other food all day, and putting salt into their mouths. The art once learnt, we had to stand beside them whilst they ate, to keep off chickens and pigs who drove them from their food, the horses being too stupid to help themselves. If I remember rightly, their ration was eight cobs, which we husked for them in our hands, blisteringour fingers in the process as they had been burned. But now the trouble of the process was repaid, the horses going strongly all day long. We passed out of the little plain, skirted a pine-wood, rode up a little hill, and saw the country stretching towards the Uruguay, a park-like prairie interspersed with trees. Cruz Alta, a white patch shining against the green-grey plain encircled with its woods, was just in sight, the church-tower standing like a needle in the clear air against the sky. Half a league more and it dropped out of view, closing the door upon a sort of half Bœotian Arcady, but remaining still a memory after twenty years, with all the little incidents of the three months’ sojourn in the place fresh, and yet seeming as they had happened not to myself, but to a person I had met, and who had told the tale.
By easy stages we journeyed on, descending gradually towards the Uruguay, passing through country almost unpopulated, so large were the “fazendas,” and so little stocked. In the last century the Jesuits had here collected many tribes of Indians, and their history, is it not told in the pages of Montoya Lozano, Padre Guevara, and the other chroniclers of the doings of the “Company,” and to be read in the Archivo de Simancas, in that of Seville, and the uncatalogued “legajos” of the national library at Madrid? Throughout the country that we passed through, the fierce Paulistas had raided in times gone by, carrying off theChristian Indians to be slaves. The Portuguese and Spaniards had often fought—witness the names “O matto[54a]Portogues, O matto Castelhano,” and the like, showing where armies had manoeuvred, whilst the poor Indians waited like sheep, rejoicing when the butchers turned the knife at one another’s throats. To-day all trace of Jesuits and Missions have long disappeared, save for a ruined church or two, and here and there a grassy mound called in the language of the country a “tapera,”[54b]showing where a settlement had stood.
We camped at lonely ranchos inhabited, in general, by free negroes, or by the side of woods, choosing, if possible, some little cove in the wood, in which we tied the horses, building a fire in the mouth, laid down and slept, after concocting a vile beverage bought in Cruz Alta under the name of tea, but made I think of birch-leaves, and moistening pieces of the hard jerked beef in orange-juice to make it palatable.
So after five or six days of steady travelling, meeting, if I remember rightly, not a living soul upon the way, except a Gaucho from the Banda Oriental, who one night came to our fire, and seeing the horrible brew of tea in a tin-pot askedfor a little of the “black water,” not knowing what it was, we reached the Uruguay. The river, nearly half-a-mile in breadth, flowed sluggishly between primeval woods, great alligators basked with their backs awash, flamingoes fished among the shallow pools, herons and cranes sat on dead stumps, vultures innumerable perched on trees, and in the purple bunches of the “seibos” humming-birds seemed to nestle, so rapid was their flight, and over all a darkish vapour hung, blending the trees and water into one, and making the “balsa,” as it laboured over after repeated calls, look like the barque of Styx. Upon the other side lay Corrientes, once a vast mission territory, but to-day, in the narrow upper portion that we traversed, almost a desert, that is a desert of tall grass with islands of timber dotted here and there, and an occasional band of ostriches scudding across the plain.
Camped by a wood about a quarter of a league from a lonely rancho, we were astonished, just at even-fall, by the arrival of the owner of the house mounted upon a half-wild horse, a spear in his hand, escorted by his two ragged sons mounted on half-wild ponies, and holding in their hands long canes to which a broken sheep-shear had been fixed. The object of his visit, as he said, was to inquire if we had seen a tiger which had killed some sheep, but his suspicious glance made me think he thought we had designs upon his cattle, and he had cometo reconnoitre us; but our offer of some of the Cruz Alta tea soon made us friends, and after drinking almost a quart of it, he said “Muy rico,” and rode back to his house.
The third day’s riding brought us to the little town of Candelaria, built on a high bank over the Parana. Founded on Candlemas Day in 1665, it was the chief town of the Jesuit missions. Here, usually, the “Provincial”[56a]resided, and here the political business of their enormous territory was done. Stretching almost from Cruz Alta to within fifty leagues of Asuncion del Paraguay, and from Yapeyú upon the Uruguay almost to the “Salto de Guayra” upon the Parana, the territory embraced an area larger than many a kingdom, and was administered without an army, solely by about two hundred priests. The best proof of the success of their administration is that in these days the Indians, now to be numbered by a few thousand, were estimated at about two hundred thousand, and peopled all the country now left desolate, or which at least was desolate at the time of which I write. Even Azara,[56b]a bitter opponent of their system, writes of the Jesuit rule—“Although the Fathers had supreme command, they used their power with a gentleness and moderation which one cannot but admire.”[56c]
I leave to the economists, with all the reverend rabble rout of politicians, statistic-mongers and philanthropists, whether or not two hundred thousand living Indians were an asset in the world’s property; and to the pious I put this question, If, as I suppose, these men had souls just as immortal as our own, might it not have been better to preserve their bodies, those earthly envelopes without which no soul can live, rather than by exposing them to all those influences which the Jesuits dreaded, to kill them off, and leave their country without population for a hundred years?
But at the time of which I write neither my partner nor I cared much for speculations of that kind, but were more occupied with the condition of our horses, for, by that time, the “Bayo Overo” and the “Pateador” were become part and parcel of ourselves, and we thought more about their welfare than that of all the Indians upon earth.
La Candelaria, at the time when we passed through, was fallen from its proud estate, and had become a little Gaucho country town with sandy streets and horses tied at every door—a barren sun-burnt plaza, with a few Japanese ash-trees and Paraisos; the “Commandancia” with the Argentineblue-and-white barred flag, and trade-mark rising sun, hanging down listlessly against the post, and for all remnants of the Jesuit sway, the college turned into a town-hall, and the fine church, which seemed to mourn over the godless, careless, semi-Gaucho population in the streets. Here we disposed of our spare horses, bidding them good-bye, as they had been old friends, and got the “Bayo Overo” and the “Pateador” shod for the first time in their lives, an operation which took the united strength of half-a-dozen men to achieve, but was imperative, as their feet, accustomed to the stone-less plains of Paraguay, had suffered greatly in the mountain paths. In Candelaria, for the first time for many months, we sat down to a regular meal, in a building called “El Hotel Internacional”; drank wine of a suspicious kind, and seemed to have arrived in Paris, so great the change to the wild camps beside the forests, or the nights passed in the lone ranchos of the hilly district of Brazil.
A balsa drawn by a tug-boat took us across the Parana, here more than a mile broad, to Ytapua, and upon landing we found ourselves in quite another world. The little Paraguayan town of Ytapua, called by the Jesuits Encarnacion, lay, with its little port below it (where my friend Enrico Clerici had his store), upon a plateau hanging above the stream. The houses, built of canes and thatched with straw, differed extremely fromthe white “azotea” houses of the Candelaria on the other side. The people, dress, the vegetation, and the mode of life, differed still more in every aspect. The Paraguayan, with his shirt hanging outside his white duck trousers, bare feet, and cloak made of red cloth or baize, his broad straw hat and quiet manner, was the complete antithesis of the high-booted, loose-trousered, poncho-wearing Correntino, with his long knife and swaggering Gaucho air. The one a horseman of the plains, the other a footman of the forests; the Correntino brave even to rashness when taken man for man, but so incapable of discipline as to be practically useless as a soldier. The other as quiet as a sheep, and individually patient even to suffering blows, but once gathered together and instructed in the use of arms, as good a soldier, when well led, as it is possible to find; active and temperate, brave, and, if rather unintelligent, eager to risk his life at any time at the command of any of his chiefs. Such was the material from which Lopez, coward and grossly incompetent as he was, formed the battalions which for four years kept both Buenos Ayres and Brazil at bay, and only yielded when he himself was killed, mounted, as tradition has it, on the last horse of native breed left in the land.
But if the people and their dwellings were dissimilar, the countries in themselves were to the full at least as different. All through the upper partof Corrientes the soil is black, and the country open, park-like prairie dotted with trees; in Ytapua and the surrounding district, the earth bright red, and the primeval forest stretches close to the water’s edge. In Corrientes still the trees of the Pampas are occasionally seen, Talas and ñandubay with Coronillo and Lapacho; whereas in Paraguay, as by a bound, you pass to Curupay,[60a]Tatané,[60b]the Tarumá,[60c]the Ñandipá,[60d]the Jacaranda, and the Paratodo with its bright yellow flowers; whilst upon every tree lianas cling with orchidaceæ, known to the natives as “flowers of the air,” and through them all flit great butterflies, humming-birds dart, and underneath the damp vegetation of the sub-tropics, emphorbiaceæ, solanaceæ, myrtaceæ, and flowers and plants to drive a thousand botanists to madness, blossom and die unnamed. Here, too, the language changed, and Guarani became the dominant tongue, which, though spoken in Corrientes, is there used but occasionally, but among Paraguayans is their native speech, only the Alcaldes, officers, and upper classes as a general rule (at that time) speaking Spanish, and even then with a strange accent and much mixed with Guarani.
Two days we passed in Ytapua resting our horses, and I renewed my friendship with Enrico Clerici, an Italian, who had served with Garibaldi,and who, three years ago, I had met in the same place and given him a silver ring which he reported galvanized, and was accustomed to lend as a great favour for a specific against rheumatism. He kept a pulperia, and being a born fighter, his delight was, when a row occurred (which he styled “una barulla de Jesu Cristo”), to clear the place by flinging empty bottles from the bar. A handsome, gentlemanlike man, and terrible with a bottle in his hand, whether as weapon of offence or for the purposes of drink; withal well educated, and no doubt by this time long dead, slain by his favourite weapon, and his place filled by some fat, double-entry Basque or grasping Catalan, or by some portly emigrant from Germany.
Not wishing to be confined within a house, a prey to the mosquitoes, we camped in the chief square, and strolling round about the town, I came on an old friend.
Not far outside the village a Correntino butcher had his shop, a little straw-thatched hut, with strings of fresh jerked beef festooning all the place; the owner stood outside dressed in the costume of a Gaucho of the southern plains. I did not know him, and we began to talk, when I perceived, tied underneath a shed, a fine, dark chestnut horse, saddled and bitted in the most approved of Gaucho style. He somehow seemed familiar, and the Correntino, seeing me looking at his horse, asked if I knew the brand, but looking at it I failed torecognize it, when on a sudden my memory was lighted up. Three years ago, in an “estero”[62]outside Caapucú, at night, journeying in company with a friend, one Hermann, whose only means of communication with me was a jargon of Spanish mixed with “Plaat Deutsch,” we met a Correntino, and as our horses mutually drowned our approach by splashing with their feet, our meeting terrified us both. Frightened, he drew his knife, and I a pistol, and Hermann lugged out a rusty sword, which he wore stuck through his horse’s girths. But explanations followed, and no blood was shed, and then we drew aside into a little hillock, called in the language of the place an “albardon,” sat down and talked, and asking whence he came was told from Ytapua. Now Ytapua was three days’ journey distant on an ordinary horse, and I looked carefully at the horse, and wondered why his owner had ridden him so hard. He, I now saw, was the horse I had seen that night, and the Correntino recognized me, and laughing said he had killed a man near Ytapua, and was (as he said) “retreating” when he met me in the marsh. The horse, no doubt, was one of the best for a long journey I have ever seen, and after quoting to his owner that “a dark chestnut horse may die, but cannottire,”[63a]we separated, and, no doubt, for years afterwards our meeting was the subject of his talk.
No doubt the citizens of Ytapua were scandalized at our not coming to the town, and the Alcalde came to interview us, but we assured him that in virtue of a vow we slept outside, and in a moment all his fears were gone.
Striking right through the then desolated Misiones, passing the river Aguapey, our horses almost swimming, skirting by forests where red macaws hovered like hawks and parrots chattered; passing through open plains grown over here and there with Yatais,[63b]splashing for hours through wet esteros, missing the road occasionally, as I had travelled it but once, and then three years ago, and at the time I write of huts were few and far between, and population scanty, we came, upon the evening of the second day, near to a place called Ñacuti. This was the point for which I had been making, for near it was an estancia[63c]called the “Potrero San Antonio,” the property of Dr. Stewart, a well-known man in Paraguay. Nature had seemed to work to make the place impregnable. On three sides of the land, which measured eight or ten miles in length on every side, forks ofa river ran, and at the fourth they came so close together that a short fence, not half-a-mile in length, closed up the circle, and cattle once inside were safe but for the tigers, which at that time abounded, and had grown so fierce by reason of the want of population that they sometimes killed horses or cows close to the door of the house. A short “picada,” of about a quarter of a mile in length, cut through the wood, led to the gate. Through it in times gone by I often rode at night in terror, with a pistol in my hand, the heavy foliage of the trees brushing my hat, and thinking every instant that a tiger would jump out. One night when close up to the bamboo bars I heard a grunt, thought my last hour had come, fired, and brought something down; approached, and found it was a peccary; and then, tearing the bars down in a hurry, got to horse, and galloped nine miles to the house, thinking each moment that the herd of peccaries was close behind and panting for my blood.
On this occasion all was still; the passage through the orange trees was dark, their scent oppressive, as the leaves just stirred in the hot north wind, and fire-flies glistened to and fro amongst the flowers; great bats flew heavily, and the quarter of a mile seemed mortal, and as if it led to hell.
Nothing occurred, and coming to the bars we found them on the ground; putting them up we conscientiously cursed the fool who left them outof place, and riding out into the moonlight, after a little trouble found the sandy, deep-banked trail which led up to the house. All the nine miles we passed by islands of great woods, peninsulas and archipelagos jutting out into the still plain, and all their bases swathed in white mists like water: the Yatais looked ghostly standing starkly in the grass; from the lagoons came the shrill croak of frogs, great moths came fluttering across our path, and the whole woods seemed filled with noise, as if the dwellers in them, silent through the day, were keeping holiday at night. As for the past two days we had eaten nothing but a few oranges and pieces of jerked beef, moistening them in the muddy water of the streams, our talk was of the welcome we should get, the supper, and of the comfortable time we then should pass for a few days to give our horses rest.
We passed the tiger-trap, a structure built after the fashion of an enormous mouse-trap, of strong bamboos; skirted along a wood in which an ominous growling and rustling made our horses start, and then it struck me as curious that there were no cattle feeding in the plain, no horses, and that the whole potrero seemed strangely desolate; but the house just showing at the edge of a small grove of peach-trees drove all these speculations out of my head: thinking upon the welcome, and the dinner, for we had eaten nothing since daybreak, and were fasting, as the natives say, from everything but sin,we reached the door. The house was dark, no troop of dogs rushed out to bark and seize our horses’ tails; we shouted, hammered with our whips, fired our revolvers, and nothing answered us.
Dismounting, we found everything bolted and barred, and going to the back, on the kitchen-hearth a few red embers, and thus knew that some one had been lately in the place. Nothing to eat, the woods evidently full of tigers, and our horses far too tired to start again, we were just about to unsaddle and lie down and sleep, when a white figure stole out from the peach-trees, and tried to gain the shelter of the corral some sixty yards away. Jumping on horseback we gave chase, and coming up with the fugitive found it to be a Paraguayan woman, who with her little daughter were the sole inhabitants, her husband having gone to the nearest village to buy provisions, and left her all alone, warning her earnestly before he left to keep the doors shut during the night on account of the tigers, and not to venture near the woods even in daylight till he should have come back. Finding herself confronted by two armed, mounted men, dressed in the clothes of Correntinos, who had an evil reputation in Paraguay, her terror was extreme. Her daughter, a little girl of eight or nine, crept out from behind a tree, and in a moment we were friends. Unluckily for us, she had no food of any kind, and but a little maté, which sheprepared for us. She then remembered that the trees were covered with peaches, and went out and gathered some, but they were hard as stones; nevertheless we ate a quantity of them, and having tied our horses close to the house, not twenty paces from the door, in long lush grass, we lay down in the verandah, and did not wake till it was almost noon. When we awoke we found the woman had been up betimes and gone on foot five or six miles away to look for food. She brought some mandioca, and two or three dozen oranges, and a piece of almost putrefied jerked beef, all which we ate as heartily as if it had been the most delicious food on earth.
To my annoyance I found my horse weak and dejected, and several large clots of dried-up blood under the hair of his mane, and saw at once a vampire bat had fixed upon him, and no doubt sucked almost a quart of blood. We washed him in a pond close to the house, and he got better, and after eating some of the hard and unripe peaches we again lay down to sleep. By evening the woman’s husband had returned, and proved to be a little lame and withered-looking man, mounted upon a lean and skinny horse. He undertook to guide us to Asuncion, remarking that it was twenty years since he had seen the capital, but that he knew the road as if he was accustomed to go there every day. With a slight lapsus this turned out to be the case, and just at daybreak we left the PotreroSan Antonio, where once before I had passed a month roaming about the woods, waiting for tigers in a tree at night, and never thinking that, in three years’ time, I should return and find it desolate. It seemed that Dr. Stewart, not finding the speculation pay, had sold his cattle, and his manager, one Oliver, a Californian “Forty-niner,” and his Paraguayan wife, had removed to a place some twenty leagues away, upon the road towards Asuncion.
There we determined to go and rest our horses, and left the place, our guide Florencio’s wife impressing on him to be sure and bring her back a little missal from the capital, and he, just like an Arab or an Indian leaving home, unmoved, merely observing that the folk in Asuncion were “muy ladino” (very cunning), and it behoved a Christian to take care.
A day’s long march brought us near Santa Rosa, and our guide here fell into his first and only error on the road. Pursuing an interminable palm-wood, we came out upon a little plain, all broken here and there with stunted Yatais, then to our great disgust the road bifurcated, and our guide insisted on striking to the left, though I was almost certain it was wrong. After an hour of heavy ploughing through the sand, I suddenly saw two immense palm-trees about a league away upon the right, and luckily remembered that they stood one on each side of the old Jesuit church at Santa Rosa,and after an hour of scrambling through a stony wood arrived at the crossing of the little river just outside the place. Girls carrying water-jars upon their heads, and dressed in long white shifts, embroidered round the neck with coarse black lace, were going and coming in a long procession to the stream. A few old men and about thirty boys composed almost the entire male population of the town. Women entirely ruled the roost, and managed everything, and, as far as I can now recall, did it not much more inefficiently than men. The curious wooden church, dark, and with overhanging eaves, and all the images of saints still left from Jesuit times in choir and nave, with columns hewn from the trunks of massive trees, stood in the centre of the village, which was built after the fashion of a miner’s “row,” or of a St. Simonian phalanstery, each dwelling at least a hundred feet in length, and all partitioned off in the inside for ten or fifteen families. The plaza was overgrown with grass, and on it donkeys played, chasing each other up and down, and sometimes running up the wooden steps of the great church, and stumbling down again. Those who had horses led them down to bathe, cut “pindo”[69]for them, rode them at evening time, and passed their time in dressing and in combing them to get them into condition for the Sunday’s running at the ring, which sport introduced by the Jesuits has continued popular in allthe villages of the Misiones up to the present time. The women flirted with the men, who by their rarity were at a premium, gave themselves airs, and went about surrounded by a perpetual and admiring band. The single little shop, which contained needles, gunpowder, and gin, was kept by an Italian, who, as he told me, liked the place, lent money, was a professing and quite unabashed polygamist, and I have no doubt long ere this time has made a fortune, and retired to live at Genoa in the self-same green velvet suit in which he left his home.
In this Arcadia we remained some days, and hired several girls to bathe the horses, which they performed most conscientiously, splashing and shouting in the stream for hours at a time, and bringing back the horses clean, and garnished with flowers in their manes. I rode one day to see a village two or three leagues away, where report said some of the Jesuit books had been preserved; got lost, and passed the night in a small clearing, where a fat and well-cared-for-looking handsome roan horse was tied. On seeing me he broke his picket-rope, ran furiously four or five times round me in circles, and then advancing put his nostrils close to the nostrils of my horse, and seemed to talk to him. His owner, an old Paraguayan, lame from a wound received in jumping from a canoe onto the deck of a Brazilian ironclad, told me his horse had been with him far into the interior, andfor a year had never seen another horse. But, he said, “Tata Dios has given every animal its speech after its kind, and he is glad to see your horse, and is no doubt asking him the news.”
During the night, I cannot say exactly what the two horses talked about, but the old Paraguayan talked for hours of his adventures in the lately terminated war. It appeared that he, with seven companions, thinking to take a Brazilian ironclad anchored in the Paraguay, concealed themselves in a small canoe, behind some drift-wood, and floating plants called “camalotes,” drifted down with the stream, and coming to the ship jumped with a yell aboard. The Brazilians, taken by surprise, all ran below, and the poor Paraguayans thinking the ship was theirs, sat quietly down upon the deck to plan what they should do. Seeing them off their guard, some of the crew turned a gun upon them, and at the first fire killed six, and wounded my host, who sprang into the stream, and gained the bank, but most unluckily not on the Paraguayan side. As at that time the Chaco Indians, who had profited by the war to make invasions upon every side, killed every Christian, as my host said “sin perdon,” so he remained half starving for a night and day. On the third morning, wounded as he was, and seeing he must starve or else be killed if seen by Indians, he got a fallen tree, and with great difficulty, and marvellously escaping the fierce fish who come likewolves to the scent of blood, and unmolested by the alligators, he reached the other side. There he was found by some women, lying unconscious on the river-bank, was cured, and though scarred in a dozen places, and lame for life, escaped, as he informed me, by his devotion to San José, whom he described under the title of the “husband of the mother of our Lord.”
In the morning he rode a league with me upon the way, and as we parted his horse neighed shrilly, reared once or twice, and plunged, and when we separated I looked back and saw the devotee of St. Joseph sitting as firmly as a centaur, as his horse loped along the sandy palm-tree-bordered trail. During our stay at Santa Rosa, which was an offshoot from the more important mission of Santa Maria de Fé, although they had no priest the people gathered in the church, the Angelus was rung at evening for the “oracion,” and every one on hearing it took off his hat and murmured something that he thought apposite. Thus did ceremony, always much more important than mere faith, continue, and no doubt blessed the poor people to the full as much as if it had been duly sanctified by a tonsured priest, and consecrated by a rightly constituted offertory. We left the place with real regret, and to this day, when in our hurried life I dream of peace, my thoughts go back to the old Paraguayan Jesuit “capilla” lost in the woods of Morosimo, Curupay, and Yba-hai, andwith its two tall feathery palm-trees rustling above the desecrated church; to the long strings of white-robed women carrying water-jars, and to the old-world life, perhaps by this time altered and swept away, or yet again not altered, and passing still in the same quiet fashion as when we were there.
Little by little we left the relatively open country of the Misiones behind, and passing Ibyra-pucú, San Roque, and Ximenes, came to the river Tebicuary. We passed it in canoes, the horses swimming, with their backs awash and heads emerging like water-monsters, whilst an impassive Indian paddled in the stern, and a young girl stood in the bows wielding a paddle like a water-sprite. The river passed, we got at once into the forests, and followed winding and narrow paths, worn by the footsteps of the mules of ages so deeply that our heavy Gaucho spurs almost trailed on the ground, whilst overhead lianas now and then quite formed a roof, and in the heavy air winged animals of every kind made life a burden. At last, leaving the little town of Quiquyó upon the right, we emerged on to a high and barren plain near Caapucú. On the evening of the second day from where we crossed the river, we came to Caballero Punta, just underneath a range of flattish hills, and riding to the door at a sharp gallop, pulled up short, and found ourselves greeted by the ex-manager of the Potrero San Antonio, my friend the “Forty-niner,” and for the first time for four months saw a familiar face.Gentle and kindly, though quick on the trigger, as befitted one who had crossed the plains in ’48 on foot, and with his whole possessions packed on a bullock, passing the Rocky Mountains alone, and through the hostile tribes at that time powerful and savage, John Oliver was one of those strange men who, having passed their lives in perils and privations, somehow draw from them that very kindliness which those living in what appear more favourable surroundings so often lack. Born somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales (these he remembered well), and as he thought “back somewhere in the twenties,” he had suffered all his life from the strange fever which impels some men to search for gold. Not on the Stock Exchange, or any of those places where it might reasonably be expected to be found, but in Australia, California, Mexico, in short wherever life was hard, death easy, and experience to be gathered, he sought with pick and shovel, rocker and pan and cradle, the “yellow iron,” as the Apaches used to call it, which sought and found after the fashion of his kind, enriches some one else. From California he had drifted to Peru, from thence to Chile, but finding silver-mining too laborious or too lucrative for his conversing, and hearing of a fertile diggings opened in the Republic of Uruguay, had migrated there, and arrived somehow in Paraguay to find that the enchantment of his life was done, and settled down to live. Tall, and with long grey hair hanging in Western fashiondown his back, a careful horseman after the style of the trappers of the West, his pale blue eyes looked out upon the world as with an air of doubt; yet he had served in San Francisco as a “vigilante,” sojourned with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, leaving as he confessed two or three wives among the saints, sat in Judge Lynch’s court a dozen times, most probably had killed a man or two; still, to my fancy, if the meek are to inherit any portion of the earth, his share should not be small.
He made us welcome, and his wife waited upon us, never presuming to sit down and eat, but standing ready with a napkin fringed with lace, to wipe our hands, pressing the food upon us, and behaving generally as if she found herself in the presence of some strange beings of an unfamiliar race. He said he had no children and was glad of it, for he explained that “Juaneeter was a good woman, but ‘uneddicated,’ and he had never taken thoroughly to half-caste pups, though he remembered some born of a Pi-Ute woman, way back somewhere about the fifties, who he supposed by now were warriors, and had taken many scalps.” His wife stood by, not understanding any English and but little Spanish, which he himself spoke badly, and their talk was held in a strange jargon mixed with Guarani, without a verb, without a particle, and yet sufficient for the two simple creatures whom a strange fate, or a discerning, ever-watchful Providence, had thus ordained tomeet. No books were in the place, except a Bible, which he read little of late years, partly from failing sight, and partly, as he said, because he had detected what seemed to him “exaggerations,” chiefly in figures and as to the number of the unbelievers whom the Chosen People slew. Two days or more, for time was taken no account of in his house, we waited with him, talking late every night of Salt Lake, Brigham Young, the Mountain-meadows Massacre, Kit Carson, Cochise and Mangas Coloradas, and matters of that kind which interested him, and which, when all is said, are just as interesting to those attuned to them, as is polemical theology, theories of art, systems of jurisprudence, the origin of the Atoll Islands, or any of the wise futilities with which men stock their minds. We parted on the third or fourth, or perhaps the fifth or sixth day, knowing that we should never meet again, and taking off my silver spurs I gave them to him, and he presented me with a light summer poncho woven by his wife. Much did he thank me for my visit, and made me swear never to pass the district without stopping at his house. This I agreed to do, and if I pass again either by Caballero Punta or by Caapucú, I will keep faith; but he, I fear, will have deceived me, and in the churchyard of the “capilla,” under a palm-tree, with a rough cross above him, I shall find my simple friend.
Three or four days of jogging steadily, passingby Quindy, and through the short “estero” of Acaai, which we passed splashing for several hours up to the girths, brought us to Paraguari, which, with its saddle-shaped mountain overhanging it, stood out a mark for leagues upon the level plain. Seldom in any country have I seen a railway so fall into the landscape as did the line at the little terminus of this the only railway in all Paraguay. The war had left the country almost in ruins, business was at a standstill, food was scarce, and but for a bale or two of tobacco, and a hide-sack or two of yerba, the train went empty to and fro. But as the people always wanted to go to the capital in search of work, six or eight empty trucks were always sent with every train. On them the people (mostly women) swarmed, seated like flies, upon the top and sides, dangling their legs outside like people sitting on a wharf, talking incessantly, all dressed in white, and every one, down to the smallest children, smoking large cigars. Six hours the passage took, if all went well, the distance being under fifty miles. If aught went wrong, it took a day or more, and at the bridges the trucks were all unhooked and taken over separately, so rotten was the state of the whole line, and in addition every here and there bridges had been blown away during the war, and roughly rendered serviceable by shoring up with wood. To meet a train labouring and puffing through the woods, the people clustering like bees upon the trucks, the engineer seatedin shirt-sleeves, whilst some women stoked the fire, was much the same as it is to meet a caravan meandering across the sands. If you desired to talk with any one the train incontinently stopped, the passengers got out, relit their cigarettes, the women begged, the time of day was passed, and curiosity thus satisfied you passed on upon the road, and the “Maquina-guazu,”[78]as it was called, pursued contentedly the jolting and uneven tenor of its way. We naturally despised it, though the conductor, scenting business, offered to take us and our horses at almost any price we chose.
By the Laguna Ypocarai we took our way; skirting along its eastern shores, then desolate, and the whole district almost depopulated, we passed by palm-groves and deserted mandioca patches, reed cottages in ruins, watched the flamingoes fishing in the lake, the alligators lying motionless, and saw an Indian all alone in a dug-out canoe, casting his line as placidly as he had lived before the coming of the Spaniards to the land. A red-blue haze hung on the waters of the lake, reflected from the bright red earth, peeping between the trees, and on the islands drifts of mist gave an effect as if the palms were parachutes dropped from balloons, or perhaps despatched from earth to find out whether in the skies there could be anything more lovely than this quiet inland sea. Close to the top end of the lake stands Aregua, once under the Mercenary friars ofAsuncion, who, as Azara says, having made the people of the place work for them for near two hundred years, began to think they were indeed their slaves, till an official sent from Spain in 1783 gave them their liberty, and the Mercenaries (as he says) at once retreated in disgust. Here we fell in with a compatriot, who at our time of meeting him was drunk. He told us that he passed his time after the fashion of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, and on arriving at his house it seemed he was provided with several wives, but of the flocks and herds, and other trade-marks of his supposed estate, we saw no trace. Still he was hospitable, setting the women to cut down pindo for the horses, take them to water, bathe them, and finally to cook some dinner for ourselves. His chief complaint was that his wives were Catholics, and now and then trudged off to mass, and left him without any one to cook his food. I doubted personally if a change of creed would better things, but held my peace, seeing the man set store by the faith which he had learnt in youth and still said he practised, but, as far as I could see, only by cursing the religion of the people of the place. We left his house without regret, though he was hospitable and half drunk for nearly all the time that we were there, and started on our last day’s march considerably refreshed by meeting one who in a foreign land, far from home ties and moral influences, yet still pursued the simple practice of the faith which he had learned at home.
Luque, upon its little hill, the Campo Grande, like a dry lake, surrounded by thick woods on every side, and then the Recoleta, we passed, and entering the red sandy road made at the conquest to move troops upon, we saw the churches of Asuncion only a league away. And yet we lingered, walking our horses slowly in the deep red sand, passing the strings of countrywomen with baskets on their heads, driving their donkeys packed with sugar-cane, and smoking as they went; we lingered, feeling that the trip was done; not that we minded that our fortunes were not made, but vaguely felt that for the last five months we had lived a time which in our lives we should not see again, and fearing rather than looking forward to all the approaching change. The horses too were fat, in good condition, had become old friends, knew us so well we never tied them, but all night in camp left them to feed, being certain that they would not stray; and thus to leave them at the end of a long trip seemed as unreasonable as to part from an old friend simply because death calls.
The road grew wider, passed through some scattered houses, buried in orange and guayaba trees, ran through some open patches where grew wild indigo and castor-oil plants, with a low palm-scrub, entered a rancheria just outside the town, and then turned to a sandy street which merged in a great market, where, as it seemed, innumerable myriads were assembled, all chattering at once, orso it struck us coming from the open solitary plains and the dark silent woods. The lowness of the river having stopped the Brazilian mail-boat from coming down from Corumba, we put up at the “Casa Horrocks,” the resort of all the waifs and strays storm-bound in Paraguay. The town buried in vegetation, the sandy streets, all of them watercourses after a night’s rain, the listless life, the donkeys straying to and fro, the white-robed women, with their hair hanging down their backs, and cut square on the forehead after the style so usual amongst Iceland ponies, the great unfinished palaces, the squares with grass five or six inches high, and over all the reddish haze blending the palm-trees, houses, sandy streets, the river and the distant Chaco into a copper-coloured whole at sunset, rise to my memory like the reflection of a dream. A dream seen in a convex mirror, opening away from me as years have passed, the actual things, men, actions, and occurrences of daily life seem swollen in it at the far end of some perspective, but the impression of the whole fresh and clear-cut in memory, standing out as boldly as the last day when on the “Pateador” I had a farewell gallop on the beach. Adios, “Pateador,” or “till so long”—horses will be born as good, better, ten thousand times more valuable, and dogs will eat them, but for myself, and for the owner of the “Bayo Overo,” not all the coursers of the sun could stir the reminiscences of youth, of lonelycamping-grounds, long nights in drenching rain, struggles with wind, wild gallops in the dark; the hopes and fears of the five months when we went fortune-seeking, and by God’s mercy failed in our search, as the mere mention of those names forgotten to all the world except ourselves.
Eight or ten days had passed away, and we grew quite familiar with the chief features of the place, having made acquaintance with the Brazilian officers of the army and the fleet, the German apothecary, with Dr. Stewart, the chief European of the place, when news came that the Brazilian mail-boat had at last arrived. We bade our friends good-bye, entrusted both our horses to the care of Horrocks, fed them ourselves for the last time, and went on board the ship; a coppery haze hung over everything, the heat raising a faint quivering in the air, the thick yellowish water of the stream lapping against the vessel’s sides like oil, the boat shoved off, our friends perspiring in the sun raising a washed-out cheer. The vessel swung into the stream, her paddles turned, the great green flag with the orange crown imperial flapped at the jackstaff, and the town dropped rapidly astern.
A quarter of a league and the church towers, tall palm-trees, the unfinished palaces, and the great theatre began to fade into the haze. Then sheering a little to the Left bank, the vessel passed a narrow tongue of land covered with grass, whereon two horses fed. As we drew nearer I saw theywere our own, and jumping on the taffrail shouted “Adios,” at which they raised their heads, or perhaps raised them but at the snorting steamer, and as they looked we passed racing down stream, and by degrees they became dimmer, smaller, less distinct, and at the last melted and vanished into the reddish haze.
Thetall, flaxen-haired stewardess Matilda had finished cutting Schwartzbrod and had gone to bed. The Danish boarhound slept heavily under the lee of the chicken-coops, the six or seven cats were upon the cabin sofa, and with the wind from the south-west, raising a terrific sea, and sending showers of spray flying over the tops of the black rocks which fringed the town, the S.S.Oldenburggot under way and staggered out into the gut.
The old white city girt on the seaward side by its breakwater of tall black rocks, the houses dazzlingly white, the crenelated walls, the long stretch of sand, extending to the belt of grey-green scrub and backed in the distance by the sombre forest, lay in the moonlight as distinct and clear as it had been mid-day. Clearer perhaps, for the sun in a sandy landscape seems to blur the outlines which the moon reveals; so that throughout North Africa night is the time to see a town in all its beauty of effect. The wind lifting the sand, drifted it whistling through the standing rigging of the tramp, coating the scarce dried paint, and making paint, rigging, and everything on board feellike a piece of shark-skin to the touch. The vessel groaned and laboured in the surface sea, and on the port quarter rose the rocks of the low island which forms the harbour, leaving an entrance of about half-a-mile between its shores and the rocks which guard the town.
West-south-west a little westerly, the wind ever increased; the sea lashed on the vessel’s quarter, and in spite of the dense volumes of black smoke and showers of sparks flying out from the salt-coated smoke-stack, the tramp seemed to stand still. Upon the bridge the skipper screamed hoarsely in Platt-Deutsch down his connection-tube to the chief engineer; men came and went in dirty blue check cotton clothes and wooden shoes; occasionally a perspiring fireman poked his head above the hatch, and looking seaward for a moment, scooped off the sweat from his forefinger, muttered, “Gott freduma,” and went below; even the Arab deck-hands, roused into activity, essayed to set a staysail, and the whole ship, shaken between the storm and the exertions of the crew, trembled and shivered in the yeasty sea. Nearer the rocks appeared, and the white town grew clearer, more intensely white, the sea frothed round the vessel, and the skipper advancing to a missionary seated silently gazing across the water with a pallid sea-green face, slapped him upon the back, and with an oath said, “Mister, will you have one glass of beer?” The Levite in partibus, clad in his blackalpaca Norfolk jacket, grey greasy flannel shirt and paper collar, with the whole man surmounted by the inevitable pith soup-tureen-shaped hat, the trade-mark of his confraternity, merely pressed both his hands harder upon his diaphragm and groaned. “One leetel glass beer, I have it from Olten, fifty dozen of it. Perhaps all to be wasted; have a glass beer, it will do your shtomag good.” The persecuted United Presbyterian ambulant broke silence with one of those pious ejaculations which do duty (in the congregations) for an oath, and taking up his parable, fixing the pith tureen upon his head with due precaution, said, “Captain, ye see I am a total abstainer, joined in the Whifflet, and in addeetion I feel my stomach sort o’ discomposed.” And to him again, good Captain Rindelhaus rejoined, “Well, Mister Missionary, do you see dat rocks?” The Reverend Mr. McKerrochar, squinting to leeward with an agonizing stare, admitted that he did, but qualified by saying, “there was sic a halgh, he was na sure that they were rocks at all.” “Not rocks! Kreuz-Sacrament, dose rocks you see are sharp as razors, and the back-wash off them give you no jance; I dell you, sheep’s-head preacher, dat point de way like signboard and not follow it oop himself, you better take glass beer in time, for if the schip not gather headway in about five minutes you perhaps not get another jance.” After this dictum, he stood looking into the night, his glass gripped in his lefthand, and in his right a half-smoked-out cigar, which he put to his mouth mechanically now and then, but drew no smoke from it. The missionary too looked at the rocks with increased interest, and the Arab pilot staggering up the ladder to the bridge stolidly pointed to the surf, and gave us his opinion, that “he, the captain and the faqui would soon be past the help of prayer,” piously adding, “that it seemed Allah’s will; although he thought the Kaffirs, sons of burnt Kaffirs, in the stoke-hole were not firing up.”
With groans and heavings, with long shivers which came over her as the sea struck her on the beam, the vessel fought for her life, belching great clouds of smoke out into the clear night air. Captain and missionary, pilot and crew, stood gazing at the sea; the captain now and then yelling some unintelligible Platt-Deutsch order down the tube; the missionary fumbling with a Bible lettered “Polyglot,” covered in black oil-cloth; and the pilot passing his beads between the fingers of his right hand, his eyes apparently not seeing anything; and it seemed as if another twenty minutes must have seen them all upon the rocks.
But Allah perhaps was on the watch; and the wind falling for an instant, or the burnt Kaffirs in the stoke-hole having struck a better vein of coal, the rusty iron sea-coffin slowly gathered headway, staggered as the engines driven to the highest pressure seemed to tear out her ribs, and forgedahead. Then lurching in the sea, the screw occasionally racing with a roar, and the black decks dripping and under water, the scuppers being choked with the filth of years, she sidled out to sea, and rose and fell in the long rollers outside the harbour, which came in from the west. Rindelhaus set her on her course, telling the Arab helmsman in the pigeon-English which served them as a means of interchanging their few ideas, “to keep her head north and by west a little northerly, and let him know when they were abreast of Jibel Hadid;” adding a condemnation of the Arab race in general and the particular sailor, whom he characterized as a “tamned heaven dog, not worth his kraut.” The sailor, dressed in loose Arab trousers and a blue jersey, the whole surmounted by a greasy fez, replied: “Yes, him know Jibel Hadid, captain, him keep her head north and by west all right,” and probably also consigned the captain and the whole Germanic race to the hottest corner of Jehannum, and so both men were pleased. The boarhound gambolled on the deck, Matilda peeped up the companion, her dripping wooden shoes looking like waterlogged canoes, and the Scotch missionary began to walk about, holding his monstrous hat on with one hand and hugging the oilskin-covered “Polyglot” under his left arm. Crossing the skipper in his walk, in a more cheerful humour he ventured to remark: “Eh! captain, maybe I could mak’ a shape at yon glass of beerthe now.” But things had changed, and Rindelhaus looked at him with the usual uncondescending bearing of the seaman to the mere passenger, and said: “Nein, you loose your obbordunity for dat glass beer, my friend, and now I have to navigate my ship.”
TheOldenburgpursued the devious tenor of her way, touching at ports which all were either open roadsteads or had bars on which the surf boiled with a noise like thunder; receiving cargo in driblets, a sack or two of marjoram, a bale of goatskins or of hides, two or three bags of wool, and sometimes waiting for a day or two unable to communicate until the surf went down. The captain spent his time in harbour fishing uninterestedly, catching great bearded spiky-finned sea-monsters which he left to die upon the deck. Not that he was hard-hearted, but merely unimaginative, after the way of those who, loving sport for the pleasure it affords themselves, hotly deny that it is cruel, or that it can occasion inconvenience to any participator in a business which they themselves enjoy. So the poor innocent sea-monsters floundered in slimy agony upon the deck; the boarhound and the cats taking a share in martyring them, tearing and biting at them as they gasped their lives away; condemned to agony for some strange reason, or perhaps because, as every living thing is born to suffer, they were enduring but their fair proportion, as they happened to be fish.Pathetic but unwept, the tragedy of all the animals, and we but links in the same chain with them, look at it all as unconcerned as gods. But as the bearded spiky fish gasped on the deck the missionary tried to abridge their agony with a belaying-pin; covering himself with blood and slime, and setting up the back of Captain Rindelhaus, who vowed his deck should not be hammered “like a skidel alley, all for the sake of half-a-dozen fish, which would be dead in half-an-hour and eaten by the cats.”
The marvels of our commerce, in the shape of Waterbury watches, scissors and looking-glasses, beads, Swiss clocks, and musical-boxes, all duly dumped, and the off-scouring of the trade left by the larger ships duly received on board, theOldenburgstumbled out to sea if the wind was not too strong, and squirmed along the coast. Occasionally upon arrival at a port the sound of psalmody was heard, and a missionary boat put off to pass the time of God with their brother on the ship. Then came the greetings, as the whole party sat on the fiddlee gratings jammed up against the funnel; the latest news from the Cowcaddens and the gossip from along the coast was duly interchanged. Gaunt-featured girls, removed by physical conditions from all temptation, sat and talked with scraggy, freckled, and pith-hatted men. It was all conscience, and relatively tender heart, and as the moon lit up the dirty decks, they paraded upand down, happy once more to be secure even for a brief space from insult, and to feel themselves at home. Dressed in white blouses, innocent of stays, with skirts which no belt known to milliners could ever join to the body or the blouse; with smaller-sized pith hats, sand-shoes and spectacles; their hands in Berlin gloves, and freckles reaching far down upon their necks, they formed a crushing argument in their own persons against polygamy. Still, in the main, all kindly souls, and some with a twinkle in their white-eyelashed steel-grey eyes, as of a Congregationalist bull-terrier, which showed you that they would gladly suffer martyrdom without due cause, or push themselves into great danger, out of sheer ignorance and want of knowledge of mankind. Life’s misfits, most of them; their hands early inured to typewriting machines, their souls, as they would say, “sair hodden doon in prayer;” carefully educated to be ashamed of any scrap of womanhood they might possess. Still they were sympathetic, for sympathy is near akin to tears, and looking at them one divined they must have shed tears plentifully, enough to wash away any small sins they had committed in their lives.
The men, sunburnt yet sallow, seemed nourished on tinned meats and mineral table-waters; their necks scraggy and red protruded from their collars like those of vultures; they carried umbrellas in their hands from early habit of a wet climate, and seemed as if they had been chosen after muchcogitation by some unskilled commission, for their unfitness for their task.
They too, dogged and narrow-minded as they were, were yet pathetic, when one thought upon their lives. No hope of converts, or of advancement in the least degree, stuck down upon the coast, far off from Dorcas meetings, school-feasts, or anything which in more favoured countries whiles away the Scripture-reader’s time; they hammered at their self-appointed business day by day and preached unceasingly, apparently indifferent to anything that passed, so that they got off their due quantity of words a day. In course of time, and after tea and bread-and-butter had been consumed, they got into their boat, struck up the tune of “Sidna Aissa Hobcum,” and from the taffrail McKerrochar saw them depart, joining in the chorus lustily and waving a dirty handkerchief until they faded out of sight. Mr. McKerrochar, one of those Scottish professional religionists, whom early training or their own “damnable iteration” has convinced of all the doctrine that they preach, formed a last relic of a disappearing type. The antiquated out-and-out doctrine of Hellfire and of Paradise, the jealous Scottish God, and the Mosaic Dispensation which he accepted whole, tinged slightly with the current theology of Airdrie or Coatbridge, made him a formidable adversary to the trembling infidel, in religious strife. In person he was tall and loosely built, his trousers baggingat the knees as if a horse’s hock had been inside the cloth. Wrong-headed as befits his calling, he yet saw clearly enough in business matters, and might have marked a flock of heathen sheep had he applied his business aptitude to his religious work, or on the other hand he might have made a fortune had he chanced to be a rogue. He led a joyless stirring life, striving towards ideals which have made the world a quagmire; yet worked towards them with that simple faith which makes a man ten thousand times more dangerous, in his muddle-headed course. Abstractions which he called duty, morality, and self-sacrifice, ruled all his life; forcing him ever onward to occupy himself with things which really he had no concern with; and making him neglect himself and the more human qualities of courtesy and love. And so he stood, waving his pocket-handkerchief long after the strains of “Sidna Aissa Hobcum” had melted into the night air; his arms still waving as the sails of windmills move round once or twice, but haltingly, after the wind has dropped. Perhaps that class of man seldom or never chews the cud either of sweet or bitter recollection; and if, as in McKerrochar’s case, he is deprived of whisky in which to drown his cares, the last impression gone, his mind hammers away, like the keys of a loose typewriter under a weary operator’s hands, half aimlessly, till circumstances place new copy under its roller, and it starts off again to work.
He might have gone on waving right through the dog-watch had not the captain with a rough ejaculation stopped his arm. “Himmel, what for a semaphore, Herr missionary, is dat; and you gry too, when you look at dat going-way boat . . . Well, have a glass of beer. I tell you it is not good to look at boats and gry for noddings, for men that have an ugly yellow beard like yours and mine.”
“I was na greetin’, captain,” said the missionary, furtively wiping his face; “it was just ane of thae clinkers, I think thae ca’ the things, has got into my eye.”
“Glinkers, mein friend, do not get into people’s eyes when der ship is anchored,” Rindelhaus replied; “still I know as you feel, but not for missionary boats. You not know Oldenburg eh? Pretta place; not far from Bremerhaven. Oldenburg is one of the prettaest places in the world. I live dere. Hour and half by drain, oot from de port. I just can see the vessels’ masts and the funnel smoke as they pass oop and down the stream. I think I should not care too much to live where man can see no ships. Yes, yes, ah, here come Matilda mit de beer. Mein herz, you put him down here on dis bale of marjoram, and you goes off to bed. I speak here mit de Herr missionary, who gry for noddings when he look at missionary boat go off into de night.
“Ah, Oldenburg, ja, yes, I live there. Meinewife she live there, and meine littel Gretchen, she about den or twelve, I don’t remember which. Prosit, Herr missionary, you have no wife; no littel Gretchen, eh? So, so, dat is perhaps better for a missionary.”
The two sat looking at nothing, thinking in the painful ruminant way of semi-educated men, the captain’s burly North-German figure stretched on a cane deck-chair. About a captain’s age he was, that is, his beard had just begun to grizzle, and his nose was growing red, the bunions on his feet knotted his boots into protuberances, after the style of those who pass their lives about a deck. In height above six feet, broad-shouldered and red-faced, his voice of the kind with which a huntsman rates a dog, his clothes bought at a Bremerhaven slop-shop, his boots apparently made by a portmanteau-maker, and in his pocket was a huge silver keyless watch which he said was a “gronometer,” and keep de Bremen time. Instant in prayer and cursing; pious yet blasphemous; kindly but brutal in the Teutonic way; he kicked his crew about as they had all been dogs, and yet looked after the tall stewardess Matilda as she had been his child; guarding her virtue from the assaults of passengers, and though alone with her in the small compass of a ship, respecting it himself.
After an interval he broke into his subject, just as a phonograph takes up its interrupted tale, as if against its will.
“So ja, yes, Oldenburg, pretta place; I not see it often though. In all eight years I never stay more to my house than from de morning Saturday to Monday noon, and dat after a four months’ trip.
“Meine wife, she getting little sdout, and not mind much, for she is immer washing; washing de linen, de house, de steps; she wash de whole ship oop only I never let her come to see. The Gretchen she immer say, ‘Father, why you not stop to home?’ You got no littel Gretchen, eh? . . . Well, perhaps better so. Last Christmas I was at Oldenburg. Christmas eve I buy one tree, and then I remember I have to go to sea next morning about eleven o’clock. So I say nodings all the day, and about four o’clock the agent come and tell me that the company not wish me leave Oldenburg upon de Christmas day. Then I was so much glad I think I wait to eat meine Christmas dinner with meine wife, and talk with Gretchen in the evening while I smoke my pipe. The stove was burning, and the table stand ready mit sausage and mit bread and cheese, beer of course, and lax, dat lax they bring from Norway, and I think I have good time. Then I think on de company, what they say if I take favour from them and go not out to sea; they throw it in my teeth for ever, and tell me, ‘Rindelhaus, you remember we was so good to you upon that Christmas day.’ I tell the agent thank you, but say I go to sea. Meine wife: she gry and I say nodings, nodings to Gretchen,and sit down to take my tea. Morning, I tell my littel girl, then she gry bitterly and say, ‘What for you go to sea?’ I kiss meine wife and walk down to the quay; it just begin to snow; I curse the schelm sailors, de pilot come aboard, and we begin to warp into the stream. Just then I hear a running on the quay, like as a Friesland pony come clattering on the stones. I look up and see Gretchen mit her little wooden shoes. She run down to the ship, and say, ‘Why you go sea, father, upon Christmas day?’ and I not able to say nodings but just to wave my hand. We warp out into the stream, and she stand grying till she faded out of sight. Sometimes I feel a liddel sorry about dat Christmas day . . . But have another glass beer, Herr missionary, it always do me good.” Wiping the froth from his moustache with his rough hand he went below, leaving the missionary alone upon the deck.