Chapter III: Part 3

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 all the 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, and for 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 like wolves 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, and with 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 fashion down 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 to meet. 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, passing by 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 seated in 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 of Asuncion, 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, or so 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 lonely camping-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 they were 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.

IN A GERMAN TRAMP

THE tall, 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. _Oldenburg_ got 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 feel like 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 black alpaca 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 left hand, 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 forged ahead. 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 beer the 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.”

The _Oldenburg_ pursued 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, the _Oldenburg_ stumbled 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 up and 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 much cogitation 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 bagging at 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. Meine wife 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.

The night descended, and the ship shrouded in mist grew ghostly and unnatural, whilst great drops of moisture hung on the backstays and the shrouds.

The Arab crew lay sleeping, huddled round the windlass, looking mere masses of white dirty rags; the seaman keeping the anchor-watch loomed like a giant, and from the shore occasionally the voices of the guards at the town prison came through the mist, making the boarhound turn in his sleep and growl. The missionary paced to and fro a little, settling his pith tureen-shaped hat upon his head, and fastening a woollen comforter about his neck.

Then going to the rail, he looked into the night where the boat bearing off his brethren had disappeared; his soul perhaps wandering towards some Limbo as he gazed, and his elastic-sided boots fast glued to the dirty decks by the half-dried-up blood of the discarded fish.

THE GOLD FISH

OUTSIDE the little straw-thatched _café_ in a small courtyard trellised with vines, before a miniature table painted in red and blue, and upon which stood a dome-shaped pewter teapot and a painted glass half filled with mint, sat Amarabat, resting and smoking hemp. He was of those whom Allah in his mercy (or because man in the Blad-Allah has made no railways) has ordained to run. Set upon the road, his shoes pulled up, his waistband tightened, in his hand a staff, a palm-leaf wallet at his back, and in it bread, some hemp, a match or two (known to him as el spiritus), and a letter to take anywhere, crossing the plains, fording the streams, struggling along the mountain-paths, sleeping but fitfully, a burning rope steeped in saltpetre fastened to his foot, he trotted day and night—untiring as a camel, faithful as a dog. In Rabat as he sat dozing, watching the greenish smoke curl upwards from his hemp pipe, word came to him from the Khalifa of the town. So Amarabat rose, paid for his tea with half a handful of defaced and greasy copper coins, and took his way towards the white palace with the crenelated walls, which on the cliff, hanging above the roaring tide-rip, just inside the bar of the great river, looks at Salee. Around the horseshoe archway of the gate stood soldiers, wild, fierce-eyed, armed to the teeth, descendants, most of them, of the famed warriors whom Sultan Muley Ismail (may God have pardoned him!) bred for his service, after the fashion of the Carlylean hero Frederic; and Amarabat walked through them, not aggressively, but with the staring eyes of a confirmed hemp-smoker, with the long stride of one who knows that he is born to run, and the assurance of a man who waits upon his lord. Some time he waited whilst the Khalifa dispensed what he thought justice, chaffered with Jewish pedlars for cheap European goods, gossiped with friends, looked at the antics of a dwarf, or priced a Georgian or Circassian girl brought with more care than glass by some rich merchant from the East. At last Amarabat stood in the presence, and the Khalifa, sitting upon a pile of cushions playing with a Waterbury watch, a pistol and a Koran by his side, addressed him thus:—

“Amarabat, son of Bjorma, my purpose is to send thee to Tafilet, where our liege lord the Sultan lies with his camp. Look upon this glass bowl made by the Kaffir, but clear as is the crystal of the rock; see how the light falls on the water, and the shifting colours that it makes, as when the Bride of the Rain stands in the heavens, after a shower in spring. Inside are seven gold fish, each scale as bright as letters in an Indian book. The Christian from whom I bought them said originally they came from the Far East where the Djin-descended Jawi live, the little yellow people of the faith. That may be, but such as they are, they are a gift for kings. Therefore, take thou the bowl. Take it with care, and bear it as it were thy life. Stay not, but in an hour start from the town. Delay not on the road, be careful of the fish, change not their water at the muddy pool where tortoises bask in the sunshine, but at running brooks; talk not to friends, look not upon the face of woman by the way, although she were as a gazelle, or as the maiden who when she walked through the fields the sheep stopped feeding to admire. Stop not, but run through day and night, pass through the Atlas at the Glaui; beware of frost, cover the bowl with thine own haik; upon the other side shield me the bowl from the Saharan sun, and drink not of the water if thou pass a day athirst when toiling through the sand. Break not the bowl, and see the fish arrive in Tafilet, and then present them, with this letter, to our lord. Allah be with you, and his Prophet; go, and above all things see thou breakest not the bowl.” And Amarabat, after the manner of his kind, taking the bowl of gold fish, placed one hand upon his heart and said: “Inshallah, it shall be as thou hast said. God gives the feet and lungs. He also gives the luck upon the road.”

So he passed out under the horseshoe arch, holding the bowl almost at arm’s length so as not to touch his legs, and with the palmetto string by which he carried it, bound round with rags. The soldiers looked at him, but spoke not, and their eyes seemed to see far away, and to pass over all in the middle distance, though no doubt they marked the smallest detail of his gait and dress. He passed between the horses of the guard all standing nodding under the fierce sun, the reins tied to the cantles of their high red saddles, a boy in charge of every two or three: he passed beside the camels resting by the well, the donkeys standing dejected by the firewood they had brought: passed women, veiled white figures going to the baths; and passing underneath the lofty gateway of the town, exchanged a greeting with the half-mad, half-religious beggar just outside the walls, and then emerged upon the sandy road, between the aloe hedges, which skirts along the sea. So as he walked, little by little he fell into his stride; then got his second wind, and smoking now and then a pipe of hemp, began, as Arabs say, to cat the miles, his eyes fixed on the horizon, his stick stuck down between his shirt and back, the knob protruding over the left shoulder like the hilt of a two-handed sword. And still he held the precious bowl from Franquestan in which the golden fish swam to and fro, diving and circling in the sunlight, or flapped their tails to steady themselves as the water danced with the motion of his steps. Never before in his experience had he been charged with such a mission, never before been sent to stand before Allah’s vicegerent upon earth. But still the strangeness of his business was what preoccupied him most. The fish like molten gold, the water to be changed only at running streams, the fish to be preserved from frost and sun; and then the bowl: had not the Khalifa said at the last, “Beware, break not the bowl”? So it appeared to him that most undoubtedly a charm was in the fish and in the bowl, for who sends common fish on such a journey through the land? Then he resolved at any hazard to bring them safe and keep the bowl intact, and trotting onward, smoked his hemp, and wondered why he of all men should have had the luck to bear the precious gift. He knew he kept his law, at least as far as a poor man can keep it, prayed when he thought of prayer, or was assailed by terror in the night alone upon the plains; fasted in Ramadan, although most of his life was one continual fast; drank of the shameful but seldom, and on the sly, so as to give offence to no believer, and seldom looked upon the face of the strange women, Daughters of the Illegitimate, whom Sidna Mohammed himself has said, avoid. But all these things he knew were done by many of the faithful, and so he did not set himself up as of exceeding virtue, but rather left the praise to God, who helped his slave with strength to keep his law. Then left off thinking, judging the matter was ordained, and trotted, trotted over the burning plains, the gold fish dancing in the water as the miles melted and passed away.

Duar and Kasbah, castles of the Caids, Arabs’ black tents, suddra zaribas, camels grazing—antediluvian in appearance—on the little hills, the muddy streams edged all along the banks with oleanders, the solitary horsemen holding their long and brass-hooped guns like spears, the white-robed noiseless-footed travellers on the roads, the chattering storks upon the village mosques, the cow-birds sitting on the cattle in the fields—he saw, but marked not, as he trotted on. Day faded into night, no twilight intervening, and the stars shone out, Soheil and Rigel with Betelgeuse and Aldebaran, and the three bright lamps which the cursed Christians know as the Three Maries—called, he supposed, after the mother of their Prophet; and still he trotted on. Then by the side of a lone palm-tree springing up from a cleft in a tall rock, an island on the plain, he stopped to pray; and sleeping, slept but fitfully, the strangeness of the business making him wonder; and he who cavils over matters in the night can never rest, for thus the jackal and the hyena pass their nights talking and reasoning about the thoughts which fill their minds when men lie with their faces covered in their haiks, and after prayer sleep. Rising after an hour or two and going to the nearest stream, he changed the water of his fish, leaving a little in the bottom of the bowl, and dipping with his brass drinking-cup into the stream for fear of accidents. He passed the Kasbah of el Daudi, passed the land of the Rahamna, accursed folk always in “siba,” saw the great snowy wall of Atlas rise, skirted Marakesh, the Kutubieh, rising first from the plain and sinking last from sight as he approached the mountains and left the great white city sleeping in the plain.