Chapter V: Part 5

The bushy plains stretched like an ocean towards the mysterious regions of El Juf and Timbuctoo, Wadan, Tijigja, Atar and Shingiet, and the wild steppes where the Tuaregs veiled to the eyes roam as they roamed before they hastened to the call of Jusuf-ibn Tachfin to invade El Andalos and lose the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa: the battle where San Isidro in a shepherd’s guise guided the Christian host. Men came and went, on camels, horses, donkeys and on foot; all armed, all beggars, from the rich chief to the poorest horseman of the tribe; and yet all dignified, draped in their fluttering rags, and looking more like men than those whom eighteen centuries of civilization and of trade have turned to apes. Men fought, careering on their horses on the sand, firing their guns and circling round like gulls, shouting their battle-cries; men prayed, turning to Mecca at the appointed hours; men sat for hours half in a dream thinking of much or nothing, who can say; whilst women in the tents milked camels, wove the curious geometric-patterned carpets which they use, and children grew up straight, active and as fleet of foot as roe.

Inside the factory the European clerks smoked, drank, and played at cards: they learned no Arabic, for why should those who speak bad English struggle with other tongues? Meanwhile the time slipped past, leaving as little trace as does a jackal when on a windy day he sneaks across the sand. Only Maron Mohanna seemed to have no place in the desert world which he had dreamed of as a boy; and in the world of Europe typified by the factory on the beach his place was lost. On marrying he had, of course, abjured the faith implanted in him in the Lebanon, and yet though now one of the “faithful” he found no resting-place. Neither of the two contending faiths had sunk much into his soul, but still at times he saw that the best part of any faith is but the life it brings. For him, though he had dreamed of it, the wild desert life held little charm; horses he loathed, suffering acutely when on their backs, and roaming after chance gazelles or ostriches with the horsemen of the tribe did not amuse him; but though too proud to change his faith again, at times he caught himself longing for his once-loathed shop in the Levant. So that clandestinely he grew to haunt the factory and the fort, as before, in secret, he had hung round the straw-thatched mosque, and loitered in the tents. His one amusement was to practise with a pistol at a mark, and by degrees he taught his wife to shoot, till she became a marksman able to throw an orange in the air and hit it with a pistol bullet three times out of five. But even pistol-shooting palled on his soul at last, and he grew desperate, not being allowed to leave the tribe or go into the fort except in company with others, and keenly watched as those who change their faith and turn Mohammedans are ever watched amongst the Arab race. But in his darkest hour fate smiled upon him, and the head chief wanting an agent in the islands sent him to Lanzarote, and in the little town of Arrecife it seemed to him that he had found a resting-place at last. Once more he dressed himself in European clothes, he handled goods, saw now and then a Spanish newspaper a fortnight old; talked much of politics, lounged in the Alameda, and was the subject of much curiosity amongst the simple dwellers in the little town. Some said he had denied his God amongst the heathen; others again that he suffered much for conscience’ sake; whilst he attended mass occasionally, going with a sense of doing something wrong, and feeling more enjoyment in the service than in the days of his belief. His wife dressed in the Spanish fashion, wore a mantilla, sometimes indeed a hat, and looked not much unlike an island woman, and was believed by all to have thrown off the errors of her faith and come into the fold.

But notwithstanding all the amenities of the island life, the unlimited opportunities for endless talk (so dear to Syrians), the half-malignant pleasure he experienced in dressing up his wife in Christian guise, sending for monstrous hats bedecked with paroquets from Cadiz, and gowns of the impossible shades of apple-green and yellow which in those days were sent from Paris to Spain and to her colonies, he yet was dull. And curiously enough, now that he was a double renegade his youthful dreams haunted him once again. He saw himself (in his mind’s eye) mounted upon his horse, flying across the sands, and stealthily and half ashamed he used to dress himself in the Arab clothes and sit for hours studying the Koran, not that he believed its teachings, but that the phraseology enchanted him, as it has always, both in the present and the past, bewitched all Arabs, and perhaps in his case it spoke to him of the illusory content which in the desert life he sought, but had not found.

He read the “Tarik-es-Sudan,” and learned that Allah marks even the lives of locusts, and that a single pearl does not remain on earth by him unweighed. The Djana of Essoyuti, El Ibtihaj, and the scarce “Choice of Marvels” written in far Mossul by the learned Abu Abdallah ibn Abderrahim (he of Granada in the Andalos), he read; and as he read his love renewed itself for the old race whose blood ran in his veins. He read and dreamed, and twice a renegade in practice, yet remained a true believer in the aspirations of his youth. He sailed in schooners, running from island port to island port down the trade winds; landed at little towns, and hardly marked the people in the rocky streets, Spanish in language, and in type quite Guanche, and but a step more civilized than the wild tribesmen from the coast that he had left. Then thinking maybe of his sojourn in London, and its music-halls, frequented uninterestedly the house of Rita, Rita la Jerezana; sat in the courtyard under the fig-tree with its trunk coated with white-wash, and listened to the “Cante Hondo,” saw the girls dance Sevillanas; and drinking zarzaparilla syrup, learned that of all the countries in the world Spain is the richest, for there even the “women of the life” cast their accounts in ounces.

Then growing weary of their chatter and their tales of woe, each one of them being, according to herself, fallen from some high estate, he wandered to the convent of the Franciscan friars. They saw a convert in him, and put out all their theologic powers; displayed, as they know how, the human aspect of their faith, keeping the dogma out of sight; for well they knew, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any man, if the fires of hell are to be clearly seen. Long hours Mohanna talked with them, enjoying argument for its own sake after the Scottish and the Eastern way; the friars were mystified at the small progress that they made, but said the renegade spoke “as he had a nest of nightingales all singing in his mouth.” And all the time his wife, an Arab of the Arabs, sighed for the desert, in her Spanish clothes. The “Velo de toalla” and the high-heeled shoes, the pomps and miseries of stays, and all the circumstance and starch of European dress, did not console her for the loss of the black tents, the familiar camels kneeling in the sand, the goats skipping about the “sudra” bushes; and the church bells made her but long more keenly for the call to prayers, rising at evening from the straw-thatched mosque. Her children, left with the tribe, called to her from the desert, and she too found neither resting-place nor rest in the quiet island life.

At last Maron Mohanna turned again to trade, and entered into partnership with one Benito Florez; bought a schooner, and came and went between the islands and the coast. All things went well with him, and in the little island town “el renegado” rose to be quite a prosperous citizen, till on a day he and his partner quarrelled and went to law. The law in every country favours a man born in the land against a foreigner; and the partnership broke up, leaving Mohanna almost penniless. Whether one of those sudden furies which possess the Arabs, turning them in a moment and without warning from sedate well-mannered men to raving maniacs frothing at the mouth, came over him, he never told; but what is certain is that, having failed to slay his partner, he with his wife went off by night to where his schooner lay, and instantly induced his men to put to sea, and sailed towards the coast. Mohanna drew a perhaps judicious veil of mystery over what happened on his arrival at the inlet where his wife’s tribe happened to be encamped. One of the islanders either objecting to the looting of the schooner upon principle, or perhaps because his share of loot was insufficient, got himself killed; but what is a “Charuta” more or less, except perhaps to his wife and family in Arrecife or in some little dusty town in Pico or Gomera? Those who assented or were too frightened to protest found themselves unmolested, and at liberty to take the schooner back. Maron Mohanna and his wife, taking the boat rowed by some Arabs, made for the shore, and what ensued he subsequently related to a friend.

“When we get near the shore my wife she throw her hat.” One sees the hideous Cadiz hat floating upon the surf, draggled and miserable, and its bunch of artificial fruit, of flowers or feathers, bobbing about upon the backwash of the waves. “She throw her boots, and then she take off all her clothes I got from Seville, cost me more than a hundred ‘real’; she throw her parasol, and it float in the water like a buoy, and make me mad. I pay more than ten real for it. After all things was gone she wrap herself in Arab sheet and step ashore just like an Arab girl, and all the clothes I brought from Cadiz, cost more than a hundred real, all was lost.” What happened after their landing is matter of uncertainty. Whether Mohanna found his children growing up semi-savages, whether his wife having thus sacrificed to the Graces, and made a holocaust of all her Cadiz clothes, regretted them, and sitting by the beach fished for them sadly with a cane, no man can tell.

Years passed away, and a certain English consul in Morocco travelling to the Court stopped at a little town. Rivers had risen, tribes had cut the road, our Lord the Sultan with his camp was on a journey and had eaten up the food upon the usual road, or some one or another of the incidents of flood or field which render travel in Morocco interesting had happened. The town lay off the beaten track close to the territory of a half-wild tribe. Therefore upon arrival at the place the consul found himself received with scowling looks; no one proceeded to hostilities, but he remained within his tent, unvisited but by a soldier sent from the Governor to ask whether the Kaffir, son of a Kaffir, wished for anything. People sat staring at him, motionless except their eyes; children holding each other’s hands stood at a safe distance from his tent, and stared for hours at him, and he remarked the place where he was asked to camp was near a mound which from time immemorial seemed to have been the common dunghill of the town. The night passed miserably, the guards sent by the Governor shouting aloud at intervals to show their vigilance, banished all chance of sleep.

Cursing the place, at break of day the consul struck his camp, mounted his horse, and started, leaving the sullen little town all wrapped in sleep. But as he jogged along disconsolately behind his mules, passing an angle of the “Kasbah” wall, a figure, rising as it seemed out of the dunghill’s depths, advanced and stood before him in the middle of the way. Its hair was long and matted and its beard ropy and grizzled, and for sole covering it had a sack tied round its waist with a string of camel’s hair; and as the consul feeling in his purse was just about, in the English fashion, to bestow his alms to rid himself of trouble, it addressed him in his native tongue. “Good-morning, consul, how goes the world with you? You’re the first Christian I have seen for years. My name was once Mohanna, now I am Sidi bu Zibbala, the Father of the Dunghill. Your poet Shakespeare say that all the world’s a stage, but he was Englishman. I, Syrian, I say all the world dunghill. I try him, Syria, England, the Desert, and New York; I find him dung, so I come here and live here on this dunghill, and find it sweet when compared to places I have seen; and it is warm and dry.”

He ceased; and then the consul, feeling his words an outrage upon progress and on his official status, muttered “Queer kind of fish,” and jerking at his horse’s bridle, proceeded doggedly upon his way.

LA PULPERIA

IT may have been the Flor de Mayo, Rosa del Sur, or Tres de Junio, or again but have been known as the Pulperia upon the Huesos, or the Esquina on the Napostá. But let its name have been what chance or the imagination of some Neapolitan or Basque had given it, I see it, and seeing it, dismounting, fastening my “redomon” to the palenque, enter, loosen my facon, feel if my pistol is in its place, and calling out “Carlon,” receive my measure of strong, heady red Spanish wine in a tin cup. Passing it round to the company, who touch it with their lips to show their breeding, I seem to feel the ceaseless little wind which always blows upon the southern plains, stirring the dust upon the pile of fleeces in the court, and whistling through the wooden “reja” where the pulpero stands behind his counter with his pile of bottles close beside him, ready for what may chance. For outward visible signs, a low, squat, mud-built house, surrounded by a shallow ditch on which grew stunted cactuses, and with paja brava sticking out of the abode of the overhanging eaves. Brown, sun-baked, dusty-looking, it stands up, an island in the sea of waving hard-stemmed grasses which the improving settler passes all his life in a vain fight to improve away; and make his own particular estancia an Anglo-Saxon Eden of trim sheep-cropped turf, set here and there with “agricultural implements,” broken and thrown aside, and though imported at great trouble and expense, destined to be replaced by ponderous native ploughs hewn from the solid ñandubay, and which, of course, inevitably prove the superiority of the so-called unfit. For inward graces, the “reja” before which runs a wooden counter at which the flower of the Gauchage of the district lounge, or sit with their toes sticking through their potro boots, swinging their legs and keeping time to the “cielito” of the “payador” upon his cracked guitar, the strings eked out with fine-cut thongs of mare’s hide, by jingling their spurs.

Behind the wooden grating, sign in the Pampa of the eternal hatred betwixt those who buy and those who sell, some shelves of yellow pine, on which are piled ponchos from Leeds, ready-made calzoncillos, alpargatas, figs, sardines, raisins, bread—for bread upon the Pampa used to be eaten only at Pulperias—saddle-cloths, and in a corner the “botilleria,” where vermuth, absinthe, square-faced gin, Carlon, and Vino Seco stand in a row, with the barrel of Brazilian caña, on the top of which the pulpero ostentatiously parades his pistol and his knife. Outside, the tracks led through the biscacheras, all converging after the fashion of the rails at a junction; at the palenque before the door stood horses tied by strong raw-hide cabrestos, hanging their heads in the fierce sun, shifting from leg to leg, whilst their companions, hobbled, plunged about, rearing themselves on their hind-legs to jump like kangaroos.

Now and then Gauchos rode up occasionally, their iron spurs hanging off their naked feet, held by a raw-hide thong; some dressed in black bombachas and vicuña ponchos, their horses weighted down with silver, and prancing sideways as their riders sat immovable, but swaying from the waist upwards like willows in a wind. Others, again, on lean young colts, riding upon a saddle covered with sheepskin, gripping the small hide stirrup with their toes and forcing them up to the posts with shouts of “Ah bagual!” “Ah Pehuelche!” “Ahijuna!” and with resounding blows of their short, flat-lashed whips, which they held by a thong between their fingers or slipped upon their wrists, then grasping their frightened horses by the ears, got off as gingerly as a cat jumps from a wall. From the rush-thatched, mud-walled rancheria at the back the women, who always haunt the outskirts of a pulperia in the districts known as tierra adentro (the inside country), Indians and semi-whites, mulatresses, and now and then a stray Basque or Italian girl turned out, to share the quantity they considered love with all mankind.

But gin and politics, with horses’ marks, accounts of fights, and recollections of the last revolution, kept men for the present occupied with serious things, so that the women were constrained to sit and smoke, drink maté, plait each other’s hair (searching it diligently the while), and wait until Carlon with Vino Seco, square-faced rum, cachaza, and the medicated log-wood broth, which on the Pampa passes for “Vino Francés,” had made men sensible to their softer charms. That which in Europe we call love, and think by inventing it that we have cheated God, who clearly planted nothing but an instinct of self-continuation in mankind, as in the other animals, seems either to be in embryo, waiting for economic advancement to develop it; or is perhaps not even dormant in countries such as those in whose vast plains the pulperia stands for club, exchange, for meeting-place, and represents all that in other lands men think they find in Paris or in London, and choose to dignify under the style of intellectual life. Be it far from me to think that we have bettered the Creator’s scheme; or by the substitution of our polyandry for polygamy, bettered the position of women, or in fact done anything but changed and made more complex that which at first was clear to understand.

But, be that as it may and without dogmatism, our love, our vices, our rendering wicked things natural in themselves, our secrecy, our pruriency, adultery, and all the myriad ramifications of things sexual, without which no novelist could earn his bread, fall into nothing, except there is a press-directed public opinion, laws, bye-laws, leaded type and headlines, so to speak, to keep them up. True, nothing of all this entered our heads as we sat drinking, listening to a contest of minstrelsy “por contrapunto” betwixt a Gaucho payador and a “matrero negro” of great fame, who each in turn taking the cracked “changango” in their lazo-hardened hands, plucked at its strings in such a style as to well illustrate the saying that to play on the guitar is not a thing of science, but requires but perseverance, hard finger-tips, and an unusual development of strength in the right wrist. Negro and payador each sang alternately; firstly old Spanish love songs handed down from before the independence, quavering and high; in which Frasquita rhymed to chiquita, and one Cupido, whom I never saw in Pampa, loma, rincon, bolson, or medano, in the Chañares, amongst the woods of ñandubay, the pajonales, sierras, cuchillas, or in all the land, figured and did nothing very special; flourished, and then departed in a high falsetto shake, a rough sweep of the hard brown fingers over the jarring strings forming his fitting epitaph.

The story of “El Fausto,” and how the Gaucho, Aniceto, went to Buenos Ayres, saw the opera of “Faust,” lost his puñal in the crush to take his seat, sat through the fearsome play, saw face to face the enemy of man, described {170a} as being dressed in long stockings to the stifle-joint, eyebrows like arches for tilting at the wing, and eyes like water-holes in a dry river bed, succeeded, and the negro took up the challenge and rejoined. He told how, after leaving town, that Aniceto mounted on his Overo rosao, {170b} fell in with his “compadre,” told all his wondrous tale, and how they finished off their bottle and left it floating in the river like a buoy.

The payador, not to be left behind, and after having tuned his guitar and put the “cejilla” on the strings, launched into the strange life of Martin Fierro, type of the Gauchos on the frontier, related his multifarious fights, his escapades, and love affairs, and how at last he, his friend, Don Cruz, saw on an evening the last houses as, with a stolen tropilla of good horses, they passed the frontier to seek the Indians’ tents. The death of Cruz, the combat of Martin with the Indian chief—he with his knife, the Indian with the bolas—and how Martin slew him and rescued the captive woman, who prayed to heaven to aid the Christian, with the body of her dead child, its hands secured in a string made out of one of its own entrails, lying before her as she watched the varying fortunes of the fight, he duly told. La Vuelta de Martin and the strange maxims of Tio Viscacha, that Pampa cynic whose maxim was never to ride up to a house where dogs were thin, and who set forth that arms are necessary, but no man can tell when, were duly recorded by the combatants, listened to and received as new and authentic by the audience, till at last the singing and the frequent glasses of Carlon made payador and negro feel that the time had come to leave off contrapunto and decide which was most talented in music, with their facons. A personal allusion to the colour of the negro’s skin, a retort calling in question the nice conduct of the sister of the payador, and then two savages foaming at the mouth, their ponchos wrapped round their arms, their bodies bent so as to protect their vitals, and their knives quivering like snakes, stood in the middle of the room. The company withdrew themselves into the smallest space, stood on the tops of casks, and at the door the faces of the women looked in delight, whilst the pulpero, with a pistol and a bottle in his hands, closed down his grating and was ready for whatever might befall. “Negro,” “Ahijuna,” “Miente,” “carajo,” and the knives flash and send out sparks as the returns de tic au tac jar the fighters’ arms up to the shoulder-joints. In a moment all is over, and from the payador’s right arm the blood drops in a stream on the mud floor, and all the company step out and say the negro is a “valiente,” “muy guapeton,” and the two adversaries swear friendship over a tin mug of gin. But all the time during the fight, and whilst outside the younger men had ridden races barebacked, making false starts to tire each other’s horses out, practising all the tricks they knew, as kicking their adversary’s horse in the chest, riding beside their opponent and trying to lift him from his seat by placing their foot underneath his and pushing upwards, an aged Gaucho had gradually become the centre figure of the scene.

Seated alone he muttered to himself, occasionally broke into a falsetto song, and now and then half drawing out his knife, glared like a tiger-cat, and shouted “Viva Rosas,” though he knew that chieftain had been dead for twenty years.

Tall and with straggling iron-grey locks hanging down his back, a broad-brimmed plush hat kept in its place by a black ribbon with two tassels under his chin, a red silk Chinese handkerchief tied loosely round his neck and hanging with a point over each shoulder-blade, he stood dressed in his chiripa and poncho, like a mad prophet amongst the motley crew. Upon his feet were potro boots, that is the skin taken off the hind-leg of a horse, the hock-joint forming the heel and the hide softened by pounding with a mallet, the whole tied with a garter of a strange pattern woven by the Indians, leaving the toes protruding to catch the stirrups, which as a domador he used, made of a knot of hide. Bound round his waist he had a set of ostrich balls covered in lizard skin, and his broad belt made of carpincho leather was kept in place by five Brazilian dollars, and through it stuck a long facon with silver handle shaped like a half-moon, and silver sheath fitted with a catch to grasp his sash. Whilst others talked of women or of horses, alluding to their physical perfections, tricks or predilections, their hair, hocks, eyes, brands or peculiarities, discussing them alternately with the appreciation of men whose tastes are simple but yet know all the chief points of interest in both subjects, he sat and drank. Tio Cabrera (said the others) is in the past, he thinks of times gone by; of the Italian girl whom he forced and left with her throat cut and her tongue protruding, at the pass of the Puán; of how he stole the Indian’s horses, and of the days when Rosas ruled the land. Pucha, compadre, those were times, eh? Before the “nations,” English, Italian and Neapolitan, with French and all the rest, came here to learn the taste of meat, and ride, the “maturangos,” in their own countries having never seen a horse. But though they talked at, yet they refrained from speaking to him, for he was old, and even the devil knows more because of years than because he is the devil, and they knew also that to kill a man was to Tio Cabrera as pleasant an exercise as for them to kill a sheep. But at last I, with the accumulated wisdom of my twenty years, holding a glass of caña in my hand, approached him, and inviting him to drink, said, not exactly knowing why, “Viva Urquiza,” and then the storm broke out. His eyes flashed fire, and drawing his facon he shouted “Muera! . . . Viva Rosas,” and drove his knife into the mud walls, struck on the counter with the flat of the blade, foamed at the mouth, broke into snatches of obscene and long-forgotten songs, as “Viva Rosas! Muera Urquiza dale guasca en la petiza,” whilst the rest, not heeding that I had a pistol in my belt, tried to restrain him by all means in their power. But he was maddened, yelled, “Yes, I, Tio Cabrera, known also as el Cordero, tell you I know how to play the violin (a euphemism on the south pampa for cutting throats). In Rosas’ time, Viva el General, I was his right-hand man, and have dispatched many a Unitario dog either to Trapalanda or to hell. Caña, blood, Viva Rosas, Muera!” then tottering and shaking, his knife slipped from his hands and he fell on a pile of sheepskins with white foam exuding from his lips. Even the Gauchos, who took a life as other men take a cigar, and from their earliest childhood are brought up to kill, were dominated by his brute fury, and shrank to their horses in dismay. The pulpero murmured “salvage” from behind his bars, the women trembled and ran to their “tolderia,” holding each other by the hands, and the guitar-players sat dumb, fearing their instruments might come to harm. I, on the contrary, either impelled by the strange savagery inherent in men’s blood or by some reason I cannot explain, caught the infection, and getting on my horse, a half-wild “redomon,” spurred him and set him plunging, and at each bound struck him with the flat edge of my facon, then shouting “Viva Rosas,” galloped out furiously upon the plain.

HIGGINSON’S DREAM

THE world went very well with Higginson; and about that time—say fifteen years ago—he found himself, his fortune made, settled down in Noumea. The group of islands which he had, as he said, rescued from barbarism, and in which he had opened the mines, made all the harbours, and laid out all the roads, looked to him as their Providence; and to crown the work, he had had them placed under the French flag. Rich, _décoré,_ respected, and with no worlds to conquer in particular, he still kept adding wealth to wealth; trading and doing what he considered useful work for all mankind in general, as if he had been poor.

Strange that a kindly man, a cosmopolitan, half French, half English, brought up in Australia, capable, active, pushing, and even not devoid of that interior grace a speculative intellect, which usually militates against a man in the battle of his life, should think that roads, mines, harbours, havens, ships, bills of lading, telegraphs, tramways, a European flag, even the French flag itself, could compensate his islanders for loss of liberty. Stranger in his case than in the case of those who go grown up with all the prejudices, limitations, circumscriptions and formalities of civilization become chronic in them, and see in savage countries and wild peoples but dumping ground for European trash, and capabilities for the extension of the Roubaix or the Sheffield trade; for he had passed his youth amongst the islands, loved their women, gone spearing fish with their young men, had planted taro with them, drunk kava, learned their language, and become as expert as themselves in all their futile arts and exercises; knew their customs and was as one of them, living their life and thinking it the best.

’Tis said (Viera, I think, relates it) that in the last years of fighting for the possession of Teneriffe, and when Alonso de Lugo was hard pressed to hold his own against the last Mencey, Bencomo, a strange sickness known as the “modorra” seized the Guanches and killed more of them than were slain in all the fights. The whole land was covered with the dead, and once Alonso de Lugo met a woman sitting on the hill-side, who called out, “Where are you going, Christian? Why do you hesitate to take the land? the Guanches are all dead.” The Spanish chroniclers say that the sickness came about by reason of a wet season, and that, coming as it did upon men weakened by privation, they fell into apathy and welcomed death as a deliverer. That may be so, and it is true that in hill-caves even to-day in the lone valleys by Icod el Alto their bodies still are found seated and with the head bowed on the arms, as if having sat down to mourn the afflictions of their race, God had been merciful for once and let them sleep. The chroniclers may have been right, and the wet season, with despair, starvation and the hardships they endured, may have brought on the mysterious “modorra,” the drowsy sickness, under which they fell. But it needs nothing but the presence of the conquering white man, decked in his shoddy clothes, armed with his gas-pipe gun, his Bible in his hand, schemes of benevolence deep rooted in his heart, his merchandise (that is, his whisky, gin and cotton cloths) securely stored in his corrugated iron-roofed sheds, and he himself active and persevering as a beaver or red ant, to bring about a sickness which, like the “modorra,” exterminates the people whom he came to benefit, to bless, to rescue from their savagery, and to make them wise, just, beautiful, and as apt to differentiate evil from good as even he himself. So it would seem, act as we like, our presence is a curse to all those people who have preserved the primeval instincts of our race. Curious, and yet apparently inevitable, that our customs seem designed to carry death to all the so-called inferior races, whom at a bound we force to bridge a period which it has taken us a thousand years to pass.

In his prosperity, and even we may suppose during the Elysium of dining with sous-préfets in Noumea, and on the occasions when in Melbourne or in Sydney he once again consorted with Europeans, he always dreamed of a certain bay upon the coast far from Noumea, where in his youth he had spent six happy months with a small tribe, fishing and swimming, hunting, spearing fish, living on taro and bananas, and having for a friend one Tean, son of a chief, a youth of his own age. The vision of the happy life came back to him; the dazzling beach, the heavy foliage of the palao and bread-fruit trees; the grove of cocoa-nuts, and the zigzag and intricate paths leading from hut to hut, which when a boy he traversed daily, knowing them all by instinct in the same way that horses in wild countries know how to return towards the place where they were born. And still the vision haunted him; not making him unhappy, for he was one of those who find relief from thought in work, but always there in the same way that the remembrance of a mean action is ever present, even when one has made atonement, or induced oneself to think it was not really mean, but rendered necessary by circumstances; or, in fact, when we imagine we have put to sleep that inward grasshopper which in our bosoms, blood, brain, stomach, or wheresoever it is situated, is louder or more faint according to our state of health, digestion, weakness, or what it is that makes us hear its chirp.

And so it was that cheap champagne seemed flat to him; the company of the yellow-haired and faded _demi-mondaines_ whom Paris dumps upon New Caledonia insipid; the villas on the cliff outside Noumea vulgar; and the prosperity and progress of the place to which he had so much contributed, profitless and stale. Not that for a single instant he stopped working, planning and improving his estates, or missed a chance to acquire “town lots,” or if a profitable 10,000 acres of good land with river frontage came into the market, hesitated for a moment to step in and buy. Now, though by this time he had long got past the need of actually trading with the natives at first hand, and kept, as rich men do, captains and secretaries and lawyers to do his lying for him, and only now and then would condescend to exercise himself in that respect when the stake was large enough to make the matter reputable, yet sometimes he would take a cruise in one of his own schooners and play at being poor. Nothing so tickles a man’s vanity as to look back upon his semi-incredible past, and talk of the times when he had to live on sixpence a day, and to recount his breakfast on a penny roll and glass of milk, and then to put his hands upon his turtle-bloated stomach, smile a fat smile and say, “Ah, those were the days, then I was happy!” although he knows that at that halcyon period he was miserable, not perhaps so much from poverty, as from that envy which is as great a curse to poor men as is indigestion to the rich.

So running down the coast of New Caledonia in a schooner, trading in pearls and copra, he came one evening to a well-remembered bay. All seemed familiar to him, the low white beach, tall palm-trees, coral reef with breakers thundering over it, and the still blue lagoon inside the clump of breadfruit trees, the single tall grey stone just by the beach all graven over with strange characters, all struck a chord long dormant in his mind. So telling his skipper to let go his anchor, he rowed himself ashore. On landing he was certain of the place; the tribe, about five hundred strong, ruled over by the father of his friend Tean, lived right along the bay, and scattered in palm-thatched huts throughout the district. Then he remembered a certain cocoa-nut palm he used to climb, a spring of water in a thicket of hibiscus, a little stream which he used to dam, and then divert the course to take the fish, and sitting down, all his past life came back to him. As he himself would say, “C’etait le bon temps; pauvre Tean il doit être Areki (chef) maintenant; sa soeur peut-être est morte ou mariée . . . elle m’aimait bien . . . ”

But this day-dream dispelled, it struck him that the place looked changed. Where were the long low huts in front of which he used to pass his idle hours stretched in a hammock, the little taro patches? The zigzag paths which used to run from house to house across the fields to the spring and to the turtle-pond were all grown up. Couch-grass and rank mimosa scrub, with here and there ropes of lianas, blocked them so that he rubbed his eyes and asked himself, Where is the tribe? Vainly he shouted, cooeed loudly; all was silent, and his own voice came back to him muffled and startling as it does when a man feels he is alone. At last, following one of the paths less grown up and obliterated than the rest, he entered a thick scrub, walked for a mile or two cutting lianas now and then with his jack-knife, stumbling through swamps, wading through mud, until in a little clearing he came upon a hut, in front of which a man was digging yams. As many of the natives in New Caledonia speak English and few French, he called to him in English, “Where black man?” Resting upon his hoe, the man replied, “All dead.” “Where Chief?” And the same answer, “Chief, he dead.” “Tean, he dead?” “No, Tean Chief; he ill, die soon; Tean inside that house.” And Higginson, not understanding, but feeling vaguely that his dream was shattered in some way he could not understand, called out, “Tean, oh, Tean, your friend Johnny here!” Then from the hut emerged a feeble man leaning upon a long curved stick, who gazed at him as he had seen a ghost. At last he said, “That you, John? I glad to see you once before I die.” Whether they embraced, shook hands, rubbed noses, or what their greeting was is not recorded, for Higginson, in alluding to it, always used to say, “C’est bête, mais le pauvre homme me faisait de la peine.”

This was his sickness. “Me sick, John; why you wait so long? you no remember, so many years ago when we spear fish, you love my sister, she dead five years ago . . . When me go kaikai (eat) piece sugar-cane, little bit perhaps fall on the ground, big bird he come eat bit of sugar-cane and eat my life.”

Poor Higginson being a civilized man, with the full knowledge of all things good and evil contingent on his state, still was dismayed, but said, “No, Tean, I get plenty big gun; you savey when I shoot even a butterfly he fall. I shoot big bird so that when you go kaikai he no eat pieces, and you get well again.” Thus Higginson from his altitude argued with the semi-savage, thinking, as men will think, that even death can be kept off with words. But Tean smiled and said, “Johnny, you savey heap, but you no savey all. This time I die. You go shoot bird he turn into a mouse, and mouse eat all I eat, just the same bird.” This rather staggered Higginson, and he felt his theories begin to vanish, and he began to feel a little angry; but really loving his old friend, he once more addressed himself to what he now saw might be a hopeless task.

“I go Noumea get big black cat, beautiful cat, all the same tiger—you savey tiger, Tean?—glossy and fat, long tail and yellow eyes; when he see mouse he eat him; you go bed sleep, get up, and soon quite well.” Tean, who by this time had changed position with his friend, and become out of his knowledge a philosopher, shook his head sadly and replied, “You no savey nothing, John; when black man know he die there is no hope. Suppose cat he catch mouse, all no use; mouse go change into a big, black cloud, all the same rain. Rain fall upon me, and each drop burn right into my bones. I die, John, glad I see you; black man all die, black woman no catch baby, tribe only fifty ’stead of five hundred. We all go out, all the same smoke, we vanish, go up somewhere, into the clouds. Black men and white men, he no can live. New Caledonia (as you call him) not big enough for both.”

What happened after that Higginson never told, for when he reached that point he used to break out into a torrent of half French, half English oaths, blaspheme his gods, curse progress, rail at civilization, and recall the time when all the tribe were happy, and he and Tean in their youth went spearing fish. And then bewildered, and as if half-conscious that he himself had been to blame, would say, “I made the roads, opened the mines, built the first pier, I opened up the island; ah, le pauvre Tean, il me faisait de la peine . . . et sa soeur morte . . . she was so pretty with a hibiscus wreath . . . ah, well, pauvre petite . . . je l’aimais bien.”

CALVARY

JUST where the River Plate, split by a hundred islands, forms a sort of delta, a tract of marshy land in Entre Rios, known as the Rincones of the Ibicuy, spreads out flat, cut by a thousand channels, heavily timbered, shut in upon the landward side by a long range of hills of dazzling sand, and buried everywhere in waving masses of tall grass.

Grass, grass, and yet more grass. Grass at all seasons of the year, so that the half-wild horses never know the scarcity of pasture which in the winter makes them lean and rough upon the outside plains. A district shut by its sand-hills and the great river from the outer world. A paradise for horses, cattle, tigers, myriads of birds, for capibaras, nutrias, and for the stray Italians who now and then come from the cities with a rotten boat, and miserable, cheap, Belgian gun, to slaughter ducks.

The population, sparse and indolent, a hybrid breed between the Gauchos and the Chanar Indians, who at the conquest retreated into the thickest swamps and islands of the River Plate. But still a country where life flows easily away amongst the cane-brakes, thickets of espinillo, tala and ñandubay, and where from out the pajonales the half-wild horses bound like antelopes, shaking their manes, their tails aloft like flags, snorting and frisking in the pride of strength, and lighting up the landscape with their variegated colours like a herd of fallow deer. A land of vegetation so intense as to bedwarf mankind almost as absolutely as we bedwarf ourselves with our machinery in a manufacturing town. Air plants upon the trees; oven-birds’ earthen, gourd-like nests hanging from boughs; great wasp nests in the hollows of the trunks; scarlet and rose-pink flamingoes fishing in the shallow pools; nutrias floating down the streams, their round and human-looking heads appearing just awash; and the dark silent channels of the stagnant backwaters, so thickly grown with water weeds that by throwing a few branches on the top a man may cross his horse.

Commerce, that vivifying force, that bond of union between all the basest instincts of the basest of mankind, that touch of lower human nature which makes all the lowest natures of mankind akin, was quite unknown. Cheating was elementary, and rarely did much harm but to the successful cheat; at times a neighbour passed a leaden dollar on a friend, was soon detected, and was branded as a thief; at times a man slaughtered a neighbour’s cow, and sold the hide, stole a good horse, or perpetrated some piece of petty villainy, sufficient by its transparent folly to reassure the world that he was quite uncivilized, and not fit by his exertions ever to grow rich.

Adultery and fornication were frequent, and, again, chiefly concerned the principals, as there were no self-instituted censors, eager to carry tales, and to revenge themselves upon the world for their own impotency.

All were apt lazoers, great with the bolas, and all rode as they had issued from their mothers’ wombs mounted upon a foal, and grown together with him, half horse, half man—quiet and almost blameless centaurs, and as happy as it is possible for men to be who come into the world ready baptized in tears.

So much for man in the Rincones of the Ibicuy, and let us leave him quiet and indolent, fighting occasionally at the “Pulperia” for a quart of wine, for jealousy, for politics, or any of the so-called reasons which make men shed each other’s blood.

But commerce, holy commerce, thrice blessed nexus which makes the whole world kin, reducing all men to the lowest common multiple; commerce that curses equally both him who buys and him who sells, and not content with catching all men in its ledgers, envies the animals their happy lives, was on the watch. Throughout the boundaries of the River Plate, from Corrientes to the bounds of Tucuman, San Luis de la Punta to San Nicholas, and to the farthest limits of the stony southern plains, nowhere were horses cheaper than in the close Rincones of the Ibicuy. Three, four, or five, or at the most six dollars, bought the best, especially if but half-tamed, and a convenient curve of the river allowed a steamboat to discharge or to load goods, tied to a tree and moored beside the bank.

Upon a day a steamer duly arrived, whistled, and anchored, and from her, in a canoe, appeared a group of men who landed, and with the assistance of a guide went to the chief estancia of the place. The owner, Cruz Cabrera, called also Cruz el Narigudo, came to his door, welcomed them, driving off his dogs, wondered, but still said nothing, as it is not polite to ask a stranger what is the business that brings him to your house. Maté went round, and gin served in a square-faced bottle, and drank out of a solitary wine-glass, the stem long snapped in the middle, and spliced by shrinking a piece of green cow-hide round a thin cane, and fastening the cane into a disc of roughly-shaped soft wood. “Three dollars by the cut, and I’ll take fifty.” “No, four and a half; my horses are the best of the whole district.” And so the ignoble farce of bargaining, which from the beginning of the world has been the touchstone of the zero of the human heart, pursued its course.

At last the “higgling of the market”—God-descended phrase—dear to economists and those who in their studies apart from life weave webs in which mankind is caught, decreed that at four dollars the deal was to be made. But at the moment of arrangement one of the strangers saw a fine chestnut colt standing saddled at the door, and claimed him as a “sweetener,” and to save talk his master let him go, and then, the money counted over, the buyer, prepared to give a hand to catch the horses, and to lead them singly to the boat. Plunging and snorting, sweating with terror, and half dead with fear, kicked, cuffed, and pricked with knives, horse after horse was forced aboard, and stood tied to a ring or stanchion, the sweat falling in drops like rain from legs and bellies on the deck. Only the chestnut stood looking uneasily about, and frightened by the struggles and the sound of blows falling upon the backs of those his once companions in the wild gallops through the forest glades, who had been forced aboard.

Then Cruz Cabrera cursed his folly with an oath, and getting for the last time on his back made him turn, passage, plunge, and started and checked him suddenly, then getting off unsaddled him, and gave his halter to a man to lead him to the ship. The horse resisted, terrified at the strange unusual sight, and one of the strangers, raising his iron whip, struck him across the nose, exclaiming with an oath, “I’ll show you what it is to make a fuss, you damned four dollars’ worth, when once I get you safe aboard the ship.” And Cruz Cabrera, gripping his long knife, was grieved, and said much as to the chastity of the stranger’s mother, and of his wife, but underneath his breath, not that he feared to cut a “gringo’s” throat, but that the dollars kept him quiet, as they have rendered dumb, priests, ministers of state, bishops and merchants, princes and peasants, and have closed the mouths of three parts of mankind, making them silent complices in all the villainies they see and hate, and still dare not denounce, fearing the scourge of poverty, and the smart lash which Don Dinero flourishes over the shoulders of all those who venture even remotely to express their thoughts.

Quickly the Ibicuy melted into the mist, as the wheezy steamer grunted and squattered like a wounded wild duck, down the yellow flood. Inside, the horses, more dead than alive, panted with thirst, and yet were still too timid to approach the water troughs. They slipped and struggled on the deck, fell and plunged up again, and at each fall or plunge, the blows fell on their backs, partly from folly, partly from the satisfaction that some men feel in hurting anything which fate or Providence has placed without the power of resistance in their hands. Instinct and reason; the hypothetic difference which good weak men use as an anæsthetic when their conscience pricks them for their sins of omission and commission to their four-footed brethren. But a distinction wholly without a difference, and a link in the long chain of fraud and force with which we bind all living things, men, animals, and most of all our reasoning selves, in one crass neutral-tinted slavery. Who that has never put his bistouri upon the soul, and hitherto no vivisectionist (of men or animals) can claim the feat, shall say who suffers most—the biped or the four-footed animal? I know the cant of education, the higher organism, and the dogmatics of the so-called scientists which bid so fair to worthily replace those of the theologians, but who shall say if animals, when suddenly removed from all that sanctifies their lives, do not pass agonies far more intense than such endured by those whose education or whose reason—what you will—still leaves them hope?

By the next morning the wheezy, wood-fired steamer was in the roads of Buenos Ayres, the exiles of the Ibicuy with coats all starring, flanks tucked up, hanging their heads, no more the lightsome creatures of but yesterday.

Steam launches, pitching like porpoises in the shallow stream, whale-boats manned by Italians girt with red sashes, and with yellow shirts made beautiful with scarlet horse-shoes, and whose eyes glistened like diamonds in their roguish, nut-coloured faces, came alongside the ship. Lighters, after much expenditure of curses and vain reaches with boat-hooks at the paddle-floats, hooked on, and dropped astern. The donkey-engine started with a whirr, giving the unwilling passengers another tremor of alarm, and then the work of lowering them into the flat-bottomed lighters straight began. Kickings and strugglings, and one by one, their coats all matted with the sweat of terror, they were dropped into the boat. One or two slipped from the slings, and landed with a broken leg, and then a dig with a “facon” ended their troubles, and their bodies floated on the shallow waves, followed by flocks of gulls. Puffing and pitching, the tug dragging the lighter reached the ocean-steamer’s side. Again the donkey-engine rattled and whirred, and once again the luckless animals were hoisted up, stowed on the lower deck in rows in semi-darkness, and after a due interval the vessel put to sea.