Read Ebook: Brought Forward by Cunninghame Graham R B Robert Bontine

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Ebook has 440 lines and 42467 words, and 9 pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning half round and offering me a cigarette, the Correntino spoke again. "It is a paradise for all those pingos here in this rinc?n: grass, water, everything that they can want, shade, and shelter from the wind and sun."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV "UNO DEI MILLE"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND

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

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

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

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

"Ye mind yon Wishaw meeting?"

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

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