Part 13

Yet it must be said that if ever men should have honour for holding to a duty when it was far more easy, and even more reasonable, to leave it, then I submit the claim of those American engineers. Having lived in the place where many of them died, and knowing their story, I feel a certain kinship. There is no monument to them. No epic has been written of their tragedy. But their story is, I should think, one of the saddest in the annals of commerce. Of the 941 who left for San Antonio at different times, 221 lost their lives, mostly of disease, though 80 perished in the wreck of a transport ship. That is far higher a mortality rate than that of, say, the South African or the American Civil War.

Few of those men appeared to know the tropics. They thought "the tropics" meant only prodigal largess of fruits and sun and a wide latitude of life--a common mistake. The enterprise became a lingering disaster. Their state was already bad when a supply ship was lost; and they hopefully waited, ill and starving, but with a gallant mockery of their lot, as their letters and diaries attest, for food and medicine which were not to reach them. The doctors continued the daily round of the host of the fever-stricken, giving them quinine, which was a deceit made of flour. The wages of all ceased for legal reasons, and they were in a place where little is cultivated, and so most food has to be imported in spite of a tariff which usually doubles the price of every necessary of life. Some of the survivors, despairing and heroic souls, attempted to escape on rafts down the river; they might as well have tried to cut their way through the thousand miles of forest between them and Manaos. The railway undertaking collapsed again, and the clearing, the huts, and the workshops, and the short line that was actually laid, were left for the vines and weeds to bury. But now again the conquering forest is being attacked. The Madeira-Mamore Railway has been recommenced, and our steamer, the "Capella," is taking up supplies for the establishment at Porto Velho, from which the new railway begins, three miles this side of San Antonio.

III

On the morning of the 23rd January, while we were still considering, seeing what the sun was like, and the languid air, and that we were reduced to tinned beans, fat bacon, and butter which was oil and flies, whether it was worth while to note our breakfast bell--the steward stood swinging it, with the gravity of a priest, under the break of the poop--a shout came from the bridge that the Rio Madeira was in view.

As far back as Swansea we had heard legends of this stream, and they were sufficiently disturbing. When we arrived at Para we heard more, and worse. The pilot we engaged there called the Madeira the "long cemetery." At Serpa, for the first time, we saw what happened to frail humanity when it ventured far on the Madeira. One day a river steamer came to Serpa, with a cargo of men from San Antonio. The river steamers of the Amazon are vessels of broad beam and shallow draft, painted the dingy hue of the river itself, and they have two tiers of decks, open-air shelves, between the supports of which the passengers sling their hammocks. The passengers do not sleep in bunks. This paddleboat came throbbing towards where we were at anchor. It was night, and she was unseen, a palpitation in the dark accompanied somehow by a fountain of sparks. Such boats burn wood in their furnaces. When her noise had ceased, and her lights imperceptibly enlarged as the current dropped her down abeam of us, a breath of her, a draught of air, passed our way. I am more familiar now with the odour malaria causes, but then I thought she must have a freight of the dead. She anchored. We could see her loaded hammocks in the light of the few lamps she carried. Through the binoculars next morning I inspected with peculiar interest the row of cadaverous heads, with black tousled hair, lemon-coloured skins, open mouths and vacant eyes, which stared at us over her rails. Each looked as though once it had peered into the eyes of doom, and then was but waiting, caring nothing.

There, ahead, was the Madeira now for us. We were then nearly a thousand miles from the sea, well within South America. But that meeting-place of the Amazon and its chief tributary was an expanse of water surprising in its immensity. As much light was reflected from the floor as at sea. The water was oceanic in amplitude. The forest boundaries were so far away that one could not realise, even when the time we had been on the river was remembered as a prolonged monotony, that this was the centre of a continent. The forest on our port side was near enough for us to see its limbs and its vines; but to the south-west, where we were heading for Bolivia, and to the north, the way to the Guianas, and to the east, out of which we had come, and to the west, where was Peru, the land was but a low violet barrier, varying in altitude with distance, and with silver sections in it, marking the river roads. In the north-west there was a broad silver path through the wall, the way to the Rio Negro, Manaos, and the Orinoco. In the south the near forest, being flooded, was a puzzle of islands. As we progressed they opened out as a line of green headlands. The Madeira appeared to have three widely separated mouths, with a complexity of intermediate and connective minor ditches. Indeed, the gate of the river was a region of inundated jungle. One began to understand why travellers here sometimes find themselves on the wrong river.

Our bows turned in to the forest wall, and for a few minutes I could not see any way for us there. The jungle parted, and we were on a narrow turgid flood, the colour of the main river, but swifter; a majestic forest was near to either beam. We were enclosed. And after we entered the Madeira my dark thoughts of our future at once left me. If they returned, it was only to be joked about, in the dry way one does refer to a dread that has been long in the distance, and then one day takes shape, becomes material, and settles down with us. Its form, as you know, nearly always allays your alarms. Your simple mind has expected something with the lowering face of evil. Lo! evil has even bright eyes. Its nature, its dark craft which you have dreaded, is not seen, and your mind grows light with surprise. What, only this, then?

I never saw earth look more resplendent and chromatic than on the day when we entered that river with a bad name. Presently, I thought--here was a brief resurgence of the old gloom which had shrouded my conjectural Madeira--I might be called upon to pay the price for this surprising gift of intense colour, light, and luscious heat, for the quickening of the blood, as though the tropic air were a stimulant as well as a narcotic. Well, it does seem but fair, if chance, being happy, gives you a place in the tropics, to expect to have less time there than is given for the job of eking out a meagre existence in the north. It would not be right to look for gain both ways. (You will have noticed already, I suppose, that I have not been on the Madeira fifteen minutes.) This, I thought, as I walked to and fro on the "Capella," is different from that endurance, bitter and prolonged, in the land where there is no sun worth mentioning, where the north-east wind blows, where the poor rate is so and so in the pound (and you are one of the fortunate if you pay it), and Lord Rosebery lectures on Thrift. I mentioned this to the Doctor. He did not remove his pipe from his mouth.

Because (the idea dawned on me as I sank into a deck chair beside the surgeon under the poop awning, and borrowed his silver tobacco-box), because, as to thrift and parching winds, abstinence and prudence, and lectures by the solemn on how to thin out your life in cold climates where all that is worth having is annexed, why praise a man who is willing to deprave his life to sand and frost? There in merry England the poor wretch is, where the riches of earth are not broadcast largess as I see they are here, but are stacked on each side of the road, and guarded by police, leaving to him but the inclement highway, with nothing but Lord Rosebery's advice and benediction to help him keep the wind out of the holes in his trousers; that benefit, and the bleak consideration that he may swink all day for a handful of beans, or go without. What is prudence in that man? It is his goodwill for the police. To be blue nosed and meek at heart, and to hoard half the crust of your stinted bread, is to blaspheme the King of Glory. Some men will touch their crowns to Carnegie in heaven.

Thrift and abstinence! They began to look the most snivelling of sins as I watched, with spacious leisure, the near procession of gigantic trees, that superb wild which did not arise from such niggard and flinty maxims. Frugality and prudence! That is to regard the means to death in life, the pallor and projecting bones of a warped existence, as good men dwell on courage, motherhood, rebellion, and May time, and the other proofs of vitality and growth. Now, I thought, I see what to do. All those improving lectures, reform leagues, university settlements, labour exchanges, and other props for crippled humanity, are idle. It is a generative idea that is wanted, a revelation, a vision. It would be easier and quicker to take regiments of folk out of Ancoats, Hanley, Bethnal Green, and the cottages of the countryside, for one long glance at the kind of earth I see now. The world would expand as they looked. They would get the dynamic suggestion. In vain, afterwards, would the monopolists and the superior persons chant patriotic verse to drown the noise of chain forging at the Westminster foundry. Not the least good, that. The folk would not hear. Their minds would be absent and outward, not locked within to huddle with cramped and respectful thoughts. They would not start instinctively at the word of command. They would begin with dignity and assurance to compass their own affairs, and in an enormous way; and they would make hardly a sound as they moved forward, and they would have uplifted and shining eyes. ("Then you think more of 'em than I do," said the surgeon.)

It would be no use, I saw clearly, sending the folk to Algeria, Egypt, or New York. Such places never betray to the traveller that our world is not a shapeless parcel of fields and buildings, tied up with bylaws, and sealed by the Grand Lama as his last act in the stupendous work of creation. There it is, an angular package in the sky, which the sun reads, and directs on its way to heaven in advance of its limited syndicate of proprietors.

Here on the Madeira I had a vision instead of the earth as a great and shining sphere. There were no fences and private bounds. I saw for the first time an horizon as an arc suggesting how wide is our ambit. That bare shoulder of the world effaced regions and constellations in the sky. Our earth had celestial magnitude. It was warm, a living body. The abundant rain was vital, and the forest I saw, nobler in stature and with an aspect of intensity beyond what the Amazon forests showed, rose like a sign of life triumphant.

You see what that tropical wilderness did for me, and with but a single glance. Whatever comes after, I shall never be the same again. The complacent length of the ship was before us. Amidships were some of the fellows staring overside, absorbed. Now and then, when his beat brought him to the port side, I could see the head of the little pilot on the bridge. His colleague was sleeping in one of the hammocks slung between the stanchions of the poop awning. The Doctor was scrutinising a pair of motuca flies which hovered about his ankles, waiting for him to go to sleep. He wanted them for specimens. The Skipper, looking a little anxious, came slowly up the poop ladder, crossed over, and stood by our chairs. "The river is full of big timber," he said. He went to stare overside, and then came back to us. "The current is about five knots, and those trees adrift are as big as barges. I hope they keep clear of the propeller." The Skipper's eye was uneasy. He was glum with suspicion; he spoke of the way his fools might meet the wiles of fortune at a time when he was below and his ship was without its acute protective intelligence. He stood, a spare figure in white, in a limp grass hat with flapping eaves, gazing forward to the bridge mistrustfully. He had brought us in a valuable vessel to a place unknown, and now he had to go on, and afterwards get us all out again. I began to feel a large respect for this elderly master mariner (who did not give the beard of an onion for any man's sympathy) who had skilfully contrived to put us where we were, and now was unaware what mischance would send us to rot under the forest wall, the bottom to fall out of our adventure just when we were in its narrowest passage and achievement was almost within view. "This is no place for a ship," the captain mumbled. "It isn't right. We're disturbing the mud all the time; and look at those butterflies now, dodging about us!" He was continuing this monologue as a dirty cap appeared at the head of the ladder, and a long and ragged length of sorrowful sailor mounted there, and doffed the cap. The Skipper brusquely signed to him to approach. He was a youngster in an advanced stage of some trouble, and he had no English. I think he was a Swede. He demonstrated his sickness, baring his arm, muttering unintelligibly. The limb, like his hand, was distorted with large blisters. There was his face, too. I mistrusted my equanimity for some moments, but braced my eyes, compelling them to be scientific and impersonal. By signs we gathered he had been sleeping on deck, such was the heat of the forecastle, and the mosquitoes, the Doctor said, had poisoned a body already tainted from the stews of Rotterdam. The corroding spirit of the jungle was beginning to permeate through our flaws.

The Doctor went to his surgery. The pilot sat up in his hammock, glanced indifferently at the sick sailor, yawning and stretching his arms, his dainty little brown feet dangling just clear of the deck. He began to roll a cigarette of something which looked like tea. Then he dropped out, and went forward to release his mate on the bridge, and the senior pilot came up as the Doctor had finished his job. The junior pilot, a fragile, girlish fellow, rather taciturn, greets us always with a faintly supercilious smile. His chief is a round, jolly little man, hearty, and lavish with ornamental gestures. We both smiled involuntarily as he marched across to us, with his uniform cap, bearing our ship's badge, stuck on the back of his head with a bias to the right ear. There is not enough of Portuguese in our ship's company to serve one conversation adequately, but we get on well with this pilot, and he with us. He sits in a hammock, making pantomime explanatory of Brazil to us strangers, and we pick him up with alacrity, after but brief pauses. While the Doctor beguiled him into dramatic moments, I lay back and watched him, searching for Brazilian characteristics, to report here.

You know that, when you have returned from a far country, you are asked unanswerable questions about its people, and especially about its women. We are easily flattered by the suggestion that we are authoritative, with opinions got from uncommon experience, especially where women with strange eyes and dark skins are concerned. So, once upon a time, I caught myself--or rather, I caught that cold, critical, and impartial part of me, which is a solemn fake--when answering a question of this kind, explaining in a comprehensive way the character of the Brazilian people, as though I were telling of the objective phenomena of one simple soul. Presently the wise and ribald part of me woke, caught the note of that inhuman voice, and raised a derisive cry, heard by me with grave deprecation, but not heard at all by my listener. I stopped. For what do I know of the Brazilian character? Very little. Is there such a thing? I suppose the true Brazilian is like the true Englishman, or the typical bird which is known by its bones, but may be anything from a crow to a nightingale, but is more likely a lark. You can imagine the foreigner taking his knowledge of the British pick-pocket who met him at the landing-stage, the pen-portraits of Bernard Shaw, the Rev. Jeremiah Hardshell, Father O'Flynn, You, Me, the cabman who swore at him, his landlady and her daughter, Lloyd-George, Piccadilly by night, and Tom Bowling, carefully adjusting all that valuable British data, just as Professor Karl Pearson does his physical statistics, and explaining the result as the modern English; adding, in the usual footnote, what decadent tendencies are to be deduced, in addition, from the facts which could not be worked into the major premises.

Now, there was the handsome Brazilian customs officer, tall, august, with dark eyes haughty and slow with thought, the waves of his romantic black hair faintly traced in silver, who might have been a poet, or a philosophic revolutionist; but who was the man, as the first mate told us (after we had searched everywhere for the articles) who "pinched your bloomin' field-glasses and my meerschaum."

Take, if you like, the ultra-fashionable ladies at the Para hotel, who looked at us with sleepy eyes, and who, I suspect, were not Brazilians at all. Supposing they were, there must be counted the wife of the official at Serpa. She came aboard there with her husband to see an English ship; she reminded me of that picture of the Madonna by Sassoferrato in the National Gallery; I am unable to come nearer to justice to her than that. Again, there was a certain vain native apothecary, and he had the idea that I was bottle-washer to the "Capella's" surgeon, much to that fellow's secret delight. The chemist treated me with a studied difference in consequence; and though our surgeon could have undeceived the mistaken man, having some Portuguese, he refused to do so. I remember the pilot who, when he left us at Serpa, and I bade him farewell, did, before all our ship's company, embrace me heartily, rest his cheek against mine, and make loving noises in his throat. And there is our present chief guide, now swinging in his hammock, and looking down upon us waggishly.

He had not been a pilot always. Once he was a clown in a circus; that little fact is a clue to much which otherwise would have been obscure in him. When he boarded us at Serpa to take the place of the man who shrank from the thought of the Madeira, the chart-room under the bridge was given to him, and as the mate put it, "he moved in." He had bundles, boxes, bags, baskets, a tin trunk, a chair, a parrot, a hammock, and some pictures. He was going to be with us for two months, but his affair had the conclusive character of a migration, a final severance from his old life. His friends came to see him depart, and they wound themselves in each others arms, head laid in resignation on shoulders. "Looks as if we're bound for the Golden Shore," commented the boatswain.

This little rounded man, the pilot, with his unctuous olive skin, tiny moustache of black silk, and impudent eyes, looked ripe in middle age, though actually he was but thirty. He wore a suit of azure cotton, ironed faultlessly, and his tunic fitted with hooks and eyes across his throat. His boots were sulphur coloured and Parisian. A massive gold ring, which carried a carbonado nearly as large as the stopper of a beer bottle, was embedded in a fat finger of his right hand. In the front of his cap he had sewn the badge of our line, and he was curiously proud of that gaudy symbol. He would wear the cap on one ear, and walk up and down in display, with a lofty smile, and a carriage supposed to appertain to a British officer in a grand moment. He had a great admiration for all that was British, except our food. If you were up at sunrise you could see him at his toilet, and the spectacle was worth the effort. His array of toilet vesicles reminded me of the shelves in a barber's shop. Oiled and fragrant, he took his seat for breakfast with much formal politeness. He shook our saloon company into a sense of its responsibilities, for we had grown indifferent as to dress, and sometimes we had three-day beards. His handkerchiefs and linen were scented, and dainty with floral designs. And ours--oh, ours--! He took wine at breakfast, and after idling a little with our foreign dishes he would wipe his mouth on our tablecloth, and then leave for the bridge. As he passed across the poop we would hear him hawk violently, and spit on the deck. Then the Skipper would glare, and drive his chair backwards in a dark passion.

* * * * *

Gazing at the foliage as it unfolded, our pilot named the paranas, tributaries, and islands, when they drew abeam. He told us what the trees were; and then with head shakes and uplifted hands and eyes, indicated what grave things were behind that screen of leaves. (Though I don't suppose he knew.) His mimicry was so spontaneous and exact that it was more entertaining and just as instructive as speech. He taught us how the Indians kill you, and what some villagers did to a naughty padre, and how the sucuruju swallows a deer, and how to make love to a Brazilian girl. He kicked the slippers from his little feet, and smuggled into the hammock mesh for a snooze, waving a hand coyly to us over the edge of his nest.

The dinner bell rang. Because the saloon is now hot beyond endurance, the steward has fixed a table on deck, and so, as we eat, we can see the jungle pass. That keeps some of our mind from dwelling over much on the dreary menu. The potatoes have begun to ferment. The meat is out of tins; sometimes it is served as fritters, sometimes we recognise it in a hash, and sometimes, shameless, it appears without dress, a naked and shiny lump straight from its metal bed. Often the bread is sour. The butter, too, is out of tins. Feeding is not a joy, but a duty. But it is soon over. Although everybody now complains of indigestion, we have far to go yet, and the cheerfulness which faces all circumstances brazenly must be our manna. Our table, some deal planks on trestles, is mellowed by a white tablecloth. We sit round on boxes. Over head the sun flames on the awning, making it golden and translucent. I let the soup pass. The next dish is a hot pot of tinned mutton and preserved vegetables. Something must be done, and I do it then. There is some pickled beef and pickled onions. I watch the forest pass. Then, for desert, the steward, the hot beads touring about the mounts of his large pale face, brings along oleaginous fritters of plum duff. The Doctor leaves. I follow him to the chairs again, and we exchange tobacco-boxes and fill our pipes. This may seem to you unendurable for long. I did not think so, though of habits so regular and engrained that my chances of survival, when viewed comparatively, for my ship mates were hardened and usually were more robust, seemed poor enough. But I enjoyed it. There was nourishment, a tonic stay, in our desire to greet every onset of the miseries, which now were camped about us, besieging our souls, with sansculotte insolence. We called to the Eumenides with mockery. Like Thoreau, I believe I could live on a tenpenny nail, if it comes to that.