Part 19

When at length the signal came, when the cannon roared, instantly that long, black, wavering line became alive, leaped forward like a long supple serpent, then separated into individual units that spread out across the plain. Men on thoroughbreds who knew horses, and even the riders of the humble cow-ponies, husbanded their strength wisely and held their horses down to the long swinging lope of the prairies, which the trained cow-pony can keep up all day. Less experienced riders, senseless with haste and greed, many with expensive horses which they had bought for the occasion, lashed into top speed at the outset, and before two miles were covered they were down and out. Prairie schooners, thousands of them, broke like a huge covey of awkward quail, set out at speed over the levels, and then dropped back to their old lumbering gait. Some had strong horses that pulled vigorously, some, horses that were weary and old and harnessed with ropes. There were even teams of oxen in this long, mad race. One man went in on a thousand dollar Kentucky thoroughbred, and when he reached the land he had picked out, he found a _sooner_ calmly ploughing with his oxen. It occurred to no one that land just over the line was as good as land twenty miles ahead. It was a woman on foot who realized this. When the cannon boomed and the long black line dashed away, she took one step forward, and stuck down in the ground a stake on which she had whittled her name. She sat down on the ground under a large black cotton umbrella and drank her bottled lemonade, while the rest rushed away in the heat, for a claim or a town lot. Cities were built in six hours.

Then came night in these cities of a few hours. What had been bare, red ground at noon, was at night well ordered cities of tents. The next day they elected a mayor and municipal officers and formed a government. In a week there were hundreds of lumber buildings. The second week they had electric lights. And the second day they had a daily paper.

The first census showed people from every state in the Union and from far away Australia. There were petty aristocrats from Europe. There was an Hungarian nobleman whose name it is not best to give, because there is just one chance in a thousand that it might have been his own name. Too bad, for it was an imposing name, made up of a title, five given names and a double-deck family name. He resembled a captain of cuirassiers. He was a hero of romance in real life; tall, spare, dark; pointed mustache, snappy black eyes, and a very distinguished manner; the cosmopolitan manner. He was an accomplished linguist, who had disembarked at every great port of the world. He knew Shanghai, Frisco, Rio, and the Straits Settlements. He came as a respectable adventurer, because being an adventurer was a profession here. He probably had no definite aim. Because however, collectively, among such a crowd of people there must be money it was an opportunity for him. And if they had money, his wits were keen enough to get some of it, because that was his objective in life. He lived lightly and easily upon the money which other people worked to earn. He waited patiently and happily until they earned it. And then he took it away from them. He used to relate to circles of open-mouthed listeners, under the round white moon of those first warm nights, when the dewless air was glittering and clear, how once he had circled the world with a prince of the blood royal. The prince had incurred his father’s displeasure so his father had decreed to punish him by temporary banishment. By way of banishment he chartered a yacht for a number of years, gave the boy a fortune in spending money, and sent him away to look the world over.

Here, for a living, this Hungarian nobleman did the people. And he did them successfully. To the German settlers he was a German; to the Hungarian a Hungarian; to the French a Frenchman. To the townspeople in general he was an international lawyer who had never seen the inside of a law book in his life. He sold legal advice for cash. His knowledge of all trickery was profound and worthy of respect. When business in a legal line was dull, he sold clothing to measure. In addition, he dealt in real estate. He was a broker of everything who never failed to leave the person he dealt with broke. He was royal in one thing, in the generous way he knew how to spend other people’s money. Even in this isolated place he contrived to look like a fashion plate. He had a large and elegantly selected wardrobe. He never knew where the next meal was coming from, but he always got a meal.

The superannuated politician from other states, who had worn out the patience of all his constituents at home, was here. There were Georgia colonels, Kentucky captains, with goatees or huge mustaches, and narrow, down hanging, black, string ties. There were judges, generals, old and _passés_, a conglomeration of ambition and proud failure, looking hopefully for another chance from Fate. To dispute with any one of them that his town would not have a hundred thousand inhabitants in a year meant gun play.

Food was from the usual western lunch counter. Here every one swung himself to a tall stool and ate. Food was reduced largely to beefsteak, canned tomatoes, wet, soggy bread, and black creamless coffee.

Night, in the towns, with the electric lights beating down upon dry sand, was hard and cruel and white. The business streets were one frame shack after another, each shack with an enormous front built up high to make it look imposing. One town’s most popular and crowded corner, was Reece Brothers’ Gambling House. Here roulette, faro, craps, stud poker, kept the restless crowd busy throughout the night. Of the Reece Brothers, Bill was what you would call the typical gambler, an ideal movie gambler of today. Grey-eyed, thin-lipped, with a mouth like a steel trap, at the ends of which there dangled a long, pointed, limp, corn-silk, yellow mustache. He wore a poetic Lord Byron collar, a flowing tie, a hugely plaided suit, and the largest and most expensive sombrero in town. This was a dry country because it was still under government control; an Indian country. Notwithstanding this fact, however, enormous amounts of liquor were sold openly over a regular bar.

Sam Reece was of a deeply religious bent. When Sunday morning came, after his night shift at the faro table, as lookout, he put on his long, black Prince Albert, tall, silk-plush hat ten years out of date, worn black kid gloves with fancy stitching along the back, and looking like an undertaker at a dry convention, he took his stately way to church. The church was an oblong tent. It was unbearably hot in summer, and in winter of course there was no heat in it. Sam had various aspirations in life. His greatest aspiration was to sing solos in the choir. It was his one genuine pleasure.

With night fall, the lonely little towns began to get busy. By eight o’clock the unpaved dusty streets were packed with a crowd of men and women milling back and forth, back and forth, from one gambling house to another. Many of these people back home were not gamblers, but church deacons, conservative business men, farmers, whom the loneliness forced to seek excitement or companionship. Any one from a corn doctor to an anarchist, could have a crowd of applauding listeners about him, if he mounted the empty sugar barrel which stood upon the Public Acre, and stood up to make a speech.

Nearly always the wind blew. It blew throughout the night, throughout the day. The air was so dry it was something glittering, sweeping continually past. The arc lights swinging wildly in the boisterous wind, cast strange and grotesque shadows upon the unpainted shacks, and the people who were moving about. The church and the gambling houses and that long, black, restless ribbon which was the incoming Santa Fé train, were the only civilizing forces that welded men together, and helped drive away distance, homesickness, and loneliness.

Each city’s idea of a celebration of any kind was noise. The ideal of noise was guns and tin pans. Every man carried one gun. The greater number carried two. Since there was no law but martial law, the population’s first desire was for territorial government. When Senator ——? of Washington, Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands, arose in the Senate, stuck his hand in the lapel of his coat and said: Mr. Speaker, as Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands, I demand for the future citizens of Oklahoma, those honest, hard-working Americans that they be given self government, and so forth, and so forth. The speech went on the wire to Oklahoma. The telegraph operator, who was likewise ticket agent, depot master, and a half a dozen other things, got it first. By way of letting the town know that good news was coming, he ran out on the platform and fired a round from his six-shooter. The proprietor of First Chance Saloon, a two-gun man from Texas, stepped out of his shack and let go both guns. He did not know the news but he felt that it must be good. And he believed in helping on a good thing. If it were good he voiced his approval. If, however, it turned out to be bad it meant that he had been voicing his disapproval. When his guns began to bark, the Feed Store Man, next door, began with his, and before another minute had elapsed the entire town was in the street firing up into the sky. It was like magic. Men leaped from shacks. Men leaped from dugouts, and saloons, everywhere. A firing squad began to march up and down the streets, firing by volley, by individuals, by twos and threes. Most of them did not know what for, but when the telegraph operator ran up the hill to deliver his message to the mayor, who, standing on the empty sugar barrel in the Government Acre, read it aloud, the crowd went mad. The celebration lasted all night. If the news happened to prove disappointing on the morrow, no one was vexed, because soon some other news of some kind would come and then they could have another celebration. Occasionally a citizen had an eye knocked out, or a half a dozen teeth, by a spent bullet. Window glass was broken nightly. No one of course minded such trifles. They were merely the by-product of frequent and joyous celebrations.

Mr. Mencken is a pugilist, not an artist. He has always been in the wrong ring. It is safer to take blows, however, which make you blue instead of black.

Mr. William Lyon Phelps is the most art-predatory of non-æsthetic pedants.

It is good to be interested in everything, from the history of pins to the color of pills preferred by potentates, pugilists, or pedagogues.

Coelho Netto, of Rio, is a person. There are not too many! He is peculiarly versatile. He has been physician and surgeon, lawyer, lecturer upon art and letters in great universities, politician, reporter, and writer of many volumes of successful plays which still hold the stage in both Brazil and Portugal. In addition, he is a novelist and prolific short story writer, and one of the first in his tongue, in South America, to gain a livelihood solely by art.

The difficulty of living by the pen, in Rio, in an early day was set down by a Portuguese journalist as follows:

“They say Brazil has thirteen millions of people. Of these twelve millions eight hundred thousand can not read. Of the two hundred thousand that remain, one hundred and fifty thousand read only daily papers; fifty thousand, only French books; thirty thousand, translations. The other fifteen thousand read the Catechism and the Prayer Book; two thousand study Comte. And one thousand read Portuguese books made in Brazil.”

He was one of the earliest artists to show the native life of the land outside the cities, together with man’s effort to contend with the resisting tropic wilderness. He has shown every class of this richly varied life in his extensive country.

_Tormenta_ is a novel of a young physician, which perhaps is reminiscent of his own youth. _Sertão_ is a collection of prose _acquarelles_ of Brazil’s colonizing days, with interesting pictures of the vast, the varied interior. Here we see storms so violent, they are almost unbelievable, like a deluge, and which last for days; then the long dry seasons, and the measureless, solitary pastures; the encrusted gold of sunsets unimpeded over disconcerting levels; and the grey and melancholy dawns.

One of his most powerful novels, the one I perhaps admire most, is _Rei Negro_. It shows life on a lonely estate in the interior and the confusing conflict, then blending, of black and white races. It is a pathetic, moving story one is forced to remember, of a beautiful woman of the tropics cursed with double race blood and a Negro who was a hero.

_O Capital Federal_ contains enchanting sketches of Rio, and likewise detailed descriptions of existence on a _fazenda_, in the country, where the luxury is so great, so unexpected, it sets one dreaming of the pleasure places of Tiberius, in the south of Italy. This novel, _O Capital Federal_, is dedicated to his uncle as follows: “My Uncle: In this book there are pages that belong to you, because I never should have written them had not my Good Fairy guided me to the ascetic but voluptuous retreat where you live in happy tranquility, following the moral law of Epicurus, and treasuring your flowers.”

This alluring place of residence was isolated in a grave garden of roses. It fronted the green, refreshing foam of the sea, where towered two black rocks. In construction it was a Swiss _chalet_. Steps of marble, polished and rare, led to it. The drawing rooms were ample, luxurious, and filled with objects of art. The bath, in this country home in Brazil, recalls the Baths of Nero. It would have satisfied the sumptuous Ruler of Rome. How he would have enjoyed pushing the buttons which filled the bath room with pink mist of attar of roses or the purple breath of violets! The dining-room, all the other rooms, were equally splendid. There were precious wines in priceless crystal. There was rare and astonishing food. And flowers, dazzling and huge.

In _Rei Negro_, Netto’s descriptions of dawn and sunset, and the blinding yellow midday, are both lovely and unforgettable. I keep this book at hand in order to renew my delight in them. There is freshness and exquisiteness in his paintings of the spaces of this unknown land.

His books are many. All of them are excellent. His is no slight talent.

_Esphinge_ (a novel). _Immortalidade_, (likewise a novel). _Treva_, a book of five novelettes; _Fabulario_ (short stories). _As Sete Dores De N. Senhora_, a noble, uplifting book of faith. _Saudades_, many very brief stories, all of which are attractive and charm with originality. _Scenas e Perfis_, short stories, too, and _O Paraiso_.

I am sorry books are advertised as they are in America today. It both lessens interest in buying and reading. Publishers ought to get together, like nations, and arrange a general disarmament plan. At least we might float, occasionally, the white flag of truce.

Every reader has his peculiarities of taste, touched always with emotion, which is something not amenable to reason. I personally prefer for pleasure, a book on falconry written by some acute and sensual oriental, to the detailed facts, marshalled accurately and dated of, say, the Newgate Calendar.

Ships fascinate me, the beginnings of navigation, Strabo’s _Geography_, maps, old globes, and the Hakluyt Voyages. When I read about a drawing made of a ship a thousand years old, I shiver as at some line of immortal verse. The great emotion sweeps me. Russel Clark wrote: _The most beautiful expression of the hand of man is the sailing ship._ Old shipping books interest me. And the adventures of whaling days. The mischances that befell the Whaling Barque, _George Henry_, kept me awake nights. And the wild-tongued, great Elizabethan Voyagers! I hope pictures have been kept of all the great old ships that ever sailed the seas!

I love gardens. But I do not enjoy reading about them. I hate to see words fade and die. I learn of gardens from painters, etchers. And then I try to remember them without words. In Persian and Indian Miniatures I have loved them best. And the flowers Renoir painted when he was old. Yet that old book _Gerard’s Herbal_ still gives out some of the spiced sweetness of all gardens.

I doubt if in novel making there is such thing as Romanticism, Classicism. Critics, like creations of God He forgot to call good, may be little men, who see in part only, or else through a glass darkly. The two terms merely classify different degrees of visibility.

It is not strange that Dr. Jozef Muls, born in one of the world’s richest art cities, Antwerp, a city that knew Rubens, Quentin Matsys, and Breughel, should write about art. And he has written well.

His _Modern Art, The Twilight of Flemish Art Cities_, and _From Greco to Cubism_, (_Van El Greco Tot Het Cubisme_), give him indisputable rank among the foremost critics of the day. Not only are they penetrating and profound as criticism, but accurately documented, and sensitive, and written in delightful, sympathetic prose. He writes in two languages, French and Flemish; and in speech, he is master of many.

He has not only written books of art but books of travel, short stories, and books of verse. I keep in memory two pleasant booklets about cities. One is _Rouen_, by André Maurois, the other is _Het Levende Oud-Antwerpen_, by Jozef Muls. The latter has eight etchings by Vaes. Both books have the indescribable charm which love of the thing written about gives to words. He writes again of the city of his birth in _De Val Van Antwerpen_.

A work of his which has given me hours of enjoyment is still another book about cities. This is called _Steden_. The chapters on Constantinople and Venice are alluring. He came across from Trieste to Venice one hot August night, over night-black water, to be confronted at dawn with a golden city floating upon a lapis sea. It looked to him like something fabulous from the depths of the ocean. The decaying palaces resembled splendors seen only in a dream. The Bridge of Sighs made him think of melancholy Byron whose heart, he insists, lives on in Venice. He rejoiced in all the eloquent memories of Tintoretto, connoisseur of art that he is, and the past glories of the Republic.

The great canals were merely the mirrors of Venice, Queen of Cities.

Albert Besnard, the distinguished painter, after being for many years director of the school of art in Italy where the coveted _Prix de Rome_ is given, turned to writing after he was an old man. And the book, properly enough, is about Rome: _Sous le ciel de Rome_. For this he was made an _Académicien_. And he deserves the honor. Only one or two other men, for a single work’s grace, have become members of _L’Académie Française_. Books of travel written by sensitive painters like Besnard are things rare and charming. In one place I recall, he exclaims: “I am standing alone at foot of stairway of the Capitol. _Rome under the stars—what delight!_” I think Besnard is quite as fine in prose as in the bejeweled, gauze-robed, almond-eyed beauties he painted in India.

Besnard remembers Marie Bashkirtseff, as he saw her once in her youth, standing beside a fountain in the gardens of the Villa Medici. She reminded him of a little golden, furred cat. He considered her fine instead of beautiful. His trained eyes found her arms too short. She was exquisite and fashionable, but she was too cold, and in her face there was no joy. Her originality, to him, was in her peculiar physical attractiveness, her elegance, and not in her conversation. He called her a poor, little child whose only pleasure was to design, then wear wonderful gowns, briefly, for the eye-pleasure of the Great Julian. He always remembered her own too cold, sharply expressive blue eyes.

His observations are arresting. He thinks it is the fatality of order and equilibrium with which modern youth can not put up. A balance is lost. Somewhere else he declares that grief is the ransom of genius. Only they who can suffer, arrive. Whenever he returns to Rome, he likes to pause a moment before entering his dwelling, on one of the hills, just for the pleasure of penetrating first with his eyes, the rich, grey, sculptured mass, which is the world’s incomparable wonder, _Rome_. He savored with pleasure the beauty of the sky that bends over the Deathless City; the grandeur, the severity of outline of Roman horizons; the deserted _campagna_; the mystery of magnificent palaces with their murmuring fountains, and above everything else, the peculiar charm of the people, who throughout the centuries have known how to keep vehement passions, the grace of the inspiring gesture, and beauty.

Writing from Rome again, he speaks of the winds of art which blow freshly in one’s face, to renew ideas, then strengthen intelligence. Besnard’s book is so alluring, every page of it, (and his book about India, too), that I should not like anyone to miss them. He is a great admirer of D’Annunzio. He writes of the splendor of the Italian poet’s soul on a par with the century-reinforced splendor of the Eternal City.

Sometimes when I read D’Annunzio I feel that he has moulded sentences, phrases, upon the proud painted canvasses of the past of his native land. His prose approaches the sumptuous completeness of Veronese. His old gardens of Rome have the poignancy of personal regret. Listen to this: “Even the garden was dull and sleep held. It was imbued with silence as rich as honey, as thick and heavy as wax, as precious gums. There was abandon and sadness, which exhausted themselves in belated perfume ... from here one could glimpse a pallid swamp with too tall lilies; yellow, heavy with pollen.”

Once when D’Annunzio was ill with fever he dreamed nightly of the rich gardens of Rome, with their fountains.

Of the kind of writing D’Annunzio does, there is not another example in the world today. I fancy there will not be another, until the age of mechanism, scientific mind, reaches its height, and passes. All things perish after they flower, even the ages.

Henry Bordeaux once exclaimed: “Here I am in Rome again after seventeen years!” Then he recalls his youth: _O those morning walks in the perfumed gardens on the Pincian!_ (Rodriguez, the South American novelist, says in _Idolos Rotos_: “I can not forget the tardy twilights on the Pincian!”) Bordeaux remarks as an aside, that even humble people, in Rome, have the gift of eloquence.

_Italy!_ Enchanting land, which still holds the heart of the world, and all its youth!

A soundly made novel that deserves consideration from thinkers, is _Idolos Rotos_ (Broken Idols), by Manuel Diaz Rodriguez, published long ago in Venezuela. It is powerful in sense of sociological, economical, and political forces. It is a possessive reproduction of locality. I do not know of any other one book in which an idle reader can learn to understand so well, the differing values, the changing present condition of a great race, suddenly thrust into new material backgrounds, undergoing the too rapid physiological pressure of an untried climate. The book has mental detachment. It has balance of ideas. It has calm, unprejudiced observation. It is brilliant, subtle, and penetrating. And it has fine sincerity. The writer carries forward fearlessly the logic of a visioned idea. The prose is always good and sometimes great.

Few have been able to look upon the civilizations that grew up with mushroom swiftness in the new lands of the West, the Americas, with clearer eyes. We meet here the mind of South American youth. And the book has stable novel architecture.