Part 10

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.