Part 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CALVARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who would not sell a farm and go to sea?” the sailor says, and turns his quid remarking, “Go to sea for pleasure, yes, and to hell for fun.” The smell of steam, confinement, the motion of the ship, monotony of days, time marked but by the dinner-bell, a hell to passengers who in their cabins curse the hours, and kill the time with cards, books, drink and flirtation, and yet find every day a week. But to the exiles of the Ibicuy, stricken with terror, too ill to eat, parching, and yet afraid to drink, hopeless and fevered, sick at heart, slipping and falling, bruised with each motion of the ship, beaten when restless, and perhaps in some dim way conscious of having left their birthplace, and foreseeing nothing but misery, who shall say what they endured during the passage, in the hot days, the stifling nights, and in the final change to the dark skies and chilling breezes of the north? Happiest those who died without the knowledge of the London streets, and whose bruised carcasses were flung into the sea, their coats matted with sweat and filth, legs swelled, and heads hanging down limply as they trailed the bodies on the decks.

The docks, the dealer’s yard, the breaking in to harness, and the sale at Aldridge’s, and one by one they were led out to meet no more; as theologians who have blessed man with hell, allow no paradise to beasts. Perhaps because their lives being innocent, they would have filled it up so that no man could enter, for what saint in any calendar could for an instant claim to be admitted if his life were compared to that of the most humble of his four-footed brethren in the Lord? Docked duly, to show that nature does not know how to make a horse, bitted and broken, the chestnut colt, once Cruz Cabrera’s pride, started on cab work, and for a time gave satisfaction to his owner, for, though not fast, he was untiring, and, as his driver said, “yer couldn’t kill ’im, ’e was a perfect glutton for ’ard work.”