Part 12

Streets, streets, and yet more streets, endless and sewer-like, stony and wood-paved, suburbs interminable, and joyless squares, gaunt stuccoed crescents, “vales,” “groves,” “places,” a perfect wilderness of bricks, he trotted through them all. Derbies and boat-races, football matches, Hurlingham and the Welsh Harp, Plaistow and Finchley, Harrow-on-the-Hill, the wait at theatres, the nightly crawl up Piccadilly watching for fares, where men and women stop to talk; rain, snow, ice, frost, and the fury of the spring east wind, he knew them all, struggled and shivered, baked, shook with fatigue, and still resisted. But time, that comes upon us and our horses, stealthily creeping like Indians creep upon the war trail without a sign, loosening the sinews of our knees, thickening their wind, and making both of us useless except for worms, began to tell. The chronic cough, the groggy feet, the eye covered with a cloud, caused by a flick inside the blinkers, and the staring coat, soon turned the chestnut, from a cab with indiarubber tyres, celluloid fittings, and a looking-glass upon each side (for fools to see how impossible it is that they can ever have been made after God’s image), to a night hack, and then the fall to a fish-hawker’s cart was not too long delayed.

Blows and short commons, sores from the collar, and continued overwork, slipping upon the greasy streets, struggling with loads impossible to move, finished the tragedy; and of the joyous colt who but a year or two ago bounded through thickets scarcely brushing off the dew, nothing was left but a gaunt, miserable, lame, wretched beast, a very bag of bones, too thin for dog’s meat, and too valueless even to afford the mercy of the knacker’s fee. So, struggling on upon his Via Crucis, Providence at last remembered, and let him fall, and the shaft entering his side, his blood coloured the pavement; his owner, after beating him till he was tired, gave him a farewell kick or two; then he lay still, his eyes open and staring, and white foam exuding from his mouth.

The scent of horse dung filled the fetid air, cabs rattled, and vans jolted on the stones, and the dead horse, bloody and mud-stained, formed, as it were, a sort of island, parting the traffic into separate streams, as it surged onward roaring in the current of the streets.

A PAKEHA

RAIN, rain, and more rain, dripping off the sodden trees, soaking the fields, and blotting out the landscape as with a neutral-tinted gauze. The sort of day that we in the land “dove il doce Dorico risuona” designate as “saft.” Enter along the road to me a neighbour of some fifty to sixty years of age, one Mr. Campbell, a little bent, hair faded rather than grey, frosty-faced as we Scotsmen are apt to turn after some half a century of weather, but still a glint of red showing in the cheeks; moustache and whiskers trimmed in the fashion of the later sixties; “tacketed” boots, and clothes, if not impervious to the rain, as little affected by it as is the bark of trees. His hat, once black and of the pattern affected at one time by all Free Church clergymen, now greenish and coal-scuttled fore and aft and at the sides. In his red, chapped, dirty, but grey-mittened hands a shepherd’s stick—long, crooked, and made of hazel-wood.

“It’ll maybe tak’ up, laird.”

“Perhaps.”

“An awfu’ spell o’ it.”

“Yes, disgusting.”

“Aye, laird, the climate’s sort o’ seekenin’. I mind when I was in New Zealand in the sixties, aye, wi’ a surveyor, just at the triangulation, ye ken. Man, a grand life, same as the tinklers, here to-day and gane to-morrow, like old Heather Jock. Hoot, never mind your dog, laird, there’s just McClimant’s sheep, puir silly body, I ken his keel-mark. Losh me, a bonny country, just a pairfect pairadise, New Zealand. When I first mind Dunedin it wasna bigger than the clachan there, out by. A braw place noo, I understan’, and a’ the folk fearfu’ took up wi’ horse, driving their four-in-hands, blood cattle, every one of them. There’s men to-day like Jacky Price—he was a Welshmen, I’m thinking—who I mind doing their day’s darg just like mysel’ aboot Dunedin, and noo they send their sons hame to be educated up aboot England.

“When? ’Oo aye, I went oot in the old _London_ wi’ Captin Macpherson. He’d bin the round trip a matter o’ fifteen times, forbye a wee bit jaunt whiles after the ‘blackbirds’ (slaves, ye ken, what we called free endentured labourers) to the New Hebrides. The _London_, aye, ’oo aye, she foundered in the Bay (Biscay, ye ken) on her return. It’s just a special providence I wasna a passenger myself.

“Why did I leave the country? Eh, laird, ye may say. I would hae made my hame out there, but it was just the old folks threap, threaping on me to come back, I’m telling ye. A bonny toon, Dunedin, biggit on a wee hill just for a’ the wurrld like Gartfarran there, and round the point a wee bit plain just like the Carse o’ Stirling. Four year I wrocht at the surveyin’, maistly triangulation, syne twa at shepherdin’, nane o’ your Australlian fashion tailing them a’ day, but on the hame system gaen’ aboot; man, I mind whiles I didna see anither man in sax weeks’ time.”

“Then you burned bricks, you say?”

“Aye, I didna’ think ye had been so gleg at the Old Book. Aye, aye, laird, plenty of stra’, or maybe it was yon New Zealand flax stalk. The awfiest plant ye ever clapt your eyes on, is yon flax. I mind when I first landed aff the old _London_—she foundered in the Bay. It was just a speecial interposition . . . but I mind I telt ye. Well, I just was dandering aboot outside the toon, and hettled to pu’ some of yon flax; man, I wasna fit; each leaf is calculated to bear a pressure of aboot a ton. The natives, the Maories, use it to thack their cottages. A bonny place, New Zealand, a pairfect pairadise—six-and-thirty years ago—aye, aye, ’oo aye, just the finest country in God’s airth.

“Het? Na, na, nane so het as here in simmer, a fine, dry air, and a bonny bright blue sky. Dam’t, I mind the diggings opening tae. There were a wheen captins. Na, na, not sea captins, airmy captins, though there were plenty of the sea yins doon in the sooth; just airmy captins who had gone out and ta’en up land; blocked it, ye ken, far as frae here to Stirlin’. Pay for it, aye, aboot a croon the acre, and a wee bit conseederation to the Government surveyor just kept things square. Weel, when the diggins opened, some of them sold out and made a fortune. Awfu’ place thae diggins, I hae paid four shillin’ a pound for salt mysel’, and as for speerits, they were just fair contraband.

“And the weemen. Aye, I mind the time, but ye’ll hae seen the Circassian weemen aboot Africa. Weel, weel, I’m no saying it’s not the case, but folk allow that yon Circassians are the finest weemen upon earth. Whiles I hae seen some tae, at fairs, ye ken, in the bit boothies, but to my mind there’s naething like the Maories, especially the half-casted yins, clean-limbed, nigh on six feet high the maist o’ them. Ye’ll no ken Geordie Telfer, him that was a sojer, he’s got a bit place o’ his ain out by Milngavie. Geordie’s aye bragging, bostin’ aboot weemen that he’s seen in foreign pairts. He just is of opeenion that in Cashmere or thereaboots there is the finest weemen in the warld. Black, na, na, laird, just a wee toned and awfu’ tall, ye ken. Geordie he says that Alexander the Great was up aboot Cashmere and that his sojers, Spartans I think they ca’ed them, just intromitted wi’ the native weemen, took them, perhaps, for concubines, as the Scriptures say; but ye’ll ken sojers, laird; Solomon, tae, an awfu’ chiel yon Solomon. The Maori men were na blate either, a’ ower sax fut high, some nigh on seven fut, sure as death, I’m tellin’ ye. Bonny wrestlers, tae; man, Donald Dinnie got an unco tirl wi’ ane o’ them aboot Dunedin, leastwise if it wasna Dinnie, it was Donald Grant or Donald McKenzie, or ane of they champions frae Easter Ross. Sweir to sell their land tae they chaps, I mind the Government sent out old Sir George Grey, a wise-like man, Sir George, ane o’ they filantrofists. Weel, he just talkit to them, ca’ed them his children, and said that they shouldna resist legeetimate authority. Man, a wee wiry fella’, he was the licht-weight champion wrestler at Tiki-Tiki, just up and said, ‘Aye, aye, Sir George,’ though he wasna gi’en him Sir George, but just some native name they had for him, ‘we’re a’ your children, but no sic children as to gie our land for naething.’ Sir George turnit the colour of a neep, ane o’ yon swedes, ye ken, and said nae mair.”

“How did they manage it?”

“The Government just arranged matters wi’ the chiefs. Bribery, weel a’ weel, I’ll no gae sae far as to impute ony corruption on them, but a Government, a Government, ye ken, is very apt to hae its way.

“Dam’t, ’twas a fine country, a pairfect pairadise. I mind aince going oot with Captin Brigstock, Hell-fire Jock they ca’ed him, after they bushrangers. There was ane Morgan frae Australlia bail’t up a wheen folks, and dam’t, says Captin Brigstock, ye’ll hae to come, Campbell. Shot him, yes, authority must be respected, and the majesty o’ law properly vendeecated, or else things dinna thrive. It was in a wood of gora-gora we came on him about the mouth of day. Morgan, ye ken, was boiling a billy in a sort o’ wee clearin’, his horse tied to a tree close by, when Brigstock and the others came upon him. Brigstock just shouted in the name o’ the law and then let fly. Morgan, he fell across the fire, and when we all came up says he, ‘Hell-fire, ye didna gie me ony chance,’ and the blood spouted from his mouth into the boiling pan.

“Deid, ’oo aye, deid as Rob Roy. I dinna care to mind it. But a fine life, laird, nae slavin’ at the plough, but every ane goin’ aboot on horseback; and the bonny wee bit wooden huts, the folk no fashed wi’ furniture, but sittin’ doon to tak’ their tea upon the floor wi’ their backs against the wall. That’s why they ca’ed them squatters. They talk aboot Australlia and America, but if it hadna been for the old folks I would hae made my hame aboot a place ca’ed Paratanga, and hae taken up with ane o’ they Maori girls, or maybe a half-caste. Married, weel, I widna say I hae gane to such a length. Dam’t, a braw country, laird, a pairfect pairadise, I’m telling ye;” and then the rain grew thicker, and seemed to come between us as he plodded on towards the “toon.”

VICTORY

RANKS upon ranks of rastaquoères, Brazilians, Roumanians, Russians, Bulgarians, with battalions of Americans, all seated round the “piazza” of the Grand Hotel. Ladies from Boston, Chicago, and New York, their heels too high, their petticoats too much belaced, their Empire combs bediamonded so as to look almost like cut-glass chandeliers, as in their chairs they sat and read the latest news from Tampa, Santiago, and how Cervera’s Squadron met the fate which they (the ladies) reckoned God prepares for those who dare to fight against superior odds.

Outside upon the boulevards, cocottes, guides, cabmen, and androgynous young men, touts, and all those who hang about that caravansary where the dulcet Suffolk whine, made sharper by the air of Massachusetts, sounds, passed and repassed.

Smug-faced, black-coated citizens from Buffalo and Albany, and from places like Detroit and Council Bluffs, to which the breath of fashion has not penetrated, scanned the _New York Herald_, read the glorious news, and, taking off their hats, deigned publicly to recognize the existence of a God, and after standing reverently silent, masticating their green cigars in contemplation of His wondrous ways, to take a drink.

Aquatic plants and ferns known only to hotels, and constituting a sub-family of plants, which by the survival of the ugliest have come at last to stand gas, dust, saliva, and an air befogged with Chypre, grew in the fountain where, in the tepid water, gold fish with swollen eyes, and blotched with patches of unhealthy white, swam to and fro, picking up crumbs and rising to the surface when some one threw a smoked-out cigarette into the basin, in the midst of which a fig-leaved Naiad held a stucco shell.

The corridors were blocked with Saratoga trunks; perspiring porters staggered to and fro, bending beneath the weight of burdens compared to which a sailor’s chest is as a pill-box.

All went well; the tapes clicked off their international lies, detailing all the last quotations of the deep mines upon the Rand, the fall in Spanish Fours; in fact, brought home to those with eyes to see, the way in which the Stock Exchange had put a rascals’ ring around the globe.

Waiters ran to and fro, their ears attuned to every outrage upon French, seeking to find the meaning of the jargons in which they were addressed.

Majestic butlers in black knee-breeches, and girt about the neck with great brass chains, moved slowly up and down, so grave and so respectable that had you laid your hands upon any one of them and made a bishop of him he would have graced the post.

Mysterious, well-dressed men sat down beside you, and after a few words proposed to take you in the evening to show you something new.

Women walked to and fro, glaring at one another as they had all been tigresses, or again, catching each other’s eyes, reddened, and looked ashamed, as if aware, though strangers, that they understood the workings of the other’s heart.

Burano chandeliers and modern tapestry, with red brocade on the two well-upholstered chairs, imparted beauty and a look of wealth, making one feel as if by striking an electric bell a door would open and a troop of half-dressed women file into the court, after the fashion of another kind of inn.

Outside the courtyard Paris roared, chattered, and yelped, cycles and automobiles made the poor _piéton’s_ life a misery, and set one thinking how inferior after all the Mind which thought out Eden was to our own.

Upon the asphalt the horizontales lounged along, pushing against the likely-looking passer-by like cats against a chair.

Cabs rattled, and the whole _clinquant_ town wore its best air of unreality, which it puts off alone upon the morning of a revolution.

Through boulevards, parvis, cités, along the quays, in the vast open spaces which, like Saharas of grey stone, make the town desolate, in cafés, brothels, theatres, in church and studio, and wherever men most congregate, groups stood about reading the news, gesticulating, weeping, perspiring, and agog with a half-impotent enthusiastic orgasm of wildest admiration for Spain, Cervera, and the men who without bunkum or illusion steamed to certain death. And, curiously enough, the execration fell not so much upon Chicago as on “ces cochons d’Anglais,” who by their base connivance had wrought the ruin of the Spanish cause.

Yankees themselves read and remarked with sneers that England’s turn was coming next, and after “Kewby,” that they reckoned to drag the British flag through every dunghill in New York; then one winked furtively and said, “We need them now, but afterwards we’ll show Victoria in a cage for a picayune a peep, and teach the Britishers what to do with their old Union Jack,” thinking no doubt of the ten-cent paper which is sold in every city of the States, stamped with the Spanish flag.

And as I sat, musing on things and others—thinking, for instance, that when you scratch a man and see his blood you know his nature by the way he bears his wound, and that the Spaniards, wounded to the death, were dying game (after the fashion of the English in times gone by, before Imperialism, before the Nonconformist snuffle, the sweating system, and the rest had changed our nature), and that the Yankees at the first touch cried out like curs, though they had money, numbers, and everything upon their side—I fell a-thinking on the Spain of old. Inigo Lopez de Mendoza, el Gran Capitan, Cortes (not at the siege of Mexico, but in the rout before Algiers) came up before me, and I thought on the long warfare, extending over seven hundred years, by which Spain saved the southern half of Europe from the Moors; upon Gerona, Zaragoza, and, most of all, upon Cervera, last of the Quixotes, Vara de Rey, Linares, and the poor peasants from Galician hills, thyme-scented wastes in Lower Aragon, Asturian mountains, and Estremenian oak-woods, who, battling against superior numbers, short of food, of ammunition, and bereft of hope, were proving their descent from the grim soldiers of the Spanish “Tercios” of the Middle Ages, and making the invaders of their country pay for their piracy in blood.

Blood is the conqueror’s coin the whole world over, and if the island which Columbus found for Spain pass into other hands, let those who take it pour out their blood like water to inaugurate their reign of peace.

Where the connection between the senses and the brain comes in, which influences first, and how, or whether a wise Providence, always upon His guard (after the fashion of an operator in a Punch and Judy show), influences each man directly, as by celestial thought suggestion, I cannot tell.

All that I know is, that once walking on the rampart gardens which in Cadiz overhang the sea and form the outside rim of the “Taza de Plata,” as the Spaniards call the town, I on a sudden saw the River Plate. The Gauchos, plains, wild horses, the stony wastes, the ostriches (the “Alegria del Desierto”), came up before me, and in especial a certain pass over a little river called the Gualiyan; the sandy dip, the metallic-looking trees, the greenish river with the flamingoes and white herons and the black-headed swans; the vultures sitting motionless on the dead trees, and most of all the penetrating scent of the mimosa, known to the natives as the “espinillo de olor.”

Turning and wondering why, I saw a stunted tree with yellow blossoms duly ticketed with its description “Mimosa” this or that, and with its “habitat” the warmer district of the River Plate.

I leave these things to wise philosophers and to those men of science who seem to think mankind is worth the martyrdom of living dogs and cats; or who, maybe, drag out the entrails of their quivering fellow-mortals merely to stimulate their senses or erotic powers.

But the “dwawm” over, looking about, fenced in by swarms of overjoyed Americans, all talking shrilly, reading out the news, exultant at the triumph of their fleet, puffed up and arrogant as only the descendants of the Puritans can be, I saw a Spaniard sitting with his daughter, a girl about nineteen.

Himself a Castellano rancio, silent and grave, dressed all in black, moustache waxed to a point, square little feet like boxes, brown little hands, face like mahogany, hair cropped close, and with the unillusional fatalistic air of worldly wisdom mixed with simplicity which characterizes Spaniards of the older school.

Being a Christian, he spoke no tongue but that which Christians use, was proud of it, proud of his ignorance, proud (I have no doubt) of his descent.

No doubt he saw everything through the clear dazzling atmosphere of old Castille, which Spaniards of his kind seem to condense and carry off with them for use in other climes.

Seeing so clearly, he saw nothing clear, for the intelligence of man is so contrived as to be ineffective if a mist of some sort is not interposed.

The daughter fair, fair with the fairness of a Southern, blue-eyed, and skin like biscuit china, hands and feet fine, head well set on, and yet with the decided gestures and incisive speech, the “aire recio,” and the “meneo” of the hips in walking, of the women of her race.

They sat some time before a pile of newspapers, the father smoking gravely, taking down the smoke as he were drinking it, and then in a few minutes breathing it out to serve as an embellishment to what he said, holding his cigarette meanwhile fixed in a little silver instrument contrived like two clasped hands.

The Spanish newspapers were, of course, all without news, or said they had none, and as the daughter read, the old man punctuated with “Valiente,” “Pobrecitas,” and the like, when he heard how before El Caney, Vara de Rey had died, or how the Americans had shot the three Sisters of the Poor whose bodies were found lying with lint and medicine in their hands.

“Read me the papers of the Americans, hija de mi corazon,” and she began, translating as she read.

Reading of the whole agony, choking but self-possessed, she read: the _Vizcaya_, _Almirante Oquendo_, and the rest; the death of Villamil, he who at least redeemed the promise made to the Mother of his God in Cadiz before he put to sea.

And as she read the old man gave no sign, sitting impassive as a fakir, or like an Indian warrior at the stake.

She went on reading; the fleet steamed through the hell of shot and shell, took fire, was beached, blew up, and still he gave no sign.

Cervera steps on board the conqueror’s ship, weeping, gives up his sword, and the old man sat still.

When all was finished, and the last vessel burning on the rocks, slowly the tears fell down his old brown cheeks, and he broke silence. “Virgen de Guadalupe, has not one escaped?” and the girl, looking at him through her now misty eyes, “No, papa, God has so willed it. . . . What is wrong with your moustache?”

Then, with an effort, he took down his grief, said quietly, “I must change my hairdresser,” got up, and offering his daughter his arm, walked out impassible, through the thick ranks of the defeated foe.

ROTHENBERGER’S WEDDING

SHORT and broad-shouldered, with the flaxen hair and porcelain-coloured eyes of the true man of Kiel or Koenigsberg, Dr. Karl Rothenberger prided himself on being a townsman of the Great Kant, “who make the critique of pure sense.” For him in vain the modern mystic spread his nets; his mass, his psychological research, his ethics based on the saving of his own gelatinous soul, said nothing to the man of Koenigsberg. His work to minister by electricity to the rheumatic, the gouty; to those who had loved perhaps well, but certainly in a vicarious and post-prandial fashion; his passion fishing with a float; a “goode felawe,” not too refined, but yet well educated; his literary taste bounded by idealistic novels about materialistic folk, and the drum-taps of the bards of Anglo-Saxon militarism; the doctor looked on the world as a vast operating theatre, sparing not even his own foibles in his diagnosis of mankind. All sentiment he held if not accursed, yet as superfluous, and though he did not pride himself exactly on his opinions, knowing them well to be but the result of education, and of a few molecules of iron, more or less, in the composition of his blood, yet would deliver them to all and sundry, as he were lecturing to students in a university. Women he held inferior to men, as really do almost all men, although they fear to say so; but again, he said, “de womens they have occupy my mind since I was eighteen years.”

So after many wanderings in divers lands, he came, as wise men will, to London, and set up his household gods in a vast plane-tree-planted square (with cat ground in the middle called a garden), and of which the residents each had a key, but never walked in, sat in, or used in any way, though all of them would have gone to the stake rather than see a member of the public enter into its sacred precincts, or a stray child play in it, unless attended by a nurse.