THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 \&
 
 CHARITY
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
 CHARITY 
 
 BY 
 
 R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM 
 
 LONDON 
 DUCKWORTH & CO. 
 
 3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN 
 
 1912
 
 6005- 
 
 TO 
 JOHN LAVERY, A.R.A. 
 
 LIBRARY
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Preface 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ix 
 
 Charity 
 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 Aunt Eleanor 
 
 
 
 • 
 
 12 
 
 La Alcaldesa 
 
 
 
 
 25 
 
 An Hidalgo 
 
 
 
 
 45 
 
 The Craw Road . 
 
 
 
 
 65 
 
 Set Free 
 
 
 
 
 73 
 
 Caisteal-na-Sithan . 
 
 
 
 
 81 
 
 Immortality 
 
 
 
 
 94 
 
 A Meeting . 
 
 
 
 
 104 
 
 San Andres 
 
 
 
 
 116 
 
 A Braw Day 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 133 
 
 Aurora La Cujini 
 
 
 
 
 146 
 
 Un Autre Monsieur 
 
 
 
 
 • 163 
 
 Christie Christison 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 177 
 
 A Princess . 
 
 
 
 
 . 196 
 
 El Jehad . 
 
 
 
 
 . 208 
 
 La Pampa . 
 
 
 
 
 227
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Hope has been said to be the quality of youth, 
 and faith of middle age. 
 
 Therefore, it ought to follow, that the old 
 should cling to charity as the best antidote to 
 avarice, their chief besetting sin. If, though, 
 they have not in their youth been hopeful, and 
 in their middle years imbued with faith, that is 
 both in themselves, in others, and in the world 
 in which they live, charity is not for them in 
 age. Hope carries in itself something that 
 impels our admiration ; faith our respect ; but 
 charity is like a mountain seedling-pine, spring- 
 ing up oft in barren places, rooted amongst the 
 rocks and flourishing in the chilliest blasts of 
 life, and in despite of fate. 
 
 Honour and virtue do not of necessity take 
 with them charity ; neither can base estate nor 
 any adverse circumstance of life stifle it in the 
 hearts of those, to whom it comes, just as the 
 fire shines out from a black opal, almost with- 
 out their ken. 
 
 In a dark winding lane, just underneath the 
 
 shadow of the rock on which Tarik first disem- 
 A 2 ix
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 barked, lived Dona Ana Alvarez. Her enor- 
 mous bulk had given her the nickname of Fat 
 Anne, which she adopted cheerfully, bearing in 
 mind the adage " Fatness comes far before mere 
 beauty, any day." The flesh seemed to surge up, 
 threatening to choke her, from her breast and 
 neck. Jet would have looked a rusty brown be- 
 side her hair, which she wore always parted down 
 the middle and trained into two curls, called 
 whiskers by the women of her class in Spain. 
 No one had ever seen her dressed but in a 
 morning wrapper, either of pique" or of muslin, 
 a habit which she alleged she had contracted 
 in her youth, so as to be always ready for her 
 work. Not that she said this in an indecent 
 way, or with a wish to raise a smile at the 
 application of the word, but because what she 
 thus referred to was the only kind of work that 
 she had ever done. 
 
 Quite simply she would explain, saying : 
 "When I was young my mother sent me to a 
 house in Seville, where I worked with the 
 other girls, when I was just fourteen. In 
 summer when I used to come back to Los 
 Barrios, for in the heat of Seville there was no 
 one left in town, my chief delight was to wake 
 up and find myself alone."
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 Her father was a general, which in Spain 
 corresponds to the familiar "daughter of a 
 clergyman," and she herself kept an establish- 
 ment in a winding lane, which ran off from the 
 main street, just opposite the church. In it 
 she sat in an armchair, flaccid, but business- 
 like. Although she had retired from active 
 intervention in the duties of her trade, she 
 still darkened her eyelids and her eyebrows, 
 powdered her face, and upon Saints' days and 
 on Sunday wore a bright red carnation in her 
 hair. Report averred that her heart still was 
 tender, and that a general in La Linea occa- 
 sionally visited her, but dressed in civil clothes, 
 and that a famous bull-fighter, when he 
 "killed" either in Algeciras or San Roque, 
 usually had a glass or two of Manzanilla at her 
 establishment. This naturally gave her a posi- 
 tion of some consideration amongst her friends, 
 and at the same time kept up her interest in 
 life. Needless to say, her house was the 
 resort of all the younger officers of the British 
 fleet, when it came into what they all called 
 " Gib." in their bluff Saxon way. 
 
 Kind and good-humoured, after their fashion, 
 their intimate persuasion that they were all 
 committing an offence, made them more brutal,
 
 xii PREFACE 
 
 if more generous, towards the inmates of the 
 house than were their fellow-sinners on board 
 the other fleets that visited the port. 
 
 Nothing was commoner than to hear them 
 say to one another, " What a beast one feels 
 when one wakes up with a sore head, beside 
 one of the girls, up at old Mother Anne's." 
 
 Most probably, no speculations of a moral 
 kind had ever entered into the head of Ana 
 Alvarez. She came, as she occasionally would 
 say, in moments of expansion, when trade was 
 bad, and when the Channel fleet delayed too 
 long in coming, from a family who for three 
 generations had always dealt in girls. 
 
 Her people all were old Christians, that is 
 they had no stain either of Jewish or of Moorish 
 blood, and in the annals of her family no thief 
 was known, although, as she allowed, some 
 few were smugglers, and her great-grandfather 
 was the first man who ever trained a dog to 
 carry on his back two little packs of fine 
 tobacco and bring them through the lines. 
 
 Seated upon an Austrian cane chair, which 
 she kept gently rocking with a foot, on which 
 a satin slipper dangled from the toe, she used 
 to pass away the time, between the siesta and 
 the coming of the breeze, dozing, but vigilant,
 
 PREFACE xiii 
 
 ready to intervene in any quarrel that arose, or 
 put a client at his ease, as he sat waiting, 
 smoking cigarettes, whilst the girls dressed 
 their hair. Fat Anne was in the main a kindly 
 potentate, all her employees liked her, for, as 
 they said, the " mistress knows the business, 
 has worked at it herself, and does not ask 
 impossibilities of any of the girls." 
 
 If they got into debt, she did not press them, 
 and never charged them interest on the debt, 
 saying, no doubt, that the Lord God would 
 send some gentlemen along to pay it for them, 
 when it seemed good to Him. 
 
 To this well-ordered house, in which, as all 
 its inmates said, they all made money, and if a 
 girl should chance to owe two or three ounces 
 no interest was ever charged by Dona Ana, 
 there came one day a man. 
 
 A guest on board the flagship, his name was 
 Scudamore. The midshipman referred to him 
 as " Ullage," though he was smart, good- 
 looking and well dressed. At first he had 
 some money and used to haunt Fat Anne's, 
 taking up with a girl known as La Jerezana, 
 tall, active and well-built. Not too fat, not too 
 thin, the Arabs say, and she quite came up to 
 their standard, and for the rest, no one could
 
 xiv PREFACE 
 
 better sing the Malaguena, or dance a Tango 
 with the true movements of the hips. 
 
 At first a little flattered by the visits of the 
 man, who she knew was on terms of intimacy 
 with all the officers, little by little she began to 
 love him, and at last doted upon him, with all 
 the fierceness of affection of women of her 
 class. Kind Dona Ana used to remonstrate, 
 after the way a mother chides a wilful daughter, 
 telling her that for a woman of her class nothing 
 could be so fatal as to fall in love. " Daughter 
 of my entrails," she would say, " love is not for 
 us. All shall love us and waste their means to 
 gratify our whims, but we, we shall take all, 
 and go our way, rejoicing, till we have made 
 enough to buy a husband, to soothe our older 
 years." 
 
 La Jerezana owned the strength of the 
 advice, but did not follow it, for, as she said, 
 "Love is as obstinate as a male mule . . . and 
 somehow . . . look, Dona Ana, you who have 
 known the world, have you not sometimes, 
 even with all your science, felt yourself bitten 
 with a man ? " 
 
 The matron smiled, and smoothing down 
 her hair, said: "Yes, my daughter, for look 
 you, the flesh is weak, and when a man talks
 
 PREFACE xv 
 
 softly, speaking of love, to one of us, whose 
 trade it is to simulate love's rapture for a 
 dollar . . . you know, I never kept a house 
 where less than that was charged . . . why, it 
 seems sweet to us, and we forget, and become 
 just as other women are ... or worse, for we 
 know better than they can, what love should 
 be. I know, of course, I know, therefore I 
 want you to escape. See, I will change you 
 for a girl from a friend's house, in San Fer- 
 nando. You shall not lose by it, and for the 
 ounces that you owe — three is it ? " Here she 
 drew up her skirt, disclosing underneath a 
 pocket made of bed-ticking, hanging round her 
 waist, and drew from it a book. 
 
 Moistening her thumb, she turned the leaves, 
 muttering, " La Sevillana, two ounces and a 
 half. I'll lose that money. Pepala Malaguena 
 . . . nothing, eh? Ah, Hueso de Cochino, 
 La Brasilena ... ah, here it is! Amparo 
 Vazquez, La Jerezana, three ounces and a 
 half, two pairs of open-work silk stockings, 
 a fan — in all about four ounces. 
 
 11 Well, that shall run on ; I will not charge a 
 centimo of interest, and at my friend's, she's a 
 good woman, though half a gipsy, is the 
 Chavala, you will be comfortable enough."
 
 xvi PREFACE 
 
 Amparo shook her head. " Thanks, Dona 
 Ana," she replied. " No, I go not ; this 
 man has become all the world to me. I care 
 not if he beats me, neglects me, or if he takes 
 my money. He is my blood, blood of my 
 blood. ..." She took a pin, and having 
 pricked her arm, drank the bright scarlet drop. 
 Raising her fat white hands to heaven, Dona 
 Ana said : " She loves him bestially . . . 
 strange too when he can hardly speak a word 
 of Christian, and has a pane of glass tied to a 
 string, stuck in his eye, just like a figure in a 
 pantomime." 
 
 So she stayed on, and one day Scudamore 
 appeared a little drunk, and rather shabby, 
 telling her that he had spent all his money, 
 and had outstayed his welcome in the fleet. 
 
 Instantly the Jerezana borrowed two ounces 
 more from Dona Ana, who, as she gave the 
 money, taking it out of a knotted pocket- 
 handkerchief, which she exhumed from beneath 
 a loose board behind her bed, said with a sigh, 
 " God knows that I was born for the profession 
 that I have followed all my life ; I never could 
 say No." 
 
 In a room on the second floor of a house in 
 a back lane, of which the Jerezana paid the
 
 PREFACE xvii 
 
 rent, Scudamore soon fell into the half-shrinking, 
 half-bullying ways of a man kept by a woman 
 of the kind. By degrees he began to take his 
 meals in Dona Ana's house. The other girls, 
 who did not see him through the magnifying 
 lens of love, all called him Tomasito, in a 
 half-patronising, half-contemptuous way. His 
 clothes got daily shabbier, and by degrees he 
 drifted into keeping the accounts of the estab- 
 lishment. When clients came and he was 
 seated in his shirt sleeves, either learning the 
 guitar, or playing cards with Dona Ana, if they 
 complained about his presence, they were told, 
 " It is only Tomasito, the Jerezana's friend, it 
 does not matter in the least." 
 
 She, having him to keep, for it had never 
 come into his head to look for anything to do, 
 had to work hard amongst the clients, to give 
 him clothes to wear and cigarettes to smoke. 
 
 When she went, as people say in Spanish, 
 " on the hunt," he used to pass her without 
 a sign of recognition, saying that he must 
 draw the line at speaking to her in the street, 
 as after all he was a gentleman. 
 
 Months passed, until one day when he was 
 sitting on the Alameda with the girl, watching 
 the coast of Africa melt into shadow, and the
 
 xviii PREFACE 
 
 white houses over in Algeciras turn violet in 
 the last rays of the descending sun, the hills 
 above Gaucin grow purple, and a red glow 
 suffuse the limestone crags of the great fortress 
 rock, a friend who had been at the post office 
 put a letter in his hand. 
 
 He read and found that he had inherited 
 some money from a far-off cousin, turned white, 
 then red, and rising from his seat, walked 
 towards the town, the Jerezana following at his 
 heels, with the air of a faithful spaniel that 
 feels its master is displeased with it. 
 
 Next day, smoking a big cigar, he paced the 
 deck of a fast liner steaming through the Straits. 
 His glass was in his eye, his hair well flattened 
 to his head with vaseline, brushed back without 
 a parting, showed he had made his toilet care- 
 fully. Bending a little to the movement of the 
 ship, the fresh sea air just tinged his cheek 
 with red, giving him a look as of a fine young 
 colonist returning home after a year or two 
 spent in the wilderness. 
 
 " Yes," he said to a kindred spirit as they 
 walked to and fro to get an appetite, " the 
 women, blast them, never leave a man alone. 
 I don't know if you saw a tall, dark, Spanish 
 girl talking to me just as we came aboard.
 
 PREFACE xix 
 
 Well, you know, don't you know, I was pretty 
 friendly with her when I was stuck in ' Gib.,' 
 and damn it all, there she was up on the mole 
 with a cow-hair trunk, corded with bass rope, a 
 goldfinch in a cage, tears running down her 
 cheeks and bothering me to take her with me. 
 . . . Good God, a pretty sight I should have 
 looked travelling about, dragging a Spanish 
 whore ... I like her well enough ; but what 
 I say is, Charity begins at home, my boy. Ah, 
 there's the dinner bell ! " 
 
 Charitable readers, you must take my little 
 story (or perhaps parable) in any way you 
 choose. 
 
 Do not forget whilst reading it that charity 
 is a shy-growing plant that often droops in 
 what appears good soil. 
 
 At other times she rears her head, almost by 
 stealth, after the fashion of an autumn crocus, 
 which peers so delicately above a growth of 
 grass that would choke hardier plants. 
 
 Hope is for fishers with a float, who as they 
 sit, watching it bob about, may chance when 
 they pull in their line, to find the body of a 
 cat, or a blind puppy, in which their hook has 
 stuck, when they had hope of fish.
 
 xx PREFACE 
 
 Faith is the quality of prophets and o( those 
 who in its exercise fear not to slay ; but charity 
 is rarer than its two elder sisters, exceeding 
 them in the same way that instinct outgoes 
 reason and leaves it in the mire. 
 
 Love, kindness, toleration, whatever charity 
 may be, or if she is compounded of them all, 
 I know not. 
 
 All that I do know, is that she is rare, 
 
 and that her emblem on a sailor's arm is 
 
 always drawn between the anchor and the 
 
 cross. 
 
 R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.
 
 CHARITY 
 
 " Charity," said the Consul, " is often quite 
 unreasoning"; he paused and added, "but so 
 is love, and the two things are one." 
 
 In the old Moorish house, built for hot 
 weather, the cold was glacial, and we had 
 drawn the dinner-table into a corner to avoid 
 a leak, from which the water, filtering through 
 the roof, dropped in a chalky stream. Long, 
 milky-looking glasses swung from the ceiling 
 in brass chains, and in them, floating upon oil, 
 burned wicks that gave a fitful light that 
 cast black shadows on the horseshoe arches of 
 the patio. Curved flint-locks hooped with 
 brass, with crooked stocks inlaid with ivory, 
 hung on the walls, and Moorish daggers, 
 shaped like scimitars, and bags with fringes, 
 like those an Indian wears upon his moccasins. 
 Bowls of Fez pottery stood here and there, and 
 on the tables and the chairs were heaped up 
 books and papers, with all the flotsam and the 
 jetsam that a solitary man living far off from 
 
 B
 
 2 CHARITY 
 
 kith and kin collects and clings to, striving to 
 fill the void in his life with something tangible. 
 
 Outside, the rain descended pitilessly, turning 
 the narrow lanes to muddy streams, upon whose 
 current floated orange-peel, dead rats and heads 
 and feet of fowls. 
 
 The call to prayers boomed like a foghorn 
 from a ship bound in fog, and seemed as if it 
 summoned up a watch reluctant to turn out and 
 go aloft. 
 
 The Consul, impervious to cold, after the 
 fashion of all those accustomed to the life in a 
 warm climate, where damp and wet are almost 
 welcome after the summer's heat, seemed to 
 consider that his guests shivered for fun, or as 
 in protest against that which every reasonable 
 man endured without a murmur as sent from 
 God, put his feet up upon a chair and said, 
 "Yes, charity is sometimes an unreasoning or 
 an unreasonable thing." 
 
 The listeners drew their greatcoats round 
 them and waited for his tale, knowing he was 
 a man who, being thrown upon himself and 
 having nothing else to study but the Moors, 
 observed them as an ornithologist might study 
 some strange bird. Cursing the people every 
 day for their unlikeness to himself and his
 
 CHARITY 3 
 
 ideals, he had become so much accustomed to 
 them in his long residence in the forlorn post 
 to which the Foreign Office had condemned 
 him that he could scarcely have existed amongst 
 other folk, or in another place. 
 
 Raising his voice, he called out " Mokh, oh 
 Mokh " ; and when a little negro boy appeared, 
 rubbing his eyes with sleep, he told him to 
 bring whisky and then go off to bed. " I 
 bought the little devil," said the Consul, and 
 then, remembering his position, added, " I mean 
 his mother gave him to me in the last outbreak 
 of the smallpox when they all died like flies. 
 I used to vaccinate 'em with some stuff I got 
 across from *Gib.' ; but still it didn't seem to do 
 much good, for they kept dying off so fast that 
 we could scarcely bury 'em. Just about as 
 much good to have done 'em with trade gin, for 
 don't you see there was no way of keeping 'em 
 in the least clean, and that's what does the 
 job." We listened to his theories on therapeutics 
 with the attention that good citizens accord to 
 those in office, and then he wandered back 
 again to where he had begun. 
 
 " The more I live amongst the Moors, the 
 less I understand 'em. At times I think I have 
 the key of the enigma, and then I seem to lose
 
 4 CHARITY 
 
 it, and find myself faced up against a wall. 
 Sometimes they seem to have no feeling, and 
 then just when you think they are hardly human, 
 they'll turn right round and do something that 
 a white man would never think of doing, that 
 leaves you wondering at them. I'll tell you of 
 a case." 
 
 Outside the wind still whistled, and the water 
 running down the street, roared like a mountain 
 burn. Lighting a cheroot, which he did at the 
 thinner end, explaining to us that no one who 
 had been in India ever did otherwise, he 
 thought a little. 
 
 We huddled round the stove, on which 
 occasionally great drops fell from the roof 
 with a sharp hissing sound. 
 
 The Consul came back to his theme slowly, 
 just as a ship appears to hesitate a little after 
 she is put about, before her sails draw and she 
 is brought up to her course. 
 
 Speaking in that constrained and as if 
 perfunctory way in which so many culti- 
 vated Englishmen express themselves, through 
 dread of being natural, he struck into his 
 tale. 
 
 11 During that outbreak of the smallpox, in 
 which I bought, I mean acquired, that little
 
 CHARITY 5 
 
 devil Mokh, there was a thing I saw that 
 stirred me up a little." 
 
 The Consul looked so hard to stir, that we 
 involuntarily smiled. He saw it, and remarked, 
 "Yes, it was curious. You know, the Moors 
 often appear cruel to us, and we to them. For 
 instance, if when I stray about the town I find 
 a starving dog with a leg broken, my impulse 
 is to shoot it, to put it out of pain. A Moor 
 thinks such an act but little short of murder, 
 for he holds that as long as there is life, hope 
 lingers, and Allah holds the keys of life and 
 death, and it is impious to unlock or close, but 
 when he wishes it. Well, just at the corner of 
 this street there lived a widow woman. She 
 had a boy, at that time about twelve, a little 
 ill-conditioned wretch he seemed to me, dirty 
 and wild, and with a scabby head that turned 
 my stomach when I looked at it. Of course, 
 he was his mother's joy, for mothers, Christian 
 or Moorish, are alike, just as alike as cows." 
 
 We said " Oh ! oh ! " although we knew that 
 he was right, and he resumed. " Well, little 
 Abd-er-Rahman, with his scabby head and 
 dirty clothes, did not seem to be a treasure to 
 the ordinary mind. Sometimes he used to 
 hold my horse, and though I told him never to
 
 6 CHARITY 
 
 tie him by the reins, I usually found him with 
 the reins buckled to the grating of a window, 
 and the boy fast asleep. Naturally, when I 
 mounted he used to hold the stirrup, and in his 
 anxiety to put his weight upon it, he used to 
 pull the horse's head away from me, so that it 
 was next to impossible to mount. What he 
 and his mother lived upon was a marvel even 
 to me, accustomed to the Moors. Their house 
 was bare, so I was told, for naturally I never 
 was inside it, but clean, though I suppose not 
 over-sanitary. In fact, a place the smallpox 
 or any other epidemic was certain to invade. 
 The Moors, you know, take no precautions. 
 All is in God's hands. He will send smallpox 
 or withhold it, as it pleases Him, for they be- 
 lieve in Him, just as in England we believe in 
 doctors, and as unreasoningly. 
 
 " The widow's boy played about as usual 
 with the other boys. One day I saw him with 
 his friends, playing at a funeral, as boys in 
 Spain all play at bull-fighting. One child was 
 laid upon a board, with four to carry him. 
 The way those little devils sang the chant the 
 Arabs use was wonderful to hear. Born actors 
 are the Moors ; but then the funerals went 
 down our street a dozen times a day."
 
 CHARITY 7 
 
 The Consul lit another of his long cheroots, 
 and added in a quiet tone of voice : " I used to 
 go into their houses, and see the bodies. . . . 
 No, not afraid a bit. I don't know why. It 
 used to seem to me it was impossible to catch 
 infection from a Moor, and then, in times like 
 that, even their faith softens a little, and a kind 
 word cheers them, just as it would ourselves. 
 One day Jelali — that's my head man, you know, 
 saddles my horse and goes to market . . . 
 cheats me, of course, but won't allow anyone 
 else to do it — came in and said that a poor 
 woman wished to see me at the door. I went 
 to see her, and she, catching me by the hand, 
 said, ' Consul, I take refuge with you ; my son 
 has caught the plague.' Of course I went with 
 her, taking some medicines with me, just to 
 satisfy her. Her son lay on the floor upon a 
 blanket, a mass of blotches, livid and horrible. 
 He moaned a little now and then, but was 
 already dying, as I saw at the first glance. His 
 mother told me that a day or two ago he had 
 come in feverish, and she, thinking it nothing, 
 had sent him down to bathe. When he re- 
 turned he had been worse, then got delirious, 
 and before midnight was as I saw him, only 
 a mass of sores. Merely to quiet her, I took
 
 8 CHARITY 
 
 a spoon, and opening his mouth tried to force 
 down his throat a little laudanum." 
 
 The Consul paused, and made a movement 
 with his hands as of involuntary disgust, as if 
 some detail of the boy's deathbed had occurred 
 to him, and then went on again. 
 
 " I never saw such a black, bloated little 
 corpse as Abd-er- Rahman's when I left his 
 mother's house just about daylight, or such a 
 dreary-looking place as their one mud-floored 
 room, with the boy's body lying on the ragged 
 blankets, and his mother swaying to and fro, 
 stupid with misery. I tell you I went home, 
 and had a good stiff tot of whisky, not that 
 I was afraid of the infection, but because the 
 thing had stirred me up a little, as I told you 
 when I began the tale. Next day there was 
 a lot of bother in the office, an English ship 
 had got ashore close to Martin, the port you 
 know, and the captain came and bullied me 
 about the want of lights and the defective 
 charts. 
 
 " With one thing and another I forgot about 
 the boy. You see there were so many dying 
 in the place a fellow scarcely had the time to 
 think, and it slipped, somehow, clean out of 
 my head. However, one day, as I was going
 
 CHARITY 9 
 
 for a walk, I passed a tailor sitting sewing at 
 his work. Upon his knees was spread a piece 
 of fine brocade, that stuff the Moors in old 
 times used to make in Fez, with gold threads 
 running through the tissue so thickly that the 
 thing would almost stand if you but stuck it up 
 on edge. In the old days in Spain they called 
 it guexi, but nowadays even the name is lost, 
 for the Moors, as you know, care nothing for 
 the past. When I clapped eyes upon it, I 
 remembered that for a month or two I had 
 bargained for it with the man, and could not 
 bring him to my price. 
 
 " I spoke to him, and then after a word or 
 two about the progress of the plague, the doings 
 of the Government in Fez, and things of that 
 kind, just to distract him from the subject, I 
 said quite carelessly, ' Ten dollars for the 
 piece.' 
 
 " He looked at me and smiled. ' Consul,' 
 he said, 'this 'piece of guexi, as you say that 
 it was called in Spain, is not for you, or any 
 other Roman.' He called me Roman, not to 
 say Nazarene, which, as you know, is a 
 contemptuous method of address amongst 
 Mohammedans. 
 
 " I asked him why, and he rejoined, half
 
 io CHARITY 
 
 smiling as he spoke, ' Because you Romans 
 have no belief in God, or His omnipotence. 
 
 " ' Consul, when little Abd-er- Rahman died, 
 . . . may God remit the balance of your sins 
 for what you did for him, ... his mother came 
 to me. 
 
 " '"Oh, father of the awl," she said to me, 
 " my son is dead. God willed it so, and also 
 that I should be poor, and I have not any- 
 thing in my possession fit for a winding-sheet." 
 I too was poor, but then as now I had upon 
 my knees this piece of old brocade. 
 
 " ■ Take it, I said, and wrap it round the 
 body of your son, as he lies on the bier, upon 
 his journey to the cemetery. Then bring it 
 back to me, and thus your son will journey 
 through the streets in a befitting style.' She 
 thanked me, snatching at my hand to kiss it, 
 which I prevented, knowing good manners, and 
 in due time she sent me back the winding-sheet. 
 
 " ' Consul, I trust in Allah.' I took and 
 shook him by the hand, and as I pass him now 
 and then as he sits sewing at his work we look 
 at one another, but seldom speak, except a 
 formal ' la bas ' as I pass upon my way. You 
 see, we understand each other." . . . 
 
 The Consul stopped, and as we rose to go
 
 CHARITY ii 
 
 he shouted loudly to his men to bring a lantern, 
 but no one answered him, for they had slipped 
 away to bed, leaving him all alone as usual in 
 his bat-infested house, in the dark narrow lane. 
 As we strolled stumbling back to the hotel the 
 rain had stopped, and a few fleecy clouds went 
 racing through the sky. Before the Basha's 
 house the guards were sleeping muffled in their 
 jelabs, and snoring lustily. 
 
 When we emerged upon the broad fidan the 
 moon had risen, and from a side street issued 
 a wedding-party, dancing and firing a stray 
 shot or two. 
 
 Their lanterns swung about, just as a ship's 
 masthead light seems to swing, as the long 
 rollers of the north-west trades catch her a little 
 just abaft the beam, their bearers looking like a 
 band of Capuchins, in their white, pointed 
 hoods.
 
 AUNT ELEANOR 
 
 There are no aunts to-day like my Aunt 
 Eleanor. Either the world is no more fitted 
 for them, or else they are not fitted to the 
 world ; but none of them remain. 
 
 Scotland and Yorkshire strove together in 
 her blood, making a compound, whimsical and 
 strange, kind and ungracious, foolish and yet 
 endowed with a shrewd common sense, which 
 kept her safe, during the lengthened period of 
 her life, from all the larger follies, whilst still 
 permitting her to give full run to minor eccen- 
 tricities, both in speech, deed and dress. 
 
 Tall, thin, and willowy, and with a skin like 
 parchment, which gave her face, when worked 
 upon by a slight rictus in the nose she suffered 
 from, a look, as if a horse about to kick, she 
 had an air, when you first saw her, almost dis- 
 quieting, it was so different from anything, or 
 anybody that you had ever met. 
 
 She never seemed to age, although no doubt 
 time did not stop the clock for her during the 
 
 12
 
 AUNT ELEANOR 13 
 
 thirty years she was a landmark in my life. 
 Perhaps it was her glossy, dark brown hair, 
 which, parted in the middle and kept in place 
 by a thin band of velvet, never was tinged 
 with grey, not even in extreme old age, that 
 made her ever young. 
 
 Perhaps it was her clothes, which for those 
 five-and-thirty years (I cannot swear it was not 
 forty) were invariable, that made her never 
 change. 
 
 Her uniform, for so I styled it, it was so 
 steadfast, was, in the winter, a black silk, 
 sprigged, as she would have said herself, with 
 little trees, and in the summer, on fine days, a 
 lilac poplin, which she called "laylock," sur- 
 mounted by a Rampore Chudda immaculately 
 white. 
 
 Her cap was generally adorned with cherry- 
 coloured ribbons. Perched on her head, as if 
 it were a crown, moral and physical, of virginity, 
 it used to have a strange attraction for me when 
 it trembled, now and then, making the ribbons 
 shake, as she reproved a servant, or signified 
 her disapproval of some necessary change. 
 The youngest of a large family, whose mem- 
 bers all were cleverer than she, until death set 
 her free by taking off her sisters, she had been
 
 14 AUNT ELEANOR 
 
 held a fool. Not that the imputation ever 
 stopped her for a moment from having her own 
 way ; but only laid her open to the comments 
 of the other members of the family, which she 
 accepted, just as a shepherd or a sailor always 
 accepts bad weather, without a murmur, and 
 with a sense as of superiority to fate. 
 
 In all her sisters the Scottish strain prevailed. 
 They spoke, not in broad Scots, but with the 
 intonation that sounds like the whine a bagpipe 
 gives when the player, after a pibroch, or a 
 lament, allows the bag to empty slowly of the 
 wind. Their mental attitude was that which 
 their stern Scottish faith gave to its votaries. 
 Even in Scotland it is now unknown, leaving 
 the world the poorer by the extinction of a 
 type of mind so much at home with the divinity, 
 that it could venture freely to admonish him if 
 he fell short in any of his deeds, from the full 
 standard of perfection raised by his worshippers. 
 So did an ancient Scottish lady on being told, 
 during the course of a dispute on " Sabbath 
 recreation," that the Lord walked in the fields 
 and ate the ears of corn, not hesitate to say, 
 " I ken that weel, and dinna think the mair of 
 Him for that, so I'm just tellin' ye." 
 
 Aunt Eleanor was of another leaven, for in
 
 AUNT ELEANOR 15 
 
 her composition the Yorkshire blood had over- 
 powered the Scotch. Reared in the lowest 
 section of the English Church, she used to go 
 occasionally into a Methodist or Baptist chapel, 
 alleging that she had no terror of dissent, 
 although it may have been she looked on the 
 adventure as in the light of dissipation, just as 
 an Arab, now and then, might eat a piece of 
 pork, being convinced his faith was steadfast, 
 but wishing, as it were, to taste the wickedness 
 of sin, to make it manifest. 
 
 In the same way, her caprice satisfied, Aunt 
 Eleanor returned again to church, but always 
 used to treat the institution as if it were a sort 
 of appanage belonging to the county families. 
 She used to send and ask the clergyman to tell 
 the organist not to pull out the Vox Humana 
 stop, which she alleged made her feel ill, and 
 never to allow his instrument to groan at her 
 as she came into church. 
 
 On ritual she was a bar of iron, not liking 
 what she called "highflyers," and stating 
 roundly that for her part she would not mind 
 if the "man" stood up to preach in his shirt- 
 sleeves, as long as they were clean. 
 
 These were, as far as I remember, all the 
 religious difficulties Aunt Eleanor had to con-
 
 16 AUNT ELEANOR 
 
 tend with, for in the practice of her creed she 
 was as upright, kind and charitable a Christian 
 as ever I have met. Not that her faith softened 
 a certain harshness in her mind, that made her 
 singularly harsh to all the failings of her sex in 
 matters sexual. 
 
 On those of men, she looked with much more 
 leniency, holding that women always were the 
 tempters, and that no girl had ever gone astray 
 except by her own fault. 
 
 Once, and once only, did she almost have 
 the chance to put her doctrines into practice, 
 but then the issue was confused, so that it 
 never was cleared up, whether my aunt was 
 better than her creed, or if she held her Scoto- 
 Yorkshire faith in its entirety. A celebrated 
 lady horse-breaker, of perhaps easy virtue, 
 having come into the street in which she lived, 
 my aunt, to the blank consternation of her 
 friends, prepared to strike up an acquaintance- 
 ship, and when remonstrated with, observed : 
 " She may be all you say, my dear, but what a 
 seat she has, and hands like air ; she must 
 have learned in a good school, she rides so 
 quietly." 
 
 As fortune willed it, the acquaintanceship 
 was never formed, but had it been, my aunt, I
 
 AUNT ELEANOR 17 
 
 fancy, would have discoursed on snaffles and 
 on curbs, and on that symbol of all equitation, 
 the sacred lipstrap, with as much gusto as she 
 used to do with other of her friends. Strange 
 as it may appear, although a semi-invalid from 
 her birth up, a martyr as she was to violent 
 sick headaches, which in those days were the 
 equivalent of "nerves," she always used to 
 ride. 
 
 She and her brother were both born horse- 
 men, riding to hounds, and jealous to a fault. 
 No woman, in my aunts eyes, could ever ride, 
 that is to say, up to her standard. Either their 
 hands were bad, or else their seats were loose, 
 or if both hands and seats were good, they had 
 no nerve, or as a last resort, rode to attract 
 attention. " You know," she used to say, 
 " Miss Featherstone never was known to jump 
 a fence, unless a man was looking at her. If 
 there was but a butcher's boy she would have 
 risked her neck, although, in that long run, the 
 one I told you of, when we met at the Rising 
 Sun upon Edge Hill, and finished somewhere 
 down in Gloucestershire, she never took a 
 fence, and then came up just as we killed, with 
 several officers, all galloping like tailors on the 
 road." 
 c
 
 i8 AUNT ELEANOR 
 
 I hear her now, talking about her celebrated 
 mare, "The Little Wonder," which she declared 
 she never touched with a whip in all her life, 
 but once, and never with the spur. This 
 happened at a fence, at which the mare had 
 swerved ; but when she felt the whip, she put 
 her back up and entirely refused. A French- 
 man who was following my aunt, passed her, 
 and took his hat off, saying as he passed, 
 " Thank you for whip' your mare. I have 
 followed you a month, but never pass you till 
 to-day." My aunt never related this, but tears 
 rose in her eyes : whether at her own cruelty, 
 or at the Frenchman having passed her, I 
 never could make out. 
 
 Horses and hunting were the chief themes 
 of conversation with my aunt, and as she did 
 not care the least for anyone's opinion but her 
 own, her talk ran usually into a monologue, in 
 which she set her theories out, as to which rein 
 should go under which finger, and how good 
 hands consisted in the wrist. " It is all done 
 with a turn of the wrist, my dear, and not by 
 butchering," a theory sound in itself and one 
 which many would be wise to follow, if they 
 had aunts as competent as mine to teach them 
 the right way. Years only added to my aunt's
 
 AUNT ELEANOR 19 
 
 eccentricity, and as she lived in times when 
 gentlewomen enjoyed ill-health, no one was 
 much astonished when one day she definitely 
 took to a couch, laid in the drawing-room 
 window, from which she could survey the road 
 and watch the people going to the meet. 
 
 For years she lay there, only getting up on 
 Sunday to go to church, which she did, either 
 in a Bath chair, or else in Jackson's fly, for she 
 averred that only Jackson in the whole town of 
 Leamington could drive with decency. The 
 other flymen started with a jerk, or sawed 
 their horses' mouths in a way that set my 
 aunt's nerves tingling, and used to make her 
 open the window and expostulate in a high, 
 quavering key. Even the trusted Jackson had 
 to submit to adverse criticism now and then, 
 both of his driving and of his horse's legs. 
 
 It used to be a curious sight to see the semi- 
 invalid, leaning upon her maid, dressed in her 
 invariable black, sprigged silk gown — she 
 would have fainted to have heard it called a 
 dress — a curtain bonnet on her head, a parasol 
 ringed with small flounces and jointed in the 
 middle, in her hand, walk down the steps of 
 her front door and stand before the fly. 
 
 Turning towards her maid, she used to say,
 
 20 AUNT ELEANOR 
 
 " Baker, lend me your arm a moment," and 
 then advancing with the half valetudinarian, 
 half sporting air that she affected, open the 
 horse's mouth. 
 
 " Well, Jackson," she would say, "you have 
 got a young one there. I think he would make 
 a better hunter than some of those I see trot- 
 ting down to the meet. They breed them far 
 too long-backed nowadays, not like the well- 
 ribbed-up, short-legged, well-coupled-up ones 
 that I remember when I hunted as a girl with 
 the Fitzwilliam hounds." 
 
 Jackson would touch his hat, and answer, 
 " You know a 'orse, Miss, and this one, e is a 
 'orse, he ought by rights to be a gentleman's." 
 
 Then with an admonition as to not starting 
 with a jerk, my aunt would get into the fly, 
 Baker having first put in a coonskin cushion 
 with the head on, made in the fashion of a 
 pillow-case. 
 
 Into it when my aunt had put her feet, 
 arranged her shawl and her belongings care- 
 fully about her, just as if she were going on a 
 journey in the wilds, the fly rolled off upon its 
 way, with my aunt looking out now and then 
 to criticise the driver and the horse. After 
 having lain upon her couch ten years or so,
 
 AUNT ELEANOR 21 
 
 one day she suddenly got up. The ensuing 
 week she went out hunting, dressed in her long 
 Victorian habit, tall hat and veil, and with a 
 boa round her neck. She hunted on, riding 
 much harder than most members of the hunt, 
 but in a modest and retiring way, and followed 
 by her groom. He, a staid lad, who had been 
 brought up with Lord Fitzwilliam as an under- 
 strapper in the hunt stables, always used to 
 say : " Them as rides with my lady 'as to know 
 ow to ride ; but then I passed my youth with 
 Lord Fitzwilliam. They was a serious family, 
 all rode to 'ounds, and all of 'em rode blood 
 'orses, from the old lord down to the little 
 gals." 
 
 My aunt continued riding to extreme old 
 age, and then went to the meets driven in a 
 fly, of course, by someone she could put her 
 trust in, though Jackson long had passed away, 
 to drive perhaps in some particular limbo, 
 where the shades of Captain Barclay, old 
 Squire Osbaldiston, and Sir Tatton Sykes 
 drove shadowy chariots, dressed in their 
 "down the road" coats, with a coach and 
 horses on the big pearl buttons, just as they 
 had appeared in life, all with ^straws in the 
 corners of their mouths, and with that air of
 
 22 AUNT ELEANOR 
 
 supernatural knowledge of the horse which 
 they all had on earth. 
 
 My aunt, I fancy, could she have chosen for 
 herself, would have gone to some heaven, half 
 stable and half country house, with just a 
 sprinkling of Low Church divines flying about 
 in black Geneva gowns and white lawn bands, 
 to give an air of having been redeemed, to 
 the select, but rather scanty, inmates of the 
 place when they sat down to dine. 
 
 Poor lady, all her life was one long tutelage, 
 till her last sister died. Then when she had 
 peeped below the blinds to satisfy herself that 
 the hearse horses all were sound, and none 
 wore housings, a thing that she detested, say- 
 ing she could not bear to see a horse in 
 petticoats, she found herself quite free. 
 
 After the fashion of the times, she did not 
 go herself to see her sister buried, but sat at 
 home and read the Burial Service, although a 
 member of the family averred on his return he 
 caught her dozing with the Church Service 
 closed upon her lap, and Market Harbord 
 in her hand. Years passed, and she became a 
 kindly tyrant in her old age, making her young 
 relations happy and terrified by her ungracious 
 kindness to them all.
 
 AUNT ELEANOR 23 
 
 Lastly, in a Bath chair, she used to have her- 
 self dragged up and down the Holly Walk or 
 the Parade, criticising horses and riders most 
 relentlessly, and now and then making the 
 chairman stop before the shops where pictures 
 were for sale, and after looking at them most 
 intently, usually saying, " 'Tis distance lends 
 enchantment to the view," a piece of criticism 
 which she thought final, as applied to art in all 
 its branches, even to photographs. 
 
 She died as she had lived, after arranging 
 her own funeral with the undertaker, and 
 enjoining on him to be sure that the hearse 
 was not started with a jerk, and all his beasts 
 were sound. 
 
 He left her presence snorting a little in a 
 bandanna pocket-handkerchief, remarking : 
 " Well, I never saw such a lady in my life, a 
 plucked one to be sure, I'll bet a suvering." 
 
 My aunt rests quietly under some elm trees 
 in Old Milverton churchyard. 
 
 Many old Scottish ladies lie round about the 
 grave where my aunt sleeps under a granite 
 slab now stained a little with the weather, 
 imparting to the churchyard a familiar air, as 
 of the tea-parties that she once used to give, 
 when they all sat together, just as they now lie
 
 24 AUNT ELEANOR 
 
 closely In the ground, to keep each other warm. 
 The rooks caw overhead, and when the hounds 
 pass on a bright November morning, I hope 
 she hears them, for heaven would be to her 
 but a dull dwelling-place if it contained no 
 horses and no hounds.
 
 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 " Cossart was talking to me once," said Man- 
 sel, — " you remember him ? the man who was 
 a diver and whom you gave a horse to in 
 Mercedes, you must remember him ; he was a 
 cook." 
 
 I did, and recollected giving him the horse, a 
 little, dark brown, with a white face, and four 
 white feet. I gave him, as it happened, with 
 the greater pleasure, or at least with a greater 
 absence of responsibility, because the horse 
 was not my own, but a stray animal who had 
 attached himself to my tropilla. The brute 
 was very hard to mount, and when at last you 
 had got with difficulty on his back, was not 
 worth a red cent. 
 
 "Well," Mansel said, "Cossart was talking 
 about matrimony the other day, up at the 
 French Cooks' Club in Sackville Street. He 
 said that it was strange so few of us had 
 married, for marriage, as he understood the 
 institution, was a good thing for men, as he 
 
 25
 
 26 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 said, sur le retour ; but that, for his part, he 
 thought himself immune on account of some- 
 thing that had happened to him, back in the 
 'seventies, in Paraguay. 
 
 "Ah! here is Cossart," said my friend, and 
 the chef came into the room, dressed in the 
 long frock-coat, white waistcoat, bell-mouthed 
 trousers, and black crepe de Chine necktie tied 
 in a bow, which were a sort of uniform to him, 
 after his business hours. In one hand was his 
 hat, curly and shiny, and in the other his thin, 
 black stick, to which a woman's leg in ivory, 
 figured as crutch. 
 
 He drew a large silk pocket-handkerchief 
 from his breast-pocket, and, flourishing it, 
 diffused a scent either of Moss Rose or of 
 Jockey Club, throughout the room. He asked 
 for "Gomme" and then for "Cassis," and 
 when the waiter of the club denied all know- 
 ledge of them, called for Italian and for French 
 Vermouth, mixed them together and added 
 bitters and a little lemon juice and curac^oa, 
 sowed powdered sugar on the top of all, put in 
 a lump of ice, and said : 
 
 "This is la boisson Cossart, my own receipt; 
 it tastes like nothing else on earth." 
 
 I well believed him ; and he went on :
 
 LA ALCALDESA 27 
 
 " You remember in my bar in Buenos Aires 
 it was my chief support. One drink, a half- 
 Bolivian. Emilienne, you remember her, had 
 a flat piece of marble, on which to ring them. 
 Never a piece escaped her. Just as I almost 
 had her trained, paf! there passes a Brazilian 
 with the sack, and she, of course, went with him. 
 How quick she was, how honest, I mean French 
 honest, a harder thing by far for one in her 
 position, than mere money proof. Clever, too, 
 and knowing more than pere et mere. The 
 Brazilian ! such a macaco as he was, coiffe" d'un 
 Panama ; his gloves immense and couleur sang 
 de bccuf. Ouf ... a Brazilian . . . well, well, 
 she finished, I have heard, quite nicely, and 
 married a rich slave-owner up in Bahia. My 
 countrywomen always finish up like that, no 
 matter how they may have lived. 
 
 "Not that Emilienne . . . pauvre fille, had 
 had a very stormy life. I got her from the 
 house that you remember, 1, 2, 3 Cerito, 
 where she had only been a month or two after 
 a malhcur that she had had at home. Le gibier 
 always was my faible. Ha! ha! yes, I re- 
 member that print I had behind the bar, called 
 ' Gibier d'Eau,' with two girls bathing in the 
 sea."
 
 28 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 Mansel cut in : " 'Tis strange Emilienne got 
 married and not you. What was it you were 
 telling me about something that happened to 
 you up in Paraguay ? " 
 
 Cossart lay back and let his heavy, fleshy 
 eyelids fall like a vulture's, over his black eyes, 
 set down la boisson Cossart, and drummed a 
 little with his huge and hairy hand upon the 
 table by his side. 
 
 Over his chin, close-shaved and blue, and on 
 his cheeks, a sort of shadow seemed to run, of 
 greyness, as when a man looks back into his 
 past. 
 
 He shivered slightly, and then, opening his 
 eyes, remarked : 
 
 " Ah ! yes, that's what you call somebody 
 walking on your grave, and what the Spaniards 
 call la Muerte Ckiquita, the Little Death, eh?" 
 
 Then he began to talk, at first with difficulty, 
 as if the springs of recollection were a little 
 rusty, and then, as they became, as it were, 
 lubricated, more fluently. 
 
 "You know," he said, "that I have had a 
 chequered life, diver in Buenos Aires, and in 
 Mercedes, bass singer in the choir." 
 
 He stopped and sang a note or two that 
 made the very windows rattle, and then re-
 
 LA ALCALDESA 29 
 
 marking : "Not so bad, eh, for a restaurateur," 
 went on: "A chapter of my life you do not 
 know, when I was up in Paraguay. I drifted 
 there as cook on board a river steamer, the 
 Iguazu, I think. Not bad the berth, and the 
 pay good, and when I found myself ashore 
 without a penny in Asuncion, often regretted 
 the snug galley where I could cook and think 
 about the future. I was young then, and 
 although now things go pretty well with me, I 
 always think about the past. Well, you know 
 Asuncion, not much to do there, at least in 
 those days, no theatres, only one cafe", and that 
 kept by a German. His wife was French, and 
 pretty. I used to go and sit and look at her, 
 not that she was the only woman in Asuncion, 
 for you remember, there were thirteen to a man 
 in those days, but bah ! ti peine desf entities, poor 
 creatures, hungry and ragged, and all smoking 
 big cigars. How it fell out, I can't recall, but 
 by degrees we became friends . . . you need 
 not smile, nothing but friends, upon my word; 
 yes, foi de Cossart. The husband, an unreason- 
 able man, avec unc tete de mart, perhaps thought 
 otherwise, and one day, seeing me talking to 
 his wife, advised himself to call me cochon de 
 frangais or something of the sort. I answered
 
 3 o LA ALCALDESA 
 
 him in the same kind, and then, why, a 
 molestia, as we used to say. The last I saw of 
 him, he looked not very pretty, lying on the 
 floor beside a broken chair. What heads they 
 have, those Germans. My first shot grazed 
 his arm. His passed my face and smashed a 
 looking-glass. I jump for him, and fetch him 
 with my pistol between the eyes, and then run 
 for the door. As I passed through, the clientele 
 was mostly underneath the tables, except a few 
 who stood holding their pistols, ready, as a 
 man does when a barulla de Jesti Cristo 
 happens to occur. I knew he was not dead, 
 and that the thing would soon blow over, but 
 thought it was full time to change the scenery. 
 So, as I wandered up and down the streets 
 between the orange gardens and past the 
 sandy, open spaces covered with castor-oil 
 plants, beyond that rancho that you must 
 remember, which had a knot of pawpaw trees, 
 where the road turns to Dr. Stewart's quinta, 
 I met a friend of mine. 
 
 " He was an Argentine tropero, one Aniceto 
 Lopez, well-doing, whom I had known in Car- 
 men de Arreco, province of Buenos Aires, and 
 who had drifted up to Paraguay, only the Lord 
 knows how.
 
 LA ALCALDESA 31 
 
 " Well, Aniceto was a good fellow, and when 
 I told him of the trouble I had had about the 
 German, he laughed like steam and said : 
 
 " * Bueno, you come with me to Corrientes 
 and help me fetch a troop of cattle for the 
 Brazilian troops : Le cheval, vous savez, ce'tait 
 ma passion. After le gibier it is the only- 
 passion that I have found endures, for, as yet, 
 I am not old enough to have experienced le 
 manie des cannes, which is the last mania, so 
 they say, in Paris, that a man ever has.' 
 
 " Lopez had lots of horses, and I went out 
 and bought bombachas, you remember, the wide 
 trousers, black merino, eh ? a poncho and a 
 saddle, and boots, of course of patent leather, 
 with an eagle in the front stitched in red thread, 
 and with his wings just disappearing round 
 the leg. 
 
 " No, Mansel, not a lasso," said the story- 
 teller, "pas si bete, I went, so to speak as a 
 deck hand, for any one can help to drive 
 a herd of cattle when it is once upon the 
 road. When I was ready we started, going 
 down by the trail that passes just behind 
 Lambar6, crossing the Tebicuari somewhere 
 near Villa Franca, right through the Estero 
 Nembucu and so by Paso de la Patria, across
 
 32 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 the Parana. Oh, that Estero Nembucu, what 
 a place, water until you cannot rest, and still 
 more water. Then a little mud, long grass 
 that you hardly shove your horse through, and 
 then more water and more mud. Mosquitoes, 
 yes, and every living devilish bug, and hot and 
 steamy, and you seated upon your horse, 
 crying out, ' Tropa? ' Vuelta toro,' whirling 
 your rebenque round your head, and splashing 
 through the mud. That was the kind of day I 
 passed with Aniceto Lopez, each time we 
 crossed the accursed Estero, driving the cattle 
 to Asuncion. At night, if we could get to a dry 
 patch, we had to ride for two hours each, slowly 
 all round the herd, to keep the beasts from 
 straying off ; at daybreak, if you had had what 
 Mansel here would call the morning watch, you 
 changed your horse and slowly jogged along 
 the road, dozing and swearing at the lagging 
 beasts, till it was time to halt and take a siesta, 
 and then jog on once more. 
 
 " You will laugh, but sometimes as I sit in 
 the sanctum of the club, I mean the room that 
 is reserved to me (the only artist in the place), 
 thinking my menus out, my mind goes back to 
 the old Estero Nembucti. 
 
 "Why? you say, eh? Well, perhaps for the
 
 LA ALCALDESA 33 
 
 same reason that we think more often on the 
 women who have made us suffer than upon 
 those who have made us happy by their love. 
 
 " Well, well, my friend Aniceto Lopez used 
 to laugh at me a good deal now and then when 
 one of his accursed horses gave me a fall on a 
 cold morning, and say I was a mahirango, but I 
 made several trips with him, and showed him 
 how to make a tolerable stew out of jerked 
 beef and mandioca meal. You soaked the beef in 
 orange juice . . . and . . . anything was better 
 than that abominable churasco they used to eat 
 upon the road. 
 
 " When we had passed the Estero we used 
 to halt a day, or sometimes two, for time was 
 what we had the most of, to rest the horses, let 
 the herd feed, and wash our clothes. How well 
 I see those camps ... eh, Daddy Mansel, do 
 you remember them ? " 
 
 Mansel, who had sat silent, plunged also 
 deep in recollection, looked up and said : 
 
 " A dozen of them, Cossart, but I cannot 
 somehow imagine you lying stretched out under 
 a tree and eating jerked beef and mandioca, 
 and sleeping in the sun." 
 
 " Necessity," rejoined the chef, taking the 
 straw out of a long Italian cigar, "makes 
 
 D
 
 34 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 us acquainted with strange comestibles; as 
 to bed-fellows, the stranger that they are the 
 better, that is, when one is young." 
 
 Having enunciated this opinion with an air 
 of having added to the world's wisdom, and to 
 Mansel's great disgust — not that he was a 
 hypocrite, but being English did not like men 
 to speak their minds on such a subject — the 
 chef continued : 
 
 " Ideal days we had, camped underneath the 
 trees, the woods on every side, running like 
 capes run out to sea into the little plain, set 
 about here and there with groups of yatais . . . 
 you know, those scrubby palms. An air of 
 being out of the world, alone with Nature. 
 Mon Dieu> they say a man when he grows old 
 falls into anecdotage ; but to philosophise is 
 worse. In those days you remember that in 
 Paraguay there were no men, that is, one man 
 to thirteen women. Lopez, you know, was 
 killed on the last horse in the republic, a little 
 roan, I think. 
 
 "Les femrnes, yes, but they were a danger 
 we used to fly from then, and even Aniceto's 
 cattle men, after the first trip, would never 
 willingly sleep in an Indian village, cUtait trop 
 terrible. I stood it pretty well; the French,
 
 LA ALCALDESA 35 
 
 you know, were never backward in such 
 matters, and one has amour propre, but the 
 odds were too great. 
 
 "Don Aniceto's capataz, a Correntino, a huge, 
 great fellow, un solide gaillard> as we say, tried 
 it and failed ... we left him in Asuncion, in 
 hospital. 
 
 "All the peones would begin, and then after 
 a trip or two get shy and sleep out in the 
 woods, or on the plains beside their horses, 
 rather than face the Indian women in the 
 towns. When I first heard about it I thought 
 it was a joke, but one experience did me for my 
 life. After that, I had a plan. Our road led 
 to the south of Caapucii, luckily missing all the 
 villages but one ... its name I can't recall. 
 How well I see them though, built round a 
 square about two hundred yards across. The 
 long, low huts ran continuously, so that they 
 looked more like a tennis-court than houses 
 fit for men. One broad verandah ran in 
 front of all of them, supported on great beams 
 of some hard wood or other, perhaps canela 
 or some other kind of wood. 
 
 " The roofs were either thatched or roofed 
 with old red tiles, made by the Jesuits. The 
 walls were dazzlingly white. The pavement of
 
 36 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 the verandah either was earth beaten hard and 
 polished, or else great blocks of wood. The 
 church stood at the east end of the square. It 
 too was built of wood, but wood to last all time. 
 No storm, no rain, not even the white ants, had 
 any prise upon it. The bells were good. Good 
 water, air and bells, the proverb says. The 
 Jesuits certainly did well in Paraguay. No, 
 no, I am not a clerical, you need not laugh ; 
 but render unto Caesar. What work they must 
 have had to get these bells through the prim- 
 eval woods. Faith, strong enough to move a 
 bullock-cart out of a mud-hole, I should think. 
 The grass that grew inside the square was 
 green . . . greener than Ireland, more like the 
 strip of green inside the reef on islands I have 
 seen in the Pacific. 'Twas curious to see the 
 inside of the church. The images made by 
 the Indians, the gold still fresh ; the gallery, in 
 which sat the musicians. Some of their in- 
 struments were left, with the strings all broken 
 and tied up with strips of hide. The people 
 played on them upon church festivals, and 
 when I came to know the place, I helped them 
 sometimes by singing in the choir. You know, 
 I had a voice, basso cantante, and singing in 
 the choir was an old trade of mine . . . do, re,
 
 LA ALCALDESA 37 
 
 mi, fa . . . ha, not bad the ut de poitrine. I 
 still can catch him, eh ? How pastoral it was ; 
 so quiet, nothing but now and then a flight of 
 parrots chattering, or a macaw sometimes sailed 
 by and screamed. At times I used to think 
 that I would settle down and pass my days in 
 Santa Tecla ; that was the name the village 
 had, I think. 
 
 " I am not strong upon the Scriptures, but 
 when the girls and women used to go down at 
 evening to the stream to fetch the water, I used 
 to think about Rebecca at the well, or Ruth 
 and Boaz, cctait si pastorale. 
 
 "How quietly they walked, each with a 
 water-jar upon her head, shaped like an 
 amphora. 
 
 "Women and girls, and girls and women, all 
 dressed in white, that is, all en chemise, with 
 their hair cut square across the forehead and 
 hanging down their backs. Only a boy or two 
 and an old man or so, but what were those 
 amongst so many ? Women did everything, 
 they tilled the fields, rang the church bells at 
 eventime, for just at sunset everybody prayed, 
 just as the Jesuits had taught their ancestors. 
 What animals they had, the women tended. 
 In the church they had some kind of prayers
 
 38 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 or other upon festivals. My friends, the tnise 
 en scene was quite ideal, a perfect Arcady. The 
 first time that we stopped there, when we had 
 got well camped, and I was free to look about, 
 1 went down to the village, leading my horse, 
 for though my passion was the horse, I had had 
 about enough of him, for the last week or two. 
 
 "Just as I passed the well, a woman stood 
 there filling her water-jar. Quelle femme ! Tall, 
 rather stout, but not too stout, only a gracious 
 embonpoint, fair, for a Paraguayan, that is, the 
 skin . . . her hair, of course, was black. 
 
 "She looked at me and smiled, a natural 
 thing to do, for I was young then, and as I 
 said, men were so scarce, there were not any, 
 even for a remedy, as the Spaniards say. 
 
 " So, when she smiled, I smiled, and asked 
 her if I should help her with her water-jar. 
 From that, we soon were friends, and as we 
 walked back to the village, she swaying lightly 
 with the water-jar upon her head, I touched 
 her hand, and we began to talk. It seemed 
 her father and her husband both were killed, 
 her brother missing after some fight or other, 
 and she was left alone. The other women of 
 the village called her ' La Alcaldesa,' that is, 
 the mayoress, and by degrees had taken to
 
 LA ALCALDESA 39 
 
 regard her as the chief woman of the place. As 
 she talked on, telling me about this thing and 
 of that, we came to where she lived. She asked 
 me to come in. I followed her, just as a horse 
 trots after a bell mare. Her house was bare 
 of everything, and all the furniture she had was 
 a hide catrd, an old chair or two, and a few 
 pictures of the saints. A hammock swung 
 between the pillars of the verandah, with its 
 long cotton fringes, and after having talked a 
 little and drunk a matd with cold water, after 
 the Paraguayan fashion of those days, I went 
 and sat in it, keeping it swinging with one foot, 
 and smoking a cigar. 
 
 " As I swung in the hammock, smoking, for 
 La Alcaldesa never let the sacred fire of Vesta 
 out, handing me small cigars fit for a man . . . 
 you remember that in Paraguay the women 
 smoked cigars as big as carrots — the night 
 came on without a twilight . . . day and then 
 darkness in a quarter of an hour. The fireflies 
 flitted round the trees, the bats flew noiselessly 
 about ... I had to scare one from my horse's 
 neck . . . the frogs croaked, and the moon 
 outlined the shadows of the palm trees by the 
 church, upon the grass. Quoi ; un vrai scene de 
 the'dtre^ but better somehow, either because
 
 40 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 you had not got to pay your entry money or 
 because you were yourself an actor in the 
 scene. 
 
 " You fancied that mysterious things were 
 going on in the thick wall of forest that ringed 
 about the town, that is, the village, the capilla 
 as they called it, and when a white-robed figure 
 crossed in the moonlight, either from house to 
 house, or right across the square, it looked as 
 if the opera of Norma, or of Poliuto, were 
 going to begin." 
 
 He paused to light a cigarette, holding his 
 ebony stick between his legs with its white 
 crutch shaped like a woman's leg, which, as 
 he said, " gave him ideas," and then, blowing a 
 hurricane of smoke down both his nostrils, re- 
 sumed. 
 
 " That evening Aniceto Lopez and the herd, 
 the trip, and everything went quite out of my 
 head. The Alcaldesa called a girl who took 
 my horse to water, and then, unsaddling it, 
 cut down some bunches ollpindd with a machete, 
 and tied him up outside the door. Our supper 
 was, if I remember right, nothing but oranges 
 and mandioca with a little chipa, that is, bread 
 made from cassava pulp. I thought, as I sat 
 eating, after all, it is far more artistic ... for
 
 LA ALCALDESA 41 
 
 I too am an artist, to make no effort with your 
 food, and eat just like the other animals, fruit 
 and such things, than to cook badly as they do 
 here, amongst you insularies. As we were 
 eating, women came and looked in, and some- 
 times said a word or two in Guarani. Sometimes 
 they only stared, as cannibals might stare at a 
 young, well-fed missionary out in La Nouvelle, 
 or the New Hebrides. Although, of course, 
 I did not understand a word they said . . . 
 I saw how the wind blew, either by intuition 
 or dans ma quality de fratifais, voyez-vous ? 
 Next morning, just a little before light, the 
 Alcaldesa got up and prepared mate. A girl 
 took down my horse to water, bathed him and 
 returned dripping herself, looking just like 
 une ndrHde, with her long, black hair upon her 
 shoulders, and her chemise her only garment, 
 clinging round her legs. I felt a little like a 
 nouvelle marie" e when women looked into the 
 door, smiled and said something to the Al- 
 caldesa . . . always the same thing, for I 
 could hear the words, although I could not 
 grasp the sense. Somehow I did not like to 
 ask her what it was they said . . . though, 
 bigre, I am not shy, but it seemed somehow as 
 if I had arrived at l'lle de Tulipatam or some
 
 42 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 such place where women do the love-making 
 . . . out, cdtait genant tout de meme, for all 
 those little Paraguayan girls devoured me with 
 their eyes." 
 
 Mansel looked at him as a man looks at a 
 five-legged sheep, and though he knew the 
 chef to be a man of courage, generous and 
 kindly to the marrow of his bones, the restless 
 strip of sea that cuts our island off from all the 
 world seemed to extend itself between him and 
 his friend, not in his view of life, but in the 
 way he spoke about the view. 
 
 The chef, perceiving it, said : 
 
 11 On est bel homme, ou on ne I'est pas, mon 
 cher, those little Paraguayans would have eaten 
 me if they could. Man doth not live by love 
 alone, you say. That is so, but it makes a 
 good entree, if you have other things to eat. 
 ... I speak en chef you know, having some 
 knowledge both of cookery and love. 
 
 " Well, well ... a high old time . . . and 
 during the three days we camped at Santa 
 Tecla, my friend Don Aniceto saw but little of 
 me. La Alcaldesa treated me en prince, loving 
 me, as you remember, Mansel, the Paraguayan 
 women loved, as if the world and love were to 
 go on forever and a day. I often think that
 
 LA ALCALDESA 43 
 
 they were right, for after all, forever is a word 
 that no one understands. Had it not been for 
 her, I rather think I should have come as 
 badly out of the three days as did some of Don 
 Aniceto's fteones, who struggled back to camp, 
 with faces long as a male mule's, surrounded by 
 a band of white-clad girls, all of whom seemed 
 to have a sort of right of property in them in 
 some mysterious way. 
 
 " We started on the trail — luckily there was 
 no more Estero to go through — at daybreak. 
 The horses were all fresh, the cattle difficult to 
 drive, Don Aniceto in a massacring humour, 
 and the whole country looking like a half- 
 evaporated sea, bathed in the thin, white mist, 
 which rises in the morning in those latitudes 
 and hangs about the edges of the woods, like a 
 white winding-sheet. 
 
 " When I had got my horse in hand, after 
 his first wild plunges, I turned, and, looking 
 back, saw the tall figure of the Alcaldesa, 
 standing at her door, with her eyes fixed on 
 me, just as a woman stands, looking at a dis- 
 appearing ship, out at a harbour's mouth. 
 Mes amis, cdtait dur, I was her ship ; and as 
 I watched her, her head fell forward on her 
 hands."
 
 44 LA ALCALDESA 
 
 The chef blew his nose loudly in a Madras 
 handkerchief, twisted his moustache, and in 
 response to Mansel's question if he had ever 
 seen La Alcaldesa afterwards, rejoined : 
 
 " Yes, often ; in fact ours was a kind of inter- 
 mittent honeymoon each time I passed by the 
 capilla ... I used to stay with her. Une 
 bonne, brave fille, va, done. ... I often thought 
 that I would marry her and settle down. 
 However, it was trop bete, to settle down — to 
 what ? Certainly she was handsome . . . pale, 
 with black hair, tall and well made, and with a 
 little . . . fossette just above one knee . . . 
 the left, I think, to ravish you. No, not the 
 least idea of cookery, it was humiliating to me 
 . . . but on the other hand, loving and kind, 
 not the least interested, and passionne'e . . . 
 well, to a fault. At times, I think I hear the 
 pounding of the Indian corn in the tall mortar 
 and the soft whirring of the insects' wings 
 amongst the orange trees, outside her house 
 ... at times . . . yes, sacre" matin, I think I 
 will go back to Paraguay before I die and see 
 if she still lives. . . . Ouf ! it has cost me a 
 good sigh to tell you this. . . . Les femmes, les 
 femmeSy ca vous abiment un homme . . . foi de 
 restaurateur"
 
 AN HIDALGO 
 
 Tall, wry-necked, and awkwardly built, with a 
 nose like a lamprey and feet like coracles, Don 
 Saturnino Vargas y Arispe was a type of man 
 that you can only see in Spain, or, as he would 
 have said, "the Spains," and perhaps apologised, 
 then added, "but all that ended with the war." 
 It may have ended as he said, but, none the 
 less, even before the war, the type was never 
 so complete in Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the 
 Philippines, as in the mother of the Spains. In 
 the lost colonies, perforce, men came in contact 
 with the affairs of life, and thus became more 
 like mankind at large, and less original. In 
 Spain, and especially in Asturias, Don Satur- 
 nino's native land, they had become beings 
 so much apart that it was easier by far to make 
 a European out of a Russian, Turk, Armenian, 
 or Jew, than of a native of the land, over 
 which flies the blood-and-orange flag. 
 
 Timid and arrogant at the same time, and 
 quite devoid of any kind of fear, except of 
 
 45
 
 46 AN HIDALGO 
 
 being thought ridiculous, which naturally was 
 the one thing he never could escape from, he 
 had inherited from a long line of hungry- 
 ancestors a certain uprightness of thought, 
 which neither training nor his false view of 
 every side of life could quite eradicate. If 
 fate had been more kind, he should have lived 
 in some old house, buried in chestnut trees, 
 deep in the hills of Satander. His arms and 
 those of his illustrious ancestors, illustrious by 
 never having done much harm to anyone, 
 would have been sculptured in a creamy, 
 yellowish stone in high relief above the door. 
 The maize fields would have flowed like a 
 great sea of green (yellow in autumn) almost 
 up to his gate. There would have been a 
 wild, neglected garden, in which some aloes, a 
 bush of blue veronica, some purple irises and 
 a few ixias strove with the weeds for life. 
 A great magnolia would have reared its dome 
 of flowers, just at the end of the long, glass- 
 covered passage, which led out from the sitting- 
 room, and the domain most likely would have 
 had an old, grey wall, bulging and full of 
 chinks, from which peered lizards, and with 
 great tufts of Venus' navelwort and mullein, 
 springing from out the stones.
 
 AN HIDALGO 47 
 
 A patch of oak copse and a patch of vines 
 would have formed part of the Asturian para- 
 dise, and in the little plot of kitchen garden, 
 great pumpkins slowly would have ripened in 
 the sun. Outside the wall there would have 
 been a pine wood, at the edge of which in the 
 sparse grass, blue gromwells twinkled, and at 
 the top, where the wood ended and the heathy- 
 plain began, a little Calvary, with its three 
 crosses and its winding stair, would have 
 alternately been sealed in icicles, or sweltered 
 in the sun. Sleek, yellow oxen would have 
 ploughed, swaying about just as a man sways 
 walking, muffled in a cloak, whilst the rude, 
 wooden carts with wicker sides, passed lazily 
 along the sandy tracks, with a harsh screech as 
 the great wooden wheels, which never had 
 been greased, slowly and painfully revolved. 
 Men would have trodden out the grapes in the 
 great tank under the trellising of vines, and 
 women washed upon the river-banks. High 
 in the silent air a quavering song would have 
 ascended from the fields, to be re-echoed from 
 the wine vat or the river-bank, and haunt the 
 mind just as the croaking of the frogs on a hot 
 night within the tropics, once heard, dwells in 
 the ear for life, This sort of world would have
 
 48 AN HIDALGO 
 
 been just as suited to the Hidalgo as is a stone 
 to an apothecary's eye, as he himself might 
 have observed sententiously, but an untoward 
 fate had ordered differently. 
 
 Sent to the "court" in early youth, to a small 
 clerkship in the Custom House, by slow degrees 
 he had risen to be chief clerk, and then had 
 been promoted to full charge in little towns, 
 such as Mondonedo, Lugo, Brafiuelas and 
 Astorga, places in which he had passed a 
 melancholy life in lodgings, eating at the hotel, 
 but which experience gave him the opportunity 
 to remark that he had seen a good deal of the 
 world. This he believed most fervently, 
 although the little towns were as much like 
 each other as are two groups of low, black 
 Arab tents out on the Sahara ; but he belonged 
 to that old-fashioned, fast disappearing class of 
 Spaniards, who never travelled during the 
 whole course of their lives more than a mile or 
 two beyond the place where they were born. 
 Just as a mule's fate is to drag a cart, so the 
 Hidalgo was one of those destined to sit upon 
 high stools, and pass their lives in entering 
 figures in a book, till their hair falls and all 
 their teeth decay, at the same dreary task. 
 
 In the same way, a willing mule receives
 
 AN HIDALGO 49 
 
 more blows than any other in the team, so 
 does the good employee have less opportunity 
 to rise, and the Hidalgo was no exception to 
 the rule. At forty, after long years of faithful 
 service, and a life passed in boarding-houses, 
 he found himself head of the Customs in a little 
 town upon the coast. His pay was miserable, 
 his outlook circumscribed, and even that still 
 more restricted by his excessive patriotism and 
 his religious views. 
 
 Needless to say he was a Catholic, not that 
 he troubled much about the dog-mas of the 
 Church, or his religious duties, so that, had he 
 not been a Spaniard, he might have found a 
 way out of the prison in which his spirit was 
 confined. As it was, like many of his kind, to 
 him religion was so much a part of the one 
 country in the world (that is of course the 
 country where he lived), that to discuss it 
 would have been as strange as if one morning 
 he had found himself unable to speak Christian, 
 or heard that he was rich. 
 
 Everything new was painful to him, and 
 though he saw at once that the electric light 
 was better than a wick floating in a brass cup 
 in evil-smelling oil, and that a train was far 
 more comfortable than was the cart and its 
 
 E
 
 50 AN HIDALGO 
 
 long train of mules, its tilt of straw, and 
 hammock swinging underneath the axles, with 
 a dog sitting in it and snarling at the passers- 
 by, in which he first had come up from 
 Asturias to Madrid, he did not reason on the 
 facts. Thus he assumed, not without profit to 
 himself in some degree, all that is most 
 material in progress, but took good care that 
 not an atom of the soul of the condition of 
 affairs, out of which progress grew, should ever 
 enter to his mind. So does an Arab pass at a 
 jump from a long, flint-lock gun, hooped round 
 the barrel with silver or with brass, to a 
 repeating rifle of the most modern kind. 
 He buys the rifle, which to him is the sum 
 total of European culture, while steadfastly 
 rejecting everything of our life, which is at 
 variance with his creed. So the Hidalgo 
 still remained as far removed from modern 
 thought, when seated in the train, as he was 
 in his youth, jogging along the roads upon a 
 mule. 
 
 In some respects he was still further off, for 
 in his youth he did not hate that which he 
 never heard of; but now he loathed that which 
 he felt was stronger than himself, though he 
 would sooner far have died than have admitted
 
 AN HIDALGO 51 
 
 it.. He used to praise the writers of the 
 "epoch of our glory," though without reading 
 them, as when he did, their realism was a rude 
 shock to his alambicated taste. Novels, in 
 which the men were brave, the women virtu- 
 ous, and Spain appeared set in a haze of 
 glory, midway between the heavens and the 
 earth, were his chief pabulum. From them he 
 took his views of life, of art, and everything 
 as if they were inspired. The heroes in his 
 books all praised Murillo, calling him divine, 
 but of Velazquez they spoke slightingly, calling 
 him too mechanical and a mere practicon, that 
 is, a man proficient in his art, but not original. 
 The Hidalgo did the same, although it is likely 
 that he had never seen the works of either of 
 them, except in oleographs. Still, in the course 
 of time, as he was not a fool, he saw that even 
 Spain was altering, and an uneasy feeling grew 
 on him that it was possible he was on the wrong 
 road and going down the hill. He might have 
 changed his point of view had not the war with 
 the United States thrown him back on himself, 
 bringing out in him all the best and the worst 
 of his strange character. 
 
 Chief of the Customs in the land-locked 
 town, with its long winding harbour, shielded
 
 52 AN HIDALGO 
 
 by islands at the mouth, remote in the north- 
 west of Spain, on every side were memories of 
 the past to feed his melancholy. Memories of 
 Spain's departed glory rose upon his view, in 
 the grim citadel, under which the lichen-covered 
 roofs of the old, slab-paved town nestled and 
 straggled up the hill. In the decaying stone- 
 faced forts upon the shore, brass cannons lay 
 beside their carriages, around their barrels 
 clustered serpents, cast in relief, about the 
 touch-holes were the arms of Spain, with an 
 imperial crown. Far up the harbour, under 
 the heath-clad, vine-edged shores of the great 
 inland lake, slumbered the fleet of the galleons 
 from Cartagena, sunk by their admiral to save 
 themselves from Drake. In the clear waters of 
 the bay, they just were visible, after a long calm, 
 lying like sleeping sheep out on a moor, beneath 
 their mounds of sand. Tradition had it that 
 their commander had perished at his post, 
 going down, standing on the poop, waving 
 the flag of Spain. 
 
 On holidays, mounted upon a mule, which 
 he rode gravely, as it had been a war- 
 horse, and shielded from the sun and wind 
 alike in his brown cloak, he used to ride 
 out to the spot, dismount, carefully make
 
 AN HIDALGO 53 
 
 a cigarette, light it, drink down the smoke, 
 expel it with a rush from both his nostrils 
 just as the vapour issues from a solfatdra, 
 and reconstruct the scene. It stirred him 
 powerfully, and as he sat, watching the 
 vessels sink, whilst the false heretics were 
 baffled of their prey, his sordid life was blotted 
 out, and he felt sure that once again Spain 
 would prevail and God be glorified. The old- 
 world province and the decaying town, the 
 country, with its legends of the past (did not 
 the Tardo, that strange lubber fiend, still issue 
 out at sundown, to fright the youths and 
 maidens if they loitered over-much upon the 
 roads, returning from the romerias ?), must 
 have done much to strengthen his beliefs, and 
 stir his patriotism. Were-wolves and witches 
 filled the people's talk, and as he walked under 
 the arches of the Plaza Consistorial, he must 
 have almost felt he had £one back to his 
 Asturian home. In his position, fortune was 
 secure, had he but cared to grasp it, for 
 from time immemorial the Custom House 
 had been a gold mine to anyone appointed 
 to the post. 
 
 Men sent there poor returned home rich 
 after a few years' service, just as a Moorish
 
 54 AN HIDALGO 
 
 Caid enters his government on a thin horse 
 and followed by a rout of starvelings, but 
 leaves it wealthy and a made man for life. 
 The Hidalgo's friends all thought his luck 
 had changed, holding quite naturally, that 
 he would do as others did, and put his boots 
 on, as the saying has it, in the estab- 
 lished way. Once entered on the duties 
 of his post, they found out their mistake. 
 Accounts were audited, and every penny that 
 came in had to be checked and then trans- 
 mitted to Madrid. His critics were dumb- 
 foundered, and his friends said there was a cat 
 of some kind shut up in the bag, for none of 
 them believed in any honesty in public life, 
 although in private all were honourable men. 
 Had he but pocketed the money all would 
 have passed without much comment, and men 
 have envied him his opportunities, rejoiced to 
 find that after all he was as they were, and 
 giving them the chance to shake a moralising 
 finger and say " We told you so." 
 
 Vigo became too hot for him when it leaked 
 out that his sole purpose was to help the 
 Treasury with funds to carry on the war, not 
 that the citizens were not imbued with patriot- 
 ism, so far as shouting was concerned, or
 
 AN HIDALGO 55 
 
 making speeches, but to send money to Madrid, 
 where they knew that it would be stolen by 
 the officials in the Treasury, appeared to them 
 both as a madness and a rejection of that local 
 patriotism so strong in Spaniards' minds. 
 Some thought him mad and quoted the old 
 saw, " Make yourself a redeemer and you will 
 be crucified," and others thought he was a 
 rogue who had hit upon some novel kind of 
 fraud, and half respected him. After the 
 truth about the miserable campaign had 
 thoroughly leaked out, he went about de- 
 jected, in fashion of a man who has seen 
 everything he once held in esteem, fall crum- 
 bling to the ground. 
 
 Back in Madrid, after his ill-timed sally into 
 patriotism, he found himself still entering 
 figures in a book, although a little better paid 
 than in his younger days. In the long hours 
 of idleness which are inevitable in public 
 offices, he set about to think. Having re- 
 viewed his life, he found that to be honest he 
 would have to change all his convictions and 
 ideas and all his prejudices. The books he had 
 admired he saw were rubbish, the pictures 
 wretched, even on politics a doubt crept in 
 and made him miserable. He saw at once
 
 56 AN HIDALGO 
 
 the precipice on which he stood, looked 
 down into its depths and turned away for 
 good. Clearly he saw his view of life and 
 faith would have to be remodelled, and felt 
 himself unequal to the task, and all it signi- 
 fied. 
 
 For a brief space he plunged into what he 
 called pecuniary love, but returned always from 
 his excursions to the side chapels of the 
 Paphian goddess, weary and sick at heart. 
 Although his fortunes had improved a little, 
 and he was recognised as an official to be 
 depended on for work, but not of course after 
 his escapade at Vigo to be advanced to be 
 the head of a department, he still lived at a 
 boarding-house, partly from lack of energy to 
 change, partly for company. His chief delight 
 was to sit talking with the keeper of the 
 boarding-house — a tall and withered-looking 
 woman from Galicia, who had been, according 
 to herself, the daughter of a general, but had 
 come down in life through the bad government 
 prevailing in the land. This of course appealed 
 to the Hidalgo, as it does usually to all his 
 countrymen, who like to rail upon their 
 Government just as a man will rail upon 
 his wife, but yet endure her to the last day
 
 AN HIDALGO 57 
 
 of a long life and suffer her caprice. Hours 
 used to pass as they sat talking about their 
 ungovernable land, the dearth of patriotism, 
 and the venality of those in power and in 
 place, in the true Spanish way. At times the 
 Hidalgo would take up the defence of one or 
 other minister, but the general's daughter 
 always was able to bring forward some 
 damning vice to shake his confidence. Not 
 that he was a fool, or really thought that 
 every public man throughout all Spain was 
 venal or a rogue, but the desire to talk to 
 somebody was strong in him, after his dreary 
 day. 
 
 How long the Hidalgo might have gone on, 
 attending to his work by day and in the even- 
 ing listening to his landlady's conversation, is 
 difficult to say, had he not happened on an 
 afternoon to look up to a window, on the way 
 from his office to his home, almost by accident. 
 
 A girl was leaning on the window-sill, and she 
 gazed into the street. He thought her beautiful. 
 Her hair was black and coarse, but plentiful, her 
 forehead low, and her eyes black and jetty- 
 looking, so dark they were unfathomable, but 
 yet giving the look of not perhaps having much 
 to fathom, when you had sounded them. She
 
 58 AN HIDALGO 
 
 wore a dressing-jacket of white piqud, not over- 
 clean, but open at the neck, and as she gazed 
 into the street, biting the stalk of a red rose 
 which she drew now and then almost up to her 
 mouth and then let fall again till it hung rest- 
 ing on her chin, she smiled at the Hidalgo 
 and, opening her lips, let the rose fall into the 
 street. Stooping, he picked it up, holding it 
 awkwardly, after the fashion of a man unused 
 to love affairs. So little practised was he 
 in such matters that he was half inclined to 
 take it back to the fair, careless charmer, but 
 then remembered that he had read in books 
 that to drop flowers was a manoeuvre of the 
 sex. So, drawing from his pocket a greasy 
 note-case, he shoved the flower into it, just in 
 the way he might have thrust a pair of boots 
 into a travelling bag. 
 
 Up in the balcony, he heard a sound of 
 stifled laughter, but when the flower was safely 
 stowed away amongst his cards and several old 
 envelopes, and he had the courage to look up, 
 hoping his charmer would reward him with a 
 smile, he found that she had gone. All the 
 way home he walked as nearly upon air as was 
 consistent with his temperament, and for a 
 space forgot the ambition of his life, to make
 
 AN HIDALGO 59 
 
 his office the most perfect in all Spain, and the 
 most competent. 
 
 In future, as he walked to his work, he 
 always took the street in which, for the first 
 time in all the current of his life, a girl had 
 given him a rose. Any other man would have 
 found out her name, or have got someone to 
 present him to her family, but he, whether from 
 shyness or from some strange romantic whim, 
 never attempted to go further in his quest, or 
 to declare his love. Sometimes the girl appeared 
 and smiled upon him, sometimes she fixed her 
 eyes on space and seemed unconscious of his 
 passage down the street, or if he were alive. 
 Upon those days he would return with a vague 
 feeling of uneasiness, as if in some way she had 
 been unfaithful to him, and had betrayed his 
 trust. Still, next day found him passing down 
 the street as usual, eager and flushed with ex- 
 pectation, with his heart thumping on his ribs. 
 Months passed, and then a year, and still he 
 walked and gazed up on the balcony, usually 
 empty, and without ever once again receiving 
 even the shadow of a rose, or any recognition 
 except a smile on rare occasions, as he passed 
 by upon his way. 
 
 The people in the street all knew him, and
 
 60 AN HIDALGO 
 
 the fat woman in the tstmncc who sold cigars 
 and stamps, would remark to her neighbour 
 ho sold small coal, as he stood at the door of 
 his dark den, " There goes the madman of the 
 daughter of Don Paco." To which he used to 
 Lr.swer. "Yes. a madman, yes; but the girl 
 sits too much at the window, and paints her 
 face too thickly for an unmarried wench. Why 
 does she paint ? you say ah, why indeed. ' Why 
 does the blind man's wife go well arrayed?' 
 the proverb says, and they both smiled and 
 winked 
 
 The Hidalgo, quite unconscious that he had 
 ever been remarked, still found the only plea- 
 sure of his life in his brief passage down the 
 street, and might have gone on to extreme old 
 age without attempting to declare his love, if it 
 v.is love he really felt, had not an unkind fate 
 cut short his dream, waking him cruellv. One 
 day as he walked to his : ~ce gazing upon the 
 ground, but his heart turning towards the 
 window where his hmamoraia generally sat, 
 he stopped and rubbed his eyes. A little crowd 
 was gathered round the door, and an unwonted 
 air of festi ;y lit up the dingy- street through 
 which he had so often passed morning and 
 evening for the las: .ear or s : He asked
 
 AN HIDALGO 61 
 
 with trembling at the estanco, foreseeing some 
 misfortune in the air. The stout :::~co- 
 keeper, in her cotton dress, which left her 
 great, unstable bust quite loose and unconfined. 
 patted her glossy hair, arranged a side curl on 
 her cheek, and looking at him with a smile 
 replied, " This is the day on which Don Paco's 
 daughter marries the captain of the Carabi- 
 neers . . . her mother has good luck, for she 
 is eight-and-twenty if a day. is getting, like 
 myself, a little like a ham, and, as you know, 
 has sat there in the window, like a canary in a 
 eagre, for the last seven years. 
 
 The Hidalgo thanked her, and having 
 bought a box of matches that he did not want, 
 walked out and stood upon the pavement to 
 see the bride enter her carriage and drive 
 awav into the world. He had not lono- to wait, 
 for leaning on the arm of a stout captain, with 
 a waxed moustache, a sword by his side, and a 
 thick perspiration on his forehead as he 
 struggled with his gloves, she stepped into 
 the street. For the first time in all his life, 
 the poor Hidalgo found his voice, and 
 launched a " Bless your mother," so loudly 
 that the bride stopped for a moment in sur- 
 prise. Then turning towards her husband, she
 
 62 AN HIDALGO 
 
 smiled a little, and whispered something in his 
 ear which seemed to tickle him. The carriage 
 door was slammed, and as it moved away a 
 hand in a white glove threw a flower from the 
 wedding bouquet to the Hidalgo, as he stood 
 stupefied. This time he understood, and, 
 stooping, picked it up and pressed it to his 
 lips, and it appeared to him that the white 
 glove fluttered an instant at the window, as 
 the bride drove away. 
 
 All day he wandered up and down the 
 streets, and for the first time in his life his 
 colleagues missed him during office hours and 
 thought that he was ill. The night he spent in 
 the Retiro, walking about the alleys, named so 
 grandiloquently, Peru, Nueva Granada, Hon- 
 duras, Mexico, and Paraguay, and after all the 
 other great vice-royalties lost to the flag of 
 Spain. 
 
 An October frost had turned the leaves in 
 the Retiro a light gold, and a thin film of ice 
 spread on the waters of the lake. The eques- 
 trian statue of the twelfth Alfonso, high on its 
 pedestal, crowning the yet unfinished monu- 
 ment, had a light covering of hoar-frost on the 
 side turned towards the north, and a chill air 
 from Guadarrama stirred the trees, making
 
 AN HIDALGO 63 
 
 them shiver at the coming of the dawn. Men 
 wrapped in blankets, their mouths well covered 
 up, began to show themselves upon the streets ; 
 then carts with a long train of horses or of 
 mules, led by a little donkey, and with a pole 
 tied to the wheels to act as a rough break, 
 jolted and rumbled on the stones. Next came 
 men driving goats, and from the country 
 creaked in bullock-carts, drawn by great 
 brindled oxen such as those that the angel 
 goaded to their work whilst the good husband- 
 man Isidro slumbered at noonday in the 
 shade. 
 
 Madrid woke up to talk, as other towns 
 wake up to work, and the streets slowly filled 
 with people, who at first sight were going 
 nowhere, by the longest way that they could 
 find. Daybreak still found him wandering 
 aimlessly. Then when the sun rose fully, red 
 and glorious, he seemed to feel the comfort of 
 his rays, and after having smoked a cigarette 
 pacing along the edge of the great pool, he 
 wrapped his cloak tighter around his shoulders ; 
 and, when the gates were opened, left his 
 Gethsemane. After a frugal breakfast at a 
 little cafe - he sat an hour or so, smoking con- 
 templatively, till it was time to go. He
 
 64 AN HIDALGO 
 
 reached his office at his accustomed hour, and 
 taking up his pen, set himself resolutely to 
 work, just as a horse with a wrung shoulder 
 throws itself hard against the collar, so as not 
 to feel the pain.
 
 THE CRAW ROAD* 
 
 All roads are said to lead to Rome. This 
 may be so, of course, if a man follows them 
 right round the world. Some, though, lead 
 you to realms in which the materialism of the 
 City of the Seven Hills has not and never had 
 a place. 
 
 Upon them no legionary in his caligula and 
 with his conquering spade upon his back has 
 ever marched. The roads he traversed led 
 straight to some place or another, over the tops 
 of hills, across the rivers, passing morasses, 
 cutting the valleys, and right across the plain, 
 just as the State that paid him made its way to 
 fame regardless of the feelings of the world. 
 My road was traced originally by homing 
 crows. Men saw them fly, and thought that 
 where they came from there must be something 
 worth their while to see. That was before the 
 coming of the legionaries. The world was full 
 
 * The name was originally the Cr6 Road, Cr(5 in 
 
 Gaelic meaning cattle. It was corrupted into " Craw," in 
 the Lowland speech. 
 
 f 65
 
 66 THE CRAW ROAD 
 
 of interest in those days, for fairies played upon 
 the heathery knolls, elves sat upon the toad- 
 stools, and the white Caledonian cattle roamed 
 the woods. The spirit of adventure was at 
 least as strong as now, for anyone who left his 
 home to travel, even a little way, where he had 
 never been before, plunged into the unknown. 
 To-day the difficulty is not, that there is not a 
 sufficiency of roads, but that there are too 
 many Romes. This difficulty did not beset the 
 builders of the road I write about. 
 
 Following the flight of crows across the hills, 
 they first of all laid a few faggots in the miry 
 places, secured a coracle or two by streams too 
 deep to cross, and, taking in their hands a club 
 or a stone battle-axe, set out across the hills. 
 Thus the road they traced in times gone by is 
 made on other principles than those in use 
 to-day. Twisting round obstacles and in and 
 out between the moors, skirting the base of 
 hills, and now and then coming back upon 
 itself in places where the first road-makers no 
 doubt sat down to rest, it winds upon its way. 
 
 Campseyan chiefs, and then Fingalians, have 
 passed along it in their light deerskin brogues. 
 In places, short cuts, now long disused, still 
 shine amongst the heath, showing stones
 
 THE CRAW ROAD 67 
 
 polished by the feet of ancient forayers. Into 
 recesses of green hills, now out again and then 
 running along the sides of streams, it winds 
 and penetrates. No road I know, not even 
 that between Mendoza and San Felipe de los 
 Andes across the stony slopes of Uspallata, 
 where in the tempests stones roll along like 
 leaves, is lonelier, more desolate, or looks more 
 hostile to mankind than this wild Scottish 
 Trail. 
 
 By rights the road should lead to nowhere 
 in particular, but finish off in some impenetrable 
 morass or in some corrie of the hills. That 
 would indeed be a crows' road, and far more 
 interesting than the majority of roads that lead 
 to places no one has any wish to go to, except 
 the people who are born there and cannot get 
 away. 
 
 This is what the Craw Road should really 
 be if it were perfect ; but, as it is, it winds 
 about the mist-filled hollows and wild hills, on 
 which feed black-faced sheep, and passes now 
 and then a lone farmhouse, white and four- 
 square, with purple slates, its stack of peats at 
 one end, cheese-stone before the door, its fank 
 for sheep-washing, and with a woman in a 
 short striped petticoat vigorously thumping
 
 68 THE CRAW ROAD 
 
 the blankets in the burn, and crooning out a 
 song. It leads through realms of heath and 
 grass unchanged, save for a sheep-drain here 
 and there, since the beginning of the world, 
 until it reaches one of the rare, old, Scottish 
 mansion-houses, left from an older age. 
 
 Miles from a railway station and jammed 
 against the flank of a steep range of hills, 
 between a melancholy little tarn, in which feed 
 tench, and a thick wood, it stands alone and 
 solitary. The grey peel-tower, with battlements 
 either for defence or else to show its owner was 
 a gentleman, stands sentinel beside a square, 
 grey house, with steep-pitched roof and corbie 
 steps, and with a low front door set in a roll- 
 and-fillet moulding, opening upon the road. 
 
 The stone above the door sets forth the year 
 of grace in which the builders rested from their . 
 task. The narrow ribbon of grey flags in front 
 is mossed and honeycombed by time. The 
 grass which surges up, close to the avenue, 
 leaving a narrow space in which to turn a 
 carriage, right before the door, has that peculiar 
 sour and scanty look of an old pasture when 
 only grazed by sheep. In the dank fields, 
 which we in Scotland dignify as " parks," the 
 trees are mostly all stag-headed, and the tall
 
 THE CRAW ROAD 69 
 
 spruces on the weather side hold out bare arms, 
 not dead, but stripped and polished by the 
 blast like ancient ivory. Moss has spread out 
 over the avenue, not like a carpet, but with 
 the look of a disease, and in a corner of the 
 grounds the ribs and trucks of an old cotton 
 mill, built as a speculation a hundred years ago, 
 add to the loneliness, by giving, as it were, an 
 air of having perished in the fight with Time 
 and destiny. 
 
 The long, dank mill-lead which once set the 
 machinery astir is silted up, in places fallen in, 
 and though long years have passed since it did 
 anything but breed innumerable frogs, is still 
 an eyesore, Nature having steadfastly refused 
 to take it to herself and veil its ugliness. 
 
 Smoke curls unwillingly from the chimneys 
 of the house, to be so soon absorbed in mist it 
 leaves one doubtful whether it is smoke, or but 
 damp floating from the trees. Squirrels and 
 rabbits have come into their own, and look at 
 you as on a trespasser, and from the woods 
 even at midday roe venture forth and play. 
 The heron's cry sounds lively, and the tinkling 
 of the burn hidden beneath the bushes of the 
 shrubbery almost oppressive in the deep 
 solitude. All must look magical in the silence
 
 70 THE CRAW ROAD 
 
 of the stars, when the moon ghostens in the 
 trees, and owls float noiselessly about or pass 
 the time of night in their long melopy, from 
 hollybush to old Scotch fir, their cries re- 
 echoing from the turrets of the house and sound- 
 ing on the lake. 
 
 Then the tall pine trees, which throng about 
 the little urn bearing the inscription " Hsec loca 
 cum peregrinis pinis exornavit, A.G.S.," and 
 the date 1845, compare their notes about the 
 flight of time, whispering uncannily. Hemlocks 
 and Douglasses must then vie with one another, 
 and the Sequoias vaunt their stature, whilst 
 trembling Deodaras shyly claim the palm of 
 grace from all the fellowship. Long, tapering 
 branches, looking fingerlike and human, must 
 be agitated, waking the birds and squirrels by 
 their movement ; and if the raiser of the urn 
 could see the trees he planted so many years 
 ago, now grown majestic in their age, he would 
 indeed plume himself on his Latin and his faith, 
 in having planted them. 
 
 Martial and angular, his frosty whiskers 
 curling round his chin, his silver snuff-box in 
 his hand, it is not likely that the planter of the 
 trees ever went out at night to hear them 
 whispering, or watch the moonbeams playing
 
 THE CRAW ROAD 71 
 
 on their boughs, silent and silvery ; but had he 
 done so, standing by his urn, he would have 
 looked as much in keeping with the scene as 
 any one of them. 
 
 Time had been impotent to bow or mellow 
 him ; so he stood still defiant, like an old ash 
 grown on stony ground that stretches out its 
 boughs to meet the elements. The suns of the 
 Peninsula, in whose wars he passed his youth, 
 the storms of politics and of religious contro- 
 versy of his middle age, had but intensified his 
 proud, unyielding soul, and made him bitter. 
 Perhaps the one soft corner in his heart was 
 to the trees, now grown so beautiful and so 
 luxuriant (after he was dead), to whom, in sure 
 and certain hope that Nature would perform 
 her unconscious miracle, he raised his little urn. 
 One fain would hope that when at night, 
 released from the presence of mankind, they 
 whisper in the breeze, his memory is cherished, 
 and that these foreign pines, which do indeed 
 adorn the spot on which they grow, say now 
 and then to one another, " Do you remember 
 that day, long ago, when we all lay together 
 on a cart, and the stern, white-haired, eagle- 
 eyed old man who set us in the ground ? " 
 Meanwhile they wave and whisper, tall and
 
 72 THE CRAW ROAD 
 
 beautiful, their branches covering the little 
 burn which I remember in my youth running 
 through a grass slope on which stood some 
 young trees, at varying intervals. 
 
 The hand that planted them is long decayed, 
 and the old place sleeps in its corrie with some- 
 thing ghostly hanging over it, even in midday. 
 
 Through the rough hills, across the moors, 
 passing the isolated white farmhouses, winds 
 the way that leads to it ; and overhead the 
 crows caw hoarsely, and seem to say to one 
 another when a rare traveller passes by, 
 " There goes a man upon our road."
 
 SET FREE 
 
 A fine, persistent rain had filled the streets 
 with mud. It lay so thickly that it seemed as 
 if black snow had fallen, and from the pools 
 which had collected here and there upon its 
 surface the passing carriages were reflected, as 
 by a mirage, distorted in the glare of the 
 electric light. The passers-by all had a look 
 of ghosts in the thick foggy air. Rain trickled 
 from their hats and umbrellas, and mud and 
 water oozed beneath their tread. The thorough- 
 fare was blocked in places with cabs all full of 
 people going off upon their holidays, for it was 
 Christmas week. Bells were heard fitfully, call- 
 ing the faithful to the churches to prepare to 
 celebrate the birth of Him who died upon the 
 Cross to bring peace to the earth. 
 
 The trees which overhang the roadway by 
 the park dropped inky showers upon the tramps 
 sleeping or talking on the seats. The drops 
 splashed on the stones and on the cross-board of 
 the rest for porters' burdens which still survives, 
 
 73
 
 74 SET FREE 
 
 a relic of the past, between the cast-iron lamp- 
 posts with their bright globes of light. Here 
 and there at the corners of the streets that lead 
 down to the artery between the parks stood 
 women dressed fashionably, wearing large hats 
 with ostrich feathers. True that their numbers 
 were diminished, for an orgasm of virtue had 
 recently swept over those who rule, and had 
 decreed Vice should do homage to her twin- 
 sister Virtue, but only on the sly. Still they 
 were there, to show how much has been 
 achieved for women by our faith, in the last 
 thousand years. Policemen stood about upon 
 their beats, stout and well fed, looking with 
 scorn if a taxpayer in a threadbare coat passed 
 by them, and ever ready, after the fashion of the 
 world, to aid the rich, the strong, and those who 
 did not need their help, and spurn the miserable. 
 During the week the churches had been 
 thronged with worshippers. Some went to 
 pray, others resorted to the fane from custom, 
 and again, some from a vague feeling that 
 religion was a bulwark reared in defence of 
 property in seasons of unrest, though this of 
 course they had not reasoned out, but felt in- 
 stinctively, just as a man fears danger in the 
 night upon a lonely road. H ymns had been sung
 
 SET FREE 75 
 
 and sermons preached inculcating goodwill, 
 peace, charity and forbearance to the weak. 
 Yet London was as pitiless as ever, and the 
 strong pushed the weak down in the gutter, 
 actually and in the moral sphere. Women 
 were downtrodden, except they happened to be 
 rich, though men talked chivalry whilst not re- 
 fraining for an instant to take advantage of the 
 power that law and nature placed within their 
 reach. The animal creation seemed to have been 
 devised by God to bring out all that was most 
 base in man. If they were tame and looked to 
 him as man, in theory, looks towards his God, 
 he worked them pitilessly. Their loves, their 
 preferences, their simple joys, attachments to the 
 places where they had first seen the light and 
 frisked beside their mothers in the fields, were all 
 uncared for, even were subjects for derision and 
 for mirth, if they were marked at all. If, on the 
 other hand, they were of those, winged or four- 
 footed, who had never bowed the knee or 
 drooped the wing to man's dominion, their 
 treatment was still worse. They had no rights, 
 except of being killed at proper seasons, which 
 were contrived so artfully that but a bare three 
 months of the whole year was left unstained with 
 blood. Woods in their thickest depths witnessed
 
 76 SET FREE 
 
 their agony. Deep in the corries of the hills, in 
 fields, in rivers, on the land, the sea, and in the 
 bowels of the earth they left their fellows, dumb, 
 stricken, wretched, and died silently, wondering 
 perhaps what crime they had committed in their 
 livesso innocentand pure. No one commiserated 
 them, for they were clearly sent into the world as 
 living targets to improve man's power of shoot- 
 ing, or to be chased and torn to pieces in order to 
 draw out the higher feelings of his self-esteem 
 and give him opportunity to say, as their eyes 
 glazed in death, There is one flesh of man, and 
 yet another of the beasts, all glory to His name. 
 Through the soft rain the roar of the great 
 city rose, though dulled and deadened, still 
 menacing and terrible, as if the worst of human 
 passions, as always happens in a crowd, had 
 got the upper hand, and were astir to wreak 
 themselves on any object ready to their hand. 
 Machines ran to and fro, noisy and sending 
 forth mephitic fumes, and seeming somehow as 
 if they were the masters, and the pale men 
 who drove them only slaves of the great forces 
 they had brought into their lives. They 
 swerved and skated, bearing their fill of trem- 
 bling passengers, and making every living 
 thing give them the road on pain of mutilated
 
 SET FREE 77 
 
 limbs or death as horrible as by the car of some 
 great idol in the East. No car of Juggernaut 
 was half so terrible, and as they took their 
 passage through the streets men shrank into 
 the second place and seemed but to exist on 
 sufferance, as tenders of machines. 
 
 Still, it was Christmas week, and the glad 
 tidings preached so long ago, so fitted for the 
 quiet ways and pastoral existence of those who 
 heard them first, so strangely incongruous with 
 us of modern times, were still supposed to 
 animate men's minds. The night wore on, and 
 through the sordid rows of stuccoed houses the 
 interminable file of cabs, of carriages and 
 motor omnibuses, still took its course, and 
 trains of market-carts drawn by small puffing 
 engines began to pass along the street. In 
 them, high in the air, lying upon the heaped-up 
 vegetables or seated on the backboard clinging 
 by one arm to the chain, boys slumbered, their 
 heads swaying and wagging to and fro as the 
 carts rumbled on the stones. Then the carts 
 disappeared, and the remaining traffic increased 
 its speed in the half-empty streets, the drivers, 
 anxious to get home, shaving each other's 
 wheels in haste or carelessness. Round coffee- 
 stalls stood groups of people in the flaring light
 
 78 SET FREE 
 
 of naphtha-lamps — soldiers, a man in evening 
 dress, a street-walker or two, and some of those 
 strange, hardly human- looking hags who only 
 seem to rise from the recesses of the night, and 
 with the dawn retreat into some Malebolge of 
 the slums. The time and place had broken 
 down all barriers of caste and they stood 
 laughing at obscenities, primitive and crude, 
 such as have drawn the laughter of mankind 
 from the beginning of the world. 
 
 In the great open space between the junc- 
 tion of the parks, where on one side the 
 hospital frowns on the paltry Grseco-Cockney 
 sham triumphal arch, just underneath the 
 monolith from which the bronze, Iron Duke 
 looks down upon the statues of the men he 
 qualified as "blackguards" in his life, a little 
 crowd surrounded something lying on the 
 ground. A covered van, battered and shabby, 
 stood, with a broken shaft. Under the wheels 
 the mud was stained with a dark patch already 
 turning black, and the smashed shaft was 
 spotted here and there with blood. A heap of 
 broken harness lay in a pile, and near it on its 
 side a horse with a leg broken by a motor 
 omnibus. His coat was dank with sweat, and 
 his lean sides were raw in places with the har-
 
 SET FREE 79 
 
 ness, that he would wear no more. His neck 
 was galled with the wet collar which was 
 thrown upon the pile of harness, its flannel 
 lining stained with the matter of the sores 
 which scarcely healed before work opened them 
 again. The horse's yellow teeth, which his 
 lips, open in his agony, disclosed, showed that 
 he was old and that his martyrdom was not of 
 yesterday. His breath came painfully and his 
 thin flanks heaved like a wheezy bellows in a 
 smithy, and now and then one of his legs con- 
 tracted and was drawn up to his belly and then 
 extended slowly till the shoe clanked upon the 
 ground. The broken leg, limp and bedaubed 
 in mud, looked like a sausage badly filled, and 
 the protruding splinter of the bone showed 
 whitely through the skin. 
 
 The little crowd stood gazing at him as he 
 lay not without sympathy but dully, as if they 
 too were over-driven in their lives. 
 
 Then came a policeman who, after listening 
 to the deposition of the owner of the horse, 
 took out a little book, and having written in it 
 briskly with a stumpy pencil, returned it to his 
 pocket with an air of having done his duty and 
 passed on upon his way. 
 
 The electric lamps flared on the scene. In
 
 80 SET FREE 
 
 the deserted park the wind amongst the trees 
 murmured a threnody, and on the road the 
 dying horse lay as a rock sticks up, just in the 
 tideway of a harbour, thin, dirty, overworked, 
 castrated, underfed, familiar from his youth with 
 blows and with ill-treatment, but now about to 
 be set free.
 
 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 
 
 It was indeed a castle of the elves. Over all, 
 hung an air of melancholy. From the deserted 
 lodge, behind the high, beech hedge, which 
 shut the place off from the lake, the avenue led 
 through a sea of billowy mounds, on which 
 grew trees as thickly as in the tropics, some 
 dead and some decaying, some broken off by 
 storms and left to die or live just as they 
 chose. 
 
 Moss had spread like a carpet over the 
 deeply rutted road. 
 
 Here and there by its side stood foreign 
 shrubs, some of them growing rankly, and 
 others which had died years ago, standing up 
 dry and sere, inside their iron cages, as a dead 
 body in a life-belt floats upon the sea. The 
 bracken met the lower branches of the trees 
 and formed a screen, through which rabbits 
 had made their runs, like little railway 
 tunnels. 
 
 g 81
 
 82 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 
 
 They fed upon the mossy grass outside, 
 retreating slowly when they were alarmed, 
 conscious they were at home, and that a passer- 
 by was an intruder into their domain. Where 
 the trees fell, they lay and rotted, covered with 
 lichens and with a growth of ferns that sprang 
 from the dead bark. 
 
 The neglected woods seemed to have bred 
 a strange and hostile air. Instinctively one 
 looked around, as if some power of nature, 
 which cultivation kills, was still unchecked, had 
 just declared a war upon mankind, and was 
 about to open its attack. 
 
 The passing of a roe through the deep 
 underwood, a passage ordinarily so fairy-like 
 and light, there, sounded ominous, and the 
 sharp cracking of a decaying twig under its 
 flying feet, or the soft rustling of its body 
 through the ferns, sent a thrill through the 
 listener, as if some monstrous creature of a 
 dream were going to appear. 
 
 Even in summer everything seemed dank, 
 and in the peaty soil the water oozed beneath 
 the footsteps, making the ground seem treacher- 
 ous and false. 
 
 Sometimes at sunset, when a red gleam fell 
 on the top of oaks, turned all the bracken fiery,
 
 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 83 
 
 and lighted up the overhanging hills which 
 peeped above the tops of the high trees, the 
 air of menace was dispelled and a breath from 
 the outer world brought back security. When 
 the last gleams had vanished, and a cold, chilly 
 air, especially before the autumn frost, crept 
 through the brakes and stirred the frozen tufts 
 of bulrushes in the black, awful-looking ponds, 
 fringed with dark rhododendrons, and set 
 about upon one side with towering spruce firs, 
 a panic seemed to creep into the soul. 
 
 The thick, white mists that rose up from the 
 pool hung in the trees, and seemed as if they 
 were alive, so stealthily they crept about the 
 branches, and twined like serpents, twisting 
 and writhing in the air. 
 
 Owls floated like gigantic moths across the 
 avenue, or sat and called to one another in the 
 recesses of the woods. All was so silent and 
 so still, you seemed to feel the waves of sound 
 that floated from their call, just as one hears 
 the whirring of an old eight-day clock before it 
 strikes its bell. In the low park beyond the 
 wood, through which the avenue led to the 
 house, the dun or creamy Highland cattle slept 
 on the hillocks, to shun the draughts of night. A 
 chilly damp rose from the old bog-land, long since
 
 84 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 
 
 reclaimed, but showing black and peaty where 
 moles had made their hills, which dotted the sour 
 grass at intervals, and in the moonlight looked 
 like animals asleep. A great moss ditch cut 
 the low park in two, and in it the black, frozen 
 water seemed like a stream of pitch. Birches 
 and stunted oaks were set about the fields, 
 their old, gnarled roots laid bare by winter 
 rains, and by the stamping of the cattle in the 
 summer, when they stood underneath the trees 
 to shelter from the flies. Through the long-, 
 
 o o' 
 
 limb-like roots, rabbits had burrowed, and here 
 and there a heavy stone was left, stuck in the 
 crevices, looking like some lost weapon of the 
 Stone Age, or prehistoric club. 
 
 Just where the deep moss ditch crossed 
 underneath the road, a high, iron, double gate 
 barred off the avenue. 
 
 Beyond it stretched a gloomy road, winding 
 between dark trees. At night, when you rode 
 through it, your horse snorting occasionally 
 when rabbits ran across the path, or birds 
 stirred in the trees, it felt as if you were a 
 thousand miles from help. In front, the 
 dark road wound, as it seemed, intermin- 
 ably, through overhanging trees. Between 
 you and the world was the half-mile or so
 
 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 85 
 
 of the mysterious woods, and the black, sullen 
 ponds. 
 
 At last, passing another gate, it led up to a 
 shrubbery. A mossy burn fed a neglected 
 duck-pond, upon whose waters floated feathers, 
 and round whose sides grew tufts of pampas 
 grass. Tall bushes of wygelia and syringa, 
 dead at the sides but vigorous in the middle, 
 with flowering currants, andromeda and rank- 
 growing thickets of guelder rose and dogwood, 
 concealed the house from view. 
 
 The rabbit netting, nailed to the fencing of 
 the park, was broken here and there, and 
 billowed like a sail. Through it the rabbits 
 entered as they pleased, burrowing beneath the 
 bushes, and leaving trails which led up to the 
 lawn. Enormous beeches, and a sycamore or 
 two, growing like cabbages, showed that at one 
 time the neglected policies had been well cared 
 for, and the decayed and mouldering rustic 
 seats, set about here and there, recalled the 
 time when children played upon the lawn, 
 whilst nurses sat and watched them underneath 
 the trees. The house itself, high and steep- 
 roofed, with pepper-boxes at the angles, and a 
 wide flight of steps, upon whose parapet two 
 great iron eagles, that once had been all
 
 86 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 
 
 painted in the proper colours of the coat of 
 arms of which they formed the crest, was 
 desolate and drear. The rough-cast plaster, 
 which at one time had covered all the walls, 
 had fallen in patches here and there, leaving 
 great blotches that looked like maps, upon its 
 sides. 
 
 Right opposite the door, a roundel of rank 
 grass, once closely shaven, but now rank and 
 ill-tended, lay like an island in the road. Two 
 whinstone posts, with eight-shaped irons at 
 their sides, for hitching horses to in times 
 gone by, just raised their heads above the 
 turf. 
 
 The house door, left ajar, but yet made fast 
 against the world by a confining chain, with 
 the bolt running in a tube, gave just the touch 
 of human interest required to accentuate the 
 melancholy of the forlorn abode. 
 
 As one peeped through into the hall, covered 
 with a well-worn oilcloth, and marked the 
 absence of sticks, hats, umbrellas, and all that 
 goes to give a hall a look of being the intro- 
 duction to a comfortable home, one felt the 
 owner was a solitary man, who in the summer 
 evenings, when the owls hooted faintly in the 
 recesses of the woods and swallows hawked at
 
 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 87 
 
 flies across the lawn, sat on the parapet of the 
 tall flight of broken steps, between his iron 
 eagles, and meditated on what might have 
 been, had things gone differently. 
 
 Beyond the hall few ever penetrated, for an 
 old woman, holding the door fast in her hand, 
 used to peep out and answer, " The laird is 
 oot," and then when the chance visitor had 
 turned away disconsolate, flatten her nose 
 against a window and watch him stumble down 
 the road. The great, old Scottish stable, built 
 round a courtyard, with the decaying clock 
 upon its tower, one hand long lost, the other 
 pointing eternally to twelve, stood, buried in 
 the trees, whose branches swept the slates, 
 showering them down upon the grass in gales, 
 and dropping ceaselessly in rain, till a green 
 lichen grew just underneath the drip. 
 
 Most of the doors had gone, and those that 
 still fought on against the rain and wind were 
 kept in place by pieces of coarse leather, 
 roughly nailed on the jambs. Upon the 
 wooden sheathing of the pump, hay seed had 
 sprouted, growing a rank crop of grass, which in 
 its turn had died, and hung all mildewed and 
 with small drops of moisture oozing from the 
 stems.
 
 88 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 
 
 Such was the place, one of the last examples 
 of the old Scotland which has sunk below the 
 waves of Time. Perhaps, not an example to 
 be followed, but yet to be observed, remem- 
 bered, even regretted in the great drabness of 
 prosperity which overspreads the world. 
 
 Few people ever trod the avenue, and even 
 tramps but rarely camped in the deserted 
 woods, though fallen trees were plentiful, and 
 none would have been the wiser if they had 
 stayed a week. The owner, an old sailor who 
 had inherited the place in middle life, had by 
 degrees become such a recluse that sometimes 
 weeks would pass without his being seen. 
 Shut off from all the world, he lived with an 
 old housekeeper, as it were in a wilderness, 
 and if by chance he met a stranger on the 
 road would dive behind the bushes to escape, 
 like a wild animal. Now and then far-off 
 relations would come down to shoot, stopping 
 at some hotel, and now and then a neighbour 
 would drive over, always to be received by the 
 old housekeeper with the same formula, " The 
 laird is oot." 
 
 Occasionally he left the country and went 
 abroad, but always to some place near the 
 seaside, where he would pass long hours look-
 
 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 89 
 
 ing at ships, though without making any friends. 
 Lubeck and Kiel, Riga or Genoa, were his 
 favourite haunts, and those who met him at 
 any of those ports used to report having 
 seen him, dressed in his blue serge suit, and 
 with the air of being the one man left in a 
 depopulated world, in the same way that cap- 
 tains jot down in their log, "In such a latitude, 
 in the first dog-watch passed a derelict." 
 
 By degrees his visits to far-off ports grew 
 rarer, and at last he seldom passed the gates of 
 his neglected grounds, except occasionally on 
 Sundays, when he attended church, reserved 
 and silent, speaking to none, but yet a little 
 critical, after the fashion of a man who had 
 read prayers on board his ship, and there- 
 fore should know something of the way in 
 which a service ought to be carried on. 
 
 On these occasions he would stand a little in 
 the churchyard, looking intently at a sort of 
 pen, surrounded by a broken iron railing, in 
 which his ancestors reposed. 
 
 Whether his thoughts ran on the unstability 
 of life, or if he only tried to make a calculation 
 of the probable expense he would incur if he 
 embarked upon repairs, was never known to 
 anyone, although some said he thought of
 
 go CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 
 
 neither, but merely leaned against the rails to 
 pass the time until the congregation had dis- 
 persed, and left him free to set off home again. 
 
 Everyone speculated on his death, some 
 saying that it would occur some day when he 
 was quite alone, out in the woods, and others 
 that he would be found dead in his chair, with 
 the Pacific Pilot open in his hand. Not a 
 bad book for an old sailor to have consulted, 
 when just about to weigh his anchor ; but as it 
 happened he had to make his landfall, unassisted 
 and alone. 
 
 A bitter frost, intense and black, had bound 
 the district, congealing the dark waters of the 
 lake into a sheet of glass. Trees groaned and 
 cracked, and in the silent woods a shudder 
 seemed to run through the gaunt avenues, as 
 if they suffered from the cold. Crows winged 
 their way, looking like notes of music on an 
 old page of parchment, across the leaden sky. 
 
 High in the air there passed strings of wild 
 geese, and in the stillness of the frost their 
 melancholy cry was heard, till they were almost 
 out of sight. 
 
 All nature seemed engaged in a stern fight 
 for life, with some calamity which had attacked 
 it unawares. The very streams stood still to
 
 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 91 
 
 watch the progress of the battle, fast in their 
 bonds of ice. 
 
 Somehow or other, after the fashion that in 
 Africa news travels always a day or two ahead 
 of any traveller, it got about the countryside 
 the laird was missing from his home. As, in 
 the little inn, the constable, "the post," one or 
 two farmers, and the innkeeper were talking of 
 the report, the housekeeper was seen hobbling 
 along the road. Coughing and wheezing, she 
 averred she " couldna bide alane, up in yon 
 awfu' house." The laird, it seemed, upon the 
 evening of the commencement of the frost, 
 had gone out, as was usual, just before tea- 
 time, but never had come back. She had 
 waited for two days, setting his meals upon the 
 table at the stated hours, and at night putting 
 out a lantern at the front door to guide him to 
 the house. A day and night had broken down 
 her courage, and given her the strength to find 
 her way alone through the deserted avenue, 
 for, as she said, "If she had passed anither 
 nicht alane wi' all they bogles and they howlets, 
 she would have gone fair gyte." 
 
 All search was useless. The woods and 
 moors guarded their secret, and had not chance 
 revealed it, the disappearance of the laird would
 
 92 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 
 
 have been put down as the last eccentricity 
 of an eccentric life. 
 
 Fate was not willing that the laird's last 
 resting-place should not be known, for as some 
 boys were skating on one of the black ponds 
 they saw what they took for bird's feathers, 
 frozen in the ice. When they came home, 
 trembling and pale, they said the feathers 
 turned out to be the hair on a man's head, and 
 that below the ice they had seen something 
 that "lookit like a muckle fish, and frichted 
 them to death." 
 
 At once the sparse inhabitants of the wild 
 district proceeded to the place, entering the 
 sacred grounds from which they had been 
 debarred for years. Their lanterns, glimmer- 
 ing like glow-worms over the dark pond, and 
 shedding a fantastic light on the black ice, 
 outlining every branch upon the leafless trees, 
 and playing on the clump of rhododendrons on 
 the bank, gave a strange air of unreality to 
 everything around. 
 
 One of the boys pointed out the spot, and 
 as the ice was frozen so intensely, on the clear, 
 windless night, they saw beneath it the laird's 
 body, in the same way that you can see a fish 
 which has been taken by the frost.
 
 CAISTEAL-NA-SITHAN 93 
 
 When they had cut it out, framed in a square 
 of ice, he was so life-like, laid upon the bank, 
 in the dim, quavering light of the horn lanterns, 
 that those who saw him always used to say, 
 11 You'd hae just thocht the laird was sleepin', 
 if he had na been sae gash."
 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 He stopped his oxen, with a prolonged low 
 cry, and standing just in front of them with 
 one hand on the yoke, the other resting on his 
 goad, which he held like a spear, stuck upright 
 in the ground, he said, after due compliments, 
 as people say when they translate an Eastern 
 letter, " I see you are looking at it." 
 
 The object that I saw was a strange building, 
 something like a Moorish saint's tomb, but with 
 a burnished copper roof, reflecting back the sun. 
 It stood out, garish and vulgar, just beyond the 
 old, brown walls of a Castilian town, built on 
 the slopes of a gaunt sierra, at whose feet ran 
 one of those deep, greenish rivers only seen in 
 Spain. A mediaeval palace of warm, yellow 
 stone, the tower of the collegiate church, the 
 strange and burnt-up country stretching almost 
 to the walls without a suburb intervening, or a 
 stray villa dotted here and there to break the 
 sea of brown, rendered the building still more 
 paltry in its meretriciousness. Lighting a 
 
 94
 
 IMMORTALITY 95 
 
 cigarette slowly and painfully with a flint and 
 steel, the bullock-driver, leaning against the 
 yoke of his great tawny oxen, said: "Yes, 
 what you see there we call the ' mushroom 
 tomb.' A lady built it as you see it now, one 
 of those modernists, who go about in motor- 
 cars, frightening the oxen and killing all our 
 dogs. Now it is finished she does not like it, 
 and, I hear, is going to pull it down, as she 
 has done two others that she built. She goes 
 on building tombs, as if one tomb was not 
 enough to be forgotten by, as other folk build 
 houses. Fools build a house, they say, for 
 other men to live in, and so perhaps the 
 Countess may build her tomb not for herself, 
 for she may die at sea or in some foreign 
 place." 
 
 I thanked him, and he, after accepting a cigar, 
 which he proceeded to cut up for cigarettes, 
 cutting it on his hand with a clasp knife a foot 
 in length that opened with a series of clicks, 
 gravely saluted me, stuck his goad into the 
 near ox, in the loose skin upon its neck, 
 and with a drawn-out Anda-a-a set out again 
 towards the town. I walked towards the tomb, 
 and saw that it was empty, unfinished, and 
 half-plastered, and that above the door there
 
 96 IMMORTALITY 
 
 was a monstrous coat of arms, just underneath 
 the cross. It stood in a flat waste of gravel, 
 which had been carted from the river, and was 
 already disappearing in the cracked, thirsty 
 ground. Looking more closely, I found what 
 I had thought was copper on the roof, were 
 tiles of orange glass, laid overlapping, like 
 planks in a boat built clinker-wise. Half- 
 finished stones lay here and there, with broken 
 wheelbarrows and bent and rusty picks. The 
 monstrous building stood upon the plain, alone, 
 ridiculous, and yet pathetic in its ugliness, 
 and in the evident intent of her who built it 
 to leave some recollection of herself when she 
 was gone. 
 
 Years passed, and I forgot the " mushroom 
 tomb," the old Castilian town with its harsh 
 Moorish name, the sierra, and the river, edged 
 with willows, looking like a thin green ribbon 
 dropped in the dusty plain. Madrid, from the 
 mere village of my youth, with its ill-paved 
 and tortuous streets, set here and there with 
 convents, and broken here and there with 
 rambling palaces roofed with brown tiles, 
 almost by accident became a modern town. 
 Seville went at a bound from a great, silent 
 Moorish city, where no one but a gipsy or a
 
 IMMORTALITY 97 
 
 beggar walked in the streets by day, to a 
 tourist centre, with paltry little shops full of 
 cheap fans and tambourines, on which were set 
 forth views of the Giralda, gipsies with eyes as 
 big as oysters, and heads of bull-fighters. Cheap 
 castagnettes, made of unseasoned wood and 
 warranted to crack the first time they were 
 used, with raw-looking guitars and tinselled- 
 handled knives all made in Birmingham or 
 Lille, but duly lettered with inscriptions such 
 as " Do not draw me without cause or sheathe 
 me without honour," were hawked about the 
 streets by turnpike bull-fighters who never 
 faced a bull. Tramways ran through the 
 narrow Calle de Genova that leads to the 
 Cathedral, and bands of tourists haunted the 
 cates and the dancing-halls, urging the gipsy 
 dancers to fresh indecencies, unknown to them 
 in unsophisticated days. 
 
 Bilbao and Barcelona had become great 
 hives of industry, the latter having developed 
 into a Manchester or Birmingham with great 
 tree-planted streets and a new suburb stretching 
 out towards the hills. The walls had been 
 demolished, and the old quays just underneath 
 them, where once lay the fruit schooners, 
 painted light green or white, with tapering 
 
 H
 
 98 IMMORTALITY 
 
 masts and spars, and with a figurehead of 
 Flora, or Pomona, carved and gilt, had turned 
 to docks, from which great liners took away 
 their droves of emigrants. Places remote as 
 Ronda had blossomed forth in great hotels, 
 with liveried touts standing about their doors, 
 and speaking every language, without the 
 smallest notion of its grammar or its form. In 
 fact, progress had come to the more frequented 
 parts of Spain. People in them no longer 
 spoke of any foreigner as El Francis, and 
 prices, which of course keep step with progress, 
 had risen mightily. In fact, an air of skin-deep 
 Europeisation had come upon the land, ob- 
 scuring almost all the national virtues, in the 
 favoured spots where it prevailed, and bringing 
 out all that was worst in Spanish character. 
 
 Business or pleasure, or something of the 
 sort, took me once more to Guadalcazar to find 
 the scene unchanged. When the slow, rum- 
 bling train had drawn up at the little station, 
 sweltering in the sun, two or three red and 
 yellow omnibuses, drawn by thin mules or 
 white, apocalyptic horses, harnessed with rope, 
 and having nearly every one an open sore 
 upon some part of him, described by Spanish 
 drivers as a flor, waited to rattle one up the
 
 IMMORTALITY 99 
 
 steep, stony road. Whips cracked, bells jin- 
 gled, and the thin windows rattled with a noise 
 like thunder, whilst the rough, wooden box on 
 wheels bounded and skated on the stones. 
 People, who must have seen it every day for 
 years, turned out to watch it pass, in the same 
 way they thronged the railway station every 
 night to watch the arrival of the train from 
 Barcelona to Madrid. Girls waved their hand- 
 kerchiefs and men shouted Adios Pepe to 
 the driver as if he had been setting out upon a 
 journey of a hundred miles. 
 
 At last, battered and sore with the long 
 twenty minutes' struggle not to be thrown 
 against the roof, the instrument of torture 
 stopped with a jerk outside the doorway, where 
 sat the owner of the inn. Nothing proclaimed 
 his status, except an air of great detachment, 
 which seemed to indicate he was a stranger 
 in the town. He sat, with a chair tilted up 
 against the wall, smoking one of those oily, 
 black cigars called Brevas, which only 
 Spaniards of his class can smoke and not 
 expire at the last puff. His spotless shirt was 
 open at the neck, and his broad face, close 
 shaved and blue, gave him a look as of a bull- 
 fighter, who had made money and retired. I
 
 ioo IMMORTALITY 
 
 was the only passenger, and one might have 
 thought he would have welcomed me ; but 
 beyond a grave answer to my salutation, no- 
 thing was farther from his mind. He thought 
 there was a room, and was just making up his 
 mind to call to somebody to show me to it, 
 when looking at me he said, " I think I have 
 the honour. Were you not here ten or twelve 
 years ago ? " 
 
 A ragged boy having taken up my bag to a 
 bare room which seemed never to have been 
 swept since my last visit to the place, I threw 
 the window open, and sitting down looked out 
 upon a grassy, half-deserted square. A feeling 
 as of having been marooned on some lone 
 island crept on me as I watched two horses 
 playing on the grass. No one regarded them 
 as they chased one another up and down. 
 At times a cat stole timidly across a street, 
 just as a tiger steals across a forest glade, 
 as stealthily and with an air as far detached 
 from man. At last even the horses ceased 
 their play and stood hanging their heads under 
 a scanty-foliaged tree. Nothing was stirring 
 in the town, and the hot open space was given 
 over to the crickets, whose shrill chirp sounded 
 so loud that one forgot a silence as of death
 
 IMMORTALITY 101 
 
 hung over everything. Later on, as the breeze 
 coming from the hills recalled the town to life, 
 I strolled out on to the hot road, bordered on 
 each side with heat-dried, ill-grown acacias, 
 and followed it outside the town to where I 
 now remembered that the "mushroom tomb" 
 had stood. 
 
 Looking towards the place, I rubbed my 
 eyes, for certainly a building occupied the 
 place, but changed indeed, from the domed 
 cupola, crowned with its yellow glass. Gone 
 were the walls with their raised Moorish 
 tracery ; gone were the dazzling tiles, and in 
 their place a Gothic structure with flying 
 buttresses and gimcrack pinnacles stood, white 
 and glittering, a newer and a more foolish 
 mushroom than the last. The gravelly waste 
 still stretched around it, and the same litter of 
 a stone-mason's yard, the picks and shovels, 
 wheelbarrows, and chips of stone, were strewed 
 about the walls. Only the coat of arms, but 
 now grown rather weather-beaten, was let into 
 a niche above the door. The arid plain scorch- 
 ing and sweltering in the sun, the old embattle- 
 mented town, the river winding between its 
 poplars, and the giant sierra, towering beyond 
 the walls, gave the fantastic tomb a look as of
 
 102 IMMORTALITY 
 
 a travelling circus, playing in some old, Roman 
 amphitheatre. A shepherd stood immovable 
 and brown, and looking like a trunk of a dead 
 tree, as he leant on his stick, oruardina- a flock 
 of brown-woolled sheep, who searched amongst 
 the stones for any herbage that had escaped 
 the drought. When they strayed out of bounds 
 he cracked his sling, unwinding it from where 
 he wore it, wrapped above his sash. They, 
 knowing a shower of stones would follow if 
 they disobeyed, put up their heads, then turned 
 and fed towards him as he stood like a land- 
 mark on the plain. Unchanging and unchanged 
 he stood, just as his forefathers must have 
 looked, brown-cloaked and sun-tanned at the 
 reconquest from the Moors. 
 
 Nothing but a poor wooden cross would 
 mark his burial-place ; a wooden cross, that in 
 a year or two would rot and fall ; nothing but 
 a brown post he looked, standing so silently, 
 with all his flock, now feeding quietly around 
 him, and well within the distance of a sling's 
 cast of a stone. His great, brown dog, with 
 its spiked collar round its neck, slept at his 
 feet, changing position when he moved, to 
 keep itself within the shade its master's figure 
 threw upon the ground. The red-roofed town,
 
 IMMORTALITY 103 
 
 wild sierra, and the shepherd with his sling, 
 his angarina, knotted quince-tree staff, his 
 gnarled, brown hands, rough hempen sandals, 
 his sheep-skin jacket, and his clear-cut features, 
 shaded by a broad hat, such as was worn in 
 Thessaly when the world was young, and men 
 and gods so near to one another that goddesses 
 came down and left Olympus, finding the love 
 of men more satisfying than the serene embraces 
 of their kind, all formed a picture of that Spain, 
 now so fast passing. 
 
 Penelope may build her tomb, as she waits 
 for the coming of her lord, him of the hour-glass 
 and the scythe. Let her build on, the only 
 lasting traces of a man's passage through the 
 world are those that the brown, sling-girt figure 
 that I saw standing in the middle distance, cast 
 upon the sand.
 
 A MEETING 
 
 It was, if I remember rightly, for it is more 
 than thirty years ago, in the great stretch of 
 forest between Caraguata-Guazii and Caballero 
 Punta, that the meeting which I think brought 
 joy, at least for a short time to one of those 
 concerned, took place. For miles the track 
 ran through the woods ; the trail worn deep 
 into the red and sandy soil looked like a 
 ribbon, dropped underneath the dark, metallic- 
 foliaged trees. 
 
 At times a great fallen log, round which the 
 parasitic vegetation had wrapped itself, turned 
 the path off, just as a rock diverts the current 
 of a stream. In places the road, opened long 
 ago, most likely by the Jesuits, ran almost in 
 the dark, under the intertwining ceibas and 
 urandeys. Again, it came out on a clearing, in 
 which a straw-thatched hut or two, with a scant 
 patch of mandioca, an orange grove, and a 
 thick bunch of plantains, marked a settlement. 
 
 The fences were all broken, and peccaries had 
 
 104
 
 A MEETING 105 
 
 rooted up the crops. The oranges lay rotting 
 underneath the trees, and as you, passed along 
 the solitary trail and came out on the clearings, 
 flocks of green parakeets took wing from 
 where they had been feeding in the deserted 
 fields, and troops of monkeys howled. The 
 four years' war had laid the country waste, and 
 villages were left deserted, or at the best 
 inhabited by women and by girls. In all that 
 long, mosquito-haunted ride, that I remember, 
 just as if I had ridden it a week ago, through 
 the old Jesuit missions, between the Parana 
 and Paraguay, it was the rarest thing to meet 
 a man, and rarer still to meet a horse. 
 Occasionally you might come upon a family 
 living alone amongst the woods, upon the 
 edge of some old clearing ; but if you did, 
 they had no animals about the house but 
 fowls. 
 
 At intervals you might chance to cross some 
 wandering Correntino, dressed in the poncho 
 and the bombachas of the Gaucho, journeying 
 towards Asuncion ; more rarely a Brazilian on 
 his mule ; but all the natives were on foot, 
 most of the horses having been killed in the 
 long war. The legend was that Lopez met 
 his death on the last native Paraguayan horse,
 
 106 A MEETING 
 
 a little roan ; but be that as it may, horses 
 were rare to find, and the fierce nature of the 
 Tropics had so reconquered all the cultivated 
 land that there was little grass for them to eat. 
 Fields that had once born mandioca were 
 indistinguishable under a tangle of rank grass, 
 dwarf palms and scrubby plants, whilst maize 
 plantations had remained unsown, bearing but 
 a few straggling plants, grown from the falling 
 ears. Even the pathways through the woods 
 had become impassable, through the thick 
 growth of gnarled and knotty lianas, which, 
 like a web of cordage, barred the way. Tigers 
 abounded, and killed the few remaining horses, 
 if they could catch them sleeping near the 
 woods. Bats and mosquitoes, with enormous 
 ticks, combined with several distempers, which 
 the natives said had only come after the war, 
 and when the country had begun to go back to 
 the primeval forest, rendered a horse's life 
 unbearable, and made him difficult to keep. 
 Those Paraguayans who had a horse 
 cherished him as the apple of their eye, 
 covering him up at night against the vampire 
 bats, and bathing him at sunrise and at sunset 
 to keep away ticks and mosquitoes and a 
 thousand other crawling and flying plagues.
 
 A MEETING 107 
 
 Even with these precautions there yet re- 
 mained the fear of snakes and poisonous 
 weeds, so that a man who had a horse became 
 a slave, and passed his time in caring for him 
 and ministering to his welfare and his health. 
 So as I jogged, that is, of course, walked, for 
 the forest trails were far too deeply worn into 
 the soil to jog with safety, I passed long strings 
 of women, dressed in their low-cut sack-like 
 garment, embroidered round the neck with 
 black embroidery. Their hair, cut square 
 across the forehead and hanging down their 
 backs, gave them a mediaeval air. All were 
 barefooted, and all smoked thick cigars, which 
 they kept lighted at the torch their leader 
 carried in her hand to scare the jaguars. Upon 
 their heads they carried baskets full of oranges, 
 of mandioca, and of maize. Sometimes they 
 all saluted, sometimes they only smiled and 
 showed their teeth, and sometimes one of them 
 would say, amidst the laughter of the rest, " We 
 all want husbands," and added something else 
 in Guarani that made a laugh run rippling 
 down the line. 
 
 Occasionally a crashing in the bushes near 
 the trail told of the passage of a tapir, through 
 the underwood, and once as I came to a little
 
 108 A MEETING 
 
 clearing a tiger lay stretched flat upon a log, 
 watching the fish in some dark backwater, just 
 as a cat lies on the garden wall to watch the 
 birds. Butterflies floated lazily about, scarce 
 moving their broad, velvet wings, reminding 
 one somehow of owls, flitting across a grass 
 ride in a wood, noiseless, but startling by their 
 very quietness. 
 
 The snakes, the humming-birds, the alliga- 
 tors basking in the creeks, the whir of insects 
 and the metallic croaking of the frogs, the air 
 of being in the grip of an all-powerful vegeta- 
 tion, reduced a man, travelling alone through 
 the green solitude, to nothingness. One felt 
 as if in all that wealth of vegetation and 
 strange birds and beasts, one's horse were the 
 one living thing that was of the same nature as 
 oneself. 
 
 Had Balaam only heard his ass's voice in 
 such a place, it would have sounded comfort- 
 ing to him, and might have cheered him on his 
 way. The heat which poured down from the 
 sun, in the few places where the track was open 
 overhead, met the heat rising from the red, 
 sandy soil and focussed on one's face, drying 
 the blood that the innumerable flies had drawn, 
 into hard, sticky flakes. After interminable
 
 A MEETING 109 
 
 hours of heat, and intervals of dozing from 
 which one woke but just in time to save one's 
 balance and to remember, shuddering, what 
 would occur, if by mischance one fell and let 
 the horse escape, alone, and miles away from 
 any human habitation, the trail led out upon a 
 little clearing in the sea of woods. Smoke 
 curled from a fire under some orange trees, 
 between whose branches hung a cotton ham- 
 mock, with the fringe sweeping on the ground, 
 as it swung to and fro, impelled by a brown 
 foot. 
 
 To my astonishment my horse neighed 
 shrilly, and was answered by a horse, which 
 on first coming to the clearing I had over- 
 looked. As I rode up, repeating as I rode, 
 the formula, " Hail, blessed Virgin," being 
 answered by the man who had been lying in 
 the hammock, " Without sin conceived," I saw 
 the horse was a red roan, fat and in good con- 
 dition, and branded with the sign of Aries, 
 set rather low upon the hip. The Paraguayan 
 welcomed me, and bringingout two solid, wooden 
 chairs with cowhide seats, tilted them up 
 against the wall of his mud and straw-thatched 
 hut, and we sat down to talk. His clothes 
 were simple, and yet adequate enough con-
 
 no A MEETING 
 
 sidering the place. Upon his head he wore 
 a home-made hat plaited from fibre of a palm 
 leaf, and round his waist a leather apron, held 
 in its place by two old, silver coins. With the 
 exception of hide sandals on his feet, and a 
 red cloak of baize hung loosely on one shoulder, 
 he was as naked as the day on which he first 
 drew breath upon the earth. For all that, in 
 his bearing he was dignified enough, and after 
 placing a long-barrelled gun which he had 
 snatched up hastily when I approached his 
 house, against the wall, but well within his 
 reach, he sat down and motioning me to the 
 other chair began to talk as a man talks who 
 has been long alone. Where had I come 
 from ? and how was it that I was dressed like 
 a Correntino, being as he imagined, a foreigner, 
 perhaps a Spaniard, or some other " nation," 
 that spoke no Guarani ? 
 
 My horse, he did not know the brand, 
 looked like a horse from the low countries 
 down the river. I had better be careful of 
 him, especially at night, or else the vampire 
 bats would suck his blood. The tigers, too, 
 were specially attracted to a white animal, but 
 then white was such a colour for a gentleman, 
 especially white with a black skin, suitable
 
 A MEETING in 
 
 too for Paraguay, as a white horse is certain 
 to swim well, and the old boat upon the 
 Tebicuari had never been replaced, and I should 
 have to cross in a canoe. 
 
 " Tell me," he said, " what are the ' nations ' 
 doing in Asuncion ? Is there a government, 
 and who is president ? What, General Cabal- 
 lero ? Ah, I remember him, a barefoot boy, 
 running about till Lopez took his pretty sister 
 to live with him. Madama Lynch was not 
 well pleased at it . . . but then a president 
 is just like God. What he wants, that he will 
 have, be sure of it." It seemed his wife was 
 dead or lost during the war, and when I pointed 
 to some women, one pounding maize in a tall 
 mortar, another picking oranges, and a third 
 swinging in a white cotton hammock, he said, 
 " Yes, women, as you see. In these times the 
 poor things have got no husbands, and Chris- 
 tians have to do their best, out of pure charity." 
 
 Much did we talk about things interesting 
 to men in Paraguay, the price of cattle and the 
 like, the increase of tigers in the land, whether 
 the road was open from Corrientes to Asuncion 
 through the Estero Nembucu, and if the 
 Indians in the Chaco had been at what he 
 called "their own," now that there was no
 
 ii2 A MEETING 
 
 law. On all these points I satisfied him as 
 far as I was able, striving to make such news 
 as I had gleaned upon my way, exact, but 
 palatable. 
 
 When we had drunk a little mate, which 
 after the Paraguayan country fashion was 
 served quite cold, my host said, " By this time 
 your horse's back must have got cool ; one of 
 the girls shall take him down to bathe." 
 
 As the girl led him past the roan, both 
 neighed, and my host's horse reared and strove 
 to break his rope. 
 
 When in a little the girl came back leading 
 my horse all dripping from his bath, the roan 
 with a wild plunge snapped his hide halter, 
 and came galloping to meet my white, and, 
 circling round him, at last stood with his red, 
 wide-open nostrils close against his nose. 
 
 The horses seemed to talk, and mine plunged 
 and would certainly have broken loose had 
 not 1 run to him. My host, who had looked 
 on with interest, told me his horse had been 
 six months without once seeing another of his 
 kind. " Let your horse loose," he said, " to 
 play with him. Neither is shod, and they can 
 do no harm to one another ; let him loose, 
 then, to play." Placing some canes and brush-
 
 A MEETING 113 
 
 wood to block the road, he said, " Now they 
 are safe ; they cannot get away, and horses 
 never go into the thick woods, and if they did 
 they cannot possibly go far." 
 
 Somewhat reluctantly I let my horse run 
 loose, leaving his headstall with a lazo trailing 
 on the ground, knowing a horse in South 
 America, once loose, is never willing to be 
 caught. 
 
 The Paraguayan smiled, and as my horse 
 passed by him, caught and undid the lazo, 
 saying, " I answer for him with my head, and 
 in the galloping that they will make, the rope 
 would be a danger to them ; besides, your 
 horse will never try to get away." 
 
 For hours the horses played, leaping about 
 like lambs, galloping to and fro, now rearing 
 up and now coming down with their legs across 
 each other's shoulders on their backs. At 
 nightfall we caught and tied them close to 
 each other, and after feeding them with maize 
 cut down bundles of green pindd, heaping it 
 up before them for the night. When we had 
 had our supper, which, if I remember after 
 thirty years, was a rough stew of rice and 
 charqui, which we ate using our long knives 
 for spoons, we sat against the corner of the 
 1
 
 n 4 A MEETING 
 
 house, swinging our tilted chairs. The women 
 brought us green cigars, and one of them, 
 taking a cracked guitar, some of whose strings 
 were mended up with copper wire and some 
 with bits of hide, sang what is called a Triste, 
 as the fireflies flitted through the trees. 
 
 " Don Rigoberto," said my host (for my own 
 name was unfamiliar to him, and to pronounce 
 it with more ease he altered it, perhaps for 
 euphony), "look at the animals." I looked, 
 and they had finished eating and stood with 
 their heads resting on each other's shoulders, 
 like the advertisement of Thorley's food for 
 cattle, which I remember in my youth at rail- 
 way stations. "Two years," he said, "I was 
 in prison in Asuncion, in the time of Lopez, 
 not the one that Jose" Diabo killed at Tacuru- 
 pita, but his old father Don Antonio. Days 
 passed, and weeks and years, and all the time 
 I never saw a man, for they let down my food 
 and water by a string. When I got out, the 
 first man that I met was to me as a long-lost 
 brother. ... I went and kissed him in the 
 street. Therefore, Don Rigoberto, I know 
 what my horse feels alone here in this roza, 
 with not a soul of his own kind to say a word 
 to him. This day has been a fiesta for him,
 
 A MEETING 115 
 
 and now let us repeat the rosary, and then to 
 bed. . . . To-morrow is another day." 
 
 I fear the part I took in the repetition of the 
 simple prayers was fragmentary ; but at the 
 break of day, or, to be accurate, about an hour 
 before the dawn, I saddled up and bade my 
 host good-bye. As I rode out into the dewy 
 trail a thick white mist enveloped everything. 
 It blotted out the lonely clearing in the first 
 few yards. It dulled the shrill, high neighings 
 of the roan, who plunged and reared upon his 
 rope. Through the long, silent alleys of the 
 primeval forest they sounded fainter as I rode, 
 until at last they ceased, leaving their sadness 
 still echoing after thirty — or is it five-and- 
 thirty ? — years, fixed in my memory.
 
 SAN ANDRES 
 
 Someone or other has said the dead have a 
 being of their own, as we confess by saying 
 such a one is dead, just as we say he is 
 alive. 
 
 The author of the saying seems to have felt 
 the dead had feelings and were not merely 
 essences purified, quite separate and un- 
 approachable by us. Few wish to see, even to 
 think about, their dead "crowned with an 
 aureole." We want them just as they were, 
 just as we knew them, in their life. The rest 
 is vanity, vanity of vanities, and all the creeds 
 are impotent to help. At best they are an 
 anaesthetic, such as curare, which holds the 
 suffering animal paralysed, so that the operator 
 may not feel the pain that it endures or get his 
 hands scratched. So we grieve on, watching 
 the trees turn red and yellow in the fall, blossom 
 again in spring, and be alive with bees in 
 summer, in winter swaying and cracking in the 
 
 wind. 
 
 116
 
 SAN ANDRES 117 
 
 This is because we never feel the dead have 
 a distinct and real being of their own. In 
 olden times, in Scotland, people thought differ- 
 ently, and it was held that too much grieving 
 for the dead, vexed them and broke their rest. 
 
 I remember once, coming long years ago to 
 an outlying settlement in the province of Buenos 
 Aires, where all the people came, I think, from 
 Inverness-shire; but, anyhow, once on a time 
 they had been Scotch. Their names were 
 Highland, but were pronounced by those who 
 bore them after the Spanish way, as Camer6n, 
 and Mclntyre, McLean, Ferguson, and others, 
 which they had altered in the current of their 
 speech, so as to be unrecognisable except to 
 those who spoke the language and knew the 
 names under their proper forms. 
 
 None of these Scoto- Argentines spoke Eng- 
 lish, although some knew a few words of Gaelic, 
 which I imagine they pronounced as badly as 
 their names. 
 
 Four generations — for most of them had left 
 their glens after Culloden — had wrought strange 
 changes in the type. They all were dark, tall, 
 sinewy men, riders before the Lord, and cele- 
 brated in the district where they lived as being 
 muy gaucho — that is, adroit with bolas and
 
 n8 SAN ANDRES 
 
 lasso, just as the Arabs say a man, is a right 
 Arab, when they commend his skill in horse- 
 manship. Having left Scotland after the 
 Forty-Five, most of their forebears had been 
 Catholics, and their descendants naturally be- 
 longed to the same faith, though as there was 
 no church in all their settlement I fancy most 
 of them believed rather in meat cooked in the 
 hide and a good glass either of Cana or Carl6n, 
 than dogmas of their creed. 
 
 Horses stood nodding in the sun before the 
 door of every house. 
 
 Packs of gaunt, yellow dogs slumbered, with 
 one eye open, in the shade. 
 
 The bones of the last cow killed lay in the 
 little plaza of the settlement, and bullock-carts, 
 with cumbrous, high wheels and thatched like 
 cottages, were left as islands here and there in 
 the great sea of grass that surged up to the 
 houses, without a garden or a cultivated field 
 to break its billowing. 
 
 Two little stores, in which were piled up 
 hides and sacks of wood, supplied the place 
 with the few outside luxuries the people used, 
 as sardines, black cigarettes, figs, raisins, bags 
 of hard biscuits, sugar, red wine from Catalonia, 
 and Cana from Brazil.
 
 SAN ANDRES 119 
 
 Climate had proved a stronger force than 
 race, and for the most part the descendants of 
 the Gael were almost indistinguishable in looks 
 from all the other dwellers on the plains. They 
 themselves did not think so, and talked about 
 their neighbours with a fine scorn as " natives," 
 and were paid back in kind by them with the 
 nickname of " Protestantes" a most unjust 
 reproach to the descendants of the men who 
 lost their all for their old kings and faith. 
 
 Protestants they certainly were not, nor for 
 that matter very Catholic, for, as a general rule, 
 people who dwell on plains, far from the 
 world, have less religion than those who live in 
 hills. Still, in the settlement of San Andres — 
 for the first settlers had called it after the patron 
 saint of their old home — some of their racial 
 traits still lingered fitfully. Born in a country 
 where neither sweet religion nor her twin sister 
 superstition ever had much influence upon 
 the people (who ever saw a Gaucho either 
 religious or the least superstitious ?), in San 
 Andres a belief in fairies and the second sight 
 still lingered in men's minds, with many a 
 superstition more consonant with mountains 
 and with mists, than the keen atmosphere and 
 the material life of the wild southern plains.
 
 120 SAN ANDRES 
 
 Unlike the Gauchos and the Arabs, who 
 bury, as it seems, in the most open place that 
 they can find, leaving the dead, as it were, 
 always with the living, as if they thought the 
 pressure of a passing foot somehow brought 
 consolation to those lying beneath the ground, 
 these Protestants railed off their little cemetery 
 with a high fence of nandubay. The un- 
 trimmed posts stuck up knotty and gnarled just 
 as they do in a corral, but all the graves had 
 head- and foot-stones, mostly of hard and un- 
 decaying wood, giving an air as of a graveyard 
 in Lochaber by some deserted strath. 
 
 There, " Anastasio Mclntyre, killed by the 
 Indians," rested in peace. " May God have 
 mercy on him." 
 
 A little further on, " Cruz Camer6n, assassi- 
 nated by his friends," expected glory through 
 the intermediation of the saints. " Passers-by, 
 pray for him." 
 
 Amparo, widow of Rodrigo Chisholm, lost 
 at sea, had reared a monument in stone, brought 
 from the capital, on which was cut a schooner 
 foundering, with a man praying on the poop. 
 Her pious faith in his salvation and a due 
 sense of local colour showed themselves in 
 a few lines of verse in which the poet, whilst
 
 SAN ANDRES 121 
 
 deploring the sad fate of Roderick, cut off so 
 far away from wife and family, was confident 
 that heaven was just as close at sea as on la 
 tierra firme, and that the Lord High Admiral 
 Christ watched over seafarers. 
 
 Such was the village, or, as the Gauchos 
 used to say, the pago, for, for a league or 
 two on every side, these Scoto-Argentines 
 were the chief settlers upon the land. Indians 
 occasionally harried their flocks and herds, and 
 burned outlying ranches, but nowhere found 
 stouter resistance than from the dwellers in 
 San Andres, so that, as a general rule, they 
 used to leave the settlement alone. 
 
 The patriarchal manners which their fore- 
 fathers had brought from the Highlands, joined 
 to the curious old-fashioned customs common 
 in those days in Buenos Aires, had formed 
 a race apart, in which Latin materialism strove 
 with the Celtic fervour, and neither gained the 
 day. 
 
 A grave sententiousness marked all the older 
 men, whose speech was an amalgam of strange 
 proverbs, drawn from their daily lives. They 
 used to pass their evenings playing the guitar 
 and improvising couplets, whilst the square 
 bottle of trade gin went round, each sipping
 
 122 SAN ANDRES 
 
 from the same glass and passing it along. 
 " Never go to a house to ask for a fresh horse 
 when you see that the dogs are thin," one tall, 
 red-bearded man would say, to which his fellow 
 answered, " Arms are necessary, but no one 
 can tell when." " A scabby calf lives all the 
 winter and dies when spring comes in," and 
 "When a poor man has a spree something is 
 sure to turn out wrong with him," were speci- 
 mens of their wit and humour, not much inferior 
 after all, to those recorded of much greater men 
 than them, in serious histories. 
 
 Sheep-shearings and cattle-markings were 
 their festivities, and now and then, on their 
 best horses, loaded down with plate, they tilted 
 at the ring. The grassy pampa, stretching 
 like the sea on every side of them, but broken 
 as with islands here and there by white estancia 
 houses set in their ring of peach groves, limited 
 their horizon, just as a sailor's view is limited 
 on board a ship, to a scant league or two. 
 
 In that horizon all of them were born, and 
 most of them had never passed outside of it, 
 except some few who upon rare occasions had 
 gone to Buenos Aires with a troop of cattle, 
 and had returned to talk about its wonders for 
 the remainder of their lives.
 
 SAN ANDRES 123 
 
 Still, none of them were boors, but had the 
 natural good manners both of the Gaucho and 
 the Highlander. The forms of courtesy were 
 long and ceremonious, and when friends met 
 upon the plain, reining their horses in to show 
 how sharply they were bitted, they used to ask 
 minutely after each other's health and of the 
 state in which each member of the family 
 found himself, and then, with an inquiry after 
 a strayed colt, touching their stiff-brimmed hats 
 with a brown, weather-beaten finger, just slack 
 their reins a little, and separate, each going at 
 a slow canter through the grass, the wind 
 blowing their ponchos out like sails, and making 
 their long hair wave about like a great bunch 
 of water-weeds moved by the current of a 
 stream. 
 
 This was the settlement which no doubt 
 long ago has turned into a town, with modern 
 improvements, electric lights and drains, beg- 
 gars and churches ; and the few settlers of the 
 older type most probably have all retired into 
 the wilder districts or become millionaires by 
 the increasing value of their lands. 
 
 There, though, the older spirit ruled, and 
 the men who spoke Gaelic, or even those whose 
 fathers once had spoken what they called el
 
 i2 4 ^AN ANDRES 
 
 (,aelico y were looked upon as the interpreters 
 of the spirit of the race Of these Don Alejan- 
 dro Chisholm was the chief. 
 
 'I all and grey-bearded, he had that look 
 of shagginess which marks the Highlander. 
 Though he knew but a few words himself, his 
 
 father used to croon old Gaelic songs, and all 
 his childhood had been passed listening to the 
 traditions which his people treasured in their 
 minds, Somehow they looked upon them as 
 their chief distinction, and seemed to feel by 
 their possession that they were in some way or 
 another superior to the rest of those with whom 
 
 they Jived, the men who passed their lives 
 
 caring for nothing but the present, whilst they 
 
 lived io the past. 
 
 Don Alejandro used to say : "A native has 
 
 very little soul. When a friend dies he never 
 
 thinks of him again, and still less sees him. 
 
 We, on the other hand, have glimpses now and 
 
 then of those who leave us, but who,': spirits 
 hover about the places that they love." 
 
 I lis daughter, Saturnina, a tall, dark girl, 
 willowy and slight, had married Anacleto, her 
 
 first COUsin, and thus, as her father, with true 
 
 1 [ighland pride in lineage, used to observe, had 
 never changed her nam':. Her husband, Ana-
 
 SAN ANDRES ia«j 
 
 cleto. was an amalgam off th : S xrt and A pon- 
 tine. Speaking no word of English or of 
 Gaelic, he yet esteemed himself as halt" a 
 foreigner, although he was a Gaucho to the 
 
 core. He and his wife were married in a 
 church, a circumstance which marked them 
 out. and people speaking of them used to say 
 they were the couple "married in Latin." 
 which cave them much consideration and a 
 sort of rank. Whet tier because of the unusual 
 sanctity that blessed their union, from accident 
 or natural causes, their marriage was so happy 
 that throughout the settlement people spoke o( 
 a happy couple as being as well mated as </ 
 wj.vvv.v'.'.v Cr::s'\\ r m, and looked on them 
 with pride, as being somehow on a different 
 plane from those who perhaps were married In- 
 some ambulatory priest, after their children had 
 been born. 
 
 They had no children, and perhaps on thai 
 account were more attached to one another 
 than are those couples whose love IS, as it 
 were, dispersed, having more objects on which 
 to spend itself. 
 
 There seemed to grow between them that 
 curious identity o\ mind which comes to all 
 women and all men who have lived long
 
 126 SAN ANDRES 
 
 together, but in their case was so much 
 marked that they divined beforehand each 
 other's thoughts, and acted on them almost 
 without words. On the long journeys which 
 the husband took with cattle, his wife used to 
 declare she always knew all he was thinking 
 of, and he, on his return, either to please her, 
 or because she really had guessed right, always 
 confirmed her words. The idea of death some- 
 times must have presented itself before their 
 minds, but, like most happy people, probably 
 only as a calamity, which might befall humanity 
 in general, but could not touch themselves. 
 
 Don Alejandro, who in his long life had seen 
 misfortunes, and was the last of all his race 
 except his daughter, used to look sadly on 
 them, and shaking his grey head, say with a 
 sigh : " God grant I may not live to see the 
 death of either of them. The children, though 
 it is a bad comparison, Lord pardon me for 
 likening Christians to brute beasts, remind me 
 of two horses that I had that followed one 
 another. One broke its neck out ostrich- 
 hunting, and the other never seemed right, 
 and pined in misery after its friend had 
 died." 
 
 The inevitable came, when Anacleto was
 
 SAN ANDRES 127 
 
 away, far on the southern frontier, out on the 
 boleada, beyond the Naposta. 
 
 Never before had he been so long separated 
 from his wife. Three months had passed, and 
 now, as he drew close to San Andres, riding a 
 tired horse, brown, dirty, and with the oppres- 
 sion that the north wind often brings in 
 Buenos Aires weighing upon his mind, the 
 well-known objects seemed to rise out of the 
 plain, just as an island seems to rise out of the 
 sea, although the men on board the ship know it 
 is there, and have been laying off their course 
 to make it, since the beginning of their voyage. 
 He saw the peach months which he had known 
 from childhood circling his neighbours' farms. 
 He crossed the sluggish, muddy stream, bor- 
 dered with dark green sarandis, hitting the 
 pass with the unerring accuracy of the man 
 born upon the plains. Feeling his horse's 
 mouth, he touched him with the spur, and 
 struck into a lope. Passing the little inequali- 
 ties of ground, the swells and billows which 
 the dwellers on the pampa know as lomas or 
 cuchillas, and recollect as well as Scotchmen 
 recollect their hills, though they are almost 
 imperceptible to strangers, he saw the well- 
 remembered old ombu tree of the settlement.
 
 128 SAN ANDRES 
 
 Eyes just as keen as were his own had seen 
 him too, and to his great surprise a horseman 
 galloped out to meet him, and as he came a 
 little nearer he recognised the well-known 
 piebald that Don Alejandro cherished as the 
 apple of his eye. Sitting upright in the saddle, 
 and swaying lightly, as if he had been five-and- 
 twenty, to every movement of his horse, Don 
 Alejandro rapidly drew near. Just about 
 twenty yards from where his son-in-law was 
 labouring along on his tired horse he checked 
 the piebald, and stopped as if turned instantly 
 to stone. " Welcome, my son," he said. 
 " Your horse looks tired, but he will take you 
 home quite soon enough." 
 
 The words froze upon Anacleto's lips when 
 he looked at the old man's countenance and 
 saw how white and drawn he had become. 
 
 "Tell me at once!" he cried; "I see the 
 tidings in your face of evil augury." 
 
 When they had drawn a little nearer Don 
 Alejandro grasped his hand, and after looking 
 at the horse his son-in-law bestrode, pointed 
 towards the little cemetery, and said : " Let us 
 go there, my son. . . . If we go slowly your 
 horse can carry you." 
 
 Dismounting at the gate, they tied their
 
 SAN ANDRES 129 
 
 horses to a post, and entering, the old man led 
 the traveller up to a little mound. 
 
 " Underneath this our treasure lies," he 
 murmured gravely, and with the air of one 
 who has got done with tears after long weeks 
 of grief. 
 
 They stood and gazed, holding each other's 
 hands, until Don Alejandro said : "Weep, son, 
 for God has given tears for the soul's health. 
 . . . Laughter and tears are the two thines 
 that lift us higher than the beasts." 
 
 His son-in-law threw himself on the grave, 
 driving his fingers into the black soil, and lay 
 there, tired, dirty, and unkempt, like a great 
 wounded bird. 
 
 At last he felt a hand upon his shoulder, and 
 heard a voice, which seemed to come from a 
 great distance, saying : " Come, let us go now, 
 and let our horses loose. In half an hour it 
 will be night." 
 
 When they had reached their home they 
 both unsaddled. The piebald, with a neigh, 
 bounded away into the night, but Anacleto's 
 horse stood for a moment, and then lay down 
 and rolled, and rising, shook the dust out of 
 his coat, just as a water-dog shakes himself 
 after a long swim.
 
 i 3 o SAN ANDRES 
 
 " He will do well," Don Alejandro said. 
 "When a horse rolls like that after a journey- 
 it is a sign that he is strong. 
 
 Over the matd, seated round the fire, on the 
 low, solid, wooden benches men used to use 
 out on the pampa, the wanderer heard of how 
 his wife had died. 
 
 Next day he passed seated upon her grave, 
 silent and stupefied with grief. 
 
 Then for a day or two he lounged about, 
 going down to the cemetery at intervals and 
 looking through the posts, like some wild 
 animal. 
 
 Weeks passed, and he still roamed about, 
 speaking to no one, but riding off across the 
 plains, returning always just at sundown, to tie 
 his horse up close to the cemetery gate and 
 stand with his head pressed against the bars 
 looking towards the grave. At last Don 
 Alejandro, fearing that he was going mad, as 
 they sat at the end of a hot day, began to 
 speak to him, saying : "It is not well to grieve 
 too long. It is, as we may say, a selfishness. 
 My father, who knew the older generation, 
 those who lost everything for their religion 
 and their king, had listened in his youth to all 
 the lore that they brought with them from
 
 SAN ANDRES 131 
 
 that far region where, as they say, the mist 
 blurs everything, My father spoke ' Gaelico ' " 
 — he said the word almost with reverence — 
 "and those who spoke it always were versed 
 in the traditions of our race. He used to tell 
 me that to grieve for the dead beyond due 
 measure disturbed them in their graves, and 
 brought their spirits weeping back again. So 
 I have dried my tears." As he said this he 
 drew his hand across his eyes, and, looking at 
 it, saw that it was dry. 
 
 " Grieve no more, Anacleto. We cannot 
 call her back to us alive. To pain the spirit 
 by our selfishness, that would be cowardly." 
 
 They sat till it was almost sunset, and then 
 Don Alejandro went down to the corral to see 
 the animals shut in, just in the way that he 
 had gone each evening, for the last forty years. 
 
 The sun set in a glare, the hot, north wind 
 blowing as from a furnace, making the cattle 
 droop their heads, and bringing troops of 
 horses, with a noise like thunder, down to the 
 water-holes. 
 
 The teru-teros, flying low, like gulls upon 
 the sea, almost unseen in the fast-coming 
 darkness, called uncannily. The tame chaja 
 screamed harshly behind the cattle-pens.
 
 132 SAN ANDRES 
 
 A boy, riding upon a sheepskin, drove the 
 tame horses into the corral. 
 
 The sheep were folded, and in the dark 
 leaves of the old ombu beside the door, the fire- 
 flies glistened, and from the pampa rose the 
 acrid smell that the first freshness of the even- 
 ing draws from the heated ground. Coming 
 out of the rancho Anacleto looked across the 
 plain. 
 
 His eyes were full of tears, but with a gulp 
 he choked them, and muttering to himself, 
 " No, it would be cowardly to break her rest, 
 Don Alejandro says so ; he had it from his 
 father, who spoke Gaelico," he slowly lit a 
 cigarette, and in the last rays of the light, 
 watched the smoke curl up in the air, blue and 
 impalpable.
 
 A BRAW DAY 
 
 Never before, in the long years that he had 
 passed in the old place, had it appeared so 
 much a part of his whole being, as on the day 
 on which he signed the deed of sale. 
 
 Times had been bad for years, and a great 
 load of debt had made the fight a foregone 
 ending from the first. Still he felt like a 
 murderer, as judges well may feel when they 
 pronounce death sentences. Perhaps they feel 
 it more than the prisoner, for things we do 
 through fate, and by the virtue of the circum- 
 stances that hedge our lives about with chains, 
 often affect us more than actions which we 
 perform impelled by no one but ourselves. 
 
 The long, white Georgian house, with its 
 two flanking wings, set in its wide expanse of 
 gravel, which, like a sea, flowed to a grassy, 
 rising slope, looked dignified and sad. An air, 
 as of belonging to a family of fallen fortunes, 
 hung about the place. The long, dark avenue 
 of beeches, underneath one of which stood 
 
 133
 
 134 A BRAW DAY 
 
 the gallows stone, looked as if no one ever 
 used it, and on its sides the grassy edges had 
 long ago all turned to moss, a moss so thick 
 and velvety, you might have swept it with a 
 broom. 
 
 The beech mast crackled underneath your 
 feet as you passed up the natural cathedral 
 aisle, and on the tops of the old trees the wind 
 played dirges in the cold autumn nights, and 
 murmured softly in the glad season " when that 
 shaws are green." 
 
 The formal terraces were roughly mown and 
 honeycombed by rabbits, the whinstone steps 
 were grown with moss, and here and there 
 were forced apart by a strong growing fern 
 that pushed out to the light. 
 
 The seats about the garden were all blistered 
 with the sun and rain, and the old-fashioned 
 coach-roofed greenhouse looked like a re- 
 frigerator, with its panes frosted by the damp. 
 Under the arch, which led into the stable yard, 
 stood two dilapidated dog kennels, disused, but 
 with some links of rusty chain still hanging to 
 them, as if they waited for the return of 
 shadowy dogs, dead years ago. 
 
 The cedars on the slope below the terraces 
 stretched out their long and human-looking
 
 A BRAW DAY 135 
 
 branches, as they were fingers seeking to 
 restrain and hold those whom they knew and 
 loved. 
 
 All was serene and beautiful, with the 
 enthralling beauty of decay. The fences were 
 unmended, and slagging wires in places had 
 been dragged by cattle into the middle of the 
 fields ; most of the gates were off their hinges, and 
 weeds had covered up the gravel of the walks. 
 
 Nettles grew rankly in the grass, and clumps 
 of dock with woody stems and feathery heads, 
 stood up like bulrushes about the edges of a 
 pond. Even at noonday, a light mist still 
 clung about the lower fields below the house, 
 marking out clearly where old " peat hags " 
 had been reclaimed. 
 
 Such was the place at noonday ; melancholy 
 as regards the lack of care that want of means 
 had brought about ; but bright and sunny as it 
 lay facing to the south, sheltered by groups of 
 secular sycamores and beech. 
 
 At night a feeling as if one had been 
 marooned upon some island, far away from 
 men, grew on the inmates of the house. 
 
 Owls fabulated from the tree-tops, their long, 
 quavering call seeming to jar the air and make 
 it quiver, so still was everything.
 
 136 A BRAW DAY 
 
 The roes' metallic belling sounded below the 
 windows, and the sharp chirping of the rabbits 
 never ceased during summer nights, as they 
 played in the grass. 
 
 When the long shadows, in the moonlight, 
 crept across the lawn, it seemed as if they 
 beckoned to the shadows of the dead, in the 
 old eerie house. Those who had gone before 
 had set their seal so firmly upon everything, 
 planting the trees, and adding here a wing and 
 there a staircase, that those who now possessed 
 the house, dwelt in it, as it were, by the per- 
 mission of the dead. 
 
 One day remained to him whose ancestors 
 had built the house ; who had lived in the old 
 ruined castle, in the grounds, and who had 
 fought and plundered, rugged and reived after 
 the fashion of their kind. All had been done 
 that falls to a man's lot to do at such a time. 
 The house stood gaunt and empty. By 
 degrees, the familiar objects that time and 
 sentiment make almost sacred and as if por- 
 tions of ourselves, had been packed up, and on 
 the walls, the pictures taken down, had left 
 blank spaces that recalled each one, as perfectly 
 as if it had been there. 
 
 Steps sounded hollow, in the emptiness and
 
 A BRAW DAY 137 
 
 desolation on the stairs, and bits of straw and 
 marks of hobnailed boots showed where the 
 workmen had been busy at their task. 
 
 Here and there marks of paint and varnish 
 on a door, showed where a heavy piece of 
 furniture had touched in passing, as sometimes 
 after a funeral you see the dent made by the 
 coffin in the plaster of the passage, as it was 
 carried to the hearse. 
 
 A desolating smell of straw was everywhere. 
 It permeated everything, even to the food, 
 which an old servant cooked in the great, un- 
 garnished kitchen, just as a tramp might cook 
 his victuals at the corner of a road. 
 
 The polished staircase, which from their 
 childhood had been a kind of fetish to the 
 children of the house, shielded from vulgar 
 footsteps by a thick drugget and a protecting 
 strip of holland, but bleached a snowy white, 
 was now all scratched and dirtied, as if it were 
 no better than the steps which led to the back- 
 yard. 
 
 The owner and his wife, after their years of 
 struggle, had felt at first as if their ship had 
 got into a port ; and then as days went by, and 
 by degrees the house which they had cared for 
 more than their own lives, grew empty and
 
 138 A BRAW DAY 
 
 more empty, till it was left a shell, now found 
 their port had vanished, and they were left 
 without an anchorage. 
 
 Still, there was one more day to pass. What 
 then to do with it? The house was empty, 
 the few old servants that remained, tearful and 
 wandering to and fro, pleased to be idle and 
 yet not knowing what to do with unaccustomed 
 leisure, jostled each other on the stairs. 
 
 The horses had been sold, all but one little 
 old, black pony ; the dogs all sent away to 
 friends. 
 
 Standing at the hall door, looking out on the 
 sweep of gravel all cut up by carts, the owners 
 stood a little while, dazed and not able to take 
 in that twenty years had flown. It seemed 
 but yesterday that they had driven up to the 
 same door, young, full of expectation and of 
 hope. 
 
 Now they were middle-aged and grey. The 
 fight had gone against them ; but still they had 
 the recollection of the struggle, for all except 
 the baser sort of men fight not to win, but 
 simply for the fight. 
 
 Some call it duty, but the fight's the thing, 
 for those who strive to win, become self- 
 impressed, and that way lies the road to com-
 
 A BRAW DAY 139 
 
 monplace. Verily, they have their reward ; 
 but the reward soon overwhelms them, whilst 
 the true fighters still fight on, with sinews un- 
 relaxed. 
 
 At last, after having looked about in vain for 
 sticks, but without finding one, for they had all 
 been packed or given away as keepsakes, they 
 walked out to the sundial in the great gravel 
 sweep before the door. Though they had sat 
 and smoked upon its steps a thousand times, 
 watching the squirrels play at noon, the bats 
 flit past at sundown, it yet seemed new to them, 
 and strange. With interest they saw that it 
 was half-past three in China, eight in the 
 evening in New Orleans, and midnight at La 
 Paz. 
 
 Somehow it seemed that they had never 
 seen all this before, and that in future, time 
 would be all the same the whole world over, 
 or at least that it would not be marked by 
 little brazen gnomons on a weather-beaten slab 
 of slate. The garden, with the gardeners 
 gone, and the gate open, seemed as strange as 
 all the rest, The flowers that they had planted, 
 and forgotten they had planted, in the course 
 of time had come to be considered in the same 
 way as the old castle just outside the garden
 
 140 A BRAW DAY 
 
 walls, as things that had existed from the 
 beginning of the world. 
 
 Weeds choked the gravel in the lower walk, 
 bounded by a long hedge of laurel cut into 
 castles at due intervals. They both agreed 
 next week they should be hoed, and then 
 stopped, smiled and looked away, fearing to 
 meet each other's eyes. The sun beats on 
 the old stone wall, ripening the magnum 
 bonum plums, for it was in September, and 
 both thought, they will be ripe in a few days, 
 but feared to tell each other what they thought. 
 
 The tangled, terraced beds, where once had 
 stood old vineries, all had been planted with 
 herbaceous plants, which, from the want of care, 
 had grown into a jungle; but a jungle unutter- 
 ably beautiful, in which the taller plants, the 
 coreopsis, bocconias, Japanese anemones, and 
 larkspurs stood up starkly, as palm trees rear 
 themselves out of a wilderness of dwarf pal- 
 mettoes, and of grass. 
 
 Over the garden gate, marauding ivy had 
 run across the stone on which the arms of the 
 decaying family were cut in hard grey whin- 
 stone, with the date 1686 in high relief, flanked 
 by a monogram. 
 
 Upon a bench, from which the view stretched
 
 A BRAW DAY 141 
 
 over the great moss that marked the limits of 
 an ancient sea, and out of which a wooded hill 
 rose like an island, the only thing that broke 
 the level plain between the garden and the 
 distant hills, they sat and let the sun beat on 
 them, for the last time, as it had often done 
 during their years of struggle and of fight. 
 
 Descending through a gate, which slagged 
 a little on its hinges, and grated on the stone 
 lintel as it opened after a heavy push, they 
 passed into the narrow strip of extra garden, 
 taken in as it were by afterthought, in the 
 old Scottish fashion, which never seemed to 
 have enough of garden laid about a house. 
 They bade good-bye to the long line of 
 arbor vitce clipped into cones which cast their 
 shadows on the path, so clearly that you were 
 half inclined to lift your feet in passing, they 
 looked so firm and round. 
 
 The curious moondial, with its niches col- 
 oured blue and red ; the burial-ground hidden 
 away amongst the trees, and with a long, grass 
 walk, mossy and damp, leading up to its old 
 grey walls, they visited but did not see, as they 
 were so familiar, that they had become im- 
 possible to look at, but as parts and parcels of 
 themselves.
 
 142 A BRAW DAY 
 
 The day seemed never-ending, and in the 
 afternoon, to pass the time, seeing a water 
 conduit underneath a road choked up with 
 leaves, the departing owner of the place set 
 about working hard to clear it, and having 
 done so, congratulated himself on a good piece 
 of work. To bid good-bye to buildings and 
 familiar scenes seemed natural, as life is but a 
 long farewell ; but to look for the last time on 
 the trees — trees that his ancestors had planted, 
 and by which he himself recognised the seasons, 
 as for example by the turning yellow of the 
 horse-chestnuts, which he saw from his bed- 
 room windows, or the first pinkish blush upon 
 the broken larch, whose broken top was cased 
 in lead — that seemed a treason to them, for 
 they had always been so faithful, putting out 
 their leaves in spring, standing out stark and 
 rigid in the winter and murmuring in the 
 breeze. 
 
 The whispering amongst their branches and 
 the melodious tinkle of a little burn that crossed 
 the avenue, were sounds which, on that last 
 day, pervaded all the air and filled the soul 
 with that deep-seated feeling of amazement 
 that looks out, hopeless and heartrending, 
 from the eyes of dying animals.
 
 A BRAW DAY 143 
 
 The interminable day came to an end at last. 
 The sun set, red and beautiful, over the low, 
 flat moss, and disappeared behind the hills. 
 The owls called shrilly from the trees, and the 
 accustomed air of ghostliness, intensified a 
 thousandfold by solitude, pervaded all the 
 house. 
 
 The mysterious footstep which in the course 
 of years had grown familiar, even in winter 
 nights, as it passed up the corridor and 
 stopped with a loud knock on the end bed- 
 room door, again grew terrifying as it had 
 been on the first night that they had heard it 
 years ago. 
 
 From out the spaces where the pictures once 
 had hung, the well-known faces seemed to 
 peer, but unfamiliar-looking, with an air as of 
 reproach. 
 
 The smallest footfall sounded as loud as if 
 it were the trampling of a horse ; and candles, 
 stuck in bottles here and there, gave a dim, 
 flickering light, casting dark shadows on the 
 floor. 
 
 Long did the owners gaze into the night, 
 watching the stars come out in their familiar 
 places. The Bear hung right across the cedars, 
 almost due north, Alphecca close to the horizon,
 
 144 A BRAW DAY 
 
 the Square of Pegasus quite horizontal, and 
 Fomalhaut in the south-west, athwart the 
 corner of the Easter Hill. 
 
 A light, white frost turned all to silver, and 
 the lake in the east middle distance lay like a 
 sheet of burnished silver under the moon, its 
 islands mirrored dimly and as if floating in the 
 air. No leaf was stirring, and as they sat 
 around a fire of logs, talking of were-wolves, 
 fairies, and superstitions of another land, with 
 their old Spanish friend and servant, the night 
 wore on so rapidly that it was daylight almost 
 as it appeared, before the sun went down. 
 
 Short preparations serve for those about 
 to go, and when a few old servants and 
 retainers took their leave, and a black pony 
 slowly took their trunks down to the station, 
 looking forlorn in the immensity of the beech 
 avenue, they closed the door upon their 
 house. 
 
 Quickly the trees rushed past, the pond with 
 its tall island looking like a ship, the giant 
 silver firs, the castle, which they beheld as in 
 a dream, all floated by. Just at the cross-roads 
 which led into the park, beside the gate, a man 
 stood waiting for them. 
 
 He carried in his hand a hedgebill, and stood
 
 A BRAW DAY 145 
 
 there waiting, as he had waited for the past 
 twenty years, for orders for the day. 
 
 Now, he held out his hand, opened his mouth, 
 but said nothing, and then, looking up with the 
 air of one well learned in weather lore, said, 
 " Laird, it looks like a braw day."
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 Isbilieh, as the Moors called Seville, had never 
 looked more Moorish than on that day in spring. 
 The scent of azahar hung in the air ; from 
 patio and from balcony floated the perfume of 
 albahaca and almoraduz, plants brought to 
 Seville by the Moors from Nabothea and from 
 Irak-el-Hind. The city of the royal line of 
 the Beni-Abbad was as if filled with a remini- 
 scence of its past of sensuality and blood. The 
 mountains of the Axarafe loomed in a violet 
 haze, and seemed so near, you felt that you 
 could touch them with your hand. The far-off 
 sierras above Ronda looked jagged, and as if 
 fortified to serve as ramparts against the in- 
 vasion of the African from his corresponding 
 sierra in the country of the Angera, across the 
 narrow straits. Over the Giralda came the 
 faint, pink tinge which evening imparts, in 
 Seville, to all the still remaining Moorish work, 
 making the finest specimen of the architecture 
 of the Moors in Spain look as delicate and new 
 
 146
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 147 
 
 as when the builder, he who built at Marakesh 
 and Rabat, two other towers of similar design, 
 raised it in honour of the one God, and the 
 great camel driver who stands beside his throne. 
 Down the great river for which the Christians 
 
 o 
 
 never found a better name than that left by the 
 Moorish dogs, the yellow tide ran lazily, sway- 
 ing alike the feluccas with their tall, tapering- 
 yards, the white Norwegian fruit schooners, and 
 the sea coffins from the port of London, tramps 
 out of Glasgow, and the steam colliers from 
 the Hartlepools or Newcastle-on-Tyne. The 
 great cathedral in which lies Ferdinand Colum- 
 bus, the most southern Gothic building in all 
 Europe, built on the site of the chief mosque 
 said to have been as large as that of Cordoba, 
 rose from the Court of Oranges, silent as a vast 
 tomb, and seemed protected from the town by 
 its raised walk, fenced in with marble pillars 
 and massive iron chains. The Alcazar, and 
 The Tower of Gold, the churches, especially 
 St. John's beside the Palm, seemed to regret 
 their builders, as, I think, do all the Saracenic 
 buildings throughout Spain. Though ignorant 
 of all the plastic arts, taking their architecture 
 chiefly from the two forms of tent and palm 
 tree, their literature so conceived as to be
 
 148 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 almost incomprehensible to the peoples of the 
 north, the tribes who came from the Hedjaz, 
 the Yemen, and beyond Hadramut have left 
 their imprint on whatever land they passed. 
 They comprehended that life is first, the chief- 
 est business which man has to do, and so 
 subordinated to it all the rest. Their eyes, 
 their feet, their verse, and their materialistic 
 view of everything have proved indelible 
 wherever they have camped. They and their 
 horses have stamped themselves for ever on 
 the world. Even to-day, their speech remains 
 embedded, like a mosaic, in the vocabulary of 
 Southern Spain, giving the language strength. 
 Notable things have passed in Seville since 
 Ojeda, before he sailed for the new-found 
 Indies, ran along the beam fixed at a giddy 
 height in the Giralda and threw a tennis-ball 
 over the weather-vane to show the Catholic 
 kines and the assembled crowd the firmness of 
 his head. Since San Fernando drove out the 
 royal house of the Beni-Abbad, and Motamid, 
 the poet king, took sanctuary in Mequin^z, as 
 Abd-el- Waned notes in his veracious history 
 of the times, much has occurred and has been 
 chronicled in blood. In the Alcazar, Pedro el 
 Justiciero loved Maria de Padilla ; in it he had
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 149 
 
 made the fish-pond where the degenerate 
 Charles the Second sat a-fishing, whilst his 
 empire slipped out of his hands. The Caloro 
 from Hind, Multan, or from whatever Trans- 
 Caucasian or Cis-Himalayan province they set 
 out from, ages ago, had come, and spreading 
 over Spain, fixed themselves firmly in the part 
 of Seville called the Triana, after the Emperor 
 Trajan who was born there as some say, and 
 where to-day they chatter Romany, traffic in 
 horses, tell fortunes, and behave as if the world 
 were a great oyster which they could open with 
 their tongues, so wheedling and well hung. 
 
 So, on the evening of which I write, a 
 Sunday in the month of May, the bull-fight 
 was just over, leaving behind it that mixed air 
 of sensuousness and blood which seems to 
 hover over Seville after each show of bulls, 
 as it may once have hovered, after a show 
 of gladiators, about Italica in the old Roman 
 days. 
 
 The fight was done, and all the tourists, 
 after condemning Spanish barbarism, had taken 
 boxes to a man, and come away delighted with 
 the picturesqueness of the show. 
 
 Trumpets had sounded, and the horses, all 
 of which had done more service to mankind
 
 150 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 than any fifty men, and each of whom had as 
 much right, by every law of logic and anatomy, 
 to have a soul, if souls exist, as had the 
 wisest of philosophers, had suffered martyrdom. 
 Hungry and ragged, they had trodden on their 
 entrails, received their wounds without a groan, 
 without a tear, without a murmur, faithful to 
 the end ; had borne their riders out of danger, 
 fallen upon the bloody sand at last with quiver- 
 ing tails, and, biting their poor, parched and 
 bleeding tongues, had died just as the martyrs 
 died at Lyons or in Rome, as dumb and brave 
 as they. 
 
 In the arena the light-limbed men, snake-like 
 and glittering in their tinselly clothes, had 
 capered nimbly before the bull, placing their 
 banderillas deftly on his neck. 
 
 Waiting until he almost touched them, they 
 placed one foot upon his forehead, and stepping 
 lightly across the horns, had executed what is 
 called el salto de trascuerno. Then leaping 
 with a pole, they had alighted on the other side 
 of him like thistledown, had dived behind the 
 screen, had caught and held the furious beast 
 an instant by the tail, and after having played 
 a thousand antics, running the gamut, known 
 to the intelligent as volapie, galleo> tijerilla^
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 15! 
 
 veronica, and chatr^ escaped as usual with 
 their lives. 
 
 The espada had come forward, mumbled his 
 boniment in Andaluz, swung his montera round 
 his shoulder towards the presidential throne, 
 and after sticking his sword, first in the muscles 
 of the neck, from which it sprang into the air, 
 and fell, bloody and twisted, on the sand, taking 
 another from an attendant sprite, butchered his 
 bull at last, mid thunders of applause. 
 
 Blood on the sand ; the sun reflected back 
 like flame from the white walls ; upon the 
 women's faces cascarilla : a fluttering of red 
 and yellow fans ; lace veils on glossy hair, 
 looking like new-fallen snow on a black horses 
 back, all made a picture of the meeting of the 
 east and west to which the water-sellers' voices 
 added, as they called Agua, in a voice so 
 guttural, it sounded like the screaming of a jay. 
 
 A scent of blood and sweat rose from the 
 plaza, and acted like an aphrodisiac on the 
 crowd. 
 
 Bold-looking women squeezed each other's 
 hands, and looked ambiguously at one another, 
 as if they were half men. Youths with their 
 hair cut low upon their foreheads, loose, swing- 
 ing hips, and eyes that met the glance as if
 
 152 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 they were half girls, pressed one against the 
 other on the seats. Blood, harlotry, sun, gay 
 colours, flowers, and waving palm trees, women 
 with roses stuck behind their ears, mules 
 covered up in harness of red worsted, cigar 
 girls, gipsies, tourists, soldiers, and the little 
 villainous-looking urchins, who, though born 
 old, do duty in the south, as children, formed 
 a kaleidoscope. The plaza vomited out the 
 crowd, just as the Roman amphitheatre 
 through its vomitoriwn expelled its crowd of 
 blood-delighting Roman citizens, Civis Romanus 
 sum, and all the rest of it. 
 
 The stiff, dead horses, all were piled into 
 a cart, their legs sticking out, pathetic and 
 grotesque, between the bars. A cart of sand 
 was emptied on the blood, which lay in 
 blackening pools here and there in the plaza, 
 and then the espada, smoking a cigar, emerged 
 like Agag, delicately, and drove off, the focus 
 of all eyes. Girls swarmed in the streets, 
 sailing along with their incomparable walk un- 
 rivalled in the world, and in the Calle de la 
 Passion the women of the life, stood against 
 open, but barred windows, painted and 
 powdered, and with an eye to business as 
 they scanned passing men.
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 153 
 
 Lovers stood talking from the streets by- 
 signs to girls upon the balcony, their mother's 
 presence hidden behind the curtain in the dark, 
 and the space intervening, keeping their virtue 
 safe. 
 
 Sometimes a man leaned up against the 
 grating and whispered to his sweetheart 
 through the bars, holding her hand in his. 
 The passers-by affected not to see them, and 
 either stepped into the street or looked with 
 half-averted eyes, at the first act in life's great 
 comedy. 
 
 In the great palm-tree planted square the 
 salmon-coloured plaster seats were filled with 
 men, who seemed to live there day and night, 
 contributing their quota to the ceaseless 
 national expenditure of talk. On this occa- 
 sion they discussed, being all intelligentes, 
 each incident and action of the fight, the old 
 men deprecating modern innovation and sigh- 
 ing for the times and styles of Cuchares, or 
 el Zeno Romero, he who first brought the art 
 of bull-fighting from heaven, as his admirers 
 say. If a girl, rich or poor, a countess from 
 Madrid, or maiden of the Caloro from the 
 Triana, chanced to pass, they criticised her, as 
 a prospective buyer does a horse or as a
 
 154 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 dealer looks down a slave at Fez. Her eyes, 
 her feet, her air, each detail of her dress were 
 all passed in review, and if found pleasing, 
 then came the approving, Blessed be your 
 mother ! with other compliments of a nature 
 to make a singer at a Paris cafd-concert blush. 
 The recipient took it all as a matter of every- 
 day occurrence, and with a smile or word of 
 thanks, according to her rank, pursued the 
 uneven tenour of her way with heightened 
 colour, and perhaps a little more meneo of 
 her hips and swaying of her breasts. 
 
 In the Calle Sierpes, the main artery and 
 chief bazaar, roofed with an awning right from 
 end to end, the people swarmed like ants, 
 passing, and then repassing in a stream. Cafes 
 were gorged with clients, all talking of the 
 bull-fight, cursing the Government, or else 
 disputing of the beauty and the nature of the 
 women of their respective towns. The clubs, 
 with windows of plate glass down to the 
 ground, showed the haute gomme lounging 
 in luxury upon their plush-upholstered chairs, 
 stiff in their English clothes, and sweating 
 blood and water in the attempt to look like 
 Englishmen, and to keep up an unconcerned 
 appearance under the public gaze. Girls
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 155 
 
 selling lemonade, horchata, agrds, with the thick, 
 sticky sweetmeats, and the white, flaky pastry 
 flavoured with fennel and angelica, left by the 
 Moors in Spain, went up and down crying 
 their wares, and offering themselves to any- 
 one who wished to venture half a dollar on 
 the chance. The shops were full of all those 
 unconsidered trifles, which in Spain alone can 
 find a market, cheap and abominably nasty, 
 making one think that our manufactories must 
 be kept running with a view to furnish idiots 
 or blind men, with things they do not want. 
 
 After the gospel comes the sermon ; sherry 
 after soup, and when the bloodshed of the day 
 has stirred men's pulses, they drift instinctively 
 towards the dancing-houses, just as a drunkard 
 in the morning turns back again to drink, to 
 give another fillip to the blood. Men streamed 
 to the Burrero, at whose narrow doors sat 
 ancient hags selling stale flowers and cheaply 
 painted matchboxes, pushing and striving in 
 the narrow passage to make their way inside. 
 The temple of the dance was an enormous 
 building, barn-like and dusty, and with its 
 emptiness made manifest by oil-lamps stuck 
 about the walls. 
 
 The floor was sanded and in the middle of
 
 156 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 it, at little wooden tables, seated on rickety 
 cane chairs, was the fine flower of the 
 rascality of Spain, whilst round the walls stood 
 groups of men, who by their dress might have 
 been Chulos or Chalanes, loafers or horse- 
 copers, all with their hair brushed forward on 
 their foreheads and plastered to the head. 
 
 All wore tight trousers moulded to the hips, 
 short and frogged jackets, and all had flat felt 
 hats with a stiff brim, which now and then they 
 ran their finoers round to see if it was straight. 
 
 Others were wrapped in tattered cloaks, and 
 mixed with them were herdsmen and some 
 shepherds, with here and there a bull-fighter 
 and here and there a pimp. 
 
 In the crank, shaky gallery was a dark box 
 or two, unswept and quite unfurnished, save 
 for a bunch or two of flowers painted upon the 
 plaster, and a poor lithograph of the reigning 
 sovereign, flanking a bull-fighter. One was 
 quite empty, and in the other sat two foreign 
 ladies, come to see life in Seville, who coughed 
 and rubbed their eyes in the blue haze of 
 cigarette smoke, which filled the building, just 
 as the incense purifies a church with its 
 mysterious fumes. 
 
 Set in a row across the stage, like flowers in
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 157 
 
 a bed, were six or seven girls. Their faces 
 painted in the fashion of the place, without con- 
 cealment, just like the ladies whom Velazquez 
 drew, gave them a look of artificiality, which 
 their cheap boots, all trodden down at the heel, 
 and hair dressed high upon the head, with 
 a comb upon the top and a red flower stuck 
 behind the ear, did little to redeem. 
 
 Smoking and pinching one another they sat 
 waiting for their turn, exchanging jokes occa- 
 sionally with their acquaintances in front, and 
 now and then one or the other of them rising 
 from her chair walked to the looking-glasses 
 placed on each side of the stage, and put her 
 hair in order, patting it gently at the side and 
 shaking out her clothes, just as a bird shakes 
 out its feathers after it rolls itself in dust. 
 
 On one side of the stage sat the musicians, 
 two at the guitar and two playing small instru- 
 ments known as bandurrias — a cross between 
 the mandoline and a guitar, played with a piece 
 of quill. The women suddenly began to clap 
 their hands in a strange rhythm, monotonous 
 at first, but which at length, like the beating of 
 a tom-tom, makes the blood boil, quiets the 
 audience, stills conversation, and focusses all 
 eyes upon the stage. The strange accompani-
 
 158 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 ment, with the hands swept across the strings, 
 making a whir as when a turkey drags its 
 wings upon the ground, went on eternally. 
 Then, one broke out into a half-wild song, the 
 interval so strange, the time so wavering, and 
 so mixed up the rhythm, that at first hearing 
 it scarcely seems more pleasing than the howl- 
 ing of a wolf, but bit by bit goes to the soul, 
 stirs up the middle marrow of the bones, and 
 leaves all other music ever afterwards, tame 
 and unpalatable. 
 
 The singing terminated abruptly, as it seemed, 
 for no set reason, and died away in a prolonged 
 high note, and then a girl stood up, en- 
 couraged by her fellows with shouts of " Venga 
 Juana" " Vaya sa/erosa," and a cross fire of 
 hats thrown on the stage, and interjections 
 from the audience of " Tu sangre " or " Tu 
 enerpo " and the inspiriting clap of hands, 
 which never ceases till the dancer, exhausted, 
 sinks down upon a chair. Amongst the 
 audience, drinking their Manzanilla in little 
 tumblers about the thickness of a piece of 
 sugar-cane, eating their boquerones, ground 
 nuts, and salted olives, the fire of criticism 
 never stopped, as everyone in Seville of the 
 lower classes is a keen critic both of dancing-
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 159 
 
 girls and bulls. Of the elder men, a gipsy, 
 though shouting "Sa/ero/" in a perfunctory 
 manner, seemed discontented, and recalled the 
 prowess of a dancer long since dead, by name 
 Aurora, surnamed La Cujini, and gave it as 
 his faith that since his time no girl had ever 
 mastered all the mysteries of the dance. The 
 Calor<5, who always muster strong at the 
 Burrero, all were upon his side, and seemed in- 
 clined to enforce their arguments with their 
 shears, which, as most of them maintain them- 
 selves by clipping mules, they carry in their 
 sash. 
 
 Then, just as the discussion seemed about to 
 end, in a free fight, a girl stepped out to dance. 
 None had remarked her sitting quietly beside 
 the rest ; still, she was slightly different in 
 appearance from all the others in the room, 
 both in her air and dress. 
 
 A gipsy at first sight, with the full lustrous 
 eyes her people brought from far Multan, 
 dressed in a somewhat older fashion than the 
 rest, her hair brought low upon her forehead 
 and hanging on her shoulders after the style of 
 1840, her skirt much flounced, low shoes tied 
 round the ankle, a Chinese shawl across her 
 shoulders, and with a look about her, as she
 
 160 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 walked to the middle of the stage, as of a mare 
 about to kick. A whisper to the first guitar 
 caused him with a smile to break into a Tango, 
 his instrument well requintado striking the 
 chords with every finger of his hand at the 
 same instant, as the wild Moorish melody 
 jingled and jarred out and quivered in the air. 
 She stood a moment motionless, her eyes 
 distending slowly and focussing the attention 
 of the audience on her, and then a sort of 
 shiver seemed to run over her, the feet gently 
 began to scrape along the floor, her naked arms 
 moved slowly with her fingers curiously bent, 
 and meant perhaps to indicate by their position, 
 the symbols of the oldest of religions, and, as 
 the gipsies say, she drew the heart of every 
 onlooker into her net of love. Twisting her 
 hips till they seem ready to disjoint, and writh- 
 ing like a snake, dragging her skirt up on the 
 stage, she drew herself up to her full height, 
 thrust all her body forward, her hands moved 
 faster, and the short sleeves slipped back ex- 
 hibiting black tufts of hair under her arms, glued 
 to her skin with sweat. Then she wreathed 
 forwards, backwards, looked at the audience 
 with defiance, took a man's hat from off the 
 stage, placed it upon her head, put both her
 
 AURORA LA CUJINI 161 
 
 arms akimbo, swayed to and fro, but still kept 
 writhing as if her veins were full of quicksilver. 
 Little by little the frenzy died away, her eyes 
 grew dimmer, the movements of the body 
 slower, then with a final stamp, and a hoarse 
 guttural cry, she stood a moment quiet, as it is 
 called, dormida y that is, asleep, looking a very 
 statue of impudicity and lust. The audience 
 sat a moment spellbound, with open mouths 
 like Satyrs, and in the box where were the 
 foreign ladies, one had turned pale resting her 
 head upon the other's shoulder, who held 
 her round the waist. Then with a mighty 
 shout, the applause broke forth, hats rained 
 upon the stage, Oles and Vayas rent the 
 air, and the old gipsy bounded on the table 
 with a shout, "One God, one Cujini"; but in 
 the tumult, La Cujini had disappeared, gone 
 from the eyes of Calor6 and of Busne\ Gipsy 
 and Gentile, and the Burrero never saw her 
 more. 
 
 Perhaps, at witches' sabbaths she still dances, 
 or perhaps in that strange Limbo where the 
 souls of gipsies and their donkeys dree their 
 weird, she writhes and dislocates her hips in 
 the Romalis, or in the Ole, she drags her skirts 
 on the floor, with a faint rustling sound. 
 
 M
 
 162 AURORA LA CUJINI 
 
 Sometimes the curious may see her still, 
 dancing before a Venta in the blurred outline 
 of a Spanish lithograph, her head thrown back, 
 her hair, en catagon, with one foot pointing to 
 a hat to show her power over, and her con- 
 tempt for all the sons of man, just as she did 
 upon that evening when she took a brief and 
 fleeting reincarnation to breathe once more the 
 air of Seville, heavy with perfume of spring 
 flowers, mixed with the scent of blood.
 
 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 
 
 I had lost sight of Elise, said my friend, until 
 one day as I was walking past, I am not sure 
 if it was Woolland's or some other shop, I met 
 her face to face. She seemed a little thin, I 
 thought, and though she walked as gracefully 
 as ever, holding her skirt up in the way that 
 only her compatriots ever can compass, she 
 looked so pale I saw that she was ill. 
 
 11 What is the matter, Elise ? " I said ; " is it 
 an affection of the heart ? " To which she 
 answered with a side look at the window of 
 the shop to see if her hat was straight, " No, 
 not of the heart ; you forget that we profes- 
 sionals [she pronounced the word ' profession- 
 elles '] are quite impervious in that region ; it is 
 the chest I suffer from. The doctors say it is 
 the life I have to lead — but really I have had 
 congestion of the lungs." 
 
 We went to lunch just opposite in the grill- 
 room of the hotel, where she insisted upon 
 taking what she called "La table de I'adultere" 
 
 163
 
 164 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 
 
 for she declared as it was in a dark corner she 
 had noticed several affairs ripen, as she ex- 
 pressed it, in the surrounding gloom. 
 
 She asked for mineral water, and consomme 
 with an egg in it, and proceeded with her tale. 
 
 " Things had been bad with me . . . how, I 
 don't know. . . . They go in cycles, I suppose ; 
 for at one time I had, as you know, half the 
 Turf Club . . . how shall I put it ... on my 
 books ? " She made a gesture with her hand, 
 graceful and gracious, to the waiter, who was 
 offering her a dish, and bit her lip and smiled 
 as a man passed in with his wife and daughter, 
 whispering to me, " He is a client," and then 
 coughing a little, began again to talk. 
 
 I looked at her with interest, and saw how 
 she had fallen away, that her collar-bones made 
 ridges in her light summer blouse. " Ah yes, 
 I see why you are looking," she said ; " it is 
 dreadful to be thin, that is to say, in my line of 
 business, for men seem to like women to be 
 fat, and I am nothing but old bones." 
 
 " I think it was a cold I caught coming back 
 from France, where I had been to see my 
 mother. Yes, do not laugh, and please say 
 nothing about ma mere ; for I know you in- 
 sularies see something comic about that. We,
 
 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 165 
 
 on the other hand, are much more lovers of 
 our family than you, though you think not. 
 Of course, both men and nations always plume 
 themselves on qualities they lack. Yes, I am 
 quite a little of a philosopher, that is, since I 
 was ill. Well, well, it was congestion, as I said, 
 which nailed me to my bed. When you are 
 young and strong and nearly six feet high, as I 
 am," and here she straightened herself up with 
 pride, looking a true descendant of the pirates 
 (she came from Normandy), with her fresh 
 colour, bright grey eyes, and masses of fair 
 hair, " it is silly to be ill. Illness in our pro- 
 fession usually takes us soon to the end of our 
 resources, for we, of course, must make a good 
 appearance, and frequent good restaurants, 
 then we are always robbed by all who deal 
 with us. 
 
 " Illness too lifts the veil, or the veneer of 
 chivalry which most of our friends assume to 
 us, although, of course, it also brings out what 
 is good. 
 
 " I become a moralist, you see, a dreadful 
 thing in one who has to chatter always and be 
 gay. Ah ! ' and an ashy look came on her 
 cheeks, " those awful conversations about 
 horses, bad plays, and books, and pictures that
 
 1 66 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 
 
 you would not use in a back kitchen as a screen. 
 I think the frankly indecent even harasses me 
 less. Your countrymen, you'll pardon me, I 
 know, have little talent de soci^te", or perhaps 
 they keep it all for those they think that they 
 respect, that is, if any Englishman really re- 
 spects a woman in his heart. Chivalry, eh — 
 bah, we see what that means. Either the idea 
 is real, or else it is a fraud. If it is real, it 
 should make a man the same to every woman, 
 especially to us who minister to his pleasures 
 and act as lightning: conductors to his home. 
 That sets me thinking " — and here that wintry 
 smile she used as an armour flitted across her 
 face — " why a man's home is to be pure and a 
 woman's not so, for strange as it may seem 
 I have a home, that is a house in which I live. 
 When a man leaves me with his ' Good night, 
 old girl,' I often wonder if he thinks his home 
 is purified by what has taken place in mine. 
 Well, well," and as she drank her coffee, her 
 eyes wandered to the man she knew who, seated 
 with his daughter and his wife, kept his face 
 turned away. 
 
 "Yes," she said, "there is a man who, no 
 doubt, in his own home is kind enough, as men 
 are kind, if all goes right with them. You see,
 
 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 167 
 
 I and his daughter, are almost of one age . . . 
 a pretty girl enough she is, and would look 
 better if only she wore good stays. How 
 strange it is, here in this island, you so often 
 see expensive clothes ill-worn and spoiled by 
 villainous bad stays or made ridiculous by a 
 cheap pair of boots, or something of that kind. 
 '* When I fell ill, and when the doctors said 
 
 I must go home and not live as I had been 
 doing, the father of that girl was one of those 
 to whom I went for help. He never answered 
 when I wrote him, nor for that matter did any 
 of the men who used to like to take me to the 
 theatres when I was well and was a credit to 
 their taste." 
 
 She paused and waived away a cigarette, 
 saying she did not want to look like a bour- 
 geoise en goguette, and as the man she said she 
 knew walked out behind his women-folk, fixed 
 her eyes on him, till he reddened, as she put it, 
 
 II at the back of his neck between the collar 
 and the hair." 
 
 Then smiling and coughing now and then, 
 she told how one of her friends had pawned 
 her rings to send her home to France and, 
 turning serious, said, " Now I will tell you of a 
 trouble I am in. You know that women of our
 
 1 68 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 
 
 class, if by some accident we fall in love, love 
 far more fiercely than those that you call honest. 
 I know the Spanish proverb about our love — 
 that it resembles nothing but a fire of straw — 
 but, there, it was concocted by a man . . . les 
 /wmmes, fa vous abiment tine femme. Personally 
 I have never felt it . . . that is, but once or 
 twice at most, and each time have regretted it, 
 both for myself and him. You smile when I 
 say ' him,' but it is true. However, that is 
 not now what troubles me, but this. 
 
 " I know I cannot follow up this life, nor wish 
 to, and I have told you that it was my ambition 
 to study Art and try and learn to paint. No, 
 no, I do not think I am a genius . . . nothing 
 of the sort, but still I think I might have made 
 a living in the Art world had I but had the 
 chance. Now, though, the thing for me is how 
 to live at all. I think I told you that I was a 
 mannequin in a great Paris shop. I am you 
 see both tall and elegant. . . . No, don't 
 laugh ... it is so ; for I was born, although 
 my family was poor, with an innate sense of 
 elegance in dress . . . the sentiment of rags." 
 This was so manifestly true, my friend said 
 nothing, but merely nodded, wondering what 
 she would say. "I cannot go back to that way
 
 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 169 
 
 of life ; for during the past years I have lived 
 in luxury, that is to say, I have enjoyed a 
 luxury tempered by the ever-present dread 
 of want, but still a luxury. I have read 
 books and haunted the museums ; I know 
 the various schools of painting tolerably well, 
 revel in Corot, adore Degas and Monet, 
 think Whistler inspired, and therefore cannot 
 go home and settle down, marrying some 
 Betrave or another, perhaps a local cattle- 
 dealer or something of the sort. Now, though, 
 a chance has come into my life, and I can 
 neither jump at it nor yet neglect it ; for as I 
 told you I am trh bonne fille^ and would not 
 like to wreck the life of anyone, especially of 
 one who says he loves me . . . yes, loves me 
 as I am." 
 
 She put a falling hairpin back into her hair, 
 played with her bag, taking it up and looking 
 at the clasp. Then put it down and after 
 having sipped her coffee, began again to talk. 
 
 " The thing is this way ... I had a lover — 
 a vieux colonel, not a bad sort of man, stiff, 
 angular, and with his face reddened by whisky 
 and the sun of India, just such a man as Loti 
 talks about, honourable I think, and wearisome. 
 He liked to spend long hours with me, drinking
 
 170 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 
 
 and telling me about himself, his life, his horses 
 and the women that he thought that he had 
 loved, Cocasse, le Colonel, but still a gentle- 
 man. One day he brought an officer of his to 
 see me. He was, I think, from Lancashire, 
 some kind of a provincial anyway, and above 
 all a type. 
 
 ''What was he like? Well, short and 
 freckled ; such feet and hands, and with a 
 neck the colour of a lobster, with the sun. 
 His clothes not bad, but with a note of some- 
 thing of k gentilhomme campagnci7'd about them. 
 For a watch-chain, a leather ... lip strap, I 
 think, you call the thing ... it go beneath the 
 curb, and he tell me it is for when the horse 
 shakes his head, so that he cannot turn the bit. 
 and run away with you. Over his boots little 
 white gaiters ; and gloves, such gloves — so 
 thick, like the stuff you make a fencing-jacket. 
 Fair hair, what of it was left — not that he was 
 bald, but I mean what the barber he have left — 
 a mouth with teeth like a shark, an eye-glass, 
 and a perpetual transpiration on his skin. Not 
 pleasant-looking, eh ? That where you make 
 a mistake, then. He did look pleasant, and a 
 gentleman, although he never said a word but 
 1 Aoh yes, awful pleased to meet yer,' with
 
 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 171 
 
 an occasional ' Ha,' which at first made me 
 jump. 
 
 " Why the colonel brought him I never could 
 make out, but from the first night I saw his 
 junior officer had fallen in love with me. 
 
 " I am not as a rule nervous . . . well . . . 
 under fire ; but this man, his very bashfulness 
 made me feel like a milkmaid when her lover 
 sits upon a gate and whistles at her. Not a word 
 did he say whilst his superior officer imbibed 
 champagne, and talked of horses he had 
 known thirty or forty years ago, except to 
 interject a ' Ha' at intervals. At last, though, 
 it seemed near ending, the colonel rose to go. 
 He pulled me to him, and giving me a winy 
 kiss or two, remarked, ' Good-bye, old girl, 
 we're going now. Ta ! ta ! Be virtuous and 
 you'll be unhappy,' or something of the 
 kind. 
 
 " I turned, and saw to my amazement that 
 the lieutenant, who had drunk little, that is for 
 one of his great bulk, had turned quite pale, 
 and glared with rage at his commanding 
 officer. 
 
 " He let his eye-glass fall with a loud chink 
 against his waistcoat buttons, and holding out 
 his hand, said, ' Good-bye ; some day I'll call
 
 172 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 
 
 again ' ; so like a gentleman I — I own, was sur- 
 prised. 
 
 "After a day or two, I got a letter from him 
 — not too well written, and with a fault or two 
 in the orthography — saying he meant to come 
 and see me to-morrow afternoon. 
 
 "Of course I thought it was the usual kind 
 of thing, and when the time came dressed 
 myself in a light peignoir, laced, and with 
 views to the inside, as we say. It suited me, 
 fair as I am, and with my yellow hair, for it 
 was colour eau de Nil, and as the gladiators 
 when they marched round the ring no doubt 
 put on their best, I always like to look my best 
 when I expect to be a sacrifice. 
 
 " Punctually at the time he said, my officer 
 came in. I came to meet him, smiling, think- 
 ing perhaps that he would kiss me, after the 
 fashion of his kind, who do not generally waste 
 time in words or in preliminaries. However, 
 he held out his hand, and said a little stiffly, 
 ' Glad to see you looking well,' and, sitting 
 down upon a chair, began to look at me. What 
 an original, I thought, as he kept staring at 
 me, until I half began to blush with his con- 
 tinued gaze. 
 
 " His eyes roved round the room, and now
 
 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 173 
 
 and then his monocle fell, and he would put it 
 back again, with a contortion of his face, like 
 something on the stage. 
 
 " At last he fixed his eyes upon a picture that 
 I had . . . well, tin peu teste, but nothing very- 
 shocking, and turning red, he pointed up at it, 
 observing, ' What a beastly thing. Ha ! yes, 
 abominable.' I did not know if I should laugh 
 or be angry, but going to it, turned it round 
 against the wall, and said, ' Now are you satis- 
 fied ? ' Then with some difficulty and with 
 a number of ' Has ' to help him through his 
 tale, he said he loved me. I had not heard 
 a man say that for the last five years, and it 
 took me by surprise, so I said nothing, and 
 I think turned red a little. Still I did not 
 take in his meaning, and made a motion as of 
 rising, for I expected he was like the rest of 
 them. ' Not that,' he said. ' By God ! Ha ! 
 No, I really mean it. Miss Elise, I love you 
 awfully.' 
 
 11 Still I said nothing, for what on earth was 
 there to say ? After a little while he went 
 away, but came again at intervals, always the 
 same — stiff, red, and awkward, and with the 
 same song on his lips. 
 
 " At last one day, quite a brule-pourpoint, he
 
 174 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 
 
 asked me would I marry him, but quite respect- 
 fully, and in a way that rather made me like 
 him ... it was phenomenal. What could I 
 say, especially as after saying what he had he 
 took my hand and, looking at me through his 
 monocle, said, ■ Could you love a fellow ? ' 
 
 " I was sore put to it, for I saw that I had 
 to do with quite another sort of monsieur to 
 him I told you of before. 
 
 11 Love and my officer were not to be carried 
 in one bag. Well, I felt grateful to him, for 
 I understood the sacrifice he was prepared to 
 make far better than he did himself, poor 
 innocent. 
 
 "When he had pressed me for an answer, 
 I told him all that he would have to undergo 
 if I said ' Yes ' to him. His horses — I had not 
 told you he was in the cavalry — would all have 
 to be sold. He gulped a little comically, for 
 he was a great polo player, but manfully 
 agreed. As his own colonel knew me, he 
 would have to change into another regiment. 
 ... I thought of foot. ... Of course I had to 
 do the thinking . . . and go to India. He said 
 that it would be a wrench, and that the Grab- 
 bies were a beastly lot. However, he would do 
 it all, if I would love a fellow.
 
 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 175 
 
 " As he talked on and held my hand, at first 
 half timidly and then as in a vice, I rather 
 liked him : he was so childlike and original ; 
 but an original. 
 
 " Love — no, that was impossible, and so 
 I told him. His face fell for a minute, but 
 he returned again, back to the charge. He 
 didn't care. Ha! no, not a bit. I was the 
 only woman that he ever cared for, and if 
 I only would consider, take time, er — he did 
 not wish to hurry me ... so like a gentle- 
 man." 
 
 Elise stopped for a moment, and then 
 
 11 1 have taken time to think of it, and cross 
 to-night to France, paying my passage with 
 the money that my friend pawned her rings 
 to get for me. His money I refused to 
 take. ... I, too, have honour . . . and the 
 best thing for me is to go home to my own 
 village Pont de l'Eveque, and try and get 
 my health. 
 
 " Then I shall live en paysanne, go to bed 
 early, and in the morning hear the swallows 
 in the roof; there used to be a nest above my 
 window three or four years ago. How good 
 their morals are compared to ours ... I mean 
 the swallows. 'Tis quite an idyll to see them
 
 176 UN AUTRE MONSIEUR 
 
 feed their young ones, and the male never 
 looks at any bird, except his legitime. 
 
 " When I feel better I shall go to Mass, not 
 that I am a firm believer, still less a practiser, 
 but the thing does you good somehow — perhaps 
 the singing, or perhaps the recollection of one's 
 childhood, or something of the kind. 
 
 " So I am off, and in a day or two shall be 
 perhaps wandering along the Chauss£e, with 
 its double rows of trees, silvery, and looking 
 like a Corot against the fields of corn. 
 
 " I shall be thinking of what I told you, and 
 of how difficult it is to love a fellow. Then, 
 when I am better, who knows what I shall 
 do ? ... Ah ! mechant. No, never, I swear it ; 
 he said he never would till we were married 
 . . . you see he was not in the least like you, 
 or any other man."
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 Of all the guests that used to come to Claraz's 
 Hotel, there was none stranger, or more in- 
 teresting than Christie Christison, a weather- 
 beaten sailor, who still spoke his native dialect 
 of Peterhead, despite his thirty years out in 
 the Plate. He used to bring an air into the 
 room with him of old salt fish and rum, and of 
 cold wintry nights in the low latitudes down by 
 the Horn. This, too, though it was years since 
 he had been at sea. 
 
 Although the world had gone so well with 
 him, and by degrees he had become one of the 
 biggest merchants in the place, he yet pre- 
 served the speech and manners of a Greenland 
 whaler, which calling he had followed in his 
 youth. 
 
 The Arctic cold and tropic suns during the 
 
 years that he had traded up and down the 
 
 coast had turned his naturally fair complexion 
 
 to a mottled hue, and whisky, or the sun, had 
 
 touched his nose so fiercely that it furnished a 
 n 177
 
 178 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 great fund of witticism amongst the other 
 guests. 
 
 Mansel said that the skipper's nose reminded 
 him of the port light of an old sugar droger, 
 and Cossart had it, that no chemist's window in 
 Montmartre had any flacon t bottle you call him, 
 eh ? of such resplendent hue. Most of them 
 knew he had a history, but no one ever heard 
 him tell it, although it was well known he had 
 come out from Peterhead in the dark ages, 
 when Rosas terrorised the Plate, in his own 
 schooner, the Rosebud, and piled her up at 
 last, somewhere on the Patagonian coast, upon 
 a trip down to the Falkland Islands. He used 
 to talk about his schooner as if she had been 
 one of the finest craft afloat ; but an old Yankee 
 skipper, who had known her, swore she was 
 a bull-nosed, round-sterned sort of oyster- 
 mouching vessel, with an old deck-house 
 like a town hall, straight-sided, and with 
 a lime-juice look about her that made him 
 tired. 
 
 Whatever were her merits or her faults, she 
 certainly had made her skipper's fortune, or at 
 least laid the foundation of it ; for, having 
 started as a trader, he gradually began to act, 
 half as a carrier, half as a mail-boat, going to
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 179 
 
 Stanley every three months or so with mails 
 and letters, and coming back with wool. 
 
 Little by little, aided by his wife, a stout, 
 hard-featured woman, from his native town, he 
 got a little capital into his hands. 
 
 When he was on a voyage, Jean used to search 
 about to get a cargo for his next trip, so that 
 when the inevitable came and the old Rose- 
 bud ran upon the reef down at San Julian, 
 Christie was what he called " weel-daein," and 
 forsook the sea for good. 
 
 He settled down in Buenos Aires as a wool- 
 broker, and by degrees altered his clothes, to 
 the full-skirted coat of Melton cloth, with ample 
 side-pockets, the heather-mixture trousers, and 
 tall white hat, with a black band, that formed 
 his uniform up to his dying day. He wore a 
 Newgate frill of beard, and a blue necktie, 
 which made a striking contrast with his face, 
 browned by the sun and wind, and skin like a 
 dried piece of mare's hide, through which the 
 colour of his northern blood shone darkly, like 
 the red in an old-fashioned cooking apple after 
 a touch of frost. 
 
 Except a few objurgatory phrases, he had 
 learned no Spanish, and his own speech 
 remained the purest dialect of Aberdeenshire
 
 180 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 — coarse, rough and racy, and double-shotted 
 with an infinity of oaths, relics of his old 
 whaling days, when as he used to say he 
 started life, like a young rook, up in the 
 crow's-nest of a bluff-bowed and broad-beamed 
 five-hundred barrel boat, sailing from Peter- 
 head. 
 
 Things had gone well with him, and he had 
 taken to himself as partner a fellow-country- 
 man, one Andrew Nicolson, who had passed 
 all his youth in Edinburgh, in an insurance 
 office. Quiet, unassuming, and yet not without 
 traces of that pawky humour which few Scots 
 are born entirely lacking in, he had fallen by 
 degrees into a sort of worship of his chief, 
 whose sallies, rough and indecent as they often 
 were, fairly convulsed him, making him laugh 
 until the tears ran down his face, as he ex- 
 claimed, " Hear to him, man, he's awfu' rich, 
 I'm tellin' ye." 
 
 Christie took little notice of his adoration 
 except to say, "Andra man, dinna expose 
 yourself," or something of the kind. 
 
 In fact, no one could understand how two 
 such ill-assorted men came to be friends, 
 except perhaps because they both were Scotch- 
 men, or because Andrew's superior education
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 181 
 
 and well-brushed black clothes appealed to 
 Christison. 
 
 He himself could not write, but knew enough 
 to sign his name, which feat he executed with 
 many puffings, blowings, and an occasional 
 oath. 
 
 Still he was shrewd in business, which he 
 executed almost entirely by telegram, refusing 
 to avail himself of any code, saying, "he 
 couldna stand them ; some day ye lads will get 
 a cargo of dolls' eyes, when ye have sent for 
 maize. Language is gude enough for me, I hae 
 no secrets. Damn yer monkey talk." 
 
 His house at Floras was the place of call 
 of all the ship captains who visited the port. 
 There they would sit and drink, talking about 
 the want of lights on such and such a coast, 
 of skippers who had lost their ships twenty or 
 thirty years ago, the price of whale oil, and of 
 things that interest their kind ; whilst Mrs. 
 Christison sat knitting, looking as if she never 
 in her life had moved from Peterhead, in her 
 grey gown and woollen shawl, fastened across 
 her breast by a brooch, with a picture of her 
 man, " in natural colouring." Their life was 
 homely, and differed little from what it had 
 been in the old days when they were poor,
 
 i82 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 except that now and then they took the air in 
 an old battered carriage — which Christison had 
 taken for a debt — looking uncomfortable and 
 stiff, dressed in their Sunday clothes. Their 
 want of knowledge of the lanoruaofe of the 
 place kept them apart from others of their 
 class, and Christison, although he swore by 
 Buenos Aires, which he had seen emerge from 
 a provincial town to a great city, yet cursed 
 the people, calling them a "damned set of 
 natives," which term he generally applied to 
 all but Englishmen. 
 
 Certainly nothing was more unlike a "native" 
 than the ex-skipper now turned merchant, in 
 his ways, speech, and dress. Courtesy, which 
 was innate in natives of the place, was to him 
 not only quite superfluous, but a thing to be 
 avoided, whilst his strange habit of devouring 
 bread fresh from the oven, washed down with 
 sweet champagne, gained him the name of the 
 " Scotch Ostrich," which nickname he accepted 
 in good part as a just tribute to his digestive 
 powers, remarking that "the Baptist, John, ye 
 mind, aye fed on locusts and wild honey, 
 and a strong man aye liked strong meat, all 
 the worrld o'er." 
 
 In the lives of the elderly Aberdeenshire
 
 Christie christison 183 
 
 couple, few would have looked for a romantic 
 story, for the hard-featured merchant and his 
 quiet home-keeping wife appeared so happy and 
 contented in their snug villa on the Floras road. 
 No one in Buenos Aires suspected anything, 
 and most likely Christison would have died, 
 remembered only by his tall white hat, had he 
 not one day chosen to tell his tale. 
 
 A fierce pampero had sprung up in an hour, 
 the sky had turned that vivid green that 
 marks storms from the south in Buenos Aires. 
 Whirlfire kept the sky lighted, till an arch had 
 formed in the south-east, and then the storm 
 broke, blinding and terrible, with a strange, 
 seething noise. The wind, tearing along the 
 narrow streets, forced everyone to fly for refuge. 
 
 People on foot darted into the nearest house, 
 and horsemen, flying like birds before the 
 storm, sought refuge anywhere they could, 
 their horses, slipping and sliding on the rough, 
 paved streets, sending out showers of sparks 
 as they stopped suddenly, just as a skater 
 sends out a spray of ice. The deep-cut streets,, 
 with their raised pavements, soon turned to 
 watercourses, from three to four feet deep, 
 through which the current ran so fiercely that 
 it was quite impossible to pass on foot. The
 
 1&4 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 horsemen, galloping for shelter, passed through 
 them with the water banking up against their 
 horses on the stream side, though they plied 
 whip and spurs. 
 
 After the first hour of the tempest, when a 
 little light began to dawn towards the south, 
 and the peals of thunder slacken a little in 
 intensity, men's nerves became relaxed from 
 the over-tension that a pampero brings with it, 
 just as if nature had been overwound, and by 
 degrees was paying out the chain. 
 
 Storm-stayed at Claraz's sat several men, 
 Cossart, George Mansel, one Don Jos6 Her- 
 nandez and Christie Christison. Perhaps the 
 pampero had strung up his nerves, or perhaps 
 the desire that all men feel at times to tell 
 what is expedient they should keep concealed, 
 impelled him ; but at any rate he launched 
 into the story of his life, to the amazement of 
 his friends, who never thought he either had a 
 story to impart, or if he had that it would ever 
 issue from his lips. 
 
 11 Ye mind the Rosebud?" he remarked. 
 
 None of the assembled men had ever seen 
 her, although she still was well remembered on 
 the coast. 
 
 " Weel, weel, I mind the time she was well
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 185 
 
 kent, a bonny craft. Old Andrew Reid o' 
 Buckieside, he built her, back in the fifties. 
 When he went under, he had to sell his house 
 of Buckieside. I bought her cheap. 
 
 "It's fifteen years and mair, come Martinmas, 
 since I piled her up. ... I canna think how 
 I managed it, knowing the bay, San Julian, 
 ye ken, sae weel. 
 
 "It was a wee bit hazy, but still I thought 
 I could get in wi' the blue pigeon going. 
 
 " I mind it yet, ye see you hae to keep the 
 rocks where they say they ganakers all con- 
 gregate before they die, right in a line with 
 yon bit island. 
 
 " I heard the water shoaling as the leads- 
 man sung out in the chains, but still kept on, 
 feeling quite sure I knew the channel, when, 
 bang she touches, grates a little, and sticks 
 dead fast, wi' a long shiver o' her keel. Yon 
 rocks must have been sharp as razors, for she 
 began to fill at once. 
 
 " No chance for any help down in San 
 Julian Bay in those days, nothing but ane o' 
 they pulperias kept by a Basque, a wee bit 
 place, wi' a ditch and bank, and a small brass 
 cannon stuck above the gate. I got what gear 
 I could into the boat, and started for the beach.
 
 1 86 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 "Jean, myself, three o' the men, and an old 
 Dago I carried with me as an interpreter. 
 
 " The other sailormen, and a big dog we had 
 aboard, got into the other boat, and we all 
 came ashore. Luckily it was calm, and the 
 old Rosebud had struck not above two or 
 three hundred yards from land. Man, San 
 Julian was a dreich place in they days, naething 
 but the bit fortified pulperia I was tellin' ye 
 aboot. The owner, old Don Augusty, a 
 Basque, ye ken, just ca'ed his place the ' Rose 
 of the South.' He micht as well have called it 
 the Rose of Sharon. Deil a rose for miles, or 
 any other sort of flower. 
 
 " Well, men, next day it just began to blow, 
 and in a day or two knockit the old Rose- 
 bud fair to matchwood. Jean, she grat sair 
 to see her gae to bits, and I cursit a while, 
 though I felt like greetin' too, I'm tellin' ye. 
 There we were sort o' marooned, a' the lot of 
 us, without a chance of getting off maybe for 
 months ; for in these days devil a ship but an 
 odd whaler now and then ever came lwh the 
 place. By a special mercy Yanquetruz's 
 band of they Pehuelches happened to come 
 to trade. 
 
 " Quiet enough folk yon Indians, and Yan-
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 187 
 
 quetruz himself had been brocht up in Buenos 
 Aires in a mission school. 
 
 " Man, a braw fellow ! Six foot six at least, 
 and sat his horse just like a picture. We 
 bought horses from him, and got a man to 
 guide us up to the Welsh settlement at Chubut, 
 a hundred leagues away. 
 
 " Richt gude beasts they gave us. and we 
 got through fine, though I almost thocht I had 
 lost Jean. 
 
 " Yanquetruz spoke English pretty well, 
 Spanish of course, and as I tellt ye, he was a 
 bonny man. 
 
 " Wed, he sort o' fell in love wi' Jean, and 
 one day he came up to the piclperia, and 
 getting off his horse, a braw black piebald wi' 
 an eye like fire intil him, he asked to speak to me. 
 First we had Cana, and then Carlon, then some 
 more Cana, and yon vino seco, and syne some 
 more Carlon. I couldna richtly see what he 
 was driving at. However, all of a sudden he 
 says, ' Wife very pretty, Indian he like buy.' 
 
 " I told him Christians didna sell their wives, 
 and we had some more Cana, and then he says, 
 1 Indian like Christian woman, she more big, 
 more white than Indian girl.' 
 
 " To make a long tale short, he offered me
 
 1 88 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 his horse and fifty dollars, then several ganaker 
 skins, they ca' them guillapices, and finally in 
 addition a mare and foal. Man, they were 
 bonny beasts, both red roan piebalds, and to 
 pick any Indian girl I liked. Not a bad price 
 down there at San Julian, where the chief could 
 hae cut all our throats had he been minded to. 
 
 "... Na, na, we werna' fou, just a wee 
 miraculous. Don Augusty was sort o' scared 
 when he heard what Yanquetruz was saying, 
 and got his pistol handy and a bit axe he 
 keepit for emergencies behind the counter. 
 Losh me, yon Yanquetruz was that ceevil, a 
 body couldna tak fuff at him. 
 
 " At last I told him I wasna on to trade, and 
 we both had a tot of square-faced gin to clean 
 our mouths a bit, and oot to the palenque, where 
 the chief's horse was tied. 
 
 " A bonny beastie, his mane hogged and cut 
 into castles, like a clipped yew hedge, his tail 
 plaited and tied with a piece of white mare's 
 hide, and everything upon him solid silver, just 
 like a dinner-service. 
 
 " The chief took his spear in his hand — it 
 had been stuck into the ground — and leaning on 
 it, loupit on his horse. Ye ken they deevils 
 mount frae the off-side. He gied a yell that
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 189 
 
 fetched his Indians racing. They had killed a 
 cow, and some of them were daubed with 
 blood; for they folk dinna wait for cooking 
 when they are sharp set. Others were three- 
 parts drunk, and came stottering along, with 
 square-faced gin bottles in their hands. 
 
 " Their horses werna tied, nor even hobbled. 
 Na, na, they just stood waiting with the reins 
 upon the ground. Soon as they saw the chief — 
 I canna tell ye how the thing was done — they 
 widna mount, they didna loup, they just melted 
 on their beasts, catching the spears out of the 
 ground as they got up. 
 
 " Sirs me, they Indians just took flight like 
 birds, raising sich yellochs, running their horses 
 up against each other, twisting and turning and 
 carrying on in sich a way, just like fishing-boats 
 running- for harbour at Buckie or Montrose. 
 
 " Our guide turned out a richt yin, and brocht 
 us through, up to Chubut wi'out a scratch upon 
 the paint. 
 
 " A pairfect pilot, though he had naething in 
 the wide world to guide him through they wild 
 stony plains. 
 
 " That's how I lost the Rosebud, and noo, 
 ma freens, I'll tell you how it was I got Jean, 
 but that was years ago.
 
 190 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 " In my youth up in Peterhead I was a sailor- 
 man. I went to sea in they North Sea whaling 
 craft, Duff and McAlister's, ye ken. As time 
 went on, I got rated as a harpooner . . . 
 mony's the richt whale I hae fastened into. 
 That was the time when everything was dune 
 by hand. Nane of your harpoon guns, nane 
 of your dynamite, naething but muscle and a 
 keen eye. First strike yer whale, and then 
 pull after him. Talk of yer fox hunts ... set 
 them up, indeed. 
 
 " Jean's father keepit a bit shop in Aberdeen, 
 and we had got acquaint. I cannot richtly 
 mind the way o' it. Her father and her mother 
 were aye against our marryin,' for ye ken I 
 had naething but my pay, and that only when 
 I could get a ship. Whiles, too, I drinkit a 
 wee bit. Naething to signify, but then Jean's 
 father was an elder of the kirk, and maist 
 particular. 
 
 " Jean was a bonny lassie then, awfu' high- 
 spirited. I used to wonder whiles, if some day 
 when her father had been oot at the kirk, 
 someone hadna slippit in to tak tea with her 
 mither. ... I ken I'm haverin'. 
 
 11 Weel, we were married, and though we 
 lo'ed each other, we were aye bickerin'. Maistly
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 191 
 
 aboot naething, but ye see, we were both 
 young and spirited. Jean liket admiration, 
 which was natural enough at her age, and 
 I liket speerits, so that ane night, after a word 
 or two, I gied her bit daud or two, maybe it 
 was the speerits, for in the morning jwhen I 
 wakit I felt about for Jean, intending to ask 
 pardon, and feelin' a bit shamed. There was 
 no Jean, and I thocht that she was hidin* just 
 to frichten me. 
 
 " I called, but naething, and pittin' on ma 
 clothes, searchit the hoose, but there was nae- 
 body. She left no message for me, and nane 
 of the neighbours kent anything aboot her. 
 
 " She hadna' gone to Aberdeen, and though 
 her father and me searchit up and doon, we 
 got no tidings of her. Sort o' unchancy, just 
 for a day or two. However, there was nae- 
 thing to be done, and in a month or so I sold 
 my furniture and shipped for a long cruise. 
 
 " Man, a long cruise it was, three months or 
 more blocked in the ice, and then a month in 
 Greenland trying to get the scurvy out of the 
 ship's company, and so one way or another, 
 about seven months slipped past before we 
 sighted Peterhead. Seven months without a 
 sight of any woman ; for, men, they Esquimaux
 
 192 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 aye gied me a skunner wi' their fur clothes and 
 oily faces, they lookit to be baboons. 
 
 "We got in on a Sabbath, and I am just 
 tellin' ye, as soon as I was free, maybe about 
 three o' the afternoon, I fairly ran all the way 
 richt up to Maggie Bauchop's. 
 
 " I see the place the noo, up a bit wynd. 
 The town was awfu' quiet, and no one cared 
 to pass too close to the wynd foot in daylight, 
 for fear o' the clash o' tongues. I didna care 
 a rap for that, if there had been a lion in the 
 path, same as once happened to ane o' the 
 prophets. Balaam, I think it was, in the old 
 Book. I wouldna hae stood back a minute 
 if there had been a woman on the other 
 side. 
 
 " Weel, I went up to the door, and rappit 
 on it. Maggie came to it, and says she, ' Eh, 
 Christie, is that you ? ' for she aye kent a 
 customer. A braw, fat woman, Maggie Bau- 
 chop was. For years she had followed the 
 old trade, till she had pit awa' a little siller, 
 and started business for hersel'. 
 
 " Weel she kent a' the tricks o' it, and 
 still she was a sort of God-fearin' kind o' 
 bitch . . . treated her lassies weel, and didna 
 cheat them about their victuals and their
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 193 
 
 claithes. ' Come in,' she says, ' Christie, my 
 man. Where hae ye come from ? ' 
 
 11 1 tellt her, and says I, l Maggie, gie us yer 
 best, I've been seven months at sea.' 
 
 " ' Hoot, man,' she says, ' the lassies arena 
 up ; we had a fearfu' spate o' drink yestreen, 
 an awfu' lot of ships is in the port. Sit ye 
 doon, Christie. Here's the old Book to ye. 
 Na, na, ye needna look at it like that ; there's 
 bonny pictures in it, o' the prophets . . . each 
 wi' his lass, ye ken.' 
 
 " When she went out, I looked a little at the 
 book — man, a fine hot one, and then as the 
 time passed I started whistlin' a tune, some- 
 thing I had heard up aboot Hammerfest. The 
 door flees open, and in walks Maggie, looking 
 awfu' mad. 
 
 11 ' Christie,' she skirls, ' I'll hae na whistlin' 
 in ma hoose, upon the Sabbath day. I canna 
 hae my lassies learned sich ways, so stop it, or 
 get out.' 
 
 " Man, I just lauch at her, and I says, ' The 
 lassies, woman ; whistlin' can hardly hurt them, 
 considerin' how they live.' 
 
 " Maggie just glowered at me, and ' Christie, 
 she says, ' you and men like ye may defile 
 their bodies ; but whilst I live na one shall 
 o
 
 194 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 
 
 harm their souls, puir lambies, wi' whistlin' on 
 His day. No, not in my hoose, that's what 
 I'm tellin' ye.' 
 
 " I laughed, and said, ' Weel, send us in 
 ane o' your lambies ! and turned to look at 
 a picture of Queen Victoria's Prince Albert 
 picnickin' at Balmoral. When I looked round 
 a girl had come into the room. She was 
 dressed in a striped sort of petticoat and a 
 white jacket, a blouse I think ye ca' the thing, 
 and stood wi' her back to me as she was 
 speaking to Maggie at the door. 
 
 " I drew her to me, and was pulling her 
 towards the bed — seven months at sea, ye ken — 
 when we passed by a looking-glass. I saw 
 her face in it, just for a minute, as we were 
 sort o' strugglin'. Ma God, I lowsed her 
 quick enough, and stotterin' backwards sat 
 down upon a chair. 'Twas Jean, who had run 
 off after the bit quarrel that we had more 
 than a year ago. I didna speak, nor did Jean 
 say a word. 
 
 11 What's that you say ? 
 
 " Na, na, ma ain wife in sichlike a place, 
 hae ye no delicacy, man ? I settled up wi' 
 Maggie, tellin' her Jean was an old friend o' 
 mine, and took her by the hand. We gaed
 
 CHRISTIE CHRISTISON 195 
 
 away to Edinburgh, and there I married her 
 again ; sort of haversome job ; but Jean just 
 wanted it, ye ken. How she came there I 
 never asked her. 
 
 " Judge not, the ould Book says, and after 
 all 'twas me gien' her the daud. Weel, weel, 
 things sort of prospered after that. I bought 
 the Rosebud, and as ye know piled her up and 
 down at San Julian, some fifteen years ago. 
 
 " I never raised ma hand on Jean again. 
 Na, na, I had suffered for it, and Jean if so be 
 she needed ony sort of purification, man, she 
 got it, standing at the wheel o' nichts on the 
 old schooner wi' the spray flyin', on the passage 
 out. 
 
 "Not a drop, thankye, Don Hosey. Good 
 nicht, Mr. Mansel ; bongsoir, Cossart, I'm just 
 off hame. Jean will be waiting for me."
 
 A PRINCESS 
 
 Nothing is wilder than the long stretch of 
 sandy coast which runs from the East Neuk 
 of Fife right up to Aberdeen. 
 
 Inland, the windswept fields, with their rough 
 walls, without a kindly feal upon the top, as 
 in the west, look grim and uninviting in their 
 well-farmed ugliness. 
 
 The trees are low and stunted, and grow 
 twisted by the prevailing fierce east winds, all 
 to one side, just like the trees so often painted 
 by the Japanese upon a fan. 
 
 The fields run down, until they lose them- 
 selves in sandy links, clothed with a growth of 
 bent. 
 
 After the links, there intervenes a shingly 
 beach, protected here and there by a low reef 
 of rocks, all honeycombed and limpet-ridden, 
 from which streamers of dulse float in the 
 ceaseless surge. 
 
 Then comes the sea, grey, sullen, always on 
 
 the watch to swallow up the fishermen, whose 
 
 196
 
 A PRINCESS 197 
 
 little brown-sailed boats seem to be scudding 
 ceaselessly before the easterly haar towards 
 some harbour's mouth. 
 
 Grey towns, with houses roofed with slabs 
 of stone, cluster round little churches built so 
 strongly that they have weathered reformations 
 and the storms of centuries. 
 
 Grey sky, grey sullen sea, grey rocks, and 
 a keen whistling wind that blows from the 
 North Sea, which seems to turn the very air 
 a steely grey, have given to the land a look 
 of hardness not to be equalled upon earth. 
 
 One sees at first sight that in the villages 
 no children could have ever danced upon the 
 green. No outward visible sign of any inward 
 graces can be seen in the hard-featured people, 
 whose flinty-looking cheeks seem to repel the 
 mere idea of kisses, and yet down in whose 
 hearts exists a vein of sentiment for which in 
 other and more favoured lands a man might 
 search in vain. As any district, country, or 
 race of men must have its prototype, its spot 
 or person that sums up and typifies the whole, 
 so does this hard, grey land find its quintes- 
 sence in the town of Buckiehaven, a windswept 
 fisher village, built on a spit of sand. 
 
 Its little church is stumpier than all the other
 
 198 A PRINCESS 
 
 little churches of the coast. Its houses are 
 more angular, their crowsteps steeper, and the 
 gnarled plane trees that have fought for life 
 against its withering blasts, more dwarfish and 
 ill-grown. The fisherfolk seem ruddier, squarer, 
 and more uncouth than are their fellows. 
 
 Their little wave-washed harbour looks 
 narrower and still more dangerous than the 
 thousand other little harbours that dot the 
 coast from Kinghorn to St. Forts. 
 
 Still in the churchyard in which the graves 
 of mariners, of old sea-captains (who once 
 sailed, drank, and suffered, where their de- 
 scendants, now sail, drink, and suffer), lie thick, 
 each waiting for the pilot, the headstones look- 
 ing to the sea, their Mecca, there is an air of 
 rest. The graves all look out seawards, where 
 their hearts lived, and yet most of the denizens 
 returned to lay their bones in the old paroch 
 where in their youth they must have run about, 
 clattering like ponies on the grey causeway 
 stones. Yet there are gravestones which re- 
 late that Andrew Brodie or George Anstruther, 
 were buried in the deep and that their monu- 
 ment was raised by Agnes, Janet, or some 
 other sorrowing wife, in the full hope of their 
 salvation, with a text drawn from the minor
 
 A PRINCESS 199 
 
 prophets and unintelligible to any eyes but 
 those of love and faith. 
 
 The lettering on the stones is cut so deeply 
 that in that mossless land it looks as fresh as 
 when the widow and the local stonemason 
 stood chaffering for its price, surrounded by 
 her fiaxen-headed children, whom in good time 
 the sea would claim, taking them from her as 
 relentlessly as it had claimed her man. 
 
 Only a little lichen here and there, yellow 
 and looking like a stain, shows that time and 
 the weather have both wrought their worst 
 r.nd failed to get a hold, so hard the whinstone, 
 and so good the workmanship. 
 
 In the low, wiry grass the graves look like 
 a flock of sheep, the rough-built wall keeps 
 them from straying, and the squat cock upon 
 the spire, that creaks so harshly in the wind, 
 looks down upon them and does not crow, 
 because it knows the inmates are asleep. 
 
 So they sleep on, sleeping a longer watch 
 below than any that they ever had on earth, 
 when the shrill boatswain's whistle roused them 
 at each recurring period of four hours, or a 
 shout called them all on deck to shorten sail. 
 
 All round the churchyard wall are old-world 
 tombs, of worthies of the places — Brodies and
 
 200 A PRINCESS 
 
 Griersons, Selkirks and Anstruthers — adorned 
 with emblems of their trades, as mallets, shears, 
 and chisels, with a death's-head and cross- 
 bones crowning all, to show not only that the 
 skeleton had sat unbidden at life's feast, but 
 after a full meal still lingered with his hosts. 
 
 The whinstone church, hardly distinguish- 
 able from the rocks beside the harbour, in 
 colour and in shape, the little burial-ground 
 more like a sheep-pen than a cemetery, the 
 high-pitched house-roofs in the steep stony 
 staircases of streets, all give the idea of a 
 corner of the world to which no stranger could 
 have penetrated except by accident. If such 
 a one there were, he must have felt him- 
 self indeed a foreigner in such an isolated 
 spot. 
 
 Yet on the south side of the church, set 
 perhaps by accident to catch the little sun that 
 ever shines upon that drear East Neuk, there 
 is a slab let in, or stuck against the wall. 
 
 Upon the granite tablet, edged round with a 
 supposititious Gothic scroll, cut into flowers like 
 pastry ornaments upon a pie, the letters poorly 
 executed, showing up paltry in their shallow- 
 ness, beside the lettering of the staunch old 
 tombs amongst the grass, is written, " Here
 
 A PRINCESS 201 
 
 lies Sinakalula, Princess of Raratonga, the 
 beloved wife of Andrew Brodie, Mariner." 
 
 What were the circumstances of their meet- 
 ing the stone does not declare, only that the 
 deceased had been a princess in her native 
 land, and had died in the obscure east-country 
 haven, and had been "beloved." 
 
 Nothing, but all — at least all that life has to 
 give. 
 
 The simple idyll of the princess and Andrew 
 Brodie, mariner, is writ on the red marble 
 slab, in letters less enduring than their love, 
 badly designed and poorly cut, and destined 
 soon to disappear in the cold rains and steely 
 blasts of the East Neuk of Fife, and leave the 
 stone a blank. 
 
 How they met, loved, and how the mariner 
 brought home his island bride, perhaps to droop 
 in the cold north, and how he laid her in the 
 drear churchyard to wait the time when they 
 should be united once again in some Elysian 
 field, not unlike Polynesia, with the Tree of 
 Life for palms, the selfsame opal-tinted sea, 
 angels for tropic birds, and the same air of 
 calm pervading all the air, only the mariner, if 
 he still lives, can say. 
 
 The princess, as Andrew Brodie first saw
 
 202 A PRINCESS 
 
 her, must have looked like the fair damsels 
 Captain Cook describes, with perhaps just a 
 slight tincture of the missionary school, but not 
 enough to take away her grace. 
 
 Dressed in a coloured and diaphanous 
 sacque, a wreath of red hibiscus round her 
 head, her jet-black hair loose on her shoulders, 
 bare arms and feet, and redolent of oil of cocoa- 
 nut, she must have seemed a being from another 
 world to the rough mariner. 
 
 How he appeared to her is harder to deter- 
 mine, perhaps as did Cortes to La Malinche, 
 or as did Soto to the Indian queen amongst 
 the Seminoles. True, we know what Cortes 
 was like, how he rode like a centaur, was 
 noble, generous, that he knew Latin, as Bernal 
 Diaz says, and Soto was designed by nature 
 to capture every heart. The Scottish sailor 
 possibly appeared as the representative of a 
 strange race, harder and fiercer, but more 
 tender at the heart than her compatriots. 
 
 His steel-blue eyes may have appeared to 
 her as hardly mortal ; his rough and hairy 
 hands, symbols of strength embodified ; his 
 halting speech, a homage to her charms. Then 
 as he must have been an honest and true- 
 hearted man, approaching her with the same
 
 A PRINCESS 203 
 
 reverence with which he would have courted 
 one of the hard-faced, red-headed women of 
 his native place, not in the fashion of the trader 
 or the beach-comber, it must have seemed as 
 if a being, superior by its strength, had thrown 
 its strength aside, all for her love. 
 
 When his ship sailed, the sailor may have 
 hidden in the hills, then when her topsails had 
 sunk well beneath the waves, and he was sure 
 the ship would not return, come out of hiding, 
 and strolled timidly along the beach, until some 
 trader or the missionary came out and sheltered 
 him. 
 
 Naturally, chiefs and missionaries and all 
 the foreign population looked on his love as 
 an infatuation ; but he, setting to work, trading 
 in copra and beche-de-mer, in coral and the 
 like, gradually made himself a man of con- 
 sequence. Schooners would come consigned 
 to him, and cargoes of his own lie heaped in 
 baracoons, thatched with banana leaves. 
 
 At last, when he had "gathered siller" and 
 become a man of substance — for Brodie certainly 
 was one of those who could not stoop to live 
 upon his wife — he must have gone and seen 
 the missionary. One sees him sweating in his 
 long-shore togs, a palm-tree hat upon his head,
 
 20 4 A PRINCESS 
 
 toiling along the beach, and rapping at the 
 door. The missionary, most likely a com- 
 patriot, bids him come in, and lays the 
 " Word," which he has been translating into 
 Polynesian, upon the table and welcomes him. 
 
 " I'm glad to see ye, Andrew. How time 
 goes on. Now you're a man of substance, and 
 will be sending for a wife . . . unless, indeed, 
 you might think of Miss McKendrick, the new 
 Bible-reader. A nice-like lass enough. No 
 bonny, but then beauty, ye ken, is not en- 
 during. . . . What, ye dinna say ? I thocht 
 ye had been cured o' all that foolishness. They 
 island girls are a' like children. What sort of 
 looking wife would she be to ye at hame, man 
 Andrew ? " 
 
 This may have passed, and then the wedding 
 in the mission church, with the dusky cate- 
 chumens looking stiff and angular in the death- 
 dealing clothes of Christianity, the bride 
 listening to the old-fashioned Scottish exhor- 
 tation on the duties of her new estate, what 
 time the chief, her father, a converted pagan, 
 thought with regret of the marriage ceremonies 
 that he had witnessed in his youth, so different 
 from these. 
 
 It may have been that for a year or two
 
 A PRINCESS 305 
 
 the ill-assorted pair lived happily, the husband 
 trading and watching his men work in his 
 garden, whilst his wife swung in a hammock 
 underneath a tree. As time went by the re- 
 collection of the grey village in East Fife 
 would come back to the husband's mind and 
 draw him northwards, whilst the wife wondered 
 what it was he thought about, and why the 
 steely eyes seemed to look through her as if 
 they sought for something that she could never 
 see. 
 
 At last would come the day when he first 
 spoke of going home, timidly, and as if feeling 
 somehow he was about to commit a crime. 
 Her tears and expostulations can be imagined, 
 and then her Ruth-like resolution to follow him 
 across the sea. 
 
 The voyage and the first touch of cold, the 
 arrival in the bare and stormy land, the dis- 
 appointment of poor Andrew, when he found 
 he was forgotten by the great part of his 
 friends, and that the rest despised him for 
 having brought a coloured woman home, all 
 follow naturally. 
 
 All the small jealousies and miseries of a 
 provincial town, the horrors of the Scottish 
 Sabbath, the ceaseless rain, the biting wind,
 
 206 A PRINCESS 
 
 the gloom and darkness of the winter, the 
 disappointment of the brief northern summer, 
 the sea, in which none but a walrus or a seal 
 could bathe, must have clone their worst upon 
 the island princess, now become in very truth 
 the wife of Andrew Brodie, mariner. One 
 sees her in her unbecoming European clothes, 
 simple and yet accustomed to respect, exposed 
 to all the harshness of a land in which though 
 hearts are warm, they move so far beneath 
 the surface that their pulsations hardly can be 
 felt, except by those accustomed to their beat. 
 
 Then in the end consumption, that con- 
 sumption that usually attacks a monkey when 
 it passes north of forty, making its end so 
 human and so pitiful, must have attacked her 
 too. 
 
 Then the drear funeral, with Andrew and 
 his friends in weepers and tall hats, which the 
 east wind brushed all awry, making them look 
 like ferrets ; the little coffin with the outlandish 
 name and date, and " in her thirtieth year " 
 emblazoned on it in cheap brass lettering ; and 
 the sloping pile of shingly earth, so soon to be 
 stamped down over the island flower. 
 
 Slowly the friends would go, after shaking 
 Andrew by the hand. He, feeling vaguely
 
 A PRINCESS 207 
 
 that he had murdered her whom he loved best, 
 would linger, as a bird hovers for a time above 
 the place where it has seen its mate fall, a 
 mere mass of bloodstained feathers, to the gun. 
 When he was gone the island princess 
 would be left alone with the wind sweeping 
 across the sea, sounding around the Bass, and 
 whistling wearily above Inch Keith to sing her 
 threnody.
 
 EL JEHAD 
 
 Si-Taher-ibu-Lezrac was discontented with 
 everything he saw. 
 
 The world had altered since his youth, but 
 he had never changed. Allah, he was certain, 
 was still the same — the One, the Indivisible, the 
 Laudable, the Beginner, the Restorer, the 
 Victorious, the Merciful, the Compassionate ; 
 Mohammed, too, must certainly be still the 
 Messenger of God, and if his glory was for the 
 time eclipsed, he would shine forth again, just 
 as the sun shines forth, after a passing shower. 
 
 Still all was wrong. 
 
 The Nazarenes were richer every day. 
 The very faithful seemed to be resigned and 
 to have grown less faithful than of yore. Some 
 even shaved their beards, leaving a moustache 
 upon their upper lips, after the Turkish style. 
 
 The women wore their veils so thin, that 
 they were more an incentive than a hiding of 
 their charms. They laughed and talked as 
 they went through the streets holding each 
 
 208
 
 EL JEHAD 209 
 
 other's hands, and hence, under their haiks 
 sometimes Si Taher fancied that the outline 
 of their figures looked as if stays confined them, 
 after the fashion of the Nazarenes. The 
 electric light, the tramways, theatres, the rail- 
 way station, and the port, where Moslems, 
 Christians, Negroes, and Chinese all worked 
 together, all the slaves of him who paid them, 
 without distinction, either of creed or race, all 
 seemed a menace to Islam. 
 
 The fault must be, he thought, a lack of 
 faith ; Allah still gave the victory, but gave it 
 only to the men who fought, and so Si Taher 
 passed his days pondering upon all he saw, 
 and miserable, anxious and unquiet, like a 
 wild beast deprived of liberty. 
 
 Types of his sort — fine Arab types that look 
 as if they might have followed either The 
 Praised One himself or Okba, Musa or Tarik— 
 come from the desert, or from some duar 
 lost in the hills, no one knows how or 
 whence. 
 
 It seems a miracle how little time has 
 changed them from the first Arabs who came 
 to Africa a thousand years ago. 
 
 They are the men marked out by nature 
 and by fate for prophets, and if they have no
 
 2io EL JEHAD 
 
 following the fault is not with them but with 
 the changing times. 
 
 Brown and hard-looking, as if cut out of 
 walnut-wood ; with a beard so thick it looked 
 more like a setting than a beard, though it was 
 flecked with grey ; his long and wavy hair 
 falling about his shoulders like the mane of a 
 wild horse, all in Si Taher, showed his desert 
 origin and his descent from the wild tribes 
 that, centuries ago, poured out like locusts 
 from the Hadramut to overspread the world. 
 
 From his whole being there exhaled an air 
 of mystery, of fanaticism, of ferocity mixed 
 with a savage simpleness. 
 
 His thin and muscular body which his haik 
 veiled, but did not hide, showed glimpses of 
 his legs and arms, hairy as are the limbs of an 
 orang-outang. His feet were shod with sandals 
 of undressed camel's skin. His strong and 
 knotted hands looked like the roots of an old 
 oak, left bare above the ground, both in their 
 size and make. 
 
 He always carried in his hand a staff of 
 argan wood, which use and perspiration had 
 polished like a bone, during the years of his 
 wanderings up and down the various countries 
 of Islam. No one remembered when he had
 
 EL JEHAD 2ii 
 
 first appeared, or where he came from, although 
 Algiers and Constantine, Tlemcen, and the 
 cities of the coast had known him well for 
 years. At times he passed whole days silent 
 and motionless. At times he sat in the 
 mosque court, but motionless ; so motionless 
 that it might well have happened, that which 
 did happen to the Prophet (whom may God 
 have pardoned) who, being in an ecstasy of 
 prayer, remained so quiet, that a dove, lighting 
 on his shoulder, laid an egg inside his hood. 
 Though he said nothing, yet it was known he 
 wp.s an enemy of all the Christians, hating them 
 mortally. 
 
 The Arabs say knowledge is from the desert, 
 and in a certain measure they are right ; for 
 certainly more of the primitive instincts of the 
 race are to be found amongst those born 
 amongst its sands, than falls to those whose lives 
 are passed within a labyrinth of bricks. 
 
 Not that the Arabs think of that when they 
 enunciate their apothegm, with the same 
 serious air of enunciating an experience of their 
 own, habitual to them even in the most futile 
 things of life. 
 
 Certain it is that in the desert all the 
 remains of old-world science, and the tradi-
 
 212 EL JEHAD 
 
 tions of their faith, are better far preserved 
 than in the towns, where modern notions and 
 conversation with the Infidel — who, as the 
 Arabs say, came from the sea — corrupt their 
 purity. 
 
 Names of the stars, as Betelgeux and 
 Aldebaran, Sohail and Fomalhaut, Algol, 
 Altair, and Ras Alhaque ; legends of the first 
 dawning of Islam ; the adventures of the four 
 just men, the companions of the Prophet ; the 
 daily practice of the simple, healthy life that 
 nomads lead ; the respect that children owe 
 to elders, even the classical speech of the 
 tribe of the Khoresh, all is preserved, more 
 pure and more intense, out in the Sahara, than 
 in these lands, spurned by the Christian's boots, 
 where his hat is, as it were, a challenge to the 
 Believers' eyes. On that account, when a man 
 from the desert comes to town, men venerate 
 him, as the most perfect incarnation of the race. 
 So, the brown, rag-clad, turbanless Si Taher, 
 with his thick curly mane, confined about his 
 forehead, with a grey cord of camel's hair, was 
 looked on as a saint, that is, a man who cared 
 not for the world, but lived within himself, for 
 amongst Arabs faith is everything. Good 
 works are estimable, especially when they bring
 
 EL JEHAD 213 
 
 benefits, but faith is Allah's gift ; he gives or 
 he withholds. 
 
 Through streets and squares he wandered, 
 looking at everything with the fixed eyes of 
 the true desert-born, which take in everything, 
 down to the smallest detail, though they seem 
 quite opaque. 
 
 He saw, and hated all he saw ; and above 
 everything his soul revolted when he saw 
 some little soldier striking a true Believer 
 without cause, shouldering him off the pave- 
 ment or, with a sudden pull, snatching his 
 tu-ban off, and leaving him ashamed, bald- 
 headed, and a sport for children and for fools. 
 
 Then in his eyes there shone a flame as 
 when a man turns on the electric light and 
 shuts it instantly, or when a captive lion 
 glares for a moment at some idiot, when he 
 sticks his cane between his bars. 
 
 However, like a true Arab as he was, he 
 had himself in hand, and the first fury over, 
 knew how to dull his eyes, and leave his 
 face expressionless and blank. Much did he 
 ponder on the ancient glories of his race and 
 on the vestiges of antique splendour still exist- 
 ing in the land that Arabs call the Andal6s, 
 naming it always with a sigh.
 
 2i 4 EL JEHAD 
 
 Well did he know the Tower of Seville, the 
 mosque of Cordoba, Malaga and its citadel and, 
 best of all, the Castle of the Pomegranate, called 
 by the Infidel, Granada, the city of dreams. 
 
 " Oh Granada," he would say, " I thought 
 to see thee as a bride in spring, but I have 
 seen thee widowed and in sorrow ; I thought 
 to see thee with my heart full of joy, but in- 
 stead my eyes have filled with tears." 
 
 In his youth he had wandered to Madrid, 
 capital of the Infidel, whose women all are 
 veilless, and who know neither faith nor law. 
 "May God destroy them," he would piously 
 observe, passing between his strong and hairy 
 fingers the beads of a thick rosary of white 
 bone, which he had always in his hand, after 
 the fashion of his kind. In his youth he had 
 been a shepherd, and well remembered the 
 happy days, when lying with his head against 
 a bush of dry palmetto, watching his goats, half 
 sleeping and half waking, amongst the sandy 
 pastures of the Sahara, he played upon a reed, 
 waiting with patience for the evening prayer, 
 and when the day was longer than the shadow 
 of a spear. He liked to muse upon the 
 proverb, " No prophet, but was a shepherd 
 in his youth " ; and used to say with an air
 
 EL JEHAD 21$ 
 
 of self-satisfaction, " Mohammed was a shep- 
 herd, as was I ; shepherds were Abraham and 
 David ; why, therefore, shall not I be one, if 
 Allah and his Messenger give me their aid ? " 
 In fact, all that a man, shepherd or not, re- 
 quires is but God's help, and this the Arabs 
 know, larding their speech with pious phrases, 
 such as " May God bestow a blessing on thee," 
 " May God increase thy welfare," or " God 
 strengthen thee." 
 
 At times the poet, who, it is said, sleeps in 
 the heart of every man, and not infrequently 
 in Arabs, in despite of their material life, woke 
 in Si Taher, and he saw the empire of Islam 
 once again flourishing, like a palm tree by a 
 pool. 
 
 He saw the banner of the Nazarenes trampled 
 beneath the feet of the Believers, and its 
 dominion once more re-established, where it had 
 flourished in the past. As in a dream, he 
 used to stray about the streets, with his eyes 
 fixed on vacancy. Little by little men began 
 to say he was a saint, a condition easily ac- 
 quired with the Arabs, amongst whom the 
 dividing-line between saint and madmen is 
 not so stringently drawn, as it is with ourselves. 
 To them all things are natural, as all things
 
 2i6 EL JEHAD 
 
 come from Allah, and if he wishes that a man 
 shall be a saint he breathes upon him, making 
 him mad, a hero, or a prophet, and setting 
 him apart. When Europeans passed him in 
 the streets they felt a feeling of repulsion ; 
 almost of fear ; the Arabs, on the other hand, 
 an ecstasy of joy when they beheld the terror 
 that he caused. 
 
 Rumours went round he was an emissary of 
 the Sennusi, that Sheikh and prophet who, 
 from the depths of his oasis, never ceased 
 praying for the restoration of the faith. 
 Others again averred he was a prophet, and 
 waited for a sign, that sign for which the whole 
 world of Islam is waiting anxiously. When 
 they receive it, so tradition says, they will all 
 rise : the husbandman will leave the plough, 
 the camel-driver his long line of camels, shep- 
 herds their flocks, and from the hills and 
 plains, thousands will march to drive the Runis 
 to the sea. 
 
 Poor and without a friend, solitary like a 
 naked sword without a sheath, Si Taher passed 
 his life, now sleeping in the courtyards of the 
 mosques, now by a camel-driver's fire, again 
 upon the shore behind a boat, with the waves 
 lulling him to sleep, now in the market-places
 
 EL JEHAD 217 
 
 watching the crowds, and walking through the 
 press, absorbed and quiet, as he were walking 
 in a wood. 
 
 Si Taher's brainpan, always as agitated as a 
 pan of crickets, kept him alternatively plunged 
 in the deepest contemplation, or else a prey to 
 visions, which left him writhen and exhausted 
 with their vividness and force. 
 
 At times, he saw himself on horseback, with 
 his long flint-lock in his hand, standing up 
 in the stirrups, leaning well back against the 
 cantle, his long reins floating in the air, his 
 burnous streaming like a flag, and close be- 
 hind him the serried ranks of an innumerable 
 army of the mysterious, blue-clad, close-veiled 
 warriors, sprung from the desert sands, as in 
 the time of the Almohades, when those fierce 
 sectaries spread over Spain like locusts, shout- 
 ing the name of God. Under the influence 
 of such dreams, his fury knew no bounds, and 
 from a peaceful, contemplative man leaning 
 upon his staff, and watching everything with- 
 out a word, he suddenly became a maniac, 
 raving and foaming at the mouth, till with the 
 very violence of his emotions, he would collapse 
 upon the sand. At such times everything 
 he saw was matter for his rage.
 
 218 EL JEHAD 
 
 French soldiers, with their baggy trousers 
 and short jackets, and worst of all their officers, 
 dressed tightly, an indecency to the true Be- 
 liever's eye, caused him to gnash his teeth, 
 and mutter that their mothers were all shame- 
 less, veilless ones, who never had said No. 
 
 Europe with all its pomps and vanities, 
 quick-firing guns, its telegraphs and telephones, 
 railways and workhouses, its boots with 
 paper soles, its women with tight stays and 
 high-heeled boots, its men who shaved their 
 chins, leaving their hair to grow, as if they 
 had been J inns, its justice which to him was 
 tyranny, and its injustices which kept him still 
 uncomprehending, all appeared as a bad 
 dream. 
 
 He had not grasped that that which is, 
 is the best that the world has known to those 
 who live in it, and that true justice only can 
 be found in some far country, unattainable 
 by man. 
 
 Well understood, the Holy Land lies always 
 just a little farther on, as did Manoa, Trapal- 
 anda, the city of the Caesars and that enchanted 
 city in the far-distant, opaline and sun- 
 flushed mountains, above San Luis Potosi. 
 For poor Si Taher, it was none of these,
 
 EL JEHAD 219 
 
 neither the Andal6s, nor Egypt, Bagdad, 
 Irak-el- Hind, or far-off Nabothea, but in the 
 humblest duar, thatched hut, or circle of low, 
 black tents of camel's hair where were maintained 
 in their integrity the customs of the faith. 
 
 These usages, which seem as if even in the 
 times of the Arabian Nights, they were old and 
 time-worn, and natural laws which dated from 
 the childhood of mankind, and which the Arabs 
 had received from those their ancestors, who 
 in the Neje and the Hedjaz, wandered with 
 flocks and herds by day and night upon the 
 piains, were to Si Taher as the essence of his 
 blood. The panorama of the bay, its ships 
 and boats, the high white town set in its frame 
 of greenest gardens, the Alcazaba, aloof, mys- 
 terious and grim, the life of the bazaars, the 
 bpen squares, in which the water-carriers bend- 
 ing beneath their bursting goat-skin, ringing a 
 little brazen bell, the passing women, noiseless 
 as spectres, and close veiled, seemed to say 
 nothing to the wanderer, or perhaps said much, 
 as may some well-remembered field say much 
 or little to the animals. 
 
 At times the injustice of his lot made him 
 indignant, as it has made indignant every outcast 
 since the beginning of the world, and as in
 
 220 EL JEHAD 
 
 the future when the advance of progress has 
 made man doubly a slave, will make those who 
 have failed, still more indignant than of yore. 
 
 Then he would say, "Vice pitches her tent 
 and fortune fixes the poles of it, whilst virtue 
 travels with adversity as her sole follower " ; 
 then set himself to find the reason with that 
 blind faith in God, which from the days of 
 St. Augustine all Africans have shared. At 
 last he thought he saw his way. Could he but 
 purify mankind all would be well, and once 
 again Allah would give the victory; but well 
 he knew that though the world goes out to 
 greet the conqueror, he must conquer first. 
 
 Since our first fathers left the fair garden by 
 the Tigris, all prophets, mad and just men, 
 and everyone who thinks upon the miserable 
 condition of mankind, racked between rage 
 and tears, has seen that man needed but purity 
 of life to save himself. 
 
 Much did Si Taher ponder on the first 
 step to take, feeling as every one of the long 
 line of prophets in the East has felt, that if 
 the world was to be saved, the task depended 
 on himself. 
 
 His constant wanderings and fasts, prolonged 
 till he saw visions, even at noontide, had re-
 
 EL JEHAD 221 
 
 duced him to a skeleton, so that he was in a fit 
 state to try and move the world, without a 
 fulcrum for the lever of his soul. 
 
 Men saw him straying about the places, 
 where those who in times past had given up 
 their lives, fighting against the enemies of God, 
 lay buried, with a rough stone to mark their 
 resting-places. 
 
 At night he gazed upon the stars, and sat 
 down listening - to the sounding of the surf, the 
 scent of orange flowers filling his nostrils as it 
 floated down the breeze. 
 
 Tears dimmed his eyes, and he recited 
 poems from the Dhvan-el-Faredi, or from 
 the Seven Suspended Lamps of the Moallakat. 
 Hours would he ponder on Al Makhari, read- 
 ing the records of his race, his studies and 
 his musings in thought becoming still more 
 melancholy, and still a little nearer to the thin 
 line that separates madness from generosity, a 
 line so thin that the most part of men can 
 never see it, thinking all mad who are not as 
 themselves. 
 
 When on the sands at powder-play, the 
 horsemen passed like a hurricane, twisting 
 their guns around their heads, just as their 
 ancestors had whirled their javelins, Si Taher
 
 222 EL JEHAD 
 
 shouted as they passed and called upon God's 
 name. 
 
 Stretched in the shade, he played his lute 
 for hours, and sang to it, in a low voice, in- 
 terminable songs, finishing every verse with a 
 long-drawn-out " Allah ! " that seemed the 
 plaint of some Believer who had lost his faith, 
 and mourned its obsequies. 
 
 When he smoked hemp he used to lie in 
 that strange drunkenness or ecstasy that falls 
 upon the smoker of the dark, pungent 
 weed. What dreams passed through his brain 
 he told to no one, or if he saw the httris, 
 beautiful as fawns, moving like branches of the 
 myrobolan, diffusing ambergris. 
 
 Most likely all his dreams were either on 
 the glories of his race, the times of Othman 
 and of Abu Bekr, or of that age when all the 
 poor were rich in contentment, the rich all 
 poor in spirit, and everyone was satisfied with 
 his condition, underneath the sky. Given over 
 to his dreams and wanderings, Si Taher 
 grew more ragged every day. His fell of 
 hair hung round his head and neck as if it 
 were a sort of unkempt aureole, uncombed and 
 dirty, and the strange air between a prophet and 
 a fool, so common to men of his kind throughout
 
 EL JEHAD 223 
 
 the East, rendered him terrible and ridiculous 
 at the same time, as he stalked glaring, 
 through the streets. 
 
 Little by little the authorities got wind. Si 
 Taher was a dangerous man. They watched 
 him carefully, but he did nothing but wander 
 through the streets, though it was known that 
 many waited anxiously, looking for a sign, 
 and the whole town was stirred, as any town 
 throughout the East is stirred when it is 
 rumoured that a prophet will arise. 
 
 At last one morning- one of those mornings 
 in the spring, in which the town buried in 
 verdure, all bathed in sun, and with the 
 scent of blossom from the orange gardens 
 make them appear like ante-rooms to Para- 
 dise, with the breeze gently ruffling the leaves, 
 the sea and land wrapped in a veil of whitest 
 light, intense and melancholy at the same 
 time, as if the sun were tired with shining for 
 so many thousand years on the same land- 
 scape, when everything was tranquil, as tran- 
 quil as in an island lost in the Pacific, Si 
 Taher rushed into the street, proclaiming the 
 Jehad, " Allahu Ackbas " the Holy War, 
 quintessence of the religion of the sword,
 
 224 EL JEHAD 
 
 and the last word of all religions upon earth. 
 Long years had passed since it last echoed 
 through the town. It ran like quicksilver 
 right to the hearts of those who heard it, 
 and serious men seated, like idols in a temple, 
 half sleeping in their shops, shivered and rose, 
 and then half doubtingly walked towards the 
 market-place. There they paused, hesitating, 
 and one looking round furtively said to his 
 friend, fingering his rosary the while, " My 
 son, take heed thy mouth break not thy neck," 
 and his friend, with his nostrils wide distended, 
 and with his breath coming spasmodically, re- 
 plied, "Yea, let the archer tarry ere he draw 
 the bow, for the shaft when it leaves the 
 string returns no more . . . but did you hear 
 the cry ? " 
 
 The water - carriers left their goat - skins 
 on the sand, and from the "Marsa" a 
 crowd of boatmen, grasping stretchers, and 
 handling their knives, left their boats rocking 
 at the quay, and flowed towards the market- 
 place all shouting out "Jehad." The word of 
 fear was mumbled by old men, and children, 
 playing, shouted it aloud. 
 
 Throughout the city a vague murmur ran, 
 as in some town, built on the slopes of a
 
 EL JEHAD 225 
 
 volcano, there runs a murmur, just before an 
 earthquake, or a lava-flow. 
 
 Rich Arabs clad in spotless white, serious 
 and imposing in their fleecy haiks, and sway- 
 ing in their majestic walk, like camels, heard 
 the cry, and taking their red praying cushions 
 underneath their arms, stood undecided waiting 
 for a sign. 
 
 Even the Spahis seated erect in their high 
 saddles, despite their discipline, looked at each 
 other furtively, afraid to meet each other's eyes. 
 
 The murmur grew, just as a mountain stream 
 in flood grows as it rushes on, and at the head 
 of a huge crowd, appeared Si Taher looking 
 like one possessed. 
 
 Foam flecked his beard, his eyes flashed 
 fire, and in his hand he bore a goat's head 
 fresh cut off, from which fell drops of blood 
 upon the faithful, when he raised his hand 
 before commencing his harangue. 
 
 He raised his voice, looked up to heaven, 
 and in the very act of speaking, stopped, as a 
 horse stops checked by the Arab bit. He 
 stopped and gazed as, pushing through the 
 crowd, there came a functionary. Short, and 
 in an ill-cut uniform that rendered him more 
 vulgar still, he tripped along with the peculiar 
 
 Q
 
 226 EL JEHAD 
 
 skipping movement of the French soldier, look- 
 ing upon the Arabs, with the look a butcher 
 gives at a fat sheep, just as he draws the knife. 
 
 His smoked-out cigarette hung to his under 
 lip, and his short sabre beat against his legs, 
 as he strode on with that peculiar air of arro- 
 gance which all authority confers. 
 
 Pushing his way amongst the crowd, he 
 made his way amongst the Arabs, who half 
 timidly and half ferociously stood waiting, as a 
 tame lion waits, not daring to attack its keeper, 
 because it fears the whip. 
 
 Striding up to the would-be Messiah, he 
 looked him firmly in the face, and in a 
 jargon, half Arabic, half French, said roughly, 
 " Macanshi el Jehad ; Si Taher, you are drunk, 
 or have been smoking hemp." 
 
 Si Taher vacillated, clutched his knife firmly, 
 then sheathed it, and then let fall the bloody 
 goat's head, which left a bright red blotch upon 
 the sand. 
 
 Obediently he followed the French soldier 
 through the crowd, and all the Arabs quietly 
 went home to wait the coming of another 
 prophet, one to whom God should give the 
 victory, and the white town returned to slumber 
 in the sun.
 
 LA PAMPA 
 
 All grass and sky, and sky and grass, and still 
 more sky and grass, the Pampa stretched from 
 the pajonales on the western bank of the 
 Parana right to the stony plain of Uspallata, a 
 thousand miles away. 
 
 It stretched from San Luis de la Punta 
 down to Bahia Blanca, and again crossing the 
 Uruguay, comprised the whole republic of that 
 name and a good half of Rio Grande, then 
 with a loop took in the misiones both of the 
 Parana and Paraguay. 
 
 Through all this ocean of tall grass, green in 
 the spring, then yellow, and in the autumn 
 brown as an old boot, the general character- 
 istics were the same. 
 
 A ceaseless wind ruffled it all and stirred its 
 waves of grass. Innumerable flocks and herds 
 enamelled it, and bands of ostriches (Mirth of the 
 Desert, as the Gauchos called them) and herds 
 of palish-yellow deer stood on the tops of the 
 
 227
 
 228 LA PAMPA 
 
 cuchillas and watched you as you galloped 
 past. 
 
 Down in the south, the Patagonian hare, 
 mataco, and the quiriquincho scudded away or 
 burrowed in the earth. Towards the middle 
 region of this great galloping ground, the 
 greatest that God made . . . perhaps He could 
 not possibly have made a better, even had He 
 tried . . . great armadillos and iguanas 
 showed themselves, and in the north, around 
 the deep metallic-toned isletas of hard-wood 
 months, flocks of macaws — red, yellow, and 
 bright blue — floated like butterflies. Up in the 
 north, ant-eaters (the Tamandua of the Guar- 
 anis) and tapirs wandered, looking as if they 
 had escaped from out the Ark. 
 
 Over the whole extent the "tero-tero" 
 hovered, screamed, whistled, and circled just 
 above your horse's head. From every montt 
 and from every maize field flew chattering 
 flocks of parakeets. 
 
 Tigers and pumas inhabited the woods, right 
 from the Estero Nembuco, which I have crossed 
 so often with the mud and water to my horse's 
 cinch, down to the Antarctic beech forests of 
 Sandy Point. 
 
 In all the rivers nutrias and lobos and the
 
 LA PAMPA 229 
 
 carpincho, with its great red teeth, swam with 
 their heads awash, laid flat upon the stream, 
 just like a seal at sea. 
 
 Viscachas burrowed, and wise, solemn little 
 owls sat at the entrance of their burrows 
 making pretence to guard them, as does a 
 sentinel before a palace door. 
 
 Locusts occasionally visited the Pampa, 
 blackening the sun, devouring all the crops, 
 and disappearing just as they had come. 
 
 "Where is the Manea?" was a familiar 
 question on the plains, and grave and bearded 
 men reined in their horses, their ponchos 
 suddenly clinging to their sides, just as a 
 boat's sail clings around the mast when it has 
 lost the wind, and pointing with a lean, brown 
 finger stained with tobacco juice, replied, For 
 allacito, en los Porongos, and then departed, 
 just as ships speak each other on the sea. 
 The north wind filled the air with cottony 
 filaments, and the pampero, roaring like a 
 whole rodeo that had taken fright, levelled the 
 houses and the grass. The air was full in 
 summer of a perpetual twittering of insects 
 that hung invisible, whilst in the winter the 
 white hoar-frost in early morning silvered the 
 grass, and hung congealed upon the tops of
 
 2 3 o LA PAMPA 
 
 stakes, just as it did in the old world in which 
 the poet-king penned the " Cantar de los Can- 
 tares," two thousand years ago. 
 
 All that, was what the Pampa had inherited 
 from nature. When I first knew it, it looked 
 just as it must have looked on the morning of 
 the seventh day in far-off Nabothea, that old- 
 world Entre-Rios, when the Creator rested and, 
 looking earthwards, saw that it was good. 
 
 Man had but little altered it, but for a peach 
 grove here and there, a white estancia house, 
 or a straw-coloured rancheria or pulperia, built 
 either at the pass of some great river or on a 
 hill, as that at the Cuchilla de Peralta, by which 
 the mule-trail, used since the Conquest, led, 
 winding upon its way towards Brazil. 
 
 Men passed each other seated upright on 
 their recaos driving their horses in a bunch 
 in front of them, swinging their whips around 
 their heads. 
 
 They passed, shouting a salutation, or if 
 too far off to be heard, waving a hand, and 
 sank into the plain just as a vessel sinks into 
 the sea, the body of the horse first disappearing, 
 then the man, poncho, and, last of all, his hat. 
 The waves of grass appeared to swallow him, 
 and as men rode they kept their eyes fixed on
 
 LA PAMPA 231 
 
 the horizon, or, if at night, upon a star. When 
 the night caught them on the plains, after 
 first hobbling the mare, they tied a horse to 
 a long soga, making, if neither stick nor bone 
 were to be found, a knot in the rope's end, 
 stamping it in, and lying down upon it. 
 
 They smoked a cigarette or two, looked at 
 the stars a little, and took good care to place 
 their heads in the direction towards which 
 they had to journey, for in the mists of sunrise 
 nothing was easier than to mistake the point 
 you aimed at, and wander back upon the trail. 
 
 In that green ocean, as the proverb said, 
 " he who wanders from the trail is lost " ; and it 
 was true enough, as many a heap of bones, to 
 which a shred of tattered cloth still clung, most 
 amply testified, as you came on them on a 
 gallop, looking perhaps for horses stolen or 
 strayed. Your companion might or might not 
 rein up his horse, but certainly would point in 
 passing, and remark, " See where the grass 
 grows rank around the bones ; there has a 
 Christian died." 
 
 " Christian " was used more as a racial than 
 a religious term, the Indians usually being 
 called Los Bravos, Los Infieles, Los Tapes, 
 the latter usually applied either to the descen-
 
 232 LA PAMPA 
 
 dants of the Charruas in the Banda Oriental, 
 or to the Indian Mansos of the Missions of the 
 north. How much the aforesaid Infieles and 
 the Tapes had left their impress on the speech 
 and the life of the Gauchos, might be seen by 
 the national costume of the poncho and the 
 chiripd. These, as the early writers tell us, 
 were adapted from the u Infidel we found 
 dwelling in all these plains, when first Don 
 Pedro de Mendoza came with his following to 
 conquer for his lord, and to proclaim the glory 
 of the name of Him who, though born in a 
 stable, is higher than all kings." In the 
 current Pampa speech the words bagual, 
 nandu, ombti and vmcka, tatu, Tacuara, and 
 bacaray, with almost all the names of plants, of 
 shrubs and trees, recalled the influence of the 
 Indians, the Quichuas, and Guaranis, the 
 Pampas and Pehuelches, Charruas, and the rest 
 of those who once inhabited the land. 
 
 Las bo/eadoras, known to the Gauchos as 
 Las tres Marias , was the distinctive weapon of 
 the southern plains. With them the Indians 
 slew many of Don Pedro de Mendoza's men at 
 the first Christianising of the River Plate, and 
 with them also did the fierce Gaucho troops 
 who rose under Elio and Liniers crash in the
 
 LA PAMPA 233 
 
 skulls of various English, Luteranos — for so the 
 good Dean Funes styles them in his history — 
 who under Whitelock had attacked the town. 
 Only upon the Pampa, in the whole world, 
 was this tremendous weapon ever known. 
 None of the Pampa tribes used bows and 
 arrows, for with them the do/as, and in especial 
 the single stone, fixed to a plaited thong of 
 hide, and called la bola perdida, quite supplied 
 their place. 
 
 In fact, for no land but the Pampa, that is, in 
 the Americas (for it could well be used in 
 Africa and Asia), are las tres Marias fit. In 
 North America the plains are bushy or the 
 grass is long as hay, conditions which would 
 militate against the throwing of a weapon 
 which, often thrown a yard or two behind the 
 quarry's legs, sprang from the ground and 
 then entangled them. 
 
 Nothing could be more typical of the wild 
 life of forty years ago upon the plains than was 
 the figure of a Gaucho dressed in his poncho 
 and his chiripd, his naked toes clutching the 
 stirrups, his long iron spurs kept in position by 
 a thong of hide, dangling below his heels, his 
 hair bound back by a red silk handkerchief, 
 his eyes ablaze, his silver knife passed
 
 234 LA PAMPA 
 
 through his sash and tirador, and sticking out 
 just under his right elbow, his pingo with its 
 mane cut into castles, and its long tail floating 
 out in the breeze as, twisting las tres Marias 
 round his head, he flew like lightning down a 
 slope, which the mere European horseman 
 would have looked on as certain death, intent 
 to " ball " one of a band of fleet nandus all 
 sailing down the wind. 
 
 Letting the bolas go, so easily, it seemed as 
 if his will and not his hand directed them, they 
 hurtled through the air, revolving on their own 
 axis sixty or seventy yards, and, when the 
 sogas met the ostriches' neck, the centrifugal 
 force being averted, the balls fell down and, 
 wrapping tightly round the legs, soon threw 
 the giant bird upon its side. Ten or twelve 
 bounds brought up the hunter, who, springing 
 from his saddle, his huge iron spurs clanking 
 like fetters on the ground, either put hobbles 
 on his horse, or if he felt quite sure of him, 
 threw the long reins upon the ground, confident 
 that it, trained by experience to know a step 
 upon the reins involved a pull upon the mouth, 
 would stand obediently. 
 
 Then, drawing his /aeon, the Gaucho either 
 stuck it deeply into the bird, low down upon
 
 LA PAMPA 235 
 
 the breast, or if occasion served, drawing a 
 spare set of boleadoras from around his waist, 
 or taking them from underneath the cojinillo 
 of the recao, crashed in his victim's skull. 
 Sometimes, indeed, with a revis of the facon 
 they used to cut the ostrich's head off at a 
 blow; but this wanted a sharp and heavy knife, 
 and an arm with which to wield it, strong 
 beyond ordinary. 
 
 I have seen a Gaucho, hunting wild colts, or 
 ostriches, in the very action of swinging the 
 bolas round his head, have his horse fall with 
 him, alight upon his feet, and without losing 
 the command of the direction of his swing, 
 catch his own horse as it, springing to its feet, 
 was just about to leave him helpless afoot upon 
 the plains. 
 
 Afoot upon the plains . . . that was indeed 
 a phrase of fear upon the Pampas of the south. 
 No mariner afloat upon the waves, his main- 
 stay but a little boat, was in a worse condition 
 than the man who, from some cause or other, 
 found himself horseless in the vast sea of 
 grass. 
 
 From having been as free as is a bird, he 
 instantly became as helpless as the same bird 
 with a wing broken by a shot.
 
 236 LA PAMPA 
 
 If cattle saw him, they not infrequently 
 attacked him, when his one chance of safety 
 (on the open plains) was to lie down and, 
 simulating death, to let them smell him, which 
 when they had done, if he lay still enough, 
 they turned and went away. When the 
 pedestrian approached a house the troop of 
 dogs that every Gaucho kept surrounded him 
 like wolves, barking and snapping at his legs 
 if it were daytime, or falling on him literally 
 like wolves if it should happen to be dark. 
 Small streams, which generally had muddy 
 bottoms, and through which his horse had 
 plunged, sinking down to the cinch, but always 
 getting through, to the man afoot became 
 impassable, making him wander up and down 
 their banks, perhaps for miles, till he could 
 find a " pass." 
 
 If by an evil chance he lost his way his fate 
 was sealed, especially upon that portion where 
 distances were great between estancias, and 
 where marauding Indians on a malon would 
 kill him if they saw him, just as a boy kills 
 a young bird when it runs fluttering across his 
 path. To lose one's horse and saddle was 
 worse than bankruptcy ; in fact, was so con- 
 sidered, as in the story of a Frenchman who
 
 LA PAMPA 237 
 
 seeing a Gaucho standing idly about, inquired 
 why he did not go out and work. 
 
 " Work, madre rnia" said the man, " how 
 can I work when I am bankrupt ? " 
 
 " What then," the Frenchman said, " you 
 have been in commerce, and fallen upon a bad 
 affair ; poor man, I pity you." The Gaucho 
 stared at him, and answered, " In commerce — 
 never in my life, but at 2.p7tlperia some Infidel 
 or other stole my horse and saddle, with lazo, 
 bolas, and a cojinillo that I bought up in 
 Rioja, and left me without shade." 
 
 Poor man, how could he work, afoot and 
 saddleless ? No doubt before the Conquest 
 men crossed the plains afoot ; but painfully, 
 taking perhaps long years to go from the 
 Atlantic to the Andes, groping along from 
 stream to stream, as the first navigators felt 
 their way from cape to cape, coasting along 
 the bays. 
 
 The coming of the horse gave a new life to 
 the vast plains ; for nature seemed to welcome 
 horses once again, from the long interval 
 between the times in which the Tertian eight- 
 footed horse roamed on the Pampas, which 
 now are populated by the descendants of the 
 thirteen mares and the three stallions that
 
 238 LA PAMPA 
 
 Pedro de Mendoza left behind when he sailed 
 back to Spain, after his first attempt to 
 colonise. 
 
 This is the way I recollect it. First came 
 short grasses, eaten close down by sheep, then 
 thistles that grew as high as a man's head, a 
 wilderness, through which the cattle had made 
 a labyrinth of paths ; then coarser grasses, and 
 by degrees wiry, brown bents, until at length 
 almost all sign of grass was lost, where the 
 Pampas joined the stony plains of Patagonia 
 in the south. 
 
 Northwards, the waving grasses also grew 
 sparser, till in the Jesuit Missions, clumps of 
 yatais encroached upon the plains, which ended 
 finally, in the dense woods of Paraguay. 
 
 Silence and solitude were equally the note 
 of north and south, with a horizon bounded by 
 what a man could see when sitting on his 
 horse. 
 
 There were few landmarks, but in the 
 southern and the middle districts a dark 
 ombu, standing beside some lone tapera 
 and whose shade fell on some rancko or 
 estancia, although the proverb said, " The 
 house shall never prosper upon whose roof 
 is thrown the shade of the o??ibu"
 
 LA PAMPA 239 
 
 Well did the ancient Quichuas name the 
 plains, with the word signifying " space," for 
 all was spacious — earth, sky, the waving con- 
 tinent of grass ; the enormous herds of cattle 
 and of horses ; the strange effects of light ; 
 the fierce and blinding storms and, above all, 
 the feeling in men's minds of freedom, and of 
 being face to face with nature, under those 
 southern skies.
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 WILLIAM BRENDON AND 60N, LID. 
 
 PLYMOUTH
 
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