Thirteen Stories

By R. B. Cunninghame Graham

Author of “Mogreb-El-Acksa,” etc.

London William Heinemann 1900

p. ivAll rights, including translation, reserved

p. vTo

George Morton Mansel

I Dedicate these sketches, stories, studies, or what do you call them. We have galloped together over many leagues of Pampa, by day and night, and therefore I hope he will find the tales (or what do you call them) as near square by the lifts and braces, as is to be expected from a mere landsman.

Acknowledgments are due to:

The “Saturday Review,” the “Westminster Gazette,” and “Justice,” in which papers several of the Sketches included in this volume have appeared.

p. viiPREFACE

To-day in warfare all the niceties of old-world tactics are fallen into contempt. No word of outworks, ravelins, of mamelons, of counter-scarps, of glacis, fascines; none of the terms by means of which Vauban obscured his art, are even mentioned. Armies fall to and blow such brains as they may have out of each other’s heads without so much as a salute. And so of literature, your “few first words,” your “avant-propos,” your nice approaches to the reader, giving him beforehand some taste of what is to follow, have also fallen into disuse. The man of genius (and in no age has self-dubbed genius called out so loud in every street, and been accepted at its own appraisement) stuffs you his epoch-making book full of the technicalities of some obscure or half-forgotten trade, and rattles on at once, sans introduction, twenty knots an hour, like a torpedo boat. No preface, dedication, not even p. viiian apology pro existentiâ ejus intervening betwixt the bewildered public and the full power of his wit. A graceless way of doing things, and not comparable to the slow

approach by “prefatory words,” “censura,” “dedication,” by means of which the writers of the past had half disarmed the critic ere he had read a line. I like to fancy to myself the progress of a fight in days gone by, with marching, countermarching, manoeuvring, so to speak, for the weather-gauge, and then the general engagement all by the book of arithmetic, and squadrons going down like men upon a chessboard after nice calculation, and like gentlemen.

Who, hidden in a wood, watching a nymph about to bathe, would care to see her strip off her “duds” like an umbrella-case, and bounce into the river like a water-rat?—a lawn upon the grass, a scarf hung on a bush, a petticoat rocked by the wind upon the sward, then the shy trying of the water with the naked feet, and lastly something flashing in the sun which you could hardly swear you had seen, so rapidly it passed into the stream, would most enchant the gaze of the rapt watcher hidden behind his tree. And so of literature, wheedle me by degrees, your reader to your book, as did the giants of the past in graceful p. ixpreface, dedication, or what do you call it, that got the readers, so to speak, into the book before they were aware. It seems to me, a world all void of grace must needs be cruel, for cruelty and grace go not together, and perhaps the hearts of the pig-tailed, pipe-clayed generals of the past were not more hard than are the hearts of their tweed-clad descendants who now-a-days blow you a thousand savages to paradise, and then sit down to lunch.

Let there be no mistake; the writer and the reader are sworn foes. The writer labouring for bread, or hopes of fame, from idleness, from too much energy, or from that uncontrollable dance of St. Vitus in the muscles of the wrist which prompts so many men to write (the Lord knows why), works, blots, corrects, rewrites, revises, and improves; then publishes, and for the most part is incontinently damned. Then comes the reader cavalierly, as the train shunts at Didcot, or puffs and snorts into Carlisle, and gingerly examining the book says it is rubbish, and that he wonders how people who should have something else to do, find time to spend their lives in writing trash.

I take it that there is a modesty of mind as deep implanted in the soul of man as is the p. xsupergrafted post-Edenian modesty of the body; which latter, by the way, so soon is lost, restraints of custom or convention laid aside.

Who that would strip his clothes off, and walk down Piccadilly, even if the day were warm (the police all drunk or absent), without some hesitation, and an announcement of his purpose, say, in the columns of the Morning Post?

Therefore, why strip the soul stark naked to the public gaze without some hesitation and due interval, by means of which to make folk understand that which you write is what you think you feel; part of yourself, a part, moreover, which once given out can never be recalled?

So of the sketches in this book, most of them treat of scenes seen in that magic period, youth, when things impress themselves on the imagination more sharply than in after years; and the scenes too have vanished; that is, the countries where they passed have all been changed, and now-a-days are full of barbed-wire fences, advertisements, and desolation, the desolation born of imperfect progress. The people, too, I treat of, for the most part have disappeared; being born unfit for progress, it has passed over them, and their place is occupied by worthy men who cheat to p. xibetter purpose, and more scientifically. Therefore, I, writing as a man who has not only seen but lived with ghosts, may perhaps find pardon for this preface, for who would run in heavily and dance a hornpipe on the turf below which sleep the dead? And if I am not pardoned for my hesitation, dislike, or call it what you will, to give these little sketches to the world without preamble, after my fashion, I care not overmuch.

In the phantasmagoria we call the world, most things and men are ghosts, or at the best but ghosts of ghosts, so vaporous and unsubstantial that they scarcely cast a shadow on the grass. That which is most abiding with us is the recollection of the past, and . . . hence this preface.

R. B. Cunninghame Graham.

p. xiiiCONTENTS

Page

Cruz Alta

1

In a German Tramp

85

The Gold Fish

103

A Hegira

119

Sidi Bu Zibbalà

145

La Pulperia

163

Higginson’s Dream

177

Calvary

189

A Pakeha

201

Victory

209

Rothenberger’s Wedding

219

La Clemenza De Tito

227

Sohail

235

p. 1CRUZ ALTA

p. 3Pasted into an old scrap-book, chiefly filled with newspaper cuttings from Texan and Mexican newspapers containing accounts of Indian fights, the prowess of different horses (notably of a celebrated “claybank,” which carried the mail-rider from El Paso to Oakville, Arizona), and interspersed with advertisements of strayed animals, pictures of Gauchos, Indians, Chilians, Brazilians, and Gambusinos, is an old coffee-coloured business card. On it is set forth, that Francisco Cardozo de Carvallo is the possessor of a “Grande Armazem de Fazendas, ferragems, drojas, chapeos, miudezas, e objectos de fantasia e de modas.”

All the above, “Com grande reduccao nos preços.” Then occurs the significant advertença, “Mas A Dinheiro,” and the address Rua do Commercio, No. 77.—Cruz Alta.

Often on winter nights when all the air is filled with whirling leaves dashing against the panes, when through the house sweep gusts of wind making the passages unbearable with cold, the rooms disconsolate, and the whole place feel eerie and ghostlike as the trees creak, groan and labour, like a ship at sea, I take the scrap-book down.

In it are many things more interesting by far to me at certain times than books or papers, or than the conversation of my valued friends; almost as great a consolation as is tobacco to a bruised p. 4mind; and then I turn the pages over with delight tinged with that melancholy which is the best part of remembrance.

So amongst tags of poetry as Joaquim Miller’s lines “For those who fail,” the advertisement for my fox-terrier Jack, the “condemndest little buffler” the Texans called him, couched in the choicest of Castilian, and setting forth his attributes, colour and name, and offering five dollars to any one who would apprehend and take him to the Callejon del Espiritu Santo, Mexico, curious and striking outsides of match-boxes, one entire series illustrating the “Promessi Sposi”; of scraps, detailing news of Indian caciques long since dead, a lottery-ticket of the State of Louisiana, passes on “busted” railways, and the like, is this same coffee-coloured card.

I cannot remember that I was a great dealer at the emporium, the glories of which the card sets forth, except for cigarettes and “Rapadura”; that is, raw sugar in a little cake done up in maize-leaves, matches, and an occasional glass of white Brazilian rum.

Still during two long months the place stood to me in lieu of club, and in it I used to meet occasional German “Fazenderos,” merchants from Surucaba, and officers on the march from San Paulo to Rio Grande; and there I used to lounge, waiting for customers to buy a “Caballada” of some hundred horses, which a friend and I had p. 5brought with infinite labour from the plains of Uruguay. Thinking upon the strange and curious types I used to meet, clad for the most part in loose black Turkish trousers, broad-brimmed felt hats kept in their place by a tasselled string beneath the chin, in real or sham vicuña ponchos, high patent-leather boots, sewn in patterns with red thread; upon the horses with silver saddles and reins, securely tied to posts outside the door, and on the ceaseless rattle of spurs upon the bare brick floors which made a sort of obligato accompaniment to the monotonous music of the guitar, full twenty years fall back.

Yet still the flat-roofed town, capital of the district in Rio Grande known as Encima de la Sierra, the stopping-place for the great droves of mules which from the Banda Oriental and Entre Rios are driven to the annual fair at Surucaba; the stodgy Brazilian countrymen so different from the Gauchos of the River Plate; the negroes at that time slaves; the curious vegetation, and the feeling of being cut off from all the world, are fresh as yesterday.

Had but the venture turned out well, no doubt I had forgotten it, but to have worked for four long months driving the horses all the day through country quite unknown to me, sitting the most part of each night upon my horse on guard, or riding slowly round and round the herd, eating jerked beef, and sleeping, often wet, upon the ground, to p. 6lose my money, has fixed the whole adventure on my memory for life.

Failure alone is interesting.

Successful generals with their hands scarce dry from the blood of half-armed foes; financiers, politicians; those who rise, authors whose works run to a dozen editions in a year: the men who go to colonies with or without the indispensable half-crown and come back rich, to these we give our greetings in the market-place; we make them knights, marking their children with the father’s bourgeois brand: we marvel at their fortune for a brief space, and make them doctors of civil law, exposing them during the process to be insulted by our undergraduates, then they drop out of recollection and become uninteresting, as nature formed their race.

But those who fail after a glorious fashion, Raleigh, Cervantes, Chatterton, Camoens, Blake, Claverhouse, Lovelace, Alcibiades, Parnell, and the last unknown deck-hand who, diving overboard after a comrade, sinks without saving him: these interest us, at least they interest those who, cursed with imagination, are thereby doomed themselves to the same failure as their heroes were. The world is to the unimaginative, for them are honours, titles, rank and ample waistbands; foolish phylacteries broad as trade union banners; their own esteem and death to sound of Bible leaves fluttered by sorrowing friends, with the sure hope of waking p. 7up immortal in a new world on the same pattern as the world that they have left.

After a wretched passage down the coast, we touched at Rio, and in the Rua Direita, no doubt now called Rio Primero de Mayo or some other revolutionary date, we saw a Rio Grandense soldier on a fine black horse. As we were going to the River Plate to make our fortunes, my companion asked me what such a horse was worth, and where the Brazilian Government got their remounts. I knew no horses of the kind were bred nearer than Rio Grande, or in Uruguay, and that a horse such as the trooper rode, might in the latter country be worth an ounce. We learned in Rio that his price was eighty dollars, and immediately a golden future rose before our eyes. What could be easier than in Uruguay, which I knew well and where I had many friends (now almost to a man dead in the revolutions or killed by rum), to buy the horses and drive them overland to the Brazilian capital?

We were so confident of the soundness of our scheme that I believe we counted every hour till the boat put to sea.

Not all the glories of the Tijuca with its view across the bay straight into fairyland, the red-roofed town, the myriad islets, the tall palm-tree avenue of Botafogo, the tropic trees and butterflies, and the whole wondrous panorama spread at our feet, contented us.

During the voyage to the River Plate we planned p. 8the thing well out, and talked it over with our friends. They, being mostly of our age, found it well reasoned, and envied us, they being due at banks and counting-houses, and other places where no chance like ours of making money, could be found. Arrived in Buenos Ayres, a cursed chance called us to Bahia Blanca upon business, but though we had a journey of about a thousand miles to make through territory just wasted by the Indians and in which at almost every house a man or two lay dead, we counted it as nothing, for we well knew on our return our fortunes were assured.

And so the autumn days upon the Arroyo de los Huesos seemed more glorious than autumn days in general, even in that climate perhaps the most exhilarating of the world. Horses went better, “maté” was hotter in the mouth, the pulperia caña seemed more tolerable, and the “China” girls looked more desirable than usual, even to philosophers who had their fortunes almost as good as made.

Our business in the province of Buenos Ayres done, and by this time I have forgotten what it was, we sold our horses, some of the best I ever saw in South America, for whatever they would fetch, and in a week found ourselves in Durazno, a little town in Uruguay, where in the camps surrounding, horses and mules were cheap.

About a league outside the town, and in a wooded elbow of the river Yi, lived our friend Don Guillermo. p. 9I myself years before had helped to build his house; and in and out of season, no matter if I arrived upon a “pingo” shining with silver gear, or on a “mancaron” with an old saddle topped by a ragged sheepskin, I was a welcome guest.

Ah! Don Guillermo, you and your brother Don Tomas rise also through the mist of twenty years.

Catholics, Scotchmen, and gentlemen, kindly and hospitable, bold riders and yet so religious that, though it must have been a purgatory to them as horsemen, they used to trudge on foot to mass on Sunday, swimming the Yi when it was flooded, with their clothes and missals on their heads, may God have pardoned you.

Not that the sins of either of them could have been great, or of the kind but that the briefest sojourn in purgatory should not have wiped them out.

To those rare Catholic families in Scotland an old-world flavour clings. When Knox and that “lewid monk,” the Regent Murray, all agog for progress and so-called purer worship, pestered and bothered Scotland into a change of faith, those few who clung to Catholicism seemed to become repositories of the traditions of an older world.

Heaven and hell, no resting-place for the weaker souls between, have rendered Scotland a hard place for the ordinary man who wants his purgatory, even if by another name. Surely our Scottish theologians p. 10had done well, although they heated up our hell like a glass furnace, to leave us purgatory; that is if “Glesca” be not purgatory enough even for those who, like North Britons, have no doubt on any subject either in heaven above, or in the earth below. So to the house of Don Guillermo—even the name has now escaped me, though I see it, mud-built and thatched with “paja,” standing on a little sandy hill, surrounded on two sides by wood, on the others looking straight out upon the open “camp”—hot foot we came. Riding upon two strayed horses known as “ajenos,” bought for a dollar each in Durazno, we arrived, carrying our scanty property in saddle-bags, rode to the door, called out “Hail, Mary!” after the fashion of the country and in deference to the religion of our hosts, which was itself of so sincere a caste that every one attempted to

conform to it, as far as possible, whilst in their house; received the answer “Without sin conceived”; got off, and straightway launched into a discussion of our plan.

Assembled in the house were Wycherley, Harrington and Trevelyan, and other commentators, whose names have slipped my mind. Some were “estancieros,” that is cattle or sheep farmers; others again were loafers, all mostly men of education, with the exception of Newfoundland Jack, a sailor, who had left the navy in a hurry, after some peccadillo, but who, once in the camp, took a high place amongst men, by his knowledge of splicing, p. 11making turks’ heads, and generally applying all his acquired sea-lore to saddlery, and from a trick he had of forcing home his arguments with a short knife, the handle fixed on with a raw cow’s tail, and which in using he threw from hand to hand, and generally succeeded in burying deeply in his opponent’s chest. Our friends all liked the scheme, pronounced it practical and businesslike, and, to show goodwill, despatched a boy to town to bring a demijohn of caña back at full speed, instructing him to put it down to our account, not to delay upon the way, and to be careful no one stole it at the crossing of the Yi.

Long we sat talking, waiting for the advent of the boy, till at last, seeing he would not come that night, and a thick mist rising up from the river having warned us that the night was wearing on, we spread our saddles on the floor, and went to sleep. At daybreak, cold and miserable, the boy appeared, bringing the caña in a demijohn, and to our questions said he had passed the river, hit the “rincon,” and heard the dogs bark in the mist; but after trying for an hour could never find the house. Then, thinking that his horse might know the way, laid down the reins, and the horse took him straight to the other horses, who, being startled at the sudden apparition of their friend saddled and mounted in the dead of night, vanished like spectres into the thickest of the fog. Then tired of riding, after an hour or two, took off his saddle, p. 12and had passed the night, as it appeared at daybreak, not a quarter of a mile away.

Between the town and Don Guillermo’s house there ran a river called the Yi; just at the pass a “balsa” plied, drawn over by stout ropes. On either side the “pass” stood pulperias, that is camp-stores, where gin and sardines, Vino Carlon, Yerba, and all the necessaries of frontier life could be procured. Horses and cattle, mules and troops of sheep passed all the day, and gamblers plied their trade, whilst in some huts girls, known as “Chinas,” watched the passers-by, loitering in deshabille before their mare’s hide doors, singing “cielitos,” or the “gato,” to the accompaniment of a guitar, or merely shouting to the stranger, “Che, si quieres cosa buena vente por acá.” A half-Arcadian, half-Corinthian place the crossing was; fights there were frequent, and a “Guapeton,” that is, a pretty handler of his knife, once kept things lively for a month or two, challenging all the passers-by to fight, till luckily a Brazilian, going to the town, put things in order with an iron-handled whip.