Brought Forward E-Book

R. B. Cunninghame Graham

• Herausgeber: R. B. Cunninghame Graham
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

LUCKILY the war has made eggs too expensive for me to fear the public will pelt me off the stage with them.Still after years of writing one naturally dreads the cold potato and the orange-peel.

Leseprobe

Brought Forward

By

R. B. Cunninghame Graham

Table of Contents

PREFACE

I. BROUGHT FORWARD

II. LOS PINGOS

III. FIDELITY

IV. “UNO DEI MILLE”

V. WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND

VI. ELYSIUM

VII. HEREDITY

VIII. EL TANGO ARGENTINO

IX. IN ABACKWATER

X. HIPPOMORPHOUS

XI. MUDEJAR

XII. A MINOR PROPHET

XIII. EL MASGAD

XIV. FEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR

XV. BOPICUÁ

NOTES.

PREFACE

Luckily the war has made eggs too expensive for me to fear the public will pelt me off the stage with them.

Still after years of writing one naturally dreads the cold potato and the orange-peel.

I once in talking said to a celebrated dancer who was about to bid farewell to her admirers and retire to private life, “Perhaps you will take a benefit when you come back from finishing your last tour.”  She answered, “Yes . . .”; and then added, “or perhaps two.”

That is not my way, for all my life I have loved bread, bread, and wine, wine, not caring for half-measures, like your true Scot, of whom it has been said, “If he believes in Christianity he has no doubts, and if he is a disbeliever he has none either.”

Once in the Sierra Madre, either near the Santa Rosa Mountains or in the Bolson de Mápimi, I disremember which, out after horses that had strayed, we came upon a little shelter made of withies, and covered with one of those striped blankets woven by the Navajos.

A Texan who was with the party pointed to it, and said, “That is a wickey-up, I guess.”

The little wigwam, shaped like a gipsy tent, stood close to a thicket of huisaché trees in flower.  Their round and ball-like blossoms filled the air with a sweet scent.  A stream ran gently tinkling over its pebbly bed, and the tall prairie grasses flowed up to the lost little hut as if they would engulf it like a sea.

On every side of the deep valley—for I forgot to say the hut stood in a valley—towered hills with great, flat, rocky sides.  On some of them the Indian tribes had scratched rude pictures, records of their race.

In one of them—I remember it just as if now it was before my eyes—an Indian chief, surrounded by his friends, was setting free his favourite horse upon the prairies, either before his death or in reward of faithful services.  The little group of men cut in the stone, most probably with an obsidian arrow-head, was life-like, though drawn without perspective, which gave those figures of a vanished race an air of standing in the clouds.

The chief stood with his bridle in his hand, his feather war-bonnet upon his head, naked except the breech-clout.  His bow was slung across his shoulders and his quiver hung below his arm, and with the other hand he kept the sun off from his face as he gazed upon his horse.  All kinds of hunting scenes were there displayed, and others, such as the burial of a chief, a dance, and other ceremonials, no doubt as dear to those who drew them as are the rites in a cathedral to other faithful.  The flat rock bore one more inscription, stating that Eusebio Leal passed by bearing despatches, and the date, June the fifteenth, of the year 1687.  But to return again to the lone wickey-up.

We all sat looking at it: Eustaquio Gomez, Polibio Medina, Exaltacion Garcia, the Texan, two Pueblo Indians, and I who write these lines.

Somehow it had an eerie look about it, standing so desolate, out in those flowery wilds.

Inside it lay the body of a man, with the skin dry as parchment, and his arms beside him, a Winchester, a bow and arrows, and a lance.  Eustaquio, taking up an arrow, after looking at it, said that the dead man was an Apache of the Mescalero band, and then, looking upon the ground and pointing out some marks, said, “He had let loose his horse before he died, just as the chief did in the picture-writing.”

That was his epitaph, for how death overtook him none of us could conjecture; but I liked the manner of his going off the stage.

’Tis meet and fitting to set free the horse or pen before death overtakes you, or before the gentle public turns its thumbs down and yells, “Away with him.”

Charles Lamb, when some one asked him something of his works, answered that they were to be found in the South Sea House, and that they numbered forty volumes, for he had laboured many years there, making his bricks with the least possible modicum of straw,—just like the rest of us.

Mine, if you ask me, are to be found but in the trails I left in all the years I galloped both on the prairies and the pampas of America.

Hold it not up to me for egotism, O gentle reader, for I would have you know that hardly any of the horses that I rode had shoes on them, and thus the tracks are faint.

      Vale.

R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.

I.BROUGHT FORWARD

The workshop in Parkhead was not inspiriting.  From one week’s end to another, all throughout the year, life was the same, almost without an incident.  In the long days of the Scotch summer the men walked cheerily to work, carrying their dinner in a little tin.  In the dark winter mornings they tramped in the black fog, coughing and spitting, through the black mud of Glasgow streets, each with a woollen comforter, looking like a stocking, round his neck.

Outside the dreary quarter of the town, its rows of dingy, smoke-grimed streets and the mean houses, the one outstanding feature was Parkhead Forge, with its tall chimneys belching smoke into the air all day, and flames by night.  Its glowing furnaces, its giant hammers, its little railway trucks in which men ran the blocks of white-hot iron which poured in streams out of the furnaces, flamed like the mouth of hell.

Inside the workshop the dusty atmosphere made a stranger cough on entering the door.  The benches with the rows of aproned men all bending at their work, not standing upright, with their bare, hairy chests exposed, after the fashion of the Vulcans at the neighbouring forge, gave a half-air of domesticity to the close, stuffy room.

A semi-sedentary life quickened their intellect; for where men work together they are bound to talk about the topics of the day, especially in Scotland, where every man is a born politician and a controversialist.  At meal-times, when they ate their “piece” and drank their tea that they had carried with them in tin flasks, each one was certain to draw out a newspaper from the pocket of his coat, and, after studying it from the Births, Deaths, and Marriages, down to the editor’s address on the last page, fall a-disputing upon politics.  “Man, a gran’ speech by Bonar Law aboot Home Rule.  They Irish, set them up, what do they make siccan a din aboot?  Ca’ ye it Home Rule?  I juist ca’ it Rome Rule.  A miserable, priest-ridden crew, the hale rick-ma-tick o’ them.”

The reader then would pause and, looking round the shop, wait for the answer that he was sure would not be long in coming from amongst such a thrawn lot of commentators.  Usually one or other of his mates would fold his paper up, or perhaps point with an oil-stained finger to an article, and with the head-break in the voice, characteristic of the Scot about to plunge into an argument, ejaculate: “Bonar Law, ou aye, I kent him when he was leader of the South Side Parliament.  He always was a dreary body, sort o’ dreich like; no that I’m saying the man is pairfectly illiterate, as some are on his side o’ the Hoose there in Westminister.  I read his speech—the body is na blate, sort o’ quick at figures, but does na take the pains to verify.  Verification is the soul of mathematics.  Bonar Law, eh!  Did ye see how Maister Asquith trippit him handily in his tabulated figures on the jute business under Free Trade, showing that all he had advanced about protective tariffs and the drawback system was fair redeeklous . . . as well as several errors in the total sum?”

Then others would cut in and words be bandied to and fro, impugning the good faith and honour of every section of the House of Commons, who, by the showing of their own speeches, were held to be dishonourable rogues aiming at power and place, without a thought for anything but their own ends.

This charitable view of men and of affairs did not prevent any of the disputants from firing up if his own party was impugned; for in their heart of hearts the general denunciation was but a covert from which to attack the other side.

In such an ambient the war was sure to be discussed; some held the German Emperor was mad—“a daft-like thing to challenge the whole world, ye see; maist inconsiderate, and shows that the man’s intellect is no weel balanced . . . philosophy is whiles sort of unsettlin’ . . . the felly’s mad, ye ken.”

Others saw method in his madness, and alleged that it was envy, “naething but sheer envy that had brought on this tramplin’ upon natural rights, but for all that he may be thought to get his own again, with they indemnities.”

Those who had studied economics “were of opinion that his reasoning was wrong, built on false premises, for there can never be a royal road to wealth.  Labour, ye see, is the sole creative element of riches.”  At once a Tory would rejoin, “And brains.  Man, what an awfu’ thing to leave out brains.  Think of the marvellous creations of the human genius.”  The first would answer with, “I saw ye coming, man.  I’ll no deny that brains have their due place in the economic state; but build me one of your Zeppelins and stick it in the middle of George Square without a crew to manage it, and how far will it fly?  I do not say that brains did not devise it; but, after all, labour had to carry out the first design.”  This was a subject that opened up enormous vistas for discussion, and for a time kept them from talking of the war.

Jimmy and Geordie, hammering away in one end of the room, took little part in the debate.  Good workmen both of them, and friends, perhaps because of the difference of their temperaments, for Jimmy was the type of red-haired, blue-eyed, tall, lithe Scot, he of the perfervidum ingenium, and Geordie was a thick-set, black-haired, dour and silent man.

Both of them read the war news, and Jimmy, when he read, commented loudly, bringing down his fist upon the paper, exclaiming, “Weel done, Gordons!” or “That was a richt gude charge upon the trenches by the Sutherlands.”  Geordie would answer shortly, “Aye, no sae bad,” and go on hammering.

One morning, after a reverse, Jimmy did not appear, and Geordie sat alone working away as usual, but if possible more dourly and more silently.  Towards midday it began to be whispered in the shop that Jimmy had enlisted, and men turned to Geordie to ask if he knew anything about it, and the silent workman, brushing the sweat off his brow with his coat-sleeve, rejoined: “Aye, ou aye, I went wi’ him yestreen to the headquarters o’ the Camerons; he’s joined the kilties richt eneugh.  Ye mind he was a sergeant in South Africa.”  Then he bent over to his work and did not join in the general conversation that ensued.

Days passed, and weeks, and his fellow-workmen, in the way men will, occasionally bantered Geordie, asking him if he was going to enlist, and whether he did not think shame to let his friend go off alone to fight.  Geordie was silent under abuse and banter, as he had always been under the injustices of life, and by degrees withdrew into himself, and when he read his newspaper during the dinner-hour made no remark, but folded it and put it quietly into the pocket of his coat.

Weeks passed, weeks of suspense, of flaring headlines in the Press, of noise of regiments passing down the streets, of newsboys yelling hypothetic victories, and of the tension of the nerves of men who know their country’s destiny is hanging in the scales.  Rumours of losses, of defeats, of victories, of checks and of advances, of naval battles, with hints of dreadful slaughter filled the air.  Women in black were seen about, pale and with eyelids swollen with weeping, and people scanned the reports of killed and wounded with dry throats and hearts constricted as if they had been wrapped in whipcord, only relaxing when after a second look they had assured themselves the name they feared to see was absent from the list.

Long strings of Clydesdale horses ridden by men in ragged clothes, who sat them uneasily, as if they felt their situation keenly, perched up in the public view, passed through the streets.  The massive caulkers on their shoes struck fire occasionally upon the stones, and the great beasts, taught to rely on man as on a god from the time they gambolled in the fields, went to their doom unconsciously, the only mitigation of their fate.  Regiments of young recruits, some in plain clothes and some in hastily-made uniforms, marched with as martial an air as three weeks’ training gave them, to the stations to entrain.  Pale clerks, the elbows of their jackets shiny with the slavery of the desk, strode beside men whose hands were bent and scarred with gripping on the handles of the plough in February gales or wielding sledges at the forge.

All of them were young and resolute, and each was confident that he at least would come back safe to tell the tale.  Men stopped and waved their hats, cheering their passage, and girls and women stood with flushed cheeks and straining eyes as they passed on for the first stage that took them towards the front.  Boys ran beside them, hatless and barefooted, shouting out words that they had caught up on the drill-ground to the men, who whistled as they marched a slow and grinding tune that sounded like a hymn.

Traffic was drawn up close to the kerbstone, and from the top of tram-cars and from carts men cheered, bringing a flush of pride to many a pale cheek in the ranks.  They passed on; men resumed the business of their lives, few understanding that the half-trained, pale-faced regiment that had vanished through the great station gates had gone to make that business possible and safe.

Then came a time of waiting for the news, of contradictory paragraphs in newspapers, and then a telegram, the “enemy is giving ground on the left wing”; and instantly a feeling of relief that lightened every heart, as if its owner had been fighting and had stopped to wipe his brow before he started to pursue the flying enemy.

The workmen in the brassfitters’ shop came to their work as usual on the day of the good news, and at the dinner-hour read out the accounts of the great battle, clustering upon each other’s shoulders in their eagerness.  At last one turned to scan the list of casualties.  Cameron, Campbell, M’Alister, Jardine, they read, as they ran down the list, checking the names off with a match.  The reader stopped, and looked towards the corner where Geordie still sat working silently.

All eyes were turned towards him, for the rest seemed to divine even before they heard the name.  “Geordie man, Jimmy’s killed,” the reader said, and as he spoke Geordie laid down his hammer, and, reaching for his coat, said, “Jimmy’s killed, is he?  Well, some one’s got to account for it.”

Then, opening the door, he walked out dourly, as if already he felt the knapsack on his back and the avenging rifle in his hand.

II.LOS PINGOS

The amphitheatre of wood enclosed a bay that ran so far into the land it seemed a lake.  The Uruguay flowed past, but the bay was so land-locked and so well defended by an island lying at its mouth that the illusion was complete, and the bay appeared to be cut off from all the world.

Upon the river twice a day passed steamboats, which at night-time gave an air as of a section of a town that floated past the wilderness.  Streams of electric light from every cabin lit up the yellow, turgid river, and the notes of a band occasionally floated across the water as the vessel passed.  Sometimes a searchlight falling on a herd of cattle, standing as is their custom after nightfall upon a little hill, made them stampede into the darkness, dashing through brushwood or floundering through a marsh, till they had placed themselves in safety from this new terror of the night.

Above the bay the ruins of a great building stood.  Built scarcely fifty years ago, and now deserted, the ruins had taken on an air as of a castle, and from the walls sprang plants, whilst in the deserted courtyard a tree had grown, amongst whose branches oven-birds had built their hanging nests of mud.  Cypresses towered above the primeval hard-wood, which grew all gnarled and horny-looking, and nearly all had kept their Indian names, as ñandubay, chañar, tala and sarandi, molle, and many another name as crabbed as the trunks which, twisted and distorted, looked like the limbs of giants growing from the ground.

Orange trees had run wild and shot up all unpruned, and apple trees had reverted back to crabs.  The trunks of all the fruit-trees in the deserted garden round the ruined factory were rubbed shiny by the cattle, for all the fences had long been destroyed or fallen into decay.

A group of roofless workmen’s cottages gave an air of desolation to the valley in which the factory and its dependencies had stood.  They too had been invaded by the powerful sub-tropical plant life, and creepers covered with bunches of bright flowers climbed up their walls.  A sluggish stream ran through the valley and joined the Uruguay, making a little natural harbour.  In it basked cat-fish, and now and then from off the banks a tortoise dropped into the water like a stone.  Right in the middle of what once had been the square grew a ceiba tree, covered with lilac flowers, hanging in clusters like gigantic grapes.  Here and there stood some old ombús, their dark metallic leaves affording an impenetrable shade.  Their gnarled and twisted roots, left half-exposed by the fierce rains, gave an unearthly, prehistoric look to them that chimed in well with the deserted air of the whole place.  It seemed that man for once had been subdued, and that victorious nature had resumed her sway over a region wherein he had endeavoured to intrude, and had been worsted in the fight.

Nature had so resumed her sway that buildings, planted trees, and paths long overgrown with grass, seemed to have been decayed for centuries, although scarce twenty years had passed since they had been deserted and had fallen into decay.

They seemed to show the power of the recuperative force of the primeval forest, and to call attention to the fact that man had suffered a defeat.  Only the grass in the deserted square was still triumphant, and grew short and green, like an oasis in the rough natural grasses that flowed nearly up to it, in the clearings of the woods.

The triumph of the older forces of the world had been so final and complete that on the ruins there had grown no moss, but plants and bushes with great tufts of grass had sprung from them, leaving the stones still fresh as when the houses were first built.  Nature in that part of the New World enters into no compact with mankind, as she does over here in Europe to touch his work kindly and almost with a reverent hand, and blend it into something half compounded of herself.  There bread is bread and wine is wine, with no half-tints to make one body of the whole.  The one remaining evidence of the aggression of mankind, which still refused to bow the knee to the overwhelming genius of the place, was a round bunch of eucalyptus trees that stood up stark and unblushing, the colour of the trunks and leaves so harshly different from all around them that they looked almost vulgar, if such an epithet can be properly applied to anything but man.  Under their exiguous shade were spread saddles and bridles, and on the ground sat men smoking and talking, whilst their staked-out horses fed, fastened to picket-pins by raw-hide ropes.  So far away from everything the place appeared that the group of men looked like a band of pioneers upon some frontier, to which the ruins only gave an air of melancholy, but did nothing to dispel the loneliness.

As they sat idly talking, trying to pass, or, as they would have said, trying to make time, suddenly in the distance the whistle of an approaching steamer brought the outside world into the little, lonely paradise.  Oddly enough it sounded, in the hot, early morning air, already heavy with the scent of the mimosas in full bloom.  Butterflies flitted to and fro or soared above the scrub, and now and then a wild mare whinnied from the thickets, breaking the silence of the lone valley through which the yellow, little stream ran to the Uruguay.