A ball in a private house at Buenos Ayres had its peculiar features in the "'eighties." In the first place, none of the furniture was removed from the rooms, and so far from taking up carpets, carpets were actually laid down, should the rooms be unprovided with them. This rendered dancing somewhat difficult; in fact a ball resolved itself into a leisurely arm-in-arm promenade to music through the rooms, steering an erratic course between the articles of furniture, "drawing the port," as a Scottish curler would put it. Occasionally a space behind a sofa could be found sufficiently large to attempt a few mild gyrations, but that was all. The golden youth of Buenos Ayres, in the place of the conventional white evening tie, all affected the most deplorable bows of pale pink or pale green satin. A wedding, too, differed from the European routine. The parents of the bride gave a ball. At twelve o'clock dancing, or promenading amidst the furniture, ceased. A portable altar was brought into the room; a priest made his unexpected entry, and the young couple were married at breakneck speed. At the conclusion of the ceremony, all the young men darted at the bride and tore her marriage-veil to shreds. Priest, altar, and the newly-married couple then disappeared; the band struck up again, and dancing, or rather a leisurely progress round the sofas and ottomans, recommenced.
A form of entertainment that appeals immensely to people of Spanish blood is a masked ball. In Buenos Ayres the ladies only were masked, which gave them a distinct advantage over the men. To enjoy a masquerade a good knowledge of Spanish is necessary. All masked women are addressed indiscriminately as "mascarita" and can be "tutoyée'd." Convention permits, too, anything within reasonable limits to be said by a man to "mascaritas," who one and all assume a little high-pitched head-voice to conceal their identities. I fancy that the real attractions masquerades had for most women lay in the opportunity they afforded every "mascarita" of saying with impunity abominably rude things to some other woman whom she detested. I remember one "mascarita," an acquaintance of mine, whose identity I pierced at once, giving another veiled form accurate details not only as to the date when the pearly range of teeth she was exhibiting to the world had come into her possession, but also the exact price she had paid for them.
It takes a stranger from the North some little time to accustom himself to the inversion of seasons and of the points of the compass in the southern hemisphere. For instance, "a lovely spring day in October," or "a chilly autumn evening in May," rings curiously to our ears; as it does to hear of a room with a cool southern aspect, or to hear complaints about the hot north wind. Personally I did not dislike the north wind; it was certainly moist and warm, but it smelt deliciously fragrant with a faint spicy odour after its journey over the great Brazilian forests on its way from the Equator. All Argentines seemed to feel the north wind terribly; it gave them headaches, and appeared to dislocate their entire nervous system. In the Law Courts it was held to be a mitigating circumstance should it be proved that a murder, or other crime of violence, had been committed after a long spell of north wind. Many women went about during a north wind with split beans on their temples to soothe their headaches, a comical sight till one grew accustomed to it. The old German housekeeper of the Chancery, Frau Bauer, invariably had split beans adhering to her temples when the north wind blew.
The icy pampero, the south wind direct from the Pole, was the great doctor of Buenos Ayres. Darwin used to consider the River Plate the electrical centre of the world. Nowhere have I experienced such terrific thunderstorms as in the Argentine. Sometimes on a stifling summer night, with the thermometer standing at nearly a hundred degrees, one of these stupendous storms would break over the city with floods of rain. Following on the storm would come the pampero, gently at first, but increasing in violence until a blustering, ice-cold gale went roaring through the sweltering city, bringing the temperature down in four hours with a run from 100 degrees to 60 degrees. Extremely pleasant for those like myself with sound lungs; very dangerous to those with delicate chests.
The old-fashioned Argentine house had no protection over the patio. In bad weather the occupants had to make their way through the rain from one room to another. Some of the newer houses were built in a style which I have seen nowhere else except on the stage. Everyone is familiar with those airy dwellings composed principally of open colonnades one sees on stage back-cloths. These houses were very similar in design, with open halls of columns and arches, and open-air staircases. On the stage it rains but seldom, and the style may be suited to the climatic conditions prevailing there. In real life it must be horribly inconvenient. The Italian Minister at Buenos Ayres lived in a house of this description. In fine weather it looked extremely picturesque, but I imagine that his Excellency's progress to bed must have been attended with some difficulties when, during a thunderstorm, the rain poured in cataracts down his open-air staircase, and the pampero howled through his open arcades and galleries.
The theatres at Buenos Ayres were quite excellent. At the Opera all the celebrated singers of Europe could be heard, although one could almost have purchased a nice little freehold property near London for the price asked for a seat. There were two French theatres, one devoted to light opera, the other to Palais Royal farces, both admirably given; and, astonishingly enough, during part of my stay, there was actually an English theatre with an English stock company. A peculiarly Spanish form of entertainment is the "Zarzuela," a sort of musical farce. It requires a fairly intimate knowledge of the language to follow these pieces with their many topical allusions.
The Spanish-American temperament seems to dislike instinctively any gloomy or morbid dramas, differing widely from the Russians in this respect. At Petrograd, on the Russian stage, the plays, in addition to the usual marital difficulties, were brightened up by allusions to such cheerful topics as inherited tendencies to kleptomania or suicide, or an intense desire for self-mutilation. What appeals to the morbid frost-bound North apparently fails to attract the light-hearted sons of the southern hemisphere.
Buenos Ayres was also a city of admirable restaurants. In the fashionable places, resplendent with mirrors, coloured marbles and gilding, the cooking rivals Paris, and the bill, when tendered, makes one inclined to rush to the telegraph office to cable for further and largely increased remittances from Europe. There were a number, however, of unpretending French restaurants of the most meritorious description. Never shall I forget Sir Edward's face when, in answer to his questions as to a light supper, the waiter suggested a cold armadillo; a most excellent dish, by the way, though after seeing the creature in the Zoological Gardens one would hardly credit it with gastronomic possibilities. The soil of the Argentine is marvellously fertile, and some day it will become a great wine-growing country. In the meantime vast quantities of inferior wine are imported from Europe. After sampling a thin Spanish red wine, and a heavy sweet black wine known as Priorato, and having tested their effects on his digestion, Sir Edward christened them "The red wine of Our Lady of Pain" and "The black wine of Death."
When the President of the Republic appeared in public on great occasions, he was always preceded by a man carrying a large blue velvet bolster embroidered with the Argentine arms. This was clearly an emblem of national sovereignty, but what this blue bolster was intended to typify I never could find out. Did it indicate that it was the duty of the President to bolster up the Republic, or did it signify that the Republic was always ready to bolster up its President? None of my Argentine friends could throw any light upon the subject further than by saying that this bolster was always carried in front of the President; a sufficiently self-evident fact. It will always remain an enigma to me. A bolster seems a curiously soporific emblem for a young, enterprising, and progressive Republic to select as its symbol.
It would be ungallant to pass over without remark the wonderful beauty of the Argentine girls. This beauty is very shortlived indeed, and owing to their obstinate refusal to take any exercise whatever, feminine outlines increase in bulk at an absurdly early age, but between seventeen and twenty-one many of them are really lovely. Lolling in hammocks and perpetual chocolate-eating bring about their own penalties, and sad to say, bring them about very quickly. I must add that the attractiveness of these girls is rather physical than intellectual.
The house Sir Edward and I rented had been originally built for a stage favourite by one of her many warm-hearted admirers. It had been furnished according to the lady's own markedly florid tastes. I reposed nightly in a room entirely draped in sky-blue satin. The house had a charming garden, and Sir Edward and I expended a great deal of trouble and a considerable amount of money on it. That garden was the pride of our hearts, but we had reckoned without the leaf-cutting ant, the great foe of the horticulturist in South America. At Rio, and in other places in Brazil, they had a special apparatus for pumping the fumes of burning sulphur into the ant-holes, and so were enabled to keep these pests in check. In private gardens in Brazil every single specially cherished plant had to have its stem surrounded with unsightly circular troughs of paraffin and water. In front of our windows we had a large bed of gardenias backed by a splendid border of many-hued cannas which were the apple of Sir Edward's eye, He gazed daily on them with an air not only of pride, but of quasi-paternity. The leaf-cutting ants found their way into our garden, and in four days nothing remained of our beautiful gardenias and cannas but some black, leafless stalks. These abominable insects swept our garden as bare of every green thing as a flight of locusts would have done; they even killed the grass where their serried processions had passed.
For me, the great charm of the Argentine lay in the endless expanses of the "Camp," far away from the noisy city. The show estancia of the Argentine was in those days "Negrete," the property of Mr. David Shennan, kindest and most hospitable of Scotsmen. Most English residents and visitors out in the Plate cherish grateful recollections of that pleasant spot, encircled by peach orchards, where the genial proprietor, like a patriarch of old, welcomed his guests, surrounded by his vast herds and flocks. I happen to know the exact number of head of cattle Mr. Shennan had on his estancia on January 1, 1884, for I was one of the counters at the stocktaking on the last day of the year. The number was 18,731 head.
Counting cattle is rather laborious work, and needs close concentration. Six of us were in the saddle from daybreak to dusk, with short intervals for meals, and December 31 is at the height of the summer in the southern hemisphere, so the heat was considerable.
This is the method employed in a "count." The cattle are driven into "mobs" of some eight hundred ("Rodeo" is the Spanish term for mob) by the "peons." Some twenty tame bullocks are driven a quarter of a mile from the "mob," and the counters line up on their horses between the two, with their pockets full of beans. The "peons" use their whips, and one or two of the cattle break away from the herd to the tame bullocks. They are followed by more and more at an ever-increasing pace. Each one is counted, and when one hundred is reached, a bean is silently transferred from the left pocket to the right. So the process is continued until the entire herd has passed by. Should the numbers given by the six counters tally within reason, the count is accepted. Should it differ materially, there is a recount; then the counters pass on to another "mob" some two miles away. Under a very hot sun, the strain of continual attention is exhausting, and those six counters found their beds unusually welcome that night.
The dwelling-house of Negrete, which was to become very familiar to me, was over a hundred years old, and stretched itself one-storied round a large patio, blue and white tiled, with an elaborate well-head in the centre decorated with good iron-work. The patio was fragrant with orange and lemon trees, and great bushes of the lovely sky-blue Paraguayan jasmine. I can never understand why this shrub, the "Jasmin del Paraguay," with its deliciously sweet perfume and showy blue flowers, has never been introduced into England. It would have to be grown under glass, but only requires sufficient heat to keep the frost out.
I had never felt the joie de vivre—the sheer joy at being alive—thrill through one's veins so exultantly as when riding over the "Camp" in early morning. I have had the same feeling on the High Veldt in South Africa, where there is the same marvellous air, and, in spite of the undulations of the ground, the same sense of vast space. The glorious air, the sunlight, the limitless, treeless expanse of neutral-tinted grass stretching endlessly to the horizon, and the vast hemisphere of blue sky above had something absolutely intoxicating in them. It may have been the delight of forgetting that there were such things as towns, and streets, and tramways. And then the teeming bird-life of the camp! Ibis and egrets flashed bronze-green or snowy-white through the sunlight; the beautiful pink spoon-bills flapped noisily overhead in single file, a lengthy rosy trail of long legs and necks and brilliant colour; the quaint little ground owls blinked from the entrances of their burrows, and dozens of spurred plovers wheeled in incessant gyrations, keeping up their endless, wearying scream of "téro-téro." I always wanted to shout and sing from sheer delight at being part of it all.
The tinamou, the South American partridge, surprisingly stupid birds, rose almost under the horses' feet, and dozens of cheery little sandpipers darted about in all directions. Birds, birds everywhere! Should one pass near one of the great shallow lagoons, which are such a feature of the country, its surface would be black with ducks, with perhaps a regiment of flamingoes in the centre of it, a dazzling patch of sunlit scarlet, against the turquoise blue the water reflected from the sky.
In springtime the "Camp" is covered with the trailing verbena which in my young days was such a favourite bedding-out plant in England, its flowers making a brilliant league-long carpet of scarlet or purple.
There are endless opportunities for shooting on the "Camp" in the Province of Buenos Ayres, only limited by the difficulties in obtaining cartridges, and the fact that in places where it is impossible to dispose of the game the amount shot must depend on what can be eaten locally. Otherwise it is not sport, but becomes wanton slaughter.
The foolish tinamou are easily shot, but are exceedingly difficult to retrieve out of the knee-high grass, and if only winged, they can run like hares. There is also a large black and white migratory bird of the snipe family, the "batitou," which appears from the frozen regions of the Far South, as winter comes on, and is immensely prized for the table. He is unquestionably a delicious bird to eat, but is very hard to approach owing to his wariness. The duck-shooting was absolutely unequalled. I had never before known that there were so many ducks in the world, nor were there the same complicated preliminaries, as with us; no keepers, no beaters, no dogs were required. One simply put twenty cartridges in a bandolier, took one's gun, jumped on a horse, and rode six miles or so to a selected lagoon. Here the horse was tied up to the nearest fence, and one just walked into the lagoon. So warm was the water in these lagoons that I have stood waist-high in it for hours without feeling the least chilly, or suffering from any ill effects whatever. With the first step came a mighty and stupendous roar of wings, and a prodigious quacking, then the air became black with countless thousands of ducks. Mallards, shovellers, and speckled ducks; black ducks with crimson feet and bills; the great black and white birds Argentines call "Royal" ducks, and we "Muscovy" ducks, though with us they are uninteresting inhabitants of a farm-yard. Ducks, ducks everywhere! As these confiding fowl never thought of flying away, but kept circling over the lagoon again and again, I am sure that anyone, given sufficient cartridges, and the inclination to do so, could easily have killed five hundred of them to his own gun in one day. We limited ourselves to ten apiece. Splashing about in the lagoon, it was easy to pick up the dead birds without a dog, but no one who has not carried them can have any idea of the weight of eight ducks in a gamebag pressing on one's back, or can conceive how difficult it is to get into the saddle on a half-broken horse with this weight dragging you backwards. In any other country but the Argentine, to canter home six miles dripping wet would have resulted in a severe chill. No one ever seemed the worse for it out there.
At times I went into the lagoons without a gun, just to observe at close quarters the teeming water-life there. The raucous screams of the vigilant "téro-téros" warned the water-birds of a hostile approach, but it was easy to sit down in the shallow warm water amongst the reeds until the alarm had died down, and one was amply repaid for it, though the enforced lengthy abstention from tobacco was trying.
The "Camp" is a great educator. One learnt there to recap empty cartridge-cases with a machine, and to reload them. One learnt too to clean guns and saddlery. When a thing remains undone, unless you take it in hand yourself, you begin wondering why you should ever have left these things to be done for you by others. The novice finds out that a bridle and bit are surprisingly difficult objects to clean, even given unlimited oil and sandpaper. The "Camp" certainly educates, and teaches the neophyte independence.
I shot several pink spoonbills, one of which in a glass case is not far from me as I write, but I simply longed to get a scarlet flamingo. Owing to the spoonbills' habit of flitting from lagoon to lagoon, they are not difficult to shoot, but a flamingo is a very wary bird. Perched on one leg, they stand in the very middle of a lagoon, and allow no one within gunshot. The officious "téro-téros" effectually notify them of the approach of man, and possibly the flamingoes have learnt from "Alice in Wonderland" that the Queen of Hearts is in the habit of utilising them as croquet-mallets. The natural anxiety to escape so ignominious a fate would tend to make them additionally cautious. Anyhow, I found it impossible to approach them. The idea occurred to me of trying to shoot one with a rifle. So I crawled prostrate on my anatomy up to the lagoon. I failed at least six times, but finally succeeded in killing a flamingo. Wading into the lagoon, I triumphantly retrieved my scarlet victim, and took him by train to Buenos Ayres, intending to hand him over to a taxidermist next day. When I awoke next morning, the blue satin bower in which I slept (originally fitted up, as I have explained, as the bedroom of a minor light of the operatic stage) was filled with a pestilential smell of decayed fish. I inquired the reason of my English servant, who informed me that the cook was afraid that there was something wrong about "the queer duck" I had brought home last night, as its odour was not agreeable. (The real expression he used was "smelling something cruel.") Full of horrible forebodings, I jumped out of bed and ran down to the kitchen, to find a little heap of brilliant scarlet feathers reposing on the table, and Paquita, our fat Andalusian cook, regarding with doubtful eyes a carcase slowly roasting before the fire, and filling the place with unbelievably poisonous effluvia. And that was the end of the only flamingo I ever succeeded in shooting.
A London financial house had, by foreclosing a mortgage, come into possession of a great tract of land in the unsurveyed and uncharted Indian Reserve, the Gran Chaco. Anxious to ascertain whether their newly-acquired property was suited for white settlers, the financial house sent out two representatives to Buenos Ayres with orders to fit out a little expedition to survey and explore it. I was invited to join this expedition, and as work was slack at the time, Sir Edward did not require my services and gave me leave to go. I had been warned that conditions would be very rough indeed, but the opportunity seemed one of those that only occur once in a lifetime, and too good to be lost. I do not think the invitation was quite a disinterested one. The leaders of the expedition probably thought that the presence of a member of the British Legation might be useful in case of difficulties with the Argentine authorities. I travelled by steamer six hundred miles up the mighty Paraná, and joined the other members of the expedition at the Alexandra Colony, a little English settlement belonging to the London firm hundreds of miles from anywhere, and surrounded by vast swamps. The Alexandra Colony was a most prosperous little community, but was unfortunately infested with snakes and every imaginable noxious stinging insect. As we should have to cross deep swamps perpetually, we took no wagons with us, but our baggage was loaded on pack-horses. For provisions we took jerked sun-dried beef (very similar to the South African "biltong"), hard biscuit, flour, coffee, sugar, and salt, as well as several bottles of rum, guns, rifles, plenty of ammunition, and two blankets apiece. We had some thirty horses in all; the loose horses trotting obediently behind a bell-mare, according to their convenient Argentine custom. In Argentina mares are never ridden, and a bell-mare serves the same purpose in keeping the "tropilla" of horses together as does a bellwether in keeping sheep together with us. At night only the bell-mare need be securely picketed; the horses will not stray far from the sound of her tinkling bell. Should the bell-mare break loose, there is the very devil to pay; all the others will follow her. It will thus be seen that the bell-mare plays a very important part. In French families the belle-mère fills an equally important position. We were four Englishmen in all; the two leaders, the doctor, and myself. The doctor was quite a youngster, taking a final outing before settling down to serious practice in Bristol. A nice, cheery youth! The first night I discovered how very hard the ground is to sleep upon, but our troubles did not begin till the second day. We were close up to the tropics, and got into great swamps where millions and millions of mosquitoes attacked us day and night, giving us no rest. Our hands got so swollen with bites that we could hardly hold our reins, and sleep outside our blankets was impossible with these humming, buzzing tormentors devouring us. If one attempted to baffle them by putting one's head under the blanket, the stifling heat made sleep equally difficult. In four days we reached a waterless land; that is to say, there were clear streams in abundance, but they were all of salt, bitter, alkaline water, undrinkable by man or beast. Oddly enough, all the clear streams were of bitter water, whereas the few muddy ones were of excellent drinking water. I think these alkaline streams are peculiar to the interior of South America. Our horses suffered terribly; so did we. We had three Argentine gauchos with us, to look after the horses and baggage, besides two pure Indians. One of these Indians, known by the pretty name of Chinche, or "The Bug," could usually find water-holes by watching the flight of the birds. The water in these holes was often black and fetid, yet we drank it greedily. Chinche could also get a little water out of some kinds of aloes by cutting the heart out of the plant. In the resulting cavity about half a glassful of water, very bitter to the taste, but acceptable all the same, collected in time. Prolonged thirst under a hot sun is very difficult to bear. We nearly murdered the doctor, for he insisted on recalling the memories of great cool tankards of shandy-gaff in Thames-side hostelries, and at our worst times of drought had a maddening trick of imitating (exceedingly well too) the tinkling of ice against the sides of a long tumbler.
In spite of thirst and the accursed mosquitoes it was an interesting trip. We were where few, if any, white men had been before us; the scenery was pretty; and game was very plentiful. The open rolling, down-like country, with its little copses and single trees, was like a gigantic edition of some English park in the southern counties. In the early morning certain trees, belonging to the cactus family, I imagine, were covered with brilliant clusters of flowers, crimson, pink, and white. As the sun increased in heat all these flowers closed up like sea anemones, to reopen again after sunset. The place crawled with deer, and so tame and unsophisticated were they that it seemed cruel to take advantage of them and to shoot them. We had to do so for food, for we lived almost entirely on venison, and venison is a meat I absolutely detest. When food is unpalatable, one is surprised to find how very little is necessary to sustain life; an experience most of us have repeated during these last two years, not entirely voluntarily. Chinche, the Indian, could see the tracks of any beasts in the dew at dawn, where my eyes could detect nothing whatever. In this way I was enabled to shoot a fine jaguar, whose skin has reposed for thirty years in my dining-room. One night, too, an ant-eater blundered into our camp, and by some extraordinary fluke I shot him in the dark. His skin now keeps his compatriot company. An ant-eating bear is a very shy and wary animal, and as he is nocturnal in his habits, he is but rarely met with, so this was a wonderful bit of luck. We encountered large herds of peccaries, the South American wild boar. These little beasts are very fierce and extremely pugnacious, and the horses seemed frightened of them. The flesh of the peccary is excellent and formed a most welcome variation to the eternal venison. I never could learn to shoot from the saddle as Argentines do, but had to slip off my horse to fire. I was told afterwards that it was very dangerous to do this with these savage little peccaries.
There are always compensations to be found everywhere. Had not the abominable mosquitoes prevented sleep, one would not have gazed up for hours at the glorious constellations of the Southern sky, including that arch-impostor the Southern Cross, glittering in the dark-blue bowl of the clear tropical night sky. Had we not suffered so from thirst, we should have appreciated less the unlimited foaming beer we found awaiting us on our return to the Alexandra Colony. By the way, all South Americans believe firmly in moon-strokes, and will never let the moon's rays fall on their faces whilst sleeping.
I judged the country we traversed quite unfitted for white settlers, owing to the lack of good water, and the evil-smelling swamps that cut the land up so. That exploring trip was doubtless pleasanter in retrospect than in actual experience. I would not have missed it, though, for anything, for it gave one an idea of stern realities.
On returning to the Alexandra Colony, both I and the doctor, a remarkably fair-skinned young man, found, after copious ablutions, that our faces and hands had been burnt so black by the sun that we could easily have taken our places with the now defunct Moore and Burgess minstrels in the vanished St. James's Hall in Piccadilly without having to use any burnt-cork whatever.
On the evening of our arrival at Alexandra, I was reading in the sitting-room in an armchair against the wall. The doctor called out to me to keep perfectly still, and not to move on any account until he returned. He came back with a pickle-jar and a bottle. I smelt the unmistakable odour of chloroform, and next minute the doctor triumphantly exhibited an immense tarantula spider in the pickle-jar. He had cleverly chloroformed the venomous insect within half an inch of my head, otherwise I should certainly have been bitten. The bite of these great spiders, though not necessarily fatal, is intensely painful.
The doctor had brought out with him a complete anti-snake-bite equipment, and was always longing for an occasion to use it. He was constantly imploring us to go and get bitten by some highly venomous snake, in order to give him an opportunity of testing the efficacy of his drugs, hypodermic syringes, and lancets. At Alexandra a dog did get bitten by a dangerous snake, and was at once brought to the doctor, who injected his snake-bite antidote, with the result that the dog died on the spot.
A river ran through Alexandra which was simply alive with fish, also with alligators. In the upper reaches of the Paraná and its tributaries, bathing is dangerous not only because of the alligators, but on account of an abominable little biting-fish. These biting-fish, which go about in shoals, are not unlike a flounder in appearance and size. They have very sharp teeth and attack voraciously everything that ventures into the water. In that climate their bites are very liable to bring on lockjaw. The doctor and I spent most of our time along this river with fishing lines and rifles, for alligators had still the charm of novelty to us both, and we both delighted in shooting these revolting saurians. I advise no one to try to skin a dead alligator. There are thousands of sinews to be cut through, and the pestilential smell of the brute would sicken a Chinaman. We caught some extraordinary-looking fish on hand lines, including a great golden carp of over 50 lb. ("dorado" in Spanish). It took us nearly an hour to land this big fellow, who proved truly excellent when cooked.
When I first reached the Argentine, travel was complicated by the fact that each province issued its own notes, which were only current within the province itself except at a heavy discount. The value of the dollar fluctuated enormously in the different provinces. In Buenos Ayres the dollar was depreciated to four cents, or twopence, and was treated as such, the ordinary tram fare being one depreciated dollar. In other provinces the dollar stood as high as three shillings. In passing from one province to another all paper money had to be changed, and this entailed the most intricate calculations. It is unnecessary to add that the stranger was fleeced quite mercilessly. The currency has since been placed on a more rational basis. National notes, issued against a gold reserve, have superseded the provincial currency, and pass from one end of the Republic to the other.
Upon returning to Buenos Ayres, my blue-satin bedroom looked strangely artificial and effeminate, after sleeping on the ground under the stars for so long.
CHAPTER IX
Paraguay—Journey up the river—A primitive Capital—Dick the Australian—His polychrome garb—A Paraguayan Race Meeting—Beautiful figures of native women—The "Falcon" adventurers—a quaint railway—Patiño Cué—An extraordinary household—The capable Australian boy—Wild life in the swamps—"Bushed"—A literary evening—A railway record—The Tigre midnight swims—Canada—Maddening flies—A grand salmon river—The Canadian backwoods—Skunks and bears—Different views as to industrial progress.
As negotiations had commenced in the "'eighties" for a new Treaty, including an Extradition clause, between the British and Paraguayan Governments, several minor points connected with it required clearing up.
I accordingly went up the river to Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital, five days distant from Buenos Ayres by steamer. A short account of that primitive little inland Republic in the days before it was linked up with Argentina by railway may prove of interest, for it was unlike anything else, with its stately two hundred-year-old relics of the old Spanish civilisation mixed up with the roughest of modern makeshifts. The vast majority of the people were Guaranis, of pure Indian blood and speech. The little State was so isolated from the rest of the world that the nineteenth century had touched it very lightly. Since its independence Paraguay had suffered under the rule of a succession of Dictator Presidents, the worst of whom was Francisco Lopez, usually known as Tyrant Lopez. This ignorant savage aspired to be the Napoleon of South America, and in 1864 declared war simultaneously on Brazil, Uruguay, and the Argentine Republic. The war continued till 1870, when, fortunately, Lopez was killed, but the population of Paraguay had diminished from one and a quarter million to four hundred thousand people, nearly all the males being killed. In my time there were seven women to every male of the population.
The journey up the mighty Paraná is very uninteresting, for these huge rivers are too broad for the details on either shore to be seen clearly. After the steamer had turned up the Paraguay river on the verge of the tropics, it became less monotonous. The last Argentine town is Formosa, a little place of thatched shanties clustered under groves of palms. We arrived there at night, and remained three hours. I shall never forget the eerie, uncanny effect of seeing for the first time Paraguayan women, with a white petticoat, and a white sheet over their heads as their sole garments, flitting noiselessly along on bare feet under the palms in the brilliant moonlight. They looked like hooded silent ghosts, and reminded me irresistibly of the fourth act of "Robert le Diable," when the ghosts of the nuns arise out of their cloister graves at Bertram's command. They did not though as in the opera, break into a glittering ballet.
On board the steamer there was a young globe-trotting Australian. He was a nice, cheery lad, and, like most Australians, absolutely natural and unaffected. As he spoke no Spanish, he was rather at a loose end, and we agreed to foregather.
Asuncion was really a curiosity in the way of capitals. Lopez the Tyrant suffered from megalomania, as others rulers have done since his day. He began to construct many imposing buildings, but finished none of them. He had built a huge palace on the model of the Tuileries on a bluff over the river. It looked very imposing, but had no roof and no inside. He had also begun a great mausoleum for members of the Lopez family, but that again had only a façade, and was already crumbling to ruin. The rest of the town consisted principally of mud and bamboo shanties, thatched with palm. The streets were unpaved, and in the main street a strong spring gushed up. Everyone rode; there was but one wheeled vehicle in Asuncion, and that was only used for weddings and funerals. The inhabitants spoke of their one carriage as we should speak of something absolutely unique of its kind, say the statue of the Venus de Milo, or of some rare curiosity, such as a great auk's egg, or a twopenny blue Mauritius postage stamp, or a real live specimen of the dodo.
Nothing could be rougher than the accommodation Howard, the young Australian, and I found at the hotel. We were shown into a very dirty brick-paved room containing eight beds. We washed unabashed at the fountain in the patio, as there were no other facilities for ablutions at all, and the bare-footed, shirtless waiter addressed us each by our Christian names tout court, at once, omitting the customary "Don." The Spanish forms of Christian names are more melodious than ours, and Howard failed to recognize his homely name of "Dick" in "Ricardo."
As South American men become moustached and bearded very early in life, I think that our clean-shaved faces, to which they were not accustomed, led the people to imagine us both much younger than we really were, for I was then twenty-seven, and the long-legged Dick was twenty-one. Never have I known anyone laugh so much as that light-hearted Australian boy. He was such a happy, merry, careless creature, brimful of sheer joy at being alive, and if he had never cultivated his brains much, he atoned for it by being able to do anything he liked with his hands and feet. He could mend and repair anything, from a gun to a fence; he could cook, and use a needle and thread as skilfully as he could a stock-whip. I took a great liking to this lean, sun-browned, pleasant-faced lad with the merry laugh and the perfectly natural manner; we got on together as though we had known each other all our lives, in fact we were addressing one another by our Christian names on the third day of our acquaintance.
Dick was a most ardent cricketer, and his baggage seemed to consist principally of a large and varied assortment of blazers of various Australian athletic clubs. He insisted on wearing one of these, a quiet little affair of mauve, blue, and pink stripes, and our first stroll through Asuncion became a sort of triumphal progress. The inhabitants flocked out of their houses, loud in their admiration of the "Gringo's" (all foreigners are "Gringos" in South America) tasteful raiment. So much so that I began to grow jealous, and returning to the hotel, I borrowed another of Howard's blazers (if my memory serves me right, that of the "Wonga-Wonga Wallabies"), an artistic little garment of magenta, orange, and green stripes. We then sauntered about Asuncion, arm-in-arm, to the delirious joy of the populace. We soon had half the town at our heels, enthusiastic over these walking rainbows from the mysterious lands outside Paraguay. These people were as inquisitive as children, and plied us with perpetual questions. Since Howard could not speak Spanish, all the burden of conversation fell on me. As I occupied an official position, albeit a modest one, I thought it best to sink my identity, and became temporarily a citizen of the United States, Mr. Dwight P. Curtis, of Hicksville, Pa., and I gave my hearers the most glowing and rose-coloured accounts of the enterprise and nascent industries of this progressive but, I fear, wholly imaginary spot. I can only trust that no Paraguayan left his native land to seek his fortune in Hicksville, Pa., for he might have had to search the State of Pennsylvania for some time before finding it.
I have already recounted, earlier in these reminiscences, how the Paraguayan Minister for Foreign Affairs received me, and that his Excellency on that occasion dispensed not only with shoes and stockings, but with a shirt as well. He was, however, like most people in Spanish-speaking lands, courtesy itself.
Dick Howard having heard that there was some races in a country town six miles away, was, like a true Australian, wild to go to them. Encouraged by our phenomenal success of the previous day, we arrayed ourselves in two new Australian blazers, and rode out to the races, Howard imploring me all the way to use my influence to let him have a mount there.
The races were very peculiar. The course was short, only about three furlongs, and perfectly straight. Only two horses ran at once, so the races were virtually a succession of "heats," but the excitement and betting were tremendous. The jockeys were little Indian boys, and their "colours" consisted of red, blue, or green bathing drawers. Otherwise they were stark naked, and, of course, bare-legged. The jockey's principal preoccupation seemed to be either to kick the opposing jockey in the face, or to crack him over the head with the heavy butts of their raw-hide whips. Howard still wanted to ride. I pointed out to him the impossibility of exhibiting to the public his six feet of lean young Australian in nothing but a pair of green bathing drawers. He answered that if he could only get a mount he would be quite willing to dispense with the drawers even. Howard also had a few remarks to offer about the Melbourne Cup, and Flemington Racecourse, and was not wholly complimentary to this Paraguayan country meeting. The ladies present were nearly all bare-foot, and clad in the invariable white petticoat and sheet. It was not in the least like the Royal enclosure at Ascot, yet they had far more on, and appeared more becomingly dressed than many of the ladies parading in that sacrosanct spot in this year of grace 1919. Every single woman, and every child, even infants of the tenderest age, had a green Paraguayan cigar in their mouths.
These Paraguayan women were as beautifully built as classical statues; with exquisitely moulded little hands and feet. Their "attaches," as the French term the wrist and ankles, were equally delicately formed. They were "tea with plenty of milk in it" colour, and though their faces were not pretty, they moved with such graceful dignity that the general impression they left was a very pleasing one.
Our blazers aroused rapturous enthusiasm. I am sure that the members of the "St. Kilda Wanderers" would have forgiven me for masquerading in their colours, could they have witnessed the terrific success I achieved in my tasteful, if brilliant, borrowed plumage.
Asuncion pleased me. This quaint little capital, stranded in its backwater in the very heart of the South American Continent, was so remote from all the interests and movements of the modern world. The big three-hundred-year cathedral bore the unmistakable dignified stamp of the old Spanish "Conquistadores." It contained an altar-piece of solid silver reaching from floor to roof. How Lopez must have longed to melt that altar-piece down for his own use! Round the cathedral were some old houses with verandahs supported on palm trunks, beautifully carved in native patterns by Indians under the direction of the Jesuits. The Jesuits had also originally introduced the orange tree into Paraguay, where it had run wild all over the country, producing delicious fruit, which for some reason was often green, instead of being of the familiar golden colour.
Everyone envies what they do not possess. On the Continent cafés are sometimes decorated with pictures of palms and luxuriant tropical vegetation, in order to give people of the frozen North an illusion of warmth.
In steaming Asuncion, on the other hand, the fashionable café was named, "The North Pole." Here an imaginative Italian artist with a deficient sense of perspective and curious ideas of colour had decorated the walls with pictures of icebergs, snow, and Polar bears, thus affording the inhabitants of this stew-pan of a town a delicious sense of arctic coolness. The "North Pole" was the only place in Paraguay where ice and iced drinks were to be procured.
Being the height of the summer, the heat was almost unbearable, and bathing in the river was risky on account of those hateful biting-fish. There was a spot two miles away, however, where a stream had been brought to the edge of the cliff overhanging the river, down which it dropped in a feathery cascade, forming a large pool below it. Howard and I rode out every morning there to bathe and luxuriate in the cool water. The river made a great bend here, forming a bay half a mile wide. This bay was literally choked with Victoria regia, the giant water-lily, with leaves as big as tea-trays, and great pink flowers the size of cabbages. The lilies were in full bloom then, quite half a mile of them, and they were really a splendid sight. I seem somehow in this description of the Victoria regia to have been plagiarising the immortal Mrs. O'Dowd, of "Vanity Fair," in her account of the glories of the hot-houses at her "fawther's" seat of Glenmalony.
Few people now remember a fascinating book of the "'eighties," "The Cruise of the Falcon," recounting how six amateurs sailed a twenty-ton yacht from Southampton to Asuncion in Paraguay. Three of her crew got so bitten with Paraguay that they determined to remain there. We met one of these adventurers by chance in Asuncion, Captain Jardine, late of the P. and O. service, an elderly man. He invited us to visit them at Patiño Cué, the place where they had settled down, some twenty-five miles from the capital, though he warned us that we should find things extremely rough there, and that there was not one single stick of furniture in the house. He asked us to bring out our own hammocks and blankets, as well as our guns and saddles, the saddle being in my time an invariable item of a traveller's baggage.
Dick and I accordingly bought grass-plaited hammocks and blankets, and started two days later, "humping our swags," as the Australian picturesquely expressed the act of carrying our own possessions. That colour-loving youth had donned a different blazer, probably that of the "Coolgardie Cockatoos." It would have put Joseph's coat of many colours completely in the shade any day of the week, and attracted a great deal of flattering attention.
The ambitious Lopez had insisted on having a railway in his State, to show how progressive he was, so a railway was built. It ran sixty miles from Asuncion to nowhere in particular, and no one ever wanted to travel by it; still it was unquestionably a railway. To give a finishing touch to this, Lopez had constructed a railway station big enough to accommodate the traffic of Paddington. It was, of course, not finished, but was quite large enough for its one train a day. The completed portion was imposing with columns and statues, the rest tailed off to nothing. Here, to our amazement, we found a train composed of English rolling-stock, with an ancient engine built in Manchester, and, more wonderful to say, with an Englishman as engine-driver. The engine not having been designed for burning wood, the fire-box was too small, and the driver found it difficult to keep up steam with wood, as we found out during our journey. We travelled in a real English first-class carriage of immense antiquity, blue cloth and all. So decrepit was it that when the speed of the train exceeded five miles an hour (which was but seldom) the roof and sides parted company, and gaped inches apart. We seldom got up the gradients at the first or second try, but of course allowances must be made for a Paraguayan railway. Lopez had built Patiño Cué, for which we were bound, as a country-house for himself. He had not, of course, finished it, but had insisted on his new railway running within a quarter of a mile of his house, which we found very convenient.
I could never have imagined such a curious establishment as the one at Patiño Cué. The large stone house, for which Jardine paid the huge rent of £5 per annum, was tumbling to ruin. Three rooms only were fairly water-tight, but these had gaping holes in their roofs and sides, and the window frames had long since been removed. The fittings consisted of a few enamelled iron plates and mugs, and of one tin basin. Packing cases served as seats and tables, and hammocks were slung on hooks. Captain Jardine did all the cooking and ran the establishment; his two companions (Howard and I, for convenience's sake, simply termed them "the wasters") lay smoking in their hammocks all day, and did nothing whatever. I may add that "the wasters" supplied the whole financial backing. Jardine wore native dress, with bare legs and sandals, a poncho round his waist, and another over his shoulders. A poncho is merely a fringed brown blanket with hole cut in it for the head to pass through. With his long grey beard streaming over his flowing garments, Jardine looked like a neutral-tinted saint in a stained-glass window. It must be a matter for congratulation that, owing to the very circumstances of the case, saints in stained-glass windows are seldom called on to take violent exercise, otherwise their voluminous draperies would infallibly all fall off at the second step. Jardine was a highly educated and an interesting man, with a love for books on metaphysics and other abstruse subjects. He carried a large library about with him, all of which lay in untidy heaps on the floor. He was unquestionably more than a little eccentric. The "wasters" did not count in any way, unless cheques had to be written. The other members of the establishment were an old Indian woman who smoked perpetual cigars, and her grandson, a boy known as Lazarus, from a physical defect which he shared with a Biblical personage, on the testimony of the latter's sisters—you could have run a drag with that boy.
The settlers had started as ranchers; but the "wasters" had allowed the cattle to break loose and scatter all over the country. They had been too lazy to collect them, or to repair the broken fences, so just lay in their hammocks and smoked. There were some fifty acres of orange groves behind the house. The energetic Jardine had fenced these in, and, having bought a number of pigs, turned pork butcher. There was an abundance of fallen fruit for these pigs to fatten on, and Jardine had built a smoke-house, where he cured his orange-fed pork, and smoked it with lemon wood. His bacon and hams were super-excellent, and fetched good prices in Asuncion, where they were establishing quite a reputation.
Meanwhile, the "wasters" lay in their hammocks in the verandah and smoked. Jardine told me that one of them had not undressed or changed his clothes for six weeks, as it was far too much trouble. Judging from his appearance, he had not made use of soap and water either during that period.
Dick Howard proved a real "handy man." In two days this lengthy, lean, sunburnt youth had rounded up and driven home the scattered cattle, and then set to work to mend and repair all the broken fences. He caught the horses daily, and milked the cows, an art I was never able myself to acquire, and made tea for himself in a "billy."
Patiño Cué was a wonderful site for a house. It stood high up on rolling open ground, surrounded by intensely green wooded knolls. The virgin tropical forest extended almost up to the dilapidated building on one side, whilst in front of it the ground fell away to a great lake, three miles away. A long range of green hills rose the other side of the water, and everywhere clear little brooks gurgled down to the lake.
I liked the place, in spite of its intense heat, and stayed there over a fortnight, helping with the cattle, and making myself as useful as I could in repairing what the "wasters" had allowed to go to ruin. They reposed meanwhile in their hammocks.
It was very pretty country, and had the immense advantage of being free from mosquitoes. As there are disadvantages everywhere, to make up for this it crawled with snakes.
Jardine's culinary operations were simplicity itself. He had some immense earthen jars four feet high, own brothers to those seen on the stage in "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" at pantomime time. These must have been the identical jars in which the Forty Thieves concealed themselves, to be smothered with boiling oil by the crafty Morgiana. By the way, I never could understand until I had seen fields of growing sesame in India why Ali Baba's brother should have mistaken the talisman words "Open Sesame" for "Open Barley." The two grains are very similar in appearance whilst growing, which explains it.
Jardine placed a layer of beef at the bottom of his jar. On that he put a layer of mandioca (the root from which tapioca is prepared), another layer of his own bacon, and a stratum of green vegetables. Then more beef, and so on till the jar was half full. In went a handful of salt, two handfuls of red peppers, and two gallons of water, and then a wood fire was built round the pot, which simmered away day and night till all its contents were eaten. The old Indian woman baked delicious bread from the root of the mandioca mixed with milk and cheese, and that constituted our entire dietary. There were no fixed meals. Should you require food, you took a hunch of mandioca bread and a tin dipper, and went to the big earthen jar simmering amongst its embers in the yard. Should you wish for soup, you put the dipper in at the top; if you preferred stew, you pushed it to the bottom. Nothing could be simpler. As a rough and ready way of feeding a household it had its advantages, though there was unquestionably a certain element of monotony about it.
As a variation from the eternal beef and mandioca, Jardine begged Dick and myself to shoot him as many snipe as possible, in the swamps near the big lake. Those swamps were most attractive, and were simply alive with snipe and every sort of living creature. Dick was an excellent shot, and we got from five to fifteen couple of snipe daily. The tree-crowned hillocks in the swamp were the haunts of macaws, great gaudy, screaming, winged rainbows of green and scarlet, and orange and blue, like some of Dick's blazers endowed with feathers and motion. We had neither of us ever seen wild macaws before, and I am afraid that we shot a good many for the sheer pleasure of examining these garish parrots at close quarters, though they are quite uneatable. I shall carry all my life marks on my left hand where a macaw bit me to the bone. There were great brilliant-plumaged toucans too, droll freaks of nature, with huge horny bills nearly as large as their bodies, given them to crack the nuts on which they feed. They flashed swiftly pink through the air, but we never succeeded in getting one. Then there were coypus, the great web-footed South American water-rat, called "nutria" in Spanish, and much prized for his fur. That marsh was one of the most interesting places I have ever been in. The old Indian woman warned us that we should both infallibly die of fever were we to go into the swamps at nightfall, but though Dick and I were there every evening for a fortnight, up to our middles in water, we neither of us took the smallest harm, probably owing to the temporary absence of mosquitoes. The teeming hidden wild-life of the place appealed to us both irresistibly. The water-hog, or capincho, is a quaint beast, peculiar to South America. They are just like gigantic varnished glossy-black guinea pigs, with the most idiotically stupid expression on their faces. They are quite defenceless, and are the constant prey of alligators and jaguars. Consequently they are very timid. These creatures live in the water all day, but come out in the evenings to feed on the reeds and water-herbage. By concealing ourselves amongst the reeds, and keeping perfectly still, we were able to see these uncouth, shy things emerging from their day hiding-places and begin browsing on the marsh plants. To see a very wary animal at close quarters, knowing that he is unconscious of your presence, is perfectly fascinating. We never attempted to shoot or hurt these capinchos; the pleasure of seeing the clumsy gambols of one of the most timid animals living, in its fancied security, was quite enough. The capincho if caught very young makes a delightful pet, for he becomes quite tame, and, being an affectionate animal, trots everywhere after his master, with a sort of idiotic simper on his face.
One evening, on our return from the marsh, we were ill-advised enough to attempt a short cut home through the forest. The swift tropical night fell as we entered the forest, and in half an hour we were hopelessly lost, "fairly bushed," as Dick put it. There is a feeling of complete and utter helplessness in finding oneself on a pitch-dark night in a virgin tropical forest that is difficult to express in words. The impenetrable tangles of jungle; the great lianes hanging from the trees, which trip you up at every step; the masses of thorny and spiky things that hold you prisoner; and, as regards myself personally, the knowledge that the forest was full of snakes, all make one realise that electric-lighted Piccadilly has its distinct advantages. Dick had the true Australian's indifference to snakes. He never could understand my openly-avowed terror of these evil, death-dealing creatures, nor could he explain to himself the physical repugnance I have to these loathsome reptiles. This instinctive horror of snakes is, I think, born in some people. It can hardly be due to atavism, for the episode of the Garden of Eden is too remote to account of an inherited antipathy to these gliding, crawling abominations. We settled that we should have to sleep in the forest till daylight came, though, dripping wet as we both were from the swamp, it was a fairly direct invitation to malarial fever. The resourceful Dick got an inspiration, and dragging his interminable length (he was like Euclid's definition of a straight line) up a high tree, he took a good look at the familiar stars of his own Southern hemisphere. Getting his bearings from these, he also got our direction, and after a little more tree-climbing we reached our dilapidated temporary home in safety. I fear that I shall never really conquer my dislike to snakes, sharks, and earthquakes.
Jardine was a great and an omnivorous reader. Dick too was very fond of reading. Like the hero of "Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour" he carried his own library with him. As in Mr. Sponge's case, it consisted of one book only, but in the place of being "Mogg's Cab Fares," it was a guide to the Australian Turf, a sort of Southern Cross "Ruff's Guide," with a number of pedigrees of Australian horses thrown in. Dick's great intellectual amusement was learning these pedigrees by heart. I used to hear them for him, and, having a naturally retentive memory, could in the "'eighties" have passed a very creditable examination in the pedigrees of the luminaries of the Australian Turf.
Our evenings at Patiño Cué would have amused a spectator, had there been one. In the tumble-down, untidy apology for a room, Jardine, seated on a packing-case under the one wall light, was immersed in his favourite Herbert Spencer; looking, in his flowing ponchos, long grey beard, and bare legs, like a bespectacled apostle. He always seemed to me to require an eagle, or a lion or some other apostolic adjunct, in order to look complete. I, on another packing-case, was chuckling loudly over "Monsieur et Madame Cardinal," though Paris seemed remote from Paraguay. Dick, pulling at a green cigar, a far-off look in his young eyes, was improving his mind by learning some further pedigrees of Australian horses, at full length on the floor, where he found more room for his thin, endless legs; whilst the two "wasters" dozed placidly in their hammocks on the verandah. The "wasters," I should imagine, attended church but seldom. Otherwise they ought to have ejaculated "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done" with immense fervour, for they never did anything at all.
"Lotos-eaters" might be a more poetic name than "wasters," for if ever there was a land "in which it seemed always afternoon," that land is Paraguay. Could one conceive of the "wasters" displaying such unwonted energy, it is possible that—
"And all at once they sang 'Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam'."
They had eaten of the Lotos-fruit abundantly, and in the golden sunshine of Paraguay, and amidst its waving green palms, they only wished—
"In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined."
I should perhaps add that "cafia," or sugar-cane spirit, is distilled in large quantities in Paraguay, and that one at least of the Lotos-eaters took a marked interest in this national product.
There were some beautiful nooks in the forest, more especially one deep blue rocky pool into which a foaming cascade pattered through a thick encircling fringe of wild orange trees. This little hollow was brimful of loveliness, with the golden balls of the fruit, and the brilliant purple tangles of some unknown creeper reflected in the blue pool. Dick and I spent hours there swimming, and basking puris naturalibus on the rocks, until the whole place was spoilt for me by a rustling in the grass, as a hateful ochre-coloured creature wriggled away in sinuous coils from my bare feet.
I accompanied Jardine once or twice to a little village some five miles away, where he got the few household stores he required. This tiny village was a piece of seventeenth-century Spain, dumped bodily down amid the riotous greenery of Paraguay. Round a tall white church in the florid Jesuit style, a few beautiful Spanish stone houses clustered, each with its tangle of tropical garden. There was not one single modern erection to spoil the place. Here foaming bowls of chocolate were to be had, and delicious mandioca bread. It was a picturesque, restful little spot, so utterly unexpected in the very heart of the South American Continent. I should like to put on the stage that tall white church tower cutting into the intense blue of the sky above, with the vivid green of the feathery palms reaching to its belfry, and the time-worn houses round it peeping out from thickets of scarlet poinsettias and hibiscus flowers. It would make a lovely setting for "Cavalleria Rusticana," for instance.
I never regretted my stay at Patiño Cué. It gave one a glimpse of life brought down to conditions of bed-rock simplicity, and of types of character I had never come across before.
We travelled back to Asuncion on the engine of the train; I seated in front on the cow-catcher, Dick, his coat off and his shirt-sleeves rolled back, on the footplate, officiating as amateur fireman.
This vigorous young Antipodean hurled logs into the fire-box of the venerable "Vesuvius" as fast as though he were pitching in balls when practising his bowling at the nets, with the result that the crazy old engine attained a speed that must have fairly amazed her. When we stopped at stations, "Vesuvius" had developed such a head of steam that she nearly blew her safety-valve off, and steam hissed from twenty places in her leaky joints. One ought never to be astonished at misplaced affections. I have seen old ladies lavish a wealth of tenderness on fat, asthmatical, and wholly repellent pugs, so I ought not to have been surprised at the immense pride the English driver took in his antique engine. I am bound to say that he kept her beautifully cleaned and burnished. His face beamed at her present performance, and he assured me that with a little coaxing he could knock sixty miles an hour out of "Vesuvius." I fear that this statement "werged on the poetical," as Mr. Weller senior remarked on another occasion. I should much like to have known this man's history, and to have learnt how he had drifted into driving an engine of this futile, forlorn little Paraguayan railway. I suspect, from certain expressions he used, that he was a deserter from the Royal Navy, probably an ex-naval stoker. As Dick had ridden ten miles that morning to say good-bye to a lady, to whom he imagined himself devotedly attached, he was still very smart in white polo-breeches, brown butcher-boots and spurs, an unusual garb for a railway fireman. For the first time in the memory of the oldest living inhabitant, the train reached Asuncion an hour before her time.
The river steamers' cargo in their downstream trip consisted of cigars, "Yerba mate," and oranges. These last were shipped in bulk, and I should like a clever artist to have drawn our steamer, with tons and tons of fruit, golden, lemon-yellow, and green, piled on her decks. It made a glowing bit of colour. The oranges were the only things in that steamer that smelt pleasantly.
I can never understand why "Yerba mate," or Paraguayan tea, has never become popular in England. It is prepared from the leaves of the ilex, and is strongly aromatic and very stimulating. I am myself exceedingly fond of it. Its lack of popularity may be due to the fact that it cannot be drunk in a cup, but must be sucked from a gourd through a perforated tube. It can (like most other things) be bought in London, if you know where to go to.
At Buenos Ayres I was quite sorry to part with the laughing, lanky Australian lad who had been such a pleasant travelling companion, and who seemed able to do anything he liked with his arms and legs. I expect that he could have done most things with his brains too, had he ever given them a chance. Howard's great merit was that he took things as they came, and never grumbled at the discomforts and minor hardships one must expect in a primitive country like Paraguay. Our tastes as regards wild things (with the possible exception of snakes) rather seemed to coincide, and, neither of us being town-bred, we did not object to rather elementary conditions.
I will own that I was immensely gratified at receiving an overseas letter some eight years later from Dick, telling me that he was married and had a little daughter, and asking me to stand godfather for his first child.
My blue satin bedroom looked more ridiculously incongruous than ever after the conditions to which I had been used at Patiño Cué.
The River Plate is over twenty miles broad at Buenos Ayres, and it is not easy to realise that this great expansive is all fresh water. The "Great Silver River" is, however, very shallow, except in mid-channel. Some twenty-five miles from the city it forms on its southern bank a great archipelago of wooded islands interspersed with hundreds of winding channels, some of them deep enough to carry ocean-going steamers. This is known as the Tigre, and its shady tree-lined waterways are a great resort during the sweltering heat of an Argentine summer. It is the most ideal place for boating, and boasts a very flourishing English Rowing Club, with a large fleet of light Thames-built boats. Here during the summer months I took the roughest of rough bungalows, with two English friends. The three-roomed shanty was raised on high piles, out of reach of floods, and looked exactly like the fishermen's houses one sees lining the rivers in native villages in the Malay States. During the intense heat of January the great delight of life at the Tigre was the midnight swim in the river before turning in. The Tigre is too far south for the alligators, biting-fish, electric rays (I allude to fish; not to beams of light), or other water-pests which Nature has lavished on the tropics in order to counteract their irresistible charm—and to prevent the whole world from settling down there. The water of the Tigre was so warm that one could remain in it over an hour. One mental picture I am always able to conjure up, and I can at will imagine myself at midnight paddling lazily down-stream on my back through the milk-warm water, in the scented dusk, looking up at the pattern formed by the leaves of the overhanging trees against the night sky; a pattern of black lace-work against the polished silver of the Southern moonlight, whilst the water lapped gently against the banks, and an immense joy at being alive filled one's heart.
I went straight from Buenos Ayres to Canada on a tramp steamer, and a month after leaving the Plate found myself in the backwoods of the Province of Quebec, on a short but very famous river running into the Bay of Chaleurs, probably the finest salmon river in the world, and I was fortunate enough to hook and to land a 28 lb. salmon before I had been there one hour. No greater contrast in surroundings can be imagined. In the place of the dead-flat, treeless levels of Southern Argentina, there were dense woods of spruce, cedar, and var, climbing the hills as far as the eye could see. Instead of the superficially courteous Argentine gaucho, with his air of half-concealed contempt for the "Gringo," and the ever-ready knife, prepared to leap from his waist-belt at the slightest provocation, there were the blunt, outspoken, hearty Canadian canoe-men, all of them lumbermen during the winter months. The fishing was ideal, and the fish ran uniformly large and fought like Trojans in the heavy water, but, unfortunately, every single winged insect on the North American Continent had arranged for a summer holiday on this same river at the same time. There they all were in their myriads; black-flies, sand-flies, and mosquitoes, all enjoying themselves tremendously. By day one was devoured by black-flies, who drew blood every time they bit. At nightfall the black-flies very considerately retired to rest, and the little sand-flies took their place. The mosquitoes took no rest whatever. These rollicking insects were always ready to turn night into day, or day into night, indiscriminately, provided there were some succulent humans to feed on. A net will baffle the mosquito, but for the sand-flies the only effective remedy was a "smudge" burning in an iron pail. A "smudge" is a fire of damp fir bark, which smoulders but does not blaze. It also emits huge volumes of smoke. We dined every night in an atmosphere denser than a thick London fog, and the coughing was such that a chance visitor would have imagined that he had strayed into a sanatorium for tuberculosis.
Things are done expeditiously in Canada. The ground had been cleared, the wooden house in which we lived erected, and the rough track through the forest made, all in eight weeks.
No one who has not tried it can have any idea of the intense cold of the water in these short Canadian rivers. Their course is so short, and they are so overhung with fir trees, that the fierce rays of a Canadian summer sun hardly touch them, so the water remains about ten degrees above freezing point. It would have been impossible to swim our river. Even a short dip of half a minute left one with gasping breath and chattering teeth.
I was surprised to find, too, that a Canadian forest is far more impenetrable than a tropical one. Here, the fallen trees and decay of countless centuries have formed a thick crust some two or three feet above the real soil. This moss-grown crust yields to the weight of a man and lets him through, so walking becomes infinitely difficult, and practically impossible. To extricate yourself at every step from three feet of decaying rubbish is very exhausting. In the tropics, that great forcing-house, this decaying vegetable matter would have given life to new and exuberant growths; but not so in Canada, frost-bound for four months of the twelve. Two-foot-wide tracks had been cut through the forest along the river, and the trees there were "blazed" (i.e., notched, so as to show up white where the bark had been hacked off), to indicate the direction of the trails; otherwise it would have been impossible to make one's way through the débris of a thousand years for more than a few yards.
I never saw such a wealth of wild fruit as on the banks of this Canadian stream. Wild strawberries and raspberries grew in such profusion that a bucketful of each could be filled in half an hour.
There was plenty of animal life too. A certain pretty little black and white striped beast was quite disagreeably common. This attractive cat-like little creature was armed with stupendous offensive powers, as all who have experienced a skunk's unspeakably disgusting odour will acknowledge. Unless molested, they did not make use of the terrible possibilities they had at their command. There were also plenty of wandering black bears. These animals live for choice on grain and berries, and are not hostile to man without provocation, but they have enormous strength, and it is a good working rule to remember that it is unwise ever to vex a bear unnecessarily, even a mild-tempered black bear.
Our tumbling, roaring Canadian river cutting its way through rounded, densely-wooded hills was wonderfully pretty, and one could not but marvel at the infinitely varied beauty with which Providence has clothed this world of ours, wherever man has not defaced Nature's perfect craftsmanship.
The point of view of the country-bred differs widely from that of the town dweller in this respect.