THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES



*



BROUGHT FORWARD



BY THE SAME AUTffOX

FAITH.

HOPE.

CHARITY.

SUCCESS.

PROGRESS.

HIS PEOPLE.

A HATCHMENT.

THIRTEEN STORIES.

MOGREB EL ACKSA : A Journey in Morocco.
(New Edition in Preparation.)



BROUGHT FORWARD



BY

R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM



LONDON

DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA ST., COVENT GARDEN, W.C.



First Published 1916.



All rights reserved



COMMANDER

CHARLES E. F. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

R.N.



497854

LIBRARY



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."

vii



PREFACE

Once in the Sierra Madre, either near the
Santa Rosa Mountains or in the Bolson de
Mapimi, 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 huisach 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
viii



PREFACE

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 dis-
played, 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,
ix



PREFACE

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 over-
took 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
x



PREFACE

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.



XI



CONTENTS



PAGE



I. BROUGHT FORWARD ..... i

II. Los PlNGOS . . . . . . II

III. FIDELITY ....... 30

IV. "UNO DEI MILLE" 40

V. WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND . . . 51

VI. ELYSIUM ....... 60

VII. HEREDITY ....... 66

VIII. EL TANGO ARGENTINO . . . . 81

IX. IN A BACKWATER ..... 97

X. HIPPOMORPHOUS .__ . . . . 1 06

XI. MUDEJAR . . . . . . .120

XII. A MINOR PROPHET . . . . .130

XIII. EL MASGAD 146

XIV. FEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR . . 164

XV. BOPICUA 185

xiii



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

I B



BROUGHT FORWARD

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 in-
tellect ; 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

2



BROUGHT FORWARD

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 ringer 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 illiter-
ate, 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

3



BROUGHT FORWARD

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

4



BROUGHT FORWARD

thought to get his own again, with "they in-
demnities."

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

5



BROUGHT FORWARD

of red-haired, blue-eyed, tall, lithe Scot, he of
the perfervtdum 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

6



BROUGHT FORWARD

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

7



BROUGHT FORWARD

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, shout-

8



BROUGHT FORWARD

ing 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

9



BROUGHT FORWARD

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.



10



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 steam-
boats, which at night-time gave an air as of a
section of a town that floated past the wilder-
ness. 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,

1 1



LOS PINGOS

dashing through brushwood or floundering
through a marsh, till they had placed them-
selves 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 nandubay,
chanar, 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

12



LOS PINGOS

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
ombus, 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

13



LOS PINGOS

buildings, planted trees, and paths long over-
grown 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

14



LOS PINGOS

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

'5



LOS PINGOS

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.

Catching their horses and rolling up the
ropes, the men, who had been sitting under-
neath the trees, mounted, and following a little
cattle trail, rode to a high bluff looking down
the stream.

Panting and puffing, as she belched out a
column of black smoke, some half a mile away,
a tug towing two lighters strove with the
yellow flood. The horsemen stood like statues
with their horses' heads stretched out above
the water thirty feet below.

Although the feet of several of the horses
were but an inch or two from the sheer limit,
the men sat, some of them with one leg on their
horses' necks ; others lit cigarettes, and one,
with his horse sideways to the cliff, leaned
sideways, so that one of his feet was in the air.
He pointed to the advancing tug with a brown
finger, and exclaimed, " These are the lighters
with the horses that must have started yesterday
from Gualeguaychu, and ought to have been

16



LOS PINGOS

here last night." We had indeed been wait-
ing all the night for them, sleeping round
a fire under the eucalyptus grove, and rising
often in the night to smoke and talk, to see
our horses did not get entangled in their
stake ropes, and to listen for the whistle of
the tug.

The tug came on but slowly, fighting her
way against the rapid current, with the lighters
towing behind her at some distance, looking
like portions of a pier that had somehow or
another got adrift.

From where we sat upon our horses we
could see the surface of the Uruguay for miles,
with its innumerable flat islands buried in
vegetation, cutting the river into channels ;
for the islands, having been formed originally
by masses of water-weeds and drift-wood,
were but a foot or two above the water, and
all were elongated, forming great ribbons in
the stream.

Upon the right bank stretched the green
prairies of the State of Entre-Rios, bounded on
either side by the Uruguay and Parana. Much
flatter than the land upon the Uruguayan
bank, it still was not a sea of level grass as is

17 c



LOS PINGOS

the State of Buenos Aires, but undulating, and
dotted here and there with white estancia
houses, all buried in great groves of peach
trees and of figs. On the left bank on which
we stood, and three leagues off, we could just
see Fray Bentos, its houses dazzlingly white,
buried in vegetation, and in the distance like
a thousand little towns in Southern Italy and
Spain, or even in Morocco, for the tower of
the church might in the distance just as well
have been a minaret.

The tug-boat slowed a little, and a canoe
was slowly paddled out to pilot her into the
little haven made by the brook that flowed
down through the valley to the Uruguay.

Sticking out like a fishing-rod, over the
stem of the canoe was a long cane, to sound
with if it was required.

The group of horsemen on the bluff rode
slowly down towards the river's edge to watch
the evolutions of the tug, and to hold back
the horses when they should be disembarked.