Читать книгу Coloured Spectacles - Frederick Niven - Страница 10

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Sunlight in South America also that magazine brought me. The ways of Tarragona were more like those of Valparaiso, in Chili, than were the ways of Clydeside. Clyde had been invisible the day our vessel bellowed up it. (We had left the Santona at Cork and made the last lap of our voyage on a steamer.) No Arran raised so much as a purple silhouette; the rock of Ailsa Craig was only a warning scream in the grey, and sleet was falling in the streets when we arrived in the beloved city of my people.

The child that was I had been puzzled by their ecstasy of home-coming. The child that was I learnt, even thus early in his life, the cult of the magic carpet—was a votary of Mnemosene long before he knew her name.

Valparaiso—Vale of Paradise: I often remembered the mole, or wharf, along which the locomotives hauled screaming trucks, locomotives that clang bells as in the United States and Canada. A long grey-painted tank steamer, like a torpedo boat, used to bring drinking water to the city then. Little tip-tapping burros, with panniers holding water-bottles, came round to the doors, and the brown drivers gave their cry of, "Agua fresca! Agua fresca!" Shipping people were agitating for a floating dry-dock to lie in the middle of the bay. They have it now; they have had it a long while.

A great sight was that bay when full of shipping. The P.S.N.C. steamers came and went from and to ports that have (for west-coast folk) music in their names, from Panama to Valdivia. Steamers from Lisbon, London, Cherbourg, lay off shore. South Sea schooners, ships and barques, wooden and iron, many of the old clipper type, lay there with the sailors' washing fluttering on the fo'c'sles, a blue-peter here and there rousing wanderfret and the house-flags and national flags tempting ramblers on the mole to consideration of the criss-crossing traffic that goes on upon the high seas. Great scows like Thames barges plied to and fro, loading and unloading, half-naked men swinging and straining on the sweeps.

Up in the town the stranger from colder latitudes noticed the great umbrellas over the drivers, the little straw sunshades tilted over the horses' heads. The people all walked on the shady sides of the streets. One pavement would be nothing but blaze of sun and indigo shadow under the blinds stretched over the warm shops; the other—one could hardly say it was in shadow so much as that there was, on that side, a tempering of the bright day. And there passed in that mellow blueness natives and aliens, Chilanos and Gringos, white, pallid, and brown. Paris fashions touched the señoritas; but the mantilla was still their usual head-covering. I used to enjoy seeing the peons at the hour of siesta, backs against a shady wall, hats tilted over eyes, little ear-rings glinting, with luscious yellow water melons between their knees.

On the magic carpet I returned often to the English Hill, beyond the hospital and Mackay's school. Tio Mackay the young ones called him—Uncle Mackay. He is gone these years but we saw him on his occasional visits to the land of his birth and loved him as greatly as of old. The town of his birth, by the way, was Campbeltown in Argyllshire. Again I saw the bullock-trains coming down from the blue space beyond the sandhills, and heard the creaking of their massive wheels, the lowing of the bullocks that hauled them. The smell of their transit I whiffed again, felt the grit of the sand-cloud that accompanied them, saw the poncho-wearing peons walking alongside, their brown faces powdered grey with dust, brown cigarettes hanging from their lips, watched them prod the big beasts with their poles.

Valparaiso lived thus in the memory chiefly as a sunny place, a place both busy and gay—dotted with priests and nuns, for local colour. Darwin, voyaging there in the Beagle, found everything delightful, the climate delicious, the heavens clear and blue. Thus it chiefly remains in the mind, though of course there is a rainy season. But the rains were also memorable. When it rained, it rained. That was no Scots drizzle. The deluge hissed down for days. In the quebradas (the gulches, where the less affluent lived) the people were often washed out. In the middle of the sloping streets were orifices, the lids of which were opened at such times to aid in giving the brooks escape into sewers and thence out to sea, below the mole.

Sundays were sacred in the forenoon, but the afternoon was for sport, for going to the races, masses over for the day, or to excursions to outlying pleasure resorts, such as Viña del Mar and Concon. In the evenings, as everywhere in which the Dons dwell, the band played, the plaza showed the rise and fall, like fireflies, of leisurely cigarettes and the twinkle of ringed hands wielding fans. With their fans they talked, these woman, and the men with their eyebrows and the shoulders.

The "Norther" I would sometimes remember—the wind that springs up with great abruptness, sets all the tall and hardy poplars swinging and the palms in the plazas rattling and the eucalyptus trees flurrying, slams all the doors in a house from front to patio, from patio to rear, like a discharge of musketry, and whirls up whatever papers are lying on the desk without a weight atop. It keeps on vigorously for a spell—and then people find that they are shouting instead of talking: the "Norther" is over.

But perhaps the chiefest memory is of waking at night and wondering why—wondering if it was a gentle earthquake, perhaps, that had interrupted slumber, for the quality of the air told me that the night was not half-run. All slept with bedroom doors open, just in case of earthquake, so as to be able to get out if necessary: doors jamb sometimes in a temblor. But it was not an earthquake, and all was silent. Then there was a weird wailing of dogs. Yet that did not seem to be a repetition of what had awakened me. Again the pariah dogs, prowling in the streets, gave voice; and—yes, that was undoubtedly what had awakened me before—a far-off faint clatter of steel, and a voice hailing with a mournful note, eerie in the darkness, making the night seem bigger and the glimpses of purple sky and of stars under the stretched outer blind more silent and aloof. It was a sentry, a sereno, over at the prison on the next hill, or perhaps at the barracks, intoning, as they intoned at intervals all through the dark hours, "All's well!"

There is another reason, clearly, why that article on Mariano Fortuny in the old volume of The Century Magazine was so intimate a find to me in the days before Glasgow ceased to be strange, the days before I understood how my folks could love the place. At Tarragona, in Spain, he had heard in the dark night that same intoning of the serenos and the wailing of pariah dogs.