CHAPTER IX
1909-1910
Since my first visit to Brazil in 1896-97, my Benedictine friends labouring in that vast country had frequently expressed the wish that I should, if possible, return and help them in their great work of restoration and reconstruction, for which more labourers were urgently needed. With health in great measure restored, and the headship of our Oxford Hall, which I had held for ten years, passed into other hands, the way to South America seemed once again open; and the autumn of 1909 found me fully authorized to make all necessary preparations for the voyage. I left Fort Augustus happy in the assurance that the long anticipated, and generally desired, reunion of our abbey with the English mother-congregation was certain to be soon realized; and stayed at Beaufort for a few days before going south, meeting there "Abe" Bailey (of South African renown), Hubert Jerningham, and some other interesting people. My last glimpse of the Highlands was a golden afternoon spent in the White Garden (the idea of one of the daughters of the house), and a vision of serried masses of white blossoms—I never realized before how many shades of white there are—standing up in their pale beauty against the dark background of trees which encircle one of the most beautiful of Scottish gardens. From Beaufort I went to Kelburn to take leave of my sister, whom I found entertaining her Girls' Friendly Society, assisted by twenty bluejackets from a cruiser lying off Arran. Their commander, Lord George Seymour, had brought his sailors by express invitation to play about and have tea with the Friendly Girls—an arrangement which seemed quite satisfactory to all parties! I crossed the Firth next day to say good-bye to Lady Bute, who was in residence at her pretty home in the Isle of Cumbrae, and went on the same afternoon to visit my hospitable cousin Mrs. Wauchope at beautiful Niddrie. The Somersets and other agreeable folk were my fellow-guests there; and Andrew Lang arrived next day, and seemed—shall I say it?—a little bit "out of the picture." I was accustomed to his small affectations and egotisms and cynical "asides," which always seemed to me more or less of a pose; for the eminent writer was really a very kind-hearted man, and I dare say just as humble-minded in reality as any of us. The poor Duke of Somerset, however, who had no affectations or pretentions of any kind, could not do with Mr. Lang at all; and I remember his imploring me (against my usual habit) to come and sit in the smoking-room at night, so that they should be on no account left tête-à-tête! On Sunday we all walked to see the noble ruins of Craigmillar Castle, sadly reminiscent of poor Queen Mary, and admirably tended by their present owner, whom we chanced to meet there, and whom I interested by a tale (oddly enough he had never heard it) of a ghost-face on the wall of his own house at Liberton.
At Woodburn, where I spent the following Sunday, and where Lord Ralph and Lady Anne Kerr were always delighted to welcome a priest to officiate in their tiny oratory, I found staying with Ralph his brother Lord Walter, whose seventieth birthday we kept as a family festival, and who on the same day retired, as Admiral of the Fleet, from the Navy in which he had served for fifty-six years. Our birthday expedition was a most interesting pilgrimage to the Holy Well of St. Triduana, near Restalrig, with its beautiful vaulted Gothic roof, recently restored by the owner, Lord Moray.[[1]] The unpretentious little Catholic chapel hard by pleased me more than the elaborate and expensive new church recently erected at Portobello, which we also visited. I broke my journey south at Longridge Towers, and whilst there motored over with Sir Brooke Boothby, our Minister in Chili (an agreeable and well-informed person) to see the poor remains of the great convent at Coldingham—sad enough, but wonderfully interesting. I made a farewell call at Ampleforth en route, lingering an hour at York to admire the west front of the minster, from which all the scaffolding was at length down after years of careful and patient repairs. Hurrying through London, I travelled to Brighton and Seaford, for the opening (by the Bishop of Southwark) of the new Ladycross school, recently transferred from Bournemouth. There was quite a notable gathering of old pupils and friends, and I had a charming neighbour at luncheon in the person of Madame Navarro (Mary Anderson), on my other side being Count Riccardi-Cubitt, English-born, but a Papal Count in right of his wife. The speeches, from the bishop, Lord Southwell, and others, were for once commendably short.
I was bidden to meet at luncheon in London next day Princess Marie Louise—a title unfamiliar to me: it had, in fact, been lately adopted to avoid confusion with an aunt and cousin, both also called Louise. We spoke of the recent re-discovery of an abbey in Lincolnshire, of which literally not a single stone had been left above ground by the iconoclasts of the sixteenth century. "My terrible great-uncle again, I suppose!" said Her Highness with a deprecatory smile. The reference was to Henry VIII.! but I hazarded a conjecture that the work of destruction dated from later and Puritan days. I attended on this same afternoon the marriage of my old friend Herbert Maxwell's only son to the youngest daughter of the House of Percy, at St. Peter's, Eaton Square, the bright and ornate interior of which contrasted cheerfully with the mirk and mire outside. The Bishop of Peterborough, the bride's uncle, tied the knot; and the church, and the Duchess of Northumberland's house in Grosvenor Place afterwards, were thronged with Percys and Campbells and Glyns.
After two busy days at Oxford, devoted to packing up and to taking hasty farewells of kind old friends (both things I detest), I went down to Hampshire to spend the Sunday previous to sailing with my brother at Kneller Court. The omens were inauspicious, for it blew hard all day, with torrents of rain. Next morning, however, was calm and bright as we motored to Southampton, where I boarded R.M.S.P. Aragon, nearly 5,000 tons bigger than the good old Magdalena. We sailed at noon, crossed to Cherbourg in perfect weather, and found the Bay of Biscay next day all smiles and dimples and sunshine. I did not land at Lisbon, having seen it all before, and having no friends there. We dropped quietly down the Tagus at sundown, just when points of light were breaking out over the city, and all the church bells seemed to be ringing the Angelus. We had a full ship, and our voyage was diversified by the usual sports, of which I was an "honorary president," my colleagues in that sinecure office being a Brazilian coffee-king, the President-elect of Argentina, and a Belgian Baron. There were four Scotsmen at my table in the saloon, three of them Davids! Somewhere about the Equator we kept the birthday of King Edward, whose health was pledged by Brazilians and Argentinos as cordially and enthusiastically as by the British. I wrote to Fritz Ponsonby to tell him of this, for His Majesty's information.[[2]] Two days later we sighted the low green shores of Brazil. I looked with interest at the well-remembered heights of Olinda, with the white walls of S. Bento shining in the morning sun. Somehow I did not picture myself stationed there again, though a newspaper which came aboard at Pernambuco announced, I noticed, that "o conhecido educationalista sr. David Hurter-blais" was coming to that city "afim de tratar da educação religiosa das classes populares!" The passengers for Pernambuco, I observed, were now chucked into the Company's lighter in a basket (in West African style), instead of having to "shin" down a dangerous companion in a heavy swell, as we used to do. Two lank-haired red-brown Indians, who came on board here to sell feather fans and such things, interested me; and I recalled how Emerson had described the aboriginals of North America as the "provisional races"—"the red-crayon sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colours for the real manhood were ready."
My destination on this voyage was not, as thirteen years previously, the steaming Equatorial State of Pernambuco, and the venerable half-derelict city of Olinda, whither our Benedictine pioneers had come out from Europe soon after the fall of the Brazilian Empire, just in time, as it seemed, to save the Benedictine Order in that vast country from collapse and utter extinction. From Olinda the arduous work of revival and restoration had gone quietly and steadily on, including one by one the ancient and almost abandoned abbeys of the old Brazilian Congregation; and it was to one of these, the monastery of our Order in the great and growing city of S. Paulo, that my steps were now turned. Bahia, two days voyage from Pernambuco, is a city to which (like Constantinople) distance very decidedly lends enchantment, and I did not land there. It was raining fast, and the fantastic hilltops were wrapped in clouds, as we entered Rio Bay. I was welcomed by a kind Belgian monk whom I had known at Olinda in 1896, and who drove me up to our fine old Portuguese abbey, standing on its own mount or morro close to the sea, where I had paid my respects to the last of the old Brazilian abbots a dozen years before. A vigorous young community now occupied the long-empty cells; and the conduct of a flourishing college, as well as pastoral work of various kinds outside, gave scope to their energy and zeal.
The weather next day was perfect, and my friend Dom Amaro devoted two or three hours to driving me round the City Beautiful. Beautiful, of course, it had always been; but I was astounded at the transformation which had taken place in four short years. From "the cemetery of the foreigner," as Rio had been called when its name, like those of Santos, Havana and Panama, had been almost synonymous with pestilence and death, it had become one of the healthiest, as it had always been one of the loveliest, capitals in the world. Four men—Brazilians all—minister of works, engineer, doctor, and prefect of the city,[[3]] had undertaken in 1905 the gigantic task of the city's sanitation. The extermination of the mosquitoes which caused yellow fever and malaria, the destruction of their breeding-places, the widening of malodorous streets, the demolition of thousands of buildings, the disinfection and removal of tens of thousands of tons of garbage, the filling-up of swamps and marshes, were only preliminary to the colossal work of reconstruction of which I saw some of the results. Right through the central city was pierced the new Avenida, a broad thoroughfare lined with noble buildings, of which the theatre, built at enormous cost, and rivalling the Paris Opéra, struck me most. More striking still was the new Beira Mar, the unique sea-drive skirting the bay for four miles, and leading to the equally beautiful circular esplanade round the Bay of Botafogo. Here I left cards and letters of introduction on the British Minister (who, I may remark en passant, never took the slightest notice of either,)[[4]]; and we drove homewards in a golden sunset, the whole city flushed with rosy light, and the heights of Corcovado and the Organ Mountains glowing purple—as purple as the evening tints of Hymettus and Pentelicus which gave to Athens the immortal name of [Greek: Iostéphanos], the violet-crowned. Behind us the pointed Sugar-loaf rose grey and menacing into the opal sky; and I recalled the quaint Brazilian tradition which tells how the Creator, when He had made the Bay of Rio and found it very good, desired to call man's admiring attention to His masterpiece by a mark of exclamation. The mark of exclamation is the Sugar-loaf! We met in the Avenida, returning from a grand formatura (review) in honour of the day (it was the anniversary of the foundation of the Republic), the President—a mulatto, by the way—and his staff, in a none too gorgeous gala carriage. I was told that he was extremely popular.
To reach S. Paulo from Rio I had the choice of two routes, the pleasanter being that by sea to Santos, and an ascent thence to the inland city by one of the most wonderful of the world's railways. But as I wished to see something of the country, I chose the twelve hours' train journey direct from the capital—and repented my choice; for though the first part of the route was through fine scenery, as we climbed the lofty Serra which stretches for miles along the Brazilian coast, the dust, heat and jolting of the train soon grew almost insufferable. I was very glad to reach S. Paulo, where the air was pleasantly cool and fresh (the city stands 2,100 feet above the sea, and just outside the tropical zone[[5]]), and where the kind abbot of S. Bento, whom I had known up to then only by correspondence, met me at the station. We were soon at his monastery, which was well situated, occupying a whole side of one of the principal squares of the city, and of historic interest as built on the same spot where, three hundred and ten years before, the first Benedictine foundation in the then village of S. Paulo had been made by Frei Mauro Texeira, a zealous and fervent monk of Bahia. The monastery, as I knew it in 1909, was an unpretentious building of the early eighteenth century, constructed not of stone but of taipa (compressed earth), its long whitewashed front pierced by ten windows, and flanked by the façade of the church with its low cupola'd tower. My host, Abbot Miguel, who had been appointed prior of the restored abbey in 1900, and abbot seven years later, had inaugurated in 1903 a school for boys, which numbered at my arrival some 300 pupils. For their accommodation, and for that of his growing community, he had done all that was possible with the old and inadequate buildings of the monastery, to which he had built on various additions. But he and his community had already decided that a complete reconstruction of both abbey and church was absolutely essential for the development of their educational and other work; and I found them all studying and discussing ornate and elaborate plans by a well-known Bavarian architect, who had "let himself go" in a west front apparently in English Elizabethan style (recalling Hatfield), and a Byzantine church with Perpendicular Gothic details and two lofty towers.[[6]] The process of demolition, commencing with the choir of the old church, was started a few weeks after I reached S. Paulo; and I remember that we were nearly asphyxiated by the falling and crumbling walls, which (as I have said) were built of a kind of adobe or dried mud, and broke into thick clouds of blinding yellow dust as they tumbled about our ears.
The rebuilding of the Benedictine Abbey was only one feature, and not the most considerable, of the architectural transformation which was taking place before one's eyes in every part of S. Paulo, and was developing it from an insignificant provincial capital into one of the largest and most progressive cities of South America. In twenty years the population had increased tenfold—from fifty thousand to nearly half a million—and two facts struck me as both remarkable and encouraging, namely that the birth-rate was more than double the death-rate, and was (so I was told) more than double that of London—nearly thirty-six per thousand. The State and city of S. Paulo were alike cosmopolitan, 300,000 immigrants (more than half of them Italians) having entered the country in the year before my arrival, and more than half the population being of foreign birth. The vast majority of the day-labourers in the city were Italians, on the whole an industrious and thrifty race (though not without obvious faults), who assimilated themselves without difficulty to the country of their adoption. The rapidly growing prosperity of S. Paulo was shown by the astonishing appreciation in a few years of the value of land in and around the city—exceeding, so I was assured by a prominent American, any phenomenon of the kind in the United States. Our Abbot had, not long before my arrival, acquired with wise prescience a fine country estate in the eastern outskirts, which was already worth at least ten times what he had expended on its purchase. The chacara (as such properties are called) included a fine old house of Imperial days, garden, farm, orchard, extensive woods, as well as a lake, football fields, playgrounds and a rifle-range; and here our young pupils spent one day every week enjoying the open-air life and sports unattainable in the city.
The college, or gymnasio, of S. Bento had already taken its recognised place among the best educational institutions of S. Paulo. The fathers were assisted in the work of teaching by a competent staff of lay masters, but retained the religious, moral, and disciplinary training of their pupils entirely in their own hands; and I was pleased to see how eminently suited the paternal and family spirit characteristic of Benedictine education was to Brazilian boys, and how well on the whole they responded to the efforts of their instructors to instil into them those habits of obedience, self-control, and moral responsibility, in which the home training of the children of Latin America is often so deplorably deficient. Naturally docile, pious, and intelligent, these little boys were brought under the salutary influence of S. Bento at an age when there seemed every hope that they would be tided safely over the difficult years of early adolescence, and moulded, under solid Christian guidance, into efficient and worthy citizens of their State and their country.[[7]] English was taught by an American priest, who was also an excellent musician, and trained our little choristers very successfully. Several of the fathers spoke English well; but I was the only British-born member of the community, and I was naturally glad of opportunities to meet the scattered English Catholics who were to be found among the not very numerous British resident colony. Our little old church, unattractive enough as to externals, was yet greatly frequented by those (and they were many) who appreciated the careful reverence of the ceremonial and grave beauty of the monastic chant. Sermons in Portuguese and German were already preached regularly at the Sunday masses; and to these was added soon after my arrival an English sermon, which was very well attended. One came sometimes in the hospitals of the city, which I visited regularly, on stray Englishmen of another class—an injured railwayman, perhaps, or a sick sailor from a British ship, who were glad enough, even if not Catholics, of a friendly visit from a countryman. I remember a young Englishman from Warrington in Lancashire (this was one of the consoling cases), who was dying of some obscure tropical disease in the Santa Casa, the chief hospital of the city. It was the hottest time of year, and he suffered much, but never once murmured or complained. He had been baptized by a Benedictine (but eighteen years before) in his native town in England, and he looked on it, as he said, as "a bit of real luck" to be tended by a Benedictine on his death-bed. "O santinho inglez" (the little English saint) his nurses called him; and his death—he was never free from pain to the last—was truly the death of the just, and made an ineffaceable impression on those who witnessed it. Fiant novissima mea hujus similia!
I soon fell into the routine of our Brazilian monastic day, which differed a good deal (especially as to the hours for meals) from our European time-tables. Coffee betimes; breakfast ("almoço") before noon; dinner at half-past five, after vespers, suited the school hours, and the busy life of the community. We anticipated matins at seven p.m.; hurried to the refectory for a dish of scalding tea (smothered in sugar, no milk), or a glass of lemonade, then hastened back to choir for night prayers and sundry pious exercises. This final collation (if it may be so called) was really alarming: the scorching tea was gulped down with a reckless rapidity which reminded one of Quilp tossing off the hissing rum in his riverside arbour! and I used to return to choir positively perspiring. But our commissariat was on the whole good, if simple; we had no such privations to face as in old days at Olinda, and as far as I was concerned the kind abbot was always on the alert to see that I wanted for nothing. Our chacara supplied us with farm produce of the best; and great platters of green and purple grapes, from the same source, were at this season served up at every meal.
The abbot, on his first free day, drove me round the interesting city. We visited a fine girls' school, conducted by Augustinian canonesses; the superior was sister to an Anglo-Irish Benedictine, and another nun was a Macpherson, with an accent of that ilk. We saw, also, two institutions founded by the Abbot, St. Adalbert's Parochial schools, under nuns of St. Catherine, and a hospital managed by sisters of the same Order. The hospital stood at the end of the Avenida Paulista, a noble boulevard lined with handsome houses of every imaginable style of architecture—Gothic, Renaissance, Moorish, Swiss, Venetian, classical, rococo, each one in its own glowing and luxuriant garden. This, naturally, was the rich man's quarter; the working people had of course their own dwellings, chiefly in the populous industrial district of Braz. But I saw no slums in S. Paulo, and nowhere the depressing contrast between ostentatious luxury and poverty-stricken squalor which is the blot on so many European cities. In S. Paulo there was, in fact, no poverty:[[8]] there was work and employment and food for all; and it is true to say there was no need for any man to be a pauper except through his own fault. To any one with preconceived ideas of South American cities as centres of lethargy, indolence, and want of enterprise, the industrial activity and abounding prosperity of S. Paulo could not but appear as astonishing. That prosperity, as most people know, was mainly due to the foresight and energy with which the Paulistas had realised and utilised the fact that their famous terra roxa was adaptable for coffee-culture on a scale truly gigantic. Two years before my arrival (in 1906-07) the production of coffee in Brazil (three-fourths of it grown in S. Paulo) had reached the amazing figure of twenty million sacks, five times what it had been a quarter of a century before. Then, when the supply was found to exceed the demand, when prices fell by leaps and bounds, and financial disaster seemed imminent, the shrewd Paulistas conceived and adopted the much-criticised expedient of "valorisation," the State itself purchasing an enormous quantity of the crop, and holding it up until prices became again normal. It was in this and in many other ways that the Paulistas showed the clearsightedness and acumen which justly gained for their State and their capital the reputation of being the most enterprising and progressive on the whole South American continent.
The abbot and I finished our afternoon's drive with a little expedition to Cantareira, a hollow among wooded hills, some twelve or fourteen miles distant (the access is by a steam tramway), where, set in charming gardens, are some of the spacious reservoirs feeding the city. We drank our coffee in a rustic arbour, with bright-hued hummingbirds glancing and circling round our heads; and returning in the luminous violet twilight (which struck me always as particularly beautiful in this clear, high smokeless atmosphere), called to pay our respects to the Archbishop of the province and diocese of S. Paulo. A zealous parish priest in the city, where he had built a fine church (St. Cecilia's), he had been made Bishop of Coritiba at only thirty, and translated to the metropolitan see two years later. He was not yet thirty-eight.
I assisted, before our school broke up for the three months' summer holidays, at some of the examinations, which were conducted in presence of a fiscal (Government official), our college being at that time considered "equiparado," i.e., equivalent to the State secondary schools, a condition of the privilege being some kind of more or less nominal Government inspection. The school work, it struck me, had all been very thoroughly done, though perhaps of a somewhat elementary kind. A distraction to us all during the last hour was the news of a great fire raging in the principal business street of the city. A big German warehouse, the Casa Allema, was in fact burned to the ground; and we surveyed the conflagration (said, but never proved, to be the work of incendiaries) from the belfry of our church tower.
The North American element in S. Paulo, though much smaller than it became later, was already fairly numerous. A great Canadian company was responsible for the supply of light and power to S. Paulo as well as Rio; some of the leading officials in both cities were Catholics, and became my kind friends. Another hospitable friend was a Scots banker married to an American wife, whom he habitually addressed as "Honey!"[[9]] There was, generally, a very friendly and hospitable spirit among the English-speaking residents; but (as usual in foreign cities) it was curiously confined to the circle of their own countrymen. Some of my Brazilian acquaintances used to express regret that the English colony, for which they had much respect, never evinced the least desire for any sort of intimacy with them; and it used to surprise me to find English families which had been settled in the country for a whole generation or more, of which not a single member knew sufficient Portuguese to carry on a quarter of an hour's conversation with an educated Brazilian of their own class. Personally, I found such Brazilians as I had the pleasure of meeting almost uniformly extremely agreeable people—kind, courteous, cultivated, and refined; and I thought, and still think, the insular aloofness of my countrymen from the people among whom it was their lot to live, a distinct disadvantage to themselves, and a mistake from every point of view.
It was a curious fact, and one worthy of attention from several points of view, that at the time of which I am writing the public and official interest of the Paulistas in educational matters, while undoubtedly exceeding that of any other community in the Republic, was in practice almost confined to primary schools. Nearly £400,000, a fifth of the whole annual budget of the State, was devoted to their support and extension; many of the school buildings were of almost palatial appearance; the code was carefully thought out, and the teaching as a whole efficient; and elementary education was, at least in principle, obligatory, though the provisions of the law of 1893, which had established a commission for bringing negligent parents to book and fining them for non-compliance with the law, were to a great extent a dead letter. For secondary education, on the other hand, the public provision was of the slenderest: there were in 1909 but three State secondary schools in the State of S. Paulo—at Campinas and Ribeirão Preto, and in the capital; and the Lyceu in the last-named city (with a population of over 400,000) numbered less than 150 pupils. The all-important work of the education of the middle and upper classes of children, both boys and girls, thus fell inevitably into the hands of private teachers, the best colleges for both sexes (mostly internatos or boarding-schools) being conducted by foreign religious orders. These institutions, receiving no State subvention of any kind, were regarded by the State with a tolerance due less to its appreciation of the principles on which their education was based, than to an obvious sense of the economic advantage of leaving private associations to undertake a work which it neglected itself. The net gain of this policy of laisser aller was that a large number of children, belonging to the classes on which depended the future prosperity of the country, were being carefully educated on solid Christian foundations, without, as far as I could observe at S. Bento and elsewhere, any sacrifice of the patriotic principles which Brazil quite rightly desired should be instilled into the rising generation of her sons and daughters.
[[1]] St. Trid's Well (as it was called before the Reformation) had the repute of miraculously curing diseases of the eye. A satirical sixteenth-century poet scoffs at the folk who flock to "Saint Trid's to mend their ene."
[[2]] The King (so his secretary wrote to me) was "much surprised and gratified" at hearing how the toast of his health had been received by the foreign passengers on an English ship. I sent on the letter from S. Paulo to the captain, who said it should be framed and hung up on board, but I never heard if this was done. Edward VII. died less than six months later, and on December 30, 1917, the Aragon, whilst on transport service in the Mediterranean, was torpedoed (together with her escort H.M.S. Attack), a few miles from Alexandria. The ship went down within half an hour of being struck, with a loss of more than six hundred lives.
[[3]] Their names are worthy of perpetuation—Lauro Muller, Paulo Frontin, Pareiro Passo (the Haussmann of Brazil), and Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, a pupil of Pasteur, and popularly known as the mata-mosquitos (mosquito-killer).
[[4]] This lapse from diplomatic courtesy on the part of Sir William Haggard was, I take pleasure in recalling, amply atoned for later by the kindness I received from two of his successors as British representative in Rio.
[[5]] The Tropic of Capricorn passes through S. Paulo—I had even heard said, through the monastery garden of S. Bento. "Let us dig and look for it," said one of my little pupils to whom I imparted this supposed geographical fact.
[[6]] When I saw S. Bento (after a long interval) eleven years later, the new buildings (except for the internal decoration of the church) were practically complete. Many of the details were no doubt open to criticism, and were in fact rather severely criticised; but it was a tribute to the architect that the general effect of his work was recognized as being both dignified and impressive.
[[7]] When I returned to S. Paulo eleven years later, I heard with pleasure from the parents of some of our former pupils of the satisfactory way in which their sons had turned out—a happy result which they attributed to the excellence of their upbringing at S. Bento.
[[8]] Let me note once for all that whatever I say about S. Paulo, here and elsewhere, is founded (facts and figures alike) on what I knew and learned of the city in 1909-10. A dozen years may, and do, bring many changes!
[[9]] "Honey!" said an American bride (returning from an early morning walk) at a door—which she imagined to be that of the nuptial chamber—in the corridor of a big hotel; "honey! it's me: let me in." No response. "Honey! it's me, it's Mamie: open the door." Still no answer. "Honey! honey! don't you hear? it's me, honey." Gruff (unknown) male voice: "Madam, this is not a beehive, it's a bathroom!"