“Yes, mucho plenty monjay.”
The question in short was, what about giving us our money back?–but we could not stop long enough to see the result. Further along, children’s sandals were ranged in a window. Mead thought that he would shine in a pair like them; but the shopkeeper thought his inquiry for sandals size 9 a good joke.
At this stage, when Mead emerged, I was very sorry to have to call his attention to a board in the window, which in his concentration on the sandals he had overlooked. It was a board giving the numbers (announced that day) of the winning lottery tickets. None of these numbers coincided with that owned by Mead.
The disappointment quite naturally led us to the refreshment room at the station and kept us there until the hour of closing. The angry Mead in some measure became reconciled to the injustice which he had suffered, and we all enjoyed the friendliness of the waiters. These, not being over busy, played the fool, except one who behind the bar sat with pen and ink and a folio blank-book laboriously copying an English exercise on the ancient pattern: Have you seen my glove?–Yes, I have seen your glove, &c. One endeavoured to persuade us that he was a Russian, and feigned a horrid interest in a news paragraph about Lenin. The other indulged in an anti-French speech, with gestures. “La Liberté!” he jeered, at the same time grasping vigorously in all directions.
Our nights were disturbed by mosquitoes, not so ferocious as formerly, and cats. Aboard, it still seemed cold; but ashore there was little breeze, and my walks round the town were warm work. The outskirts of this ramshackle place were dreary, but I liked them better than city streets. They formed a loose encampment of tin, or plaster, or matchboard, in which one would perhaps notice most the open drains, the chickens, goats (some of them of most sheepish appearance), cows, pigs, cats, dogs of the silly sort, sunflowers, and gentlemen in blue cotton trousers, about the thresholds. Grumble as you may at militarism, most army camps would have been better favoured in some respects: since here, despite the prospects of mud suggested by the dust of the present season, no hut seemed to have a raised approach, whether stone causeway or duck-walk. I never walked into Bahia Blanca, though not far short of its tall spires, but found these habitations a sufficient view; the way back to the Bonadventure might be over a moorish level, thickly grown over with yellow flowering weed, and all sorts of drouthy “flora of the marsh.” Marsh, however, it was not, the soil being thoroughly baked and cracked. Here were a few birds, that seemed to me the thrushes of the place; a few butterflies; beetles, lying dead here and there; lizards in greater number. But the fields hereabouts had all a solitary look. Often the track was inches deep in dust.
On one of my walks, the wireless operator being with me, we were seen going up from the wharf by the ship’s carpenter, who, it afterwards came out, had tried to attract our attention by shouting. The reason for his attempt is interesting. He was, in fact, at that time in “calaboosh,” having been haled thither during the night, according to a prophecy of Mead’s. Looking too long on the wine (three glasses, by his reckoning) and the beer (one innocent glass), he had succeeded in arriving abreast of the Brazilian next to us. At this point, he had the misfortune to lose the way to the Bonadventure; and presently for his safety the police took him to the cells. Thence, the next afternoon, Chips was released, and that without even a fine. The winter wind is not so unkind as this cadaverous man’s ingratitude to the gendarmes for their kindly act. Asked about it, he complained in loud and bitter terms that such things should be, and
with swinish phrase
Soiled their addition.
This episode appeared to please the mate, Meacock, in no small degree. He recounted other imprisonments; told of black sheep among crews newly arrived from Sing Sing and similar haunts, for whose arrest a warrant was always handed to the police as soon as the ship arrived in port; described the difficulty of getting these incorrigibles from the ship to the wharf, the police having no sanction to touch them on the ship; and how the Brazilian police got the upper hand of bruisers towering above them by lambasting them with the flat of their swords.
Lethargy and grain dust seemed to hang in our air together. The exploration of Ingeniero White as an amusement became less liked as time went on, and as sometimes the dull sky broke in a drizzle of rain. One hatch was filled with wheat; the gang trimmed it quickly; and the loading of the other hatches continued apace, so that our going to sea again looked close at hand. The sailors and apprentices with pots of paint were perched at various points above and beside the ship; and it was no great surprise to me when one of the boys, much given to recreation, suddenly appeared in a waterlogged state.