“Señor,” I replied, “my very best thanks for your kind warning, but I discovered that about half an hour ago.”
Whereupon I continued for where I had started—to keep an engagement with a fellow-countryman at the afternoon races in Palermo, a rendezvous I had for a time feared I should have to miss unless I cut short my very entertaining Easter morning with the bunco steerers.
CHAPTER III
FAR AND WIDE ON THE ARGENTINE PAMPAS
The traveler who visits only Buenos Aires will almost certainly carry away a mistaken notion of the Argentine. There is perhaps no national capital in the world so far in advance of, so out of proportion to its nation as is the great city on what the English called the “Plate.” We of the northern hemisphere are not accustomed to cities which are their countries to the extent that Buenos Aires is the Argentine. American editors and publicists expressed astonishment, and in some cases misgiving, when our latest census showed that one tenth the population of the United States dwells in its three largest cities. Of all the people inhabiting the Argentine Republic virtually one fourth live in the capital.
The contrast between this and the great background of pampas is incredible; Buenos Aires is far more closely allied to Paris or Rome than to the broad country over which it rules. There are several reasons for this disparity, besides the general South American tendency to dress up the capital like an only son and trust that the rest of the country will pass unnoticed, like a flock of poor relatives or servants. The two principal crops of the Argentine, cattle and wheat, do not require a compact rural population. Being the chief port as well as the metropolis and capital, Buenos Aires has first choice of those who cross the sea seeking new occupations and homes. It sucks the life blood from the constant stream of immigration, leaving the “camp” a sparsely settled expanse of boundless plain and the other cities mere provincial towns, sometimes pleasant places to live in, but wholly devoid of metropolitan features. Buenos Aires is as large as Philadelphia; the second city of the Argentine is smaller than Akron, Ohio.
Numerous efforts have been made to bring about a better balance. The government offers the immigrant free transportation to any part of the country. Down on the Paseos of Colon and Julio, beneath the arcades of which Spanish and Armenian petty merchants, cheap Italian restaurants, and den-like second-hand shops make first appeal to the thin purse of the newly arrived fortune seeker, the broad brick pillars are covered with the enticements of employment agencies,—a cuadrilla of such a size wanted for railroad work three hundred miles west; so many laborers needed on an estancia in a distant province, free fare, nominal fee—just such signs as may be seen on the corner of Madison and Canal Streets in Chicago and in a score of our western cities. The wages offered are from twenty to thirty per cent. lower than for the same grade of labor in the United States at the same period, and the cost of meals somewhat higher. But it is something more than this that causes the majority of immigrants to pause and read and wander on in quest of some occupation financially less attractive in or near the capital. Possibly it is a subconscious dread of the horizonless pampas which stretch away into the unknown beyond the city; some attribute it to the now happily decreasing autocracy of grafting rural officials and the lack of government protection in districts out of touch with the capital. Or it may be nothing more than the world-wide tendency to congregate in cities. The fact remains that Buenos Aires is congested with the very laborers who are sadly needed on the great undeveloped plains of the interior.
A railroad map of the Argentine is a striking illustration of this concentration of population. As all roads once led to Rome, so do all railway lines of the Argentine converge upon Buenos Aires. Tracks radiate from the capital in every direction in which there is Argentine territory, a dense network which suggests on a larger scale the railroad yards of our great centers of transportation. No other city of the land is more than a way station compared with the all-absorbing capital. There is probably no country in the world in which it is easier to lay rails, though it is sometimes difficult to keep them above the surface. With the beginning of its real exploitation, therefore, new lines sprang up almost overnight. As in the United States beyond the Alleghenies, railroads came in most cases before highways; for though Spaniards settled in the Argentine four centuries ago, the scattered estancieros and their peons were content to ride their horses across the open plains, and the modern movement is as yet scarcely a generation old. There are many regions where the railroad is to this day the only real route; those who do not use it drive or ride at will across the trackless pampas, with thistles or waving brown grass threshing their wheels or their horses’ knees. To-day there are railways not only from Buenos Aires to every town of the adjoining provinces, but to Bolivia and Paraguay on the north, to Chile on the west, and Patagonia in the South. Long palatial trains roll out of the capital in every direction, entire trains bound for cities of which the average American has never heard the name, the destination announced by placards on the sides of the cars as in Europe—and as it should be in the United States.
With the exception of a minor French line or two, and some rather unimportant government roads of narrow gauge, all the railways of the Argentine are English, very English, in fact, with British managers and chiefs of departments, engines without bells, and with the nerve-racking screech of European locomotives, to say nothing of the British “staff” system which forces even “limited” trains to slow down at every station enough for the engineer to snatch the sort of iron scepter which is his authority for entering another section. The rolling stock, however, is more nearly American in appearance. The freight cars are large, the passenger coaches—of two classes—are built on a modified American plan, without compartments. Both in comfort and speed the main Argentine lines rival our own, though there are fewer through expresses which maintain what we would call a high rate throughout their runs. For one thing the government assesses a fine against those trains which are more than a little late without palpable excuse, and it is natural that the companies so arrange their schedules as to make such punishment unlikely, with the result that many trains have a tendency to wait at stations for the time-table to catch up with them. Nor, with the exception of the through lines to the neighboring republics, do most of the tracks forming that great network out of Buenos Aires fetch up anywhere in particular. Nearly all of them have the air of pausing in doubt on the edge of the great expanses they set out to explore, with the result that while the provinces bordering Buenos Aires are so thickly strewn with tracks that the map suggests there is not room to set down a foot between them, there are enormous tracts of territory in the central and western portions of the country wholly untouched by modern transportation. Life slows down on these many arteries of travel, too, in exact proportion to the distance from the heart from which all the Argentine is nourished. But there are indications in most cases that the pause at nowhere is only temporary, that presently the lines will summon up breath and courage to push on across the still trackless pampas.
The great drawback to travel in the Argentine is the cost, both in time and money. Distances are so great, places of any importance so far apart, that while fares are not much higher than in the United States, it takes many hours and many pesos to get anywhere worth going. Towns which look but a cannon-shot apart on the map may be reached only by several hours of travel, saddened by the despairing flatness and monotony of the desolate pampas, where there is rarely a tree to give a pleasing touch of shade, no spot of green to attract and rest the eyes, a landscape as uninviting as an unfurnished apartment.
In my double capacity of consular protégé and prospective “booster,” however, I was furnished with general passes by all the important railways, and time is no object to a mere wanderer. But for this official recognition of my unstable temperament I should probably have seen little of the Argentine, for even the man who has tramped the length of the Andes would scarcely have the patience to face on foot the endless horizon of the pampas; and “hoboing” has never been properly developed on Argentine railways. Rarely had I been given temporary carte blanche on almost every train in the country when, as a second stroke of fortune, consular business turned up which took me into various sections of the “camp” without cutting me off from my modest official income. I hastened to lay in a supply of heavy garments, for the first trip was to be south, and the end of April had brought an autumn chill even in Buenos Aires, over which birds were flying northward in great V-shaped flocks.