Turning, I saw the speaker, a Gaucho of about thirty years of age, dressed all in black in the old style of thirty years ago. His silver knife, two feet or more in length, stuck in his sash, stuck out on both sides of his body like a lateen.
Where he had come from I had no idea, for he appeared to have risen from the scrub behind me. “Yes,” he said, “Puta, Pingos,” giving the phrase in the more classic, if more unregenerate style, “how well they look, just like the garden in the plaza at Fray Bentos in the sun.”
All shades were there, with every variegation and variety of colour, white, and fern noses, chestnuts with a stocking on one leg up to the stifle joint, horses with a ring of white right round their throats, or with a star as clear as if it had been painted on the hip, and “tuvianos,” that is, brown, black, and white, a colour justly prized in Uruguay.
Turning half round and offering me a cigarette, the Correntino spoke again. “It is a paradise for all those pingos here in this rincón: [28] grass, water, everything that they can want, shade, and shelter from the wind and sun.”
So it appeared to me—the swiftly flowing river with its green islands; the Pampas grass along the stream; the ruined buildings, half-buried in the orange trees run wild; grass, shade, and water: “Pucha, no . . . Puta, Pingos, where are they now?”
III
FIDELITY
My tall host knocked the ashes from his pipe, and crossing one leg over the other looked into the fire.
Outside, the wind howled in the trees, and the rain beat upon the window-panes. The firelight flickered on the grate, falling upon the polished furniture of the low-roofed, old-fashioned library, with its high Georgian overmantel, where in a deep recess there stood a clock, shaped like a cross, with eighteenth-century cupids carved in ivory fluttering round the base, and Time with a long scythe standing upon one side.
In the room hung the scent of an old country-house, compounded of so many samples that it is difficult to enumerate them all. Beeswax and potpourri of roses, damp, and the scent of foreign woods in the old cabinets, tobacco and wood smoke, with the all-pervading smell of age, were some of them. The result was not unpleasant, and seemed the complement of the well-bound Georgian books standing demure upon their shelves, the blackening family portraits, and the skins of red deer and of roe scattered about the room.
The conversation languished, and we both sat listening to the storm that seemed to fill the world with noises strange and unearthly, for the house was far from railways, and the avenues that lead to it were long and dark. The solitude and the wild night seemed to have recreated the old world, long lost, and changed, but still remembered in that district just where the Highlands and the Lowlands meet.