| PAGE | ||
| I. | Brought Forward | [1] |
| II. | Los Pingos | [11] |
| III. | Fidelity | [30] |
| IV. | “Uno dei Mille” | [40] |
| V. | With the North-East Wind | [51] |
| VI. | Elysium | [60] |
| VII. | Heredity | [66] |
| VIII. | El Tango Argentino | [81] |
| IX. | In a Backwater | [97] |
| X. | Hippomorphous | [106] |
| XI. | Mudejar | [120] |
| XII. | A Minor Prophet | [130] |
| XIII. | El Masgad | [146] |
| XIV. | Feast Day in Santa Maria Mayor | [164] |
| XV. | Bopicuá | [185] |
I
BROUGHT FORWARD
The workshop in Parkhead was not inspiriting. From one week’s end to another, all throughout the year, life was the same, almost without an incident. In the long days of the Scotch summer the men walked cheerily to work, carrying their dinner in a little tin. In the dark winter mornings they tramped in the black fog, coughing and spitting, through the black mud of Glasgow streets, each with a woollen comforter, looking like a stocking, round his neck.
Outside the dreary quarter of the town, its rows of dingy, smoke-grimed streets and the mean houses, the one outstanding feature was Parkhead Forge, with its tall chimneys belching smoke into the air all day, and flames by night. Its glowing furnaces, its giant hammers, its little railway trucks in which men ran the blocks of white-hot iron which poured in streams out of the furnaces, flamed like the mouth of hell.
Inside the workshop the dusty atmosphere made a stranger cough on entering the door. The benches with the rows of aproned men all bending at their work, not standing upright, with their bare, hairy chests exposed, after the fashion of the Vulcans at the neighbouring forge, gave a half-air of domesticity to the close, stuffy room.
A semi-sedentary life quickened their intellect; for where men work together they are bound to talk about the topics of the day, especially in Scotland, where every man is a born politician and a controversialist. At meal-times, when they ate their “piece” and drank their tea that they had carried with them in tin flasks, each one was certain to draw out a newspaper from the pocket of his coat, and, after studying it from the Births, Deaths, and Marriages, down to the editor’s address on the last page, fall a-disputing upon politics. “Man, a gran’ speech by Bonar Law aboot Home Rule. They Irish, set them up, what do they make siccan a din aboot? Ca’ ye it Home Rule? I juist ca’ it Rome Rule. A miserable, priest-ridden crew, the hale rick-ma-tick o’ them.”
The reader then would pause and, looking round the shop, wait for the answer that he was sure would not be long in coming from amongst such a thrawn lot of commentators. Usually one or other of his mates would fold his paper up, or perhaps point with an oil-stained finger to an article, and with the head-break in the voice, characteristic of the Scot about to plunge into an argument, ejaculate: “Bonar Law, ou aye, I kent him when he was leader of the South Side Parliament. He always was a dreary body, sort o’ dreich like; no that I’m saying the man is pairfectly illiterate, as some are on his side o’ the Hoose there in Westminister. I read his speech—the body is na blate, sort o’ quick at figures, but does na take the pains to verify. Verification is the soul of mathematics. Bonar Law, eh! Did ye see how Maister Asquith trippit him handily in his tabulated figures on the jute business under Free Trade, showing that all he had advanced about protective tariffs and the drawback system was fair redeeklous . . . as well as several errors in the total sum?”
Then others would cut in and words be bandied to and fro, impugning the good faith and honour of every section of the House of Commons, who, by the showing of their own speeches, were held to be dishonourable rogues aiming at power and place, without a thought for anything but their own ends.
This charitable view of men and of affairs did not prevent any of the disputants from firing up if his own party was impugned; for in their heart of hearts the general denunciation was but a covert from which to attack the other side.
In such an ambient the war was sure to be discussed; some held the German Emperor was mad—“a daft-like thing to challenge the whole world, ye see; maist inconsiderate, and shows that the man’s intellect is no weel balanced . . . philosophy is whiles sort of unsettlin’ . . . the felly’s mad, ye ken.”