I cannot remember that I was a great dealer at the emporium, the glories of which the card sets forth, except for cigarettes and “Rapadura”; that is, raw sugar in a little cake done up in maize-leaves, matches, and an occasional glass of white Brazilian rum.
Still during two long months the place stood to me in lieu of club, and in it I used to meet occasional German “Fazenderos,” merchants from Surucaba, and officers on the march from San Paulo to Rio Grande; and there I used to lounge, waiting for customers to buy a “Caballada” of some hundred horses, which a friend and I had brought with infinite labour from the plains of Uruguay. Thinking upon the strange and curious types I used to meet, clad for the most part in loose black Turkish trousers, broad-brimmed felt hats kept in their place by a tasselled string beneath the chin, in real or sham vicuña ponchos, high patent-leather boots, sewn in patterns with red thread; upon the horses with silver saddles and reins, securely tied to posts outside the door, and on the ceaseless rattle of spurs upon the bare brick floors which made a sort of obligato accompaniment to the monotonous music of the guitar, full twenty years fall back.
Yet still the flat-roofed town, capital of the district in Rio Grande known as Encima de la Sierra, the stopping-place for the great droves of mules which from the Banda Oriental and Entre Rios are driven to the annual fair at Surucaba; the stodgy Brazilian countrymen so different from the Gauchos of the River Plate; the negroes at that time slaves; the curious vegetation, and the feeling of being cut off from all the world, are fresh as yesterday.
Had but the venture turned out well, no doubt I had forgotten it, but to have worked for four long months driving the horses all the day through country quite unknown to me, sitting the most part of each night upon my horse on guard, or riding slowly round and round the herd, eating jerked beef, and sleeping, often wet, upon the ground, to lose my money, has fixed the whole adventure on my memory for life.
Failure alone is interesting.
Successful generals with their hands scarce dry from the blood of half-armed foes; financiers, politicians; those who rise, authors whose works run to a dozen editions in a year: the men who go to colonies with or without the indispensable half-crown and come back rich, to these we give our greetings in the market-place; we make them knights, marking their children with the father’s bourgeois brand: we marvel at their fortune for a brief space, and make them doctors of civil law, exposing them during the process to be insulted by our undergraduates, then they drop out of recollection and become uninteresting, as nature formed their race.
But those who fail after a glorious fashion, Raleigh, Cervantes, Chatterton, Camoens, Blake, Claverhouse, Lovelace, Alcibiades, Parnell, and the last unknown deck-hand who, diving overboard after a comrade, sinks without saving him: these interest us, at least they interest those who, cursed with imagination, are thereby doomed themselves to the same failure as their heroes were. The world is to the unimaginative, for them are honours, titles, rank and ample waistbands; foolish phylacteries broad as trade union banners; their own esteem and death to sound of Bible leaves fluttered by sorrowing friends, with the sure hope of waking up immortal in a new world on the same pattern as the world that they have left.
After a wretched passage down the coast, we touched at Rio, and in the Rua Direita, no doubt now called Rio Primero de Mayo or some other revolutionary date, we saw a Rio Grandense soldier on a fine black horse. As we were going to the River Plate to make our fortunes, my companion asked me what such a horse was worth, and where the Brazilian Government got their remounts. I knew no horses of the kind were bred nearer than Rio Grande, or in Uruguay, and that a horse such as the trooper rode, might in the latter country be worth an ounce. We learned in Rio that his price was eighty dollars, and immediately a golden future rose before our eyes. What could be easier than in Uruguay, which I knew well and where I had many friends (now almost to a man dead in the revolutions or killed by rum), to buy the horses and drive them overland to the Brazilian capital?
We were so confident of the soundness of our scheme that I believe we counted every hour till the boat put to sea.
Not all the glories of the Tijuca with its view across the bay straight into fairyland, the red-roofed town, the myriad islets, the tall palm-tree avenue of Botafogo, the tropic trees and butterflies, and the whole wondrous panorama spread at our feet, contented us.