CHAPTER IX
1909-1910
Since my first visit to Brazil in 1896-97, my Benedictine friends labouring in that vast country had frequently expressed the wish that I should, if possible, return and help them in their great work of restoration and reconstruction, for which more labourers were urgently needed. With health in great measure restored, and the headship of our Oxford Hall, which I had held for ten years, passed into other hands, the way to South America seemed once again open; and the autumn of 1909 found me fully authorized to make all necessary preparations for the voyage. I left Fort Augustus happy in the assurance that the long anticipated, and generally desired, reunion of our abbey with the English mother-congregation was certain to be soon realized; and stayed at Beaufort for a few days before going south, meeting there "Abe" Bailey (of South African renown), Hubert Jerningham, and some other interesting people. My last glimpse of the Highlands was a golden afternoon spent in the White Garden (the idea of one of the daughters of the house), and a vision of serried masses of white blossoms—I never realized before how many shades of white there are—standing up in their pale beauty against the dark background of trees which encircle one of the most beautiful of Scottish gardens. From Beaufort I went to Kelburn to take leave of my sister, whom I found entertaining her Girls' Friendly Society, assisted by twenty bluejackets from a cruiser lying off Arran. Their commander, Lord George Seymour, had brought his sailors by express invitation to play about and have tea with the Friendly Girls—an arrangement which seemed quite satisfactory to all parties! I crossed the Firth next day to say good-bye to Lady Bute, who was in residence at her pretty home in the Isle of Cumbrae, and went on the same afternoon to visit my hospitable cousin Mrs. Wauchope at beautiful Niddrie. The Somersets and other agreeable folk were my fellow-guests there; and Andrew Lang arrived next day, and seemed—shall I say it?—a little bit "out of the picture." I was accustomed to his small affectations and egotisms and cynical "asides," which always seemed to me more or less of a pose; for the eminent writer was really a very kind-hearted man, and I dare say just as humble-minded in reality as any of us. The poor Duke of Somerset, however, who had no affectations or pretentions of any kind, could not do with Mr. Lang at all; and I remember his imploring me (against my usual habit) to come and sit in the smoking-room at night, so that they should be on no account left tête-à-tête! On Sunday we all walked to see the noble ruins of Craigmillar Castle, sadly reminiscent of poor Queen Mary, and admirably tended by their present owner, whom we chanced to meet there, and whom I interested by a tale (oddly enough he had never heard it) of a ghost-face on the wall of his own house at Liberton.
At Woodburn, where I spent the following Sunday, and where Lord Ralph and Lady Anne Kerr were always delighted to welcome a priest to officiate in their tiny oratory, I found staying with Ralph his brother Lord Walter, whose seventieth birthday we kept as a family festival, and who on the same day retired, as Admiral of the Fleet, from the Navy in which he had served for fifty-six years. Our birthday expedition was a most interesting pilgrimage to the Holy Well of St. Triduana, near Restalrig, with its beautiful vaulted Gothic roof, recently restored by the owner, Lord Moray.[[1]] The unpretentious little Catholic chapel hard by pleased me more than the elaborate and expensive new church recently erected at Portobello, which we also visited. I broke my journey south at Longridge Towers, and whilst there motored over with Sir Brooke Boothby, our Minister in Chili (an agreeable and well-informed person) to see the poor remains of the great convent at Coldingham—sad enough, but wonderfully interesting. I made a farewell call at Ampleforth en route, lingering an hour at York to admire the west front of the minster, from which all the scaffolding was at length down after years of careful and patient repairs. Hurrying through London, I travelled to Brighton and Seaford, for the opening (by the Bishop of Southwark) of the new Ladycross school, recently transferred from Bournemouth. There was quite a notable gathering of old pupils and friends, and I had a charming neighbour at luncheon in the person of Madame Navarro (Mary Anderson), on my other side being Count Riccardi-Cubitt, English-born, but a Papal Count in right of his wife. The speeches, from the bishop, Lord Southwell, and others, were for once commendably short.
I was bidden to meet at luncheon in London next day Princess Marie Louise—a title unfamiliar to me: it had, in fact, been lately adopted to avoid confusion with an aunt and cousin, both also called Louise. We spoke of the recent re-discovery of an abbey in Lincolnshire, of which literally not a single stone had been left above ground by the iconoclasts of the sixteenth century. "My terrible great-uncle again, I suppose!" said Her Highness with a deprecatory smile. The reference was to Henry VIII.! but I hazarded a conjecture that the work of destruction dated from later and Puritan days. I attended on this same afternoon the marriage of my old friend Herbert Maxwell's only son to the youngest daughter of the House of Percy, at St. Peter's, Eaton Square, the bright and ornate interior of which contrasted cheerfully with the mirk and mire outside. The Bishop of Peterborough, the bride's uncle, tied the knot; and the church, and the Duchess of Northumberland's house in Grosvenor Place afterwards, were thronged with Percys and Campbells and Glyns.
After two busy days at Oxford, devoted to packing up and to taking hasty farewells of kind old friends (both things I detest), I went down to Hampshire to spend the Sunday previous to sailing with my brother at Kneller Court. The omens were inauspicious, for it blew hard all day, with torrents of rain. Next morning, however, was calm and bright as we motored to Southampton, where I boarded R.M.S.P. Aragon, nearly 5,000 tons bigger than the good old Magdalena. We sailed at noon, crossed to Cherbourg in perfect weather, and found the Bay of Biscay next day all smiles and dimples and sunshine. I did not land at Lisbon, having seen it all before, and having no friends there. We dropped quietly down the Tagus at sundown, just when points of light were breaking out over the city, and all the church bells seemed to be ringing the Angelus. We had a full ship, and our voyage was diversified by the usual sports, of which I was an "honorary president," my colleagues in that sinecure office being a Brazilian coffee-king, the President-elect of Argentina, and a Belgian Baron. There were four Scotsmen at my table in the saloon, three of them Davids! Somewhere about the Equator we kept the birthday of King Edward, whose health was pledged by Brazilians and Argentinos as cordially and enthusiastically as by the British. I wrote to Fritz Ponsonby to tell him of this, for His Majesty's information.[[2]] Two days later we sighted the low green shores of Brazil. I looked with interest at the well-remembered heights of Olinda, with the white walls of S. Bento shining in the morning sun. Somehow I did not picture myself stationed there again, though a newspaper which came aboard at Pernambuco announced, I noticed, that "o conhecido educationalista sr. David Hurter-blais" was coming to that city "afim de tratar da educação religiosa das classes populares!" The passengers for Pernambuco, I observed, were now chucked into the Company's lighter in a basket (in West African style), instead of having to "shin" down a dangerous companion in a heavy swell, as we used to do. Two lank-haired red-brown Indians, who came on board here to sell feather fans and such things, interested me; and I recalled how Emerson had described the aboriginals of North America as the "provisional races"—"the red-crayon sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colours for the real manhood were ready."
My destination on this voyage was not, as thirteen years previously, the steaming Equatorial State of Pernambuco, and the venerable half-derelict city of Olinda, whither our Benedictine pioneers had come out from Europe soon after the fall of the Brazilian Empire, just in time, as it seemed, to save the Benedictine Order in that vast country from collapse and utter extinction. From Olinda the arduous work of revival and restoration had gone quietly and steadily on, including one by one the ancient and almost abandoned abbeys of the old Brazilian Congregation; and it was to one of these, the monastery of our Order in the great and growing city of S. Paulo, that my steps were now turned. Bahia, two days voyage from Pernambuco, is a city to which (like Constantinople) distance very decidedly lends enchantment, and I did not land there. It was raining fast, and the fantastic hilltops were wrapped in clouds, as we entered Rio Bay. I was welcomed by a kind Belgian monk whom I had known at Olinda in 1896, and who drove me up to our fine old Portuguese abbey, standing on its own mount or morro close to the sea, where I had paid my respects to the last of the old Brazilian abbots a dozen years before. A vigorous young community now occupied the long-empty cells; and the conduct of a flourishing college, as well as pastoral work of various kinds outside, gave scope to their energy and zeal.
The weather next day was perfect, and my friend Dom Amaro devoted two or three hours to driving me round the City Beautiful. Beautiful, of course, it had always been; but I was astounded at the transformation which had taken place in four short years. From "the cemetery of the foreigner," as Rio had been called when its name, like those of Santos, Havana and Panama, had been almost synonymous with pestilence and death, it had become one of the healthiest, as it had always been one of the loveliest, capitals in the world. Four men—Brazilians all—minister of works, engineer, doctor, and prefect of the city,[[3]] had undertaken in 1905 the gigantic task of the city's sanitation. The extermination of the mosquitoes which caused yellow fever and malaria, the destruction of their breeding-places, the widening of malodorous streets, the demolition of thousands of buildings, the disinfection and removal of tens of thousands of tons of garbage, the filling-up of swamps and marshes, were only preliminary to the colossal work of reconstruction of which I saw some of the results. Right through the central city was pierced the new Avenida, a broad thoroughfare lined with noble buildings, of which the theatre, built at enormous cost, and rivalling the Paris Opéra, struck me most. More striking still was the new Beira Mar, the unique sea-drive skirting the bay for four miles, and leading to the equally beautiful circular esplanade round the Bay of Botafogo. Here I left cards and letters of introduction on the British Minister (who, I may remark en passant, never took the slightest notice of either,)[[4]]; and we drove homewards in a golden sunset, the whole city flushed with rosy light, and the heights of Corcovado and the Organ Mountains glowing purple—as purple as the evening tints of Hymettus and Pentelicus which gave to Athens the immortal name of [Greek: Iostéphanos], the violet-crowned. Behind us the pointed Sugar-loaf rose grey and menacing into the opal sky; and I recalled the quaint Brazilian tradition which tells how the Creator, when He had made the Bay of Rio and found it very good, desired to call man's admiring attention to His masterpiece by a mark of exclamation. The mark of exclamation is the Sugar-loaf! We met in the Avenida, returning from a grand formatura (review) in honour of the day (it was the anniversary of the foundation of the Republic), the President—a mulatto, by the way—and his staff, in a none too gorgeous gala carriage. I was told that he was extremely popular.
To reach S. Paulo from Rio I had the choice of two routes, the pleasanter being that by sea to Santos, and an ascent thence to the inland city by one of the most wonderful of the world's railways. But as I wished to see something of the country, I chose the twelve hours' train journey direct from the capital—and repented my choice; for though the first part of the route was through fine scenery, as we climbed the lofty Serra which stretches for miles along the Brazilian coast, the dust, heat and jolting of the train soon grew almost insufferable. I was very glad to reach S. Paulo, where the air was pleasantly cool and fresh (the city stands 2,100 feet above the sea, and just outside the tropical zone[[5]]), and where the kind abbot of S. Bento, whom I had known up to then only by correspondence, met me at the station. We were soon at his monastery, which was well situated, occupying a whole side of one of the principal squares of the city, and of historic interest as built on the same spot where, three hundred and ten years before, the first Benedictine foundation in the then village of S. Paulo had been made by Frei Mauro Texeira, a zealous and fervent monk of Bahia. The monastery, as I knew it in 1909, was an unpretentious building of the early eighteenth century, constructed not of stone but of taipa (compressed earth), its long whitewashed front pierced by ten windows, and flanked by the façade of the church with its low cupola'd tower. My host, Abbot Miguel, who had been appointed prior of the restored abbey in 1900, and abbot seven years later, had inaugurated in 1903 a school for boys, which numbered at my arrival some 300 pupils. For their accommodation, and for that of his growing community, he had done all that was possible with the old and inadequate buildings of the monastery, to which he had built on various additions. But he and his community had already decided that a complete reconstruction of both abbey and church was absolutely essential for the development of their educational and other work; and I found them all studying and discussing ornate and elaborate plans by a well-known Bavarian architect, who had "let himself go" in a west front apparently in English Elizabethan style (recalling Hatfield), and a Byzantine church with Perpendicular Gothic details and two lofty towers.[[6]] The process of demolition, commencing with the choir of the old church, was started a few weeks after I reached S. Paulo; and I remember that we were nearly asphyxiated by the falling and crumbling walls, which (as I have said) were built of a kind of adobe or dried mud, and broke into thick clouds of blinding yellow dust as they tumbled about our ears.
The rebuilding of the Benedictine Abbey was only one feature, and not the most considerable, of the architectural transformation which was taking place before one's eyes in every part of S. Paulo, and was developing it from an insignificant provincial capital into one of the largest and most progressive cities of South America. In twenty years the population had increased tenfold—from fifty thousand to nearly half a million—and two facts struck me as both remarkable and encouraging, namely that the birth-rate was more than double the death-rate, and was (so I was told) more than double that of London—nearly thirty-six per thousand. The State and city of S. Paulo were alike cosmopolitan, 300,000 immigrants (more than half of them Italians) having entered the country in the year before my arrival, and more than half the population being of foreign birth. The vast majority of the day-labourers in the city were Italians, on the whole an industrious and thrifty race (though not without obvious faults), who assimilated themselves without difficulty to the country of their adoption. The rapidly growing prosperity of S. Paulo was shown by the astonishing appreciation in a few years of the value of land in and around the city—exceeding, so I was assured by a prominent American, any phenomenon of the kind in the United States. Our Abbot had, not long before my arrival, acquired with wise prescience a fine country estate in the eastern outskirts, which was already worth at least ten times what he had expended on its purchase. The chacara (as such properties are called) included a fine old house of Imperial days, garden, farm, orchard, extensive woods, as well as a lake, football fields, playgrounds and a rifle-range; and here our young pupils spent one day every week enjoying the open-air life and sports unattainable in the city.