Twentieth-century development of Portugal, where the tourist is concerned, will largely centre in the exploitation of Algarve, the southern province which borders on the Atlantic's approach to the Mediterranean. On the beautiful bay of Lagos, whence da Gama set sail for India, a modern hotel is to be raised, and other schemes are afoot which deserve encouragement and success. The climate is far superior to that of the French Riviera, and generations must elapse before the picturesque and fertile coast could possibly become spoiled. Meanwhile let me say that even now there is comfortable hotel accommodation to be had at Praia da Rocha and Faro, and those who wish to enjoy "Côte d'Azur" conditions on simple lines, far from the madding crowd of gambling plutocrats of all nations, may reasonably set off for the Algarve littoral "right now." One word as to motoring in Portugal. I did a great deal of road-travelling by car, and in many places found it indispensable; but, much as I should like to say otherwise, I cannot recommend the motoring tourist to take his own vehicle so far afield. The roads, like the curate's egg of the story, are "good in parts"; but through travelling by road is not to be lightly undertaken, especially as the country would have to be approached through Spain unless the car were shipped from England by sea. There are garages, nevertheless, in the chief towns, and I would advise the hiring of cars for intermediate journeyings after suitable inquiries on the spot as to the available possibilities. The tourist who sees Portugal by ordinary means need have no fear as to his comfort at hotels, or the welcome he will receive if he speaks the English tongue. If he finds himself in any difficulty in the streets, however, and knows nothing of the language of the country, the best tip I can offer is: "Do not try English or French on an adult, but lay hold of the nearest schoolboy." English is understood by the rising generation to a surprising degree, and probably there are more Portuguese youngsters who could go through all three verses of the English national anthem than could be found in England itself. As for the learning of Portuguese, the pronunciation is everything; and let not the tourist ask when the boat will arrive at Leixões-the port for Oporto-with any phonetic approach to its spelling. The actual pronunciation is "Leshoines," or sometimes "Leshines"! THE CASE OF PARAMORE By Katharine Fullerton Gerould OR the sake of moral values I ought to wish, I suppose, that Paramore had been a more conspicuous figure. There is moral significance in the true tale of Paramore the tale which has been left to me in trust by Hoyting. I cursed Hoyting when he did it; for Paramore's reputation was nothing to me, and what Paramore knew or didn't know was in my eyes unspeakably unimportant. I wish it clearly understood, you see, that if Paramore deliberately confused exogamy and endogamy in the Australian bush, it doesn't in the least matter to me. Paramore is only a symbol. As a symbol I am compelled to feel him important. That is why I wish that his name were ringing in the ears and vibrating on the lips of all of you. His bad anthropology doesn't matter-a dozen big people are delightedly setting that straight-but the adventure of his soul immensely does. Rightly read, it's as sound as a homily and as dramatic as Euripides. The commonest field may be chosen by the opposing generals to be decisive; and in a day history is born where before only the quiet wheat has sprung. Paramore is like that. The hostile forces converged by chance upon his breast. I have implied that Paramore was never conspicuous. That is to be more merciful than just. The general public cares no more, I suppose, than I do about the marriage customs of Australian aborigines. But nowadays the general public has in pay, as it were, an army of scientists in every field. We all expect to be told in our daily papers of their most important victories, and have a comfortable feeling that we, as the age, are subsidizing research. By the same token, if they deceive us, we the age-are personally injured and fall to "muckraking." It is typical that no one had been much interested in Paramore until he was discredited, and that then, quite without intelligible documents, we all began to despise him. VOL. LIV.-40 The situation, for that matter, was not without elements of humor. The facts as I and the general public knew them were these before Hoyting, with his damnable inside information, came into it. Paramore sprang one day full-armed from some special academic obscurity. He had scraped together enough money to bury himself in the Australian bush and grapple face to face with primitive religion in its most concrete form. Each to his taste; and I dare say some casual newspaper readers wished him godspeed. There followed the proper interval of time; then an emaciated Paramore suddenly, emerging, laden with note-books; then the published volume, very striking and revolutionary, a treasure-house of authentic and indecent anecdote. He could write, too, which was part of his evil fate; so that a great many people read him. That, however, was not Paramore's fault. His heart, I believe, was in Great Russell Street, where the Royal Anthropologists have power to accept or reject. He probably wanted the alphabet picturesquely arranged after his name. At all events, he got it in large measure. You see, his evidence completely upset a lot of hard-won theories about mother-right and group marriage; and he didn't hesitate to contradict the very greatest. He actually made a few people speak lightly of "The Golden Bough." No scientist had ever spent so long at primitive man's very hearth as Paramore had. It was a tremendous achievement. He had data that must have been more dangerous to collect than the official conversation of nihilists. It was his daring that won him the momentary admiration of the public to whom exogamy is a ludicrously unimportant noun. Very soon, of course, every one forgot. It was not more than two years after his book was printed that the newspapers took him up again. Most of them appended to the despatch a brief biography of Paramore. No biographies were needed 419 I went to one of the rue de Rivoli hotels and met him by appointment. Of course he hadn't told me what it was about. Hoyting never writes; and he puts as little into a telegram as a frugal old maid. Any sign from Hoyting, however, would have sufficed to bring me to Paris; and I stayed in my hotel, never budging even for the Salon so close at hand, until Hoyting appeared in my sitting-room. in Great Russell Street. This was the international complication intervened, and point where the comic spirit decided to the next thing the newspapers found time meddle. A few Germans had always been to say about him was that he had gone protesting at inconsistencies in Para- to the Upper Niger, still on folk-lore bent. more's book, and no one had paid any at- That fact would have been stupendous if tention to them. There is always a learned it hadn't been so unimportant. Two years German protesting somewhere. The gen- later the fickle press returned to him just eral attitude among the great was: any long enough to say that he had died. I one may challenge or improve Paramore's certainly thought then that we had heard conclusions in fact it's going to be our the last of him. But the comic spirit had delightful task for ten years to get more laid her inexorable finger on Hoyting. out of Paramore than he can get out of And suddenly, as if in retribution for my himself but do get down on your knees spasmodic interest in Paramore's beautibefore the immense amount of material ful fraud, Hoyting sent for me. he has taken the almost fatal trouble to collect for us. No other European was in a position to discredit Paramore. It took an Australian planter to do that. Whitaker was his quite accidentally notorious name. The comic spirit pushed him on a North German Lloyder at Melbourne to spend a few happy months in London. It was perfectly natural that people who talked to him at all should mention Paramore. The unnatural thing was that he knew all about Paramore. He didn't tell all he knew—as I learned afterward-but he knew at least enough to prove that Paramore hadn't spent so much of his time in the bush as would have been absolutely necessary to compile one-quarter of these note-books. Whitaker was sufficiently reticent about what Paramore had been doing most of the time; but he knew for a fact, and took a sporting interest in proving it, that Paramore had never been west of the Musgrave Range. That in itself sufficed to ruin Paramore. It was perfectly easy then for the little chorus from Bonn, Heidelberg, etc., to prove in their meticulous way that both his cribbing and lying (his whole treatment of Spencer and Gillen was positively artistic) had all been mere dust-throwing. Of course what Paramore really had achieved ceased from that moment to count. He had blasphemed; and the holy inquisition of science would do the rest. It all took a certain amount of time, but that was the net result. Paramore made no defence, oddly enough. Some kind people arranged an accidental encounter between him and Whitaker. The comic spirit was hostess, and the newspapers described it. It gave the cartoonists a happy week. Then an I asked Hoyting no questions. I hadn't an idea of what he wanted. It might, given Hoyting, be anything. He began without preliminaries-except looking frightfully tired. That, for Hoyting, was a rather appalling preliminary. "Three months ago I was in Dakar. I don't know just why I had drifted to Sénégal, except that I've come to feel that if there must be colonial governments they had better be French. If there was any special thing that pushed me, I've forgotten it. "They were decentish people, those French officers and their wives. A little stiff always, never expatriated, never quite at ease in their African inn, but not half so likely to go fantee as the romantic Briton. And once a fortnight the little boats from Bordeaux would come in bringing more of them. I rather liked them; but even so, there wasn't any particular reason for my staying on so long in Dakar. I hung on like an alarm that has been set. I couldn't go off-or on— until the moment I was set for. I don't suppose the alarm-clock knows until the vibration begins within it. Something kept me there in that dull, glaring, little official town, with its dry dock and torpedo-basin, which, of course, they had managed to endow with the flavor of pro vincial France. They do that everywhere -you'll have noticed? "I used to go up sometimes in the comparative cool of the evening to dine with the fathers. It isn't that I hold with them much-Rome was introduced to me in my childhood as the Scarlet Woman-but all travellers have the same tale to tell. They are incomparable missionaries. And it stands to reason that they can get on better with savages than the rest of you. You can meet magic only with magic. It was they who introduced me to Paramore." "Oh, it's Paramore!" I exclaimed. "Heaven forgive you, Hoyting, you are always in at the death. How do you manage it? But fancy being in at Paramore's! By the way, I suppose you know Ι that no one knows anything except that he's dead." "Umph! Well, I do," returned Hoyting. "That's what I was set for-like the clock: to turn up at the Mission House just when he was brought in there with fever. I don't go hunting for things like that, you understand. I'd as soon have thought of staying on for Madame Pothier's beaux yeux.' "I didn't know you knew whether eyes were fine or not." "I suppose I don't. But I can guess. There are always other people to tell you. Anyhow, her fine eyes were all for le bon Dieu and Pothier. She was a good sortmarried out of a little provincial convent school to a man twice her age, and taking ship within a month for Sénégal. She loved him for his scars, probably, Desdemona-fashion. Have you ever noticed that a woman often likes a man better for a crooked white seam across his face that spoils all the modelling? Naïve notions women have about war! They tiptoe round the carnage, making eyes at the slayers. Oh, in imagination, of course. And if they once appreciate how they really feel about it, they begin to gabble about disarmament." Hoyting fingered the dingy little packet that he had taken out of his pocket and laid on my table. He looked far away out of the window for a moment, narrowing his eyes as if trying to focus them on another hemisphere. "So he was taken to the Pothiers'." "You're leaving out a lot," I interrupted. "Why 'so,' and why to the Pothiers'? You said to the mission." "Oh"-his brows knitted. He didn't like filling up his own gaps. The things Hoyting takes it for granted one will know about his exotic context! "The mission was full of patients-an epidemic had been running through the converts, and it was up to them to prove that the sacrament of baptism wasn't some deadly process of inoculation. As I say, it's all magic, white or black. Poor Paramore wasn't a convert-he was by way of being an agnostic, I imagine-and the fathers weren't, in a sense, responsible for him. Yet one must do them the justice to say that they'd never have sent him away if they hadn't had a better place to send him to. The mission was no place at the moment for a man with fever-sweating infection as it was, and full of frightened patients who were hiding gri-gris under their armpits and looking more than askance at the crucifixes over the doors. The Pothiers had known Paramore two years before, when he had stopped in Dakar on his way into the interior. They took him in quite naturally and simply. Paramore had noticed her fine eyes, I believe-oh, in all honor and loyalty. There were lots of ways in which he wasn't a rotter. He was merely the finest liar in the world-and a bit of a Puritan to boot. "Is there any combination life hasn't exhausted, I wonder?" Hoyting walked to the window, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the eternal race of the taxicabs below. "Think of what may be going by in any one of those taxis. And Paramore was a bit of a Puritan, for all his years of fake anthropology." His face was heavily weary as presently he turned it to me. "I was involved in Paramore's case. I've been to the bottom of this thing, I tell you. Paramore overflowed-emptied himself like a well; and at the end there was absolutely nothing left in his mind; it was void up to the black brim. Then he died-quite vacuous. He had simply poured out his inner life around me. I was left alone in Dakar swimming in the infernal pool of Paramore's cerebrations. You can't, on the banks of the Sénégal, refer a man to his solicitors. If Paramore had been a Catholic, I could have turned his case over to the bishop. But bishops had nothing to do with Paramore. And that's where you come in." "Oh, I come in, do I?" I asked a little fearfully. No one wants to come in where Hoyting leaves off. "Of course. Why else did I make an appointment with you? You'll take this packet when you leave. You don't suppose I'm going to London!" "I didn't know Paramore." "No; but I did. And when I've told you, you'll see. I don't take a trip like this for nothing. I hate the very smell of the asphalt." "Go on." It's what one always says to Hoyting. "I can't tell it coherently-though I can tell it, I suppose, more coherently than he did. In the first place, what do you know about him?” The question sent a flood of dingy reminiscence welling slowly and muddily up through my consciousness. I thought for a moment. What, after all, was there to tell about Paramore except that he had lied, and that in the end he had been discredited as lavishly as for a time he had been believed? For any one else I might have made a sprightly little story out of the elliptical narrative of the newspapers; but no one that I know of has ever tried to be a raconteur for Hoyting. He has use only for the raw material; art disgusts him. I gave him as rapid a précis as I could, suppressing all instinct to embroider it. When I had finished: "He's completely discredited, then?" I waved my hands. "My dear Hoyting, no one would take Paramore's word about the manners and customs of his own household." "It's a pity," said Hoyting simply. "It makes it harder for you." "I've nothing to do with Paramore. If there's one thing that interests me less than his disaster, it's his rehabilitation." I didn't mean to be flippant, but Hoyting's ominousness invited it. "Oh, rehabilitation-no, I dare say between us we couldn't manage that. I merely want to get the truth off my hands." Hoyting lighted another cigarette. The atmosphere of my room was already densely blue, and I opened the window. His hand shot up. "Shut that, please. I can't be interrupted by all those savage noises. God! for a breath of sea air!" I sat down and faced him. After all, the man has never lived who could stagemanage Hoyting. "Did you ever meet the Australian?" he asked. "Whitaker? No." "A pretty bad lot, I gather." "Do you mean that he lied?" "Oh, no. From what Paramore said, I should think that was just the one thing he didn't do." Hoyting dropped his chin on his breast and narrowed his eyes. Then he shook his head very slowly. "At my time of life it's silly to be always saying how strange things are, and how clever life is, and all that literary nonsense; but, on my word, if ever a scene was arranged to make a man a protagonist in spite of himself this was it. Every element in that Dakar situation was contrived to bring Paramore out. He had fever and the prescience of death-which is often mistaken, but works just as well notwithstanding; he had performed his extraordinary task; he was in love with Madame Pothier. The cup was spilling over, and I was there to wipe up the overflow." Hoyting was silent for a moment. Then he spoke irritably. It "I don't know where to begin. There isn't any beginning to this story. hasn't any climax-or else it's all climax. It's just a mess. Well, I shall have to begin, I suppose, if Paramore didn't. Perhaps the first thing was his sitting up in bed one morning and peering out at me through his mosquito-netting. It gave him a queer, caged look. His voice went with it-that cracked and throaty voice they have, you know. 'Do you know Whitaker?' he asked. "No, indeed,' I said. 'You'd better lie down.' "If you could have seen him then, you'd have felt, as I did, that he'd better not talk: that he wouldn't say anything one wanted to hear. "It was Whitaker that finished me.' Still he peered out at me. |