by John Buchan
“I want a job,” he declared a little later. “I was meant by Providence to be in a service, and to do work under discipline — not for what it brought me, but because it has to be done. I’m a bad case of the inferiority complex. When I see one of my shepherds at work, or the hands coming out of a factory, I’m ashamed of myself. The all have their niche, and it is something that matters, whereas I am a cumberer of the ground. If I want to work I’ve got to make the job for myself, and the one motive is personal vanity. I tell you, I’m in very real danger of losing my self-respect.”
It was no good arguing with Sandy in this mood, though there were a great many common-sense things I wanted the say. The danger with anyone so high-strung and imaginative as he is that every now and then come periods of self disgust and despondency.
“You’re like Ulysses,” I told him. “The fellow in Tennyson’s poem, you know. Well, there’s a widish world before you, and a pretty unsettled one. Ships sail every day to some part of it.”
He shook his head.
“That’s the rub. As I’ve told you, I can’t grow up. There’s a couple of lines by some poet that describes me accurately: ‘He is crazed by the spell of far Arabia, It has stolen his mind away.’ Far Arabia — that’s my trouble. But the Ulysses business won’t do for an ageing child of forty. Besides, what about the mariners? Where are the ‘free hearts, free foreheads?’ We used to have a rather nice little Round Table, Dick, but it is all broken up now and the wood turned into cigar-boxes for wedding present; Peter is dead, and you and Archie are married, and Leithe and Lamancha are happy parts of the machine.”
“There’s still Blenkiron.”
“He doesn’t count. He was a wandering star, that joined us and revolved cheerfully with us for a little, and then shot back to where it belonged...You can’t alter it by talking, my dear chap. I’m the old buccaneer marooned on a rock, watching his ancient companions passing in ocean liners.”
We had reached the top of the hill above Laverlaw and were looking down into the green cup filled with the afternoon sunlight, in which the house seemed as natural a thing is a stone from the hillside. I observed that it was a very pleasant rock to be marooned on. Sandy stared at the scene, and for a moment did not reply.
“I wish I had been born an Englishman,” he said at last. “Then I could have lived for that place, and been quite content to grow old in it. But that has never been our way. Our homes were only a jumping-off ground. We loved them gainfully and were always home-sick for them, but we were very little in them. That is the blight on us — we never had my sense of a continuing city, and our families survived only by accident. It’s a miracle that I’m the sixteenth Clanroyden...It’s not likely that there will be a seventeenth.”
III
Left Laverlaw rather anxious about Sandy, and during our time at Machray I thought a good deal about my friend. He was in an odd, jumpy, unpredictable state of mind, and didn’t see what was to be the outcome of it. At Machray I had a piece of news which showed his restlessness. Martendale, the newspaper man, came to stay, and was talking about boats, for his chief hobby is yacht-racing.
“What’s Arbuthnot up to now?” he asked. “I saw him it Cowes — at least I’m pretty sure it was he. In an odd get-up, even for him.”
I said that I had been staying with Sandy in August and that he had never mentioned Cowes, so I thought he must be mistaken. But Martendale was positive. He had been on the Squadron lawn, looking down on the crowd passing below, and he had seen Sandy, and caught his eye. He knew him slightly, but apparently Sandy had not wanted to be recognised and had simply stared at him. Martendale noticed him later, lunching out of a paper bag with the other trippers on the front. He was dressed like a yacht’s hand, rather a shabby yacht’s hand, and Martendale said that he thought he had a glimpse of him later with some of the crew of the big Argentine steam yacht, the Santa Barbara, which had been at Cowes that year. “The dago does not make an ornamental sailor,” said Martendale, “and if it was Arbuthnot, and I am pretty certain it was, he managed to assimilate himself very well to his background. I only picked him out of the bunch by his clean-cut face. Do you happen to know if he speaks Spanish? They were all jabbering that lingo.”
“Probably,” I said. “He’s one of the best linguists alive. But, all the same, I think you were mistaken. I saw him a fortnight later, and, I can tell you, he isn’t in the humour for escapades.”
In November, when I ran up to London from Fosse for a few days, I got further news of Sandy which really disquieted me. It appeared that he had gone down to the grass countries to hunt — a fact which in itself surprised me, for, though a fine horseman, he had always professed to hate hunting society. But for some reason or other he kept a couple of horses at Birkham and spent a lot of time there. And he seemed to have got mixed up with a rather raffish lot, for since the War the company in the Shires has not been what you might call select. The story told to me was that at a dinner where much champagne was swallowed Sandy had had a drunken row with a young profiteering lout, which had just about come to blows. He seemed to have behaved rather badly at dinner and worse later, for after having made a scene he had bolted, shown the white feather, and refused to take responsibility for what he had done.
Of course I didn’t believe a word of it. In the first place, Sandy was as abstemious as a Moslem; in the second place, he had the temper of a seraph and never quarrelled; and, in the third place, he didn’t keep any white feathers in his collection. But the story was repeated everywhere and, I am sorry to say, was believed. You see, Sandy had a great reputation in a vague way, but he hadn’t the kind of large devoted acquaintance which could be always trusted to give the lie to a slander. And I am bound to say that this story was abominably circumstantial. I had it from an eye-witness, quite a decent fellow whose word it was hard to disbelieve. He described a horrid scene — Sandy, rather drunk and deliberately insulting an ill-tempered oaf in the same condition, and then, when it almost came to fisticuffs, funking the consequences, and slipping off early next morning without a word of explanation.
I hotly denied the whole thing, but my denials did not carry very far. Sandy had disappeared again, and his absence gave gossip its chance. The ordinary story was that he had taken to drink or drugs — most people said drugs.
Even those who believed in him began to talk of a bad break-down, and explained that the kind of life he had led was bound some day to exact its penalty. I tried to get hold of him, but my telegrams to Laverlaw brought the answer that his lordship had gone abroad and left no address for letters.
Three days after Christmas I got the shock of my life. I opened The Times and found on the foreign page a short telegram from New York which reported the death of Mr John Scantlebury Blenkiron on board his yacht at Honolulu. The message said that he had once been well known as a mining engineer, and that at various times he had made coups in Wall Street.
I took the first train to London and interviewed Ellery Willis at the Embassy. He confirmed the news, for he had had a wire from Washington to the same effect.
“What did he die of?” I demanded. “And what was he doing at Honolulu? And in a yacht? He loathed the sea. He used to say that he would as soon take to yachting for pleasure as make his meals off emetics.”
“He must have been ill some time,” Willis suggested. “That would account for his disappearance. He wanted to be by himself, like a sick animal.”
I simply wouldn’t credit it, and I asked Willis to wire for details. But none came — only a recapitulation of the bare fact. When a week later I got the American papers my scepticism was a little shaken. For there were obituaries with photographs. The writers enlarged on his business career, but said nothing about his incursions into politics, nor did they give any further news of his illness. I was almost convinced, but not quite. The obituaries were full but not full enough, for Blenkiron had been a big figure and one would have expected the press to go large on his career and personality. But the n
otices all gave me the impression of having been written to order and deliberately keeping wide of the subject. There was nothing in the way of personal reminiscences, no attempt to describe his character or assess his work. The articles were uncommonly like the colourless recitals you find in a biographic dictionary.
I wired about it to Sandy, and got a reply from his butler that he was still abroad, address unknown. I wished that I knew where to find the niece who had visited Laverlaw in the summer, but Janet Roylance, to whom I applied, could tell me nothing. She and Archie were setting off almost at once on their delayed honeymoon, and had chose South America.
I have one other incident to record before I bring the preliminaries to a close. Palliser-Yeates came to stay with us for a week-end in January, and one night, after Mary had gone to bed, we sat talking in the library. He had never known Blenkiron, but he was a friend of Sandy, and to him I unburdened my anxieties. I thought he listened to me with an odd look on his face.
“You don’t believe the stories?” he asked.
“Not one blessed word,” I said. “But the poor old chap has managed to get himself a pretty fly-blown reputation.”
“Perhaps he wanted to,” was the astounding answer.
I stared, and asked him what he meant.
“It’s only a guess,” he said. “But Sandy has for a long time had a unique reputation. Not with the world at large, but with the people who matter in two hemispheres. He was known to be one of the most formidable men in the world. Now, suppose that he was engaged, or about to be engaged, in some very delicate and dangerous business. He would be marked down from the start by certain, people who feared him. So he might wish to be counted out, to be regarded as no longer formidable, and what better way than of have it generally believed that his nerve had gone and that he was all to pieces? If I wanted to create that impression, I would lay the foundation of it in the Shires, where they make a speciality of scandal. If that was his purpose, he has certainly succeeded. By this time the rumour has gone all over Europe in the circles where his name was known.”
I was digesting this startling hypothesis, when Palliser-Yeates told me the following story:
He had been in Paris just before Christmas on some business connected with Argentine banking, and one of his South American colleagues had taken him to dine at a restaurant much in vogue among the rastas. I think it was on the Rive Gauche, not a specially reputable place, but with amazingly good food. The proprietor was from the Argentine, and all the staff were South Americans. Palliser-Yeates noticed one of the waiters, not at his own table but a little way off, and he recognised the man’s face. The hair and skin were darkened, but he was positive that it was Sandy — Sandy in a greasy dress suit and a made-up black tie. When the room filled up and got rather noisy, he made an errand to speak to the conductor of the orchestra, and managed to get a word with this waiter. He cannoned against him in one of the doors and said, “Sorry, Sandy.”
The waiter knew him perfectly, and whispered from behind his pile of dishes, “Don’t give me away, John. It’s damnably serious. And never come here again.” So Palliser-Yeates took himself off, and had scrupulously held his tongue except for telling me. He said that Sandy looked well enough, and seemed to have mastered his job, for you couldn’t detect any difference between him and the rest of the outfit.
When I heard this, I decided to go to Paris myself and have a look at the restaurant, for anxiety about Sandy was coming between me and my sleep. There was something about Palliser-Yeates’s story which took my memory back a dozen years to old Kuprasso’s dancing-house in Constantinople and the man who had led the Company of the Rosy Hours. Sandy was on the war-path again, and I was bound to keep an eye on him.
But two days later I had a letter — from Blenkiron. It had a typed address and a Southampton postmark — which was no clue, for it had probably been brought over by passenger in a ship and posted at the port of arrival. The handwriting was Blenkiron’s unmistakable scrawl. It ran as follows:
“The papers will say I have gotten across the River. Don’t let that worry you. But the Golden Shore at present is important and I may have to stay there quite a time. Therefore keep up the requiems and dirges until further notice.”
Also at last I got a reply from Sandy, in answer to my string of letters. It was a telegram from London, so he had left Paris, and it merely contained Abraham Lincoln’s words: “You stop still and saw wood.”
After that I stopped still. Both Blenkiron and Sand were up to some devilry, and I had an instinct that the were working together. I have set down here my slender personal knowledge of the beginning of the strange event now to be related. The rest comes from the actors themselves.
BOOK I - THE GRAN SECO
I
The open windows, protected by wire blinds as fine-meshed as gauze, allowed the cool airs from the sea to slip in from the dusk. The big restaurant was in a pleasant gloom broken by patches of candlelight from the few occupied tables. The Hotel de la Constitucion stands on a little promontory above the harbour of Olifa, so the noise of the streets comes to it only like the echo of waves from a breakwater. Archie Roylance, looking into the great square of velvet sky now beginning to be patterned by stars, felt as if he were still at sea.
The Vice-Consul interpreted his thoughts.
“You are surprised at the quiet,” he said. “That is only because we dine early. In a little there will be many lights and a jigging band and young people dancing. Yet we have good taste in Olifa and are not garish. If you will be my guest on another occasion, I will take you to a club as well quipped as any in Pall Mall, or to a theatre where you will see better acting than in London, and I will give you a supper afterwards which Voisin’s could not better. We have civilisation, you see — for what it is worth.”
The Vice-Consul, whose name was Alejandro Gedd, was a small man with a neat, dark, clean-shaven face, and high cheek-bones from which his critics deduced Indian blood.
As a matter of fact they came from another ancestry. His grandfather, Alexander Geddes, had come out in his youth from Dundee as a clerk in a merchant’s house, had prospered, married a pretty Olifera, begotten a son, and founded a bank which rose in the silver boom to fortune. That son had married a lady of pure Castilian descent, whose beauty was not equal to her lineage, so the grandson of old Geddes had missed both the vigour of the Scot and the suave comeliness of the Olifera. Don Alejandro was an insignificant little man, and he was growing fat. The father had sold his interest in the bank at a high figure, and had thereafter dabbled in politics and horse-breeding; the son, at his death, had promptly got rid of the stud and left the government of his country to get on without him. He had been sent to an English school, and later to the Sorbonne, and had emerged from his education a dilettante and a cosmopolitan. He professed a stout Olifa patriotism, but his private sentiment was for England, and in confidential moments he would speak of his life as exile. Already he had asked Archie a dozen questions about common friends, and had dwelt like an epicure on the recollections of his last visit — the Park on a May morning, an English garden in midsummer, the Solent in August, the October colouring of Scottish hills.
His dinner-jacket had been made in the vicinity of Hanover Square, and he hoped that his black stock and his black-ribboned eyeglass were, if not English, at any rate European.
Archie was looking at the windows. “Out there is the Pacific,” he said, “nothing nearer you than China. What is it like the other way?”
“The coastal plain for a hundred miles. Then the foothills and the valleys where the wine is made. A very pretty light claret, I assure you. Then, for many hundreds of miles, the great mountains.”
“Have you travelled there much?”
Don Alejandro shook his head. “I do not travel in this land. What is there to see? In the mountains there are nothing but Indians and wild animals and bleak forests and snow. I am content with this city, where, as I have said, there is civilisation.”
“A man I met on the boat told me about a place called the Gran Seco. He said it was bound to be soon the greatest copper area in the world.”
Don Alejandro laughed. “That ill-favoured spot becomes famous. Five years ago it was scarcely known. To-day many strangers ask me about it. The name is Indian-Spanish. You must understand that a hundred miles north of this city the coastal plain ends, and the Cordilleras swing round so that there is no room between them and the ocean.
“But at the curve the mountains, though high, are not the great peaks. These are far to the east, and you have for a big space a kind of tableland. That is what we call the Gran Seco — the Great Thirst — for it is mostly waterless and desert. But it is very rich in minerals. For long we have known that, and before the War there were many companies at work there. Now there is one great company, in which our Government has a share, and from which Olifa derives much of its wealth. The capital employed is mostly foreign — no, not American — European, but of what country I do not know. The labourers are the people of the hills, and the managers are Europeans of many nationalities. They pass through this city going and coming — through this hotel often — perhaps we may see some of them to-night. They are strange folk who do not mix freely with us of Olifa. I am told they are growing as wealthy as Rockefeller. There are no English among them, I think — Slavs mostly, with some Italians and now and Then a German, so I do not come across them in the way of business, and it would appear that they have no time for pleasure...May I ask, Sir Archibald, for what purpose especially you honour us with a visit? I want to know how best I can serve you.”
Archie wrinkled his brow. “You are very kind, Don Alejandro. The fact is we’re here mainly for the fun of it. This is a sort of belated honeymoon trip. Also, I’d like to know something about the politics of Olifa and South America generally. You see, I’m a Member of Parliament, and I’ve an idea that this part of the globe may soon become rather important. I have brought several introductions.”
