by John Buchan
Archie inquired concerning Mr Rawlinson.
“He’s a fine man and a big man, one of the biggest on the Pacific coast. I’ve nothing against Burton. He’s rich, and he’s public-spirited, and he’s gotten a mighty fine collection of pictures. I can’t say I take to his offspring and their friends. There’s more dollars than sense in that outfit.”
“I like the Moplahs,” said Janet. “I want to know them.”
Archie, who was a connoisseur of dancing, observed that the men danced better than the women, a thing he had noticed before with Americans. “Did a fellow with starched linen bags ever come to your office?” he asked the Consul. “Slightly built fellow, a little shorter than me?”
Mr Wilbur shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t remember him. All their garments struck me as curious. Heaven knows what’s going to become of our youth. Sir Archibald. They’ve quit behaving like ladies and gentlemen — running wild like bronchos, and their parents can’t do the lassooing. They’re hard cases at seventeen.”
“There’s an appalling innocence about them,” said Janet and looked up smiling, for two of the dancers had left the floor and were approaching them.
The girl was small, and a little too plump, but very pretty, with a mop of golden curls like a mediaeval page’s. The young man was thin and beaky, and his longish hair was parted in the middle.
“Say, what about dancing?” he said. “Won’t you cut in?” He looked at Janet, while the girl smiled pleasantly on Archie.
“Most awfully sorry,” said Archie. “I’d love to, but I’ve got a game leg.”
“Pardon?”
“I mean I’m a bit lame.”
Janet rose smiling and took the young man’s arm.
“I don’t know your name,” said Mr Wilbur, who was a stickler for the conventions, “but I reckon you’re with the Corinna party. This lady is Lady Roylance.”
The youth regarded him solemnly. “You’ve said it, Grandpa,” was his reply. “Come on, lady.”
The girl was still partnerless, and Don Alejandro offered himself for the breach. He sprang to his feet and bowed deeply from the waist. “If I may have the honour,” he said. Archie and the Consul were left alone to their cigars.
The dancing-place was soon crowded, and Janet and Don Alejandro seemed to have been completely absorbed into the whirl. Glimpses could be caught of Janet’s porcelain elegance, and of an unwontedly energetic Don Alejandro in the grip of various corybantic maidens. The two men in the lounge-chairs presently ceased to be spectators and fell into talk.
Mr Wilbur, as if the absence of his colleague had unsealed his tongue, expanded and became almost confidential. He asked Archie for his impressions of Olifa, and when he was told “tidy and contented and opulent,” nodded an acquiescent head.
“You’re about right, sir. That’s Olifa first and last — the Olifa of to-day. Better policed than New York, and just about as clean as Philadelphia. Manicured, you might say. But it wasn’t always like that. When I first came here Olifa was the ordinary South American republic, always on the edge of bankruptcy and revolution, and this city had one of the worst names on the coast. The water-front was a perfect rat-hole for every criminal in the Pacific — every brand of roughneck and dope-smuggler and crook — dagos with knives and niggers with razors and the scum of the United States with guns. To-day you could take your wife along it in perfect safety any hour of the night. The Treasury was empty, for politics were simply who could get their hands first and deepest into it. There was bad trouble up-country, and there was always a war going on in the mountains, which the little under-fed and never-paid soldiers couldn’t win. Now we’ve got a big balance in the budget and the peace of God over the land. It’s a kind of miracle. It’s almost against nature, Sir Archibald.”
“Why, it’s principally the Gran Seco,” he continued, in response to Archie’s request for an explanation. “That, as you know, is the richest copper proposition on the globe, and the Government has a big share in it. There’s money to burn for everybody nowadays. But there’s more than money. Olifa’s gotten a first-class brain to help her along.”
“The President?”
Wilbur laughed.
“The Excelentisimo is a worthy gentleman, and he has gotten some respectable folks to help him, but it isn’t the President of this republic that has made the desert blossom like the rose. There’s a bigger brain behind him.”
“You mean the Gran Seco fellow — what’s his name?”
“I mean Mr Castor. At least I reckon it must be Mr Castor, for there isn’t anybody else. You see, I can size up the members of the Government, because I know them, so it must be the man I don’t know.”
“I see. Well, it’s clear that I must get alongside of this Castor if I’m to learn much about Olifa. What’s the best way to work it?”
“Through the President, I reckon. I’d like to help you but I haven’t much of a pull in Olifa just at the moment. You see, the United States is going through one of its periodical fits of unpopularity. Olifa has waxed fat, like the man in the Bible, and she’s kicking, and when a South American nation kicks it’s generally against the United States. Don Alejandro will fix an interview with the President for you, and he’ll arrange your trip to the Gran Seco. He’s a good little man, though he don’t like my country.”
Thereafter Mr Wilbur discoursed of his nation — its strength and its weakness, its active intelligence, imperfect manners, and great heart. He was a critic, but he was also an enthusiast. To this man, grown old in foreign lands in his country’s service, America was still the America of his youth. Her recent developments he knew only from the newspapers, and he loyally strove to reconcile them with his old ideal. America only needed to be understood to be loved, but it was hard to get her true worth across the footlights. “You English,” he said, “have got a neat, hard-shell national character, with a high gloss on it. Foreigners may not like it, but they can’t mistake it. It hits them in the eye every time. But we’re young and growing and have a lot of loose edges, and it’s mighty hard to make people understand that often when we talk foolishness we mean wisdom, and that when we act high and mighty and rile our neighbours it’s because we’re that busy trying to get a deal through we haven’t time to think of susceptibilities. You’ve got to forget our untidy fringes.”
“Like the crowd from the yacht,” said Archie. “They don’t rile me a bit, I assure you...Just look at the way that lad dances. He might be David capering before the Lord.”
“That’s because you’ve seen a lot of the world, Sir Archibald. I reckon you’ve met enough Americans to know the real thing.”
“No, I’ve met very few. You see, I’ve never crossed the Atlantic before. But I knew one American, and for his sake I’m ready to back your country against all corners. He was about the wisest and bravest and kindest old fellow ever came across.”
Mr Wilbur asked his name.
“He’s dead, poor chap. Died a few months ago. I daresay you’ve heard of him. His name was Blenkiron — John S. Blenkiron.”
Archie had his eye on the Hebraic dancer or he might have noticed a sudden change in his companion’s face. When Mr Wilbur spoke again — and that was after a considerable pause — it was in a voice from which all feeling had gone, the voice in which he conducted his consular duties.
“Yes. I’ve heard of Mr Blenkiron. Mighty fine man, they tell me. Just how well did you know him, Sir Archibald?”
“I only saw him for a week or two in the Amiens business of March ‘18. But they were pretty solemn weeks, and you get to know a man reasonably well if you’re fighting for your life beside him. He was with a great pal of mine, General Hannay, and the two of them put up a famous show at Gavrelle. I can see old Blenkiron’s face yet, getting cheerier the more things went to the devil, and fairly beaming when the ultimate hell was reached. I wouldn’t ask for a better partner in a scrap. I’m most awfully sorry he died. I always hoped to see him again.”
“Too bad,”
said Mr Wilbur, and he seemed to be absorbed in some calculation, for his brows were knitted.
A flushed Janet joined them, attended by two cavaliers who insisted on plundering the pot plants to give her flowers, Presently Don Alejandro also extricated himself from the dancers, with his black-corded eyeglass hanging over his left shoulder.
“These innocents are going to the Gran Seco,” Janet announced. “They seem to think it is a sort of country club, but if your account is true, Mr Wilbur, they’ll be like humming-birds in a dustbin.”
“They surely will,” said the Consul. “When do you expect your own permits, Lady Roylance?”
“They should be ready to-morrow,” said Don Alejandro.
Archie and Janet left their caleche at the hotel gates, and walked up the steep avenue to enjoy the coolness of the night wind. At the esplanade on the top they halted to marvel at the view. Below them lay the old town with the cathedral towers white in the moonlight — a blur of shadows in which things like glow-worms twinkled at rare intervals, and from which came confused echoes of some secret nocturnal life. Beyond lay the shining belt of the Avenida, and the Ciudad Nueva mounting its little hills in concentric circles of light. On the other side the old harbour was starred with the riding lights of ships, and the lamps of the water-front made a double line, reflection and reality. To the south at the new harbour there was a glow of fires and the clamour of an industry which did not cease at sunset. To the west, beyond the great breakwater, sea and sky melted under the moon into a pale infinity.
Suddenly Archie’s spirits awoke. He seemed to see Olifa as what he had hoped — not a decorous city of careerists, but a frontier post on the edge of mysteries. The unknown was there, crowding in upon the pert little pride of man. In the golden brume to the east were mountains — he could almost see them — running up to icefields and splintered pinnacles, and beyond them swamps and forests as little travelled as in the days of Cortes. Between the desert of the ocean and the desert of the hills lay this trivial slip of modernity, but a step would take him beyond it into an antique land. The whiff of a tropical blossom from the shrubberies and the faint odour of wood smoke unloosed a flood of memories — hot days in the African bush, long marches in scented Kashmir glens, shivering camps on Himalayan spurs. The War had overlaid that first youth of his, when he had gone east to see the world, but the rapture and magic were now returning. He felt curiously expectant and happy.
“I’ve a notion that we’re going to have the time of our lives here,” he told his wife.
But Janet did not reply. For three days she had been busy chasing a clue through her memory and now she had grasped it. She had suddenly remembered who was the tall girl she had seen with the party from the Corinna on the day of their arrival.
All night Archie dreamed of the Gran Seco. As he saw it, it was a desolate plateau culminating in a volcano. The volcano was erupting, and amid the smoke and fire a colossal human figure sat at its ease. Then the dream became a nightmare — for the figure revealed itself as having the face and beard of the man he had seen leaving the office in the Avenida, but the starched white linen knickerbockers of the preposterous young American.
IV
Archie set out on his exploration of Olifa with his nose in the air, like a dog looking for game. The spell of a new country had fallen on him, as had happened fifteen years before when he left school. The burden of the War and all it had brought, the cares of politics, the preoccupations of home had slipped from his shoulders, and he felt himself again an adventurer, as when he had first studied maps and listened hungrily to travellers’ tales. But now he had one supreme advantage — he had a companion; and Janet, who had never before been out of Europe, was as eager as he was to squeeze the last drop out of new experience.
He left over his more important letters for the moment and used those introductions which had been given him by the friends he had made during his time at the Madrid Embassy. The result was that the pair were taken to the heart of a pleasant, rigid little society — as remote from interest in the Government of Olifa as an unreconstructed Southern planter is from a Republican White House, or a Royalist Breton from the Elysee. Archie was made a member of the Polo Club and played with agreeable young men, who had their clothes and saddlery from London and their manners from the eighteenth century. A ball was given in their honour, where the most popular dance, to Janet’s amazement, was a form of Lancers. They met composed maidens who were still in bondage to their duennas, and young married women, languishing and voluble, of discreet and domesticated, among whose emphatic complexions Janet’s delicate colouring was like a wood-anemone among gardenias: and witty grandmothers running terribly to fat: and ancient hidalgos with beaks like birds of prey. It was a comfortable society, with the secure good manners of a tiny aristocracy, but it knew of no world beyond its pale, and was profoundly uninterested in its neighbours.
They went a little, too, into business circles, both Olifero and alien, the representatives of shipping and trading companies and the big foreign banks. This, too, was a pleasant world, good-tempered and prosperous. Here they heard much of politics, but it was business politics. The existing Government was spoken of with respect, but not with intimate knowledge; it functioned well, kept the country solvent, and left trade in peace. Politicians were a class by themselves, a dubious class, though it was believed that the present lot were honest. But they met none of the Copper people. These seemed to form an oligarchy apart, and were mentioned respectfully but distantly. When Archie asked about the Gran Seco he was only given statistics of output and an encomium on its efficiency. Of its President the commercial world of Olifa spoke as an ordinary automobile-manufacturer might speak of Henry Ford, as one who was a law to himself, an object to admire, but not to emulate.
“This is a queer place,” Archie told Janet. “It seems to have two Governors — the Castor fellow and the President — and the ordinary man don’t seem to know or care much about either. It’s about time we started out for the Gran Seco.”
But when Don Alejandro was approached on the matter he had to explain with many apologies that their permits had not arrived. There was some inconceivably foolish hitch, which he had not yet tracked down.
“But the American troupe got through straight away,” Archie complained. “They left a week ago.”
“I know. That is a way Americans have. Perhaps in your case the difficulty is Mr Wilbur. Officiously and quite unnecessarily he interested himself in getting your passes, so he said — and he may have exhausted his purchase in franking his countrymen through and raised a prejudice. As I have told you, his nation is not loved by our Government.”
Don Alejandro went on to explain that the delay could only be a matter of days. “Meantime, why not visit my cousin at Veiro? There you must go some time, and this hiatus gives you the chance.”
So to Veiro they went — fifty miles by train and twenty by motor-car along a superb concrete highway, which suddenly gave out four miles from the house, so that the journey was completed by a sandy track over primeval prairie. They arrived just at sunset, when the place swam in a clear coppery gold. The house was low and white and seemed to cover acres, with its adobe outbuildings, its great corrals for the cattle, and its trim red-roofed stables built on the English model. The palms of the coast had been left behind, and at this elevation the tropics had faded from the landscape. The garden was ablaze with coverts of hibiscus and plots of scarlet zinnias among the rough lawns, and the wind-breaks which flanked it were of acacias and walnuts. A big irrigation dam to the right caught the last rays of the sun, and beyond it the tender green of the alfalfa fields seemed a continuation of its waters. Far to the east, above the lifting savannahs, was a saw-like edge of tenuous white mountains which seemed to hang in the central heavens. There was a succession of thin spires now picked out with gold and rose. Archie asked their name.
“Los Doce Apostolas — the Twelve Apostles,” said the driver, and rattled off a list of uncouth syllabl
es.
Don Mario Sanfuentes, the cousin of Don Alejandro, was small, spare, and blue-jowled, with the figure of a groom and the profound solemnity of the man who lives with horses. His wife was dead and his ranch and stables were to him both family and profession. He greeted his visitors with the grave courtesy of manner which needs no words to emphasise it. Their rooms were wide chambers with scrubbed wooden floors and windows looking across a broad verandah to a hundred miles of space, as bare and fresh as a convent dormitory. They had their meals in a dining-room which contained the remnants of the Sanfuentes heirlooms — cabinets of lacquer and tortoiseshell, a Murillo which had been an altar-piece in one of the forgotten churches of the Conquistadors, fantastic tapestries now faded into a mellow confusion, an Italian triptych of carved ivory, and a great galleon of tarnished silver. But they sat mostly in Don Mario’s own room, where in the evenings a wood fire was lit in the wide fireplace — a room where every table was littered with books and papers and cigar-boxes and quirts and crops and spurs, and from the walls looked down the delicate heads of those descendants of the Darley Arab, the Byerley Turk, and the Godolphin Barb whose fame has gone abroad wherever men love horses.
By day Archie and Janet rode with their host about his state, examined his young stock, and tried out promising colts on the gallops, where by assiduous care a better turf lad been got than in the ordinary savannah. At every meal he talk was of horses, but at night, when the fire was lit, Don Mario from the depths of his well-rubbed armchair would speak at large of the land. In modern Olifa he had little interest, but he told of the diversions of his youth — his pack of foxhounds which had to be so constantly renewed from England that he gave up the game in despair, tiger hunting in the forest country, punitive expeditions against Indian horse-thieves from the hills. The time passed in a delicious calm: a combination, said Janet, of Newmarket and Scotland. And then on the last day of their stay came another visitor.
