Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  In any case that would have been impossible, for the newcomers found a complex programme provided for their entertainment. They had no occasion to hire a car: the Administration provided one, a neat Daimler limousine which at all hours waited on their convenience. They were shown every phase of the great industry, and the day after their arrival they lunched with the Administration. The Gobernador himself appeared at the meal, an honour which, it was hinted, was almost unexampled. He apologised for the absence of the Vice-President, the same who had been made to blush by the Moplahs. “My colleague,” he said, “sends his profound apologies, but at the moment he is suffering from a slight attack of jaundice. He deeply regrets that he cannot be here to welcome you, for he has many friends in your country and in Europe. He is of Mexico, and a Mexican is like a Russian — his country is so remote from the life of the world that he must needs adopt all countries. He is the true international.”

  The meal was a Spartan one compared, to the banquet at the President’s mansion, but the food was perfectly cooked and, for a place in the heart of wild hills, extraordinarily varied. The company were all grave, pallid, perfectly mannered, with expressionless eyes and no gestures — what Don Alejandro had called the type Gran Seco. There was nothing of the hustling liveliness which Archie associate with a luncheon of commercial magnates. Also all seemed to be in awe of their President, and hung on his lips. Castor talked indeed, brilliantly and continuously, but it was a monologue, and he went through a series of subjects, adorning each and then dropping it. There was none of the give-and-take of good conversation. Yet the time passed pleasantly, and when they rose from table Castor offered to show them his office.

  It was on the first floor of the main building, lit by four large windows, into which travellers on the top of the tram-cars could look and see the great man at his work.

  Here there was no seclusion or mystery. The big bright chambers gave its occupant no more privacy than an aviary gives a bird, for not only could it be looked into from the street, but at one end was a glass partition separating it inadequately from a room full of busy secretaries. There were maps and plans of the Gran Seco on the walls, a complicated mechanism of desk telephones, a bookcase full of mining reports, an immense safe, a cigar cabinet — and that was all. It might have been the office of a real-estate agent in a provincial town in the United States or Canada.

  The contrast between Castor’s personality and his modest habitation was so startling that Janet laughed.

  The Gobernador seemed to understand her feelings. “I have other lairs,” he said, smiling. “One, much grander, is in Olifa, and I have my rooms too in Paris and London. But this is my true workshop.”

  He opened a door, which revealed a tiny bedroom and bathroom.

  “Compact, is it not?” he said. “I need no more. I am a simple man.”

  That night Archie and Janet dined in the hotel with the Financial Secretary, and afterwards went to hear Beethoven performed by a string quartet in the music-room of the Gran Seco Club. When they returned to their apartments, Archie was loud in his praises of his hosts.

  “Odd, isn’t it? to find Castilian manners in business grandees! We didn’t find them at Veiro, for old Sanfuentes was just like the ordinary country gentleman at home. But these fellows here are all hidalgos. I feel noisy and rather vulgar among them. And, good Lord! what must they think of the Moplahs?

  “Castor too!” he went on. “What rot it was Gedd and Wilbur making him out a mystery man! He’s an extraordinarily clever fellow, but as open as the day. A mystery man couldn’t live in a place like a cricket pavilion!”

  “Did you ever read a poem called ‘How it strikes a Contemporary’? Browning, you know.”

  “No,” said Archie.

  “Well, the poem is all about a tremendous mystery man — the Corregidor, Browning calls him — and he lived in just such a way as Mr Castor. How does it go? —

  “‘Poor man, he lived another kind of life In that new stuccoed third house by the bridge, Fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise! The whole street might o’erlook him as he sat Leg crossing leg — and—’

  “I can’t remember it all, but anyhow he played cribbage every night with his housekeeper and went to bed punctually at ten.”

  Their permit for the Gran Seco had specified no time-limit. For two days they explored the details of the industry, were conducted through vast laboratories, studied the latest types of furnace and converter, pored over blue prints in offices and gave themselves vile headaches. Archie declared that the smelting works were like the Ypres Salient after a gas attack. He tried to be intelligent, but found himself gravely handicapped by his lack of all scientific knowledge. “I have had the meaning of a reverberatory furnace explained to me a dozen times,” he complained, “but I’m hanged if I can keep it in my head. And what Bessemerising is remains to me one of Allah’s secrets. It’s no good, Janet, this isn’t my pidgin. Thank God, we’re going to the Mines to-morrow. I think that should be more in my line.”

  They were taken to the Mines through a sad grey country a desert of shale and rock. “Calcined,” Archie called it, having just acquired that word, and Janet said that she supposed it must be like the landscapes in the moon. Every stream-course was bone-dry, and the big dams they passed, with the green water very low in their beds, only accentuated the desiccation. Yet, where wells had been sunk, the soil was not without fertility, and the thin grasses seemed give a living to considerable flocks of sheep and goats. They passed many ruins — not only old mine workings, but the remains of Indian villages, which suggested that at of time the Gran Seco had been a more habitable country.

  At the Mines they were shown little, for there was little time. Managers were ready with sheafs of statistics, and at the Universum they lunched luxuriously. But of the miners at work they saw nothing. They returned invigorated by the keen air of the steppes, and Archie, who had caught from a ridge a glimpse of the snowy peaks of the Spanish Ladies, had had his appetite whetted for further travel. But the Administration was not encouraging. That was all Indian country — policed, it was true, for it was the chief recruiting-ground of labour, but not open to ordinary travel. “We could send you there,” said an urbane secretary, “but you would have to take an escort, and you would have to submit to be treated like a schoolboy. You will understand, Sir Archibald, that this Gran Seco of ours is in parts a delicate machine, and the presence of ever so little extraneous matter might do harm.”

  That evening after dinner Janet and Archie were in their sitting-room. The Regina was full of the preparations for departure of the Moplahs, who were going down-country by the night train, and their shrill cries could be heard in the corridor, since their rooms were on the same floor.

  “We’re extraneous matter here,” said Archie. “What about it, Janet? They’ve given us a very good show, but I’m disillusioned about the Gran Seco. Wilbur must have been pulling my leg. The place is as humdrum as the Potteries, and just about as ugly. I should have liked to have had a shot at the high mountains, but I can see their reason for not encouraging visitors in their labour reserve. I rather like the crowd — they behave well and they must be the last word in efficiency...Confound those Moplahs! This is like living beside a hencoop!”

  Janet looked serious, and, as was her way in such a mood, she sat with her hands idle in her lap. “Let’s get away from this place,” she said. “I hate it!”

  “Why in the world...?”

  “I hate it. Those soft-spoken, solemn men have got on my nerves. I think there’s something inhuman about them. Most of the faces of the people at the smelting works and at the Mines were like masks...And at that awful luncheon!...I believe that sometimes I saw the devil grinning out from behind them...And in the streets. I saw one or two villainous ruffians, who should have been in rags, but were as spruce as bagmen. I felt as if I were in an orderly and well-policed Hell...Why did they shepherd us away from the Mines, for remember we saw nothing there? Why won’t they let u
s go into the back country? I believe it is because they are concealing something, something so bad that the world must never know of it.”

  Archie stared.

  “I must say you’ve got a lively imagination,” he began, but Janet was not listening.

  “Let us go away — at once — to-morrow morning. I should like to be going to-night...Ring up the Administration and say we must get home in a hurry...I think there’s something infernal about this big, noiseless machine. I want to be back at Veiro, where there are human beings. I want to be with the honest silly little Moplahs. I want something more peaceful...”

  “I should have thought that the Gran Seco was more peaceful than the Moplahs.”

  “No, it isn’t, for there is death here, and death is unsettling.”

  “Well, we’ll go off to-morrow, if you wish it. We’re not likely to want for peace in the next few weeks. The thing is how to avoid boredom...By the way, oughtn’t we to go downstairs and say good-bye to the Americans? They’re friendly souls.”

  But Janet was in a strange mood. “You go. I don’t think I’ll come.” She still sat with her hands in her lap, looking straight before her.

  But the Americans were already packed into the station omnibus, and Archie could only shout to them from the doorway, and receive in return blown kisses from the ladies and hand-waves from the men. They seemed to be waiting for a member of their party, and as Archie turned into the hall he met the laggard charging through the crowd of waiters and porters. It was the one who had not yet shown himself, and Archie realised that it must be the driver of the car in the Avenida de la Paz, the youth in the linen knickerbockers. What his present clothes were could not be guessed, since he wore a tweed ulster, but he had the same preposterous, broad-brimmed hat on his head.

  To his surprise the young man, whom he had never met, made straight for him, and gave him his hand. Something passed from it, and Archie’s fist held a crumpled paper.

  The next second he was gone, but not before Archie had had another shock. For this was not the youth of the Avenida de la Paz. It was Don Luis de Marzaniga, and in their moment of contact his eyes had looked into his and they had commanded silence.

  Deeply mystified, Archie went upstairs with the paper held tight in his fingers. When his door closed behind him, opened it. The scrap contained a scrawl in pencil in a large, irregular hand. It read: “Please be both in your sitting-room at eleven o’clock.”

  He showed it to Janet.

  “I said there was no mystery in the Gran Seco, but it seems I spoke too soon. I’m hanged if I can make it out. It was Luis that gave me this paper, but it was Luis pretending to be that American lad in the linen knickerbockers. You remember he was the one of the Moplahs we never saw.”

  “We never saw the tall girl either. I am positive that she was Miss Dasent.” Janet looked at her wrist-watch. “Eleven, the note said. A quarter of an hour to wait.”

  That quarter of an hour was spent by Janet in the same contemplative immobility, while Archie tried to read, smoked two cigarettes feverishly, and occupied a few minutes in washing his hands. The bedroom opened from the sitting-room, and beyond it was the bathroom which he used as a dressing-room. He was just about to begin a third cigarette when he saw that the hands of the sham ormolu clock on the mantelpiece pointed to eleven. After that he kept his eyes on the door which led to the corridor.

  But that door did not open. It was an exclamation from Janet that made him turn his head.

  A waiter had appeared suddenly, entering from the bedroom. He carried a tray with three cups of mate, which he placed on the table at Janet’s elbow.

  “Look here, you’ve made a mistake,” Archie said in his halting Spanish. “We gave no orders.”

  The man replied in English. “Didn’t you? All the same, you’d be the better for cup. I’m going to have one myself. You might lock the door, Archie, and give me a cigarette.”

  While Archie stared thunderstruck, Janet laughed — a laugh which began as a low gurgle and ended in riotous merriment. She rose from her chair and stood before the waiter, her shoulders shaking, while she dabbed her small handkerchief on her eyes. Then, suddenly, she became grave. “You have been having a rough time. Sandy,” she said, and she laid a hand on his shoulder. He winced, and drew back.

  “So — so,” he said. “That arm is still tender...What malign fate brought the pair of you here?”

  The waiter was to all appearance an ordinary mestizo, sallow-skinned, with shaggy dark hair, handsome after a fashion because of his pleasant eyes. He wore ill-fitting dress trousers, a shirt not too clean, a short alpaca jacket and slippers rather down at heel. He smiled on Janet as he poured out the mate, and then from Archie’s case took a cigarette.

  “Yes. I want to know just how you managed it,” continued. “Wilbur did his best to prevent you, and Luis told me he thought he had dissuaded you, and in spite of everything you bubble up. You’re an incorrigible pair!”

  “But why shouldn’t we come here if we want?” Janet asked.

  “Because it’s deadly danger — for yourselves and for others. You go to lunch with the Administration, and the Vice-President hears of it just in time to have a touch of jaundice. You blunder into this hotel, and I can only save myself by making this assignation. You two innocents have been complicating my life.”

  Enlightenment broke in on Archie. “You were the bounder in the linen bags — the fellow that drove the car.”

  “I was. You were within an ace of recognising me, if I hadn’t tilted my hat.”

  “Then what was Luis doing, got up in your rig?”

  “He took my passport. This is a country of passports, you know, much more efficient than anything we had in the war zone in France. He came into the Gran Seco by a back door, and so didn’t require one. But it was essential that mine should be used and that I should be believed to be out of the place. It was equally essential that I should remain here.”

  “How did you manage your present camouflage?”

  The waiter looked down with pride at his spotty shirt.

  “Rather successful, isn’t it? I have a bit of a graft in this line. My weeks in the Cafe de l’Enfer were not altogether wasted.”

  He finished his mate and lit a cigarette. He looked at the two before him, Janet with her girlish wind-blown grace, Archie with his puzzled honesty, and he suddenly ceased to be a waiter. His brows bent, and his voice from friendly banter became the voice of authority.

  “You must clear out at once,” he said. “Tomorrow morning. Do you know that you are walking gaily on a road which is mined in every yard?”

  “I knew it,” said Janet. “I felt in my bones that this place was accursed.”

  “You don’t know it. You cannot know just how accursed it is, and I have no time to explain. What I have to tell you is that you must go down to Olifa to-morrow morning. You will be encouraged to stay longer, but you must refuse.”

  “But look here, Sandy “ — it was Archie who spoke—”they have nothing against us. Janet and I can’t be in my danger.”

  “No, but you are a source of danger to others. Myself, for example, and the Vice-President, Senor Rosas.”

  “Rosas — I never heard of him.”

  “A very pleasant Mexican gentleman. You once knew him as Mr Blenkiron.”

  “Good Lord! But he’s dead!”

  “He is officially dead. That is why it won’t do for him to meet old friends.”

  “Sandy dear,” said Janet, “you mustn’t treat us like this. We’re not babies. We’ll do what you tell us, but we deserve more confidence.”

  The waiter compared his Ingersoll watch with the sham ormolu clock.

  “Indeed, you do, but the story would take hours, and I have only three minutes left. But I will tell you one thing. Do you remember my showing you at Laverlaw the passage in the chronicle about the Old Man of the Mountain, the King of the Assassins, who lived in the Lebanon, and doped his followers with hashish and sent them about t
he world to do his errands? Well, that story has a counterpart to-day.”

  “Mr Castor!” Janet exclaimed. “Archie liked him, but I felt that he might be a devil.”

  “A devil! Perhaps. He is also a kind of saint, and he is beyond doubt a genius. You will know more about him some day.”

  “But you are sending us away...Sandy, I won’t have it. We are too old friends to be bundled off like stray dogs from a racecourse. You are in some awful pickle and we must help.”

  “I am sending you away,” said the waiter gravely, “because I want your help — when the time comes. There’s another woman in this business, Janet, and I want you to be with her. I want you both. I pay you the compliment of saying that I can’t do without you. You will go back to Olifa to the Hotel de la Constitucion, and you will make friends with an American girl there. She is expecting you and she will give you your instructions.”

  “I know,” said Janet. “She is Mr Blenkiron’s niece — a Miss Dasent. What is her Christian name?”

  The waiter looked puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I never asked her.”

  VII

  The waiter at the Regina was an exemplary servant. He dispensed the morning meal of fruit and coffee with soft-footed alacrity. At the mid-day dejeuner, when it was the custom of the Company’s officials, including some of the greatest, to patronise the hotel, he had the big round table in the north window, and in a day or two had earned the approval of his fastidious clients. Miguel was his name, and presently he was addressed by it as if he had been an old feature of the establishment. Those solemn gentlemen talked little, and at their meals they did not ransack the wine-list or summon the cook, but each had his little peculiarities of taste which Miguel made it his business to remember. He was always at their elbow, smiling gravely, to anticipate their wants. In the evening the restaurant was less full, only the guests living in the hotel and a few junior officials, for it was the custom of the magnates to dine at the club. In the evening Miguel was frequently off duty in the restaurant, engaged in other branches of hotel work, and twice a week he had his time after 7 p.m. to himself.