by John Buchan
“I think you are happy,” she said.
“I am happy because I have found something. I have found friends, and I have found a better philosophy. Also I have found what I never had before, a country. I am discovering the rudiments of life.”
“You are ten years younger.”
He laughed. “And yet I am destroying all the things I have given my life to make. I have jettisoned my old ambition. I hoped to be a Napoleon to change the shape of the world. Fool that I was! I should only have begun to yawn after it was done, and then somebody would have shot me. Now I am quite content if I can help to make an inconsiderable Latin republic a more wholesome State — and if I can prove myself not unworthy of my friends.”
“That is the truth,” she said. “This is not Sandy’s country...You have changed places, I think. You have come down into the homely world, and Sandy is beginning to wander in the cold uplands of his finical conscience. It is a side of him you have never seen, but I have. Unless he is tied to duties which need every atom of his powers, he will begin to torment himself with questions.”
“That is perhaps the explanation of the adventurer,” was his reply. “He is happiest when he need not stop to think. For myself, I have thought too much about large matters, and I now think only of little things, like Olifa.”
That night Luis returned, bringing with him Miguel de Campanillo, Don Alejandro, and one of the young Zarranigas. At supper, which was eaten on tables in the veranda under a grape trellis, for the night was warm, there was the equivalent of a Council of War. It was the eve of raising the standard. The troops at Pecos had been elaborately tampered with, and at a signal the majority which favoured the revolution would occupy the barracks and the depot, much as the Mines Police had done in the Gran Seco. But before that it was necessary to make certain that Lossberg would be detained beyond the mountains, and for this purpose Santa Ana must be occupied. This task was entrusted to Blenkiron, who with two thousand mounted troops was to move next morning. Once his job was completed, he was to join hands with the Campanillos at Pecos, who hoped to add their local levies to the regulars who would by that time have seized the place. The railway beyond Santa Ana was to be destroyed and the telegraph wires cut. Lossberg’s blockhouses did not come within eighty miles of Santa Ana, not farther south than the frontier station of Gabones, but, in case he attempted to break through, the narrow pass south of Gabones was to be held in strength, and the road which accompanied the railway was to be comprehensively mined. Meantime the concentrations at Veiro and Alcorta Junction were to be completed, and the dockyard at Cardanio was to be taken.
The talk at first was all of numbers and distances. Castor, who carried a multitude of figures in his head, satisfied himself that nothing had been omitted, and he was answered by Luis from a file of messages. Then, as the stars pricked out, and the wind from the hills began to temper the heat, the company relaxed. Soon the air was blue with cigarette smoke, and some, cramped by a long day in motor-cars on bad roads, strolled into the courtyard, where the scent of flowers from the great painted wine-vats was mingled with sharper smells of baked earth and miles of grasses, Presently Sandy went off with Blenkiron and Castor to verify some figures. Barbara and Archie walked with the young Zarraniga, and Janet found herself in a party of four with Campanillo, Luis, and Don Alejandro..
There was something in the tropic night which went to her head. Though she had no prospect beyond the courtyard shimmering under the stars, she seemed to be looking from a watch-tower over an immense country — steaming coast marshes, baked white cities, miles of waving green, cliffs red as blood falling into an angry blue sea, mountains that stretched cold fingers to the very courts of heaven.
For months she had been breathing that air which only belongs to lands which man has not yet mastered, and its sharpness and strangeness had entered her blood. She was in love with space. For a moment she was a patriot of this huge child of a raw and half-made continent.
“Don Alejandro,” she said, “do you remember the first night when we dined with you in the Olifa hotel? You told us about Olifa, how she had no problems — no discontents — because she was rich and secure. But you said that she had bartered her pride for prosperity.”
Don Alejandro laughed. “True,” he said. “I also said that she had no soul, but in saying that I lied. Olifa has always had a soul, but it has been sleeping. Now it looks as if Luis had awakened it.”
“What puzzles me is why?” Janet said again. “You had no grievances — I mean the ordinary people. They had an orderly Government and light taxes and no conscription, and the reason was the golden eggs from the Gran Seco. What has made the ordinary Olifero angry with the golden goose?”
“He is not angry.” It was Luis who answered. “He does not trouble. The ordinary man everywhere in the world only wishes to be left alone. Revolutions are not made by the many but by the few. Yet there are enough of the discontented, I think, to do our business.”
“But why the discontent?”
“Because we have remembered our pride. We of the old houses have not been happy in a State which was no better than a big trading firm — with foreign brains to do the work which the Olifero should do himself.”
“What work?”
“Governing us and defending us. Our army is mainly a force of skilled mercenaries. And our Government — well, the voice of the ministers was the voice of Olifa, but the wires which made them speak and act were pulled by the Commander-in-Chief, who is now having a final talk about Santa Ana with Lord Clanroyden and Senor Blenkiron. We have still an old-fashioned prejudice in favour of governing ourselves.”
“How long have you been organising this discontent?”
“How long, Sandro?” Luis asked Gedd. “About three years come Christmas. The thing went fast, for the spirit was there waiting for it. Prosperity is not enough for us Oliferos. Our pride was outraged by our stout bourgeois ministers, who took their orders so obediently from another...But we organised in the dark, blindly, for we knew that we needed some notable piece of good fortune to succeed. Then we found the Yanqui Wilbur, and through him Senor Blenkiron. And at the end came Lord Clanroyden. It is a simple tale of the mercies of God. Let us hope that these mercies are not exhausted.”
“But if Olifa was under the thumb of Mr Castor, won’t it be the same even if we win? He is our commander, isn’t he? Can you have a nationalist revolution led to victory by the man whose domination of your country stirred up your nationalism? You have made your chief opponent your leader — a foreigner too, a man with no country.”
“Not so. He is one of us.”
“But he is an Austrian.”
“On his father’s side he is Austrian. But his grand-mother was a Campanillo, a great-great-aunt of friend Miguel here.”
“Does he know that? Does Sandy know it?” The girl was open-mouthed in amazement.
“He has always known it. I myself have known it this past year, and the fact was the basis of our plans...It is a long story. Lady Roylance, too long to tell at this hour of the night. As you justly say, he had no country. That is a fashionable folly among certain clever people in Europe. To-day he has found one...That was one reason why Lord Clanroyden and I planned to carry him off and maroon him up in the Patios de la Mariana — that he might find his country. There is no loosing the chains of blood. Once he got the bitter-sweet smell of our land into his nostrils and the clean air of our hills into his lungs, we believed that the cobwebs would, fall from his eyes and very old ancestral things come to life. That has happened, I think...More than that, of course. Between us — you, perhaps, especially — we have made him a human being. He will dream different dreams now, more wholesome dreams.”
“What will you do with him? Can you fit him in — anything as big as he is?”
“We will of course make him our President,” Don Alejandro interposed. “He is our great man, our show figure. We look to his brains to give us good government and to keep us prosperous.”
/> “But can you harness him?” Janet persisted. “Can you turn Niagara into a useful stream which will irrigate gardens?”
“He will harness himself,” said Luis, “for he is wise.”
“And yet,” she urged, “for years he has been hugging ambitions vast enough to set half the globe on fire — not silly whims, but closely-reasoned ambitions worked out to decimal fractions. He hated America — that was why Mr Blenkiron first decided to fight him. From what I remember of your table-talk, Don Alejandro, you also had no great love for America. Didn’t you say that you regarded her patronage as an insult to your country? Why should you wish to put a spoke in the wheel of a man who has the same prejudice?”
“Because I am not a fool.” Don Alejandro spoke with a brusqueness remarkable in one so suave. “Because I will not have Olifa made a pawn in a crazy game which means ruin. I do not love Yanquis, apart from Miss Dasent and Wilbur and Blenkiron and perhaps three others. But I want my country to be a rival to the United States in power and quality — not to be a blind mouse along with other blind mice in the hands of deracine genius.”
Luis laughed. “You have stirred up the gentle Sandro, Lady Roylance, by touching his sorest spot. I do not think you quite understand the meaning of Spanish blood. You ought to, for the British are nearest to us of any race. We are realists, you know, very calculating and prosaic and close to the earth. But we must have our glamour too, our touch of poetry. We make good monarchists — and good republicans, if we can hit on the right president. Castor will suit us admirably, for he will give us poetry, which the dingy camarilla now in Olifa never did. He will have ideas and imagination and colour, and the air of magnificence. With him we will advance so fast that we shall astonish mankind. But his brilliance will not be dangerous, for all around him will be Spaniards, we Oliferos, very appreciative of poetry, but quite resolved to keep our feet on the ground. Like your Scotch, who will quote the poets and weep over them, and the next moment make hard bargains.”
A lamp had been put on the table by a servant, and round it white moths were fluttering. As Janet looked at the faces revealed in its light, she received a sudden clear impression of something she had not met before — an ardour which was not ashamed to reveal itself because it was in turn based on a revelation. Don Alejandro with his neat small features and high cheek-bones — Luis, fair, golden brown of skin, with his glowing eyes — the young Zarraniga with his slender eyebrows and grave, rather sullen mouth — there was something innocently apostolic about them. They were in the grip of an idea. Their patriotism was an adventure, for their country was still to be made.
She smiled at the boy Miguel, and he smiled back at her. She had seen the same look, as a child, in the faces of young men starting for Flanders. Here was one to whom new horizons had suddenly appeared. Luis read her thoughts.
“We are going to make a country which will offer careers for youth,” he said. “Our young men will no longer have to leave Olifa, or, if they stay at home, stagnate on their estates. Their future will be their country’s future, for they will govern it, and thereby we shall have an advantage over that great people whom Sandro so much dislikes. We shall invent a new civilisation in this continent, which will be a bridge between the old world and the new.”
Sandy’s face suddenly appeared in the circle of light, and behind him Blenkiron and Castor. There was a hush, inevitable when serious talk is suddenly overheard. Blenkiron’s jolly laugh broke it.
“Looks as if you folk had been picking on my poor little country,” he said.
“No, indeed we haven’t,” said Janet. “We have only been deciding that Olifa is going to be neither a satellite nor an enemy of America, but an honourable rival.”
“That’s fine! They’ll be mighty glad to hear it in Washington.”
Archie and Barbara and the young Zarraniga presently joined them, and the group reasserted itself.
Janet sat very still, her eyes on two faces, Castor’s and Sandy’s. In the first she saw what she had not observed before, a certain kinship to the men with whom she had been talking. It was a subtle resemblance, a thing not of feature or manner, but of a look in the eyes, a tone in the voice. Castor belonged here after all. He could be captured by a dream...She had once said that he had a short-range imagination, and it was true. He was the ready slave of an idea...And he was young. He had never been anything else but young. She looked at Sandy, and suddenly felt that they were old — he and she and Archie and Blenkiron — even Barbara. They could not be happily rapt into a dream, because they dragged too great a weight of tradition behind them. They were children of an ancient world, and could not break from it...She no longer felt herself a sharer in their enterprise, but a benevolent stranger...And Sandy? The burden had left his shoulders and he looked a little bewildered. Perhaps a little homesick? These others had found a country. Might it not be that he was longing for his own?
She lay awake for some time after she went to bed, puzzling over this new direction of her thoughts. Might not something great come out of this venture, something of high moment for the world? And then she thought of a look she had caught on Barbara’s face, and she fell asleep with her mind on a fresh trail...She was awakened at three o’clock by the sound of departing motor-cars. That would be Blenkiron on his way to Santa Ana. Her friends might have no spiritual share in the fervours of the rebellion, but they had a very practical part to play in it.
III
The succeeding days were full of bustle and excitement, for the train had been lit and the explosions were beginning. The road and railway to the Gran Seco were destroyed by Blenkiron with the completeness of a great engineer. The revolt of the troops at Pecos went like clockwork. Also the naval base at the Cardanio was easily surprised, and the Olifa navy, except for two destroyers in Olifa harbour and a few patrol boats along the coast, was quietly put out of action.
But on the first news of success there followed less comforting messages. The concentration at Veiro was going slowly. The ordinary Olifero was nervous, and hesitated to declare himself till he was certain which was the winning side. At Alcorta, too, the industrial centre, there was a danger of Communist trouble, which would immobilise forces which should have been marching north.
“Whoever said ‘Il n’y a que le premier pas qui coute,” Sandy told Janet, “was a fool. It is blindingly untrue of revolutions. The first step is easy. You can always start with a bang. It’s the second step that is the devil. We haven’t succeeded, or anything like it, for the country hasn’t risen, and it isn’t certain by a long chalk whether it is on our side. It is waiting to see how the cat jumps. We’ve got my Gran Seco troops, and about four thousand of the regulars. Add Luis’s recruits and we may have a total of twelve thousand. Also we’ve temporarily bottled up Lossberg. But the Government has far more than three battalions in the city, as we believed. They’ve the better part of a division, and they’ve the pick of the artillery. Old Bianca is no fool, and they’re fortifying like blazes. We haven’t yet the strength for a coup, and it’s a question whether we’ll ever get it. It’s all a question of moral. Unless we can bluff the Government into a surrender by cracking their moral, we can’t force them...Oh yes, once they surrendered it would be smooth going. The cat would have jumped and the whole country would be behind us. But you can’t run a revolution, as Luis thinks you can, on a handful of grandees.”
“What is the worst that could happen?” Janet asked anxiously.
“That Lossberg should break out. That would blow us sky-high. He would stiffen the Government, and put the fear of death on the Oliferos. They’re not going to stand up against the first-class regular army they have bought and paid for. Down on these plains Lossberg would drive us like sheep, and we should all go off to heaven in a whirl of aimless glory...Janet, I’m sick with anxiety. I’ve brought you and Archie into this mess, and it’s the kind of mess I don’t understand.”
He looked far more haggard than she had ever seen him in the Gran Seco.
“You’re tired to death,” she said, and knew that she was talking nonsense.
“I’m not tired,” he replied wearily, “but I’m out of my element. I hate war, except my own sort, and any moment this may become the hopeless ordinary kind that I detest and am no good at...You see, this isn’t my country, and it isn’t yours or Archie’s. We can’t feel about it like Luis and the others. I’ve done what I set out to do, and spiked Castor’s guns. But the curse of life is that you can’t stop short when you want, and I seem to have landed you all into the fire out of the frying-pan...The worst of it is, I can do nothing. There’s no job for me here. El Obro is dead and buried, and I’m only a foreign filibuster mixed up in a show for which he has no heart.”
Yet he seemed busy enough. He was splitting up his command, and had already parted with most of the white mounted troops. Only his Indians remained, under their white officers; it had always been decided to reserve them to the last, because of their effect on the nerves of the Olifa population. Of them he had now a little over a thousand. They were paraded one evening, tall, lean men on little wiry horses, who by now had almost the discipline of cavalry and were also trained marksmen. Janet and Barbara stood beside Sandy, as he watched them pass in the dusty sunlight.
“A fine lot,” he said. “These fellows have something to fight for. Thank God, they’ll never go back to the old slavery. If the worst happens, there’ll be a new breed of bandit in the hills.”
