The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  “I am going to quarrel with you, señor inglés,” announced Impe sternly. “A man like you leading Manuel into such places!”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Rosario said, dashing to the aid of her protector. “He is very discreet.”

  “Vaya, mujer! He should be ashamed of himself. Boys can do what they like. But this man has grey hair behind his ears.”

  “We only went for a drink,” Toby laughed. “You wouldn’t have us swallow a bottle of brandy in the street?”

  “You could have come to the Casa del Corregidor,” said Impe—and then, with a woman’s curiosity: “Were there any pretty ones? Besides Rosario, I mean.”

  “None to be compared with yourself!”

  “Quiá! Don’t think you’ll get off by paying me compliments! A face, yes! It is not bad. But the rest—well, we all know what children do.”

  “Foolishness!” exclaimed Paolo. “Me, I like things to be natural. If they strapped you up like a rich woman, there would be heads enough turned to look after you.”

  “There are already, brother!” replied Impe. “Then there was no one at all, señor inglés?”

  “Well,” said Toby, suddenly remembering, “there was a pretty little piece called Elena. Shall I send her a message, Rosario?”

  “Don’t worry. If she is at the Aconcagua, there’ll be a dozen round her like wasps on a honey pot. I am pleased that you thought of sending her a message. The times that I have waited for a man,” sighed Rosario, “and he has not come!”

  Toby returned to his hotel and dined in his room. After a year and a half of almost continual travelling, he was very weary of hotel rooms. Usually he had agents, customers or friends to occupy his leisure; and in a new town there were restaurants and cafés to be explored. But inevitably there were evenings when he was driven back upon some room with neither a view from the window, nor a balcony nor a fire nor any other aid to doing nothing; and they always caught him, as this evening, without a book and at an hour when the booksellers were closed. His mind was too tired to play any longer with the possibilities of a, new-found faith. He sent the porter out for a polyglot collection of European papers and settled down, impatient and unrelaxed, to read them. At last, thankful that the clock showed ten, he went to bed.

  NORTHWARD BOUND

  IX

  TRAVELLERS IN TOYS

  Toby awoke clear-headed and eager for the day, satisfied that his depression of the previous night had merely been the aftermath of excessive drinking at the Alcázar. After a six-page market report accompanying a sheaf of order forms, a report on the Valparaiso agent and a private letter to Whitehead giving a brief sketch of his character, he felt a pleasant sense of accomplishment. That was the reward of a foreign salesman’s job. Every fortnight or so he could round off his work and see it as a whole—the prospecting of the market, the discovery of an agent, the visits to customers, the report—and then be away to a different set of problems in a different country.

  He lunched at leisure, savouring a farewell to the cool and delicate Chilean hock, and packed his bags. At four the porter telephoned to say that there was a man downstairs with a coat that Señor Manning had forgotten at the Muelle de Flores; he asked to be allowed to return it in person.

  Manuel entered and shut the door.

  “What news of Almádena?” Toby asked.

  “Conscious, but not allowed to talk yet. He’s said nothing coherent except that he was hit by an Englishman.”

  “I’m glad he has some chivalry.”

  “He probably thinks it’s true,” said Manuel. “And in any case he wouldn’t like admitting that he had had his head broken by a woman. I had a visit from the police last night. They hoped to find you with me.”

  “Any difficulty?”

  “Not the slightest. They didn’t annoy anyone else in the house. But it’s as well you are going. When do you expect to be in Mexico?”

  “Let’s see. A week in Lima. Then Guayaquil, Quito, Bogotá and Barranquilla. I think I’ll go direct from there to Vera Cruz. Say eight weeks with the travelling time and two more in Mexico before I can be free of toys.”

  “Well, I must be patient for ten weeks. It shouldn’t be difficult after five years of patience. But I have risen from the dead, Tobal. With one blow.”

  “You really mean me to get the gold?”

  “Of course! Of course!”

  “Man! But you hardly know me!” Toby laughed.

  “Tobal, you are very English.”

  “Thanks for the compliment. But the English are no more honest than others.”

  “It was no compliment. I meant that at times you have the mind of a shopkeeper.”

  “Well, damn it! You’ll admit it isn’t usual to entrust a vast sum of money to a man you’ve only known for thirty-six hours.”

  “Usual!” exclaimed Manuel with an ironical smile. “Then give me a bank reference! Get yourself vouched for by two responsible ratepayers! Refer me to your solicitors! All of them make money out of you, eat your dinners, and for very shame can only speak well of you. Tobal, I am sorry for your toy manufacturers. If you’ve no more confidence in your own judgment of men than you have in mine, you must have handed them a lot of bad debts!”

  “It’s my modesty,” said Toby.

  “You haven’t any. Humility, yes. Modesty, none whatever. Like Don Quixote and Jesus Christ. It’s a type one can trust. Now I’ll explain to you where the gold is. Write it in your notebook. Between the forty-eighth and forty-ninth kilometre stones along the railway from Durango to Torreón you will come to the mouth of a valley that runs up into the hills to your right. The railway crosses it on a culvert. You can’t miss it. Got that?”

  “Right!”

  “Ride up the valley, keeping to the stream bed, until you come to a little cliff the height of your head. I’m not sure of the exact distance—about three kilometres—but it’s the first sheer bank that you come to. There may be others higher up the valley, but this is the first. And it’s only on one side of the arroyo—on your right.”

  “That may be a devil to find,” said Toby. “But I’ll leave plenty of time.”

  “Yes. It would be wise. From the top of the cliff, climb fourteen paces up the slope. You will see straight up the valley a sharp V where two ridges cross. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “On a line between you and that V, and about two hundred metres away, are three stones. They are not conspicuous—no higher than this chair—but you can’t miss them if you have the line right. The gold is behind them. There may be a little earth on top of it, or it may not be hidden at all.”

  “But are you sure it’s still there?”

  “Of course not. But why shouldn’t it be? There are two million square kilometres of land in Mexico, and this one is as desolate as any.”

  “Well,” said Toby, closing his notebook, “I’ll do my best. But I don’t suppose I’ll succeed if you couldn’t.”

  “It will be risky,” Manuel admitted. “But you’ll have a better chance than I ever had. Your reasons for going to Mexico are unquestionable. You look prosperous. You’re the sort of commercial traveller who gets asked to lunch by his consul and is given every assistance. No one would ever suspect you of illegalities.”

  “It’s true,” Toby replied rather regretfully. “I am one of the people to whom nothing ever happens. If I forget my passport, they bow me over the frontier instead of putting me in gaol. If there’s a revolution I sleep through it. If I trod on a snake it would probably turn out to be somebody’s harmless pet.”

  “It wouldn’t between Durango and Torreón, and don’t you forget it,” said Manuel. “But, as you say, you’re one of the people whom policemen salute by instinct. That’s what I count on.”

  “I warn you I know nothing whatever about pack horses or what food and water they’ll need.”

 
“I’ll write you a list of all you should buy. And I can give you an excuse for the journey. It’s weak, but people will believe anything of a mad Englishman. Suppose that consignment of toys to have been yours. You want to see where it was lost. You suspect that the agent lied—that he received the toys and invented the train wreck. How would you have sold?”

  “C.I.F. Mexico City—if they really had been ours.”

  “Well, the insurance company didn’t pay up—they said war risks were not covered. You want to see the spot for yourself and something of the wilds of Mexico at the same time. Can you embroider on that?”

  “Admirably!” Toby laughed. “I almost believe it myself. How shall I get the gold out?”

  “Use your own judgment. Avoid bribery if you can. And I should advise you not to dip into the gold until you have decided how and where to sell it. We only want to answer questions once.”

  Toby nearly asked him if he was still seriously inclined to found a monastery. But the question would have been ridiculous. His expression and the intensity of his voice left no doubt that he was in earnest.

  “Three hundred thousand pesos will be enough?”

  “Gold pesos, remember. Yes, enough for a start. They would be worth about £100,000 to-day. And that will not be all, Tobal. We offer security to the poor noble, but also peace to the wealthy—and his possessions will become the possessions of the order. He might not make them over to his companions if they were poor, but he will if they are already rich.”

  “God! Do we want such a man?”

  “Why not? He might share all our ideals but doubt if we were practical. He needs proof. The funds behind the order are that proof. And they will be well handled. We are not fools.”

  “No. At any rate more efficient than the average company director. Have you enough money to go on with, Manuel?”

  “Yes. I have some savings. And I can pay my fare to England and the Salvinis’.”

  “Are you sure that you want to? Why not found the community in America?”

  “We can do more good in Europe. With all its faults, Spanish America is still a continent of nobles. It does not need us, and we ourselves should rot like the colony of communists in Paraguay. Or are you thinking of the United States?”

  “God forbid! We should either be deported as immoral or turned into a playground for businessmen like the Masons and Elks—with a weekly pep talk for sales managers.”

  Manuel laughed.

  “You ought to have been a Mexican, Tobal! Whatever goes wrong up there, they say it is the fault of the United States. But we’ve no time for argument. Give me some paper. If I stay long, the porter will begin to suspect something.”

  Manuel sat down at the table, made a rough list of Toby’s requirements and then neatly tabulated them.

  “There!” he said. “That’s all you will need. Remember the weight of the gold is nearly five hundred kilos. If you go any distance you will need three horses for that alone. And here is my map of the province. The red ink markings are water. I’ve put them in from memory, for Lara and I kept our maps in our heads. But they won’t be far wrong.” He held out his hand. “Good-bye and good luck! Don’t break your heart if you fail.”

  “I shall come and join you at the Muelle de Flores,” Toby smiled. “Good-bye.”

  At nine Toby drove down to the ship. A customs officer stopped the taxi at the dock gates and cast a sharp glance over its occupant and his baggage. He then saluted and wished him a pleasant journey. It was a good omen. An hour later he was out of Chilean waters.

  His journey north was happy and uneventful. The hospitality of Lima, the mountain peace of Quito, the heat and babble of Barranquilla succeeded one another too rapidly. There was no town he visited where he would not gladly have stayed longer. What Manuel had said was true. The Andean Republics had caught little of the commercial spirit; they were delectable countries of miners, peasant farmers and estancieros where the human distaste for buying and selling was considered natural and not in the least shameful; where land and bounteous living were frankly preferred to the luxury of possessions. Trade was good, but suggested that the next generation would consider their fathers unprogressive. The demand was for model aeroplanes and Hanson & Crane’s new police car with a clockwork siren that was guaranteed to make nearly as much noise as the real thing.

  Toby reached Mexico City two months after leaving Valparaiso. It was the last visit on his programme, and he had asked for and obtained a couple of weeks’ holiday off the expense account when Hanson & Crane’s business should be done. Seafair expected plenty of Mexican orders from his representative, for he had not forgotten the days of Porfirio Díaz when Hanson & Crane had done considerable business in stock lines, besides manufacturing trains, model oil wells, armies and Atlantic liners for the fortunate sons and daughters of vast estates. Their agent had been a German, one Josef Scharbeck, dropped during the war and since lost to sight. Two lesser agents had succeeded him and vanished in turn, leaving Hanson & Crane with a large total of small and unrecoverable debts. For years before Toby’s visit they had exported nothing whatever to Mexico.

  His first task was to find a new agent. The problem of the agent’s nationality was the same as in all the other Latin-American countries. The natives were hardly engaged in the import business at all. The North Americans were usually unaware that Europe had any exports and doubtful about handling them. The English considered it beneath their dignity to touch anything but steel, machinery, coal and armaments. There remained the Germans, Gentile or Jewish, honest Auslandsdeutsche trained in the great export houses of Hamburg and willingly self-exiled at an early age to do any sort of trade with anybody who would trade with them. The German usually accepted his new country, married one of its daughters and assumed its customs, instead of worrying for twenty years to make enough money to return to his birthplace and spending the remaining twenty cursing the day that he did so. Toby liked the Latin-American Germans and appointed them agents whenever he could.

  One of the older shopkeepers had heard of Josef Scharbeck and believed that he was still in Mexico City. Toby gathered that he was close on eighty years old and, if not completely bedridden, no longer in active business. It was only after wasting a week in the search for a younger man with a taste for toys that he decided to seek him out.

  Nobody knew his address, and the telephone book gave no Josef Scharbeck. The hotel, however, was run on the North American plan with dozens of well-dressed clerks behind the desk, completely inefficient at promoting the comfort of their guests, but marvels at supplying out-of-the-way information on anything from Mexican mining law to the ingredients of a side car. It was child’s play for them to find the address of Josef Scharbeck. He had Mexicanised his name to José Xabec, an ingenious and accurate rendering which at once prejudiced Toby in his favour.

  Herr Josef was evidently still in business, for his address was in a huge block of office buildings that towered above a mean street of taverns and cheap clothing stores and was a little too far from the centre to house a commercial firm of any importance. The interior, with its whitewashed walls, tiled floors and innumerable small rooms with the name of the occupant on the outside, suggested a well-run prison. Cell No. 4112 had the name of José Xabec in bold black letters across the frosted glass of the door. Toby knocked and entered.

  The boxlike office was furnished with a ponderous and ancient safe, some shelves of samples, a bookcase containing Kelly and Didot-Bottin from 1898 to 1911, a severe and high-backed chair for visitors and a vast roll-top desk. Herr Josef stuck his head round the corner of the desk and peered at his caller through thick glasses, like a very aged tortoise emerging from some cavernous recess—a dapper tortoise, for his face was decorated with white moustache and imperial, and his person antiquely uniformed in a black suit, stiff white shirt and cuffs, and a butterfly collar with a broad silk cravat.

  Toby handed him
his card with a bow.

  “I have been very eager to meet you,” he began in German.

  The old gentleman made an obviously courteous remark in an unknown language and waved him to a seat.

  “Thank you,” said Toby. “I am glad to see you looking so well, Herr Scharbeck.”

  The agent made another unintelligible remark, which Toby asked him to repeat. This time it was recognisable as English.

  “It is one long time,” said José Xabec slowly and distinctly, “that I haf not seen English chentleman.”

  “Ah, you speak English—and very well!” Toby exclaimed.

  “Mit English chentleman I shpeak”—Xabec tapped himself proudly on the chest so that his dickey crackled—“English!”

  “That’s splendid,” said Toby. “I represent Hanson & Crane.”

  The old gentleman held up the card to his glasses. The name had a familiar sound, but he disbelieved his own ears.

  “Hanson und Crane! Lieber Gott! Nach so vielen Jahren! ”

  “We have not forgotten you,” said Toby encouragingly, returning to German.

  “We shall do big business!” declared José Xabec excitedly. “Big business! You have come all the way from England to see me, nicht wahr? ”

  “Yes. Our old friendship—”

  Herr Xabec burst disconcertingly into voluble and accurate French.

  “Cher collègue, je suis vraiment enchanté! Vous parlez français, n’est-ce pas? Bien entendu! Comme moi, vous êtes homme d’affaires international! ”

  “Oui, monsieur,” Toby replied, struggling to contain his amusement.