The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  “C’est épatant! ” declared Xabec, continuing in the same language. “It is like the good old times! Englishmen, Greeks, Italians, Brazilians—they came to my office. All très distinguès! All eager to do business with Mexico! And I would speak to them a little in their own language, as I spoke to you. And then as none of them understood Spanish, we would speak French. French, of course! The language of society and affairs! Ah, how good it is! On fera de bonnes affaires—vous verrez! ”—his wrinkled eyes flashed behind the glasses. “It is I, Josef Scharbeck, who speaks to you. I know the country!”

  Toby self-consciously straightened his tie. Sitting in the identical chair that had nursed the formal buttocks of so many distinguished envoys of commerce, he was aware of his very dirty hat, his soft collar and suede shoes. He doubted whether he could play the part of an English businessman of the correct and prosperous eighteen-nineties.

  “I am sure you know it,” he said. “You did splendid work for Hanson & Crane before the war.”

  “I became their agent in 1902. In November 1902,” declared Xabec. “You were with them then?”

  “No,” answered Toby, smiling.

  “Of course! You are too young. One forgets how time passes. But Mr Seafair, he will remember me.”

  “He sent you his compliments,” Toby lied, “and told me that the first thing I must do was to call on you.”

  “Ah, the English! They never forget! It is such pleasure to do business with them. They put friendship first and profit after.”

  “Alas! Times are changing, Monsieur Xabec,” answered Toby.

  “Never! I will not believe it. The English do not change. Les commerçants les plus honorables!”

  “At any rate I think you will find that Hanson & Crane have changed less than most. We go in for mass production now, but the quality is as good as ever.”

  “It will be an honour to represent you again,” said José Xabec.

  This was going too fast. Toby doubted whether the old gentleman could walk the length of the street, let alone compete with the energetic young representatives of German and North American toy firms.

  “I am afraid our business might make too heavy a claim on your time,” he answered tactfully.

  “My time? Voyons, Monsieur Manning! I will be frank with you. You see this rubbish?”—he waved a quivering hand towards the shelves lined with worthless samples typical of the cheap commission agent; a Japanese safety razor, a patent corkscrew, a brass-nibbed fountain pen, a cigarette case and electric torch combined—“That is the beginning. I retired twenty years ago, and I have now been back in business for nearly one. To begin all over again!”

  “You have had losses, Monsieur Xabec?” enquired Toby sympathetically.

  “The greatest losses. My friends, my sons—one in ’25 and one in ’29—and then my wife.”

  José Xabec took off his glasses and wiped them. Et puis ma femme— they were simple words, but the tone of voice called up a vision of some tender and dignified Mexican lady who had shared fifty years of his life and left him as bewildered by her death as if he himself had died and reawoken in an unfamiliar world.

  “I am so sorry,” said Toby.

  “Let us not speak of it. And so, you see, I was alone. I had to occupy myself. I could not sit at home. I beg you. Monsieur Manning, to honour me with your agency. I am healthy for an old man, and I shall give your firm ten years of service yet.”

  Toby’s natural instinct was to appoint him agent without more ado. He knew that he would do so in the end, but, as a passing tribute to the conventions of commerce, put off the moment when he would have to say yes.

  “If you would care to visit some customers with me?” he suggested. “Of course we should give you full rates of commission on any business you introduced.”

  “Willingly, monsieur!”

  José Xabec produced from under his desk a bowler hat, the first that Toby had seen in Mexico City, armed himself with a massive gold-mounted walking stick of polished teak, put a handful of cigars in his pocket and led the way, almost jauntily, to the lift.

  The old gentleman cruised along the street in firm, very short steps at the rate of one mile an hour, stopping dead at frequent intervals to show his companion the sights of Mexico City; this he would do without any warning, extending his stick to point out some building of interest and completely dislocating the flow of passers-by, to whom—or to those who would stop and listen—he apologised at length. Traffic he ignored. Once Toby pulled him from under the bows of a tramcar but only succeeded in getting them both grazed by a passing taxi. After that he let him alone. There was a deliberation about Herr Xabec’s movements while in the centre of the road which gave the drivers of vehicles ample warning of what he was going to do. They might, and did curse him, but they could not run him over. By the time that they arrived at the department store of Valdes & Garay, Toby was sweating with exasperation and very unappreciative of the antiquities of Mexico.

  José Xabec, in no way put out by a notice that travellers would only be seen from 2 to 5 P.M. on Thursdays, handed both their cards to a good-looking young woman and demanded to see Señor Valdes. She made a courteous pretence of announcing them and returned to say that Señor Valdes was engaged.

  The old agent pulled down his cuffs, looked at his watch and subtly dissociated himself from all the importunate brood of salesmen.

  “You will tell Don Cayetano Valdes, please, my daughter, that I am José Xabec, a dear friend of his late grandfather,” he said, “and that this gentleman, at my advice, has come all the way from London to see him. Where is the waiting room?”

  She exchanged an amused glance with Toby, offered them chairs, and returned again to say that the managing director would see them.

  Señor Valdes, though modelling himself on the types of big businessmen that he saw on the movies, was too Mexican to be impolite to an old man, especially since he vaguely remembered that his grandfather had indeed had a friend by the name of José Xabec or something like it. He was cordial but curt. Price and price alone, he said, was what interested him; since children smashed their toys within a week of receiving them, it was common sense to give them the cheapest and showiest. He flicked contemptuously through Toby’s catalogues and quoted Japanese and German prices. In the same breath he mentioned that toys were not what they had been. When he was a boy he had a vertical steam engine that was still working for his son.

  “In that case, Don Cayetano,” said the old German suavely, “why not telephone your home and find out the name of the maker? It is on the flywheel boss.”

  “Mañana,” said Señor Valdes, scenting danger.

  “Now!” Herr Xabec encouraged him. “There is the telephone!”

  He thrust it into the managing director’s hands and patted him gently on the shoulder as if to apologise for this Nordic brusqueness.

  Valdes got through to his house, let off his irritation on the speaker at the other end—his wife, to judge by the mixture of rudeness and endearments—and after a short delay announced that the name on the flywheel boss was Hanson & Crane.

  “You still make the same steam engine?” Xabec asked Toby.

  “We can do.”

  “How many will you take?” asked the agent, producing a black leather order book with the respectability of a bible.

  “Price?”

  “We cannot say,” answered Herr Xabec with dignity. “They must be manufactured specially for you.”

  “Well, but how do I know—”

  “You are dealing with an English firm,” Xabec gently rebuked him, as if he had questioned not merely the honesty but the very existence of the English.

  “A dozen,” said the managing director sulkily—and then, feeling that he was in for it anyway: “Bueno! And tanks? You have tanks?”

  “Here’s a good tank that we can do at 72/- the dozen C.I.F. V
era Cruz,” said Toby.

  “Too dear!”

  “Too cheap!” declared José Xabec. “I am the agent—good! I shall say what I want! I want a tank I can drop from my office window and that will go after it hits the ground. I want a tank I can shoot at with an air rifle and not harm it. I know my customers. I am near enough to my second childhood.”

  “That’s an idea!” Toby exclaimed. “What about a compressed-air anti-tank gun?

  “Have you one?” asked the managing director eagerly.

  “Our chief chemist has just passed it out of the laboratories,” said Toby, who had only that moment conceived the toy. “The tank Don José wants is this.” He pointed to the catalogue. “180/- the dozen, and will run fifty yards on one winding. An anti-tank gun would be about the price of our model compressed-air seventy-five. Built to the same scale as the tank, say, 12/- each—and if they catch on, we’ll bring the price down a lot. You can trust us. We want sales.”

  “At least you have ideas,” said Señor Valdes. “Book me four dozen tanks and a dozen anti-tank guns.”

  “And to make up the case?” asked José Xabec.

  “Have you no shame, grandpapa?” exclaimed Valdes genially.

  He ran through the catalogues, now slowly, and ordered some dolls and a gross of boxes of soldiers.

  “Payment ninety days from the arrival of the goods?” he asked.

  Toby looked at his agent for advice. Don José beamed with pride.

  “We agree!” he said.

  It was the beginning of a successful round of visits. Day after day Toby and Xabec crept from store to store booking orders. He was a remarkable salesman and quite unconscious of his art, preferring frankly to be congratulated on his cumbrous system of bookkeeping. He followed Toby about with adoration, openly disapproving of two things only: his hat, and the fact that he spoke Spanish. Neither were typical of the Envoy of Commerce, but were to be overlooked since Toby was also the Envoy of the Almighty.

  “The good God has never failed me,” he said with fine old Lutheran piety. “There have been times when I thought I could endure no more, Monsieur Manning. And always I have prayed. And always something has been done for me. The week before you came, I said to myself, I am too old. I will die now. Il n’y a plus rien à faire.’ And then, presto! You arrived! You were sent by God, Monsieur Manning.”

  Toby was so impressed by this piety that he used to lie in his bath and consider whether or not he had felt any direct inspiration to go and call on José Xabec. He could only admit, regretfully, that he had not; but he went about for several days in a state of unnatural virtue, and even caught himself limiting the quantity of wine that might be poured into so precious a vehicle of divinity.

  He had already consulted his consul about Hanson & Crane’s imaginary loss in the railway accident of 1924, and had asked him to write to the ministry for confirmation that it had really happened as and when an imaginary agent of those days had said. No answer but an acknowledgment was received to the enquiry and the consul thought it unlikely that any would be received for three or four months. Toby then suggested that he himself should go to Durango and make enquiries on the spot. The consul, thinking him a punctilious ass, but being reluctant to discourage such thoroughness in the representative of an English firm, obtained for him an introduction to the stationmaster at Durango.

  While he was determined to keep the secret of the gold to himself, Toby felt that he might need a person of confidence to unload his heavy baggage from the horses wherever he took the train. He told Herr Xabec that he had to attend to a private affair of great intricacy up country, and asked if he could recommend a trustworthy man who knew his Mexico.

  “Cher collégue” answered José Xabec regretfully, “in business there are still honourable firms. But in an affair of private profit, work alone.”

  “You don’t know some young German?”

  “Monsieur Manning, you grieve me. I am ashamed that I cannot recommend you one. Alas! Defeat cost us very dear.”

  “It’s better now,” said Toby. “I’m no friend of the Nazis, but I must admit they have improved the morale.”

  “The Nazis!” snorted Herr Xabec. “Ah, what the great Bismarck would have done to those play actors! He had no use for exaltés! He needed men and he made men. They even come to Mexico, these Nazis, upsetting good boys who have made their homes here. Hysterical schoolgirls, Monsieur Manning! When I think what Bismarck would have done to them! My emperor could not have conquered France with Nazis. We were men then!”

  “You are still,” said Toby. “This will pass.”

  “Not without war, Monsieur Manning. And do you know what the world will do? Their armies will pass over Germany and leave not a city standing. My Germany! It seems strange to you that one should love a country one has not seen for fifty years?”

  “No,” Toby answered. “You remember the best. And, by God, it was a good best! To my mind it’s the Auslandsdeutscher who keeps the true Germany alive. He wasn’t infected by that diseased republic and he doesn’t fall for Nazi hysteria.”

  “He does!” stuttered Herr Xabec indignantly. “He will! Do you know there is now in Mexico City a delegation to lecture to the German colony?”

  “Is there really? Let’s go to a meeting.”

  “I? Never!”

  The old agent wiped his glasses, and remembered that it had always been his duty, self-imposed, to provide for visiting representatives the amusements they preferred; it had dragged him into entertainments quite as distasteful to him as a Nazi rally.

  “Well, well—perhaps I am unreasonable. Let us go. Tomorrow night at the Sportverein.”

  “Much too late for you to be up, cher collègue!” said Toby genially. “And I shall be quite happy alone.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Quite sure. Can you get me a ticket?”

  “Easily! They give them to anyone who will listen,” replied Herr Xabec scornfully.

  Toby was curious to see how Nazi propaganda would be presented to Germans who were free to read the foreign press. With a ticket and a note of introduction from Herr Xabec to the secretary of the club, he turned up at the hall and was received with the frankest good-fellowship.

  There were some three hundred men and women present, seated at long tables, decked with breads and delicatessen, that ran the length of the hall. A low stage at the far end, though hung with flags and photographs, gave the illusion of an honest provincial beer house where some beefy and superannuated opera singer would shortly appear to entertain the noble public. The wings and low proscenium arch were formed by a pergola of timber into which pine boughs had been closely woven; this simple decoration would separate a speaker from the audience and yet avoid any suggestion of the paint and canvas of a theatre. The backdrop was a pleasantly fanciful map of Europe and the Americas, on which the distribution of Germans abroad was marked in heavy shading. The old Mexican Germans, who had turned up out of a sense of duty, though they shook their heads over National Socialism, were obviously relieved that it was to be the sort of evening they understood and enjoyed; an informal, homely show. The younger members were delighted to find that patriotism need not be too exacting. The trouble with Germans, thought Toby, as beer and courtesies were thrust upon him by his neighbours, was that one couldn’t help liking them when they were off duty—undoubtedly the most amicable of nations to the foreigner in their midst!

  The evening progressed quite naturally into unself-conscious community singing until a good rousing atmosphere had been developed in which everything Mexican was forgotten and everything German remembered. Suddenly into the roar of conversation, silencing it by beauty and passion of voice without the distracting aid of a chairman’s rap on the table, a young tenor, fair and manly as Siegfried, poured forth the Horst Wessel song. The storm of applause was stilled at last by the German consul mounting the platform and ho
lding up his hand. He spoke a few short compact sentences on the identity of feeling in the fatherland and in its sons abroad and introduced:—

  “The Countess Irma von Reichensund!”

  A tall woman strode on to the platform as the hall was darkened, and a diffused spotlight picked her up. She stood between the pine boughs dressed in a severe and simple frock of autumn browns that was inspired, though being in no way fancy dress, by the close-fitting corsage and flowing skirt of the mediaeval chatelaine. A heavy belt of steel and gold was buckled loosely over her hips. It was effective. She was the German woman in a German setting, and as she spoke her shadow moved among the blocked masses of German colonists on the great map behind her.

  The long hips, their slim beauty emphasised by the falling belt, were vaguely familiar to Toby. Irma? By God, it was his Irma! He knocked over his beer, endured agonies as the noise and his whispered apologies turned fifty faces, white in the blessed darkness, towards him, and settled down to recover what he could of the face of the girl from the face of the woman.

  Her mouth was a firm gash from cheek to cheek, and, apart from a pleasant fullness of the lower lip, was like the wide mouth of a priest—an impression that was heightened by the two deep furrows that ran down to the corners from the centre of her nose. Eyes, hair, forehead and the long space between nostrils and lips were unchanged, except that the brows, once delicately plucked, were now full and commandingly mysterious. It was the face of an interesting and extremely individual woman who had quite evidently lived her life without regard for convention or for her own suffering—a face that had beauty but no appeal. It prohibited the desire that every man in the room had momentarily felt for her tall and exquisite body.

  Irma spoke fluently but with simplicity, using the party’s weapon of irony with great effect. She took her audience through the unsavoury history of the republic and showed them the contrast between a fatherland demoralised by the Treaty of Versailles and the strong and disciplined fatherland of Hitler. When she came to the creed that had produced such startling results, she stressed its socialism rather than its nationalism, mindful that her hearers were more or less internationalists in fact if not by conviction. A Germany without classes, where every man should feel his own duty to the state to be of equal importance with any other’s—that was what they were trying to make!—(cheers)—A Germany where the souls of peasants and workers, landlords and capitalists, would be inspired by a sense of loyalty to the community—(cheers)—not by the Bolshevist absurdities of setting class against class nor by the equal absurdity of a class claiming privileges without duties. That ideal could only be attained under the benevolent dictatorship of a man sprung from the people, never by a democracy with its corrupt, jealous and futile strife, nor by any state in which the religious—the dirty Jews, for example!—considered their own community of more importance than the nation. She pictured Germany defenceless in a ring of armed nations—or disarmed, as they had called themselves!—(applause and laughter). France hectoring. The little nations snarling like dogs around a carcass—so long as the biggest dog snarled first. England intolerably patronising. Beloved Austria a helpless puppet dangled by Mussolini to amuse the Sunday school at Geneva. She asked them to compare that picture with Germany to-day; a peaceful giant taking his rights with calm superiority, willing to forgive the world its mistakes, holding out the hand, the loyal Aryan handclasp of friendship, to his former enemies.