He was awakened by the clatter of the horses’ hooves as they plunged up the hillside. The sun was down, and the yellows of the slopes had turned to greys and the greys to timid greens. To his opening eyes the valley gave a momentary illusion of kindliness, as of land that could support animal life. Irma offered him the wineskin and the fierce red juice trickled hearteningly into his stomach. He stood up, forcing his muscles against their stiffness, and tried to help her with the loading of the animals; but his hands were useless, the palms watering and bleeding. All he could do was to pass her the bars, lifting them between stiff fingers.
Each horse had to carry eight bars, of various sizes, four on either flank—a load that, so far as mere bulk went, could have been packed into a gamekeeper’s two pockets. Around and over the bullion they distributed the coin, burdening the pack horses with a total guessed weight of three hundred pounds apiece, and each of the riding animals with some two hundred and fifty pounds. For the latter they made quite adequate pack saddles out of water skins, cutting away the centre of one side to leave two open pouches at either end.
On their return to camp it was Irma who had to prepare fire and food, Toby being a mere beast of burden with a sore back and no hands. She served him with humility, thankful for his presence and his helplessness, busying herself with useless tasks to stave off the reaction that threatened to set in. She dreaded the long hours of darkness ahead, and longed for him; but he was in no fit state to be an interested lover. She too was very weary. She knew it, and accused herself of desiring to find forgetfulness in his arms, of wishing most grossly to use the beauty of mutual passion as a mere drug.
While they ate, Toby kept the conversation going. He was in good form, as gay as if they had been dining in Vienna and their happiness were so deep-rooted that it could flower in a thousand entertaining superficialities. Being a woman of taste and urbanity, she answered him as gaily, her thoughts blowing like clouds across a black chasm of depression, sometimes revealed, sometimes hidden under the writhing mist, but always terrifying in its emptiness. She longed and feared to throw herself into it. At last she left the fire on the pretence of cleaning up the camp before they slept.
Toby watched her passing indecisively as a ghost between the horses, the baggage and the stream, and understood that in his own content he had been less occupied with her than he should have been.
“Irma, you’re too far away,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Washing up, darling.”
“What’s the good? We’re leaving the pots and pans here for the archaeologists to find.”
“I’ll leave them clean. Then they’ll know we were civilised.”
“I’m lonely without you,” he answered, refusing to be drawn into a witty answer.
“Later.”
He went to her and put his arm round her shoulders, expressing his comradeship by the touch rather than words; destroy everything we have to live for and they don’t put anything in its place.”
“I know,” he answered. “I’m not with you about communists and Jews. But the cranks and creeping Jesuses and half-baked intellectuals and United States females who think you can cure the ills of Europe as easily as founding a home for sick lapdogs—by God, I’d see the lot of them in a concentration camp with pleasure! In my own blasted country the chap who preaches disarmament is so often the man who fights to prevent us having a drink after eleven—imagine!”
“Thank God you understand!” she cried. “It matters to me so terribly, Toby. My ideas are all mixed up. Violence and war and the nation—even now I’m not sure that they aren’t good for Europe. I, whose whole youth was wrecked by war, whose husband was killed by war!”
“What war?”
“Ours. Yours and mine. Our precious war that has fascinated and damned and twisted us. He had a bit of a French shell in him. They couldn’t get it out and they told him it might wander. It did. Toby, Toby! Give me something to live for! There’s nothing to hold me. I want to stay as I am now, as I was when I was married. I’m not insane—tell me I’m not!”
“You’re sane as I am, sweet,” he answered, holding between his hands the dear head so marked by suffering and intelligence. “I don’t know what we have to live for—unless for the sake of others like us.”
“Where are they then?”
“Everywhere in Europe. Not so much in the younger countries. There they can still believe. They have an illusion of activity. But Europe has nothing to do—chained like Prometheus. By God—he must have been thankful for the vulture that tore out his liver! It saved the days from monotony. And any vulture will do for us—communism or fascism or frantic money-making. All of them lead to war and hatred, all of them force us to take sides and swear to creeds. The people for whom it is worth our while to live are those with no sides and no creeds—Europeans who long as we do for a trumpet to ring out over Europe, but won’t blow a penny whistle meanwhile, and pretend it is the trumpet.”
“What is the trumpet?”
“I don’t know. It’s international. That goes without saying. It may be a religion. A religion for the pub-keeper and the shop-steward and the squire—the sort of fellows that the man in the street will listen to when he merely tells the prophet to go and get a hair-cut.”
“Religion?” she asked bitterly. “What religion can help me? I suppose there’s some kind of life after death, but I can’t believe that what I do makes any difference to it.”
“Nor do I. If one lives by the ethics of the Christian or any other faith, one is possibly nearer to some ultimate purpose. But it doesn’t weigh with me. I don’t really mean a religion. I mean a code of manners.”
“It’s too weak a thing.”
“I’ll call it a conception of honour, then. My pub-keeper and shop-steward and squire don’t know much about manners or morals, but they all know what honour is, and they all mean much the same thing by the word. I’m not talking about national honour—that may cover the purest idealism or the plainest bullying—just Honour without any adjective. They all recognise it. There’s not enough salt in Europe, Irma. What there is has lost its savour and there’s not enough of it. The honourable man was killed in the war. In all countries he was the first to be killed. And the agonies after the war killed his son and his father. His type of mind has got to be re-created.
“I offer you that as an object. It’s very simple—neither trumpet call nor penny whistle. But it may prepare the way for the trumpeter. Give us back the noble. Give us back our salt.”
“Toby! But you dear fool!”
She looked up at him tenderly, moved by his enthusiasm but feeling it petty and even priggish compared to the great wave of national emotion by which she had been caught and disciplined.
“Nobody wants the noble back again. Our creed with all its faults is better than that.”
“You haven’t understood me,” he said. “Remember your father’s friends, Irma—the people you mixed with as a girl. They were narrow. Often they were irresponsible, impractical parasites—I grant you all that. I grant you that nobody wants them back. But they were the guardians of certain fine ideals. They despised flag waving and the itch for money and this mad modern desire to impress somebody at all costs. They would have dismissed Hitler and a Jewish cinema producer with the same word. They would have said he was vulgar. You know it’s true.”
“No more so than Mussolini,” she answered sharply.
“Much less so than Mussolini. But is that your ideal?”
“No … I don’t know. The world gets what it wants, Toby, and the world is vulgar.”
“Yes—because we have lost our standards. A class of nobles gave us some. The ideals are still there. But each man who holds them is isolated in a sea of men who do not, instead of being supported by others who do. Help those nobles isolated in their shops and factories and offices! Give them leisure and power! That is what Manue
l and I want to do with this gold.”
“Now I see what you mean!” she cried. “But how? You can’t set them wholly free. All you can do is to organise them, give them a uniform in their spare time. A Sturmabteilung with different ideals.”
“Couldn’t they be freed through the monastery?”
“The monastery?”
“Yes! Imagine an abbey of men and women of all nations, bound together by a single aristocratic conception of honour and service. We mean to found it. I call it an attempt to re-create the noble. Manuel would call it an Order of Franciscans without religion. But the intention is the same. A refuge for the man of honour and a base for his operations.”
“And the woman too?”
“Yes—for the few who can accept complete liberty. There can’t be any rules of conduct, you see. A companion would renounce all possessions to the order, but would remain as free as in his or her club. There would have to be obedience to the abbey council when on abbey business, of course.”
“What would that mean?”
“God knows! Insult, slander and occasionally prison, I should think.”
“It isn’t hard.”
“No violence and no heroics, Irma!”
“I’m sick of both,” she said. “But you accept women too easily. If I were to join you, complete liberty would be impossible.”
“Make your own rules then.”
“How could I?”
“Dear, you’re just as capable of doing it as I am. Surely the very essence of a noble is that he or she can live with others without offending them? The man or woman who is accepted by us needs no rules.”
“But you and I? Well—imagine that we were tired of each other and both running after other companions.”
“We shouldn’t,” he answered, smiling to see that her interest had overcome the shame that had been torturing her. “Within the abbey, we shall be like soldiers in a frontier town. On the whole, it’s rare for an officer to seduce the wife or daughter of a brother officer. If it’s easy for them, it’s easy for us. Outside the abbey, we can do what we like, so long as we are reasonably discreet. But the community has every right to demand that it shall not be disturbed by the vagaries of my lecherous body. They are unimportant.”
“You will find few women who think so.”
“Yes. And we shall have few women with us. A handful of rare creatures such as you. A few devoted wives.”
“Darling, it would be a heaven,” she murmured. “Oh, Toby! Toby! There’s too much to think of. I can’t go to sleep. Can you?”
“I could sleep for a week!” he said.
“I’d forgotten!” she exclaimed remorsefully. “Let me see your hands.”
Toby held them out, red and raw in the firelight.
“Any bandages?” she asked.
“Yes, in my pack. And lint. And there’s some clean olive oil in the tin. Do you think you can fix me up?”
“Whatever else she may be, a Nazi woman isn’t ignorant of first aid,” Irma laughed.
She washed and dressed his palms, then spiralled the bandages professionally over hand and wrist.
“That will last until we reach Durango,” she said. “Tomorrow night I’ll dress them again. Where shall we be, Toby?”
“Sleeping by the roadside if all goes well. We must avoid hotels. We don’t want the baggage handled more than once. Do you mind?”
“No! Think of hotel rooms after all this beauty!”
The faint drip of water and the sudden sighing of a horse’s breath marked the passage of the night. The stars blazed in a limpid blackness that seemed to extend beyond and behind the points of light, as if they had been lamps reflected in the immensity of a still pool, its banks the black walls of the canyon.
“It must end like this, for the present,” she said.
“You won’t come with me to New York?”
“No. I must stay a day or two in Monterrey out of courtesy. I’ll see you in London. You’ll wait there for Manuel Vargas, I suppose?”
“Yes—if I get through.”
“Let me know, and I will come over to meet him. I must see him, and Germany too. Don’t fear for me, Toby. Whatever I decide will be what I want.”
She kissed him and fussed tenderly with his blankets; then sat by the fire and watched him sleep.
No longer under the spell of his voice, she wished that the prospect ahead of them were a honeymoon, regular or irregular, rather than—than what? The hard and heavy reality of the saddlebags against which she rested her back were proof enough that the abbey was no dream. Two mature and practical men—one of them apparently as careless of society as any fiery mediaeval saint—with a sack of gold to back them were certain to bring their common vision to life. It might be a short and rickety life, but it would be a recognisable incarnation of their thought.
She was amused by herself. She had had a new freedom and a new cause offered to her, and at once she longed for marriage. It gave her a joyous sense of sanity that she, Irma, should be able to sit and watch the workings of Irma, and feel neither ashamed nor proud of them. Dear Toby! To hold him was impossible. She knew it, for she had seen enough of men vowed to the service of an ideal. All other romance but that which they kept to themselves faded swiftly. One couldn’t distract such a life from its purpose. If she were certain that she wished to bind herself to him, she could choose another way of fulfilling her love; but the child must be her own affair, born as independently as in a primitive tribe where men and women had never discovered that the miracle budding within its mother had anything whatever to do with mutual desire.
Her racing mind kept her awake until the hour when the bushes showed their dim and twisted shapes in a darkness that held no other sign of dawn. When Toby arose a little before sunrise, he found her deep in a first sleep, and let her lie while he fed the horses and prepared a mighty breakfast of eggs and bully beef to last the pair of them until they reached Durango. His bandaged and padded hands were equal to any clumsy work demanded of them.
Leaving everything behind but the gold, their blankets and a little water, they marched down the arroyo to the culvert. A train passed them, the guard shouting some kindly and unintelligible greeting to the two figures trudging by their string of laden horses. By ten they had reached the car. It was undisturbed. There was no one in Durango to ride so far from water without a purpose, and compelling purposes were fewer than in Lara’s time. Fearing that the loaded Benz could never be worked back on to the track, Irma drove it slowly up the dry watercourse while Toby followed with the horses. Once on the open desert, they transferred the gold from the saddlebags to the luggage, tamping it well down by the trays and the linen that he had bought for the purpose.
Toby proposed to hitch the horses to the back of the car and drive at trotting pace the forty kilometres to Durango. To this Irma objected on the grounds that it was too hard on the animals and too slow. She mounted one and led the other three, stripped to their halters, at a smart canter over the sandy track. She reminded Toby, luxuriating at the wheel of his eighty unromantic horses, of a glorious Victory driving her quadriga. They made three short halts while she changed horses and reached Durango in a little over four hours.
Toby went straight to the telegraph office and wired the travel agency to book him on the American Broker, choosing a slow boat since he intended to write to Simon Bendrihem and Mark Ottery from the train and wished his letters to reach them at least a week before his own arrival. Leaving Irma and the car in the care of the stationmaster, he accompanied the retired general to the horse dealer. The dealer found a number of non-existent sores upon his weary animals and offered to return the purchase price less 20 per cent instead of the stipulated 10. This Toby accepted—much to the disgust both of the general and the dealer, who were prepared to spend the rest of the afternoon in the pleasurable pursuit of adjusting the deduction to 15 per
cent.
They dined heavily in an open-fronted café with the car and its precious burden immediately under their eyes. The general, the stationmaster and the barber sat with them, devouring Irma with long stares by which they hoped to extract the secret of whether or not their friend had succeeded in his supposed designs upon her virtue. Toby, with the memory of such savagery and beauty still in his mind, was quite unable to invent an answer that would satisfy their curiosity, and Durango was left guessing. The barber was of opinion that he had succeeded, the general that he had not.
“If he had,” whispered the general, “he would say so. He says nothing. Therefore he did not—for all educated men know that an Englishman will not tell a lie. And besides he has not perfumed himself.”
It was impossible to find the way by night from Durango to the main road between Mexico City and Monterrey. They drove twenty miles out of the town, and spread the cushions of the car by the deserted roadside, passing the night merrily enough with mutual affection and three bottles of French champagne that Toby had picked up in Durango. It was clear to him that Irma’s soul was contented; she became uproarious rather than tragic under the influence of alcohol.
The next night they passed in the open outside Monterrey, reserving their entry into the town until the following day so that Toby might be dropped at the station, with every appearance of a normal traveller, ten minutes before the train for Laredo and New York was due. They breakfasted at a posada, where he washed and shaved and dressed himself in the single crushed but conventional suit that he had reserved for the journey. He picked up his steamship ticket, and was again the respectable representative of Messrs Hanson & Crane Ltd., Toy Manufacturers.
She said good-bye to him outside the station, and watched from the car his actual departure. He stood over his baggage with the unmistakable air of an Englishman to whom fellow travellers were a nuisance and frontiers absurdities that might try the righteous man but could not seriously inconvenience him. The train pulled in. She saw him tip the pullman porter and make some jest. His suitcases vanished into the pullman and his trunk into the baggage car. Its weight was the cause of a laugh or two, but no suspicion.
The Third Hour Page 34
