The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  Toby settled down on the platform of the observation car. He tried to read a newspaper and seemed to himself to be succeeding very well until he automatically turned from the front page to the centre and found that he had not the slightest memory of anything he had read. The train rumbled towards the frontier, reeling out behind it a black ribbon of track, the only feature upon a yellow rolling landscape. There was nothing to hold the interest. If the train reeled out enough ribbon, it would eventually reach Laredo. There was no avoiding that. There would be gaols presumably on both sides of the order. He thought that on the whole he would prefer the Mexican. A consul could get one out of a Mexican gaol—it was, after all, what consuls were for. But somehow one couldn’t imagine a consul interfering with the formidable steel and whitewash of the United States.

  The immigration inspector saluted him courteously. Toby handed over his passport, finding for him the United States transit visa among the polychrome muddle of Latin-American and European stamps. He produced his steamship ticket. He chatted casually of the toy business. It seemed to him incredible that the man should not see his nervousness. He was quite unaware that his exterior was perfectly self-possessed, and that the immigration inspector had always longed to go to South America and was dreaming of secret police and gold and the high-sounding names scattered through the passport.

  The Customs officer joined them. Transit via the United States? Well, he was used to that—but it always seemed darned funny. Here was this country with all the world, especially wops and greasers and kikes, trying to get into it, and yet folks came from Mexico with transit visas as if the United States were nothing but a transcontinental highway. He looked a regular fellow, this Englishman, not the sort of guy to throw packets of dope out of the windows, and the pullman porter said he was O.K. He might at least give New York the once-over instead of getting out of it on the same day that he got in. Jealous, probably. Well, it was no business of his!

  He chalked Toby’s bags, told him that he needn’t worry about his trunk in the baggage car, and passed on to more important duties.

  The train pulled into Laredo. Toby climbed down from the car determined to salute the first American flag he saw. Not seeing one, he solemnly paid his tribute to the civilisation by buying a five-cent magazine, a five-cent cigar and a chocolate ice-cream sundae in a cardboard carton, and handing them all with a deep bow to a fat and surprised Slovene in a cowboy hat who hoped that the station was mistaking him for a Texan. He sent a long wire to Manuel and a short one to Irma; then hesitated at the counter. He wanted to give Hanson & Crane a month’s notice, but suspected himself of a foolhardy gesture; it was neither wise nor courageous to burn boats. Yet after all, he argued, his decision was final—had to be final. If Manuel failed him or he failed himself, then life had no more significance than the bustle of the railway station. One came from somewhere; one went somewhere else; and spent the interval lounging, pretending, passing the time in eating, drinking and reading newspapers. Yes, his decision was final. Whether or not the gold reached its destination, whether or not it was used as he intended, the pattern of his life had been changed and its object declared. He could never go back to Hanson & Crane, and the honourable course was to let them know it as soon as possible. He cabled them his resignation.

  TREASURE ON EARTH

  XI

  LORDS TEMPORAL

  Simon Bendrihem’s office in Ivy Lane had an air of gentle tragedy. He had given up his agency for printing machinery, and refused to handle paper. He would have closed the office altogether if he could have brought himself to dismiss his mechanic, his three clerks and his secretary. He could easily find jobs for them; that he did not do so was, he knew, the purest egotism. He was a man with few intimate friends, and the daily society of his staff meant a great deal to him. He had made it his hobby to study their idiosyncrasies. He was the confidant of Miss Mason’s hopeful but disappointingly innocent romances. He admired his stock keeper’s extraordinary flair for picking winners, and was fascinated by his whispered stories of how he had met a man who knew another man who was the second cousin of the Daily Herald’ s racing correspondent. He had bought a book on roses in order to appreciate his accountants horticultural triumphs in the Dagenham flower show. He had analysed by unobtrusive questioning the reasons for his mechanic’s shocking bad temper every second Monday. All these things stimulated his curiosity and his sense of community with other human beings. He could not bear to leave them; so the office was still kept alive like a marriage, happy, but deprived of its primary reason for existence, passion.

  Miss Mason placed the morning mail on her employer’s desk. There were a few letters from his former principals in Germany straightening up accounts and acknowledging receipt of instalments from customers. These Bendrihem turned over to his bookkeeper. The arrogant and discourteous ending of Deutsche Grüsse annoyed him so profoundly that he refused to read them. There were also some letters from customers asking for advice or for repairs to their presses; these he welcomed, since his mechanic would have something to do and could indulge his natural genius for taking the conceit out of head printers. There was a letter mailed from New York by the Bremen and addressed in a handwriting that was vaguely familiar, though he could not remember whose it was. It was a hand more common in the professions than in business, belonging to someone—for the writing of Greek had left its inevitable mark—who had been educated on the classical side of an English public school. He opened the letter, expecting it to be some ingenious Jewish charity appeal.

  MY DEAR BENDRIHEM,

  You told me over a year ago that if ever I could answer the question of what cause people like you and me should serve, I was to let you know. You didn’t, I think, mean anything commercial or political. So far as I remember, we neither of us knew what we meant—except that we felt ourselves wasted as things were.

  I have a proposal to make to you which is far too complex to write. I won’t call it a new religion, yet there is something religious in it, though any of us are free to believe what they like on the questions—important only to priests and atheists—of God, afterlife and such-like fruitless subjects. It might be called the establishment of an international aristocracy, or of a new order of Franciscans. At any rate I believe it to be a movement after your own heart, which you will join and help to mould into a practical form.

  The funds of the movement are now in my possession, and, unfortunately, in the form of gold bars and coin. I had no difficulty in removing them from their country of origin and see none in getting them out of New York (though I believe I am liable to God knows how many years of imprisonment if I don’t sell them to the Federal Reserve) but I do foresee difficulty if awkward questions are asked by the English customs when I arrive.

  This gold belongs (so far as it belongs to anyone) to a friend of mine for whom I am handling it. He cannot prove it is his. There is nothing at all to prevent me claiming it is mine. I have no reason, beyond my trust in him, to suppose that he will really apply it to our joint scheme. So you see the whole affair is one of mutual confidence. There’s no tariff on gold, but it will be somebody’s duty to know where it comes from. I must short-circuit that somebody.

  What I want you to do is to put up some specious top-hatted façade of respectability which will enable me to pass through customs without question—in fact to be bowed through customs. If you like, form a company with yourself, Ottery, Whitehead and me as directors, and sell the gold for delivery by the American Broker arriving London on the 20th. There are approximately 1065 pounds of it. The only chance I’ve had to weigh the damned stuff was on a station platform, and I’m not quite sure of the weight of the luggage that contains it. I guarantee you that there will never be any question as to its origin or our right to it so long as we avoid publicity. I am writing to Ottery by this mail, and leave it up to the pair of you. Radio me to the American Broker what you are doing.

  All good wishes, and lookin
g forward to seeing you.

  Yours ever,

  TOBY MANNING

  Bendrihem walked to the window and looked out on Ivy Lane. On a spring morning with the sun slanting into its narrow canyon, lighting the tulips in a flower shop and the awnings over the entrance to a pub, it had the quality of a narrow Mediterranean street. He found that gazing down the length of Ivy Lane made him forget the City of London and Anglo-Saxon conscience, and put him in touch with the genuine instincts of humanity. He looked at Ivy Lane when he had to sack an employee or protest a bill—with the result that he seldom did either.

  There was no doubt in his mind that he was being asked to connive at something which, if not criminal, was unpleasantly shady. Toby’s honesty was, he knew, unquestionable—witness the fact that he was apparently travelling with somebody else’s 1065 pounds of gold—but it was always possible that his honesty on this occasion might be a personal loyalty of which society would not approve. He had not forgotten, however, the night on Helsingfors sound, and the sincerity of his own request to Toby. Toby had now appealed to him for help, and it was not surprising that any scheme sufficiently unconventional to satisfy them both should present features that would not fit into the morality of the business world.

  Bendrihem picked up the telephone and was eagerly answered by a warm and worried Ottery, who was only too glad to accept his invitation to come over to Ivy Lane and confer. He then sent for Miss Mason and asked her to fix an appointment for him with Otto Montrose, senior partner of Klein & Marcus, Bullion Brokers.

  “And I am expecting a Mr Ottery,” he added. “Will you show him in as soon as he comes, Penelope, and see that we are not disturbed?”

  Penelope Mason nodded and gave her employer a happy smile, more personal than that with which she usually received his instructions. She had not seen him so absorbed by anything since he gave up the German agency. It delighted her to see his face alive and his eyes thoughtful. Bendrihem recognised her sympathy and guessed its cause.

  “You’re a friendly girl,” he said gratefully.

  Penelope Mason had an equally brilliant smile for Ottery when he arrived. She had never seen him before, but suspected that he was in some way responsible for the reawakening of her employer. Mark Ottery, who was thinking about Toby and had been vaguely aware of Penelope only as a slim, high-bosomed figure that opened the door of the private office, was startled by this frank look of intimacy.

  “Quite!” he murmured. “Quite! Er—thank you.”

  He entered Bendrihem’s room feeling confused, and certain that the girl must consider him an ass. He had answered her as if she had said something, and he now realised that she had not opened her mouth.

  “Roses, roses everywhere,” he remarked obscurely to Bendrihem. “And here am I, a drunken sot and a pillar of the City of London.”

  “Roses?” asked Simon.

  “Your secretary. I gave her a leer. A grand leer. Poor old Ottery—he is admiring secretaries.”

  “Oh, Penelope!” Bendrihem exclaimed, laughing. “I’m glad you appreciate her!”

  “She doesn’t look like all these damned Englishwomen!” Mark Ottery answered. “Exotic! She lives virginally upon a tiger skin. Good, that one! Did you find her in Constantinople?”

  “No. Bayswater.”

  “She lives in Bayswater?”

  “One of those deadly boarding houses for business women.”

  “Beautiful Bayswater! Oh, most seemly Bayswater! In a lovely residential district five minutes from the Park—and you find it’s the wrong side of Paddington Station.”

  “Yes. Hers is.”

  “I must give her another leer when I go out. I have a wicked leer, Bendrihem! I say, what are we going to do about Toby? He seems to have been raiding the Spanish Main. Pieces of eight, by God! Can one sell a piece of eight?”

  “A respected city merchant with the help of his bank manager and a chartered accountant can sell anything,” Simon replied. “We’re above suspicion.”

  “Somebody in this world has to be above suspicion,” Ottery answered. “That’s why I don’t like this business. Why doesn’t he go to Antwerp or somewhere?”

  “May I see what he has written to you?”

  Ottery handed him his letter from Toby, and took in exchange that which had been addressed to Bendrihem. There was little difference between them. Mark shed his decorative surcoat of fantasy and appeared in the cold armour of a chartered accountant.

  “The essential question,” he said, “is, do we trust him?” “I do,” replied Bendrihem, surprising himself as well as Mark Ottery by this decisive confession of faith.

  “I suppose I do too. But he does not conform to ordinary standards; and in the city one trusts a man because he orders his public life according to certain conventions which become a habit with him. You can count on them.”

  “That,” said Simon, “is the reason why, when you have a crash in the city, it’s usually a big one. I’d rather trust a man than a set of habits, Ottery; they are too easily assumed.”

  “Granted! There are scamps everywhere. But one can’t know what Toby is going to do next.”

  “I feel that I do know,” Simon answered thoughtfully. “It’s possible that what Toby is up to would be considered shady by conventional standards. But I’ve trust in him enough to know that he wouldn’t ask me to do anything which I myself should consider shady.”

  “It’s funny,” said Ottery, touched by this answer. “I’ve been brought up with Toby Manning, yet you know more about his workings than I do. Bendrihem, I am respectable. I shall be an alderman in ten years, and like it! It’s a terrible thought. I envy Toby.”

  “You romanticise him. His standards are the same as yours, but he’s worked them out for himself.”

  “He’s asking a lot of us.”

  “Yes. I am glad. He’s asking us to do something for the sake of an idea. I am sensitive to that.”

  “I’d be thankful for an idea worth living for, myself,” said Ottery, a little stung. “But I don’t see Toby as a prophet. I was at school with him. He’s irresponsible.”

  “Why?”

  “Obviously irresponsible.”

  “Why should you call him irresponsible because he hasn’t chosen to follow a beaten track? You implied that you wouldn’t be sorry to get away from it yourself.”

  “All right. But Toby has no limits. He might turn Mohammedan to-morrow. A bloody great grand vizier with five hundred wives and a thousand concubines. A lecherous old dog. A corner-stone of the slave market.”

  “He’d make a very good Mohammedan,” remarked Simon. “I admit he’s something of a hedonist, but he believes in the brotherhood of man. A negro slave would be lucky if he belonged to Toby.”

  “Broad-minded old devil you are, Bendrihem!”

  “Perhaps. I am never sure.”

  “I am. You horrify me. How are we going to land that impossible man and his pieces of eight?”

  “You’ll do it then?”

  “Yes. I disagree. I have registered my disapproval. I’d like to see Toby Manning in hell. But I can’t let him down.”

  “You’re harder to understand than he is.”

  “No! Simple! An upright man who walks in the way of righteousness—that’s me! I don’t believe in Toby—I think he has robbed the President of Nicaragua. But we’ll sell the swag for him. Who’ll buy my pieces of eight? Who’ll buy? Who’ll buy? Jolly fat round pieces of eight stolen from the President of Nicaragua!”

  Ottery slapped his thigh and laughed loudly.

  “I’m afraid,” said Bendrihem mildly, “that we may be overheard on the other side of Ivy Lane.”

  “Unseemly!” Mark agreed. “Most unseemly. Hawking the swag in the very shadow of St Paul’s. Are you a churchwarden, Bendrihem?”

  “Certainly not!” Bendrihem replied with some warmt
h. “I am an agnostic.”

  “I doubt if St Paul’s has churchwardens anyway,” said Mark.

  Bendrihem laughed and threw out his hairy hand in a gesture of apology.

  “I’m sorry. I ought to have known you were pulling my leg,” he said. “You have no idea of the number of people who tell me I ought to be baptised because it would be good for business. They have given me a blind spot. It makes me angry even to be considered a Christian. It’s absurd, because I never go near the synagogue and I don’t observe the law.”

  “Lovely and pleasant are the Lord’s people, even as honey in my nostrils,” said Ottery, “when they don’t burn down their businesses for the insurance. I say, I’m very sorry, I—”

  “Oh, I’m not touchy on that point! You’re quite right. The Jew who is forcing his way up is inclined to put cleverness before honesty. He has been compelled to give up his own morality, you see, and adjust himself to another. He has been taught to believe that money is everything. But I wish you Gentiles knew the Jewish proletariat—the equivalent of the average man in a country pub. With eighty per cent of my people you never come in contact at all; kindly, hospitable souls, bound up in their family and friends, and many of them well-read in their own philosophy and mysticism. And parts of the Talmud, my dear fellow, are as sane and western as Epicurus!”

  “He who passes by a celebration without entering in offends against the Lord,” Ottery quoted.

  “Ah! I forgot you’d been a theologian!” Bendrihem laughed. “Well, there you have it! A generous people who love good cheer.”

  “How utterly incredible anti-Semitism must seem to a Jew!” exclaimed Mark.