by John Buchan
The first edition
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE BY SIR RICHARD HANNAY
BOOK I - THE GRAN SECO
BOOK II - THE COURTS OF THE MORNING
BOOK III - OLIFA
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE BY SIR RICHARD HANNAY
I
This story begins, so far as I am concerned, in the August of 192-, when I had for the second time a lease of the forest of Machray. Mary and Peter John and the household had gone north at the end of July, but I was detained for ten days in London over the business of a Rhodesian land company, of which I had recently become chairman. I was putting up at my club, and one morning I was rung up by Ellery Willis of the American Embassy, who had been wiring about me all over the country. He seemed to be in a hurry to see me, so I asked him to luncheon.
I had known Willis in the War, when he had had a field battery with the American 2nd Corps. After that he had been on the Headquarters Staff at Washington, and was now a military attache at the London Embassy. He seemed to have a good many duties besides the study of military affairs, and when I met him he was always discoursing about world politics and the need of England and America getting close to each other. I agreed with him about that, but used to tell him that the best way was not to talk too much, but to send Englishmen and Americans fishing together. He was an ardent, rather solemn young man, but with a quick sense of humour, and Mary said he was the best dancer in London.
He cut at once into business.
“You are a friend of Mr Blenkiron’s — John S. Blenkiron,” he said. “I want to know if you have heard from him lately?”
“Not for months,” I said. “Blenkiron was never a regular correspondent, and the fount has dried up since last December.”
He looked grave. “That’s bad,” he said.
“There’s nothing wrong?” I asked anxiously.
“Only that nobody knows what has become of him.”
“But that was always the old ruffian’s way. He likes to cover his tracks, like Providence, and turn up suddenly when he is not expected. There’s a lot of the child in him.”
Willis shook his head. “I expect there’s more to it this time than that. I’ll tell you what we know. He made a dive back into Wall Street last fall, and did some big things in electrolytic zinc. Then he went to Santa Catalina, and returned to New York in the second week of January. On the 27th day of that month he sailed for Panama in a fruit-steamer, having previously shut up his office and wound up his affairs as if he were thinking of his decease. From that day no one has clapped eyes on him. He has nothing in the way of family life, but I needn’t tell you that he has plenty of friends, and they are beginning to get anxious. All that we can find out is that last March a little Jew man turned up in New York with an order from Mr Blenkiron for a quarter of a million dollars. It was all right, and the money was handed over, and the shape it took was a draft on Valparaiso to be paid after countersignature by our consul there. We got in touch with the consul, and heard that the money had been collected on Mr Blenkiron’s instructions by some fellow with a Spanish name.”
“That sounds queer,” I said.
“It certainly does. But there’s something queerer still. In June Mr Neston of the Treasury got a letter — he had been a business associate of Mr Blenkiron’s at one time and they used to go bass-fishing in Minnesota. It didn’t come by mail, but was handed in one evening at Mr Neston’s private residence. It bore no name, but there could be no doubt it was from Mr Blenkiron. I have seen a copy of it with Mr Neston’s commentary, and I can tell you it was great stuff. The writer warned his old friend that there might be trouble brewing in certain parts of the world which he did not specify, and he begged him, as he was a good American, to keep his eyes skinned. He also said that he, the writer, might have to ask some day soon for help, and that he counted on getting it. The funny thing was that the letter was in a kind of cypher. I understand that Mr Blenkiron used to write to his friends in a high-coloured version of our national slang, and that he had a good many private expressions that were Choctaw to those that did not know him. That letter might have been read as the perfectly natural expression of a light-headed American, who had been having too many cocktails and was writing drivel about his health and his habits and the fine weather. But, knowing how to construe it, it made Mr Neston sit up and take notice...There was another thing.
“I have said that the letter had no name, but it was signed all the same. It seems that in any very important and intimate communication Mr Blenkiron used to make a hieroglyphic of his surname and stick J. S. after it in brackets. That was meant to be a kind of S.O.S. to his friends that the thing was mighty important. Well, this letter had the hieroglyphic in three places, scrawled in as if the writer had been playing absent-mindedly with his pen. Mr Neston’s conclusion was that Mr Blenkiron had written it in some place where he was not allowed to communicate freely, and might be in considerable danger.”
I admitted that it looked like it, and said that if Blenkiron had been captured by bandits and held up to ransom, I could vouch for it, from what I knew of him, that his captors had done the worst day’s work of their lives. I asked what his Government was doing about it.
“Nothing official,” said Willis, “for we are in this difficulty. We are afraid of spoiling Mr Blenkiron’s game, whatever it may be. Washington has a very high respect for his talents, and we should hate to cross him by being officious. All the same, we are anxious, and that is why I have come to you.”
He proceeded to give me one of his lectures on international affairs. America, by his way of it, was in a delicate position, in spite of being rich enough to buy up the globe. She was trying to set her house in order, and it was a large-sized job, owing to the melting-pot not properly melting but leaving chunks of undigested matter. That was the real reason why she could not take a big hand in world-affairs — the League of Nations and so forth; she had too much to do at home, and wanted all her energies for it.
That was the reason, too, why she was so set on prohibition of all kinds — drink, drugs, and aliens. But her hand might be forced, if anything went wrong in the American continent itself, because of her Monroe Doctrine. She didn’t want any foreign complications at the moment. They would be very awkward for her, and possibly very dangerous, and she would resolutely keep out of them, unless they occurred, so to speak, opposite her front yard, in which case she would be bound to intervene. Therefore, if anyone wanted to do her the worst kind of turn, he would stir up trouble in some place like South America. Willis believed that Blenkiron had got on the track of something of the kind, and was trying to warn her.
That sounded reasonable enough, but what was not reasonable was Willis’s straight request that I should put on my boots and go and look for him. “We can’t do anything officially,” he repeated. “An American would be suspected where an Englishman would get through. Besides, I believe you are his closest friend.”
Of course I at once disabused him of that notion. I knew old Blenkiron too well to be nervous about him; he could no more be badly lost than Ulysses. I saw Willis’s point about American politics, but they were no concern of mine. I told him in so many words that my travelling days were over, that I was a landowner and a married man and the father of a son, with all sorts of prior duties. But he was so downcast at my refusal, and so earnest that something should be done, that I promised to put the matter before Sandy Arbuthnot. I proposed in any case to go to Laverlaw for a couple of days on my way to Machray.
II
Laverlaw is a very good imitation of the end of the world. You alight at a wayside station in a Border valley, and drive for eight miles up a tributary glen between high green hills; then, when the stream has grown small and you think that the glen must stop, it suddenly opens into an upland paradise — an amphitheatre of turf and woodland which is the park and in the heart of it an old stone castle. The keep was once a peel-tower, famous in a hundred ballads, and the house which had g
rown round dated mostly from the sixteen century. I had never been there before, for the old Lord Clanroyden had lived sick and solitary for years, and Sandy had only succeeded in the previous February. When arrived in the early gloaming, with that green cup swimming in amber light and the bell-heather on the high ground smouldering in the sunset, I had to rub my eyes to make sure that the place was not a dream. I thought it the right kind of home for Sandy, a fairy-tale fortress lying secret in the hills from which he could descend to colour the prose of the world.
Sandy met me at the gates and made me get out of the car and walk the rest of the way with him. In his shocking old tweeds, with his lithe figure, his girlish colouring, and his steady, glowing eyes, he fitted well into the fantastic landscape. You could see that he was glad have me there, and he made me welcome with all his old warmth, but in the half-mile walk I felt a subtle change him. His talk didn’t bubble over as it used to, and I had feeling that he was rather making conversation. I wonder if being a peer and a landowner and that sort of thing had sobered him, but I promptly dismissed the idea. I wasn’t prepared to believe that external circumstances could have any effect on one who had about as much worldliness as fakir with his begging-bowl.
All the same there was a change, and I was conscious it during the evening. Archie Roylance and his young wife were staying there — like me, for the first time. I am prepared to rank Janet Roylance second only to Mary as the prettiest and most delightful thing in the world, and I knew that she and Sandy were close friends. In the daytime she was always, so to speak, booted and spurred, and seemed have the alertness and vigour of an active boy; in the evening she used to become the daintiest lit porcelain lady; and those who saw Janet as a Dresden shepherdess in a drawing-room would scarcely believe that it was the same person who that morning had been scampering over the heather. She was in tremendous spirits, and Archie is a cheerful soul, but they found it heavy going with Sandy.
We dined in what had been the hall of the thirteenth-century keep-stone walls, a fireplace like a cave, and Jacobean rafters and panelling. Sandy wore the green coat of some Border club, and sat like a solemn sprite in the great chair at the head of his table, while Janet tried to keep the talk going from the other end. The ancient candelabra, which gave a dim religious light, and the long lines of mailed or periwigged Arbuthnots on the wall made the place too heavy a setting for one whom I had always known as a dweller in tents. I felt somehow as if the old Sandy were being shackled and stifled by this feudal magnificence.
The Roylances, having been married in the winter, had postponed their honeymoon, and Janet was full of plans for bringing it off that autumn. She rather fancied the East. Sandy was discouraging. The East, he said, was simply dusty bric-a-brac, for the spirit had gone out of it, and there were no mysteries left, only half-baked Occidentalism. “Go to Samarkand, and you will get the chatter of Bloomsbury intellectuals. I expect in Lhasa they are discussing Freud.”
I suggested South Africa, or a trip up through the Lakes to the Nile. Janet vetoed this, because of Archie’s stiff leg; she thought big-game hunting would be bad for him, and she considered with justice that if he were in the neighbourhood of wild beasts he would go after them.
Archie himself was inclined to South America. He said he had always had a romance about that part of the world, and he understood that it was the only place which still held some geographical secrets. Also it appeared that, though a poor linguist, he could talk a sort of Spanish, owing to having spent some time in the Madrid Embassy.
“I’ve never been there,” said Sandy, “and I never want to go. It’s too big and badly put together, like a child’s mud castle. There’s cannibal fish, and every kind of noxious insect, and it’s the happy home of poisons, and the people of the future will be concerned with the New World. It might be rather useful to me in politics if I went and had a look round.”
Sandy laughed. “Better go to the States. That’s the power-house where you press the button.”
This gave me the chance to talk about Blenkiron, and I told them what I had heard from Ellery Willis. Archie, who had only seen Blenkiron in the last year of the War, was rather excited; Sandy, who knew him intimately, was apathetic.
“He’ll turn up all right. Trust John S. You can’t mislay a battered warrior like that. You’d better tell Willis that he is doing a very poor service to Blenkiron by starting a hue-and-cry. The old man won’t like it a bit.”
“But, I assure you, Willis is very much in earnest. He wanted me to start out right away on a secret expedition, and to quiet him I promised to speak to you.”
“Well, you’ve spoken,” said Sandy, “and you can tell him I think it moonshine. Blenkiron will come back to his friends when his job is done, whatever it may be...Unless Archie likes to take the thing on?”
He seemed to want to drop the subject, but Janet broke in: “I always understood that Mr Blenkiron had no relations except the nephew who was killed in the War. But I met a girl last month who was a niece or a cousin of his. She told me she had been staying in the Borders and had been taken to see you at Laverlaw.”
Sandy looked up, and I could have sworn that a shade of anxiety passed over his face.
“Her name was Dasent,” Janet went on. “I can’t remember her Christian name.”
“Probably Irene — pronounced Ireen,” said Sandy. “I remember her. She came over with the Manorwaters. She seemed to have got a little mixed about Scotland, for she wanted to know why I wasn’t wearing a kilt, and I told her because I was neither a Highlander nor a Cockney stock-broker.” He spoke sharply, as if the visit had left an unpleasant memory.
“I should like to meet a niece of Blenkiron’s,” I said “Tell me more about her.”
In reply Sandy made a few comments on American young women which were not flattering. I could see what had happened — Sandy at a loose end and a little choked by his new life, and a brisk and ignorant lady who wanted to enthuse about it. They had met “head on,” as Americans say.
“You didn’t like her?” I asked.
“I didn’t think enough about her to dislike her. Ask Janet.”
“I only saw her for about an hour,” said that lady. “She came to stay with Junius and Agatha at Strathlarrig just when I was leaving. I think I rather liked her. She was from South Carolina, and had a nice, soft, slurring voice. So far as I remember she talked very little. She looked delicious, too-tallish and slim and rather dark, with deep eyes that said all sorts of wonderful things. You must be as blind as a bat, Sandy, if you didn’t see that.”
“I am. I don’t boast of it — indeed I’m rather ashamed of it — but I’m horribly unsusceptible. Once — long ago — when I was at Oxford, I was staying in the West Highlands, and in the evening we sat in a room which looked over the sea into the sunset, and a girl sang old songs. I don’t remember whether she was pretty or not — I don’t remember her name — but I remember that her singing made me want to fall in love...Since I grew up I’ve had no time.”
Janet was shocked. “But, Sandy dear, you must marry.”
He shook his head. “Never! I should make a rotten husband. Besides, Dick and Archie have carried off the only two women I love.”
After that he seemed to cheer up. I remember that he took to telling stories of poisons — I suppose the mention of South America set him off on that. He showed us a box with three tiny pellets in it, things which looked like discoloured pearls, and which he said were the most mysterious narcotics in the world, and one of the deadliest poisons. They reminded me of pills I once got from an old Portugee prospector, which I carried about with me for years but never touched, pills to be used if you were lost in the bush, for one was said to put you into a forty-hours sleep and two gave a painless death. Sandy would explain nothing further about them, and locked them away.
What with one thing and another we had rather a jolly evening. But next morning, when the Roylances had gone, I had the same impression of some subtle change. This new Sandy
was not the one I had known. We went for a long tramp on the hills, with sandwiches in our pockets, for neither of us seemed inclined to shoulder a gun. It was a crisp morning with a slight frost, and before midday it had become one of those blazing August days when there is not a breath of wind and the heather smells as hot as tamarisks.
We climbed the Lammer Law and did about twenty miles of a circuit along the hill-tops. It was excellent training for Machray, and I would have enjoyed myself had it not been for Sandy.
He talked a great deal and it was all in one strain, and — for a marvel — all about himself. The gist of it was that he was as one born out of due season, and mighty discontented with his lot.
“I can’t grow old decently,” he said. “Here am I — over forty — and I haven’t matured one bit since I left Oxford. I don’t want to do the things befitting my age and position. I suppose I ought to be ambitious — make speeches in the House of Lords — become an expert on some rotten subject — take the chair at public dinners — row my weight in the silly old boat — and end by governing some distant Dominion.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want to. I’d rather eat cold mutton in a cabman’s shelter, as Lamancha once observed about political banquets. Good Lord, Dick, I can’t begin to tell you how I loathe the little squirrel’s cage of the careerists. All that solemn twaddle about trifles! Oh, I daresay it’s got to be done by somebody, but not by me. If I touched politics I’d join the Labour Party, not because I think then less futile than the others, but because as yet they haven’t got such a larder of loaves and fishes.”