by John Buchan
“First of all, I need hardly tell you that the world to-day is stuffed with megalomania. Megalomania in politics, megalomania in business, megalomania in art — there are a dozen kinds. You have the man who wants to be a dictator in his own country, you have the man who wants to corner a dozen great businesses and control the finance of half the world, you have the man who wants to break down the historic rules of art and be a law to himself. The motive is the same in every case — rootlessness, an unbalanced consciousness of ability, and an overweening pride They want to rule the world, but they do not see that by their methods they must first deprive the world of its soul and that what would be left for their dictatorship would be an inanimate corpse. You see, for all their splendid gift they have no humour.”
“What is Mr Castor’s nationality?” Janet asked irrelevantly.
“He has none. He was born in Austria, and I think he has a Spanish strain in him. Blenkiron has a notion that he has English blood, too, but he cannot prove it. The man is like Melchizedek, without apparent origin. He is what you call a weltkind, the true international.”
“He has no humour,” said Janet with emphasis.
“I agree. But he has most other things, and one is clear and searching mind. His strength, and also his weakness, is that he has no illusions. For one thing, he does not possess the illusion which ordinary people call a creed. He does not want to remake the world on some new fantastic pattern, like the Communists. He has none of Mussolini’s arbitrary patriotism. He wants to root out various things, but I doubt if he has a preference for what should take their place. I don’t profess to understand more than bits of him. He is an egotist, but in the colossal sense, for he has vanity. He considers that he has been called on to do certain things, and that he is the only man living who can. The world, as he sees it, is suffocating from the debris of democracy, and he wants to clear it away. He does not hate it, he despises it. He is the scientist and philosopher who would introduce the reign of reason and the rule of law, but first some decaying refuse called popular liberties must be destroyed. Therefore he is against Britain, but only half-heartedly, for he thinks that with us democracy is tempered by more rational instincts, and that in any case our number is up. But for America he has the unfaltering contempt which a trained athlete might have for a great, overgrown, noisy, slobbering, untrained hobbledehoy. With America it is war to the death.”
“I’ve known other people take that view,” Archie put in.
“With him it is not a view, it is a crusading passion. In Castor you have the normally passionless, scientific mind kindled to a white heat. The mischief is that he is human — not cruel, but inhuman. He will use the ordinary stuff of humanity to further his ends as ruthlessly as a furnace swallows coke. He will do any evil in order that what he considers good may come.”
“That is the definition of a devil,” said Janet.
“Not quite. Castor is just as near being a saint. If he had a different religion he might deserve to be beatified, for he is scrupulously loyal to what he believes to be the right. He’s not evil — he just happens to have missed the human touch. He knows nothing of friendship — nor, of course, of any kind of love. His world is a narrow cell with the big dynamo of his brain purring in it. He is cruel, simply because he cannot conceive the feelings of anybody but himself, and is not interested in them. He is a master over things, and over men so long as he can treat them as things. If he were Emperor of the world I have no doubt he would be a just ruler. As it is — well, I have been seeing too much of his methods these last days to be in love with him.”
He paused for a second to shake out the ashes from his pipe.
“Well, I’ve given you what Blenkiron would call the ‘general Castor proposition’. Now, how would a man, obsessed by this idea, set about realising it? First of all, he would want money, money on a gigantic scale. He has got it in the Gran Seco. Remember, he is a very great practical engineer and chemist — Blenkiron, who should know, says the greatest in the world — and he is a first-class man of business. Second, he would want a base, and a well-camouflaged base. He has got that in the republic of Olifa. You have seen for yourselves how completely Olifa is in his power. He has changed in a few years the whole character of her governing class. He has made her Government rich and supine, and got it under his thumb. The thing is a miracle of tact and diplomacy. The Olifa ministers do not share in his secrets, they know very little of his schemes, but he has organised them as he wanted and they do his bidding without a question. Up in the Gran Seco he has his laboratory and factory, and in the State of Olifa he has his outer barrage, the decorous bourgeois republic which keeps watch at his door.
“Thirdly, he had to have his staff and his army to opera for him throughout the globe. He has got that, too — slaves who mechanically obey him. You have seen some of them in your Olifa hotel and in the Gran Seco. You have lunched with them, and Janet says that they made her flesh creep.”
“The type Gran Seco,” said Archie.
“The type Gran Seco. Have you any notion who they are? They look like robots, with their pallid faces and soft voices and small, precise gestures. All their individuality seems to have been smoothed away, so that they confer to one pattern. Nevertheless, they were once men of brains and character. Their brains they have kept, but the characters have been stereotyped, and they have surrendered their wills into the hand of their master. They have been most carefully selected from every nation. One or two you have known before, Archie.”
“I swear I haven’t.”
“But you have. The Gran Seco is the port for missing ships. Men who have foundered somehow in life — respectable careerists who suddenly crash on some private vice — fellows who show the white feather — soldiers without regiments, financiers without credit — they are all there. Do you remember Lariarty, Archie? He was about your time at Eton. There was a bad scandal about him in 1915.”
“Good God! Of course I do. I heard he was dead.”
“He sat opposite you a few weeks ago when you lunched with the Administration. You couldn’t recognise him. Everything that once was Lariarty has gone out of him, except his brain. You remember he was a clever fellow. And Romanes — the man who was in the 23rd — people said he was with the Touaregs in the Sahara. He’s one of them, but I believe at the moment he is in Europe. And Freddy Larbert, who was once a rising man in the Diplomatic Service. He did not hang himself at Bucharest, as they said he did, for to-day he is in the Gran Seco. I could mention others, and they come from every country — Russian aristocrats who were beggared and Russian revolutionists who were too clever, broken soldiers and blown-on politicians and speculators who missed their market. The Gran Seco is the true Foreign Legion, and it needs no discipline. Castor asks only for two things, brains and submission to his will, and once a man enters his service he can never leave it.”
“Why?” Archie asked.
“Because he does not want to. Because the Gran Seco is his only home and away from it he is lost. I told you that Castor was like the Old Man of the Mountain in the chronicle I showed you at Laverlaw. There is nothing new under the sun. Castor rules his initiates as the old ruffian in the Lebanon ruled his Assassins. You remember he gave them hashish, so that their one desire was to get their job in the outer world finished and return to the Lebanon to dream. Castor has the same secret. As I have told you, he is a mighty chemist, and this continent is the home of drugs. One in particular is called astura and is found in what they call the Pais de Venenos, the Poison Country in the eastern mountains. The secret of it was lost for ages till he revived it, and, except as a legend in the Marzaniga family, it was unknown in Olifa. This astura is deadly poison, but it can used in two ways as a drug. In one preparation it takes the heart out of a man, but gives him increased physical strength, till suddenly he cracks and becomes doddering. That preparation Castor uses to turn out docile labourers for the mines. He gets marvellous results in output, and the reports say that it is due to his scien
tific management and his study of industrial fatigue, but we know better. The other preparation does not apparently weaken the bodily strength, though it alters the colour of the skin and the look in the eyes. But it is a most potent mental stimulant, and its addicts tend to live for the next dose. It kills in the end, but only after a considerable period, and during that period it gives increased intellectual vitality and an almost insane power of absorption, varied by languors like the opium-eater’s. Those who once take to it can never free themselves, and they are the slaves of him who can supply it. Willing slaves, competent slaves, even happy slaves, but only the shadows of what once were men. Lariarty and Romanes and Larbert and others are among the initiates. They go about the world on Gran Seco business and they do Castor’s will as little wheels obey a master-wheel. They have a name for their brotherhood. They call themselves the new Conquistadors — conquerors, you see, over all the old standards and decencies of human nature.”
Archie inquired what precisely they did in their journeys about the world. He had rumpled his hair, and his eyes looked as if he were painfully adjusting a manifold of experience in the light of a new idea.
“First of all, they make money. They are the most efficient bagmen alive. For the rest, they break down things and loosen screws, and they have unlimited funds at their disposal, for Castor spends nearly as fast as he earns...No, no. Not Bolshevism. The donkeys in Moscow have in a sense played Castor’s game, but they were far too crude for him, and to-day I fancy he finds them rather a nuisance. By their folly they are creating a reaction in favour of that democracy which he hates...Remember, I don’t know him. I’ve seen him, but have never spoken to him. I can only speak at second-hand of his methods, but I’ll give you Blenkiron’s summary. Blenkiron says that half a century ago Abraham Lincoln fought a great war to prevent democracy making a fool of itself. He says that Castor’s object is just the opposite — he wants to encourage democracy to make a fool of itself, to inflate the bladder till it bursts...His instruments? The press, for one thing. He has a mighty grip on that. The politicians, too, and every kind of fool organisation for boost and uplift. You’d be amazed to learn how many gushing societies, that look like spontaneous ebullitions of popular folly, have his patient direction behind them. He is the greatest agent provocateur in history.”
“But the thing is impossible,” Archie exclaimed. “He can’t bring it to a head, and I take it that he knows he is not immortal and wants some sort of result in his lifetime.”
Sandy nodded. “He has a general ultimate purpose, but has also a very clear, practical, immediate purpose. He wants to make trouble for America — before she can set her house in order. The United States, Blenkiron says, have reached the biggest crisis in their history. They have got wealth and power, but they have lost the close national integration they had when they were poorer. Their best men are labouring like galley-slaves to discipline their country. They have to give it an adequate law, and a proper public service, and modernise its antediluvian constitution. Castor wants to catch them at the moment of transition, when they haven’t found their balance. He believes that bad foreign trouble, which they couldn’t afford to neglect, would split the unwieldy fabric. Democracy, of which America is the incoherent champion, would become a laughing-stock, and he and his kind would have the reordering of the fragments.”
“I think,” said Janet, “that he has taken on too big a job. Does he imagine that any alliance of Latin republics would have any effect on America? I have heard you say yourself hat she couldn’t be conquered.”
“True.” The speaker’s eyes were on the other girl who was sitting in the shadow outside the circle of firelight.
“No Power or alliance of Powers could conquer America. But assume that she is compelled to quarrel with a group of Olifas, and that with her genius for misrepresenting herself she appears to have a bad cause. Has she many friends on the globe except Britain? Most countries will flatter her and kowtow to her and borrow money of her, but hate her like hell. Trust them not to help matters by interpreting her case sympathetically. Inside her borders she has half a dozen nations instead of one, and that is where Castor comes in. A situation like that, when she was free to act and yet didn’t want to and didn’t know how to, might, if properly manipulated, split her from top to bottom. Look what happened in the Civil War, and she was an integrated nation then compared to what she is now. Twenty years ago the danger would not have been there; ten years hence, if all goes well, it may be past; but today, Blenkiron says, there is precisely as big a risk of a blow-up as there was in Europe in June 1914. The who count in America know it, even without Blenkiron telling them.”
“Mr Blenkiron discovered Castor?” Janet asked.
“Yes. He came on the track of some of Castor’s agents and in his slow, patient way worked backwards to the source. Then he succeeded in laying himself alongside of Castor. How he managed it, I can’t tell. You see, he’s a big engineering swell, and I daresay he made himself useful over the actual copper business. Not as John Scantlebury Blenkiron, of course — as Senor Rosas, the agreeable denationalised Mexican, who has lived long enough in States to have a healthy hatred for them. He must have had a pretty delicate time, and I don’t suppose he was free from anxiety till he managed to arrange for his opportune decease. He was never in Castor’s full confidence, for he didn’t belong to the Conquistadors and never touched astura — gave out that he had to be careful in his habits because of his duodenum. His graft was that he understood the mining business like nobody else except Castor. But he had to be very cautious and had to stick like a limpet to his rock. Till he got in touch with Luis, he was next door to a prisoner.”
Janet asked how that had been contrived, and Luis replied, “Through Wilbur. I am afraid you underrated that drawling New England Consul! Wilbur is a great man. He was a friend of mine, and enlisted me, and then we enlisted others. After a time — after a long time — we got in touch with Lord Clanroyden.”
Archie drew a deep breath. “I think I see the layout,” he said. “That is to say, I see what Castor is driving at. But I can’t for the life of me see what we can do to stop him...Unless we got America to chip in first.”
“That was Blenkiron’s original plan,” said Sandy. “But it was too difficult — might have precipitated what we wanted to avoid. So we decided to do the job ourselves.”
Archie stared at the speaker, and then whistled long and low. “You haven’t lost your nerve, old man,” he said at last. “I’m on for anything you propose — likewise Janet — but what precisely are the odds? About a million to one?”
Sandy laughed and hoisted himself out of the chair.
“Not quite so bad! Stiffish, I agree, but not farcical. You see, we hold certain cards.”
“I should like to know about them,” said Archie. “You seem to me to have taken on one of the toughest propositions in history. A species of Napoleon — unlimited cash in — a big, docile, and highly competent staff — a graft everywhere — and at his back the republic of Olifa with the latest thing in armies. I assure you, it won’t do to underrate the Olifa field force. And to set against all that you’ve Blenkiron, more or less a prisoner — yourself — Miss Dasent and her friends — with Janet and me as camp-followers. It’s a sporting proposition.”
“Nevertheless, we hold certain cards. There’s a fair amount of explosive stuff in the Gran Seco and we have been organising it.”
“The Indians?”
“The Indians. Castor has bled them white with his accursed forced labour, but there’s still a reserve of manhood to be used — very desperate and vindictive manhood. Also, there is an element among the white employees. You have the Conquistadors at the top and the Indians at the bottom, and between them the foremen and the engineers. They are the weak point of Castor’s scheme, for they are not under his spell and know nothing of astura. He had to have skilled men and men whose interest lay in asking no questions, but he could never count upon their loyalty. He recruited
every kind of scallywag and paid them lavishly, for he wanted people whose interest lay in sticking to the Gran Seco. But he has always had his troubles with them, and he and his Conquistadors in self-protection had to have their bodyguard. What sort of bodyguard? Oh, the usual bad-man type, the killer, the gunman...You must have noticed them in the Gran Seco, quiet, steady-eyed, frozen-faced fellows — the Town Police is full of them, and so was the Mines Police till Blenkiron began to weed them out.
“Well, Blenkiron has had a lot to do for the past year with recruiting both the foremen and engineers and the Mines Police, and we have managed to get them pretty well staffed with our own men. Hard cases, most of them, but a different kind of hard case. Blackguards often, but a more wholesome brand of blackguard. The Gran Seco at this moment is a sort of chess-board of black and white, and we know pretty exactly which are the white squares. If a row begins, we calculate that we have rather the balance of strength on that cheerful plateau. But I hope there will be no row. I don’t like that crude way of doing things.”
Archie passed a hand over his forehead.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said plaintively. “There must be a row, a most unholy row. You want to raise the Indians, assisted by your friends in the Police and in the Mines, against the Administration. The Gobernador, if he is what you say he is, will resist like a tiger, and he has his gunmen behind him, and Olifa at the back of all. You will have to fight Castor...”
Sandy smiled. “Oh, no. We will not fight Castor. We mean to fight for him. Castor will be our leader. The Indians in the back-country are wearing medals with his face on them, and look to him as their deliverer. That’s the advantage of being a mystery man. No one knows him, except the Conquistadors, who don’t count. He is going to be the Bolivar of the Gran Seco, the pioneer of liberty.”
“Good God! Do you mean to say you are working in with him?”