“What did you do?” he asked.
“You know already,” Manuel answered, unwilling to give information away. “It is on the card.”
The lieutenant read aloud the card attached to Manuel’s photograph.
“Train robbery. Not covered by the amnesty. To be sent to Mexico City for questioning. That has a bad sound, comrade. They want information from you, and they’ll get it without ceremony. Tell them what they want to know. That is the best advice I can give you.”
“Any reward?” Manuel asked.
“No. For the police there are no rewards.”
“So it should be!” declared Manuel with pretended enthusiasm. “A police service of true caballeros! And paid a respectable salary!”
“You know what government salaries are!” the lieutenant replied, shaking his head. “It is fortunate for them that duty counts with us more than money.”
“Oiga, amigo!” said Manuel earnestly. “I speak to an old comrade, not to the lieutenant of police. Let us suppose, between friends, that I have not landed at all. I am a tourist, going to Cuba. It is in error that I came to the police. I meant just to land and spend an hour in beautiful Vera Cruz and go back on board.”
“It would be a natural mistake,” agreed the lieutenant. “But the tourists who do such foolish things are rich.”
Manuel emptied his pockets on to the desk.
“Leave me fifty dollars to pay my passage to Havana and twenty more to buy food when I get there. I swear to you I have nothing else in the world. I came here to make my fortune.”
The officer rose from his desk and passed his hands over Manuel’s person to see if there were a belt of money hidden under his clothes. He pocketed nine hundred and fifty dollars and handed back to his prisoner a note of fifty, another of twenty, his small change and other unimportant possessions.
“Quickly then! And see that you get on the boat. I shall have you watched.”
“You are very kind. Adiós, hermano, y muchísimas gracias!”
“Adiós! And don’t return! You are sure to be caught.”
Manuel shook hands and turned to go. His hand was on the door when the lieutenant called him back.
“Is it true you fought with de la Huerta?”
“Word of honour.”
“We had fun in those days,” the lieutenant sighed. “We were men!”
“It is true that we were men.”
“Oiga, hermano! I do not wish to be hard. Take another fifty dollars!”
Manuel accepted it gratefully. He left the police station and went directly on board his ship.
BUSINESS MEN
III
ALBERT WHITEHEAD
At seven-thirty a.m. in the standardised bathroom of his villa at Croydon, Albert Whitehead was shaving himself with his right hand. He had never taken a conscious satisfaction in this, for him, remarkable performance; and indeed it was due to modesty rather than pride that he was able to use his right hand at all.
When young Albert went to France at the age of seventeen, his powerful voice, his fine physical condition and his football—the Chelsea managers had their eyes on him—had already earned him his corporal’s stripes. He might well expect a commission if he bore himself with moderate efficiency in action and lived to receive it. After his first three days in the line, Corporal Whitehead had no reason to be displeased with himself. His platoon commander allowed him responsibility without fuss. They repulsed a determined little raid which left him acting sergeant. His imagination was not troublesome. Albert looked back with pleasure at those three days. He had undergone a physical test of manhood and satisfied himself. That was comforting to remember after fifteen years of office life.
On the fourth day an ironical god put it into the head of a nervous young private to carry his rifle at the trail with his little finger inside the trigger guard; it gave him a vague sense of security to have even the most useless of his fingers near the trigger—a harmless vice if he could have been trusted to remember his safety catch. He tripped over a duckboard and shot Albert Whitehead through the wrist at a range of eight inches. Albert reported the incident and walked back to the casualty clearing station, leaving his platoon commander breathing fury and damnation upon the thoughtless idiot who had shot him. Albert’s wound had not yet reached the fiery height of pain; he did not think it very serious, but supposed he had got a Blighty. He was not as joyful at the thought of hospital in England as he should have been. He was by no means a funk-ridden hero, desirous of testing and retesting his own courage; but the sweets of responsibility had tasted good in his mouth, and his experience of battle, while tense, had been neither nerve-racking nor unduly messy. He was a fine young animal, in all simplicity accepting the world as he found it.
The clearing station was filling up, for two miles away a German divisional commander was straightening out a salient that had been driven at great cost into his sector. The salient did him no harm and was indeed a handicap to its unfortunate defenders, but he disliked its reproachful appearance on the map. Albert Whitehead had to wait his turn. When it came, the surgeon stripped off the bandages and noticed the severe powder burns around the bruised hole.
“Self-inflicted?”
“What?” asked Albert, not understanding.
“You shot yourself,” the man said positively.
“I? No, sir! I’ll tell you how it happened.”
“No time to listen!”—the surgeon told the truth, for he was tortured by want of sleep and the certain knowledge that his skill was slowly ebbing from weary fingers—“Go and lie down. You’ll be bloody lucky if your turn comes at all to-day.”
“But I didn’t shoot myself,” Albert insisted, still unbelieving in face of the unjust horror of this accusation.
The surgeon signed to his orderly to remove the patient and replace the temporary dressings.
“It’s no good, mate,” said the orderly not unkindly. “You should find out what ’appens to them as goes and blows their ’ands off before you ups and does it.”
“But, God damn you, it was an accident!” shouted Corporal Whitehead. “It ain’t my fault if a perishing bastard trips on a bloody duckboard, is it?”
“Well, if it’s as you say,” answered the orderly, “you should have brought down some word. Can’t blame us!”
“Can’t I send a message?”
“No one to send, and if they’re copping it as ’ard as it looks like, there won’t be no one to send back. And what’s the use anyway?” added the orderly as an afterthought. “They ain’t going to say you didn’t shoot yourself when you did, are they?”
He changed the swab and re-bandaged the shattered wrist.
“Don’t you worry,” he said. “We gets lots like you, and they don’t do nothing to ’em.”
Whitehead in his innocence had never dreamed that his word would be doubted. He had heard of course of hands and feet sacrificed to escape the terror of death, so much harder to endure than the certain arrival of death itself. But that he, Corporal Whitehead, should be accused of this hysteria was a nightmare, a nightmare depending for its torment on the deprivation of the subject of all power of movement or self-help. He felt like a sane man in a lunatic asylum—not that he had ever experienced such a fate, but it was familiar to him from his sensational excursions into paper-covered literature. The more strenuously he denied the accusation, the less likely he was to be believed. To a boy of his generous simplicity the whole situation was incredible. There were so many people who could have told them that he had not done this thing; his mother, his football captain, his platoon commander or any one of his fellows. A muddled procession of friends and enemies marched through his mind, all of them ready to swear to his honesty of purpose.
Confusing the real and the imaginary, he sat up and looked around the ruined farmhouse with a vague hope of finding some one person who would
be instantly convinced that Albert Whitehead was not the sort of blighter who shoots his hand off. The man next to him, catching his desperate eye, winked helpfully. It was all he could do. The bandages on the lower part of his face were shapeless and bulging as if they bound a jelly. The wink cheered Albert enormously. It was exactly the comment he most needed—a fearless assurance of the essential ribaldry and injustice of life. Five minutes later the winker took his short turn at the table. A scalpel mercifully slipped—the surgeon himself could not have said whether it was deliberate or accidental—and the soul went forth to search for some spiritual member, as communicative as the human eye, with which its unconquerable irony might be expressed.
Meanwhile Albert’s bullet hole was growing as painful as any of the more jagged wounds about him. The chaos inside those closed and swollen lips of flesh, the bits of wadding, the splinters of bone, the seeds of death, were defeating the constructive optimism of his cells. From shoulder to fingertip the arm protested against the neglect of its owner by drum taps and rolls and long-drawn trumpet calls of pain. For hours he endured it in a haze of anger and with determination not to add his cries to the muttering of the men awaiting their turn. Actually he was moaning with a regular thirty-second rhythm, but unconscious of it. The haggard surgeon looked over the rows of suffering men and again passed by Whitehead. His resentment of injustice turned to a fury against the heartless devil who would not help him.
“You bastard! Oh you bastard!” shrieked Albert. “Oh you bloody bastard!”
A chorus of voices told him to shut up and wait his turn.
“My turn? My turn? Do you chaps know how long I’ve been here? Six hours! Six bleeding hours!”
“Put him outside,” ordered the surgeon.
The orderlies laid Albert with the dead.
He was quiet there. Protests were futile. All that he could do to influence his fellows he had done. He was now a living island among the dead. In a flash of imagination it occurred to him that he was one with them, so completely was he cut off from communication with his fellows. Compelled to adjust himself to this terrifying isolation, he grew very calm within. It was not merely that he comforted himself with the immemorial thought of man—it cannot last forever. With a wisdom far beyond his seventeen years, he realised that for himself he alone existed and that he must do the best he could with that little world. He found in it unknown reserves of strength. He cared no more for honour or dishonour. He ceased to worry about friends and football and wages; nor did he promise himself a future as a refuge from the unendurable present. He was content to discover that there was a plane in which the human soul could exist whatever happened to it, that peace was attainable even if one escaped the notice of men, or perhaps because one escaped it. He had not found the ironical peace of that dead wink, the refuge of the passionate west, but he was near to the complete detachment of the east.
Some ten hours later, when the rush of casualties had eased, the orderlies remembered Corporal Whitehead and carried him to the table. He was by then delirious. There was a fresh surgeon in attendance, still alert enough to be imaginative. The neglected wound troubled him. He asked questions. He accepted the explanations that had, he heard, been offered by the chattering burning lump of humanity set down before him. He gave generously of a peace-time skill, sent to Albert’s unit for confirmation of his story and despatched him marked urgent along the route of healing. Of all this the fevered mind knew nothing until it awoke to consciousness a week later in a London hospital.
The long days of agony while tubes drained the suspended wrist were easy to bear, for he had discovered a technique of endurance. The continual operations were less bearable, for they seemed merely to waste his body. He doubted whether these kindly doctors and nurses, to whom the history of his case was known, were treating him as anything but an experimental rabbit. That their whole pride in their profession was involved in the efforts to undo the damage wrought by one weary surgeon, he could not, at this point, be expected to believe. Nevertheless, a graft of bone from his own shin and a permanent loan of the jumping sinews of a kangaroo were so far successful that in six months he was able to wiggle his fingers. The wrist was immovable and always would be so; but the restricted use of his right hand depended for the future, they said, on himself.
Albert Whitehead now knew himself to be different from the mass of his fellows in inward form, but he had a dread of any difference in outward appearance. A crippled hand would make him conspicuous, an exception among the crowd of honest, unthinking men in which he wanted to be sunk. He exercised the mutilated sinews unceasingly. Within a year he could eat, write, shave himself and perform the ordinary tasks of daily life. Fifteen years later he had forgotten the handicap, though not its cause, and unobservant friends knew him for months before ever noticing the stiff wrist and the fingers that could not curl to meet the palm.
Albert Whitehead finished his shave, took a cold bath and, while dressing, made himself tea and boiled a couple of eggs. In this he differed from the other two hundred fathers of families who were also about to catch the 8.35 to town. Either their servants, if they had any, or their wives got their breakfasts. Albert’s income did not yet run to a servant. With his wife he had made a pact, since the baby arrived, that he would get his own breakfast. Edith Whitehead, a simple woman with two very definite qualities—a sense of humour and a power of honest love—at first protested against this lone and early breakfast-making but was compelled to give way. She discovered that to start her day two hours after her husband—which was only fair, Albert pointed out, since she carried on four hours later at the other end—improved her health and good-fellowship. The family secret that Albert Whitehead broke his fast by his own efforts never passed the front door. They knew well that envious wives would have tattled of Edith’s laziness and husbands reproached Albert for his bad example.
He said good-bye to his wife and his small son, who had instantly occupied the treasured depression in the double bed when his father left it, and caught the 8.35 to town. For fifteen years he had been an inconspicuous and painstaking clerk in the export department of Hanson & Crane Ltd., Toy Manufacturers, whose advertisement he had answered on his discharge from hospital in 1918.
Hanson & Crane Ltd. was a wealthy little business which employed some hundred and fifty men in the Bermondsey factory and ten in the Bond Street shop. All the shares were held by the managing director, his solicitor, his next-door neighbour whose golf had never been quite good enough to beat him, an antique capitalist who was Chairman of the Board, and two of his cronies who seldom left Bournemouth and their bath chairs. There were neither Hansons nor Cranes in the firm, nor had there been since the middle of the eighteenth century. Hanson had been a maker of toys so ingenious that it had pleased His Majesty Louis XV to present his children at birth with a complete set of playthings manufactured by the English craftsman. He had died young and rich. Crane had only been connected with the firm for a couple of years. He was the landlord of the Anchor at Wapping, and had backed Hanson with some of the profits accrued from the thirst of homecoming American colonists.
Since the eighteenth century Hanson & Crane had known many changes of fortune but had preserved its title. Under the guidance of Mr Seafair, the managing director, it had remade a famous name in the early nineteen-hundreds by the excellence of its tin soldiers and its toy trains. The royal arms of three nations were suspended over the entrance to the Bond Street shop, and few indeed were those princes who had not hit their cousins and brothers and scattered with their feet the regiments of Hanson & Crane when neither nurse nor—on one famous occasion—Field Marshal von Kluck himself could decide the victor in their Lilliputian manoeuvres.
It was his success in foreign courts that had turned Seafair’s attention to the export trade, up to then entirely in German hands. After the war princely customers were to seek, but he still had an eastern market of sultans and maharajahs, and a western market
of rich and prolific estancieros, nitrate kings and mine owners. The United States trade had never been important owing to a feeling, which Hanson & Crane, with their magnificent tradition, still considered a trifle unpatriotic, that American toys were good enough for American children.
When England went off the gold standard, Seafair, though privately believing that the Last Judgment was at hand, discovered that for good-class toys he was at last able to meet the prices of the Nürnberg factories. He ordered the mass production of his favourite export lines and at once found that his export manager was a nincompoop—a discovery made at the same time by several thousand directors throughout the country who had long since given up export as hopeless and installed as managers pet nephews or clerks from the home sales known to be inefficient but believed to speak French. Seafair fired his export manager, nearly disrupting Hanson & Crane in the process since the man was the son-in-law of his golfing partner, and temporarily left Albert Whitehead in charge.
Albert took no particular pleasure in his new responsibility for his salary was not increased; nor pride, since he was unwilling to be separated from the mass, to be isolated again where they could point a finger at him. He began, however, to work ten hours a day instead of seven, and was puzzled by a conviction, which occasionally broke through his modesty, that he was doing the work with twice the thoroughness of his former boss. He had a peculiar gift for understanding the difficulties of agents five thousand miles away; out of the long letters and almost incomprehensible English he would extract the very commercial soul of the writer. Albert Whitehead spoke no foreign languages and had never been abroad apart from his single and disastrous experiment in the service of his country; but he had astonishing human sympathy. After six months Seafair, who knew most of the agents personally, was disconcerted by Whitehead’s accurate appreciation of credit risks. He seemed to have a flair for distinguishing the men who could pay and didn’t want to, who wanted to pay and couldn’t, and neither could nor wanted to. Seafair, while not yet admitting to himself that he meant to leave Whitehead in charge, stopped looking for a qualified export manager and raised his chief clerk’s salary by £25 a year.
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