The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  “But you know far more about it than I do,” he added apologetically.

  “No. No more than you. Russia is dead for us, for all of us Europeans.” Tina opened her arms like a sorrowful mother calling her children from incommunicable loneliness. “We just know what they are doing, and nothing about what they are thinking. All those millions of peasants—they might be on the moon and we on the earth. And they don’t know what we are thinking either.”

  “Yes,” Toby agreed. “They don’t realise that Europe isn’t living in 1848. So far as I can see, the Russian is like the North American, priding himself that only in his country is there equality of opportunity. But there’s hardly a country left in Europe that doesn’t have complete equality of opportunity. In politics and business there’s nothing to stop the careerist, whatever class he comes from, rising to the top. The trouble is—what the devil is he to do with the opportunity? The Russian seems to think a man should be proud if he becomes as efficient as he normally would be in the capitalist world. The American thinks he should be proud if he has two cars, a radio and a piece of real estate. Both those ideals are utterly un-European. We want more than that. We have always wanted more. We want to go off on crusades. Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, even War—they are signs of the restless spiritual strength of Europe. We’ve set free vast resources of men through general education and cut them loose from their traditions. What are we going to give them? They don’t want any existing religion. The best of them don’t want money. They’re turning in despair to the worship of the nation. It’s the one thing bigger than themselves that they can understand. But is there no other standard we can give them?”

  “You are puzzling,” said Vassilieff, “over the obvious. The solution is to create a new ruling class.”

  “A leisured class?”

  “In a sense. You won’t approve of it. Nobody does. How can we when we have to sweat round stationers’ shops begging them to buy our Teddy bears? We think of a ruling class as the support of nightclubs and race courses. Well, it need not be, but it was. I should know, by God! I’ve soaked in vodka and women for a week and spent two years’ income doing it.”

  Tina smiled at her husband’s vehemence. They were so far away, those pre-war days. It was as if he had confessed to dissoluteness in a previous and remembered incarnation of his soul.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “To have done it once—that makes things easier now.”

  “Yes. I enjoyed it. Glad to have done it! But it’s not an advertisement for a ruling class. Youth isn’t fit to have money and leisure. If a boy uses them well, there’s something wrong with him. A man shouldn’t be in command of an estate till he’s over forty.”

  “What’s an estate got to do with it?” Toby asked. “If you want to create a new ruling class, you must draw it from slums and ghettos and city clerks as well as from capitalists. Wherever nobility is, it should be sought out and used.”

  “Very well. But you must have some economic basis for the ruling class. They have to be supported somehow. We haven’t found a better system than to give them land. Land means responsibility—but the man who inherits millions in stocks and bonds has no responsibilities. If he’s decent he makes some for himself. Hospitals. Research scholarships. Libraries. But it’s not satisfying. All he has to do is to write to his stockbroker and draw a cheque. He’s merely redistributing money, not caring for men. He’s a nuisance. He upsets the economic laws with miracles. He’s as unjust as old Jehovah showing mercy unto thousands that loved him. The communists are quite right when they damn all paternal industry and such-like charities. A factory run badly by a trades-union council is a happier spot than one run efficiently by a socialist millionaire.”

  “I disagree with you,” interrupted Toby.

  “I don’t give a damn if you do,” Vassilieff barked. “Let me go on. A communal factory is human. It’s corrupt. It’s inefficient. It’s ignorant. But it belongs to the men. It knows them. It obeys logic. The millionaire, whether he gives his surplus to hospitals or spends it on his workers, is capricious as Jehovah, I tell you! He’s above his people, not among them, however hard he tries. That’s why I say that land-ownership is the right way to support a ruling class. They are compelled to have humanity. A good feudal landlord is happy, truly happy. So are his tenants. He’s an example to his people and their protector. Their protector, understand me! Not their superior.”

  “But, my Gregory,” said Tina, “they were not like that.”

  “Frequently they were not—because they were absentee landlords. If the noble doesn’t live on his land, then there’s no difference between him and the millionaire of industry. In fact, he’s worse. You can screw profits out of a factory without much damage. But if you try to get a rouble more out of peasants and farmers than the land will give, it costs human agony. I’m talking of the noble who did live on his land. Interested in his tenants as a Kolhoz, and more efficient! We need them—a ruling class supported by their estates and sticking to them. They were never nationalists. Peaceful patriarchs. A strong sense of duty. Often scholars. The history of nineteenth-century Europe proves their worth.”

  “It wasn’t without wars,” said Toby.

  “No. But who made them? The new nationalists. The new democracies. Napoleon. Italy. The Balkans. Until Bismarck the conservative forces all over Europe were for peace. The bourgeoisie with its damned catchwords of progress, independence, democracy were for war. Why the devil should a people have the right to govern themselves just because they speak a dialect that’s unintelligible to other Europeans? Recreate the aristocrat. That’s what must be done if you want to give the people standards. I idealise him, I admit. But I mean the sort of man who married and owned land anywhere between Archangel and Sicily. He owed service to his emperor, to Christendom and above all to his tenants. He had no conception of nationality. It was a vulgarity. His influence for peace was enormous.”

  “I agree with you that we need something to take the place of the European aristocracy that was destroyed by the war and the revolutions,” said Toby. “But it can’t be supported by the land. For good or ill the landed aristocracy has gone. And I don’t admit that they had the virtues you claim for them, but assuming they did—some of them—can’t we recover the virtues on another basis?”

  “Give them each a toy factory!” snorted Vassilieff ironically. “But how are they to act? The old nobility made its influence felt through the tenants and through the market town. But you’re not felt. I’m not felt. We may be leaders but we have no accepted position. It’s harder still for the men without our education. You’re right—there are nobles in the slums and ghettos. But what are we to do about it? How is a Jew to get his nobility recognised in Rumania? Or an east-end docker with his horrible accent, worse than mine, to make his character felt in Mayfair? Give them land and it can be done. But what else? You can’t give them banks and factories. They’d have no leisure to rule. You can’t give them the interest on bonds, or they become as isolated in soul as millionaires. So we’re done, Manning. We must sell toys”—he looked at his watch—“and it’s three o’clock already.”

  “To-morrow,” Tina pleaded. “We are amusing ourselves so much.”

  She let them go unwillingly. Her husband’s devotion to business was a continual marvel to her. She knew that he despised it, but that it kept up his pride; a contradiction which she accepted without wholly understanding.

  “You will see us again?” she asked Toby. “When are you leaving?”

  “The day after to-morrow. On to Belgrade.”

  “So soon! Will you dine with us to-morrow? It is my maid’s birthday, and we have a party.”

  “I should love it. Thank you so much.”

  Toby kissed the slender hand that she held out to him and looked up to meet Tina’s humorous eyes.

  “You have a Russian soul,” she said.

  “Have I?�
� laughed Toby.

  “You float—how shall I put it, Gregory? You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t. You say that everyone you like has a Russian soul,” answered her husband, smiling. “I should have thought he was very English.”

  “But not like Captain Eliot.”

  “No. Not like Eliot.”

  “I only know what Captain Eliot won’t do,” she explained. “But I could never know what you wouldn’t do.”

  “A criminal anarchist!” chuckled Vassilieff. “The Russian soul!”

  “No! Don’t make fun of me, Gregory!” She turned to Toby. “You do understand, don’t you?”

  “Perfectly,” said Toby.

  Toby Manning left Bucharest two days later, and finished his tour by way of Jugoslavia, Italy, and Spain. He was home in January 1934. Seafair was cordial but disappointed. His representative could only report, first by letters and now verbally, that Europe was making its own toys and keeping out English and German alike by protective tariffs.

  There was at any rate a trickle of new trade to justify optimism, and it was coming in from the fringe of Europe where industry was not yet highly developed. Toby suggested a further tour of the fringe, especially the Near East, and Seafair agreed. He left England again with a slight feeling of dishonesty and congratulating himself on nothing except that he had brought Whitehead into contact with Bendrihem and Ottery, and that both of them had liked him.

  His second tour led him from Egypt around the eastern end of the Mediterranean to Turkey and Greece. He sold the cheapest and nastiest toys that Hanson & Crane manufactured, but he sold a lot of them. Mohammedans, Syrian Christians and Jews were his daily companions. He enjoyed their society, while frankly admitting to himself that he did not understand them. Their exquisite manners formed a bridge upon which any two human beings could meet and talk with perfect liberty for either to cross to the other’s side or to return to his own.

  From Greece he sailed up the Adriatic and visited Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Belgium. In six months the spirit of the man in the European street had profoundly changed. He talked hopefully of the colossal armaments of Russia, of the efficiency of the Russian air force. Since he had known the courage and suffering of Central Europe at first hand, Toby had great sympathy for the Germans. That their racial policy was mad he admitted; but it seemed to him that no diplomats, even Prussians, could have forced the rest of Europe to consider their own country as the archenemy without definite ill will on the part of the rest. The purge of July 1934 convinced him that the man in the street was right, that a force of sheer brutality had arisen against which any ally was better than none.

  He returned to England to find Whitehead at long last confirmed in his position as export manager, and Seafair pleased with himself and the pair of them. Vassilieff was doing well with model aeroplanes and constructional toys, and bombarding Whitehead with monosyllabic letters demanding the impossible. Half a dozen of the other agents appointed on Toby’s first tour had woken up; the Jewish boycott had brought little trade to Hanson & Crane, but the German exchange difficulties were bringing a great deal. Since Germany would not import, not even her friendliest neighbours could buy.

  It was this economic law that decided Seafair to send his overseas representative to South America. German toys for the mass—English toys for the very rich had been the law of Latin America for the last thirty years, and ordinarily he would have thought it bad business to send his Mr Manning on so expensive a journey. But now there were few marks and plenty of pounds across the South Atlantic. If they wanted toys—and everyone knew the immoral Latins were always producing children—they would have to buy them from their best customer. Our Mr Manning would kindly make arrangements to sail at the end of September and our Mr Whitehead would supply him with all the details of past agents and past trade.

  THE PILGRIMAGE OF TOBY MANNING

  VI

  THE QUEST

  The Muelle de Flores was nearly empty, for it was a restaurant that earned its profits at lunch, not dinner—or at any rate not dinner in the cool spring nights of November. Toby chose a table sheltered from the wind by a glass veranda, with a clear view across the bay of Valparaiso to the cloudy Andes. It pleased him to think that a mountainous pink and white mass, streaked with black, might be Aconcagua. He was moderately sure it was not, for in the failing light the mass upon the horizon looked too immoderately high to be attached to earth. But so did all the Andean giants. Since he was fascinated by high peaks and the imagined sight of one was as good as a cocktail, he decided that it was indeed Aconcagua and not a cloud.

  It was a propitious day, a day worthy of some quiet personal celebration. Brazil was done. The Argentine was done. Chile was done. And what a fortnight his Chilean visit had been! The exquisite wines; the cheap currency; the women of Santiago, more lovely even than their nearest competitors, the women of New York and Bucharest. Santiago had produced a flood of orders. What business there was in Valparaiso he had done in two fast-moving days. He was ready to make plans for the romantic journey up the Pacific Coast.

  This little restaurant jutting out into the bay looked a good spot in which to rejoice that one was alive. The spicy and faint scents of the kitchen were a fine aperitif, and the tables and boxes of flowers had evidently been arranged by a master hand. He suspected the waiter rather than the proprietor. The man was making out a bill at the other end of the terrace. He had the manner—except that he was rather too young—of one of those devoted old servitors of the public, solidly fixed as the coffee urn, with regular customers and knowing their tastes in cookery, politics and newspapers. He wore a black suit and a black bow tie at the collar of his white silk shirt. His clothes, except for the white apron, might equally well have been worn by any Spaniard in mourning for a close relative. The flaring nostrils, the thin lips, the ironical eyes, the burnt orange of the prominent cheekbones guaranteed a past less conventional than the present. Toby, examining him closely, caught the waiter’s eye and smiled. He came over to greet the new client. On a genial impulse Toby rose to greet him as if he had been the maître d’hôtel of a fashionable restaurant.

  “Manuel Vargas, para servirle,” said the waiter, acknowledging the courtesy by introducing himself in the Spanish manner.

  “Toby Manning, a su disposición.”

  Manuel replied in English. They spoke each other’s language for a few embarrassed seconds. The Spaniard, having the more persistent politeness, won.

  “What would you like?” he asked, offering the menu.

  “A good sole and a bottle of white.”

  “Not hungry?”

  “Yes, reasonably. But I’m a bit off meat.”

  “That’s natural,” said Manuel, smiling. “Your English meat is so good that it spoils you for meat abroad.”

  “Our grills are passable, I admit. But the splendid English roasts are a myth. Have you, frankly, ever eaten a good roast in any restaurant anywhere?”

  “There was a gigot in Amsterdam once,” said Manuel thoughtfully, “but I was very young and perhaps I didn’t know.”

  “I’ve been spoiled by Argentine meat, not English,” Toby went on. “I’ve just come from Argentina. Is there a mixed grill in the world as perfect for example as the España’s in Buenos Aires? And there are a dozen restaurants just as good.”

  “You’re right,” Manuel replied. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you a mixed grill that would compete. But if you don’t mind waiting, I’ll give you an Argentine churrasco and guarantee it crisp and juicy.”

  “You’re very bold,” said Toby sceptically.

  “Don’t pay for it if you don’t like it.”

  “I shall like it. What do we put in front of it?”

  “I suppose,” said Manuel, “that it is too much to hope that you are fond of little eels in casserole—angulas bilbaínas? ”

  “It isn’t to
o much to hope, then, that the Muelle de Flores knows how to do them? I warn you I have lived in Bilbao.”

  “So have I,” replied Manuel shortly. “And before the angulas I suggest a Mexican enchilada just to open the appetite. A very small one, naturally—the cheese tasty, and the peppers too hot for an Englishman, right for a Spaniard and not hot enough for a Mexican.”

  “How would a very dry sherry—a manzanilla, if you have one—go with it?”

  “I’ve never tried. I am perhaps too conventional. But I think you are right and they will marry themselves very nicely. The bars of Madrid wouldn’t hesitate to serve you enchiladas with sherry if they knew what they were.”

  “Good! And a half of Chilean Rhine with the angulas. And with the churrasco? ”

  “I have a Mendoza red—seven years in bottle. I have put a French label on it—an apparent dishonesty, I admit. But our customers would never pay the price that wine deserves if I did not. But please forget the label. I promise you the wine is good.”

  Toby Manning leant back in his chair, pleasantly anticipating the imperial offerings of Spain and her colonies. Meanwhile he watched the pelicans diving for fish in Valparaiso Harbour and dreamily wished that he knew more of natural history. The pelicans had such odd shapes for diving birds. They hit the water like shells, sending up columns of spray twelve feet high. The pelican, he thought, must have spent its first million years waddling about the foreshore and hunting for worms. But that efficient bill was too good for worms; so perfect an instrument demanded a fuller employment. The pelican had found it; but that its breast might be protected from those terrific and probably painful belly flops into the water, some further modification of its structure was still necessary.

  His thoughts played over Manuel Vargas. The waiter was also an animal in the course of development. His aristocratic ease, his assumption that the customer was every bit as good as himself, suggested that he too had given up paddling for diving. His menial employment made it probable that he was not yet adjusted to it. Toby sympathised with Manuel Vargas, waiter. He remembered a period when he too would have been glad of a waiter’s job or any other. God!—the purposeless, unending stream of one’s life that meandered from birth up to the present. Or was it no stream at all, but a lake, all parts of it coexistent in time? There was certainly no point at which one could say: this is the present; but only points at which memory selected more or less events. Toby amused himself by reckoning how far back the present went before it could honestly, if at all, be called the past.