Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “But it’s impossible that you should have come.”

  “Just outside there is one. The fisherman saw her yesterday.”

  “She rose and spoke to one of the fishing-boats.”

  “But it is impossible that you should have come here.”

  “Yet I am here,” answered Hillyard, the very mad multi-millionaire. “What will you, my friends? Shall I tell you a secret? Yes, but tell no one else! The Germans would be most enraged if they found out that we knew it. There aren’t any submarines.”

  A little jest spoken in a voice of good-humour, with a friendly smile, goes a long way anywhere, but further in Spain than anywhere else in the world. The small crowd laughed with Hillyard, and made way for him.

  A man offered to him with a flourish and a bow a card advertising a garage at which motor-cars could be hired for expeditions in the island. Hillyard accepted it and put it into his pocket. He paid a visit to his consul, and thereafter sat in a café for an hour. Then he strolled through the narrow streets, admired this and that massive archway, with its glimpse of a great stone staircase within, and mounted the hill. Almost at the top, he turned sharply into a doorway and ran up the stairs to the second floor. He knocked upon the door, and a maid-servant answered.

  “Señor José Medina lives here?”

  “Yes, señor.”

  “He is at home?”

  “No, señor. He is in the country at his finca.”

  Hillyard thanked the girl, and went whistling down the stairs. Standing in the archway, he looked up and down the street with something of the air of a man engaged upon a secret end. One or two people were moving in the street; one or two were idling on the pavement. Hillyard smiled and walked down the hill again. He took the advertisement card from his pocket and, noting the address, walked into the garage.

  “It will please me to see something of the island,” he said. “I am not in Mallorca for long. I should like a car after lunch.” He gave the name of a café between the cathedral and the quay. “At half-past two? Thank you. And by which road shall I go for all that is most of Mallorca?”

  This was Spain. A small group of men had already invaded the garage and gathered about Hillyard and the proprietor. They proceeded at once to take a hand in the conversation and offer their advice. They suggested the expedition to Miramar, to Alcudia, to Manacor, discussing the time each journey would take, the money to be saved by the shorter course, the dust, and even the gradients of the road. They had no interest in the business in the garage, and they were not at all concerned in the success of Hillyard’s excursion. That a stranger should carry away with him pleasant recollections of the beauties of Mallorca, was a matter of supreme indifference to them all. But they were engaged in the favourite pursuit of the Spaniards of the towns. They were getting through a certain small portion of the day, without doing any work, and without spending any money. The majority favoured the road past Valdemosa, over the Pass of Soller to Miramar and its rocky coast on the north-east side of the island, as indeed Hillyard knew the majority must. For there is no road like it for beauty in the Balearics, and few in all Spain.

  “I will go that way, then,” said Hillyard, and he strolled off to his luncheon.

  He drove afterwards over the plain, between groves of olive and almond trees with gnarled stems and branches white with dust, mounted by the twisting road, terraces upon his left and pine-clothed mountainside upon his right, past Valdemosa to the Pass. The great sweep of rock-bound coast and glittering sea burst upon his view, and the boom of water surging into innumerable caves was like thunder to his ears. At a little gate upon the road the car was stopped at a word from Hillyard.

  “I am going in here,” he said. “I may be a little while.”

  The chauffeur looked at Hillyard with surprise. Hillyard had never been to the house before, but he could not mistake it from the description which he had been given. He passed through an orchard to the door of an outrageous villa, built in the style of a Swiss chalet and glaring with yellow paint. A man in his shirt-sleeves came to the door.

  “Señor José Medina?” Hillyard inquired.

  He held out his card and was ushered into the room of ceremony which went very well with the exterior of the yellow chalet. A waxed floor, heavy white lace curtains at the windows, a table of walnut-wood, chairs without comfort, but with gold legs, all was new and never to be used and hideous. Hillyard looked around him with a nod of comprehension. This is what its proprietor would wish for. With a hundred old houses to select from for a model — no! This is the way his fancies would run. The one beauty of the place, its position, was Nature’s. Hillyard went to the window, which was on the side of the house opposite to the door. He looked down a steep terraced garden of orange trees and bright flowers to the foam sparkling on the rocks a thousand feet below.

  “You wished to see me, señor,” and Hillyard turned with curiosity.

  Twelve years had passed since he had seen José Medina, but he had changed less than Hillyard expected. Martin remembered him as small and slight, with a sharp mobile face and a remarkable activity which was the very badge of the man; and these characteristics he retained. He was still like quick-silver. But he was fast losing his hair, and he wore pince-nez. The dress of the peasant and the cautious manner of the peasant, both were gone. In his grey lounge suit he had the look of a quick-witted clerk.

  “You wished to see me, señor,” he repeated, and he laid the card upon the table.

  “For a moment. I shall hope not to detain you long.”

  “My time and my house are yours.”

  José Medina had clearly become a caballero since those early days of adventure. Hillyard noted the point for his own guidance, thanking his stars meanwhile that the gift of the house was a meaningless politeness.

  “I arrived at Palma this morning, in a yacht,” said Hillyard.

  José Medina was prepared for the information. He bowed. There had been neither smile nor, indeed, any expression whatever upon his face since he had entered the room.

  “I have heard of the yacht,” he said. “It is a fine ship.”

  “Yes.”

  José Medina looked at Hillyard.

  “It flies the English flag.”

  Hillyard bowed.

  “As do your feluccas, señor, I believe.”

  A mere twitch of the lips showed that Medina appreciated the point.

  “But I,” continued Hillyard, “am an Englishman, while you, señor — —”

  José Medina was not, if he could help it, to be forced to cry “a hit” again.

  “Whereas I, señor, am a neutral,” he answered. The twitch of the lips became a smile. He invited Hillyard to a chair, he drew up another himself, and the two men sat down over against one another in the middle of that bare and formal room.

  That one word neutral, so delicately emphasised, warned Hillyard that José Medina was quite alive to the reason of his visit. He could, of course, have blurted it out at once. He could have said in so many words, “Your tobacco factories are on French soil, and your two hundred feluccas are nominally owned in Gibraltar. Between French and English we shall close you down unless you help.” But he knew very well that he would have got no more than fair words if he had. It is not thus that delicate questions are approached in Spain. Even the blackmailer does not dream of bluntly demanding money, or exposing his knowledge that he will get it. He pleads decently the poverty of his family and the long illness of his mother-in-law; and with the same decency the blackmailed yields to compassion and opens his purse. There is a gentlemanly reticence to be observed in these matters and Hillyard was well aware of the rules. He struck quite a different note.

  “I shall speak frankly to you, Señor Medina, as one caballero to another”; and José Medina bowed and smiled.

  “I put my cards upon the table. I ask you whether in your heart you are for the Germans or for us.”

  José Medina hitched his chair a little closer and holding up one hand with
fingers spread ticked off his points, as he spoke them, with the other.

  “Let us see! First, you come to me, señor, saying you are English, and speaking Spanish with the accent of Valencia. Good! I might reply, señor, how do I know? I might ask you how I am to be sure that when that British flag is hauled down from your yacht outside the bay over there, it is not a German one which should take its place. Good! But I do not make these replies. I accept your word as a caballero that you are English and not an enemy of England laying a trap for me. Good!” He took off his eye-glasses and polished them.

  “Now listen to me!” he continued. “I am a Spaniard. We of Spain have little grievances against England and France. But these are matters for the Government, not for a private person. And the Government bids us be neutral. Good! Now I speak as a private person. For me England means opportunity for poor men to become great and rich. You may say I have become rich without the opportunities of England. I answer I am one in many thousands. England means Liberty, and within the strict limits of my neutrality I will do what a man may for that great country.”

  Hillyard listened and nodded. The speech was flowing and spoken with great fervour. It might mean much. It might mean nothing at all. It might be the outcome of conviction. But it might again be nothing more than the lip-service of a man who knew very well that England and France could squeeze him dry if they chose.

  “I wish,” said Hillyard cordially, “that the captains of the ports of Spain spoke also with your voice.”

  José Medina neither assumed an ignorance of the German leanings of the port officials nor expressed any assent. But, as if he had realised the thought which must be passing in Hillyard’s mind, he said:

  “You know very well, señor, that I should be mad if I gave help to the Germans. I am in your hands. You and France have but to speak the word, and every felucca of mine is off the seas. But what then! There are eighteen thousand men at once without food or work thrown adrift upon the coast of Spain. Will not Germany find use for those eighteen thousand men?”

  Hillyard agreed. The point was shrewd. It was an open, unanswerable reply to the unuttered threat which perhaps Hillyard might be prompted to use.

  “I have spoken,” continued José Medina. “Now it is for you, señor. Tell me what within the limits of my neutrality I can do to prove to you the sincerity of my respect for England?”

  Hillyard took a sheet of paper and a pencil from his pocket. He drew a rough map.

  “Here are the Balearic Islands; here, farther to the west, the Columbretes; here the African coast; here the mainland of Spain. Now watch, I beg you, señor, whilst I sketch in the routes of your feluccas. At Oran in Africa your factories stand. From them, then, we start. We draw a broad thick line from Oran to the north-east coast of Mallorca, that coast upon which we look down from these windows, a coast honeycombed with caves and indented with creeks like an edge of fine lace — a very storehouse of a coast. Am I not right, Señor Don José?” He laughed, in a friendly good-humoured way, but the face of José Medina did not lose one shade of its impassiveness. He did not deny that the caves of this coast were the storehouse of his tobacco; nor did he agree.

  “Let us see!” he said.

  “So I draw a thick line, since all your feluccas make for this island and this part of the island first of all. From here they diverge — you will correct me, I hope, if I am wrong.”

  “I do not say that I shall correct you if you are wrong,” said José Medina.

  Hillyard was now drawing other and finer lines which radiated like the sticks of an outspread fan from the north-east coast of Mallorca to the Spanish mainland; and he went on drawing them, unperturbed by José’s refusal to assist in his map-making. Some of the lines — a few — ended at the Islands of the Columbretes, sixty miles off Valencia.

  “Your secret storehouse, I believe, señor,” he remarked pleasantly.

  “A cruiser of our Government examined these islands most carefully a fortnight ago upon representations from the Allies, and found nothing of any kind to excite interest,” replied José Medina.

  “The cruiser was looking for submarine bases, I understand, not tobacco,” Martin Hillyard observed. “And since it was not the cruiser’s commission to look for tobacco, why should it discover it?”

  José Medina shrugged his shoulders. José Medina’s purse was very long and reached very high. It would be quite impolitic for that cruiser to discover José Medina’s tobacco stores, as Medina himself and Martin Hillyard, and the captain of the cruiser, all very well knew.

  Martin Hillyard continued to draw fine straight lines westwards from the northern coast of Mallorca to the mainland of Spain, some touching the shore to the north of Barcelona, some striking it as far south as Almeria and Garrucha. When he had finished his map-making he handed the result to José Medina.

  “See, señor! Your feluccas cut across all the trade-routes through the Mediterranean. Ships going east or going west must pass between the Balearics and Africa, or between the Balearics and Spain. We are here in the middle, and, whichever course those ships take, they must cross the lines on which your feluccas continually come and go.”

  José Medina looked at the map. He did not commit himself in any way. He contented himself with a question: “And what then?”

  “So too with the German submarines. They also must cross and cross again in their cruises, those lines along which your feluccas continually come and go.”

  José Medina threw up his hands.

  “The submarines! Señor, if you listen to the babblers on the quays, you would think that the seas are stiff with them! Schools of them like whales everywhere! Only yesterday Palma rang with the account of one. It pursued a French steamer between Minorca and Mallorca. It spoke to a fishing boat! What did it not do? Señor, there was no submarine yesterday in the channel between Minorca and Mallorca. If there had been I must have known.”

  And he sat back as though the subject were disposed of.

  “But submarines do visit these waters, Señor Medina, and they do sink ships,” replied Hillyard.

  José Medina shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands.

  “Claro! And it is said that I supply them with their oil.” He turned swiftly to Hillyard. “Perhaps you have heard that story, señor?”

  Hillyard nodded.

  “Yes. I did not believe it. It is because I did not believe it that I am here, asking your help.”

  “I thank you. It is the truth. I will tell you something now. Not one of my captains has ever seen one of those submarines, neither on this side nor on that,” and Medina touched the lines which Hillyard had drawn on both sides of the Balearics on his chart. “Now, what can I do?”

  “One simple thing, and well within your scruples as a neutral,” replied Hillyard. “These submarines doubly break the laws of nations. They violate your territorial waters, and they sink merchant ships without regard for the crews.”

  “Yes,” said José Medina.

  “You have agents along the coast. I have friends too in every town, Englishmen who love both England and Spain, Spaniards who love both Spain and England. We will put, if you permit, your agents in touch with my friends.”

  “Yes,” said José Medina innocently. “How shall we do that? We must have lists prepared.”

  Hillyard smiled gently.

  “That is not necessary, señor. We know your agents already. If you will secretly inform them that those who speak in my name,” and he took his card from the table, and gave it into Medina’s hands, “are men to be trusted, it will be enough.”

  José Medina agreed.

  “I will give them instructions.”

  “And yet another instruction if you will be so kind, to all your captains.”

  “Yes?”

  “That they shall report at the earliest possible moment to your nearest agent ashore, the position of any submarine they have seen.”

  José Medina assented once more.

  “But it wi
ll take a little time, señor, for me to pass that instruction round. It shall go from captain to captain, but it will not be prudent to give it out more widely. A week or two — no more — and every captain in my fleet shall be informed. That is all?”

  Hillyard was already rising from his chair. He stood straight up.

  “All except that they will be forbidden too,” he added with a smile, “to supply either food or drink or oil to any enemy vessel.”

  José Medina raised his hands in protest.

  “That order was given months ago. But it shall be repeated, and you can trust me, it shall be obeyed.”