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    The Third Hour
    The Third Hour
    The Third Hour
    Ebook507 pages9 hours

    The Third Hour

    By Geoffrey Household

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    About this ebook

    A reckless Spanish adventurer and a British workingman join forces in a dangerous hunt for hidden treasure

    By the age of twenty-seven, Manuel Vargas has already lived more than most men. A restless adventurer and world traveler, he has journeyed far from his home in Spain, and now fate and tragedy have deposited him into the ranks of the Mexican revolutionary army. But when he discovers that a passenger train he and his fellow rebel confederates have blown off the tracks is carrying a fortune in gold, his life takes yet another strange turn.

    Meanwhile, in London, a traveling salesman named Toby plies his ordinary trade, unaware of what destiny has in store for him. When Vargas and Toby cross paths, two very different men will be united by their wild desires and dreams as they set off together on a perilous quest for treasure that could be their salvation—or their doom.

    In the decade preceding the Second World War, the remarkable Geoffrey Household
    had already won praise far and wide for his ability to add rare depth and intelligence to the classic thriller. Thoughtful and unforgettable, filled with unexpected turns and richly drawn characters, The Third Hour is a masterful demonstration of everything that a suspenseful and deeply human adventure novel can be.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 24, 2015
    ISBN9781504005258
    The Third Hour
    Author

    Geoffrey Household

    Geoffrey Household (1900–1988) was born in England. In 1922 he earned a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from the University of Oxford. After graduation, he worked at a bank in Romania before moving to Spain in 1926 and selling bananas as a marketing manager for the United Fruit Company. In 1929 Household moved to the United States, where he wrote children’s encyclopedia content and children’s radio plays for CBS. From 1933 to 1939, he traveled internationally as a printer’s-ink sales rep. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer for the British army, with posts in Romania, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and Persia. After the war, he returned to England and wrote full time until his death. He married twice, the second time in 1942 to Ilona Zsoldos-Gutmán, with whom he had three children, a son and two daughters. Household began writing in the 1920s and sold his first story to the Atlantic Monthly in 1936. His first novel, The Terror of Villadonga, was published during the same year. His first short story collection, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories, appeared in 1938. Altogether, Household wrote twenty-eight novels, including four for young adults; seven short story collections; and a volume of autobiography, Against the Wind (1958). Most of his novels are thrillers, and he is best known for Rogue Male (1939), which was filmed as Man Hunt in 1941 and as a TV movie under the novel’s original title in 1976.

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    • 3/5
      Another Household I have long owned but not, I think, read through. A Latin American revolutionary blows up a train with a load of gold, and later an English adventurer get involved with it.

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    The Third Hour - Geoffrey Household

    Dedicated

    TO THE NOBILITY

    of

    MY WIFE

    whose peers,

    in this book,

    I have imagined

    Strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine. But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and said unto them … these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.

    THE LIFE AND FORTUNE OF MANUEL VARGAS

    I

    THE LIFE

    The train toiled southwards, a thin black lizard picking its way along the easiest slopes through a tumble of desert hills. The engineers who built that line had felt themselves to be the very prophets of an indefinite religion named Progress. Day by day they had fought with intractable material and known the pride of artists in their tunnels, their bridges, their tremendous bastions armoured to withstand the fury of torrents on unabsorbing ground. Day by day their bank balances piled up in Mexico City and New York. But even a world so supremely well ordered for their happiness did not satisfy them; they needed to link their temporary content to a universal purpose, to feel that they were fulfilling the intent of past generations and smoothing the path of the unborn. Since none of the religions to which they paid their various lip services had set up the mastery of nature as a virtue, they accepted the private faith of the nineteenth century. Their formless domestic god was Progress.

    The little group of men lying inconspicuously upon the hillside had neither bank balances nor content nor any thought at all of the vanished engineers. To them the god Progress was only a word, and at that a word which they used in widely different senses. To General Lara, Progress was merely the slave of a greater and even vaguer deity whom he worshipped under the names of Communism or Liberty or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. To Manuel Vargas, El Camarero, Progress was meaningless; he occasionally used the word, however, in order to stir those under his command or in his employ to a more lively efficiency. To the ragged insurgents crouching under the cover of the rocks, Progress meant more money, more frequent meals and better horses. They were realists. The train that slowly approached their hillside had no more significance for them than a lizard which they were about to kill; indeed less, for a lizard could be eaten whereas there was little hope of looting the train.

    Another three minutes, said Lara. This time we will make an exhibition!

    It was the general’s favourite remark. Like any true craftsman contemplating his raw materials, he felt that the composition about to be created would be his finest. It was no mean art to paralyze heavily guarded government railways with a few pounds of dynamite, and Lara had invented his own technique. The permanent way and the locomotives, being in theory the property of the people and hard to replace, he spared; but his carefully planned attacks on the rolling stock were as devastating as a transport strike because the effects and the delays were incalculable.

    Lara lifted an excellent pair of field glasses, looted from a romantic female archaeologist who had visited his camp and lost all but what she had hoped to lose, and studied the approaching train. It was a mile away and broadside on to them, about to enter the curve that would carry it direct under their position.

    They are expecting me, he said, and handed the glasses to El Camarero.

    The train ended in a heavy steel flatcar and a roomy caboose. The flatcar was armed, and stripped for action bare as the deck of a battleship. The barrel of a Krupp mountain gun pointed the length of the train, a harmless position which promised that it could instantly be swivelled to either flank. This formidable weapon was assisted by three machine guns. A bridge leading from the flatcar to the caboose showed that the train guard, though now hiding in their quarters from the merciless white sun, could swiftly man their improvised fighting deck.

    Better wait for the guard, suggested El Camarero, handing back the glasses.

    What a thought! Blow them up and lose the gun? Never! I have never had a gun, Camarero.

    We couldn’t carry it away.

    No. But we might take it and shell the relief train. A surprise for them! A pretty little surprise!

    Lara watched the flatcar with frank and hungry admiration. His face had the innocence of a child peering into the window of a confectioner’s shop.

    Then try the third. It’s a tank car.

    No. I should like to, but it would carry the locomotive with it. The eleventh! We will blow up the eleventh!

    The eleventh was a wealthy tourist on the Mexican Northern Railway, a comfortable, neatly painted visitor from the New York Central. This boxcar was a temptation in itself, and admirably placed to do the maximum of destruction. If the couplings held, it might well carry with it down the hillside numbers nine to fourteen, all of which were lightly loaded.

    Lara’s explosives were cunningly placed. A frugal charge at the outer edge of the embankment would undermine the track and cause a slight subsidence of the metals. A second and heavier charge under the inner rail supplied the necessary lift to topple over the chosen wagon. The general’s art was far too delicate to be described as the dynamiting of trains. His few ounces of explosive were mere aids to the far greater forces of gravity and momentum.

    The general peered between the rocks that covered his party, the keys of two detonators under his hand. He was almost pure Indian. Under a battered felt hat his face, hairless as that of a boy of twelve, was beautiful in its unconscious cruelty; the wide mouth, sensitive and expressive, the large eyes, intent and shining, had the natural ferocity of a carnivore. Yet it was not an animal face; its rich humour even, or perhaps especially, in the act of destruction made it entirely human and likeable.

    Manuel Vargas, the immigrant from Spain, the man of culture and experience, was fond of his general. He liked his thoroughness and his frank good-fellowship; and he was fascinated by the incalculable quality of cruelty in this young and destitute leader, with his ragged shirt and trousers so crossed by the belt of his Mauser pistol, the belt of his .45 revolver, the belts of corresponding ammunition, the straps of water bottle and instruments that he needed a medieval squire to disarm him. To have Lara’s friendship was as stimulating as to keep a leopard for a pet.

    The train crawled along the hillside, chasing the pilot engine that preceded it. Lara pressed his first key as soon as the two engines had passed. There was a muffled report and a puff of dust. The trucks rocked unsteadily, canting towards the slope as they clattered over the sinking rail. The eleventh car swayed into position and Lara pressed the second key. This time the craftsman had his work more immediately under his eye. A fan of flame, gravel and yellow smoke punched the tourist under his leading bogey and threw him off his balance. Number eleven crashed down the slope, dragging with it six of the adjoining trucks.

    The lizard, thus cut in half, appeared to hesitate uncertainly. Its head stopped. Its tail began to run downhill, gathering speed as the weight of the flatcar and armaments took command. Lara’s men rose from the protective colouring of the bronze ground and watched with interest the unwilling flight of their opponents. They had expected a sharp exchange of shots before the guard discovered that nothing but an antiaircraft gun could throw a shell into their eyrie and that a direct assault would cost more lives than it was worth. This unforeseen triumph, the seemingly inspired climax so often added by chance to an honest piece of work, confirmed his men’s trust in Lara’s daring. The caboose, the flatcar and three wagons raced towards the curve of the line while small figures crawled over them to reach and apply the hand brakes. The little band of rebels lit cigarettes and laughed like children, without pity or malice.

    They’ll upset on the bend! shouted Lara delightedly. The sons of bitches are going to upset!

    They’ll stop in time, answered El Camarero.

    I’ll bet my field glasses to your rifle they don’t!

    Done!

    Manuel Vargas knew that he would lose. The lifeless half of the train was shooting down the line, and it was evident that the brakes had either broken or were insufficient. Only obstinate hope made him dispute the point with Lara; he had accepted the bet in a sudden rage with himself and his own impotence. His rifle, Eibar made, accurate and a link with Spain, was a sacrifice offered to the gods of the unexpected, a tribute to assure himself of his own sincerity in his civilised and desperate desire that the helpless troops should escape.

    The tail of the train swayed outwards over the curve, increasing its angle as the inner wheels left the metals. It appeared to bank as deliberately and gracefully as an aeroplane, and slid silently out of sight. The thin and agonised shouts, the crashings and splinterings that reached their ears four seconds later seemed to have nothing to do with this peaceful flight into space.

    I have warned you already not to bet with me, said the general. I understand railways. When we have the People’s Republic I will be Minister of Communications.

    If there are any, El Camarero answered drily, handing over his rifle.

    Lara slung it on his back, finding a suitable path for the leather among the maze of bandoleers, and laughed with pleasure. He felt kindly to the Spaniard whenever he scored off him, and generally repaid him by some act of feudal generosity. El Camarero was a good fellow—though a superior man who had no right to be fighting with the representatives of the people. One felt that he did not approve of all his general’s acts. Still, so witty, so courteous, and with such a head on him—one would regret it if at some time or other he had to be removed.

    "Vámonos! said Lara. There will be loot after all! You can choose any weapon you like, Camarero!"

    While the attention of the raiders was occupied, the train crew uncoupled the wagons derailed but not overturned by the explosion. The head of the train made off at full speed towards Durango, leaving its wrecked belly and tail to these devils who sat among the rocks. Lara and his men scrambled down the hillside to their first victim.

    Number Eleven had burst open and scattered most of its riches among the cacti; it had apparently carried a mixed bag of goods shipped to Mexico City from Europe via New York, merchandise of price but little weight. Bales of English tweed dotted the torn slope. A crate of expensive toys had spilled out the wagons of a neat little train; they lay drunkenly on the bare earth, imitating their model with an exactitude that even the meticulous care of the manufacturers had not intended. A crushed case of perfumes lent to the cleanly cactus the magnificent reek of an imperial brothel, and a bidet of red Italian marble that had come to rest right side up confirmed the impression. Manuel Vargas was seized by a fit of laughter at the sight of this unseemly bathroom luxury and at once improvised a charming coplita upon the garden that wept for its lost fountain. It fell flat since neither Lara nor his men had any idea of the uses of a bidet. El Camarero improved their education by a short and vivid lecture.

    They approached the tail of the train with needless caution. The flatcar seemed to have turned a somersault in the air and crashed upside down on to the caboose, reducing it to a heap of splinters as formless as a rubbish dump. There was none left who could be called alive. On those that still breathed Lara performed his only act of mercy of the day. Twenty bodies, spread-eagled on the hillside, impaled on cactus and crushed together in the dump, provided a satisfactory haul of weapons and ammunition that partly comforted the general for the loss of the mountain gun. He hummed El Camarero’s coplita, and allowed him the first choice of the scattered armaments.

    On the pretext of examining the bodies on the hillside Manuel separated himself from his companions. The shock of this disaster was rising up into his conscious mind. He had tried to exorcise it with a bet, to forget it with obscene laughter; but the smashed bodies were difficult facts for a civilised person to blink. He was compelled to consider them. Manuel Vargas was a Spaniard and an adventurer; as either, he was rather less sensitive than the ordinary man to the liquids and machinery of the human body exposed by violent death. In his general experience, however, such death was the result of fair fight or admissible accident, and no matter for shame and disgust. That he now felt both was a vivid revelation of truth. He had been an adventurer more in search of himself than of sensation. Well—por Dios!—he had found himself!

    Manuel Vargas was the son of a wholesale grocer at Valladolid. By the age of sixteen he had the high fantastical humour of a dweller among the unforgiving hills of Old Castilla, a taste for good Rioja and a fund of admirable stories about priests and nuns, most of which he fathered on to the innocent Jesuit in whose service he donned a nightgown and swung a censer; these duties he performed in order to keep the peace with his mother, an estimable woman in whom piety took the place of intelligence. His education had been catholic and classical; that is to say, he had learned nothing at all that was likely to make him any money, but had acquired a fine clear mind and the Latin virtue, unrecognised by any purely Anglo-Saxon school, of knowing that he was lying when he was.

    His father had now given up groceries for fruit, having been accidentally introduced to the trade by one of his debtors whose only assets were four tons of oranges. He found that his resources allowed him to take the risks which perishable fruit demanded and his competitors, invariably working on insufficient capital, were unable to take; or, taking, were wiped out by a hot day or a fall in prices. By Manuel’s seventeenth birthday old Vargas was the biggest fruit dealer in three provinces, and eager to send his son, already a useful helper in the warehouse, to complete his commercial education in England; he worshipped the English merchants as models of honesty and acumen, and the universities he admired were London and Liverpool. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge, of which he had vaguely heard, could be compared in his mind to Salamanca; but the very names of London and Liverpool invested their degree of commerce with unequalled sanctity and power.

    Manuel chose London; he had no particular reverence for the capital but it was the farther south of the two. What they had to teach him of the laws and practice of commerce he learned quickly and carefully, and he was impressed to the bottom of his soul by the exactitude of the great merchant houses—not that there were many delays or inaccuracies in old Vargas’s office, but Manuel was becoming drunk on English thoroughness as an occasional Englishman on the Spanish way of life. He admired, practised and developed a philosophy of the Efficient, distinguishing the false, which he considered to be merely speed under another name, from the true, which was a form of artistry.

    It was in England too that Manuel began to understand the other half of the human world. Spain had given him little contact with women. From the age of fourteen he had enjoyed, of course, an occasional embrace when he had the money to pay for it. When he had none, he visited the brothels, as did his companions, simply for the sake of conversation with the girls. Thus he discovered at least that women also possessed human intelligence. He could never have guessed it from the girls of Valladolid, with whom his relations were limited to the audacious compliment and the conventional repartee, the pinch on the bottom followed by the slap in the face.

    Manuel did not fly high for his education. He was in fact picking up shop girls at public dances in the pre-war days before they were recruited from a beggared middle class. He was attractive to women. The slight body of middle height, the soft voice, the velvety eyes that seemed to have been intended for brown and were actually grey, the foreign eagerness, all made of him a maiden’s dream to those fortunate young women; fortunate because their fantasies of Spain had nothing to do with the geographical reality, with old Vargas’s fruit warehouse, with work, marriage or childbearing or anything at all but a lovely romance compounded of reading and hearsay, to which Manuel’s mildly dishonourable intentions lent a temporary truth. By men he was disliked. His face was pudgy, his clothes vulgar, and his quiet manner such a reflection on the noisiness of youth that fathers and brothers unhesitatingly described him as a greasy dago.

    The outbreak of war caught Manuel in London. He had no desire to return to Spain; indeed his first impulse was to join the British army. He was young and quixotic enough to wish to lend his sword—it was his own expression—to the country that had so freely offered him its daughters and its hospitality. He was nearly accepted, for the authorities were not too particular in demanding a birth certificate, and his adventures had been so good for his English that he could, while admitting a Spanish mother to account for his darker complexion, pass as an Englishman. But Manuel had acquired by painstaking practice the cockney o, believing it, because so difficult a sound, to be the very hallmark of idiomatic English, an embellishment of speech as racy and correct as the lisp of Madrid; it lurked invariably among the vowels of both his Berlitz teacher and his mistresses. For English ears it was odd to hear this unmusical diphthong from the London dialect decorating an otherwise cultured and imaginative flow of speech. The recruiting officer would readily have passed a slightly foreign accent—for the British Empire was large and he sincerely wished it had been larger—but he was puzzled by this incongruous o. He pressed his questions, and Manuel was rejected.

    His father, hearing with pleasure of this failure, wrote decisively to Manuel that his first duty was to the Vargas fortunes and to Spain. He hinted, knowing his son, that there might be plenty of excitement for a neutral engaged in lawful commerce. Manuel became the agent for a ring of Spanish fruit exporters. He needed little more than honesty and method for success. Prices were soaring, and all that could surely be said of any shipment of oranges, lemons or melons was that it would fetch a higher price than any previous shipment.

    Even so the price of half a dozen crates in England was the price of one in Germany. Though their London agent was only a boy of nineteen, the ring of exporters could find no better man to organise their sales to the Central Powers. Through the German Embassy in Madrid, Manuel was put in touch with their buying agents at Rotterdam. Soon Berlin and Hamburg were as familiar to him as London and Liverpool, and a regular service of fruit trains was crossing the Dutch frontier.

    In spite of his frequent journeys into Germany, his Spanish passport was proof enough for the English that he had never left Holland. The German authorities supplied him with a forged Colombian passport showing him to be a resident in Rotterdam. He used this for his travel between Holland and Germany, and his Spanish passport for travel between England and Holland; thus it was a full year before his hosts had definite proof that he was trading with the enemy. When they had it, they gave him twenty-four hours in which to leave the country. Manuel spent them at his office, left the books of the English half of the business in perfect order, and caught a boat from Tilbury to Buenos Aires with ten minutes to spare.

    He had no time for cool judgment in the choice of his next residence. The impulse that drove him to the Argentine was composite. He longed for his own language, and he was weary of Nordic peoples dourly preoccupied by a struggle as unremitting as a tug of war between two teams of overfed policemen. He had money, an indecent quantity of money, in his pocket and on a letter of credit. London and Berlin had given him a taste for luxury but little time in which to indulge it. He both desired and deserved a period of wine and women. The Argentine held out more lavish promises than Spain.

    Manuel’s self-confidence was absolute. At the age of twenty he had already tasted the delights of big business and had been sufficiently successful to annoy a first-class power. Lest his own achievements should appear small to him he worshipped success and defined it as wealth. He was as worldly minded as an ambitious boy just out of a business college, and with considerably more cause. For the easy-going Argentinos he felt a good-humoured contempt, and was sure that in such a country his worth would swiftly be recognised and that in a few weeks he would have a salary and responsibilities equal to those he had enjoyed in England.

    Outwardly mature, by now well dressed and the best of companions, he was accepted into a set of cheerful youngsters who had nothing to offer him but their clubs, their girls and their horses. Sons of the great estancias, they were interested in spending money, not in making it; money made itself for them. On the strength of their political and social connections they could obtain, if necessary, commercial sinecures for themselves, but not for a casual Spaniard. They would never have thought of offering him a job in the campo, nor did he want it.

    While waiting for a business in which to employ his energy and capital, Manuel did not think it worth while to invest. He spent wildly, and still more wildly as his disappointment increased. Had he taken a clerkship in meat or railways or oil he would swiftly have been appreciated, for the civilisation of the towns was built out of the brains of ambitious immigrants from all nations and offered to them infinite opportunity. But commerce had been made too easy for him and he would not accept subordinate work.

    After four months in Buenos Aires Manuel realised that he had failed. He drew his last thousand pesos from the bank and bought a first-class ticket to Mendoza—since the town was at the foot of the Andes, which he desired to see before travel should be prohibited by poverty. The rest of his money he spent in a thirty-six-hour orgy. His excesses were deliberate and enjoyed without fear for the morrow. As the cabaret de luxe, the expensive casa de citas, the first-class restaurant would thenceforth be out of his reach, he bought himself a final stock of memories. He knew that he had no chance of starving in that land of plenty so long as he took a definite step down in society.

    His trust in the future was swiftly justified. He shared his compartment with a talkative compatriot, a native of Malaga, who owned a considerable vineyard at Mendoza. Don Castor Vallejos was an authority on dessert wines but had the usual Andalusian ignorance of reds. Manuel, by this time a connoisseur of wine, engaged him in argument, courteous in its personalities, heated in its condemnation of Mendoza clarets. Don Castor, impressed, offered him keep and a small salary in exchange for his business experience and palate. Manuel got off the train an employee of the Compañía Vinícola Vallejos.

    Mendoza was leafy as an English town in summer. The streets were lined with trees, and cobbled channels along which the clear mountain water gurgled and raced. The massed foliage darkened and cooled the pavements more gently than the usual colonnades of Latin towns. It never rained. West of the city the desert foothills of the Andes were arid and melancholy, with not a shade of green to break the monotony of grey and brown; but in the folds of the hills lay hidden very valleys of paradise where the streams from the snows of the high peaks had been gathered into pools and led in a tracery of rivulets over cultivated terraces and down to rich, small pastures.

    The Vallejos estate was one of these oases, a tiny patch of emerald sunk into the immense brown flanks of the cordillera. The sides of the valley were dotted with vines, and its head closed by the length of the white, single-storeyed house with flower garden and shaded pools before it, and a grove of eucalyptus, marking the site of the dam, behind. The wine house was backed against the northern slopes, a façade of round white arches masking the cellars that had been carved out of the rock in imitation of the caves of the Rioja. Lower down the valley was a group of outbuildings where the mestizo and Italian labourers and their families kept up a fierce communal establishment, and enlivened the still nights with laughter, quarrels, music and moving lights. For two years Manuel was exceedingly happy and generously repaid for his cleverness and energy by Don Castor, by the labourers and by the vines themselves.

    As he watched Lara and his men scavenging the barren Mexican ground where blood ran more frequently than water, a composite picture of the slopes of the Viña Vallejos and the trees of Mendoza overwhelmed his mind with longing. It was an image of peace and of agony. The two were connected in his mind, so that he was compelled to avoid peace whenever it threatened him. Invariably he excluded the memory of Mendoza but now for a second he dwelt in it as a refuge.

    He had married Lola Vallejos, a slender child, delicate and of a living white like that of the syringa flowers she loved to pin in her smooth hair. He had spent months over the romantic ceremonies of Andalusian courtship that the good family expected. He had kissed her hand, extended through the bars of her window, more desirously than he had ever kissed the lips or the breasts of any other woman. At the fiestas on the estate, drunken with an ecstasy of love as the golden dust swirled up under her dancing feet, he had satisfied his longing with verse after verse flowing from voice and guitar as easily as passionate speech. Under the trees of Mendoza he had walked after Sunday mass, passing and repassing her as convention demanded, and at each sight of her had drawn in his breath as if it had been the first. Nor was their marriage less sweet even than the exaggerated dreams of unsatisfied desire. Don Castor built an extra wing to his house for them, where they lived a honeymoon of nearly a year, free of jealousy or any strife, until Lola’s child was ripe for birth. But she herself was not. The new life, struggling in vain, slew both itself and its mother.

    When the funeral was over, Manuel could bear the Viña Vallejos no longer. Numbed by the four endless days through which he had watched her sufferings, he said short and monotonous farewells, put all he cared to possess upon the back of a mule and rode over the pass to Chile.

    The second period of his life was patternless, a succession of events that satisfied nothing but the desire, common to all the Primates, for some absorbing activity. He avoided thought unless in the cause of his daily bread. Manuel went straight to the nitrate fields. He messed in a hut with two other Spaniards, a Swede and a French deserter; the mere fact that they had some of their European energy left was enough to ensure them positions of minor responsibility. The two Spaniards were foremen, and, after a week, Manuel also. The Frenchman was an engine driver, the Swede an assistant cashier. For their labour in the white dust they were well paid, but there was no pleasure but drunkenness to buy. Money was a mockery in that livid plain which stretched, like the surface of a dead moon, without hillock or green thing to a perfectly circular horizon.

    Each of the exiles, when his purse outlasted his capacity for alcohol, had a different method of getting rid of the surplus. It was so useless that one resented its possession. The Swede would take off his clothes and dance naked and hairless through the camp fighting anyone who interfered with him and paying his fines and damages next morning. The Spaniards set up bottles of champagne and shot at them with revolvers. When this palled they shot at each other, one stalking either of the other two with drunken intensity over the moonlit plain. There was only one rule to the game—a man might not be potted at when he was asleep. Fortunately at least two of them always fell into crapulous slumber before arriving at close range. The engine driver, consumed by hatred of all that was not the France he had deserted, tore at the rails with his bare hands until overcome by weeping. The fit took him after the third bottle so that he alone, with subconscious thrift, was able to save a little money.

    For Manuel it was a healthy period. He used neither brain nor emotions, and his wounded soul hid in the darkness and healed itself. He was roused from this Nirvana of labour and alcohol by a letter from Valladolid telling him that his father was dead. He had no capacity for grief left, and his tribute was only a gathering of tender memories and a passing sadness. But the news roused his dormant ambition. Though answerable to none but himself—the business was wound up and his mother had made over the bulk of the capital to the Church—he yet felt an abstract responsibility as the head of his family. The Spanish individualism was strong in him; his unconscious desire was to avoid disappearance in the mass of his fellows. Old Vargas had done it, rising from a small grocer in a mean street to a figure of provincial importance. Now his son must do it. Manuel recognised an obligation, but did not know what he wanted. Not money, evidently, for he had only to save to have plenty of it. Power? Perhaps. To feel that he was a person who mattered? Certainly. On the nitrate fields he could not think that he or any other mattered. At the next payday he fled to Antofagasta without farewells, lest the parting drinks should consume his capital, and took a ship to Callao.

    Peru suited him. Though the skins of its inhabitants were dark with Indian blood, the country was more Spanish than Chile or the Argentine. He took the first job that he saw advertised—bookkeeper in a stationer’s shop at Lima. His employer was practically bankrupt, for in a mood of optimism he had established a printing works behind the shop and now owed for machines, paper, ink and rent. He was a round little man with a face the colour of a glossy chestnut, beaming and sweating in the effort to appear business-like. Efficiency, word of an Englishman, business method were continually in his mouth. He had been blandly unconscious that he had none of them until, deeply hurt by his creditors’ remarks, he had been forced to suspect the truth. Having no idea how much he owed he employed Manuel to tell him.

    Manuel audited the books of the Imprenta Sota—approximately, since Don Pepe Sota had lost most of his receipts and torn up his bills in a passion. After a week he was able to advise Don Pepe that he owed a total of fifteen hundred Peruvian pounds. The obstinate little ball of excited flesh stared, argued, swore it was not so and finally pretended to destroy itself. Manuel took away from him the paper knife that he was pressing gently with both hands against his third waistcoat button, and corked him down between the strong arms of his office chair. Then he gave him an analysis of his position in flowery phrases that soothed and precise data that carried conviction. It was the first time that Don Pepe had come up against a concrete example of the business method that he so admired. He had little understanding of what Manuel explained, but was hypnotised by this lithe cat of a man who pounced from books to files, files to vouchers, vouchers to invoices, slammed columns of figures under his nose and all the while purred his emphatic and logical Castilian Spanish. The gist of it seemed to be that this incredible sum of 1500 libras was a small debt for a stationer’s shop in the main street with two fast and economical Miehles and half-a-dozen platen presses in the works behind. That, said Don Pepe, suddenly optimistic again, was what he had always thought, but could Señor Vargas persuade the creditors? Manuel could and did, and got out of them a salary for himself into the bargain.

    Fortunately he found in charge a mulatto head printer who was mechanically competent though devoid of initiative and ideas. Manuel supplied the ideas and touted the Lima businessmen for orders, concentrating on the North American and English firms. Some damned him for his dynamic insolence; some gave him sceptically a trial order. Within four months they all came over to him, revering him as an archangel of a printer who not only turned out accurate copy in Spanish and English, but delivered on the promised date.

    Black with ink, hoarse with talking, Manuel ran the shop for eight hours a day and usually four hours of overtime as well. He read proof, mixed colours, did his own costing, buying and selling, and mercilessly drove his workmen. True care and efficiency were beyond them, so that the reputation of the Imprenta Sota depended entirely on his own eye. Sota himself was terrified by the relentless industry of his printing works and the genial abuse hurled at his head whenever he ventured into them; he confined himself to the stationery shop. All of them would have resented Manuel’s bullying if they had ever had time to resent anything. It seemed to them that his wit, oaths and swift movements were driving not only themselves but the machines.

    The machines, however, were driving Manuel. He had no mastery of this complex craft, and made mistake after mistake which had to be swiftly righted lest the pounding presses should be forced to wait, and work fall behind schedule. His face took on the printer’s pallor. His eyes hurt him and sank deep into his head. Two years of this unremitting labour damaged him more than any past excesses of bedding and drinking, for he never got enough sleep to recuperate. He was saved from a breakdown by sudden disgust with himself. He discovered that in his passionate devotion to the immediate object he had become a tyrant, debauching the humanity of his followers.

    One night they were running off twelve thousand soap wrappers for delivery the following day. The head printer used their heavy guillotine at the same time as the presses. Manuel had again and again forbidden this practice since the underpowered electric motor revolved irregularly whenever the great knife was driven into the piles of paper, and disorganised the timing of the presses. Half the wrappers were out of register. Manuel forgot his Castilian courtesy and remembered only his Nordic training. He called his head printer a liar, a descendant of negroes, a son of a whore and an addict of unnatural vices. Since the printer was in fact all of these and thus more touchy than another, Manuel should have found a knife between his ribs. Instead, the man dropped his head on the overseer’s desk and wept bitterly. It shook Manuel. He was compelled to ask himself how and for what purpose he had become so drunk with labour. He knew himself to be a leader of men, but now saw that he was unworthy to be so—a Spanish adventurer, brutal as Pizarro, but without a single object to justify brutality. The next day he apologised to the shop and left. They saw him go with horror and genuine grief.

    Manuel drifted northwards through Quito and Bogotá and down the Magdalena to the Atlantic. His ultimate objective was Mexico, where a man with a creed in which he believed might yet win some satisfaction. His own creed was socialism. It had been forced upon him in Peru, where he saw a proletariat of Indians and mestizos supporting a tiny class of white landlords, the top-heavy edifice of the Church and a few capitalists as soulless as the founders of the industrial revolution, which, for their own country, they were. He had no particular affection for the ballot box. The frank and comparatively bloodless revolutions of Latin America seemed to him a more honest method of gaining power than intimidation of voters and mass bribery. Apparently a little group of nations around the North Sea were able to make democracy work, but for the rest of the world it seemed to him a preposterous system. Accepting revolution as a natural political weapon, he desired it to be sweeping, just and lasting, and for a worthy object.

    On his progress northwards he supported himself by whatever turned up. He dreaded instinctively the leisurely life of the land—it would have brought back the dormant memories of Mendoza—and his desire for commercial success was wearing thin. There seemed to be no object in efficiency for the sake of money or of efficiency itself. He prospected for gold in Ecuador and worked as a proof-reader in Colombia. This led him to journalism, which he practised for the first and only time in San José de Costa Rica. To be paid for expressing opinions that he did not hold struck him as the most humiliating method of earning a living that he had yet attempted. He satisfied a quixotic conscience by publishing a manifesto on the introduction of communism into that little paradise, and was promptly and quietly put on a north-bound boat and assured that an accident—for Costa Rica was a law-abiding country—would happen to him if he returned.

    In Guatemala Manuel worked as a waiter in a hotel run for tourists from the United States. Ice, nickel plate, clean linen and chafing dishes were much in evidence, but the food was atrocious. Manuel’s tactful suggestions, in English to the guests, in Spanish to the cook, improved everyone’s temper and appetite and swiftly promoted him to assistant maître d’hôtel. He liked the work and seriously considered making a career for himself in the restaurant business; but before he could make up his mind he was driven out of Guatemala by the marimba.

    At lunch and dinner he had to endure the marimba orchestra. The streets were full of marimba soloists. Every café had either a gramophone that played marimba records or a marimba band, and the greater the virtuosity of the players the more they sounded like a concert of massed barrel organs. Such was his value to the hotel that the manager, when Manuel

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