Tales of Mysteries & Espionage - John Buchan Edition. Buchan John

provided one, a neat Daimler limousine which at all hours waited on their convenience. They were shown every phase of the great industry, and the day after their arrival they lunched with the Administration. The Gobernador himself appeared at the meal, an honour which, it was hinted, was almost unexampled. He apologised for the absence of the Vice-President, the same who had been made to blush by the Moplahs. “My colleague,” he said, “sends his profound apologies, but at the moment he is suffering from a slight attack of jaundice. He deeply regrets that he cannot be here to welcome you, for he has many friends in your country and in Europe. He is of Mexico, and a Mexican is like a Russian—his country is so remote from the life of the world that he must needs adopt all countries. He is the true international.”

      The meal was a Spartan one compared, to the banquet at the President’s mansion, but the food was perfectly cooked and, for a place in the heart of wild hills, extraordinarily varied. The company were all grave, pallid, perfectly mannered, with expressionless eyes and no gestures—what Don Alejandro had called the type Gran Seco. There was nothing of the hustling liveliness which Archie associate with a luncheon of commercial magnates. Also all seemed to be in awe of their President, and hung on his lips. Castor talked indeed, brilliantly and continuously, but it was a monologue, and he went through a series of subjects, adorning each and then dropping it. There was none of the give-and-take of good conversation. Yet the time passed pleasantly, and when they rose from table Castor offered to show them his office.

      It was on the first floor of the main building, lit by four large windows, into which travellers on the top of the tram-cars could look and see the great man at his work.

      Here there was no seclusion or mystery. The big bright chambers gave its occupant no more privacy than an aviary gives a bird, for not only could it be looked into from the street, but at one end was a glass partition separating it inadequately from a room full of busy secretaries. There were maps and plans of the Gran Seco on the walls, a complicated mechanism of desk telephones, a bookcase full of mining reports, an immense safe, a cigar cabinet—and that was all. It might have been the office of a real-estate agent in a provincial town in the United States or Canada.

      The contrast between Castor’s personality and his modest habitation was so startling that Janet laughed.

      The Gobernador seemed to understand her feelings. “I have other lairs,” he said, smiling. “One, much grander, is in Olifa, and I have my rooms too in Paris and London. But this is my true workshop.”

      He opened a door, which revealed a tiny bedroom and bathroom.

      “Compact, is it not?” he said. “I need no more. I am a simple man.”

      That night Archie and Janet dined in the hotel with the Financial Secretary, and afterwards went to hear Beethoven performed by a string quartet in the music-room of the Gran Seco Club. When they returned to their apartments, Archie was loud in his praises of his hosts.

      “Odd, isn’t it? to find Castilian manners in business grandees! We didn’t find them at Veiro, for old Sanfuentes was just like the ordinary country gentleman at home. But these fellows here are all hidalgos. I feel noisy and rather vulgar among them. And, good Lord! what must they think of the Moplahs?

      “Castor too!” he went on. “What rot it was Gedd and Wilbur making him out a mystery man! He’s an extraordinarily clever fellow, but as open as the day. A mystery man couldn’t live in a place like a cricket pavilion!”

      “Did you ever read a poem called ‘How it strikes a Contemporary’? Browning, you know.”

      “No,” said Archie.

      “Well, the poem is all about a tremendous mystery man—the Corregidor, Browning calls him—and he lived in just such a way as Mr Castor. How does it go?—

      “‘Poor man, he lived another kind of life In that new stuccoed third house by the bridge, Fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise! The whole street might o’erlook him as he sat Leg crossing leg—and—’

      “I can’t remember it all, but anyhow he played cribbage every night with his housekeeper and went to bed punctually at ten.”

      Their permit for the Gran Seco had specified no time-limit. For two days they explored the details of the industry, were conducted through vast laboratories, studied the latest types of furnace and converter, pored over blue prints in offices and gave themselves vile headaches. Archie declared that the smelting works were like the Ypres Salient after a gas attack. He tried to be intelligent, but found himself gravely handicapped by his lack of all scientific knowledge. “I have had the meaning of a reverberatory furnace explained to me a dozen times,” he complained, “but I’m hanged if I can keep it in my head. And what Bessemerising is remains to me one of Allah’s secrets. It’s no good, Janet, this isn’t my pidgin. Thank God, we’re going to the Mines to-morrow. I think that should be more in my line.”

      They were taken to the Mines through a sad grey country a desert of shale and rock. “Calcined,” Archie called it, having just acquired that word, and Janet said that she supposed it must be like the landscapes in the moon. Every stream-course was bone-dry, and the big dams they passed, with the green water very low in their beds, only accentuated the desiccation. Yet, where wells had been sunk, the soil was not without fertility, and the thin grasses seemed give a living to considerable flocks of sheep and goats. They passed many ruins—not only old mine workings, but the remains of Indian villages, which suggested that at of time the Gran Seco had been a more habitable country.

      At the Mines they were shown little, for there was little time. Managers were ready with sheafs of statistics, and at the Universum they lunched luxuriously. But of the miners at work they saw nothing. They returned invigorated by the keen air of the steppes, and Archie, who had caught from a ridge a glimpse of the snowy peaks of the Spanish Ladies, had had his appetite whetted for further travel. But the Administration was not encouraging. That was all Indian country—policed, it was true, for it was the chief recruiting-ground of labour, but not open to ordinary travel. “We could send you there,” said an urbane secretary, “but you would have to take an escort, and you would have to submit to be treated like a schoolboy. You will understand, Sir Archibald, that this Gran Seco of ours is in parts a delicate machine, and the presence of ever so little extraneous matter might do harm.”

      That evening after dinner Janet and Archie were in their sitting-room. The Regina was full of the preparations for departure of the Moplahs, who were going down-country by the night train, and their shrill cries could be heard in the corridor, since their rooms were on the same floor.

      “We’re extraneous matter here,” said Archie. “What about it, Janet? They’ve given us a very good show, but I’m disillusioned about the Gran Seco. Wilbur must have been pulling my leg. The place is as humdrum as the Potteries, and just about as ugly. I should have liked to have had a shot at the high mountains, but I can see their reason for not encouraging visitors in their labour reserve. I rather like the crowd—they behave well and they must be the last word in efficiency… Confound those Moplahs! This is like living beside a hencoop!”

      Janet looked serious, and, as was her way in such a mood, she sat with her hands idle in her lap. “Let’s get away from this place,” she said. “I hate it!”

      “Why in the world… ?”

      “I hate it. Those soft-spoken, solemn men have got on my nerves. I think there’s something inhuman about them. Most of the faces of the people at the smelting works and at the Mines were like masks… And at that awful luncheon!… I believe that sometimes I saw the devil grinning out from behind them… And in the streets. I saw one or two villainous ruffians, who should have been in rags, but were as spruce as bagmen. I felt as if I were in an orderly and well-policed Hell… Why did they shepherd us away from the Mines, for remember we saw nothing there? Why won’t they let us go into the back country? I believe it is because they are concealing something, something so bad that the world must never know of it.”

      Archie stared.

      “I must say you’ve got a lively imagination,” he began, but Janet was not listening.

      “Let