The Third Hour Read online

  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 northw
ards 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.