Tales of Mysteries & Espionage - John Buchan Edition. Buchan John
Emperor of the world I have no doubt he would be a just ruler. As it is—well, I have been seeing too much of his methods these last days to be in love with him.”
He paused for a second to shake out the ashes from his pipe.
“Well, I’ve given you what Blenkiron would call the ‘general Castor proposition’. Now, how would a man, obsessed by this idea, set about realising it? First of all, he would want money, money on a gigantic scale. He has got it in the Gran Seco. Remember, he is a very great practical engineer and chemist—Blenkiron, who should know, says the greatest in the world—and he is a first-class man of business. Second, he would want a base, and a well-camouflaged base. He has got that in the republic of Olifa. You have seen for yourselves how completely Olifa is in his power. He has changed in a few years the whole character of her governing class. He has made her Government rich and supine, and got it under his thumb. The thing is a miracle of tact and diplomacy. The Olifa ministers do not share in his secrets, they know very little of his schemes, but he has organised them as he wanted and they do his bidding without a question. Up in the Gran Seco he has his laboratory and factory, and in the State of Olifa he has his outer barrage, the decorous bourgeois republic which keeps watch at his door.
“Thirdly, he had to have his staff and his army to opera for him throughout the globe. He has got that, too—slaves who mechanically obey him. You have seen some of them in your Olifa hotel and in the Gran Seco. You have lunched with them, and Janet says that they made her flesh creep.”
“The type Gran Seco,” said Archie.
“The type Gran Seco. Have you any notion who they are? They look like robots, with their pallid faces and soft voices and small, precise gestures. All their individuality seems to have been smoothed away, so that they confer to one pattern. Nevertheless, they were once men of brains and character. Their brains they have kept, but the characters have been stereotyped, and they have surrendered their wills into the hand of their master. They have been most carefully selected from every nation. One or two you have known before, Archie.”
“I swear I haven’t.”
“But you have. The Gran Seco is the port for missing ships. Men who have foundered somehow in life—respectable careerists who suddenly crash on some private vice—fellows who show the white feather—soldiers without regiments, financiers without credit—they are all there. Do you remember Lariarty, Archie? He was about your time at Eton. There was a bad scandal about him in 1915.”
“Good God! Of course I do. I heard he was dead.”
“He sat opposite you a few weeks ago when you lunched with the Administration. You couldn’t recognise him. Everything that once was Lariarty has gone out of him, except his brain. You remember he was a clever fellow. And Romanes—the man who was in the 23rd—people said he was with the Touaregs in the Sahara. He’s one of them, but I believe at the moment he is in Europe. And Freddy Larbert, who was once a rising man in the Diplomatic Service. He did not hang himself at Bucharest, as they said he did, for to-day he is in the Gran Seco. I could mention others, and they come from every country—Russian aristocrats who were beggared and Russian revolutionists who were too clever, broken soldiers and blown-on politicians and speculators who missed their market. The Gran Seco is the true Foreign Legion, and it needs no discipline. Castor asks only for two things, brains and submission to his will, and once a man enters his service he can never leave it.”
“Why?” Archie asked.
“Because he does not want to. Because the Gran Seco is his only home and away from it he is lost. I told you that Castor was like the Old Man of the Mountain in the chronicle I showed you at Laverlaw. There is nothing new under the sun. Castor rules his initiates as the old ruffian in the Lebanon ruled his Assassins. You remember he gave them hashish, so that their one desire was to get their job in the outer world finished and return to the Lebanon to dream. Castor has the same secret. As I have told you, he is a mighty chemist, and this continent is the home of drugs. One in particular is called astura and is found in what they call the Pais de Venenos, the Poison Country in the eastern mountains. The secret of it was lost for ages till he revived it, and, except as a legend in the Marzaniga family, it was unknown in Olifa. This astura is deadly poison, but it can used in two ways as a drug. In one preparation it takes the heart out of a man, but gives him increased physical strength, till suddenly he cracks and becomes doddering. That preparation Castor uses to turn out docile labourers for the mines. He gets marvellous results in output, and the reports say that it is due to his scientific management and his study of industrial fatigue, but we know better. The other preparation does not apparently weaken the bodily strength, though it alters the colour of the skin and the look in the eyes. But it is a most potent mental stimulant, and its addicts tend to live for the next dose. It kills in the end, but only after a considerable period, and during that period it gives increased intellectual vitality and an almost insane power of absorption, varied by languors like the opium-eater’s. Those who once take to it can never free themselves, and they are the slaves of him who can supply it. Willing slaves, competent slaves, even happy slaves, but only the shadows of what once were men. Lariarty and Romanes and Larbert and others are among the initiates. They go about the world on Gran Seco business and they do Castor’s will as little wheels obey a master-wheel. They have a name for their brotherhood. They call themselves the new Conquistadors—conquerors, you see, over all the old standards and decencies of human nature.”
Archie inquired what precisely they did in their journeys about the world. He had rumpled his hair, and his eyes looked as if he were painfully adjusting a manifold of experience in the light of a new idea.
“First of all, they make money. They are the most efficient bagmen alive. For the rest, they break down things and loosen screws, and they have unlimited funds at their disposal, for Castor spends nearly as fast as he earns… No, no. Not Bolshevism. The donkeys in Moscow have in a sense played Castor’s game, but they were far too crude for him, and to-day I fancy he finds them rather a nuisance. By their folly they are creating a reaction in favour of that democracy which he hates… Remember, I don’t know him. I’ve seen him, but have never spoken to him. I can only speak at second-hand of his methods, but I’ll give you Blenkiron’s summary. Blenkiron says that half a century ago Abraham Lincoln fought a great war to prevent democracy making a fool of itself. He says that Castor’s object is just the opposite—he wants to encourage democracy to make a fool of itself, to inflate the bladder till it bursts… His instruments? The press, for one thing. He has a mighty grip on that. The politicians, too, and every kind of fool organisation for boost and uplift. You’d be amazed to learn how many gushing societies, that look like spontaneous ebullitions of popular folly, have his patient direction behind them. He is the greatest agent provocateur in history.”
“But the thing is impossible,” Archie exclaimed. “He can’t bring it to a head, and I take it that he knows he is not immortal and wants some sort of result in his lifetime.”
Sandy nodded. “He has a general ultimate purpose, but has also a very clear, practical, immediate purpose. He wants to make trouble for America—before she can set her house in order. The United States, Blenkiron says, have reached the biggest crisis in their history. They have got wealth and power, but they have lost the close national integration they had when they were poorer. Their best men are labouring like galley-slaves to discipline their country. They have to give it an adequate law, and a proper public service, and modernise its antediluvian constitution. Castor wants to catch them at the moment of transition, when they haven’t found their balance. He believes that bad foreign trouble, which they couldn’t afford to neglect, would split the unwieldy fabric. Democracy, of which America is the incoherent champion, would become a laughing-stock, and he and his kind would have the reordering of the fragments.”
“I think,” said Janet, “that he has taken on too big a job. Does he imagine that any alliance of Latin republics would have any effect on America? I have heard you say yourself hat she couldn’t be conquered.”
“True.” The speaker’s eyes were on the other girl who was sitting in the shadow outside the circle of firelight.
“No Power or alliance of Powers could conquer America. But assume that she is compelled