The Courts of the Morning

John Buchan

• Publisher: Endymion Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781531298203
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

South America is the setting for this adventure from the author of 'The Thirty-nine Steps'. When Archie and Janet Roylance decide to travel to the Gran Seco to see its copper mines they find themselves caught up in dreadful danger; rebels have seized the city. Janet is taken hostage in the middle of the night and it is up to the dashing Don Luis de Marzaniga to aid her rescue.

IX

~

WHEN ARCHIE AND JANET CAME down to dinner that evening at Veiro they found Don Luis de Marzaniga, a little thinner and browner than before, but spruce and composed as if he were about to dine at his Olifa club. He kissed Janet’s hand, and asked Archie if he had enjoyed the weeks since his return from the Gran Seco.

“I’ve been obeying orders,” was the answer. “There is my commander-in-chief. She’ll tell you how docile I’ve been, and how I’ve never bothered her with questions, though Janet and I are sick with curiosity.”

The tall girl, whose name was Barbara Dasent, smiled. “I’ll testify that he has been a good boy.”

She was very slim, and at first sight the delicate lines her neck and her small head gave her an air of fragility—an impression presently corrected by the vigour and grace of her movements. Her face was a classic oval, but without the classic sculptural heaviness, her dark hair clustered about her head in childish curls, her clear skin had a healthy pallor which intensified the colouring of her lips and eyes. These eyes were a miracle—deep and dark, at once brooding and kindling, as full of changes as a pool in the sunlight, and yet holding, like a pool, some elemental profundity. The lashes were long and the eyebrows a slender crescent. Janet ad crossed the room and stood beside her, and each was to the other a perfect foil. Yet, though they had no feature in common, there was an odd kinship, due perhaps to the young freedom of each, their candid regard and a certain boyish gallantry of bearing.

At dinner, under the Sanfuentes Murillo, Luis cross-examined Archie about his recent doings. It appeared that, on Miss Dasent’s instructions, he had been travelling widely in the coastal flats of Olifa. He had been given introductions from the Minister of Defence, and had been the guest of several regiments, attended an infantry camp of instruction, and taken part in cavalry manoeuvres. Also he had visited various flying-stations, and had made several flights. The result was unqualified admiration.

“I can’t claim to be a military pundit,” he said, “but I now a first-class thing when I meet it. All I have to say that Olifa has got the most completely professional outfit have ever seen. There isn’t one lesson of the Great War he hasn’t learned. Her infantry tactics are the sort of thing we were feeling our way to before the Armistice. Her tanks are the latest pattern, better than anything I’ve seen in England, and, by Jove, she knows how to use them. Her army is mechanised to the full, but not too far, for she has the sense to see that cavalry rightly handled will never be out of date. And she has an amazing good staff, picked from up and down the earth, all as keen as mustard-like what we used to imagine the German staff to be, but less hidebound. Of course I don’t know what strength she has in the way of reserves, and I can’t speak of the fighting spirit, but there’s no doubt she has a most efficient standing army for a nucleus. What puzzles me is why she should want anything so good when she’s so secure.”

Luis asked about the Air Force.

“That was the only thing with which I was a little disappointed,” Archie replied. “It’s extraordinarily good in the scientific way—the last word in machines and engines and all that sort of thing—but just a little lacking in life. Those chaps don’t spend enough hours in the air. They’ve got all the theory and expert knowledge they can carry, but they haven’t got as much devil as we have. Too serious, I should say. Keener about the theory than the game.”

Luis had been listening closely. “You are very near the truth, Senor Roylance,” he said. “We in Olifa have al that science and money can give us, but we have not enough soul. What is your English word—guts?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that.”

“But will say it. And it is perhaps fortunate. I would not blame my nation, for our army is not national, since its leaders are mercenaries.”

“I’m still puzzled. What do you want it for? I never got any figures of man-power and reserves, but if you’ve an adequate shaft behind this spear-head, you’ve a superb fighting-machine. What do you mean to use it against?”

Luis laughed. “It is the conventional insurance premium which our rich Olifa pays. Pays carelessly and without conviction. That is why, as you truly say, our army is made up chiefly of mercenaries. We have collected the best soldiers of Europe who were out of a job. It is a police, if you choose. If a little political war came with a neighbour, Olifa would use her pretty toy and ask only that she got her money’s worth... Unless, of course, it was war which touched her heart, and then she would fight the old way—with her people.”

They sat late at table, Archie answering Luis’s questions and illustrating his views by diagrams on the backs of envelopes. Presently Miss Dasent left the room, and on her return said something to Don Mario. He rose and the way to his sitting-room, where, according to custom a wood fire crackled on the wide hearth. The curtain, usually left untouched to reveal the luminous night, was now closely drawn. A man in a flannel suit stood with his back to the fireplace.

Janet blinked at him for a moment, and then ran up to him with both hands outstretched.

“Oh, Sandy dear, I have been miserable about you. Thank God, you’re safely back. You’re desperately thin. You’re not ill?”

“I’m perfectly well, thank you. But I’ve been pushed up to the limit of my strength. It’s all right. I’ve done it often before, you know. I only want to lie fallow for a bit. It’s good to see you and Archie... I feel as if had come home.”

“Are you safe here?” Janet asked anxiously.

Luis answered. “Perfectly—at present. The Gobernador must suspect something or he would not have been here yesterday. But he can know nothing. We have pickets out, and at the worst we shall get ample warning. To-night, the any rate, we can sleep sound.”

“We have asked no questions,” said Janet. “For the last week Archie has been behaving like the intelligent tourist, and I have been sketching in water-colours. We want to be enlightened, Sandy dear.”

The man addressed—he looked very young in the dim light, for his hair had grown long and was tousled like a boy’s over his forehead—flung himself into an armchair and stretched his lean shanks to the blaze. He slowly filled an old pipe and looked round at the audience—Don Mario erect and prim, Luis sprawling on a couch, Archie swinging his long legs from a corner of the table, Miss Dasent very quiet in the shadow, Janet standing on the tiger-skin rug, an incarnate note of interrogation. He looked round and laughed.

“You ask a good deal. Luis knows everything, and Miss Dasent. Don Mario knows as much as he wants to. But you two are newcomers, so I must begin from the beginning. Sit down on that stool, Janet, and, Archie, get off the table. I’m going to make a second-reading speech, as they say in your little Parliament. After that the House can go into committee...

“First of all, I need hardly tell you that the world to-day is stuffed with megalomania. Megalomania in politics, megalomania in business, megalomania in art—there are a dozen kinds. You have the man who wants to be a dictator in his own country, you have the man who wants to corner a dozen great businesses and control the finance of half the world, you have the man who wants to break down the historic rules of art and be a law to himself. The motive is the same in every case—rootlessness, an unbalanced consciousness of ability, and an overweening pride They want to rule the world, but they do not see that by their methods they must first deprive the world of its soul and that what would be left for their dictatorship would be an inanimate corpse. You see, for all their splendid gift they have no humour.”

“What is Mr Castor’s nationality?” Janet asked irrelevantly.

“He has none. He was born in Austria, and I think he has a Spanish strain in him. Blenkiron has a notion that he has English blood, too, but he cannot prove it. The man is like Melchizedek, without apparent origin. He is what you call a weltkind, the true international.”

“He has no humour,” said Janet with emphasis.

“I agree. But he has most other things, and one is clear and searching mind. His strength, and also his weakness, is that he has no illusions. For one thing, he does not possess the illusion which ordinary people call a creed. He does not want to remake the world on some new fantastic pattern, like the Communists. He has none of Mussolini’s arbitrary patriotism. He wants to root out various things, but I doubt if he has a preference for what should take their place. I don’t profess to understand more than bits of him. He is an egotist, but in the colossal sense, for he has vanity. He considers that he has been called on to do certain things, and that he is the only man living who can. The world, as he sees it, is suffocating from the debris of democracy, and he wants to clear it away. He does not hate it, he despises it. He is the scientist and philosopher who would introduce the reign of reason and the rule of law, but first some decaying refuse called popular liberties must be destroyed. Therefore he is against Britain, but only half-heartedly, for he thinks that with us democracy is tempered by more rational instincts, and that in any case our number is up. But for America he has the unfaltering contempt which a trained athlete might have for a great, overgrown, noisy, slobbering, untrained hobbledehoy. With America it is war to the death.”

“I’ve known other people take that view,” Archie put in.

“With him it is not a view, it is a crusading passion. In Castor you have the normally passionless, scientific mind kindled to a white heat. The mischief is that he is human—not cruel, but inhuman. He will use the ordinary stuff of humanity to further his ends as ruthlessly as a furnace swallows coke. He will do any evil in order that what he considers good may come.”

“That is the definition of a devil,” said Janet.

“Not quite. Castor is just as near being a saint. If he had a different religion he might deserve to be beatified, for he is scrupulously loyal to what he believes to be the right. He’s not evil—he just happens to have missed the human touch. He knows nothing of friendship—nor, of course, of any kind of love. His world is a narrow cell with the big dynamo of his brain purring in it. He is cruel, simply because he cannot conceive the feelings of anybody but himself, and is not interested in them. He is a master over things, and over men so long as he can treat them as things. If he were 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 fatigu...

Table of contents

• PROLOGUE BY SIR RICHARD HANNAY
• I
• II
• III
• BOOK I - THE GRAN SECO
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• IX
• X
• XI
• XII
• XIII
• BOOK II - THE COURTS OF THE MORNING
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• IX
• X
• XI
• XII
• XIII
• XIV
• BOOK III - OLIFA
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• IX
• EPILOGUE