O D T A A

A NOVEL

By

JOHN MASEFIELD

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.

1926

First Published February, 1926.

New Impression April, 1926.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

THE LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS, LIMITED, ST. GILES’ WORKS, NORWICH

TO

MY WIFE

ODTAA

I

Santa Barbara, being the most leeward of the Sugar States, is at the angle of the Continent, with two coasts, one facing north, the other east. The city of Santa Barbara is in a bay at the angle where these two coasts trend from each other.

Those who will look at the map of the State will see that it contains, in all, ten provinces: three eastern, four central, three western, each of which must be briefly described. The visitor sees the land as low-lying coast, growing sugar, with immense ranges of scrub, wild land and pasture behind the sugar country, then foothills above and behind the ranges, and behind the foothills, as the southern boundary of the State, the Sierras of the Three Kings, all forest to the snowline.

The easternmost province of the State is that of Santa Barbara, which contains the capital city. This, Meruel and Redemption, are the three eastern provinces.

Meruel, to the south of Santa Barbara, has a more temperate climate than the western provinces, owing to the cold Southern Drift which follows the prevalent southerly along the coast. Meruel, the capital of the province, stands on a rise of iron outcrop which gives the earth a reddish look. The people of Santa Barbara nicknamed the Meruel land “the Red Country” and the Meruel people “the Reds.”

Redemption, the coal country, lies to the south and west of Meruel. It was formerly a small independent Republic. It was seized by Santa Barbara in 1865, in the war of aggression known as the Redemption War, when a young man, Lopez Zubiaga, the son of a Meruel landowner, “wedded” (as they put it) “the Meruel iron to the Redemption coal.”

The four central provinces are Pituba, near the sea, San Jacinto, in the heart of the State, and the two mountain masses, Gaspar and Melchior.

Pituba, once the home of the warlike Carib race, the Pitubas, is now one of the richest sugar countries in the world. It stretches along the northern coast for nearly two hundred miles, no mile of which is without its plantation, either of sugar or of coffee.

San Jacinto, which lies to the south of Pituba, is the most barren of the provinces; most of it is of that poor soil known as scrubs or burnt land: it is mainly thorny waste, with patches of pasture. In spite of its barrenness, it is most beautiful, because of its expanses. Its chief town, the Mission city of San Jacinto, stands on a peninsula rock above the river of San Jacinto, which rises in the Sierras and comes down in force there, in a raddled and dangerous stream (now controlled so as to be navigable).

Gaspar and Melchior, to the south of San Jacinto, are vast, wild, forested mountain masses.

The three western provinces are Baltazar, Encinitas and Matoche.

Baltazar, to the south, is a mountain mass, forested to the snowline: it is part of the Sierra, like Gaspar and Melchior.

Encinitas, to the north of Baltazar, lies between the San Jacinto River and the Western Bay. Of all the provinces, Encinitas is the most delightful to an English mind. It is mainly an expanse of grass, marvellous to see. It rises from the river into a range of downs or gentle hills, called the Encarnacion Hills, which are crowned with a little walled town, called Encinitas, because the Conquistador, who founded it, came from the village of that name in Spain.

To the north of Encinitas there is a narrow, hilly strip which thrusts out a snout into the ocean. The strip is the western province of Matoche: the snout is the northernmost point of the State, Cape Caliente. The copper found in the hills is smelted and exported at Port Matoche, on the western coast of the snout, in the deep water at the mouth of the Western Bay, the State’s western boundary.

The bay is a deep, dangerous expanse dotted with volcanic islets.

At the time of this story, and for many years afterwards, only seven of the ten provinces ranked as inhabited. The mass of the Sierras, forest to the snowline, were hardly visited by white men: the three forest provinces of Gaspar, Melchior and Baltazar had not been explored. Seasonal rains made the forest unendurable from November until April: the forest fever, to which the Indians burnt copal in copper bowls, was fatal to man and beast from April till November.

At the time of the Spanish Conquest the lowlands were inhabited by small warlike tribes of Caribs who lived in stockaded settlements near the coasts. Of these tribes, the Araguayas, of Meruel, and the Pitubas, of Pituba, were the most important. When the Spaniards landed, Don Manuel of Encinitas, the Conquistador of the State, allied himself to the Pitubas by marrying the daughter of their chief. With the help of his allies he exterminated the Araguayas and drove the survivors of all other tribes into the forests of the south, where a few of their descendants still exist, as forest-Indians; that is, as the shadows of what they were.

After the conquest, vast tracks of land in Encinitas were granted to Don Manuel: other tracts in San Jacinto were granted to a Castilian noble, from whom they passed to a branch of the de Leyvas.

The colony or province of Santa Barbara was administered like all other Spanish possessions in the New World for a little more than three centuries. Jesuit missionaries converted the Indians; the owners of haciendas imported negroes. In the course of the three centuries the northward provinces became sparsely inhabited by horse and cattle breeders, sugar-growers, rum-makers and copper-miners, governed (if it can be called government) by a Viceroy in Santa Barbara city.

In the year 1817, the inhabitants, following the example of other Spanish colonists, broke the link with Spain, by declaring the land to be the Republic of Santa Barbara, with a Constitution partly modelled upon that of the United States. At the time of the foundation of the Republic the State contained, perhaps, one hundred thousand souls, of whom not more than one-third were white.

It happened that a retired English naval lieutenant named William Higgs-Rixon took a prominent part in the capture of Santa Barbara from the Spanish garrison. For this reason, and from the fact that English merchants were the only traders to and from the country, English was taught in the schools, and English people were (as they still are) popular throughout the State. After the War of Independence a good many Englishmen came (and were welcomed) as settlers in the land about Santa Barbara city. In the ’fifties and ’sixties the copper boom brought others, mostly Cornishmen, to Matoche. After the Redemption War a good many more (mostly from the northern Midlands) came to Meruel, to mine iron or coal. In the ’seventies others, from all parts of England, settled as sugar-planters along the northern sea coast in the Pituba country. These men, though they were but a sprinkling, helped profound changes in the land, which in three generations of men multiplied the population tenfold.

It is well, now, to talk of these changes.

Soon after the establishment of the Republic the two political parties in the land became defined as Feudalist and Modernist. In Encinitas and in western San Jacinto, the will of the great landowners was still law: in Santa Barbara City, Pituba and in Meruel a new and vigorous race was demanding freedom from the feudal lords and wider teaching than the priests gave. As the feeling between the two parties ran highest upon the point of Church teaching, the Church party, which was that of the great landlords, came to be known as the Surplices or Whites. For a while, as the Reds were without a leader, the governments of the Republic were White.

Mention was made of one Lopez Zubiaga, who seized the coal country of Redemption in 1865. This Lopez, born in 1840, was the first leader of the Red or forward party to count in affairs. At the time of the Redemption raid, he was a tall, strongly built, masterful and very handsome young man, with a contemptuous manner and savage courage. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, which made some think that he was not the son of the landowner, but of an Englishman, named variously Corbet, Corphitt or Cardiff, about whom there had been talk.

After his success in seizing Redemption, Lopez was elected President of the Republic in place of old General Chavez, the White. As President he rallied the Reds, and carried through what was called “the Liberal Struggle,” which made all Meruel and Redemption places of mines and factories, and took the schools from the control of the Church. After four years of his Presidency, the Whites returned to office, under the hidalgo, Miguel de Leyva, of San Jacinto, a man of burning faith, more ardent than wise, who provoked the forward party almost to the point of civil war. At the next election, the Whites were turned out of office and the Reds put in, with such unanimity that Lopez could rule as he chose. After the election of 1878, which repeated his triumph, Lopez declared himself Dictator, “while his country had need of him.”

Miguel de Leyva, disgusted, retired from politics: the Whites had no other leader, save young General Luis Chavez, who was indolent, and Hermengildo Bazan, who was only a speaker.

The Dictatorship of Lopez was marked outwardly by a great increase in the foreign trade of the eastern provinces, the threefold growth of the city of Santa Barbara, and an improvement of all the ports, harbours and coastwise railways. After 1884, those who studied the land’s politics felt that the real Dictator was no longer Lopez, but old Mordred Weycock, the manager of the United Sugar Company, an unscrupulous business man.

It was at this time that the oddness and brusqueness in Lopez’ character changed to a madness not likely to be forgotten.

The madness began to show itself in a passion for building big and costly public works. He rebuilt the cathedral (a Colonial Renaissance building) on the lines of the temple at Hloatl. He built himself a palace of glass, having heard, though wrongly, that the Queen of England lived in one. He then built himself a summerhouse, roofed with silver plates, and added to it an ivory room inlaid with gold. Being a Red, he caused all the bread used in his palace to be coloured red. He frequented shambles in order to see, as he said, “the divine colour.”

He had two favourites. Livio and Zarzas; two negro servants, Green Feather and the Knife; and one son, the child of his youth, Don José, born in 1860, a depraved youth of sickly beauty, who headed a clique of vicious lads at the court.

Late in the year 1886, the Dictator’s madness began to take other forms, of hatred and suspicion of the Whites, fear of assassination, and the belief that he was god. All these obsessions were fostered by Mordred Weycock, who contrived to win, from each of them, advantages for himself or his firm.

In all his schemes, Mordred was helped by his nephew, Roger Weycock, twenty-seven years of age, who had been in Santa Barbara since 1883, after having failed for the Diplomatic Service. Roger was a tall, polite, brown-haired, fair-bearded man, with a pleasant manner and a pale, inscrutable face. He was the channel through which Englishmen knew Santa Barbara. It was through his able weekly letters to the English press that English opinion was in favour of Lopez for so long. He knew Lopez to be mad; but the Red party favoured his firm and he had no pity for the Whites: old Miguel de Leyva had once kept him waiting in the hall, and had then brushed by to lunch.

Miguel de Leyva was now dead, leaving many children, including his youngest, the girl Carlotta, born in 1868, who even in infancy impressed people as a creature from another world. She comes into this story (as into many others) as a rare thing, whose passing made all things not quite the same. She was of a delicate, exquisite, unearthly charm, which swayed men, women and children: the Indians of San Jacinto used to kneel as she passed: some have said that animals and birds would come to her: at the least she had a beauty and grace not usual.

Nearly all the province of Encinitas was owned by the last descendant of the Conquistador, Don Manuel of Encinitas, who lived at his palace in his town, or in his hacienda below it, with his old mother, whom they called the Queen Dowager.

Don Manuel was born in 1857. He has been so often described, that it need only be said of him that he was a very glorious young man, noble in beauty and in intellect. In the days of this story he was an unmarried man of not quite thirty. In his youth, before his father died, he had had his wild time in the city with other young men. He had been a friend of Don José, Don Lopez’ son, and had practised black magic with Rafael Hirsch. All this ceased when his father died in 1879. Since then he had lived at Encarnacion, breeding horses, for the men of his State, who are among the great horsemen of the world. He took his stature, beauty and masterful fierce eyes from his mother, the Queen Dowager, who had been a Peralta from Matoche.

In October, 1886, Don Manuel met Carlotta de Leyva for the first time: they became betrothed that same month, to the great joy of the Queen Dowager, who had longed to see her son married.

Miguel de Leyva had a sister Emilia, who married a Piranha of Santa Barbara city, and lived there, after her husband’s death, in a house too big for her fortune. She had been much in England with her husband, either for pleasure or the marketing of copper. She spoke English well. She caused her daughter Rosa, who had been for some years a convent friend of her cousin Carlotta, to spend a year in an English household. Rosa returned to Santa Barbara from England some months before this tale begins.

Rosa Piranha was then nearly twenty, being a few months older than Carlotta. She was slight in build and not very strong, but had a mannish spirit, with courage and dash enough for anything. She had no looks: she was very short-sighted: she always wore tinted spectacles, even when indoors. Yet she was amusing, and very attractive: several Englishmen proposed to her during her stay in England; but she would not marry into their Church.

She was brown-haired, not dark like most of her country women. In herself she had that mixture of boyish cheek with feminine grace which one loves in Viola, in “Twelfth Night.”

On New Year’s Day, 1887, Carlotta and Manuel planned to be married at Easter, in the cathedral church of Santa Barbara.

On that same New Year’s Day, Don Lopez, the Dictator, in his palace of Plaza Verde, in Santa Barbara city, gave a lunch to some of the great of the State, the Red ministers, his son Don José, his creatures Don Livio and Don Zarzas, some merchants and English speculators and the Archbishop of Santa Barbara. At this lunch he publicly accused the prelate of using the power of the Church against the Red party. “I have my eyes everywhere, like the Almighty,” he said. “Nor can there be two supreme authorities, here or in heaven.”

To this the Archbishop replied: “There is but one supreme authority: Lucifer has always found that.”

To this Don Lopez answered: “A greater than Lucifer prepares his wings.” Having said this, in tones of threat, he rose from the banquet, told Pluma Verde to call the prelate’s carriage, and invited his other guests to come within, to watch some dancers.

Roger Weycock, who was present at this lunch, has left an account of it in his history, The Last of the Dictators, where he says that, “It made him feel that some explosion within the State was about to occur.” He wrote that evening to the English newspapers that Don Lopez had received information of a White conspiracy against him: “No names were mentioned; but all the great White families, as well as the Church, are said to be involved. It is possible that Don Lopez will be forced to take extreme measures, to end for ever the menace of White reprisals. The Whites have never forgiven and never will forgive his part in ‘the Liberal struggle’ and in the remaking of the land. The Church hates him for his establishment of secular schools: the great landowners hate him for his establishment of a commercial class which out-manœuvres them in Senate and out-votes them in Congress. This must not seem to suggest that either Church or hidalgos would go so far as to employ an assassin; but both parties of the White side control large numbers of violent, ignorant, passionate fanatics, to whom the killing of Lopez would be an act pleasing to God. What Don Lopez seems to expect is a soulèvement générale of the Whites against his government at the time of the Easter celebrations.

“Undoubtedly, with such a ruler as Don Lopez, forewarned is forearmed: we need not doubt that he has the situation well in hand.”

As it happens, another Englishman, without any bias of party or interest, saw Don Lopez on this New Year’s Day, and described him thus: “I watched Don Lopez, while I was with him, very carefully, because of the strange tales I had heard of his extravagance in building, in cedarwood, ivory and silver, etc. I had thought that these were lies or exaggerations, but I am now convinced that they are true. He has built or begun to build such buildings, but not finished them: he never finishes: he begins, then begins something grander, and then begins something new.

“All the time that I was with him some unseen musicians made music upon some Indian instruments, seemingly of some kind of strings and a rattle. It was irritating at first, then perplexing, then troublesome and exciting. I was told that he has this music always in his palace. He listened to what I had to say with attention, and said that what I wished should be done. Then, to my surprise, he said, ‘They are seeking my life. One of them was behind the gateway this afternoon. See there, you see that man passing beyond the gates? He is a murderer, paid by those Whites to kill me. My mission here is not accomplished. It is but begun. What did Jove do in heaven? He forged thunderbolts. He crushed them. But Jove was all-seeing. I, too, am becoming all-seeing. This palace may seem stone to your eyes, but it is not stone. It is all eyes, and this city is all eyes, and I see into their hearts, into their councils, into the pretence of their God. But a little while longer and the world will see that a ruler can be godlike, as in Rome.’

“I was made a little uneasy by his words and by the restless, queer manner in which he uttered them. I had seen him some years before, when I had been much struck by his air of overbearing masterfulness. That air was still on him. He looked masterful and overbearing, but there was something about him now which did not look well. His hair seemed thin and somewhat staring, his skin seemed dry and his eyes both dry and bright. Then his mouth, which had always shown an expression between a snarl and a sneer, seemed permanently caught up at one side, so as to show the teeth. Possibly it was some malformation, possibly some play of muscle, which had become habitual or fixed, but it gave the effect of a state of nerves, never (as I should imagine) quite human, that had become those of a tiger about to bite. I was suddenly reminded of one of the late busts of Nero.

“Seeing me looking through the window at the marble tank surrounding the palace fountain, he said to me, ‘What colour is the water in the fountain?’

“ ‘It looks whiteish.’

“ ‘So has my mercy to the Whites been,’ he said. ‘But let them beware or I will fill that fountain with their blood and their daughters shall come to see it play. If they call too much upon God to help them, God shall reveal Himself. If you have any White friend, tell him that. I am as patient as God. But tell them that.’

“All the time that he spoke his two great negroes stood behind his throne, each holding his sword. They were naked to the waist. People mistook them sometimes for bronzes. That disgusting creature, his son, Don José, stood at another window, killing flies. He was a languid-looking youth, sickly and vicious, with a face of exquisite features, showing neither intellect nor will, nothing but depravity. He turned to me as his father ceased speaking.

“ ‘There will be a baptism of blood,’ he said, ‘to the sound of flutes.’

“It was time at that moment for the Dictator to ride abroad. His Indians entered with his riding costume, a golden head-dress and a tunic of gold chain-mail all set about with the plumes of the scarlet-crested dill-birds.

“ ‘See,’ he said, ‘this is what they force me to wear. I, who am God, the father of this land, have to wear gold mail, lest I be assassinated. Let them see to it.’

“When he had put this on, he looked, as he always did, magnificent beyond description. I understood how it was that his Indians worshipped him as God. They decked him with a scarlet serape and led him out to his horse. It was a white stallion, which he was afterwards said to have fed with human flesh. He and his bodyguard of Indians set out at a gallop. They always galloped at this time from this fear of assassination, which had become an obsession to him. I must say that I was glad when he had gone.

“One of his two negroes, the one with the knife, said, ‘He ride the White horse; that show the Whites he ride them. He ride with spur, too: you see.’ ”

Bill Ridden was an English gentleman who comes a little into this story. In his youth he spent some years in Santa Barbara, where he made a good deal of money in the copper boom at Matoche. He was a very good friend to the Piranhas at this time (and later in the copper crisis). He was a man of strong affections; he kept in touch with his friends in Santa Barbara long after he had returned to England and settled down. He married in 1857. His wife was Sarah Ocle, a loud, fresh-coloured, robust mare of a woman, by whom, as he put it, he “sired some colts and fillies, as well as a darned pup I might have drowned.” This “pup” was his youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, born in 1869, who was not quite eighteen when this tale begins. It was at Bill Ridden’s house that Rosa Piranha spent her year in England.

This house was the Foliats, in Berkshire, where Bill’s mother’s people, the Foliats, had lived. It was a small, red-brick Queen Anne house, with a racing stable at the back and the Downs behind the racing stable. Here Bill bred steeplechasers and rode much to hounds. Bill was an ugly devil, foul-mouthed and rude, something between a publican and a horse-coper in appearance, yet strangely gentle with women and horses. He had a Judge Jeffreys manner on the bench of magistrates. He loved his daughter Bell and hated his youngest son. “If he had been a pup,” he used to say, “I could have drowned him; if he had been a trout, I could have put him back; but being this, by God, there is nothing that I can do, short of pitching him in at the deep end, to see if he’s got guts enough not to sink.”

His wife, Sarah Ridden, was fond of this son, but wished that he would be like others boys, “not always messing about with cog-wheels.” Her children had gone from her into the world, with the exception of her daughter Bell, a year older than the boy. She found life easier with the boy out of the house, “not putting my old man’s back up.” Quiet life, the Liverpool Spring Meeting and asparagus were the things she loved best; but she was a fine rider and understood horses.

Bell Ridden, the daughter, was a lovely, shy girl, worshipped by her father and mother. As she lived at home, she helped her father in the stable: she was clever with horses; the stable boys loved her: she got more out of them than Bill could. It was her instinct that sent the Lilybud to Mandarin, by which Bill got Chinese White, the horse which won him his glory.

The five older children were scattered: Polly and Sally married, Harold in a line regiment, Chilcote and Rowton in the city, in copper.

This brings us to the youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, the Hi of these pages, the lad who had not yet found what he could do. He was of the middling height and build, with brown hair, and a pleasant, freckled face, somewhat puckered at the eyes from his habit of not wearing a hat. His eyes were grey-blue, under eyebrows darker than one would expect from the eyes: his nose was a small pug nose, neatly made and set. His ears were well made and placed. His mouth was wide, pleasant, thin-lipped and firm. He was a nice-looking lad, who would have done well enough under other parents, or with none.

Being the last of the seven, he came at a time when both his parents had had enough of children, but wanted, as they said, “a filly to finish up with.” As Hi turned out to be a colt, or as Bill put it, “another of these buck pups to have about,” he was a disappointment to them from the first.

He went to the school where the other Riddens had been, he got his second eleven colours in his last summer term; but learned nothing; he was “always messing about with cog-wheels.”

In the Christmas holidays Bill called him into his “study,” where he kept two hunting horns, six long hunting-pictures by Henry Alken, seven foxes’ masks (one of them almost white, killed in the winter of the great frost), eleven crops on a rack, three small oil portraits of Moonbird, Sirocco and Peter, much tobacco of all sorts, and many bottles of liqueur, made by himself.

“Now, Highworth,” he said, “you’ve come to an age now when you’ve got to decide what to do. You’ve had a first-rate education; at least, if you haven’t, it’s your own fault, I know it’s cost enough. Now what are you going to be? What do you want to do?”

“Well, sir, as you know, I’ve always wanted to be an engineer.”

“I’ve already gone into that, boy. I thought you knew my mind on that point once for all. But it’s the kind of answer I expected from this last report of yours. You waste your time at an expensive public school messing with toy engines with that young maniac you persuaded us to invite here, and then say you want to be an engineer. A nice thing it would be for your mother and sister to see you a . . . mechanic doing the drains with a spanner. By God, boy, you’ve got a fine sense of pride, I don’t think.”

Hi said that engineering was a fine profession and that lots of people went in for it.

“What do you know about its being a fine profession?”

“Because it gives men all sorts of power, sir.”

“Power be damned, boy. Power to stink of paraffin whenever they go out to dinner; though that must be seldom, even now, I’m glad to think.”

“Sir James Russel was a fine man, sir; and so was William Horrocks, who made the Gartishan Dam.”

“Sir James Russel may have been God Almighty, for all I know or care; I never heard of him; but William Horrocks I do know, or at least know of, for his uncle was old John Horrocks, the mealman down at Kill Hill, and a dirtier, old, snuffy scoundrel I never saw out of an almshouse.”

“I don’t know what his uncle was, sir.”

“No, boy, but if you will let me say so, the point is, that I do.”

“Yes, sir, but I am talking of William Horrocks.”

“I think I understand as much. I am merely pointing out to you, in the teeth of a great deal of interruption, that your hero was a man whom no one here would touch with a barge-pole or have inside his house.”

“Sir, a man ought not to be judged by what his uncle is, but by what he is in himself.”

“A man is judged by what his uncle is. In this country, thank God, having respectable relations counts for a good deal, and so it should. You’re a Ridden and a Foliat, and I’m not going to have you messing an honoured name with wheel-grease because you’ve read some damned subversive rag which you’ve neither the sense to drop nor the wit to judge. There are some things which a man can do and keep his self-respect and be asked out to dinner, but going round with a spanner isn’t one of them.”

“I don’t ask to go round with a spanner, sir, nor to be asked out to dinner.”

“What do you ask, then?”

“I would like to learn engineering, sir, because I’ve always enjoyed engines and the application of power, and that sort of thing.”

“What do you call that but going round with a spanner? And how do you propose to learn engineering?”

“I hoped, sir, that you would let me go to an engineering works.”

“Engineering works be damned.”

“I don’t see it, sir. It’s the thing I should do best.”

“Well, I do see it, sir, and it’s the thing I won’t have.”

“But why not, sir? I should work at it. I shouldn’t disgrace you.”

“Your notions of disgrace aren’t mine. Your notions of disgrace are the sort of damned sentiment that will wreck this country and all that’s in it.”

“I don’t see why, sir. I don’t want to argue with you, sir; but it is important to me: what I am to do all my life.”

“It is equally important to me that my son should not make a mistaken choice.”

“But what a man most wants to do, sir, can’t be a mistaken choice.”

“You’re not a man; but a damned young ass. That being so, and it is so, it’s for me to decide. I’ve got to supply the money whatever you do; I suppose you won’t deny that.”

“I was wondering, sir, whether you would advance to me Aunt Melloney’s money, that I’m to have when I’m of age, and let me pay for myself.”

“Pay what for yourself?”

“The fees or premiums, sir, for going through the shops.”

“So that’s what the fellow meant, was it? Now I know. ‘The shops,’ he said. There was a drunken engineer at Newmarket, who said, ‘Let the gentleman keep clear of the shops.’ He was drunk when he said it; but that’s what he meant; now I know; and he showed a fine sense of the situation.”

“Would you advance me the money, sir?”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort. These engineers and fellows are a gang I will not tolerate. They defile God’s country. They’ve already spoiled the hunting, and the racing’s following as fast as it can go. If you’d been a boy with any guts, instead of clockwork, you’d have been glad, I should have thought, to have been at home here, and borne a hand in the stable. Breeding is about the last thing this poor country’s got in these damned days. We’ve still got horses, thank God. We don’t depend on a traction-engine gang, doing a tenth of the work for double the money. Why don’t you take off your coat and come into the stable? It’s a needed job; a pleasant job; and a gentleman’s job, what’s more. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, sir; but I’m not very good at horses. Besides, you’ve got Bell in the stables. I should only be in the way.”

“Ashamed of working with your sister, are you?”

“No, sir; but Bell wouldn’t want me there, and you’d always be swearing at me.”

“Damme,” Bill said, “there are things in you boys that would make any father swear. You go to a prep. school for three years, then to a public school for five years, then you ask to be kept for another seven while you learn a profession, and by God, when you’ve learnt it, you can’t make a living at it. I’ve been talking to your mother about this, as well as to Rosa Piranha before she sailed. You’ll not go back to school, that I’m resolved on, after this last report. You’ll stay here a week or two to get some clothes, and then you’ll do what I did. You’ll go to Santa Barbara and see if you can keep your head above water by your own hands. If you can, well and good. You will have letters to people; a lot better people than I ever had; and you will have time given you to look about you. You ought to be able to make good; I don’t say in copper, that is over, but in a new land there are new things and new opportunities. There are always sugar, tobacco and ranching; there should be timber, cocoa, piacaba, countless things. As I said, you ought to be able to make good. If you can’t, it will be your own lookout. You’ve got to paddle your own canoe, like any other youngest son. Now I’m not going to have any argument about the superior beauties of cog-wheels. I’ve written to people and written about your ticket. Since you won’t work in the stable here and have no choice of your own, except a damned dirty falallery which I won’t have, you’ll go to Santa Barbara. You may count yourself more than lucky to have the chance. Very few youngest sons ever get into the sun at all, but stink in a rotten town, by God, where even the horses puke at the air they breathe.

“You turn up your nose, do you? I wish I was going to Santa Barbara to have my time again. You can turn up your nose as much as you like, but that’s what you’ll do, so make up your mind to it. When you’ve seen the place you’ll thank me for having sent you there. When you’ve been there a few days you’ll thank your stars for your luck.”

Hi did not answer his father, knowing that thumbs were down. His heart sank at the thought of the foreign country, yet leaped again at the thought of liberty from school and life beginning. He had still one little ray of hope, which his mother extinguished.

“Your father’s got his back up,” she said. “Between you and me, Hi, he has had a bad year. Newmarket was nearly a finisher. So be a good old sport and go; there’s a dear. There’s far more scope there than here; everybody says so. Besides, your Aunt Melloney’s money went into Hicks’s. I don’t know that you could get it out, even if your father agreed.”

* * * * * * *

There was a brief delay, in spite of Bill’s speed, because the first letter from Rosa Piranha brought the news that Santa Barbara politics were somewhat unsettled. Bill had to pause to make some enquiries, through his sons in the copper business and his friends in the United Sugar Company. “It’s probably nothing much,” he said, when he had heard the reports. “These Reds and Whites are always at each other, in the way these foreigners always are. It won’t concern the boy, if he’s got the sense to keep out of it. Let him go and learn sense in the only school for it.” After this, there was a second brief delay for farewell visits to relations. When Hi returned from these, his clothes, of drill and flannel, were ready in their ant-proof tin trunks. Towards the end of February, he sailed for Santa Barbara city in the Recalde.

During the week in which he left home, Don José, the son of the Dictator, caused his favourite, Lucas Zanja, to be beheaded in the ivory room, “so that he might enjoy,” as he said, “the beauty of the blood upon the ivory.” Don Lopez’ papers called this a

DASTARDLY ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE

OUR PRESIDENT’S SON

and added in smaller type

ASSASSIN PERISHES IN THE ATTEMPT.

The Whites did nothing. Zanja was infamous, even for a Red of the palace set.

II

Hi had planned to learn “enough Spanish to rub along with” on the voyage out, but fate disposed of this plan. He was seasick till after Lisbon; then they started cricket; then, by chance, he met the third engineer, who was as fond of cog-wheels as himself. After this, he passed most of his time either in the third engineer’s cabin or in the engine-room. He learned no Spanish whatever. “You’ll not need it,” the third engineer said, “they’re very intelligent people: they’ll make out what you want.”

Ten mornings later Hi was roused from sleep by his cabin steward.

“The dawn is just breaking, Mr. Ridden,” he said. “We are just entering the outer harbour now.”

Hi turned out on deck in his pyjamas; he saw before him the promised land of Santa Barbara about which he had thought so much. It was still dim, close in shore. A big light was near at hand to his right; a small revolving light blinked far away to the left. In between, in the arc of the bay, were the lights of the city and of the ships at anchor. The city itself was little more than a smudge against a darkness. Far beyond the city, in a line like an army, were the high Sierras of the Three Kings. Their peaks rose up out of the clouds like mountains in another world. As they were now catching the dawn they seemed made of jewels. Mount Gaspar was golden. Mount Baltazar was like a bubble of blood, and Mount Melchior a blue and evil finger glistening. As Hi watched, amazed by the beauty of the scene, colour began to come upon the bay. He saw away to his left an enormous expanse of shallow water, over which strange birds, such as he had never seen, were now passing from their night ashore.

“You see those birds?” said the fourth officer of the Recalde beside him. “They’re bobacherry birds. You always see them working their lower jaws as though to get the cherry in. It’s a pretty place, Santa Barb, of a morning like this.”

He passed away to get the watch to the washing of the decks; Hi remained staring at the shore.

“I had never thought that it was to be like this,” he thought. “It’s like an earthly paradise. I might have been stewing in London like Rowton; or being frozen up six months of the year in British Columbia. I shall be as happy here as the day is long.”

As the Recalde passed the dead-slow limit Hi saw some lighters bearing down upon her from both sides, urged by the sweeps of such men as he had never seen nor dreamed of. They were wild-looking men of enormous stature. All were almost naked; all shone as though the life in them made them radiant. All were of a rich red-golden colour like new pennies. Even the smallest of them looked a match for two strong Europeans. Even the most benign of them looked like the devil he was and the cannibal he could be. All wore gold, ivory or copper placques, shaped like new moons, which hung from their noses and covered their mouths. They looked curiously like the lids of letter-boxes.

“See those fellows, Mr. Ridden?” said the captain on the bridge. “They’re Pitubas from up-country and they’re cannibals to a man. You’d better put a coat over those pyjamas of yours, or the sight of you may be more than they can stand. They like their meat white, and they like it young.”

Some of the lighters swept alongside and made fast, the winches at once began at all three hatches; baggage and mails were hove out before the Recalde reached her moorings. At breakfast the tables were covered with flowers and fruits, of kinds new to Hi. Clinging to the flowers were insects, coloured like jewels, shaped like sticks, or leaves or blades of grass.

“This is your first taste of the new world, Mr. Ridden,” said the captain, “what d’you think of it?”

“I think it’s amazing, sir,” Hi said.

“Well, it’s all that,” said the captain, “but after a few years of it, you’ll curse these blue skies and give a year’s pay to be able to see your breath.”

“I don’t think I shall ever tire of this, sir,” Hi said. “It’s the kind of place I have dreamed of all my life.”

“Pretty scenery,” the captain said. “But give me Sefton Park.”

* * * * * * *

After breakfast, Hi was rowed ashore from the Recalde, to begin his new life. He saw the Recalde, which linked him with home (for his mother had walked her deck and leaned over her rail), now drop away into the past. In front of him was a new world, to which he had at present three keys, his friendship with the Piranhas, a letter to Mr. Roger Weycock of the Sugar Company, and a letter to Mr. Allan Winter, a sugar-planter (not far from the city) whom Bill had known in the past. These were his keys, but his father had told him not to trust to them. “The thing you’ve got to trust to, and the only thing, is just you yourself. That’s the only key that will open doors to a man, of any kind worth getting open.”

With some distrust of this key and some anxiety about his boatman’s fare, he drew near to the landing stairs, where pirates of five colours, in turbans and kerchiefs of every colour, showed their teeth at him and offered him all things, from brothels to the new cathedral. As the boat sidled up to the steps, he heard his name shouted: “Mr. Highworth. Mr. Ridden. Mr. Highworth.” He caught sight of a little man diving down the stairs at him and crying, “Dammy, dammy, dammy, I’ll get drunk to-night.”

“O, Mr. Highworth, Mr. Highworth, Mr. Ridden,” he cried. “Don’t ’ee know me? I knew you, sir; the minute I seen ’ee.” Here he turned on the other pirates who were laying hold of Hi’s baggage. “Get out of this,” he said, in the seaport language made up of the oaths of all civilised lands. “Get out of this, heekoes de pooters. I take all the Señor’s gear. Don’t ’ee know me, Mr. Highworth? I know thee, soon’s I seen ’ee.” He was weeping like a child and sucking his tears into his mouth with twitches of his face: he had all Hi’s baggage in his hands. “Pay the boatman, sir,” he said. “One of the big ones and a small one. This sort is sharks. You’d ought to have took a licensed boat, which would have been only one peseta.” He led the way up the stairs and shoved through the crowd on the Mole. “O, dammy, dammy,” he kept saying, “I’ll break into my burial money, but I’ll get drunk to-night.” He was dressed in an old pair of English riding breeches, a black velvet coat, much too tight at the shoulders and elbows, a tall black sombrero, and part of a yellow serape. Hi didn’t like the look of the man, nor his display of emotion.

“Look at me, Master Highworth,” he said. “Don’t ’ee know me?”

“No, I don’t,” Hi said. “Who are you?”

“Don’t ’ee know ’Zekiel Rust?” the man said. “I did use to beat for Squire William Ridden, many’s the time, till I had to run for it. I knowed you and your father and Mr. Rowton and Miss Mary. But you were young, Mr. Highworth. You might never have heard tell. They may have kept it from you, the deed of gore I done. I’m not an ordinary man, you understand. I had to run for it; I’m Rust, the murderer. It was I killed old Keeper Jackson. I’d a-been hung, if they’d a-took me. Now you remember me? You remember how I killed Keeper Jackson?”

“Good Lord,” Hi said. “Yes; now I remember. And you have been here ever since.”

“Dammy, dammy, bless you for remembering,” the man said. “Now, but Master Highworth, I don’t want to presume; but I’ve been all these years, seven years now, in this unchristian land, and I never see a word of anyone come from the old part. Anyhow I’ll see to thy baggage, Master Ridden. Now you want to go to a good hotel. The Santiago is the one for you. I’ll see you to there, Master Highworth, and I’ll look after you, and don’t you turn from me, Master Highworth, for anyone would have killed Keeper Jackson, the way he spoke.

“I was out on a moony night, and I’ll tell ’ee just where I were. I were up there by the valley, where the water comes out; and it wasn’t murder really. I’d gone out with my old pin-fire. It was a lovely moony night, and I got a hare. Well then, a hare’s a rebel, ain’t he, and game? So I got a hare and put ’un in my pocket and I was going on away along up, when I see another hare. He was on a bank just above the road. So ‘I’ll have ’ee, my master,’ I says, and I up after him and I give him my pin-fire and he went over the bank, and I went over the bank; and he wasn’t a hare, not really, he was a fox. I see him when I got up the bank. And there was Keeper Jackson and he says, ‘I’ve got you, my man,’ he says, ‘you best come quiet.’ And I says, ‘That wasn’t a hare,’ I says, ‘that was a fox, and a fox is a rebel and he isn’t game.’ And he says, ‘You come quiet. I’ve had my eye on you a long time,’ he says, and he lets fly at me with his gun. And one of the pellets went through my gaiters, and so I give him pin-fire. And when I see I killed him, I go along up the downs and there I come upon a man driving sheep. I put old pin-fire in a ditch and cover him over. I goes along with the man driving the sheep, until we come to Salisbury. But I’ll tell you all about that. We’ll go along to the Santiago.”

Hi remembered the man very well now as a poacher, who did odd jobs for Squire Bill in the dog-breaking and ferret business. It was perfectly true that he had murdered Keeper Jackson and had been searched and advertised for as a murderer, but had escaped.

Hi had been only ten at the time; but the thing had made a stir in that quiet place.

By this time Ezekiel had hailed a carriage, partly by signs and partly by noises, which the signs explained. For a moment he showed Hi plainly that he meant to run after the carriage until it reached the hotel, but this Hi would not allow. He made him sit with him inside.

“You’re the first ever I’ve seen from anywhere near those parts, Mr. Highworth,” Ezekiel said. “You see, after I got to Salisbury, they read in a paper how the body was found and it was me, so I thought I’d best not stay there, so I out of the pub, and, as I come out of the pub, there come up thirteen policemen and they were looking for me. And they walked straight by me and never took me. So I thought the best thing I could do is to follow these men now they’ve passed me, so I followed them along a bit, and then they separated, and I thought, ‘This won’t do,’ so I went along the road a bit and there was a man driving some cows, so I said to him, ‘I’m going along the road a bit. Shall I help thee drive?’ So I drive them along a bit, and he said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ And I thought, ‘Well, it won’t do to tell anybody where I’m going,’ so I said, ‘I’ll just turn back and go into the town now.’ And so I turned back, because I thought, ‘Well, he’ll notice me,’ and he must have been suspicious or he wouldn’t have asked where I was going to. And I thought, ‘Now, I’ll diddle him like I diddled the policemen. I’ll go right across this town and out the other side. No one would think of looking for me there.’

“Well, I went across and, as I was going across, I passed like an inn yard, and just at that inn yard door, like a gateway, there was Black George Rylands that used to drive Mr. Hanshaw. If I’d a-took another step I’d a-been right into him, and so I thought, ‘Now, Ezekiel Rust, you’re doomed. They all knows that you’re here. They’re all on the scent.’ So then I don’t know what to do, and presently I see Black George turn away into the inn, so then I made one dart.

“So then I got out of Salisbury, and I come up out on a place, like it was downs, and there were some gipsy fellows there. I’d known some of them come round with baskets, but they didn’t know me, and I asked them which way I’d better go to get out of England, and they said they’d set me on the road, part of the way, and so we set off next day and we come to a town. I thought I was safe when I was with them, but, coming through that town, my blood run cold.”

“Why?” said Hi. “Were there more police?”

“No, Mr. Ridden, there was not more police, there was soldiers—soldiers after me, hundreds of ’em. I come into the town, and there was all they soldiers in red coats, looking for me. But I got past ’em and I come to a town, and there was a man wanting another man to help him take charge of a bull. He was coming out to these parts and there was to have been another man in charge of the bull, but the other man, if you understand me, Mr. Ridden, he didn’t want, when the time come, to live up to his bargain. And I didn’t want to let it be known, not at once, that I was eager to get out of the country, because that wouldn’t have done. They’d all have known that I was a murderer, if I let ’em think that. Naturally that was the first thing they’d have thought. So I pretended first I was afraid of bulls, and then I said I didn’t like to leave my old mother, and then I said I didn’t much like these foreign parts by what I’d heard of them. I let them think the wrong thing, you see, Mr. Highworth. But in the end I said I’d help take the bull. So then they said they didn’t want to run any risks, and said, ‘You’d better come on board straightaway.’ So they took me along and we passed through a gate where there was a lot of notices and there I read what made my blood run cold. Now I had always been against they photographs. Often people said to me, ‘Now you stand there and let me take your picture.’ But I knew better. ‘No,’ I always used to say. My golly, Mr. Highworth, I tell ’ee, there they’d got me all described and wrote out. ‘Wanted, for murder, suffering from a crushed left thumbnail,’ it said. It must have been Mrs. Thompson told them that.

“You may talk what you like, Mr. Ridden, about there not being a God, but there is a God. And how do I know that there is a God? Because, when I read that, there was a policeman there and I got my left thumb in my pocket at the moment, and, if I’d not had my left thumb in my pocket at that moment, why, he’d have seen it, wouldn’t he?

“There, that shows you whether there’s a God or not. So the other fellows that wanted me to take the bull, they didn’t want me to be reading there; they wanted me to come along. But it wouldn’t have done to come along, not with that policeman there. No, because he’d have thought at once, ‘There’s something funny,’ if I’d have gone along. There was fifty pounds reward, too, for me.

“And the policeman says to one of the chaps that was with me, ‘Seen anything of this chap?’ he says.

“ ‘No,’ they says, ‘worse luck, because we could do with fifty pounds.’

“ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘he’s pretty sure to be coming around here. Who’s this you’ve got?’

“ ‘Why,’ they says, ‘he’s a drover coming to look after the old Astounder, that big bull they’ve got on board.’

“ ‘Well, I wish him joy of his job, then,’ the policeman said, ‘for a bull is a fair coughdrop, when he’s seasick.’

“Well then, we got on board the ship. That’ll show you whether there’s a God or not.

“Well, I hope your troubles were at an end then,” said Hi.

“No, Mr. Highworth, they were not. And why were they not? Why, use is second nature, as we say. Soon as I got on board that old ship, they said the captain wanted to see me and so I thought, ‘Well, now they’ve caught me; now what am I to do?’ Then I thought I’d better go, I might brazen it out. And I went up to a place all shining, and there was all the chief detectives of London town come to look for me. And the captain, he says, ‘Now, my man, what’s your name?’ Now what would you have answered? Use is second nature, isn’t it? So I plumped out straightaway ‘Ezekiel Rust,’ I said. Then, directly I said that, I see what I done. And he said, ‘Well, you put your name on that paper there.’ And then I know what to do. I said, ‘Please, sir, I can’t write.’ And so he says, ‘Well, you must put your mark.’ And there was a man writing on a paper and he wrote my name, only he hadn’t wrote it right. He wrote it wrong, because he hadn’t followed what I said. He put ‘Jack Crust.’ And so I put my mark and the detectives they looked at me and they didn’t recognise me and I thought, ‘My boys, there’s the worth of fifty pounds in me and I never been worth more than eleven and a penny at one time before, and that they cheated me of, coming back from the races.’ And so he said, ‘Now, my man, go down to that bull and mind he don’t toss you. They call him the Wrekin’s Astounder,’ he said, ‘and he’ll astound you, if you don’t be careful.’

“And I went down and had a look at the bull and I thought ‘This ’ere creature will be a friend to me. They won’t come looking for me, not down with this old Astounder.’ But they did come looking for me, and a policeman come and they come with the captain and he says, ‘Who’ve we got here,’ he says.

“ ‘Oh, that’s the prize bull and his keeper,’ they says, ‘what you read about in the papers.’

“ ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘now I’m safe. There won’t be any more policemen come along for me.’ Then the steward come down. He calls me, ‘Crust, Crust. Where’s this man, Crust?’ he says. It make my blood run cold to hear my name called like that. So he says, ‘Come along and get your tea, man. Get your tea while you can eat it. We shall be gone in another hour and you’d best have something to be sick on, if you’re going to be sick.’

“Well, I sat down to supper with a lot of others, and be darned if one of them didn’t say, ‘Your name Crust? You any relation of the murderer?’

“ ‘No,’ I said, ‘thank God.’

“And another said, ‘What murderer’s that, Bert?’

“ ‘Why,’ he says, ‘a man called Crust shot a gamekeeper and there’s fifty pounds reward for him.’

“So then I saw that they suspected me and I said, ‘There’s only one way to deal with murderers and it’s what they call the old way. They used to get a great big tin of paraffin and they put the murderer into that and then they boil him. Wherever that’s been tried,’ I said, ‘people know enough not to do any more, because they know what they’ll get.’

“And then one of them said, ‘Yes, but they’re not always caught. They know that.’

“And I said, ‘No, they’re not always caught at once, but in the end they’re always caught.’

“Now you’d think that I’d run dare-devil escapes enough by that time. That very evening the ship began to go and I thought, ‘Now I’m free.’ And then I wake up in the night and the ship were groaning awful. She gave great creaking groans like right down and I thought, ‘I know how it’s going to be. There’s going to be a storm, because it knows that I’m on board and there’ll be a storm until they find out who it is.’ And then some men came by with a lantern and I was in the stall, if you understand me, next to my bull, and I lay down in the straw and they went past. They didn’t see me. And the next morning, when I got up, I thought, ‘I’ll see whether we’re away from England or not.’ So I went up, and the first thing I see you could have knocked me down. There was a lot of men-of-war’s men. Some of them was here and some of them was there, if you understand what I mean. They made my blood run cold. ‘I see what it is,’ I said, ‘They know I’ve come this way, but they don’t know which I am and so they’re stopping and watching every place. My only chance is to keep down just by the bull.’ So I went down to him and he knew I had shot old Jackson, and he rammed at me with his great horns and I stayed there all day. I stayed down there two weeks. Proper lot of whiskers I grew while I was down there. At the end of that time the captain said, ‘I’ve never had a man,’ he said, ‘look after a beast like you’ve looked after that old bull. Now I’ll give you five pounds,’ he said, those were his words, ‘I’ll give you five pounds,’ that’ll show you what he thought of me, ‘if you’ll stay and take the other bulls that we have, like you took this. He eats out of your hand just like a tame canary.’

“So I said, ‘No, thank you, sir, I’m sure. I’d like to go with my bull.’

“So you’d think my troubles were at an end then. We come to the foreign place where the bull was to go ashore. It wasn’t here, it was somewhere further down from here. I heard one of the men say, ‘The police-boat’s come alongside,’ and then my blood run cold. I thought, ‘They know that I’m on board here, because why, they’ll have sent the description and that. It would have gone quicker by post than we could have come.’ So I stayed down by my bull and presently, when we got the bull ashore, there was a policeman, at least he didn’t look like what we should call a policeman. He stopped me, but luckily for me there was the captain there and he knew me and he said, ‘He’s come with the bull.’ And so I went with that bull; oh, a matter of five hundred miles, I should think. I don’t know where we didn’t get to. I come to a very nice place. I never see more rabbits than were in that place, though they weren’t rabbits neither, come to think of it: I thought, ‘If I had got old pin-fire and my two ferrets, I’d have some of you fine chaps.’

“Well, that’s seven years ago, and I’ve been up and down since, and I’m married to one of these foreigners now. Isabella her name is. I don’t understand what she says half the time, because she don’t talk any Christian language. And we live in Medinas Close, Cercado as they call it, but it means close, three floors up, number 41; where we’ve got a room, and, if ever you want me, Mr. Highworth, it’s the middle room of three, and there’s no job I can’t turn my hand to; or if you want an English body-servant, it wouldn’t matter my having a wife, because I knowed your father, Mr. Highworth, Squire William, and I know all about this land, in case you wish to know. There’s goings on and there’s goings on, but what I once say a white man is a white man, isn’t he? You can’t get away from that. Isn’t he a white man? And why did the Lord make him a white man, do you suppose? Why, so that he shouldn’t be a black man, I suppose. Very well then, there’s fine goings on. I don’t say a word against black men. There’s very good ones here, very cheerful sort of people, the black men here. Only their feet—they don’t have feet like we do. The leg-bone comes down in the middle of the boot, not at the end, like with us. But, when you get used to that, they’re very nice, cheerful people; they wouldn’t do you any harm. You trust the black people and they’ll trust you. No, it’s these yellow fellows, those are the ones, and there’s queer goings on. Now, look there, look there, Master Highworth Foliat Ridden, there’s what I don’t like to see, those yellows.”

At that moment the carriage had to draw to the pavement. There came a noise of a barbaric music of rattles, drums and gongs, to which cavalry were marching. A column in twos came slouching by the carriage. They were led by an almost naked yellow savage who wore scarlet plumes in his hair. The music followed him, swaying from side to side or giving little leaps in their seats from the excitement of the rhythm. After the music came the troop of perhaps fifty savages, carrying red pennoned lances. They wore nothing which could be called uniform, except the metal moons over their mouths. Some wore linen coats or drawers, some had ponchos or serapes. They were smoking, singing and calling out to the passers-by.

“There,” Ezekiel said, “they’re the yellows. Tents of Shem, I call it. They all got lids to their mouths. Government’s made those yellow soldiers; and they come in, hundreds of them. Now, Government doesn’t see them in the way we see them; they don’t live with Government the way they live with us. But these yellow fellows, they’ve been brought into this here city, and they don’t look Christians do they, and they aren’t Christians. And why aren’t they Christians? Because they’re cannibals. And they’ve been billeted down Medina Close, and what do you think they say they’ve come here for? They’re going to eat baked Christians, they say, baked Christians!”

He said all this in a broad English country dialect, mixed up with scraps of Spanish and emphasised by a lot of signs, which no doubt could be understood by Isabella. Hi thought that the man was as mad as a hatter as well as being a murderer.

He did not quite like being with a mad murderer, even though it was seeing life, but it smote him to the heart to see the poor old fellow weeping at the sight of him, and swearing to be drunk that night, even if it took the burial money: his heart warmed to him.

They drove through a square where a squadron of Pituba lancers, newly arrived in town, were forming a bivouac. These men looked as though they had been on a foray. Some of them had newly-slaughtered sheep slung across their horses in front of them, others had big round loaves of army bread or, in some cases, chickens, on their lance-points. They rode uncared-for, wiry, evil little horses of a pale sorrel colour. They rode with a leather thong instead of reins. Most of them had no stirrups, but knotted leather thongs, hanging from the saddles, which they clutched between their toes.

“Now, Master Highworth,” ’Zeke said, “I don’t expect anything from you, neither now nor any time. You’re a great gentleman and you don’t want to come and speak with a murderer; not that he was a murderer. And why wasn’t it a murder? Because old Jackson, he was a rebel, and he fired at me, didn’t he, and he’d got a better gun than me, didn’t he, and he shot me through the gaiters, didn’t he, and besides it wasn’t a hare I was after, it was a fox, and he knew that as well as I, and I didn’t know, not really, when old pin-fire would go and when he wouldn’t, for the matter of that. But Number 41 Medinas Close, three floors up. Don Crust they calls me and my wife Señora Crust. Anybody knows me. I could tell you of queer goings on, very queer; things you’d want to know, so as you could watch out, Master Ridden. But there’s another thing, Master Highworth; you wouldn’t want to come to Medinas Close not after dark, not in your good things. It’s always safer to wear a poncho—because why? Why then, if they come at you, you’ve got something to stop it with. It isn’t like these ordinary tight things. You can’t really tell where a man ends inside a blanket.

“Besides, there’s another thing, Master Highworth, which I wouldn’t tell to everyone; but old Keeper Jackson’s forgiven me. He didn’t at first, not he. In the night, he used to come to me, ‘Darn ’ee,’ he said, ‘I’ll have ’ee yet,’ he said. He used to come all sideways at me with his blue teeth at first; not quite at first, you understand, Master Highworth; for he must have been a bit confused at first, from old pin-fire and being in the moon, but it was when I was with the bull he began to come. Many a shiny night he come at me. ‘You come back,’ he said, ‘you best come quiet, or darn ’ee I’ll make ’ee come.’ And he done his best to make me come; there were temptations come to make me go back, but I saw through them. But he lost track of me among this new religion. He didn’t know the lingo or something, or else their tiddlewinks upset him.

“Then one night he come again; be blest if he didn’t come again. But he didn’t come like he ever come afore. He come in sort of shiny, not what you would call an angel, Mr. Ridden and sir, but he hadn’t so many teeth as the other times, if you understand what I mean. ‘Darn ’ee, Rust,’ he says to me, ‘you’ve given me a bad go in Tencombe graveyard, along of all them damned and women. But I’m out of sitting there,’ he said, ‘and I don’t mind about it now, like I did. It’s a darned poor snipe,’ he said, ‘could sit on a grave seven years and bear malice at the end. Besides,’ he said, ‘I’m going; they’ve given me a horse, and I’m off in the morning.’

“He wouldn’t tell me where he was off to. He was always one of they artful ones. ‘I thought I’d tell ’ee I was going,’ he said, ‘there’s a whole lot of us got horses.’

“But 41 Medinas Close is where you’ll find me, Master Hi; it isn’t a nosegay, nor anything to please the eye. It’s back of the cathedral, not dead back of it, for that’s the Bishop’s, but keep to the right of that, and then there’s a gate, but you mustn’t take that, for it don’t lead anywhere, but bear round, and then you’ll come to a place stinks like chemicals, for it is chemicals; only you don’t go in there, but more round, if you understand, till you come into Two Brothers Fountain Lane. Well, it isn’t far from there. Two naked brothers in a fountain; you’d think they’d a-been ashamed; but these foreigners don’t know the value of clothes the same way that we do.”

“How did you know me?” Hi asked. “I was only ten or eleven when you saw me last.”

“Master Highworth, I’ve known all your family since I don’t know when. I know your blessed great-grandfather, when he wore his pigtail. But use is second nature, as we say; they all wore pigtails, come to think of it. Then I know old Mr. William and Master Rowton, not your brother Master Rowton, but your father’s, the squire’s, older brother that was. Lord, he was a proper one, Master Rowton. ‘A horse can jump anything,’ he used to say, ‘if you want him to.’ Well, he wouldn’t take warnings; not once, nor twice, so the third time they bring him home on a door. That was jumping into that pit at Beggar’s Ash. Old Mr. William didn’t say much about his son, but he took on about the six-year-old, for he’d backed him in a race.

“So when I seen ’ee, I said, ‘That’s a Ridden out of the Foliats,’ I said; ‘don’t tell me, because it can’t be anybody else. And it won’t be Mr. Chilcote, for Mr. Chilcote keeps his lip cocked up, and besides, this is too young for Mr. Chilcote. And Mr. Rowton’s got a swelled mouth, like old Mr. William had the same, almost as though he’d had a smack on it, so it won’t be him. It’s young Mr. Highworth.”

Hi promised to see him within a few days. He did not like to offer the old man money, but contrived to make him a present, partly as a wedding present, partly to celebrate his meeting with a Tencombe man. He found himself in an upper room of the hotel, looking out on an array of roofs from which washing was hanging. Somehow, the washing looked more romantic in that bright light than it had ever looked in England. He was cheered at being at last an independent man of the world. He had had a lovely voyage, and at the end of it there had been this welcome, from one who knew all his people and the land from which he came.

His room had a scarlet carpet and a red plush rocking-chair, which seemed out of place in that climate, already as hot as an English May. The walls, which had been white, were marked with dirty fingers. Somebody, who had occupied the room earlier that morning, had smoked cigars in it. Bitten ends of cigar were in a flower-pot near the window. The place seemed frowsy, untidy and feckless. The mosquito-curtains over his bed were smeared with the bloody corpses of old mosquitoes. All round the room, wherever the carpet failed to reach the wall, little pale yellow ants came and went. He sat down upon his bed, feeling suddenly homesick; then, realising that there were three electric fans in the room, he set them all going, knelt down and began to unpack. He had not knelt for thirty seconds when something bit him viciously in the leg; glancing down, he saw a small black thing flying at great speed along the floor. He looked at the place bitten, which had swollen and was itching. He scratched the place and went back to his unpacking, but was bitten again and then again. This time, having learned to be very swift, he slew his attacker, who smelt, when dead, worse than he liked. Feeling indignant at being placed in such a room, he went down to the hotel bar to see the proprietor.

“Yes, Mr. Ridden,” said the proprietor, “what is it? What can I do for you?”

“Look here,” Hi said, “you’ve put me in a room all full of bugs and things.”

“I haven’t got a bug in the house,” the man said. “Them ain’t bugs, them’s bichos. What you want to take is this bottle here, called Blenkiron’s Bicho Blaster. No bicho nor skeeto will come where Blenkiron blasts. Squirt Blaster freely round in floor and bed, the skeetos will be downed, the bichos dead.”

After unpacking, Hi walked out into the city to see the sights of the new world all shining in the sun. On the water-front, negroes and Caribs were loading a lighter with what looked like bunches of rusty wire: they were nearly naked: they shone and sang. Old negresses in scarlet turbans kept time for them by clinking bottles together. At the south end, were the gates of what had been the Viceroy’s garden in the old days. They stood ajar, yet still bore the device of the horse and globe. In the garden were flowers, butterflies like flying flowers, and birds like jewels and flowers. Beyond the flowers was the old white Spanish fortress, from which floated a blood-red banner, with a golden star for each province.

“I am glad I’ve come to this place,” Hi thought, “if only I can find something to do, I shall be as happy as the day is long.”

In his saunterings upon the water-front, he paused to look into the window of a picture-dealer’s shop, which was decked with three sketches in oil of scenes in a bull-ring. The picture-dealer, a man with a strangely broad face, was smoking a cigarette at his door. Hi asked him if the scenes had been sketched in Santa Barbara. The man replied, “You’d better inform yourself, sir.” The unusual rudeness of the answer made Hi wonder if the man were sane: he noted the name over the shop, and passed on, less happy than before.

Yet in spite of this one man’s rudeness, the morning proved to be a long adventure of delight.

The narrow, busy, crowded streets, so full of life, colour, strangeness and beauty, all lit as never in England, excited him. There were fruits and flowers, and costumes like fruits and flowers, men from the west, Indians from the plains and from the forest; negroes, Caribs; women in mantillas, women with roses in their ears; men in serapes, men hung with silver, like images in chapels; peones in black and silver driving ox-teams; church processions intoning Latin; all were marvellous. Yet an impression formed in his mind that all was not well; the Indian lancers and certain parties of foot soldiers, who looked as though they had been rolled in brickdust, seemed to be there for no good.

At the cathedral parvise, some workmen were sinking scarlet flag-poles into sockets in the gutters. Inside the cathedral, men were hanging scarlet draperies all round the sanctuary; Hi supposed that they were making ready for the Easter festivals. “They’re beginning early,” he thought.

Near the cathedral was the green in which the palace stood. “Palacio,” a guide, explained to him. “This is the palace of President Lopez.” He had never seen a palace before; he stopped to stare at it. The guards at the gate wore scarlet serapes; they rode white horses so bitted with heavy silver that Hi longed to protest. The palace was a big, squat, yellow building; at one end of it was a glittering pinnacle still surrounded by scaffolding. “I’ve heard of that,” Hi thought, “that’s his silver building. I’ll bet it isn’t silver, though; but quicksilver. I suppose the President is inside there somewhere, because the flag is flying.”

It was now drawing towards noon. Men in evening dress, wearing scarlet rosettes or sashes, were driving to the gates, dismounting from their carriages, and entering the palace precincts, either for a cabinet meeting or for lunch. Some of these people were cheered by the onlookers, especially one man, who had the look of a “spoiled priest.”

At noon, some gunners in red fired a noon-gun in front of the palace; instantly throughout the city there came a change in the noise of the day as though everyone had ceased suddenly from work and pattered out to dinner. Hi returned to his hotel, to lunch upon foods which were strange to him: okra, manati, water-melon and a sangaree of limes.

After lunch, he wrote to his mother and to Señora Piranha, to say that he had arrived. Having posted these letters, he set out to the offices of the Sugar Company, to present his letter to Mr. Roger Weycock, who received him very kindly and asked him to dine that night at the Club.

“Do you know any other Englishman here?” he asked.

“I’ve a letter to Mr. Allan Winter.”

“That’s lucky. He’s in town. He was here a few minutes ago; we’ll get him to dine with us. Oh, all the English here belong to the Club; we must see about making you a temporary member. But we’ll go into that to-night, shall we, at the Club?”

At dinner at the Club that night, Mr. Weycock introduced Hi to Mr. Allan Winter, who was a grizzled and rugged soul, of long standing as a sugar-planter.

“I’ll call for you at eight to-morrow,” he said, “and drive you out to my place, where you will see the sort of place it is.” Seeing that Hi was perplexed, he added, “But perhaps you’re doing something else to-morrow.”

“No, thanks, sir,” Hi said, “but I’ve written to a friend to say that I shall be here all day to-morrow.”

“Oh, have you friends in Santa Barbara?” Mr. Weycock asked.

“I know a girl,” Hi said. “Miss Rosa Piranha, sir. Perhaps if you know her you can tell me if she’s in town?”

“Oh, you know Miss Piranha, do you?” Mr. Weycock said. “I suppose you met her in England?”

“Yes, sir.”

A change came on Mr. Weycock’s face, as though the subject were unpleasant to him. “I have met her,” he said, “but I do not know whether she’s in town or not. You see, Ridden, my work brings me into touch with the dynamic party, the Reds, now in power here. I am not well in favour with people like the Piranhas. You can always call on the Piranhas. I would go with Winter to-morrow, if I were you.”

“I’d love to,” Hi said, “but I don’t feel quite free.”

“No, I see your point,” Mr. Winter said. “You aren’t quite free. So don’t decide now. I’ll call at eight to-morrow and you can come if you can. You may have had an answer by then. Leave it like that.”

Hi asked why so many soldiers were in the city.

“Precaution,” Mr. Weycock said; “the Reds, the present Government, are being threatened by the Whites. The feeling is running very high.”

“I should think it ought to run high,” Mr. Winter said, “when these gangs of cannibals are imported to keep order. I never saw such a set of ruffians in my life. ‘I will not ask what the disease be, the cure being what it is.’ ”

“They are surely as civilised,” Mr. Weycock said, “as some of these Whites, who would burn heretics here to-morrow if they had their will. Besides, you must know, Winter, that the Pitubas have always been allies here. They helped the Spaniards in the Conquest.”

“I’ve nothing against that,” Winter said. “But whatever my politics were, if I were a white citizen here, seeing those yellow cannibals brought in to keep me in order, would make me want to shoot someone. But I don’t meddle with politics here and, I hope, never will.”

“I do not meddle in them,” Mr. Weycock said, “but I’m bound to watch them for the sake of the firm. I only hope that the measures taken will be sufficient. It would be a disaster to this Republic if Don Lopez were to be killed now.”

“Killed,” Mr. Winter said, “killed and disaster? Rats.”

“Well, I’m glad you take that cheery view.”

After this, they put away all thought of Red and White, but dined and were merry. Hi was introduced to several very good fellows; he was nominated for election at the next ballot and admitted to the Club privileges pending election. He passed a very pleasant evening. As he walked back to his hotel, he thought that he had never passed so wonderful a day.

“And I may spend my life here,” he thought. “It may not have the charm of engineering; but it must be wonderful to pass one’s days in a place so beautiful.”

Yet as he walked, he saw three Pituba lancers dragging a white man to a divisional gaol, which had its entrance on the water-front. The sight angered him strangely; and again he had the feeling that things were wrong in the land. “There are strange goings on,” old Rust had said; “they’re going to eat baked Christians.” He noticed the looks of citizens who watched the dragging, and the looks of other citizens watching for looks of disapproval. “I’ll ask Rosa about all this,” he thought. “There ought to be a letter from her in the morning.”

There was no letter from her in the morning, but Mr. Winter called and drove him out to his plantation at Quezon.

III

During the drive, he asked Winter if he feared any civil trouble.

“Yes and no,” he said. “The Whites and Reds always bicker a bit at Easter; they go out of their way to do it. They’ll do it this year. But it will be nothing. And my advice to you is to pay no attention to politics here, unless you’re naturalised. I’m not a citizen, and don’t intend to be, so I keep clear of both parties. What you want to steer clear of in this country are foreigners with axes to grind, like Weycock’s old uncle. I say nothing against young Weycock; he’s friendly and decent, and all that, but when I hear him boosting the Reds I wonder how much his uncle’s had to make him sing.”

“But he said that Lopez was in fear of being murdered by the Whites.”

“Rats. The Whites won’t murder Lopez; they’ve got no one to put in his place, and they know it. Besides, they know that it isn’t Lopez who is running this land, but the foreign firms who’ve put money into it and mean to get it back. As for Lopez being afraid of being murdered, I say, rats again. He’s afraid of nothing, from hell-fire up; never has been.”

Hi spent a happy day at Quezon, slept there, and was driven back to his hotel the next morning. “You go in and see your friends,” Mr. Winter said, “then come out here again and spend a week or two. Everything’s hard work here, like everywhere else. A lot of these young bloods come out here thinking life’s going to dances and belonging to the Cocktail Club. You’re too wise for that foolishness; you’ve got some sense.

“And now just let me say this, I stand in loco parentis here, mind. Don’t accept a job from the United Sugar people without just coming and talking it over with me. They may have nothing for you, of course. They’re in with a very queer set, who aren’t out for sugar or any other kind of sweetness, but just both hands in the till. I see their workings, and I know. The matter with Lopez is not that he’s afraid, but that he’s too darned indolent to watch their steps a little.”

* * * * * * *

When he returned to the hotel, Hi found no letter from the Piranhas. “No answer,” he thought. “She’s had time enough for a dozen answers. It means that she’s out of town. Yet Rosa, in her last letter, said that she would be in town now.”

He wandered out into the streets, where the work and beauty of a seaport filled every yard with wonder. He felt that he could never tire of a life so varied, so full of colour, passed in such light. Yet again the people gave him the impression that all was not well. He was a newcomer, who saw the game from outside, with fresh eyes. He felt that the Whites and Reds were certainly going out of their ways to bicker at this coming Easter. On his way back to the hotel, he saw some Red officials sacking (as it seemed) a little newspaper office. A young American, who seemed amused at his want of grasp of the case, explained that the cops were pulling the joint and pinching the editor.

“What for?”

“I dunno. He’s one of these White guys. I guess he wrote something some big bug didn’t quite stand for.”

He watched the sack to its completion. He could tell from the looks on people’s faces what their politics were, and his heart went out to the under dogs, the Whites, who were outnumbered there, and dared not show all that they felt. “Rosa is a White,” he thought, “I’ll get her to tell me what is going on.”

* * * * * * *

He was just about to lunch at his hotel, when a negro waiter, who seemed impressed by something, came to tell him, chiefly by signs, that he was wanted in the foyer. Wondering what he could have done wrong, or what could cause the negro’s manner, he went out to the foyer, where a footman, in a green and white livery, very politely told him, in Spanish and pantomime, that there was something very important for him, seemingly outside the doors. Looking as the footman’s signs directed, he saw an old carriage, in which two ladies sat, beneath green parasols. “Rosa,” he thought, “Rosa and her mother.”

One of the ladies was old, with white hair; she sat upright with an absorbed look as though she were praying. The other was Rosa, but changed indeed from the Rosa of the Foliats; this creature was painted into a kind of purple mask with high lights of white powder on her nose. Over her eyes, arches of plainly false eyebrows had been put in with the brow-stick. Great gold ear-rings, enclosing green stones, hung from her ears, her mouth was scarlet. He had never seen a more raddled-looking baggage, yet this was the Rosa of four months before, who had galloped hatless astraddle before breakfast with him. Both ladies turned to him at once with an air which made him feel ashamed that he had no hat to take off to them and very thankful that he hadn’t. The old lady was more subtly made up than her daughter, but even she seemed to wear a mask or glaze of enamel. “I suppose it’s the fashion here,” he thought.

Glaze or not, they were plainly great ladies here, conferring incredible honour upon the hotel. Half the staff was there to attend their pleasure already. The Señora held her hand for Hi to kiss (his good angel guarded him from shaking it), she bade him welcome in English. He had not seen her since he was a little child, but he remembered her clearly, as Donna Emilia, a lady who held herself very straight and was always praying. “She needed not to have made up,” Hi thought. “There is something very beautiful in her face.”

“Welcome,” she said; “your father has been a good friend to us. You and yours have been good friends to Rosa. I hope that all your household was well when you left England. Let me see you, Highworth. You are liker your mother than your father. But my eyes are failing, I cannot be sure of this. Come now, with us, will you, to spend some hours at our house?”

“I should love to,” Hi said.

“Go and get your hat, then, and put it on,” Rosa said. “Never, never come out without a hat again. Put it on at once, or this sun will skin you. It doesn’t come through a watery envelope as it does in England. That is your vanity, wanting to look brown. You wouldn’t look brown, you’d crack, and all your poor little brains would pop.”

They drove down the water-front, past the Viceroy’s garden, to the gate. Several houses on the water-front were displaying the scarlet banners, starred with gold, which Lopez had declared to be the national flag.

“Is there to be some sort of celebration?” Hi asked.

“A display, I understand,” Donna Emilia said.

“How wonderful the bay looks with the shipping,” Rosa said quickly. “Do you see, Hi, the shallows beyond the bay? All that southern bay is only about six feet deep.”

“Good bathing, I should think,” Hi said. “Is one allowed to bathe there?”

“I believe that some of the Indians sometimes bathe there,” Rosa said, “but there are swarms of sharks. If you go out in a boat, they’ll come all round you, and rub along the side and try to tip you out.”

“What do you do then?” Hi asked. “Sing them to sleep?”

“The best way is to hit them a bat with the flat of an oar-blade.”

“I wonder you don’t stare at them,” Hi said. “No shark can resist the power of the human eye.”

“Women’s eyes excite them,” Rosa said.

“I should have thought a haughty look would shrivel them. The books are full of it: ‘She darted a freezing glance at him.’ ”

At this moment they were passing through the gate of the city. On their right was a park of palms, flowers and busts, on their left, beyond the fortress, was the approach to the market pier, where the boats landed fish, fruit and other produce at dawn each morning. A party of men and women were coming from this pier with donkey carts laden with fruits, eggs and vegetables. “They’re the second market,” Rosa said, “they buy up the leavings from the boats and hawk them through the closes.”

The men of the second market recognised the liveries of the Piranhas. They stopped their carts, stood still, uncovered and cried, “Long live the Whites. Long live the Whites. Let the Reds perish.” To Hi’s astonishment neither woman took the slightest notice. They stared ahead as though they neither saw nor heard. Hi thought it odd that they did not bow; Rosa turned to him.

“Do you see the boats, Hi?” she asked. “Those are some of the coast boats which bring the produce. There are many market gardens along this great shallow bay, especially at La Boca, ten miles down. The gardeners send their things in the boats, which are just as fast as boats can be. They often race both ways. We can see them from our windows.”

Out in the bay there was enough wind to ruffle the water. About a dozen boats of queer rigs were rushing home under all the sail they could set. Some were lateen-rigged with striped sails of blue and white; most were polacca schooners with steeved bowsprits setting a sprit beneath upon a yard. The sails of these were of a bright orange colour. All had high curved whaler’s bows topped with gilt emblems. All were fast boats; even Hi was surprised at the way they travelled. A rounded white gleam at their sides showed their speed and the cleanness of their thrust.

“Aren’t they like dolphins?” Rosa said. “Don’t they seem to enjoy it?”

Less than half a mile from the gate of the city they entered the gates of the Piranhas’ estate, which lay to the left, between the road and the sea. In the niches of the masonry of the gates were figures of painted terra-cotta, representing Friendship and Affection, one on each side. They had been labelled when new, but time had destroyed the plaster on which the labels were painted. “We can’t tell t’other from which now,” Rosa said. “People think they’re both the Virgin, and lay little bunches of flowers before them on their way to work.”

The gates were old masterpieces of wrought iron, now frail from rust, their palm leaves were snapping, some of their bars had worn through. All within the gates showed the same marks of decay. It had once been an Italian garden, but time, poverty and the sea winds had helped to bring it to ruin. Marble busts of poets and nymphs were fallen, or overgrown with trailers. The great red clay or terra-cotta urns had been split by the roots of their flowers, so that they looked like fountains of flowers falling under the living glitter of the humming birds. The shingle of the walk, though marked with wheels and horse-hoofs, was almost overgrown with a thick green-leaved trailer, full of minute blue flowers. The house was a biggish, oblong, yellow building, with decorative panels of scarlet plaster in the recesses of the masonry. The scarlet had faded to pale red, it was scaley and mildewed; altogether, the house looked out of fashion. There had been a device between supporters over the door. The supporters were now nothing but legs, two hairy, with paws, two human, with feet. The device was wholly gone. Part of a label bore the legend:

non sufficit.

Hi wondered what it was that did not suffice.

As the carriage stopped below the perron an old negro with powdered hair, wearing the uniform of the Piranhas, white with green splashes on the shoulders, came down the steps to welcome them. He carried a long ebony cane with a gold pineapple at the end. Hi helped Donna Emilia up the steps. Outside the house, all things gave evidence of a great family coming down in the world. Inside, it was all as it had been in the time of its splendour, except that colours had faded.

“Come into my room, Highworth,” Donna Emilia said.