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 all 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