I

THE LIFE

The train toiled southwards, a thin black lizard picking its way along the easiest slopes through a tumble of desert hills. The engineers who built that line had felt themselves to be the very prophets of an indefinite religion named Progress. Day by day they had fought with intractable material and known the pride of artists in their tunnels, their bridges, their tremendous bastions armoured to withstand the fury of torrents on unabsorbing ground. Day by day their bank balances piled up in Mexico City and New York. But even a world so supremely well ordered for their happiness did not satisfy them; they needed to link their temporary content to a universal purpose, to feel that they were fulfilling the intent of past generations and smoothing the path of the unborn. Since none of the religions to which they paid their various lip services had set up the mastery of nature as a virtue, they accepted the private faith of the nineteenth century. Their formless domestic god was Progress.

The little group of men lying inconspicuously upon the hillside had neither bank balances nor content nor any thought at all of the vanished engineers. To them the god Progress was only a word, and at that a word which they used in widely different senses. To General Lara, Progress was merely the slave of a greater and even vaguer deity whom he worshipped under the names of Communism or Liberty or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. To Manuel Vargas, El Camarero, Progress was meaningless; he occasionally used the word, however, in order to stir those under his command or in his employ to a more lively efficiency. To the ragged insurgents crouching under the cover of the rocks, Progress meant more money, more frequent meals and better horses. They were realists. The train that slowly approached their hillside had no more significance for them than a lizard which they were about to kill; indeed less, for a lizard could be eaten whereas there was little hope of looting the train.

“Another three minutes,” said Lara. “This time we will make an exhibition!”

It was the general’s favourite remark. Like any true craftsman contemplating his raw materials, he felt that the composition about to be created would be his finest. It was no mean art to paralyze heavily guarded government railways with a few pounds of dynamite, and Lara had invented his own technique. The permanent way and the locomotives, being in theory the property of the people and hard to replace, he spared; but his carefully planned attacks on the rolling stock were as devastating as a transport strike because the effects and the delays were incalculable.

Lara lifted an excellent pair of field glasses, looted from a romantic female archaeologist who had visited his camp and lost all but what she had hoped to lose, and studied the approaching train. It was a mile away and broadside on to them, about to enter the curve that would carry it direct under their position.

“They are expecting me,” he said, and handed the glasses to El Camarero.

The train ended in a heavy steel flatcar and a roomy caboose. The flatcar was armed, and stripped for action bare as the deck of a battleship. The barrel of a Krupp mountain gun pointed the length of the train, a harmless position which promised that it could instantly be swivelled to either flank. This formidable weapon was assisted by three machine guns. A bridge leading from the flatcar to the caboose showed that the train guard, though now hiding in their quarters from the merciless white sun, could swiftly man their improvised fighting deck.

“Better wait for the guard,” suggested El Camarero, handing back the glasses.

“What a thought! Blow them up and lose the gun? Never! I have never had a gun, Camarero.”

“We couldn’t carry it away.”

“No. But we might take it and shell the relief train. A surprise for them! A pretty little surprise!”

Lara watched the flatcar with frank and hungry admiration. His face had the innocence of a child peering into the window of a confectioner’s shop.

“Then try the third. It’s a tank car.”

“No. I should like to, but it would carry the locomotive with it. The eleventh! We will blow up the eleventh!”

The eleventh was a wealthy tourist on the Mexican Northern Railway, a comfortable, neatly painted visitor from the New York Central. This boxcar was a temptation in itself, and admirably placed to do the maximum of destruction. If the couplings held, it might well carry with it down the hillside numbers nine to fourteen, all of which were lightly loaded.

Lara’s explosives were cunningly placed. A frugal charge at the outer edge of the embankment would undermine the track and cause a slight subsidence of the metals. A second and heavier charge under the inner rail supplied the necessary lift to topple over the chosen wagon. The general’s art was far too delicate to be described as the dynamiting of trains. His few ounces of explosive were mere aids to the far greater forces of gravity and momentum.

The general peered between the rocks that covered his party, the keys of two detonators under his hand. He was almost pure Indian. Under a battered felt hat his face, hairless as that of a boy of twelve, was beautiful in its unconscious cruelty; the wide mouth, sensitive and expressive, the large eyes, intent and shining, had the natural ferocity of a carnivore. Yet it was not an animal face; its rich humour even, or perhaps especially, in the act of destruction made it entirely human and likeable.

Manuel Vargas, the immigrant from Spain, the man of culture and experience, was fond of his general. He liked his thoroughness and his frank good-fellowship; and he was fascinated by the incalculable quality of cruelty in this young and destitute leader, with his ragged shirt and trousers so crossed by the belt of his Mauser pistol, the belt of his .45 revolver, the belts of corresponding ammunition, the straps of water bottle and instruments that he needed a medieval squire to disarm him. To have Lara’s friendship was as stimulating as to keep a leopard for a pet.

The train crawled along the hillside, chasing the pilot engine that preceded it. Lara pressed his first key as soon as the two engines had passed. There was a muffled report and a puff of dust. The trucks rocked unsteadily, canting towards the slope as they clattered over the sinking rail. The eleventh car swayed into position and Lara pressed the second key. This time the craftsman had his work more immediately under his eye. A fan of flame, gravel and yellow smoke punched the tourist under his leading bogey and threw him off his balance. Number eleven crashed down the slope, dragging with it six of the adjoining trucks.

The lizard, thus cut in half, appeared to hesitate uncertainly. Its head stopped. Its tail began to run downhill, gathering speed as the weight of the flatcar and armaments took command. Lara’s men rose from the protective colouring of the bronze ground and watched with interest the unwilling flight of their opponents. They had expected a sharp exchange of shots before the guard discovered that nothing but an antiaircraft gun could throw a shell into their eyrie and that a direct assault would cost more lives than it was worth. This unforeseen triumph, the seemingly inspired climax so often added by chance to an honest piece of work, confirmed his men’s trust in Lara’s daring. The caboose, the flatcar and three wagons raced towards the curve of the line while small figures crawled over them to reach and apply the hand brakes. The little band of rebels lit cigarettes and laughed like children, without pity or malice.

“They’ll upset on the bend!” shouted Lara delightedly. “The sons of bitches are going to upset!”

“They’ll stop in time,” answered El Camarero.

“I’ll bet my field glasses to your rifle they don’t!”

“Done!”

Manuel Vargas knew that he would lose. The lifeless half of the train was shooting down the line, and it was evident that the brakes had either broken or were insufficient. Only obstinate hope made him dispute the point with Lara; he had accepted the bet in a sudden rage with himself and his own impotence. His rifle, Eibar made, accurate and a link with Spain, was a sacrifice offered to the gods of the unexpected, a tribute to assure himself of his own sincerity in his civilised and desperate desire that the helpless troops should escape.

The tail of the train swayed outwards over the curve, increasing its angle as the inner wheels left the metals. It appeared to bank as deliberately and gracefully as an aeroplane, and slid silently out of sight. The thin and agonised shouts, the crashings and splinterings that reached their ears four seconds later seemed to have nothing to do with this peaceful flight into space.

“I have warned you already not to bet with me,” said the general. “I understand railways. When we have the People’s Republic I will be Minister of Communications.”

“If there are any,” El Camarero answered drily, handing over his rifle.

Lara slung it on his back, finding a suitable path for the leather among the maze of bandoleers, and laughed with pleasure. He felt kindly to the Spaniard whenever he scored off him, and generally repaid him by some act of feudal generosity. El Camarero was a good fellow—though a superior man who had no right to be fighting with the representatives of the people. One felt that he did not approve of all his general’s acts. Still, so witty, so courteous, and with such a head on him—one would regret it if at some time or other he had to be removed.

“Vámonos!” said Lara. “There will be loot after all! You can choose any weapon you like, Camarero!”

While the attention of the raiders was occupied, the train crew uncoupled the wagons derailed but not overturned by the explosion. The head of the train made off at full speed towards Durango, leaving its wrecked belly and tail to these devils who sat among the rocks. Lara and his men scrambled down the hillside to their first victim.

Number Eleven had burst open and scattered most of its riches among the cacti; it had apparently carried a mixed bag of goods shipped to Mexico City from Europe via New York, merchandise of price but little weight. Bales of English tweed dotted the torn slope. A crate of expensive toys had spilled out the wagons of a neat little train; they lay drunkenly on the bare earth, imitating their model with an exactitude that even the meticulous care of the manufacturers had not intended. A crushed case of perfumes lent to the cleanly cactus the magnificent reek of an imperial brothel, and a bidet of red Italian marble that had come to rest right side up confirmed the impression. Manuel Vargas was seized by a fit of laughter at the sight of this unseemly bathroom luxury and at once improvised a charming coplita upon the garden that wept for its lost fountain. It fell flat since neither Lara nor his men had any idea of the uses of a bidet. El Camarero improved their education by a short and vivid lecture.

They approached the tail of the train with needless caution. The flatcar seemed to have turned a somersault in the air and crashed upside down on to the caboose, reducing it to a heap of splinters as formless as a rubbish dump. There was none left who could be called alive. On those that still breathed Lara performed his only act of mercy of the day. Twenty bodies, spread-eagled on the hillside, impaled on cactus and crushed together in the dump, provided a satisfactory haul of weapons and ammunition that partly comforted the general for the loss of the mountain gun. He hummed El Camarero’s coplita, and allowed him the first choice of the scattered armaments.

On the pretext of examining the bodies on the hillside Manuel separated himself from his companions. The shock of this disaster was rising up into his conscious mind. He had tried to exorcise it with a bet, to forget it with obscene laughter; but the smashed bodies were difficult facts for a civilised person to blink. He was compelled to consider them. Manuel Vargas was a Spaniard and an adventurer; as either, he was rather less sensitive than the ordinary man to the liquids and machinery of the human body exposed by violent death. In his general experience, however, such death was the result of fair fight or admissible accident, and no matter for shame and disgust. That he now felt both was a vivid revelation of truth. He had been an adventurer more in search of himself than of sensation. Well—por Dios!—he had found himself!

Manuel Vargas was the son of a wholesale grocer at Valladolid. By the age of sixteen he had the high fantastical humour of a dweller among the unforgiving hills of Old Castilla, a taste for good Rioja and a fund of admirable stories about priests and nuns, most of which he fathered on to the innocent Jesuit in whose service he donned a nightgown and swung a censer; these duties he performed in order to keep the peace with his mother, an estimable woman in whom piety took the place of intelligence. His education had been catholic and classical; that is to say, he had learned nothing at all that was likely to make him any money, but had acquired a fine clear mind and the Latin virtue, unrecognised by any purely Anglo-Saxon school, of knowing that he was lying when he was.

His father had now given up groceries for fruit, having been accidentally introduced to the trade by one of his debtors whose only assets were four tons of oranges. He found that his resources allowed him to take the risks which perishable fruit demanded and his competitors, invariably working on insufficient capital, were unable to take; or, taking, were wiped out by a hot day or a fall in prices. By Manuel’s seventeenth birthday old Vargas was the biggest fruit dealer in three provinces, and eager to send his son, already a useful helper in the warehouse, to complete his commercial education in England; he worshipped the English merchants as models of honesty and acumen, and the universities he admired were London and Liverpool. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge, of which he had vaguely heard, could be compared in his mind to Salamanca; but the very names of London and Liverpool invested their degree of commerce with unequalled sanctity and power.

Manuel chose London; he had no particular reverence for the capital but it was the farther south of the two. What they had to teach him of the laws and practice of commerce he learned quickly and carefully, and he was impressed to the bottom of his soul by the exactitude of the great merchant houses—not that there were many delays or inaccuracies in old Vargas’s office, but Manuel was becoming drunk on English thoroughness as an occasional Englishman on the Spanish way of life. He admired, practised and developed a philosophy of the Efficient, distinguishing the false, which he considered to be merely speed under another name, from the true, which was a form of artistry.

It was in England too that Manuel began to understand the other half of the human world. Spain had given him little contact with women. From the age of fourteen he had enjoyed, of course, an occasional embrace when he had the money to pay for it. When he had none, he visited the brothels, as did his companions, simply for the sake of conversation with the girls. Thus he discovered at least that women also possessed human intelligence. He could never have guessed it from the girls of Valladolid, with whom his relations were limited to the audacious compliment and the conventional repartee, the pinch on the bottom followed by the slap in the face.

Manuel did not fly high for his education. He was in fact picking up shop girls at public dances in the pre-war days before they were recruited from a beggared middle class. He was attractive to women. The slight body of middle height, the soft voice, the velvety eyes that seemed to have been intended for brown and were actually grey, the foreign eagerness, all made of him a maiden’s dream to those fortunate young women; fortunate because their fantasies of Spain had nothing to do with the geographical reality, with old Vargas’s fruit warehouse, with work, marriage or childbearing or anything at all but a lovely romance compounded of reading and hearsay, to which Manuel’s mildly dishonourable intentions lent a temporary truth. By men he was disliked. His face was pudgy, his clothes vulgar, and his quiet manner such a reflection on the noisiness of youth that fathers and brothers unhesitatingly described him as a greasy dago.

The outbreak of war caught Manuel in London. He had no desire to return to Spain; indeed his first impulse was to join the British army. He was young and quixotic enough to wish to lend his sword—it was his own expression—to the country that had so freely offered him its daughters and its hospitality. He was nearly accepted, for the authorities were not too particular in demanding a birth certificate, and his adventures had been so good for his English that he could, while admitting a Spanish mother to account for his darker complexion, pass as an Englishman. But Manuel had acquired by painstaking practice the cockney “o,” believing it, because so difficult a sound, to be the very hallmark of idiomatic English, an embellishment of speech as racy and correct as the lisp of Madrid; it lurked invariably among the vowels of both his Berlitz teacher and his mistresses. For English ears it was odd to hear this unmusical diphthong from the London dialect decorating an otherwise cultured and imaginative flow of speech. The recruiting officer would readily have passed a slightly foreign accent—for the British Empire was large and he sincerely wished it had been larger—but he was puzzled by this incongruous “o.” He pressed his questions, and Manuel was rejected.

His father, hearing with pleasure of this failure, wrote decisively to Manuel that his first duty was to the Vargas fortunes and to Spain. He hinted, knowing his son, that there might be plenty of excitement for a neutral engaged in lawful commerce. Manuel became the agent for a ring of Spanish fruit exporters. He needed little more than honesty and method for success. Prices were soaring, and all that could surely be said of any shipment of oranges, lemons or melons was that it would fetch a higher price than any previous shipment.

Even so the price of half a dozen crates in England was the price of one in Germany. Though their London agent was only a boy of nineteen, the ring of exporters could find no better man to organise their sales to the Central Powers. Through the German Embassy in Madrid, Manuel was put in touch with their buying agents at Rotterdam. Soon Berlin and Hamburg were as familiar to him as London and Liverpool, and a regular service of fruit trains was crossing the Dutch frontier.

In spite of his frequent journeys into Germany, his Spanish passport was proof enough for the English that he had never left Holland. The German authorities supplied him with a forged Colombian passport showing him to be a resident in Rotterdam. He used this for his travel between Holland and Germany, and his Spanish passport for travel between England and Holland; thus it was a full year before his hosts had definite proof that he was trading with the enemy. When they had it, they gave him twenty-four hours in which to leave the country. Manuel spent them at his office, left the books of the English half of the business in perfect order, and caught a boat from Tilbury to Buenos Aires with ten minutes to spare.

He had no time for cool judgment in the choice of his next residence. The impulse that drove him to the Argentine was composite. He longed for his own language, and he was weary of Nordic peoples dourly preoccupied by a struggle as unremitting as a tug of war between two teams of overfed policemen. He had money, an indecent quantity of money, in his pocket and on a letter of credit. London and Berlin had given him a taste for luxury but little time in which to indulge it. He both desired and deserved a period of wine and women. The Argentine held out more lavish promises than Spain.

Manuel’s self-confidence was absolute. At the age of twenty he had already tasted the delights of big business and had been sufficiently successful to annoy a first-class power. Lest his own achievements should appear small to him he worshipped success and defined it as wealth. He was as worldly minded as an ambitious boy just out of a business college, and with considerably more cause. For the easy-going Argentinos he felt a good-humoured contempt, and was sure that in such a country his worth would swiftly be recognised and that in a few weeks he would have a salary and responsibilities equal to those he had enjoyed in England.

Outwardly mature, by now well dressed and the best of companions, he was accepted into a set of cheerful youngsters who had nothing to offer him but their clubs, their girls and their horses. Sons of the great estancias, they were interested in spending money, not in making it; money made itself for them. On the strength of their political and social connections they could obtain, if necessary, commercial sinecures for themselves, but not for a casual Spaniard. They would never have thought of offering him a job in the campo, nor did he want it.

While waiting for a business in which to employ his energy and capital, Manuel did not think it worth while to invest. He spent wildly, and still more wildly as his disappointment increased. Had he taken a clerkship in meat or railways or oil he would swiftly have been appreciated, for the civilisation of the towns was built out of the brains of ambitious immigrants from all nations and offered to them infinite opportunity. But commerce had been made too easy for him and he would not accept subordinate work.

After four months in Buenos Aires Manuel realised that he had failed. He drew his last thousand pesos from the bank and bought a first-class ticket to Mendoza—since the town was at the foot of the Andes, which he desired to see before travel should be prohibited by poverty. The rest of his money he spent in a thirty-six-hour orgy. His excesses were deliberate and enjoyed without fear for the morrow. As the cabaret de luxe, the expensive casa de citas, the first-class restaurant would thenceforth be out of his reach, he bought himself a final stock of memories. He knew that he had no chance of starving in that land of plenty so long as he took a definite step down in society.

His trust in the future was swiftly justified. He shared his compartment with a talkative compatriot, a native of Malaga, who owned a considerable vineyard at Mendoza. Don Castor Vallejos was an authority on dessert wines but had the usual Andalusian ignorance of reds. Manuel, by this time a connoisseur of wine, engaged him in argument, courteous in its personalities, heated in its condemnation of Mendoza clarets. Don Castor, impressed, offered him keep and a small salary in exchange for his business experience and palate. Manuel got off the train an employee of the Compañía Vinícola Vallejos.

Mendoza was leafy as an English town in summer. The streets were lined with trees, and cobbled channels along which the clear mountain water gurgled and raced. The massed foliage darkened and cooled the pavements more gently than the usual colonnades of Latin towns. It never rained. West of the city the desert foothills of the Andes were arid and melancholy, with not a shade of green to break the monotony of grey and brown; but in the folds of the hills lay hidden very valleys of paradise where the streams from the snows of the high peaks had been gathered into pools and led in a tracery of rivulets over cultivated terraces and down to rich, small pastures.

The Vallejos estate was one of these oases, a tiny patch of emerald sunk into the immense brown flanks of the cordillera. The sides of the valley were dotted with vines, and its head closed by the length of the white, single-storeyed house with flower garden and shaded pools before it, and a grove of eucalyptus, marking the site of the dam, behind. The wine house was backed against the northern slopes, a façade of round white arches masking the cellars that had been carved out of the rock in imitation of the caves of the Rioja. Lower down the valley was a group of outbuildings where the mestizo and Italian labourers and their families kept up a fierce communal establishment, and enlivened the still nights with laughter, quarrels, music and moving lights. For two years Manuel was exceedingly happy and generously repaid for his cleverness and energy by Don Castor, by the labourers and by the vines themselves.

As he watched Lara and his men scavenging the barren Mexican ground where blood ran more frequently than water, a composite picture of the slopes of the Viña Vallejos and the trees of Mendoza overwhelmed his mind with longing. It was an image of peace and of agony. The two were connected in his mind, so that he was compelled to avoid peace whenever it threatened him. Invariably he excluded the memory of Mendoza but now for a second he dwelt in it as a refuge.

He had married Lola Vallejos, a slender child, delicate and of a living white like that of the syringa flowers she loved to pin in her smooth hair. He had spent months over the romantic ceremonies of Andalusian courtship that the good family expected. He had kissed her hand, extended through the bars of her window, more desirously than he had ever kissed the lips or the breasts of any other woman. At the fiestas on the estate, drunken with an ecstasy of love as the golden dust swirled up under her dancing feet, he had satisfied his longing with verse after verse flowing from voice and guitar as easily as passionate speech. Under the trees of Mendoza he had walked after Sunday mass, passing and repassing her as convention demanded, and at each sight of her had drawn in his breath as if it had been the first. Nor was their marriage less sweet even than the exaggerated dreams of unsatisfied desire. Don Castor built an extra wing to his house for them, where they lived a honeymoon of nearly a year, free of jealousy or any strife, until Lola’s child was ripe for birth. But she herself was not. The new life, struggling in vain, slew both itself and its mother.

When the funeral was over, Manuel could bear the Viña Vallejos no longer. Numbed by the four endless days through which he had watched her sufferings, he said short and monotonous farewells, put all he cared to possess upon the back of a mule and rode over the pass to Chile.

The second period of his life was patternless, a succession of events that satisfied nothing but the desire, common to all the Primates, for some absorbing activity. He avoided thought unless in the cause of his daily bread. Manuel went straight to the nitrate fields. He messed in a hut with two other Spaniards, a Swede and a French deserter; the mere fact that they had some of their European energy left was enough to ensure them positions of minor responsibility. The two Spaniards were foremen, and, after a week, Manuel also. The Frenchman was an engine driver, the Swede an assistant cashier. For their labour in the white dust they were well paid, but there was no pleasure but drunkenness to buy. Money was a mockery in that livid plain which stretched, like the surface of a dead moon, without hillock or green thing to a perfectly circular horizon.

Each of the exiles, when his purse outlasted his capacity for alcohol, had a different method of getting rid of the surplus. It was so useless that one resented its possession. The Swede would take off his clothes and dance naked and hairless through the camp fighting anyone who interfered with him and paying his fines and damages next morning. The Spaniards set up bottles of champagne and shot at them with revolvers. When this palled they shot at each other, one stalking either of the other two with drunken intensity over the moonlit plain. There was only one rule to the game—a man might not be potted at when he was asleep. Fortunately at least two of them always fell into crapulous slumber before arriving at close range. The engine driver, consumed by hatred of all that was not the France he had deserted, tore at the rails with his bare hands until overcome by weeping. The fit took him after the third bottle so that he alone, with subconscious thrift, was able to save a little money.

For Manuel it was a healthy period. He used neither brain nor emotions, and his wounded soul hid in the darkness and healed itself. He was roused from this Nirvana of labour and alcohol by a letter from Valladolid telling him that his father was dead. He had no capacity for grief left, and his tribute was only a gathering of tender memories and a passing sadness. But the news roused his dormant ambition. Though answerable to none but himself—the business was wound up and his mother had made over the bulk of the capital to the Church—he yet felt an abstract responsibility as the head of his family. The Spanish individualism was strong in him; his unconscious desire was to avoid disappearance in the mass of his fellows. Old Vargas had done it, rising from a small grocer in a mean street to a figure of provincial importance. Now his son must do it. Manuel recognised an obligation, but did not know what he wanted. Not money, evidently, for he had only to save to have plenty of it. Power? Perhaps. To feel that he was a person who mattered? Certainly. On the nitrate fields he could not think that he or any other mattered. At the next payday he fled to Antofagasta without farewells, lest the parting drinks should consume his capital, and took a ship to Callao.

Peru suited him. Though the skins of its inhabitants were dark with Indian blood, the country was more Spanish than Chile or the Argentine. He took the first job that he saw advertised—bookkeeper in a stationer’s shop at Lima. His employer was practically bankrupt, for in a mood of optimism he had established a printing works behind the shop and now owed for machines, paper, ink and rent. He was a round little man with a face the colour of a glossy chestnut, beaming and sweating in the effort to appear business-like. “Efficiency,” “word of an Englishman,” “business method” were continually in his mouth. He had been blandly unconscious that he had none of them until, deeply hurt by his creditors’ remarks, he had been forced to suspect the truth. Having no idea how much he owed he employed Manuel to tell him.

Manuel audited the books of the Imprenta Sota—approximately, since Don Pepe Sota had lost most of his receipts and torn up his bills in a passion. After a week he was able to advise Don Pepe that he owed a total of fifteen hundred Peruvian pounds. The obstinate little ball of excited flesh stared, argued, swore it was not so and finally pretended to destroy itself. Manuel took away from him the paper knife that he was pressing gently with both hands against his third waistcoat button, and corked him down between the strong arms of his office chair. Then he gave him an analysis of his position in flowery phrases that soothed and precise data that carried conviction. It was the first time that Don Pepe had come up against a concrete example of the business method that he so admired. He had little understanding of what Manuel explained, but was hypnotised by this lithe cat of a man who pounced from books to files, files to vouchers, vouchers to invoices, slammed columns of figures under his nose and all the while purred his emphatic and logical Castilian Spanish. The gist of it seemed to be that this incredible sum of 1500 libras was a small debt for a stationer’s shop in the main street with two fast and economical Miehles and half-a-dozen platen presses in the works behind. That, said Don Pepe, suddenly optimistic again, was what he had always thought, but could Señor Vargas persuade the creditors? Manuel could and did, and got out of them a salary for himself into the bargain.

Fortunately he found in charge a mulatto head printer who was mechanically competent though devoid of initiative and ideas. Manuel supplied the ideas and touted the Lima businessmen for orders, concentrating on the North American and English firms. Some damned him for his dynamic insolence; some gave him sceptically a trial order. Within four months they all came over to him, revering him as an archangel of a printer who not only turned out accurate copy in Spanish and English, but delivered on the promised date.

Black with ink, hoarse with talking, Manuel ran the shop for eight hours a day and usually four hours of overtime as well. He read proof, mixed colours, did his own costing, buying and selling, and mercilessly drove his workmen. True care and efficiency were beyond them, so that the reputation of the Imprenta Sota depended entirely on his own eye. Sota himself was terrified by the relentless industry of his printing works and the genial abuse hurled at his head whenever he ventured into them; he confined himself to the stationery shop. All of them would have resented Manuel’s bullying if they had ever had time to resent anything. It seemed to them that his wit, oaths and swift movements were driving not only themselves but the machines.

The machines, however, were driving Manuel. He had no mastery of this complex craft, and made mistake after mistake which had to be swiftly righted lest the pounding presses should be forced to wait, and work fall behind schedule. His face took on the printer’s pallor. His eyes hurt him and sank deep into his head. Two years of this unremitting labour damaged him more than any past excesses of bedding and drinking, for he never got enough sleep to recuperate. He was saved from a breakdown by sudden disgust with himself. He discovered that in his passionate devotion to the immediate object he had become a tyrant, debauching the humanity of his followers.

One night they were running off twelve thousand soap wrappers for delivery the following day. The head printer used their heavy guillotine at the same time as the presses. Manuel had again and again forbidden this practice since the underpowered electric motor revolved irregularly whenever the great knife was driven into the piles of paper, and disorganised the timing of the presses. Half the wrappers were out of register. Manuel forgot his Castilian courtesy and remembered only his Nordic training. He called his head printer a liar, a descendant of negroes, a son of a whore and an addict of unnatural vices. Since the printer was in fact all of these and thus more touchy than another, Manuel should have found a knife between his ribs. Instead, the man dropped his head on the overseer’s desk and wept bitterly. It shook Manuel. He was compelled to ask himself how and for what purpose he had become so drunk with labour. He knew himself to be a leader of men, but now saw that he was unworthy to be so—a Spanish adventurer, brutal as Pizarro, but without a single object to justify brutality. The next day he apologised to the shop and left. They saw him go with horror and genuine grief.

Manuel drifted northwards through Quito and Bogotá and down the Magdalena to the Atlantic. His ultimate objective was Mexico, where a man with a creed in which he believed might yet win some satisfaction. His own creed was socialism. It had been forced upon him in Peru, where he saw a proletariat of Indians and mestizos supporting a tiny class of white landlords, the top-heavy edifice of the Church and a few capitalists as soulless as the founders of the industrial revolution, which, for their own country, they were. He had no particular affection for the ballot box. The frank and comparatively bloodless revolutions of Latin America seemed to him a more honest method of gaining power than intimidation of voters and mass bribery. Apparently a little group of nations around the North Sea were able to make democracy work, but for the rest of the world it seemed to him a preposterous system. Accepting revolution as a natural political weapon, he desired it to be sweeping, just and lasting, and for a worthy object.

On his progress northwards he supported himself by whatever turned up. He dreaded instinctively the leisurely life of the land—it would have brought back the dormant memories of Mendoza—and his desire for commercial success was wearing thin. There seemed to be no object in efficiency for the sake of money or of efficiency itself. He prospected for gold in Ecuador and worked as a proof-reader in Colombia. This led him to journalism, which he practised for the first and only time in San José de Costa Rica. To be paid for expressing opinions that he did not hold struck him as the most humiliating method of earning a living that he had yet attempted. He satisfied a quixotic conscience by publishing a manifesto on the introduction of communism into that little paradise, and was promptly and quietly put on a north-bound boat and assured that an accident—for Costa Rica was a law-abiding country—would happen to him if he returned.

In Guatemala Manuel worked as a waiter in a hotel run for tourists from the United States. Ice, nickel plate, clean linen and chafing dishes were much in evidence, but the food was atrocious. Manuel’s tactful suggestions, in English to the guests, in Spanish to the cook, improved everyone’s temper and appetite and swiftly promoted him to assistant maître d’hôtel. He liked the work and seriously considered making a career for himself in the restaurant business; but before he could make up his mind he was driven out of Guatemala by the marimba.

At lunch and dinner he had to endure the marimba orchestra. The streets were full of marimba soloists. Every café had either a gramophone that played marimba records or a marimba band, and the greater the virtuosity of the players the more they sounded like a concert of massed barrel organs. Such was his value to the hotel that the manager, when Manuel told him his reason for leaving, offered to change the marimba orchestra for a jazz band. His assistant maître d’hôtel pointed out to him, however, that he would only have to bring the marimbas back again, since the guests, who seldom stayed more than a week, inevitably and continuously demanded them.

Manuel crossed the frontier into Mexico in June 1923. He was now twenty-seven—a lean, lightly-built man of middle height. The flesh had fallen away from his face, outlining the powerful bridges of nose and cheek. The wide mouth, with a slight upward twist at the corners, reflected something of the irony and incisive speech that had passed between its sensitive lips. The once velvety complexion had become a taut skin of red and yellow leather, seamed with the lines of sun and good humour and giving richness to the quick, dark and sunken eyes. It was a face that aroused merely curiosity in women, but gained from a man instant appreciation and respect.

The hotels at Tapachula, the frontier town, were full, for a division of troops was quartered in and about the city to overawe any possible opposition to the Obregón reforms. Speech was free in spite of the military, and Manuel quickly discovered that for the moment the communists and the Church were both stirring up trouble for the federal government; the position reminded him of his triangular duels on the nitrate fields. The first taste of Mexico pleased him. The people, Indians though they were, had a proud Iberian independence; it was as if they had taken over the culture of the conquistadores and ignored the next four hundred years of Spanish history.

Manuel searched for a bed from street to street, visiting first the hotels and then the women of the town. Both were fully occupied. He returned at last to the best hotel in Tapachula, hoping to find the night porter on duty and the proprietor in bed. A cigarette and a couple of pesos produced the result he wanted. The night porter, a squat mestizo in dirty flowered pyjamas, led him secretly to an empty room. It had no furniture but a plain iron bed, a chamber pot, an oleograph of the Bleeding Heart that had been used as a pistol target, and a chair with some stained cotton underclothing thrown over it. Other evidence that the room had a tenant was the torn mosquito net; it was full of mosquitoes on the inside, which had worked their way through the holes to feed on the legal occupant of the bed, but had had no incentive to find their way out again. Manuel tied the net into a ball and fell asleep as soon as the night porter had pocketed a further tip and left.

He was awakened at two in the morning by furious knocking and a storm of curses. He opened the door and was faced by a thick-set Mexican colonel who was brandishing the night porter in his left fist and a revolver in his right. Cautious heads were peeping out of the other doors in the passage to see what had so disturbed the military. Manuel gathered from the argument that his was the room of Lieutenant Colonel Montes, that the colonel seldom spent his nights there, having his girl in another part of the town, and that he, the invader, was justly accused of corrupting the night porter. Manuel apologised. He regretted that he had caused the gallant colonel a moment’s inconvenience; he was sure, he said, that so distinguished a caballero would put the kindliest construction upon what had happened; he explained that he was a stranger from the mother country and begged for the colonel’s indulgence. Montes replied that if the son of a bitch of a night porter chose to fill his bed with lousy vagabonds, he would at least prefer that the lice should be Mexican lice, patriotic lice, good revolutionary lice that had lived on the blood of men, not of miserable and effete gachupines who could not even win a war against the gringos.

To this Manuel made no reply, for he had learned that trouble with Latin-American officers was best avoided. He bent down to pick up his bag and was promptly knocked over it by a contemptuous kick on the backside. This was too much. Rising with the bag in his hand, he swung it in a single motion against the colonel’s head and went into action. Manuel did not easily come to blows, considering physical contact an infantile method of settling disputes; but when compelled, he fought inhumanly, a leaping flame utterly careless of defence. The colonel pitched heavily against the door, slamming it shut. His revolver knocked out of his hand, he felt for his knife. Manuel helped him to find it and pinned it through his shoulder into the door. Before Montes could wrench himself away, Manuel had the revolver. Locking and bolting the door, he ordered Montes to raise his right arm above his head and to remove his trousers with the wounded one, thus causing him the greatest mental and physical pain that he could for the moment imagine. He packed the trousers in his bag, and dropped with it out of the window.

Divided between satisfaction at having dealt justly by an insolent, and annoyance at his own folly, he walked through the deserted streets of Tapachula. It was, he admitted, ridiculous to have compromised his migration to Mexico by getting into a fight. He had not been hurt; his life had been in no danger; nor would he have lost self-respect by accepting the kick and quietly withdrawing. He concluded that his ideas of honour and dignity were still those of a barbarian, chuckled at the memory of Colonel Montes’s inadequate shirt tails, and again cursed himself. It was evidently going to be difficult to get away from Tapachula unnoticed, for he was constantly challenged by police and military piquetes to whom he answered that he had arrived that afternoon from Guatemala and was looking for a hotel.

He decided to make for the station and wait in the sidings until the 6.15 train left for the north. Alternative courses were to return to Guatemala or to take to the open country on a stolen horse. The first seemed too cautious and the second unnecessarily drastic. He doubted whether the train would be watched or searched for him, for he was sure that the colonel would not accurately publish his shame and thought it unlikely that rumour unaided would be exact enough to lead to his arrest. He hid himself in a truck loaded with bundles of forage, between which he had a clear view of the station platform.

The forest-covered hills behind Tapachula slowly revealed their ragged curves in the grey light, and when the dawn turned pink dressed themselves in deep emerald as swiftly as a man puts on a coat. The station lights went out. Two patient Indians squatted down on the platform with a basket of oranges. Yawning railwaymen drank at a splashing tap and drifted to their tasks, scratching thoughtfully as the fresh breeze stirred their hair and its inhabitants. Shortly after sunrise the train pulled into the station; there was yet half an hour to go before it started, and Manuel waited and watched. Six infantrymen and an officer lounged at the entrance to the station, but there was nothing unusual in that; nor was the number of police greater than that to be expected. At 6.15 Manuel slid to the ground and entered the train, unseen, from the side of the tracks.

He settled down at the most crowded end of the coach and hid his face behind a newspaper that had belonged to the last occupant of the seat. But the train did not start. Twice a pair of policemen strolled casually through the car, and he was aware, though he did not lift his eyes, of being closely examined. The wait was endless. At half-past six they came through again and spoke to him. He was compelled to lower his newspaper. They were holding between them the night porter, still in his flowered pyjamas. The man identified him in a babble of excited exclamations, like the yapping of a hound which hoped to escape punishment for past misdeeds by a show of officiousness when the trail was found for it. Manuel picked up his bag and left the train with a pistol poked into the small of his back.

He was handed over to the young officer and his escort of six men, who received him with broad grins that were certainly not unfriendly. Manuel, encouraged, suggested that he had not had breakfast—would the señor teniente join him in some coffee and tortillas? The lieutenant was delighted. And the gentlemen by whom he would have the honour to be escorted? The gentlemen were also delighted.

In the course of breakfast Manuel discovered that he was a hero. Only a vague rumour of his assault upon the colonel had reached the barracks, and he was compelled to tell the story twice over, each time producing the trousers for inspection. The escort were full of legends of Montes, who appeared to be the most unpopular officer in the southern command. He had distinguished himself by shooting a civilian dentist who caused him a moment’s agony in the chair; nothing was done to him, the lieutenant explained, for he had sold his sister to the Minister of Justice. But the army felt disgraced by so hysterical a crime and had been incommoded by the subsequent strike of dentists. Nobody would have objected to the bloody-mindedness of the colonel if he had only tempered his savagery with a sense of humour. Now General Lara, said the lieutenant, before whom Señor Vargas would shortly be brought, was a man, on the contrary, of delightful humour. He had learned his trade as a mere boy with Pancho Villa and had recently been promoted for the sake of his friendship with Pancho’s brother, Hipolito. Vaya! What jests they had!

Manuel was marched to barracks and after a short wait led into the orderly room; the lieutenant with an imperceptible wink at his prisoner set down the bag at his side. Half a dozen officers were sitting on and behind a long table that ran the length of the far wall. The general’s desk was at right angles to it, and decorated with a bottle, a bust of President Madero, a cavalry sabre and a vast collection of rubber stamps dangling from two stands the size of chandeliers. Lara was busily stamping a pile of orders, and Manuel, with a flash of insight, suspected him of wishing to impress his Spanish prisoner with the industry of the Mexican army. He came smartly to attention and met Lara’s eyes, unfathomable as those of an Aztec god. Curiosity was the only emotion he perceived in them.

“Listen, you!” said Lara. “We will cut this short. I do not like asking questions. You are a gachupín. You arrived in Mexico last night. And you assaulted my Colonel Montes. Is that right?”

“Quite right, my general.”

“You see!” said Lara, turning triumphantly to his officers. “A lot of questions are not necessary. Now we know all we require.”

“They will want the name and occupation for the death certificate,” suggested one of the officers.

“Manuel Vargas. Waiter,” said Manuel, knowing that this despised trade would make Montes appear all the more ridiculous.

“Waiter?” asked Lara, amazed.

“Yes, my general.”

“A camarero!” shouted Lara delightedly. “A waiter! Montes knifed by a waiter! Did you hear that? And you, tell me! How did you find the courage to attack the great Montes?”

“He kicked me,” Manuel answered. “And that of course was not to be borne.”

Lara began to enjoy himself.

“Show me where,” he ordered.

“I could show you more easily if the colonel were here,” replied Manuel. “Between God and his backside there is nothing.”

“Is it true, then, that you took off his trousers?”

“Not entirely, my general. I made him take them off himself.”

“Impossible! You are mistaken!”

“Pardon, my general. I have them in my bag.”

Manuel produced the colonel’s breeches and revolver, and handed them to Lara.

“It hurts me to have you shot!” Lara exclaimed. “Truly, it hurts me! But we must make an example. I tell you frankly that Colonel Montes is not to my taste, but I have to punish you, friend. What did you say your name was?”

Manuel repeated it.

“Your political opinions?”

“None, my general. I do not like politicians.”

“Nor do we!” Lara agreed heartily. “They should leave government to the men who understand it. They talk too much. You, did you do your military service?”

Manuel had not, but thought it best to lie. It was probable that a soldier would have more consideration than a mere civilian.

“Three years. One at Ceuta.”

“Rank?”

“Alférez.”

“An officer, eh?”

“Yes, my general.”

“Can you ride?”

“Yes. But I was born in a town, you understand.”

Manuel rode well enough for all practical purposes, but his seat appeared clumsy to those of his American friends who had been born in the campo and ridden before they could walk.

“He was born in a town,” repeated Lara, rolling the flavour of the answer over his tongue. “He has wit, our camarero!”

The general was silent for a moment. He looked straight and quizzically into Manuel’s eyes and tapped out a tune with three fingers on the desk. Then he smiled at his own interior brilliance and nodded to his staff to warn them that he was about to perpetrate one of his better jests.

“Listen, camarero! Do you want to live?”

“If it does not inconvenience you.”

“Hombre! Why should it? I like you, but I cannot let you go, you see. So—I shall offer you a commission. We will even promote you. A captain! What do you say to that?”

“And if I refuse?” asked Manuel.

Lara jerked his thumb towards the escort.

“They will oblige you,” he said. “It is long after dawn, but we are not punctilious.”

“In that case,” Manuel answered with a shrug and a smile, “I accept the commission. I hope the food is good, my general?”

“As good as your company can steal, chico! But you have not asked where I am sending you.”

“Where then?” Manuel asked politely as if humouring a child.

“Yucatan!”

There was a roar of laughter from the assembled officers. Lara’s finesse was very good! Oh, very good indeed! He had rewarded the Spaniard and carried out the death sentence at the same time. What a general! Not even Montes could complain.

Manuel was alarmed by the joke that everyone could see but he, yet there was no doubt that they were well disposed towards him. He had a nickname already—El Camarero—and they used it affectionately. Now that the informal court-martial was over, he was cheerfully cross-examined on the Montes adventure, on Spain and on all the American countries that he had visited. His provisional commission was made out on the spot and signed by Lara with a rubber stamp.

It was a dirty and unimposing document, but it appeared to be the one reality in this lawless and illogical world into which he had suddenly been flung. As a man awaking under the shadow of a dream and ignorant in what life the elusive present is to be found, he took the commission to the civilian authorities and asked for the permits and identification papers that would give him the right to stay in Mexico as long as he wished. The chief of police accepted the fantastic appointment without question, and cordially made out a set of documents in the name of Manuel Vargas, Captain of Infantry. The captain returned to barracks and sought out the friendly lieutenant of his escort in the hope of getting some information that would make sense.

Over four bottles of iced beer the happenings of the morning promptly fell into an intelligible pattern. The tribes of the interior of Yucatan were in a state of more or less chronic revolt, and President Obregón had taken advantage of a lull in the civil strife of his generals to send a small expedition against them. Lara had had no difficulty in collecting a contingent of sixty men as his contribution but found it impossible to officer them. Nobody would volunteer for service in Yucatan—it was considered certain death—and the general did not wish to weaken his band of trusted collaborators. His choice of Manuel had been an inspiration.

That afternoon the captain was introduced to his command. They were mostly Indian peons who had innocently enlisted in the hope of better food than they got on the coffee plantations; the rest were criminals from the local gaol, convicted of smuggling without bribery, Catholicism without humour, or communism without discretion. Knowing nothing whatever of military drill, Manuel was in some fear lest his ignorance should be discovered. He found, however, that no more was expected of him than to drive his cattle on to the train to Puerto Mexico and the boat to Campeche, where he would be told how he and they were to be slaughtered. No one had tried to organise the little human herd. Dressed in ragged uniforms they squatted miserably on the barrack square, continually cooking and eating tiny scraps of food. Manuel took a roll call and divided them into squads, each under the command of a smuggler or a communist whom he assumed would have rather more initiative than the rest.

His own plans for the future were in suspension. To enter a Mexican army was a promising route to the discovery of an objective and to its attainment. On the other hand, if he were to change his mind, he could always disappear on the way to Yucatan. He was not unduly afraid of service there, for he considered it probable that the plateau Mexicans had wildly exaggerated in their own minds the dangers of the tropical forest.

Two days later they left Tapachula in a couple of baggage cars that Lara had commandeered. Arms and money were to be supplied at Puerto Mexico. Meanwhile Manuel was the only one who looked a soldier. He had bought a serviceable tropical uniform and a serape for cold nights; he still had Montes’ revolver, and Lara, who judged the usefulness of a fighting man by the amount of ammunition he habitually carried, had issued him enough for a campaign. His sixty men gave him little trouble, for he slid by instinct into the easy ways of Mexican command. A European regular officer would never have got the draft intact from Tapachula to Campeche; formal discipline would have terrified them into stampede or a state of unresisting obstinacy in which they would have died rather than obey another unintelligible order. As it was, the draft had no motive for desertion, for they were without money and there were food, water and tobacco in the cars.

At Campeche Captain Vargas discovered that the little punitive expedition would be no picnic for such as him and his command. The untrained recruits contemptuously despatched by provincial generals were to be sent up into the jungle to carry on a show of war, while the regulars remained at the bases for use, should it be expedient, against the federal government. Manuel endeavoured to pass himself off as a Spanish-trained officer, but without success; his complete ignorance of the military art on or off the parade ground was instantly exposed. Desertion no longer occurred to him. That he had only accepted a commission as an alternative to the firing squad should have been excuse enough for disappearing at the first opportunity. But he could not deny that it would be desertion, and the word carried such an association of disloyalty that it was prohibitive.

He and his sixty men were drafted into a battalion and marched off into the bush; all now had rifles, but he alone had boots. The platoon soon learned to hang together for the common defence—not against the enemy who were seldom seen, but against their comrades. His Chiapas Indians, born and bred among tropical vegetation, were quite docile in that horrible tangle of Yucatan and showed signs of intelligence so long as they were not compelled to preserve any discipline but their own. His smugglers, accustomed to carry under their shirts anything from a live iguana to a kilo of tobacco, stole artistically for the cooking pot. The rest of the battalion, men from the plateau who had seen little green but cactus and felt no heat but the direct impact of the sun, were quite unable to cope with these jungle rats. To get rid of them, the colonel banished Manuel to hold an advanced post a day’s march from the main body.

It was on a low ridge, overgrown with scrub, that formed a natural causeway across a string of marshes. They shared the dry land with the ibis that perched like white flowers on the bushes and the snakes that sunned themselves wherever the heat could find a path to earth. As far as the eye could stretch was the green carpet of swamp thickly dotted with cones and tumps and hemispheres of darker green, built up by the creepers that crawled over the dead bodies of trees and the choked mass of their predecessors. The plain looked like a solid field full of ivy-clad ruins, but there was no square yard of it that would bear the weight of a man. The southern end of the ridge led into the heart of the rebels’ country; thence the yucatecos delivered frequent and desultory raids, coming by day, for they knew their own country too well to waste their strength among the mists and insects of the swamp after nightfall. The northern end was Captain Vargas’s line of communication with the battalion. When it was open and the battalion commander remembered them, they got supplies; but the coincidence was rare.

There was nothing but war itself to save them from utter demoralisation. Their food was rice and bananas, producing a lassitude of body and spirit. Their flesh lost the power to heal itself, so that the scratching of a bite left a running sore and the mere sucking of a leech would dig out an ulcer. No bandages could keep out all the hungry and microscopic life that flew, and a wound held open pale lips until filled with a pullulating mass of grubs. They longed for death—when any movement hurt, it was heaven to imagine perfect stillness. Yet when death came near, they fought and organised instinctively like the blind soldiers of the white ants. Retreat was useless and escape impossible. The horror of that country was so great that their open space was home.

Manuel lived in a haze of pain and fever. Nothing mattered and nothing hurt him beyond bearing. He was resigned. He had given way to the life force of his own body which warned him not to struggle with circumstance lest he die. His conscious mind, or that part of it which could be expressed in words and action, still accomplished certain automatic tasks. His men drove him as the machines had driven him in Sota’s printing shop. They were dependent on him to feed them, heal them and keep open, when he could, the link with their fellows and their past lives.

They died slowly in twos and threes, for their position could not be taken so long as they were on their guard against surprise. But their casualties were unpleasant; the half-naked enemy used both muzzle-loaders and arrows. Manuel hated these winged sticks and cursed them impotently as the most barbarous weapon ever invented by man. It was murder to pull them out of a wound. The barbed head either came off and remained deep in the flesh, or dragged out with it two threads of human material. When his first batch of wounded reached divisional headquarters instructions were sent back to him that he should push an arrow through, if it could be done without obvious risk to a vital spot, and then break off the head so that the shaft could be withdrawn. It was he who had to decide whether there were obvious risk or not. He was not always successful.

After three months Manuel’s regiment was sent down to the coast. Fifteen of his men were left. In the whole battalion there were less than a hundred who could walk. None of them had shown any heroism, unless in the brute effort to keep alive. They had had few chances to attack and none to run away. Whether marching or road making or in action, each band of men had felt themselves to be gripped at the centre of an impassable maze of vegetation.

When he arrived at Campeche, Captain Vargas discovered that civil war was again merrily cantering over Mexico, and that his regimental loyalty was to de la Huerta, at the moment blockading Tampico. He was not disappointed. Any physical comfort at all was such paradise that he did not long for the greater and hypothetical comfort of peace. The three months had been a spiritual eternity, blotting out the manners and methods of his past life. He had no use for peace, since the military road to ambition seemed to him natural, nor for thought, since it led only to a consciousness of suffering.

Nothing was clear in the confused network of policies and intrigues except that Obregón and Calles had the backing of the United States; it was therefore reasonable to suppose that for the moment they represented the reactionary forces of foreign capital. Manuel, his sympathy for the Indian and mestizo proletariat increased by their common sufferings, was personally as well as regimentally on the side of the insurgents. Though hatred of Lara had been his fiercest private emotion in Yucatan, he now felt more kindly towards the general. De la Huerta, Maycotte, and the other rebel leaders were only names to him, whereas Lara’s character was calculable. A man of enterprise and education should be able to influence that magnificent and savage youth. Manuel renewed his ragged Spanish passport so that the frontier would be open to him at any time, and joined Lara at his headquarters in the Sierra Madre Oriental.

The general greeted El Camarero with amusement and surprise, and tickled his own sense of humour by appointing him to his staff in place of the late Colonel Montes—late, since Lara had no longer anything to fear from the colonel’s influential connections in Mexico City. The civil war was a much more enjoyable and romantic affair than the expedition to Yucatan. The caudilla rode with its baggage and women into the golden infinity of Mexico until contact with the enemy had been effected. Both sides then dismounted and blazed away at a safe distance until one or the other began to run out of ammunition. The vanquished, under cover of a last burst of rapid fire, ran crouching to their horses and scattered, leaving the victors in possession of the useless field. When a man was mortally wounded, his woman shot him. When a wound was curable, rest and the sun-drenched mountain air usually cured it. Manuel was reminded of the conventional battles of ancient Greece. After one such victory, full of looted champagne and irony, he persuaded Lara to erect a trophy of four field kitchens and a smashed machine gun to show that the day was his.

If the insurgents had only been successful in the field, the war might have gone on eternally; but they paralysed the whole commercial life of the country, cutting railways, telegraphs and pipe lines, until Mexico City, which had learned to look on revolution with a tolerant eye, was alarmed and gave solid support to Obregón and Calles. One by one the generals surrendered or escaped abroad. When the rebellion collapsed, Lara’s caudilla had been driven halfway across the country into the highlands southeast of Torreón.

The general was offered reinstatement in the federal army, but refused to surrender. He was delighted with his independence, and had no more desire for regular employment than a jaguar for the zoo. But for whom was he to fight? For what cause, asked his men, shall we give the vivas? Lara hit on an ingenious answer, and the caudilla, idealists all of them if an idea was primitive, greeted his orders enthusiastically. They gave their vivas for the Communist International. El Camarero, sympathetic but reserving judgment, decided to follow his leader. He merely contributed the suggestion that they should carry a red flag. They took him seriously and were delighted.

Based near the angle of three states, Coahuila, Durango and Zacatecas, the band terrorised officials, landowners and capitalists over fifty thousand square miles of the plateau. The villages, still waiting for the common lands stolen from them by Porfirio Díaz and only nominally restored by Carranza, treated them as liberators. The labour leaders in the towns talked of them as gallant comrades who would never sheathe the sword so long as the revolution was betrayed. The government hunted them half-heartedly, fearing that the capture and execution of Lara might provoke a general strike; they did not realise that in fact the relations between the caudillero and the unions were purely sentimental. Labour found him useful because his exploits impressed Moscow and could be used to loosen the purse strings. Lara on his part was quite ready to desert the cause of the people if he could find a more profitable label to cover his activities. Meanwhile he posed successfully as the avenger of peasants and workers, and, since he himself had been brought up in the perfect communism of an Indian village, knew for what he was fighting.

The caudillero was the absolute ruler of some two hundred and fifty men with their women and children—a nomadic and self-sufficient tribe living inconspicuously as ground squirrels among the yellow rocks and frequently changing their habitat according to the objective to be reached or the anticipation of pursuit. Their raids were delivered by small parties who could escape into the desert hills carrying with them so much water that any considerable body of pursuers would be forced to break off the chase and ride gasping to a familiar spring or river. Their attacks on the Norte de Mexico railway were neither as thorough nor as merciless as those of Hipolito Villa who during the civil war had cut all communication between Mexico City and the northern frontier; for Lara had no wish to provoke the federal government beyond bearing. He left the passenger traffic alone, but did his best to dislocate, cheaply and effectively, the movement of goods.

El Camarero was his secretary of state, mascot and licensed jester. Manuel found great beauty in their life, for it ran counter to none of the fundamental truths of human nature. The men were ascetic as a tribe of Arab saints. True, they had no lack of women; true, they drank themselves into insensibility when there was anything to drink; but comfort and discomfort were meaningless words to them. They were content with tortillas and charquí, simple meals of maize flour and dried goat’s meat. Their houses were the serapes wrapped around each man and woman, the thick wool protecting them luxuriously from sun, frost, wind and the hardness of barren ground. No material possessions but cartridges were of value to them, for they lacked nothing essential to life. Silver they enjoyed, but used it, like their Aztec ancestors, chiefly for the decoration of their persons and equipment. Ambitions they had none. Even Lara would have found it hard to say what more he wanted from life.

It was this pure and violent living that for half a year had blinded Manuel to the insincerity of his position. He had the action that his heart still craved, and a creed which partly sanctified it in his own eyes. He suppressed his doubts, but he was near to being forced to suppress them consciously and deliberately. The Calles government was swinging further to the left than anyone expected, showing a stern face to the Church and the United States, and a sympathetic to the peons and workers. Material, corrupt and treacherous though it was, it was carrying out the ideals of an Indian socialist republic more effectively than Lara.

As he sat between two dead bodies on the edge of the railway, his mind cleansed of its layers of pretence, Manuel weighed the eternal contradiction between the necessities of government and the true ideals of humanity. The Duke and Don Quixote. Stalin and Trotsky. Pilate and Christ. Calles and Lara. The parallel instantly struck him as ridiculous, for a less Christ-like figure than Lara it was hard to conceive; he was a very Ixtaccihuatl smelling with pleasure the burning bodies of the slain. Yet it seemed to him there was truth in his conception; he had ranged the romantics, the blessed simple, against the worldly. On the one side was the calculable conduct of individuals true to themselves; on the other the lies, the intrigues, the compromises of men caught in the complex net of civilisation, and ambitious to order that tangle into some system, however temporary.

Undoubtedly the latter were the more desirable citizens, but the romantics the better models for mankind. He remembered the cafés of Valladolid, and how his father’s friends might have been divided into the two types. There were some who would never allow the man from another town—the forastero —to pay for his own refreshment during his stay in Valladolid. There were others who lay in wait for the forastero in order that their own hunger and thirst might be satisfied at his expense; men of practical common sense, they were often the kindlier husbands, the better fathers, the more useful friends. But the others, though they might be cruel as Lara and fantastic as himself, were those who had given an aristocratic flavour to all that Spain touched and conquered.