IT will generally be conceded that an underground river flowing with terrific force through a region of perennial fire, must, of its nature, form a most insecure foundation for any large body of masonry; and the danger of building upon such a bottom will be the more apparent if the materials used in the construction of the edifice be insufficiently cemented through the business capacity of a contractor indifferent to the voice of conscience. Yet such were the conditions upon the flanks of Mt. Popocatapetl when, in the Autumn of 1914, it was determined to erect on such a site the Popocatapetl Dam, for the containment of the Popocatapetl reservoir and the ultimate irrigation of El Plan.
Mt. Popocatapetl rises in a graceful cone to the height of 22,130 feet above the level of the sea. Its summit is crowned with eternal snows, while round its base, in spite of numerous earthquakes, constantly followed by the outburst of vast fountains of boiling water, cling a score of towns and villages, some with Spanish, others with unpronounceable names. To[14] these the beneficent and lengthy rule of Gen. Porfirio Diaz has lent a political security which Nature would do well to copy,—has led the inhabitants to seek their treasure upon earth, and has bequeathed the inestimable advantage of the great Popocatapetl Dam.
I say the “inestimable advantage,” for though the construction of this remarkable barrage has wholly cut off the insufficient water supply of this region, it has brought into the neighbourhood very considerable sums of American money, an active demand for labour, and a line of railway at the terminus of which can be purchased the most enlightened newspapers of the New World. The simplest journalist,—should such a being be possessed of the means to travel in these distant regions—might also inform the residents,—should they in turn be willing to hear him patiently,—that the irrigation of El Plan, though 150 miles distant from their now desiccated homes, can not but react to their advantage and create a market for their wares.
Mysterious designs of Providence! This mountain (among the noblest of volcanic phenomena) was destined to threaten with ruin a great English family, to precipitate onto the Treasury bench a young man of unassuming manners and of insufficient capacity, to shake half the finances of the world, and to determine a peerage for a man to whom such ornaments were baubles!
To appreciate by what chain of circumstances[15] Popocatapetl’s hoary head might with its nod produce so distant a consequence, it is necessary for the reader once again to fix her mind most firmly upon the truth that an underground river flowing with terrific force through a region of perennial fire, must of its nature form a most insecure foundation for any considerable body of masonry, and that the danger of building upon such a bottom will be the more apparent if the material used, etc.
In the light of this knowledge, which (in common with the majority of rational beings) Ole Man Benson possessed, an investment in the stocks of a Company whose dividends depended upon the security of such an edifice might have seemed to those ill-acquainted with our modern Captains of Industry, an unpardonable folly.
It is none the less true that Ole Man Benson carried a heavy load of “Popocatapetls,” naked and unashamed.
He did not positively control Popocatapetls. Heaven forbid! But apart from a considerable block of which he was the actual owner, no small fraction was held by the Durango Investment Company, the majority of whose shares being the property of the Texas and Western Equalisation Syndicate, gave to Ole Man Benson in his capacity of Chief Equaliser, a distant but effective control over the second lot of Popocatapetls in question; while the very large investment of which the N.N.O.[16] and S.L. Line had made at his command of their reserve funds in the same company, gave him in his capacity of Chief Terroriser thereof yet a third grip upon the venture.
One way and another Ole Man Benson stood in for Popocatapetls in a manner as healthy as it was unmistakable. And strangely enough, the fiercer the perennial fires and the louder the roaring of the subterranean river, the more steadily did Popocatapetls rise, the more sublimely did Wall Street urge their ascension, the more vigorously did the American investor (who was alone concerned) buy as he was told until, upon a certain day, a great Republican statesman of undoubted integrity but of perhaps too high an idealism, was announced to speak upon the great national enterprise.
Ole Man Benson loved, trusted and revered this statesman and supported him in every way: his name escapes me, but upon his decision the future of the undertaking would without question lie; and such was the bond between the two men that the politician had not hesitated to receive from the capitalist certain rough notes which had been jotted down in the office for the supreme verdict which was to be delivered to the nation.
It was to be delivered at Washington upon a certain Wednesday (the date is memorable) at the unconventional hour of ten, in order that a full report of it might reach the foolish and the wise in New York City in ample time for its effects to be fully felt[17] upon the markets; and Ole Man Benson had given instructions to sell not later than half-past three of that same fateful Wednesday.
But what, you cry (if such is your habit), what of all this in connection with the ancient houses of this land? With the Cabinet? With peerages and the rest?
Tut! Have you never heard how sensitive is the modern world to every breath of commercial news, and how all the modern world is one? Well then, I must explain:
Some two years before, in London, one George Mulross Demaine had lain languishing for lack of money.
He was of good birth, and doubtless had he possessed a secure and flowing fortune, his natural diffidence would have been less pronounced, and the strange fatality by which he could hardly place his hands and feet in any position without causing some slight accident to the furniture, would have passed unnoticed, or would have been put down to good nature. But George Mulross was wholly devoid of means.
George Mulross Demaine, like so many of his rank, was related to Mary Smith.
Now Mary Smith, her pleasing, energetic person, her lively eyes and dear soul, the reader can never fully know unless she has perused or rather learned by heart, that entrancing work, “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election,” in which, like a good fairy, she plumps[18] across the scene and is perceived to be the friend, the confidant, the cousin, the sister-in-law or the aunt of at least three-quarters of what counts in England.
She will not feel, I say, unless she has made that work her bible, how from St. James’s Place Mary Smith blessed Society with her jolly little hands, and indulged in the companionship of characters as varied as the Peabody Yid and Victoria Mosel.
What a woman! Her little shooting-box in Scotland! Her place in the West Country! The country house which she so rarely visited in the Midlands but which she lent in the freest manner! Her vivacity, her charm, her go, her scraps of French—her inheritance from her late husband, himself an American and Smith, as I need hardly say, by name!
The reader unacquainted with the Work which I refer her to, must further have introduced to her at the proper place the notable figure of cousin William Bailey, at what an expense of repetition upon my part I need hardly say. He also was of the gang; he also had been elected of the people: but violent eccentricities now kept him apart from his true world. Thus he professed a vast interest in Jews, making them out to be the secret masters of England. How far that fanaticism was sincere, he could not himself have told you. It diverted him hugely to discover mares’ nests of every kind; he was never happier than when he was tracking the relationship between governing families or the connection[19] of some spotless politician with a spotted financial adventure. There was but one excuse for his manias, that he remained, through the most ardent pursuit of them, a genial cynic. We shall meet him again.
Mary Smith, then, was related to all of them and they were all related to each other, and in their relationship there was friendship also, and they governed England and the taxes bore them on.
That the Leader of the Opposition should be Mary Smith’s close friend goes without saying; much closer and dearer to her was her other cousin, the young and popular Prime Minister, to his friends Dolly, to the world a more dignified name, who suffered slightly from his left lung. He had attained his high position before his fiftieth year was closed. For over four years he had conducted with consummate skill the fortunes of the Nationalist Party, and was at that very moment when Popocatapetl nursed so sullenly its internal rage, piloting in distant Westminster the Broadening of the Streets Bill through an excited session of Parliament.
But of all her relatives, near or distant, of all the friends whom she called by their Christian name, not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not the First Sea Lord, not the six chief members of the front Opposition bench, not the eight or nine disappointed men with corner seats, not the score or so of great financiers whom she honoured at her board,—not the Secretary of State for the Colonies (a diminished post since the Sarawatta business),—not the young[20] and popular Prime Minister himself, who suffered slightly from the left lung,—was quite so dear to her as that sort of nephew, George Mulross Demaine.
The relationship was distant, and it was less on account of the ties of blood than by reason of the strong friendship that had always existed between his father and herself that Mary Smith first befriended the lad as she had already befriended so many others. For Demaine’s father, though what the world would call a failure and even for many years separated from his wife, had always exercised a peculiar charm over his acquaintance.
Opinion had been sharply divided upon several episodes of his life, so sharply that towards the close of it he preferred to live abroad, and George’s boyhood had been passed in the most uneasy of experiences, now with his father in Ireland, now with his mother in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, and occasionally under the roof of Mary Smith during her short married life.
She had grown to do for him what she would not do for another—for Charlie Fitzgerald for instance,—for he was not a scatterbrain nor one to get rid of money with nothing to show for it. He was simply a quiet, unostentatious English lad, a little awkward (as we know) with his hands and feet but hiding a heart of gold, and destined to inherit nothing. He was not yet of age when his mother died, and during the first years of his manhood he passed more and more time under the roof of this[21] kindly and powerful woman who had determined that the misfortunes or faults of his parents should not be visited upon him.
She took him everywhere, she kept him in pocket money and, most important of all, two years ago she had arranged his marriage.
The moment was opportune: he was twenty-five, he had lost his father, he was penniless, the title of Grinstead into which he would certainly come was distant and was unprovided for. He had not chosen, or rather had not been given, the opportunity of entering, the army, but there had been just enough bungling about that to make him miss the university also. He was so unfitted for diplomacy that even William Bailey, who was accustomed to recommend for that profession the least vivacious of his young friends, shook his head when it was proposed, and after a very short experience in Paris he was withdrawn from it.
No profession naturally proposed itself to a man of his talents, and he had not the initiative to live as a free lance. His marriage, therefore, was one of these providential things which seemed to fit almost too exactly into the general scheme of life to be true. He met his wife when Mary Smith (after making all her inquiries at the Petheringtons’) had caught and branded that heiress: and the wife so branded was Sudie Benson, the daughter of so wealthy an American as made the traffic of London not infrequently halt for his convenience, and who[22] rather more than two years before my story bursts open, had seen fit to bring the radiant girl to London.
The two were forcibly introduced—I mean the boy and the girl—they understood from the first what their destiny was to be. She could find no fault in the society which swam round her and to which such a marriage would introduce her activities; he saw no drawback to the alliance save one or two mannerisms in his prospective father-in-law, which time might modify—or on the other hand, might not.
Ole Man Benson, to give him once more the name by which he was known and hated in another sphere, from the first ten thousand[1] which by the age of forty-three he had laboriously accumulated in shredded codfish, had dealt not with things, as do lesser men, but with figures. He had gone boldly forward like a young Napoleon, using, it must be remembered, not only the money of others but very often his own as well.
He had been born of Scotch-Irish parents, probably of the name of Benson, and certainly married in the First Baptist Church of Cincinnati not quite three-quarters of a century ago. He was the youngest child of a numerous family, and was baptized or named after the poet Theocritus, with a second or middle name of Chepstow, which in his signature he commonly reduced to its initial letter.
Theocritus C. Benson, now familiar to the whole[23] Anglo-Saxon race of every colour and clime, was of that type always rare but now, though rare, conspicuous, which can so organise and direct the acts of others as to bring order out of chaos, chaos out of order, and alternately accumulate and disperse fortunes hitherto unprecedented in the history of the world.
He was accustomed (in the interviews which he was proud to grant to the newspapers of England, America and the Colonies) to ascribe his great position to unwearied industry and to an abhorrence of all excess (notably in the consumption of fermented liquors) and particularly of the horrid practice of gambling. His puritan upbringing, which had taught him to look upon cards as the Devil’s picture-book, and upon racing as akin to the drama in its spiritual blight, was, he would constantly assert, the key to all that he had done since he left his father’s home. But in this manly self-judgment the Hon. Mr. Benson did himself an injustice. These high qualities are to be discovered in many million of his fellow-citizens, and he might as well have pointed, as sometimes he did point with pride, to the number of his Lodge or to his ignorance of foreign languages as the causes of his repeated triumphs.
There was more: To his hatred of hazard and to his stern sense of duty and unbending industry, he added something of that daring which has made for the greatness of the blood in all its adventures[24] Overseas, and for no branch more than for the Scotch-Irish.
He would boldly advance sums in blind confidence of the future, the mere total of which would have appalled a lesser man, and he would as boldly withdraw them to the ruin of prosperous concerns, where another would have been content to let production take its own course. And this fine command of cash and of credit which he used as a General uses an army, had in it something of personal courage; for towards the latter part of his life, when he had come to control a vast private fortune, it was imperative that in many a bold conception he himself should stand to lose or gain.
At the moment when his only daughter left her happy Belgian convent to be presented at the Court of St. James, he was, though at the height of his fortunes, a lonely and to some extent an embittered man.
His wife had married another: their only child he had not seen for three years, and though he knew that her robust common sense would stand against the religious environment of the gentle nuns who had been entrusted with her upbringing, yet he could not but feel that she had passed the most formative years of her life in an alien air, and under influences quite other than those of the Ohio Valley.
He had therefore determined to decline numerous and advantageous offers and to be present himself in London during the season which saw her introduction[25] to the world, and there, in spite of his unfamiliarity with English ways, he soon appreciated the central position of Mary Smith whose late husband indeed he had come across a quarter of a century before when he was freezing the Topekas off the Pit.
Theocritus C. Benson had seen young Demaine and was contented; he was also naturally anxious to come across old Lord Grinstead if possible, that he might estimate for himself how long his daughter might have to wait for her title. Indeed he would not allow the marriage to take place until the old man had been pointed out to him, shrivelled almost to nothingness and pulled with extreme caution and deliberation in a bath-chair through the private gardens of Bayton House.
Had he known that the figure thus exhibited to him so far from being that of the aged peer was but the carcase of a ruined dependant it would perhaps have done little to alter his decision, for though Lord Grinstead was of gigantic stature, with purple face and thunderous voice, yet his habit of gross and excessive drinking gave him a tenure of life at least as precarious as that of the enfeebled figure upon which the financier had gazed; and what is more, Lord Grinstead, though an execrable horseman, had suddenly begun to hunt upon hired mounts with a recklessness and tenacity which, if from that cause alone, should speedily ensure a violent death.
When all was happily settled, when Demaine had[26] been given away by his principal creditor, and Sudie by her upright and handsome old father, when the last of the wedding gifts had been exchanged at the usual discount and the young couple had gone off to Honiton Castle which had been lent them for ￡2000 during the honeymoon, another aspect of life had to be considered.
A point upon which Mary Smith had done her best and failed was the settlements—￡1500 a year to stand between his child and starvation or worse, Theocritus was willing to determine. It was the sum he had himself named before the first negotiations were begun; but as they proceeded he refused to change it by one penny, and at last the discussion was abandoned in despair. All the young people might need they should have—she was his only child, they could trust him to be more than generous. Capital sums when they were required for anything but direct investment, should be always at their disposal, and the half or more than the half of his enormous income should be ready to their call; but he resolutely retained to himself the right to control the management of all save the infinitesimal sum which was to stand between Sudie and her husband’s tyranny, or the world’s harshness.
Mary Smith’s veiled threats and open flattery were alike useless. She capitulated, told the young woman to earmark her tiny allowance for journeys, and gained from Theocritus Chepstow only this:—that he would buy a freehold for them, build and[27] furnish it. Theocritus was on like a bird; and the lovely little lodge which London now knows as Demaine House, with its curious formal gardens, odd Dutch stables and Grecian weathercock on the site of the old mews in what is now Benson Street, is the proof that he kept his promise.
For a year Ole Man Benson had not only kept his promise in the way of building and furnishing for the young people: he had done more. He had floated them upon London with all the revenue that could be reserved from the new venture upon which he designed to double the colossal sums which directly or indirectly stood to his name, and every penny that he could spare from his first early purchases of Popocatapetls went into the status and future social position of his daughter. Now, after two years, Popocatapetl Dam was finished and yet greater things lay before them.
Demaine was put into Parliament by a majority comparable only to the financial advantages which had secured it. His birth, her voice and its timbre, gathered into Demaine House all that so small a Great House could hold.
So things had stood to within a week of the March day upon which we saw that very different man, Charles Repton, walking into the City of London....
But from the name of Charles Repton let me rapidly slew off to the sombre pyramid of that peak in the neighbourhood of Darien and recall the[28] caprice of Popocatapetl upon which so much was to depend.
It was a Wednesday in that March of 1915 that the Statesman was to speak in Washington at ten: (for two years Demaine House had thriven, it slept that Tuesday night unconscious of its fate). It was for the Wednesday at 3.30 that the order to sell stood in Ole Man Benson’s name.... Well ...