"Spare me your protests." The younger man waved his hand
languidly. "You wish not to confer upon this subject----"
"It's a subject we'll omit," said Richard.
His companion stopped swinging, allowed the hammock to come to
rest; his air of badinage fell from him; for the moment he seemed
entirely sober; and he spoke with gentleness. "Mr. Lindley, if you
please, I am still a gentleman--at times."
"I beg your pardon," said Richard quickly.
"No need of that!" The speaker's former careless and boisterous
manner instantly resumed possession. "You must permit me to speak
of a wholly fictitious lady, a creature of my wanton fancy, sir,
whom I call Carmen. It will enable me to relieve my burdened soul
of some remarks I have long wished to address to your excellent
self."
"Oh, all right," muttered Richard, much annoyed.
"Let us imagine," continued Mr. Vilas, beginning to swing again,
"that I thought I had won this Carmen----"
Lindley uttered an exclamation, shifted his position in his chair,
and fixed a bored attention upon the passing vehicles in the
glimpse of the street afforded between the house and the
shrubberies along the side fence. The other, without appearing to
note his annoyance, went on, cheerfully:
"She was a precocious huntress: early in youth she passed through
the accumulator stage, leaving it to the crude or village belle to
rejoice in numbers and the excitement of teasing cubs in the
bear-pit. It is the nature of this imagined Carmen to play
fiercely with one imitation of love after another: a man thinks he
wins her, but it is merely that she has chosen him--for a while.
And Carmen can have what she chooses; if the man exists who could
show her that she cannot, she would follow him through the devil's
dance; but neither you nor I would be that man, my dear sir. We
assume that Carmen's eyes have been mine--her heart is another
matter--and that she has grown weary of my somewhat Sicilian
manner of looking into them, and, following her nature and the law
of periodicity which Carmens must bow to, she seeks a cooler gaze
and calls Mr. Richard Lindley to come and take a turn at looking.
Now, Mr. Richard Lindley is straight as a die: he will not even
show that he hears the call until he is sure that I have been
dismissed: therefore, I have no quarrel with him. Also, I cannot
even hate him, for in my clearer julep vision I see that he is but
an interregnum. Let me not offend my friend: chagrin is to be his
as it is mine. I was a strong draught, he but the quieting potion
our Carmen took to settle it. We shall be brothers in woe some
day. Nothing in the universe lasts except Hell: Life is running
water; Love, a looking-glass; Death, an empty theatre! That
reminds me: as you are not listening I will sing."
He finished his drink and lifted his voice hilariously:
"The heavenly stars far above her,
The wind of the infinite sea,
Who know all her perfidy, love her,
So why call it madness in me?
Ah, why call it madness----"
He set his glass with a crash upon the table, staring over his
companion's shoulder.
"_What_, if you please, is the royal exile who thus seeks refuge
in our hermitage?"
His host had already observed the approaching visitor with some
surprise, and none too graciously. It was Valentine Corliss: he
had turned in from the street and was crossing the lawn to join
the two young men. Lindley rose, and, greeting him with sufficient
cordiality, introduced Mr. Vilas, who bestowed upon the newcomer a
very lively interest.
"You are as welcome, Mr. Corliss," said this previous guest,
earnestly, "as if these sylvan shades were mine. I hail you, not
only for your own sake, but because your presence encourages a
hope that our host may offer refreshment to the entire company."
Corliss smilingly declined to be a party to this diplomacy, and
seated himself beside Richard Lindley on the bench.
"Then I relapse!" exclaimed Mr. Vilas, throwing himself back
full-length in the hammock. "I am not replete, but content. I
shall meditate. Gentlemen, speak on!"
He waved his hand in a gracious gesture, indicating his intention
to remain silent, and lay quiet, his eyes fixed steadfastly upon
Corliss.
"I was coming to call on you," said the latter to Lindley, "but I
saw you from the street and thought you mightn't mind my being as
informal as I used to be, so many years ago."
"Of course," said Richard.
"I have a sinister purpose in coming," Mr. Corliss laughingly went
on. "I want to bore you a little first, and then make your
fortune. No doubt that's an old story to you, but I happen to be
one of the adventurers whose argosies are laden with real cargoes.
Nobody knows who has or hasn't money to invest nowadays, and of
course I've no means of knowing whether _you_ have or not--you see
what a direct chap I am--but if you have, or can lay hold of some,
I can show you how to make it bring you an immense deal more."
"Naturally," said Richard pleasantly, "I shall be glad if you can
do that."
"Then I'll come to the point. It is exceedingly simple; that's
certainly one attractive thing about it." Corliss took some papers
and unmounted photographs from his pocket, and began to spread
them open on the bench between himself and Richard. "No doubt you
know Southern Italy as well as I do."
"Oh, I don't `know' it. I've been to Naples; down to Paestum;
drove from Salerno to Sorrentoby Amalfi; but that was years ago."
"Here's a large scale map that will refresh your memory." He
unfolded it and laid it across their knees; it was frayed with
wear along the folds, and had been heavily marked and dotted with
red and blue pencillings. "My millions are in this large irregular
section," he continued. "It's the anklebone and instep of Italy's
boot; this sizable province called Basilicata, east of Salerno,
north of Calabria. And I'll not hang fire on the point, Lindley.
What I've got there is oil."
"Olives?" asked Richard, puzzled.
"Hardly!" Corliss laughed. "Though of course one doesn't connect
petroleum with the thought of Italy, and of all Italy, Southern
Italy. But in spite of the years I've lived there, I've discovered
myself to be so essentially American and commercial that I want to
drench the surface of that antique soil with the brown,
bad-smelling crude oil that lies so deep beneath it. Basilicata is
the coming great oil-field of the world--and that's my secret. I
dare to tell it here, as I shouldn't dare in Naples."
"Shouldn't `dare'?" Richard repeated, with growing interest, and
no doubt having some vague expectation of a tale of the Camorra.
To him Naples had always seemed of all cities the most elusive and
incomprehensible, a laughing, thieving, begging, mandolin-playing,
music-and-murder haunted metropolis, about which anything was
plausible; and this impression was not unique, as no
inconsiderable proportion of Mr. Lindley's fellow-countrymen share
it, a fact thoroughly comprehended by the returned native.
"It isn't a case of not daring on account of any bodily danger,"
explained Corliss.
"No," Richard smiled reminiscently. "I don't believe that would
have much weight with you if it were. You certainly showed no
symptoms of that sort in your extreme youth. I remember you had
the name of being about the most daring and foolhardy boy in
town."
"I grew up to be cautious enough in business, though," said the
other, shaking his head gravely. "I haven't been able to afford
not being careful." He adjusted the map--a prefatory gesture.
"Now, I'll make this whole affair perfectly clear to you. It's a
simple matter, as are most big things. I'll begin by telling you
of Moliterno--he's been my most intimate friend in that part of
the continent for a great many years; since I went there as a boy,
in fact."
He sketched a portrait of his friend, Prince Moliterno, bachelor
chief of a historic house, the soul of honour, "land-poor"; owning
leagues and leagues of land, hills and mountains, broken towers
and ruins, in central Basilicata, a province described as wild
country and rough, off the rails and not easy to reach. Moliterno
and the narrator had gone there to shoot; Corliss had seen
"surface oil" upon the streams and pools; he recalled the
discovery of oil near his own boyhood home in America; had talked
of it to Moliterno, and both men had become more and more
interested, then excited. They decided to sink a well.
Corliss described picturesquely the difficulties of this
enterprise, the hardships and disappointments; how they dragged
the big tools over the mountains by mule power; how they had kept
it all secret; how he and Moliterno had done everything with the
help of peasant labourers and one experienced man, who had "seen
service in the Persian oil-fields."
He gave the business reality, colouring it with details relevant
and irrelevant, anecdotes and wayside incidents: he was fluent,
elaborate, explicit throughout. They sank five wells, he said, "at
the angles of this irregular pentagon you see here on the map,
outlined in blue. These red circles are the wells." Four of the
wells "came in tremendous," but they had managed to get them
sealed after wasting--he was "sorry to think how many thousand
barrels of oil." The fifth well was so enormous that they had not
been able to seal it at the time of the speaker's departure for
America.
"But I had a cablegram this morning," he added, "letting me know
they've managed to do it at last. Here is, the cablegram." He
handed Richard a form signed "Antonio Moliterno."
"Now, to go back to what I said about not `daring' to speak of
this in Naples," he continued, smiling. "The fear is financial,
not physical."
The knowledge of the lucky strike, he explained, must be kept from
the "Neapolitan money-sharks." A third of the land so rich in oil
already belonged to the Moliterno estates, but it was necessary to
obtain possession of the other two thirds "before the secret leaks
into Naples." So far, it was safe, the peasants of Basilicata
being "as medieval a lot as one could wish." He related that these
peasants thought that the devils hiding inside the mountains had
been stabbed by the drills, and that the oil was devils' blood.
"You can see some of the country people hanging about, staring at
a well, in this kodak, though it's not a very good one." He put
into Richard's hand a small, blurred photograph showing a spouting
well with an indistinct crowd standing in an irregular semicircle
before it.
"Is this the Basilicatan peasant costume?" asked Richard,
indicating a figure in the foreground, the only one revealed at
all definitely. "It looks more oriental. Isn't the man wearing a
fez?"
"Let me see," responded Mr. Corliss very quickly. "Perhaps I gave
you the wrong picture. Oh, no," he laughed easily, holding the
kodak closer to his eyes; "that's all right: it is a fez. That's
old Salviati, our engineer, the man I spoke of who'd worked in
Persia, you know; he's always worn a fez since then. Got in the
habit of it out there and says he'll never give it up. Moliterno's
always chaffing him about it. He's a faithful old chap, Salviati."
"I see." Lindley looked thoughtfully at the picture, which the
other carelessly returned to his hand. "There seems to be a lot of
oil there."
"It's one of the smaller wells at that. And you can see from the
kodak that it's just `blowing'--not an eruption from being `shot,'
or the people wouldn't stand so near. Yes; there's an ocean of oil
under that whole province; but we want a lot of money to get at
it. It's mountain country; our wells will all have to go over
fifteen-hundred feet, and that's expensive. We want to pipe the
oil to Salerno, where the Standard's ships will take it from us,
and it will need a great deal for that. But most of all we want
money to get hold of the land; we must control the whole field,
and it's big!"
"How did you happen to come here to finance it?"
"I was getting to that. Moliterno himself is as honourable a man
as breathes God's air. But my experience has been that Neapolitan
capitalists are about the cleverest and slipperiest financiers in
the world. We could have financed it twenty times over in Naples
in a day, but neither Moliterno nor I was willing to trust them.
The thing is enormous, you see--a really colossal fortune--and
Italian law is full of ins and outs, and the first man we talked
to confidentially would have given us his word to play straight,
and, the instant we left him, would have flown post-haste for
Basilicata and grabbed for himself the two thirds of the field not
yet in our hands. Moliterno and I talked it over many, many times;
we thought of going to Rome for the money, to Paris, to London, to
New York; but I happened to remember the old house here that my
aunt had left me--I wanted to sell it, to add whatever it brought
to the money I've already put in--and then it struck me I might
raise the rest here as well as anywhere else."