Land of Marvels (21 page)

He returned from these explorations with the eager anticipation of talking about them to Edith Somerville. He left for his fieldwork early in the morning, as soon as it was light, timing his return, as far as he possibly could, to arrive well before Somerville and Palmer were back from the excavation, which was generally well after sundown. Patricia nowadays almost always accompanied them, partly because she had become increasingly interested in the discoveries being made, mainly because she wanted to be where Palmer was. So usually—and it was a source of obscure disappointment to Edith and distinct vexation to Elliott if it proved otherwise—he would find her alone, and they would have an hour or so together.

It was remarkable, and might have been demonstrated on a graph, the rise in the frequency of their encounters, which both, however, still chose to regard as accidental, and in the amount of time these occupied. On one occasion he remained at the house for part of the morning to study the rock specimens he had brought back with him and make notes on them, and she brought coffee to him and they talked together while he drank it. Sometimes after dinner they would find themselves alone for a short while, though without conscious contrivance, on Edith’s part at least—time for a smile to be exchanged and a few words to be spoken. But the regular time of their meeting was in the late afternoon; they would have tea together, just as on the day of Elliott’s arrival. Quite soon this taking of tea together took on the quality of a ritual, with Elliott mainly talking and Edith mainly listening.

The preponderance was natural; he was by far the more loquacious. But he asked her questions about herself, and these she was usually reluctant to answer. Concerning her married life she said practically nothing at all, and he construed this restraint as a mark of discontent, though without really understanding it; she did not express energy of feeling through eager words or vivacity of manner like the American women he had known, but through a sort of charged reticence, which was new to him and full of erotic challenge. It was curious, it was intriguing, that she should seem less than happy without betraying the fact by any sort of remark save the most indirect. It was as if she were waiting with an assumption of nonchalance—and this could harden into hauteur if she was pressed too closely—for something, someone, to compel her to frankness, force an admission from her, make her expose herself to damage by declaring it.

About the years before, her girlhood, when she still lived with her parents, she would talk more, particularly about her father, the QC, his defense of the underdog, how much he had been admired and respected for his generosity and his passion for justice, how he never undertook a defense unless he firmly believed his client was innocent of the charge against him, how he would accept lower fees or even waive his fee altogether if he thought it was a deserving case.

He had got rich all the same, Elliott thought, with a skepticism that came mixed with immediate dislike for this phony philanthropist. Defending the underprivileged had paid off. She had been born to money; it was written all over her. She had never felt the ache of poverty and deprivation—not like himself, ragged-trousered and sometimes hungry, son of a settler on a homestead in Oregon. Naturally he gave no expression to these thoughts, even contriving nods of the head and looks of admiration. Concealment had always come naturally to him. He wanted her, and this gave him a tact that he might otherwise not have summoned, a tact indistinguishable in his mind from considerations of strategy, similar to the feeling that made him avoid glancing too frequently at the line of her bosom or the reclination of her limbs as she sat opposite him.

Her eyes shone when she spoke of her father and her life at home. Her mouth, which was wide but delicately molded, softened with tenderness, and she held her head up and looked to Elliott altogether beautiful and regal. Her father was a great storyteller in addition to everything else; he had told her a lot of stories when she was a little girl, he made them up as he went along, he could make anything into a story. There was one she remembered about a wolf called Cuthbert, who had a bad name, quite undeservedly.

“Well,” Elliott said, “I guess wolves are much maligned.” He had shot wolves as a boy, in winter, to keep them off the hogs, but he said nothing of this. He wondered whether she had sat in the QC’s lap for these stories and how old she had been when they were discontinued. But these were not questions anyone could ask; and in any case she did not want those days, that paradise of an indulged childhood, from which he suspected she had never really emerged, subjected to questions; it was inviolable. Instead he talked to her about his activities of the day, though taking care to give nothing much away.

He began this way at least; but Edith had only a limited interest in source rock analysis, and the limits soon showed in a certain vacancy of expression that would descend on her. It was stories she liked—just as much as ever it seemed; it was the marvels of geology that made her face light up, and for this reward Elliott was more than ready to supply them. In North America, beneath the Great Plains, fossil remains of marine creatures had been found. Just imagine, five thousand miles from the sea, at altitudes of four thousand feet, they had found fossils of sea creatures, among them the giant reptile
Mosasaurus.
Had she heard tell of this unfriendly fellow? You can look today at the rock print of a monster that has been extinct for millions of years, that lived and feasted when these rocks were being formed on the floor of the sea. Imagine the power that tumbled these rocks from the seabed and thrust them up so high. At Los Angeles, where oil seeped to the surface and its volatile elements evaporated, a vast lake of pitch was formed and sheets of water gathered above it and the ancestors of Cuthbert the Wolf came to drink there and died there, trapped in the swamp of pitch. No one could tell how long this oil had been leaking. Among the skeletons they found while extracting the pitch were some belonging to
Smilodon
, the saber-toothed tiger, another ugly customer.
Smilodon
had ceased to inhabit the earth fifty thousand years ago . . .

Always, as he talked, his own sense of the miraculous came to him, informed all his words and gestures. To be here in this place at this time, to know oneself for the product of those inconceivably ancient travails of fostering earth . . . He was wooing the woman before him with marvels, this he knew, knew also that he was making headway, knew it from the quality of the attention she gave him, the way her eyes rested on his face as he related to her the phases of the globe, the gaseous, the liquid, the long consolidation. But he had no sense of exploiting this wonder of hers, because he so totally shared it; he was himself in thrall to these marvels, had been so from earliest manhood: the furnace at the heart of the world, the cataclysms of earthquakes and the secret paths of their vibration, the amazing tumult of volcanoes. When he described to Edith how the deposits of oil and gas had been formed from plants and creatures that had once been in the world, had lived and died and coagulated together for millions of years, and then for more millions had been subject to heat and pressure beyond human imagining, he was lost in the wonder of it, and she, needing always something less abstract, more touchable, thought of seaweed and eels and seahorses crushed into a paste, imagined some remote and mysterious animal breathing its last on the floor of the sea, adding its body to the great host of bodies that were slowly being squeezed and melted together to make the oil.

Elliott, the better to illustrate this long, hot grip of the rock, raised his hands and clenched his fists as if they too held that creative fire. His blue eyes burned; his voice came in bursts of rhetoric. Daimler, she heard him say. The first Mercedes. The Model T. A million registered automobiles in 1913, in the United States alone. You could say good-bye to steam. It was fuel oil now, fuel oil in the boilers of the factories, trains, ships. He leaned toward her, his body tense with the vision of it. They were producing eighty million barrels a year now in the state of California. That vast and astounding upheaval, that unimaginable heat, designed by Providence to bring this great boon to humanity. A billion-dollar industry. Already the lives of millions of Americans had been transformed. It could happen here too, right here. The desert could be made to bloom, a new golden age ushered in. Where now there were just a few wandering characters on camels, living in tents and shooting at strangers, there would be highways, industries, spacious brick-built houses with front lawns and efficient plumbing and regular garbage disposal facilities.

Once more in London, in his Park Lane mansion, Rampling began to give serious consideration as to what to do about the traitorous Elliott.

There was much else to claim his attention at the time. A meeting was planned for early April to discuss among other things the further financing of the Baghdad Railway and the route it was to take. Germany and Russia and Austro-Hungary, as well as France, would be sending representatives to this, and the financial group Morgan Grenfell, of which he was an associate, would have a considerable part to play in the negotiations and needed to be well primed as to the conditions of British involvement. There were also to be preliminary discussions sometime in April at government level, between Britain and France, though very few knew of this and agreement about time and place had been delayed for reasons of secrecy, the subject being the delicate one of settling the territorial lines to be drawn between the two powers in the Near East in the event of war and consequent dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Some progress had been made: It was agreed in principle that the French should have Syria, and the British the land between the Two Rivers. But they were still at loggerheads over Mosul and the oil fields of northern Mesopotamia.

So he had enough to engage him without double-dealing geologists. But the business of Elliott’s duplicity rankled with him. He had been hoodwinked; that was the only word for it. The thought was unwelcome to him. That he never fully trusted anybody did nothing to mitigate his displeasure, nor did the knowledge that there was no one to blame but himself; it was he who had made the appointment, there was no denying that, though of course there had been glowing recommendations. It was precisely the source of these recommendations that troubled him now; they had all come from high-ranking officials of Standard Oil. If Elliott was so much lacking in basic morality as to double his fee in this way, he might easily have tripled it by making some agreement with the Americans before leaving; if so, it would probably be with the Chester Group, which had lately been increasingly active in seeking concessions in the region. And then there was the further possibility that as an American he intended to favor these people by falsifying his reports to the others. With a delinquent character like that one could not be sure of anything.

It was a moral issue really. It was a question of what could be regarded as pardonable. There were degrees in everything, balance and moderation in good as in ill. But Elliott’s turpitude went beyond all bounds. It was pardonable, it was even meritorious, for a man who was really a geologist to pose as an archaeologist in order to explore for oil on behalf of the British government. In lands not under British rule imposture was necessary before the activity could be carried out at all; and it was an activity that would bring profits to individuals, certainly, but that would ultimately add to the power and wealth of Britain, enhance her prestige, maintain her ability to rule the waves and enable her to extend the bounds of empire. These were worthy aims, and Elliott, though an American, had made them his own at the moment of accepting his fee and signing the contract. Quite otherwise were the greed and perfidy he had displayed in accepting a fee from the Deutsche Bank, and possibly also from an American cartel, to do the same job. This was to strike a blow at the foundations of commercial practice on which European civilization was based; the man had doubled, possibly trebled his reward while reducing practically to zero the value of his reports, even if they proved to be genuine; there was little advantage in obtaining advance information if it was to be shared among all the interested parties.

There was only one thing to do with Elliott, a solution urged equally by justice and logic. Too much was at stake to be sentimental about it. He would hardly have had time yet to do much in the way of compiling reports, let alone communicating them. If someone could be sent now, at once, he might get there in time. He could carry a letter under government seal, authorizing him to take into his care whatever notes the American had made, any maps or indications of findings. These once secured, he could arrange for something to happen to Elliott. The Arabs of the desert fringe were given to shooting at strangers; not much in the way of bribes would be needed. Or he could be shot and the Arabs given the blame. But who to employ in the business? Time would be saved if it were a local man, someone recruited by the British Resident at Baghdad, for example, or a professional assassin from Aleppo or Damascus. But this would leave too much to chance. No private agent could be fully trusted; being mercenary, he would be lacking in the spirit of service, probably, and without much in the way of patriotic feeling. Besides, there would be the danger of blackmail. Someone from the Secret Service, perhaps. But on what pretext, in what disguise could they get him to a remote archaeological site in Mesopotamia? And it would take too long to arrange things, to obtain his release; the red tape in that department could be measured in miles. No, it would have to be an army man, someone in military intelligence, used to taking orders, with a sense of honor, who knew Arabic, if possible knew the terrain, might even have been in the region before, someone whose arrival would not arouse much question.