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.