He said with a laugh: "I'm thirty-seven - you're twenty-four. That's all it amounts to."
After a pause Mallinson asked suddenly: "Oh, by the way, how old should you say Chang is?"
"Anything," replied Conway lightly, "between forty-nine and a hundred and forty-nine."
Such information, however, was less trustworthy than much else that was available to the new arrivals. The fact that their curiosities were sometimes unsatisfied tended to obscure the really vast quantity of data which Chang was always willing to outpour. There were no secrecies, for instance, about the customs and habits of the valley population, and Conway, who was interested, had talks which might have been worked up into a quite serviceable degree thesis. He was particularly interested, as a student of affairs, in the way the valley population was governed; it appeared, on examination, to be a rather loose and elastic autocracy operated from the lamasery with a benevolence that was almost casual. It was certainly an established success, as every descent into that fertile paradise made more evident. Conway was puzzled as to the ultimate basis of law and order; there appeared to be neither soldiers nor police, yet surely some provision must be made for the incorrigible? Chang replied that crime was very rare, partly because only serious things were considered crimes, and partly because everyone enjoyed a sufficiency of everything he could reasonably desire. In the last resort the personal servants of the lamasery had power to expel an offender from the valley - though this, which was considered an extreme and dreadful punishment, had only very occasionally to be imposed. But the chief factor in the government of Blue Moon, Chang went on to say, was the inculcation of good manners, which made men feel that certain things were "not done," and that they lost caste by doing them. "You English inculcate the same feeling," said Chang, "in your public schools, but not, I fear, in regard to the same things. The inhabitants of our valley, for instance, feel that it is 'not done' to be inhospitable to strangers, to dispute acrimoniously, or to strive for priority amongst one another. The idea of enjoying what your English headmasters call the mimic warfare of the playing field would seem to them entirely barbarous - indeed, a sheerly wanton stimulation of all the lower instincts."
Conway asked if there were never disputes about women.
"Only very rarely, because it would not be considered good manners to take a woman that another man wanted."
"Supposing somebody wanted her so badly that he didn't care a damn whether it was good manners or not?"
"Then, my dear sir, it would be good manners on the part of the other man to let him have her, and also on the part of the woman to be equally agreeable. You would be surprised, Conway, how the application of a little courtesy all round helps to smooth out these problems."
Certainly during visits to the valley Conway found a spirit of goodwill and contentment that pleased him all the more because he knew that of all the arts, that of government has been brought least to perfection. When he made some complimentary remark, however, Chang responded: "Ah, but you see, we believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much."
"Yet you don't have any democratic machinery - voting, and so on?"
"Oh, no. Our people would be quite shocked by having to declare that one policy was completely right and another completely wrong."
Conway smiled. He found the attitude a curiously sympathetic one.
Meanwhile, Miss Brinklow derived her own kind of satisfaction from a study of Tibetan; meanwhile, also, Mallinson fretted and groused, and Barnard persisted in an equanimity which seemed almost equally remarkable, whether it were real or simulated.
"To tell you the truth," said Mallinson, "the fellow's cheerfulness is just about getting on my nerves. I can understand him trying to keep a stiff lip, but that continual joking of his begins to upset me. He'll be the life and soul of the party if we don't watch him."
Conway too had once or twice wondered at the ease with which the American had managed to settle down. He replied: "Isn't it rather lucky for us he DOES take things so well?"
"Personally, I think it's damned peculiar. What do you KNOW about him, Conway? I mean who he is, and so on."
"Not much more than you do. I understood he came from Persia and was supposed to have been oil prospecting. It's his way to take things easily - when the air evacuation was arranged I had quite a job to persuade him to join us at all. He only agreed when I told him that an American passport wouldn't stop a bullet."
"By the way, did you ever see his passport?"
"Probably I did, but I don't remember. Why?"
Mallinson laughed. "I'm afraid you'll think I haven't exactly been minding my own business. Why should I, anyhow? Two months in this place ought to reveal all our secrets, if we have any. Mind you, it was a sheer accident, in the way it happened, and I haven't let slip a word to anyone else, of course. I didn't think I'd tell even you, but now we've got on to the subject I may as well."
"Yes, of course, but I wish you'd let me know what you're talking about."
"Just this. Barnard was traveling on a forged passport and he isn't Barnard at all."
Conway raised his eyebrows with an interest that was very much less than concern. He liked Barnard, so far as the man stirred him to any emotion at all; but it was quite impossible for him to care intensely who he really was or wasn't. He said: "Well, who do you think he is, then?"
"He's Chalmers Bryant."
"The deuce he is! What makes you think so?"
"He dropped a pocketbook this morning and Chang picked it up and gave it to me, thinking it was mine. I couldn't help seeing it was stuffed with newspaper clippings - some of them fell out as I was handling the thing, and I don't mind admitting that I looked at them. After all, newspaper clippings aren't private, or shouldn't be. They were all about Bryant and the search for him, and one of them had a photograph which was absolutely like Barnard except for a mustache."
"Did you mention your discovery to Barnard himself?"
"No, I just handed him his property without any comment."
"So the whole thing rests on your identification of a newspaper photograph?"
"Well, so far, yes."
"I don't think I'd care to convict anyone on that. Of course you might be right - I don't say he couldn't POSSIBLY be Bryant. If he were, it would account for a good deal of his contentment at being here - he could hardly have found a better place to hide."
Mallinson seemed a trifle disappointed by this casual reception of news which he evidently thought highly sensational. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" he asked.
Conway pondered a moment and then answered: "I haven't much of an idea. Probably nothing at all. What can one do, in any case?"
"But dash it all, if the man IS Bryant - "
"My dear Mallinson, if the man were Nero it wouldn't have to matter to us for the time being! Saint or crook, we've got to make what we can of each other's company as long as we're here, and I can't see that we shall help matters by striking any attitudes. If I'd suspected who he was at Baskul, of course, I'd have tried to get in touch with Delhi about him - it would have been merely a public duty. But now I think I can claim to be OFF duty."
"Don't you think that's rather a slack way of looking at it?"