Death's Other Kingdom

by Woolsey, Gamel; Jacobs, Michael;

  ‘Soon there’ll be none left when they really begin to need them,’ he said with the usual Spanish gift for disillusionment.

  I went on out into the kitchen where Maria was trying to make the water for our coffee boil, fanning the charcoal with a palm-leaf fan; the charcoal as usual glowing sullenly and producing little heat. I waited idly talking to the company in the kitchen, which was crowded as it always was now with old women, young women, children and babies. They were all in terror of the Moors, and afraid to stay in their own houses. I tried to reassure them, telling them that everyone said that the Moors were still near Algeçiras and showed no signs of coming towards us at all; but they would not believe it.

  ‘They will come and cut off everyone’s heads,’ they said. They asked me if they could come to us at the fatal hour, and I said, yes, of course they could come, we would fill the house with them, the garden, too, if necessary, fly the English flag, behave quietly, and nothing would happen to any of us. The Moors, I told them, were soldiers with officers, they were not going to attack an English house (I hoped this was true) – but anyway the Moors were not anywhere near us and were not coming any nearer. The thing to do was not to be frightened, but to go on with their own occupations as usual. I left them a little calmer, and as the coffee was ready at last went out to join Gerald in the garden for breakfast.

  It was already set out on an old green café table, with a marble top, our invariable, always delicious, breakfast, of strong black coffee with hot goat’s milk, marmalade made from our own bitter oranges and toast made from the marvellous Spanish country bread – bread so good that the Spaniards instead of saying As good as gold, say As good as bread.

  We were sitting in our usual place beside a bed of brilliant zinnias: flaming dahlias and tall cockscombs flared in the sunlight around us, but we sat in the dense shade of two large Japanese medlars and looked out of their shadow at the autumn flowers glowing in the morning sun. The sound of the lorries hardly reached us there; it was the most peaceful moment we had had since the war began. But it was not destined to last for long, before we had even finished our coffee a messenger arrived with a letter from an English friend in Torremolinos. In it she said that she had been asked by the Consul to get word to us that there was a destroyer leaving that afternoon, which was taking off English people and other foreigners to Gibraltar, that the Foreign Office wished to impress on English subjects the danger of their situation and the possibility that there would not be another opportunity of leaving, etc., etc. Our friend then resumed her own voice and invited us to come to lunch, a farewell lunch if we were staying as she was going, had been leaving soon anyway, or a fortifying lunch if we were all to join the crowd on a small destroyer.

  We talked it over while the messenger was being refreshed in the kitchen. We had never really thought about leaving before. We had always felt (and we were right) that we were perfectly safe among these dangerous ‘Reds’ the Foreign Office was painting in such lurid colours, they were not going to do anything to us; we had never injured them, nor were we associated in their minds with any class of people or institutions which had. We did feel however, that our house and land was safer with us in residence. If there were a real revolution from the Left and it reached a point where confiscation began, a big empty farmhouse with fertile gardens and orchards and plenty of water for irrigation was an obvious thing to confiscate, or at any rate to put several peasant families in.

  But we could not imagine their turning out two perfectly friendly English people. Then there were the house-burning tendencies of the time to be considered though they appeared to have ceased. If they should burn our neighbour, Don Cristober’s house after all, our house would certainly be in danger. If we were there to direct operations we could almost certainly save it; if not, it might well go too.

  So we decided not to think of leaving unless things became very much worse. Everyone thought then that Malaga would probably be taken before very long, but we did not see why we should not stay through the taking. We might be able to help a few of the poor people through the difficult moment. We might also (this appealed to me very much) establish a small hospital to take care of the wounded and sick if there was fighting near us. Our house, I could see, was made for a hospital on a small scale. Its long whitewashed rooms with their high ceilings and big windows and cool smooth-tiled floors could be kept immaculate with little work, and would make splendid wards. The large garden with its fountains and fresh running water would help restore the convalescents. There was a bathroom with a good modern water-heater for which we luckily happened to have in a large supply of anthracite. I got quite enthusiastic while I was thinking of the possibilities of the house – Don José, the saint-like village doctor, would help us, the Village Committee would get some beds and bedding for us somewhere, perhaps a destroyer would bring us medical supplies from Gibraltar – so my mind ran on.

  But at other moments when I had no project for being useful in mind to amuse myself with, and remembered that we had definitely decided to stay in Spain, I confess that my heart sank. I was not really afraid of anything happening to ourselves. I did not even believe that there was any immediate danger to our Spanish friends. We did not then know the horrors which were going to take place in Spain, the cruel murders by the terrorists among the parties on the Left, the brutal massacres by the extremists on the other side. And yet I felt something. William James had a theory that the subconsciousness of all men might flow together at a level far below ordinary knowledge and thought, so that we are all aware in the depths of our minds of the same things though we do not ordinarily realise it. Freud in one or two passages shows that he has had the same idea, as when he suggests that the dreams of people living in the same house might affect each other. And I think that at that time in Spain, I, and a great many other people, somehow knew that something was coming in Spain far worse than anything which we yet expected with our conscious minds. I could feel something ominous in the air that sometimes frightened me.

  This feeling of apprehension passed like an uneasy wave through my mind as we sat finishing our coffee that morning, and subsided again below the conscious level. Pilar came and cleared the table, and we wrote an answer to our friend accepting her invitation to lunch, but declining to leave on the destroyer. But we did ask her if she could take a suitcase full of papers (just in case), the deeds of the house and so forth, with a few of my favourite shawls and ornaments. We found the messenger cooled and refreshed waiting in the kitchen and discussing with the servants all the latest alarms and rumours, while the old women sitting around in their dingy black dresses croaked a melancholy chorus whose refrain was always ‘Los Moros!’

  The young man had come on a bicycle, and it was the first bicycle we had seen flying the Red Flag, in this case a small dirty bit of red ribbon. Later on every cart and bicycle, every cottage, pigsty and hencoop had one. ‘Hasta los burros tienen sus banderas rojas!’ Maria said sardonically (‘Even the donkeys are flying their red flags!’).

  We felt very reluctant to set out on that long hot walk again. Memories of how heavily the radio had dragged upon us during the last mile made us consult Enrique about hiring a donkey to carry the suitcase. The only difficulty seemed to be that there was a general strike going on so that it was not permissible to hire anything. I cannot imagine what the general strike was against – Fascism perhaps – or why anyone thought a general strike was going to help in conducting a war. Perhaps it was just too exciting to work. Anyway no one could hire us a donkey: but of course, Enrique explained, we could borrow one and send a present later. He went off to get one from a neighbour, while Maria crossly and unwillingly made us up the usual merienda. We heard her talking to the old women about us as we went away to pack our things. They had exclaimed at our rashness in leaving ‘our own village’ in such times. Maria declared angrily ‘The English are afraid of nothing and nobody!’ It was by no means praise, but an accusation of presumption amounting to hubris.

&nbs
p; By the time we were ready Enrique had returned with the donkey. It was grey, and grey donkeys in Spain, as far as my experience goes, are invariably called Platera – a happy portmanteau combination of two ideas: silvery, and plateracky, both highly applicable to a rawboned grizzled ass. (Brown donkeys are naturally always called Moreno, Brown One.) I addressed this Platera by his natural name, and he turned his mild face and lifted his large ears.

  Enrique announced that he was going with us, to manage the burro, and also to see the English battleship. He strapped the suitcase firmly on Platera’s back, and said that as it was so hot I had better ride for a while; I did not like to refuse though there is nothing that I like less than riding donkeys. The Spanish burro, perhaps I ought to explain, is often a large animal almost the size of a small mule, and this one thought nothing of my weight, but plodded along indifferently and methodically whether I was on or off its back at the usual donkey rate of two and a half miles an hour. Enrique knew burros too well to make any serious efforts to hurry it, he only gave it a light thwack across its hindquarters from time to time not to let it think that it was entirely left to its own devices, and occasionally shouted at it ‘Ahre! Burro!’ or simply gave a harsh long-drawn-out protesting cry of ‘Buuuuuuuuurrrrrro!’ The donkey did not appear to notice him at all, it did not even flick its ears, but I begged Enrique for my sake not to beat the patient creature. It was obviously just a waste of strength anyway, we would have to adapt ourselves to its crawling pace, and we did, and our trip to Torremolinos appeared interminable; it was after one o’clock when we finally found ourselves walking down its long white street towards the sea.

  As the bright blue water came suddenly in sight between the dazzling houses we all gave exclamations. A large motionless destroyer seemed to be painted on this vivid backdrop. We were too late! Abandoning Antonio and Platera we took the suitcase and rushed on as fast as we could to the fashionable English pension where the English had been told to assemble. To our relief we found that the garden and veranda looking out over the sea were still crowded and swarming with English and American people standing about or sitting on piles of luggage; they seemed excited and the throaty high middle-class voices buzzed together like an angry hive. ‘What’s the matter?’ we asked the first acquaintance we saw, a young English painter who had a little villa below. ‘Well, the destroyer has come for us, but she can’t land a boat to take us off because the proper authority hasn’t come from Malaga. She radioed Malaga for it but it hasn’t come yet, and Spain being in a state of war she can’t land a boat without a special order from Malaga to the local authorities. Everyone is telephoning, and the poor Consul is being blamed for everything.’ There was in fact a sort of British Chorus declaiming:

  ‘Disgraceful!’

  ‘British Subjects!’

  ‘Telephone the Consul!’

  ‘Communists!’

  ‘What are they going to do?’ we asked.

  ‘Oh! I suppose they’ll just wait for permission. The real trouble is that she came before she was expected. They told us three o’clock.’ Just at that moment the stationary destroyer which had been picking up her rejected launch puffed out a cloud of black smoke and started off full speed ahead for Malaga. There was a chorus of disappointed ‘Ohs!’ from the crowd in which we joined. Faces fell; we were being deserted, abandoned. A charming young man, apparently out of a Wodehouse novel, sprang forward and threw up his arm. ‘Stop!’ he shouted after the rapidly disappearing ship. We all laughed but we all sympathised too with his impotent anger which wanted to catch that deserting destroyer by the rudder and tie her to the shore. Exasperatingly she steamed rapidly away and soon grew small in the distance.

  ‘Telephone the Consul!’ everyone cried at once. The advice was quite unnecessary as the poor Consul had never been able to put down the receiver for a minute since the destroyer had first appeared, busy as he was trying to evacuate British subjects from mines, waterworks, ruined castles, prehistoric cave villages and all the other odd places the English get themselves into in Spain, and at the same time to refuse heart-rendingly to help the stream of poor Spaniards on the Right who begged him to help them to escape or to save some much loved son or husband. We heard a loud woman’s voice going on and on into the telephone. ‘You must do something about it at once! Very badly mismanaged –’ She came out at last, a large formidable creature. ‘They should have sent a battleship,’ she said. She sat down in a vacant chair and began a conversation about Communists.

  Two English friends had come to join us on our comfortable curb, Jan W. and her young daughter Janetta. It was delightful to be with English people who felt as we did, and shared our horror of what was happening, and even without the Spanish friendships and love of Spain, that made the situation so painful to us, still were thinking more of the people who were really suffering than of their own temporary inconvenience. For the attitude of our fellow Anglo-Saxons was one of the things which depressed us most during the Civil War, in Spain, and even more at Gibraltar.

  While we sat talking to Jan and Janetta we looked around at the refugees. They were not the anxious, flying, possessionless creatures one usually associates with that word, but well-fed, well-dressed members of the richer classes who had had good breakfasts and baths that morning and would most probably have them tomorrow morning too. The Civil War was just an annoyance to most of them, it was interrupting their vacations just when the bathing was at its best. I saw not a trace in them of any realisation that something was happening of shocking importance to the Spanish people and probably to the world. In most of them the war appeared to affect nothing but their egotism; and many of them were full of a sort of huffy pomposity as if the war had been got up on purpose as a personal offence to them.

  I say the war made no impression on them, and it did not appear to at the time, but on some of them it certainly did make a profound and surprising one; for a few of the refugees taken off by that destroyer (not I think any of our Torremolinos ones but some from Malaga hotels), who had seen absolutely nothing except the smoke of some burning buildings and suffered not the slightest hardship except I believe missing their lunch and tea on the destroyer which was very crowded, arrived in Gibraltar with the most amazing atrocity stories. One educated man of reputable position said that he had seen a nun burned alive in broad daylight in one of the public squares of Malaga. I suppose these preposterous stories show that the Civil War did make some impression on the British refugees, though hardly a desirable one. (As a matter of fact no nun in Malaga was ever injured in any way. And months after the rising the nuns who worked in the hospitals were being publicly thanked in the newspapers for their kindness to the wounded.)

  Near us as we sat waiting that morning a sharp young woman was haranguing a group of acquaintances on the subject of the reign of terror we were supposed to be experiencing. It seemed that a gang of Anarchists, or as she of course called them ‘Communists’, had come out from Malaga to burn the images in the local church; they dragged them out and broke them up and set fire to them, she said.

  ‘Was no one killed?’ her hearers asked hopefully. No, apparently not only was no one killed, but there was not the slightest disorder.

  ‘Didn’t the villagers protest or try to save the images?’ No, they just stood looking on indifferently for a while and then went home to supper, and only the children stayed on to dance around the bonfire. It was all rather casual apparently and no one seemed to take much interest in it; even the Anarchists went about it in a matter-of-fact way as if it were a sort of hygienic duty they had to perform.

  Her story was interrupted by the appearance of two polite young workmen in clean blue overalls who had come to tell us that they had succeeded in arranging everything, they were members of the Village Committee. The refugees were to join the destroyer in Malaga, there would be buses to take them in that afternoon; as the destroyer could not leave that day (she had to wait for refugees from other villages who could not arrive in time), they were to s
pend the night at an hotel on the outskirts of Malaga – it was perfectly safe, the Consul would be there, and there would be a guard of carabineros. Everything was arranged, everything would be quite all right. No one much liked the idea of spending the night in Malaga which did look rather an ominous place with its cloud of smoke. But there was nothing else to be done. The crowd began to disperse in search of lunch. Just then our friend Madame Vandervelde appeared and carried us off for ours.

  The high dark room we sat in was cool and the long glasses we drank from were cooler still and infinitely refreshing. Madame Vandervelde drew me aside for a minute to discuss the best disposal of some of the things which had to be left behind by various people. She picked up a big earthenware bowl from the sideboard, a beautiful thick, heavy thing with a greeny grey glaze. ‘Could I possibly take this with me, do you think?’ she asked me. ‘But what is it?’ I asked in my turn. It was certainly not an example of the Spanish pottery we were so fond of, could it be Chinese?

  ‘You know –’ she answered. ‘It’s Omega pottery. Roger Fry made it for me.’ I looked at her and picked up the bowl silently, for I had loved Roger Fry, too. And what a strange place, what a strange moment in which to see the handiwork still surviving the death of its maker, of that Apostle of beauty and the intelligence. I put it down sadly. Here in my hand, it seemed to me, was a piece of that very civilisation of the Western World we are always talking about saving; and the destroyer was certainly not going to bother about saving it, and if a bomb fell on it something would be left, but not very much.