The Three Sentinels

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘And was your republic taken seriously?’

  ‘Only by the Government—and the poor harbourmaster who had to entertain the ship’s company of the gunboat which was sent. Friends, I know we cannot go back to the beginning, but never forget that Cabo Desierto was once my home!’

  ‘It’s plain you understand its dogs,’ said Gil Delgado.

  A trap there. If he answered anything like a simple affirmative, the fellow would quote him as saying or implying that the workers of Cabo Desierto were dogs.

  ‘The man who does not understand them is either a fool or a coward. To understand one’s fellow citizens is harder. But perhaps we could work together in some things.’

  ‘For example?’ Rafael asked.

  ‘For example, something healthy to drink while none of us has much money. There is a surplus of wine in Chile. It would be very cheap and the duty is low. Shall I buy in bulk for the canteen?’

  ‘We cannot use the canteen.’

  ‘Who is stopping you?’

  ‘Man, it’s understood.’

  ‘So long as it is not against your principles! In my day it might have been. There was always a taste of oil in everything.’

  ‘You would permit it?’

  ‘Why not? The cooks and servers might as well do some work for their pay. And the profit, if there is any, goes to the Welfare Fund.’

  ‘We cannot draw on the Welfare Fund.’

  ‘But it is yours like the land.’

  ‘No! The land belongs to the Co-operative. But the Fund belongs to the employees of the Company. And since we are no longer employees …’

  ‘I see. You should be a lawyer, Sr. Garay. But I hear there is some suffering.’

  ‘Among the children,’ Rafael admitted.

  ‘You have a son, I believe. What is his name?’

  ‘Chepe,’ Rafael answered and then, feeling that the nickname was too informal for managerial society, added: ‘José -Maria.’

  ‘Doña Catalina was a churchwoman?’

  ‘Yes, but she had no need to be.’

  ‘I have heard that where she was, was heaven already.’

  Rafael did not respond. The General Manager had no right to state a truth which had never—in so many words—occurred to him.

  ‘I will see what I can do about the Welfare Fund. Lend it to the Mayor, perhaps. We do not want children in our battle.’

  ‘There is no battle, Mr. Manager,’ Rafael said impassively. This is a boycott, not a strike.’

  ‘What do you propose to end it?’

  ‘Nothing. We of Cabo Desierto have decided to live without oil.’

  ‘And what do you propose?’ Gil asked.

  ‘Also nothing. Since we are agreed, some more rum? And as I am an older inhabitant than either of you I must be permitted to pay.’

  ‘We thank you,’ said Rafael, rising. ‘But we have much to do.’

  The two leaders shook hands with the General Manager and strolled up the street with an air of importance they could not help. Until they had turned into the Company’s housing estate, away from the main street and its eyes, they did not discuss at all the unprecedented occurrence.

  ‘You were very formal, Rafael,’ Gil said.

  ‘Look! No one would expect us to refuse to allow him to sit down. But to continue in friendship and to accept his drinks, no!’

  ‘All the same, there is much to discuss if he is willing.’

  ‘At a café table? That would be beneath his dignity.’

  ‘He is a man who carries his dignity about with him.’

  Rafael Garay silently agreed and resented it. Respect for the enemy was an unnecessary complication of his boycott, so deadly simple if it were kept simple. He stopped in his compact stride and flung out the palm of his hand.

  ‘If he wishes to fight, I told him there!’

  The gesture was for himself—an affirmation of faith. He saw that it was so undeniably true that he could safely feel pity for his victim if nothing more.

  ‘Suppose he does not wish to fight and offers guarantees for the future?’

  ‘What future? We will not forget the dead.’

  ‘Who says I forgot them?’

  ‘I take it back, brother. A little frankness between friends—that is all.’

  Gil pressed his arm.

  ‘Believe me, Rafael, after you and Chepe no one loved Catalina more than I. But Cabo Desierto—one must remember that there is a world outside it.’

  Rafael went on alone to his house, one of a casual unregimented cluster which stood close under the hillside beneath the first hairpin of the road. His son was in the yard, heartily flooding the cans, tubs and troughs of flowers which Catalina had watered daily. Few of them seemed likely to recover from neglect.

  ‘Have you had a good day?’ he asked.

  It was Catalina’s invariable question when Rafael returned. To hear it again from Chepe reminded him how keenly he would have missed the repetition had she once omitted it.

  ‘So, so.’

  ‘The committee, papacito?’

  From one so small the word sounded overlarge; but that was natural enough. The committee was a great, vague unknown which swallowed up his father.

  ‘No, not the committee. I have been talking to the General Manager.’

  Rafael, as any other man, was bound to show his pride when speaking to wife or son. In public he would have affected an air of unconcern.

  ‘He is kind. I told you so.’

  ‘Well, now I believe all you said.’

  ‘Didn’t you then?’

  ‘When one is young, one does not always know the difference between play and truth.’

  ‘I do. I tell the truth.’

  ‘Yes? As when you speared the whale and it died?’

  ‘It was a whale and I stabbed it hard and my stick went in,’ the boy answered boldly.

  No getting out of that! And indeed it was a whale, a very small whale, and Chepe had been the first to find it stranded on the foreshore. Whether it died because he poked it with his stick was, Catalina had said, beside the point.

  ‘And so you really spoke to Don Mateo on the night he arrived? What did he say?’

  ‘He said I must not go home past the police at the gate.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘He stayed a little longer. He played with the fish, too, and went to bed.’

  ‘But why did you go there?’

  The boy hesitated.

  ‘I thought he might kill people like the other.’

  ‘You walked all the way up to his house?’

  ‘I only meant to go up the hill. You said you would be late. So I jumped a truck on the bend. I go up and down as I like. But the truck went all the way to the old field. When it stopped, the driver got out. I did not know him, so I got out too and followed him.’

  ‘Chepe, that is not right. I have told you that you are not to watch grown-up people secretly.’

  ‘Not with girls, you said. I saw him lift up some boards and then he went back to the truck and started to unload boxes and carry them away.’

  ‘What was in the boxes?’ Rafael asked, knowing his son.

  ‘Like in the box you told me not to touch. So while he was away at the boards I took one and climbed into Don Mateo’s garden.’

  ‘A cartridge?’

  ‘No. The sort you light and throw at policemen.’

  Rafael was startled by so plain a statement. When and from what conversation had the boy picked that up? He was as full of curiosity as a mouse in a tool shed, unsuspected until one caught a glimpse of sensitive whiskers and one bright eye. His father fell back on a feeble excuse that killing policemen was wrong and one didn’t light it.

  ‘That was what Don Mateo said,’ Chepe answered, as if his opinion of the General Manager had now been confirmed by superior authority.

  Rafael’s passionate respect for his son stopped him from exclaiming what he thought of this revelation. Though a drop of cold sweat was trickling down h
is ribs, he solemnly agreed that Don Mateo was right. Chepe, relieved to find that attempted murder was taken so calmly by all concerned, came out triumphantly with the whole story.

  For Rafael the problem was how to show his gratitude. Whatever his feelings, a person of honour must have decent manners. But to call upon this Don Mateo at his office or his house was impossible, and to write an appropriate letter needed the assistance of someone more experienced who could never be trusted to keep it quiet. In any case he had to admit that his son had seen explosives and listened to some boasting of their value in defence against the police. More awkward still were those two rifle shots at Birenfield, which he had aimed only to frighten but with a hand so shaking with anger that the first had smashed the arm of his chair.

  To hell with it! Manners would just have to stay on his conscience. Meanwhile, who was the driver of the truck and what was he doing with dynamite? The committee had only a few kilos collected from week-end fishermen who had nicked them from railway stores in the Capital for use in the more sheltered coves to the north. None of the sticks had been distributed.

  ‘Where did he hide the boxes, Chepe? Can you show me?’

  ‘It was very dark, papacito, and I could not see the number of the well. He took the third road and had his lights out.’

  ‘Where did he stop?’

  ‘Not far from 58.’

  The world outside Cabo Desierto, which Gil Delgado tended to mention more often than at first, was opening up too far. Rafael’s vision of it was a hostile mass compressing the workers into ever great solidarity. But the eccentricities of this perceptive General Manager did not fit in; nor did the behaviour of the stranger. That he really was a stranger was fairly certain. Chepe knew the whole field by sight, if not by name.

  ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘No, papacito. I have been sitting still all day.’

  ‘For ten minutes, perhaps! Then let us eat a bite and go!’

  The boy and his father climbed the slope to the sharp curve of the road where Chepe was accustomed to jump a truck, and then up the steep footpath, well-worn by men taking a short cut home, which led from one bend to another, across the lip between the ridges and on up to the abandoned field. In old days there would have been plenty of movement on road and path, but now there was only the tall outline of Rafael carrying Chepe on his shoulders.

  On the second ridge the derricks, being darker than the night, were clear enough, but their order had been complicated by the dismantling of useful machinery and a mess of beams, old iron and drill pipe left behind on the ground. Where the truck had stopped beyond the old bailing well numbered 58 was plain, and Chepe was sure of the direction in which the driver had walked; but once engaged in the derelict forest where earth, concrete and every object was equally black with oil, he was no longer sure of anything except that the boxes had been hidden under some boards. When pressed with questions he merely got muddled between the ranks of the fifties and the ranks of the thirties.

  It seemed unlikely that the driver would have taken the road he did if he were bound for the thirties. However, they were not far away and worth a visit in the hope that Chepe would recognise some landmark. The off shore breeze was busy among the rigs, creaking loose struts and banging notice boards with enough noise to cover the padding of canvas-and-rubber shoes as Rafael and Chepe moved carefully over the litter. Beyond the next well, numbered 32A, somebody else was not so careful. There was a thud and a whispered blast of curses. Father and son dropped behind a pump and watched a cone of light gliding and traversing over the broken ground. The man behind the torch passed close to the pump and Rafael recognised him, more by his bearing than his face. It was undoubtedly Lorenzo, the General Manager’s driver.

  When the intruder had returned to the road, Rafael asked:

  ‘Was it Lorenzo you saw that night?’

  ‘No. I am sure.’

  ‘A company truck or a town truck, Chepe?’

  ‘Company.’

  ‘And the number?’

  ‘I did not look.’

  Lorenzo was not hiding another consignment of explosives or withdrawing any from stock. His movements made it obvious that he was searching for the right place just as they were, and it seemed probable that this was one of several repeated attempts undertaken when his day’s work was over and he knew that he would not be needed. Such obstinacy fitted his character. It was his duty to find the stuff and he couldn’t. But duty to whom? Lorenzo was a loyal servant with no sympathy for the boycott. He might well have been ordered to look for the source of Chepe’s stick. But how did Don Mateo know it was in the old field? And if he did know, one would have thought that the search would be made in daylight by a party from the office under Mr. Thorpe, not secretly at night.

  ‘Chepe, did you tell the Manager where you got it?’

  ‘No, papacito. He did not ask me.’

  It was a waste of time to stay longer and keep Chepe out of bed. The boards were undiscoverable. Any way the carpenter’s shop had never been asked to make any sort of lid for a hole. Rafael put the whole uncomfortable business out of mind, happy for the moment in the companionship of his son. They slid home hand in hand down the steep footpath, laughing like boys returning from some forbidden adventure. Only when Chepe was asleep and no other breathing sounded did Rafael’s mood change to self-reproach—not blaming himself for what he had achieved, which was right a thousand times, but for accepting leadership when he was nothing but a good carpenter. To kill the field had been easy, yes, and triumphant, but not turning out as simple a death as that of a man who stayed dead. It was more like the burning of a hillside. On the surface everything died and underground everything was alive—silent and complicated as the unintelligible power of the Three Sentinels.

  Chapter Five

  For the pioneers of Cabo Desierto oil had been easier to tap than water. The nearest of the short rivers of the coast was thirty miles away and useless—violent after mountain storm, reduced to paddle pools or nothing for the rest of the year. Faith, finance and an army of labour, easier to recruit than to feed, drained the high, misty bogs, tunnelled and dammed and were rewarded beyond expectation. In Mat Darlow’s youth the overflow from the tanks on the old field and the town reservoir formed a respectable stream running into the Pacific.

  This precious waste was impounded in the Charca and put to work. Step by step the coast was irrigated to establish the Company Farm. When all drilling stopped in the old field and again there was water to spare, the Company formed a Co-operative of individuals and groups willing to transform the desert as a profitable leisure activity. Both the Company Farm and the Communal Lands turned out to be first-class investments, supplying the field with more than half its food well under the blackmailing prices of the wholesale merchants in the Capital.

  If ever there were an example of enlightened capitalism digging its own grave by a generous gesture, this, Mat thought, was it! One of his first visits had been to the Central Market to see for himself how the community carried on without money. Well, strictly speaking, it didn’t. Imports had dried up and shopkeepers were in a bad way, but relief funds and a small dole distributed by the Co-operative dribbled just enough cash into circulation for a workable economy. The boycott could last indefinitely provided the men were really determined to live as peasants.

  After the market he had inspected production—if one could call it inspection when only staring. The landscape of green fields and blue sea, set against grey desert and tawny mountain, was artificial as a painting on the neutral walls of a gallery with a similar brilliant life of its own. In the Co-operative’s section of this startling oasis maize, lucerne and vegetables showed the effect of intensive, personal care. There was even wheat, though far too heavy in the ear and blotched by the channels of the wind. He had never really believed that Cabo Desierto could live without oil, but this was not at all the woolly project of an agricultural commune which, in London, seemed sure to collapse. The overwhelming, verda
nt fact formed a base so strong that it invited violence in attack and defence.

  Between the fields and the sea small gangs were steadily at work in the evening sun extending the irrigation channels. He longed to stop and talk to them, but questions at that early stage could only arouse suspicion; so he had driven on to the Company Farm and spent an hour with the manager, Manuel Uriarte, a young Chilean happily aware that he was one of the few human beings to see dreams come true. After looking over the dairy herd, the arable, the citrus orchards just coming into bearing, he congratulated the creator of it all on his marvellous experiment. Experiments were few, Uriarte answered. This was simply what happened with scientific management and enough water. He was prepared to grow three crops a year of anything which would stand twelve hours of tropical sun at sea level.

  ‘That’s possible for the communal lands, too?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And before the boycott the men took a serious interest?’

  ‘Serious as children in a laboratory. They have offered to pay my salary if the Company won’t.’

  ‘What will they use for money?’

  ‘Not an idea! But I’m staying even if they pay me in beef and bananas.’

  Mat assured him that no such Utopia was likely. The Three Sentinels would never be allowed to stand still in a bucolic dream.

  ‘I’m told the water will not be cut off.’

  It was a question rather than a comment. Uriarte’s steady voice would, Mat guessed, be well known to doctors. Am I going to die? Will everything go irretrievably back to desert in three weeks?

  At this time of year it was possible, for the High Dam in the Cordillera was delivering only enough for the town. In the past week the overflow from the Charca had stopped and its level would now fall fast for a couple of months without a hope of restoring it. Thus it was easy to break the boycott by opening the pipes in the dam abutments—or would be easy if there were a company of troops, ruthless and well-armed, to prevent desperate men, faced by surrender or starvation, from closing the valves.