Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  “No.” Helen, who had been pacing the carpet with short unsteady steps, plumped herself down like a stout little bolster on the sofa. “No to what, dear?” cried Lily in a voice of alarm. “No, I shan’t give them the Vermeer.” “Oh, Helen!” the ladies reproached her in wailing chorus. “No,” Helen repeated with a decisive wobble of her receding, indeterminate chin. “I don’t care what they promise. Jeroen swore to me that not a hair of its head would be harmed. But I’ve no right to take his word for it. Any more than if it were a child. The painting will stay where it is, Henry. They can have the Titian if they want.”

  It became alarmingly clear that she intended to stick to her guns. Henry’s reasoning was useless, and Frank could not shake her resolution, though he was feeling it his pastoral duty to try. Like anyone who has arrived at an immense decision, she had a look of being at rest, serene as a rock in the midst of the storm around her. Bearing out the prophecy that they could be “bigger” for their experience, her dumpy form seemed to have gained a full inch and not only in moral stature. It was a matter of posture, doubtless; her small muffin head was drawn up and her chest thrust mildly forward as she sat unmoving in the “place of honor” vacated by Margaret on the sofa. Perhaps she felt proud of the dauntless stand she had taken or pleased to be the undivided center of attention, but, if so, it only showed in a vague, bemused little smile, which she directed at those around her benignly and sympathetically, as though, from her present modest elevation, they were no longer quite in focus.

  She did not turn a deaf ear to their arguments and objections but listened politely, with an evident effort at attention, nodding from time to time to show that she was following, as no doubt she did at her club when a lecturer dealt with a topic that was “interesting,” although not directly to her. Facing her, Frank had drawn up a straight chair and kept hitching himself forward on it so as to be able to “reach” her. To the audience grouped around them he seemed to be giving a demonstration of his professional skills, like a doctor operating on a patient before a group of students. This was something he could not help, but the audience—or at least Sophie—could not help viewing it as a performance, that is, critically, forgetful of the earnestness of his purpose.

  “Helen! You bear the same lovely name, ‘torch’ in Greek, as my own wife and daughter. Now let’s think a little about this Vermeer. In the last analysis, it’s a material object, isn’t it? Just oil and canvas handled in a certain way that you and I recognize as art. But that’s relative, don’t you agree? Depending on the culture we’ve been raised in. I mean, to an Eskimo or a Ugandan, the marks on that piece of canvas wouldn’t say a darn thing. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ as the old saw had it. Well, isn’t that pretty much accepted by art historians today? In art, we’re responding to a set of conventions, the way we do in our clothes and the food we eat. Some creative spirits want to overthrow those conventions, and I don’t say that I altogether blame them, even though I don’t always understand what they’re getting at. But that’s beside the point. The point is that in our society we’re making a shibboleth of art. We’ve learned that there’s nothing sacred or eternal in our dress fashions and food habits. We’ve lived through several revolutions in those departments, with women wearing pants and men carrying purses and our young people cooking in ‘woks’ and eating raw fish like the Japanese…. Well, you know what I mean. But our attitudes toward art are still as rigid as they ever were, paradoxical as that may sound. We reverence art as something sacred, when we ought to be using it for our enjoyment as we do today with our clothes. Modern art hasn’t succeeded in liberating man from the fetishism of Art with a capital A. We’ve come to worship a class of objects-paintings and sculptures—and we treat their creators as gods. If we all could be artists, as one day I hope we can, we wouldn’t feel that way any more. We wouldn’t look on art as precious property to be accumulated by any single person or society. Now, mind you, I think this totemism has a lot to do with the failure of organized religion. Despite church attendance figures, we’ve let ordinary humanity lose touch with the divine, with God. No wonder that the lucky few among us are tempted to put daubs of oil on canvas in His place. I say ‘daubs’ deliberately, Helen, to shock you. Remember, we’ve just agreed that to the Ugandan your Vermeer is no thing of beauty, and who is to say that he’s wrong?”

  “Yes, thank you, Frank. Very interesting. I know you mean well. And I suppose it’s all relative, as you say. I’ve never cared much for African sculpture, though I know people who have a passion for it.” Frank hitched himself forward another inch and made a gesture of entreaty. “Helen! Do you still know your Ten Commandments?” She nodded. “Well, recite me the First, then. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,’ is that what you mean?” “Yes, dear Helen. ‘Or the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.’ This terrible experience should bring home to us the good sense of that commandment. Of course what was being enjoined against at that time was the fashioning and worship of idols. Secular art was unknown to the ancient Hebrews and indeed to most of the ancient peoples. And the special genius of the Hebrew religion was that its God was invisible, that is, immaterial, not to be represented or imitated in any material shape or form. The Incarnation, of course, was a radical break with that view of Him. ‘And was made man.’ Still, I wonder whether the old ban on representation didn’t have more true wisdom in it than our own Church, reacting to the Puritan excesses, has been willing to admit. Did Moses foresee that the fashioning of images would be bound to lead to the worship of them? The story of the Golden Calf seems to point that way, doesn’t it?”

  “My wife’s a Presbyterian,” said Henry. “You won’t find graven images in her church. But you’re dead right on one point. She idolizes that Vermeer.” Helen still wore her dreamy smile. “Did you ever happen to see it, Frank? It was hanging on show at Wildenstein’s. For the Crippled Children. There was always a throng around it, wasn’t there, Henry?” “I’m sorry,” confessed Frank. “I missed it. I’m so darned busy with church work that I don’t get out much to exhibitions any more.” “Oh, well, then…If you had, you might understand.” She was in love with the picture, that was obvious, though the minister did not seem to realize it. Moreover, there was a suggestion of tender reminiscence in her tone, a commemorative note, as though the “Girl” belonged to a distant, enshrined past, too far off now for tears. However the others were interpreting the ultimatum, Helen had clearly decided that she was on her way to a better world, leaving her dear possession behind.

  Undiscouraged, Frank tried another tack. “Maybe we make too much of a cult of originals. Helen has had the privilege of living with one, but if she’d lived with a reproduction instead, nobody could take it away from her. If it happened to be stolen, she could always get another, exactly the same. Whereas when you lose a loved one, say a member of your family, there’s no replacement. That’s why, Helen, we hold human life sacred; the individual in each of us is one of a kind, loved by the Creator for the divine unique spark in him. Don’t let your ‘torch’ go out. Your life is sacred to me, Helen, as it should be to you. You blaspheme if you think of exchanging it for a mere material possession, a thing whose value may be specious—in the sense of highly relative—as you yourself admit.” But the Vermeer was one of a kind; that was the point he himself had just made, even if for him it would have done better to exist in the plural. It was odd that he did not see that everything he was saying about human life applied for Helen, equally—indeed more emphatically—to her “Girl.”

  “Leave her be, Frankie,” gently spoke up the Bishop. “Let her follow her own counsel. We shall pray for you, my dear, and ask the good Lord to soften the hearts of these misguided young people toward you.” “Helen Potter!” Jeroen himself stood in the doorway. “Come along now.” Henk half rose, as if to intervene. “Stay where you are, Deputy,” Jeroen said. “This affair does not concern you. You also, Henry Potter
. Your wife does not need your company.” With her short teetering steps, she followed him into the kitchen; Hussein with his pistol was at her back. The Bishop wiped his eyes. There went the stuff of martyrs. “Queen Victoria,” whispered Henk, gravely approving. In fact there was a resemblance to the queen in her later years, something of pudgy royal dignity, that all at once had become visible.

  “I suppose I might have offered to take her place,” muttered Henry. “It wouldn’t have done any good,” the others assured him. “She’s made her bed,” said Harold. “Shut up, you,” said Sophie. The door to the kitchen was closed. Outside Hussein stood on guard, his pistol raised. Frank and the Bishop moved their lips in silent prayer. Carey swiftly crossed himself. “I can’t bear it,” cried Aileen, putting her fingers to her ears. For an eternity they waited.

  Ten

  WITHOUT ANY WARNING, TOWARD the end of the afternoon, the television screen lit up. It was still Wednesday. Yusuf, very helpfully, got to work twirling the dials till the image would stay put. In the box appeared the farmhouse they were prisoners in, shown from several angles and surprisingly close up. The shots had been taken from the air: those military planes that they had heard zooming about this morning; sometimes, annoyingly, a wing got in the way of the picture. It was odd to have a bird’s-eye view of your place of confinement, which you had never fully seen with your own eyes—on the night they had arrived it had been too dark. Now they were able to look down on the broad sloping roof—underneath was the drafty attic half of them had been sleeping in—the television aerial, the chicken coop and the rabbit run near the spot where the men peed. From above they saw a crisscrossing of canals and ditches, the highway they had landed on, and the big unfinished barn with its roofing of tarpaulin. Although the snow had melted, the camouflage job was still effective; examining it from a pilot’s perspective, even Harold admitted to a certain satisfaction in the result of their labors, what the Sophie girl called “pride of workmanship.”

  Yusuf had turned up the sound, and Henk, who was found napping on the floor behind the sofa, was rushed to the screen to translate. They had missed the beginning while they were trying to wake him up, but they learned—what they could see anyway—that the long-awaited breakthrough had happened. It was the hijackers themselves who had taken the initiative. They had broadcast a message to the authorities announcing their location; the radio in the kitchen, it seemed, was a powerful short-wave sending and receiving set, which one of the Arabs—Yusuf probably—had known how to rig up to the TV aerial. Henk and Carey said that they had suspected that there would be a “pirate station” in the house—a pity that they had not come out with that sooner, when it would have cleared up some little misunderstandings. Anyway, the authorities, at first, had treated the message as a hoax, with the result that two whole hours had been lost. The message identifying the “command post’s” position had come through shortly after two, according to the commentator, and now it was a few minutes past four.

  The program, apparently, had started with a full list of the hijackers’ demands; that of course would be the part they had missed. But now a spokesman came on the screen recapitulating the chief ones. First, an astronomic ransom—one and a quarter million dollars, half to be distributed among the workers and peasants of Surinam—for the return of the helicopter and its crew. Second, immediate withdrawal of Holland from NATO and breaking of relations with Israel. Third, liberation of all “class-war prisoners” from Dutch jails. Superficially, that one sounded more feasible: in a very liberal country like Holland, there could not be so many. But in fact it could mean anything, depending on the definition: the release of common criminals, for instance, if they were of working-class origin, which obviously most of them would be. The demand, Henk said, would be unacceptable as it stood to his government; several rounds of “clarification” might be needed before the ruling coalition could consider acting on it. Eventually a few fringe elements who by stretching a point could be regarded as political prisoners might be let out: e.g., small groups of squatters who had occupied canal houses and struck policemen seeking to evict them…. But in his opinion the kapers did not take this demand of theirs too seriously; it was on their list pro forma, to satisfy revolutionary protocol. The outcome for the hostages would surely not hinge on it. The same with NATO and Israel: he doubted that the terrorists really expected to change the foreign policy of the Netherlands by their “rhetoric”—his expression—of violence.

  More to the point was the final demand: that a small helicopter with a one-man crew be supplied to pick up a bundle of tapes containing instructions from the prisoners to their families on how to bring about their release. This demand had a deadline attached to it. In less than half an hour from now, the pilot was to begin hovering over a designated spot, which would be marked by a flag and lanterns, thirty meters from the command post; at a signal he was to drop a cable. He was not to attempt to land, and any other craft entering the air space during the pick-up would be shot down. The tapes must then be transferred to a long-range carrier and delivered to the families of the hostages; under no circumstances should they be allowed to fall into the hands of the FBI or any other agency of the U.S. imperialist government. Failure to observe this condition would bring immediate reprisals. The Dutch military attaché in Washington would be held responsible for the prompt transfer of the tapes to the parties concerned. Delay or sabotage on his part would be viewed as an act of war, to be answered for in blood by the prisoner Van Vliet de Jonge, whose image in full color now flashed on the screen…. As he sat on the floor, fiddling with the knobs, they saw him chatting with the Queen at the opening of Parliament addressing a crowd, eating a herring at a street stall. Then came some still photos of his wife and their children, poor little tykes—it was a surprise to learn that he was married to a Javanese beauty, slender, with sloe eyes. Henk’s family vanished from the screen and were replaced by the Minister of Defense, a funny stiff old socialist, declaring that Her Majesty’s government, mindful of the human factor, was bending every effort to meet the conditions laid down in the final demand: a helicopter of the Alouette II type was being dispatched, and a Lockheed Lodestar stood ready to receive the bundle of tapes. With a last sweeping view of the farmhouse, the special broadcast ended. Further news and commentary would be shown on the regular program at eighteen hours fifty-five, five minutes of seven.

  As the image of their prison faded from the screen, the Chadwicks eyed each other. It looked indeed as though Senator Carey had known whereof he spoke when he said that making the tapes was not “the easy way out.” He had tried to warn Harold in particular against that fatal cocksureness of his. It had been foolish of Harold, foolish of all of them, to imagine that the “kapers,” as Henk called them, would not do everything in their power to keep the FBI from interfering with their plan. As for “stalling” over the delivery of the paintings (“gaining time”!), from what they had just heard such tactics could cost Henk his life. Harold might not care if Henk was executed, but the others would. He was such good company, their “Laughing Cavalier,” and he had a brilliant career ahead of him—they had not understood that till they saw him on television, though Charles had always said so.

  No wonder Harold and Eloise were looking doubtfully at each other. After all, if he had not been so brassily confident of the harmlessness of making the tapes, the others might have hesitated. And there sat Helen, the living proof of how wrong they had been to listen to him. Jeroen and Company—so far at least—had wreaked no vengeance on her. She had made a tape with instructions to turn over the Titian as the price of Henry’s head. That was all. No one had struck her or furiously twisted her arm. They had simply told her that they would be seeing her later. She had seemed almost let down when she came trotting back into the room. It was hard to believe that the band would give up on the Vermeer so easily; they would surely try again. But two hours had passed, and no new summons had come for her. If anyone had “gained time,” it was she. Of course they h
ad other business to occupy them, most importantly the helicopter, which was due any minute if the deadline was really going to be met.

  The hostages in the parlor crowded against the western window to watch for it. In the dusk, they saw lanterns moving in the direction of the field. Nothing yet but a star—Venus rising—in the sky. “Watchman, tell us of the night,” someone hummed, as a “sick” joke surely, for it was not signs of promise such as had appeared to the Magi that they were awaiting—rather, the reverse in the collectors’ case. Still, one could not deny that there was something strangely thrilling in scanning the evening sky for the approach of a visitant from what seemed now like the other world. At any rate, it would be a break in the monotony. For some time, they had been hearing heavy thumps against the house wall: extra sandbags, the men said, being piled up around it in the event of an attack. At last Eloise’s sharp ears caught the sound of the helicopter’s rotors. There it was, hovering, a midget compared to theirs. They were able to watch the drop of the cable, but, disappointingly, the armed guards with lanterns patrolling cut off a view of the loading. Also it had become dark. They had only a glimpse of an indistinct object swinging upward to tell them that the pick-up was over. The little craft with their voices aboard immediately started to climb.