Wide Is the Gate

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny had brought his camera from the car and followed Raoul, pushing his way through the crowd. The Spaniard announced his official position and introduced his friend as a “periodisto americano.” The profession of journalist justifies any sort of intrusion, so the militiamen bowed and said: “Si, si, Senor,” and Lanny went to work with speed and assurance to snap the plane from every angle.

  It was a Budd-Erling, all right, but with modifications which Lanny was quite sure had never been made in Newcastle. With some help from Raoul he exposed the engine and photographed that. Lanny had breakfasted, lunched, and dined with the Budd-Erling “Tornado” engine every day he had spent in his father’s home and he knew its every feature and the reasons therefor; he knew what parts to photograph, and where to look for the serial numbers of engine, carburetor, and other parts. When he got through he said to his friend: “Both plane and engine were made in Germany, and this camera film and these notes may be worth a thumping big sum to my father. What’s more important, they may be the means of stopping him from trading with the Nazis.”

  Raoul replied: “I ought to be entitled to a commission for my help, wouldn’t you think?”

  “You bet your life!” Lanny took it seriously.

  “All right, tell him I’ll take one plane for my government!” Lanny grinned and promised to present the claim.

  X

  The shelling of the city continued, but Lanny found it as Raoul had said—you got busy at your job and forgot everything else. As they drove away from the park Raoul turned on the radio, and they listened to the labor-union station declaring that the enemy had not yet ventured his all-out assault, and when he did so he would be set back on his heels. Five thousand militiamen had arrived from Barcelona, partly by train and partly by truck; Russian tanks had come from Cartagena, and the enemy would no longer have a monopoly of those weapons; also the International Brigade had arrived at the Atoche Station and would soon be marching to the Toledo Bridge. “Give them a welcome!” said the radio voice.

  Lanny commented: “Is it wise to give the enemy such military information?”

  “He gets it in a hundred different ways,” replied his friend. “This is a people’s war—we have to give them courage and tell them what to do.”

  Lanny said: “I’d love to see that march. Where would it come?”

  “By the Calle de Atoche,” was the reply, and Lanny drove there quickly. They saw crowds ahead and heard cheering. “La Brigada Internacional!” It was a great moment in the lives of two idealists who had been running a school and writing newspaper articles and otherwise laboring to promote the idea of human brotherhood, and now suddenly saw that idea taking flesh, putting on boots, and marching with firm tread on a wide city boulevard. “The international party shall be the human race”—so the workers’ hymn promised, and here were men from practically every nation of Europe and the Americas, having come of their own free will and impulse to help defend the Spanish people’s Republic.

  For a couple of months the left-wing press had been full of accounts of this brigade of heroes. It might be doubted if so small a body of troops had ever had so much publicity, for its ranks were made up in considerable part of writers and would-be writers, and from its training-camps had gone out first-hand stories in a score of languages, some of them havigg merit enough to gain space in capitalist newspapers and magazines. It was a dream stepping out of men’s hearts and onto the pages of history. Each of these thousands of men had his own dream, and they put them all together and made one. It shook the pavements of Madrid, and shook the hearts of the spectators; it would shake the Nazi-Fascist dream of power, and would continue to arouse the souls of lovers of liberty and justice for the rest of time. Lanny thought: “This is the greatest sight I have ever seen in my life, and I ought to tell them so.” He and Raoul got out on the running-board of the car and added their cheers to the clamor. To hell with the Fifth Column!

  Like many another event which history deems important, this wasn’t much of a show externally. These wool khaki uniforms had been used for drilling and digging trenches and crawling in the dust. Whole companies of the men had had no time to get uniforms, but marched in the clothes they had worn in New York or Havana or Budapest. A few wore the Spanish worker’s costume, one-piece blue denim overalls known as monos, fastened with zippers down the front; Lanny hoped they had something warm underneath! But all had rifles and cartridge belts, and all wore grim expressions, knowing that this was no dress parade and that the enemy was only a couple of miles away. Most of the columns carried the red, yellow, and purple flag of the Spanish Republic; there were a few Red flags and Soviet flags, for it was an army of free opinion and free speech. Many groups had banners indicating the nation from which they had come, and Lanny watched the faces as they passed; Raoul had told him that a number of students or former students of the school had enlisted, also some of the Italian refugees whom Lanny had aided in the course of the fourteen years of Mussolini’s rule.

  There came a columna with a banner reading Thalmann; those were the Germans, named in honor of a Communist leader whom Hitler had in prison. Lanny scanned the rows of faces, for he had met many Leftists in Berlin and elsewhere, and might get some news for Trudi. He got it, indeed, for marching at the head of one company, wearing a captain’s insignia, he saw a stocky, deep-chested Prussian with weather-beaten skin, dark hair shaved, and that peculiarity which seems to mark the North Germans, the absence of any curve from the back of the head all the way down the neck. Two years ago Lanny had studied that masterful face for an hour or two and had been thinking about it off and on ever since.

  He called to Raoul: “Look at that officer! Do you know him?”

  Raoul answered: “That is Capitan Herzog. Have you met him?”

  “I met him once,” Lanny replied. He didn’t try to say more, because of the shouting; but after the last brigadiers had marched by and the pair had got back into the car, he said: “I met that Capitan Herzog once in London under rather peculiar circumstances. He was going under the name of Bernhardt Monck.”

  “He called at our office, and said he had escaped from the Oranienburg concentration camp. He was in the German Army in the last war.”

  “I had doubts about him in my mind,” added Lanny. “I couldn’t feel quite sure whether to trust him.”

  “Well, you know now,” replied the Spaniard. “No spies or traitors are going into that hot furnace, you can bet.”

  XI

  Lanny said: “I hate to be running away in a crisis like this.” But his friend replied: “There’s not a thing you can do here, and you have your jobs outside. You’d better go while you can; Franco might surround us entirely, and you’d be stuck for a long siege.”

  Lanny hadn’t had time to tell his friend about the paintings. Now he said: “Raoul, I’ve got much the same proposition as we had with the Comendador. That turned out to be a genuine Goya, and I got twenty-five thousand dollars for it; I gave the whole amount to buy medical supplies which are doubtless being used here in Madrid now. I have another chance of the same sort, only these are French paintings, so I don’t suppose they are properly to be classified as part of the national treasure of Spain.”

  “It’s all right with me,” said Raoul; “we need antiseptics more than we need art right now.”

  “All right, then; I’ll take a chance on them. But there’s one important problem—enough gasoline to get me back to Valencia.”

  “It takes an official permit,” said the Spaniard; “but I think I can arrange it. I have had to attend to it for some of the journalists. If you brought in two aviators, you’re surely entitled to take yourself out again.”

  The Sandoval home was on the Plaza de la Independencia, a fashionable neighborhood and a pretentious structure in French Renaissance style. Lanny rang the doorbell, and then rang again, and again, and again; his heart began to sink, for evidently the cowardly butler had run away. How was a stranger to get in and gather six examples of French Impr
essionist art from the walls of the salon? Lanny rang some more, and in between rings he kicked on the door most impolitely—but this was wartime. He was about to suggest that Raoul go to the next house and make inquiry when he heard a faint click and perceived that a small slot in the door had been pushed aside and one dark eye was peering at him.

  “Buenos dias,” said Lanny. “Es esta el domo de Senor Sandoval?”

  “Si, Senor,” replied the eye.

  Lanny explained in slow and careful Castilian that he had a letter from the master. He added: “You may remember me; I was here last summer to look at the pictures.”

  “Si, si, Senor.” The man started to unfasten the door, apologizing meanwhile. “The times are dangerous, and we have been living in the cellar.”

  “The master is worried because you have not written to him.”

  “We have been afraid to go out, Senor. The anarquistos are terrible men, and Moros worse.”

  The butler was a faithful soul, Lanny perceived. It had never occurred to him that he had a right to follow his master’s example and run away. He had brought his wife and children and they had locked up the house and were hiding away from bombs and shells, and still more terrible humans.

  “Here is the letter,” Lanny said. Probably the man couldn’t read the names of the paintings, but he knew the stationery and the signature, and remembered Lanny’s face. He allowed Lanny to select the paintings, each in an appropriate frame, and brought some old bedding in which they might be wrapped; he dutifully carried them down and stowed them in the trunk of the car, for which he received a suitable tip and gave suitable thanks, and then fled back into the house. The Plaza de la Independencia seemed to be right in the line of fire, and the sounds resembled a dozen thunderstorms all going at once. Their violence was reduced when you locked the house door, and more so when you locked the cellar door, and still more so when you put a mattress over your head.

  There was only one thing more, la gasolina. Raoul told Lanny where to drive; he got the permit and Lanny’s store of pesetas paid for it. “Now take my advice,” said the Spaniard; “lock your doors and drive straight through. You’ll have thousands of people begging to be taken in, but if you do it you may use up all your gas and not be able to get more.”

  It seemed cruel advice; but war is like that. Lanny knew that the money he would get for the pictures would serve the cause; on the other hand, if harm came to the pictures, the debt of about twelve thousand dollars would handicap him greatly. Also, the undeveloped film in his camera might represent a coup for Robbie, and thus aid the cause, even if indirectly. “All right,” he said; “I’ll do that.”

  But he didn’t.

  XII

  He put Raoul off a block or two away from his office, and then went to the Palace Hotel and paid his bill. This immense structure on the Plaza de las Cortes—eight hundred rooms and a bath with every room—was pretty nearly empty, except for a recently arrived staff of Russian technicians. More were promised, for apparently the Soviets had made up their mind to match the Italians at the Alfonso XIII in Seville. Here in Madrid the Palace had soft-footed waiters in black tie and tails to serve its guests, but had to apologize for the fact that its stock of coffee was entirely exhausted and the bread all gone for the day.

  Lanny said his adios, distributed his propinas, and stepped into his car. He locked the doors and closed the windows, all but the one by his seat. Indian summer was over, and a freezing wind was blowing over the Castilian plateau, so he put on his overcoat for the long drive. He put his precious little camera into the canvas bag with his tool kit and tucked it away in the space under the driver’s seat—the safest hiding-place he could think of. These things he did at top speed, for during the period since he had left the home of Senor Sandoval half a dozen bombs or shells had fallen near enough for him to feel the concussions, and the next one might hit among some French Impressionist paintings and force Lanny Budd into bankruptcy.

  Free at last, he rolled eastward on the Calle de Alcala, which turns into a highway. The thunder died gradually, and as he ceased to hear the battle he heard about it. The Franco radio assured him that the real effort had not yet begun; what had so far-been experienced was a preliminary bombardment, a process known in military terminology as “softening up.” Within an hour after leaving the capital Lanny heard Radio Lisbon to the effect that a white flag had been raised over the Post office building of Madrid. He ventured to doubt it—unless the action had been taken by some of that Fifth Column about which everybody in the capital was talking.

  The road was crowded with fugitives, as before, and again he had to keep tooting the horn. He understood that one form of the class struggle is waged between peasants driving donkey-carts and tourists driving pleasure-cars; especially when there is only one tourist, and he locks up his heart as well as his car, and rushes on, scattering mud on both sides of the highway and leaving a stink behind. Lanny looked out for a government truck that he could follow, but apparently they were slowed up like himself.

  Darkness found him among the mountains between Guadalajara and Cuenca, and here it was raining and bitterly cold, the road slippery and dangerous, and the need for caution extreme. Lanny had encountered one accident coming and now he encountered another going. A peasant cart had been struck by some sort of vehicle which had gone on without stopping to give aid. There was a family sitting by the roadside, a woman with a baby in her arms and three children huddled by her, the man standing in the roadway holding out his hands as if in prayer. There was barely room to get by the cart, so Lanny had to stop. He got out, thinking to help the man set the cart upright, but discovered that the donkey had a broken leg, which was the end of that. The baby had been thrown from the cart and might be injured; there sat the family soaked with rain and facing the prospect of freezing before daylight.

  Lanny said: “All right, I’ll take you, if you want to come.” An agonizing decision, over which they wept; for here was everything they owned in the world, and somebody would steal it all. The cart! Couldn’t the Senor tow the cart? No, the Senor couldn’t, and he got back into the car and said “Adios.” Then the woman came screaming; the life of her little one might be at stake. She climbed into the rear seat with her baby, Lanny piling his suitcases on top of the paintings at one side. The other children clambered in beside the mother; and what was the father going to do? Stay with his cart and goods? Who would help him to move them? Who would have a donkey to spare in times like these? And how could he ever find his family? Santa Madonna, what was a poor labriego to do?

  Lanny said “Adios” again, and the man stumbled forward, got into the seat beside the driver, buried his face in his hands, and shook with sobbing. With these precious belongings he could start life again, but without them he would be a pauper! Lanny gave thought to the unfortunate donkey, and got out his Budd automatic. The peasant was dumbfounded; he had never heard of such an idea. To drive a borrico, yes, of course, but to pity a borrico—what a mad foreign notion! Lanny said: “Can you drive it? No? All right, then, why do you care what I do?” He put a bullet into the poor creature’s brain. The woman screamed, the children cowered, and they were afraid of him for a long while.

  XIII

  Lanny drove with his added load, remembering Raoul’s warning about gasoline. But he knew that Raoul would have done the same if he had been along. The car was full of unpleasant odors—for labriegos are bad enough in dry weather and hi the open air, but when you wet them and crowd them into a tiny space they become something awful. They were all shivering with cold, so he couldn’t suggest opening another window. They kept moaning and sobbing, telling Lanny things which he could only half understand, because of their old-fashioned words and turns of phrase which he had never heard. But there was something they had which required no naming—the Spanish pulgas; it wasn’t long before these active little creatures discovered the new pasture, and they must have found it especially luscious. Lanny was in torment; but he told himself that it was
war.

  He had thought to unload the passengers at Cuenca; but, “Who will care for us, Senor?” they asked, and what could he answer? He knew that this least-spoiled of ancient towns had seven gateways and a cathedral with famous grilles, but did it have a public hospital? He didn’t know, and there appeared no way to find out after midnight. His unhappy human freight knew they were hopelessly separated from their belongings, and now had but one thought, to get as far as possible from the war. Who could say when the dreadful Moros might appear in Cuenca? Outside, the night was dark, cold, and wet, but in this car it was warm, and never had they dreamed of such cushions or such safe and rapid motion. “If you please, Senor, will you take us as far as you will?”

  So Lanny took them all the way to Valencia. It was warm there and the sun was shining; he bought food and milk for the children, gave the parents some money, and deposited them in a public park, already crowded with refugees. Misery loves company, and presumably the government would make provision for them all. They thanked him and he thanked them in return, for they had talked freely and taught him a lot about Spanish peasants. They had had a hard life and now expected only the worst, but still they had courtesy, and thought that a Senor americano who drove a self-moving chariot equipped with magical voices from Madrid and Barcelona and Seville must surely be at least a first cousin to the Heavenly Family.

  Lanny drove to the Army headquarters and reported to the agreeable officer, told him what he had seen in Madrid, and got a permit to the border, also help in getting a final load of la gasolina. Then he visited a botica, and purchased some powder to protect him against both pulgas and piojos, and with this he liberally sprinkled his car, and himself inside his clothing. Also, he opened the windows and let the fresh breezes of the Mediterranean sweep the odor of charity out of his heavenly chariot.