Thing to Love

by Geoffrey Household

  Somebody near the window pulled up a few inches of the Venetian blind. Since the room faced the sea, only one of the cars, on the extreme left of the line, was visible. Its gun was traversing to the right and upwards, apparently covering the roof of the Palace. But the committee’s attention was more urgently drawn to the passage beyond the closed doors. Army boots rushed over the carpets and clinked over the stone flags before thundering up the staircase at the end of the corridor.

  The more excitable supporters of Infantile Literature were on their feet. The more cautious remained uneasily seated. No one had any doubt what was happening. The Army was in politics again. Yet under the suppressed screams and the agitated movement was an underlying calm. Feminine common sense was not in the least affected by the conventional reaction of feminine hysteria. Former experience assured them that all this turmoil in the Palace would be over very quickly — whatever might happen in the streets — and that the conference room was by far the safest place to be. Nobody but Felicia and Julia Carrillo made any attempt to leave it.

  Posted at the main entrance were a corporal and four men of Fifth Division. The detachment of the Presidential Guard which had been on duty was being marched off by an officer and two N.C.O.’s. Felicia could not help feeling a twinge of pity at so cold a contrast between past and present. Those glorious males, equipped with steel and serene leather and nodding horsehair for some formal minuet of war, towered above the gray-green figures, shapeless with webbing and magazines, which shepherded them impassively to their quarters.

  “The general?” Felicia asked.

  “With His Excellency,” replied the corporal.

  “Your orders?”

  “No one is to leave or enter, mi Señora.”

  Felicia nodded towards Julia Carrillo, who had taken advantage of the corporal’s moment of overrespect to his general’s wife to slip past and make for the steps.

  “Stop her!”

  At the command to halt, Julia froze as effectively as if she had been trained by General Kucera. Behind her were the detestable Sten guns of that brutal guard at the door. Ahead were armored cars and a detachment of infantry which they had carried. All seemed completely at ease and quite unconcerned about her, but there were enough weapons pointing in the general direction of the steps for her to have an impression of uncountable black holes like round spots on a foulard silk.

  “Put her back inside the third door on the left,” Felicia advised.

  The corporal ran down the steps to the arrest — or rescue — of the petrified Julia. Meanwhile Felicia discreetly disappeared. She did not wish Julia to know that she had told the corporal what to do with her. And in any case it was only a suggestion, not an order.

  When Julia had been escorted down the passage, Felicia remained just inside the entrance hall. Outside, the troops preserved the silence of easy discipline, broken only by the low voices of officers and sergeants inspecting their vehicles for possible damage. Two lorry loads of infantry rolled into the Glorieta, received a written order, and roared off in the direction of the Alameda.

  The beetle-buzzing of the helicopter began again. It was now rising. It couldn’t be more than three or four minutes since it had landed. She heard her husband’s voice coming from the Palace roof. She never knew that he could unleash such tremendous carrying power. He must have learned the accomplishment in his Czech military school and possibly never used it since.

  “Calixto, bring down that helicopter!”

  She was oddly astonished that the sequence should be as exact as on the range — Irigoyen to the troop commander to that car on the left of the line which they had seen from the conference room. Two coughing cracks responded as precisely as if the order had been finally repeated by a human being instead of a slender tube with slots and funnel on the end of it.

  It looked as if the gun had missed. She guessed that the crew had fired with spit-and-polish smartness instead of taking time for more deliberate aim. The barrel of the gun moved slightly upwards. There were four more of those violent coughs, and a quickly suppressed unanimous exclamation from the troops. Somewhere out of sight, probably on the seafront, there was a splintering crash — metal to ground, and metal on metal.

  Miro raced through the entrance hall without seeing her, and halfway down the steps. He was ordering a guard on the wreckage of the helicopter and the immediate presence of a civil magistrate.

  Gregorio and Concha Vidal followed him. They were pale and excited, but Felicia had the impression that they were struggling with anger rather than fear. The little President stood at the head of the steps, framed by the columns of the lovely portico and undoubtedly gathering to himself an added elegance from the imperial history behind him and the presence of his loyal troops in front.

  Lieutenant Colonel Calixto Irigoyen stepped forward and shouted:

  “Viva Vidal! Viva el gran Presidente!”

  Vidal’s response to the cheering was perfect. He smiled his pleasure, and raised his hand deprecatingly. This was not, he implied, the moment for enthusiasm.

  Felicia was in two minds whether or not to return to the conference room. Her position as an onlooker embarrassed her. She was reluctant to be closely identified with Miro in action: to be, as it were, a too persistent camp follower. The feeling was akin to her shyness in face of salutes at the Citadel. But as she hesitated between the potted palms and the sentries, Doña Concha discovered her, embraced her and presented her, with a word of explanation, to Miro.

  The confusing sequence of events became clear, though the explanations were more exclamatory than revealing. Vidal had been courteously and firmly arrested by the captain and lieutenant of the morning guard. The men had not been involved at all — had continued to stand, stiff, decorative and unthinking as their lances and red horsehair, at their posts outside the Palace. The helicopter had come down on the flat roof of the Palace. Gregorio and Concha were to have been put on board, and would have been put on board if it hadn’t been for some device of Miro’s by which the President at the moment of his arrest had been able to give the alarm at the Citadel.

  If the helicopter had arrived before Miro and the squadron, the success of the revolution would have been certain and bloodless. No one could dispute the story that Gregorio Vidal, faced with a determined rising of the people, had feared for his safety and taken off with his wife. True, there hadn’t yet been any rising of the people, but who, afterwards, would look too closely at a matter of minutes one way or the other? It was probable that the Avellanistas were already inside the Casa de Radio-Difusión, and Avellana himself near at hand, ready to mount the steps of the Palace as soon as it was announced by radio that the President had fled.

  “Who was in the helicopter when it took off?” Felicia asked her husband.

  “The two officers of the guard, and the pilot. It was their only chance to get away.”

  “It was essential, you think, to . . .?” Vidal began.

  “Yes,” the general interrupted sharply. “It was a challenge to discipline. I couldn’t allow it.”

  “Of course, of course! An example more spectacular than court-martial. And yet what publicity we may have missed! To suppress a revolution without loss of life. Think of it!”

  “But leaving a doubt of Fifth Division’s loyalty?”

  “Well, there is that. And there was no time for finesse. Two or three minutes more and I should have been on my way to — well, Lérida Airfield, I suppose, and then a quick transfer to a plane.”

  “We underrated Don Gil’s familiarity with modern science,” Miro said drily.

  “No. But we forgot his imagination. Imagination is always troublesome in an enemy. There is always someone in a back room who can supply it with the facts on which to work. Friend Miro, you must excuse my momentary regret at the astonishing efficiency of your fire. Without loss of life, I said. It was the optimism of relief. Avellana is finished, but how many of his supporters are going to die before they realize it?”

&nb
sp; “Julia Carrillo was in the plot,” Felicia said. “When Doña Concha was called out of the room, she knew why.”

  “She did?” Concha exclaimed. “See if I don’t ship the old bitch in a helicopter to Buenos Aires! Meanwhile I shall return and take the chair at my committee as if nothing had happened.”

  Felicia regarded her determined back view with new respect as she retreated down the passage. So that was the language used by this able and patient woman in the privacy of Don Gregorio’s home! Her pleated black skirt swung as gallantly as on a girl. It was even possible to believe that she had a waist.

  Left alone on the terrace, above the handful of troops now moving at ease among their vehicles, the three listened to the town. There appeared to be little movement. After the roar of the troop carriers and armored cars had died away, the noise of civilian traffic also faded as each individual driver pulled up near the comparative safety of an archway, a lane or a buttressed church. From the direction of the Casa de Radio-Difusión came some faint crackling which might be pistol-shots. Vidal looked his anxiety at Miro.

  “One can’t expect them to surrender without a gesture,” Miro said.

  There was also some evidence of trouble in the Alameda. Cheering broke out and stopped. Calixto Irgoyen ran up the steps and handed his general a signal just received through the earphones of the command vehicle.

  “The police were uncertain,” Miro said. “They have now decided to return to their allegiance.”

  He dispersed the remainder of the squadron: a troop to the side streets east of the Glorieta, from which it could command the approaches from the Alameda; and two to the northern suburbs in case Morote should decide, after all, to test the strength of the government by a demonstration.

  Whatever the disaffected units of the Army were doing in the provinces — Twelfth Cavalry had obviously secured Lérida Airfield — San Vicente was at peace. Telegraph, telephone and radio were safe. Police and civil governor, who might well have declared, if advisable, for Avellana, had been overawed by the loyalty of Fifth Division. The factories and the Barracas were quiet.

  Vidal, an instinctive politician, was disconcerted by the unknown influence which had kept them quiet. It was inexplicable, and hinted at a greater force than his own.

  “But it is a marvel,” he murmured uneasily. “One would say we were in London, not San Vicente.”

  The unnatural calm of the city began to dissolve. An automobile hooted and gave courage to others. The wavering call of a fish-woman, melancholy and penetrating as a seabird’s cry, came from the little streets behind the Palace as she replaced her basket on her head and continued her interrupted round. Then, distant, too late but swiftly approaching, gathering to itself a raucous hideousness of mass hysteria, came the revolution.

  “What the devil is that?” Miro asked.

  The cheering, the shouts and the rhythmic roar of slogans were approaching the Glorieta from the south, from the new city with its ultramodern avenues which was the heart of Vidalismo. It was a most unexpected quarter.

  “The university,” Vidal said.

  “Now? But don’t they know it’s all over?”

  It would indeed have been a master stroke if it had been delivered on time. Even though the plot to kidnap Vidal had failed, the rush of the students a quarter of an hour earlier might have rallied all Avellana’s supporters in the town, neutralized the police and forced the garrison commander into the one position he was determined to avoid, where he must either shoot to kill or withdraw to the Citadel and await the orders of the new President.

  “Julia!” Felicia exclaimed. “I should have let her go. She would have warned them. That was why she was here — to report!”

  “They never saw what happened to the helicopter?” Miro asked incredulously.

  “They may have hoped I was in it,” said Vidal.

  The head of the procession came into sight, filling the wide avenue which led into the far side of the Glorieta opposite the Palace steps. Miro raised his field glasses. Some of the university staff, Carrillo’s friends, were there, recovering their youth in action; but the main body of the crowd was composed of boys and girls between seventeen and twenty. To judge by the banners there seemed to be a minority of Socialists, a handful of Communists, and a great mass of Avellana’s Revivalists: Down with the United States! Down with Vidal! Long live the Aristocracy of Labor! Viva Avellana!

  The police, disorganized by the sudden authority of Fifth Division as well as by their own former hesitation, tried to head off the procession. An overzealous detachment from headquarters charged out with tear gas, forgetting that the breeze in San Vicente, though it blew always from the Pacific, was indifferent to the direction it trickled down any avenue which ran parallel to the sea. Choking and cursing, the police fell back leaving the way into the Glorieta open. The university poured through. The traces of gas, generously wetting their eyes, enhanced emotion.

  As the straggling procession closed up and flowed into the square, the turrets of the armored cars in the eastern side streets traversed to cover the whole snake of excited bodies. To a soldier the threat might have been enough; but the students seemed only aware that there was nothing, no physical and visible obstruction, between them and the Palace.

  Miro lowered his glasses and looked round for orders, but his President and commander in chief had gone. Well, after all, the first principle of the Managerial Society was to manage so that somebody else could take the blame.

  What were these children and their teachers up to? They must surely realize that Fifth Division, though thin on the ground, was in complete control. Surely the young idiots must see that slogan and riot were futile against disciplined troops? They didn’t seem to care that the military were out in support of the civil power. It flashed through Miro’s mind that an angry university was like a regiment, so sure of its continuity and traditions that it was careless of present danger to individuals. But what would they do if he gave the order to fire? Well, he wasn’t going to. It was not necessary. Even in a madhouse power and absolute confidence were respected.

  He walked down the steps to the screaming advance guard of Guayanas’s cultural elite, and boomed genially:

  “What’s up, friends? You have only to tell me what you want and we can talk.”

  But the commanding figure, which would have halted police or military, accustomed to leadership and appreciative of gallantry, appeared to the students a little comic. They weren’t afraid of a pair of boots and a uniform, not they! They were not yet of an age to realize that confidence was no trick, that somewhere behind it lay the inescapable fact of power.

  They swarmed like black ants over the general, treating him not as an enemy but as a mere encumbrance to be pulled down, trampled on and ignored. The armored cars on the east of the Glorieta were helpless; they dared not fire on the Palace steps where their commander lay, and refrained from the brutality of massacring the broadside of the procession. Fifth Division discipline held, too, for the corporal’s guard at the entrance to the Palace. They stepped forward, nervously pointing their weapons, nervously prepared to be overrun but not to take on themselves the responsibility of blasting civilians out of the way.

  Felicia saw her husband go down under the contemptuous rush. The troop commander with a handful of his men was racing across the Glorieta, but still fifty meters away. She turned to the corporal and snapped the order familiar from so many evenings of crossing the Citadel’s parade ground:

  “From the hip — automatic — fire!”

  The racket of the Sten guns echoed back from the walls and cavities of the Palace and was dulled by the mass of excited bodies at one moment on the level of the terrace and almost upon the five isolated soldiers; at the next, melting, thinning, tumbling: a waterfall of white shirts and dark trousers leaping down the Palace steps into the Glorieta and away.

  Sharing the. steps with Miro were eleven dead, five of them girls, and a dozen bodies falling or wriggling from stair to sta
ir like half-crushed insects. Those of the students who now and forever had become men fearlessly carried away or supported their wounded. As they passed the prostrate bulk of the general, two of them looked at him slowly and defiantly.

  “Who gave that order?” Miro gasped, raising his head.

  “I did,” Felicia answered.

  He said nothing. After all, her eyes could see as clearly as his what she had done. And there it was. Done. What was the use of saying that, whatever happened to him, the demonstration should only have been manhandled — fiercely if they asked of it, firing over their heads if essential? All his officers knew that. If it had been one of them who had given the order he would have had him court-martialed, for panic love of a leader was no excuse. But love of a husband? In the darkness and pain which began to close on him, prohibiting such formal debate, only pity for her was left — pity for his Feli who loved and would never have any court-martial but her own to tell her whether her action was criminal or, for herself and him, heroically justifiable.

  “Miro, the corporal hesitated,” she appealed, misjudging his silence. “His orders were to let no one pass. And you yourself had challenged.”

  Well, at any rate that was the military way out. It need never be known that an order which was not an order at all had been given and obeyed.

  Fighting unconsciousness as the troops lifted him, he found enough clear voice to tell the corporal that he had been within his rights.

  CHAPTER VII

  [November 11]

  HENRY PENRUDDOCK strolled along the length of the Ateneo terrace with inscrutable geniality, stopping here and there for a word with friends, once bowing solemnly and delivering a speech of condolence.

  But it was not mourning which overshadowed the usual discussions of money and politics. A few deaths were inevitable when revolution was mishandled. Mourning might alter the pitch of the voices but not the talk. Indeed conversation should have been lively as each member from the depths of his chair explained to his neighbor how he would have avoided Avellana’s mistakes. There used to be — well, one could only describe it as a sense of public holiday. Somebody won. Somebody lost. The few dead — unless it had been a matter of destroying some bloody dictator like Orduñez — were eventually accepted as glorious dead, whichever side they belonged to.