Another day passed without news, and then the Superintendent himself set out after them with four good fellows and his own wife and Catalina. The women would listen to her, and the doctor told her what to do if they and their children were dying of thirst.
A coward, the General Manager, with his telegrams! Nothing but telegrams for the help of the army and a plane. Anyone could have told him that the poor martyrs would hide because they were afraid of being sent back. Meanwhile the Superintendent found them in a rocky cove—seventeen of them dead and the rest giving the children sea water to drink because they cried.
They had no longer the strength to walk. The only way to save them was by sea, and that was almost beyond hope even for the men of the port who could handle a boat in any surf. Somehow they got those helpless women off, but Catalina was drowned and two men pulped on the rocks trying to save her.
Yes, and after that there was a tanker at once to take the four hundred and seventy men back to Cabo Desierto. But not to work! No, friends, not to work! The Union refused to back the boycott. It told the unwanted men that they must go and that then it would get higher wages for the rest. Its leaders were not going to draw on the funds which kept them living in the cafés of the Capital. But workers in the country sent what they could and there were contributions from oil fields in all Latin-America. Everyone had to tighten his belt a hole, but not yet two. It was a miracle what Cabo Desierto could achieve when all were working full time on the communal lands.
So much discipline and activity—and still there remained his son’s question.
‘Look.’ Rafael told him. ‘We are not God Almighty to share out the blame. But the Company killed her, and it is on the Company that we avenge her.’
Chapter Two
The office of the Compañía Petrolífera Cabo Desierto in London Wall had served the Company for the thirty-five years of its life and in an old-fashioned way was still luxurious, panelled in light oak, furnished with green leather chairs of great comfort, decently spacious and designed to appeal to the financier or shareholder or fellow oilman who might have, regrettably, to wait. The buying of the Company’s stores and the selling of its products was carried on across the river at Bermondsey. There, too, the waiting-room had changed little. It was furnished for commerce rather than finance and still uncomfortable.
The sole occupant of the green leather chairs would have suited London Wall or Bermondsey equally well. He might have been a sales manager or geologist back from abroad, spare, tall, in his early fifties, with a face once bronzed but now yellowish from lack of sun and the forgotten illnesses of his youth. It was a classless face, having little in common with the firm mouth and professionally kindly expression of the soldiers and colonial administrators. The grey eyes were indeed kindly, but ironical; they had watched rather than accepted, seen through rather than overseen. An employer—a real intelligent tycoon out of the top drawer—could never be quite sure that such a mouth, disturbingly mobile and compassionate, would not smile at what was serious or let loose in the solidity of the board room the outrageous bitter laughter of its unstable habitations.
Matthew Darlow felt himself out of place in London Wall. Bermondsey was all he expected. Presumably they did not know that he would gladly have taken a job as chief clerk—even as a night watchman if it came to that. When he met Henry Constantinides he had fortunately been a little drunk. Not as in old days! The price of alcohol now limited him to an occasional beer. A few gins and some wine with dinner, which had once been as normal an intake as the bread on his plate, produced in these days a vulgar self-confidence, followed in the loneliness of his bedroom by a depth of melancholy which he had to discipline himself to ignore.
Two years before, he could still tell any promising acquaintance what he wanted. Now, however delicately he put his request, it sounded in his own ears as if he had shouted: ‘for Christ’s sake give me a job!’ But that genial night in a friend’s house had temporarily restored the sense of belonging to his normal world. When Henry Constantinides had asked him what he was doing he answered casually that he had practically retired but might be open to any interesting offer. Henry had looked him over carefully, said little and asked for his telephone number. Mat Darlow didn’t think he had been taken in for a moment. Still, the references for half his life had been demanded and the invitation to call at London Wall had come.
He was used to humble waiting in offices—a poor end to more than thirty highly enjoyable working years in which he had always served his masters better than himself. The Compañía Petrolífera Cabo Desierto had been his second employer and his first love. For five years his job as Secretary and Assistant to the General Manager had been wholly satisfying. The concentration of human beings where they had no right to be provided his character, even then that of a fascinated observer, with interests which married into his daily work. Texan drillers and the hybrid labourers of the coast equally rejoiced him by their departure from the norms of European behaviour. And the Company had been generous with local leave. One could jump on a launch to the Capital for the asking.
Why had he left them? Well, would anyone really want to spend his life between Cabo Desierto and London? That answer was instant, yet followed by sour self-approach. Irresponsible! Too many employers just for the sake of curiosity. If only he had stopped then, at the beginning, the exasperating pattern of his life!
But at twenty, thirty, even forty, one could not foresee the need for some sort of security at fifty. Security was like death. Obviously it would happen, and obviously you didn’t know how. After Cabo Desierto had come Central America; after that, the Congo. All training for each other. It was odd how Spanish civilisation taught a man to be on easy terms with any people of any colour. You were conditioned to profound respect for the individual though you might have none at all for his way of life. In the end white men not black had tired his taste for Africa; they did not want to understand or they understood too scientifically. It was depressing, when he came to think of it, that he had refused careers from sheer impatience with the stupid, whether they were plain inhuman or, to his mind, over-earnest.
Couldn’t the stupidity be his own? Well, he had not shown any in London before the war when he was in business for his own account and using his bit of capital for the import of rare woods. He had acted as his own salesman, travelling with a special van full of his lovely samples from the rain forests—silver and red and black and all the yellows from the palest lemon to flame. Inch planks, four feet by two. He usually had to start his sales patter in the general office, but in a few minutes the builders or architects or furniture-makers were out in their yards, fascinated by his polished beauties as he slid them off the racks.
Of course he had not made out of it all that he might have done; but it was an assured living, ready for expansion whenever profits allowed. If the war had not come along, he might have had time to buy a house in the country, look around and get married.
Marriage and children. Prosperity. Christ and Recristo and Damn and Redamn! Why wreck a solid future, so late begun, by enlisting like a boy of twenty? There was no reason for pride in rising from private to full colonel. Anyway he had enjoyed himself far too much to bother with pride. And such promotion was inevitable for a man of wide experience who could command with confidence the languages and customs of the commanded.
On his return to his own country in 1946 he had caught the general sense of exhaustion in a grey, featureless culture. Even he, who had exploited the world of free enterprise to its farthest limits of freedom, was now wary of it. Besides that, he had new assets—among them a minor decoration and a wry taste for government service. So he had taken a sound, unadventurous job in Timber Control. He congratulated himself on being sensible at last; in a few years he would rank as an established civil servant with a pension when he retired.
Timber control was abolished too soon for that. He was disappointed but felt no grievance. It was high time for an end to import licences together
with the administrators who grew fat on them. He was assured that with his experience he wouldn’t have any trouble in getting a business job. Not the slightest, old boy! Did they know that was nonsense or—cushioned from the crude world—didn’t they? He never could decide.
Suddenly he was conscious that he, who in his own mind had stayed permanently in the late thirties, was now fifty- two. Responsible posts were no longer for him. He didn’t fit into the pension schemes. He had, officially, only thirteen years of useful work left—though that was time enough, one would have thought, to ensure the success of any small firm bumbling along without any original mind at the top. But how to prove the original mind? Employers very naturally thought there must be something wrong with a man of fifty-two who was on the market. The Welfare State would not of course let him starve. His local Labour Exchange had even offered to have him trained for rug-making.
‘Sir Dave Gunner and Mr. Constantinides will see you now, Colonel Darlow.’
He resisted the impulse to correct the little honey. Inwardly and outwardly he had become Mr. Darlow within three weeks of demobilisation. No doubt these people in the outer office were carefully instructed to hand out any title which could conceivably flatter vanity—their own or the caller’s.
Henry Constantinides, leaning against the broad, carved mantelpiece of the board room, looked very much the grey-streaked, genial Managing Director. He was still recognisable as the young financier, daring and highly intelligent, who in 1930 had spent a month at Cabo Desierto trying to pick the brains of the General Manager and the Fields Manager. The General Manager hadn’t any and the conversational powers of the Fields Manager, who had, were limited to smut. They had used young Mat Darlow as their interpreter, and it had been he who initiated Constantinides into the dynamism of a new and appallingly speculative field.
Yes, Henry was still the same: a real professional City gent, expensively educated, with one generation of money behind him. How it had been made the Lord knew—and some little adventurous Greek of a type which Mat had always relished. Their lives were more rootless than his own, yet they made money.
‘Ah, Mat!’ Constantinides greeted him as if he were a delightful and quite unexpected visitor. ‘This is Sir Dave Gunner, our Chairman.’
Sir Dave had no affectations, except to dress deliberately as if he had just bought his suit off a hanger in a back street of Leeds. He spoke with a firm Yorkshire accent and shook hands as if he had learned the true grip by correspondence course—all qualities which befitted an honest broker between Capital and Labour.
Mat Darlow knew all about Sir Dave—once secretary of a vital Trades Union, now retired and collecting directorships. One couldn’t call him a fraud. Far from it. He had fully deserved his knighthood if he wanted one. No, it was simply that this born negotiator (didn’t they call him?) could not be imagined as doing much more than negotiate. Henry, on the other hand, was an honest, aggressive manipulator of money. Instead of peddling paraffin, buttons and rubber goods, as his father might have done, he peddled the companies which manufactured them.
Sir Dave plunged into the interview with a proper north-country objection to wasting time.
‘Now, what has been your attitude to Labour?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have one,’ Mat answered. ‘I have never been able to see where Labour begins and ends.’
‘Labour is what gets paid every week,’ Henry said. ‘When it gets paid at the end of the month, it isn’t Labour.’
A useful definition for practical purposes. That brisk mind could always be trusted to over-simplify anything. Sir Dave did not comment, but added in the tone of an evangelist:
‘Labour, Colonel Darlow, responds to leadership. Leadership in the Trades Unions. Leadership in our great firms which are the envy of the world. Labour cannot think for itself. It requires leadership.’
True enough, but misleading as talking of a nation as ‘she’. How the devil could any sensitive man, with his mass memories of cheerful faces and easy-going characters, lump together those individuals as ‘it’?
‘Sir Dave has faith in generals,’ Henry said, ‘but I have managed to persuade him that heartiness of manner might not be enough for Cabo Desierto.’
‘Trouble with the men?’
‘We had to lay off some eight hundred and seventy when the third of the Sentinels came in. The Three Sentinels. Because the rigs were on the skyline of the first ridge. Sounds more imposing than 97, 98 and 98A, doesn’t it?’
Mat agreed, and there was silence. Apparently the Board wanted his advice or the use of his memory; but Henry, for an incisive man, seemed reluctant to come to the point.
‘You knew in your time that there was oil at 13,000 feet,’ said Sir Dave.
His remark was almost an accusation, as if the pioneers of thirty years earlier must take part of the blame for whatever was wrong.
‘The geologists always thought it likely. We used to wonder if it would ever be possible to drill to that depth.’
‘It was not till 1950—not for a company of our resources at any rate,’ Henry said. ‘Up to then the field had stayed as you remember it—bailing and pumping wells working at under 2,000 feet. They brought in No. 97 in 1954 and had the fright of their lives before they could cap it. Then 98 and 98A came in this year.
‘So we closed down the shallow field. There’s oil in it still, but why pump when we can fill tanks by turning a cock? That meant we had surplus labour. Some of them refused to go.’
‘But they couldn’t stay with no wages.’
‘We’d made it a home from home for them, see?’ said Sir Dave. ‘A bloody garden city with clubs, canteens, allotments, the whole bag of tricks except a Women’s Institute.’
‘They insisted they could live off the land,’ Henry explained. ‘Growing maize on the sports ground, our General Manager called it. He turned it down flat. Myself, I wanted to hear more details.’
‘We could not allow a slum to grow up,’ Sir Dave rebuked him. ‘So the Company very generously shipped them off to inspect the jobs which were waiting for them, and Birenfield, our manager, arranged that they should have plenty of time to make up their minds. But no patience! No gratitude at all! And then a foolish party tried to join them on foot.’
On foot! The overland track had been used solely and very rarely by such tough, undesirable characters as could not establish a right to passage in the launches. Henry’s father—the father, that is, whom he had invented for Henry—would have been just the fellow to go by land with a load of contraband on his back or his mule.
‘Why weren’t they sent by launch?’
‘They left without saying anything. It’s believed they were frightened when the police arrived. There was some street fighting.’
‘Afraid of the police? In my time, if there was real trouble threatening, we used to give the police a day off to go fishing.’
Sir Dave stared at him. He remarked that Colonel Darlow’s comment was just the sort of shrewd advice the Company needed and that, aye, he might do.
‘You want me at Cabo Desierto?’
‘As temporary General Manager,’ Henry said.
It was desperately disappointing. Henry must have forgotten that he had never been an oil engineer.
‘You have taken up my references?’
‘All of ’em,’ Sir Dave answered aggressively. ‘And I tell you straight that if we could find an experienced oilman with the qualities we want, I’d snap him up. But what with all these new fields in Canada and Arabia there aren’t enough good men to go round. So the next best thing is a chap who knows the place and has proved he can manage native labour even if he’s not so young as he was. What we want you to do is to break the strike, stay on a bit and then hand over.’
‘What’s the real grievance? Just the dismissals?’
‘They claim that some women died.’
‘Seventeen women and five children died on the overland track and two men and one woman trying to rescue them,’ said
Henry Constantinides with a clarity which was openly contemptuous of his Chairman. ‘Now you know what you are up against.’
‘What do they propose?’
‘Nothing! That’s the damnable part of it. Their attitude is: you broke a promise, you killed our women, you shall have no more oil ever. And they mean the blasted republic quite as much as us. The Ministry sent the police. We didn’t.’
‘With the full approval of the Miner’s Union,’ Sir Dave added. ‘And I want you to remember, Colonel Darlow, that the strength of the Union must be built up. Organised Labour is the only hope of stability in these backward countries where governments change once a month.’
‘Sir Dave has a point there,’ Henry said, ‘but unfortunately they threw the Union delegates into the sea.’
He did not sound as if he thought it unfortunate. Mat at once tried to divert an argument which could end with both men putting the blame for it on him.
‘Has there been any communist influence?’ he asked.
‘Of course!’ Sir Dave bubbled, ‘they are largely responsible.’
Henry’s silky voice murmured that to those less familiar with the international labour movement evidence was lacking.
‘That is not at all what I hear from private sources,’ said Sir Dave, ignoring his Managing Director and turning to Mat. ‘But the Union assures me that they know how to deal with this wildcat strike if we turn a blind eye, give ’em a free hand and afterwards increase the pay packet.’
Mat smiled politely and remarked that in his time the field was always on the boil but on the whole a happy family.
‘Which is why I want you,’ Henry replied. ‘Can you recover that feeling?’
‘I can try. But your present General Manager?’
The Three Sentinels Page 2