Wide Is the Gate

by Upton Sinclair

  VI

  Raoul came to the hotel at dinnertime to report. He had been disappointed because he had been unable to see the important officials he had asked for; each had had a score of persons claiming his time. Apparently everything was in the utmost confusion: people rushing this way and that, shouting orders when there was no one to obey. That, too, was a phenomenon of revolutions; a hundred things to be done in the time ordinarily allotted to one. The city was expecting attack at any moment and the only thing to do was to grab a gun and fight; if you didn’t have a gun, or a truck, or medical supplies, you would just have to go out and find some way to be useful, if you could.

  Raoul had been comforted by an encounter with one of the schoolteachers whom he had met on the previous visit to the city. An official in the teachers’ syndicate, this man had mentioned that there was to be a meeting that evening at a corner of the Plaza de Cataluna, two or three blocks from Lanny’s hotel; meetings were being got up all over the city, for the purpose of awakening and instructing the people, and it might be possible for Raoul to speak. The translator-secretary was so excited over this that he didn’t want to eat any dinner, but went off by himself to think how he could help the people of Barcelona to realize the dreadful peril in which they stood.

  An American of leisure strolled down to Barceloneta, the harbor district, and ate in that restaurant where he and Raoul had previously made some acquaintances. Now these husky toilers ate in a hurry, for they were loading trucks with supplies for the workers’ army. Some were surly to a stranger who might be a spy; but Lanny could tell about the workers in France and what they would be thinking about the Franco insurrection—and all wanted to hear this. No trouble to make friends all over again, and when he mentioned the meeting at the Plaza de Cataluna a couple of sailors volunteered to stroll up with him and attend.

  VII

  It was still twilight when the meeting began. The orators stood on a truck, and a couple of thousand people crowded around it. All the tram-traffic in that large square had stopped, so there was nothing to interrupt the oratory. They sang The Red Flag, and then the head of the teachers’ syndicate spoke, followed by several others. Lanny didn’t see Raoul until the latter was introduced as a victim of the Primo de Rivera terror returned to the defense of his homeland.

  Lanny had heard his friend speak on many occasions, but never one like the present. This stand of the workers against Fascist counter-revolution was the culmination of a Spanish peasant boy’s whole life; it was the hour for which he had sought his education, the proof that it had been worth while, for himself and for others. He told the listeners a little about his life, just to let them know that he was one of them and shared their bitter knowledge of hunger and oppression. He told how the light of understanding had dawned upon his soul, and how he had striven like Prometheus to bring that light to others. There were men who sought to snuff it out and plunge the people into darkness; men who thought of human beings as beasts of burden, as machines from which toil could be extracted; whose hearts held no love for their fellows, no hope for their future, no generous impulse to lift them up, but only a greedy desire to extract from their labor the utmost material gain.

  Raoul had been introduced to speak for a few minutes, and he tried to stop, but the crowd would not let him. “Mas! Mas!” they shouted. His flowery language was exactly what their ardent temperaments enjoyed; all the grand high-sounding words that he used—libertad, igualdad, fraternidad, humanidad—these were the dreams upon which they fed their souls. They shouted more loudly and their applause spurred the orator to greater fervor. Before he finished, they were completely in his hands, and if he had told them to go out and burn the Iglesia de Santa Ana which stood at one side of the square they would have done it. What he told them was to organize and defend their government to the last man and woman; to gather paving-stones and hurl them from the rooftops upon the Fascist invaders; to fight them with pikes, kitchen knives, and clubs with nails in; to take for their own the slogan of the French at Verdun: “Passeront pas! No pasaran! They shall not pass!”

  The people crowded around the orator, clamoring, shaking his hand, patting him on the back, telling him how they agreed with him, promising to follow his advice. In short, it was a triumph, and the place of Raoul Palma in the Spanish workers’ movement was assured. He was like the eaglet, which does not leave the nest and hop from limb to limb like other birds, but stands on the edge of the nest, exercising his wings day after day until he is fully ready. Then he launches himself, and it is his flight; from that moment he is an eagle.

  The two sailors who had accompanied Lanny from the harbor urged that this silver-tongued orator should come to a meeting there and deliver the same speech. Somebody brought up a car and put Raoul into it; others crowded in, or clung to the running-boards, or in back, and off they went, horn tooting, to Barceloneta.

  Lanny didn’t follow; he knew the speech, because Raoul had been practicing on him in fragments for the past three weeks. Moreover, he reflected that it was a dangerous thing to go wandering about these streets at night. By day he could use his amiable smile and savoir-faire, but in the dark men are afraid, and shoot quickly in order to shoot first. Reflecting thus, he strolled one block along the Paseo de Gracia and two blocks along the Calle de las Cortes Catalanas, and so into his hotel. As he undressed he thought that he had seen about enough of history-making in Spain. Raoul would be busy from now on, and Lanny couldn’t be with him without making himself known. After all, revolutions are pretty confused affairs—at any rate when viewed from the outside.

  Lying in bed, he thought: “Well, I’ve lost the car. Some staff officer or union official will find it too convenient to give up. But it’s in the third year, and Beauty will be glad.”

  That had always been the way in Lanny’s home-life, whether it had been his mother or his wife who was boss; his suits, his shirts, his ties, his cars were always getting out of fashion; everything that he got used to had to be replaced by something which the advertisers persuaded the ladies was more a la mode. To be driving a car the third season was really a social disgrace. So he would have a new model, and would lose only the trade-in price of the old one, not so much in the third year.

  What make should he get? It was a problem that absorbed the rich and formed one of their principal topics of conversation. Every man had his favorite that he swore by. Lanny, who specialized in being open-minded, wasn’t sure; but he could count upon the fact that whichever he chose, it would run and take him wherever he desired to go on this old Continent. With such agreeable meditations, he dropped into a peaceful slumber.

  VIII

  How long he slept he didn’t know. He was awakened by a dull, heavy sound, many times repeated: boom, boom, boom. He opened his eyes and lay still, thinking: “That is firing!” He had heard a lot of it during the World War, in Paris and London when the Zeppelins came over, in Bienvenu when the subs were hunting and being hunted. With others to advise him, he had become quite an expert in sounds. He thought: “That is artillery. The Fascists must be on the move.”

  He lay still, listening. There was nothing he could do about this battle. His car had gone to the Marxists and his Budd automatic and all the cartridges to Raoul. He tried to estimate whether the sounds were coming nearer; probably not, for artillery isn’t moved while it is firing. He thought: “I might as well go to sleep again.” But he found that he was too busy trying to guess who was firing and at what.

  He looked at the window and saw a pale gray light. The attack was being made at dawn, a common military practice. There was traffic below his window, and he decided to get up and have a look. A string of busses, municipal transports, were coming into sight, loaded with men inside and on top; they were singing the Internationale. “’Tis the final conflict, let each stand in his place!” In the dim half-light it sounded really moving; men going to their death, and proclaiming the future which they might never see. “The international party shall be the human race!”
>
  Communists, Lanny thought. But no, they were all mixed up now, a united front at last, singing one another’s songs: Communists, Socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, democrats, republicans, liberals, going out to fight oppression and exploitation under whatever label. It was the thing Lanny had been hoping for since first he had begun to understand. Now he felt himself exalted, and pledged his faith anew.

  But not for long, of course. Great moments do not last in a confused and helter-skelter world. The idealist dreams how things ought to go, but they don’t—there being no perfect human creatures or groups of them. Presently Lanny saw a red glow over the rooftops and then fire-engines rushing toward it. He realized that the fire was near, and drawing a mental map of the neighborhood he decided it was the Iglesia de Santa Aria which he had seen looming in the dark sky as a background to Raoul’s speech. Had somebody decided to burn it, even without such advice from the orator? Various persons had decided to burn churches and church buildings in Spain, as a means of putting an end to the use of religion in support of political reaction and industrial slavery. Lanny was sorry, because to him these old churches were sanctuaries of art and of such culture as had existed in their day. What he wanted to burn was not old churches but old customs and social arrangements.

  IX

  The inveterate sight-seer thought he would go and see some of this. He dressed and went down into the lobby, where he found the few remaining guests, some of them not having stopped even to dress. What was happening? The porter had been outside and advised strongly against their going, because somebody had fired a shot at him; it had hit the wall and made a fearful pinging noise behind his head. The young fellows were going crazy and didn’t know what they were doing. The man said this in Spanish, then in English, then in French. His job required that he be able to say a few things in all three languages; his frightened voice and hands supplied color and conviction. Lanny decided to return to his room, where he had a good and safe view.

  He watched the dawn come up like thunder over Barcelona and its blue “Midland Sea”; quite literally thunder, for there was now a heavy battle in the southwestern suburbs of the city. Being a “star boarder” of this hotel, he asked and received a radio in his room, and when the other guests heard about it, they sought his hospitality. Thus he had agreeable company most of the morning: ladies and gentlemen from several parts of the world, all of whom might have been in the drawing-room at Bienvenu and who said just what they would have said there.

  The Barcelona radio gave items of news every few minutes. Rebel regiments were advancing on the city, including the artillery regiment. The government forces, made up of Civil Guards, police, and the Marxist militia, were resisting firmly. Men and women capable of fighting were urged to hasten to the front. Civilians were advised to stay in their homes. The only traffic permitted on the streets was military cars, trucks carrying supplies to the fighters, and cars of doctors and nurses. The revolt would soon be crushed and order restored.

  Then news from outside. The rebels were being put down in Valencia, Cadiz, and Seville; in the north the Asturian miners were marching to the aid of Madrid with sticks of dynamite in their belts instead of cartridges. After such announcements, the radio would shift to some old American record, Chu-Chin-Chow, or Rose-Marie, or other light-opera tune. The ladies and gentlemen would begin saying how terrible everything was, and would they all be murdered by the Marxists, and how on earth were they to get out? Lanny couldn’t say anything comforting, for he knew that civil wars are not polite; he knew, what these privileged people had never troubled to learn, the age-old wrongs which had set the fires of hatred to blazing in the hearts of wage-slaves.

  Shortly before noon the Red avalanche descended upon the guests of the Hotel Ritz, in the form of a company of armed men who introduced themselves as Sindicalistos and announced that the hotel was being taken over as a headquarters, or a hospital—there appeared to be some uncertainty, but none on the point that the guests were to clear out with what they had on their backs or could carry in their hands. Pronto! De seguida!

  Lanny stood on the same footing as all the others. He had no way to let them know that he was a comrade; they would have laughed at him if he had tried. He had foreseen what might be on the way, and had his money sewed up inside his belt, and the Comendador wrapped in light oilcloth; everything else could be replaced, even his precious card-file, of which there was a duplicate in Bienvenu, and his correspondence, of which he had made notes and sent them home. Everything else was at the disposal of the invaders. “Help yourselves, companeros.”

  They were doing it anyhow, going through all his effects, for they found him a suspicious character; he had such elegant things, and so many papers—what was more likely than that a Fascist agent should masquerade as an American? Did he have any guns? Any tobacco or liquor? When he assured them that the large cylinder contained an old oil painting they found it hard to believe, for to them a painting was something flat and rigid in a frame, and they had never heard of the idea that it could be rolled. Lanny was destined to have that same trouble over and over, and to get very tired of explanations, but he must never let politeness and urbanity fail for one moment. It takes no longer than that to die dead in a civil war!

  X

  The art expert emerged from the. Hotel Ritz carrying the Comendador on one shoulder and a suitcase in one hand. He stood for a minute or two, looking up and down the broad calle, wondering which way to go. Deciding that any place was safer than where he was, he started toward the Plaza de Cataluna, thinking he might put up at the Colon. The Church of Santa Ana was still burning, and, strangely enough, there was nobody watching the fire. That ought to have warned Lanny, but he wasn’t used to revolutions or to the thought of personal danger. He didn’t realize the situation until he was near the Plaza and observed several men with rifles crouching behind the corner of a building, one of them aiming and firing at the hotel. From the windows of the great structure came answering shots, and one of these shots, or some other, passed Lanny’s head with a sound like the wailing of a lost soul.

  The visitor never did find out what happened there; whether the militia had tried to take over the hotel and some of the guests had resisted or whether the Fascists had seized it as a strong point. One hint was enough for Lanny, and he stayed not on the order of his going; without a thought of dignity or diplomatic immunity, he ran as fast as was possible with his clumsy bundles, back the way he had come and into another street. The broad open spaces of plazas and the long vistas of ramblas lost all their charms for him, and the splendors of de luxe hotels no longer lured him; he decided that he would turn proletarian for a while and take a chance on bedbugs instead of bullets.

  This part of Barcelona had been laid out in recent times; the old city walls had been torn down and the spaces filled with wide boulevards called rondos. There was no place to hide, and everywhere Lanny turned it seemed that there was shooting. The Fascists were using homes and clubs and churches as fortresses, firing from windows and rooftops. The Marxist volunteers were roaming the streets, seeking their enemies wherever they could be found, laying siege to buildings and seizing near-by buildings as counterfortresses. Lanny realized that he had done something very foolish to get himself into the midst of such a free-for-all.

  Breathless, and perspiring in semi-tropical sunshine, he dashed across the Ronda de San Pedro, southeastward to where he knew there was a tangle of small and obscure streets. He still clung to the Comendador and the suitcase. In a block where there was no shooting he saw a small hotel and darted inside, joining a number of persons who perhaps had entered for the same compelling reason. They stared in surprise at a well-dressed stranger with such an unusual burden.

  Lanny went to the desk and addressed the clerk in his most polished Spanish: “Por favor, una habitacion con bano.”

  The little man with black mustaches twisted to needle-points inquired: “El Senor es americano?” and then: “Perhaps you would rather speak English
?”—a great relief in an emergency.

  “I ran into some shooting,” explained Lanny; “and I ran farther.”

  “I was once employed in Chicago,” replied the little man, with a twinkle in his dark eyes. “I had the same experience there; it was bootleggers.”

  Lanny was glad to laugh. Then, thinking an explanation due: “I have an oil painting with me, and apparently people think it is a machine gun or something of the sort. I would like to leave it in a room where it won’t be shot at.”

  He obtained a room for about one-tenth of what he had been paying at the fashionable place, and much safer. He examined both the Comendador and himself and made sure that he had no wounds and the Comendador no more; then he got the Sunday newspapers, and with the help of the little pocket dictionary which he was never without, he read the details of events up to the previous midnight. Afterward he went downstairs to the telephone and tried to find the teachers’ syndicate in the book, but he didn’t know the exact name or any way to get enlightenment. Raoul would be worried about him, but there was no use trying to reach him until the firing was over. By that time Raoul might be dead, or in the hands of the Fascists, which would come to the same thing.