The Three Sentinels (3 page)

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?’

‘Birenfield lost his nerve. Or his wife did. Resigned and cleared out.’

‘Who’s in command at the moment?’

‘Gateson, the Field Manager. Afraid of nothing when it’s a technical question, but no knack of handling men.’

‘Birenfield and Gateson were on the right track,’ Sir Dave insisted. ‘The men are only foreigners. Some of ’em as black as my hat! On the other hand, Colonel Darlow, a
Company which is a model employer with—ah—prominent figures on its Board cannot risk open bloodshed and unfavourable publicity.’

Steady now! When the Chairman of the Compañía Petrolífera Cabo Desierto had been inspired by heaven and Henry Constantinides to drop the end of all misery into one’s
lap it wouldn’t do to tell him that he stank. And, anyway, not a quarter of the story had come out yet. The Company, too, had a case. It was exasperating to have so housed and contented your
men that they refused to leave.

‘What would the Board offer?’

‘Ten thousand and a year’s contract.’

‘Anything afterwards?’

‘A directorship,’ said Sir Dave, ‘would not be beyond the bounds of possibility.’

Lord, and half an hour before he could only remember that he was an unwanted fifty-two and that anyone could see his suit was old.

‘I’d prefer it to be well within them.’

‘Frankly I doubt if it would be,’ Henry said, again cutting through Dave Gunner’s evasions. ‘You’re not a business man, Mat. You never were. Don’t regret it!
You’ve had a lot of fun by not being. Take your ten thousand and another ten—the accountants can cook it to be tax free—if you set the oil flowing and don’t get us in Dutch
with the Government! Your lawyer and ours will have to put that into some sort of form, but we both know what I mean.’

‘When do you want me to leave?’

‘Early next week if you can. Fly to Barranquilla and then on down the coast. You’ve no attachments?’

None. For the past two years he had bitterly congratulated himself that there were none. But now the implication of that kindly enquiry shattered the unison of his personal flourish of trumpets.
Good God, he couldn’t even produce an illegitimate daughter, say, to whom half his salary should be paid! His life had been rich in meetings and partings and good fellowship; but all the
scattered men and women for whom he had deep affection, probably returned, seemed at any given moment to be absent in time or place.

‘No,’ he answered casually, ‘no attachments.’