Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (18 page)

"Maybe
authoritarian
is a better word than dictatorial, my dear," suggested Lady Hensley, "considering what we think about demagogues and dictators?"

At that moment Josef ina put her hand up. "Please, Mister Richard, can you help my cousin...?"

In fact they were to hear General Blair's voice on the radio only a couple of evenings later from the Spanish front, wherever exactly that was.

"Fellow Britons, fellow believers in freedom," came a soft staccato croak, which nevertheless conveyed sublime calm and power, as if the very best kind of big brother were invisibly by one's side, "our British Expeditionary Force of heroes is gaining by the day in giving a lesson to the dark forces of dictatorships. A well-deserved and veritable caning! Our praiseworthy preferences for peace after the miseries of the f irst war were great, yet in recent years wise minds knew that something had to be done, and now by God we are doing so!" The repetition of the Ps seemed to associate Blair personally with peace.

"To have peace," the voice continued, "we must sometimes have war—and this cannot be done without much bloody sweat on the part of all decent folk, thus it is only fitting that I myself should have contributed a little such personally three days ago—yet today I particularly wish to single out Rif leman Albert Jones from Cardiff who is being recommended for the Military Cross after single-handedly storming a rebel machine-gun position despite sustaining serious, though not fatal, wounds...."

Afterward, Sir Richard said, "Mind you, Léon Blum got away with intervention by the skin of his teeth!"

"Por los pelos,"
interpreted Mrs. Eagleton for the benef it of girls who never before had skin on their teeth. "By the hairs" made a lot more sense. "Got away with?" queried Akorda. "He stole...?" Drat the English for all their phrasal verbs! They imagined their language was easy because they favored short words, but one teeny verb such as
get
could be followed by a whole blackboard of pronouns and could end up meaning anything at all. Get up to, get by on, get on with—two different meanings to
that
one....

"No, Akorda, stealing was Stalin's plan, under the guise of assisting the Republic. When it got out that—" "When it became known," supplied Mrs. Eagleton. "—yes, became known that the Russians would sell war materials if the Republic transferred most of its gold reserves to Moscow at
half the international value
until the gold got used up—Peter Vansittart's spies, I mean diplomats, found that one out—well, the Republic sent
all of its gold
to Paris, and that tipped the balance—not
least since Spain had the fourth largest gold reserves in the world!" "I've some very nice news," Lady Hensley chipped in to announce. "Two weeks on Saturday we'll all go by bus to Oxford, and you'll be able to dance on the lawn in the cloisters," and she glanced for assistance to Mrs. Eagleton. "Claustros," said that lady. "Almost the same word. Not everything is so different." "Well then, in the claustros at
Maudlin.
Richard's old college. He asked the president personally." "But," said Akorda, "you have a prime minister and a king, not a president." Lady Hensley laughed merrily. "Most Oxford colleges have masters as their heads, but a few have presidents, and one has a warden. All the thirty or so colleges govern themselves, consequently there isn't any one
place
you can say is the University of Oxford. Our American friends often get confused." "So do I," confessed Mrs. Eagleton. "Also, Oxford students aren't called students, they're called undergraduates." "And the Fellows aren't teachers, they're
dons."
A good Spanish word. "In
los claustros,"
María Teresa asked in horror, "will
monjes
watch us dance?" "Why should there be monkeys? Granted there's a deer park inside
Maudlin,
but the place isn't a zoo. Girls, the workers from the steel and car factories, as well as students, will come to see you." "Will those workers be Socialists or Communists or Anarchists?" asked Akorda. "Bless me, I've no idea."

On the appointed Saturday, all of the girls, except for a couple who'd come down with upset tummies, piled into the rickety old bus along with Akorda and Mrs. Eagleton, bound for Oxford. Mrs. Tucker would look after the disappointed duo whose misfortunes couldn't have anything to do with her cookery, otherwise all of the girls would be rushing to the toilet. Probably those two ate some filthy fungus they found in the woods. Sir Richard and his wife proceeded ahead in his Riley Sprite two-seater; they'd be lunching in college with a politically friendly history Fellow who'd helped to appease the head gardener regarding foreign brats prancing on his most prized lawn.

The bus grumbled and creaked along for over an hour before finally disgorging the girls at Oxford's Gloucester Green bus station, till quite recently a cattle market. Patriotic Union f lags hung as bunting, and delightfully some ikurriña f lags, red field with a white cross and a green St. Andrew's cross symbolizing the sacred oak tree of Guernica that the Condor Legion had failed to incinerate. The girls, in their long white-banded skirts and red pinafores, cheered.

A small Salvation Army band struck up, to lead the way to Maudlin College; consequently Mrs. Eagleton needn't worry any more about remembering the litany of
George Street, Cornmarket, The High,
as she and Akorda led the crocodile. Shoppers clapped.

Grand sandstone edifices lined much of the High Street as it curved to bring into view the massive turreted tower of Maudlin. A crowd greeted the procession of girls as they reached the gatehouse, to be met by Sir Richard and Lady Hensley and a chubby chap wearing a scarlet and grey gown, looking like some cardinal. Amidst their families, some workers waved red f lags, others the f lag of the Republic, red, yellow, and purple, watched with stern disapproval by several men in dark suits wearing bowler hats. Elegantly dressed fresh-faced undergraduates, some in blazers and boaters, milled about. They must have come up early.

"¡Bienvenidas!"
proclaimed the chap, oops don, in the gown to the girls; then, making a megaphone with his hands, he called out to the crowd, "I say: nobody will be admitted to college carrying any political symbols. We are here today simply to enjoy the dancing of these brave young refugees displaced by war, and to give generously
toward their upkeep and the good work of the Basque Children's Committee. The Bulldogs will conf iscate any f lags."
"Bulldogs?"
queried Akorda, who could see none anywhere, nor conceive how even the best-trained dogs could confiscate anything. "Those chaps in the bowler hats," Sir Richard told her quickly. "Wearing
sombreros de hongo,"
supplied Mrs. Eagleton. "The university police," said Sir Richard.

The quadrangle of lawn within the cloisters was a striped wonder of apple-green and emerald that might have been cut with nail scissors, surrounded on all sides by mullioned arches beneath mullion-windowed rooms, above which gargoyles jutted, crowned by crenellations from which stone finials rose high, partly hiding the sloping slate roofs.

"Es un puto monasterio,"
hissed Laureana, but friends hushed her.

A burly presumed head gardener in baggy trousers and a waistcoat, sleeves rolled up, scrutinized from under a f lat cap the innocent f lat white footwear of the girls, an uprooted KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign tucked under his arm reproachfully. He needn't worry too much: for decency there'd be no high leaps in the girls' dances. Presently the arches became crowded with spectators, town mixing amicably enough with gown. Soon enough Akorda struck up on her squeezebox for a
mutxikoak,
an ancestor dance in a circle....

The incident happened after another five delightful dances followed by a choral song. As the sound of the accordion died away, this time with a soft clear clarinet tone, to applause, a shout of
Get back 'ere, you!
pursued a body dodging its way nimbly through the crowd behind the mullions, alternating with
Beg pardon, Sir, Ma'am,
as a bowler-hatted Bulldog strove to keep up.

Through the stone gateway that was the only access to the lawn erupted a ragged urchin with a huge mop of brylcreemed black hair, straw and stray feathers entangled in it, who came to a sudden halt, enchanted. "Josef ina!" he cried out, stepping forward on to the sward in bare feet. "Esteban!" exclaimed Josef ina, wide-eyed. As the Bulldog in his big black shoes,
which might even be hob-nailed,
beg-pardoned his way through the blazers and dresses crowding that gateway and advanced purposefully on to the turf, the head gardener launched himself forward, ignoring the bare-footed lad, veritably growling at the Bulldog while brandishing the KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign. This confrontation allowed Esteban to reach his cousin, who hugged him. "What have you done, Josef ina?!" exclaimed Akorda. "I... I only wrote him a letter... saying we were coming... to Oxford... to dance... in a college with a name that isn't said the way it's spelled...." And Josef ina burst into tears, the enormity of her indiscretion becoming clear to her.

"And Esteban could find a town like Oxford, even if he could never find Kellstone Abbey!"

"I'm sorry I interrupted you," piped up Esteban in Basque, "but that angry man was chasing me...." "You look like a scarecrow," said Akorda. At that moment, blessedly some undergraduates raised a cheer, triggering applause all around the cloisters. Even so, when the girls trooped off the grass back through the gateway, since their performance had now evidently reached a natural conclusion, the Bulldog arrested Esteban with an iron grip on the lad's arm.

Thus Esteban missed the picnic of egg and cress sandwiches accompanied by
lemonade on a much vaster lawn reached through a narrow stone passageway, fallow deer grazing in their railed park nearby.

"Behold," declared Lady Hensley as she presided, "not a monkey in sight! If we exclude one naughty and now departed boy...." Sir Richard's gowned Don soon achieved the release of Esteban. What to do with the lad? Word had spread quickly. Sir Richard felt obliged to refuse the charitable offer from the Socialist Workers Anti-Fascist War Committee (whose members had waved those flags) to house the boy with a family close to the Pressed Steel factory—much too politically provocative. After some telephoning, Esteban was placed as a temporary measure in the Basque colony at Witney, famed for its woolen blankets that came from the thousands of local sheep, and a dozen miles closer to Kellstone Abbey than Oxford city was. The returning bus would drop him off there; so at least Esteban was able to spend a little more time on the way with Josefina.

Come the Monday, as well as celebrating the Basque dances in Maudlin, the
Oxford Mail
featured a runaway ragamuff in story, provoking a letter in the Tuesday edition harrumphing about bicycle-thieving ingrates. "Blair's War" of intervention wasn't to everyone's liking, opponents ranging all the way from idealistic pacif ists and pragmatic appeasers right through to Oswald Mosley's blackshirts, whose admiration for the Third Reich was extravagant and (one hoped) ridiculous. By Tuesday evening a right-wing Tory M.P. was asking in Parliament why those refugees' children hadn't
already
been repatriated, if the campaign of the British Expeditionary Force was going so dashed well apart from minor reverses? Well, the Francophobe Duchess of Atholl pitched in, and the red squire Cripps, although in the Lords the Marquis of Bute called again for a halt to intervention; that bastard had sold off half of Cardiff to fund the rebel generals, and he wasn't the only supporter of Franco amongst the great and the good in Britain and in America, too.

On the Thursday evening, to the nation's surprise, General Blair contributed by radio in a jerky rasp.

"Fellow Britons, I recoil from war at the same time as I engage in it, for war can corrupt those who wage it—but we are putting our very souls, our free unblemished souls, into this crusade against dictatorship, and failure is inconceivable." Then, rather than singling out a British soldier as hero of the day, he whispered hoarsely:

"It has come to my attention that a Spanish lad of twelve named Esteban, or in plain English Stephen, bravely and ingeniously made his way almost two hundred and fifty miles through what to him is a strange and foreign country, our England, to rejoin his beloved sister, who by an oversight was placed far away from him in one of the refuges we provided." A self-deprecating cough. "Stephen's sense of geography may well be rather better than my own..."

The jerky rasp continued. "Stephen's is the sort of pluck and perseverance that inspires our troops every single day in our fight to restore freedom, democracy, and decency to all of Spain so that ordinary families can live in peace and at least moderate prosperity without fear." "But I am not Esteban's
sister,"
said Josefina. Sir Richard grinned. "Sister sounds better as propaganda. Or maybe Blair simply made a mistake."

Akorda looked mischievous. "A
blare
means a loud sound, yes? Like the blast of a trumpet?" "With a different spelling, dear," said Mrs. Eagleton.

"So the general could have signed his political pieces in newspapers as by
Mr. Blare
with the different spelling."

"Clever idea, Akorda," said Sir Richard, "but that wasn't Blair's pen-name. Now what
was it, what was it? Oh yes, he took the name of the river that f lows through Ipswich where his parents' house was. The river Orwell. He called himself George Orwell."

In the Spring of 1939, while the British army was still busy assisting the rescued Spanish Republic to repair itself and root out the last rebels, the forces of the Nazi Reich swiftly smashed an armored, air-supported corridor fifty kilometers wide through a plucky if puny Poland as access for Hitler's victorious invasion of Russia while all remained quiet on his western frontiers. Soon the Führer's voice sounded from Siegfriedstadt, formerly Leningrad, and a fortnight later from the ruins of Moscow.