The Three Sentinels Read Online Free

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