Thing to Love by Geoffrey Household

I thank heaven for that!” said Avellana, smiling. “Do you know that Morote would follow you anywhere?”
    â€œBut that’s absurd! Sometimes I feel I am not one of you at all, Don Gil. You are all so impressed by such little things.”
    â€œWhat was the little thing which impressed Morote? He has told me just enough to make me guess the rest wrong.”
    â€œI don’t see why you shouldn’t know. He came to see me when the Citadel was building. Privately, of course. At my house.”
    Miro exchanged glances with Felicia. It was she, really, who had persuaded Morote to speak frankly. She had treated him as an intellectual — which he wasn’t — and convinced him that they were all in the same vague camp of good will. God knew whether that ancestry of hers hadn’t counted too! Morote was at least three-parts Indian.
    â€œThere was serious trouble about overtime,” Miro went on.“Pablo Morote couldn’t get any sort of honest dealing out of the contractors. He was being forced to call a strike with the probability that the dockers and railwaymen would come out in support. And that meant — or so he thought — that the government would arrest the leaders. I didn’t see how they could. But Morote reminded me that the Emergency Act of 1952 had been allowed to lapse but had never been repealed. Both sides were ready for a showdown. With violence, if necessary.”
    â€œYou might have had to fire?”
    Miro avoided the question.
    â€œThey were all working very well and cheerfully. And they had a first-class case for overtime. Legally, there was a shade of doubt. Contractors after all know how to draw contracts. But it was the principle of the thing. A few pesos.”
    â€œWhat did you do?”
    â€œFaulted the concrete,” he laughed. “It was on the borderline anyway. And I had absolute powers as an inspector. What happened was exactly what I expected. So I told the crook that the munificent bribe which he could afford to offer me would be paid to his labor . . . Or else. It wasn’t very much when distributed as overtime. But it created a precedent and saved Morote’s face.”
    â€œThe men knew?”
    â€œNo. But Morote had to. His advice has been a great help to me ever since. About his people. What they thought and how they thought. One doesn’t like to depend entirely on the reports of civil police.”
    â€œYou have your own agents then?” Gil Avellana asked with a dryness of tone which seemed to hide either surprise or uneasiness.
    â€œNeither agents nor the funds for them. But I am easily accessible.”
    â€œPermit me to say what I think of you. You are very much of an aristocrat.”
    Miro laughed.
    â€œIt’s true my father was a big landowner,” he said. “But he was middle class of the middle class.”
    â€œI meant it in the Spanish sense — that you treat all men as if they had your own self-confidence.”
    â€œI have learned that here. For six generations, Don Gil, the Kuceras were valets and stewards. Czechs — under the Hapsburg Empire — were in one way rather like the Basques. The most trustworthy servants of the nobility were as likely as not to be Czechs. One generation of landowning does not overcome such a background. My heredity — if there is such a thing — is to serve and obey. I am not sure that I understand your mystique of aristocracy.”
    â€œMy mystique, as you call it, is for people who feel a truth without being able to analyze it. Look! If I were trying to explain it to a North American, I should ask him: What are the qualities which fascinate you in the “western”? Simplicity of character. Independence. Individual standards rather than mass standards. Honesty. Uncalculating hospitality. I am not holding up the poverty and violence of a cattleman’s life as anything to be cherished. I am merely saying that