The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

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  The High Place

  Geoffrey Household

  Contents

  THE SANCTUARY

  THE AMŒBA

  OUTSIDE EXPERT

  ALONE

  TWILIGHT

  INTERMEDIARY

  For Ilona, my love

  THE SANCTUARY

  1

  OF ALL THAT I LEARNED FROM THAT UNCOMPROMISING prophet, Anton Tabas, the tenet which seems to me most true and least acceptable is that no man can obtain absolution from any but himself. Therefore when the tumult was over and the action irrevocable and I had struck down what most I loved, I did not go to him for comfort. I knew too well that, though he might send another to his priest, to me he would say that my conscience must sit in judgment on itself.

  That is the reason for this very personal narrative. My signed statement I might almost call it—except that it will be obvious to any curious policemen that I have disguised all details which might lead to the violent or the legal punishment of others. No, I will be my own policeman and my own probation officer. I desire that I, the Eric Amberson who begins this story, shall live again the hope, the high adventure and the misery, and so, rebuilding through sentence and paragraph the rhythm of his self-esteem, recover—well, not the Eric Amberson that was, but at least a companion whom he can observe with tolerance across the dinner-table of his soul.

  Many a way have I tried that might lead into my story. There are models enough, for it is the fashion of our wretched century to confess, and God knows I could race with any other renegade which of us should eat dirt the faster. But I do not want to tell my spirit what it should feel. I want to ask it. Neutrality, not abasement, is my object. That being so—and I am determined that it shall be so—I will give the reasons for my departure from England to Syria, and present a farce before the tragedy.

  For three generations the Ambersons have been land agents and auctioneers in the remotest little market town of Devon. My grandfather and my father were each of them magistrates for the last thirty years of their lives, and mayors of the town at decent intervals. In 1939 I too was appointed a Justice of the Peace, but this voluntary service to society, by now almost hereditary, gave way to another, and the amateur magistrate became an amateur infantry subaltern learning his job in the trampled dust beside the Suez Canal.

  In the autumn of 1945, when I returned to Devon and the business, I was not at all sure that I wished to remain an active partner. I found in myself a distaste for that extreme com­mercial acumen which a country dealer must enjoy, and for which indeed he is respected. My grandfather had been called the sharpest honest man in Devon; it would have been untrue to call him the most honest sharper, but the distinction is slight.

  Though I was reluctant to fill my office chair, I was not allowed to have any hesitation at all about resuming my seat upon the bench. As a comparatively idle man in his late thirties, resident in the town itself and easily accessible, my duty was made very clear to me by my colleagues. One of them was deaf; one of them was old; and one was a very busy farmer.

  Thus the case of The House that Jack Built—as the news­papers inevitably called it—was mine without any interference, and I never attempted to shuffle off my responsibility.

  Jack Yealm was fisherman, sawyer, amateur engineer and landowner. The land he owned was little more than a strip of mud and shale on the banks of a small tidal creek, but, what with his slipway, his quay of loose stone, his tons of gravel and seaweed and good earth rammed down behind solid piles, it had all the appearance of solid ground. A stream which once had entered the green-tufted creek four hundred yards above his house had been dammed, tapped, and harnessed to a second­hand mill-wheel which drove his saw.

  Yealm had two sons. Both had returned to civil life—one because he had left his foot in the driving seat of a Sherman, the other after long service in the Navy. Before the war they occupied a pair of adjoining cottages, bought with old Yealm’s savings and conveniently placed just off the main street of the town. During the war these cottages had been requisitioned by the Admiralty—which was fair enough, for the young Yealm wives had gone to an aircraft factory and left them empty—and after the war the Admiralty had passed them to the Ministry of Fuel by one of those little coups of bureaucratic chicanery, without any reference to the local and more humane authorities.

  I needn’t go into all the resettlement problems of the Yealm sons. They had two wives and five young children in a total of four rooms in other people’s houses. Nothing else, said our Superintendent of Police, protected by his official dead-pan from any suspicion of irony, nothing else was known against them.

  Now old Jack Yealm had a vague idea of the Housing Acts, and he knew very well that he was not allowed to use materials that were in short supply, or to employ builders; but he didn’t know—and how, brought up in liberal England, should he?—that he couldn’t build a house on his own land with his own and his sons’ hands.

  Among the myriad untidinesses of his foreshore there was no shortage of material. He reminded me of one of those maiden ladies who have never in a long life thrown away a stick of furniture or an old dress, and still possess, intact though un­recognizable, every object they have ever acquired. His attic was the space above high-water mark, and his junk was all that had floated or been dragged into his creek to die—or rather, to wait in suspended animation until resurrected by Jack for some new and wholly unsuspected life.

  The house that Jack built was a mighty good house, though you had to look at it twice to see that house it was. It might have been a sail loft, or a shed for the proper exhibiting of a whale. It sank completely and satisfactorily into its background, as a natural part of the foreshore. That, I think, was the reason why it escaped so long the eye of the inspector. Indeed he came upon it by the merest accident, while reconnoitring the creek for some other damned inspector who wanted a permit to build a concrete villa there.

  So Jack and his sons came up before the beaks. It was obvious that they were considered to have committed a very serious crime against their country’s bureaucracy, for the court was solemn with inspectors and local government officials, all of them watching each other, like a bunch of puritans at a prayer meeting, in the hope that one of the brethren should fail to show a proper zeal. They were bringing a test case with all the menace of Whitehall solidly behind them. That was what made me angry. They put me in the position of a State Prosecutor, whereas my duty was to preserve the King’s Peace by showing mercy—if they deserved any—to my fellow citizens.

  The Yealms could only plead guilty; they hadn’t obtained a single one of the twenty permits that were necessary before they could even begin to clear the building site. Yet it was plain to me—at least I thought it was—that Parliament in its wisdom had never intended the Acts to apply to such a case. I said so. I fined the defendants 7s. 6d. each, and told them with reason­able severity that they were not to do another hour’s work on the house until they had obtained a sheaf of permits to cover the use of the labour and materials that they were not going to use. My colleagues on the bench concurred; they were the deaf and the old, and they had not the faintest notion what the case was about. My clerk, of course, protested—but he had a marked sense of mischief, bless him, and his grin took all the formality out of his warning.

  The Rural District Council chuckled and did nothing—after all, they were both lazy and my neighbours—but the Ministry appealed. Their reputation for incorruptible inhumanity was threatened, and it was their duty as democrats to see that the minority was oppressed f
or the sake of the majority. Jack Yealm and his sons were fined two hundred pounds, and Eric Amberson, J.P., was removed from the bench. The majesty of the proceeding was imposing. I was lucky, I gathered, not to find myself in the Tower. And it wasn’t a fuss about nothing. As a Justice of the Peace I had refused to administer an Act of Parliament. When I let off the Yealms with their derisory 7s. 6d. apiece, I hadn’t seen the constitutional implications. I had made myself one with the procession of Barons and Bishops and plain revolutionaries who had defied Parliament down the ages. I had even, as a Sunday paper unctuously exploded, defied the King.

  That was what hurt me. I had a shocking bad press. I was accused of making a futile gesture against socialism. I was even called an irresponsible fascist. It occurred to no one that the Acts against which I had protested were passed by the National Government and not the Socialists; nor had I said anything against the Acts themselves—which were obviously necessary—only against the rigidity of their administration.

  No, it was not removal from the bench which distressed me; it was the fact that my people, my English, thought the removal right and proper. I realized that I had become a foreigner, for one of their sufferings I had never shared. During the six years of my service abroad they had tolerated, for the sake of their collective conscience, a gradual disciplining of their civil life; and there was no one to mark the change so keenly as we, the startled army exiles. The turbulent islander had become a grey, obedient citizen so imperceptibly—since the puritan half of him was thinking only in terms of self-abnegation—that he did not know a revolution had passed over him. Only the planners and the politicians knew, and they, whatever their party, were united in their determination that obedient he should remain.

  I could not face the sadness of it, the weary submission of so great and so deservedly victorious a people. I wasn’t ashamed. I knew that I had been right and the government wrong; but my impotence as an individual was driven into my soul, affect­ing me as if it had been sexual impotence. I saw myself con­demned, if I remained in England, to a futile lifetime of impatience. I sold my partnership. I collected some agencies for tools, fertilizers and agricultural machinery, and settled my­self and my small capital on the Syrian shore.

  The reason for my choice of Syria was simple; I had enjoyed myself there. In 1942 I was left with an unmilitary digestive system, after a fragment of 88 mm. shell had carried away some inessential coils, and the doctors said that for a year or two it would not stand up to desert rations and shortage of water. So I became a political officer in Syria. I had no qualifications except that I spoke French and could stammer a little Arabic. My appointment and my destiny thereafter were due to my accidental presence in the depot adjutant’s office when he opened the envelope.

  For three years of the war Syria and the Lebanon were my hobbies and my home. I learned to love the country: the line of little towns, Rouad and Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, that seemed to float, their rocks half awash, upon the tideless sea: the red-roofed villages set on the bends of narrow roads, one above another, to the ragged top of Lebanon: the Moslem cities threaded along the straight highway between mountain and desert, gate leading to gate from Aleppo to Hama, to Homs, to Damascus. This variety of beauty predisposed me to like the peoples by whose variety of race and religion it had been created, and to taste that Arab culture which had given to them all their language, their courtesy and their easy acceptance of frustra­tion.

  I was not homesick, for England was less of a necessity to me than to my fellows. Between the university and my father’s death I worked for a firm of manufacturing chemists which specialized in the needs of agriculture. We were consultants to the Colonial Office, to great producing companies of sugar and rubber and wheat, and occasionally to foreign governments in trouble with their experimental crops. I became the man who went to the spot and reported, and often remained season after season with my finger on the vast pulse of prairie or plantation. I was no chemist, but I had listened to farmers’ problems ever since I was old enough to come down to lunch; to the worried parent of an anaemic harvest or a lazy soil I was a more welcome representative of my firm than a technician.

  So, when I came to choose a home, I had enough experience of foreign ground to know where I myself would be most fruit­ful, and that my roots were healthy enough to stand so drastic a transplanting. Now, as I write, it is easy enough for me to see that I ran away to Syria for my own selfish pleasure, but pleasure at least it was. My duty, of course, was to sacrifice my liberty for what I believed—to stay, to refuse my taxes, and to force the government to imprison me. Humanity against the State has only one weapon: neither escape nor political action, but the passive resistance of the individual. The farce, however, is too slight to bear such a moral, and it is over. I shall have nothing more to say of England and its Yealms.

  2

  My house was in El Mina, the old port of Tripoli. It was offered to me a few weeks after my arrival in the country, while I still had to decide whether my base should be Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus or, as a bad fourth, Tripoli. By itself it made up my mind. The house was on the western side of El Mina, well away from the harbour, and was built into and out of the remains of the ancient wall. On the ground floor were a ware­house, the servants’ quarters and kitchen. Above was the living accommodation of four whitewashed, box-like rooms, presenting a blank wall to the street and opening on to a terrace of masonry which faced the unbounded sea.

  I can best describe the airy, clear delight of the place by saying that time which most satisfied me was the radiant quarter of an hour between breakfast and the office. First I would approve the sea, whatever its mood, and watch through the white geraniums, whose tiled boxes lined my parapet, the ex­cited dance or slow procession of the morning water; then, to my right, I looked down into a little walled garden, visible only from the terrace and made for the jealously guarded walk of women. To pass by a mere turning of the head from limit­less blue and white into a finite heaven where there was no more sea tempted me with a moment of joy, never to be re­sisted, before the day’s work began.

  At the far end of the garden a door gave on to a lane, hedged by cactus and floored by the natural rock, which hooves of donkeys and the winter torrents had worn into a passable sur­face. This was a truly Mediterranean door. Outside it was a desiccated world of dust and sand-dunes and all the sun-baked filthy litter that blows on the outskirts of an Arab town; within were moist black flower-beds surrounding a well, and so shaded by the thick foliage of pomegranates that until eyes grew accus­tomed to the green twilight they could not tell white rose from lily.

  My warehouse was cool as the crypt of a great church—and such, indeed, it may have been, for the vaulting was Crusaders’ work. It was a typical and traditional Arab place of business; and down the long aisles where generations of traders had stacked their bales and tubs gleamed the reds and blues and yellows of my agricultural machinery. The tractors looked more engine-like, more full of hidden omnipotence for wealth, than behind the showroom windows of the Western dealer.

  In that light, so much diffused by space and thickness of masonry, I first met Elisa Cantemir. Therefore, I think, my first impression was of a voice, a grace undefined by any bound­ing line, a fascination that was wholly sexless. Nothing could have been more prosaic than our conversation. She wanted to know about the latest types of cultivators—ideal for working the narrow hillside terraces of vine or fruit or tobacco. She gave me no information about herself. Her English, though spoken with a faint foreign accent, was more than fluent; often indeed her flying thought seemed to test the very wings of the language. I wondered if she were the European and energetic mistress of some princely Arab landowner.

  I asked her if she would like a demonstration of the culti­vator. My voice must have sounded professionally inviting, but what I was after was to find out in whose rich acres of plain or mountain she held her court.

  ‘Salesmanship?’ she asked, smiling. ‘Here?’

 
‘What’s odd about it?’

  ‘Your stained-glass tractors,’ she said. ‘One doesn’t expect, somehow, the bazaar carpet-seller to bring out a Hoover.’

  I took her upstairs to the terrace, desiring no doubt to show her that not all of me was Levantine trader. She said little, and I admired her for knowing that her swift look of surprise was a better tribute than any flow of conventionalities. In the fierce spring sun she took shape, though its delicacy was no more to be measured and memorized than that of a thin tongue of flame.

  She was still, I think, more character than flesh to me. At any rate my curiosity about her was far more insistent than any admiration. I had never felt quite the same quality of interest in a woman unless she were beyond the age of desire. That may be the reason why I never married. I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur of women. It is an empty and inhuman phrase which most vilely smells of a seaman’s brothel. Yet I had upon me the curse of the Don Juan: that I was for ever seeking the binding of two lives into one, and always aware that what I found—or made, perhaps—was nothing but a working model.

  ‘Your estate is in the Lebanon?’ I asked.

  It was the spring of 1948. I had been in the country two years, so I was astonished that I couldn’t place her.

  ‘In Syria,’ she replied. ‘At Kasr-el-Sittat.’

  ‘Good God! Are you all alone there?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she laughed. ‘Not the last of the wives!’

  Kasr-el-Sittat was about thirty miles from the coast in the broken Alaouite downland, where the valleys and even the rounded tops of the hills had plentiful remains of forest. That green remoteness formed a soft and gentle threshold to some of the wildest country in Western Asia, stretching away along the Turkish frontier to Lake Van Ararat.

  The settlement had a reputation that was sinister, and comic only to a European, for it had been deliberately constructed around the scattered stones of a pre-Phœnician attempt to house the wives of God. In the early days of the occupation of Syria, God had been a standing joke among us, the political profes­sionals. He was a pagan Arab who had simply set himself up in business as the Almighty and had a following of some thousands. I knew him, I won’t say well, but well enough for him to accept a drink from me when he visited the Latakia hotel like a plain mortal. He had quite a reasonable theory to explain the failings of his humanity; to refute him you needed to be up in all the theological subtleties of the fourth century.