The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  While he was with me I could not show my resentment at his callous sacrifice of Eugen Rosa. Ashkar was an old friend, and must be allowed his self-respect. The ways of his people and the necessities of his job were cruel and tortuous. No allowances that I made for him, however, could disguise from me that all my sympathy was with Kasr-el-Sittat. Myself an exile, I was deeply attracted by their purpose of protecting and cherishing the homeless, of restoring their trust in humanity, of rescuing them from the intolerable exactions of the State.

  The colony fascinated me and I could not keep away. I per­suaded myself again I had business in the tobacco villages, and again I spent a night at Kasr-el-Sittat. This time I happened to have a rifle, for I intended on the way home to look for pig in the Orontes marshes. I wasn’t allowed to take it with me to the guest bungalow; the colony rule was that no firearms were permitted within the gate—or, at any rate, beyond the garage. The reason was courtesy rather than any objection to bloodshed. These refugees had seen so much of weapons and the dead that they wished for each other no reminder. I accepted the veto gladly, and indeed was so impressed that I never went after pig at all. They must have recognized in me a new and eager warmth, for I was invited to come back and spend a longer and more serious visit whenever I liked.

  And so the colony became for me too a refuge. I had no reason to be discontented with my life—far from it—but at Kasr-el-Sittat I entered into an eternal human dream; it was, at any rate on that Utopian surface presented to the eager stranger, a fairyland where time stood still for him, and the companions had no cares. The sheer scenic beauty may have influenced me. To come up from hot and dusty Tripoli over the barren uplands and through the desolate tobacco villages, down into a green country of rocks, and groves of oak and beech, and huge cool springs, where the celestial Elisa queened it over her sudden garden of Europeans, was enchantment enough to break the continuity of past and future, of my work­aday picture of self and the world.

  THE AMŒBA

  1

  I HAD BEEN STUCK TO MY OFFICE CHAIR FOR LONGER THAN I liked, busy, I remember, with the problem of shipping my machinery up and down the coast to local caiques, when I had a letter from Elisa to tell me that she was about to spend a few days in Damascus. It was a commanding little note—in the sense that it showed neither invitation nor interest, but allowed me to join her if I could. Business in Damascus I could always make, and I was eager to entertain her in my own world and to repay her kindness. I suspected that she might be less grave a creature in Damascus than at Kasr-el-Sittat.

  That is, perhaps, a preposterous understatement of my hopes. Or didn’t I know that I loved her? Certainly she seemed to me so unattainable that I wasn’t admitting it. I had enough experi­ence to be cautious in handing over my happiness. I reasoned myself into believing that my longing for her was mere desire.

  She was in the lounge of the hotel when I arrived, dressed for the summer heat of the Arab capital in unrelieved white silk, for which her small head, and the delicious, nervous sharpness of shoulder, hip and breast were sufficient ornament. In all her clothes, especially at Kasr-el-Sittat, there was a slight suggestion of uniform; but if this were uniform, it was that of a Nefertiti contemptuously covering her beauty for a visit to the Chief of Staff.

  Official visits were indeed her object. At dinner, under the great solitary tamarisk of my favourite Arab restaurant, she told me that her business at Damascus was financial—and successful—and talked of the apparent fascination that the Euro­pean woman of character, from Lady Hester Stanhope to Ger­trude Bell, held for the Arab. I said that it wasn’t altogether due, as she thought, to the excitement of so unfamiliar con­tact, and that the Arab instantly recognized outstanding quality in man or woman. Worth was far more important to him than well-being.

  ‘Because again and again his civilization has been destroyed,’ she said, ‘and left him with nothing but the human values.’

  I asked her if there were no other way but destruction, and suggested that a sane dictatorship might show us the way to a world where the individual could develop freely. I was feeling for her creed, for the driving force behind Kasr-el-Sittat. I still did not know what it was. Some of the colonists believed their own naïve admission that they had escaped from society to work for its own good; others had a more genial love of humanity, tempered by a child’s capacity for being shattered by injustice. There was also the handful of Russians who always turn up in any unconventional movement, and would not have been out of place, if judged by way of life and protestations, in one of the regular Lebanese monasteries. I could not believe that such people as Elisa and Osterling would have any truck with these mild and innocuous forms of anarchism.

  ‘Dictatorship?’ she cried—and I was exhilarated by the fiash of indignation in her voice. ‘Government can swallow up any dictator! Did you ever come across what Mussolini said? “We are nearing the annihilation of human personality. The State is a vast machine which eats the living and throws them up as dead statistics. The great curse which fell on men in the hazy beginning of history and pursued them down the centuries has been to build the State and for ever be crushed by the State.”

  ‘Oh, and he was intelligent enough to know it was true! Yet when he had power he was compelled into socialism, and all he could do was to call his government fascist. God save us from dictatorship! It’s even worse than your democracy of apes.’

  Then she herself passed to the attack, as if she had been waiting for my curiosity to deprive me of any more right to reticence.

  ‘Why did you join World Opposition?’

  It was the last question I expected. It was even a sinister question, for it implied that she had made enquiries about me.

  As a result of all the publicity of the House that Jack Built, I received, among a mass of abuse, a few letters of encourage­ment and congratulation from ultra-conservative persons and organizations. Most of them were tiresome, and missed the point. I was by no means against the ideals of socialism. I was against the growing and inhuman power of central government. Among the organizations there was just one which understood me and linked my isolated action to a definite creed. That was World Opposition. It was an international brotherhood which required its members to oppose the tyranny of their government, whatever its colour and however worthy its motives.

  I hesitated to answer her seriously. Though I myself had started this duel of interrogation, the political Elisa was not the woman I wanted. I had, too, a foreboding that I was about to leap into space. And yet, whenever I hit ground or floated, there she would be.

  ‘In me,’ she said, following without effort the perplexities of my mind, ‘there is no conflict between ambition and what I want for myself. And just as you must tell a woman that you love her, though she already knows it, so you must tell me in your own words all the other things that I already know.’

  It was clear enough from her tone that I must await her own time before claiming that half-promise, so I began to tell her of the House that Jack Built.

  She let me go on until she had heard enough, I suppose, to confirm what she had from the agents of Kasr-el-Sittat. Then she interrupted:

  ‘I know that too. But you are not a man who acts from pique. What was there in World Opposition which appealed to you? What was the belief you had formed for yourself?’

  ‘I believe that only this generation can check the growth of the State,’ I answered, trying to express a whole year of lonely thought with a simplicity that could not be misunderstood. ‘It must be fought now, before it can educate out of us the very desire for revolt.’

  ‘And you thought World Opposition would do that?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It’s woolly, like its pretentious name. But on the right lines.’

  ‘As an Englishman,’ she laughed, ‘you’d rather it were called the Royal Society for the Protection of Civil Rights. But the name had to have a flavour of internationalism. If a patriot is to attack his government whatever it does, he m
ust be sure that his companions are doing the same in every other country.’

  ‘Can it exist behind the Iron Curtain?’ I asked.

  ‘Not in that form. But do you think the State isn’t hated there?’

  ‘A powerless hatred.’

  ‘Eric, wherever you have a police state, you have a powerful, disciplined underground. And it’s a thousand times easier for Kasr-el-Sittat to capture an existing organization than to break down the apathy of the West.’

  ‘You? You mean that you are behind World Opposition?’

  ‘And much else, too, Eric,’ she answered calmly, ‘and now we need you.’

  ‘In the colony?’

  ‘No. Where you are.’

  ‘How much do they know in Damascus?’

  ‘As much as you did: that we are a harmless Tolstoyan com­munity—which can be bled for money.’

  ‘And elsewhere?’

  ‘Only our direct agents.’

  I perceived at once that those four words bound me to Kasr-el-Sittat as long as it or I should exist. That my visionary World Opposition, with its weekly news-sheet and its distin­guished foreign lecturers, should turn out to be the tip of one of Kasr-el-Sittat’s antennæ was unimportant. The material point was that no ordinary members—apart from over-enthusiastic women with wild stories of some esoteric centre in the East—had ever imagined that policy, funds and propaganda were not controlled by London, or perhaps New York; so it was obvious that in those graver organizations at which Elisa had hinted, not even a local leader could ever be allowed to discover what I had just been told: that if he followed up the underground chain of communication from cell to cell he would arrive in Syria.

  I was not afraid of the secret nor of the responsibility for keeping it. As a political officer I had had access to plenty of information that was potentially explosive, and my loyalty was no less willingly engaged than in the war. Indeed, it was en­gaged for the same reasons. I had not fought Germans. I had fought their conception of the State.

  ‘Don’t be so overcome, Eric,’ she said, with a smile that was a caress of friendship. ‘I know what I am choosing.’

  I assured her at once that, so far as I understood myself, her trust was not misplaced. It was simply my shock at discovering she was so inescapably dedicated.

  She raised her eyes in a slight ironical gesture that included the old Damascus courtyard, her own enigmatic presence as my guest and the atmosphere of temporary romance that was so foreign to her disciplined life.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Nothing of all this really matters.’

  ‘Yes, it does matter. I wanted to give you rest. And now I never can.’

  ‘You have missed nothing,’ she answered, ‘I do not rest.’

  The words were deliberately, almost gaily pronounced; and, as I watched her across the table, I knew that they were true. She was restless as some animal living only by its speed. Her head, its shadows sharpened by the far-spaced lights, had a poised and pointed grace, a lightness that made the common human head seem round and clumsy.

  I asked her whether in her life of ease before the war she hadn’t surrendered to the passing days like the rest of us.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘What I believe now, I believed as a girl. But my thoughts weren’t clear. They hadn’t got as far as action—or even as words, I think. It was as if I had been some sort of angel, who couldn’t get used to working through a human brain.’

  It was now my turn to ask questions. I won’t repeat them all. My love of her led me to choose my words and to cut them so that they opened without jarring door after door into her tortured memories. I think that at last she forgot my presence and talked to herself. What she said I must put down as neutrally as I can, trying not to remember that it was I who condemned her future to continue her past.

  She told me of the power and seclusion of her family which had been settled in the forests of the Bukovina for several hundred years; 1918 deprived them of their lands, but not of their wealth nor their traditions. They had no sense of nation­ality, and no allegiance whatever to any of the succession states which drew their frontiers through the possessions of the Cantemirs. Their loyalty, now wholly frustrated, was to their former people—deported kulaks, persecuted Polish Jews, and all the helpless minorities who were corrupted by the Roumanians or forced into their stern national mould by the Czechs.

  She claimed—and I daresay it was true—that through the centuries while the Cantemirs protected their rich and inacces­sible corner from rival emperors a special relationship had grown up between them and the powerless. She admitted that their sense of duty was exceptional, but it had been a rare land­lord, she insisted, who was as unimaginative as the State.

  Clarity, the precise image of what she wanted to destroy, came to her when the Russians killed her parents. That was in 1940 when they annexed the Bukovina. They told her with quite convincing politeness and regret, that the death sentence was an economic necessity; they expected that she would sym­pathize when she came to understand their ideals.

  Then she escaped to Germany. She didn’t like the Nazis any better, but she had money in Berlin. Her father and his friends, who had been forced to exchange wealth with responsibilities for still greater wealth with none, had investments from Norway to the Argentine.

  ‘We blame the aristocrats for all they never thought of doing,’ she said, ‘but at least they were the only true internationalists Europe has ever known.’

  Some of them had so loathed the German purpose that they had been ready to give their lives for Europe. They did. She poured scorn on their gallant, indiscreet conspiracy. She didn’t think that they had deceived the Gestapo for a month.

  ‘I wanted to die then. Just wanting to is a sort of surrender, Eric, the nearest I ever came to rest. But they never gave me a chance to die. The commandant of the place asked me if it wasn’t quite easy. He would never be present at interrogations. He lived in a lovely Wagner world of heroism. Really I had to explain to him that they didn’t put naked swords at my throat. That commandant, my dear, he stands for them all—all the men of decent upbringing and instincts who daren’t disobey.’

  She said that the British were just the same. What mattered to them was her record on paper. Our people had smothered her under the softness of if onlys. If only she had been a Jew­ess, they said; if only she hadn’t been released before their army arrived; if only she had worked with an allied underground; why then, she would be free to go where she liked. Get a certiticate, they told her, that you were imprisoned and tor­tured. From whom? Who knew? Was she to walk through the ruins from city to city looking for bits of Gestapo? So they were sorry, but from their point of view she was simply a Nazi sympathizer who had fled to Germany for fear of their dear allies.

  On foot, with no interference but hunger, she dragged her­self to a refugee camp in the American zone, where they didn’t insult her by arguing about the past. They didn’t understand it, anyway, she said; they were as kind as they were self-righteous, and they applied to her the touchstone of the present. When it came to sending her to Russia because her home was now in Russia, they asked her simply whether or not she believed in democracy.

  I don’t know what happened to infuriate her. She was not a woman to have any hesitation in twisting civil or military rules to her advantage. Possibly it was the mild and spectacled obtuseness of the questioner. Possibly the words were an intolerable challenge to one who had seen too closely the stupidity of elected politicians and its effect upon the world.

  ‘I told them that no thinking man or woman had any trust at all in democracy,’ she said. ‘I told them I wasn’t such a child as to think the tyranny of a majority any better than the tyranny of a minority.’

  So they put her down as an anarchist, and she accepted the description. She gloried in it. Then and there she saw that it was the only political label which, in the modern world, could be applied to the once respectable opinions of an eighteenth-century Whig. It wasn’t till afte
r this episode that she found the full and conscious spirit which possessed her.

  To her interrogator, however, communists and anarchists were all one. He wasn’t after all paid to know that the most unrelenting enemy of communism was the anarchist. He put her on the next train for the revolutionary paradise.

  ‘And then, thank God for him, I met a man who had no duty and no morality!’ she exclaimed. ‘I bribed him to take me off the train and into Turkey as his mistress. He was the only one of them all who trusted me when he looked into my eyes. He believed what I said—that if I were free I could give him money.’

  Her voice was without emotion or self-pity. Only the gather­ing speed of her words revealed the incandescent anger beneath her irony. When she told me of that bitter triumph of her eyes, I was overcome by so uncontrollable, so helpless a hatred of our world that I could not keep the tears from my cheek.

  ‘Are those mine?’ she asked.

  Her exact words—but my memories of that night colour them with a sentimentality that did not exist. In truth her tone was of interested surprise.

  ‘Someone has to do it for you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, as if I had made a sober statement of fact. ‘Will you?’

  I asked her what she meant.

  ‘In any partnership one of the two must be breakable,’ she explained.

  ‘And repairable?’

  ‘Easily. That is what I mean. It’s usually the woman. But I—am not breakable. I ask your friendship, Eric, for the sake of your lovely power of suffering,’

  Friendship? I took up that tentative challenge, and knew that all her body listened. I think that few men had found her curious physique so exquisite that it moved them to the full poetry of desire.