The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  Grynes’ quotation from his saint shocked me. It seemed at variance with Anton Tabas’ humanity. But when I came to know Tabas better, I saw how difficult it was to repeat his sayings and preserve that sense which had been plain to the hearer. I do not think he considered men who fought for land or any material possession more blameworthy than the rest of us; he simply meant that they were as unapproachable, as spiritually dead as mad dogs.

  So Tabas determined to leave his little world of hatred and to wander towards that Western civilization which he had never seen. There was no doing anything with him. He had to go. And Grynes, who would far rather have accompanied him to the wilds of Africa, or anywhere else where there was sun and a man could get his rations off a tree, had to go too. He couldn’t abide the thought of Tabas, friendless, in the chill smoke of some industrial town—though, I must understand, Tabas had no real need of him at all.

  ‘He has,’ I at once protested. ‘You’re the other half of the world, and you keep his feet on the ground.’

  ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ he replied, with a quick and grateful glance from his battered eyes. ‘When I met him on the road that day, I asked him to teach me his religion. He said he couldn’t because there were no words that could ever teach, for none of us meant the same by his words as another. And then he said that if ever our words meant the same, I should have just as much to teach him.’

  Grynes, as an experienced policeman, knew very well that it would be most difficult to obtain any kind of travel document for Tabas. He decided not to bother the few harassed British officials left in Palestine; they would be short with Anton, and shorter still with him—a respectable sergeant who had managed so quickly to appear a distressed British subject. So he and Tabas joined the stream of simple and intimidated Arab villag­ers who fled from Galilee into peaceful Lebanon, and there, under my roof, they were, and very much obliged. He supposed that I must think him quite mad. I said that I reserved judgment till I had seen more of Anton Tabas, but that I envied him.

  I couldn’t think what advice to give them in a world where the sinner may travel freely, but the saint and the plain citizen may not. They had been with me three days when one morning, occupied in my cherished moment of terrace meditation, I saw that for such as Tabas and Grynes, homeless and obeying no law but their own, Kasr-el-Sittat was a temporary or per­haps permanent resting-place. I had no doubt at all that the colony would receive them. Its generosity was a constant.

  When I told Tabas of this secular monastery, he was eager to go and to learn from it. Wherever there was any sort of gathering for the sake of an ideal, there he was prepared to travel. Seek and ye shall find was to him a literal truth, for he didn’t expect the finding to be a recognizable event at any definite moment, and disappointment had no meaning for him. To Grynes, however, I recommended caution, and made him promise that the pair of them would return to me if they felt out of place.

  I drove them to Kasr-el-Sittat and left them to stroll around the colony while I went to talk to Elisa. She listened with some amusement to my account of Anton Tabas, but she seemed to consider my behaviour very natural, even complimentary to her.

  ‘Phil Grynes could be useful to you,’ I said apologetically. ‘He speaks Arabic, and he’s a handy sort of man. But it’s your use to them that I was really thinking of.’

  ‘You’re a curious person, Eric,’ she answered. ‘You send your crazy prophet here, and you’re perfectly right. But how did you know it?’

  ‘Because it’s the worth of the individual that matters to Kasr-el-Sittat. You cultivate pity.’

  ‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘We cultivate hatred—but it’s true that no one can hate till they can pity.’

  We walked down the hill towards the gate, and found Tabas and Grynes already in earnest conversation with Juan Villaneda and three or four colonists. The group parted as we approached, leaving Tabas and Elisa face to face.

  They made a glorious pair, those two. It may have been their physical slenderness, their lightness upon the earth, that gave such an impression of spirit and mobility. ‘Like a couple of fighting cocks,’ Grynes said to me afterwards. That was the last simile I should have chosen, for there was no suggestion what­ever of antagonism. But I saw what he meant. Call it two fal­cons, beak to beak, the great wings folded.

  ‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting,’ Elisa said.

  ‘I was not ready before,’ Anton answered.

  ‘Oh, we’re not as important as all that,’ she smiled, under­standing immediately the implication of his reply. ‘Peace is all we have to offer you. Or should I say the opportunity for peace?’

  ‘You are most gracious,’ he replied with sudden courtliness.

  That drew from Elisa a smile of sympathetic but irresistible amusement. Anton’s manner, the gallant unbending of an old-fashioned scholar, was undoubtedly borrowed from one of the archæologists who had impressed his youth; it belonged to the suit, but not to the sandalled feet, the dust, the odd rags which he wore around his neck. This politeness, however, had more than a conventional meaning; it always implied that Anton profoundly disagreed with what the last speaker had said, while perceiving a goodness of intent.

  After ten minutes’ conversation with my recruits, both Elisa and Juan unhesitatingly accepted them as useful prototypes of that class of harmless visionaries who provided the exhibition group of the colony. Juan, I am sure, felt that Tabas was worth serious study, for I saw him jot down two of his sayings. Elisa preferred Grynes. She appreciated his good, earthy loyalty, though she didn’t think much of his choice. When she asked Tabas with a shade of sarcasm what she should do to be saved—I can’t remember how she worded the question, but that was the sense—he replied at once that she should have done with fear.

  It was an odd remark to make to a woman whose physical and mental courage were beyond question, but Elisa did not protest.

  ‘Fear is my saviour,’ she declared. ‘It is fear that keeps the animal alive, and fear that drives men to plan for the future.’

  ‘But Fear and Love are not the same,’ Tabas answered.

  She gave him a meaningless, encouraging smile, and turned away to talk to Juan Villaneda about accommodation.

  As Elisa and I strolled back to the central building and its delightful common-room, she said laughingly that Tabas was an impressive old fraud, and asked me if I thought he knew what he meant himself.

  Now, I had always had a taste for that peculiar quality of my adopted country which has made of it throughout the cen­turies a nursery of religions, and I had often talked with mild and wandering believers in their personal creeds; so I had a standard of comparison. I told Elisa that Tabas certainly knew what he meant himself, but that he spoke from depths where neither the philosopher nor psychologist could fairly get at him. By Love he expressed that compulsion upon human beings to give of their best without hope of reward, and he would apply the word to a pure mathematician as well as to a mother plan­ning for her child. And so, I said, I took his remark to mean that she was confounding the two main incentives to human action.

  ‘There is only one,’ she cried, ‘for the test of love is fear for the beloved. And how can we love at all if we are unwilling to destroy?’

  OUTSIDE EXPERT

  1

  IT IS CONCEIVABLE THAT IN HIS OWN SETTING AND AT A normal time I might have liked Oliver Poss. I shall try in all honesty to present him as he was, and I will not pretend that my loathing of him was constant or that I was in­sensible to his gross vitality. There was nothing of grey obedience in Poss; he was an unconscious World Opposition in himself with­out the slightest trace of any idealism. I feel for him the same illogical hatred as that of some barbarous caliph towards the bringer of bad news, for I cannot forgive his crime of not permitting me to remain in ignorance. Impalement, I think, would be a caliph’s choice—unless Poss had made some revolting jest upon the waiting stake, and had his mouth stuffed with gold for it. I resent the abominable c
omedy of this great goat gambolling over our lives.

  He lay in wait for me at Hotel de Syrie. I usually lunched there on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I did my business with bank and railway, and arranged the documentation of any consignments that were to pass over the nominal frontier between the Lebanon and Syria. It was a comfortable and friendly hotel, with the simplest of dining-rooms and a cool lounge which had blossomed into all the worst intricacies of Damascus decoration—fretted screens, plaster arches, couches upholstered with imitation carpets, and in the middle an imitation fountain. The lounge was not intended to attract the tourist; it represented, completely and satisfyingly, the execrable taste of the middle-class Arab.

  After lunch I was drinking coffee and reading the paper in one of these orientalized cosy corners—they were comfortable to the body, if not to the eyes—when a bulk of considerable weight gracefully subsided on to the opposite couch, as if a large animal had imperceptibly approached and plunged to its ease. The newcomer gave me a pleasant good afternoon in English, but my startled reply did not lead to conversation. He too ordered coffee, and settled down to a French newspaper printed in Turkey.

  I observed him cautiously. He was a big man—not fat, but built to a model of supple generosity. His full-lipped mouth, heavy black moustache, and the distance between his eyes were in keeping with the volume of head and body. The brown face had a gipsy-like quality, and if I had met him ill-dressed on an English street I should have put him down as a dealer in rags, rabbit skins or cat’s meat—but he had every appearance of vulgar prosperity.

  He cocked one leg over the other—a leg trousered in utility flannel with a startling yellow stripe—and I noticed a certain carelessness in his dress. I had no doubt that he was unaware of it, for a healthy carelessness seemed to be in character with the face. When I got up to go, I said to him in the low and reverent voice that one uses for such absurd communication:

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but your flies are open.’

  ‘Sir, so is my heart,’ he answered, laying down his paper and smiling at me with courteous interest.

  ‘I mean, your buttons are undone.’

  ‘That, sir,’ he said, ‘is a matter between them and their maker, who was compelled by his government to fashion them too small for their ignoble task.’

  I hesitated between begging his pardon for unwarrantable interference, and pointing out that the local police might con­sider the excuse inadequate. He relieved my embarrassment, rapidly becoming an angry embarrassment, by continuing:

  ‘And I must apologize for failing to make proper comment on the weather. I have observed that my fellow-countrymen are often alarmed by my advances; so, when abroad, I no longer address them unless invited. But since you yourself have had the politeness to call my attention to an oversight that can be remedied—though, I fear, only temporarily—and shall indeed be remedied forthwith’—he proceeded full-handedly to do up his buttons under the fascinated gaze of waiter and cashier—‘I wish to emerge from my newspaper. Sometimes I feel that journalists believe what they write, and that depresses me. My name, sir, is Oliver Poss.’

  It is hard to give the quality of Poss’s conversational style. In the absence of his rich and detestable voice, the mere words have a suggestion of pomposity; but in fact he enjoyed listening to himself far too much to be either unctuous or affected. Speech bubbled from him fast and clear.

  I introduced myself, sat down again and offered him a drink. I was of course eager to know how so much flamboyance fitted into Tripoli or anywhere else. A wild guess was, I remember, that he might be the advance agent of some circus touring the Middle East.

  ‘I thought as much,’ he said, as soon as he heard my name. ‘Indeed, I wouldn’t dream of deceiving you. I knew it. May I offer you a cigar?’

  He explained that he had arrived by train from Turkey on the previous afternoon, and assured me that he had not asked for me by name. He had merely found out the movements of the principal Europeans in town. And so—here he was!

  ‘But if you wanted to see me,’ I said, ‘you had only to look in the telephone book.’

  He dismissed my remark with a wave of the hand, as if it were a shallow formality unnecessary between gentlemen.

  ‘Now how is that cigar?’ he asked. ‘Up to standard?’

  ‘A good deal over my standard.’

  ‘You wouldn’t mind changing to them, eh?’

  I naturally jumped to the conclusion that he was a traveller in cigars—though no one who made any enquiries at all could imagine there was a market in Syria. The duty on imported tobacco was prohibitive; and I hardly ever saw an Arab smoke a cigar, even if rich enough to afford the utmost luxury.

  ‘My dear sir,’ I said. ‘I’m poor and a pipe-smoker.’

  ‘Mr. Amberson, the cigar you have just accepted is no more expensive than those I have delivered to you. And, in my opinion, it is the best that has been rolled in Cuba for the last thirty years. Elisa ordered me to market the best. She has paid for the best. I thought I had found the best. Well, I hadn’t. This is better.’

  ‘Who is Elisa?’ I asked.

  ‘A name I just mentioned to prove my bona fides. Mr. Amber­son, I have sent you certain boxes of tools and seeds. Marks, P in a Diamond. Transhipment at Bari. But they were not the same crates that came to Bari from London.’

  He didn’t look like a police agent, and I didn’t think his game was likely to be blackmail—not, at any rate, if he knew any­thing of Kasr-el-Sittat and its powers of retaliation. I admitted that I had received such shipments, and added that there was no mystery about them.

  ‘In the light of my experience I observe, Mr. Amberson, that your status is amateur,’ he said. ‘Therefore, as a professional, I will be the first to put my cards on the table. I deal in luxury. Brandy from France to England. Dollars and gold from England to France. Even a little unfolding of the iron curtain, Mr. Amberson. Damnation! The least of commissars desires a trifle of silk to cover the proletarian nakedness of his mistress, and a little capital abroad in case he should guess wrong and have to hop it. And then—your cigars to Syria.

  ‘Sir, I am wanted by the police of several countries, and let me insist—since the Englishman, however cosmopolitan, has no respect for any cops but his own—that while I frequently visit our dear land, I should hesitate to do so under my own name of Oliver Poss. I mention these details,’ he added genially, ‘merely to give you confidence, for, believe me, crime cannot pay unless the criminals have confidence in one another—not that I should apply that crude monosyllable to my efforts to raise the standard of living in countries that are determined to depress it, or to your straightforward trading, but you will see what I mean. Now, Mr. Amberson, Elisa Cantemir is financ­ing my shipment of cigars. I want to talk to her.’

  All this mouthing, lit by an occasional shaft of sense, con­vinced me that Poss might well be some sort of useful outside expert, like myself, but that he would never be trusted with any knowledge of Elisa’s motives. I was very cautious. I asked him why on earth he should suppose Elisa Cantemir was in Syria.

  ‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘But I thought you might know where she is. And as I had some business in Turkey, it was easy to slip down and see you.’

  ‘Why not write to the usual address?’

  ‘God’s Weary Wounds! Because I would get back two lines and a cheque. I don’t want a cheque. I want permission to market this cigar instead of the other. And I can’t get that without talking to Elisa. She might be anywhere, anywhere at all. If you really don’t know, we could spend a pleasant hour in guessing. There’s always a city to fit the homeless, and if they have money to move they find it. My personal conjecture, for what it’s worth, is that she’s in New York. That tall, smart streak of nerves, where else could she be but New York? Madi­son Avenue on an autumn morning—now isn’t that Elisa?’

  I have never been in New York, but the suggestion of a clear, high, straight street in the autumn of a continental climate cer­tainly
fitted Elisa if she were judged on appearance only. For the true Elisa it was wrong. She had too much depth and dark­ness for your windy air. Oliver Poss evidently knew her, but not well.

  ‘I like your game,’ I said. ‘What city do you choose for me?’

  ‘My dear sir. I give you credit, with your character, for being where you want to be—or think you want to be. But I must admit I am puzzled. You do not look at all the sort of con­signee that I expected to find.’

  This casual meeting in the Hotel de Syrie might pass, for it was obvious to everyone that we were strangers; but whatever the link between Poss and myself—and it seemed at least to exist—the less we were seen together the better. I gave him my address, so exactly that he would not have to ask his way, and told him to call on me after dark. I also took from him another cigar.

  It was impossible to get in touch with Elisa. There was not a telephone or telegraph line within ten miles of Kasr-el-Sittat. The colony had no more need of communication with the rest of Syria than any other remote monastery. All I could do in an emergency—and as the emergency had never arisen I hadn’t tried—was to telephone a number in Istanbul that Gisorius had given me, identifying myself by a certain use of the voice, and have my message transmitted to Kasr-el-Sittat by wireless. It seemed to me that Oliver Poss was not a name to be bandied about on telephones, and, in any case, unlikely that I could get a reply the same afternoon. I decided to interview him first, and report to Elisa next day.

  Part of his story could be checked, for in my store was one of Bari crates, awaiting transport to the colony. I told the ware­houseman to take it upstairs, and there I broke it open. I found a compartment at the bottom, lined with lead foil, containing a dozen boxes of twenty-five cigars. I lit one. It seemed to be identical with that which Osterling had offered me on the night of my initiation into Kasr-el-Sittat.