The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  Now, I knew Miss Tassen was insincere, for she had bored me with half an hour’s lecture on her own opinions when I wanted to talk to Elisa. She believed exactly the opposite of what she had written: that her own country suffered from a metallic social standardization which closely resembled the Russian ideal, and that therefore it was bound to move farther and faster than Western Europe toward the socialist state. Then what were she and Osterling up to? I didn’t like their propaganda. By dividing the West, they were too cynically ignor­ing the risk of war. In another week, on September 21st, the Paris Conference was to meet.

  There was, of course, nothing whatever to connect Kasr-el-Sittat or World Opposition with this campaign. Miss Tassen’s visit to the colony might very well be known, but what of it? It was the old story of an adventurous American woman travel­ling in Syria—if Syria still counts as adventure—and spending a month at some retreat for eccentric refugees. Even if Kasr-el-Sittat had chosen to let it be known in the right quarters that they were behind the Tassen article, they could have got a pat on the back and a cheque from the Cominform for making trouble between the Atlantic Powers, and another cheque from Ameri­can diehards for attacking socialism.

  I tried the Tassen article on Oliver Poss, but the only effect it had was to produce from unknown depths a surprising out­burst of patriotism; he called it the bloody impertinence of some blasted tart. He was better informed than I, but he read news­papers with no suspension at all of disbelief. He had a lusty contempt for journalists and lawyers—not because they were paid to distort the truth, but because they would never admit it.

  He was staying at the Pera Palace, where I visited him soon after his arrival. His room was on the fourth floor, looking across the Golden Horn to the old grey carpet of Stamboul.

  The drop to the patch of waste ground below was a good hundred feet, and he alarmed me by leaning his back against the iron railings of the balcony, with his arms spread out generously on either side, while he told me what he thought of the Egyptians. When I protested—against the risk, not his opinions—he shook the railings vigorously.

  ‘My dear sir,’ he said, resuming his position, ‘it dates from the days when capitalists built for capitalists. In the financiers of the Ottoman Empire I place my trust.’

  I don’t know how Kasr-el-Sittat authenticated their messages to Oliver Poss. He had certainly received some word through Gisorius, for he accepted me without question as a pleni-potentiary in the matter of cigars. I told him that the syndicate were more interested in the name of Coriolano than he had realized and that, whether they were the best or not, he was not to sell any other brand.

  The following night I dined with him at the hotel. He was an admirable host for my purpose, since he did not expect me to keep pace with his astonishing consumption of wine. We had to smoke a couple of his own cigars, and I shook him a little by saying that it was very doubtful, according to the best judges, if Coriolano wasn’t the better in a dry climate.

  After dinner we went up to his room for a general business talk until the cabarets opened. He offered me another cigar, and was about to take one himself when I stopped him.

  ‘I want you to try one of these Coriolanos,’ I said, taking the box from my pocket and opening it. ‘And do choose your own.’

  He pinched and sniffed, and chose, as Osterling must have known he would, one of the two end cigars. I helped myself to another from the middle. He lit up and puffed appreciatively.

  ‘Lovely condition,’ he said, after a minute or two. ‘How do you keep them?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I answered. ‘The box was given to me just to prove you are wrong—well, that’s too strong—not wholly right for all possible climates.’

  ‘Bloody polite!’ Poss exclaimed. ‘Always bloody polite!’

  He pulled himself together with obvious effort.

  ‘Close in here,’ he remarked, going to the fully open window and taking a breath of the night air.

  ‘Who’s bloody polite?’ I asked cautiously. ‘Me?’

  ‘God’s Great Beard!’ he replied, speaking with sober clarity, but very fast. ‘You? I don’t care about you! You go on selling marbles to the black boys. It’s the syndicate I’m talk­ing about. Always bloody polite! What do they think I am, Mr Eric Hassan Abdullah or whatever your name is?’

  ‘Perhaps they’re afraid you mightn’t like their politics,’ I suggested.

  ‘Politics? Never gave ’em a thought! Not socialists, are they? That’s what I can’t forgive! Governing the country for the sake of ten per cent of the people. No levelling up. Levelling down Sir, it is fortunate for the yeomen of England that there are few eunuchs among the industrial proletariat.

  ‘Always bloody polite!’ he roared. ‘Keep me outside—nothing like politeness for doing that! But then what do they expect. Abdul Aziz? Tell me that!’

  ‘Poor old Poss,’ I said. ‘What have they done that you’re resenting?’

  ‘Resent? Resent? Oliver Poss does not resent, my dear sir! I’m a yeoman of England, and so were Drake and Hawkins and the rest of them. All a lot of spivs, making money in spite of the government. I’m a yeoman of England and I’ll hang FitzErnest on the yardarm!’

  ‘Hang FitzErnest on the yardarm.’

  ‘Hang FitzErnest on the ya-a-ard-arm!’ he carolled in an imperial voice that surged across the Horn and must have lifted the heads of ferrymen on the opposite shore.

  ‘Why don’t you like FitzErnest?’ I asked in an interval.

  He strode towards me and forced me down by his side on a little spindly chaise-longe that cracked sharply under our weight.

  ‘Abdul Aziz,’ he declared ‘I don’t care an angel’s fart for any of them! But I like you. I like you, my little Tripolitanian friend.’

  I remember marvelling that the word Tripolitanian came out sonorously and without a hitch.

  ‘I’ll take responsibility for everything. Act! Act! That’s me So I acted when Eugen Rosa didn’t turn up.’

  ‘He let you down?’

  ‘Hell! Rosa was my contact. My word is my word, and I expected the same. A yeoman of England. Six hundred boxes of Coriolanos, just for those precious slobs who speak for you and me and the waiter—God help us all, Abdul Aziz!—those gutless owls at the United Nations. Diplomatic stores to Bor­deaux, and Eugen Rosa was to take them over and see them through Customs. No Rosa, no communication. So I took re­sponsibility. I went up to Paris and called on Mr. Bloody FitzErnest.’

  He hung FitzErnest on the yardarm all over again, until I reminded him that he hadn’t told me who FitzErnest was.

  ‘The descendant, my dear sir, of so gross a Hanoverian that even his sweaty women shuddered at him. A sort of chief of Protocol. The man who shoves the bloody glasses of water on the conference table, and changes the blotting paper when the delegates make each other puke on it. Tickles the typists and plays rummy with the cops. And bloody pleased when he can get his picture in the papers alongside the foreign ministers. Frederick FitzErnest! He fits my boot!’

  I mentioned the name of Czoldy, but Poss merely abused him on general principles as a part of UNO. He knew of no connection between Czoldy and FitzErnest, or Czoldy and the syndicate.

  ‘But what made you go to FitzErnest,’ I asked, ‘when Eugen Rosa didn’t turn up?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, Hassan Abdullah! I like telling you things, you fine, greasy, sympathetic sod! Just because I knew he was in the syndicate—that’s why I went to FitzErnest.

  ‘I’m not afraid of responsibility. Eloquence is not enough. I landed my cargo and told FitzErnest to fix the documents. Hadn’t I any discretion, he asked me, the slimy little toad! Doesn’t want it known he gets a rake-off, I suppose, on all the cigars for all the bloody conferences! And just because Rosa doesn’t turn up and I do the job myself, he treats me like some cop who’s just pulled his union secretary out of a brothel. No discretion, Mr. Poss! Me! Discretion! I’ll take responsibility for anything, I told him.’

  I know noth
ing of FitzErnest, for his path and mine never crossed. Poss’s reading of him as a snob may have been right, but was not the only explanation of his behaviour. It was clear that FitzErnest had been afraid, and had lost his head.

  ‘Didn’t Elisa like your visit to FitzErnest?’ I asked, to see if he had any suppressed ill-feeling against her.

  ‘Not a word! Little Elisa minds her own business and I mind mine. All brain and ankles, but I’ve nothing against that. She hates the whole world and I love it, so we dance on the worms together, if you see what I mean. Olympian, my dear sir, Olympiam! Hell’s bells, I’m a yeoman of England, and I’ve mas­tered my trade! I am discreet. Am I not discreet, Abdul Aziz,’ he yelled, ‘am I not discreet?’

  ‘Of course you are, old boy,’ I said, and let him rave a bit.

  I was anxious to hear such end as there might be to this hazy meeting of Poss and FitzErnest. As soon as he drew breath, I asked him:

  ‘Did you tell FitzErnest what you thought of him?’

  ‘God’s Weary Wounds, my dear sir,’ he replied, ‘Am I one to complain to UNO’s lavatory man? Let him arrange his papers in peace! Did Clive complain? Did Raleigh complain? I regret there are no more scaffolds, for there alone would I allow myself to speak with decent freedom and, I trust, com­posure. As it was, Hassan Abdullah, and seeing I’d already been paid, I left with him the customs documents, and assured him I had not come to write Tobacconist upon his office door.’

  Oliver Poss had too sane a mind for Urgin’s insidious thiopentone. He appeared to have no recent resentment except against the unfortunate FitzErnest, and no sense of guilt what­ever, beyond what might be inferred from his passionate iden­tification of himself with the various heroic scoundrels of Em­pire. As soon, however, as I ceased to question him on the points of interest to Elisa, out came the inhibitions.

  His secrets have nothing to do with my story, so I will not betray them. It is enough to say that sex didn’t bother him at all; what did were disciplines, social and religious. He wanted to put his hoof through the glass of every conceivable taboo. Then I heard a bitter and detailed denunciation of the police of his own country, to which the Yeoman of England could not openly return. I should never have dreamed that he was drunk or drugged. In his fast speech there was no sign that he was not simply an excited man, convinced of injustice and over­powered by rage.

  I didn’t know how to put an end to this intolerable evening. To go out into the town with Poss in his present condition was to invite adventures for which I had no spirit. Indeed, I was disgusted with myself. I felt as once in early youth when I tempted a tame stag with sponge-cake soaked in port; comedy was expected, but dignity was a reproach. The head retained its stateliness, and the body was its will, if not its force, to over­come such unintelligible treachery.

  In one of Poss’s silences I suggested bed, and, to my surprise, he agreed. It was another half hour before I got him there. Meanwhile, with the last kick of the drug, he showed a maudlin outburst of affection for me.

  I had said good-bye, but in the morning he came to see me off at the airport. His brown, gipsy face had an uneasy and ingratiating air, as if he were up before the magistrates for tres­passing after game. I put on a broad grin to relieve his anxiety.

  ‘Not since I was eighteen, my dear sir,’ he said very seriously. ‘Not since I was eighteen. Now what do you suppose produced so astonishing an effect?’

  ‘Burgundy,’ I suggested, ‘and the effect of FitzErnest upon Francis Drake.’

  He stared at me, as memory began to pulsate along the cir­cuit that my words had restored.

  ‘Well, now that you mention’t ߪ no doubt! No doubt! And have I anything to apologize for? It seems to me—indeed I am regrettably sure—that in friendly reference to your ex­perience of these lands, and not, I hope, with insolence, I addressed you by certain Arab names.’

  ‘The Slave of God and of his Glory,’ I answered. ‘I could wish they were more appropriate.’

  ‘I see a bishop is lost in you, and I take heart,’ he said. ‘Plainly I have confessed more than I should, but may I not have, my dear sir, my complement of vultures like the rest of us?’

  ‘And the liver otherwise in good condition?’

  ‘Undeservedly, yes. Well, Amberson,’ he added, accom­panying me across the tarmac to the plane, and waving away some officials, ‘if it can be arranged that I may deal with the syndicate through you, I will cross the Mediterranean at any time to do so.’

  3

  Back in El Mina and my own familiar office, I could not get rid of an uneasiness which I now see to have been a formless sense of guilt. Awaiting me was a mass of work—a mass, that is, if measured by hours, for there was little paper. There were just messages from casual customers, officials, transport con­tractors and the like, who wished to see me and to spend solemn hours of talk and coffee.

  I had always had the patience for this genial method of doing business; indeed I enjoyed the slow and profitable pace of it. Yet in the two busy days after my return from Istanbul, I found myself restless as any European dealing with Arabs for the first time in his life. To what I looked forward, for what purpose I grudged the hours, I did not know. It was not that I specially longed for Elisa or was impatient for her coming. That longing was constant, and I could live with it. I still must live with it.

  I was continually thinking of Ashkar, clinging to Ashkar’s honest, badly-shaven face. The association was of course through Eugen Sosa, but I could not imagine why Ashkar and his dark valleys should be, as it were, a patch of radiance in my mind, while all else had taken on that blackness from which, impatiently, one turns outwards to anything present—a biting of the nails, or drink or suicide, which is, I suppose, to hurl oneself into the most absolute present possible.

  Elisa had sent me a wire from Aleppo that I was to expect her about the third night. She came early, and at sunset we were together on the terrace. Her mood was very different to that of our last meeting; her poise was more eager, and the line of her body, at Kasr-el-Sittat so grave and upright, flowed as if drawn by a swift stroke of charcoal. Gay and relaxed, she strode between chair and parapet with the litheness of some delightful boy. She may have consciously considered her throwing-off of the cares of the day to be masculine, for she had her vanities, and they were baseless as those of all lovable creatures; but in fact her body had no masculine attribute but length of limb, and that too slender for any man.

  I desired to prolong the moment, to talk of nothing, to watch her. She did not press for my news. She too must have known that in the peace of the evening we were closer than passion or the common task had ever bound us. It was not until the sun was far over the horizon, and the sea turned from amethyst to grey, that she spoke of my mission.

  When I told her of Poss and FitzErnest, she laughed.

  ‘Yes, we knew all about that,’ she said. ‘Poss did the right thing, and very discreetly. It was easy for him to trace the con­nection between Rosa and FitzErnest, and if you’re sure he didn’t look beyond, it doesn’t matter. I don’t like FitzErnest any more than Poss did, but he’s efficient.’

  ‘English?’ I asked.

  ‘His grandfather was. But I don’t know what FitzErnest calls himself. He’s a little pale snake with sandy hair—Belgian, Dutch or one of the respectable kinds of German. He’s Czoldy’s man, and he can’t get away.’

  She pronounced those four contemptuous words as if they were a statement of unalterable fact. I do not know what hold Czoldy had upon FitzErnest. It may have been as simple as cocaine, or as complex as a hysteria induced by some proven and practical psycho-damnation.

  ‘A little man,’ she said. ‘Shall we always have to prove such creatures, Eric?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When the State has gone, and Kasr-el-Sittat is an island. No, I’m not thinking of another flood, with you and me as Noah and his wife’—she smiled at my puzzled expression like some queen-priestess officiating before a suburban altar—‘but
my vision is always of Kasr-el-Sittat as an island. Don’t you see it?’

  I said that indeed it seemed to me an island of beauty and idealism.

  ‘God, what a reputation!’ she laughed. ‘The schoolgirl heart of—what was it Poss called you—Abdul Aziz! Eric, my dear, do you think I had nothing in my mind but tobacco when I chose that site? What is the path of the armies? Where have they always marched? The coast road and Palestine. Deir ez Zor and down the Euphrates. All around our island, to which there is no road.

  ‘Eric, you know the practice of war. You’ve seen it. Suppose that all the Middle East were in flames. Imagine the armies, burnt, tormented, isolated, all frontiers gone, every man know­ing that war will go on another twenty years and that there can only be one end to it. What attention would they pay to Kasr-el-Sittat? Tell me—quite literally—from your experience in Syria?’

  ‘All frontiers gone,’ I repeated, impressed by the certain truth of the phrase. ‘Then you would have a military governor at Aleppo or Antioch or Alexandretta. And his representative in your district—it’s remote and harmless, you see—would probably be a corporal, and not within five miles of you at that.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ she answered, ‘though I hadn’t got as far as your corporal. Now go a little further with me, Eric, and think hard of the next war. After a few years of it, which side would the military governor of Aleppo be on?’

  I said that I could only speak for my own nation, and that if the military governor were a British colonel, a British colonel he would remain.

  ‘Yes? With no pay for him or his men? No food but what he could commandeer? No ships. No petrol. No orders from the starving rioters at home. Oh, don’t you see that whether your colonel was American or English or Russian or French, from then on he’s an Aleppo colonel!