The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

‘And in Europe, too. The Russian governor of Manchester, the American governor of Kiev, they must forget their nation­ality in order to keep alive. Their homeland is where they are, for they have no other. All they can do is each to organize his district, so that he and his troops and their women and their labour do not starve, and to form his own frontier against disease and radio-activity and rebellion. For such a world as that, Eric, Kasr-el-Sittat is prepared. We have the organization and the trained men to ride that storm. And we have our headquarters, self-supporting, remote, safe. Now do you see why I call Kasr-el-Sittat an island?’

  ‘Anarchy——’ I began, and with the word I saw the essence of Kasr-el-Sittat, the permanent substance of the amœba.

  ‘Yes, Eric, anarchy,’ she interrupted. ‘All of them, generals, philosophers, even politicians, admit that another war must end in anarchy. They try to terrify the people with their talk of anarchy. They never see that it is preferable to the tyranny of the State. Anarchy—it is the only way to save the future of man, to preserve him from the soulless slavery of the hive. There is no solution but disaster. Then the social groups can begin again, guided by those of us who are left, resolved never again to return to Money and Law and Industry—all which gives them an illusion of prosperity so that they breed and breed until they have to sell their souls to the State in exchange for food and security.

  ‘A clean sweep, Eric. A fluid world in which the State cannot function. Nothing stands between us and that but the patience of Western statesmen. Nothing but their ridiculous little patience! Our fate is in their hands, not the Russians! The Kremlin is terrified of war, but also terrified to lose power. They are fatalists. If war comes, it comes. And it would come to­morrow if your British and American statesmen lost their patience. Imagine that for a day, at any conference, they had the mentality of Berchtold or Conrad von Hotzendorf!’

  ‘And if war made the State, everywhere, stronger than be­fore?’ I asked. ‘It always has.’

  She replied that without the means of production, without transport or communications, the modern state must cease to exist. Communities would slowly be reborn, no more resembling the great nations than the communities of the Dark Ages re­sembled the over-governed, bankrupt Roman provinces.

  The permanent absence of the amœba. She hadn’t meant to reveal it to me. That the Secretariat should protect them­selves and their ideas from war by the creation of a sane island was reasonable enough. That Elisa herself might even hope for war I could imagine and forgive. But now, knowing her and her companions and their relentless logic as I did, I could follow their thought to the end. Another war, far surpassing the last two in bitterness and ruin, would infallibly destroy the industrial state. The Secretariat were deliberately working to provoke that war. It was the solution, the mad, triumphant last line of their otherwise hopeless problem, and I knew that not one of them would shrink from it.

  I had grasped her vision and her intent, but that night I could take neither of them seriously. I could think only of the impact of our world upon her, of the agony she had suffered, of the bright flame that remained to her in the place of a human soul. I lay awake with her dark head on my shoulder, and told my­self that so much power for evil could not in fact exist in a woman abandoned to sleep and her lover. I said to myself that you don’t hold a Lenin in your arms. For some reason this absurd argument satisfied me. It seemed to put the final seal on the impossible.

  She awoke radiant. Never had I seen her so free from dedi­cation. Or is memory coloured because I know and cannot bear to think that she was near to love? If only we could have had week after week together, my house might have become a keener reality to her than Kasr-el-Sittat. Time, I wanted time—time for the devouring angel to be disconcerted by the steadi­ness of love, by its idleness. But why conjecture what is not in the world’s pattern? I could not hold her. Even that morning I could not keep her from her car. And when I begged her to stay, she let fall, still quite merrily, the last deadly detail I needed to complete the picture.

  ‘I must get back,’ she said, ‘Gisorius is coming to-night and leaving to-morrow for Paris.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Over the border.’

  ‘What a passion he has for cloak-and-dagger! Why not go by train from Aleppo?’

  ‘Reasons,’ she laughed. ‘For example, he might not want it known that he had been in Syria.’

  I do not know what business I did, nor how I passed the day, but that was always so after I had seen her. The automatism of a man’s work is never so obvious as after some uncounted in­terval when he had only to turn his head to beauty or stretch out his hand to touch it, when every word of the beloved was sought and accepted for a profounder meaning.

  In the evening thought could no longer be dismissed. I left my house to get away from the ghost of her, and went out along the deserted shore. Again and again I told myself that my imagination was out of control. But the evidence was insistent. I will not say it was clear.

  That gross and damnable Oliver Poss with his cursed cigars! Why did he have to call on me in Tripoli? Why did the fool have to open my eyes to what he didn’t know himself? If only I had been left alone to worship Elisa and win her back to the wealth of life, a thousand things might have interposed to pre­vent her outrage upon history. Why could I not remain in ignor­ance? I can cry with Adam why did I eat, but not that the woman tempted me. She had no wish at all that I should share her knowledge, and as yet no suspicion that I had—for she did not know the secret of Eugen Rosa’s disappearance.

  That was the key. Eugen Rosa was to have taken over Poss’s shipment and delivered it to UNO’s commissariat; and I knew that Rosa had carried on his person a box of Urgin’s doped cigars. Selim, who had smoked one or more of them, had been drunk and afflicted—boasting, said Ashkar, as if to an Aleppo whore. That was why my mind had been mysteriously obsessed with Ashkar on my return from Istanbul. That was why Elisa’s political ranting, which otherwise I might have taken—and in past weeks had taken—as a mere private explosion of her mania for destruction, was now plain to me as the Secretariat’s in­tended, practical policy.

  I sat down on the sand and wrote in my note-book, to com­pel my thoughts into some kind of order, what I knew or sus­pected. Before I got up to go, I tore out and burned those leaves, but this was their sense:

  1.Oliver Poss had been employed to ensure that anywhere in Europe or America, whether the import of Havana cigars was allowed or not, a connoisseur could obtain Coriolanos, get used to them and trust to them.

  2.Poss having innocently scattered the ground-bait, it was easy for Czoldy and FitzErnest to make Coriolanos the official conference cigars.

  3.Urgin could dope a Coriolano with such artistry that no palate could detect anything wrong with it.

  4.Rosa had been carrying a box of Urgin’s specials to Czoldy.

  5.Czoldy intended to use them at the Paris Conference, and there was not the remotest chance of him being caught. The effect of the thiopentone exactly simulated a tired man’s loss of self-control.

  The matter of the cigars had, for me, a simplicity which I do not think it had for Elisa. Hers was not a mind for petty plotting. She did not plan a logical sequence of exact events, all of which might be upset by a single miscalculation. She created, far more dangerously, a relation structure into which events might fall in any chance pattern or order so long as they conformed to the structure. If she could call into existence, even for a week, another Kaiser Wilhelm II, the effects of his in­stability of character could not be foreseen, could not be con­trolled, but among them would be War. A little alcohol for safety’s sake. A Coriolano from Czoldy’s box. And there you had a man who would express his recent resentments with the same mastery as the Kaiser.

  It was true, of course, that no statesman from East or West could actually declare war at a conference table, but whether, after his outburst, he resigned or not, chaos would have been created. Resignation could only prove that his government h
ad lost its nerve at the last moment and that fact, combined with the success of the Osterling-Tassen propaganda in showing the West as divided, was the grimmest invitation. Mood, in fact, was the Secretariat’s real explosive. The cigar was merely a trigger device. Its timing could safely be left to Czoldy. He came directly under the Assistant Secretary-General of his branch, and he would know as well as any man when mood was at the breaking-point.

  There, on the beach, my emotional decision against Elisa was immediate; but it was not a logical decision. I believe and believed that our civilisation is rushing towards an ant-heap discipline and welfare, and that progress must be checked if any recognizable human spirit is to survive. War was the surest way to check it. The Secretariat was right. To the eternal ques­tion of the revolutionary—are you prepared to destroy the liv­ing for the sake of their descendants?—Elisa answered Yes, as the communist, for his own millennium, must answer Yes. But I, as she had so often called me, am a sentimentalist. In that, and perhaps only in that, I prove myself one with my own English ancestors. We are not good fanatics. We would protest against the Last Coming itself as too sudden and unimaginative a revolution; and our deep, unrealized belief that time does not run in human days shows us, I think, to be in harmony with the universe.

  Emotional decision, yes, was easy. Every other thought, except horror, was inhibited. I left the beach and the black specks of burnt paper with a picture in my mind which obsessed me. I saw myself as the infinitesimal point of an inverted tri­angle, resisting the thrust of the powerful base. The image was so vivid, the point so small that contemplation made me dizzy. It was a nightmare, as if one should consider and be forced to consider an immense sphere balanced upon a pin-point. The mind knows it to be impossible, and yet retains the vision, shud­dering away from it until physical sickness relieves imagination.

  ALONE

  1

  ON AND ON THROUGH THE NIGHT ENDURED MY DESPAIR, bearable to me without madness only because, in the end, I called it fatalism. My love and the overwhelming power of the Secretariat were both against me. With each hour that passed the demand of my conscience for action became clearer, and clearer the hopelessness of any open opposition. That was as well, for I was compelled to move in the way of the Levant along the easiest path, submissive and unsuspected, employing the only quality left to me, the underling’s gift for subtle and treacherous intrigue.

  It was September 20th, the day before the opening of the Conference Elisa had said that Gisorius was leaving that night for Paris after a swift visit? Why? Why not keep away from Czoldy at a time when any meeting of the two should not be risked? Was it possible that the box of Coriolanos which Rosa should have delivered to Czoldy had never been replaced?

  The more I thought of it, the more likely it seemed to me. They must have investigated for anxious months before they could be sure that Rosa and his box were not, somewhere, in the hands of interested police. And then it would take some time for Urgin, who must have worked long and lovingly over each masterpiece, to produce another full box. A full box was essential. There could be no gambling, at a critical moment, on a man choosing the cigar intended for him. Oh, I could imagine the exasperation of Elisa and Osterling, as Urgin re­fused to be hurried! They could fool him completely over in­tangibles such as politics, but they couldn’t compel him to dope cigars with his volatile thiopentone (rather than something else which amused him more) without some gross lie which might arouse his suspicion.

  I decided to start at once and have lunch with Ashkar. I had some urgent business in Aleppo which would serve as an excuse for my sudden absence from home, if the question ever arose. Then, I remember, I began a note to Elisa and tore it up. I could not bring myself on the same journey to visit Kasr-el-Sittat.

  There were no leaves to fall; the autumn dust, borrowing their movement, sailed in sunlit eddies of pink and orange past the windows of Ashkar’s billet, as we tasted the new wine and washed down a roast hare stuffed with olives. When his orderly had served us and left, I asked Ashkar what he had done with the box of cigars he had taken from Selim. He was horrified at this unmannerly mention of a forgotten and discreditable episode, and answered that if he had known I liked cigars he would have sent a trooper riding to Cairo to get some for me.

  I pretended to be impressed, and in my turn assured him that I too was ready to visit the ends of the earth to satisfy his lightest wish; friendship, I went on in a lowered tone, was the motive behind my question.

  Ashkar fixed me with expressionless brown eyes, searching to divine my hidden meaning. He said shortly that everything which belonged to Eugen Rosa had been buried.

  ‘And you are still sure Selim will never talk?’

  ‘He is dead.’

  I showed no particular interest, and drank my coffee in silence. After a bit Ashkar began to rumble and curse, as the story erupted through the stratified layers of gendarme.

  ‘By God, I am a child! By God, my years have gone for nothing! By God, I trusted myself to a fool! I told you Selim was mad. I told you that he boasted, and that I showed him, written down in good Turkish, all he confessed to me. I knew his plans, his associates, his routes. It was the end of Selim. He had thrust such a curb behind his teeth that I could break his jaw with my little finger. And then! Then he behaves as if he had said nothing!

  ‘He ran a string of stolen camels from Antioch to Harim by the very route he told me of. When I heard, I could not believe it, but the tracks of his passage were there. As soon as he re­turned to Antioch, this time with a load of hashish, I sent word to the Turks and told them where he would camp. The Turks are without our respect for justice. I counted on that, and for the first time in all this business I was not wrong. Selim was shot while trying to escap.’

  ‘When you took the cigars from Selim, had he smoked any?’ I asked.

  ‘One. And another he carried between his fingers, lit, when he came to tell me about Rosa. He said,’ added Ashkar grimly, ‘that he would burn off my eyelids so that I should see the better.’

  ‘Suppose there were hashish in those cigars?’ I suggested.

  ‘Hashish!’ he exclaimed. ‘It could be! His eyes and his babbling, yes! But Selim’s speech was clear. No hashish-smoker ever spoke as he did. And then’—he looked at me so mild an enquiry that I could ignore it if I wished—‘the cigars came from Kasr-el-Sittat.’

  ‘That is why I am here.’

  His face still did not change, but the elasticity seemed to leave those powerful jaws on each side of his jaw-bone, so that the iron-grey stubble stood out and became the dominating colour. I knew what he was thinking: that in any battle with Kasr-el-Sittat—and battle there would be—he must finish the loser.

  ‘White drugs?’ he asked.

  ‘Not quite. A mixture of white and hashish that is now fashionable in Europe.’

  I was leading him towards the path I wanted him to take, but my suggestion was not, I think, wholly untrue. Urgin did experiment with hashish and had isolated the alkaloids. I believe he used them in minute quantities in order that his thiopentone should simulate more exactly the effect of alcohol.

  ‘Does Villaneda know?’

  The mere fact that he could ask this question—and that a dozen times I had put it to myself—shows the trust that Juan Villaneda inspired. I didn’t want to destroy as yet the bridge between Ashkar and Kasr-el-Sittat, so I denied that Juan knew anything at all about drug running.

  ‘No. A group of colonists are smuggling for their own account,’ I said, ‘and the quantities are too small to be worth a scandal.’

  ‘Small or not, it shall stop,’ he grumbled. ‘I? I, who have shaken the hand of Russell Pasha and been commmended by him to my government, shall I allow this? By God, shall my troopers sit drinking with the Turks, and say that their Christian captain is corrupt?’

  ‘You needn’t allow it,’ I answered, ‘but if you use the wisdom of Solomon, Kasr-el-Sittat will never know. To-night Juan Vil­laneda will bring you a traveller for
Turkey. See him before he crosses the frontier and examine his baggage. If he is carrying cigars, take the box from him, look at it and return it unopened. But do not return the same box that you took.’

  I went out to my car, and came back with three full boxes of twenty-five Coriolanos.

  ‘Give him one of those,’ I said, ‘and no one will ever be the wiser till the buyer finds out that ordinary cigars without the drug have been delivered to him.’

  Ashkar smiled with relief, appreciating the flavour of a cun­ning that he might have prepared himself. I have never had a better compliment than his immediate belief. Of course he recognized the box of Coriolanos as identical with that which Eugen Rosa had carried; otherwise he had really no evidence beyond the fact that I had explained the illogical, unaccountable behaviour of Selim.

  ‘If the trick works, it will do for the present,’ he said. ‘But after?’

  ‘It will do till seller and buyer decide that neither of them has lied. And even then—who will think of the minute when the box was in your hands?’

  ‘And always these Coriolanos?’

  ‘If they change the brand, I will change it too.’

  Then he made a very acute remark—jovially, but with the first shade of disrespect I had ever heard from him.

  ‘You run between friends like a money-changer in the bazaar,’ he said, and both are profited.’

  I admitted that indeed my second motive was to protect a friend in the colony, and told him that neither he nor his orderly should mention my visit, and that he and I should never com­municate with each other unless we had taken the most extreme precautions.

  ‘Do you not want to know whether the traveller carried cigars or not?’ he asked.

  Certainly I could not bear the suspense of remaining in ignor­ance. I gave the problem some thought, and suggested he might send me a message by Juan Villaneda. I didn’t want to risk so much as a telephone call between us.