I repeated what Osterling had said: that he had noticed a separation of the Mediterranean element from the rest, and that Tabas seemed to be acting as the unconscious catalyst which split the colony.
‘He is three-quarters right,’ Juan exclaimed. ‘His damned Excellency is always three-quarters right, and the quarter he forgets is the most important. I told you these colonists were sheep. Well, those who are least sheep, who know their own worth, they listen to Tabas. They are men and women whom it was safe for me to sound. Latins? Not necessarily. But sane and crisp and of the people. Tabas is not in our world, yet through him I have formed my party.’
‘Grynes suspects something,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t surprise me. He is there and he keeps his eyes open. What about him? Is he yours if we want him?’
I declared fatuously that he was, entirely forgetting that Grynes was no Ashkar, and that he had lived a lifetime of the spirit since he left the Palestine Police.
‘What chance have we?’ I asked.
‘Less than I thought. There is no time. Czoldy’s best opportunity must be in the last four days of November, and we are now at the 23rd. My only hope is to control all communications, and that is not easy. Does Elisa carry an arm?’
‘Good God, no!’
The thought of bloodshed at Kasr-el-Sittat was abominable.
‘I intend nothing against her,’ he said, ‘even if I win. I must know what there is—that is all. How is she?’
‘Impatient. A flame of impatience.’
‘She is not the only one.’
I asked him what part he wished me to play, and was thankful when he answered me that my part was over. I was to behave, he said, as a mere visitor until I was needed. He assured me that it would be made perfectly plain to Elisa that I was not permitted to see her.
I was thankful, I say. It seemed to me that I would be an exception to the law of the universe, and escape responsibility for my own acts. I even hoped—and there, I think, Juan was with me—that I might help in the resurrection of Elisa’s spirit.
When I came out of my bungalow into the windy morning, the palace revolution was all over. Juan’s timing had been faultless. He allowed the early risers to breakfast in peace and to go to their work on the road or the estate. He then arrested Osterling and Gisorius, who were too incredulous to resist, removed them to Elisa’s bungalow and put a guard over all three. Simultaneously his partisans seized the power station, the explosives store, Osterling’s office and the wireless transmitter. There was no violence, beyond the sudden and painless overwhelming of the two men. From Osterling Juan took his keys, and from Gisorius a pistol. Gisorius wasn’t the sort of man to go to breakfast without a hidden pistol, rule or no rule.
All this happened a little after eight o’clock when half Kasr-el-Sittat was in the dining-hall. Ten minutes later Juan himself came to the hall, and addressed the astonished colonists in his harsh, astringent English. For the sake of those whose command of the language was still weak, Lucia translated him into French and Russian. I missed Juan’s own explanation, but came in while she was interpreting.
I think I have already made it clear that the colonists of Kasr-el-Sittat were all most purely dedicated, as any priests, to the salvation of man from the grey hell that awaited him; yet they knew no more of the practical details of their battle against the State than the average taxpayer of his government’s economics, or the cooks, typists and engineers in a political warfare headquarters of the devices employed to destroy the enemy’s morale. Juan gave little away. He was careful as the Secretariat to cover up the extent, the methods and the personalities of the movement. What he told them was that the proletarian wing of the party had disagreed with the policy and central control of the Secretariat, and especially with their insistence on war as a short-cut to the world of voluntary association. He had taken over, he said, all communications, and he asked them not to attempt to leave the colony. There would be no violence, and their work and way of living would be undisturbed.
Yes, his palace revolution was a masterpiece—and yet, for our purposes, futile. We had not got the wireless codes, and so could send no message to Czoldy that he would believe. Juan had confidently expected to find all the details of the wireless traffic in Osterling’s safe, but they were not there and could not be discovered. His only course, therefore, was to send his messages en clair to such chiefs of his own party abroad as he knew personally and could trust.
He met with utter defeat. The wireless operator was an impressionable German. Lucia won him over by some complex ideological nonsense as well as personal charm, and he had promised to come in with Juan. He would have sent off a sheaf of cyphers without bothering in the least about their meaning: when, however, he saw the messages which he was expected to transmit, his melancholy Teutonic mind simplified the whole issue into one of loyalty. He hadn’t he said, any objection to war as a political weapon. War was a redeemer in itself. He refused to send a single message without Osterling’s direct order.
His damned obstinacy grew by feeding on itself. He wouldn’t even give us the details of the times, the traffic and the call-signs; and when Juan locked him up in the house behind Elisa’s so that the same guard could look after the lot, he yelled out what he had done, in triumph at his own exceptional virtue, as if he had been heiling Hitler.
2
Kasr-el-Sittat that morning was objectless, inconsequent as a dream. There were none of the brisk movements of the daily round, no normality of motive. The colonists formed their unhappy groups and spoke in lowered voices. Sheep, Juan called them. Yet remember that not long ago they had been displaced persons accustomed by the years to a future without hope or plan, their only national status that of an intolerable nuisance. They were conditioned to the dilemma of refugees: that so long as spirit remained, they were a menace to good order; when it had gone, they were objects of contempt.
Shy, puzzled, dejected, they hesitated on the paths of Kasr-el-Sittat, or passed, looking backwards, to their work. And I, I felt myself to be one of them. I had not the effrontery to compare my suffering with theirs—though, God knows, no scientist can measure in his decibels the crying of the soul—but we were alike in this: that we had dwelt in a vision of peace and seen it vanish while still we lived.
To them, too, the scene must have presented a horrid familiarity. There were the pickets, plainly to be seen; pickets in paradise. It was the old game of tough men and eager women, dark hair in the wind, holding the key positions. They had no rifles, no lethal oddments slung from those waists which were intended for each other’s hands. That was the only difference.
Even so the colony preserved its air of holiness. Our anciently consecrated hill, where, whatever the work, one could hear the stirring of trees and the rush of water, compelled the colonists to mark and to abide by the complete peace of this revolution in their midst.
Do nothing, Juan had said. Well, what else could I do? Outwardly I was a mere member of a disconcerted public. Elisa’s bungalow stared at the green on the hilltop. She might as well have been out. No one shook the door. No one gesticulated at the barred windows. There can have been little peace within. Yet, when I was about to surrender all my emotions to pity of Elisa, I remembered that she and her two companions were the more powerful, and must know it. They had nothing to lose by allowing Juan’s adherents to stand on their self-conscious guard till they tired of it, till this flash-in-a-pan of a revolution burned itself out. Their creation was finished; there was no further touch that they could add to ensure the progress of their apocalyptic vision, and nothing we could do to stop it. They knew we couldn’t use the wireless. Osterling had merely laughed at Juan’s threats and questions.
When Kasr-el-Sittat gathered again in the dining-hall there was too much silence. The colonists that second winter numbered nearly two hundred, and Juan’s partisans were not more than forty. Time and the hundred and sixty puzzled neutrals were on the side o
f inaction. Since I was known to be Elisa’s intimate friend, the colonists talked to me freely. Nothing kept them from mass protest but fear of the unknown; they weren’t even sure what the Secretariat would want them to do. I muddled public opinion as far as I could by suggesting that the Secretariat might have expected and welcomed this outbreak, but I could feel that in my harmless companions were stirring memories of that world of direct political action which they thought to have escaped for ever. Juan’s hope of control without violence was running down with every tick of the clock in the dining-hall.
At two in the afternoon Urgin, of all people, took a car from the garage, rushed the gate guard and tried to make a break for the outside. He drove at the boulder-strewn diversion like a cinema hero, and that of course was the end of his front axle. When Juan asked him what the devil he was up to, he said that he was going to fetch the police. Whether it was devotion to Elisa or to research that created this sudden passion for law and order I do not know. He certainly preserved his reputation as an original thinker.
There was no sure way of preventing anyone who wished from leaving Kasr-el-Sittat on foot or horse, and sending a telegram; but apart from the Secretariat and Juan Villaneda himself, there were few who knew any actual names and addresses of responsible chiefs abroad. Thus the danger that Czoldy could be warned to ignore all orders from Kasr-el-Sittat was very small.
Juan’s partisans, however, were thin on the ground for all they had to do. After Urgin’s unsuccessful attempt, he decided to close the road. A heavy tractor was driven to that smooth little gorge where the bridge girders were in position, and toppled over into the cataract. The level of the ford rose at once by a couple of feet. That put an end to all fear of his prisoners making a swift escape by car, and enabled Juan to take his guards off the garage and the gate.
I can only conjecture what debate went on that night within Elisa’s bungalow. The three must have thought that their guards were unarmed, and that a determined effort to break out and call for help might well be successful. To Elisa and Osterling, however, the walls of the bungalow were not the walls that mattered. If Juan had merely drawn a chalk circle round them, the opposition to their will would have been neither more nor less effective. Osterling was no man for a rough and tumble, and for Elisa it was unthinkable. She did not live on a plane where violence was decisive.
No, to a pair of their intelligence the issue was plainly one of moral force against moral force. They needed only patience, and when war came the whole colony and party would unite for self-protection and the training of future leaders. Precipitate action could only lead to a lessening of their prestige.
This common—or shall I call it spiritual?—sense must have been most unwelcome to Gisorius. He was a man of action whose life for years had been insecure. Elisa and Osterling could both remain unaffected by the terrorism of their eastern policy. Gisorius had it always upon his conscience. And so he saw the crisis as immediate, and the problem as one that could be solved by violence. His view of Kasr-el-Sittat was very different to that of his colleagues. To him as to them it was an island, but its isolation was a mere convenience. That its whole future might be wrecked by treating it as an island where some black or missionary potentate could be knocked on the head and deposed did not occur to him.
I suspect that Elisa and Osterling very reluctantly agreed that Gisorius should escape so long as he could do so peacefully. It wasn’t difficult. God had ordered his bungalows to be built without any means of access to the roofs; so the contractors, who had estimated for normal Arab roofs, strong enough to support the whole family and the drying of the grain, saw a literally god-sent chance of profit. They covered the houses with laths and a thin layer of cement.
Gisorius put Elisa’s table on her desk, and a chair on that. He surrounded this tower of furniture with bedding to soften the noise of falling plaster, and went to work. So much was obvious, afterwards, from the mess, but I don’t know when he started or how long it took him. He drove the main breach by inserting a bar between brick and cement at the outlet of the stove chimney, and for a second or two he must have made a lot of noise. The guard heard it all right but when they looked into the bungalow they found Elisa and Osterling awkwardly moving a bed from room to room, and were wished a pleasant good evening.
Gisorius, I am sure, had promised to go straight for Aleppo and the frontier, and to take over temporary control of the whole movement from Istanbul. Above all, Elisa and Osterling must have wanted information; they knew that Juan Villaneda had penetrated their secret intentions, but they did not know how or through whom or if he alone was the employer of Ashkar. They cannot have imagined that Gisorius would be such a fool as to try to use the wireless; they were quite content to be certain that we could not.
The routine of the guards was simple to evade, for they remained outside the door and occasionally strolled round the house to see that all window bars were intact. Gisorius dropped to the soft ground at the back, and got away unnoticed. Then he must have reconnoitred the garage and found, to his surprise, that it was wide open, and the cars unguarded. There wasn’t even any need to stalk one of Juan’s partisans and hit him over the head with a spanner. That aroused his suspicion, for he very intelligently went down the road to the ford, where he was seen but not recognized.
Gisorius, like so many underground leaders, could instil patience into others, but had very little himself. He could have got clear away on foot, in spite of the watch on every regular path out of the colony, but it would have taken him some time across country to reach the frontier or Aleppo. He must have thought, too, that Ashkar could be called in against him. Against such opposition, moving at night or very cautiously by day, it might have been thirty-six hours before he reached a station or a hirable car, and another two days to Istanbul. This to a man of his temperament was an eternity; so he turned back into the colony—perhaps to get a better picture of Juan’s tactics, perhaps to see if there were a guard on the stables.
What he found was that Osterling’s office and the wireless room were occupied only by Lucia. There was no reason at all to expect any attempt on the administrative buildings. Lucia was acting more as duty clerk than anything else. Juan couldn’t spare a man to accompany or relieve her, but because she was nervous at being left alone he had given her Gisorius’ pistol.
Gisorius prowled around that bungalow like a tiger around the flimsy shelter of some native telegraph clerk. Against the swift and supple man Lucia had no chance at all. She couldn’t tell us how he got in or what happened. She woke up to find a gag in her mouth, and Gisorius completing the lashings around her ankles. She wasn’t much hurt. I imagine that Gisorius, who had carried so much theoretical training into actual experience, could nicely measure a knockout, like a length of time-fuse, so that it lasted for ten seconds or all eternity.
It was then nearly 2.45 a.m., one of the scheduled times, as we found out afterwards, when the Kasr-el-Sittat station stood by for incoming messages, Gisorius, of course, knew this, and was himself a competent signaller, I can picture him looking at his watch outside the office, suddenly realizing his opportunity, deciding to gamble on getting through to Istanbul—and damn the immediate consequences!
The wireless room opened off Osterling’s office, to which it was connected by a short passage with two doors. The first was an ordinary painted door, like that of a cupboard, opening outwards; the second was a swing door, padded on both sides to deaden sound. The room had no outside windows, and was ventilated by two shafts, in one of which was a fan.
After tying up Lucia and recovering his pistol, Gisorius entered the wireless room and coded a signal to Istanbul, instructing them to ignore all orders from Kasr-el-Sittat until he, Osterling or Elisa turned up in person—the message to be repeated to western stations and passed urgently to Czoldy. We found his signal written out on a pad alongside the key of the transmitter. We also found the codes, call-signs, time schedules and frequencies, for which Juan h
ad searched in vain. They had been kept in a cleverly concealed steel cupboard let into the panelling of the passage between the two doors. Anyone working with Osterling in his office would think he put the codes away in the wireless room, and the operator would think he kept them in his safe.
The instrument was unfamiliar, and Gisorius spent some minutes in mastering it. Meanwhile the electrician at the power plant noticed the load. There were few lights on in the colony, and no farm machinery was working. He assumed therefore that Kasr-el-Sittat was transmitting. For all he knew, we might have found an operator, so he didn’t cut off the current. He went to find Juan who was in his quarters half-way down the colony.
Juan ran to Osterling’s office, taking the electrician with him—for the office was nearer by several minutes than the power plant. On the way he hammered at the window of the guest bungalow, and shouted that I was to follow him. I was the only one of his supporters who could be reached without going out of his way; and I was doing, as I had been told to do, nothing—a sleepless nothing so feverish that even the next minutes of action have not wiped it from memory.
Juan and the electrician burst into the office and tumbled through the first door of the wireless room, the electrician leading—for Juan had just stopped in his stride to slash at the tie and handkerchiefs with which Lucia was bound. Gisorius was already in contact with Istanbul. I can understand his excitement. It was the future of the world as he desired it against a man’s life; and he believed so profoundly in his own moral right that no other could govern, even for a moment, his impulse. As the swing door opened and the electrician shouted, Gisorius shot him dead and called out that the next man to come through would get the same. Juan recognized Gisorius’ voice and pulled the electrician’s feet clear of the door, which swung to. Anyone else he might have tackled, but Gisorius, armed and with the initiative, could not be rushed.
I was close behind, having stopped only to fling a mackintosh over my pyjamas, and it was at this moment that I arrived. The door from the office into the passage was open, and I could hear the faint buzzing of the transmitter as Juan dragged out the electrician’s body. I made nothing of his flash of explanation except that Gisorius was in there and armed. Lucia stumbled past me on her way to find someone to cut off the power.
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