The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  Juan himself had a weapon. That morning his partisans had made a score of them in the explosives store. The peace of their revolution was illusory. He drew from his pocket a small, round tobacco tin, lit the stub of fuse projecting from a hole in the lid, waited, opened the swing-door three inches and rolled it through. The buzzer stopped as Gisorius jumped for the far corner, or for the shelter of a desk. The bang was little louder than that of a 12-bore gun to the firer. A lump of metal from the inside of the tin struck the upper part of the door.

  Juan ordered him to come out, but Gisorius’ only answer was to fire a short burst at the door, and then continue his dots and dashes.

  ‘Lie down,’ Juan whispered to me, ‘and keep his attention on the door.’

  I did so. I don’t suppose I was there more than half a minute. Even Gisorius’ magnificent concentration could not deal with earphones and key, a door that kept on swinging and shutting, and once an inkpot that rolled through. He guessed that I—or, as he probably thought, Juan—would be lying down, and he splintered the door on the level of my head. Then he turned to the buzzer again; but I could tell from rhythm and repetition that no coherent message was going out.

  Then I heard two explosions on the other side of the door. Gisorius seemed to fall, get up and blunder about the room. Juan ran in, and told me he had dropped one of his tins down each ventilator shaft. I answered, feeling sick and guilty, that they had been effective. I knew none of that overwhelming relief which in war masquerades as a bitter exhilaration.

  Gisorius was horribly wounded. His flank was laid open from lung to kidney. He must have jumped away from the first explosion, which had done no damage, and backed towards the whirling fan just as the second tin demolished it. Even so he fired again, but couldn’t lift the pistol off the floor. Juan took it away from him, and put him out of pain with the last round in the magazine. It may have been merciful. I do not know and will not think of it. All I can say in Juan’s defence is that those who are accustomed to use such a weapon as his tin must not shrink, as I should, from the only antidote.

  He was unaffected. The look which he gave to Gisorius’ body held something of a silent salute, but little pity; he showed more human emotion in his excitement at finding the code-book and sheets of cyphers. He had sacrificed his sensitivity to his ideals as devotedly as Elisa—Elisa, who, four hundred yards away, was listening so keenly that I was conscious of her. Love of the mass, and hatred of the mass—only their clear-sighted dread of the State could have united the two fanaticisms of Juan and Elisa.

  Of simple public opinion Juan, at least, was swiftly reminded. While we were carrying Gisorius into Osterling’s office and tidy­ing him up to lie alongside the electrician, the lights went out. We became aware that at all the windows were a few white faces watching us. They were like the puzzled ghosts of the masses who have been sacrificed to the masses. When Juan went to the door and spoke to them, they dispersed. Ghosts do.

  Only Phil Grynes remained. He followed Juan into the room, and reported to me, as it were, for action. He had even acquired a torch from somewhere, and was dressed in two sweaters and heavy trousers, ready for any emergency. He looked like a boxer out for his morning run.

  I murmured something to the effect that the wireless had been wrecked by a lunatic: that it was all either needless or useless—I forget which.

  ‘Didn’t know they had one,’ Grynes answered. ‘Shall I see what can be done?’

  Juan and I stared at him. It had never occurred to us that Phil Grynes might be a signaller. He and Tabas were too odd to be really considered as permanent members of the colony, and their trades had never been card-indexed. I, who knew the armoured cars of the Palestine Police and their stations built and equipped to stand siege, should have guessed that an ex-sergeant might well be a wireless expert.

  Grynes’ discipline saw him through the condition of that passage and the room. The offence to the eye was bad enough; the slight adhesion of linoleum to the feet was worse. We brought him a fresh chair, and he sat down to examine the set, while Juan went up to the power plant to turn on the current.

  Phil Grynes said little. So far as his personal sympathies were concerned, he had no need yet to commit himself. The colony’s property was damaged. His job was to assist the colony. That, I think, was how he saw it. Ten years’ police service had given him plenty of practice in trying not to think beyond his immediate duty.

  He answered my too eager questions in monosyllables. There was no obvious damage to the transmitter except a dent in the case out of which was sticking a bent bolt with a nut threaded on it—one of the bits of scrap metal with which Juan’s tins were packed.

  When Juan returned, Phil Grynes put on the earphones.

  ‘Set’s working,’ he said at once.

  He listened, switched over, and began to tap with a more professional certainty than Gisorius. Then he lifted the ear­phones and asked me if he should sign off.

  ‘What’s the language?’ I enquired.

  ‘English.’

  ‘Ask them how far they received the last message.’

  ‘First six groups clear,’ he replied after an interval. ‘Please repeat next four groups which are unintelligible.’

  ‘Ask them to repeat back all groups as received.’

  He gave us the cypher groups which Gisorius had sent. We had in front of us the books and figures which he had used, so it was quick and easy to compare the message he had written on the pad with the groups of numerals below it.

  Istanbul had received:

  FROM FOUR ON BEHALF OF SECRETARIAT TO

  NINE REPEAT LONDON NEW YORK PARIS

  The rest, which Gisorius had tried to transmit with one eye on the door, was hopelessly mutilated except for a group mean­ing URGENT FOR CZOLDY, which had only one figure wrong and could be guessed.

  ‘Tell them that we’re having trouble with the power,’ I said to Grynes, ‘and that we hope to repeat the message at …’

  I looked at Juan, who had the wireless schedules in front of him. for information.

  ‘There’s an emergency time at 10.30 a.m.,’ he said.

  Grynes tapped out the message and closed down.

  Juan locked up Osterling’s office and put a guard on it. He also doubled the number of his partisans at the power plant, and made it his headquarters. Grynes and I went back to my bungalow and had a much-needed drink. He preserved his silence, and there was an element of disapproval in it.

  ‘If she got out, you know,’ he said suddenly, ‘that would be the end.’

  I agreed. It would indeed be the end. There was no explosive which Juan held with the energy of Elisa.

  ‘Then why not do it?’ he suggested. ‘I don’t mean by force. Just demand her. All of us.’

  It was a shock to me to remember that he knew nothing of the conflict behind this palace revolution, and that he could not doubt I would be on Elisa’s side. He had accepted my presence with Juan in the wireless room as something reprehensible which I could not avoid.

  ‘Phil, what are your politics?’ I asked, meaning to appeal to his simplicity by whatever was the shortest cut.

  ‘I wouldn’t be here if I had any,’ he answered.

  ‘I mean, in general.’

  ‘I haven’t any,’ he repeated. ‘I used to be leftish. But then there was Palestine. And now Anton. I’ve been thinking a queer thing lately. Some of these chaps may have put it into my head. The more corrupt politics are, the better. All the misery is caused by well-meaning, honest fellows who think they’ve got a cure-all and stick at nothing to put it into practice.’

  ‘Well, you’re up against cure-alls here,’ I told him. ‘And they may be both wrong, but there’s no doubt which you’ll choose.’

  I explained to him that the Kasr-el-Sittat he knew was merely the setting for the headquarters of a new Anarchist Party: that we were all agreed in a policy of active opposition to the State, but that the leaders were divided. The Secretariat was convinced that wa
r, by annihilation of industrial centres, by famine and radio-activity, must destroy the modern State so utterly that humanity could return to the true track of progress through small voluntary associations. They had worked for war, and were on the verge of success. Juan Villaneda, on the other hand, loved the living masses too deeply to slaughter them for the happiness of future generations.

  ‘And where do you come in?’ he asked.

  ‘With Juan. I agree with him in nothing else, but accept war.’

  Then I told him why Juan had taken over control of the colony, and what Gisorius had been trying to do.

  ‘It’s God’s mercy, Phil,’ I said, ‘that you’re a wireless operator. Now we can recall Czoldy and the worst of the risk is over. In a way, for the next twenty-four hours, there’s no one in the world more important than you.’

  ‘Plenty of ’em,’ he replied. ‘And Anton for one.’

  ‘But you can do what he can’t.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I can. Makes you wonder if it’s worth doing, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Do you want to see your country in another war?’

  ‘No. But all this doing’—he stressed the word with a certain disgust, as of one who had experienced a whole lifetime of use­less and devoted action—‘where does it get you? There’s been enough doing for your twenty-four hours—that’s what I think. And I only know what’s right for me. I’m not a politician. I don’t know what’s right for the rest of the world.’

  ‘Phil,’ I said, ‘I loathe violence as much as you, and especially at Kasr-el-Sittat. But this isn’t a moment to turn Quaker on me. And even if that is your point of view, your duty is still clear.’

  ‘Two men murdered to date,’ he answered. ‘How many more do you want just to avoid what may not happen? I can’t under­stand this weighing of blood against blood. They always get the result all wrong, you see. You’re right for you. And I know Anton respects you. But it doesn’t mean you’re right for me.’

  I thought that Grynes didn’t believe me, so I began to tell him the story again. He stopped me, and said he didn’t have a doubt that I’d put the alternatives fairly, but that he felt, some­how, that all this was an outrage upon Kasr-el-Sittat. I shouted, out of an evil conscience, that of course it was, but I couldn’t help it—and if he hadn’t the sense to see his plain duty, let him ask Anton.

  He was very worried. He said that he owed me, too, a lot, and that if I really thought Anton would have no hesitation, I must be right. It wasn’t Anton’s sort of problem, but certainly we would find him and ask.

  Grynes got up and went straight out to do so. He and Tabas had no conventional regard for night and day. They rested their bodies or exercised their souls wherever there was opportunity and whenever there was need.

  On the western edge of Kasr-el-Sittat was a long, low building which the colonists had constructed on a foundation of unknown age. It was divided into little rooms, floored and walled with unfaced stone blocks, but comfortably matted and furnished. Here Grynes and Tabas had their quarters.

  Anton was not in his room, but Phil showed no surprise. He repeated that Tabas was unsettled, and behaving just as in the last weeks at Cæsarea.

  ‘Do you know where he is?’ I asked.

  ‘Up at his altar, I expect.’

  ‘His altar?’ I exclaimed involuntarily, for I had always thought of it as Elisa’s—not that she was often there, but I had fixedly associated the topographical axis of Kasr-el-Sittat with its spiritual axis.

  ‘As much his as anyone else’s, isn’t it?’ Phil answered. ‘And he uses it when he wants to be alone.’

  While we talked in the guest bungalow it had been raining. The half-light of the winter morning grew through the washed and purified air, promising a gentle day in which the green growth would be that of northern spring. A few doors opened in the houses below us, showing for an instant tarnished golden light as early risers, or, more probably, the many sleepless, proved to themselves with eyes and nostrils that a night so reminiscent of their past was over.

  On the grass below the altar, his head supported by the slant­ing drum of a column three-quarters in the turf, Tabas slept. His gaunt body was huddled under an old army greatcoat, the knees drawn up like those of an excavated skeleton. Phil Grynes hung over him tenderly, and with a mother’s unnecessary gesture adjusted the coat so that it covered neither more nor less of the sleeper; then he searched under his sweaters for any remains of a cigarette, lit the squashed half he found and sat still, watching the new moisture of the valley begin to live and sparkle in the light from eastern clouds. Meanwhile I fidgeted in the back­ground, intent upon 10.30 as any suburban psychopath upon his train.

  ‘Thank you, Philip,’ said Anton, opening his eyes.

  ‘What for now?’ Grynes asked, smiling as if at some elaborate and unnecessary courtesy.

  ‘For watching over me while I slept.’

  ‘Been here five minutes, cock.’

  ‘Love has no minutes.’

  Tabas got up and came straight towards me. I was quite still; yet he knew I was behind him.

  ‘You have forgotten your garden,’ he said. ‘But I cannot.’

  I replied that I wished to God I could forget it.

  ‘No,’ Anton answered. ‘When we lose our peace we must cherish the memory of it. Remember happiness, for it may be that the object of this life is to teach us what to seek when it is over.’

  ‘There was peace here, too.’

  ‘There was never peace here, Eric. There was only fear. That blood upon your clothes has changed nothing. Sit down and tell me.’

  I told him, and how weary I was of the story! I found my words growing emptier and emptier of meaning. The facts and the politics were sordid and pointless, as if my own voice were that of some insistent stranger boring me with details from a life that nowhere touched my own. Only when I had to explain the emotions of Elisa and Osterling, of Juan and myself, did my sentences have a cracked ring of truth; and, even so, no more meaning than a cry of pain.

  Phil Grynes listened with a deep frown on his wrinkled fore­head. His police service had so disillusioned him of the efficacy of action that he was ready to find in Tabas’ teaching a spirit of negation that was not really there. He was furious with Juan Villaneda for using Anton. Wasn’t it possible for Anton to talk, he asked, without a lot of damned bloodthirsty revolutionaries taking advantage of him?

  ‘No, Philip,’ Anton answered. ‘It is not possible. Nor should you judge a cause by the effect you can understand, for effect is in all time. That is why I tell you: do not seek reasons for what you know to be right conduct. And if you do not know what is right conduct, you must ask and accept the answer.’

  ‘Well, I am asking, cock,’ Grynes protested too loudly.

  ‘Philip, you are asking what you already know.’

  Phil Grynes turned to me with sudden confidence.

  ‘Look here!’ he said. ‘It’s not that I want to punish Villeneda or anything. All this may be as you say it is. But I’m not going to do anything against Mrs. Cantemir or Mr. Osterling. I’m their guest—that ought to put it so that you’ll understand. Well, and it isn’t so easy as all that either. It’s just that my duty is to the nearest neighbour, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Anton!’ I appealed.

  ‘Suppose that I could work this machine,’ he asked, smiling, ‘would you try to tell me what is right for me?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then why do you expect me to tell Philip what is right for him?’

  ‘Because for him there shouldn’t be any doubt.’

  ‘Do you mean that there is more than one morality, Eric?’

  I said that I didn’t mean that at all, and then hesitated and asked him to tell me what I did mean.

  ‘You mean that every man has his own field of action. The principle of conduct is one and unchanging. But the principle is applied by the conscience of man, and the conscience is limited in vision. Do you believe in creatures
of spirit, Eric?’

  ‘Not quite. But I do not see why all forms of life should necessarily be visible.’

  ‘If they exist, consider their conscience. The principle that they obey is your principle, but their world is not your world, and their time is not your time. Right conduct is absolute, but relative to the observer, who may see evil as good and good as evil. Therefore only the spirit itself, in its own field of action, can be the judge of what is right conduct and what is not. So I say to you that if Philip believes with his whole heart that he is doing right, you and I must be humble before him, for he is obeying the Purpose of God.’

  It was full morning, and I was impatient. I said that humble could be damned, and if there were any purpose in all this lunacy, it was I who fulfilled it.

  ‘No, Eric,’ he answered. ‘Both of you fulfil it.’

  ‘But one of us must be right?’

  ‘Both of you are right.’

  ‘Then Elisa too may be right. If belief is your standard, she believes in herself more than any of us. And I am a fool to have wrecked her life and mine.’

  ‘You have not understood me, Eric,’ he said. ‘I tell you that when conscience is opposed to conscience, both fulfil the purpose of God. To Elisa also there is an opposite, for whom she is wholly evil. Yet to That of which light and darkness are alike the servants, both she and her opponent may be right.’

  I was too impatient to understand him, but now, as I repeat his words, the shadow of the sense falls upon me. He meant that he himself was the opponent of Elisa to whom she was wholly evil. Yet neither then nor later had his opposition to her any appearance of deliberation. He hardly entered our too human battle.

  At the time I despaired of any force to be measured against the Secretariat but Juan and his forty partisans. I found him at the power plant, and told him that Grynes had been too repelled by bloodshed to obey us, and that Tabas had supported him.