The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  Then she asked them at least to remove and bury the bodies of their companions, and in a moment the whole sixty of us were flowing down the hill towards Osterling’s office.

  It was a complete surprise. She had not indicated by any threat or rhetoric or even a pause that she was going to set the colonists in action. And her spell was such that I doubt if a single man, except Juan Vilianeda, remembered that it wasn’t in her character to fuss over what happened to anybody’s car­case, including her own. Mass occupation of the wireless office was what she was after.

  Juan and his party raced across the front of the colonists, who were moving fast but with too great solemnity, reached Oster­ling’s office ahead of them and slammed the door. It was no moment for half measures. Without a shock to stop them, the colonists would have surged right through the building. Juan hurled two of his bombs from the window, and he must have held on to them till the last second, for they exploded as they hit the ground about twenty feet ahead of the advancing mass. He was an old soldier, all right, accustomed to think while run­ning. Time and distance were coolly judged. Two or three of the nearest colonists were hurt, but none seriously.

  The crowd recoiled and instinctively opened up. Their movement might have been a result of the military training that many of them had received, or simply fear of being caught in a crush of humanity: a solid target, from the midst of which there could be no jump aside.

  I remember watching those empty yards in front of Osterling’s bungalow, that uncrossable channel of young grass with a shallow brown wound in the centre where the explosive had ripped the turf. It divided the colony with such absolute simplicity. It was restful to one so wearied with complexities as I—restful and unreal as war would be to that exhausted states­man who, with Czoldy’s help, should end the uneasy peace.

  My responsibility for the bloodshed was inescapable, yet I could not even be sure which side I was on. The question, like the fascination of that empty space between Juan and Elisa, was too easy—and neither of them, after my equivocal behaviour, could have answered it with any certainty. The only comfort that I found was in Osterling’s eyes. He at least had a clear picture of me. He gave me confidence that I existed.

  The seconds that were so long for me must have been unnoticeable to Elisa. The flame of her spirit enveloped all of us. Her exaltation so amazed me, gave me so strange a longing to weep and worship her, that she had to ask her question twice. It was whether they could use those things inside the house. I answered that of course they couldn’t without suicide.

  ‘Then come!’ she said. ‘Why are we waiting, Eric!’

  There were thirty yards to cross. She didn’t rush them. For her the spiritual dignity of Kasr-el-Sittat was at stake. Those who called force into her paradise were not only to be over­whelmed by it, but shamed out of its use.

  I suppose the sheep were following us closely, but I remember hoping that they weren’t, and that this idyll of heroism would end in ridicule. Many a man, in the clear sanity of approaching death, must have comforted himself with the thought that its futility would be the only obvious lesson to be learned by the still living.

  I heard Juan’s order to stop, and saw his face and hand at the window. My steps were still linked to Elisa’s. When the tin hit the ground six feet ahead of us, I fell on it. That wasn’t courage. It was nearer the false sentiment which Elisa so despised. I embraced the thing with a sort of gratitude. I was very tired, and death, though I wouldn’t have chosen it, was just as welcome as continued treachery.

  Even so I was cheated. The damned tin didn’t go off. There was no calculation concerned, no bluff. Juan meant to finish with Elisa; that was the only answer she left him. It just hap­pened that the fuse was not pushed right home into the detonator. Juan had not time to make them all himself.

  The sheep, after all, were following. They made a pretty wide detour round my doomed body, but when I got up they were pouring in through the door and the windows of the bungalow. Juan hadn’t the necessary seconds to light another fuse, and wait, and throw. He and his party cleared out through Oster­ling’s bedroom window.

  At the time I didn’t know what had happened, for after I had taken a few steps away from the bomb, my imagination re-created and exploded it for me. There was no heat of battle, no sort of responsibility to make me look forward rather than back, so I staggered instinctively to the dark crevice between a stack of drainpipes and a half-built house, and there collapsed.

  I do not think I ever hoped to open my eyes and find Elisa; she had, after all, another lover in still greater danger. I was surprised, however, when I came round, to discover Poss sitting on the pipes and taking my pulse with a bedside manner that seemed both efficient and genuine. When I sat up, he drew a flask from his hip-pocket. His brandy was welcome, but I must admit that his large unconcern was possibly more helpful. He radiated life, even if one didn’t approve of its quality.

  ‘Winning, my dear sir?’ he said in reply to my immediate question. ‘Elisa, of course! But what she is winning is known to nobody but herself. And, by the way, may I ask if you have had the misfortune to offend our sympathetic syndicate? The gentleman who looks like an ambassador on a discreet holiday was about to place a large stone where you could reasonably be supposed to have bumped your head on it when you fell for­ward. I have seldom seen a man grasp an opportunity with such instant decision. Here indeed is the rock in question’—he offered me a jagged lump of building stone—‘the two black streaks merely represent the points where he struck a match when he saw that I had observed him, and I also struck one to impress upon him that there was no ill feeling.’

  I thanked him for his intervention with such enthusiasm as I could pretend. Osterling, I am sure, would have done the job with one completely convincing blow, and anyway I was unconscious.

  ‘A very gallant act of yours, my dear sir,’ he went on. ‘I always felt that consular appearance of yours could not be wholly misleading. Am I right in supposing you knew very well that it was what Elisa intended you to do?’

  I screamed at him that I knew nothing of the sort.

  ‘No? Well, well, in that case we will dismiss the subject. Indeed, Amberson, it is not surprising if some of my intelligent surmises be at fault. In the three hours since I rode with what now appears undue lightheartedness into this nest of anarchists, I am sure of nothing but that the only anarchist on this beguiling hilltop is myself.’

  When Poss and I arrived within sight of the power plant we found that most of Juan’s forty partisans had rallied to him there, and that the plant was surrounded. Surrounded is perhaps too strong a word, for the colonists kept their distance, and their loose screen of pickets was in no way aggressive. Elisa was standing on the steps of a neighbouring bungalow, leaning with one raised arm against the door-frame. Her pose suggested com­plete calm and self-assurance. She was not a woman who normally leaned against anything.

  She had seized and kept the moral advantage. Juan with his few men had been more dangerous and impressive than with his full force. It was now so obviously in his power to attack the indecisive colony and to enforce whatever discipline and punishments he chose. But that was just what he didn’t want to do. At all costs he had to avoid creating martyrs and a coherent opposition. However irresistibly he struck, he would still be no nearer a wireless operator, no nearer reversing the Secretariat’s policy, no nearer the permanent control of Kasr-el-Sittat.

  Elisa greeted me with that eager passion of hers which con­cealed—from herself as well as from others—the very existence of remorse.

  ‘Try to understand!’ she cried. ‘I could not go back.’

  ‘I didn’t expect it.’

  That was a plain statement of truth, and I suppose that I smiled as I uttered it.

  ‘No, you would not expect it,’ she answered, ‘my very faithful.’

  The quiver of gratitude in her voice was not in the least because I had been prepared to give my life for her. That was something she
had already discounted, and, perhaps, long since imagined. No, she was touched and surprised that I could keep a consort’s bargain, and accept her for what she was without reproach.

  Osterling, who had gone inside the bungalow for a wash and shave, immmediately came out. He could not run the risk of allowing Poss any private speech with Elisa. We exchanged compliments, and I suspect that he, too, found a certain pleasure, a delicate and much-needed flattery of self-esteem, in the irony which was audible to no one but ourselves. He left the general handling of the situation entirely to Elisa. The subtleties in which she dealt were not his, and he knew it.

  She had, I am sure, no formal plan of action. She had no doubt that her own spiritual force was the strongest in the field, and that all lesser forces, including violence, must conform to the curve she had created. With her was the full moral influence of a disapproving and unarmed colony, and so long as she didn’t lose it, she was bound to win. Her supporters were playing passive resistance for all it was worth.

  When Anton Tabas started to shamble up and down over the gravel outside the power plant, as if he were unaware that this space, so convenient for perambulating meditation, was anything but accidental, he drew the two sides into hardly percep­tible movement towards himself—perhaps a mere shifting of position to get a better view. He appealed to the sense of comedy, for he illustrated with such gentleness the eternal, easily recognizable jest of the absent-minded professor.

  Elisa was disconcerted by this random element in her chain of probabilities. She went down through her people, and took him by the arm.

  ‘Come, Anton!’ she said, smiling. ‘This is no place for you.’

  ‘Do you need me?’ he asked.

  ‘I? Not at all!’

  By this time Poss and I were with her, for it was quite on the cards that she intended to provoke another attack. The four of us formed a group that still further confused the issue, and I saw relief on the drawn faces of Juan’s partisans. That was not at all what she wanted. She separated herself decisively, and faced both us and the power plant behind us.

  ‘Come, Anton!’—this time it was an order—‘you are out of your world. And so are you, Poss!’

  Poss, as it were, bowed to his audience. I will not swear that he actually did so, but he was obviously satisfied with his isolation.

  ‘Sir,’ he said to Anton, ‘my name is Oliver Poss. It would appear that we have one essential in common, and that is a determination to enjoy ourselves—though no doubt our ideas of what constitutes enjoyment are very different.’

  I expected Tabas to be embarrassed by so foreign and over-bearing an approach. He was silent for an instant while he looked into Poss’s impudent eyes and judged him. Then he gave a broader smile than I had ever seen upon his face before—a positively commercial smile—and patted Poss on the shoulder as naturally as if he were standing a round of drinks.

  ‘For him who cannot serve life,’ he said, ‘it is enough to praise it.’

  ‘We are none of us in a mood for religion, Anton.’ Elisa insisted.

  Her tone was compelling, but sad rather than resentful. She might have been ordering a Salvation Army band to go and play in some street where the blood of revolutionary comrades was not so fresh upon the ground.

  ‘Yet you have made this a house of religion,’ he answered.

  Every word of his deep voice was a rebuke, delivered without anger, slowly, with a sincerity that shook him.

  ‘If it has been that for you, I am glad,’ she said. ‘But for those of us who have suffered it is a house of peace.’

  Some woman shouted from the power plant:

  ‘Hypocrite! Assassin!’

  ‘Both! And liar! And any animal that it does you good to call me!’ Elisa retorted proudly. ‘But for whose sake? For you, because here, where you live and work, is the hope of all humanity. What other policy can there be but ours? You are futile as the fools who chatter democracy, the fools who pin their faith to the sacred majority, which year by year must vote more power to the State or die! Half of them will be dead in fifty years—does it matter so greatly if they die now? The majority whom I serve is greater still, and it is yet unborn. What have you to offer them? Nothing but talk like students in a café! Nothing but Libertarian Communism!’—she charged the name with an explosion of contempt—‘Juan Villaneda, what is your policy?’

  She had control. We were two camps again. Tabas, Poss and myself stood in the no man’s land. They appeared unconscious of their position, or perhaps considered it natural and right. As for me, I was embarrassed by this isolation, yet unwilling to move lest the gesture of joining one side or the other be taken as a provocative expression of my sympathies.

  ‘Why do you not answer, Juan?’ Tabas asked, as if he were confident of the effect.

  ‘Because there is no answer, and she knows it,’ Juan replied—and there was even gaiety in his tone. ‘There is no way to freedom so certain as war. Good! I admit it! But I will not serve the unborn at such a price. And I have passed too much time in the chorus to be impressed by tragic queens. Look you, friends—I am an anarchist, but I am a European. And war is against my conscience.’

  That was enough to steady his followers, who murmured their approval; but to the colonists behind Elisa, those very educated Slavs and Germans determined to cling to any philo­sophy that would guide them through their endless and barbaric questionings, Juan at that moment was merely an obstinate peasant. I could see on their faces contempt for the line of defence that he had chosen.

  Somebody shouted:

  ‘The Purpose of God!’

  ‘Purpose of God be damned!’ Juan retorted. ‘I say it is against my conscience.’

  Anton Tabas smiled at this reference to his teaching. He was between the houses, like a dog seeking its master. He carried a handy foot of lead piping. That he should distrust the pacifism of Kasr-el-Sittat was hardly surprising, but he should have known Tabas needed no other bodyguard than his own eyes and bear­ing. Grynes gave up his weapon to me, being conditioned to obey a sharp order, and I sent it whirling over the roof of the nearest bungalow. It was, I suppose, a nervous, over-dramatic action, yet I was bitterly hurt by Elisa’s derisive smile.

  Meanwhile Tabas was speaking of the evil of fear. He used the word more or less in a psychiatrist’s sense, but he wasn’t the first prophet to have done that. He got a hearing, though impatient. At the end he again carried the attack to Elisa.

  ‘And you, lady, you were ashamed when I called your house a house of religion, because you know that you have filled it only with the darkness of your fear.’

  I was the only one in all that crowd who had the eyes to see the little leap of the muscles, whose hand had felt and could feel in imagination the beating of her heart. I made an involun­tary step towards her, but the coolness of her voice detained me.

  ‘Anton, Anton, must you reproach me because I am afraid for the unborn?’ she answered unconcernedly. ‘I know that you believe as I do that the soul of man must not be sacrificed to the State. You would not have remained with us so long if you did not. Then tell us—is there any political action that can ever help him?’

  To my surprise Tabas’ reply needed no translation into the words of every day.

  ‘No. There is none.’

  She asked him how he then dared condemn her, since politics and religion were both of no avail. She said that if there had been a single religion which offered any hope she would have joined it instead of founding Kasr-el-Sittat. But there was not one, as he well knew, which did not teach obedience to the State.

  ‘It is neither right nor wrong to obey government,’ Tabas answered, ‘but the Purpose of God must not be disobeyed. Therefore a man must follow his conscience if he believes that his rulers are acting from fear or from the love of power. For the conscience of every spirit creates its own right, and there is no absolute right that can be known to us. It is not enough to cry out that a law is evil or a tax unjust. The law should be disobeyed a
nd the tax unpaid. Nor is it shameful to be called a criminal. It is only shameful that there should be sufficient prisons to hold those who have followed their conscience.’

  ‘There are enough executioners,’ said Elisa. ‘And none of us here can doubt it.’

  ‘In the nature of man I am certain only of this: that he is willing to suffer and die for what he believes,’ Anton replied. ‘If it were not so, there would be no religion. If it were not so, there would be no war. Are there a million in the world who believe your teaching that the State must be resisted? If there are, they have only to refuse obedience. Then those that you have allowed or chosen to be your rulers will be made humble, and for the unborn the day shall come when men will be unwill­ing to govern, and therefore worthy to do so.’

  I think it was the vine-dresser who shouted:

  ‘Down with War! Long live Civil Disobedience!’

  I could willingly have shot the fool. Yet it was that cry, that hysterical simplification of Tabas, which defeated Elisa. Instead of ignoring the childish protest, she answered it.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘Or out of work?’

  The sarcasm might have been effective if it had not stirred too many memories. Most of those men and women behind her had carried banners or shouted slogans in their time. No doubt, as she expected, they looked back on their youthful enthusiasm with the contempt of an élite. Yet she had ignored Anton’s constant of human nature: its pride in suffering.

  Juan Villaneda seized his opportunity. He cried:

  ‘Will you use the lives of others to destroy the state, or will you give your own?’

  There wasn’t one of us who could fail to see that Tabas had offered a creed, that Juan had accepted it, and that it was a challenge to the sincerity of our ideals. Moreover, it was a practical creed. The humiliation of the state by individuals fearless of the consequences to themselves was a policy exactly fitted to Kasr-el-Sittat and its organisations.