The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘But there is nothing to fear in hunger,’ he answered, as if I had suggested that their movements should be governed by the phases of the moon.

  ‘Friend, tell that to the man who has starving children!’ Juan retorted.

  Phil Grynes compressed his face into still deeper wrinkles as he tried to find words for an answer which he felt rather than knew.

  ‘I suppose I do sound a bit like pie in the sky,’ he replied, ‘but if you don’t like Mrs. Cantemir’s solution and you won’t have communism, I don’t see what else there is but religion.’

  We talked for half an hour, eager as if a charter for the new Kasr-el-Sittat had to be improvised before Czoldy’s reply came through. At intervals Grynes put on the earphones and listened. It was nearly 4 a.m. before he nodded to us and began to write on the pad in front of him. We leaned over to watch the quick scrawls of the pencil.

  Six here in person. Confirm your last message and state source of information.

  Czoldy had not bothered to use code. It was a pretty sure sign that our warning had struck home, and that he treated it as a matter of extreme urgency. I could imagine him hastening from some café or obscure room where he had decyphered our message, watching to see that he was not already under police surveillance, and appearing, formidably decisive, at the party headquarters.

  Juan’s face was grim. He was too honest a man for this crisis. If we did not produce a clear, circumstantial and utterly convincing lie, we should not only fail but might drive Czoldy and his Coriolanos into immediate action.

  ‘No one ever knew what happened to Eugen Rosa,’ I reminded Juan.

  ‘No one but you and I.’

  I told him to give me a source which Czoldy would consider impeccable.

  ‘Theodore,’ he answered.

  He was a good conspirator. I had a struggle to get out of him any details at all about Theodore. I didn’t want to know who he was, but simply where he lived and why Czoldy should accept his information. At last he told me that Theodore was a high official of the N.K.V.D. and directly responsible to Gisorius for the internal organization of the party in Russia.

  ‘If the Soviet police knew what Czoldy intended, would they co-operate with the West?’ I asked him.

  ‘Of course. Every hand is against the anarchist. And besides, they would be afraid of being accused themselves.’

  I wrote down:

  Source Theodore. Eugen Rosa kidnapped, held in Moscow since June and confession forced. Missing cigars intercepted through Amberson and Ashkar to confirm Rosa’s story. Theodore unsuspected but not informed till last Saturday when file submitted to him for comment.

  ‘Will that do?’ I asked.

  Juan’s admiration was sour in his mouth. I think he felt illogically that an old comrade did not deserve so stupendous a lie, or perhaps it shocked him that I should profane the value and courage of Theodore.

  We gave Theodore, Rosa and myself their numbers, and coded the message in the Secretariat’s personal cypher. I was astonished that I too had been considered important enough to have a number. I still see it. It was 37, and in Elisa’s writing.

  When Grynes had finished the transmission, I wedged open the doors and took a cautious look at the office. Ashkar’s ser­geant had become bored with playing the detective, and was standing in complete idleness by the door chatting to the few colonists in the worst of pidgin French, while his troopers listened admiringly. It was still dark, but the dawn wind was beginning to blow; it carried from the bodies of Gisorius and the electrician the faint, fresh smell of a butcher’s slab. I went back into the wireless room. The lusty smell of the living was fouler, but its associations were sweet.

  We waited. Phil Grynes was asked to accept a message relayed from New York, and we decyphered it to pass the time. They requested authority to use World Opposition funds for the defence of some fool who had been preaching nineteenth century anarchism in California. Juan refused as decisively as Osterling would have done, and reminded them sharply that it was party policy to support the extreme right in a democratic state and the extreme left only in a totalitarian state.

  Then at last Czoldy’s reply came through. For a moment Juan and I hesitated to extract the meaning from the groups of numerals. We had been so sure of success—influenced no doubt by the deceptive ease with which he had sent his order to America—and now the reaction came back the stronger. Juan’s voice cracked as he read out the figures, and I snapped at him that they were mutilated. It took us a minute of argument to reach the obvious conclusion that Czoldy was not using the code in which we had replied to New York, but the personal cyphers. Then we hadn’t long to wait.

  Shall resign to-day on grounds of ill-health

  Czoldy replied, and he gave his future address and the name under which he would be known. Grynes confirmed receipt and signed off.

  When Ashkar arrived half an hour later and led us out into the office, he was solemn and worried. Elisa and Osterling had truthfully stated that Juan had imprisoned them and murdered Gisorius. They had denied any knowledge of his motives, but implied that they suspected him of all manner of illegalities. They must have quickly satisfied themselves that Juan was not the influence behind Ashkar, and so they had impressed this solid policeman, known to be interested in their cigars, that Villaneda was the man he was after.

  The hour that I had foreseen and chosen was on me, but there was one constructive act that I could do—and that was to leave Juan in firm control of Kasr-el-Sittat with Ashkar’s con­fidence in him unshaken.

  ‘They are quite wrong,’ I said. ‘Their evidence is hearsay. They weren’t there. Bring in Osterling and confront him with Villaneda.’

  I seated myself in Osterling’s chair and laid out the code-­books and sheets of figures on his desk. Nobody protested at my enigmatic position. Ashkar evidently decided that I had at last come out into the open as the secret agent in charge of the case.

  When Osterling was brought in by a trooper, he bore himself well. His traditions were too old and too gallant for him to show the slightest indignation; but the two sleepless nights of anxiety had marked him. He was no longer a force, a grace, whose age was what you chose to give him. He was an erect and polished old gentleman.

  I spoke to him in English, which Ashkar did not understand, and told him how we had passed the night. Then I let him read the text of the four messages that had gone back and forth between ourselves and Paris.

  ‘So Grynes was an operator,’ he said. ‘We are both fortunate.’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘Because he is not a man to lie to me.’

  He held out to Phil Grynes the sheets torn from the pad and covered with the neat groups of figures.

  ‘Did you send and receive these?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Grynes answered.

  He still seemed doubtful, wondering perhaps if there were no way in which we could have deceived Grynes himself.

  ‘Do you know anything of the case of an anarchist in California?’ I asked.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then read these.’

  It was the final proof. He met my eyes, looked casually away and met them again. The colour came back into his face. He forced himself to imitate the Osterling of every day, and indeed he became him. It was a good memory to leave behind, a com­pliment to himself and to us.

  ‘Theodore …’ he said reflectively, and then added in the tone of an interested seeker after truth:

  ‘That part was an invention?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘To warn Czoldy. I see. But why did you want to warn Czoldy? Why not let him be arrested?’

  Only then did I realize that he took the rest of the message as literal fact, and believed that I had really handed Eugen Rosa over to Moscow. I did not answer him.

  ‘Our old game of sparing Elisa? Villaneda to take the blame and you still to appear the benevolent neutral? But, my dear Amberson, she knows it was you who gave this puzzled gendarme his orders, you who again pu
t her into the power of—well, boots and breeches.’

  I told him savagely that I could do nothing else, and that I had made my choice deliberately. He observed me with concern but without pity as if I had been a promising young official whose career had been irrevocably smashed.’

  ‘For the sake of your future happiness. Amberson,’ he said, ‘it is unfortunate that your passion for Elisa is more real than your ideology. When you find that out, perhaps you will join me, and we can talk over the respective values. But shall we then be interested in such petty details? One can only hope not. Would you now permit me to take a very personal possession from that drawer in front of you?’

  I stood up and let him sit at his own desk. There was much to love in Osterling, and I could so easily have been his devoted servant. It was a last demonstration of his power to impress his principles on me that I accepted and still accept his Roman decision as right. He had no other world to which he could return.

  Ashkar sprang forward when Osterling put his hand to his mouth. He didn’t accuse me of knowing what was going to hap­pen. The tone of our conversation in that strange and sibilant language had been far too friendly.

  ‘God the All-Merciful!’ he cried. ‘But that was swift!’—and I could hear in his voice that he had upon him a fear of death beyond all experience of simple bloodshed.

  As he bent over Osterling he prayed aloud, for he had the infinite good fortune to be a pious Christian.

  Meanwhile his troopers needed all their pretence of ferocity to keep back the colonists who had been watching from the threshold. Some scattered to carry the news; some remained, with the air of self-conscious witnesses to the inhumanity of the police.

  I told Ashkar in as firm a voice as I could assume that he was in luck, that he had been spared all scandal, all embarrassing processes of law, for there lay the man who had been responsible for the drug smuggling and the vague subversive activities abroad; and his suicide in this remotest corner, like the occasional suicide of God’s occupationless wives, was worth a bit of stamped paper and no more.

  Ashkar was thankful. This ride to Kasr-el-Sittat had been his duty, but he had known only too well that it might mean for him dismissal from the service.

  ‘And the lady?’ he asked.

  ‘Let us finish here first.’

  I could not send for her as if I were, even temporarily, the greater of the two. It was not that I was afraid, for in imagina­tion I had already faced the coming interview and was emptied of emotion. No, if there were any bitter triumph, any possible attitude of splendour in which she could take refuge from humiliation and build herself a myth to comfort memory, I wanted her to be free to choose it.

  Ashkar examined the two bodies and the wireless room. Juan Villaneda tried to pretend that the transmitter was only a receiver, but Ashkar was not so ignorant. He put a couple of sentries on the office, and we went out.

  It was full dawn, still and cloudy. The hills were deep and mournful green against the grey velvet of the horizon. When we reached the open space at the top of the hill, I saw Elisa standing under the southern cedar. Many of the colonists were gathered by her bungalow. One said to me as I passed, thinking me to be a friend, that she wished to be alone. She was. There was no one near her except Poss who was sitting on the altar and smoking a cigar. She had forgotten his presence, if indeed she had ever noticed it. She stood still, looking down the valley. She was one with her Kasr-el-Sittat, drawing back from it the strength which she had given.

  I remember that she was taller, more ethereal, more exquisitely graceful than even I had ever thought her; nor is that memory so exalted because it is my last. It was crisis that empowered her, gave her youth. Crisis was always beauty to her soul, and therefore to her body.

  She halted our petty little procession simply by calling me to her. Her tone imperiously chose me as the delegate. There was a half-smile in eyes and on mouth. Her face had the humanity, the disillusioned humanity, of the wiser forgiving the more foolish. I do not know how far she intended to detach me from her enemies and save for Kasr-el-Sittat whatever could be saved, or how far she deceived herself. I do not think she could have attempted one without the other.

  ‘What did you show him?’ she asked.

  I gave her the papers, and she read them.

  ‘He believed this?’

  I nodded. There was no word that I could say. The plainest monosyllable could have carried all the cruelty of insult. She would not let my spirit go.

  ‘But I remember the separate minutes of day and night,’ she said. ‘I could quote you your own words, Eric. I know that you did none of this. Eugen Rosa? You knew nothing of him, and still you don’t. Oh, why will you not leave politics to me? My poor lost neutral, trying to do his English justice to both sides!’

  Keeping me with her, she descended upon Juan, Ashkar and Grynes, who had stopped uneasily a few yards below us.

  ‘Juan, we have been comrades,’ she begged. ‘For the sake of us all, tell me. He watched and you acted. Isn’t that the truth?’

  ‘I had to use what I could, Elisa,’ he answered. ‘That is true.’

  Did she know that Juan’s impulsive tenderness could never be proof against such a question? God knows what he hoped to effect by his answer! I suppose he did not think at all. He simply longed for the impossible: to spare Elisa.

  She turned to me, and must have meant to touch me, for I saw the first movement of that nervous shoulder. I can only imagine what horror she saw upon my face, what shame at the unbearable lie.

  ‘You!’ she cried.

  The word was a long moan, as all the life that had ever been mine went out to her. Her face became that which Poss had once described to me: a skull, all eyes.

  ‘You!’ she repeated, now more sharply. ‘You and Villaneda. One of you weak and the other a romantic fool. You aren’t communists. Who was behind you to tell you what to do? Where did you find the strength?’

  Oliver Poss took his cigar out of his mouth. He was half-reclined on the altar, impudent and detached as some spectator in a theatre seat he hadn’t paid for.

  ‘Don’t you really know, my girl?’ he said.

  ‘Get off that stone, goat!’ she ordered. ‘Who?’

  ‘His reverence,’ he answered.

  She called him an imbecile, and told him that Anton Tabas was utterly incapable of offering practical advice to anyone. She asked Grynes, derisively, if Tabas had ever told him to destroy her.

  Phil Grynes, misquoting his master and wholly unaware of the brutality with which he struck her, stammered that Tabas had only said she couldn’t love.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she cried.

  Then, as if it were a proof of her love, she tried to kill her Kasr-el-Sittat. She raised her arms in a most lovely gesture and called the waiting colonists to her. She told them that they must go, back to their homes, back to whatever the State would give them, back, if there were nothing else, to the camps from which she had taken them. She mourned over them, like Medea over her children.

  Juan Villaneda would have none of it.

  ‘Go or stay, woman!’—his incisive voice cut through the mur­mur of misery and worship—‘but we are staying. Kasr-el-Sittat belongs to the community.’

  ‘In poverty?’ she asked. ‘Without protection? How long can you last?’

  She pointed at Ashkar. As the colonists turned towards him, he set his face into absolute impassivity. He appeared the very epitome of the unfeeling police about to do their painful duty.

  ‘In poverty,’ Juan answered her. ‘And under the protection of poverty. By God, we are called a house of religion, and a house of religion we will be.’

  She ignored him.

  ‘Captain Ashkar, my passport is in order,’ she said. ‘May I leave the country?’

  ‘I regret, madame.’

  ‘She wasn’t there,’ I reminded him. ‘She doesn’t even know who killed Gisorius.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ he said, ‘yet.’

  ‘
I did,’ I answered. ‘And Eugen Rosa?’

  ‘We will talk of that later. She may go.’

  ‘Come, Poss!’ she ordered. ‘God help you, you are all I have, and I cannot be alone.’

  Ashkar was not so ready to extend his permission to a man whose appearance contrasted vividly with that of the colonists; they had a communal quality in their faces, which exempted them, like ecclesiastical dress, from the attentions of a busy policeman. Poss, however, even to the eyes of a Syrian, appeared a leader. He could plead indifference, but never ignorance.

  Ashkar looked suspiciously through the opening pages of the pale blue passport.

  ‘You are no Greek,’ he accused him.

  ‘Dear colonel. I was born in Arcadia,’ Poss answered.

  ‘Oh, give yourself a label that he can understand!’ I cried impatiently, seeing that he was about to prolong the intolerable moment with his mouthing.

  ‘Label? Label?’ he replied. ‘Ah, yes, of course! He can’t release a man without a label. Well, put it that I ate mine. A goat on a railway journey—ha! ha! ha!’

  I appealed to Ashkar, but he remained unhelpful until he found the entry stamp which showed that Poss had been crossing the frontier at the hour of Gisorius’ death.

  There is no more to tell. I gave Ashkar a signed confession that I had killed Gisorius in self-defence, and he allowed me two days to leave the country; it would not, he assured me, be worth while to extradite and prosecute me for a very doubtful case of manslaughter. He promised that he would be a father to the colony and their visitors on condition that the wireless was destroyed. For the rest, he was a gendarme, he said, and his only business was to see that Kasr-el-Sittat did not break the laws of Syria. If they continued to have influence abroad—well, that was my concern or his government’s.

  I heard the three spaced explosions as Juan and his partisans demolished the tractor which dammed the stream. I could no longer keep my self-control by pretence of interest in Ashkar and his papers. I went up alone to the top of the hill. The departing car was already over the ford. I watched its slow progress down the road. Ever since, in every moment of contemplation which intrudes into the hour, in every leisure and through all my nights, even now when I had hoped to clear the vision from my soul, I see the empty valley, and the outline of that shoulder of the hill which was so absolute an end.