The High Place (10 page)

Grynes’ spare-time hobby became the search for information about Tabas; and by the mere fact of trying to understand him, he found himself in contact with those who were also trying. Tabas
was well known in highly respectable circles with which the police never bothered—the scholars of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Chassidic Jews, the Bahai and the Moslems who were attracted
to them. He had no means of support but three acres of ancient olive trees in Upper Galilee, the produce of which he used for food rather than income. He had no home. If he wasn’t wandering
through the villages or accepting some very simple hospitality in Jerusalem, he might be found in a cave near Sasa or a hut in the ruins of Cæsarea.

‘I loved the country, you know,’ said Grynes, as if showing his sympathy for Tabas’ wayfaring. ‘I’d have been an Inspector in another year.’

‘Didn’t they offer you anything when the police were shipped home?’ I asked.

‘Just government promises. I lived on unemployment pay before I joined the police, and damned if I do it again! So I decided to stay on in Palestine. Headquarters didn’t like it, but
I got them so muddled with yarns of the commercial offers I’d had that they left me in peace.’

In fact, the only offer he had received was to peddle kitchenware through Arab Palestine and Transjordan. He hadn’t any qualifications for civil life at all, for he had joined the
Palestine Police at the age of twenty. In his teens he had never had a regular job, and had earned what he could by turning out to meet better boxers than himself in the Blackfriars Ring.

‘I always felt,’ he said slowly, ‘I couldn’t be in Palestine for nothing.’

‘A sense of destiny?’ I suggested.

‘Well, if you want to put it like that. But it’s no bloody wonder! Here I am, and think what I would have been if I’d stayed in England!’

He wasn’t conscious of any irony at all. And I agreed with him. There, as he said, he was—without money, clothes or home, but with every other sort of wealth and perfectly aware of
it.

Before committing himself to a future of kitchenware, he decided to intercept Tabas on his way from Jerusalem to Cæsarea, and they had a long conversation by the roadside which ended in
Grynes choosing to go with him.

‘But I told him,’ he added, ‘that I wasn’t going to fetch up as a blasted colonel in the Salvation Army.’

‘What did he say to that?’ I asked.

‘That it wasn’t essential for dervishes to dance,’ Grynes chuckled.

I have seen Cæsarea. It is a waste of grey mounds, shapeless as the surrounding sandhills. There is a village where the fisher­men, like a colony of swallows, have made habitable the
walls of Roman and Crusader by accretions of mud. There are flat ledges of rock, that were the Roman quays, over which the sea laps and trickles unless the wind is offshore. There is the beach,
which is the best road to the place. And that is all.

On the edge of the sands, in a hut of Roman stones and flattened petrol tins, the pair of them settled for some months, living on Anton’s olives, and bread and fish which Grynes bought in
the village. No doubt he was predisposed to peace after being impartially shot at by Jews and Arabs for the past ten years, but that he could endure so absolute a peace I can only ascribe to his
need of Tabas.

‘What on earth did you do all day?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he answered cheerfully. ‘And then there was always someone to talk to.’

Because he lived with Tabas, he was unquestioningly accepted by Jews as by Arabs. He tried to explain that this new simplicity of social intercourse fascinated him, for his whole life had been
spent in conflict with his fellows.

‘We could have stayed on,’ he said. ‘No one would have harmed us. But they would talk politics to Anton. He used to spend the nights wandering about and meditating. I was
afraid he’d go out and preach between the armies, and the hell of a job I’d have had to look after him! But he saw that he was helpless. He said at last that he couldn’t live
among the dead. And when I asked him what he meant, he told me that men who fought each other for an idea were mistaken, but men who fought for land were already dead.’

Grynes’ quotation from his saint shocked me. It seemed at variance with Anton Tabas’ humanity. But when I came to know Tabas better, I saw how difficult it was to repeat his sayings
and preserve that sense which had been plain to the hearer. I do not think he considered men who fought for land or any material possession more blameworthy than the rest of us; he simply meant that
they were as unapproachable, as spiritually dead as mad dogs.

So Tabas determined to leave his little world of hatred and to wander towards that Western civilization which he had never seen. There was no doing anything with him. He had to go. And Grynes,
who would far rather have accompanied him to the wilds of Africa, or anywhere else where there was sun and a man could get his rations off a tree, had to go too. He couldn’t abide the thought
of Tabas, friendless, in the chill smoke of some industrial town—though, I must understand, Tabas had no real need of him at all.

‘He has,’ I at once protested. ‘You’re the other half of the world, and you keep his feet on the ground.’

‘It’s funny you should say that,’ he replied, with a quick and grateful glance from his battered eyes. ‘When I met him on the road that day, I asked him to teach me his
religion. He said he couldn’t because there were no words that could ever teach, for none of us meant the same by his words as another. And then he said that if ever our words meant the same,
I should have just as much to teach
him
.’

Grynes, as an experienced policeman, knew very well that it would be most difficult to obtain any kind of travel document for Tabas. He decided not to bother the few harassed British officials
left in Palestine; they would be short with Anton, and shorter still with him—a respectable sergeant who had managed so quickly to appear a distressed British subject. So he and Tabas joined
the stream of simple and intimidated Arab villag­ers who fled from Galilee into peaceful Lebanon, and there, under my roof, they were, and very much obliged. He supposed that I must think him
quite mad. I said that I reserved judgment till I had seen more of Anton Tabas, but that I envied him.

I couldn’t think what advice to give them in a world where the sinner may travel freely, but the saint and the plain citizen may not. They had been with me three days when one morning,
occupied in my cherished moment of terrace meditation, I saw that for such as Tabas and Grynes, homeless and obeying no law but their own, Kasr-el-Sittat was a temporary or per­haps permanent
resting-place. I had no doubt at all that the colony would receive them. Its generosity was a constant.

When I told Tabas of this secular monastery, he was eager to go and to learn from it. Wherever there was any sort of gathering for the sake of an ideal, there he was prepared to travel.
Seek and
ye shall find
was to him a literal truth, for he didn’t expect the finding to be a recognizable event at any definite moment, and disappointment had no meaning for him. To Grynes, however, I
recommended caution, and made him promise that the pair of them would return to me if they felt out of place.

I drove them to Kasr-el-Sittat and left them to stroll around the colony while I went to talk to Elisa. She listened with some amusement to my account of Anton Tabas, but she seemed to consider
my behaviour very natural, even complimentary to her.

‘Phil Grynes could be useful to you,’ I said apologetically. ‘He speaks Arabic, and he’s a handy sort of man. But it’s your use to them that I was really thinking
of.’

‘You’re a curious person, Eric,’ she answered. ‘You send your crazy prophet here, and you’re perfectly right. But how did you know it?’

‘Because it’s the worth of the individual that matters to Kasr-el-Sittat. You cultivate pity.’

‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘We cultivate hatred—but it’s true that no one can hate till they can pity.’

We walked down the hill towards the gate, and found Tabas and Grynes already in earnest conversation with Juan Villaneda and three or four colonists. The group parted as we approached, leaving
Tabas and Elisa face to face.

They made a glorious pair, those two. It may have been their physical slenderness, their lightness upon the earth, that gave such an impression of spirit and mobility. ‘Like a couple of
fighting cocks,’ Grynes said to me afterwards. That was the last simile I should have chosen, for there was no suggestion what­ever of antagonism. But I saw what he meant. Call it two
fal­cons, beak to beak, the great wings folded.

‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting,’ Elisa said.

‘I was not ready before,’ Anton answered.

‘Oh, we’re not as important as all that,’ she smiled, under­standing immediately the implication of his reply. ‘Peace is all we have to offer you. Or should I say the
opportunity for peace?’

‘You are most gracious,’ he replied with sudden courtliness.

That drew from Elisa a smile of sympathetic but irresistible amusement. Anton’s manner, the gallant unbending of an old-fashioned scholar, was undoubtedly borrowed from one of the
archæologists who had impressed his youth; it belonged to the suit, but not to the sandalled feet, the dust, the odd rags which he wore around his neck. This politeness, however, had more
than a conventional meaning; it always implied that Anton profoundly disagreed with what the last speaker had said, while perceiving a goodness of intent.

After ten minutes’ conversation with my recruits, both Elisa and Juan unhesitatingly accepted them as useful prototypes of that class of harmless visionaries who provided the exhibition
group of the colony. Juan, I am sure, felt that Tabas was worth serious study, for I saw him jot down two of his sayings. Elisa preferred Grynes. She appreciated his good, earthy loyalty, though
she didn’t think much of his choice. When she asked Tabas with a shade of sarcasm what she should do to be saved—I can’t remember how she worded the question, but that was the
sense—he replied at once that she should have done with fear.

It was an odd remark to make to a woman whose physical and mental courage were beyond question, but Elisa did not protest.

‘Fear is my saviour,’ she declared. ‘It is fear that keeps the animal alive, and fear that drives men to plan for the future.’

‘But Fear and Love are not the same,’ Tabas answered.

She gave him a meaningless, encouraging smile, and turned away to talk to Juan Villaneda about accommodation.

As Elisa and I strolled back to the central building and its delightful common-room, she said laughingly that Tabas was an impressive old fraud, and asked me if I thought he knew what he meant
himself.

Now, I had always had a taste for that peculiar quality of my adopted country which has made of it throughout the cen­turies a nursery of religions, and I had often talked with mild and
wandering believers in their personal creeds; so I had a standard of comparison. I told Elisa that Tabas certainly knew what he meant himself, but that he spoke from depths where neither the
philosopher nor psychologist could fairly get at him. By Love he expressed that compulsion upon human beings to give of their best without hope of reward, and he would apply the word to a pure
mathematician as well as to a mother plan­ning for her child. And so, I said, I took his remark to mean that she was confounding the two main incentives to human action.

‘There is only one,’ she cried, ‘for the test of love is fear for the beloved. And how can we love at all if we are unwilling to destroy?’

1

I
T IS CONCEIVABLE THAT IN HIS OWN SETTING AND AT A
normal time I might have liked Oliver Poss. I shall try in all honesty to
present him as he was, and I will not pretend that my loathing of him was constant or that I was in­sensible to his gross vitality. There was nothing of grey obedience in Poss; he was an
unconscious World Opposition in himself with­out the slightest trace of any idealism. I feel for him the same illogical hatred as that of some barbarous caliph towards the bringer of bad news,
for I cannot forgive his crime of not permitting me to remain in ignorance. Impalement, I think, would be a caliph’s choice—unless Poss had made some revolting jest upon the waiting
stake, and had his mouth stuffed with gold for it. I resent the abominable comedy of this great goat gambolling over our lives.

He lay in wait for me at Hotel de Syrie. I usually lunched there on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I did my business with bank and railway, and arranged the documentation of any consignments that
were to pass over the nominal frontier between the Lebanon and Syria. It was a comfortable and friendly hotel, with the simplest of dining-rooms and a cool lounge which had blossomed into all the
worst intricacies of Damascus decoration—fretted screens, plaster arches, couches upholstered with imitation carpets, and in the middle an imitation fountain. The lounge was not intended to
attract the tourist; it represented, completely and satisfyingly, the execrable taste of the middle-class Arab.

After lunch I was drinking coffee and reading the paper in one of these orientalized cosy corners—they were comfortable to the body, if not to the eyes—when a bulk of considerable
weight gracefully subsided on to the opposite couch, as if a large animal had imperceptibly approached and plunged to its ease. The newcomer gave me a pleasant good afternoon in English, but my
startled reply did not lead to conversation. He too ordered coffee, and settled down to a French newspaper printed in Turkey.

I observed him cautiously. He was a big man—not fat, but built to a model of supple generosity. His full-lipped mouth, heavy black moustache, and the distance between his eyes were in
keeping with the volume of head and body. The brown face had a gipsy-like quality, and if I had met him ill-dressed on an English street I should have put him down as a dealer in rags, rabbit skins
or cat’s meat—but he had every appearance of vulgar prosperity.

He cocked one leg over the other—a leg trousered in utility flannel with a startling yellow stripe—and I noticed a certain carelessness in his dress. I had no doubt that he was
unaware of it, for a healthy carelessness seemed to be in character with the face. When I got up to go, I said to him in the low and reverent voice that one uses for such absurd communication: