The High Place (15 page)

‘The Slave of God and of his Glory,’ I answered. ‘I could wish they were more appropriate.’

‘I see a bishop is lost in you, and I take heart,’ he said. ‘Plainly I have confessed more than I should, but may I not have, my dear sir, my complement of vultures like the
rest of us?’

‘And the liver otherwise in good condition?’

‘Undeservedly, yes. Well, Amberson,’ he added, accom­panying me across the tarmac to the plane, and waving away some officials, ‘if it can be arranged that I may deal with
the syndicate through you, I will cross the Mediterranean at any time to do so.’

3

Back in El Mina and my own familiar office, I could not get rid of an uneasiness which I now see to have been a formless sense of guilt. Awaiting me was a mass of work—a mass, that is, if
measured by hours, for there was little paper. There were just messages from casual customers, officials, transport con­tractors and the like, who wished to see me and to spend solemn hours of
talk and coffee.

I had always had the patience for this genial method of doing business; indeed I enjoyed the slow and profitable pace of it. Yet in the two busy days after my return from Istanbul, I found
myself restless as any European dealing with Arabs for the first time in his life. To what I looked forward, for what purpose I grudged the hours, I did not know. It was not that I specially longed
for Elisa or was impatient for her coming. That longing was constant, and I could live with it. I still must live with it.

I was continually thinking of Ashkar, clinging to Ashkar’s honest, badly-shaven face. The association was of course through Eugen Sosa, but I could not imagine why Ashkar and his dark
valleys should be, as it were, a patch of radiance in my mind, while all else had taken on that blackness from which, impatiently, one turns outwards to anything present—a biting of the nails,
or drink or suicide, which is, I suppose, to hurl oneself into the most absolute present possible.

Elisa had sent me a wire from Aleppo that I was to expect her about the third night. She came early, and at sunset we were together on the terrace. Her mood was very different to that of our
last meeting; her poise was more eager, and the line of her body, at Kasr-el-Sittat so grave and upright, flowed as if drawn by a swift stroke of charcoal. Gay and relaxed, she strode between chair
and parapet with the litheness of some delightful boy. She may have consciously considered her throwing-off of the cares of the day to be masculine, for she had her vanities, and they were baseless
as those of all lovable creatures; but in fact her body had no masculine attribute but length of limb, and that too slender for any man.

I desired to prolong the moment, to talk of nothing, to watch her. She did not press for my news. She too must have known that in the peace of the evening we were closer than passion or the
common task had ever bound us. It was not until the sun was far over the horizon, and the sea turned from amethyst to grey, that she spoke of my mission.

When I told her of Poss and FitzErnest, she laughed.

‘Yes, we knew all about that,’ she said. ‘Poss did the right thing, and very discreetly. It was easy for him to trace the con­nection between Rosa and FitzErnest, and if
you’re sure he didn’t look beyond, it doesn’t matter. I don’t like FitzErnest any more than Poss did, but he’s efficient.’

‘English?’ I asked.

‘His grandfather was. But I don’t know what FitzErnest calls himself. He’s a little pale snake with sandy hair—Belgian, Dutch or one of the respectable kinds of German.
He’s Czoldy’s man, and he can’t get away.’

She pronounced those four contemptuous words as if they were a statement of unalterable fact. I do not know what hold Czoldy had upon FitzErnest. It may have been as simple as cocaine, or as
complex as a hysteria induced by some proven and practical psycho-damnation.

‘A little man,’ she said. ‘Shall we always have to prove such creatures, Eric?’

‘When?’

‘When the State has gone, and Kasr-el-Sittat is an island. No, I’m not thinking of another flood, with you and me as Noah and his wife’—she smiled at my puzzled
expression like some queen-priestess officiating before a suburban altar—‘but my vision is always of Kasr-el-Sittat as an island. Don’t you see it?’

I said that indeed it seemed to me an island of beauty and idealism.

   ‘God, what a reputation!’ she laughed. ‘The schoolgirl heart of—what was it Poss called you—Abdul Aziz! Eric, my dear, do you think I had nothing in my
mind but tobacco when I chose that site? What is the path of the armies? Where have they always marched? The coast road and Palestine. Deir ez Zor and down the Euphrates. All around our island, to
which there is no road.

  ‘Eric, you know the practice of war. You’ve seen it. Suppose that all the Middle East were in flames. Imagine the armies, burnt, tormented, isolated, all frontiers gone, every
man know­ing that war will go on another twenty years and that there can only be one end to it. What attention would they pay to Kasr-el-Sittat? Tell me—quite literally—from your
experience in Syria?’

 ‘All frontiers gone,’ I repeated, impressed by the certain truth of the phrase. ‘Then you would have a military governor at Aleppo or Antioch or Alexandretta. And his
representative in your district—it’s remote and harmless, you see—would probably be a corporal, and not within five miles of you at that.’

 ‘That’s what I mean,’ she answered, ‘though I hadn’t got as far as your corporal. Now go a little further with me, Eric, and think hard of the next war. After
a few years of it, which side would the military governor of Aleppo be on?’

I said that I could only speak for my own nation, and that if the military governor were a British colonel, a British colonel he would remain.

‘Yes? With no pay for him or his men? No food but what he could commandeer? No ships. No petrol. No orders from the starving rioters at home. Oh, don’t you see that whether your
colonel was American or English or Russian or French, from then on he’s an Aleppo colonel!

‘And in Europe, too. The Russian governor of Manchester, the American governor of Kiev, they must forget their nation­ality in order to keep alive. Their homeland is where they are,
for they have no other. All they can do is each to organize his district, so that he and his troops and their women and their labour do not starve, and to form his own frontier against disease and
radio-activity and rebellion. For such a world as that, Eric, Kasr-el-Sittat is prepared. We have the organization and the trained men to ride that storm. And we have our headquarters,
self-supporting, remote, safe. Now do you see why I call Kasr-el-Sittat an island?’

‘Anarchy——’ I began, and with the word I saw the essence of Kasr-el-Sittat, the permanent substance of the amœba.

‘Yes, Eric, anarchy,’ she interrupted. ‘All of them, generals, philosophers, even politicians, admit that another war must end in anarchy. They try to terrify the people with
their talk of anarchy. They never see that it is preferable to the tyranny of the State. Anarchy—it is the only way to save the future of man, to preserve him from the soulless slavery of the
hive. There is no solution but disaster. Then the social groups can begin again, guided by those of us who are left, resolved never again to return to Money and Law and Industry—all which
gives them an illusion of prosperity so that they breed and breed until they have to sell their souls to the State in exchange for food and security.

‘A clean sweep, Eric. A fluid world in which the State cannot function. Nothing stands between us and that but the patience of Western statesmen. Nothing but their ridiculous little
patience! Our fate is in their hands, not the Russians! The Kremlin is terrified of war, but also terrified to lose power. They are fatalists. If war comes, it comes. And it would come
to­morrow if your British and American statesmen lost their patience. Imagine that for a day, at any conference, they had the mentality of Berchtold or Conrad von Hotzendorf!’

‘And if war made the State, everywhere, stronger than be­fore?’ I asked. ‘It always has.’

She replied that without the means of production, without transport or communications, the modern state must cease to exist. Communities would slowly be reborn, no more resembling the great
nations than the communities of the Dark Ages re­sembled the over-governed, bankrupt Roman provinces.

The permanent absence of the amœba. She hadn’t meant to reveal it to me. That the Secretariat should protect them­selves and their ideas from war by the creation of a sane island
was reasonable enough. That Elisa herself might even hope for war I could imagine and forgive. But now, knowing her and her companions and their relentless logic as I did, I could follow their
thought to the end. Another war, far surpassing the last two in bitterness and ruin, would infallibly destroy the industrial state. The Secretariat were deliberately working to provoke that war. It
was the solution, the mad, triumphant last line of their otherwise hopeless problem, and I knew that not one of them would shrink from it.

I had grasped her vision and her intent, but that night I could take neither of them seriously. I could think only of the impact of our world upon her, of the agony she had suffered, of the
bright flame that remained to her in the place of a human soul. I lay awake with her dark head on my shoulder, and told my­self that so much power for evil could not in fact exist in a woman
abandoned to sleep and her lover. I said to myself that you don’t hold a Lenin in your arms. For some reason this absurd argument satisfied me. It seemed to put the final seal on the
impossible.

She awoke radiant. Never had I seen her so free from dedi­cation. Or is memory coloured because I know and cannot bear to think that she was near to love? If only we could have had week
after week together, my house might have become a keener reality to her than Kasr-el-Sittat. Time, I wanted time—time for the devouring angel to be disconcerted by the steadi­ness of
love, by its idleness. But why conjecture what is not in the world’s pattern? I could not hold her. Even that morning I could not keep her from her car. And when I begged her to stay, she let
fall, still quite merrily, the last deadly detail I needed to complete the picture.

‘I must get back,’ she said, ‘Gisorius is coming to-night and leaving to-morrow for Paris.’

‘How?’

‘Over the border.’

‘What a passion he has for cloak-and-dagger! Why not go by train from Aleppo?’

‘Reasons,’ she laughed. ‘For example, he might not want it known that he had been in Syria.’

I do not know what business I did, nor how I passed the day, but that was always so after I had seen her. The automatism of a man’s work is never so obvious as after some uncounted
in­terval when he had only to turn his head to beauty or stretch out his hand to touch it, when every word of the beloved was sought and accepted for a profounder meaning.

In the evening thought could no longer be dismissed. I left my house to get away from the ghost of her, and went out along the deserted shore. Again and again I told myself that my imagination
was out of control. But the evidence was insistent. I will not say it was clear.

That gross and damnable Oliver Poss with his cursed cigars! Why did he have to call on me in Tripoli? Why did the fool have to open my eyes to what he didn’t know himself? If only I had
been left alone to worship Elisa and win her back to the wealth of life, a thousand things might have interposed to pre­vent her outrage upon history. Why could I not remain in ignor­ance?
I can cry with Adam why did I eat, but not that the woman tempted me. She had no wish at all that I should share her knowledge, and as yet no suspicion that I had—for she did not know the
secret of Eugen Rosa’s disappearance.

That was the key. Eugen Rosa was to have taken over Poss’s shipment and delivered it to UNO’s commissariat; and I knew that Rosa had carried on his person a box of Urgin’s
doped cigars. Selim, who had smoked one or more of them, had been drunk and afflicted—boasting, said Ashkar, as if to an Aleppo whore. That was why my mind had been mysteriously obsessed with
Ashkar on my return from Istanbul. That was why Elisa’s political ranting, which otherwise I might have taken—and in past weeks had taken—as a mere private explosion of her mania
for destruction, was now plain to me as the Secretariat’s in­tended, practical policy.

I sat down on the sand and wrote in my note-book, to com­pel my thoughts into some kind of order, what I knew or sus­pected. Before I got up to go, I tore out and burned those leaves,
but this was their sense:

The matter of the cigars had, for me, a simplicity which I do not think it had for Elisa. Hers was not a mind for petty plotting. She did not plan a logical sequence of exact
events, all of which might be upset by a single miscalculation. She created, far more dangerously, a relation structure into which events might fall in any chance pattern or order so long as they
conformed to the structure. If she could call into existence, even for a week, another Kaiser Wilhelm II, the effects of his in­stability of character could not be foreseen, could not be
con­trolled, but among them would be War. A little alcohol for safety’s sake. A Coriolano from Czoldy’s box. And there you had a man who would express his recent resentments with
the same mastery as the Kaiser.