The High Place (22 page)

The thought of bloodshed at Kasr-el-Sittat was abominable.

‘I intend nothing against her,’ he said, ‘even if I win. I must know what there is—that is all. How is she?’

‘Impatient. A flame of impatience.’

‘She is not the only one.’

I asked him what part he wished me to play, and was thank­ful when he answered me that my part was over. I was to be­have, he said, as a mere visitor until I was needed. He assured me
that it would be made perfectly plain to Elisa that I was not permitted to see her.

I was thankful, I say. It seemed to me that I would be an exception to the law of the universe, and escape responsibility for my own acts. I even hoped—and there, I think, Juan was with
me—that I might help in the resurrection of Elisa’s spirit.

When I came out of my bungalow into the windy morning, the palace revolution was all over. Juan’s timing had been faultless. He allowed the early risers to breakfast in peace and to go to
their work on the road or the estate. He then arrested Osterling and Gisorius, who were too incredulous to resist, re­moved them to Elisa’s bungalow and put a guard over all three.
Simultaneously his partisans seized the power station, the ex­plosives store, Osterling’s office and the wireless transmitter. There was no violence, beyond the sudden and painless
over­whelming of the two men. From Osterling Juan took his keys, and from Gisorius a pistol. Gisorius wasn’t the sort of man to go to breakfast without a hidden pistol, rule or no
rule.

All this happened a little after eight o’clock when half Kasr-el-Sittat was in the dining-hall. Ten minutes later Juan himself came to the hall, and addressed the astonished colonists in
his harsh, astringent English. For the sake of those whose command of the language was still weak, Lucia translated him into French and Russian. I missed Juan’s own explanation, but came in
while she was interpreting.

I think I have already made it clear that the colonists of Kasr-el-Sittat were all most purely dedicated, as any priests, to the salvation of man from the grey hell that awaited him; yet they
knew no more of the practical details of their battle against the State than the average taxpayer of his government’s economics, or the cooks, typists and engineers in a political
war­fare headquarters of the devices employed to destroy the enemy’s morale. Juan gave little away. He was careful as the Secretariat to cover up the extent, the methods and the
per­sonalities of the movement. What he told them was that the proletarian wing of the party had disagreed with the policy and central control of the Secretariat, and especially with their
in­sistence on war as a short-cut to the world of voluntary asso­ciation. He had taken over, he said, all communications, and he asked them not to attempt to leave the colony. There would
be no violence, and their work and way of living would be un­disturbed.

Yes, his palace revolution was a masterpiece—and yet, for our purposes, futile. We had not got the wireless codes, and so could send no message to Czoldy that he would believe. Juan had
confidently expected to find all the details of the wireless traffic in Osterling’s safe, but they were not there and could not be discovered. His only course, therefore, was to send his
messages en clair to such chiefs of his own party abroad as he knew personally and could trust.

He met with utter defeat. The wireless operator was an im­pressionable German. Lucia won him over by some complex ideological nonsense as well as personal charm, and he had promised to come
in with Juan. He would have sent off a sheaf of cyphers without bothering in the least about their meaning: when, however, he saw the messages which he was expected to transmit, his melancholy
Teutonic mind simplified the whole issue into one of loyalty. He hadn’t he said, any objection to war as a political weapon. War was a redeemer in itself. He re­fused to send a single
message without Osterling’s direct order.

His damned obstinacy grew by feeding on itself. He wouldn’t even give us the details of the times, the traffic and the call-signs; and when Juan locked him up in the house behind
Elisa’s so that the same guard could look after the lot, he yelled out what he had done, in triumph at his own exceptional virtue, as if he had been heiling Hitler.

2

Kasr-el-Sittat that morning was objectless, inconsequent as a dream. There were none of the brisk movements of the daily round, no normality of motive. The colonists formed their un­happy
groups and spoke in lowered voices. Sheep, Juan called them. Yet remember that not long ago they had been displaced persons accustomed by the years to a future without hope or plan, their only
national status that of an intolerable nuisance. They were conditioned to the dilemma of refugees: that so long as spirit remained, they were a menace to good order; when it had gone, they were
objects of contempt.

Shy, puzzled, dejected, they hesitated on the paths of Kasr-el-Sittat, or passed, looking backwards, to their work. And I, I felt myself to be one of them. I had not the effrontery to compare my
suffering with theirs—though, God knows, no scientist can measure in his decibels the crying of the soul—but we were alike in this: that we had dwelt in a vision of peace and seen it
vanish while still we lived.

To them, too, the scene must have presented a horrid fami­liarity. There were the pickets, plainly to be seen; pickets in paradise. It was the old game of tough men and eager women, dark
hair in the wind, holding the key positions. They had no rifles, no lethal oddments slung from those waists which were intended for each other’s hands. That was the only difference.

Even so the colony preserved its air of holiness. Our anciently consecrated hill, where, whatever the work, one could hear the stirring of trees and the rush of water, compelled the colonists to
mark and to abide by the complete peace of this revolution in their midst.

Do nothing, Juan had said. Well, what else could I do? Out­wardly I was a mere member of a disconcerted public. Elisa’s bungalow stared at the green on the hilltop. She might as well
have been out. No one shook the door. No one gesticulated at the barred windows. There can have been little peace within. Yet, when I was about to surrender all my emotions to pity of Elisa, I
remembered that she and her two companions were the more powerful, and must know it. They had nothing to lose by allowing Juan’s adherents to stand on their self-conscious guard till they
tired of it, till this flash-in-a-pan of a revolution burned itself out. Their creation was finished; there was no fur­ther touch that they could add to ensure the progress of their apocalyptic
vision, and nothing we could do to stop it. They knew we couldn’t use the wireless. Osterling had merely laughed at Juan’s threats and questions.

When Kasr-el-Sittat gathered again in the dining-hall there was too much silence. The colonists that second winter num­bered nearly two hundred, and Juan’s partisans were not more than
forty. Time and the hundred and sixty puzzled neutrals were on the side of inaction. Since I was known to be Elisa’s intimate friend, the colonists talked to me freely. Nothing kept them from
mass protest but fear of the unknown; they weren’t even sure what the Secretariat would want them to do. I muddled public opinion as far as I could by suggesting that the Secretar­iat
might have expected and welcomed this outbreak, but I could feel that in my harmless companions were stirring memories of that world of direct political action which they thought to have escaped
for ever. Juan’s hope of control without violence was running down with every tick of the clock in the dining-hall.

At two in the afternoon Urgin, of all people, took a car from the garage, rushed the gate guard and tried to make a break for the outside. He drove at the boulder-strewn diversion like a cinema
hero, and that of course was the end of his front axle. When Juan asked him what the devil he was up to, he said that he was going to fetch the police. Whether it was devotion to Elisa or to
research that created this sudden passion for law and order I do not know. He certainly preserved his reputation as an original thinker.

There was no sure way of preventing anyone who wished from leaving Kasr-el-Sittat on foot or horse, and sending a tele­gram; but apart from the Secretariat and Juan Villaneda him­self,
there were few who knew any actual names and addresses of responsible chiefs abroad. Thus the danger that Czoldy could be warned to ignore all orders from Kasr-el-Sittat was very small.

Juan’s partisans, however, were thin on the ground for all they had to do. After Urgin’s unsuccessful attempt, he decided to close the road. A heavy tractor was driven to that smooth
little gorge where the bridge girders were in position, and toppled over into the cataract. The level of the ford rose at once by a couple of feet. That put an end to all fear of his prisoners
making a swift escape by car, and enabled Juan to take his guards off the garage and the gate.

I can only conjecture what debate went on that night within Elisa’s bungalow. The three must have thought that their guards were unarmed, and that a determined effort to break out and call
for help might well be successful. To Elisa and Osterling, however, the walls of the bungalow were not the walls that mat­tered. If Juan had merely drawn a chalk circle round them, the
opposition to their will would have been neither more nor less effective. Osterling was no man for a rough and tumble, and for Elisa it was unthinkable. She did not live on a plane where violence
was decisive.

No, to a pair of their intelligence the issue was plainly one of moral force against moral force. They needed only patience, and when war came the whole colony and party would unite for
self-protection and the training of future leaders. Precipitate action could only lead to a lessening of their prestige.

This common—or shall I call it spiritual?—sense must have been most unwelcome to Gisorius. He was a man of action whose life for years had been insecure. Elisa and Osterling could
both remain unaffected by the terrorism of their eastern policy. Gisorius had it always upon his conscience. And so he saw the crisis as immediate, and the problem as one that could be solved by
violence. His view of Kasr-el-Sittat was very different to that of his colleagues. To him as to them it was an island, but its isolation was a mere convenience. That its whole future might be
wrecked by treating it as an island where some black or mis­sionary potentate could be knocked on the head and deposed did not occur to him.

I suspect that Elisa and Osterling very reluctantly agreed that Gisorius should escape so long as he could do so peacefully. It wasn’t difficult. God had ordered his bungalows to be built
with­out any means of access to the roofs; so the contractors, who had estimated for normal Arab roofs, strong enough to support the whole family and the drying of the grain, saw a literally
god-sent chance of profit. They covered the houses with laths and a thin layer of cement.

Gisorius put Elisa’s table on her desk, and a chair on that. He surrounded this tower of furniture with bedding to soften the noise of falling plaster, and went to work. So much was
obvious, afterwards, from the mess, but I don’t know when he started or how long it took him. He drove the main breach by inserting a bar between brick and cement at the outlet of the stove
chim­ney, and for a second or two he must have made a lot of noise. The guard heard it all right but when they looked into the bungalow they found Elisa and Osterling awkwardly moving a bed
from room to room, and were wished a pleasant good evening.

Gisorius, I am sure, had promised to go straight for Aleppo and the frontier, and to take over temporary control of the whole movement from Istanbul. Above all, Elisa and Osterling must have
wanted information; they knew that Juan Villaneda had penetrated their secret intentions, but they did not know how or through whom or if he alone was the employer of Ash­kar. They cannot have
imagined that Gisorius would be such a fool as to try to use the wireless; they were quite content to be certain that we could not.

The routine of the guards was simple to evade, for they remained outside the door and occasionally strolled round the house to see that all window bars were intact. Gisorius dropped to the soft
ground at the back, and got away unnoticed. Then he must have reconnoitred the garage and found, to his surprise, that it was wide open, and the cars unguarded. There wasn’t even any need to
stalk one of Juan’s partisans and hit him over the head with a spanner. That aroused his suspicion, for he very intelligently went down the road to the ford, where he was seen but not
recognized.

Gisorius, like so many underground leaders, could instil patience into others, but had very little himself. He could have got clear away on foot, in spite of the watch on every regular path out
of the colony, but it would have taken him some time across country to reach the frontier or Aleppo. He must have thought, too, that Ashkar could be called in against him. Against such opposition,
moving at night or very cautiously by day, it might have been thirty-six hours before he reached a station or a hirable car, and another two days to Istanbul. This to a man of his temperament was
an eternity; so he turned back into the colony—perhaps to get a better picture of Juan’s tactics, per­haps to see if there were a guard on the stables.

What he found was that Osterling’s office and the wireless room were occupied only by Lucia. There was no reason at all to expect any attempt on the administrative buildings. Lucia was
acting more as duty clerk than anything else. Juan couldn’t spare a man to accompany or relieve her, but because she was nervous at being left alone he had given her Gisorius’
pistol.

Gisorius prowled around that bungalow like a tiger around the flimsy shelter of some native telegraph clerk. Against the swift and supple man Lucia had no chance at all. She couldn’t tell
us how he got in or what happened. She woke up to find a gag in her mouth, and Gisorius completing the lashings around her ankles. She wasn’t much hurt. I imagine that Gisorius, who had
carried so much theoretical training into actual experience, could nicely measure a knockout, like a length of time-fuse, so that it lasted for ten seconds or all eternity.