The High Place (23 page)

It was then nearly 2.45 a.m., one of the scheduled times, as we found out afterwards, when the Kasr-el-Sittat station stood by for incoming messages, Gisorius, of course, knew this, and was
himself a competent signaller, I can picture him looking at his watch outside the office, suddenly realizing his opportunity, deciding to gamble on getting through to Istanbul—and damn the
immediate consequences!

The wireless room opened off Osterling’s office, to which it was connected by a short passage with two doors. The first was an ordinary painted door, like that of a cupboard, opening
outwards; the second was a swing door, padded on both sides to deaden sound. The room had no outside windows, and was ventilated by two shafts, in one of which was a fan.

After tying up Lucia and recovering his pistol, Gisorius entered the wireless room and coded a signal to Istanbul, instructing them to ignore all orders from Kasr-el-Sittat until he, Osterling
or Elisa turned up in person—the message to be repeated to western stations and passed urgently to Czoldy. We found his signal written out on a pad alongside the key of the transmitter. We
also found the codes, call-signs, time schedules and frequencies, for which Juan had searched in vain. They had been kept in a cleverly concealed steel cupboard let into the panelling of the
passage between the two doors. Anyone working with Osterling in his office would think he put the codes away in the wireless room, and the operator would think he kept them in his safe.

The instrument was unfamiliar, and Gisorius spent some minutes in mastering it. Meanwhile the electrician at the power plant noticed the load. There were few lights on in the colony, and no farm
machinery was working. He assumed therefore that Kasr-el-Sittat was transmitting. For all he knew, we might have found an operator, so he didn’t cut off the current. He went to find Juan who
was in his quarters half-way down the colony.

Juan ran to Osterling’s office, taking the electrician with him—for the office was nearer by several minutes than the power plant. On the way he hammered at the window of the guest
bungalow, and shouted that I was to follow him. I was the only one of his supporters who could be reached without going out of his way; and I was doing, as I had been told to do, nothing—a
sleepless nothing so feverish that even the next minutes of action have not wiped it from memory.

Juan and the electrician burst into the office and tumbled through the first door of the wireless room, the electrician lead­ing—for Juan had just stopped in his stride to slash at the
tie and handkerchiefs with which Lucia was bound. Gisorius was already in contact with Istanbul. I can understand his excite­ment. It was the future of the world as he desired it against a
man’s life; and he believed so profoundly in his own moral right that no other could govern, even for a moment, his impulse. As the swing door opened and the electrician shouted, Gisorius
shot him dead and called out that the next man to come through would get the same. Juan recognized Gisorius’ voice and pulled the electrician’s feet clear of the door, which swung to.
Anyone else he might have tackled, but Gisorius, armed and with the initiative, could not be rushed.

I was close behind, having stopped only to fling a mackintosh over my pyjamas, and it was at this moment that I arrived. The door from the office into the passage was open, and I could hear the
faint buzzing of the transmitter as Juan dragged out the electrician’s body. I made nothing of his flash of explanation except that Gisorius was in there and armed. Lucia stumbled past me on
her way to find someone to cut off the power.

Juan himself had a weapon. That morning his partisans had made a score of them in the explosives store. The peace of their revolution was illusory. He drew from his pocket a small, round tobacco
tin, lit the stub of fuse projecting from a hole in the lid, waited, opened the swing-door three inches and rolled it through. The buzzer stopped as Gisorius jumped for the far corner, or for the
shelter of a desk. The bang was little louder than that of a 12-bore gun to the firer. A lump of metal from the inside of the tin struck the upper part of the door.

Juan ordered him to come out, but Gisorius’ only answer was to fire a short burst at the door, and then continue his dots and dashes.

‘Lie down,’ Juan whispered to me, ‘and keep his attention on the door.’

I did so. I don’t suppose I was there more than half a minute. Even Gisorius’ magnificent concentration could not deal with earphones and key, a door that kept on swinging and
shutting, and once an inkpot that rolled through. He guessed that I—or, as he probably thought, Juan—would be lying down, and he splintered the door on the level of my head. Then he
turned to the buzzer again; but I could tell from rhythm and repetition that no coherent message was going out.

Then I heard two explosions on the other side of the door. Gisorius seemed to fall, get up and blunder about the room. Juan ran in, and told me he had dropped one of his tins down each
ventilator shaft. I answered, feeling sick and guilty, that they had been effective. I knew none of that overwhelming relief which in war masquerades as a bitter exhilaration.

Gisorius was horribly wounded. His flank was laid open from lung to kidney. He must have jumped away from the first explosion, which had done no damage, and backed towards the whirling fan just
as the second tin demolished it. Even so he fired again, but couldn’t lift the pistol off the floor. Juan took it away from him, and put him out of pain with the last round in the magazine.
It may have been merciful. I do not know and will not think of it. All I can say in Juan’s defence is that those who are accustomed to use such a weapon as his tin must not shrink, as I
should, from the only antidote.

He was unaffected. The look which he gave to Gisorius’ body held something of a silent salute, but little pity; he showed more human emotion in his excitement at finding the code-book and
sheets of cyphers. He had sacrificed his sensitivity to his ideals as devotedly as Elisa—Elisa, who, four hundred yards away, was listening so keenly that I was conscious of her. Love of the
mass, and hatred of the mass—only their clear-sighted dread of the State could have united the two fanaticisms of Juan and Elisa.

Of simple public opinion Juan, at least, was swiftly reminded. While we were carrying Gisorius into Osterling’s office and tidy­ing him up to lie alongside the electrician, the lights
went out. We became aware that at all the windows were a few white faces watching us. They were like the puzzled ghosts of the masses who have been sacrificed to the masses. When Juan went to the
door and spoke to them, they dispersed. Ghosts do.

Only Phil Grynes remained. He followed Juan into the room, and reported to me, as it were, for action. He had even acquired a torch from somewhere, and was dressed in two sweaters and heavy
trousers, ready for any emergency. He looked like a boxer out for his morning run.

I murmured something to the effect that the wireless had been wrecked by a lunatic: that it was all either needless or useless—I forget which.

‘Didn’t know they had one,’ Grynes answered. ‘Shall I see what can be done?’

Juan and I stared at him. It had never occurred to us that Phil Grynes might be a signaller. He and Tabas were too odd to be really considered as permanent members of the colony, and their
trades had never been card-indexed. I, who knew the armoured cars of the Palestine Police and their stations built and equipped to stand siege, should have guessed that an ex-sergeant might well be
a wireless expert.

Grynes’ discipline saw him through the condition of that passage and the room. The offence to the eye was bad enough; the slight adhesion of linoleum to the feet was worse. We brought him
a fresh chair, and he sat down to examine the set, while Juan went up to the power plant to turn on the current.

Phil Grynes said little. So far as his personal sympathies were concerned, he had no need yet to commit himself. The colony’s property was damaged. His job was to assist the colony. That,
I think, was how he saw it. Ten years’ police service had given him plenty of practice in trying not to think beyond his immediate duty.

He answered my too eager questions in monosyllables. There was no obvious damage to the transmitter except a dent in the case out of which was sticking a bent bolt with a nut threaded on
it—one of the bits of scrap metal with which Juan’s tins were packed.

When Juan returned, Phil Grynes put on the earphones.

‘Set’s working,’ he said at once.

He listened, switched over, and began to tap with a more professional certainty than Gisorius. Then he lifted the ear­phones and asked me if he should sign off.

‘What’s the language?’ I enquired.

‘English.’

‘Ask them how far they received the last message.’

‘First six groups clear,’ he replied after an interval. ‘Please repeat next four groups which are unintelligible.’

‘Ask them to repeat back all groups as received.’

He gave us the cypher groups which Gisorius had sent. We had in front of us the books and figures which he had used, so it was quick and easy to compare the message he had written on the pad
with the groups of numerals below it.

Istanbul had received:

FROM FOUR ON BEHALF OF SECRETARIAT TO

NINE REPEAT LONDON NEW YORK PARIS

The rest, which Gisorius had tried to transmit with one eye on the door, was hopelessly mutilated except for a group mean­ing URGENT FOR CZOLDY, which had only one figure wrong and could be
guessed.

‘Tell them that we’re having trouble with the power,’ I said to Grynes, ‘and that we hope to repeat the message at …’

I looked at Juan, who had the wireless schedules in front of him. for information.

‘There’s an emergency time at 10.30 a.m.,’ he said.

Grynes tapped out the message and closed down.

Juan locked up Osterling’s office and put a guard on it. He also doubled the number of his partisans at the power plant, and made it his headquarters. Grynes and I went back to my bungalow
and had a much-needed drink. He preserved his silence, and there was an element of disapproval in it.

‘If she got out, you know,’ he said suddenly, ‘that would be the end.’

I agreed. It would indeed be the end. There was no explosive which Juan held with the energy of Elisa.

‘Then why not do it?’ he suggested. ‘I don’t mean by force. Just demand her. All of us.’

It was a shock to me to remember that he knew nothing of the conflict behind this palace revolution, and that he could not doubt I would be on Elisa’s side. He had accepted my presence
with Juan in the wireless room as something reprehensible which I could not avoid.

‘Phil, what are your politics?’ I asked, meaning to appeal to his simplicity by whatever was the shortest cut.

‘I wouldn’t be here if I had any,’ he answered.

‘I mean, in general.’

‘I haven’t any,’ he repeated. ‘I used to be leftish. But then there was Palestine. And now Anton. I’ve been thinking a queer thing lately. Some of these chaps may
have put it into my head. The more corrupt politics are, the better. All the misery is caused by well-meaning, honest fellows who think they’ve got a cure-all and stick at nothing to put it
into practice.’

‘Well, you’re up against cure-alls here,’ I told him. ‘And they may be both wrong, but there’s no doubt which you’ll choose.’

I explained to him that the Kasr-el-Sittat he knew was merely the setting for the headquarters of a new Anarchist Party: that we were all agreed in a policy of active opposition to the State,
but that the leaders were divided. The Secretariat was convinced that war, by annihilation of industrial centres, by famine and radio-activity, must destroy the modern State so utterly that
humanity could return to the true track of progress through small voluntary associations. They had worked for war, and were on the verge of success. Juan Villaneda, on the other hand, loved the
living masses too deeply to slaughter them for the happiness of future generations.

‘And where do you come in?’ he asked.

‘With Juan. I agree with him in nothing else, but accept war.’

Then I told him why Juan had taken over control of the colony, and what Gisorius had been trying to do.

‘It’s God’s mercy, Phil,’ I said, ‘that you’re a wireless operator. Now we can recall Czoldy and the worst of the risk is over. In a way, for the next
twenty-four hours, there’s no one in the world more important than you.’

‘Plenty of ’em,’ he replied. ‘And Anton for one.’

‘But you can do what he can’t.’

‘Yes, I suppose I can. Makes you wonder if it’s worth doing, doesn’t it?’

‘Do you want to see your country in another war?’

‘No. But all this doing’—he stressed the word with a certain disgust, as of one who had experienced a whole lifetime of use­less and devoted action—‘where does
it get you? There’s been enough doing for your twenty-four hours—that’s what I think. And I only know what’s right for me. I’m not a politician. I don’t know
what’s right for the rest of the world.’

‘Phil,’ I said, ‘I loathe violence as much as you, and especially at Kasr-el-Sittat. But this isn’t a moment to turn Quaker on me. And even if that is your point of view,
your duty is still clear.’

‘Two men murdered to date,’ he answered. ‘How many more do you want just to avoid what may not happen? I can’t under­stand this weighing of blood against blood. They
always get the result all wrong, you see. You’re right for you. And I know Anton respects you. But it doesn’t mean you’re right for me.’

I thought that Grynes didn’t believe me, so I began to tell him the story again. He stopped me, and said he didn’t have a doubt that I’d put the alternatives fairly, but that
he felt, some­how, that all this was an outrage upon Kasr-el-Sittat. I shouted, out of an evil conscience, that of course it was, but I couldn’t help it—and if he hadn’t the
sense to see his plain duty, let him ask Anton.

He was very worried. He said that he owed me, too, a lot, and that if I really thought Anton would have no hesitation, I must be right. It wasn’t Anton’s sort of problem, but
certainly we would find him and ask.