The High Place (25 page)

‘Perhaps he doesn’t know what it’s all about,’ she said—and it seems to me now that she avoided the direct question of whether I did nor not. ‘Or have they
persuaded you that it’s for my own good, Eric?’

I cried to her that there was nothing I could do, letting her take my distress in any sense she pleased.

‘I was only asking. Remember that we are prisoners. Is Gisorius dead? Or is that just something they have told us?’

‘He is dead,’ I answered.

‘Why? Killed trying to escape?’

‘He murdered your electrician first,’ I replied indignantly.

‘A strong word, Amberson.’ Osterling protested. ‘But you never liked him, did you?’

He was sitting a little behind Elisa, who paid no attention to his casual tone. His eyes were fixed steadily on mine, and in them was a bitter admiration. My own vehemence had given me away
completely to him. He knew at long last that I had been the enemy, but, for the sake of Elisa and the uncharted future, he had quickly covered me. In that second of no speech we exchanged more
facts than were ever resolved by our many hours of conversation.

Elisa pressed me with questions. Because of Poss’s presence I told her that it was in the shed containing the milking-machine that Gisorius had been cornered, and I described the weapon
which Juan’s partisans had made for themselves.

‘And our guards—they have these tins too?’ she asked.

I answered emphatically that they certainly had. I wanted to discourage her from taking risks. I should have known better.

‘And that is all? Just force? I thought Juan Villaneda had a stronger weapon.’

‘It’s beastly enough,’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t deny it, Eric my dear! But I feared his arm might be public opinion.’

She strode to the window. There were perhaps a dozen of the colonists upon the green, smoking and resting before going to their tasks of the afternoon. The group stirred when they saw her. I
wished that I too had been outside and watching, that I might have felt, for a moment of oblivion, their leaping of the heart at the sight of that treasured face.

‘Then why are we here?’ she asked, turning towards us. ‘We will all walk out together.’

She stood with her back to the window, her long and exquisite arms spread out on each side of her towards the sill, relaxed and smiling, as if the solution was so simple.

And it
was
simple. To keep back just Elisa and Osterling, the four guards could merely have linked obstinate arms. It would have been enough; no one wanted an undignified scuffle with all its
incalculable effects. Faced by four of us, however, the guards had either to let us pass or threaten death; and their weapon, though deadly in assault or defence, was no arm for a sentry. It
couldn’t be poked or pointed. It had to be lit and thrown.

Osterling got up and flicked from his coat the ashes of humiliation and too many cigarettes.

‘Or would you say, Amberson,’ he asked, ‘that walking out amounted to abuse of the Red Cross? But of course our only neutral is Poss. You, I take it, are wholly on our side.
Indeed, you may have come to us with some better plan?’

That was checkmate. Osterling, of course, reckoned that I would submit rather than declare myself in front of Elisa. He gambled that I would be a coward, and he won.

I cannot excuse my action. Yet there, her confident eyes on mine, was Elisa before me, still my beloved, still too precious to be shattered by so crude, immediate and wanton a revelation of my
treachery. I could not do it. And if a man were to tell me that the human relationship of love should have been noth­ing to me compared with my duty to our world, then he must agree that those
unfortunate children who accepted their highest duty as that towards their Nazi or Communist society, and for the sake of it betrayed their parents, were right to do so.

I answered Osterling, in a voice as blank as I could make it, that I hoped Elisa’s plan would work; and I was comforted to read in his face that, though victory was his, he hadn’t
the faint­est idea what to do with it.

There was not even any collision of bodies, let alone a blow. Poss threw open the door, genial and overbearing, and the three of us marched quickly out behind him. For a second or two the
bewildered guard accompanied us, shouting at Elisa and Osterling to return. Then the colonists ran across the green to meet us, and Juan’s four partisans were faced by a situation in which
they could only use violence or submit. One bayonet would have been enough, but they hadn’t got it. The worst of Juan’s weapon was its deliberation. You lit it. You held it for three
seconds—or five if you were a bold man with experience as a dinamitero—and then you had to get rid of it. And in that time the whole aspect of your little world of danger and emotion
might have changed.

One of the guards ran to find Juan. The other three remained some twenty paces from us, self-conscious, angry and power­less. I felt as they did. The influence of Elisa radiated too
strongly. She could not make us unfaithful to ourselves, but she could make us so doubt that action lost its joy and belief its certainty.

She sat down a few feet from where Tabas had slept that morning. Two of the colonists had already gone charging down the hill to round up the leaderless and eager sheep from dining-hall and
houses. There was nothing for her to do but to let the years of work fulfil their purpose. For the moment her spirit was free to hover delightedly over its own creation. I watched in eyes and mouth
the intensity of her dreams, as she gave her­self to my only rival, Kasr-el-Sittat.

Poss was unimpressed. The jest of her escape was over for him. He neither cared what he had done, nor saw the beauty of the freed falcon.

‘Elisa, my girl, I cannot conceive what you are doing in this paradise,’ he said, ‘and still less why you have to tinker with it. But knowing you as I do, I am aware that you
are about to make a bad situation intolerably worse.’

She turned to him confidently, almost lazily, and told him to mind his own business—in just those words. She had an ease in her dealings with Poss that was unfamiliar to me, and even, I
think, to her comrade, Osterling.

There was no rush to the hilltop, no self-arranging of the new arrivals into anything so formal as a bodyguard or an audience. Yet the gathering was swift. At one moment we were waiting; at the
next we were part of a normal Kasr-el-Sittat assembly. I was never so impressed by the freedom and dignity of the colonists. Voluntary association was not only their way of life, but in their
hearts.

When Juan arrived from the power plant with such of his partisans as he had been able to collect, he wisely remained outside the group and a little below it, ready for action. They were a party
of ten, all men. Their dry, determined faces con­trasted with those which surrounded Elisa. The difference was accidental, and largely due to the fact that the men and women easily available
for the support of the Secretariat at that time of day were those with intellectual interests; but it was a marked difference. Juan’s followers were silent and resolute as a bunch of
disciplined soldiery, Roman soldiery, watching some romantic prank of northern barbarians.

Undoubtedly Elisa was shaken. She had taken Juan’s revolu­tion as a flash-in-the-pan, owing its success only to its timing; she had not expected to meet so solid a core of opposition.
As she watched his partisans, she must have realized that force, at which she had jeered as a weapon of the weak, was a formidable adversary when backed by a belief in justice.

Standing by my side, she linked for a moment arm to arm, twining her hand over mine and pressing it against her hip.

‘So neutral, Eric,’ she reproached me. ‘And yet all I ask of you is what you have to give.’

I write her exact words, and I treasure the memory of them even though I know they were calculated. She cannot have fore­seen the detail or form in which the crisis would present itself; she
dealt only in probabilities, in the mood which should spread its circle of effects over the water of time. She knew—and it was enough—that violence and my reaction to her danger were
inevitable, and that she could put such a sequence of events to use.

I do not care. I cling to her words as a woman to the endear­ments of a past lover though she knows them to have been insincere. Is it not that she finds in them a deeper truth than any
intention of the speaker? So I take comfort that Elisa, my Salome, longed in her dark heart for the intertwining of our lives to end in her utter possession of me.

1

T
HE GROUP AROUND US NOW NUMBERED SOME FIFTY OR
sixty of the colonists. Elisa began to talk to them. It was not a speech. She
was careful not to mount upon any of those tempting blocks of ancient masonry.

Her voice was that voice in which she spoke to me. Only response to what she loved could so move her, and in any hearer there could be no doubt that love she did. Sound did not seem to be
produced in any hollow of her body. She was resonant, all of her, with a harsh sweetness; and the vibrations of skin and sinew were her only gestures.

‘I didn’t want to take you back into the world, not yet, not till we were all ready,’ she said. ‘There was no need. We have all of us known the agony of possessing
knowledge that was no use to us, that we didn’t want, that might condemn every friend and love we had to torture or death.’

She paused, and the silence round her was that of men and women who heard again the knocking at the door before dawn, the unwearying questions of the interrogator and the rustle of his file upon
the table.

‘I have tried to spare you any more of that. You trusted me, and so I could. But now, since the policy of your leaders has been challenged, I must tell you what it is. Our methods do not
matter. Not even Juan Villaneda has anything to say against them. We are all agreed that the happiness of future genera­tions justifies any methods, any means.

‘Our policy is more than opposition to the State. It is destruc­tion of the State. All of you know that Kasr-el-Sittat extends far beyond our own dear hill. All of you wish that it had
power. I tell you that it has, that your dreams are urgent realities. And if you believe, as you do, that the State is evil, illimitable, the ultimate, eternal damnation of mankind, then you must
not shrink from this moment.

‘The State everywhere, in every country, is about to destroy itself. Another war must be the end of it. Shall we or shall we not use our influence to prevent war? That is the only
difference between Juan Villaneda and your leaders.’

Her tone was almost casual. She put the profound conflict of policy as if it were merely some philosophical quarrel between well-read anarchists, excited over a new interpretation of their basic
creed. What she said was true enough, but the shape of the amœba that she presented would not have alarmed me if I had known no more than her hearers. There was no suggestion at all that the
Secretariat’s policy was deliberately intended to create war.

‘Avoid war, they say. Do not bring on a revolutionary era—no, not even when all advantage is on our side! Wait! Yes, they say Wait! Wait till the strength of our party is exposed!
Wait till the State can destroy us piecemeal in one country after another! Wait till we are proscribed like mad dog! Just a matter of routine for police officials anxious for promotion. How many of
your libertarian communists are left in Barcelona, Juan?

‘Kasr-el-Sittat’—her voice lengthened the vowels like a mother lingering over the name of her child—‘Kasr-el-Sittat, they can­not even control it for a day
without murder. Gisorius was the chief of our resistance in eastern Europe. You must know that even if you do not want to. Gisorius was the most devoted, selfless enemy of the most ruthless state
that has ever existed. They couldn’t kill him. That was left for us, Kasr-el-Sittat. It is our responsibility as well as Villaneda’s. I did not foresee. You did not resist. And so we
killed him.’

Then she asked them at least to remove and bury the bodies of their companions, and in a moment the whole sixty of us were flowing down the hill towards Osterling’s office.

It was a complete surprise. She had not indicated by any threat or rhetoric or even a pause that she was going to set the colonists in action. And her spell was such that I doubt if a single
man, except Juan Vilianeda, remembered that it wasn’t in her character to fuss over what happened to anybody’s car­case, including her own. Mass occupation of the wireless office
was what she was after.

Juan and his party raced across the front of the colonists, who were moving fast but with too great solemnity, reached Oster­ling’s office ahead of them and slammed the door. It was no
moment for half measures. Without a shock to stop them, the colonists would have surged right through the building. Juan hurled two of his bombs from the window, and he must have held on to them
till the last second, for they exploded as they hit the ground about twenty feet ahead of the advancing mass. He was an old soldier, all right, accustomed to think while run­ning. Time and
distance were coolly judged. Two or three of the nearest colonists were hurt, but none seriously.

The crowd recoiled and instinctively opened up. Their movement might have been a result of the military training that many of them had received, or simply fear of being caught in a crush of
humanity: a solid target, from the midst of which there could be no jump aside.

I remember watching those empty yards in front of Osterling’s bungalow, that uncrossable channel of young grass with a shallow brown wound in the centre where the explosive had ripped the
turf. It divided the colony with such absolute simplicity. It was restful to one so wearied with complexities as I—restful and unreal as war would be to that exhausted states­man who,
with Czoldy’s help, should end the uneasy peace.

My responsibility for the bloodshed was inescapable, yet I could not even be sure which side I was on. The question, like the fascination of that empty space between Juan and Elisa, was too
easy—and neither of them, after my equivocal behaviour, could have answered it with any certainty. The only comfort that I found was in Osterling’s eyes. He at least had a clear picture
of me. He gave me confidence that I existed.