The High Place (29 page)

‘For the sake of your future happiness. Amberson,’ he said, ‘it is unfortunate that your passion for Elisa is more real than your ideology. When you find that out, perhaps you
will join me, and we can talk over the respective values. But shall we then be interested in such petty details? One can only hope not. Would you now permit me to take a very personal possession
from that drawer in front of you?’

I stood up and let him sit at his own desk. There was much to love in Osterling, and I could so easily have been his devoted servant. It was a last demonstration of his power to impress his
principles on me that I accepted and still accept his Roman decision as right. He had no other world to which he could return.

Ashkar sprang forward when Osterling put his hand to his mouth. He didn’t accuse me of knowing what was going to hap­pen. The tone of our conversation in that strange and sibilant
language had been far too friendly.

‘God the All-Merciful!’ he cried. ‘But that was swift!’—and I could hear in his voice that he had upon him a fear of death beyond all experience of simple
bloodshed.

As he bent over Osterling he prayed aloud, for he had the infinite good fortune to be a pious Christian.

Meanwhile his troopers needed all their pretence of ferocity to keep back the colonists who had been watching from the threshold. Some scattered to carry the news; some remained, with the air of
self-conscious witnesses to the inhumanity of the police.

I told Ashkar in as firm a voice as I could assume that he was in luck, that he had been spared all scandal, all embarrassing processes of law, for there lay the man who had been responsible for
the drug smuggling and the vague subversive activities abroad; and his suicide in this remotest corner, like the occasional suicide of God’s occupationless wives, was worth a bit of stamped
paper and no more.

Ashkar was thankful. This ride to Kasr-el-Sittat had been his duty, but he had known only too well that it might mean for him dismissal from the service.

‘And the lady?’ he asked.

‘Let us finish here first.’

I could not send for her as if I were, even temporarily, the greater of the two. It was not that I was afraid, for in imagina­tion I had already faced the coming interview and was emptied of
emotion. No, if there were any bitter triumph, any possible attitude of splendour in which she could take refuge from humiliation and build herself a myth to comfort memory, I wanted her to be free
to choose it.

Ashkar examined the two bodies and the wireless room. Juan Villaneda tried to pretend that the transmitter was only a receiver, but Ashkar was not so ignorant. He put a couple of sentries on the
office, and we went out.

It was full dawn, still and cloudy. The hills were deep and mournful green against the grey velvet of the horizon. When we reached the open space at the top of the hill, I saw Elisa standing
under the southern cedar. Many of the colonists were gathered by her bungalow. One said to me as I passed, thinking me to be a friend, that she wished to be alone. She was. There was no one near
her except Poss who was sitting on the altar and smoking a cigar. She had forgotten his presence, if indeed she had ever noticed it. She stood still, looking down the valley. She was one with her
Kasr-el-Sittat, drawing back from it the strength which she had given.

I remember that she was taller, more ethereal, more exquisitely graceful than even I had ever thought her; nor is that memory so exalted because it is my last. It was crisis that empowered her,
gave her youth. Crisis was always beauty to her soul, and therefore to her body.

She halted our petty little procession simply by calling me to her. Her tone imperiously chose me as the delegate. There was a half-smile in eyes and on mouth. Her face had the humanity, the
disillusioned humanity, of the wiser forgiving the more foolish. I do not know how far she intended to detach me from her enemies and save for Kasr-el-Sittat whatever could be saved, or how far she
deceived herself. I do not think she could have attempted one without the other.

‘What did you show him?’ she asked.

I gave her the papers, and she read them.

‘He believed this?’

I nodded. There was no word that I could say. The plainest monosyllable could have carried all the cruelty of insult. She would not let my spirit go.

‘But I remember the separate minutes of day and night,’ she said. ‘I could quote you your own words, Eric. I know that you did none of this. Eugen Rosa? You knew nothing of
him, and still you don’t. Oh, why will you not leave politics to me? My poor lost neutral, trying to do his English justice to both sides!’

Keeping me with her, she descended upon Juan, Ashkar and Grynes, who had stopped uneasily a few yards below us.

‘Juan, we have been comrades,’ she begged. ‘For the sake of us all, tell me. He watched and you acted. Isn’t that the truth?’

‘I had to use what I could, Elisa,’ he answered. ‘That is true.’

Did she know that Juan’s impulsive tenderness could never be proof against such a question? God knows what he hoped to effect by his answer! I suppose he did not think at all. He simply
longed for the impossible: to spare Elisa.

She turned to me, and must have meant to touch me, for I saw the first movement of that nervous shoulder. I can only imagine what horror she saw upon my face, what shame at the unbearable
lie.

‘You!’ she cried.

The word was a long moan, as all the life that had ever been mine went out to her. Her face became that which Poss had once described to me: a skull, all eyes.

‘You!’ she repeated, now more sharply. ‘You and Villaneda. One of you weak and the other a romantic fool. You aren’t communists. Who was behind you to tell you what to
do? Where did you find the strength?’

Oliver Poss took his cigar out of his mouth. He was half-reclined on the altar, impudent and detached as some spectator in a theatre seat he hadn’t paid for.

‘Don’t you really know, my girl?’ he said.

‘Get off that stone, goat!’ she ordered. ‘Who?’

‘His reverence,’ he answered.

She called him an imbecile, and told him that Anton Tabas was utterly incapable of offering practical advice to anyone. She asked Grynes, derisively, if Tabas had ever told him to destroy
her.

Phil Grynes, misquoting his master and wholly unaware of the brutality with which he struck her, stammered that Tabas had only said she couldn’t love.

‘Oh, my God!’ she cried.

Then, as if it were a proof of her love, she tried to kill her Kasr-el-Sittat. She raised her arms in a most lovely gesture and called the waiting colonists to her. She told them that they must
go, back to their homes, back to whatever the State would give them, back, if there were nothing else, to the camps from which she had taken them. She mourned over them, like Medea over her
children.

Juan Villaneda would have none of it.

‘Go or stay, woman!’—his incisive voice cut through the mur­mur of misery and worship—‘but we are staying. Kasr-el-Sittat belongs to the community.’

‘In poverty?’ she asked. ‘Without protection? How long can you last?’

She pointed at Ashkar. As the colonists turned towards him, he set his face into absolute impassivity. He appeared the very epitome of the unfeeling police about to do their painful duty.

‘In poverty,’ Juan answered her. ‘And under the protection of poverty. By God, we are called a house of religion, and a house of religion we will be.’

She ignored him.

‘Captain Ashkar, my passport is in order,’ she said. ‘May I leave the country?’

‘I regret, madame.’

‘She wasn’t there,’ I reminded him. ‘She doesn’t even know who killed Gisorius.’

‘Nor do I,’ he said, ‘yet.’

‘I did,’ I answered. ‘And Eugen Rosa?’

‘We will talk of that later. She may go.’

‘Come, Poss!’ she ordered. ‘God help you, you are all I have, and I cannot be alone.’

Ashkar was not so ready to extend his permission to a man whose appearance contrasted vividly with that of the colonists; they had a communal quality in their faces, which exempted them, like
ecclesiastical dress, from the attentions of a busy policeman. Poss, however, even to the eyes of a Syrian, appeared a leader. He could plead indifference, but never ignorance.

Ashkar looked suspiciously through the opening pages of the pale blue passport.

‘You are no Greek,’ he accused him.

‘Dear colonel. I was born in Arcadia,’ Poss answered.

‘Oh, give yourself a label that he can understand!’ I cried impatiently, seeing that he was about to prolong the intolerable moment with his mouthing.

‘Label? Label?’ he replied. ‘Ah, yes, of course! He can’t release a man without a label. Well, put it that I ate mine. A goat on a railway journey—ha! ha!
ha!’

I appealed to Ashkar, but he remained unhelpful until he found the entry stamp which showed that Poss had been crossing the frontier at the hour of Gisorius’ death.

There is no more to tell. I gave Ashkar a signed confession that I had killed Gisorius in self-defence, and he allowed me two days to leave the country; it would not, he assured me, be worth
while to extradite and prosecute me for a very doubtful case of manslaughter. He promised that he would be a father to the colony and their visitors on condition that the wireless was destroyed.
For the rest, he was a gendarme, he said, and his only business was to see that Kasr-el-Sittat did not break the laws of Syria. If they continued to have influence abroad—well, that was my
concern or his government’s.

I heard the three spaced explosions as Juan and his partisans demolished the tractor which dammed the stream. I could no longer keep my self-control by pretence of interest in Ashkar and his
papers. I went up alone to the top of the hill. The departing car was already over the ford. I watched its slow progress down the road. Ever since, in every moment of contemplation which intrudes
into the hour, in every leisure and through all my nights, even now when I had hoped to clear the vision from my soul, I see the empty valley, and the outline of that shoulder of the hill which was
so absolute an end.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1950 by Geoffrey Household

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

978-1-5040-0721-4

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

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