The High Place (5 page)

Ashkar paused, grimly self-confident of his power in the no man’s land between Syrian and Turk.

I asked him how I could help, what advice he needed from me.

‘Between soldiers there is little difference. We know or can guess what the other is thinking,’ he said, eager to show me that there was one manifestation of European life which was
not at all foreign to him. ‘But to understand the religion of a people, one must be of their blood. You have stayed at Kasr-el-Sittat. What is your opinion?’

‘They could be fools,’ I answered. ‘But they have too much money to be smugglers.’

‘That’s as may be. And what am I to do?’

I removed the lamp, which was attracting a plague of wings from the irrigation canals of Tripoli, and poured out more wine. Then from my safe darkness I told him, as sententiously as any old
Turk:

‘When in doubt—do nothing!’

Well, if it must be, I will let them pass, one by one and secretly. But, by God, if I find a man of them peddling drugs or with a laden horse, all Damascus shall not save them—not even if
they send their protector seven Stambuli boys!’

I quieted him down. I knew that Elisa and her companions could never be ordinary criminals in any sense that would in­terest Ashka—though she wouldn’t be deterred from necessary
and perhaps greater illegalities by what she would certainly call bourgeois morality.

Ashkar stayed talking for another hour, and then thanked me so profusely for my disinterested advice that conscience gave me a foretaste of the melancholy of dual allegiance. He refused to spend
the night with me. No doubt Tripoli had some other attraction, probably a semi-respectable widow rather than a light-of-love. His were the habits of the camp, and he was un­able or unwilling to
adjust himself to anything more permanent.

While he was with me I could not show my resentment at his callous sacrifice of Eugen Rosa. Ashkar was an old friend, and must be allowed his self-respect. The ways of his people and the
necessities of his job were cruel and tortuous. No allowances that I made for him, however, could disguise from me that all my sympathy was with Kasr-el-Sittat. Myself an exile, I was deeply
attracted by their purpose of protecting and cherishing the homeless, of restoring their trust in humanity, of rescuing them from the intolerable exactions of the State.

The colony fascinated me and I could not keep away. I per­suaded myself again I had business in the tobacco villages, and again I spent a night at Kasr-el-Sittat. This time I happened to
have a rifle, for I intended on the way home to look for pig in the Orontes marshes. I wasn’t allowed to take it with me to the guest bungalow; the colony rule was that no firearms were
permitted within the gate—or, at any rate, beyond the garage. The reason was courtesy rather than any objection to bloodshed. These refugees had seen so much of weapons and the dead that they
wished for each other no reminder. I accepted the veto gladly, and indeed was so impressed that I never went after pig at all. They must have recognized in me a new and eager warmth, for I was
invited to come back and spend a longer and more serious visit whenever I liked.

And so the colony became for me too a refuge. I had no reason to be discontented with my life—far from it—but at Kasr-el-Sittat I entered into an eternal human dream; it was, at any
rate on that Utopian surface presented to the eager stranger, a fairyland where time stood still for him, and the companions had no cares. The sheer scenic beauty may have influenced me. To come up
from hot and dusty Tripoli over the barren uplands and through the desolate tobacco villages, down into a green country of rocks, and groves of oak and beech, and huge cool springs, where the
celestial Elisa queened it over her sudden garden of Europeans, was enchantment enough to break the continuity of past and future, of my work­aday picture of self and the world.

1

I
HAD BEEN STUCK TO MY OFFICE CHAIR FOR LONGER THAN I
liked, busy, I remember, with the problem of shipping my machinery up and
down the coast to local caiques, when I had a letter from Elisa to tell me that she was about to spend a few days in Damascus. It was a commanding little note—in the sense that it showed
neither invitation nor interest, but allowed me to join her if I could. Business in Damascus I could always make, and I was eager to entertain her in my own world and to repay her kindness. I
suspected that she might be less grave a creature in Damascus than at Kasr-el-Sittat.

That is, perhaps, a preposterous understatement of my hopes. Or didn’t I know that I loved her? Certainly she seemed to me so unattainable that I wasn’t admitting it. I had enough
experi­ence to be cautious in handing over my happiness. I reasoned myself into believing that my longing for her was mere desire.

She was in the lounge of the hotel when I arrived, dressed for the summer heat of the Arab capital in unrelieved white silk, for which her small head, and the delicious, nervous sharpness of
shoulder, hip and breast were sufficient ornament. In all her clothes, especially at Kasr-el-Sittat, there was a slight suggestion of uniform; but if this were uniform, it was that of a Nefertiti
contemptuously covering her beauty for a visit to the Chief of Staff.

Official visits were indeed her object. At dinner, under the great solitary tamarisk of my favourite Arab restaurant, she told me that her business at Damascus was financial—and
successful—and talked of the apparent fascination that the Euro­pean woman of character, from Lady Hester Stanhope to Ger­trude Bell, held for the Arab. I said that it wasn’t
altogether due, as she thought, to the excitement of so unfamiliar con­tact, and that the Arab instantly recognized outstanding quality in man or woman. Worth was far more important to him than
well-being.

‘Because again and again his civilization has been destroyed,’ she said, ‘and left him with nothing but the human values.’

I asked her if there were no other way but destruction, and suggested that a sane dictatorship might show us the way to a world where the individual could develop freely. I was feeling for her
creed, for the driving force behind Kasr-el-Sittat. I still did not know what it was. Some of the colonists believed their own naïve admission that they had escaped from society to work for
its own good; others had a more genial love of humanity, tempered by a child’s capacity for being shattered by injustice. There was also the handful of Russians who always turn up in any
unconventional movement, and would not have been out of place, if judged by way of life and protestations, in one of the regular Lebanese monasteries. I could not believe that such people as Elisa
and Osterling would have any truck with these mild and innocuous forms of anarchism.

‘Dictatorship?’ she cried—and I was exhilarated by the fiash of indignation in her voice. ‘Government can swallow up any dictator! Did you ever come across what Mussolini
said? “We are nearing the annihilation of human personality. The State is a vast machine which eats the living and throws them up as dead statistics. The great curse which fell on men in the
hazy beginning of history and pursued them down the centuries has been to build the State and for ever be crushed by the State.”

‘Oh, and he was intelligent enough to know it was true! Yet when he had power he was compelled into socialism, and all he could do was to call his government fascist. God save us from
dictatorship! It’s even worse than your democracy of apes.’

Then she herself passed to the attack, as if she had been waiting for my curiosity to deprive me of any more right to reticence.

‘Why did you join World Opposition?’

It was the last question I expected. It was even a sinister question, for it implied that she had made enquiries about me.

As a result of all the publicity of the House that Jack Built, I received, among a mass of abuse, a few letters of encourage­ment and congratulation from ultra-conservative persons and
organizations. Most of them were tiresome, and missed the point. I was by no means against the ideals of socialism. I was against the growing and inhuman power of central government. Among the
organizations there was just one which understood me and linked my isolated action to a definite creed. That was World Opposition. It was an international brotherhood which required its members to
oppose the tyranny of their government, whatever its colour and however worthy its motives.

I hesitated to answer her seriously. Though I myself had started this duel of interrogation, the political Elisa was not the woman I wanted. I had, too, a foreboding that I was about to leap
into space. And yet, whenever I hit ground or floated, there she would be.

‘In me,’ she said, following without effort the perplexities of my mind, ‘there is no conflict between ambition and what I want for myself. And just as you must tell a woman
that you love her, though she already knows it, so you must tell me in your own words all the other things that I already know.’

It was clear enough from her tone that I must await her own time before claiming that half-promise, so I began to tell her of the House that Jack Built.

She let me go on until she had heard enough, I suppose, to confirm what she had from the agents of Kasr-el-Sittat. Then she interrupted:

‘I know that too. But you are not a man who acts from pique. What was there in World Opposition which appealed to you? What was the belief you had formed for yourself?’

‘I believe that only this generation can check the growth of the State,’ I answered, trying to express a whole year of lonely thought with a simplicity that could not be
misunderstood. ‘It must be fought now, before it can educate out of us the very desire for revolt.’

‘And you thought World Opposition would do that?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It’s woolly, like its pretentious name. But on the right lines.’

‘As an Englishman,’ she laughed, ‘you’d rather it were called the Royal Society for the Protection of Civil Rights. But the name had to have a flavour of
internationalism. If a patriot is to attack his government whatever it does, he must be sure that his companions are doing the same in every other country.’

‘Can it exist behind the Iron Curtain?’ I asked.

‘Not in that form. But do you think the State isn’t hated there?’

‘A powerless hatred.’

‘Eric, wherever you have a police state, you have a powerful, disciplined underground. And it’s a thousand times easier for Kasr-el-Sittat to capture an existing organization than to
break down the apathy of the West.’

‘You? You mean that you are behind World Opposition?’

‘And much else, too, Eric,’ she answered calmly, ‘and now we need you.’

‘In the colony?’

‘No. Where you are.’

‘How much do they know in Damascus?’

‘As much as you did: that we are a harmless Tolstoyan com­munity—which can be bled for money.’

‘And elsewhere?’

‘Only our direct agents.’

I perceived at once that those four words bound me to Kasr-el-Sittat as long as it or I should exist. That my visionary World Opposition, with its weekly news-sheet and its distin­guished
foreign lecturers, should turn out to be the tip of one of Kasr-el-Sittat’s antennæ was unimportant. The material point was that no ordinary members—apart from over-enthusiastic
women with wild stories of some esoteric centre in the East—had ever imagined that policy, funds and propaganda were not controlled by London, or perhaps New York; so it was obvious that in
those graver organizations at which Elisa had hinted, not even a local leader could ever be allowed to discover what I had just been told: that if he followed up the underground chain of
communication from cell to cell he would arrive in Syria.

I was not afraid of the secret nor of the responsibility for keeping it. As a political officer I had had access to plenty of information that was potentially explosive, and my loyalty was no
less willingly engaged than in the war. Indeed, it was en­gaged for the same reasons. I had not fought Germans. I had fought their conception of the State.

‘Don’t be so overcome, Eric,’ she said, with a smile that was a caress of friendship. ‘I know what I am choosing.’

I assured her at once that, so far as I understood myself, her trust was not misplaced. It was simply my shock at discovering she was so inescapably dedicated.

She raised her eyes in a slight ironical gesture that included the old Damascus courtyard, her own enigmatic presence as my guest and the atmosphere of temporary romance that was so foreign to
her disciplined life.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Nothing of all this really matters.’

‘Yes, it does matter. I wanted to give you rest. And now I never can.’

‘You have missed nothing,’ she answered, ‘I do not rest.’

The words were deliberately, almost gaily pronounced; and, as I watched her across the table, I knew that they were true. She was restless as some animal living only by its speed. Her head, its
shadows sharpened by the far-spaced lights, had a poised and pointed grace, a lightness that made the common human head seem round and clumsy.

I asked her whether in her life of ease before the war she hadn’t surrendered to the passing days like the rest of us.

‘No,’ she said. ‘What I believe now, I believed as a girl. But my thoughts weren’t clear. They hadn’t got as far as action—or even as words, I think. It was
as if I had been some sort of angel, who couldn’t get used to working through a human brain.’

It was now my turn to ask questions. I won’t repeat them all. My love of her led me to choose my words and to cut them so that they opened without jarring door after door into her tortured
memories. I think that at last she forgot my presence and talked to herself. What she said I must put down as neutrally as I can, trying not to remember that it was I who condemned her future to
continue her past.

She told me of the power and seclusion of her family which had been settled in the forests of the Bukovina for several hundred years; 1918 deprived them of their lands, but not of their wealth
nor their traditions. They had no sense of nation­ality, and no allegiance whatever to any of the succession states which drew their frontiers through the possessions of the Cantemirs. Their
loyalty, now wholly frustrated, was to their former people—deported kulaks, persecuted Polish Jews, and all the helpless minorities who were corrupted by the Roumanians or forced into their
stern national mould by the Czechs.