The High Place (9 page)

‘All my psycho-patho-neuro-wormfood?’ she laughed. ‘No, I wouldn’t be served for the sake of that. Besides, you serve it very well already.’

‘My darling, you’re merely trying to ask me why I love Elisa Cantemir,’ I protested.

‘I am,’ she said. ‘But it’s putting the wrong question to nature. We can’t get an answer till we know what is Elisa Cantemir.’

‘She’s a woman of action. And therefore she can only be what I think her.’

Elisa looked at me with the swift, surprised glance of approval that I loved.

‘You are like Juan,’ she said. ‘He once told me that the only use I had for thought was to justify what I did. Of course! And if I am right, what does it matter? But you are
saying that a woman of action can have no self.’

‘Not when she is changing, and has to stop and question.’

‘She doesn’t really change or rest. Poor little God Almighty Elisa! But with you, in this garden, she’s conscious of a here and now. And it’s like a dream—not
pleasant or unpleasant, but uneasy, because one isn’t sure which is reality.’

‘Does it matter? Awake into your dream.’

‘Into which? And with what self? Oh, I know what you are thinking, Eric. You are the woman of the two, and you believe I have to make a sort of woman’s choice between work and a
lover. But I have both, and I am happy with both. Because I am puzzled, because I have a self when I am with you, it doesn’t mean that love is stronger. I won’t lie to you. There could
never be any choice between you and Kasr-el-Sittat. If it could serve us, I’d send you to your death. You know that, and yet you would go in ecstasy.’

‘Not ecstasy,’ I answered. ‘I’ve been near enough to death to know.’

‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘You would go as if I were asking you to die within my body.’

‘If I knew you would remember me with pride …’

‘Eric, you are exasperating!’ she cried. ‘Leave your damned sentiment out of it! Suppose you had to be removed, my child, and I wasn’t at all proud of you? I’d let
it be done. Oh, and there might be tears, and you could treasure them for what they’d be worth to you then! That isn’t the Elisa I do not under­stand. The Elisa I mean is bound to
you like Salome to John, and I do not know her.’

I think that was the nearest she ever came to telling me she loved, the nearest she could get to it herself. She could admit no more; nor, I suppose, could the priestess of Kasr-el-Sittat, who
might have been called by her Gods, four thousand years before Elisa, to mutilate her lover on that persistent altar-stone, where the colonists sat in summer dusk, and played with idle fingers in
the soft seeds of grass that choked the blood-channel.

‘Which dream is that?’ I asked, for I know she had compelled herself into a bitter unhappiness.

‘You are so gentle,’ she murmured.

For that I would have died, but I had the sense to be silent. Do I know what is sentiment? Did she?

‘I am here,’ she said, ‘and now,’ the strings of her voice discordant beneath the unaccustomed bow.

3

I do not know whether I have made it clear that the whole atmosphere of this monastery of political warfare was, at bot­tom, religious. The colonists had lost faith in churches—if they
hadn’t, they wouldn’t have been at Kasr-el-Sittat—but their worship of the individual and his right to free development was passionate enough to constitute a heresy. Many of them
believed that they were doing the will of God; all of them believed that they were working for the ultimate good of humanity. I too believed it.

I admit that at this period, the climax of my devotion to Kasr-el-Sittat, I could not have separated the woman from the cause, but I will not brand myself a hypocrite. If a man is to become
psychiatrist at the bedside of his own sick soul, then the fee that he must pay is absolute inaction. That my vision of Kasr-el-Sittat and its beauty was sincere is certain; for I sent to it a man
whom I supremely valued, knowing that among their many freedoms he would find such rest as he permitted to himself.

I met Anton Tabas at the British Consulate in Beirut, where I had gone on some business of shipping documents that I entirely forget. When I passed through the consul’s outer office on my
way to the street, I saw among the half dozen grubby suppliants for visas or certificates two faces that I knew. One of the men I had certainly seen some time, somewhere, during the war, for my
imagination at once clothed him in uniform. His present appearance, however, was that of a distressed sea­man, hatless and clothed in dirty shirt and shorts.

He was speaking English. I stopped to see if he wished to renew our acquaintance, whatever it was. Yet all the while my eyes were seeking his companion, just as if he had been accom­panied
by some very attractive woman, and I were hanging around waiting for an introduction.

‘I once brought a man up to you at Damascus,’ he said, ‘under escort.’

‘I remember. You were a Palestine policeman.’

‘Sergeant Grynes.’

I asked him what he was doing in the consulate, and he replied that he was trying to get some documents for his friend Anton Tabas.

‘Well, you’ve come to the right place.’ I said inanely.

‘No,’ answered Tabas, getting up. ‘This is not the right place.’

I have written that I knew his face. Had I, I wonder, ever passed that singular pilgrim on the roads of Syria? Or was it that Anton Tabas gave out an impression of having known me, or any other
stranger, all his life, and that I was hypnotized into thinking I had met him by a naturalness of manner that one would only expect from some intimate friend?

His eyes were full and dak; round as the eyes in a Persian or Byzantine portrait, and somewhat expressionless in that they seemed to find unnecessary the European’s sudden and vivid
changes of reconnaissance. They were watchful eyes, without suspicion, without aggression, but missing nothing whatever that was there for them to see. I must describe them as ox-eyes—with
the proviso that no one could have failed to notice that they were the doorway to a highly intelligent soul.

When Tabas stood up, I at once put him down as the most distinctive figure to be seen between Armenia and the Mediter­ranean. His general outline could only have been that of some tall, thin
Englishman: an eccentric theologian, perhaps, or some visitor from an ancient college, whose mind had never left its library, whose body was content with the admirable and unwearing tweed suit
brought thirty years before. Yet his feet were sandalled and sockless, and his head, emaciated and scholarly, had no right at all to those gently luminous eyes.

‘No? Not the right place?’ I repeated vaguely. ‘Well, you’d better come with me.

I remember my words. I meant that we could hardly discuss a question of documents or the lack of them before the clerks in the outer office; but Tabas, either by his smile or his immedi­ate
move to the door, seemed to invest the casual remark with an unconditional simplicity.

I took the pair of them round the corner to an open-air café. As it seemed from their appearance that they might be hungry, I pretended enthusiasm for the fresh red mullet in the ice-box,
and ordered a mess of them to be fried. Anton Tabas drank coffee, and Sergeant Grynes beer.

Grynes explained diffidently that the pair of them were, he supposed, sort of refugees. He himself had a British passport, but his friend had never possessed any passport at all.

‘What is your nationality?’ I asked Tabas.

‘My father was English, and my mother Persian.’

‘But he hasn’t got a birth certificate,’ Grynes complained.

I suggested that a marriage certificate of his parents might do.

‘I have none,’ said Tabas. ‘Those who are truly married are very few. Nor could anyone,’ he added with the smile of apology which he assumed when he was being practical,
‘give them a certificate but themselves.’

‘Where were you born?’ I asked.

‘At Tabas in Persia. And so I have made it my name.’

‘How do you know your father was English, cock?’ Grynes asked. ‘You’ve never told me that, you see.’

The mixture of love and irreverence in his voice was curious to hear. He might have been speaking to such a woman as Tabas’ mother.

‘She said so, Philip. And I am told that I look English.’

‘Perhaps I could advise you,’ I suggested, ‘if I knew a little more of your life.’

‘But I am with you,’ said Tabas, ‘and my life is what I am.’

Phil Grynes caught my eye and winked at me. To my sur­prise the wink was admiring. It was from that point that I ceased to consider Anton Tabas as an amiable lunatic. I felt no respect for
the opinion of a rough ex-Palestine policeman whom I hardly knew, but I could not fail to feel it for his obvious devotion.

Before I answered Tabas, I stopped to think. What he meant was that the judgment of one human being on another should only depend on the now of their meeting, and not on the in­essential
complications of their pasts—an ideal which might be a practical way of living for the primitive or the very spiritual.

‘I meant the mere incidents along the path,’ I said. ‘For example, did you learn English from your father?’

‘It is probable,’ Tabas replied, ‘for I never remember a time when I did not speak it.’

‘And how did you keep it up?’

‘I was educated by missionaries. Then, as a youth, I worked with English archæologists in Persia. It was they who taught me that truth can never be found, but must be sought. Yet
they did not despise the missionaries who believed that truth was already known.’

I asked Grynes where they were staying, and he answered with a grin that they had no address. They looked it. In a northern country I might have expressed my concern, but in the Syrian summer
one does not need a roof.

‘Why not come back to Tripoli with me and have a clean-up?’ I suggested.

‘We’re lousy,’ Grynes warned me. ‘It’s only fair to tell you.’

‘Liberty and lousiness go together,’ I answered with assumed heartiness.

‘You are courteous,’ said Tabas, ‘but I do not understand.’

Again I was forced to check the half-formed thought of nor­mal conversation. I meant, I said, that deliberate poverty was the greatest freedom.

‘Where there is love, how can there be freedom?’ he asked.

I wouldn’t like to say how far my motive was plain, vulgar curiosity, and how far the charity that such a man as Tabas inspired. Perhaps it was neither, for even then I vaguely
per­ceived that Elisa and Tabas were two aspects of the same pur­pose. As individuals they had nothing in common—sometimes almost comically nothing. Yet they stood, like the two
cedars of Kasr-el-Sittat, on opposite sides of the unknown altar which I sought.

I drove my pilgrims home with me, fed them and let them loose in the bathroom. Grynes’ two garments and Tabas’ shirt, which I could easily replace, I burned. His suit commanded
veneration; he was unimaginable in anything else. I wrapped it in brown paper and gave it to my servant Boulos, telling him that my friends had been living among the devil-worshipping Yezidis, of
whom Boulos, a Christian, would believe anything. He sent the suit by the hands of his unemployable cousin to some Arab professional, whose discreet trade it was to deal with the garments of the
poor on such occasions as marriages or visits to the rich.

After the bath Phil Grynes decided that Tabas should go to bed, and firmly put him there and tucked him up.

‘The old cock can’t stand it like I can,’ he said. ‘Not used to towns, you know.’

There was no doubt that Anton Tabas was temporarily exhausted. The noise and aimlessness of Beirut may well have been responsible, for I feel sure that he could have outlasted Grynes, though he
was some twenty years older, in resistance to fatigue and hunger. Tabas’ body was as accustomed to privation as that of a desert Arab.

Grynes and I sat on the terrace. He had one long whisky and soda with me, and refused more—not, he explained, from any scruples, but because he no longer needed its effect upon his
mood.

He was an odd type to be able to substitute an inner peace for alcohol. He was broad and of medium height, with an uncut and unsavoury mass of brown curls falling over a forehead that was
already deeply wrinkled. He had the swollen cheekbones of a professional boxer, and his nose had at some time been broken. To a respectable eye he would have appeared the most undesirable of
beachcombers, especially since the face was of a man who had the impudence to be happy.

‘Where did you meet him?’ I asked.

‘He stared at me,’ said Grynes, ‘and I didn’t like it. It was just that I was a policeman, you see.’

In reply to my questions he told me that while walking a beat one hadn’t time to distinguish the stare of resentment from those of abstraction or innocent curiosity. That, at any rate, was
his own analysis whenever he wondered why on earth insolence should have been his first impression of Anton Tabas, who had in him less insolence than anyone else in the world.

His professional curiosity had been aroused. At a distance he had put Tabas down as an ill-dressed archæologist shambling through the Holy City. Then he met the eyes, and knew at
once—just as I had—that they weren’t the eyes of a European. So he found out Tabas’ name and referred to the files.

The Palestine Police had no record but a note: Christian, harmless. The Army file had elided these two words into one, and called him: Eccentric. It added: Father believed English. Contacts,
Russian—to which, said Grynes, an unknown and exasperated hand had added in pencil: Monks, you twerp!

This wasn’t good enough for the sergeant, still mentally blushing under that peculiar stare. He wanted to know Nationality, Occupation, Address and Political Sympathies. He interviewed
Anton Tabas over coffees, and discovered that the only answer to all these questions which would fit an official form was NIL.

‘I couldn’t place him at all,’ Grynes said. ‘I was bloody annoyed about it at the time.’

He laughed at the policeman he had been.

‘I was quite ready to believe his story,’ he went on, ‘but he hadn’t any story. Well then, I was ready to believe in
him
. But I didn’t know what I meant by that.
It’s just his character, you see. So far as I can tell, Anton thinks one religion as good as another.’