Juan took it well. He was dead tired, and his eyes were brilliant with that fever of the spirit which surpasses the effect of rest, and quickens in any true leader his grasp of essentials and his power of decision. He didn’t waste time in wondering what pressure of argument or physical force we could bring to bear on Grynes. He went straight to the point—a point which I had not seen at all.
‘The hell of a saint, your Anton!’ he exclaimed ironically. ‘Well, if I’m to go his way, he must tell me what it is.’
3
As the morning wore on, it was plain that Juan’s first full day of control had ended in stalemate; and that was failure. From behind the window curtains of the bungalow Elisa and Osterling must have seen that their patience was beginning to pay a dividend. Breakfast went in to them, and the empty tray came out. The guards moved uneasily, and began to look self-conscious. There was already a tendency for groups of colonists to hang about on the turf of the hilltop; they were almost picketing the picket. I felt that it was no longer the authority of a moral chalk-line which separated them from their leaders, but only a rumour of that weapon which had killed Gisorius.
At midday the car from Aleppo arrived and stopped at the far side of the ford. It brought the mail and Oliver Poss. The driver we could deal with. He returned immediately to Aleppo with the outgoing mail, except that posted in the last twenty-four hours, unaware that there was anything wrong in the colony except a temporary flooding of the road. Poss, however, was more than a practical problem; he was an emotional shock. He burst into the closed intensity of our thoughts, and dazed us. We had no room for any preoccupation but Kasr-el-Sittat and those conference tables where Czoldy smiled and served.
It was folly to turn Poss back to Istanbul, with some story that he had been refused access to Elisa; moreover, it was certain that he would refuse to go. He was perfectly capable of sitting on the river bank and smoking cigars until he had formed a party of his own from the passers-by.
The ford was now five feet deep in the centre. Juan sent down two horses for the transport of Poss, the stores and the mail. It was not enough for Oliver Poss merely to cross the ford. He rode as far as the gate of Kasr-el-Sittat, where I was deputed to receive him, at a smart trot, his shoes and trousers tied round his neck. His legs were brown and hairy, and he looked massively at home on a horse. In spite of his respectable and double-breasted upper half, I was reminded of one of those innumerable pictures of rustics, English or Italian, riding up from water.
‘My dear sir!’ he exclaimed, dismounting at the gate. ‘Had I known that I should find you here, I would have comported myself with more oriental dignity. Put it down, Amberson, to the effect of a cold stream upon a soul oppressed and cushioned by too long a residence in wagons-lit.’
He turned to bow to a startled Slav who was staring at him, and to bellow a cheerful good day.
‘Amberson,’ he demanded, ‘where am I and what is this? My personal guess is that Elisa has at last and very properly put herself in the hands of a psychiatrist. I observe with pleasure that she continues to merit your devotion, and that her fellow patients look remarkably well.’
I led him into the garage, where he resumed his shoes and trousers. Meanwhile I explained that this was the headquarters of the syndicate and Elisa’s permanent home.
‘You astound me! Now why should Elisa—who is by nature the sort of gem that only a city can hold in its heart—why should she have chosen so delectable a spot? God’s Wounds, my dear sir, had I brought with me a penny whistle, I would sit upon that hilltop and play these bloody bungalows back into the mud! What deviltry is Elisa up to here? Well, within a matter of minutes no doubt I shall be in the presence and committing myself to some intolerable complication. Therefore, at the risk of seeming abrupt, I will ask you whether you agree that I should take over your business. That house of yours? That garden? And you do not seem to have slept?’
There was affection for me in his damned patronizing orotundities, but I could not respond. I felt physically overwhelmed by him, and dried and weary. Like some disinterested chief clerk, I told him that the syndicate was in the midst of reorganization and that the question of my business was not immediate. Then I took him to the guest bungalow, and fixed him up in the room opposite my own.
I persuaded Juan that Poss had better be allowed to see Elisa, that only by an embarrassing show of force could we keep him away. Since she had never spoken to him of greater issues than the supposed syndicate, I said, it was improbable that she would do so now, and therefore a meeting could do no harm. The point which really convinced him—for he was willingly ignorant of the handling of money—was that Poss would be needed as Kasr-el-Sittat’s man of business whoever was in control. He may have known that not one of my arguments was sincere. I didn’t care. What I wanted was to see Elisa, and the arrival of Poss gave me an excuse.
That patience which had been impressive when imagined from outside the bungalow was not so obvious within. The empty breakfast plates were bluff. I caught a glimpse of puddled food on a dish in the kitchen. The clean fragrance of the rooms was overpowered by the heaped ash-trays which surrounded Osterling. Elisa was colourless as if she had been confined for weeks. When she saw us, light and shade began to play again between mouth and temple. The forced repose of her face or its sudden living—I do not know which was harder to bear.
She searched me with her eyes and smile. Her greeting seemed ironically content, as if she had known that I should not be equal to this crisis, and that my best, in face of violence and determination, would be too poor or too subtle a resistance.
‘This reminds me of our first meeting, Poss,’ she said. ‘How much has Eric told you?’
‘My dear Elisa,’ he answered, ‘since you know our friend as well as I do, you will agree with me that owing to his long residence in the Levant he is incapable of making a clear statement on any subject whatever.’
Those were his words, and I must admit that so far as my relations with him were concerned they were just; otherwise, they are wholly untrue.
‘I have observed merely that a little Latin gentleman accompanied us to your door,’ he went on, ‘and informed some other Latin gentleman that we were to be let in and out. I trust he was only your doctor or a disgruntled shareholder, but to one of my experience there is a faint smell of presidents’ palaces. Cavalry upon the tram lines. I’ll take the Treasury and Archibaldo shall have the Police. Amberson, however, has preserved the discreet detachment of a United Nations observer in the hotel cocktail bar.’
‘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.
INTERMEDIARY
1
THE 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 tru
sted 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.’
The High Place Page 19
