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The High Place

Geoffrey Household

Contents

THE SANCTUARY

THE AMŒBA

OUTSIDE EXPERT

ALONE

TWILIGHT

INTERMEDIARY

For Ilona, my love

THE SANCTUARY

1

OF ALL THAT I LEARNED FROM THAT UNCOMPROMISING prophet, Anton Tabas, the tenet which seems to me most true and least acceptable is that no man can obtain absolution from any but himself. Therefore when the tumult was over and the action irrevocable and I had struck down what most I loved, I did not go to him for comfort. I knew too well that, though he might send another to his priest, to me he would say that my conscience must sit in judgment on itself.

That is the reason for this very personal narrative. My signed statement I might almost call it—except that it will be obvious to any curious policemen that I have disguised all details which might lead to the violent or the legal punishment of others. No, I will be my own policeman and my own probation officer. I desire that I, the Eric Amberson who begins this story, shall live again the hope, the high adventure and the misery, and so, rebuilding through sentence and paragraph the rhythm of his self-esteem, recover—well, not the Eric Amberson that was, but at least a companion whom he can observe with tolerance across the dinner-table of his soul.

Many a way have I tried that might lead into my story. There are models enough, for it is the fashion of our wretched century to confess, and God knows I could race with any other renegade which of us should eat dirt the faster. But I do not want to tell my spirit what it should feel. I want to ask it. Neutrality, not abasement, is my object. That being so—and I am determined that it shall be so—I will give the reasons for my departure from England to Syria, and present a farce before the tragedy.

For three generations the Ambersons have been land agents and auctioneers in the remotest little market town of Devon. My grandfather and my father were each of them magistrates for the last thirty years of their lives, and mayors of the town at decent intervals. In 1939 I too was appointed a Justice of the Peace, but this voluntary service to society, by now almost hereditary, gave way to another, and the amateur magistrate became an amateur infantry subaltern learning his job in the trampled dust beside the Suez Canal.

In the autumn of 1945, when I returned to Devon and the business, I was not at all sure that I wished to remain an active partner. I found in myself a distaste for that extreme commercial acumen which a country dealer must enjoy, and for which indeed he is respected. My grandfather had been called the sharpest honest man in Devon; it would have been untrue to call him the most honest sharper, but the distinction is slight.

Though I was reluctant to fill my office chair, I was not allowed to have any hesitation at all about resuming my seat upon the bench. As a comparatively idle man in his late thirties, resident in the town itself and easily accessible, my duty was made very clear to me by my colleagues. One of them was deaf; one of them was old; and one was a very busy farmer.

Thus the case of The House that Jack Built—as the newspapers inevitably called it—was mine without any interference, and I never attempted to shuffle off my responsibility.

Jack Yealm was fisherman, sawyer, amateur engineer and landowner. The land he owned was little more than a strip of mud and shale on the banks of a small tidal creek, but, what with his slipway, his quay of loose stone, his tons of gravel and seaweed and good earth rammed down behind solid piles, it had all the appearance of solid ground. A stream which once had entered the green-tufted creek four hundred yards above his house had been dammed, tapped, and harnessed to a secondhand mill-wheel which drove his saw.

Yealm had two sons. Both had returned to civil life—one because he had left his foot in the driving seat of a Sherman, the other after long service in the Navy. Before the war they occupied a pair of adjoining cottages, bought with old Yealm’s savings and conveniently placed just off the main street of the town. During the war these cottages had been requisitioned by the Admiralty—which was fair enough, for the young Yealm wives had gone to an aircraft factory and left them empty—and after the war the Admiralty had passed them to the Ministry of Fuel by one of those little coups of bureaucratic chicanery, without any reference to the local and more humane authorities.

I needn’t go into all the resettlement problems of the Yealm sons. They had two wives and five young children in a total of four rooms in other people’s houses. Nothing else, said our Superintendent of Police, protected by his official dead-pan from any suspicion of irony, nothing else was known against them.

Now old Jack Yealm had a vague idea of the Housing Acts, and he knew very well that he was not allowed to use materials that were in short supply, or to employ builders; but he didn’t know—and how, brought up in liberal England, should he?—that he couldn’t build a house on his own land with his own and his sons’ hands.

Among the myriad untidinesses of his foreshore there was no shortage of material. He reminded me of one of those maiden ladies who have never in a long life thrown away a stick of furniture or an old dress, and still possess, intact though unrecognizable, every object they have ever acquired. His attic was the space above high-water mark, and his junk was all that had floated or been dragged into his creek to die—or rather, to wait in suspended animation until resurrected by Jack for some new and wholly unsuspected life.

The house that Jack built was a mighty good house, though you had to look at it twice to see that house it was. It might have been a sail loft, or a shed for the proper exhibiting of a whale. It sank completely and satisfactorily into its background, as a natural part of the foreshore. That, I think, was the reason why it escaped so long the eye of the inspector. Indeed he came upon it by the merest accident, while reconnoitring the creek for some other damned inspector who wanted a permit to build a concrete villa there.

So Jack and his sons came up before the beaks. It was obvious that they were considered to have committed a very serious crime against their country’s bureaucracy, for the court was solemn with inspectors and local government officials, all of them watching each other, like a bunch of puritans at a prayer meeting, in the hope that one of the brethren should fail to show a proper zeal. They were bringing a test case with all the menace of Whitehall solidly behind them. That was what made me angry. They put me in the position of a State Prosecutor, whereas my duty was to preserve the King’s Peace by showing mercy—if they deserved any—to my fellow citizens.

The Yealms could only plead guilty; they hadn’t obtained a single one of the twenty permits that were necessary before they could even begin to clear the building site. Yet it was plain to me—at least I thought it was—that Parliament in its wisdom had never intended the Acts to apply to such a case. I said so. I fined the defendants 7s. 6d. each, and told them with reasonable severity that they were not to do another hour’s work on the house until they had obtained a sheaf of permits to cover the use of the labour and materials that they were not going to use. My colleagues on the bench concurred; they were the deaf and the old, and they had not the faintest notion what the case was about. My clerk, of course, protested—but he had a marked sense of mischief, bless him, and his grin took all the formality out of his warning.

The Rural District Council chuckled and did nothing—after all, they were both lazy and my neighbours—but the Ministry appealed. Their reputation for incorruptible inhumanity was threatened, and it was their duty as democrats to see that the minority was oppressed for the sake of the majority. Jack Yealm and his sons were fined two hundred pounds, and Eric Amberson, J.P., was removed from the bench. The majesty of the proceeding was imposing. I was lucky, I gathered, not to find myself in the Tower. And it wasn’t a fuss about nothing. As a Justice of the Peace I had refused to administer an Act of Parliament. When I let off the Yealms with their derisory 7s. 6d. apiece, I hadn’t seen the constitutional implications. I had made myself one with the procession of Barons and Bishops and plain revolutionaries who had defied Parliament down the ages. I had even, as a Sunday paper unctuously exploded, defied the King.

That was what hurt me. I had a shocking bad press. I was accused of making a futile gesture against socialism. I was even called an irresponsible fascist. It occurred to no one that the Acts against which I had protested were passed by the National Government and not the Socialists; nor had I said anything against the Acts themselves—which were obviously necessary—only against the rigidity of their administration.

No, it was not removal from the bench which distressed me; it was the fact that my people, my English, thought the removal right and proper. I realized that I had become a foreigner, for one of their sufferings I had never shared. During the six years of my service abroad they had tolerated, for the sake of their collective conscience, a gradual disciplining of their civil life; and there was no one to mark the change so keenly as we, the startled army exiles. The turbulent islander had become a grey, obedient citizen so imperceptibly—since the puritan half of him was thinking only in terms of self-abnegation—that he did not know a revolution had passed over him. Only the planners and the politicians knew, and they, whatever their party, were united in their determination that obedient he should remain.

I could not face the sadness of it, the weary submission of so great and so deservedly victorious a people. I wasn’t ashamed. I knew that I had been right and the government wrong; but my impotence as an individual was driven into my soul, affecting me as if it had been sexual impotence. I saw myself condemned, if I remained in England, to a futile lifetime of impatience. I sold my partnership. I collected some agencies for tools, fertilizers and agricultural machinery, and settled myself and my small capital on the Syrian shore.

The reason for my choice of Syria was simple; I had enjoyed myself there. In 1942 I was left with an unmilitary digestive system, after a fragment of 88 mm. shell had carried away some inessential coils, and the doctors said that for a year or two it would not stand up to desert rations and shortage of water. So I became a political officer in Syria. I had no qualifications except that I spoke French and could stammer a little Arabic. My appointment and my destiny thereafter were due to my accidental presence in the depot adjutant’s office when he opened the envelope.

For three years of the war Syria and the Lebanon were my hobbies and my home. I learned to love the country: the line of little towns, Rouad and Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, that seemed to float, their rocks half awash, upon the tideless sea: the red-roofed villages set on the bends of narrow roads, one above another, to the ragged top of Lebanon: the Moslem cities threaded along the straight highway between mountain and desert, gate leading to gate from Aleppo to Hama, to Homs, to Damascus. This variety of beauty predisposed me to like the peoples by whose variety of race and religion it had been created, and to taste that Arab culture which had given to them all their language, their courtesy and their easy acceptance of frustration.

I was not homesick, for England was less of a necessity to me than to my fellows. Between the university and my father’s death I worked for a firm of manufacturing chemists which specialized in the needs of agriculture. We were consultants to the Colonial Office, to great producing companies of sugar and rubber and wheat, and occasionally to foreign governments in trouble with their experimental crops. I became the man who went to the spot and reported, and often remained season after season with my finger on the vast pulse of prairie or plantation. I was no chemist, but I had listened to farmers’ problems ever since I was old enough to come down to lunch; to the worried parent of an anaemic harvest or a lazy soil I was a more welcome representative of my firm than a technician.

So, when I came to choose a home, I had enough experience of foreign ground to know where I myself would be most fruitful, and that my roots were healthy enough to stand so drastic a transplanting. Now, as I write, it is easy enough for me to see that I ran away to Syria for my own selfish pleasure, but pleasure at least it was. My duty, of course, was to sacrifice my liberty for what I believed—to stay, to refuse my taxes, and to force the government to imprison me. Humanity against the State has only one weapon: neither escape nor political action, but the passive resistance of the individual. The farce, however, is too slight to bear such a moral, and it is over. I shall have nothing more to say of England and its Yealms.

2

My house was in El Mina, the old port of Tripoli. It was offered to me a few weeks after my arrival in the country, while I still had to decide whether my base should be Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus or, as a bad fourth, Tripoli. By itself it made up my mind. The house was on the western side of El Mina, well away from the harbour, and was built into and out of the remains of the ancient wall. On the ground floor were a warehouse, the servants’ quarters and kitchen. Above was the living accommodation of four whitewashed, box-like rooms, presenting a blank wall to the street and opening on to a terrace of masonry which faced the unbounded sea.

I can best describe the airy, clear delight of the place by saying that time which most satisfied me was the radiant quarter of an hour between breakfast and the office. First I would approve the sea, whatever its mood, and watch through the white geraniums, whose tiled boxes lined my parapet, the excited dance or slow procession of the morning water; then, to my right, I looked down into a little walled garden, visible only from the terrace and made for the jealously guarded walk of women. To pass by a mere turning of the head from limitless blue and white into a finite heaven where there was no more sea tempted me with a moment of joy, never to be resisted, before the day’s work began.

At the far end of the garden a door gave on to a lane, hedged by cactus and floored by the natural rock, which hooves of donkeys and the winter torrents had worn into a passable surface. This was a truly Mediterranean door. Outside it was a desiccated world of dust and sand-dunes and all the sun-baked filthy litter that blows on the outskirts of an Arab town; within were moist black flower-beds surrounding a well, and so shaded by the thick foliage of pomegranates that until eyes grew accustomed to the green twilight they could not tell white rose from lily.

My warehouse was cool as the crypt of a great church—and such, indeed, it may have been, for the vaulting was Crusaders’ work. It was a typical and traditional Arab place of business; and down the long aisles where generations of traders had stacked their bales and tubs gleamed the reds and blues and yellows of my agricultural machinery. The tractors looked more engine-like, more full of hidden omnipotence for wealth, than behind the showroom windows of the Western dealer.

In that light, so much diffused by space and thickness of masonry, I first met Elisa Cantemir. Therefore, I think, my first impression was of a voice, a grace undefined by any bounding line, a fascination that was wholly sexless. Nothing could have been more prosaic than our conversation. She wanted to know about the latest types of cultivators—ideal for working the narrow hillside terraces of vine or fruit or tobacco. She gave me no information about herself. Her English, though spoken with a faint foreign accent, was more than fluent; often indeed her flying thought seemed to test the very wings of the language. I wondered if she were the European and energetic mistress of some princely Arab landowner.

I asked her if she would like a demonstration of the cultivator. My voice must have sounded professionally inviting, but what I was after was to find out in whose rich acres of plain or mountain she held her court.

‘Salesmanship?’ she asked, smiling. ‘Here?’

‘What’s odd about it?’

‘Your stained-glass tractors,’ she said. ‘One doesn’t expect, somehow, the bazaar carpet-seller to bring out a Hoover.’

I took her upstairs to the terrace, desiring no doubt to show her that not all of me was Levantine trader. She said little, and I admired her for knowing that her swift look of surprise was a better tribute than any flow of conventionalities. In the fierce spring sun she took shape, though its delicacy was no more to be measured and memorized than that of a thin tongue of flame.

She was still, I think, more character than flesh to me. At any rate my curiosity about her was far more insistent than any admiration. I had never felt quite the same quality of interest in a woman unless she were beyond the age of desire. That may be the reason why I never married. I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur of women. It is an empty and inhuman phrase which most vilely smells of a seaman’s brothel. Yet I had upon me the curse of the Don Juan: that I was for ever seeking the binding of two lives into one, and always aware that what I found—or made, perhaps—was nothing but a working model.

‘Your estate is in the Lebanon?’ I asked.

It was the spring of 1948. I had been in the country two years, so I was astonished that I couldn’t place her.

‘In Syria,’ she replied. ‘At Kasr-el-Sittat.’

‘Good God! Are you all alone there?’

‘Oh, no!’ she laughed. ‘Not the last of the wives!’

Kasr-el-Sittat was about thirty miles from the coast in the broken Alaouite downland, where the valleys and even the rounded tops of the hills had plentiful remains of forest. That green remoteness formed a soft and gentle threshold to some of the wildest country in Western Asia, stretching away along the Turkish frontier to Lake Van Ararat.

The settlement had a reputation that was sinister, and comic only to a European, for it had been deliberately constructed around the scattered stones of a pre-Phœnician attempt to house the wives of God. In the early days of the occupation of Syria, God had been a standing joke among us, the political professionals. He was a pagan Arab who had simply set himself up in business as the Almighty and had a following of some thousands. I knew him, I won’t say well, but well enough for him to accept a drink from me when he visited the Latakia hotel like a plain mortal. He had quite a reasonable theory to explain the failings of his humanity; to refute him you needed to be up in all the theological subtleties of the fourth century.

Upon what his spiritual power depended I cannot imagine; it may merely have been that he claimed to be God. So astonishing an assertion was alone enough to impress the simple. His livelihood was the growing of hashish, and his amusement the collection of wives. In his remote district he preserved an absolute gangster’s power by the old game of playing British against French—until at last his divinity went to his head and he defied both of them simultaneously. After that his widows retired to secular life, and the bungalows, so far as I knew, had remained empty and derelict.

‘Someone is living there?’ I asked, surprised.

The group of little houses served no economic purpose whatever. The surrounding villages were enough for the sparse population of the district. God had chosen the site not for convenience, but for the sake of its religious prestige—the lonely hill had been a vague centre of superstition ever since the decay of whatever cult had served its altar—and he had given it the current name of Kasr-el-Sittat, meaning the Fortress of Holy Women.

Elisa Cantemir explained to me that towards the end of 1946 the deserted settlement had been discovered and bought by a communal colony of European refugees. The sacred houses, she said, were in fair condition. They hadn’t even been quarried by the poor for timber and metals. And on the spot was most of the material needed to finish the paths and drainage.

‘A desirable building site, partly developed,’ I suggested.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it did look like that at first. I wonder why God had such a liking for red brick.’

I could tell her that. It was a symbol of his modernity, imported at enormous expense, like the lavatory pans, purely to decorate the squat stone house; and to a faithful wholly unfamiliar with red brick, porches and casements were bright as the gates of Paradise.

‘To us, too,’ she declared, with a bitter and sudden smile. ‘We were all homeless, you see.’

‘You are Jews?’

‘Have they a monopoly of suffering? No, just displaced persons.’

‘Back to the land?’

I knew as I uttered it that the phrase carried a suggestion of hope and inefficiency that didn’t fit her at all.

‘If you like,’ she answered. ‘But a good many of us were brought up on it.’

She turned the conversation to business, and compelled me to become a salesman and talk cultivators. She emphasized that most of Kasr-el-Sittat’s farming was done on straight capitalist lines with hired labour.

‘If you were amateurs,’ I said at last, ‘the cultivator would be the thing for you. If you employ local labour it is not.’

‘That’s what I think,’ she replied with some amusement. ‘But why do you?’

‘Because two of my cultivators would put a whole village out of work. The poor devils are always on the edge of starvation as it is.’

We stared at each other. I well remember that long, veiled, almost emotionless marriage of our eyes. When I look back on this first meeting with her, it seems to me that our spirits, disregarding the momentary antagonisms, had carried their drinks, as it were, into a corner of the room and were satisfying their curiosity about each other with all the wordless intimacy of old friends.

‘I only meant,’ she said, ‘that manpower in this unsettled world is likely to be surer than petrol. So we are agreed that I am not to buy a cultivator?’

‘I am afraid so,’ I answered with mock severity.

She left me without any spoken invitation to come and see her colony. It was a proof of her wisdom. Those who were attracted to Kasr-el-Sittat came of their own accord; and thus a process of natural selection weeded out both visitors and colonists before ever the more fallible human selection came into play.

During the next few weeks I was busy and gave little thought to Kasr-el-Sittat, dismissing the visit of Elisa as one of those delightful, inconclusive episodes from which, after first youth has passed, one expects no more than a bank cashier from the passing over his counter of a single but most lovely foreign coin.

Like the Syrians themselves, I was perfectly accustomed to colonies of cranks. The Middle East is so full of the floating spawn of dead cults and living hopes that monasteries, communities and societies for hocus-pocus take root and flourish wherever there are solitude and running water. It is hard now to remember what I expected of Kasr-el-Sittat, but certainly that it would be some experiment of innocent idealists, destined to be short-lived.

I might never have gone to the place if it had not been close to the tobacco villages. Some of the small growers who kept up the standard of the finest home-cured Latakia leaf were, for illiterate villagers, unexpectedly careful of their soils. They couldn’t distinguish between science and witchcraft—I’m not sure that I can myself—but they consulted me. I admired their interest, and gave to them far more of my time than their few piastres worth of orders ever justified.

So, one early afternoon when I was within ten miles of Kasr-el-Sittat and weary of referring my customers to Allah to explain the inexplicable, I decided that I would be no more a trader for that day, and turned my car into a brown dirt track which led northwards. For a sturdy vehicle the district was not difficult of access, but it was poor, primitive, almost unpoliced. and on the way to nowhere at all but an uninhabited stretch of frontier. There was no reason for merchant or stranger or even government official to take himself and his car up the slopes graded for pack animals and down across the fords.

The road improved as I approached Kasr-el-Sittat, and swept purposefully round the foot of a ridge into the long glen that led straight to the colony. God’s primordial creation had been tidied up. Ahead of me, on a low but prominent hill, which divided the narrowing valley like a wedge of turf, was the gay group of little flat-roofed houses.

My welcome within the gate of Kasr-el-Sittat—a simple, white farm gate—was sufficient, but not at all effusive. I gave my name and asked for Elisa Cantemir. I was told that she was away and would be back in the evening. The few colonists around the entrance and the garage didn’t seem to know what to do with me. I found out afterwards that European visitors invariably came from Aleppo in the colony’s transport, so I didn’t fit into any recognized routine.

I made things easy for them by playing the expert commercial traveller and going straight to the workshops where two tractors and a hopper were under repair. There, over the question of a stripped bevel drive, I proved myself to have the earnest usefulness that seemed to be expected by the colonist; and they, in the intervals of our technicalities, were eager to explain their experiment.

They had all at some time been refugees or displaced persons, and they ran Kasr-el-Sittat as a communal property on the lines of a Jewish kibutz in Palestine—except that a few rich members had financed the whole venture out of their own capital. Men and women worked at whatever they liked. The workshops, the water and electricity, the laboratory, the hospital and the kitchens occupied those with professional skill. Others, with the full approval of their fellows, were presented with the leisure for intellectual and political interests. A few—those who were accustomed to Mediterranean agriculture—supervized the estates. The colony owned orchards, vineyards and tobacco plantations, and enough pasture and arable land to be self-supporting. I needn’t have bothered about local labour. Kasr-el-Sittat used all the villagers it could get, and wanted more.

After a while I wandered off to have a look at the ruins. The houses, linked together by irregular pathways, rose up through scattered timber to the bare crest of the ridge, where they stopped short at the edge of a shallow prehistoric ditch. Within the ditch, great flagstones and the drums of fallen columns appeared here and there above the turf. In the middle was the altar, tilted and split but easily recognizable. It was flanked by two magnificent cedars, one to the north of the altar and one to the south. These trees and the open space between the topmost houses gave the impression of a village green.

I sat in this lovely clearing, which commanded the whole sweep of the valley, and felt, I remember, disappointed. The colonists whom I had met in the workshops and on my way up the hill seemed a prosaic lot to be withdrawn from the world in the little houses of this divine seraglio. True, I felt they were dedicated to something more than their own content; but they inspired in me only pity, and that boredom which often accompanies it—unless one is a saint or a professional interferer with the lives of others.

This complacent and somewhat provincial mood of mine was swiftly shaken. A man of indeterminate age—he must have been more than ten years older than the fifty which he looked—strolled casually across the green to join me. In spite of rough and quite neutral clothing, his grey-haired elegance was obvious. Indeed, if he had actually been wearing the London tailor’s country clothes that hung, invisibly, from his shoulders, I think his distinction would have been less. As it was, attention was concentrated upon his bearing and his manner.

‘I am sorry, Mr. Amberson,’ he said. ‘They only just told me you were here. You must, I think,’ he added with a smile, ‘be the man who wouldn’t sell Elisa Cantemir what she wanted.’

I explained that really we had been talking at cross purposes. She hadn’t told me that the estate was pretty well mechanized already.

‘Oh, don’t apologize!’ he replied. ‘She has a most disconcerting trick of drawing the essentials from any casual acquaintance whom she likes. From you, for example, that you don’t believe in material progress. But I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Osterling.’

‘Osterling!’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought that you——’

‘No, not dead. Diplomats, you must remember, are like bishops. Their judicial murder is too complicated to be worth the trouble.’

Osterling’s presence at Kasr-el-Sittat was indeed a signal that I should not judge the colony too hastily. Before the war he had worked for a league of Balkan monarchs, with a possible extension westwards by means of a Hapsburg restoratio; and I had been entertained by his brilliant autobiography which made you think he cared for nothing but the frivolities of aristocracy, and then forced you to admit that the irresponsibilities of the professional democrats who followed were infinitely more inane. His opinions, of course, were anathema to Hitler, and I did not think he had survived the invasion of Austria.

‘They always funked it,’ he said, ‘when it came to the point.’

‘Was that often?’

‘It had ceased to concern me very greatly,’ he answered. ‘So I couldn’t say.’

‘But what are you doing in Syria?’

‘If you ask yourself the same question, Mr. Amberson, I think—if I am any judge of men—that you will find the answer for both of us.’

A little puzzled, I replied that I was in the country to stay, and that the life of a Christian Arab with a moderate income would very well content me.

‘It would, eh? In other words you prefer the peace of exile to anything that our poor Europe has to offer. Believe me, impatience and disgust have built more empires than any love of country.’

Osterling showed me round the colony, but did most of the questioning himself—as if his sightseeing tour of my character must necessarily be of far more interest to both of us than bricks and mortar. I fear it was. I couldn’t be proof against such a compliment from such a companion. He may have been suspicious of the motives behind my visit, or perhaps this curiosity had been aroused by Elisa. She had evidently talked about me, though, probably impressed more by my way of living than myself. He wouldn’t hear of my leaving before she returned, pressed me to stay the night and left me at the very comfortable guest bungalow half-way down the colony.

An hour later I went across to the common-room where any of the colonists who wished gathered at the end of the day. Thirty or forty men and women were standing or sitting in easy groups around the bottles and the glasses. The odd mixture of faces, some conventionally well-bred, some markedly proletarian, suggested a political club. The room had its original red-tiled floor and whitewashed walls upon which were hung four ancient Kashan rugs, each like a mosaic of jewels set in golden borders, and a few gay, light landscapes painted by one of the colonists.

Elisa Cantemir came forward to greet me. After introducing me to a number of her companions, whose names seemed to hail from all over Europe, she played the hostess and apologized for having nothing but local drinks. I assured her, with what must have been obvious sincerity, that Syria produced all a man could want—unless he were indissolubly wedded to whisky and vintages—and a lot of peculiar flavours that he wouldn’t find elsewhere. She immediately asked me to overhaul their cellar and stock it for them. It was extraordinary how she guessed that to me, as a Syrian bon viveur, it would be a labour of love. She didn’t for a moment mean that I should be their wine merchant.

Because she now had the full reality of a woman in her own chosen setting, I appreciated her, physically, for the first time. She was tall and very thin—though of a thinness that was feminine and tense. I cannot call her slim; the word implies a softness of outline that Elisa had not. She was almost angular, but every one of her angles was delicate and exciting. Her head was small, and her mouth, which was the natural colour of an autumn leaf, was wide and mobile. She had about her an aromatic bitterness that was in sharp contrast to the purposeful benevolence of the general run of colonists.

In the dining-room she placed me next to her. There was nothing monastic about the seating arrangements, no main table self-consciously round or with awkward top and bottom. The colonists helped themselves from hatches and sideboards, and pulled tables together if any group of them wanted to continue a conversation begun in the ante-room. The talk which I overheard was mostly in English—by general consent the common language of the colony. Where national parties were sitting together, one heard a good deal of German and the Slav tongues.

Besides Elisa, Osterling and myself, there were two others at our table. One was a handsome and spectacled American called Lois Tassen; she was a journalist and something of a political philosopher, formidably cynical and well-informed. The other was Eugen Rosa, the familiar spirit whom after that evening I never saw again, alive or dead.

I began to feel that Kasr-el-Sittat was not so predictable an organization as I had imagined, and I confined my questions to those a mere sightseer would be expected to ask. Elisa, however, satisfied my unspoken curiosity with a frankness that seemed harsh. Or was harshness my early impression of that incisive voice? It had the quality of a cello in the hands of some too resolute but brilliant player.

Her companions, she told me, had been gathered together by friend choosing friend, by letter, by justifiable blackmail of staffs in charge of displaced persons, by bribery of frontier police and passport officials; and the general scheme of the colony had been conceived by a group of refugees at Istanbul, whose lives and capital were safe in Turkey. It was to Turkey, she said, that so many victims of our modern states had escaped. She seemed to lump all governments together as equally damnable, and equally capable, given the power, of Nazi-Communist methods.

In my heart I agreed with her, but I protested the platitude that the world had known nothing like the mass murders committed by Russian and German oligarchs since Tamerlane and his piles of skulls. She positively scolded me for shallow thinking. Her leaf-fine nostrils, which were never wholly at rest, quivered with impatience. She held up Tamerlane as a benefactor compared to his modern successors; he had merely destroyed the organization of states; he had not taken the slightest interest in the regimentation of individuals. Where Tamerlane had passed there was less government, and more freedom for those who remained.

‘Is there a single citizen of the civilized world,’ she asked, ‘who does not bitterly resent the interference of the State with his daily life, even if he knows he must accept it?’

Her evident interest in my opinions made me feel that her vehemence was exciting rather than discourteous.

‘Not one,’ I answered, ‘except convinced communists.’

‘Oh, I leave out the governing classes!’ Elisa exclaimed. ‘To interfere is their livelihood. Among all the charlatans of state, communists are only the most conceited.’

‘What are your politics, Mr. Amberson?’ Lois Tassen asked, fixing me with an efficient and patronizing eye.

I told her that I admired politicians too greatly to have any.

At that she went up in the air. She assumed, I suppose, that I was a hero-worshipper, and nothing is more exasperating to the journalist than that—at any rate in private.

‘If you won’t be bored by a perfectly true anecdote,’ I said, ‘I think I can explain.’

And I told them how, during the Abyssinian campaign, a six-ton lorry broke down on a lonely road. The rocks were full of baboons, and they climbed down and sat in a circle to watch the driver and his mate tinker with the engine. Those two poor devils couldn’t get it started, and had to walk ten miles to the nearest vehicle aid post. When they got back with a mechanic and a breakdown truck, they found that the baboons had mastered the use of that fascinating toy, the spanner, and were unscrewing the lorry nut by nut.

‘What’s more, they went on unscrewing,’ I said. ‘It would have cost a man’s life to stop them. Well, my sympathy is with the baboons. I am amazed at their cleverness, their willingness to learn.’

Osterling was delighted.

‘What a pity that politicians have not blue bottoms,’ he exclaimed, ‘so that we could recognize them at birth!’

Elisa, however, saw that my story was no paradox, but a sincere expression of my own personal attempt to adjust myself to my world.

‘You are very English,’ she said. ‘You can forgive because you have such a genius for contempt.’

‘Isn’t forgiveness common at Kasr-el-Sittat?’

‘Towards everything,’ she answered, ‘except the State.’

‘You are anarchists?’

Elisa hesitated. Her eyes were brilliantly alive and very tired. Even then, I think, she was beginning to have plans for me and did not wish me to be frightened by a name.

‘Philosophically,’ said Eugen Rosa in the inflectionless voice of a man who had learned English perfectly, but seldom used it, ‘philosophically, I question it. It is not necessarily anarchism to hold the individual above the State, to care—shall I say?—for his worth rather than his well-being.’

‘It is even the essence of Christianity,’ Elisa agreed ironically, as if that tremendous interpretation of the world deserved to be considered only as a parallel creed. ‘And here too religion will keep creeping in.’

3

When next morning I continued a leisurely journey through the tobacco villages and on to Aleppo, I found that the surrounding inhabitants shared—with due allowance made for Arab imagination—my own vision of Kasr-el-Sittat. They suspected that on that site and in so deliberately isolated a community there must be a fanatical religion; and, on the plane of everyday life, they felt the impact and influence of a highly organized reality.

I dared not pass the house of a friend without entering in—for he would have heard of my movements and be offended—and so, patiently obeying the conventions of my adopted land, I had coffee with two village headmen, a snack with a harness-maker and a very late lunch with a local notable. The mention that I had spent a night at Kasr-el-Sittat invariably produced a nervous silence, and then a spate of exaggerated praise. There was little serious comment, even from men who had actually been employed on the estate.

The colonists were popular, for they paid good wages and looked after their people; but it was no secret that large subventions paid to influential Syrians accounted for permission to buy Kasr-el-Sittat, and their subsequent freedom from any government interference. The inhabitants of the valleys, who were used to naked power and had learned to walk delicately, were well aware that town officials might with every excuse pretend to be ignorant of what went on in so remote a district, and that the colony, if it wished, could be as arbitrary as their late and not much lamented God. They did not care to discuss such unbounded possibilities.

Among my friends was Captain Ashkar of the Syrian Gendarmerie, who was in charge of the mounted patrols along the western section of the Turkish frontier—a tangle of forest and little precipitous foothills through which none ever passed but the smugglers and Ashkar’s troopers. His headquarters were well back from the frontier, and easily accessible from Djisr-ech-Choghour, a god-forsaken village where the road from Latakia to the great plain of northern Syria crosses the Orontes.

I had not seen Ashkar for some months, and on my way home from Aleppo to Tripoli I decided to call on him. Between dusk and midday he might be out with his patrols or inspecting frontier posts or visiting his agents; but in the afternoon he was always to he found sitting outside the comfortable cottage where he had billeted himself and regarding the hills and his horses with idle benevolence. He slept when and wherever there was a chance to sleep; and I suppose that in his life of waiting for something to happen on the spot where it was likely to happen, his odd hours of sleep added up to a sufficient total.

Ashkar was in his late forties. He had begun his military training under the Turks and completed it, with honour, under the French. He looked like a stocky, greying, French colonial officer, though he was of the purest mountain blood—Canaanite rather than Arab—and had a fleshy hooked nose that might have come straight off an Assyrian statue. He was a Christian, and held his post in a country of Mohammedans and Alaouites merely because the government knew he would favour neither of them. So good a soldier should have been at least a colonel, but he had never been popular with the politicians of his own nation; he had served the French a little too faithfully, and he was renowned for scrupulous honesty. I won’t say that honesty actually told against him, but it deprived him of the suppleness, the little touches of diplomacy, which were necessary for advancement.

As I drove cautiously over the bare, water-worn rock into which his village road had degenerated, I looked forward to his solid welcome and to his geniality over a jug of the heavy, dry country wine. He shared my perverted taste for the stuff, and we would argue fantastically for and against the bouquets of cow-dung, charcoal or tobacco flowers which gave character to the wine according to the barns where it had been made and stored.

His reception of me had the warmth that I expected, but as soon as I steered the conversation to Kasr-el-Sittat, telling him that I had stayed there and been most favourably impressed, he became polite and ceremonious. To any stranger passing the cobbled forecourt where we sat, especially if the stranger had been a European, we should have appeared the closest of friends; yet the proper note of intimacy had vanished. When I admired a pure-bred Arab three-year-old which some friendly official in Damascus had just sent him as a remount, he kept on insisting that it was mine to take away without even the twinkle in his eye which would have told me he knew his offer to be conventional nonsense.

It was obvious that Ashkar shared the general sense of caution in discussing Kasr-el-Sittat, and this was the more surprising since, in the cause of law and order, he feared neither influence nor superstition nor the complexities of high policy. In the bad old days of Kasr-el-Sittat he himself had upended the bare soles of God’s feet, when no one else dared to carry out the arrest, and given him eighteen strokes of the best with a steel-centred quirt.

His opinions of the colony were non-committal as those of the villagers, but his exaggerations were more amusing. He declared that Kasr-el-Sittat was a lunatic asylum for Europeans which the Turks had paid the Syrians to accept in their territory; alternatively—and with a wealth of detail—that it was an experimental station for discovering new ways to perpetuate the race.

This gave me an opening. So far as my Arabic allowed, I took upon myself the character and flowers of speech of an old Aleppo roué, and lectured on the beauties within the walls of Kasr-el-Sittat—thus accounting for the enthusiasm with which, unwisely, I had spoken of the colony. Ashkar swallowed the bait, and I could see that his old brown eyes were no longer fixed on me so warily. The memory of Elisa Cantemir lent a note of sincerity to my voice: so much so that I felt disgusted with myself, as if I had been describing beloved rather than imagined women.

The captain fetched another jug of wine, which he swore had been made by a Maronite priest and tasted of incense. It did—and we passed to a fanciful project of obtaining three barrels from a Yezidi, a Druse and an Alaouite (all more or less pagan religions flourishing within a hundred miles of the Mediterranean) and analysing the difference. I knew that confidence had been restored, and that Ashkar no longer thought there was any likelihood of my being involved in the private affairs of Kasr-el-Sittat.

He even opened up a little, and told me how the colonists had drifted down from Turkey, singly and in groups, to their curious home. They had attracted more than a routine attention from Syrian and foreign police; but even the British and French legations, to whom a list of the colonists’ names had been discreetly submitted, could report nothing definite against them. Since their arrival they had proved themselves, from a policeman’s point of view, desirable citizens. They were generous employers, entertained exceedingly well, neither ran around naked nor refused their taxes. They were, he insisted, welcome guests—but his old gendarme’s mind was still worrying at an invisible bone. Before I left he said mysteriously that he was about to investigate a little further, that he might need my advice—since I was his father and friend and knew the colony—and that he would come and see me at Tripoli in a week or two when God willed.

About a fortnight later I stood on my terrace in the freshness of the morning, lighting my after-breakfast pipe, when I observed a poor and ragged Christian Arab sitting discreetly in the dust at such a distance that I could just see him over the garden wall. Why an Arab should choose to squat in one small unyielding patch of the Levant rather than another, neither he nor his fellow can know; but the spot this squatter had selected was so unattractive that I guessed he wished to speak to me, and that he was aware—as who was not in that little town?—of my morning routine.

I opened the garden door, and exchanged with him a formal blessing. He came down into the lane, adding a further and more flowery salutation, and presented me with a letter from Ashkar. I read that he intended to call on me the following night, and that he would take it kindly—assuming it was not an intolerable inconvenience to dismiss my devoted clients and retainers—if I could arrange for us to have a private chat.

The devoted retainers to whom Ashkar had politely referred consisted of Boulos, my Lebanese cook, and an unemployable young cousin of his, to whom, for the sake of conscience and family honour, he gave board and lodging in exchange for such work as was too undignified for his own attention. I was permitted to give the cousin an occasional tip, but to preserve the polite fiction that he did not live at my expense.

Nothing was easier than privacy in that delightful house. The owner had but to close the staircase door, and not a slit nor window could command his love, his business or his riotous nights.

On the following morning Boulos set out drinks and a cold meal for two by the garden well, and returned to his quarters, smirking lasciviously. I unbolted the gate into the lane, and about nine o’clock Ashkar came in. He was wearing civilian dress and a tarboosh on his head. I was impressed by this exaggerated discretion. The captain in civilian clothes was inconceivable; he lived in and of his uniform. Had I wished to form a mental picture of Ashkar in bed, my imagination would certainly have dressed him in boots and breeches until common sense protested that a night-shirt (not, I think, pyjamas) was by far the more probable wear.

We talked personalities and politics, horses and silkworms, while I waited for Ashkar to decide that the proper atmosphere of disinterested friendship had been created. He had obviously been attacked by one of those fevers of caution to which policemen and frontier guards, poised as they usually were between the threat of dismissal if they did their duty and of blackmail if they did not, could have no resistance.

It was not uncommon, he began at last, for a gendarme in his position to receive unofficial instructions—that, of course, I, as a former political officer, would understand. Sometimes it was in the interests of governments that their frontiers should not be too zealously guarded. Individuals had to be let out or let in, and it was left to the discretion of the officer in charge—very properly, didn’t I agree?—to arrange such delicate matters with or without the help of his Turkish colleague across the border.

He had had, he said, a request, an indication—nothing so unmannerly as a definite order—that if his patrols were to pick up anyone with a temporary identity card proving residence at Kasr-el-Sittat, they might—if Ashkar had no objection—take it for granted that he was a colonist and in the frontier hills on innocent business. Twice his patrols had in fact run into such wandering foreigners, and it was fair to assume that they had crossed or intended to cross the border.

Ashkar declared with pride that he was no hidebound policeman, but, as I knew, the very soul of tact. He stopped for confirmation, and I assured him, with extensive mental reservations, that so he was. In view of his long experience, he went on, he was as ready to obey a wish as an order; but it was essential he should know what was going on. His frontier was wide open. Anybody and anything could travel between Turkey and Kasr-el-Sittat, and the colony itself was certainly immune from search. If the government fell or policy changed or a politician retired on his winnings, Ashkar would be left holding the baby.

He had therefore been compelled to carry out his responsibilities as best he could. He did not apologize at all, he told me, for being on friendly terms with a few Turkish smugglers and hashish runners for just so long as he had insufficient proof to arrest them; in his job one might be exchanging shots with an unknown traveller at dawn, and drinking peacefully with him in the evening. He believed that European police, too, were often on good terms with criminals, were they not? It was permissible to allow a man liberty to do a little petty crime himself in return for gossip about bigger criminals.

The next time a traveller from Kasr-el-Sittat was seen riding towards the frontier, Ashkar dutifully looked the other way but sent immediate word to one of his friendly enemies over the border—a free-lance bandit named Selim—that if the traveller were followed and discreetly high-jacked, and the contents of his saddle-bags handed to Ashkar in person, there might be favours to come.

I had no doubt his tale was true. There must have been plenty of picturesque scoundrels in the Turkish villages only too ready to earn the goodwill of the incorruptible but otherwise complete Levantine who guarded the Syrian border. His pasha’s trick was excellently plotted; he would never be suspected of complicity in a sordid frontier crime, which anyway happened outside his jurisdiction, and Selim would hand him over all he wanted to know. In fact, however, Selim handed him nothing but the quite ordinary contents of pockets and suitcase, and the embarrassing news that the traveller had resisted too fiercely and was now indiscoverably buried at the bottom of a ravine.

Ashkar had brought with him the traveller’s passport. I lit the lamp that stood on the table between us. The dead man was Eugen Rosa, that serious idealist who made one of our table at Kasr-el-Sittat a fortnight earlier.

This placed me face to face with Elisa, as if she instead of the slow-speaking Ashkar had been my companion in the dark garden. Rosa was one of her couriers, whose free passage across the frontier had been—to judge by the captain’s hints—bought at a fair price from some corrupt official in Damascus. I sympathized with the colony. Since Kasr-el-Sittat was busily engaged in collecting recruits and money from countries that did not readily permit the export of either, it was not surprising that they needed an occasional clandestine messenger. I continued to pretend to the captain that human life was not particularly sacred in the foothills of Taurus—as indeed it was not—but I was profoundly shocked by the whole episode. It was fortunate for Ashkar that there was no proof of the story but his word.

The passport was Nicaraguan. Nothing could be more neutral, more discouraging to any guesswork. Whatever Eugen Rosa’s true nationality, it was not Nicaraguan. I came to more interesting ground when I discovered that Rosa had a valid Turkish visa. There seemed no reason why he should not have travelled north in comfort and safety by the Taurus Express. Ashkar, however, with his professional knowledge of indecipherable frontier stamps and squiggles, pointed out that according to the passport its owner had never left Turkish territory.

‘Wasn’t he carrying anything at all?’ I asked. ‘No letters?’

‘By God, nothing! Nothing but a box of cigars! Not even enough of them to make a profit,’ answered Ashkar disgustedly. ‘And those Selim stole!’

‘Did he tell you?’

After all, Ashkar couldn’t have known about them unless Selim had confessed. He seemed remarkably honest for a bandit.

‘The devil was in his tongue,’ Ashkar grumbled. ‘He was drunk and afflicted. It was God’s mercy that I was alone, for he came to me in the woods shouting that he had killed the man, that he was Selim the Fearless and that he would kill me too. So I took away his gun and searched him, and found the cigars in his trousers. Then I stayed with him, listening, till he was sober.

‘Well, a man’s heart is beyond knowledge. I tell you I have sat with Selim for hours, filling him with his foul Turkish araq till he stank, watching for an unguarded word like a cat over a hole, and never has he said anything about himself that I did not already know. Yet this time, when I trusted to his discretion, he talked and boasted as if to an Aleppo whore. As soon as he was sober, I showed him my note-book, with the names and addresses he had given me written out large in simple Turkish that he could read. I shall have no more trouble with Selim.’

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.

THE AMŒBA

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.

She claimed—and I daresay it was true—that through the centuries while the Cantemirs protected their rich and inaccessible corner from rival emperors a special relationship had grown up between them and the powerless. She admitted that their sense of duty was exceptional, but it had been a rare landlord, she insisted, who was as unimaginative as the State.

Clarity, the precise image of what she wanted to destroy, came to her when the Russians killed her parents. That was in 1940 when they annexed the Bukovina. They told her with quite convincing politeness and regret, that the death sentence was an economic necessity; they expected that she would sympathize when she came to understand their ideals.

Then she escaped to Germany. She didn’t like the Nazis any better, but she had money in Berlin. Her father and his friends, who had been forced to exchange wealth with responsibilities for still greater wealth with none, had investments from Norway to the Argentine.

‘We blame the aristocrats for all they never thought of doing,’ she said, ‘but at least they were the only true internationalists Europe has ever known.’

Some of them had so loathed the German purpose that they had been ready to give their lives for Europe. They did. She poured scorn on their gallant, indiscreet conspiracy. She didn’t think that they had deceived the Gestapo for a month.

‘I wanted to die then. Just wanting to is a sort of surrender, Eric, the nearest I ever came to rest. But they never gave me a chance to die. The commandant of the place asked me if it wasn’t quite easy. He would never be present at interrogations. He lived in a lovely Wagner world of heroism. Really I had to explain to him that they didn’t put naked swords at my throat. That commandant, my dear, he stands for them all—all the men of decent upbringing and instincts who daren’t disobey.’

She said that the British were just the same. What mattered to them was her record on paper. Our people had smothered her under the softness of if onlys. If only she had been a Jewess, they said; if only she hadn’t been released before their army arrived; if only she had worked with an allied underground; why then, she would be free to go where she liked. Get a certiticate, they told her, that you were imprisoned and tortured. From whom? Who knew? Was she to walk through the ruins from city to city looking for bits of Gestapo? So they were sorry, but from their point of view she was simply a Nazi sympathizer who had fled to Germany for fear of their dear allies.

On foot, with no interference but hunger, she dragged herself to a refugee camp in the American zone, where they didn’t insult her by arguing about the past. They didn’t understand it, anyway, she said; they were as kind as they were self-righteous, and they applied to her the touchstone of the present. When it came to sending her to Russia because her home was now in Russia, they asked her simply whether or not she believed in democracy.

I don’t know what happened to infuriate her. She was not a woman to have any hesitation in twisting civil or military rules to her advantage. Possibly it was the mild and spectacled obtuseness of the questioner. Possibly the words were an intolerable challenge to one who had seen too closely the stupidity of elected politicians and its effect upon the world.

‘I told them that no thinking man or woman had any trust at all in democracy,’ she said. ‘I told them I wasn’t such a child as to think the tyranny of a majority any better than the tyranny of a minority.’

So they put her down as an anarchist, and she accepted the description. She gloried in it. Then and there she saw that it was the only political label which, in the modern world, could be applied to the once respectable opinions of an eighteenth-century Whig. It wasn’t till after this episode that she found the full and conscious spirit which possessed her.

To her interrogator, however, communists and anarchists were all one. He wasn’t after all paid to know that the most unrelenting enemy of communism was the anarchist. He put her on the next train for the revolutionary paradise.

‘And then, thank God for him, I met a man who had no duty and no morality!’ she exclaimed. ‘I bribed him to take me off the train and into Turkey as his mistress. He was the only one of them all who trusted me when he looked into my eyes. He believed what I said—that if I were free I could give him money.’

Her voice was without emotion or self-pity. Only the gathering speed of her words revealed the incandescent anger beneath her irony. When she told me of that bitter triumph of her eyes, I was overcome by so uncontrollable, so helpless a hatred of our world that I could not keep the tears from my cheek.

‘Are those mine?’ she asked.

Her exact words—but my memories of that night colour them with a sentimentality that did not exist. In truth her tone was of interested surprise.

‘Someone has to do it for you,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, as if I had made a sober statement of fact. ‘Will you?’

I asked her what she meant.

‘In any partnership one of the two must be breakable,’ she explained.

‘And repairable?’

‘Easily. That is what I mean. It’s usually the woman. But I—am not breakable. I ask your friendship, Eric, for the sake of your lovely power of suffering,’

Friendship? I took up that tentative challenge, and knew that all her body listened. I think that few men had found her curious physique so exquisite that it moved them to the full poetry of desire.

It is not a matter of which I wish to write. Woman to her man she wanted—well, let it be! I loved and love her like a woman, and I take it that we—if they will permit me for a moment to be one of them—know a permanency of passion and of misery that to men is rarely given. Yet male I am in this: I had not the anodyne of women, the unquestioning loyalty to the beloved for as long as it remained beloved.

Was I a humiliation to her? That was a subject which I never dared to approach. Her initial resistance was artistic but perfunctory, and thereafter she made little concession to the vanity of the male. For the sake of her prestige she wouldn’t take a mate among her own companions at Kasr-el-Sittat. Well, I was the best, perhaps the only European alternative; and at times, when she would lie awake staring at anything but me, she may have put it to herself as crudely as that. A passionate chef d’œvre of amorous sculpture, likely to be awarded the prize of the year by any session, if such could be, of competent judges—that, I have no doubt, was her warmest, her most ecstatic picture of our affair. O God, I wish I had no doubt.

We spent three days in Damascus, and I can remember every hour of them. Such a period comes only once in a man’s life, when he may love without impediment or afterthought, when the mere earning of a living is simple and secure, when he has a cause as well as a woman to which he can give his heart.

Little by little Elisa was more explicit. At first I was uneasy as she unfolded to me the objects of Kasr-el-Sittat and its growing power. I shied away from all the implications, and insisted that the movement was really nothing more than a sort of Civil Liberties organization with teeth in it.

‘Yes, you might call it that,’ she answered. ‘The more aspects there are, the better for us—so long as our own object is clear. Here’s a question for you to think about when you’re all alone in your little house at Tripoli.’

I told her that the house waited for her and was made for her, but she laughed and insisted that I should listen to her question:

‘On which side was the Vichy Government during the war?’

‘God knows,’ I answered. ‘It was like an amœba. Its shape depended on its environment.’

The illustration delighted her, and moved her to more frankness than she had, I think, as yet intended.

‘Then suppose we allow the Americans to put Kasr-el-Sittat under the microscope, what do they find? A bitter anti-communist organization which can prove the existence of a flourishing underground from Niev to Budapest. And now put it in the Cominform’s solution. They hate it. It hasn’t any shape at all. It looks like nihilism. Still—we are creating disaffection and disobedience in the West. Eric, I tell you we can get money from both sides. All of them, East or West, may suspect that for itself the amœba has a shape, but why be afraid of it when it is so useful? Did the men who financed Hitler look any further than their own intentions?’

‘And what is there at the heart?’ I asked boldly.

‘Clear sight, Eric, and implacable hatred.’

I drove Elisa back to Kasr-el-Sittat, and was put up for the Saturday and Sunday nights in an empty bungalow that had just been whitewashed and reconditioned. The colony was expanding and busy with its home. We passed a party of local labourers, their black cotton garments powdered with cement and plaster, returning to the villages; and on the paths of the settlement were industrious colonists carrying ladders and pots of paint.

The dining-room was fuller than I had ever seen it, and there were a number of new faces. As Elisa had not turned up, I sat down with a party of mixed Slavs, who seemed as naïve as mid-nineteenth-century nihilists. They were all anxious to explain their ideas, and I don’t think they ever gave me a chance to reply. That the disciplined Bolshevik party had driven through these idealists like a tank through a mist was no wonder. I admitted, however, that, properly handled, they might yet have power to blind the driver.

When we had nearly finished, Elisa swept in, accompanied by Osterling and two strangers. One was nothing but moustache and dark glasses; the other was a tall man of splendidly wiry physique, dressed dashingly and purposefully in jacket, boots and breeches. He had a bony, Baltic head, and I put him down—correctly—as a Pole. Elisa was smouldering with annoyance, and looked it. I was selfish enough to adore that touch of humanity. A fit of the sulks upon my coolly radiant goddess had hitherto been unthinkable.

Osterling jumped up as I passed their table, and asked me to wait for them at my bungalow. They would all come round, he said, and crack a bottle. He had the irresponsible cheerfulness of an accomplished diplomat, and I was far from guessing his real intent. He sounded as eager and innocent as if he were suggesting that I should lay on a champagne supper for the two of us and a couple of Viennese cabaret stars.

I strolled back through the delicious June night, and waited for Elisa and her party outside the door. The scattered houses between my own and the rest of the colony were not yet ready for occupation, and the network of paths was deserted. Starlight and faint voices reminded me of loneliness in some hut above a mountain village.

Elisa, when she arrived, still seemed embarrassed and inaccessible, but Osterling was most genial. He introduced the Pole as Mr. Gisorius and the man in the dark glasses by some temporary name I have forgotten. He then produced a syphon and bottle of whisky. The rule of consuming only local drinks did not, he said, apply to respectable ex-statesmen in their hungry sixties.

As soon as we had settled down, Osterling remarked, with his delightful smile, that Elisa had been telling them about my amœba. I disclaimed any copyright in the metaphor.

‘But the trouble is,’ he said, ‘that she seems to have shown it to you in too many typical environments.’

I became aware that I was alone, facing Elisa and the three men. Our seating had, accidentally but too plainly changed to that of the accused before his judges. Osterling at once moved with complete naturalness to an easy chair more or less by my side.

‘Have a cigar?’ he offered.

Elisa began to prowl about under the window with tightly-clenched fists. I thanked him, and lit up an exquisite Havana.

‘I expect,’ I said, ‘that you all have the same respect for Elisa Cantemir’s judgment that I have.’

I met Gisorius’ analytical eye. It was not wholly hostile; it held indeed the grim humour of a man entirely confident in himself and his sense of justice. His head was ridged and faceted as an animal’s skull.

‘A profound respect,’ he answered, ‘for her judgment in cold blood.’

Elisa smothered the opening syllables of something that sounded as if it would be perilously near abuse. I kept quiet, for Osterling had already started to deal with Gisorius.

‘My experience of human beings,’ he said gracefully, ‘persuades me that their judgment is more affected by what they want than by what they have. And in any case Elisa’s instinct is that of the immortals, neither cold nor hot nor logical, but invariably right. No, no, I shouldn’t dream of questioning it. Our problem, Amberson, is not whether Elisa is right, but whether we can afford to be wrong. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Perfectly,’ I replied. ‘On the other hand, she said you needed me. I don’t know why. But obviously you have to take a risk with someone. And you had better ensure, as she did, that he’s in full sympathy.’

‘In full sympathy?’ asked Gisorius. ‘An ordinary business man?’

His tone was matter-of-fact rather than offensive, but he had touched a sensitive spot. I told him—and I must have sounded sincere, though too excited—that his remark was typical of a political pedant, that the millions compelled into commerce had among them as many subtle and fine intelligences as the whole body of professional master-minds, and that one of the major causes of strain and impatience in the world was that the damned economists wouldn’t grant to the trader any higher ambition than the making of money.

The man in the dark glasses took them off. He had looked like a somewhat blank and massive Rudyard Kipling, but now I knew that I had seen his face before. Little wrinkles that seemed due to intensity of effort rather than humour radiated from the corners of his eyes, and beneath were heavy pouches; but the orbs were clear and magnificent.

‘The higher ambitions of the trader,’ he repeated. ‘Interesting how quickly the pendulum swings! Now I should have thought that you, in England especially, had had quite enough trouble with the higher ambitions of the trader.’

‘I mean his right to be considered an altruistic thinker, failing any evidence to the contrary,’ I said. ‘To put it crudely, I suggest that the average commercial traveller is a deal less prejudiced than the average intellectual.’

‘The interesting thing is that you believe that,’ he answered. ‘I don’t. I think your opinion is merely a reaction against the pseudo-science of the politicians. But we must talk it out some other time. On your next visit, perhaps.’

These last words of his were, I think, a sort of casting vote. None of them showed any immediate change of mood. Even Elisa did not yet sit down. I was intensely curious both then and afterwards to know how the discussion before dinner had gone, but since all were determined to create the illusion that there had never been any discussion at all, I tried to live up to their manners. It is my guess that Gisorius would have preferred me to have no next visit anywhere, and that for Osterling, who always thought in human symbols, the possible damage I might do was nothing compared to the certainty of upsetting Elisa’s balance and energy.

‘It’s the old question of the missionaries and the trader,’ said Osterling with a friendly smile. ‘We need you because you know the country.’

I said, more to Elisa than to him, that they seemed to be managing very well in Damascus. Elisa replied impatiently:

‘My dear, I was fifteen when I learned how to bribe an official without hurting his dignity.’

‘I will explain my own case, which is typical,’ said the stranger, ‘by the way, I think you have recognized me?’

‘I’ve only got so far as thinking I ought to,’ I replied. ‘Your face is familiar to me from newspaper photographs before the war. And something you stood for I liked.’

‘So did I,’ he said. ‘We were on our way to a world then, But there is no return. My name, Mr. Amberson, is Czoldy.’

Czoldy, of course! His personality had fascinated both journalists and public in the ’thirties. In the League of Nations debates he used to dissect the soul and intentions of Nazi statesmen with an exquisite irony that couldn’t be openly resented and yet was unanswerable. It was odd to think of so passionate a European at Kasr-el-Sittat, but what might be in Czoldy’s mind after the destruction of his life’s work and ten years of poverty, prison camps and humiliation was beyond my conjecture.

‘Are you here for good?’ I asked eagerly.

‘My dear sir, I wish I were! No, I am on the permanent staff of the United Nations. Where else should I be? I am like one of those palace servants who were slaughtered to attend their royal master in the grave. We bear the seals of the nations, and there is no flesh on our hands. But I was giving you an example of our difficulties. Czoldy may visit Turkey. Why not? It is better, however, that he should not be known to have visited Kasr-el-Sittat. So he must come by paths that seem to him, at his age, unnecessarily romantic. Is there a safer route, Mr. Amberson?’

‘There’s the sea,’ I said, ‘and you will have me at a port. But Kasr-el-Sittat is conveniently close to the frontier.’

‘Is that common talk?’ Gisorius asked at once.

‘No. You’re not discussed at all outside your own corner. And to local people you’re mysterious and feared—but just another monastery.’

Gisorius seemed pleased that I had understood the implications of his question.

‘You were in Intelligence, weren’t you?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly. A very amateur political officer.’

‘I was with you, too, all through the war,’ he said. ‘You were going to fight on till the independence of Poland was restored, if I remember.’

He dipped a knee and held out his arm in a macabre and supplicating gesture that no ballet dancer could have bettered.

‘A cup of dust for your dead master, Czoldy! But it was fresh blood when I filled it.’

He recovered from his extravaganza with a smooth athleticism of body and mind that astonished me. One could not dislike a man who hid such volcanic vitality at the bottom of his soul.

‘That Captain Ashkar——’ he asked suddenly. ‘Should we pay him?’

His voice was dry and unpleasant, but he was doing his best, like a friendly commanding officer, to make me feel I was a fellow expert.

‘In Ashkar’s mind the frontier belongs to him personally,’ I answered, ‘and, believe me, he can’t be bribed. You can trust him to carry out his orders from Damascus, not to talk, and no more.’

‘Shall we have him broken?’ Elisa asked.

In reconstructing what I remember of this conversation, I may have given an impression of myself as a bumptious rabbit in a trap. That was not so. All my emotions—and I do not mean just those overwhelmed by Elisa—were passionately devoted to Kasr-el-Sittat, and blind as the loyalties of the many dead whose chief crime was to adore a leader. I could even forgive Gisorius and admit that in his place I too might have refused such a gamble as myself. Logic? When one is under the excitement of a revelation, there is no logic. These were my people, and the purpose of my life was momentarily clear. Even so, I could not quite forget my old army sympathy for an official trying to do his duty under difficulties, and to that extent I was on the side of Ashkar. Entire sincerity towards either party was impossible, but Elisa’s question at least allowed me to be an honest middleman.

‘No, don’t try to break him,’ I replied. ‘You might get a crook who would be harder still to handle. And up to a point I can deal with Ashkar for you.’

I waited for the enquiry about Eugen Rosa. I was prepared to say that I would ask Ashkar to investigate. But nobody mentioned him or even seemed on the verge of a question. I began to suspect that they did not connect him with Ashkar at all, and that there must be other places along Rosa’s route where he might have disappeared. This guess, as I found out later, was a good one.

‘You’re happy on your beach,’ Osterling remarked.

‘Yes. It’s a home. And it’s friendship that counts with the Arab more than money. Let them feel you like them, give a favour for a favour—and this country is open.’

‘The port too?’ Gisorius asked.

‘Within reason.’

‘Heavy crates?’

‘My business is machinery, and if the crates bear my marks——’

‘And could you land, for example, Czoldy or me or a party in my charge?’

‘Not at El Mina. On the open beaches, yes. But I’d remind you that seamen always talk. And I can’t guarantee anything at the Turkish end.’

Gisorius looked at me ironically.

‘I see you have not fully appreciated all that Elisa Cantemir told you,’ he said. ‘In Turkey, if I am discreet, I am allowed considerable liberty of action.’

That was my first and last meeting with the whole Secretariat of Kasr-el-Sittat.

2

And now began three even months of my life when I had a clear conscience and the satisfaction of success. A clear conscience? Well, a man who has been brought up to common honesty should at least mark carefully his own illegalities. I can only say that I did not. The smuggling which I carried out for Kasr-el-Sittat was too easy and conformed too closely to the morality of the country. Of course if conscience had bothered me I could have found a thousand excuses to satisfy it, for my motives to me were pure; but I never seemed to feel the necessity for any excuses at all.

The work was not nearly so melodramatic as the Secretariat feared. Their collective intelligence, brilliant and wary though it was, did not move easily through the subtleties of an Arab country in which government was a matter of vague intentions and vaguer obedience. I used to explain to them that they were operating in a land so free as to be a practical example of their own ideal—a paradox which amused Osterling and roused Elisa to violent argument.

My cover was perfect. In Tripoli and El Mina gossip was good-humoured and mildly envious. They discussed, of course, the visits of Elisa to my house and hidden garden, and I like to think that the woman and the setting sometimes turned their light minds to imagine beauty that in fact was real—but, if I know them, they probably thought I had seduced Elisa in order to get Kasr-el-Sittat’s orders for agricultural machinery.

Our biggest import was the wireless transmitter. It was shipped to me from New York as an electrically-driven milking machine. The suction pipes and attachments of a milker were packed on the top of the case, and I had no difficulty in demonstrating to a friendly and interested customs inspector that a milking machine was what it was. From then on Kasr-el-Sittat could communicate—of course by Morse only—with all its secret offices in Europe. I never knew the technicalities of the network. Kasr-el-Sittat itself used the call-signs of a ship.

Then there were the boxes of seeds and tools which purported to have come from London via Italy. All I knew of these little shipments was that the boxes had false bottoms. So primitive a method of smuggling would have been discovered at once if they had been consigned to anyone but a regular merchant with the correct official friends. For me, however, customs examination was merely a disagreeable routine. If I wanted to move my goods at an awkward time, or if the documents were too complicated for the easy-going, I was allowed to show the clerks how the clearance should be done; and if the port were busy, customs examination sometimes took place in my own warehouse after hours and over drinks.

All this was so smooth, so much in the normal, unhurried movement of El Mina’s day, that, as I say, it never gave me a moment of anxiety. I didn’t like the caique traffic, but only twice did I have to organize it—once for Czoldy and a party of three, and once for two Russians who were taken on board at Istanbul and landed on the Syrian coast after dark.

It was safer that Ashkar should be of the common opinion that my interest in the colony was commercial and licentious, so I never approached him directly on questions of the frontier. I kept in the background, but managed to get rid of that unsatisfactory arrangement by which he was expected to keep his eyes closed. He was requested, instead, to keep them open; and he adopted a neutrality so benevolent that our few clandestine travellers were all but handed over to him for forwarding.

Again it was friendship, the friendship of Ashkar and Juan Villaneda, which produced the result. Villaneda had been born in Spanish Morocco, and the North African dialect of Arabic was one of his native language; it hadn’t taken him long to pick up the classical Syrian speech. He loved to refresh himself by contact with the simple, and to them he appeared as missionary rather than monk. In his occasional wanderings through Syria and the Lebanon he was a walking advertisement that Kasr-el-Sittat was full of harmless cranks.

That, I thought, was his chief use to the colony—that, and the firm friends he made among the villagers and the very poor. When I suggested to Elisa that I should arrange an interview between Ashkar and Villaneda, I had no idea that Juan was of any importance. Indeed, it was Ashkar’s respect for him that made me ask questions and discover his key position in the colony.

On the day of the meeting I arrived at Ashkar’s billet well before Villaneda, and explained to him over lunch that by talking to this friendly and eccentric Spaniard he might satisfy himself that Kasr-el-Sittat was not interested in petty smuggling. Ashkar took it very well, remarking sententiously that a gendarme could lose nothing by increasing the circle of his acquaintances, and might in an emergency gain much.

Juan Villaneda, with the good sense of Mediterranean man, arrived after we had had a comfortable siesta. He was not seen at his best when delivered at the door by a powerful American car, for he looked like any poor Syrian who could just afford a suit of European clothes. To win the heart of a suspicious stranger he should have come on a dusty donkey or on foot.

‘I do not often travel like this,’ said Villaneda at once, ‘and I don’t like it. A man can’t stop and talk on the road. I see a face that pleases me, and by the time the driver has stopped I a half a kilometre further on. Then reverse, you say? But, my friends, confidence has gone. Would you talk to a man who comes roaring at you backside foremost?’

Ashkar smiled in his moustache, while preserving perfect dignity and uttering the conventional exclamations of welcome. To impress the unknown envoy he had put on his best uniform and shiniest boots, and posed a careful group of his orderly and horses.

Villaneda’s sincerity of manner was a little too abrupt for the long formalities of Arab courtesy, but now he took the shortest route to the captain’s heart; he admired the horses, and plunged straight into the sporting slang of the breeder. Ashkar uttered a word of warning as Villaneda closely examined a foul-tempered roan taken over from one of the French Light Squadrons, but the horse seemed to be just as impressed by the Spaniard’s knowledge as I was myself.

He was a compact, sturdy little man. His round face, vigorously invaded by thick eyebrows and black, coarse hair growing low on the forehead, was that of many southern peasants, but the nose and mouth were sharp, mobile and sensitive. A peasant, you would have said, but one who had far more interest in spirit than soil.

We sat formally on hard chairs in the shade, while Ashkar pressed on us cold savouries and wine—a commercial brand with gaudy label which he kept for conventional hospitality merely because it was expensive. I turned the conversation to Kasr-el-Sittat, and, so far as I could, paraded Villaneda’s character for inspection.

He played up beautifully, offering flowery thanks to Ashkar, as representative of his government, for the freedom that Syria allowed to the colony.

‘Christian and Moslem alike,’ he said, ‘you have learned charity from each other. Where but here could we have found such a refuge and such tolerance?’

‘To the poor, the whip. To the wealthy, tolerance.’ Ashkar answered, as if complimenting the colony on its prosperity.

Villaneda caught the allusion, and flung it merrily back.

‘Shall the guest prove ungrateful?’ he asked.

‘In the camp the dearest guest is honour,’ replied Ashkar, warning him off the frontier.

‘And for me and mine,’ said Juan, ‘for I am a true communist.’

That nearly sunk the whole interview. The captain was Arab enough to enjoy a good, fast game of parables and proverbs, but the essential Ashkar to keep in mind on his own precious frontier was much nearer some tough old French sous-officier. I could see him mentally reaching for stamped paper and taking a signed statement from Juan Villaneda. The colour pattern of his politics was primitive as that of any other policeman; he saw the existing order, whatever it might be, as white and everything else as dripping red.

I couldn’t understand what Villaneda was up to. He told me afterwards that in many villages he had been nicknamed The Communist, that Ashkar would certainly hear of it, and so it was better to deal with the coming accusation at once.

‘Men may well have honour in Russia,’ said Ashkar doubtfully, but politely—for after all Villaneda was his guest.

‘They may,’ Juan agreed, ‘provided the State orders them to have it. But I said I was a true communist, captain. And, by God, there are no men on earth, capitalists, socialists or plain sons of bitches who hate the Soviet dictatorship as a true communist.’

‘You do not want communism as in Russia?’ Ashkar asked patiently.

‘Never! I am a libertarian communist. There is no need for the State, no need for economics. When you are in want, you have a right to ask and be given. Suppose to-day I sell the captain a chicken for two piastres and next week he comes to me and sells me a cabbage for two piastres, which of us is better off? Why should we not have supplied each other’s needs in the first place without giving or asking money?’

Ashkar relaxed. The anarchist creed of voluntary association was in his blood. The Christians had been preaching it for the last two thousand years from all the monasteries between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates; and while they preached it, the Moslem Fellahin, who seldom had two piastres anyway, quietly lived up to it.

‘You are religious then at Kasr-el-Sittat? asked the captain.

‘Perhaps,’ Villaneda answered. ‘But so was Jules Verne.’

Ashkar seemed to appreciate this obscure remark immediately. His mind, as Juan had already discovered, dealt in symbols and catchwords without being confused by the original reality. As for me, I needed a long minute’s thought before I could arrive at what was meant and understood by this conversational shorthand. It was, roughly, that Juan disclaimed any organized religion for Kasr-el-Sittat, but suggested they might be prophets whose dreams and ideals would come true, as had the prophecies of Jules Verne.

Villaneda developed for the captain his visionary political theories: that all the ills of men resulted from their lust for property, and that progress based on the mere possession of objects could only be illusion. It was a simplification of his creed, evolved for and partly by the strangers he met on the roads of Syria, of whom hardly a man would have more possessions than he could pile on a handcart. When Juan was talking to revolutionaries, well-read in their own doctrines, I swear he didn’t use a substantive of less than four syllables.

Ashkar was disarmed by this deliberately exaggerated innocence, and even grumbled that every honest man would be a communist—or at least one of Villaneda’s libertarian communists—if he believed that communism could or would end in the withering away of the State.

‘How do you recruit your members?’ he asked. ‘How did you yourself come to Kasr-el-Sittat?’

Villaneda gave us a dry and humorous sketch of his life. He had known as much spiritual disillusionment as anyone in Kasr-el-Sittat, yet his voice was wholly without bitterness. I suspect that in the raw unconscious at the bottom of their souls Elisa and Osterling looked on the colony as a last weapon to the use of which they had fallen. For Juan it was a fulfilment of all his hopes, to which he had risen.

He was born and bred in Morocco, where his father had been the confidential peon of an army contractor, loyally undertaking whatever business was too dirty to permit the personal appearance of his boss. Then Villaneda senior won a big prize in the Christmas Lottery, and, though he could neither read nor write, doubled and doubled and doubled again this unexpected capital by buying horses and selling them to the cavalry.

Meanwhile Juan was receiving a first-class formal education, and, in spite of it, developing his principles; after the death of his father he lived up to them, and simply gave his capital away. What to? Anything but the Church, he said. And it took him a fair time. He explained that people were always paying him back with interest. His magnanimity must have been catching.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he made his way to Barcelona and enlisted in a communist formation. He rose swiftly to command of a company, and impressed on it his own belief that the only value of human life was to prepare the way for the next generation. They died, he told us (apologizing for the word) like saints. He also convinced his company that the dictatorship of the proletariat, or of anyone else, was a quite unnecessary stage on the way of the generations, and so was shot in the back while defending Madrid by a political sergeant attached to him for that very purpose. His men had dealt with the sergeant, inserting into his person a detonator with a length of slow fuse. This Juan regretted, for the detonator did nothing to prove which of them was the better communist. Moveover, the bullet had missed his spine by a centimetre, and his heart by—Juan held up a finger and thumb that might have admitted between them a grain of barley.

From hospital he passed into the camps of the defeated across the Pyrenees, and so to forced labour in East Prussia. He was liberated by the Russians who exhibited him as a rescued comrade—his proletarian goodness would have impressed the most jaundiced secret policemen—and allowed him to see something of their state. To him, a Spaniard bred on variety, it seemed the negation of all human values. The public parks, he said, infuriated him; every one in every big town was exactly the same, with the same statue in the middle. He couldn’t get over his horror of mass-produced amenities.

During the long years of war he had been ready to accept, after all, the infallibility of the Kremlin, but now the fires of his youth burned again, and more fiercely than ever. In the Ukraine, seething with hopeless rebellion and discontent, he joined a guerilla band of some five thousand men and women who fought their way to the Carpathians and reached them four hundred strong. Then they separated, and Juan with a few others infiltrated into the American zone of Austria. There, he said, he had been persuaded to join the colony of Kasr-el-Sittat by a certain Eugen Rosa.

I preserved the poker face of a bad actor, which could have been recognized as such twenty yards away; but fortunately Juan Villaneda was looking at Ashkar, not at me. The captain leaned forward and poured some more wine. He was intent and courteous, and I could have sworn he had never heard of Eugen Rosa. He had been caught cleverly and completely off his guard, but it was simply not in his Levantine nature to show surprise.

Ashkar effortlessly ignored the end of Juan’s life story and picked up the beginning. He asked him if he hadn’t at least missed the smell of stables when he decided to give his possessions away. When Juan admitted that about the only envy left to him was envy of other people’s horses, Ashkar, who loved to behave like a prince when he could, at once offered to mount him on anything he liked whenever he chose.

In spite of the ghost of Eugen Rosa, the captain declared, as soon as Juan had left, that there was a man with whom he could do business. He went so far as to call him a natural leader. When I asked him if he didn’t think Villaneda too eccentric for command, he replied in a self-satisfied tone that men answered to the heart, not to the head.

Soon after this meeting, responsibility for the Syrian affairs of Kasr-el-Sittat divided itself naturally and well, with hardly a conference between us. Elisa dealt with Damascus; Villaneda with Ashkar and the rare district officials; and I with such secret illegalities as were beyond the power of influence or friendship to arrange.

The pattern of the colony’s organization became plainer to me, though I was always in the position of a confidential peon, like Villaneda’s father, possessing such secret information as the Secretariat was compelled to give me, yet having little knowledge of who shared it, or what was the chain of command.

It was Elisa who had planned and created the colony, and was responsible for its organization and finance. Osterling was in charge of propaganda; Czoldy of what one might call operational intelligence; and Gisorius of security and subversive activities. He lived permanently in Istanbul. I imagine that even if he and his network had been exposed, the final link between him and Kasr-el-Sittat might have been indiscoverable.

In the East the organization was underground; and its weapons were terrorism and that art, which the Russians called sabotage, of exploiting government-made confusion until the government servants themselves were paralysed. In the West their chief instrument was World Opposition, which, outwardly, confined itself to propaganda. Under this cover, however, it had fomented strikes against state-control—with the help, as Elisa had hinted, of communist funds—and in countires under socialism, where the routine of innumerable offices could be dislocated by a pretence of mass stupidity or a flood of wrong returns and well-meant enquiries, it was experimenting with the Russian form of sabotage.

Although the rank and file of the party members were drawn from the middle classes, they had no control. The Secretariat had captured, financed and developed a movement of the revolutionary proletariat; and the action committees abroad were largely composed of libertarian communists, who saw clearly that their first enemy was no longer private capitalism, since it was rapidly evolving, everywhere, into state capitalism. That accounted for the importance of Juan Villaneda. The committees knew his record of idealism and were reassured by his presence at Kasr-el-Sittat.

And what of the mass of the colonists? Well, they had been chosen for the sake of background or special knowledge, for their sufferings and disillusionment, but most of them had only a very general idea of the tactics of the Secretariat. The colony, in fact, was not unlike a great central office of Political Warfare, with its clerks and linguists, its quartermaster’s office and ration parties, its electricians, wireless operators and maintenance parties of engineers. All this ‘personnel’ would, in a wartime organization, have been carefully selected to ensure that each individual was in sympathy with the main object, but would have known no more than the colonists of Kasr-el-Sittat of the methods and secrets employed.

And I? What was I, who had never been an anarchist by conviction, who had never seen the State at work upon my loved ones like a smug and incompetent veterinary surgeon? To-day when I remember the fire and fearlessness of Elisa, I accuse myself of being a revolutionary no more genuine than some corrupt conservative. Yet in fact I had no calculating self-interest, and my allegiance to Kasr-el-Sittat sprang from an emotional despair.

I will leave an attempt at explanation to Elisa. Whether there is any meaning I do not know, but that harsh voice, quivering under the impact, the lonely impact of her thoughts, as if she were playing to herself some instrument in the silence of my garden, may gather up with it a sense that the clarity of my desk and daylight gives me not at all.

She so loved to sleep under the stars that I had arranged a high square tent of fine mosquito netting, large enough for us to choose a miniature garden from the greater, and lie upon the turf, enclosing with us such flowers as she desired to smell and touch. It was August, and the night was a hot blackness, moving a little as the air spread inland from the beaches. There was no light but the gleam of her body.

‘Do you know, Eric,’ she said suddenly, ‘you are a craftsman, a superb craftsman who hasn’t any craft. That’s why you are with us.’

I answered lazily that I didn’t feel particularly unfulfilled.

‘You did. But that was not what I meant. You have the craftsman’s intolerance. You want technique, and you are furious at any pretence of it when it isn’t there. You don’t really hate the State. You hate the pretentious men who compose it.’

‘It’s the same.’

‘No, it is not the same. You’re no prophet. It’s only your intellect that tells you whither the world is bound – to the cruelty of the hive, to the end of all fear and all hope. You have no vision of those grey faces hurrying obediently from school to work, and work to pension—so painless a living that they will not know when they are dead.’

She was silent, and I could feel her heart—for in that spare body vein and sinew pulsed so near the surface—racing in some imaginary struggle. In her dream world, at least, she won the victory, for the heart-beat dropped and she turned to me.

‘At first when I came to you,’ she said, ‘my vision of past and future was always with me. I had not time to know that I was here. I used to tell myself that in a moment, a blessed moment, I could be nowhere else but here. And now—it isn’t only in your arms. If you are near me, I am here all the time. A self. Myself? If it exists, Eric, what would you do for it?’

‘Anything.’

‘Why? Just for a body that you think beautiful?’

‘No. For those eyes. Or for that head.’

She gave a low laugh of derision.

‘What sentimental differences you find, my dear! Or would you do for my eyes what you wouldn’t for this white flame, as you poetically call it? What would you do for me, I asked. This body isn’t me.’

I told her that without using the word soul, which was taboo to her, I couldn’t answer.

‘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.’

Grynes’ spare-time hobby became the search for information about Tabas; and by the mere fact of trying to understand him, he found himself in contact with those who were also trying. Tabas was well known in highly respectable circles with which the police never bothered—the scholars of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Chassidic Jews, the Bahai and the Moslems who were attracted to them. He had no means of support but three acres of ancient olive trees in Upper Galilee, the produce of which he used for food rather than income. He had no home. If he wasn’t wandering through the villages or accepting some very simple hospitality in Jerusalem, he might be found in a cave near Sasa or a hut in the ruins of Cæsarea.

‘I loved the country, you know,’ said Grynes, as if showing his sympathy for Tabas’ wayfaring. ‘I’d have been an Inspector in another year.’

‘Didn’t they offer you anything when the police were shipped home?’ I asked.

‘Just government promises. I lived on unemployment pay before I joined the police, and damned if I do it again! So I decided to stay on in Palestine. Headquarters didn’t like it, but I got them so muddled with yarns of the commercial offers I’d had that they left me in peace.’

In fact, the only offer he had received was to peddle kitchenware through Arab Palestine and Transjordan. He hadn’t any qualifications for civil life at all, for he had joined the Palestine Police at the age of twenty. In his teens he had never had a regular job, and had earned what he could by turning out to meet better boxers than himself in the Blackfriars Ring.

‘I always felt,’ he said slowly, ‘I couldn’t be in Palestine for nothing.’

‘A sense of destiny?’ I suggested.

‘Well, if you want to put it like that. But it’s no bloody wonder! Here I am, and think what I would have been if I’d stayed in England!’

He wasn’t conscious of any irony at all. And I agreed with him. There, as he said, he was—without money, clothes or home, but with every other sort of wealth and perfectly aware of it.

Before committing himself to a future of kitchenware, he decided to intercept Tabas on his way from Jerusalem to Cæsarea, and they had a long conversation by the roadside which ended in Grynes choosing to go with him.

‘But I told him,’ he added, ‘that I wasn’t going to fetch up as a blasted colonel in the Salvation Army.’

‘What did he say to that?’ I asked.

‘That it wasn’t essential for dervishes to dance,’ Grynes chuckled.

I have seen Cæsarea. It is a waste of grey mounds, shapeless as the surrounding sandhills. There is a village where the fishermen, like a colony of swallows, have made habitable the walls of Roman and Crusader by accretions of mud. There are flat ledges of rock, that were the Roman quays, over which the sea laps and trickles unless the wind is offshore. There is the beach, which is the best road to the place. And that is all.

On the edge of the sands, in a hut of Roman stones and flattened petrol tins, the pair of them settled for some months, living on Anton’s olives, and bread and fish which Grynes bought in the village. No doubt he was predisposed to peace after being impartially shot at by Jews and Arabs for the past ten years, but that he could endure so absolute a peace I can only ascribe to his need of Tabas.

‘What on earth did you do all day?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he answered cheerfully. ‘And then there was always someone to talk to.’

Because he lived with Tabas, he was unquestioningly accepted by Jews as by Arabs. He tried to explain that this new simplicity of social intercourse fascinated him, for his whole life had been spent in conflict with his fellows.

‘We could have stayed on,’ he said. ‘No one would have harmed us. But they would talk politics to Anton. He used to spend the nights wandering about and meditating. I was afraid he’d go out and preach between the armies, and the hell of a job I’d have had to look after him! But he saw that he was helpless. He said at last that he couldn’t live among the dead. And when I asked him what he meant, he told me that men who fought each other for an idea were mistaken, but men who fought for land were already dead.’

Grynes’ quotation from his saint shocked me. It seemed at variance with Anton Tabas’ humanity. But when I came to know Tabas better, I saw how difficult it was to repeat his sayings and preserve that sense which had been plain to the hearer. I do not think he considered men who fought for land or any material possession more blameworthy than the rest of us; he simply meant that they were as unapproachable, as spiritually dead as mad dogs.

So Tabas determined to leave his little world of hatred and to wander towards that Western civilization which he had never seen. There was no doing anything with him. He had to go. And Grynes, who would far rather have accompanied him to the wilds of Africa, or anywhere else where there was sun and a man could get his rations off a tree, had to go too. He couldn’t abide the thought of Tabas, friendless, in the chill smoke of some industrial town—though, I must understand, Tabas had no real need of him at all.

‘He has,’ I at once protested. ‘You’re the other half of the world, and you keep his feet on the ground.’

‘It’s funny you should say that,’ he replied, with a quick and grateful glance from his battered eyes. ‘When I met him on the road that day, I asked him to teach me his religion. He said he couldn’t because there were no words that could ever teach, for none of us meant the same by his words as another. And then he said that if ever our words meant the same, I should have just as much to teach him.’

Grynes, as an experienced policeman, knew very well that it would be most difficult to obtain any kind of travel document for Tabas. He decided not to bother the few harassed British officials left in Palestine; they would be short with Anton, and shorter still with him—a respectable sergeant who had managed so quickly to appear a distressed British subject. So he and Tabas joined the stream of simple and intimidated Arab villagers who fled from Galilee into peaceful Lebanon, and there, under my roof, they were, and very much obliged. He supposed that I must think him quite mad. I said that I reserved judgment till I had seen more of Anton Tabas, but that I envied him.

I couldn’t think what advice to give them in a world where the sinner may travel freely, but the saint and the plain citizen may not. They had been with me three days when one morning, occupied in my cherished moment of terrace meditation, I saw that for such as Tabas and Grynes, homeless and obeying no law but their own, Kasr-el-Sittat was a temporary or perhaps permanent resting-place. I had no doubt at all that the colony would receive them. Its generosity was a constant.

When I told Tabas of this secular monastery, he was eager to go and to learn from it. Wherever there was any sort of gathering for the sake of an ideal, there he was prepared to travel. Seek and ye shall find was to him a literal truth, for he didn’t expect the finding to be a recognizable event at any definite moment, and disappointment had no meaning for him. To Grynes, however, I recommended caution, and made him promise that the pair of them would return to me if they felt out of place.

I drove them to Kasr-el-Sittat and left them to stroll around the colony while I went to talk to Elisa. She listened with some amusement to my account of Anton Tabas, but she seemed to consider my behaviour very natural, even complimentary to her.

‘Phil Grynes could be useful to you,’ I said apologetically. ‘He speaks Arabic, and he’s a handy sort of man. But it’s your use to them that I was really thinking of.’

‘You’re a curious person, Eric,’ she answered. ‘You send your crazy prophet here, and you’re perfectly right. But how did you know it?’

‘Because it’s the worth of the individual that matters to Kasr-el-Sittat. You cultivate pity.’

‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘We cultivate hatred—but it’s true that no one can hate till they can pity.’

We walked down the hill towards the gate, and found Tabas and Grynes already in earnest conversation with Juan Villaneda and three or four colonists. The group parted as we approached, leaving Tabas and Elisa face to face.

They made a glorious pair, those two. It may have been their physical slenderness, their lightness upon the earth, that gave such an impression of spirit and mobility. ‘Like a couple of fighting cocks,’ Grynes said to me afterwards. That was the last simile I should have chosen, for there was no suggestion whatever of antagonism. But I saw what he meant. Call it two falcons, beak to beak, the great wings folded.

‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting,’ Elisa said.

‘I was not ready before,’ Anton answered.

‘Oh, we’re not as important as all that,’ she smiled, understanding immediately the implication of his reply. ‘Peace is all we have to offer you. Or should I say the opportunity for peace?’

‘You are most gracious,’ he replied with sudden courtliness.

That drew from Elisa a smile of sympathetic but irresistible amusement. Anton’s manner, the gallant unbending of an old-fashioned scholar, was undoubtedly borrowed from one of the archæologists who had impressed his youth; it belonged to the suit, but not to the sandalled feet, the dust, the odd rags which he wore around his neck. This politeness, however, had more than a conventional meaning; it always implied that Anton profoundly disagreed with what the last speaker had said, while perceiving a goodness of intent.

After ten minutes’ conversation with my recruits, both Elisa and Juan unhesitatingly accepted them as useful prototypes of that class of harmless visionaries who provided the exhibition group of the colony. Juan, I am sure, felt that Tabas was worth serious study, for I saw him jot down two of his sayings. Elisa preferred Grynes. She appreciated his good, earthy loyalty, though she didn’t think much of his choice. When she asked Tabas with a shade of sarcasm what she should do to be saved—I can’t remember how she worded the question, but that was the sense—he replied at once that she should have done with fear.

It was an odd remark to make to a woman whose physical and mental courage were beyond question, but Elisa did not protest.

‘Fear is my saviour,’ she declared. ‘It is fear that keeps the animal alive, and fear that drives men to plan for the future.’

‘But Fear and Love are not the same,’ Tabas answered.

She gave him a meaningless, encouraging smile, and turned away to talk to Juan Villaneda about accommodation.

As Elisa and I strolled back to the central building and its delightful common-room, she said laughingly that Tabas was an impressive old fraud, and asked me if I thought he knew what he meant himself.

Now, I had always had a taste for that peculiar quality of my adopted country which has made of it throughout the centuries a nursery of religions, and I had often talked with mild and wandering believers in their personal creeds; so I had a standard of comparison. I told Elisa that Tabas certainly knew what he meant himself, but that he spoke from depths where neither the philosopher nor psychologist could fairly get at him. By Love he expressed that compulsion upon human beings to give of their best without hope of reward, and he would apply the word to a pure mathematician as well as to a mother planning for her child. And so, I said, I took his remark to mean that she was confounding the two main incentives to human action.

‘There is only one,’ she cried, ‘for the test of love is fear for the beloved. And how can we love at all if we are unwilling to destroy?’

OUTSIDE EXPERT

1

IT IS CONCEIVABLE THAT IN HIS OWN SETTING AND AT A normal time I might have liked Oliver Poss. I shall try in all honesty to present him as he was, and I will not pretend that my loathing of him was constant or that I was insensible to his gross vitality. There was nothing of grey obedience in Poss; he was an unconscious World Opposition in himself without the slightest trace of any idealism. I feel for him the same illogical hatred as that of some barbarous caliph towards the bringer of bad news, for I cannot forgive his crime of not permitting me to remain in ignorance. Impalement, I think, would be a caliph’s choice—unless Poss had made some revolting jest upon the waiting stake, and had his mouth stuffed with gold for it. I resent the abominable comedy of this great goat gambolling over our lives.

He lay in wait for me at Hotel de Syrie. I usually lunched there on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I did my business with bank and railway, and arranged the documentation of any consignments that were to pass over the nominal frontier between the Lebanon and Syria. It was a comfortable and friendly hotel, with the simplest of dining-rooms and a cool lounge which had blossomed into all the worst intricacies of Damascus decoration—fretted screens, plaster arches, couches upholstered with imitation carpets, and in the middle an imitation fountain. The lounge was not intended to attract the tourist; it represented, completely and satisfyingly, the execrable taste of the middle-class Arab.

After lunch I was drinking coffee and reading the paper in one of these orientalized cosy corners—they were comfortable to the body, if not to the eyes—when a bulk of considerable weight gracefully subsided on to the opposite couch, as if a large animal had imperceptibly approached and plunged to its ease. The newcomer gave me a pleasant good afternoon in English, but my startled reply did not lead to conversation. He too ordered coffee, and settled down to a French newspaper printed in Turkey.

I observed him cautiously. He was a big man—not fat, but built to a model of supple generosity. His full-lipped mouth, heavy black moustache, and the distance between his eyes were in keeping with the volume of head and body. The brown face had a gipsy-like quality, and if I had met him ill-dressed on an English street I should have put him down as a dealer in rags, rabbit skins or cat’s meat—but he had every appearance of vulgar prosperity.

He cocked one leg over the other—a leg trousered in utility flannel with a startling yellow stripe—and I noticed a certain carelessness in his dress. I had no doubt that he was unaware of it, for a healthy carelessness seemed to be in character with the face. When I got up to go, I said to him in the low and reverent voice that one uses for such absurd communication:

‘Excuse me, sir, but your flies are open.’

‘Sir, so is my heart,’ he answered, laying down his paper and smiling at me with courteous interest.

‘I mean, your buttons are undone.’

‘That, sir,’ he said, ‘is a matter between them and their maker, who was compelled by his government to fashion them too small for their ignoble task.’

I hesitated between begging his pardon for unwarrantable interference, and pointing out that the local police might consider the excuse inadequate. He relieved my embarrassment, rapidly becoming an angry embarrassment, by continuing:

‘And I must apologize for failing to make proper comment on the weather. I have observed that my fellow-countrymen are often alarmed by my advances; so, when abroad, I no longer address them unless invited. But since you yourself have had the politeness to call my attention to an oversight that can be remedied—though, I fear, only temporarily—and shall indeed be remedied forthwith’—he proceeded full-handedly to do up his buttons under the fascinated gaze of waiter and cashier—‘I wish to emerge from my newspaper. Sometimes I feel that journalists believe what they write, and that depresses me. My name, sir, is Oliver Poss.’

It is hard to give the quality of Poss’s conversational style. In the absence of his rich and detestable voice, the mere words have a suggestion of pomposity; but in fact he enjoyed listening to himself far too much to be either unctuous or affected. Speech bubbled from him fast and clear.

I introduced myself, sat down again and offered him a drink. I was of course eager to know how so much flamboyance fitted into Tripoli or anywhere else. A wild guess was, I remember, that he might be the advance agent of some circus touring the Middle East.

‘I thought as much,’ he said, as soon as he heard my name. ‘Indeed, I wouldn’t dream of deceiving you. I knew it. May I offer you a cigar?’

He explained that he had arrived by train from Turkey on the previous afternoon, and assured me that he had not asked for me by name. He had merely found out the movements of the principal Europeans in town. And so—here he was!

‘But if you wanted to see me,’ I said, ‘you had only to look in the telephone book.’

He dismissed my remark with a wave of the hand, as if it were a shallow formality unnecessary between gentlemen.

‘Now how is that cigar?’ he asked. ‘Up to standard?’

‘A good deal over my standard.’

‘You wouldn’t mind changing to them, eh?’

I naturally jumped to the conclusion that he was a traveller in cigars—though no one who made any enquiries at all could imagine there was a market in Syria. The duty on imported tobacco was prohibitive; and I hardly ever saw an Arab smoke a cigar, even if rich enough to afford the utmost luxury.

‘My dear sir,’ I said. ‘I’m poor and a pipe-smoker.’

‘Mr. Amberson, the cigar you have just accepted is no more expensive than those I have delivered to you. And, in my opinion, it is the best that has been rolled in Cuba for the last thirty years. Elisa ordered me to market the best. She has paid for the best. I thought I had found the best. Well, I hadn’t. This is better.’

‘Who is Elisa?’ I asked.

‘A name I just mentioned to prove my bona fides. Mr. Amberson, I have sent you certain boxes of tools and seeds. Marks, P in a Diamond. Transhipment at Bari. But they were not the same crates that came to Bari from London.’

He didn’t look like a police agent, and I didn’t think his game was likely to be blackmail—not, at any rate, if he knew anything of Kasr-el-Sittat and its powers of retaliation. I admitted that I had received such shipments, and added that there was no mystery about them.

‘In the light of my experience I observe, Mr. Amberson, that your status is amateur,’ he said. ‘Therefore, as a professional, I will be the first to put my cards on the table. I deal in luxury. Brandy from France to England. Dollars and gold from England to France. Even a little unfolding of the iron curtain, Mr. Amberson. Damnation! The least of commissars desires a trifle of silk to cover the proletarian nakedness of his mistress, and a little capital abroad in case he should guess wrong and have to hop it. And then—your cigars to Syria.

‘Sir, I am wanted by the police of several countries, and let me insist—since the Englishman, however cosmopolitan, has no respect for any cops but his own—that while I frequently visit our dear land, I should hesitate to do so under my own name of Oliver Poss. I mention these details,’ he added genially, ‘merely to give you confidence, for, believe me, crime cannot pay unless the criminals have confidence in one another—not that I should apply that crude monosyllable to my efforts to raise the standard of living in countries that are determined to depress it, or to your straightforward trading, but you will see what I mean. Now, Mr. Amberson, Elisa Cantemir is financing my shipment of cigars. I want to talk to her.’

All this mouthing, lit by an occasional shaft of sense, convinced me that Poss might well be some sort of useful outside expert, like myself, but that he would never be trusted with any knowledge of Elisa’s motives. I was very cautious. I asked him why on earth he should suppose Elisa Cantemir was in Syria.

‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘But I thought you might know where she is. And as I had some business in Turkey, it was easy to slip down and see you.’

‘Why not write to the usual address?’

‘God’s Weary Wounds! Because I would get back two lines and a cheque. I don’t want a cheque. I want permission to market this cigar instead of the other. And I can’t get that without talking to Elisa. She might be anywhere, anywhere at all. If you really don’t know, we could spend a pleasant hour in guessing. There’s always a city to fit the homeless, and if they have money to move they find it. My personal conjecture, for what it’s worth, is that she’s in New York. That tall, smart streak of nerves, where else could she be but New York? Madison Avenue on an autumn morning—now isn’t that Elisa?’

I have never been in New York, but the suggestion of a clear, high, straight street in the autumn of a continental climate certainly fitted Elisa if she were judged on appearance only. For the true Elisa it was wrong. She had too much depth and darkness for your windy air. Oliver Poss evidently knew her, but not well.

‘I like your game,’ I said. ‘What city do you choose for me?’

‘My dear sir. I give you credit, with your character, for being where you want to be—or think you want to be. But I must admit I am puzzled. You do not look at all the sort of consignee that I expected to find.’

This casual meeting in the Hotel de Syrie might pass, for it was obvious to everyone that we were strangers; but whatever the link between Poss and myself—and it seemed at least to exist—the less we were seen together the better. I gave him my address, so exactly that he would not have to ask his way, and told him to call on me after dark. I also took from him another cigar.

It was impossible to get in touch with Elisa. There was not a telephone or telegraph line within ten miles of Kasr-el-Sittat. The colony had no more need of communication with the rest of Syria than any other remote monastery. All I could do in an emergency—and as the emergency had never arisen I hadn’t tried—was to telephone a number in Istanbul that Gisorius had given me, identifying myself by a certain use of the voice, and have my message transmitted to Kasr-el-Sittat by wireless. It seemed to me that Oliver Poss was not a name to be bandied about on telephones, and, in any case, unlikely that I could get a reply the same afternoon. I decided to interview him first, and report to Elisa next day.

Part of his story could be checked, for in my store was one of Bari crates, awaiting transport to the colony. I told the warehouseman to take it upstairs, and there I broke it open. I found a compartment at the bottom, lined with lead foil, containing a dozen boxes of twenty-five cigars. I lit one. It seemed to be identical with that which Osterling had offered me on the night of my initiation into Kasr-el-Sittat.

Then I lit the cigar Poss had given me, and tried alternate puffs. Whether it would have been at once recognized as the better by the palate of a real connoisseur I could not tell, but it was certainly no worse. Then Poss up to a point had told the truth. To what point? The picture presented to me was impossible. Elisa and the Secretariat were far too conscientious to risk a scandal for the sake of a few cigars.

My servant, Boulos, whom I had placed at the obscure street door to watch for Poss, told me that he was startled by him. The man arrived with the silence and efficiency of a great cat. He patted Boulos on the shoulder, slipped a large tip into his hand and started up the stairs without even asking if it were the right house. I suppose he was accustomed to do business single-handed in alleys and courtyards which might to a stranger appear threatening. But Poss was unthreatenable. He had a confidence in his own judgment so absolute that it affects me as I write about him; and the dislike I feel for his memory is seen to be—well, just but inhumane.

I did not offer to show him the garden which was now so sacred to me. We took our drinks on to the terrace, where he stretched and unbuttoned himself in satisfaction with the Mediterranean and the moon. I told him that I expected to know very soon where Elisa was, and I might be able to get in touch with her quicker than he could. What exactly did he want? And where had he met her?

‘Mr. Amberson,’ he said, ‘I’ll be fair. The trouble with you is that I cannot get over the impression I am speaking to the British Consul. Confidence springs to my lips, takes one look at you and hides her head behind my dentures.’

I laughed, and put a box of his own cigars upon the table.

‘That is of material assistance,’ he admitted. ‘And now—would you tell me what the devil you do with them?’

I had thought out an answer to that during the afternoon.

‘I send them to Egypt by caique. El Mina is one of the centres of the caique traffic—schooners up and down the coast, and most of them avoiding customs duties when they can. I tranship those boxes—and others—for an account in Alexandria.’

‘Nearly good enough,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘I’m a trader in the Levant,’ I replied, ‘and I am afraid we just get used to doing favours for our friends. In the eyes of the Arab it’s never wrong to swindle a government—especially the Egyptian Government.’

‘And the friend in Alexandria?’

‘Straight streets and a windy town,’ I said. ‘But it isn’t autumn yet and wouldn’t suit her.’

‘Here’s luck to you and your caiques!’ he exclaimed, raising his glass. ‘Confidence is flooded forth from her retreat. Now, I’ll answer your second question first—where did I meet Elisa? In a bloody great marshalling yard, what was left of it, outside Budapest. I was, my dear sir, being paid, for the first time in my life, to be international. A trusted servant of UNRRA. But let us not be harsh. They had no time for enquiries, and no judgment to do without them—a situation admirably suited to my cosmopolitan experience in trade.

‘I was in charge of a train—indeed of several trains. But this one had fourteen wagons of excellent American food consigned to the Ukraine. Amberson, there were but two destinies for the contents of those wagons. They might be sold by the Soviet Government to high officials and ballet dancers, or by me to hungry Turks who were prepared to pay. And in the marshalling yards was a state of muddle to which, I must admit, I had contributed. Some drunken Russian sentries, an underpaid yardmaster, and myself in an invaluable and welcome uniform! Sir, I was the only man on miles of rusty tracks who knew his mind—and that was to uncouple the food wagons at the rear of the train, and set them safely on their somewhat circuitous route to Turkey.

‘The front part of my train—oh, it was very military indeed! But, hell’s bells, we’re all human! Elisa was allowed to stretch her legs, with a bayonet about two feet from her backside. Under the arc lights of the yard she had a head just like a skull, Amberson. All eyes. We hadn’t much time to talk. She said to me in English: “I’ll give you a thousand quid to get me out of this.” “Where?” I answered, for it was obvious that if she had it in her pocket she wouldn’t be on that train. “In Turkey or Roumania,” she said. I took another look at her, and that was that. “Turkey it is,” I said. So I broke open a case of prime ham, and contrived her absence during the distribution. Then I packed her in among the rations with a crate of beer and a can-opener, and didn’t see her again till the Turkish frontier.’

‘That’s not quite her story,’ I said to him, cold with jealousy.

‘No? Well, no doubt she expanded it a bit. Played the tragic queen, eh?’ he asked, searching my face. ‘Ah, now I see! Well, well, Amberson, well, well, well! This clarifies the whole situation. At last I understand those favours to a friend! But have you never discovered my dear sir, that Elisa romanticizes herself? Oh, I can guess where she added the little touch of art! She was discovered by the Turkish police, you know. Very obstinate, the Turks! Only believe what they can see! “All right,” I said at last. “No girl friend, no grub for Turkey.” And she had to put up a show for them. God’s Glory, Amberson, she’s not my type at all! No planks for me, however well they’re carved! I like to know I’ve got something in my arms. A bit of bounce, eh?’

I think I was even more angry than before, but it was an easier anger to disguise. I could forgive, contemptuously, his lack of taste. What annoyed me was his statement that Elisa romanticized herself. I saw that it was true. She did paint herself a little darker, a little more savagely interesting than was strictly accurate; and at once, in my own mind, I was hot in defence of that delightfully feminine trait, though it had never before occurred to me that she possessed it.

‘My motives were of the purest,’ added Oliver Poss. ‘A thousand quid, and I got it.’

‘And that ended your UNRRA experience?’ I asked.

‘Good God, no! I did just as much for them as for myself. They only found out about my record when they wanted to give me a decoration. By that time, Amberson, I was again a capitalist. Not very rich, you understand, but liquid.’

‘And you’ve seen Elisa since?’

‘Lord, yes! But not for the last year. And it’s no business of mine to run round to addresses asking silly questions. She must have some sort of syndicate behind her, but I daresay you know more about that than I do. It’s beyond me what their game is. They may be using cigars as an international currency.’

‘And where do you come in exactly?’ I asked.

‘My dear sir, indispensable! If you want to supply the demand for fine Havana cigars in a day and age when most countries don’t allow the import, you need someone with my experience of trade.

‘Well now, a minimum of essential information—that is all we can be expected to give one another on so short an acquaintance. There is in Cuba a group of small fincas that was financed in the ’twenties and ’thirties by a firm of tobacco importers in Vienna. Used to supply the Imperial Court when there was one. Happy days of free trade, Amberson, happy days! Not that I’d want to go back to them. It’s easier to make money in a world of government controls.

‘Rosa, the name was. I dare say they had been Spanish Jews. At any rate old Rosa didn’t survive Hitler. But the fincas had plenty of capital by then and they carried on. That’s their mark’—he caressed the box on the table—‘Coriolano, and a gold band with a little emerald tobacco plant on it.

‘Elisa sent me out to Cuba with a couple of letters of introduction—one from Eugen Rosa, who was the old boy’s grandson and one from a fellow called Urgin who had spent years out there investigating soils and aromas and that sort of thing. Not that I wanted any favours. I’m a wholesale buyer, and for cash.

‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you very much about my sales organization. A lot of this cigar business is on the level. What’s the only hospitality today, Amberson? The real larks in aspic with a flunkey behind your chair? Government, embassies, all this United Nations nonsense, and what courts there are left—that’s the market for Coriolanos, and the syndicate had the connections to capture it. Any judge of cigars will tell you there is nothing better, and he’ll thank God if he can get his fingers round one as a great favour.

‘And now we come to the point. Havana has done better than Coriolano at last. There isn’t much of the new brand yet, but it’s on the market. I offered a few myself—and got a venomous couple of lines from Elisa just telling me what she thought of me. It’s no use my writing. I can’t make her understand. I have to see her, and explain that her syndicate must sell both if they expect to keep their special clients. It needn’t even be Elisa I talk to, if there’s someone else—this Rosa would do—who’s a judge of cigars and can put the case to her. I hoped that you would turn out to be the chap.

‘You see my difficulty. She has done a lot for me. There’s not much money in cigars, but, God’s Glory, I wouldn’t like to lose her foreign exchange business! I’ll sell whatever they want me to sell, but I would like to be sure she understands that there’s a better cigar than Coriolano.’

‘What are your movements?’ I asked.

‘My dear sir, I am represented by our Mr. Poss, and he is always on the move. Nowhere long. A kill here and a kill there, and lie up in a hotel to complete digestion. And one hotel is much like another. As soon as I’ve had a drink with the night porter, all are home to me. I wouldn’t mind a little place like this of yours, but not yet. Now what would you advise? I must attend to some business in Cairo. Shall I see you again on my way back to Istanbul?’

I told him he could have a week or so in Egypt so long as he hurried back to Istanbul. This mysterious advice was simply to persuade him to leave immediately. It was essential to get him out of Tripoli. I doubt if anyone in the town or port knew the name of Elisa Cantemir—she was just the tall woman from Kasr-el-Sittat—but Oliver Poss seemed remarkably efficient at discreet enquiries; and if the devil put it into his head to visit Damascus or Aleppo he would at once be on to the knowledge, which he was evidently not supposed to have, of Elisa’s address and occupation.

‘And not embarrass you on the way back?’ he asked.

I took a chance, and bluffed.

‘Poss,’ I said, ‘you mentioned that all we can be expected to give one another is a minimum of essential information. I’ll tell you this much. When I myself am at Istanbul, I find communications very satisfactory.’

‘Fast, but far from satisfactory,’ he answered. ‘In fact, I should describe them as short, discourteous, unsigned, but undoubtly authentic although they bear a Turkish stamp. Sir, I put myself in your hands without reserve and within reason.’

In the morning I drove him down to Beirut to catch the Cairo plane. He took it kindly, and did not suspect that my only intention was not to let him out of my sight till he was safely in the air. When I asked him in what ivory or peacocks he meant to trade, he said he was investigating the arms traffic. He wasn’t a bit interested, he assured me, in how people chose to kill themselves, but rather in how they paid for their pleasure. He wanted to lay his hands on some free currency, and he reckoned that among the Egyptian Greeks who supplied the Jews and the Egyptian Jews who supplied the Arabs there ought to be plenty of beautifully disguised credits for sale. My first impression of Oliver Poss as a well-dressed gipsy was not so very wrong; at any rate he was most intelligible when considered as a sort of gipsy-banker. He had his stock-in-trade of luxury goods, but first among them was luxury money—untraceable, untouchable bank balances which he was prepared to buy or sell. His passport—that which he used at our end of the Mediterranean—was Greek. I handled it with some amusement. He had even had the impudence to describe his profession as merchant-adventurer.

I snatched a hasty lunch in Beirut, and turned back along the coast road through Tripoli to Latakia—a hundred and fifty glorious miles between sea and mountain which I always drove with fresh delight—and so eastwards into the rocky highlands, bare and burnt by the summer heat, and north again towards the trees and the water. It was deep dusk when I drove through the white gate of Kasr-el-Sittat.

Elisa was alone. When she came into the central hall of her bungalow to greet me, I could see through the open door to the right her desk covered with papers. It was a neat desk, though she had but that moment risen from her chair; and she herself looked businesslike. There was nothing deliberate: no glasses on the eyes, no fuss, no suggestion of either nonchalance or purpose. She was merely cleared for action. Her shirt and skirt of khaki drill had a functional simplicity, as if they governed rather than hid the upward drive of blood and sinew to the long throat and exquisite head.

She was woman enough to ask me why I hadn’t warned her by letter that I was coming. In answer I let her see herself, ever-new, through my own eyes. Then I told her that I had had a visit from Oliver Poss, and assured her at once that he had not known she was in Syria, and still did not.

‘He’s not a man to arrive by accident,’ she said.

‘No. But it seems he has been shipping me cigars. So he thought I might lead him to you.’

She examined me fiercely and calculatingly, as if I had become for the moment an intrusive stranger. It was such a look as I might have had from Poss, but without his humour.

‘Don’t bother!’ I said. ‘I had him in my world, not his. So I told him a good story, and sent him off to Cairo.’

Her face cleared, and she laughed.

‘Yes, I believe you could,’ she replied. ‘I can just see you playing the old Arab trader in his mysterious office. But, Eric my dear, would you mind telling the whole story in front of Osterling as well, and being cross-examined a bit?’

I said I was ready for anything, and especially some food and a bottle of wine; so we called at the kitchens, and walked over to Osterling’s quarters.

He received us with an eager and voluble courtesy. I suspect that it was his superb training rather than any real love of society which made him, both in speech and writing, such excellent company. Or was it that he had so profound a conviction of the importance of his thoughts that he was determined to charm any listener into acceptance of them?

He was much intrigued by old Pop-eyes, as he called Tabas, and congratulated me on discovering so original a member of the colony.

‘He’s the craziest old coot we ever had,’ he said. ‘Do you know, he has already got a following among the garage hands? My studio audience. Whenever Pop-eyes prophesies, and they are all agreed as to what he means, I use the quotation on a wider public.’

I asked why particularly the garage.

‘Oh, his Sancho Panza turned out to be a grand mechanic. Police training is always good. They only permit clumsiness in dealing with the public.’

Elisa, who could be easily exasperated by Osterling’s pretence of relaxation, mentioned that we had come on urgent business.

I told my story while Osterling played host and interrogator, carving cold duck for me and putting his questions with the deprecating and indulgent manner of some society lawyer.

‘What an admirable citizen is an international spiv!’ he remarked at last. ‘He stands for liberty against all governments alike.’

‘He stands for Mr. Poss’s bank balance,’ I answered.

‘Does it matter? What about your Hampden and Pym? Heroes of revolt and why? Because they didn’t like paying taxes. What’s the difference between them and your business man who is in revolt for the same reasons?’

I suggested that Hampden and Pym and all of us in the room were prepared to suffer for their opinions, and the spiv was not.

‘Now I get nearer your conception of Oliver Poss,’ said Osterling. ‘I’ve never met him. He’s Elisa’s discovery. And what I’m feeling for is—would he be in sympathy with Kasr-el-Sittat?’

Elisa and I simultaneously uttered an emphatic No!

‘A pity! Now is he likely to go to any trouble to find out more about what he believes to be a syndicate?’

‘I don’t know the weak points of your financial organization,’ I replied. ‘If there’s a door asking to be pushed open, he’d push it. Otherwise, I should say he’s a master at minding his own business.’

‘You’re sure you yourself gave nothing away?’

‘Nothing. I’ve told you how I accounted for the imports.’

‘How do you account for them?’ he asked sharply.

I replied that I hadn’t the foggiest notion.

‘Why not to smoke?’

‘I haven’t noticed much self-indulgence at Kasr-el-Sittat.’

‘You really do deserve another glimpse of the amœba,’ he laughed—and I surrendered, as always, to the extraordinary grace with which he could clothe his imitation of sincerity. ‘It is so simple. We have no right to deprive a man of his life’s work because he chooses to live with us at Kasr-el-Sittat. You’ve met Urgin, our biochemist. Well, Urgin shouldn’t be limited to Latakia and cigarette leaf. He must have cigars, and he needs a lot of them. We couldn’t possibly afford to pay the Syrian duty. But let’s go and see the laboratory.’

The east slope of Kasr-el-Sittat was a part I had never visited since first I was shown round the colony; it was full of barns, storehouses, and tarpaulin-covered dumps of machinery and building material. Nobody lived there except Urgin, the man who had supplied Poss with a letter of introduction to friends in Cuba.

Urgin had the advantage of a flat that was built as a flat by the colonists themselves. It formed part of the laboratory block, which was constructed on steel girders set across the solid stone walls of God’s old hashish and tobacco warehouse The only access was by a flight of outside steps leading to Urgin’s quarters, so that he himself acted as hall-porter to the laboratory.

As we picked our way along the silent and much-encumbered paths, I said that Urgin seemed to have been set very far apart from his fellows.

‘You don’t like him, Eric?’ Elisa asked. ‘Well, of course you wouldn’t!’

I replied that I could only judge him by casual contacts, but that he was far too dogmatic for my taste, and—though possibly he didn’t realize it—opposed to the whole philosophy of Kasr-el-Sittat. An individual to him was a random element of no statistical importance and mighty little historical influence.

‘Yet I never knew a man with more respect for the human body,’ she laughed. ‘You ought to like that.’

‘Amberson has an instinctive ideology,’ said Osterling. ‘He smells in Urgin the Marxist deviationist. And, of course, he’s perfectly right! All scientists have a strong tendency to Marxism, for they know perfectly well that in the present stage of human development every discovery they make is a potential menace. Therefore they cling to a childish belief in planning. Daddy Planning will be able to mend it. But don’t let it bother you, Amberson. Good God, give ’em the toys and money they want, and they’re as easy as soldiers for the intelligent man to manage!’

Urgin opened the door a little sulkily, with an open book in his hand to emphasize the fact that he was enjoying his privacy. He brightened up when he distinguished Elisa among his three nocturnal visitors, and received us with a warmth that was entirely sincere, though you heard him, as it were, fumbling for the switch which turned it on.

‘You know I never disturb you except on duty,’ she said, ‘or unless I’m invited.’

‘Invited?’ he protested. ‘I don’t have to invite you. You’re always welcome.’

‘Then sometimes you ought to tell me so.’

That was the only time I ever heard Elisa deliberately exploit her sex. Flirtation was a manner that I could have sworn did not enter into her values or even her calculations. And yet how right she was! She ensured the peaceful devotion of whatever simple and honest soul Urgin kept for use outside his laboratory.

He was, I believe, a Lithuanian, but he had taken his degree at London University and spoke perfect English. He had no longer a country or a family, and assumed a pose of bitter internationalism. I doubt if he considered, when alone in his flat, that small countries were as futile as he pretended.

‘Did it ever occur to you, up here,’ she asked with affectionate mockery, ‘how we import your cigars?’

‘I’m an observer of nature, Elisa,’ he retorted, ‘and it’s hardly likely I shouldn’t have noticed that the boxes have no custom stamps.’

‘Well, there’s your smuggler!’

Urgin looked at me with a cheerfulness he had never shown before. He was a stocky little man, with a round bald head and round eyes. They had always seemed to me round with indignation before, but now they were round with interest.

‘Then I owe him an apology,’ he said. ‘The last time we met I accused him of having a completely untrained mind. I see I was using the wrong standards of comparison. To be a man of action and open to ideas—how admirable!’

‘But surely not rare?’ I asked, smugly accepting the description of myself as man of action, which I know only too well that I am not.

‘Urgin will leave the bio-out of his chemist.’ Osterling remarked with a cruelty that I did not for the moment appreciate. ‘That’s why he tends to socialism.’

‘I don’t tend to socialism,’ Urgin replied indignantly. ‘I am a socialist. If I wasn’t, what would I be doing in your damned colony? Though, if you ask me, you’re all anarchists.’

He switched on the laboratory lights, and ushered us through the door with a sharp little bow as if from an expert to a government inspector. The place was aromatic as a tobacconist’s shop until the nose picked up the faint and alien scents of inorganic matter.

Cabinets, apparatus and a huge refrigerator overcrowded the room, which, though a good forty feet long, was evidently too narrow for Urgin’s enthusiasm. It preserved, however, the desolate purposefulness of a laboratory except in one corner which Urgin seemed to have prepared for some coarse hospitality of his own. There a grotesque imitation of a small public bar had been constructed, with bottles, packets of chocolate and cigarettes, and even shabby paper streamers on the shelves; and on the counter a jug of water, spilt pools of various liquids, bitters and plates of sausage. The lighting was cleverly arranged, and it was only at a second glance that I saw the whole stage set was enclosed in Perspex.

‘An experiment in absorption,’ said Urgin, ‘under natural conditions.’

‘Good God!’ Osterling exclaimed, showing a certain distaste for the deliberate filthiness of the display.

Elisa was amused. Her robust and resolute mind was blind to the vulgar or to the macabre—or indeed to any detail, however repugnant, so long as it was purified by an intent she could appreciate.

‘Which is the villain of the piece?’ she asked.

‘The calendar,’ Urgin answered, pointing to a fly-spotted and indecent champagne advertisement which hung behind the bar. ‘It is impregnated with a solution of garlic, and other things.’

He turned to me.

‘My life’s work, Mr. Amberson, has been an endeavour to formulate general laws from the pointer readings of taste and smell, accepting the two senses as more exact instruments than any my laboratory can contain. You will object at once that the pointer readings are there, but unmeasurable. It is, however, possible to produce a parallel scale, and partly by chemical analysis, partly by electronics, to detect and record the passage of those molecules which our senses insist is actually taking place. I would not claim infallibility for the sense—it is not difficult to deceive them when the laws that govern their reactions are known—but I do claim for them a greater accuracy than most of my colleagues would be prepared to admit.’

I said that I thought his chief difficulty must be to establish an average standard of taste and smell.

‘A very intelligent objection,’ he complimented me, ‘which at once reveals my research to be empirical, as indeed it is. But I have expressed myself badly. My own taste must of course be the primary detector. If I find a better, and his superiority is definable, then the calibration, as it were, of my parallel scale can be vastly improved.

‘For example, if I had the privilege of entertaining a professional wine-taster for a month, I should, I think, be able to express in mathematical formulæ those very subtle differences which only his palate can detect. I start, I must repeat, from the assumption that the palate is right, and that the distinctions do exist and are measurable.’

Under the casement windows which ran the length of the laboratory were low white cabinets, their drawers marked with names of tobaccos and estates. Laid out for some experiment were labelled jars of ash, and glass trays containing hashish, a light cigarette tobacco ready-cut, smoke-cured Latakia and a variety of cigarette papers. Nearby was an apparatus resembling a small still, or a very large orchestral tuba, mounted on a rubber-tyred trolley; at a lower level were racks supporting an electric pump, gas cylinders, glass retorts and some inflatable rubber bags, all connected together by a labyrinth of rubber and nickel-plated tubing.

Urgin, with a smile that expressed his gratitude for my unsuspected illegalities, took a Coriolano cigar and fitted it into the glass projection that resembled the tuba’s mouthpiece. When he switched on the motor and lit the cigar, the smoke was drawn in through the mouthpiece and expelled through an orifice to the side of it.

‘This,’ he said, bringing into action one of the rubber bags which filled and pulsated, ‘represents the suction of the mouth. And here are the lungs—doing their best, as you see, under difficulties.’

An auxiliary pump began to work irregularly, inhaling and exhaling air. Urgin then permitted the lungs to inhale smoke, and the rhythm of smoking slowed as the auxiliary took over the main suction.

‘The pump control is ingenious,’ he said, ‘and essential if one is to study the residues retained in the lungs. Otherwise this is a quite ordinary commercial apparatus adjusted by myself for the analysis of ash—smoke, that is—before and after it enters the body. I can also vary the quantity and quality of the ash by reproducing any method or rhythm of smoking.’

He removed the cigar, and fitted over the mouthpiece a mask, like a caricature of some revolting Teutonic capitalist.

‘That is funny, is it not?’ he declared with satisfaction, replacing the cigar. ‘But, alas, he has no palate, as indeed his appearance might lead us to believe.

‘Now, Mr. Amberson, I suggested to you that it was not difficult to deceive the senses when the laws that govern their reaction are known. I admit that as yet the exquisite measuring instrument of the wine-taster would defeat me. But, without boasting, I could deceive the good palate of the ordinary connoisseur. My research has little practical value, though occasionally Osterling is kind enough to ask his moneyed friends to test——’

‘We’ll have a test,’ Osterling interrupted, sharply silencing the flow that looked likely to go on and on. ‘Have you any of the experimental brandy left?’

Urgin and he went to the other end of the laboratory and after hunting around in a cupboard returned with one of those odd-shaped and unlabelled bottles which somehow promise that the contents are superb.

We returned to the flat and made ourselves comfortable. When Urgin, with some difficulty, drew the cork, I was relieved to see that it had not been tampered with, and that the other three sipped their brandy without hesitation.

‘A cigarette?’ asked Osterling, offering me his case.

I thanked him, and lit it.

I remember yawning a couple of times, and then waking up as Osterling addressed some question to me. I apologized for dozing, and said it must have been the effect of the brandy after a day in the open air.

‘But I suggested a practical test,’ Osterling reminded me.

I suddenly realized that there was a pillow under my head which had not been there before, and that Urgin had left the room. I might have been angry if Elisa had not been smiling at me with that confident air of proprietorship which in her took the place of tenderness.

‘Your cigarette?’ I asked.

‘I only wished to prove to you the perfection of Urgin’s work,’ Osterling said, ‘for you may have to trust to it. You have had half an hour’s healthy sleep. Do you agree that any normal man would ascribe it, as you did, to brandy and open air?’

I answered shortly that of course I did.

‘As for the rest,’ he went on, ‘I wish you were a chemist. But as you’re not, you’ll have to take my word for it that neither in the ash nor the butt of that cigarette would any trace of any drug be found.’

What he gave me I do not know. I could taste nothing wrong with the cigarette, and there were no after effects at all. The absence of Urgin made me wonder whether the drug had been intended to make me talk. I decided it had not—for some at least of any confessions likely to emerge from my sub-conscious would have concerned Elisa, and she would hardly permit any babbling before a witness.

‘While you were asleep, Eric,’ she said, ‘we were discussing Oliver Poss. I still don’t think I was wrong to use him, but we’re uneasy. Will you see him again and find out how much he really knows?’

I replied that of course I would, but that I suspected Poss might be more than a match for me.

‘If you are sure you don’t mind,’ Osterling said with deceptive diffidence, ‘we rather wanted you to try one of Urgin’s conjuring tricks on him.’

My face must have shown that I found the suggestion distasteful, for Elisa gave me a half-smile which was dear and familiar; it was the expression with which, a score of times, she had received some scruple or opinion of mine that was founded on deep but illogical prejudice.

‘He drinks of course?’ Osterling asked.

‘Like a fish—if it’s good.’

‘Then let him repay your hospitality, and as well as he likes. His drinks, you understand, ordered by him—because if he has any suspicion at all it will fall on the drinks. But he won’t have any. He’ll merely assume, afterwards, that he reached a stage of maudlin drunkenness, and he’ll put it down, Amberson, to bad mixing or to your undoubted human sympathy.’

‘It will be a cigarette?’ I asked.

‘For such an evening as I envisage? Good God, let it be a Coriolano at least! By the way, you must tell him to leave his new cigar alone.’

I turned to Elisa, and asked her what else she wanted me to do.

‘To listen, dear Eric—at which you are so good. But for the silences, these are the questions: does he know any connection between the supposed syndicate and political action? Does he know Czoldy? Has he any suspicion that we are not mere traders?’

‘I can answer some of that now,’ I said. ‘He knows there’s little money in cigars, and thinks you may be using them as a currency, like cigarettes in Germany—and, of course, that you’re working up connections for bigger deals in something else.’

She said that Poss was quite right, and that I must test to the bottom how much he had guessed. I warned her that Poss would be an awkward customer if he were to suspect I had drugged him.

‘Amberson your mind is inclined to melodrama,’ Osterling laughed. ‘Let me explain. Your own body, like mine, has developed a tolerance for large doses of alcohol. Now, you must have noticed that the tolerance is less, if with the alcohol you consume strong tobacco. In that case you lay down your cigar, admit to yourself that you have had enough to drink, and—if I am not wrong—immediately have another drink to clear your head.

‘That, from the subjective point of view of the smoker, is exactly the result which Urgin’s Coriolano will produce. Poss will be convinced that he is disgustingly drunk. In the morning he will be properly ashamed that after a lifetime of experience he couldn’t control himself. But why on earth should he suspect that Urgin has synthesized a volatile thiopentone from barbituric acid, and succeeded—with an impish delight that I have encouraged—in adding it to a cigar?

‘So much for what Urgin calls the deception of the higher centres. The effect of the drug will be approximately that of ordinary commercial Pentathol, of which you’ve probably heard. I’m sorry for you—but Poss is going to pour out all his recent resentments and inhibitions.

‘He’s a connoisseur of cigars,’ I objected. ‘What about taste?’

‘Amberson, were you so sleepy that you missed the point of Urgin’s lecture? Taste is all that interests him. To him it would be a far greater triumph if he could use, say, onion peel instead of barbiturics. Poss will blow out a mouthful of smoke, and say the Coriolano is a beauty. And if he’s really a connoisseur, I’ll bet he asks you how you keep your cigars in this climate. In fact, that gives you your excuse for not smoking his. Tell him that by no means everybody would agree that his new cigar is better, and offer him a Coriolano in perfect condition to prove it.’

Elisa walked back with me to the guest bungalow, and said good-night. At Kasr-el-Sittat we were never lovers. That was not, I think, due to her pride, but rather to the intense and continual preoccupation of her thoughts.

In the morning she was restless and strained, and I could guess she had not slept. Her flair for making use of such eccentric creatures as Poss and myself—and subtly limiting the knowledge they possessed—must have worried her less intuitive colleagues and led to exhausting argument. She presented me with a box of ten Coriolanos, apparently unopened, and warned me not to smoke the two outside cigars myself.

I told her that my greatest chance of success was to tackle Oliver Poss in Istanbul, where he could reasonably be expected to entertain me and to do it well. We didn’t want him in Syria again. To this she agreed, and said that if I would wireless the date of my return through Gisorius, she would come down to El Mina to get the news.

‘And when I’m at home, is there no quicker way of reaching you than a letter?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Drive up and see me. Does it seem so very far?’

She put her hands on my shoulders, and for a moment her mouth was ungoverned by the strange severity of her pose.

‘And soon, my dear, soon,’ she murmured. ‘You will be with all of us at Kasr-el-Sittat.’

Perhaps, when tired, she permitted herself the longing that we should not be parted; but in the soon for which she cried, the soon which that very night may have been decided, there surely can have been little room for the image of a lover. I pray and believe that she was not a woman to set her heart on writing a sonnet into the apocalypse.

2

I exchanged telegrams with Oliver Poss, and arrived in Istanbul three days before he was due. I had a little business of my own to transact with shipping agents, and I wanted a breath of freedom in a city that I loved.

I had not been out of Syria and the Lebanon for a year. Istanbul lifted my spirits to that conscious joy of living, that exhilarating percipience, which always welcomes me on arrival in a metropolis after any long spell, however contented, of provincial life. Why Istanbul should keep its air of the capital of the Middle East when it is not even the capital of a country, I do not know. Why does the City of London still give the impression of being the financial centre of the world? A city, I suppose, can no more get rid of its past than a man of his education. Once the eyes of its traders have been opened to the diversity of civilization, open they remain; and the thoughts of the humblest porter, when he thinks at all, have some share in the collective wisdom of his ancestors.

In Tripoli I read little of current affairs. Neither my own politicians nor any others seemed to have sincerity or human understanding, or even that tradition of statesmanship which prevents a man without either from doing any harm. So to avoid melancholy I cultivated ignorance. In Istanbul, however, such a pose was impossible. There was too lively a discussion going on in what I had chosen to think a dead and disillusioned world; and it was Lois Tassen, the American journalist at our table on my first visit to Kasr-el-Sittat, who had started it.

Her opinions evidently commanded respect or, at any rate, notoriety; for when I bought an armful of recent American newspapers and magazines I watched the editors and columnists all hunting along the line that she had laid. I found her original article. It was a sinewy and magnificent attack on state tyranny in Western Europe, with special reference to Great Britain. Every difference between ourselves and America, and every likeness of our state to Russia were cleverly documented and emphasized.

Now, I knew Miss Tassen was insincere, for she had bored me with half an hour’s lecture on her own opinions when I wanted to talk to Elisa. She believed exactly the opposite of what she had written: that her own country suffered from a metallic social standardization which closely resembled the Russian ideal, and that therefore it was bound to move farther and faster than Western Europe toward the socialist state. Then what were she and Osterling up to? I didn’t like their propaganda. By dividing the West, they were too cynically ignoring the risk of war. In another week, on September 21st, the Paris Conference was to meet.

There was, of course, nothing whatever to connect Kasr-el-Sittat or World Opposition with this campaign. Miss Tassen’s visit to the colony might very well be known, but what of it? It was the old story of an adventurous American woman travelling in Syria—if Syria still counts as adventure—and spending a month at some retreat for eccentric refugees. Even if Kasr-el-Sittat had chosen to let it be known in the right quarters that they were behind the Tassen article, they could have got a pat on the back and a cheque from the Cominform for making trouble between the Atlantic Powers, and another cheque from American diehards for attacking socialism.

I tried the Tassen article on Oliver Poss, but the only effect it had was to produce from unknown depths a surprising outburst of patriotism; he called it the bloody impertinence of some blasted tart. He was better informed than I, but he read newspapers with no suspension at all of disbelief. He had a lusty contempt for journalists and lawyers—not because they were paid to distort the truth, but because they would never admit it.

He was staying at the Pera Palace, where I visited him soon after his arrival. His room was on the fourth floor, looking across the Golden Horn to the old grey carpet of Stamboul.

The drop to the patch of waste ground below was a good hundred feet, and he alarmed me by leaning his back against the iron railings of the balcony, with his arms spread out generously on either side, while he told me what he thought of the Egyptians. When I protested—against the risk, not his opinions—he shook the railings vigorously.

‘My dear sir,’ he said, resuming his position, ‘it dates from the days when capitalists built for capitalists. In the financiers of the Ottoman Empire I place my trust.’

I don’t know how Kasr-el-Sittat authenticated their messages to Oliver Poss. He had certainly received some word through Gisorius, for he accepted me without question as a pleni-potentiary in the matter of cigars. I told him that the syndicate were more interested in the name of Coriolano than he had realized and that, whether they were the best or not, he was not to sell any other brand.

The following night I dined with him at the hotel. He was an admirable host for my purpose, since he did not expect me to keep pace with his astonishing consumption of wine. We had to smoke a couple of his own cigars, and I shook him a little by saying that it was very doubtful, according to the best judges, if Coriolano wasn’t the better in a dry climate.

After dinner we went up to his room for a general business talk until the cabarets opened. He offered me another cigar, and was about to take one himself when I stopped him.

‘I want you to try one of these Coriolanos,’ I said, taking the box from my pocket and opening it. ‘And do choose your own.’

He pinched and sniffed, and chose, as Osterling must have known he would, one of the two end cigars. I helped myself to another from the middle. He lit up and puffed appreciatively.

‘Lovely condition,’ he said, after a minute or two. ‘How do you keep them?’

‘I don’t,’ I answered. ‘The box was given to me just to prove you are wrong—well, that’s too strong—not wholly right for all possible climates.’

‘Bloody polite!’ Poss exclaimed. ‘Always bloody polite!’

He pulled himself together with obvious effort.

‘Close in here,’ he remarked, going to the fully open window and taking a breath of the night air.

‘Who’s bloody polite?’ I asked cautiously. ‘Me?’

‘God’s Great Beard!’ he replied, speaking with sober clarity, but very fast. ‘You? I don’t care about you! You go on selling marbles to the black boys. It’s the syndicate I’m talking about. Always bloody polite! What do they think I am, Mr Eric Hassan Abdullah or whatever your name is?’

‘Perhaps they’re afraid you mightn’t like their politics,’ I suggested.

‘Politics? Never gave ’em a thought! Not socialists, are they? That’s what I can’t forgive! Governing the country for the sake of ten per cent of the people. No levelling up. Levelling down Sir, it is fortunate for the yeomen of England that there are few eunuchs among the industrial proletariat.

‘Always bloody polite!’ he roared. ‘Keep me outside—nothing like politeness for doing that! But then what do they expect. Abdul Aziz? Tell me that!’

‘Poor old Poss,’ I said. ‘What have they done that you’re resenting?’

‘Resent? Resent? Oliver Poss does not resent, my dear sir! I’m a yeoman of England, and so were Drake and Hawkins and the rest of them. All a lot of spivs, making money in spite of the government. I’m a yeoman of England and I’ll hang FitzErnest on the yardarm!’

‘Hang FitzErnest on the yardarm.’

‘Hang FitzErnest on the ya-a-ard-arm!’ he carolled in an imperial voice that surged across the Horn and must have lifted the heads of ferrymen on the opposite shore.

‘Why don’t you like FitzErnest?’ I asked in an interval.

He strode towards me and forced me down by his side on a little spindly chaise-longe that cracked sharply under our weight.

‘Abdul Aziz,’ he declared ‘I don’t care an angel’s fart for any of them! But I like you. I like you, my little Tripolitanian friend.’

I remember marvelling that the word Tripolitanian came out sonorously and without a hitch.

‘I’ll take responsibility for everything. Act! Act! That’s me So I acted when Eugen Rosa didn’t turn up.’

‘He let you down?’

‘Hell! Rosa was my contact. My word is my word, and I expected the same. A yeoman of England. Six hundred boxes of Coriolanos, just for those precious slobs who speak for you and me and the waiter—God help us all, Abdul Aziz!—those gutless owls at the United Nations. Diplomatic stores to Bordeaux, and Eugen Rosa was to take them over and see them through Customs. No Rosa, no communication. So I took responsibility. I went up to Paris and called on Mr. Bloody FitzErnest.’

He hung FitzErnest on the yardarm all over again, until I reminded him that he hadn’t told me who FitzErnest was.

‘The descendant, my dear sir, of so gross a Hanoverian that even his sweaty women shuddered at him. A sort of chief of Protocol. The man who shoves the bloody glasses of water on the conference table, and changes the blotting paper when the delegates make each other puke on it. Tickles the typists and plays rummy with the cops. And bloody pleased when he can get his picture in the papers alongside the foreign ministers. Frederick FitzErnest! He fits my boot!’

I mentioned the name of Czoldy, but Poss merely abused him on general principles as a part of UNO. He knew of no connection between Czoldy and FitzErnest, or Czoldy and the syndicate.

‘But what made you go to FitzErnest,’ I asked, ‘when Eugen Rosa didn’t turn up?’

‘I’ll tell you, Hassan Abdullah! I like telling you things, you fine, greasy, sympathetic sod! Just because I knew he was in the syndicate—that’s why I went to FitzErnest.

‘I’m not afraid of responsibility. Eloquence is not enough. I landed my cargo and told FitzErnest to fix the documents. Hadn’t I any discretion, he asked me, the slimy little toad! Doesn’t want it known he gets a rake-off, I suppose, on all the cigars for all the bloody conferences! And just because Rosa doesn’t turn up and I do the job myself, he treats me like some cop who’s just pulled his union secretary out of a brothel. No discretion, Mr. Poss! Me! Discretion! I’ll take responsibility for anything, I told him.’

I know nothing of FitzErnest, for his path and mine never crossed. Poss’s reading of him as a snob may have been right, but was not the only explanation of his behaviour. It was clear that FitzErnest had been afraid, and had lost his head.

‘Didn’t Elisa like your visit to FitzErnest?’ I asked, to see if he had any suppressed ill-feeling against her.

‘Not a word! Little Elisa minds her own business and I mind mine. All brain and ankles, but I’ve nothing against that. She hates the whole world and I love it, so we dance on the worms together, if you see what I mean. Olympian, my dear sir, Olympiam! Hell’s bells, I’m a yeoman of England, and I’ve mastered my trade! I am discreet. Am I not discreet, Abdul Aziz,’ he yelled, ‘am I not discreet?’

‘Of course you are, old boy,’ I said, and let him rave a bit.

I was anxious to hear such end as there might be to this hazy meeting of Poss and FitzErnest. As soon as he drew breath, I asked him:

‘Did you tell FitzErnest what you thought of him?’

‘God’s Weary Wounds, my dear sir,’ he replied, ‘Am I one to complain to UNO’s lavatory man? Let him arrange his papers in peace! Did Clive complain? Did Raleigh complain? I regret there are no more scaffolds, for there alone would I allow myself to speak with decent freedom and, I trust, composure. As it was, Hassan Abdullah, and seeing I’d already been paid, I left with him the customs documents, and assured him I had not come to write Tobacconist upon his office door.’

Oliver Poss had too sane a mind for Urgin’s insidious thiopentone. He appeared to have no recent resentment except against the unfortunate FitzErnest, and no sense of guilt whatever, beyond what might be inferred from his passionate identification of himself with the various heroic scoundrels of Empire. As soon, however, as I ceased to question him on the points of interest to Elisa, out came the inhibitions.

His secrets have nothing to do with my story, so I will not betray them. It is enough to say that sex didn’t bother him at all; what did were disciplines, social and religious. He wanted to put his hoof through the glass of every conceivable taboo. Then I heard a bitter and detailed denunciation of the police of his own country, to which the Yeoman of England could not openly return. I should never have dreamed that he was drunk or drugged. In his fast speech there was no sign that he was not simply an excited man, convinced of injustice and overpowered by rage.

I didn’t know how to put an end to this intolerable evening. To go out into the town with Poss in his present condition was to invite adventures for which I had no spirit. Indeed, I was disgusted with myself. I felt as once in early youth when I tempted a tame stag with sponge-cake soaked in port; comedy was expected, but dignity was a reproach. The head retained its stateliness, and the body was its will, if not its force, to overcome such unintelligible treachery.

In one of Poss’s silences I suggested bed, and, to my surprise, he agreed. It was another half hour before I got him there. Meanwhile, with the last kick of the drug, he showed a maudlin outburst of affection for me.

I had said good-bye, but in the morning he came to see me off at the airport. His brown, gipsy face had an uneasy and ingratiating air, as if he were up before the magistrates for trespassing after game. I put on a broad grin to relieve his anxiety.

‘Not since I was eighteen, my dear sir,’ he said very seriously. ‘Not since I was eighteen. Now what do you suppose produced so astonishing an effect?’

‘Burgundy,’ I suggested, ‘and the effect of FitzErnest upon Francis Drake.’

He stared at me, as memory began to pulsate along the circuit that my words had restored.

‘Well, now that you mention’t ߪ no doubt! No doubt! And have I anything to apologize for? It seems to me—indeed I am regrettably sure—that in friendly reference to your experience of these lands, and not, I hope, with insolence, I addressed you by certain Arab names.’

‘The Slave of God and of his Glory,’ I answered. ‘I could wish they were more appropriate.’

‘I see a bishop is lost in you, and I take heart,’ he said. ‘Plainly I have confessed more than I should, but may I not have, my dear sir, my complement of vultures like the rest of us?’

‘And the liver otherwise in good condition?’

‘Undeservedly, yes. Well, Amberson,’ he added, accompanying me across the tarmac to the plane, and waving away some officials, ‘if it can be arranged that I may deal with the syndicate through you, I will cross the Mediterranean at any time to do so.’

3

Back in El Mina and my own familiar office, I could not get rid of an uneasiness which I now see to have been a formless sense of guilt. Awaiting me was a mass of work—a mass, that is, if measured by hours, for there was little paper. There were just messages from casual customers, officials, transport contractors and the like, who wished to see me and to spend solemn hours of talk and coffee.

I had always had the patience for this genial method of doing business; indeed I enjoyed the slow and profitable pace of it. Yet in the two busy days after my return from Istanbul, I found myself restless as any European dealing with Arabs for the first time in his life. To what I looked forward, for what purpose I grudged the hours, I did not know. It was not that I specially longed for Elisa or was impatient for her coming. That longing was constant, and I could live with it. I still must live with it.

I was continually thinking of Ashkar, clinging to Ashkar’s honest, badly-shaven face. The association was of course through Eugen Sosa, but I could not imagine why Ashkar and his dark valleys should be, as it were, a patch of radiance in my mind, while all else had taken on that blackness from which, impatiently, one turns outwards to anything present—a biting of the nails, or drink or suicide, which is, I suppose, to hurl oneself into the most absolute present possible.

Elisa had sent me a wire from Aleppo that I was to expect her about the third night. She came early, and at sunset we were together on the terrace. Her mood was very different to that of our last meeting; her poise was more eager, and the line of her body, at Kasr-el-Sittat so grave and upright, flowed as if drawn by a swift stroke of charcoal. Gay and relaxed, she strode between chair and parapet with the litheness of some delightful boy. She may have consciously considered her throwing-off of the cares of the day to be masculine, for she had her vanities, and they were baseless as those of all lovable creatures; but in fact her body had no masculine attribute but length of limb, and that too slender for any man.

I desired to prolong the moment, to talk of nothing, to watch her. She did not press for my news. She too must have known that in the peace of the evening we were closer than passion or the common task had ever bound us. It was not until the sun was far over the horizon, and the sea turned from amethyst to grey, that she spoke of my mission.

When I told her of Poss and FitzErnest, she laughed.

‘Yes, we knew all about that,’ she said. ‘Poss did the right thing, and very discreetly. It was easy for him to trace the connection between Rosa and FitzErnest, and if you’re sure he didn’t look beyond, it doesn’t matter. I don’t like FitzErnest any more than Poss did, but he’s efficient.’

‘English?’ I asked.

‘His grandfather was. But I don’t know what FitzErnest calls himself. He’s a little pale snake with sandy hair—Belgian, Dutch or one of the respectable kinds of German. He’s Czoldy’s man, and he can’t get away.’

She pronounced those four contemptuous words as if they were a statement of unalterable fact. I do not know what hold Czoldy had upon FitzErnest. It may have been as simple as cocaine, or as complex as a hysteria induced by some proven and practical psycho-damnation.

‘A little man,’ she said. ‘Shall we always have to prove such creatures, Eric?’

‘When?’

‘When the State has gone, and Kasr-el-Sittat is an island. No, I’m not thinking of another flood, with you and me as Noah and his wife’—she smiled at my puzzled expression like some queen-priestess officiating before a suburban altar—‘but my vision is always of Kasr-el-Sittat as an island. Don’t you see it?’

I said that indeed it seemed to me an island of beauty and idealism.

‘God, what a reputation!’ she laughed. ‘The schoolgirl heart of—what was it Poss called you—Abdul Aziz! Eric, my dear, do you think I had nothing in my mind but tobacco when I chose that site? What is the path of the armies? Where have they always marched? The coast road and Palestine. Deir ez Zor and down the Euphrates. All around our island, to which there is no road.

‘Eric, you know the practice of war. You’ve seen it. Suppose that all the Middle East were in flames. Imagine the armies, burnt, tormented, isolated, all frontiers gone, every man knowing that war will go on another twenty years and that there can only be one end to it. What attention would they pay to Kasr-el-Sittat? Tell me—quite literally—from your experience in Syria?’

‘All frontiers gone,’ I repeated, impressed by the certain truth of the phrase. ‘Then you would have a military governor at Aleppo or Antioch or Alexandretta. And his representative in your district—it’s remote and harmless, you see—would probably be a corporal, and not within five miles of you at that.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ she answered, ‘though I hadn’t got as far as your corporal. Now go a little further with me, Eric, and think hard of the next war. After a few years of it, which side would the military governor of Aleppo be on?’

I said that I could only speak for my own nation, and that if the military governor were a British colonel, a British colonel he would remain.

‘Yes? With no pay for him or his men? No food but what he could commandeer? No ships. No petrol. No orders from the starving rioters at home. Oh, don’t you see that whether your colonel was American or English or Russian or French, from then on he’s an Aleppo colonel!

‘And in Europe, too. The Russian governor of Manchester, the American governor of Kiev, they must forget their nationality in order to keep alive. Their homeland is where they are, for they have no other. All they can do is each to organize his district, so that he and his troops and their women and their labour do not starve, and to form his own frontier against disease and radio-activity and rebellion. For such a world as that, Eric, Kasr-el-Sittat is prepared. We have the organization and the trained men to ride that storm. And we have our headquarters, self-supporting, remote, safe. Now do you see why I call Kasr-el-Sittat an island?’

‘Anarchy——’ I began, and with the word I saw the essence of Kasr-el-Sittat, the permanent substance of the amœba.

‘Yes, Eric, anarchy,’ she interrupted. ‘All of them, generals, philosophers, even politicians, admit that another war must end in anarchy. They try to terrify the people with their talk of anarchy. They never see that it is preferable to the tyranny of the State. Anarchy—it is the only way to save the future of man, to preserve him from the soulless slavery of the hive. There is no solution but disaster. Then the social groups can begin again, guided by those of us who are left, resolved never again to return to Money and Law and Industry—all which gives them an illusion of prosperity so that they breed and breed until they have to sell their souls to the State in exchange for food and security.

‘A clean sweep, Eric. A fluid world in which the State cannot function. Nothing stands between us and that but the patience of Western statesmen. Nothing but their ridiculous little patience! Our fate is in their hands, not the Russians! The Kremlin is terrified of war, but also terrified to lose power. They are fatalists. If war comes, it comes. And it would come tomorrow if your British and American statesmen lost their patience. Imagine that for a day, at any conference, they had the mentality of Berchtold or Conrad von Hotzendorf!’

‘And if war made the State, everywhere, stronger than before?’ I asked. ‘It always has.’

She replied that without the means of production, without transport or communications, the modern state must cease to exist. Communities would slowly be reborn, no more resembling the great nations than the communities of the Dark Ages resembled the over-governed, bankrupt Roman provinces.

The permanent absence of the amœba. She hadn’t meant to reveal it to me. That the Secretariat should protect themselves and their ideas from war by the creation of a sane island was reasonable enough. That Elisa herself might even hope for war I could imagine and forgive. But now, knowing her and her companions and their relentless logic as I did, I could follow their thought to the end. Another war, far surpassing the last two in bitterness and ruin, would infallibly destroy the industrial state. The Secretariat were deliberately working to provoke that war. It was the solution, the mad, triumphant last line of their otherwise hopeless problem, and I knew that not one of them would shrink from it.

I had grasped her vision and her intent, but that night I could take neither of them seriously. I could think only of the impact of our world upon her, of the agony she had suffered, of the bright flame that remained to her in the place of a human soul. I lay awake with her dark head on my shoulder, and told myself that so much power for evil could not in fact exist in a woman abandoned to sleep and her lover. I said to myself that you don’t hold a Lenin in your arms. For some reason this absurd argument satisfied me. It seemed to put the final seal on the impossible.

She awoke radiant. Never had I seen her so free from dedication. Or is memory coloured because I know and cannot bear to think that she was near to love? If only we could have had week after week together, my house might have become a keener reality to her than Kasr-el-Sittat. Time, I wanted time—time for the devouring angel to be disconcerted by the steadiness of love, by its idleness. But why conjecture what is not in the world’s pattern? I could not hold her. Even that morning I could not keep her from her car. And when I begged her to stay, she let fall, still quite merrily, the last deadly detail I needed to complete the picture.

‘I must get back,’ she said, ‘Gisorius is coming to-night and leaving to-morrow for Paris.’

‘How?’

‘Over the border.’

‘What a passion he has for cloak-and-dagger! Why not go by train from Aleppo?’

‘Reasons,’ she laughed. ‘For example, he might not want it known that he had been in Syria.’

I do not know what business I did, nor how I passed the day, but that was always so after I had seen her. The automatism of a man’s work is never so obvious as after some uncounted interval when he had only to turn his head to beauty or stretch out his hand to touch it, when every word of the beloved was sought and accepted for a profounder meaning.

In the evening thought could no longer be dismissed. I left my house to get away from the ghost of her, and went out along the deserted shore. Again and again I told myself that my imagination was out of control. But the evidence was insistent. I will not say it was clear.

That gross and damnable Oliver Poss with his cursed cigars! Why did he have to call on me in Tripoli? Why did the fool have to open my eyes to what he didn’t know himself? If only I had been left alone to worship Elisa and win her back to the wealth of life, a thousand things might have interposed to prevent her outrage upon history. Why could I not remain in ignorance? I can cry with Adam why did I eat, but not that the woman tempted me. She had no wish at all that I should share her knowledge, and as yet no suspicion that I had—for she did not know the secret of Eugen Rosa’s disappearance.

That was the key. Eugen Rosa was to have taken over Poss’s shipment and delivered it to UNO’s commissariat; and I knew that Rosa had carried on his person a box of Urgin’s doped cigars. Selim, who had smoked one or more of them, had been drunk and afflicted—boasting, said Ashkar, as if to an Aleppo whore. That was why my mind had been mysteriously obsessed with Ashkar on my return from Istanbul. That was why Elisa’s political ranting, which otherwise I might have taken—and in past weeks had taken—as a mere private explosion of her mania for destruction, was now plain to me as the Secretariat’s intended, practical policy.

I sat down on the sand and wrote in my note-book, to compel my thoughts into some kind of order, what I knew or suspected. Before I got up to go, I tore out and burned those leaves, but this was their sense:

1.Oliver Poss had been employed to ensure that anywhere in Europe or America, whether the import of Havana cigars was allowed or not, a connoisseur could obtain Coriolanos, get used to them and trust to them.

2.Poss having innocently scattered the ground-bait, it was easy for Czoldy and FitzErnest to make Coriolanos the official conference cigars.

3.Urgin could dope a Coriolano with such artistry that no palate could detect anything wrong with it.

4.Rosa had been carrying a box of Urgin’s specials to Czoldy.

5.Czoldy intended to use them at the Paris Conference, and there was not the remotest chance of him being caught. The effect of the thiopentone exactly simulated a tired man’s loss of self-control.

The matter of the cigars had, for me, a simplicity which I do not think it had for Elisa. Hers was not a mind for petty plotting. She did not plan a logical sequence of exact events, all of which might be upset by a single miscalculation. She created, far more dangerously, a relation structure into which events might fall in any chance pattern or order so long as they conformed to the structure. If she could call into existence, even for a week, another Kaiser Wilhelm II, the effects of his instability of character could not be foreseen, could not be controlled, but among them would be War. A little alcohol for safety’s sake. A Coriolano from Czoldy’s box. And there you had a man who would express his recent resentments with the same mastery as the Kaiser.

It was true, of course, that no statesman from East or West could actually declare war at a conference table, but whether, after his outburst, he resigned or not, chaos would have been created. Resignation could only prove that his government had lost its nerve at the last moment and that fact, combined with the success of the Osterling-Tassen propaganda in showing the West as divided, was the grimmest invitation. Mood, in fact, was the Secretariat’s real explosive. The cigar was merely a trigger device. Its timing could safely be left to Czoldy. He came directly under the Assistant Secretary-General of his branch, and he would know as well as any man when mood was at the breaking-point.

There, on the beach, my emotional decision against Elisa was immediate; but it was not a logical decision. I believe and believed that our civilisation is rushing towards an ant-heap discipline and welfare, and that progress must be checked if any recognizable human spirit is to survive. War was the surest way to check it. The Secretariat was right. To the eternal question of the revolutionary—are you prepared to destroy the living for the sake of their descendants?—Elisa answered Yes, as the communist, for his own millennium, must answer Yes. But I, as she had so often called me, am a sentimentalist. In that, and perhaps only in that, I prove myself one with my own English ancestors. We are not good fanatics. We would protest against the Last Coming itself as too sudden and unimaginative a revolution; and our deep, unrealized belief that time does not run in human days shows us, I think, to be in harmony with the universe.

Emotional decision, yes, was easy. Every other thought, except horror, was inhibited. I left the beach and the black specks of burnt paper with a picture in my mind which obsessed me. I saw myself as the infinitesimal point of an inverted triangle, resisting the thrust of the powerful base. The image was so vivid, the point so small that contemplation made me dizzy. It was a nightmare, as if one should consider and be forced to consider an immense sphere balanced upon a pin-point. The mind knows it to be impossible, and yet retains the vision, shuddering away from it until physical sickness relieves imagination.

ALONE

1

ON AND ON THROUGH THE NIGHT ENDURED MY DESPAIR, bearable to me without madness only because, in the end, I called it fatalism. My love and the overwhelming power of the Secretariat were both against me. With each hour that passed the demand of my conscience for action became clearer, and clearer the hopelessness of any open opposition. That was as well, for I was compelled to move in the way of the Levant along the easiest path, submissive and unsuspected, employing the only quality left to me, the underling’s gift for subtle and treacherous intrigue.

It was September 20th, the day before the opening of the Conference Elisa had said that Gisorius was leaving that night for Paris after a swift visit? Why? Why not keep away from Czoldy at a time when any meeting of the two should not be risked? Was it possible that the box of Coriolanos which Rosa should have delivered to Czoldy had never been replaced?

The more I thought of it, the more likely it seemed to me. They must have investigated for anxious months before they could be sure that Rosa and his box were not, somewhere, in the hands of interested police. And then it would take some time for Urgin, who must have worked long and lovingly over each masterpiece, to produce another full box. A full box was essential. There could be no gambling, at a critical moment, on a man choosing the cigar intended for him. Oh, I could imagine the exasperation of Elisa and Osterling, as Urgin refused to be hurried! They could fool him completely over intangibles such as politics, but they couldn’t compel him to dope cigars with his volatile thiopentone (rather than something else which amused him more) without some gross lie which might arouse his suspicion.

I decided to start at once and have lunch with Ashkar. I had some urgent business in Aleppo which would serve as an excuse for my sudden absence from home, if the question ever arose. Then, I remember, I began a note to Elisa and tore it up. I could not bring myself on the same journey to visit Kasr-el-Sittat.

There were no leaves to fall; the autumn dust, borrowing their movement, sailed in sunlit eddies of pink and orange past the windows of Ashkar’s billet, as we tasted the new wine and washed down a roast hare stuffed with olives. When his orderly had served us and left, I asked Ashkar what he had done with the box of cigars he had taken from Selim. He was horrified at this unmannerly mention of a forgotten and discreditable episode, and answered that if he had known I liked cigars he would have sent a trooper riding to Cairo to get some for me.

I pretended to be impressed, and in my turn assured him that I too was ready to visit the ends of the earth to satisfy his lightest wish; friendship, I went on in a lowered tone, was the motive behind my question.

Ashkar fixed me with expressionless brown eyes, searching to divine my hidden meaning. He said shortly that everything which belonged to Eugen Rosa had been buried.

‘And you are still sure Selim will never talk?’

‘He is dead.’

I showed no particular interest, and drank my coffee in silence. After a bit Ashkar began to rumble and curse, as the story erupted through the stratified layers of gendarme.

‘By God, I am a child! By God, my years have gone for nothing! By God, I trusted myself to a fool! I told you Selim was mad. I told you that he boasted, and that I showed him, written down in good Turkish, all he confessed to me. I knew his plans, his associates, his routes. It was the end of Selim. He had thrust such a curb behind his teeth that I could break his jaw with my little finger. And then! Then he behaves as if he had said nothing!

‘He ran a string of stolen camels from Antioch to Harim by the very route he told me of. When I heard, I could not believe it, but the tracks of his passage were there. As soon as he returned to Antioch, this time with a load of hashish, I sent word to the Turks and told them where he would camp. The Turks are without our respect for justice. I counted on that, and for the first time in all this business I was not wrong. Selim was shot while trying to escap.’

‘When you took the cigars from Selim, had he smoked any?’ I asked.

‘One. And another he carried between his fingers, lit, when he came to tell me about Rosa. He said,’ added Ashkar grimly, ‘that he would burn off my eyelids so that I should see the better.’

‘Suppose there were hashish in those cigars?’ I suggested.

‘Hashish!’ he exclaimed. ‘It could be! His eyes and his babbling, yes! But Selim’s speech was clear. No hashish-smoker ever spoke as he did. And then’—he looked at me so mild an enquiry that I could ignore it if I wished—‘the cigars came from Kasr-el-Sittat.’

‘That is why I am here.’

His face still did not change, but the elasticity seemed to leave those powerful jaws on each side of his jaw-bone, so that the iron-grey stubble stood out and became the dominating colour. I knew what he was thinking: that in any battle with Kasr-el-Sittat—and battle there would be—he must finish the loser.

‘White drugs?’ he asked.

‘Not quite. A mixture of white and hashish that is now fashionable in Europe.’

I was leading him towards the path I wanted him to take, but my suggestion was not, I think, wholly untrue. Urgin did experiment with hashish and had isolated the alkaloids. I believe he used them in minute quantities in order that his thiopentone should simulate more exactly the effect of alcohol.

‘Does Villaneda know?’

The mere fact that he could ask this question—and that a dozen times I had put it to myself—shows the trust that Juan Villaneda inspired. I didn’t want to destroy as yet the bridge between Ashkar and Kasr-el-Sittat, so I denied that Juan knew anything at all about drug running.

‘No. A group of colonists are smuggling for their own account,’ I said, ‘and the quantities are too small to be worth a scandal.’

‘Small or not, it shall stop,’ he grumbled. ‘I? I, who have shaken the hand of Russell Pasha and been commmended by him to my government, shall I allow this? By God, shall my troopers sit drinking with the Turks, and say that their Christian captain is corrupt?’

‘You needn’t allow it,’ I answered, ‘but if you use the wisdom of Solomon, Kasr-el-Sittat will never know. To-night Juan Villaneda will bring you a traveller for Turkey. See him before he crosses the frontier and examine his baggage. If he is carrying cigars, take the box from him, look at it and return it unopened. But do not return the same box that you took.’

I went out to my car, and came back with three full boxes of twenty-five Coriolanos.

‘Give him one of those,’ I said, ‘and no one will ever be the wiser till the buyer finds out that ordinary cigars without the drug have been delivered to him.’

Ashkar smiled with relief, appreciating the flavour of a cunning that he might have prepared himself. I have never had a better compliment than his immediate belief. Of course he recognized the box of Coriolanos as identical with that which Eugen Rosa had carried; otherwise he had really no evidence beyond the fact that I had explained the illogical, unaccountable behaviour of Selim.

‘If the trick works, it will do for the present,’ he said. ‘But after?’

‘It will do till seller and buyer decide that neither of them has lied. And even then—who will think of the minute when the box was in your hands?’

‘And always these Coriolanos?’

‘If they change the brand, I will change it too.’

Then he made a very acute remark—jovially, but with the first shade of disrespect I had ever heard from him.

‘You run between friends like a money-changer in the bazaar,’ he said, and both are profited.’

I admitted that indeed my second motive was to protect a friend in the colony, and told him that neither he nor his orderly should mention my visit, and that he and I should never communicate with each other unless we had taken the most extreme precautions.

‘Do you not want to know whether the traveller carried cigars or not?’ he asked.

Certainly I could not bear the suspense of remaining in ignorance. I gave the problem some thought, and suggested he might send me a message by Juan Villaneda. I didn’t want to risk so much as a telephone call between us.

‘But how?’ he enquired.

‘After the traveller has gone on his way, will Juan Villaneda eat with you?’

‘If God wills.’

‘Then if the traveller was carrying a box of cigars and you succeeded in changing them, give Villaneda stuffed vine leaves. If he had the box, but you could not change, give him cold meat. If there was nothing, whatever else you like.’

Ashkar took to the old trick at once, and asked no more questions. He merely looked, smiling a little sternly, at the boxes of cigars I had so readily produced which bore no customs stamps. I saw on his face, or imagined that I saw, the regret of an honourable man at the lower standard of his associate. Never again, I knew, should I be able to persuade him that I was not involved in the secret dishonesties of Kasr-el-Sittat.

When I left Ashkar, I was angry with him and with myself. I drove away to Aleppo, over the melancholy plain, carrying on a resentful dialogue with him in my imagination. I wanted to explain to him that I would have broken every law in Syria for Kasr-el-Sittat and its ideals—but, if that were so, what about my treachery? I took refuge in the childish satisfaction that, right or wrong, I had taken action.

The colony rented a house in Aleppo, where two of the companions were always in residence. They met visitors arriving by train, collected mail and supplies, and sent a car or truck every second day to Kasr-el-Sittat. I called on them to find out if they had any news of Juan Villaneda. He never had much patience with the placid life of Kasr-el-Sittat, and was continually passing through Aleppo on the way to and from his contacts with the dusty masses, without which he felt himself to be a fraud.

They told me that he would probably bring in the next batch of visitors returning from the colony. Sure enough, two days later, I found him at Aleppo station, where he was seeing off a typically odd collection of guest: two gentle and disillusioned Hindus, a gorgeous South American woman whose unexpected bare feet and sandals were an obvious tribute to the monasticism of Kasr-el-Sittat, and a jolly Frenchman in a beret, whose politics, however burning, were causing him at the moment less excitement than the sleeping accommodation allotted to the South American.

Juan called me over at once to talk to the Hindus, who wanted to know some complicated detail about hotels in Basra, whence they were sailing for home. They seemed a little disconcerted by Kasr-el-Sittat. No doubt they recognized a spiritual content, but found the expression of it unfamiliar. I wondered what they made of that Brahmin, Osterling, or he of them. I wondered, too, why the Secretariat, who were such masters at making use of the innocent, didn’t send out their contraband by such visitors. I found the answer at once. They never took an unavoidable risk. It wouldn’t do for a customs offer to be smoking thiopentone in a confiscated cigar. A pious Moslem who didn’t drink but enjoyed an occasional smoke of hashish would have no doubt at all that the cause of his intoxication was the cigar, and might even find it enjoyable. That, certainly, was one of the reasons why Rosa and Gisorius had not left Syria by a legal route. Customs examination at departure from the Turkish airport could be overcome by Gisorius’ influence, and by Czoldy’s on arrival in Paris.

I walked away from the station with Juan Villaneda. He led me to a thatched booth, outside the old khan of the pilgrimage, where the proprietor had a few bottles of good sherry for Christian consumption. They had been bought cheap, said Juan, from the restaurant car of the Taurus Express. The question of wine gave an easy lead to Ashkar, and I asked Juan whether he had seen him recently.

‘A couple of nights ago,’ he replied. ‘He made a parcel of Gisorius.’

‘Did you eat with him afterwards?’

‘Just a snack with the patrol,’ he said, and dropped the subject.

I had forgotten that Juan never noticed what he ate. Food to him was just something you couldn’t do without.

‘Ashkar makes a fuss,’ I suggested hopefully. ‘Even of that.’

‘Fuss!’ he laughed. ‘It took two troopers and his orderly just to warm up some meat in leaves.’

I ordered more sherry and relaxed. Czoldy would never find out that the Coriolanos delivered by Gisorius were harmless until they failed to take effect. And that meant that his first and finest opportunities would be lost.

Then I turned to the cautious examination of Juan’s opinions. I told him of my business in Aleppo—which was to book, if I could get it, a very big order for ploughs and combines—and explained how agricultural machinery would change the whole life of the steppes of northern Syria, where there were no features to check the run of plough and harvester but the man-made hillocks, a hundred feet high, formed by mud-hut built on mud-hut for the last six thousand years. I was aware, I said, of an inconsistency between my beliefs and my trade. This land of beehive huts, its soil only scratched by wooden ploughs, would become a plateau of windy wheat, pouring down its grain over new railways and roads to the Mediterranean or the banks of the Euphrates; and that meant that the State, hitherto known to the fortunate peasant only through the policeman and the distant post-office, would interfere with every activity of his life. His prosperity might be greater, but his freedom to live and die as he liked would be gone.

Juan laughed, and said that there was no inconsistency, that I was a practical prophet of anarchy. The long-term result of my agricultural machinery would merely be to make the Syrian plain a desert.

‘Then am I justified in making deserts?’ I asked him. ‘Are all means justifiable?’

He looked at me keenly to see if I were serious—for our conversation had been tuned to sherry and a casual meeting—and then replied to me as if he weighed his responsibility for every word.

‘Yes. All means. But, mark you, friend, before you can understand my faith, you must understand communism. The communists are honest, as I am. They are full of pity, as I am, and appalled at the needless misery of the world. They look forward, as I do, to the extinction of the State, and we all believe that the end justifies the means.

‘But here we part company. They have faith that the Marxist State will extinguish itself. I know that it cannot. Technique, power, education, capital—the State will never give them up until it has murdered the individuality of its subjects. To the communist that discipline is an end in itself. To me all compulsion is evil. And any tactics which weaken the State are justifiable.’

‘Including, of course, war,’ I said, as if it were a foregone conclusion.’

‘A revolutionary must never forget that it is for the masses he works,’ Juan answered evasively. ‘So I cannot always agree with Bakunin that every act of destruction is good, because it makes an intolerable world less bearable still.’

I dared not press him any further. When we parted, I still could not guess whether or not he shared the Secretariat’s policy and secrets. He expected from war the decisive destruction of the State, but I felt he was by no means ready to fire the charge whatever the circumstances. It was his heart rather than his head, as Ashkar had implied, which made of him a natural leader.

As soon as I was home again, in those rooms and that garden haunted by Elisa, the faint hope aroused in me by Juan’s essential humanity died away. I remembered that the most merciless fanatics of history had often been persons of blameless life and considerable personal charm. In the worst hours of self-pity I cried out that Kasr-el-Sittat had no effective enemy in the world but me. It may have been true. The enemies of the cover organizations in Russia, in America, in Western Europe, were legion, but I doubt if any chief of police shared my vision; each must have thought that he was fighting, or merely watching a vague opposition to his own particular form of government.

I can imagine a common-sense jury of my countrymen asking me why I did not tell to some responsible agent or official what I had discovered. The answer is that I did—and the interview was a desert of futility such as only these all-withering years of the twentieth century could have created.

I went to the most sensible of our consuls, a man who really knew the country and gathered intelligence that was by no means wholly commercial. For that reason I will not say in which Levantine city he carried on his patriotic business. I told him that Kasr-el-Sittat was more than a mere colony of impractical anarchists.

‘I know it is,’ he said, with lift of his voice on the last word that rebuked me for my interference.

‘I thought you might know.’ I answered. ‘But my information is that their agents don’t only work behind the Iron Curtain.’

‘Quite probable, Amberson,’ he agreed. ‘Quite likely. But we have no need to take all these crazy isms seriously. Whereas anything cheap that does some damage to the other fellow is not to be despised.’

So loose a remark horrified me, and he saw it.

‘Believe me,’ he added apologetically, ‘anarchism is a hundred years out of date. The only anarchists to-day are old dyed-in-the-wool Tories, but they aren’t aware of it—and they are hardly likely to see salvation in Kasr-el-Sittat.’

‘You’re forgetting the power of propaganda,’ I replied. ‘Couldn’t they be made to see it?’

‘Not unless you called Anarchism the Royal Empire League of Freedom or somethin!’

I was shaken by this echo of Elisa’s irony. Royal Society for the Protection of Civil Rights had been her contemptuous proposal when I objected to the name of World Opposition.

I knew at once that I could never convince the consul, without witnesses or written evidence, that my whole report was not just hearsay and imagination. I had to keep to myself the story of Urgin’s Coriolanos. That, doubtless, would have been investigated, but could never be proved; and when the indignant Czoldy had established his innocence, Gisorius would soon arrange a fatal accident for me.

I told the consul that I was entirely satisfied, and asked him—on the grounds that Kasr-el-Sittat was a good customer of mine—not mention my visit. He assured me, with an unnecessarily patronizing air, that he wouldn’t even bother to make a note of what I said, and advised me not to become so provincial in my little corner that I began to believe in Syrian bogey stories. He added, to gild the pill, that he would always be very grateful for any information on Arab politics in Tripoli. I never went near officials again.

2

I had taken what action I could, and as the weeks passed and the mutual insults at the Paris Conference were no more discourteous than usual, I sank into a dullness of spirit that was almost peace. In such a mood the guilt of the Secretariat seemed to me less merely because their innocents had no part in it. I remembered that Tabas was still at Kasr-el-Sittat, which proved—to my easy satisfaction—that he had seen nothing wrong. I clung to him, imagining his walks under the two cedars on the hilltop. I told myself that his insight was far more penetrating than my petty collection of half-evidence and guesswork.

It was Sunday afternoon When Elisa and Gisorius turned up at El Mina. Gisorius only remained long enough for a drink, and then took the car back to Kasr-el-Sittat. Elisa told me that he was staying at the colony on special business—an uneasy piece of news.

‘I wish that you liked each other better,’ she said. ‘You have never let him know you.’

‘Let him?’ I retorted. ‘Good God, why should he ask questions? When I obey his orders, I don’t!’

‘What’s wrong, Eric?’ she asked, hearing the bitterness in my voice, and holding out to me her slim, brown hands.

‘Gisorius, perhaps.’

‘No! Why didn’t you tell me that you were in Aleppo last month?’

I said weakly that my business had been important, and that in dealing with Arabs one couldn’t limit oneself to a twelve-hour day.

‘But you should have come to Kasr-el-Sittat on your way back. Why not?’

I loved her so at that moment. What other woman would have shown no wounded pride, no jealousy of the unknown mood or person which had kept me from her? I suppose she knew with utter certainty that I was neither weary of her nor unfaithful, and she was above the pettiness of inventing a grievance. Her smile and the tone of her why not? almost implied that I had not come to see her because I had been suddenly and unaccountably shy.

And she was right, of course! Shyness, though so small a word, expressed in a sense my longing for her and my horror of her influence. She had laid over our love a patina beneath which, for her own sake, she never dared to look, but in its black and gleaming surface she would often see my moods reflected, and I hers.

‘Have you heard any more of Poss?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘You knew he was the man who took me off the train into Turkey?’

I nodded. It was now her turn for shyness. She stood still and straight, and her skin became alive, absorbing light. I cannot call it a flush, for there was no redness.

‘What exactly did I say,’ she asked, ‘that evening in Damascus when I talked of my life?’

‘You made a physical shame of a spiritual one.’

This so pleased her that for the time she forgot Aleppo and our estrangement. Her straight body did not relax, but it lived, instantly, like a foil taken from the rack into a fencer’s hand. Often I thought of her as an exquisite sword. No soft young girl, however slim, could have the flexibility of this woman in her thirties, stripped by the years down to the very essence of beauty.

The twilight faded to darkness unperceived by us, and the house was still, so much more silent than the garden where leaf was ever stirring or water lapping—so silent that I knew our love, whatever eternal agony might await it, was already in its tomb. Then I heard Boulos in the kitchen; and the wind off the sea, no longer welcome in late October, began to blow through the open windows.

In the summer—dreaming, God help me, of such an evening as this!—I had built an open hearth and chimney in the living-room. I left Elisa, and while Boulos laid our meal I lit a fire. It smoked, of course, abominably, and I was still struggling with stone-pine and drift-wood when she joined me. I gave her a cocktail, and returned to my tongues of flame that were slowly massing into one.

She stood over me, glass in hand, and again I felt that our sexes were reversed. In accepting service she was so like a man. The difference is only, I think, one of poise and bearing. A woman accepts service admiringly and graciously, whereas a man accepts it with a shade of patronage. There is a suggestion in our very stance, when we watch a woman work, that we could do whatever she is doing so much better if only we chose to bother. Or do I imagine that quality in Elisa, because it was I who felt the gentle and—in our early months of happines—the laughing humility which is the prerogative of women?

When we sat down to Boulos’ array of dishes before the now obedient fire, Elisa was evidently satisfied that the cloud over our relationship had streamed away. She told me of the recent development of Kasr-el-Sittat, of the frontier and of the Secretariat, and how she could never hope to dominate it unless Osterling was on her side. I remember my overwhelming desire to cry out to her to stop, to let me know no more, to limit the bounds of my treachery. I drowned this intolerable sensitivity in draughts of white wine, so that I could return her look for look.

‘You must attend, Eric,’ she said at last. ‘Stop drinking and listen to me. I am trying to tell you that you are under suspicion.’

I answered that I had watched her preparing the way for that pronouncement, and that I couldn’t be bothered with it. Like an importunate woman I went round the table and kissed her. She answered me with lips made vicious by annoyance.

‘No more,’ she ordered, taking the bottle and putting it on the floor by her side.

‘One glass,’ I begged—for, by God, I knew that I was going to need it.

I even knew what she was going to say, or, if that be an exaggeration, at least I knew she was going to talk of my friendship with Ashkar.

‘Do you remember meeting a man called Eugen Rosa?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘You must.’

‘But I met you the same evening, beloved.’

‘Eric, this is urgent. Be sane, my dear.’

‘What about him?’ I asked, and drank the glass she had allowed me.

‘He disappeared in Turkey on his way to Europe, and it seems certain that he got no further than the frontier.’

I told her that the frontier was stiff with bad characters on the Turkish side and ours, and that if Rosa had stopped for an earnest political chat with one of them, it might easily have been his last.

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she answered. ‘He was carrying a box of cigars—for an interrogation—like those you took for Oliver Poss.’

‘Why worry?’ I said. ‘If anyone murdered Rosa and sold the cigars in Turkey, it will never be known where they came from.’

‘Yes. But we sent another box.’

‘That’s all right then.’

I listened to the blood pounding irregularly through my body, and thanked God for the wine which enabled me to blur all outlines so naturally that I neither condemned my treachery nor advanced it.

‘Eric,’ she said, exasperated. ‘That second box didn’t arrive either. It had been changed somewhere for a box of ordinary Coriolanos.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because they were tested after one of them had failed to have any effect.’

‘Urgin slipped up, and gave you the wrong box?’

‘That’s what I hope,’ she answered. ‘These damned scientists are never as careful as they like to be thought. But the box was for a few minutes in Ashkar’s hands.’

‘What does it matter? He couldn’t have had another to swop it for.’

‘Couldn’t he? But, Eric, unless there’s a most improbable coincidence, it must be the same man who killed Rosa and who exchanged those cigars. And that man is Ashkar. But who is behind him?’

‘The evidence is pretty black against me,’ I admitted.

‘It isn’t black at all,’ she answered, ‘for when Eugen Rosa disappeared, you had only just visited Kasr-el-Sittat for the first time, and you knew nothing at all about us.’

I reached for the bottle with my foot, and slid it over and filled my glass. She didn’t notice. She too must have been struggling with the complexities of loyalty. She said nothing at all of what action had been taken against me.

‘Don’t be angry or afraid, my dear, just because you are a possible suspect. At some time it has happened to everyone who is near the heart of a revolutionary movement. We have only to find Ashkar’s contacts, and you will be cleared.’

‘What about Ashkar?’ I asked

She hesitated, and then answered me with the serenity, the gentleness of one who had thought out a problem and filed away, for action at a later time, the irrevocable solution.

‘Eric, I shall never hurt you, never force you to know more than you must. You are English, and you haven’t suffered. Those who have—well, don’t condemn them. Try to understand. That’s all I shall ask of you: to understand. Not to do. Not to know.’

For Ashkar’s sake I was very near confessing. The only loyalty that remained to me was to him, and I clung to it. Then I perceived that Ashkar could lose neither his job nor his life until the Secretariat found out who was behind him; and since there wasn’t anybody behind him but myself, the longer they watched him and his contacts, the more they must be convinced of his innocence.

‘For your own sake and mine, don’t go near Ashkar for a while,’ she said. ‘Just stick close to your business.’

In the morning she went on to Beirut by taxi. There was a conference of UNESCO delegates, state-licensed to spread their harmless culture from one to another. Among them, she said, Kasr-el-Sittat had two propaganda experts who had been, in effect, trained by Goebbels, for they had monitored and analysed his speeches throughout the war. For all I know, those two may have brought the whole conference to Beirut in order to refresh their contact with Kasr-el-Sitta. I can think of no other reason why UNESCO should have chosen a small Arab port from which to effuse its rationed light.

Left alone among my crates and invoices to confront the danger to myself and Ashkar, I was aware of relief. Attack had been hopeless; defence was not. The point of the triangle which resisted that intolerable thrust was no longer infinitely small. It had an immediate weight to counter, and therefore took on a visible reality.

I had to see Ashkar at once—that very night if it were possible—in order to get back from him the box of doped Coriolanos which he had taken from Gisorius, and the two boxes which remained to him for future exchange. There was the risk, the certainty, that the Secretariat would send another traveller over the frontier with a second box of cigars, and see what happened to them.

What else would they do? Well, there was one obvious move. I asked Boulos if anyone had been watching the street, or seeking information about me. A stranger, a friend, the local policeman, anyone at all? In Boulos himself  I had absolute trust. There were limits, of course, to his devotion. He would neither have fought for me nor resisted a determined interrogation for me (though I wouldn’t put it past him to do both for the head of his family), but he would not take money to spy on me.

Boulos had noticed nothing, and he was sure that my clerk and warehouseman were as reliable as himself. He delivered an impromptu oration in choice classical Arabic upon the privilege of serving me. I hoped privately that one-tenth of it was true, and replied with equal courtliness that a good son made a good father.

I observed that he had given no guarantee for his cousin, and asked after his health. I was answered by a stream of invective. The cousin had been in the local brothel for the last twenty-four hours, and was now sleeping off his debauch in a corner of the kitchen. Boulos assured me that he had gone through all my possessions very carefully to see that nothing had been stolen, and that in any case, as I well knew, the cousin was never allowed to pass the staircase door.

That put the matter beyond a doubt. Though the disreputable little beast was unofficially fed by me and occasionally tipped, he never had any money. Boulos, of course, denied that the cousin would ever have accepted a piastre to report on me, his host and benefactor, and I politely agreed with him; but neither of us was in the least taken in by this exchange of courtesies.

I tried not to hear what was going on in the kitchen. Boulos, as the senior member of a dishonoured family, was evidently taking drastic measures to obtain a full confession. I would not like to be awakened from a drowsy hangover by an irate cook with a hot stove at his disposal.

Boulos returned. His eyes did not belong at all to his round and inoffensive face.

‘He was paid,’ he said, ‘but by a stranger. He can only tell me that the man was a Turk.’

I was not surprised that Gisorius’ agent had chosen Boulos’cousin. He was a sharp and plausible little rogue, who preferred the life of an alley cat to any regular employment; he was often in the company of the more shady caique captains, and he acted as a runner for the establishment where he had just disgraced himself. His failing—as I knew, and a stranger could not—was that he spent any windfall at once and flamboyantly.

Boulos agreed that the family honour would be no worse off if his cousin had free board and lodging for a few days, so I called up the port police and asked them to put him inside on general principles and a charge of creating a disturbance. They were delighted at this opportunity to talk to him; and the smoothness with which they carried out the wholly illegal transaction, without mentioning my name at all, was a comforting reminder that I understood my adopted country, whereas Kasr-el-Sittat did not.

That cleared the cousin out of the way. I then told Boulos that I found it necessary to have a bout of malaria for two days and nights, and that he was to follow our normal routine of bringing up food and pretending to make my bed, so that callers, the warehouse and the general public would have no doubt at all that I was sweating, cursing and incapable on the other side of the staircase door.

Ashkar was a most difficult person to contact except at his own headquarters; and there I dared not go. Nor could I risk a telephone call—not that Kasr-el-Sittat was equal to tapping local lines (that was just the sort of job for which I was so valuable to them), but Gisorius, through Juan Villaneda, could easily control the gendarmerie’s register of incoming messages. Transport, too, was the devil of a problem, for of course I could not use my car. I looked over the bus schedules and the railway guide, and at last got an inspiration for, at any rate, a promising start. My ingenuity amazes me when I look back on it. I was interesting as a trapped ape who manipulates simple machinery to get at the bananas.

There was a train to Homs Junction shortly after dark which would take me through Tel Kalakh, the nominal customs post between the Lebanon and Syria. That post could make trouble for the merchant if it wished, so naturally I had a friend there. He wasn’t by any means a mere pensionary. The man was a wonderful shot, and I had introduced him to the delights of snipe-shooting. Like nearly all Arabs, he had considered snipe too small to be worth cartridges, and he was grateful to me for relieving the tedium of winter evenings in Tel Kalakh by a brand new sport.

My terrace, as I have said, commanded the sandhills and the sea. I kept under cover and watched until twilight to be sure that no one was taking an interest in my back door. After dark I slipped out of the garden gate, and ran to the station. Something over an hour later I was at Tel Kalakh.

I remained in the train, for I couldn’t think of any excuse for getting out unless I were invited. I put my head out of the carriage window, and asked a policeman on the platform if my friend the Customs Inspector was anywhere about. Yes, he was drinking coffee with the stationmaster. I sent a message to him enquiring whether he could spare time from his valuable and indispensable duties to come and have a chat.

The Inspector insisted, as I knew he would, that I should take a little something with him before the train started. He declared that he would not let it leave without me, and that in any case it would be held up for twenty minutes. So I returned with him to the stationmaster’s office and the coffee.

In reply to his questions, I told him that my car had broken down, and that I was forced to take the train through Homs to Aleppo. He played up beautifully with just the hospitable reaction that I expected. How could he allow me to spend a lonely night on a slow train? Why didn’t I stay with him instead? He would find transport for me in the morning or when God willed, and it would be quicker than the train. No, we must all eat together, for the All-seeing Omnipotence, who knew that I was coming, had sent two brace of partridges to the very muzzle of his gun.

I allowed myself to be persuaded, and we settled down to gossip until suddenly he rose with a great oath.

‘I have forgotten the train!’ he exclaimed.

The three of us rushed out together to start the train, which had remained at Tel Kalakh an extra quarter of an hour, waiting for the purely formal all-clear of the Customs. It steamed out into the Syrian night, leaving us alone upon the country platform, where the steps of porters and police returning home echoed in the silence of the valley. At that moment my love of this people who had accepted me, of their manners and their generous impulses, was very great.

We ate the partridges at the Customs Post on the main road, where the Inspector and his chaps made me, by their own standards, very comfortable. I brought up the subject of Ashkar, whose character was always good for an hour of conversation. My friend, being a Moslem, did not at all approve of him. He produced the old accusation that Ashkar was more French than Syrian.

I said that I hoped to see him on my way to or from Aleppo, but that I did not want him to know I was coming. It was a matter, I added mysteriously, of an Alaouite girl, an orphan of singular beauty with hips like melons. Could the Inspector telephone Ashkar’s headquarters and find out where he was likely to be for the next couple of days?

He put through an official call, and told me that the captain was on a tour of the frontier, and would reach Kassab the next day, where he would certainly stay the night.

This was awkward, for Kassab was the frontier post on the road from Latakia to Antioch; to get there, any sane man would return to Tripoli and follow the coast to the north. I couldn’t now tell the Inspector that I wanted to go back to Tripoli, so I said I wouldn’t bother to see Ashkar at all.

In the morning my host put me on a fast lorry that was going as far as Hama; if I had really been bound for Aleppo, this would have been a first-rate lift on the way. As it was, I got off the lorry 160 long miles from Kassab. It might have been worse, for in Hama, where my name and face was quite unknown, I could safely hire a taxi; and there was a metalled road across the mountains to the coast.

I chose a powerful car with a fine, scoundrelly driver who responded instantly to cheerful indecencies. He reached Latakia in four hours—which would have qualified him for any Alpine trial—and only stopped twice, once to pick up and cut the throat of a chicken he had killed, and once to return a baby, which was not fair game, to its hysterical mamma.

Talking he never stopped, and I had ample time to judge him. Like most of his caste, he was wit, pimp, smuggler and blackmailer, and on the road he drove his competitor to the wall with the insolence of a renaissance Italian. I reckoned that he was a man to do anything for money, but unlikely, unless underpaid, to soil by betrayal the panache of his six cylinders.

A little way from Kassab, I told him that I wanted to be left in the woods by the side of the road, and that he was to go on to the frontier post with a letter from me to Captain Ashkar. He was not to deliver it while anyone else was present, nor to mention that a European had sent him. Then he was to drive Ashkar back to me.

This task my invaluable driver performed most shrewdly. He simply ran up to the frontier post with his empty car and said that Ashkar had ordered it. When Ashkar himself came out to remonstrate with him, he delivered my note, and the rest was easy.

The captain’s army training overcame his national habit of drawing out the preliminaries. He had come straight from his command in a military moo—and besides he disliked all mysteries that were not of his own making. He cut down his compliments to half a minute.

‘The cigars again,’ I told him. ‘You exchanged the box of one traveller, but has there been another since?’

‘Yes, three days ago,’ he grumbled, ‘but what the father of obscenities carried I neither know nor care. I told Villaneda that I should be on tour, and couldn’t look after him.’

‘God is great!’ I exclaimed. ‘And what have you done with the boxes?’

‘That which I took from the traveller is in a sure place. The other two are in my safe.’

I didn’t relish his implication that the safe was not a sure place, and asked him where the keys were.

‘There is only one, and I have it on me,’ he said.

I warned him that he was suspected of doing away with Eugen Rosa and exchanging the cigars, and that both our lives were in danger.

‘From Kasr-el-Sittat? I am used to threats from Kasr-el-Sittat. Have you forgotten our friend, God, and how he threatened to stuff my boots and breeches with what would be left on me? These half-wit colonists—well, I know they could have me retired on a pension. And if I am convinced that they intend to get rid of me, I will make their lives a burden in the time that remains. My brother, they have no consuls to protect them.’

Ashkar refused to believe that Kasr-el-Sittat had any greater power than their influence at Damascus. He was polite but sceptical about my guarded story of organizations abroad. A monastery to him was a monastery. Nestorians and Maronites—they too had protectors abroad, but not effective enough to bother the sleep of a captain of gendarmes.

He asked me where I was staying the night. I told him that I hadn’t yet had time to give it a thought, and that I mustn’t be seen in Latakia, for I was supposed to be in bed with malaria at home.

That impressed him far more than anything I had said, and he enquired if I were sure of Boulos.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But his cousin was paid to watch me. Are you sure of all your own men?’

He became thoughtful.

‘Can this taxi-driver be traced?’ he asked.

‘Unlikely. I picked him up in Hama, and there’s no reason why Kasr-el-Sittat should look there.’

It was already night. We drove back towards Kassab, and about a mile from the frontier turned off the main road on to a track.

‘You will be safe there,’ said Ashkar. ‘I shall be about two hours. Shall I bring some food?’

The taxi-driver and I exclaimed together, for we had had nothing since a quick snack in Hama.

Ashkar’s heavy steps, each one resenting the absence of a horse, faded away up the road, and the woods were silent. I hoped to heaven that he knew the routine of the Kassab post, and that we should not be disturbed. I didn’t want to be discovered acting suspiciously within a mile of the frontier.

The taxi-driver seemed to sense that I was an amateur.

‘Have no fear,’ he said. ‘I have done this before, but he was not on our side then.’

‘God prospers him who forgets the names of policemen,’ I suggested.

‘My licence is my living’ he assured me. ‘For me they are nameless as for their fathers.’

He curled up on the front seat and went to sleep, leaving me to meditate upon the improbability of Ashkar and myself ever being able to arrange a really secret meeting in this country where the movements of every official and every foreigner aroused curiosity and gossip. The true problem of any agent employed by the Secretariat was not so much the tailing of Ashkar as knowing in which café to sit and listen.

At the sound of hooves turning off the road and breaking into a canter on the soft red dust of the track, the taxi-driver rose out of his sleep into the bushes like a startled partridge. I was not so accustomed as he to the rusted latches of the taxi door, so I had to remain where I was. Fortunately the horseman turned out to be Ashkar, arriving before his time.

We left the driver with meat and water and flat loaves of mountain bread. Though a Moslem, he seemed a little disappointed at the water, and Ashkar produced a bottle of araq, declaring it, for the sake of the driver’s conscience, to be lemonade. Then we went up the hill out of earshot.

‘You are right. I am being watched,’ said Ashkar. ‘Ten days ago Damascus sent me a new clerk—a Christian, but I didn’t like him. I went back to Kassab just now to ask my orderly about him; he too is an Ashkar, so he tells me the truth. This clerk is everywhere, even in my quarters. And he pays coffee for my men.’

‘Has he seen the inside of your safe?’ I asked.

‘I do not know. But some time he may have looked over my shoulder when I opened it. Even so he could not be sure, for the cigar boxes are behind a heap of files.’

I asked Ashkar then and there to decide upon some sure way of sending me back the boxes. I couldn’t allow him to destroy them. The Bari crate, from which I had taken them, had been in my warehouse for a month and could stay there longer—for Poss’s deliveries were of course irregular—but soon or late I should have to send that case to Kasr-el-Sittat with the correct number of cigar boxes in the false bottom. Before I came under suspicion, it wouldn’t have mattered how many boxes arrived. I could have told some story of the bottom being smashed in transit, and got away with it.

Then Ashkar turned all gendarme on me, and insisted on keeping the box of Coriolanos which he had taken from Gisorus. He made it, of course, a ceremoniously veiled refusal, but he meant it. To put bluntly what took him a good two minutes to say, that box was his evidence against Kasr-el-Sittat and a charge of drug-smuggling was his weapon in self-defence.

I had to explain a good deal more of Kasr-el-Sittat and its objects. I reminded him that if you looked at the reverse side of Villaneda’s innocent libertarian communism, it was anarchism. He had heard of anarchism, and at once connected it with assassination.

‘But that did neither harm nor good,’ I told him. ‘These people are cleverer. They would use the politician instead of killing him. They would make him a little more foolish than he is. They would turn him into a Selim. Now do you understand? The drug in those cigars is not one that a man takes for pleasure—or knowingly.’

Ashkar’s reaction was quite unexpected. He embraced me. Why hadn’t I told him before, he complained. Why had I let him think that I, who had been an example to them all of justice and incorruptibility, had been dabbling in the dirt? Why hadn’t I known that his heart was with the British as always? I didn’t disillusion him. I let him keep his Arabian Nights dreams of an ever-present secret service.

‘First,’ he said, ‘my clerk shall meet with an accident.’

‘For God’s sake, no! It would only increase suspicion. Get rid of the cigars, and then let this clerk see everything you do.’

‘It is a pity.’ he said regretfully. ‘My sergeant is teaching him to ride, and it would have been so easy to set him on a mare in heat, and loose the stallion. Very well! Very well! I will send the three boxes down to you by safe hand. You remember my clansman who delivered you a letter? My orderly shall give them to him secretly, and he will bear them to Tripoli.’

I said that would do admirably, so long as he filled up the space in his safe with something that looked like cigar boxes, but wasn’t. Then I asked him if he had any money.

It was a pretty hopeless question to put to the one honest gendarme on the frontier. He produced with pride the equivalent of ten shillings and said that it was mine.

My trouble was that I had left home with what cash there was in the office. It had seemed an adequate sum for all likely emergencies, but wasn’t enough to employ a taxi for twenty hours, to give the very considerable tip that would be essential to preserve the driver’s goodwill, and to get myself home from wherever I left him. I couldn’t take the taxi to Tripoli lest he should discover where I lived, and I couldn’t give him a cheque for fear of revealing my name.

After I had guarded myself against so many possible accidents by which my movements might be traced, this was a nasty little inconvenient fact. A commonplace, no doubt, to men who must conceal their movements. I suspect that of criminals on the run just as many have been caught through lack of ready cash as have escaped because police or pursuers were checked at a critical moment by the same exasperating problem.

I said good-bye to Ashkar—a more affectionate good-bye than our last, though undeserve—and told the driver to go back to Hama. We stopped for a very early breakfast on the way, and I made him idle away an hour or two, so that we reached Hama when the banks were open. I directed him to a hotel as if I lived there, and went in and out the back way, and round to the local branch of my bank. I didn’t want the driver to know where I had gone, for the national curiosity would certainly have led him to get my name from one of the clerks. I asked the manager to telephone his Damascus office, where I had an account, and to cash me a cheque. That done, I returned to the very anxious driver, who was already arguing with the hall porter, and paid him off.

Hama was a town where I had no business, and the last place where anyone would look for my tracks. Even so, I avoided any chance of being seen, and spent the day sleeping under a fig tree outside the town. I returned to Tripoli by a bus which got in after dark, and walked by the lanes on the outskirts of the town to my garden gate.

After a bath and a long whisky and soda, I came to the conclusion that I was pretty safe. The only risk I had taken was at leaving and entering Tripoli, where, at the station or the bus stop, I had probably been recognized by some casual citizen. There was no reason, however, why Kasr-el-Sittat should make enquires when they could so easily find out from my customers or my warehouse that I was home in bed.

A week later Ashkar’s poor and ragged relative came boldly into my warehouse and asked for a job. Not by a sign of eyes or any slyness of bearing did he show that he had ever seen me before. He was just a labourer on the edge of starvation looking for work, with his possessions stuffed into a filthy waist-band. I took him into my office to interview him, and, to my intense relief, recovered from his rags the three boxes of Coriolanos. I put them back into the crate and nailed it up again. I hoped that when Urgin used the cigars for experiment or for the Secretariat’s requirements, he would either never discover that one of the boxes was doped, or, if he did, would assume that after all he had made the mistake that Elisa suspected, and sent a quite innocent box of Coriolanos out of the laboratory.

3

It is mere conceit that has made me linger over so detailed an account of my absurdities. That ingenious journey to Kassab was the last occasion on which I could feel myself to be a man of action, and find content in dramatics. It was futile, futile as a child’s game by which he passes through a string of satisfying incidents, and ignores the gaps between the beads. I have confessed what I did and what I thought, but those deeds and thoughts now seem to me a mere display of activity. Was it wholly useless activity? Yes, on the plane of events that were under my control. No, in the ultimate, fully-dimensioned pattern that emerged.

Some three weeks after my return I was sitting in my office, spending a slack evening hour on the accounts, when my clerk announced Mr. Villaneda from Kasr-el-Sittat. I was glad of the distraction. I am no accountant. At the end of the half year I used to shut myself up for a whole blasphemous day and night until I understood why my official balance-sheet showed a profit or a loss.

A distraction, yes. I took Juan upstairs, and opened a bottle or two. I felt no presentiment at all. There were a dozen objects for which he might have come to see me, and all more pleasant than accounts: a message from Elisa, some trouble with the colony’s agricultural machinery, or merely a night’s lodging and a friendly meal.

He sat down in the corner farthest from the fire, and lit a cigarette. He seemed to avoid by nature the disorderly comforts of the north, preferring the tiles, the bare table, the windows that united him with the cleanliness of Mediterranean space. His face was drawn, and I remember thinking that never before had I noticed how straight and ascetic was the sharp line of his mouth.

After a casual chat about Tabas and Grynes, I asked him if he had recently been on any of his cross-country wanderings.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘to Damascus and Hama.’

The room was full of shadows. I got up and switched on the light. His eyes, as I expected, were too firmly fixed on me.

‘What took you to Hama?’ I asked.

‘Gisorius does not understand Syria,’ he answered. ‘I do.’

I said that Hama was an unattractive town.

‘I want to understand this business,’ he insisted, trampling over me with his directness. ‘Ashkar—well, he is an honest man and he has obeyed you. But you? I could have sworn I knew your character, and I am not a fool. Tell me your story.’

Against any of the rest, except Elisa, I was ready to fight through every interrogation and every trick they had learned; but Juan and I had, in judgment of human beings, the same set of values. Though by no means intimate friends, we understood each other without effort. I hadn’t a hope of lying to him successfully, and we both knew it.

‘Which story do you want?’ I asked.

‘Is there more than one?’ he answered impatiently. ‘Listen, friend!’

He told me that my bank accounts at Tripoli and Damascus had been watched as soon as I was. Bank clerks, he said, were the priests of capitalism, paid as poorly as other priests and yet as unaccountably discreet. But were they not Arabs? So friendship counted where money alone did not. Didn’t I agree that I myself could look at any bank account in Syria if I really wanted to? But that was beyond Gisorius, so the investigation had been left to him.

That cheque drawn at Hama had seemed to him queer, out of the pattern, and when he discovered that I had been at home and in bed at the time, it seemed queerer.

To leave no room for any illusions, he told me his movements step by step. He had gone the round of possible customers; they knew of my firm, but were sure that I did not sell direct to anyone in Hama. Then to the hotels. No trace of me in the registers, but one of the porters recognized my description, and directed him to my taxi-driver. He had proved surprisingly loyal to his unknown fare, but he couldn’t deny—having babbled about the trip to the porter and some of fellow-drivers—that he had been to Kassab. That was enough for Juan.

‘Yes, friend,’ he said, ‘you met Ashkar at Kassab, and you told him to get rid of his cigars. He is simple, Ashkar, when he is not in his frontier forests. He showed his safe too openly—and painted cardboard does not look at all like cedar boxes, especially when one is expecting a change. Now, where is Rosa?’

‘I’ll never persuade you that I had nothing to do with his disappearance,’ I answered, ‘but it’s true.’

‘Man, nothing makes sense in this! So for the present I will believe you. But tell me the truth and all the truth, for you have only one chance of life.’

‘I know. But I don’t want to take it,’ I said. ‘I can’t live a lie.’

‘We don’t understand each other. What is the chance you see?’

‘That the Secretariat will tell Elisa nothing, for her sake.’

‘It is possible,’ he admitted. ‘But the chance I meant is that you know more than I do.’

I told him that even if I did, I wouldn’t buy my life—and that I was quite certain he wouldn’t turn loose an enemy of Kasr-el-Sittat for the sake of any information about his accomplices.

‘Compliments all round!’ he said ironically. ‘But you have misunderstood. Your accomplices—we will go into that later. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had none. No, the information I want is—what were your motives? Why Rosa, who was unimportant? Why not Czoldy or any of the others who have passed through your hands or Ashkar’s?’

‘I’ve told you that I had nothing to do with Rosa’s death,’ I repeated.

‘Disappearance, you said. Can it be that you take your orders through Ashkar?’

I told him that of course I did not, and that Ashkar was exactly what he had always thought him.

‘Then Ashkar killed Rosa,’ he said acutely. ‘And for some reason that he believed his duty. And Rosa’s death started—what?’

‘If I tell you, will you see that Ashkar comes to no harm?’

‘Man, how can I promise that? Are you forgetting the Secretariat? My power is outside Kasr-el-Sittat, not here. Remember the one chance I spoke of, and tell me your motives. God knows there have been times when I too have been weary of life as you are! But you have a duty to Ashkar.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Why you are a traitor. I have not yet said a word to Gisorius of what I have discovered. Does that have no significance for you?’

I replied that he would naturally want as full a story as possible before making his report.

‘Am I a policeman?’ he retorted. ‘No, there is far too much I do not understand. Your only chance is that I may take another view of your intentions. Put it this way, friend—I am convinced of your loyalty until I am proved wrong.’

‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘I changed those cigars, and I hoped to do it again.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I too think of the masses.’

‘The masses! You have never given a true thought to the masses in your life,’ exclaimed Juan contemptuously and, I hope, unjustly. ‘This isn’t a play, friend! No attitudes!

‘Then put it that I’m a mere bourgeois sentimentalist,’ I replied. ‘I’ve seen what two wars have done, and I don’t want another.’

‘But what have those cigars to do with war?’

‘And no attitudes from you!’

‘Still you do not understand me,’ he said. ‘For the moment I am your judge, not Gisorius. And you have been clever enough not to be caught if I do not speak. I promise you nothing. But your one chance is to tell me why you thought the cigars were worth your life.’

I was still uncertain whether his ignorance was not a pretence, a trap to find out how much I knew. I played for time, and asked him to what purpose he himself thought the cigars were being smuggled out.

‘Interrogation,’ he answered.

‘Not very efficient.’

‘Why not?’

Slowly, waiting for his remarks and questions, I told him all I had learned of the effects of thiopentone. My hopes were rising; his interest was far too keen to be simulated. I explained to him that Urgin’s Coriolanos were mighty little use for police or underground interrogation—since a man who believed he had done his duty, and had no sense of guilt, would continue to have no sense of guilt under the drug. The interrogator would get everything except the facts he wanted. Torture of body or nerves would be far more profitable than thiopentone.

‘Then they have lied to me,’ he said, ‘and to Urgin, too. And now—go on!’

My story must have lasted over an hour. I told him much of what I have written here, without, of course, the personal details, and with far more of political discussions that were relevant only within the closed circle of the colony.

‘But police—they swarm like lice at these conferences,’ he objected. ‘Wouldn’t they suspect the cigars if some fool of a statesman starts shouting what he really feels?’

‘Not if he were tired and had been drinking—even a single glass. His voice would be excited, but perfectly clear and normal.’

‘And what of a man who doesn’t drink at all?’

‘Safe, I suppose—for Czoldy wouldn’t take the risk. But are there many? You wouldn’t choose a teetotaller for a job which requires a pretence of good-fellowship.’

Juan Villaneda brooded at the table, head in hands. Though his brain was swift and practised, he couldn’t get away from the gestures of a peasant to whom thought was a deliberate effort.

‘You are utterly without logic or you would be with the Secretariat,’ he accused me suddenly. ‘What is your objection? At the end of their war it is certain they will have the conditions they want. Freedom for the individual who can survive. The Secretariat at least can reason. But what is there in you that I can trust?’

‘As much as I myself can trust, and no more,’ I answered bitterly. ‘Hatred of the State, yes. …’

Juan’s contemptuous question seemed to force me down through all the floating rubbish half believed, the sewerage of ideas created by others and undissolved, until I reached a bottom of sincerity.

‘Hatred of the State, but a belief that no violence can destroy it.’

‘You must grow a beard, friend, if you are going to play the old Kropotkin,’ he mocked, not unkindly. ‘Russia is the only country where you would be understood, and just as surely shot.’

He left his barren end of the room, and joined me by the fire.

‘I must work with what I have,’ he said. ‘What you believe God knows! But at least I have a guarantee that you believe it.’

My humiliation was so great that I had forgotten. I asked him what guarantee.

‘That you have chosen pain, man! And that you know there is worse pain to come.’

He placed a hand on my knee with the sharp Latin smack of comradeship. I looked down at the long, stub-ended fingers. It was the hand of a guitar-player—a limited instrument but for its power to reproduce the sigh of all humanity.

‘Here is a letter from her.’

I hesitated to open it. That powerful, neutral writing stared at me from the envelope. The broad down strokes of the ‘i’ and ‘A’ and ‘m’ were feminine, yet tail-less and unornamented.

‘Read it,’ he said. ‘I have read it already. This is no time for delicacy.’

I have the letter before me now. It was the first and last that had a note of tenderness.

Eric,

There was a morning when I told you that soon you would be with us at Kasr-el-Sittat, and you were glad. When I remember how much you can tell me with no words, I know that I use too many.

It is time to come to me. Do not worry about your business. We will talk about that, for it might be useful to us. But come, and bring your garden with you—all of it that matters.

‘Friend,’ said Juan, ‘there is no return.’

When I had recovered myself, he asked me:

‘Why does she tell you to come now?’

‘To avoid suspicion,’ I said, though I knew it wasn’t true.

‘There is no real suspicion yet. There is only doubt. Doesn’t she mean that Czoldy has his weapon at last, and is sure of success?’

‘There is time,’ I protested. ‘There must be time.’

I could not, would not accept the inference that such a note should herald the four horsemen, and that fifth who rode only in the stars until we mounted him on earth.

‘Two weeks, perhaps,’ he answered. ‘The Greek question comes up at the end of the month. I see no opportunity for Czoldy till then. I have been watching the agenda.’

‘Watching it? What for?’ I shouted at him. ‘If you were suspicious, why in God’s name didn’t you act?’

I attacked him angrily for his futile ignorance, for accepting whatever stories the Secretariat liked to give him. I told him he would have done better to stick to his precious proletariat.

‘The way to revolution is no longer through the proletariat, and you know it,’ he retorted. ‘They won’t fight for liberty. They can’t see that they haven’t any.’

His face flared red and gold like his country’s flag, but he kept his self-control. He had to defend his own honesty of purpose—to himself as well as to me. He admitted furiously that he had played his part in devising the general policy of the Secretariat, and cursed all their subtleties that he hadn’t the experience of statecraft to understand. The only one of them, he said, who could have roused a Barcelona mob was Elisa.

‘Man! Neither I nor my comrades abroad wanted war!’ he exclaimed. ‘And there was no reason to expect it. The West will not, and the Russians think only of defence. They believe Marx. Yes, they still believe him! And according to Marx, Capital must be the aggressor.’

Then Juan produced an odd paradox, which I repeat for what it is worth; he certainly believed it himself.

‘Marx was right! But the power of private capitalism is finished, and the tyranny of state capitalism is more ruthless than the other ever was. Therefore, in the Marxian sense, the great capitalist union is Russia. So, if only they could understand their own creed, they would know that the West cannot be the aggressor.’

The last two months had made him uneasy, and dissatisfied with the explanations that Osterling had given him. The usual game of creating tension between America and the social-democracies of Europe had been carried, he thought, too far; it was propaganda that could only have a short-term effect, and would be utterly discredited when the newspapers recovered a sense of proportion.

At the same time there had been an attempt at assassination in Moscow, which had been kept quiet because the government could not afford another purge. To Juan it was foolish and ill-timed. When he protested, Elisa and Gisorius had assured him that it meant nothing, that the underground had got out of control.

‘And so I think that Czoldy will succeed,’ he said. ‘They have shown up the West as divided. They have put the Kremlin between a fear and a fear. If the cigar does all you say, war is now certain.’

I misread this attitude of his. Taking it as an acceptance of the inevitable, I grew excited.

‘Calm, man! Calm!’ he ordered. ‘The Secretariat is not so powerful as you think. They have sacrificed so much to secrecy that the heart is weak. I have told them so a hundred times. He who controls Kasr-el-Sittat controls the party.’

‘They can count on loyalty,’ I said.

‘You think so? Yet sheep are sheep.’

In Juan’s tone there was no longer any anger or even disillusionment. He was calculating the interacting forces in a field that was familiar to him. What Czoldy and Osterling had learned as national leaders in the nineteen thirties, he too had learned through union and syndicate and civil war. He was accustomed to the capture and recapture of a party or its individuals.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked, holding out Elisa’s note.

‘To come, friend, and to be silent. We do not want to destroy Elisa or Kasr-el-Sittat—true? Well then, be silent,’ he repeated, ‘and obey. It wouldn’t please me at all if I had to hand you to Gisorius to save myself.’

TWILIGHT

1

THE FIRST RAINS CAME, PITTING AND FASTENING THE DUST which had blown, since the harvest, from field to field between Sinai and Syria. The ground, except in gardens such as mine, was still too hard to receive the blessing of the water that returned to sea in its full original volume through every dry and waiting wadi. From my terrace I could see the choppy and discoloured semi-circles at the mouths of three temporary rivers, dyed brown, grey and orange, where the earth bled into the Mediterranean.

I decided to leave for Kasr-el-Sittat at once, knowing that their local road might be impassable for some days after the winter rains set in for good. It was a week since I had seen Juan Villaneda and received Elisa’s note. I had employed it to set my affairs in order as if for a successor. I expected to return, but I shrank from any contemplation of that Eric Amberson who would walk again up the stairs from the warehouse.

When I drove off the highlands into the chain of little valleys that led to Kasr-el-Sittat, I found the colony’s indefatigable rank and file already at work on the road. The farm tractors were hauling stone; and here and there, on the verges, were concrete culverts ready to be dug in and covered. To avoid the last ford, where even in summer the smooth, racing water was never below the hub-caps of my car, a new track had been cut out of the escarpment by bulldozer and explosive. The surface was being gravelled and rolled by local labour; and downstream, where the river was a clear, lead-coloured cataract between narrow walls of rock, the red girders were in position and waiting to carry a bridge.

I suspected that the rough diversions around work in progress had proved too much for my front springs, so on arrival I went through the garage into the workshop. I found Phil Grynes busy with broken caterpillar tracks. He said that, Cripes, he was glad to see me—in a tone which expressed relief rather than any compliment. After inspecting the car and assuring me that the forge could easily manage a new leaf, he led me out into the open.

My first question about Anton Tabas had been turned aside by a grudging remark that he was all right. I now tried again.

‘The fact is,’ said, ‘that he’s a bit silent—carrying on like he used to do the last month at Cæsarea.’

‘And you? Still quite contented?’

‘Oh, I’ve got everything I want,’ he replied.

His voice made it perfectly clear that having everything he wanted still wasn’t enough. I took up the invitation to ask questions.

‘Oh, no!’ he laughed. ‘That side of it is all right. A Greek, she is. And it’s a marvel to me she’ll look at a man at all after what she’s been through.’

‘Has Anton got any objections?’

‘He? He just told me to ask myself what harm it would do to others. And when I said straight off that it wouldn’t do any, he told me to give her the love that I gave to him. Well, I can’t do that, but I see what he means.’

‘What’s the trouble then?’

‘Well, look her—I’ll tell you. Once a policeman, always a policeman. And I’m ashamed of it.’

Little by little it came out that he’d noticed or seemed to notice the formation of small groups. There weren’t any street corners in the colony, he said, but if there had been, he’d have put on a plain-clothes man to hang about them. And really, he supposed, there weren’t any more groups than before. It was just that somehow they looked careful and dispersed more quickly.

‘I’ll be up here for a week or two, Phil,’ I said.

‘I’ll be glad of it, sir,’ he answered, wholly unconscious of that monosyllable of hierarchy. ‘I’m all for this voluntary association they talk about, but there are times when a chap would like to know who’s the boss.’

My reception by the Secretariat was suave and natural. Elisa had the same severe and spirited graciousness that she always assumed for me at Kasr-el-Sittat, but it was plain that her apparent spontaneity was costing her a deal of nervous determination. As soon as we were alone, she caught my hands, and cried:

‘Wait, Eric, wait!’ in a voice breaking under the pressure of all that she could not tell me. Her tired and brilliant eyes shone with excitement, as if she were promising to me and to herself work and love upon her satanic island. She took the emotion in my face as approval of her own, compelling me to involuntary, irremediable treachery.

On that first evening Osterling and Gisorius, rather than Elisa, played my hosts. Gisorius was restless as a tiger at feeding-time, and had developed a new habit of playing with a two-foot length of stout twine while he talked. That damned piece of string held my eyes. I have no doubt that its movements between his fingers were calculated to put an added strain on the nerves of a guilty man. I was trying to think what reaction he would expect from the innocent when Osterling removed the sinister rosary, and casually tied it round a bottle. He disliked avoidable eccentricities.

The next day Osterling called for me at the guest bungalow and took me for a walk round the estate. His mood was very different from Elisa’s. For him waiting was no agony; it was rather an opportunity to rest. He saw his life in terms of chapters, penny packets, a succession of units. It was a stoic attitude which enabled him to throw off his cares in the intervals, and to recognize, as in another three days he did, the difference between an interval and an end.

His mind, however, was never off duty. Our talk hovered around Tabas and Grynes, and suddenly he remarked:

‘What a splendid way to plant a serpent in our little paradise, Amberson—just introducing him as stooge to a holy man!’

I remember that we were leaning on the wall of the pig pens at the time: the very picture, no doubt, of two country gentlemen enjoying the winter sunshine. Osterling’s friendly voice invited me to share the joke, but I knew he was listening for the slightest note of strain in my reply.

‘I suppose Gisorius has made some enquiries,’ I replied.

‘Yes, of course. There’s a certain freemasonry among refugees, and the Jews will always answer a civil question. All that story of his about Cæsarea is perfectly true. Good Lord—the queer creatures that you and Elisa get hold of! You’re an extraordinary pair. How is it that you never quarrel?’

‘Mutual curiosity, perhaps.’

‘Yet there seems to be a bit more reserve than usual. Don’t resent my mentioning it, Amberson. I know it’s an unpardonable intrusion. But I can’t have Elisa upset.’

I saw now what he was after—to guess from my response whether or not Elisa had mentioned the Secretariat’s suspicions. What an accomplished diplomat he would have been in a sane world! That I was a match for him at all I can only ascribe to my Syrian habit of considering words as a mere polite exercise and waiting patiently for the motive they concealed.

‘You’ve been in my position a dozen times in your life,’ I answered. ‘What with my own affairs and yours, I’m a very busy man. I can’t always make my movements fit her convenience.’

‘I sympathize,’ he said. ‘But in fact I’ve never been in your position. It’s a rare one. Would you be offended if I suggested that you have the responsibilities, severely limited—the faintest possible parallel—of a prince consort? And may I add you have the tact for them?’

I was angry enough to have struck him. It wasn’t his fault. I am sure he never suspected the abandonment of my love for Elisa, nor the humility which that entailed. He couldn’t know that his thought and his very phrase had been among my most private and cherished fantasies.

‘We wish you to join us at Kasr-el-Sittat,’ he went on. ‘Will you?’

I must have hesitated an instant in my reply, for I remember what seems an intolerable time while I stared at the whitewashed walls of the piggeries and tried to think myself back into the summer. I was at the limit of my power as an actor. I could only carry on by taking a part that I had actually played, by answering as my bygone self would have answered.

‘Gladly. And what do you want me to do with my business?’

‘Elisa’s man Poss will take over from you. Oh, we shan’t expect from him your knowledge or devotion,’ he protested, seeing that this plan repelled me. ‘It’s just that it would be convenient for our finance if he had a bona fide Lebanese company—and possibly for him, in this explosive world.’

I reminded him that they had not wanted Poss to know of the existence of Kasr-el-Sittat.

‘What after all is Kasr-el-Sittat, Amberson?’ he replied. ‘The headquarters of the syndicate which employs him as moneychanger and cigar-merchant, with some rather odd people in it like Tabas and our excellent roadmenders who you so naughtily describe as earnest. We’ll give the amœba a convincing shape for him.’

I have never known so likeable a man with so subtle a brain. Not knowing whether I were innocent or guilty, he had ensured from then on I would be in his keeping. I was to be stripped of everything I possessed—my garden, my house, my business. If I were as devoted to Kasr-el-Sittat as Elisa thought me, that wouldn’t distress me. If I were the unknown enemy, it put me beyond all ties, all inconvenient enquiries, and made my removal very simple. He had covered the possibilities, and left himself free to take action when he wished.

We strolled through the home pastures, and back into the colony at the top of the hill, where the highest houses formed an irregular ring around two cedars, the fallen columns and the altar. It was the beginning of the lunch hour, and a few of the colonists had gathered round Tabas under the northern tree.

‘Old Pop-eyes seems to be in form,’ said Osterling half-admiringly. ‘But I’m sorry his attitude is so Confucian. Not a hope of pre-lunch cocktails for the multitude!’

His irreverence jarred, but perhaps was salutary. Those of us who took Tabas seriously were inclined to take him very seriously indeed. When I commit his words to writing, I become as futile as a commentator. His eyes, his voice, his power to express a definite meaning by the use of our very indefinite human words—those were what counted, and still count in memory.

‘Who are the multitude?’ I asked.

Osterling raised his hand to his glasses—an invariable mannerism of his when speaking to or looking at any number of people. I felt sure that the origin of this gesture was contempt; he was lifting his spy-glass, like a Regency buck, to observe the goings-on of the vulgar. Even so, he gave his usual impression of warmth. His smile and the movement of his hand brought him nearer to his company.

‘One of the women is Lucia, an Italian who works in my office,’ he said, ‘and the other is Elisa’s chief accountant. There’s the chap in charge of tobacco-drying, the electrician and two mechanics. And the man with the pony is our vine-dresser. It’s an odd thing, Amberson. There’s only one German among the lot, my wireless operator. Tabas acts on the colony as a sort of catalyst. I hope a harmless catalyst. He separates the Mediterranean element from the rest. Now why the devil should he appeal to the hard, limited sense of the Latin? You would think that mist called to mist, but it doesn’t.’

‘Tabas is only mist to you because you’re a northerner yourself,’ I answered. ‘It needs hard sense to understand simplicity.’

The vine-dresser was pressing Tabas with questions; he couldn’t be described as baiting him, for he was obviously interested in the answers.

‘But what do you mean by God?’ I heard him insist, as he lounged gracefully with an elbow on the pony’s saddle.

‘You,’ Anton replied.

‘And my horse too?’

‘Your horse too. But he cannot know it.’

‘And after death what is the difference between us?’

‘I am not a fortune-teller,’ Tabas answered with a gentle smile.

‘Nor am I!’ the electrician exclaimed heartily. ‘But those of us who have no faith, what can we know?’

‘The Purpose of God,’ said Tabas, turning his head, and revealing those softly luminous eyes which might have had as large a pupil behind each sphere for looking inward.

‘How?’

‘By seeking for it in ourselves.’

Lucia, Osterling’s propaganda woman, asked if by the Purpose of God he meant Evolution, and Anton answered that, for her, he did.

‘Then I think you must admit there are too many purposes for us ever to find the one.’

She spoke with a quiet dignity, trying—as I afterwards saw—to clarify her mind, much as Juan Villaneda did when he took to the road in Syria and refreshed himself by contact with the untutored anarchy of the Arab.

‘The Purpose of God appears to be the State,’ she went on. ‘The individual loathes it, yet it draws him with what I fear to be an evolutionary force. Which is the Purpose of God, to resist or accept?’

‘Neither,’ he answered, ‘for acceptance preserves what is evil, and resistance creates a new evil. It is hard for any society of men to obey the Purpose of God, for God is not all of us. He is each of us.’

Osterling liked that.

‘One could make out a very good case, Anton,’ he said, ‘for God being each of us, and the devil all of us.’

‘Do you believe it?’ Tabas asked, almost eagerly.

‘I give it you for what it’s worth,’ Osterling replied.

‘Then it is worth nothing.’

That was the only time in our acquaintance when I ever saw Osterling look embarrassed.

‘I think I understand you, Anton,’ Lucia said. ‘You mean that mankind can never be developed by political action, only through the moral standard of the individual. But I still ask you—how do I know which of my many beliefs is the Purpose of God?’

‘If you do not know, ask and accept the answer. He who cannot believe the truth that is in him must believe a religion. Among them all he will find a truth that is his truth.’

‘And how about rendering unto Cæsar?’ I asked.

‘I do not know which things are God’s. Do you?’

‘Yes,’ I answered boldly. ‘Some of them.’

‘Then those you will never surrender.’

‘To any community?’ the electrician asked.

There was an odd silence. Every one of those listeners had his or her eyes fixed on Tabas. His face grew melancholy, for he saw that he and his principles were being used for some worldly intrigue. I thought it probable that, to avoid the unknown conflict, he would not answer; but he broke the silence courageously.

‘When we do not know to what neighbour is our duty,’ he said, ‘there is nothing left but our duty towards God.’

Osterling shrugged his shoulders, and led me away down the hill. Even he could not entirely escape the influence of the catalyst.

‘I am uneasy, Amberson,’ he admitted. ‘Tabas is innocent of any intent, but to anyone who despises the State with real moral fervour he offers the only alternative policy to our own. Rebellion of the individual. Religion rather than mass action. Thank God his religion isn’t intelligible! If it were, we should have to set a limit to our hospitality.’

I cannot remember the rest of that day. A sort of Sunday peace must have descended upon Kasr-el-Sittat, a period of apparent quiescence like the silence of the crowd before the starter’s pistol. I went to bed early, and couldn’t sleep. Yet Juan Villaneda moved so quietly that he had passed through the central hall of my bungalow and was in my room before I heard him.

‘Don’t turn on the light,’ he said.

I asked him if I were being watched even at night, and he replied that of course I was and that he himself was in charge of the arrangements.

‘But we’ll take no chances, friend,’ he added. ‘For all I know, Gisorius may be watching me too. Tell me quickly. You were with Osterling all the morning. What is your impression?’

‘That I am in no danger at all.’

‘I know that, man!’ he answered impatiently. ‘But has he noticed anything? Have you?’

I repeated what Osterling had said: that he had noticed a separation of the Mediterranean element from the rest, and that Tabas seemed to be acting as the unconscious catalyst which split the colony.

‘He is three-quarters right,’ Juan exclaimed. ‘His damned Excellency is always three-quarters right, and the quarter he forgets is the most important. I told you these colonists were sheep. Well, those who are least sheep, who know their own worth, they listen to Tabas. They are men and women whom it was safe for me to sound. Latins? Not necessarily. But sane and crisp and of the people. Tabas is not in our world, yet through him I have formed my party.’

‘Grynes suspects something,’ I said.

‘That doesn’t surprise me. He is there and he keeps his eyes open. What about him? Is he yours if we want him?’

I declared fatuously that he was, entirely forgetting that Grynes was no Ashkar, and that he had lived a lifetime of the spirit since he left the Palestine Police.

‘What chance have we?’ I asked.

‘Less than I thought. There is no time. Czoldy’s best opportunity must be in the last four days of November, and we are now at the 23rd. My only hope is to control all communications, and that is not easy. Does Elisa carry an arm?’

‘Good God, no!’

The thought of bloodshed at Kasr-el-Sittat was abominable.

‘I intend nothing against her,’ he said, ‘even if I win. I must know what there is—that is all. How is she?’

‘Impatient. A flame of impatience.’

‘She is not the only one.’

I asked him what part he wished me to play, and was thankful when he answered me that my part was over. I was to behave, he said, as a mere visitor until I was needed. He assured me that it would be made perfectly plain to Elisa that I was not permitted to see her.

I was thankful, I say. It seemed to me that I would be an exception to the law of the universe, and escape responsibility for my own acts. I even hoped—and there, I think, Juan was with me—that I might help in the resurrection of Elisa’s spirit.

When I came out of my bungalow into the windy morning, the palace revolution was all over. Juan’s timing had been faultless. He allowed the early risers to breakfast in peace and to go to their work on the road or the estate. He then arrested Osterling and Gisorius, who were too incredulous to resist, removed them to Elisa’s bungalow and put a guard over all three. Simultaneously his partisans seized the power station, the explosives store, Osterling’s office and the wireless transmitter. There was no violence, beyond the sudden and painless overwhelming of the two men. From Osterling Juan took his keys, and from Gisorius a pistol. Gisorius wasn’t the sort of man to go to breakfast without a hidden pistol, rule or no rule.

All this happened a little after eight o’clock when half Kasr-el-Sittat was in the dining-hall. Ten minutes later Juan himself came to the hall, and addressed the astonished colonists in his harsh, astringent English. For the sake of those whose command of the language was still weak, Lucia translated him into French and Russian. I missed Juan’s own explanation, but came in while she was interpreting.

I think I have already made it clear that the colonists of Kasr-el-Sittat were all most purely dedicated, as any priests, to the salvation of man from the grey hell that awaited him; yet they knew no more of the practical details of their battle against the State than the average taxpayer of his government’s economics, or the cooks, typists and engineers in a political warfare headquarters of the devices employed to destroy the enemy’s morale. Juan gave little away. He was careful as the Secretariat to cover up the extent, the methods and the personalities of the movement. What he told them was that the proletarian wing of the party had disagreed with the policy and central control of the Secretariat, and especially with their insistence on war as a short-cut to the world of voluntary association. He had taken over, he said, all communications, and he asked them not to attempt to leave the colony. There would be no violence, and their work and way of living would be undisturbed.

Yes, his palace revolution was a masterpiece—and yet, for our purposes, futile. We had not got the wireless codes, and so could send no message to Czoldy that he would believe. Juan had confidently expected to find all the details of the wireless traffic in Osterling’s safe, but they were not there and could not be discovered. His only course, therefore, was to send his messages en clair to such chiefs of his own party abroad as he knew personally and could trust.

He met with utter defeat. The wireless operator was an impressionable German. Lucia won him over by some complex ideological nonsense as well as personal charm, and he had promised to come in with Juan. He would have sent off a sheaf of cyphers without bothering in the least about their meaning: when, however, he saw the messages which he was expected to transmit, his melancholy Teutonic mind simplified the whole issue into one of loyalty. He hadn’t he said, any objection to war as a political weapon. War was a redeemer in itself. He refused to send a single message without Osterling’s direct order.

His damned obstinacy grew by feeding on itself. He wouldn’t even give us the details of the times, the traffic and the call-signs; and when Juan locked him up in the house behind Elisa’s so that the same guard could look after the lot, he yelled out what he had done, in triumph at his own exceptional virtue, as if he had been heiling Hitler.

2

Kasr-el-Sittat that morning was objectless, inconsequent as a dream. There were none of the brisk movements of the daily round, no normality of motive. The colonists formed their unhappy groups and spoke in lowered voices. Sheep, Juan called them. Yet remember that not long ago they had been displaced persons accustomed by the years to a future without hope or plan, their only national status that of an intolerable nuisance. They were conditioned to the dilemma of refugees: that so long as spirit remained, they were a menace to good order; when it had gone, they were objects of contempt.

Shy, puzzled, dejected, they hesitated on the paths of Kasr-el-Sittat, or passed, looking backwards, to their work. And I, I felt myself to be one of them. I had not the effrontery to compare my suffering with theirs—though, God knows, no scientist can measure in his decibels the crying of the soul—but we were alike in this: that we had dwelt in a vision of peace and seen it vanish while still we lived.

To them, too, the scene must have presented a horrid familiarity. There were the pickets, plainly to be seen; pickets in paradise. It was the old game of tough men and eager women, dark hair in the wind, holding the key positions. They had no rifles, no lethal oddments slung from those waists which were intended for each other’s hands. That was the only difference.

Even so the colony preserved its air of holiness. Our anciently consecrated hill, where, whatever the work, one could hear the stirring of trees and the rush of water, compelled the colonists to mark and to abide by the complete peace of this revolution in their midst.

Do nothing, Juan had said. Well, what else could I do? Outwardly I was a mere member of a disconcerted public. Elisa’s bungalow stared at the green on the hilltop. She might as well have been out. No one shook the door. No one gesticulated at the barred windows. There can have been little peace within. Yet, when I was about to surrender all my emotions to pity of Elisa, I remembered that she and her two companions were the more powerful, and must know it. They had nothing to lose by allowing Juan’s adherents to stand on their self-conscious guard till they tired of it, till this flash-in-a-pan of a revolution burned itself out. Their creation was finished; there was no further touch that they could add to ensure the progress of their apocalyptic vision, and nothing we could do to stop it. They knew we couldn’t use the wireless. Osterling had merely laughed at Juan’s threats and questions.

When Kasr-el-Sittat gathered again in the dining-hall there was too much silence. The colonists that second winter numbered nearly two hundred, and Juan’s partisans were not more than forty. Time and the hundred and sixty puzzled neutrals were on the side of inaction. Since I was known to be Elisa’s intimate friend, the colonists talked to me freely. Nothing kept them from mass protest but fear of the unknown; they weren’t even sure what the Secretariat would want them to do. I muddled public opinion as far as I could by suggesting that the Secretariat might have expected and welcomed this outbreak, but I could feel that in my harmless companions were stirring memories of that world of direct political action which they thought to have escaped for ever. Juan’s hope of control without violence was running down with every tick of the clock in the dining-hall.

At two in the afternoon Urgin, of all people, took a car from the garage, rushed the gate guard and tried to make a break for the outside. He drove at the boulder-strewn diversion like a cinema hero, and that of course was the end of his front axle. When Juan asked him what the devil he was up to, he said that he was going to fetch the police. Whether it was devotion to Elisa or to research that created this sudden passion for law and order I do not know. He certainly preserved his reputation as an original thinker.

There was no sure way of preventing anyone who wished from leaving Kasr-el-Sittat on foot or horse, and sending a telegram; but apart from the Secretariat and Juan Villaneda himself, there were few who knew any actual names and addresses of responsible chiefs abroad. Thus the danger that Czoldy could be warned to ignore all orders from Kasr-el-Sittat was very small.

Juan’s partisans, however, were thin on the ground for all they had to do. After Urgin’s unsuccessful attempt, he decided to close the road. A heavy tractor was driven to that smooth little gorge where the bridge girders were in position, and toppled over into the cataract. The level of the ford rose at once by a couple of feet. That put an end to all fear of his prisoners making a swift escape by car, and enabled Juan to take his guards off the garage and the gate.

I can only conjecture what debate went on that night within Elisa’s bungalow. The three must have thought that their guards were unarmed, and that a determined effort to break out and call for help might well be successful. To Elisa and Osterling, however, the walls of the bungalow were not the walls that mattered. If Juan had merely drawn a chalk circle round them, the opposition to their will would have been neither more nor less effective. Osterling was no man for a rough and tumble, and for Elisa it was unthinkable. She did not live on a plane where violence was decisive.

No, to a pair of their intelligence the issue was plainly one of moral force against moral force. They needed only patience, and when war came the whole colony and party would unite for self-protection and the training of future leaders. Precipitate action could only lead to a lessening of their prestige.

This common—or shall I call it spiritual?—sense must have been most unwelcome to Gisorius. He was a man of action whose life for years had been insecure. Elisa and Osterling could both remain unaffected by the terrorism of their eastern policy. Gisorius had it always upon his conscience. And so he saw the crisis as immediate, and the problem as one that could be solved by violence. His view of Kasr-el-Sittat was very different to that of his colleagues. To him as to them it was an island, but its isolation was a mere convenience. That its whole future might be wrecked by treating it as an island where some black or missionary potentate could be knocked on the head and deposed did not occur to him.

I suspect that Elisa and Osterling very reluctantly agreed that Gisorius should escape so long as he could do so peacefully. It wasn’t difficult. God had ordered his bungalows to be built without any means of access to the roofs; so the contractors, who had estimated for normal Arab roofs, strong enough to support the whole family and the drying of the grain, saw a literally god-sent chance of profit. They covered the houses with laths and a thin layer of cement.

Gisorius put Elisa’s table on her desk, and a chair on that. He surrounded this tower of furniture with bedding to soften the noise of falling plaster, and went to work. So much was obvious, afterwards, from the mess, but I don’t know when he started or how long it took him. He drove the main breach by inserting a bar between brick and cement at the outlet of the stove chimney, and for a second or two he must have made a lot of noise. The guard heard it all right but when they looked into the bungalow they found Elisa and Osterling awkwardly moving a bed from room to room, and were wished a pleasant good evening.

Gisorius, I am sure, had promised to go straight for Aleppo and the frontier, and to take over temporary control of the whole movement from Istanbul. Above all, Elisa and Osterling must have wanted information; they knew that Juan Villaneda had penetrated their secret intentions, but they did not know how or through whom or if he alone was the employer of Ashkar. They cannot have imagined that Gisorius would be such a fool as to try to use the wireless; they were quite content to be certain that we could not.

The routine of the guards was simple to evade, for they remained outside the door and occasionally strolled round the house to see that all window bars were intact. Gisorius dropped to the soft ground at the back, and got away unnoticed. Then he must have reconnoitred the garage and found, to his surprise, that it was wide open, and the cars unguarded. There wasn’t even any need to stalk one of Juan’s partisans and hit him over the head with a spanner. That aroused his suspicion, for he very intelligently went down the road to the ford, where he was seen but not recognized.

Gisorius, like so many underground leaders, could instil patience into others, but had very little himself. He could have got clear away on foot, in spite of the watch on every regular path out of the colony, but it would have taken him some time across country to reach the frontier or Aleppo. He must have thought, too, that Ashkar could be called in against him. Against such opposition, moving at night or very cautiously by day, it might have been thirty-six hours before he reached a station or a hirable car, and another two days to Istanbul. This to a man of his temperament was an eternity; so he turned back into the colony—perhaps to get a better picture of Juan’s tactics, perhaps to see if there were a guard on the stables.

What he found was that Osterling’s office and the wireless room were occupied only by Lucia. There was no reason at all to expect any attempt on the administrative buildings. Lucia was acting more as duty clerk than anything else. Juan couldn’t spare a man to accompany or relieve her, but because she was nervous at being left alone he had given her Gisorius’ pistol.

Gisorius prowled around that bungalow like a tiger around the flimsy shelter of some native telegraph clerk. Against the swift and supple man Lucia had no chance at all. She couldn’t tell us how he got in or what happened. She woke up to find a gag in her mouth, and Gisorius completing the lashings around her ankles. She wasn’t much hurt. I imagine that Gisorius, who had carried so much theoretical training into actual experience, could nicely measure a knockout, like a length of time-fuse, so that it lasted for ten seconds or all eternity.

It was then nearly 2.45 a.m., one of the scheduled times, as we found out afterwards, when the Kasr-el-Sittat station stood by for incoming messages, Gisorius, of course, knew this, and was himself a competent signaller, I can picture him looking at his watch outside the office, suddenly realizing his opportunity, deciding to gamble on getting through to Istanbul—and damn the immediate consequences!

The wireless room opened off Osterling’s office, to which it was connected by a short passage with two doors. The first was an ordinary painted door, like that of a cupboard, opening outwards; the second was a swing door, padded on both sides to deaden sound. The room had no outside windows, and was ventilated by two shafts, in one of which was a fan.

After tying up Lucia and recovering his pistol, Gisorius entered the wireless room and coded a signal to Istanbul, instructing them to ignore all orders from Kasr-el-Sittat until he, Osterling or Elisa turned up in person—the message to be repeated to western stations and passed urgently to Czoldy. We found his signal written out on a pad alongside the key of the transmitter. We also found the codes, call-signs, time schedules and frequencies, for which Juan had searched in vain. They had been kept in a cleverly concealed steel cupboard let into the panelling of the passage between the two doors. Anyone working with Osterling in his office would think he put the codes away in the wireless room, and the operator would think he kept them in his safe.

The instrument was unfamiliar, and Gisorius spent some minutes in mastering it. Meanwhile the electrician at the power plant noticed the load. There were few lights on in the colony, and no farm machinery was working. He assumed therefore that Kasr-el-Sittat was transmitting. For all he knew, we might have found an operator, so he didn’t cut off the current. He went to find Juan who was in his quarters half-way down the colony.

Juan ran to Osterling’s office, taking the electrician with him—for the office was nearer by several minutes than the power plant. On the way he hammered at the window of the guest bungalow, and shouted that I was to follow him. I was the only one of his supporters who could be reached without going out of his way; and I was doing, as I had been told to do, nothing—a sleepless nothing so feverish that even the next minutes of action have not wiped it from memory.

Juan and the electrician burst into the office and tumbled through the first door of the wireless room, the electrician leading—for Juan had just stopped in his stride to slash at the tie and handkerchiefs with which Lucia was bound. Gisorius was already in contact with Istanbul. I can understand his excitement. It was the future of the world as he desired it against a man’s life; and he believed so profoundly in his own moral right that no other could govern, even for a moment, his impulse. As the swing door opened and the electrician shouted, Gisorius shot him dead and called out that the next man to come through would get the same. Juan recognized Gisorius’ voice and pulled the electrician’s feet clear of the door, which swung to. Anyone else he might have tackled, but Gisorius, armed and with the initiative, could not be rushed.

I was close behind, having stopped only to fling a mackintosh over my pyjamas, and it was at this moment that I arrived. The door from the office into the passage was open, and I could hear the faint buzzing of the transmitter as Juan dragged out the electrician’s body. I made nothing of his flash of explanation except that Gisorius was in there and armed. Lucia stumbled past me on her way to find someone to cut off the power.

Juan himself had a weapon. That morning his partisans had made a score of them in the explosives store. The peace of their revolution was illusory. He drew from his pocket a small, round tobacco tin, lit the stub of fuse projecting from a hole in the lid, waited, opened the swing-door three inches and rolled it through. The buzzer stopped as Gisorius jumped for the far corner, or for the shelter of a desk. The bang was little louder than that of a 12-bore gun to the firer. A lump of metal from the inside of the tin struck the upper part of the door.

Juan ordered him to come out, but Gisorius’ only answer was to fire a short burst at the door, and then continue his dots and dashes.

‘Lie down,’ Juan whispered to me, ‘and keep his attention on the door.’

I did so. I don’t suppose I was there more than half a minute. Even Gisorius’ magnificent concentration could not deal with earphones and key, a door that kept on swinging and shutting, and once an inkpot that rolled through. He guessed that I—or, as he probably thought, Juan—would be lying down, and he splintered the door on the level of my head. Then he turned to the buzzer again; but I could tell from rhythm and repetition that no coherent message was going out.

Then I heard two explosions on the other side of the door. Gisorius seemed to fall, get up and blunder about the room. Juan ran in, and told me he had dropped one of his tins down each ventilator shaft. I answered, feeling sick and guilty, that they had been effective. I knew none of that overwhelming relief which in war masquerades as a bitter exhilaration.

Gisorius was horribly wounded. His flank was laid open from lung to kidney. He must have jumped away from the first explosion, which had done no damage, and backed towards the whirling fan just as the second tin demolished it. Even so he fired again, but couldn’t lift the pistol off the floor. Juan took it away from him, and put him out of pain with the last round in the magazine. It may have been merciful. I do not know and will not think of it. All I can say in Juan’s defence is that those who are accustomed to use such a weapon as his tin must not shrink, as I should, from the only antidote.

He was unaffected. The look which he gave to Gisorius’ body held something of a silent salute, but little pity; he showed more human emotion in his excitement at finding the code-book and sheets of cyphers. He had sacrificed his sensitivity to his ideals as devotedly as Elisa—Elisa, who, four hundred yards away, was listening so keenly that I was conscious of her. Love of the mass, and hatred of the mass—only their clear-sighted dread of the State could have united the two fanaticisms of Juan and Elisa.

Of simple public opinion Juan, at least, was swiftly reminded. While we were carrying Gisorius into Osterling’s office and tidying him up to lie alongside the electrician, the lights went out. We became aware that at all the windows were a few white faces watching us. They were like the puzzled ghosts of the masses who have been sacrificed to the masses. When Juan went to the door and spoke to them, they dispersed. Ghosts do.

Only Phil Grynes remained. He followed Juan into the room, and reported to me, as it were, for action. He had even acquired a torch from somewhere, and was dressed in two sweaters and heavy trousers, ready for any emergency. He looked like a boxer out for his morning run.

I murmured something to the effect that the wireless had been wrecked by a lunatic: that it was all either needless or useless—I forget which.

‘Didn’t know they had one,’ Grynes answered. ‘Shall I see what can be done?’

Juan and I stared at him. It had never occurred to us that Phil Grynes might be a signaller. He and Tabas were too odd to be really considered as permanent members of the colony, and their trades had never been card-indexed. I, who knew the armoured cars of the Palestine Police and their stations built and equipped to stand siege, should have guessed that an ex-sergeant might well be a wireless expert.

Grynes’ discipline saw him through the condition of that passage and the room. The offence to the eye was bad enough; the slight adhesion of linoleum to the feet was worse. We brought him a fresh chair, and he sat down to examine the set, while Juan went up to the power plant to turn on the current.

Phil Grynes said little. So far as his personal sympathies were concerned, he had no need yet to commit himself. The colony’s property was damaged. His job was to assist the colony. That, I think, was how he saw it. Ten years’ police service had given him plenty of practice in trying not to think beyond his immediate duty.

He answered my too eager questions in monosyllables. There was no obvious damage to the transmitter except a dent in the case out of which was sticking a bent bolt with a nut threaded on it—one of the bits of scrap metal with which Juan’s tins were packed.

When Juan returned, Phil Grynes put on the earphones.

‘Set’s working,’ he said at once.

He listened, switched over, and began to tap with a more professional certainty than Gisorius. Then he lifted the earphones and asked me if he should sign off.

‘What’s the language?’ I enquired.

‘English.’

‘Ask them how far they received the last message.’

‘First six groups clear,’ he replied after an interval. ‘Please repeat next four groups which are unintelligible.’

‘Ask them to repeat back all groups as received.’

He gave us the cypher groups which Gisorius had sent. We had in front of us the books and figures which he had used, so it was quick and easy to compare the message he had written on the pad with the groups of numerals below it.

Istanbul had received:

FROM FOUR ON BEHALF OF SECRETARIAT TO

NINE REPEAT LONDON NEW YORK PARIS

The rest, which Gisorius had tried to transmit with one eye on the door, was hopelessly mutilated except for a group meaning URGENT FOR CZOLDY, which had only one figure wrong and could be guessed.

‘Tell them that we’re having trouble with the power,’ I said to Grynes, ‘and that we hope to repeat the message at …’

I looked at Juan, who had the wireless schedules in front of him. for information.

‘There’s an emergency time at 10.30 a.m.,’ he said.

Grynes tapped out the message and closed down.

Juan locked up Osterling’s office and put a guard on it. He also doubled the number of his partisans at the power plant, and made it his headquarters. Grynes and I went back to my bungalow and had a much-needed drink. He preserved his silence, and there was an element of disapproval in it.

‘If she got out, you know,’ he said suddenly, ‘that would be the end.’

I agreed. It would indeed be the end. There was no explosive which Juan held with the energy of Elisa.

‘Then why not do it?’ he suggested. ‘I don’t mean by force. Just demand her. All of us.’

It was a shock to me to remember that he knew nothing of the conflict behind this palace revolution, and that he could not doubt I would be on Elisa’s side. He had accepted my presence with Juan in the wireless room as something reprehensible which I could not avoid.

‘Phil, what are your politics?’ I asked, meaning to appeal to his simplicity by whatever was the shortest cut.

‘I wouldn’t be here if I had any,’ he answered.

‘I mean, in general.’

‘I haven’t any,’ he repeated. ‘I used to be leftish. But then there was Palestine. And now Anton. I’ve been thinking a queer thing lately. Some of these chaps may have put it into my head. The more corrupt politics are, the better. All the misery is caused by well-meaning, honest fellows who think they’ve got a cure-all and stick at nothing to put it into practice.’

‘Well, you’re up against cure-alls here,’ I told him. ‘And they may be both wrong, but there’s no doubt which you’ll choose.’

I explained to him that the Kasr-el-Sittat he knew was merely the setting for the headquarters of a new Anarchist Party: that we were all agreed in a policy of active opposition to the State, but that the leaders were divided. The Secretariat was convinced that war, by annihilation of industrial centres, by famine and radio-activity, must destroy the modern State so utterly that humanity could return to the true track of progress through small voluntary associations. They had worked for war, and were on the verge of success. Juan Villaneda, on the other hand, loved the living masses too deeply to slaughter them for the happiness of future generations.

‘And where do you come in?’ he asked.

‘With Juan. I agree with him in nothing else, but accept war.’

Then I told him why Juan had taken over control of the colony, and what Gisorius had been trying to do.

‘It’s God’s mercy, Phil,’ I said, ‘that you’re a wireless operator. Now we can recall Czoldy and the worst of the risk is over. In a way, for the next twenty-four hours, there’s no one in the world more important than you.’

‘Plenty of ’em,’ he replied. ‘And Anton for one.’

‘But you can do what he can’t.’

‘Yes, I suppose I can. Makes you wonder if it’s worth doing, doesn’t it?’

‘Do you want to see your country in another war?’

‘No. But all this doing’—he stressed the word with a certain disgust, as of one who had experienced a whole lifetime of useless and devoted action—‘where does it get you? There’s been enough doing for your twenty-four hours—that’s what I think. And I only know what’s right for me. I’m not a politician. I don’t know what’s right for the rest of the world.’

‘Phil,’ I said, ‘I loathe violence as much as you, and especially at Kasr-el-Sittat. But this isn’t a moment to turn Quaker on me. And even if that is your point of view, your duty is still clear.’

‘Two men murdered to date,’ he answered. ‘How many more do you want just to avoid what may not happen? I can’t understand this weighing of blood against blood. They always get the result all wrong, you see. You’re right for you. And I know Anton respects you. But it doesn’t mean you’re right for me.’

I thought that Grynes didn’t believe me, so I began to tell him the story again. He stopped me, and said he didn’t have a doubt that I’d put the alternatives fairly, but that he felt, somehow, that all this was an outrage upon Kasr-el-Sittat. I shouted, out of an evil conscience, that of course it was, but I couldn’t help it—and if he hadn’t the sense to see his plain duty, let him ask Anton.

He was very worried. He said that he owed me, too, a lot, and that if I really thought Anton would have no hesitation, I must be right. It wasn’t Anton’s sort of problem, but certainly we would find him and ask.

Grynes got up and went straight out to do so. He and Tabas had no conventional regard for night and day. They rested their bodies or exercised their souls wherever there was opportunity and whenever there was need.

On the western edge of Kasr-el-Sittat was a long, low building which the colonists had constructed on a foundation of unknown age. It was divided into little rooms, floored and walled with unfaced stone blocks, but comfortably matted and furnished. Here Grynes and Tabas had their quarters.

Anton was not in his room, but Phil showed no surprise. He repeated that Tabas was unsettled, and behaving just as in the last weeks at Cæsarea.

‘Do you know where he is?’ I asked.

‘Up at his altar, I expect.’

‘His altar?’ I exclaimed involuntarily, for I had always thought of it as Elisa’s—not that she was often there, but I had fixedly associated the topographical axis of Kasr-el-Sittat with its spiritual axis.

‘As much his as anyone else’s, isn’t it?’ Phil answered. ‘And he uses it when he wants to be alone.’

While we talked in the guest bungalow it had been raining. The half-light of the winter morning grew through the washed and purified air, promising a gentle day in which the green growth would be that of northern spring. A few doors opened in the houses below us, showing for an instant tarnished golden light as early risers, or, more probably, the many sleepless, proved to themselves with eyes and nostrils that a night so reminiscent of their past was over.

On the grass below the altar, his head supported by the slanting drum of a column three-quarters in the turf, Tabas slept. His gaunt body was huddled under an old army greatcoat, the knees drawn up like those of an excavated skeleton. Phil Grynes hung over him tenderly, and with a mother’s unnecessary gesture adjusted the coat so that it covered neither more nor less of the sleeper; then he searched under his sweaters for any remains of a cigarette, lit the squashed half he found and sat still, watching the new moisture of the valley begin to live and sparkle in the light from eastern clouds. Meanwhile I fidgeted in the background, intent upon 10.30 as any suburban psychopath upon his train.

‘Thank you, Philip,’ said Anton, opening his eyes.

‘What for now?’ Grynes asked, smiling as if at some elaborate and unnecessary courtesy.

‘For watching over me while I slept.’

‘Been here five minutes, cock.’

‘Love has no minutes.’

Tabas got up and came straight towards me. I was quite still; yet he knew I was behind him.

‘You have forgotten your garden,’ he said. ‘But I cannot.’

I replied that I wished to God I could forget it.

‘No,’ Anton answered. ‘When we lose our peace we must cherish the memory of it. Remember happiness, for it may be that the object of this life is to teach us what to seek when it is over.’

‘There was peace here, too.’

‘There was never peace here, Eric. There was only fear. That blood upon your clothes has changed nothing. Sit down and tell me.’

I told him, and how weary I was of the story! I found my words growing emptier and emptier of meaning. The facts and the politics were sordid and pointless, as if my own voice were that of some insistent stranger boring me with details from a life that nowhere touched my own. Only when I had to explain the emotions of Elisa and Osterling, of Juan and myself, did my sentences have a cracked ring of truth; and, even so, no more meaning than a cry of pain.

Phil Grynes listened with a deep frown on his wrinkled forehead. His police service had so disillusioned him of the efficacy of action that he was ready to find in Tabas’ teaching a spirit of negation that was not really there. He was furious with Juan Villaneda for using Anton. Wasn’t it possible for Anton to talk, he asked, without a lot of damned bloodthirsty revolutionaries taking advantage of him?

‘No, Philip,’ Anton answered. ‘It is not possible. Nor should you judge a cause by the effect you can understand, for effect is in all time. That is why I tell you: do not seek reasons for what you know to be right conduct. And if you do not know what is right conduct, you must ask and accept the answer.’

‘Well, I am asking, cock,’ Grynes protested too loudly.

‘Philip, you are asking what you already know.’

Phil Grynes turned to me with sudden confidence.

‘Look here!’ he said. ‘It’s not that I want to punish Villeneda or anything. All this may be as you say it is. But I’m not going to do anything against Mrs. Cantemir or Mr. Osterling. I’m their guest—that ought to put it so that you’ll understand. Well, and it isn’t so easy as all that either. It’s just that my duty is to the nearest neighbour, if you see what I mean.’

‘Anton!’ I appealed.

‘Suppose that I could work this machine,’ he asked, smiling, ‘would you try to tell me what is right for me?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then why do you expect me to tell Philip what is right for him?’

‘Because for him there shouldn’t be any doubt.’

‘Do you mean that there is more than one morality, Eric?’

I said that I didn’t mean that at all, and then hesitated and asked him to tell me what I did mean.

‘You mean that every man has his own field of action. The principle of conduct is one and unchanging. But the principle is applied by the conscience of man, and the conscience is limited in vision. Do you believe in creatures of spirit, Eric?’

‘Not quite. But I do not see why all forms of life should necessarily be visible.’

‘If they exist, consider their conscience. The principle that they obey is your principle, but their world is not your world, and their time is not your time. Right conduct is absolute, but relative to the observer, who may see evil as good and good as evil. Therefore only the spirit itself, in its own field of action, can be the judge of what is right conduct and what is not. So I say to you that if Philip believes with his whole heart that he is doing right, you and I must be humble before him, for he is obeying the Purpose of God.’

It was full morning, and I was impatient. I said that humble could be damned, and if there were any purpose in all this lunacy, it was I who fulfilled it.

‘No, Eric,’ he answered. ‘Both of you fulfil it.’

‘But one of us must be right?’

‘Both of you are right.’

‘Then Elisa too may be right. If belief is your standard, she believes in herself more than any of us. And I am a fool to have wrecked her life and mine.’

‘You have not understood me, Eric,’ he said. ‘I tell you that when conscience is opposed to conscience, both fulfil the purpose of God. To Elisa also there is an opposite, for whom she is wholly evil. Yet to That of which light and darkness are alike the servants, both she and her opponent may be right.’

I was too impatient to understand him, but now, as I repeat his words, the shadow of the sense falls upon me. He meant that he himself was the opponent of Elisa to whom she was wholly evil. Yet neither then nor later had his opposition to her any appearance of deliberation. He hardly entered our too human battle.

At the time I despaired of any force to be measured against the Secretariat but Juan and his forty partisans. I found him at the power plant, and told him that Grynes had been too repelled by bloodshed to obey us, and that Tabas had supported him.

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 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.

The seconds that were so long for me must have been unnoticeable to Elisa. The flame of her spirit enveloped all of us. Her exaltation so amazed me, gave me so strange a longing to weep and worship her, that she had to ask her question twice. It was whether they could use those things inside the house. I answered that of course they couldn’t without suicide.

‘Then come!’ she said. ‘Why are we waiting, Eric!’

There were thirty yards to cross. She didn’t rush them. For her the spiritual dignity of Kasr-el-Sittat was at stake. Those who called force into her paradise were not only to be overwhelmed by it, but shamed out of its use.

I suppose the sheep were following us closely, but I remember hoping that they weren’t, and that this idyll of heroism would end in ridicule. Many a man, in the clear sanity of approaching death, must have comforted himself with the thought that its futility would be the only obvious lesson to be learned by the still living.

I heard Juan’s order to stop, and saw his face and hand at the window. My steps were still linked to Elisa’s. When the tin hit the ground six feet ahead of us, I fell on it. That wasn’t courage. It was nearer the false sentiment which Elisa so despised. I embraced the thing with a sort of gratitude. I was very tired, and death, though I wouldn’t have chosen it, was just as welcome as continued treachery.

Even so I was cheated. The damned tin didn’t go off. There was no calculation concerned, no bluff. Juan meant to finish with Elisa; that was the only answer she left him. It just happened that the fuse was not pushed right home into the detonator. Juan had not time to make them all himself.

The sheep, after all, were following. They made a pretty wide detour round my doomed body, but when I got up they were pouring in through the door and the windows of the bungalow. Juan hadn’t the necessary seconds to light another fuse, and wait, and throw. He and his party cleared out through Osterling’s bedroom window.

At the time I didn’t know what had happened, for after I had taken a few steps away from the bomb, my imagination re-created and exploded it for me. There was no heat of battle, no sort of responsibility to make me look forward rather than back, so I staggered instinctively to the dark crevice between a stack of drainpipes and a half-built house, and there collapsed.

I do not think I ever hoped to open my eyes and find Elisa; she had, after all, another lover in still greater danger. I was surprised, however, when I came round, to discover Poss sitting on the pipes and taking my pulse with a bedside manner that seemed both efficient and genuine. When I sat up, he drew a flask from his hip-pocket. His brandy was welcome, but I must admit that his large unconcern was possibly more helpful. He radiated life, even if one didn’t approve of its quality.

‘Winning, my dear sir?’ he said in reply to my immediate question. ‘Elisa, of course! But what she is winning is known to nobody but herself. And, by the way, may I ask if you have had the misfortune to offend our sympathetic syndicate? The gentleman who looks like an ambassador on a discreet holiday was about to place a large stone where you could reasonably be supposed to have bumped your head on it when you fell forward. I have seldom seen a man grasp an opportunity with such instant decision. Here indeed is the rock in question’—he offered me a jagged lump of building stone—‘the two black streaks merely represent the points where he struck a match when he saw that I had observed him, and I also struck one to impress upon him that there was no ill feeling.’

I thanked him for his intervention with such enthusiasm as I could pretend. Osterling, I am sure, would have done the job with one completely convincing blow, and anyway I was unconscious.

‘A very gallant act of yours, my dear sir,’ he went on. ‘I always felt that consular appearance of yours could not be wholly misleading. Am I right in supposing you knew very well that it was what Elisa intended you to do?’

I screamed at him that I knew nothing of the sort.

‘No? Well, well, in that case we will dismiss the subject. Indeed, Amberson, it is not surprising if some of my intelligent surmises be at fault. In the three hours since I rode with what now appears undue lightheartedness into this nest of anarchists, I am sure of nothing but that the only anarchist on this beguiling hilltop is myself.’

When Poss and I arrived within sight of the power plant we found that most of Juan’s forty partisans had rallied to him there, and that the plant was surrounded. Surrounded is perhaps too strong a word, for the colonists kept their distance, and their loose screen of pickets was in no way aggressive. Elisa was standing on the steps of a neighbouring bungalow, leaning with one raised arm against the door-frame. Her pose suggested complete calm and self-assurance. She was not a woman who normally leaned against anything.

She had seized and kept the moral advantage. Juan with his few men had been more dangerous and impressive than with his full force. It was now so obviously in his power to attack the indecisive colony and to enforce whatever discipline and punishments he chose. But that was just what he didn’t want to do. At all costs he had to avoid creating martyrs and a coherent opposition. However irresistibly he struck, he would still be no nearer a wireless operator, no nearer reversing the Secretariat’s policy, no nearer the permanent control of Kasr-el-Sittat.

Elisa greeted me with that eager passion of hers which concealed—from herself as well as from others—the very existence of remorse.

‘Try to understand!’ she cried. ‘I could not go back.’

‘I didn’t expect it.’

That was a plain statement of truth, and I suppose that I smiled as I uttered it.

‘No, you would not expect it,’ she answered, ‘my very faithful.’

The quiver of gratitude in her voice was not in the least because I had been prepared to give my life for her. That was something she had already discounted, and, perhaps, long since imagined. No, she was touched and surprised that I could keep a consort’s bargain, and accept her for what she was without reproach.

Osterling, who had gone inside the bungalow for a wash and shave, immmediately came out. He could not run the risk of allowing Poss any private speech with Elisa. We exchanged compliments, and I suspect that he, too, found a certain pleasure, a delicate and much-needed flattery of self-esteem, in the irony which was audible to no one but ourselves. He left the general handling of the situation entirely to Elisa. The subtleties in which she dealt were not his, and he knew it.

She had, I am sure, no formal plan of action. She had no doubt that her own spiritual force was the strongest in the field, and that all lesser forces, including violence, must conform to the curve she had created. With her was the full moral influence of a disapproving and unarmed colony, and so long as she didn’t lose it, she was bound to win. Her supporters were playing passive resistance for all it was worth.

When Anton Tabas started to shamble up and down over the gravel outside the power plant, as if he were unaware that this space, so convenient for perambulating meditation, was anything but accidental, he drew the two sides into hardly perceptible movement towards himself—perhaps a mere shifting of position to get a better view. He appealed to the sense of comedy, for he illustrated with such gentleness the eternal, easily recognizable jest of the absent-minded professor.

Elisa was disconcerted by this random element in her chain of probabilities. She went down through her people, and took him by the arm.

‘Come, Anton!’ she said, smiling. ‘This is no place for you.’

‘Do you need me?’ he asked.

‘I? Not at all!’

By this time Poss and I were with her, for it was quite on the cards that she intended to provoke another attack. The four of us formed a group that still further confused the issue, and I saw relief on the drawn faces of Juan’s partisans. That was not at all what she wanted. She separated herself decisively, and faced both us and the power plant behind us.

‘Come, Anton!’—this time it was an order—‘you are out of your world. And so are you, Poss!’

Poss, as it were, bowed to his audience. I will not swear that he actually did so, but he was obviously satisfied with his isolation.

‘Sir,’ he said to Anton, ‘my name is Oliver Poss. It would appear that we have one essential in common, and that is a determination to enjoy ourselves—though no doubt our ideas of what constitutes enjoyment are very different.’

I expected Tabas to be embarrassed by so foreign and over-bearing an approach. He was silent for an instant while he looked into Poss’s impudent eyes and judged him. Then he gave a broader smile than I had ever seen upon his face before—a positively commercial smile—and patted Poss on the shoulder as naturally as if he were standing a round of drinks.

‘For him who cannot serve life,’ he said, ‘it is enough to praise it.’

‘We are none of us in a mood for religion, Anton.’ Elisa insisted.

Her tone was compelling, but sad rather than resentful. She might have been ordering a Salvation Army band to go and play in some street where the blood of revolutionary comrades was not so fresh upon the ground.

‘Yet you have made this a house of religion,’ he answered.

Every word of his deep voice was a rebuke, delivered without anger, slowly, with a sincerity that shook him.

‘If it has been that for you, I am glad,’ she said. ‘But for those of us who have suffered it is a house of peace.’

Some woman shouted from the power plant:

‘Hypocrite! Assassin!’

‘Both! And liar! And any animal that it does you good to call me!’ Elisa retorted proudly. ‘But for whose sake? For you, because here, where you live and work, is the hope of all humanity. What other policy can there be but ours? You are futile as the fools who chatter democracy, the fools who pin their faith to the sacred majority, which year by year must vote more power to the State or die! Half of them will be dead in fifty years—does it matter so greatly if they die now? The majority whom I serve is greater still, and it is yet unborn. What have you to offer them? Nothing but talk like students in a café! Nothing but Libertarian Communism!’—she charged the name with an explosion of contempt—‘Juan Villaneda, what is your policy?’

She had control. We were two camps again. Tabas, Poss and myself stood in the no man’s land. They appeared unconscious of their position, or perhaps considered it natural and right. As for me, I was embarrassed by this isolation, yet unwilling to move lest the gesture of joining one side or the other be taken as a provocative expression of my sympathies.

‘Why do you not answer, Juan?’ Tabas asked, as if he were confident of the effect.

‘Because there is no answer, and she knows it,’ Juan replied—and there was even gaiety in his tone. ‘There is no way to freedom so certain as war. Good! I admit it! But I will not serve the unborn at such a price. And I have passed too much time in the chorus to be impressed by tragic queens. Look you, friends—I am an anarchist, but I am a European. And war is against my conscience.’

That was enough to steady his followers, who murmured their approval; but to the colonists behind Elisa, those very educated Slavs and Germans determined to cling to any philosophy that would guide them through their endless and barbaric questionings, Juan at that moment was merely an obstinate peasant. I could see on their faces contempt for the line of defence that he had chosen.

Somebody shouted:

‘The Purpose of God!’

‘Purpose of God be damned!’ Juan retorted. ‘I say it is against my conscience.’

Anton Tabas smiled at this reference to his teaching. He was between the houses, like a dog seeking its master. He carried a handy foot of lead piping. That he should distrust the pacifism of Kasr-el-Sittat was hardly surprising, but he should have known Tabas needed no other bodyguard than his own eyes and bearing. Grynes gave up his weapon to me, being conditioned to obey a sharp order, and I sent it whirling over the roof of the nearest bungalow. It was, I suppose, a nervous, over-dramatic action, yet I was bitterly hurt by Elisa’s derisive smile.

Meanwhile Tabas was speaking of the evil of fear. He used the word more or less in a psychiatrist’s sense, but he wasn’t the first prophet to have done that. He got a hearing, though impatient. At the end he again carried the attack to Elisa.

‘And you, lady, you were ashamed when I called your house a house of religion, because you know that you have filled it only with the darkness of your fear.’

I was the only one in all that crowd who had the eyes to see the little leap of the muscles, whose hand had felt and could feel in imagination the beating of her heart. I made an involuntary step towards her, but the coolness of her voice detained me.

‘Anton, Anton, must you reproach me because I am afraid for the unborn?’ she answered unconcernedly. ‘I know that you believe as I do that the soul of man must not be sacrificed to the State. You would not have remained with us so long if you did not. Then tell us—is there any political action that can ever help him?’

To my surprise Tabas’ reply needed no translation into the words of every day.

‘No. There is none.’

She asked him how he then dared condemn her, since politics and religion were both of no avail. She said that if there had been a single religion which offered any hope she would have joined it instead of founding Kasr-el-Sittat. But there was not one, as he well knew, which did not teach obedience to the State.

‘It is neither right nor wrong to obey government,’ Tabas answered, ‘but the Purpose of God must not be disobeyed. Therefore a man must follow his conscience if he believes that his rulers are acting from fear or from the love of power. For the conscience of every spirit creates its own right, and there is no absolute right that can be known to us. It is not enough to cry out that a law is evil or a tax unjust. The law should be disobeyed and the tax unpaid. Nor is it shameful to be called a criminal. It is only shameful that there should be sufficient prisons to hold those who have followed their conscience.’

‘There are enough executioners,’ said Elisa. ‘And none of us here can doubt it.’

‘In the nature of man I am certain only of this: that he is willing to suffer and die for what he believes,’ Anton replied. ‘If it were not so, there would be no religion. If it were not so, there would be no war. Are there a million in the world who believe your teaching that the State must be resisted? If there are, they have only to refuse obedience. Then those that you have allowed or chosen to be your rulers will be made humble, and for the unborn the day shall come when men will be unwilling to govern, and therefore worthy to do so.’

I think it was the vine-dresser who shouted:

‘Down with War! Long live Civil Disobedience!’

I could willingly have shot the fool. Yet it was that cry, that hysterical simplification of Tabas, which defeated Elisa. Instead of ignoring the childish protest, she answered it.

‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘Or out of work?’

The sarcasm might have been effective if it had not stirred too many memories. Most of those men and women behind her had carried banners or shouted slogans in their time. No doubt, as she expected, they looked back on their youthful enthusiasm with the contempt of an élite. Yet she had ignored Anton’s constant of human nature: its pride in suffering.

Juan Villaneda seized his opportunity. He cried:

‘Will you use the lives of others to destroy the state, or will you give your own?’

There wasn’t one of us who could fail to see that Tabas had offered a creed, that Juan had accepted it, and that it was a challenge to the sincerity of our ideals. Moreover, it was a practical creed. The humiliation of the state by individuals fearless of the consequences to themselves was a policy exactly fitted to Kasr-el-Sittat and its organisations.

The next shout came from behind Elisa. It was a sign that Juan no longer represented a mere negative.

‘I ask what is the strength of our movement!’

He came straight out of the power plant across the no man’s land, followed by his supporters. They were no longer partisans; they were delegates.

‘I will answer your question, friend,’ he said. ‘The strength of our movement in the West is double the million for which Anton has asked. In the East it is every man who knows a dozen others with whom he can talk freely.’

The more irreconcilable of the colonists closed immediately round Elisa—for it was, after all, only twenty minutes since Juan had tried to kill her. This defensive movement gave her the chance to recreate the dividing line.

‘Leave them alone! she cried sharply, as if she were genuinely afraid that her own people would resort to force.

She turned away, leaving behind her only an odd dozen of the colonists, for whom the pleasure of argument with their opponents was irresistible. To that extent her authority was weakened. It didn’t matter so long as Czoldy in far-off Paris was undisturbed.

The ruthlessness of Juan and his party, whatever its motives, was to most of the colonists an unforgivable outrage upon the peace of Kasr-el-Sittat; and Elisa’s tacit sentence of excommunication effectively countered the attack. The rebels were limited to their positions. They could submit to public opinion or defeat themselves by impatience.

We had only gained the now useless allegiance of Phil Grynes. He showed himself a typical policeman by grasping his opportunity when it was too late. As the colonists eddied about us, he whispered to me that he had changed his mind, that he had not realized before how fundamental was the difference between Elisa and Anton Tabas. I fear I was somewhat short with him. His hesitation had nearly cost Elisa’s life and mine. I told him that he should be a little surer of his damned conscience.

Tabas, who had overheard my raised voice, rebuked me with the same sternness that he used to Elisa.

‘Are you so firm a Christian, Eric, that you believe in the unchanging victory of God? I tell you that the race between good and evil is unending.’

I did not resent his severity, for I knew that I was wrong. I was far more annoyed at the lightheartedness of Oliver Poss.

‘My dear sir,’ he remarked—‘or should I say your reverence?—I yield to none in my respect for a good piece of fulmination. But if you’re going to bring up angelic races let us not forget that the 1.30 at Amberson Park damn near ended in a photo-finish.’

2

Discussion there might be, but the bodies of Gisorius and the electrician still lay on the table in Osterling’s office, while Elisa’s indignant friends preserved the peace for them; and Juan’s partisans in the power plant still kept a cigarette alight for the instant ignition of a fuse. There was no agreement to observe the status quo. It imposed itself. Elisa and Osterling dared not attack the plant and the explosives store, the two points that Juan must hold at any cost. As for Juan, he had learned his lesson. He knew now that nothing but a massacre would give him control of the wireless room.

The night came down over Kasr-el-Sittat, and the lights went on all over the colony. Juan could afford to be generous, for he still held our German wireless operator. The common-room and the dining-hall lived again, but like an ant-heap with the top cut off lived with an unnatural activity.

We had all forgotten that we inhabited any other country than Kasr-el-Sittat, for to us it was a country in itself. Even I, during those last thirty-six hours, had become a typical European, occupying myself so intensely with a closed circle that I forgot the existence of the natives. Yet the local labourers of Kasr-el-Sittat were all round the colony in their huts and villages, and they had ears and tongues; being Syrian, they also had plenty of imagination. The story as Ashkar heard it must have surpassed the very wildest of the rumours that broke out from Kasr-el-Sittat in the days of God and his wives.

After midnight, when the colony had settled into a hill silence, I awoke suddenly from a few hours of exhausted sleep. Some hunted part of me must have been listening for any unfamiliar noise. It was the splashing of horses through the distant ford that I had heard, and as I opened my eyes and listened I heard a volley of curses when Ashkar discovered that the water was deeper than he had any right to expect. I put on my coat and shoes—which were all I had taken off—and went out into the hall. Poss was sitting at the table with a case of papers open in front of him, engaged on the accounts of his complex trafficking. He yawned generously and said that he was sitting up in case Osterling again had nothing to strike matches on. I was surprised and grateful. I told him that he could now confidently go to bed as the police had arrived. His immediate response was to lock up his papers with a speed and neatness born of long experience.

At Kasr-el-Sittat there was only a night breeze, but in the upper air convoys of clouds rolled and wallowed from sea to desert past the station of the half moon. In an interval of light I saw Ashkar, a sergeant and six troopers halted near the gate, and obviously puzzled by the lack of any disturbance. A few colonists stood by in the shadows. They were being evasive as any villagers. One of them, who actually taught at the colony’s language courses, pretended that he didn’t understand Ashkar’s excellent French. They were, of course, on most delicate ground. They had never before dealt with, or even seen the civil power of the land.

Ashkar praised God for the beholding of me, and entirely forgot his proper calm—chiefly, I think, because he had put on his best boots and breeches to impress the Europeans of Kasr-el-Sittat, and was suffering from all the annoyance of a poor man at getting them soaked in the ford.

‘What is the truth of all this foolishness?’ he exploded. ‘A battle last night? Guns, bombs and parachutes? Or is it all because some father of forty thousand whores chose the middle of the night to kill a pig?’

‘God curse the father of him!’ I echoed piously, playing for time.

‘And you? What are you doing here? Come—tell me all! And it shall go no further.’

Then I remembered that I had let him go from our last meeting still under the impression that I was some sort of agent of the British Government.

‘There are two men dead,’ I answered, ‘and you must do your duty.’

‘Murdered?’

‘That is for you to judge. I am only a visitor.’

He took the hint.

‘Then I will not come to you till I must. But tell me this. How am I to proceed?’

‘As you would in a Christian village.’

‘Who is the headman?’

‘A woman. Elisa Cantemir. They will have told her of your arrival, and she will come to you here.’

Then I saw what I must do. The outline of the scheme and of its consequences was plain; and as I thought of those consequences and shuddered away from them, the details too presented themselves to my unwilling mind. I and I alone could ensure our peaceful possession of the wireless room on condition that I no longer kept up my weak pretence of neutrality—which Juan and even Osterling respected for Elisa’s sake—and struck at her boldly and openly.

There is no hope that I can ever forgive myself, and least of all for the words that I now said. They have been said too often of Elisa before, and I put myself deliberately in the class of those who had uttered them.

‘Hold her for interrogation till dawn.’

Deliberately. It was conscious abandonment for ever of my happiness and self-respect. My life, when I was blindly inspired to give it, was a far easier surrender, and I understood at last Elisa’s wisdom and even kindliness in demanding that I should die for her. But she and Tabas, continually holding and withholding their spiritual purposes were both too complex for me. In some obscure way, clothing no doubt my reluctance in a convenient mysticism, I saw myself as representing a humanity that had rejected my blood sacrifice and cried out to me to perform my simple duty.

‘Get the man Osterling,’ I told Ashkar, ‘and keep him with Cantemir. You will also have to detain and question Juan Villaneda, but do it this way. Send your sergeant to the office’—and I explained to him where it was—‘to clear out the public and make an examination of the bodies. When I come with Juan Villaneda and another Englishman, tell him to arrest the lot of us and put us for safe keeping in the inner room which I will show him. He should not finish his job, or let us out till daylight. And do not say you have seen me.’

Ashkar hesitated, more to memorize my advice than to question it—for what I asked was a reasonable routine—and then agreed. I vanished into the shadows of the garage and strode up the hill. Between the houses I saw a flicker of white as Elisa went down to the destruction of her work and soul.

Juan’s people let me into the power plant unwillingly, for he was asleep. He sat up, swaying his body in time with the thump of the Diesel, as if the influence of that industrial lullaby had not yet ceased to control his dreams. He did not hide his weariness and impatience, evidently considering that I had come with some too subtle message or proposal, which, at the moment, would be beyond his power to analyse and answer. When I told him that Grynes was now with us, he cursed both me and him.

I didn’t stop to explain my behaviour. It wasn’t worth the trouble; nor, since his attempt on Elisa, did I care any longer what he thought of me. He was not a friend; he was a necessary ally. I reported Ashkar’s arrival and what I intended to do. I must have had an air of assurance that was decisive. He produced without question all the code-books and copies of messages that he had taken from Osterling’s office.

‘Elisa is not a fool, friend,’ he said. ‘She will know after this that it was you.’

Was he testing me? Or was his admiration of her so profound that, like Osterling, he could not strike without considering the effect on her?

I answered shortly that of course she would know. He understood, and stretched out a hand which I avoided. For a good revolutionary he was too swift to recognize pain.

‘Have you decided what you want to say to Czoldy?’ I asked him.

He replied that he had, but wished me to correct his English. The primary code was from English into numerals.

His draft message was unconvincing, a lot of details about a change of policy which Osterling might conceivably have written—we had sone copies of his directives—but which were utterly unlike the incisive style of Elisa or Gisorius. They, I felt sure, would have stuck to facts in any crisis, and trusted to Czoldy to take action on them.

‘Who will decypher at the other end?’ I asked.

‘Normally the Paris leader. But we can make Czoldy himself decypher.’

There was a certain mathematical combination which the Secretariat used for communications between themselves. If we headed our message URGENT AND PERSONAL FOR SIX—which was Czoldy’s number—and then switched to the private code, the message could not be read in the Paris headquarters and would be delivered to him personally.

The list of numbers and names was the only document which Juan did not offer to show me, nor had I any desire to see it.

We agreed at last on this:

Bitterly regret missing boxes Coriolanos analysed by police laboratories London and Moscow and your connection traced. Recommend you take immediate steps for safety yourself and FitzErnest and advise us if possible to-night.

If it entered Czoldy’s head that the personal code was compromised, the mention of Coriolanos and the name of FitzErnest (which was not in the code-book and had to be spelt out) should carry conviction. Not even Juan, and certainly not the leaders of the party abroad knew anything of those cigars.

Juan, indeed, objected to my message on the grounds that the whole affair of the Coriolanos was only intelligent conjecture and that I might be wrong. I snapped at him that if wrong I were, we could all thank God and go home to bed.

We found Phil Grynes with Tabas. Both of them were awake. The room gave an impression of peace as if they had sat together contentedly in a long silence. I asked Grynes again if he had any objection to transmitting whatever we gave him, for I did not want to be let down at the last minute. He promised that he would, and added apologetically to Tabas that he supposed action was a necessary illusion.

‘To him we are all the same!’ Juan exclaimed impatiently.

‘Do you complain of that, you who have committed murder?’ Tabas answered. ‘But to Philip you are not the same, nor should be. I give him only this guidance: among men who claim to serve their fellows, learn to distinguish those who love from those who wish to lead.’

That was the nearest approach to practical politics I ever heard from Tabas. His words could profitably be written up in a polling booth. Certainly they cleared away any lingering doubts that Grynes might have had, and he came with us gladly. He was even excited. A return to the world of necessary illusion, so long as he could go there with a clear conscience, must have been a bit of a holiday for him.

At the office Ashkar’s sergeant was duly spinning out his job. Measuring the floor. Packing exhibits. Description of corpse, orifices and angles. He must have read an occasional detective story, for I swear that none of this had ever entered into his routine. Normal procedure in a case of murder was merely to take signed statements with the help of a riding-switch, and sign the witness’s name for him.

One of the troopers was inside, helping his sergeant and calling for God to admire. The other stood savagely on guard at the door with a carbine and fixed bayonet. Elisa’s garrison had been turned out, and were waiting indecisively on the path. I explained to them that Juan had come to give himself up to the police and be questioned. They let him pass, for they had no reason to be suspicious of Grynes and myself. They knew that since we both spoke Arabic we were obvious choices to deal with the local gendarmerie. The cyphers and code books which I carried, hidden among papers, in a cardboard folder under my arm gave me an appearance of legal authority.

The sergeant put on a convincing show of being a stupid and unfuriated Arab. He struck the air before our faces, waved his pistol at us and drove us from wall to wall, whispering when his back was to the window:

‘My father, in which room is it your will that I should put you?’

He snatched carbine and bayonet from his trooper at the door, foaming a little at the mouth for good measure, and drove us through the two doors into the wireless room.

We had ten minutes to go till 2.45, which Grynes employed in familiarizing himself still further with the transmitter. He got in touch with Istanbul without difficulty; they informed us at once that, in view of the interrupted message of the night before, Paris was standing by to receive it direct from us if conditions were good enough. For a moment I couldn’t give their phrase ‘the night before’ a meaning. It seemed to me that weeks had passed since Gisorius sat at the instrument and sent his URGENT FOR CZOLDY.

We waited while Phil Grynes tapped and listened, tapped and listened, and fiddled with the dials. Without the fan it grew hot and stuffy in that little room. We passed through all the conditions of sweat, from the first fat cold beads of excitement to flush after flush of moisture so that our hands stuck to the pages of cyphers.

Paris, said Grynes, was receiving him well enough to try. I passed him the sheet of figures. Juan and I sat in silence. The men in Paris who listened anxiously to the incoming dots and dashes were so vivid a reality that I dared not speak lest Czoldy should hear me.

I knew enough Morse to recognize that several groups of numerals were going out over and over again. Reception was poor, and Grynes was compelled to repeat various parts of the message. He felt our impatience, and kept it in check by looking over his shoulder from time to time with a cheerful grin.

At last he lifted his earphones and said:

‘Addressee has made arrangements for immediate delivery. They want to know if they should stand by after the usual time in case he wishes to reply.’

I answered that they should; and asked Juan how far the Paris headquarters were from the district of the Etoile where Czoldy was fairly sure to be staying.

‘Man! He won’t be at his hotel’, Juan declared with absolute certainty, ‘but somewhere nearby. Give him an hour, not more. And not less, because he has to decypher and cypher.’

We tried to go out for a breath of air, but were driven back with insults. Ashkar had well trained his men in literal and unquestioning obedience—and they put into it all the enthusiasm of the Arab for working himself into a rage, especially if pretended. The waiting colonists pressed closer to the door, and the light fell on their faces. I could see that they were shocked at this brutal treatment of Juan Villaneda, even though they were Elisa’s men. I was afraid they might rush the sentry, and shouted to them as we were hustled back that they should keep calm till the captain of gendarmerie arrived. As there was now no sound of transmission to be heard, we wedged the two doors open. The draught through the ventilators cooled the room.

Our message sent, I was overcome by the doubt which Juan had put into my mind. Suppose Elisa and the Secretariat were not plotting war at all, but merely planning to take advantage of it when it came? Then all these heroics were completely misconceived. It seemed to me possible that I should find myself a mere, futile, petty intriguer against Elisa.

To comfort myself with some vision of the future, I asked Juan if he had any general message ready. He replied that he had, and that as soon as he was securely in control of Kasr-el-Sittat he would call in all the leaders abroad for a party conference. He wanted Tabas to remain till then.

‘He won’t,’ replied Phil Grynes. ‘He says we have no more to teach each other.’

I played on Grynes’ devoted care for his master, and pointed out that at Kasr-el-Sittat he had absolute liberty and three square meals a day.

‘But there is nothing to fear in hunger,’ he answered, as if I had suggested that their movements should be governed by the phases of the moon.

‘Friend, tell that to the man who has starving children!’ Juan retorted.

Phil Grynes compressed his face into still deeper wrinkles as he tried to find words for an answer which he felt rather than knew.

‘I suppose I do sound a bit like pie in the sky,’ he replied, ‘but if you don’t like Mrs. Cantemir’s solution and you won’t have communism, I don’t see what else there is but religion.’

We talked for half an hour, eager as if a charter for the new Kasr-el-Sittat had to be improvised before Czoldy’s reply came through. At intervals Grynes put on the earphones and listened. It was nearly 4 a.m. before he nodded to us and began to write on the pad in front of him. We leaned over to watch the quick scrawls of the pencil.

Six here in person. Confirm your last message and state source of information.

Czoldy had not bothered to use code. It was a pretty sure sign that our warning had struck home, and that he treated it as a matter of extreme urgency. I could imagine him hastening from some café or obscure room where he had decyphered our message, watching to see that he was not already under police surveillance, and appearing, formidably decisive, at the party headquarters.

Juan’s face was grim. He was too honest a man for this crisis. If we did not produce a clear, circumstantial and utterly convincing lie, we should not only fail but might drive Czoldy and his Coriolanos into immediate action.

‘No one ever knew what happened to Eugen Rosa,’ I reminded Juan.

‘No one but you and I.’

I told him to give me a source which Czoldy would consider impeccable.

‘Theodore,’ he answered.

He was a good conspirator. I had a struggle to get out of him any details at all about Theodore. I didn’t want to know who he was, but simply where he lived and why Czoldy should accept his information. At last he told me that Theodore was a high official of the N.K.V.D. and directly responsible to Gisorius for the internal organization of the party in Russia.

‘If the Soviet police knew what Czoldy intended, would they co-operate with the West?’ I asked him.

‘Of course. Every hand is against the anarchist. And besides, they would be afraid of being accused themselves.’

I wrote down:

Source Theodore. Eugen Rosa kidnapped, held in Moscow since June and confession forced. Missing cigars intercepted through Amberson and Ashkar to confirm Rosa’s story. Theodore unsuspected but not informed till last Saturday when file submitted to him for comment.

‘Will that do?’ I asked.

Juan’s admiration was sour in his mouth. I think he felt illogically that an old comrade did not deserve so stupendous a lie, or perhaps it shocked him that I should profane the value and courage of Theodore.

We gave Theodore, Rosa and myself their numbers, and coded the message in the Secretariat’s personal cypher. I was astonished that I too had been considered important enough to have a number. I still see it. It was 37, and in Elisa’s writing.

When Grynes had finished the transmission, I wedged open the doors and took a cautious look at the office. Ashkar’s sergeant had become bored with playing the detective, and was standing in complete idleness by the door chatting to the few colonists in the worst of pidgin French, while his troopers listened admiringly. It was still dark, but the dawn wind was beginning to blow; it carried from the bodies of Gisorius and the electrician the faint, fresh smell of a butcher’s slab. I went back into the wireless room. The lusty smell of the living was fouler, but its associations were sweet.

We waited. Phil Grynes was asked to accept a message relayed from New York, and we decyphered it to pass the time. They requested authority to use World Opposition funds for the defence of some fool who had been preaching nineteenth century anarchism in California. Juan refused as decisively as Osterling would have done, and reminded them sharply that it was party policy to support the extreme right in a democratic state and the extreme left only in a totalitarian state.

Then at last Czoldy’s reply came through. For a moment Juan and I hesitated to extract the meaning from the groups of numerals. We had been so sure of success—influenced no doubt by the deceptive ease with which he had sent his order to America—and now the reaction came back the stronger. Juan’s voice cracked as he read out the figures, and I snapped at him that they were mutilated. It took us a minute of argument to reach the obvious conclusion that Czoldy was not using the code in which we had replied to New York, but the personal cyphers. Then we hadn’t long to wait.

Shall resign to-day on grounds of ill-health

Czoldy replied, and he gave his future address and the name under which he would be known. Grynes confirmed receipt and signed off.

When Ashkar arrived half an hour later and led us out into the office, he was solemn and worried. Elisa and Osterling had truthfully stated that Juan had imprisoned them and murdered Gisorius. They had denied any knowledge of his motives, but implied that they suspected him of all manner of illegalities. They must have quickly satisfied themselves that Juan was not the influence behind Ashkar, and so they had impressed this solid policeman, known to be interested in their cigars, that Villaneda was the man he was after.

The hour that I had foreseen and chosen was on me, but there was one constructive act that I could do—and that was to leave Juan in firm control of Kasr-el-Sittat with Ashkar’s confidence in him unshaken.

‘They are quite wrong,’ I said. ‘Their evidence is hearsay. They weren’t there. Bring in Osterling and confront him with Villaneda.’

I seated myself in Osterling’s chair and laid out the code-books and sheets of figures on his desk. Nobody protested at my enigmatic position. Ashkar evidently decided that I had at last come out into the open as the secret agent in charge of the case.

When Osterling was brought in by a trooper, he bore himself well. His traditions were too old and too gallant for him to show the slightest indignation; but the two sleepless nights of anxiety had marked him. He was no longer a force, a grace, whose age was what you chose to give him. He was an erect and polished old gentleman.

I spoke to him in English, which Ashkar did not understand, and told him how we had passed the night. Then I let him read the text of the four messages that had gone back and forth between ourselves and Paris.

‘So Grynes was an operator,’ he said. ‘We are both fortunate.’

‘Why you?’

‘Because he is not a man to lie to me.’

He held out to Phil Grynes the sheets torn from the pad and covered with the neat groups of figures.

‘Did you send and receive these?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Grynes answered.

He still seemed doubtful, wondering perhaps if there were no way in which we could have deceived Grynes himself.

‘Do you know anything of the case of an anarchist in California?’ I asked.

‘I do.’

‘Then read these.’

It was the final proof. He met my eyes, looked casually away and met them again. The colour came back into his face. He forced himself to imitate the Osterling of every day, and indeed he became him. It was a good memory to leave behind, a compliment to himself and to us.

‘Theodore …’ he said reflectively, and then added in the tone of an interested seeker after truth:

‘That part was an invention?’

‘Of course.’

‘To warn Czoldy. I see. But why did you want to warn Czoldy? Why not let him be arrested?’

Only then did I realize that he took the rest of the message as literal fact, and believed that I had really handed Eugen Rosa over to Moscow. I did not answer him.

‘Our old game of sparing Elisa? Villaneda to take the blame and you still to appear the benevolent neutral? But, my dear Amberson, she knows it was you who gave this puzzled gendarme his orders, you who again put her into the power of—well, boots and breeches.’

I told him savagely that I could do nothing else, and that I had made my choice deliberately. He observed me with concern but without pity as if I had been a promising young official whose career had been irrevocably smashed.’

‘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.

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Table of Contents

Title page

Contents

Dedication

THE SANCTUARY

THE AMŒBA

OUTSIDE EXPERT

ALONE

TWILIGHT

INTERMEDIARY

Copyright page