Free The High Place by Geoffrey Household

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