Free The High Place by Geoffrey Household Page B

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