The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  Nikolai covered his mouth with a trembling hand.

  “And that letter displeased you, for the Governor was a worldly man, and you suspected that when he did this at noon he was trying to curry favour with you and your devout kind. That was what you wrote in your diary. Gorin read it.”

  “God forgive me for my lack of charity,” said Nikolai. “You do not hurt me as much as you hope by telling me that I am betrayed. I am a Christian and I know it must be so. Judas exists for all of us. That he touched Christ with his foul hand means that he touches every member of the human race with his eternally polluted finger, at all moments in time, in the past, in the present, in the future.”

  “If I pester you for the name which Judas has assumed for you and for me at this particular moment of time,” said Chubinov, “it must by your showing be the will of God that I should pester you.”

  “Leave me alone,” said Nikolai. “Give me a moment that I may pray for forgiveness for my lack of charity towards that poor man who was slaughtered by your assassins as he sat with God in a book upon his knee—”

  “Grandfather, Grandfather,” said Laura, “what are you saying? Do you mean that these people killed the Governor?”

  “Yes, indeed, and Sipyagin also was shot through the heart,” said Nikolai. “But my lack of charity, how unseeing, how insolent it was. If a man is brought to God by hopes of advancement, and the Governor of Ufa was a man with few social advantages and must have been much tempted that way, nevertheless he is brought to God and is sacred.”

  Her spine stiffened, she sat up and stared at Chubinov with the total fury of a cat. She said to him, “You’re mixed up with all these murders?”

  “They were not murders but surgical operations designed to cure the cancer which devours our Russia,” he answered. She hissed with hatred. She could not bear to think of a man with such meagre hair, such weak eyes, being responsible for the stopping of life. But he ignored her, asking Nikolai, “Don’t you really want to know the identity of the man who has made use of you to remove those objects of your loyalty, Dubassoff, Plehve, the Grand Duke Serge—”

  “Oh, God,” exclaimed Nikolai, “were you, the son of my friend, a party to all those crimes?”

  “Why, so were you,” said Chubinov.

  The old man winced. She put her arms about him. “Why do we have to bother with this awful man?” she asked. He said, “Leave me alone, Sofia, Tania, Laura. I have to find out whether I have been negligent.” She had not the slightest idea what to do. This was possibly because she was only half-Russian. She had an idea that her grandmother or her mother would have found some means, which would perhaps have been a gesture rather than anything said, of persuading Nikolai to stop talking to this horrible man who owned he was as wicked as Jack the Ripper or Charles Peace. Perhaps they would have thrown themselves kneeling at his feet. But if she had done that she would simply have looked silly. It was open to her of course to go along the corridor and get the attendant to put Chubinov out of the carriage, but she did not dare to leave him alone with her grandfather, for he probably had a revolver on him. Perhaps she could get the Frenchwomen to watch for that while she went and got the attendant, they looked as if they might have a talent for screaming. She turned to them and was checked by the repugnance on their faces. She remembered that nannies and schoolmistresses were always saying that people who behaved oddly made themselves unpopular. The truth seemed to be sharper than that. Also, if she got the attendant, her grandfather would probably say he wanted to go on talking to Chubinov, that he was a friend. She kept her arms ineffectually on the great mass of his body while he and Chubinov talked about people with Russian names in the policemanly way.

  “Yes,” said Nikolai, thoughtfully. “I did know someone called Pravdine. And, yes, I have a vague impression that he had some connection with the Ministry of Justice. I can even remember what he looked like. He was a small man, a very small man. And now I speak of him, I can see him quite distinctly, holding his little daughter by the hand, a little girl who looked like a doll, who had golden curls and blue eyes and cheeks like painted wax. There was a toy trumpet swinging from her little hand. But I had hardly anything to do with him. He can’t have told your Gorin anything about me of importance.”

  “I’m of that opinion also,” said Chubinov. “I think Gorin lied when he said his informant was Pravdine. There. I have said it. I think Gorin lied.”

  “Yes,” Nikolai went on, “now I see Pravdine very clearly. He’s standing in the entrance of his apartment with this little girl by his side, this child who looked like a French doll. She was wearing a fine muslin dress which spread out like the lampshades ladies have in their boudoirs, and she carried this toy trumpet. Behind him was an open door, opening on a gaslit room, and I can just see the tips of the branches of a Christmas tree, and I hear the sounds of children’s voices. I can’t imagine why I should have been present on such an occasion at this man’s home, for he was a person of no importance. Ah, yes, now it comes back to me, Pravdine was the man we used to call the fifth cow in the Ministry of Justice. But you wouldn’t understand that.”

  “Indeed I do,” said Chubinov. “I’ve known the story ever since I was a child. When your father inherited your grandfather’s St. Petersburg palace he invited my grandfather to go over it with him, and they found five cows kept in stalls on the roof, with a serf from the estate living with his wife and children in a hut beside them. That was usual enough, of course. But only four of the cows belonged to the family, the fifth was an intruder whose milk was sold in the street by a Kalmuck who was living in another hut on the roof and could give no account of how he came to be there. The serf had found him there when he was sent up from the estate. And always at my home, as I think at yours, we spoke of the unidentifiable person, the guest at the party whom nobody knows, the speaker at the conference whose name is not on the agenda, as ‘the fifth cow.’”

  “Oh, Vassili Iulievitch,” breathed Nikolai, “how pleasant it is to talk of what there was between your father and me, your family and mine. You smiled like an innocent man when you told me that story. For a minute it seemed as if nothing had gone wrong, with any of us, with Russia. Ah, well, the fifth cow. The fifth cow. But of course I know why we called Pravdine that. He had a room in the short corridor leading from the main one to my office—”

  “Then Gorin’s story might be true?” Chubinov asked eagerly.

  “Not possibly. The room was very small. At one time the cleaners had kept their pails and brooms there, and it was no place for any official, but we had to find somewhere to put poor Pravdine, who kept office hours but had almost nothing to do. You see, this was a case of impulsive royal generosity. The Empress Mother had visited some town in the provinces and had been touched by the plight of the widow of an official who had been struck by lightning in a storm which struck the city at the moment of her arrival. The official was of quite a humble rank and his family were left with no means, and therefore the Empress arranged for the woman’s son, who was Pravdine, to be appointed to a post in the Ministry of Justice which she herself had just insisted on being created because she had formed an erroneous impression that there was no school for the staff’s children in a prison she had inspected on the Polish border, and had concluded, as erroneously, there were no schools for the children of prison staffs anywhere in Russia. The whole story was consonant with the Empress Mother’s unique personality.”

  “You know what the Tsar and Tsarina call her in private?” asked Chubinov, smiling. “‘L’Irascible.’”

  “You know that too,” said Nikolai and fell silent for a moment. “Well, there Pravdine lived in his little cupboard, sometimes ordering a blackboard or some exercise-books. But I never spoke to him except once, when I went to his Christmas party at his apartment, because his wife’s sister had married a priest of whom my wife thought well. I don’t see how the poor man could possibly have told you anything about me, even if he had wanted to, and I don’t believe he woul
d want to.”

  “I’m sure that’s so,” said Chubinov. “This is, as you say, a case of A bringing valid information about B and saying falsely that it comes from C. Now let’s get on to the next stage in the story. For years we accepted that Pravdine was our informant on you. Then when you went for your trip to Paris, which we knew, long before you did, was to be your permanent exile, we were distressed. We were, you see, specially anxious to go on studying the serial story of the Tsar’s perfidy which you were writing in your diary without knowing it. Also, we wanted to know whether you and your associates went on being baffled by the mystery of who it was in your entourage who had betrayed you over the attack on the two Grand Dukes at Kiev and the one on the Tsar at Reval. Then, also, and perhaps most important for those of us who bear the responsibility for the terrorist branch of the revolutionary movement, there was another mystery which had to be solved. I’ll talk of that later. But for the meantime, you’ll see the situation. It was important that we should find someone to spy on you in Paris as Pravdine had spied on you in St. Petersburg. Yes, yes, I realize now Pravdine wasn’t the man, but we then thought that he was. But we never imagined we’d find anybody who could get his foot inside your door in Paris for weeks, or months, or even years. Just think how difficult it was bound to be, with the Russian Secret Police having its own office in Paris to deal with expatriates.”

  “Well, those fellows don’t do much,” said Nikolai. “They all get corrupted by the West. The ideal would be for all Russians to live and die in Russia, seeing only their own kind and maintaining their own system. It’s only you accursed expatriates which make us break our rule in the case of the police.”

  “Oh, those fellows keep their claws. You’re wrong if you think they give our people much rope. Well, it seemed to us a remarkable example of Gorin’s efficiency that almost at once he found someone in Paris who would be able to report to us just as regularly as we thought Pravdine had done. But that’s what’s so wonderful about Gorin. He seems so gentle and, as it were, so bemused, turning from one object of kindness to another, not knowing whom to comfort first, and then there’s a specific task to be done, and all of a sudden he changes into somebody else—he might be one of those great industrialists, those railway magnates, those capitalist monsters whom Count Witte is always trying to let loose on our country for the exploitation of our wretched people. Well, Gorin sprang into action now. In no time he found us a man who could tell us from moment to moment what you are doing. A man named Porfirio Ilyitch Berr.” He repeated the name softly. “Porfirio Ilyitch Berr.”

  “You ought to be in a lunatic asylum,” said Nikolai Nikolaievitch. “You and all your friends. First my diaries are being read and my most intimate secrets revealed by a man named Pravdine who in fact sat in a housemaid’s cupboard all day ordering blackboards and spoke with me, so far as I can remember, once in my life and then to wish me a happy Christmas, and never set foot in my office. Now I’m having my soul put under the Röntgen rays by a man I’ve never seen or heard of, Porfirio Ilyitch Berr. You’re all mad.”

  “You’re wrong when you say you don’t know Berr,” said Chubinov, looking for the first time rather disagreeable, sly and harsh. “It’s the world you live in that makes you think you don’t. That world where everything good and noble and enduring is annulled by the system, the monstrous, murderous system that subordinates everything to the aim of putting the few over the many. You know Berr. You even derive, because not all your heart is callused by power, the most exquisite pleasure from his company.”

  “Mad,” said Nikolai, “raving mad, the lot of you.”

  “But all that I’ll explain later. First, before I can make that explanation, I must express to you that we are two halves of a whole. We’re in the same plight as you. We have our Judas.”

  “Oh, I know who he is,” said Nikolai.

  “You know?” cried Chubinov. “Then tell me, tell me!”

  “Berr,” said Nikolai, “old Berr,” and chuckled into his beard.

  “You’re impossible. For God’s sake do not be light-minded, as all you reactionaries always are, and answer me one question seriously. The names of Vesnin, Patopenko, and Komissaroff mean to you what they mean to me. They mean a man who was shot, and two men who are slowly dying in the most northerly penal settlement of Siberia. Oh, the cruelty of Tsarist authority, which sends the political idealist into the Arctic cold. How did you come to arrest these three men?”

  “That’s an official secret,” said Nikolai, “so I’ll not discuss it.”

  “You must tell me if you want to live.”

  “I wouldn’t buy my life by the betrayal of any official secret.”

  “Imbecile old man,” shouted Chubinov, “will you risk your personal safety to keep the secrets of the Tsar, when he has treated you far worse than my grandfather or yours would have treated one of their serfs?”

  “The answer is, yes. I will do nothing to help the enemies of the Tsar, even to save my life, or the life of any one of my family. There are men who are called to serve God by conformity and I’m one of them. I’ve always known that. At certain times in my life I’ve greatly longed to drink and to gamble, I’ve been hungry for the enormous pleasure in the loss of my senses and in gaining or in losing large sums for no reason. But I’ve always foreseen that these things would give me no lasting happiness, that my part was to be a pillar and that a pillar must never even sway. Go on telling your story if you like. But I can’t believe it’ll mean anything to me. You and I were created in different dreams of God.”

  “There you’re mistaken. We’re the children of the same dream. Listen. We revolutionaries have, as you know, had many successes in the last few years, but many failures also. We’ve inflicted the sentence of death on a far greater number of social criminals than have ever been brought to justice before in the same period, but at the same time we’ve lost more and more of our men to your forces of reaction. Of these Vesnin, Patopenko, and Komissaroff were the most important. They’d all the qualities that would have made them leaders of our organization, particularly Vesnin. But there were many others, and we find the circumstances under which you arrested them incomprehensible. There was always a great knowledge of the workings of our organization behind all these arrests, but they weren’t the arrests one would have expected any man who had that knowledge to make. Before each of our great achievements—”

  “You mean assassinations.”

  “Of course. Before each of them, and after them, the police became very active and rounded up a number of terrorists, but never the men and women really engaged in the current conspiracy. Vesnin, however, was arrested just after he had killed the Commandant of St. Petersburg—” Laura drew in her breath with a hiss again—“and Patopenko and Komissaroff when they were just about to execute another important plan, but they were exceptions. Most of the arrested revolutionaries had either struck their last blows some time before or were subordinates not yet ripe for terrorist action. Now, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, what would you make of that?”

  “Why, what you do, I expect,” answered Nikolai slowly. “That on our side we weren’t receiving the information which we’d really have liked, which would have enabled us to uproot the terrorist organization there and then. We were being given just enough to let us cripple the revolutionary movement and prevent it from realizing its full potential. Awkward for us. Awkward for you, too. You lost your leaders of five or ten years ahead, and the survivors are left in a state of mutual distrust, without the old hands to steady them.”

  They grumbled on. They talked about a lot of people. In Russian conversations there always seemed a crowd of faceless personalities doing violent things. It seemed that many of them lived very uncomfortable lives. Men were told to go from St. Petersburg to Kharkov and choose their own day and their own route and keep the choice a secret. That, apparently, was insisted on by this man Gorin. Then the traveller arrived at noon and sat about in a dark corner of the station with the story of
a further journey ready on his lips if he were questioned, and waited till the afternoon to go into the town, because by then the police were less vigilant. Then he’d be crossing the station square and as he went by the line of drojkis two of the lean horses would paw the ground and jangle their harness, fretted by the two men standing in wait between them, two policemen, who stepped forward with the right interrogations, the proper incredulities. In some room at the headquarters of the Secret Police a voice had said, “Don’t try to take him at the station, inside or at the exits. Many of the workers are on his side and they’ll warn every solitary traveller if you’re about. But you’ll find him making his way across the square at about four o’clock in the afternoon.” Yet the traveller had never said to himself, “At four o’clock I’ll go across the square into the town.” He’d just gone there when he felt like it. Some of them had been able to tell the organization that afterwards.

  Nikolai said, “Someone knew that if one sits on a station bench from noon one’s back feels as if it were breaking just about four o’clock, and stretching one’s legs doesn’t do any good. Just as someone on your side knows that when my lot have to raid a café where your miserable pack meet to plan their villainies, it’s nervous work, as your lot have their revolvers and their bombs and no mercy in their hearts, and the inspector’s nerve will break at a particular hour and he’ll hustle out his men to get the thing over. And when they get to the café they find no soul there who isn’t a blessed saint.”

  Chubinov said, “But it remains to be learned how they know the day.”

  “Yes. Or the place.”

  Both sighed. Then they talked of more men with Russian names that had to be heard several times before they could be clearly grasped. How could Nikolai be content to absorb his attention in this ugly male world when his women called for his interest, his pity! Only a little time ago, when Sofia lifted her small strong ringed hands to pat a hunter’s neck and rub his muzzle, it had been on a parity of health; and at night she had stood upright within her satin gowns, unbowed by the weight of her jewels, while now she was a shrunken mummy, dead except for her courage which was kept alive by her fear. And Tania, she needed pity too. When she used to stand by the window of her bedroom, her elbows supported on the sash and her cheek pressed against the glass, scanning the gardens to see if the double peonies with the heavy scent were open, the corner house to see if the South African diamond people who had bought it had moved in yet, the summer-house to see if the old colonel who lived next door and had been so ill was sitting there with his nurse, she had had the air of an inquisitive child happily dispelling the boredom of the nursery; now she looked as if she were hanging face backwards on a cross, as if you would only have had to turn her round to see tears on her cheeks, bitten lips. How could Nikolai free himself from the thought of these two women who needed his help and listen to this chit-chat about murderers who should only be hanged!