The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  “Yes, yes, I know, it is not necessary for you to protest, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, I am just telling you what Gorin said. He went on to tell me that this man, Porfirio Ilyitch Berr, had been employed at the Ministry of Justice, but in middle life had inherited some money and had come to France with his wife to live with a niece, who had married the proprietor of a small restaurant near Les Halles in Paris. Berr was apparently an unamiable character, so unamiable that Gorin expressed surprise that you, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, should have engaged him to act as a sort of clerk and account-keeper to come to your house every day for an hour or two. But Gorin supposed it had something to do with his qualifications as a book-keeper, which were high. It wasn’t so, then? Well, that tells us nothing about Gorin’s honesty. For he explained that he was only vaguely informed regarding Berr, whom he had dealt with always through an intermediary, who said that Berr must never be approached by anybody but himself, because his niece’s husband was fiercely opposed to his political views and might even denounce Berr to the police if he had any idea of Berr’s role as a member of the revolutionary movement. Gorin said that at any rate he believed the stories of Berr’s unamiability, for an agent of his had once followed Berr from your house, and found him most unprepossessing. We then talked of you, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, with great respect and a sense of shame. We both wished we were not obliged to set spies on you, we wished we were not obliged to eavesdrop on the Tsar’s attempts to degrade you. But we have assumed responsibility for the future of Russia, and that involves us in much guilt which we must accept for the sake of the people. We were so unhappy about it that we fell silent, and simply sat together, watching the strange whitish radiance which the night casts on the waters and the sparkling lights in the towns on the other side of the lake. I felt that if I could have given my life for you I would have offered it up gladly. When we rose to go home Gorin laid his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I know well that much that is best in you comes from Nikolai Nikolaievitch.’

  “I left Montreux the next morning, and after a day at our centre in Lille I got to London the next evening and was met at Victoria by two English comrades. I was still so happy at having been with Gorin that I had walked the whole length of the platform before I realized that they were utterly overcome by misery. They laid their fingers across their lips to tell me that the cause of their distress could be safely discussed only in some private place, and they took me in a cab to a room in a dark and dingy place called Pimlico, very Gothic, which was no surprise to me, for I know my Dickens. Locking the door, they asked me if I had known that Primar, Korolenko, and Damatov had been intending to come to London. I stared at them in embarrassment. I hadn’t known it, but I’d guessed it, and I was very sure that there were very good reasons why they shouldn’t be told. However, they informed me that that morning a woman named Nadya Sarin had arrived from Paris with a story that these three comrades had been arrested there on the eve of their departure for London. They themselves had known that a team was to arrive on its way to Glasgow, but they hadn’t known how many men were coming, or who they were, or when they would come, and they were not certain that she was not mistaken or, perhaps, a lying police agent.

  “When I cast my mind back I remembered that an actress called Nadya had been Damatov’s mistress at one time, and that they had parted because she had a brother much younger than herself who was still at the gymnasium, and several incidents had suggested that her love-affair was leading the authorities to regard the boy with suspicion. I remembered also hearing that as her French was unusually good she had joined a Parisian company of players then in Petersburg and had returned with them to France. So I told the English comrades that in all probability the woman was who she said she was and that her story was true, and I asked them to take me to her at once. We then got into another cab, and went to another part of London called Notting Hill. She had been taken in by one of our members who ran a lodging-house and we found her lying in bed, surrounded by comrades, in a room which looked across a wide railway-cutting, a positive chasm, with many tracks running along the bottom. The aspect was not unpicturesque, for on the opposite cliff of the chasm stood a line of tall houses, neoclassical in design, which were reflecting an orange sunset from their stucco façades. London is very exotic. All these places like Camden Town and Pimlico and Notting Hill have a wild majesty.

  “But it was a pity the poor woman hadn’t been found other quarters, for every time a train ran through the cutting she buried her head in the pillows and screamed. Also, the room was too full of people who seemed to be taking pleasure in witnessing her agitation, and even going to some pains to outdo it. There was one person I marked with special disapproval, a tall young man with straight yellow hair and broad shoulders who was striding up and down with a glass in his hand, making exaggerated gestures of despair. In consternation I asked the comrades who had brought me to this place what sort of story we were all going to tell if the police broke in, but they assured me that this was most unlikely. It filled me with joy that an admittedly great power should be so much more liberal than Russia, but I also saw that it must be difficult to run a revolutionary movement if one cannot tell the comrades that if they make too much noise they may attract the attention of the police. It was some time before I could make myself heard and really get down to questioning the actress, who was of a refined and elevated type, pale and slender, with an oval face and long black hair. She could have sat to an artist for a picture called ‘Melancholy’ or ‘Autumn.’

  “She told me that she and Damatov had never ceased to be sincerely devoted, and that she had been overjoyed when he had called on her at her lodgings in Paris, which were somewhere near the Bridge of Passy, about one o’clock two days before. He had told her that he had come to acquire the rights of a French play which the Petersburg State Theatre wished to perform, and that he had two friends with him, named Primar and Korolenko, who would call for him later. The other two came about five, and as it was a very fine evening they decided to go for a walk. The actress went with them, though she had to leave them before long, as she was acting that night. When they were outside on the pavement, Korolenko, who knew Paris better than his friends, said, ‘Here, this way,’ and they made their way up the Avenue Kléber. They went the whole length of the avenue, right up to the Étoile, and there the actress said good-bye to them, and took a cab to her theatre. She had imagined that she would be seeing Damatov before very long, for he had promised to be at her lodgings when she returned from her performance, and to stay with her till he had to go to the station in the morning.

  “She stayed awake all night, but Damatov never came to her. In this London room, she beat the people away from her bedside with a gesture so that she could whisper in my ear, and she told me that as the hours had passed she had grown terrified, she found herself praying that he might have changed since their separation, into the sort of man capable of insulting a woman. In the morning she was at a loss to know what to do. Though he had told her he would have to leave Paris that morning, he hadn’t said where he was going, so she couldn’t go to any station and see whether he was leaving. But she hadn’t believed for one moment his story about buying the rights of a play, she had known he hadn’t expected her to believe it, that he was telling it as part of his terrorist drill. So, in the end, she went to consult a Russian medical student living in a hotel not far from hers, and when he heard what had happened he took her to an old revolutionary who was having a late breakfast in a near-by café. He had known Korolenko, he was sure too that there would be a terrorist reason for the presence of these particular three young men in Paris; and, thinking it over, he thought it probable that if Korolenko had taken his party up the Avenue Kléber it was with the intention of ending up at the Café Viborg in the Avenue de la Grande Armée, which is much frequented by our people. They hailed a taxi and went straight there, and had to look no farther. The proprietor told them that Korolenko and two young men unknown to him had come into the café early
on the previous evening, and a quarter of an hour later half a dozen police agents had driven up in a van and taken them away.

  “On hearing this, the actress assumed that her friend was doomed either to death or to many years of imprisonment, and, as you know, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, she would be right. The older man took her back to her lodgings and went to see somebody, but she didn’t know who it was. He came back after an hour and helped her pack her baggage and put her in the afternoon train for London, giving her the address of some London members, and telling her that he would telegraph them and they would meet her at Victoria. He said she was not to mind leaving Paris so suddenly and embarrassing her employers, for she must be removed from the sphere of the French police and the Russian Secret Police operating in Paris. She said that, as for that, she didn’t care, she only wanted to die. But then she was told that the three young men might have been going to London, and that their interception might mean danger to members of our movement there, and the brave woman had consented to make the journey. So there she was, in this London room, full of chattering and gesticulating people who seemed far more theatrical than she was, and she looked up at me and said that she had accomplished her mission, and she lived now only to find out whether Damatov was alive or dead. She said it very quietly. One would not have thought that an actress could speak with such little resonance. It was as if her voice had been taken out of her throat and beaten and put back. I did not doubt what she thought she would do if she found out that he was dead.

  “I had to do my duty, I had to inquire into all the circumstances as if I were a police officer. She had fallen back on the pillows and I made them give her some brandy, and then I asked her if she had had any impression during her walk through Paris with the three young men that they had been watched. No. Not exactly. But that there had been one little incident which she had noticed with distaste and could not forget, though she thought it impossible that it could have any bearing on what had happened. As they were drawing near the end of their walk and the Arc de Triomphe was well in sight, Korolenko’s cigarette went out, and Primar stopped to give him a light but found his match-box empty and called out to Damatov, who turned back and gave them his. While the three men were halted, the actress strolled slowly on, came to a stop, and stood smiling around her at nothing, as she put it, because it was all so delightful. Suddenly she realized that she had been smiling at something, or rather at someone. She had come to a standstill a few yards away from the doorway of one of the larger houses on the avenue, which was wide open, showing the vaulted entry to the courtyard. Unconsciously she had been smiling into the shadows of the entry, just where a man was standing. She couldn’t see him very well. There was a blank space of wall between the left-hand leaf of the door which had been folded back, and the entrance to the concierge’s lodge; and this man was in the thickest of the shadow. He wore spectacles, and he was holding a pair of gloves in front of his mouth and chin. She wouldn’t venture to say he was doing that to hide his face. It was something people did when they were sunk in thought. She could really see nothing of him except that he was of medium size, and she could not have sworn to anything about him. Yet she had a nagging impression that when she first caught sight of him he had already been staring out at her with the intensest interest.

  “For an instant she was terrified, and thought of running back to the three young men and saying to them, ‘There’s a man here watching us.’ But then the man in the shadows made a gesture of unmistakable meaning. It was as if he said to her, ‘Just wait for a minute, my dear, you’re just what I fancy, I’m coming out, or will you come in?’ She forgot everything in her indignation, and just then Damatov and the others caught up with her. The man in the entry shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands in a pantomime of dismay, spun around on his heel, and withdrew into the courtyard. Damatov just saw the tail-end of the movement, and said with not very great anger, ‘What’s this going on? If I’d the time I’d stop and give that Don Juan a black eye.’ That was how it had seemed to him, and how it had seemed to her, and she had some experience, for since she had come to Paris many men had spoken to her on the street. She still thought that might have been all that happened, for the gesture of invitation had been so truly vulgar, so deeply nasty in its lecherous bourgeois way, that it couldn’t have been feigned, except by a really great character actor. Yet she had to admit that when she first saw the man he seemed to be watching her with an intensity beyond that, and a selective intensity, which would not have been satisfied by the sight of anybody but herself and her companions.

  “When I heard this I couldn’t speak. I was sure that the man in the entry had been our scourge, our Judas, our false brother, the traitor who could betray the secrets he had never been told, because his experience was our experience, his past our past, his present our present. Of course he hadn’t had to follow his quarry. The actress had told us with some wonder how the old revolutionary had known from the mere fact that Korolenko had led the party up the Avenue Kléber that he meant to take them to the Café Viborg, but I had drawn the very same conclusion myself. ‘Ah,’ I’d said to myself, ‘he was going to take them up to see old Alaner at the Café Viborg.’ No doubt our traitor had told Korolenko to take them there. Then he’d only to stand in a doorway at the Avenue Kléber, which was right on the route they were bound to take, to make sure that his victims were on the way to the place where, as soon as he had time to make the necessary telephone call, the police would pick them up. Our traitor had the knowledge for that, and also the abominable intelligence to throw off the scent a woman whose sensitiveness had detected him, by an insulting trick which depended on her being virtuous.

  “I asked the actress, ‘Can you give us any idea of the whereabouts of the house? Was it on the right or the left of the Avenue? Was it as far up as the Rue Dumont-d’Urville just off the Avenue des Portugais?’ But she interrupted me by saying, ‘I can do better than that. I remember the number.’ It seemed that as she turned away in disgust from the door the small enamel number-plate on the wall had caught her eye, and she had noted the figures because they were three more than the year of the century in which she had been born.

  Perhaps because I was so tired by my long journey, and because I was so overcome with grief over the capture of these three young men, with whom I had been so recently, I passed at this moment into a state of light-mindedness. I didn’t listen to the number as she said it. I sat there, smiling, almost openly laughing, because it struck me as so ridiculously characteristic of an actress to remember a number because it was three more than the year in which she was born. Any of us might say, ‘Why, ’68 or ’69, or whatever it might be, that’s the year I was born,’ but to say, ‘ ’71, that’s three more than the year I was born,’ that takes the theatrical temperament, the innocent egotism of the player.

  “Then I suddenly heard the young man with the straight yellow hair, of whom I’ve already spoken, exclaim, ‘Why, that’s the number of the house where the Minister of Justice who was disgraced, the Count Diakonov, has an apartment. And it explains the whole thing. For there’s a Tsarist spy working in that household.’ I asked stupidly, ‘How should you, an Englishman, know that?’ He answered, ‘What do you mean? I’m not English, I’m Russian. You should know that, aren’t we talking Russian now? Very few Englishmen know any Russian and when they speak it you’d take it for Double Dutch. I’m a student at Oxford. I’m here only because my father’s one of the secretaries at our Embassy in Paris. It’s from my father’s papers that I know there’s a Tsarist spy working in Diakonov’s household.’ I thought he was talking nonsense. A revolutionary spy, but not a Tsarist spy. What an extraordinary idea, I told myself, and wondered how the confusion could have arisen; and I said coldly, ‘What grounds can you have for saying that?’ as I have often said before, when we older ones have had occasion to keep our younger comrades from spreading false rumours.

  “The young man said with what I realized afterwards was great good
nature, considering my tone, ‘I go home for my holidays to stay with my father in Paris. He knows nothing of my revolutionary sympathies and I see what I can see for the good of the cause. I can tell you for certain that there is a Tsarist spy in Diakonov’s household who sends to our Embassy in Paris the fullest reports of all his doings, and who photographs all his diaries and his letters. His diaries are pitiful, and show the Tsar in the worst light, and as they are all sent back to Petersburg, the old man is in great danger. The Tsar is eagerly looking for some excuse to recall him to Russia and lay some trumped-up charge against him, and then discredit him thoroughly by never bringing him to trial and abandoning the proceedings on the pretence of showing him mercy. It’s easy to see that my father, who is an honourable though unenlightened man, hates the whole business, which is indeed repulsive. There was one letter from Baron Roller, written from Vichy, in which he refused to come and see old Diakonov, though they’d been friends since childhood, because the Tsar had forbidden it, and that disgusted my father so much that when he read it he tore the copy across, and it had to go on its way to the Tsar, with a note from the secretary saying there’d been an accident. My father’s often quite bitter these days, and I’m sure it’s about this.’

  “I sat there, asking the actress questions which I knew didn’t matter, while it sank in: the knowledge that the Tsarist authorities were receiving precisely the same documents which were being regularly transmitted to us by our agent, Porfirio Ilyitch Berr. But when I tried to visualize a Tsarist spy and a revolutionary spy working side by side in your apartment I couldn’t believe it. We know, of course, how many rooms there are in your apartment and how many servants you have. You’ve greatly reduced your household. It could be said that you live more like a French or an English aristocrat than a Russian one. It seems most unlikely that in your comparatively modest household there should be two men, both having access to your papers and both taking advantage of their opportunities to remove those papers and photograph them surreptitiously, who didn’t sooner or later become aware of each other. But I knew Berr’s reports by heart, and I was sure he’d never expressed any suspicion that there was a police spy working beside him in your study. I could draw only one conclusion. There were not two spies in your household, but one. The spy who was working for us was also working for the police. It was he who had stood in the entry and looked out at Korolenko and Primar and Damatov; and if he knew enough to betray them, then he was the Judas who had long persecuted us. I remembered too the unpleasant impression Berr had made on the few people who had seen him. I said to the diplomat’s son, ‘Have you no idea who supplies your father with Diakonov’s papers?’ and he answered, ‘I don’t know the man’s name, he’s always referred to by a number, which I’ve forgotten. But he’s an agent who has worked for the police over a number of years, and again and again he has given them most valuable information.’”