by Rebecca West
“‘I wonder,’ he said, as if speaking to himself, ‘whether Berr has not become someone very different from what he was a year or two ago.’ He fell into a brown study, and I went back into my trance, astonished that Berr, who seemed to be as unambiguous as a tree, should be spoken of as if he were a warlock who could change his form. If I hadn’t met Berr that morning, I might have made some sense of the hinting half-sentences that Gorin was dropping, but as it was he might as well have tipped a basketful of mice on the floor.
There was activity of a sort going on, but it did not matter to me, it was just faintly, but not alarmingly, repulsive.
“At length, Gorin came over to me and said, ‘I must ask you a question,’ and my blood ran cold in my veins. I thought, ‘If only he doesn’t ask me whether I’ve told anybody else about this. That he mustn’t ask me.’ But he did. I answered as truthfully as if I had been Berr. Then he proceeded to give me just those instructions I had guessed he would, once he had heard that I had spoken of my discoveries to him and to him alone. It seemed the committee was meeting the next day, to discuss this very matter, and I could help him greatly. It seemed that two people in touch with the Diakonov household were leaving messages with two of our comrades that afternoon, and he would be much obliged if I would collect them and bring them to him. ‘We must have only the most reliable members concerned with this,’ he said, knitting his brows. From habit I felt pleased because he was taking me into his confidence.
“He explained to me who the comrades were and where I was to find them. One was a comrade of whom I’d never heard, a Russian who was accustomed to pay a visit every afternoon to his brother-in-law, a Frenchman who kept a pharmacy in the Rue St.-Philippe-du-Roule, near the Rond Point, for the purpose of picking up material left by various agents. I was to be there at three and leave if the comrade hadn’t arrived by four, and to go on to the other comrade, who was someone I knew quite well and had some reason to dislike, a doctor who lived on the other side of the river in the Rue de l’Université. I was to wait for Pyotr’s message there until seven but no later, for I had to go back to Gorin’s hotel, and then, he said gravely, I might yet have another mission to perform. ‘That is,’ said Gorin, laying his hands affectionately on my shoulders, ‘if you really feel fit for all this running-about. You’ve taken all this terribly to heart, haven’t you? I don’t blame you.’
“I said to him, ‘What have I ever minded doing for the cause and for you?’ My own words sent my mind running back through the years, and I reproached myself for the irrational love I had suddenly conceived for Berr, the stranger of whom I knew so little, while the proper object of my love stood beside me, the friend who had been for so long my brother but without the awkwardness that comes of kinship. All real brothers are Siamese twins, and inconvenience each other when they want to turn over. The association of separates—friendship—that is the real blessing. I held out my arms to him. But to my astonishment, he backed away, his mouth open, as if to call for help, his hands thrust out. He feared I was about to attack him. For a minute we stood staring at each other, then he relaxed, murmured, ‘My noble comrade,’ and kissed me on both cheeks. But the moment didn’t really come to an end.
“Yesterday, you remember, was a hot day. The Hôtel de Ville isn’t too close to the Rond Point, and I was quite glad that on my arrival at the pharmacy in the Rue St.-Philippe-du-Roule my man wasn’t there, and I could sit down and rest for an hour. It was a pleasant place, set in one of those districts embedded in Haussmannite Paris, which obstinately remain villages and are hardly modified by the metropolitan Paris all round them, and it was just such a pharmacy as you might find in Nevers or Yvetôt, with polished wooden counters, shining brass scales, porcelain jars with gold letters on them, and scrubbed floorboards, all in a style banished from the boulevards for many years. So far as this shop was concerned there might be no Art Nouveau today. The pharmacist, a stout middle-aged Gascon, gave me a handsome welcome, regretted that his wife had gone out and wasn’t there to entertain me, and said that his brother-in-law wasn’t expected, but might come in, and that I could wait for him either in the shop or in the sitting-room at the back. I chose the shop. There was a plump black cat sleeping in a circle on the counter, and a small mongrel dog, far too fat, trotting in and out, both testimonies to the good nature of the family. One customer went out as another came in, and always the pharmacist gave a kindly greeting, took trouble, sent salutations with his good-bye; and when the shop was empty for a minute or two he asked me civil questions through my dream and offered me in turn coffee, snuff, and a free sample of throat pastille. Searching for one customer’s requirements, he moved a panel behind the goods in his window, and a shaft of light shone into a dark part of the shop. The motes of dust were dancing in it, which, I thought, looked beautiful and reminded me of Lucretius. But the pharmacist was distressed. He said he was glad his wife wasn’t there to see it, she worked so hard to keep the place clean, but in Paris, struggle as one might, one had to live in dust.
“The brother-in-law didn’t come. I hadn’t thought he would. Many of our women comrades keep good homes, but they wouldn’t keep on talking about the dust, it isn’t the sort of thing that really distresses them. Also there was no trace of the anxiety which is the hall-mark of our kind. I was sorry to leave the pharmacy and go on to the Rue de l’Université, for both the doctor who lived there and his wife belonged to the one class of comrade which I cannot endure. He was the son of the stationmaster in a small town near Riga, and as a child he had shown such unusual intelligence that the local landowner had put him through school to the university. But he was without charm, and the landowner dropped him as soon as he’d got the boy qualified. You know what the Baltic nobility are like, they lack even the superficial virtues which we Russians of the same class possess, and probably this landowner showed his disenchantment brutally. It was always my impression that the doctor had joined the revolutionary movement not out of true selfless love for the people, but out of a desire to revenge on the landowning class the disappointment he’d felt at the withdrawal of this landowner’s patronage. Yet he was embarrassingly pleased when the movement brought him into contact with people like myself who are of aristocratic birth. So I never felt comfortable with either the doctor or his wife, who was of the same type, the daughter of a German shopkeeper in another small Baltic town; and I was aware that this uneasiness was noticed by both of them and that they suspected me of despising them for their birth and, by implication, of not being a sincere revolutionary. This made my manner towards them quite unnatural, for I wanted to show them that they were mistaken in thinking that I despised them, though in fact I did.
“But when I got to their apartment I was most cordially received. The doctor was out and no message had been left, but his wife warmly invited me to come in and wait, and she took me into her salon and gave me tea and cakes. Though Gorin had said he would not telephone her and I must take my chance, the vulgarly furnished room was extremely tidy, as if she had expected visitors. It was as if I were a little boy again and my father had taken me to call on some shopkeeper or functionary in one of the towns on our estate. My simple heart used to swell at the kindness with which these people laid their best before us, though as I grew older I saw that the relationship between our family and these people was tainted through and through by the poison of our inequality, and what I had accepted as a heartfelt welcome was nothing but an attempt of servility to buy its own ends. My hostess pressed food and drink on me, and she made small talk, but the thought of Berr was strong in my mind. The flowers growing round his hut, which I had trodden on when I looked in at him through the window, were of a clear bright blue, which hadn’t interested me at all at the time, but now it delighted me to recall their colour, and when I forced myself to attend to what the woman was saying, it was just as it had been when I had tried to listen to Gorin, I became sleepy, I stammered, I even yawned.
“My drowsiness lay so heavy on me that she c
ouldn’t help but notice it, and she asked me if I wouldn’t like to lie down on the sofa. I said I’d be glad to, as I’d been travelling and was tired out. When I’d lain down she brought me a pillow and a rug and assured me that I could rest with an easy mind, for she’d be sitting in the next room, which was divided from the salon only by an arch hung by portières, and nobody could come in without her knowledge.
“I contemplated the character of Berr, which I saw as erect and suffused with light, and which changed as sleep fell on me into the likeness of a tree, a poplar, receiving and storing the sunshine in its leaves. But I was dragged back to wakefulness. A clock was chiming. I stirred and sat up, and immediately the portières, which were of a material which imitated brocade but looked worthless even to me, jerked apart, and the doctor’s wife looked down at me with a panic-stricken expression, replaced without delay by a smile which showed her gums. She told me that it was only half past five and begged me to sleep on, since I was so tired, assuring me that she’d wake me the minute her husband got back. I sighed as if I were still weary, and indeed I was, but for some time after she had gone I couldn’t sleep, remembering the look on her face when she had first parted the portières. She had been asked to detain me for some hours. Why had Gorin done that? He wanted time. Time for what? Time to set in motion some hostile plot against me. Why should he want to prepare such an act? Because my discovery that Berr isn’t the spy in the Diakonov household and that Kamensky probably is may be supremely inconvenient to him. I didn’t let myself ask any more questions, I clung to the image of Berr. I slept and dreamed deliciously.
“But again I was dragged back to the surface, this time by a memory. I saw Gorin as he had been when he had considered my reasons for my belief that the Tsarist and the revolutionary spy were one spy. I saw him with his arms folded, leaning against the window-ledge, and looking down on his small feet in their shining and well-fitting black shoes. I smiled at the remembrance of Gorin’s shoes, they had always amused me, they were smooth and bright as a seal’s fins, they might have been part of his body. Then it struck me that my father had worn shoes like that, shoes which reflect the light and closely follow the line of the foot, and that I’d worn such shoes too, in the days when I was an idle and now I bent down and picked them up and looked at their scaled and greyish surface, the deep creases in them, the worn heels. They didn’t often get a proper cleaning and they cost very little to begin with. It came into my head that I’d only Gorin’s word for it that the proprietress of the pension at Montreux was a sympathizer and gave him his luxurious rooms at a reduced rate.
“Again I brought my mind to a stop and fell asleep, but not for long. I had to go on admitting to myself what I knew. If Gorin had wanted to keep me out of the way for some hours in order that he might prepare a plot against me, he had sent me to the two best places I could imagine. Nearly all our members in Paris knew and respected me, and if Gorin had asked them to detain me, their astonishment would have been so great that he would have had to invent an explanation which would bear subsequent discussion before our committee. But if the pharmacist’s brother-in-law had nothing whatsoever to do with our movement and was simply a parasitic young man. But the shoes I wore now were not at all like that. I had taken them off before I lay down on the sofa, and Russian living in Paris for business reasons, who had run into Gorin casually, perhaps at a café, my visit to the shop in the Rue St.-Philippe-du-Roule would simply mean that one Russian had another Russian to see him, in our gregarious way. As for the doctor, anything he could do against me would count as an instalment of his revenge against the Baltic landowner. I wondered if I might not be doing the best for myself if I got up and went at once. But I decided to get a little more sleep. It was odd how I could command it.
“I woke with a start and found the doctor’s wife holding apart the portières with an expression which indicated no anxiety but much relief. In the room behind her the clock was striking half past six, but this time she didn’t urge me to go on resting. I rose and thanked her for her hospitality, at which she smiled to herself, in a way which would have been unworthy, no matter how well justified she might have been in acting as a decoy. Her baseness shamed me as much as if I myself were guilty of it, and I became conscious of my crumpled clothes and my uncombed hair. I went up to a long mirror on the wall and tried to improve my appearance, smoothing my hair with my hands, and she came and stood beside me. Our eyes met in the mirror, and we were both embarrassed, as if our relationship were pushed to a further degree of indelicacy by the presence of our reflections side by side within the mirror-frame. I turned away, appalled because I should have become involved in a situation which obliged me to think badly of Gorin when I was in the company of this despicable woman. I still honoured him too highly for that to be tolerable. With a burst of foolish, apologetic laughter, which she echoed, I took my leave.
“When I got into the street, I automatically looked around to see if any spy was waiting for me, according to our routine, and indeed there was a tall young man, very pale, lounging in a doorway opposite, whom I had seen before. On my way from the Rue St-Philippe-du-Roule to the Rue de l’Université, I’d crossed the Seine by the Pont Alexandre Trois, that bridge which the French, who certainly love liberty, have so strangely chosen to name after one of our Russian tyrants. Half-way over it, I stopped to take off my hat and let the river breeze play about my head and rest my eyes by looking down on the water. This same tall young man had been leaning against the parapet ten yards away, his body taut as if he were an archer bending his bow. I’d seen him then. I was seeing him now. I was going to see him later. I went along the Rue Jacob to the Boul’ Mich’, and while I was ordering a cup of coffee the tall young man brushed past me, his face averted, and sat down at the table behind me.
“After a few minutes I put a cigarette between my lips, pretended to search my pockets, stood up, looked round, and bent over him, asking for a light in the peculiar manner of the French. You must have noticed how oddly they do it. Though they’re a ceremonious people, and commonly apologize when they have to accost strangers, they simply lean towards the man who has a lit cigarette, say tersely ‘Du feu,’ and when the cigarette is alight, turn away without a smile or a word of thanks. It’s solemn, as if the rite of some forgotten religion had fused with the mechanism by which a contemporary need is satisfied. ‘Du feu,’ I said to the boy who was staring up at me. The whites of his eyes were bluish, as they are in people who are very young and have never abused their youth by dissipation. He drew back his head and his nostrils dilated. He had the noble look of a young stag. His dark eyes wide open, he took his cigarette out of his mouth, and held it out to me, supporting his elbow on the table. I steadied my fingers against his, and his hands recoiled just as his head had done, but he forced himself to endure the loathed contact. His whole body was trembling with the force of his pure aversion, his exalted reaction to some lie he had believed out of sanctity. As I breathed the light from his cigarette into mine, I knew quite well that he wasn’t a police agent, he was one of our marvellous incorruptible young men. I was being spied on by my own Party.
“I sat down again and drank my coffee and stared at the passing crowds. I knew that I must not go back to see Gorin. Something would happen which would convince other people of something about me which was not true. I heard again Gorin’s voice as he had asked me whether I had told anybody else of my discovery about Berr. I heard, which was worse, his murmured remark, ‘I must put an end to all this,’ and the nervous little laugh which had followed when he realized he’d spoken aloud. I tried to guess the exact form in which Gorin would put an end to ‘all this,’ which meant me. Possibly a crime had already been committed for which I could be handed over to the police, but I didn’t think so. The police couldn’t be trusted to deal with me finally. I had an idea that some time during the night, in one of the darker streets, I’d find myself confronted by this young man who’d just given me a light, and he’d have a revolver in his h
and. His burning purity would be at the command of anybody who spoke to him in the name of the people, even if obedience meant his own destruction, and it would. He’d never get away, and he’d die for killing a friend of the people at the command of an enemy of the people, and that was why I felt sure it would be he who’d do it. He’d something one might almost call beautiful about him, though that’s a strange word to apply to a man, something which I’ve learned to recognize in the course of my years in the revolutionary movement. It’s the moral counterpart of the consumptive’s flush, it’s the sign of those whose sacrifices are going to be premature, fevered, and useless.