The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  He guffawed, and Chubinov tried to laugh too.

  “But Grandmother’s far more ill than you realize, you can’t go back to Russia,” Laura went on saying, but neither of them heard her.

  “Already, at this moment, you can be sure,” Nikolai went on, “the startling news of your treachery has reached your fellow-members, not only in Paris, where by your own account they’re all loading their revolvers to take a pot-shot at you, but in St. Petersburg and in Moscow and everywhere else where your pestilential co-conspirators poison the air with their stench. By this time, you’ve no more chance of defending yourself than Judas if he came before a church synod. You lamentable ass, you’re already dead. In a few days some dupe no brighter than yourself or me will be taken to some villa which has been burgled by Kamensky and he’ll be shown your body hanging from a meat-hook in the kitchen ceiling, and listen gaping to some tale about how you handed over three innocent boys to the Cheka, long live the Revolution.”

  “You put it odiously, but you are right,” breathed Chubinov. “But how well it has all been planned. It is, isn’t it, in a sort of abhorrent way?”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Laura. “If you do something so awful that nobody could imagine you doing it, then nobody’s going to work out ways of stopping you.” But again neither of them heard her. They were sitting in a fog of solemnity, though surely what they had found out should have made them angry instead of impressing them. Were men perhaps no good? Even when things were still going well at home, she had suspected that though her mother loved her father she did not feel an all-out respect for him. Often Tania talked of her husband and her father as if they were magnificent horses, probably marred, though she was not yet certain, by some incurable fault, like a tendency to take off too soon before a fence. As for her grandmother, conflicting ideas about men were always passing through her head. Her manner to Nikolai was submissive, it proclaimed her readiness to obey him in all circumstances, but hardly concealed her lack of conviction that this would serve any useful purpose. One could see even more clearly how odd her feelings were when she was dealing with men servants and was more detached. She ordered them about imperiously, but always with a reservation, as if admitting that though here on earth she had the upper hand, there was another world of immaterial values, where superiority would be accorded to them simply because they were male. Nevertheless, when she spoke to them, her mouth was vigilant. She checked whether they had carried out her orders; she always entrusted any task demanding conscientiousness and reticence to her women servants, and not to the men; but she liked to have men servants about her, standing about the place, as if they brought good luck. She did not approve of that other world which accorded men a supreme value, but evidently she thought it might exist.

  Nikolai and Chubinov were behaving as women never would dare to behave. Laura could not imagine any woman saying that she and her friends had never contemplated murdering the Governor of somewhere and searching the distance for the cause of this exceptional abstinence, with a gentle, misted eye, as if speculating on the whereabouts of a lost umbrella. It would have been funny if the missing object had not been a murder; and what was infuriating was that the two were now suffering agonies of self-pity because it had not paid to treat murders as of no more consequence than umbrellas. What was the point of all these corpses, even leaving out that they were horrible? They could just as well have hung a dummy from that meat-hook in the kitchen of the villa on the Peterhof Road, and agreed that one side would say it was Valentine, and the other that it was Kamensky’s brother. They never need have started this stupid game, and they could have stopped it at any moment they chose.

  She was vexed at that moment, quite unaccountably, by a memory of Susie Staunton, standing before the tall cheval glass in the visitor’s room, her narrow body narrowed by her narrow dressing-gown, her extravagant fortune of pale golden hair falling broad about her shoulders, and that look of hopeless hungering after plenty making a shadowed triangle of her face. It had all been nonsense, it turned out afterwards. Someone who came to luncheon, a man from the Foreign Office who had never been made an Ambassador because there was something funny about him, had known her family well, and he dropped the information that she was quite rich, and that not even at second hand, but in her own light. A cousin of her father, who drew the ground-rents from acres in an industrial Midland town, had died after her two sons, her only children and unmarried, had been killed in the Boer War, and a mention of Susie in her will as a residuary legatee, intended as a mere expression of good will, had brought her a great inheritance. Mr. Staunton was in the Caribbean not to eke out a livelihood, but to develop a property which looked like a staggering long-term investment. Few people had yet heard of her new wealth, her friend had said, for she carried it without ostentation.

  But that was silly. For Susie was ostentation itself in her pretence that she had no money at all. She always drew her gloves on and off with humble, smiling carefulness, as if, though she would never utter a word of complaint, they were the last pair she would be able to afford for a long time. What was the point of that perpetual fraud? What did she gain by it, why did she not settle down to spending her huge income joyously? And it was as strange that she always looked as if she must ache with pain, would have to go away, would perhaps die, if someone did not say certain kind words to her, enfold her against a winter which seemed to continue all the year round for her, even when it was summer. But people liked her, and surely she could have got happiness as other people did out of family and friends. Perhaps she secretly did. For the spectacle of bruised fragility which she presented did not cause any of the distress which normally comes from contact with pain, which had made it so heart-rending to be with Tania for the last year or so. Nobody ever looked less like a man than Susie; yet she was like a man. She could have stopped playing whatever game it was she was playing any moment she chose. Was it strange that she should think of Susie at this moment when such horrors were being discussed? No, Susie fitted in here.

  But Chubinov was saying, with an air of astonishment: “But there’s something you don’t see. So I’m forced, absolutely forced, to commit alone and without the approval of a single human being the act I’ve always dreaded. I’ve been in the movement so long without having to do it. I hoped I’d escape the necessity for ever, but hope is the angel without wings. I’ll have to do it. I’m in for it.”

  “What does he mean? Grandfather, what does he mean?”

  “I won’t trouble to ask. What is it that he and his friends do, instead of reading Greek and Latin in their libraries, managing their estates or following their professions, raising God-fearing and solvent children, attending church or shooting boar? He will be doing that other thing, we can be sure. Let’s avert our minds from the spectacle. And the train is stopping. Let us get out of this accursed carriage, this moving Golgotha, this rolling-stock abode of skulls.” He rose and stood rocking on his feet.

  “Please, please,” said Laura, “let’s stay in the train and go on to Aunt Florence’s. Think, you can’t rush off to Petersburg when Grandmamma’s just gone into a clinic.”

  A wordless roar came out of Nikolai’s throat. He lurched towards the door into the corridor and stretched out his arms towards the handle, but his body had suddenly suffered a stony change. He could not bend his elbows, he was beating out with his hands as if he could not move his fingers, and he continued to rock from one side to another, as if he were a statue propped up, though the train was slowing down. His face looked as if he would never break silence again. He was simply a huge oblong inflexible shape within his flexible clothes. Laura thought that they were saved, he would not be able to open the door into the compartment, they would have to stay in the train till they got to Mûres-sur-Mer and the strength of Pyotr. But a number of passengers had gathered in the corridors, their baggage in their hands, ready to get out at the station, and one of these, a spectacled elderly woman, turned a kind face towards the compartment window
, saw the old man flailing his arms and hastened to open the door, with a smile of such good will that Laura had to smile back through her anguish. Out in the corridor they were surrounded by upturned apprehensive faces, fearful lest the staggering old man, a head taller than any of them, should fall this way or that. She looked over her shoulder and saw that Chubinov was still in the compartment. She called, “Come quickly, help me with Grandfather.”

  He joined her and, with unexpected competence, slid an arm under Nikolai’s shoulder and braced him firmly. “Why has my grandfather changed so suddenly?” she asked, not expecting an answer. “Look at him.”

  The train had slid under the glazed roof of the station and come to a stop. They drew the old man back against the compartment door, to let the able-bodied hurry by. When the last passenger had gone, Nikolai lurched back into the corridor and rolled along it, falling first against one side and then ricocheting on to the other, like one of those Russian dolls with weights in their base which always swing upright. “God forgive me, I had forgotten how old he is,” said Chubinov, staring after him. “It’s terrible he should have had this shock.”

  “Go and help him then, you gave him the shock,” she said, and went back into the compartment to pick up her trinket-box and his case. The other two were at the top of the steps when she reached them, and the attendant was saying, “But we’ll never get him down to the platform,” and Chubinov was explaining, “But I’m stronger than you might think. I worked hard at gymnastics in my youth because of this same old man. I must tell you—”

  “He doesn’t want to know,” said Laura. “Tell me later. Get down on the platform.” People were waiting at the bottom of the steps to get on the train, and she looked down on a circle of upturned and exasperated faces, some of them old and tired. She said loudly to them, “You must forgive us,” and added, “my grandfather has been taken ill on the train.” But that was not what she had meant at first. She had felt ashamed. If these two men had not spent their lives playing this cruel and stupid game they would not be getting in the way of people without half the advantages they had had. She pulled down Chubinov after her to the platform and put down the two cases, and they both stood with their arms spread out, ready to catch Nikolai. The attendant shoved Nikolai down on them, and he heeled over on top of them, his weight covering them like a thick cloak. They reeled under it and just managed to keep their balance while he got his, the people pushing past them and blinding them with their haste. When the three of them were standing clear Nikolai stood sawing the air with his arms and uttering an angry cry. For an instant she lost her Russian and asked stupidly, “What’s he want? What’s he want?”

  “His case,” said Chubinov. “Just hold it up and show it to him. He seems not able to see it. Considering the world he’s lived in it’s not unnatural that he should have developed an excessive attachment to material possessions. Now we can start. You take one arm, I’ll take the other, and I can manage his case. We’ll look for a bench and make him comfortable, and then I’ll inquire about the trains to Paris, a slow train for me, an express for you. I think he’ll be able to get on the train. This business has been a great shock to both of us. Try to behave so that nobody will notice us. That’s an important part of our revolutionary technique. People do not remember one afterwards.”

  Poor creature, what nonsense he talked. It was quite a big station. There was no barrier, they had come in at the main platform, and passengers leaving the train gave up their tickets when they left the station; and everybody was staring at them. They must have looked very odd indeed: a huge old man with disordered white-and-gold hair and elegant clothes, staggering along between a silly-looking man wearing in midsummer a winter overcoat like a lunatic’s dressing-gown, and a young girl with hair of the colour which made people gape anyway. “Oh, we’ll be remembered all right, Chubinov is a funny too,” she thought, shaking her hair straight, as her grandfather had knocked it askew with a windmill gesture. But Chubinov was more efficient than she had expected. He found a bench for them against the sooty wall between the entrances to the ticket-office and the waiting-room, and after lowering Nikolai down into a huddled and twisted sort of comfort, he went away, making a gesture which frightened her. He might have been bidding her good-bye. She was surprised to find how much she would prefer that he came back. She wet her lips and tried to laugh. Awful people in England said they were going to see a man about a dog when they wanted to have a drink, she supposed Chubinov’s friends would say in like circumstances that they had gone to see a man about a bomb. How odd that this whole episode wasn’t a joke, like the executions in The Rose and the Ring, like the Queen of Spades’ “Off with their heads!” in Alice in Wonderland. How odd it was that this man really had killed, not with his own hands, but, worse still, by planning the killing. She should not be wishing that he would come back.

  But he was leaning kindly over her, and had brought a porter with him. “I’m sorry, Miss Laura, my slow train leaves before your express, indeed it’s starting quite soon. But this man will take you and the case to the Paris express when it comes in at half past two, and he’ll bring another man with him, a strong man, to get Nikolai Nikolaievitch into the carriage. I’ve chosen him,” he explained, raising a didactic forefinger, “because he has silver hair and grey eyes and a bronze skin, it would be interesting to know what stock he comes from, I hope you will read the anthropological works of the brothers Reclus some day, they are anarchists and therefore politically futile, but their scientific ideas have a bearing on the new society. Because he has silver hair and grey eyes and a bronze skin, you will be able to pick him out from the other porters. If you are looking for someone, and he’s also looking for you, and you memorize his characteristics, you can join up with him and excite only the minimum interest during your search. Keep that in mind. You must do everything to prevent people from remembering you.” With a vaguely conspiratorial gesture he dismissed the porter, who had been so interested in the queer group of foreigners that he walked away backwards, unable to take his eyes off them.

  Chubinov bent over Nikolai and sighed. “He’s fallen asleep. Let’s not disturb him. If one had come on Oedipus sleeping in the grove at Colonus one would have let him sleep.” Straightening himself, he went on. “If one had been a pious Greek one might have insulted Oedipus and tortured him to death as an outcast condemned by the gods, and if one had been a rationalist Greek one might have insulted him and abandoned him for his surrender to gross superstition, but whichever side one had been on, one couldn’t have been cruel enough to waken him out of his sleep. What a dreadful thought! The one mercy we feel we must show our fellow-men is to allow them such moments of unconsciousness that they attain. That can mean only one thing, that we live in a state of despair. Yet, of course, one despairs of life only because one lives under a tyranny. But perhaps I’m feeling specially acute despair now because I have lost Gorin. Ah, Gorin, Gorin. Also there is this repugnant action I have to perform, this duty I must fulfil regarding you. Miss Laura,” he said, suddenly recovering his air of sense, “have you really got plenty of money?” She gave him all the francs Tania had put in her handbag, and he left her, again with this gesture which might have been farewell. That puzzled her, frightened her. She called him back, “Why do you look at me and half wave your hand, as if you were going off for good?”

  “Well, anything might happen now,” he said vaguely.

  It was just one of his ideas. There would be nothing in it. She wished that her grandfather had not fallen asleep, his closed eyes were so like the eyes of a statue. But as she looked at him, anxious lest this change in him should mean more than itself, he opened his eyes and lifted his clouded topaz gaze to the great clock hanging above the platform. It seemed to give his mind a place to rest. Now and then his pale lips parted in his white and yellow beard when the minute hand swung, and closed when it swung again. It was as if he had asked a question and the clock had answered it. There was no use worrying him. The clock was n
ursing him. Laura let herself be distracted by a natural comedian, a woman with a foolish round face surmounted by a pork-pie hat and an unfortunate figure, narrow above the waist and broad below, and pulled to left and right by the weight of the two heavy hold-alls swinging from either arm. She went circling below the clock in little steps and casting anxious glances up at it until she reached the spot exactly beneath it. There she became serene and dumped down the hold-alls.

  “How lovely,” thought Laura, “somebody has promised to meet her under the clock, so she has to see to it that she really is under the clock, right under the clock. She must be a nice funny.”

  Chubinov was beside her again. “Look,” he said, “in this envelope are your tickets back to Paris, and the right amount of money for the two porters’ tips here, and for the other two you’ll need at the Gare du Nord. And here’s the rest of the money. An astonishing amount. It is surprising, it is even shocking, that your parents should have given you so much for the journey. Force yourself, I beg, to think sometimes of the suffering of the poor.”