The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  “I hear of the suffering of the poor from morning till night,” said Laura. “You can’t know my grandmother very well if you don’t know that she worries about the poor all the time, and my father’s people are Irish Low Church, and they’re nervously charitable, because of being the ascendancy, and ashamed of it. Indeed, if you’re reckoning up the sufferings of the poor, you might take into account that they must be sick of the sight of our family. It’s a funny thing, Mr. Chubinov, but you never, ever say anything that isn’t wide of the mark.” It was the first time that she had ever been rude without restraint to a grown-up person. She found great pleasure in it, but was instantly ashamed. She said, “I’m sorry, I got nervous because I was afraid you weren’t coming back. I’m really most grateful to you. You’re a murderer, but you’re very kind.”

  “I am not yet a murderer,” he said pedantically, “and I am not specially kind,” and sat down beside her, lifting the tails of his overcoat, evidently obeying an injunction given him long ago regarding some other garment, for this one would have looked no better uncrumpled. “I perhaps don’t have an accurate impression of your circumstances,” he said, “because I am dealing with you as I would deal with my two sisters, who are the only girls of your age I’ve ever known, and they would certainly have felt utterly lost in your situation. I suppose you’re more or less in the same case. I don’t suppose you go out by yourself in London.”

  “There you’re wrong,” she said. “I took myself to school all the last year before I left and now I take classes, and I go to them alone if Tania doesn’t want to come too. But she nearly always does. She says it keeps her mind off things, learning new subjects.” She looked up at him defensively. “Off things,” she explained, “like housekeeping worries, you know. We’re very modern. My father’s elder sister was one of the first women to go to Girton.” She was hardly thinking of what she was telling him. The way things had gone wrong at the house in Radnage Square was a smart behind her eyes, a lump in her throat.

  He was as abstracted. “I’m glad to hear it. Only by education will the world be saved,” he murmured absently, and then snapped out in his distress: “I’m not thinking of what I’m saying. I’m failing my moment. I’m not getting to the point. This journey has been a horrible shock to me. Not that I haven’t been on a number of railway journeys which were the very reverse of agreeable, but those were also glorious. You see, I often accompanied my wife when she was carrying dynamite to groups in other cities who had not the facilities for manufacturing it, and it can never be pleasant to transport dynamite. It has to be carried under one’s clothing, in case one’s baggage is searched, and when it’s warm it gives off exhalations which are quite unwholesome, causing sickness and headache. And if the train’s not heated, then, of course, one’s on tenterhooks, for when the surface gets chilled and then is brought into the warmth, well, then, chemical changes occur, and there’s a risk of an explosion. But none of these inconveniences troubled us, for we were doing what was right, we were obeying the demands of idealism, and there could be no taint of wrong in it, for we were running the risk of sacrificing our own lives. So we could bear anything.

  “But now I’m suffering. As I’ve never suffered before. I realize that I’m a weak man, for it makes a great difference that I’m now alone, I haven’t my dear wife with me. I even find myself thinking on a deplorably low level, a personal level. I find myself imagining that the worst crime of Gorin is not his betrayal of the sacred idea of revolution and the slaughter or imprisonment of many of our most splendid comrades, but the frustration of my sainted wife’s unremitting labours. Which were what killed her. The doctors said she had contracted the tuberculosis of which she died because she worked so hard, and often in unsanitary improvised laboratories, but I think what made her succumb to it was her many disappointments. For some of her most earnest efforts came to nothing.”

  “You mean nobody got killed?”

  “Nobody. Not on the occasions I am thinking of. On others, yes. But not on these. And now I know why. Gorin. We always worked with him. I find myself thinking so bitterly of that, to the exclusion of other and more fundamental issues. That shows what a weak man I am, and now I can’t escape the obligation to act as if I were strong. I’ve every conceivable handicap. I’m weak, I’m unpractical, I’m unobservant, and though I’ve taught myself to observe certain routines I’m apt to become abstracted at the wrong moment. But all the same, I’ve got to kill Gorin.”

  “To kill Gorin? To kill Kamensky?” she repeated incredulously. She felt sick. “Oh, you can’t mean it! Not another murder, on top of all the rest? You’re mad, I tell you, you’re completely mad.” She turned in her seat and looked him full in the face to bully him the better. But he was such a poor thing she was silenced. The veins in his hollow temples recalled to her some straggling violets in a hand-shaped vase of translucent white china Tania had once put on the drawing-room window-ledge one winter’s day. Beyond the glass there had been a grey sky, bare trees, ridges of discoloured snow on the lawn, and birds hopping avidly on the stone flags of the terrace, pecking the tea-time crumbs out of the cracks. His beard was so scanty, his eyebrows so scruffy: feathers on a small ailing bird. “You mustn’t keep pets,” a nameless voice said out of some other occasion of the past, “if you aren’t prepared to look after them.” It was a pity nobody had ever said that to God. She wanted to tell Chubinov what could not possibly be said: “You mustn’t commit a murder. You’ll be hanged. You’re not good-looking enough, people simply won’t care. They’re brutes.”

  For the sake of saying something, and because the birds had put it into her mind, she asked, “Aren’t you hungry? Go and get something to eat before you start. Those biscuits I gave you in the train were all I had.” He put a hand into the pocket of the awful overcoat and took out a biscuit of his own. “Oh, you can’t eat that,” she said, “it’s got thread all over it.”

  He murmured absently, “I’ll rub it off,” did so ineffectually with his dirty gloves, and lifted the biscuit to his lips again.

  “Oh, please,” she begged, “go to the buffet, get something solid, you really need it, and my grandfather’s sound asleep, we’ll be all right till you come back.”

  He shook his head. “Please don’t worry about me. I’ve two or three more biscuits in my pocket. It’s enough.”

  He had nothing, nothing, least of all good luck. He wouldn’t get away. For one thing, that overcoat would make him a sitting duck. “That overcoat!” she muttered wretchedly.

  “My overcoat?” he asked, smiling. “Then you have noticed my overcoat?”

  She had not known she had said the words aloud. She brazened it out. “I wondered if it came from Russia.”

  “No,” he said, his eyes brightening. “It is, as you have noticed, something special, but it didn’t come from Russia, it was made by the wife of a comrade in Switzerland. An excellent woman. She trained as a dentist in Germany, hoping to use her skill among our peasants, but was chased out of Russia by your grandfather’s police. So now she has set up a tailoring business in Vevey.”

  A dentist. How Tania would laugh at that. The woman obviously made the clothes with forceps and a drill, and put her customers under gas as soon as they got into the shop and clad them in her monstrosities and took the money out of their wallets while they were still unconscious. Chubinov was now on his second biscuit, which looked worse than the first. She said, smiling, with tears in her eyes, “Please, Monsieur Chubinov, don’t think any more about killing Gorin. Don’t go back to Paris. Take a train in the other direction, get on a Channel steamer, and hide in London.”

  “Why, you brave, kind Russian girl,” he said smiling, “I really think you mind what happens to me. But there’s something you haven’t realized. I’m rather surprised that you haven’t, but then an English upbringing is not suitable preparation for all this. Don’t you see that I have to kill Gorin for your sake? Don’t you understand that, without meaning to, I’ve put you in a posi
tion of the gravest danger? I didn’t know you’d be travelling with your grandfather. Your mother didn’t say so on the telephone, and I didn’t consider it possible. I’d so many things to think of, and my heart was broken by what I’d just found out about Gorin, and it never even crossed my mind that a young lady like you would be allowed to go a long railway journey alone with an old man. I tell you, I took it for granted you’d be as helpless as my sisters were at your age. Then when I saw you with Nikolai Nikolaievitch at the Gare du Nord I couldn’t stop what I was doing. I’d gone too far, and I was sick and dizzy, because there was no Kamensky and that meant that he was Gorin. And anyway, never for one moment did I think that Nikolai Nikolaievitch would insist on leaving the train here and going back to Paris. I thought he’d continue his journey to Mûres-sur-Mer and deal with the issues we’d raised from there, in something like safety. You do see, don’t you, that nothing, absolutely nothing has happened as I expected? But reproach me as much as you like. For there it is, it happened. Gorin must have taken the precaution of posting a watch at the Gare du Nord. It would be inevitable, according to our technique. So now he knows that I travelled with both of you, and he cannot fail to guess what we talked about.”

  “Well?” Then a sword struck at her. “You mean,” she said, “that Kamensky will want to kill my grandfather and me because we know he’s Gorin?” At his nod she learned how mistaken she had been when, from time to time in the past, she had believed that she was frightened. Fear was what she knew now, and she had never felt it before. It was chiefly a sliding of her bowels and a blackness before her eyes. Unseeing, she turned towards her grandfather and laid her hand on his knee, and wondered at the thinness of the layer of flesh above the bone, and wondered again because through the scant flesh there flowed a slight movement, as slight as movement can be. She raised her hand and put it into the gap in his overcoat over his chest, and pressed her fingers against the fine linen of his shirt, under his beard. It was the steady rhythm of a sleeper’s breath that made his chest rise and sink, but also there was running through him this delicate tremor, more pervasive and wayward than a pulse, a signal made by some excitement of the body, never likely to be expressed in the grossness of word or gesture. She said, “But my grandfather too?”

  “Yes. He too. But his time is nearly come. It’s you that must not be killed.”

  Long ago, in some house curtained against the heat of a summer afternoon, she had woken in a darkened bedroom beside a bed where a figure lay swaddled in sleep, had dropped from the sheer height of the bed, reached up to the doorhandle, gone out on the landing and peered between the banisters down on a silent hall, with its doors ajar on silent rooms. A red admiral was fluttering and alighting and soaring through the shafts of sunlight and the alcoves of shadow, out of the silent hall into the silent rooms and back again, the one small fragile living thing. Her hand on her grandfather’s, she cried to Chubinov, almost with laughter, “I’ll get out of this.”

  “My brave Russian girl,” said Chubinov, sadly. “We’ll work together. As I told you, I’ll get out of the train at a suburban station outside Paris and then I’ll make my way to my hotel near Les Halles. I’ll stay in my room for thirty-six hours so that they’ll think I’m not in Paris. I think they’ll rely on my being very helpless without Gorin. I’ll spend the time piecing together what I know of Gorin’s habits so that I can make plans for waylaying him. Then I’ll go out and shoot him. That will be easy. Your grandfather really made a fine revolver shot out of me. Then I’ll try to get away. That won’t be so easy. I really will be helpless without Gorin then. And I will not take too much trouble to save myself. My lifelong friend will kill me after I’ve killed him, and I won’t care, for I love him too much to want to live after I have been his executioner.”

  “It’s disgusting of you to kill him, but it’s just as disgusting for you to love him after you know how horrible he is.”

  He paid no attention. “Now, as for you. You should hurry back to London, of course. Or take your grandfather to rest at a hotel in the town. But he has made up his mind to return to Paris, and that’s what you’ll find yourself doing. He’s got more will than is usually possessed by individuals, he moves as irresistibly as a species, as the wild geese flying south in autumn or the deer on the tundras seeking the summer pastures. It will be the same even if he is quite ill and his mind is affected. His will never had much to do with his mind. So you’ll find yourself rashly, dangerously back at the Avenue Kléber. Now listen to what you must do.”

  He put his arm round her and drew her close so that he could speak softly. Little pellets of advice were thrown at her, another and another. She was to tell her mother everything the moment she saw her. No matter how worried Tania Nikolaievna was about Sofia Andreievna, she must learn everything, everything, about Kamensky. Of course her grandfather must be stopped from starting for Russia. He would not get to Berlin alive, perhaps not even to the station. Nobody must go out of the apartment, nobody must be allowed in. “You see,” he whispered, sounding as a ghost telephoning from the grave, “one can never tell for certain who anybody is.” Then if everything went well, they would hear of Kamensky’s death; either it would be in the newspapers or they would get a letter from him saying he had done it. Then they need worry no more. “But if Kamensky does not die, if I die, and if you have heard nothing at the end of three days, then your mother must ring up the British Embassy and ask for protection.” She need not fear they would disbelieve her story, for though their Secret Service was elementary they would know enough. But even after the British Embassy had sent round their men, the whole family must go on staying indoors and not letting anybody into the apartment, even if they were friends. Meanwhile, her mother must get her father to come over from London, to make arrangements to take them all back to London under armed guard. “You could telegraph to your father from here, asking him to go to your mother at once—” But the whisper stopped. She was glad, her ear was tickling. Hesitantly the whisper began again: “Ah, but you’d have to explain to your father, wouldn’t you, that there was something extraordinary going on, if you were to be sure he would come? There’s—there’s a difficulty, isn’t there?”

  “A difficulty! What sort of difficulty?” she cried.

  She had recoiled from him, but his face followed hers and was still close. Through his thick spectacles his magnified eyes seemed vague wet stumps, like sea anemones. “Why, a difficulty. About your father,” he sighed.

  She jerked her head away. “I can’t understand what you’re saying! There’s no difficulty about my father. I don’t know what it could mean, ‘a difficulty about my father.’”

  “Forgive me,” said Chubinov meekly. “I must have misunderstood something I heard.”

  “Something you heard from Gorin, I suppose.” Somewhere in the station an engine was letting off steam, and hatred hissed out of her like the steam. “Go away. Go away at once. You’re planning a murder, a common murder, you’re like Jack the Ripper and Charles Peace. What have my grandfather and I to do with that? We’re the sort of people who’d rather be murdered than be saved by a murder.”

  A porter drove his hand-truck into a suitcase which had been left standing on the ground, its owner ran up, and there was shouting. Till it died down Chubinov could not hear her, and he kept his hand spread out round his ear, his mouth open, till she repeated what she had said, and then he appeared hurt and astonished.

  “Miss Laura, do not be foolish. I won’t reproach you, because you can’t help having been brought up in capitalist hypocrisy. But your grandfather and you have no real objection to murder. Your grandfather has sent many victims to the gallows. Your father, being in the House of Commons, ranges himself on the same side as the English hangman.”

  “That’s different. If you’re going to try Kamensky in a proper law court, well and good.”

  “But, dear Miss Laura, in our present society, there are no proper law courts. They exist simply to protect the exploitati
on of the many by the few, and now you’ve strayed into a domain where there are no law courts at all.”

  “I’ll get out of that domain, just you see if I don’t,” she told him, her face blazing. “And whose fault is it I ever got into it? Yes, I know you didn’t grasp I was on the train. But you knew my grandfather was. You must have realized you’d drag him into trouble, and what did you get on that train for, anyway? Simply because you wanted to know if Gorin was Kamensky. But we Diakonovs didn’t particularly want to know if Kamensky was Gorin. What harm was he really doing us, when you come to think of it, what harm could he do to people who are so old and will soon be out of it, twaddling pious nonsense to them while he’s reading all their letters like a scoundrelly butler, and does it make it much worse if you have a scoundrelly butler that he’s being someone else’s scoundrelly butler at the same time? But you would butt in, and now here my grandfather and I have got to dodge your horrible friends who want to throw bombs at us and shoot us, and to crown everything you have the impudence to put the responsibility for another murder on us. What a nuisance you are, what a nuisance!”

  What would it be like to be blown to pieces, to be suddenly hurled to the ground by a bullet as pheasants are hurled out of the air? She had to cover her mouth to stop a scream.

  “You utterly fail to allow for the ideal,” said Chubinov miserably.

  “You and my grandfather, with your ideals,” she muttered through her fingers.

  “Ah, you’re very sad, Miss Laura,” he said. “But you must try to understand that neither your grandfather nor I have ever been able to choose what we did. You see, he and I are embedded in Russia, up to our necks, we can’t move. The river has broken its dams and it’s made mud of all our land. Your grandfather and I and all Russians have to stay where the floodwaters have cast us, where we were sucked down into the marsh, we can’t free ourselves, we’ve just got to wait there. I can’t help feeling that a clever girl like you should realize how it is with us, how it would have been with you, if you’d been born in Russia. You too, as we say, ‘would have had to take sides,’ though what we really mean is that you’d have had to realize at what point in the Russian marshland you’d got stuck. You’re a truly Russian girl, you’re full of ideals, you would have made an excellent revolutionary. You truly want me to save my life, don’t you, and to save me from the guilt of murder? Yet I don’t suppose you like me. I haven’t got sufficiently positive characteristics to be likeable. I don’t know how it was that my wife felt the affection for me which she undoubtedly did. And I am always surprised that Gorin likes me—” his pale face grew paler—“but I forgot. All these years he has not liked me at all.”