The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  “But lots of other people do.” She looked at Nikolai and made sure that he was still asleep, and said with a confidence which she would have lacked if he had been awake, “I’m sure my grandfather’s very fond of you. I know he’s awful to you, but that only shows how much he bothers about you. And I like you very much.” She was startled to find that this was true. “Forgive me if I was rude to you on the train. The fact is, I couldn’t tell you the meaning of the thing I called you in English, for the reason I don’t know it myself. It’s just something I heard a cabby call our coachman once.”

  “All the world over, it’s like that,” laughed Chubinov. “Cab-drivers swear terribly at coachmen, and always the children hear and remember. Their lessons they forget, and the good counsel given them by their elders, but what the cab-drivers call the coachmen, that lingers on and on—”

  His laughter was unbearable, it was so tender, pleasant, and well-bred, thin and defenceless. It was drowned by the noise of the train which was puffing in to the shadow of the station, from the outer track, slowing down to a standstill just in front of them on the main platform. It must be the slow train to Paris. She shouted into his ear, “Please, please, go to England. To London. Then see my father. He’ll help you. Tell him everything. He looks as if he’d mind, but he won’t. He always calls the Home Rule members Fenian assassins, but he’s great friends with some of them, the best ones come to dinner. I won’t give you our address, you won’t remember it, but you can get him at the House of Commons.”

  His eyes crinkled with amusement. He took another of the dreadful biscuits out of his pocket, but it broke and fell in crumbs on the lapel of his coat. It must have been very stale. He took out a fourth, but it crumbled at once and fell in pieces on the stone flags at his feet. “What a waste,” he said, “there are no birds in here. But what could I do in England?”

  “Why, you could teach in a school. Your French is beautiful. And nobody could murder you if you were teaching in a school.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just wouldn’t happen. Not in a school. If a man came into a school and tried to murder you the headmaster or headmistress would send for the police and they’d come and arrest him. Your friends are awful, but they wouldn’t stand a chance. You’ve got to go to England. Now, from this station. Now. From this station.” “Oh, Miss Laura, you are like my wife. She also was a dove and an eagle. But do not distress yourself about me. I would rather not murder Gorin. But I must do so, in order to protect you, your grandfather, and the revolutionary movement. And I will be sustained by certain considerations. I am justified in my action by my masters Kant and Hegel.” The didactic forefinger was up again. “The supreme end of reason is the complete subordination of nature to the prescripts of morality, and if I use my freedom to renounce my life, my unique place in nature, to perform an act I think moral, then I am in a morally unassailable position. Almost certainly I will die for the murder of Gorin, either at the hands of his dupes or of the capitalist government of France. So I am in a sense happy, because broken as I am, robbed of my lifework and my major friendship, I am in a sense happy, because I am going to perform a moral act, the murder of Gorin, and—you do see, don’t you—absolve myself from all blame by dying myself, so I am in a state of complete integration with the Absolute. I can’t be subject to the slightest reproach whatsoever, don’t you see, because I’m a proven instrument of the supreme good. Also I think Berr will know that I am doing right.”

  “The blind man! You think he’ll feel you were right?” “He would find some difficulty in understanding the problem,” said Chubinov. “He has the advantage of living in an extremely simple world, where ethical considerations rarely come into conflict with one another. My world, on the contrary, has been thrown into extreme ethical confusion by my ineluctable connection with the crimes of Tsardom, forced on me by my birth into a family belonging to the minor nobility. It’s my duty to stamp out the crimes of Tsardom, as it is the duty of every man to renounce his own sins. This can only be done by punitive acts directed against the criminal Tsar and his criminal officials. I’m obliged to become a criminal myself, and the execution of Gorin, whom I know now to be one of those criminal officials, is one of the crimes I am thus compelled to commit. I doubt if Berr could understand this predicament, but if he could understand it, he would give me his approval. So I move towards my horrible duty of killing Gorin, safeguarded by his intense goodness. He is, to use his own way of putting things, giving me his blessing.”

  “He isn’t doing anything of the sort,” said Laura. “Nobody, practically nobody, gives people their blessing for going about killing people. The idea’s absurd. It’s funny. If death can be funny, and, of course it can be. There’s that song the servants sing at home when Papa and Mamma have gone out.” It was lovely to speak English for a little.

  “Oh, a Norrible Tale I have to tell

  Of sad disasters that befell

  A family that once resided

  Just in the same thoroughfare that I did.”

  “How does it go?”

  “First the father into the garden did walk

  And cut his throat with a lump of chalk,

  Then the mother an end to herself did put

  By hanging herself in the water-butt,

  Then her sister went down on her bended knees

  And smothered herself with toasted cheese.”

  “What is that? Repeat it, please, I did not follow, sometimes when I am tired my English quite deserts me. Perhaps you’d kindly translate it into Russian.”

  “No, no. I really can’t. It’s untranslatable.”

  “Ah, yes, like much of your English poetry, and most of ours. Pushkin. But to return to Berr. He will recognize that I am acting as instrument of the supreme good, not by use of his intellect which is quite undeveloped, but in his simple way, by intuition. I am sacrificing myself, and already he admires self-sacrifice in the saints and martyrs, and in his God, and his Christ. Therefore he is certain to give me his sympathy.”

  “Really, you’re incredibly silly,” exclaimed Laura. “Berr may be simple, but he can’t be so simple that he couldn’t pick out a number of differences between you and Christ. People in the Old Testament are as silly as you, but absolutely nobody in the New Testament. But of course you can’t help being silly. But what I can’t stand is something you could help, and that is that you’re such a humbug. You haven’t spent your life in all this plotting and blowing up people because of the supreme good but because you like doing it, just as my father and my brothers like playing cricket, and they don’t pretend they’re saints and martyrs. Oh,” she wailed, “try and have some sense and stop blithering and think what you really want to do. Do you want to go to Paris and kill Kamensky and get killed, or won’t you be sensible and go to England?”

  “It is perhaps not the time or the place to discuss that now. And you are upset.”

  “It is the time and the place. Don’t you see that that’s the train you said you’d take to Paris? The one in front of us. Look at the boards on it. If you don’t want to take it, well and good. But if you do, there it is. It’ll leave in a minute. It’s crowded. I don’t want you to go to Paris and be killed, but if you’ve made up your mind to it, you may as well have a seat on the way.”

  “You’re quite right. But now I wish I hadn’t to go. You are rude, you’re very rude indeed, but you are a good girl. Truly, there’s something about all your family, something.” He rose and stood for a second looking down on Nikolai Nikolaievitch, who stirred, as if the glance pierced through his sleep. “Good-bye, my friend,” said Chubinov. “How mild and beneficent he looks, as if it had been his office to sentence people not to death but to eternal life. How well one can believe, at the sight of him, in the legend that our Tsar Alexander the First had a corpse from a hospital buried under his name and lived for many years another life as the holy hermit Kuzma.”

  “You haven’t time to tell me that now, you must go,” said Laur
a. “Don’t you see, the train’s starting.”

  But he was writing with exasperating slowness, on a piece of paper. “Here, don’t lose this. That’s the name of the hotel near Les Halles, where I will be staying under the name of Baraton, and the telephone number. If I can be of any use to you during the next few days ring me up or send me a telegram, and please remember, I had no idea, no idea at all, that you would be with your grandfather.”

  “I tell you it doesn’t matter. But,” she said, suddenly moved by the weedy height of him as he leaned over her, the shabbiness of the cuff above the tobacco-stained hand he held out to her, the biscuit crumbs on his lapel, the weak pure beam of friendship filtering through his thick spectacles, “how kind you are. Everything about you is all wrong, everything you believe and do, but you’re awfully kind. I don’t want you to commit that murder, but I quite see that you’re doing it partly for my grandfather and me, and anyway you keep on worrying about me, as I wouldn’t worry about anyone if I had to commit a crime and might get found out. But now you must go, you really must, and try to get something decent to eat when you can.” She put the piece of paper into her bag out of politeness, she would never use it.

  Now he was looking through rather than at her, and when he spoke it was with the imitation of briskness which meant that he was following his revolutionary technique. He asked, “Tell me, has Gorin any fixed time for visiting your family? The day after tomorrow, now when would he be likely to come to your grandfather’s apartment?”

  She knew what he was at. “He’s no fixed time for coming, and if he had I wouldn’t tell you. My grandfather and I will get out of this in our way, not yours. But hurry, hurry, or you’ll lose that train.”

  It was on the move when he reached it. Some soldiers leaning from a corridor window burst into laughter at the sight of him as he loped across the platform with his overcoat flapping round his thin legs, and they opened the door and pulled him aboard in the nick of time, with an air of acquiring an amusing mascot. He waved to her from the window, and so did the laughing boys round him, when they saw who it was he was waving to, and as the train puffed off she heard them raise a roar, “Auprès de ma Blonde.” She was glad her grandfather was asleep, he would have been angry. But she waved back, laughed back. The boys meant no harm and had they known what was happening they would have been on her side. That seemed the only important thing now. She waved till she could see them no longer and the train had jerked its way out of the station and into the open brightness beyond. Clouds of yellowish smoke were blown backwards from the engine and hovered under the glass roofs slowly wasting to traceries of mist and then to nothingness. The crowds had thinned. There was nobody in the full agony of travel, trudging under the weight of luggage or dragging children by the hand, only some people sitting on the bench. It could not be said there was silence, but the space of the station was not quite filled by its noise, there was an emptiness high under the roof. It was there that her fear seemed to be, not within herself. Up under the sallow glass and blackened iron was her recognition that she might be hurt and die. To avoid it she looked away. On her right the roof came to an end not far off, and she had an oblique view of a high embankment of dark bricks, stained dirty tawny by the sunshine, and topped by a row of street-lamps. One could just see the roofs and upper storeys of the line of mean little houses that they lit. She would rather live out the span of her life simply looking at this one hideous scene than be dead and see nothing; and the thought brought her fear out of the air into herself. Even if she got out of this, and of course she would, she would never be quite alive again.

  She heard her grandfather say her name. His voice had changed. There was water in its wine. She would not let them do anything more to him. She slipped her hand into his and held it to her lips.

  “Laura,” he said, “did you not hear the trumpet?”

  Perhaps she had lost her Russian again. What trumpet? But of course a trumpet had sounded when the Paris train left. The tinny little trumpet which did the work in France which the guard’s flag and whistle did in England. “Yes, I heard it.”

  The blanched voice went on. “It was the little girl. The little girl who looks like a doll has put the trumpet to her lips.”

  There was not only murder, there was not only death and the fear of death, there was this also. “Oh, hush, hush,” she said softly, “there’s no little girl here.”

  “But Pravdine’s little girl is here,” he told her, “the little girl at the Christmas party. She looks like a doll and is wearing that dress of fine muslin, like a lampshade. I told you they had given her a trumpet. She has put it to her lips. It had to happen some time, and now it has happened.”

  “Nothing has happened,” she assured him. “You’ve been asleep, you’re still dreaming. What you heard was the trumpet they blow to send out the train.”

  “She has blown her trumpet,” persisted Nikolai, “and all has come to an end.” He raised his eyes to the great clock which hung above the platform. “The hands are not moving.”

  “They are, indeed they are,” said Laura. “Look, the minute hand is swinging forward now.”

  “No, no, the clock has stopped,” said Nikolai. His hand in hers was shaking.

  “Grandfather. Nothing is happening that isn’t ordinary. You just can’t see the hands.”

  “The clock has stopped,” groaned Nikolai, and he rose from the bench. “God have mercy on our souls.”

  He began to rock on his feet, as he had done in the train. Then his unbending body slanted slowly towards the ground, like a falling tree. His hat dropped off and his cane clattered on the stone flags and rolled away; and still the slanting mass of him continued to keel over. Laura cried out, and a porter, passing by with a hand-trolley, halted it beside them and waited with bent knees to catch the lethargically moving weight that was hard to deal with, as if it had been crashing down quickly, because it was so huge; and the porter’s own movements were slowed down by wonder. He was very young, and she saw his lips pout as he recognized the prodigiousness of Nikolai, like a child who goes to the zoo and sees a rhinoceros for the first time. He was just able to keep the old man from falling to the ground and to break his fall on to the trolley. Only his head and torso rested on it; his legs stuck out stiffly to the ground. His eyes were closed, his skin was the colour of white silk long laid by in a drawer.

  Everything seemed to be happening somewhere else or behind a wall of glass. The station had seemed empty, but at once a crowd was round the prostrate body. In the past, when Nikolai went about London or Paris, people had found it embarrassing to look at him except by stealing narrowed glances at him and then frowning into the distance as if they had not seen him at all. But now he was performing in public the private act of dying, they were not ashamed to stare at him with wide eyes. Most of the men took off their hats. Several men and women crossed themselves, there were mumblings of prayer, and a slight devout stir started up like a breeze.

  Someone said, “He must have been a magnificent man,” and someone else said, “His hair, that’s very strange,” and indeed his thick white locks, streaked with bright gold, looked very unnatural, now they were spread wildly round a still face. He might have been a saint whose halo had been broken over his head by a persecutor. Laura said to herself, “It is not possible this should be happening. It’s only two minutes since Chubinov went off and left me alone, simply so that he could commit another murder. How awfully like him. But one shouldn’t blame him, he didn’t know.”

  The porter had already called to another porter, telling him to fetch the stationmaster, and she knelt by her grandfather and spoke to his pale face, though it was like speaking to the sky or a shoulder of the downs. For his sake she was glad that he was dead. If she had had to struggle with Kamensky for their lives, if she had had to take a revolver out of his hand, her grandfather would have been humiliated because he had lost the strength to kill, and because the man he should have killed was the man he had loved. “God,
” she prayed, “thank you for sparing him all that.” But this was humbug. She was relieved because now she had only herself to think of, she would have a better chance of escaping from Kamensky. In shame she cried, “God, don’t let him be dead,” and kissed his hands. But there was a touch on her arm, and she found that there were two men standing beside her. One was the station-master in his uniform, the other was a silver-haired man with a small trim beard and bright grey eyes, neat clothes, and an air of command.

  She asked herself, “Who can this be? A friend of Gorin’s?” and her heart stopped. But he had the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his button-hole, and the stationmaster was explaining that she was fortunate, there was a medical school in the town, and this was Professor Saint-Gratien, the head of the surgical faculty. He had come in on the same train from Paris as herself and had been lunching in the station restaurant with a friend before going home. It sounded all right, so she turned to him in trust. He asked her questions and she answered them, regardless of the listening strangers round them. They might have been meeting in a wood, with people as trees. Yes, her grandfather had just fallen down. No, she had never seen him have such an attack before. He lived in Paris, and they were on their way to Mûres-sur-Mer, but had got out of the train, because—she had to sob here, till she could think of a reason she cared to give—because he had got worried over something and had wanted to go home, partly, she thought, out of concern for his wife, who was very ill.