by Rebecca West
“I can’t tell you this comrade’s name. But he’s wholly dedicated to the cause of revolution, that I must say for him, and highly intelligent, a former journalist on the staff of a Moscow newspaper. He came to me because when Gorin decided to kill me he had also to make my killing a respectable act by proving that I was a traitor to our organization. That’s where this man came in. Gorin was going to allege that I was secretly an adherent of a Marxist group which does not approve of terrorism and is not, like us, strictly democratic. Correspondence was to be produced between me and a man named Ulyanov or Lenin, who’s been for the last two or three years in Siberia, and has just returned to Russia and is on the point of being exiled and coming out into the West. This comrade who is helping me was commissioned by Gorin to forge the correspondence. But he came straight to me, and told me everything. For he himself is actually a secret member of Lenin’s group.”
“Let’s get this straight,” said Laura. “I haven’t understood. If this man was a member of the group, why did he tell you what he’d been asked to do, because if Gorin had to forge evidence proving you were a member of this group, you obviously weren’t?”
Chubinov looked uncomfortable. “Miss Laura, we aren’t in the nursery. We are making a revolution. Therefore we don’t, I freely admit it, act always with perfect candour. It’s possible, if it should happen that the revolutionary cause seemed to be in danger and the leaders were quite certain that this was due to one particular member, but they had no actual proof, they might feel under an obligation to provide forged evidence to convince the rank and file, who are bound to be their inferiors in intellect and intuition and experience.”
“But you wouldn’t have done that. Vassili, you couldn’t have done that.”
“No,” he said wretchedly, “it is not in my nature. But perhaps that is a weakness. And, as for Gorin, I thought that he was so clever, so harmonious, that such problems never existed for him, that he always found a way of avoiding them.”
The grief in his voice was so great that she stretched her hand across the table and stroked his cheek. “But this comrade. What happened when he came to you, thinking that you were one of the Marxist group and heard you weren’t?”
Again Chubinov looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t feel bound in view of the very pressing circumstances to tell him the exact truth. Then in the morning, when the import of Gorin’s papers was quite clear, I was frank with my comrade. And by that time it was obviously in the interests of both of us to work together for the purpose of exposing Gorin’s villainy. For when the truth is out we will be able to purify the revolutionary movement, which he has left honeycombed with treachery and mistrust, and to prove to the whole world the rottenness of the Tsarist government. This will certainly be to the benefit of our organization, and by a pardonable error, which I find quite pathetic, my poor comrade thinks that it will benefit his little Marxist group. Though heaven help us, if it were to be so, for Lenin and his followers represent the idea of revolution with all the poetry, all the spontaneity, all the natural grandeur, subtracted from it. Though, mind you, this Lenin is a clever man. He knows how to get people on to committees and off them against the will of the organization, indeed without anybody in the organization realizing what is happening till it is too late. But a courageous deed, the sublime defiance of authority, these things mean nothing to Lenin. Such a man can never change the course of history. That is for our organization to do, for to a man we are idealists.”
She poured herself out some coffee. She felt the need of something warm inside to counter this feeling of hollowness. Why did these pathetic waifs and strays think of themselves as idealists? An idealist did some good to somebody. But these poor pantaloons could do no good by this endless masquerading under false names, this spying, this stealing of private papers, this fuss about being sent to prison or to Siberia or into exile, though obviously the authorities had to find somewhere to put people who thought themselves at their best when they were engaged in assassination. Of course, millions of Russians were hungry, but she doubted if one of them had ever been moved nearer a square meal by anything Chubinov had ever done. He was not sufficiently sensible about getting square meals for himself. And of course millions of Russians were oppressed, but she doubted if the practice of continual crime was likely to cause a reduction in the police force. “I’ve made that problem worse myself, now,” she said aloud, but he was too absorbed in his recital of a future glory to ask her what she meant. Looking across the table and hearing this babble, she was moved by his shabbiness, his fatigue, his dry lined skin, his sparse hair and beard, his spiritless and nicotine-stained hands, his air of shock. He had spent all his life turning it into something which was to ordinary people’s lives as straw is to grass. He was not doing anything for anybody. Conspiracy was for him, as she had already recognized, what cricket was for her father and her brothers. It was the game he happened to enjoy. It was his kind of fun. There was no more to his revolutionary passion than that. If he had really been doing anything for the sake of helping other people, he would sometimes have got bored with it, for it was everyone’s instinct to live for themselves, and he would have gone off and done what he really enjoyed doing. She had found out that, by working to raise funds for Indian Famine Relief, there came a time when one simply had to stop embroidering those night-dress cases and go to the theatre. But this lot kept on and on being revolutionaries, year in, year out, and could not think of anything else, showing that they were simply serving their own pleasure.
“Lenin,” Chubinov was saying now, “can be very insulting. He has called our movement childish, thoughtlessly provocative, frivolous.”
“I’m for Lenin,” thought Laura. Yet she liked Chubinov, she liked him very much, she even loved him, as if he were one of the family, the nice fool of the family. When he rose and took that overcoat down from the door, her heart ached.
It was so ingenuous in its malconstruction that she even had to guide his arms into his sleeves. Then he said, “Never forget that Kamensky loved your grandfather. In his diary he expressed such satisfaction because he would be able to attend the Ninth Day Requiem.” He fell into reverie. “But what a mysterious story this is. I still don’t fully understand the pattern. There’s a piece missing. Why did Gorin leave himself off guard by going to Grissaint, when he should have been in a defensive position, and make it possible for us to go through his papers? After a lifetime of carefulness, how could he be so careless?”
“Well, he was looking forward to going to this new job in South America.”
“Also he may have been distracted by his affection for this woman he was about to marry. How wretched that in performing a necessary act of justice I have had to bereave a woman, about whom I know nothing, who can never have committed any offence against me!”
“Oh, her. Surely they were married already? He spoke to me about his wife.”
“I think not. We gathered from his diaries that he was much in love with a girl whom he had known only a short time. At first he had doubted whether she could possibly love him, then he realized from unmistakable signs that she returned his passion.”
“Well, I think she was his wife. He talked a lot about what they were going to do together in South America.”
“Strange. We knew nothing of a wife. Taking him as Kamensky, had you any idea he was married?”
“It never occurred to me. You don’t ask yourself whether somebody like that is married or not.”
“Well, anyway he had tickets for himself and his wife on a ship sailing for Rio in eleven days. Just after the Ninth Day Requiem. I must face the facts. Through me a woman has lost her devoted lover.”
“I shouldn’t worry about that,” said Laura. “What sort of woman would Kamensky love? Only a woman like himself, capable of treachery and murder.”
They went out into the corridor and he paused on the threshold to say softly, “Tell me when we pass the room.” When she laid her hand on his arm and said, “Here,” h
e laid his cheek against the door. They could hear the quick low monotone of the Psalms, very indistinct now, for it was still Berr’s wife who was reading. Chubinov murmured, “In there. Nikolai and Berr.” She would have told him that if he went in, both her grandfather and Berr would turn back to him from the presence of God out of loyalty to their own kind; which God in His peculiar way would probably regard both as a virtue and a sin. But she assumed it to be a point of honour with Chubinov not to take grace poured out generously. He would prefer some mean trickle among the rocks. She prayed that the whole story of the world might blaze up like the Northern Lights on the other side of the door and put an end to people being foolish, but if she had learned anything during the last three days it was that miracles do not happen. When he drew his cheek away from the door, he said, “This I have done for Nikolai. I’ve given him back his splendid shining name, and you and all his family will be treated like royalty for the rest of your lives. The Tsar will be ashamed, he will grovel,” he added, for a second, full of hate. “But to Berr I can give only this little, little present of not seeing him. Not bringing a further trial upon him. All I can do. I’m a beggar, really. Destitute. Not a spiritual penny in my pocket.” She put up her hand and stroked his cheek again, and he kissed her on the forehead, and with his arm about her shoulders they went along the corridor. On the threshold he paused. “All the same, the future is mine. No other organization can stand against our spirit.”
The twitter of exclamatory Russian rose from the hall below, the elevator door banged. So Chubinov put his fingers on his lips, and he became a descending shadow on the shadowy staircase. But as she turned to go back into the hall he recalled her in a loud whisper. His spectacles shone through the dusk with an air of urgency.
“Miss Laura, I don’t want you to think worse of me than I deserve.” She went out onto the landing, hoping that he was going to tell her that he had not killed Kamensky, that out of chivalry he had taken on himself the guilt of a comrade. But he said: “It may occur to you that I have got this post in Bournemouth on Hippolyte Baraton’s academic qualifications, and this may seem to you like a fraud. But I can assure you that my own academic qualifications are much higher. Good-bye, dear, dear Miss Laura.”
But still he lingered. “If you could find,” the weak voice stuttered, “some way of speaking about me to Berr …” The elevator was grunting its way up, he slipped quietly down into the darkness.
She did not suppose, as she turned away to avoid the newcomers, that she would ever hear of him and his great plans again. Probably he was right enough in foretelling that the Russian and the French governments would throw a pall of silence over Kamensky’s death; but surely Chubinov’s life would be as silent. She could see him, years hence, mum at the end of a crocodile of mocking schoolboys, as it wound under the dripping pines of Bournemouth down to the broken-spirited sea; while his Marxist helper was as mute, the post never bringing anything to the point, at Westgate, and Ulyanov, who was also Lenin, said not a word at Eastbourne. Yet she could not forget that once at least it had passed through her mind that Kamensky spoke like a man of power, used to being obeyed on large issues, although his apparent role was to obey; and Madame Verrier, whose aim was always on the target, had railed at him as at a chancellor of a university, the President of the Republic, the Pope. Anyway it must cost a tremendous amount of money to keep all these people running about. She did not really know what to think. She wanted to try to forget them all except Chubinov.
She felt a great desire to be with her mother. She had not heard her go into the room, and there was some time to go before the evening service began. She went to Tania’s bedroom, but it was empty, and the air too heavy with the scent of gardenias. Her mother, who was careless now, or rather too full of care to do the little things that the fingers ordinarily do without care, had left the stopper out of her scent-bottle. As Laura pressed it down, wishing she were married and could use really interesting scent instead of just lavender-water, a voice called to her through the communicating door into Sofia Andreievna’s bedroom, which was ajar. “Is that you, my darling? Come and talk to me. We’ve a few minutes before the service, and there’s something I must ask you.”
Tania was stretched on Sofia Andreievna’s bed, in the shadow of her taffeta curtains, her cheek resting on a pile of covered pillows. “I don’t know why, I felt like lying here on my mother’s bed,” she said, as Laura pulled forward a chair. “How I want my mother. And how glad I am she does not have to go through all this. Did I tell you that when I saw her at the clinic she sent you her love and was sure you managed splendidly at Grissaint, and thanked you for it?”
Laura murmured her acknowledgments, and found she had to raise a question which had occurred to her several times. “I say, how clever of you to recognize that Monsieur Baraton from the family photographs. He must have changed a lot.”
“Of course I didn’t recognize him. But if a Grand Duke or a Cabinet Minister tells you that you’ve been together on some occasion, it’s all right to say, ‘I’m so sorry, my memory is bad, at the moment I’ve forgotten.’ But if it’s somebody less important than you are, then you say ‘Oh, of course, but I remember perfectly,’ and you fudge up something agreeable. And a tutor would be bound to be in the family photographs.”
It had all worked out very well, Laura thought.
Tania put up her hand under the corner of a pillow and tweaked it so that it hid her face. Her voice cracked as she asked, “Would you feel it terrible if we didn’t go back to England? We would stay here for a time till your grandmother is cured. Then we would go to Russia.”
“For good, you mean?”
“For good.”
Laura was in the drawing-room at Radnage Square as it was on autumn evenings, when the smoke curled up blue from the heaps of burning leaves in the gardens, and the reflected sunset was tempered scarlet and gold over the roofs of the houses on the opposite side of the square, and the street-lamps blossomed primrose-yellow one by one, and the parlourmaid drew the faded gold-green damask curtains that had come from the Rowan house in Ireland, and they were all shut in with Tania, and the bowls and vases of bronze chrysanthemums, and the crackling new-lit fire. The noonday sun blazed down on the sand in the cove, burning it white, while Nannie rubbed her down after her swim in the icy blue-purple sea and gave her a gingersnap. Her father took them all to the zoo on Sunday afternoon, each with a tin of Lyle’s golden syrup to give to the bears. She did not exactly want to cry, but her eyes stung. But what she was regretting was not there any more. Tania had not been very good about the chrysanthemums lately; Nannie had gone, having stayed on as a sewing-maid but leaving suddenly six months ago after she had been suddenly rude to Mr. Rowan; and if the bears had relied for their golden syrup on the Rowan family they had been out of luck for quite some time. It was hardly for her to decide to leave England. England had left her.
She supposed she should consider what it would mean to her father if her mother and she went away, but she found it hard to consider that. It was irrelevant, since she understood this sort of silliness cleared up after a time, that at the moment he would not really notice whether they stayed or left, except for appearances’ sake. But she could hardly bring herself to think of her father. For an instant it seemed to her that it was he whom she had seen lying on the pavement outside the house, his face blotted out by roses. Even when the hallucination left her, and she knew he was alive, he did not live for her. But she saw her brother Osmund as he was when he was out on the cricket-pitch bowling, an archer who was his own bow, changing a clumsy ball into a keen searcher like an arrow; she remembered his blue eyes, solemn with recognition that as little fuss as possible should be made about everything, particularly his own excellences. She saw her brother Lionel, bouncing his top-hat on his head as he walked through the water-meadows on the Fifth of June, with his hands in his pockets, laughing because he was aware that it was ridiculous to be wearing such clothes in a water-meadow on the Fifth o
f June, but not getting indignant about it, there was so much in Eton that he liked. She understood why her mother had forgiven Nikolai for not sending messages to her and her sisters and brothers, saying that he had regarded his children as parts of himself like his fingers and toes. She hardly ever thought of her brothers when they were not there, but she found herself crying, “Mummie, you can’t just walk off and leave Osmund and Lionel!”
“That’s just what I’m afraid I must do. I told you before, if I go back to England, I’ll behave strangely. Your father’s left me so completely. And for her. I haven’t the strength to bear it. I don’t think Osmund and Lionel will suffer as much pain at losing me as they would if they saw me disgracing them.”
Speaking like that, like someone who had gone down to the tomb and come back for some other reason than that she wanted to, she was probably right. “I’ll come,” said Laura. In any case, right or wrong, her mother could not go away alone.
“I know I shouldn’t do this. It isn’t fair I should have to do it. Because something wrong has been done to me, I’m being forced to do wrong,” Tania went on. Laura reflected that there seemed a good deal of that in life. “You’re sure, Laura, that it won’t break your heart to leave England?”
Laura shook her head. She would cry if she spoke. Also she was so strongly tempted to tell her mother that, to judge by the last few hours, there was much to be said for leaving a country where, if one asked the vicar to hide a revolver in a coffin, he might raise objections. But she felt the victim of injustice. Everyone would think she had chosen to go to Russia. Yet she had no choice. Life was making her do it.
“Then we’ll talk no more of this till after the funeral,” said Tania, swinging herself off the bed on to her feet. She had crumpled her dress by lying on it, and she raised her hand as if to ring for Hélène, dropped it, and frowned down on the creases, as if longing to get to the end of a period in which she could not use the prop of elegance. She sat down in front of the dressing-table and smoothed her hair, and asked, “By the way, has the little Kamensky turned up?”