The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  Time passed. The white roses in a crystal vase on the table beside her shed one petal, then another, then another. Where people were unhappy the flowers were neglected. She pushed the petals together in a little pile. The old man opened his eyes, looked round him, and resumed his misery.

  “I am quite well,” he said argumentatively. “I am never ill.”

  “That’s what we thought,” said Kamensky. “And now we know it. If you were, such a short sleep couldn’t have refreshed you. There’s a lot of the evening left. Would you like to play a game of chess?”

  “I haven’t the time,” said Nikolai. “The darkness awaits me, and there are many things of which we should talk.”

  “About ideas?” said Kamensky.

  “No, that is too dangerous a pleasure,” said Nikolai. “How right Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov was. You have heard of him?”

  “Minister of Education about 1850,” said Kamensky. “I confess I might have failed to recognize his name had I not once benefited by a prize he instituted.”

  “He made a wise decision afterwards reversed. He entirely prohibited lectures on philosophy in all the universities of Russia. He saw that speculations regarding the Creator are superfluous, since the revelations we have been given on divine authority are sufficient, but he saw that researches into the wonders of Creation can never do any harm. So he encouraged the physical sciences. This must be right, because it is logical—though I have to admit that some of the students of physical sciences are among our most godless and subversive. No, I want to talk to you not about ideas, but about facts. You saw that I was afraid when I questioned you about that medicine?’”

  “Yes. But, as I say, it was not unreasonable.”

  “You might answer differently if I opened my heart to you. I did not tell you everything. It wasn’t only that I feared that those tablets might have been poisoned by my enemies. I had another fear. Let me tell you a story, and do not laugh at me, though it may strike you as absurd.”

  “Miss Laura and I could never laugh at you.”

  “It will comfort me a lot to confess what happened to me some years before my disgrace. I can’t remember the exact date, even the year. But one day I was at my office and a member of the Poliakov family, the grain dealers, came to see me. He happened to take from his pocket a letter from his son, a young lawyer who had gone to Warsaw on business. He thought it would interest me, but it didn’t. My attention was caught by one thing, however. The letter was written on bright red paper, and the envelope was bright red too. At the moment I made nothing of it except as a sign that young people like to do things in a way which is obviously incorrect.”

  “How long ago,” Laura asked herself, “was this? Those young people are probably old now, and just what he approves of.”

  “I should mention that I had heard some rumours that this young man had been seen with associates who could only be described as liberals. Well, a few weeks later my official duties took me to Odessa. To Odessa,” he repeated and fell silent, staring at the floor.

  After a moment or two Kamensky said comfortably, “To Odessa.”

  “Yes, to Odessa. But I’ve forgotten why I had to go there. It was to investigate a grave scandal, that is clear to me, something to do with the misappropriation of public funds. But beyond that I’m not now sure of anything. I really am not myself just now. Many people were suspected, some of them my own officials, some of them bank employees, two or three land speculators, and a couple of shipowners. But which of them proved innocent and which guilty has gone from my mind.”

  “Don’t distress yourself, dear Count,” said Kamensky. “It can’t matter any more.”

  “Not matter? To know of a group of men which were bad and which were good? That must always matter.”

  “Yes, that that should be known matters more than anything else,” said Kamensky, “but it is not we who need know it.”

  “True, true, Alexander Gregorievitch,” said her grandfather, “but how could the Tsar know except through his Ministers? And I was one of them.”

  “But surely,” thought Laura, “Monsieur Kamensky meant God and not the Tsar. He did. He’s trying not to smile. But it serves him right. He was too smug when he said it.”

  “It was my duty,” continued Nikolai, “to see and hear for my master the Tsar. I fear now that my ears and eyes were already, even then, past such service, and had let me stray into a world of folly and suspicion in which I may now be a prisoner. You see, about that bright red writing paper.”

  “That bright red writing paper,” Kamensky prompted him, after a minute.

  “Yes, yes. There came a night when I wished to meet a man involved in this scandal, who seemed to me guilty, or at least to have compromised his honour, and for that reason, I didn’t like to ask the Governor, with whom I was staying, to admit him to his house. So I arranged a dinner for four persons, myself and my secretary, I forget his name, he was a person of your own sort, and this man and one of his associates, at a restaurant in the town. It was attached to a hotel, and one had to go in by a mediocre sort of café, a place where the tradespeople of the town went in the evening to drink beer and eat sausages. As I passed through it my eye was caught by a girl sitting all by herself at a table.”

  Again he fell into silence.

  “This girl.”

  “As I say, she was sitting all by herself, though she was not—” he shot a look at Laura—“not anything of that sort. And indeed it was quite a respectable place. But she was very young to be out alone, possibly under twenty, and she should not have been in such a café even with an escort, for she had an air of breeding, though she had done her best to lose it. She had thrown off her fur hat, it was lying on the table beside her. Everything about her showed that she no longer cared what people thought of her. It was very disagreeable. She had cut her hair, and her head was covered with rough curls, as if she were a boy. She was bending right over the table, writing, and smiling as she wrote, putting out her tongue, just like a child getting on well with its first copy-book. I suppose she was very pretty. But that gave me no pleasure. So far as she was concerned, there might have been nobody else in the room. A woman should not feel so. There was a pile of books lying beside her fur hat, and I tried to read the titles as I went by, for it struck me that she might be a medical student. You know I had some temporary success in closing all our schools for women doctors. Alas, that that too, like Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov’s decision concerning the teaching of philosophy, was reversed. It was then that I saw that she was writing her letter on bright red paper.”

  Kamensky’s brows were knitted. “Now what would that be?” he asked softly, almost under his breath; and he shook his head.

  “Ah, you too think it mysterious. That encourages me. But why? You may simply be thinking it was mysterious that I should think it mysterious. Well, I didn’t enjoy my dinner. Whoever it was my guests were, I came to the worst conclusions about them. But when

  I got back to the Governor’s house and went to bed I could not sleep, and it wasn’t because of these wretched criminals, it was because of that bright red writing paper. I couldn’t imagine anybody well brought up, as that girl must have been brought up, wanting to communicate with family or friends on such horrible glaring stuff, so unlike any writing paper which it is natural and right to use. And I woke up in the middle of the night remembering that a Frenchman, a friend of my grandfather, had mentioned in his memoirs that just before the Revolution it became the fashion among French infidels to use bright red writing paper. Do you think I was foolish because, next morning, I sent my secretary to go round all the stationery shops in Odessa to find out if they sold such paper?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” replied Kamensky. “But did you find any?”

  “It was being sold everywhere. And when I examined what he brought me back I found that the watermark was sinister. It was a cock. Well, the cock is Russia. But it’s France too: France, the country of anarchy and atheism, the enemy of
Holy Russia, willing host to all its exiles, among whom I now, by the most horrible irony, have to count myself. And what does ‘the red cock’ mean in our native language, Laura? Tell her, Alexander Gregorievitch.”

  “It is one of the most terrible phrases in our tongue. That’s what our serfs called the arson they committed in the old days when our landowners were tyrants, and still commit, in spite of all our modern reforms, when bad men incite them. It’s a terrible phrase. Innocent as the Russian peasant is, he can be seduced into burning crops, granaries, forests.”

  “The terrorists would feel such evil glee in using anything inscribed with that symbol,” mourned Nikolai, “as we would feel holy glee in handling what is marked with the cross. And this writing paper would be a useful instrument in their conspiracy against their country. It would frustrate one of the most effective measures we take for the protection of our people, the perlustration of our mail, the examination of letters through the post, a measure which the innocent have no cause to fear and which is a hardship only to the guilty.”

  “How so?” asked Kamensky. “How would this paper help the terrorists?”

  “The organizers of the terror would have no reason to write their final instructions to their dupes. The most blameless letter, written on this red paper, might be an intimation that now was the time to commit a long-planned crime. And what clue would we have?”

  “Why, you’re right,” said Kamensky. “It is really a most ingenious idea, and I can believe that those fiends might conceive it.”

  “So it seems to you,” said Nikolai, “and so it seemed to me. But perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps you have allowed my influence over you to persuade you into believing what is wrong. For listen. I decided I must warn the proper authorities of this danger, and I sent some sheets and envelopes of this paper to Count Brand, who was then Minister of the Interior, pointing out the sinister significance of the colour and the watermark, telling him of the passage in the Frenchman’s memoirs, and conveying that the two people whom I knew used it were tainted by suspicion.”

  “Well, did they find out anything?” asked Kamensky.

  “It wasn’t like that at all. I noticed when I dictated the letter to my secretary that he was ill at ease. But I imagined that he might be worried about being away from St. Petersburg for so long, for he had a sick child. But when the Minister answered me I realized that I had been on quite the wrong tack. Count Brand is a very old friend of mine, and all our lives we have written to each other freely. But this time Brand sent me what was little more than a formal acknowledgment of my letter, and when my secretary gave it to me I knew from his manner that he had expected and feared this. He had not wished me to bring my fine discovery about the red writing paper before another Minister, because he had thought it ridiculous and he had quite rightly feared that Brand would find it ridiculous.”

  “Ah, you are jumping at conclusions—Brand may have been preoccupied, unwell—”

  “No. It was his considered opinion. The next time we met it was in the corridors of Tsarskoe Selo, and he looked at me with eyes full of pity and warned me against overwork. He presumed, he presumed! He told me that I must not let the terrorists break my nerve, since that is one of the chief aims of the terrorists. He dared say that.”

  “Gently, gently,” said Kamensky. “Remember, you aren’t well, and all this happened long ago. It doesn’t do any good to live it all over again.”

  “He dared to say it. He dared. I can’t tell you how unpleasant I found it to be pitied by a man who was certainly an old friend, but whom I had never considered as an equal. I was stronger than he’d ever been, and could work harder, and God gave me greater courage. That we had proved again and again when we were young and were in the same regiment. I rode many horses he did not trust himself to mount. Many risks that I was glad to take again and again were beyond him. I have known him ride away so that he should not see me take the big water jump on the officers’ course at Kharkov. I would be silent about such things as a rule, for they are a matter of God’s gift, which He has explained to us in a parable. He feels no need to make us equal. But I feel obliged to mention it now, just to make plain that if Brand’s nerve had not broken it was inconceivable that mine should break.”

  She was glad her father was not there to hear this. But she did not mind. Quite often one wanted to brag.

  “Don’t let’s talk of this any more,” said Kamensky. “Count Brand is well known to be of a peculiarly sceptical, rejecting kind of intelligence, who thought anything he had not found out for himself had never happened and could never happen. To him writing paper would not be dangerous unless it got out of its envelope and bit his hand. But none of this is of any significance today. Chess, chess, let us play chess.”

  “Later. Later. Let me finish. My secretary was a good little man, full of common sense, but he was of the same mind as Brand. He thought my great discovery about the writing paper purely absurd, half-way to a delusion. Tell me, Alexander Gregorievitch, am I mad? I have been thrown down and disgraced because certain information known only to myself and three other officials passed out of our hands, and in consequence two sacred persons were murdered by the servants of evil. The three other officials were killed by the same bomb. We may presume them innocent. Therefore I have been presumed guilty. It seems to me that I was guiltless and that I am the victim of a conspiracy. But this may not be true. It might have been that though I kept my plans secret they were insufficiently ingenious, and that the terrorists were able to guess them, and guessed correctly all the three alternative routes from which we chose only one at the last moment, that thus they ambushed them all, and were able to strike when they saw the Grand Dukes. Look how the facts go round and round in my head. I speak in sentences like carousels, I want to tell you that all over again, but I must get on, sane men do not repeat themselves. I don’t think I did fail. I think my plans were sufficiently ingenious, and I think they were efficiently executed. I believe I was betrayed. I told you about those marks on the wood of the drawer in my desk, where I kept the orders for that day. They were faint marks, and other people might have missed them, but I still have eyes like a hawk. They were like pencil-strokes which someone had rubbed out, all but the last least trace. They could have been drawn round documents so that they could be taken away and replaced exactly where they had been before. Yet the police agents said that they might have been marks left by the carpenters. But what guidance could a carpenter need on the floor of a drawer? And if they were marks made by a spy, what can that mean except that someone copied my keys? And what keys they were! That was more a safe than a drawer. Only a familiar of mine, with liberty to come and go about my office, with the right to spend hours there unchallenged could have copied those keys. Oh, God, had those pencil-strokes any meaning which would have halted the attention of a sane man?”

  “But, Count,” said Kamensky, “don’t you know quite well, as you know that you have a beard, that you are sane?”

  “Well, I know that I can’t be very mad. I was always a capable administrator, even to the last, and my family was happy round me, though as you’re aware I have from time to time had disagreements with my sons. But you also know that that happened rarely, and it was always their fault and never mine, and they were always humbled and came back to me on their hands and knees, and I raised them up by my forgiveness, and it was as if it had never happened. But I may have become a little mad as the years went on. Seeing connections, you know, between things in fact unconnected. Like the old woman you find in every village, who comes on a branch on the road blown down from a tree by a gale and thinks it has been laid there by the butcher as a sign to the baker that the day has come for them to fulfil the plot they have long had in the hatching, and there will be arsenic in the next loaf she buys. I might be like that old woman, for God is no respecter of persons. He has turned my hair white as if I were anybody.”

  “I worked under you for many years,” said Kamensky, “and I learned that yo
u were a man of many facets, some of which would surprise you. But none of them ever made me think of a mad old woman in a village.”

  “Don’t speak to me in that nurse’s voice,” said Nikolai, looking at him with something almost as cold as dislike. “Tell me the truth, I am dying for lack of it.”

  “You need not die. You are right in believing yourself to be the victim of a conspiracy. Let me tell you how I know this. You’ve told me many things, quite trivial in themselves, which dovetail into a design we can’t imagine coming into being by accident. To speak of only one thing, I was particularly impressed by what you told me about the man who came in the beginning and the end of the winter to see to the lead roof on the Ministry cupola and how you met him in the corridor, at a strange hour for a maintenance worker to be on his job and—”

  “Stop, stop,” groaned Nikolai, “we are back with the pencil-strokes in the drawer, with the bright red writing paper. Give me no more sympathy and sweetness, you who ought to have been a monk, be an engineer and give me real proof that I am not mad, for I am in torment.”