The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  “That is an utterly inexact description of our sacrifices, Miss Laura,” said Chubinov.

  Laura’s temper suddenly ran away. It seemed to have nothing to do with her. It was like a flag going up on a mast.

  “I don’t care what you are. I want you to stop bothering my grandfather. What on earth can it matter to anybody but himself whether he is or isn’t frightened of dying? I never heard of a more idiotic reason for starting a fight. Please go away. If you won’t, at least stop standing in front of us, which is most irritating, and sit down, and be quiet.”

  “You have the arrogance of your class,” said Chubinov as he took his seat. “No, Miss Laura, it is not true that we are of the same class. Didn’t you notice that your grandfather paused before he said my father was a noble? We are not like the Diakonovs. Our family belongs to the very minor nobility.”

  “From the way you say that, it’s clear you believe in the whole silly business yourself,” said Laura. She was shaking with rage and suddenly felt she wanted something to eat. She opened her trinket-box and took out the other slab of chocolate. When she had taken off the silver paper she paused and thought to herself, “I don’t think this man meant to kill us, probably he’s only tiresome and wants to talk,” while she said aloud, “Here, have half, my grandfather doesn’t like it.”

  “You’re quite wrong about my attitude to nobility,” he told her. “I’ve no respect for such trifles, I assure you. My whole life is spent in an attempt to form a classless society.”

  “Do you eat chocolate or don’t you?” asked Laura.

  Absently he took the bar. “How you’re wasting the opportunities open to you because you were born in England,” he said didactically but not unkindly, “where the call to reason has already been heard. You’ve chosen to carry on the obsolete traditions of your grandfather, though you are a compatriot of Darwin, Huxley, Win-wood Read—”

  “I was at school with two of the Darwin family,” said Laura, “and it’s not a family which would go in for making scenes in railway trains in front of strangers.”

  That was rather too rude, she reflected a minute later. She gave him some more chocolate and one of the nicer of the two sorts of biscuits the cook had given her. When he had finished munching and brushed off the crumbs with a large handkerchief, clean but with a hole in the middle, he said: “One would think that the bourgeois system of bringing up girls without discipline or education, solely for the marriage market, would at least produce a certain sensibility. But it doesn’t seem to have struck home to you that I’m labouring under intense emotion. I’m very unhappy. I don’t think I’ve ever been more unhappy in my life.”

  “If you’re so keen on being rational,” she said, “surely you must see that I can’t care whether you’re unhappy, at least not very much. If I could put an end to your unhappiness, I’d do it. But I’m sure I couldn’t, so we needn’t worry about that. For the rest, so far as I’m concerned, you’re just a nuisance. You came in and said you must wake up my grandfather, and I told you not to. I have the right to do that, he’s my grandfather and not yours, I said you’d upset him and you went on and on and on, and did upset him, and about something so idiotic. You actually started a fight about whether he was afraid of death or not. Of all things. You’d said that there was something important you wanted to talk about, and that’s what you chose. And now there he is, half dead with it all, and you’re just sitting there eating chocolate and staring at the tops of your boots and you don’t look as if you were even thinking of going away. But that’s what you ought to do.”

  Quite a long time passed before Chubinov answered her: “You’re wrong. I’ve something quite important to say to your grandfather. I’m sitting like this because I’m a coward. I’m staring at my boots, at your grandfather’s tartan rug, though my boots are anything but beautiful—oh, I’ve been thinking about my boots lately, I know they’re awful—and staring at that rug, which probably represents a criminal waste of money, which should have gone to the poor, because I’d like to go on for ever like this, travelling in this compartment, travelling very fast, staring down at my boots and the rug or looking up and seeing you and those two lost and villainous Frenchwomen—”

  “Why lost and villainous?” asked Laura.

  “They are bourgeois and therefore corrupt. But let that pass.”

  “Yes. Let that pass as nonsense. You don’t know anything about them.”

  “They are bourgeois and therefore corrupt,” he repeated, with mild obstinacy, devoid of malice. “But I tell you, I’d rather sit like this, staring sometimes at the poplars and the farm buildings and the fields that are rushing past, for ever and ever. For if we never got to a railway station I wouldn’t have to talk to your grandfather about this matter, which, as I told you, is important. I never wanted to do anything less.”

  “Then don’t talk about it. If you go on like this I’ll go down the corridor and fetch the attendant.” Once more Chubinov took off his spectacles and brought the other pair out of his pocket. She broke off in exasperation. “Why do you keep on doing that? Why do you keep on changing your spectacles?”

  “They’re not my spectacles. Not my real spectacles. Not my current spectacles. They got broken last week. I haven’t had time to get them mended. That’s part of it. Everything has gone so wrong during the last few days. So I’ve fallen back on two old pairs I had. But they’re quite old, and my sight seems to have changed a lot, and I can’t make out which is the better for me to use now. Both hurt my eyes after I’ve been wearing them for a little.”

  “But you’ll blind yourself if you go on wearing the wrong spectacles!” she exclaimed. He was really too silly.

  “I know, I know,” he said piteously, trying on first one pair and then the other, and blinking like a child in its bath who has had soap in its eyes. “When there is a great tragedy, all other things should go well,” he sighed. “It’s not fair, having to look after all sorts of secondary matters as well.”

  Perhaps she ought to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she was being harsh and unkind, and even careless of her grandfather’s interests. “Am I being stupid?” she asked him, giving him another biscuit. “Would it make my grandfather happier if you talked to him about whatever it is?”

  “Not happier,” said Chubinov. “No, not happier. That we won’t be. Neither him nor me. For my case, surprising as he’ll find it, is the same as his. We’re both going through the world manacled to a mystery. If the talk goes well we’ll lose our manacles. Still, we won’t be any happier.”

  “Then why have the talk?”

  “These manacles weigh heavy. It’ll be a relief to be without them. And there’s safety. I mean it in the simplest way. Staying alive, you know.”

  “Nonsense,” she said, then caught her breath. “Oh, the Russian thing. But no. We’re not in Russia. We’re in France. The police here aren’t like the English, but there’s still some of them.”

  “You left behind the world where police are any good,” said Chubinov. “You left it when you got into this train. I left it long ago, and so, in spite of everything he could do, did your grandfather.” He leaned over and laid his hand on Nikolai’s sleeve, and Nikolai started to strike it away, but stopped. They looked into each other’s eyes, taut like fencers.

  “I wrote to you as soon as I heard you’d got to Paris,” said Chubinov, “but you never answered me.”

  “You can’t have expected an answer,” said Nikolai, gently. “You couldn’t really have hoped for a second that I would contribute my memoirs to your infidel review, which stands for everything I detest, and is written and read only by renegades and haters of Russia like yourself, none of whom would be at liberty today if I had had my way.”

  “Yet it’s only in the pages of my review,” said Chubinov, as gently, “that your memoirs could be published if you wrote them honestly, and of course you would, if you were to write them at all. What’s more, they’d do no harm, even from your point of view, i
f they appeared in my review, for the Tsar would appear in your memoirs just as my contributors and readers already think of him. Mean, evasive, grotesquely careless of his country and his own honour.”

  “I am listening to you quietly,” said Nikolai, “because it is necessary that I should know what the powers of evil are planning in my case.”

  “Fruitful in tricks, your Tsar,” Chubinov continued, “tricks one wouldn’t expect from even the most hardpressed of gentry fallen on evil days, and God knows we’re a poor lot when we’re overtaken by adversity. Tricks one would never expect from an Emperor, lord of half a continent of abundance. Tricks as would seem in character only if they were committed by a Yid moneylender coming out to rob the peasants from his den in a ghetto.”

  “You and your friends charge us servants of the Tsar with unreasonable hostility to the Jews,” said Nikolai, still softly, still without passion. “I’m interested by your allusion to those moneylenders.”

  “I spit on Jewish moneylenders not because they are Jews but because they are moneylenders and belong to a depraved species fostered by the capitalist system,” Chubinov said, with a certain haste, but keeping his voice low.

  “I am glad you have corrected your phrase to ‘Jewish moneylenders,’” said Nikolai. “I don’t myself use the word ‘Yiddish,’ or ‘Yid,’ and have never permitted any of my officials to do so.”

  “To continue,” said Chubinov, glaring, but speaking more softly than ever, “the Tsar has to your own knowledge not shrunk on certain occasions from the lie, the lie in its most degraded form, the lie told to throw blame on another—”

  “Even the foulest words,” Nikolai said sweetly through his clenched teeth, “cannot defile the Lord’s anointed.”

  “Ah, forgive me,” said Chubinov, his voice suddenly breaking, while he got out his torn handkerchief and wiped his forehead, “but I have to say this to you, for your sake as well as mine. I must go on, I must point out to you that there were moments when it must have been borne in on you that the ointment the Lord employed in this instance must have been insufficient or of an inefficacious kind? I know that you came on many incidents which must have aroused such suspicion.”

  “Never,” said Nikolai.

  “But I’ve found testimony that you did,” murmured Chubinov, “testimony in your own correspondence.”

  Nikolai winced.

  “In my stolen correspondence,” he said with remote contempt.

  “No,” said Chubinov. “In your perlustrated correspondence. Perlustration is the word you servants of the Tsar give to your practice of opening letters in the post. You do it in order to maintain your control of the social system in which you believe. We revolutionaries open letters, not in the post, but before they are posted or afterwards, in order to inaugurate the social system in which we believe. There’s no moral difference between us.”

  “Only the difference between heaven and hell,” said Nikolai. “Unworthy as we are, we represent lawful authority.”

  It seemed so odd, all these people reading other people’s letters, like the sort of butler and lady’s maid that gets sacked without a reference.

  “That’s your tragedy, Nikolai Nikolaievitch,” said Chubinov. “You believe in your system, with a religious faith. You’re so honest. Tears have often come into my eyes, your diaries are so honest.”

  “My diaries?” asked Nikolai in a whisper. His clasped hands must have hurt each other.

  “Your diaries. They are so honest. They might be written by a well-trained gun-dog, a setter or a Labrador. You know, a dog trained to bring in game and keep a soft mouth and not break a feather of the bird he carries. You learned as an official to fetch home the truth without a broken feather and put it whole into your memoranda. So the most fantastically evil business came out with the clarity which a dishonest man would have reserved for the recital of the Tsardom’s most virtuous acts, the spending of the apanage on schools, and the gifts to hospitals, and all the fumbling rest.”

  “For your father’s sake, tell me what you mean by this nonsense.” She could hardly hear the faint words.

  “You wrote, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, the whole truth about the Sipyagin diaries, in the barest terms, but all the shame came through. General Sipyagin’s widow complained to you that after the assassination of her husband the court officials had seized his diaries and had not returned them, though months had passed. You wrote to her so naively, and if I may say so without patronizing you, so nicely, assuring her that there must have been a breakdown in routine, and that you’d get back her lost property without delay. Then General Hesse told you that he had had the diaries and that he’d given them to the Tsar with his own hands, and hadn’t seen them since. Then two days later, you were graciously received by the Tsar and you raised the question of the diaries on the poor woman’s behalf, and the Lord’s anointed looked you straight in the face and said, ‘I know nothing of these diaries, but I know that General Hesse and General Sipyagin were on bad terms, and I expect that General Hesse found much in the diaries relating to himself, and that he’s destroyed them, for to tell you the truth, General Hesse has, in spite of all his good qualities, certain weaknesses which would permit him to do a thing like that.’ Poor gun-dog, trained to bring home the truth, your disgust wrote itself on the page in spite of all your efforts. It could be clearly seen which of the two men you thought the liar, General Hesse or the Lord’s anointed.”

  “Your spy stole my diaries, and you read them,” whispered Nikolai Nikolaievitch. “What would your father have said to that, Vassili Iulievitch?”

  “The Lord’s anointed, the Lord’s anointed, the things he gets up to,” said Chubinov. “He assured you, didn’t he, that though he’d accepted your resignation, he was convinced of your innocence. He said that though you alone had known beforehand the change of route by which the two Grand Dukes proceeded to the station at Kiev at the close of the feast of Saint Vladimir, he was certain that it wasn’t through you that the terrorists had known what the best point of vantage would be. He said also that he was certain that the plot against his life, accidentally uncovered by the arrest of a revolutionary group at Kharkov, had not been formed as a result of any indiscretion of yours, however much the evidence seemed to suggest that it had. He told you that he believed you to be his loyal and devoted servant and persuaded you to believe that your disgrace was due to your fellow-Ministers and not to him, by adding that though he was glad you were going to Paris for a rest, it was a great sorrow to him that you and he could not prepare for Easter communion together, as you had done the year before. You wrote it all down. I could see the setter’s eyes growing great in adoration of his lying master.”

  “I’d like to strike you,” sighed Nikolai.

  “Can’t you shut up?” Laura asked Chubinov.

  “But he hadn’t finished with you, the Lord’s anointed. First of all, before you left for Paris, he wrote to you asking for the return of all the letters he had ever sent you. You obeyed. But I know what it must have cost you. For you kept them in a place which was sacred to you, where you keep the letters of your father. All the same you obeyed. And what happened then? He sent his burglars to your house on the Kammeny-Ostrov Prospect to see that none had been held back. The Lord’s anointed, should he keep his private thieves? Then after you got to Paris, there came the letter from Baron Roller. I could repeat it to you word for word.”

  In the hush, one of the Frenchwomen said to the other, “I thought we were in for a quarrel. But the old man’s as happy as a lark. It can’t have been politics, it must have been a family dispute. But it’s evidently completely settled.”

  “Are family disputes ever completely settled?” asked the other.

  “Then,” said Chubinov, “came the letter from Baron Roller. Please, please don’t look at me like that. I must tell you. The letter from Baron Roller. This is how it went, didn’t it? ‘I consider it necessary to share with you the impression made by a talk I have just had with his Majest
y. When your name was mentioned in connection with the present political situation, his Majesty expressed himself to the effect that your return to Russia would be at the present time highly undesirable. I have judged it—’”

  “Enough,” said Nikolai. “Laura, you should not have heard all this. Do not believe what this fool has said about the Tsar. He is speaking of him as if he were a man. So he is, but he is the man chosen to be an intermediate between God and Man, and he takes on himself the guilt of earthly power, so that other men, unsullied by political action, can the more easily work out the destiny which in the end brings them to reconciliation with God.”

  “The only objection to that is that there is no God,” said Chubinov.

  “There is a God,” said Nikolai, baring his teeth. “Laura, Laura, you must listen. If in the course of the Tsar’s assumption of the burden of power, he is forced into an apparent loss of honour, that is to be considered as a sacrifice he has made for the sake of his people. I do not even need to forgive him. Whatever he has done against me is part of his intercessory function, it is not, it cannot be a sin. Chubinov, you will not get me off my knees before the Tsar. I perpetually pray to him as a saint, and as a martyr too. You may think this strange, Laura, for of course the Tsar will die in his bed, his people will always protect him. But there are martyrs, Laura, who die in their beds. Do not think I am not telling the solemn truth because I am gasping, I am panting. I am simply choking with rage. You are half-English and the English overestimate the value of calm. I am enraged, I would kill this man if I could, for about God and what He wills for Russia I enjoy perfect knowledge of the truth, and this man is blaspheming. Vassili Iulievitch, you talk repulsive nonsense of a very degraded type. A country schoolmaster with some disgusting digestive disease might think as you do. Yet I have to thank you. For you have done me a great favour, tonight I shall sleep as I have not slept for years.”