The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  She went back to the salon and found that Catherine had brought in a bottle of Vichy water, which was standing in a bowl of ice. She filled a glass and went back to the window. The street was busier now. More customers than before were going in and out of the lit shops and stopping to gossip with the women and old men who were sitting on cane chairs beside the doorways, while the younger men leaned against the walls. Nearly all the women were sewing or knitting as they sat, and some of the old ones were bending their white linen caps over little pillows on which their lace was pinned, but their real occupation was the talk, which by jerked hands, shrugged shoulders, hands flung out palm upwards, wove the French fairy-tale about other people having shown an extraordinary lack of common sense. In the middle of the paved causeway children in blue overalls played gentle games. If a wrangle turned rough, parents started forward in their chairs and shot out jets of scolding, but the mellowness set in again at once. As the street darkened the sky grew brighter. The red roofs glowed terracotta, and in one of them, some distance off, a high sky-light blazed scarlet and diamond. There must be a magnificent sunset. Red sky at morning the shepherd’s warning, red sky at night the shepherd’s delight. The Channel would be smooth for her father.

  When it was nearly night all the children ran to one end of the street and escorted back a boy and girl of eleven or nine or so, dressed in party clothes, carrying toys and leading between them a little girl, not more than five, golden-haired and dressed in a white frock with a blue sash low on her hips, who was clasping in her arms a doll dressed in white like herself. They all bore themselves like celebrities, and the occasion from which they had returned had evidently been recognized by everybody in the neighbourhood as quite out of the ordinary. As they went along the causeway, bright figures at the head of their blue-clad companions, the people sitting outside the houses eagerly called on them to stop, questioned them, examined their toys, admired their clothes, rubbing the hems of the little girls’ dresses between finger and thumb, kissed them all, and waved them on with congratulating gestures. After they had gone, the other children lost interest in their play and by twos and threes went indoors. Now the roofs were darkening to brown, and the sky-light might just have been a hole, the glass gave back no light. Above, across a crystal blue-green sky pricked with the first stars, there raced black clouds, sometimes mounting up into great cliffs fissured with gulfs and staying so, sometimes marching like armies, substanceless but full of purpose. Up towards this aerial confusion the smoke rose from the chimneypots in tight blue spirals, and swallows descended from the higher air to the eaves and up again, in flight as quick as cries. Her fear was like a dark arch over the lit stage where these things happened. She drank the cool water and put her forehead against the cool glass and prayed that her father would come soon.

  Madame Verrier came out and said, “Your grandfather wants you. That sedative hardly worked at all. But the Professor will be coming back.”

  Though the nurse had lit the gas and the bedroom was not dark, Nikolai asked Laura, “Who are you?” and then said to himself, “Yes, it’s her voice. And her slight accent. You would know she was not born in Russia.” Then he told her, without tenderness, as if giving instructions to a clerk, “Well, now I know what it was all about, and you must listen.”

  “And what was it all about?”

  “Why, nothing at all. When I say, nothing at all, I mean that that Kamensky business was of no importance.”

  “What, you mean that what Chubinov said wasn’t true, was nonsense?”

  “No, nothing he said was nonsense. He was one of us. He was one of the Russian nobility. Not a great family, but noble. If our sort talked nonsense, it was only because the occasion made it useless to talk sense. There have been many such occasions in Russian history. This was not one of them. The story Chubinov told us about Kamensky was perfectly true. But it meant nothing. Had no significance. Neither had the story of which it was a part, including my disgrace. That had no significance either. All that has happened is simply a consequence of the law that if opposites exist and meet they must destroy each other. To me the Tsar’s power is the point at which historical being meets the will of God. But it seems to Kamensky and his imbeciles that the Tsar debauched history and that there is no God. If we could have remained separate, Kamensky and I, we might have done each other no harm. But we were drawn together by the existence of the Tsar, by the existence of God. They forced us two to confront each other. So all that was he rushed out to destroy me, so all that was I rushed out to destroy him. It is an accident, that is all, like a collision between two railway trains.”

  “But you aren’t destroyed.”

  “In an earthly sense, I am. Utterly destroyed. First my honour, then my life. I would have lived years longer if I had not learned this morning that little Sasha was my Judas. I felt the sword coming out at the other side of my thick body. And Kamensky will die too. Chubinov will kill him.”

  She breathed, “You’re sure of that?”

  “Quite sure. To begin with, Chubinov is not such a fool as he looks. And consider his education. I took quite a lot of pains to make him a good revolver shot. My reason was that it was the sort of thing his father thought he would not be able to do, and he despised him for it. But whether I went to all this trouble out of Christian charity, because I was sorry for poor young Vassili, or because I wanted to keep his father in his place as inferior to me, I really cannot say. Well, there was I training him to kill Kamensky, without knowing it, and on the other side there was Kamensky training him to kill Kamensky, without knowing it either, by rubbing into him through the years the tactics and strategy of assassination. But, Laura, I hope you understand that you must do everything you can to prevent Chubinov killing Kamensky.”

  “Of course, Grandfather.”

  “Don’t say ‘of course.’ It is your Christian duty, but nobody can say ‘of course’ with any appositeness about a Christian duty, which is always forced and extravagant and the last thing any sensible person would choose to undertake. I feel more certain that it is your duty to attempt to stop Chubinov killing Kamensky because it is so very unlikely that a young girl will be able to avert this crime. Oh, Laura, my little Laura, I grieve for you. Kamensky is very low. I had to raise him up to a great height before we could speak together and form a mutual affection, form what I believed to be a mutual affection. But through his lowness a great force travelled. Oh, my little one, dear child of my dear child, it may destroy you, it must certainly alter your world. The universe is full of great forces which manifest themselves in disgusting ways through our fallen humanity. O Lord, when I am dead, explain to me the folly of Thy creation, for the wisdom Thou Thyself hast given me faints with bewilderment.”

  Professor Barrault and Madame Verrier had stolen in quietly through the folding-doors. “What are those two shuffling about for? Do they think I cannot see and hear? Till the last moment of my life my senses will be sharper than theirs have ever been. Ask the woman to leave. The man can stay, but not the woman. Yes, I know she is a nurse, but she affects me disagreeably, like the women students in our Russian universities. Thank you, my dear. Now give the man a chair. I am sure he knows his business so well that he will notice when I give signs of actually dying and will come forward and do what is necessary. Convey to him my respect for his skill and my gratitude that I should be the object of it. Now let me get on with what I must tell you, Laura. It’s fortunate for you that you have inherited the Diakonov intelligence and will understand at least part of my story. You see, I have discovered what my sins are, or rather what my great sin is. What is extraordinary is that, though nobody could call me a vain man, it proceeds from vanity. Some time ago you left the room—what did you do?”

  “I sat at a window and looked down at the street.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Old people sitting at the doors, people going in and out of the shops, children playing, three children coming back from a party. It was quite pretty.�
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  “It may have been pretty but it can’t have been of the slightest importance. Whatever you did when you left the room can’t have meant anything at all. You see, when you went away I tried to imagine what it will be like when I am dead and come into the presence of God, and it wasn’t very hard, for I am no longer with you in my entirety. Half of me has already left my body and this world. So I could see how it will be when I meet God. And it will be a meeting between two beings who are different, more different than a man from a woman, more different than a white man from a Negro, totally different. It was like that”—he could still snap his fingers—“I saw the difference between God and Man running through the universe as a flash of lightning runs through the sky. I say that because that difference is a thing in itself. Other differences are comparisons. Not this, which is unique.”

  He wept and impatiently dried his eyes with the sheet. Laura wiped away his tears with her own handkerchief and called him softly the tender names her nannie used to call her when she was ill, knowing that he would not understand them and could not blast them away with his scorn. He could not argue off-hand that he was not a cocker-nonny. Choking, he went on: “I’ve been wrong all the time. O my God, when I have done my best to serve Thee, why didst Thou not inform my ignorance and keep me from this sin? When we are face to face explain to me the mystery of Thy lack of candour. Almost before Thou dost anything else. Well, I have always known that God is good and the maker of all things good, the sower who broadcasts good seed and reaps the good harvest, and I have known too that Man is not good, he is a chaos in which evil mingles with good and is always preferred by its host, he is the bad land in which the good seed can grow but poorly, and then only by grace. But I thought Man was a lesser member of God’s family, even as I have relatives who are drunkards and adulterers and many things that I am not. I saw God as a man divinely free of Man’s evil, with no human qualities save when he clothed Himself with Jesus, and I saw Man as a God with the divinity extracted and the human qualities grossly proliferating into perpetual sin. On the contrary, God is God and Man is Man, and there is no bridge between them but grace, and that does not change Man into God, it simply saves him from damnation. In the same way, I could not make Kamensky my kinsman simply by making him my friend.”

  “Well, then, that’s settled, you’re not God, you’re Man,” said Laura. “But we all loved you as a man. Of course God will forgive you. Now lie back and rest, dear, dear Grandfather.”

  He sobbed a little longer and said, as soon as he could, “I would be glad if you would see that Kamensky and Chubinov are each given some little possession of mine as a souvenir. An object of some value but with no family associations. Neither is related to me.”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” said Laura. She turned aside and muttered into her wet handkerchief, “I’ll see them damned first.”

  Professor Barrault said, “But this must stop. He is exhausting himself. Another tablet, I think, Mademoiselle—”

  “He’s being quite happy in his way,” said Laura.

  “You grasp the appalling consequences of my mistake. Since I didn’t understand that God and His Son are unique, I didn’t grasp that His suffering was unique and unlike that of any human being. Therefore I was led into the blasphemy of supposing that because His suffering has meaning, so has mine. Pretentious idiot that I was! I thought that in suffering I was buying something at a great price, carrying out a costly sacrifice which in time would be hailed in heaven and on earth as glorious. So I have lived in anguish. I’ve been tormented by the itch to inquire into the mechanism of my disgrace, for a martyr can’t help, I imagine, but have some curiosity about the details of his martyrdom. Sebastian must have wondered why all those pagan arrows did not harm him, though later the pagan rods beat him to death. Without dignity I panted like a thirsty dog, waiting for the day when my persecutors would be routed and my martyrdom acclaimed by men and angels. So I howled and caterwauled and made the lives of those around me a misery because I impudently expected my agony to be a sacrament to be the symbol in this material world of an event in the spiritual world. I’ve been no better than a peasant who goes mad and believes himself heir to an immense fortune, to an estate in the Crimea and mines in the Urals, so that he refuses to work and lets his wife and children and old parents starve. I have wasted my life because I have not seen that my pains are of no more significance than my pleasures, and they have none, and that my only worth lies in my love of God, and all that I did and was on earth is without meaning, because I am a man.”

  He was in agony. She said, “This isn’t true. I love you, my mother loves you, my grandmother loves you, many people love you, for all sorts of reasons which matter. Oh, for one thing, you were so brave when you were hounded down.”

  In a small voice he said, “Above the window.”

  She turned about and looked.

  “That blotch on the wall, running towards the corner of the room. The rain’s seeped in from a gutter on the outside. A workman’s scamped his work. My suffering means only that. I am evil because I am human, my evil heritage called to those cursed by the same heritage, and together we laid out our portion so that it increased. I am repenting. God will forgive me. But that doesn’t make my sufferings any more interesting. If you remember my misfortunes and your kind heart and your family loyalty make you pity me, remember that blotch on the wall. My whole life is as important as that blotch, no less and no more.”

  Laura prayed aloud, “Oh, God, don’t let him think anything so awful. Do some sort of miracle.”

  Nikolai said, “Ah, I’ve broken your heart. But I had to tell you, and it’s of no importance that anybody’s heart is broken. Conquer your pride and your respect for the emotions, which should be despised with all you can muster of contempt, which I hope is not much, since you are a woman, and remember what I say: ‘Man is not God, God is not Man,’ and repeat it often to yourself. You will have children, all women in our family marry, they never lack great attractions, and you must repeat it to those children of yours also. You may think it isn’t necessary, for the difference between the human and the divine is stated in every book of the Bible and in every office of our liturgy. But there’s a treacherous paradox here. There’s no better guide than custom, but on all that’s customary there settles the thick dust of material time, so that the mind turns away from it in distaste. For me that message of the Scriptures and the Church was dimmed with many readings and many hearings, so only in this last bitter hour did I learn what they had been trying to tell me. What a mistake, what frustration, but it does not matter, I know now I am a man.”

  She prayed silently, “God, let him die now, God, let him die now.” Surely God could see the foam on his lips.

  “I hope you go back to Russia, Laura. Oh, God, grant me this, since I am penitent, send my little Laura back to Russia. Our Russian society is the society which is precious to Thee, all the others are chance coagulations of pagan mobs. Russian society alone serves God, but not strenuously enough. It prays but it does not fast. At present it simply tells each of its members to spare himself the trouble of deciding what he shall be and do here on earth, since the Tsar makes all such decisions for him and takes on himself the guilt of earthly power. How beautiful, how very beautiful is our system. As time goes on it will be admired as the most merciful and fatherly form of government the world has ever known. Yet it has its faults. It is insufficiently rigid. There are occasions when it permits a man to use his own will. Even I, who have given my utter loyalty to the system, can look back to moments when I have made my own choice, God forgive me.”

  Laura’s eyes and mouth opened wide. Was he really unaware that from his birth he had done exactly as he pleased?

  “At many moments our Russian State turns to water. It often does not stand four-square. These weaker moments are speciously attractive. My own doctor is the son of one of my father’s serfs, and in my folly I have rejoiced in this as admirable. But now I see I was wrong, for such li
berty leads straight to the sin I have committed. If a man can change his place in the world and the condition of the world, he must construct for himself some philosophical belief which will teach him what changes to make, and since he is vain he will attach great importance to this belief, since it is the work of his own mind. Then he is bound to sin with me and forget that God is God and Man is Man. He will become a rival to God and pretend that he understands life as well as God does and can control the direction of history. Then he must become a miserable and grieving rebel against God, and will insist that his suffering has a meaning, though the whole of existence will prove to him that it has not, and he will waste his life in useless lamentations as I have wasted mine, or in murderous conspiracies like my poor little Sasha and that idiot Vassili Iulievitch. A small man has come into the room, my eyes are failing, I can only see that he is small. How curious it must be to be small. I am glad I was spared that humiliation. Who is he?”

  “He’s the doctor who was so kind to us at the station.”

  “Tell him he may stay if he does not interrupt. Oh, Laura, we Russians have been too lax. Let Russians build up a citadel of goodness, where nobody places a vain value on his individuality, where everybody realizes that his highest destiny, his only respectable destiny is to obey. Let each Russian offer up the dear wayward son of his soul, his will, as God the Father offered up His dear obedient son, Christ. For the sake of the world we must surrender our souls to God and our bodies to His servant the ruler of Russia. This is not even very much to ask of ourselves, for it is not a sacrifice which need be made for ever. When Holy Russia has been anointed for centuries by the blessed oil of its children’s abnegated will, all Russians will be born committed to innocence. The State is only an instrument of man’s moral struggle, so then, all men being moral, there will be no need for the State. It will wither away. Grace will replace the law. The kingdom of Heaven will be established on earth. Laura, go back to Russia and await that day.”