The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  “Don’t be silly, you’re only trying to be kind. I told you he’d be coming here at four, and that’s how you cornered him.”

  “Miss Laura, you’re not regarding the matter from a proper philosophic standpoint—”

  “You asked me when he’d be here so that you could shoot him and I told you he’d be here at four, and you came and you shot him. That’s enough for me. Now go on.”

  “Well, by ‘him,’ of course, he meant the Tsar. And I realized he was telling the truth. He had put into motion a plan for killing the Tsar, which would be completed if he were to live. My helper and I had found in one of his rooms a telegram from a man called Sartrin, a leather merchant in St. Petersburg, which acknowledged the receipt of an order for so many hides, and saying that these were ready for dispatch whenever required. That is a phrase which among our people means that all preparations have been made to carry out an operation as soon as the signal is given. Sartrin is an activist member of our organization, who, among other duties, is our contact with a member who is a groom in the imperial stables. As this member is very young, and as any attempt he might make on the life of the Tsar must certainly result in his death, we have as yet hesitated to exploit the advantages of his position. I was about to stammer out some question about the regularity of the proceedings, whether the Battle Organization had in fact been fully informed regarding this important operation, when Gorin backed away from me and again spread out his arms in that revolting gesture. He repeated the word ‘him’ a third time, and his left hand and the roses jigged high in the air, but his right hand went down and down and down, far lower than before. This was his supreme act of treachery. He was not merely conveying that the execution of the Tsar would be of great service to our cause. He was acquiescing in the system of values we had spent our lives repudiating. He was claiming that the Tsar is all-precious, and outweighs all other human life, being a particle of human substance transmuted to the superhuman by its function, just as would be believed by the most bigoted priest and illiterate peasant. What was still more horrible, it was Gorin’s recognition of the supreme value of the Tsar which made him resolve to murder him. There was a huge solemn snobbery about him. He had the air of a vulgarian who asks one to dinner, though you do not know him very well, and holds out as bait that among the guests there will be a Countess. But the solemnity was real. He believed in the holiness of what he was about to kill.”

  Yes, Kamensky believed in the holiness of the Tsar. And also he did not believe it. But she could not explain this to Chubinov now, or perhaps ever. It was too silly.

  Chubinov poured himself out a glass of vodka. “I found myself performing the routine I’d often practised with the others. I turned on my heel, walked several paces away from him, gripped my revolver firmly in the depths of my pocket and braced my arm against my hip, spun round, squeezed the trigger three times, spun round again, and went on my way as if nothing had happened. I found myself passing the pharmacy again, and I went in and bought a tin of toothpowder, calmly enough, I think, for the pharmacist seemed to notice nothing unusual about me. Every minute I expected to hear a clamour in the street outside, and the sounds of shouts and running feet coming nearer and nearer, until, if my luck had gone against me, the shop-door would be burst open. But the afternoon was like any other. I concluded my purchase and to gain time to think what could have happened, I chatted to the pharmacist for a minute or two about his little dog, which was snuffing about my ankles. Suddenly it occurred to me that I might have grossly overestimated my prowess as a revolver shot, and missed Gorin. Immediately I went out into the street, and was humiliated to find that this was the truth. For he was standing stock-still on the corner of the avenue, just where I had left him, and nothing seemed odd about him except that he was clutching the roses to him very tightly, as if he feared someone might take them away from him. But then he moved off, too slowly, and as he entered the avenue, he reeled. I saw I hadn’t missed him. And I was in agony.”

  “Why should you be in agony because you’d hurt this abominable man?”

  “It wasn’t quite like that. My agony went deep. It went back to my boyhood. When your grandfather taught me to shoot, he told me it was a sin, a real sin, he would have had it included, if he could, among the sins one has to confess and wipe out by penance, to shoot something and wound it without killing it. ‘Think of what it must be,’ he used to say, ‘to be a bird with a shot in its breast, unable to fly, unable to get to water, unable to fight off the hawk or the carrion crow, think of what that must mean for a deer, and the bear, who have nervous systems like our own and can suffer as we do. If we kill these creatures outright, they die as we would like to die, but if we wound them and leave them to a lingering death, then we torture them, and torturers are savages.’ Now, I was torturing Gorin in this way. I followed him up the avenue, and as he staggered on and I saw the blood he left on the pavement, he became innocent as a wounded pigeon, a pheasant, a deer, a bear. As for the staggering—that’s not the right word. His body jerked about as if it were trying to evict his soul, and the soul wouldn’t consent to be evicted, seemed to be angry with the body, to be feebly bludgeoning it from within. Perhaps that’s why it’s such a sin to wound and not to kill, perhaps there are such struggles between soul and body when there’s no muting of the sense by disease. Then the man in the light suit went to his aid, and I felt jealous of him, I ran forward to share the precious burden, and then Gorin whirled round, still clutching those roses, and exclaimed, ‘I must get there, I must get there.’ You know how sweet his voice was. Sometimes it was particularly so, with a hungry sweetness, though hungry is the wrong word, for he was eager not to take but to give. That’s how it sounded then. Only it was more melting, more pathetic, more like the sound of a harp, than I have ever heard it. Then he cried out in Russian, ‘There must be an explanation,’ just as he’d done when he’d showed surprise I wasn’t in England. After that his body and his soul wrestled for another second, and then he slid down into the arms of the man in the light suit, and through them on the pavement, landing softly, like a sack with hardly anything in it, and he lay stretched on the stones, quite easy, quite untroubled. Only his hands struggled to the last and they were convulsed among the flowers, so that he died with them covering his face. I walked slowly towards him, praying that he was not dead and would sit up, or that at least someone would uncover his face, so that I could look on him for the last time. But there was only the neat suit and the roses and the blood.”

  “Don’t cry. Oh, Vassili, you shouldn’t cry. It couldn’t be helped. We couldn’t just let him kill us.” But she knew that would not comfort him. The murder was necessary, but that did not prevent it from staining them both. If hooligans threw one into the mud, that was not one’s fault, but one’s clothes would be muddy. This was the blackest mud.

  When he had stopped weeping, he asked, “And Berr. Have you seen Berr?”

  “He is here now. He is here all the time; his wife is a candle-bearer.”

  But Chubinov would not let her fetch Berr. He started one of those distressing disquisitions about the working and counterworking of the machine his friends controlled and the machine his enemies controlled, which had to be respected, since he was intelligent and had studied this subject and nothing else for years, but which were ugly. Man could not have been born for this. Russians, he said, lived in a labyrinth of suspicion, whether they were in Russia or abroad, and he did not want anyone drawn into its dark core because of him. There would be a brief period when the murder would be considered by the French police as an ordinary crime, with nothing to show that victim and assailant were not inhabitants of Paris. But as soon as he had gone away, and he assured her that his plans for getting away would surprise her, it would be intimated to the landlords of the Hotel de Guipuzcoa et de Racine and the Hôtel San Marino that a client of each, who would by then have been absent from his room for some days, was to be found in the police morgue; and in case either landlord felt reluct
ant to involve himself with the law, the police were to receive the same intimation. Then when it was realized that Gorin and Kamensky were one and the same man, and this a Russian, then the detectives in charge of the case would recall the unlucky policeman’s suspicion of Hippolyte Baraton, and for a day or two everybody known to have spoken to him would be examined and cross-examined, held at police headquarters, threatened, perhaps imprisoned. Even

  Laura herself and her mother would be questioned, he thought. But that would be no ordeal. The Diakonov family was too important, and the British Embassy would protect them; and anyway her story was perfect, she had only to go on saying that her grandfather had introduced Baraton to her on the train.

  This persecution would last only a day or two, even before they had time to recall him, in his role of Baraton, for examination. For the Russian Embassy would recognize at once that the dead man was not only Gorin and Kamensky but also Kaspar, their chief police agent, and by this time Chubinov and his helper would have seen to it that there had reached them material proving that most of the conspicuous terrorist accusations in recent years had been planned by Kaspar. It would be a Day of Judgment for the Russian Secret Police, particularly the staff of their Paris bureau. Also the French and Swiss Secret Services would be embarrassed, for they should have detected Gorin both as a terrorist agent and a Tsarist agent on their territories. The Quai d’Orsay would have to act in the interest of discretion. The press would be silenced and the police investigations would be abandoned. It annoyed Laura that he foretold this with pride. For if he and his friends had not been making this cat’s-cradle of mischief through the years the police investigations would never have begun in the first place.

  But his gentle voice rang quite loud with pride, when he leaned forward and said, “But, Miss Laura, the matter will not end there. We of the revolutionary movement will make the truth known. In our own way. On our own terms. Russia will be aflame.”

  That was too absurd. This shabby row had no spark within it to kindle any fire. A man with a talent for lying had used it to buy himself power and devotion, pleasant quarters by a lake, and fine clothes, while his doting and obedient disciples wandered homeless, shorn of their own kin and their identities, clad in garments such as the product of the female dentist’s skill, which Laura could see over Chubinov’s shoulder, hanging on the door in obvious deformity. It was so badly cut that it did not even fit the air.

  “But for a day or two the authorities will carry on a merciless harassment of everyone who met me as Hippolyte Baraton. And even though the file is closed, a black mark might remain against the names of those questioned, if they were poor and helpless. I’d not choose to do that to anyone. But it gives me the pleasure of making a gift to a beloved friend, not to do it to Berr. So I’ll not see him. Anyway, it’s a great thing to sit here, under the same roof as Berr, as Nikolai, as your mother, as you.”

  He should be in Russia, working as a doctor or a teacher in some town where generation after generation would profit by his sweetness, and rejoice to pay him back in kind. Her eyes were wet, and she saw that his were too. He had better be left alone for a time. She put the coffee-pot and the dish of lapsha on the tray, since they were cold by now, and they seemed all he wanted. She carried the tray to the kitchen and asked that some fresh coffee and some hot lapsha should be ready in a quarter of an hour, and sat down in a corner, watching the first stage of the sombre domestic carnival which, her mother said, would reach its height the next day. The servants were all dressed in black cotton clothes, and they were still cooking, as they had been since dawn, the meal that would be served to the mourners after the funeral. The kitchen-table was covered with cold birds, and the cook was slowly moving round it decorating them with slices of lemon and sprays of herbs. There was a smaller table set up not far from it, spread with a fine cloth, on which a woman Laura had never seen before, who must have been brought in specially, was rolling out pastry into huge thin sheets, rolling them thinner and thinner till they were bluish, folding them up, and setting them aside, and beginning all over again. Nothing could stop the servants preparing this feast for mourners who were thousands of miles away, and who, even had they been present, would probably not have dared to attend. All of the servants moved slowly and hieratically, but the kitchen echoed with their quick cries, which, as always, performed a linguistic miracle: the Russians were talking Russian to the French, the French were talking French to the Russians, and although neither knew more than a few words of the other’s language, the conversation was coherent. But though it was coherent it was wild, for they talked as if there were taking place in their midst, in this apartment, even in the kitchen, an event which was a cross between a circus and a harshly conducted Day of Judgment.

  Little Louison went by, staring down into the small wooden bowl he was carrying, pressing up and down a cutter shaped to its inner sides. He saw her, halted, and pulled up a stool beside her, as if they were two Westerners sticking together. She saw that the bowl and its cutter were a tool for chopping up herbs, and exquisitely made. She felt the smooth sides of the bowl, admired the way the cutter fitted into them. Human beings were never so exquisite as the things they made. She pulled out a fine frond of the parsley which had escaped the blade. Human beings were never so exquisite as the earth they lived on and the things that grew on it. Louison leaned towards her, and asked her to tell him who the people were in the pictures painted on the big iron panel round the kitchen clock. The French servants, he said, did not know, the Russian servants tried to tell him, but he could not understand what they said.

  “Those are scenes from the life of Saint Serafim of Sarov.” They showed him standing before the altar and seeing the Son of Man coming down a path of gold between the kneeling worshippers; prostrating himself in the snow by his hermitage in the forest; walking among the pines with a maimed wild-cat in his arms and a wolf and bear beside him like happy children; being beaten by unbelieving robbers but saved by an angel from the final blow; receiving in his tiny cell the Queen of Heaven, attended by her twelve handmaidens, two angels, and Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Divine.

  “Ah, superstition,” nodded Louison, his blade going chop-chop in the bowl. So it was. But only such legends, which were not true, had prepared her for the strangeness of life. What the newspapers and books gave as fact pretended that events and people were the colour of photographs, and predictable. She did not know how she could explain this to Louison, but how useful it would be if she had the power. She stiffened with rage as she remembered the cruel trick that Kamensky had played by pretending that the boy had slammed the door on his hand. Perhaps poor Louison might still worry about this at nights, particularly if he heard that Kamensky had come to an ill end. She wished she could tell him that a devil from Hell had come to plague him for that minute.

  When the quarter of an hour was up she took the tray along the corridor, she felt sick, for it was as if she would find in the sewing-room both Chubinov and the thing they had done together.

  But he looked so gentle, so helpless, so spent, that she forgot everything in her concern for him, and listened sympathetically to his plans, for which he expected praise, though they sickened her. He was going to wander still farther away from his home, on an errand which would be empty of any purpose but deception; his very name would be a colourless blob, because it was assumed and there was no childhood or youth or manhood behind it. He was going to England, not to London, where Gorin’s people would still be hunting for him, but to England. For he had been much impressed by the advice she had given him at Grissaint when she had said that if he became a teacher in an English school he would be safe, for if members of the Battle Organization came to kill him the headmaster would simply send for the police and the matter would be at an end. He thought she was taking too simple a view of the situation. It could not be, he said, smiling, that England was so unaffected by the march of progress. She saw that he thought there was something slightly disgraceful i
n the idea of a society where, if someone with political ideas wanted to kill a teacher in a school, the staff might be able and willing to prevent it. He was so silly as to be mad, she reflected. But he had considered that in England the process of extraditing him might go so slowly that he would probably not get fetched back to France until the authorities had stopped looking for the murderer of Gorin. So he had gone to a scholastic agency which had once found him a post in a Belgian school when he was in need of cover, and found there was an emergency call from an English headmaster who had lost his French teacher in mid-term. So, tomorrow morning, after he had made his statement at the police-station, he would take the train to England and make his way to St. Aloysius’ College, Bournemouth.

  “I think it will be an agreeable hiding-place. They tell me Bournemouth is surrounded by pine-woods, and I imagine it resembles Finland, where I spent some happy summers when I was a child.”

  “I shouldn’t count on that.”

  But the future was to be wholly glorious. The next time her mother went back to Russia she would be received with the highest honours, solemnified by the remorse of the imperial family, for her father’s memory would have been rehabilitated, indeed enhanced, by the material he and his helpers would by that time have put before the authorities. “I have been able to clear your grandfather quite finally, thanks to the help of this comrade, who, as I mentioned to you, so greatly aided me to search Gorin’s two rooms. It’s ironical that we were brought together by Gorin’s own determination to destroy me.”

  She had to listen. Of course she had been fully justified in conniving at the murder of Gorin. Yet she felt a strange hunger for still further justification.