The Birds Fall Down (18 page)

“I’m sure that’s so,” said Chubinov. “This is, as you say, a case of A bringing valid information about B and saying falsely that it comes from C. Now let’s get on to the next stage in the story. For years we accepted that Pravdine was our informant on you. Then when you went for your trip to Paris, which we knew, long before you did, was to be your permanent exile, we were distressed. We were, you see, specially anxious to go on studying the serial story of the Tsar’s perfidy which you were writing in your diary without knowing it. Also, we wanted to know whether you and your associates went on being baffled by the mystery of who it was in your entourage who had betrayed you over the attack on the two Grand Dukes at Kiev and the one on the Tsar at Reval. Then, also, and perhaps most important for those of us who bear the responsibility for the terrorist branch of the revolutionary movement, there was another mystery which had to be solved. I’ll talk of that later. But for the meantime, you’ll see the situation. It was important that we should find someone to spy on you in Paris as Pravdine had spied on you in St. Petersburg. Yes, yes, I realize now Pravdine wasn’t the man, but we then thought that he was. But we never imagined we’d find anybody who could get his foot inside your door in Paris for weeks, or months, or even years. Just think how difficult it was bound to be, with the Russian Secret Police having its own office in Paris to deal with expatriates.”

“Well, those fellows don’t do much,” said Nikolai. “They all get corrupted by the West. The ideal would be for all Russians to live and die in Russia, seeing only their own kind and maintaining their own system. It’s only you accursed expatriates which make us break our rule in the case of the police.”

“Oh, those fellows keep their claws. You’re wrong if you think they give our people much rope. Well, it seemed to us a remarkable example of Gorin’s efficiency that almost at once he found someone in Paris who would be able to report to us just as regularly as we thought Pravdine had done. But that’s what’s so wonderful about Gorin. He seems so gentle and, as it were, so bemused, turning from one object of kindness to another, not knowing whom to comfort first, and then there’s a specific task to be done, and all of a sudden he changes into somebody else—he might be one of those great industrialists, those railway magnates, those capitalist monsters whom Count Witte is always trying to let loose on our country for the exploitation of our wretched people. Well, Gorin sprang into action now. In no time he found us a man who could tell us from moment to moment what you are doing. A man named Porfirio Ilyitch Berr.” He repeated the name softly. “Porfirio Ilyitch Berr.”

“You ought to be in a lunatic asylum,” said Nikolai Nikolaievitch. “You and all your friends. First my diaries are being read and my most intimate secrets revealed by a man named Pravdine who in fact sat in a housemaid’s cupboard all day ordering blackboards and spoke with me, so far as I can remember, once in my life and then to wish me a happy Christmas, and never set foot in my office. Now I’m having my soul put under the Röntgen rays by a man I’ve never seen or heard of, Porfirio Ilyitch Berr. You’re all mad.”

“You’re wrong when you say you don’t know Berr,” said Chubinov, looking for the first time rather disagreeable, sly and harsh. “It’s the world you live in that makes you think you don’t. That world where everything good and noble and enduring is annulled by the system, the monstrous, murderous system that subordinates everything to the aim of putting the few over the many. You know Berr. You even derive, because not all your heart is callused by power, the most exquisite pleasure from his company.”

“Mad,” said Nikolai, “raving mad, the lot of you.”

“But all that I’ll explain later. First, before I can make that explanation, I must express to you that we are two halves of a whole. We’re in the same plight as you. We have our Judas.”

“Oh, I know who he is,” said Nikolai.

“You know?” cried Chubinov. “Then tell me, tell me!”

“Berr,” said Nikolai, “old Berr,” and chuckled into his beard.

“You’re impossible. For God’s sake do not be light-minded, as all you reactionaries always are, and answer me one question seriously. The names of Vesnin, Patopenko, and Komissaroff mean to you what they mean to me. They mean a man who was shot, and two men who are slowly dying in the most northerly penal settlement of Siberia. Oh, the cruelty of Tsarist authority, which sends the political idealist into the Arctic cold. How did you come to arrest these three men?”

“That’s an official secret,” said Nikolai, “so I’ll not discuss it.”

“You must tell me if you want to live.”

“I wouldn’t buy my life by the betrayal of any official secret.”

“Imbecile old man,” shouted Chubinov, “will you risk your personal safety to keep the secrets of the Tsar, when he has treated you far worse than my grandfather or yours would have treated one of their serfs?”

“The answer is, yes. I will do nothing to help the enemies of the Tsar, even to save my life, or the life of any one of my family. There are men who are called to serve God by conformity and I’m one of them. I’ve always known that. At certain times in my life I’ve greatly longed to drink and to gamble, I’ve been hungry for the enormous pleasure in the loss of my senses and in gaining or in losing large sums for no reason. But I’ve always foreseen that these things would give me no lasting happiness, that my part was to be a pillar and that a pillar must never even sway. Go on telling your story if you like. But I can’t believe it’ll mean anything to me. You and I were created in different dreams of God.”

“There you’re mistaken. We’re the children of the same dream. Listen. We revolutionaries have, as you know, had many successes in the last few years, but many failures also. We’ve inflicted the sentence of death on a far greater number of social criminals than have ever been brought to justice before in the same period, but at the same time we’ve lost more and more of our men to your forces of reaction. Of these Vesnin, Patopenko, and Komissaroff were the most important. They’d all the qualities that would have made them leaders of our organization, particularly Vesnin. But there were many others, and we find the circumstances under which you arrested them incomprehensible. There was always a great knowledge of the workings of our organization behind all these arrests, but they weren’t the arrests one would have expected any man who had that knowledge to make. Before each of our great achievements—”

“You mean assassinations.”

“Of course. Before each of them, and after them, the police became very active and rounded up a number of terrorists, but never the men and women really engaged in the current conspiracy. Vesnin, however, was arrested just after he had killed the Commandant of St. Petersburg—” Laura drew in her breath with a hiss again—“and Patopenko and Komissaroff when they were just about to execute another important plan, but they were exceptions. Most of the arrested revolutionaries had either struck their last blows some time before or were subordinates not yet ripe for terrorist action. Now, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, what would you make of that?”

“Why, what you do, I expect,” answered Nikolai slowly. “That on our side we weren’t receiving the information which we’d really have liked, which would have enabled us to uproot the terrorist organization there and then. We were being given just enough to let us cripple the revolutionary movement and prevent it from realizing its full potential. Awkward for us. Awkward for you, too. You lost your leaders of five or ten years ahead, and the survivors are left in a state of mutual distrust, without the old hands to steady them.”

They grumbled on. They talked about a lot of people. In Russian conversations there always seemed a crowd of faceless personalities doing violent things. It seemed that many of them lived very uncomfortable lives. Men were told to go from St. Petersburg to Kharkov and choose their own day and their own route and keep the choice a secret. That, apparently, was insisted on by this man Gorin. Then the traveller arrived at noon and sat about in a dark corner of the station with the story of a further journey ready on his lips if he were questioned, and waited till the afternoon to go into the town, because by then the police were less vigilant. Then he’d be crossing the station square and as he went by the line of drojkis two of the lean horses would paw the ground and jangle their harness, fretted by the two men standing in wait between them, two policemen, who stepped forward with the right interrogations, the proper incredulities. In some room at the headquarters of the Secret Police a voice had said, “Don’t try to take him at the station, inside or at the exits. Many of the workers are on his side and they’ll warn every solitary traveller if you’re about. But you’ll find him making his way across the square at about four o’clock in the afternoon.” Yet the traveller had never said to himself, “At four o’clock I’ll go across the square into the town.” He’d just gone there when he felt like it. Some of them had been able to tell the organization that afterwards.

Nikolai said, “Someone knew that if one sits on a station bench from noon one’s back feels as if it were breaking just about four o’clock, and stretching one’s legs doesn’t do any good. Just as someone on your side knows that when my lot have to raid a café where your miserable pack meet to plan their villainies, it’s nervous work, as your lot have their revolvers and their bombs and no mercy in their hearts, and the inspector’s nerve will break at a particular hour and he’ll hustle out his men to get the thing over. And when they get to the café they find no soul there who isn’t a blessed saint.”

Chubinov said, “But it remains to be learned how they know the day.”

“Yes. Or the place.”

Both sighed. Then they talked of more men with Russian names that had to be heard several times before they could be clearly grasped. How could Nikolai be content to absorb his attention in this ugly male world when his women called for his interest, his pity! Only a little time ago, when Sofia lifted her small strong ringed hands to pat a hunter’s neck and rub his muzzle, it had been on a parity of health; and at night she had stood upright within her satin gowns, unbowed by the weight of her jewels, while now she was a shrunken mummy, dead except for her courage which was kept alive by her fear. And Tania, she needed pity too. When she used to stand by the window of her bedroom, her elbows supported on the sash and her cheek pressed against the glass, scanning the gardens to see if the double peonies with the heavy scent were open, the corner house to see if the South African diamond people who had bought it had moved in yet, the summer-house to see if the old colonel who lived next door and had been so ill was sitting there with his nurse, she had had the air of an inquisitive child happily dispelling the boredom of the nursery; now she looked as if she were hanging face backwards on a cross, as if you would only have had to turn her round to see tears on her cheeks, bitten lips. How could Nikolai free himself from the thought of these two women who needed his help and listen to this chit-chat about murderers who should only be hanged!

Chubinov was saying, in the unctuous tones of a medical missionary lecturing to the upper fifth: “In order that the secret should be kept, we didn’t disperse at the end of the meeting, we stayed together in the café until there was time for them to have executed the plan and got away. That was Gorin’s idea. ‘Just so that there can be no Judas work,’ he said. He and I sat down together and played a game of chess. I can see him now, pausing in play and putting down his queen, to say to me in his gentle way that we must avoid all bitterness in thinking of the traitor amongst us, for it might be that he was one of the older members of the Party and had perhaps been deranged by many years of imprisonment. And then I tried to go on with the game, but kept on making the stupidest mistakes. And Gorin laughed and said, ‘You’re like me, all the Party members are as your own children and when they are in danger it is as if one had sent into battle the real fruit of one’s loins.’ But then Lydia Sture came into the café, weaving her way among the tables like a drunken woman, and she bent over our chessboard and whispered that Patopenko and Komissaroff had been arrested even as they left their lodgings with their bombs.

Fora long time we three were silent and stared at the chessmen as if the way the game was set out would give us a clue to the mystery which was engulfing us.”

“Very touching,” said Nikolai. “Particularly as Patopenko and Komissaroff’s arrest meant that they weren’t able to murder the Chief Military Prosecutor. I can’t cry over your story, Vassili Iulievitch.”

“And you won’t tell me how those three arrests were made? Then I’ll have to tell you how it is our paths have crossed again.”

“The most talkative man I ever heard of was Goethe,” answered Nikolai. “Dear God, why should I be called upon to be another Eckermann? Particularly as you’re no Goethe so far as quality rather than quantity is concerned.”

The train was slowing down, and the two Frenchwomen were collecting their bags. “Where are we?” asked Chubinov, staring about him. “I forget what line we are on.”

“It’s Amiens,” said Laura.

“A town I’ve never liked,” said Nikolai. “A blasphemy is committed here. In the cathedral there is a Byzantine Christ which should not be in a heretical place of worship. But one can’t do anything about it. I once tried. The Bishop was most unreasonable.”

Chubinov politely helped the Frenchwomen get their luggage out into the corridor and got them a porter by gesticulating from the window. Then they sat in silence while the hubbub of the station boiled around them. But as soon as the train started again Chubinov said, “It’s the
Rurik.”

“The
Rurik
, the cruiser we’re having built in Glasgow? Do you mean to say that your infamous company of assassins have got to work there too?”

“As you probably know, the ship is so far advanced that the skeleton crew has been sent over to get their hand in so that when the full crew comes to take her to the Baltic they can be taught quickly the ways of the new ship. Among the skeleton crew are several members of our Party. More of us will come out with the full crew.”