The Birds Fall Down (31 page)

“A difficulty! What sort of difficulty?” she cried.

She had recoiled from him, but his face followed hers and was still close. Through his thick spectacles his magnified eyes seemed vague wet stumps, like sea anemones. “Why, a difficulty. About your father,” he sighed.

She jerked her head away. “I can’t understand what you’re saying! There’s no difficulty about my father. I don’t know what it could mean, ‘a difficulty about my father.’”

“Forgive me,” said Chubinov meekly. “I must have misunderstood something I heard.”

“Something you heard from Gorin, I suppose.” Somewhere in the station an engine was letting off steam, and hatred hissed out of her like the steam. “Go away. Go away at once. You’re planning a murder, a common murder, you’re like Jack the Ripper and Charles Peace. What have my grandfather and I to do with that? We’re the sort of people who’d rather be murdered than be saved by a murder.”

A porter drove his hand-truck into a suitcase which had been left standing on the ground, its owner ran up, and there was shouting. Till it died down Chubinov could not hear her, and he kept his hand spread out round his ear, his mouth open, till she repeated what she had said, and then he appeared hurt and astonished.

“Miss Laura, do not be foolish. I won’t reproach you, because you can’t help having been brought up in capitalist hypocrisy. But your grandfather and you have no real objection to murder. Your grandfather has sent many victims to the gallows. Your father, being in the House of Commons, ranges himself on the same side as the English hangman.”

“That’s different. If you’re going to try Kamensky in a proper law court, well and good.”

“But, dear Miss Laura, in our present society, there are no proper law courts. They exist simply to protect the exploitation of the many by the few, and now you’ve strayed into a domain where there are no law courts at all.”

“I’ll get out of that domain, just you see if I don’t,” she told him, her face blazing. “And whose fault is it I ever got into it? Yes, I know you didn’t grasp I was on the train. But you knew my grandfather was. You must have realized you’d drag him into trouble, and what did you get on that train for, anyway? Simply because you wanted to know if Gorin was Kamensky. But we Diakonovs didn’t particularly want to know if Kamensky was Gorin. What harm was he really doing us, when you come to think of it, what harm could he do to people who are so old and will soon be out of it, twaddling pious nonsense to them while he’s reading all their letters like a scoundrelly butler, and does it make it much worse if you have a scoundrelly butler that he’s being someone else’s scoundrelly butler at the same time? But you would butt in, and now here my grandfather and I have got to dodge your horrible friends who want to throw bombs at us and shoot us, and to crown everything you have the impudence to put the responsibility for another murder on us. What a nuisance you are, what a nuisance!”

What would it be like to be blown to pieces, to be suddenly hurled to the ground by a bullet as pheasants are hurled out of the air? She had to cover her mouth to stop a scream.

“You utterly fail to allow for the ideal,” said Chubinov miserably.

“You and my grandfather, with your ideals,” she muttered through her fingers.

“Ah, you’re very sad, Miss Laura,” he said. “But you must try to understand that neither your grandfather nor I have ever been able to choose what we did. You see, he and I are embedded in Russia, up to our necks, we can’t move. The river has broken its dams and it’s made mud of all our land. Your grandfather and I and all Russians have to stay where the floodwaters have cast us, where we were sucked down into the marsh, we can’t free ourselves, we’ve just got to wait there. I can’t help feeling that a clever girl like you should realize how it is with us, how it would have been with you, if you’d been born in Russia. You too, as we say, ‘would have had to take sides,’ though what we really mean is that you’d have had to realize at what point in the Russian marshland you’d got stuck. You’re a truly Russian girl, you’re full of ideals, you would have made an excellent revolutionary. You truly want me to save my life, don’t you, and to save me from the guilt of murder? Yet I don’t suppose you like me. I haven’t got sufficiently positive characteristics to be likeable. I don’t know how it was that my wife felt the affection for me which she undoubtedly did. And I am always surprised that Gorin likes me—” his pale face grew paler—“but I forgot. All these years he has not liked me at all.”

“But lots of other people do.” She looked at Nikolai and made sure that he was still asleep, and said with a confidence which she would have lacked if he had been awake, “I’m sure my grandfather’s very fond of you. I know he’s awful to you, but that only shows how much he bothers about you. And I like you very much.” She was startled to find that this was true. “Forgive me if I was rude to you on the train. The fact is, I couldn’t tell you the meaning of the thing I called you in English, for the reason I don’t know it myself. It’s just something I heard a cabby call our coachman once.”

“All the world over, it’s like that,” laughed Chubinov. “Cab-drivers swear terribly at coachmen, and always the children hear and remember. Their lessons they forget, and the good counsel given them by their elders, but what the cab-drivers call the coachmen, that lingers on and on—”

His laughter was unbearable, it was so tender, pleasant, and well-bred, thin and defenceless. It was drowned by the noise of the train which was puffing in to the shadow of the station, from the outer track, slowing down to a standstill just in front of them on the main platform. It must be the slow train to Paris. She shouted into his ear, “Please, please, go to England. To London. Then see my father. He’ll help you. Tell him everything. He looks as if he’d mind, but he won’t. He always calls the Home Rule members Fenian assassins, but he’s great friends with some of them, the best ones come to dinner. I won’t give you our address, you won’t remember it, but you can get him at the House of Commons.”

His eyes crinkled with amusement. He took another of the dreadful biscuits out of his pocket, but it broke and fell in crumbs on the lapel of his coat. It must have been very stale. He took out a fourth, but it crumbled at once and fell in pieces on the stone flags at his feet. “What a waste,” he said, “there are no birds in here. But what could I do in England?”

“Why, you could teach in a school. Your French is beautiful. And nobody could murder you if you were teaching in a school.”

“Why not?”

“It just wouldn’t happen. Not in a school. If a man came into a school and tried to murder you the headmaster or headmistress would send for the police and they’d come and arrest him. Your friends are awful, but they wouldn’t stand a chance. You’ve got to go to England. Now, from this station. Now. From this station.” “Oh, Miss Laura, you are like my wife. She also was a dove and an eagle. But do not distress yourself about me. I would rather not murder Gorin. But I must do so, in order to protect you, your grandfather, and the revolutionary movement. And I will be sustained by certain considerations. I am justified in my action by my masters Kant and Hegel.” The didactic forefinger was up again. “The supreme end of reason is the complete subordination of nature to the prescripts of morality, and if I use my freedom to renounce my life, my unique place in nature, to perform an act I think moral, then I am in a morally unassailable position. Almost certainly I will die for the murder of Gorin, either at the hands of his dupes or of the capitalist government of France. So I am in a sense happy, because broken as I am, robbed of my lifework and my major friendship, I am in a sense happy, because I am going to perform a moral act, the murder of Gorin, and—you do see, don’t you—absolve myself from all blame by dying myself, so I am in a state of complete integration with the Absolute. I can’t be subject to the slightest reproach whatsoever, don’t you see, because I’m a proven instrument of the supreme good. Also I think Berr will know that I am doing right.”

“The blind man! You think he’ll feel you were right?” “He would find some difficulty in understanding the problem,” said Chubinov. “He has the advantage of living in an extremely simple world, where ethical considerations rarely come into conflict with one another. My world, on the contrary, has been thrown into extreme ethical confusion by my ineluctable connection with the crimes of Tsardom, forced on me by my birth into a family belonging to the minor nobility. It’s my duty to stamp out the crimes of Tsardom, as it is the duty of every man to renounce his own sins. This can only be done by punitive acts directed against the criminal Tsar and his criminal officials. I’m obliged to become a criminal myself, and the execution of Gorin, whom I know now to be one of those criminal officials, is one of the crimes I am thus compelled to commit. I doubt if Berr could understand this predicament, but if he could understand it, he would give me his approval. So I move towards my horrible duty of killing Gorin, safeguarded by his intense goodness. He is, to use his own way of putting things, giving me his blessing.”

“He isn’t doing anything of the sort,” said Laura. “Nobody, practically nobody, gives people their blessing for going about killing people. The idea’s absurd. It’s funny. If death can be funny, and, of course it can be. There’s that song the servants sing at home when Papa and Mamma have gone out.” It was lovely to speak English for a little.

“Oh, a Norrible Tale I have to tell

Of sad disasters that befell

A family that once resided

Just in the same thoroughfare that I did.”

“How does it go?”

“First the father into the garden did walk

And cut his throat with a lump of chalk,

Then the mother an end to herself did put

By hanging herself in the water-butt,

Then her sister went down on her bended knees

And smothered herself with toasted cheese.”

“What is that? Repeat it, please, I did not follow, sometimes when I am tired my English quite deserts me. Perhaps you’d kindly translate it into Russian.”

“No, no. I really can’t. It’s untranslatable.”

“Ah, yes, like much of your English poetry, and most of ours. Pushkin. But to return to Berr. He will recognize that I am acting as instrument of the supreme good, not by use of his intellect which is quite undeveloped, but in his simple way, by intuition. I am sacrificing myself, and already he admires self-sacrifice in the saints and martyrs, and in his God, and his Christ. Therefore he is certain to give me his sympathy.”

“Really, you’re incredibly silly,” exclaimed Laura. “Berr may be simple, but he can’t be so simple that he couldn’t pick out a number of differences between you and Christ. People in the Old Testament are as silly as you, but absolutely nobody in the New Testament. But of course you can’t help being silly. But what I can’t stand is something you could help, and that is that you’re such a humbug. You haven’t spent your life in all this plotting and blowing up people because of the supreme good but because you like doing it, just as my father and my brothers like playing cricket, and they don’t pretend they’re saints and martyrs. Oh,” she wailed, “try and have some sense and stop blithering and think what you really want to do. Do you want to go to Paris and kill Kamensky and get killed, or won’t you be sensible and go to England?”

“It is perhaps not the time or the place to discuss that now. And you are upset.”

“It is the time and the place. Don’t you see that that’s the train you said you’d take to Paris? The one in front of us. Look at the boards on it. If you don’t want to take it, well and good. But if you do, there it is. It’ll leave in a minute. It’s crowded. I don’t want you to go to Paris and be killed, but if you’ve made up your mind to it, you may as well have a seat on the way.”

“You’re quite right. But now I wish I hadn’t to go. You are rude, you’re very rude indeed, but you are a good girl. Truly, there’s something about all your family, something.” He rose and stood for a second looking down on Nikolai Nikolaievitch, who stirred, as if the glance pierced through his sleep. “Good-bye, my friend,” said Chubinov. “How mild and beneficent he looks, as if it had been his office to sentence people not to death but to eternal life. How well one can believe, at the sight of him, in the legend that our Tsar Alexander the First had a corpse from a hospital buried under his name and lived for many years another life as the holy hermit Kuzma.”

“You haven’t time to tell me that now, you must go,” said Laura. “Don’t you see, the train’s starting.”

But he was writing with exasperating slowness, on a piece of paper. “Here, don’t lose this. That’s the name of the hotel near Les Halles, where I will be staying under the name of Baraton, and the telephone number. If I can be of any use to you during the next few days ring me up or send me a telegram, and please remember, I had no idea, no idea at all, that you would be with your grandfather.”

“I tell you it doesn’t matter. But,” she said, suddenly moved by the weedy height of him as he leaned over her, the shabbiness of the cuff above the tobacco-stained hand he held out to her, the biscuit crumbs on his lapel, the weak pure beam of friendship filtering through his thick spectacles, “how kind you are. Everything about you is all wrong, everything you believe and do, but you’re awfully kind. I don’t want you to commit that murder, but I quite see that you’re doing it partly for my grandfather and me, and anyway you keep on worrying about me, as I wouldn’t worry about anyone if I had to commit a crime and might get found out. But now you must go, you really must, and try to get something decent to eat when you can.” She put the piece of paper into her bag out of politeness, she would never use it.

Now he was looking through rather than at her, and when he spoke it was with the imitation of briskness which meant that he was following his revolutionary technique. He asked, “Tell me, has Gorin any fixed time for visiting your family? The day after tomorrow, now when would he be likely to come to your grandfather’s apartment?”

She knew what he was at. “He’s no fixed time for coming, and if he had I wouldn’t tell you. My grandfather and I will get out of this in our way, not yours. But hurry, hurry, or you’ll lose that train.”