The Birds Fall Down (19 page)

“Everywhere, everywhere,” muttered Nikolai. “When I told them so, they wouldn’t believe me. They said it was only students and the intelligentsia, but I knew better. Plague doesn’t select its victims.”

“These sailors and some of the Admiralty staff have informed our committee that all arrangements have been made for a ceremonial review by the Tsar on the ship’s arrival at a Baltic port. These sailors and officials were eager to use the opportunity to assassinate the tyrant.”

“This appetite for death, it’s amazing,” said Nikolai. “The whole of our social structure is being liberalized, people are being taught to read and write as never before, they are less hungry, they’ve less reason for social vengeance than ever before, and all they think of is killing.”

“But they thought it unwise that one of their own number should be made responsible for the deed, for it was certain that some agents of the Secret Police had been planted among the crew and would keep a continuous watch on the men who had shown signs of revolutionary sympathies as the time of the naval review drew near.”

He said this, Laura thought, as if he regarded this police action as unsporting, like shooting a fox.

“Therefore the sailors begged our committee to send to Glasgow some of our members who were properly trained in terrorist methods, so that arrangements could be made to smuggle aboard one or two activists at the proper time, who could be kept in some safe corner until the North Sea was crossed on the homeward journey.” His eyes became glazed and he went into an account of the plans the committee had made to prevent detection. It was as boring as a card-game. “… So we’ve been sending small groups to Glasgow, never less than two or more than four, to travel on false passports to Paris or Berlin or Brussels, where our local branches gave them a new set of false passports, made out in names they had invented, till then unknown even to the travellers themselves, and instructions from the Glasgow sailors as to the place and time of the meetings, couched in a code unknown to the French or German or Belgian members who transmitted them, though it had been imparted to all the delegates before they left Russia. There was also a lapse of time left between the delegates’ departure, first from Russia and then from whatever Western centres they used, and their arrival in Glasgow, so that nobody knew exactly till the last moment when they would get there—”

“Such an ingenious plan that I’ll give you a hundred to one that there’s a member of yours sitting at this very moment in a bathing-machine at Ostend wondering how he got there and what he should do next,” said Nikolai, “and I’ll lay another bet that you get a lot of your delegates cutting off with the travelling expenses.” He laughed hugely, vulgarly, with his mouth open, like a peasant. “‘Ah, poor Ivan Ivanovitch, he must have been arrested by the wicked police.’ And where Ivan Ivanovitch really is I wouldn’t like to say in front of my granddaughter.”

“Nothing of that sort has ever happened,” snapped Chubinov. “At least, only once or twice.”

“Forgive me, Vassili Iulievitch,” said Nikolai. “For what you’ve spent your life doing, you’re a sensitive man.” But Chubinov was bitter as he said, “What has gone wrong is quite different, and it went wrong in your apartment in the Avenue Kléber.”

VI

“I’ve told you,” said Chubinov, “that Gorin has been ill of late years, though it’s not true that he’s ever been in a sanatorium. I was one of the first to realize that at last his vitality had snapped under the strain of constant warfare for the rights of the people, austerity, and rough travelling. About eighteen months ago, while you were still in office, the police suddenly threw a dragnet over the larger towns and made innumerable arrests. At once our organization warned its members to leave their homes and lodgings till the storm was over, to sleep here and there in hotels not ordinarily used by the movement, to keep away from friends and write no letters, and to give up frequenting our usual cafés. I myself took refuge in a cottage on a sympathizer’s estate thirty miles out in the country, but I was called back to the city to dismantle one of our printing-presses, as the police had been making some inquiries about a man with the same name as the landlord of the little workshop where it had been set up. I went to that workshop, packed the parts of the press under the floorboards, brushed shavings all over them, and saw to all the other little precautions one has to take in such circumstances, locked up, and went out into the street, and the first thing I saw was Gorin, the head of our Battle Organization, driving by in an open cab, wearing that little air of peace which he carries about with him as his own private angelic world. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“He didn’t see me. But as soon as the bad time was passed and we revolutionaries could safely meet again, he sent for me and without knowing it, provided an explanation for this curious event. He told me that he’d had a most disquieting experience. For several days and nights he’d worked without cease, getting this suspected man out to Scandinavia on the Finland route, getting that unsuspected woman home to her family in the Urals because she was a chatterbox, snatching an hour’s sleep when he could, and forgetting all about food and drink. Suddenly he had a brainstorm. He’d no recollection of what he did or where he was for a period of about twenty-four hours, and suddenly he found himself sitting in a night-club in the Nova Derevnia, with two police agents at the next table staring at him. When he got out into the street he nearly fainted. ‘What am I to do?’ he asked, smiling that very sweet smile I knew very well, which meant that he wanted to soothe me but at the same time warn me of a danger, ‘if I become a peril to you all?’

“When I told him that I’d seen him driving through the streets of Petersburg in an open cab during that terrible period, he was shocked. He hadn’t the slightest recollection of doing any such thing. Then he admitted to me that for some time past he’d been hiding from us that he was not well. He’d been suffering from attacks of dizziness, lapses of memory, and headaches. At once he consented to go to a doctor. I don’t think he would have done this for his own sake, but he realized he’d become a danger to his comrades. Well, there were some visits to a couple of specialists, and the verdict came, that he must live, at any rate for a time, in a milder climate. The doctors recommended the isle of Capri, but Gorin insisted on going to Lausanne, though it was not nearly so suitable for his condition, because there he could establish relations with the Swiss universities and carry on collaboration with our French and Italian members.

“We haven’t had to say good-bye to him. Every now and then, when he feels better, he returns to us and though there’s now another head of the Battle Organization—I expect you know all about him … yes, I mean ‘Hilarion’—he always defers to Gorin, and we accept his advice and the admirable material he brings us. About a month ago he was with us again in Petersburg, and he arranged that I should go to England, to take some manuscripts of pamphlets to be printed at a Russian press we have working in a district of London called Camden Town. There’s an English wine merchant who’s enthusiastic for our cause and not only gives us money but lets us use his name and his warehouse as a cover for our work. I tell you we are going to win, we are going to take over the world. Well, to my delight Gorin told me that he wished me to break my journey to England by a detour to Lausanne, so that I could stay with him and receive some last instructions. I went there ten days ago, and stayed for five days.

“I haven’t had such a happy time for many years. Gorin doesn’t live in Lausanne, nor even very near it, but in a pretty lakeside village on the outskirts of Montreux, where there’s an Italianate villa on an little island in the middle of a harbour, so that one has the illusion of living on a stage set for an opera. Gorin’s lodgings are in a
pension
with a fine view of the lake and the harbour, and it’s more than comfortable, it’s even luxurious. His sitting-room is really beautiful, it opens on a marble balcony covered with wisteria. I was filled with nostalgia, it was so like the places I used to go to with my parents when I was a boy and even until I was a young man, before I had seen the light and taken to the way of suffering. For though my father was not rich like yours, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, who owned a villa in Corfu, I seem to remember—and there was one at Nice, wasn’t there—still we had our holidays abroad at beautiful hotels, at the Schweizerhof in Lucerne, at the Grand in Rome, at Danieli’s in Venice. It was surprising to find Gorin in such quarters, for he came from a poor family, he hadn’t the habit of going to such places, and he’s never taken a moment’s thought for his own comfort. Of course there was an explanation. Though the proprietress looked precisely like any other proprietress of an expensive
pension
, a stout woman with a military expression and pompous yet obsequious manners, she was a sympathizer and she gave Gorin special terms. I was very pleased to hear this, for it removed the scruples I would otherwise have felt at returning to a way of life I had promised myself to abandon for ever.

“What filled my happiness to the brim was the arrival, the day after my own, of three comrades from Moscow, Korolenko, Primar, and Damatov. They’re all younger than I am, much younger, and of each I’d thought at one time or another, ‘How I wish there was more leisure in my life, so that I could make this young man my friend.’ Korolenko had just graduated as a doctor, and I remember that when I heard that I reflected happily, ‘How fortunate, if there is any young wife among my kin who is going to have a child, any old man who is finding it difficult to leave the world, here’s someone who will be the rock they can cling to,’ though of course I now have no kin, they will have nothing to do with me. Primar was the son of a timber merchant who had renounced a rich inheritance and never thought of it again, plunging himself into poverty and danger as into a carnival ball. He had a wave of fair hair which curled forward across his head, like the crest of a macaw, which somehow aroused one’s tenderness. And Damatov was the most charming of them all. He was one of those who are born to make a mock of our aristocracy, for he looked like a prince, he might have been Hamlet, but he was the son of a rich fishmonger in a town two hundred miles north of Kharkov on the river Selm. You know how such people used to pile up the roubles before there were railways, when they fetched the fish up in ice from the Sea of Azov. It happened that his father was one of those whom the tours of the State Theatre Company make stage-struck, and he’d bred his son to be the same. So Damatov had come up to Petersburg to work at the State Theatre, and had soon become a stage-designer, and then a dramatist. But simply to be with him was to attend a better play than he would ever write, indeed it was like crossing the footlights and changing into a character in a drama written by Shakespeare or by Schiller.

“Now I had leisure to know them, and to know them well, better than it might seem I could, in such a short time. You can’t think what Gorin adds to any meeting by the quality of his friendship. He turns his face from one friend to another, and his smile says, ‘Not one person here but is wonderful.’ This is not empty benevolence, not the unfocused beam which shines from the bland faces of so many holy personages in pictures, for he opens his friends’ minds like jewel-boxes and brings the enclosed treasures out into the light. It turned out Korolenko could play the piano like a master, that Primar’s supple mind had a talent for mathematics, and when he talked of a problem it was like watching the faultless tumbling of a child acrobat at a fair. Damatov made up poetry, not the elegant odes and tragic laments one would have expected, but funny little poems, about such things as a fat lady taking a fat little pug-dog for a walk by the lakeside, not at all vulgar, not at all cruel, indeed kind and good-natured. What added to our happiness was that all this talk and laughter and music never seemed too much for Gorin. He had evidently recovered from his illness to a degree quite wonderful in a middle-aged man who had suffered years of privation and strain. He even insisted on going on a long walk with us up in the mountains, and though he did things we knew his doctors wouldn’t have allowed, he really seemed afterwards to have done himself no damage. He actually took a swim in a lake up in the mountains.

“The three young men left in the afternoon of the fourth day, and I wasn’t invited to go with Gorin to the station to see them off. I found this natural enough. It had crossed my mind that this must be another team on its way to a
Rurik
conference in Glasgow, and it would have been contrary to our security plans for anyone to see what train they’d boarded. When Gorin came back he asked me to go for a stroll by the harbour, and we got there just at the time when, one by one, the lamps went up on the mastheads of the little lake-going craft, and the windows of the Italianate villa on the island began to glow a beautiful rose-colour—they must have had red curtains. I can never see lights coming on in summer twilight without emotion. When I was a little boy the sight always made me cry, not because I wasn’t happy, for I was a happy child—as you know, ours was a happy home—but because I used to feel that my happiness would not last. My mother would be trailing her long flounced skirt round the croquet lawn, still playing though it was too dark to see the balls except when they rolled into the bright panels cast on the grass by the lit rooms in the house, simply because her nature, which was like a child’s, couldn’t bear to admit that the little pleasure of the game was coming to an end; and then I used to weep because, though I really was a child and she wasn’t, I was so much less childish that I could see farther than she did, to a day when she’d be unable to finish the game, not because the twilight had fallen but because she would be neither in the dark garden nor in any of the rooms, lit or unlit, of the house. My throat would swell with love for this precious figure, which would not always be there, and I felt a return of that emotion when I walked by the little harbour with my dear friend in the dusk. This made me think of you, Nikolai Nikolaievitch. Such recollections always make me think of you, you were such a commanding figure in my childhood. To cover my emotion, I said to Gorin, ‘What of the Diakonov situation?’ and he answered, ‘Well, you have seen the material I’ve been forwarding. Valuable as it is, it’s very painful reading, and it’s not easy to collect either, for Berr is nothing like so amenable and comradely as Pravdine.’