The Birds Fall Down (45 page)

“… and after my friend and I had spent two years together at the University, we felt like brothers.”

“Which university was that?” she jeered. It had been like a geography lesson in the train, when her grandfather and Chubinov had talked of the universities where Gorin and Kamensky had or had not studied: St. Petersburg, Karlsruhe, Darmstadt, Moscow, Berlin.

Without noticing the gust of laughter which escaped her because he had to think for a minute, he answered, “Berlin. We were there, yes, for more than two years. But it did not make us any less Russian. I can’t imagine anybody more Russian than my friend. So inevitably he suffered.”

“What from?”

“That’s a curious question. Why, what all of us young Russians suffered from. Do you know the poems of Pechorin? An insignificant man. He died a Roman Catholic, which is quite wrong for a Russian. We can belong to the Orthodox Church or become atheists, but only the most contemptible among us, the unbaked loaves, can adopt the Latin faith. Nevertheless, Pechorin wrote some wonderful lines. Listen. ‘How sweet it is to hate one’s native land, and eagerly await its annihilation.’ Pechorin wrote that.”

“Well, I knew at once it wasn’t by Rudyard Kipling.”

“Of course not. It couldn’t be written by anybody but a Russian. Only a Russian could feel this, Miss Laura, and it is what all Russians who love Russia passionately must feel and do feel. So inevitably they must suffer, and my friend felt it more than most, so his sufferings were great indeed.”

“Uncomfortable for him.” She could not help yawning.

“You’re not using the right word. It’s rarely that I have to suggest that your Russian is anything but perfect. But you don’t mean ‘uncomfortable’—you mean ‘tragic’”

“No, I don’t. I mean uncomfortable. Your friend wasn’t tragic. Not like Othello. Not like King Lear.”

“There’s evidently a misunderstanding, but let us pass on. My friend is, in fact, very like Hamlet.” He brooded for a moment, then, smiling complacently, took another prawn. “Extremely like Hamlet. Well, he felt as I did, under the influence of Nikolai Nikolaievitch, being deeply impressed by the bravery with which he had faced the problem of Russia. Do you know what the problem of Russia is? I will tell you.” He wagged a forefinger at her. “In our Russian society there is a minority of informed men and women with cultivated minds, who are ready to forgo all personal advantages and determine the course of history so that for ever morality is imposed upon the State. But the majority, the vast majority, of men and women, are passive as brute beasts. Their fates are determined by the blind flight of events, and therefore when they die they fall to dust, without having done anything to impart meaning to life and eliminate injustice and misery. It is the business of the intelligent minority to convert the unintelligent majority into a majority as enlightened as themselves.”

“Yes, yes.” The male world was deep, deep in the dust of tedium. “But people have that idea everywhere. If they didn’t there wouldn’t be schools all over the world.”

“That is a very English way of looking at the problem. We Russians look at it differently. With a Russian seriousness. And my friend was enormously impressed by Nikolai Nikolaievitch because, serious himself, he recognized a certain sort of seriousness in your grandfather. He was astonished because he himself was a liberal. One of the few liberals I have ever known. So he detested the Tsardom and thought that all men who worked for the Tsar were evil and stupid. But Nikolai Nikolaievitch was not evil or stupid, he saw the Russian problem clearly, as clearly as my friend, your grandfather. But believed that the conversion of the majority from passive barbarism to activist intelligence could be brought about through the wise exercise of power by the privileged classes taking office under the Tsar and performing their duties ably and conscientiously. Many of his kind held the same faith, but there was, you know, Miss Laura, something wonderful about the way he held it. He was violent and his capacity for pleasure must have been immense, oh, what he must have been when he was a young man, but he had laid that faith in his duty to serve Russia as a yoke on his great shoulders. A little child looking up at a mammoth, that’s how my friend felt when he met Nikolai Nikolaievitch, and so he became his disciple. He imitated him first by his devotion to his profession—”

“And what was that?” She wanted to sleep, to sleep.

“He was an engineer.” The pause had lasted only a hundredth of a second. “A railway engineer. Most conscientious in the discharge of his duties. But your grandfather affected him not only as a servant of the State, but as a philosopher. My friend is of a very philosophical turn of mind. There your grandfather could not help him. He was a religious man, and the Orthodox Church has never been a friend to philosophy. Therefore my friend had to work out for himself certain aspects of the Russian problem and he was embarrassed by the obligation which all of us who love Russia recognize, the obligation to impose morality on the State. For what’s morality?”

Now she was awake. The answer rushed out of her. “Why morality’s not lying! Not cheating! Not murdering!”

Her wave of passion was so strong that he had to take notice of it, but it broke and scattered against his glazed calm and left it as it was. “What’s so wonderful about you, Miss Laura, is that you’re at once so gentle and so fierce. So untamed. Are you a great rider, like your grandmother? I should like to see you on horseback.
Riding to hounds? Clearing a fence? Fox-hunting?”
he said in his horrid English. “Yes, indeed. And what you say about morality charms, because it’s so high-spirited. I can imagine your hair blowing backward as you
go into a gallop
. But it’s not true, save on the superficial plane. These things you abhor are sacrifices which have to be offered up on the altar of necessity. Think of your own Army.
Your Navy. Your Red Coats. Your Tommy Atkinses. Your Jack Tars
. You wouldn’t repudiate them, any more than I would repudiate our Cossacks of the Setch. But they spy. They kill.”

“That’s why we English try to keep the peace. In peace one doesn’t spy or kill.”

“You’re right,” he exclaimed, his voice soaring and happy as if he were quite young and it were early in the night. “But you don’t know how right you are! Peace is what the heart desires. After the long pitting of force against force, after all the arguing, the scheming, the destruction, which even though it is necessary is still horrible—” he covered his eyes and shuddered—“oh, it could be utterly, utterly horrible—after all that there comes the establishment of a perfect balance, of equilibrium, of the synthesis, of peace. And the joy of it’s past believing. That’s what my friend had found … oh, he’s so happy. Mind you, he didn’t know for a long time what he was seeking, and he never imagined how glorious it would be to reach the goal. He began simply by following a clue in Hegel.”

“Ah, yes, Hegel,” she said. Chubinov and Nikolai had talked of Hegel in the train. Both had found in his works the messages they wanted, though they must have been very different: and now Kamensky turned out to have found what he wanted in the same place, though he had nothing in common with the other two. She was reminded of her father’s fast sister, Aunt Georgie, who had once been engaged to three men at the same time.

“You’ve heard of him? I’m glad. Some day in the future, somewhere very far from here, we may read Hegel together. He is not only a writer, he is
the
writer. If all the rest of literature should be destroyed, and his works alone remained, humanity could still follow its path towards new being. He that seeks, in Hegel shall he find. My friend is a seeker. He is the human embodiment of the search. Well, Hegel held out his hand to him from immortality and brought him to his haven. Through the theory of the dialectic.”

“The dialectic,” echoed Laura. It was one of those words to which she never troubled to attach a precise meaning. Teleology, oolitic, proportional representation, symbiotic; what they stood for was part of the world, and might once have been bright like the world, but the dust which falls wherever there are males had buried them in its dingy drifts. But he had spoken of the theory of the dialectic before, on the first evening of her stay in Paris, with a special relish, dreamy enjoyment. She must listen: the hunted should learn all they can about the hunter.

“I shouldn’t plague you with these serious matters. The opera, nightingales, rose-gardens, balconies overlooking Swiss lakes, marble landing-stages from which gondolas take off, the gondoliers singing. Your world should be made of such things only. But I talk like a schoolmaster because my friend is both a learner and a teacher, and as he was so very close to Nikolai Nikolaievitch, it relieves my sorrow to tell you about him.”

“Do anything you can which makes you better able to bear my grandfather’s death.”

“You’re so kind. Well, Hegel points out that every concept your mind can grasp leads it on to another. Why should it do that? Because all concepts are imperfect. Do you know why?”

“Because we are imperfect.” Imperfect, she added to herself, “and can’t do without our sleep.”

“That is not a satisfactory answer from the philosophic point of view. Rather would he say that it is because we can think about the universe only as we know it, and we can know only the small part of it which is within our experience, and that is always changing. Hence every concept we form is incomplete, or involves a contradiction or contradictions. We realize this, and so move on from the first concept to another, in the hope that it will complete the first or annul its contradictions.” He drank from his glass with an inappropriately pedagogic air, as if that were another way of wagging his forefinger. “The most profitable type of second concept which we can choose is the exact opposite of the first, for it covers the same field. Thus we can very fruitfully compare them, and discard what is false in both the first concept and the second, and retain what is true in both, and lo that gives us a third concept, which brings us a step nearer reality. Have you understood me so far?”

“Yes.” Her need for sleep was hunger, thirst, sickness.

“Excellent. Thus we saw that there are three stages in the dialectic process. We think of a concept, we summon up its opposite, we establish the truth which is common to both, and form it into a new concept. These three stages called the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. You should repeat these terms. They are very important.”

“Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But what has that to do with my grandfather and your friend?”

“Everything. It explains the whole of life. In evolving this theory Hegel did something more wonderful than Columbus when he discovered America, and the theory has been further developed by a German named Marx, with whom I do not agree, for he is inferior to our own Russian thinkers, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky and Machajski, but whose genius I must admit. Because of Hegel and Marx we now all realize that ideas are not static but dynamic. Ideas live like us. And this, dear Miss Laura, raises the possibility, as my friend has seen, that perhaps we can live like ideas.” He looked at her with bright shy eyes, as simple people do when they are going to say, “I’ve brought you a present.”

The dance-music thumped on the walls during his long silence, and in the street below a cat-fight spurted out jets of sound. It would be wonderful if Madame Verrier would wake and send Kamensky away, but even at the last tearing screech her tired eyes did not open, she merely frowned, shook her head, and pressed the cotton wool deeper into one ear.

Kamensky spoke again, as if he were now going to take off the silver paper and show the splendid present. “Suddenly my friend thought to himself. And this is what was so wonderful. My friend thought, Why should we not apply the dialectic process to actions as well as to ideas? Why not follow one deed by its opposite? Why not go gloriously further, and serve one way of life and then its enemy?’ Why not join one set of people who devoutly observe a system of morality, become truly one of them, not the loosest but the strictest adherent of their system, and pour one’s whole being into the furtherance of their ends, achieving utter and final loyalty to it? And why not at the same time join another set of people who live as devoutly by another system of morality, if possible one that’s totally opposed to the first, and pour one’s whole being into that too?
Why not
,” he asked, in that detestable English, “
do first one thing and then the other?
”

“You mean,” she said slowly, her need for sleep gone again, “fight for both sides at the same time without either knowing one’s working for the other? Be a Roundhead and a Cavalier at the same time? Fight for the French and the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, for the Boers and the British in the South African War? Be a Liberal and a Conservative?”

“Just that,” he said and drank the last drops from his glass, and wiped his mouth.

“Why, everybody know’s that’s wrong,” she said. “If you asked a child, quite a little child, or a navvy working on the road who couldn’t read or write, they’d tell you that was wrong.”

“But we’re superior to little children, and still more are we superior to men who, debased by society, work on the road—”

“Oh, no we’re not,” she said, “not if we do that sort of thing.”

“But you’re so delightful,” he said, laughing and taking off his glasses to look at her tenderly with his head on one side, “you’re dismissing what my friend is doing in such an English way. You don’t like it because it is
not fair play. Not playing the game. Not cricket
. Ah, but you don’t understand that we’re passing beyond that to a freer, happier, wiser day. Remember what I told you about the dialectic theory, about the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis. You’re standing at the point of the thesis. My friend’s moved on, by throwing all his strength and ability into both of two organizations he’s formed, quite opposite in their aims, he’s attained the antithesis. Now will come the synthesis, both the organizations will destroy each other, and a third will emerge which will be superior. Don’t you now understand what my friend’s doing, not just for those two organizations, but for the whole world, for morality itself? If people practice at one and the same time what’s considered bad conduct and what’s considered good conduct, then they’re bound to find themselves practising a new kind of conduct which shall be neither bad nor good but
lootshee—meilleur—besser—better—
more in accordance with reality, nearer the Absolute. Oh, Miss Laura, my friend is helping mankind on its journey as only the greatest teachers have done, as only the greatest teachers have done, he is with Christ, he is with Buddha—”