Rebecca West - The Birds Fall Down

The Birds Fall Down

Rebecca West

To
MILAN AND LELA GAVRILOVITCH
whom I love and honour

Contents

This novel is founded on a historical event: perhaps the most momentous conversation ever to take place on a moving railway train. Students of modern history will recognize the necessity for specifying that it was moving. The Armistice which ended the First World War was signed in a stationary train. The conversation in this book takes place on a slow train making its way up through Northern France at the very beginning of the twentieth century, just after the close of the South African War; the conversation which historians have recorded took place nearly ten years later, on the Eastern Express between its departure from Berlin and its arrival at Cologne. The real participants differed from my characters in many respects, but not in their interests and emotions; and their exchange of information had the same effect on the Russian political scene. There were certainly other factors at work. But it is true that because of this conversation the morale of the powerful terrorist wing of the revolutionary party crumbled, and the cool-headed Lenin found the reins in his hands. It is also true that the Russian bureaucracy found the affair gravely disillusioning.

Most of the characters in these pages are portraits of people who were living at this period and were seriously involved in this situation, though they bore other names, and I have drawn heavily on their recorded sayings and their writings. I think I can claim to have told a true story, as it may have happened on a parallel universe, differing from ours only by a time-system which every now and then gets out of true with our own. Sometimes my story may surprise only because the changes in our society have been so rapid and so fundamental. It would have been inevitable in 1900 that a girl like Laura would speak and understand, as a matter of course, Russian, the Old Slavonic of the liturgy, French, and English; and she would probably have been a fair German and Italian scholar as well. And it would not have been surprising at that time that a French professor in a medical college was an enthusiastic Latinist. It is also to be noted that I have exaggerated neither the bloody score of the terrorists, nor the number of executions and imprisonments for which the Tsarist government must bear responsibility, as well as its interferences with liberty, such as the violation of the mails, known as perlustration.

I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the writings of Boris Nikolaievsky, of whose death I heard with much regret while I was writing the last chapter of this book. I would also like to send a word of thanks to the ghosts of Ford Madox Ford and his sister, Juliet Soskice, wife of a Russian revolutionary who took refuge in England and a pioneer translator of Russian literature, from whom I first heard rumours of the story I have transformed into this novel, so long ago that the leading participants were still alive.

We are all bowmen in this place.

The pattern of the birds against the sky

Our arrows overprint, and then they die.

But it is also common to our race

That when the birds fall down we weep.

Reasons a thing we dimly see in sleep.

CONWAY POWER, Guide to a Disturbed Planet

One afternoon, in an early summer of this century, when Laura Rowan was just eighteen, she sat, embroidering a handkerchief, on the steps leading down from the terrace of her fathers house to the gardens communally owned by the residents in Radnage Square. She liked embroidery. It was a solitary pastime and nobody bothered to interfere with it. The terrace had been empty till ten minutes before, when her father had come out of the house. She had known without looking up that it was he. He had shifted a chair quite a distance to a new position and as he settled in it had grumbled at its failure to comply with his high standards of comfort; and as he had thereafter kept up a derisive mutter she assumed he was reading a book. He could not see her. She was sitting on the bottom step, and she was content that it should be so, as otherwise he would have told her either to sit up straight or not so straight. His criticism was not so urgent as other peoples was apt to be, and never demanded instant action, but it was continuous. Presently she heard the click of the french window which opened on the terrace, and she set down her embroidery and prepared to eavesdrop. For the last year or so everybody in the house had been eavesdropping whenever they had a chance.

Her unseen mothers voice said with a curious formality, as if she were reading the words out of a book, Edward, Im writing to my mother. Id like to be able to say that Im taking Laura over to Paris for a fortnight quite soon. Of late her English accent had deteriorated. Anyone could have told she was a foreigner.

After a pause Edward Rowan answered, You know quite well, Tania, that I dont think its good for any of the children to go over there. Its too heavily charged an atmosphere. Its also not very sensible to go among the French when they havent yet got over their feelings about the Boer War. And I wish you yourself didnt have to make quite such a long visit.

A long visit? repeated Tania ironically. A fortnight!

Long enough, in the circumstances, her husband told her.

In your circumstances or mine? asked Tania.

Laura thought, Its no use pretending that theyre fond of each other any more. They were, but they arent. Is that unusual, I wonder? Are other peoples parents happy together? They all pretend to be, of course. But is it true? The cat from Number 13 walked along the gravel path and paused beside her, but she did not dare to pet it, lest she miss something.

It doesnt suit the boys, I know, Tania went on in a conciliating tone, as if she were already sorry for her sharpness. Osmund likes nothing except Eton and cricket and summer at Torquay, and Paris makes a perfect little clown of Lionel. They dont like being half-Russian. Theyre wholly your children, she said bitterly. But Laura can sail through anything, she never notices whats going on round her. And as for me, she said, all attempt at conciliation abandoned, if I might put forward my own claims, I think it my duty to visit my father and mother. After all, theyre lonely and unhappy.

Why lonely? They know everybody.

Not now.

Oh, not everybody can have turned their back on them, there must be a lot of decent Russians

You dont appreciate their position. How should you? Youve always put off going to see it for yourself. Youre a busy man. I do not blame you. But you havent even thought of them, tried to imagine what its like to be them, for quite a long time. Youve been so extremely, so excessively occupied with other things. Well, there isnt anybody my parents can see. Theyd rather die than have a liberal exile inside the house, and the Russians of their own sort who come abroad merely to travel are equally out of the question. Either they think that my father did something wrong and deserves to be disgraced, in which case they sincerely dont want to see him, or they think hes innocent, in which case they might pay such a price for showing their faith in him that he wouldnt dream of allowing them to run the risk. And also, she added, hesitantly, my father doesnt want to be considered innocent if the Tsar thinks him guilty. You dont allow for that, Edward. My father cant quarrel with what the Tsar has done any more than he could quarrel with God.

Perhaps, perhaps, said Edward Rowan. But no, I really cant swallow that. He cant honestly be such a believer in juju. I remember perfectly well what he used to be like when we were first married, oh, and long after, when he was a Minister, all that good talk, and those excellent speeches. He wasnt quite like an Englishman but he wasnt much different from a top man at the Quai dOrsay or the Ballplatz. I cant believe all this stuff about Holy Russia. I believe its the same sort of humbug we have over here. I go to church every Sunday and say, All we like sheep, and so do all the rest of us, but I dont believe any of us really thinks that we closely resemble four-legged animals covered with wool. But even if your father does carry it so far as to feel that the Tsar is always right, I cant think he couldnt stop feeling it tomorrow if he chose. Anyway, he ought to come over here. Hes apparently kept a firm grip on most of his income and he could easily find a place in the country with some shooting.