The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  “Like a wooden doll. With two red spots on her cheeks. I have often wondered since then whether she suffered from a skin disease, or was vain and had heard that great ladies had their own ways of keeping beautiful in their old age, and tried to imitate them and use rouge without knowing how to go about it.”

  “And her house, what was that like?”

  “It was a village house, because it was right on the outskirts of Moscow: wooden and built end on to the street. There were birches by the roadside, and inside the garden lilacs and a summerhouse, big enough for us to have meals there when the family came to visit her. And quite a long path laid out in pebbles, black and white arranged in circles and diamonds, made by my grandfather with his own hands so that my grandmother could walk up and down when it was wet underfoot. And at the end of the path beyond the summer-house some more birches, which he had planted specially. My grandmother loved birch trees, she was a sylvan creature inside her doll’s body. Her great delight was to go out into the forest and picnic, even when she was very old.”

  “Mother always says there aren’t enough birches in England,” said Laura.

  “You look as if you were dreaming when we speak of the Russia where you have never been,” said Kamensky, “and your voice grows warm.” Laura had been congratulating herself on keeping a conversation going though it bored her, just as grownups did. But that was pretence. She had liked hearing about that village house. He went on, “But you haven’t told me what it was you were going to ask, and then didn’t.”

  “Why, that was nothing. Simply I thought, it’s summer-time, and why should Monsieur Kamensky have chilblains in summer-time? I wondered where you’d been.”

  “You have an eye for little things,” said Kamensky. “That you don’t get from your grandfather. The little things he never notices. I could surprise you if I told you how unobservant he is. I don’t think he has ever had his watch stolen from his waistcoat, but I can’t think why. And, Miss Laura, you were right in being ashamed to ask that question, for the answer’s embarrassing. Here I am, Alexander Gregorievitch Kamensky, a grown man, and so much more than grown that my hair is getting thin and my waist is getting thick, and I’ve taken degrees at the universities of Moscow and Berlin, and I’ve built hydro-electric installations at which nobody dared to look down their nose. But I’ve no sense at all. Some things make an idiot of me still. When I pass a lake shining in the sunshine, I have to swim in it, even if the wind cuts like a knife. That’s what I did a fortnight ago, and that’s why I got chilblains in June, and reek of tansy. Now you’ll despise me for being silly.”

  “I don’t,” said Laura. “I got a cold last week because I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that the moon was rising over the trees in the square and I hung out of the window for hours. I just couldn’t go back to bed. That was silly, if you like. I had to go to a party two days later, and I looked awful.”

  “The trouble with us,” said Kamensky, smiling, “is that we’re both of us poets, and so you get a little red nose and I get chilblains. And such beautiful emotions we had, you as you watched the moon rising, I as I watched the sun sparkling on the water. But let me tell you that what we’re engaged in isn’t trivial. The philosophers have busied themselves with it. You and I, young lady, are exemplifying the dialectic process. The great Hegel discovered it. Life advances by contradictions, so first we surrender ourselves, you and I, to a positive state of poetic rapture, and then we pass into a negative anti-poetic state, chilblains for me and a cold in the head for you; and we should pass into a third state of synthesis when we reconcile these two opposites. And so we have. We’re sitting here agreeing that swimming in the lake and watching the moon were worth while, all the same.” Suddenly his hand closed over her wrists and she frowned at him in surprise. “Your mother and your grandmother have come back into the room. I think the Countess has come back to speak to you. It would be good if you did not show her that you noticed she was not well.”

  She went to meet Sofia, who said through a fixed smile, “I’ve returned to bother you because I won’t be seeing you again today. Tania says I must go to bed now and have my dinner there. She’s right. The church made me tired. But I haven’t yet said welcome to you, I haven’t yet told you how I’ve waited for you, my little one, and thought you’d never come.” Laura lowered her face to be kissed, and a timid expression spread over her grandmother’s face, as if modesty prevented her intruding her altered self on someone young. The alteration was great. In the past she had kissed the children with an official air, as if she were conferring an honour, pinning on her kisses like orders. Now Laura had to kiss her, and under her lips her grandmother’s cheek felt unlike flesh, hot and dry and in texture like some thin woven material. She forced herself to give the second kiss on the other cheek slowly and placidly.

  The old woman clasped the girl’s hands to her breast, which felt strange, just like some bones knocked together anyhow. “You are like your cousin Nadine, you are like my son Vladimir’s Nadine,” she told her. The old man at his table in the corner suddenly cried out, and everybody turned to look at him. He threw the letter he was reading on the floor and exclaimed, “A disgusting mind! Souvorin has a disgusting mind!” His wife turned to Tania and out of the shelter of her arms said in a thin and distant voice, “If only we were in Russia. Oh, if we were only back in Russia.”

  Nikolai, slumped deeply in his chair, growled softly, “If only we were back in Russia,” and then Tania repeated it, in a flat, loud voice, so loud that it was shocking. They were all still and silent for a moment. Then Sofia sighed, “Take me to bed.” Monsieur Kamensky went to open the door for them, and Laura dropped on her knees to pick up the sheets of paper scattered at Nikolai’s feet. She wished her mother had not said she wanted to go back to Russia in that voice; it had sounded like someone tearing cotton. She might have said that she would like to take her children with her. And would she not care about leaving the house in Radnage Square? Did she not love it as they all did? There was also Papa to be thought of; but now Laura seemed to herself to be saying something not true, just for the sake of saying it. She thought, looking round for someone to blame, “I hate my grandfather, there is trouble all round him.” But as she stretched up to put the papers back on the table, she saw that tears were in his eyes, tears that ran down the deep furrows by his nose and shone like pale topazes on his yellow skin.

  II

  By the time the victoria turned out of the Rue de Rivoli into the wide Place de la Concorde, Laura had long ceased to give her mind to what her grandfather was telling Monsieur Kamensky—not that it was uninteresting, but one cannot go on and on listening for ever. She turned her eyes on the calm stone matrons representing the French provincial capitals, long-necked and wide-breasted, on their thrones round the edge of the Place, and she uttered a sound of protest and passion. Nikolai, whose senses had long been sharpened by fear, heard and grumbled, as if resenting an infringement of his exclusive right to distress, “What’s the matter, child?”

  She answered, “It’s the statue of Strasbourg. I always feel so sorry for the French when I see that figure, draped in black. It must be awful to have part of one’s country taken by the Germans.”

  Nikolai growled, “The French lost Strasbourg, they lost Alsace, they lost Lorraine, which they pretended was sacred to them because of their saint, though they are deeply infidel. A republican people deserves to lose all, must lose all.”

  “But,” objected Laura, “when France lost Strasbourg and Alsace-Lorraine, France wasn’t a republic, it was ruled by the Emperor.”

  “No matter,” said Nikolai, “the French were a people who had once had it in them to make France a republic, and had it in them to make it one again.”

  “Have you noticed, Count,” asked Kamensky, “that it is only the very young who look at the statues in our cities? As we get older we keep our eyes for staring at the invisible.”

  “But it can’t be right that we should be punish
ed for what we’re doing long before we’ve done it,” persisted Laura. “We might never do it.”

  “God would foresee that we were going to do it,” said Nikolai. She never remembered him talking about religion on her previous visits, but now he never stopped alluding angrily to God. “Thus it is right that He should punish the apparently innocent. Perhaps that is the explanation of my own destiny. Perhaps I have been rightly disgraced, though I am innocent of the offences they pretended, for the reason that before I die I am going to commit a great sin which will deserve such chastisement.”

  “That none of us will believe,” said Monsieur Kamensky. “It is more likely that you are simply being rewarded by God for your goodness and your good deeds by exceptional opportunities to be at one with His son in suffering.”

  “I do not feel the kiss of congratulation upon my cheek,” said Nikolai. “I think I am being punished, punished as men punish other men, for my sins. God is just and I sin in doubting it. O God!” he muttered. “I have recklessly thrown aside Thy fatherly gift of glory.” He was speaking another sort of Russian now, the Old Slavonic of the liturgy. “And among sinners I have dissipated the wealth which Thou gavest to me, wherefore I cry to Thee with the voice of the Prodigal. I have sinned before Thee, O merciful God, receive me, a penitent, and make me as one of Thy hired servants.”

  “Do you understand what your grandfather is saying, Miss Laura?” asked Monsieur Kamensky.

  “Yes, most of it. Mamma’s taken us all to the Embassy church ever since we were little, and the priests used to give us lessons.”

  “Wasn’t that a great trouble to you, a great bore, as you say in English?” asked Monsieur Kamensky, with a smile that offered complicity.

  She did not return the smile, she thought it impertinent of him to suggest that anything which her mother made her do could be a trouble or a bore. So she kept silent and looked ahead, to the golden light of the late afternoon behind the Arc de Triomphe, while her grandfather repeated, “Wherefore I cry to Thee with the voice of the Prodigal: I have sinned before Thee, O merciful God, receive me a penitent and make me as one of Thy hired servants.” But a tremor ran through him. He drove his strong white teeth down into his lower lip. “But to bring such an accusation against a Diakonov! When we have served Russia since the days of Monomach!” He raised his stick, leaned forward, and drove the ferrule into a soft spot of the coachman’s back between the ribs and the spine. “Drive home,” he shouted, “drive home, and hurry.”

  Monsieur Kamensky said pleasantly to the coachman, “The route by the Rue François Premier is the quickest. If it looks clear, let us go that way.”

  In the unhappy apartment Sofia Andreievna was sitting in the curtained dusk, and looked up at them with the protruding eyes of one stretched on the rack, and told them that she was much better. She was giving tea to a dull, sad man and woman in poorish clothes, who rose when Nikolai came in and greeted him with long, soft, involved speeches, which he returned as lengthily and not so softly, but in a muted roar that was meant to be humble. He stood huge above these people, but he bent his hugeness, he bowed to them. Laura curtsied and turned away and left the room, going along the dark corridors to her mother’s bedroom, but in there could not at first see her. Then her ear caught a quick gabble from somewhere near the floor, and she looked down and saw her mother’s hindquarters—she really did not know what one called that part of the body when it belonged to one’s mother. It was up in the air, her back sloping down to her golden head, which was right down on the carpet. Laura stood and stared. Had Tania really been prostrating herself, as she had seen the wilder-looking members of the congregation doing at the Russian church in the Rue Darou, had she been beating her forehead on the floor?

  Her mother sat up on her haunches and looked at her with vague eyes which focused sharply as she cried, “For heaven’s sake, don’t stand there looking so English. You have to help us. Mamma has to go into a clinic at Passy.”

  “To have her teeth out?”

  Tania stood up and brushed her skirts and seemed to reflect. “Yes. To have her teeth out.”

  “How can I help?”

  “We can’t have your grandfather in Paris while it’s going on. He’d want to visit her in the clinic. Also he might not approve of the people who are treating her. They’re Poles. He’d make a fuss. This is a serious matter for Grandmamma at her age, and she ought to be kept perfectly quiet. You must take him away. We simply must get him out into the country.”

  “I quite see that, he simply roared at those people who are having tea with Grandmamma. It must have hurt her head no end. He was being quite nice to them, though.”

  “Oh, he would be,” said Tania. “He has a great respect for that couple. The man’s blind and his wife has been wonderful to him.”

  “I think this must be another lot,” said Laura, “the man didn’t look blind.”

  “He doesn’t but he is. He’s very proud, apparently, and he hates to be helpless, so he tries to look as if he could see. Papa and Mamma do a lot for them and admire them enormously. But anyway, you’ve got to go and take Papa to stay with Aunt Florence at the villa at Mûres-sur-Mer. Mercifully, she’s settled down there for the summer already.”

  “What a lark,” said Laura. “When I bathe will the old lady still insist on that footman who is at least seventy-five standing with the surf boiling round his boots in case I drown? The only thing is I shall get fat with all those interminable meals and nobody talking so that there’s nothing to do but eat. And I’ll do the wrong thing all the time, you do realize that?”

  “Perfectly,” said Tania. “It’s so hard to do the right thing there. It isn’t fair, Uncle Konstantin having married an American. It isn’t fair on us Continentals that there are Americans at all. There’s this English language and one learns it, and there’s this English literature and one reads that, and one learns English customs, calling things by the wrong names, your father was at the House and it’s really Christ Church. And then some accident, like your uncle marrying Aunt Florence, suddenly acquaints one with the fact that there’s also an American English language and a literature written in it.”

  “Well, Mark Twain’s lovely,” said Laura.

  “I know, but there’s William Dean Howells,” said Tania. “He’s a friend of Aunt Florence, and if she asks you to read his books aloud to her, you must.”

  “Will that be awful?”

  “Not nearly awful enough,” said Tania. “About a life unnaturally unawful. Or is one,” she asked, going to the dressing-table and looking at herself in the triple mirror, “specially unlucky? Are other people’s lives perhaps not awful at all? But there are mysteries about America. Thank goodness it’s a question of going to Mûres-sur-Mer. It would be worse if you had to take your grandfather to Aunt Florence’s family house in the States, at a place called Newport. They attach immense importance to it being at Newport, it’s like having a palazzo at Venice, and when you get there there’s not just no Venice, there’s nothing, nothing at all. We were astonished, your father and I.” She ran a comb through her hair. “But help all you can. Let your grandfather talk to you if he seems to bother Aunt Florence, keep on curtsying to her; she thinks that’s a guarantee that you’re well brought up—though why should it be, everybody can bend their knees—and try to fix your mind on the game if she wants you to play bezique, and always try to behave as if you were entirely English, it goes down best. Oh, darling,” she said, laying down the comb and resting her elbows on the table and looking at herself in the mirror censoriously, “I should have arranged this better, but I haven’t, and I’ve got to ask you to do this. But I know it isn’t very nice for you.”

  “It’s not so dreadful either,” said Laura, “and I don’t suppose it’ll be for very long.”

  Tania took up her comb again. “I don’t know how long it’ll be,” she said in a choked voice. “I really don’t understand much about your grandmother’s illness.”

  Laura went to the
dressing-table and took the comb out of her mother’s hand, and played with the abundant hair, winding bright strands of it round her fingers, and rubbed her face against her mother’s shoulder. “Don’t be so worried,” she said. “Teeth are nothing nowadays, we’re not in the Middle Ages. But I wish you weren’t unhappy about this when you’ve been so upset at home. I thought this visit was going to be lovely for you.”

  Her mother repeated, “Upset at home?”

  “I am a fool,” thought Laura, “I’ll just have to go straight on.” She said aloud, “Well, weren’t you? I thought you were.”

  “No,” said her mother slowly, as if she were completely bewildered. “I haven’t been upset about anything. Why should I be?”

  “You’ve looked it sometimes. You always look beautiful, I don’t mean you’ve ever been plain or anything like that, but once or twice I’ve thought you were worried about something.”

  “My eyes have been getting inflamed lately,” said Tania. “I never remember to use the prescription Dr. Carey gave me. I may sometimes have looked as if I’d been crying.” She took up a powder puff and passed it over her face and throat.

  “Well, it was rather that I was thinking of,” said Laura. “Yes, I have thought you had been crying, several times. I’m glad you weren’t. And don’t worry about me at Mûres-sur-Mer. I’ll look after Grandfather all right, and anyway I’ll get some swimming.”

  “But tell me,” said Tania, “what did you think I was upset about at home?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, tell the truth, Laura,” said Tania. “It’s such an odd idea to have got into your head. What could go wrong at home?”

  “Well, I thought perhaps Papa had lost a lot of money,” replied Laura. “He has seemed worried, and so have you, and people’s fathers seem to lose their money. Two of the girls in my class say theirs suddenly got poor. They say it was awful, like a hurricane. One day the money was there and the next day it wasn’t.”