The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  He threw himself back in his bed and closed his eyes violently, as if to kill his sight. Professor Barrault came forward and put his fingers on his wrist and said to the nurse, “Quick, the syringe.” But Nikolai flung off his hand and said, “Remember, Laura, to give my love to my dear wife and all my family, the women as well. I realize how much I must have tried their patience by my preoccupation with my griefs. But I suppose I made it up to them in quite a number of ways.”

  “Nurse,” said Professor Barrault, “let’s try again. He really ought to have the injection.”

  “I shouldn’t bother,” said Professor Saint-Gratien.

  Nikolai heaved himself up in bed again. Shuddering, he said, “In the desert place I may see a giant hand or foot. I must try to keep my self-command though I will be dead and remember that it’s an illusion of the Devil. Why has nobody lit the gas? I saw a gas-jet when I came into the room.”

  “The gas is on,” said Professor Barrault.

  “Then get candles,” said Nikolai, turning his face about so that everybody present got the full force of his displeasure. “Must we talk in the dark like gipsies?”

  It was as if he himself were a candle: a lit candle which was then blown out.

  When the doctors sent Laura out of the bedroom, she went back to the window and looked out through the lenses of her tears. The shops were still bright and had some customers, but there were no children in the causeway, except a few who were leaning against the walls and eating sandwiches or supping out of bowls, with an air of discontent and abandonment. All the chairs had been taken in from the doorways. Most of the upper rooms were lit and it was there life was being carried on now: dark figures moved backwards and forwards against the wavering blow of lamplight. The hours were passing, it could not be so long before her father would be with her. She did not know how she could bear this sharp pain without him. For as she had found earlier that fear is an affliction of the body, gliding about in the bowels, so she was now finding out that grief was a wound in the chest. Presently the doctors came in and drew up two chairs beside her. Now that she had seen a dead person, the living seemed more strange. How did one move and feel? While she listened to the doctor she surreptitiously looked down at her hand, spread out the fingers, brought them together again, and wondered at the miracle.

  It seemed that she must not go back to the bedroom for a time, the nurse had various things to do to Nikolai. She nodded, accepting that there were yet more mysteries, and told them that it was important his icon must be put on his breast. The doctors went on to say that her grandfather must have been a very great man. A man of state, said Professor Barrault, drawing himself up, broadening his shoulders, impersonating unassailability. She wanted to deny it, to disclose that Nikolai had been oppressed and deceived and persecuted and pitiful, but was not sure that he would have liked them to know it. Then Professor Barrault asked if she would care to spend the night at his house, Professor Saint-Gratien breaking in to explain that he could not make such an offer, since his was a bachelor establishment. Professor Barrault hastily mentioned, as if to clear a colleague from a suspicion of light-mindedness, that Professor Saint-Gratien had the misfortune to be a widower. He himself enjoyed the happiness of having a wife and three daughters, and his eldest girl would be glad to give up her room to Laura. True, he and his family would be out all evening, for they were going to the ball which was to be held downstairs, so heartless, he added, was circumstance. But his servants would give her supper and help her to retire early.

  She was shocked. They should not think her capable of leaving her grandfather alone. While she was talking to them she was also talking to him, in her mind, assuring him again and again that the giant head or foot would be an illusion of the Devil, and letting her left hand hang over the arm of her chair so that his spirit hand could grasp it if he wanted. As soon as the nurse had finished whatever it was she was doing, she would go and pray beside him. But it turned out that Professor Saint-Gratien and Madame Verrier had known that she should want to keep Nikolai company during his first night of death, for they had already arranged for a camp-bed to be put in the salon, and Madame Verrier was to stay with her till the morning. Then the two doctors said good-bye, promising to come in later, when they were at the ball, and Laura said she would be glad, but that her father would be here soon, and would want to meet them. When the door had closed she knelt by the window and again put her forehead against the glass and let the tears run down her face, and repeated all the prayers she could remember from the Orthodox service, sometimes speaking to Nikolai. Now there was true night above the roofs, and the street was empty. Most of the shops were shuttered, though the windows above still glowed with lamplight and were crossed by silhouettes. Down below the ball had begun. She could hear the band.

  Madame Verrier came out of the bedroom and stood beside her at the window, patted her shoulder, and gave her a clean handkerchief. Two dogs chased a cat down the causeway, a door opened, the cat shot in, the dogs yapped and sauntered on. The half-hour struck on a distant clock. Then a woman, her cloak drawn high about her head, ran in a soft helter-skelter along the causeway.

  “Madame Gallet,” said the nurse. “I’d know her anywhere, wrap up as she likes.”

  “Is she one of your patients?”

  “She’s been to me twice.”

  The woman down in the causeway came to a halt, let the cloak fall on her shoulders, smoothed her hair, shook out her skirts, and went at a sober pace into a house.

  “Thoughtless girl,” said Madame Verrier. “I wonder where she’s gone. But she’s no worse than thoughtless. Life’s very hard.” Staring out into the darkness, she raised her small clean hand and beat out the rhythm of the quadrille which was bumpety-bumping through the walls and floor. “Your grandfather,” she said, with hostility, “must have been a very handsome man.” But then, as if an extenuating circumstance had crossed her mind, she exclaimed, “The poor old gentleman. It’s hard on a man when he comes to die. Harder than it is for women. For many dying men, it’s the first time that anything’s gone against them, the first time they find their bodies not doing just what they’re told. Women are used to that, which of us would choose what happens to us every month? That’s an idiotic business. And as for children, it’s the women who want them who don’t have them, and the poor women who don’t want them, God help them, nobody else does, who get them. In either case, it’s a great injustice, indeed one might call it the great injustice. But men, everything goes as they want it till the last moment and then they aren’t able to credit it that their luck’s turning. One can’t,” she said in a grudging tone, “help feeling sorry for them.”

  XI

  The trouble was to stay awake till her father came. She wanted him to find her self-possessed and in control and as elegant as if she had been grown-up for a long time; and she asked if she might have a bath. But the night was out of hand. The gaslight simmered and wavered on the walls, keeping time with the singing in her ears, while the thudding rhythm of the band downstairs hammered on the exact place in her head where, she suspected, it was decided whether she slept or woke, and she was not sure which she was doing. The music itself confused her, for it seemed strange that a ball should be taking place in a room which was for her still occupied by white light, space, a man on a ladder removing a holland cover from a chandelier as reverently as if it were a vast inverted pyx, women in distance-coloured cotton gowns kneeling on the floor and tending it like put-upon lay sisters at work in a chapel built on the bones of saints. When Catherine Marcot came to say the bath was ready, Madame Verrier took Laura out into the corridor on her arm, but she staggered. Out here the music was different and stronger. The violins and clarinets which could not pierce the walls and floor of the salon came up the staircase shrill and sharp and unashamed, and so did the laughter and applause which burst out when the playing lurched to its close. She was again confused, seeing in her mind’s eye the dancers going off the dance-floor in a flushed,
chattering, and vulgarly excited crowd, backing dangerously against the ladder by the window on which the slender girl, raising her arm and pressing her duster round and round the upper pane, still signalled piously to the clouds, though the night had fallen. Laura knew it was not so, but yet it was so, inside her head.

  Madame Verrier tenderly asked her what was the matter, calling her tu as if she were a little child, warned her that the water would be getting cold, and drew her on along the corridor with her compact, featherweight-boxer strength. In a linen-room, walled with cupboards painted greyish-blue, a pendant gas-jet reflected as a primrose-yellow highlight on each cupboard door, Catherine was bending over a hip-bath, pouring in now hot water and now cold, stooping so low that she had the stance of a four-footed animal, the gravity of a cow on her face, as she tested the heat with her finger. She might have been one of the beasts round the manger at the Nativity. When she left them Madame Verrier knelt down at Laura’s feet and took off her shoes and peeled off her stockings, rose and swiftly stripped her to her skin, and turned aside to feel the bath-water, leaving her standing naked. Laura felt surprise at having no clothes on, with someone else there, which had not happened since she was grown-up. Amused, she said to herself, “I might be a statue in the British Museum,” but statues were men and women, gods and goddesses, involved in business which meant nothing to her. It was like a pillar that she felt. Madame Verrier’s voice came to her through darkness, “Hurry up now, I want to get you into bed,” and she realized that for an instant she had been asleep on her feet.

  Madame Verrier steadied her as she stepped into the bath, saying, “You have a beautiful figure,” without admiration, even with grimness. She might have been warning her of a defect bound to cause trouble later. Solemnly and scrupulously, she washed Laura’s body with a soaped pad of cotton wool, let her lie back in the warm water and close her eyes, stood her up and dried her as swiftly as she had stripped her, and pulled a fine lawn night-dress over her head and down to her feet, remarking with the same air of not liking what she saw in the crystal ball, “A beautiful figure.” Laura said drowsily, “This is a lovely night-dress. It’s like the ones my mother wears. I’m only allowed plain crêpe de Chine. And this peignoir too, it’s very nice.” A wonder struck her. “Where do they come from?”

  Madame Verrier told her tersely that when Professor Saint-Gratien had arranged for her to come to look after the old gentleman he had instructed her to buy soap, a hairbrush, and some night apparel on her way to the hotel, as the Russian young lady had no baggage. Her fingers wavered as she was tying a bow on the peignoir, she smiled, began a sentence, checked it, and interrupted Laura’s thanks to finish it. “He was as grave about it as if he were telling me I was to buy some food for someone starving.” The amusement in her voice nearly rose to laughter. Her arm round Laura’s waist, she led her out into the corridor, into the harsh bumping music, halting at the top of the stairs to say, in the tone mothers use when they are dissimulating their pride in their children, “But the Professor’s like that.”

  In the salon Catherine, half-way through making up the camp-bed, was taking from a page-boy a parcel wrapped up in lilac tissue paper and a letter addressed to Laura. “But nobody knows I’m here,” she said, and then caught her breath. Since her grandfather had died she had hardly thought of Kamensky. “Put it down on the table. Please put it down on the table.” Her fear had split into several images at the back of her mind, like paintings hanging on a wall. One was a dark cloud bursting into the opposite of a thunderstorm, a single flash of darkness more blinding than any lightning, followed by silence, rolling on and on for ever. Then her fear became practical. She spent a full minute staring at the parcel on the table, pitying the two women because they were looking at her with pity. They knew so much more than she did; but what she knew that they did not was so much worse. Slowly she put out her hand and felt the parcel, but it was not a bomb, it was quite soft. It did not interest her to open it after that, but under the women’s puzzled eyes she had to read the letter. “It’s from Professor Barrault,” she told them. “He’s sending me a night-dress belonging to his daughter Elodie. How kind everybody is,” she murmured, forcing her eyelids to keep up.

  “So they should be. Young girls,” said Madame Verrier, “should be protected. Usually they are, if they are rich, but emergencies like this do happen. Well, you’ve been very brave. Look, they’ve sent up a tray. It’s all stuff from the ball supper. Lamb cutlets, salmon, strawberry mousse. You’d have liked something plainer, but try to eat a little.”

  “I think I should be fasting,” said Laura.

  “Fasting? Ah, because of your grandfather’s death. Ah. Tomorrow. Start fasting tomorrow. Tomorrow’s a good day for fasting, the best.”

  Laura was bewildered. Tomorrow would be Wednesday. Why was that a good day for fasting? If it had been Friday there would have been some sense in that. But Wednesday? “Also, I’d like to pray beside my grandfather before I go to sleep.”

  Madame Verrier bit back a short word. “It’s quite unnecessary. God and His angels,” she remarked, with an air of handing a baby a rattle, “have him in their care.”

  “It’s not like that with us Russians. Us Orthodox.” But she did not feel equal to explaining that Nikolai was now traversing a desert, confused by the loss of his body and assailed by the fierce Prince of the Air. “He hasn’t,” she said vaguely, “got there yet. We don’t. Not at once.” She thought of the giant head and foot. “I really must go and pray beside him.”

  He was dead. His face was quite dead. But his great yellowish hands were clasping the icon to his breast as a strong man still feeling pity might hold a small wounded bird close to give it warmth. She knelt and muttered encouragement, telling him that his strength would take him through the desert and that God could not help loving his strength. Something brushed her face. It was the counterpane hanging down from his bed. She was huddled on the floor, and Madame Verrier was lifting her up by gripping her under the armpits. Laura explained that she had not really fallen asleep, and Madame Verrier said that she quite realized this, but feared that she might have come near to falling asleep, and then might have been startled if she woke from a doze and found her poor grandfather as he was. She might cry out, and that, Madame Verrier suggested with patent insincerity, might disturb her grandfather’s soul. Pursing up her clear-cut lips before she could force out the pietistic phrase, evidently as repugnant to her as oaths, she assured Laura, “The poor gentleman is at rest. The angels,” she added, as if speaking of a family which had always bored her, “have him in their care.”

  Laura agreed to have some supper, and settled down in an armchair, and the far-off clock sounded another hour. Time was passing. Grissaint was so near the coast, it should not have taken so long to come from London. She told her grandfather, “I am in a desert too.” She ate a cutlet and said, yes, she would try to eat another if Madame Verrier thought she should, and smiled to think how amused Tania would be when she heard of this Good Samaritan unbeliever, forcing herself to engage in the improprieties of belief. Tania was always ready to be amused, or had been so. Laura remembered an afternoon, before things went wrong, when she had gone into her mother’s bedroom and found her rosy and golden with that pleasure which came round regularly twice a year. She had been to her milliners in Bond Street the day before and had chosen a dozen hats or so, to be sent home on approval, and there they were, all over the floor, in the great round hat-boxes made of pale buckram, looking like tenor drums assembled for a peculiar concert. Of course Tania had asked Susie Staunton to share the treat, but Laura had not seen her when she first entered the room, for Susie, always self-effacing, had found a seat in the background, out of the way of the afternoon’s ritual. Tania was sitting at her dressing-table in her chemise, her shoulders bare except for the narrow ribbon straps, but her hair as carefully done as if she were about to start for a grand party; and half a dozen ostrich-feather boas were hanging over the back of her chair, b
lack, white, sea-green, sea-blue, beige, and emerald. Hélène, the lady’s maid, was opening each hat-box in turn, tilting its lid against it, withdrawing a hat in its nest of tissue paper, disengaging it, and carrying it with an acolyte’s deliberation over to the dressing-table, where she pinned it to the golden whorl of Tania’s hair. Then she went to the wardrobe and took out the dress which Tania was most likely to wear with that particular hat, and stood behind her, passing her hands between her mistress’s arms and sides and holding the dress up in front of her. If the verdict was not immediately yes or no, Hélène made Tania get up and stand in front of the cheval glass in the corner, sometimes festooning her with one of the feather boas.

  It should have been a tedious ceremony, but Tania laughed when a hat suited her, as though she and it together were going to play an impudent fraud on the world, and when it did not suit her, she laughed even more, as if she had been caught cheating, but in any case had been doubtful of getting away with it; and she kept on turning away from the glass and calling over her shoulder to Susie, inviting her to join in this ridicule of her own beauty, or crying out some scrap of gossip she had just remembered, or propounding one of the theories which kept on bubbling up in the champagne of her mind. At that moment she was expressing her belief that Englishmen did not really like playing cricket—who could?—but had it forced on them in their schools and universities by a secret and subversive society like the Freemasons. To all this Susie, from her seat beside Tania’s broad bed, responded by her timid kind of laughter and by sounds of agreement uttered in the soft tone and with the strict rhythm of a cooing dove. Every now and then she put out a vague, hovering finger to trace the design of the creamy Venice-point counterpane, or looked up at the canopy of faded Persian brocade which fell from the crown of crystal plumes fixed high on the wall, with her air of admiring things she could never hope to possess herself. When Susie was looking up like that, one could see how long her throat was, and how curious her mouth, so indeterminate, so hard to describe or remember. The blackness of sleep was before Laura, she flung herself into it.