The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  That afternoon, two summers ago, in Tania’s bedroom, when the floor had been covered with the pale yellow buckram hat-boxes, had ended in such drunkenness. One of the hats excited doubts in Hélène, the lady’s maid, as soon as she took it out of its tissue paper. Her lower lip protruding, she brought it over to the dressing-table and Tania cried, “Well, here we evidently haven’t done well for ourselves, but don’t look like that about it, when you stick out your lip like that anybody could see that you come from a rugged mountain district where they have avalanches. We have snow but no avalanches in Russia. She comes,” she explained over her shoulder to Susie, “from Auvergne.” “But never returns there,” said Hélène, “not like this hat, which is going to return to its box, and return to the shop.” “But let me look at myself for a minute,” said Tania. “You can do that, but I won’t trouble to pin it on,” said Hélène. Tania shouted with laughter at her reflection. “Look what an awful face I really have! How is it people don’t notice it? I look like the plain sister, the one that never got married, or one of those blond cows Paris Bordone painted. How can I have chosen it?” “Because you were alone,” said Hélène, “the Duchess always took me with her.” “Well, that I can’t do, because I never know till the last moment when I’m going. But ah! ah!” Her voice soared into a sweet rowdiness. “I know quite well why I chose it! I watched a woman on the other side of the room try it on, and she looked charming. And why? Because she had fine, fine, fine little bones, like you, Susie.” She whirled round on her chair, snatching the hat from her head. “You’ll look an angel in it! Come and try it on. I’ll make you a non-birthday present of it.” She jumped to her feet and sprawled magnificently through space as painted goddesses sprawl across palace ceilings, holding out the hat as if it were a crown she had proffered to another goddess. It was all too much for Susie, who shrank into smiling, disconcerted waifdom. She did not rise at once, but gently cooed that, oh, no, such things were not for her, and went on pressing down one hand on Tania’s broad soft bed, and pressing it down again, as a cat sometimes kneads a sofa or a comfortable chair.

  Laura wished that afternoon had not come into her mind. She supposed it seemed repellent now because mean people would think that Tania had made a fool of herself giving Susie that, when Susie could have gone to Paris and bought a hundred hats from Caroline Reboux without feeling any the poorer. Also, it might have been that suspicion about Susie, but there was no evidence for that. Laura told herself she must forget it. She freed her right hand from the sheets, and let it lie on the coverlet, in case her grandfather wanted to hold it. The dance-music distressed her with its hobnailed boots; she saw Elodie and the Captain, Madame Barrault and the General, poor Professor Barrault and the General’s wife, dancing awkwardly in the yellowness cast by the chandeliers, enemy of the whiteness which had been there this morning. It was strange that once a chandelier had been lit, though that was the very purpose for which it had been made, it lost its place among the magically pure things, swans, snow, icicles, moonbeams, Northern Lights. But as she lay there the ballroom returned to what it had been, to what it always ought to be, flooded with undiluted light, save for the gods and nymphs, white like the icing on a wedding-cake, and the nun-like women tending the floor and the men with green baize aprons gentling the harp and setting up the music-stands, all with a priestly lack of haste, so seriously that they were either serving other darker gods elsewhere or knew that these gods would have to change their substance before they were done. On the top of the ladder the girl still wrote great O’s on the highest pane of the window with her yellow duster, O, I love you! O, I adore you! O, come soon and save me! The young man at the foot of the ladder holding a sheet of music, covered with great O’s, sang nothing but made more O’s with his open mouth, O, I love you! O, I adore you! O, come soon and save me!

  Suddenly Laura came out of sleep and found herself sitting up in bed. The music had stopped. Clear across the town came the lurching and panting of a starting train. Though the light was dim she saw that Madame Verrier was asleep. She was huddled in her chair as if she were never gallant, her hands lax in her lap, her head hanging defeated on one side. It was true, Laura thought, what Chubinov had said when he bent over Nikolai at the station, that it was a crime to waken any sleeper. Chubinov was not so silly, her grandfather had been right about him. She dropped back on the pillow; and mercifully the bed creaked, and Madame Verrier stirred and opened her eyes and said thickly, “Mademoiselle?”

  “I heard a train, could my father have come by that?”

  Madame Verrier blinked at the window. “No, it’s still dark. That would be the late express from Paris.” She burrowed down into the chair and was asleep. The music started again. Laura pulled her sheet over her face and cried a little. The phosphorescent length of her grandfather stretched across the dark lining of her lids again. What had happened to him happened to everyone. That was harder to believe than any fairy-tale. Shuddering, she slept, but not for long. There was a soft knock on the door, and another, and another. As she hurried to the door she hoped her father would not be too angry because she was barefoot.

  XII

  Outside stood Monsieur Kamensky and Catherine, who was bright-eyed with happiness. She bobbed, said, “We’re all so glad this gentleman has come, after all we’re only strangers,” bobbed again, and went off down the corridor, walking lightly, she was so pleased. Up the well of the staircase the music came in its completeness, gay with all its notes, the low ones and the high ones as well, which did not penetrate the walls of the room. The violins and the trombones fell silent, the clarinet ran a few steps up the scale, twirled about, and ran down again, then the other instruments joined together in acclamation. Laura leaned against the doorpost. If she ran past him down the corridor he would realize that she knew he was Gorin, and would kill her. That would be the sensible thing for him to do; and he looked still sensible though wild, as if his sense had now to work on disturbing material. His face was as smooth as usual, but his clothes were rumpled, and the two straps of the small hold-all he was carrying were not done up properly, the first strap was caught in the second buckle, the other strap was loose.

  She asked, “How did you know we were here?”

  He did not hear the question. “Is it true what they told me downstairs? Is he dead?”

  She nodded. Kamensky set down his hold-all, snatched off his spectacles and threw them on the floor. She stooped and picked them up, and put them back in his hand, saying, “That’s a gesture you can’t afford.”

  Again he did not seem to hear. He put his hands to his head and said softly, “I feel like a masterless dog.”

  Perhaps he was not Gorin after all. “Tell me,” she asked, “how did you know we were here? Why have you come?”

  The sound of her voice simply did not seem to reach him. “He was alive when I left Paris. I never thought he would be gone when I got here. This is a different tragedy.” A tremor ran through him, she thought he was going to fall. “Can’t I come in and sit down? There’s a nurse with you, isn’t there? They assured your mother there would be. It’s quite proper for me to come in, isn’t it, if there’s someone with you? I am at the end of everything.”

  She softened to him, because he was so tired, hardened again as it came on her what goings and comings had made him tired, reflected she might as well be shot inside a room as outside, and felt neither soft nor hard, but simply an exile, lifted suddenly to some place a long way away from anywhere she had ever been before. “Come in,” she said and settled him on a chair. She had to guide him, he was dazed and tremulous, and when her hand touched his arm he groaned. She went over to Madame Verrier, gently shook her, and told her that a friend had come from Paris: a special friend, she added, wondering why she troubled, for nobody’s benefit, to be ironic. Would Madame mind if they talked? Madame Verrier muttered that nothing would keep her awake, reached out and found a swathe of cotton wool she had left on the table and plugged her ears, smiled with close
d eyes, and said indistinctly, “A pity it’s not your father.”

  Laura turned to Kamensky and said, “We’ll keep the gas low and talk quietly,” and stopped. In the half-light Kamensky’s spectacles hid his eyes as if they were made of black glass, and the two shining dark circles were levelled on her steadily, they might have been two gun-muzzles aimed at her face. She wanted to put up her hands but stood quite still. It came back to her that Dolly the housemaid had once told her that if a tramp attacked her out in the country she must kick him between the legs. She supposed she could do that if she had to. It now struck her as idyllic, the world where, if a man attacked one, it would be a tramp.

  Kamensky said as if in anguish, “I used to think your mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. Now I think that of you.”

  She exclaimed in bewilderment, “What’s that? What did you say?” Only an idiot could consider her more beautiful than her mother, and anyway why should she be interested if he did?

  And why would he bring that up at such a moment?

  “I beg you to forgive me. You must think I’m rambling. But it suddenly struck me that if your grandfather had the worst possible fortune in some respects, he had the best in others. Such a daughter, such a granddaughter.”

  She pushed an armchair towards him and sat down in it, facing him. “How does it happen that you’re here?”

  “It’s quite a story. A chapter of accidents,” he said, in his unpleasing English. “Professor Barrault became distressed about you and telephoned to your mother in Paris.”

  “Oh, yes, it would be he.” Not Saint-Gratien, not Madame Verrier.

  “He knew that you and another doctor had communicated with your father, but he thought that the message to London might not be delivered at once. So he looked up your grandfather’s address in the Paris telephone book, and rang the apartment, and was put through to the clinic, but your mother couldn’t leave your grandmother, who is apparently feeling very unwell. I wasn’t at the clinic, I’d had to go back on my undertaking to take them there. My hand, you remember.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “But I happened to call in at the apartment later, and, oh, Miss Laura, I knew that the dearest part of my life was over. It wasn’t only that I learned that your grandfather was dying, I saw what his dying meant. What struck me sounds trivial, but it isn’t. You see … the apartment in the Avenue Kléber has always been so orderly. Your grandfather kept his papers and his books so neatly, and all comings and goings were so formal that he might still have been a Minister of State with a secretariat working for him. That, of course, isn’t entirely due to him. Your grandmother’s very able. She saw to it, and, please God, will see to it again, that in her household there were no such muddles, no such inexplicable and annoying delays, no occasions for anger, such as there are in other homes.

  Early in the day each servant was given the appropriate orders and the machine ran without a hitch till nightfall. Oh, there was plenty of noise, you know what our people are, but nothing went wrong. In Russia, you know, Sofia Andreievna managed her own stables, and other owners came miles to see them, even from Austria and Hungary, where they know what’s what. Well, when I went to the apartment yesterday it was a den of confusion. The servants were all weeping, we seemed caught in a web of telephone calls and telegrams that were sent and never arrived, and even those, and I find this so horrible, that were to call me to my happy duty of serving you. For, you see, even after I’d had my hand attended to, I didn’t go back to my hotel. This turned out to be one of the busiest days in my life.”

  “It must have been.”

  “For, though I’d have kept my promise to go to the clinic with your mother, I’d many other things to do. It happens that I’ve been asked—and how pleased your grandfather would have been, for he always took the most generous interest in my career—to take charge of a new construction. In South America. Under a French company. And it’s this very day that I’ve had to settle this business, going from one tedious interview to another, so it was quite late before I got to the apartment, and telephoned your mother at the clinic, and got the whole dreadful story of how you and your grandfather had had to get off the train. Of course, I told her I’d start at once.”

  “Of course.”

  “But I couldn’t keep that promise either. I hastened to the station, eager to be with your grandfather and pray with him his last prayers—and then, look!” He held out his left hand, which was now swathed in bandages.

  She touched that white linen, and would not have been surprised had she felt underneath it the hardness of an artificial limb. She would not say she was sorry for him. Even though it meant that he must realize her disbelief, she said, “Poor little Louison.”

  But it went by him. “Ah, poor little Louison,” he echoed, pausing to laugh tenderly. “I’ll have to keep it from him that he did rather more damage than we thought. Though my friend the chemist believed he’d settled everything by giving me a little laudanum, by evening my hand was hurting so intensely that I had to stop on my way to the station and go to a doctor to put a dressing on it.” Choking, he cried, “But what’s the use of talking about such stupid things! He’s dead! I didn’t think he’d ever die!” He covered his eyes with his handkerchief, then took it away to look at her directly and say, “You’re glad to see me?”

  “Of course. Of course. But your hand. It’s so painful, shall we wake up the nurse and get her to look at it?”

  “What, wake the poor toiler, worn out with her long day spent in works of mercy?” he answered without a second’s delay. “And unfortunately,” he added, “the dressing has to be left undisturbed for several days, or so the doctor said.” She laughed and was horrified by her lack of self-control, and wondered if, in the half-light, he had seen that she was mocking him. He went on, in a tone she could not understand, for it sounded as if it were he who was frightened and she who had no need to be, “I caught the last train which could bring me here today. I got to the station in time to catch an earlier one. I couldn’t force myself to climb into the carriage and take my seat. Think of that. The first time in my life I’ve ever done anything like that. So irresolute.”

  Again his spectacles were trained on her like gun-barrels. She did not see how she could kick him between his legs if he went on sitting like that, bending forward. The advantage was to him. She smoothed her hair, and made sure that the ribbon bow at the neck of her peignoir was fastened. It seemed important that everything about her should be neat. She raised her chin and waited.

  “Could you possibly give me something to drink?”

  “There’s some champagne on the table. Not the fizzy kind. And there’s lots of food.”

  She had been watching lest he tried to get her to turn her back on him; but he turned his back on her, went over to the table, filled and emptied a glass, heaped a plate with food, ate only a mouthful, and then went back to his chair. He pulled it still closer to hers so that their faces were only three or four feet apart. “Now I must ask you some things, Miss Laura,” he said, then groaned and put his hands to his forehead. He closed his eyes and rocked backwards and forwards. “I don’t feel well,” he muttered. She could not pretend that she cared. Opening his eyes he stared at her, and again it was as if he were tracked down and panic stricken. “Tell me, did anything happen to you on the train?”

  “Kind and sensible,” she thought, “kind and sensible of Professor Barrault to telephone Paris. My mother would have done it, so would my father. And it means that I have to face Kamensky unarmed, with no lies properly arranged.” But it was not so bad. “Yes,” she said, “something quite odd happened to us on the train,” and felt braced, as if she had dived into a cold sea.

  “What was that, Miss Laura?”

  “After the train left Paris a man came into our compartment. Somebody Grandfather knew but hadn’t seen for a long time.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Grandfather never told me. He didn’t introd
uce us. They just said, ‘Can it really be you?’ and ‘Let’s see, how many years is it since we met?’ and that sort of thing, and then the man said he had something private to tell my grandfather, and my grandfather shrugged his shoulder, you know the way he did when he was bored, like a sleepy mammoth. And he sent me off to sit in the next compartment. Then, just before we got to Grissaint, the man came and told me my grandfather was ill. He was in a great fuss. He said he hadn’t meant to upset my grandfather, he’d only talked to him for his own good. I laughed, rather. My father says that phrase pairs with the raven as an ill omen. Then I saw my grandfather, and I couldn’t laugh any more.”

  “Was he ill already? How ill?”

  “Very ill. He was quite yellow, and he was panting, and he couldn’t walk or stand properly, and he was talking nonsense. When I got him out of the train at Grissaint and they blew that little trumpet they use here instead of a whistle, he thought it was a toy trumpet and that a little girl was blowing it at a Christmas party in St. Petersburg. And he kept on staring at the big station clock and saying it had stopped, though it hadn’t.”

  Kamensky sighed as if to himself, “They were waiting in the station. All alone.” He went back to the cross-examination. “And the man who had spoken to you on the train?”

  “Oh, he helped us, he got us a porter, and then he went away.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “Yes, and that was queer. For he said he was going straight back to Paris, but he didn’t, for when the train we’d just got out of started again, I saw him standing in the corridor, and of course that was the Calais train. I don’t think he liked me seeing him. He turned his head away.”