by Rebecca West
She repeated the phrase in wonder. It was so commonplace that it was odd to hear it uttered except on some occasion when platitude was privileged, in a pulpit or at a prize-giving. Yet he had spoken it with agony. He was speaking of death as her grandfather had spoken of conspiracy and the fear of madness. Surely he had not really loved Nikolai, so that just knowing he was dead pierced him through and through. He took off his spectacles, and she put out her hand for them, saying, “Let me polish them,” so that she could stare into his naked eyes. But in the half-light they were merely circles of lustred darkness, and in any case they would never have told her anything. They had their own shutters.
Looking back into her eyes, he whispered, “What’s the negation of the negation here? What’s the negation of death? Ah, you can’t say. Only I know the answer. Perhaps nobody else has ever known it before. Our circumstances are terrible and unique. But perhaps I’m wrong there. History is terrible, possibly other people have been burned to the bone by such an obligation—such a—” Gently his fingers forced the spectacles out of her hand, he put them on again as if the nakedness of his eyes had suddenly become shameful to him. Unsteadily he told her, “It’s so awkward, not being able to explain to you. But you wouldn’t understand, at least not with your mind. Your whole being might grasp the meaning of what’s happened, of any action that was determined by necessity. The poise of your head, the elegance of your movements, they speak of consent to the force which makes the earth move round the sun, the same consent that’s given by all the great statues of the world. But in the meantime you must take my word for it. For what happened to my friend. There was life at its best. There was beauty, the still focus on earth of this force which keeps the stars shining in their place like icons, that sends forth the planets like processions on Holy Days. Then death came, or rather the threat of death. It seemed that life at its best had to go down to the grave. Beauty had to go into the darkness like a shooting star. Perfection had to rot. I accepted that. I even willed it. It had to be. But I felt such horror I thought I would fall dead myself, a crumpled heap of clothes, nothing inside them when they picked them up, myself ground to dust by my heartbeat. Then suddenly my horror turned to something else. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. There came happiness. The synthesis. A glory for which there are no words. The spreading of pinions. The light up to the sun. The fearless flight. Knowing that the sun will not consume one. Knowing that one will consume the sun with one’s own fiercer, purer fire.” His voice broke, though his lips went on moving.
Watching him she was troubled by the suspicion that he was silently saying her name over and over again, as if he were practising some kind of magic against her. To get him back to talking she forced out the words, “What can death have to do with happiness?”
“Nothing at all, if you are thinking of happiness as it’s been known till now. But this is something new. I said, ‘flying up to the sun.’ Within sight of the Absolute. There are no words for it. There could not be. For it has not existed till now.”
“So that’s how it is,” she said, and composed her hands on her lap. She had worked so hard to make Kamensky believe that she had not heard what Chubinov had told her grandfather, and had thought she had succeeded. But this raving could mean only that she had failed, that he intended to kill her, and that killing her would give him such pleasure that it was useless to hope he could be deflected from his purpose. He was sitting quite still, in a tense dream of action like a cat before it springs, and on his lap his bandaged hand pointed towards her, as if under its pretended helplessness there was a weapon ready to discharge. Somehow she was sharing his secrets. Quite well she knew that he was imagining with joy the act of shooting her, or piercing her body with a knife, or throwing a bomb that would scatter her to fragments. If she could keep going till the morning, her father would come and save her. But the tears formed in her eyes, for she doubted if she had so long. He was so clever, and he wanted so much to kill her.
Kamensky rose and stretched himself and smiled down at her, as if she were something he were going to eat. Slowly he strolled towards the window, brushing by the hunched body of Madame Verrier, without taking care not to awake her. He was a cruel man.
If it had been Chubinov who was here, as soon as his eyes had fallen on the nurse she would have become his sister, and her grandfather would have harshly classed her as an inferior, and then been tender with her. But to Kamensky she was no more than a chair or a table. Probably he could not relate her to anything he had ever read in a book.
With his back to Laura, he said, “I am here, nowhere else but here, how wonderful that is,” and drew back the curtains. The music from the ball stopped, and silence pressed into the room from outside. “What a pity. I thought it would be dawn. I expected the first sunlight and the first birds, but it’s still night. Only such an unstained night, I shouldn’t feel aggrieved. Look at the stars. They might be tapers lit for your grandfather’s death, the beeswax tapers you and I will be holding as we stand together at his funeral. Up there space should be smelling of beeswax, of honey.”
She wondered if that meant he planned to let her live until her grandfather was buried.
“And look at the white light over to the east, where the sun will rise. Such a pure light, against that blackness. Oh, Miss Laura, take me now to your grandfather. Let me kneel beside him and pray.”
She found herself on her feet. “You can’t do that.”
“But I must. I have so many things to tell him while he lingers on the threshold. I want to give thanks for all he did for me, and they’ll not be ordinary thanks. Generosity like his dispenses special powers along with its other gifts. Now in this hard hour I can render them back to him.”
She told herself that she must do anything Kamensky asked of her, until her father came. But she found herself standing in front of the folding-doors. “No. You can’t go in there.”
“But why not? You and I could kneel side by side and join our prayers together. I’m a man of the new age, I am a technologist, but I belong also to the world of old and magic things. All, all is within the Absolute.”
She repeated, “You can’t go in there,” and he repeated, “But why not?” There stirred within the gentleness of his voice a subdued suspicion, as if the conspiratorial elements in him had revived, though not at full strength. If he were still in any doubt as to whether she knew what Chubinov had told her grandfather, if he could yet be convinced that she did not know what he was, it might save her life if she let him pray by the dead as friends do. But she felt obliged to bar his way, and what was worse, to bar it in a way which showed she thought he was unfit. She had stiffened into the attitude of a priestess defending an altar from desecration, or rather, of a bad actress playing such a part. She had thrown her head back as far as it would go, her chin was sticking out, and her arms were stretched across the folding-doors behind her like pump handles. But she could not hold herself naturally, perhaps because she really wanted him to know what she was thinking. If she could save her life only by sucking up to Kamensky, it was not worth saving. Yet the whole thing was silly. It could make no difference to Nikolai if Kamensky chose to go on acting the hypocrite for a few minutes beside his discarded body. But that was nonsense, she could not face the shame of letting him into the room where that body lay, yellow, finished, empty, but still invested with a kind of honour which would be spat on as soon as that sweet voice began to call on God and the Birthgiver. “No,” she said, “you can’t,” and sighed deeply, for part of her wanted to live at any price.
Kamensky came even closer to her, his spectacles aiming point-blank at her face, stretching out his hands. She stared at them revolted by the spurious bandage, and expecting him to perform some deadly conjuring trick, to bring some small murderous object down from his cuff into his palm. But he made them into a cradle. So, in the next room, her grandfather was holding the icon on his dead breast. He murmured, “I see what it is. Your nature is so sweet. I suppose your gran
dfather’s last seizure disfigured him, and you want to spare my feelings. Oh, Miss Laura, thank you for that thought. But death and I are not strangers—”
“I didn’t think so.”
“No, indeed. A man of my age—”
He stopped, and looked over his shoulder at the door into the corridor and turned his back on her. There were sounds of cautious movement and whispering from outside, and a scratching round the lock. Someone was trying to get in, and furtively. It could not be her father. Perhaps it was some of those idealistic young men who went on such beautiful mountain walks near Montreux, come to help Kamensky by killing her and running and leaving him appalled; everyone would believe him. But that could not be right. He meant to kill her himself and when they were alone. The joy was to be private. On the other hand, it might be Chubinov with some of his lot. It would be like him to have difficulties with a door that had opened easily enough for everyone else. She leaned back against the folding-doors, resting against her grandfather’s strength, while Kamensky took up his stance nearer the door, his knees slightly bent, his body twisted, his right hip forward, his hand deep in his trouser pocket. His gun would be there. At least he was not sure who was trying to get in; and indeed they could not be conspirators. They did not want people to hear them, but for some other cause than fear. A deep voice panted, “But it’s not locked,” and the door swung open, a woman was pushed in by the tall man behind her, who had a blacksmith’s majesty. Coming out of the lit corridor, they were blind in the half-darkness and stood breathing deeply like spent runners, without knowing they were seen.
The man’s great shoulders were a wide frame behind the woman’s head, his great arms were about hers and crushed them to her side, his great fingers went on kneading her bodice until his eyes grew accustomed to the muted light. The woman’s dress was honey-coloured, shining too gently to be satin, and a veil of the same dim brightness flowed from a wreath of pale flowers on her straw-pale hair, falling about her shoulders and her breast, where a fold of it was caught between two of the man’s fingers, one loaded with a thick sombre ring. The vacillating gaslight made her skirt and veil tremble like a settling moth, and about her neck ebbed and flowed the blue shimmer of old diamonds. Colourless and vague and shaped like a fine vase, she stood there in an attitude of resignation, as if she found what had brought her there so strange that her capacity for surprise was exhausted, and she was accepting passively the further strangeness that in this room, which she must have expected to be empty, there should be a woman sleeping in a chair, a young girl in a peignoir who had thrown herself back against a door, and in the middle of the room a man standing in a contorted position and speaking to her peremptorily in an unknown language. She continued to inspect them with a dazed curiosity as if they might move, and by their movement tell her what she ought to be thinking about what had happened to her.
For a time the tall man stood as she did, shocked into waxwork stillness, while through the open door there came the noise of the people in the ballroom below laughing and clapping, followed by a silence, and then more laughter and a long volley of applause. Then he came to himself and made an embarrassed and impatient gesture, which his shaking shadow made more widely across the corner of the room. The woman stirred, and a tremor ran down her long gloved arms. Slowly she moved her pale flowered head from side to side, as if drowsily throwing off drowsiness, uttered a sound of distress, pleasant in tone but not interesting, and shrank into the arms of the man behind her, who grasped her as he had done before, and drew her backwards. It was impossible to know how he felt about her from the way he touched her. He might have been moving a piece of furniture. The door banged, cutting off the first bars of the “Marseillaise,” it was softly reopened and softly closed.
Laura began to cry. Once more she was face-to-face with Kamensky, who would probably start all over again wanting to pray by her grandfather, and she could not go on and on being brave. Also an irrational grief was hurting her chest. Surely there was no reason why those two people should make her feel humiliated and deserted and passed over, why she should have had a sense of loss and guilt because she had not clearly seen the tall man’s face. In the half-light it had been only a dark mask. She would have liked to hurry along the corridor and catch them up, and lay a hand on the man’s arm, so that he would turn round and look down on her. Yet she did not think she would have liked his face. She wished she had never seen the pair, she would have liked to break them as in her childhood she had broken dolls which had seemed to her frightening. But all the same Kamensky was talking shocking nonsense about them. He had taken her hand and was calling them disgusting beasts and angrily repeating over and over again how terrible it was that they should have come in when she, she was there. But they had meant no harm. It was improbable that they had read dangerous books in which they had found a command to kill her.
“Miss Laura, you must stop crying. Forget that shameless couple. Oh, you are so free, so intelligent, so brave, so affectionate, and so innocent, above all so innocent. To think that they should breathe the same air, it’s insufferable—”
“I’m not crying because of those people. I’m crying because I want to go to sleep.”
“Oh, Miss Laura, I will leave you now. But I will not go far.”
“I’m sure you won’t.”
“No, indeed, I will take a chair and sit in the corridor outside until morning.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much. My father will find you there.”
XIII
Laura woke into a dream which was a memory. When she was quite little the whole family, her grandfather and grandmother as well, went to stay with a cousin who lived in Scotland. One day Nannie had taken her and her brothers into the dining-room where their elders sat over their dessert at a long bright luncheon-table, surmounted by a pyramid of pink and white carnations and asparagus fern. Nikolai called her to his side and held out to her a marron glacé, impaled on a fork. She had lifted her mouth to it, feeling as if her constant dream of being an animal had come true, and she had been changed into the tame fawn kept by the children of the house, which every morning after breakfast waited at the foot of the steps leading down from the terrace to the park and lifted its muzzle for scraps of bread and butter. It might be that if she could hold her breath for five minutes or pass some other magical test, her grandfather would speak to her in animal language and that she might understand and answer in the same tongue. He must have divined that she was telling herself a fairy-tale, for when she had swallowed the marron glacé he gave a long, secret-sharing gaze and put down the fork with a sorcerer’s gesture.
Her heart melted with love; and she became aware that she was being shaken, and pulled up and out of the bedclothes by the strong small hand of Madame Verrier, at whom she smiled, forgetting all that was disagreeable, the woman had such an amusing flavour, sweet and acid at the same time like raspberries.
“Your father’s here. In France. In Grissaint. In this hotel. Third floor down. In the landlord’s office.”
Laura took her hand and kissed it, she was glad she was abroad where one could do such things. She looked towards the folding-doors and said in Russian, “Grandfather, I’m safe, my father’s here,” and repeated to herself in English, “he’s here, he’s here.”
Madame Verrier said slowly, their hands still gripped. “You rely on your father a lot, don’t you? How pleasant for you.”
“I was frightened,” said Laura, and under the nurse’s clinically inquisitive gaze, she explained, “frightened at seeing my grandfather die.”
“Naturally. Now get up and dress.”
“But can’t my father come up here?”
“He didn’t want to. I mean, he couldn’t. He’s talking to somebody from the Town Hall. About the return of your poor grandfather’s body to Paris. You know what we French are. Papers, papers, papers, always papers. If you’re in a hurry to see him, jump out of bed.”
“Please wait a moment.” She was shaken by her
renewed fear. “Where’s Monsieur Kamensky?”
“Ah, him. He’s gone out into the town.”
“Did he meet my father?”
“Yes, as soon as he arrived.”
“Did they talk?”
“Yes. For half an hour, I’d say.”
“And then he went into the town?”
“Yes. Why, you’re more like a judge than a young girl, asking all these questions. Do get up.”
“Did Monsieur Kamensky say where he was going?”
“Not a word. But he and I, we don’t feel any great need to communicate. When I left this room to go to the cabinet de toilette I found him asleep in a chair outside the door. Well, if that’s how he likes to spend his nights, I’ve no objection. But he woke up and told me about two people bursting into the room in the middle of the night, and what an affront it was to your innocence. I bit his head off. Very tiresome those two coming in like that, but it sets my teeth on edge to hear any man talking about female innocence.”
“Did he say when he would be back?”
“Not a word. But do get up. The place is upside-down after that ball, and you’ll have to wash in this basin, you can’t have a bath. All I could get is this crock of hot water, and it’s not too hot either. I’ll bring you some breakfast once you’re downstairs with your father.”
But when she said that she was ready Madame Verrier denied it. “No. Your stockings are not straight, and your hair, you haven’t brushed it properly. You may be going downstairs to see your father, but there’s nobody, but absolutely nobody, of the opposite sex before whom we can safely appear at a disadvantage.” The poor woman was always making remarks suitable for printing on a calendar designed to prove that no day in the year was worth living. Her father would never have cared that her hair was too bushy, he did not judge her as if she were a stranger; and when he heard that her life was in danger he would run his hand through her hair, as he had done when he had saved her from the sea, like a man counting the coins of his treasure.