The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  Expectation of the rage he would feel made her tingle as they went out into the corridor, going through the alternating tunnels of darkness and the shafts of light slanting out of open bedroom doors, which had pails and brooms on the threshold or chamois-leathers hanging on the doorhandles. Out of one room there suddenly protruded a gaunt old head under a mobcap and a voice whistled through gaps left by missing teeth, addressing nobody in particular but with a personal vehemence, like a prophet crying in the wilderness, “Hurry up after four-twenty, they’ve just this moment gone down, they’ve left some of their rubbish.” A night-gown too weightless to take the air flew hesitantly out and sank on the carpet in a rosy transparent quoit. “No use to me,” the old voice cackled, and another old voice from another room cackled a comment which Laura could not understand and made Madame Verrier cry out a wordless laughing admonition. Nikolai was dead but not much else was wrong.

  When they got down to the landing at the top of the great gilded staircase they had to wait. The double doors into the ballroom were ajar, and beside them stood a stout elderly woman with a moustache, her pomp and her lax black skirts suggesting the cassocked priesthood, in spite of her loaded bodice. She was holding a large bunch of keys with a ritual air, and out of the ballroom there filed, sober as nuns, all the women in blue-grey cotton gowns who had the day before been polishing the parquet floor so dutifully. Beyond them could be seen a narrow vista of the lovely room, quiet as if it had never throbbed to the clumping rhythm of the dance-band, given over again to the pure light from the high windows. Apollo and his nymphs had a simple morning look, as if they too had stripped to wash out of a basin, as she had just done; the figures in low relief on the ceiling were vague as the pattern on a damask cloth; and the chandeliers were back in their holland bags. After the last servant had passed down the stairs, the mustachio’d woman locked the door with an air of determination, and followed them with a heavy step, slower than theirs. It was the sort of thing that makes historians write, “So ended the something or other.”

  That fitted well enough. She would not choose to come back to the town where her grandfather had died and she had had to sit the night through enveloped in Kamensky’s murderous sweetness. It was a pity that this meant losing this ballroom, with its air of elegant fashion and eternal peace, and a worse pity that she must also lose Madame Verrier, whose arm round her waist felt protective but not in a humiliating way, it was as if they were sharing an adventure. Had they been two women soldiers, two Maids of Saragossa, this is how the one that had not been wounded would have supported the one that was. Her heart ached as it used to at the end of the summer holidays, when she had to leave behind her at the sea-side all the people she had come to love, particularly the blacksmith’s mother and the oldest of the fishermen. It hurt worst if, at the actual hour when the dog-cart came to drive them to the station up on the moors, the tide was out, the sea a blue bar far beyond the yellow sands, withdrawn from the bastions on each side of the cove. One way or another, there was too much loss in life.

  She said, “Madame Verrier, you must come to London and stay with us.”

  “You’re very kind. And you’re a great charmer. But alas, my work is here.”

  “But surely you take a holiday sometimes.”

  They were not going all the way down the great staircase. Madame Verrier stopped in front of a panel which looked like all the rest, turned a gilt knob which might have been an ornament, and led the way into a dark passage. “Holidays,” she said in sudden dreaminess through the dusk, “I always spend them in the same place. A little village in the Dordogne. Nobody knows of it. There’s nothing there but an inn and a river, not a big river, quite a little river, running between rocks. There are pools under the rocks, and hills above, covered with woods.”

  She was still smiling when they came out into the daylight again, on a glassed-in gallery round a large courtyard, where much was going on, full of a bustle of coaches and gigs. Now she knew she was going to see her father she was at ease and took her time, amused because the glass was so thick that not a sound came through, and so full of flaws that every few yards the vehicles and the horses and the ostlers and the travellers were elongated into rippling shapes, as if they were doing all their bustling far down under water.

  Before the last door in the corridor Madame Verrier said, “Here,” and they entered an encumbered room which was half-dark. It did not need to be so, for the window was high and wide enough, but the dingy damask curtains had fallen away from some of their rings and hung loose from a bent rod, not to be drawn clear. On the walls hung a watery mirror or two, some crumbling gilt frames enclosing squares of darkness, in the depths of which floated white wigs and shining crosses and medals, bits of necks and bosoms, half the branches of a tree and the midriff of a palace, and two newer pictures of an elderly man and woman, garish but insubstantial, portraits of coarse ghosts. There was a tall and rather splendid bookcase, choked with books in fine bindings, some crammed in across the tops of others, and on the chimneypiece was an ormolu clock, also rather splendid, surmounted by Father Time, with a wad of letters stuffed between him and his scythe. At a flat desk, littered with papers, her father was sitting, bright in the dusky room. He did not see his daughter, he was settling something; the two Professors stood in front of the desk, like prefects called before their headmaster, and a fourth man, probably the official from the Town Hall, was standing by the window, his back to the room, scrutinizing some papers and putting them one by one into an envelope.

  It was delightful to look at her father when he did not know he was being looked at, to enjoy his quiet handsomeness, and recognize the quality her mother often mentioned as his peculiar virtue. Tania often told her children that never once in all their life together had she seen him jealous of another man’s success. For that they should look up to him, because it meant a triumph over his own ambition, which was strong; and men were more prone to jealousy than women, since they were not teased out of it when they were little boys in the nursery, as little girls were. Simply his admiration for what was admirable in other people flowed so strongly that it could not be dammed by any selfish consideration. And there Laura saw him at the desk, leaning forward in the chair, enjoying the quality of the two doctors who stood before him, a smile crinkling the skin round his eyes, his hand lying open before him, palm upward, as if ready to catch a ball when it was thrown.

  Professor Barrault was saying: “I agree with my colleague. Nothing more could have been done. Not, I think, by any doctor. The state of the patient was outside the pattern for which the practice of medicine and surgery prepares us. I am probably not expressing myself with what I hope is my usual lucidity, for I have, I don’t know why, a terrible headache this morning—” it seemed to Laura that both Saint-Gratien and Madame Verrier silently giggled—“so I will simply say that the wonder was not that we failed to keep him alive when he got here, but that he got here alive. It was, I suppose, a matter of a formidable will, which we recognized, transmitted in a graceful form, in your most remarkable daughter.”

  “Yes,” said Saint-Gratien, with a cat-like edge to his voice. “A pity she had to go through this ordeal alone. The episode made me understand how wise it is that we doctors have always to leave word where we are, no matter how inconvenient it may be.”

  Madame Verrier said severely, “Mademoiselle Laura is here,” and they all swung round. Her father pulled himself up from the heavy Empire armchair and came round the desk, drew her into his arms, and kissed her on both cheeks, then pushed her gently away from him, laid his hands on her shoulders, and scrutinized her. She told him, “Oh, I’m all right. It wasn’t so terrible as you’d think. He was very grand about dying.” Turning towards the doctors, she said, “It’s kind of you to worry about me, but really I didn’t mind except for the sadness, and that had to come some time, he was old, I realize that.” She wanted to get them out of the room so that she could tell her father that she was in danger, she had begun a so
cial smile of dismissal, when she became stone. The man at the window had turned round, and he was not an official from the Town Hall, he was Kamensky.

  “Please,” she said to her father, “please.” She herself felt that her beseeching stare was almost a grimace, but his hazel eyes, which, though brilliant, were always vague, as if he did not care to notice what was close at hand, were surely vaguer than usual. Altogether, there was something strange about the meeting. It was as if a cloud had taken her in his arms and not her father.

  “Yes, I expect he made a good end,” he admitted, “but nobody would have wished you to share in quite such a heroic experience at your age, my poor girl.” He spoke calmly, but as if he had forgotten there were other people in the room. “We must get you out of this atmosphere, give you a change, send you somewhere cheerful. What about going to stay with your cousins in Florence? It won’t be too hot till July and then they go to their place in Portofino. You haven’t seen Italy yet.”

  She exclaimed, “But I don’t want to leave my mother!” At once she added, “Or you.” But he should have understood that. Sometimes her nurse and governess had told her she was unkind because she made more fuss over her father than over her mother.

  Yet he was looking as if he had been wounded to the quick by some tactlessness on her part. He said, and it was evident that now he remembered that there were other people in the room, “And Monsieur Kamensky says there was some queer business with a man in the train. Who was he?”

  “Well, he was a Russian—”

  “He would be that,” her father said, with a shade of grimness. Then with an apologetic glance at Kamensky he repeated it as if simply commenting on a matter of fact. “Yes, he would be that. But you’ve no idea of who he was, or what it was that made your grandfather collapse?”

  “Not the slightest,” she lied. “Didn’t Monsieur Kamensky explain about that? Grandfather sent me into another compartment. I wish now I hadn’t gone. But how could I tell what was going to happen? The man was just mousy. You couldn’t have dreamed he would do anybody any harm, though I gathered he was mixed up with Grandfather’s disgrace, and, to be just, I don’t believe he meant to upset Grandfather so badly.”

  Her father said to the other men in the room: “It’s all very disquieting. My wife’s father had, as you saw, this magnificent physique. You may not have grasped that his mind was as remarkable as his body. When he was young he was a very good soldier. If he had cared to stay in the army he could have ended up as chief of staff. He chose instead to be an administrator, and he was superb in his field, granted how different his country was from ours, and he had a statesmanly way of looking at things, very surprising, all things considered. He had great possessions, for what that’s worth.” She thought she saw mockery on Kamensky’s face. But she knew her father was speaking sincerely. He had been brought up among the Anglo-Irish gentry, most of them bone poor. “Then things went wrong for him. As apparently they can very easily in Russia, if I may say so without offending you, Monsieur Kamensky. So someone whom my girl here can only describe as ‘mousy’ could corner him in a train, and it’s all over, the huge body, the six languages, the Ministries that worked like Swiss watches, the mines in the Ural and the oil wells down at Baku, the intellect. Disgrace can work all that out through its underlings without a shot fired.”

  The three men murmured sympathy, and Laura stepped forward and said, “Please, Father,” joining her hands under her chin in petition. Surely when he saw how wildly she was staring at him he would have the sense to say to them all, “Forgive me, but would you leave us alone for a few minutes. I want to be alone with my daughter.” But he said to her with a false air, which made her think him still hurt by her tactlessness, whatever form that might have taken, “In any case, I was horrified when I got in from the House of Commons and found your telegram and realized what you’d have to go through before I could reach you.”

  “Oh, poor Daddy! You were at the House?”

  “Yes, we had an all-night sitting.”

  “How funny. Professor Saint-Gratien sent two telegrams for me, one to the House and one to Radnage Square, didn’t you, Professor Saint-Gratien?”

  After the Professor had uttered his faint assent, a silence fell.

  It was broken by Saint-Gratien. “How young you are, Mademoiselle. If you were as old as we are, you would know that of two telegrams, one very often goes astray.” They all followed him in laughing at nothing, and Madame Verrier said with soft roughness, “Professor Saint-Gratien, may I speak to you for a moment about that case of yours that’s booked for tomorrow?” The little silvery man bent his head over Laura’s hand, and his eyes looked into hers, not ignoring her, seeing her as her father had not yet seen her. When he left the room with Madame Verrier she called after them, hardly caring if they were busy and she was plaguing them, “But we must say good-bye before I go,” and they answered as if they had known her a long time and would not think of forsaking her, “Oh, yes, oh, yes, but certainly. We’re not going far, we’ll be out in the gallery, there’s just something we must settle.”

  Professor Barrault cleared his throat and began to speak. “I have heard, Mr. Rowan, that the members of your Houses of Parliament are far more given to classical quotations than our Deputies and our Senators.”

  Kamensky had moved across the room and was standing beside her. She shuddered back from the threat of him, and mastered herself, and moved closer, to show her friendship. Her father answered Barrault absently, searching on the desk for a pen and finding it, smoothing out a sheet of writing paper in front of him. “Gladstone and Robert Lowe seem always to have been at it, but that’s a long time ago. Still, Asquith comes up with a tag now and then. He tries very hard.”

  If Professor Barrault was going to talk about the classics she had better sit down. When she had settled in a chair, Kamensky bent over her, murmured, “I haven’t said good morning to you yet,” and kissed her hand. She was determined not to flinch, but found that an effort. Other men barely brushed her skin with their lips, but Kamensky laid his whole mouth on her knuckles, and the man must have a fever, it was so hot. “I raised the subject of classical quotations,” the Professor continued, “because this family tragedy of yours, in which my colleague and I have played so unhappily ineffectual a part, has often recalled lines from our dear masters in the antique world. The vision of our race accorded to Virgil showed it at its most refined, its proudest, and its least perturbed. What does he tell us the noble ask for as they stand beside their dead? Manibus date lilia plenis. Give lilies with full hands. Purpureos spargam flores. That those bright flowers I may scatter. I think ‘bright’ is a legitimate translation of ‘purpureos.’”

  Kamensky had gone back to his place by the window. Mr. Rowan asked him in an irritable undertone what he had done with the blotting paper, and then said civilly, “Yes, yes, Professor: phrases no less marvellous for being quoted and requoted.”

  “They came into my mind as I watched your daughter at her pious duties beside her grandfather’s death-bed. She was a truly Virgilian figure. Her youth might well have been appalled by his sufferings, but she listened to his lamentations as calmly as if they were sitting together in his study or in his garden. Her appearance never became disordered, and several times I saw her grandfather regarding her with pride and the pleasure with which one salutes a woman who, when the wind is no longer tempered to her femininity, yet remains feminine.”

  He had hit, Laura thought, on one of the thoughts least likely to occur to her grandfather on his death-bed or at any other time of his life. But there was no harm in it. Of course it was in a way maddening that he was not talking about her but about her looks. He was shutting her into a book because he liked her appearance in the same way he liked the book, and he had no eyes for her real troubles. He was not sorry for her because in some way she could not understand she had offended her father, and she did not want Kamensky to kill her. Now she was trembling with fear of Kamensky, he had found
the blotting paper and returned to his chair, and even after she had turned her face away from him, she was aware that he was regarding her with an alarming intensity. He reminded her of the gardener in Radnage Square, who in summer burned his initials on any new spade or fork he got by focusing the sun-rays on the wooden handle with a magnifying glass. This was surprising. She would have supposed the desire to murder ice-cold, not burning hot.

  “An unavailing service, Virgil called the scattering of these lilies on the dead, and of course they are. But it is only if mourners perform such unavailing services that the grave loses its terror. Good-bye, Mademoiselle, I shall never forget you. Good-bye, Mr. Rowan. I’m uplifted by having met a representative of English Parliamentarianism.” He hesitated before letting go Laura’s hand, and said sorrowfully, “Look, the child is pale, far too pale. Goodbye, Monsieur Menshikov, may you have a pleasant journey back to your country.”

  The door closed, and Edward Rowan took up his pen and then set it down, to say, “Laura, a very charming speech has been made in your honour. If it should later occur to you that it was not quite spontaneous, and that he had perhaps written it out before he left home and learned it by heart, don’t think less of the compliment but more.” He looked at her quite kindly. Whatever her fault had been, it was forgiven. He always liked to hear her or Tania praised.

  Gaily she said, “Yes, we must tell Mummie about it.”

  She had inflicted the wound again. Coldly he turned to the paper on his desk. Surely things had not gone so badly that she could offend him simply by speaking of her mother?