The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  At the Gare du Nord the carriage was waiting, with a red-eyed Vissarion, a red-eyed Louison. When Vissarion looked down on her from his box, weeping, she was just able to make a show of sympathy. Kamensky had confused the moment. He had told Chubinov that Pyotr was a spy, and that was certainly untrue, but it could be the truth that the spy was Vissarion, of whom Chubinov had possibly never heard, so that he probably had not inquired into his loyalty. As Louison opened the carriage door for her, again Kamensky confused her. She remembered how he had pretended the boy had slammed the door on his hand, but now wondered if he and the boy might not have been working together. She would live in a maze of suspicion till Chubinov had rid her of Kamensky. After that everything would go right, even the loyalty of these servants, had that been disturbed. They were simple people who could not be expected to resist the persuasion that had deceived Nikolai; and once the persuader was annihilated they would be themselves again.

  They drove off through an evening identical with the one which had received her when she had come from London a few days before. The same sort of sunset was painting a bloom on the buildings and making the hurrying crowds sparkle like rivers under summer. Yet the city had changed. Then it had had an advantage over her. Everyone looked as if he knew more than she did. On that first journey from the station the horses had had to be held back at a street-corner where there was a café. At one of the tables a young woman, with a huge fair chignon under her broad poppy-laden hat, was sitting comfortably settled in her own flesh, her plumpness shown off, offered, self-praised by a starched white blouse and a black skirt; and a young man, self-praised too by his wavy black hair and his flowing white cravat, bent over her table and spread his hands with apologetic gestures. The girl had an easy air of anticipating exactly what he was about to say, and the young man had an easy air of anticipating all her anticipations. Looking out on them Laura had felt an innocent and awkward fool. Now she knew so much that they did not. They might be aware that on the other side of the river, on the Rue de Grenelle, there was the Russian Embassy. But they would not know that in one of its rooms an elegant diplomat sat at his desk and thought himself another Judas because he was reading the private papers of a man superior to himself, bought from a man despicable by trade, but need not have troubled, because he was already punished, his loved son across the Channel at Oxford was Judas to his father. The world was encrusted with layer upon layer of these secrets, coloured and intricate like jewellery, but horrible. Only, mercifully, the world was nothing when one considered death. The spread sky above the Champs Elysées was a pure, unearthly, shining green void, with a white sun sinking. Nikolai had gone an infinite journey through such landscape, and would pass planets from which the earth would look as little as the moon seen from earth, capable of being reflected like the moon in quite little ponds. In wonder at the universe, she laid her hand on her father’s, but he was frowning and biting his lips, and answered only by an abstracted murmur.

  Aglaia and Katinka opened the apartment door and fell stiffly on their knees, one a pace to her right and the other a pace to her left, and each seized one of her hands between both theirs, and covered it with kisses, while they wept noisily yet formally. She felt the hot tear-drops roll over her knuckles down her fingers, while her own tears ran down her cheeks. It was all sincere but controlled by design. It was as if the three of them had receded out of life into the surface of the painted wall which hides the holy place of an Orthodox church. Grief lost its horrid immediate character.

  Her father said wearily, “Can’t you tell them to stop?”

  “Please let them have it out. This is their way of taking things. They need the relief, and it’s terrible for them. They’ve been through so much for Grandfather, coming to France when they hate it so. Now they must feel—” she paused, but had to use Kamensky’s phrase, there was no better one—“masterless dogs.”

  “I would have thought that ordinary self-control helped people more.”

  He must be very unhappy to talk like a headmistress. It struck her that she had not heard him say anything amusing for quite a long time. It was as if Mummie had lost her looks. “Oh, Daddy. Just let them go on with it a little longer. They’re quieting down. In a minute I’ll tell them that I’m tired. But just give them a little more time.”

  He uttered an exclamation of disgust. But there was a new cause for that. Over the Venetian mirror facing the front door there was hung a fine sheet, over the smaller Dutch mirror at the beginning of the passage a net curtain.

  “Oh, that. We do that when there’s a death in the house. Mummie’s told me about it before.”

  “We?”

  She recognized what he was doing; piling up grievances to kill his sense that he was in the wrong. She often did it herself, but had hoped that she would grow out of it. “I mean the Russians. It’s hard for me to keep straight on the word ‘we,’ being a mongrel.”

  “Do you mean to say educated Russians do it?”

  The question angered her. She felt nearer Aglaia and Katinka than to him. There was a case for the custom. Looking-glasses in a house reflect what happened to the people who live there, and life is so strange that often when these people die it must seem intolerable that they should have had to endure what they did, so one would want to seal off the mirror that had carried the images of what they had to bear, as one might beg the witness of a painful scene to say nothing about it. This Venetian mirror must often have reflected Monsieur Kamensky giving up his hat to Pyotr (of whom she would never again be quite sure) and being helped off with his coat before he went in to comfort the unfortunate Diakonov family, and Monsieur Kamensky being given his hat and helped on with his coat after he had comforted the unfortunate Diakonov family. She pressed the sheet close against the mirror surface.

  Hélène, yellow-faced and much older, came down the passage and greeted them respectfully over the heads of Aglaia and Katinka. “Madame is with the dressmaker at the moment. There’s tea in the drawing-room, and she’ll join you there. If only I’d been with you, Mademoiselle. You must have felt it strange when you had no clean things to put on this morning.” Her voice cracked. “Forgive me, that is a trivial remark. I’m talking according to my trade. Permit me to offer you my humble sympathy. Your loss is immense. So is mine,” she added, with an unexpected desperateness. She had never appeared desperate before. “I am an orphan, one of the attractions of this situation was that the Count always made the family seem so secure.”

  It was not Edward Rowan who had made Hélène feel secure; it was Nikolai. Noting it coldly, Laura went and washed, and then went to the red drawing-room and found her father there. The great mirror over the chimneypiece was shrouded too, and he had pushed his chair to a point where he did not need to see either that or the icon and its lamp in the corner. She wondered if she could find a way of suggesting he should take a room at the Ritz.

  “Surely nobody’s coming?” he asked. “All this school-feast spread, I mean.”

  On the table there was one of the oldest of samovars, a number of the fragile tumblers etched with gold for those who like to drink their tea in glasses, and some Meissen cups, all set out on the great tray made from the coins which one of her great-great-grandfathers had brought back from the countries where he had campaigned. Around it were several jam-dishes, plates covered with slices of bread and butter, and cream puffs, sand-cake, almond-cake, and several other kinds of cake.

  “Didn’t you ever go to a funeral when you were in Russia?” she asked him. She knew he had, he had told her so. “I would have thought you’d have known it was always so, the servants go mad and go on making more and more food.” She paused and decided that it was not the time to tell her father what he might not have heard, that the servants imagined themselves to be providing for angelic guests as well as the visible company. “It’s part of the treatment, part of the system worked out for relieving everybody’s feeling. You do, don’t you,” she asked, disagreeably, “have Irish wakes?” He l
ooked so tired, so shabby, so uninteresting. “But please try to eat some of it. That cold chicken they gave us from the hotel wasn’t much. Have some plyoomkek. They call it that because they think they’re copying our plum-cake, but it’s much nicer.”

  She cut him a slice, and he ate it silently and dourly, a child awaiting punishment.

  “The tea’s good,” he said.

  “There’s a panic in the household if the bricks don’t come through from Russia and they have to fall back on the tea Mummie sends from London.”

  She heard the doorhandle click. It was turning backwards and forwards, as if another apprehensive child stood outside.

  Tania came in slowly. She was wearing a tea-gown of pale satin, fastened at her breast by one of those great brooches, large in itself and made of large stones, which she did not like to wear publicly in England, where jewellery was small, and therefore used about the house for casual purposes. The diamonds were throwing out bright rays, she was so shaken. Her hair was not dressed but was coiled on the nape of her neck. Along the opening of her gown there ran a line of smooth, short, glistening rosy feathers, curling back on themselves, and these were trembling. She threw her arms wide to Laura and gave a dry sob under her kiss, then pushed her away so that she could search her face, and said, “So it was horrible. But you could stand it.”

  “It was horrible,” Laura agreed. But not so horrible as the feeling of her mother’s body in her arms, pulsing like a bird one had just saved from the cat. “But nothing, really, to fuss over.”

  “Fortunately there were quite a number of helpful people there,” said Edward Rowan, “though of course it was most regrettable she was alone.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Good-bye, Edward,” said Tania, and went to the door.

  Laura followed her mother and on the threshold turned to say, “Excuse me, Daddy.” He should not have sat at that desk in the landlord’s room and written that letter, that long letter, while everything between them perished. But in case he had something to say she waited. But neither his voice nor his face said anything. The cruel text came back into her mind: “And there shall be no more sea.”

  Her mother had walked so quickly down the corridor that she “was going into her bedroom when Laura caught up with her. She slipped her arm round her mother’s waist and kissed her wet face and led her to an armchair and put a coverlet round her as if it were cold, and knelt at her feet and called her the silly pet-names Nannie had called them in the nursery. She had comforted Nikolai with them the night before. It had not occurred to her they would come in handy so soon again.

  Letting the tears run but speaking steadily, Tania said, “Now tell me about your grandfather. Did he suffer much?”

  “It didn’t hurt him to die, not at all.”

  “How wonderful. I thought God’s cruelty might pursue him to the very end. How strange you should have seen someone die when I never have. It makes you older than me. Oh, that you should have been alone, to bear this horror.” She wept the harsh, hacking tears of rage.

  “Never mind that. Never think of it again. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t manage. Listen, it was easy for him. He thought the gas wasn’t on, and he bullied the doctors and nurse for not lighting it. ‘Need we talk in the dark like gipsies,’ he asked. Then he was dead. Like this.” She snapped her fingers.

  “Thank God. Thank God. But he will be angry with me, where he is. He’ll think I’ve behaved badly to your father.”

  “If he knows anything about it—which is doubtful, after all if the Church is right he’s a lot to do just now—if he knows anything about it, I should think he would feel that Daddy has behaved quite badly to you.”

  “But I should have done more than just say, ‘Good-bye, Edward,’ to him.”

  “Well, it did seem a bit terse.”

  “But I can’t say anything of the things I really feel.” Now her tears were gentle again. “What’s unbearable to me is that I’m still beautiful. If I were old and ugly, then what’s happened would be natural. I’d be in no sort of disgrace, I’d simply be in the same position as a singer who retires when age destroys her voice. But I’m beautiful and if he leaves me now, and our life is nothing but a form of desertion in which he both deserts me and is at my side to see how much I’m hurt at being deserted, then it means that he’s rejecting my beauty, and my beauty is me, and I’m being rejected. But I can’t say that, it sounds like vanity. That shows how impossible it is to be a woman. One’s whole life depends on one’s looks, but one mayn’t speak of one’s own beauty and one mayn’t say either that it’s specially galling if one’s husband leaves one for a woman who isn’t as nice as one is oneself. That would be counted as vanity too. Did your grandfather have a heart-attack when he was spoken to by this strange man on the train the Professor talked about?”

  Laura wished yet once again that Professor Barrault had held his tongue. “No. He was just irritated, upset, bothered by seeing this man. Who seemed rather nice, really. I don’t think that meeting was anything much to do with his death.”

  “But wasn’t that why your grandfather got out of the train? Another thing I can’t say to your father is that what I mind is that she never tipped people properly. It’s so pleasant, it’s such fun, to give money to people who need money. She didn’t like it. I thought it was because she was poor and then it turned out she had all that money, and it was just that she didn’t enjoy tipping. But I thought your grandfather got out at Grissaint because he was feeling ill, after this man had said something to upset him. Tell me, Laura, tell me everything. I loved him so.”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite like that. Grandfather told me to go into another compartment because he wanted to talk to this man, without me, and then just before we got to Grissaint this man came down the corridor looking into every compartment to find me, and—” She stopped. So often had she gone over the story that she now came near to believing it. She seemed to remember, not merely imagine, what Chubinov had looked like as he pushed back the compartment door and bent his spectacles towards her and told her that Nikolai seemed not very well, she had better come quickly. Perhaps this was how Kamensky had begun his lying. “The man told me,” she went on, “that Grandfather was ill. But I don’t know whether that wasn’t just his way of putting it because he was in a hurry. Grandfather wasn’t feeling well, and of course, he wasn’t well, but I think the real reason he wanted to get out of the train was that he felt he had to get back to Paris, because the man, whoever he was, had reminded him of something he thought might help him clear his name with the Tsar. You must remember, Mummie, that it didn’t really matter what was making Grandfather ill, he was hardly conscious of it, he was so preoccupied by the other thing, the row in Russia. And he’d got excited about something to do with that.”

  “But the Professor thought he was taken quite ill in the station. Wasn’t he suffering then?”

  “It wasn’t quite like that. Grandfather was sitting on a bench and waiting for the train to Paris, and then suddenly he couldn’t move.” It sounded incredibly bare. She wanted to pour out the truth, the whole truth about Chubinov and Kamensky and who Kamensky was. She grasped her mother’s hand and was about to tell her to get ready for a shock. But even her mother’s hand was wet, her tears were everywhere, and her eyes were full of grief, but not quite full, there was still room in them for a spaniel’s sad hope. If her mother heard the truth, she would use it as an excuse for running to her husband as if he were still her husband, and annulling that good-bye: “Edward, Edward! Listen to what Laura’s told me!” If that happened, her father would take ordinary measures for her protection which would be quite wrong, since the man from whom she had to be protected was extraordinary and had caught her in the mesh of an extraordinary way of life. She had been sure of this at Grissaint, she was more certain now. He lacked the love which would have made sense of the long involved story, he would produce a quiet and deadly common sense. He would tell the police, and Chubinov woul
d be arrested, and would be in prison when Kamensky came to kill her. She went on distracting Tania’s attention from the truth. “And Grandfather was quite delirious. He kept on talking about a little girl blowing a toy trumpet.”

  “One of us, perhaps? My sister Varvara, or perhaps Olga?—or perhaps,” she just dared to suggest, “me?” She averted her eyes quickly so that she need not see Laura’s embarrassed shake of the head. “Of course not. He wouldn’t speak of any of us, even at the very end. Any more than he’d speak of his fingers or his toes or his ribs. He thought of us as a part of himself. And not a very important part. Dear me, a little girl blowing a toy trumpet.”

  “At a children’s party.”

  “It must have been something that really mattered to him.”

  “What?”

  “What the man told him on the train.”

  Sometimes people thought her mother was silly. They were wrong. She could have wished that they were more right.

  “It must have been really very important,” Tania went on, dreamily, “to have sent his mind running all the way back from his greatness to a little girl blowing on a toy trumpet at a children’s party. That’s yet another thing I can’t say to your father. I am so terrified that if I go back to London my mind will run away from what happens to me there now. I might act so strangely that people would think I was mad or drank or took drugs. I might start gambling. It’s our Russian way of taking misfortune. There’s some sense to it. At roulette or baccara one can strip one’s luck bare, and see if it’s bad or good, and if it’s bad one can give it a chance to take pity on one and change. But I couldn’t admit to your father that what he has done has hurt me so much that I can’t stay in the world of sanity and face it, he’d think I was simply being jealous and hysterical, and that’s not what’s happened. It’s like being obliged to take up a cross and nurse the afflicted in prison, this being strange, the whole of one has to give the part of one that’s suffering a chance to live outside the world of logic, where it’s been scourged and thrown into a dungeon. But about your grandfather, you’re sure he didn’t suffer—”