The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  XV

  “If my father had been in his own home in Russia,” Tania said bitterly to Laura, “we would not have been with him, but he would have had three sons and two daughters and fourteen grandchildren to kneel by his side. Now, because he was exiled by our most pious, autocrat, and puissant Tsar of All the Russias, as the Prayer Book calls him, he is alone with you and me. So one or other of us will have to spend nearly all the day with him and we will keep vigil with him tonight. It’s a lot to ask of a girl of your age, but think of yourself as going out to meet the Tsar on the field of battle and humiliating him with your prayers. Oh, don’t look at me in that English way. You English sing, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ there can’t be so much to feel strange about in this.”

  “You don’t understand. I was wondering about something else. Quite different. Feeling like that about the Tsar, could you join the revolutionaries?”

  “Of course not. Let’s leave out the question of whether a revolution would do any good or not, whether it isn’t so alien from the Russian people that a revolution would mean that they ceased to exist as what they now are, it’s not possible for people like you and me to become revolutionaries. Tyrants have to be deposed by subjects who have broken, whose nerves snap under tyranny, who are seized by frenzy. But people like us don’t break. It’s not specially to our credit. Indeed, it’s a form of misfortune. Now I must go and receive General Dukingen. I am dreading it, he’s very deaf.”

  Laura went slowly down the corridor to the room where the coffin lay, noting that her mother was out of date. She was thinking of the French Revolution. Now revolutionaries sat quiet in their enemies’ armchairs, and handed the ladies of the household their coffee and their cognac, and sat well-brushed and dapper while their thoughts went out and did their work for them. In the room, she found Berr’s wife still standing at the lectern and reading the Psalms, though she had begun in the early morning, and it was now afternoon. The other candlebearer was quite ready to take her place. Laura had just seen him in the kitchen, eating pickled mushrooms and reading back-numbers of Russian newspapers, and he had spoken of Berr’s wife with humorous sympathy, as a professional might speak of an amateur intractable in her enthusiasm. But Berr’s wife meant to use her stocky strength till it ran out, Berr was kneeling in prayer beside her, because they could make no other sign of gratitude to the old man in the coffin. She was chanting the Holy Writ in the quick monotone the priests had taught her, so that the words ran together into an incantation such as tongue and lips might have woven before words were invented. But her round peasant face confirmed the sense. When her face crumpled as if a milk-ing-pail had fallen on her toe, the King David was crying that God had cast him off and had given up his armies as sheep to the slaughterers, and sold them for nought and made them a scorn and derision for their neighbours. When happiness lifted her cheeks high like little shrunken russet apples, then David was naming the Lord his light and his salvation, the strength of his life, in whom he delighted, and who gave him the desires of his heart.

  The incantation, the upward reflection of the Psalter on her face, did not cease when visitors came into the room, to pray by the coffin and sometimes to lift the pall and look on Nikolai’s face. There were more of them than Tania had expected. She had known the Countess von Krehmunden would come. It was in the chapel of her house in the Champs Elysées that Sofia had been worshipping of late. The old woman had drawn the exiled family as close to her as she could, saying that she was too old to fear anything the Tsar could do, but moved, Tania said, by a far more interesting consideration. “She’s Russian only by marriage, being a German by birth, but she’s the more Russian for that. She’s a member of the house of Anhalt-Zerbst which never forgets it sent Catherine the Great to Moscow. So she thinks of the present Tsar as having let a flourishing family business go to pot. And when Germany had the luck to send another Tsarina to Russia in our time, she can’t bear to think it was the present poor little thing.” It was indeed deep shame which possessed the Countess as she advanced into the room, small and stout, dwarfed by a hat covered with black birds on the top of a crimped mahogany wig, her short neck built up solid as a fortress with a dog-collar of black and white pearls, her black dress armoured with jet, her hand just able to beat the air in an attempt at a reverent gesture, since arthritis had made her rigid. The skill of her maid had covered her old face with some powder or lotion which did in fact soften her wrinkles with something like the bloom of youth, and this incongruity was not incongruous. She was an octogenarian grieving stoically for a lifelong friend and for a dynasty, but she was also pitifully embarrassed, as a young person might be when confronted with the fatal results of an act committed by a discreditable relative. The wrong that Nikolai had suffered was so great that, not only for the Countess but for all the other visitors, it competed with death in its power to awe. The Countess must have been the only one of them who had not had to overcome at least a moment of cowardice before determining to disregard Tania’s advice and pay the customary visit of condolence; for all the rest murmured, “We felt we had to come,” and moved with the dandyish air given by consciousness of bravery, the men holding their tall hats high against their pearl-grey waistcoats, the women curtsying slowly right down to the floor. When they lifted the pall from Nikolai’s face they did not sigh at its sudden revelation of the peace of eternity, they breathed quickly, angered by what had been done to him in his time, of what might, perhaps, be done to them also, in a small measure, simply because they had made this act of presence.

  They came and they went; but there were not many of them, and there were long stretches when Laura knelt by the coffin and tried to pray. But her mind constantly wandered. She did not know where her father was. She had not seen him since the evening before, when Tania had bade him good-bye, and she had no idea whether he was in the apartment or not. It might be that he had gone down to the Ritz, and had taken a room on the pretext of keeping Aunt Florence company after she arrived that night from Mûres-sur-Mer. But it was also possible that he was travelling across Northern France, staring out of the window at the brassy cornfields and smiling that obsessed half-smile, passing through Grissaint without noticing it, going on to the Channel boat and off again, without sense of the sea, sealed in his contentment. If he had started last night or early this morning, he might already be back in London. She was thinking of him as a short, correctly dressed figure, walking with a false, uneasy springiness, small as if she were looking at him through the wrong end of an opera-glass. It was beyond her understanding why she wanted to know where he was, or why she thought of him as short, when he was really quite tall, or of his gestures as trivial, when they were so decided and so sensible. But, then, she now thought of Kamensky, who really was small, as large and coarsely made, and on the point of some gigantically violent gesture for which he would not really have had the strength. Her hatred of Kamensky blazed up, and she begged God to do just one thing out of the many He could do for her and her family, and kill Kamensky. She would not ask him to raise Nikolai from the dead. By now he must have reached the presence of God, and if he turned round and came back he would still have to deal with the Tsar, and it would need a vast revision of earthly affairs to make that other than an inconvenience, because the next Tsar would probably be a stupid Grand Duke who would be just as bad. But she would ask God to let Kamensky kill her and Chubinov and to spare them both the necessity of killing him on their own account. “You created him,” she said into her hands, “we didn’t. So You ought to kill him. Let him drop dead in the street, and then send someone in here to say so. You should kill him for Your own sake. What’s the good of our praying ‘God’s will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,’ with people like Kamensky about?” The word “Heaven” took her thoughts back to Nikolai. Now he must be happy, even if he had to spend some time in Hell, because nobody was reading his letters any more, and he would never have laid on him again the duty of reading other people’s letters. The diplomat
in the Russian Embassy, too, the one with the son at Oxford, he would be fortunate as soon as he died, and he no longer need read stolen and tear-stained diaries, while his son stole the sight of them from him. The idea of eternity captivated her. It would be candid life, it would have the special beauty of flowers which open wide in their moment of perfection, like the wild rose.

  Chubinov’s wife being dead, she would not like to remember how she had spent her life making dynamite at Kamensky’s behest, for surely one learned the truth about everything as soon as one died, and she would long have known of Kamensky’s treachery. Also she could not wish that her husband should run the risk of being guillotined. Laura was praying to Chubinov’s wife to intercede with God and make Him kill Kamensky, when her thoughts passed to that appalling overcoat made by the female dentist at Lausanne. There could not be another like it in Paris. If Chubinov got away after he had shot Kamensky, the police would be able to trace him easily by that unique garment. Of course the day was too warm for an overcoat, but it would be like Chubinov not to notice that. She should have warned him to leave it at home, but it would have been an odd thing to put in a telegram, and she had wanted to stick to the point. Remembering what that point was, she was delivered over again to fear, and her bowels writhed once more.

  Laura had no hope that God would answer her prayer and kill Kamensky. The aspect of this room the night before, with the tall cross and the coffin set aslant, had warned that this was not the sort of prize it offered. But it had been Chubinov’s opinion that Berr had received from God some sort of plain, straightforward kindness such as a kind man might show to the victim of misfortune. She looked across the coffin into Berr’s blind face to see what that might be. She found that Berr’s wife was not only reading the Psalms as an incantation and living out their meaning in her mind, so that they worked their full exorcising power on the old man in the coffin, she was doing other magical work as well, by sometimes stretching out her hand and touching her husband, without interrupting her chant. She looked a very simple woman, who would find it hard to go much beyond the most elementary drudgery, who would be able to do little more than scrub a floor and cook kasha porridge and cabbage soup, but she was practising some intricate and supernatural art in partnership with her husband, though he looked as simple, and stupidly so. Here he had lost his disagreeable air of arrogance, which was natural enough; since it was God who had made him blind, it was no use pretending before God that he could see. But he had a sheep’s head, his forehead sloped, his nose was long, and so was his upper lip, and his chin receded. Much of the time he looked not just slow-witted but even a little drunk, for he jerked his head about and muttered to himself in complaint. It was then that his wife, without ceasing to chant, put out her hand and grasped his shoulder, and at that he grew still, raised his head, stared at something in front of him, panted, and struggled on, to think a new thought. He might have been wrestling, thought was not his trade. But his thinking brought him deliverance, and then his features became firm and intelligent, sometimes he laughed, and his blind eyes looked as if they saw, and saw a glory. Then too his wife put out her hand and touched him, but to stroke his head, laying her hand on it reverently, as she might have touched the paten that held the altar-bread or the chalice that held the communion wine. It seemed conceivable that if there had been no men on earth a vast immaterial heart would have ached with want. She did not doubt that the Berrs had wisdom such as she would never possess, if only because they were superior in equipment, having gifts of which she had so little that she could not even name them. But the Berrs could not help her. Their wisdom was rooted in their experience, which had nothing in common with hers. She tried to frame a question she could put to them which would convey her difficulty to them, and failed. Her mind wandered to her father, and to Chubinov’s overcoat, and she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to four.

  She rose from her knees and stood looking down on the coffin, while she said good-bye to Nikolai. Perhaps this would be the last time she would be in the same room with him. She bowed to the icon, the cross, the coffin, and turned towards the door, to be checked by a thick black column rising high above her. It was Father Iliodor, a priest who had assisted the Metropolitan in the service held that morning. She had remarked him because he was so tall, and because he had a magnificent bass voice, like an opera-singer’s, which was doubtless what had brought him into the Church. Otherwise he would have earned his living by his strength, probably as a soldier, and he still called to mind the fact of fierceness, for he had the light eyes and vigilant mask of a lion. But he was removed from the natural world by the cross on his breast and his long black robe and the tawny-gold hair glowing over his shoulders and his long tawny-gold beard, both undulating in the fine waves which came of keeping them tightly plaited all night. After the service, when Tania had given the priests and the mourners some food and drink in the dining-room, he had moved about in an indifferent, unemployed way, as if to him everyday life was merely the margin of the liturgy, the unused portion of the paper it was printed on. Now he was as glad to be in this room of mourning as most people would be to leave it. It was through him and his kind that the Berrs had gathered their wisdom, but he could not help her. A saint might profit from an encounter with a lion who could sing hymns, but she could not. After Laura had been to her room and combed her hair and washed her hands, she went down the dark corridor towards the hall. As she passed one door she heard Tania’s voice, fatigued by the effort of shouting graciously. “But I can assure you, General, that my father quite understood why you had not been to see him lately. He spoke of you only a few days ago with the warmest affection.” It was monstrous of her not to warn Tania. But her mother would try to stop her, and anyway she would be able better than most people to cope with what would happen afterwards, for she was always at her best in unforeseen circumstances. It was long strain which her mother could not bear. Laura let herself out of the front door, leaving it open, and slowly went down the four flights of broad, shallow steps, through the dusty darkness, rehearsing what she was going to do and say during the next half hour or so. It was her intention to hide in the archway, peering out of its shadows into the avenue, just as Kamensky had hidden there when the actress and the three young conspirators went by, and to wait till she heard the noise of the shot. Then she would hurry into the street and see where they both were. If a policeman had got there already and had caught Chubinov she would go up to him and, imitating Tania as much as possible, tell him that the killed or wounded man was a Russian terrorist, that he had threatened to kill her, and that Chubinov had shot him only to protect her, and at her request. But French crowds sometimes lynched assassins, and she saw their point; she could only wish that some crowd had lynched Kamensky long ago. But if a mob were closing in on Chubinov she would pull her hair down and scream, “Leave that man alone, he’s innocent, I am guilty,” over and over again, and perhaps tear her dress a little down the front, to look more dramatic. They would think her mad, but if that distracted their attention until the police came, she could put up with it. Still, she wanted to do none of these things. The world was choked with death and she did not want to add to it; and the goose-pimples rose on her flesh as she thought of strangers laying hands on her in the street.

  On the last landing she stopped and stared at the broad mahogany door of the first-floor apartment, with its brass knob in the centre of each panel and the brass plate on the wall announcing this to be the Paris office of the Anonymous Society of the United Enterprises of Tokyo-Caracas-Tananarive, while the elevator thudded and clicked and squeaked past her up to the floor above. Rather than die out in the street she would choose to live the natural term of her life standing there on the spinach-green carpet, which had the matted texture of carpets not privately owned, in hotels or theatres or concert halls, and looking through the unsunned twilight at the gross door and listening to the whine of the elevator rope. She had thought the same at Grissaint station, sitting beside her
grandfather, and deliberating on Chubinov’s warning; she had been willing to spend her life looking at the stained and sordid masonry of the railway-cutting beyond the platform. It was disgusting of her to want to live as much as that. A neighbour of theirs in Radnage Square had become a drunkard when quite an old man, and Dolly the housemaid had told her that when he found the sideboard and the cellar locked against him by his family he went down to the kitchen by night and stole the methylated spirit. She was behaving like that. Quickly she ran down the stairs into the hall and past the concierge’s lodge into the courtyard and the lazy warmth of the afternoon, and had to smile when her eye caught sight of the plaster naiad on her pedestal in the circle of shrubs. The basin into which she poured her vase had been filled with potted plants by someone anxious to avoid the trouble of watering them. Bending over them with a languorous air of self-surrender, she seemed unusually fond of geraniums.

  The smile went from Laura’s lips as she walked towards the archway. Beyond its shadow, a few yards of the sunlit avenue were shown like a lit stage. In the apartment she had not realized how fine a day it was. In the background the cabs and carriages were rolling by, the horses’ heads proud or humble, their hooves ringing on the metalled road. A low branch of a tree rose and fell with the breeze just below the span of the archway, drawing a dark pattern against the sunshine without. The air scintillated with summer. In the foreground a tall blond young woman, wearing a large purple hat of transparent material, wired to stand out like an aureole, and a pale mauve dress that glistened, seemed to be rigid in anger at an affront. Her face was vibrating as if someone had just slapped it. Then her eyelids drooped, and she grew still as a wooden figure under her floating clothes, and fell back into the arms of a bearded young man in a frock coat and striped trousers. As he caught her his monocle flew out of his eye and swung in a drunken circle on its black ribbon, at the same time that his top-hat slid off the back of his head, but this ridiculous double misfortune did not embarrass him, he was grey with nausea. Laura could not see how these people could be involved in the story of her grandfather and Kamensky and Chubinov, and wondered whether they were what they seemed, or were conspirators, and if so on which side. But of course the young woman might have been fainting in front of this house by sheer chance, as she might have fainted anywhere else in Paris, and the man might simply be unused to handling unconscious women. But an elderly man in a light suit, with a red face very round under a bowler, was standing at right-angles to the couple with his back to the traffic, staring down on the ground with an astonished expression. It was on the same spot that the young man’s eyes were fixed. Both men were looking at Kamensky. He was lying on his back on the pavement. Laura recognized him only by the polished black toes of his small shoes, which were pointing straight upwards. Where his face should have been, there was a bunch of white roses. He was gripping it with both hands, and these rested on his throat, just covering his beard. There was a spreading red stain on the paving-stone beside him, coming from somewhere near his left armpit.