by Rebecca West
A revolver was such a little thing. As she walked along the corridor, she kept it pressed under her hand against her thigh. It might never be noticed by Tania if they came face-to-face. And that was unlikely to happen. Tania’s voice shrilled from behind the door, almost maniacal with sustained good will, “No, I wouldn’t go home now if I were you, General. You wouldn’t have time to go and come back and be with us at the service this evening. That’s going to be later than usual, but not so very much later.” When Laura shut herself in her own room, its pleasantness seemed foolish. It smelt sweet. The cream and pink peonies in the gold Meissen vase on the round table lay in the path of the sun, and the scent rose strong above them. The silver brushes and the cut-glass bottle of lavender-water were fourfold on the dressing-table, with the triple mirror behind them, and the sunlight cast patterns across the intricately ruched white muslin counterpane and ended by blazing back from the brass cart-wheel bedhead. One of the wardrobe doors had swung open and showed the many-coloured dresses Tania had bought for her. But what she needed was a flat box just big enough to hold a revolver. There was nothing of that sort here.
Her trinket-box was long enough and broad enough, but too deep. She tipped the necklaces and brooches out on the bedspread and lifted out the tray, and laid the revolver on it. Then she slipped the scissors out of her manicure set and took them on the tray over to the chiffonier where her underclothes were kept and found a pair of knickers and ripped out the elastic from the waist and snipped it through. She wound the elastic tightly round the tray and knotted it so that the revolver would not fall out. Her business now was to find some grand material. She was willing to cut up one of her dresses, but that would give her no more than a strip of plain silk or fine wool, and she wanted something far grander than that. With her knuckles to her lips, she stood trying to remember what she had brought from London, and out of the corner of her eye caught sight of her image in the mirror, fierce-eyed and desperate, an offence against the calm girlish room. She was much more afraid than she had realized. “It’s the room that’s wrong, not me,” she said aloud. “I have to get wild and frightened if I am to do the right thing.” It came to her that Hélène had said she would pack her orange Spanish shawl. It was in the lowest drawer.
Laura was sorry that it was too bulky and she had to hack off a broad strip with the flimsy scissors, for it was really very pretty. She supposed that by now Kamensky’s white roses would be trodden into the dirt. It was hard to saw off the thick fringe of the shawl, but when she had folded in the butchered edges and fastened the fabric round the revolver with a safety-pin hidden inside the fold, the parcel looked quite important, quite solemn. It would not be disrespectful to take it anywhere, and nobody would guess what was in it. But when she got to the room where Nikolai lay, she had to hold herself back on the threshold and count up to twenty, for her fingers shook on the doorknob and she must be looking quite mad.
Berr’s wife was still pouring out her strength in the incantation, her husband was still kneeling at her side. Father Iliodor was just completing his reverences to the icon and the crucifix, and turned about to go to the door and ran into her. She detained him with a murmur, and the lion-mask bent down towards her.
“Father, there was something my grandfather wanted buried in his coffin. He told me that I would find it in a drawer in my room, but it’s only now that I’ve found the key. I know it’s the right thing. It’s just as he described it.”
There was uncertainty in the pale amber eyes. A lion in a zoo must spend much time pondering on the incomprehensibility of the human life that goes on around it. He held out his great hands. So that he could not guess her panic she laid the parcel in them with exaggerated, hieratic slowness, looking up at him with a fixed gaze as if she saw things unseeable. The lion-mask became troubled. Perhaps her hieratic gesture was a mistake, and he was feeling uneasy lest she was asking him to perform a rite till then unknown to him. But he took the parcel from her and bowed low over it, paused for a moment and muttered, “Well, whatever it is, it can’t do much harm in a coffin.” Laura thought this the most sensible remark she had heard for a long time. They stood side-by-side while he folded back the pall and the inner coverlet over Nikolai’s feet and laid the parcel against his soles. The priest murmured a farewell to Laura, and the necessary reverences again, and was gone.
Laura said to the crucifix, “You created Kamensky, and someone had to do something. And if Chubinov and I did the wrong thing, remember You created us too.” She let the silence settle. It appeared to her that the crucifix was having the last word. Wearily she conceded, “Not that I think that can possibly be all there is to her eyes to rest on the pall where it rose slightly over his face, it.” But she felt guiltier towards her grandfather. She had to force
“Yes, I know you said that it was my Christian duty to do everything I could to discourage Chubmov from killing Kamensky. But can you blame me for wanting to live as long as you did? And about it being my Christian duty, I don’t know how far you really meant that. You so often didn’t really believe what you believed, did you? Or rather you sincerely believed some things that you didn’t, or I should say don’t, actually believe in, though you believed in other things.”
But she would have to leave that till a time when she had quite a long time to go on her knees and talk to him, and when she was not so hag-ridden by the idiotic fear that the parcel would hurt Nikolai’s feet, and by the sense that she had been presuming, irreverent, vulgar, by putting anything under the pall. Her grandfather had brought the pall from Russia, fearing he might die in exile; it would have to be taken back to Russia. It was of pale and shimmering brocade, decorated with a cross made from pieces of the same stuff joined together, and sewn on lengthwise, and it was embroidered round the edges with texts from the Gospels. It was the work of a woman of the family who, centuries ago, had been imprisoned for many years in a fortress in the marshes, because a lesser prince had accused the prince her husband of betraying a greater prince to the barbarians. To have a pall in readiness she had cut up a gown she had brought back from a crowning in Byzantium and sewn it with a needle made from a nail. The thing was beautiful, unpurchasable, inimitable, an inheritance such as the present or the future could never hope to bequeath. Laura felt ashamed because she had used it for a cover for that ugly killing metal thing, which had killed a traitor, and was tied up with elastic ripped out of her knickers inside a rag of fabric bought in a shop. It was the meanness of the disaster that she minded. This outrageous act had been forced on her by an accidental contact with a pack of shabby fanatics, who would die when they died and never find refuge in a paragraph in the history books. She would not have been able to go back and talk patiently to poor dear, silly, futile, forever insignificant Chubinov, had not Berr suddenly raised up a face clever with glory, and his wife, the flow of the Psalter never drying on her lips, stretched out a hand to touch his grey hairs, damp with prophecy, her face glorious though still not clever.
In the kitchen Laura told the servants she wanted a tray sent into the sewing-room for a mourner who was tired and hungry, and specially sad over the Count’s death: coffee and a slice or two of fish pasty and cold chicken, and she added, for the servants’ pleasure, some of the beggars’ food. For they had cooked a mountain of that, although it had been explained to them—and indeed they were so intelligent that they must have grasped it already—that there would not be the customary beggars’ dinner tomorrow, since there were no beggars in Paris, at least not such as could be relied on to attend a lengthy funeral service in a proper state of cleanliness and piety. The clochards who slept under the Seine bridges simply would not do. As she left the kitchen she said over her shoulder, as carelessly as she could, that she understood there had been an accident outside the house, someone had been hurt, the gentleman in the sewing-room had seen it, perhaps the police would be calling to question him. If they did, they were to be taken to the sewing-room and her mother was to be asked to come and talk
to them.
When she got back to Chubinov he had slumped forward in the uncomfortable chair, his face pressed against the maple cover of the sewing-machine. He sat up and wiped his eyes with what he evidently thought was a handkerchief, but was some sort of kitchen-cloth, she thought the muslin through which one strained cottage-cheese. She wondered where on earth he had got hold of it, and how it had been so well washed. But cleanliness was his only point of contact with physical order. He said unsteadily, “I’ve lost the two friends I loved most in the world. It’s illogical that I should complain of this, as I’ve just shot one of them after I’ve for years assisted the other one to make his life unendurable. Yet I’m weeping.”
“Well, Nikolai will understand everything now.” Yes, but Nikolai would still, even if he were actually in the presence of God, consider Chubinov an awful fool. It was impossible to imagine conditions in eternity which would have led him to modify this view. “And some food is coming along in a minute. And I took your gun out of your overcoat when I went out of the room and I wrapped it up and gave it to one of the priests. He put it in my grandfather’s coffin.”
Between his sparse moustache and beard his mouth was open.
“You can’t be shocked!” she cried, in sudden loneliness. “Oh, no, you daren’t be shocked.”
“Oh, I’m not shocked at all,” he breathed, “but startled. It’s so exactly what your grandfather would have done in your place.”
“Well, will it work? Was it the right thing to do?” she demanded. “Are we safe?”
He deliberated. “I think we are. You despise us revolutionaries. But we’ve this much of a case. The police of this or any other country are a great deal less likely to search the coffin in which there lies a dead aristocrat than if he was a pauper.”
She flared up in rage. “You have no right to blame society for anything, anything at all. If you put up people like Kamensky on a pedestal and lie and kill at their command, so that if the police feel suspicious about what’s gone into a coffin they are probably right, it’s sheer impudence to complain if when they search a coffin they don’t do it with perfect self-control and self-command and justice.”
She had to turn aside and disguise her anger when Aglaia brought in the tray, and then her heart softened towards him. For it was when she lifted the silver dish-cover off the beggars’ food that he cried out in nostalgic greed, “Lapsha, it’s really lapsha! Oh, how good it used to taste when I sat on a high stool beside the fat cook in our kitchen and ate with her, and my elders never knew! I used to think it so much better than the veal and the chicken and the venison we had at the family table.” Really it was not so nice as all that, it was just like macaroni, only heavier. But he had loved his home and everything and everybody about it. This man of all men should never have got infected with this disease of the mind which sent people running out into exile like fever patients deliriously rising from bed and running out into the cold.
After he had cleared the plate and drunk a cup of coffee, she put her hand on his and said, “Forgive me,” and he murmured that it was nothing, he had understood how she felt. Then she said, “Now go over the story again, I want to get it word-perfect,” but he held up his finger. “Dear Miss Laura, it’s too late. They’re coming now.
Be sure you let me do most of the talking, and remember that you don’t know that Gorin was shot, you think he was stabbed.”
The unlucky policeman with the black moustache came in with two others, one a man of his own age, also in uniform, but fair and smart and at his ease, and the other an older man in plain clothes. They were not getting on well together. They might even have had an altercation up till the very moment they entered the room. Their faces were untidy with disagreement. She poured out vodka for them, and sent Aglaia for more chairs. Till they came the three men stood wide apart, eyeing the room over the rims of their glasses. The unlucky policeman kept on looking at her hair.
When they were all settled down, the older man took out a notebook, put it down on his knee, licked the point of a pencil, and did no more, for his attention had been caught by the watch pinned to Laura’s breast. Her grandmother had had it made for her by Fabergé, and though it was inconspicuous, simply a niello watch-face sunk in a circle of pearls, it had been enormously expensive. Her father had thought it a ridiculous present for a child. Laura was sure this man knew exactly how much it had cost. Then his gaze moved to Chubinov, from his face to his clothes, from his clothes to his hands. Faintly he raised his eyebrows. The unlucky policeman inspected Chubinov too, with a gimlet of a hostile stare.
The man in plain clothes alluded briefly to the unfortunate incident in the street below, disregarded Laura’s inquiry as to whom the victim had been, and went on to show an unexcited curiosity regarding Hippolyte Baraton of the Villa des Mimosas, Nice. He accepted the papers of identity which were handed to him and passed them to his uniformed assistant, who bent his head over them, raised it and nodded, while the unlucky policeman watched with under-lip protruded. Chubinov answered the question with unexcited verbosity, passing into an impersonation of a bore operating under no stress at all, in favourable circumstances such as he rarely enjoyed. He had four strangers to listen to him. Familiars, he must have learned long ago, do not listen. It appeared that Hippolyte’s grandfather had been a Russian, and was tutor to both the Count Diakonov and his brother, who was Ambassador in Paris for some time.
“Oh, an Ambassador?”
“My Uncle Ivan,” said Laura. “He was Ambassador at Berlin too.”
“And had been appointed to London at the time of his death.”
The man in plain clothes and his uniformed assistant looked very hard at the unlucky policeman, whose under-lip protruded still farther. There was a faint shrug of his shoulders.
The grey stream of denatured facts went on. One winter the Diakonovs wintered in Nice, and brought grandfather Baraton with them. He married a Frenchwoman, whose father was engaged in the manufacture of crystallized fruits: a description of the process, which demanded more care than the public usually realized, was with difficulty cut short. The couple’s son had in turn tutored the Ambassador’s children, here in Paris and down at Nice, and some of the Count’s older children, when they spent any length of time in France. Once three of them had been down in Nice for several months, convalescent after suffering in Russia from a peculiar form of measles, not at all like ordinary measles, oh, no; differing from it in several of the symptoms.
“Yes, yes.”
The grandson, Hippolyte himself, had tutored some of the younger children of the two families and some grandchildren. The Diakonovs had always been very kind to the Baratons. They had bought for his grandfather the little villa at Nice, which was small but commodious. They had given his father in his turn some shares in Russian mines and railways which had risen enormously in value. Thanks to them, he himself was quite comfortably off, not rich but never in need of a franc, and it was for this reason that he had been able to spend the last twenty years writing a book on Lord Byron.
“Has it been published?”
“Oh, no. It isn’t nearly finished.”
A look of trust passed over the faces of the three men. The unlucky policeman’s lower lip ceased to protrude. They could not believe that a man would say he had spent twenty years writing a book if it were not true.
“Is it a very long book?”
“No. It will be very short.”
The confidence established was nearly complete.
“It is because of the book, really, that I’m here, with this dear young lady at this moment.” He had taken a post as a French teacher in England, in order to do some research on Lord Byron. Sometimes he felt as if his studies had only just begun. When he broke his journey in Paris, he had rung up the Count, suggesting that he might call on him. This had worked out unfortunately, for the Count had explained that he and his granddaughter were leaving for Mûres-sur-Mer the next day, and had proposed that he should travel with them on
the Calais train, and when they had got off proceed on his way to England. He had felt obliged to fall in with the Count’s wishes, but had not wished to do so, for his purpose in breaking his journey in Paris had been to inspect some letters, apparently by Byron, but possibly not genuine, owned by an old lady living at Versailles. It was very important that the authenticity of the letters should be proved or disproved, for they bore on a crucial event in Byron’s life.
“I have the vanity to believe that I would know, I might claim at a glance, whether they are genuine or not.”
“Yes, yes. Yes, yes.”
“Well, I had a pleasant journey with this young lady and the Count, who was a great man, great in body, great in brain, great in soul.”
He began to weep. His tears were real. They were true. Laura saw him change back from Baraton to Chubinov, and feared the truth was going to burst out of him. She handed him a glass of vodka, not daring to speak. Hell was this, being afraid of hearing someone tell the truth. She begged Nikolai’s pardon, but could not see how she could have avoided being in this room, with these sordid things happening around her.
“But before we had reached Mûres-sur-Mer, at Grissaint, to be precise, the Count felt ill and decided not to proceed to his destination and to stop the night in a hotel there, and return the next morning to Paris. Then, gentlemen, I was guilty of a grave error of judgment, a dereliction of the duty owed by the Baraton family to the Diakonov family. Tempted by the opportunity it gave me to inspect, after all, the Byron letters in the possession of Madame Jellinek, I took the first train back to Paris, and left this poor young lady alone with her grandfather, who died shortly after I left. I cannot forgive myself.” He could hardly get the lies out because of his terribly honest tears.
“But it didn’t matter,” Laura said, “I’ve told you it was all right. There were doctors all over the place. If it had mattered, I wouldn’t have sent you that telegram inviting you to come here at four o’clock for the service.” She was enraged against him. Some of his tears were certainly for Nikolai, but some were for Kamensky, who was wicked. It would be this unnatural sorrow, which was not of God, which would break him, if he should break. To give him time, she said to the policeman, “Monsieur Baraton was exceptionally kind to my grandfather and me in the train.” But the eyes of all four men had gone past her. Her mother was standing in the doorway, her skin glowing because she took her grief indignantly, the bright hair the brighter because of her black dress. “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said, “I’m sorry to hear of—” her long white hand saved her the trouble of clearly recollecting what this tragedy, not relevant to her own, might precisely be—“all this. Have you everything you want?”