The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  Tania’s voice soared. “Laura, look at her! Look at her hair! Ours is horsehair beside it. And look at her little, little wrists and ankles! Compared to her we’re just cart-horses. That’s why we have horsehair. Oh, Susie, wonderful Susie!” But Susie shook her head and said, with the slight stammer which always afflicted her when she was complimented, “No, no, I’m …” She did not end the sentence and define what she was, but her oval face, though it remained quite smooth, was appalling in its avowal of privation. It was perhaps the blurred mouth that avowed it. She had great possessions, she had this hair, but she was racked, as if she were wandering waterless in the desert, by this phantom yet unassuageable need.

  Laura got up and poured herself a glass of water, and drank it between the sheets, and told herself it was a medicine that would sweat out her fears. It was so strange she should keep on thinking of Susie Staunton. Nobody, nobody, she must remember this, had ever said that Susie Staunton was responsible for what had happened between her mother and father. She slept and woke to a more hopeful morning, and when she dressed went to Nikolai’s sitting-room, where she knew he would be, drinking the black coffee which was all his breakfast, to see if he was still talking about England. But mercifully that was at an end.

  He looked up at her and said, “Laura, I understand we are going to Mûres-sur-Mer, simply because my poor wife would not stay in the clinic if she thought that you and Tania and I were in the apartment, because her dutiful nature would make her rise from her bed and come back to take care of us. See, Laura, how miserably deluded we are by our affections, for actually my dear wife’s concern for me is making me do something I detest. I don’t want the trouble of getting into a train unless it’s going to take me somewhere in Russia. To St. Petersburg. To Moscow. To Kiev. To our country house, to Datchina. Ah, Laura, you can’t think how beautiful Datchina is.”

  “She cannot think how beautiful Russia is,” said Monsieur Kamensky. She had not heard him come in, but he was standing just behind her. He must come to the house very early.

  “Yes, Russia is beautiful. Not in the way that Europe is beautiful. We have no Acropolis, no Venice, no Bay of Naples. But our whole country is suffused with beauty which is the property of our most featureless and monotonous landscapes, it is a component part of the air in our forests and on our plains and over our lakes and on our rivers and above our mountains, there is no point where it begins and none where it ends, and every place seems its heart. I believe Datchina to be its heart, though I know it can’t be so, that Datchina is just a place like many another, and each of them is thought by some Russian to be the living core of his country’s beauty.”

  “Will you not have a croissant, Excellence?” said Monsieur Kamensky. “Black coffee is not enough for you now. You must begin to pamper yourself.” He set about buttering one.

  “Has anybody told you, Laura, what Datchina is like?”

  She knew every foot of it, from her mother’s descriptions, from Grand-Aunt Feodora’s water-colours, and the photographs. She had even believed when she was little that she had been born there, for on the photograph of the tennis-party on the veranda there was a peasant woman with a high head-dress holding a baby, which she had taken to be herself, though of course it was Tania. She said, “Tell me about it, Grandfather.”

  “Listen, Laura. The house stands on a hill among the forests. The hill was long ago clear-felled, in the time of the Great Catherine, and never replanted. It is a park. But from all the windows we look down, over this park, on a sea of treetops, a sea of dark green pines, with the birches and maples between them, light green in the spring, a kind of singing green; but the birches are yellow in the autumn and the maples are crimson. At the foot of the hill is a river. Your mother must have told you about the river. She used to swim there, though only the boys were supposed to bathe in it, the current was so strong. That’s a strange thing, women have no need for courage, yet there is a certain charm about a courageous woman. Well, the road to the house crosses the river by an old wooden bridge, built well by our splendid serfs long ago, long ago, and the road winds about the hill up to the pillared front of the house. We know when our guests are drawing near because we hear the horses’ hooves clop-clop-clopping over the bridge. Sometimes it would be one of my dear sons who was arriving, bringing his wife and his children, your cousins, Laura, whom you have never seen, whom I shall never see again, or some of my friends, and I shall never see them again, either, all people of whom I approved, whom I liked, whom I even loved.

  “Let me give you a present, Laura, a good thing to remember about your father and your mother when they were young. Early one morning I was drinking my coffee in my bedroom, and it was very early, for I rose at cockcrow in those days, and suddenly I heard the clop-clop-clop, and I asked myself, ‘Who can that be, crossing our bridge so early in the morning?’ Then there was a knock on my door, and in came your mother in her dressing-gown, her eyes shining and her hair flowing over her shoulders, heavy, heavy gold, and she said, ‘That is my Englishman.’ I exclaimed, ‘What, at this hour?’ and she answered, ‘Yes, he said he would drive all night to be with me at the first possible moment.’ I should have known from that moment that the marriage was meant to be.”

  She had had her eyes fixed on the door for fear Tania might come in. She heard Monsieur Kamensky say, “Excellence, it is nearly time for the doctor to come, we had better go and prepare for him.” When her grandfather had left the room Monsieur Kamensky turned back to her. “I am arranging for the Metropolitan to dine with your grandfather tonight. They would like to be alone. So this evening your mother and you must reconcile yourselves to dining with no better company than mine.”

  She said, “But that will be delightful,” and smiled gratefully, and wondered how much he knew. But what was there to know? She drew her hand across her face to hide her spasm of anguish. He said, “There are not enough fountains in Paris.” “What did you say? Not enough fountains in Paris?” “Exactly. In Rome there are enough fountains. The water rises up into the sunlight and falls down shining, all day long, and one knows that nothing matters. But in Paris, no. It’s a great lack.”

  Next morning they were all three of them sitting together in the same room, waiting till it was time to start for the Gare du Nord, and Nikolai’s mind was still in Russia, still at Datchina.

  “It was always delightful there. It was of course supremely delightful when I was a boy, for then society was stable. We had only the sorrows laid on us by God, not those engineered by the devil, and they were outnumbered by our joys. But the place was delightful still in the last years. Indeed there seemed, except in the troublesome papers I had to bring from St. Petersburg, almost no change. The young women were still playing tennis in their pretty white dresses, the boys looked strong and supple and Russian when they came up from bathing in the river. And the sport was still marvellous. The fishing and the shooting. But fishing is nothing, women can do it. Shooting’s another thing. There strength tells, the true strength, not the mere brawn that a peasant has, but the strength of muscles and nerves fused into an electric current by perfect co-ordination. We had that in my young days, all the men of my kind had that. None of us was ever tired. And our strength didn’t leave us with our youth. Shooting was the great test we put ourselves to. One must be able to walk for miles, get soaked to the skin and stay soaked, wait in perfect stillness for hours, and then send one’s arm and one’s shot together in a single straight flight of the will, perfectly, without error, again and again and again. I could always pass that test. I passed it still, the very last time I was at Datchina. By the mercy of God I did not know that it was to be the last time. God, I have not thanked Thee enough for that.”

  His lids dropped, he seemed to sleep and presently Monsieur Kamensky’s head nodded and fell forward. He had told Laura that he had had to sit up very late with Nikolai and the Metropolitan. She went to the window and looked down on the Avenue Kléber, and of course there was something going on, t
here always was. The nuns at the head of a crocodile of little girls were about to take them across the road, when one thrust out a forefinger from her thicket of black draperies and counted. Panic followed. The nuns ran about scolding, the crocodile twisted and broke apart into a centipede. The two missing children were much farther down the avenue, hidden from the nuns by a tree-trunk as they tore out each other’s hair. They looked horrid, it was nice to think they were hurting themselves and no one else.

  “Laura, Laura. I wanted to tell you about these two special shoots we had at Datchina, which were among the greatest pleasures any man could know. You have nothing like them in England. Your father was a little shocked by them. You see, in England, where everything is small and sparse, you have to preserve your game in the mating season or you would have none left. But we have so much that we can shoot as we like, it makes no mark on our abundance. So at Datchina we shoot woodcock when the snows are melting, when the spring has come, when the birds are courting. Laura, it was so beautiful when we shot the woodcock. The foresters used to send word when they had seen them coming up from the north, in their three-cornered flights, and we would make up a party, and drive out into the forest about midnight. It had to be then, for we had to go far, far into the forest, and we needed to be at the trysting place about half past two or three in the morning. Then we would go into the brushwood shelters the foresters had built on the side of a clearing, for each gun a shelter. There was something holy about sitting there alone, looking at the dawn, which with us comes quickly, far more quickly than the dawns here in France. How slowly daylight comes in this accursed country. But in Russia the dawn is very clear and brings hope as well as light. Then we would hear the swish of many wings, and a croaking call, and a curious double whistle, and the woodcocks came dropping down in the clearing, very neatly for their size. They are larger than your English woodcock.

  “You know what a woodcock is like, Laura? It’s a dark bird, with a long bill and a large eye, a speaking eye, an eye such as one doesn’t see in any other game bird. When one picks them up off the ground after the shoot they stare at one as if they had been baptized. And indeed what do these birds do when they alight but give proof that through all nature runs the pattern of ritual, of ceremony. Matrimony is their business then. The hen-birds settle on the bushes and dress their feathers with their beaks, and the cocks strut on the ground below, and immediately it appears that each hen is sought by more than one cock, and there’s going to be trouble. Then the strangeness of the occasion makes itself felt. The birds don’t go at their rivals at once. First they freeze into a kind of trance. They are active, this is the peak of their lives’ activities, but their consciousness of it takes the form of unconsciousness. They go into an ecstasy, they move but they are in a sort of stillness, like dancing dervishes. They are awake, and they move, and they are asleep.

  “Above, on the bushes, the hens quiver, but are hypnotized. They are impaled on the sight of the warring cocks below; and as for the cocks, they circle round and round and round one another and then they rush together and wound each other with their long bills, at once without sensation and as purposeful as fencing men. The hens they watch, the cocks they fight, they watch and fight, they watch and fight, and they hear nothing when we begin to shoot. Then some of the cocks are pierced through their nescience, not by the noise, for they do not turn their heads, but by astonishment that adversaries whom they have not killed are falling dead. They stand in shock beside the carcasses, and then the spell on the hens is broken. They shriek. Then cocks and hens alike rise straight up in the air, shrieking, shrieking, shrieking in panic. It is then that we really shoot. We bring them down by hundreds. They come down like a plump feathered rain, down, down.” His voice faded away. “I tell you, there is nothing like a woodcock shoot.”

  He might be her grandfather, he might be very unhappy. All the same, she had to say, “It sounds horrible.”

  “It is only right you should think so. I should be shocked if you did not. You are a young girl. But a woodcock shoot is for men, and it is beautiful with more than its own beauty. There is an indescribable fascination in what is happening: a system, perfect in itself, and exquisitely ingenious, is destroyed at the very moment when it is implementing its perfection, by another system, just as perfect and ingenious.”

  “You’re always talking about God,” said Laura. “What does He say about this? What about caring when a swallow falls?”

  “He may care for each individual woodcock,” said Nikolai, “but for the destruction of one system by another, that is part of His plan. There is such war between nations, between empires. And take heed of what this little war, this woodcock shoot, really is. Men who are threatened with a thousand perils go out with guns against birds who enjoy almost complete safety in the forest. Men, who at any moment may be displaced in the favour of God by another species. Have you never thought that may be the punishment our sinfulness brings upon us? Our system may be destroyed by another system, and perhaps it will be the system of our own sins.”

  “But why would a merciful God do that?” asked Laura, feeling no mercy towards him.

  “Oh, there is pity for the individual man, the individual woodcock. But not for the system. I have sometimes thought there might be such catastrophes among the stars. Galaxies might defeat each other, not by action, but by being simply what they are, by their mass, their momentum. The great may perish as the small. But why do I use such words as ‘great’ and ‘small’? The galaxies may be only birds, whom we think fixed in the sky but which are falling through it at the slow pace of a larger time, while hunters to whom the universe is not knee-high level at them guns that were loaded outside infinity. But again galaxies and such hunters may be small, simply corpuscles within the blood-stream of a vaster being, which would be small itself, being itself some part of another still vaster being. Not that any of that would alter what I am telling you, that Datchina was beautiful, and the woodcock shoot one of the most beautiful things that happened there. Wasn’t it so, Alexander Gregorievitch?”

  “You forget that I never had the opportunity to learn to shoot,” said Monsieur Kamensky, “and I’m rather of the opinion which I read on Miss Laura’s face, that what breathes should be allowed to go on breathing. But, Excellency, the Countess has come to say good-bye to you.”

  She was leaning on the arm of Tania, who said, “Papa, it’s time you went.” Sofia echoed, “Time you went,” and turned on them a strong, piercing glance and a weak smile. Her hair had been carefully marcelled, and she had changed into a dress too elaborate for morning wear, and perhaps too young for her, made of honey-coloured ottoman silk with a fichu of heavy lace. She had put on rouge, not without cunning, but too much.

  She held out both hands to Laura and said, “Dear child, remember your grandmother.”

  “I won’t have the chance,” answered Laura. “Grandfather talks about you all the time, just as Mummie does when we’re at home.”

  “Your mother’s brought you up to have good manners,” said Sofia, and regarded her steadily, even staring at her.

  “I only wish you were better, Grandmamma,” said Laura, to break the silence.

  “You’ve got your wish already,” Sofia said with sudden vivacity, “I’ve been much better, much, much better, for the last three days. And now good-bye.”

  The girl curtsied deeply and raised her lips, but the old woman shook her head and simply laid the hot, dry cloth of her cheek against the young face. Straightening herself, she remarked to nobody in particular, “What’s happening to me is like—what is it like? Like being on a horse that’s bolted.” She moved to Nikolai and ran her fingertips over his sleeves. “My dear one, the carriage is ready. You must go, we’re no longer in Russia, you can’t keep trains waiting for you here, you know.”

  “I’m quite ready,” he said, patting his pockets. “Yes, the tickets are in that envelope, my notes in the red wallet, my papers in the black, but where’s my little money? And are
those tickets really in that envelope? Laura, I must tell you about this other shoot we had at Datchina, better at Datchina than anywhere else—”

  “Say good-bye,” said Sofia. “Say good-bye to me.” She nuzzled in the breadth of his chest.

  “Good-bye, my dear little one,” he said, kissing her while his hands were busy with the things he had taken out of his pocket. “Why, what a sad face! Be sensible and remember that our separation is to be a short one.”

  “You’re right,” said Sofia. “It can’t, in any case, be a very long one.”

  Nikolai gently pushed her away and, breaking into a little laugh, said to the others over her head, “Do you know, just because I’ve travelled with secretaries all my life and had the business of tickets and baggage and passports taken out of my hands, I feel as helpless as a little child now I have to look after myself, though it was precisely because I was less helpless than other people that others were deputed to take such things out of my hands. But really I won’t be happy starting till I’ve made sure all over again that everything’s in order.”

  Shaking his head at his own silliness, he sat down again and checked on everything he had taken out of his pockets. Sofia stood beside him, her great sunken eyes losing not one of his movements. “Nikolai,” she said softly, “Nikolai. Pay attention to me, are you paying attention to me? Nikolai, you must always remember that what is broken here on earth will be made whole in heaven.”

  He replied, “My dear, I give you my word that I need no such advice. I have forgotten everything about my disgrace for the last half hour or so, telling our dear Alexander Gregorievitch and this child here of the good times we used to have at Datchina.”