The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  “I believe Rio de Janeiro is a delightful place to live. There’s a magnificent mountain by the sea, a huge sugar-loaf. Living is expensive, but my salary, as I say, should be enough. I should be able to give my wife a home. Not a palace. But a home where I could make her happy. We would not have many servants, but we would have some servants. We could not have great stables, but we would have a carriage and pair. An official of the company whose superior I would be tells me that he keeps his carriage. I chose well, becoming a hydraulic engineer, though little did I know. The climate, I believe, is agreeable and healthy.”

  Edward Rowan lifted his head from his letter and again stared into and through his daughter’s face. She could not bear it, and she rose in her chair, and called to him. She knew he had heard her, but only because he frowned and looked away into the corner of the room. There was a faint smile on his lips, which brightened into silent laughter. Then it was as if his face were burning. It might have been that tears came into his eyes, he looked down at the paper again and paused before he began to write again, and then was solemn as he wrote. He must have been remembering some happy time he had spent with Susie.

  But he should never have been happy with Susie, not for a second. The proof of that had come that afternoon when Tania had been trying on hats, and the bedroom floor had been covered with round yellow buckram hat-boxes and clouds of tissue paper, and Susie had sat quiet as a mouse in the background beside the bed, while Tania sat at her dressing-table and Hélène brought her hat after hat. Tania had sprung up from her chair and held out to Susie a hat she thought would suit the fine small bones of her face; and as she threw out her arm in the gesture of giving, one of her shoulder-straps broke, and she had had to clap her hand against her chemise to prevent it falling clear away. As it was, the lace edging fell forward over her fingers, showing the rise of her breast, and in the triple glass behind her there was reflected and re-reflected, golden under the sunshine pouring in through the high windows, the cord of her spine, her strong shoulder-blade, like a wing cut off near its base, her long waist tapering down into her satin corset. “If the other shoulder-strap goes,” Laura thought to herself, “she’ll be left there all Elgin marble, and the silly dear won’t notice, she’s so keen on giving Susie that hat.”

  She looked over to Susie to share the joke. But though Susie had seen a joke, it was not the same one. Her mouth was no longer vague as it trembled and twisted, as she altered a smile of derision to a smile of compliance, and with difficulty kept it so. She was wearing a black dress that covered her from neck to wrist and ankles, and it was an ambush from which she watched Tania making a fool of herself, romping like a schoolgirl, flinging out her arms so that she ended half-naked in front of her daughter and a servant. It was not mollifying Susie at all that, if Tania was half-naked, it was simply because she had wanted so much to give her a present. It could not be the spectacle of accidental nakedness which had thrown Susie off her balance; nobody could call Susie common. Of course it had to be allowed that Susie was finickingly neat by nature, and that untidiness always seemed to strike her as a threat, a hole in the dike that kept the waters out. But it came to Laura suddenly that Susie had some large, coarse reason for despising Tania at that moment. Her lips went on twitching when Tania cried out, in a voice made pure as a blackbird’s by her ecstasy of giving, “Quick, try it on, we’re longing to see you in it. There was never anybody who had so many different ways of looking lovely as you!”

  Susie had at first not responded to the invitation, modestly shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head, as so often before miming her role of one doomed to go without, to go without what, to go without almost everything, while her narrow hand passed backwards and forwards, out of time with her other movements, over the Venice-point counterpane on Tania’s broad bed, just below the pillows, for a foot or so. Ultimately Susie had been persuaded to come forward and take Tania’s place before the dressing-table, to try on the hat, and to accept it, eyes enormous with surprise. She went on sitting there for some time, while Tania set the hat this way and that on her pale golden head, infatuated with the delight of making her beautiful friend more beautiful, preoccupied with it, so that she never paused to put on the négligée which Hélène was patiently holding ready for her. In the triple glass Tania’s bare arms, bare shoulders, half-bare breast, and all the rest that was too little obscured by her cloudy chemise, wove a pattern of rosy flesh round Susie’s black figure, still covered to the throat. Laura felt that at any moment Susie might push back her chair and stand up and burst into laughter unnaturally loud and long and cruel. This had not happened. Yet Laura could never recall the scene without thinking that it had, and that Tania had then turned into a statue, her hands above the little hat, while she grew pale and rocked on her feet under the force of the insult. Now Laura knew her memory to be only slightly mistaken, and that through being too intelligent. This was what had nearly happened. Her father should not have been able to be happy with Susie for a single second.

  Till then she had not known that she had stopped loving her father, that he was nothing to her. She said aloud, “There shall be no more sea.”

  So strong was her sense of loss that her fingers closed on her handbag lest that go too. Everything seemed gone from her body except her heart, which felt as if it were made of glass and had been cracked into a thousand sharp-edged fragments, which were holding together, as the pantry-window at Radnage Square was still holding together, though Osmund had sent a cricket-ball through it in the spring. “I feel as if my heart would break,” Dolly the housemaid had said, when her brother was killed at Spion Kop, and Laura had thought she simply meant that she was very sad. But Dolly had been telling the literal truth: real grief meant a feeling of fracture inside one’s body, on the left side, just above one’s waist. What happened when the pieces of glass fell apart? There must be a crucial ending if people were as wretched as she was, abandoned, feeble, betrayed, unjustly sentenced, exiled, taken for less than they were, put below others who were their inferior. She supposed they died. Well, she hoped that dead her father would realize that he had killed her. With that for prize, her mind went down into the pit. But it came back to her that for the last twelve hours at least she had been under threat of death, and that real death was quite different from the sort of dying she had been contemplating, which was like death in a picture or a poem, not death at all, just something about it. If there was one thing she had learned from that threat it was that she did not want to die, and that the sense in which her father might kill her was unimportant compared to the sense in which Kamensky meant to kill her.

  She had relied on her father to save her from this real death. Now she doubted whether he could do it. He was on his third sheet of writing paper now, and his half-smile of happiness was still on his lips. Now she came to look at him, he did not seem remarkable. Leaving out the Irish members and Keir Hardie, he might have been any other Member of Parliament; when girls at her school had asked her to their homes their fathers had always looked much as he did; he was even like the people he sometimes invited to luncheon or dinner at Radnage Square, hoping they would not be able to accept. Apprehensively, she remembered what she had always respected in him as a sign of wisdom, his habit of probing any crisis with quiet questions. When she told him of her danger he would ask, “But did your grandfather tell you quite definitely that he believed Chubinov? Did he say whether he had had any reason to suppose he was truthful and responsible, besides this acquaintance in the remote past? I don’t understand why your grandfather and Chubinov attached so much importance to this horrible business about the man found hanging in the villa kitchen. Try to tell me more clearly. No, Laura, you have not yet given me any really satisfactory evidence that Kamensky, who seems a very decent fellow, is the same as this scoundrel Gorin. Go back to that point about the blind man.” She would have to go back to point after point, while time was running out; and she felt relieved because the people in the story had such simple
names as Gorin and Kamensky and Chubinov, for her father always muddled up Russian names of more than three syllables. That in itself was odd for a man who spoke and read Russian, who had visited Russia several times, and had been married to a Russian wife for over twenty years.

  It could only mean that he had turned his face against Russia. He wanted to reject the wild mating of consonants and vowels which made the Russian language, he would be unkind to the confusion of good and evil, of imagination and obtuseness, of delicacy and coarseness, which made the Russian character. He wanted to reject everything Russian, and she was half-Russian, so of course he would reject her and her way of thinking. When she had told him as much of the matted story as he could understand, he would say something contrary to the Russian way of living. He would say, “Well, anyway we can clear up the whole matter if we can get these two scoundrels, Gorin and Chubinov, under lock and key. Then we’ll see who Kamensky is. I’ll get on to the police as soon as I reach Paris.” But Chubinov must not be put in prison. He was a good man. Though he had been accomplice to so many murders it was only because everybody round him was talking of murder as if it were a virtuous act, and he loved virtue, and had not too much sense. But he was of good will. He reminded her of a fairy-tale someone had told her, about a frozen city in the North, and a little draggled bird that hopped about the snowy streets in search of crusts put out by kindly householders, but not to peck at them itself, only to fly with them in its beak, one by one, and drop them in the laps of vagrants huddled in doorways. Her need for Chubinov was so strong that for a moment it seemed to her that it was he who was sitting beside her, and she let her body go loose towards him, turning her head and shutting her eyes to take the kindness of his imagined words.

  But the quick furtive undertones of the other one were still skeltering on. “Apart from all the pleasantness of the beaches, there’s much agreeable that happens just because one’s living there. The nights are warm. The stars, I’m told, are astonishing in their brilliance. There’s the Southern Cross. Only think of seeing the Southern Cross. Think of changing one’s whole life, even to the stars above. Under this new night sky, I’ll sit beside my wife, my dear wife, in the courtyard of our house, all the houses have courtyards, and it seems that they grow a number of flowers out there which exhale a strong scent after nightfall, a fountain will play—”

  She murmured, “A fountain, I like fountains,” lest he should guess that rage was flaring up in her, as savage rage as she felt against her father, a pure flame of hatred. It was so grotesque that he should be telling her how he meant to enjoy himself after he had killed her, when the worms were eating her or she was fine dust on the wind. Her rage turned into bewilderment and disgust, for Kamensky had passed into a state of silent excitement like a fit. He had been staring at her with this impudent burning-glass intensity, but now he turned aside, his head jerking, and rubbed the trembling knuckles of one hand on the trembling bandaged palm of the other. His chair was set near hers at such an angle that he could not quite hide his face from her, she could just see that between his neat moustache and his neat beard his mouth was wild, pulled into a twitching square, his upper lip raised so that his small white teeth were visible to the gums. His hands separated and became fists that clenched and unclenched, grinding the air between them. It was natural that he should want to get rid of her, the supremely inconvenient witness, but it was unjust that he should hate her so. She had never chosen to learn what he was doing. Yet he would have liked to go on and on tearing her to pieces, she could tell that from the flexing and unflexing of his fingers. A blackness came down on her, and she began to breathe deeply, since she had heard that was the way to keep from fainting. When the light came back she found that Kamensky was breathing deeply too, and in the same rhythm as herself. They were in a horrid physical agreement. It came into her mind that Chubinov had offered to rid her of this man.

  Softly she asked Kamensky, “You will be coming to our apartment at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

  He had to struggle for control before he could answer her. “Yes, at four o’clock.”

  She had thought she could not possibly let Chubinov save her his way. But if it were the only way, she would not reject it now.

  “The apartment will be crowded with mourners. But we can go into that little drawing-room at the end of the corridor.”

  It was hard to think how he meant to kill her with so many people about. Perhaps while he was sitting with her, the door would suddenly open on strangers who were his friends, as she had thought the man and woman who had come into her room the night before, but who had proved innocent.

  “Be there when I arrive so that we can talk. You know the room I mean. Not the big drawing-room and not the little drawing-room with the picture of the pinewoods under snow and the Verestchagin of the Cavalry charge. The other one. Where we sat one evening while your grandfather slept and the petals fell from the roses in the vase on the table.”

  That evening her grandfather had slept so soundly because his trusted young friend, Kamensky, had told him, in his sober opinion, there might be a conspiracy at work. It was time he died.

  She stood up murmuring, “I shall be there. I have got to go now—” she felt for a reason and found it just in time—“I must go upstairs and see that my grandfather’s things are not left behind.” He rose and kissed her hand, and over his bent head she looked at her image in the mirror on the wall, and was distressed because her body was not keeping up appearances, her eyes were blazing, she was flushed, even her lips seemed too bright, she might have been an actress ready to go on the stage and play a tragic part. At the door Kamensky said softly, “Miss Laura, don’t worry yourself, I’ll see that you don’t miss the train.” She glanced over her shoulder at her father, he was still scribbling.

  In the dim room she had forgotten it was a fine day. She walked blinking through the sunshine to Chubinov without the knowledge of her father and Kamensky. She bracketed them now as enemies. If she went down to the desk in the hall and got the porter to send out a boy to the post office the landlord would be sure to rush forward as her party was leaving the hotel and recite to them the service his staff had done for her, with his air of recommending himself for a decoration. She was planning to slip out into the streets and ask the way to the post office and send the telegram herself, when through the glass wall she saw on the opposite side of the gallery, straight across the courtyard, two figures which, though the glass seemed thicker at this point, looked like Professor Saint-Gratien and Madame Verrier, standing side by side and looking down as if there were a table in front of them. Now that she had made up her mind to take Chubinov at his word she felt proud and powerful, she might have compelled by her will those two people to be there where they could help her.

  They did not see her till she was close to them. The table at which they stood was hardly that, it was more like a gardener’s bench and on it stood some sickly potted plants. The glass had seemed thicker at this point because it had been built out to overhang the courtyard by a foot or two, in a sort of greenhouse, fitted with shelves on which there were more of these bleached and drooping plants. A sheet of paper was spread out on the bench and Madame Verrier, head on one side, was letting a pencil wander over it, and both were watching what it traced, as if the lead in itself were by its own volition spelling out a message settling some shared perplexity of theirs. But when they saw her they smiled as if they had no cares.

  “So you’ve got what you want,” said Saint-Gratien. “Papa is here. Forgive me if I speak to you as if you are a little girl. But you were so last year. I’m old and I can’t keep pace with the times. So I say, Papa is here, and may you always get what you want as quickly, by waiting a single night.”

  She could not say anything to that. She felt her eyes blaze even brighter, her cheeks grow hotter.

  “And we,” said Madame Verrier, “are behaving more like little children than you ever would. The Professor has an operation at half past two
, I must go to a new case this afternoon. So we have some spare moments. But we’re always telling ourselves that if only we had a spare moment, we would do this and that. And now here we stand, wasting our precious time.”

  “In an appropriate place, the folly constructed by the landlord’s wife,” said Saint-Gratien. “It looks full south, and she adored her plants, so she smashed up this gallery, which is very old, older than the rest of the house, part of the Louis Quatorze building that was originally here, and built this sort of conservatory. But never mind, she looked very nice in her peignoir, about ten in the morning, wielding her watering-can, she had pretty arms.”

  “Where is she now?” asked Laura.

  “In Lyons with a commercial traveller who took her there last spring.”

  “Oh! Is that why her husband is as he is?”

  “Well, the landlord’s wife is in Lyons because her husband is what he is, and he is as he is because his wife is in Lyons. That’s what Saint Paul meant when he said that marriage was a mystery.”

  She need not have worried because she was looking strange. They were so happy that they saw nobody but each other. It was as well, perhaps the whole idea of sending a telegram to Chubinov was a mistake. Perhaps she was tired and overwrought and had only imagined that in these days, in a civilized country, murder was possible.

  “What are you doing?” she asked Madame Verrier, who was still playing with her pencil.

  “Spoiling a temperature chart. Defacing it with an ill-drawn dog, an ill-drawn cat, an ill-drawn church.”

  “To which the dog would go,” said Saint-Gratien. “But not the cat. All cats are Voltaireans.”

  “But they’re not ill-drawn,” said Laura. “They’re awfully good and very funny.”

  “She loves to draw,” said Saint-Gratien. “She steals all my pencils.”