The Birds Fall Down Page 8

  Laura had been watching the equestrians who were pounding along the track beside the road, some of them in very funny clothes. She said to Monsieur Kamensky in an undertone, “That girl in the check breeches rides so badly that she’ll fall off.”

  “She will not quite fall off,” said Monsieur Kamensky. “She will nearly fall off, and that kind gentleman just behind her on the bay mare, who is a more expert horseman, will ride forward and offer his assistance. That, I think, is the plan.”

  “It can be seen in our churches, the flowering of that relationship. Oh, Laura, a Russian church is so beautiful. For that alone I would be thankful to have been born a Russian, that I have had at my hand that consolation and inspiration, the Russian church, not the great body of souls, but the edifice, the actual place of worship. For that alone I would regret that I am an exile. It would be the crown of my days to take you, the best-looking of all my granddaughters, to share in the warmth, the joy, the repose of a Russian service. In our churches all social distinctions, those ineradicable marks of the fall of man, are eradicated, privilege is annulled, and so is shame. The poorest beggar is equal to the greatest noble. The church is the only place—how happy we are to have one such place, the English have none—where the poorest man in rags will not be asked, ‘What are you doing here, and who are you?’ It is the only place where the rich cannot say to the poor, ‘Your place is not beside me but behind me.’ Oh, Laura, if only you could see how Russians, rich and poor, good and bad, immerse themselves together in the sea of God and are washed clean.”

  “You were right, Monsieur Kamensky,” said Laura. “The gentleman on the bay is helping the girl in the check breeches. But he looks much too nice to bother about her. And the horse is good too.”

  “But Alexander Gregorievitch, may you never have to enter an English church. You would be stricken to the heart. The place is devout, even pretentiously solemn, but it is a congregation not of men and women but of ladies and gentlemen. The rich sit in separate seats known as pews. A horrible word, like an exclamation of disgust. And they sit instead of standing, even the hale and hearty loll in those seats, as only the sick are allowed to do in Russia when they are in God’s house. I tell you they sit in these pews like subscribers to the opera in their loges. All use prayer books and each has his own. It is a sign that each wants to be alone before God in his own proud isolation instead of liquefying himself in a sea of worshippers dissolved by worship. Ah, that divine liquefaction.”

  He really slept. They had to wake him when they got to the Avenue Kléber. He seemed very tired, and though he would not go to bed, he did not come in to dinner but had a tray sent into his sitting-room. He was not so tired, however, for when the ice-pudding was being served he sent in a message to say he was expecting them all and hoped they would not be long. When the butler had gone out to say they were nearly finished Monsieur Kamensky looked across the table, which glittered like a Catholic altar, with all the silver and the Prague crystal, and said to Tania: “If I may say so, you are very pale. May Miss Laura and I not make your excuses to the Count?”

  “I am quite well,” she told him coldly.

  “I must be rude and set aside the glacé cherries in this pudding,” he said, as if he had not made the suggestion and had not heard the reply. “But I have a horror of them, they taste to me like cardboard.” After a pause he added, smiling, “Perhaps Miss Laura has told you, his mind was running on England during our drive.”

  “Laura told me nothing except that you had been able to foresee the behaviour of a blond young lady in check breeches, and we both wondered how that came about,” said Tania, and laughed at him over the rim of her glass. But her laughter went. She asked wearily, “But why does my father go on and on about England? Why is it always in his mind?”

  “Simply because you live there.”

  “There’s no other reason?”

  “None. That’s enough, you know.”

  “I wondered if he might have heard, have heard, that I was not happy living there. There comes a time, you know, when people living abroad want to go home. He might perhaps have thought that that had happened to me. But it hasn’t. It hasn’t.” Her voice died away.

  As she opened the door into Nikolai’s room she halted, threw back her head, sighed, stiffened herself, and went to her seat, for he had called out: “Alexander Gregorievitch, Alexander Gregorievitch. This afternoon we were talking of the English Church and the way it is ordered for the enjoyment of the rich. I do not think I explained how far this goes. Incredible as it may seem, in the English Church the powers of appointing priests to parishes are owned by the rich, and they appoint whom they please and pay them themselves. The Bishops are supposed to have some say in the matter, but you can imagine how much of a safeguard that is in such a corrupt society. My son-in-law took me to his club, the Athenaeum, and there were Bishops in that worldly place, behaving like any of the other prosperous shaven and combed and oiled and tailored worldlings who frequent that place. It is a horrible traffic. The office of priest can be bought by a rich person for a certain sum, calculated according to the capital value of the income, just as in Russia lawyers and stockbrokers can buy partnerships in firms. Nothing is lacking to make the arrangement disgusting. In any English newspaper you may find a series of advertisements offering these priestly appointments, which are called ‘Livings,’ an ironical name for a sign of spiritual death. There is actually a journal published in London wholly devoted to this shameless simony, and it is typical of English hypocrisy that it bears an innocuous title, ‘The Church Preferment Register.’ What could sound more virtuous? What in fact could be more depraved?”

  “Well,” said Monsieur Kamensky, placidly, “it’s always been a problem how to provide for the material needs of the clergy.”

  “Nowhere else has such a deplorable solution been accepted. When I think of this shameful system, carried on under the cloak of piety, I am the more enraged by my recollections of those delegations. Those delegations! Those accursed delegations of English clergymen, which persist in presenting themselves at St. Petersburg and Moscow, harping shamelessly on their sense of brotherhood with us, and impudently demanding union of their corrupt Church with ours, when they should know, even though they are ignorant as children, that their creed and their practices are merely sacrilegious parodies of the true faith and valid liturgy which are our Russian heritage. God is merciful that He has not long ago destroyed them.”

  “I must bring you a copy of a German religious journal,” said Monsieur Kamensky, “in which a German theologian discusses this very point and suggests that we consider it calmly.” But that did not work. “Laura,” said Nikolai, with thunder in his voice and an expression conveying benevolence and common sense, “you must forgive me if I have spoken frankly of your father’s country. But I must own that at one time it lay heavily on my conscience that I should have permitted one of my daughters to marry an Englishman, and I would like to explain to you that it wasn’t lightly that I disregarded my scruples.”

  “Oh, Father, don’t let’s talk of that,” said Tania. “I chose to marry Edward. It was my decision.”

  “It was not. How could it have been? If I hadn’t wished you to marry him you wouldn’t have married him. What I want you to understand, Laura, is that when I gave my consent to your parents’ marriage, I realized all the arguments against it. For one thing, I realized that there can never be peace between England and Russia until we have taken India from her.”

  “What on earth does he think India would do with Russians walking about all over it being crazy about the Orthodox Church?” thought Laura.

  “Until we have it, England must regard her with suspicion and fear, and this can only be replaced by resentment when the struggle comes to its inevitable end. As a Christian woman, your mother is bound to accept it as her duty to have no thought and emotions which are not her husband’s, so she would be bound to side with England in this dispute did I allow her to marry an Englishma
n. So it might have happened that I might rejoice when we gained a bulwark for our empire and at the same moment lost a daughter. This might yet happen in my lifetime,” he cried in sudden alarm. “After all that has happened to me, it might very well be that this too might befall me, I might not die before Russia takes India from England, and then I would be divided from my Tania.” He looked upwards as if some enemy in the sky were eavesdropping and, scowling, crossed himself.

  His roar became gentler and more reflective. “But it was not only India which troubled me. It was the coldness of the English character, the avoidance of error and all contact with the extreme, which I fear for my Tania. Even a woman should not always stay in the garden, she should sometimes walk in the forest, for her soul’s sake. I watched your father, I must confess, with something almost like dislike, certainly with apprehension, not because of his individual character, but because he was an Englishman and must limit his wife’s experience to what is right and unsurprising. But presently I saw signs that he wasn’t as English as all that. True, he always stood upright or sat with a straight back, and held his head up, and bowed and acknowledged greetings with formality, as if he were deliberately cooling his sentiments, but sometimes there were signs that within him burned the same fires that burn within us Russians. His eyes are light. They are blue-grey. But sometimes they appear quite dark—”

  “So they do,” said Tania. “So they do. I don’t know how it can be possible, but it’s so. When Edward feels anything deeply his light eyes suddenly become dark. How odd you should have seen that. I always think you don’t notice things.”

  “I do not trouble to notice things as a rule. But I was watching a man who, if he made you unhappy, would be my enemy. So I noticed too that his voice changes when he is moved. As a rule it is clipped and shallow, but it is quite different when he cares about something. He doesn’t shout, as we Russians do. On the contrary, the words cling to his lips and one can hardly hear—”

  “Yes,” said Tania. “That’s true too. His words cling to his lips.” Monsieur Kamensky had put down a glass of brandy beside her, and she picked it up and sipped it.

  “I knew then that if my daughter married Edward Rowan, she was not marrying a mere English Protestant but a man who had transcended all the limitations imposed on him by that unfortunate situation. Suddenly I felt at peace. Calmly I withdrew my opposition to the marriage, feeling I was doing the will of God, Who had indeed perhaps specially contrived my daughter’s curious infatuation, since, foreseeing the torments of my old age, He wished to give me a good son-in-law. I often wonder whether he hasn’t some Russian blood far back in his ancestry which has made it impossible for his Protestant upbringing to corrupt him. So I gave my daughter to your father, Laura, knowing she would have a husband beyond price, a Russian without Russian faults, an Englishman without English faults—”

  “You were right, Father,” said Tania, suddenly emptying her glass down her throat. “Edward is perfect. He has never bought a living in his life. No copy of the Church Preferment Register has ever entered our house.”

  “I can believe that,” said Nikolai happily, “and like me he’s also opposed to cremation.”

  “There’s an awful lot of cremation in India,” Laura warned him, and Tania giggled.

  “That means much to me,” said Nikolai. “How coarse and repugnant I find the English and German agitation for this new and perfunctory method of disposing of the dead. We don’t find it distasteful to bend our eyes to the fleshly abode of the departed soul, we cherish it as it lies in its coffin, we reverence it and don’t shrink from giving it the last climactic kiss, we watch over it for three days and three nights of praying and chanting, and we delay the surrender to earth of the beloved body by the length of our beautiful funeral prayers. But these barbarians, these Anglicans, these Lutherans, these atheists, they wish to tip their dead into specially constructed furnaces, after a ceremony which by its brevity betrays that the survivors grudge their poor departed ones both their time and their tears. It’s sickening to think that our own Orthodox Church refuses to condemn this infamous practice. I was so pleased when the last time I saw Edward he told me that he too was repelled by this cold and unkind method of alienating the dead from the living.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Tania, “we’re a perfect couple. Innocent of the slightest taint of simony, we shall lie side by side in the Rowan family vault. Not that one can be sure of anything. But it’s time we went to bed. Something tells me I shall go earlier and earlier to bed while I stay in Paris.” She knelt before her father and lifted her face to his, saying impatiently, “Good night, good night.” As soon as he had kissed her she tried to free herself and rise, her face contradicting itself, as if she wanted both to cry and to make someone else cry, but he folded her in his arms, so that she was forced back on her knees.

  “Thank you, my little Tania,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

  “What’s this now?” she murmured. She was blinking in confusion. “Why are you thanking me?”

  “Because your marriage is the one thing that has gone right in my life,” he answered, “the one thing not brought down in ruins by my disgrace. Your brothers and sisters are in the orbit of my shame. You’re outside it and you’re happy. I eat and drink your happiness.”

  She sat back on her heels and stared up at him. “How generous you are,” she said softly. “Your thanks come gushing out like a spring. Oh, how good, how very good it is that I made a marriage that gives you such pleasure. To think that I can give you such pleasure!” She choked, she had to go on sitting on her heels till she recovered mastery over herself. Suddenly it could be recognized that only an accident of appearance made her seem proud and daring and harsh, she was really humble, a sort of saint. But of course she was that. If she took Laura and the boys anywhere she was grateful to them for enjoying themselves, when Papa brought her home a present she would take it all over the house showing it to the butler, the cook, or Dolly the housemaid, going out into the square gardens and telling the gardener about it, in a daze of wonder that she should have been so favoured. But people usually went by the high carriage of the head, the slightly raised eyebrows, and were a little afraid of her. Laura went over and pulled her to her feet and took her to her bedroom. They walked like sisters through the corridor. And as she undid the hooks and eyes at the back of her mother’s dinner-dress, her mother said, “To think that my father is happy because of us. It’s a great privilege. For he is a great, great man and his sufferings are great.”

  Lying in bed half an hour later Laura marvelled how it was that one looked and looked at people and then quite suddenly saw them as they were. That made her think of Susie Staunton. Why did she have to think of Susie Staunton so often, and see her so brightly against the blackness of the night or of her own shut lids? She had been quite used to Susie Staunton going and coming about the house before she realized that Tania was right enough in considering her remarkable. It had seemed to her before that time that Tania was simply being over-grateful to someone who had only the special advantage of being invariably agreeable. But that was the wrong word. It sounded as if Susie made an effort, and she was never so positive. She simply agreed to everything and anything proposed to her in the house in Radnage Square, with a gaiety which was assumed to be brave. For it was still understood that she was poor. True, she lived in a Knightsbridge square which was not cheap, but possibly the house was lent, people would enjoy being kind to such a lovely creature. Oh, she must be poor, Laura thought so too. One day she was coming downstairs while her mother’s guests were arriving for a luncheon-party, and Mrs. Staunton was standing in the hall while the butler was letting in the woman who had followed her by seconds. Against the light of the open doorway Susie was a dark silhouette, a slight movement of her wide hat showing that she was timidly looking about her, as if she were a governess come for an interview and afraid that, with her habitual ill luck, she had strayed into the wrong house. But behind her the front do
or closed, and she moved forward, her skin and hair quite bright, not more visibly impoverished than the plume-crested and heavily boaed guest on her heels, her glacé silk skirts rustling, quite a big brooch at her throat. Yet even so there hung about her a delicate version of want. She was in need of something she had not got, though she was keeping the particulars of her poverty a secret.

  So it was natural that when Tania and she arranged to ride together in the Row, Tania should reserve a quiet mare for her for the season at Smith’s Stables in Sloane Square, and give her a silver-mounted switch and a new habit, and that all their companionship involved such generosity. Then, late one afternoon, during the thickening of the friendship, when Tania had had a committee meeting in her drawing-room of one of the societies for the relief of distress among the troops returned from South Africa, Susie, whom Tania had put on the committee, brought an evening-dress and changed into it in the visitors’ room. They needed plenty of time to dine before they took Laura to see Barrie’s new play, Quality Street. Tania’s maid was out, so she and Laura went in to see if they could help. They found Susie standing before the cheval glass in a prim, close dressing-gown, a hairbrush in her narrow hand, her hair loose about her shoulders in a spreading cloak of primrose light. Though everybody who met Susie noticed, and went on noticing, the unique colour of her hair, this was a surprise. It could not have been guessed, what happened to Susie when she took the pins out of the coils and bands which gave her the same shaped head as all fashionable women of the time. Now the released ethereal abundance of her hair made her a supernatural being, and odd at that, an angel whose shining wings had a span far wider than was needed to lift her fragility.