The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West Read Free Book Online

tearing cotton. She might have said that she would like to take her children with her. And would she not care about leaving the house in Radnage Square? Did she not love it as they all did? There was also Papa to be thought of; but now Laura seemed to herself to be saying something not true, just for the sake of saying it. She thought, looking round for someone to blame, “I hate my grandfather, there is trouble all round him.” But as she stretched up to put the papers back on the table, she saw that tears were in his eyes, tears that ran down the deep furrows by his nose and shone like pale topazes on his yellow skin.

II
    By the time the victoria turned out of the Rue de Rivoli into the wide Place de la Concorde, Laura had long ceased to give her mind to what her grandfather was telling Monsieur Kamensky—not that it was uninteresting, but one cannot go on and on listening for ever. She turned her eyes on the calm stone matrons representing the French provincial capitals, long-necked and wide-breasted, on their thrones round the edge of the Place, and she uttered a sound of protest and passion. Nikolai, whose senses had long been sharpened by fear, heard and grumbled, as if resenting an infringement of his exclusive right to distress, “What’s the matter, child?”
    She answered, “It’s the statue of Strasbourg. I always feel so sorry for the French when I see that figure, draped in black. It must be awful to have part of one’s country taken by the Germans.”
    Nikolai growled, “The French lost Strasbourg, they lost Alsace, they lost Lorraine, which they pretended was sacred to them because of their saint, though they are deeply infidel. A republican people deserves to lose all, must lose all.”
    “But,” objected Laura, “when France lost Strasbourg and Alsace-Lorraine, France wasn’t a republic, it was ruled by the Emperor.”
    “No matter,” said Nikolai, “the French were a people who had once had it in them to make France a republic, and had it in them to make it one again.”
    “Have you noticed, Count,” asked Kamensky, “that it is only the very young who look at the statues in our cities? As we get older we keep our eyes for staring at the invisible.”
    “But it can’t be right that we should be punished for what we’re doing long before we’ve done it,” persisted Laura. “We might never do it.”
    “God would foresee that we were going to do it,” said Nikolai. She never remembered him talking about religion on her previous visits, but now he never stopped alluding angrily to God. “Thus it is right that He should punish the apparently innocent. Perhaps that is the explanation of my own destiny. Perhaps I have been rightly disgraced, though I am innocent of the offences they pretended, for the reason that before I die I am going to commit a great sin which will deserve such chastisement.”
    “That none of us will believe,” said Monsieur Kamensky. “It is more likely that you are simply being rewarded by God for your goodness and your good deeds by exceptional opportunities to be at one with His son in suffering.”
    “I do not feel the kiss of congratulation upon my cheek,” said Nikolai. “I think I am being punished, punished as men punish other men, for my sins. God is just and I sin in doubting it. O God!” he muttered. “I have recklessly thrown aside Thy fatherly gift of glory.” He was speaking another sort of Russian now, the Old Slavonic of the liturgy. “And among sinners I have dissipated the wealth which Thou gavest to me, wherefore I cry to Thee with the voice of the Prodigal. I have sinned before Thee, O merciful God, receive me, a penitent, and make me as one of Thy hired servants.”
    “Do you understand what your grandfather is saying, Miss Laura?” asked Monsieur Kamensky.
    “Yes, most of it. Mamma’s taken us all to the Embassy church ever since we were little, and the priests used to give us lessons.”
    “Wasn’t that a great trouble to you,