Read Online The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West - Free Book Online Page B

decided to do without it for a time, as she sometimes decided to wear no jewels. But now she was being absurd about her mother’s health. Though Sofia had taken fall after fall in the hunting-field and Tania had remained calm, now she was almost hysterical because the old lady had to have some teeth out. But just now it was as if everybody were moving away from the place where they had seemed rooted. Her grandfather had seemed to her in the past simply someone foreign and grand, one of the people wearing plumed hats who drove after the crowned heads in state processions, about whom she had the secret knowledge that Tania loved him, that he enjoyed giving presents and hugging silently as he gave them, and that when there were no other grownups about he could deliciously pretend to be a magician. But now he might belong to a different species, and one generally supposed to be extinct. If there had been men at the same time there were mastodons and dinosaurs, he might have been one of them. He was also like someone in the Bible. When Monsieur Kamensky had knelt at her grandfather’s feet, it was as if the older man were out of the Old Testament, the younger man out of the New.
    Time passed. The white roses in a crystal vase on the table beside her shed one petal, then another, then another. Where people were unhappy the flowers were neglected. She pushed the petals together in a little pile. The old man opened his eyes, looked round him, and resumed his misery.
    “I am quite well,” he said argumentatively. “I am never ill.”
    “That’s what we thought,” said Kamensky. “And now we know it. If you were, such a short sleep couldn’t have refreshed you. There’s a lot of the evening left. Would you like to play a game of chess?”
    “I haven’t the time,” said Nikolai. “The darkness awaits me, and there are many things of which we should talk.”
    “About ideas?” said Kamensky.
    “No, that is too dangerous a pleasure,” said Nikolai. “How right Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov was. You have heard of him?”
    “Minister of Education about 1850,” said Kamensky. “I confess I might have failed to recognize his name had I not once benefited by a prize he instituted.”
    “He made a wise decision afterwards reversed. He entirely prohibited lectures on philosophy in all the universities of Russia. He saw that speculations regarding the Creator are superfluous, since the revelations we have been given on divine authority are sufficient, but he saw that researches into the wonders of Creation can never do any harm. So he encouraged the physical sciences. This must be right, because it is logical—though I have to admit that some of the students of physical sciences are among our most godless and subversive. No, I want to talk to you not about ideas, but about facts. You saw that I was afraid when I questioned you about that medicine?’”
    “Yes. But, as I say, it was not unreasonable.”
    “You might answer differently if I opened my heart to you. I did not tell you everything. It wasn’t only that I feared that those tablets might have been poisoned by my enemies. I had another fear. Let me tell you a story, and do not laugh at me, though it may strike you as absurd.”
    “Miss Laura and I could never laugh at you.”
    “It will comfort me a lot to confess what happened to me some years before my disgrace. I can’t remember the exact date, even the year. But one day I was at my office and a member of the Poliakov family, the grain dealers, came to see me. He happened to take from his pocket a letter from his son, a young lawyer who had gone to Warsaw on business. He thought it would interest me, but it didn’t. My attention was caught by one thing, however. The letter was written on bright red paper, and the envelope was bright red too. At the moment I made nothing of it except as a sign that young people like to do things in a way which is obviously incorrect.”
    “How long ago,” Laura asked