The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West

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