The Birds Fall Down
Rebecca West
Language: English
Pages: 435
ISBN: 0670167924
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the VIRAGO MODERN CLASSIC series, a family saga and political thriller, in which eighteen-year-old Laura Rowan unwittingly becomes a witness to the momentous events leading up to the Russian Revolution.
Der Spion des Königs: Historischer Roman
The Conquering Family (The Pageant of England Series, Book 1)
From Byzantium, we are the real Greeks, we are pre-Greek, part of the mystery which hung over Greece since the beginning of time. Ask where that first blood that was in Mycenae came from and went back to, if not us. Their huge crimes are ours, their huge unequal contests with the gods. All vineyards should be ours too, all olive terraces. It is beautiful to look down on the sea shining blue between olive trees, their trunks dark, their branches loaded with the silver of their leaves. The Bible.
Voice simply did not seem to reach him. “He was alive when I left Paris. I never thought he would be gone when I got here. This is a different tragedy.” A tremor ran through him, she thought he was going to fall. “Can’t I come in and sit down? There’s a nurse with you, isn’t there? They assured your mother there would be. It’s quite proper for me to come in, isn’t it, if there’s someone with you? I am at the end of everything.” She softened to him, because he was so tired, hardened again as it.
Her grandfather, if he could yet be convinced that she did not know what he was, it might save her life if she let him pray by the dead as friends do. But she felt obliged to bar his way, and what was worse, to bar it in a way which showed she thought he was unfit. She had stiffened into the attitude of a priestess defending an altar from desecration, or rather, of a bad actress playing such a part. She had thrown her head back as far as it would go, her chin was sticking out, and her arms were.
Nicer of the two sorts of biscuits the cook had given her. When he had finished munching and brushed off the crumbs with a large handkerchief, clean but with a hole in the middle, he said: “One would think that the bourgeois system of bringing up girls without discipline or education, solely for the marriage market, would at least produce a certain sensibility. But it doesn’t seem to have struck home to you that I’m labouring under intense emotion. I’m very unhappy. I don’t think I’ve ever been.
But I didn’t see how he could stop me from telephoning your apartment, and I went back in the café and did that very thing. “I’d difficulty in finding your number, because I didn’t know how you transliterated your name. How utterly we Russians are not at home in the Western world! But at last I got it, I was put through, I repossessed my own life, I did something which Gorin couldn’t have foreseen. No, nobody in your home would have reported it to you. I didn’t dare to give my name to the lady.