The Birds Fall Down (13 page)

“I hope the pharmacy isn’t too far away,” she told her grandfather, “he looks as if he were going to faint.”

“It’s a curious thing,” Nikolai ruminated, “people are not as strong as they used to be. I don’t think that when I was his age I would have fainted just because I’d hurt my hand. I wonder if I have our tickets and my passport.”

“Of course you have,” said Laura. “Don’t you remember, you took them out and went over them and put them back in your pocket just before we started.”

“I did? I did? You must be right, but …”

This had not happened before, not quite like this. Several times since she had come to Paris, he had shown forgetfulness, but what was forgotten had been eminently forgettable. It had been as if his mind were too full of memories and he had thrown away some that did not matter. But now the facts, even the most useful ones, were running out of his mind like water out of a cracked cup. The journey before her suddenly looked different. She would have to behave well, she would have to behave like Monsieur Kamensky.

But when they came to the Gare du Nord her grandfather transacted the first business of the journey better than she had expected. He gave the porters reasonable directions in a voice like anybody else’s. But once they passed under the smoky glazed vaults of the station he paused and looked around him at the hurrying and cantankerous crowds, bowed his head, folded his hands behind his back, and strode on ahead, as if he were alone. She hurried at his heels, and after her hurried little Louison, carrying Nikolai’s leather attaché-case and her trinket-box. In the station, as in every French railway terminus she had ever seen, there was an atmosphere of threatening and causeless rancour, as of a revolution without an object. The porters pushing their barrows uttered cries less like warnings than demands for revenge, the passengers swept on in angry waves as if storming a palace to wring a constitution from an absolute monarch, instead of merely boarding trains for which they had been issued tickets. It was funny, but it was not kind. Had Monsieur Kamensky been there it would have been only funny. He would have looked at the black-browed crowds without yielding an inch to their ferocity, his bearded face relaxed and lineless like the face of someone in a holy picture, but lit by hidden laughter. When they reached their carriage her grandfather dropped an excessive number of francs into the porters’ hands, muttering in Russian, “Dear God, dear God, these creatures produced by a popular government,” and he helped her up the high steps, while he gave Louison a farewell tip and some last instructions.

There were two women already in the carriage, sitting opposite their own reserved places, women dressed in heavy mourning, with round faces framed for contentment, but not at that moment contented. The older was saying, “It was indelicate of them to buy us the first-class tickets. If they had given us the money for first-class tickets, the handsome gesture was there, we would have given them the credit for it. I am sensitive to generosity, I am touched by it, and the fact that we would have travelled third and kept the balance wouldn’t have lessened my gratitude to them. As it is, I must reconsider my view of them.”

“They meant to be kind,” said the younger woman.

“Meaning is one thing and doing is another,” said the other, “and it’s the lack of delicacy which appals me. And always,” she added after some seconds, “will.”

She hoped Grandfather would not hear them going on like that, popular government and God could get into the business at the drop of a hat. She wished they could go to Mûres-sur-Mer as she and her father and mother and brothers went to Scotland or Torquay, with nothing much coming up except that they were going to Scotland or Torquay. But when her grandfather sat down beside her he was mild, he was back in Russia before that had become a torment to him.

“I’ve been trying to tell you all the morning about the capercailzie shoot, but people kept on interrupting us. The capercailzie were with us about the same time as the woodchuck. In April, would it be, or was that too early? I can’t remember. An exile gets confused about the seasons. But it was a time in the year when there was gaiety in the air, it was a pleasure like going to a ball when one is young, just to be alive. To get the capercailzie we had to go even farther into the forest than when we were after the woodcock, we drove sledges mile after mile, to where the marshes begin, then we went on foot, a long way on foot. It was a real ordeal, this shoot. I tell you I dreaded every year lest this time I should find I was too old and make a fool of myself in front of my inferiors. But I was still able to carry it off up to the last spring I spent at Datchina. I am still enormously strong.

“The capercailzie isn’t like the woodcock. It is more of an aristocrat. It doesn’t give itself away by fighting itself blind and dead, it keeps its sense till the very last, and till then it hears everything even to the snapping of a twig underfoot. I’ve seen the whole thing a failure because of some lout’s single false step. Keeping absolute silence, that’s it. Standing still and waiting, feet on the frozen marshland, and staring up at the tall trees, the firs and birches, silhouetted against the night sky. They are sparser here. You hardly call it the true forest, it just straggles down into the marshes.

“The hen-birds are hidden in the branches of the trees. You can’t see them. Even I with my sight which is so much keener than other people’s, even I could not see them. The capercailzie is like your grouse, you know, but of course much bigger, bigger than a pheasant, and very dark in colour. Then, suddenly, just before the dawn breaks, the cock-birds come. They fly swiftly, discharging themselves like arrows at the treetops, where they alight on the topmost branches. There they remain still, quite still, while the sun comes up. The wait seems endless, though probably it isn’t ten minutes, because you daren’t make the smallest movement, you hardly risk breathing. If the birds hear the faintest sound they’re up and spreading all over the sky, into the distance, as quick as a woman shaking out her fan, and you’ve come all the way for nothing. But if you stay quiet, all at once the cocks begin to sing. They’re serenading their mates in the branches below, the sun is on the cocks above, the hens are still down in the darkness. At first the song’s faint, one can just hear the soft chuck-chuck-chuck, but soon it swells, it’s their church choir.

“Even then you can’t be sure you’re safe. As I told you, these birds keep their ears, they get every sound at this point, and sometimes they stop singing altogether, and there’s a hush, such a hush, you hear the blood beating in your head and you think they must hear it. It’s that which makes this shoot such a test. Keeping still like that exhausts a man’s nervous and muscular energy before he lifts his gun. We thought a man a remarkable shot if he could bag six or seven birds with the kind of guns we had when I was young. You see, there’s just one moment when one can get them, when one has to twist oneself into the right stance and blaze away, and that moment comes at full dawn, when one stops thinking, ‘It’s getting light, hurrah, it’s getting light,’ and thinks, ‘It’s light, it’s broad daylight,’ surely it must have been light for quite a time, because the day tips into the dark sky as if someone were emptying the bottle bolt upright above it, filling it up to the brim. It’s then that the cock-bird’s lovesong rises to its height in one long note. Shrill, penetrating. It’s terrible to hear, in a way, that note, it’s like a cold finger slowly drawn down one’s spine. A very high note as it goes on. And it seems to stretch everything, one’s nerves, everything, even the sky. It’s then one shoots. The cocks know nothing when they’re singing this extraordinary note. The hens know nothing when they’re listening to this extraordinary note. They’re quite defenceless, both of them. They become the note itself. They’re nothing else.”

The words crumbled on his lips. A line of saliva ran down from the corner of his mouth. Distastefully he wiped it away, and said, “It tires me to remember that note. Indeed I can’t quite remember it. But it was wonderful, that shoot.” He sighed, his eyelids drooped.

She was not sorry. As he spoke she had been looking out of the window at Louison, who was standing in the correct position for a footman seeing off his master and family at the station, at right-angles to the door, with his arms crossed and his elbows in the palms of his hands. He had a babyish profile, with a snub nose and plump cheeks falling to a little round chin, and he was looking very sad, sad because he was too young to be sad, like a grieving puppy. She leaned from the window and said, “Louison, are you all right?”

He started. “Oh, yes, Mademoiselle. Your grandfather gave me a gold piece.”

“Well, that’s nice,” she said.

“It’s more than that. It’s an occasion. It’s the first I’ve ever had. In fact, it’s a little awkward, it’s so much more than I expected. I’m wondering if he really meant to give it to me. Sometimes at the house we think the Count and Countess don’t know the value of French money.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” said Laura. “If it was an accident, it isn’t likely to occur again, so take it and spend it and be happy.” That was the kind of thing her father would have said in such a situation.

“But I can’t be happy,” said the little footman. “I can’t get over what I seem to have done to Monsieur Kamensky. He made light of it, but that’s his way. He’s always been so kind to me, I can’t tell you. For I’ve had my difficulties at the Avenue Kléber. The last butler I was with said that every kitchen had as much intrigue in it as the Chamber of Deputies, and that’s certainly true of your grandfather’s establishment, there being the French and the Russians working together. I’m the youngest and I’ve had to bear the brunt. But Monsieur Kamensky’s always helped me, and he’s always made light of it. And now it seems I’ve hurt him quite badly.”

“Don’t worry,” said Laura. “He was going to a chemist whom he trusted. His hand will probably have stopped hurting by now.” She opened her trinket-box and took out a packet of chocolate and handed it to him. Her grandmother had told her that Louison would carry her jewellery to the train, but she had not all that much, so she had filled the vacant space in the box with chocolate and biscuits. Everybody had told her that when she grew up she would stop being hungry all the time, but it had not happened yet.

“Within ten minutes,” said Louison, “my first gold piece and my first chocolate from Maison Rumpelmayer.”

“Your first step towards becoming President,” said Laura as the train started. She had heard her father say something like that to a gardener’s boy whom he had tipped: “Your first step towards becoming Prime Minister.” She was always imitating people. She could not think how to be kind to her grandfather except by imitating Monsieur Kamensky, and if she were to go to a grand party her only idea of behaving properly would be to imitate Tania. She suspected that she had no character of her own, which was a curious defect for a member of her family. “Mentally, I am an albino,” she decided, “and perhaps that is why I can’t imagine myself doing all sorts of things other people want to do. I don’t want to get married. If there were any other way of going down an aisle in a white satin dress I’d take it. I don’t want a husband. Men talk about interesting things, but they are not interesting in themselves.” She shuddered with an apprehension of the disagreeable. “Only women,” she thought, “are nice to look at and worth imagining things about.” She made sure that her grandfather was still sleeping, and opened one of the magazines Kamensky had bought for her. A note on the cover proclaimed that it was designed
“pour les jeunes filles,”
and it contained articles on the soppier pictures in the Louvre—particularly those by Murillo and Sassoferrato—on the childhood of the Empress Josephine, and on the construction of the atoll, all alike described in a nervously persuasive manner, as if to distract the attention of
les jeunes filles
from some powerful preoccupation.

“How sad,” she reflected, “that after all this trouble it doesn’t work, and French married women are so awful that I’m not allowed to read Paul Bourget. I wonder how long it takes for them to change over. How many years from atoll to adultery? Can I repeat that to Tania? Perhaps not. Half my best jokes have to curdle inside me.” Lifted up by the gaiety of travel, she smiled across at the two women, they smiled back, they seemed about to speak.

But just then her grandfather woke up and turned to her with agony and embarrassment in his eyes. “Where are we?” he whispered, then his glance became hard again and he said, as if dismissing her from intimacy, “Ah, yes. This tedious journey.” But his hand looked miserable on his lap. She clasped it in hers and he softly pressed her fingers. They were still near Paris, just where the Nord line bridges a steeply trenched valley slicing down to a river like a strip of mirror, which gives back the woods from its glass. The sight of it always pleased Tania, and she watched for it every time she made the journey. “Look,” Laura said to her grandfather, “this is the place Mummie thinks so pretty.”

To her surprise Nikolai, who talked as if he knew nothing of France outside Paris and Nice, who had once asked her where the Pont du Gard might be, nodded in recognition. “The river is the Thève,” he said. “I’ve often been in that valley. One rides under the trees to the hunting-lodge of a queen. I have forgotten which queen, a medieval queen. One breakfasts there at tables in a courtyard, the huntsmen play music on their horns.”

“When does this happen?” asked Laura.

“I don’t suppose it happens any more. But it used to happen. Years ago, many years ago. When my eldest brother, Ivan, was Ambassador of the Tsar in Paris.”

That sounded very grand. “Did I know him when I was little?”

“No. God is merciful, Ivan died before the times became evil,” said the old man, and closed his eyes. At first he murmured angrily to himself, but soon he slept without disorder. His huge and delicate hands gripped the firm tables of his knees, his white and golden beard marked the exact centre of his chest, each of his bowed shoulders was like the rounded top of a strong wall. He had for the moment gone over to the other side, he was an emblem of serenity.