The Birds Fall Down (32 page)

It was on the move when he reached it. Some soldiers leaning from a corridor window burst into laughter at the sight of him as he loped across the platform with his overcoat flapping round his thin legs, and they opened the door and pulled him aboard in the nick of time, with an air of acquiring an amusing mascot. He waved to her from the window, and so did the laughing boys round him, when they saw who it was he was waving to, and as the train puffed off she heard them raise a roar,
“Auprès de ma Blonde.”
She was glad her grandfather was asleep, he would have been angry. But she waved back, laughed back. The boys meant no harm and had they known what was happening they would have been on her side. That seemed the only important thing now. She waved till she could see them no longer and the train had jerked its way out of the station and into the open brightness beyond. Clouds of yellowish smoke were blown backwards from the engine and hovered under the glass roofs slowly wasting to traceries of mist and then to nothingness. The crowds had thinned. There was nobody in the full agony of travel, trudging under the weight of luggage or dragging children by the hand, only some people sitting on the bench. It could not be said there was silence, but the space of the station was not quite filled by its noise, there was an emptiness high under the roof. It was there that her fear seemed to be, not within herself. Up under the sallow glass and blackened iron was her recognition that she might be hurt and die. To avoid it she looked away. On her right the roof came to an end not far off, and she had an oblique view of a high embankment of dark bricks, stained dirty tawny by the sunshine, and topped by a row of street-lamps. One could just see the roofs and upper storeys of the line of mean little houses that they lit. She would rather live out the span of her life simply looking at this one hideous scene than be dead and see nothing; and the thought brought her fear out of the air into herself. Even if she got out of this, and of course she would, she would never be quite alive again.

She heard her grandfather say her name. His voice had changed. There was water in its wine. She would not let them do anything more to him. She slipped her hand into his and held it to her lips.

“Laura,” he said, “did you not hear the trumpet?”

Perhaps she had lost her Russian again. What trumpet? But of course a trumpet had sounded when the Paris train left. The tinny little trumpet which did the work in France which the guard’s flag and whistle did in England. “Yes, I heard it.”

The blanched voice went on. “It was the little girl. The little girl who looks like a doll has put the trumpet to her lips.”

There was not only murder, there was not only death and the fear of death, there was this also. “Oh, hush, hush,” she said softly, “there’s no little girl here.”

“But Pravdine’s little girl is here,” he told her, “the little girl at the Christmas party. She looks like a doll and is wearing that dress of fine muslin, like a lampshade. I told you they had given her a trumpet. She has put it to her lips. It had to happen some time, and now it has happened.”

“Nothing has happened,” she assured him. “You’ve been asleep, you’re still dreaming. What you heard was the trumpet they blow to send out the train.”

“She has blown her trumpet,” persisted Nikolai, “and all has come to an end.” He raised his eyes to the great clock which hung above the platform. “The hands are not moving.”

“They are, indeed they are,” said Laura. “Look, the minute hand is swinging forward now.”

“No, no, the clock has stopped,” said Nikolai. His hand in hers was shaking.

“Grandfather. Nothing is happening that isn’t ordinary. You just can’t see the hands.”

“The clock has stopped,” groaned Nikolai, and he rose from the bench. “God have mercy on our souls.”

He began to rock on his feet, as he had done in the train. Then his unbending body slanted slowly towards the ground, like a falling tree. His hat dropped off and his cane clattered on the stone flags and rolled away; and still the slanting mass of him continued to keel over. Laura cried out, and a porter, passing by with a hand-trolley, halted it beside them and waited with bent knees to catch the lethargically moving weight that was hard to deal with, as if it had been crashing down quickly, because it was so huge; and the porter’s own movements were slowed down by wonder. He was very young, and she saw his lips pout as he recognized the prodigiousness of Nikolai, like a child who goes to the zoo and sees a rhinoceros for the first time. He was just able to keep the old man from falling to the ground and to break his fall on to the trolley. Only his head and torso rested on it; his legs stuck out stiffly to the ground. His eyes were closed, his skin was the colour of white silk long laid by in a drawer.

Everything seemed to be happening somewhere else or behind a wall of glass. The station had seemed empty, but at once a crowd was round the prostrate body. In the past, when Nikolai went about London or Paris, people had found it embarrassing to look at him except by stealing narrowed glances at him and then frowning into the distance as if they had not seen him at all. But now he was performing in public the private act of dying, they were not ashamed to stare at him with wide eyes. Most of the men took off their hats. Several men and women crossed themselves, there were mumblings of prayer, and a slight devout stir started up like a breeze.

Someone said, “He must have been a magnificent man,” and someone else said, “His hair, that’s very strange,” and indeed his thick white locks, streaked with bright gold, looked very unnatural, now they were spread wildly round a still face. He might have been a saint whose halo had been broken over his head by a persecutor. Laura said to herself, “It is not possible this should be happening. It’s only two minutes since Chubinov went off and left me alone, simply so that he could commit another murder. How awfully like him. But one shouldn’t blame him, he didn’t know.”

The porter had already called to another porter, telling him to fetch the stationmaster, and she knelt by her grandfather and spoke to his pale face, though it was like speaking to the sky or a shoulder of the downs. For his sake she was glad that he was dead. If she had had to struggle with Kamensky for their lives, if she had had to take a revolver out of his hand, her grandfather would have been humiliated because he had lost the strength to kill, and because the man he should have killed was the man he had loved. “God,” she prayed, “thank you for sparing him all that.” But this was humbug. She was relieved because now she had only herself to think of, she would have a better chance of escaping from Kamensky. In shame she cried, “God, don’t let him be dead,” and kissed his hands. But there was a touch on her arm, and she found that there were two men standing beside her. One was the station-master in his uniform, the other was a silver-haired man with a small trim beard and bright grey eyes, neat clothes, and an air of command.

She asked herself, “Who can this be? A friend of Gorin’s?” and her heart stopped. But he had the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his button-hole, and the stationmaster was explaining that she was fortunate, there was a medical school in the town, and this was Professor Saint-Gratien, the head of the surgical faculty. He had come in on the same train from Paris as herself and had been lunching in the station restaurant with a friend before going home. It sounded all right, so she turned to him in trust. He asked her questions and she answered them, regardless of the listening strangers round them. They might have been meeting in a wood, with people as trees. Yes, her grandfather had just fallen down. No, she had never seen him have such an attack before. He lived in Paris, and they were on their way to Mûres-sur-Mer, but had got out of the train, because—she had to sob here, till she could think of a reason she cared to give—because he had got worried over something and had wanted to go home, partly, she thought, out of concern for his wife, who was very ill.

It was vulgar to tell people who one was for the sake of impressing them. But now she was in danger, she felt she had to use everything at her disposal to grapple the two men to her. She told them her grandfather was Count Diakonov and had been Minister of Justice in Russia, and that her uncle had been Russian Ambassador in Paris. The stationmaster inclined his head several times to show his respect, and the doctor intimated that he had not needed to be informed of the social importance of her and her grandfather, he had divined it at sight. From his manner she realized that he was not over-awed at meeting grand people, though he was pleased that to the number of grand people he knew pure chance had added two more. She thought no worse of him for that. There were many such people in Kensington, where she would have liked to be. She went on to exploit this vein by confiding that she had been travelling alone with her grandfather only because the Diakonov household was disorganized by her grandmother’s illness and that she was quite at a loss.

“But what relatives have you in Paris who could come immediately?” asked the stationmaster, taking out a notebook. “You see, the body of your poor grandfather the Count must be left here till a policeman has viewed it, and I’ve already sent for one, and then it has to be removed to a mortuary attached to the hospital, where, since it is also a convent, they’ll take you in till your relatives come to make arrangements, and come they must, for—”

“But the young lady’s grandfather isn’t dead,” said the doctor. “Not dead!” exclaimed the stationmaster, and a woman standing by said quite sharply that all she knew was that her husband had looked just like the old gentleman when he had fallen down in his shop, and he had been dead all right.

“Well, I can’t claim to see as many dead people as some members of my profession,” said the doctor. “A certain number of my patients recover. But my experience, such as it is, inclines me to believe that that old gentleman is for the moment alive, not so much alive as some of us but more alive than others.”

A hush fell. The crowd was losing sympathy. It was even with coldness that they watched him as he bent down and put his fingers on the old man’s wrist. He straightened himself and mocked them with a smile, just slightly more elegant than a clown’s grin.

“A disappointment for you all,” he said, “he’s got a pulse.” But he turned to Laura and murmured, “That’ll get rid of them. But he’s very ill. He has a pulse, but it’s only a pulse of sorts. The stationmaster’s quite right. You must send for your relatives. But what’s this? It’s formidable.”

Nikolai had groaned, stirred, and turned his head from side to side, and now he was sitting up. A deep part of Laura silently exclaimed, “Oh, God, he is alive, I won’t be able to get away.” Now she knew for certain that she had been relieved when she thought he was dead because she had a better chance of escaping Kamensky if she were alone. Nothing in the day had been so bitter as this revelation that she was a coward. She sat down on the trolley beside her grandfather and wrapped him in her arms and told him again and again how glad she was he was better, how frightened she had been, while her heart said, “I am a coward, I am that for ever, I can’t rub it out.”

Above her the doctor said, “Why is he staring up at the clock?”

The old man said in this new diluted voice, which had gone halfway back to a childish pipe, “Little Laura, you were right. The hands are moving.”

“I told you,” she said, “nothing has happened, everything is as usual.”

“I should have known it,” he said, shaking his great head. “I should have known it to be unlikely that time would come to an end because a child had blown a trumpet, a child of no importance, Pravdine’s daughter. There are archangels and angels, cherubim and seraphim, it will be their appointed task. Ah well, I must wait a little longer.”

Laura’s arms were still about him, and she felt a tensing of his muscles which she took for strength. But it was only effort. He could not get on to his feet. He lost hope and softened into a heap of clothes. Most of the crowd had dispersed, but a few people still watched him, as they might have watched a cab-horse fallen in the street, with maudlin smiles of pity confused with gratification at their own pity and a cold expectation of further calamity. The stationmaster, without troubling to lower his voice, said, “We must do something. I don’t know why that policeman doesn’t come. The Paris express is due in twenty minutes. We must have the platform cleared by then.”

Nikolai gave himself the face of an unstricken man and said, “The Paris express is the train I and my granddaughter must catch.” A great part of him had gone, spilled out, but some was left. He would not catch that train, but when the train came in he might be obstinately sitting there, in everybody’s way.

The doctor said coldly, “You can’t catch any train.” He said it as if he were throwing a stone at him. Then he threw another. “You’re very ill.” He threw a third. “You’re going to a hospital.”

Nikolai threw them all back. “I must catch that train. I am never ill. I will not go to a hospital.”

The doctor answered, “Good. You’re not ill, and it is an absurd idea for you to go into hospital. See where your hat and cane are lying. Since you are not ill, pick them up.”

Nikolai looked at them with the sad gaze of an old dog. They were not four feet away from him. He made no reply.

“Since you can’t do it,” said the doctor, “I’ll do it for you.” He stooped and recovered them with ostentatious suppleness and dexterity. “How dirty they are,” he commented. “What a pity you had to let them fall when you had a seizure.” He dusted the hat with his handkerchief, shook out its folds fastidiously, murmured, “Excuse me, Count,” and set it on Nikolai’s head.

Nikolai meekly inclined his head in thanks. “Ah, ah,” said the doctor, “that nearly sent your hat spinning again, didn’t it? Now we’ll get on to the hospital. These two porters will help you to my carriage, and we’ll drop you at the hospital.”

“You are very courteous, sir,” said Nikolai. “But not to a hospital. Not to a hospital. It would be a Catholic hospital, wouldn’t it? I’d be looked after by nuns, wouldn’t I?”

“Yes,” said the doctor.