The Birds Fall Down (33 page)

“Then no,” said Nikolai, and turned away like a sulking child.

The doctor said loudly and blithely to Laura, “Oh, you are liberal exiles? Well, you needn’t fear any lack of sympathy. The Voltairean spirit isn’t dead among Frenchmen yet.”

“Oh, hush, hush! My grandfather thinks Voltaire worse than nuns. He’s a very devout member of the Orthodox Church and they all hate Catholics.”

“The Catholic Church disbelieves the doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, and whoever rejects that doctrine does not know how divinity is placed in relation to itself, and therefore cannot know where he himself is placed in relation to the universe,” said Nikolai. “Also, what evil has the Roman Church not wrought on our poor Byzantium? Who can forget the Fourth Crusade?”

“Alas, your Excellency, we’ve all a right to our own opinions. That is Voltairean too,” said the surgeon. In an undertone he asked Laura, “Your grandfather isn’t like this ordinarily? He’s delirious, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say so. It’s true that he’s had a lot of trouble lately and since then he’s talked more like a preacher than he used to, but what he’s saying isn’t so mad as you might think. In fact it isn’t mad at all. He’s just talking about the things Russians go on and on about, just as you French go on and on about Napoleon.” She went on slowly, “You see, we met a Russian in the train …” But it was no use. If she told him the truth this man would not believe her, and she might lose his kindness. She simply stood there, her mouth a little open.

“And this Russian frightened you and your grandfather.”

“Oh, no. No.”

“Odd. For a moment you looked very frightened indeed.” He remained silent and questioning till he saw she was not going to speak. “Well, then let’s not bother about that. I see you’re very fond of your grandfather, which is to his credit.” He turned to Nikolai and said, quite gently now, “Since you don’t like my hospital I’ll find you a room in a hotel and you can go to bed there, and I’ll put in a nurse.”

“Not a nun?”

The surgeon smiled brilliantly. “No, not a nun.”

The two porters closed in on Nikolai and gently heaved him upright, and the three joined figures staggered off. Laura started to follow them, but the doctor held her back. “They know where my carriage is and they’ll take some time getting him there. We’d better settle about sending for your relatives now. The station-master can send a telegram from here more quickly than any post-office in the town would do it. What’s your family’s address?”

She stared at him blankly. Nobody at the apartment in the Avenue Kléber must know where she and Nikolai were till she had a chance to tell them about Chubinov. Otherwise they might tell Monsieur Kamensky. “Please, please believe me. It’s no use telegraphing to Paris. It would be cruel to do it. My mother’s almost out of her mind with worry about my grandmother, she’s so ill, she’s gone to a clinic today.” She stopped and thought what she should say next; and in the midst of the clang and bustle which the arrival of the Paris express was starting off, she received some intimation that though the silvery little man standing in front of her would not understand what it meant that Gorin was Kamensky, his experience had taught him nearly everything else. She said gravely, “And my mother’s very unhappy, specially unhappy even for that situation,” and paused. “But my father and mother live in London, and my father’s there. Just let’s send a telegram to him, asking him to come at once. We’ll have to send a telegram to the people at Mûres-sur-Mer we were going to stay with, so that they don’t fuss. But it’s my father I want. Only my father. We’ll have to send two telegrams. One to 80, Radnage Square, the other to the House of Commons. Then he’ll be sure to come at once.”

“It shall be done. We will send for your father. And how beautiful you are when you look happy.”

It was odd. He meant to be kind. She knew he would do anything for her that he could. Yet he understood so little what she was like that he did not realize how she hated people to say that sort of thing. It was really very odd that people wanted to be kind to one when they had absolutely no sense of what one was.

IX

For quite some time Laura sat with Nikolai in the carriage outside the hotel, his hand clutching hers, loosening, falling to his lap, then clutching hers again. The hotel was the one large and solid building in a square of tall old houses, themselves crooked, with pale shutters hanging slightly crooked on their crookedness. In the gravelled centre of the square a market bubbled and boiled, the crowd here and there divided by strings of cattle being led away, past stalls hooded by tarpaulins, shaking and bellying in a high wind, which was making the white linen caps of the women rock on their heads like little ships on a rough sea. She hoped the Channel would be smooth for her father’s crossing. Presently Professor Saint-Gratien put his head into the carriage and explained that he had had to keep them waiting because he had forgotten something: that the most important ball of the year was held in this hotel on this very night, and the place was upside-down. All the same, he had got rooms for them, and what was more, two men strong enough to help her grandfather up the staircase, which was, it appeared, for a staircase, quite a staircase. This hotel had been a nobleman’s palace in the time of Louis Quinze, and it had its grandeurs, which were sometimes inconvenient, but these two men could handle anything; and when they came that seemed plausible enough. One was an ostler in a leather jerkin and breeches, the other a blacksmith smelling of metallic toast and wearing a tawny apron as long as a woman’s dress, and both had to bend their knees before they could look in at the carriage window. They offered soft, gruff exclamations at what they saw. “They’re surprised,” said the doctor to Laura in halting English, “to find that one of their size can be old and helpless. Human beings are very amusing.”

The vestibule was so splendid that the ordinary people and the servants who were standing about made both the splendour and themselves seem not quite real. This might have been a rehearsal on a stage by players who had not yet been given their costumes though the stage was set, and the landlord bowed and greeted her with the sincerity and over-emphasis of a bad actor. He said that until Monsieur le Comte could be found a room in the hospital he would be the hotel’s honoured guest, but that he himself had a thousand things to do, the Mayor’s secretary was there at that actual moment to talk about the night’s festivity, he would have to go to him at once, but it was a pity, such a pity. In his effort to make his excuses he conveyed the impression that to attend on Nikolai, ill as he was, would be a gay and carnivalesque diversion, and that the ball, on the contrary was, in his eyes, sad as a funeral. That was the sort of thing, Laura reflected, that her brothers called flannel. But the landlord kept it up well when it appeared that the staircase, which was indeed magnificent, presented a difficulty.

It rose in merciless elegance, climbing first in a diminishing semicircle, then dividing into two flights curved like soaring wings, its wrought-iron balustrades were mineral lace, not to be clung to, and the blond wooden steps shone like ice. Before this lovely peril the two giants halted, and Nikolai, drooping between them, uttered faint sounds of command which everyone disregarded. The landlord, in tones suggesting that it was all merely a matter of academic interest, asked the porter if the back-stairs would be better, but no, they weren’t broad enough for three abreast. The landlord lifted up his voice and called for Rose and Marthe, they hurried in, they hurried out, they came hurrying back, they knelt before the ostler and the blacksmith and wrapped dusters round their boots. The two men took care not to let go of Nikolai while they were working on their feet, they managed to keep him propped up, swaying and continuing to issue orders which became less and less audible, while they struggled to keep their balance. A censorious and contented male voice came clearly to Laura’s ear, “The old man shouldn’t have been allowed to travel in this state,” and another voice, belonging to a woman, agreed, “Yes, it can’t be good for him, and it’s causing so much trouble.” What made it worse was that the words were spoken sweetly, with no sense of what they meant, out of a desire to make agreeable small talk. The two giants swung Nikolai up the stairs between them, but his feet were blind and wilful animals off on their own. The doctor called the men to halt and said to Laura, “Go ahead of them up to the landing. Look at our assembly room there. It’s very pretty, if life were what it should be you’d have come to Grissaint to dance there.”

The wide door was just ajar. She did not open it any farther, she could see without being seen. She wanted to hide, for she felt dirty from the train, dirty from disaster, and this place was so clean it abashed her. The assembly room was white and was flooded with light from tall windows on one side, and it was being preened to further brightness for the evening’s festivity. There were four chandeliers, three of them in full glitter, and under the fourth was a stepladder, with a man in a green baize apron standing half-way up and cautiously freeing the lustres from a holland bag. At work on a low stage at the end of the room other men in green baize aprons were setting up music-stands, and two were on their knees beside a harp, which was rocking slowly, like a sensitive animal recoiling from the human touch. Behind the stage, in high relief, a plaster Apollo in a semicircle of plaster nymphs struck a gilded lyre, and in alcoves on each side of the stage stood statues of slender young men, one with a bow and arrow, one carrying a fawn. On the polished floor two women in blue-grey cotton gowns knelt among patches of sunshine, devoutly leaning forward as they pried at the parquet with little tools, while two others, erect but with heads bowed, pushed forward mops and their own reflections across the gleaming wood. There was a high stepladder by one of the tall windows, and on the topmost rung stood a graceful girl, seeming to greet a friend up in the clouds, for she was rubbing a duster round and round on the pane of glass above her head; and at the foot of the ladder a blond and spectacled young man, with his back to her, held a sheet of music at arm’s length and sang with widely open mouth, but silently. All these people were so grave that they might have been preparing for some religious or philanthropic meeting rather than a ball, but the light from the wind-scavenged sky, shining through the high windows down on the bright brown floor, the sugar-white gods, the chandeliers, the white-and-gold walls, lit up a formal but extreme gaiety built into the place. They must have been using beeswax on the parquet, there was a smell of honey. But behind her came the panting and stumbling sounds of the people it was her duty to be with, and she had to turn round and follow the knot of bodies along the corridor, up another staircase, along another corridor, and into a salon which gave out the ruined sweetness of an old scent-bottle.

Nikolai groaned, “To the sofa, to the sofa.”

The blacksmith said, “But it’s too short for you. You’d never be able to lie down.”

“I don’t want to lie down on it,” said Nikolai, “I want to sit on it.”

“What a ridiculous idea,” said the doctor. “You’re not going to lie down or sit up or do anything else in this room. Your place is not in the salon, it’s in that bedroom behind those folding-doors.”

Nikolai drew back his head like a scolded child.
“Da, da,”
he mumbled, and the ostler and the blacksmith exchanged kindly glances and nodded and said, “Yes,
da, da.”
Laura exclaimed angrily, “He’s saying ‘yes,’ in Russian.”

Nikolai said in a neutral tone, as if he were telling her the time, “You need not trouble. My dignity does not matter any more.” Then he said in French, “I’m quite willing to go to bed, if it’s ready.”

“It ought to be by now,” said the doctor, and opened the folding-doors. A chambermaid blinked at the sudden entrance, a big stout woman in her forties, with faded fair hair parted in the middle, and the convex profile of a cow. She was standing beside a curtained bed, edging the plumpness of a pillow into its slip. When her protruding blue eyes fell on Nikolai’s face she could hardly finish her task, her fingers stiffened. It might have been thought that she recognized him, and Laura wondered in panic if all these people were really Russians in disguise; but the next minute she saw that all the woman had recognized was his state. She might as well have said aloud, “Is this the gentleman who’s ill? Well, ill he is, and no mistake.”

Nikolai lurched to the bed and stroked the coverlet. “How strange. When I got up this morning I didn’t know this bed existed.”

“Oh, beds ambush us all our lives long,” said the doctor, “they’re the great conspirators.”

Nikolai sat down heavily on the bed and looked at the ostler and the blacksmith, as attentively as the chambermaid had looked at him. He asked the doctor, “Do you have a special regiment in the French Army where you draft men like this?”

“Not since the time of Napoleon, I think,” the doctor answered. “But if there was one I don’t think that the blacksmith would have obeyed the call. He’s a different sort of soldier. He’s a great preacher for the Salvation Army, aren’t you?”

The blacksmith’s eyes flashed and he nodded shyly, his long black hair shaking about his ears. “That’s a good thing,” said Nikolai. “We men who are very strong need to be controlled by religion. We must be ringed like bulls, and only God can do that. May I go to bed now?”

“This very moment,” said the doctor. “Where’s that case? I brought it up myself. Would you open it please, Mademoiselle? He may have something useful in it. Yes, his sponge-bag and his nightdress, and isn’t this what you call an icon? What a strange thing. It’s barbaric workmanship, isn’t it, Byzantine, one would say?”

“Give it to me,” said Nikolai. “It is my most precious possession. No. It is now my only possession.”

“You’ll feel better tomorrow,” said the doctor. “Now, Mademoiselle, go into the room. These two men will help me to undress him and get him into bed. The maid here will bring you up some sort of cold meal, and mind you eat it. You’ve got to hold the fort until your father comes.” His manner was to real cheerfulness as false teeth are to teeth.