The Birds Fall Down (36 page)

“No. Nor in the one I read. But in those days when they didn’t know much about the sea, any man who was a sailor must have been a brave man. Brave and skilled. Well, if a man who was, you know, someone, who wasn’t a mere nothing, if he heard a voice on the waters saying, Pan is dead, great Pan is dead,’ it might be a prophecy that he was going to die.”

This time Nikolai slept longer. Then he began to talk about oil again. “The oil of regeneration makes all those anointed by it terrible to their adversaries. Some of the promises held out to us are useless. This is one of them. I do not wish to be terrible to the adversary who is the spearhead of all my adversaries. I do not want to be terrible to Kamensky.”

“Wait a moment,” Laura interrupted, “somebody’s knocking on the door.”

“That is mere imagination,” said Nikolai, “I hear it all the time. I will tell you a thing. Kamensky is a middle-aged man, but I see him always as a young animal, a setter learning to work with the guns, a tame fox-cub reared by a gamekeeper. How unreasonable. How inexplicable.” There was another knock on the door. “Come in, Alexander Gregorievitch. Come in, Sasha.”

Outside stood Catherine, too much awed to find the voice to do more than murmur. “It’s Professor Barrault.”

It was unfortunate that he was as full of character as Professor Saint-Gratien. She wished help could be brought to her by somebody as impersonal as an old nannie or, if men were never like that, by an automaton like the mechanical chessplayer one kept on reading about in the newspapers. This man’s hair and beard flowed in thick curling chestnut waves, his head recalled one of the nobler and newer plaster casts in an art school, and his pince-nez trembled perpetually like the organ of a highly discriminating sixth sense. He held a black bag as if its contents were magical. Retaining her hand too long, and looking at her with unnecessary intensity, he explained that he had been unable to obey his colleague’s summons earlier because of circumstances which he left vague, but not so vague that they could be suspected of being unimpressive, while vague enough to prevent him being accused of boastfulness. But he dropped her hand when he looked past her and saw Nikolai, who indeed looked almost as much out of place in the coquettishly curtained bed as if he had been a horse or a bull. He was sitting up, almost the whole of his great torso free of the bedclothes, and he was saying angrily, “If I were anointed with the holy oil I might know what I really feel about Kamensky. As it is, I can’t be sure. I can’t understand how God can do this thing to me, to bring me here where there is no oil, no possibility of Holy Unction.”

“What is he saying?” asked the Professor. “My colleague Professor Saint-Gratien tells me that you are Russian. Of modern languages I speak a tolerable English, German, Italian, some Flemish, and even a little Syrian.” He spoke with an air of humility which would have been appropriate if he had been admitting that he could just read and write. “But Russian, no. Is he delirious?”

“Who is not delirious?” asked Nikolai, in French. “I was, however, saying something entirely reasonable at that moment. I was saying I wished to have something like your rite of Extreme Unction, only this is for people not dying but simply, like myself, temporarily not in perfect health.”

“Perhaps we can arrange that you need not go without this fortification of the spirit,” said the Professor. “The town of Grissaint has more resources than the passing stranger might guess. We must make an effort,” he said, turning to Laura, “for it’s sound medical practice to put the patient’s mind to rest before we start on correcting his body.”

“I think you’d better get on with his body,” said Laura. “The ceremony he wants takes seven priests, and they all have to have special wands, and there has to be some wheat, and I think that has to be special too. The ceremony must be immensely long.”

“The rites of the Church and the State cannot possibly be too long,” said Nikolai, in French, “for one couldn’t possibly spend time in a better way. Your mother should have made such a fundamental principle quite clear to you.”

“She has, really she has,” said Laura. “My brothers and I find the Trooping of the Colour awfully long, and she’s always told us that we shouldn’t mind. But this gentleman is a doctor, Grandfather, if we don’t talk about your illness he won’t get on to his other patients.”

“Go to those other patients at once, my dear doctor,” said Nikolai. “Don’t trouble about me. Not that I’m ungrateful for your visit. I’ve a great admiration for French doctors. I’ve known several and my mother when old and my wife when young were treated by your admirable Dr. Jean Pehan. But I myself am in no need of your services, all I want is some rest before I make the long journey back to Russia. My granddaughter is unnecessarily alarmed about me, young girls are often hysterical. It is iron, I seem to remember, that excitable young girls require. Prescribe her some iron. And tell her that I’ll be fit to travel to Paris tomorrow.”

“But how can I tell Mademoiselle any such thing until I have examined you?” asked the Professor, with an air of cunning, looking at Laura to be sure she had observed the ruse and was admiring it.

“I have been caught up in something,” sighed Nikolai. “Do what you want with me. I feel as if I had let myself in for being fitted for a lot of clothes I shall never wear. Make haste. I want to think.”

When Laura got back to the salon Catherine had taken away the tray with the chicken on it, but had left the bottle of still champagne and a glass. “How funny she should think I would want to drink more of that stuff,” she thought, “but then lots of people like it. Next time she comes I’ll get her to bring me something really nice, like Evian or Vichy or orangeade.” The emptiness of the room now seemed a threat that she had come to a place, or a time, where there was nothing. She would have liked to take down a ledger from the shelf over the desk, or to open the decaying hat-box, just to assure herself that objects existed and actions were performed, that people kept accounts and made hats, wore hats, travelled with hats; but her fastidiousness disliked touching other people’s belongings. She went to the window and knelt beside it. Now only one side of the paved street below was gilded by the sun, and the town was awake again, customers were going in and out of the shops, coming out brightly coloured from the doorways, crossing the pavements and entering the shadows and turning gray. The child and her book and the mongrel at her feet were on the sunlit side and shone in the strong oblique rays, their shadows lying long on the pavement, parallel with the shop-front. The little girl was not moving, she was simply waiting for her father.

X

The doctor touched Laura on the shoulder. She had fallen asleep while she was praying for a miracle which would bring her father to her at once, faster than the railway could do it. Looking up at the doctor, she asked, “How ill is my grandfather?”

“It’s not easy to say.” He had lost all his affectation. His fine head was less like a plaster cast, he was blinking and polishing his pince-nez. The gesture sent a shudder running through her. The lenses might be clear glass. He might be on the other side, one of Kamensky’s men. True, his eyes, which were singularly beautiful, violet-blue and set far apart, had grown soft with concern for her grandfather, and even seemed to be a little moist as they met hers. That meant nothing: Kamensky would choose his lieutenants from people who could look like that when they did not mean it. But her suspicions left her, for he began to speak with a bewilderment which could not be pretence. It had the prick of hurt pride, and deceivers, she had noticed at school, were always proud of themselves.

He was saying that he could not understand her grandfather’s case. The Count ought to be very ill, to go by his pulse, his blood-pressure, his respiration. “Yet he’s fully conscious, he’s talking vigorously, and he grasped my hand a minute or two ago—thinking we were saying good-bye, though of course I’ll be looking in every couple of hours or so—quite firmly, indeed, quite painfully. I understand he had a shock?”

“A shock?”

“Yes, I understand there was a man on the train—”

How could he know that? He must be one of them.

“A Russian, wasn’t it?” She could not speak. “Did I make a mistake then? Didn’t Professor Saint-Gratien tell me that you and your grandfather had been bothered by some Russian on the train?”

“Oh, that. Yes, of course. There was a tiresome Russian on the train. I’d forgotten that. But it was nothing.”

“Odd, I understood from my colleague that he thought you had been quite upset over it.”

“No. Not really. To tell you the truth, I didn’t quite understand what was going on, but it was nothing my grandfather couldn’t have dealt with ordinarily, in spite of his age. They’re wonderful people, his family,” she told him, her voice shrill, as if she were lodging a complaint. “I can say it without being conceited, for I’m half-English. What they are is diluted in me. But the whole strength, it’s something tremendous. And for the family, he’s not very old. My mother says most of their relatives live into the eighties. Oh, you don’t know what the Slavs are like. They’re not like us, those people at the other end of Europe.” At the thought of the power of some of them, and how it might be exercised, she went over to a chair at the other side of the room and sat down with her head in her hands. “They’re not Europeans at all.”

The Professor murmured, “Yes, everybody knows that the Russians are formidable, formidable. But all the same,” he objected sadly, “even Russians don’t live for ever.”

“No,” she agreed bleakly. “We don’t live for ever. We haven’t the prescription for that.”

“Not even for long, with such a pulse, such blood-pressure, such respiration rate. No, really, that he can’t do. Whoever he is. Is it really impossible, as Professor Saint-Gratien says you feel it is, for your mother to come from Paris? You’re quite sure?”

As she shook her head she thought, “Will they never leave me alone?” It appeared the only sensible thing that she would have to tell them the truth, but that was impossible. “No, I’m sorry, if my mother was told she might tell a man who would come and kill my grandfather and me. Who is he? Well, he’s two people. Gorin and Kamensky.” But it sounded sheer madness.

“I’m sorry to hear it. For this is going to be a very harrowing sickbed. Your grandfather, he’s in a highly emotional state. He cried out to me that he must go back to Russia, and that at once. I’ve never heard anything like the passion behind his cries. I avoid dishonesty in dealing with my patients, what happens to them is the will of the good God and it is my duty to acquaint them with it, but I felt obliged to assure him that he would be able to start on the journey after a few days’ rest, may God pardon me for the falsehood.”

His eyes lay on her with a certain fixity. It might have been that he was racking his brains to think of a way to help her, it might have been that he did not believe her. But in any case, he was not being annoyed with her for being in a difficult position, making him feel he ought to do something about it. Gratefully, she said, “But don’t worry about me. My father’s coming. He’ll start from London the very moment he can. I’ll be all right.”

“But have you heard definitely that he’s on his way? I understood from my colleague that—”

“No. But he’ll come.”

“I wish you had heard from him. A telegram or a telephone message. I know from experience how difficult it can be to get in touch with relatives in cases of emergency. There seems to be a malignant fate at work—”

“But it’ll be easy to find my father. He’ll be either at home or at the House of Commons. There’s nowhere else he could be. He’s sure to come.”

“All the same,” sighed the Professor, “I wish you’d had an answer.” There was a knock at the door and he grew calmer. “This may be some message. Come in, come in.”

Something had gone wrong. The chambermaid Catherine came in slowly, her mouth a little open, her pale eyes wide, plainly the bearer of news so bad, and yet not so very bad, that they were enjoyable. “Professor,” she said, “Monsieur Saint-Gratien has sent along Madame Verrier to nurse the Duke.”

“Madame Verrier!” repeated the Professor. “Not Madame—” his voice cracked—“Verrier?”

A little woman with clear-cut features pushed past Catherine, dark and pale and slight, wearing a severe coat and skirt and hat, like a man’s, and carrying a black bag. Lowering her head as if about to butt, she said, “I am a qualified nurse as well as a midwife. And there’s someone ill here, isn’t there? So why are you surprised to see me, Monsieur the Professor?”

“My grandfather is your patient,” said Laura, going into an impersonation of her mother, and holding out her hand. “I’m so glad you have come. I am Laura Rowan. How do you do?”

The woman made a truce with the world just long enough to return the greeting, then said, “Now perhaps I might be taken to the patient, Professor.” They went into the bedroom and Laura was left with Catherine, who was still breathing heavily. “You know Madame Verrier?” asked Laura. “Why are you surprised to see her? Doesn’t she nurse as a regular thing?”

“Oh, yes, she’s a regular nurse. But it’s not suitable,” said Catherine. “It’s funny of Professor Saint-Gratien to have sent her. That’s all.”

“Isn’t she a good nurse?”

“Oh, yes,” said Catherine, looking this way and that in embarrassment. “She’s a good nurse all right. She never has an accident. Not like the others. But it’s not suitable.”

“Lots of things that aren’t suitable are happening today,” said Laura. Then she caught her breath. “Madame Verrier isn’t connected with Russia in any way, is she?”

“With Russia? No. Whatever made you think that? We’ve no Russians here in Grissaint except some students at the medical college, and a doctor or two, and she’s nothing to do with them. She’s the daughter of Brunois the watchmaker down by the Prefecture.”

“She isn’t mixed up with politics? She isn’t a revolutionary, you know what I mean, a nihilist, someone who would throw bombs?”

“Heavens, no. I never heard her worst enemies say that about her. She’s not a Catholic, of course, that she couldn’t be, doing what she does. That’s why Professor Barrault doesn’t like her. He’s a very good Catholic, the President of all our Catholic societies.”