The Birds Fall Down (41 page)

“An appropriate epitaph for Mademoiselle’s grandfather,” said Professor Saint-Gratien. He started to say something else, checked himself, had a sip of champagne, put it down, and let the suppressed remark hiss out of him. “And it would serve as well for Captain Dreyfus.”

Madame Verrier clicked her tongue in annoyance. Professor Barrault went on eating strawberry mousse as if he had not heard, but presently he pushed his plate away. “I was only trying to be pleasant,” he said. “The Count died, he wanted to go back to Russia, his longing for his fatherland was terrible to witness, and this poor young lady was compelled to be present, though the proper setting for her is the rose-garden of Bagatelle, or the Bay of Naples, or the Parthenon; and all the plans we’ve made for fetching her natural protectors seem to have gone astray. Quite a catalogue of disasters. But at least Virgil said what we all felt about the old gentleman’s death. I thought it might do the young lady good, do us all good, to hear those lines. But you, Saint-Gratien, you found it necessary to be sharp, sharp as one of your own scalpels.” He held out his glass to Madame Verrier, who, with a cluck of tenderness, filled it to the brim. She put down the bottle with a bang and Laura saw her give Professor Saint-Gratien an angry nudge. It looked as if she had kicked him quite hard under the table. “There must have been times and places in the antique world,” Professor Barrault went on, wiping his beard and moustache. A little of the strawberry mousse had gone astray. “There must have been times and places in the antique world when life was lived much more agreeably than it is today. Oh, I know the antique world had its own coldness, how should it not, when it lacked the knowledge of Christ, but it had its urbane moments when people met and were together, simply together, without pursuing their own ends or feeling anger, when they ate and drank and talked about things that had no cutting edge. Those moments must have been golden, like this champagne, this excellent champagne, which is so much better than the champagne that’s going downstairs, though I drank a lot of that too. It’s inevitable that the champagne you brought up here would be better, Saint-Gratien, you have always understood such things as I have not. But those golden moments of companionship, they’re what I long for. I wake up in the night and wish I had been born in that time, when one could simply be together in a golden moment, when life would be like a golden sphere, perfectly rounded. And it was like that just now. I thought all our differences were forgotten. And so they were. By me. But not by you. Not by you.”

“Oh, Barrault, Barrault! You should know what I am, by this time.”

“But that’s just what I don’t know, what I’ve never known. More brilliant than I am, but what else?”

“Why, I’m your devoted friend—But, ah, who’s this?”

Laura had known it was not her father; he would not have knocked on the door quite like that. There came in the landlord of the inn, who had struck Laura as possibly insincere, in the vestibule downstairs, by his insistence that it was tedious to attend to the ball and he would have liked to have given himself up to the pleasure of devoting himself to her grandfather. She did not recognize him at first, for he was now in evening clothes, and his moustache, which had been a loose bush growing round his mouth, was waxed into tight upturning points. But he bowed to her with the same humbugging air of desolation, and after he had saluted the others he said, “You must excuse this liberty, I wouldn’t intrude on this sad occasion, for sad it must be in spite of all you gentlemen are doing out of the kindness of your hearts to comfort the young lady, but I’ve been sent by Madame Barrault to tell Monsieur the Professor that in five minutes’ time Mademoiselle Elodie and Captain de Germain will be leading the quadrille, and Madame Barrault thought it would be agreeable if you and the General and his lady all sat together to watch the young people treading a measure. Not the last they’re going to tread together, I understand,” he added, coyly.

“What are you saying?” mourned the Professor. He put on his pince-nez, having a little difficulty with the ribbon, and then got out his watch, having a little difficulty with the chain, and looked at it for a long time. “That quadrille doesn’t start for another twenty minutes. I made sure of that. Twenty minutes.” His eyes fell sadly on his plate, where there were still some pink castellations of strawberry mousse, and on his glass of champagne, which Saint-Gratien had just refilled. “I’m so sorry to leave you all,” he said. “You’re such superior people. The moment was golden. Ah, Saint-Gratien, in eternity all our differences will be reconciled, we shall achieve perfect understanding. But let us go a little way towards that now. Saint-Gratien, you might have understood I’m not quite a fool, how could you think I didn’t know that Odysseus was simply nattering Nausicaä and never for a moment took her for a goddess? Of course I knew. But it’s such a beautiful speech I’ve always wished that it had been spoken sincerely. I was simply pretending that that was so, and what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, my dear, dear friend,” said Saint-Gratien. Someone called to Barrault from the corridor, his features contracted, he moved backwards towards the door, as if the voice had been a hook which had caught in his clothes and was hauling him away.

“Ah, poor Professor Barrault,” said the landlord, “it’s like being in the army for him, always under orders, but married to his dear lady, whom we all respect, there’s no Field-Marshal’s baton in his knapsack, never a chance of a senior command.” He clapped his hand over his mouth. “One must choose between being witty and keeping a hotel, particularly a hotel that caters for the quality. Surely it doesn’t show cowardice and lack of principle to realize that if Voltaire himself had kept a hotel, he would have ceased to make jokes.”

“Good night,” said Monsieur Saint-Gratien. “No, we don’t want anything more, landlord, nothing at all.” When he had gone a silence fell. Madame Verrier tapped her foot on the ground. Saint-Gratien refilled her glass and his with deliberate nonchalance, and said jauntily, “Poor old Barrault. A shame he should be so hideously bullied by that woman. Sending for him like that.” Madame Verrier said nothing. He sipped his champagne, waited, and went on, “And she’ll be unjust. If poor old Barrault’s had a drop too much, it’s just a drop, but she’ll take the hide off him, and by this time General de Germain will have drunk up the sea and all its fishes, but that’ll be different.”

Madame Verrier’s voice sprang out of her like a jack-in-the-box. “Why did you have to say that?”

“To say what?”

“What you said about Captain Dreyfus?”

“Alas, I was wrong.” He lifted his hands above his head and made the grimace of a penitent child, but she did not laugh. “I was wrong,” he repeated. “I won’t defend myself.” But a cold, silvery fire flared up in him. “Yet I will. Really, what he did was too gross. Wondering why the heavenly spirits harboured such rage against a patient of consequence, a Russian Count, a Minister of the Tsar, but refusing to put the same question about Dreyfus. And he’s too intelligent not to have seen the truth. But how well,” he sneered, “it’s suited his book to limit his intelligence on this one matter. He’s got a rich wife, they’ve got an ugly daughter, he’s toed the line, he’s come out against Dreyfus, the ugly daughter’s leading a quadrille with the son of a general who’s descended from Charlemagne, though who isn’t, by this time. I don’t like it. I can’t like it.”

“And what does it matter? What can it matter what any of these imbeciles do? But what does matter is that you took the trouble to dig up Barrault’s error when for the moment it was buried. He was at his best. He often is. You might attach some importance to the fact that he’s a good doctor. You know that’s all that matters really. But you have to say something that raised an issue on which he’s at his worst. You do that to everybody. You like to feel this town of Grissaint round you like a hollow tooth. But what feels at home in a hollow tooth? Only the germ of decay.”

“How gently,” said Saint-Gratien, in a dry voice, “you reproach me for my lack of gentleness.”

They sat in silence for a moment.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, summoning up a smile, “it’s time we left you to get to bed.”

“Yes,” agreed Madame Verrier, summoning up the same sort of smile.

“But I won’t sleep,” murmured Laura, for she felt that they should not separate at this moment. But also she liked both of them being there. Fear was above her and below her and around her.

Madame Verrier put down her glass, took out her handkerchief, and blew her nose. “Forgive me,” she said softly to Saint-Gratien, “I’m so tired.”

“I know you are,” he answered as softly.

“And you,” her voice rising in self-reproach. “You must be dead tired. Those two days of hard work in Paris. The journey back this morning. And all you’ve done since. Forgive me. Forgive me, Professor,” she added, formally.

“I’m not so tired. But I’m on edge. While I was away, it seems, my son lunched with Barrault and the worst of the anti-Dreyfusard crowd of them. A kind friend told me at the hospital.”

“I heard it too,” she said, swallowing. “Do forgive me, you know that when I’m tired I don’t think, I bark like a little dog.”

“No, you spit like a little cat,” he said and filled all three glasses again, and they all laughed and drank.

But the landlord was back with them. He shut the door behind him and leaned against it. “I sent your learned colleague down to what was waiting for him,” he said, and shook his head sadly. “You might say he’s now in custody.” He came towards the table, and Laura thought that it was odd, it was summertime but he smelled of mince-pies. But of course it was brandy that made mince-pies smell as they do. He must have had too much to drink. Like some butlers, some cooks, and a wicked cousin of her father’s.

“I’m so tired,” the landlord sighed, sinking into a chair. “Thank you for asking me to sit down,” he said, though nobody had done so, “and thank you for not asking me to have a drink. That’s most understanding of you. I’ve been running here and there all day, seeing to the thousand and one things that have to be done on the very day of the ball, no matter how hard one works beforehand, and I can do with a chair. But a glass of wine, no, indeed. Everywhere I turn someone offers me something—a cognac here, a port there, and the time comes when a wise man knows when to stop. Not another drop for me this evening,” but he made a long arm across the table to the glass of champagne Professor Barrault had been forced to abandon and brought it back to his lips. He looked over the rim at Laura’s face and bowed. “They’re in luck, those ladies downstairs, that Mademoiselle isn’t at the ball. The flower of Grissaint, of all the Pas de Calais, but who would look at them if Mademoiselle was there?” His eyes went upwards as he lifted the glass of champagne to his lips, and before he drained it he paused for a moment to breathe, so softly that the others could just hear it, the words, “The cows.” Refreshed by the draught, he continued: “Oh, it’s not right that Mademoiselle shouldn’t be there, and for such a reason. Oh, that’s most wrong of all. People keep on saying that death is no respecter of persons, but that’s just what it should be, if there was justice. You wouldn’t run a hotel without being a respecter of persons, you’d never make it pay. It wouldn’t have the right atmosphere. Well, the principle that’s right for little things is right for big things. The great should live for ever. Napoleon should never have died. Long live Napoleon,” he cried, raising his glass, but lowering it to say, “No offence to Mademoiselle. I had forgotten you were Russian, I know Napoleon burned St. Petersburg.”

“Moscow,” said Saint-Gratien.

“Say Moscow if you like,” said the landlord, “but how much rather the poor people in Moscow would have preferred it to be St. Petersburg. You have to think of other people’s point of view.” He drained the glass and said hopefully, “No, not another.”

“No, not another,” agreed Monsieur Saint-Gratien.

“No, not another,” echoed the landlord, as if reading an epitaph. “But what did I come here to say? Ah, yes, I’m so sorry not to have a bedroom for Mademoiselle, but this is a ball of the first importance. All our great families are here, it doesn’t matter where they live, Abbeville and Arras, Boulogne and Roubaix, they’re here tonight. Every room in the hotel is let, and that’s had the frightful result that never have people with such luggage as yours, Mademoiselle, come to my hotel, and I am forced to treat them like vagabonds.”

“Ah, no,” said Laura, “you’re mixing us with some other people. We didn’t bring our luggage, it went on to Mûres-sur-Mer. We’d only my grandfather’s small case.”

“But what a case,” said the landlord, “what leather! I said to myself as it was brought in, ‘If that’s their small luggage, what would I not give to see their big luggage, it must be magnificent,’ yet, I couldn’t give you a proper room. It’s my Waterloo. Poor Napoleon. Marie-Louise was quite unworthy of the honour of being his wife.”

“Let’s go downstairs,” Saint-Gratien said to the landlord, “and see how things are getting on.”

“No, let me speak frankly of my failure,” said the landlord. “You see how I was placed, don’t you? There were only these two rooms in the hotel. And why were they vacant? Well, that worries me. Will there be articles in the newspapers about your esteemed grandfather’s death? If so, I’ll ask for your discretion, because strictly speaking, these rooms were not vacant. They’re rented year in, year out, by a distinguished personage, the last representative of the family who owned this building before it was a hotel, whose palace it was. Oh, you should see the ballroom and the banquet-hall downstairs. On the mantelpiece of the banquet-hall there is carved the family escutcheon, in real marble from Italy. But, what am I thinking of, Mademoiselle, such things seem nothing to you. If you saw it you would simply say to yourself, ‘Ah, just another escutcheon,’ and you would shrug your shoulders and turn away. That’s what you would do. Shrug your shoulders and turn away.” He imitated the movement, was fascinated by it, went on and on making it.

“For heaven’s sake,” giggled Madame Verrier through her handkerchief, “send the idiot away.”