The Birds Fall Down Read online

  “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.

  Laura looked at her other magazines and found that they were all pour les jeunes filles. She was surprised, she thought that Monsieur Kamensky had realized that she was practically grown-up. But in one there was an article about the Angkor Wat, with beautiful photographs of the profuse jungle pressing in on a profusion of towers and domes and terraces and carved images. “I must go there,” she thought, “I must go there soon. I would like to see all Asia and all America.” Then the corridor door slid open and someone came into the compartment. She looked up in annoyance, supposing it would be the ticket-collector, who would wake up her grandfather. But it was a passenger, a middle-aged man, carrying one of those satchels used only by schoolchildren in England but by quite grown-up men on the Continent. She went back to her book, wondering why he remained standing when the two middle seats on each side of the carriage were free. He was probably going to be a fussy fellow-traveller, since he was changing his compartment.

  Still standing, he said, “Good morning, Miss Laura.”

  He had spoken in Russian. But he was not one of the Russians she knew. She had not met him in Paris or in London. Slowly she said, “Good morning, Monsieur,” taking a good look at him, and was still sure that she had never seen him before. He was middle-sized, lean and pale, with unkempt hair and meagre beard and moustache, all mouse-brown, and grey eyes behind spectacles. He would have passed unnoticed if it had not been that he was very badly dressed. His greatcoat looked like a dressing-gown, for it was made of an odd fawn-and-blue striped material and too loosely cut, and it was worn carelessly, the belt twisted, the collar half up, half down. He looked Russian, she would have known he was that, even if he had never opened his mouth.

  He had the high cheekbones and that air of being in the middle of thinking about something important. She knew too that he was a gentleman, like her grandfather, like her father. But neither of them would have chosen this man as their friend. She could not have said why. He was in one place, they were somewhere else; it was just that. But it was usually people less fortunate than her grandfather and father who carried such satchels, people who worked in offices and banks as clerks, and this satchel was worn and battered; and so was the hat he held in his other hand. If he were poor, she had to be polite. So, though she did not want at all to speak to him, she said, trying to smile, “How do you know my name is Laura?”

  “Well, you’re Tania Nikolaievna’s daughter, aren’t you? Well then,” he said with an air of cold logic, “you must be Miss Laura.”

  “But how do you know anything about my mother, how do you know anything about me? Do tell me,”
she said, forcing the smile, “who you are.”

  He gave no answer and stood contemplating her grandfather.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “You belong, Miss Laura,” he said, as if he had not heard, “to a remarkably handsome family. Look how splendid Nikolai Nikolaievitch is. What a unit! His skeleton and his muscular system are so perfect that when he is relaxed not one part of them gives way, they remain in a state of equilibrium. This is because he is an aristocrat and therefore has been adequately nourished since he was an infant.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Not so,” he said in English, “are our Russian peasants, not so the wretched workmen who labour in our Russian cities.” He waited as if for a compliment, so she told him that his accent was remarkable. He looked happy for a second, bowed, and then went back to Russian. “I have to admit that your grandfather is a work of art, though I think the cost of producing him has been too great. A part of me, the same part which insists on still enjoying the Imperial Ballet when I have the opportunity of seeing it, insists on enjoying him. I would like to go on looking at him as he is now for quite a long time, and I regret that I must wake him up.”

  “But you can’t do that.” Suddenly she felt frightened. She knew she was talking nonsense. This shabby man could wake her grandfather and do much besides, though what that was she did not precisely know. “My grandfather,” she said, “isn’t very well. Things worry him. He’s had a bad time lately. You mustn’t wake him up, really you mustn’t.”

  “But I must,” said the stranger, “we have to talk about something very important.”

  “Nowadays there’s only one thing which is important to him,” Laura said, “and I don’t think you can know anything about that.”

  “But that’s the thing I want to talk to him about,” said the shabby man.

  She said, “But how could you know anything about it? All he wants is—” she paused. One never talked of one’s family affairs to outsiders. But for the last minute or so she had suddenly become aware that all rules were suspended, a cold feeling crept over her scalp. She went on, “Nothing matters to him except being pardoned by the Tsar, and you can’t have been sent by the Tsar, he wouldn’t send somebody to speak to my grandfather in a train. So let him sleep. Please, please go away.” She found she had risen to her feet. But anything she could say or do would be inadequate. This man had some sort of advantage over her and everybody else in the carriage. It was as if they had met to perform a play and he was the only actor who had seen the script and learned his lines, while the rest of them had to improvise. The women sitting opposite were watching with intense but placid curiosity, as if he were indeed an actor and what he was doing could have no consequences in the real world. Yet it could for her and her grandfather. He had shifted his stance so that he stood between her and the corridor door, still carrying his battered satchel in the one hand, the battered hat in the other, but spreading his arms wide. He did not mean her to get past him. “There’s always the communication cord,” she thought. “But who ever really pulled that? And he wouldn’t let me get there. He’s quick on his feet.” She turned her head to the window and scanned the moving landscape as if a tree, the mass of a hill on the skyline, or a church-spire might signal her instructions for her next move. Now it was no help to speculate how Edward Rowan or Tania would have met the occasion, for she did not believe they could have done so. Out of her confusion came the clear knowledge, “This man is on the other side. Of course. Monsieur Kamensky said they were everywhere. He means to do something dreadful to my grandfather. I’ll have to stop him.” Everything was glassy, time had slowed down, it was like the moment after one has dived and is deep down in the water and it has not begun to lift one to the surface. She found herself repeating, “Let my grandfather sleep. Please let him sleep.”

  She must have spoken quite loudly, for Nikolai stirred and muttered. The shabby man put down his satchel and his bowler on the seat, removed his spectacles, took another pair from his pocket, put them on very carefully, still taking care to keep between Laura and the door, and bent over Nikolai, peering down into his face. Recoiling, he made a gesture as if he were going to cross himself, but stopped it, and exclaimed softly, “How he has altered since I last saw him!”

  Laura said, “Why, you really know him.”

  The shabby man was trembling. “Know Nikolai Nikolaievitch? Since my childhood. What have they done to him since then! I can see that he is a greater man than he set out to be. But the sight of him has sent me back to the days when I talked nonsense, and had not seen the light of reason, for of course he cannot be a great man at all, no man can be greater than his social function, and your grandfather has been deprived of any possibility of greatness by our present system. But I won’t deny that, looking at him now, he appears to me as great. I’m disturbed,” he said, frowning, “I’m even moved.”

  “He likes him, he even likes him very much,” she thought. It was not the words that proved it, but the blend of pity and resentment, of veneration and condescending affection in his voice. That was how all of the older people in the family spoke of her grandfather. But she had heard that terrorists considered it their duty not to be influenced by their natural feelings. They even seemed to be regarded as noble for that reason, though she could not see why. Vigilantly she watched the shabby man as he pulled her grandfather’s sleeve with fingers yellowed by nicotine, and spoke his name. There was something dangerous about even that. She covered her mouth with her hands and said, “Let him sleep, oh, let him sleep.” But the old man’s eyes opened, and when they saw the stranger grew as hard as stone.

  “Do you recognize me?”

  “Of course. You are Vassili Chubinov, Vassili Iulievitch, and your father was—your father was a noble, a very fine lawyer, and my trusted friend. You have done many things to him and to Russia which make it quite impossible that I should ever forget you or forgive you.” He looked the stranger up and down. “You not only are a liberal, you look like one. I would know that look anywhere.” He caught his breath, his teeth drove down into his lower lip, then he was calm again.

  “Why are you here? Has my time come to die?” he asked in a full strong voice. Laura sat down beside him and put her arms round him. He did not seem to notice.

  “No, it hasn’t!” exclaimed the shabby man, irritably. “You shouldn’t alarm your granddaughter unnecessarily like this. If your subordinates have done their duty properly, you should know that I’m not one of the activist members of my organization and never have been. From the first my task has been to depute and clarify the theory of our movement and give it a sound ideological basis, as well as to act as its historian. If your hirelings had shown as much intelligence in reading my letters as they have assiduity, you should have known that.” More gently he added, “So you needn’t fear death, yet, Nikolai Nikolaievitch.”

  “Fear death!” said her grandfather contentiously. They were already in the heart of an argument. They might have been bickering for hours instead of minutes. “I didn’t say anything about fearing death. I asked if my time had come to die, so that I could put myself in the proper frame of mind to enter the presence of my Creator. But fear, no. I’ve always obeyed the injunctions of the Church, I’ve been a regular communicant and I’ve kept the fasts, I’ve served God and His instrument on earth, the Tsar, and therefore when I die the saints will protect me and bring me to the feet of God, Who will forgive me my sins and I shall be raised to salvation. Why should I fear this splendid fulfilment of my destiny? I look forward to it.”

  “But that can’t be true,” said Chubinov, changing to his other pair of spectacles. “The first law of animal life is self-preservation. All living things wish to live as long as possible. Therefore you must fear death.”

  “I don’t. Try to kill me and see.”

  She hoped Chubinov would not take him up on this. It would probably be he that got killed.

  “I’ve told you,” said Chubinov, “that I’m not one of the act
ivist members of my group. But even if I were, I couldn’t kill you. I’ve a great attachment to you, Nikolai Nikolaievitch. In another form of society you might have been a remarkable person. But if you’d any of the scientific spirit you’d realize that you must fear death.”

  It was odd, Laura thought, nearly all Russians who were anybody were brought up by English governesses, but they never seemed to have been taught not to argue.

  “Nonsense. If science is anything, it’s observation,” said Nikolai. “I’m not an egotist, Heaven knows, I think nobody has ever charged me with that. But I am obliged to study myself by the Church, and as a result I know I haven’t any trace of the fear of death. It’s absurd for you, because of something you’ve read in a book, probably by an English or a French infidel, a Huxley or a Renan, to deny the truth of my own observations of myself, and it’s not the scientific spirit which impels you to this folly, it’s the spirit of godlessness, which desires that man should be indistinguishable from the brutes, and likes to imagine that a man dies like a pig or an ass or a goat, and not as a child of God.”

  “I think they’re talking about politics,” said one of the Frenchwomen to the other. “But what a language. Swish-swish-swish.”

  “Please don’t shout, Grandfather,” said Laura, “you’ll make yourself ill. Mr. Chubinov, don’t excite him any more.”

  They did not even hear her. “You’re shouting,” Chubinov told Nikolai, “because you know perfectly well that you’re defending an absurd and superstitious point of view, unworthy of a modern man.”

  “Your father never beat you enough when you were a boy.”

  “Your reference to violence shows that you are conscious how little you can defend that point of view by argument.”

  “What folly,” said Nikolai, gasping. “As if a sensible man with all reason on his side would not feel an inclination to strike an idiot who insisted on babbling blasphemies in his presence. And what an extraordinary thing for a terrorist to say. You and your friends must know that there is no logical justification for their arguments at all, for they resort to the extremest form of violence, known as murder. This man,” he told Laura, leaning back in his seat and panting, “is a murderer and the friend of murderers.”