The Birds Fall Down (42 page)

“In a minute, in a minute,” said Saint-Gratien. “The little one’s loving it, she’s like me, she’s got vulgar tastes.”

“What were we talking about?” The landlord inquired. “Not surely just about escutcheons. A noble but not a fruitful subject. Ah, it’s about these rooms. They’re rented to the last gentleman who has a right to display that escutcheon we’ve been speaking of, who’s now a brigadier in a colonial regiment. He’s been my tenant ever since his father sold his house to the company of Grissaintois citizens which employs me, and in which my father held considerable shares, though what has happened to them I hardly know. This furniture you see around us came from the suite on the floor below which he occupied as a youth, chairs and tables, they all came upstairs, along with his hat-box and those ledgers, and his overcoat and his frac, which are in the wardrobe next door. I wish I liked him better, didn’t feel so uneasy when he’s staying here, it’s his eyes, they follow one as if there was some question of owing him money. But it’s not because I can’t like him that I sometimes let this room, though strictly speaking it’s let to him. But I have my reasons, in fairness to myself I must point out that I have my reasons.”

“What are they?” asked Saint-Gratien cynically.

The landlord looked blank. Then his face brightened. “For one thing, there’s Christianity. Or the religion of humanity. Call it what you like, which makes it impossible to turn away those in need of shelter, like Mademoiselle and her poor grandfather, the Archduke, who is no longer with us. But it’s not only that, it’s my moral obligation to the Brigadier himself. He tells me not to let the rooms, but he’s insane about them being kept clean, running his finger round the highest ledge, asking me if it’s cleaned out regularly, with those dunning eyes of his. But, oh, if I didn’t let the rooms from time to time when he’s away, then he’d have something to grieve over! Just think, Professor, just think what would happen!”

“Well, what would happen?” asked Saint-Gratien, wickedly.

“What would happen?” He could not find an answer for a moment. “Why,” he cried happily, “no chambermaid will keep a room clean if it isn’t going to be let, everybody who has ever run a hotel will tell you that. If I just locked up this suite, as he wants me to do, in no time you wouldn’t be able to see out of the dirty windows, the curtains would be in rags, there’d be cobwebs everywhere, the carpets would be in holes, the furniture would lose all its polish, the castors would come off the chairs, and, heaven help us, I haven’t thought of the worst catastrophe, there might be a fire. Why do you laugh? Easily, easily, there might be a fire, disaster might fall on the possessions of this last survivor of our greatest Grissaintois family, poor possessions but possessions, nevertheless, which he had entrusted to my care, under the roof, which allowing for alterations, quite extensive on this side of the establishment, may be said to have protected him when he still knew the affection of a father, yes, and of a mother, why should she be forgotten? No, that, that I couldn’t do!”

Exultant, he made a long arm again, and took to himself Monsieur Saint-Gratien’s glass. “To your health, the friend of all Grissaint, the greatest of surgeons in France, in Europe, in the whole world,” he said, “and let me drink to you also, Madame Verrier, so bold, so courageous, so heroic—”

“Yes, yes,” Saint-Gratien interrupted, “let’s drink to Madame Verrier rather than to myself, a toast to Madame Verrier, and then let’s go downstairs, you and I.”

“But not without expressing our full gratitude to her,” said the landlord, his eyes growing moist, “for if she withheld her aid from those hapless girls who call her blessed, what would they face but death and despair followed by a life of shame—”

“It’s time you and I left the ladies,” said Saint-Gratien, springing to his feet.

“But I can’t go yet, I can’t leave the ladies without making a certain matter to them clear,” protested the landlord, as Saint-Gratien laid a hand on his arm, “and offer my apologies, for they’re victims of my carelessness. For I’ve only one key to this room. There’s another, but the Brigadier, with his foolish obsession about the room, his blindness to his true interests, he’s laid hold of that. At this moment it’ll be in Korea, in Seoul, to be exact. But I can’t find my own key. ‘Where can it be?’ I ask myself. Can I have let it fall into the hands of an unauthorized person? No, a thousand times no. If I have a fault, it’s that my sense of duty is too strict. Well, anyway, whoever I gave it to, he left the room unlocked and didn’t return the key, and probably for a reason with which we must all sympathize, for great happiness leaves us, as I’m sure the doctor will agree, in a state of confusion. Out of these rooms, out of the hotel, he went, whoever he was, feeling as if he had wings—”

“Let us go downstairs together and look for that key,” said Saint-Gratien, slipping his arm under the landlord’s armpit, and getting him out of his chair and over to the door in a single quicksilver movement, his eyes bright with exasperation and amusement.

“Useless, we might as well stay here,” said the landlord, trying to sink back into his chair.

“Then we’ll try and find some champagne instead,” said Saint-Gratien.

“But I never touch it,” said the landlord, “except at some innocent child’s first communion, or,” he turned his head to explain to Laura, “the wedding of some young lady, the touching wedding of some young lady like yourself. Don’t you, Professor, find something inexpressibly touching about the wedding of some young lady who is, if you understand me, Professor, such a bride as we are sure Mademoiselle will be?”

“Out, out,” said Saint-Gratien, “and quickly.”

Laura laughed aloud. Those people in the
Arabian Nights
called calendars, who were always reaching out for the wine-cup again and again and accounting for their position by claiming that they had been turned into apes or a copper horse had bolted with them; they must have been like the landlord. But Madame Verrier gave only a twisted smile and got on at once with the business of finding cushions for her armchair and unfolding a blanket. She looked smaller than she had done. Laura offered to give up the camp-bed to her, as she had had two hours of sleep, but was refused, and she lay listening to the soft boom of the dance-music and looking at the stucco garlands on the ceiling, which shifted from high relief to low, as the gaslight wavered, while Madame Verrier padded about getting ready for the night. Once there was a flutter of movement and she remarked in a cold, resolute voice, “When women are free, they will no longer wear corsets.” She was evidently getting back to her usual self. When she had turned down the gas to a small trembling source of twilight and settled in her chair, she yawned piteously, but Laura had to ask the question which was on her mind.

“Did all that nonsense the landlord talked mean that we can’t lock the door?”

Madame Verrier’s answer came like a shot from a gun. “Exactly. But don’t be frightened. I won’t leave the room.”

It was disconcerting when older people showed themselves innocent. This woman had no idea that someone might come in the night so ruthless that it would not matter whether she stayed in the room. There lay like a bar across the darkness behind her eyelids the image of her grandfather, stretched on his bed in the other room, within a shell of discoloured light, which was his Asiatic part disengaging itself as all his human characteristics were disengaging themselves from his body, which was finished, ended. When he totally abandoned his body perhaps his memory would go as well. The dead, she had heard from an Orthodox priest, could not forget the relatives, whom God had chosen for them, but companions whom they had brought to themselves by their own will they might not remember except by God’s special grace. If that were so, then her grandfather might have forgotten Kamensky, and only herself and Chubinov knew what Kamensky really was; and Chubinov was far away now, probably lost to her, up to the neck in the pit of some misadventure. She saw him lolloping down an alley, towards a full moon low over the rooftops, in some town where he had not intended to be, pursued by people who thought he was someone else. She was alone in the universe with Kamensky. She should be glad that Madame Verrier, not knowing what Kamensky was, would be willing to attack him if he came into the room. She wished that her grandfather had been more appreciative of Madame Verrier. True, he had spoken about her in Russian, but she must have been hurt when he sent her out of the room and let the doctors stay. It was a pity, for if he had recovered he would have given her a lavish present, forcing on her asceticism some indulgence she would have enjoyed, perhaps a fur coat. Both her grandfather and her grandmother liked making presents, as they liked food and drink, and so did Tania, who got high-coloured and flushed on it.

That afternoon, two summers ago, in Tania’s bedroom, when the floor had been covered with the pale yellow buckram hat-boxes, had ended in such drunkenness. One of the hats excited doubts in Hélène, the lady’s maid, as soon as she took it out of its tissue paper. Her lower lip protruding, she brought it over to the dressing-table and Tania cried, “Well, here we evidently haven’t done well for ourselves, but don’t look like that about it, when you stick out your lip like that anybody could see that you come from a rugged mountain district where they have avalanches. We have snow but no avalanches in Russia. She comes,” she explained over her shoulder to Susie, “from Auvergne.” “But never returns there,” said Hélène, “not like this hat, which is going to return to its box, and return to the shop.” “But let me look at myself for a minute,” said Tania. “You can do that, but I won’t trouble to pin it on,” said Hélène. Tania shouted with laughter at her reflection. “Look what an awful face I really have! How is it people don’t notice it? I look like the plain sister, the one that never got married, or one of those blond cows Paris Bordone painted. How can I have chosen it?” “Because you were alone,” said Hélène, “the Duchess always took me with her.” “Well, that I can’t do, because I never know till the last moment when I’m going. But ah! ah!” Her voice soared into a sweet rowdiness. “I know quite well why I chose it! I watched a woman on the other side of the room try it on, and she looked charming. And why? Because she had fine, fine, fine little bones, like you, Susie.” She whirled round on her chair, snatching the hat from her head. “You’ll look an angel in it! Come and try it on. I’ll make you a non-birthday present of it.” She jumped to her feet and sprawled magnificently through space as painted goddesses sprawl across palace ceilings, holding out the hat as if it were a crown she had proffered to another goddess. It was all too much for Susie, who shrank into smiling, disconcerted waifdom. She did not rise at once, but gently cooed that, oh, no, such things were not for her, and went on pressing down one hand on Tania’s broad soft bed, and pressing it down again, as a cat sometimes kneads a sofa or a comfortable chair.

Laura wished that afternoon had not come into her mind. She supposed it seemed repellent now because mean people would think that Tania had made a fool of herself giving Susie that, when Susie could have gone to Paris and bought a hundred hats from Caroline Reboux without feeling any the poorer. Also, it might have been that suspicion about Susie, but there was no evidence for that. Laura told herself she must forget it. She freed her right hand from the sheets, and let it lie on the coverlet, in case her grandfather wanted to hold it. The dance-music distressed her with its hobnailed boots; she saw Elodie and the Captain, Madame Barrault and the General, poor Professor Barrault and the General’s wife, dancing awkwardly in the yellowness cast by the chandeliers, enemy of the whiteness which had been there this morning. It was strange that once a chandelier had been lit, though that was the very purpose for which it had been made, it lost its place among the magically pure things, swans, snow, icicles, moonbeams, Northern Lights. But as she lay there the ballroom returned to what it had been, to what it always ought to be, flooded with undiluted light, save for the gods and nymphs, white like the icing on a wedding-cake, and the nun-like women tending the floor and the men with green baize aprons gentling the harp and setting up the music-stands, all with a priestly lack of haste, so seriously that they were either serving other darker gods elsewhere or knew that these gods would have to change their substance before they were done. On the top of the ladder the girl still wrote great O’s on the highest pane of the window with her yellow duster, O, I love you! O, I adore you! O, come soon and save me! The young man at the foot of the ladder holding a sheet of music, covered with great O’s, sang nothing but made more O’s with his open mouth, O, I love you! O, I adore you! O, come soon and save me!

Suddenly Laura came out of sleep and found herself sitting up in bed. The music had stopped. Clear across the town came the lurching and panting of a starting train. Though the light was dim she saw that Madame Verrier was asleep. She was huddled in her chair as if she were never gallant, her hands lax in her lap, her head hanging defeated on one side. It was true, Laura thought, what Chubinov had said when he bent over Nikolai at the station, that it was a crime to waken any sleeper. Chubinov was not so silly, her grandfather had been right about him. She dropped back on the pillow; and mercifully the bed creaked, and Madame Verrier stirred and opened her eyes and said thickly, “Mademoiselle?”

“I heard a train, could my father have come by that?”

Madame Verrier blinked at the window. “No, it’s still dark. That would be the late express from Paris.” She burrowed down into the chair and was asleep. The music started again. Laura pulled her sheet over her face and cried a little. The phosphorescent length of her grandfather stretched across the dark lining of her lids again. What had happened to him happened to everyone. That was harder to believe than any fairy-tale. Shuddering, she slept, but not for long. There was a soft knock on the door, and another, and another. As she hurried to the door she hoped her father would not be too angry because she was barefoot.

XII