The Birds Fall Down (49 page)

Edward Rowan was about to take up his pen, but turned to Kamensky. “But the way, surely your name is not Menshikov?”

Kamensky gave a restrained smile, amused, but not presuming to invite a superior to share his amusement, yet indicating that it was there to be shared, should superiority condescend. Her temper flared up at the joke this powerful man had played on her grandfather for years, in St. Petersburg and in the apartment in the Avenue Kléber, that he was now preparing to play on her father, by building up, brick by brick, a huge construction of lowliness.

“No,” he said, “that’s not my name. To a Frenchman one Russian name is the same as another. At least, I hope that’s the reason why the Professor made the mistake, for I wouldn’t like to think anything about me had reminded him of the most celebrated of the Menshikov family, the Marshal who had the temerity to cheat Peter the Great out of a hundred thousand roubles over a wheat swindle. Anyway, the Professor must be pardoned for forgetting the quite uninteresting fact that I’m Alexander Gregorievitch Kamensky.”

Edward made a slight inclination of the head. “I’d not forgotten it. I hope the Professor doesn’t get his medical facts as mixed. I suppose the old gentleman did get as good medical attention as he needed.”

“You needn’t have a moment’s anxiety on that count. Not one moment. I have friends in the town. I went to see them early this morning. They tell me that Professor Barrault, the one with the inordinate affection for the classics, is the dean of the medical college here, and has a high reputation, and that the other Professor, Saint-Gratien, has an even higher reputation. He is a Grissaintois, but was a distinguished surgeon in Paris till his father died and left him the old family house in town and a property near the coast, which influenced him to take a chair in the college. The only thing against him is that, unfortunately, he is a supporter of Captain Dreyfus.”

Laura and her father stared at him in sudden unity. “I’m not likely to think any the worse of him for that,” said Edward Rowan dryly.

Kamensky was taken aback. He jerked up his head and there was rage and bewilderment and shame on his face. She could see him, when he got back to that little room in the Hôtel de Guipuzcoa et de Racine, or it might be the Hôtel San Marino, whichever he got back to first, sitting on his bed and writing in a little notebook, probably in code, that English reactionaries were for some reason not anti-Dreyfusards, his mouth savage under his beard, because for once an insincerity had misfired, and also he had been misinformed. She could have laughed aloud, she was not sure she had not done so. Kamensky neatened his face and said in tones of melancholy sweetness, “Also, Professor Saint-Gratien is known to have an unfortunate attachment.”

After a pause Edward said slowly, scribbling on the blotting paper, “Ah, an unfortunate attachment.”

“To a most unsuitable person. So my friends in the town tell me. It has caused quite a scandal. Many people say he is finished, his career ruined. Our hypocritical society does not forgive. I believe it’s so in your country too.” He sighed and dropped a single monosyllable as if it were a tear-drop. “Dilke,” he said.

Slowly Edward tore up the blotting paper and dropped the fragments in the wastepaper basket. “Well, if the doctors are really first-class men, then it can have made no difference that I wasn’t there.”

“None at all,” said Kamensky. Then the words forced themselves out of his mouth. “Except for Miss Laura.”

“I was all right,” she told him coldly. Again her temper rose against both of them. Kamensky was exploiting her to torment her father; and her father was being stupid about Kamensky. He was being taken in by Kamensky more thoroughly than she had ever been, accepting him on his own terms as a little underling, a bottle-washer, a nobody. Even she had had the wits to guess from time to time that he had crossed the line and won a place among the people who mattered, though she had been fooled into thinking that he had earned it by loyalty. He had not noticed that Kamensky’s annoyance at being wrong about their attitude to Dreyfus was that of a man who finds himself wrong and is accustomed not only to being right but to being told that he is right. Just for the moment he had been like one of her father’s grander friends, Cabinet Ministers or Ambassadors, if, at Sunday luncheon, somebody worsted them in argument. Then in revenge for having been proved wrong, he had said that thing, that poisoned thing, about an unfortunate attachment, and her father had not seen its malice. She must separate the two men. She leaned forward and said, her voice cracking, “Don’t you want to see grandfather? Let’s go up together?”

“Yes, it would be a good thing to get it over, we must leave for the station some time soon.” Edward pushed back the heavy chair, took a step towards the door, halted and turned to Kamensky with a courtesy obviously framed to put an inferior at his ease. “Since you’ve been such a good friend to my wife’s family, and so kind to my daughter, I should be glad if you’d accompany us.”

Kamensky bowed his head modestly. “You are doing me a great honour.”

Laura did not move. It was not fair. Not only was she not going to see her father alone, Kamensky had got his wish and would invade her grandfather’s room. By now Nikolai would be farther on his way to God, he might not mind so much. Yet surely his honour, vulnerable to insult as it had been to injury by the Tsar, would cling about his body. There came a knock at the door, and in her absorption in questions of where her grandfather’s soul might be in eternity and his honour in time, she expected a messenger to enter who would be charged with precise answers, probably a priest of the true Church, bearded and wearing a high biretta. But it was the landlord, followed by a waiter, carrying a tray.

“This coffee is for the young lady,” he said to the waiter in an advisory tone, as if the poor fellow would have made some foolish use of it unless directed by a superior intelligence. “Good morning, Mademoiselle. Hardly can I venture to hope that you slept well, simply I must ask you to believe that I wish you had. Madame Verrier ordered this breakfast for you, she has an excellent heart in spite of everything, and I beg you not to believe all you hear. No, not a quarter of it. Where are you going with that tray, Léon? Ah. How odd I haven’t had that table-leg repaired. I cherish that table. Part of the original furniture left here by the aristocrats who gave this great house its tone. Never mind, Léon, put the tray down on the little table. But what’s that? What’s that on the little table?”

They all turned to see. He sounded as surprised as if he had caught sight of a hooded cobra.

“A bottle of cognac. How extraordinary. Ah, the mysterious things which happen even in a perfectly conducted establishment. Who can have left a bottle of cognac in my office? Not me, I swear. Wine I drink, from time to time, but not brandy. I rarely touch the stuff, not more than two or three times a year.” He weighed it in his hand. “Empty,” he murmured. “Empty. How can that be? But as I was saying, Sir Rowan—”

Kamensky was bending over the tray. “I’ll pour out your coffee, Miss Laura. Princesses should be waited on.”

She thanked him and watched closely to see he did not put anything in it.

“You see, I know how you like it. A little milk. No sugar, unless there should be a tiny lump like this. Yes, you’re quite right. I’ve never before seen you drink coffee in the morning. But I’ve sat beside you as you drank coffee after luncheon and after dinner, and on my observations I’ve based a theory regarding how you would take it at breakfast, and the theory’s correct, isn’t it?”

She knew that behind this meaningless patter there was a meaning: “I’ve watched you so carefully that I can predict anything you might say or do at any moment of the day or night. You won’t get away.” Out of pride she managed to return his smile.

“You won’t like this coffee. It’s not as you get it in Paris. There’s chicory in it. But take plenty of butter on your
croissants
. It’s the best in the world, here in Northern France.”

Again it was as if he were a cannibal and meant to eat her.

“Yes, yes,” her father was saying to the landlord, “we’ve got all we want, your staff has looked after us admirably, please don’t trouble about us any more.” Though he was an impatient man, he often lost his impatience under provocation as other people lose their tempers. He would show an astonishing forbearance to drunken cabbies, slow railway-porters, crazed beggars, which he said he had learned when he was a young officer. Old soldiers, he would say, who were drunken and slow, might have some very good qualities, such as courage and comradely kindness; and he had never been sorrier for anyone in his life than for the men who enlisted in the army because they were too eccentric to follow one of the usual trades, and were thrown out because the army found them over-eccentric too.

The landlord replied: “You’ll excuse me for making all these inquiries about your comfort. But I’m moved partly by Christian sympathy with the bereaved, which I hope is as strong in me as it is in the next man, and partly because the death of his Highness the Duke on my premises was, if you know what I mean, a challenge. I am a frustrated man. I would have loved to spend my life in the service of glory.” He looked round the dim and disordered room and put his hands to his forehead. “Nobody would believe what a headache I have this morning. But why should that be an occasion for surprise? I ran backwards and forwards from the dawn of yesterday until the dawn of today, preparing for the ball, seeing that the ball achieved itself, doing this, doing that, eating nothing, and, of course, drinking nothing. In my position a man cannot drink.”

“No, indeed,” said Edward Rowan, “and now my daughter and my friend and I must—”

“Spare me but one more minute,” said the landlord. “Among all the rich Englishmen who form your circle, do you know one who would like to buy this hotel?”

“By some odd chance, no,” said Edward Rowan, smiling.

Kamensky had started fussing about Laura’s breakfast tray again. In a low voice, as if he were offering her some confidential service of a grave nature, he told her that as he was sure she would not like the strawberry jam that had been sent in on her tray, and as there would be no marmalade in the hotel, he would be delighted to get her honey. She told him bitterly that he need not trouble, too much sweetness of any kind made her sick. He answered: “How wrong that you should not want honey. When we used to sit in the little drawing-room and you and your mother chose seats far away from the lamp, in case your grandfather should want to take up his book, your hair and your mother’s reminded me of that honey, the specially rich honey, we get in Russia.”

“Of course, of course, I realize,” the landlord was continuing, “that even the resources of such Englishmen as would be your friends must be strained by the beautiful castles you all possess, the vast studs of race-horses, your fleets of yachts, the weekend parties you give for the Prince of Wales or is he your King? But even so I would think that among your friends there must be one, perhaps of the Byron sort, who will say to you one day as you sit together in the Turkish baths of your magnificent clubs, magnificent but not ostentatious, ‘I’m tired of drawing my income from prosaic stocks and shares, I would like a financial adventure, I seek an investment with more fantasy to it, more panache,’ and you will reply, ‘My friend, I know the very thing, a hotel, but a hotel which is more than a hotel. The hearth of one of the greatest families of France, a hearth still warm, never allowed to get cold, tended by persons insignificant, yes, in themselves, but not without sentiment.’ Your friend, believe me, will answer, ‘I can hardly believe that such an opportunity exists,’ and he will not wait till you have brought him here.”

His spreading arms and upturned eyes suggested that he was standing in some immense hall, but as his gaze followed his expository gesture, his face fell. “Seeing all these papers scattered about this office, you might suppose them bills. A pardonable error, none of us can help being infected by the cynicism of the modern world. But an error all the same. These papers are receipts. Oh, there may be a bill or two among them, one here or there, but all the rest are receipts so many that the stamps on them must go far to paying the salaries of all our local officials. Ah, that reminds me. My primary purpose in coming here was to bring you the papers which have been sent along from the Town Hall this very moment—this very moment—”

Edward Rowan sighed. His good humour was wearing thin. “Hand them over, there’s a good fellow, we’re in a hurry, we must be getting on to Paris.”

The landlord stood by the desk for a moment or two, but Edward Rowan did not look up from the papers. “It’s of no consequence,” said the landlord at last, in a bright voice. There was no response, and he tried a second time. “It doesn’t matter at all.” When there still was no response, he shook his head and made his way to the door. As he passed Laura his moist eyes looked into hers, and she smiled and said, “The
croissants
are delicious.”

The landlord waved his hand towards them, as if encouraging them in their deliciousness. There came the mince-pie smell again, but not as strong as it had been yesterday. “Ah, Mademoiselle, it’s only an accident which has caused me to offend Sir Rowan. All would have gone well if Napoleon had been allowed to live out his life. These papers, these papers, these insupportable papers, he would have rid France of them by one of those simple edicts with which his genius so often inspired him.” He slunk out soft-footed as a beaten dog.

Kamensky had drawn his chair close to hers, and though his head was bowed she knew he was looking at her obliquely. He muttered that it was a long time since he had breakfasted, and he would be glad if he might finish what she had left half-eaten on her plate. That was surprising. The pale gold feathers of the bitten pastry merged into a streak of the more golden butter among the crumbs on the china, and she would not herself have cared to eat anything like that from somebody else’s plate. “Shan’t we ring and get the waiter to bring you a fresh one?” she suggested, but he shook his head saying, with a curious, bashful obstinacy, “It’s that one I want.” It occurred to her that he really felt faint after his long fast, and that he feared it would take a long time to get hold of the waiter, and then she gave it to him gladly. It was pleasant to give food to anybody hungry, no matter who it was. She forgot for the moment that he meant to kill her.