The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West Read Free Book Online Page A

a great bore, as you say in English?” asked Monsieur Kamensky, with a smile that offered complicity.
    She did not return the smile, she thought it impertinent of him to suggest that anything which her mother made her do could be a trouble or a bore. So she kept silent and looked ahead, to the golden light of the late afternoon behind the Arc de Triomphe, while her grandfather repeated, “Wherefore I cry to Thee with the voice of the Prodigal: I have sinned before Thee, O merciful God, receive me a penitent and make me as one of Thy hired servants.” But a tremor ran through him. He drove his strong white teeth down into his lower lip. “But to bring such an accusation against a Diakonov! When we have served Russia since the days of Monomach!” He raised his stick, leaned forward, and drove the ferrule into a soft spot of the coachman’s back between the ribs and the spine. “Drive home,” he shouted, “drive home, and hurry.”
    Monsieur Kamensky said pleasantly to the coachman, “The route by the Rue François Premier is the quickest. If it looks clear, let us go that way.”
    In the unhappy apartment Sofia Andreievna was sitting in the curtained dusk, and looked up at them with the protruding eyes of one stretched on the rack, and told them that she was much better. She was giving tea to a dull, sad man and woman in poorish clothes, who rose when Nikolai came in and greeted him with long, soft, involved speeches, which he returned as lengthily and not so softly, but in a muted roar that was meant to be humble. He stood huge above these people, but he bent his hugeness, he bowed to them. Laura curtsied and turned away and left the room, going along the dark corridors to her mother’s bedroom, but in there could not at first see her. Then her ear caught a quick gabble from somewhere near the floor, and she looked down and saw her mother’s hindquarters—she really did not know what one called that part of the body when it belonged to one’s mother. It was up in the air, her back sloping down to her golden head, which was right down on the carpet. Laura stood and stared. Had Tania really been prostrating herself, as she had seen the wilder-looking members of the congregation doing at the Russian church in the Rue Darou, had she been beating her forehead on the floor?
    Her mother sat up on her haunches and looked at her with vague eyes which focused sharply as she cried, “For heaven’s sake, don’t stand there looking so English. You have to help us. Mamma has to go into a clinic at Passy.”
    “To have her teeth out?”
    Tania stood up and brushed her skirts and seemed to reflect. “Yes. To have her teeth out.”
    “How can I help?”
    “We can’t have your grandfather in Paris while it’s going on. He’d want to visit her in the clinic. Also he might not approve of the people who are treating her. They’re Poles. He’d make a fuss. This is a serious matter for Grandmamma at her age, and she ought to be kept perfectly quiet. You must take him away. We simply must get him out into the country.”
    “I quite see that, he simply roared at those people who are having tea with Grandmamma. It must have hurt her head no end. He was being quite nice to them, though.”
    “Oh, he would be,” said Tania. “He has a great respect for that couple. The man’s blind and his wife has been wonderful to him.”
    “I think this must be another lot,” said Laura, “the man didn’t look blind.”
    “He doesn’t but he is. He’s very proud, apparently, and he hates to be helpless, so he tries to look as if he could see. Papa and Mamma do a lot for them and admire them enormously. But anyway, you’ve got to go and take Papa to stay with Aunt Florence at the villa at Mûres-sur-Mer. Mercifully, she’s settled down there for the summer already.”
    “What a lark,” said Laura. “When I bathe will the old lady still insist on that footman who is at least seventy-five standing with the surf boiling round his