The Birds Fall Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

this. “I wouldn’t be any good at the Russian court or the English. I’ve got to be presented next year and I hate it. I’m frightened. I’ll do the wrong thing and we’ll—” She was going to say, “We’ll all be sent to the Tower,” and then checked herself. Nikolai had been sent to the Tower.
    The servants, seeing that things were going better, were backing out. “You wouldn’t do the wrong thing, Laura,” said Tania. “I thought I would, but something comes and takes over. After all, the family has been doing it for so long, we’re wound up.” She went to stand by the fireplace, rested her elbow on the chimney-piece, between a chalcedony frog and an agate tortoise. Her small hat, trimmed with a bird, her close-fitting blouse, and her long skirt, cut in the slanting lines of a tacking yacht, gave her the shape of a swift force prepared to go into action. “After all, Laura,” she said in an undertone, “Grandmamma can’t be so bad if she goes out at all. And to one of our services. You have to be pretty strong for that. The Almighty always feels he can’t outstay his welcome with us.” To Nikolai she said, “The silly girl doesn’t realize one can do anything one really wants to.”
    “She would have looked superb in the demoiselle’s ruby velvet dress,” said Nikolai.
    “Laura doesn’t want to look superb,” said Tania. “Do remember she’s half-English, and so doesn’t care much about drama. But the English are a sentimental people. Laura prefers to love people rather than to be a person. She’s prepared to love you and Mamma though she doesn’t know you as well as I would like. She loves me,” she said, in a sudden flight of rapture, looking in the glass as if the reflection of her face confirmed what she said. “I don’t want to look as I did at my first great ball. I’d be grateful enough if I could look like myself, if I don’t just fall to pieces and be nobody, be dust. But I’m kept together because my children love me. Laura loves me quite a lot. Papa, does it mean a great deal to you that your children love you?” When he vaguely smiled and nodded, she turned round and begged him, “Hasn’t it meant a great deal to you that we love you so much, in this time, in this bad time, since all this has happened to you? Haven’t you found it true that the love of your children makes up for anything that can happen to you?”
    Nikolai answered, “Yes, yes, it means a lot. A family life is one of the few real joys we’re vouchsafed here on earth. Sit down and rest. Presently they’ll bring you some tea, some Russian tea. I hope your brothers send you tea regularly, as they do to us, real tea from Russia. But they may not, they’ve never been in England and they don’t know how dreadful English tea is. Much that’s drunk there is that rubbish from India. Even that appalling stuff from Ceylon.”
    “We love you so much,” Tania went on. She had turned again to the glass and was combing her hair with one of her hatpins. “I didn’t know till this last year how much I loved you. You and Mamma on the one hand, the children on the other. Nothing,” she said, her face distorted with pain, “can really hurt me, because of that love.” She spun round, crying, “Isn’t that Mamma talking out there in the corridor?”
    It was frightening, when one wanted one’s mother, for her to want her mother too. But that was being a selfish beast. The door did not open at once. There was a weak twisting of the handle as if someone outside was trying to turn its massiveness with one hand, and then a call for help. Then Pyotr held the door open and her grandmother came in, leaning heavily on the arm of a small bearded man whom Laura recognized as Monsieur Kamensky, though chiefly because she remembered that he had looked very like a lot of other people, and so did this man. Whoever he was, Madame Diakonova pushed him away when she saw Tania and Laura, stretched out her hands, and took a