The Birds Fall Down Read Online Free

houses that were nearly palaces, towards the Arc de Triomphe, proud and black against the silver ending of the sunset.
    Then they turned into the sombre breadth of the Avenue Kléber, and came to a halt at the most sombre building there; and that was the end of pleasure, of Paris. They drove across the pavement through an open double gateway into a courtyard where a circle of shrubs grew round a fountain flowing from a vase held by a plaster naiad, and they were met in a dark hall by a yellow-faced concierge, who, as she remembered, was half-French and half-Japanese. The Diakonovs had made their home in this building solely because it was owned, and the lower floors occupied, by a commercial syndicate of so many and such bizarre nationalities, including a substantial Japanese participation, that they could trace no connection with Russia and therefore feared no curiosity from their landlords. Hélène stayed to look after the luggage, and Tania and Laura stepped into a lift made of iron grilles and red mahogany, which rose moaning and whistling up a pole shining like a slate pencil; and on the fourth storey they got out at an open door, and Laura saw that the place was as awful as she remembered it. There was no actual difficulty in seeing that the hall was lined with tapestries and rugs, and those gorgeously coloured, but the gloom took them to itself, the walls were dull as if they had been panelled with deal. Laura followed Tania as she hurried through one sitting-room after another, pushing aside portières of fringed and bobbled bottle-green velvet, penetrating a darkness intensified by weak shaking circles of light emanating from the lamps burning before the icons in the corners of each room. Tania paused before the last doorway and exclaimed, “They aren’t here, yet surely, surely they can’t have gone out.” But in this last room an old man was huddled at a little round table, pondering over a game of patience and looking too weak to do anything else, to rise or to speak, but who sprang to his feet, overturning the table and sending the cards spinning across the floor, and shouted, “Tania, my daughter Tania!”
    “He’s just what I remembered, I didn’t exaggerate,” thought Laura with admiration, with distaste. He was so huge. Her father was six foot; Nikolai Nikolaievitch must have been four inches taller, and even for that he was broad. Though his roar was loving, in his embrace Tania appeared the victim of a great beast of prey.
    His head was too massive; when he bent to kiss his daughter first on one cheek and then on the other, it seemed terrible that she should have to suffer the second blow. He was not growing old in a way young people like to see; his white hair and his beard were streaked with the barbaric gold glowing as it glowed on his daughter’s head. His features were nearly classical yet were thickened as if by some blood not European, and the colour of his skin sent the mind to Asia. It made him look all the taller and stranger and yellower that he was wearing a long fawn garment cut like a monk’s robe. But it was the change in him that was so alarming. Before, he had been a wilder, stronger version of other and quite familiar kinds of people. There were Members of Parliament who came to the house for dinner and looked quite like Nikolai Nikolaievitch, allowing for a difference in size and vehemence. And when her grandfather came to London he frequented the Distinguished Strangers Galleries in the Lords and Commons, and had been to dinner at Downing Street and stayed at Hatfield and Chatsworth, and it had all gone very well. But now he could not have set foot outside the apartment without being followed by a crowd, and without gratifying their anticipations, for his movements were strange as signals to another star.
    “Darling Papa, where is Mamma?” asked Tania, freeing herself from his arms.
    The old man’s great amber eyes went to Laura. She was engulfed in his hugeness, smothered