When Blackbirds Sing (13 page)

As soon as he had gone Lady Dilton said fretfully: “I wish Marcus would attend to his cards.” She went up to bed.

“Well, that was a cheerful evening,” said Lord Dilton. “I’m sorry.” He began to pour out whisky, and said: “Say when.”

They sat down in armchairs, and he suddenly exclaimed: “Marcus is mad. He thinks the war is to give him an interest in his old age. He doesn’t know or care where it’s leading as long as it doesn’t stop. I wish I knew myself.” He drank some of his whisky, and asked: “What do you think?”

Dominic had never thought where the war was leading, nor had any of the men in his regiment. They concerned themselves with their immediate duties, and had a vague idea that afterwards there would be an earthly paradise for those heroes who had not gone to a heavenly one.

“There you are,” said Lord Dilton. “If the soldiers at the front have no idea of what they are up to, who has? It seems to me that the cost of moving the trenches one way or the other is out of all proportion to the advantage gained, if there is any advantage in owning an extra bit of blasted heath. D’you think there is any chance of getting them really on the run this year?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, sir,” said Dominic.

Lord Dilton looked moodily at his whisky. His conscience was beginning to trouble him. It was further disturbed by Marcus’s repulsive conversation. For three years he had been training subalterns and after a few months sending them out to France, into the Moloch jaws. After another few months they were either dead, those decent boys, or back again wounded, and there was no result for all this, or any sign of a result. The line scarcely wavered.

“I thought you went to war to get some advantage out of it,” he said. “We seem to be going to war to ruin ourselves. I don’t like the Germans much. The Kaiser’s a pompous ass, but I’m not prepared to commit suicide out of spite: and I’d rather have a German general than that damned Welsh Baptist. What the devil has the ‘sword of the Lord and Gideon’ got to do with the Prime Minister of England? He wants a ‘knock-out blow’ and he’ll knock out Europe, England included. He hates us. He declared war on us long ago.” By “us” Lord Dilton meant the landowners.

“Now he has found an easy way to wipe us out,” he went on. “Look at the Wolverhamptons. Old Wolverhampton died. They had to pay death duties. A week later his eldest son, ‘the first of the litter’, was killed. The second son was killed a month ago—a third lot of death duties. The family exterminated and the estate confiscated, the reward for serving your country. What’s left goes to the daughter who has married the son of one of those damned newspaper peers who are hounding us on to ruin. When you pretend you’re waging war from high moral principles, you’re on the way to hell. You’ve taken off the brakes. The war is really to make fortunes for the men who are going to buy our confiscated estates. Lansdowne is the only one with the guts to point it out, and they all attack him, and say we’re not going to stop the war to preserve Lansdowne House and Bowood. What sort of country will this be when Bowoods are gone, and the Diltons and Waterparks too? I always thought that England was the Bowoods and the Diltons and the Waterparks, with the farms and cottages around them.”

His eyes in his heavy red kind face stared in angry questioning at Dominic, who did not know what to answer. He had thought that he was fighting to save Waterpark and his farm in Australia from being seized by the Kaiser, not to lose them.

“Perhaps I should not talk to you like this,” said Lord Dilton, becoming suddenly diffident. “You’re a serving soldier. But I feel that I have a responsibility that I’m avoiding, and there are not many people I can talk to freely. You have always seemed to me honest in your opinions. But you’d better forget it.”

He poured himself out another whisky “for the road” and drank it quickly. Dominic went with him to his car which was waiting at a side door. There they shook hands warmly.

“It was good of you to come down,” said Lord Dilton. “The best of luck. You mustn’t take what I said too seriously.”

As he drove away he wondered if he would ever see Dominic again, whether he would be dead in a month. He wondered about his own sons, if they too would go before long, and his family would suffer the fate of Wolverhampton’s.

In the morning Dominic lay in that pale green bath in which he had first thought of Sylvia. He could see through the low-silled window into the park, where the still, drowsy morning promised a hot day. The shadow of an oak tree was like a pool on the grass in which some of Lord Dilton’s famous black cattle were munching and whisking their tails.

He felt that he had broken through to an extension of experience since he had lain here imagining Sylvia. His imagination had passed into knowledge. Also Lord Dilton’s comments on the war had influenced him more than he knew, and more than Lord Dilton would have wished. They increased his feeling that reality differed from his imagination, and that he was beginning to know it, that he was becoming adult in his mind as well as his body. Cracks were appearing in the darkness which had surrounded him all his life, and gleams of light were coming through.

When he left later in the morning, Lady Dilton came out to the car with him, and to his surprise she kissed him as she said goodbye. It still did not occur to him that he should not accept all their kindness and affection, coming straight from his escapade with Sylvia.

On arriving in London he went to the little Mayfair hotel and rang her up, but was told that she was out at luncheon. She would be back later in the afternoon. He knew that he should go to see Cousin Emma while he was on leave, and he took this opportunity.

It was still early when he arrived at Brompton Square, and she was just coming down from her rest. She was extremely fragile, and needed to cherish herself carefully if she was to keep the flag flying. The unexpectedness of his visit jolted her slightly. She implied a rebuke that half past three was not a fashionable hour at which to call, but said that she was glad to see him. He thanked her for the plum cake. She asked him if he was going to Dilton, and he said that he had just come from there.

“Did you see that pretty girl you were engaged to?”
she asked. “The one you introduced to me outside the Oratory?”

“She wasn’t there,” said Dominic.

“It’s a pity you didn’t marry her,” said Cousin Emma, with the insolence of an old woman who has lived for “society”.

She had thrown a stone into the pond of Dominic’s emotions. His pride and his love for Helena were immediately affronted; but at the same time her remark stimulated his desire for Sylvia. The two things were in sudden violent conflict. He looked bewildered and furious.

He wanted to leave the house as soon as possible. He felt suffocated in the stuffy Edwardian drawing-room, overcrowded and tasteless, with some beautiful old English furniture cluttered up with Second Empire rubbish. He even was repelled by Cousin Emma’s stuffy festive old lady’s clothes, so much jewellery and feathers and black lace. His repudiation of her and her whole way of life was an unconscious attempt to reconcile Helena and Sylvia in his own mind. They both wanted what was fresh, passionate and alive. He did not realize that Sylvia in the course of time would become a latter-day Cousin Emma; nor that Cousin Emma had once been a late Victorian Sylvia.

He soon stood up to leave, and she became once more a kind, affectionate old lady, promising another plum cake. He thanked her but said that things were hotting up in France, and the delivery of parcels would be uncertain.

When he was walking the short distance from the door to the Brompton Road, he had a feeling that made him look back. He saw that she was standing on one of the little iron first-floor balconies, waving to him. He was filled with
discomfort and sadness, and again it seemed an extension of knowledge. That day, of the two hardest, most socially inexorable women he knew, one had impulsively kissed him goodbye; the other stood, regardless of the sedate conventions of the square, waving to him from the balcony. She nodded her head and he could see some little stiff black flowers quivering in her bonnet.

He walked to the top of Sloane Street and took a bus to Victoria. Sylvia tried to impress on him that if he must use a public conveyance he should take a taxi, not a bus, but he would not spend any money on himself which could be sent to Helena. So now, though he was going to see Sylvia, he went in a way that was going to save money for his wife.

She was not yet at home and he went in to wait for her. She came in a few minutes later, and seemed a little startled to find him there, reading an evening paper which her maid had given him. He looked so well established, as if he belonged to the place.

“Have you brought your luggage?” she asked, and was relieved when he said that it was at the hotel. This was partly because she did not want him to appear too naturally at home here, but also because she intended to ask him to stay on the following night, his last of leave, when he had the excuse of the early train.

The conspiracy between them had now become open. They argued about it. She suggested dining in a restaurant. Dominic wanted to dine in.

“If we dine at a restaurant will you come to the hotel afterwards?” he asked.

“No. That would be much too risky.”

“It’s risky here.”

“Not when you’re staying. Tomorrow.” She kissed him and they laughed.

The following evening, as on the previous occasion, they came in early to dinner and did not go out again. She suggested that he might like to go to a play on his last night, but he only said: “What for?”

Throughout the night they made love greedily, seeking nothing but physical satisfaction, taking all the pleasure they could in each other while it was accessible.

In the morning again she went with him to Victoria, and as before Dominic met there a subaltern whom he knew, not one of his regiment, but a young man whom he had met on a Lewis-gun course. Despondent that his leave was over, the subaltern was pleased to find a companion with whom he could travel back to France. Thinking, as Hollis had done, that Sylvia was Dominic’s wife, and without sufficient imagination to realize that if this were so they would not want to spend their last minutes together gossiping with a stranger, he attached himself to them. Sylvia turned on him and asked coldly: “Have you been over the top yet?”

“Not exactly,” said the subaltern, and looking hurt and confused he drifted away.

Dominic quickly shut this incident out of his mind. He felt the symptoms of an inner explosion which he could not possibly allow at this moment. He thought hard of the wonderful time Sylvia had given him, and when he had to enter the train he tried to express his thanks; but he used more the language suitable to a hostess, than that from a lover torn away by a war.

In the train he felt an uneasiness in his mind, but soon he fell asleep, and did not wake up till Folkestone. Through all the bustle of embarkation, during the crossing, and when he landed at Boulogne, he was conscious of this uneasiness, that there was something in his mind that he would not face. He was told that he had to catch a train at half past seven for Béthune. He went to the Officers’ Club, and sat there dozing in an armchair. Sometimes he ordered a drink and then fell asleep. When he slept the curves and creases round his mouth were heavy and voluptuous. His black silky hair fell over his forehead, and he was dark under the eyes. One or two of the officers looked at him curiously, and no one cared to speak to him.

At last it was time to go to the train. When it jolted, rattled and crawled out of Boulogne station, it was like a suitable transport to hell. The windows were broken, the seats stained with rain and spilt beer, the woodwork was cut and scribbled with obscenities. The two other officers in the carriage lighted candles and stuck them guttering on the window ledge. They sat opposite each other at the far end of the carriage. They said good evening to Dominic when he came in, but they had been to the same school and spoke exclusively to each other. One was a staff captain. Dominic heard him say: “They’re trying to create a tradition of fair play between the Hun airman and our own. We’ve got to stop that. The only good Boche is a dead one.”

Dominic felt the symptoms of an explosion again. He could not control it. It burst and he said violently: “Damn you, shut up!”

The staff captain turned to him with the manner of a
prefect to whom a small boy has been rude, but when he saw Dominic’s blazing eyes he really thought that he was in a carriage with a madman, and he said nothing. Soon afterwards the crawling train stopped at a wayside station. The staff captain and his friend took their luggage from the rack, their candles from the window ledge and moved to another carriage.

Dominic sat alone in the darkness. The explosion had been like the bursting of some inner growth, spreading poison through his body. All kinds of black imaginings rose into his mind, affecting his thoughts about Sylvia. The staff captain’s remark about the airmen was somehow linked up with her brutal question to the subaltern at Victoria Station. She and the staff captain were the same type. Why had she asked the subaltern how much danger he had known? How dared she from her life of safety and pleasure? How dared the staff captain, safe in some château behind the line, tell the airmen that they should abandon their decencies?

He began to have horrible suspicions about her. He remembered the competence with which she arranged their times together, the ready lies she told, the ease with which she took him. Had she brought out that map of England for other men? Were certain areas ruled out, not because she knew the local families, but because she had already been there with someone else?

Then he thought of himself and his suspicions as contemptible. She had given him a wonderful time. His head began to ache with conflicting ideas. He was exhausted. She had drained the life out of him. But he had worshipped the beauty of her body. Yet last night she had only drained
the life out of him. It was a night of pure sensuality, without love, without meaning. Their bodies had acted with practised skill to achieve the extreme pleasure. There was no tenderness between them.