When Blackbirds Sing (14 page)

He fell asleep again and had confused and odd dreams. He knew that there was violence in his nature, and that it was said to be inherited from a Spaniard who had strangled altar boys in the crypts of his castle, the ancestor who was a joke to his brothers. To Dominic he was no joke, but a horror latent in his blood. In his dream he was still hearing the staff captain talking, though he had left the carriage. He also was somehow Harrison and also Colonel Rodgers. He was saying: “We must have the orgasm, the orgasm of killing. Never mind women. Pierce another man with a sword. Don’t release the seed of life, but the blood of death.”

Dominic woke up with a jolt, sweating and nauseated. He believed that he had met the evil in himself face to face, and he was afraid to go to sleep again.

When at last in the early dawn the crawling train reached Béthune, he learned that the battalion was out of the line at a village some kilometres away. He went to the Hôtel de France to have a bath and breakfast, and then to the Officers’ Club, where he hung about trying to get transport to the battalion, which he did not reach until late in the afternoon. He was directed to his company mess, in one of the inevitable peasants’ cottages. It was deserted except for his servant, who took him to his billet and gave him some letters. Finch, the servant, was a youth of about nineteen, modest, intelligent, with sensitive manners which put some of the public school subalterns to shame. As they walked to the billet in another peasant’s cottage, he told Dominic the battalion gossip, that it was said they were going to take part in a big attack soon.

The letters had been forwarded from his Australian bank in London. He could have had them when he was
on leave but he had not called there, as it was out of his way. He had cashed cheques at Cox’s, the army bank, or at the hotel. Amongst the letters was one from Helena. He glanced through the others and took Helena’s out into a meadow behind the cottage. Here it was very peaceful. There was a little stream bordered with pollarded willows, and a row of taller trees made long shadows across the grass. He thought that in this quiet place her letter could heal him. She had always been able to dispel his evil spirits. A hideous dream, like that in the train, could not happen when she was sleeping by his side. She was his life and his health. As he took out her letter into the peaceful meadow he was not troubled by his infidelity with Sylvia, as he had never thought of her as a substitute for Helena. He had no feelings of uneasiness, as sitting on the grass by the stream he opened her letter, only the hope of his restoration.

She was ill in bed, she wrote, with some disease she had caught while dipping the sheep. She repeated that she had to do this because she had dismissed Harry who would not go to the war. She was in the hospital in the nearest town, but she expected to return to the farm in a week. She had no other news.

This letter, instead of bringing Dominic peace, churned up more conflicting feelings in him, the first an awful pity for Helena lying in bed with a disease caught from animals. The Calvinism he had been taught by his governess in his childhood at last bore on his relations with Sylvia. He felt that he had brought the disease, a divine retribution on Helena, part of the mad vindictive “justice” which he had been taught was an attribute of God. At the same time
he had a recurrence of his anger with her for dismissing Harry, now more disturbing as he linked it up with Sylvia’s question to the subaltern on Victoria Station, and the staff captain’s comments on the chivalrous airmen. Why should the Hollises and the Harrys go on pouring out their blood in the trenches for Sylvia’s pleasures and the staff captain’s promotion, or even for Helena’s safety? The hatred of the old, even of people as old as himself, rose up in him again. He thrust Helena’s letter into his pocket, and feeling on edge with everything, he went along to the company mess. He found Frost there, and a new subaltern called Raife.

Harrison also had just returned from leave, three days in Paris. His bedroom opened off the room used as the mess. He was changing and when he heard voices he came in and sat on the floor in his underclothes. He was a little drunk and very pleased with himself. He drank more as he told them of his exploits. He had gone to an expensive brothel and picked one from a choice of girls. He showed them her photograph. She was rather like himself, fair, with a narrow forehead and a beaky nose. They had spent three days and nights together. He described them in detail. It had cost him fifty pounds.

Finch and another officer’s servant came in and out of the room during this recital. They were laying the table for dinner. They had faintly uncomfortable silly smiles on their faces. Dominic hated to see them degraded by this half-deference to Harrison’s squalor.

Raife lifted a glass filled with Cointreau and white wine.

“Here’s to the three F’s!” he exclaimed. They stood for war, hunting and sex.

Harrison was so pleased with himself that he tried to make a gesture of reconciliation towards Dominic.

“I bet you’ve been having some fun too, Langton,” he said. “Come on, tell us all about it, you sly old bastard.”

The turmoil in Dominic became unbearable. He demanded that there should be a difference between his feelings for Sylvia and Harrison’s for the whore in Paris, but he could find none. To be completely honest he should be sitting drunk and half-naked on the floor, shouting about the three F’s. This further conflict in his mind, added to what he had felt in the train, and the effect of Helena’s letter filled him with a new explosive violence. A spark was put to it by Harrison’s use of the word “bastard”.

Dominic’s mind was full of antique conventions, which were the cause of much of his unconventionality. He firmly believed that anyone who had been called a bastard could not honourably survive unless he had drawn the other man’s blood. He believed that Harrison had stated that his mother, in whom for him were gathered all kindness and human dignity, was no better than the woman he had bought in Paris. He knew that if he attempted to speak he would only stutter inarticulately. His eyes blazed but the flesh sagged on his face so that it looked like a skull. He pushed back his chair, knocking it over, and he left the room. The other three officers were momentarily sobered, and Raife asked: “What’s he up to?”

Dominic went back to his billet where he wrote a note to Jackson, a subaltern in C Company. He said that Harrison had grossly insulted him, and that he was going to challenge him to a duel. Would Jackson act as his second?
Jackson had a French mother and both his parents lived in Paris. He was not a close friend of Dominic’s but on the few occasions when they had spoken together there had seemed to be a sympathy of ideas between them. His conventions, like Dominic’s, were more medieval than public school.

When Dominic had written his note, Finch arrived to tell him that dinner was ready. Dominic said that he was not coming to dinner and told Finch to take the note to Jackson, who, however, was not as medieval as himself.

Jackson thought it fantastic for a lieutenant to challenge his company commander, or in fact anyone else to a duel. If either of them were wounded, or even if it became known without this, there would be a terrific shindy. Dominic might be court-martialled, or even shot for wounding a superior officer in (technically) the field, and he would be a party to it. He sympathized with Dominic’s attitude, but he was extremely worried. He told Finch that there was no answer, and he went round to A Company mess to see Harrison, who was at dinner.

“Good evening,” he said. “Langton wants to shoot you.”

Raife grinned, Frost looked concerned, and Harrison went white. He thought Dominic quite capable of shooting him.

“What do you mean?” he asked, though he understood that Jackson had come in the capacity of a second.

“He says that you called him a bastard.” Jackson, although he wanted to prevent a duel, also wanted Harrison to suffer the apprehension of one.

“It was only a joke.”

“Langton doesn’t take it that way. He doesn’t think a gentleman calls another a bastard, even as a joke.”

“Is Langton a gentleman? I thought he was an Australian,” said Harrison.

“Shall I tell him that? If so you’d better say your prayers,” Jackson replied, himself now touchy that his friend was further insulted.

Harrison tried to laugh as if the whole thing were childish.

“Well, what’s the programme?” he asked.

“I only have a note from him. I haven’t seen him yet. I suppose that you choose your weapons. . . . But you’re in for a hell of a row whatever happens. If Langton wounds you there’ll be a court martial. If on the other hand it comes out that you called one of your junior officers a bastard and then shot him, it won’t help your career.”

“It’s all mad,” said Harrison irritably. “What d’you want me to do?”

“You could apologize.”

Harrison looked sullen, but at last said: “Very well.”

“Shall I tell him that?” asked Jackson. “You’d better come with me.”

Harrison went into his room to put on his Sam Browne and a cap and they walked round to Dominic’s billet. Jackson told him to wait outside.

Dominic was sitting at a table trying to write a letter of instructions to a family lawyer in Melbourne about certain dispositions in the event of his death.

“Have you told him?” he asked Jackson as he came in.

“I’ve spoken to him. He’s willing to apologize.”

“I didn’t ask him to apologize. I sent him a challenge,” said Dominic smouldering.

“It makes things a bit awkward,” said Jackson.

“I’m used to awkwardness,” Dominic retorted. “It’s my constant companion. Did you give him my challenge?”

“I told him about it.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he would apologize.”

“I don’t want an apology. He sat there wallowing half naked and drunk on the floor, with the men laying the table.” A curious old-maidish primness came into his voice, grotesque in the context. “And then he insulted my mother.”

“That wasn’t his intention. You see he’s not a gentleman.” It gave Jackson a malicious pleasure to say this. He also thought, understanding Dominic’s medieval mind, that it might make him less anxious to fight Harrison. It seemed to have an effect on him.

Jackson followed up his advantage. He pointed out the possible repercussions of a duel, the harm not only to Dominic or to Harrison, but to their relatives and to the regiment. “After all,” he said, “you want to keep your bullets for the real enemy.”

As he spoke Dominic seemed to go away from him, to retreat into his private gloom. When he spoke his voice changed, and had become oddly remote.

“Harrison is my real enemy,” he said “The Germans are only my artificial enemy. I know nothing about them except what I read in the papers. When I see them, when the prisoners come in, they are not my enemies. They are the same as everyone else. They are just like the people
you see in the street—in London or Melbourne or Paris or anywhere. They are not my real enemies. Harrison is my real enemy.”

Jackson was puzzled. “He’s waiting outside to apologize,” he said.

“All right. Let him come in,” said Dominic indifferently.

Jackson went to the door and signed to Harrison, who came in half-sheepishly, half-hearty. He spoke to Dominic in a slightly patronizing way, as if he had been stupid to take seriously anything said so lightly. He offered his hand. Dominic held out his own, but his clasp was lifeless.

“Now let’s go back to dinner,” said Harrison. “Will you come with us?” he asked Jackson.

Dominic said: “I must finish my letter,” and the other two thought it best to leave him.

He sat down again and stared at his unfinished letter. It had no meaning for him and he tore it up. He felt a deathly exhaustion. Both his mind and his body refused to function any more, and he lay down on the bed. After the conflicts inside him, followed by the violent currents of rage against Harrison, all his fuses were burnt out. Finch came in and found him lying asleep in his clothes, with the lights on. He woke him, and Dominic let him help him undress and get into bed.

He fell asleep at half past eight, and except for the semi-conscious five minutes while Finch put him to bed, he slept deeply and dreamlessly for eleven hours. He no longer attempted to resolve his inner conflicts. He followed his routine duties mechanically, and sat silent at meals. Except for Raife, who liked anything or anyone who increased the
tension and colour of life, he was treated with mistrust. Harrison and Frost were a little afraid of him.

He had always had the idea that authority was right, and his troubles had largely come from his attempts to reconcile his own ideas of virtue with the rightness he expected to find in authority. Now after the conflict in his mind which lasted from his parting with Sylvia at Victoria until his failure to provoke Harrison to a duel, he no longer made the attempt. A kind of savage humility had come upon him. The violence in him which he had always felt was his most evil trait, revealed so clearly in his dream in the train, was now endorsed by authority; and as it happened with a new emphasis.

The governments and the generals on both sides must at this time have been on tenterhooks lest the soldiers woke up to the suicidal futility of their lives, that some common humanity such as that of Christmas 1914, or the sheer weariness which the French were beginning to show, might lead them simply to stop fighting. It would have been a disaster for either High Command if the enemy had walked away. There would have been no glory attached to victory. At Christmas 1914, this disaster had been prevented by a high-ranking English officer firing into the German lines while the opposing troops were dancing together round bonfires in No-man’s-land. At Etaples there had been a riot and the soldiers had killed five military policemen. Always there was fear of the psychological uncertainty of a million men, and everything possible was done to prevent peace breaking out. Lloyd George addressed those Old Testament exhortations to the armies, which so disgusted Lord Dilton. He would not consider an armistice “as it might be difficult
to get the nations fighting again”. Raids like that in which Hollis was wounded were ordered “to keep alive the spirit of offensive”. A general came to inspect the battalion. He asked each subaltern: “What were you in civilian life?” When the young man answered modestly: “I was at school,” or “I was reading law,” the general replied: “Well, you’re going to be a soldier for the rest of your life, remember that.” And this was true for a number of them, as half the battalion was wiped out in the approaching attack, though the general ended his days playing golf in Surrey.