When Blackbirds Sing (16 page)

Again this was due to Harrison, whose attitude to him was not hostile, but only, so he told himself, disciplinarian. He was irritated by his detached manner towards the military hierarchy, and the contrast between his efficiency in the line and his independence out of it, his unconscious and to Harrison unjustified assurance. His feelings towards Dominic were much kinder than Dominic’s towards him. He really wanted his friendship, and secretly his approval. Like Lord Dilton he felt that “there was something in” Dominic, and that the approval of this indefinable “something” was necessary to his self-respect. To show that he was not unfair towards him he secured him this decoration.

Dominic lay awhile thinking of the battalion, the dead and wounded men, and then he took up his Australian letters. He looked at the postmarks so that he could read them in the order in which they had been sent. There were three from Helena. She had recovered from the disease from the sheep, and Aunt Mildred had come up from Melbourne to help. She had also found an oldish man to take Harry’s place on the farm. The baby was flourishing, and now quite articulate.

His mother’s letter was in the same strain of the life at Westhill, where now it was spring, and the daffodils were blooming under the gum trees along the drive. Helena’s last letter was written about two days before he was wounded. She said that she had not heard from him recently. She went on to describe in detail the life on the farm, hoping to bring it, and so herself, vividly before him. She mentioned the names of the horses, the new tank she had bought to increase the supply of water to the kitchen, and she gave an amusing picture of Aunt Mildred trying with refinement to feed the pigs.

The life seemed remote to him. He could not imagine it clearly, not in all its colour. While trying to do so, he opened Sylvia’s letter. It had been written some weeks earlier and had lain with the others at the bank. She had seen his name in the casualty list and had discarded her usual discretion. She began: “My dearest Dominic,” and ended, “With all my love.” Reading this immediately after Helena’s letter again produced the sensation of a jam in his brain. In his weak condition it stunned him, and he fell asleep, his hand on the letter.

In his sleep the haunting vision returned. Again he was shooting a boy in the moment of recognition, but in the confusion of his dream the boy became Harry, whom Helena had dismissed. Then he changed into Finch, his wounded servant.

Hermione Maine also had a letter from Sylvia on that morning, to say that she was coming down on the following day. She went to Ward IV to tell Dominic, and found him sitting up but asleep, his head sagged on his chest, his hand on a letter. She saw that it was on the same coloured blue
paper as her letter from Sylvia. She could read the only words which Dominic’s hand left uncovered: “With all my love, Sylvia.” She did not wake him up, but came again in the afternoon, to ask him to have tea with herself and Sylvia in her office the following afternoon.

“Have you seen her since you returned to England?” she asked quizzically.

“No, I was brought straight here,” said Dominic.

“I mean since you came back from Australia.”

“Yes. I saw her at Dilton and in London,” he added, not wanting to be more misleading than was necessary.

“She didn’t tell me,” said Hermione, rather cross but amused. “How very sly of her. I shall chaff her about it.”

“No, don’t,” said Dominic, with the calm authority which either impressed or irritated those to whom it was directed. It piqued Hermione.

“Why not?”

“It would not be advisable.”

She laughed shortly and left him. No one had spoken to her like that since she left the schoolroom, certainly not in her own house. She really ought to snub him, but she did not see how she could snub someone who not only looked like an El Greco
pietà
, but whose weakness clothed him with indifference, and who also seemed to contain an extreme humility within an implacable pride. She thought Sylvia had been a fool to give him up for Wesley-Maude.

Dominic now spent two or three hours every day out of bed, either on the terrace if it was fine, or sitting up in a chair in the ward. His greatest effort so far was to walk up the main staircase to Hermione’s “office” on the first floor.
This was really her own sitting-room, left unchanged when the house was turned into a hospital. The furniture was not unlike that of Sylvia’s toy palatial drawing-room. There were similar kingwood and ormolu commodes, French chairs, and a grandiose looking-glass over the Adam mantelpiece. When Dominic, a little breathless from climbing the stairs, came into this room, and saw Sylvia sitting there alone—Hermione perhaps intentionally was attending to some duty—it was almost a reconstruction of when he had been shown into her drawing-room at Catherine Street. She was wearing the same kind of clothes as on that morning when he met her in Green Park, a dark fur-collared coat, the pearls, a black velvet hat on her golden hair.

In her eyes as she looked up at him, was an almost anxious, questioning look. This look and the echo of Catherine Street seemed to make a demand on him which he could not meet. He did not know whether the demand was an impossible one on his weak body, or if it was on something else, on his mind that it should in some way conform to and accept the limits of her own.

When they shook hands his was lifeless. Although they were alone he did not attempt to kiss her, and she saw no memory of their love in his eyes. She drew up a chair for him to the tea-table, and she said in her ordinary, rather cold conventional voice: “How are you? Was it too much for you to walk upstairs?”

“No. I’m getting better. But I have to go slowly.”

They talked a little stiffly about his health, and then Hermione came in, and Sylvia found it more easy to talk to him.

“Why didn’t you let me know you were here?” she asked him.

“I haven’t written to anybody yet.”

“He wasn’t strong enough,” said Hermione.

“If you’re strong enough to walk upstairs you can write a letter.”

“No. It’s much harder to write a letter,” said Dominic. They laughed and the atmosphere was easier.

“Does father know where you are?” asked Sylvia. “He’ll be very hurt if you don’t write to him.”

Sylvia was talking with the language used between intimates, critical but friendly. Hermione noticed that Dominic’s response was not on the same level.

“I shall write to him,” he said, “in a little while.” He seemed more to be deciding something for himself than to be speaking to Sylvia.

Hermione poured out the tea and the conversation became general. She was puzzled by them. Dominic seemed more remote than ever, not stimulated and enlivened, as she had hoped he would be, by Sylvia’s presence. And she could see that Sylvia, beneath her rather hard social manner, was not happy. Sylvia had once helped her out of a fairly innocent scrape when she was engaged, and in gratitude she was willing to be useful to her when possible. She was a little uneasy at being asked to pretend that she was staying with her, but Sylvia gave the excuse that her mother was always pestering her to go down to Dilton. She did not approve of Sylvia having an “affair” with Dominic, especially while Maurice was at the front, but she thought that it would be mildly amusing to confront her with her former lover, and might also help to
revitalize Dominic. When she saw “With all my love” on his letter from Sylvia, she had already invited her.

But Dominic, holding his teacup, looked more than ever like an El Greco
pietà.
It would certainly be safe to leave them alone together, and with a sort of muddled good nature towards Sylvia, she made the excuse of seeing another patient, and left the room. When she came back they were sitting as she had left them, and apparently in silence. He looked so exhausted that Hermione said: “I think you had better go back to bed.”

“Shall I help you downstairs?” asked Sylvia.

“I can manage,” said Dominic. “I’ll hold on to the banister.”

They shook hands again. He felt utterly weak and inadequate, unable to meet the demand of her mere presence. He tried to smile, but the effort was pitiful. He thought that he must say something and the only words that came were: “It was good of you to come down.”

Hermione went with him to the stairs, and then fearing that he might fall, took his arm and guided him down. When she came back to her sitting-room, she found to her astonishment that Sylvia was crying.

Dominic took off his clothes—it was the first time that he had been completely dressed—and climbed into his iron bed. In the dead traditional room the other weak and wounded men lay in their black beds, either asleep or reading by shaded lamps. The wood beyond the park was veiled in blue mist, and further obscured by the reflections on the glass. Everything was still and fading, the autumnal wood, the bleak room where there was no colour left on the
walls, as across the park the glowing leaves had fallen from the trees. Upstairs in Hermione’s room the colour remained, the tradition still lived, but it was no longer alive for him. Even Sylvia, so much herself in that kind of room, because of it, became unreal to him. She had been a symbol of the things he had missed, but which now were dead. He could not feel any contact with her.

Between her face and his was the face of the boy he had shot. Because of the response in that boy’s eyes as he shot him, he could no longer meet her eyes. This had become not so much an emotional obsession, as a reasoned perception of his mind. He reasoned about everything connected with that incident.

He was better here, he thought, in the dead room, under the bare walls, the cold pillars and the hollow dome, than in the room above where the old life remained. He could not respond to the rays of its colour. There had never been tenderness between himself and Sylvia, only the passion of their bodies. Now he saw clearly, with his mind but not with his heart, that she had tenderness to offer him. He was puzzled, but he could find no response to it.

In a few days he had a letter from Lord Dilton, who wrote:

He did not reply to this letter until he had left Hermione’s hospital, a few weeks later.

When he left the hospital Dominic went to the little hotel in Mayfair where he was now known. On arrival he rang up Cousin Emma’s house. She was out, but he said that he would come round to collect some luggage he had left there. The parlourmaid told him that it was not ready to take away. The suitcases were in the boxroom, and his clothes had been put away with camphor in chests of drawers. They would need to be aired and pressed. He said that did not matter, and he took a taxi down to Brompton Square. The parlourmaid helped him pack his clothes. When they had done this she asked him to wait to see Cousin Emma who would be back soon, and sorry to miss him, but he did not feel sufficiently braced to meet her, and he only left a grateful message.

He went back to the hotel and changed into a creased and smelly grey suit. Then he went out and sat in the park
near Stanhope Gate. He wore no overcoat as he hoped that the fresh air would take the smell of camphor from his suit. But he was soon cold and he went back and lit the gas fire in his hotel bedroom. He hung his coat on a chair before the fire and lay down on the bed, and tried to think what to do.

This hotel room was now the only room he had, apart from his farm, where his wife and child lived on the other side of the world. But his farm had almost ceased to have material reality for him, in spite of Helena’s evocative letters. It had been too long an unattainable dream, and the letters had the nature of a medieval description of heaven. He had as so often in his life followed his impulse without seeing the next step. He had put on civilian clothes, and then saw no direction in which he could turn. He had left the hollow room, the dead tradition in which he had lived hitherto, but he had no other dwelling, no one even that he could go to see. Cousin Emma would be incredulous and hostile when she saw him no longer in his smart uniform. When he thought of going to see Sylvia the jam at once came violently down in his brain. He could not even give himself a reason why he could not see her.

He could not go to see Colonel Rodgers, even if he were in London, though now that he had been wounded and could, if he wished, put the ribbon of the Military Cross on his tunic, if he were wearing it, there was no one who would welcome him more warmly. He had something to establish himself with, to make him respected among his fellows, and he could not use it. To do so would be to ignore all that had happened in these last months, to ignore the boy whom he had shot, and to whom in some curious fashion he now felt
his life belonged. With that feeling the jam in his brain was eased. He found that at last he could write to Lord Dilton. He crossed the room and sat down at a table where there was some stamped hotel paper in a box. He wrote: