When Blackbirds Sing (19 page)

He went despondently upstairs. The grand house seemed inimical to him, even in this peaceful room, with its rosy chintzes gleaming in the firelight, the slippery-smooth sheets turned back invitingly, the copper can of hot water covered with towels, the glass of hot milk which owing to some magic signal was always there when he came up to bed. These things for which he had been so immensely grateful when he first arrived, now seemed to belong to a life which he had already left. The hollow room in the hospital, the arches and columns of a dead tradition were more his proper dwelling place, than this house which was not yet stripped of its life and colour. Lord Dilton had said: “We must think what to do,” and it was clear that the atmosphere had changed. He no longer had the feeling that they were in this together. His sympathy was withheld if not his friendship. It was his sympathy which had enabled Dominic to stay here, feeling that the tradition was still alive. But it had only been a palliative, deadening a pain, not removing its cause.

On the next day Lord Dilton went up to London, made certain enquiries, and pulled some of those strings which were so easily accessible to him. He was not used to failing in what he undertook, and it was a disagreeable experience. He was annoyed with Dominic for not making more apparent effort to control his reactions, though he now believed they were due to shell-shock. He was still intent on avoiding any public scandal, both for the sake of the regiment and of Dominic, and also from friendship for the latter’s father, who was not here to help him, and whose name, long known in the county, he did not want
to see blazoned across some squalid paper describing the court martial.

As his activities were mostly in the neighbourhood of Whitehall, he went along to see Sylvia. He found her sitting alone, white-faced and listless, and looking far from well. He thought that she must have bad news of Maurice, but she said: “It’s only the war. Will it never stop?” This surprised him, as he had thought, though he did not put it in these words, that she was enjoying the war, with endless theatres and parties and all the excitements of political rumour. He suggested that she should come down to Dilton for a few weeks and feed herself up, though there was still the continuous flow of cream, butter, game and fresh eggs from Dilton to Catherine Street.

“Dominic is there,” he said. “You can cheer him up. He’s probably going in a day or two.”

“How is he?” she said.

“He’s fit enough. But there’s something the matter with his mind.”

“D’you mean he’s mad?” she asked horrified.

“Good God, no! I mean that he has something on his mind. It’s shell-shock. I’m trying to get him into a place where they’ll treat him. It’s a healthy place down in Cornwall, near Penzance.”

“In Cornwall!” she exclaimed. “But you can’t send him there.”

“Why not?” demanded her father, mystified and cross.

Sylvia tried to laugh. “I only thought it was so far away. He’ll have no one to look after him.”

“Dammit,” said Lord Dilton, “he’ll have half a dozen nurses.”

“Yes, of course.” They talked of other things and she gave him a whisky before he went off to Paddington. She said that she would come down in a few days, but she did not intend to go until Dominic had left.

The place in Cornwall where Lord Dilton was arranging to send Dominic was for young officers suffering from shell-shock. Some of the cases were hopeless, and it was more of a mental hospital than Lord Dilton realized. He hoped that Dominic would agree to go there and he was prepared to use a fair amount of sentimental blackmail about his family and the regiment to persuade him. He thought it possible that he might insist on a court martial to draw attention to the futility of the endless slaughter maintained merely “to keep alive the spirit of the offensive”. Dominic perhaps overestimated the effect of such a protest, but it might easily be awkward for the authorities if an officer with a good record and a decoration refused to fight any longer on the grounds of chivalry and morality. It would not be good propaganda. Dominic would receive additional publicity from his associations, and from the fact that he was heir to an ancient name. The gossip-writers would probably rake up his engagement to Sylvia, and his long stay at Dilton. Her photograph might be on the front page of some rag. It would be damnably unfair to Maurice.

Lord Dilton, his blood-stream so well nourished from his farms, and inflammable with good wine, sitting alone in his first-class carriage, had a sudden access of anger. It was not directed towards Dominic but towards the newspapers. To find Sylvia looking ill and jaded by the war had further upset him. If it continued he did not see how they
could escape the fate of the Wolverhamptons. So far his two sons were alive. Dick had been wounded but was back at the front. His elder son was on the brigadier-general’s staff, near the front line. Either or both of them might be killed any day. They could not last indefinitely under these conditions. If his boys had to be killed for their country he could say nothing; he must accept it. But he did not believe it was for their country. The war was continuing to destroy their country. It should stop at once, by agreement, before the European social structure was wrecked beyond repair. He admitted to himself that Dominic was fundamentally right, and his anger increased.

Why not let the boy go through with it? Why not support him? Why not mobilize the few peers who had kept their heads, and saw the ruin we were racing for? They would say he was trying to save his sons. Why the devil shouldn’t he try to save his sons? Damn the Welsh Baptist! Damn the press-magnates! Not one of those who were hounding the nation to ruin was an Englishman, at any rate not of the kind whom Lord Dilton thought were fitted to rule the country. Weren’t there enough decent Englishmen to stop a generation being butchered to satisfy the ambitions of these adventurers? He felt the veins swelling in his forehead. He felt that he would burst with his rage. He was in uniform and if anyone else had been in the carriage, they would have imagined that this apoplectic colonel was itching to seize the Kaiser by the throat.

Before the train reached Frome he had calmed down, and his usual habit of mind reasserted itself. The structure of the government had to be supported, and Dominic could
have no effect. If every young man behaved like him there would be anarchy. Lord Dilton was unaware that if Dominic had come from different origins, he would not have tolerated his attitude for a moment. It was because he regarded him as a member of his own, the landed ruling class, that he accepted his protest as an expression of responsibility.

But he had misjudged the intention of Dominic, who had no wish to make a demonstration as a public martyr. He was only ready to accept the role if it was forced upon him. He was little concerned with what lay beyond his personal contacts. His present attitude was entirely the result of these; chiefly his contact with Hollis, and above all of that with the German boy. His concern was not to commit, not to train others to commit a similar murder. He did not believe that Hollis and the German boy were a menace to each other. They were forced into their artificial hostility from above. He would not help the process. That was as far as his conscience and his reason had taken him.

Lord Dilton was relieved when he told Dominic that he had arranged for him to go to the hospital in Cornwall, that he did not have to use any sentimental blackmail. Dominic was even pleased when he heard that there would be a doctor who dealt with mental difficulties, who could help him to relieve the jam in his brain.

Before he left Dilton, a few days later, he borrowed the bicycle which he had used on the day after his arrival from Australia, and rode once more over to Waterpark. He wanted to look again at the place which one day presumably would be his. He was curious about his own attitude towards it. He wanted to know how much he still felt it
to be his home. He rode through the white gate, with its notice, “Wheels to Waterpark House only”, and up the short avenue to the door in the crumbling garden wall—the old, inconvenient but unchanged way of reaching the front door. A new parlourmaid answered the bell. He gave his name and asked if he might see Mr Cecil.

He was shown into the drawing-room and in a few moments Mr Cecil appeared. Although rather more amiable than on Dominic’s first visit, he still complained about the repairs needed, and he pointed out the patch of damp which had appeared again on the staircase wall. Altogether the house looked a little bleak. It had a negative good taste, but all the glowing colour of the old pictures, the soft gold of their frames, and the faded yellow damask had gone. The rooms no longer had that peaceful look which comes when the furniture had found and grown into its place through the centuries. Mr Cecil asked him to stay to tea, but he felt uneasy in the house, and said, as on his first visit, that he wanted to look at the village, and to ride back to Dilton before dark, as the bicycle had no lamp.

He went by the meadow path, first wheeling his bicycle across the lawn to the three oak trees. He stood by the bridge looking back at the house. At one time he had thought of Waterpark as his only real home. He had expected to spend his life there, married to Sylvia. He tried to imagine what that life would have been like, but his imagination could not work unless stimulated by his feelings, and he no longer had any feeling about this place. The ethos created by long association between one people and one stretch of land, or between a family and their dwelling place seemed to have
evaporated. The tie which bound his blood to this land had broken. It had not snapped suddenly, but the cord had slowly perished, and now fallen soundlessly apart.

When he did succeed in imagining that Mr Cecil had ended his tenancy, and that he had inherited the place, he had a feeling of oppression. He thought of all he would have to do if he lived there, and with insufficient money. He would have to bring back the furniture and the pictures from Australia again, those unfortunate ancestors who at intervals were transported across the Indian Ocean. The thought was a nightmare.

He stood on the bridge looking down into the stream where as children they had played through the long summer days among the reeds, becoming almost part of its intimate life of frogs and dragonflies. Here his brother Bobby, now nearly twenty years dead, had held his imaginary conversations with the trout, while his grandparents and parents in their easy-going way had laughed and gossiped as they sat at tea under the oak trees. These memories could not evoke them. Here they were an idea, not an emotion, and he thought of them as leading their true life in the Australian countryside. He felt as he had in the hollow room in the hospital, that the life and colour were gone. This was partly because he felt that something was gone from himself.

He rode his bicycle across the narrow meadow path, where so often in the early days of summer, the buttercups had filled the creases in his shoes with yellow dust as he walked on his way to see Colonel Rodgers, for one of those sessions with guns and swords, to sit entranced while the colonel told him of battles and bullfights, of the thousands
of birds and animals he had shot, and how he had killed the two natives whose shrunken mummified heads were his
garniture de cheminée.
Instinctively he went to the church to look once more at the tombs, which, apart from Cousin Emma, and the colonel in the War Office, and that young widowed cousin in Dorset whom he had not yet been to see, contained almost the only relatives he had in England. The earlier tombs were under simple stone slabs let into the floor. In the seventeenth century they had become more ostentatious, and there were wall monuments with skulls, cherubs and coats-of-arms. No Langtons had been buried here for two generations. The last was Cousin Thomas, to whose memory his grandfather had put up that window blazing with escutcheons. As a boy he had been proud of its brilliance and grandeur. Now it had no meaning for him. It was as if he had come across one of his old toys, a wooden horse pulled on wheels. Or, if it had a meaning it was a deathly one, not because it was a memorial to the dead, but because all those shields were themselves part of the panoply of battle and murder and sudden death. They should be taken from the church, as the pictures had been taken from Hermione’s dining-room, to make it a place of healing.

Yet how had he felt in that hollow room? More deathly than peaceful, with its breathing colour gone. Was it possible that the only things that coloured his own life, that made his blood flow, were in themselves deathly? That if they were removed he would be as empty as that ward, as bleak as this church would be if the armorial tombs and the glowing window were taken away? He began to feel the stoppage
in his brain, and before that dreadful feeling completely possessed him he left the church which had brought it on.

He rode hurriedly through the village, not staying to see Colonel Rodgers as he had intended. He wanted to escape the past. It seemed to him that all the beauty of the English countryside contained within itself a single evil, the obsession with killing. All the life he had enjoyed, all his amusements were centred on killing. The chapel of the most gracious country house, of Waterpark itself, peaceful and secluded with its lichened stone, its lawns, its stream, its cooing doves, was really the gun-room.

The home for shell-shocked officers was to the east of Marazion, on the south-west slope of a hill. It had been built by a retired tea-planter from India, and designed to trap as much sun as possible in a northern climate. There was a verandah with a wide balcony over it, which could be enclosed with glass in the winter. From this there was a clear view of the sea and of St Michael’s Mount, but of the side away from Penzance. Dominic arrived in the evening and the castle was against the light of the setting sun, still mysterious, still Wagnerian.

He dined in a sort of mess for the patients. They all seemed a little odd to him, nervous, despondent or excitable; but he supposed that he was a little odd himself. The worst cases did not come in to meals, but had them in their rooms, and these were given single rooms. Dominic was also given a single room. He often found that in life, for no
apparent reason, he was allowed privileges, but now it was because of his association with Lord Dilton. He went up immediately after dinner to settle himself in, and to write to Helena, telling her where he was. He said that he was quite fit, but that “they” thought he should come here for a time. He did not mention his attitude to the war, nor his intentions. He could not explain them in a letter. He would do so when he returned; and he thought that she who stood for all that was best in his life, who was so good and sane and kind and wholesome would naturally accept them, and that they would be drawn together again closer than ever, in body and spirit. He could not even hint at this in a letter. He told her that he would not be sent back to France, so that she should not be anxious about him.