When Blackbirds Sing (20 page)

His room was at the end of a row which opened through glass doors on to a balcony. When he came up from breakfast he stepped out to look at the view of the sea and the castle in the morning light. Sitting in a cane chair outside the window next to his own was a young man with the most evil and hideous face he had ever seen. The mouth would not close over the teeth and was twisted in a cruel sneer. The cheek had a kind of knotted lump in it, and from an almost lidless eye-socket stared a blue blank glass eye. Dominic felt shocked and sick, and stepped back quietly into his room, before the other could be aware of him.

He sat on his bed for a minute, and then rose to go down to the ground floor verandah. The stairs were at the far end of the passage, and from the landing another glass door led on to the balcony. He went through it to look at the view thinking that he would be able to avoid seeing the
young man at the far end. He leaned on the rail looking down at the deep, greeny-purple sea. It was a fine morning at the end of October, and the white horses of the breaking waves gleamed in the misty sunlight, which now shone too in its morning freshness on St Michael’s Mount. When he saw it he thought of Sylvia, but in this light he did not recall the wild desires of the room in Penzance. He took in deep breaths of the strong air, and felt as if he were freeing himself from the fumes of a narcotic. He turned to enter the house again, but could not prevent his eyes glancing along the balcony to that dreadful figure, still staring out at the sea.

At first he thought that another young man had taken its place, or that he himself was suffering from an hallucination. He stood still with surprise, not only at the change, but at the distinction of the face he now saw, which, even more surprisingly, seemed vaguely familiar. Then he realized that it was Hollis.

He went down the balcony and spoke his name.

Hollis did not turn his face towards him, but he moved his eye to see who had spoken. When he saw Dominic he exclaimed: “Langton!” and took his hand, holding it in a tight grip which he would not release, as if he were being saved from drowning. A tear rolled from his eye down his cheek, its former schoolboy chubbiness now finely drawn with suffering, and beautiful in its sad contours.

Dominic said: “I’ll get a chair from my room,” and made to step round him, but Hollis swiftly turned his head away and said: “Please don’t go on that side of me. You can go through my room.” His voice was a little slurred.

Dominic did not know whether to tell him that he had already seen the other side of his face, and to pretend that it was not so bad; but he did not yet feel sufficiently steeled to keep up his pretence. He brought his cane chair round through Hollis’s room and sat beside him. When they had sufficiently expressed their surprise at finding themselves together again, Dominic told him how he had come to be there, but did not tell him his ideas about the war, partly because of Hollis’s condition. He soon found that everything to do with the cause of his disfigurement was a horror to him, and he had developed an almost uncanny animal sensitiveness and agility in keeping the wounded side of his face from the view of anyone but the doctor and nurse. He ate with difficulty and was one of those allowed their meals in their rooms.

They talked of the more trivial pleasant times they had had in France, of meals in hotels, but not of the dinner on the night when Hollis had visited the prostitute. Hollis recalled how one morning, after a fortnight in the mud of the trenches, his boots had been bleached of all colour. His servant had cleaned them with “oxblood” polish, and he had gone on parade with bright pink boots. He laughed at this memory. It was one of the few amusing incidents he was treasuring to support him through the rest of his life when nothing funny could happen. He would tell it for another forty years. His laughter had a curious sound because of the injury to his mouth.

Dominic after an hour’s conversation felt drained of vitality. He found that all the time he had been making the pretence that everything was normal and agreeable, and that it was a pleasure for them to be there. It was perhaps
a pleasure for Hollis that he had come, if it can be called a pleasure when a starving man is given a crust of bread. For Dominic was only a crust from the full life he had known, and to him it was no pleasure to sit by this boy who had been, and was in a different way still his friend, and to know that he dared not look at the other side of that beautiful profile. All the time he was trying to shut it out of his imagination. Also Hollis’s cheerfulness was false. It was febrile, a pretence that what he had lost still existed.

A nurse released him by saying that the doctor was ready to see him. The doctor gave him a brief overhaul and said, in a puzzled way: “You’re as fit as a fiddle, and your nerves seem all right. Why have they sent you here?”

“It’s really because of what I think,” said Dominic uncertainly.

“What you think? What d’you mean?”

“When I think of going back to the war I get a kind of jam in my brain.” He knew he had expressed this as badly as possible, but the doctor’s manner rattled him.

“You mean you’ve got cold feet.”

Dominic felt a surge of anger, an impulse that he had not experienced since he was wounded.

The doctor muttered something, took up a paper and read out: “Shell-shock.” Then he said: “Very well. That’s all for the present.”

Dominic walked up the hill behind the house. He was trembling with his controlled impulse of violence. He sat down on a stone to try to calm himself. He had thought that the violence in his nature had fused, but it had flickered again in a sudden sharp red light. He felt the same
impulse as when he had sent a challenge to Harrison. He had thought that his honour demanded that. But it was an artificial honour.

Now the coat-of-arms had gone with the rest of the colour from his traditional room. He felt an awful sense of disintegration. He was trying to reason about things in his nature which he could not understand. He looked down at the white hospital, and from above could see the striped roof of the balcony. He thought of Hollis sitting there, hiding half his face. He thought of the German boy. He had resolved that he would never send another body rolling on the ground, and that through him no other Hollis should spend his life in a torment of division. That was enough. It was futile to reason about it. He could only stick to his decision whatever happened.

Away to his right, beyond the house, the noonday sun shone on the island mountain, the church and the castle, beautiful but simple facts, no longer a mystery. It was what he required of life, beauty and simplicity, not mystery. He did not want to feel this endless agonized yearning for what he could not understand, the feeling he had when he made love to Sylvia, against the castle and the sea. He tried to imagine her with him now, and only knew that if she were, he would want to escape.

In the afternoon he went again to see Hollis, who asked him if he would come for a walk with him after tea, when it would be dark. He left his end of the balcony only after sunset, when the other patients were in the dining-room dawdling over their tea. Hollis said that he would meet him at the front door at five o’clock.

When Dominic came he was standing out in the dusk, with the right side of his face turned to him. He had pulled his hat down over the left side which gave him a jaunty appearance, but somehow this combination of jauntiness with the infinitely sad beauty of his profile made him appear sinister.

They walked along the coast road. He kept Dominic on his right, and when they turned, with that almost animal instinctive agility, he kept the left side of his face always hidden.

Hollis began to talk about the woman he had visited in Béthune. She had already become for him the symbol of freedom and abundant life. He had forgotten her slight irritability and his dissatisfaction afterwards. He spoke of her emotionally.

“I think of her as my wife,” he said, “she is the only one I shall ever have.”

Dominic was silent. He could not tell him that he too had visited that woman. It would be like telling him that he had seduced his wife, if that was what she had become in his mind. It would be destroying this vision of what he had to feed on all his life as his experience of marriage. When they returned to the house it was dinnertime, and they parted for the night.

For dinner there was some twice-cooked mince, floury potatoes hard in the middle, and a steamed suet pudding. This, after the perfectly cooked fresh food at Dilton, upset Dominic’s stomach; and it was eaten in the company of men all suffering from disordered nerves, instead of in the tranquil magnificence of the Dilton dining-room. The man opposite him could not stop twitching.

He went early to bed but could not sleep. He thought of Hollis living for life on the memory of half an hour with a prostitute, his whole intimate experience of “love”. He thought of his own visit to the woman and wondered how he could ever have gone there. It was, he believed, because everything that he had done from the moment he had returned from leave till the moment he was wounded was evil.

It was evil because he had performed what in nature were hot-blooded actions in cold blood. The devil was not hot but cold. He had deliberately in cold blood taken the idea of violence into his mind, knowing from his dream in the train what he was doing. In cold blood he had given that filthy talk on violence to his men. He had obeyed the instruction to keep alive the spirit of the offensive, when the spirit of the offensive was cold. He had visited that woman in cold blood. It was because his blood was cold that he waited that split second while the German soldier ran him through with his bayonet, and he had received the reward of his actions.

As he lay awake the events of the past few months passed in disturbed sequence through his mind. He thought of Sylvia and St Michael’s Mount, and of Hollis sitting on the balcony looking at it from the other side, and he realized that if Hollis had not been wounded he might not have been in Cornwall with Sylvia. It was Hollis’s wound that advanced his leave, so that it did not clash with Maurice’s. It was a strange coincidence, a bizarre design of life, that he was now here with Hollis. When at last he fell asleep he had confused nightmares in which the two different aspects
of St Michael’s Mount had become the two sides of Hollis’s face, and Sylvia was the whore of Béthune. Everything was split and double.

After a few days he fell into a routine. He spent his time exclusively with Hollis, not only because their earlier friendship enabled them to talk unreservedly, but also because Hollis was the only one in the house whose nerves were not disordered. He was full of sorrow, sometimes inclined to be morbid, but so far sane.

They played games together, draughts, chess and two-handed poker. Dominic bought beer in the village, and they sat on the balcony, smoking, drinking and playing cards in a kind of continuation of their life in the mess. It was against the rules to bring drink into the home, but again a freedom was allowed to Dominic which others could not have taken, perhaps because the nurses favoured him for his looks. However, the doctor spoke to him sharply about his exclusive association with Hollis, saying it was abnormal.

“He was in my regiment,” said Dominic, “we were in France together. Besides he can’t talk to anyone else.”

“He could if he wanted to,” said the doctor. “It’s only vanity.”

Again Dominic felt his fused violence flickering back to life. Before it blazed he turned and walked out of the room. Was Hollis to be allowed nothing, was he to be deprived of the only facet he could present to the world, the illusion that he was still a healthy and handsome boy? And yet Dominic was uneasy. There was something in the way Hollis cherished the illusion, in the instinctive animal agility of his concealment that was perhaps abnormal. Then
he thought: “Damn it! What right have they to expect him to be ‘normal’ when they have done that to his face?” Illusion was all that was left to him.

One night when they were walking it was very dark. They did not speak much. After a while Dominic asked quietly: “Why won’t you let me see all your face?”

“You know why. The other side is like hell,” said Hollis.

“I would soon get used to it.”

“You couldn’t. I wouldn’t want you to. I wouldn’t want you to think of me like that.”

“I would know that was not you. I would still have the other side where I can see you truly.”

“You couldn’t help yourself. The bad side makes the most impact.”

“It shouldn’t. I feel that the concealment makes a kind of constraint between us.”

“No one can reveal himself wholly to another person, although you know more of me than anyone else does. Another thing, if you were a bit irritated with me, as you are sometimes when I’m slow making a move in chess, and if you looked up then and saw my face, you would hate me.”

“I couldn’t hate you,” said Dominic seriously.

Hollis did not reply, and Dominic felt that the tears were welling from his eye—perhaps from that awful blind socket.

Christmas came and they had painful festivities. The disordered men with forced hilarity hung up mistletoe and holly in the dining-room. Their relatives sent crystallized fruit and crackers, which could not be pulled, as in one or two of the patients any explosion produced a state of
panic. One of the local families sent them brandy, which again was forbidden. Dominic wanted to eat his Christmas dinner with Hollis in his room, partly so that he should not be alone, and also to avoid the pretence of merriment downstairs. But Hollis would not hear of it. He would not let anyone see him eat.

Dominic sent a Christmas card to the Diltons, and he wrote as well to Lord Dilton saying that he was very fit, but still held the same attitude to the war. He said that he was receiving no treatment of any kind, mental or physical. He did not see that he could stay in the hospital indefinitely. Lord Dilton replied asking him to put up with it a little longer.

After Christmas Dominic and Hollis fell back into their former routine. Often they could only take short walks after tea because of the bad weather. When they became tired of games they talked and talked. Dominic told Hollis of the resolution he had made. He was not shocked but he was uninterested. It was now outside the scope of his own life. Dominic quoted to him what he had read about the good man and the bad man in the library at Dilton, but he only said: “I suppose so.” Although he had said that no man can reveal himself wholly to another man, there was little of himself that he did not reveal on these dark evenings, either sitting in his little room with his face averted, or walking along the road above the winter sea.