When Blackbirds Sing (21 page)

Their intimacy was now so complete that one night Dominic told him that he had visited the woman in Béthune.

“D’you mean just to talk?” asked Hollis.

“No,” he replied.

Hollis did not seem upset. Perhaps his imaginative picture of this woman had changed. He had not mentioned her recently. But the next night when they were again out walking he referred to her. It was a mild February night, the sky was full of stars and there was a feeling in the air that soon the trees would blossom.

“D’you remember that night when we were walking back,” asked Hollis, “and the orchard?”

“Yes,” said Dominic, but he did not want to talk about it. Two or three times in his life he had had this impulse to strip himself and walk naked under the stars in some remote sylvan place—along an Australian bush road, on a cliff above Port Phillip Bay, and then, so much later, in the orchard near Béthune. He did not know why he obeyed this impulse, which had sometimes equally been felt by saints and poets. At the time it gave him a feeling of serenity, that with his clothes all evil was shed away. When he remembered it afterwards he was ashamed, because of the puritan instruction of his childhood. Hollis apparently wanted to talk of it, but Dominic was not responsive.

The days grew longer and it was light again after tea. Hollis would not walk out until after dinner, when in his jaunty hat he waited for Dominic at the front door. As they walked along the coast road he again referred to the orchard near Béthune, and said that soon the trees would be in blossom.

“Not the apples,” said Dominic.

“The plum trees will soon be out,” Hollis replied. “They will look wonderful in the moonlight. There will be a full moon in a fortnight.” This evening the moon was a pale crescent, just above the tower of the castle.

A night or two later he led the way along a road beyond St Hilary, where he said that there was an orchard.

“What sort of trees are they?” asked Dominic to humour him, yet he felt in himself a faint interest, almost an excitement at the image of the orchard in bloom. But it was not an impulse towards innocence, which had made him walk along the bush track in his boyhood.

The orchard was on a southern slope, and was of mixed trees, apples, pears and plums, the latter with swelling buds, and a few in this sheltered place already showing tips of white.

“You see,” said Hollis. “They will be out at the full moon.”

After this on every walk he spoke of the coming full moon. It was impossible to keep him away from the subject. It had become an obsession with him, a morbid compensation. He spoke as if it had implications of which they were both aware. At times Dominic had the feeling that he must escape, that he could not stand this routine any longer—the walks always in the darkness, and always with that beautiful profile turned to him, and the other hideous side of the face concealed beneath the jaunty hat. At other times he felt himself touched with the same morbidity, and when Hollis counted the days to the full moon, he shared his excitement that they were few. But he knew that this orchard would not be the same as that near Béthune. Then his impulse had been towards innocence, rising in the heart. This would be planned in the head, and he knew that when actions which normally sprang from the heart were planned, they were tainted.

They came in one night, and when he parted from Hollis at the door of his room, he knew that he was committed to this rendezvous in the orchard. In his own room he had a sudden violent reaction, an enlightenment. He rubbed the palms of his hands in his eyes. He was living in a madhouse and he had let it infect him. Everything here was double and confused. Even the view of St Michael’s Mount had become a sort of hallucination of duality, which had its exact and dreadful counterpart in Hollis’s face. Outside of this place Venus and Mars had kept their separate identities, but here they were united into a horrible hermaphrodite. He had to get away at any cost. It was better to be imprisoned or shot than to be touched with madness. He sat down and wrote to Lord Dilton saying that he must leave the hospital at once, even if it meant court martial. In a moment of desperation he added a postscript that he would come back to the depot if he could escape from this place.

In the morning he re-read his letter. Its tone was urgent but there was nothing he wanted to alter, though he was uneasy about the postscript. He was going to cross it out, but did not do so because he thought it would look untidy, and after all surely anything was better than to rot into lunacy. After breakfast he walked down to the village to post the letter himself in the same way that he had gone out to post his letter to Lord Dilton from the Mayfair hotel. He wanted to be sure that it went, and as soon as possible.

When he came back the second post had arrived, and amongst the letters on the baize board was one for himself from Lord Dilton. He wished that he had not been so hurried in posting his own letter. As he was opening the
envelope, a nurse came and told him that the doctor wanted to see him. He went to the office, or surgery.

“You’re invalided out,” said the doctor. “I’m damned if I know why. It’s not my doing. Anyhow you’re free to go when you like.”

Dominic was dazed. He walked slowly upstairs. At first he wished more strongly that he had not posted that letter, especially that he had not written the postscript. On the landing he read Lord Dilton’s letter, which also told him that he was invalided out, and gave him some instructions. But he was free—that was the main thing. He could go at once, this afternoon. He would escape another of those night walks with Hollis when most he felt that his sanity was in danger. When he thought of that he had a great affection and pity for Hollis. He went out on to the balcony to tell him. He was sitting waiting with a chess board ready on the wicker table.

“Where have you been?” he asked fretfully. “It’s going on for eleven o’clock.”

“I’ve been out to post a letter.”

“You could have put it in the box in the hall.”

“It was important. I’ve been invalided out. I’m leaving this afternoon.”

Hollis sat perfectly still. He did not speak for a minute. Then tears welled from his eye and rolled down his sad beautiful cheek. Dominic was moved. He had not known anyone weep at losing him before. Even Helena, if she had wept, had kept her tears till he had gone. And yet he was himself full of relief and gladness, even at leaving Hollis. He wanted to make some compensation to him.

“I wish you could leave too,” he said feebly, “and get
away from all this.” Suddenly Hollis turned his full face to him. The tears too were welling from under the staring glass eye, and running down the twisted hollows of his cheek. Dominic tried to keep any shock of repulsion from showing in his face, and so deprived it of all expression. It was clear that Hollis expected some response, some action from him. His living eye looked up, accusing and appealing. Dominic did not know what response to make. He put out his hand uncertainly. Hollis did not take it, but turned his face away again, and seemed to ignore his presence.

Dominic said: “I’ll go and pack.” There was now no reason why he should not walk past Hollis, but he kept to the former convention and went round through the other bedroom to his own.

He had a dreadful feeling of inadequacy. He should have said something, done something that Hollis expected. Should he like St Francis have bent and kissed that hideous cheek? Then he thought what a beastly thing that would have been—when the boy offered him his whole face, to kiss only the side that was distorted and horrible, ignoring what he still had of life and health, the smooth fresh skin of his youth. And that was what everyone was doing. They would only caress youth when it was wounded. The whole and the sane must pass first through the Moloch jaws. With anger he thought of Sylvia at Victoria Station, and her question to the subaltern: “Have you been over the top yet?”

He spent the rest of the morning packing. After lunch he went out on to the balcony to spend with Hollis the twenty minutes or so before he left, but now they found little to say.

When Dominic stood up to go he said: “Show me all your face.”

Hollis at first stiffened into rigid obstinacy. Then, not with a sudden defiance as in the morning, but slowly he turned showing his full face. Dominic stroked gently his smooth unblemished cheek. A look of surprise and then almost of happiness came into Hollis’s eye, as if something had been restored to him. When Dominic entered the car, waiting in the drive below, he came to the edge of the balcony and called goodbye to him, looking directly down at him.

From the train Dominic saw St Michael’s Mount from yet another angle. Under the grey sky it looked picturesque with the fishermen’s cottages at its base, but with no suggestion of mystery. All the same he wished that he had gone there, and climbed up to the castle on the summit. It would have been simpler than he had imagined, as now it was low tide he saw that the Mount was joined to the mainland by a causeway.

Following the instructions in Lord Dilton’s letter, Dominic went up to London to complete the formalities of his demobilization. A passage back to Melbourne had been arranged for him, and the ship left in ten days’ time. There was no suggestion that he should come to Dilton before leaving England, and it was clear that he was expected to go without any more fuss. The letter concluded with formal good wishes for his complete restoration to health.

Lord Dilton’s attitude to Dominic had changed, not only because of the failure of his plan; though if he did not succeed in an object he preferred to blot it out of his mind as soon as possible. He began this process as soon as he had written his final instructions to Dominic. When he had his letter asking to be released at any cost from the hospital he glanced through it, thought with impatience: “That’s all done with,” and threw it into the waste-paper
basket. He hardly took in the implications of Dominic’s desperate postscript, offering to return to the depot. He did not want him back. He was too unpredictable. He felt towards him much as he had after his broken engagement to Sylvia. It was possible that if they met in another five years’ time their latent friendship might reawaken. At the moment he did not want to see him.

But the deepest cause of his change of attitude was something outside themselves. It was now March 1918 and the Germans had begun their offensive. The English Fifth Army was cracking up. Béthune, like many other towns, became mostly ruins, the churches and the brothels heaps of rubble. Whatever Lord Dilton might have thought about passing an endless stream of young men into the Moloch jaws of the stationary trenches, now in a time of real danger, he thought such ideas treasonable. It was not a time when his patient treatment of Dominic could be extended. He still acted with concern for his welfare, but as much in his own interest as in Dominic’s. He did not want to have the discredit of a rebellious officer in the battalion he commanded. The authorities did not want the bad propaganda of a decorated officer’s being court-martialled for refusing to serve any further. The fact that he was an Australian made the situation more complicated. The best thing for everyone was to send him back to the bush as quietly as possible. Lord Dilton had pulled his strings with the greatest ease.

Dominic stayed alone in the little Mayfair hotel until the day of his departure. As when he was last there, he did not go to see any of the people whom he might have visited. He went to the War Office and to Cox’s bank to complete
his formalities, and spent the rest of his time walking about the streets. He felt as if he had climbed out too far along a branch, and was perched there isolated. If he had known the people who might have sympathized with his attitude, the socialistic pacifists, he would have shocked them with his Tory-anarchism, with his background of tradition, even if he had stripped away all its colour. His instincts were non-political. He had no ideas of progress through politics. He only wanted to achieve some passionate innocence in his own life, and to redeem his inherited violence, though this longing was not explicit in his mind.

All the time he was aware that he was close to Sylvia, but he did not want to see her. Sometimes he felt that by now her father would have told her all about him, and that she would meet him with the same insolence that she had shown to the subaltern at Victoria. At times he was filled with uneasiness, remembering the postscript to his letter to Lord Dilton. He knew that it was not true that he could have returned to his duties at the depot. He thought that this postscript must be the reason why Lord Dilton had not written to him again.

His ship sailed from Plymouth. On the evening before it left, he again took a train from Paddington, perhaps, he thought, for the last time. He had a sense of ending, of everything being for the last time. It was not oppressive, but only faintly melancholy. This was the station from which he had made so many fateful journeys—first as an infant from Australia being brought to live with his grandparents at Waterpark; then when his parents came back to take their inheritance; then when he had to go
down to announce to them that he had failed for the army; then to join the regiment at the depot; then with Sylvia on their stolen honeymoon; then to convalesce at Dilton, and at the madhouse near Marazion; now finally to return to Australia, perhaps for good. He might never take another train from Paddington.

On the ship he entered that strange dream-like existence between two worlds. He now thought of Australia as his home. He had sweated Europe out of his system, and had done so with his blood. He had left the traditional room. His place was out in the open, in the natural world where Helena was waiting for him. That was the only place where he had come to terms with life.

The people on the ship were mostly Australians. There were some wounded men, invalided out like himself, but with more obvious reasons; and women more or less of the smart kind, wives of the wounded officers or vaguely connected with war work. Australia was his home, but he did not take in that these people were his fellow-countrymen, and that with them his sense of home-coming should begin. There was not the same hearty compulsion to games as on the voyage to England, but now, with a different reason, he kept to himself. Like Mrs Heseltine, but with less intelligent kindness, a gossipy woman tried “to take an interest in him”. She said that she had had a wonderful time in London, doing war work in exalted circles.