When Blackbirds Sing

by Martin Boyd

  “Wouldn’t I be in a false position there?”

  “Of course not. It’s my house,” said Lord Dilton curtly.

  “I mean Lady Dilton might not like my being there if she knew.”

  “She won’t know, nor will anyone else. You haven’t spoken of this till now?”

  “No, sir. I had to tell you first.”

  “Good. Will you come down tonight, or would you rather wait till tomorrow?”

  Dominic said that he would rather wait. He went with Lord Dilton to the door of the hotel, where he thanked him for not being angry.

  “As a matter of fact, I was damned annoyed,” said Lord Dilton, but he laughed.

  Dominic went up and lay on his bed. Having made this arrangement with Lord Dilton, there was now, he thought, no reason why he should not go to see Sylvia. But he could not feel that there was any relationship between them. He had not felt any when they met in Hermione Maine’s sitting-room. All their passionate unions, their abandonment in that moonlit bedroom in Penzance, were like something he had once read in a book. Not a single fibre of his body vibrated at the memory. With his persistent habit of expecting other people’s feelings to correspond with his own, in spite of repeated shocks from the discovery that they did not, he imagined that she too had passed through a similar change of emotional climate. If she came down to Dilton while he was there, he thought that it would be mildly pleasant.

  But she did not go down while he was there, partly because she did not want to repeat the humiliation of their meeting at Hermione’s, which she thought would be certain when she heard that Dominic had been in London without letting her know. Another reason for her not coming was the extreme caution she observed, and she was afraid that if her mother saw them together, she might instinctively divine, from some expression when their eyes met, even if it was not one of love, what had passed between them.

  Dominic went down by the afternoon train, and in the evening he dined alone with the Diltons. There was the same peaceful domestic atmosphere as on the night nearly two years ago when he had arrived unexpectedly from Australia, and it gave him a sense of homecoming. His problems seemed less urgent, and to belong to some other region.

  Soon after dinner Lady Dilton said that Dominic should go to bed, and her husband left for the depot. In the hall he told Dominic to take things easily, to do what he liked, and to put his difficulties out of his mind for the present. He had to build himself up.

  “I can’t come over every evening,” he said, “as I have to dine in mess. I hope you’ll find some way of amusing yourself. You can browse in the library, and when you feel like it you can go out and shoot a pheasant.”

  Dominic slept deeply through the silent night. At the hospital there had been the slight noises made by other patients in the ward, the screens, the bedpans, and the feeling of an institution; in London there was the traffic. Here there was absolute stillness, until at eight o’clock the housemaid came in quietly and drew back the curtains, revealing a soft grey morning with a rain that was little more than a mist. He felt that if the housemaid stopped her quiet movements, he would hear the mist falling on the grass in the park. His breakfast, with porridge and cream, with eggs laid last evening, and all the home-grown produce, butter and honey, that kept the Diltons’ cheeks so rosy, was brought up to his room. The tray was sparkling with soft Georgian silver. He supposed that the linen was clean at the hospital, but it did not seem to have had the virginal whiteness of his tray cloth. The pillow was softer, the sheets were slippery-smooth. The fire which the house-maid had just lighted was crackling up the chimney, and the flames were reflected in the chintz, covered with sprawling roses, of the curtains and the chairs. The material conditions were those of absolute security and peace, and they affected his state of mind.

  Lady Dilton came up to see him after breakfast and asked the usual questions: “How did you sleep?” “Have you everything you want?” So tough and bossy were those in good health, with an invalid, especially with a wounded soldier; she was all solicitude, and would almost retard his recovery with excessive cosseting. She told him not to get up until he felt inclined as it was a damp morning.

  “If you do get up,” she said, “you can come and help me with my envelopes.” Her envelopes, like the temperature of the bath water, had become one of the leit-motifs of life at Dilton during the war.

  At eleven o’clock he dressed and went down to Lady Dilton’s sitting-room. She immediately rang the bell and ordered a glass of hot milk for him. When he had drunk it they settled on either side of the writing table and addressed envelopes. The retriever lay on the hearthrug with his head in the fender.

  “Byng,” she said crossly, “don’t lie like that. You’ll roast your brains.” The dog rose lazily and came over and put his head on her knee. She took no notice of him and he went back and flopped against the fender. The peaceful routine of the day went on.

  In the afternoon Colonel Rodgers came over to see Dominic. Since early in the war the hour of tea at Dilton had been advanced to half past four. One of the colonel’s articles of faith was that “no gentleman has his tea before five o’clock”. He could not bear to think that his own sister tarnished her coronet by this common and unclean habit, and he always arrived at five, when the tea was stewed and tepid, so that his visits began with peevish recriminations. He had been told by Lord Dilton that he was not to ask Dominic questions about the war, as it was doctor’s orders; but his annoyance at being given a cup of pale lukewarm liquid tasting faintly of tar, made him ignore this injunction. He asked at once: “Why aren’t you in uniform?”

  Dominic flushed, but Lady Dilton said brusquely: “Because he’s more comfortable like that.”

  “You must have your photograph taken in uniform with your M.C. up,” said Colonel Rodgers.

  He obeyed his brother-in-law’s instructions to the extent of not actually asking for the description of a battle, but he talked only of matters connected with the war, and the prospects of smashing the Germans in the spring.

  Lord Dilton’s attitude towards Dominic was not only one of sympathy with a point of view which he believed was largely justified. It was part of a plan. He hoped that Dominic, receiving kindness and friendship in the familiar places of his youth, would be brought to conform to the pattern of life there, and abandoning his self-ostracism would agree to return to the depot for the rest of the war.

  His wife told him that Marcus had come over to tea, half an hour late as usual, that he had talked about nothing but the war, and that as soon as he left Dominic had gone to bed with a violent headache. Lord Dilton, exaggerating what he believed to be true, had told her that he was suffering from a form of shell-shock.

  He was very angry when he heard this. He was kind, just, and often easy-going, but he was also an autocrat. He had been the most important person in his neighbourhood since he was a young man, and he regarded any form of disobedience as a personal affront. Dominic’s letter at first had made him more than “damned annoyed” but his anger had cooled quickly, partly because Dominic had done well at the front, but more because of a special feeling he had had for him since he first became aware of him in his seventeenth year, which he could only explain as he did then by saying: “There’s something in that boy.” He rang up Colonel Rodgers and “gave him hell”, forbidding him to come to Dilton again while Dominic was there.

  This was a boon to Dominic. He realized how reluctant he had been to see the colonel. When they had lived at Waterpark, with Colonel Rodgers in the dower-house across the meadow, he had always been in his company. He had fastened on him as a disciple in his cult of death and violence. The colonel had stimulated in him that black inherited streak, which had come into his conscious mind in the nightmare in the French train. He had an old affection for him, but the source of its nourishment was deathly.

  There was a succession of days of drizzle. Except for a walk in the park, when Dominic was not helping Lady Dilton with her envelopes, or driving with her to
deliver them, he spent most of his time in the library. He was not educated in the ordinary sense of the word. After his failure at school he had only technical training, either in agriculture or in the army. But he had been brought up in an educated atmosphere, though a dilettante one. He had travelled and had been accustomed all his life to hear a kind of philosophical conversation, the speculations of people with curious minds, who also sought their pleasure mostly in unselfconscious aesthetic appreciation. He knew the names of the great creative artists in every field, and had a dim idea of the nature of their achievements, but no exact knowledge of any of them. This contributed to his sense of being outside the pale of ordinary people, though those from whom he felt most excluded, his immediate relatives, were not in his sense ordinary. They did not fit any pattern except that of their own group.

  He thought that with this library and his leisure he might begin to dispel his ignorance. He took down a translation of the Dialogues of Plato, and found to his surprise that they were easy to read. When Lord Dilton next came over to dine he talked of them eagerly. A new planet had swept into his ken. Lord Dilton was pleased. His plan for Dominic seemed to be working out. Nothing could be better than that he should build himself up in the ordered life of this household, and fill his mind with ideas remote from immediate problems. He advised Dominic to broaden his outlook by reading the literature of other times and countries. This had an unfortunate result—unfortunate for his plan.

  Dominic searched along the shelves for translations of the literature of other countries. One of his dim cultural ideas was that the height of European civilization was reached in French literature of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He took down the Duc de Sully’s book on war, and read of how the princes of that time made war, ravishing cities and slaughtering the people, with no excuse beyond their own vanity, greed and ambition. It seemed to him to apply exactly to the situation in Europe at the moment. He was excited, and could hardly wait for Lord Dilton to come to dine the next evening to show him his discovery. He was convinced now that his attitude was supported by the best authority. On the same morning, glancing into a book, he had read: “The good man tries to prevent others experiencing his own sufferings; the evil man finds compensation in seeing them repeated in others.”

  The next evening when he had shut the dining-room door behind Lady Dilton, he returned to the table, and taking Sully’s book from the pocket of his dinner jacket, he showed the most forceful passage to Lord Dilton, who read it, and then said: “Yes. You see human nature does not change.”

  “But it’s not human nature, sir,” replied Dominic, “the people didn’t want their cities sacked then, any more than the conscripts want to be butchered today. It’s only a few men at the top of each country who want it, to fill their own pockets or satisfy their personal ambitions. You told me that at this very table.”

  Their conversation became more or less a repetition of that in the back room of the Mayfair hotel. Lord Dilton looked bothered and a little impatient.

  “We can’t go over it all again,” he said. “Even if we agreed, we are not in a position to do anything about it.” He rose from the table and they went into the sitting-room.

  Lord Dilton saw that his plan for Dominic was not working out. He could not stay on indefinitely at Dilton. As soon as he was quite fit, which would not be long now, he would either have to rejoin his unit or be arrested. When he left for the depot he said: “I wouldn’t stay indoors reading when it’s fine. Why don’t you go out with a gun?”

  Dominic wanted to please him in any way he could. On the following afternoon he took the gun he had been lent, called Byng, the retriever, and walked down a field of stubble near a wood to the west of the house. When he was about fifty yards from the wood, a pheasant rose clear on his left. Dominic fired. The pheasant fell in the stubble and the dog retrieved it.

  This was the first shot he had fired since he had killed the German boy. Though then it was from a revolver and now from an ordinary double-barrelled gun, the report was much the same. It was enough to bring back that scene in a flash of memory. The response to his recognition, the split second of surprise as the bullet went through his heart, and then the body rolling over and over, as Hollis had rolled in the dew. He had killed the German boy and now he had killed this bird. In some crazy way they were identified in his mind. He stood in a kind of dazed horror, touched with the same self-disgust as when he had awakened from his nightmare in the train. He barely restrained an impulse to fling away the finely made gun. He did not take the dead bird from the dog and put it in his game bag, but turned back towards the house, the dog following him, proud and contented to be carrying the bird.

  Lord Dilton was concerned about Dominic, and in the evening he came over again to dine at home. He was pleased when he heard that he had been out shooting, but worried again at his withdrawn manner, and his silence at dinner. When Edith had left the room he asked him if he were not well.

  “I’m well in body,” said Dominic, “but I don’t feel well in my mind.”

  “Can’t you cure that yourself?” asked Lord Dilton. “Especially if you’re aware of it. Don’t think of things that disturb you. Think as much as you can of normal things, the ordinary activities of life.”

  “The ordinary activities of life make me think of other things,” said Dominic. “If I read I come across things that disturb my mind; or if I go out shooting. I can’t go out shooting any more. I don’t think it’s wrong. We have to eat. But it does something to me.” He put his hand against his forehead. “There is something in my mind which normally I don’t know is there. Then I do some ordinary thing, reading or shooting, and suddenly I get a kind of jam in my brain. I can’t let my thoughts turn in any direction. Then the thing in my mind reveals itself. It’s as if it shows me someone who is really myself, not the self I think I am. Then I have to act as that other self wants. I must. I can’t help it, and I can’t explain it. I couldn’t when you asked me about it in London, so I said ‘the Holy Ghost’, but that is what I meant. Sometimes we say things that are true before we know what we are saying. The truth follows our words. I suppose it sounds mad.”

  Lord Dilton looked at him gravely and attentively. He saw that there was little hope of bringing him back to lead the life of an army officer. He did not think that Dominic was mad, but he thought that he really was suffering from shell-shock, that it was not merely a convenient fiction to say so. Though he was sorry that he could not restore him to conventional behaviour, in one way he was relieved, as it justified further medical treatment and would avoid scandal.

  “What you say is outside my experience,” he said, “so I can’t judge it. It is more the subject for a doctor.”

  “Perhaps there was so much violence in my blood,” said Dominic, “that it has fused itself and there is none left.”

  “It may be so,” said Lord Dilton, but as if humouring him. He pushed back his chair, and putting his hand behind the candle flames, he blew them out.

  In his wife’s sitting-room he suggested a rubber of three-handed bridge, though neither of the other two were good players. The evening was subdued, and when Edith made mistakes he did not attack her with his usual good-humoured chaff, but was quietly irritable.

  When he left, Dominic as usual went out with him to his car.

  “I don’t think I should stay here much longer, sir,” he said.

  “We’ll have to think what to do,” Lord Dilton replied. He stood a moment in thought. Then he said, half-smiling: “You always were rather a difficult young man, Dominic.”

  Dominic went back to say goodnight to Lady Dilton, who was putting the cards away, puffing up the cushions, and throwing the contents of the ashtrays into the fire, things normally left to the servants, which she now did as part of her war effort.

  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 ba
ck 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.