When Blackbirds Sing

by Martin Boyd

  “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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  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.

  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.

  D
ominic 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.