When Blackbirds Sing

by Martin Boyd

  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 replie
d 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.

  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 kiss
ed 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.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  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.