by Martin Boyd
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.
“You must hate having to go back before it’s all over,” she said. “I expect you had tremendous fun.”
Occasionally Dominic did feel discomfort that he was returning at this time, when the English army was in retreat, but he had never been much aware of the general progress of the war, in the way that Colonel Rodgers and the country clergymen followed it, pinning their flags into maps. The junior officers, Harrison, Frost, Raife, all of them were only concerned with their immediate line of trench and the routine connected with it. The rest was someone else’s affair.
The gossipy woman gave him up, saying to her friends: “He looks marvellous, but he’s as dull as ditchwater.”
He did not mind. He thought of life ahead and Helena waiting for him. They would live at peace together, eating the fruit of their own vine, and no one else would matter. Their children would grow up in the innocence of the natural world. He elaborated his dream during the weeks of the voyage. He re-read Helena’s letters, the detailed descriptions of life on the farm, at last visualizing it with the full force of his imagination.
He left the ship at Melbourne, both so that he would arrive home sooner, and also to see his parents. His father met him at Port Melbourne, to drive him to an uncle’s house in South Yarra, where his mother was waiting. He was surprised at the expression of his father’s face, welcoming him across the barrier at the end of the pier—the suppressed joy and relief of his son’s returning alive from the war. In spite of his unfailing patience and kindness towards him, of the same nature but more disinterested than Lord Dilton’s, Steven had really believed that Dominic disliked him. When Dominic met his mother she seemed both strange and familiar to him. The laws of gravity had once more changed. The air was light and unreal. After an hour or so they fell into their old easy way of talking. They did not mention the war or the reasons for his return, but they asked him a good many questions about Waterpark, and whether he really wanted to return there to live. His father believed that those who had fought and had been wounded in the war were entitled to all the promises made to them, and he had discussed at length with his wife the possibility of uprooting themselves again, and changing the whole pattern of their lives to fulfil their obligations to their hero son. They were surprised at the vehemence of his reply. They appeared to have stirred up some deep repugnance in him.
“No! Good heavens, no!” he exclaimed, and they exchanged a glance of relief, though of rueful amusement that they had wasted so many anxious hours discussing it.
In the evening there was a crowded family party, at which Dominic, the black sheep of more than twenty years, was the centre of admiration; though his Aunt Mildred made a great fuss because he was not in uniform. At intervals her voice could be heard bleating plaintively: “Oh, I am disappointed.”
He met people whom he had not seen since he ran off with Helena and who, if it had not been for the war, would never have spoken to him again. He took their interest as a display of family affection, and not due to the fact that he had won the Military Cross, and had lost four pints of blood. Even less did he realize that if they knew what had brought him back so soon, half of them would not have come.
The next da
y he took the train to Sydney, and from there another train to the country station, twenty miles from his home, where Helena was to meet him in a Ford car recently given her by her mother. Before, they had used only horses. She had not gone down to Melbourne or even to Sydney, as she did not want their reunion to be amongst a crowd of relatives, or in a noisy city, but in the surroundings of their happy life together, which she had tried so hard in her letters to keep before him.
He put his head out of the carriage window a mile before the train reached the little wayside station. Here the country was flat, and the line ran straight ahead. Soon he could see a handful of tiny figures on the platform. He stared at them until he could distinguish a woman, standing a little apart, and knew that it must be Helena. He felt almost nervous and his heart beat quickly. At last he saw her clearly, in a tweed skirt, a white blouse and a hat like a man’s. She walked along the platform to where he was leaning out of the window. He had to take his luggage from the train before he could greet her, as it had stopped only to drop him.
Then he turned to look at her. She too was strange, and yet familiar and kind. She was very brown. Her skin was not as smooth and cared for as when he left, and there was a mark on her cheek, a tiny scar left by the disease she had caught when dipping the sheep, and her eyelids had tired lines. She looked in some way a little harder, yet her eyes when she met his were so kind. He kissed her cheek and he felt that it was her kindness that he was kissing.
They turned towards the exit, where a little Union Jack was stuck over the door. When the train had drawn out, the station-master came up and greeted him, shaking his hand warmly and making a little speech of welcome. He beckoned to the other men to come up and shake hands, which they did with off-hand embarrassment.
The station-master helped them out with his luggage. Helena asked Dominic if he would like to drive, but he had not driven since he had occasionally been allowed to use his father’s car at Waterpark eight years ago. Mr Gowrie, the station-master, made another speech about the wife holding the fort while the husband was away, but when he returned, the husband must take command. In spite of this Helena moved her brown tweed jacket from the driving seat and took the wheel. When she had driven half a mile she stopped the car and turned toward him.
They looked at each other, each seeking under the changes of these violent years the separated lover. She looked at him a little anxiously, searching with her eyes. He felt that she had changed, but only on the surface. She felt that there was some change in him at a deeper level. She missed something in him, the fire which it had been her pride to control. She thought perhaps it was only that he had become re-anglicized, conventionalized by the life of an English officer, and that back on the farm he would become his impulsive self again.
With tenderness for her kindness and loneliness he took her in his arms and they hugged each other tightly, desperately seeking their former selves. When he released her, she wiped her eyes with her handkerchief, and they drove on across the brown plains, between smooth brown hills, strangely capped with the white arabesques of white dead gum trees. There was not a drought, but the dry summer grass had not yet turned green with rain. After a while, to break the constraint of silence after their embrace, she said: “Why aren’t you in uniform?” She did not say it critically, like Mrs Cecil and Colonel Rodgers, or fretfully like Aunt Mildred, but the question startled him.
“I’m no longer a soldier,” he replied.
“But surely you could have been allowed to wear it till you got home.”
“I don’t know.” He did not want to think about anything to do with the army. All that cult of death was over for him. He realized how utterly he had repudiated it when he did not go to see Colonel Rodgers on that last day at Waterpark. Helena was to restore him to life and innocence. That was the role he had fixed for her when he sat dreaming in his deckchair on the voyage out. Perhaps it was the role he had intended for her during the whole of his absence. He did not want her even to mention the army and the war, until the time came for him to explain to her that the traditional room in which he had lived was stripped of its furnishings, hollow and dead.
At last they came over a hill and saw below them the farm which he had longed for so impossibly when he was away, that at times it had seemed only to exist as a vision. Now it was a solid material reality, and Helena said: “Here we are.”
He said: “Stop again,” and she pulled up just below the brow of the hill. He wanted to look at his home before he reached it, to realize its actuality, to shed that feeling which again had come over him that the laws of gravity had changed and that he was light-headed. The white road curved down the hill to the little settlement, the whitepainted house showing through the trees. The afternoon shadow was moving down the smooth hill, as cleanly as the sweep of a brush of water-colour, but the farm was still in the sunlight, the yellow trees and the orchard and the two poplars flanking the gate into the stableyard.
He wanted to realize that it was his, this lovely quiet place, and that he need never leave it again. Amongst those trees his own son was waiting for him, his wife was beside him; all these immense riches, all that a sane man could desire, were restored to him. Trying to realize it, to force himself to know it in his blood, he turned again and took Helena in his arms.
Stevie, their boy, was waiting on the verandah with Helena’s one domestic, a girl called Effie. He came forward shyly, led by the pleasant-faced girl. He had been told that he must say: “Daddy” when he met Dominic, but he turned his head away.
“Go on,” said Effie, nudging him.
The boy said: “Daddy” very quietly, looking the other way. They all laughed and Dominic picked him up. Stevie was not frightened of him, and soon was quiet and friendly. Dominic felt again the emotions he had when he held his new-born baby. Everything now was born again, restored to him in a way he had never imagined.
Stevie held Dominic’s hand as they walked round the place, looking at improvements Helena had made, the extension of the garden, the new trees in the orchard, the new garage and the extra tanks. Everything was in perfect order, the grass mown, the beds weeded, the dead heads cut off every plant. They had all been slaving, since the day they heard that he had sailed, to make the place fit to welcome him. At last he had a welcome home, such an important thing in his life, equal to his expectations.
They had tea on the verandah, where the Gloire de Dijon was in thick bloom, and tangled with it were hanging purple grapes, and trees laden with ripe peaches and nectarines. Effie, whom from natural kindness and commonsense, but also from necessity, Helena had made a friend, sat with them and looked after the boy. Dominic felt that his life was restored to its pattern, simple and patriarchal. He wished that Harry, whom Helena had sacked, were here. He could not bring himself to ask about him. When he thought of doing so he felt a slight discomfort, a faint echo of the jam in his brain, which had come on him in the London hotel and at Dilton.
That night he made love to Helena. It was not as it had been before they went away. Then they had been entirely one, and they sank together into the sleep of fulfilment. Now they lay silent, each not liking to assume that the other was awake. They thought that they had to get used to each other again, or that their union after so long had disturbed more than solaced them. Or was it only that? Soon Helena asked quietly: “Are you asleep?”
He answered: “No,” without any hint of drowsiness.
Some minutes passed in which each was conscious of the other’s alert mind. Then she asked: “Have you been unfaithful to me?”
“Yes,” he said, after a brief hesitation.
She was silent again, but then said: “Can you tell me with whom?”
Again he hesitated a little longer before saying: “With a woman in Béthune.”
“A prostitute?” she asked.
“Yes.”
They lay silent again. He wanted to say he was sorry, but he could not bring himself to do so without telling her the whole truth, and he could no
t tell her about Sylvia. He knew that it would hurt her dreadfully, and that it would blight the life that had been restored to him. It would be bringing the past to destroy the present.
She said: “I don’t mind if it was only a physical necessity.”
“I suppose it was,” said Dominic.
“But I wish you hadn’t.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
They were silent again. The emotions which they had hidden and treasured for three years were brought out, but churned up and confused. They had to clear them to return to their old understanding.
With Sylvia the only real accord had been that of their bodies, so he had made violent love to her body to try to understand her, to learn her with his hands. He could not restore his understanding with Helena in this way. It had to come through their hearts and minds, then their bodies would be in obedient harmony.
The window was open to the night. There was not a breath of wind. The stillness was absolute and in it their quiet voices were loud. From the garden came aromatic country smells. He was where he had longed to be, lying beside his wife in his own home, where every condition was peaceful except that of their minds. He had to remove what he believed was really the cause of their disunity, something more serious and enduring than his escapade with Sylvia. Now, when they were open to each other, lying in the darkness, his brain stimulated and clear, was the time to do it.
“I have to tell you something,” he said.
“What is it?” Her voice sounded apprehensive, and he had the fleeting thought that she expected him to tell her about Sylvia. But he answered: “I am quite well. There is nothing wrong with me physically.”
“That is wonderful.”
“Yes, but there was no need for me to come home.”
“You deserved it. You had done wonderfully well at the front. I am so proud of you.”
“Other people couldn’t come. I came because I chose to. If I had not been a friend of Lord Dilton’s I might be in prison or shot.”