When Blackbirds Sing (11 page)

“I hope to God I manage all right,” he said. “This sort of thing isn’t really my cup of tea.” He gave a nervous laugh.

“You’ll be all right,” said Dominic. “Just go straight ahead but don’t walk into our barrage.”

Hollis gripped his hand and held it. “Cheerio!” he said and returned to his men.

Dominic stood with sudden melancholy, looking towards the German lines. At the moment the scene could hardly have been more peaceful. The stretch of wasteland before him, where every living growth and every construction of man was blasted and battered flat, suggested the sea at sunset. At this hour in the village churches all over England, they would be singing the last hymn at evensong, where the mothers and lovers of the men huddled nervously in the trenches, waiting for zero hour, had been praying for their safety.

Then, in a second, the heavens opened. Shells crashed on the German lines. Shrapnel burst in golden rain, beautiful in the evening sky. The men straggled out of the trenches across No-man’s-land. One of the shells fell short on a section of nine men, killing them all. Now and then a straggling man fell over like a doll, putting his name on a War Memorial. As Dominic watched them, a protective numbness of feeling came over him. He was tense and alert for any need of action on his part. The casualties were not individual human beings—they were only part of the phenomenon.

After some time the raiders returned. Eighty of their number had been killed and more wounded, but they had taken several prisoners and the raid was judged a success. The prisoners were fair round-faced Bavarian peasants, brought back from Russia and bewildered by the fury of the Western Front. The sergeant of Dominic’s platoon stood behind a traverse and kicked each one as he passed.
Harrison smiled when he heard this, thinking the sergeant “naughty” but amusing.

A platoon was sent out under another barrage to bring in any of the missing wounded. Dominic was in charge of this. They found Hollis with apparently half his face blown away, gurgling and twitching but still alive. Even this did not waken Dominic from his numbness of feeling.

When they came out of the line the surviving officers gave a dinner to celebrate the successful raid. They drank large quantities of champagne, whisky and crèmede-menthe, and they broke the furniture in the
estaminet
where the dinner was held.

One result of all this was that, owing to Hollis and another officer being wounded, and a third killed in the raid, Dominic became due to go on ten days’ leave a month sooner than he had expected. He was told of this only the day before his leave began, and he arrived in London without warning.

When he left the train at Victoria, and, carrying his suitcase, came out into the forecourt of the station, he again had that feeling of a rarity in the air, of changed laws of gravity, which any sudden return to a once familiar scene gave him. He was surprised to be back so soon, and that his war experience had been so comparatively negligible. He had not been in a great battle, nor seen one German soldier, except the prisoners brought in after the raid. He had seen many killed by shellfire, and many wounded, but the numbness protected him from the full reality of what he had seen.

Standing uncertainly outside the station he had a feeling of anticlimax, that he was not met by some welcoming face. From childhood, to be welcomed home had seemed to him one of the most important happinesses of life. Once, when a boy, owing to an accident to his foot, he had not been taken on a summer holiday. On the return of the family he had
painted a large floral notice, “Welcome Home”, and fixed it over the front door. Now, on an occasion which, more than any other, called for joyful faces, there was no one to meet him, and even worse, nowhere he could go except to an hotel.

There was, of course, Sylvia, but when he thought of going to Catherine Street, he had again that slight stoppage in the brain, not a strong or painful one, but enough to keep him standing in indecision. When, in those phases of revulsion from the war, he had sat in some empty traverse, or on the steps of a village church, longing to be back again in the true pattern of human life, it was of Helena whom he thought, of his wife and child on the other side of the world. The week of companionship and that last urgent night with Sylvia had become an incident unrelated to the rest of his life. Her few brief letters and a parcel from Fortnum’s had done little to keep it in mind. Yet, unless he went to Cousin Emma, and the thought of this made him feel utterly bleak, he could only go to Sylvia. He went back through the station into the Grosvenor Hotel, where he booked a room and left his luggage. He then walked along to Catherine Street, but it was more in search of affectionate welcome from someone with whom he had ties of early friendship than to a lovers’ meeting.

Just as he rang the bell Sylvia, dressed to go out, opened the door. She started when she saw him, and with the surprise in her eyes was a brief, barely perceptible hostility. Dominic saw it, and expecting a human welcome, a flash of anger came into his own eyes. They were both surprised at this, and Sylvia immediately covered it with an exclamation of delight. She thought it was due on her side to annoyance
at his coming without warning. Maurice was shortly due on leave and it would have been awkward if they had met.

“Dominic!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you let me know that you were coming?”

“I didn’t know myself till the last minute. We had some casualties. Hollis was wounded and I went up three places on the leave roll.”

“Oh, that was luck. I was just going to tie up parcels, but I’ll ring up and say I can’t. Come in.”

Dominic sat in the miniature grandeur of her drawing-room, while she lied cheerfully to a Miss Charlton on the telephone. He was still dazed by the change of atmosphere, the contrast between this room and the life he had just left. When she put down the telephone she saw that he was not yet with her. Dominic somehow had brought the trenches with him into this exquisite room. Most officers who came on leave washed them away with their first hot bath. What made Dominic so difficult was that he wanted all his worlds to be reconciled, his life integrated. Although so much that he did was instinctive and apparently irrational; in his mind, if frequently smothered by his actions, was that streak of logic, of legal perception, which made his irrational divisions intolerable.

Half an hour later, in Bond Street, he made her more consciously aware of this. He said that he liked walking up Bond Street as it was so different from the trenches. She smiled amiably, but she did not like the remark. She did not like the partitions to be removed between the pigeonholes of opposing ideas. Necessary inconsistencies should be kept apart so that the pattern of life was not disturbed.

They went into a fashionable tea-shop. An acquaintance of Sylvia’s came in, and passing their table, stopped to speak to her. Sylvia introduced Dominic and said that he was an old family friend and just off to stay at Dilton.

“Why did you say that I was going to Dilton?” he asked, when the woman had gone away. “Do you think that I ought to?”

“No, but I thought it better to say that you were.”

“Why?”

Sylvia did not answer. She moved the cups on the table and began to pour out the tea. A situation had arisen. She had the same expression as when they walked up the Brompton Road after meeting Cousin Emma, a look of annoyance and uncertainty. Why was he so crude and stupid? It was obvious that she would want to conceal their association. Or was there again no association to conceal?

Dominic hitherto had been so full of his own emotions as a home-coming soldier, that he had not clearly thought of his relationship to Sylvia. He had only been looking for civilization and friendliness. But he was not as stupid as she thought, it was only that his perceptions were stronger than his reasoning facilities. Looking at Sylvia rather petulantly moving the tea-cups, he felt an echo of something else. It was of the woman in Béthune when, after ten minutes of polite conversation, she asked Hollis, if there was nothing doing, to go. He was shocked at himself for thinking of her in connection with that woman, and yet at the same time there was a kind of snap in his brain, as if the jam, the stoppage which so often he felt there, had been finally cleared away, and all that he required of life was open to him.

They did not speak much during tea, but Sylvia’s expression of uncertainty faded. They knew that there was an acknowledgement between them. Their bodies were now directing their minds, and there was no need to speak. When they left the tea-shop they took a taxi back to Catherine Street, and sat silent during the short drive. He did not touch her or take her hand. Their feelings were too strong and certain for any trivial caresses.

In her drawing-room she turned to him and they embraced closely, Dominic kissing her hungrily all over her face and neck. They separated, and when she had straightened herself before the grandiose Italian mirror she rang the bell. When her maid came she said: “Mr Langton has just come on leave. He wants a bath.”

It was as usual to offer a soldier arriving on leave a bath as a cup of tea, and the maid accepted this customary ritual.

“Will he be staying the night, madam?” she asked.

“No,” said Sylvia.

They allowed the maid time to run the bath and put out towels, and then they went upstairs, Sylvia into her own room and Dominic into the bathroom; but when he had undressed he did not get into the bath. He went instead into her room. She had drawn the apricot coloured curtains, on which the sun made a slanting rectangle of light, so that the room was full of a warm evening glow, in which she lay waiting for him on the bed. After months of harsh and squalid living, of brutality and chastity, his passion was almost beyond endurance.

But afterwards he sang in the bath, and when they came down they were more cheerful and easy together
than they had ever been. Everything was acknowledged between them. They planned frankly how they could spend his whole leave together, day and night, and decided that it would be best to go out of London.

The snap in his brain, the feeling of mental liberation he had in the tea-shop, had infused his whole body. He had a sense of freedom in his body that filled him with joy. Nothing else mattered. He had won through. All his anxieties, his loneliness and frustrations were wiped away, like dusty webs that had been clouding his sight. He had never known such freedom. Perhaps he had felt a similar joy when he had first been married to Helena, but then it was as if he had entered a haven. He was also taking responsibility. Now he had escaped from enclosing walls and had discarded responsibility. With Helena he was apart from other men. With Sylvia he had broken through into their company. He was the same as other satisfied, normally sensual men, which, he thought, he had always wanted to be. He was full of the delight of his body, and he had ten days of that delight ahead of him. It was enough. All the rest was dreary nonsense. They dined in Sylvia’s tiny semi-basement dining-room. The room was so small that it was as if the dugout where he had first dined in the front line had been touched by some golden fairy’s wand. Sylvia again wore a dress of stiff yellow silk, and in the shaded light of the candles looked as if she were a portrait in the room. Her face was softened not only by this light, but by Dominic’s passionate love-making, so that it had a look of having undergone suffering, of a sad wisdom, mellowing her chiselled perfection.

When they came up into the brighter light of the drawing-room this illusion faded. They were lively and cheerful together, furthering the conspiracy of their bodies.

Sylvia had brought out a large map of England. They spread it on the floor and knelt beside it, looking for some place where they could go to stay. Sylvia, who had a wide acquaintance in the English counties, ruled out areas where they might run into her friends. Dominic, his romanticism working automatically, suggested Cornwall.

“It’s a long way to go,” she said, “but perhaps that’s a good thing. What part of Cornwall?”

“Penzance,” said Dominic.

“Why Penzance?”

“I like the name,” he said.

She laughed and rang up Paddington station to ask about the trains. The best one left at ten in the morning.

“We can’t catch that—not tomorrow,” she said as she put down the telephone.

“Why not?” asked Dominic.

“It’s only twelve hours from now. I shall have to make all kinds of arrangements and everyone will be asleep.”

“Look,” he said. “I’ve only got ten days’ leave. I can’t waste one.”

“No. But I can’t leave London till after tomorrow.”

“You could if it was a matter of life and death.”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, pretend it is. It is to me—a matter of life.”

“Very well. I will,” she said. “I must telephone like blazes.”

First of all she rang up two or three London friends
and put off social engagements. Then she rang up Hermione Maine, a friend who lived in Hertfordshire, where she had turned her country house into a hospital for convalescent officers. She asked her if she would say that she was staying there, if there were any enquiries for her in the next week. She would telephone her real address. She then wrote brief notes to Miss Charlton and to her mother, saying that Hermione wanted her to go down and help her at the hospital for a few days. All these deceptions, which normally would have disgusted Dominic, he accepted as necessary to remove the obstacles between him and his strong desire.

“There,” said Sylvia, as she stamped the letter to her mother. “Now, I’ve only got to tell the servants that I’m going down to Hermione’s in the morning.”

“You can do anything if you want to do it strongly enough,” said Dominic.

“Have you always done what you wanted?” asked Sylvia a little quizzically.

“Not always. But I’m going to from now on,” he said.

As he walked back to his hotel, having arranged to meet her at Paddington in the morning, he felt that he could always do what he wanted. It was easy he thought, when you knew what you wanted, and he certainly knew that. Hitherto his mind had been confused with childish scruples and nonsense.