When Blackbirds Sing (2 page)

When Blackbirds Sing

All the way home on the ship Dominic thought of Helena. For the first week he had not so much thought of her as felt her, or felt the loss of her. It was as if part of his body had been torn off, and his life was pouring out of the wound. He had so often been unhappy; though for brief periods, an afternoon or a day when on a horse or in a boat, the rhythm of riding or sailing had brought him into harmony with his surroundings, and he had felt an intense joy of living, which, while it lasted, enabled him to forget his inability to make any real contact with his fellows. When he tried to make it, he generally did something that infuriated them. At last, when he married Helena this obsession had left him; though his marriage had infuriated everybody, especially the way he did it, carrying her off while another man was waiting for her at the altar steps. Since then he had experienced nearly four years of at first bewildering happiness, which soon he came
to regard as normal existence. His deep feeling for the natural world and his longing for complete human fellowship were satisfied on the farm where they lived in New South Wales.

And now he was separated from her for no one knew how long. It might be for ever if he were killed, for he was on his way to the war. He had very simple ideas of honour, as had Helena. If he had not gone to the war they might not have continued to be happy, knowing that their honour stood rooted in dishonour. Also Dominic had originally been intended for the army, but he had failed in his examinations, and he thought that now he had the opportunity to remedy this disgrace, which had overwhelmed him at the time. Again, with his inability to achieve a balanced relationship, either with people or between different facts, he did not realize, not in its full sharp meaning, what separation from his wife would involve.

In the anguish of this first week on the ship he was back again, a misfit new boy at school. It was partly to avoid these sensations that he was going home to join an English regiment, not so much from his own choice as on his father’s advice. He had been going to enlist in the Australian Light Horse, but Steven had pointed out that Dominic’s peculiar temperament, judging by his experience at school and at an agricultural college, appeared to arouse more hostility, or at any rate brutal ridicule, in the young Australian than in the young Englishman. So here he was on the ship, feeling again like the new boy; and ships in those days were very like small public schools. Committees were formed to organize games, and the members came round like prefects, forcing passengers to play. Cricket was almost compulsory for the
men, and those crossing the line for the first time were forced to undergo the rites of Neptune.

It was very rough in the Great Australian Bight, and the public school spirit did not take control until the ship left Fremantle, so that for the first week Dominic was left alone in a deathly anguish which was almost physical. When he awoke in the night, and turned to touch the source of his life and peace, she was not there. She was hundreds of miles from him, and every hour the heaving ship took him further away. Not till then did he know how much she had given him. She had kept him serene, contained within himself, other than her, yet one with her in perfect harmony. He had lost all that tortured longing to escape his loneliness by meeting another person in the intimacy of anger. When he awoke in the morning and put his lips on her neck, her skin was full of cool, peaceful life. It was like dew. And she did not give him only physical peace. She calmed his mind. When, in spite of his general happiness, at times he thought that she did not really understand him and he felt his old impulse towards violent anger, which he had been told was an inherited taint in his blood, she did not meet it in any way, either in fear or repulsion, and it left him.

In the mornings he came into the saloon with his dark El Greco face looking haggard. A man at his table chaffed him about sea-sickness. Dominic did not answer. The man was one of that vast mass of people outside his comprehension, from whom formerly he had suffered so much in trying to win their friendship.

This was the first stage of the voyage when the other passengers either thought that he was seasick or were themselves
too sick to notice him. In this stage he did not think, but only felt. He felt the loss of the integrity that Helena had given him, felt himself disintegrating, turning back into the bewildered perennial new boy.

The second stage began after Fremantle when the sports committee began to function. The sea was calm and he sat in his chair thinking of Helena. His feeling had become numbed with its own intensity and only gave him intermittent pangs. He filled his mind with pictures of her, in the dairy skimming the cream, or doing things with plums and apricots and tomatoes, drying them in the sun to use in the winter, or shaking the seeds from the pods of poppies. She was always engaged in country activities of this kind. Sometimes she was waiting for him, leaning over the gate when he came in from riding, or even sitting on the flat top of the gate post, which made him laugh. She also did this for him. He did not laugh easily and she released his laughter. He thought of her after their baby was born. He remembered his emotion, how through this she had brought him into the human fellowship from which he had always felt excluded, and had related him to the natural world which was his home.

One of the men organizing the games came up to him and told him that he was putting him down for the eleven against the ship’s officers. Dominic said that he did not play cricket. The man laughed and said: “You can’t get out of it with that one.”

This was one of his difficulties in life. People so often could not believe the simplest facts when he told them. It was true that owing to his somewhat erratic education he
had played hardly any cricket, and he did not like a game that was a sort of moral commitment and was even a substitute for a moral code. He thought games should be entirely for pleasure. He was not unathletic. He could break-in a colt and jump a five-barred gate. He was a strong swimmer and had dodged bulls in the arena at Arles.

He explained politely to the man that he saw no need to get out of it. The man gave him a curious look and after that left him alone. He explained to his committee that Dominic was a queer fish. Because of his dark, slightly foreign appearance, one of the passengers suggested that he might be a German spy. A Mrs Heseltine from Melbourne said that was nonsense, and that she knew his family quite well. She admitted that he was a bit of a black sheep, chiefly because he had run off with his first cousin, the bride of Wentworth McLeish, one of the richest squatters in the Western District, on the very day of the wedding.

Seeing him so lonely, and also attracted by his looks, she made herself known to him. He was longing for something or somebody familiar and he was always responsive to kindness and never questioned its sincerity. The numbness which succeeded his anguish was beginning to thaw. This friendly, pretty, rather frizzy woman who knew Aunt Mildred, though she was eighteen years older than himself, sent a warmth along his veins. For the first time since he left, his sombre face suddenly lighted up in a smile. He brought her deck chair and put it beside his own and they sat together for the rest of the voyage, the subject of a good deal of half-amused, half-malicious gossip.

They went ashore together at Durban, where he refused
to go in a rickshaw, saying that he did not like being pulled by a human being.

“I must be able to say that I’ve ridden in one,” she protested as she looked at a magnificent rickshaw boy, dressed in feathers, wearing huge horns, grinning and prancing and pretending to be a horse. But she allowed herself to be over-persuaded, not entirely disliking the sensation. Also she rather admired Dominic for refusing. She felt somehow that the same kind of hot pulsing blood beat in his veins as was in the African’s. Dominic also felt this, but not so consciously, though it was indeed the reason why he would not have the African’s noble body used as an animal’s. As they walked in search of a cab, this feeling of affinity with the negro, whose impulses were not intellectualized, came up to his conscious mind, and produced a slight smouldering in him, that the man’s splendid body should be exploited.

After two days ashore, seeing new things together, enjoying themselves and having a few slight arguments, they felt that they were old friends, and back on the ship their conversation became more intimate.

She asked him about his wife, and he told her how Helena had stayed to run the farm. It would have been too expensive for them all to come to England. The sea was calm from Cape Town to Teneriffe, and as the steamer crawled up through the warm drowsy ocean along the coast of Africa, he gradually unfolded to her the whole story of his life, in a way in which he had never confided to anyone else—not even to his mother, whom he could exasperate, nor to Helena for whom his confidence did not need words.

Mrs Heseltine had lost her husband in the previous year and was now on her way home to visit a young married daughter who lived at Wimbledon. When he told her how dreadful it had been leaving Helena she could understand, and there was a further bond between them. In this curiously unreal setting, he seemed for the first time to see himself and his life objectively. If he told her of some misfortune or disgrace that had come on him out of the blue, she showed him what it was in himself that had brought it about.

At Teneriffe she saved him from a scrape, but before it happened. They stood at the side of the ship, watching the local young men dive for coins thrown by the passengers. The water was an opalescent blue, but clear as glass, more vivid than he had ever seen it, even in the Pacific. The bodies of the young men were a golden brown, and as they fell like arrows into the sea, and moved about in marvellous patterns deep down in the opal clarity, Dominic’s eyes glowed and darkened, as always when he saw something supremely beautiful, above all when it showed the freedom of men in the natural world.

“I want to do that,” he said. “I’ll go and change.”

She put a hand on his arm and said: “No, you can’t possibly.”

“Why not? I’m a jolly good diver.”

“You’re an English gentleman. You can’t dive for coins with natives.”

“I’m an Australian: and they’re not natives. They’re Spaniards, so am I, partly.”

“The captain would be furious.”

“But it wouldn’t hurt anyone,” said Dominic, mystified.

“It wouldn’t be dignified.”

He could not see what she meant. It was as if she had said that a tiger, its stripes spotted with sunlight as it moved through jungle shadows, or swallows whirling in the autumn sky, were not dignified. The divers moving in patterns beneath the translucent sea were not only beautiful to watch; he also thought that they must feel the water as a fish feels it, and savour its acrid salts as a fish would do. Was a man standing a few yards away, his body misshapen from a sedentary life and clad in hot brown tweeds, more dignified?

Mrs Heseltine laughed at Dominic’s inability to understand the values of this world. He mentioned these divers two or three times before they parted, and they argued about the meaning of dignity.

Between Teneriffe and Plymouth they were in the submarine area. In the evening the decks were darkened and some of the men did not change, feeling vaguely that it would show a lack of seriousness to be drowned in a dinner jacket. Dominic did not have this sense of propriety, and his white shirt gleamed faintly where he sat in his deck chair beside Mrs Heseltine, advertising their association till the last moment.

In the darkness and the danger their conversation became more intimate, about the needs of the body and the soul. At times he surprised her by the simplicity of his wants and his aims. At other times she felt that he was asking for the whole world. He treated her more as a confidante than as a woman whom he might desire. She was glad that the voyage was ending, as in spite of the difference in their ages,
she felt that she would soon be preposterously in love with him. On the last evening before they arrived at Plymouth, he said goodnight to her in the narrow corridor outside her cabin.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose this is almost goodbye.” She allowed her semi-maternal love for him to show in her eyes. He was used to this look in women’s eyes, but unless it was a woman towards whom he felt a strong physical attraction, he only responded to it with a kind of boyish friendliness. He looked at her now with affection and gratitude.

“Without you the voyage would have been unbearable,” he said.

They shook hands, and she did not let his go. Not quite knowing what to do, he kissed it. She then said goodnight again and turned into her cabin.

“Really, he’s a little silly,” she thought.

Dominic walked slowly to his cabin. He was sorry that they had to part, and he thought that he owed her a great deal. She had eased the wretchedness of his separation from Helena by allowing him to talk about it. Helena was no longer a torn-off part of his body, with his life pouring out through the wound. She was what he most desired, but he was once more a complete being in himself, and Mrs Heseltine had done this for him. She had in some odd way given him back his integrity.

He thought that it would be nice to see her sometimes in London, and to renew their talks. They had already exchanged addresses. But it turned out that she had fulfilled her one function in his life, and when he remembered this voyage, the Spanish divers were more vivid in his mind.