When Blackbirds Sing (23 page)

“You couldn’t help it,” she said. “If you hadn’t shot him he would have killed you.”

“He mightn’t have. Not if I had returned his glance, not if I had recognized his humanity.”

“But if everyone behaved like that you couldn’t fight a war,” said Helena a little impatiently.

“That is what I mean,” said Dominic.

He told her how he was wounded, and how in hospital, in his doped, half-conscious state, he had always seen the German boy’s face, the eyes in their split second of surprise awakening to friendship. He described the ward in Hermione’s house, the emptiness of the hollow room, stripped like his mind of all traditional pictures. He told her of his conversation with Lord Dilton in London, of his further convalescence in his house, of his shooting the pheasant. Finally he described the home near Marazion and Hollis’s face.

“So you see,” he ended, “I am not the same as when I left.”

“It’s all dreadful,” said Helena. “But we have to win the war, and those things are unavoidable.”

He saw that he had failed to awaken her imagination, and that she could not visualize what he described. He tried to influence her by more practical arguments and said that the war could be ended by agreement, and he quoted some of Lord Dilton’s remarks on the war-leaders and the profiteers. He told her how he had said that the war was
destroying the landed families, and that those who were most strident in prosecuting it were none of them men with an understanding of the structure of Europe. But now he was not speaking from his heart. He was only nagging at her with his mind, putting forward arguments which to himself were secondary.

“You are talking like those horrible Labour people,” she said, “who voted against conscription.”

“The Australian soldiers also voted against conscription,” he replied. He repeated his argument that when one conscript attacked another, he was only attacking an artificial menace to himself. She was horrified. He was trying to destroy every belief that had supported her during these three years, that had enabled her to run the farm without him, to sack Harry and to dip the sheep herself, to do a hundred things which she would not have contemplated if they had not been necessary in this struggle for their country and their freedom. For Helena was constitutionally incapable of not believing what she was told by authority and by people obviously better informed than herself. She accepted the surface of what was presented to her. If she had spent time considering what was behind it she could not have led her brave active life. She thought of Dominic as the sun and centre of her life and like Lord Dilton, felt that there was “something in him” that other men had not got, but she did not think it was political intelligence, and the capacity to judge world affairs. She told herself that his mind must be affected, otherwise he would not have been sent to that home in Cornwall, and then invalided out. It did not occur to her that Dominic, the dunce and black sheep
of the family, could possibly be someone of such potential embarrassment to the authorities that they were glad to let him go home.

She felt a heavy depression as if her limbs were of lead, lying heavily on the bed. She had him back, but with a disfigurement far worse than one to his body. Soon he fell asleep, tired with his journey, his love-making, and the effort of trying to explain himself to her. But she did not sleep for a long time, wondering if his mental affliction would show itself in other ways, or if under the quiet wholesome influences of this place, he would be cured.

In a few days they had resumed the routine of daily life which his absence had interrupted, and often they were happy together. But the unresolved difference remained between them. Sometimes she thought he was not afflicted in his mind, but only perverse. When the March offensive was halted, and the Germans in their turn were on the run, he was glad because it seemed that the war would soon be over, but he could not share her light-hearted cheerfulness. He saw in his mind the battlefield. At times she was angry with him for his perversity.

In July he received an envelope with an English stamp, and was a little puzzled by the familiarity of the handwriting. It had been some time on the way, as it had been originally addressed to Cox’s bank, who had forwarded it to his London bank, who had sent it on here. It did not contain a letter, but only two cuttings from
The Times.
One read: “The Hon. Mrs Maurice Wesley-Maude gave birth to a son in London yesterday.” On this was scribbled in the corner, “18th April”.

The other was from the casualty list under “Died of wounds”.

It read: “Wesley-Maude. On the 15th April 1918, Maurice Vavasour Wesley-Maude, D.S.O., Major
—nth
Hussars.”

He looked again at the envelope and saw that it had the Dilton postmark. He thought that the cuttings were sent by Lady Dilton, whose handwriting, not unlike Sylvia’s, he vaguely remembered from helping her address the envelopes. Actually they were from Sylvia.

When in November the Armistice was signed, he and Helena were united in their relief that the war was over, and her slightly different emphasis was unnoticeable. Sometimes after that, a reference to the war, each seeing it from a different angle, might cause a tiff, but on the whole they jogged along contentedly enough.

It was not until the following year that Dominic’s war medals arrived, and with them his Military Cross, as he had not attended an investiture. He had ridden to the mailbox and on his return he hung the reins over a post at the gate, and walked through the garden to the verandah where Helena was sitting sewing. He handed her two letters and looked at the small, rather heavy parcel from the War Office.

“What is that?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It may be my medals,” he said.

“Oh!” Her face lighted up with interest.

Effie came out on to the verandah. “I think the cake’s done, Mrs Langton,” she said. “It’s very brown on top.”

“I’ll come and look at it,” said Helena, putting down her sewing. When she returned a few minutes later Dominic
had gone to take his horse round to the stables. He took off the bridle and saddle by the harness room, and then with a halter led the horse out to the water-hole in the paddock, and stood beside it while it drank. When, dribbling, it backed up the clayey slope, he thought that he would not be riding again that day, so he slipped off its halter, and giving it a smack on the rump, let it go free.

Still standing by the pond, with the halter on his arm, he took the package of medals from his pocket and idly examined it, finally opening it with his pocket-knife. The two service medals were in a white cardboard box, the Military Cross in its separate case. He looked at them curiously. One of the medals was inscribed “The War for Civilization”.

He stood a long time, holding it and looking at it, and while he did so he forgot the horse, grazing in the paddock a few yards from him; he forgot his home and his child, and his wife waiting for him on the verandah. All the things he had longed for vanished from his consciousness and he saw only the places where he had most sharply longed for them.

He saw it all again, but now without that numbness, the anaesthetic which nature provided to stop the soldiers going mad. Even when he had found Hollis in No-man’s-land, twitching and gurgling with half his face a mass of blood, his mind refused to pass on to his heart what had happened. When he made his report to Harrison after blowing up the German dug-out, this anaesthetic had not completely worked. When the men had fallen over like dolls in the attack, he had felt no pity for them, only a curiosity at what was happening. Now, in contrast with this peaceful
place, where the only sound was that of the horse cropping the grass, the immensity of the suffering of the war over-whelmed him, as when he tried to reason with Lord Dilton in the hotel sitting-room. These medals were given him for his share in inflicting that suffering, that agony multiplied and multiplied beyond the possibility of calculation. And this Military Cross was awarded for what to him was the worst thing he had ever done, when he had violated his own nature at its deepest level.

He gave a shudder of repudiation; and with an almost involuntary gesture, he flung the medals into the clayey-yellow pond. There was a splash of light where they hit the water, from the sunlight on the spray and from their own silver. As he watched the circle of ripples widen and die away, he was aware that he had put himself once more where he had been before this marriage to Helena, outside the fellowship of ordinary men.

He was partly shocked at himself. His native Toryism was shocked at his anarchy. He realized fully the implication of what he had done, that it was in a sense of repudiation of the social order as well as of the war. He felt utterly alone.

His face was heavy as he walked back to the house, the flesh seeming to sag on his bones, giving him that appearance of a skull, as when he had slept opposite Hollis in the train to Dover.

Helena had returned to the verandah. As he came up the path and she saw his expression, she gave a start.

“What is the matter?” she asked. “Where are the medals?”

“They are in the pond,” said Dominic.

“Oh, how dreadful!” She rose quickly, and threw her sewing on to a chair.

“We must try to rake them out.” She thought that he had ridden his horse into the water, and that they had fallen from his pocket.

“We can’t. They’re in the middle—I threw them there.”

She looked at him with sudden apprehension. She half thought that he was joking, but it was not the kind of joke that he made. She used to understand him perfectly, the meaning of every movement and every inflection of his voice, but now she could no longer be sure. Something had happened to him, some transmutation of his nature. He was cold to all that warmed her heart, when before he had been its central flame. And he was cold too towards what was for her the noblest experience of mankind in their century. All through the war she had felt: “Now God be thanked who matched us with his hour.” She firmly believed, and no one else whom she knew doubted it, that the war was a struggle not only for their survival, but for that of every decent human instinct. Their young men had bled and died for them, and Dominic dared to question the value of their sacrifice. All through the war she had stayed here in loneliness and hardship to keep the farm going, doing her small part to help those who were fighting evil, chiefly Dominic himself. And this was involved with a personal reason. They had been happy before the war, but it was happiness stolen illicitly by their elopement. After the war she had thought, they would have won it honourably.

Now he had made all her hope and all her activity senseless, as if she had been merely some busy but useless
machine, pulling nothing. And if he had really thrown his medals into the pond, he had insulted the wounds of brave men, the tears of every bereaved mother, and the bodies of the dead.

“You’re not serious?” she said.

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