When Blackbirds Sing Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Most of the passengers left the ship at Plymouth and went to London by train; partly because they were tired of the long voyage, but more because, having escaped the submarines, they thought it would be foolish to take a further and greater chance of being drowned, or of floating about the Channel in lifebelts. They were all ashamed of giving these very sensible reasons and made up excuses about appointments in London. Dominic disembarked at Plymouth because his father had asked him to look in at Waterpark, the ancient inherited home of their family, in which, for the past two generations, they had made repeated nostalgic attempts to live, always ending in a sudden flight back to the sunlight and freedom of Australia. These were sometimes due to loss of money, but the occasion of the last flight, about five years earlier, was the rather discreditable way in which Dominic had provoked the breaking of his engagement to Sylvia Tunstall, the daughter of their nearest neighbours, the Diltons. He was now supposed to see how much the tenant’s continual demands for repairs were justified. Mrs Heseltine, who had little money and a cheerful fatalistic attitude to danger, went on in the ship.

  When Dominic left the train at Frome, the once familiar station seemed strange to him. It was all dream-like, as if the air were less dense, or the law of gravity modified. There was a new station-master who did not know him. When he told him his name, recently so well known in the county, he showed no sign of recognition, but he told him where he could hire a motor-car to drive out to Waterpark, seven miles away. The driver of the car knew who he was, but did not give him any effusive welcome to his home town. Dominic felt lonely and flat. As they drove along the deep lanes the sense of being isolated and alien to his own countryside grew stronger. It occurred to him, too late, that when he arrived at Waterpark in a car piled with his luggage, he would not necessarily be made welcome by Mr Cecil, the tenant, whom he had never met. He had followed the long
habit of his youth and, without thinking, had put his luggage in the car at Frome station. As a small child he had been met there by one of his grandfather’s carriages, and as a young man by his father’s motor-car. He felt one of those curious stoppages in his brain, which happened when he suddenly found that he had acted instinctively without regard to changed circumstances. For a moment he could not think what to do. He was just going to tell the man to turn back. He would stay at the inn at Frome and come out again the next day. The man would think him mad, as people often did when to his own mind he acted sensibly.

  Just then he saw the Dilton gates ahead of him, with the two stone greyhounds on the pillars. He told the driver to turn in. He did not doubt that the Tunstalls would welcome him, though he had not seen them for five years, and their last meeting, when he had practically jilted Sylvia, had been the most awkward possible. He judged other people by himself, and as he never nursed a grievance, he was sure that they would welcome him with the same affection, which, remembering only happy times, he felt as the car sped through the familiar park. He was sure that his arrival would be a pleasant surprise, and that with homely warmth, which had never been a Tunstall trait, he would immediately be restored to the family circle.

  But when the car stopped below the steps of the huge late Georgian house there was little sign of welcome or even of life. The blinds were drawn in many rooms, and the front door had that indefinable look, perhaps from dust in the jambs, of being seldom opened.

  Again he had the feeling of changed laws of gravity, and sometimes in later life he dreamed of this arrival at the forbidding door of Dilton, itself at this moment like something in a dream. But his feeling did not prevent him telling the driver to take out his luggage, and he paid him off. He rang, but it was a long time before the door was opened, and then not by the butler whom he knew, but by a parlourmaid. He asked if Miss Sylvia was at home.

  “Miss Sylvia’s been married two years,” said the young woman, looking with puzzled disapproval at this apparently foreign gentleman, and the luggage piled at the bottom of the steps.

  “Is his lordship in?” asked Dominic.

  “His lordship’s at the depot.”

  “What depot?”

  “Where he’s the colonel,” said the parlourmaid, slightly indignant at his ignorance.

  “Oh.” Dominic thought for a moment. He had asked for the family according to the degree of attachment he had had for them. He realized he should first have asked for Lady Dilton, and did so now. “Will you tell her Mr Langton’s here?” he said.

  She told him to wait, and she shut the heavy iron-studded door in his face. Like the people on the ship she thought that he might be a spy. In a few minutes he heard again the grating of the bolts and she reappeared, asking him to enter. Lady Dilton, her curiosity aroused by the parlourmaid, who had given his name wrongly, had come out into the vast empty hall. Dominic was standing against the light.

  “Who is it?” she asked with the fretfulness of a large woman who is a little nervous.

  “It’s me, Dominic,” he said.

  “Oh!” She hesitated a moment, then added: “Come in.” She led the way back into the little drawing-room which she used mostly during the war, and turned to face him.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, without excessive geniality, but she shook hands. “I didn’t know you were in England.”

  He explained that he had just arrived, that he had been going to Waterpark, but passing Dilton he had come in to see them.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is your luggage?”

  “On the steps.”

  She smiled with that grim smile which Dominic had sometimes provoked in her. When she had seen him in the hall she had felt indignation which had lain dormant since their last encounter. But it had only been a flicker, and now it died.

  “You’d better stay here,” she said. “That parlourmaid’s a fool. All the men have gone into the army.” She tugged a bell pull and when the maid came she told her to take the luggage up into Mr Richard’s room. She explained that both her sons were in France.

  “I suppose you have come over to fight for us,” she said. This made her more inclined to let bygones be bygones.

  “Yes,” said Dominic, though it had not occurred to him that he had come over to fight for Lady Dilton. He thought that he had come so that he and Helena, or if he did not return, Helena and the baby, could go on living on their farm in New South Wales, and so that it would not be a German colony.

  “Sylvia’s married?” he said.

  “Yes, to Maurice Wesley-Maude.”

  “Is he nice?”

  Again Lady Dilton gave her grim smile. “He’s a gentleman,” she admitted. “I heard you are married too.”

  “Yes, to Helena Craig.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing.” Lady Dilton was uninterested in the identity of Dominic’s wife, but apparently felt that it made things easier now that both he and Sylvia were safely tied up elsewhere. They talked for a while about what had happened in their families since they last met. He asked about the tenants at Waterpark.

  “We don’t know them very well,” she said. “They don’t shoot. I think the man reads books.”

  Colonel Rodgers, her brother, who rented the dower-house at Waterpark, and who had tried, at the cost of much suffering, to found with Dominic, in his adolescence, a friendship based on a mutual passion for lethal weapons, was in London angling for a job in the War Office. She gave him the address of his club, and told him to be sure and go to see him. Sylvia had a tiny house behind Buckingham Gate. “They are very poor,” she explained. Dominic knew that Sylvia had an allowance of a thousand a year, and her husband presumably had some money, if only his army pay. “The house is no bigger than a box,” she went on. “Sylvia says it is smart. That is not a word we used in my younger days. Only vulgar people were smart.” She did not give him Sylvia’s address, and it was obvious that she thought it better not. All Lady Dilton’s subtleties and snubs were obvious. Anyone who cared to point this out could have brought about a collapse of her immense dignity, but most people whom she met were too intimidated, and her friends of equal position were too kind, or else behaved in the same way themselves.

  At last she said: “I must get on with these wretched circulars. Perhaps you would help me?” For the first time in her life when she needed a secretary, she had not got one.

  She gave him a list of names and addresses, and they sat down at opposite sides of a large regency writing-table, contentedly scribbling away. Sometimes she spoke to him rather crossly, saying that his writing was illegible, and that he ought to leave more space for the stamps. The intimacy of this made him contented. The awful isolation he had felt at times on the ship, in spite of Mrs Heseltine, had left him. Here he was in a house he knew, within an hour, back as one of the family, being scolded for his untidy writing. This was what he liked best, to be at ease in familiar places with people who knew him well, who knew the worst things he had done but had accepted them. Also in this house he had known hours of blissful happiness in the days when he was engaged to Sylvia.

  They were interrupted by the entry of Lord Dilton in khaki. He looked surprised, and waited for his wife to explain and introduce the young man sitting opposite her at the table. Then he saw that it was Dominic, and as in his wife five years’ resentment awoke, flickered and died.

  “Good God, Dominic!” he exclaimed, and shook hands warmly.

  “He has come over to fight for us,” said Lady Dilton, thinking this might temper her husband’s possible annoyance, but he appeared delighted to see Dominic. He chatted for a few moments and then said: “I hope to goodness the water’s hot tonight. I’m afraid that you’ll be confoundedly uncomfortable here. We’ve no men and the monstrous regiment of women can’t stoke the boiler. Have they lit a fire in Dominic’s room? And is there one in mine?”

  “We weren’t certain that y
ou were coming,” said Lady Dilton.

  “It’s better for me to have pneumonia than to waste sixpence worth of coal,” he said to Dominic. He only went on like this when he was in high spirits.

  “It’s not the coal,” said his wife. “They get bad-tempered if they have to light a fire for nothing.”

  “Is there a fire in Dominic’s room?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If the depot was run like this house we’d soon lose the war,” he said.

  They argued a little more as to where Dominic should have his bath, and finally agreed that the water in the green bathroom was generally hotter as it was nearer the boiler. Lady Dilton again pulled the bell rope and Dominic felt that the whole of the enormous house was buzzing with preparations for his bath. Lord Dilton said: “I must go down and find something for you to drink.”

  Dominic lay in his bath in a state of contented relaxation of mind and body. This was the first freshwater bath he had had for over six weeks, since he left Melbourne. He disliked the smell of hot salt water, and here not only was the water fresh, but the soap had a delicious scent of aromatic leaves. He was glad that he had found the Diltons alone. He might have been embarrassed at meeting Sylvia, though he wanted to see her. The boys, now smart young guardees, might have made him feel too much a backwoodsman. The house itself was more friendly, with its slight domestic incompetence, than with its former grandeur.

  He wondered if Sylvia had ever used this bath. He thought that she must have; in spite of the size of the house, there were few bathrooms, and they were converted bedrooms. He wondered what it would have been like to have married her. If he had, they would now have been living in the dower-house at Waterpark, having turned out Colonel Rodgers. Perhaps she had used this bath. She had a lovely skin, and he thought with her golden hair against the pale green enamel she must have looked wonderfully beautiful. Back in this house, with the Diltons so kind, the atmosphere of those days was returning to him. He felt that he had missed something that should have been his.