by Martin Boyd
They could hardly speak. Finch and the other soldier-servant waiting at the table emanated the same gloom. Even Raife had nothing to say. His three F’s were only a bright idea in his head. He had not yet experienced any of them, except a little fox-hunting when staying with some cousins in Ireland. Now that the first F was to become a reality, he felt the blood not racing happy and scarlet in his veins, but like lead.
Dominic alone was calm, enclosed in his dedication to violence. Now at last he was going to fulfil the purpose for which he had left his home, to achieve the greatest orgasm, that of killing his enemy. He now accepted the enemy given him by authority. “Who dies fighting hath increase.” He did not know what this meant, but Julian Grenfell’s beautiful senseless poem ran in his head.
When his platoon paraded in the dusk, he saw that one of his men was drunk, for which he could be shot. In spite of Dominic’s new resolution of violence, the instincts of his life hitherto continued to function, and he tried to conceal the man’s condition from the sergeant. When they were in the communication trench he carried his pack. All the way into the line there was a conflict between his will to save the man, and the sergeant’s will to send him back to be court-martialled and shot. Dominic although he was in a kind of mystical exaltation at the approaching fight, spent his time on the way to battle in saving a life. Technically he was a commissioned officer, above the sergeant. In practice, if a temporary or territorial subaltern, one of those easily acquired, plentiful thousands with the milk on their mouths, had overridden a valuable, long-trained, regular army sergeant in a matter of this kind, he would have been in trouble with his colonel. Dominic knew this, and he showed unusual subtlety and ingenuity in helping the man outside the sergeant’s observation.
The attack was planned for sunrise on an early September morning. The night before was a long vigil of depression until the rum was given out just before zero hour. Afterwards Dominic could not remember much about all this. It was like some mad dream, from which he only awoke in the moment of losing consciousness. Harrison was white-faced and nervous, nearly unfit to command the company. Frost was correct and dutiful, and calm through absence of imagination. Raife met Dominic once or twice during the night. He grinned and said: “My bowels are like water.”
Suddenly in the stillness of the dawn, the serene empty heavens rained down hell. The men climbed out of the trenches and stumbled across under the protection of the barrage. It was as on the evening of the raid. A section would be blotted out by a shell. A man would fall over like a doll. The noise produced an intense exhilaration in Dominic, as loud explosions do in Mediterranean people. In this daze of excitement he went forward, approaching the final orgasm. This only was fixed in his mind. He carried a revolver in his hand and a Mills bomb in each of his side pockets. He would kill the enemy who faced him. At last in all the row and confusion, when he hardly knew what was happening, when from his limited view the battle had no order or design, he found himself face to face with a German soldier, and he lifted his revolver to fire.
As he did so he looked in the German’s eyes. He was a boy of about the age of Hollis, to whom he had an odd resemblance. In the half second while he lifted his revolver, he gave a faint glance of recognition, to which the boy made an involuntary response. But Dominic did not stay the instinctive movement of the hand, and in that instant of mutual human recognition, with eye open to eye, he shot the boy, who fell dead a yard in front of him, rolling over and over as Hollis had rolled in the dew. He stood for a moment, bewildered, and another German soldier stepped over his dead companion and plunged a bayonet into Dominic’s body. His part in the orgasm had become passive.
CHAPTER NINE
Dominic was not killed. The bayonet missed his heart and his stomach, but he lost four pints of blood to nourish those Flanders poppies which had become the symbol of the devouring jaws, making it all sound pastoral. He was sent to a hospital at the base, where his wound was given time to heal. After that he was taken to England, to another hospital for semi-convalescent officers in Hertfordshire, which turned out to be the converted house of Sylvia’s friend Hermione Maine. She lived in a house in the village but was the commandant of the hospital.
Although Sylvia made use of her as a “Bunbury” she did not always tell her why, and Hermione had never heard of Dominic except vaguely as someone to whom Sylvia had been engaged before she knew her, and she had forgotten his surname. When she heard that a lieutenant called Langton was coming, the name conveyed nothing to her, and she asked: “Can he walk?” When she was told that he was very weak and had better be downstairs, she said: “Put him in Ward IV,” which was her former dining-room.
This was a large room with white plaster decorations, a domed and coffered ceiling, round arches over symmetrically placed doors and twin white columns. It was on the east side of the house, and opened on to a terrace above the park. On a sunny morning it appeared cheerful enough, but in the afternoons it was cold and bleak. Its classical austerity had formerly been relieved by the warm colours of eighteenth-century portraits, rich stuffs and red faces; but when a young officer in the returning high spirits of recovery had flung a fork and lodged it in one of these faces, the portraits had been removed.
In the afternoon Dominic lay in this cold hollow, look ing across to where beyond the park an autumn wood glowed in the afternoon sun. In a dim half-conscious way he was affected by the design of the room, cold and bare and traditional, the life-giving colour removed. He felt now that his life somehow corresponded with the room, that it was an empty arbitrary inheritance, from which he could see, but because of his weakness, never reach the green and golden woods where natural life throbbed in its free rhythm. He thought of the wild berries and the hazel nuts, and the plumage of pheasants. He was empty as the room, as cold and as static. There was no warmth in the atmosphere of his mind. Again the air had become thin, and the law of gravity had changed. His mind had become a traditional room which had lost its natural use and its meaning.
Yet in the room of his mind one picture remained, one from which he could never escape; whether his eyes were open or closed; whether the morning sun made the columns an echo of Greece and Rome, or whether towards evening it became a dead eighteenth-century hollow. As we are said to see all the scenes of our life at the moment of death, so he, conversely, was to see the scene of what could have been his death, for the remainder of his life. He still lived in the half-second in which he exchanged with the German boy that glance of human recognition, and at the same time shot him dead. As he lay weakly returning to life that face was before him. The stronger he became the stronger grew the image. As he went into the attack one of his ideas, a traditional picture in his mind, was that he would avenge Hollis. But he had shot Hollis in the moment of recognition. Now his mind was like the hollow room without the sun, and in it the only picture was that of the German boy, with his open friendly eyes at the moment of death.
Hermione Maine went daily round the wards. She smiled at Dominic but did not speak to him at first as he looked so weak and withdrawn. She was interested in his haggard-handsome face with its Mediterranean look of sorrow, a deep sorrow of being, rather than grief at external misfortune. One day when he seemed stronger she stopped by his bed and asked automatically: “Have you everything you want?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Dominic, though he had nothing he wanted. Everything he had wanted had vanished, like the pictures from the walls.
“No one has come to see you. And the sister says that you have no letters.”
“I’m an Australian. My letters are forwarded from the bank. They don’t know I’m here yet.”
“Oh, they must be told at once,” said Hermione, with a commandant’s efficiency. “I’ll write myself. Which is your bank?”
He told her and she asked: “Haven’t you any friends in England?”
“I have a cousin in London, but she’s very old. She couldn’t come here.”
“Haven’t you any friends?”
“I have some friends at Dilton near Frome. But they are fairly old, too. I couldn’t ask them to come all this way.”
“Dilton?” Hermione paused and then asked: “What is your Christian name?”
“Dominic.”
“Oh, you are that man! How extraordinary!” she exclaimed.
“Why?”
“You were engaged to Sylvia. She is one of my greatest friends. She must come to see you. She often comes down. Have you made it up? After the broken engagement, I mean.”
“Yes, we did. Her father is my colonel,” said Dominic.
His face became haggard with weariness. To think of Sylvia was an effort for him. His passive look of sorrow became one of active pain. She saw that she had tired him and said: “You had better sleep now.” As she went out she said to the nurse: “Mr Langton is a friend of Mrs Wesley-Maude’s. See that he has everything he wants.”
As a result of Hermione’s writing to the bank, there arrived a few mornings later a batch of letters for him, mostly from Australia, but also two or three others, including one from Raife and one from Sylvia. He opened Raife’s first. It dealt with the life closest to him and so would be the least effort to read. In the base hospital he had heard rumours of the fate of the battalion, and this letter confirmed them. Harrison came through all right. Frost had been killed. Finch had been wounded. Raife himself was wounded. He described with ribald indelicacy the nature of his wounds, and also wrote that Dominic was likely to get the Military Cross. Dominic wondered why.
Again this was due to Harrison, whose attitude to him was not hostile, but only, so he told himself, disciplinarian. He was irritated by his detached manner towards the military hierarchy, and the contrast between his efficiency in the line and his independence out of it, his unconscious and to Harrison unjustified assurance. His feelings towards Dominic were much kinder than Dominic’s towards him. He really wanted his friendship, and secretly his approval. Like Lord Dilton he felt that “there was something in” Dominic, and that the approval of this indefinable “something” was necessary to his self-respect. To show that he was not unfair towards him he secured him this decoration.
Dominic lay awhile thinking of the battalion, the dead and wounded men, and then he took up his Australian letters. He looked at the postmarks so that he could read them in the order in which they had been sent. There were three from Helena. She had recovered from the disease from the sheep, and Aunt Mildred had come up from Melbourne to help. She had also found an oldish man to take Harry’s place on the farm. The baby was flourishing, and now quite articulate.
His mother’s letter was in the same strain of the life at Westhill, where now it was spring, and the daffodils were blooming under the gum trees along the drive. Helena’s last letter was written about two days before he was wounded. She said that she had not heard from him recently. She went on to describe in detail the life on the farm, hoping to bring it, and so herself, vividly before him. She mentioned the names of the horses, the new tank she had bought to increase the supply of water to the kitchen, and she gave an amusing picture of Aunt Mildred trying with refinement to feed the pigs.
The life seemed remote to him. He could not imagine it clearly, not in all its colour. While trying to do so, he opened Sylvia’s letter. It had been written some weeks earlier and had lain with the others at the bank. She had seen his name in the casualty list and had discarded her usual discretion. She began: “My dearest Dominic,” and ended, “With all my love.” Reading this immediately after Helena’s letter again produced the sensation of a jam in his brain. In his weak condition it stunned him, and he fell asleep, his hand on the letter.
In his sleep the haunting vision returned. Again he was shooting a boy in the moment of recognition, but in the confusion of his dream the boy became Harry, whom Helena had dismissed. Then he changed into Finch, his wounded servant.
Hermione Maine also had a letter from Sylvia on that morning, to say that she was coming down on the following day. She went to Ward IV to tell Dominic, and found him sitting up but asleep, his head sagged on his chest, his hand on a letter. She saw that it was on the same coloured blue paper as her letter from Sylvia. She could read the only words which Dominic’s hand left uncovered: “With all my love, Sylvia.” She did not wake him up, but came again in the afternoon, to ask him to have tea with herself and Sylvia in her office the following afternoon.
“Have you seen her since you returned to England?” she asked quizzically.
“No, I was brought straight here,” said Dominic.
“I mean since you came back from Australia.”
“Yes. I saw her at Dilton and in London,” he added, not wanting to be more misleading than was necessary.
“She didn’t tell me,” said Hermione, rather cross but amused. “How very sly of her. I shall chaff her about it.”
“No, don’t,” said Dominic, with the calm authority which either impressed or irritated those to whom it was directed. It piqued Hermione.
“Why not?”
“It would not be advisable.”
She laughed shortly and left him. No one had spoken to her like that since she left the schoolroom, certainly not in her own house. She really ought to snub him, but she did not see how she could snub someone who not only looked like an El Greco pietà, but whose weakness clothed him with indifference, and who also seemed to contain an extreme humility within an implacable pride. She thought Sylvia had been a fool to give him up for Wesley-Maude.
Dominic now spent two or three hours every day out of bed, either on the terrace if it was fine, or sitting up in a chair in the ward. His greatest effort so far was to walk up the main staircase to Hermione’s “office” on the first floor. This was really her own sitting-room, left unchanged when the house was turned into a hospital. The furniture was not unlike that of Sylvia’s toy palatial drawing-room. There were similar kingwood and ormolu commodes, French chairs, and a grandiose looking-glass over the Adam mantelpiece. When Dominic, a little breathless from climbing the stairs, came into this room, and saw Sylvia sitting there alone—Hermione perhaps intentionally was attending to some duty—it was almost a reconstruction of when he had been shown into her drawing-room at Catherine Street. She was wearing the same kind of clothes as on that morning when he met her in Green Park, a dark fur-collared coat, the pearls, a black velvet hat on her golden hair.
In her eyes as she looked up at him, was an almost anxious, questioning look. This look and the echo of Catherine Street seemed to make a demand on him which he could not meet. He did not know whether the demand was an impossible one on his weak body, or if it was on something else, on his mind that it should in some way conform to and accept the limits of her own.
When they shook hands his was lifeless. Although they were alone he did not attempt to kiss her, and she saw no memory of their love in his eyes. She drew up a chair for him to the tea-table, and she said in her ordinary, rather cold conventional voice: “How are you? Was it too much for you to walk upstairs?”
“No. I’m getting better. But I have to go slowly.”
They talked a little stiffly about his health, and then Hermione came in, and Sylvia found it more easy to talk to him.
“Why didn’t you let me know you were here?” she asked him.
“I haven’t written to anybody yet.”
“He wasn’t strong enough,” said Hermione.
“If you’re strong enough to walk upstairs you can write a letter.”
“No. It’s much harder to write a letter,” said Dominic. They laughed and the atmosphere was easier.
“Does father know where you are?” asked Sylvia. “He’ll be very hurt if you don’t write to him.”
Sylvia was talking with the language used between intimates, critical but friendly. Hermione noticed that Dominic’s response was not on the same level.
“I shall write to him,” he said, “in a little while.” He seemed more to be deciding something for himself than to be spea
king to Sylvia.
Hermione poured out the tea and the conversation became general. She was puzzled by them. Dominic seemed more remote than ever, not stimulated and enlivened, as she had hoped he would be, by Sylvia’s presence. And she could see that Sylvia, beneath her rather hard social manner, was not happy. Sylvia had once helped her out of a fairly innocent scrape when she was engaged, and in gratitude she was willing to be useful to her when possible. She was a little uneasy at being asked to pretend that she was staying with her, but Sylvia gave the excuse that her mother was always pestering her to go down to Dilton. She did not approve of Sylvia having an “affair” with Dominic, especially while Maurice was at the front, but she thought that it would be mildly amusing to confront her with her former lover, and might also help to revitalize Dominic. When she saw “With all my love” on his letter from Sylvia, she had already invited her.
But Dominic, holding his teacup, looked more than ever like an El Greco pietà. It would certainly be safe to leave them alone together, and with a sort of muddled good nature towards Sylvia, she made the excuse of seeing another patient, and left the room. When she came back they were sitting as she had left them, and apparently in silence. He looked so exhausted that Hermione said: “I think you had better go back to bed.”
“Shall I help you downstairs?” asked Sylvia.
“I can manage,” said Dominic. “I’ll hold on to the banister.”
They shook hands again. He felt utterly weak and inadequate, unable to meet the demand of her mere presence. He tried to smile, but the effort was pitiful. He thought that he must say something and the only words that came were: “It was good of you to come down.”
Hermione went with him to the stairs, and then fearing that he might fall, took his arm and guided him down. When she came back to her sitting-room, she found to her astonishment that Sylvia was crying.
