When Blackbirds Sing by Martin Boyd

Author:Martin Boyd [Boyd, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CLASSIC FICTION
ISBN: 9781922148995
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2014-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

When at last in the early dawn the crawling train reached Béthune, he learned that the battalion was out of the line at a village some kilometres away. He went to the Hôtel de France to have a bath and breakfast, and then to the Officers’ Club, where he hung about trying to get transport to the battalion, which he did not reach until late in the afternoon. He was directed to his company mess, in one of the inevitable peasants’ cottages. It was deserted except for his servant, who took him to his billet and gave him some letters. Finch, the servant, was a youth of about nineteen, modest, intelligent, with sensitive manners which put some of the public school subalterns to shame. As they walked to the billet in another peasant’s cottage, he told Dominic the battalion gossip, that it was said they were going to take part in a big attack soon.

The letters had been forwarded from his Australian bank in London. He could have had them when he was on leave but he had not called there, as it was out of his way. He had cashed cheques at Cox’s, the army bank, or at the hotel. Amongst the letters was one from Helena. He glanced through the others and took Helena’s out into a meadow behind the cottage. Here it was very peaceful. There was a little stream bordered with pollarded willows, and a row of taller trees made long shadows across the grass. He thought that in this quiet place her letter could heal him. She had always been able to dispel his evil spirits. A hideous dream, like that in the train, could not happen when she was sleeping by his side. She was his life and his health. As he took out her letter into the peaceful meadow he was not troubled by his infidelity with Sylvia, as he had never thought of her as a substitute for Helena. He had no feelings of uneasiness, as sitting on the grass by the stream he opened her letter, only the hope of his restoration.

She was ill in bed, she wrote, with some disease she had caught while dipping the sheep. She repeated that she had to do this because she had dismissed Harry who would not go to the war. She was in the hospital in the nearest town, but she expected to return to the farm in a week. She had no other news.

This letter, instead of bringing Dominic peace, churned up more conflicting feelings in him, the first an awful pity for Helena lying in bed with a disease caught from animals. The Calvinism he had been taught by his governess in his childhood at last bore on his relations with Sylvia. He felt that he had brought the disease, a divine retribution on Helena, part of the mad vindictive “justice” which he had been taught was an attribute of God. At the same time he had a recurrence of

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