When Blackbirds Sing Read Free

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