When Blackbirds Sing Read Free Page A

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 toSylvia 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. Theman 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