The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  “When I had got rid of the fumes and the nausea it was tea-time. Dr. Dashwood gave me some bromide. And before I went to see Toogood at the Workhouse I bought some violet cachous, and took care to turn my face away when the old boy sounded me. Anyway, it’s awful to breathe in anyone’s face. I think he appreciated this, for he gave me a week’s extension. So here I am!”

  “Did Dr. Dashwood write Middleton, Phillip?” asked Mrs. Neville.

  “I couldn’t read any of his writing, Mrs. Neville.”

  “Just as well!” cried the fat woman, with sudden laughter. “Still,” she added, solemn again, “if he is a bit of a rogue, he is a charming rogue, I’ll say that for him.”

  The extra leave took Phillip to Friday night. He was due to report to his new unit in Essex on the Saturday morning. But on his last night Desmond was not on duty with the searchlights, and on the Saturday morning Phillip put off his start for a cup of coffee in the flat, then another cup, then a quick game of snakes-and-ladders while eating bread and cheese; after which he took Desmond on the back of his motor cycle to Freddy’s bar in the High Street for a glass of beer, and as they were coming out in walked Dr. Dashwood. After a round of drinks they went for one for the road, as the doctor called it, in the Conservative Club, where, said the doctor, “Auld Scottie” whiskey, unlike Teacher’s he had had before, was as mild as milk, and the very thing to kill any bug which might be exploiting the dull patch in Phillip’s lung.

  “The trouble with me, Doctor, is that I have never been able to stop my thoughts racing about in all directions,” said Phillip. “When I was a child, I called this to myself the battle of the brain. I find it awfully hard to control thoughts of disaster, even of torture, however much I try to reason things out. I suppose it is bad form not to conceal one’s thoughts, but then I’m not a gentleman. Also, I’m a frightful coward, and always have been. And, as you can see, I have no reserve, as mother is always telling me. I just can’t help saying what I think.”

  It was a handicap to have too much imagination, Dr. Dashwood said, kindly, after Phillip had returned to the Club to thank him for a further week’s leave. “Sometimes I think I am all imagination, and by a freak was born with the spirit of a hare,” went on Phillip, and thereupon told the doctor why he had transferred to a home-service unit.

  “I get absolutely stiff and trembling with fear, when I think of facing machine guns again. That’s why I applied to be a gas officer at Loos, because I couldn’t face the idea of going over the top. I was given several days light duty afterwards, for a slight gassing, but I didn’t really get gassed at all. I saw men who did. Their faces and bodies turned the colour of plums, with saliva all over their chins and tunics. Slugs seemed to like it, when they were dead. You don’t see those things in the papers.”

  “My dear Middleton, as I told you, you have too much imagination! Why should such details be put in newspapers? Surely the right thing is to keep them out? You don’t see what goes on in any hospital, ‘in the papers’. Now to change from the general to the particular, I don’t like that bronchial rasp you have. Come into the billiard room, and let me sound your bellows. Yes, definitely you have a dull patch. I’ll give you a note to Toogood.”

  “But you’ve just given me one, Doctor!”

  “Oh, did I? Well, that calls for a celebration!”

  It was Dashwood who had done the wheezing, Phillip thought, not himself; but the main thing was that he had another week’s leave, and would be with his great friend Desmond again.

  *

  The Gild Hall was filling up with its Saturday evening crowd, now that the shops closed early at half past seven, owing to the war. Large straw hats of black, set well back on the head, worn with white blouses and dark skirts above the ankle, with black cotton gloves to the elbow, appeared to be the fashion among those flappers who wore their hair in plaits either over a shoulder or down the back. Many of the youths, the more envied ones, were in uniform, although obviously under military age. Others had dressed themselves in brown shoes with slacks, sharply creased, some with turn-ups; or brown boots with lace-up breeches; both styles unauthorised and worn only on leave, to suggest a gentility above that of the ordinary private soldier. Their jackets, too, had been altered, to take away the issue roughness, to show the shape of the torso—all from aspiration to glory and freedom.

  The manager of the Gild Hall was now, as he put it to himself, in evidence, as he stood beside the pay-box leading to the billiard hall proper. He was an upright figure with thin white hair, wearing an ancient pattern of frock coat with celluloid collar, dickey, ready-made flat black tie held in place by elastic, and stringy waxed moustaches that looked as though they had been thick and bushy. A scrawny neck and prominent Adam’s apple stood out of the oversize celluloid collar. This great-grandfatherly teetotal figure gave forth contentment with life, as he surveyed the youthful throng before him.

  Mavis was playing dominoes, with Nina. The smooth, slurring slide of the ivory and ebony pieces, the feel of them to the finger-tips was of summer childhood, when she had loved all the world and was loved by everyone, all the faces round the big mahogany table in the sitting room, which had a new leaf in it, brought up from under the floor, through the trapdoor, because Aunt Liz and cousins Polly and Percy had come to stay, and Dads was ever so jolly as he played games of halma and ludo with them, and promised prizes of Callard and Bowser’s cherry toffee bars in silver paper. It was summer, and a wet day, but the rain did not matter, for everything was so jolly and shining inside the sitting room. Then it was dark and sad again, and it was Phil’s fault, for Dads opening his roll-top desk had found out that some of the toffee was gone, and Phil had told a lie, saying that he had not opened the desk with one of the keys on Mother’s key-ring, when he had; and Mummie had scolded her for saying that he had told a lie, and Dads had sent Phil upstairs to take down his trousers for a caning, and he had cried like a baby as he left the room and Mummie had cried, too, and it had spoiled the lovely feeling of summer and the rain on the window.

  “Don’t you feel it awfully hot in here, Nina? Let’s go, shall we? There’s no point in our stopping.”

  “But I’ve just ordered some more coffee, Mavis.”

  “We can tell the girl we don’t want it.”

  Nina was used to the sudden peremptory moods of her friend; and as her care was to save her from being upset, she got up to speak to the waitress, being sensitive about cancelling an order only when the tray should arrive. She was half way to the girl, who was standing by the pay-box at the entrance to the billiard hall proper, when she heard loud voices, then a prolonged cry between a cheer and a yell, as the glass doors leading in from the porch were pushed open and three figures staggered into the room, arm in arm, barging into one another with laughter. She recognised Phillip, his friend Desmond, and a smaller, dark man in a blue suit and bowler hat, carrying an ebony cane with large silver top, and wearing an eyeglass, who, she thought, must be Eugene, the Brazilian friend of Desmond.

  They stood by the sunken pool, and appeared to be arguing about something, hands on one another’s shoulders. Their voices were loud, everyone was looking at them, the domino games suspended. Nina saw that Phillip’s jacket was dripping with water, as though a jug had been tipped over him, as indeed it had, by Mrs. Freddy in the bar over the road. Anxious for her friend, Nina went back to Mavis, whose eyes were dark and anxious.

  “Are they tipsy?” she whispered.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why didn’t you let me go when I first said I wanted to? I knew something like this would happen, you know! I have second-sight, like Mother! Listen, what are they saying?”

  The argument was apparently about whether they should play three-handed snooker, or Eugene and Desmond play a hundred up at billiards. Mavis winced at the loudness of the voices. Phillip was drunk, she decided; his cap was pulled down on the side of his head, and he had the weak, foolish grin on his face that made him look so undignified. Thank
goodness he was not in uniform!

  Very soon her worst fears, or previsions, were realised.

  “All right, you two birds go and play,” she heard her brother drawl. “I’ll come and watch.” He followed them to the door. The manager stood there. She saw him put a hand on Phillip’s chest, before saying something inaudible to him.

  The two others went through the door, leaving Phillip standing there. Then he tried to go through the door into the billiard room, after the others. The manager stopped him. In the silence she heard him say, “I’ve asked you to leave, now go quietly, sir.”

  While he continued to stand there, a fourth figure entered the Gild Hall, wearing raincoat and bowler hat, carrying an umbrella. Seeing Phillip, he went towards him. Mavis recognised Tom Ching, and her spirit darkened. So that was it; he and Phillip had been drinking together!

  “Look, that awful creature! He’s the cause of it, I bet. Oh look what’s happening.”

  Throwing off Ching’s offered arm, Phillip said something to the manager; then holding out his arms he began to walk, or totter, backwards, as though he had lost all sense of balance. Back he went, a dozen paces, and fell into the goldfish pool.

  Mavis went out, followed by Nina. Outside in the murky air she said, “Oh, I would have died if anyone had recognised me as his sister!”

  Opposite the fire station, at the turning to Randiswell, the friends said goodbye, for Nina’s way lay to the south.

  “See you tomorrow, usual time? Don’t be late, will you? And swear on your honour that you will never tell anyone what happened tonight?” Mavis allowed herself to be kissed, then she hurried across the road, unaware that she was being followed by Tom Ching, who had as powerful an impulse towards his image of Mavis as she had towards the image of her lost father.

  *

  Tom Ching was Phillip’s age. He was not in uniform because he was a second-grade clerk employed in the Admiralty. His excuse for not having joined up was his indispensability. He was reserved; but there was talk of a Military Service Bill coming before the Commons, and “Cuthberts in Whitehall being combed out”, and sent into the services. This was one of Ching’s dreads, for he had nothing in himself with which to resist the terrors of death should he have to face what Phillip had gone through at Messines with the London Highlanders, and again at the first battle of Ypres. If Phillip’s heritage of courage had been dissipated in childhood by the cold ignorance of a righteous father at odds with his wife, Ching’s had been liquidated by an early horror of knowing what his father did to his mother; of himself doing the same thing, in fascination and horror (at first) with his sister; and being found out, by a father who did not punish him, but in his heavy, fleshy way told him that he had committed one of the great sins which can eat into the soul of a family. This had not shocked the youth, who had been at school at the time, so much as being told by his sister, later on, that father had since done the same thing to her.

  Now the father was paralysed, a mass of soft pink and white flesh above a formless heavy face, looked after by the daughter. The mother, a mental invalid, was in Peckham House, an asylum.

  These complications had emphasised Ching’s feeling for the ideal, which for some years now had been centred on Mavis; but he practised his love alone, in the thoughts of unattainable deeds. And to help escape his guilt, he had taken to drinking rum, a drink acceptable to his stomach, apparently, for unlike Phillip after three or four quarterns of whiskey, he was never sick.

  He hurried after Mavis, in order to confirm his worst fears.

  *

  In the sitting room of the Maddison house the curtains were drawn against Zeppelins and the cold November night. A coke fire glowed brightly in the hearth. It was an extravagance on his part, in war-time too, to have built up a fire so late, thought Richard, as he lay back in his armchair, legs and feet stretched to the polished steel fender. But he was not to be on special constabulary duty again until the Monday, and all Sunday’s ease lay before him. He lay back with a sigh of contentment, his cup of hot water on the plush table-cloth beside him, and took up a blue-covered booklet which he had purchased for one penny that afternoon from the London book-stall where, regularly every month, he called for his favourite Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine.

  Always meticulous when he was not emotionally disturbed, Richard read the title-page carefully.

  Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages appointed by His Majesty’s Government and Presided over by The Right Hon. Viscount Bryce, O.M., etc., etc., formerly British Ambassador at Washington.

  He read the first two pages of the preamble, and then his eye wandered. He turned to Part 1, The Conduct of the German Troops in Belgium, read a little, and turned over again to read a passage about Liége. Villages around the fortress burned … systematic execution of civilians, by being summarily shot … survivors of volleys bayonetted, including a young girl of thirteen. He breathed deeply, and took a few sips of hot water.

  There followed page upon page of the same thing, shooting, bayonetting, burning. Where were the rapings? He turned over more pages, until he came to Part 2 (b) The Treatment of Women and Children. He was reading with horror entwined in fascination when his wife came into the room. His privacy thus being broken into, he put down the booklet.

  “I am ready, Dickie, if you would like to play a game of chess,” said Hetty, almost gaily.

  “You’re back early, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, dear, Papa wants to write a letter, so I shall go back later for the game of piquet.”

  It did not take much to make Richard feel unwanted. She could put herself out for her father, but would she ever do the same for him? He picked up the blue book and went on reading; but soon the disharmony of his thoughts broke into indignation.

  “Listen to this incident, Hetty! It took place not far from the district where your convent stands, or did stand, at Wespelaer, a little more than a year ago. I can only thank heaven that Mavis came home last year in the nick of time.”

  “On the afternoon of the 14th or 15th August, three German cavalry officers entered the house and demanded champagne. Having drunk ten bottles, and invited five or six officers and three or four private soldiers to join them, they continued their carouse, and then called for the master and the mistress of the house: ‘Immediately my mistress came in’, says the valet de chambre, ‘one of the officers who was sitting on the floor got up, and, putting a revolver to my mistress’ temple, shot her dead. The officer was obviously drunk. The other officers continued to drink and sing, and they did not pay great attention to the killing of my mistress. My master and the officer went into the garden, the officer threatening my master with a pistol. My master was then forced to dig the grave, and bury the body of my mistress in it. I cannot say for what reason they killed my mistress. The officer who did so was singing all the time’.”

  “Terrible, terrible,” murmured Hetty, making a clicking noise between tongue and palate.

  “But that is not the worst, Hetty!

  ‘One witness reports that a young girl who was being pursued by a drunken soldier at Louvain appealed to a German officer, and that the offender was then and there shot: another describes how an officer of the 32nd Regiment of the Line was led out to execution for the violation of two young girls, but reprieved at the request or with the consent of the girls’ mothers. These instances are sufficient to show that the maltreatment of women was no part of the military scheme of the invaders …’”

  Richard’s voice ceased. He put down the Report, with a further feeling of being cheated. However, there was the clean, unopened copy of Nash’s at his elbow. He turned to his wife and said rhetorically,

  “What is the point of publishing an indictment of German military brutality, which we know exists, if in the same breath the Report exonerates the guilty? In my opinion such two-facedness is typical of that old woman Asquith, whose wife, the blatant ‘Margot’, openly visited German officer prisoners at Donnington Hall in Lincolnshire,
taking with her hampers of the best comestibles from Curling and Hammer, and playing tennis with them, while her country is at war, and her husband Prime Minister!”

  “Yes, Dickie, it is all very wrong. Shall I get the chess board? Or do you feel too tired to play tonight?”

  “Oh,” he said airily. “Do not let me keep you from your duties in the house next door.” Richard’s relationship with his father-in-law was one of dislike reduced to nullity. As his wife went out of the room he said, “Now, if you please! Do not be late. I want to be in bed by eleven, and cannot get to sleep until every member of this house is in bed, you know that.”

  Hetty knew that he was worried about Phillip, about whom she had gone next door, to speak to Papa. “I shan’t be long, Dickie,” as she left the room, her heart feeling lighter.

  “Let the cat in, as you go out, will you? I don’t want Zippy to catch cold, waiting in that draughty porch.”

  “Very well, Dickie.”

  Soon the cat was in the room, purring, purring, purring, to see its master again—and the warm fire.

  *

  During the years a cat had been almost the only medium by which tenderness was released in the Maddison household. There had been three cats, all called Zippy. Zippy never upset anyone, by interfering. Having security from want, fear, and entanglement by sex, Zippy was always in the same mood. In the short days of the duller half of the year Zippy followed the sun around the house, from one resting place behind glass, to another; cushion, chair, window sill, top of wicker dirty-clothes-basket, table beside balcony window. In the season of light, Zippy lived a country gentleman’s life. His landed property was the garden and part of the Backfield, where sparrows, mice, frogs, moths, and daddy-long-legs existed for the chase. A surgical operation long forgotten and preceded by a howl of finality had spared Zippy the pangs and aspirations of love; and being nimble, Zippy was generally able to avoid the periodical clashes with female cats, which smacked the neuter’s face if Zippy did not immediately flee from their insults and oaths. So Zippy took it out of small birds and mammals, which it left bedraggled and maimed when it had had what Richard, often expressing impatience with what he called his wife’s sentimentality, described as its sport.