The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  “We did not see one scout ’plane during the entire battle of Loos, Mrs. Kingsman. Of course the weather was dud at times, and our machines were outmatched by the Fokkers, which can fire through their propellers, and so our chaps in their Martinsydes, Morane Parasols, and dud old B.E.’s and F.E.’s hadn’t a hope. Anyway our staff is hopeless, the whole battle was a ghastly mess-up in every way. Where the R.F.C. was I don’t know, probably having a binge miles away from it all. They get even more pay than our old navvies, and have tremendous champagne parties.”

  “Not all the time, surely?” said Kingsman, quietly.

  “Well, quite often, from what I heard. And I do know that for the four days I was on the battlefield, not one ’plane was to be seen. Again and again I heard our chaps asking where the R.F.C. was, and then the German reserves came up unspotted, and when we went over to the attack on Sunday, whole battalions were mown down. Nobody knew where or how or why they were there, and some of the reserves, who came up late and hungry, fired at one another, never having seen a German. No observation by the R.F.C., obviously.”

  Neither Kingsman nor his wife spoke. The butler stood unmoving as Phillip finished his pudding, while Mrs. Kingsman played with a fork and a few scraps on her plate. It was a relief when the meal was over and Mrs. Kingsman told the butler they would have coffee in the smoking-room. There to his surprise, she smoked a cigarette with them, taking nervous puffs at it while talking about the birds which came to her bird-table, including nuthatches and woodpeckers. This mood did not last, for the distant look came back into her eyes and she left, murmuring about writing some letters.

  When she had gone, Kingsman said, “I expect you would like to see your room,” and Phillip wondered if they had both found him a bore, and to make matters worse, he had begun to stutter. In silence he walked beside Kingsman up the broad stairs to where on the first landing a long corridor with leaded windows all along one side of the house led to what he thought was a wing. Coats-of-arms in stained glass were let into all the leaded casements of the windows. It was the Long Gallery, said Kingsman, and faced north to give an even light upon the pictures hanging along the opposite wall.

  Opening a door beyond the gallery, he said as Phillip hesitated, “Do go in, won’t you.” Inside the room he said, “You might care to rest for a bit, or write letters; if there is anything you want, you’ll ring, won’t you?”

  Phillip saw a tester bed, a table with a rack holding very blue writing paper, envelopes, sealing wax and pens, a bowl of mixed apples and pears, and a green plate with gilt edging on which lay a gold dessert knife. The uneven glass of a bookcase reflected the flames of the wood fire burning in the hearth. His haversack lay on a stool.

  “At three o’clock, in about an hour’s time, Dolly and I usually go for a walk, you might care to see the gardens, such as they are at this time of the year, but do please yourself. We’ll be down in the hall at three. Ring if you want anything, won’t you,” and Kingsman went out and shut the door.

  Phillip thought he would write a letter to Mrs. Neville, telling her of his extraordinary adventure, and the mysterious atmosphere in the house, while examining a piece of blue writing paper embossed in white Tollemere Park, Chelmsford, Essex, with a telephone number and station name of the Great Eastern Railway. But first he must explore. Carefully opening a door, after warning coughs, he found himself in a bathroom, with many immense pipes wrapped in some sort of bandages heavily covered with cracked white enamel; and opening a second door, discovered a dressing-room, with a thing like a commode without pan, but with sort of bicycle handles for holding on, and a base covered with leather hiding some sort of springs. It had a wooden handle projecting from the back, by which it could be jigged up and down. What was it, a liver rattler? Perhaps in the old days of two-bottle port men, this was necessary as well as foxhunting six days a week. Or was it for the summer, anyway it was a horrible looking thing.

  It appeared that he had the wing to himself. After exploring the landing, and hearing only heavy silence which hung in the shut air with the fog of his breath, he walked on tip-toe to the gallery, and examined the last two pictures, which had seemed to be different from the others as he had walked past them with his host.

  One was of a family group, Jasper Kingsman and his wife with a small boy sitting in dappled sunlight under a laburnum tree with its yellow blooms hanging down and the house in the background across lawns with clumps of rhododendrons. Next to this picture, which was signed Sargent, was the portrait of a boyish figure wearing a brown leather flying helmet carelessly left unfastened, and showing the dark fur lining. His leather coat was open, too, revealing the wings of a scout pilot, and under the wings the riband of the Military Cross.

  Phillip stared up at the face. It was smiling slightly, the eyes were a deep blue, the features delicate and sharp, almost childlike in their innocence. Where had he seen the picture before? Of course, it had been one of the pictures in the Royal Academy of the past summer, and photographs of it had appeared in the newspapers. Hadn’t it been painted by someone called Orpen? He looked, and saw the name in the corner. How strange, that Captain Kingsman had never spoken of having a son.

  He went along the gallery, looking at the portraits of men and women, most of them in family groups, with fresh, easy faces as though nothing had ever worried them, all ideally happy in the country that belonged to them. This appearance changed when he came to the Jacobean period; faces became sterner, with little ruffs and beards and eyes looking out beyond ideal country scenes, as though thoughtful with trouble in the time of religious struggles; then, into the Tudor period, the men looking more cocky, in both dress and manner, as though feeling the world was wide and they were masters of it.

  He listened on the edge of the main landing. There was no sound. He crossed over behind the heavy oak balustrade, and tip-toed down a passage, drawn by a flickering light. When he reached another passage he saw an image of the Virgin holding the dead Christ, set in an alcove in the wall, before which was a small bunch of flowers in a bowl. The pieta was lit by two candles, or tapers Mother called them, which had burned away half their lengths. It was like the street boys’ grottos, which they made once a year and exhibited on the pavements for pennies. Had the grotto the same derivation as the pieta, or was it earlier—relic of Great Pan being dead?

  So the Kingsmans were Roman Catholics.

  *

  The walk was dull, he could feel nothing in the countryside, which was bleak and bare and desolate as the small red sun went down like a wound in the flesh of a man lying dead on no man’s land. How could he get through the rest of the day; why had he come; he might by now have been with Desmond and Eugene; even Tom Ching’s face would be welcome in Freddy’s or the Gild Hall; and here he was, his life fret-sawed away into pieces by his mind taking him all over the place, and tomorrow was Sunday, the dead dull day of the week. He would not be able even to go with Mother and Doris to sit in the gallery of St. Simon’s church, in the hope of seeing Helena Rolls below in her family pew; vain and hopeless as that would be.

  In this mood of feeling lost within himself, as a hoar frost began to settle over the level landscape, and partridges were calling rustily, he returned with the Kingsmans to tea with muffins in the hall and sat upon the edge of a deep leather armchair before a fret of flames beginning to arise in triumph all along the other half of the six-foot length of split beech trunk, which two men had carried into the hall as they had set out for their walk. When the electric light was switched on he saw on the wall beside the corner of the hearth where Mrs. Kingsman sat with her work-basket, a small frame covered by glass in which hung a Military Cross.

  A visitor arrived during tea. He wore the black-skirted cassock of a priest. The setter seemed to writhe with suppressed joy to see the figure, as it took in its mouth the pair of slippers which Phillip had noticed on the other side of the hearth, of blue velvet embroidered with what looked like a flowery pattern. The dog advanced with high steps t
owards the newcomer, who stopped to pat it before going to Mrs. Kingsman to take her hand in both of his. Then to Kingsman; and turning to Phillip, who had stood up when the visitor arrived, was introduced as Father Aloysius.

  The newcomer brought life into the room, as he set about eating with zest the muffins from a covered dish that had been kept warm on the hearth.

  “You walked, I suppose, Lulu?”

  “Rather! It helped to clear the miasmas from my mind. I was beginning to feel like Shakespeare’s ‘vagabond flag upon the tide, that rots itself with motion’. But I was sorry to leave my many friends, I had no idea they would feel the parting as I did. I’ve spent the last two years,” he said, turning to Phillip, “in a London suburb south of the river—a place that George the Second, travelling by coach from Kent on his way to London early one morning, called ‘long lazy lousy Loos’am,’ having apparently watched door after door opening along the High Street to see his subjects yawning and scratching their heads as the Royal Coach passed by. Of course the Hanoverians, as you know, were not exactly popular then.”

  “No—I mean yes.”

  “How did you come, by Liverpool Street, Lulu?”

  “I was lucky to get a lift in a motor going over Woolwich Ferry to Chelmsford, Dolly. My word, it’s good to see the rodings ridge-and-furrow again! There’s something about a London suburb, a nervous tension, an underlying anxiety, a suppression of true living that is not of the town and certainly not of the country, which is most hard to combat.”

  Phillip wondered if this was the same Father Aloysius that his mother had spoken of, as being ‘such a good man’, the priest-in-charge of St. Saviour’s in the High Street.

  “What did you think of your chaplains in France?” went on the priest, turning to him.

  “I can hardly judge, sir, I saw only one, and he preached a sermon that told us only that Zero day was not far off. The troops call chaplains the Royal Staybacks.”

  The priest laughed. “What did your man say, can you remember?”

  “He said, ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian religion, a fight between the mailed fist and the nailed hand.”

  “That sounds like the Bishop of London.”

  It was too late to leave now; darkness had come, and there were no lamps on the Swift. His great lonely bedroom! He remembered what Father had always said about Roman Catholic priests: how they tried to control other people’s lives, and although supposedly devoted to things spiritual, they were great acquirers of property. But Father disliked Roman Catholics because his mother had come from a German Lutheran family which had suffered from persecution. Anyway, what did it matter? All religions were the same—merely made up from people’s fears and desires.

  The others began to talk about people they knew, including someone called “Margot”. The only Margot Phillip had heard of was the Prime Minister’s wife, and to his surprise this was the same person. The Kingsmans must be very high up, if they were intimate friends of the Asquiths. He must be careful not to say anything against the war.

  “The newspapers are dreadful,” said Mrs. Kingsman. “Poor Margot! That wretched canard about her visit to Donnington Hall, to play tennis with the German officer prisoners there, is still going the rounds. Even my head gardener believes it to be true. Margot says she does not even know where Donnington Hall is.”

  Phillip remembered that Mrs. Asquith’s visit was one of the things that made Father furious with the Liberal Prime Minister. He might have known it! The Daily Trident had right across its chief page, A Real British Victory at Last! on the Monday following the attack at Loos … The Daily Liar.

  “Even if she did go to visit old friends, I don’t see anything wrong in it,” he could not help saying.

  To his surprise the priest exclaimed, “Bravo! Therein lies hope. Tell me, do many think like you do, in France?”

  “I don’t think so. Or if they do, they don’t say so. You see——” he began tremulously, but could not finish.

  “Henry Asquith is so good,” he heard Mrs. Kingsman saying. “He will not defend himself. He will not believe that they are intriguing against him.”

  “One of the disadvantages today of being a Balliol man,” said Kingsman.

  “Tell me,” said the priest softly, leaning across the sofa to Phillip, “would it have been a help if you had had a padre with your men in the line, sharing their lives, one to whom they could confide their unhappiest thoughts?”

  This was so strange a question that Phillip did not know what to reply.

  “One to whom a man could tell even his fears of being killed?”

  “I think he would be killed just the same, whether he told his fears or not, if his time had come, sir.”

  “You know Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’, of course?”

  “No—I don’t, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, my dear boy! It is one of the great poems of the war, with Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnets! It is your meat and drink, as a soldier! Where can we find you a copy?”

  “I have kept The Times, Lulu!”

  Mrs. Kingsman got up, a strange exalted smile on her face, and went up the stairs.

  “Julian was our friend,” said the priest, softly. “At Balliol nearly ten years ago he was known as Roughers, or the Rough Man. He was tremendously keen on physical fitness, delighting in all beauty, fired by great poetry, feeling kinship with animals, particularly horses, that was our dear, dear Rough Man, with his stock whip, cracking its lash with a noise like a pistol shot! But since all human qualities must have their defects, for what is man but a wayward pilgrim unto God, Julian had the fault of intolerance. Thus, he could not bear the sight of one fellow undergraduate in particular, and would hunt him whenever he saw him, hurling that great thong of his stock-whip until the lash exploded about the ears of the fleeing Jew … who is now, in the whirligig of time, an A.D.C. to a general in France, while our dear Roughers has died of wounds,” ended the priest, with a smile.

  Phillip did not know what to say to this. He remembered his father saying that grandfather Twiney was a Jew. What did it matter, anyway, what religion a man was?

  As Mrs. Kingsman came down the stairs with The Times, the priest went on, “You will know your Heraclitus,” and he quoted for nearly half a minute, while Mrs. Kingsman waited. “You remember your Greek?”

  “I did not learn Greek, sir.”

  “Oh, do forgive me, I did not intend——” The priest got up and took the newspaper from Mrs. Kingsman. Spreading it open on the table he said softly, “Read it to us, my dear Maddison,” and then he began to pace the room, touching his rosary.

  The naked earth is warm with Spring

  And with green grass and bursting trees

  Leans to the sun’s gaze, glorying,

  And quivers in the sunny breeze.

  And life is Colour and Warmth and Light

  And a striving evermore for these;

  And he is dead who will not fight.

  And who dies fighting hath increase.

  Phillip read on, transfixed, as scenes of the countryside he had known with such happiness rose before him with so startling a clearness that he lowered his eyes, waiting for the tears which filled them to go.

  The kestrel, hovering by day,

  And the little owls that call by night,

  Bid him be swift and keen as they,

  As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

  The blackbird sings to him: “Brother, brother,

  If this be the last song you sing,

  Sing well, for you may not sing another,

  Brother, sing.”

  “Do go on, Phillip!” said Kingsman. “Yes, do,” said Mrs. Kingsman. They watched the slim figure hesitating, then the nervous stroking of dark hair with a hand; the indrawn breath, the voice clear, gentle, and firm.

  And when the burning moment breaks,

  And all things else are out of mind,

  And only Joy of Battle takes

  Him by th
e throat and makes him blind,

  Through joy and blindness he shall know,

  Not caring much to know, that still

  Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so

  That it be not the Destined Will.

  The thundering line of battle stands,

  And in the air Death moans and sings;

  But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,

  And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

  In the silence that followed he could hear the flap of the flames and the slight clicking of beads; then the low voice of Father Aloysius began to pray in Latin. Captain Kingsman and his wife bowed their heads, followed by Phillip. He felt himself to be small and simple, and blessed.

  “And now,” said the priest, as he drew up his chair, “tell me about your Redpoll herd, Dolly, and if the cows are doing their duty. I am looking forward to that bowl of cream, and that blackberry and apple pudding that Marty in the kitchen, bless her, knows so well how to make.”

  What a marvellous poem, Phillip was thinking, again and again. And yet——

  *

  It was a marvellous dinner, he thought, looking round the table lit by tapers burning in Elizabethan holders of hand-wrought silver. Now he knew why he had felt that something was wrong with the Kingsmans, and the explanation was as sad as it was simple: he had taken for granted that all homes, or the people in them, were like his own. These people were kind, and because they were kind they were polite to one another. And they did not show their feelings or their spiritual bruises because they were not bruised. Even the death of their only son had not broken as it were their skins. Father Aloysius before they had gone into dinner had whispered to him that their son, their only child, had been shot down during the battle of Loos by the German airman Boelcke flying a Fokker; so, said the priest, “Let us not speak harshly of the mistakes or deficiencies of others. We are all pitiful in our errors, our lives are composed of joy and of Virgil’s lacrimae rerum, ‘the tears of things’.”