The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  Somewhat shaken, he crossed the road, and went into the gilt and marble Apex House, and upstairs to the Green Room, with pleasurable feelings that he would soon be seeing Alice.

  When after ten minutes she did not come, he went downstairs to look for her, and after waiting there another five minutes, he returned to the Green Room, and at once saw that Alice was already sitting at a far table with Timmy, her naval commander. The commander was leaning over the table, his face close to hers. She was smiling, as she looked into his eyes. Pretending not to have seen them, he went on without pause to his table, and keeping his eyes down, sat there mournful and perplexed until his waiter came. Hardly knowing what he said, he ordered a bottle of claret and a herb omelette. This he ate, with draughts of wine, followed by toasted cheese, and angels on horseback.

  Brandy and black coffee to follow; then, having got the bill, he tipped the waiter five shillings, and forcing himself to appear easy and nonchalant, like a misjudged hero in a magazine story, he walked across the room and out into the street and so to the Café Royal, hoping against hope that she would follow him, and a touching scene of wet-eyed remorse follow.

  He swirled in black depression; and after sitting still for some time, turned suddenly to the red-bearded painter at the next table and said, “Please may I speak to you, sir?”

  “By all means. Have a drink.”

  After an interval Phillip said, “I’ve got two tickets for the Coliseum. Would you—please forgive me asking—but would you care to come with me?”

  “Unfortunately I have an appointment,” replied the painter, taking out a gold watch. “Some other time, perhaps. I won’t have a drink, thank you. Good luck to you.”

  Phillip walked to the Coliseum, his hands clenched as he said to himself that this was the end of a friendship.

  He hardly knew what went on on the stage before him. There was a long sketch called Potash and Perlmutter, which seemed to amuse the audience; it was all about men with voices like lizards selling ladies underwear, but how it was funny, he could not see. There were songs, the chief being one he knew, from a record of his father’s, The Bride of Lammermuir, by Donnizetti. There were acrobats, some dancers, and two rather sweet sisters with dark hair, dressed in yellow, who were stars, called Beattie and Babs.

  Christmas Eve! Eleven o’clock in London, midnight in Berlin. Now the lighted fir-trees would be on the parapets, voices singing Heilige Nacht. Why was he not there, how could it be the same without him, he thought, as he stood to attention for God Save the King.

  And so to Baker Street station, through darkness without meaning, and the long walk to camp, while he lived in memory upon the frozen battlefield, where the morning star shone white and lustrous in the east.

  It was one o’clock when he got to his cubicle, to see Lord lying on his camp bed fully dressed and snoring, an empty bottle of grocer’s port and an untasted cup of cold tea on the floor beside him.

  *

  Christmas Day at the camp was given over to ghosts, though few knew it: the ghosts of lost childhoods, of lovelessness, of spiritual self denials and self-suppressions so normal that almost automatically most of the herded young men got drunk.

  It began with a church parade which was for most a mere marking time, until they should get back to, or away from, camp, and so start the day. Rounds of drinks in the mess, joviality, rivalry, one bad quarrel—Ray calling Wigg a hoary old swankpot and Wigg calling Ray a little squit from the gutter—while others sought to get the insulted to shake hands: which both refused to do with mutual scorn. Christmas dinner, presided over by Major Gleeson, was of roast beef and baked potatoes dripping with fat inside and out; and the fat on the baron of beef was yellow. Lord, who had worked for a butcher in private life, said it was cow-beef, which was the cause of the toughness and the frill-like yellow fat. Lumps of it were left on the sides of plates.

  “Goo on,” said Major Gleeson from the top table, “eat it up, you fellers. Do you good. Provides ’eat, lines yer guts with plenty o’ reserve energy.” He put a wodge of the stuff on his fork and flipped it into his mouth, then steadily chewed, while an amiable grin spread over his face. The Christmas pudding tasted of gritty currants and water, its flavour all boiled away. The rich tawny port then began to circulate.

  Lord, who shared Phillip’s cubicle, was away, so Phillip had the brittle grey hollow—to which came most noises in the other eleven cubicles in the hut—to himself. The window was too high for an emergency, but he found his way out of the door and down the passage and away into the darkness where beef, pudding, and port left their temporary receptacle on the way back to earth.

  When Lord returned soon after midnight he found Phillip lying in his bed surrounded by empty cups of tea, and an empty bottle of milk of magnesia.

  “Blime,” he said, “looks as though you’ve been enjoyin’ yerself, old cock.”

  “For God’s sake put out that horrible cigar,” groaned Phillip.

  *

  During his four days leave he did not see Desmond, who had been home for Christmas. Mrs. Neville had been away on Boxing Day, she said, and on her return, had found plates and glasses “all over the place”, with half-drunk cups of tea and a bottle of whiskey on her drawing-room table with the cork out, beside a pile of records and Phillip’s trench-gramophone. Her son and Gene, she declared, with laughter, must have had an orgy. Well, how was Phillip?

  He told her all about the visit to Tollemere, Father Aloysius (“Yes, everyone speaks well of him, Phillip”), the girls of Northampton and the new fellows at the camp.

  “We are no longer navvies, Mrs. Neville, but part of Kitchener’s Army, and as such I suppose, will go out when trained to take part in the Big Push everyone is talking about for next summer. Ah well, I shan’t mind going back there again, we’re all in it together.” Then he asked about what was pressing on his mind: had she any news of Helena Rolls.

  “I see her coming up on her bicycle, Phillip, from the Hospital, and she always looks up at my window and waves to me. She is a brave girl, she has pride you know, but one can see from her face, how it has been refined by grief, that she still feels Bertie Cakebread’s death. Why don’t you go in and see her one night? When the old man’s away, of course, as he is from Monday till Friday. There can be no harm in it. Take your gramophone with you, why not, and let her mother and Helena hear some of your beautiful music.”

  “Oh, I daren’t! They would think I am imposing on them!”

  Instead, Phillip played his favourite Liebestod at the open window of the front room at home, as Helena walked by, pushing her bicycle, on two afternoons in succession; but on neither occasion did her footfalls pause behind the privet hedge; she was gone, remaining what she had always been to Phillip, a vision: but now intensified in his mind as Colour and Warmth and Light, great rest, and fullness after dearth.

  Freddy’s was not the same without Desmond; he knew no-one in the Gild Hall, and dreaded to go there, lest he hear laughter; so he spent the rest of his leave with Mrs. Neville, visiting his grandfather, doing nothing in the sitting-room at home, and going for long walks in the darkness.

  On his last evening there arrived a letter from his cousin Willie, now in France after the evacuation of Gallipoli.

  Christmas Day this year was somewhat different from the one we shared last year, outside Ploegsteert Wood. This time an order came round that there was to be no fraternisation. To see that this was carried out the Corps commander ordered the guns, both heavies and field, to start shelling at 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The old Ger. sent over very little by way of retaliation. It turned out that a deserter coming into our lines some days before had spoken of their programme of festivities, and exactly at half past ten at night, or half an hour before Berlin midnight, the batteries concentrated on a particular spot where a dinner was to be held, with Christmas trees and candles, and blew it all to hell. The comment of our C.O. was that “the honours of Christmas Eve belong to the British”.

  When
he had read this to his mother in the kitchen, Hetty said, “Perhaps it would be better if you did not show it to your father, Phillip. He is so proud of Willie, you know, and so fond of him. Of course it is very sad that such a thing should have happened on Christmas Eve, but then the Germans have done terrible things to our men, haven’t they?”

  Without a word Phillip got ready to leave. Then saying goodbye to parents and sisters, he left for London, to catch a late train back to camp.

  When he returned he learned that he and Lord had been posted to the Machine-Gun Training Centre at Grantham, and were to “proceed there forthwith, after reporting to the Orderly Room for railway vouchers”.

  Chapter 8

  TRAINING CENTRE

  “Gentlemen,” said the captain of Grenadiers, who had been hit by eleven German machine-gun bullets during the first battle of Ypres, “you may stand at ease.”

  Six hundred officers, of all regiments of horse and foot—glengarries, trews, breeches, knickerbockers; puttees, ankle and field-boots, both black and brown, Norwegian-pattern trench-knee-boots, leggings; every kind of tunic button of brass, black composition, and leather—badges of every county in England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland—yeomanry, infantry, cavalry, bicycle—stood before him in the new large hall built upon agricultural land.

  The captain of Grenadiers continued to stand in a position which was the opposite to that of any suggestion of ease. Stiff, upright, withered arm held in a black silk sling, chin resting on a burnished steel cup, above which moustaches were horizontally brushed out, he spoke in a curiously muffled voice.

  “You have come here to learn about the Vickers Mark Ten machine-gun, its virtues and limitations, its possibilities as a tactical weapon, used singly and in battery. First you will learn about the mechanism of the weapon, then you will fire it on the range. Later you will learn how to site your guns, always with a view to protecting your infantry against enemy attack, and supporting them in advance, by both direct and indirect fire. It has been decided that the officers of the new formations are to be mounted, so those of you who pass into the new Corps will go through Riding School, before being posted to your companies.

  “The armament of each company, to be attached eventually to an infantry brigade, or in the case of cavalry, each squadron to a cavalry brigade, has been laid down as sixteen guns, divided into four sections of four guns, each commanded by a section officer. Four companies, one in reserve, will form a battalion, under a lieutenant-colonel at divisional headquarters. That, in brief outline, is the organisation into which those of you who pass out here will be absorbed.

  “Officers will now be detailed into squads, each under its instructor. Will you take the parade, Mr. Bostock.”

  The stiff figure, converted into an enlarged marionette after being brought back from the dead, returned the salute of the promoted warrant officer from the Hythe Musketry School, and retired to the Orderly Room.

  *

  The officers of the new Corps settled into squads of a dozen grouped on wooden chairs around sergeant-instructors, each sergeant sitting at his squad’s centre like a nurse with its charge, or a priest with its godling—Machine-Gun, one, Vickers, Mark Ten—guarded between khaki knees above puttees covering ankles and calves in herring-bone pattern. Not for them the common loops, which might, or might not, cling tightly to the outline of the lower leg. These wore, by order of the Corps Sergeant Major, their puttees in a pattern of the élite: these were the sergeant instructors of the weapon which could spit forth approximately six hundred rounds a minute, according to the tensioning of the recoil spring, a rate of fire to surpass that of the hitherto invincible German Spandau gun.

  Mornings and afternoons wore away slowly, while dull verbal mechanical acquaintance was continued with the steel corrugated cylinder squatting low on three steel legs with spade lugs, concealing within its water-jacket all but the muzzle recoil cup of the barrel which could spit out ten nickel wasps with leaden cores every second at figures in feld grau, carrying rifle, stick-bomb and pocket Bible to the counter-attack.

  This the Weapon

  This the Corps

  To foe and friend

  A crashing bore

  scribbled Phillip in his note-book, with a sketch of batteries of machine guns pouring forth streams of bullets.

  “Now if I may turn aside for a moment to ask a question on another plane, gentlemen,” said the instructor, as time for the fallout for lunch was near, “What reference in Holy Writ could be applied today to describe the function of the Vickers Mark Ten machine-gun?”

  The godling guns

  Of Vick and Span

  Will end the life

  Of everyman

  but the intended picture of corpses everywhere was not completed.

  The instructor was young and gentle, belonging to the Artists’ Rifles; he was patient and smiling, never varying his soft-voiced encouragement to the forgetful or the disinterested. He was said to be a volunteer lay-preacher on Sundays in a chapel in the industrial part of the town.

  “No one knows the quotation, gentlemen?”

  He smiled around the circle.

  “The answer, which with the question is not part of the official curriculum of course, is, ‘Saul hath slain his thousands, but David slew his tens of thousands.’”

  The afternoon sessions were given over to lectures, including accounts of the parts played by the machine-gun in the battles of 1914 and 1915. The lecturers were all of them regular soldiers, and maimed: the leader of the veterans was now a major: he bore the name of Slaughter, this Guardee with one shoulder held high, crippled arm, steel-corsetted spine, broken neck, and indomitable moustaches bristling out of the steel cup. Phillip was glad that this officer would not be going back to the front, for, like “Spectre” West, he had really done his bit. It was rather wonderful that the Guards captain was always so pleasant in manner, as though unaffected by his wounds.

  *

  After nearly two months’ instruction, including riding school and firing on the range, the squad passed out of the Training Centre. G.S. waggons took the kits to another camp, about two miles away. Here amidst trees, stood echelon after echelon of huts of creosoted wood, with roofs of tarred corrugated iron. They were built in what had been a deer park, in the centre of which stood one of the stately homes of England, its southern front covered with Virginian creeper from which nearly all the red pointed leaves had fallen in the fogs and frosts of the year’s dead end. He wondered what the family thought of the way their beautiful park had been mucked up. At least the vista in front of the house had been left open, with its trees and sward; but immediately to either flank, and behind it, the concentration of dark huts, their stove-pipes issuing thick coal-smoke, was dense and extensive, each holding forty-eight men with a cubicle for corporal or sergeant; while the huts of the officers’ quarters apart in a separate place were of equal size.

  He walked round the house, taking care to keep his distance from it, for it was still occupied by the noble owner. Beyond the stables and outbuildings was a cookhouse; and farther on, among trees, and almost enough to fill an entire hut in quantity, was the usual dump of loaves, half carcases of sheep, quarters of bullocks and other food, beside another immense pile of large bully-beef tins. No doubt the lot awaited clearance in the carts of farmers, for their pigs. There had been waste of food at Hornchurch, but practically none at his last camp (Major Gleeson had seen to that); here the pile was ten feet high, and heaving in places with rats.

  *

  There were no duties after noon on Saturday until 9 a.m. on Monday morning, so he thought to go home by the one o’clock express to King’s Cross. Officers of the new Corps being mounted, the dress regulations permitted field-boots and spurs. So he went to the Army and Navy Stores and bought himself a pair of long brown boots, breeches of fawn cavalry twill, with buttons, not laces; and short-necked spurs with leather straps under the instep, not chains. The straps were specially cut while he waited, for he
wanted the spurs to be parallel to the sole of the boot, and high under the ankle bone, not flopping down anyhow as worn by some gunner officers.

  Having admired his new appearance in a looking glass, he paid the bill, stuffed the hob-nailed boots in haversack, caught an omnibus to the Elephant and Castle, and changed there for one that would pass Wetherley’s garage, while longing to feel the rush of wind past his face as, with Helena’s throttle open and exhaust drumming harmoniously, the grey road rushed upon him in imagination and he flew upon wheels into the future. Surely the bike would not have been sold?

  *

  It was not sold. It stood beside the Swift, a FOR SALE notice on the handlebars. “I think,” said Phillip, “I will keep both, after all. But thank you for trying. You must let me pay the garage fees, of course. Did you manage to get a new inner tube? Oh, good. I’ll leave the Swift here, then. I’m rather fond of the old bus. I hope the bike will start after all this time.”

  The engine fired after the plug was heated in a blow-lamp, then he pushed off, and with the old half-roll vaulted into the saddle; and lying low over the tank, accelerated past the police station and over the bridge into Randiswell, the barks of the exhaust being answered by several protesting dogs in the gardens and by their gates in Charlotte Road. A glance up at the flat, to see Mrs. Neville waving from her armchair; and thinking that he would go down to have tea with her, swooped up Hillside Road, and braked hard outside No. 11.

  Mrs. Bigge next door was standing, trowel in hand, by her rockery. “I thought it wouldn’t be long before I saw you, you know! I said to myself, ‘There’s Phillip’, when I heard the Chinese Crackers coming up Charlotte Road. That’s what we call you among ourselves, ‘Chinese Crackers’. How are you in yourself, dear?”