The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  If Tommy has sufficient notice, he likes to fight trim, dressed for the part. He shaves, brushes his hair, mends his kit. Also he sees carefully to the action of his rifle, and he finds something wherewith to put a fierce edge on his bayonet.

  They’ll be difficult to hold back this time. I don’t feel like holding them back, either. Goodbye, dearest; I must tidy up too. I want to get a bit of my own back as well.

  CHOTA.

  He lay back, exhausted. The whole account was a fraud. How could they have fetched a Veterinary Officer, from Division, miles behind the front line, so quickly? And anyway a wounded dog would feel like a wounded man, and cling to life, in a world of its own terror, the more terribly the worse it was hit, at least while it remained conscious. Howells had screamed when he had pointed the Lewis gun at him; he had known his intention, and had been almost out of his head with fright. Perhaps his so-called bullet-proof vest had saved him; more likely it would have roasted him. He felt distress as he thought of it; his body was hot, his leg aching, and a new pain grew in it, like the gnaw of phosphorus. He pushed Nash’s through the bars of his cot. The author of that piece had not been anywhere near the line. It was all of it untrue. Why were such pieces printed? Father took Nash’s. He would hate the Germans more than ever when he read about the dog’s death, and so help to make the war last longer.

  The war began to ache in his wounds, as he thought of going home to hear again the same old talk. Then the ache spread to his head, and the glazed-glassy world came back, which was before the rough-and-smooth nightmare feeling. His temperature was taken. The nurse went away, and returned with the doctor. He was given something to drink, then an injection in his leg, and his pillow turned over, so that it was cool. Soon he was sinking down into calmness and bliss, while the sun shone with a mellow light which bore him along a lane across a heath, with shadowy forms around him. He could hear voices, but not what they were saying. He could see the whirr of wheels, and heat was shimmering from gravel spread upon tar which had come up in black bubbles. The tar clung to the bicycle tyres. They dragged and made pedalling hard. Phew, the day was a scorcher! The last day of July, 1914.

  They were sitting outside the little brick Greyhound Inn on the left of the road. His bike and the three others’ bikes were leaning against the dingy yellow brick wall. There was a wooden trestle table outside the inn, and two wooden forms, unpainted and grey with exposure to rain and sun.

  Pink china pots of cider were on the table. They were sitting on a bench by the wooden table, while gorse-seeds popped on the common. Willie, Desmond, Eugene, himself—all viewless.

  They were all at the beginning of a great new friendship. He was taking them to the secret Lake Woods, and their rods were tied on their bicycles. Then with running leaps they got on their bikes and were racing up the slope towards the windmill, and he followed, but his heart was thumping black, his eyes were sparky, as he tried to catch up with them; then they were gone, and he saw the oak paling fence of Knollyswood Park, and turning north, was swooping downhill past the Fish Ponds, gleam of water under pine-trees, ratchet-click of free-wheel past the lodge, he was at the end of the cleft-oak fencing. At the boundary the footpath led under trees into the unknown. On the upper side was a tall taut barbed-wire fence, on steel angle-iron posts seven feet high. How could he get over it, and where were the others? He could not see them, although he could hear them talking but without any sound. He saw them, far below him, scraping a hole in the leaf-mould under the lowest strand. Then he was floating under pigeon-clattering tall hollies and oaks. He came to the Lake Woods, one terraced above the other. They were surrounded by rhododendrons and towering firs. He heard dry patterings, sudden startling wing-drumming kock-karrs! of upbursting cock pheasants, flying away with tails rippling.

  There was a peacock in full blue-and-green display on the grassy dam between two ponds. Its maniac cry rang through the woods. Then from an upper lake flapped a grey heron, its legs trailing. It dropped a thin white thread, which fell across the leaf-reflecting surface. He watched it dissolve palely in the water.

  The bailiff, in grey whip-cord, was walking to the higher iron gate. They all hid. They watched him go away up the woodland ride. Cole-tits in the fir-tree tops talked to one another as they flitted in and out of the sun. The ring-doves cooed serenely. A figure was now quite near him. It was fitting together a long bamboo roach-pole. He tried to speak, but was unable even to move. There were four lengths, fitted together without brass ferrules. It was a Thames roach-fisher’s pole. It was being taken apart and the figure was pushing the sections, now tied together with string, into a rhododendron bush, where it would be hidden until they came again.

  When they had all gone away and left him he felt desperately ill because he could not recall their faces. Then he saw Mavis. She wanted to follow him, but he tried to escape from her. She was very small, she had left Mother’s arms, she was trying to walk after him, round the sitting-room table, and the guard was not up before the fire. He said go away and she still followed him, and because he wanted to be alone to stand still and grieve by himself he pushed her backwards and she fell into the fire, and she was screaming until Mrs. Feeney ran in and pulled her out, her clothes burning. O Master Phil whatever made you do such a thing he heard Mrs. Feeney’s voice saying, but he could not see her, or find the room again. He was alone, suspended in a void. He searched but could not move, called but could not see, looked but could not hear. Everything became rough, and then sickeningly smooth.

  When he woke out of this torture he was wet with sweat, and tried to steady the swaying ship by holding his eyes upon a trolley with tea being wheeled round the ward. He told the orderly he was feeling sea-sick, but the orderly said they had docked at Southampton. The orderly did not bring him a bowl, so to his shame and degradation he was sick on his pillow.

  On the hospital train, gleaming white in the long ward-like coach, a lady came round with telegraph forms and pencils. Would he like her to send a telegram to his next of kin? No thank you, he said, unable to bear the thought of what Father or Mother or Mavis or anyone belonging to the old life might say, their shame and their criticism, and now probably saying how proud they were of him, when he had failed utterly.

  Part Three

  THE QUIET BOY

  Chapter 20

  LILY’S RESOLUTION

  Phillip had written a letter to his mother from Rouen, saying that he was wounded, but not badly, and would she please not be worried (he meant fuss) about him, as he was really lucky to be where he was, considering all things. He added that he might not be at Rouen very long, so no letter should be written to him. He would write when and if he got to England. He also sent a field post-card to Freddie, hoping that Mr. Jenkins, when he went there, would see it.

  Considering all things was his way of under-stating what, in fact, he could not bring himself to write; he could not even think it to himself. It was too much: the mind flinched from thought of the grinding advance up the slightest of grassy slopes to the chalk thread of the German trench seen only occasionally in hazy gaps of wafting smoke and spouting earth. Indeed, on that day, until he was taken down to Albert he had not seen a German, nor during the advance had he known where the firing was coming from. Punctured khaki figures had fallen, to writhe, cry out, crawl, twist, or lie still. That was all he had seen of the battle; half-realised scenes of which recurred again and again, in flashes and shards within his mind, as he lay in bed, fixed by an iron ache of pain which the feeble dribble of the glass tube in his buttock wound, sucking at the pus, failed to relieve, while the smell of iodoform in his nostrils mingled with the nauseating scent of roses in the bowl on the table.

  He endured long moments of self-exasperation before he could assemble himself to overcome the shame of asking for the bedpan; while to ask for the screens at the same time was a thought of horror because it would reveal his feeble weakness. Black and bitter laxative was another dread, lest the inevitable pain occur when sister
was engaged elsewhere, and he disgrace himself in her eyes. Thank heaven she was not a lady. “Haven’t you got anyone coming to see you?” she said on the third day. “My, you’re a real lonely soldier, aren’t you. No letters for you this morning. Were you expecting any?”

  “Oh, we don’t write much in our family, sister.”

  The morning probing, after the doctor’s inspection, was an agony, while he lay on his face, and got the cotton of the pillow slip between his lips, to hold hard against crying out. Caked and stinking swabs were lifted out by tweezers, then the tatters of muscle, otherwise flesh, which had rotted in the night, must be picked away. All the damaged flesh had to loosen and go before new growth could begin. He sweated violently. Drain tubes, which had been removed, were then replaced to rasp away elsewhere in the foetid yellowing crater.

  “Tell me if I hurt you.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, sister, really,” came the muffled voice from the pillow. It was nothing, he thought, compared with the chap in the next bed, who had had his private parts shot away, and his thigh-bone broken by a shell splinter. He groaned a lot, his monstrous plaster leg under a wooden cage. He had pince-nez spectacles, and his wife came to see him every afternoon, bringing black grapes.

  Then the merciful cool spray of malachite green; it was all over for another twelve hours, except the putting on of fresh swabs and bandages.

  “I suppose the bandages have to be very tight, don’t they, sister?”

  “The binders, you mean?” she said, taking a safety-pin from her mouth with one hand, while holding the end of the roll tightly with her other hand. He wondered if it was healthy to hold it in her mouth; but no doubt it was sterilised. “Yes, as tight as possible, so don’t you start complaining.”

  Why did she say that? He had never complained. For a while he had wanted to die, since nothing was left to live for; but that had passed, and with it his mood of not writing to his mother.

  “What day is it, sister?”

  “Saturday. Have you lost count? You must pull yourself together!”

  “You’ve done that for me, sister!”

  “That’s better! The shock is wearing off, I see.”

  “What shock? I’ve had no shock!”

  “That’s what you think! Now be a good boy, and write to your people, and they’ll get the letter in time to visit you tomorrow, and take tea with you in the ward. Sunday afternoon is Visiting Day, from two o’clock until half-past four. I’ll post the letter when I go off duty at nine o’clock, if you hurry up.”

  He wrote to his mother, asking her to come with Doris, as only two visitors were allowed in, he said, for each patient. He felt ill at the thought of his father, or Mavis, coming to see him; and tore up the letter. He wrote another, and screwed it up half way through. Then he wrote a third, and while he was writing it the sister returned and stood by while he addressed an envelope; so that one was posted.

  *

  On the Saturday afternoon of July 8, Richard Maddison was working in his allotment, with a satisfaction based on two thoughts that gave him a calm feeling: one, that his son was at least out of the battle, with wounds that were not so severe as to lead the authorities, in whom he had implicit trust, to send for his mother and himself; two, that the benefit of sub-soiling he had done upon his rods of land was to be seen in the healthy appearance of the growing crops. It was helped, of course, by the half-rotted compost he had trenched-in a spit deep, and the hop-manure raked into the seed-beds.

  Bran, mixed with powdered napthalene, had accounted for the slugs. A maze of black thread, thought of as barbed wire defending his main-crop position, had kept sparrows from the peas. Thin lines of lime around the lettuce plants in their straight rows were his outposts against skirmishing snails.

  On his way to the allotment, pushing wheel-barrow and tools, he had noticed a young woman looking at him as though expectantly; she had made as if to smile, and he had been quickened by the wide-spaced blue eyes in a pleasant, open face which reminded him of his young sisters, Effie and Viccy, when they had been in their early ’teens. Effie had died young, of phthisis; she had been the beauty of the family.

  He was thinking of past days as he mixed sand with lettuce seed for economy of sowing, when he noticed that the young woman, who had apparently been on her way to Joy Farm, was gazing in his direction as she stood, with an open sunshade over her shoulder, on the gravelley cart-track which led to the farmhouse, or what was left of it now that it was almost entirely surrounded by rows of houses in yellow brick.

  He knelt to release the seeds and sand carefully between finger and thumb, looking through his gold-wire reading spectacles, to make sure that the line was absolutely straight. It was most important that his sowing be along a precise line, in order to hoe within half-an-inch of the “drill” (as he called it) and so catch the weeds before they grew to the two-leaf stage. If it rained, the weeds would grow fast; the guns in France were said to be causing precipitation of cumulus into nimbus by percussion, according to an article in The Daily Trident.

  When he had drilled the seed to the end of the row, he stood up to straighten his back, and saw that the young woman with the sunshade was still dawdling upon the cart-track. She was looking his way, and appeared to be hesitating. Then she smiled.

  The good news in the paper from France that morning, the friable state of his soil, the colour of his plants, and now a smile from the lady-like young woman on a summer afternoon, freed the automatic reticence of a Victorian upbringing, based on what was correct behaviour towards all women, and he called out,

  “Are you waiting to see me, by any chance?”

  The Vision—as he thought of her later—of pink cheeks and smiling blue eyes came forward, and said in a soft voice, “Please excuse me intruding, sir, but I heard from a friend that Lieutenant Maddison had been wounded, and as I happened to be passing, I thought I would ask you if he is all right.”

  “We have not heard particulars yet, but no doubt no news is good news.”

  “Oh I am so glad.”

  It was then, with disappointment which showed itself in a masking of his affability, that he recognised her as the young woman he had seen leaving Randiswell police station on the night of his son’s recall to France. She looked quite a nice girl, too; but one could never tell by appearances.

  “I hope you don’t mind me speaking to you, sir.”

  “Well, as I expect you know, there has been a lot of fighting in France, and no doubt the authorities are hard put to it to communicate with the next of kin of all the casualties.”

  “Yes, Mr. Maddison, these last two days the Borough Military Hospital has had no beds vacant.”

  “Oh, you work there, do you?”

  “Yes, sir. I do volunteer work there nights.”

  Richard felt easier. She had a frank, open face. Her next remark pleased him, for the consideration it showed.

  “Well, sir, I must not keep you from your work. I hope you will excuse the intrusion.”

  “Oh, no intrusion, I assure you. On the contrary, I am most obliged to you for your kind inquiry.”

  She blushed prettily, he thought, while a feeling of pleasure spread up from his knees. Thereafter she was the Vision.

  “Thank you ever so, Mr. Maddison.”

  “I will let Phillip know that you asked after him, when we get in touch with him. May I inquire your name?”

  “Lily Cornford, sir,” she said, and then, after slight hesitation, “I hope your son has a speedy recovery.”

  “Thank you, Miss Cornford, I will tell him when I see him,” he said, giving her a little salute. He restrained himself from looking after her as she went away; and was surprised that he felt a pang that his visitor was gone. The allotment seemed stony and flat for a few moments. And when he glanced at the plot adjoining his own, he felt its tangle and untidiness acutely. He sighed, and went on with his task.

  *

  The allotment next to Richard’s was in the occupation (as he phrase
d it to himself) of his neighbour and fellow special-constable, Mr. Jenkins. Or, more correctly, non-occupation, for Mr. Jenkins was, he thought, in the nature of an absentee tenant. Only a fifth of his ground had been dug over, and so long ago that it had re-covered itself with couch grass, for Mr. Jenkins—despite the trouble he had taken on his behalf to tell him what the rubbishy condition of the land needed—had made no attempt to trench or deep-dig his plot.

  When the young woman was at a safe distance, Richard looked in her direction, and saw that his dilatory neighbour was approaching. He watched him stop when he came to the young woman. How came that fellow to know her?

  When he arrived at his allotment, Mr. Jenkins immediately made the matter clear.

  “Hullo, Sergeant! Busy as usual, I see.”

  “Yes, Mr. Jenkins. The time of year is passing.”

  “You don’t say, Sergeant!”

  Richard’s neighbour of No. 8 Hillside Road used the Randis-well’s Specials mode of address to Richard when off-duty as a kind of criticism of his senior’s aloofness, and of the older man’s disapproval of the habits of the majority of Specials, e.g. slipping into a saloon bar to “have a quick one” while on duty during Zepp-less nights.

  “Well, it will soon be too late to put out any seeds, I fancy.”

  “What do you think of the news that Phillip and Desmond have both been wounded in the advance, Sergeant?”

  “Oh!” said Richard. “I had not heard about my son’s friend being a casualty, Mr. Jenkins.”

  “Then you are almost the only one of our squad, Sergeant, who hasn’t.”

  “Oh!”