The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  “Colonel Orlebar came, with his wife. She had smoothed out lines on her face and neck, and was quite old, over thirty I should think, and yet she was gayer than a very young person. I felt a little out of it, for another colonel of the regiment came too, Colonel Mowbray, now a brigadier-general. He came with his daughter. Aren’t they terribly polite, Society girls? Are they always on their best behaviour, I wonder?”

  “Oh yes, Phillip, they’re trained from the cradle—good manners are second-nature to them. Mrs. Hudson has the most exquisite manners. The three rules of manners, she used to say, were, Keep your distance; never repeat the gossip of the servants’ hall; never ask personal questions. She is very well-connected. Oh, very! All her brothers went to Clifton, with Desmond’s father. Hudson’s ‘Bristol Ship Shape’ tobacco, and wine, you know—one of the old Merchant Venturer families. Some of them are Quakers, of course.”

  Phillip began to laugh. He saw a family party of Hudsons, all quaking as they tottered away, each seeking a lonely corner in Bristol, after smoking ‘Ship Shape’ thick twist. Rather as he had felt, half way through his cigar after the luncheon, on top of six glasses of champagne with smoked salmon, lobster, various gateaux, a pêche Melba, and two Napoleon brandies (at seven-and-six a little glass like a finger, too) all floating about inside him.

  Awful! He had locked himself in one of the lavatories, and two hours later, when he had recovered, everyone had gone from the restaurant.

  “What a fool I was to drink all that wine! Still, I’ll never see any of them again. Even so, I feel awfully ashamed. But the waiter kept filling my glass, and everything was so happy. Still, the real test of a gentleman, which I’m not, is if he can hold his liquor, isn’t it?”

  “I should think it’s much more likely the sign of a healthy stomach if it gets rid of all that poison as soon as it can, Phillip! Mr. Hudson always said that the average healthy human liver can stand no more than two fluid ounces of alcohol. He used to tell us how the French specially lace some of their champagnes with brandy, for the English market; but that they’d rather be found dead in a field—or dead drunk more likely!—than drink it themselves. The English have little regard for the niceties of the palate, you see, Phillip, they drink, Mr. Hudson said, to forget their eternal winter of climate and thought. Anyway, don’t you worry yourself unduly. Just write a little note to ‘Spectre’ West and thank him for his hospitality, and explain that you were not feeling well, and were overcome. He’ll understand.”

  “Yes I will. Thanks for the tip. All the same, I wish I’d pretended when I saw him outside Buck House, as they call it, that I’d promised to go to lunch with someone else. Apart from drinking too much, I didn’t really know what to say to them. They talked of India, pig-sticking, polo, friends in the Regiment, while Tenby Jones told the most amusing stories about famous people. He kept them roaring with merriment, but as I didn’t know any of the people, I had to pretend to be in the know.”

  “I expect they understood, dear. A young man in the company of elder men does not have to try and compete, you know. Indeed, if he sits quiet, and is a good listener, they like him for his diffident manner. Youth,” pronounced Mrs. Neville, “has one trump card that older people never get dealt to them as they journey on through life.”

  “What is that, Mrs. Neville.”

  “Why, youth, dear. ‘Ehue fugacious, fugacious’, as Mr. Hudson used to say.”

  “I know the feeling, Mrs. Neville,” he sighed.

  *

  Life was not only fugacious, it was stagnant and dull. What could he do, to kill time until Saturday? Play tennis in the evenings? Somehow, he did not feel like going to see Cherry. Nor did he really want to meet Helena, after the really wonderful tennis dance. What was the matter with him? Why, after all the years of intense longing, was Helena now ordinary to him? It was the same about the war, which was fascinating but only when he was not in it: but the moment he was apart from what it really was, it seemed romantic and enthralling. Was his brain injured perhaps, by what had happened before he was born, when Gran’pa Turney had knocked Mother down, and she had lain unconscious for several hours, as Uncle Sidney had told him? Perhaps the brain had slipped, and so could never think properly except afterwards, when it changed things from what they really were to something quite different. A misfit of a brain! It missed gear, as it were, and the ’bus didn’t go forward properly. Perhaps he was fated to become insane, and these were the symptoms.

  He tried to outwalk the thought. He really was a bad person. For example, he had felt an utterly selfish, mean desire to hurt Polly, to put her in the family way, to pay her out—for what? She had never harmed him. Yet others as well felt like that towards girls, wanting to “teach them”—why? Girls never wanted to harm boys. “Put it acrost them”—that’s what common soldiers wanted to do. Harm them. Grind them down, in more ways than one. Why? What did it all mean? Why had Keechey behaved towards Lily as a ferret to a rabbit? Lily—when he saw her, what would he really feel? How much would he pretend? Was pity unnatural, a weakness? There was no pity in Nature, really; was that why wild birds and animals were so beautiful?

  *

  From a seat on the Hill below the school he saw Desmond arrive at the flat below, and felt that he could not face him. He walked up to the crest ready to clear off if he saw Helena walking rapidly in her white tennis things, swinging racquet and string bag of balls. He did not see her, and was disappointed. Probably she had gone round by road on her bike. Should he walk to the club, and peer through the privet hedge? As soon as he thought of it, he started off; but veered away when he got to the dog-marked paving stones of Foxfield Road, and went down to Pit Vale, and so to the Obelisk, meaning to call on Mrs. Cornford; but veering in his mind again, he crossed the bridge over the Quaggy, dead in its oval concrete bed, and went to the Bijou Electric Palace, to see the new Charlie Chaplin film. Veering once more at the box office, he followed boyhood’s way up the steep hill, to his old school, and so to the upland levels of the Heath, which Cundall had told him was a reserve landing ground for anti-Zeppelin aeroplanes at night. Football was being played everywhere. He walked across grass and gravel patches to Greenwich Park. The place looked colourless. The fallow deer were gone. Huts stood on the grass under the trees where they had driven, as children, in a wagonette, for their picnic. He stood still, trying to re-enter the past, to drag it out of memory, to make live again in his mind the dappled sunlight under the trees and see himself, his sisters and friends and all who were there on that hot summer day of 1911, when in the shade the temperature was a hundred degrees, according to Negretti and Zambra, the instrument makers who were always mentioned in the newspapers before the war. Come back, he cried wildly in his mind, come back, O summer day of my childhood, let me re-enter just one crystal moment; but he could see nothing, all was beyond invisibility, far away in ancient sunlight, life lost for evermore. For the moment he felt stricken into stone; then turning away, walked out of the park between the avenue of chestnuts planted, Gran’pa had said, in Charles the Second’s reign. Layer on layer of ghosts, perhaps helping to suspend sunlight in the air, atoms pressed tightly together like invisible gold-dust, by which the electricity of creation was brought to the living. After all, if matter was indestructible, why not spiritual force? Everything was built up of atoms, held together by the spirit of life. Feeling suddenly happy, he looked at his watch, and thought that Lily would now be in a tram, on her way down Pit Vale and the High Street, and so home. Was she thinking of him, with her shining nature, and had he caught her thoughts through the aether?

  He set off across the Heath, walking all the way, to delay his arrival, becoming more and more nervous as he descended the hill into the High Street and drew near the railway bridge just beyond which was the Conservative Club on one side of the arch, and the Gild Hall on the other. Then a turn to the left, and he was walking up towards Nightingale Grove. He walked past her house, telling himself that he ought to give her time to be with her
mother and at last, almost with a feeling of going over the top, he swung back the tiny iron gate and knocked at the door.

  Chapter 28

  NIGHT AND MORNING

  Lily came to the door. For a few moments she looked at him without speaking. She did not swim from her eyes towards him; she was a different Lily.

  “I am so glad that you could come.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “Won’t you come in?”

  Mrs. Cornford came from the scullery to welcome him. She was impersonal, as before; contained within herself, keeping her distance with amiable reserve. He thought how very nice she was; much calmer than Mrs. Neville at her creamy best. Lily’s mother kept back her personal feelings, she was a natural lady, he thought. Lily had changed, she was like her mother now.

  “Have you had tea?”

  “Yes thank you.”

  Lily looked at him with a smile. “Sure?”

  “Well, actually I seldom have any tea.”

  “We’re just going to have ours,” said Mrs. Cornford, serenely. “Perhaps you would like to join us. I must watch my toast.”

  She went into the kitchen, leaving them in the sitting-room.

  “I must draw the blinds. Mother is frightened of raids.”

  “She doesn’t show it, she looks always so calm.”

  “She was well trained as a servant, in her young days, you see.”

  “Weren’t they rather hard days? I mean, it was rather a severe life, wasn’t it? below—er—I mean, in the servant’s hall?” This sounded a bit better than below stairs.

  “Oh no, we all enjoyed ourselves. It wasn’t a very grand house, of course, like the county-and-town gentry live in,” said Mrs. Cornford, coming into the room, with a tea tray. “My master and mistress were quite comfortably off, as they would have said. We lived in one of the houses in the Paragon on the Heath, I expect you know it. My master was a City gentleman, with a carriage and pair. It was some time ago now, of course. He used to drive to the City wearing a deerstalker, and just before he got to Lower Thames Street he would take it off and put on his topper. They were fine old days,” she said, as she went out of the room. “I’ll bring the toast shortly.”

  “Mother was trained under the housekeeper, and when the butler left she became head parlourmaid,” said Lily. “When she left service to get married, she and her mistress cried together like sisters, she always says.”

  “I see,” he said, thinking of his own sisters.

  “Won’t you sit down? You look tired.”

  She sat at the other end of the sofa, and looked at him. “Was it very bad, out there, I mean?”

  “It was for some, but not so bad for me.”

  “You won’t go back for some time, I expect?”

  “I want to get back as soon as I can.”

  “You’re still not very happy, are you?”

  “Oh, I’m quite happy, thanks.”

  “Oh, Phillip,” said Lily, moving to him. “I have thought about you all the time you were away.”

  “I thought about you, too,” he said, formally, feeling himself to be melting.

  She took his hand, and opened the fingers, one by one. “You’ve been sitting here all the time with both hands clasped tight, as though waiting to fight something. You were like that when I first saw you. I look after little children in the ward, you see, and all the unloved ones hold themselves in at first, and hands clasped tight are one of the signs. Please don’t hold yourself away from me. I’ll never do anything to hurt you.”

  “I know that.”

  “It probably looks as though I’m vamping you, but I promise I’m not, and never will. For one thing, I’ve taken a vow.”

  “A vow?” He was startled, and disappointed.

  “Here’s mother. I’ll tell you after tea.”

  He munched toast, and sipped hot tea, wishing that he could speak without feeling stilted.

  Mrs. Cornford said she had to do some shopping after tea, and left the house. Sitting again on the sofa, with sudden ease he took her hand. “Were yours ever clenched tight?”

  “Yes, once or twice. But I was lucky to have Mother.”

  “Do you confide in her?”

  “Some things, yes. But not everything. She wouldn’t like me to.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She says it’s best to have a little reserve in all friendships. Don’t look at my fingers, they are very rough.”

  “It’s a nice shape, your hands. I like rough hands best. They look honest. A bird’s pads are very rough.”

  “Oh, I’ve often remembered our walk in the country!”

  “Yes, it has often been in my mind.”

  “Has it? Oh, I am so happy.” She lifted his hand to her cheek, then kissed it lightly. He put his cheek against hers, and felt its kindness like an invisible light. He thought of Keechey, and felt himself harden against the fat, buck-tooth face; and knew she had felt his thought when she said,

  “I am sorry for Keechey’s wife and little children. If he goes to prison they won’t have anything to live on.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Did you know I was thinking of him?”

  “I thought so, when your hand closed up.”

  “What am I thinking about now?”

  “I don’t know. But is it Desmond?”

  “Yes! How extraordinary! He arrived home this afternoon, but I haven’t seen him yet.”

  “Are you friends again?”

  “I’m afraid he’s rather adamant.”

  “He’ll want to make it up again, you’ll see if I’m not right. Then I shall be ever so happy.”

  “What is your vow, Lily.”

  “It was when I turned Roman Catholic.”

  He felt fear, and loneliness. She took his hand.

  “No,” he said, taking it away. Always the misfit; he did not belong anywhere.

  “I made a vow to Our Lady, that I would serve Her.”

  “You’re going to become a nun?”

  “No, it is a private vow I made. I was selfish before, seeking happiness in the wrong way. Now I want only to serve.”

  “I see,” he said bleakly.

  “Don’t you see, I’ve got to make something of my life, not just drift along as I was before. So I became a nurse, and when I’m trained I hope to be sent out to France.”

  “No more Freddy’s?”

  She shook her head, looking at him.

  “I met you too late,” he said as he got up, his hands clenched tight. “I suppose you think that I should have taken what the gods provided, like Desmond and Eugene did, and your other men friends?”

  “Do you really believe that, Phillip?”

  “What does it matter what anyone believes?”

  “Oh, it does matter. You don’t really believe that, do you? I hope I haven’t upset you. Please don’t go. I didn’t mean anything, truly. I’ll do anything for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  She looked at him humbly. “I thought you didn’t want me, because I’d been with other men. I couldn’t bear you not to like me.”

  He sat down, hands still clenched.

  “I’d give anything to see you happy, honest I would. Only I know I’m not good enough for you.”

  “I’m not good enough for you. May I tell you something just to prove it?”

  He told her about Polly.

  “You didn’t love her, that’s why you acted like that. But if she really loved you, you would have felt safe with her, I think. I think she was in love with you, only.”

  “Do you feel safe with me, Lily?”

  “Oh, it is so lovely to hear you call me Lily! Of course I feel safe with you. Didn’t you know it?”

  Touched by his unhappy look she said, “Can’t you tell when anyone is fond of you, Phillip?” Then the desperation in his face made her exclaim, “Oh, you’re so tired! Lie down awhile, why not. I’ll get you a cushion for your head. Now lie down, and rest your poor head. Dear head,” she murmured, sitt
ing by him and stroking his brow with her finger-tips.

  He held her hand and with a distraught expression in his eyes bowed his head and hid his face in the crêpe-de-chine of her blouse, feeling her warmth and softness; while as though to a child who had yielded to her, given up to her the ghost of itself, beyond the fatigue of its wilfulness, she murmured as her lips touched his hair and brow. “O, I love you, I have always loved you, my only dear, and now you have come to me. Do not be afraid, I will not harm you.”

  All purposelessness fell from him with repeated sighing, and then he sat up and stroked her forehead, and her hair, touching with finger-tips her eyelids and smoothing her eyebrows, before clasping her head and feeling its ordinariness, its smallness, its skull-shape, with its curving bump at the back, so tender. It seemed that his eyes were filled with her thoughts, the sky-blue thoughts of Lily, no longer to be afraid of, for she was only a little girl, of bone and flesh and hope like himself. She was a spirit, he could feel her clear feelings, as simple as his own.

  “And I was so afraid of you, little head, poor little head that worried so much, in the darkness of the Rec. Can you be the Lily I saw on that stool in the Bull? The Lily in the lamplight by the yews in the churchyard, longing for the Wings of a Dove? You are a dove, I think. You are gentle, and kind, like a dove.”

  “Oh, you are sweet! You look just like you did on the Hillies, when we played cricket, and you showed me how to hold your bat,” she said, with glistening eyes turned upon him.