The Golden Virgin (15 page)

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.

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”.

“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.

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?”

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?”

“Oh, still not properly outside myself, you know. I hope you and your family are flourishing? I’m just home for a few hours, to look round the old rat-runs.”

“What say? I’m getting a bit deaf, Phillip, between you, me, and the gatepost! What was that you said?”

“I said I came just to see the dear old faces, Mrs. Bigge!”

“How very considerate of you, dear. Now if you had arrived five minutes earlier, you would have seen your father, Phillip. He just went down the road with his wheel-barrow and garden tools. He’s taken an allotment on the field next to Joy Farm.”

“I’ve got the very boots for him for that job, Mrs. Bigge.” He took them out of the haversack.

“My, Father will be pleased,” she said, nodding her head. “Now you go in and see Mother, like a good boy.”

Hetty too said that Father would be pleased that he had come home.

“He’ll be back for tea at five o’clock, why not run round to see him, Phillip, I’m sure he would like you to see his allotment. He’s so keen on it. The vegetables will be welcome, too, prices have gone up so much all round. Well, my son, how are you?”

“Oh, all right, thanks. Is Desmond at home?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, Phillip.” She tried not to show her hurt.

“Mrs. Neville will know, I’m going to have tea with her. I’ll take the boots round to Mr. Pooter now, as you suggest, and admire his new allotment. Poor old Father, he used to tell us children such interesting stories, years ago, when he was always pretending to be a farmer, and saying what he would do with the crops in this field, or the tillage in that. Then the trams came, and the elms were cut down, and the fields grew bricks and mortar, he said, and then he didn’t do any more farming in the fields beside the road to Cutler’s Pond, on our Sunday morning walks there. And your little boy you tried to hush hush hush when he tried to say this and that grew into a string of Chinese Crackers.”

Hetty was startled by the way he had spoken. He seemed to be almost a stranger; yet what he had said explained most, if not all, of Dickie’s life. Was it by accident that Phillip spoke like that: or was he beginning to understand, to feel sympathy for others?

“Yes, Father was very keen on the land when he was a young man, but it was not possible, owing to family matters.”

“Grandfather Maddison was a bit of waster, wasn’t he? What in those days was called a ne’er do well? Something like me, only more so? Well, Lupin will buzz off now and visit Mr. Pooter, on his farm at last! Did Father ever say anything about that book,
The
Diary
of
a
Nobody,
by the way?”

“He said it was too much of a lampoon for his liking. Don’t mention it, will you, or he may think that we are laughing at him, and feel hurt.”

“But you think the book funny, don’t you, Mum?”

The childhood address made her exclaim, “Sonny, it is the funniest book——!”

They laughed together; then he said he would go round to see Father, and come back to tea. She was happy once more; her son wanted to have tea in the place which, for the mother, was not truly home while her children were away from it. Indeed, she thought of them all the time; she had hardly any other life, except when, occasionally, she went to London during the day, with her father, and sometimes, Aunt Marian. “But don’t call me Sonny, d’you mind, Mum?”

“Very well, Phillip.”

*

The next afternoon, a Sunday, he left for London Bridge and the Great North Road by way of Islington and Barnet, where he arrived at four o’clock. Grantham was still one hundred miles north, and that meant the last part of the journey in darkness. The container of his carbide lamp held only ash, and all shops would be closed.

Why not spend the night at Polly’s? At the fork of two roads he stopped, undecided whether to press on, or to turn left-handed for St. Albans, ten miles distant, and so to Beau Brickhill. He tried to thrust away Polly’s challenging face, in order to think out a plan. At what time should he get up the next morning in order to arrive in camp for breakfast; and he must not miss Riding School, for those passing out well were sure to be chosen as transport officers for the new companies; and that meant a very good chance of seeing
out the war in France. If he left Brickhill at dawn, he would be all right.

The motor-bike ran well, drumming between the hedges of the narrow, empty road of Sunday afternoon, coming to St. Albans in fifteen minutes. Then
Helena
was raising the dust of Watling Street lying towards distant downs; and passing through the small town of Dunstable, he continued for a few miles until the turning that led through the village of splendidly noble houses and cottages, and so to the Duke’s park; and leaving behind the wall of dark-red brick, with massed trees behind its coping, with cock pheasants crowing to the drum-like beats of the open exhaust, sped down a sandy lane, over the well-loved bridge with the Satchville brook below, up the hill, and so to Beau Brickhill, to turn through the gate into the gravelled courtyard as evening was settling into night.