The Golden Virgin (4 page)

Richard laughed delightedly, the whole scene was most vivid, he could see it all happening. He lay back in his chair before the bright and crackling coke fire, stretching his toes in his old carpet slippers, feeling a sense of continuity with life as he unfrogged the ancient pleated smoking jacket that had belonged to his
father. He felt he was cosy in a dug-out, with his soldiers’ pet Zippy contentedly lying beside a brazier.

Before settling down again with his magazine, he poured himself another cup of hot water from the kettle simmering in front of the fire, then lifting the cat to his knee, covered it with
The
Daily
Trident,
so that Zippy could feel safe, as in a cave or hollow tree. All being settled, he lay back to read; but hardly had he turned the page when the bell of the front door rang. He sighed: his evening alone was ended.

“Good evening, Father.”

“Hullo, Mavis. Don’t forget to wipe your boots on the mat, if you please.”

“It’s quite dry out, Father.”

“Even so, it is a good habit, which you children do not seem yet to have learned.”

“Is Mother in?”

“She is where she prefers to be—next door.”

“Will it be all right if I have my bath now, Father?”

“Why do you ask? You know very well your Mother said it was available for you tonight. Only don’t take too much hot water—the price of coal is very nearly prohibitive as it is.”

Without further words, Richard went back to his chair, and Mavis disappeared upstairs. It took him five minutes to feel clear again; and back with Chota.

At twenty past ten Hetty gave her brief little trill to the bell; Richard sighed; his period of peace was over.

“Mavis returned while you were away, Hetty, and is having her tub. Have you seen anything of Master Phillip?”

“No, dear, but I expect him any moment now.”

“Oh you do, do you? Have you any special reason for knowing that he will, for once, be home before midnight?”

“I don’t suppose Phillip will be long now, Dickie. He likes to walk about at night, he says he can think clearer then.”

“So the Wild Boy thinks at night, does he? Are you sure you are not confusing the word
think
with another that rhymes with it?”

“Phillip has had a lot on his mind, Dickie, one way and another. He always was a thoughtful boy.”

“A pity he does not think more about others, or his home, if that is the case.”

In an exasperated voice Richard went on, “Do you think that you can pull the wool over my eyes with such an explanation?
But there, you have always shielded that best boy of yours! Do not deceive yourself that I am ignorant of what has been going on! Night after night he has been coming home the worse for liquor! Now don’t try and defend him, as you always tried to do when he was a boy! You spoiled him, let me tell you! It is high time you realised that Phillip will have to stand on his own feet!”

Despite her anxiety about her son, Hetty saw the funny side of these words. No, no, it was not funny, her sudden mind-picture of Phillip, perhaps at that very moment unable to stand upright. Mary, Mother of God, help my son, she tried to transmit through her brain, as she strove against another picture of Hughie, her dearest brother, thin and shambling, dying of
locomotor
ataxia.
She must hope for the best about Phillip; she must pray for guidance to come to him. Should she go to see Dr. Dashwood, and ask him not to encourage Phillip in his loose ways? People were beginning to talk about it. Mrs. Feeney, the charwoman, had mentioned it only that morning.

“I saw Master Phillip the other evening, coming out of the Conservative Club with Dr. Dashwood, m’m. It’s not my place to speak about it, but it would be a pity if someone so much older was to lead Master Phillip astray. If you’ll excuse me mentioning of it, m’m.”

“Yes, of course, Mrs. Feeney. You are a very old friend, and have known Phillip since he was little. Between ourselves, that very self-same thought has been worrying me.”

Mrs. Feeney knew all about the fate of poor Mr. Hugh next door; but she knew her place, and would never have mentioned to the mis’ess about Master Phillip, except that Dr. Dashwood was so well known for his liking for the bottle.

Hetty had been to see Mrs. Neville about it; to be momentarily reassured by that tolerant woman with a “There’s no harm in our boys, Mrs. Maddison! My boy Desmond and your Phillip are only young, dear! They mean no harm by it! Don’t you worry, Phillip is all right. They can take care of themselves, if I know those two boys! What friends they are! I call them David and Jonathan, David being Phillip, of course.”

Hetty was not so sure. She knew Phillip’s weaknesses; from the first he had been almost fearfully susceptible to everything around him, so that his life had seemed to be one long round of trouble, so mischievous, excitable, curious, and wilful had he been. And what was he but a boy still, so young for his age,
despite having been twice to the front. Was it the rum in the trenches that had started him off on his intemperate habits?

Another thing had disturbed Hetty: something his Father must never be allowed to find out. She had seen cousin Polly in her nightdress coming out of Phillip’s bedroom, after they had returned home late from seeing
Tonight’s
the
Night
at the Gaiety in the Strand. It was in the Strand that Hughie had contracted that terrible illness which had ruined his hopes for marrying Dora, and led to paralysis and early death of her gifted brother. Was Phillip to go the same tragic way? Better Polly than a stranger; even so, one bad habit led to a worse habit, more often than not. Had not Hughie, while protesting love for Dora, at the same time fallen into temptation with a complete stranger? O, how could men do such things?

As for Phillip, he had confided in her, that very morning, that he would never cease to love Helena Rolls; but that, she knew, was more a feverish obsession with him than something real—what was called calf-love. What a strange boy he was; almost at times he seemed to be two distinct persons.

She poured herself a cup of hot water. Richard had decided to give up his nightly cup of cocoa for the sake of economy, and also for reasons of health. The cost of living was going up; and he felt that he slept the better, with fewer worries arising to upset his mind, on what he called a clean stomach.

*

The
Daily
Trident
was being flicked slightly at one corner, Zippy’s ear was being tickled by the paper. “Poor Zippy, did I cover you up too much, then, poor Zippy?” Tenderly Richard lifted the newspaper, and scratched Zippy’s ears. The cat purred gratefully; and thus encouraged, Richard took up
Nash’s
Magazine
and turned to the serial by Robert W. Chambers,
Athalie,
the
Romance
of
a
girl
with
a
strange
power,
for a few moments; but his wife’s presence got between him and the beautiful, luring heroine. Putting down the magazine, he turned to his wife and said, with an explosion of irritability,

“There’s another matter on my mind that I think you should know about! I do not at all approve of what Phillip has been saying in that low haunt of his in the High Street! Things get about, let me tell you, among certain of our special constables who shall remain nameless! I do not know what Phillip did during his recent visit to France, or what part, if any, he took in the Loos battle, for he apparently has no desire to tell me any of
his doings, but he can hold forth, from what I hear, in no uncertain voice about the conduct of affairs in the Army overseas! And, furthermore, he is saying things in the enemy’s favour which will get him into serious trouble one of these days! More than one person has reported to me, at the Station, what they have overheard him to say in that public house he frequents. Hark! Was that a bomb?”

Richard’s thoughts were of Mathy, the redoubtable Commander Mathy whose raids on England had been made with such skill that, it was thought, he worked with spies—many German spies—throughout the country.

Only the crackle of coke, and the purring of the cat, was audible in the room. Hetty thought of her elder daughter, Mavis, alone in the end bedroom upstairs. Her footfalls were softly audible. The girl was highly nervous, and terrified of Zeppelins.

Richard sipped his hot water. “No, I do not think it could have been a bomb. Zippy’s ears always go up when Zeppelins are about, he hears the engines a long way off, don’t you, Zippy dear?” He fondled the cat’s neck and head, talking to it in a crooning voice. It was the only personality in the house which he had not, unwittingly, turned from him.

The hearkening mother heard heavier footfalls overhead, from her son’s bedroom. Thank goodness that Dickie was a little deaf, she thought, as there came two bumps, as of shoes being torn off. Then the noise of a bed spring extending. She went out of the room; and when she came in again she said almost gaily: “Phillip is in bed after all, Dickie!”

“H’m!” said Richard, as he took up
Nash’s,
“I suppose that I, as the mere master of this house, can consider myself to be extremely fortunate if I see the Wild Boy for breakfast tomorrow, or will he then be sleeping off the effects of his ‘night thoughts’? When is he going back to duty, do you know? Even a visitor to an hotel has the courtesy to give notice when his room is no longer required, you know.”

“He has one more week, I think, Dickie, before going to his new duties.”

Why his son had “exchanged”, as he put it, from the Gaultshire Regiment in France to a non-combatant unit at home, Richard did not know; but he could guess.

*

Phillip lay in bed, knees drawn up to chin for warmth and companionship. The “battle of the brain”, as he had called it
since childhood, was raging in his head. He was near to despair, a not unusual condition of his living.

When the worst of the “battle” was over he turned about and rearranged the sheet which he had drawn tightly about his neck. After settling down, instinctively he nipped between the edges of his lips a fold of the sheet; and feeling some relief in the smoothness of the material against his face, sighed deeply with the hope of sleep.

The habit of nipping and holding the sheet between his lips was a survival from babyhood, when in his cot he had had two objects of consolation for the loss of protecting maternal warmth: a thumb to suck, and a strip of white silk from an old petticoat of his mother’s to hold over his face. The strip was given him, at night, when he cried for his mother.

Richard in those days had wanted his wife for himself in bed; he had wanted, also, quietness at night; and though he disapproved of both thumb and silk he had not openly objected to what he had called the baby’s soporifics during the first year of the child’s life.

Soon after the first birthday anniversary he considered that the time was come for reformation. A bad habit was a bad habit; the sooner it was broken, the sooner it would be forgotten. Sonny must learn not to cry for his mother, too. So at the age of fifteen months the child was put in a room by himself, with Anky, and told that to suck Thumb was very, very naughty. If he cried, too, he would be smacked.

Thus, Richard thought, the boy would, from an early age, learn to face the hardships of life.

At eight o’clock one morning of the following week, Richard took a letter coming through the box of the front door as he passed on his way to breakfast. It was addressed to his son. The flimsy envelope from France was franked by a signature which he made out to be
H.
J.
West,
Capt.,
and bore the oval red rubber stamp of the Base Censor. It had been redirected from
Brickhill
House,
Beau
Brickhill,
Gaultshire.

Richard had to leave the house at eight twenty-two a.m. to catch his train from Wakenham station over the hill. His daughter Mavis caught the next train, which enabled her to get to the office in time for its opening for business at half-past nine. The younger girl, Doris, was still at school, and left at twenty-five to nine.

Breakfast was usually silent. Richard, looking at
The
Daily
Trident,
spoke only when he had some fault to point out, such as taps left to drip, bedrooms left untidy “for your mother to attend to”; or the boot-cleaning box in the scullery had not been put back, with its brushes and Japanese blacking pot upright, under the scullery table.

Phillip, urged by his mother to come down for breakfast with the others, “out of courtesy to your Father, dear”, appeared just as Richard was putting his table-napkin into its ivory ring.

“Good morning, Father. Good morning, Mother. How do you do, Mavis. Hullo, Doris. Thanks for purring, Zippy.”

“There’s a letter for you, from France,” said Doris.

“Good lord! ‘Spectre’ West!” He sat down. “May I have permission to open it, sir?”

The unexpected courtesy surprised Richard.

“Good news, I hope,” he said, when his son had read the letter.

“Yes, Father. A friend of mine in hospital is getting on well.”

“I see it has been re-directed from Brickhill, Phillip,” said Hetty.

“Westy is in the Gaultshires, Mother.”

Phillip put the letter in his pocket, and added milk to his porridge. He still felt sick, and would have preferred a glass of cold water.

“Pass your brother the sugar, Mavis.”

“No thanks—really. I never have sugar——”

As soon as Richard had shut the front door behind him, Mavis cried, “Why do you pretend that you live at Brickhill, can you tell us that?”

When he did not reply, she went on, “I know! It’s because it’s a swankier address than poor old Wakenham.”

Hetty screwed up her eyes, and made a
moue
with her lips to Mavis, meaning be quiet. “Won’t you tell us what it says, Phillip?”

“Oh, it’s just an ordinary letter, Mother.” He went on trying to eat his porridge, while calculating from experience how long
it would be before he would have to get rid of it. Not, he hoped, while Mavis was in the house.

Experience did not betray him. Afterwards, alone with his mother, he showed her the letter. “On the condition, Mother, that you do not breathe a word of what it says to anyone.”

“Well, perhaps it would be better if I did not see it, if it’s like that, dear.”

“No, it’s not that. Only it isn’t true, that’s all.”

He gave her the letter, and Hetty read with surprise that grew to tearful emotion. The writer declared that the bar to his Military Gross, “which came up with the rations”, should have gone to Phillip, and would have gone, too, if he had not left the regiment after the damned fine show he put up during the flank attack on Lone Tree Ridge.

“‘Spectre’ West wasn’t there, you see. He was hit before we started. It was all over when we got to Lone Tree. The Germans had chucked it. No more ammunition. Anyway, the Welch had already got right behind them. Itwas awful good luck for us.”

“He says he is sorry you have left the ‘Mediators’, Phillip. That surely shows——”

“I told the Colonel afterwards that I was up at Cambridge before the war. I was nervous because I had only been to a grammar school when all the other officers were public school men. So I pretended I was a ‘’varsity m’n’. I’ve got no guts, I never had any. Tell that to Father if you like, but not that other rot.”

“Why, I wonder, must you always insist on showing yourself in the worst light? Always as a boy you were without reserve of any kind. You should have more pride, Phillip.”

“Oh Mother, for God’s sake——” He hastened away to the lavatory. Later—“I feel better now. But no bacon, for heaven’s sake. Just a cup of weak tea. A large one. Put it in a basin. Here, let me get one. That’s the sort, holds a quart. Thank God tea at home doesn’t taste of chloride of lime.” The thought made him quaver; the quaver took him back to the lavatory.

“You ought never to drink spirits, you know, Phillip. You have a weak stomach. That was always your trouble as a child. Now try and eat a little dry toast, and later on I’ll make you some beef tea. It was always good for you, after train sickness, do you remember?”

“Yes, and so was brandy,” replied Phillip. “But I’d rather have some plain hot water at the moment. If it’s all the same to you, Hetty,” he added, almost jauntily.

Saturday morning; his leave was up. “Everything is flat, Des, now I’m leaving you.” Just one more drink at Freddy’s; but when they came out of Freddy’s after only two half-pints of beer, Phillip ready to run and vault into the saddle and dash away to the thuds of his open exhaust, music in his ears, there was the motor bike sunken down on its rear, with a flat tyre.

“She must have heard my very words, and taken them literally,” said Phillip. “Good old girl. Let’s shove her to Wetherley’s, and get him to mend the puncture.” The inner tube was perished. Wetherley had no replacement in stock.

A
For
Sale
notice on a runabout motor car caught Phillip’s eye. Only £60! He bought it at once, not so much for its appearance, as the thought of his own appearance driving his own motor car. Having bought it, he asked what it was, and if it was in good condition. Mr. Wetherley assured him that it was the best 1909 model of a Swift he had driven. It had a two-cylinder water-cooled engine. The grey paint was new, and so was the varnish. Mr. Wetherley folded and put into his pocket-book the cheque for £60, and said he would try and sell the motor cycle for £15 without taking commission. The sudden transaction now had its effect; Phillip wondered if his cheque would be dishonoured by Cox & Co., his bankers.

“However, it will be all right by the first of the month. Then some field allowances are due, Mr. Wetherley, so don’t worry.”

“I do not worry, sir,” said Mr. Wetherley. “I have had the pleasure of serving your father for many years now. Indeed I sold him the first All-Black Sunbeam in the district. There is no question, sir, of doubting the word of the son of such a gentleman as Mr. Maddison.”

Phillip felt that he must hope for the best, as the garage owner showed him how to get to Hornchurch, pointing out the route on the map, by way of the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames. This done, he explained about the oiling of the engine, by the drip feed visible behind glass on the dashboard.

“Don’t forget to push down the hand pump as soon as the oil stops dripping into the bowl.”

Mr. Wetherley checked the milled screw controlling the drip, and gave it two extra clicks.

“Don’t turn it on more unless you want to go fast, say over thirty-five. Otherwise you may oil a plug. You’ll find her a useful little runabout.”

Phillip’s two-mindedness now showed itself. “I suppose,” he
said, doubtfully, “you wouldn’t let me have a test run before I actually—well, I have, haven’t I? Anyway, I think I’ll test it, before I really start off.”

“I’d be very pleased to take you for a run, sir.”

“Well, thanks. Could you take me to my home a minute? It’s quite a steep hill.” A wild hope that Helena Rolls or her mother would see the car pierced him.

Desmond was left at the garage, since three in front would be a squeeze. Mr. Wetherley drove as far as Randiswell, then Phillip took the wheel. The Swift went easily up Hillside Road, and to his alarmed delight, there was Helena coming out of her gate with her mother.

The motor was praised, then—“Why have you not been to see us, Phillip?” He could not reply; and Mrs. Rolls said, “Well, when you are next on leave, don’t forget, will you?” The full look of Helena’s eyes was upon him; he felt enveloped and dissolved, and was relieved when they had gone on down the road, for now he could release his feelings of joy, rush in and bang at the door and tell Mother the terrific news, in which the Swift was for the moment forgotten.

His mother and younger sister Doris came out to admire it, though Hetty looked a little anxious. “Are you sure you can drive it, Phillip?”

“Easily! I’ll take you all out to Reynard’s Common and the Fish Ponds when I come home next. Well, cheerho. I mustn’t keep old Wetherley waiting. Give my love to everyone.” Mr. Wetherley was on the opposite pavement, apparently interested in the sheep on the slopes of the Hill beyond the railings. Together they went down the road, the tyres crackling on the flinty surface. Waving at Mrs. Neville in her window, Phillip drove safely back to the High Street. There Desmond was awaiting him on the kerb.

Phillip had driven a motor car before, and soon he felt mastery of the Swift. With Desmond beside him he drove up the hill and on to the Heath, and down into Greenwich. At the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel stood a military policeman on duty. He said that a brigade of field guns had just gone through, and another was expected, the tunnel being temporarily closed to all other traffic. “You have a pass, sir, of course?”

Phillip pointed to the O.H.M.S. plate tied on the side of the bonnet. Standing aside, the redcap saluted. Phillip raised a negligent hand, as a staff officer might, he thought, and praying that he would not grate the gears when starting off, let in the
clutch and drove on with a wild feeling of possible self-destruction into the circular brick mouth of the tunnel.

“My God, and we’ve got no lamps!” he said to Desmond, with a laugh, as they rushed into darkness.

The car drove itself; then gradually seemed to be guided by two golden threads overhead. These were carbon-filament bulbs lining the roof, stretching away to a minuteness that dipped in the centre, the middle of the river. Suddenly he became aware of an army lorry just in front of him. The tunnel was ammoniacal with horse-dung; he too, like the solid-tyred ’bus in front, was slipping about.

With relief he drove into cold fresh air to see masts and funnels of steamers rising above rows of black and crushed-in little sooty brick houses, with black sheds and warehouses, cranes, army lorries, and, as he drove on, sudden rows of field guns, olive-green and wheel to wheel along a sort of wharf. A notice board by a tall iron gate set with spikes and barbed wire was headed
East
India
Dock.
The surface of the cobbled streets came up through the shackle bolts of the springs and reproduced myriad contours in their bones.

There was a market, with stalls and donkey shallows, a litter of paper and rotten fruit all across the road, lean dogs routing and fleeing from boys with sticks held as guns, and wearing old badgeless khaki caps. Other boys with pails were collecting horse dung.

It was a mild November day, with no wind. The river mist and smoke hung as daze in the low arc of the iodine-brown sun. Tall chimneys and towers darkened the dull skyline rising upon the ancient flats of the riverside. Smells, industrial and chemical, moved in layers upon them: paint, iodoform, picric acid, and a whiff of pear-drops, from the waterside factories of Silvertown.

“There is the great chemical concern of Brunner, Mond and Company,” said Desmond. “The Zeppelins are always trying to find it. The whole district is given over almost entirely to war work.”

They drove away from the sprawl of street and factory, coming to an open level prospect of deep brown ploughlands, of dark and stunted oak trees in sooted hedgerows, acid pastures, sad-looking stacks of hay and corn, and untidy fields of cabbages and roots—the environs of industrial London. Phillip began to feel depressed with the level colourlessness of the extending country, which seemed to have upon it the mark of death. Here the bittern and the duck among the reeds had seen the marching of the Romans,
while the sails moved up the broad Thames, not then held back by wall and bank; the marshman went, and the ploughman came, and now the factories were waiting to kill the land forever with their weight of brick and steel, a countryside sentenced to industrial death.

“I suppose there is still some wildfowling down on the marshes somewhere, Desmond?”

“It’s been stopped since the war, all down this coast. My cousins on my father’s side live in Essex, and they told me.”

It was the first time Desmond had spoken to Phillip about his father’s people. Phillip wanted to hear more, and waited for him to speak. When he did not, Phillip glanced at his face. Desmond said, looking straight ahead, “My father’s people have lived in Essex for centuries.”

“Are your mother’s people from Essex, too?”

“My mother hasn’t got any relations.”

Desmond was holding his head so still, staring ahead, that Phillip wondered what was the matter. Desmond’s usually pale face was faintly pink.

Phillip drove on, silence between them. He felt slight distress that Desmond had never wanted to confide in him, his great friend. He had always shared everything with Desmond—secrets of his nests in the old days, his permits in Knollyswood Park and elsewhere, his holy-of-holies the Lake Woods—where Desmond had taken his school-friend Eugene, without first asking if he might do so. He had told Desmond everything about himself; but Desmond had never really shared any of his secrets with him.

“I say, Des, I’ve had most frightful luck.” He told his friend about the invitation from Mrs. Rolls. “I’ll call there next time I come on leave!”

Feeling happy, he stopped to examine the engine under the bonnet. Everything looked clean and polished and painted.

“It’s worth the money, don’t you think, Des?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t driven her.”

“Of course, why didn’t I think of it! You take the wheel now. After all, you let me drive your uncle’s Singer. You can take her back this afternoon, if you like. That is, if I can’t get week-end leave.”