The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  The hub was small, in the financial centre of an island; and like a device upon the hub the bronze statue of Eros, the Winged Archer, was ever about to shoot his arrow into the human beings circulating below, with their thoughts of food, fear, fornication, and death; and here and there an individual inspired by austere thoughts of love everlasting, of patriotism, of the hope of courage in the final test of duty.

  Dim specks of oil-lamps on taxicabs, their bodies built high like hooded bath-chairs, and almost as slow; blue-painted street lamps above the kerbs of pavements; uniforms of the principal nations of the Entente, Britain, France, Russia, Italy; and of the Allied nations of Japan, Belgium, Montenegro, Servia, Portugal. Officers of Colonial troops from Africa, spahis and other coloured troops wearingthe fez; Australians with bushranger hats, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and the Gold Coast Regiment, the King’s African Rifles. Among the masses seeking escape and relaxation from their thoughts, three suburban friends in file pressed through the slow thronging uniforms making for a restaurant which one of them, who considered himself to be a Man about Town, had discovered. There, he declared, one could eat a very good dinner at a moderate price, and drink the finest wines in London—Tiger’s Popular Restaurant, less than one hundred yards from Eros, on the northern side of Piccadilly. Doors of wrought iron filigree and glass; golden electric lamps on tables; a carpet soft as sand, a string orchestra playing.

  German submarine warfare had not yet stripped the bottoms in which money through trade had come to Great Britain: food was plentiful for those with money: the Great Push of the New Armies would end in the splendours of Victory.

  *

  One of the things Phillip liked about Eugene was his love of music. Eugene had heard operas with his father, and could hum many of the airs of Bohême, Tosca, Butterfly, and others. He had told Phillip the stories of these operas, producing in his listener the emotions he himself felt. Therefore it was extra pleasure that Phillip saw Gene going to the conductor of the orchestra, to ask for selections from Pagliacci, with its wonderful On with the Motley, the broken-hearted clown’s lament for his betrayal and ruined life. Phillip felt himself to be the clown and ordered for a start two bottles of claret with the porterhouse steak; which when it came was surrounded by mushrooms, fried potatoes, onions, with six poached eggs lying upon it—a South African dish Phillip had heard of from a Boer officer at Grantham. When the second bottle was empty, he proposed a toast of the Big Push, declaring that he was off to Grantham on Monday, to finish his transport course, and apply to be attached to an early company going overseas; after the third bottle, Desmond declared that he would desert to France if his transfer to a Tunnelling Company of the Royal Engineers did not soon come through; while with the fourth bottle Senhor Eugene Franco Carlo Goulart etc. was on his feet declaring that Brazil would soon be coming into the war to join the Allies and then the spirit of his famous grandfather the General would etc. At this point the manager requested him to be seated, as the other customers wanted to be quiet, he said. Not to be suppressed, Phillip ordered a fifth bottle, and when that lay under the table empty he began to see how funny the quiet people at the other tables were, and by God, the three of them ought to wake them up and begin painting the town red!

  A wonderful dinner. The host, when he had paid the bill and tipped the waiter five shillings and pressed upon each of his friends a pound note, followed them into the warm darkness of Piccadilly, to be led by Gene to the Empire Palace Hotel, and sit in an immense room of cream and gilt, with walls like Gorgonzola cheese from which the blue had been transmuted into veins of gold, where a thousand odd people sat at tables drinking coffee and liqueurs, eating pastry of Oriental splendour, while thick-red-lipped they stared around with mental hunger in dark brilliant eyes for glimpses of beauty and distinction to uplift them from their levels of living; and finding nothing, sat back upon those levels, ruminating prospects of more and more business due to war. They sat, seldom moving, secure in their fat, transients from the east, from Whitechapel, Aldgate, and Houndsditch to the west and north-west, Maida Vale, Hampstead, and Golders Green, families rising on the tide of clothing, furniture, and armament contracts.

  Eugene, looking round with superior feelings, began to say that Phillip had let him down, by not being in uniform. He would be dismissed as a slacker. That’s right. Also, if he had worn his’h uniform, he wouldn’t mind betting that those two birds in the Gild Hall would have come to his flat s’ afternoon.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, dear boy,” said Phillip, “I was’h thinking of someone called—hush!—Lily—so—you see—I stopped ’em from comin’.”

  *

  A taxicab took them to Westbourne Terrace, and the driver, deeming them to be seeing double, sympathetically adjusted the fare to this state; and was surprised to be paid treble the sum on the clock.

  It took twenty merry minutes, while doors opened to emit angry human barks before abruptly closing to loud cuck-oos by Phillip, before the attic flat was reached, where they slept, fully dressed. All night trains whistled and shunted in the yards of Paddington station below the row of tall seedy houses, heard remotely by Phillip as he tottered to the lavatory with aching head, throat, and gut; murmuring never again.

  The repentance of the sick devil, or weak saint, went the way of most good intentions, including the romantic determination under the tawny flag to return to Grantham early on the Monday morning; for after spending Sunday in bed at home, and missing the supper party next door, on the following morning, when he got up at his mother’s earnest request, to say goodbye to his father, he felt so weak that he decided to see Dr. Dashwood again, and ask for an extension of leave.

  When Richard had left for the office, Mavis ran downstairs, and after swallowing her breakfast, said, “Mother, I must have ten shillings, quickly! I promised to pay for my new boots today, and have only nine and ninepence, which will leave me threepence when I’ve paid for them. Quick, quick, you must help me!”

  “You’ve had a pound this month already, Mavis, and it is only the second week. I really cannot afford any more out of the housekeeping.”

  “But I must pay for my new boots! I must! I must! I must! Don’t waste any more ti me, or I shall miss my train!”

  “I really cannot affor d any more, Mavis. You must wait till pay day.”

  “Give me ten shillings! I saw a note in your bag. Let me have it!”

  Hetty looked at the face of her child, which was contorted, and near to frenzy.

  “Quick, I say!” cried Mavis, as she stamped her foot.

  “You did promise it would be the very last time, only on Saturday, Mavis.”

  “Oh Mother, don’t waste time!”

  Hetty looked helplessly at her daughter. “Oh very well, but this is the very last time, remember.”

  Mavis snatched the note, and ran out of the room.

  “Don’t bang the door!” yelled Phillip.

  “Mind your own biz!”

  The door clashed behind the hurrying girl.

  “That stained glass will get loose in the lead strips. Why do you give in to her, Mother?”

  “What can I do, Phillip? She works herself up so——”

  “Why does she always want to dress herself in all these ridiculous fashions? And why must Nina always go with her, ‘to help her to choose’ this and that? She doesn’t. It is always Mavis who chooses, and Nina who must agree with her. Mavis only wants someone to fetch and carry for her. They’re like two birds together, a parakeet mincing along beside a thrush, Mavis in her finery and Nina in her tweed overcoat, and plain little hat. And they’re always having tiffs, Nina always humbly asking how she has offended Mavis, and it usually ends in her crying; while Mavis holds out, won’t say what Nina has done, but seems to enjoy prolonging Nina’s distress. You say that Father often accuses you of what you haven’t done, then sulks and withdraws into himself, letting you suffer; well then, can’t you see that Mavis and Nina are in the same relationship?
Why do you pander to her? It only makes her worse.”

  “Phillip, my son,” said Hetty, looking at him with a steadiness near to despair, “‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ Mavis has been very unhappy. The boy she loved long ago, Albert Hawkins, was killed last October, at Loos, the same day that Bertie was killed. Do you begin to understand, my son?”

  Phillip sat still. Then he gave a long sigh and said, “Yes, I think I do. Mother, at least let me give you this money, it’s only three pounds, only you must swear never to say that I gave it to you. Help Mavis. Help yourself, too. Before Desmond or Gene borrows it first!” he laughed. “No, I didn’t mean that. I’m very glad to be able to share with my friends. Oh dear, I can’t go back today, I’ll have to get twenty-four hours’ extension. Never again.”

  Dr. Dashwood, that most courteous and titubating practitioner, after insisting on what he called a couple of pick-me-ups and the patient considered to be potential lay-me-downs, insisted on a medical examination in the billiard room.

  “Definitely a dull patch on this lung, Middleton. I can’t let you return to duty until you have consulted my colleague Toogood. I will give you a chit to take to him, Middleton.”

  To the Military Hospital Phillip went, and without further examination Lt.-Col. Toogood, R.A.M.C., gave him another chit and told him to report forthwith to Millbank Military Hospital.

  There Phillip—having left his motorcycle in the porch of his father’s house, where it dripped oil that stained the terra-cotta tiles, hitherto kept scrupulously clean by Mrs. Feeney the charwoman—was put in the Observation Ward, and told to get into bed, after the usual preliminaries of written-down details; and await an examination.

  Chapter 11

  TWO MONTHS’ LEAVE

  A condition of anaemia was found. The left lung showed symptoms of phthisis; a sputum test having proved negative, it was considered possibly to be due to chlorine gas inhalation. The action of the heart was intermittent.

  “Of course,” he heard the R.A.M.C. major say to the lieutenant, “the absence of tubercle in the sputum is not conclusive. He needs building up.” Phillip heard this with impassive face, while thinking what a fraud he was.

  He was put on a diet of milky foods; this was succeeded by white fish, and chicken, while he had to remain in bed.

  The ward had twenty-four beds, twelve a side. Each bed was occupied by an officer. He noticed, during the morning inspection by the R.A.M.C. lieutenant on duty, and more pronouncedly when the major and the colonel came round during the bi-weekly inspection, how some of the faces opposite took on expressions of dullness or weakness specially for the occasion.

  Some of them talked among themselves of having had medical boards, one after another, until an original three months’ leave had been extended to six, then nine, then twelve; and one officer, a senior subaltern seconded to the R.F.C. from a regular battalion of an infantry regiment, had been on sick leave, with brief periods in hospital such as the present period, since November 1914. He seemed to have had a wonderful time. His talk was of dancing at Grafton Galleries, actors and actresses like Teddie Gerrard, Phyllis Monkman, Matheson Lang, Gaby Deslys, Vi Lorraine, and other famous people.

  His bedside companion was also in the R.F.C. He had P.U.O. on his temperature chart, and said it was trench fever, probably from lice. He spoke of the coming Great Push. It was to be in the chalk country known as the Garden of Eden, the quietest and most peaceful sector of the British front. This sector, he said, had been taken over from the French, since the German attack at Verdun. A new British Army, the Fourth, had been formed under General Rawlinson, especially for the Push.

  “Does the R.F.C. have liaison officers in the trenches, as the gunners do?”

  “No. My engine went dud and I crashed my undercart behind the front line near Hebuterne, in our new sector. The Old Hun strafed my bus, but I got away into the trenches, where I got crummy but thought no more about it after a lysol bath. Then I had ten days’ leave and here I am.”

  He went on to say, “In that trench they were digging a large rectangular pit, with a notice board stuck in it, SITE FOR WATER TANK. They groused like hell having to hack out all that chalk, and the skipper who entertained me in his dugout said it was a blind, in case the Hun raided, to give the idea that our trenches there were a fixture. It was just like the staff, he said, to think out such a Boy Scout idea to deceive the Old Hun.”

  “Don’t you believe it!” called out a man across the ward. “Those pits are for a new kind of armoured land-fort, on caterpillar tracks. They put up the notice about water tanks to bluff Jerry.”

  The man in the next bed to Phillip was quite old, and in the Indian Army. He cursed things violently, and grumbled most of the time: a yellow-faced swarthy officer who, when he got up, put on a light khaki drill uniform. He had served in Mesopotamia, and was one of the few who had got awa from the siege of Kut-el-Amara, after the battle of Ctesiphon. He was in hospital because he had what he called the Tigris Jigger in his guts. This, he explained, was a swimming organism with a corkscrew on its head, with which it burrowed, causing pain and bleeding. He had permanent screens around his bed, because he could not hold his water. He was given sandalwood oil in capsules, and hexamine; and he was privately dosing himself with whiskey. “Fire drives out fire, and corkscrew corkscrew,” he said. The whites of his eyes, Phillip noticed, were as yellow as his Indian drill uniform.

  One night he came back very late, saying that he had been arrested for “indecent exposure of the person in Trafalgar Square”. He swore and raged, saying it was the bilharzia in his bladder—the Tigris Jigger. He cursed the Government for letting down the Army in Mespot. “We defeated Adbul the Turk at Ctesiphon, eighteen miles from Kut—five thousand wounded, and only springless carts to bring some of the poor sods back, over rough tracks, while Arabs gnawed like bloody rats at the wounded left behind, cutting off their private parts and sticking them in their victims’ mouths.” He told about the hospital ship Mejidieh floating down the river in a cloud of flies and stink for seventeen days, the wounded helpless and unattended on the decks, lying in their own fæces, black with flies—the lads who had fought at Ctesiphon.

  In went the corkscrew, up went the bottle of whiskey.

  After two days in slacks and carpet slippers, Phillip was told, “Matron says you may go out today. Have you friends or relations to go to? London is a naughty place nowadays, for a lonely soldier,” as she relished him with her eyes. He dissembled, looking innocent to keep his detachment. “Oh yes, thank you, I live not far away.”

  “Then see that you are back in the ward by nine o’clock,” she said shortly, as she went away, with a glance of disdain at the yellow, leathery officer of Ghurkas, sitting on the next bed and manicuring his fingernails.

  Phillip walked about on the Hill, talked to Gran’pa and Mr. Bolton in their shelter, and wondered what he could do until six o’clock, when Desmond would return.

  At seven they were in Freddy’s, at half-past eight he caught a 36 bus to Victoria, jumped off at the Embankment, and walked to Millbank Hospital. After a few days of this, he returned on his motor-cycle, wheeling it into the hall of the hospital, and leaning it against the wall near the foot of the stairs. In the morning he wheeled it out again, and in sunny weather went home. For a week he followed the same routine; until the D.M.S., the old boy whose velvet tabs and hat-band were the hue of claret, asked what this O.H.M.S. machine was, and what purpose did it serve, and to whom did it belong. On being told it was the transport of a young officer patient, he said, “A hospital is no place for transport, let him arrange accommodation for it with the D.Q.M.G. Horse Guards.”

  “I think it might be simpler not to leave it here any more,” said Phillip to the Matron, who said, “We don’t want to separate you from your beloved Helena, so the Senior Medical Officer has arranged a board for you both at Caxton Hall tomorrow.”

  He felt he would be sorry to leave; his stay had been quite pleasant. Ah well, back to
Grantham after a wonderful mike. But to his surprise the kindly old R.A.M.C. colonel—one of many white-haired dug-outs sitting solitary at little tables in the large hall, each with a convalescent officer seated before him—said, “I am giving you two months’ convalescent leave. I would like you to go into the country and take things easily. Do you fish? The very thing to relax those tautened nerves of yours. Have you a good appetite?”

  “Fairly good, sir.”

  “Now have you friends or relatives who will take care of you? If not, Georgiana Lady Dudley will be able to fix you up at one of her places. Meanwhile two copies of the Leave of Absence Form D.3a will be sent to you, one for your retention, the other you should send to your regimental agents, if you draw your pay through that channel. Your own copy should be kept by you, in order to support any claim for allowances, should you be entitled to any. Now if you go to the sergeant’s table over there, he will issue you with a railway voucher for the station you want to go to. Good morning!”

  There were half a dozen officers waiting at the sergeant’s table, where warrants were being issued. As more accumulated, the sergeant got another book of warrants from a drawer and said, “If you gentlemen will take turns to fill in the particulars of rank, name, and regiment in this book, I will fill in the counterfoils, and we shall halve the time of waiting that way. Block letters, gentlemen, please.”

  The book of warrants went from one to another, with an indelible pencil. At last Phillip’s turn came, and he made out his warrant for Lynton. He would stay in Aunt Dora’s cottage, where he had spent his holiday just before the war.

  When he got home, he fixed the warrant in the looking-glass frame above the fireplace. Lynton! Had not Father and Mother gone there for a holiday, too, just after he was born? A wonderful, romantic place. He hoped Father would notice it.