The Golden Virgin (3 page)

There followed page upon page of the same thing, shooting, bayonetting, burning. Where were the rapings? He turned over more pages, until he came to Part 2 (b)
The
Treatment
of
Women
and
Children.
He was reading with horror entwined in fascination when his wife came into the room. His privacy thus being broken into, he put down the booklet.

“I am ready, Dickie, if you would like to play a game of chess,” said Hetty, almost gaily.

“You’re back early, aren’t you?”

“Yes, dear, Papa wants to write a letter, so I shall go back later for the game of piquet.”

It did not take much to make Richard feel unwanted. She could put herself out for her father, but would she ever do the same for him? He picked up the blue book and went on reading; but soon the disharmony of his thoughts broke into indignation.

“Listen to this incident, Hetty! It took place not far from the district where your convent stands, or did stand, at Wespelaer, a little more than a year ago. I can only thank heaven that Mavis came home last year in the nick of time.”

“Terrible, terrible,” murmured Hetty, making a clicking noise between tongue and palate.

“But that is not the worst, Hetty!

Richard’s voice ceased. He put down the Report, with a further feeling of being cheated. However, there was the clean,
unopened copy of
Nash’
s
at his elbow. He turned to his wife and said rhetorically,

“What is the point of publishing an indictment of German military brutality, which we know exists, if in the same breath the Report exonerates the guilty? In my opinion such two-facedness is typical of that old woman Asquith, whose wife, the blatant ‘Margot’, openly visited German officer prisoners at Donnington Hall in Lincolnshire, taking with her hampers of the best comestibles from Curling and Hammer, and playing tennis with them, while her country is at war, and her husband Prime Minister!”

“Yes, Dickie, it is all very wrong. Shall I get the chess board? Or do you feel too tired to play tonight?”

“Oh,” he said airily. “Do not let me keep you from your duties in the house next door.” Richard’s relationship with his father-in-law was one of dislike reduced to nullity. As his wife went out of the room he said, “Now, if you please! Do not be late. I want to be in bed by eleven, and cannot get to sleep until every member of this house is in bed, you know that.”

Hetty knew that he was worried about Phillip, about whom she had gone next door, to speak to Papa. “I shan’t be long, Dickie,” as she left the room, her heart feeling lighter.

“Let the cat in, as you go out, will you? I don’t want Zippy to catch cold, waiting in that draughty porch.”

“Very well, Dickie.”

Soon the cat was in the room, purring, purring, purring, to see its master again—and the warm fire.

*

During the years a cat had been almost the only medium by which tenderness was released in the Maddison household. There had been three cats, all called Zippy. Zippy never upset anyone, by interfering. Having security from want, fear, and entanglement by sex, Zippy was always in the same mood. In the short days of the duller half of the year Zippy followed the sun around the house, from one resting place behind glass, to another; cushion, chair, window sill, top of wicker dirty-clothes-basket, table beside balcony window. In the season of light, Zippy lived a country gentleman’s life. His landed property was the garden and part of the Backfield, where sparrows, mice, frogs, moths, and daddy-long-legs existed for the chase. A surgical operation long forgotten and preceded by a howl of finality had spared Zippy the pangs and aspirations of love; and being nimble, Zippy was
generally able to avoid the periodical clashes with female cats, which smacked the neuter’s face if Zippy did not immediately flee from their insults and oaths. So Zippy took it out of small birds and mammals, which it left bedraggled and maimed when it had had what Richard, often expressing impatience with what he called his wife’s sentimentality, described as its sport.

Had Hetty shown less obvious distress, less melting pity when smaller, weaker things were hurt and despairing, it is possible that her husband would have been less critical of her so-called sentimentality. He had been brought up in the country, and knew the balancings of nature, of life and death. A bird taking a butterfly, a cat the bird in its turn, should be outside a man’s feelings. Privately, he preferred that the cat should run after what he called his drag—a rabbit’s foot tied to string.

Now, taking the lure from his desk, Richard and the cat played together. The chase went on for several minutes around the bulbous mahogany legs of the table, under the mahogany bookcase, the gramophone stand, over the chairs. Finally the string was fastened to the handle of the door, so that the furry foot hung clear of the carpet. Thus the game was rounded off, until the cat had had enough, and went back to its place, to tuck paws under before the fire; then Richard untied the lure, and locked it away until the next time.

*

Mavis looked back as she crossed the humped bridge over river and railway, and saw that Ching was following her. She felt disgust. He had written letters to her; she suspected that he waited in the grass behind the garden fence, to watch her when she went to bed in the end room. Where poor, gentle Alfred Hawkins had once crept, to leave little poems for her in a crack of one of the posts. Until——

She put away the terrible childhood scene that Phillip had been responsible for.

Mavis hurried on, to escape Ching’s attentions. He kept pace with her. Then, turning into Charlotte Road, with its leafless polled chestnuts, she decided to walk slower. Why should she have to run away from anyone? Perhaps he had something to tell her about Phillip. Perhaps he had not been drunk, after all, but only ill. Impossible. There was nothing the matter with him—except that he was going the way of Uncle Hugh. Poor Mother! Father bullying her on one hand, Phillip destroying her peace
of mind on the other. Mother was a saint. Her whole life had been given to her husband and her son, and both treated her shabbily. Men were utterly selfish. Grandpa had knocked her down when he had found out about her secret marriage to Father, when she was carrying Phillip; and she had been unconscious for hours, in a kind of fit. And now Phillip was showing himself just as bad as Father, and in his time, Grandpa.

What did Ching want to say to her this time? The usual grovelling?

She allowed him to overtake her just before the turn up Hillside Road. It would be better there, than outside the house.

He took off his bowler hat, and stood before her. At first he could not speak. She heard him swallowing, and felt calm. But if he tried to kiss her suddenly, she would poke him with her umbrella—one of the new three-quarter size models, called The Gay Paree, price four and eleven three in Beeveman’s Store near the Obelisk. Mavis had borrowed the money from her mother to buy it, and Hetty, after protest, had made her promise to pay the money back next salary day, for the money was out of the housekeeping, and food was now very expensive, she said. Mavis had paid it back, reluctantly, then borrowed it again the next day to pay for her lunches.

“Mavis, I humbly beg your pardon for accosting you like this. Will you forgive me?”

“What, are you tipsy too?”

“I swear it was none of my doing! I was only being a good Samaritan. Phillip was overcome by gas.”

“By whiskey, you mean!”

“Well, only a very little. Please, Mavis, do not judge him!”

“You mean you don’t want me to judge you, I suppose?”

“Oh, I do not matter at all. It is for Phillip that I hasten to plead. He is not well. He has a lesion on one lung.”

“Who told you, I should like to know?”

“I heard it on high authority.”

“Don’t tell me it was that Dr. Dashwood!” she cried derisively. “We all know what he is!”

Ching said humbly. “It may be a matter of grave concern. Even of life and death.”

“I bet! What is it, then?”

Encouraged by her matter-of-fact manner, Ching felt easier in himself, and correspondingly flummoxed about what he could say. He pretended.

“Well, the high authority is Phillip himself. After all, it is a matter of life and death to him.”

Mavis laughed. “Pooh, I don’t believe you know what you’re talking about, Ching!”

“As a matter of fact, I do. It concerns the love of his life.”

“Oh, that old thing! That is only his pretence! Besides, Helena Rolls cares nothing for him. Why should she? His talk about eternal love is entirely one-sided! So one-sided, in fact, that it doesn’t stop him from going after at least one other girl.”

“I never have, I swear,” said Ching hoarsely. He clasped his hands. “Mavis—Mavis——”

“I know that you’re only pretending, you know! Why do you?”

“Please don’t be unkind,” he groaned. “I can’t help feeling—as I do. Can’t we be just friends? Oh please—that’s all I ask—I know I’m no good—please don’t be angry——” Ching, to his remote satisfaction, managed to break into tears.

For a moment Mavis was shocked in a way that surprised her. Her mood of brittle scorn fell away, and she felt that Ching was part of the sadness of the world. There was only one way by which one’s personal sorrows could be harmonised with those of the world.

“Do you mind if I say something to you, Ching?”

“Yes, Mavis, of course, of course, anything!”

“Go and see Father Aloysius at St. Saviours, in the High Street, and he will tell you what to do.”

“Yes, you go there with your friend Nina, I know.”

“Well, you go too, Ching. Now I must go. Please do not think anything more about me, I am only a substitute for something else in your eyes. Father Aloysius will explain it all to you.”

“You mean there’s no hope for me otherwise?” he moaned.

“I can’t say any more, Ching. Everyone has their troubles, you know.”

Ching passed away in the darkness, and Mavis went on up Hillside Road, dullness overcoming her as she drew near her home.

*

Richard, lying back in his armchair, was feeling some sort of freedom, as he read about life on the Western Front, obviously an account at first hand, in
Nash’s.
BILLET NOTES,
being
casual
pencillings
from
a
Fighting
Man
to
his
Mother,
was obviously the real thing. Why couldn’t his own son tell him what he had
always wanted to know about the front, instead of replying in monosyllables, if at all? If only he himself were younger, he would join up and get away from the drudgery and restriction that had been his life for two and twenty years now.