The Golden Virgin (47 page)

*

It had rained almost without break for a week; the mouth of the valley was overhung darkly, the river in spate, salmon running. Then the clouds lifted; but rain fell again, and in the dark of the valley Dora lost some of her feeling of hopefulness, and relapsed into her reflective mind, which had given up the struggle for a fairer world, and accepted the literature of the Ancients as a revelation of the inevitable fate of European civilisation. In this mood the happiness of the young people was poignant, so gay and
care-free were they, regarding the war as something entirely apart from their lives. They appeared to accept it without question.

In Dora’s mind the war had entered upon its most terrible phase; she realised now that it would be a long and bitter struggle. Once single-minded in opposing the war, her mind was now cleft: the run of her thoughts went in two directions; that no military tyranny must be allowed to dominate the world of Christendom; that the cousin nations of Europe were likely to bleed themselves to death. What new world could come, as many were saying, out of the chaos that so titanic a struggle must leave behind it? This lonely woman reflected upon the rivalries of the Hellenic City states, which had destroyed one another until the fairest and clearest light of the ancient world was extinguished. No, not wholly extinguished: Pallas Athene had survived, flying in the twilight from the sad ruins of Athens, to settle for awhile with the white bird of the Khristos, uneasily in the kingdoms of the West.

If only she could feel sure about the sole responsibility of Germany for bringing about the war! Surely in both cousin countries
hubris
had been long growing; materialism, based on coal and iron, had dulled and despoiled the plumage of owl and dove. Was Christendom, surely arising from the spirit of Hellenism, to sink forever under the machines of Armageddon, above the valley of Desolation, which history might well decide to have been the valley of the Somme? Where, even in one year’s time, would be the faces around the cottage table, laughing now over games of rummy and nap, snakes-and-ladders, ludo, tiddlywinks and halma—bought at the village shop which was also the post-office—while it rained and rained outside. Would they be lost in the flames—that innocent, guileless country boy Percy, with his rosy cheeks, his slow speech? Phillip with his ready smile, his wit, his startling resemblance to the bust of Alcibiades in the Vatican at Rome, his look of trying to resolve some problem which he did not fully understand—his mind still clouded, an effect, perhaps, of having been the unhappiest small boy she had ever known? Willie with his warm, brown-eyed eagerness, his quick, intelligent movements? Were these faces fated to vanish in their generation, with the singers, the poets, the splendid young men who had already fallen, voices of a generation doomed before it could come fully to flower—Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, and unknown others whose deathless verses would, in Time, be all that remained of a generation lost in the holocaust?

“Have you still got the copy of Rupert Brooke’s poems I sent you, Boy?”

“Oh yes, Aunt Dora.”

“What do you think of the 1914 sonnets?”

“I think they are very fine, but—— Well—it’s only my opinion, of course—probably quite wrong——” He looked uncertainly at her. “Yes, I think they are very fine.”

“What are?” asked Willie. Dora told him and he said promptly, “Yes, but they could only have been written before Gallipoli and the Somme.”

“I think he’s right,” said Phillip. “Also Julian Grenfell’s
Into
Battle
.”

“I am glad you are not afraid to speak your minds,” said Dora, coming between them, and taking an arm of each. “I am most interested to hear what your generation has to say. So far I know you only by what your poets have said. Won’t you tell me more? What do you think about it all, Phillip?”

His mind winced; imagination fluttered hopeless into the void. Dora sensed this. “I expect the thought of die war is too overwhelming—it will take years to see it in perspective. And why should you have to think about what you have passed through, to satisfy an old woman’s curiosity? Now I do declare,” she said, going to the window, “I see the sun coming out! That is one of the virtues of our West Country weather; one moment a sky black as your hat, as they say in the village, and then the clouds lift, their tails drag, and lo! suddenly it might be the Aegean!”

“Well, with all due respect the Aegean is one place I don’t want to see again,” said Willie.

When he had gone away Dora, who felt herself rebuffed by her younger nephew’s manner, said to Phillip, “I wonder if you can spare a moment to glance at a book I have here, before you go for your walk.”

She put a large book on the table, containing photographs of sculptures ranging from the ancient to the modern world, beginning in Greece, continuing past the Dark Ages to the Renaissance, and ending in a Paris garden. She hoped he would be interested; he was more composed than Willie, who was too restless, too taut. She was happy to see Phillip settle down to the book, apparently finding it interesting. When he had come to the end she asked him which period he liked best. He said that he preferred the last statues, then the ones in the middle, and the early ones last of all—Rodin, Donatello, Phidias.

“Now that is most interesting! You are for the romantic, rather than the classic. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I think so. It was explained to me by my colonel, Jasper Kingsman. He said that the classic is the hard, objective line, the romantic the tender, subjective line.”

“Well, can you see the difference between Rodin and Phidias?”

“One is beautiful; the other is beyond the beautiful. But both dream, you know.”

“How well you express yourself! In saying that you reveal the classic basis of your mind! You understand both subjective and objective attitudes.”

“I like both Rodin and Phidias.”

“Phidias, to me, is perfection. He was responsible for the temple of Athena in the Acropolis—you have heard of the Parthenon?”

“Only just.”

“Such genius of course caused jealousy, and Phidias eventually was accused of impiety, in having put both his own likeness, and that of his patron Pericles, on the shield of Athena the goddess—what in a later age would be called blasphemy. So he was cast into prison, where he died of disease—the greatest sculptor of the ancient world. But that is the idiom of history, of all the poets and the great men, in any age. We have to accept it. It is the spirit of man at its highest expression, confronted by ordinary men. But you will be wanting to join the others in their bathe. I must not ride my hobby horse.”

“It is the winged horse, Aunt Dora!”

She was charmed by his grace and courtesy, and felt herself no longer to be the odd one out of the family. For the rest of the morning, while the young people were away enjoying themselves in the sun, she felt no longer to be a woman lost to life in her own aloneness, which had become loneliness. Soon, soon, she had been thinking, soon the young faces would be gone, and the cottage would reveal itself, in appalling moments, to be a home without atmosphere; it was an empty cottage, spiritually speaking; it was bare, without a soul. Now, it had a living soul; the world was eternally young, despite its shadows.

Why had she allowed herself to be downcast before? Was her mood taken from the running noises of the stream below, the water everlastingly hurrying, blindly, despite its clearness when no rain had fallen, to the sea, its blind parent? The sea, “the unnumbered smile of ocean” of her youth, now blind, for ever set upon its task
of reducing rock to sand, and sand to dust? Water in the end wore away the hardest stone.

Deeply within her, Dora was afraid of her cottage; she feared something intangible about it; an indefinable remote dread haunted her, as though the Erinyes, avenging spirits of twilight, dwelt in the dark glen above the village.

“Your colonel sounds a nice man, Boy,” she said, when they returned.

“He’s dead now, of course. Our other colonel was a great character—‘Spectre’ West. He was a classical scholar, too.”

It was the first time he had spoken to her of the war.

“Do tell me more about them, if you feel like it.”

“Jasper Kingsman was a classical scholar at Balliol. So was his friend Father Aloysius, a Catholic padre—the troops all called him ‘Father’. He went over the top with his battalion, reading his breviary. His real name is Llewellyn Vaughan-Herbert. He was also at Balliol, but later, and knew Julian Grenfell. It was wonderful to hear Father Aloysius and Jasper Kingsman talking; they were very great friends, but always so polite, in an easy sort of way, all the time.”

“What did they say, can you remember?”

“Well, vaguely. Jasper Kingsman saw the Christian religion as something grafted on to pagan rites, and bits of older religions, as described in Frazer’s
Golden
Bough.
I think it was called that. He said that it was all part of man’s spiritual life; but Father Aloysius said that Christ’s coming was a complete revelation, the first, the only, the final truth revealed by God. He said the fact that other superstitions and beliefs existed, and had existed until they passed with the civilisations which had engendered them, made not the least difference: they were limited, temporary truths, while Jesus had brought the whole, or permanent truth. But they didn’t argue about that.”

“‘Vaguely’, you say! I think you have understood the whole of what was said. And what lucidity you have, to be sure. It’s amazing to me how your outlook has developed during the past year or so. Both your Colonel and Father Aloysius seem to have been splendid men. They are both dead?”

“Jasper Kingsman is. Another friend was ‘Spectre’ West. He gave me this book.”

“What a splendid gift! The
Everyman
Library
is a most excellent series.”

“Would you like to borrow it?”

“May I? How kind of you.”

Dora knew it well; but she looked into it as though she had seen it for the first time.

“I think I’ll go and find the others now, Aunt Dora. We’re going to bathe this afternoon, when the tide is right in.”

“You will be most careful, won’t you? The currents are dangerous.”

*

The tides in the Bristol Channel ran so fast that they gave a permanent cant to the paddle steamers plying between Cardiff, Swansea, Ilfracombe and Lynmouth before the war. The summer sky was blue, reflecting its colour upon the waters flowing into the harbour. Walking on the quay, with its crab-pots and nets, they put up a greater black-backed gull, which flew with weighty slowness of wings to a post marking the channel, where sat another black-back, presumably its mate, for the newcomer soared up, and with wings held gracefully aloft to hold the air, dropped lightly down to sit upon the other bird’s back. For a few moments the under-gull put up with this, then giving way under the weight, dropped down and flew to the next post, leaving the usurper upon the pole.

“You see!” said Willie. “The soldier’s philosophy also applies to the gull world.”

“I bet she was his wife,” said Doris. “How like a man!.”

“Here, I say,” said Percy, looking at her with simple eyes.

“Ah, Percy, don’t forget that probably he’s been feeding her all the while she was sitting on the eggs, so why should she take his armchair? Down with votes for women!”

“I don’t think he was very nice,” said Polly. “He thought only of himself.” She tossed her head at Phillip.

“Apart from all rotting, Polly, it was probably the bird’s post, and the second gull was using it as a vantage point, to rob the first gull of anything it found in between the boulders at low tide. I saw a gull the other day snatch a sea-trout of over a pound, working its way up the stream.”

“Well, what can the gull have been looking for now it’s high tide.”

“Fish heads and guts the cottagers chuck into the river, or other things.”

“Do they really? Then I certainly don’t want to bathe here,” said Polly.

“Why not, Polly? What’s wrong with a fresh fish head?”

“Anyway, if I had been the bird on that post, I would have stood up for myself,” said Doris. “I hate all bullies!”

At this moment the bird which had been turned off its post flew back and pitched upon the back of the usurper. They all laughed at the ridiculous sight, which was interrupted by a salmon leaping straight up out of the water, a few feet from the quay. As it fell back with a smack the two black-backs, uttering gruff bass cries, flew across the harbour to the far bouldered shore, to stand together at the water’s edge.

Phillip and Willie watched them from the quay, with Percy. The girls had gone on, to get undressed behind some boats drawn up, with a pile of crab-pots, under the cliff.

“I wonder what made it jump like that.”

“They say to knock off the sea-lice, Phil. The lice suck blood around the vent, and it must itch like hell. After a day up the river the lice die. They can’t live in fresh water.”

“What a lot you know. I wish we’d lived in the country.”

“But you know a great deal about the country.”

“All picked up from books at the Free Library, my dear Coz!”

“You’re jolly lucky to have one to go to!”

This led to talk about their fathers. Both agreed that they lived extremely narrow lives. Both were in ruts. A pity that they never visited one another.

“I believe they did once, actually, Willie, a tremendously long time ago, long before the Boer War, even. Aunt Dora had that cottage over there then—that one behind the pub,” said Phillip, pointing at the sett-stoned narrow lane leading up from the quay, to a cottage red with rambler roses. “Does Uncle John ever go to see Uncle Hilary?”

“Father’s always saying he’ll go, but seldom leaves the library where he practically lives nowadays. He likes fishing, too, and says that Uncle Hilary’s beat on the Avon is a jolly good one, but he doesn’t care for Aunty Bee. Anyway, she’s gone. Uncle Hilary is selling his place there, and is going to buy land at Rookhurst.”

“I wonder what for, Willie.”

“Get it back in the family, I suppose.”