The Golden Virgin (48 page)

“Oh, good. Father will be jolly glad to hear that!”

The girls had bathed before, but this was Phillip’s first swim since bathing in the Ancre. He was apprehensive of the deep water, lest he got cramp in his leg. They strolled on to the boats drawn up beyond the lift. The girls, walking on ahead, were opposite the entrance when three young officers from Hollerday House appeared. Two wore bath-robes, with towels round necks; the third was in plain clothes. He had been on leave when Phillip had arrived at Hollerday House; but as soon as he saw him, Phillip had recognised him as the man at the Casualty Clearing Station at Heilly who had come into the hut on the padre’s arm, and pretended to be fighting the Germans.

His name was Piston. It was the first time he had seen the girls, but he treated them immediately as though they were old friends.

“Hullo, dear ladies!” with a double flip of his rat’s-whisker moustaches. “Welcome to Lynmouth! Delightful spot down here, don’t you know! I’m from the same jolly old place as Phil and Bill, you know, Georgie Newnes’ shack built on
Tit-Bits,
and looking like it, too. These Cheap Press Wallahs get my goat. I don’t care who they are—Billy Castleton, Alf Harmsworth, Arty Pearson, Georgie Newnes—the whole bang lot of them ought to be shot in my opinion, for feeding the muck they do to the hoi polloi. They’re all yellow bellies,” he went on, with a high-class drawl. “I know quite a lot about Fleet Street. The Hidden Hand, and all that.
Wang!
I’d shoot the whole dam’ lot!”

The dark eyes darted from face to face as he went on, “I was with dear old Phil in the Somme show, you know. Ac-tually, I got lifted sky-high by one of the mines in front of La Boisselle. Lost my memory, or parts of it, ever since! And the trouble is, strictly between ourselves, which parts! God knows who I am. Sometimes I don’t even know myself. Ever had the feeling of being reincarnated? If so, take my advice—don’t!”

The speaker’s face had gone pale. He looked exhausted. With a glance at Polly, half-shy, half-furtive, he went on, “I expect you think my name sounds a bit odd. Ac-tually,” with a flip of moustaches, “one of my great-great-uncles invented something that made little old James Watt’s steam-kettle idea practicable.
Few people realise that, as they equally fail to realise that Major Shrapnel invented the shell, Sir Hiram Maxim the machine-gun, and old Uncle Tom Cobley Gatling that barrel-organ thing they used on the Fuzziwuzzies in the Sudan.”

Phillip wondered if his manner was due to his trying all the time to get away from something he could not bear to think about, so he was always talking and imagining things in order to forget what had hurt him. Perhaps he had suffered from “the battle of the brain”, when he was a boy? Had the war frightened him, literally, out of his wits? So much so, that he was pretending to be mad, in order to get out of the army? Poor devil.

“Let me introduce you to my sister and to my cousin Miss Pickering—Mr. Piston.”

“Somewhat belated!” said Piston, saluting. “Well, I can see that you are all straining at the leash to get on with the old trudgeon stroke, invented by a bloke called Trudgeon, by the way, a pal of mine, so I’ll leave you to it. Cheeroh! I’m unfortunately not swimming just now. Concussion!” He coughed hollowly, wheezed, and thumped his chest.

Phillip was glad that the blue cloth of his bathing dress covered the ugly purple-red crater on his left buttock, and that the bullet hole in his foot just above the instep was hardly noticeable. Willie’s wound was through the shoulder, and had healed cleanly. They were both being worked upon twice a day by a Swedish masseuse, who pulled and pushed, to ease away any stiffness in the new muscles. He was glad, too, that both Polly and Doris looked all right: Doris in her bathing dress with its frills round neck, knees, and elbows: Polly in an overcoat. However, she should have worn a bathing cap, like Doris, her hair tucked up into it. As it was, with her white skin and black curls all over her shoulders, Polly looked rather fast, he thought. He hoped she would not attract attention from the others.

With some uneasiness he saw, when she took off her overcoat, that Polly was wearing a boy’s bathing dress, which showed her legs above the knees, as well as an arc of her white neck; while her bosom pushed out the loose worn blue stockingette of her costume and showed the swelling of her breasts. What would people think of her?

He was not left long in doubt. Piston, who had taken a quick, almost guilty look, which had in it some satisfaction, offered to hold Polly’s coat. Phillip began to regret that he had been so friendly towards Piston; he was going to be beastly familiar, he
considered, already calling her by her christian name. The other two from the house were waiting by the little lighthouse on the quay. They ran their eyes over Polly’s figure, too. He wasn’t going to introduce them, and run the risk of having them hanging round the cottage.

Dared he go in? The water was deep; the surface was two feet below the quay, and he might do a belly-flopper. While he waited, Polly prepared to dive. He felt anxious about currents, although at the moment there were none; the tide was still flowing in, but he knew that it began to go out strongly at the turn, and also there was much fresh water coming down from the moor. How well could she swim? He watched her getting a grip with her toes on the edge of the stone. She placed her feet together, threw back her arms, bent her knees, she sprang, he saw the pink palms of her feet, instep to instep, as she curved in, leaving only a round white ring in the water, much neater than the salmon’s. He saw her pale shadow down in the green before she bobbed up a dozen yards away, shook water out of her eyes and hair, and with swift overarm strokes made for the quay, leaving behind a wake of white water. Ignoring Piston’s hand, she drew herself up, sleek and dripping, to stand, arms by her side, one knee slightly bent, while about her feet formed a pool of water. She was as self-possessed as a statue; she was transformed, like his thoughts of her. He felt proud that she was with him; her white arms and shoulders were like the sculptures of Rodin. Could this be Polly?

“Top hole!” said Piston, holding her coat. “I mean that, Polly!”

The others plunged in, leaving Piston, Phillip, and Polly on the quay.

“Don’t you swim?” said Phillip, moving between Piston and Polly.

“No costume, old boy, there’s been a war,” said Piston, darkly. “Pity we can’t all go in starko. Why should we be ashamed of nature? It’s only the blasted beaks, all puff and paunch, that made the dam-silly laws. Your Cousin Polly is a peach. Beats Annette Kellerman, in my not so humble opinion.”

“Are you sure you will be all right, with your leg?” said Polly, turning to Phillip.

He wished he had gone straight in; the more he hesitated, the feebler he would look. So arms over head, and pray that it would not be a belly-flopper. It was, and it stung. Exuberance rose in him. He could still swim! He saw Doris sitting on the edge of the
quay, beside Percy. “Come on in!” Then Polly dived in and rose up beside him.

“I’m going in off the tower.”

“No, it’s too dangerous! You might hurt yourself!”

“Pouff!”

“Polly, come back!”

Polly walked on. He watched her open the door of the lighthouse, and go inside. She reappeared on the balcony, climbed upon the parapet, and stood there awhile, looking around with assumed unconcern. Was she brazen about her figure? Treading water, he saw that people up the street were looking at her. Among them was Aunt Dora, with a sunshade. Others were staring up, too. He wanted to call out that it was too risky. Supposing she hit the edge of the quay? He felt distress.

But Polly, unknown to Phillip, was the champion swimmer of her school beside the river in Gaultshire. She crouched and swung and came down in a swallow dive into the water, leaving a small shell-splash behind her.

“Hi-ee-o!” yelled Piston, as he jumped into the water. He swam about, singing, “My old man’s a fireman; He puts out fires!” His head was dark and sleek. Reaching for his tweed cap which was floating in the water, he flung it on to the quay. Phillip thought, after Piston had tried to duck Polly, that he was a bit too much of a good thing.

The water in the harbour was from the Atlantic, pressing up between Cornwall and the south-east coast of Ireland. It had the chill of the ocean main; soon Phillip felt the cold strike him.

“You stayed in too long, you know,” said Dora, seeing his face. “Now go and dress quickly, and then come back to the cottage and let me give you some hot milk. What was that odd-looking creature doing, swimming about in his clothes?”

“He hadn’t got anything else to swim in.”

“Of course not, poor man, he has come straight from the battlefield. I must look him out something.”

When Piston swam again he wore a heavy worsted combination suit of blue and white rings, which buttoned up from the middle of the chest. It covered all his body except his neck, head, forearms, and legs below his kneecaps. It had been left behind by Richard after the visit to Lynmouth in 1895.

As Phillip had imagined, Piston became almost a fixture in Ionian Cottage. Still, he wasn’t such a bad chap after all. He offered to do odd jobs to help Aunt Dora, being handy with saw,
nail, hammer, and mason’s trowel. He also must have peeped into the pages of
A
Smaller
Classical
Dictionary,
for one afternoon after all of them had returned from fishing in a hired motor-boat, he said to Dora, “One of my ancestors was called Pistor, I’ve just remembered. I lost my memory after that show, you know. Ancestral memory goes back a long way, under stress. Funny, it all came back to me as I pulled in that pollock that it’s been a tradition in the family for God knows how long that the old boy invented a stunt of chucking out bags of quartern loaves to the old Gauls when they were besieging Rome, to make the old Gauls think the blokes inside the fortress had lashings of grub to eat. Whether old Pistor got away with it I don’t know, anyway later on one of the family came to England with the Romans, and founded the English branch of our family. That’s the rumour, anyway. Probably all bilge, like most pedigrees, you know, bars sinister and all that hoodoo.”

Dora, who had never met anyone like him, thought that he had the innocent make-believe imagination of the child. This was shown also in the way he had made friends with various children, whose company he seemed to prefer. Then there was his strange devotion to his fire-pail, as though to some
penates
of his mind, a bucket he had found somewhere, perforated with a number of holes. He claimed that it was a fire-pail he had brought back with him from the trenches in Plugstreet Wood.

“Actually, Aunt Dora, it is the original bucket that suggested to Bruce Bairnsfather the idea for his cartoons.”

“How very interesting,” she said, not realising at first that this statement was in the same category of fancy as the “Pistor” story. Had she done so, she would not have continued, “Willie will be most interested to hear that—he was in Ploegsteert Wood during that first winter, too.”

She saw his eyes dart about before he replied hastily, “I got blown up there, too, and can’t remember anything about it, except the jolly old fire-bucket and Bruce’s face when the idea came to him to do the first picture for
The
Bystander.
”

Was he inventing this too, she wondered. Could the source of his fantasy be disturbance to the brain when he had been blown up with the mine before La Boisselle, a graphic account of which he had given her, of himself rising high in the air, and being saved on returning to earth by the cushioning effect of powdered chalk? Might not the shock in some way have brought to the fore a primitive part of the mind? Who knew the mysteries of the brain?

“Piston by name and Piston by nature, that’s me, temperamental you know, up one moment and down the next.” He was, she told Dr. Minstrel, a kind young man. Not only did he play with some of the village boys at being a pirate, collecting “pieces of eight” in his fire-bucket—circular corks off fishing nets—but he entered into the spirit of the children, making camp fires on the boulders by the shore, and roasting potatoes in the embers. “He is one of them,” she said, and thought of him as The Innocent.

“I’m bung-full of Devonshire Cream and ozone, Aunt Dora. I say, old thing, do you mind frightfully if I call you Aunt Dora? I haven’t any aunts of my own left, you see. The last two, God bless ’em, were killed in Mathy’s raid on Hull on the fifth-sixth June last year. So may I have the honour to call you Aunty, please?”

She thought he was most pathetic, a pleading in his eyes like that of a spaniel, and replied impulsively, “Of course, dear boy, I am most touched by your request! Now do please stop lime washing the scullery wall, and go out and enjoy yourself with the others while this fine weather lasts. Mrs. Sloly and I can manage these walls, can’t we, Mrs. Sloly?”

“Aye aye!” roared the semi-bearded fat cottage woman who came in every day. “Us can manage thaccy, midear, yesmye!”

“Ah midear!” he shouted back. “Leave it to Piston! Piston always pays! Piston will do it more quickly than slowly, no-yesmye?” to the woman’s bellows of laughter and “You’m a praper pup, midear, you be!”

Then seeing Dora’s face he said with little-boy brightness, “That’s all right, Aunty, I’m quite happy doing this until the little tackers come along, honestly Aunty! Cross my heart!” The tackers were the small fry which formed his band upon the bouldered beach.

*

The easy days passed in a bright flow of summer weather. Phillip and Willie went about together; Doris and Polly, too, were the firmest friends. The officers at the convalescent home came down to bathe, or fish, or sail offshore in the charge of fishermen. There was a boat-house belonging to Hollerday, and among the boats there was a dinghy, and also a small outboard motor. Phillip managed to make this work, after removing and drying out the coil, and adjusting the contact-breaker; but Matron said it belonged to the house, and should not be touched. So the two cousins hired a boat, and went fishing for pollock and
mackerel and other fish offshore. Phillip learned how to sail. They hired ponies in Lynton, and taking lunch with them, rode up the valley to the high moor. Westward lay the Atlantic; and Dartmoor to the south rose dimly in the hazy harvest air murmurous with bees at the heath bells. Once the air seemed to quiver with distant and continuous reverberations: the guns in France, the Somme battle still raging.