The Wooden Shepherdess Page 11

  But now that mounting bank of cloud had reached the westering moon; and his darling savages all disappeared, as the sultry night went suddenly dark with a little moaning wind.

  A flash of lightning—and out of the nearby trees above them a dreadful scream.... Feeling his way downhill inch by inch (for he hadn’t a torch), it was Sadie’s “uncle” who’d screamed and dropped his grappling-iron when the lightning showed him, under the trees, a coven of seemingly headless leprous trunks with only the stumps of legs and arms.... But the almost instantaneous crash of the thunder drowned his yammering flight.

  The lightning—the scream—the crash of thunder; but then came the rain, and even the scream was forgotten. It fell not in drops but in pailfuls: you felt its weight as it fell, and it wiped the leaves off the trees like wiping a slate. At first the falling water was warm and they felt no chill, but soon the deluge had turned so cold that it chilled them right to the bone; and seconds later it started to hail. Stung by the hail, and bewildered, they jumped to their feet; and as flash followed flash, by that awesome light they began to scramble back to the place where they’d parked the cars. They were still stark naked, and very afraid: for the lightning was all around them, violet and blue and yellow—you smelled the discharge as it leaped from tree to tree, and even below them it skiddered across the hissing rain-furred lake like ducks-and-drakes. And the thunder! The noise didn’t really matter of course, but it had its effect for their ears were beaten and battered by noise like blows. Then a luminous ball came floating over the trees, and one tree burst into flame.

  At last they found the cars. These were both of them flivvers: one of them hadn’t a top, and they didn’t attempt to put up the other one. Neither did anyone try to dress: it was hopeless, for some of their clothes were lost and the rest impossibly wet. But they cranked the handles and somehow the engines were made to fire, and they started for home. The track was a torrent, but long-legged flivvers don’t seem to mind and at last they were out on the highway—too thankful at being alive to think about anything else.

  By now it was two in the morning. The worst of the storm had passed, though the rain still fell.

  They dropped Augustine as close to his home as they could without using an ax (for year by year that trail had narrowed to little more than a footpath). Nearing the shack with his prize jar under his arm and his bundle of clothes, Augustine was more than astonished to see a light: had he really forgotten to blow out the lamp when he left? But then he opened the door, and—dripping all over the floor, and shivering nearly enough to shake out his teeth—he smelled such a welcoming smell and saw such a warm, domestic sight: there was Ree at his lighted oil-stove, tending a steaming enamel jug....

  “Coffee,” she said “You need it, I guess!” and this time turned her back as he toweled himself and dressed.

  27

  While the coffee was being drunk Augustine cooked bacon and eggs, and the shack was filled with an even more savory smell. They ate in a leisurely way with their plates on their knees: when finished, they wiped their plates with their bread and ate that too. After this, instead of him taking her home at once (for the rain had stopped) they sat a while in the lamplight talking, entranced—these two alone together again at last, right back where they used to be before the Pack had found out about him and spoiled it. Whatever is was they said doesn’t matter much, except that nothing was said about parting tomorrow (although of course she knew). What mattered was rather the feeling of being two voices almost turned into one, with once more nobody else in the world but them; and nothing to break the spell. Like those times such ages ago when together they used to creep into holes in the rocks “like a couple of badgers setting up home.”

  Late as it was, what both of them really needed was sleep. But she showed no signs of going; and Augustine was equally loath to tell her she must (though he knew he ought). They sat very still, and at times hardly even talked. Once Ree tried to save a moth that was blindly burning itself to death on the lamp, yet the more she tried the wilder its dashes against the heated glass till antennae and even wings were spoiled. But she made no other move. Once or twice Augustine looked at his watch; but he kept on putting it off, and dozed.

  Then all of a sudden the circling storm had returned, and thunder jerked them awake. Augustine went to the door. The darkness, the sheets of rain and the lightning.... Going was out of the question now: she’d have to sleep on his bed for what was left of the night he told her, and he would lie on the floor. She made no answer, but merely narrowed her eyes as people do with a headache; and didn’t move for a moment. But then she finally crushed with her eggy fork what was left of the charred and suffering moth to put it out of its pain: stood up, and kicked off her shoes.

  A yawning Augustine was spreading rugs for himself in a corner when something made him turn. From the bed an almost inaudible voice had said “I’m not ashamed, so you needn’t put out the lamp when you come.” He looked: she lay on her back stark naked, lit by a flicker of lightning brighter than any lamp; and his loins were seared by a pang that seemed the lightning itself. “I don’t want you put out the lamp,” she repeated: then cupped her half-apple breasts in her hands for her elbows to take her weight, and playfully ran her two little feet up the wall like mice till her hips were lifted clear.

  His heart was beginning to thump so hard that it hurt his chest. But when she heard him crossing the floor and rolled on her side towards him, the arms she outstretched as he loomed above her were truly the match-stick arms of a child.... She couldn’t know what she was doing! And what was he doing himself? He suddenly bundled together her scattered clothes, and dropped them almost on top of the face that was lifted to kiss: “Get up!” he said in so brutal a voice it surprised him, “And cover yourself.”

  She snatched a blanket right to her chin where she lay. Her face went smaller and smaller, her eyes went larger and larger, her mouth fell open and started to shake. He turned away; but he couldn’t go back and lie down, so paced the floor with his mind in a turmoil. He didn’t speak again, for he didn’t dare—as well as feeling ashamed in such strangely conflicting ways. Again and again he saw those feet running up the wall ... and after, the pain in that small, terrible face. There wasn’t a sound from the bed; but nothing would make him look.

  Then daylight came, and Tony honked his horn from the road.

  *

  Augustine was gone.... As soon as her misery let her think, Ree dwelt for a while on making him care by hanging herself from a beam. She imagined the scene when they found her.... She hoped that God wouldn’t mind too much—if there was a God, who could let things happen like this! But whether there was one or not there anyhow wasn’t a rope, so instead she had to get into her clothes and go home to face the music.

  A God? Till now she had never bothered her head about it. Everyone took Him for granted without a thought: like the air, which you never bother to think that you breathe. Even now her “doubt” was only the fleetingest notion, in at one lobe-of-the-brain and out at the other, because quite simply it wasn’t a question which ever really mattered a cent—and even less at a time when you suffered as much as this.

  28

  Since Augustine had had no sleep and Russell so little Tony and Sadie took turns at the wheel all day, leaving those two to sleep in the back of the Buick in peace—if “peace” you could call it, or “sleep,” for Augustine! A-child-is-a-child-is-a-child.... And again and again those feet running up the wall, and the face that was lifted to kiss.... And the shaking mouth in that face as he’d seen it last, with the blanket pulled to her chin.... The journey passed like the kind of half-waking, half-sleeping dream a delirious patient endures. Augustine noticed almost nothing outside—barely the hot-dog stand where they stopped for lunch, and a glimpse of Lake Champlain one later time that he opened his eyes. The insistent Goodyear hoardings mile after mile were more like voices shouting than anything seen. However all day the Buick excelled herself: more than two hundred and
fifty miles in eleven hours without any serious trouble. So just before reaching the border they stopped for Tony to cross the leads to a couple of plugs: that started her coughing her head off, and made her seem all-too-ready to die in her tracks if flagged, and hold up the traffic. Thus Tony proved right: at Rouses Point they weren’t even stopped, nor stopped at Lacolle on the other side by the Mounties.

  As soon as the border was crossed into Canada, Tony began to wax lyrical over his “logging” days: though he had to admit it wasn’t big timber for lumber, just second-growth trash for the paper-mills in Chicoutimi (mills where the mill-girls paddled about in tepid water, and all the machines were hidden in steam). But Augustine heard only snatches. That, and a bit about horses trained to haul out the stumps with a single gigantic jerk; and a bit about building the stuff into rafts....

  That face, as he’d seen it last....

  The next thing he heard, the logging seemed to be over and Tony’d arrived where the Assuapmoussoin River runs into Lake St. John. There he seemed to have joined the canoes of the Pointe Bleue Indians just setting off for a season’s trapping up towards Hudson Bay (up there you everywhere went by canoe, said Tony: there weren’t any trails in those northern forests apart from the “portage” tracks round the worst of the rapids and river-to-river at water-sheds). Tony had still got plenty to tell when a back-tire burst within yards of a run-down roadhouse. This, on that ancient model of Buick, meant changing a rim (not the whole of the wooden wheel); and with bolts rusted in it called for a hammer and chisel at least. So this seemed an omen to stop for the night; and the place looked cheap.

  While they sat round a table waiting to eat, Tony’s story went on. Mostly canoes weren’t paddled up-stream (he explained) on turbulent rivers like this one: the Indians stood up and punted, although they could none of them swim and believed even pulling somebody out of the water to save his life would bring you bad luck....

  But Augustine hardly listened: a-child-is-a-child-is....

  The banks of the river, said Tony, were lined with eerie skeleton camps: for they never took down their tent-poles, cutting them fresh each night (is-a-child-is-a ... ). Even these days they still wrote letters and wrapped things in birch-bark. They smelled....

  While Tony talked on and on and Augustine’s mind went round like a mill the roadhouse family ran in and out arguing hotly in patois. Papa was a beady-eyed forty, and thin: Maman a bleary-eyed thirty, and fat; and the number of children ran into double-figures at least. They had caught a wretched bullfrog and kicked it about like a ball, while the Holy Virgin smiled from her lamp-lit niche and a red-haired baby tobogganed around the room on his pot. They were lively children all right—apart that was from the eldest, a teenage girl (she looked Ree’s age, or hardly older at all) who sat in a corner alone. She was pretty, and rather sweet; but the vacant look in her eyes as well as the cold contempt the little ones showed her told you at once that she wasn’t all there. At first Augustine’s gaze had wandered her way as he thought about Ree; but she turned her skirt right back on her lap as if no one was here to see, and carefully measured the girth of a naked thigh at various points with a length of string. Then she dipped the lemon a teasing brother gave her in salt, and munched it with evident relish. In dumb-show one of the children explained the red-haired baby was hers: while everyone laughed, and seemed to expect the Yankee four to join in. In spite of all which the oniony supper itself when it came was remarkably good; and they went to bed replete.

  Augustine’s room was an attic whose door wouldn’t shut, and which smelt of citronella and ponds. The window was set so low that even lying in bed you still couldn’t see the sky: you lay looking down through the dirty mosquito-screen at a lake on the opposite side of the road. An old man was out in a leaky boat in the path of the rising moon—singing, and hauling in traps of eels. Augustine must have slept for a moment and dreamed, for now he too was slipping about in a boatload of squirming eels: yet he somehow wasn’t “Augustine” at all, he seemed to be Ree (or was it the eels which were Ree? It was hard to make out). Then he woke, and the eels disappeared. Instead, inside the lids of his eyes lay Ree stark naked stretched on her back and cupping her breasts in her hands as she ran her feet up the wall till her loins were lifted clear....

  How many hundreds of times had Augustine been over and over it all in his head! Someone under the Age of Consent ... A-child-is-a-child—or, IS it? Suppose.... But what else could a person have done? No wonder this rent him, and flung him about on his bed like people in Bible times got flung about by a devil!

  The door was open of course, and she must have been barefoot: he heard no sound till he felt a tug at the sheet and opened his eyes on somebody shadowy standing over his bed. In panic he thought of the daft girl.... “Move,” said Sadie, “and give a poor wench some room.”

  He moved. It was Fate, he had no more fight ... but because of her onion-and-patchouli breath he kept his face as far as he could from hers.

  With the cold-porridge parody over, he slept like a log. Then daylight came, and he woke to the sound beside him of stifled sobs.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I guess you was virgin?”

  Augustine made no reply.

  Then another sob, and “You’re not very kind, not even to kiss me before it!” the girl complained.

  Tony had told them his Indians smelled half-way between gypsy and fish: though he said that camping with them you hardly noticed it, sleeping on pungent spruce-boughs....

  Tony’s shooting the rapids in Indian canoes had sounded exciting. Suppose ... but no, he must get to the Governor-General’s office in Ottawa quick as he could to apply for another passport. He’d cable Mary at once.... But first he had got to get everything clear: just bleating “A-child-is-a-child-is-a-child” and “What else could a decent fellow have done?” didn’t do any good, the pain in that small terrible face as he’d seen it last was something that never could be undone—a weight that he couldn’t crawl out from under. For he was the one who had clumsily done it to someone he loved, and who loved him.... Thus it was no good asking how else could a person with decent instincts behave: somehow he’d somewhere got out of step ... and this load on his heart, this leaden lump at the very core of his being seemed mighty close to what people like Mitzi must mean by “sin!”

  But there couldn’t be “sin” if there wasn’t a God to offend—which there wasn’t, of course.... And so, was it Freud whom Augustine in fact had offended against? Or the God Who Didn’t Exist? Or would some wholly impartial observer, perhaps, have deemed him in Dutch with both?

  A God “like the air” (Ree would say) “which everything breathes....” “Like the air” (as Mitzi might add) “which certain creatures can also fly in—though even they have to learn....”

  Augustine turned his eyes to the low-set window and there, on the lake below, he saw reflected the rising sun. It seemed to be hung from the tips of a line of pines which bordered the very top of the picture upside-down.

  BOOK TWO

  The Meistersingers

  1

  “GOD, LIKE THE air, is something which everything breathes—and certain creatures can fly in....”

  Think back now to the previous winter, when Mitzi’s second retina slipped and she lost the last vestige of sight. She was always a rather detached and withdrawn sort of girl; and the shock of this total blindness at seventeen was bound to turn her in even more on herself, or on God—and that prime distinction no longer was easy to draw, now the strain of bearing what couldn’t be borne had snapped like an overtaut wire. For now, when she probed to her own very innermost pinpoint “I am,” it was like looking into a tiny familiar room through a window and finding herself instead looking out—upon landscapes of infinite width: no longer her little “I am” inside there at all, but only His great “I AM.”

  The times when a separate “Mitzi” still seemed to exist were no more than a lingering nightmare she hoped to be rid of for ever as so
on as she woke up after His likeness, a nun: no longer her little “I will” there ever again, but only His WORD.

  Her father regarded convents as more-or-less human litterbins, meant for the tidy disposal of girls of good family Fate had unsuited for life in the world (as their “natural refuge,” to put it a little less crudely). The family too were agreed that now she was blind there was nothing else to be done with her.... Still, he hadn’t been finding it easy to broach: so when she told him herself that she wished to become a nun, he was so relieved at her common sense that he kissed her.

  Augustine (we know) looked on convents as dangerous webs like a spider’s where any girl buzzing anywhere near one was doomed—in a trice she’d be whisked inside and wound hand-and-foot in a habit, sucked dry and the mummy hung up out of sight before you said knife; and even Walther had no more idea than Augustine—or Mitzi herself—that convents were nowadays harder by far to get into than out of. Her choice of that neighboring Carmelite House at Kammstadt where one of her aunts was Prioress seemed a choice so obvious, surely he’d only to write to Adèle’s holy sister and tell her the girl would be coming.... So when the Prioress wrote by return flatly refusing to even consider taking a blind girl, it set him right back on his hunkers.