The Wooden Shepherdess Read online

  For a while he stood there transfixed, unconsciously probing his scar with nails that were stubby and broken and traces of tar in the quick—till a hair got caught in a cracked one. Roused at last by the twinge he turned his back on the river: abandoned the child to her swimming, and started off home through the woods with his feet slip-slopping along in the span-deep sand of the overgrown buggy-road, mind still heavy with Mitzi. Her frost-pink face, half hidden in furs....

  And again last winter’s bitter taste of despair, in a throat too dry to quite hawk it up.

  2

  “But surely the time has arrived to put Mitzi right out of my mind altogether!” Augustine told himself, deep in the heart of these woods right across the Atlantic.

  The sun shone dappled through trees overhead, lighting up the odd leaflike a bit of stained glass: by the time the light reached the ground it was green, like being under the sea.... They were lovely, these lonely Connecticut woods; and yet not a bit like Mary’s Dorset woods around Mellton, not only because of the conifers here and there but because of this wholly impervious undergrowth everywhere, making you stick to the tracks. Bushes, each one like a myriad green eyes.... Trees so thick with leaves that you hardly saw branches, let alone trunks....

  Moreover these trees were hardly any the same as in England: not even the ones which used English names, for this “oak” was never a real English oak nor these “elms” real elms.

  As he absently slapped something biting his wrist Augustine considered how different the woodland creatures were too, here. Chipmunks: brown furry ground-hogs—and skunks, he’d been warned about skunks (if you scared them, their smell could drive you out of your house and your senses). Porcupines ... Squirrels even were mostly gray ones and black ones, seldom the squirrel-color ... Birds of strange plumage and voices ... Only the deer coming down to the creek at dusk seemed anything like the same (but now he nearly fell over while trying without stopping walking to slap at his ankle).

  Woods that were paradise—almost: that is, apart from plants which brought you out in a rash and these bites (for now the brutes were biting him right through his shirt, and he twisted an arm back trying to scratch exactly between his shoulder-blades). Funny that nobody here would admit they were bad even here, in hilly Connecticut: “Ah, down in Jersey they’re real mean!” they said.

  But unlike as these were to English woods, in spite of the pines they seemed even less like the serried echoing boles of those man-made Bavarian forests like endless insides-of-cathedrals....

  Here he reined in his wandering thoughts with a jerk: for hadn’t he made up his mind to put Bavarian Mitzi right out of his mind altogether?

  A rustle of leaves in a rare breath of breeze.... Did these woods hold other small dryads like Ree? For they don’t have children in France, and he’d missed them: those German children were really the last he’d made friends with for ages—till Ree....

  This set him once more wondering just how old little Ree really was (for “growing girls” one doesn’t go near with a barge-pole!). That ominous crêpe-de-chine ... And “I don’t drink liquor” did seem a funny remark for a child (a funny thing children should even bother to say so, he meant). However she must be a child still, Augustine decided: for only an absolute child could have gone on touching a man in that innocent way little Ree had kept touching him.

  “I don’t drink liquor....” But all Americans seemed to be funny that way about drink: Prohibition had made it a kind of obsession, they talked about drink all the time like the English talk about weather! New York (so they told you, with relish) was fuller of speakeasies now than ever there’d been saloons; and many were pleasanter places, which meant that any restaurant not serving liquor (in teapots or something) soon had to put up its shutters. All over the city the little stills bubbled, and “London Gin” which had cost ten cents the quart to distill (they printed their own English labels) retailed at twenty-five cents the shot. Why, even out here there was hardly a farmer who didn’t distill his own rye or corn....

  Prohibition had split America—split her as nothing had split her since slavery! This was democracy’s ultimate nightmare, a nation attempting to tyrannize over itself with The People’s Will plumb-opposed to the people’s wishes.... No wonder “a-law-is-a-law-is-a-law” had completely ceased to apply over here where drink was concerned, and the whole Enforcement Machine was corrupt right up to the White House. But poor little Ree—what a country to bring up a child in!

  *

  With the Canada border a mere dotted line on a map, imported liquor still trickled through by the truckful. Enforcement Patrols were unpredictably venal or violent: times cash passed and the convoy passed, times both sides shot it out to a finish—but either way, plenty got through.

  Then those other road-convoys, which also were armed with machine guns—the ones which came thundering in from the thousands of miles of beaches where fast “contact-boats” outstripping the revenue-cutters had landed the “Rum Row” stuff.... Three weeks ago, that traveling salesman who gave Augustine a lift out of Hartford had downright insisted the stranger must sample the “genuine Scotch” in his flask: for it came, so he proudly declared, “from Rum Row” (in fact it was palpable bath-tub, tasting not very much worse than the worst they sold in Montmartre). Trundling along those leafy Connecticut lanes in his ancient Buick, the man had gone on to instruct the ignorant Englishman newly arrived that “Rum Row” was the fleet of liquor-ships come from all over the Globe and lying at anchor just outside territorial waters, since there they couldn’t be touched. This vast Armada, he said, was not only the Longest Bar in the World but the Largest-Ever Assemblage of Shipping in History....

  Up till that moment Augustine had sat very still and said nothing; but now had decided to get out and walk.

  3

  For somebody reared like Augustine, the life he’d been leading these last few months seemed compacted of stuff so strange it already felt almost a dream; and indeed even now he still felt half in a dream—even here in these alien woods, on his way from the pool he had swum in and met that American child. He felt any moment he’d wake up at home: back in Wales, up above all those empty enormous rooms which he never used in his little white attic under the roof with the moon staring straight in his eyes.

  To Augustine it might seem a dream; and yet he’d been certainly changed by it. Coarsened—or made just a little more “realistic,” if that is the word you prefer. It was much as happens in war: for just as a boy when his voice breaks now sings bass but loses his top-notes, so must the need for adjustment to action and danger—the downward shift of his whole emotional gamut to take it—leave him calloused a bit at the finer, more sensitive end of his thinking and feeling. So now as Augustine ducked his height to bob under a bough overhanging the trail, or leapt a log with the litheness of somebody young who had spent half his youth on a marsh after wildfowl and now had the added litheness the sea gives, his thoughts were no longer concerned at all with the abstract riddles the Universe holds. “Significant Form”: all those wonderful pictures he’d bought and left behind him in Paris—what crap!

  But “My poor little Ree, what a country to bring up a child in ...” It suddenly struck him he’d failed to ask where she lived, or even her surname: so now he had probably lost her again, this nearest approach to a friend he had made since he landed.

  She’d seemed so disposed from the first to be friends: not a bit like Trudl and fierce little Irma had been to begin with, or Rudi and Heinz (for those German children had certainly taken some taming, although in the end one couldn’t help getting fond of them).

  Schloss Lorienburg, though.... At the time it had all seemed real enough; but once over here in the New World he found it incredible anywhere quite like that feudal German castle existed these days, or dug-outs like Walther and Otto its lords! As for her brother that double-dyed lunatic Franz, if he weren’t so absurd with his dreams of another Great War it would almost be frightening.... Somehow it seemed s
o unnatural finding young Germans, chaps one’s own age, still wrapped in Laocoon-knots with such antique neuroses as Franz and indeed more alien, more incomprehensible even than old ones.... “Well,” said a Voice: “then what would you say of a girl who even last winter—the winter of 1923—could choose to go for a nun?” And Augustine startled a lizard no end by swearing out loud: for why must each train of thought he embarked on end up back with her?

  Augustine had tried so hard for so long to forget her. July this was now and all this sun-baked American boscage was dried-up and dusty, with leathery leaves that began to look tired: yet right back in France.... Yes, back in the spring when from Paris right down to the coast all the trees had been only in bud—and even that night he’d arrived at St. Malo, wasn’t it “putting Mitzi right out of his mind altogether” (like now) which had kept him mooning around the ill-lit quays so late that even the bistros were closing, the night last spring he got slugged?

  Trees, he noticed, grew wild over here that were prized in parks and gardens at home; and now he heard in his mind’s ear Nanny’s voice raised in alarm and a Mary who called to her child reassuringly (this was when five-year-old Polly had climbed “that American tree” in the Mellton arboretum, and couldn’t get down).

  Dear Mary, dear Polly! He hadn’t seen sister or niece for ages—why, not since October last year!

  October; and this was July, with each day still getting hotter and hotter. He wasn’t half-way to his shack, yet already as sticky and hot as before he’d been swimming at all. The very ground gave out heat: even here in the ovenish shade it was burning him right through the soles of his shoes. The trees smelled of heat. His head rang too with all this incessant trilling (some sort of cricket, perhaps—or were they cicadas?) and all this bronchial twanging of frogs like catarrhal guitars. Katydids ... Insect-noise more than made up here in din for the rareness of birdsong: not like those tiny British insect-sounds you must listen for, rather an earsplitting clamor of insects and frogs you could hardly shout down. No wonder Americans just didn’t notice the shattering row in their towns when their very woods were as noisy as this was! “Americans never hear absolute silence” Augustine opined from his just-three-weeks’ experience of America, scuffing the sweaty deposit of mosquitoes off his neck with the side of his hand.

  Then once more he thought about home, and how quite the best thing about those Dorset downs was their silence—except for the larks.... For almost more than anything else Augustine loved riding alone with his sister up there on the silent downs where the thymy turf was a spring-board—though purely for pastime and Mary’s society, not sharing Mary’s inordinate passion for hunting (but Mary had had to forgo her hunting for almost the whole of last winter with starting a second baby, she’d told him in one of her letters to France).

  Over here they shot foxes, and “hunting” turned out to be walking-up birds with a gun! Yet surely Americans weren’t proper foreigners: more some kind of near-Englishman, like in the Colonies? That’s why such strange aberrations as shooting foxes and using words wrong here struck you at once: though of course when genuine foreigners shot them—or kept them for pets, like that queer little beast at the Schloss which Mitzi....

  But surely the passage of time and his lately—well, call it discreetly “more extrovert” life should have cured him by now completely of calf-love, and ... blind Carmelite nuns?

  *

  It was two long miles from the pool to his shack, through that normal New England ninetyish summer warmth which a Briton just wasn’t used to. He got there dripping with sweat and covered in bites.

  By now it was mostly his own misty sea-marsh in Wales that he found himself thinking about: the cool of his huge stone empty ancestral house, with its hundred unlit chimneys to count; and the gunroom, its center and focus. Or otherwise, Mary and Polly in Dorset—at any rate Home! For he suddenly felt he had had quite enough of America.... What was the use, though, of pining for home when how to get out of this blasted country at all without telling them how he got in was the crux?

  Meanwhile Mary would soon be having that baby.... Indeed as Augustine stood on the porch and pulled back the screen-door to enter, it suddenly struck him that “June” was what Mary had said in that long-ago letter to France—and this was July! So by now that baby’d have come....

  As he let the screen-door swing-to behind him Augustine reflected that he and Mary had never been quite so apart before in the whole of their lives: indeed it seemed plumb against Nature for her to go having a baby, and he not even to know had it come yet or not come.

  Augustine himself had written home once (from Sag Harbor, awaiting the ferry across the Sound his first day on shore). But he’d told her nothing apart from the fact he was still in the land of the living, and given no kind of address to write back to. He didn’t dare: for Gilbert and Mary were man and wife—and Lord, if Gilbert ferreted out the least inkling of what he’d been up to and how to get on his tracks there’d be trouble!

  In spite of feeling so homesick, Augustine was hungry: so lit his oil-stove (they called it “kerosene” here just to fool you), and put on a pan. But this baby of Mary’s.... Alas, what on earth sort of present could anyone find in a place like America fit for Mary’s new baby—supposing it really had come?

  For his new little nephew or niece.... “Well, which is it this time I wonder?” he asked his eggs out loud while they boiled (but the eggs only bubbled). The thought of a new little “Polly” was lovely.... But that would make Gilbert livid: they’d have to keep on till they turned up a boy for Mellton, but quite the last thing Gilbert would want was a quiverful.

  As for it being a boy ... Augustine hoped not: for the thought of an Infant Gilbert was just a bit much.

  4

  An “infant Gilbert?” Had Augustine been in Mellton Church that day he’d have quickly been reassured. There was hardly a blaze of flowers in here, just a discreet vase or two round the font; and the christening plainly a quiet one.

  This was a Dorset and not a New England July: yet even here, in the cool of his ancient church, the vicar was hot in his cassock. And getting impatient: they really were shockingly late!

  There was no one in church yet at all, bar himself at his post by the west door. Like Gilbert, the Village were much disappointed this wasn’t an heir. They weren’t the captouching kind, as the vicar well knew; but an heir would have meant such a different class of festivity—large marquees on the lawn, and a Silver Band in attendance: tea and champagne for the gentry, whisky for all the big tenants, beer for the poor ... and at least a thirty-pound cake. As it was, what villagers had assembled (mostly ones in arrears with their rents) were waiting outside in the sun, and absorbed in admiring their graves.

  The vicar loathed waiting this end of his church, because from here he couldn’t help seeing his special bête-noire. This was a half-ton Victorian limpet stuck to the Norman chancel-arch where most churches carry no more than a hymn-board—a huge Open Book (the Recording Angel’s, no doubt) that was bound in polished red granite with pages of Parian marble. The heavenly ledger’s Parian pages displayed the virtues of PHILIP WADAMY ESQre (Paxton’s disciple who’d glass-roofed the whole central quad at the Chase); and although the curves of the pages were carved in perspective, the black-letter writing they carried was not. A double-size pair of pink marble hands stuck out from the ancient masonry, clad in frilly white marble cuffs, pretending to hold up the weight—which was really upheld by acanthus-leaf corbels of cast-iron covered in low-carat gold. Always he tried not to look; but his eyes just couldn’t keep off it....

  How late were they now?—Well, where was his watch? In vain he patted his stomach and chest in the hope of locating it.

  The old man was feeling a bit on edge anyhow, always finding this kind of occasion his chiefest thorn-in-the-flesh as a country incumbent. The effrontery of these infidels in high places, blandly expecting the Church to embellish their social occasions of “hatches, matches and dispatches” with f
rills of religion—something they just found pretty or quaint! Marriage-vows made at the altar not knowing the difference between a vow and a contract, nor even suspecting there was one: promises made at the font to bring up a child in the faith they themselves had forsaken—and godparents chosen more for the help they could give in the ways of the world than of heaven.... Often such godparents didn’t bother to come; and supposing they did turn up might be Jews, Turks or Hereticks for all one dared to inquire.

  Why hadn’t he gone to the Wadamys straight and made a clean breast of it? “You who parade your open unfaith, you yet have the nerve to bring your own child to the font—and even then you couldn’t be punctual....” Ah, but a queer sort of Christian priest that would be for the parents’ sins denying baptismal grace to the child! For this was a Sacrament: Water and Word would as certainly graft this unpromising Wadamy bud in the very Body of Christ as ... as even an Archdeacon’s son.

  It was Jeremy Dibden of course that the vicar meant, that unsatisfactory friend of Augustine’s. “Poor old Dibden!” he thought: “There can’t be much sweetness even in brand-new Archidiaconal gaiters when finding your only boy, whom you’d always meant for the Church, mixed up with this Wadamy lot and already a self-declared atheist.”

  Sadly the old man sighed. “No, I must play my priestly part—and trust His Omnipotent Power to find the way, in the end, to His Own.” So he said to himself, still absently patting his cassock in search of the missing watch (he had only been waiting ten minutes although it felt like an hour).