The Wooden Shepherdess Read online

  But then he remembered: the watch was right underneath, in his trousers.

  Trouser-pockets are sometimes awkward to get at, in cassocks. He had in the end to hitch cassock and surplice right up to his armpits, and hold them there with one hand while he fumbled it out with the other. A brace-button broke; and that very moment a sound behind him made him turn round—to find that the folk from the Chase had arrived, with that papist Nanny bearing the infant in front and a rag-bag of sponsors apparently rigged out for Ascot!

  They stood there watching in silent amusement, while (like the first-act curtain in Farce) cassock and surplice came down with a run.

  *

  But at last exhortations and dissertations were over, the babe through the mouths of others had promised her promises.

  Now the vicar was taking her into his arms. Nanny Halloran pursed her lips, for that clumsy old man was crushing the christening-robe which was Honiton lace and more than a hundred years old (Father Murphy had said she could come if she tried not to listen too much).

  The vicar said “Name this child,” and the godfather mumbled.

  “Susan Amanda” Mary prompted, rather too loud.

  The vicar looked down at the baby: the baby stirred and looked up at him, wide-eyed as a kitten. “Susan Amanda, I baptize thee in the Name of the Father ...” (his voice was utterly prayerful, and trembled indeed with love for what lay on his arm) “And of the Son ...” (as the water touched her again she screwed up her face) “And of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  The third time the water touched her, she wailed. The villagers stirred, for they knew what that wail meant—that was the Devil come out.... Some of them even instinctively glanced at the north door, being the way he must go; but Catholic Nanny Halloran pursed her lips yet again as the baby was handed back and she smoothed out the lace. For this hadn’t been real baptising.... However, it might be better than nothing: “One just has to hope for the best,” Father Murphy had told her.

  Meanwhile Mary stood twisting her handkerchief round her fingers. She had found it even worse than what she remembered of Polly’s. How could Gilbert have wanted it? “Just for the sake of the Village,” he’d told her; and “Why needlessly hurt the old fool’s feelings? Anyway haven’t we had all this out before over Polly, and didn’t you end by letting Polly be done? So why stir up hornet-nests now over nothing?”

  So atheist Mary had swallowed her principles. Still, didn’t Gilbert care how obscenely disgusting so much of this was? “Delivered from Thy Wrath” harked back to the vengeful gods of the jungle! My poor little sweet! (she was longing to kiss her baby but too many people were watching). “Conceived and born in sin”? What a horrible lie—and indeed how absurd, when the marriage service itself said....

  How Mary wished she had gone to the vicar in spite of Gilbert and made a clean breast! But what would have been the use? That silly old man could never have understood.

  Gilbert, in formal trousers and spats with his tall silk hat on the pew in front (but wearing only a short black coat for a girl-child), stood by a pillar smoothing his gloves. Gilbert himself had heard everything, listened to nothing. “That went very nicely,” he thought: “But thank goodness it’s over, and now we can get back to serious matters.... But bother, here comes the vicar!” Gilbert was well aware that vicars expected a kind word or two on occasions like this: “Ah, my dear Vicar! I hope ...”

  “I must trust in Him to find His own way ...” thought the vicar, escaping from Gilbert as soon as he decently could. Once out of sight in his vestry he fell on his knees to pray for the child (but he had to be quick: they had asked him over to tea, and it wouldn’t do to be late).

  *

  These were crucial times—this summer of 1924—for a rising Liberal statesman whose voice was at last beginning to make itself heard in the Party’s councils; and Gilbert had much on his mind. Labour in Office had scarcely attempted to check Unemployment: MacDonald was much too occupied dangling Dawes in front of Herriot trying to winkle him out of the Ruhr, and Ponsonby at it ding-dong with Rakovsky (wits said the Bolshevik emblem ought to be Hammer-and-Tongs). Hitherto the Liberal watchdogs had felt themselves blissfully free to bite both sides (and each other); but now the time had arrived to decide the issue on which to withdraw their Party’s lobby support and to let this minority Labour Government fall. That would mean yet another election (the third in a couple of years); and our chance—if we choose the issue correctly—to win back the erring working-class vote....

  So, with all his legitimate hopes, this hardly a time for Gilbert to welcome Augustine’s vagaries as well to worry about. Still, duties are not to be shirked.... One’s own wife’s brother (it’s in Who’s Who): if he gets in a mess one can’t just stand on the touchline.

  Gilbert rehearsed the truant’s misdeeds. Offending his German hosts by decamping like that: consorting all winter with arty riff-raff in Paris, and then disappearing and giving us all such a fright. Now, breaking silence at last with a quite inexcusably uninformative letter which gave no hint of his whereabouts—that is, apart from the Sag Harbor postmark and something about a ferry.... He said not a word about where he’d been all these last four months, about why he had gone to America, what were his plans; and who could fail to read into such studied mystification involvement with something—or somebody—most undesirable?

  There in the States, where his social standing.... The States, where so many laws lay about to be broken a stranger could hardly help breaking one (buying a lady’s inter-State railway ticket—or teaching Latin in Texas): a place where the boy was only too likely to fall into really bad hands, out there on his own....

  The Gazetteer said Sag Harbor was down the far end of Long Island: the “ferry” he spoke of must cross to New London. So now on the way home he’d have to put it squarely to Mary—and surely she wouldn’t be difficult? Surely it stood out a mile: in the boy’s own interests something had got to be done?

  5

  The godparents’ shoes were unsuited to grass: so Trivett trundled them round by road in the Daimler, while Gilbert and Mary walked home alone through the park. Gilbert, his tall silk hat enhancing the set of his jaw while tending to hide the uneasy look in his eyes as he nerved himself to his task: Mary, her flowery hat in her hand and her red-gold curls exposed to the sun—and a stubborn set to her lips.

  “That brother of yours,” said Gilbert at last (it was rather unnerving how like at times she looked to that brother): “I think I’ll get the F.O. to contact our Embassy, quietly.”

  “Do be careful!” said Mary, alarmed.

  “Esme Howard’s our new man in Washington: Howard’s the soul ...”

  “Suppose you start something? You’d better look out.”

  “I very much fear lest the boy’s in some serious scrape: more so perhaps than he knows. Your brother—I’d never forgive myself,” countered her husband with simple sincerity.

  “He’s twenty-four now: he isn’t a child.”

  Gilbert shrugged. “I’d go over in person to help him, if only ...”

  “But why not let him alone, as he obviously wants?”

  In the heavy summer shade of a huge oak Polly’s small piebald pony (the one that Augustine had given her) stood on three legs and swished at flies with his tail. He nickered as they approached, and Mary stopped to examine him. Mean-while Gilbert resumed: “I’d go over myself like a shot, but I can’t be possibly spared at this crucial moment; you see that, dear, don’t you? And Jeremy’s too—far too lightweight, too inexperienced.” (Jeremy having been unsuccessfully sent to look for his friend when Augustine vanished in France.) “So what I propose ...”

  “Just look at his feet!” interrupted Mary indignantly: “Really you’ll have to get rid of that blacksmith, he’s hopeless!”

  In park turf otherwise perfect stood one errant thistle; and no one was looking when Gilbert took a quick run—spats and all—and neatly kicked off its head.

  After that they talked of indifferen
t matters (but both on their guard), till they reached the cool and the dark of the Yew Walk where even the scent of the blazing roses outside hardly penetrated. There Gilbert tried a new tack. Augustine’s letter said nothing about coming home: what about his estates? His agent in Wales seemed decent enough, but was old; and wasn’t this just how estates got into a mess? “But Augustine shouldn’t be too hard to trace, with that postmark to go on. The ferry he spoke of must cross to New London: that means he’ll have gone to Bar Harbor, or Newport—or possibly Marblehead: this time of year there aren’t many places that anyone goes. And that sort of upper-ten summer resort will be stiff just now with Embassy chaps....” For surely Mary must see for the boy’s own sake the Embassy’d better get their hooks in him pretty damn quick?

  But this time Mary said nothing. “Gilbert’s on tenterhooks,” Mary thought, “over his post in the next Liberal Ministry—deadly afraid lest his brother-in-law does something embarrassing....” Mary had guessed a lot more clearly than Gilbert himself what lay behind his sudden solicitude: for Gilbert never allowed unworthy motives to rise to the surface of even a private mind “so schooled” as the unkind Jeremy said of it once, “only to see the best in everyone, starting of course with himself!”

  Thus husband and wife arrived at the house feeling sadly at odds (“Mary is being difficult ...” “Gilbert is being absurd ...”). But the garden door was overhung by Mellton’s famous late-flowering yellowish-white wisteria, dripping with bees; and a bee stung Gilbert’s neck, which took their minds off the rift for a while.

  *

  Once tea was over, Mary went up to her room. There the baby was brought for its six o’clock feed, and although it was really her bedtime Polly came too (it was good for Polly to take an interest).

  “My birfday tomorrow!” said Polly.

  “Birthday, dear,” Nanny corrected, and crackled her starch. “You’re old enough now to talk properly: tomorrow you’ll be ...”

  “I saw you!” Polly interrupted, triumphant: “There was six!”

  “‘Little-Miss-Sharpeyes,’” said Nanny (Polly had caught her getting out the colored cake-candles for Minta to take down to Cook).

  Once Mary had lifted her breast and fitted the strong little mouth to her nipple it instantly started to suck; and “Who’ve you invited to come to your birthday, darling?” she asked.

  “Only dogs,” said Polly with finality.

  “What—no Mrs. Winter?” said Nanny: “No Mr. Wantage?”

  “Yes of course them! But, and only dogs.”

  “Not even your Father and Mother, Miss Polly?”

  Polly looked up in surprise at so silly a question, and didn’t bother to answer. But after a long pause she added: “I do wish Gusting would come!” and sighed from the depths of her heart. Augustine—the key performer erstwhile at all Polly’s birthdays....

  With Susan’s prehensile little sucker dragging her nipple the mother lapsed into a daze; but in spite of her mind’s increasing milkiness all her thoughts (like Polly’s) went back to the distant Augustine.

  Indeed what on earth was he up to? For even this latest letter said nothing; and ever since going abroad his letters were all of them like that, they never said what you wanted to know. His letters from Paris had talked about nothing but Art—not a word about even why he’d left Germany!

  Art indeed seemed to have suddenly gone to his head: Modern Art, “Significant Form” and all that from Clive Bell. A Cézanne, a late Van Gogh and a little Renoir: Picabia—he seemed to be buying the lot! And as for the really aberrant eccentrics, the ones even he called the Wild-cats—the Cubists and so on: while frankly admitting he couldn’t make head-or-tail of their painting he still flopped about near the flame, like a moth! Cock-a-hoop at even seeing Derain afar in some café, let alone really meeting Matisse....

  Augustine was hoping to meet a certain “Miss Stein” whose salon these fanatics all frequented; but that apparently never came off, for his last Paris letter of all had said he was leaving post-haste for St. Malo (it seemed some young French poet who lived there might take him to visit that eminent Cubist across the water at Dinard). He must have dashed off to St. Malo without even stopping to ask if Picasso this year was at Dinard at all (which he wasn’t, as Jeremy later discovered); and there—from St. Malo—he’d just disappeared!

  She shifted Susan across.

  Her husband, her brother.... So much poor Mary did love and admire them both; but she’d long ago given up hoping to cope with the way those two underrated each other. Probably Gilbert expected Augustine would end up in jail—an American jail, and in all the American papers! Dear Gilbert, on this sort of issue he could be his own worst caricature....

  All the same, whatever Augustine was up to was very certainly Hush—and Gilbert had got to be stopped!

  The conviction struck Mary so forcibly she almost cried it aloud: her milk ceased coming, and Susan set up a howl.

  6

  In the ovenish midnight dark the ominous sound of a rogue mosquito grew higher and shriller the closer it drew to the sleeping head on the pillow. Augustine stirred at the sound, and woke just before the brute could alight to feed on his ear.

  He woke from a nightmare in which he was pushed on a public stage with an unknown play going on, and had had to learn his part while he played it. Lying awake, he reflected that this was indeed a pretty fair picture of how he had spent those lost four months between St. Malo and here: for he’d never intended becoming a desperado and hadn’t a clue as to how to conduct himself....

  Pacing the late-night quays at St. Malo, a lawful and lovesick traveler.... Then he remembered nothing until the sound of that rhythmical watery gurgle-and-plop, gurgle-and-plop in the pitch dark and feeling of rearing and reeling each time he came-to (and went under and came-to again). A genuine dizzy swaying and reeling of everywhere, fused and confused in the dark with the swaying and reeling and pain inside his own stomach and head. Noise, and the cold; and the smell of tar, and of bilge water slopping up at him reeking of dead rat and well-oiled machine guns and burst pots of paint and the vomit all over his clothes. Overhead, fearful impacts of metal on wood. Pain—and the perishing cold; and an absolute blank in his mind about whether he’d ever left Paris, and where he was now. And nobody with him down there in the darkness and noise, apart from a cat having kittens....

  In short, the English Milord had been slugged for his bulging wallet and flung down any old hatchway alongside the quay—down one just about to be closed as it happened, the ship being ready to sail; and there had lain sprawled, without money or passport, in the battened-down hold of a schooner bound for Rum Row. By the time Augustine came-to they’d been out in the pobble surrounding the Île de Cézembre—and already off Ushant before he was found.

  Alice May’s thirsty cargo was stowed in the main-hold, amidships: this was the forehold, which only housed the spare gear (including the guns they would need when they got there as well as the fenders and ropes which had broken his fall when that dockside thug slung him down). If they’d not had to look for the cat they adored they might never have found him—not even off Ushant.

  *

  The Master was Cockney, the Mate was from Hull: a fond pair of old friends who played the giddy-goat all day with each other, and kept the crew in a roar with their practical jokes and music-hall backchat but handled their ship as a maestro handles a fiddle, and blew on their men as a flautist blows on a flute.

  Faced with a wholly unwanted concussed Augustine and nowhere to land him they’d had to make use of him, turning him into a rum-running Able Seaman as best they could. They mightn’t have had to cope with Augustines before, but their touch with this one was faultless. Once back on his feet and fit for light duty (with sail-thread still in his scalp and still inclined to see double), they started to tease and play tricks on him just like each other. From moment to moment he never knew if those two were fooling or serious: this made his sea-apprenticeship none too easy—but left him with no t
ime to think (which was really the point, as he realized now).

  They had made no bones at all about being rum-runners, looking on Prohibition as just a low-comedy villain whom every right-minded person must want to help foil; and you weren’t even breaking the law (so they told him) provided you stopped outside territorial waters and sold your stuff for the contact-boats to run in. On the Row, moreover, the prices were golden....

  Liners can chug more-or-less straight across; but west-bound sail finds it pays to make a big detour, adding a thousand miles to the distance but dodging those northern waters where headwinds prevail and working down south to pick up the Trades. So the schooner’s course for the Long Island coast she was bound for had taken Augustine to seas that were streaked with more greens and blues, and more bluey-greens and greeny-blues, than even Pissarro in Paris had painted with: amethyst rollers veined with turquoise and shot with emerald, flecked with gold and swallowing snow. Week after week those nights when the stars slowly swayed right-to-left, left-to-right past the fingering topmast and, deep in her shadow, the flattish curve of her hull streamed sparks in the inky darkness below. Dawns with the sun leaping suddenly out of the sea astern like a searchlight: days with one blazing sun overhead and the waves tossing back a myriad sparkling suns of their own—but with rainbows of spray sweeping over the deck, and a cooling breeze.... All the same, life at sea wasn’t all beer-and-skittles; and once they’d ensured he would dance to their tune like the others they made him pull ropes like a seaman, shoot stars like a mate, tally accounts like a supercargo—and cook, when the cook got D.T.s.

  His first time out on a topsail yard had been absolute hell, for you climbed the ratlines and then you sidled away from the mast with your feet on a fly-away swinging footrope—and balanced waist-level against the heaving yard, with your hands full of gear so only your quaking belly left to hold on with knowing if once you let your feet swing forward from under you’re going to be bucked straight backwards into the air; and eighty feet up you smash like an egg if you tumble. It’s merely a matter of balance of course, and pie as a ground-level ploy for any well-found nursery-governess: still, up aloft there and giddy with height, that first time of all he had nearly fallen to death for no reason other than fear.