The Wooden Shepherdess (2 page)

B
ARON
W
ALTHER VON
K
ESSEN
: a distant relative of Augustine's living at Schloss Lorienburg in Bavaria.

A
DÈLE
: his wife.

F
RANZ
: their eldest son.

M
ITZI
: their eldest daughter, aged 17, with whom Augustine fell madly in love, but before he could tell her so she went blind and vanished into a convent.

O
TTO
: Walther von Kessen's half-brother and general factotum: a retired Colonel who lost a leg in World War I.

P
UTZI
H
ANFSTÄNGL
: An ardent Nazi in whose cottage at Uffing Hitler was hiding when arrested after the Munich “putsch.”

R
EINHOLD
S
TEUCKEL
: a distinguished Munich lawyer.

L
OTHAR
: a starry-eyed young patriot, who took part in the “putsch.”

[W
OLFF
: Lothar's brother. A young guerilla and political assassin, who hanged himself in the attics at Lorienburg.]

ABOVE, IN THE dried aromatic scrub, an early cicada churred.

A watersnake flashed in the dwindled summer cascade scarcely tinkling into the one pool deep enough to swim in—yet high up these hollow banks wrack dangled from washed-out roots, spring's melting snows must send a torrent down this wide gully of hot white stones.... Out of the quivering overhead heat a big butterfly flopped on the rock beside them, and opened its wings to the sun.

“What a mean scar! How come?” the girl asked curiously, feeling the back of his head none-too-gently with her fingers.

You couldn't quite call her a child—but certainly not a grown-up.... Like him, she was stretched on the rock chin-on-knuckles: wide blue eyes gazed out of sunburn and freckles straight into his, so close he could feel her breath on his cheek. You couldn't
quite
call her a child ... and he stirred on the hard stone, withdrawing a little—but then settled back on the same spot exactly, for anywhere else was too hot to touch.

Her sun-bleached hair was cropped like a boy's. She was dressed in a boy's blue denim overalls bought at the village store, faded and softened almost to rottenness by much sun and much washing; a blue canvas work-shirt (ditto, and some of the buttons undone). When she had caught him there swimming stark naked, no wonder at first he had thought it was only a boy and hadn't bothered! When it wasn't a boy he had pulled on shirt and trousers without stopping to dry himself: she, though, had simply stood there and watched him and when he sat down to pull on his shoes had simply sat down beside him and started to talk. For this young English stranger arrived in New Blandford from nowhere, his six-foot frame adorned in such threadbare and clumsily-mended incongruous clothes ...“We” wanted to know every last thing about him, it seemed!

She had proved full of questions. Indeed she had asked much too much that she mustn't be told (or allowed to find out, if he wanted to keep out of trouble). However, he liked her.... If not any longer entirely a child it was clear she didn't yet know it: she seemed still as open and friendly and—unadolescent as one. “That, on the back of my head? Where somebody slugged me,” he told her, and smiled.

She felt it again (having nothing finer to sew with had left a raised seam on his scalp, like a sail). “It's scary!” she said: then hitched herself on her elbows an inch or two even nearer and lay like a lizard, smelling sweetly of sun. Out of his damp iridescent wet mop (each hair a miniature prism to split this intense white light) she saw droplets of water still trickle to dry on the golden tan of his broad intelligent forehead, his peeling nose....

The water glittered. The glassy air warped in the heat: heat struck up at them both from the rock as well as down from the sky. Their faces touched, almost. A tiny sweat-bead had formed on one of her freckles, and crept down the nose one inch from his own. She screwed up her eyes, and puckered her lips like someone beginning to whistle.... Then—with her eyelids still shut so tight that they quivered—her hand fumbled open the front of his shirt and slid right inside, warm against skin still froggy a bit from the creek: “Sakes!” she exclaimed, “What makes your heart hammer
so
?”

Firmly he felt for those fingers and gently withdrew them: let go the moment he got them outside, and asked in a voice as flat as he could what her name was....

Blinking incredulous eyes wide open and suddenly sitting bolt-upright, “Ree” she said absently. Then for no obvious reason she shot away six feet from him, skiddering over the rock on her pointed behind the way little apes do. “Anne-Ma
rie
” was volunteered huffily, over her shoulder. Then she relented a little, and told him: “Was named for a Louisiana grand-mother.... Yeah, and your name too's.... ‘Augusteen': that sure is French!”

She'd pronounced it almost as French; but before he had time to protest (or even to wonder how she'd discovered it) back she was, close: “Lookee!” she urged, and was making him look at her shirt's breast-pocket under the bib of her overalls. “REE” was clumsily chain-stitched across it in colored wools, below a colored-wool turtle: “You feel my turtle—it's sure s-soft!” she invited, and tugged at his hand (but he wouldn't).

The next thing she said was: “Loan me your shirt, so I embroider your name like all ours,” and “T,I,N,O”—she was spelling it out on his chest with her finger, glancing sideways up at him: “‘Tino': is that what folks call you, back home?”

He told her firmly that
none
of his friends called him Tino. Whereon she relapsed at last into silence: yawned, stood up, and began to undress.

“All the same, I don't smoke cigarettes!” she shouted, apropos of nothing, her shirt over her head and her jeans round her ankles: “Do you smoke cigarettes for Chrissake—or what
do
you do?” She wriggled her feet out of trousers and sneakers together. “
And
I don't drink liquor, I hate it!”

Expecting just tomboy bare skin as she peeled off her tomboy attire, it came as a shock to see all the modish crêpe-de-chine she wore under it.

“Well? My hair fell out with the fever—so what?”

Then—peach-colored crêpe-de-chine nonsense and all—she dived straight in off the rock; and Augustine's thoughts reverted to Mitzi with rather a bump.

*

Mitzi
... Unseeing gray eyes, spread fingers among the breakfast things finding her coffee-cup for her like feelers....

The passage of months and oceans had shrunk her image to something small and bright and picture-like: something seen as if looking back through a tunnel, or down the wrong end of a telescope. Something that danced in the air like a kind of medallion above this alien Connecticut pool, and yet was enough to convince him he'd never love anyone quite like Mitzi again for the whole of his life. If only he'd had a fair chance before she went in her convent to teach her there isn't a God to go in to.... Sorrow rose stale in his throat.

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.

“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.

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!