The Wooden Shepherdess (3 page)

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 so 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.

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 frills 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).

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 ...”