The Wooden Shepherdess (31 page)

Dinner time came. They looked for somewhere to sit not wholly infested with ants, then pulled off their squelching boots and stockings to “dry” in the sun and pulled out their bread-and-jam. Everyone shared alike, so Brian didn't go hungry; but no one would sit very near him because how he smelled, in the sun—though a pair of Red Admiral butterflies loved it, and wouldn't leave him alone.

After dinner most of the others went back to the water to get even wetter; but Norah sat on, in that place of jammy bits of paper and crumbs, downcast that her lovely idea for brightening Brian's life didn't seem to have worked. Presently three others joined her: Jean (who also was only twelve, though the length of her legs had won her a double portion of kingcups), Rita the Gormless—whose father was treating them better now, so pawning his Sunday suit had worked in the end; and Lily, the “bad” one none of their mothers liked. Four girls the same age, and soon so engrossed with each other that presently even Norah forgot about Brian.

After a while they must have felt they needed some shade to sit in, or flowers to pick or something: for Brian saw them wandering off—still barefoot, and treading the tussocky turf like Agag for fear of prickles. So what should he do? If he joined those other ones down at the pool he might get splashed, or even pushed in; and anyway children were not much use when what his slaughterhouse day-dreaming needed was something four-footed and furry.... His sheep? As he crawled through the hedge to look, the quickset above him was suddenly all alive with wings; and poking his nose in the flowering weeds beyond he saw, two inches away from his streaming hay-feverish eyes, a head like a maniac horse's with disk-like eyes you couldn't tell what he was thinking and legs like enormous jointed derricks....

That big green grasshopper's blank-looking eyes must have read the watery glint in his own: for it jumped one-tenth-of-a-second before he grabbed. Moreover his sheep was gone. There weren't even rabbits about: he nibbled some rabbit-droppings to taste how recent they were, though really he knew full well that at this time of day the rabbits would all be deep in their burrows. With restless hands in his pockets he tried to envisage a soft-eyed calf waiting its turn for the knife; but baseless imagination was not his strong point.

Then somehow it entered his head to follow those four big girls: not catching them up of course, just scouting stealthily after the sound of their voices.

Keeping well hidden himself, at last he sighted them sitting among some gnarled old hawthorn bushes: a wellworn bower littered with cigarette-packets (and worse), but amply festooned with briars and brambles and old-man's-beard. Long-legged Jean had woven her kingcups into a coronet, Rita's head was wreathed in ivy and ragged-robin, Norah had stuck pink campion into her carroty hair and Lily wore cowslip earrings. They sat with their heads together and faces flushed: on the ground beside them were primrose bunches which nimble fingers unconsciously wove into chains, while the wicked Lily held forth in a furtive giggling voice and the other three listened entranced....

He ought to have seen they were talking secrets, and made himself scarce at once—not mindlessly watched them from cover awhile, then crept out into the open and stood up shyly.

As soon as they saw him the four girls screamed, they sprang to their feet and surrounded him calling him Peeping Tom and a spy. How much had he overheard? Lily said something about how he ought to be tore into bits by rights.... His knees felt ready to fold, for these girls were so awful big and look at them beefy great arms! But worst of all were them eyes, with a funny old look which had him wanting to run—though he couldn't of course, he knew he hadn't a hope....

The next thing, Norah gave a high-pitched cackle of laughter and started dressing him top-to-toe in flowers. While all of them hung their primrose-chains round his neck, Norah set about properly decking him out as a Flower King: with a bluebell crown on his head, a half-made cowslip-ball as an orb to hold and an early ragwort stalk as a scepter. Then four huge Flower Maidens joined their hands in a circle round him and started to dance. Trapped in the middle, he turned from one to the other with doubtful appeasing smiles: so afraid of their crimson excited faces and big blank grasshopper-eyes that he squeezed his orb and scepter to pulp.

Suddenly Lily broke from the ring and snatched at the gaping front of his shorts so it hurt what her fingers tweaked. He started to grizzle; but Lily pushed him flat on his back, flung herself down on top and rolled on him. Norah dived to the rescue but.... Whew, that lascivious stench in the pitiless sun of terrified overheated boy and the blood of cowslips and bullocks mixed! The Devil himself must have brewed that stink: for instead of it letting her drag the incubus off him it rolled her on top of him too, and the little gold cross she wore round her neck cut his eye. Then all four rolled on the squashed little male in turns, squirming like dogs do rolling in something dead.

Even after they'd all got off him that awful Lily must put the lid on it, squatting down in the open and doing a countryone right where Brian could see.

As soon as he got enough breath back he started to cry, and wouldn't get up off the ground. It was starting to rain, and the other three girls all crept under bushes; but Brian just lay where he was, and Norah must stick to her guns (with that wicked old bog on the prowl for all lost little boys) till he promised to follow them back—he could lag behind them as far as he liked provided he kept them in sight.

That was luckily only a shower, though looking like more was to come with the sun already gone down in a stormy tumult of gray and gold as they started home. On the weary trek back to town there were punitive showers of hail, and the little ones started to cry: so they had to be carried, as well as the nets and jars and the branches and bunches of flowers for Mum.... Lucky Lily, whose baby brother and sense of sin seemed equally light! For Norah was burdened down by that awful load on her conscience as well as with fat little Syl on her back because he was nobody's brother. She needed both hands for his flowers, so Syl had to hold her tiddler-jar; but Syl was sleepy, and presently slopped it all down the back of her neck inside—the water and tiddlers too, so he had to be set down a minute and slapped and afterwards hugged and kissed (this made him wrinkle his nose, for now she was wet she smelled even more of Brian).

To speed their weariness Norah started them singing “Three Blind Mice” in their innocent out-of-tune voices, while straining her ears all the time—wild horses couldn't have made her turn to look—for the sound of Brian dragging his feet a couple of hundred yards behind them, almost the only one neither carried nor carrier.

Darkness had fallen before they got home, and their mothers were wild; but the truants were quickly forgotten because of the wonderful news that the General Strike was over—we'd won, and the Coventry Council of Action had issued a handbill:

A MASS VICTORY MEETING WILL BE HELD TONIGHT POOL MEADOW—6 P.M.

LONG LIVE THE BRITISH WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT!

(Meanwhile Norah's mother had taken one sniff and told her daughter to thoroughly wash her hair; but nobody noticed when Norah instead slipped out to Confession in case she died in the night.)

After the meeting, jubilant strikers stayed up till dawn preparing their victory celebrations; and when morning came with the news that the Strike had really ended in abject surrender by Organized Labour they couldn't believe their ears. Some of the leaders hoped that the Strike could be started again even now. They piled into somebody's car, and went on a deputation to Eccleston Square; but all they got was the dustiest dusty answer—and frankly, most of the rank-and-file were only too glad to get back to work as soon as the Boss would allow.

It was back to school for children as well as grown-ups; but Norah found that in spite of her having had Absolution she couldn't, today, do even the easiest sums.

She had lent her ears to impure talk, and her body to impure desires: Absolution had washed her clean of her carnal sin—for what that was worth, but Absolution couldn't begin to undo the harm she had done to that poor little runt she had set out to help! To the albatross henceforth hung round her neck.... For she'd get no second chance: the Brian who seemed unapproachable once would be even more hopelessly unapproachable now. If her soul was indeed washed clean that could be only its outside: inside it felt like a sink.

She was feeling much as Augustine had felt that morning he'd woken to see a reflected sunrise hanging outside his Canadian window upside-down.

TWO RATTLESNAKES FIGHTING deny themselves the use of their fangs: they merely wrestle till one or the other admits defeat. The British appeared to have reached the ethical level of rattlesnakes, ending their General Strike like that with nobody shot or knifed or even kicked in the teeth—though this was the nearest thing to a civil war which Britain had known since heaven-knows-when. Jeremy thought all this had been Baldwin's predeterminate plan: “Dr. Baldwin's National Vaccination” he called it, writing to Joan: “A minimal dose of the Continental virus of Revolution aimed at conferring lifelong immunity.”

Joan showed Jeremy's letter to Ludovic Corcos, who merely remarked: “Yes, they order things better east of the Rhine.”

He left her to guess what he meant. But in Germany Nazis and Communists, Nazis and Social Democrats, Stahlhelm—these rivals could hardly meet on the streets without somebody getting killed. Fifty to eighty casual deaths each year was part of the normal process of winning votes; and if that was the norm which Franz's and Lothar's generation was used to, then England's bloodless General Strike (so far from being admired) could only portend a hopelessly lightweight nation that couldn't be serious even over its politics. Once Prime Minister Baldwin had let the fruits of victory slip through his fingers with nobody hanged or even thrown in the Tower, how could even the Anglophil Walther help wondering what had become of the sturdier England of Cromwell and Charles I?

But the English are famous for being incomprehensible. Father and son alike remembered that visiting English cousin of three years back, that “Augustin.” Head and body and legs had looked like a fellow-human yet nothing he said or did made sense: his mind seemed unable to take in the simplest basic human ideas, like trying to play a game of draughts with your horse....

*

One June morning at Tottersdown, Ludo was urging too how very much nearer the knuckle it is to describe the English as uncomprehending than merely incomprehensible (Joan had come over to see the Manet his father had lately bought: Augustine was there already, and now all three were talking of other things in Ludovic's den upstairs). “You're capable only of seeing the world through your own English eyes, so all you see is a mirror reflecting your own English faces and can't conceive that what makes Germans tick is other than what makes you tick yourselves.”

“We're hopelessly Anglomorphic?” suggested Augustine.

“Exactly.
You
've never known what it means to feel cribbed and confined like Dr. Theophilus Wagner's psychotic rats.”

“What were they?”

“The Professor kept them close-caged in a garden shed, where he found that their wild-state social system completely broke down and turned to a murderous struggle for senseless dominance—each rat biting his neighbor's carotid or peritoneum, and leaving the victim to die of internal bleeding or sepsis.”

“Rats are terribly human,” sighed Joan.

“In that case, so are the Germans! This senseless aggression of German against brother German was something unknown in pre-War days. Then, wild-state Germans could wander all over the world; but ever since 1918 the Germans have felt themselves caged in by hostile keepers. This has produced that same traumatic sense of confinement, an almost hysterical longing for ‘Lebensraum' wrecking their once-exemplary social cohesion.”

“One thing Jeremy told me after his trip abroad was how ‘political action' means opposite things today in English and German,” said Joan.

“It does indeed! Here it means making a speech in the House; but there ‘political action' lies in the streets, not in a Reichstag hamstrung by splinter-parties. The only German political party which counts is one with a ‘Militant Arm.' The Nazi
Storm Troops
, the Tories'
Helmets of Steel
, the Socialist
Iron Front
—and the Communist
Red Front
guns for Socialists even more than for Stahlhelm or Nazis! All these private thuggery-armies excite themselves with uniforms, brass bands and flags—then out come their knives and knuckle-dusters and clubs.” Ludo pulled out of his pocket some three or four inches of iron pipe: “Have you ever seen one of these?”

“No,” said Augustine. “What is it?”

“They're called ‘Stahlruten,' and now become regular Storm Troop issue. The weapon is little enough to lie hid in the fist, but swing it and out fly small iron balls on the end of springs which can crack the solidest skulls. They're far more lethal than old-fashioned bicycle-chains.” He swung it, and shattered a vase he had never liked.

“What beats me,” said Joan as she picked up the bits, “is how the Weimar Republic still holds together at all. Yet Reichstag elections take place, and Members go through the motions of passing laws and making or breaking governments.”

“Only because of the Regular Army,” said Ludo. “The Army stands aloof in the background, like Gallio caring for none of these things yet always ready to put in its oar if an actual Putsch is threatened—it happened to Hitler in 1923 when he tried it on. Moreover, their Head of State and Supreme Commander-in-Chief is now their old War-Lord, Field-Marshal Hindenburg. That makes the Army's allegiance doubly secure....”

“But does it?” broke in Augustine: “You never quite know with Germans—how they'll react, I mean. Jeremy once heard a Junker colonel he met in Vienna denounce the old man as a traitor for breaking his oath to the Kaiser—
he
wanted your Field-Marshal President hanged!”