The Wooden Shepherdess (36 page)

Men maimed.... Yet that cheerful couple of crippled beggars (one with his hands and feet cut off, the other his eyes put out) had regarded their ancient sentence not only as fair since they'd both been thieves, but the obvious commonsensical one since now they could thieve no more: “After a mere spell in jail like under the French today we'd have just gone back to our former lives.” They had tried to make him admit European penal ways were the crude unintelligent ones!

To him it had come as a breath of fresh air that—unlike most conquered “colonial” peoples—the Moors felt no faintest inferiority complex towards Europeans: for Unbelievers could barely be thought of as equals, much less superiors. Once, the Moors had overrun Europe and now it was Europe's turn; but come the next swing of the pendulum Moors would be back in Spain and France....

One couldn't help liking a country moreover with no class-distinctions, which commonly used the same word—one meaning “friend”—for
master
and
servant
both: whereas in Dorset imagine a caller at Mellton asking Wantage if Wantage's “friend” was at home!

But, trapped by that simple thought of four bare legs in a bed....

“Mazagan's first: a tramp-steamer bound for Liverpool sailing tomorrow night,” said Ludo thrusting a sailing-list under Augustine's nose.

Augustine's neck went a brick-red color not wholly the fault of the sun. “Sorry.... Perhaps.... Well, I don't think I need be in quite so much hurry as
that
,” he mumbled.

“Next week would do?”

Augustine mumbled again even more indistinctly, but seemed to imply that he mightn't be going at all after second thoughts. They could hardly expect him to leave Morocco again so soon, now he'd got there at last....

Once again Ludo showed no surprise; but “Poor fish, Morocco has got you truly and properly hooked!” was what Ludo thought.

In Dorset all had gone well at the birth, with only a vaguely disgusting unease which Mary couldn't even locate while her third—and as it were posthumous—baby was winkled into the world without any help from herself.

The boy had been born on October the 29th. November was hardly the month for large marquees on the lawn, so thank God (thought Gilbert) for Paxton's Disciple! That glass-roofed acre was eighty yards long and sixty yards wide: the “ballroom” could easily hold such an omnium-gatherum Christening Party as this one, with drugget to save the parquet from hobnailed boots and carpets spread on the part reserved for the gentry.

After the sun—if any—went down, all seventy gauntleted forearms clutching electric bulbs must blaze into light even if some of them needed rewiring first. The only serious problem was heat.... In places the chimney-pipes of those cast-iron stoves were rusted through, which inclined them to smoke. But surely so many hundreds of guests could generate quite enough natural animal heat of their own without any stoves at all? And Mrs. Winter had six suits of Wadamy livery laid up in mothballs since the War, so footmen to wear them would have to be hired from an agency....

As for the date, that would have to depend on the Bishop's other engagements: so Gilbert wrote to find out (what a pity that Mellton Church wasn't larger!).

Meanwhile the names for the boy must be settled. As heir to the Mellton Acres and other even more lucrative sources of income, it stood to reason his first name had to be “Gilbert.” But Gilbert père was magnanimous: one name at least should commemorate kin on the mother's side. Mary's father turned out to have been another “Augustine,” so
he
wouldn't do.... Great-Uncle Arthur, or Great-Uncle William? But Gilbert didn't much like either name: “Didn't you have a young cousin killed in the War who, if he'd lived? ...”

So “Henry” it had to be, on the Penry-Herberts' behalf: with a lot more besides, traditional Wadamy names from the family tree which Gilbert already had up his sleeve.

Choosing the godfathers called for even more thought. They had to be fairly young and be future prime-ministers: spotting the right ones taxed even Gilbert's powers of foresight, and almost called for a crystal ball. But the god-mother.... Surely, surely, the obvious claimant was Joan—if only Gilbert had dared to propose her?

*

One raw and windless November morning poised on the very brink of frost, ecclesiastical duties had called the Archdeacon to Salisbury. Joan had some shopping to do, so had driven him in.

Once her shopping was done she had slipped inside the cathedral. There her mind had divided. The purely habitual half—triggered off as it always was as soon as she got inside by the perfect triple cube of that wonderful nave—began for the fiftieth time to speculate what the cathedral looked like before those Georgian vandals got loose on it tearing down mediaeval chantries, smashing the ancient stained-glass windows simply to get at the lead, and dumping cartloads of priceless glass in the City Ditch. That aesthetically insensitive eighteenth-century Age of the Georges had much to answer for to posterity.... Such reflections however were quite automatic, and meanwhile the upper half of her mind got busy on what she had really come for: choosing a quiet spot in which to study again Augustine's evasively-worded cable. For nearly a week she had carried it everywhere in her bag, but she still couldn't quite make out what he meant to do except that he might not be coming home “just yet.”

She finally slipped to her knees: for God at any rate ought to know what Augustine's intentions really were, even supposing he barely knew them himself!

Fully five minutes had passed before she began to be vexed by a feeling she wasn't alone after all. She raised her eyes; and there stood a young man silently watching her. Some-body, surely, she didn't know from Adam.... Or was that face perhaps vaguely familiar after all, and merely some-one she couldn't quite place? When she rose from her knees he stepped forward and bowed, and spoke of that fateful Boxing Day Meet nearly two years ago. For this was Anthony Fairfax, Augustine's American friend—and as for meeting Miss Dibden again by chance like this, he couldn't be more delighted!

But what had brought him to England? In order to talk more freely they moved outside to the porch. The young American said he had come back mainly to pay his respects to a distant kinsman, head of the Fairfax line and only American citizen ever to have his right to an ancient peerage confirmed by the House of Lords. But of course he had hoped to meet up with Augustine as well. He had written before he sailed, but had got no reply: was Augustine abroad?

Joan remarked in an off-hand way she believed he had gone to Morocco or some such outlandish place where the letter was probably lost. Anthony then went on to explain he had come down here intending to call at Mellton and ask for news of his friend, but couldn't until he knew if that poor unfortunate Mrs. Wadamy still was alive....

Just then Joan saw her brother crossing the withered grass of the Close: a black and almost emblematic appearance under those silent limes and elms, their bare boughs hoary-bearded with rime and mist. Mr. Fairfax was introduced, and insisted on walking them both to Milford Street to lunch at the ancient inn where he lodged. There, quite a passable claret was found; and over their chops he charmed the Archdeacon so much that the latter invited him over to dine. And of course this meant he must stay the night if he hadn't a car, for branch-line trains didn't run very late....

Mr. Fairfax accepted with thanks, if it wasn't too great an imposition.

Their talk then turned to the tombs which that infamous Georgian architect Wyatt had so disastrously rearranged: a subject on which the Archdeacon felt strongly. Mr. Fairfax duly deplored their present higgledy-piggledy too (he had ancestors buried here on his mother's side). As for Wyatt's wanton destruction of Beauchamp and Hungerford Chantries and even the Bell-tower, Archdeacon Dibden possessed some rare old prints he would like Mr. Fairfax to see this evening.... And bless me, why not stay for three or four nights if their guest could spare the time?

Mr. Fairfax politely demurred at first; but his new friend assured him that Rectory life was deadly dull for an Archdeacon's sister, he had to be out so much: she saw so few new faces these days it would be an enormous kindness to Joan as well as himself.

As for trains.... Since he hadn't a car he had better come back with them now, if he didn't object to an hour's drive in a rather ancient and battered Morris-Cowley.

It must have been four or five weeks later that Ludo had ridden out from Marrakesh one day with Augustine, to lunch with a friend of his father's—“lunch” being a meal that had started early and lasted nearly five hours. Their host the Shareef was hardly the shape for climbing stairs, so there weren't any stairs in his castle but only the gentlest of ramps which took perhaps fifty yards to rise to the floor above; and even then he moved so slowly he almost appeared to be standing still (not that his guests felt anxious to move much faster than he did, after that meal). All the same, they had to ascend to the top of the walls from which to admire the miles of olives he owned, and on which his ample income depended as well as on holiness.

Therefore before going home they were sent to inspect his olive presses. These looked ancient and crude contraptions of boards weighed down by stones; and yet they produced from superlative hand-picked, hand-peeled, hand-pipped fruit the most delectable “virgin” oil. This wonderful oil was famous throughout the country, and far too rare and fine to be sold: the Shareef made his money by afterwards shipping the pulp to Marseilles to be squeezed again in hydraulic presses, then pulverized in hot water and anything oily skimmed off the top like the fat off soup—or be doctored with carbon disulphide and God-knows-what—to produce the “Huile de Provence” of commerce.

Augustine's mind was still brimming over with olive-oil and even dreaming of buying some olive-groves of his own when at last they got back to Marrakesh and Fernet Branca, which wasn't till after sundown.

There Augustine found a letter from Anthony Fairfax, dated from Garland's Hotel in Suffolk Street: a place that the Cloth frequented—a place not so much a home-from-home as a Close-from-Close. This was the sort of London hotel Archdeacons were likely to recommend: which might have provided a clue, had Augustine known the place.... And a clue was needed, for this was an unexpected letter indeed—challenging him to a duel but giving no hint of the reason. It merely asked him to choose his weapons and name his seconds.

Augustine tossed it across to Ludo: had poor old Anthony gone off his head? Ludo was tired and overfed and feeling silly: “You'd better choose rubber balloons, and name the Archbishops Ebor and Cantuar as your seconds.” He tossed the letter back. “What has he got against you?”

“God knows: we haven't seen each other since Mary's fall.”

“You're right: he must be nuts. But does anyone really fight duels nowadays, apart from French politicians who shut their eyes and shoot at the sky?”

“Oh yes, in the Southern States they apparently do. This would be Anthony's third. The first was when someone accused him of giving his ball a push at the County Croquet Tournament.... I can't remember about the second.”

“You'd better just tear it up.”

But Augustine was rather more worried than Ludo guessed, for on no account did he mean to lose his friend if that could by any means be avoided. It certainly wouldn't do to send an even faintly facetious reply: misunderstandings can be cleared up and even some unintentional slight be forgiven in time, but poking fun on the sacred subject of dueling—never, not by an Anthony Culpepper Fairfax of South Carolina! No: even though he might have his tongue in his cheek he must pen a carefully-worded and dignified answer instead, declaring he had not the faintest idea how he might have offended and taking his stand on the point that he could not, in honor, accept the challenge without being told this in black-and-white. “Fairfax” could hardly expect “Penry-Herbert” to stand and be shot through the head without even knowing what crime he was dying for.

*

Posts from Morocco were slow, since each Great Power maintained its own; and perhaps the postman who carried the bag to the coast had run out of kif on the way, for the ration His Majesty's Postmaster-General issued them was—to say the least of it—niggardly.... Anyway, Penry-Herbert's reply only landed on Fairfax's breakfast tray on Christmas morning.

Anthony read it with growing disillusion. Since Penry-Herbert's pretense not to know the issue was arrant nonsense, he must also know very well his demand to have it expressed in writing was one that could not be met (for the name of the lady concerned, and even the fact that a lady's name
was
involved must never be breathed in Affairs of Honor). What saddened him most was to think he had ever called “friend” a man who could make such flimsy excuses to get out of fighting.

Anthony even thought of pursuing him out to Morocco in order to slap his face and thereby compel him to fight—but why should he bother? The long and the short of it was that Penry-Herbert was yellow: which put him beyond the pale, leaving Anthony free henceforth to pay court to Joan with an easy conscience.

* *

It only remains to record that the next time Augustine went to Dorset he wouldn't find any hardly-used Patient Griselda awaiting him. Long before that Mrs. Fairfax was gone: all Tottersdown Rectory had to show was an elderly housekeeper, someone (alas for the poor Archdeacon!) who ruled her master's goings-out and his comings-in with a rod of iron.

It was lucky for Joan that Anthony wasn't a gambling type, and that land-speculation hadn't hit South Carolina. In England, spring had seen the collapse of the General Strike; and across the Atlantic, this autumn saw the collapse of the Florida Land Boom. That was America's first warning bell, which almost nobody heard (America's final bell wouldn't ring for another three years, when the Stockmarket bubble burst as the Florida bubble had burst—but that was a tocsin you had to be deaf-as-a-post not to hear re-echoing round the whole capitalist world).