The Wooden Shepherdess (50 page)

If Norah
had
been able to love him then nothing could keep them apart—not hell nor high water! But Norah's falling in love with him simply was not on the cards—like her falling in love with a horse.

His love was hopeless; and therefore something he had to take by the throat and choke before it hurt anyone else. Norah must never guess it because it would shock her so frightfully, killing all dawning liking for Mary as well as himself. But it shouldn't be too hard to hide, as the last thing Norah would ever expect....

Or even pretend he was pining for Joan?—But no, that kind of dissembling belongs in Restoration Comedy not in real life; and with deliberation he dropped Dibdin's
London Theater
smack on the library floor.

What grimly ironical words that tree had used, “Will you never learn to know when you're lucky?”!

*

“Nellie's right, nobody couldn't help liking her!” So Norah thought, crossing the park from the village that same afternoon. For you can't go on pitying someone who flatly refuses to pity herself; and once she had learned to treat Mrs. Wadamy not as a freak or disaster but just like anyone else, Norah had found her top-hole.

But
he
was right too: she hadn't enough to do. In the house, with Mrs. Winter and all those servants, the Mistress was more like a guest. Her kids? She loved them O.K., but Miss Penrose gave them their lessons and took them walks, Nanny Halloran saw to their clothes and their meals and put them to bed (her chair couldn't anyhow climb to the second floor): they were daffy about their uncle. Not much room there for a loving Mum! About all she sees of them seems to be.... Yes, there they were, climbing a tree with their uncle—and there she was too, watching behind a bush. As always, watching it all from a distance: the ground too rough for her chair to get anywhere near.

As for him, he's barmy about those brats: funny he never got married....

But then a bough broke, depositing Susan and Gillie both on the turf: and Norah broke into a run. As she reached them, “Don't tell Nanny!” she heard him plead: “I'm in trouble enough with her already, as well as you're late for bed.”

“We will, though!” wailed a furious Susan: “You know it was all your fault!”

“We will, we will!” echoed Gillie: “You
told
it to break!”

“Little b's!” said Norah, smacking both bottoms left and right.

They were so appalled that they stopped their crying at once, and eyed her. “You dare....” ventured Susan at last, uncertainly.

Norah's eyes flashed. “Want me t'do't again?—Tell y'runcle Sorry.”

Susan held out as long as she could: then “Sorry,” she muttered almost inaudibly.

Norah turned to Augustine, unconsciously switching her voice to as near as she could “BBC”: “That's my Good Deed for the day!” she said to him cheerfully. Then she turned back to the children, all sunshine and holding out both her hands. Like mesmerized rabbits they took them, and started back to the house each side of her still holding hands. This left Augustine to bring up the rear alone, until Norah made room for him in between her and Susan—insisting he held hands too....

“Needs looking after, poor lamb!” thought Norah, firmly gripping a hand gone limp and slippy as if agog to escape: “Even if only to make him wear proper clothes, not look like a tramp. What would Mum have thought, if she'd seen him come in the Yard dressed like that?”

As they neared the bushes where Mrs. Wadamy watched, she was noiselessly wheeling her chair out of sight by hand: she didn't wish to be seen, so they all looked the other way. “Lucky me, landing this job!” was what Norah was thinking now: “If you call it a job when it don't seem one—except getting paid.”

She liked to be able to send money home; but how far off Coventry was already, the Yard and the Mending-room at the Mill and all that! She raised her eyes to the bare Dorset downs, and remembered those picnics outside the town where she used to take all the kids.... Perhaps at heart she was really a country girl all along?

Meanwhile: “I can hide it from Norah herself all right,” thought Augustine: “Mary I'm not so sure about....”

“What do we call you?” asked Susan peaceably.

“Norah.”

“Norah.... I like that name,” said Gillie, and started swinging her arm.

Two letters on Mary's tray next morning bore Swiss stamps and were postmarked “Genève.” She opened first the one from Mme Leblanc: Polly shall travel home as soon as adequate escort can be arranged and shall
not
return next term.

Mary was hardly surprised: poor Mme Leblanc had put up with a lot, but this was the final straw. For Polly's skill as a mimic was famous, and Sylvia Davenant (Janey's aunt) had told her already about some fake Lady Sylvia telephoning the school to ask if Janey and Polly might take a steamer-ride down the lake to spend the weekend at Vevey. It had only been after the two girls failed to return on time—and their passports were missing, and nothing was known at Vevey of them or of Lady Sylvia either—that Mme Leblanc discovered the hoax.

Polly's own letter was long and excited and seventh-heavenly incoherent: it had to be read at least twice to extract any facts at all, piece them together in narrative order and try to imagine the rest. But the long and the short of the matter was this. The truants, indulging their strange obsession with Hitler, had made their way to Munich and then on to Berchtesgaden. There they fell in with a German cousin of Janey's at school nearby. This young Countess Sophie was given to mountain walks, and told them she'd sighted the Führer more than once enjoying a glass of milk outside the Hochlenzer mountain inn (his favorite port-of-call on the Scharitzkehl). But that wasn't all: for this very morning, on one of the forest paths which traversed the Obersalzberg itself, she had suddenly met his cortège face-to-face: the Führer striding ahead with his dog, and a dozen or so dim figures who followed discreetly behind. Sophie had tried to shrink out of sight but the Führer's Alsation had flushed her, knocking her over and pinning her down till the Führer called it to heel. A gigantic adjutant lifted the tousled schoolgirl onto her feet: the Führer's own hand picked pine-needles out of her yellow hair and then—as further amends for her fright—he told her to go back to school, choose a couple of friends and bring them up to his mountain retreat this afternoon for tea.

The aristocratic Sophie affected to treat the whole affair as a bit of a bore. She was ready enough to agree when Polly insisted—while Janey nearly sank into the ground—that Polly and Janey themselves were the girls she must take....

Mary read on with increasing dismay, and tried to imagine the scene when the same gigantic adjutant came to collect the three girls: drove them for twenty minutes or so up a narrow road all pot-holes and hairpin bends, and finally set them down near a small wooden chalet with wide, overhanging eaves. A typical middle-class weekend cottage, “built” (Sophie said) “by some Hamburg businessmen, Hitler rented it first and afterwards bought it outright.” A few yards further along the road, on the opposite side, was an inn—which was lucky, for Haus Wachenfeld itself was too small for even one overnight guest.

Mary had to imagine an Alpine meadow which soared up to peaks aglow in the clear autumnal air for herself, since neither Polly nor Janey were there to admire the view! It must have been cold at that height moreover, and all three girls would be glad to be brought inside to the warmth. There (from Polly's description), apart from some cushions embroidered with swastikas, all the sitting-room furniture too was in typical German holiday-cottage taste: fake antiques in the farmhouse style, a self-consciously plain wooden bench round a “rustic” fireplace, dimity curtains, a chirping canary-cage and a rubber-plant.... But then the Führer himself had appeared, wearing leather shorts and a jacket of Cambridge blue—and instantly Polly had ceased to see anything else but him.
Any
background blurred by the dazzling light of his presence was rendered invisible....

Had this Sophie been doubtful how Hitler might take her choice of two foreign girls as her fellow guests? Perhaps; but as soon as he learned that Polly and Janey were not only English but well-connected, he beamed. So! Janey's papa was an Earl, with a seat in the House of Lords; and Polly's papa was in the Government? Taking each girl by both her hands he jigged her a step or two: you must tell your papas how glad he had been to welcome their beautiful daughters, for friendship with England had always been the dearest wish of his heart—and here were its two lovely harbingers!

Henceforth Polly's letter claimed to be quoting him word for word, as he told them that England's so-called alliance with France was a crass denial of History, brittle and artificial. England and France were historic enemies—always had been and always would be—whereas our two great Germanic nations, the allies of Waterloo.... With England ruling the oceans, her Island Home's security guaranteed by a friendly Germany back at her rightful post as a great Continental Power, we two could thumb our noses at all the World! “To you I reveal my inner thoughts: when you get back home you must tell your papas....”

But then tea came, and a car drew up with three young women to whom they had to be introduced. Two were “my excellent secretaries.” The third (a Fräulein Eva Braun) was left unexplained....

Mary laid down the letter. The whole thing seemed such a typical schoolgirl's dream that she almost wondered if Polly had made it up.

*

Alas, all too soon the girls had found themselves shepherded out through the door. They climbed back into the Führer's car just as another Mercedes drew up: a man with a somewhat preoccupied look got out, and passed them into the house. As their car drove off they heard the Führer's voice once again: no longer (it seemed) the genial tones of five minutes ago, but an ear-splitting noise....

“Some poor devil is getting it hot,” remarked Sophie.

Nobody spoke for a time; but just before reaching Berchtesgaden, “Those wonderful deep blue eyes!” sighed Janey.

“Blue?” cried Sophie, amazed: “They're not blue at all.”

“Then what color are they?” asked Polly, surprised that she couldn't remember.

“The color of codfishes' eyes on the fishmonger's slab,” declared Sophie. “And as for his voice, it sounds as if Goebbels had stuffed a microphone up his nose.” Polly and Janey looked at the blasphemous creature in horror. “I know what's wrong with those eyes! They haven't had proper sleep for weeks—and no wonder, after those June-the-thirtieth murders!”

Relations were thus somewhat strained by the time that the two English girls ran into the railway station to catch the slow train to Munich.

Relations might have been even more strained had they known what Sophie did, once the Führer's Mercedes had driven her back to her school and news of the tea-party spread: had they known that she took off the shoes which had trodden the Führer's carpet and sold them as sacred relics—and then, since she found the market so good, went straight downtown and sold all her other six pairs as well with identical affidavits.

But it hadn't been any “poor devil getting it hot” which the girls had overheard as they left. Hitler had merely been thinking aloud to a favored friend: confiding his innermost thoughts to this latest arrival at Haus Wachenfeld, this small pink man with the turned-up nose.

Some successful businessman, you would probably guess: taking note of his well-cut clothes and of small, gray-green eyes, the shrewdness of which seemed at odds with a flabby and almost expressionless face. His name was Paganuzzi; but Herr Paganuzzi was German in spite of his name or Hitler would never have packed him off to the Saar with the delicate task he had come to report on—if able to get a word in edgeways.

A couple of hours later his audience was over. A dark-red ball of sun was setting behind the pine-clad peaks and a sickle of new moon hung in a luminous greenish sky as Paganuzzi started his walk across to the “Zum Türken” inn, reflecting how often his interviews with the Führer had ended like this—with Hitler apparently blissfully unaware that he'd changed his mind and adopted the very course he'd rejected at first!

Versailles had ceded the coal of the Saar to France; and for fifteen years the Saar had remained cut off from the Reich, a tiny paternalistic state ruled by a League of Nations Commission. Not subject to German Law nor to Germany's economic troubles (its currency being the franc had escaped the Great Inflation which ruined the Weimar Republic), the Saar had achieved the only luxurious living-standards for miners of any coalfield in Europe—nightclubs, and evening dress! But now the Saarlanders' time had come to decide, by secret ballot, whether they wished to return to the Reich, and place themselves under the aegis of Hitler open-eyed....

This was the situation which Paganuzzi was sent to appraise. Nobody doubted which way the voting would go: indeed most observers expected a 90% majority opting for Hitler's Reich—if it ever came to the vote. But what Paganuzzi feared was the risk of the Nazi “Deutsche Front” fatally overplaying its hand and provoking riots: for once the situation got out of control the League's instructions to Knox (the British diplomat serving as Chief Commissioner) told him to call on the French for troops to restore public order; and that might well mean postponing the Referendum—even if nothing worse!

So Hitler had to be warned after all, there was nothing to lose by “telling the Deutsche Front to soft-pedal a bit till the quarry was safe in the bag”.... But how had this been received?

Hitler had simply pooh-poohed his fears. The Foreign Office in London were far too cagey to let Knox call in the French, thus setting a match to the powder-barrel—and even supposing he did, the French themselves would refuse. Though possessing the finest army in Europe those cowards in Paris would pass the buck to the League, and propose some International Force manned only from neutral states. The Deutsche Front were to be encouraged, not curbed: they must feel the final victory due to their own efforts alone....