The Wooden Shepherdess (34 page)

Augustine had never seen any room quite so lovely—or quite so ominous, chilling and comfortless.

In England, on that same October Saturday afternoon Joan had been visiting Jeremy's rooms in Ebury Street (he had lately ceased to be Resident Clerk), and had asked for news of Augustine. But Jeremy shook his head: “Nothing for two or three months. They were then in Fez, but thinking of moving south to Marrakesh as soon as the weather got cooler.”

“Still no signs of him coming home?” was what her eyes asked; but Jeremy merely shrugged. “It's those Djinns and Afreets,” he thought (Augustine's own letter from Fez had indeed likened Morocco to living inside the Arabian Nights).

Four long months had done nothing to ease the ache. In a way that was nowadays automatic whenever she felt the need of an antidote, Joan began to rehearse in her head her private list of Augustine's faults: his lack of ambition of any kind, and even of any consistent aim in life. At last she complained out loud: “In a few more years he'll be thirty!” and added “he'd money enough to embark on any career he liked.”

Jeremy snorted. “I suppose what you mean is the Diplomatic, or governing bug-ridden tropical colonies! Surely it's one of the sourest fruits of our prevalent Classical Education, this antique ‘liturgical' notion about the duties which go with ample private means.” He paused. “Or—since wealthy poets and painters don't need to debase their gift by having to make it pay—what a pity Augustine can't even paint for nuts.... But perhaps you think all the same he should have a try?” Joan winced at the irony in his voice, and he wagged an accusing finger: “I almost believe you'd go for some absolute moron, provided he played the part at least of a conscientious squire—ready to open bazaars at the drop of a hat, or to plant a spinney when times were bad! Men ready to sit on the Bench, and the County Council.... D'you want Augustine to settle at Newton and live like that?”

“You're not being very helpful.”

“Perhaps.... Because I bet I can read what you've really got in your tiny mind: Augustine's curious craze for his miners, you think, should have led to an active role in the Labour Party—like Mosley, or Strachey's son.”

Joan was startled into confessing that some such idea might indeed have entered her head....

“Then you couldn't have read him wronger!—Look, my girl....” He paused, to think how best to put it. “Can't you hoist in that Augustine's miners are no mere impersonal aggregate Cause, they're a ‘Twm,' and a ‘Dai'?—Because people can't be added together like ‘things,' which is where the root of the whole Political Fallacy lies.” He was cocking a doubtful eye at Joan to see how much he was getting across, having learned by now that to most of mankind it is far from axiomatic—this sacred particularity of the “self,” as something wholly outside the domain of number.

“Then why not use his money to help them in other ways?”

Jeremy stared at Joan in astonishment: “Now it's the miners you're utterly failing to understand.”

“Constructive ways, of course—like those Quaker workshops.”

“Can't you see how any experienced miner must hate those Quakers' benevolent guts—expecting the salt of the earth to waste time cobbling shoes or knocking up tables and chairs, instead of their proper job?”

But misery made Joan stubborn: “All right then, over to you! What
does
Augustine intend to do with his life?”

“Perhaps it's a rarer achievement than you imagine, Augustine's knack of having things happen to him without ever needing to lift a finger to make them happen,” said Jeremy softly.

Joan's snort was an infinitesimal snort, but suddenly Jeremy's patience snapped: “Very well! But if he must have a ‘career,' please remember how being rich has narrowed his field of choice.”

“Has ‘narrowed' it?”

“Yes. For all manual work—and that's nine-tenths of the field—is strictly reserved for the poor.”

Joan gasped. “But why on earth, with his brains and his education....”

“Why on earth not—or have you forgotten how blissful he was on that rum-running schooner? If that sort of thing is his natural bent his brains needn't get in his way—his highly-intelligent miners are proof of that. Although I admit that his lack of even the most elementary manual education might....” Suddenly Jeremy sprang to his feet and started striding up and down: “Have you ever thought that instead of just hero-worshipping miners he could have been one himself, if instead of his horrible Public School he had gone underground as a fifteen-year-old? And that takes us back to the days when the Rhondda was still Eldorado, the Saturday pubs as full as the Sunday chapels.... It just isn't fair on a man, this blight of the silver spoon in his mouth!”

Perhaps this paradoxical gospel of manual work would have mystified Joan even more had her glance not fallen on Jeremy's paralyzed arm—when the sudden insight caused her a twinge of pity.

Later, “I've never been underground even to look,” said Jeremy sadly, over their tea. “Say what it's like.”

“Do you want to be told how they carry their food in strong tin boxes, because there are more rats than men down those human ratholes? And take down quarts of tea to make up for the sweat they lose? And their ironclad boots, fit to stand up to kicking against sharp rock eight hours on end in the dark?”

“That much I've seen; but say what it's really like right inside a mine.”

“Augustine has only taken me once, myself—and then not the kind you go down in a lift, but merely a ‘level' with ferns round its mouth.” She paused. “I found myself gasping for breath like a fish the moment I got inside: the air had been breathed so often there wasn't much left except vaporized sweat, and even my lamp burned dim. All its glimmer showed was drips like tropical rain from the roof, and the shine on the rails I must balance along because the roadway was knee-deep in water. Then, fifty yards in ...” (her voice took on nightmarish tones) “a strong smell of iodine. Stone, and splintered timber—and yards of sodden discarded bandage got snarled round my ankles, I didn't know what it was in the dark.”

“A fall of the roof, and someone'd got caught?” Joan nodded, speechless. “Well, carry on.”

“I can't. That's as far as they'd let me go—thank God, for already I felt the whole weight of mountain on top of me, squeezing out pebbles and ooze from between the props.”

“Have a try,” he wheedled. “From things you've been told.”

Joan took a deep breath, and put down her muffin half-eaten. “You may have to crawl, with only a couple of feet of headroom, to get to the coal-face at all; and lie there for hours on end, in water, listening all the time to the pump in case it chokes and you haven't got time to escape. Meanwhile you're patiently undercutting the seam till the Atlantean weight on top of it forces bits down. Then these must somehow be shoveled back up the roadway to where a tram can get near enough in to load—still crawling, of course....”

“So now don't you pity the poor little rich boy, who
mayn't
get his knees and his back rubbed raw by the floor and the roof like this for night after night—and with grit ground into the meat wherever the skin is gone?” cried Jeremy, watching her wince. “Remember, he's only a half-grown fifteen....”

“That's enough from you!” said Joan in an ominous voice.

“But I mean it you booby, you must see that! And when he gets back to his lodgings—through streets where grimy sheep from the uplands scavenge the dustbins like alley-cats—who might he find there but
you
? You, still not out of your teens and down on your two knees scrubbing the doorstep, showing a great deal of leg.... He's ‘blacker than Midnight's arsehole' (to quote the Classics), and dripping black puddles all over your lovely work—but you're used to that.... Then you move indoors, where a wooden tub stands in front of a kitchen fire with the breakfast bacon frying; and there stands your Dad, sponging his naked lodger's bleeding back—with Augustine bashfully trying to hide his newly-fledged private parts from you, you shameless hussy, standing there blankly wondering when the wind will change and stop blowing coal-dust over your washing-line....”

Joan bent her head to examine the teapot: “It needs more water,” she said.

“But those of course were the palmy days.” He paused, and cocked his ear to sounds from the street below. “Whereas now.... Just listen to that.” Both of them crossed to the window to look. “They must have walked the whole way from Wales, like their fathers the drovers before them.”

Across the street an Unemployed Miners' Choir sang in the autumn drizzle, as wholly absorbed in their singing as if on the stage of the Albert Hall. Joan thought they looked as if none of the bowler-hatted ninnies scurrying past them was even worth their pity....

“Now you see what Augustine has missed,” said Jeremy's deadpan voice.

Suddenly Joan clutched his arm: “But there
is
Augustine!”

“Where?” With her heart in her mouth she was pointing directly below at a threadbare figure, its back towards them, shaking an upturned cap for pennies under embarrassed averted Londoner's faces—that unmistakable six-foot frame.... “The lunatic!” Jeremy gasped: “That's carrying things too far!”

He darted downstairs to the street, and was just about to seize hold of Augustine's sleeve when “Augustine” turned—to reveal a different face altogether. Though much of the same age and height, Augustine's “Doppelgänger” had lost one eye and his blue-black nose had been crushed back into his face; his clothes hung loose on his bones. When Jeremy fumbled out a coin, he was thanked in an almost inaudible windless voice from lungs it would take a stonemason's chisel to cut.

Meanwhile slaves had brought carpets to spread on the floor and mountainous cushions to loll on, followed by other slaves bearing candles enormous as any in Catholic churches; and somebody closed the shutters to keep out the chill. Then had come slaves with glowing earthenware braziers poised on their heads, and incense thrown on the white-hot charcoal filled the room with blue aromatic smoke. The jittery Ali must have been badly in need of warmth, for he squatted on top of one of these braziers tucking it under his skirts as a personal central-heating system, and groaned with pleasure as tiny smoke-wisps of incense came curling out at his neck.

As they sat cross-legged on the floor, Augustine and Ludo took pains to appear without a care in the world; but on learning their dreaded host was away from home, hearts leapt.... Though he hadn't gone far (they were told), and a runner already had set out to find him—whereon their hearts fell again, and further still too when they heard the Khalifa's orders were soon expected if not the Khalifa himself.

After a time, however, their supper began to arrive: so every right hand that must dip in the dish was washed in water scented with orange-blossom, and then came the ceremonial breaking of bread (for bread must never be cut). Long-legged radishes helped to inspire those grateful belches good manners required as dish followed dish: cous-cous with quails in it sprinkled with cinnamon, roast chicken basted with honey and garnished with walnuts, a highly-spiced stew—and a lamb roasted whole, so tender its flesh came away in pinches (there being no knives or forks). But Ali, his hood still hiding his face, ate almost nothing right down to the final “gazelles' feet” honey-and-almond pastries.

There must have been fully a dozen courses before more washing of hands was followed by mint-tea served in ornate little gilded glasses.... What ages it seemed before the servants had all withdrawn, and at last they were left alone! It was close on midnight—and no one had told them whether their absent host the Khalifa had sent his instructions or not.

Ali was smoking pipe after pipe of comforting kif; but he seemed to draw little comfort from it, and told them that crossing the open yard he had recognized someone.... Suppose this someone had recognized him, and had spread the tale that these “guests” were spies of the Glaoui? Augustine looked at the door; but the door hadn't even a bolt—or at any rate none on the inside, if somebody came in the night. Suppose someone did, was he really about to have his throat cut? Ali was surely the one to know, and Ali certainly seemed to think they would.... If so, it's silly enough getting killed for a “Cause”; but what a consummate fool he would feel if he got himself killed in so pointless a fashion as this! Really at twenty-six he ought to have had more sense.... Playing at being a he-man, that's all this crack-pot excursion was: playing at being Walter Harris—or even at being Lawrence!

Augustine thought of the god-like glamour of T.E. Lawrence's presence at Oxford, its stunning effect on somebody really young: how it made one remember his lightest word, as when he'd refused Augustine's sherry since “wine might spoil my palate for water” (for weeks after that Augustine had noticed the flavor of every glass of water he drank, self-consciously savored the peaty bouquet of mountain streams). He recalled one sacred evening spent in Lawrence's All Souls rooms, with even Jeremy fallen respectfully silent while Lawrence explained how he'd cut the railway precisely enough to hamstring the Turks but never enough to render them desperate. Lawrence had told them the
Art
of war was to win it while getting not only as few of your own men killed as you could but as few of the enemy too.... No, Lawrence was not the conventional he-man but one of the subtlest minds Augustine had ever met: a mind like an onion—skin after skin to peel off without ever finding the final Lawrence within.

It would take a bit more than a Berber cloak and a spice of danger to turn an Augustine into a Lawrence; and this was something he should have got wise to ages ago.

When the time came to put out the candles Ali stationed their three little slave-boys to sleep on the stairs outside, their Negroid faces invisible in the dark once their eyes and their lips were closed: he hoped they would squeak loud enough to give the alarm if any intruder trod on them. Then he laid himself down right across the door with his hand on the drawn knife under his cheek—a copybook “Faithful Guard.” But both these precautions were more dramatic than useful, Augustine remarked to Ludo: for even had their party been armed to the teeth—and Ali's collection of razor-sharp knives were the only weapons among them, at least they'd had that much sense—nothing they did could prevent the Khalifa from having them killed in the end if he'd made up his mind to kill them; and Ludo agreed.