The Wooden Shepherdess (49 page)

He downed his port at a single gulp, and eyed the decanter; but Gilbert showed no sign of passing it on.

Augustine felt still more uneasy when Jeremy started again: “But Gilbert, old cock!” (you could hear the inverted commas), “You've side-stepped my point. This Disarmament blah in high places, this Leave-it-all-to-the-League tommy-rot.... You and I may know that the British Lion is just taking forty winks; but in German eyes it looks like death and decay. They think us Anglo-Saxons a moribund branch of the ancient Germanic tree which calls for the forester's ax. When we do wake up it may be too late, with the Führer driving in state down a bombed Whitehall.—Heil Hitler!” He greatly embarrassed them both by grotesque attempts with the other hand to support his polio-stricken right arm erect in a Nazi salute: “You're better fitted to practice this pantomime gesture than me, old boy—and we'll both of us find ourselves having to learn it in earnest unless your Cabinet pals do something pretty-damn-quick!”

“All Germans are cracky,” Augustine put in, “But aren't they disarmed? They're hardly so cracked as to try to conquer the whole British Empire with just their bare hands.”

Gilbert smiled a superior smile: “Yes, you seem to envisage a sudden German attack—next week, as it were; but with what?” He glanced at his watch (he was longing to join the ladies, but couldn't quite yet): “As a junior Civil Servant,” he went on in cutting tones, “You claim to be better informed than my ‘Cabinet pals' as you call them?”

“They've had the information all right! But it runs off their backs, because you politicians can only believe what you feel in your bones that the bulk of electors already believe—which is what, after all, it pays to believe: that's what has got them their lovely jobs. Their beliefs are a matter of choice and scarcely ever affected by facts.”

“But....”

“Just a moment, please: I haven't dealt with your other point. I said nothing about ‘next week'—that's absurd. But in two or three years....”

“You did say, ‘pretty damn quick,'” interrupted Augustine.

“Because this Year of Grace is our very last chance to hang on to our lead: they're re-arming fast. We suspect that they're secretly laying down battle-cruisers of 26,000 tons, far above the Treaty limits. U-boats they aren't allowed at all; but we know that the frames and the parts are already in storage at Kiel, all they need is assembling. They've tripled their naval personnel.... Of course
we
are laying down warships too, but we're hampered at every turn. Most British armor-plate firms closed down in the Twenties, we have to import it from Czechoslovakia! Half our gun-sights and submarine periscopes have to be ordered from
German
optical firms.”

“You and your naval friends!” said Gilbert with withering scorn: “All you can think of is ships. Today our foremost line of defense is a modern Air Force, soon to be reinforced with another forty-one squadrons.”

“‘Soon'? In another five years, with luck! And the Germans are building far faster than us: their Air Force already's two-thirds the size of our own and will equal our own in another few months. In a year from now they'll have fifty-per-cent more machines than ourselves and almost catch up with the French.”

“Nonsense! Where did you get those incredible figures?” said Gilbert, startled in spite of himself.

“Never mind where: they're reliable.”

“Bosh!” said Gilbert: “They haven't an Air Force at all: only civil planes, and a number of engineless gliders for sport....”

“Or for landing troops!—Now, here's one other thing which I hope may convince you: Hitler has gained great kudos by halving his Unemployed; but how? By sending them all to the Ruhr! Krupp the Armament King is taking on thousands of extra hands, as I found out myself last June. And I.G. Farben, who make synthetic petrol from coal: they've motionless acres of turbulent Danube ice, which a thaw must one day release....”

Yet surely Jeremy couldn't be right—not
another
war! “I must think all this out, and talk to him quite by himself some time.”

Then all three of them, civilly smiling, entered a room from which a discreet Miss Penrose had disappeared. A room where a dazzling Southern Belle sat impatiently waiting, alone with a chair-borne mummy.

“He hasn't altered one bit!” thought Joan with a desperate pang in her heart as Augustine walked in.

Two days later Augustine departed briefly for Wales, leaving Mary and Norah together engrossed with colored chalks working out weaving designs.

On his way he paid a short call on old friends in the anthracite valleys; and what a relief that Welsh miner's kitchen was after Mellton with Gilbert in it! From there he carried on west through Carmarthen, St. Clears and Red Roses by roads increasingly narrow and winding the nearer they got to the Pembrokeshire coast; and finally down a mere muddy track—once the back way, but now the only way in. Then the Bentley rolled under a noble Regency arch, stampeding a score of cross-bred Rhode Island Reds as it came to rest in a vast Piranesi-like stable yard.

The birds flapped over the bonnet, squawking. The ten-year-old feeding them dropped his bucket and dashed to an open window hollering “Mam!” then dashed back again to heave with the whole of his ten-year-old strength at the groaning Gothic-cathedral doors of the coach-house—grinning all over his freckled face as he caught the apple Augustine threw....

Augustine was home at last.

The latent anchorite in him still loved this ancient enormous house where a lone and servant-abhorring Augustine could live—as he still supposed he would always prefer to live—more like a single pea in a big bass drum than the wealthy squire which he was.

Ever since his great-uncles died, Newton Llantony had slept an enchanted Mabinogion-sleep. Most of its hundred rooms were shut up, with its gardens climbing unchecked till they darkened the first-floor windows: its drawing-rooms shrouded in dust-sheets, mirrors veiled against lightning, lusters and chandeliers guarded from spiders and dust in brown holland bags. The baize of its billiard table was still scattered with camphor under the covers to keep away moth, although it had not heard the crack of cannoning ivory balls for some twenty or thirty years—not since the uncles had grown too old for such strenuous exercise.

Furniture, family pictures, the knickknacks of centuries: nothing was consciously changed from the closing days of that previous reign, except that those two old emblems themselves were under the sod instead of enthroned each side of a blazing billiard-room fire. Even that monstrous photokit portrait in oils of Henry, the cousin who should have come into the place but had perished at Ypres instead, still hung where it always had hung: while Augustine's own pictures (his late Van Gogh, his Cézanne and his little Renoir) still hung—as they had hung ever since crossing the Channel—in Mary's boudoir at Mellton Chase.

Blissfully coming back from a day spent shooting snipe on the Marsh to a vast and totally empty house, there to cook for himself on the gunroom stove and climb by night to the small attic room where he'd slept as a visiting child.... That's what Augustine liked. But, alas, how closely Dilapidation and Dry-rot tread on the heels of Neglect! Caretakers seem an intrusion which even hermits may have to endure....

It was Wantage who'd thought of Lily—and Jimmy the knife-boy, sacked for getting this little scullery-maid with child. Hence now that invisible “Mam” with her panicky chickens, the helpful small boy and indeed the rest of a fast-growing family tucked away in a distant wing.

*

Next morning Augustine went out “to shoot”—or, at any rate, carried a gun. But whether he did this simply from habit or vaguely meant to excuse him for spending a rainy September day in the open is hard to say. He wasn't on serious shooting bent, for he took no dog; and moreover in oilskins and waterproof Cording's boots he went by way of the upland fields and woods, not down on his wildfowling sea-marsh at all.

The thing is, Augustine had come home expressly to think; but not just now about Jeremy's revelations over the port, those must wait for some other time. His unexpected meeting with Joan had revived the past: it had given this bachelor (now in his thirty-fifth year) plenty to think about, crouched down under a favorite ash-tree in sight of the Bristol Channel and feeling the rain-drops plop on the yielding tweed of his deerstalker hat.

Joan was incredibly beautiful still; and attractive, although of course more—mature....

“As for your Hermit-of-Newton ploy” (this sour voice, of course, was the ingrained Defensive Principle in him), “that woman knows how to get what she wants! She'd have soon had the dust-sheets off and the spare-rooms painted; and even yourself fitted out with a proper Purpose in Life.”

Oh yes, the Defensive Principle in him was heartily thankful he'd sheered off in time, those years ago when he'd fled to Tangier, as he squatted here trying to focus his eyes on the distant sea—its far horizon dissolved in rain. Glimpsed through curtains of rain he could see the dull reddish-brown of the sails of a couple of trawlers, probably French: they were using their engines of course, the sails were simply to stop them rolling....

However, this wasn't his only interior voice. That marriage had once been a damn-near thing, and now it was plain that in spite of the passing years Joan still felt the tug. It was equally plain that seeing her only a few times more he could all-too-easily find himself feeling it too....

“Then for God's sake give her as wide a berth as you can!” warned Augustine's Defensive Principle.

Quite, but.... That is, provided you're sure that you want to remain a bachelor all your life like your uncles, and end up a childless old fuddy-duddy?

“She didn't give Anthony any children, and then you'd be properly caught!”

Could it be that he wanted a child or two of his own without really wanting a wife at all?

All this mental to-ing and fro-ing had taken a couple of hours. The rain kept on and the wind was rising: it must be blowing up for a gale for the gulls to be flying so far inland, for this wasn't like Spring when they mob the potato-planters for worms....

Very well, then! Agreed, the undoubtedly sensible thing was to steer clear of Dorset till Joan was safely in France. But that too raised problems. She'd seemed so surprisingly vague after all about her departure-date: how would Mary get on without him once Gilbert was back in town, if Joan hung around for weeks?

Of course, she had Norah now.... But stopping away from Mellton meant leaving Norah to cope all alone; and was this entirely fair yet on someone he'd landed in strange surroundings and totally unfamiliar ways—to be robbed of her only interpreter so-to-speak, the only one with an inkling of working-class life? Mrs. Winter couldn't take her too openly under her wing, not after that row over Norah's meals in the “Room.” Suppose this tapestry-loom idea with Mary flopped, or if anything else went badly wrong? She'd be out on a limb....

Perplexed, he took off his hat to scratch his head: whereupon the tree he was sitting under seized the chance of giving itself a shake and decanting a cupful of rainwater down his neck.

Yes: it was plain that the nub of the problem was Norah. He
had
to go back to Mellton because he must
not
risk letting Norah down.

“A girl in a thousand!” Her gamine appearance and pitiful cardboard case in that hotel garage. Driving beside him across the Cotswolds wrapped in his rug.... Corned-beef and pickles shared in a pub.... Then up Goggledown Lane, and her widening eyes when he showed her the Chase....

*

By now, the partridge had left the stubble and all gone early to roost. Augustine rose to his feet: it was futile sitting here in the rain—and certainly doing his gun no good.

“A girl in a thousand,” Nellie had called her. But what did she really think about Mellton—and Mary—and him? He sighed. An enigma: the Welsh aren't worried too much about class, but in England what pariahs gentry are! There you can never get properly inside the mind of somebody born lower down in the social scale, you only imagine you can.

“Will you
never
learn to know when you're lucky at last?” the tree he'd been sitting under remarked.

Augustine jumped: when and where in his life had he heard that oracular voice before? He even turned to look back, though he knew it was only a tree.

Yet in spite of that Talking Tree, Augustine had been back at Mellton for fully a week before he found out that he'd fallen in love with Norah.

Alas! For how could she even consider a man like him? He knew that to Slaughterhouse Yard a gentleman isn't a “boy”: he is something not fully human, and certainly not to be thought of in marriage. Something much on a par with what Germans think about Jews or Americans, Negroes. A dire taboo, with roots as deep in the past of the English Prole as couch-grass in English gardens....

Augustine was spending the morning alone in the leathery smell of the Mellton library, pulling books out of the shelves and pushing them back unread (often upside-down), while he told himself that Cophetua Syndromes are find in fairy-stories but every beggar-maid knows them for hell in actual life. Even today, in 1934, there was still this Pyramus-Thisbe wall. Marriage could never turn Norah into a lady, quite, nor Augustine gain acceptance as genuine working-class—as he would most willingly try to do had that been a possible answer, rather than
her
lose caste and be looked at askance by all her Coventry friends.

On the wall hung a steel engraving, the portly Sir Peter Wadamy KCB, Vice-Admiral of the Red. “The lower orders, if comely,” said Admiral Wadamy's roguish eye, “are there to be tupped. But however besotted you are let that be the end: as ‘My Lady' they're neither flesh, fish nor fowl.” From the picture, Augustine's gaze wandered back to the shelves of books.... If only he'd stuck to his writing, for poets counted as mules who had opted out of their species already! Like painters and actors, nobody knows where they really belong—whereas he and Norah both knew all too well exactly where they belonged.