The Wooden Shepherdess

by Richard Hughes

  In Augustine’s old world you didn’t kiss any girl till you and she were engaged; and with such ideas he was bound to assume (at first) that these boys and girls must nearly all be engaged, from the kissing, in spite of their youth and in spite of it proving a bit confusing at times sorting out which was and with which (especially piled in the back of a car with one rug over the lot of them). Not that Augustine was likely to guess one-tenth of what happened under that rug: for whenever he piled in among them himself it was Ree he took on his lap, being proud to have Infant Innocence lying intact in his arms (even if knowing no better it sometimes nibbled his ear); and by common consent, the rest of them left their elderly mascot almost untouched. No doubt they sensed that six-or-so half-ripe females and males cleaving together all one whacking great flesh in a communal fumbling act would be more than Augustine could take at his somewhat later, more two-and-two stage of development. Also—a thing to be glad of with innocence such as his to be guarded—believing in deeds not words they never talked smut.

  As for Ree.... Well, it made her pretty despairing at times with the others around all the while nowadays and Augustine anyone’s prey—and Janis she couldn’t abide! But the fact that whenever she sat on Augustine’s lap he still kept his hands from exploring her sensitive parts (and never-never-never had kissed her) was something by now she accepted completely: indeed she had come to love him so much it was even part of his charm.

  Apart from sometimes drinking themselves unconscious (Ree “never touched liquor” because she found just wine quite potent enough), and petting, and charging around in cars, their other amusements were plenty and various. Horseback-riding was one. Janis herself owned a saddle-horse—weedy, a hollow-backed broomtail bought for twenty-five bucks—which never got corn (she swore it only ate rocks): Sadie could boast of a genuine mustang (the creature was ancient and only half-broken and bit), and farmers would rent them for next-to-nothing provided you didn’t mind saddlery falling to pieces. Augustine and Janis were two who often went riding together for miles; and on these occasions Ree most often went with them, though horseback-riding made her so sore that she limped and had to sleep face-down in bed—even if she didn’t fall off.

  But another amusement was swimming—and Ree could swim like a fish. They most of them could, and with far better style than the self-taught Augustine. Even Sadie in spite of her gammy shoulder could dive like a gannet. It also was pretty spectacular watching young Russell’s dislocate limbs come right out-of-joint in the crawl, like a panic-struck octopus. Janis-the-Scot however, because of some phobia Augustine failed to uncover—she said she’d had a great-aunt in Orkney betrayed in innocent youth by a seal—wouldn’t go within miles of the water: she even would shut her eyes driving cars over bridges, just aiming herself across like an arrow.

  As time went by Augustine almost forgot his danger and need to lie low: he rode about with them openly everywhere just like everyone else. He even entered the store nowadays without peeping first to see if strangers were there. But one day Janis and he had just arrived in sight of the store when out came a man in some sort of uniform, pistol in holster: flung his leg over a huge red “Indian” motor-bike leaning against the porch and stood there shading his eyes. Everyone froze, and for several seconds he studied the hate in their faces. But then the engine roared at his kick: he turned in a hair-pin bend with his heel in the dirt and was gone (as Russell, the Poet and Student of English, remarked) “like a fart out of Hell.”

  “Old rubbering meanie!” said Janis disgustedly.

  “Peeking around New Blandford the whole fugging week!” said Sadie.

  Augustine’s spine felt crawled by a covey of ice-cold spiders. He timidly asked if anyone knew who the Trooper was looking for.

  “Keeps his goddam trap shut!” Ali Baba said, and spat like a field-gun.

  15

  His stomach well down on its way to his boots, Augustine’s first idea was to run for it—get himself right out of here while the going was good. For once arrested he hadn’t a hope: it wouldn’t cut very much ice with the Judge to tell him he’d never intended becoming a rum-runner, all this was no-wise his fault—it was Fate’s, it was merely the way that things had worked out since the night he got slugged. That was all very true, but would hardly explain to the Court how come he’d been caught red-handed landing the hooch and had knocked out an innocent coastguard and bolted.

  But where should he run to? The sensible answer was surely New York, if he couldn’t get back to sea straightaway: in a country place a stranger sticks out, and it’s always said to be easier fading out of sight in a city. He’d give it some serious thought.... But his countryman’s every instinct revolted: he hated and feared all cities, and anyway how could he possibly live in New York? His wad—the money the skipper had thrust in his hands at the very last moment—well, even out here it was dwindling fast and would be gone in the city in no time. He’d plenty of money in England, but couldn’t get any sent over with nothing to prove who he was when he wanted to draw it: while as for working—if even to ask for a job meant filling in forms and producing identity papers.... That really left only crime: perhaps he could get in touch with some bootlegging gang in the city, so hope to get back to Rum Row in the end? But even he had the sense to know that becoming a gangster was only a picaresque pipe-dream for someone like him: he was such a hopeless amateur, life would indeed prove “nasty, brutish, and short.”

  No, for the moment at least there was only one thing to be done: he must really go into hiding, right here in the woods—he must leave his shack and live for a bit à-la-Fennimore-Cooper in one of those badger-like holes in the rocks he’d discovered with Ree. From there he could still keep an eye on his shack (if mosquitoes left him an eye that would open) and know if they searched it; and if they didn’t—because after all his alarm might be just a lot of fuss about nothing, it could be the Trooper was really looking for somebody totally else....

  But someone was trying to catch his attention: he turned, and there at his elbow was Ree. She was quite unaware of his panic and wanted to take him across to the church, where she said she’d discovered a brand-new species of Giant Church Mouse. He warmed to the poppet at once. He might as well go, for it wouldn’t take long and the Trooper was anyhow gone for the nonce. It would anyway give him a minute or two to think....

  Inside, the building smelled of old pinewood and spiders. And there indeed was her giant “mouse.” ... But it looked, said Augustine, “more like an Anglican vicar in cassock and surplice collapsed in the heat of his service.” In fact the recumbent incumbent was only a black-and-white cow which lay there chewing the cud, and together they put her outside. But Ree still wanted to linger apparently. Perching herself on the back of a seat she asked if Augustine believed in ghosts.—Well, not so much ghosts exactly, as sperrits.... In short: did he think he’d a soul?

  Something stifled Augustine’s instinctive “No”: he was curious what she was getting at. Gently he probed her.... Yes, sure-mike she herself had a soul and she’d lately wondered if he had, since other folk too had some of them souls she believed. For instance her Pop—he had one for sure! She didn’t of course mean quite this kind of soul (and she waved a hand at their whitewashed Christian surroundings): a gen-u-ine soul all the same.

  He questioned her further. It happened just before falling asleep, she explained. You felt like your body was sinking from under you (this of course was relative, i.e. the “you”—your “soul”—rising out of it). Not that you ever seemed able to get very far from your body, in fact all she’d ever achieved was to hold her soul lying prone right on top of her body a minute or two—it would then snap back, like elastic. But Pop was an adept: not only could Pop stay out of his body a full five minutes but even constrain his soul to sit up while his body lay flat! But not even her Pop could get his soul right off the bed and make it step down on the floor—let alone leave the room where his body was laid....

  Where on earth had she got th
e idea? It was Pop who had taught her a long time ago, when sometimes she slept in his bed. She struggled for words, and Augustine guessed rightly how much this tremendous mystic experience meant to her—guessed too she hadn’t told anyone else in the world but himself (and the Pop who connived). He must watch his step, or he’d hurt her.... And so “As for getting your soul right off the bed and across to the door,” in a serious voice he advised her not even to try. For suppose it should wander right off? Yes, suppose “she” got lost and never got back to her body at all? She would then be a ghost without having died! This terrible thought made her shiver: she jumped down on to her feet, and (bodies and all) they both went out in the sun. But his ghostly advice had impressed her:

  “It makes me so happy you’re spirichool too,” she whispered, and slipped her hand into his: “I sure was sure that you must be. It maybe accounts....”

  “Accounts for what?” asked Augustine, and added “For something about me which puzzles you?”

  “U-huh.”

  Augustine had learned by now that this aspirate grunting meant “Yes”; but just what it was this accounted for, that he couldn’t get out of her.

  Him, to be told he was “spirichool!” Even the dear little goose herself, who’d ever have guessed.... He would have to be careful not to give pain, but some day he’d try to get into her noddle that all these feelings are purely subjective and something to do with pressure of blood in the brain: that there’s no such thing as “spirit” or “soul,” like there being no God.... But then he remembered his dismal failure the time when he tried to tell her there isn’t a God: how she’d blushed, and shied off the subject.... Indeed Ree had found it acutely embarrassing—almost as bad as when her science teacher in school had suddenly blurted out to his class that he as a scientist had to believe in God, just as the page in the Wenceslas carol believed in the king whose footsteps he trod in. Everyone then had opened their mouths in acute discomfort: of course they “believed” in God, but He wasn’t a thing to be mentioned except in church—like the things you never mention except in doctors’ offices.

  Why are girls so prone to these strange superstitions? Good Lord, she was almost as bad as—and just for a moment Augustine saw Mitzi again as he’d seen her first in Cousin Adèle’s overheated and overcrowded hexagonal drawing-room standing behind her mother. That cold and serious white face with its large gray thoughtful eyes: the carefully-brushed fair hair, reaching nearly to her waist and tied back with a big black bow: the long straight skirt with its black belt, the white blouse with its high starched collar; and curled on the sofa in an attitude of sleep but bright eyes wide open lay that fox.... But just for a moment only; and how many weeks was it now since Mitzi had even entered his head?

  16

  There came a day when Ree had the grippe, so Augustine and Janis for once went riding alone. They were both of them secretly glad though nobody said so. Their horses seemed glad as well—Augustine’s hireling and Janis’s darling broomtail—without that lumbering third on their heels; and they cantered or walked side-by-side all morning with never an inch of nose out in front.

  They stopped for a picnic lunch in the cool of a ruined, roofless mill a long way from home. Outside the gaping door with its curtain of vines two hobbled horses nibbled the same bush; and within, on the earthen floor two riders munched their salami together, feeling more friendly towards each other than ever before—so wholly in tune indeed that they started telling each other about their childhood. They found they had both been afraid of the dark: Augustine because of the tiger he knew lived under his cot, while in Janis’s case the lurking beast was a bear. Then Augustine described his fear that if he didn’t jump out of the bath the instant Nanny pulled up the plug he’d be sucked down the waste: his sister Mary though older was just as scared, and he spoke of his awful panic one time when Mary had jumped out first and toppled him back in the water right on the gurgle itself. So Janis confessed to the time when under her frock her pants fell down in the middle of running a race on Parents’ Day, and she’d wanted to die....

  After that they were silent awhile. But at last Augustine embarked on a story which never till now had he tried to tell to anyone else in the world: the nightmare story of what he had suffered the first time he visited Aunt Berenice at Halton.

  He started off lightly enough just describing this Aunt: “The kind of intelligent woman that nobody knows how to live with. My Uncle had loved his ancestral home, but he took more and more to exploring in countries unfit for a woman to go to and left my Aunt Berenice at Halton alone.” This Halton, Augustine explained, was a beautiful sixteenth-century manor house right in the heart of the Black Country. There (in the halcyon days of Augustine’s earliest childhood soon after the turn of the century) almost as fast as Gilbert Murray translated the plays of Euripedes, Aunt Berenice performed them. The setting was perfect. A sunken courtyard served as an outdoor stage; and the L-shaped house behind, with its gray walls clothed in magnolias, offered a ground-floor door for mortals to go in and out and a balcony overhead where gods could appear.

  “Aunt Berenice didn’t lack talent, and people would come from miles around—a few already in cars, but more in carriages still and older children from schools arriving in horse-drawn brakes. They sat on some long stone courtyard steps which served them as benches, and listened to Deathless Verse—and were purged by pity and terror, provided the rain held off.”

  The pit-head hooters could hardly be heard for the cooing of pigeons and singing of all kinds of birds, for the house was still surrounded by fifty acres of ancient woodland effectively hiding the tips; but its walls were already beginning to crack on account of the mines running under, “And last time I went, just after the War, the house was said to be so unsafe it would have to be all pulled down.”

  “What a sin!” said Janis: “That darling old place!”

  Augustine continued: “I must have been barely four, and Mary seven, the summer our mother took Mary and me to Halton—although she knew her sister couldn’t stand tinies about her, like people who can’t stand cats. The play was Medea, and the part suited Aunt Berenice down to the ground. Jason was somebody good from London and so was Medea’s Old Nurse, but the rest of the cast were locals. The school-mistress led the Chorus: the butler was Creon, condemning his mistress to exile with verve. Medea’s two children were meant to be two little miners’ brats from the village, but right on the morning the two little brats got mumps.”

  There was only one thing to be done: Augustine and Mary must wear the clothes (albeit Augustine’s tunic reached to his ankles) and act, though totally unrehearsed. The “Children” have anyhow little to do in Medea—they don’t even open their mouths till near the end, when their mother begins to kill them. “They die off-stage of course: the audience hears a childish scream from the palace, followed by two little voices protesting—but very briefly—in Deathless Verse. And presently two little bodies are seen up aloft in the dragon-car on the roof as Medea sets off (by air) for Athens. Mary’s curls did well for a boy and she’d acted before: I was much too young to understand ‘acting,’ but Mary they thought could push me around and the butchery done off-stage allowed for plenty of prompting.” Indeed it permitted Mary to speak for both, if reciting even a couple of lines of Deathless Verse should prove a bit too much like finishing up all the fat on his plate for four-year-old lips.

  Since Nanny and Mabel-the-nursemaid were out there watching, Mary had taken charge of Augustine entirely. Each time before leading her garrulous brother on to the stage she gagged him with one of the monster peppermints Mabel had furnished, and told him he wasn’t to utter on any account “like being in church.”

  “And in fact it all seemed just like being in church only more so, with all those dressed-up people intoning meaningless words in meaningless voices—except that in church you’re safe in a pew where the clergymen can’t get at you but here you were right in among them, and dressed in sort of surplices almost everyone see
med to be clergymen.”

  Still, with Mary there to protect him he surely ought to be safe; and in fact his first time down in the courtyard among them wasn’t too bad, in spite of he mustn’t speak. While those two old people intoned their responses the child had plenty of time to search with his eyes for Nanny—or anyone “normal.” ... And look—there was Mabel sitting right up at the back! He waved, and took out his giant bull’s-eye to show her; but Mary yanked at his arm all too soon and hauled him off to the house....

  Janis listened, but only because she wanted to listen. She had never read the Medea, and wondered more than a bit what on earth all this was in aid of.

  17

  Outside the roofless mill, Janis’s animal squealed with delight as Augustine’s playfully nipped its neck. Inside, Augustine moved a little closer to Janis to dodge the creeping sun. She widened her eyes; but he seemed now scarcely aware of his audience, blurting his story out in jerks as if every separate word were a separate fossilized lump on his chest.

  “But then it got worse and worse. Each time they took me out in the open there was Aunt Berenice—gaudy as hell in her Colchian robes, and getting madder and madder. The way it appeared to me, in real church they notice a clergyman getting like that: they hustle him off to stand up high in a special cage to shout, and don’t let him down till the fit is over. But no one did that with my Aunt, and now she was mad she wouldn’t let Mary and me alone: that’s what was most alarming of all, the way she pretended she loved us!” For little Augustine was well aware how extremely this wasn’t true and normally just kept out of her way on the rare occasions he saw her, but now whenever he tried to bolt someone had always got hold of him. Thus when the time came to follow the stage-direction “she gathers them passionately into her arms” and he felt himself gathered, he lost all control—gave way to panic, and bit her. “Oh, darling mouth ...” she snarled, going on with her hugging just as if nothing had happened. She finished her speech with her finger bleeding on to her batik and “followed them into the house.”