The Wooden Shepherdess

by Richard Hughes

  The Reverend Mother’s refusal was firm. To her way of thinking Carmelite Convents were no easy havens for misfits but front-line posts of continual ghostly danger and struggle, and nobody blind could possibly live to the difficult Carmelite Rule. They were places of wonderful happiness, given a true vocation; but, knowing her Walther, she felt pretty sure that the whole crazy idea came from him: that the girl had merely consented—no doubt in a state of hysteria. Still, she had couched her letter in terms such as Christian Charity coupled with upper-class manners and family ties permitted. She stressed the Carmelites’ Rule of Silence: for surely even a Walther must understand the unbearable strain of silence on someone already cut off by her blindness! But then (not to seem too abrupt) she went on to describe all the reading a nun has to do, both alone and aloud: the Office, with all its intricate daily changes....

  At that, “Hold hard!” thought Walther, beginning to get back his wits: “But what about Braille?” For there must be missals and so on in Braille. Anyway, Carmelites weren’t some teaching or nursing Order whose need for their eyes was obvious: these were Contemplatives merely, just kneeling around all day and waiting for beautiful thoughts. So perhaps the woman had got in the habit of being discouraging: all she needed was just a little persuading—or pressure.... And “pressure” started him reckoning high-up connections in Rome, where if need-be appeal could be made to the Holy Father himself—since one wasn’t the Freiherr von Kessen for nothing!

  So Baron Walther wrote off to Rome in that tiny feminine hand which belied his gigantic bulk and almost needed a microscope, confident all would come right if the right strings were pulled. As for Mitzi herself, she was quite unperturbed from the first. She was one who’d her Marching Orders from God; and even a Prioress cannot thwart Him.

  Meanwhile, re-reading the Carmelite Mother’s letter, Walther had noticed a postscript that “Mitzi had better come to be talked-to.” All the Prioress meant was that somehow the girl must be shown how her true vocation lay in the world, but not of it—with possibly comforting talk about Lourdes; and she knew that she ought to see the poor girl and explain things herself, not let the parents or even the Parish Priest perhaps make a hash of it. Still, given Mitzi’s frame of mind, it is hardly surprising if when she did “go to be talked-to” the interview passed not quite as the Reverend Mother expected.

  That morning the children had gobbled their breakfasts, had filled their pockets with sausage and slung their toboggans and carried Augustine off for an all-day jaunt in the snow, which kept him far from the scene (and suspecting nothing) when presently Father and Mother and Mitzi and coachman set off on that fateful visit to Kammstadt. Their heavy old two-horse family sleigh was terribly slow, and they lunched on the way; but at last the horses came to a halt—and the sound of the sleigh-bells.

  No one expects of a simple Carmelite House, with its score of Sisters, the grandeur of some mediaeval great abbey with hundreds: still, Walther was pained at finding this place didn’t even look specially built. It was just a commonplace middle-class house, set back from a quiet middle-class road in a Kammstadt suburb behind a high garden wall; and this hardly seemed proper retreat for a nobleman’s daughter, which made their pretended rejection of one even more outrageous. However, he pulled a bell in the garden wall and a smiling apple-cheeked Extern admitted them, one by one, through a narrow wicket beneath a leafless acacia. They found it doubly dank in the frost-bitten yard inside, since the wintry afternoon sun was already too low to slant over that wall; and even the life-size St. Joseph with snow on his shoulders could hardly solace Walther’s sense of fitness, guarding an all-too obvious former back-door.

  They were taken first to a cubby-hole ten feet square where in secular days some drudge would have polished the boots and knives. Refreshments were brought them (the daintiest cakes, and a kind of tisane); and a wispy paraffin stove was lit, but it tempted no one to take off their furs. Then at last the Portress returned. She led them up back-stairs crusted with varnish and ushered them into the parlor.

  This was a bare room, seemingly colder than even the yard outside: a room moreover with only three walls, for the fourth was mostly that fixed portcullis (or “grille”) of stout iron bars with spikes that you have to talk through to nuns. “Like bloody bears in a zoo!” thought Walther, now more than ever disgruntled (that very morning his answers from Rome had arrived, and hadn’t been helpful at all). But Mitzi—in tailor-made gray coat-and-skirt of thick winter cloth, with a neat felt hat and her long yellow hair looped up—sat down on the chair by the grille she was led to as gay as a cricket, and trying her best not to show it.

  2

  That unusual, joyful calm; and indeed the rock-like look of that will....

  As soon as the Prioress drew back her curtain she saw that this was no docile creature dumbly obeying her father’s orders; and no hysterical creature either—no desperate eel on a hook. She realized almost with shock that those big gray useless eyes were brimming with joy; and behind, from the shadows, she heard the Sub-prioress only too audibly gasp her astonishment. All she’d intended to say was better forgotten—leastwise the comfort, and talk about Lourdes: yet nothing could alter the fact that admission was out of the question, today’s exaltation was something unlikely to last and a nun was a nun for a life-time.... Silence on top of her blindness must sooner or later drive anyone “odd” (the bugbear of every enclosed community): nowhere on earth would the girl find a convent imprudent enough to take her.

  But better than simple refusal would be to convince this unusual child that she must have mistaken God’s will—even then not by openly saying so, rather by helping her figure it out for herself how impossible blindness rendered the Carmelite Rule.... So the Prioress plunged, without any preamble, straight into details of Carmel’s day: a day of eighteen hours in winter and nineteen in summer, “because our fatigue itself prays better than we could.” The deafening clapper which woke them at half-past five (in summer at half-past four): the hours of said or silent worship in Choir: the solitude in their cells, the menial labor, the study and intricate reading-aloud: the strict enclosure, which meant that from now for the rest of her earthly life she would never once leave these walls. And throughout, like a kind of refrain, she stressed that almost perpetual silence “so dear to us who have eyes.”

  If the creature wasn’t quite beyond measure pig-headed or even a trifle deranged, surely her own common sense must show her this just was not humanly possible....

  Nothing, however, seemed able to shake the girl’s conviction that God had called her to live to this Rule, this Rule and none other. She barely pretended to listen, for given that premiss her logic was simple: to Him who required this of her all things were possible, therefore the means and conditions were up to Him to work out and in due course He would. “Means” weren’t Mitzi’s concern: she was one who had Marching Orders from God, and was therefore no longer open to argument.

  Thus time passed. As the darkening room grew darker and darker, the shining of Mitzi’s eyes grew apparently even brighter. Faced with this yellow-haired, shining-eyed, shadowy object erect in the gloaming beyond those double-banked bars, the Prioress started all over again—determined this time to speak plainer. This time she would cross every t and dot every i....

  What was it, then, which so suddenly brought to the Reverend Mother’s mind the late Pope Leo’s words to the “Little White Flower” (the fourteen-year-old Thérèse), when she too had made her exceptional plea for admission to Carmel? “All’s well,” the Holy Father had said: “All’s well, if God wants you to enter you will.” That child was now “St. Thérèse of Lisieux”: a bare generation ago, yet already a canonized Saint! And what was it made her ask herself—rather, what was it asked her almost like Peter dreaming at Joppa: “Dare you call “blind” these eyes which the Lord’s own Finger has touched, and opened for purposes of His own?”

  Thus, even while she continued speaking, she found herself knowing she mustn’t handle
this case alone any longer in spite of the special grace of her office: those doubts which had entered her mind had seemed less thoughts of her own than like some alien signal, repealing the whole of her argument.... Could they be heavenly guidance? That very question meant that she needed advice: for a Carmelite knows too well the ways of the private schizoid mind to accept as authentic a “voice” or a “guidance” unless confirmed in the common mind of the Sisterhood. Putative guidance must always be laid before Council....

  Meanwhile Walther stirred on the chair he was much too large for. His bottom ached, and the woman seemed to be wandering. Parting with Mitzi was anyhow trying enough, and all this argle-bargle was taking too long.... He was taken quite by surprise when the Prioress all of a sudden dismissed them, a trifle abruptly.

  3

  By now it was much too late to start home through the forest. But only the coachman was sent to sleep at a Gasthaus, for no one of consequence stays in public hotels and Walther’s custom (whenever he had to stop in town overnight) was to billet himself on his man-of-business in Kammstadt, the lawyer Krebelmann.

  Krebelmann was a Kammstadter born and bred: a man with obsequious mouth and contemptuous eyes and a nervous trick of shifting his papers about for emphasis when he spoke, and another ridiculous one of leaning back when he walked as though he carried a tray. But no one denied he was shrewd.

  The Krebelmann house was roomy and old and over-ornate, having once belonged to an infant heir whose affairs Herr Krebelmann managed, and then changed owners nobody quite knew how. It stood on Kammstadt’s principal street; and was gloomy, as though it felt come-down-in-the-world nowadays with only a small-town lawyer’s family in it.

  Walther had found himself more and more seeking the lawyer’s advice these days; and tonight the two had plenty of pressing things to discuss, while Frau Emma took Adèle and Mitzi away to talk women’s-talk and to coo at the latest baby—or rather, to coo at the tiny upturned nose which was all that emerged to breathe from a sea of wool, like a miniature schnorkel.

  *

  Back in the Convent too there was anxious discussion. The Reverend Mother had spent a whole hour in private prayer, then summoned her Council and laid the problem before them. At first they took the common-sense view: they agreed that blindness would handicap far too severely the strenuous life of a nun, and the applicant must be refused. But the other Council Sisters had never seen Mitzi, and when they asked the Sub-prioress what she had thought of the girl she said “That you just can’t argue with Grace!” That loosened the Reverend Mother’s tongue, and she spoke the name already so much on her mind: Thérèse Martin, the child who in spite of refusals had gained admission to Carmel when still under age—to become a Canonized Saint. Then, sorely perplexed, all four of them jointly offered the problem in prayer.

  Mother Agnes of the Holy Face, the oldest Religious among them, eased the tension a bit when she asked the Prioress why she considered the question was one which need be finally settled now? This blind girl offered herself to God as a Postulant only. Postulants wear no habit: they’re not even Novices yet, let alone Nuns—and may never become so, for not every tadpole grows to a frog. That rests in the hands of the Lord. Since only a “No” at the present time need be final, why not allow her to come—thus leaving the Lord to reveal His will in His own good time?

  Postulants take their place in the convent life, but only like guests who can leave any moment they want to. Surely this girl would presently leave of her own accord when she found it impossible? Also, said Mother Agnes, Advent was only a few days off (in the penitential season of Advent the silent seclusion of Carmelite life grows even more rigorous): “No normal time for a normal admission, I grant you; but coming in Advent surely this girl whom words can’t convince will see for herself all the sooner that blind girls cannot go on....”

  “Unless,” the Sub-prioress added in a little more than a whisper: “Unless the Lord’s will really is otherwise....”

  What Mother Agnes said turned the scales: the Council agreed, and presently so did the Chapter. Formally asked by Chapter, the Bishop gave his consent. Thus was that Wednesday the Twelfth of December settled for Mitzi’s admission as Postulant, albeit few of the Sisters imagined she’d stop very long (perhaps barely the end of the year).

  *

  Mitzi of course was fully convinced this was final; and Schmidtchen got down at once to preparing her darling’s (flannel and calico) trousseau.

  Walther gave all the credit to Rome: for there must have been high-up pressure to cause such a sudden surrender. Indeed, in his eyes, this all went to show that even if ancient nobility nowadays cut little ice in the secular world in the Church it still counted for something—at any rate, ancient nobility backed up like his with a couple of Curial cousins (in short, things always did come right in the end if the right strings were pulled).

  Returning at last from Munich to seek his bride, Augustine’s first intimation of what was afoot was the children’s thunder-bolt words as they flocked to the station to meet him: for no one had thought to tell him before, since no one supposed him concerned. A second Persephone’s Rape! In his calendar “Wednesday December the Twelfth 1923” would remain ever after his unforgettable date of historic despair.

  Those desolate hours he spent alone in the snowy forest kept him again off-stage when Mitzi set off on her second and final journey; and long before Walther and Adèle got back he had fled from their castle and even their country. All they found on return was a cryptic note saying nothing of why he was going, or where.... He had humped his own bags to the train and forgotten his guns: Otto said he seemed half off his head.

  Only ten-year-old Trudl, loving Augustine herself, had spotted his trouble was love; and Trudl of course wasn’t telling.

  4

  Wednesday, December the Twelfth.... That heavy old two-horse sleigh had plenty of room for all four of them, Father and Mother and Mitzi and coachman—and luggage.

  Soon after ten in the morning it passed from the comforting homely smell of cows through the hollowly-echoing castle gate, and crossed the causeway; but since there were drifts that day in the forest it didn’t arrive at the convent gate till dusk. There they were once again left to wait in that tiny carbolicky room for an hour or more before the Portress, candle in hand, returned to lead the way to the parlor.

  Mitzi could hear hushed voices behind the curtains; and even before she was called to the grille, and the curtains were drawn aside, she guessed that the struggle wasn’t yet over....

  The time then was half-past six. At six, the Sisters had walked in procession to supper chanting the De Profundis: then eaten their meal in absolute silence without sitting down and in front of a skull on the table—for such was their custom. In other than seasons of penance, they’d then have adjourned for that pleasant hour of recreation together which, being one of the rare occasions they talked, was the hour most often ordained for receiving a Postulant. But this was Advent, with no such hour of recreation allowed them; and so tonight they’d assemble only briefly, and break their silence for only so long as was strictly needful for Mitzi’s formal reception among them.

  For Mitzi’s reception, that is, if Mitzi was still unconvinced.... For now (as everyone knew) she was still barred out behind that grille in the parlor, and hearing one last attempt by all four Sisters-in-Council in concert: one final attempt to dissuade her from risking her own neck (and theirs) on the perilous cliff-face of Carmel.... “Elijah’s unscalable mountain,” she heard them describe it, “Where one weak climber imperils herself and impedes all the others.”

  But Mitzi, in spite of the strain of this one-against-all resistance, was not to be moved; and indeed how could she be moved when she knew herself driven on by Something—oh, greater by far than her reasoning self? So at last the useless reasoning ceased; and the sound of a key in a lock came to tell her the door of Enclosure at last stood open in front of her.

  Hands reached over the threshold to guide her
. A gentle pressure told her to kneel, and something was held to her lips which must be a crucifix. Rising again, she felt them turning her round to face the door she had come by and bow her farewell to the world. Then she heard that door on the world being locked, and her father blowing his nose.

  *

  Schacht (the financial dictator) had lately trebled a landowner’s troubles by stopping inflation so suddenly: cash was instantly scarce, and with bank-rate at 15 per cent credit impossible. Forests are largely capital work; but now all capital work on the land had to cease and men be laid off, or stretches of forest be sold—and who, these days, had the money to buy them? Mitzi’s problem at least was settled, while all these other things weren’t: so as soon as they reached the Krebelmanns’ house tonight the Baron retired with his Man of Business, and started discussing his thorniest problems at once. Walther might feel heavy-hearted at parting with Mitzi, but had to put Mitzi right out of his mind and get down to it—heavy-hearted or not.

  It was well after midnight before the two men finally left their papers and sat down to supper. The women had long ago gone up to bed. The Krebelmanns’ peasant slave always breathed through her mouth, but now her eyes were gummy with sleep as well as she served hot consommé, sipped from cups while munching a wealth of steaming sausage and so on—and afterwards, beer.

  When Walther at last went up to bed, his wife never stirred. Her face was hidden; but Walther concluded she must be uncommonly deeply asleep by the way she gave no sign even when he none-too-quietly kicked off his boots: and although it wouldn’t be fair to call that a downright attempt to wake her, he found his wife’s continued coma no small annoyance because, in spite of the beer, he didn’t feel ready for sleep himself and wanted to talk. For now he had come to bed not even financial worries could keep his thoughts any longer from Mitzi: recalling the long-ago days when his little darling would climb on his lap to play with his watch-chain, and used to squeal with delight if he chucked her high in the air and pretended to let her fall....