If indeed any such thing exists! For that makes the whole nature of Hitler’s “greatness” merely a preternatural empathy, turning him into a caricature of yourself whoever you are—and even, however many you are: an incarnate caricature of the whole German Nation. “And that” (as Euclid would say) “is absurd.” Or at least confusing, because it implies that the more you believe in Hitler’s this-sort-of-greatness the less you believe in Hitler’s intrinsic existence—and, damn it, we know he exists!
For one has to admit his mysterious gravitational pull.—Like you moon up there, the amazing tides which that force personalized as his “will” can raise among men are proof-positive Hitler exists....
But now Paganuzzi had reached his inn and demanded a bath.
12
Ten days later Polly arrived at Victoria Station.
Warned by Mme Leblanc, the “adequate escort” she’d had to wait for (an Indian Civilian’s leathery widow) had taken charge of Polly’s passport and tickets as well as her own: had bribed the ticket-inspector to lock their compartment door, and had never allowed her slippery prisoner out of her sight for a moment except when Polly wanted to wash her hands—and even then she had waited outside till Polly emerged. Only while crossing the Channel was any respite allowed, since Polly was hardly likely to want to swim.
Yet Polly had shown not the slightest signs of any wish to escape. As if in a daze she had taken it all with an icy politeness, a passive non-resistance as if she couldn’t care less: she had sat in her corner seat all the time, reading Zane Grey—except in the restaurant car, where she ate like a wolf.
In London they spent the night at Brown’s Hotel. Gilbert was due at a crucial conference somewhere and hadn’t got time, so Augustine it was who came to collect his niece. In Brown’s Hotel she didn’t look much like a schoolgirl—and even less like a penitent: dressed in the height of expensive good taste, her slender and graceful figure looked almost grown-up. It was only her starry-eyed little face which still had a childish look as she greeted without any vestige of warmth the uncle she used to adore.
Handing her over, the escort almost seemed to expect a signed receipt for the package safely delivered; and Augustine indeed had to meet a whacking bill for expenses (a bill which left the leathery widow sufficient margin to pay for a visit to Harvey Nichols before retiring to Kew).
It was roughly a decade since once before Augustine had driven alone with Polly from London to Dorset. Staines and Basing-stoke, Stockbridge, Salisbury, out at last on the beautiful Dorset downs.... His Bentley’s purring organ-like roar.... All these were much the same; but instead of that much-loved caroling woolen ball that had bounced around on the seat beside him, all he had now was an alien lackadaisical nymph who answered him only in grunts. She read Zane Grey all the time, never once looking out at the places they passed.
Just before getting to Mellton he stopped the car to read her the Riot Act: “Look here, Polly,” he said, “Pull yourself together! Me you can treat how you like, but you can’t go meeting your mother like this. Snap out of it!” Polly lifted her eyes for a moment only, and then returned to Zane Grey. Firmly he took the book out of her hands: “I intend stopping here till you’ve had a good cry. You’ll feel better after it.”
“Then we stop here all night,” said Polly: “I haven’t the slightest desire to cry.” She surveyed the familiar Dorset lane with distaste: “I’m glad to be home again.... I suppose. Give me back my book.”
She was still reading Zane Grey (though without taking in one word) when they reached the front door—but then, how would Peter or James or John have responded, if only a short while after witnessing Christ’s Transfiguration, someone had tried to make him “snap out of it?”
Mary was less upset than Augustine by Polly’s zombie behavior: at Polly’s age she had felt for a Latin Mistress almost exactly what Polly felt for the Führer of Germany. Hitlers or Latin Mistresses, what’s the odds? If a rose-is-a-rose-is-a-rose a pash-is-a-pash-is-a-pash.... So without one word about Polly’s escapade and expulsion she kissed her daughter goodnight and sent her up to her room.
When Polly was gone, “I suppose she’s now lighting candles in front of her Hitler Ikonastasis,” grumbled Augustine bitterly. “Mary, I’m not so sure we were right after all to shield the child from all contact with Christianity. Even a God young girls are encouraged to dwell on the torturing of and imagine they eat seems somehow healthier.”
Mary smiled to herself: “Poor Augustine is jealous-as-hell of Hitler,” she thought. “No idol takes kindly to being supplanted.”
Augustine chuckled. “The sheep to be eating the Shepherd for once! It’s a bit of a change of role....”
Because of his Christian upbringing, saying this kind of thing still made him feel a bit like a naughty small boy scrawling rude words on a wall.
*
But when Polly got to her room she had barely glanced at her Hitler icons: the photographs looked so insipid and posed compared with the Real Thing.
Instead she leaned from her window and gazed at the moon in a halo of luminous haze which extinguished the nearer stars. It was brilliant, and verging on full. She stared at those shadows across it which look like a face, but which Gusting (for this had been back in the days when she still called him that) had told her were mountains and plains. Mountains, and “seas without any water in them” he’d said. He told her about the telescope he himself had made as a boy, and how clearly it showed ring-craters of dead volcanoes: night after night he had mapped them, picked out by the “dawn” on the moving line which divided the lit from the darkened part of the orb. He had taught her some of their names (“Copernicus with its rays” was once she remembered suddenly). Also that rift, like a knife-cut many miles deep and hundreds of miles in length: “the Valley of ... something” (was it “the Alps?”).
Of course she’d believed all he said. But then as now, looking up at that shining disc with the naked eye, it was hard to believe there was nothing mystic about it. Merely another world like our own—yet not like our own, because it had neither water nor air. No life, just a desert hotter than any Sahara by day and colder than any Greenland by night.
No life on it.... That meant no possible Polly up there—in which case, what was it for? Was it there just to shine on this one particular night when she chanced to look out of the window—to flood this one particular Dorset garden with silver, exciting her dog to howl and the frogs to croak and keeping the screech-owls awake?
No ... for as Polly had gazed at the moon she was moved by a deeper thought: the moon’s skyline had nothing to do with her! That moon had been there forever, the same and unchanging, whatever might happen on Earth. Since before the Evolution of Man.... Since even before she was born!
That gave rise to a further stupendous thought: it would shine there the same even when Polly was dead. Even when she was no more (that unthinkable kind of time) the moon would be there just the same....
The light was so bright that her eyes were beginning to water. She wiped it away with her hand because now she felt sure she could read in that very light the answers to all those ultimate questions she’d tried to read in the face of Hitler. The answers which no philosopher—not since the Dawn of Time—has been able to put into words, she could read them all now in the face of the moon: what the Universe meant, and why Polly existed.... Even if (like other sages) she couldn’t yet quite put the Answers she brimmed with in words, that could wait till tomorrow: already tonight she was greater and wiser than anyone else in the World!
—All the same, once in her pajamas, she went to the secret place where she kept that worn three-legged old teddy bear which she counted on still to keep away bogies; and fell asleep with it tightly clutched to her breast. Next morning, when Susan and Gillie crept in to jump on her stomach and wake her that way, the bear was still there. But, alas, no longer the Key to the Universe: somehow that seemed to have taken wings in the night.
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOO
K
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1973 by Richard Hughes
Introduction copyright © 2000 by Hilary Mantel
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Richard Hughes
First Published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1973
Cover photograph: Francesca Woodman, detail from McDowell Colony, Summer 1980; courtesy of Betty and George Woodman
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Hughes, Richard Arthur Warren, 1900–1976.
The wooden shepherdess / by Richard Hughes.
p. cm.
Second vol. in the trilogy The human predicament; the 1st vol. is
The fox in the attic.
ISBN 0-940322-30-7 (paperback)
I. Title.
PR6015.U35 W6 2000
823'.912—dc 21 21 99-34920
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-532-3
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
The Wooden Shepherdess Page 40
