The Wooden Shepherdess Read Free

as French; but before he had time to protest (or even to wonder how she’d discovered it) back she was, close: “Lookee!” she urged, and was making him look at her shirt’s breast-pocket under the bib of her overalls. “REE” was clumsily chain-stitched across it in colored wools, below a colored-wool turtle: “You feel my turtle—it’s sure s-soft!” she invited, and tugged at his hand (but he wouldn’t).
    The next thing she said was: “Loan me your shirt, so I embroider your name like all ours,” and “T,I,N,O”—she was spelling it out on his chest with her finger, glancing sideways up at him: “‘Tino’: is that what folks call you, back home?”
    He told her firmly that none of his friends called him Tino. Whereon she relapsed at last into silence: yawned, stood up, and began to undress.
    â€œAll the same, I don’t smoke cigarettes!” she shouted, apropos of nothing, her shirt over her head and her jeans round her ankles: “Do you smoke cigarettes for Chrissake—or what do you do?” She wriggled her feet out of trousers and sneakers together. “ And I don’t drink liquor, I hate it!”
    Expecting just tomboy bare skin as she peeled off her tomboy attire, it came as a shock to see all the modish crêpe-de-chine she wore under it.
    â€œWell? My hair fell out with the fever—so what?”
    Then—peach-colored crêpe-de-chine nonsense and all—she dived straight in off the rock; and Augustine’s thoughts reverted to Mitzi with rather a bump.
    *
    Mitzi ... Unseeing gray eyes, spread fingers among the breakfast things finding her coffee-cup for her like feelers....
    The passage of months and oceans had shrunk her image to something small and bright and picture-like: something seen as if looking back through a tunnel, or down the wrong end of a telescope. Something that danced in the air like a kind of medallion above this alien Connecticut pool, and yet was enough to convince him he’d never love anyone quite like Mitzi again for the whole of his life. If only he’d had a fair chance before she went in her convent to teach her there isn’t a God to go in to.... Sorrow rose stale in his throat.
    For a while he stood there transfixed, unconsciously probing his scar with nails that were stubby and broken and traces of tar in the quick—till a hair got caught in a cracked one. Roused at last by the twinge he turned his back on the river: abandoned the child to her swimming, and started off home through the woods with his feet slip-slopping along in the span-deep sand of the overgrown buggy-road, mind still heavy with Mitzi. Her frost-pink face, half hidden in furs ....
    And again last winter’s bitter taste of despair, in a throat too dry to quite hawk it up.
2
    â€œBut surely the time has arrived to put Mitzi right out of my mind altogether!” Augustine told himself, deep in the heart of these woods right across the Atlantic.
    The sun shone dappled through trees overhead, lighting up the odd leaflike a bit of stained glass: by the time the light reached the ground it was green, like being under the sea.... They were lovely, these lonely Connecticut woods; and yet not a bit like Mary’s Dorset woods around Mellton, not only because of the conifers here and there but because of this wholly impervious undergrowth everywhere, making you stick to the tracks. Bushes, each one like a myriad green eyes.... Trees so thick with leaves that you hardly saw branches, let alone trunks....
    Moreover these trees were hardly any the same as in England: not even the ones which used English names, for this “oak” was never a real English oak nor these “elms” real elms.
    As he absently slapped something biting his wrist Augustine considered how different the woodland creatures were too, here. Chipmunks: brown furry ground-hogs—and skunks, he’d been warned