The Wooden Shepherdess Read Free Page B

bath-tub, tasting not very much worse than the worst they sold in Montmartre). Trundling along those leafy Connecticut lanes in his ancient Buick, the man had gone on to instruct the ignorant Englishman newly arrived that “Rum Row” was the fleet of liquor-ships come from all over the Globe and lying at anchor just outside territorial waters, since there they couldn’t be touched. This vast Armada, he said, was not only the Longest Bar in the World but the Largest-Ever Assemblage of Shipping in History....
    Up till that moment Augustine had sat very still and said nothing; but now had decided to get out and walk.
3
    For somebody reared like Augustine, the life he’d been leading these last few months seemed compacted of stuff so strange it already felt almost a dream; and indeed even now he still felt half in a dream—even here in these alien woods, on his way from the pool he had swum in and met that American child. He felt any moment he’d wake up at home: back in Wales, up above all those empty enormous rooms which he never used in his little white attic under the roof with the moon staring straight in his eyes.
    To Augustine it might seem a dream; and yet he’d been certainly changed by it. Coarsened—or made just a little more “realistic,” if that is the word you prefer. It was much as happens in war: for just as a boy when his voice breaks now sings bass but loses his top-notes, so must the need for adjustment to action and danger—the downward shift of his whole emotional gamut to take it—leave him calloused a bit at the finer, more sensitive end of his thinking and feeling. So now as Augustine ducked his height to bob under a bough overhanging the trail, or leapt a log with the litheness of somebody young who had spent half his youth on a marsh after wildfowl and now had the added litheness the sea gives, his thoughts were no longer concerned at all with the abstract riddles the Universe holds. “Significant Form”: all those wonderful pictures he’d bought and left behind him in Paris—what crap!
    But “My poor little Ree, what a country to bring up a child in ...” It suddenly struck him he’d failed to ask where she lived, or even her surname: so now he had probably lost her again, this nearest approach to a friend he had made since he landed.
    She’d seemed so disposed from the first to be friends: not a bit like Trudl and fierce little Irma had been to begin with, or Rudi and Heinz (for those German children had certainly taken some taming, although in the end one couldn’t help getting fond of them).
    Schloss Lorienburg, though.... At the time it had all seemed real enough; but once over here in the New World he found it incredible anywhere quite like that feudal German castle existed these days, or dug-outs like Walther and Otto its lords! As for her brother that double-dyed lunatic Franz, if he weren’t so absurd with his dreams of another Great War it would almost be frightening.... Somehow it seemed so unnatural finding young Germans, chaps one’s own age, still wrapped in Laocoon-knots with such antique neuroses as Franz and indeed more alien, more incomprehensible even than old ones.... “Well,” said a Voice: “then what would you say of a girl who even last winter—the winter of 1923—could choose to go for a nun?” And Augustine startled a lizard no end by swearing out loud: for why must each train of thought he embarked on end up back with her ?
    Augustine had tried so hard for so long to forget her. July this was now and all this sun-baked American boscage was dried-up and dusty, with leathery leaves that began to look tired: yet right back in France.... Yes, back in the spring when from Paris right down to the coast all the trees had been only in bud—and even that night he’d arrived at St. Malo, wasn’t it “putting Mitzi right out of his mind altogether” (like