The Wooden Shepherdess

  Joan had reckoned Augustine’s probable absence in terms of weeks. When weeks turned into months, and when autumn even had come without him returning, Jeremy started suspecting his friend must be having a whale of a time among Djinns and Afreets, Sultans and brigands, gazelle and wild boar: for surely simple heartache could never have kept him away so long!

  After a whole month in Fez Augustine and Ludo had reached the coast at Rabat, where (or rather, across the river in Salli) they got themselves stoned and spat-on by blue-eyed and red-bearded Moslems (descended from Christian slaves, and thus all-the-more fanatical). Then down the coast past dreary commercial Casablanca to Mazagan; and on to Saffi, where beautiful bronze Portuguese cannon with handles molded like dolphins and knobs like bunches of grapes still lay about on the Keshla ramparts just where—centuries back—the Portuguese gunners had left them. There they turned inland again, towards Marrakesh; and saw for the first time—floating as if detached above the heat-haze—distant snow-covered peaks: the tempting, forbidden Atlas Mountains....

  This turned their thoughts again to the Glaoui, whose hold on that mountainous south was nowadays said to be pretty complete—apart from his infamous nephew Hammou, whose torture-chambers and vast arsenal-fortress of Telouet were defended by cannon forged (for the Franco-Prussian War) by Krupp; and one or two lesser ruffians no doubt, whose eyries lay too far from the caravan routes for the Glaoui to bother about them....

  Thus Mary was once more nearing her time, with Augustine on this occasion even further removed in Epoch than Space—in the Calendar Year 1345. That was by Muslim computation of course; but he might just as well have been back in Christendom’s Middle Ages, in mountains where Berber chieftains living in fortified castles snapped their fingers at Sultans and even Protecting Powers. Like Christendom’s mediaeval barons, each one ruled as far as the arm of his wrath could be made to reach till somebody stronger did him in.

  It was wholly by Glaoui’s personal favor and quite unknown to the French—who’d have done their damnedest to stop it—that late in October Augustine and Ludo had found themselves three days’ journey already into those xenophobe Atlas Mountains. Tonight they were lodged in a Berber castle.... But this was a castle (it happened) whose brigandish owner was counted among those “lesser ruffians” with little love or respect for the Glaoui—though that was a fact they had found out rather too late.

  Indeed there seemed good reason to doubt if tomorrow morning would find them alive.

  6

  A week ago, in Marrakesh, Ludo had played his cards well when they called at the Pasha’s vast and desolate palace. Sipping his scented coffee, Ludo had hinted (no more) at their crazy impossible pipe-dream of crossing the mountains from Asni towards Taroudant “had the French been less insanely jealous of British intruders.” This nettled the Glaoui: the Atlas was his domain, and permission had nothing to do with the French.... Without more ado he had given his blessing; then turned to one of his Berber bodyguard, Ali, and told him in Shleuh (the Berber tongue) to guide this Jew and this Christian, and guard them—and not to come back without them.... Whereupon Ali—knowing full well what that warning meant from the merciless Glaoui—had sat up the whole night sharpening knives.

  They had ridden on horseback as far as Asni: from there the grooms must take the beasts back, for horses were useless on mountain tracks. With the plains and their acres of olives and palms left behind, Augustine had felt like a boy escaping from school and inclined to behave like one: hoping “to stretch his legs” (among mountains anything up to 14,000 feet high), he had even pleaded for making the journey on foot. But this was a country where only the scum-of-the-earth went on foot, and Ludo had had to insist on hiring three mules to ride—with three little slave-boys thrown in—as the minimum style required when personal friends of the Glaoui took to the road. So the two of them covered their “Christian” clothes in Berber cloaks and the cavalcade had set off, with the taciturn Ali riding in front and the three boys joking along in the dust behind letting out occasional ear-splitting yells to encourage the beasts.

  They sat side-saddle without any saddles—just panniers flung over each animal’s back, incessantly drumming its near-side ribs with their heels since the moment the drumming faltered the sluggish animal stopped. At first it made even the seaman Augustine giddy to find himself riding like this on the outside brink of a four-foot track cut across the face of a cliff, and looking sheer down between his own drumming heels to a green-edged thread of quicksilver hundreds of feet below: then meeting a convoy of baggage-camels, and having to lie out flat on his animal’s back—with the animal somehow walking with bended knees like a slinking cat—while a camel’s side-bales of merchandise swayed just an inch or two over his nose.

  When rivers had to be crossed there weren’t any bridges: they had to be forded, towing the three boys behind through the ice-cold water gripping the tails of the mules in their teeth. At night they would come to some mud-built village, where Ali would summon the Sheikh and the magic of Glaoui’s name would secure them lodging of sorts: a carpet to sleep on, mint-tea and rock-like bread—and possibly hard-boiled eggs. For three days, indeed, all had gone well: three magical days.... But then on the fourth—and late in the afternoon at that—they had come to a spreading valley where Ali had seemed uncertain which track to take (so uncertain that Ludo suspected they’d taken a wrong one already to find themselves there at all). There was no one about to ask; but on cresting a rise they had sighted this castle, and sanguinely hoped for rather higher-class entertainment here than villagers could afford.

  The bare earth was crimson; the snow-capped mountains were crimson and even the river was tinged with red. The castle itself was crimson, with splashes of white high up round the few outside windows—like eyes.... As they neared it, hundreds of sharp-sighted pigeons flew out and wheeled in the crimsoning evening sky. The final approach to the castle was cut single-file through a thicket of otherwise quite impassable thorn, a thicket which barely left room to skirt three sides of the fortress and get to the fourth where alone was there any gate—and even then they were still single-file, on the narrow bank of a raging pinkish river. The gate moreover was masked by a short curtain-wall which would leave attackers no room for wielding a battering-ram, and no hope of covering-fire from across the torrent.... “Whoever planned this castle’s defenses,” Augustine remarked, “certainly knew his job!”

  But where had they got to? “Who owns this castle?” Ludo had asked their “guide” more than once; but Ali seemed not to hear. The gates were closed; but now a wizened face had looked out through a wicket, so Ludo made Ali ask him in Shleuh....

  When he learned at last where he was even Ali blenched, and pulled his hood over his face. He whispered to Ludo that Allah had brought them to country where claiming the Glaoui’s friendship merited instant death. “Mashallah,” said Ali.... But “Allah’s Will” be damned, and hastily Ludo conferred with Augustine.

  The sun was already setting, and nobody spends the night in the open but footpads and cut-throats.... Anyway, turning back once they’d been seen would be fatal.... Bluff seemed their only hope: two English travelers (thanks be to heaven at least they weren’t French!) who pleaded the law of Koranic hospitality, naming themselves “deeaf Allah”—“guests sent him by God.”

  Hoping against all hope that no one would recognize Ali as one of the Glaoui’s men, Ludo boldly beat on the gate with his fist while Augustine felt like some wretched MacDonald, back in the days of Glencoe, beating by night on the gates of the Master of Stair. Then the wicket was opened again, to reveal this time an almost gigantic elderly Negro: a man of majestic presence, dressed in a black-and-white striped jillaba and wearing a silver-sheathed koumiyah nearly as big as a scimitar. Ali was hiding his face in his hood and appeared struck dumb, so it fell to Ludo himself to say the piece which ought to have come from his man: “Tell your master that two very high-ranking Englishmen—intimate friends of the English King—have been sent b
y Allah to stand at his gate and await a hospitality rightly famous among the Faithful.”

  The man looked doubtful (perhaps he didn’t know very much Arabic). Anyway, back he went for orders; and dusk was already falling before at last he heaved wide open the groaning gates and they found themselves in a pitch-black vaulted darkness filled with the roar of rushing water.... For here was the final attacker’s hazard, and only a narrow booby-trap bridge crossed a sluice which ran like a mill-race. Guiding hands, however, were laid on their arms; they crossed a courtyard where tribesmen were camped, and climbed the outside stair of a corner-tower.

  This small upper room was completely empty. Across the four corners were cedar-beams polished with age providing racks for their cloaks, but otherwise—nothing. A bare polished plaster floor like old ivory faintly reflected the reds of the richly-painted cedarwood ceiling; bare polished-ivory walls reflected the dying hues of the sunset. The windows were small and unglazed, with beautiful wrought-iron grilles looking up at the pink of snow-covered peaks or down at the darkening vegetation around those mountains’ feet. The very air seemed the color of blood.

  Augustine had never seen any room quite so lovely—or quite so ominous, chilling and comfortless.

  7

  In England, on that same October Saturday afternoon Joan had been visiting Jeremy’s rooms in Ebury Street (he had lately ceased to be Resident Clerk), and had asked for news of Augustine. But Jeremy shook his head: “Nothing for two or three months. They were then in Fez, but thinking of moving south to Marrakesh as soon as the weather got cooler.”

  “Still no signs of him coming home?” was what her eyes asked; but Jeremy merely shrugged. “It’s those Djinns and Afreets,” he thought (Augustine’s own letter from Fez had indeed likened Morocco to living inside the Arabian Nights).

  Four long months had done nothing to ease the ache. In a way that was nowadays automatic whenever she felt the need of an antidote, Joan began to rehearse in her head her private list of Augustine’s faults: his lack of ambition of any kind, and even of any consistent aim in life. At last she complained out loud: “In a few more years he’ll be thirty!” and added “he’d money enough to embark on any career he liked.”

  Jeremy snorted. “I suppose what you mean is the Diplomatic, or governing bug-ridden tropical colonies! Surely it’s one of the sourest fruits of our prevalent Classical Education, this antique ‘liturgical’ notion about the duties which go with ample private means.” He paused. “Or—since wealthy poets and painters don’t need to debase their gift by having to make it pay—what a pity Augustine can’t even paint for nuts.... But perhaps you think all the same he should have a try?” Joan winced at the irony in his voice, and he wagged an accusing finger: “I almost believe you’d go for some absolute moron, provided he played the part at least of a conscientious squire—ready to open bazaars at the drop of a hat, or to plant a spinney when times were bad! Men ready to sit on the Bench, and the County Council.... D’you want Augustine to settle at Newton and live like that?”

  “You’re not being very helpful.”

  “Perhaps.... Because I bet I can read what you’ve really got in your tiny mind: Augustine’s curious craze for his miners, you think, should have led to an active role in the Labour Party—like Mosley, or Strachey’s son.”

  Joan was startled into confessing that some such idea might indeed have entered her head....

  “Then you couldn’t have read him wronger!—Look, my girl....” He paused, to think how best to put it. “Can’t you hoist in that Augustine’s miners are no mere impersonal aggregate Cause, they’re a ‘Twm,’ and a ‘Dai’?—Because people can’t be added together like ‘things,’ which is where the root of the whole Political Fallacy lies.” He was cocking a doubtful eye at Joan to see how much he was getting across, having learned by now that to most of mankind it is far from axiomatic—this sacred particularity of the “self,” as something wholly outside the domain of number.

  “Then why not use his money to help them in other ways?”

  Jeremy stared at Joan in astonishment: “Now it’s the miners you’re utterly failing to understand.”

  “Constructive ways, of course—like those Quaker workshops.”

  “Can’t you see how any experienced miner must hate those Quakers’ benevolent guts—expecting the salt of the earth to waste time cobbling shoes or knocking up tables and chairs, instead of their proper job?”

  But misery made Joan stubborn: “All right then, over to you! What does Augustine intend to do with his life?”

  “Perhaps it’s a rarer achievement than you imagine, Augustine’s knack of having things happen to him without ever needing to lift a finger to make them happen,” said Jeremy softly.

  Joan’s snort was an infinitesimal snort, but suddenly Jeremy’s patience snapped: “Very well! But if he must have a ‘career,’ please remember how being rich has narrowed his field of choice.”

  “Has ‘narrowed’ it?”

  “Yes. For all manual work—and that’s nine-tenths of the field—is strictly reserved for the poor.”

  Joan gasped. “But why on earth, with his brains and his education....”

  “Why on earth not—or have you forgotten how blissful he was on that rum-running schooner? If that sort of thing is his natural bent his brains needn’t get in his way—his highly-intelligent miners are proof of that. Although I admit that his lack of even the most elementary manual education might....” Suddenly Jeremy sprang to his feet and started striding up and down: “Have you ever thought that instead of just hero-worshipping miners he could have been one himself, if instead of his horrible Public School he had gone underground as a fifteen-year-old? And that takes us back to the days when the Rhondda was still Eldorado, the Saturday pubs as full as the Sunday chapels.... It just isn’t fair on a man, this blight of the silver spoon in his mouth!”

  Perhaps this paradoxical gospel of manual work would have mystified Joan even more had her glance not fallen on Jeremy’s paralyzed arm—when the sudden insight caused her a twinge of pity.

  Later, “I’ve never been underground even to look,” said Jeremy sadly, over their tea. “Say what it’s like.”

  “Do you want to be told how they carry their food in strong tin boxes, because there are more rats than men down those human ratholes? And take down quarts of tea to make up for the sweat they lose? And their ironclad boots, fit to stand up to kicking against sharp rock eight hours on end in the dark?”

  “That much I’ve seen; but say what it’s really like right inside a mine.”

  “Augustine has only taken me once, myself—and then not the kind you go down in a lift, but merely a ‘level’ with ferns round its mouth.” She paused. “I found myself gasping for breath like a fish the moment I got inside: the air had been breathed so often there wasn’t much left except vaporized sweat, and even my lamp burned dim. All its glimmer showed was drips like tropical rain from the roof, and the shine on the rails I must balance along because the roadway was knee-deep in water. Then, fifty yards in ...” (her voice took on nightmarish tones) “a strong smell of iodine. Stone, and splintered timber—and yards of sodden discarded bandage got snarled round my ankles, I didn’t know what it was in the dark.”

  “A fall of the roof, and someone’d got caught?” Joan nodded, speechless. “Well, carry on.”

  “I can’t. That’s as far as they’d let me go—thank God, for already I felt the whole weight of mountain on top of me, squeezing out pebbles and ooze from between the props.”

  “Have a try,” he wheedled. “From things you’ve been told.”

  Joan took a deep breath, and put down her muffin half-eaten. “You may have to crawl, with only a couple of feet of headroom, to get to the coal-face at all; and lie there for hours on end, in water, listening all the time to the pump in case it chokes and you haven’t got time to escape. Meanwhile you’re patiently undercutting the seam till the Atlantean weight on top of it forces bits down. Then these mus
t somehow be shoveled back up the roadway to where a tram can get near enough in to load—still crawling, of course....”

  “So now don’t you pity the poor little rich boy, who mayn’t get his knees and his back rubbed raw by the floor and the roof like this for night after night—and with grit ground into the meat wherever the skin is gone?” cried Jeremy, watching her wince. “Remember, he’s only a half-grown fifteen....”

  “That’s enough from you!” said Joan in an ominous voice.

  “But I mean it you booby, you must see that! And when he gets back to his lodgings—through streets where grimy sheep from the uplands scavenge the dustbins like alley-cats—who might he find there but you? You, still not out of your teens and down on your two knees scrubbing the doorstep, showing a great deal of leg.... He’s ‘blacker than Midnight’s arsehole’ (to quote the Classics), and dripping black puddles all over your lovely work—but you’re used to that.... Then you move indoors, where a wooden tub stands in front of a kitchen fire with the breakfast bacon frying; and there stands your Dad, sponging his naked lodger’s bleeding back—with Augustine bashfully trying to hide his newly-fledged private parts from you, you shameless hussy, standing there blankly wondering when the wind will change and stop blowing coal-dust over your washing-line....”