The Wooden Shepherdess

  Joan bent her head to examine the teapot: “It needs more water,” she said.

  “But those of course were the palmy days.” He paused, and cocked his ear to sounds from the street below. “Whereas now.... Just listen to that.” Both of them crossed to the window to look. “They must have walked the whole way from Wales, like their fathers the drovers before them.”

  Across the street an Unemployed Miners’ Choir sang in the autumn drizzle, as wholly absorbed in their singing as if on the stage of the Albert Hall. Joan thought they looked as if none of the bowler-hatted ninnies scurrying past them was even worth their pity....

  “Now you see what Augustine has missed,” said Jeremy’s deadpan voice.

  Suddenly Joan clutched his arm: “But there is Augustine!”

  “Where?” With her heart in her mouth she was pointing directly below at a threadbare figure, its back towards them, shaking an upturned cap for pennies under embarrassed averted Londoner’s faces—that unmistakable six-foot frame.... “The lunatic!” Jeremy gasped: “That’s carrying things too far!”

  He darted downstairs to the street, and was just about to seize hold of Augustine’s sleeve when “Augustine” turned—to reveal a different face altogether. Though much of the same age and height, Augustine’s “Doppelgänger” had lost one eye and his blue-black nose had been crushed back into his face; his clothes hung loose on his bones. When Jeremy fumbled out a coin, he was thanked in an almost inaudible windless voice from lungs it would take a stonemason’s chisel to cut.

  8

  Meanwhile slaves had brought carpets to spread on the floor and mountainous cushions to loll on, followed by other slaves bearing candles enormous as any in Catholic churches; and somebody closed the shutters to keep out the chill. Then had come slaves with glowing earthenware braziers poised on their heads, and incense thrown on the white-hot charcoal filled the room with blue aromatic smoke. The jittery Ali must have been badly in need of warmth, for he squatted on top of one of these braziers tucking it under his skirts as a personal central-heating system, and groaned with pleasure as tiny smoke-wisps of incense came curling out at his neck.

  As they sat cross-legged on the floor, Augustine and Ludo took pains to appear without a care in the world; but on learning their dreaded host was away from home, hearts leapt.... Though he hadn’t gone far (they were told), and a runner already had set out to find him—whereon their hearts fell again, and further still too when they heard the Khalifa’s orders were soon expected if not the Khalifa himself.

  After a time, however, their supper began to arrive: so every right hand that must dip in the dish was washed in water scented with orange-blossom, and then came the ceremonial breaking of bread (for bread must never be cut). Long-legged radishes helped to inspire those grateful belches good manners required as dish followed dish: cous-cous with quails in it sprinkled with cinnamon, roast chicken basted with honey and garnished with walnuts, a highly-spiced stew—and a lamb roasted whole, so tender its flesh came away in pinches (there being no knives or forks). But Ali, his hood still hiding his face, ate almost nothing right down to the final “gazelles’ feet” honey-and-almond pastries.

  There must have been fully a dozen courses before more washing of hands was followed by mint-tea served in ornate little gilded glasses.... What ages it seemed before the servants had all withdrawn, and at last they were left alone! It was close on midnight—and no one had told them whether their absent host the Khalifa had sent his instructions or not.

  Ali was smoking pipe after pipe of comforting kif; but he seemed to draw little comfort from it, and told them that crossing the open yard he had recognized someone.... Suppose this someone had recognized him, and had spread the tale that these “guests” were spies of the Glaoui? Augustine looked at the door; but the door hadn’t even a bolt—or at any rate none on the inside, if somebody came in the night. Suppose someone did, was he really about to have his throat cut? Ali was surely the one to know, and Ali certainly seemed to think they would.... If so, it’s silly enough getting killed for a “Cause”; but what a consummate fool he would feel if he got himself killed in so pointless a fashion as this! Really at twenty-six he ought to have had more sense.... Playing at being a he-man, that’s all this crack-pot excursion was: playing at being Walter Harris—or even at being Lawrence!

  Augustine thought of the god-like glamour of T.E. Lawrence’s presence at Oxford, its stunning effect on somebody really young: how it made one remember his lightest word, as when he’d refused Augustine’s sherry since “wine might spoil my palate for water” (for weeks after that Augustine had noticed the flavor of every glass of water he drank, self-consciously savored the peaty bouquet of mountain streams). He recalled one sacred evening spent in Lawrence’s All Souls rooms, with even Jeremy fallen respectfully silent while Lawrence explained how he’d cut the railway precisely enough to hamstring the Turks but never enough to render them desperate. Lawrence had told them the Art of war was to win it while getting not only as few of your own men killed as you could but as few of the enemy too.... No, Lawrence was not the conventional he-man but one of the subtlest minds Augustine had ever met: a mind like an onion—skin after skin to peel off without ever finding the final Lawrence within.

  It would take a bit more than a Berber cloak and a spice of danger to turn an Augustine into a Lawrence; and this was something he should have got wise to ages ago.

  When the time came to put out the candles Ali stationed their three little slave-boys to sleep on the stairs outside, their Negroid faces invisible in the dark once their eyes and their lips were closed: he hoped they would squeak loud enough to give the alarm if any intruder trod on them. Then he laid himself down right across the door with his hand on the drawn knife under his cheek—a copybook “Faithful Guard.” But both these precautions were more dramatic than useful, Augustine remarked to Ludo: for even had their party been armed to the teeth—and Ali’s collection of razor-sharp knives were the only weapons among them, at least they’d had that much sense—nothing they did could prevent the Khalifa from having them killed in the end if he’d made up his mind to kill them; and Ludo agreed.

  Walter Harris never went armed.... He had once told Ludo if trouble arose and you had a revolver the best thing to do was to throw it over their heads and start them fighting each other to get it....

  It tickled Augustine to find himself more fatalistic than Ali the Muslim; and since his staying awake could serve no possible end, he settled himself in his cushions and soon fell fast asleep.

  *

  Throughout what might well prove his last night on earth, Augustine slept like a log. The person who got little sleep that night was Joan, in her Suffolk Street hotel—and this wasn’t simply her lumpy bed. The nonsense Jeremy talked and that strange apparition outside had re-opened the wound, and revealed—in the light of these wretched four months—that living without Augustine was life with its radiance gone and its very reason. Wanting him otherwise than he was—that was useless.

  She’d have to swallow her pride and summon him home: which was probably all he was waiting for, in his chivalrous way, a point she ought to have thought of before....

  That poor dead Henry (she thought), whose only existence today was when his resemblance stared at her ghostlily out of Augustine’s beloved face! But she and Augustine were made for each other....

  Just for one somnolent moment she dreamed of two blazing suns revolving entirely around and merging into each other; but “Two into one can’t be done!” said a sonorous voice; and that piece of profoundest wisdom woke her to wonder what changes she’d make at Newton, and where she would put her grandmother’s chest-of-drawers. That awful Billiard-room needed a lot more light; but orange curtains and cream-colored paint work wonders....

  So where was her pen? In a minute she’d get out of bed to look, but the room was cold and the light-switch was by the door. She hadn’t Augustine’s address in Morocco, but Ludo’s father was certain to know—a
nd on second thoughts, it might be better to cable than write.

  9

  Augustine woke next morning teased by the thought there was something vital he had to remember but couldn’t; and several agonized seconds had passed before he recalled that he might have woken up dead. But now he was being offered the standard “hareerah” breakfast soup: fresh bread, with shavings of butter kept crisp by snow rushed down from the peaks, and a bowl of delicious honey....

  Ludo and he avoided each other’s eyes, both trying to kid themselves they had never been taken in by Ali’s ridiculous fears last night. They sent a message of blessing and thanks to their still-invisible host, distributed ample largesse and were feeling as pleased as Punch as they joined their mules at the gate.

  A-guest-is-a-guest-is-a-guest, even when personal contact has been avoided with care lest any magical “baraka” pass and the host be obligated. But once the party had gone through the gate they were guests no longer: before they had even mounted, peremptory orders came out to go back by the way they had come; and the messenger secretly tipped them the wink to make all the haste they could to Marrakesh. Solely because they weren’t French the Khalifa might give them a few hours’ start before sending out tribesmen to hunt them down—and he rather fancied himself as a cat-and-mouse man....

  A slow cavalcade of mules, pursued by galloping tribesmen.... Crossing the courtyard Augustine had seen their horses, tied by their feet to pegs in the ground. “All the same, we mustn’t appear to hurry,” said Ludo.

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, we’re not supposed to know. For another, as soon as those three boys twig something’s up they’ll contrive to decamp with the mules.”

  “That’s true....”

  But Augustine’s wits were working fast; and once out of sight of the castle walls he pretended hilarious spirits, proposing a mule-race by way of amusement. He promised a prize for whichever boy’s mule was the fastest: the boys were delighted, and off they all went at the gallop—the boys leaping over the rocks and thorn-bushes yelling their heads off, and each one prodding his mule from behind with a sharp-pointed stick whenever he got within reach. It was hard to believe how those two-miles-an-hour mules could fly once they took it into their heads! Ali’s mule easily won, for Augustine nearly fell off with laughing as Ludo behind him came bouncing over the scree like John Gilpin.

  No question of course of stopping to rest or eat all day: like camels, they had to live on their (last night’s) humps; and they kept the boys going by jokes and mockery laced with bribes. The mules seemed to know they were facing home, and by sunset they’d covered ground enough for more than a normal day-and-a-half. They were even beginning to hope they might now be beyond the Khalifa’s reach, till outside the village they hoped to sleep in a villager warned them his Sheikh had orders to apprehend them on sight. The man had no idea where these orders came from: it could be the French, or it could be someone whose mercies might prove less tender; but simply to spite his own Sheikh (that uncircumcised son of a strumpet who’d stolen his calf) he proposed to hide them himself, if they waited outside till dusk.

  So they waited till dusk, then spent a hilarious night in a windowless mud-walled stable half-full of dung and lit by a single candle: the three grown men and the mules and the slave boys all hugger-mugger, and playing infantile jokes on each other—except for Ali, who didn’t seem given to jokes. The boys were enchanted, and begged them to buy them when they got back: all three—they swore—wouldn’t come to more than the price of a goat (and a spell in Gibraltar jail, under British Law).

  Soon after midnight they heard a staccato drumming outside, and a voice crying “Where are those dogs of Christians? Death to the Infidels!” Augustine peeped through a crack in the door: a single Negro with frothing lips was waving an awesome ax in one hand and wildly rat-tatting his drum with the other.

  Humorless always, Ali darted across to the door with his knife; but Augustine forestalled him. In this sort of situation it sharpens the English Explorer’s wits no end not having a gun, and Augustine remembered a prep-school performance of his which always had little boys in stitches: so out he went now, and presented himself to this one-man Holy War in the role of a monkey catching fleas.

  The dumbfounded fanatic’s curses began to give way to giggles; and finally, helpless with laughter, he flung his ax in the bushes and came in to join the party.

  The next night they slept in the little French inn at Asni.

  “The net result has been merely return to Marrakesh a trifle sooner than planned,” said Augustine.

  “With sobering thoughts that the wily Khalifa may never have sent out a posse at all: he may even have prompted the ‘friendly warning’ simply to make quite sure he was rid of us.”

  Galling—but all-too-possibly true, thought Augustine. A sobering thought indeed, that perhaps from start to finish there’d never been any danger at all.... But how could they ever know? Kaleidoscopic Morocco was like that: once the passing moment had shaken the bits you never would know.

  “We’d better not call on the Glaoui and face his questions, for old Ali’s sake,” said Augustine. “For Ali really did make a pretty good balls of it all: why didn’t the lunatic tell the Glaoui straight off this part of the mountains was country he didn’t know, and shift the job on to someone who did?”

  Ludo shrugged his shoulders. “He wouldn’t dare question the Glaoui’s orders. And anyhow everything lies in the hands of Allah, so why should he worry?”

  10

  They were back in Marrakesh. Ludo had gone for their mail, while Augustine was sipping a Bock in a hotel garden where tourists were boasting about the bargains they’d bought in the Souks. Augustine wondered what they’d have thought of the “bargain” he hadn’t bought: three half-starved human boys for the price of a goat—three pairs of reproachful eyes he had left behind him at Asni, looking like dogs whose master was inexplicably starting out for a walk without them.

  But buying one even in order to set him free was a penal offense for a Briton—and rightly (Augustine thought), for “freedom” would merely mean that nobody any longer had any obligation to feed him: like setting superfluous kittens “free” on the London streets.

  In so lovely a garden as this those tourists’ appearance was truly an eyesore, their voices an earsore; and Bock was conducive to meditation. Augustine ordered a second glass. He then began to study himself in the light of their Atlas escapade, and with growing amazement at what he found: for whether their danger had ever been real or not he had certainly thought it was at the time—and in that case, what on earth could have made him behave almost like somebody out of the Boys’ Own Paper the way he had? Calmly composing himself for sleep, with only a fifty-fifty chance of ever seeing the morning light: confronting unarmed that fanatic who threatened to chop them up with his ax? He hadn’t been “brave,” because that means conquering fear and he’d acted throughout with a total absence of genuine panicky fear: whereas in the past that Long Island landing for instance had frightened him out of his wits, and so had the Bearcat chase....

  It was all so incredibly out of character! Could he be really changing his nature like that with advancing years—or was it just something perhaps in the very air of Morocco, and quite automatic when thrown among people who rate life cheap to devalue your own? Like in hospital: back in 1918, finding himself in a whole ward dying of Spanish Flu, death had seemed the natural thing and not worth fussing about....

  Augustine lifted his puzzled gaze to a branch overhead, where a subfusc mottled chameleon’s bulbous eyes (they had only a tiny hole in the middle to see through) focused a fly. Creatures believed to keep changing color to match their surroundings—though all this one did was to dart out an eight-inch tongue and whip in the fly.... So perhaps his own curious lack of fear had been merely a human chameleon’s unconscious “doing-in-Rome-as-Rome-does” deep-psychological automatic reaction? But that was a pretty alarming thought: if the leopard can’t chan
ge its spots but a civilized rational humanist atheist quite so easily can, he had better watch out in case this applied right across the board in surroundings where man-made law was totally disregarded but no one would dream of disobeying the least of the Laws of God!

  As a psychological force outclassing the Will and Reason—outclassing Ethical Absolutes, Sex, and Self-preservation alike— his new “Automatic Chameleonism” Law could account for a lot in human behavior. Placed in general heretic-burning surroundings, for instance, that was how decent intelligent men could have acquiesced and even approved (St. Paul joining in when Stephen was stoned). One day he must try the idea out on Jeremy....

  Just then Ludo arrived with a bundle of mail, sat down and clapped imperious hands for a drink: “I’m a wreck—that bloody British P.O. here is quite as slow as the French!”

  On the top of Augustine’s batch were a couple of telegrams. One was from Mary: she’d had her baby all right—this time a six-pound boy, her “infant Gilbert” at last.... But then Augustine read Joan’s; and his heart gave a curious sideways leap, neither properly up nor down. He read it through twice; but all he said was, “It looks like I’ve got to get home at once.”

  Ludo showed no surprise. “From here the quickest is probably hiring a car to Casablanca or Mazagan, and catching a boat from there.”

  “Then that’s what I’d better do, I suppose.”

  “I’ll try and find out about sailings” said Ludo, and vanished inside the hotel.

  Augustine read through the cable a third time, wondering still at how little elation he seemed to feel. As soon as he saw Joan, of course, it would probably boil up again.... But meanwhile, incontinent thoughts kept creeping back to their late expedition.

  For decades the whole Souss Valley and Taroudant had been closed to all Europeans: suppose they’d got through? And Ludo and he would have certainly tried it again, if he’d stayed. Maybe they would join a caravan through the mountains dressed as Moors—with himself a pretense deaf-mute: or maybe they’d try to work their way round by the coast.... Then a recollection flashed through his mind of the “Mulay Abdullah” Quarter of Fez: of a coal-black Senegal sentry on guard at an ominous Gustave-Doré hole in a vast blank moonlit wall (the only way in), after which a gigantic groaning water-wheel had to be passed in the dark. Like the groans of ten thousand unfortunate clients with Clap it had sounded, and quite enough to put anyone off before getting through to the girls and the bright lights at all.... But now it seemed to him more like the groans of ten thousand happily-married men—trapped by that same simple thought of four bare legs in a bed—who had had to abandon for ever all hopes of one day entering Taroudant on a mule....