The Wooden Shepherdess (15 page)

How many hundreds of times had Augustine been over and over it all in his head! Someone under the Age of Consent ...
A-child-is-a-child—or
, IS
it?
Suppose.... But what else could a person have done? No wonder this rent him, and flung him about on his bed like people in Bible times got flung about by a devil!

The door was open of course, and she must have been barefoot: he heard no sound till he felt a tug at the sheet and opened his eyes on somebody shadowy standing over his bed. In panic he thought of the daft girl.... “Move,” said Sadie, “and give a poor wench some room.”

He moved. It was Fate, he had no more fight ... but because of her onion-and-patchouli breath he kept his face as far as he could from hers.

With the cold-porridge parody over, he slept like a log. Then daylight came, and he woke to the sound beside him of stifled sobs.

“What's the matter?” he asked.

“I guess you was virgin?”

Augustine made no reply.

Then another sob, and “You're not very kind, not even to kiss me before it!” the girl complained.

Tony had told them his Indians smelled half-way between gypsy and fish: though he said that camping with them you hardly noticed it, sleeping on pungent spruce-boughs....

Tony's shooting the rapids in Indian canoes had sounded exciting. Suppose ... but no, he must get to the Governor-General's office in Ottawa quick as he could to apply for another passport. He'd cable Mary at once.... But first he had got to get everything clear: just bleating “A-child-is-a-child-is-a-child” and “What else could a decent fellow have done?” didn't do any good, the pain in that small terrible face as he'd seen it last was something that never could be undone—a weight that he couldn't crawl out from under. For he was the one who had clumsily done it to someone he loved, and who loved him.... Thus it was no good asking how else could a person with decent instincts behave: somehow he'd somewhere got out of step ... and this load on his heart, this leaden lump at the very core of his being seemed mighty close to what people like Mitzi must mean by “sin!”

But there couldn't be “
sin
” if there wasn't a God to offend—which there wasn't, of course.... And so, was it Freud whom Augustine in fact had offended against? Or the God Who Didn't Exist? Or would some wholly impartial observer, perhaps, have deemed him in Dutch with both?

A God “like the air” (Ree would say) “which everything breathes....” “Like the air” (as Mitzi might add) “which certain creatures can also fly in—though even they have to learn....”

Augustine turned his eyes to the low-set window and there, on the lake below, he saw reflected the rising sun. It seemed to be hung from the tips of a line of pines which bordered the very top of the picture upside-down.

“GOD, LIKE THE air, is something which everything breathes—and certain creatures can fly in....”

Think back now to the previous winter, when Mitzi's second retina slipped and she lost the last vestige of sight. She was always a rather detached and withdrawn sort of girl; and the shock of this total blindness at seventeen was bound to turn her in even more on herself, or on God—and that prime distinction no longer was easy to draw, now the strain of bearing what couldn't be borne had snapped like an overtaut wire. For now, when she probed to her own very innermost pinpoint “I am,” it was like looking into a tiny familiar room through a window and finding herself instead looking out—upon landscapes of infinite width: no longer her little “I am” inside there at all, but only His great “I AM.”

The times when a separate “Mitzi” still seemed to exist were no more than a lingering nightmare she hoped to be rid of for ever as soon as she woke up after His likeness, a nun: no longer her little “I will” there ever again, but only His WORD.

Her father regarded convents as more-or-less human litterbins, meant for the tidy disposal of girls of good family Fate had unsuited for life in the world (as their “natural refuge,” to put it a little less crudely). The family too were agreed that now she was blind there was nothing else to be done with her.... Still, he hadn't been finding it easy to broach: so when she told him herself that she wished to become a nun, he was so relieved at her common sense that he kissed her.

Augustine (we know) looked on convents as dangerous webs like a spider's where any girl buzzing anywhere near one was doomed—in a trice she'd be whisked inside and wound hand-and-foot in a habit, sucked dry and the mummy hung up out of sight before you said knife; and even Walther had no more idea than Augustine—or Mitzi herself—that convents were nowadays harder by far to get into than out of. Her choice of that neighboring Carmelite House at Kammstadt where one of her aunts was Prioress seemed a choice so obvious, surely he'd only to write to Adèle's holy sister and tell her the girl would be coming.... So when the Prioress wrote by return flatly refusing to even consider taking a blind girl, it set him right back on his hunkers.

The Reverend Mother's refusal was firm. To her way of thinking Carmelite Convents were no easy havens for misfits but front-line posts of continual ghostly danger and struggle, and nobody blind could possibly live to the difficult Carmelite Rule. They were places of wonderful happiness, given a true vocation; but, knowing her Walther, she felt pretty sure that the whole crazy idea came from him: that the girl had merely consented—no doubt in a state of hysteria. Still, she had couched her letter in terms such as Christian Charity coupled with upper-class manners and family ties permitted. She stressed the Carmelites' Rule of Silence: for surely even a Walther must understand the unbearable strain of silence on someone already cut off by her blindness! But then (not to seem too abrupt) she went on to describe all the reading a nun has to do, both alone and aloud: the Office, with all its intricate daily changes....

At that, “Hold hard!” thought Walther, beginning to get back his wits: “But what about Braille?” For there must be missals and so on in Braille. Anyway, Carmelites weren't some teaching or nursing Order whose need for their eyes was obvious: these were Contemplatives merely, just kneeling around all day and waiting for beautiful thoughts. So perhaps the woman had got in the habit of being discouraging: all she needed was just a little persuading—or pressure.... And “pressure” started him reckoning high-up connections in Rome, where if need-be appeal could be made to the Holy Father himself—since one wasn't the Freiherr von Kessen for nothing!

So Baron Walther wrote off to Rome in that tiny feminine hand which belied his gigantic bulk and almost needed a microscope, confident all would come right if the right strings were pulled. As for Mitzi herself, she was quite unperturbed from the first. She was one who'd her Marching Orders from God; and even a Prioress cannot thwart Him.

Meanwhile, re-reading the Carmelite Mother's letter, Walther had noticed a postscript that “Mitzi had better come to be talked-to.” All the Prioress meant was that somehow the girl must be shown how her true vocation lay
in
the world, but not
of
it—with possibly comforting talk about Lourdes; and she knew that she ought to see the poor girl and explain things herself, not let the parents or even the Parish Priest perhaps make a hash of it. Still, given Mitzi's frame of mind, it is hardly surprising if when she did “go to be talked-to” the interview passed not quite as the Reverend Mother expected.

That morning the children had gobbled their breakfasts, had filled their pockets with sausage and slung their toboggans and carried Augustine off for an all-day jaunt in the snow, which kept him far from the scene (and suspecting nothing) when presently Father and Mother and Mitzi and coachman set off on that fateful visit to Kammstadt. Their heavy old two-horse family sleigh was terribly slow, and they lunched on the way; but at last the horses came to a halt—and the sound of the sleigh-bells.

No one expects of a simple Carmelite House, with its score of Sisters, the grandeur of some mediaeval great abbey with hundreds: still, Walther was pained at finding this place didn't even look specially built. It was just a commonplace middle-class house, set back from a quiet middle-class road in a Kammstadt suburb behind a high garden wall; and this hardly seemed proper retreat for a nobleman's daughter, which made their pretended rejection of one even more outrageous. However, he pulled a bell in the garden wall and a smiling apple-cheeked Extern admitted them, one by one, through a narrow wicket beneath a leafless acacia. They found it doubly dank in the frost-bitten yard inside, since the wintry afternoon sun was already too low to slant over that wall; and even the life-size St. Joseph with snow on his shoulders could hardly solace Walther's sense of fitness, guarding an all-too obvious former
back
-door.

They were taken first to a cubby-hole ten feet square where in secular days some drudge would have polished the boots and knives. Refreshments were brought them (the daintiest cakes, and a kind of tisane); and a wispy paraffin stove was lit, but it tempted no one to take off their furs. Then at last the Portress returned. She led them up back-stairs crusted with varnish and ushered them into the parlor.

This was a bare room, seemingly colder than even the yard outside: a room moreover with only three walls, for the fourth was mostly that fixed portcullis (or “grille”) of stout iron bars with spikes that you have to talk through to nuns. “Like bloody bears in a zoo!” thought Walther, now more than ever disgruntled (that very morning his answers from Rome had arrived, and hadn't been helpful at all). But Mitzi—in tailor-made gray coat-and-skirt of thick winter cloth, with a neat felt hat and her long yellow hair looped up—sat down on the chair by the grille she was led to as gay as a cricket, and trying her best not to show it.

That unusual, joyful calm; and indeed the rock-like look of that will....

As soon as the Prioress drew back her curtain she saw that this was no docile creature dumbly obeying her father's orders; and no hysterical creature either—no desperate eel on a hook. She realized almost with shock that those big gray useless eyes were brimming with
joy
; and behind, from the shadows, she heard the Sub-prioress only too audibly gasp her astonishment. All she'd intended to say was better forgotten—leastwise the comfort, and talk about Lourdes: yet nothing could alter the fact that admission was out of the question, today's exaltation was something unlikely to last and a nun was a nun for a life-time.... Silence on top of her blindness must sooner or later drive anyone “odd” (the bugbear of every enclosed community): nowhere on earth would the girl find a convent imprudent enough to take her.

But better than simple refusal would be to convince this unusual child that she must have mistaken God's will—even then not by openly saying so, rather by helping her figure it out for herself how impossible blindness rendered the Carmelite Rule.... So the Prioress plunged, without any preamble, straight into details of Carmel's day: a day of eighteen hours in winter and nineteen in summer, “because our fatigue itself prays better than we could.” The deafening clapper which woke them at half-past five (in summer at half-past four): the hours of said or silent worship in Choir: the solitude in their cells, the menial labor, the study and intricate reading-aloud: the strict enclosure, which meant that from now for the rest of her earthly life she would never once leave these walls. And throughout, like a kind of refrain, she stressed that almost perpetual silence “so dear to us who have eyes.”

If the creature wasn't quite beyond measure pig-headed or even a trifle deranged, surely her own common sense must show her this just was not humanly possible....

Nothing, however, seemed able to shake the girl's conviction that God had called her to live to this Rule, this Rule and none other. She barely pretended to listen, for given that premiss her logic was simple: to Him who required this of her all things were possible, therefore the means and conditions were up to Him to work out and in due course He would. “Means” weren't Mitzi's concern: she was one who had Marching Orders from God, and was therefore no longer open to argument.

Thus time passed. As the darkening room grew darker and darker, the shining of Mitzi's eyes grew apparently even brighter. Faced with this yellow-haired, shining-eyed, shadowy object erect in the gloaming beyond those double-banked bars, the Prioress started all over again—determined this time to speak plainer. This time she would cross every
t
and dot every
i
....

What was it, then, which so suddenly brought to the Reverend Mother's mind the late Pope Leo's words to the “Little White Flower” (the fourteen-year-old Thérèse), when she too had made her exceptional plea for admission to Carmel? “All's well,” the Holy Father had said: “All's well, if God wants you to enter you will.” That child was now “St. Thérèse of Lisieux”: a bare generation ago, yet already a canonized Saint! And what was it made her ask herself—rather, what was it asked her almost like Peter dreaming at Joppa: “Dare you call “blind” these eyes which the Lord's own Finger has touched, and
opened
for purposes of His own?”

Thus, even while she continued speaking, she found herself knowing she mustn't handle this case alone any longer in spite of the special grace of her office: those doubts which had entered her mind had seemed less thoughts of her own than like some alien signal, repealing the whole of her argument.... Could they be heavenly guidance? That very question meant that she needed advice: for a Carmelite knows too well the ways of the private schizoid mind to accept as authentic a “voice” or a “guidance” unless confirmed in the common mind of the Sisterhood. Putative guidance must always be laid before Council....

Meanwhile Walther stirred on the chair he was much too large for. His bottom ached, and the woman seemed to be wandering. Parting with Mitzi was anyhow trying enough, and all this argle-bargle was taking too long.... He was taken quite by surprise when the Prioress all of a sudden dismissed them, a trifle abruptly.