Free The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes

that in the end—or else fell asleep and fell off.
    As dawn broke Augustine and Sadie were left to the last: so Augustine fell off on purpose, leaving Sadie up there alone. Silhouetted against the pale green sky in exiguous pink crêpe-de-chine and stockingless garters (and scented this time with Citronella, to ward off the bugs) Sadie the lone survivor had started to sing, in a powerful deep operatic contralto. Augustine kept under the eaves to be out of her sight on his way back to bed in the waxing daylight, picking his way through the light-colored sleeping heaps—for, feeling the cold, they had mostly crept together in heaps in their flimsies (he found Bella’s puppy-fat arm right across Russell’s face obstructing the breathing, so moved it).
    But Ree was sleeping alone, and shivering. Made slightly reckless by wine, this way and that he divided the swift mind as to whether to carry her in under cover; but thought in the end “better not,” and brought out a blanket instead. Just as he tucked it round her she sat up straight and was sick out loud (since she “didn’t drink liquor” it must be the melon had done it?). Then, without noticing who he was, she wound herself tight in the rug and was instantly back asleep.
    That morning Augustine slept late. When at last he went out to retrieve his blanket he found his green purlieus battered and trampled, but everyone vanished. The blanket however still lay exactly as Ree had crawled out, like an empty cocoon. The carboy was gone. But when he looked up he saw they’d forgotten their lantern: there it still hung from his chimney, the tiny flame still orange through smoke-blackened glass in the face of the noonday sun.
    Augustine’s letter to Mary (in which he’d already described the wooden church as “a little deserted shepherdess, scorned by her faithless swain the derelict Ford”: “Ali Baba’s Cave” with its stills and its staybones and so on) remained to be finished. But last night’s party was surely a bit altogether too Malinowski.... Those fabulous Trobriand Islanders, this with a vengeance was Whites keeping up with the Browns! He’d never seen, never dreamed of anything like it.... He felt most loth to write home about it because it had left him far too disturbed, as if something was cracking inside—and excited. The fact is he didn’t know yet what to think: was this Progress or Decadence? Augustine didn’t feel ready as yet to commit himself—quite. It was shocking, girls getting drunk—even anyone not quite grown-up.... Yet one thing at least was fully apparent: life here could be mighty enjoyable—Sadie apart.
    The better to think he sat down, and at once fell asleep in the sun. Sleeping, he dreamed of that fateful day back in Wales, the day he came home from the Marsh to his empty echoing house with a drowned child doubled over his shoulder, and found to his horror on lifting it down it had stiffened bent double. But there things changed: for he knew in this dream (without knowing the reason) that this time he couldn’t just leave the tiny waterlogged body all night as it was in its sopping clothes on the sofa—he’d got to undress it, like putting a live child to bed. Yet as soon as he started to do so, he found that instead of bare skin underneath this child was downy all over with delicate fur; and a fur attractively soft to the touch, like a mole’s.... When he pulled her last vest over her head—leaving all the downy body uncovered except for the socks—he saw that the wide-open eyes in the small dead face were alive and were eagerly watching him take off her clothes: nor were these even the pair of eyes which belonged, they were Ree’s....
    He woke on his back in the sun with his larynx cramped in the soundless act of a scream, and his body-pores squirting sweat.
13
    In theory some vague kind of Freudist, in practice Augustine