The Wooden Shepherdess

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Authors: Richard Hughes
Tags: Fiction, Historical, War & Military
tended to treat all lids as something to sit on: he found his repressions the one thing he couldn’t repress with impunity. This was something built-in, which only an earthquake could shift. His shattering dream (what on earth was he up to with Ree?) had hauled him half up by the roots; but he hadn’t a clue as to why.
    As for that party, he still couldn’t make up his mind: therefore the less said to Mary about it just yet, he decided, the better. He finished his letter without it. The letter was then wrapped up with the present he’d bought for the baby (a treasure from Ali Baba’s Cave); and the package finally mailed, he arranged, in New York.
    *
    â€œIf only Augustine were home!” thought Mary. “There’s something so solid about him, as well as intelligent....”
    Mary this morning was feeling badly in need of Augustine’s help. The problem was Nellie, a problem which couldn’t be solved yet couldn’t be any more shelved—poor tragical Nellie! First.... No, first came that hydrocephalous baby, and only then little Rachel drowned untimely—and now her tuberculous husband was out of his pain at last.
    Now that Gwilym was dead she couldn’t stay on in that lonely hovel they’d lent him to die in: for Gwilym’s sect was a poor one, whose maximum pension for Indigent Ministers’ Widows was ten pounds a year. But what possible job could the widow find with a baby hung round her neck and millions of others already hopelessly looking for work? What was she fit for?—Some sort of nursery-governess?—Quite; but not with a baby! For who among all Mary’s friends would take on a growing working-class child who must presently go to the village school and bring nits, impetigo, bad habits and even bad accents into the house? It sounded callous, but mothers had to be tough about this sort of thing and put their own children first. For Polly’s and Susan’s sake she wouldn’t do it herself, so she couldn’t ask anyone else to....
    If only Augustine were home! There was nobody else to advise her. She couldn’t ask Gilbert: right from the start (when Rachel was drowned so soon before Nellie’s new baby was born and her husband sent home as incurable) Gilbert had warned against getting involved. To his way of thinking, a Liberal Humanist’s proper concern was with social measures in general only: private do-gooding only deflects—is unfair to the rest, and therefore morally wrong. He was scathing as hell on the “conscience” which boggles at one Nellie starving in close-up but swallows a million in long-shot.... Who else? Jeremy’s clergyman father, she’d heard, was now Arch-something which sounded terribly powerful: Jeremy though had just gone abroad for three or four months before being put in some government office or other, and atheist Mary hadn’t the nerve for approaching prelates direct....
    Thus Mary was thinking about Augustine already the morning his letter arrived (with Gilbert away up North on the moors, she could read it in peace). Inside the package, addressed “For the Very New Baby—in case,” was a crude glass pickle-dish: moulded in deep intaglio into the bottom, the bust of a woman in Ninetyish corsage had round it the legend in Ninetyish script: “ Love’s Request is Pickles .” The sight warmed Mary at once: for here was a christening-present which none but the old Augustine she loved could have possibly sent! Next came some drawings inscribed “For Polly, with love”: one was of deer with floppy white tails, and another called “Mother-skunk with her Little Ones.” Not that Augustine drew very well, but Polly she knew would adore them....
    Unfolding the letter, she saw at once there was still no address to write back to (and yet so much she was longing to tell him, with Susan and all and those snapshots of Polly the day she was six). And as

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