The Wooden Shepherdess Read Online Free PDF Page A

haven’t we had all this out before over Polly, and didn’t you end by letting Polly be done? So why stir up hornet-nests now over nothing?”
    So atheist Mary had swallowed her principles. Still, didn’t Gilbert care how obscenely disgusting so much of this was? “Delivered from Thy Wrath” harked back to the vengeful gods of the jungle! My poor little sweet! (she was longing to kiss her baby but too many people were watching). “Conceived and born in sin”? What a horrible lie—and indeed how absurd, when the marriage service itself said....
    How Mary wished she had gone to the vicar in spite of Gilbert and made a clean breast! But what would have been the use? That silly old man could never have understood.
    Gilbert, in formal trousers and spats with his tall silk hat on the pew in front (but wearing only a short black coat for a girl-child), stood by a pillar smoothing his gloves. Gilbert himself had heard everything, listened to nothing. “That went very nicely,” he thought: “But thank goodness it’s over, and now we can get back to serious matters.... But bother, here comes the vicar!” Gilbert was well aware that vicars expected a kind word or two on occasions like this: “Ah, my dear Vicar! I hope ...”
    â€œI must trust in Him to find His own way ...” thought the vicar, escaping from Gilbert as soon as he decently could. Once out of sight in his vestry he fell on his knees to pray for the child (but he had to be quick: they had asked him over to tea, and it wouldn’t do to be late).
    *
    These were crucial times—this summer of 1924—for a rising Liberal statesman whose voice was at last beginning to make itself heard in the Party’s councils; and Gilbert had much on his mind. Labour in Office had scarcely attempted to check Unemployment: MacDonald was much too occupied dangling Dawes in front of Herriot trying to winkle him out of the Ruhr, and Ponsonby at it ding-dong with Rakovsky (wits said the Bolshevik emblem ought to be Hammer-and-Tongs). Hitherto the Liberal watchdogs had felt themselves blissfully free to bite both sides (and each other); but now the time had arrived to decide the issue on which to withdraw their Party’s lobby support and to let this minority Labour Government fall. That would mean yet another election (the third in a couple of years); and our chance—if we choose the issue correctly—to win back the erring working-class vote....
    So, with all his legitimate hopes, this hardly a time for Gilbert to welcome Augustine’s vagaries as well to worry about. Still, duties are not to be shirked.... One’s own wife’s brother (it’s in Who’s Who ): if he gets in a mess one can’t just stand on the touchline.
    Gilbert rehearsed the truant’s misdeeds. Offending his German hosts by decamping like that: consorting all winter with arty riff-raff in Paris, and then disappearing and giving us all such a fright. Now, breaking silence at last with a quite inexcusably uninformative letter which gave no hint of his whereabouts—that is, apart from the Sag Harbor postmark and something about a ferry.... He said not a word about where he’d been all these last four months, about why he had gone to America, what were his plans; and who could fail to read into such studied mystification involvement with something—or somebody— most undesirable?
    There in the States, where his social standing.... The States, where so many laws lay about to be broken a stranger could hardly help breaking one (buying a lady’s inter-State railway ticket—or teaching Latin in Texas): a place where the boy was only too likely to fall into really bad hands, out there on his own....
    The Gazetteer said Sag Harbor was down the far end of Long Island: the “ferry” he spoke of must cross to New London. So now on the way home he’d have to put it squarely to Mary—and surely