The Pandervils (2 page)

Egg remembered his father as a gentle ironical man whose permanent mood was one of controlled exasperation; he was bookish, perverse, wrapped in silence; when he spoke it was in a tone of infinite patience more eloquent of bitterness than the most savage curse would have been. He had the air of one who, disappointed of his dearest ambition, takes refuge not in anger, not in the vice of communicating his misery, but in a habit of sardonic resignation. Kindly by nature and in intention, though too deeply self-absorbed to avoid unkindness by neglect, he became as he grew older more and more misanthropic, his silences more pointed, his self-control less sure; so that by the time his son Egbert was fourteen he could tolerate with but an ill grace the least interruption of his solitude. He divided his time between long solitary walks —periods, one surmises, of savage self-communing
—and hours of browsing among books. Of supervising the work of the farmstead, to which he had characteristically given the name of Fipenny Hall, he made only the thinnest pretence, preferring to entrust the fortunes of his family to a salaried bailiff, who, at the instance of Elizabeth, hard put to it to make ends meet, was in due time succeeded by the eldest son, William the younger. Willy, as he was called, had reached his twenty-second year when this burden—the task of wresting a livelihood for his own and his landlord's family out of a hundred or so exhausted acres—fell upon his shoulders. The boy had—so strong was tradition, so thorough his mother's training of him—a powerful respect for his father, as indeed had all the children, so that Mr Pandervil, in part by virtue of his office, in part by virtue of his being a gentleman and a reputed scholar, became an autocrat in spite of himself. His wife never forgot that in marrying her he had mingled fire with her humble clay, and his withdrawal from life, which was in effect though not in intention supercilious, served to keep her in mind of that social disparity between them which he himself had all but forgotten. Had he known her to have been still conscious of her inferiority, still gratefully aware of her unworthiness, he would have been deeply touched and hurt, for beneath the thick blankets of his egoism he was sensitive enough. One can imagine his weak eyes widening, his hands being raised in a gesture of compassionate deprecation: ‘My poor dear girl!' But no such revelation
ever occurred; for these two had never bared their minds to each other. Their intimacy was superficial. There was the habit of affection between them, no longer on his part a conscious habit; they shared the same bed and were parents of the same children; for the rest, she served the vegetables and he the joint, and their marriage was a happy one. Indeed, at fifty, Elizabeth Pandervil accounted herself something of a darling of fortune. Sarah, the firstborn, who had shared the domestic drudgery for fifteen out of her twenty-four years, was an increasing comfort to her mother; Willy, the eldest son, was a hard worker; Algernon, besides helping on the farm, brought in a few shillings a week by running errands for the local doctor; and Egbert, now fourteen, gave occasional delicious hints of taking after his wonderful father. The four other girls, from Flisher (Felicia), aged twelve, to Mildred the little four-year-old, with Martha and Jane intervening to demonstrate that morality was not extinct, gave very little trouble, always contriving to wear each other's clothes or suffer their mumps, their measles, their scarlet fever, simultaneously and in the same bed. Yes, Mrs Pandervil had been lucky in her children; two thirds of their number (a magnificent proportion) had survived; and of the others only Frederick, who by now would have been twenty, remained to haunt her with a wistfulness that was the faint echo of a tumultuous grief. Ebenezer, Lucy, and Arthur—it had been pitiful to see them die, but scarcely less pitiful perhaps to see them live,
so small and feeble did they seem; and when she remembered these three consecutive disasters she caught herself venturing, half-conscious of impiety, to thank God that now, as she had good reason to believe, her child-bearing days were over. For Arthur's death had frightened as well as saddened her. The christening curate had arrived in the nick of time—two minutes later, with the magic words unsaid, that tiny body, puking and convulsive, would have been snatched to everlasting fire. Even Elizabeth, an unimaginative woman, could not forbear to shudder when she thought of that. Fortunately she had little time for unproductive thought of any kind, and at this period nothing occurred to disturb her busy serenity except the occasional, the terrible, the dramatic collapse of her husband's control of his perpetually quivering nerves.

One such collapse it was that precipitated the boy Egbert into the beginning of maturity. He stood dreaming in the sun-spangled farmyard, a bill-hook held absent-mindedly in his hand, his eyes dazzled with the gleam of sleek cobblestones, his nostrils filled with the familiar smell of pigs and cow manure and damp decaying straw. Just returned from the fields, where he had been helping his elder brother trim hedges, he now leaned luxuriously against a stable wall filling his mind with vague bright fancies. From the warm darkness of the stable came the sound of Willy's movements and mutterings, and the pawing of the responsive nag grateful for his ministrations; there
was a drowsy hum of life in the air, though summer was not yet come; and the afternoon sunlight beat almost pulsatingly upon his bare head. He was at peace, consciously and lazily enjoying the delicious sensation of fatigue ebbing from his limbs, of sleepiness invading his brain. Nor did it greatly irk him to hear Fang, the old black and white sheep dog, suddenly break into infuriated protest and run into the road. A cart was passing, and Fang was indignant; his years had not taught him to suffer such insolence patiently. Egg turned a languid eye towards the cart as it came across his line of vision; grinned a greeting to Sam Reddick; and lapsed again into dream, hardly noticing that Fang's barking went on and on, cutting the languid afternoon into a hundred sharp fragments of noise. But he did notice that an upper window of the house was suddenly flung open. It was the window at the end of the passage leading from his father's study, that room into which, when the world could no longer be borne with dignity, Mr Pandervil retired.

‘I can't stand it any more.'

Mr Pandervil uttered these words clearly and quietly but in a voice that trembled, almost as though they had been a prayer. His face was deathly pale, his eyes were blazing; Egg saw the corners of his mouth twitching as with pain.

Egg ran forward. ‘Is anything the matter, sir?'

‘That dog,' began Mr Pandervil … and for a moment could say no more. ‘Where's Willy?' he presently gasped. Willy had already
emerged from the stable and was moving towards his brother. ‘Ah, Willy!' said Mr Pandervil, in a tone of ice. ‘That dog's noise. Every time anything passes in the road. I can't bear it. Take the animal away, Willy, do you hear? Take it away and shoot it. Yes, at once, my boy. Fetch your gun and shoot the damned thing.'

In Mr Pandervil's world, to command was to be obeyed. He withdrew, and shut the window. Egg felt as though he had received a heavy blow on the back of the head. He removed his fascinated stare from the now blank window and looked upon a world that had become, in a few seconds, crazy and horrible. The sunlight, formerly a splendour, was now a sickly grin. The silence, after that thin cold precise voice had finished speaking, was dreadful, full of nameless menace.

‘Willy,' said Egg to his brother. ‘Do you think the Guv'nor's mad?'

For answer Willy scratched his head thoughtfully. His plump red face wore a puzzled look. But his hesitation, if he experienced any, endured but for an instant. Thought was an activity beyond his scope. He could eat and sleep, love and hate, fight and dumbly suffer and (as he proved two years later at Inkerman) die in his country's quarrel without understanding a word of it; but to these talents had not been added the power of thought. Best of all he could obey; and now, with the merest frown puckering his forehead, he turned into the house to obey his father. Egg, following close at his brother's heels, could scarcely
believe what he saw; could scarcely believe, being unversed in the world's unchanging ways, that dull wits would faithfully carry out what the sick brain had ordered. Above all things in the world he wanted to save poor Fang, and in his heart there burst into flame an old smouldering fury against his brother. ‘Don't be such a great oaf, Willy!' he called. But Willy, though affronted by this unseemly speech from a junior, took down without a word the gun that hung across the kitchen fireplace; loaded it; and went out into the yard again.

Egg ran to his mother. ‘Stop him, Mother. He's gone out to shoot old Fang.'

‘Shoot Fang?' echoed Willy's mother. ‘Deary me, now what would he do that for?'

‘Stop him, Mother. Oh, do stop him!' Seeing her look of bewilderment he patiently explained: ‘Father told him to do it, but he couldn't have meant it really.'

‘Father said shoot Fang?'

‘Yes, but … '

‘Now, don't you be a narty boy,' said Mrs Pandervil, mildly reproving. ‘No doubt your father has his good reasons. And of
course
Willy must do as he says! The very idea!'

A kind of terror mingled with the childish rage that burned in the boy's eyes and cheeks. A sense of impotence came upon him—a sense that the world might at any moment go mad and he be powerless to stop it. As he stumbled into the sunshine he could hear the voice of Willy—‘Come along Fang! Good dog! Good dog!'—wheedling
the animal to its doom. That fellow, that lump of docility, had cunning enough to pat and stroke the victim, and coax him out of the yard. They were already moving away, Fang leaping joyously about his master, encouraged by the sight of the gun to believe that rabbiting was afoot. Egg, staring in dumb misery, watched the two disappear behind the barn. The paralysis of despair had descended on him. He guessed that the meadow called Flinders was to be the scene of slaughter, because the intervening hill, Stally Pitch, would help to deaden the sound of the gun. But why, he asked himself, why this shyness about a mere gunshot, no unusual event on a farm? Would it injure his wretched father to know that his edict was obeyed? The boy, racked now by indecision, whether to attempt a rescue by violence or to wait here till Willy returned alone, could not for the space of several minutes find heart to do anything whatever beyond stand at the edge of the sunlight and stare dismally at his own dark thoughts. Hate blazed in his heart, blazed darkly and dreadfully like ancient night wild with black winds and lit by neither moon nor star. He imagined himself with a gun in his hand and slaying—with a cold anger not unlike his father's—all the stupid people in the world. Violent impulses, running riot in him, spent themselves harmlessly against the wall of his temperamental indecision. In fact he could do nothing, nothing at all, it seemed; but in fancy he saw himself knee-deep in murder—killing Willy, killing Father, killing everything that wantonly
threatened the wretched innocent Fang. And Mother as well? From that last insanity his imagination recoiled, and tears blurred his eyes. A cloud lifted from his brain; his limbs were released; he set off in pursuit of his brother.

The farmlands lay still and drowsy in a trance of afternoon sunlight, but in the boy's mind a storm was raging. He ran quickly across the yard and passed out of it by way of the east gate that gave on to a narrow cart-track bounded by high hedges, a cool cloister of shade from which, scarcely noticing that the blackthorn was already in leaf and the tardier hawthorn in bud, he presently emerged into a region—exquisitely unreal —of flowering fruit-trees, pink and white; and so to the twelve-acre field of young corn, and beyond to where in the shelter of a shallow valley a few score sheep were grazing. After the recent April rains the grass in the green valley was bright with urgent youth, its greenness starred with daisies and lit with buttercups. Cowslips sheltered under the hedges; and dandelions, like little rayed suns, blazed yellow from the ground. But to these rich colours, as to the quivering web of sound spun by the bees, and the lyrical passion of ascending skylarks, the boy's heart was dead. Upon him a shadow had fallen, and he hurried on with no thought to spare for anything except the benevolent lie he was preparing for his brother's ears.

As he climbed, panting, towards the green crest of Stally Pitch he heard the sound of gunshot and knew that he was too late. He slackened pace and
presently came to a standstill, again in the grip of a sick lethargy. But after a few blank moments he resumed his journey, not knowing why, and a dozen steps brought him within sight of where Willy stood, gun in hand, staring down at his handiwork. Young Egbert, still hating his brother, cherished now no murderous thoughts. The time for action was past; the stupid thing had happened; it was over and done with and irremediable, and he struggled to harden his heart against grief, trying to forget the calamity in contempt for its cause.

His brother, by the time Egg reached him, had begun digging the dog's grave. The two exchanged no greeting, but after watching the work in silence for a while Egg inquired in a dull cold tone: ‘Where did you get that spade from?'

‘Eh?' Willy turned a surprised face to the questioner.

‘Where did you get that spade from?'

‘The spade? It was lying about up yonder. So I brought it along with me.'

Egg smiled devilishly. ‘Think of everything, you do.'

Willy resumed his digging. ‘One thing. He was getting old,' he muttered after a few minutes.

‘By the way,' said Egg airily, ‘what will Algy have to say about it when he comes back from Doctor's? Give you a putty medal, shouldn't wonder, for being so clever.' Obscurely he felt that he mustn't for one moment stop hating and hurting Willy; for in that hatred lay his only salvation from tears. He was bitter and dry-eyed.
He stared at the dead dog with no visible emotion. After a pause he returned to the attack. ‘How will you round the sheep up now, eh? Perhaps you'll learn to bark yourself? It's all you're fit for, if you ask me.'