The Pandervils (35 page)

‘But bless my soul …'

Seeing that Egg was taking the disappointment to heart, Nicky attempted gaiety. ‘Ah, you don't understand, Dad. Jolly strenuous life in a bank. Takes a chap with big biceps to add up figures all day. You ought to hear what old Hart says.
He says the mere sight of a ledger makes him tired. That just shows you/

His father ignored these remarks. ‘It's a real worry, that's what it is. Here's me been and given you a good education, better than your brothers by a long chalk, and now it's all to be wasted as I see things. Not robust enough! Not robust enough to sit on your bottom in an office all day. What's the donkey
mean?
I never heard such a thing.'

‘It's the widows, Dad,' explained Nicky.

Egg looked across. He stared. ‘What's
widows
to do with it?'

‘The widows and orphans. My little lot. You didn't know I'd got any, did you? No more did I. But
he
knows, that doctor johnny knows. He has to think of everything, don't you see? And if I die young, muscular strain or something, they've got my widows on their hands.'

‘Such a nice safe profession 'twould a bin,' said Egg sadly. ‘Money goes on just the same even when you're ill. Now I've never bin ill. Not to
say
ill. Couldn't afford it. … I'm sure I don't know what to do with you. I'm fair beaten.'

Not to anyone else would Egg have admitted himself ‘fair beaten'; and a year ago he would not have admitted it even to Nicky. But he was conscious nowadays of being not quite the man he had been. He was nearing seventy; looking back it seemed to him that all his life he had been consistently denied whatever he had at any time chanced to set his heart on, and at last his stock of patience had run out. Whatever he wanted he
must have now or never; there wasn't much time left. Above all things he wanted to see Nicky comfortably settled in a good safe job, and married— if that wasn't too much to hope—to the right kind of girl. If I can only last another ten years, thought Egg, I can see the boy launched in the world. Nicky was now seventeen: a wonderful age, a dangerous age, thought the old man, who remembered something—not very much but something—of his own young manhood spent in Mershire on his father's farm. Why, I couldn't a bin moren twenty three or four when I left home. It was true; nevertheless he felt that he had never been really young after leaving Mershire, after that cruel bit of a love affair of his. Ignorant and raw perhaps, but not young. He had forgotten much of that affair, and he could not for the life of him remember the girl's face; but he remembered how, after her going, the beauty of his native shire had been an intolerable burden to him, every responsive pulse of joy being turned instantly to pain by the agony of recalling the heaven he had lost. The air caressed him with her hands; birds called with her voice; a starlit sky, with the great moon moving up, was become but a cruel counterfeit of hours shared with her in the orchard. The very sunlight had stabbed at him with intimations of a vanished glory, so that his heart was an inexhaustible fountain of pain. … It was very different now, very dim and far away, as though it had all happened to someone else. He no longer felt the emotion: he remembered it, as
one remembers an old tale. And he hoped with all his heart that Nicky would be luckier than ever he had been. This rheumatism had worried him increasingly of late; it had shortened his temper and caused him twinges of fear as well as pain. He could not bear the idea of dying yet, with Nicky only seventeen. That girl he had loved, she would be an old lady now, white-haired, feeble perhaps, or perhaps dead; and with this thought the feeling came to Egg Pandervil that he himself had lived too long. The show was over for him, and all his friends were gone. Pummice gone, Farthing gone, old Miss Hunt of the Post Office gone; and the High Street thronged with strange faces. Every death had brought his own end nearer in imagination, Carrie's most of all; and every death, even Carrie's at first, had made life a little less worth living. These bustling young people—he was out of touch with them. Even Nicky was more reserved with him than he had been as a child.

Carrie's death had shaken Egg and changed him; that change was still going on, and he had not yet grasped all its meaning. He had freedom at last, but to what end? Freedom to read the newspaper without fear of interruption from upstairs, that was what it amounted to. The incomparable gift had come too late: he was used up, worn out. And the new habit was difficult to learn: it demanded unceasing vigilance. Many a time during those first weeks he was shaken with surprise to find the bedroom empty when he entered it at night; and, waking in the early morning,
it was strange, not to hear Carrie's loud breathing, strange not to be compelled to listen, with quivering nerves, to the singing kettle in Carrie's nose. How he had hated that sound! In retrospect he hated it still, but he was none the less discomforted by its absence. He began to think that it was this house that oppressed him, and to toy with vague impossible plans for getting away from it. But were they so impossible? Harold was now a competent enough grocer, and willing, it seemed, to marry and settle down.

‘Open-air life he said, didn't he?'

‘Who?' Nicky emerged from a reverie.

‘That doctor. Said you ought to have an open-air life.'

‘Believe he did.'

‘Might do worse than farming,' suggested Egg tentatively.

‘Umph!' Nicky was unresponsive.

‘Used to be mad about it when you were a little chap,' said Egg. ‘Always asking me about the farm, you were. Pigs an' geese, eh?'

‘I don't know,' said Nicky. ‘It's all right, I suppose.'

‘Well, is there anything else you wanta do?' Egg spoke patiently, hiding his disappointment. ‘Anything in y'r mind?'

Nicky wondered whether this was the moment for speaking about that half-finished epic locked in his desk at home. He decided it was not. ‘No. Haven't thought much about it. I always supposed it would be a bank or something. Wants
thinking over, doesn't it? I don't know.'

‘Of course,' admitted Egg, ‘farming needs capital. … And I haven't got any capital,' he added thoughtfully. ‘Not likely. P'raps y'r Uncle Algy'll be able to suggest something. He's full of ideas, he is. Always was.'

‘He'll want to make an auctioneer of me,' said Nicky. ‘I'd rather not, if you don't mind.'

‘Wonderful how he goes on, y'r Uncle Algy. A tidy bit older than me, y' know. And a martyr to gout these
five
years. How'd it be to run over and see him, Nicky?'

Nicky looked at his father without replying. Egg, reading that look, felt his heart sink within him; for it was evident that the boy did not share this fancy of his for farming. The wonder of it, the magic, the bridge across half a century of wasted time—Nicky was blind to this.

‘Of course'—Egg shrugged his shoulders—‘you must do as you like, my boy. No good putting you to something you hate. I know that well enough.'

Nicky was silent. And his father could not bring himself to say more. Without speaking they turned into a cheap restaurant and ordered poached eggs on toast. A battle was raging in Nicky's heart; he wanted to cry. Presently he remarked, in as easy a tone as he could muster: ‘I daresay farming'll be rather a lark, once I get to know a bit about it. What do you think, Dad?'

With Nicky away the house was quiet indeed; and the ghost of Nicky—for Nicky was now learning to farm under the guidance of a Mershireman named Crabbe—replaced that of Carrie. For Egg the experience was almost in its effect a suspension of life, a pause between two periods, an empty transition from the existence he had known to something as yet unguessed that was to follow. He was waiting for this something to happen. Meanwhile he became extravagantly interested in the movements of the postman, and cherished his son's letters like a lover. Marvellous letters they seemed to him, and full of a quality that he called ‘litry genius'. He chuckled delightedly over Nicky's schoolboyish, exuberant descriptions of Farmer Crabbe, and Mrs Crabbe, and of his fellow-pupil, a taciturn young man named James. He cherished a wonderful plan for paying Nicky a visit once this tiresome business of Harold and Lily should have been settled.

The hostility between Lily Colebrook and Selina Bush became open—a domestic scandal. Egg was reluctantly aware of it. ‘Now my boy, you and me must have a bit of a talk.'

Harold stared at his boots. ‘All right, Dad.'

‘Don't like the look of things, I don't. Sleena's been behaving very queerly about you and Lily. Very queerly indeed she has. What's the meaning of it?'

‘Better ask
her,'
mumbled Harold. ‘It's a bit thick, if you ask me, the way she goes on about us. Lily says it's time she went about her business.'

‘Indeed?' Egg's voice was gently sarcastic. ‘That's what your Lily says, is it. And maybe she's her reasons. Yes, my boy, and maybe Sleena's
her
reasons for behaving as she does. I'm not a blind bat, let me tell you. Nor an old fool neither.'

Harold grew red. ‘Don't know what you mean, Dad.'

‘Well,' said Egg, at once plaintive and exasperated, ‘Sleena didn't
use
to behave like that. What's come over her? … Now tell me straight, Harold. I want to know. Has there been anything going on between Sleena and you?'

‘Course not!' answered Harold limply, with the feeblest show of indignation and surprise. ‘Oh what's the good of talking about all that now.'

‘No good at all in lies,' said Egg sternly, ‘if that's what you mean.' He was profoundly wretched. His voice trembled. ‘How long has this been going on?'

But he hardly listened to Harold's answer. It was drowned by the tumult within him. Such treachery, such wickedness, and in his own house! Was it not enough to break an old man's heart to discover such rottenness in his son? Yes indeed it was. The teaching of the Reverend Shadrach Pierce left him in no doubt of that. What had he done to deserve such a son! ‘It's a mercy your poor mother didn't live to hear of this!' Harold, hanging
his head, made no reply; and Egg's anger spent itself silently against that silence. In a few minutes he had sounded, in quick succession, the whole gamut of appropriate reactions: from primitive excitement, prudish horror, moral indignation and social alarm, to intelligent understanding. And, resolutely turning his back on the shade of Shadrach Pierce, who would have persuaded him that this son of his was doomed to suffer everlasting hellfire, he summed up his final thought on the matter by saying: ‘Time you got married, my lad, that's what it comes to!' Crimson to the ears, Harold agreed. ‘Anyhow,' he blurted out, ‘it wasn't any fault of Sleena's, Dad! Don't go blaming her!' And Egg, in his misery, took comfort from this small sign of grace in the sinner.

A campaign was set afoot for making an honest man of Harold. A formidable task, but not an impossible one. Egg shouldered the responsibility with energy: the more readily, perhaps, because he vaguely foresaw that it hastened the day of his release from Farringay. His first and last difficulty was with Lily Colebrook, who suddenly, finding herself the centre of attention, decided that she wouldn't marry Harold, not on any account she wouldn't.

‘And quite right too!' said Egg severely. ‘You don't deserve a good girl like Lily. Better look round for somebody else.' But repenting of his severity—for Harold, at twenty-eight, seemed pitifully immature to him—he asked: ‘Are you really fond of her, my boy?' It was on the tip of
his tongue to ask another and a more searching question, for he was troubled by the fear that this young man, cheap all through, knew nothing of love's heights. ‘Are you really fond of her, or is it …' But he left it at that, and even so, seeing Harold's confusion, did not stay for an answer. ‘Because if you do, I daresay she'll forgive you.'

‘She says she hates me,' said Harold. ‘She says why don't I marry Sleena.'

‘Marry Sleena!' cried Egg, up in arms. ‘What the devil next! Not but what you ought to, in a way,' he hastily added, blushing for his violence. ‘But marriage is a long business. It's no good rushing it. And I won't have my son marrying any Sleenas, and that's flat.' To whom did he address this defiance? Not, surely, to Harold, who cannot be suspected of an eagerness to marry Selina. And not to Lily Colebrook, whose innocent piece of rhetoric Egg perfectly understood. Perhaps it was to Farringay: to all the folks who knew him as a commonplace grocer and knew not that his father had been gentle.

And now that he had started this benovelent meddling he found that he must go on with it. It became his fixed idea that Harold must be married —if possible to Lily Colebrook; if not, to some other nice girl. His dream was that the pair of them should take over control of the shop, leaving him free to follow the devices and desires of his own heart. These desires pointed all in one direction—Nicky; and the picture of Nicky was doubly
attractive because it was now framed in Mershire. Egg fancied himself living snugly in a little cottage, with Nicky either sharing it (and going to and from his work as a farm-hand) or, married to some wholesome pretty country wench, living within easy distance. Although his own experience of marriage had been an unhappy one he never doubted nowadays that Nicky's wife would be a treasure, a perpetual delight to her husband, a solace to her father-in-law, and a wise mother to her family of boys and girls. Egg had already, you might say, chosen Nicky's wife for him; such a wife as he, Egg, would perhaps have chosen for himself had he his time over again; a tall, deep-bosomed, generously proportioned girl, with music in her speech and kindness in her heart; a girl not unlike the girl his own mother, Elizabeth, must once have been, and still more like someone he had known a lifetime ago whose face he had forgotten but whose personal quality—some exquisite essence more subtle than the smell of roses—pervaded, like a breath, certain moments that still recurred in his life at intervals, moments of stillness and perplexed wonder, a mystery of which he had long since lost the key. That he might one day live within reach of this son and this son's wife, and take pleasure in the sight of his grandchildren, was now the old man's dearest hope, in pursuit of which he quite forgot to consider the problem of what was to become of Selina: all his plans were based on the unconscious and absurd assumption that Selina would remain where she was. Selina was peculiarly
dependent on these Pandervils; she had never known another home than theirs except the home provided for her in infancy by a philanthropist named Barnardo.