The Pandervils (39 page)

‘I shall certainly do my best,' said Nicky in confusion. He was eighteen and profoundly sceptical of all the religion that had been offered him.

‘Do it with all thy might,' said Mr Crabbe, finishing his quotation with a smack of the lips. ‘You come from a godly 'ome, I believe, young Pandervil?' Nicky's reply, though unintelligible, was taken to be affirmative. ‘Fambly prayers and all, eh?' said Mr Crabbe. He was a short, thickset man between forty and fifty, with reddish eyes, a clipped red moustache, prominent fox-red nostrils, and bushing red eyebrows; no Mershireman he, as his speech made evident, but a foreigner, as the natives say, from one of the more northern counties. Brisk, and brimming with self-complacency, yet not unwilling to be friendly, he stood
with arms akimbo and head cocked appraisingly, awaiting Nicky's answer.

Nicky all but hung his head. ‘Now and again,' he said indistinctly. He was as shy and ashamed as Egg would have been in like circumstances. And he was compelled by his truthful habit to add: ‘Not so often. In fact, hardly ever. But we
have
had them.'

‘Ah!' Mr Crabbe emitted a brief bark of satisfaction. ‘We'll mebbe teach you a thing or two more than farming here, eh Mother!' He rubbed his hands together in unctuous glee, and the next morning made haste to begin his good work. For Family Prayers he assumed an accent of quite astonishing refinement, which did not, however, obliterate the impression that even from God himself he would stand no nonsense. The effort to sound humble hurt Mr Crabbe; and he was further hampered in these public devotions by the erratic behaviour of his two young daughters, Gladys and Lottie, and the failure of their haggard, thin-lipped mother to control them. ‘O greecious Gard and Heavenly Fawther,' cried Mr Crabbe, with the air of a man in a hurry giving instructions to a liftboy, ‘we would 'umbly ask and crave thy greecious blessing, O Lard, upon this 'ousehold one and all gathered 'ere together at thy footstool. And especially would we ask thee—stop scraping them feet, Lottie!—would we ask thee, at this junction and at this season and at this time, to drop a blessing or two on young Pandervil, the stranger within our gates. There's no call for you to giggle,
Gladys: I'll teach you giggle—with a slipper, girl! Vouchsafe him to do his duty like a man, and work hard, and keep straight, and be a credit. Givvim strength, Gard. Givvim persewerance. Givvim religion. Givvim a sense of duty. And givvim,' said Mr. Crabbe, briskly completing his order, 'thy 'oly spirit.' And when he had finished the prayer, in order to mark the occasion he read with flashing eyes a passage from the Old Testament, spat vigorously into the fireplace, and filled his mouth with a rasher of bacon wound round and round his fork. So, Father having begun his breakfast, Mother and family and Nicky himself timidly followed his example. This was Nicky's first experience of the Crabbes' bacon and the Crabbes' Family Prayers. He had no second taste of either until six days were past and another Sunday was come.

The household included John James, a young man—five years older than Nicky—who was working for his keep and gathering experience against the day when his father would ‘set him up'. James was remarkable chiefly for his taciturnity. Such remarks as he made were all most dismally to the point, the point being farming and stock-breeding. At night, when Nicky entered the shared bedroom, he would wake to say ‘You're back then,' and instantly fall asleep again. By day, on social occasions such as a bread-and-cheese lunch shared in the fields, he would utter a few pithy sentences, as though trying over his knowledge like a schoolboy preparing for examination. ‘Hurdle tegs on
turnips—best way,' he would say, staring mournfully at the crust in his hand. And, half an hour later: ‘Clover first like, then wheat—gets ground ready for wheat, clover does.' This was perhaps James's idea of keeping the conversation lively. The rest was silence. Nicky sometimes made mild fun of him, but the industrious fellow was proof against that. Nothing moved him; much never reached him. When Charlie Bly, the cowman, made obscene jokes about Flo Petula, a blameless and attractive young kitchen-maid at a neighbouring farmstead, James grinned and grunted and uttered an aphorism or two about crops and the weather and the price of pigs. Nor did the changing seasons change his demeanour. In summer he sweated, sowing turnips, loading hay-wains, cleaning hedges, swilling out stables and cowsheds, and knocking the small blind heads of unwanted puppies against the stable wall; and in winter, rising in pitch-dark mornings and lighting a candle and shaking Nicky from sleep, he would growl in a sibilant undertone as he wiped his face with a damp flannel, that growl, suggestive of a man trying to smother himself, being his tribute to the winter coldness. But otherwise it made—so far as Nicky could observe—no difference to him whether the sky was blue or grey, the birds singing or silent. By day or by night, in summer or winter, whether drunk or sober, James remained the same neutral-coloured creature, a born drudge, a mechanical farmer, a clockwork man. One day, in the harvest field, he was persuaded to take too much cider,
which indulgence, though it made him more talkative, did not in the least affect the quality of his talk: his maxims that morning covered the whole farming year from seed-time to harvest.

With no one but James within reach, Nicky was starved of companionship. It puzzled him to observe that Gladys and Lottie were rather fond of that silent man, and that he himself, so much nearer them in age, somehow intimidated them. Gladys was sixteen, her sister a year younger; and, though they were not specially attractive or amiable girls, Nicky in his loneliness would have been glad enough of their friendship. He had no one at all to talk to, or even to sit with in the pleasant silence that familiar friendship breeds. Mr Crabbe, uneasily arrogant in his self-importance, was always concerned to prove that he, educated or not educated, was more than a match for any young man who came to him, fresh from school, talking genteel, and with money in his hand, to be taught farming. ‘Needn't be afraid of dirtying y'r fingers, Pandervil. Nor y'r boots neither.' This was a favourite saying. And once, when for the first time in history the word ‘Woolsack' appeared in the
Mercester Chronicle
, and provoked artless questions from Lottie, Mr Crabbe, having sneeringly extorted an answer from Nicky, burst into angry sarcasm. ‘Ah, my love, Mr Pandervil knows, you see. It's what the Lord Chancellor sits on. A kind of cushion. Correct me if I'm wrong, Mr Pandervil. In Germany it's the Rucksack. Ain't that so, Mr Pandervil?' He gave a
short laugh. ‘I may not 'ave bin to the Oxford and Cambridge College, but I know what's what. … Well Mother, and what are
you
scowling at, eh? You mind y'r own business and look a bit pleasant about it.' Clearly Mr Crabbe was not a man from whom Nicky could hope for friendship. As for Mrs Crabbe, she was too profoundly worried and dispirited to be able to take more than a merely civil perfunctory interest in a young man whom her husband had made up his mind to dislike. Nicky was driven into himself, a dark tumultuous wonderful world.

That world, upon its surface, seemed placid enough, even dull. But below there was a quickening and a restless desire. Earth's loveliness—and Mershire was lovely in Nicky's eyes, though he didn't see it quite as Egg saw it—could not be all. What one saw could never be all. These fields, these birds and beasts, these patient dreaming cows, these young sheep calling to each other like babies, this astonishing sky and those nude maternal hills of the horizon—lovely, he thought, lovely and wonderful, but there's something behind it all, some meaning, isn't there?—something that's like Edna Howard (that boyish fancy), warm and intimate and all-sufficing. In search of this mystery he cycled on Sunday evenings to Mercester, under cover of going to church; and sometimes, indeed, he did go to church, not in order to worship Mr Crabbe's God—an irascible potentate, peevish with age, but still doing a brisk trade in repentance and forgiveness—but in the hope of finding there
what he had never found in the Ebenezer Chapel at home, a presence (for he had read a little Wordsworth) that disturbs us … yes, disturbed him, and quickened him, and spilled silence like a benediction into his heart, a presence that he felt in the first soft breath of a summer evening and heard in the soaring skylark. The reaction from Ebenezerism drove him, inevitably, towards the Church of England; but God, if he attended that place of worship, always slipped quietly out, it seemed, just before the sermon. Nicky took some pleasure in the sonorous prayers, though they did not, to his mind, make good sense. And why is religion so
holy
, he thought; and he hardly knew at first what he meant by the question, for he had found no words for his obscure feeling that somehow this holiness, this solemnity and hush, was a kind of timidity in disguise. It could not burst into song, as the lark did; it did not make the heart leap as did the sight of the first green of the year budding in the hedges. It was—and this he did say—sober and respectful and middle-aged, this holiness. And, quite definitely, it wasn't what he wanted. What, then, did he want?

Well at least he didn't want Gladys Crabbe, though perhaps … no, he didn't want Gladys Crabbe, who came seeking him one evening, one warm dusky summer evening, in the granary. ‘ There's a bit of supper ready. Dad and Mum's abed.'

‘All right,' said Nicky. He concealed his surprise. ‘Thanks. I've about finished here anyhow.'
After a pause he added, making conversation: ‘Where's Lottie?'

‘She's abed too. She's not feeling herself.'

Gladys made no movement to go. She stood near him, tall and slim and rather disturbing in this new mood of friendliness, her face and flowing hair a vague blur in the dim half-light. ‘I say, I'm sorry I was rude to you at tea.'

‘What's that?' said Nicky rather sharply. He was surprised to the point of alarm. Gladys was eighteen now, and he twenty-one; and after all, if rudeness was in question, she had been more or less rude to him for two years. But his feeble pretence of not having heard could not be sustained. ‘Oh, that doesn't matter,' he said. ‘Not a bit.'

The straw rustled. She came nearer. ‘Will you forgive me? I've always been catty, haven't I? I dunno why. It's something comes over me, so's I want to bite. It isn't as if …' She stretched out an eager wavering hand to him. ‘Will you …'

‘Why, what's come over you, Gladys!' He forced a laugh, which even to himself didn't sound very real. ‘You mustn't take things so seriously.'

They confronted each other in the darkness, shadow to shadow. He found it queer and frightening that he could not see her face. And presently the silence was broken by a quick gasping sob. ‘Oh I hate you, I hate you!' Her voice broke, changing to a childish squeak. She clutched at his hand and pressed her mouth against it, and sank to the ground at his feet.

‘What on earth …? I say, are you ill? Let me help you into the house.'

He felt helpless and foolish, and angry for being made to feel so. Bending over the sobbing girl, he tentatively touched her shoulder, and then, becoming bolder, began lifting her. At last she uncovered her face and thrust him fiercely away. ‘I hate you!' she repeated brokenly.

It was very odd; there was something here that greatly puzzled and excited him; he could find no clear reason for not believing what she said, though in his heart he doubted it. He stood waiting until her agitation had subsided. ‘Let's go and have that supper, Gladys, for heaven's sake.' At last she consented, and they went back to the house, she walking quickly, with downcast head, a yard or two in front of him. James, as they entered the kitchen, was wiping drops of milk from his ragged moustache. ‘Good night,' said James, rising and going to the door, and the two others sat uneasily facing each other, almost as if they were waiting for his heavy footsteps on the stairs to cease and leave them undisturbed. The girl's hair, in colour a lustreless gold with rich hints of copper here and there, was in disorder: a warm handful of it, unfastened, hung over her left shoulder and provided a new setting for her profile. She sat moodily silent, not touching her food; and Nicky, stealing an occasional secret glance at her, saw for the first time that she was a woman. His heart began beating loudly, and he found he could no longer swallow without difficulty. She would have
let me kiss her up there! Why didn't I? Why didn't I want to? For he had never—and he burned when he thought of it—he had never kissed anyone as he now wished to kiss Gladys. But it wasn't Gladys he wanted, as he knew. And he knew, or fancied, that if he let go of himself now he would be committed to something far beyond his calculation, something which, while making him profoundly different (oh profoundly! he thought in his innocence), would leave him in one thing unchanged, for it would not and could not, Gladys could not, appease the ultimate desire of his heart, which was set upon a vision of beauty so marvellous, so remote, so far beyond the range of waking sight, that his imagination was all but exhausted with the labour of conceiving it. I wish she would be quiet, he thought in a panic; for, though she had said not a word since entering the house, and though she kept her eyes averted and her mouth angrily pouting, she was still in a state of tumult.

‘Well, bed for me!' said Nicky. His chair scraped on the brick floor.

He walked round the table and past her. Unwillingly, his feet faltered. Gladys did not raise her drooping head, but he saw a shiver pass through her and he hated himself. In imagination he cupped her face in his hands and kissed it hungrily. She would lean back in his arms and abandon herself to him. But it wasn't Gladys he wanted, and he dragged himself away from her allurement. Not Gladys, and yet, as he entered the bedroom—
‘You're back then!' grunted James, in his sleep— why the devil didn't I do it up in the granary! It's too late now. I wish … if only … I wish. Wishing vaguely that everything, especially himself, were different, he at last drifted into sleep, to be wakened, almost immediately as it seemed, by James shaking him.