THE PANDERVILS
by
Gerald Bullett
But, Esora, thy face wears a pulled look. One thing puzzles me, she answered, for I cannot think what could have put it into his head that he was sent into the world to suffer for others. For are we not all suffering for others?
THE BROOK KERITH
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter
I The Brothers
II Monica
III Noom’s
IV Carrie
V Father and Son
PART TWO
Chapter
I The CUB
II Plans and Hopes
III The Lovers
IV The Waiting
V The Last Days
Preface
In this volume the two parts of one novel, divided hitherto by the accident of their several publication, appear as a continuous whole: which is to say, as originally planned by their author. It was the tale not of Egg but of Nicky that I sat down to tell, one morning in the spring of 1927: only to discover, after writing a few paragraphs, that of these two Pandervils, father and youngest son, the father, being overscored with the intimate tracery of time, was at the moment the far likelier to engage my passionate interest. I at once conceived the project of making in the thread of my narrative a loop that should hold this father’s past history as in a parenthesis; and, after an interval of perhaps a day, or two days, suddenly the dog Fang began barking, the Pandervil acres lay shining before me, and the events of those earlier years, with Egg and his brothers and the rest, came crowding into my mind. I planned to return to Nicky as soon as I should have completed this loop: which in fact I did, as the reader may see for himself. Equally clear to see is the difference between what I have done and what I began by intending: my loop, completed, was found to enclose a story, or part of a story, to which Nicky, my original subject, was no more than a vitally important contribution. So it is that the heart of Egg Pandervil, which began to beat as it were parenthetically, becomes, and remains to the end, the true heart of this novel.
JUNE, 1930. G. B.
Part One
Chapter The First
The Brothers
1
‘And now you’re fit to kiss the ladies!’ said his father, lifting Nicky Pandervil out of the bath and planting him carefully on the cork mat. ‘Or will be,’ he added, with pretended fierceness, ‘when I’ve done with you.’ Egg Pandervil flung a towel round his son’s steaming body and began rubbing him down vigorously. The child grinned his infinite appreciation of the ritual. He liked being bathed by his father, far better than by Selina Bush, who, though kind enough in general, sometimes made frightful faces at him till she became a different person, a person called Mrs Murky. At such times he had to hide his eyes and scream out: ‘Oh, do come back, Sleena! Mrs Murky’s after me!’ And Selina, resuming her proper self, would tell him, with her wide eyes feasting on his terror, that the noise made by the last rush of bath-water through the plughole was the ghost of Mrs Murky threatening to come again next time. His father did none of these things. His father always let him soak a good long time, and always shewed an interest when Nicky said, as he seldom failed to say: ‘I say, Dad! Look at my place!’ For Nicky, on the inside of his right leg, just above the ankle, had a magnificent ‘place’, which served to keep in memory how two years ago he had climbed in at the scullery window and stepped into a copper full of boiling water, and, not content with that naughtiness, had afterwards scratched one of the blisters so that it burst and left an everlasting mark, at first a matter for reproach, but now a source of great pride and joy on bath-nights.
‘What ladies shall I kiss?’ asked Nicky, placing his hands on Mr Pandervil’s shoulders to prevent himself being tumbled over. But he did not stay for an answer. ‘When you’ve dried me, will you polish me, please?’
‘Dessay,’ said Mr Pandervil. Rubbing and scrubbing him with the warm towel Mr Pandervil emitted a hissing sound. ‘That’s what ostlers do when they rub the horses down,’ he explained. ‘How d’you like being a horse, hey?’
These two Pandervils seldom expected answers from each other, and still more seldom got them. Though half a century divided them, they were alike in this: that each had acquired the habit of living alone, apart, inside himself. There was understanding between them, imperfect but sufficient for everyday intercourse. During the past year or two Nicky and his father had struck up more than an acquaintance, positively a friendship; for Mrs Pandervil’s increasing ill-health threw them together. There were certain things, like this bathing, that the child could not, at seven years old, do for himself, or could do only under supervision; and, Selina Bush, the Elp, being often too busy with housework to sustain her accustomed minor role of nursemaid, Mr. Pandervil, to his surprise, had found himself playing mother to Nicky, and, still more to his surprise, he enjoyed it—so far as with all his anxious preoccupations he had time or capacity to enjoy anything. He was a worried little man, nearing sixty. Instinctively one calls him little, for though he was of medium height he was slim and with advancing years had acquired the habit of stooping. His head was bald on the crown, but fringed with silken hair that just missed being black; his mutton-chop whiskers were of a pale reddish colour flecked copiously with grey; his eyes were light brown and at once eager and tired; his nose was straight and thin, and his brow deeply furrowed. In moments of indignation, and in moments of pain, he would thrust forward his sharp shaven chin in a gesture weakly aggressive; when he smiled, his mouth widened generously, like a boy’s, and his eyes became little suns with fine wrinkles radiating from them. At the moment, but for Nicky, he had little occasion for smiling. The ups and downs of his grocery shop, that bother between Mabe and Dan, Bob’s impending marriage to a girl who was no better than she oughta bin, Harold’s reluctance to carry on the business, the way the paper kept peeling in the parlour, the big stores round the corner that was trying to make Pandervil’s look small, and most of all Mrs Pandervil’s nerves, always, a dismal undercurrent in any reverie, Mrs Pandervil’s nerves— such things as these had made Mr Pandervil forget that there was anything in the world so fresh, so unspoiled, so comparatively happy, as young Nicholas. He had made the re-discovery unconsciously, and was only now fully aware of having made it. Nicky was by over ten years the youngest of his children, the errant Bob being twenty-one, the restive Harold eighteen, and Mabe, wife of the unsatisfactory Daniel Finch, twenty-seven turned. Nobody quite knew how Nicky had occurred; it had seemed at the time an unfortunate miracle. And nobody, least of all his parents, was pleased to see him; but Mr Pandervil was by now more than reconciled to the child’s existence.
‘Dry as dry,’ said Mr Pandervil briskly. ‘And that’s the driest thing there is, I’ll be bound!’ Nicky, with a beatific smile, raised his two arms like a diver, and chuckled with joy to find himself being enveloped in his nightshirt. He experienced anew that moment of delicious suspense, the fear lest he should be smothered before his head found its way out of the garment. ‘And now for bed!’ said Mr Pandervil. He seized the child in his arms and carried him like a bundle to his bedroom. Safe in bed, tucked up comfortably and insured against all nocturnal danger by having recited the verse of a hymn and invoked the magic Name, Nicky confidently asked his father to tell him a story.
‘Dessay,’ answered Mr Pandervil evasively, concealing the fact that, as always, he was immensely pleased and flattered by the request. His relations with the child were still exquisitely tinged with a shyness that was like the bloom on a ripening plum, or like the tremor of delight that comes with the first breath and the first green shoot of spring. Years ago—occasionally and with little pleasure—he had nursed Mabel, Bob, Harold; but in those days, to which he looke
d back across the chasm of Mrs Pandervil’s nervous disorders, he had been smarting with too fresh a sense of disappointment to take much account of paternity and its incidental joys. Perhaps, had his memory been better, he could have recalled some little stab of wonder in these small lives; and perhaps some faint vibration from the past did in fact enrich, without his knowing it, such moments as he was experiencing now. But if the strings were plucked the music was muted; if the rhythm persisted, the melody was none the less forgotten; and his pleasure in Nicky came therefore with the sharpness of surprise. He was sometimes casual or jolly or playfully gruff with the child, because, being secretly awed by his smallness, his youngness, his coltish beauty, secretly a little intimidated by the clear candour of his gaze, he had not even yet learned to be always quite at ease with him. But for the most part his demeanour reflected Nicky’s own joyous gravity. He was happier with Nicky than with anyone else, for Nicky quickened within him the sense—against all reason—that happiness still existed.
‘Will you, please?’ said Nicky again.
‘A story. Dunno any stories.’
‘Tell me,’ said Nicky, ‘about when you were my size.’
‘Well,’ began Mr Pandervil, ‘when I was your size I lived with my Par’n’mah ’n Uncle Algy ’n Aunt Sarah in the country. On a farm it was. Green fields. Pigs’n’geese … ’
‘Reelly pigs?’ cried the town-bred Nicky, whose knowledge of pigs, outside picture-books, was confined to the elegant corpses hanging in Mr Catch’s shop. ‘Tell me s’more, Dad.’
Mr Pandervil, delighted to have made a sensation with mere pigs, warmed to his task, became exuberant, and the bag of his memory bulged with wilder fowl. ‘Cows, too, with long horns, Nicky, ’n sheep, and a big black ram, what’s more … ’ Mr Pandervil, seeing his listener enthralled, tasted the first sweets of authorship.
From this indulgence a voice in the front bedroom recalled him.
‘Eggie, dear!’ It was a querulous voice.
The light faded from Nicky’s eyes. His father’s face fell.
‘Did you call, Mother!’ answered Mr Pandervil feebly.
A loud sigh, a sigh that resembled a groan. Then sharply; ‘Eggie dear! It’s only your dying wife as wants to speak to you.’
Mr Pandervil, found guilty of forgetting his wife’s sad state, started up in haste, blew out Nicky’s candle, and stole down the corridor to the conjugal bedroom, leaving untold the strange exciting story (thought Nicky) of his earlier life.
2
It was not, by other standards than Nicky’s, a remarkable story, unless any human life, involving as it does the paradox of unity in flux and the translation of the tangible world into the stuff of consciousness, offers us a microcosm of the universal mystery. Egbert Pandervil was one of a family of twelve children, five sons and seven daughters, all born (and four buried) within a period of twenty years to William Pandervil and Elizabeth his wife. William was the youngest son of a wealthy Guernseyman; and in 1830, having been cast off by his father for marrying a pretty kitchen wench met during his last year at Cambridge, he had migrated to the Midlands and set up as a gentleman farmer. His gentility was less questionable than his farming, but he continued to the day of his death paying rent to the local pontiff, and continued absent-mindedly, after the fashion of his times, begetting children for whom, as it seemed, no adequate provision was likely to be made. As a farmer, however unsuccessful, he can hardly have been ignorant of the laws of reproduction; yet it was always with a certain air of surprise, and often with some slight indignation, that he learned of his wife’s pregnancy. Elizabeth, English and rustic to the core, was admirable both as wife and mother: lusty, good-natured, provident, and, outside her particular sphere, comfortably stupid. Her children for the most part took after her, and devoted though she was to her husband she was thankful for it. Egbert was one of the fruits of his parents’ middle period of fecundity, a period when, after Sarah and William and Frederick, they had begun to feel the need of a more gaudy nomenclature. Algernon and Felicia, as well as Egbert, paid the price of this parental fancy. Egbert was of the three the most unfortunate. The Pandervil boys were all given schooling of sorts, and it was a happy day for Egbert’s schoolmates when they found that by calling him Good Egg or Bad Egg they could reduce him to tearful rage.
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.
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