The Pandervils

by Gerald Bullet

  She answered with another question: ‘Why did you come?’

  ‘To find you,’ he said promptly.

  ‘To find me indeed!’ She pretended indignation. ‘You didn’t know I’d be here. I didn’t know myself until this morning.’

  ‘When did you know?’ asked Egg eagerly.

  It was suddenly immensely important that he should know precisely at what hour her decision had been reached; but once again she parried with a question. ‘Do you come to the orchard every morning?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Egg. He knew by her smile that she didn’t believe him; and he knew that she interpreted his ‘Yes’ as a promise. ‘Have you been reading your book out here?’ he added.

  He had only just consciously noticed that curious portent, her book; and it explained something about her that had vaguely intimidated him. With a book in her hand she had almost the air of being on her way to or from church; for he had never before seen any book carried into the open air except a Prayer Book or a Bible. He guessed now that Monica’s was a piece of secular literature, but her association with it started all his old disorders again. She was evidently a clever one, a reader of books; and he was nothing at all. No sooner had the question fallen from his lips than a feeling of unworthiness invaded him Sheepishly he turned his eyes away from her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I thought it would be a nice place to read in, the orchard. Are you going to prosecute me, Mr Pandervil, for trespassing?’

  At that, for a moment, he felt sheerly wretched. But seeing the mischief in her eyes he took courage to say: ‘That’s what they call Father, not me. I’m Egg, you know.’

  ‘Mr Egg then. Would you like to look at my book?’

  He received the book awkwardly, nervously, as though it had been an infant that he was afraid of dropping. ‘It looks very … very nice, I’m sure,’ he said politely, turning the pages. His cheeks were scarlet. ‘But I’m not clever enough for books, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘I’m not at all clever.’ She spoke quickly, all her schoolgirlish levity gone in a flash. ‘But I love reading. So would you. That’s by Shakespeare. Sonnets or something.’

  ‘Shakespeare? Oh, yes! It’s him the Vicar sometimes talks of, isn’t it? Your uncle, that is.’

  ‘It’s Uncle’s book,’ confessed the girl. ‘I sort of stole it. Well, you know, took it. Of course I shall put it back. What I mean is that he doesn’t know I’ve got it. He’d be cross if he did, I expect.’

  Was it then a prohibited book? Egg was human enough to be stimulated by the suggestion into looking at the pages more attentively. ‘It’s printed funny, isn’t it? A funny shape.’

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so.’ Monica came to his side, puzzled. They studied the page together. After a pause she said, tentatively: ‘It’s poetry, you see.’

  ‘Oh, poetry, of course!’ That word, for Egg, was the summing up of all that was high and difficult and eccentric. ‘Not in my line, poetry. Very nice, I’m sure. But I can’t understand it.’

  He was about to close the book, but she placed a finger on the page and cried: ‘There, that’s a lovely one. Some of them are very hard, but anybody can understand that one.’

  Wrinkling his brow, Egg read the sonnet through. It meant nothing to him. He read it again, silently forming the words with his lips, and he received a vaguely pleasant impression. A phrase in the fourth line, ‘heavy Saturn’, proved a stumbling block; for he read it as ‘heavy Satan’, and he felt that to mention Satan in the presence of a lady must surely amount to swearing.

  ‘Do you like it?’ asked Monica.

  Being interested, Egg had forgotten his fear of her superior intelligence. ‘Lemme read it once again,’ he said.

  This time he discovered, with something like excitement, that he was reading an avowal of love. And, by some miracle (or was it her pointing finger?) four lines of the fourteen leapt up at him and presented themselves as a poem separate, complete, and curiously personal. Their meaning was not immediately clear, but he felt them to be beautiful.

  Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,

  Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;

  They were but sweet, but figures of delight.

  Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

  He liked these lines so much that he blushed in admitting the fact. ‘But what does “drawn after you” mean?’ he asked, with the image of a cart and horse in his mind.

  Monica explained: ‘Drawn like pictures, don’t you see? The way we had to copy things at school.’

  ‘I see. And the pattern means …?’

  ‘That’s what you have to copy.’

  Egg read the sonnet a fourth time, paying special attention to this chosen passage; and he began to see that there was ‘something in’ poetry, in spite of its superficial queerness. And a plan of incredible daring formed in his mind. ‘I see what it means,’ he said, looking at Monica. ‘It means you.’

  She turned from him with downcast eyes, and blushing. After a few minutes silence she said, ‘I must go now.’ And Egg was miserable all day thinking that his boldness had frightened her away from him for ever.

  2

  For seven more days Egg visited the orchard in search of her. She did not come. Nor did she come up to the house for milk. On Sunday he saw her distantly in church, but she seemed unaware of him. He made sure that he had irretrievably lost her.

  Meanwhile the work of the farm went on, and Egg could not afford to be idle. Ten acres or so must be ploughed for root-planting—mangolds, turnips, swedes—or there would be no food for the cattle; there were sixty five sheep to be shorn; and, of the lambs, the ‘singles’ were now more than fat enough to be profitably sold, and many of the others were coming on smartly. Then before many weeks were past it would be time to be thinking about mowing and tedding and hauling the hay; Flisher would be busy with her cheese making, and three of the cows would be due to calve. Then, with the corn harvest and the fruit picking, another season would have come full circle. Altogether there was plenty of work to occupy Egg and Algernon, Higlett the shepherd, Dan Oaks the cowman, and Potty Oaks who was reputed to be Dan’s son and to have been begotten shamefully, said the gossips, within the tables of consanguinity; plenty of work, this, leaving little time, one might have supposed, for lovesick dreaming. Yet Egg, none the less, lived all that summer in a state of half-feverish, half-delightful melancholy, bearing on his twenty-year-old shoulders a burden of sorrow such as no one, he vowed, had ever borne before. With Algernon and Higlett— a small fellow, like a gipsy, with a squint eye and a mouth full of black teeth—he rounded up the ewes, penned them in hurdles, and sheared them in record time. Egg was a practised shearer—he had helped Willy in the old days. And Algernon, though he fussed and fumed a great deal, and talked incessantly, and sometimes drew blood, made a tolerable show. But compared with Higlett, with his fifty years’ experience of sheep, the boys were the merest bunglers. With him it was as easy, he confessed, as shelling peas; and he was fond of boasting, with a leer, that the ewes, when he had finished with them, were as smooth and sleek as a girl’s thigh, with never a scratch on them. At such remarks Algernon would giggle and look hot, and Egg would grunt.

  Higlett, at sixty or so, was a crafty fellow with a taste for lascivious conversation; and Egg’s impenetrable reserve piqued him. It had not escaped the notice, even of Algernon, that he was slightly intimidated by Egg, whose orders he obeyed with an alacrity unnatural in him. Dan Oaks was an utterly different type of man: heavily built, slow-minded, trustworthy, sanctimonious, a feudal serf. In his son Peter, nicknamed Potty for a reason sufficiently obvious, mental deficiency was balanced by a kind of animal cunning; the poor lout, nearing thirty, was attached to his father by the bonds of servitude only; to Dan, not to the Pandervils, he was answerable; he had no official status in the hierarchy of farm labour, and received no pay, but an occasional thrashing from Dan served to keep him in a proper state of filial subordination, and he made himself useful in cleani
ng ditches and swilling out cowsheds. Of these three not one could write or read his own name.

  During the third week in July the Pandervils and their two men set out with a scythe apiece to mow the rich green meadows of the higher valley. The day was warm and bright, true haymaking weather; and Egg, as he swung his scythe, felt the pride of young manhood flowing in every vein. At the end of each line he turned to look back with satisfaction upon the broad shining swaths; the smell of the grass was in his nostrils, and the brightness of summer for a moment filled his heart. The season, the ripe earth, his own strength of limb—all combined to reproach him for submitting so tamely, throughout these weeks, to the trivial tyranny of the fate that was separating him from Monica. He had lost count of the weeks that had passed since his last meeting with her in the orchard, but the glory of her now returned to him. There were a hundred reasons for despondency: his youth, his poverty, the difference in station—despite his father’s gentility—between her and himself, she being so clearly a young lady, so obviously the Vicar’s niece. That he should ever win her, possess her, marry her, was a threefold miracle for which it would have been the merest folly to hope. Yet hope he did. More than that, he swore to himself passionately, stubbornly, that the impossible should be made to happen; and in that moment nothing seemed too great a task for his powers, if only, if only, she could be persuaded to love him. That thought brought him again to the verge of despair and made him tremble with a sense of his gross presumption. What was he that he should so dare? He was an unlettered boy, undistinguished, the working son of a farmer, with no personal gifts or attractions—how often he had peered hopelessly in the bedroom mirror!—and with no prospect of independence. He had nothing in the world that he could call his own except a few shillings of pocket-money which his mother, he suspected, could ill afford to spare him. He had nothing to offer Monica except his devotion. But with all his body responding to the sunlight it was impossible to be convinced by such reasoning. Hope became a flame in his heart, so that he was hardly surprised, when Flisher came into the field with jugs of hot tea, to see that she was accompanied by another girl. As the two came nearer, Egg observed calmly, holding his mad joy in check, that this other was Monica herself. The age of miracles was beginning.

  Egg dropped his scythe and walked—with heart uplifted, with head downcast and face flushing— towards the girls, who stood in the shelter of the hedge awaiting the haymakers. Not till he was standing at her side, too full of excitement to speak, too sharply aware of Flisher to want to speak, did Monica turn her large dark eyes towards him. For the briefest instant their glances met— his inquiring and (as he hoped) noncommittal, hers timid and veiled with shyness—and the very absence of words and incident gave to the meeting a warm sensation of intimacy. The merest faintest smile greeted him; yet he knew that their friendship, persisting through all these weeks of separation and silence, was now actively resumed. In some sense, he dared not wonder how, he and she were united, bound fast together in the enchantment of those orchard mornings. He saw her now, in his mind’s eye, against a background of blossoming trees, herself the morning, the springtime, the intangible loveliness of life made tangible. But he was already bracing himself for the task of ordinary conversation, and reluctantly he heard Flisher remark brightly: ‘This is Miss Wrenn, Egg. And she says I may call her Monica. We’re going to be great friends.’ A silly girlish speech, thought Egg; a babyish attempt to dispossess him of Monica, for Flisher knew well enough that they had met before. Having that glance to cherish, and being so deeply conscious of that bond, he could afford not to be jealous. Yet a small twinge bore witness to his resentment of Flisher’s proprietary airs; her use of the sacred name offended him and made him a little sulky, although it was possible—indeed it was more than possible—that a form of friendship between marvellous Monica and his very humdrum sister might work to his advantage. Had it not already led to this reunion?

  ‘It’s very hot,’ said Monica.

  Until now she had not spoken a word. Her presence, a grave brief glance, a faint smile on the lips—this had been all. But now he heard again, with the rapture of re-discovery, her voice, her deliciously ‘different’ speech. And now he was alive, awake, summoned out of the half-sleep in which he had existed for so long. This very day, the moment before her coming, he had exulted in his power to respond—with every drop of his young blood—to the joyous challenge of the sunlight; but that moment of exultation had been but a dim dream compared with the vital light of his present state. He was in heaven and he was lord of it, lord of everything except the adored one, the divinity whose voice—‘It’s very hot’—had translated him to this height, had invested him with kingship, had made of flesh and blood and bones and sinew a body of pure pulsating radiant energy, as of one raised from the dead. ‘So this mortal shall put on immortality … ’ But his thoughts were inarticulate, and he stammered a little in replying: ‘Good haymaking weather. But we get very heavy dews, evenings, more’s the pity.’

  Flisher had brought with her a tray as well as a large basket. Egg, idly observing her preparations, saw that to-day they were to use saucers as well as cups, that the doorsteps of buttered bread were no more than half an inch thick, and that Flisher, so profound her sense of this occasion, had positively provided a white cloth for the tray. He, his heart softening towards his sister, silently applauded these refinements.

  ‘Of course,’ said Flisher, as though reading his thoughts, ‘we’ve had ours. …’

  Yes, it was inevitable that the girls should have already taken tea, with Mrs Pandervil, in the stuffy little drawing room of Fipenny Hall; for that Monica Wrenn, a young lady of breeding, should picnic with rough men in a hayfield had been too great a condescension, and one which, if offered, could never have been permitted by Mrs Pandervil. Yet Egg, while he so reasoned with himself, experienced the smallest pang of disappointment. He blushed, however, with a sense of his unworthiness when Flisher continued:

  ‘… though I b’lieve Monica would a liked to have it in the fields here.’

  Egg looked—this time steadily and with purpose—at Monica. ‘Would you really?’ he asked.

  She laughed, and answered with a pretty and unexpected emphasis: ‘Indeed I would!’ And another little heartbreaking melody was added to Egg’s rich store. How did this girl so powerfully and easily enchant him? Was she more beautiful, more kind, more clever than others of her sex? Indeed she was. She had a smile of infinite candour and sweetness; she had a dimple, and long dark lashes, and eyes that were at once bright and soft and thoughtful. Each one of these charms seemed, when she was silent, to be the secret of her, but when she spoke he felt that the magic was all in her voice, the enchantment summed up in the fact that the cadences of her speech were always deliciously unexpected. It may be that the whole of Egg’s life turned on this pivot: that where another’s voice would come to rest with an effect of finality on the last word, Monica’s rose by an exquisite fraction of a tone and left her words delicately suspended in air, her speech beautifully unfinished as though it were a windborne phrase from the unending music of fairyland, and her hearer excited, expectant, and tantalized with a happy hunger for more. Egg never got used to these surprises; his memory cherished her cadences, learning them by heart and counting them over with a miser’s passion; yet when they fell again upon his ears they were always new—new minted gold, fresh blossoming flowers, stars flashing in a blue sky, an ancient music never heard before.

  He said again: ‘Would you really!’ And this time he could hardly keep pride and tenderness out of his voice. What wonder could ever exceed the wonder of her having been willing, indeed eager, to share, in a hayfield with the likes of himself, tea poured rudely from a jug into thick cups more than one of which shewed dirty brown cracks, instead of sipping delicately, in a ladylike fashion, from Mrs Pandervil’s best china? It was impossible that there was another girl in the world with so free and generous a spirit. And she so cultivated and accomplished, under
standing poetry and all!

  She nearly blushed, meeting his look. ‘Yes, why not? How absurd you are!’ Quickly she glanced away from him to stare at the bronze hair of Flisher who was kneeling in front of her basket. ‘Can I be of any help?’

  ‘Here come the others,’ remarked Egg, to ease the tension, the very existence of which, nevertheless, gave him profound satisfaction and excited him with hope. Also he was uplifted by her calling him absurd, for her manner of saying the word—her bright glance, her wide smiling mouth, the quick downcasting of the eyes that had suggested an imminent blush—imparted to it a quality that was almost fondness, as of a mother for her beloved comical child. It made him feel at once like a little boy and like a god; proud, an accepted lover; humble, a willing slave. I am a giant, I am crude and strong, his heart said; and you, so small and frail, can with a word or a glance quell me. His mind, being inarticulate, said no such thing. Nor was she in fact either small or frail, as her sex went; she was generously made and lusty with a lustiness that gave peculiar piquancy, the right touch of intoxicated madness, to his sense of her being a lovely child, young and little, helpless and unprotected. She was a miracle and by a miracle sustained; because he loved and desired her he saw her beauty sharpened by the shadow of an unimaginable danger, a danger from which, whatever it might be, he and he alone, by virtue of this new irresistible power descended upon him from heaven, could defend her.

  The approaching Algernon, seeing a strange girl, paused a few yards from the group; then with a kind of obstinacy in his demeanour came boldly on. Not waiting for an introduction, being in fact a little too obviously terrified of so idle and genteel a ceremony, he nodded towards Monica, muttering: ‘How de do, miss!’ And to Flisher he hastened to say, in a voice unwontedly loud. ‘Cup a tea’s just about my ticket. Got plenty of sugar in? Eh, Flisher?’ The three other men—for Potty Oaks was among them, though not safe to be entrusted with a scythe and therefore of no practical use—grouped themselves dubiously at a respectful distance. ‘Come and get your tea, you men!’ shouted Algernon in his grandest manner. Shewing off! thought Egg. But his mind was busy not with Algernon’s awkwardness but with the question whether he could fitly offer Monica his jacket to sit on, or whether he would do better to wear it. The jacket was hanging on the gatepost ten yards away; and Egg, as he now realized with some embarrassment, was in his shirt sleeves. What a sight he must be for a lady, he all hot and sweaty and shewing his braces! But looking at her again he ceased to remember himself, being filled anew with sheer wonder and with a wish to serve. He ran and fetched the jacket and spread it at her feet.