The Pandervils

by Gerald Bullet

  Egg answered sleepily, rubbing his eyes: ‘What’s time?’

  ‘Hullo!’ said Algernon. He stared in surprise. ‘Cut your cheek, have you! Pillow’s all over blood.’

  Egg, jumping out of bed, answered evasively; but by the time he had finished washing himself he had realized the wisdom of satisfying his brother’s curiosity. Algy lacked finesse, but he was loyal. He could be relied upon not to betray a confidence, unless by a show of mystery he inadvertently betrayed it. But if he were left entirely in the dark he would sulk, his lonely heart would generate malice—after this very familiar pattern was Algernon made.

  ‘Doesn’t look so bad now, does it?’ Egg presented his face for inspection.

  ‘Only a scratch,’ agreed Algernon.

  ‘It was Twigg’s signet ring that did it, I’ll wager,’ said Egg.

  ‘Twigg’s signet ring!’ Algernon gasped.

  ‘Met him last night in the orchard,’ explained Egg, carefully (too carefully) getting into his breeches. ‘He said things I didn’t like, and there was a bit of a fight.’

  ‘A fight! You fought the Reverend Twigg!’ Algernon’s eyes widened.

  ‘Yes.’ Egg strove to be quiet and matter-of-fact. ‘He said things I didn’t like at all. So there was nothing for it but to have it out.’

  ‘Things? What things?’ Algernon, after a moment’s deep thought, was visited by an inspiration. ‘Things about that girl?’ He was excited.

  ‘Yes. About Monica Wrenn.’

  ‘Did you lick him?’

  ‘Well, you see,’ explained Egg, ‘I was a bit mad with him. He made out I’d done things I hadn’t. And he let fly at me with a stick.’

  ‘And you licked him?’ asked Algernon again, jealous for the honour of the Pandervils.

  Egg began pulling his boots on. ‘I suppose so. He had enough of it anyhow … Of course, mum’s the word. Say I slipped up in the yard and got niched with the scythe.’

  ‘You don’t catch me telling!’ declared Algernon, rubbing his hands together in jubilation. ‘Ah, that’s a good ’un, that is! Give him a black eye, Egg, didjer?’

  Deceiving Nature had done her work well, for, in the hayfield, Egg’s mind—despite a sharp intermittent anxiety—played happily with pictures of a radiant future. His desires projected images of their own satisfaction. He saw himself a rich man with a farm of his own; he saw Monica as mistress of his home, and he followed her from room to room playing with her, making love to her, teasing her and being teased. And he thought of the long shared nights, nights of unimaginable beauty to which last night had been but the shy prelude. Darling Monica. Lovely Monica. Life this morning had no meaning but Monica.

  When Algernon went in to his midday meal, Egg, blushing an excuse, hastened to the Vicarage. Throughout all his rapturous reverie there had persisted a faint undertone of fear, which now he could no longer pretend to ignore.

  He knocked at the Vicarage door.

  He told the maidservant boldly: ‘I want to speak to Miss Wrenn, please.’

  ‘Miss Wrenn is confined to her room, Mr. Pandervil.’

  Egg’s heart began galloping. ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘I’ll inquire for you,’ said the maid. ‘Will you please to step inside?’

  He was not kept waiting long. The maid returned in ten seconds with the news that Miss Wrenn was indisposed and could see no one.

  Egg stood his ground. ‘Did Miss Wrenn herself say so?’

  ‘I didn’t venture to disturb her, sir. It was the Vicar that sent the message.’

  This interview changed the colour of his thoughts. The day was a torment and the night a fever… At noon the next day he presented himself again at the Vicarage.

  ‘Miss Wrenn is not here,’ said the maid. ‘She has gone home, I’m to tell you.’

  Holding despair at arm’s length he replied: ‘You’re to tell me. I daresay you are. But is it true?’

  The girl’s eyes softened. ‘Yes, indeed, Mr. Egg. It’s true enough. Off she went this morning, as sure’s sure. And my mistress with her. Ah, Mr. Egg, and she’d been crying, the poor young lady!’

  He turned away without another word, knowing in his heart that this was the end.

  5

  First love had come late to Egg Pandervil, for his boyhood had been untroubled by amorous fancies and experiments. During all the dreaming years of adolescence, years lived in a spiritual solitude that was in effect cloistral, he had wooed beauty unawares, and love had gathered, drop by crystal drop, in his heart. Now at last, all being made ready, this vaguely apprehended dream had become alluring flesh, with eyes to enchant him, arms to enfold and lips to assuage, and—above all other wonders—a heart that answered his heart, a living and loving spirit. He had lived twenty years and Monica was the first woman he had ever seen. Upon this first love all the accumulated riches of his heart were squandered. Monica was the meaning and purpose and justification of his life; and he had lost Monica.

  Five days after her going, a letter arrived for him, greatly to the excitement of his family. In her letter—queer mixture of primness and candour—she seemed far younger, in mind, than he had ever supposed her to be. This new and last revelation tore his heart with tenderness. He had always, despite her dazzling youth and perhaps because of her gentle breeding, believed her to be far wiser and stronger than he; but now he saw her as a lovely, lonely, bewildered child, and himself as a man who had lived through centuries of pain. Monica wrote:

  Your Monica is now far away. But why do I say your Monica when I can be yours no longer! For it seems I have been a very wicked girl, my dear Parents are very very angry and very sad, I have hurt them so. Perhaps it was wrong of me to do as I did and let you kiss me, and indeed I did more than let you for I wanted you to—but I fear I would act in the same way again, you were so sweet to me. So I must be very wicked indeed if what they say is true. And if that was a sin so is this letter one, for my Mother has forbade me to even think of you and I write these words against her command— to say good-bye to my good little child—do you remember the lullaby I sang to you? Dear boy dear Love, you must not write to me even, because I shall not be allowed to read your darling letters—so it is good-bye! I am full of wild rebellious thoughts. I would rather share poverty with you than wed the wealthiest man in England, but a whole long year must pass before I shall be twenty-one and if anything were to happen to his cousin Richard my Father would be a Peer if you please—so there is no hope for us, dear Love, no hope at all. How I hate being a lady I shall never forget the orchard and I fray that you may never be so wretched as your heart-broken Monica.

  Underneath this was written in tiny caligraphy: ‘Dearest, darlingest. How I love those sticky fingers!’

  And now, for many days, the tangible world was less real to him than his love’s phantom. A hundred times a day he caught himself fancying, for one mad moment, that she was here walking by his side, talking to him, laughing with him; and each several disillusion was a sword-thrust. The fields were populous with memories of her, associations sacred and terrible. Crossing the farmyard he imagined himself meeting her; in the hayfield he was tortured by mocking expectation; and the orchard he dared not enter. His heart was become a fountain of pain; whatever he thought of, whatever distraction he pursued, that thought betrayed him, that path led him back. He was haunted un-endurably by the cadences of her speech, by chance phrases, by the funny little way she turned her head; in the midst of his work he would suddenly lose himself and stand at gaze, recalling this and that, the curve of her lips, the shape of her ear, until… surely she was here in the flesh, darling lovely Monica! Ah, no, she would never come again … By bitter experience he learned the folly of such indulgence; the pain of that inevitable return to reality was too great to be borne. Hating himself for what seemed like infidelity, he began cultivating forgetfulness, trying deliberately to occupy himself with little trivial practical affairs, and sending Monica away; but the very effort defeated itself, and the moment his strained vi
gilance relaxed, she stole back into her kingdom. Sometimes, for very weariness, nature aiding, he forgot her for a while; and that was the worst experience of all, for after an interval the exiled memories would return, refreshed by oblivion, more radiant than before, to be greeted with a passionate and despairing ecstasy. Everything conspired to his undoing; the merest word, the most familiar sight, would recall her; his mind became infinitely cunning in self-betrayal. He learned to fear solitude but never to shun it. He feared every generous impulse, every stirring in him of kindness or pity; he tried to harden himself. In time he became afraid to think of any beautiful thing, for by that door, infallibly, Monica would enter him again. The sun shone with her light; birds sang with her laughing voice; summer’s night, with leaves rustling and the sky moon-washed, was nothing but a reminiscence and false promise of her. Every night he went to bed worn out and eager to lay aside his burden of consciousness.

  At last he told his father that he wanted to be sent away. ‘I’m sick of farming.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m sick of it. I’m not happy here. Let me go away—to London, if you like, sir. I’ll learn some trade and earn money to send home and help Mother.’

  Mr Pandervil winced at the innocent implication.

  ‘How will your brother manage without you?’

  ‘He’ll manage.’ Egg didn’t know how and didn’t care. ‘You can get another man, or a boy perhaps. He’ll manage. He’ll be glad to. I’ve spoken to him about it.’

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ said Mr Pandervil.

  Within ten days of this conversation Mr Pandervil was taken dangerously ill. Egg drove with reckless speed to fetch the doctor, glad to have found something that he could do with enthusiasm. But Monica remained with him; he was still possessed. And when they told him, weeks later, that Mr Pandervil was dead, his first thought was half-envious. Lucky Father!—his troubles are over. Then, remembering that queer melancholy smile, those delicate trembling hands, he groped his way out of the house, and suddenly, with childish abandonment, burst into tears.

  Chapter the Third

  Noom’s

  1

  If one were to describe a circle round London with the Bank of England for its centre and with a radius of say five and three quarter miles, at a certain north-easterly point the circumference of that circle would bisect Farringay High Street. Egg Pandervil found the place by the more direct method of buying a ticket and travelling on the newly constructed railway to the terminal station of a little branch line from King’s Cross. The urbanization of Farringay was only just beginning. Its shops were but five in number and insignificant in appearance; its High Street boasted (and the word is accurate) but one lamp; and its Police Force was contained in one cottage. Critics of Farringay sometimes called it a one-eyed street, because nearly the whole of one side was occupied by the red-brick wall that enclosed the estate of Squire Oaks. Signs of progress, however, were not wanting. Drainpipes had been thoughtfully deposited upon the roadside against the time when it should occur to somebody to use them; and in the fields enclosing Coppett’s Lane several stacks of bricks had been dumped—as an earnest of good intentions—by a speculative builder who called himself Blogg and Brother. Blogg himself occupied a raw red double-fronted villa at the corner of Coppett’s Lane, a very commanding position. Brother occupied no house at all, for Brother was a trade fiction; but this fiction had so deeply engaged the curiosity of Farringavians, and was so faithfully insisted upon by Blogg himself, that a fanciful man could not spend five minutes in the builder’s company without being haunted by the sense of a third presence. ‘We can do that for you, mister, in a brace of shakes,’ Blogg would say. He himself was a tall lean fellow with vigorous black hair and a face as red as his own bricks; and when he added half under his breath, ‘I’ll see what me brother says,’ he conjured up irresistibly a second edition of himself. This duplication of his personality gave him the beginnings of fame. It got him talked about; it got him sought after. In Farringay the phrase ‘Blogg’s brother’ became a proverbial symbol for the non-existent. Unquestionably, whether he knew it or not, Blogg owed a great deal to his brother.

  Egg’s ‘opening’, so kindly found for him by Sarah’s Mr Twigg, was in Noom’s the village grocery. With a bag in his hand and a bundle on his shoulder, and feeling—perhaps looking—not unlike Dick Whittington, Egg walked into the shop just before closing-time on a Saturday evening. Never having been so far from home before, he felt numb with loneliness, realizing for the first time what comfort had flowed into him from the fields and vistas of his native Mershire. His aching sense of loss was dulled but not dead; in his heart there was a name he dared not utter. He was alive, he was twenty-two, and the future awaited his discovery. He was anxious and curious to see what would happen to him next. It seemed indeed impossible that anything out of the ordinary could happen to him in this prosaic interior. The shop was dark and small, lit inadequately by lamplight, and smelling powerfully of cheese and watering-cans and oil. The room was so small, and so well stocked with goods, that Egg had the sensation of being jostled as by a crowd. There were two counters, one comparatively empty where the business of the post office had once been transacted, the other laden with biscuit-tins.

  He stood, nervous, hesitating, savouring the quality of his new surroundings.

  ‘Yes?’

  The voice made him start guiltily. With a shock he became aware of a presence in the shop. Behind the grocery counter, more than half concealed by the ramparts of tins, sat a girl a few years younger than himself. She, like the shop, was dark and small; she had sharp eyes, plump cheeks, and a slightly tip-tilted nose. Egg, blushing in the knowledge that she had been watching him, was quick to read malice, or at least suspicion, in her air of alertness.

  He said: ‘Oh, I didn’t see anyone there.’

  She slipped down from her stool and came to the counter, across which she silently confronted him. He felt very foolish, and he hated her for not helping him out with his explanation.

  ‘I’m E. Pandervil,’ he said presently. ‘Come to help in the shop. Is Mrs Noom at home? She’ll know all about me, I expect.’

  ‘Name of Pandervil, did you say?’ The girl’s tone was brisk, but not unfriendly. ‘I’ll tell them.’ She went to the back of the shop, opened a door, and bawled: ‘Pa! Ma!’ After waiting a second or two she said, answering a voice inaudible to Egg: ‘Yes, it’s him all right.’ Then she returned to the young man. ‘I’m their daughter, you know. Carrie Noom.’ This time her tone was definitely and encouragingly that of a friend. He ventured on a shy smile, because it seemed absurd to be afraid of such a youngster; but he was too busy with expectation of her parents to think of anything to say to her. The briskness of her movements was not unpleasing; her youth was attractive; her nose offered a hint of agreeable impudence.

  ‘Well,’ said the girl, ‘Pa don’t seem to be coming. And it’s time to shut up the shop.’ She vanished behind the biscuit-tins, to reappear the next instant behind the empty counter, the flap of which she lifted. ‘Holiday to-morrow, thank goodness!’ she remarked, joining Egg in the outer part of the shop.

  ‘Can I help?’ asked Egg politely. ‘With shutting up the shop, I mean.’ He was nervously eager to be of use. ‘How do you do it?’

  ‘Like this,’ said Miss Noom. She danced to the door; slammed it; bolted it. ‘You just shut it, see?’ She grinned at the young man, her head cocked pertly on one side, so that one of her two pigtails was shaken out of place and fell across her bosom. ‘It’s quite easy when you know how.’