His voice was edged with plaintiveness. Mr Wimmett spent much of his life in wishing. …
These friendships and activities formed for Egg Pandervil the kaleidoscopic background of a more private drama, which in its turn was at first shadowy and insignificant compared with the adventures and agonies of his own lonely spirit. Entering the Noom household he had felt at first like an incredulous civilian who strays by accident into the firing zone; for he became gradually aware of a mysterious battle raging around him, a battle of which there was no visible or comprehensible objective. Who was the aggressor, and who the attacked? That was no easy matter for Egg to determine. All he knew in those early days was that to himself Mrs Noom was consistently gracious, though she had, it was clear, a grievance against her husband and her daughter. He supposed that it was her womanly compassion for a boy exiled from home that prompted her conspicuous kindness towards himself; or perhaps her conception of politeness forbade her to utter the criticisms which he must, he thought, sometimes provoke in her mind. Not seldom her public benevolence to him was displayed in such pointed contrast to her treatment of these others, the old man and the young girl, as to make Egg profoundly uncomfortable and vaguely uneasy, till sometimes he half-doubted whether she were not deliberately working to alienate him from all affection but her own. She praised his manners, his industry, his honesty, his skill in salesmanship, she held him up as an example even to her husband. And she would openly claim possession of him by saying, with the air of brisk geniality so characteristic of her: ‘Egg’s my boy! We understand one another, don’t you make no mistake!’ Often her asperities to husband and daughter were sheathed in a smile by which Egg could not help being a little charmed, and the idea that Carrie and the old man were allied against her did for a while invest her with a certain pathos. And then one day she confided to him terrible things. ‘Whatever you do, Egg, don’t get into mischief of that sort. Thou God seest me. Remember that. Many a promising lad’s come to grief through gallivanting after girls. And not only lads, let me tell you. Not by any manner of means. Men too. Oh yes, indeed. I know. I name no names, but I’ve had something to put up with in my day. Not that I’m breathing a word about anyone, that’s not my way nor never was. I can suffer in silence, because I’ve learnt my lesson, and in a hard school, as the Lord well knows. White hair don’t make a saint, young man; and a hypocrite’s a hypocrite all the world over.’ With every word she said he liked her less, though he began to feel sure at last that she was a deeply wronged woman. ‘I’ll tell you something, Egg Pandervil,’ resumed Mrs Noom after a pregnant pause. ‘I’ll tell you something. When my Carrie was a tiny thing, her ma’s own chick, we had a girl here, general servant she called herself, though general nuisance and general disgrace to my way of thinking. And that girl—well, I’ll say no more. I’m old enough to be your mother, that I am. But I’ll say no more. Them as the cap fits must wear it, and I wouldn’t have some people’s consciences, not for a mint of money I wouldn’t. Not that he’s got a conscience either if it’s a conscience we’re talking about. More sinned against than sinning I daresay she was, the sly cat—but that’s as may be.’ Mrs Noom’s speech, the facile flow of her vulgarities, was without precedent in Egg’s experience of her. She was excited, and the floodgates of an unsuspected garrulity were opened upon him. He guessed that in a moment, with the least encouragement, she would make a scene. She lusted after a scene. He left her abruptly, to join Mr Noom in the shop.
He was horrified by what he had heard, because it threatened to destroy the image of Mr Noom— good, kindly, wistful, genial Mr Noom—that he had set up in his heart. He had respected and liked Mr Noom. Sometimes the old man was irritable and tiresome, tut-tutting about the shop in Egg’s wake like a censorious hen after a young chicken. But even then it had been impossible to take his displeasure deeply to heart, for the rosy benevolence of his appearance could not be extinguished by a frown. Nature had cast him for a ‘sympathetic’ part, and he contended against Nature in vain. Surely it could not be true that this seemingly gentle creature was a man of loose life? Egg was still in the golden confusion of adolescent idealism, and the mere doubt sufficed to hurt him deeply; more deeply, perhaps than he, knew. He was not overwhelmed; he maintained a kind of detachment, resolutely reminding himself from time to time: It’s no affair of mine anyhow. But the unhappy thought recurred too often to be ever quite out of mind during the whole of that day; it nagged at him like a nagging tooth; and the very frequency of his protests— What’s it got to do with me? No business of mine!—betrayed him into the hands of anxiety, the enemy.
Did this day-long anxiety, half-smothered as it was, contribute its iota of cause to the evening’s indiscretion? Perhaps it did. He now hated Mrs Noom and doubted Mr. Noom, and it was perhaps his sense of being homeless again, of finding ugliness where he had fancied simple honest worth, that drove him back in his thoughts to the hills and fields, the hedgerows and little lanes of Mershire, and so set aching again the old wound till it seemed that anything, any distraction, any inducement of oblivion, must be better than this throbbing misery of the mind. Not quite consciously, nor yet quite unconsciously, he gave rein to libidinous fantasies, seeking thereby to lose sight of the one beloved face whose beauty had power to pluck the heart out of him, for the censor in his mind forbade the conjunction of sacred and profane. In imagination he clipped hungrily to his arms that slim, dark-eyed, post-office girl at whom he had sometimes glanced with idle admiration. Her mouth was warm velvet under his; her supple body shuddered amorously in his embrace; she had no thoughts, no personality, no independent being, but was merely an appetite responsive to his own. His pulse beat fast; fever mounted in his cheeks; and he closed his eyes for a moment lest anyone— Mr Noom or another—should see in them the picture that they were seeing. ‘I want a pound and a half of best lard, young man.’ Certainly madam, prompted his mind; and his voice took the hint. It was a beastly shame to think of a respectable girl in that way, and a girl he didn’t care twopence for, had hardly spoken to. A shame it was. … But was it? It could do her no harm; it was a dead secret; nobody knew. It wasn’t as if. … And didn’t he perhaps care for her, after all? Maybe he had been really in love with her, in a sort of way, all the time. ‘And the next article, please?’ Frances Hunt. I s’pose they call her Fanny at home. Fanny Hunt. A pretty name. He began saying the name soundlessly to himself, thoughtfully, tenderly, over and over again. And when her face flashed back into his mind, he was startled to observe how extremely pretty it was. Dark eyes, a small pouting mouth, black hair recently ‘put up’, a straight demure nose—who could help being in love with such attractions as these! ‘That’ll be three shillings and sixpence halfpenny altogether, madam. Thank you very much.’
In the evening, when the shop was closed, he received permission to go out. It was an open secret that he sometimes visited the Green Man, and when mildly challenged by his employer it had been sufficient defence to invoke the name of Pummice, that good and prosperous citizen. But tonight he found, of his three friends, only Mr Farthing.
‘What you doing here, Mr Farthing?’ asked Egg with a grin. ‘Band of Hope night, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t talk about hope to me, Mr Pandervil. I’d rather have a drink.’ Mr Farthing, having for a moment contemplated this remark of his in silence, greeted it with a smile and a nod. He seemed to see possibilities in it. He chuckled. And finally he leaned confidentially towards his companion and asked with the air of a tipster. ‘See here, Mr Pandervil, what do I want with hope for? I’ve got something better than hope in this glass.’ he winked. ‘Yes, something better than hope.’
‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Egg. For in the past Mr Farthing had made him laugh sincerely, and would doubtless, when fortune favoured him, repeat the benefaction; and it would have been churlish to discourage him now by failing to be amused. ‘But what I say is this, Mr Farthing. Let’s go to-night, you and me, and see the Magic Lantern.’
‘And sing the hymns?�
�� asked Farthing sarcastically.
‘Well, what’s the matter with a hymn or two? You sing ’em every Sunday, don’t you, same as the rest of us.’
‘I do no such thing, let me tell you. I listen. That’s all.’
‘Same thing,’ said Egg. ‘Sing or listen, it’s all one.’
Mr Farthing shook a sorrowful head. ‘No, squire! Not with a voice like mine it isn’t.’
This time Egg forgot to laugh, his thoughts busily circling round the special reason he had for wishing to go to the Band of Hope meeting. ‘Well, I’m going anyhow.’
So they went to the little Mission Room, offshoot of the Chapel, where they found the meeting already begun. Egg, intent on escaping from the unbearable loveliness with which memory tormented him, glanced quickly and covertly round in search of the particular distraction to which he had already in his mind half-committed himself. Yes, she was there. And yes, she was pretty. ‘Where’s the Magic Lantern?’ asked Mr Farthing in a hoarse whisper. She was with an older woman, naturally; too much to hope that she should have been alone. Now that he saw her in the flesh, a definite and separate person, his imagination respected her and submitted without bridling to the control he instinctively exercised over it. He approached her, in fancy, with a more timid ardour, though he was still too impatient, too urgently driven by his escaping impulse, to decide just how and when, with what words and gestures, the first advances were to be made to her. His mind overleaped the first preliminaries and carried him—impetuous steed that it was—to the moment when he should say: ‘Would you mind very much if I was to call you Fanny?’ He could hear his voice tremble in saying this, and he could feel his heart leap when her answer came—an answer not in words, but a shy, downcast, loving look. ‘Please I want to see the Magic Lantern,’ pleaded Mr Farthing in a comic, child’s voice. And then he would take her hand and say—what would he say? Cruelly there came back to him that moment—peak of his existence—when there had been no need of words at all, and so with a kind of terror he raced out of his dream, back to the lighted Mission Room, which was now echoing to the strains of a four-part song rendered by two hearty young ladies and two timid young gentlemen whose heads were clustered together, like flowers radiating from one stalk, on the platform:
I’m very fond of a social glass.
And so am I!
And so am I!
It makes the time so pleasantly pass,
But it must he filled with water.
And, at Egg’s side, Mr Farthing was urgently, almost desperately, nudging and winking, first preliminaries to the process known as ‘sending us all into fits’. Egg grinned perfunctorily, and then with a quick glance renewed his sense of Fanny Hunt. A pretty girl … dark, slim … oh, a pretty girl, and any man would be lucky who got her. Mr Farthing was making it known to Egg, by means of silent mouthing and other facial exercises, that he proposed to return to the Green Man. ‘For a social glass,’ he whispered, rapturously smacking his lips over the new rich flavour this phrase had acquired. Egg shrugged his shoulders. ‘Oh, all right.’ Perhaps the spell of Fanny Hunt would be more powerful in absence from her. ‘But we mustn’t make a row,’ he whispered back. Good night, Miss Hunt. Would you mind very much if … Good night, Fanny—dear Fanny.
In the Green Man they found, among others, Pummice and Wimmett; and Farthing won great applause by relating and imitating what had happened at the Band of Hope. Egg, though rallied from time to time for his absentmindedness— ‘Regular old oyster, eh Mr Pummice? Regular jolly old native oyster, what do you say, Mr. Wimmett?’—was left for the most part with his private thoughts. Fanny, I’ve been dying to talk to you. Ever since I first saw you, in the post office it was (or was it in the street? He didn’t know at all), I’ve wanted to—well, to sort of talk to you, and tell how much I … Fanny, do you think that some day you might get to sort of … like me?
‘Patience on a monument, eh Mr Pandervil?’ said Pummice.
Egg smiled a vague response, his hand closing eagerly on darling Fanny’s. ‘Let’s have another pint all round,’ he suddenly blurted out, eager to atone for his silence. ‘Some of that good old strong stuff, Mrs Hemp.’ And after a few mouthfuls of the good old strong stuff his fancies flowed more easily and happily. Soon they were married, he and Fanny, after a short and passionate courtship. They were alone together for the first time in their little home. She was so precious to him that he couldn’t leave go of her hand, couldn’t stop stroking her smooth flushed cheek, and noting one by one, with quick glancing eyes, her several points of charm—items in a delicious feast. ‘Well, friends, the same again all round?’ But the feast was not delicious. Even here, in this dark alley of the imagination, he was pursued by that which reduced all his careful cunning make-believe to a handful of sour dust. He emptied his glass and gazed stupidly at the approach of another. When he rose to greet it, the room was filled with a faint haze through which he could see walls and furniture and men swaying in a curious and rather unpleasant manner. Being sure that his friend Mr Pummice was about to fall, he thrust out a helping hand, and then, with some suddenness, sat down. His brain cleared a little. He felt better. But now he was lying in the long cool grass of an orchard, with Monica, lovely Monica, bending over him. One instant in heaven; then, cast out and damned.
‘I think I’d better be getting along back,’ he heard himself say. But no one else seemed to hear him. He repeated the remark in a louder tone, and was angry to see the conversation go on, the mouths open and shut, the faces grin and sway towards each other, as though nothing had happened. He rose unsteadily, threateningly, and roared at the top of his voice: ‘C-c-curse you for a lot of louts!’ There was silence, an abrupt silence followed by discreet laughter. Mrs Hemp bustled forward indignantly. ‘Why, Mr Pandervil, I’m surprised at you!’ The truth burst in upon his fuddled intelligence: O Lord, I’m drunk! And at once he was sober.
He was sober, that is to say, as to the intelligence. Abdominally he was drunk, and he found as he lurched through the streets with Farthing as a prop one side of him, and Wimmett the other, that he had all but lost control of his legs. But at least his personality was no longer submerged; he was gloomily aware of his condition, and with the night air fanning his brow he was even clearheaded enough to begin retracing the steps that had led him into this pit of folly. To begin, but not to go on to the end; for try as he might he could not get past Monica. The night with its billowing road and reeling stars was a cup in which he tasted again —proud now to be so compelled, and a hero but for that ungovernable nausea in the stomach—the anguish of his lost love. He seized Farthing by the arm and said intensely: ‘Farthing, old boy! Dear old boy Farthing! I wanta tell you about —’ But he checked the sacred name in time, and a spasm of self-disgust shook him.
They piloted him to the shop and waited with him until, in response to a timid knock, light footsteps could be heard approaching. It was very late; he had never been so late before; but not until the door was opened did he begin to consider what this escapade might mean to him. Certainly disgrace, perhaps dismissal. He heard a cheerful voice saying: ‘That you Egg? Come in, do! It’s cold.’ Relief and gratitude took shape in the fog of his brain. It was Carrie, good old Carrie, in an overcoat not quite concealing her nightdress, and with a candle in her hand.
He stepped carefully across the threshold. ‘Awf’lly sorry wake you up,’ he said.
‘Oh, I wasn’t asleep. That don’t matter.’ Her voice was intimate, confidential, a pleasant husky whisper. ‘I sat up—in my bedroom, you know, reading and what not. But I say, Egg, you’re a fine old cup of tea to stay out till this time of night. You won’t half catch it, I reckon, from Par’n’Ma! … Shut the door, do! It’s cold as charity.’
Something of this reached him. He shut the door with a bang. Something reached him, and he would have got it all in time; but just now a particular question was urgent in him. ‘You waited up. Kind of you. Kind Carrie. Very kind.’ She moved nearer to him, saying ‘Hush!�
��, and pulling at his sleeve to persuade him to hurry to bed. In the candlelight he saw a new Carrie, her familiar face—young, elfish, with a comical little nose—touched with strangeness. He put his question. ‘Thad old man, Carrie. Is he good old man, or bad old man?’
‘What do you mean? Go to bed, do!’
‘I mean your father. Mist’ Noom. He’s not a wicked rascal, is he?’
She seized him by the arm and stared up into his face. ‘Oh, Egg!’ she said, with grief in her voice, ‘you’ve been drinking too much!’ The forgotten candle, held carelessly, dripped grease on the floor. ‘Lor! Just look at that!’
Why should she care what he did? He didn’t know. But she did care; and, hating himself for what he had done, he averted his face in shame and pushed her away. Conscious of her gaze following him he made a blundering ascent of the stairs, and lurched his way into his bedroom. Safely there, he fell into a sitting posture on the bed and began drowsily watching the phantasmagoria of his thoughts.
‘Egg, are you all right?’ Carrie paused with her candle at his half-open doorway.
He grunted thanks, whereupon she ventured to look in.
‘Can you … undress yourself?’
‘Um.’ He nodded. ‘Um.’
Taking this for an affirmative, she said ‘Good night!’ and went away, shutting the door behind her. He was left alone with his darkness …
Darkness it was, and sickness, both of body and mind. He woke at some indeterminate hour of the night to find himself huddled on the floor, very cold and still fully dressed. The darkness was heaving about him. Yet he struggled into a sitting posture, and his hands, swimming as it were through waves of cold nausea, found at last the laces of his boots. He began undressing—a difficult and tedious business. So this was what Carrie had meant. Kind Cannie. Kind Farrie. Kind Fanny. Ah, Fanny! He must keep on thinking about Fanny. And he got into bed thinking about her, a bed that at first floated round and round the room, and then up and up and up to the ceiling, but came at last to a standstill so that he fell asleep, fell into a landscape slashed with bright colours and filled with a heavenly voice, from which, fingers in ears, eyes streaming, he ran and ran to the very edge of the world. At the edge of the world he found his bed and his bedroom and the militant light of day. Someone was thumping on the door. ‘It’s late, Egg. Get up, do!’ He sat up and stared about. A repellent heap of clothes lay on the floor. ‘All right. Getting up.’ The atmosphere of the bedroom was sour. Himself tasted vile. And as he washed and dressed, he tried to calculate the chances of dismissal. Was I very bad last night? Did I make a noise? And who saw me?
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