‘Thank you for nothing,’ said Mrs Noom.
‘Further, it is my duty, I think, to point out to you that it might, in certain circumstances, be to your advantage to leave your daughter’s roof. On the other hand …’
‘Rest easy, Mr Sparks!’ Mrs Noom’s voice was gall itself. ‘I shall stay.’ She closed her mouth with a snap. ‘And what,’ cried Mrs Noom, turning savagely on her daughter, ‘what’s between you and this young smarty here, Miss Creepy Crawly? Sneaking round your poor Pa and poisoning his innocent mind against his own wife!’
‘If you’re referring to Mr Pandervil, Ma,’ said Carrie, with a toss of the head, ‘well, I’m going to marry Mr Pandervil, that’s all about it … Yes, Ma, I mean it. I’m going to marry Egg and take care of him, and he’s going to look after the business for us, and we shall all be as comfy as you please. Shan’t we, Egg?’
Egg saw with dismay that Carrie was five years older than the girl he had kissed yesterday, and that the commanding gesture with which she challenged the future might almost have been her mother’s.
Chapter the Fourth
Carrie
1
At eleven o’clock on a Monday morning, some seven years after the death of Mr Noom, there was great excitement in Farringay; but, for all that we know to the contrary, it was almost entirely confined within one breast: that of Mr Farthing, who stood, hands in pockets, pensively jingling his keys and coppers, in the doorway of Noom’s Stores. Mr Farthing, whose features now peeped through a forest of black beard, had come to make a small purchase and to pass the time of day with his neighbour Mr Pandervil, but at the moment he was doing neither of these things: with his back to the shop, shutting out the morning sunlight, he stared in a kind of melancholy fever at the work of demolition going on across the street, where workmen, with complete disregard of Mr Farthing’s feelings, were destroying that fifty yards of ancient red-brick wall which had given the High Street its peculiar distinction, its character, its onesidedness. The housebreakers worked without haste and without pity, like time itself; they had a long job before them, for there was old Mrs Bartlett’s tumbledown cottage as well as this wall to be removed. A stubborn old lady with a strange whim for dying in the house she had been born in, Mrs Bartlett had for many years opposed modern progress by the simple expedient of not hearing anything that was said to her and by being unable to read or write. But she had at last vacated her cottage—just the place, said Mr Catch, for a nice butcher’s shop—and moved into an even humbler lodging in the churchyard; and Squire Oaks—as this more formidable obstacle was still called by the older inhabitants of Farringay—had got himself into financial difficulties from which only the sale of half of his estate could extricate him. The peasant’s death and the Squire’s fall had been Farringay’s great opportunity; and Farringay, in the person of Blogg and Brother, had been quick to see and to seize it. Mr Blogg, as everybody allowed, did a smart deal; he first bought the land from Mr Oaks and the cottage from Mrs Bartlett’s heirs, and then, having worked up a tremendous agitation for the broadening of the High Street, generously sold part of what he had bought to the District Council, of which, by a touching coincidence, he happened to be chairman. The land of which Farringay became thus possessed was called ‘accommodation land’, a phrase that explained, to everybody’s satisfaction, why Mr Blogg had been compelled to charge for half his purchase ten times as much as the whole of it had cost him six months before. And now Farringay was to have a splendid High Street, and everybody was rubbing his hands with pleasure in the prospect, except, among Egg Pandervil’s acquaintances, Mr Farthing. For Mr Farthing was a sentimentalist. Useless to talk to him of Farringay’s future glory; he was mourning the destruction of her past. Worse than useless to urge upon him that the High Street would be improved out of all knowledge, for that was precisely the kind of improvement which Mr Farthing most bitterly disliked and feared.
And so he stood brooding in the doorway of Egg’s shop. ‘I don’t like the look of that, Mr Pandervil,’ he said presently, half turning. ‘Not a bit I don’t.’ Receiving no answer he said: ‘What’s your way of thinking?’
Egg, from behind his counter, nodded indifferently. ‘Seems a pity, p’raps. But if they will ’ave it, let ’em! It won’t keep me awake of nights.’
‘It’ll be omnibuses next week,’ said Mr Farthing bitterly.
‘Omnibuses?’ exclaimed Mr Pandervil. ‘Omnibuses next week! First I’ve heard of it.’
‘Next week or next twelvemonth, it’s all one,’ said Mr Farthing. ‘They’ll come, mark my words. And soon, what’s more.’
With his back to Egg he stood for another five minutes in complete silence. Then he remarked suddenly: ‘Well, I mustn’t stand here chatting all day!’ And he set off down the street.
In ten seconds he was back again. ‘Nearly forgot. The missus wants a bit of bundle-wood, Mr Pandervil, if you’ll be so obliging.’
‘Pleasure, Mr Farthing.’
Mr Pandervil tendered the bundle-wood, and Mr Farthing received and paid for it with a formal courtesy of which each was both conscious and proud. It is in this style, they were both thinking, that buying and selling across the counter should be conducted; subtly, without a word said, they affirmed the dignity of retail trade. And Mr Pandervil, enjoying the piquancy of the moment, shewed a nice discrimination in not saying, as it was on the tip of his tongue to say: ‘May I send it for you?’ For that would have been overdoing it. An artist knows when to stop.
The transaction over, they were old friends again. ‘Well, I’ll be bowling my hoop,’ said Mr Farthing.
He meant, and was understood to mean, that he was going. With this preliminary the two friends settled down to a little quiet conversation.
‘How’s the olive-branches, Mr Pandervil? Sprouting and shooting and puttething forth leaves in their season, hey?’
‘Mustn’t complain,’ said Egg. ‘Mabe come over queer yesterday, but she’s all right again ‘smorning. It’s my belief she eats too much for a child of her age. Why, when I was five …’ The gleam of false reminiscence visited his eyes, to be extinguished next instant by the cloud of a genuine and recent memory. ‘Young Bobbie ’ad quite a bit to say for ’imself last night. Up half the night I was, with bottles and dill-water and I don’t know what all.’
Mr Farthing nodded. ‘I know. I bin through it, Mr Pandervil. And shall again, I shouldn’t wonder. Well’—he moved reluctantly, a few steps nearer the door—‘this won’t mend the parson’s boots, will it!’ He nodded farewell, and stood irresolute.
‘It’s a dry day, to be sure,’ said Mr Farthing presently. ‘And I should hate a glass of beer,’ he added wistfully.
‘Jest a minute, Mr Farthing!’ said Egg.
Mr Farthing came back to the counter. ‘What! Did I leave me bit of bundle-wood after all!’
‘So you did,’ Egg laughed nervously. ‘I hadn’t noticed. Fancy that! There was something I wanted to ask you, Mr Farthing. A sort of a bet it is that I’ve got on with someone. Now if you saw the word honourable front of someone’s name, same as it might be “the Honourable John Smith”, frinstance. Now what would you say that meant?’
Mr Farthing looked thoughtful. ‘Members of Parliament,’ he suggested. ‘Aren’t they honourables?’
‘Ah, p’raps you’re right!’ exclaimed Egg, affecting enlightenment. ‘It’s of no importance, you know. Just a bit of an argument I had; that’s all. One said one thing and one said another. So we sort of bet on it.’
‘Jusso,’ agreed Mr Farthing. ‘Well …’ He nodded again, and this time the departure was achieved.
Left to himself Mr Pandervil stood for some while resting his hands on the counter and staring at that oblong of blazing brightness, the doorway. In his shirt-sleeves, and aproned, he looked precisely what he was—a grocer in a small but comfortable way of business. From his appearance and demeanour it could not have been guessed that his father had written a book so learned and so dull that no one had ever b
een persuaded to publish it, and that he himself in his time had ploughed and sown and reaped a hundred acres and assisted countless labouring sheep to deliver their lambs one stage nearer the slaughter-house; nor could it have been guessed that he was not the king of this particular castle, Noom’s Stores, but only the consort of its queen. To all appearance he was an ordinary enough grocer. But his behaviour during the next five minutes was anything but ordinary. First of all, awaking from his dream, he glided quickly to the glass-panelled door of the parlour and peeped in. Satisfied with what he saw, or did not see, he walked across the shop and closed the street door, so shutting out the radiant summer. Finally, he removed the lid from a biscuit tin, and, standing with his back to the window, held this improvised mirror in front of his face and stared with intense and mournful curiosity at the vague reflection it gave back to him. He saw, dimly but indubitably, the lines of resignation that pencilled his forehead, and the russet muttonchop whiskers that altered so oddly the character of his face; and by a queer trick of memory he suddenly recalled that moment—the night Sarah betrothed herself to Mr Twigg, was it twelve years ago, or more?— when he had scrutinized himself in the bedroom mirror at home, with Algernon watching him perplexedly from the bed.
The shop-bell tinkled. ‘Morning, Mr Pandervil!’
He was caught, the lid of the biscuit-tin still in his hand, still raised at a significant angle. ‘How d’ye do, Mr Wimmett! All the neighbours coming to see me this morning! Had Mr Farthing here only a minute ago.’
Mr Wimmett eyed his friend in surprise. ‘Whad you doing with that thing, Mr Pandervil? Cut yourself with it or suthing?’
‘No, not exactly cut myself,’ said Egg. ‘Do you know, these bits of tin they haven’t half got a shine on ’em. Never noticed it before. See, Mr Wimmett—dash me, you can see your face in ’em … And what can I do for you this morning?’
Mr Wimmett’s manner became curiously hesitating and confidential. His willowy figure stooped towards Egg. ‘See here, Mr Pandervil. It’s about that letter of yours.’
‘Letter?’ said Egg.
‘Yes. It come this morning right enough. P’raps I was surprised to get it, p’raps I wasn’t. I won’t say it was what I’d call a neighbourly letter, Mr Pandervil; but I will say that maybe I deserved it.’
Egg was troubled and mystified. ‘Got the letter on you, Mr Wimmett?’ Mr Wimmett looked astonished. ‘Mind if I have a look at it,’ said Egg. ‘Just to refresh my memory, you know.’
Mr Wimmett found the letter in his pocket. Egg, having read it through, handed it back with an apologetic frown. It was not a neighbourly letter, and it was signed E. Pandervil. Egg had never seen it before.
‘Funny thing,’ said Egg, after a difficult silence. ‘I didn’t remember the letter was quite so … so strong as that.’ A conflict raged within him: to whom was his loyalty due—to himself and his friendship with Wimmett, or to the writer of that letter?
‘Well, I must say,’ said Mr Wimmett, ‘since you’ve said it yourself, as good as, I must say it don’t read to me quite like you, Mr Pandervil. Still I’m not saying I don’t deserve it, and if you can be patient a while longer I’ll see you get every penny of it, every blessed penny. I tell you what I’ll do, what’s more,’ cried Mr Wimmett, with sudden enthusiasm, ‘I’ll pay interest on it. Ten per cent. I’ll pay. No, twenty per cent. …’
Egg interrupted him, for he saw that in the ecstasy of this resolution Mr Wimmett was in danger of regarding the debt as already paid, and of walking out of the shop inflated with a sense of his own generosity. ‘We don’t want interest, and we won’t have it. But we do,’ said Egg, remembering Carrie, ‘we do want the account paid, and the sooner the better. Fact is,’ he added, unable to sustain his asperity, ‘Mrs Pandervil doesn’t care about giving credit at all. It’s always been spot cash in this shop, and that’s the best way in my opinion. Pay for what you have when you have it, and then this kind of unpleasantness between neighbours doesn’t arise.’ Old Mr Noom, could he have heard this speech, would have smiled recognition at it.
‘Ah, Mr Pandervil, if I could only lay my hands on a fifty-pound note, I’d never run up another account as long as I lived, I wouldn’t.’
‘By the way,’ said Egg, ‘I don’t know if you’re a man for riddles and problems and general knowledge and suchlike.’
‘Pretty middling that way,’ said Mr Wimmett.
‘Well, I met some folks the other day. No one you know. Nice people too. Well, we got talking, and the question come up: when they call people honourable, what does that mean? Some said this, some said that. In the end, I’m dashed if we didn’t have a little bet on it.’
‘Honourable?’ Mr Wimmett looked as though he didn’t quite like the tone of the conversation. ‘You’re not getting at me, Mr Pandervil? For let me say this, that I didn’t come here to be called out of my name. I’m a mild man, Mr Pandervil, and I try to be neighbourly with them as is neighbourly-minded. But if I thought. …’
‘Bless my soul!’ Egg laughed with a boisterousness that would not have deceived a less simple man than Mr Wimmett. ‘What bree’s biting you now?’ he cried, and his tongue took pleasure in remembering that Mershire saying. ‘No, no, Mr Wimmett, you’re on the wrong track. What I mean is this. Suppose you call somebody, as it might be, the Honourable John Smith, ‘what’s the meaning of that? Some said,’ added Egg hopefully, ‘that it was something to do with a man’s father.’
‘Dunno,’ said Mr Wimmett. ‘Lost my poor old father years ago. Give it up. What’s the answer.’
‘No good asking me,’ replied Egg. ‘We had a little bet on it. Of course it makes no matter, whatever it means. But you know how folks get talking. Myself, I thought it might be this way. Suppose your father was a lord, Lord Farringay we’ll say. Then you’d be the Honourable So-and-So Wimmett. But that’s only a guess.’
Mr Wimmett smiled wanly, and repeated the rich fantastic words with the air of trying them on his person: ‘The Honourable So-and-So Wimmett! That’s a good one, that is! Though I reckon a fifty-pound note’d be more use to me than a high-sounding affair like that. Well, good day, Mr Pandervil.’ He paused at the door to inquire, over his shoulder: ‘Children well? … And Mrs P? … That’s right. Well, good day to you, I’m sure.’
It was not a busy morning, and the few little tasks demanded of him from time to time—a big parcel to be made up for the Vicarage, a pound and a half of best cheese for Mrs Simmons, and seven pounds of preserving sugar for Mrs Blake—did not seriously interrupt his secret train of thought. He could not forget the contrast between what he had seen in the lid of that biscuit-tin with what he had seen in the little, deal-framed mirror on his chest of drawers at home. And a third face sometimes appeared among his thoughts. Just before noon Mr Wimmett put his head in the doorway, a certain air of triumph colouring the vague hesitancy that was his normal manner. ‘Mr Pandervil, you there? Ah, I just looked in to tell you about that puzzle of yours. Went and asked Mr Pummice, I did. I thought he’d know. I said to myself: If there’s one man in Farringay as’ll know, that man’s Mr Pummice.’
Egg waited patiently. ‘Well? What did he say?’
‘You was right, he says. If I was the Honourable So-and-So Wimmett—that’s a good one, that is!—my father would be a lord. Peer of the realm, I think Mr Pummice said. You know what a one he is for his joke. So you’ll have won your bet, I reckon?’
Egg nodded and laughed. ‘Yes, I s’pose I have.’
But his demeanour, when Mr Wimmett was out of sight, did not suggest that of a man who has won a bet. He looked guiltily round the shop; then began feeling in his waistcoat pocket. But at that point his courage failed him. He hesitated; he heard steps approaching from the house, exasperated steps; and, with a spasm of anxiety passing over his face, he called out: ‘All right, Carrie! I’m coming. I’m coming.’ There was urgency in his voice. He went into the house at once.
Carrie and Mrs Noom were already seated at the dinner-table, with f
ive-year old Mabel and one-year-old Bobbie within easy reach of them. Mabel, nearest her grandmother, was a sullen-looking child, and her voice was already edged with the note of complaint. Egg would sometimes mildly reprove her for these ungracious airs, but he was not encouraged to do so. ‘Why must you always be on at her, Father?’ Carrie would say. ‘She’s not feeling well, poor lamb, issums, ducky?’ If, on the other hand, he seemed disposed to take pleasure in his daughter’s existence, he was accused of spoiling her. ‘She’s a pert enough miss already, Father, without you fussing and petting of her. Leave the child alone, do!’ He left the child alone; and, if the truth must be told, it was no great hardship to him. Before her birth the prospect of fatherhood had stirred him more to curiosity than to any other feeling, and such pleasure as he had known in anticipation was quickly quenched. The smallness and helplessness of the baby excited compassion in him, but he did not feel towards it any specifically paternal tenderness. Mabel and Bobbie were Carrie’s children; it happened that he was their father. Absurd, but it was so. Absurd and unaccountable, and it sometimes profoundly humiliated him to reflect how utterly he had been shaped and bullied by events. Of what he had wished and planned to do, he had done nothing. Instead, he had done a number of involuntary things, acquiring in the process a number of irrelevant possessions, among which were these two children, a shop, and a mother-in-law. Was Carrie herself, then, excluded from this category? That was a question he did not even ask, still less answer: either because some secret fear, parading in the dress of loyalty, forbade so radical an examination of his heart, or because, having learnt a wisdom of sorts, he was ready, given the slightest encouragement, to exaggerate the compensating advantages of his plight.
‘Now Mabe!’ said Egg. Haven’t you got a hanky?’
Mabel scowled without answering. He repeated his challenge.
The Pandervils Page 16