‘Yes, Father.’
‘Then you’d better use it, me dear.’
Bobbie, for no assignable reason, began screaming with rage. ‘Diddums wantum din-din den?’ murmured Mrs Noom, with a reproachful glance at Egg. She thrust a rubber teat into the child’s mouth. Carrie, who sat within hand’s reach of Bobbie, so that she could slap him or cuddle him according to her varying mood, fixed the child with a commiserating stare and remarked to the world at large that some people always did have to be interfering. This did not appease Bobbie, who, having skilfully ejected the ‘comforter’, resumed his screaming. As a screamer Bobbie was an unqualified success. He was thorough; he was a worker. He had, for the time being, adopted screaming as his chief business in life, and by industry and perseverance, his deceased grandfather’s favourite virtues, he seemed likely to make that business prosper and pay large dividends. Egg, though he made no voluntary sign, was unable to conceal his discomfort; but the two women, without any further attempt to subdue the screamer, began eating ribs of mutton with an air that told him plainly enough that he had brought it all on himself. He did not rhetorically inquire, either of the women or of himself, what conceivable connection there could be between his daughter’s dirty nose—it was still dirty—and his son’s fury; experience had taught him the futility of such questions. He sat silent, munching his food; and, when the nuisance became too grievous to be borne any longer, he resorted to a favourite expedient of his, which was to close his eyes and pretend that the noise he heard was that of a steam-engine rushing through a tunnel. In this way, by losing himself in a fantasy of travel, he was able to get just that moment’s respite without which, it seemed to him, he must infallibly have gone mad. After five minutes of this intermittent hell Carrie went out of the room to fetch food for its author. When she rose, it became apparent that she was carrying her third child.
There was no conversation during the meal. So much the better, thought Egg. That Carrie was in a disagreeable mood did not greatly surprise or anger him; he was eager indeed to make allowances for her, for there existed in him, deep down and long forgotten, a dumb and utterly irrational gratitude to Carrie that dated from her first bodily surrender to him. Tut the light out, do! It’s a disgrace.’ Half furtive and half eager that surrender had been, missing beauty by reason of her conviction of sin, her shame which made him ashamed, yet touched, in the end, with a hint of frail grace by her awakening compassion for him. She had kissed him warmly, forgivingly. For that he had been grateful; without knowing it, he was grateful still; that gratitude, buried in him but buried alive, moved him to exercise a degree of patience which he himself, had he seen events from the outside, would have found unaccountable. He no longer, unless disturbed, as he was now, by some unwonted excitement, spent any thought on such matters; marriage was become very much a routine affair; but in those early days he had been greatly perplexed, and for a while deeply unhappy. For what was a man to do? After that sorry bridal night it seemed to him only reasonable to suppose that ‘all that sort of thing’, which Carrie appeared to find degrading and repellent, was at an end between them; but his wife quickly found means to convince him of his mistake. She knew her duty, she loved her husband, and for nothing in the world would she be unkind to him. ‘And besides …’ said Carrie, and hid her face in the pillow. And so she gave him, insisted on giving him, everything of herself except such beauty and candour as might have made the gift a precious one. He never saw her unclothed. It was his privilege to see her with her hair in curlpapers, to watch her—were he so minded—brushing her teeth, and, inadvertently, to surprise her in various inelegant stages of undress; but her body’s grace, the body his own had embraced in darkness, was never revealed to him. Once, before the first baby had been weaned, he entered the bedroom unexpectedly in the middle of the morning, to be greeted with an alarmed cry: ‘You mustn’t come in now, dear! Go away, do! Baby’s having her breakfast.’ He reproached himself for his rough country manners: but with only half his heart, for surely, he thought, if things had fallen out differently for me …? That conjecture had been too wonderful to be stated even in thought. …
‘There’s the bell, dear!’ said Carrie.
‘Right-O!’ answered Egg. ‘I’ve had all the dinner I want, anyhow.’
He was glad to get back to the shop, where, with less drastic interruption and in a more congenial atmosphere, he could resume his dream, and perhaps, if fortune favoured him, could torture himself once again with a sight—the still astonishing sight—of her name. Mingling with these reflections was a reiteration of his resolve to have it out with Carrie about that Wimmett letter. She didn’t ought to have done that; it’s going a bit too far, that is, I’m dashed if I don’t tell her so. He doubted, nevertheless, whether his indignation would keep warm enough to be worth pouring out upon her; opportunities of private talk were rare indeed in this household, for when the children were not present Mrs Noom was. Bedtime was the only time for talk, and nowadays at bedtime they were so often too sleepy to exchange more than an indifferent word or two. In the first years of their marriage Egg had found the richest of his compensations, the most substantial reward of intimacy, in the kindly comfort of that lying side by side in the darkness, quietly turning over, in thought and drowsy speech, the day’s doings and the morrow’s possibilities; and it was by virtue rather of such homely satisfactions than of passion, or of the marriage service permissive of passion, that Carrie was truly his wife, a woman for whom he would have—even while he might be hating her—a unique, an obstinate, a highly inconvenient and exasperating affection.
Of all this he was not aware, except perhaps in a very dim and confused fashion. Such reflections, indeed, would by no means have accorded with his mood, which was, so far as he could make it so, one of resentment and stern resolution. Yes, Carrie should certainly be told about it—making free with his signature like that, and setting his old friends against him! But his heart was not in this punitive enterprise; his heart was in his fingers which, during all that afternoon and evening, when no one was observing them, would be forever moving towards his waistcoat pocket. Nevertheless, when he followed Carrie that night into their bedroom he at once, with the courage of desperation, launched his attack.
‘Wimmett came into the shop to-day. About that blessed account of his.’
‘Did he pay it?’ asked Carrie.
‘No. But he promised he would. And look here, Carrie!’ Egg’s indignation was by now unfeigned; he had vividly remembered Wimmett’s crestfallen air. ‘Look here, Carrie! You’d no call to go and write him that letter you did. Tisn’t fair on me, either, signing my name to it like that!’
‘Oh, you and your Wimmetts,’ said Carrie, ‘you fair give me the stomach-ache.’
Her tone was less sharp than he had expected it to be. In effect she had accepted his rebuke, and honour was satisfied. He said no more, but glanced at her with a certain curiosity visible in his eyes. She returned his glance, half grinning, with a kind of lazy tolerance which he, from his seven years knowledge of her, took to be a sign that she was pleased with him and with herself. Yet there was a change in her; there was something he did not remember to have seen before, and he was disconcerted by it, for having accepted her as familiar, a book read from cover to cover, he did not wish to be compelled at this time of day to take a new interest in her. At the moment, however, he was busy with other and dearer things.
She came close to him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You might give us a kiss.’
Astonished to the point of alarm, he did as he was told.
‘Something to tell you, Eggie!’
‘What is it?’ asked Egg.
‘Well, I’m getting rid of Ma. That’s what it is.’
It was too good to be true, but Egg could not rejoice. ‘How do you mean?’
‘She’s going. Clearing out. Leaving us to ourselves. And about time, too!’
‘When did she tell you this?’
Carrie smiled, and Egg
could not help thinking that there was cruelty in her smile. ‘She didn’t. I told her.’
‘You’re never turning her out!’ protested Egg.
‘Well!’ exclaimed Carrie. ‘Well, I never did! If you’re not the softest-hearted old goose in the world, I never seen one.’
Egg was troubled. ‘Whad she say? Make a fuss? And where’s she going?’
‘Oh, I’ve found her a place. Nice little place it is, too, and the woman next door’ll come in and do for her.’
‘Do for her?’
‘Clean up for her.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Egg, ‘I don’t say I’m so anxious to have her about. But it couldn’t have been for long, anyhow. Seems hard on an old woman of over seventy to be bundled out of her home like as if she was a bit of furniture. What suddenly put it into your head, Carrie, after all these years? She hasn’t been so bad lately, has she?’
‘Oh, hasn’t she just!’ Carrie sniffed, without thereby enhancing her attractiveness. ‘If you saw as much of her as I ’ave to, you wouldn’t ask what suddenly put it into my head. Put it into my head indeed. It’s time you and me was alone a bit, as you’d a bin the first to have said if you’d bin half a man. Put it into my head—’
‘All right. All right. She’s your mother, not mine.’ Egg raised his voice to dam the tide of her speech; then lowered it to mumble, inaudibly: ‘And you get more like her every minute, you do!’ But already his thought had wandered back to its former obsession. ‘Going downstairs for a second. Believe I left the shop-door unbolted.’
‘Just like you if you did,’ said Carrie.
Leaving Carrie with the lighted candle for company he groped his way down the dark stairs and into the shop. He was still fully dressed, and there were matches in his pocket. He lit the lamp. But he did not examine the bolts of the shop-door. He went eagerly to the counter, and taking, at last, that treasure from his waistcoat pocket, he flattened it out with trembling fingers. It was a torn and tiny fragment of newspaper. He stared at it as though it had been the strangest, most precious, most terrible thing in the world. He had utterly forgotten the tremendous piece of news just imparted to him by Carrie. He had utterly forgotten Carrie herself. Yet there was nothing so very remarkable in what he read:
iage has been arranged and will
ke place between Major George William
he Coldstream Guards, eldest son of the Rev.
ildmay, and the Hon. Monica Wrenn, only dau
The paper, besides being crookedly torn, had been rendered all but illegible by contact with something wet and bloody. It was, however, not Egg’s life-blood that stained it, but that of a young calf, part of whose liver—a nice tasty piece—Carrie had brought home from her marketing last Saturday.
2
It is probable that Mrs Noom never forgave Carrie for turning her out of the home she had occupied for forty years, and it remained a puzzle to Egg how his wife had had the heart to conceive such a scheme, and how, the resolution made, she had found courage and cunning enough to put it into effect. In a series of discussions that tended to become acrimonious Carrie did her best to enlighten his darkness. She flew into a rage when she discovered, more by chance than by direct questioning, that, though he professed still to hate Mrs Noom for her treatment of the old man, he hated far more bitterly the idea of casting her out. She was old; as a grandmother, though in no other capacity, she was almost benevolent; and she would be lonely in her new cottage, however efficient the ministrations of the woman who was ‘to do for her’. And had she not, he inquired, been a great help to Carrie with the children? This, as it proved, was not a fortunate remark, since in Carrie’s eyes Mrs Noom’s chief offence was that she had tried to come between the children and their mother. ‘Knows too much by half, she does!’ exclaimed Carrie, with exceeding bitterness. ‘What does a girl like me know about rairing children! Oh, nothing, to be sure! It’s her or me goes, Egg Pandervil, so I tell you straight.’ Egg had already given up the argument, but Carrie couldn’t let it rest. ‘What’s more I want her bedroom for the gel. When Baby’s born we’ll have to get a gel, and she’ll have to sleep somewhere. I s’pose … But p’raps she could sleep under the counter!’ cried Carrie, with angry sarcasm. Egg walked away, closing the door behind him. He knew no other method of silencing Carrie, once she was roused. And it would do her no good, he thought, to get so worked up; for the time of her delivery was now very near.
One can scarcely suppose that during her last six weeks in familiar surroundings Mrs Noom did not suffer considerable anguish of heart, facing, as she was now compelled to do, the prospect of a more drastic change than anything in all her long experience save for her husband’s death; yet Egg caught himself wondering whether the pleasures of her situation were not more real to her than its pains. He said as much to Carrie, for every day Mrs Noom’s behaviour made it easier for him to feel less sorry for her. Having complained all her life of scorn and neglect, the old woman was now, and for the first time, provided with a genuine grievance, the magnitude of which could scarcely fail, after the first shock of horror, to afford her a certain grim satisfaction. This is conjecture, for into Mrs Noom’s private mind Egg was never able to peep; but there can be no question that she threw herself with some relish into the part—so rich in melodramatic quality—that an unkind fate, with Carrie for stage-manager, had now cast her for. She quickly took the stage-management out of her daughter’s hands; for even Carrie, well as she knew her mother, could not have known that she had kept so clean and bright and sharp her talent for persecution. She watered the children with her tears, and set Mabel crying: ‘Dear Granny, don’t leave Mabe!’ The days were measured by her long-suffering sighs; and two nights were dedicated to deathbed scenes less convincing, by many degrees, than the first of that series. Often towards the end of a hearty meal, she would suddenly declare that the food choked her and she daren’t touch another crumb; and more than once, at suppertime, she publicly assured the Lord that she would bear her cross without murmuring. She saw to it that no one in the house, the children least of all, forgot that she was under sentence of expulsion. On the axis of poor Granny’s patient martyrdom the Pandervil world revolved.
Though it caused him some inevitable discomfort, Egg paid but scant attention to Mrs Noom’s behaviour, his mind being, as usual, occupied with more pressing affairs. He had long been a thrall to regret; and now he was acquiring the habit of worry. In particular he was worrying about the expected child. Neither he nor Carrie wanted another child; she was weary of carrying and giving birth, to say nothing of the long sequel of nursing; and he, for his part, shrank from the vicarious suffering these processes entailed for him no less than from the practical nuisance and misery of harassed days and broken nights. He was anxious, too, on Carrie’s account, for her last confinement had been a long and grim ordeal: so grim that no amount of patience now, he thought, could ever ‘make it up to her’. But there it was; another child was soon to be born; and while he kept saying to himself that after all it couldn’t be helped, these things being decided for us by One Above, he yet felt guilty about it, a lout, a clumsy fellow. It made him feel a fool that having got poor Carrie into this plight he could do nothing at all to help her, but must just stand about, anxious and ridiculous, awaiting the issue of events. His friend Farthing, to whom, in an unprecedented moment of confidence, he confessed these feelings, thought him a queer fellow and laughed at his self-reproaches and his fears. ‘You’ll soon get used to it, Mr Pandervil, my boy! After a while it comes as easy and natural as shelling peas. Wait till you’ve got your sixth. Then’ll be the time to talk about too many.’ Mr. Farthing had begotten six.
It pleased Mrs Noom to leave the house just as Carrie’s labour was about to begin. ‘Fetch the doctor, dear. It’s starting,’ said Carrie, with pain shewing in her face. ‘And,’ said Mrs Noom, ‘you can fetch me a cab while you’re at it, Egg Pandervil. There’ll be no room for me in this house now. Come, Carrie, my love, I’ll help you
to your bed and then I’ll go from where I’m not wanted.’ Half an hour later, Farringay was scandalized by the spectacle of a white-haired old lady—wonderfully prim and sweet in her best bonnet, black beaded dress, and elastic-sided boots—seated on a large tin trunk in the middle of the road. Such a thing had never happened in the High Street before, and the gossips were soon busy with it. Who could it be? Why, it was Mrs Noom! Mrs Noom, poor old thing, bundled out of her own house, and waiting, as brave as brave, for the cab to come and take her away. Why, she might be run over, sitting there like that!
But Mrs Noom was not run over. She had chosen her place with some care, and she was far too conspicuous an obstacle to be overlooked by the astonished carters, who, pulling their horses violently to the side of the road, could not forbear asking her what was amiss. She, not ill-disposed for conversation, explained in a gentle voice and with a sad smile that it was nothing, nothing at all; she was only an old widow lady turned out of doors by her daughter. Yes, Mrs Noom she was, of Noom’s Stores, and seventy years old as near as made no matter, and her daughter was married to a man named Pandervil, a quiet enough man to look at, and yet—but it wasn’t her way to say a word against her own son-be-law, nor she never would. Dabbing her eyes with a tiny handkerchief, she smiled a gallant acknowledgment of all kind inquiries, and she praised the Lord for letting this bad bad business happen on a nice summer day, for if it hadda bin winter she didn’t hardly know how she coulda borne it, ‘being not so young as I was, and with my poor rheumatics to try me.’ Mrs Noom was bounded on the east by an ancient gingham umbrella, which lay in the road with its ferrule pointing accusingly at Noom’s Stores, and on the west by her booted feet; and it was impossible for a cart to avoid contact with one or other of these extremities except by special diligence on the part of its driver.
Egg, meanwhile, was panting along the Binstead road in search of someone who would assist an unwanted child into the world. He had called at Dr Renwick’s, and, learning that the doctor was out on his rounds, had left a message. He was sick with anxiety. Had he not taken the precaution of looking in at Farthing’s shop, to stammer a word of entreaty to Farthing’s missus, he would have been almost in despair. Before he had been running twenty minutes, however, he was overtaken by a tall gentleman riding a boneshaker. The clothes and deportment of this stranger proclaimed him a swell, and he managed his machine with the most elegant skill imaginable. In ordinary circumstances Egg would certainly not have ventured to address this gentleman except across the shop-counter; but he hailed him now, without pausing to calculate the chances of being thought an impudent fellow, and in two breathless sentences explained his urgent need of a doctor. And the velocipedist, having performed the gymnastic feat of dismounting, proved on closer acquaintance to be very pleasant and condescending; for he listened without any sign of being offended, and his free hand twirled his long drooping moustaches —first one, then the other—with an agitation that clearly expressed his sense of the crisis. ‘Very well, my man! I shall do the best I can for you.’ His best, through no fault of his own, availed Egg nothing; for in twenty-five minutes he returned with the news that this other doctor, too, was out visiting his patients. ‘Deuced anxious time for you.’ said the gentleman. ‘I can see that.’
The Pandervils Page 17