The Pandervils

by Gerald Bullet

  The resumption of the sale was a relief to Egg, and conceivably it was a relief to Mr Pummice. Both felt that now they could keep silent without suspicion of boorishness or of bearing malice. Egg, defying Carrie and leaving young Mabe to look after the shop for an hour, had had, instead of his dinner, a drink or two—rare indulgence—at the Green Man in company with Farthing and Wimmett: the original band of something better than hope (said Farthing, with a pause for his laugh), needing only that old booby Pummice to make it quite like old times. And here was that old booby Pummice, that master of malice, looking, thought Egg, not nearly so black as the three friends, mournfully conscious of the occasion and glad to keep the conversation running in safe unsentimental channels, had delighted to paint him. Egg, at this moment, felt at once heavy-hearted and hilarious. The Wimmetts’ plight had distressed and irritated him; he told himself he mustn’t be so soft about other people’s troubles; and he was giving generous rein to the reaction. When he recalled that absurd dispute with Pummice in the middle of the High Street, so many years ago, he wanted to laugh aloud and dig his old enemy in the ribs. I should like to pummel Pummice. I should like to pummice Pummel. That audit ale they gave us was strong stuff.

  ‘I beg pardon,’ said Mr Pummice.

  ‘I didn’t speak, Mr Pummice,’ said Egg.

  ‘My mistake, Mr Pandervil.’

  The selling up of Wimmett was now proceeding briskly. It was surprising to see so much furniture in the sale, surprising that so much furniture had ever been paid for. But the Wimmetts had begun in fine style; ten years ago it had been common talk in the village that Wimmett’s marriage was making a new man of him, and his own sudden radiance lent colour to the belief. But whatever Wimmett’s marriage had done for him, it had not done that, and nothing short of that could have saved him from ultimate ruin. Mr Wimmett was a gull, and it was Mr Wimmett who gulled him. He suffered from an overweening confidence not in himself but in the future, and not in the immediate future, but in a far-off, divine event. Success was certain, but it was always so far away as to be not at the moment worth working for. Instead of working, instead of stocking his shop with numerous small domestic articles that people were constantly and vainly asking him for, he made magnificent plans. Next year, if all went well, he would get the landlord’s permission to enlarge the premises, taking in half that bit of garden at the back, and joining the front parlour on to the shop, making, in fact, one large room of it like, by taking the door away or even pulling the wall down. All this was done, in Mr. Wimmett’s mind, between breakfast and dinner; and from that time forth he never looked back. The money simply rolled in. And Mrs Wimmett, you may be sure, was as pleased with her wealth, and as proud of her husband, as a woman could well be, and there were no more of those plaintive questions and niggling unimaginative criticisms which are so tiresome, so unhelpful, to a man engaged in dreaming himself rich. ‘But we don’t seem to sell the stock we’ve got, dear, do we? Why do we want room for more?’ Doing it all for her, he was, worrying and planning all day long in the hope of decking out his wife in rich grenadine; and this— one can imagine him thinking—was all the thanks he got. The existence of the Wimmett children provoked Mr Farthing to a ribald affectation of surprise. When the first was announced he remarked: ‘Never! Not Mr Wimmett! He musta dreamt it!’ And he had since been called upon to invent six variants on this little joke.

  ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! And good day to you all!’

  The sale was over, and the room was emptying. ‘You were telling me, Mr Pandervil, as how you have a brother?’

  ‘Yes.’ What a funny fogey the man is, thought Egg. ‘Yes, name of Algernon, but we always call him Algy. Wears check suits and sells sheep faster than any other feller in Mercester. Married too, he is, though I got ahead of him there.’ He simulated mirth. ‘And how have you been keeping, Mr Pummice, after all these years?’ Ah, that was silly, that was a mistake; he’ll think I’m digging up old scores.

  ‘Pretty so-so,’ said Mr Pummice. ‘Yes, Mr Pandervil, I mustn’t grumble. Business might be better, but it might,’ he added portentously, with a facial contortion that pointed an allusion to the Wimmetts, ‘it might be a good deal worse.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ agreed Egg, moving towards the door in the wake of the little crowd. ‘I hear you’re. …’

  ‘Not me,’ said Mr Pummice fiercely. ‘It’s none of my doing. Mrs Pummice—well, I won’t deceive you, she’s got a kind heart. And a spare room, what’s more. F’my part, I don’t hold with this coddling. I think he deserves all he’s got. Yes, Mr Pandervil, every bit of it. And it’s not my way to encourage idleness and sleepiness and sloth. Drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags, as the Bard of Avon tells us. And that’s a true word.’ He linked his arm in Egg’s and drew him slowly towards the door. ‘If I was a vulgar man, Mr Pandervil, which I hope and trust I never shall be, I should say that Master Dreamy Daniel Wimmett ought to have … well, you know what … and you know where.’

  They were now in the doorway, and the room was empty but for Wimmett and his wife who were wandering aimlessly about, looking at this and that and exchanging a colourless word or two every few moments. Egg called good bye to them in as hearty a voice as he could command. ‘You coming along, Mr Pummice?’

  Mr Pummice replied with a terrifying grimace and was understood to whisper that he would linger awhile to have a word with these folks.

  Egg nodded. ‘I’ll wait for you.’ It seemed to him, in his present abnormal mood, only the neighbourly thing to do, and without curiosity he watched Mr Pummice join the Wimmetts, take an arm of each, and march them into a corner, muttering savagely the while. What on earth was the old buffer doing? But more surprising than the behaviour of the old buffer was that of Mrs Wimmett, who suddenly, for no apparent reason, seized one of Mr Pummice’s hands in both her own and gazed intensely into his face. Her lip quivered and her tears fell. Mr Pummice, shaking himself free, waved his hand airily in the direction of the table. ‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘And those two chairs.’ Seeing that her tears still fell he scowled at the marble clock and said: ‘That’s a bad bargain, I’ll wager. Has it ever bin known to tell the time, Mrs Wimmett? Not much more use to you than your precious husband, if you ask me.’ Catching at last a front view of Mr Pummice’s face, Egg observed that the commotion among his features had reached the dimensions of cataclysm, and that water was running freely in and out of their numerous creases.

  Deciding to wait no longer for Mr Pummice, although that gentleman was already edging towards the door, he went into the street and walked slowly homeward. But soon, thinking of all there was to be done, remembering Carrie and Mabe and Bobbie, to say nothing of Harold who was now four and quite old enough to help his brother get into mischief—thinking of these numerous responsibilities, from which for an hour or more he had been absent both in spirit and in person, he was seized with that fever of anxiety which nowadays was almost his normal condition. He quickened his pace, conscience accusing him of grossly neglecting his duties as husband and father. Was not the Wimmetts’ example a terrible warning to him! For many years now—since the hour of his wedding, to be precise—conscience had always in his thoughts worn Carrie’s face and spoken in Carrie’s sharp sarcastic tones; and by means of this device it had acquired a tyrannical power over him, so that nowhere, not even in his secret mind, could he be sure of a moment’s peace. The income from the business could not keep pace with the needs of his growing family. There were now two rival grocers in the High Street, which was become an important thoroughfare; and several others held commanding positions on the outskirts of what was now called Old Farringay, or ‘the village’, to distinguish it from the large scattered suburb of which it was the centre. These supplied the large new residences and the rows of doubled-fronted villas, and Egg could not successfully compete with them. And so many of his best customers, while resisting the blandishments of these upstart grocers, got into the unpatriotic habit of taking tram to the city o
nce a week—it could be done in fifty minutes with good horses and not too many stops—and doing there the greater part of their shopping. He had cares more personal and less definable than these, but these certainly helped to make him look and feel, at forty, a good deal older than his years.

  Immersed in such thoughts, he noticed, without the interest it might otherwise have aroused in him, that a carriage was drawn up outside Noom’s Stores, from the door-way of which, with himself within five yards of it, a stranger emerged, a woman broadbrowed, full bosomed, and evidently in the prime of a radiant maturity. Her eyes wore a pensive look; and her mouth, grave and sweet, seemed to express an habitual kindness. She stepped, not proudly but with a patrician grace of movement, into the waiting carriage. Egg could see at a glance that she was ‘a real lady’, and not of Farringay. At his second glance his heart stood still. He stared in wonder and in a kind of terror … and he shuddered with relief, though feeling sick and dazed, when the enchantment that paralyzed him was snapped by the coachman’s word to his horse, the gathered reins, the moving wheels. With a sense of escape he turned into the shop, where he found Carrie busy behind the counter.

  At his entry Carrie looked up. She eyed him sharply. ‘Lady asking bout you. Didjou see ’er?’

  ‘Lady? What lady?’

  ‘Her as jest went out of the shop. Must have run into her almost. In a kerridge she was.’

  Egg considered. ‘I did see a lady in a carriage,’ he admitted judicially. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Ever seen her before?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Egg.

  ‘She knows you anyhow. Seems she was a friend of yours when you was a lad with your father.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Egg busied himself, unnecessarily, in moving bottles of pickle from one shelf to another. ‘Who might she ’ave bin, I wonder?’

  ‘Ask me another,’ said Carrie. ‘Just passing, she said she was. Just happened to see the name. Such an uncommon name. Oh, very la-di-dah she was, I can tell you!’ sneered Carrie. ‘Wanted to know was you the Mr Pandervil that useta be farming out at Mershire, when she was a girl staying at the Vicarage.’

  ‘And what did you say to that?’ inquired Egg, with his back towards her. He waited, in an ecstasy of apprehension, for the answer. No answer. ‘What did you say to her, Carrie, when she arst that?’ he said, turning round.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Carrie grimly. ‘I never did care about talking to a man’s backside. Well if you want to know, I sent her about her business. As good as.’ She met his stare defiantly. ‘I said there musta bin some mistake, and was there anything more to-day, ma’am? That’s what I said.’ After a bitter silence she added explosively: ‘I don’t want any of your swell ladies here, so I tell you straight.’

  At that moment he hated Carrie. He could have wished her dead, save that, before such a wish could take shape, his despised ‘softness’ would have intervened against it. He hated Carrie, and he hated all the drab litter, the humiliating tangle of circumstances, that she symbolized for him. Yes, glad though he was that this visitor from another world would never come to torture him again, he believed that he would never forgive Carrie for the words she had just uttered. It’s all along of that new name, he thought; if we hadn’t a changed the name this wouldn’t a happened. And he remembered the day—soon after Mrs Noom’s expulsion—when Carrie, excited as a young girl, had led him out of the shop to show him the innovation she had secretly, and with immense ingenuity, contrived as a ‘surprise’ for him:

  E. PANDERVIL

  late

  NOOM

  Formerly the name of Noom had stood alone, and for the good of the business it must never be removed. But now, ‘with Ma gorn’, Carrie and Egg Pandervil were verily in possession at last. … Remembering that moment and her naive pleasure in it, he could not—ungenerous and unlovely though she was—hate her with an undivided heart.

  4

  Nevertheless he was conscious now of a deeper estrangement than anything that had divided him from Carrie before. Where there had been division indeed, but division superficially bridged by the words and gestures of routine affection, there was now, as it seemed to Egg, an impassable gulf of bitterness. For many days not only was he a prey to wretchedness, haggard with the savouring of an old grief and a new disgust, but —I don’t care if she sees it, he said to himself savagely; half a mind to have it out with her, I am; chaining me up like as if I was a dog! He half-decided that he would leave Carrie and her children for ever, and live the rest of his life as a farm-labourer in some remote Mershire village; the idea visited him in a series of idyllic pictures, and his manner with customers became noticeably absentminded. He tried to imagine what life would be like were it spent in the company of that bewitching stranger, that lovely lady who had once been his Monica; and, snatched up into a fool’s paradise utterly and gloriously remote from reality, he would say to himself, Perhaps even now … only to remember, the next instant, what and where he was: a grocer, middle-aged, ridiculous, not over prosperous, and the father of three children. More than ever before he felt spiritually homeless. He had shut himself, willingly, out of Carrie’s country; and no magic existed by whose virtue he could re-possess his own.

  But the notion of escaping did not die so easily. He began to make mental lists of the things he would need to take. As for Carrie, she had the shop. It had been her shop always, and, though— as he now recalled with surprise—she had not been over-quick to remind him of her proprietorship in that matter, he had never spent more on himself than the wages of an ill-paid manager would have amounted to. Moreover he had, as a grocer, justified Carrie’s confidence in him; for when it was discovered that Mr Noom had left trade debts behind him as well as benevolent intentions, it was Egg’s energy, to say nothing of sixty-three pounds ten which had been his share of the late Mrs Pandervil’s estate, that saved the situation. That things had gone somewhat awry in recent years was none of his doing, he reflected. And now, let Carrie get on with it! She would manage, somehow. He would go to-morrow, or the day after to-morrow at the latest.

  With this resolve in his mind he mounted the stairs and entered the shared bedroom. Carrie, half undressed, was putting her hair into curlpapers. He saw at once that she had been weeping, and his foolish heart betrayed him into asking: ‘What’s up?’

  She wouldn’t look at him. ‘Caught again, that’s all. Fat lot you care!’

  ‘When did you know?’ he asked. ‘Are you sure.’

  ‘Days and days … Yes, pretty sure.’

  He cursed quietly, angry and compassionate. After a moment’s silent brooding, while his fingers removed collar and tie, he remarked: ‘Well, it had better be the last, if you ask me. I don’t know what you think.’

  A more friendly note sounded in Carrie’s reply. ‘Just what I was going to say. I’ve had about enough of it. At my age too!’

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Egg. He had forgotten that he would be leaving Carrie to-morrow, or the next day at latest. ‘Tell you what … we’ll see it doesn’t happen again.’ His voice was so eager that he might have been proposing marriage instead of, in effect, a kind of divorce.

  ‘How d’you mean?’ said Carrie, frowning at him.

  ‘Won’t give it a chance. Won’t risk it, see?’ He was confused, being still afraid of shocking that famous modesty of hers.

  Carrie, however, was no longer the timid bride. She understood his meaning and faced it. ‘I didn’t mean that? she said. ‘I didn’t mean that. Might as well not be married at all.’ She was silent for a while. ‘There’s other ways. Somebody was saying the other day … I met somebody who told me—never mind who it was. …’ She tried again: ‘It seems there’s some new medicine out now. Almost certain it is, the person said that told me. So p’raps,’ ended Carrie cheerfully, ‘p’raps Harold’ll be the last, after all. Three’s plenty in a house this size.’

  Egg looked gloomy. ‘Don’t much like the sound of that, Carrie. You better be careful with yourself.’ And he mad
e up his mind to do all he could dissuade her from the use of unknown and unauthorized ‘medicines’. He was anxious about her, and the impending crisis of childbirth made him forget that he hated her. To-night she seemed to have lost something of her customary hard assurance, and when he blew the candle out and got into bed she crept up close to him, as if for protection. He kissed her cheek, and, because he felt guilty for not loving her, he gave her a second and a warmer kiss before turning over to settle down to sleep. He fell into drowsy reflectiveness. When he looked back over the years of his marriage he found it easy to persuade himself that Carrie had once been kind and charming, and that he had loved her. It had always been so. From the bridal night itself, when had been contracted that mysterious debt of which he could have given no rational account, he had suffered the Carrie that now was for the sake of a Carrie that he pretended had once been. Despite her sharp tongue, her managing ways, her personal unattractiveness, he could not altogether ignore in himself a feeling of being tied to Carrie by something other than law and custom. Perhaps he encouraged the feeling; perhaps—who knows?—he half-wittingly induced it; and if ever he had asked himself why, it was to this arcady of the imagination, this period of mutual kindness and delight, that the answer would have pointed. And so, in requital of a past that he had never in fact experienced, he surrendered the future once more into her hands—a future for which, after all, he had now no other use.

  Chapter the Fifth

  Father and Son

  1

  But if Egg thought that life held no more surprises for him, he was mistaken. At the age of forty-seven he found himself singing a somewhat sketchy bass in the choir of the Ebenezer Chapel. He was confessedly no musician, but the Reverend Shadrach Pierce welcomed him none the less heartily for that. ‘The harvest truly is plenteous,’ said Mr Pierce, ‘but the labourers are few. And the Lord,’ he added solemnly, ‘listeneth not to the voice of man but readeth the secret heart.’ To Egg that seemed a very good argument for his staying at home on Sunday to muddle through his accounts, instead of importuning the Lord with a service of song to which He would not listen; but he had a reluctant respect for the Reverend Shadrach Pierce, and was pleased, perhaps a little flattered, by his attentions. ‘One of our leading citizens, Mr Pandervil,’ said the pastor. ‘Think of the value of the example to our district.’ It had once been ‘our village’; it became ‘our town’; it was now definitely ‘our district’. The High Street, itself now half a mile long, was linked more intimately than ever with its parent city, London; and Farringay contributed a street-accident nearly every week to the annals of progress. ‘Yes, Mr Pandervil, the Lord is knocking at the door of your heart. Won’t you let Him in?’ Despite the pastor’s wistful woeful look, Egg found in himself no response to this particular appeal: it was the kind of talk he didn’t understand. The choir, sociability, an atmosphere of hearty friendship—this he understood better.