So that was it! That was the meaning of this strangely formal gathering in the parlour: Harold had gone and got engaged. And this was what an engaged couple looked like. Nicky’s glance, shyly curious, wavered from one face to the other. The girl looked pretty and defiant, and Harold looked sheepish. Now what was the proper thing to say to them? Nicky could think of nothing except his wish to get away.
‘Well, if you’ll excuse me … promised to meet a chap down Coppice this evening.’
But still he lingered, and at this moment a queer thought entered his mind and would not be expelled; and, as if in answer to that queer thought, Selina, the subject of it, abruptly entered the room.
‘I expect the lady ud like a cup of tea, wouldn’t she, ’Arold?’
A cup of tea at half past six o’clock—why? Harold, staring, gaping, managed to say: ‘Thanks very much. Spect she would.’
The moment he had spoken, by the curl of Selina’s lip and the blazing of her eyes Harold knew, Nicky knew, perhaps the astonished Lily half-knew, that he had fallen into the crudest trap. Selina waited, her eyes fixed on Harold, making the most of this her last moment. ‘Would she reely now, Harold darling! Then she can jest set about getting it ’erself. See? And not in my kitchen neither. See?’
Selina was gone, leaving havoc behind her; and at the same moment Egg returned from his visit upstairs. ‘Nicky, you run off to the doctor. Your mother’s not so well to-night. Say Mr Pandervil’s compliments and will he please come round soon’s he can.’
Egg’s voice was calm and unhurried. He had lived through too many of these crises to have credulity to spare for this one. His wife in a weary sighing voice had said: ‘I think I’m going to die, Eggie!’ And he had answered patiently: ‘Very well, my dear. I’ll send for the doctor.’ An answer quite innocent of irony, as of unkindness, and one he had made, on like occasions, a score of times before. True, he was anxious; but anxiety had become his normal state, and he was not too much preoccupied to say civil things to Lily, who now, eager and agitated, rose to say she must go.
She went, and Harold with her. Egg was left alone with his thoughts. But he preferred his newspaper, which he had been too busy to read properly during the day. It was not the exciting reading it had been a year or two before, during the Boer War; but, what with this and that and the other, there was always some odd little thing happening. Egg took pleasure in the odd little things, preferring them to murders and divorces and what Mr Balfour said about Tariff Reform. ‘That plaintiff’s dog had eaten his artificial teeth was the allegation made by John Tweed, warehouseman, 37, of 229B Maiden Avenue, Camber-well, yesterday at the Old Bailey when charged with alleged assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm to Henry Westerman, bank clerk, 29 …’ This was the sort of thing that took a man’s mind off his troubles; it was better than the serial story, because it set you thinking and making up ridiculous stories of your own, and better far than the pompous leading articles which could not in less than a column contrive to call the other side an ass.
‘Doctor’s out, Dad.’ It was Nicky come back.
‘Leave a message?’ asked Egg.
‘Yes. Expect him any minute, they said.’
‘Good boy,’ said Egg. ‘Done your homework?’ Nicky shook his head. ‘Cut along and do it then. What is it to-night?’
‘Algebra and Latin. Oh, and French.’
Egg stared his admiration. ‘AH that! Ah, you know a deal too much for me, Nicky. Capes of Europe and nine square feet one square yard was as far as ever I got. Off you go now, or it’ll be bedtime before you start.’
Egg returned to his newspaper. He wished the doctor would come, and so relieve him of this carefully suppressed uneasiness, this little aching sense of responsibility. He was not really alarmed: by this time he knew better than to take his wife’s melodrama seriously; but he wished the doctor would come. Not alarmed, because if there was one thing certain in this world it was that Carrie would outlast him, just as her mother had outlasted the old man. Tough as pig iron these Noom women were, in spite of what they told you! Old Mother Noom, who at Carrie’s age should have been dead three times over according to her own account, went on till well past eighty, and would be going strong still, thought Egg, if she hadn’t chanced to fall downstairs. One of his clearest memories was of Mrs Noom’s first deathbed scene, when she had frightened everyone in the house, her poor little husband most of all, by declaring that her end was at hand, and Egg himself, not much more than a boy at the time, he thought, had had to read a bit of the Bible to her. Carrie, thank heaven, had never played tricks like that; but Carrie was her mother’s daughter all the same, and knew well, none better, how to make the most of such pains as she had. Carrie was ill now: not a doubt of that. But had she been as well as well, you’d a never got her to admit it, she was that stubborn, like as if she was afraid of losing the advantage of you. Tearing her insides about with those dratted pills didn’t do her any good if you ask me, muttered Egg, conducting an argument in his mind with some second self. But she would take ’em, he insisted, disclaiming responsibility; again and again, no matter what I said. Might jest as well have talked to a post, I might. If I’d a had my way there’d never have been any need for sech things; but there it is, no use grumbling. … He wished the doctor would come. He looked at his watch, which told him that more than an hour had passed since his visit to Carrie. Better go and have a look, he thought; and with the thought came a picture of the bedroom in which Carrie was now lying, the very bedroom and the very bed in which her mother had feigned death and her father had died, containing the same yellow wardrobe, the same ottoman, the same ugly and everlasting chest of drawers so placed as to exclude such little light as the window admitted. Egg let fall his newspaper. Better go and cheer her up a bit till the doctor comes.
As soon as he entered the room he knew himself alone in it. Something, some queer difference, told him that what the bed contained was no longer Carrie. He moved forward on his toes with the sensation of treading in a void. The silence of the room deafened him. He knew; and yet when, as he stared into that face, the words formed in his mind she is dead she is dead, it was as if he had not known until this dread revealing moment. She can’t be dead, not Carrie … not dead! This was Carrie, and deep-rooted habit would not let him think of her as dead. In a moment that glassy look would fade from the staring eyes, and Carrie would say something to him, something tart no doubt, but what did that matter? Anything was better than nothing; anything was better than this violent wrench at the mind, this cruel sudden assault on a habit that had grown into him and become part of himself. He put out a trembling hand and touched her. But it was useless to fight; the new habit was gaining strength; he resisted it no longer, but prayed that he might be given courage to close the eyes before young Nicky had a chance of seeing them and reading in them the universal doom … and when this had been accomplished it was as if Carrie lay sleeping, a younger Carrie utterly and coldly at peace. Egg, awe-struck by this specious dignity, turned his face away, remembering the young girl she had once been, and how, downstairs in the kitchen, he had kissed her for the first time. Memories crowded in upon him, but though as he moved to the door his lips were saying soundlessly Poor Carrie poor Carrie, the grief that surged in him was not for Carrie, not for himself, but for something he knew not what.
He tiptoed downstairs calling softly: ‘Nicky! Nicky my boy.’
An irrational agitation seized him. He must call someone, he must get help, he must give the alarm. What foolishness, he thought the next instant. There’s no help now, and no hurry. And at the realization that never again would there be any hurry on Carrie’s account, an immense burden was lifted from his life; yet at this moment he would have given anything to have that burden back in exchange for the new one he had just acquired.
Nicky met him at the foot of the stairs. ‘Yes, Dad?’
‘It’s your mother,’ said Egg. He put a hand on Nicky’s shoulder to steady himself, and sat down
on the lowest stair, bowing his head.
‘What’s the matter, Dad? Mother bad?’
‘She’s dead, my boy. I feel … a little poorly.’
Nicky stared at the bald patch on his father’s head, and tried to understand what he had heard. It meant that there was a dead body in the house. He shuddered, and tears welled into his eyes. A big fellow now, close on fifteen; but he was frightened, and the sight of his father stricken and bowed thrust sharply at his heart. To comfort and be comforted he fell on his knees and put his arms round Egg’s neck, and in the warmth of that embrace the same thought came to each: What if it had been you! For a few moments they remained so, clinging desperately to all they possessed.
Chapter the Second
Plans and Hopes
1
The doctor appointed by the City and Provinces Bank to examine candidates for their service was a tall, lantern-jawed gentleman of forty. When he had finished with Nicky he cleared his throat, shook his head, and remarked: ‘I’m afraid … I’m rather afraid … not very robust … open-air life.’ So saying he seized each of the two Pandervils by an arm and marched them towards the door. At the door he warmly shook hands with them both. ‘Good day! Good day!’
Nicky and Egg walked down the street. Egg was bewildered. ‘What’s the meaning of that, Nicky? It’s beyond me.’
‘It means,’ said Nicky, ‘that I’m not brawny enough to be a bank clerk, Dad. Did you notice how upset he was when he took my chest measurement?’
‘But bless my soul …’
Seeing that Egg was taking the disappointment to heart, Nicky attempted gaiety. ‘Ah, you don’t understand, Dad. Jolly strenuous life in a bank. Takes a chap with big biceps to add up figures all day. You ought to hear what old Hart says. He says the mere sight of a ledger makes him tired. That just shows you/
His father ignored these remarks. ‘It’s a real worry, that’s what it is. Here’s me been and given you a good education, better than your brothers by a long chalk, and now it’s all to be wasted as I see things. Not robust enough! Not robust enough to sit on your bottom in an office all day. What’s the donkey mean? I never heard such a thing.’
‘It’s the widows, Dad,’ explained Nicky.
Egg looked across. He stared. ‘What’s widows to do with it?’
‘The widows and orphans. My little lot. You didn’t know I’d got any, did you? No more did I. But he knows, that doctor johnny knows. He has to think of everything, don’t you see? And if I die young, muscular strain or something, they’ve got my widows on their hands.’
‘Such a nice safe profession ’twould a bin,’ said Egg sadly. ‘Money goes on just the same even when you’re ill. Now I’ve never bin ill. Not to say ill. Couldn’t afford it. … I’m sure I don’t know what to do with you. I’m fair beaten.’
Not to anyone else would Egg have admitted himself ‘fair beaten’; and a year ago he would not have admitted it even to Nicky. But he was conscious nowadays of being not quite the man he had been. He was nearing seventy; looking back it seemed to him that all his life he had been consistently denied whatever he had at any time chanced to set his heart on, and at last his stock of patience had run out. Whatever he wanted he must have now or never; there wasn’t much time left. Above all things he wanted to see Nicky comfortably settled in a good safe job, and married— if that wasn’t too much to hope—to the right kind of girl. If I can only last another ten years, thought Egg, I can see the boy launched in the world. Nicky was now seventeen: a wonderful age, a dangerous age, thought the old man, who remembered something—not very much but something—of his own young manhood spent in Mershire on his father’s farm. Why, I couldn’t a bin moren twenty three or four when I left home. It was true; nevertheless he felt that he had never been really young after leaving Mershire, after that cruel bit of a love affair of his. Ignorant and raw perhaps, but not young. He had forgotten much of that affair, and he could not for the life of him remember the girl’s face; but he remembered how, after her going, the beauty of his native shire had been an intolerable burden to him, every responsive pulse of joy being turned instantly to pain by the agony of recalling the heaven he had lost. The air caressed him with her hands; birds called with her voice; a starlit sky, with the great moon moving up, was become but a cruel counterfeit of hours shared with her in the orchard. The very sunlight had stabbed at him with intimations of a vanished glory, so that his heart was an inexhaustible fountain of pain. … It was very different now, very dim and far away, as though it had all happened to someone else. He no longer felt the emotion: he remembered it, as one remembers an old tale. And he hoped with all his heart that Nicky would be luckier than ever he had been. This rheumatism had worried him increasingly of late; it had shortened his temper and caused him twinges of fear as well as pain. He could not bear the idea of dying yet, with Nicky only seventeen. That girl he had loved, she would be an old lady now, white-haired, feeble perhaps, or perhaps dead; and with this thought the feeling came to Egg Pandervil that he himself had lived too long. The show was over for him, and all his friends were gone. Pummice gone, Farthing gone, old Miss Hunt of the Post Office gone; and the High Street thronged with strange faces. Every death had brought his own end nearer in imagination, Carrie’s most of all; and every death, even Carrie’s at first, had made life a little less worth living. These bustling young people—he was out of touch with them. Even Nicky was more reserved with him than he had been as a child.
Carrie’s death had shaken Egg and changed him; that change was still going on, and he had not yet grasped all its meaning. He had freedom at last, but to what end? Freedom to read the newspaper without fear of interruption from upstairs, that was what it amounted to. The incomparable gift had come too late: he was used up, worn out. And the new habit was difficult to learn: it demanded unceasing vigilance. Many a time during those first weeks he was shaken with surprise to find the bedroom empty when he entered it at night; and, waking in the early morning, it was strange, not to hear Carrie’s loud breathing, strange not to be compelled to listen, with quivering nerves, to the singing kettle in Carrie’s nose. How he had hated that sound! In retrospect he hated it still, but he was none the less discomforted by its absence. He began to think that it was this house that oppressed him, and to toy with vague impossible plans for getting away from it. But were they so impossible? Harold was now a competent enough grocer, and willing, it seemed, to marry and settle down.
‘Open-air life he said, didn’t he?’
‘Who?’ Nicky emerged from a reverie.
‘That doctor. Said you ought to have an open-air life.’
‘Believe he did.’
‘Might do worse than farming,’ suggested Egg tentatively.
‘Umph!’ Nicky was unresponsive.
‘Used to be mad about it when you were a little chap,’ said Egg. ‘Always asking me about the farm, you were. Pigs an’ geese, eh?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nicky. ‘It’s all right, I suppose.’
‘Well, is there anything else you wanta do?’ Egg spoke patiently, hiding his disappointment. ‘Anything in y’r mind?’
Nicky wondered whether this was the moment for speaking about that half-finished epic locked in his desk at home. He decided it was not. ‘No. Haven’t thought much about it. I always supposed it would be a bank or something. Wants thinking over, doesn’t it? I don’t know.’
‘Of course,’ admitted Egg, ‘farming needs capital. … And I haven’t got any capital,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘Not likely. P’raps y’r Uncle Algy’ll be able to suggest something. He’s full of ideas, he is. Always was.’
‘He’ll want to make an auctioneer of me,’ said Nicky. ‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.’
‘Wonderful how he goes on, y’r Uncle Algy. A tidy bit older than me, y’ know. And a martyr to gout these five years. How’d it be to run over and see him, Nicky?’
Nicky looked at his father without replying. Egg, reading that look, felt his heart si
nk within him; for it was evident that the boy did not share this fancy of his for farming. The wonder of it, the magic, the bridge across half a century of wasted time—Nicky was blind to this.
‘Of course’—Egg shrugged his shoulders—‘you must do as you like, my boy. No good putting you to something you hate. I know that well enough.’
Nicky was silent. And his father could not bring himself to say more. Without speaking they turned into a cheap restaurant and ordered poached eggs on toast. A battle was raging in Nicky’s heart; he wanted to cry. Presently he remarked, in as easy a tone as he could muster: ‘I daresay farming’ll be rather a lark, once I get to know a bit about it. What do you think, Dad?’
2
With Nicky away the house was quiet indeed; and the ghost of Nicky—for Nicky was now learning to farm under the guidance of a Mershireman named Crabbe—replaced that of Carrie. For Egg the experience was almost in its effect a suspension of life, a pause between two periods, an empty transition from the existence he had known to something as yet unguessed that was to follow. He was waiting for this something to happen. Meanwhile he became extravagantly interested in the movements of the postman, and cherished his son’s letters like a lover. Marvellous letters they seemed to him, and full of a quality that he called ‘litry genius’. He chuckled delightedly over Nicky’s schoolboyish, exuberant descriptions of Farmer Crabbe, and Mrs Crabbe, and of his fellow-pupil, a taciturn young man named James. He cherished a wonderful plan for paying Nicky a visit once this tiresome business of Harold and Lily should have been settled.
The hostility between Lily Colebrook and Selina Bush became open—a domestic scandal. Egg was reluctantly aware of it. ‘Now my boy, you and me must have a bit of a talk.’
Harold stared at his boots. ‘All right, Dad.’
The Pandervils Page 27