Not till the late evening, when Egg after his bread and cheese and milk had gone to bed, were the lovers left alone together; and then the constraint weighed still more heavily upon them. They sat in silence for half an hour, a silence which, though each laboured to break it by an occasional remark, survived all trivial interruptions. Nine o’clock had struck, and this was a traditionally sacred hour when they could sit together, the long day’s work done at last, and taste lingeringly the sweets of their comradeship; but to-night, and for many nights past, it had been an hour quickening with anxiety and breeding discomfort between them. Two years of marriage, while diminishing the fever of delight, had deepened their love, which nowadays they were apt to express not in the old way, of frequent passionate avowals, but by various devices of indirection, by banter and mock-quarrelling and comical abuse: in which fashion they had invented between them a whole system and vocabulary of private nonsense that was more intimate than an embrace. And if these exchanges were a frequent substitute for loving demonstration they were sometimes perhaps a substitute for that communion of mind of which Nicky had once dreamed. His marriage with Jane was beautiful and imperfect: it filled him and left him hungry. She was inarticulate; she astonished him alike by her wisdom and her ignorance, the wisdom of a child, the ignorance of one who resists knowledge of which the relevance to personal life is not immediately perceived. During their first year together Nicky somehow contrived in his spare time to write two acts of a poetic drama; and Jane listened to his reading it aloud, and loved him: loved his profile, his voice, the light in his eyes, and loved him for being able to write such difficult things. Her glance was fond and wistful, like that of a mother who is both gratified and intimidated by her child’s cleverness. When he looked up to meet it she said with guilty haste: ‘That is nice, Nicky! What a wonderful boy you are!’ He smiled love at her, but he felt lonely and frustrated, realizing that she had not understood a word of his darling work. ‘Well, now comes a little song by way of interlude.’ She can’t miss this, he thought. ‘Janey, you remember that day we went across the hills to Up Elston?—’ But no, the idiom of verse utterly obscured his meaning from her. She greeted the lyric with a face rendered all but blank by the effort to conceal her unresponsiveness, a face that would have been null and void but for that hunted look, that desperate anxiety not to disappoint him. ‘Yes, I do like that,’ she said. Heroic pretence! The pitiful gallantry of it made him fling his manuscript down and take this lovely perplexed child into his arms. She received his kisses gratefully, glad to be comforted, and—though he hated himself the moment after— he could not quite stifle the thought: Yes, she understands this: a thought that was followed, after a long bitter interval, by its antidote—I’m not much of a poet, anyhow: Jane’s poetry itself, the darling! … But he wasn’t altogether convinced by this pretty pleading.
Since then, though his literary ambitions were far from dead, he talked to her in the evenings of matters nearer home, of sowing and reaping and breeding. The farm he never quite succeeded in seeing through his father’s beglamoured eyes: he was inclined still to resent it because it was a destiny not of his own choosing. But it was his work and he accepted it, recognizing its wholesome qualities and enjoying its compensations, chief among which was Jane herself. It was good, it was good indeed, to come back after a hard day in the fields, or a disappointing day at market, to the comfort and rich plenty of Jane. In many ways, as he had to admit when taking stock of it, his situation was perfect. He possessed, at twenty-five, not only a farm of his own, and the wife he had wanted and still loved, but—in the person of his father—a veteran farmer to share the responsibility with him; for though Egg, after so deep a lapse of years, was at first almost as much pupil as teacher, it took him surprisingly little time to pick up the dropped threads. No doubt Nicky knew his job better, in fact, than Egg did; it was rather in enthusiasm that Egg pointed the way. Egg’s enthusiasm was infectious up to a point, and even beyond that point Nicky was obliged to put a good face on it; for to have confessed to discontent would have been to disappoint an eager child. His chief lack was the companionship of his own kind. Nicky, one might almost say, missed something he had never fully experienced. But in imagination, which had school memories to work upon, he had experienced it; he knew that somewhere in the world there was good talk to be had, ideas to be exchanged, fine theories to be filled with words and sent ballooning among clouds of tobacco smoke. Men, men who wrote for the newspapers, were meeting every day in Fleet Street taverns and talking philosophy over their beer: this was Nicky’s picture of the journalistic life, and he would have given anything, he thought, to be in it. How wonderful in the midst of a roaring argument about Plato (one of Nicky’s fourpenny-box discoveries) to be interrupted by the ‘printer’s devil clamouring for copy’! How magnificent to dash off a column or two on the spot, with this same devil at one’s elbow (his traditional post) and then order another drink as if nothing unusual had happened! But, above all, how intoxicating to hear good talk!—his thoughts, however far they went romancing, always came back to their starting-point. No doubt he wanted to discuss Beauty and Art and similar solemnities proper to his age, and to savour the grandeur of such discussions; but there was more to it than that, for he was consumed by a genuine passion for ideas. Ideas visited him that were beyond, though not far beyond, his technique of expression; ideas bubbled in his mind, needing release and clarification; ideas came visiting him as he went about the farm. And having no one who could or would listen to him he was driven to confiding his thoughts to a diary; later he overflowed into essays and stories. Being a farmer and being married did not leave him much opportunity for this secret literary indulgence, and often, for weeks at a time, he allowed it to be crowded out. But on reading he stubbornly insisted. He had puzzled Jane, perhaps wounded her, by getting for his own use a camp-bed which he stuck in a corner of their room, with a bookshelf near it and a folding screen to shut in his candlelight, so that he might with an easy conscience read for a while before sleeping. His books included a couple of hundred English classics, a sprinkling of red sevenpennies, such volumes of the Home University Library as treat directly of literature or philosophy, and two volumes of Plato’s Dialogues, very much tattered and very precious, for, as Chapman to Keats, so to Nicky Pandervil was the translator of the Apology. These were his friends, and he had few others. With no one outside his household to exchange a word with but people like Fred Curtis, who hadn’t a notion beyond crops, and Harry Swan, who was everlastingly grumbling about the Government, and old Smart, his father’s acquaintance, who drove by the farm every Sunday morning on the way to church and always stopped at Pandervil’s to cadge a glass of cider, Nicky sometimes felt like Robinson Crusoe.
But to-night quite other feelings were occupying him, and in the hope of hiding them from Jane he struggled to make conversation with her. Yet they could not for ever be hidden, and it was almost with relief that he heard her say, impatiently brushing aside his laborious banter:
‘Nicky, we can’t go on like this, can we?’
Meeting her troubled glance he answered soberly: ‘No, my dear, we can’t.’
‘It’s a misery, that it is.’ Jane spoke indignantly, but without the least trace in her tone of anger against Nicky. ‘Better speak your mind, Nicky. It isn’t like you to keep me so much in the dark.’
Jane bent again over her darning and waited for Nicky’s revelation.
Nicky said: ‘Dad’s getting to be an old man now. Not far short of eighty, you know.’
‘Yes.’ Recognizing Nicky’s circuitous method of approach, Jane displayed no impatience. ‘He’ll be seventy-eight.’
‘And he’s dropping out of things,’ complained Nicky. ‘I don’t mean the farm. He’s crazy keen on the farm, we all know. But outside things don’t seem to mean anything to him.’
‘What sort of things?’
Nicky stared with frowning affection at the brown head bent over a bundle of mending. ‘Well, t
ake this morning, for instance, out in the near orchard with old Pansy. Dad was full of a brother of his that got knocked out in the Crimean War. The Crimean War, Jane! Think of it!’
‘What made your father think of it?’
‘Oh, seems he was in that very same orchard when Uncle Algy brought him the news. It’s rather terrific, that. A rum feeling. But the strange thing was that all the time he was talking about it he never once remembered our war, the real war. I say, Jane, do you realize it’s been going on for close on twelve months?’
‘What has?’
‘This bloody war.’ His violence startled her: she looked quickly up. ‘And I’m about at the end of my tether.’
She wouldn’t help him. She obstinately wouldn’t help him. ‘What do you mean, end of your tether?’
‘I mean I must take a hand in it,’ said Nicky. He spoke curtly, because the effort to give utterance to this decision left no smoothness in his voice. ‘I’m going to join up,’ he added, being resolved to leave her no scope for further equivocation.
‘Oh Nicky! Haven’t we had all that out before?’
‘This is different,’ said Nicky. ‘I’ve made up my mind, Jane. I’ve got to go. I shan’t respect myself if I don’t.’
Jane dropped her pretences and rose from her seat to face him with anguished eyes and trembling lips. And now there was anger in her voice. ‘Who’s been getting at you?’
‘No one.’
‘There were some soldiers hanging about the yard t’other day. Did they talk you round?’
‘Of course not.’ Nicky flushed under this catechism, feeling like a schoolboy again. ‘They only said what had been in my own mind long enough.’
‘Ah, they were from the Recruiting Office at Mercester, were they?’
‘What if they were!’ Good Lord, thought Nicky, are we actually quarrelling, Jane and I!
‘Did you tell them the doctor wouldn’t pass you for the bank?’
‘Oh that!’ said Nicky contemptuously. ‘That was years ago. I’m fit enough—always have been. Besides, anything on two legs’ll do for the army now.’ Seeing her implacable face he fell to brooding awhile; then said: ‘Most girls want their men to go. They’d be ashamed of a man hanging back.’
‘I’m not one of that sort,’ said Jane. ‘D’you wish I was?’
‘No.’ He couldn’t, even for the argument’s sake, pretend that. ‘Of all sickening sights the Female Jingo is the worst. It’s that kind of cattle started the whole thing, I dare say — bloody-minded half-wits, greybeards, old women. But we’ve been dragged into it and we’ve got to see the job through. Can’t let those chaps go ramping through Europe as they please.’
‘Why can’t we?’ asked Jane woodenly.
Nicky shrugged his shoulders. ‘Think what happened in Belgium. You wouldn’t expect me to stand by and look on if that kind of thing happened here, on this farm. Would you now?’
Jane was quietly and desperately weeping. Through her tears she managed to say: ‘If I could come with you I wouldn’t mind. It’s stupid. It’s wicked. It won’t save Europe, you being killed. Millions of people being killed won’t save anything.’
Dimly discerning a truth in her words, he yet stood and stared at her, perplexed by her attitude. So lovely and so simple-minded a creature, why did she not take the simple-minded view of this war, and believe without question what the newspapers told her day after day? Yet perhaps it was this very simple-mindedness in her that made her cling stupidly he thought, to her conviction of the wickedness of people’s hating and killing each other, and made her refuse to listen to argument. She was so sound at core, so wise in her instinctive judgments, that he was the more exasperated by her deafness to reason. Even the blessed word Belgium failed to shake her. She could not or would not see why men who had no quarrel with each other as individuals should fly at each other’s throats to oblige their masters. And once, when Nicky began enumerating the reasons, she had remarked infuriatingly: ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, about that. But Jesus told us to love one another.’ What—asked Nicky of himself—what can you do with such a woman?
And now, harrowed by her tears, he could only say, ‘Don’t cry, Janey! Don’t cry, please!’ He stroked her hair soothingly. But both words and action lacked the perfect ease of spontaneity: her emotion, though he shared it, made him feel self-conscious, because there was still a fundamental disagreement dividing them. There was, indeed, open conflict now: he having decided to go fighting, with or without her consent, and she being resolved, it seemed, to oppose his going by every device her wit could invent. He had never loved Jane so much as at this moment, but he loved her at the expense of this new Jane, this enemy, this bitterly weeping woman who had displaced the Jane he knew. To think of her as a stranger provided some defence against the agony of knowing that he was about to leave her.
Her weeping subsided, and as they climbed the stairs together she remarked in a drowsy voice: ‘My word, I’ll not need rocking to-night. I’m that tired.’ It was as if her tears had washed away all the accumulated trouble in her heart. Yet Nicky’s self-consciousness persisted. He felt, against all reason, guilty, as though this thing that he was planning to do—fight in his country’s cause—were a subtle treachery cloaked in heroic khaki. In the bedroom he was tongue-tied, being embarrassed by a new indecision. Because he was lonely, because Jane seemed shut away from him, he wanted to sleep by her side, comforted by the knowledge of her nearness; and for the same reasons he found it impossible to raise the question, impossible not to do as he had done for some few nights past—set up his separate candle, arrange his screen, and take a book from the shelf. And for five minutes after Jane had got into her bed he remained standing with an open book in his hand, pretending to be absorbed by what he read and trying trying to make himself say: ‘I don’t much want to be alone tonight, do you Jane?’ But he couldn’t say it; the words wouldn’t come.
And presently Jane, calling a soft ‘Good night’, blew her candle out.
He crossed the room to where she lay. Bustling a little, to hide his nervousness, he re-arranged the bed-clothes for her. ‘Good night, Janey!’ Bending down he gave her a quick shy butterfly kiss and in a moment was gone back to his own corner.
He lay in the darkness and despaired of sleep. A tide of misery rolled over him when he tried to remember all the things that would have to be done. First he would see the harvest in, a matter of not many weeks. Then he would have to talk to his father. No, better join first and talk after. And I must make a will, he thought—for the idea that he would never come home again was present to his mind, though just now it troubled him less than did these minor anxieties. So long as Jane’s all right, and the old governor.… He woke, astonished to find that he had been asleep. A thin shaft of moonlight fell like a pointing finger upon the bed where Jane lay quietly sleeplessly thinking. Nicky, listening to her breathing, knew at once that she had been awake all night.
‘Are you awake, Janey?’
His voice was thick with drowsiness; hers was quiet and clear. ‘Yes.’
‘It’s hot, isn’t it! Can’t you sleep?’
‘No.’
‘Nor can I,’ he said, and closed his eyes and was away again.
Next time he woke someone was kneeling at his bedside. ‘Hullo, Jane!’
‘I was hot,’ she answered. But her voice seemed to belie her, so calm was it, so grave, so deeply controlled; her eyes were large and dark and lustrous with profound thought. ‘I was hot. I’ve been sitting by the window with nothing on.’
‘Darling! Didn’t you feel cold?’
‘Yes, so I wrapped myself up in this thing.’
‘What is it?’ He put out a hand to touch it.
‘The eiderdown.’
He sleepily stroked her shoulder. ‘Funny girl!’
‘I’ve been thinking, Nicky.’
He roused himself to sit up and attend to her.
‘If you’re going away from me,’ she said after a pause, ‘I m
ust have a child.’
‘But——’
His mind was full of prudent objections, but she put two fingers lightly on his lips. ‘Hush, hush!’
She rose to her full height and lifted her arms so that the covering slipped from her like water from the shoulders of a swimmer and she stood revealed in her lovely perfection, austere in the moonlight. He trembled as he took her in his arms.
2
Egg, when he heard his son’s decision, looked like a hurt child; but to Nicky’s eager self-justification—‘All other chaps of my age went months ago’—he opposed no argument. To outward appearance he took it, as Nicky said, mildly. But a silence fell upon him; fell and enveloped him. He had grown the least bit garrulous with age, or rather with the second youth, the Indian summer, that had blossomed from this happiness of having Nicky and Jane and the farm to care for; he never wearied of last year’s crops and this year’s prospects and of explaining how if Blossom went to the bull on her right day she’d be in full milk just when Pansy would be drying off. Others may sometimes have wearied of listening, but he did not weary of talking. But now the tide of his speech was dammed up, or had stopped flowing. Nicky went away in mid-September, the day after the ram was raddled and loosed into Flinders. Egg and Nicky drove to Mercester in the milk-float. Scowling self-consciously the young man gripped his father’s hand. ‘Well cheerio Dad! I’ll write and tell you how I get on.’ But Egg only grunted and stared at the old pony’s ears; and presently he was in the station-yard, alone with his three milk-churns.
From that day, though he did not neglect the farm, Egg lived in a profound solitude. While he could he watched with a fatherly care over Jane, who, carrying a new life within her, faced day after day, week after week, and nothing certain beyond, with dumb and smiling courage. But even Jane’s need, the more that it was never obtruded, did not always compel him from his grey reverie. Too often, for days together, he forgot her; and from these periods of absentness he would return full of unuttered and unavailing self-reproaches. Nowadays, whatever his intentions, he could not but shut himself up with his circling thoughts. Of one thing he was assured: no great harm would come to Nicky, soldier though he was. Others might suffer abominable things, but not Nicky. In due time Nicky would come back home right as a trivet: of that there could be no doubt, as, again and again, with an almost angry emphasis, Egg told himself. Meanwhile the work of the farm constantly claimed him, and in that he found, as he had found before, a sort of comfort.
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