The Pandervils (15 page)

With these three men, the youngest of whom was at least nine years his senior, Egg struck up something of a friendship; and the four fell into the habit of meeting once or twice a week in the bar parlour of The Green Man. Mr Pummice was fond of what he called a quiet pint of an evening; Mr Farthing frankly liked beer and good fellowship; and Mr Wimmett welcomed anything that would help him to forget his slow drift towards insolvency. Egg was drawn into their company perhaps chiefly by his loneliness, although, indeed, no matter how lively the talk or with how eager a heart he contributed to it, his loneliness persisted, so that sometimes in the very moment of throwing back his head to laugh at one of Farthing's drolleries, he—remembering what he had tried to forget—would suddenly find the
taste gone out of life, and the inn and the men and the laughter and Farringay itself would seem unreal, empty, a bitter dream from which there could be no awaking.

The attitude of these men to Egg was subtly different from their attitude to each other. Although he was their junior both in years and in status there was, in the beginning of the friendship at any rate, a hint of half-amused deference accorded to him. Once Mr Farthing, with a twinkle in his bright black eye, referred to him in his hearing as ‘the young gent here'. And one day Mr Wimmett drew the eyes of all four upon him by asking of Egg: ‘Now what might you have come to be a grocer for, Mr Pandervil? No doubt you had your reasons.' Egg was still too shy to be more flattered than embarrassed by these attentions, but he was nevertheless touched by them, and his heart warmed towards his companions; yes, even towards Mr Pummice himself, who, rather comically, tried by the most delicate shrugs and hints, and by turning over his very small stock of literary allusions, to establish a kind of secret understanding with Egg, an alliance as of one cut-above-his-neighbours to another. ‘All the world's a stage—eh, Mr Pandervil?' he would say, accompanying the remark with a facial disturbance that was in effect a wink. And with a turn of his head he would make it clear that this fragment of English literature was for Egg's ear only, not for these others—good honest fellows enough, but they lacked, after all, through no fault of their
own, the cultural advantages shared by himself and Mr Pandervil. Egg, as near blushing as a young man of his years could well be, would as often as not turn the edge of the compliment—unwelcome and, to tell the truth, undeserved—by saying with a grin: ‘Ah, Mr Pummice, we're not all such great readers as you, y'know.' Yet he liked Mr Pummice; and he liked worried, straw-coloured, hesitating Mr Wimmett; but nearest of all to his heart was little Farthing, black-browed, confiding, gay, and agreeably vulgar. Good friends though they all were and good fellows—for Pummice's snobbery was not radical in him—they never addressed each other familiarly, but were always Mr Farthing, Mr Wimmett, Mr Pummice, Mr Pandervil, wearing the courtesy title perhaps consciously, but not proudly, as the badge of their class, a badge that distinguished them alike from the lower orders as from ‘the quality'.

Egg had been only nine months among them, yet was already very much at home to all outward seeming, when a movement known as Teetotalism began to reach Farringay, finding a spiritual home in the Ebenezer Chapel which devoted a week-night service to its propagation. Rumours reached the four friends of alluring entertainments, including a novelty known as the Magic Lantern, which, so it was incredibly reported by eyewitnesses, could project coloured pictures upon a white sheet.

‘Very gratifying, they tell me, to the young people,' said Mr Pummice. With a plump forefinger he whisked away the superfluous froth on
his beer. ‘And young Hartick has paid his tanner and signed the blessed pledge, would you believe it!'

Mr Farthing shook his head shrewdly; then took a deep draught of ale, as if to make sure of it before the madness spread. ‘That's a thing,' said he, ‘as I wouldn't do! No, Mr Pummice, you don't catch me at that caper. Not if you was to go down on yer benders and arst me, Mr Pandervil, I wouldn't. Believe
me
, Mr Wimmett.'

‘Best keep away,' remarked Mr Wimmett. And his friends exchanged meaning glances, remembering that Mr Wimmett was a chapel-goer. ‘If only I could lay my hands on a fifty-pound note … I wish I could.'

His voice was edged with plaintiveness. Mr Wimmett spent much of his life in wishing. …

These friendships and activities formed for Egg Pandervil the kaleidoscopic background of a more private drama, which in its turn was at first shadowy and insignificant compared with the adventures and agonies of his own lonely spirit. Entering the Noom household he had felt at first like an incredulous civilian who strays by accident into the firing zone; for he became gradually aware of a mysterious battle raging around him, a battle of which there was no visible or comprehensible objective. Who was the aggressor, and who the attacked? That was no easy matter for Egg to determine. All he knew in those early days was that to himself Mrs Noom was consistently gracious, though she had, it was clear, a grievance
against her husband and her daughter. He supposed that it was her womanly compassion for a boy exiled from home that prompted her conspicuous kindness towards himself; or perhaps her conception of politeness forbade her to utter the criticisms which he must, he thought, sometimes provoke in her mind. Not seldom her public benevolence to him was displayed in such pointed contrast to her treatment of these others, the old man and the young girl, as to make Egg profoundly uncomfortable and vaguely uneasy, till sometimes he half-doubted whether she were not deliberately working to alienate him from all affection but her own. She praised his manners, his industry, his honesty, his skill in salesmanship, she held him up as an example even to her husband. And she would openly claim possession of him by saying, with the air of brisk geniality so characteristic of her: ‘Egg's
my
boy! We understand one another, don't you make no mistake!' Often her asperities to husband and daughter were sheathed in a smile by which Egg could not help being a little charmed, and the idea that Carrie and the old man were allied against her did for a while invest her with a certain pathos. And then one day she confided to him terrible things. ‘Whatever you do, Egg, don't get into mischief of that sort. Thou God seest me. Remember that. Many a promising lad's come to grief through gallivanting after girls. And not only lads, let me tell you. Not by any manner of means. Men too. Oh yes, indeed. I
know
. I name no
names, but I've had something to put up with in my day. Not that I'm breathing a word about anyone, that's not my way nor never was. I can suffer in silence, because I've learnt my lesson, and in a hard school, as the Lord well knows. White hair don't make a saint, young man; and a hypocrite's a hypocrite all the world over.' With every word she said he liked her less, though he began to feel sure at last that she was a deeply wronged woman. ‘I'll tell you something, Egg Pandervil,' resumed Mrs Noom after a pregnant pause. ‘I'll tell you something. When my Carrie was a tiny thing, her ma's own chick, we had a girl here, general servant she called herself, though general nuisance and general disgrace to my way of thinking. And that girl—well, I'll say no more. I'm old enough to be your mother, that I am. But I'll say no more. Them as the cap fits must wear it, and I wouldn't have some people's consciences, not for a mint of money I wouldn't. Not that he's got a conscience either if it's a conscience we're talking about. More sinned against than sinning I daresay she was, the sly cat—but that's as may be.' Mrs Noom's speech, the facile flow of her vulgarities, was without precedent in Egg's experience of her. She was excited, and the floodgates of an unsuspected garrulity were opened upon him. He guessed that in a moment, with the least encouragement, she would make a scene. She lusted after a scene. He left her abruptly, to join Mr Noom in the shop.

He was horrified by what he had heard, because
it threatened to destroy the image of Mr Noom— good, kindly, wistful, genial Mr Noom—that he had set up in his heart. He had respected and liked Mr Noom. Sometimes the old man was irritable and tiresome, tut-tutting about the shop in Egg's wake like a censorious hen after a young chicken. But even then it had been impossible to take his displeasure deeply to heart, for the rosy benevolence of his appearance could not be extinguished by a frown. Nature had cast him for a ‘sympathetic' part, and he contended against Nature in vain. Surely it could not be true that this seemingly gentle creature was a man of loose life? Egg was still in the golden confusion of adolescent idealism, and the mere doubt sufficed to hurt him deeply; more deeply, perhaps than he, knew. He was not overwhelmed; he maintained a kind of detachment, resolutely reminding himself from time to time: It's no affair of mine anyhow. But the unhappy thought recurred too often to be ever quite out of mind during the whole of that day; it nagged at him like a nagging tooth; and the very frequency of his protests— What's it got to do with me? No business of mine!—betrayed him into the hands of anxiety, the enemy.

Did this day-long anxiety, half-smothered as it was, contribute its iota of cause to the evening's indiscretion? Perhaps it did. He now hated Mrs Noom and doubted Mr. Noom, and it was perhaps his sense of being homeless again, of finding ugliness where he had fancied simple honest worth,
that drove him back in his thoughts to the hills and fields, the hedgerows and little lanes of Mershire, and so set aching again the old wound till it seemed that anything, any distraction, any inducement of oblivion, must be better than this throbbing misery of the mind. Not quite consciously, nor yet quite unconsciously, he gave rein to libidinous fantasies, seeking thereby to lose sight of the one beloved face whose beauty had power to pluck the heart out of him, for the censor in his mind forbade the conjunction of sacred and profane. In imagination he clipped hungrily to his arms that slim, dark-eyed, post-office girl at whom he had sometimes glanced with idle admiration. Her mouth was warm velvet under his; her supple body shuddered amorously in his embrace; she had no thoughts, no personality, no independent being, but was merely an appetite responsive to his own. His pulse beat fast; fever mounted in his cheeks; and he closed his eyes for a moment lest anyone— Mr Noom or another—should see in them the picture that they were seeing. ‘I want a pound and a half of best lard, young man.' Certainly madam, prompted his mind; and his voice took the hint. It was a beastly shame to think of a respectable girl in that way, and a girl he didn't care twopence for, had hardly spoken to. A shame it was. … But was it? It could do her no harm; it was a dead secret; nobody knew. It wasn't as if. … And didn't he perhaps care for her, after all? Maybe he had been really in love with her, in a sort of way, all the time. ‘And the next
article, please?' Frances Hunt. I s'pose they call her Fanny at home. Fanny Hunt. A pretty name. He began saying the name soundlessly to himself, thoughtfully, tenderly, over and over again. And when her face flashed back into his mind, he was startled to observe how extremely pretty it was. Dark eyes, a small pouting mouth, black hair recently ‘put up', a straight demure nose—who could help being in love with such attractions as these! ‘That'll be three shillings and sixpence halfpenny altogether, madam. Thank you very much.'

In the evening, when the shop was closed, he received permission to go out. It was an open secret that he sometimes visited the Green Man, and when mildly challenged by his employer it had been sufficient defence to invoke the name of Pummice, that good and prosperous citizen. But tonight he found, of his three friends, only Mr Farthing.

‘What you doing here, Mr Farthing?' asked Egg with a grin. ‘Band of Hope night, isn't it?'

‘Don't talk about hope to me, Mr Pandervil. I'd rather have a drink.' Mr Farthing, having for a moment contemplated this remark of his in silence, greeted it with a smile and a nod. He seemed to see possibilities in it. He chuckled. And finally he leaned confidentially towards his companion and asked with the air of a tipster. ‘See here, Mr Pandervil, what do I want with hope for? I've got something better than hope in this glass.' he winked. ‘Yes, something better than hope.'

‘Ha, ha!' laughed Egg. For in the past Mr
Farthing had made him laugh sincerely, and would doubtless, when fortune favoured him, repeat the benefaction; and it would have been churlish to discourage him now by failing to be amused. ‘But what I say is this, Mr Farthing. Let's go to-night, you and me, and see the Magic Lantern.'

‘And sing the hymns?' asked Farthing sarcastically.

‘Well, what's the matter with a hymn or two? You sing 'em every Sunday, don't you, same as the rest of us.'

‘I do no such thing, let me tell you. I listen. That's all.'

‘Same thing,' said Egg. ‘Sing or listen, it's all one.'

Mr Farthing shook a sorrowful head. ‘No, squire! Not with a voice like mine it isn't.'

This time Egg forgot to laugh, his thoughts busily circling round the special reason he had for wishing to go to the Band of Hope meeting. ‘Well,
I'm
going anyhow.'

So they went to the little Mission Room, offshoot of the Chapel, where they found the meeting already begun. Egg, intent on escaping from the unbearable loveliness with which memory tormented him, glanced quickly and covertly round in search of the particular distraction to which he had already in his mind half-committed himself. Yes, she was there. And yes, she was pretty. ‘Where's the Magic Lantern?' asked Mr Farthing in a hoarse whisper. She was with an older woman, naturally; too much to hope that she should have been alone. Now that he saw her in
the flesh, a definite and separate person, his imagination respected her and submitted without bridling to the control he instinctively exercised over it. He approached her, in fancy, with a more timid ardour, though he was still too impatient, too urgently driven by his escaping impulse, to decide just how and when, with what words and gestures, the first advances were to be made to her. His mind overleaped the first preliminaries and carried him—impetuous steed that it was—to the moment when he should say: ‘Would you mind very much if I was to call you Fanny?' He could hear his voice tremble in saying this, and he could feel his heart leap when her answer came—an answer not in words, but a shy, downcast, loving look. ‘Please I want to see the Magic Lantern,' pleaded Mr Farthing in a comic, child's voice. And then he would take her hand and say—what would he say? Cruelly there came back to him that moment—peak of his existence—when there had been no need of words at all, and so with a kind of terror he raced out of his dream, back to the lighted Mission Room, which was now echoing to the strains of a four-part song rendered by two hearty young ladies and two timid young gentlemen whose heads were clustered together, like flowers radiating from one stalk, on the platform: