The Pandervils (25 page)

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 made 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.

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.

Mr Pierce was a youngish man with a great mane of brown hair, eagle eyes, and a voice like an American organ. Egg's friend Farthing didn't, he said, care for the fellow's look. ‘Actressy!' said Mr Farthing. ‘Besides, there's too much of him. Arms and legs like an octopus. Wants taking in a tuck or two, does your Reverend Pierce.' But by his own denominationalists Mr Pierce was considered to be a great Force for Righteousness; and there could be no disputing that he had ‘got on'. He was militant in his Dissent. Instead of being content, as his predecessors had been, with a congregation of sixty or seventy redeemed souls, he went into the highways and hedges and compelled alien religionists to come in. By sensational preaching, and by visiting the tents of the ungodly as well as those of the faithful, he filled his little chapel to bursting-point. Carrie Pandervil, who for years had been ailing and peevish, found great satisfaction in the flash of his eyes, the deep rich drawl of his voice, and the dexterity with which he supplied a spiritual lesson for her every need. He persuaded her to come and hear him preach a sanguinary sermon on ‘The Blood of Christ cleanseth
us from all sin'; she listened with absorbed, gluttonous, hot-eyed attention; and so she was won for the Lord from the vain pomp and worldly ambitions and wicked papist ritual of the Church of England. Egg, as we have seen, was won by other means. He did not positively like the Reverend Shadrach; and, though he had become lax in church attendance (greatly to the scandal of his neighbours), he still cherished sentimental memories of Keyborough Parish Church. But these dissenting folk were such hearty handshakers, and made so much of a man who looked in for a Sunday or two out of mere curiosity, that it was difficult to rebuff them; and young Mr Pierce himself was so touchingly confident of always getting his own way that Egg had not the heart to disappoint him. Before he quite knew where he was, he had ‘joined the church', a ceremony that reached its triumphant conclusion in a series of questions and answers, after this fashion:

‘As I understand you, Mr Pandervil, you have expressed a spontaneous desire to enter the Lord's communion?'

‘Er … that's right!' agreed Egg cheerfully.

‘And you would wish me, his unworthy servant, to extend to you the Right Hand of Fellowship at our next divine service?'

‘That's right!' said Egg again. ‘Whatever's usual.'

‘Mr Pandervil,' said the Pastor, ‘this is a wonderful moment. There is great rejoicing in heaven at this moment. Hark!' Mr Pierce raised his
hands and eyes to the ceiling. ‘Hark! I can almost hear the singing of the heavenly host, Mr Pandervil.' He gazed tenderly at his convert. ‘Come let us thank the Lord together, for that he hath dealt mercifully with one who has been a great sinner.'

‘Oh, I don't know about that,' said Egg modestly. ‘Not really much in the great sinner line, you know.'

‘Let us pray!' intoned the reverend gentleman, sliding round into a kneeling posture and propping his elbows on the chair he had just vacated. ‘Let us pray, brother!'

‘Oh, right you are!' said Egg, with cheerful alacrity. He hoped by this demeanour to conceal his momentary surprise and dismay. He was disappointed to find in himself nothing that responded to Mr Pierce's mood. He had experienced—perhaps half-a-dozen times in his life—moments of a rare strangeness and beauty: high impersonal moments touched with a degree of wonder that made him feel as though great music were being wrought in him. But the sight of Mr Pierce burrowing into his chair like a rabbit, the sight of Mr Pierce's black-trousered legs propped up on the toes of his large-booted feet—this did not recall those moments. Mr Pierce, an accredited agent of heaven, was addressing the Lord in prayer; and Egg, whose thoughts had broken beyond all decent control, could do nothing but hope that the Lord would not notice how extremely comical he and the parson, nosing the seats of their
chairs, must look. He became hot with a confusion of shame and reverence. He tried to echo in his own heart the prayer that was being said for him. And when it was over he remained kneeling for some moments out of sheer self-consciousness.

So it was that Egg Pandervil became a member of Ebenezer Chapel and a voice in Ebenezer choir. If he did not sing bass, he at least sang something that was not treble, not alto, and not tenor. He could master a simple tune without much trouble. After a month or two among the Ebenezerites he could (but would not) have sung you the air of any one of his dozen favourite hymns. But it was just the air that he must not sing; for him, a low baritone, there was more subtle work to be done. Having no sense of harmony he was hard put to it to hold his own against the three rival parts— especially the dangerous top-part—going on around him; and the musical score did not help him much, though he understood that here you must go up a bit and there you must go down, and that at the end of the verse you wait, if necessary, for the others to catch up with you. His brother-basses, though a feeble lot, were on the whole more help than the music. When he lost touch with them, it seemed safest to stick to two notes, or even, at a pinch, to groan his way through a whole hymn on one alone, provided that one was well-chosen—a low note, and not too loud.

After these vocal exercises he found it easier and pleasanter to spin his private reveries than to follow the Reverend Shadrach Pierce on his racketing
expeditions to hell and back. The fate of the wicked was the preacher's constant theme, and he eked out his shreds and tatters of doctrine with a gorgeous patchwork of histrionics. By way of illustration he one day pretended that his pulpit was a red-hot cage, and in trying to escape from it he burnt his hands so often and so convincingly that Egg could almost smell the roasting flesh. ‘And that,' said Mr Pierce, ‘will be the fate of the wicked—the idolater, the fornicator, the unbeliever—not for an hour, not for a day, not for a week, not for a month, not for a year—nay, not for a century only, but for all eternity!' It was dismal hearing, but Egg took it very little to heart, perhaps because he had never encountered any of these ‘wicked' people of whom just lately he was hearing such sad accounts. He couldn't imagine any of the simple sinners of his acquaintance falling into that category or provoking such anger on the part of their Maker. No confessed unbeliever had ever come his way; not one of his neighbours had been caught bowing down to idols; and as for ‘the fornicator', Egg had no precise notion of what the word meant, though he knew it to mean something unspeakable, bizarre, and utterly remote from ordinary experience. No doubt, in his mild way, he believed in hell, for he was none of your atheists; but he thought of hell as permanently empty—except perhaps for a devil or two by way of staff—empty and existing only as a warning to doubters and other desperadoes. He spent little time on this branch of theology, a science in which,
as we see, he had made no perceptible progress since boyhood. More often he thought of heaven, of family gatherings after death where he would find brother Willy, straight and smart in his red coat and grinning with happiness; and Mother, pouring out tea for everybody; and Father, still absent from them in mind, still looking wistfully for something beyond the horizon; and Algernon and all the sisters. Yes, and others would be there, others who even in heaven couldn't be fitted into any plausible scheme. Heaven would be better than nothing, but it would fall very short of his heart's desire.