The Pandervils (4 page)

They held their breath, these Pandervil children, till their mother should announce her decision. At last she said: ‘Very well. Likely it is best so.'

Egg stood up. His heart beat wildly, his face was pale, and his lips were stiffly set. Watched by all eyes he walked self-consciously to the door, and there, unable to bear the silence a moment longer, he remarked, with his fingers on the door-handle: ‘He's in the study, I suppose?' Before it occurred to anyone to answer the superfluous question, he was gone.

He tapped on the study door. Hearing no response he tapped again. He was now on the verge of tears, and this delay was unendurable. What he had to do must be done quickly or it could not be done at all. His courage was at the ebb, and he was afflicted by a sense of the sheer silliness of this anticlimax. He tapped a third time, and still hearing nothing opened the door softly.

William Pandervil's study was a country foreign and frightening yet in some unfathomable way attractive to Egg. It was the only room in the house that contained books, and it contained little else. Books lined three of the four walls, from the floor to within two feet of the ceiling; and the smell of their leather hung palpable in the air, an intimidating smell that started a long train of forgotten associations in Egg's nether consciousness. In the presence of so much learning Egg felt himself
to be a bumpkin, a clodhopper; at such times he shared his mother's sense of inferiority. He was dimly aware that in these books were recorded the thoughts and discoveries of dead or distant men, but if he felt a moment's curiosity it died at once in face of the assumption that such things were not for him. At school he had acquired a rudimentary knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, together with a list, necessarily incomplete, of the kings and capes of England. He knew that Alfred had burnt some cakes, that Charles the First had been beheaded, and that— some time between these two equally important events—Queen Elizabeth had sunk the Spanish Armada. He knew that there were rivers in Europe called the Danube, the Rhine, the Seine, and the Volga—the last because it was the same as a word used by the schoolmaster in rebuking a mannerless boy. He knew, further, that Queen Mary had had ‘Calais' written on her heart, and that to describe this queen as ‘bloody' was not swearing. He knew: ‘Not Angles but angels!' and ‘Take away that empty bauble!'; and he knew that the English Channel divides England from France, and that his good fortune in having been born on the right side of that same Channel made him the equal of any three Froggies. These titbits had given him no appetite for the larger meal of education; and his schooling, what there was of it, being now at an end, he had turned with a certain eagerness to more significant matters. The habits of birds interested him, and the queer
look in the eyes of the farm animals set him speculating curiously. He often wondered what it would feel like to be something or somebody else —a cow or a tree or the elderly vicar of his parish; but if ever such a question concerning his father presented itself he shrank from it hastily, the mystery being too dark and dreadful. In the fields he was happy, giving no thought to books or to the dull difficult alien gentility they stood for; but here in his father's study he was suddenly ashamed of his ignorance, thinking himself despised for it. This shame for one instant distracted him from the memory of his crime and its impending punishment. He was further distracted by the queerness of his father's attitude.

Pandervil senior was leaning forward in his chair, his thin vague face sunk between hunched shoulders and resting in the cup of two twitching hands. Staring at a spot on the carpet, and seeing nothing, he was a man lost, utterly remote. He did not look up at his son's entry.

Egg remembered his errand. He remembered, too, that Fang had been shot by command of this man. He blurted out: ‘I called you a beast, sir.'

Mr Pandervil emerged from his reverie. He gazed at his visitor with puzzled, patient, weary eyes.

‘Please?' said Mr Pandervil, using one of the rare locutions he retained of his native Guernsey speech.

‘Downstairs,' stammered Egg, ‘I said you
were a beast, sir. Mother's sent me to be whipped.'

Mr Pandervil seemed more than ever puzzled. ‘You said I was a beast. But why?' His manner, mild and courteous, had not changed.

‘I said you were a beast,' repeated Egg stubbornly. He fancied that this clever educated stranger was sneering at him. Only so could his mildness be accounted for. The boy felt inconceivably clumsy and stupid. Yes, he was stupid; he had made a fool of himself, and everybody despised him for it, everybody was laughing at him, most of all his father. But, stupid or not, he was not going to be tricked into an argument about whys and wherefores.

Mr Pandervil repeated his question: ‘But why? Why did you call me a beast?'

A look of mulish and cunning obstinacy disfigured Egg's face; he himself was aware of it, and he fancied it to be his best defence. ‘I've come to be punished,' he insisted. To be punished, not to be sneered at and made game of by the man who had read all those books. ‘Shall I bend over?' For besides the knowledge acquired at school he had learned the inevitable consequences of such wickedness as his. He had committed a grave offence in the sight of God and man. He knew himself to be a wicked boy, and he knew that if he were struck several times across the buttocks with a stick or switch he would be miraculously made good again, the soreness behind redeeming him from the corruption within.
Whether or not he understood the theory of the matter, of the practice there could be no doubt. If you put your hand in the fire your fingers were burnt; if you called your father a beast, you were beaten. This, in Egg's world, was a plain natural law. And so, impatient to get the ceremony finished, he said: ‘Shall I bend over?'

He bent over. Mr Pandervil picked up a long ruler from his table and bestowed five sharp cuts upon the seat of regeneration. ‘That'll do, my lad.'

By Egg's standards the punishment was light, even trivial. Even to him it was apparent that there was no conviction behind the castigation; and now, released from his obsession, he was at liberty to wonder what ailed his father.

‘And now,' said Mr Pandervil, ‘if you will kindly satisfy my curiosity,
why
did you call me a beast?'

Remembering the reason all too bitterly, Egg answered, flushing: ‘Because you had Fang shot. Our dog Fang. Because I hated you.'

Mr Pandervil smiled. It was a smile that betokened neither mirth nor bitterness—a queer heartrending smile that suddenly, for no reason at all, filled Egg's eyes with the tears he had so stubbornly held in check. Looking on his father, as for the first time, he saw him as a suffering creature, mortal like Fang, simple like Willy, blundering and bewildered like himself. A sob gathered in the boy's throat, and tears began streaming down his hot cheeks. …

He returned red-eyed to the kitchen, where Algernon, noticing his state, came to him with brotherly sympathy, saying, with an arm flung about the youngster's shoulder: ‘Bit of a stinger, was it, Eggie? Never mind, lad. 'Tis over now.'

On Easter Day in each year Mr Pandervil went to church, because, as he explained to his wife, he took a peculiar interest in pagan festivals. Elizabeth, had she understood the remark, would have attached no importance to it; and in this she would have been right, for in fact Mr Pandervil was a firm believer in the Church of England, which he regarded as a necessary state department existing for the propagation of Christian mythology in the interests of good morals and good manners. Far though he was from being a family man, contriving when he could to forget that his family existed, he would have been troubled and indignant had the Pandervil womenfolk proved lax in church attendance. Fortunately no such disaster was possible with Elizabeth in command. She herself took turns with Sarah in cooking the Sunday mid-day dinner; one went to church, one stayed at home; but she saw to it that her younger daughters (except the baby), and as many of her sons as could be spared from the farm, never failed to set out in two decorous parties. Sarah in her Sunday bonnet and best crinoline, and linked
with her sisters hand to hand, had such a matronly air, and in years was so far beyond her companions, that a stranger might have been excused for supposing her to be a young mother surrounded by her own children. In her left hand she carried the prayer-books; in her right she held the moist fingers of Martha's left; and at the other end of the line was Flisher, between whom and Martha little Jane was supported. Mildred, at four, was left behind, her good behaviour being still a matter more for conjecture than for hope. At a decent distance behind the girls, followed two of their three brothers, sheepish, self-conscious, hands scrubbed and faces polished, and looking—in their ill-fitting, sober, Sabbath garments—pathetically gawky and anxious to please.

To Egg, though he would perhaps rather have been out of doors, this necessary church-going was not an unmitigated misfortune. He did not, indeed, take pleasure in listening to the shrill, brisk, gabbled chanting of Hebrew psalms; to prayers nasally intoned; and to chapters from the Bible read with a dreary unction that invited nothing but open-mouthed, empty-minded reverence; and he did not like that incessant alternation of kneeling and sitting, sitting and standing, which we know to be peculiarly pleasing to the Holy Trinity. But, for the sermon, of which he never consciously heard more than a dozen words, he was vaguely grateful, because it gave him a chance to sit still and lose himself in a rich daydream compounded of the glowing colours of stained
glass, the holy smell of the stove in winter and of warm varnish in summer, and the rise and fall of the Vicar's drawling voice, together with all manner of odd thoughts and random recollections, associated for the most part with other Sunday mornings. From the windows, especially, he never failed to derive enjoyment—an enjoyment sensuous in the main but not wholly so, for the pictures, too, interested him, and he was able bit by bit to piece together a strange world—a stained-glass-window world—in which dwelt the saints and the patriarchs and the persons of the Trinity, all perpetually re-enacting their several parts in the brightly coloured drama that these windows depicted. This world he identified with the heaven into which, if he learned his catechism and did not too often call his father a beast, he would some day be translated. I have said that outside his father's study Egg gave no thought to books, being absorbed in the business of touching and tasting and intimately knowing the things of his own world. So, too, his dalliance with questions of religion was confined not merely within the limits of Sunday but within the time spent in the church itself. Religion, on its imaginative side, was for him a rather agreeable game, a many-coloured reverie to be resumed every week at the moment when the Vicar announced his text. One just slipped back into that other world, taking up the thread of fancy at the point where it had been unreluctantly dropped seven days ago, or indeed at any other point, for there were no rules in this
game. Into this confused luminous dream there sometimes floated—to be instantly invested with a new exotic quality—fragmentary memories of his life outside, his real life; pictures appeared out of nowhere; and sonorous cadences—‘defend us in the same from all assaults of our enemies, that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not fear the power of any adversary'—echoed like organ-music, rang like deep-toned bells, in his mind; for phrases from the very prayers that had been tedious to hear became rich and satisfying in recollection.

In due time another element was introduced into the Sunday morning game by Miss Jinny Randall, at whom both Willy and Egg used to stare under cover of religious exercises: the one for reasons that may be plausibly surmised, the other by force of a perplexing example. Jinny, it seemed to Egg, was by no means a remarkable young woman. She was neat and small and not bad-looking; but, unless poor Willy accounted darkness a virtue, dark hair, dark eyes, a cream-tinted skin, she was no whit superior to our Sarah, who, as everybody knew, was not an exciting person. Moreover, in spite of her ladylike ways and her school-teaching, in spite of the villagers' tribute, ‘She
do
talk well-off!', everybody knew her to be the daughter of Randall's General Store, and most people, including Willy himself, had received at her hands bags of flour, packets of pepper, tins of mustard, bundles of firewood, popcorn, bullseyes, reels of cotton, canvas shoes, egg-cups, mop-heads,
string bags, pairs of braces, and other articles of domestic consumption. But three years ago she had been snatched up and educated by a rich relation, and was now come back, a real young lady, to teach pothooks and hangers and catechism to such of the village children as could be persuaded to listen to her. And yet, if one had only to look at Jinny Randall to see that she would never be a romantic figure, one had only, when she was near, to look at Willy Pandervil to know that for him she was romance itself. Her power over him was a phenomenon not to be ignored. Egg discovered it almost as soon as did the victim himself, and a day or two sooner than Jinny; and before long it was common knowledge in the Pandervil household: which means that it was known to everyone except Mildred the baby and William the sire. It was for Jinny Randall's sake that Willy blacked his boots and polished his gaiters with ridiculous frequency; it was for Jinny Randall that, two or three nights a week and twice on Sundays, he dipped his hairbrush into the ewer and laboured to make his hair lie flat and sleek on his head. Jinny Randall was indeed the beginning and the end of Willy. He was born again in the moment of seeing her enter the church after her long sojourn in the halls of culture, and it was some word of hers—Egg never knew quite what— that made the poor sheep finally break out of his pen.

Had Egg, on the night our history opens, been free to follow the train of thought set stirring by
his son Nicky's questions, he could scarcely have failed, gazing back across the years, to see in Jinny Randall the arbiter of his brother's destiny.