The Pandervils (46 page)

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, take 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 must 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.

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.

With no one to help them but an old man, Roger Bunt, and a youngster well under military age whom they called Beechy, Egg and his daughter-in-law had plenty of work to do. Jane, who was locally famous for her butter and cheeses, did much of her own milking as well as the work of the house; and Egg made the sheep his special care. The ram's belly had been raddled with red, and at a fortnight's end nineteen of the thirty-nine ewes had been touched with that colour. Then they must put blue on him and try again; and, if any ewes remained still untouched with another fortnight gone, there must be a third raddling and this time with black. By means of this triple raddling the ewes could be grouped, so that you knew within a little when their lambs would be born. Indeed there was no lack of things to be doing. Six acres of clover sward had been ploughed in and was now,
in October, ready for the wheat that should follow. It was time, too, to sow the oats; and the mangolds and turnips, two and a half acres of them, must be pulled before the frosts came. ‘Swedes, we can leave 'em be,' said Roger Bunt. ‘They'll take no harm. So the young master's gone for a soldier, eh Mr Godfrey sir?' The former tenant of the Ridge Farm had been a Godfrey, and Roger had no head for names. His mind worked slowly: Nicky had been gone a month before he found it necessary to speak of his absence, and then it was as if the news had only just reached him. And another absence troubled him now. ‘So Sarah Bunt she went off this morning. She's been long going but she's gone now, I spose.' Egg stared at his man questioningly, but Roger, having pulled a few more turnips, went on with placid melancholy: ‘Thirty months or more, and aches and pains back and front, poor soul. And now she's gone. … Prettiest thing you saw, forty year ago, and a rare 'un for skipping. I've knowed Sarah Bunt since she was
so
high, Sarah Williams she was then, and we've buried our five and raired our three. Queerish her going off like that, and things won't be quite the same I dare say.… It'd be three o'clock last night, as near as no matter, she give a sort of skrooking, and when I got a candle, reckon she's going this time poor soul, and when I got a candle, sure enough there she was stark and staring and not a word to say when I talked to her. You fair daunted me, I says, with that skrooking, and now you'm gone, poor soul, and no candle to see
by.… Middling good turmuts these are, Mr Godfrey sir.' That was Roger Bunt at his most garrulous, a patient lump of old manhood, younger by several years than his master but looking a great deal older, his body bent by habit towards the earth that had claimed all his labour and would one day claim himself. Beechy, the boy about the place, was young and raw and not very sharp in his wits; for the sake of his mother, who had once lived in sin and was now denied poor relief, he was paid a good deal more than his worth to the farm. Apart from Jane, these two, the old man and the boy, were Egg's only companions. Young neighbours sometimes came—Fred Curtis and wife from down the road, or the Marsdens from t'other side of Keyborough—to sit in a bunch round the fire and between vast intervals of silence discuss not only the price of cattle cake, and what Mr. Ambrose had said to Miss Price of the Grange, but something that was now almost equally important—the news from France. The war did not stop, shewed no sign of stopping. It couldn't of course go on much longer because … well, it couldn't, could it? The Government had already begun to interfere, and there were rumours of a more drastic interference to come. Meanwhile the war went on and work went on. Fat bullocks fetched a fine price; the poultry promised good profit this Christmas; and soon the October sowings were thrusting spears of green into the cold December light.