The Pandervils (7 page)

‘Well, Jinny, how are you, my dear, and all at home? You'll stay to a cup of tea, won't you?' Seeing that Egg hovered in the doorway Mrs Pandervil added, with a smile: ‘Be off with you, my boy. Jinny's come to talk to me. We don't want young men about us, do we Jinny?'

For answer, catching an imploring look from the girl, Egg diffidently stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. ‘She asked me to stay, mama. Made quite a point of it, she did. Do you mind?'

Jinny said quickly: ‘Yes, Mrs Pandervil. I asked Egg to stay. Please let him. It's about Willy that I've come, and Willy said …'

Bright-eyed, the two women faced each other; the one alert, suspicious; the other already afraid and faltering. Egg, staring almost agape, was aware that the relationship between them had in an instant changed. In Jinny's face the flame of her secret mounted; the light in his mother's eyes was like the glint of steel. That one word, ‘Willy', had made division where formerly there had been on his mother's part nothing but goodwill, tinctured, perhaps, with curiosity; and, on Jinny's, nothing but timid hope. Now, for an instant, they were at primitive enmity: jealous, implacable, ripe for murder.

‘Ah!' sighed Mrs Pandervil. With a satisfaction in which was a hint of cruelty—Egg's stare
became incredulous—she watched the girl's confusion. ‘I think we'll sit down, maybe.' They sank into chairs opposite each other. Egg remained standing by the door, forgotten by both of them.

‘Well, Jinny Randall,' said Mrs Pandervil, ‘what have you to say about my Willy?'

The girl raised her eyes from the ground. ‘He was
my
Willy too, Mrs. Pandervil. That's what I came to tell you.'

Mrs Pandervil answered nothing. Her lips were set in a hard line, her gaze was unrelenting. She waited to hear more, yet contrived to let it appear that whatever more was said could not greatly interest her.

‘He was mine, Mrs Pandervil,' Jinny repeated. And after a pause she added, in a breathless whisper: ‘And I'm near my time.'

‘Ah!' said Mrs Pandervil again. ‘So that's it!' She turned in her chair. ‘Egbert, this is no place for you.'

Egg, standing his ground, made no answer. That he should leave Jinny to the mercy of this strange woman, this mother he had never seen before, was out of the question. He was in the presence of something alien, monstrous, half-insane—something to which he could not even try to give a name; and he felt as perhaps a man may feel when for the first time he hears the sound of turning thumbscrews and creaking rack. Hatred and terror surged in the silent room; pain quivered into life but uttered no cry. To his secret sense, sword met sword, and the treacherous dagger flashed and fell;
yet still unmoving, still without words, the antagonists gazed at each other.

Presently the older woman got out of her chair, stepped rigidly a pace forward, and began speaking in low angry tones, while Jinny sat staring and flaming at the ground, twisting and untwisting her fingers. Egg—so oddly did the scene strike him—hardly listened to the words that were said. If these two women had been made of wood, they and their gestures could not have seemed to him more queer and stiff and unlifelike. He was bewildered by the release in his mother of a personality utterly strange to him. He had seen her angry; he had seen her sternly judicial; but he had never before been allowed to lose his sense of a fundamental kindness in her, and the experience was so shocking as to falsify everything that was said, everything that happened. The spate of denunciation flowed past him, so that he did not consciously hear it; but, after it was past, chance phrases returned to him to mingle with his circling thoughts. The whole story of Willy, so far as he knew it, repeated itself in his mind in a series of little bright pictures; and behind these pictures moved the drama, as Egg's fancy conceived it, of Willy's love story, beginning with that critical Sunday morning when a translated Jinny Randall walked up the aisle of the church, and ending with the secret passionate farewells of lovers who were never to meet again. Between that first scene and this last there came numerous homely memories that for Egg were more significant: of Willy, red-faced
and eager-eyed, earnestly polishing his boots and gaiters before setting out to pay his respects to Jinny; of Willy plastering down his hair with water in front of the bedroom mirror; of one evening especially when Willy swore wild oaths—all but wept—because at the last moment his braces broke; and of Willy plucking at one's sleeve in church, generously ready, naively eager, to share the ecstasy of seeing Jinny first appear. These visions flashed by, these echoes sounded, and- Aren't you ashamed of yourself, miss! Enticing my poor boy. Sly tricks. Sent him to his death. No better than a whore, as God's my judge … Such fragments as these he found recently written on his mind, and coming upon the vilest of them he suddenly—minutes after the words had been spoken —broke out with a passionate cry:

‘Mother! Mother!'

Mrs Pandervil turned on him quickly—in anger, maybe, but still more in surprise. Her eyes pierced a question at him.

‘Mother, you've said enough. You've said too much. I think … I think you've lost your senses.'

‘Hold your tongue, child! How dare you speak to your mother so!'

Egg heard himself shouting: ‘I'm not a child and I won't hold my tongue. Willy promised I'd stand by her, and I will. She's not what you say.' He moved half-blindly towards the girl and held out a hand to her. ‘Come along. I'll take you back home.'

Staring dazedly up at him, Jinny answered: ‘I can't go home. I daren't. They've turned me out.' She rose slowly to her feet. ‘But of course I can't stay here either.'

‘No, that you can't,' declared Mrs Pandervil. ‘The very idea!'

Egg detected a subtle change in his mother's voice, but he could not spare eyes for her, being vigilant to see any new sign on the face of Jinny. And, indeed, at that very moment, a spasm of pain twisted the girl's lips, blanched her cheeks, made her dark eloquent eyes stare wildly like those of a tortured animal. She swayed, and, stretching out a hand to steady herself, fell into Egg's arms.

‘She's fainted,' gasped the boy.

Mrs Pandervil opened the door. ‘We must carry her upstairs, to Flisher's room. Ah, the disgrace of it! The wickedness!'

‘I'm not fainted,' murmured Jinny. ‘I can walk. Let me go.'

She leaned heavily on Egg's arm; Mrs Pandervil supported her on the other side. ‘Poor deary, the pains are on her. Steady now, and we'll put you to bed.'

‘Let me carry her, Mother. She's no weight.'

He lifted the girl from the ground, and with her arms clinging round his neck he felt Willy's strength flowing in his veins and rippling in his muscles. The burden was a heavy one, but he supported it with ease, his mind fixed on the task yet able to afford hospitality still to all manner of random thoughts. His step was confident, careful;
his heart joyous. Jinny, her head sinking on his shoulder, moaned in pain; but he mounted the stairs exultantly, conscious of his mother hovering in the rear, and half-conscious of the fancy that it was Willy himself he was carrying in his arms. When, after a long journey, a crowded little interval of time, he at last laid down his precious burden on the bed, he heard the voice of Mrs Pandervil, a mother newly restored to him, murmuring: ‘There, there, my lamb! We've got you safe! Mother's got you!' And he realized with a pang that indeed something living, something that was marvellously and mysteriously Willy, was struggling to be born into the world of light.

During all that winter he had been from time to time aware of the little prickings of a new revelation, of something struggling—as the child had struggled in Jinny's womb—to be born in his consciousness; and when orchards flowered again, and hedges became warm with the first scent of hawthorn, the world of sense seemed burdened for him with a secret message whose purport he could not as yet surmise. Jinny's child, although it bore traces of being Willy's too, ceased, soon after it was born, to hold any strong interest for him. It was a baby like other babies. It lacked teeth; it lacked hair; it was very small; and it was called, inevitably, Billy. Egg liked the creature well enough and would have done anything in reason for its comfort and safety, but he was aware of it as an organism rather than as an individual. He took pleasure, however, in observing Jinny's maternal infatuation; and was satisfied that there would be no more talk of turning Jinny out. Mrs Pandervil—not maliciously, perhaps not willingly, but rather as a matter of plain duty—had advertised her sense of the danger of exposing her daughters to such moral corruption as Jinny stood for. But
the balance of opinion was against her; even Sarah, plain and precise and in imminent danger of becoming an old maid, begged her not to mention the matter again, lest it should reach the ears of the young mother herself. In fact, against all the canons of decency and justice, the sinner was made much of, and the child of sin waxed fat. The Pandervil girls competed jealously for its favour; Mr Pandervil, on one occasion, made an indulgent clucking noise at it; and even Algernon, now a fervent farmer, had his sentimental moments. Egg alone, Egg who had first championed its cause, appeared but mildly interested in the child. He already, in a sense, was settling down into the routine of hard healthy drudgery, eating, sleeping, working. Everything that happened, happened; he had almost ceased to wonder why; and he had, for the time being, quite ceased to bother his head with those queer speculations about other people's lives, other creatures' lives, which had once occupied his private thoughts. He had become self-absorbed, troubled by a sense of something beyond, something just out of reach, to which he was perhaps moving. Anonymous expectancy agitated his few reflective moments.

Crossing the farmyard one crisp May morning, his arm hooked under the handle of a bucket half full of bran mash, his eyes staring at the sunlit cobblestones, Egg Pandervil moved unconsciously into his new life. A shadow fell across his path; a voice greeted him, cool and clear as running water; and he looked up to see a young girl standing
before him—dark, cool, and neither tall nor short, the plump oval of her face shadowed by a sunbonnet. Yes, she was visibly a girl, an ordinary mortal young woman; young and dark, younger than himself; young and dark and seductively soft, like a warm summer night spent lying in long grass naked and abandoned, drowsily aware of the rise and fall of earth's ample bosom. He was bewildered as by unexpected music poignantly sweet, so that for a moment he could do nothing but stand and stare at her, stupid with wonder.

She, as if to explain her presence, held out for his inspection a milk-can. She repeated the request he had been too deeply shaken to notice. ‘May I have an extra pint, please, for Mrs Wrenn?'

Egg put down his bucket with a clang. ‘Pint of milk, did you say?'

‘Please. It's for the Vicarage. I'm their niece.'

‘Oh, yes. Certainly. A pint of milk.' He did not offer to take the milk-can from her. He stood quite still, not knowing what to do, and not caring, being empty of thought. He wanted nothing; he was content. But presently, after a perceptible hiatus, it came upon him, piercing his armour of bliss, that something had to be done. Already he had realized the propriety of not staring too boldly into the kingdom of heaven, and had glanced, with guilty abruptness, at his boots. And now there was this other matter—a pint of milk. ‘You did say a pint, didn't you?'

‘Yes, a pint. We've had our usual quart, but Auntie sent me to get a pint more. Ought I to call
at the house for it? I expect I ought. How stupid of me!'

‘Oh, no!' He took the milk-can from her hand. ‘I'll … I'll fetch it for you. Won't you … ' He nearly said: ‘Won't you sit down?' And he blushed for the absurdity, as though she had read the words in his mind. Seeing his confusion she could not but smile faintly and lower her eyes. The universe burst into song.

In the dairy, which was cool and dim after the brightness outside, he found his sister Flisher. He handed the milk-can to her, for it was understood that, in the dairy, men were definitely subordinate not merely to their mother but even to their sister, if it were Sarah or Flisher. ‘Someone from the Vicarage wants a pint of milk.'

‘Who is it?' asked Flisher, as she filled the can.

‘Someone from the Vicarage,' said Egg.

‘Yes, I know, silly. But
who?'

‘How should I know? A girl. Vicar's niece or something.'

‘That'll be the Monica Wrenn they were telling of,' said Flisher. ‘I'll take it to her. Where is she?'

Egg was already at the dairy door, with a pint of milk for which he would if necessary have paid with an equal quantity of his life's-blood. ‘She's waiting outside. I've got to go that way.'

He stepped quickly out of the dairy, in terror lest the apparition called Monica Wrenn should have vanished, leaving the earth desolated. But
no, she was still there, incredibly actual. She stood gazing intently at distance, her chin resting on a long white forefinger; but at Egg's approach her attitude stiffened with a hint of delicious awkwardness.

‘Thank you very much. And Auntie says will you please put it to the account.'

Egg, with great difficulty, blurted out the speech his mind had been busy preparing for him. It was neither a long nor a bold speech; yet he stammered in its delivery and went very red in the face, and almost forgot his words. ‘Did you … I mean, did you come through the orchard… the orchard way?'

‘Oh, yes,' she said. And, marvellously, her voice rose on the second word, instead of falling as that of a Mershire girl would have done. It rose in a heavenly flight; rested for an instant; and then vanished—a melody in two notes, delicately and excitingly inconclusive, so that Egg, filled with longing to find some way of making her say ‘Oh, yes' again, had hardly wit enough to understand her when she added: ‘It's the only way, isn't it, except by the road? … Good morning!'