The Pandervils (3 page)

‘Eh?' said Willy.

From his blank look Egg could see that Willy had not taken in a word he had said. And he saw, with a shock of something more than surprise, that there were tears in the stupid fellow's eyes. Egg hastened to remind himself that he hated Willy. They had been friends, no doubt, his brother and the dog; and he hadn't much liked the dirty job. But Egg wouldn't be sorry for him. Great oaf, he should have thought of that before! What's the good of being sorry now? Egg's mind slipped back ten minutes, and, carried forward by the impetus of his former plan, he suddenly and without volition blurted out: ‘Father's sent me to say he's changed his mind, Willy. Mother spoke up for Fang, and he says not to shoot Fang after all.' He himself was surprised to hear these words.

But still his brother seemed not to have been listening. ‘What you say, Egg?'

Egg shrugged his shoulders. ‘Oh, doesn't matter.'

‘Well, now you're here,' said Willy, a trifle truculently, ‘you can lend a hand lifting 'un.' The grave was ready, and but little remained to be done. Only a dog after all, Egg told himself. Without word or sign of feeling he stepped forward to do as he was asked.

As though a drop of blood had been spilt upon it, the gold in the western sky was gradually reddening, and the April sun, tempering the sharp sword of his light, glowed now within an ace of the world's rim. On their way back to the house Willy remarked: ‘Late for tea, I fancy. Must be nigh on ha' pas' six, by the look of it yonder.' He nodded towards the sun. Egg made no sign of having heard, being absorbed in the task of industriously hating his companion; and presently Willy, as if afraid of silence, spoke again. ‘Tell you one thing, Egg. He didn't suffer, old Fang didn't.' Egg strode on, a pace or two ahead, staring fixedly at the ground. ‘'Twas over in no time,' said Willy. ‘When I … when I'd done it, I just sorta patted him, and he licked my hand, you know, same as ever, and rolled over dead. And … well, that was all.'

‘Oh, shut your row, can't you!' growled Egg, turning quickly round.

The brothers confronted each other with every appearance of anger. Then suddenly Egg realized with astonishment that Willy was blubbering and shouting at him: ‘You bloody young fool, why coont you stay outa harm's way! I dint make you come, did I! Come out to Flinders a-purpose, I did, so's to keep you out of it. And here's you sneering and sulking and … ' The voice broke past control, and Willy, ashamed of his emotion, turned his back on Egg, hunched up his shoulders, and, snatching a large red handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose with trumpeting emphasis.

Egg was bewildered, aghast. Life had become, in an instant, an inconceivably complicated and mysterious affair; and hating, an almost impossibly difficult task. He was disconcerted, even angry, to find his purpose weakening; disconcerted by this revelation in Willy of something that inconveniently evoked in himself an old affection and a new feeling akin to what he had once or twice felt for the smallest of his sisters, four-year-old Mildred. Blubbering donkey, he thought, or tried to think. But it was no use: the iron of his resolution, the cold steel of his contempt, had melted; and he caught himself wishing that Willy would box his ears, as an elder brother should, and so resolve this problem of what to do next. In default of any such happy termination of the situation Egg stared at the horizon and contrived to whistle a bar or two of
The British Grenadiers
. He sauntered on for a few paces, and when he heard Willy's footsteps overtaking him called back over his shoulder, ‘Mother's sure to save us a bit of something, late or not, eh?' And so, without further incident beyond an occasional sniff from Willy, the brothers walked home together, shy of each other, afraid to speak much, and still more afraid lest their glances should meet and confess the newborn love that vibrated between them.

The kitchens, back and front, were populous with Pandervil children. In what they called the back-kitchen, Flisher, Egg's junior by two years, was helping Sarah, his senior by ten, to wash up the crocks and cutlery of the last meal, with the little
girls, ten-year-old Martha and six-year-old Jane, getting in the way by alternately playing shops and clamouring to be taken on as extra hands. Shoo'd away from the sink these juniors started a rival washing-up industry and became very busy cleansing imaginary plates in imaginary water. The game was not a success; for Jane was a child imitative to the point of stubbornness, and Martha was too weakly compliant. If Martha did the washing, so then must Jane; and if Martha, yielding up the invisible dishcloth, began the pantomime of wiping the things her sister had dipped in water, that ritual became at once infinitely attractive to the younger child. Flisher, from the Olympus of her real sink, intervened from time to time, urging upon Jane that this business of washing-up tea-things involved two operations, and that a double washing or a double wiping was profitless. But Jane would not listen to these reasonable counsels; and Flisher, a fair freckled prematurely domesticated child, anxious beyond her years, grew cross with her, and infected Martha with this crossness, so that the back-kitchen became noisy with the broad vowels and the sing-song intonation of Mershire so marked in the female Pandervils. Sarah, plump like her mother and pretty as twenty years earlier her mother had been, cast an occasional glance behind her and said mildly, ‘Leave 'er be, Flisher. Why, what a to-do, to be sure!'—an appeal that passed quite unnoticed.

Between this scene of strife and the kitchen proper, where Mrs Pandervil presided over her
sons' delayed tea, the door was wide open; and the three males carried on such manly conversation as seemed necessary, discussing crops and prices and the news from the war-front, to the accompaniment of clattering dishes and feminine altercation. Algernon, loyal to his brothers, had refused to eat until their return, and was now expiating this neglect of his appetite by the consumption, heroic in its scope, of bread and dripping and suet pudding swilled down by half a gallon of weak tea. Willy and Egg were more taciturn than usual, a little unresponsive to the traveller's tales brought home by Algernon, whose casual labour for Doctor Wilson sometimes took him as far as six miles distant into regions seldom visited by his brothers and never (‘The very idea!') by his mother and sisters. All three were conscious of a certain constraint in the air, though only two of them, the youngest and the eldest, knew its cause; and all, with no overt sign, turned their hearts towards Mrs Pandervil, the one utterly right and unchanging fact in this world of flux, this maelstrom of Early Victorian modernity. She sat at the head of the table, a huge brown teapot in front of her, and, without ceasing to savour the rich joy of this present moment, chewed the placid cud of her memories. This was her hour, and this her teapot: an hour she never forewent: a teapot whose use she never delegated, even to Sarah, no matter what domestic crisis should be darkening the horizon. The humblest of women, asking only (and not in vain) that she should be made perpetual use of by her husband and children,
she was at such moments happily and rosily enthroned. Her cheeks retained something of the roundness and the wholesome colour that had once made her, in the eyes of young William Pandervil, irresistible; and time, removing the bloom of youth, had summed up her history in delicate hieroglyphics, a significant beautiful tracery of fine lines. She was not an old woman, and a certain native insensibility had prevented her being too intimately hurt by life's assaults; her youth persisted, and was visible, beneath the thin veneer of advanced middle age; but her everlasting benevolence, tempered only by the rigours of the current code, made her a venerable figure. Slow-minded, uninformed, she yet by habitual kindness showed herself wise. Being as sensitive to emotional atmospheres as she was proof against ideas, she detected at once the undercurrent flowing between Willy and Egg, and she was aware, no less, of Algernon's growing perplexity. It was he who led the conversation and he who sustained it.

‘They frosts last week will have snipped all the fruit blossom, eh Willy?'

‘Shouldn't wonder,' admitted Willy.

‘Bad thing,' said Algernon. ‘Wrong time o' year for frosts, ain't it, mother? 'Tis them as cripples it. They frosts, I mean.' He seemed determined that his remarks should not be disregarded for lack of being understood.

Willy was still apathetic. ‘I dare say.'

‘No fruit at all this year,' said Algernon, after a silence. ‘Eh, Willy?'

‘Eh?' returned Willy.

‘I were saying, no fruit at all this year, what with frosts so late and all. Frosts at the end of April—tint fair! No fruit at all this year. No stone fruit anyhow, by the look of things.'

Egg could see that Algernon was now making a deliberate assault on the ramparts of silence built up by his brothers. Having guessed that something was being concealed from him he was ill disposed to leave them in peace. Moreover he was naturally a talkative lad and he had been away from home all day seeing the world, for the most part through the window of Doctor Wilson's dispensary. Adolescence—for Algernon was two years deeper in that adventure than the nimbler-minded Egbert—had not tied his tongue; nor had it quickened his inventive wit. He had introduced the subject of frosts and fruit, and of that conjunction of ideas an endless series of small irritating remarks would be born unless his sociable appetite were speedily appeased.

‘Well,' said Algernon, eyeing his elder brother narrowly, ‘if we don't get any fruit this year. …'

Egg cried out, almost in his father's voice: ‘Oh shut up about fruit, Algy! Can't you think of something else to say?'

Sixteen and fourteen glared at each other. ‘Don't you be so cheeky, young 'un!'

Mrs Pandervil intervened: ‘Now don't quarrel, boys. Egg mustn't shout, and Algy mustn't worry poor Willy. We're not in a chattering mood this evening.'

Algernon stared. ‘Somebody dead?' he inquired with veiled insolence.

‘Yes. Fang's dead.'

It was Egg who spoke, and as he uttered the words their significance bit deeply into his mind, so that he became angry again and was put to the emotional necessity of hating someone. This unplacated hunger, like a hawk in mid air, hovered over his thoughts seeking a convenient victim.

‘What, old Fang dead?' The shock sobered Algernon. He looked blankly from face to face.

With every repetition of these words, ‘Fang dead', Egg's anger burned the more fiercely. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Fang's dead. He's been shot dead. We've just buried 'un, Willy and me. So now you know!'

‘Who shot him?' demanded Algernon.

Egg noticed that the clatter in the back-kitchen had abruptly ceased. The girls were crowded in the doorway, listening. He paused before answering. Everyone looked at him. Even Willy looked at him. Egg said: ‘We shot him ourselves. Willy and me shot him, if you want to know. By order'—and here the hawk, seeing its chance, swooped swiftly down—‘by order,' added Egg deliberately, ‘of
that beast Father?
Ah yes, that tasted good.

He was perhaps a little flattered, and more than a little awed, by the sensation that his blasphemy created. For blasphemy it was, no less; the most outrageous utterance that had ever reached his mother's ears. The girls fluttered and trembled;
Flisher failed to repress an hysterical giggle that changed the next instant to weeping; and Mrs Pandervil sat staring with horror in her eyes as though she looked on madness itself. She opened her mouth, from which nothing issued at first but a little gasp. Then she pushed back her chair from the table and slowly rose, wringing her hands and saying in a tense whisper: ‘You wicked, wicked boy!' White-faced, biting his lip, Egg tried to meet unconcernedly her grieved accusing eyes. Little wonder she was shaken, seeing him so bold in sin; for she cannot but have feared that this son of hers, in whom she had sometimes seemed to see a trace of the father, was utterly corrupt of heart and destined for a bad end. But perhaps that evil vista was shut out of her imagination by the immediate necessity of punishing the sinner. ‘You bad wicked boy,' she repeated, ‘to speak so of your father! I can't believe it !I can't!'

Egg felt a touch on his elbow. Willy was bending towards him. ‘Better say you're sorry, Egg.'

Algernon, overhearing the advice, thought to help matters by casting his vote. ‘Yes, Egg, say you're sorry! Do!' And Egg's purpose, which had been wavering towards a qualified repentance, stiffened again and would neither bend nor break.

‘Yes, I'm sorry,' he heard himself say. And, with a harsh little laugh: ‘I'm sorry Father's a beast. But it's not my fault.'

Mrs Pandervil, with a mournful cry, sank down into her chair. ‘The Lord forgive me, I've borne a son without grace. He hates his own father!'

Egg, the centre of this storm, stared at his stricken mother, heard Flisher's sobs, was conscious of his brothers' bewildered eyes upon him. He felt himself to be alone in a hostile world, and with no histrionic sense such as might have solaced a more egoistical Satan, he was forlorn indeed. Forlorn and near to tears; but against that surrender he struggled bitterly, for at last, at last, he had realized whom he must hate, whom he must blame. Without question his father was a beast; there could be no going back on that.

The unhappy woman spoke again, sadly but with decision: ‘Willy, my boy, you must whip your brother.'

Willy shrugged his shoulders, and after a pause he remarked with unwonted spirit: ‘Seems I'm to have all the dirty work to-day. Can't I have a rest same's other folk?'

Being now in control of herself Mrs Pandervil answered quietly: ‘Willy, are you going to obey your mother?'

Willy grunted. ‘Oh well, we must do as you say, Mother. Egg knows that 'swell as me.' He got slowly out of his chair.

‘No!' said Egg. He had suddenly remembered that revelation on the way down Stally Pitch; he stood again in the sunshine and watched Willy's face crumple up, comically, heartrendingly, like a a baby's; at all costs Willy must be protected from this further ordeal. ‘No, Mother. Willy needn't whip me. Let Father whip me. Let me go to Father now and tell him that he's … and tell
him what I said.' An astonished silence followed this speech. ‘I'll tell him, Mother,' said Egg eagerly. ‘Honour bright I will!'