The Pandervils (23 page)

He stared at her. ‘Doctors all out. How's she going on?'

‘'Sall right!' said Mrs Farthing, who was forty-five and looked fifty—a lean woman with boot-button eyes. ‘Doctor Renwick's with 'er.'

‘Doctor Renwick!'

‘Came twenty minutes ago. And that person as calls herself a nurse is helping him, or getting in his way. As to that I've my own opinion.'

‘Is she … bad?'

‘Mrs P? Well, it's early to say, isn't it. Bad, yes. Sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's worse still, but it's always bad. I've heard of women having easy times at their lying-ins, but I've never met one. I
'ave
'eard of unicorns and zebberers, if it comes to that. But there! I didn't ought to be talking this way to a gentleman!' She added that she must get away along back to her shop. ‘I sold a pound of candles for you, and here's the money. They said it was right.'

He thanked her warmly, and as soon as she was gone he lapsed into a state of musing. For a while, being assured that the doctor was doing all that could be done, he felt relieved of all responsibility, comparatively carefree. It was true that Carrie was not yet out of danger. Carrie might even die, and —more because he had a profound horror of death than because it meant losing Carrie—he did not want her to die. But just now the idea of her dying was not real or vivid enough to appal him. He stared at it speculatively. In fancy he saw her funeral. His black gloves split in one finger when he put them on. The sweet detestable smell of white lilies assailed him. Carrie's relations, an endless tribe, unctuous, snivelling, black-garbed, filed past him into the room where the coffin was … He shook himself out of his evil dream.
But he remembered, too well, Mr Noom's funeral. A nasty sweaty business.

‘Mr Pandervil!' Someone had run in from the street. It was Mr Pummice. ‘The old lady's gone off!'

‘Eh?' Which old lady could that be? Oh, yes. ‘Glad to hear it,' said Egg.

Mr Pummice appeared to be profoundly shocked by this remark. His features quivered like the protuberances on a jelly-mould. ‘Glad to hear it!'

‘Well,' said Egg sheepishly, ‘we didn't want her sitting in the road
all
day, did we!' But the sight of his neighbour's extreme perturbation suggested a more sinister interpretation of his phrase. ‘Gone off? You said gone off, dint you? You don't mean she's——'

‘Gone off in a faint or fit or something,' supplied Mr Pummice. ‘Seems to me,' he added severely, as Egg lifted the flap of the counter and hurried forward, ‘seems to me it's time you remembered your duty to that poor old lady, Mr Pandervil.' He seized Egg's arm and hurried him into the street.

Another and younger woman was now seated on the tin trunk, and in the lap of this stranger Mrs Noom's head reclined. The rest of her person sprawled shockingly—but not, thought Egg, uncomfortably—on the road. A group of awestruck children and a sprinkling of sympathetic neighbours lent an extra touch of drama to the scene. Egg, taking a sixpenny piece from his pocket, approached the eldest-looking among the children. ‘See here, my lad!' said he, and bent to the child's
ear. With his back to the neighbours he could hear the voice of the young woman, excited and compassionate: ‘I b'lieve she's coming to!' And he turned round to confirm his astonished guess that this was no stranger after all, but Fanny Hunt; and uncommonly pretty she looked, as he couldn't help noticing, though not so pretty as she had been. Conscious that something was expected of him, he stepped reluctantly into the inner circle of first-aiders. Mr Pummice was at that moment trying to pour a few drops of brandy into the sufferer's mouth. But her teeth were tightly clenched.

‘Tight as can be!' exclaimed Mr Pummice, grimacing over his shoulder at Egg. ‘Like a vice, upon my word.'

‘Try holding her nose a bit,' suggested Egg.

From the indignant murmurs that arose, and from the reproach flashed at him from the pretty hazel eyes of Fanny Hunt, he realised that he had said the wrong thing. Couldn't the noodles
see
that the old woman was shamming?

‘Not the man I thought you,' muttered Mr Pummice, yearning tenderly over the recumbent figure of Mrs Noom. ‘Not by any manner of means … Heartless!' he declared, nuzzling the mouth of his flask against the tight-shut lips of his patient. ‘No bowels!' he added, in a somewhat louder voice, chucking her gently under the chin. Despairing of success, he got up and repeated his remark with dreadful distinctness. ‘No bowels of compassion, Mr Pandervil!'

There followed a loud silence.

‘Can't you
see
she's making game of us?' Egg spoke his thought aloud. ‘Fit! Fainting! Does she
look
as if she's fainted? Not her. She's as tough an old party as ever walked, and the craftiest too … Hullo, here comes the doctor! Doctor! Doctor Renwick!'

Mrs Noom gave a gasp, opened her eyes, and murmured: ‘Where am I?'

‘You see?' said Egg. ‘As soon as she thinks the doctor's coming, she's as right as a trivet. She thought he was safe out of reach, and so he was, and so he is,' he added excitedly. But he might have saved his breath, for whichever way he turned, there were shocked faces staring at him. ‘Come along, Ma!' he said. ‘He's a fine doctor, Doctor Renwick is! Just the sound of his name puts you right, don't it?' But the confidence had gone out of him. The weight of public sentiment was too oppressive.

While Fanny Hunt stroked the old woman's head and made maternal noises over her, Mr Pummice, evidently feeling that Farringay waited for a lead from him, stepped forward a pace and cleared his throat nervously. ‘The quality of mercy,' he began. Then, abandoning his quotation with the air of a man who drops his sword and resorts to a cudgel, he remarked in a swelling voice: ‘As for You, sir! I can only conclude that you have Taken Leave of your Senses.' There was a murmur of applause. ‘Please!' he said, raising a deprecating hand. ‘Please! … Let's carry the the poor old lady into the house.'

Egg, who until this moment had listened with an uneasy grin, suddenly and fatally lost his temper. ‘Not into my house, nor my shop neither! Be damned if you shall. Be damned! Be damned!' The little crowd shuddered away from this wicked and violent man. The cab drove up, with Egg's messenger riding triumphantly in it. ‘Now then!' said Egg. ‘In you go!' He darted towards the prostrate Mrs Noom, pushing aside Pummice who sought to bar his passage. ‘You go and make faces at home, Pummice!' He stooped over his mother-in-law; she stared and screamed at him with vexation. The next instant, before anyone could stay him, he was carrying her bodily to the waiting cab. ‘In with you!' She was in. He shut the door. ‘And a mighty good riddance!' The cab drove off.

Wonderfully refreshed by this release of anger, perhaps heartened by the discovery that he was still capable of resolute and even violent action, he grinned without malice at the backs of his dispersing neighbours; and when he observed that the tin trunk still occupied the middle of the road, it distressed him not at all. The cabman ought to have remembered it; his instructions had been explicit; but it could be sent on later—to-morrow, or next week. And if the old woman lacked a nightdress, she could sleep in her shift.

He dragged the trunk to the door of his shop, from which, just as he reached it, Doctor Renwick was emerging.

The sight of the trunk appeared to surprise the doctor. ‘Left it behind, did she! After making
me lug it out of the house for her, the old baggage!' He laughed. ‘Did I hear someone out here calling me a few minutes ago?'

‘Yes, but it's all right now … Is it over?' He scanned the doctor's face and was alarmed by what he seemed to see there.

‘Yes, it's over.'

‘Do you mean … ' Did he mean that Carrie was dead?

‘Stillborn, I'm sorry to say. As I feared. Your wife's pulling through pretty well. Shaken up, and she'll be disappointed, of course. But it was a quick delivery.'

Egg found himself wanting to weep: not for the death of an unknown baby, but for the squandered agony, the courage, the dumb endurance. He pictured Carrie lying up there staring at the wall, rather sulky, but with the sulkiness of a child threatened by a storm of tears. His heart tightened. ‘Can I go and see her?'

‘I've put her to sleep,' said Doctor Renwick. ‘But you can go in quietly and have a look at her. She won't wake for an hour or two, I fancy. And … by the way, I'll make all the necessary arrangements. See?'

He was gone before Egg could reply.

Egg tiptoed his way into the room. The nurse —that district nurse so despised by Mrs Farthing —shot at him a glance of mournful welcome. He approached the bed and stared down at his wife. She was sleeping peacefully, her lips slightly parted. Tears started to his eyes. She was neither
pretty nor young; but her expression of naive contentment made her seem not only a child, but a child mocked. P'raps it's for the best, he said to himself. After all we didn't really want another, either of us. But the sense of waste and of some fundamental desolation was still quick in him; and, as he slouched out of the room, another picture flashed into his mind, for a moment displacing Carrie. He saw Mrs Noom as—without thought, without understanding—he had seen her less than ten minutes ago. Having fought her last fight and suffered defeat, she sat back in the cab that was to take her into exile. There was a dazed look in her eyes, a bitter twist about her lips … And Egg, re-living this moment as he slowly descended the stairs, heaved a sigh that was half sadness and half homage—though what this homage could mean, and to whom it was offered, were questions which, had they entered his mind, he would have been puzzled indeed to answer.

During the next few years there was a decided coolness between Mr Pandervil, persecutor of old ladies, and Mr George Pummice, Farringay's literary stationer. Moreover, there was for a while a general feeling that Mr Pandervil had behaved scandalously—first throwing his own mother-in-law into the street, and then, with her at death's door as you might say, taking hold of her like as if she'd a bin a sack of coals and emptying her head
first into that cab. Mr Pummice was voted a hero for the way he had ‘stood up' to the wild man; and no one thought the better of Mr Pandervil for having punched and kicked and bitten a gentleman nigh fifteen years older than himself. ‘Like a mad dog he was,' declared Fanny Hunt, the post office maiden, whose hatred of Egg was advertised all over Farringay. She never wearied of describing how Mr Pandervil had picked the old woman up and carried her, as easy as easy, to the cab. ‘Must be strong as a lion!' she would say, her eyes shining with an excitement that reduced her age by at least five years. And she would add, with a small delicious shudder, that he oughtn't to be at large, it wasn't safe it wasn't. Perhaps, in recent years, life had become just the least bit too safe for Fanny Hunt; she was now on the wrong side of thirty; and it may be that when her fellow-gossip had gone—‘Well, Miss Hunt, I wouldn't care to meet a hooligan like
that
in a dark lane!' ‘Nor wouldn't I, Mrs Tilly! My word, no! Good day to you!'— it may be that then, alone with her thoughts, she found it possible to modify her hatred of Mr Pandervil and even to half-en joy her fear of encountering him in a dark lane.

With the help, perhaps of the Farthings, who made it their business to circulate an approximately true version of the story, Farringay soon forgot its disapproval of Egg. Not so Mr Pummice, who continued to turn his head away whenever the culprit came near him. By constant practice these two became adept in the art of avoiding each other, so
that they did not meet again until six years later, on the occasion of the Wimmett sale, at which, to their common discomfort, they found themselves standing side by side. For Wimmett, who had been getting into and out of difficulties all his commercial life, was at last being sold up by his creditors, the chief of whom was represented by a genial and very smartly dressed old gentleman from the metropolis. Mr Wimmett himself, whose career would have been very different if only he had been able to lay his hand on a fifty-pound note from time to time, watched the proceedings dull-eyed from a corner. The sale was being conducted in the drawing room. Near Mr Wimmett was that little brown mouse of a woman, his wife, who, staring round in a bewildered fashion at what with innocent pride she had called her ‘best suit of furniture,' and at the knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, the lovely lustres and the imitation-bronze horses and the marble clock that had been Papa's magnificent wedding-present ten years ago, appeared to derive no pleasure from the reflection which must have crossed her mind, that she would never again have the bother of dusting these things and of putting the room to rights. Perhaps she was thinking of her seven children; for her children had been distributed among her comparatively rich relatives, and it was difficult to know when she might hope to see them all under one roof again. And perhaps that fugitive smile, which Egg found it peculiarly difficult to bear, meant that she was already planning the new home—smaller, no doubt, but
cosy and comfortable—which she was to have as soon as Mr Wimmett's ship came to harbour. She could not, however, but have known that Mr Wimmett's ship must be regarded as utterly becalmed unless and until he could lay his hand on … in short, until the first condition preliminary to any sort of success had been fulfilled; for it is notorious—and Mr Wimmett made no secret of the fact—that a man can do nothing and get nowhere in this world, nowhere at all, without he has a bit of capital behind him.

‘A bad business, this!' remarked Mr Pummice. And lo, it was the insolent, the heartless Pandervil that he found himself addressing. And presently, with embarrassment rather than bitterness, and later with perhaps a twinge of regret for the years wasted in quarrelling, he was engaged in conversation with that ruffian. Both men were nervous of each other, and eagerly polite. Having once spoken they became afraid of silences. Egg talked rather rapidly, and almost at random; and Mr Pummice displayed an exaggerated interest in everything that was said to him, working his face into all manner of strange and eloquent shapes.