The Pandervils (42 page)

‘Did you speak, uncle?'

‘Eh?' Uncle Algy was peevish.

‘I thought you said something.'

‘No.' He fussed with his watch. ‘Late if he
don't look lively. Tom! Hi, Tom Meadows! …' He tried to get on to his feet to reach the speaking tube, failed, and sank back with a fierce grunt. ‘Tell him, can't you! Rap on the thingummy.'

‘But we're almost there now, uncle. See, it's only half-past twelve, and we're within ten minutes of Mercester. Sale's not till two, you know.' Seeing his uncle grow calmer he tried to comfort him further by talking of food. ‘Don't know how
you
feel, but I'm ready for lunch.'

‘You c'n 'ave mine too,' grumbled Uncle Algy. ‘I shan't eat anything.' But in this belief he was mistaken, for when the waiter at the Coach and Horses brought him, with a most flattering bow, the bill of fare, he began to be himself again. ‘Now, nephew, we must make a good lunch. Can't go to battle on an empty belly. We must fortify the inner man, as I used to tell y'r aunt in the old days.' He recalled the waiter. ‘George old friend! —fetch me a wine list, will ye? You look at one, Nick, and I'll look at t'other, so that we can make a real job of it and no time lost. Got it, George? That's the style!'

The waiter knew Mr Pandervil well, and perhaps it was that, as much as the prospect of food, that heartened the old man. Indeed everybody knew him in Mercester, and it was quite like old times to be sitting in the dining-room of the Coach and Horses (an altogether grander place than the old Farmer's Rest had been even in its forgotten prime), nodding genially at this neighbour, cracking a loud joke with another, and having youngsters
of fifty or sixty jump up at sight of him and come to his table to pay their respects. ‘Old Pandervil! Quite an old cure!' That's what they said of him, as he well knew, for he had overheard such things more than once; and, with that knowledge snug and warm inside him, and being wide awake to the glances and smiles his presence kindled in the company, it hardly needed George's highly recommended Old Madeira to put a sparkle in his rheumy eye. ‘Glad to see you, Mr Jones. And how's things with you, old friend? This is my nephew and heir, Mr Nicholas Pandervil. Say how d'ye do to Mr Jones, Nick. A good friend of mine is Mr Jones. Many a fine beast I've knocked down to Mr Jones. Hey, Mr Jones? … Ah, here's young Mr Kitto come to tell me how many beans make five. That's so, isn't it, my dear fellow? This is my nephew Nicholas, farmer like y'rself, and chip of the old block, as you see. My brother's youngest. Nick, a word in y'r ear, boy. Mr Kitto here knows what's what. Went and married the prettiest young lady in Mershire, the young scamp.
I
asked her first but she dint hear me, so now she's Mrs Kitto.' He gave Kitto a confidential nudge. ‘Only my fun, old friend.' A third acquaintance came into view. ‘ ‘Pon my word if it isn't Mr Jennings! Glass o' wine, Mr Jennings. Glass of wine, Mr Jones. Now don't run away, Mr Kitto my dear boy, come and have a glass o' wine. George! Where's George! … We'll drink a health or two,' explained Uncle Algy, with a knowing wink at Nicky. ‘We'll
drink success to the sale. Eh, Nick?'

So deeply engrossed did Uncle Algy become in talking and drinking with his cronies that he didn't offer to stir from his seat till Tom Meadows came to help him down to the billiard room, where the sale was on the point of beginning. Arranged as it was now, with rows of deal benches facing the auctioneer, the room reminded Nicky of the Ebenezer Sunday School, a resemblance strengthened by the solemn silence in which the auctioneer and his congregation stared at each other for a few preliminary seconds. There was but a sprinkling of people: nobody, it seemed, greatly cared to whom or for what price the Ridge Farm would be sold. And when the bidding began—‘one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand four, one thousand four, I'll take fifties, one thousand four fifty, and five to you, sir? one thousand five'— Uncle Algy, so little was he impressed (the knowing fellow!), found time to whisper caustic comments into Nicky's ear. ‘Poor chap, he's new to it. Slow, very slow. I'd like to shew him how, I'd just like to shew him how. Half asleep the folks are, and no wonder. Doesn't know what he's about. Thinks he's bathing the baby by the sound of 'im. Hushabye baby on the tree-tops. That's not the way to sell a farm.' But presently his monologue died away, and people began to look round at him. There were audible whispers. ‘Mr Pandervil's bidding.'

To Mr Pandervil the property was finally knocked down. ‘That bit of money I spoke of,
nephew: you'll find it three thousand pounds short when you come to count it. And the farm's yours, boy.' He could hardly speak in his excitement, but with Tom and Nicky each lending him an arm he struggled to his feet again.

The auctioneer's clerk came, followed by the auctioneer himself eager to pay a compliment to his ancient rival. ‘Don't disturb yourself, Mr Pandervil.'

Uncle Algy, as slowly as he had risen, sat down. ‘Mr Nicholas, my nephew and heir. Never so happy in all my life.'

‘Very gratified to see you here, sir. Congratulate you on securing a fine little property.'

Nicky, staring with mild curiosity at the author of these civilities, and liking the fellow, was surprised by the laugh with which Uncle Algy responded to it. It was a sibilant mirthless laugh; harsh and hard; and it went on and on. Looking quickly round, Nicky stammered out: ‘Why, whatever … I say!' Uncle Algy's head was flung backwards across the back of his chair; his eyes were wide and staring; and from his mouth, which hung dribbling open, came a curiously mechanical noise like that of sawing.

They lowered him to the ground, loosened his collar, poured brandy into his mouth from Tom Meadows's pocket flask. They did all the usual things. And when he was dead the two young men for whom he was something more than a tedious or whimsical old fellow met each other's eyes. Tom Meadows, it seemed, had not yet forgotten his
grievance.
‘I told
'im so!' grumbled Tom. ‘That stubborn 'e was, he wouldn't listen.' For a moment he stared crossly at the dead distorted face; then, turning convulsively away, he burst into a loud blubbering.

Nicky's fancy that he and Jane had been made for each other was already become a deep-rooted habit of his mind. It was irrational and indefensible, but he stuck to it; and though, like every other lover, he tormented himself with the possibility of losing her, telling himself a hundred times a day that he wasn't worthy to be in the same world with such perfection as hers, he nevertheless thought of her already as his betrothed and sometimes even pictured her—mad presumption!—as his wife. To discover who she was and where she lived had proved no very difficult task. He seized the first opportunity of sneaking into Upridge Church when it was empty and examining the pew she had occupied with her mother (for surely it was her mother); and there, on the little disc of identification such as marked each of the rented pews, he read the name
Marsh
. This excited but did not content him: the evidence was not conclusive. He shamelessly pried into the flyleaves of the various devotional books that lay on the pewledge, and in one of them, a New Testament, was written in a prim schoolgirlish hand:
Eleanor Jane Marsh. 1907
. Jane! That's her! And that was
her handwriting four years ago—how delicious! Not always, now, was he so surely stirred by his thoughts of her: it needed, in fact, some concrete thing, some vestige of contact such as this scrap of her handwriting offered, to convince him of her reality; for of late the idea of her, that daydream at first so bright, had shone more dimly and required a more conscious rekindling. The suddenness of his uncle's death had shaken and bewildered Nicky, and for some few days after that event death had seemed the only fact worth taking any account of. To be alive and happy one moment, and dead the next—it made a mockery of everything. He looked with new eyes on his fellow creatures: doomed creatures, every one of them, and himself doomed too. Why do we put up with it! Why do we go on living and wanting to live, when at any moment this stupid horrible thing may happen to any one of us! It's like … it's like … like walking a tightrope over a precipice and knowing you'll fall sooner or later, perhaps this very minute, perhaps to-morrow. What's the use, then, of making plans and looking forward! And why— again he came back to that unanswerable absurd question—why do we put up with it, how can we bear it? Everyone knows the rope will break or he'll lose his balance or something, but we all go on pretending to forget it, pretending that it's worth while going on. It's a kind of crazy conspiracy, and we're all in it. Death's real, he said, death's permanent; and everything else is only a sort of game we play to stop ourselves thinking
about it. He didn't know that anyone had made this discovery before him, and he wondered at the blindness of the world, wondered how it was that this knowledge of death, the knowledge that is man's bitter privilege, did not poison for everyone, as it was doing for him, every minute of existence. But no sooner was the funeral over than he began to neglect the verdict of his logic, and to take the same unreasonable pleasure in being alive as he had taken before this ugly intrusion. He still asked sometimes why people consented to go on living on such humiliating terms; but meanwhile he himself fell into step with them; vital impulses drew his thoughts back from the encompassing darkness into our circle of candlelight. He remembered that he was in love, or thought he was—for now, in his most honest moments, he wasn't quite sure which. His pursuit of Jane's identity was carried out rather in the hope than in the certainty that she was as necessary to him as he chose to believe her; but now, sitting where she had sat that first time he saw her, and seeing the name, her own name, that her own hand had written—O Jane, his heart whispered, O my Jane!

The gods are said to look with disfavour on such extravagant presumption as Nicky's, and to punish the offender. But Nicky they indulged, not punished; contriving that he and Jane Marsh should happen upon each other in the church porch one Sunday evening, and so long after the beginning of evensong they had not the effrontery to go into the church.

And now—or never—he must speak to her. ‘I'm afraid it's late.'

Taken by surprise, she looked at him with question in her glance. ‘ Yes.'

‘Too late to go in, I mean.'

‘Yes.'

That conversation was over. Nicky thought he had never seen anything so certainly finished, so dead and buried and hopeless of resurrection, as that conversation. But presently he tried again: ‘Er … I've often seen you in church.'

Perhaps it was surprise that made her hesitate before responding. ‘Have you?' She glanced quickly away. Her voice, though not unfriendly, was cool; its impersonality seemed to rebuke him. He wanted to say: ‘Well, since we're too late for church, let's go somewhere else and have a talk.' That was clearly impossible, and equally impossible were all the alternatives he could think of. He felt awed, shy, apologetic, afraid of being thought an impudent fellow. He stared with troubled eyes at his boots, resolving to say no more and wondering whether he had best clear off at once. The silence became an intolerable embarrassment, but no sooner had he conceived the idea of instant flight than indecision paralysed him. Whether to say good-bye or to go without a word, that was the question. The first seemed cheeky, the second uncivil. Yet he felt he would go crazy if he had to stand here much longer, awkward and self-accusingly silent in her presence. His not looking at her was surely, he thought, as insulting
now as his looking had been before. He dragged himself a few feet away and pretended to be trying to read the parish notices, which were posted on the wall. So occupied, he heard her voice.

‘I beg … Did you say …?'

‘In the ruin,' she repeated. ‘There's a nest there with young ones in.'

It was sudden, but he rallied his wits. ‘Oh, birds. Do you mean birds?'

‘Yes. Finches, I think. It was looking at them made me so late. I simply daren't go in now, dare you?'

‘No fear,' said Nicky, with enthusiasm. ‘Where did you say the birds were?'

‘In the ruin.'

For a moment, blankness; then Nicky remembered that behind the present church, with only a few yards of grass intervening, there stood an ancient ruin, roofless, ivy-covered, and believed to be a thousand years old. ‘Oh I know. The ruined church.' She faintly smiled, perhaps at his slowness, perhaps recalling the sight of the nestlings. ‘I wonder,' said Nicky, ‘if I could find it. The nest I mean.' A wonderful hope dawned in his mind. ‘Could you …'

‘Yes, I'll tell you where to find it.' She stepped out of the porch, the better to direct him. His hope became dim, but he quickly joined her. ‘It's on the outside of the big wall. That'll be … that'll be the south wall, won't it?' O desolation! His hope was quenched. ‘ The nest's about as high as me, so I've built a sort of platform to stand on,
with some of the old bricks lying about there.' She pointed him the way; and at sight of her standing in the sunlight, facing him unselfconsciously, one hand shading her eyes and the other pointing towards the ruined church, he had the sensation of being in a world beyond time and space, the thought flashing upon him: I shall never forget this, never; and, in the moment of her moving, that picture of her became for him imperishable.

She lowered her arm and turned slightly away as if in dismissal, and the gesture so deeply agitated him that he tried, desperately, one more cast of the net. ‘I suppose you couldn't come and
show
me. I mean come and help me find it.'

She hesitated, shyly but not for long: for long enough only to make her consenting, when it came, a surprise as well as a rapture.

She set off through the churchyard, leaving him to follow. Her haste must mean, he thought, that she found his persistence tiresome and was anxious to be rid both of this task he had set her and of him. While he hurried after her he was planning to say something in extenuation of his conduct. But he happily forgot this plan when he saw her mount that step of piled bricks and heard her whisper ‘Yes, here they are!' She jumped down, so that Nicky could take her place; and for an instant he almost forgot her in the first quick queer pleasure of seeing a cluster of small bird-mouths wide and confidingly open. He stared for a few seconds.