‘Had a talk with Jinny t’other night,’ said Willy at his side.
‘Did you?’ murmured Egg. Well, come to that, Willy often did have a talk with Jinny, didn’t he? The goose withdrew its beak into the basket. The auctioneer arrived and began saying in stern tones that this was the best goose he had ever seen.
‘Yes, had a talk,’ said Willy.
‘Whad she say?’ asked Egg.
Egg became aware that he and Willy were now hemmed in on every side by bidders and spectators. The bidding had begun. The poultry was being sold, and in particular the goose was being sold. It could not matter to Egg who bought the bird, or what price it fetched; yet he was conscious of giving only half his attention to Willy.
‘Bit noisy here,’ said Willy. ‘Tell you ’nother time.’
Egg took him at his word and stopped listening to anything but the bidding. Yes, someone had bought the goose, together with certain other birds that were being sold with it. The auctioneer moved on a few paces, taking his congregation with him. And Willy began talking again.
‘Yes, Jinny and I had a bit of a talk.’
‘Bit of a talk, eh?’ said Egg.
‘We did so,’ Willy assured him. ‘Might almost say a bit of a tiff,’ he added after a pause.
‘A tiff?’ echoed Egg. ‘Oh, not a tiff surely?’
The goose’s new owner was now taking possession of his property. A rich joke that bird was, and no mistake. The man untied the basket, thrust a hand in, and seized the goose cleverly by the legs and drew it out. It squawked and fluttered furiously. Some children stood by, watching the fun—four little boys, the eldest ten, the youngest perhaps five years old. They appeared to be happy children, but in a perfect world their noses would have been wiped. Goose tightly and easily held in one hand, with the other the purchaser fished out of his trousers-pocket a knife. With the help of his teeth he opened the knife. It looked a serviceable instrument for his purpose.
‘She kind of dared me,’ said Willy. He had been telling Egg about this bit of a tiff, but Egg was finding the story a difficult one to follow. And now Egg was conscious of a dull pain in his temples, where the knife had been stuck in … but that was nonsense, it was the goose’s head that had been transfixed, not his. The goose hung upside down from a nail in the fence; black and crimson gobbets dripped from its amusing beak; its white wings beat passionately; and the four little boys pointed, and nudged each other, and giggled delightedly. When the convulsion ended, the glee faded from their eyes. If only the goose could have been brought to life again, thought Egg, they could have had their fun a second time. But that was impossible. A pity, said Egg to himself; for he was hot and angry and a little sick; and he was secretly flustered, too, because he could not for the life of him get the drift of Willy’s occasional remarks. Jinny had kind of dared Willy—that was all that Egg could make out. But he could see that the trouble, whatever it was, meant a lot to Willy, and feeling ashamed of his inattention he didn’t care to ask questions that would let poor Willy see how little of the story had been listened to.
‘Of course,’ said Willy, ‘there’s no call to go telling ’em everything at home. But I wanted you to know, because you’ve got a head on your shoulders, moren some of us have. And—well— I wanted you to know.’
Yes, that was something that Egg did understand; for he would have felt the same about Willy, although Willy had not, as it happened, a very good head on his shoulders. Willy, despite the ten years between them, was nearer in sympathy to Egg than to Algernon; nearer, indeed, than Egg and Algernon were to each other. Egg was obscurely aware of this; and since he had never given it a moment’s conscious thought it seemed a perfectly natural thing calling for no explanation.
Willy’s remark amounted to an avowal of affection; so Egg asked quickly: ‘What did the lambs fetch?’
Willy stared in surprise—‘Didn’t you hear the bidding?’
Egg confessed that he had been wool-gathering; and when Willy told him the lambs’ price he made an eager show of interest. Meanwhile the two brothers had turned into The Farmer’s Rest and now sat down to the regulation market-day dinner. The place was already filled with men, and with the noise of men eating and talking together.
Willy nudged his brother. ‘There he is—just the chap I want.’
Following his brother’s indication, Egg saw that a stranger was come amongst them, a fellow conspicuously not of the farming fraternity who wore, for all the world as if it belonged to him, the bright scarlet uniform of the 17th Mershires. He was a very peacock among sparrows. With his gleaming buttons, his fine moustache, his loud voice and the proud chevrons of his rank, he looked like the illustration to a patriotic song. Before many minutes were passed everyone in the place was sharply aware of him. His brilliant presence struck so peremptory a note in that homespun company that was like a fire alarum, or the clangour of a brass bell commanding silence. He was the magnet for all eyes. Mouths gaped admiration; voices were lowered; there was a great deal of nudging and whispering and winking; and the serving-wenches went scarlet with a sense of the occasion. The only living thing in the room that seemed unconscious of the Sergeant was the Sergeant himself. Knife and fork held perpendicularly in the two fists planted one each side of his plate, he sat magnificently at ease, waiting his turn as though he had been an ordinary man. Proud, having such a presence, he could not help being: to call him proud is but to call him human. But haughty he was not; nor domineering. If he knew that his long mustard moustachios were the finest in Mershire, he did not flaunt the knowledge; if he knew himself physically a match for any three of these sleepy agriculturalists, he was not puffed up on that account. His manners were loud and civil. He said: ‘I’ll thank you for the salt, sir … Greatly obliged, sir!’ He was respectfully gay with the girls, rising to receive his plate of meat from the eager hands of one of them with a gallantry that almost translated boiled beef and carrots into a nosegay for his buttonhole; and twinkling kindly with his prominent russet-coloured eyes at the lass who brought him his tankard of ale. For a while, thereafter, he ministered faithfully to his appetite, quite unaware, you could have sworn, that all the world was covertly, and with an air of high expectation, watching for what he would do next. If he had been swallowing swords or munching glass they could not have found in him a more fascinating spectacle. And presently their vigilance was rewarded. He leaned towards his nearest neighbour and remarked: ‘They’re a savage lot, sir, them Roosians!’ Flattered and embarrassed by the honour of being taken into the Army’s confidence the man addressed could do no more than nod gravely, as if to say that he had already suspected as much. ‘But,’ added the Sergeant, raising his voice, ‘our lads are a match for them, never fear!’ In tribute to that sentiment all civilian tongues ceased to wag: and the Sergeant, continuing in a loud deliberate voice, yet with an air so heavy with secret meaning as to be almost conspiratorial, remarked to the world at large: ‘Though I’m not saying they couldn’t do with an ’elping ’and, gentlemen! No, no; I’m not saying that!’ And then, having got on good terms with his audience, the dazzling enigmatic creature hastily filled his mouth with suet pudding and munched fiercely for three silent minutes. He swallowed his pudding to the last glistening crumb of fat; took a long draught of ale; and, having sucked the froth off his moustache, he approached the root of the matter. ‘I don’t mind telling you gentlemen,’ he said, screwing up his eyes like a tipster, ‘I don’t mind telling you gentlemen that there’s a few more wanted for the Calvary.’ He rose to his feet and signed to the girl for his bill; paid it with pomp; and marched with clanking spurs to the door. There he halted, and then— on the heel of the right foot, on the ball of the left foot, and bringing the left smartly into the right —he performed an exemplary Right Turn.
‘Gentlemen, it’s a chance in a lifetime! Who’s for the Calvary! Who’s for swinging his leg over an ’orse and riding to glory!’ The gentlemen sat spellbound. Undoubtedly the fellow had a way with him. And as they st
ared at him his manner subtly changed. A whimsical smile creased his face; the stiffness of his pose relaxed. ‘Come, boys!’ he said cajolingly, affectionately. And at once these farmers felt like boys and saw this gallant scarlet-coated fellow as the genial father of them all, a man like themselves, fond of his pint and his joke, and craftier only in the ways of war. A moment before, they had been admiring the man’s performance: now, with two words, he had touched their hearts. ‘Come, boys! There’s fighting and there’s fun, there’s dooty and there’s danger! Who’s for the Queen and the Queen’s shilling?’
A chair scraped the floor. A young man stepped forward. ‘I’m with you, Sergeant!’
‘And you’ve the figure for it, lad!’ said the Sergeant. ‘You’ll look a fair treat on an ’orse. A regular stachoo!’ And with that he repeated his formula: ‘Who’s for the Queen and the Queen’s shilling?’
Egg felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Goo’bye, Eggie lad!’
He looked up, dazedly, into the face of Willy. One queer look passed between them, and then, before Egg understood his meaning or intention, Willy was having his hand shaken by the Sergeant.
‘Willy! Willy! Don’t be a gert fool!’
Egg’s shout was the signal for uproar. The spell was broken and the enchanted tongues unloosed. But when the boy would have rushed forward to hold his brother back by main force, a friendly hand gripped him. ‘Steady, lad! Steady!’
‘Let me go, damn you! Can’t you see what’s happening? It’s Willy, my brother. … ’
But the Sergeant had already hustled his men away, and when at last Egg succeeded in forcing a passage through the excited chattering group that remained, he reached the door just in time to see them vanish from sight at a bend in the street— that little huzza-ing crowd, by now mostly children and women, in whose midst strode Willy Pandervil, arm-in-arm with scarlet Death.
4
The Pandervil acres—which is to say the acres for which the Pandervils had paid rent for thirty years—consisted of some seven or eight fields, more grass than arable, distributed on and around a spur of the Mercester Hills know as Saffron Ridge. It had always been called the Ridge Farm, and Mr Pandervil’s fancy for writing Fipenny Hall at the head of his letter-paper did not for an instant threaten to break down the local custom. If Mr Pandervil was a gentleman that liked his joke, let him have it and enjoy it in private, especially a foreign joke such as a body couldn’t be expected to understand. Two centuries old, the house nestled snugly in what might be called the lap of Saffron Hill; for the shape of the hillside roughly suggested a woman asleep in a half-sitting half-recumbent attitude, with her head thrown back; her knees supported the farmhouse, and her ample bosom sheltered it from the north-east winds. The south and the west windows—such as they were—commanded a view of green valleys and of the lesser hill—little more than a bump— called Stally Pitch, beyond which lay Flinders. By climbing to the top of the Ridge the Pandervils could see, while still in their own fields, almost the whole of the great undulating plain of Mershire lying at their feet, a pattern of green and brown and silver. If in fact they seldom took the trouble to do so, it was perhaps because they had neither time nor thought to spare for the singular charm and interest of their situation, all being busy with more immediate affairs.
The weight of these affairs, in so far as the farm contributed to them, fell now, in Willy’s absence, on Algernon and Egg, though their father too, waking somewhat belatedly to a sense of danger, began to take an active part in the farm’s administration. Algernon resented being dragged away from the service of Dr Wilson; to Egg it seemed that his brother feared to lose that cosmopolitan glamour which daily intercourse with the outside world had imparted to him. For many weeks he did his farm-work grudgingly, and under Egg’s direction; but one day he seized the reins of government and asserted his seniority. ‘To-morrow, my lad,’ said Algernon, ‘we’ll finish that bit of ploughing back there.’ Had his appetite for authority been satisfied with such a statement of the obvious, all would have been well; but before long Algernon began to get ideas about farming, and then, for all his good intentions, he was a dangerous fellow. He appalled Egg one day by proposing that Flinders, the best grazing land for twenty miles round, should be ploughed and sown with wheat. ‘And where shall we graze the sheep then?’ asked Egg. Algernon, with a mulish look, replied that the sheep could graze where they pleased, adding: ‘Back up the hill. They’ll be out of the draught there. You and your precious sheep!’ ‘Where should we ’a been last year without sheep?’ demanded Egg, ‘with corn harvest ruined as it was? Too busy washing bottles to notice, you were! And there’s this about my precious sheep—they’re sheep, not goats. Maybe you didn’t know the difference. There’s not enough grass on the scrubby hillside to keep a rabbit healthy, let alone a few score sheep!’ Encounters of this kind made for strained relations between the brothers, for, though neither of them was disposed to cherish anger, they fell into the habit of disagreement and so were perpetually wrangling. It made matters no better that Mr Pandervil, when intervention was necessary, always decided on the conservative policy; for this strengthening of Egg’s hand made Algernon, smarting with humiliation, fall back on the fiction that he was a man in advance of his time, a pioneer whom nobody was quick enough to appreciate; and such a notion did not help to make him more lovable. Yet Algernon, when his ill-defined itch of ambition ceased for a while to trouble him, showed himself pathetically eager not to be shut out of Egg’s confidence. Perhaps his sense of having been always excluded from the unspoken affection subsisting between Egg and Willy had set up in his mind a conflict of which his stubbornness, his singular self-assertiveness, were but symptoms. Egg, who as he grew older became quick in divination of such disorders, half-guessed the truth about Algernon and began to make allowances for him. He did, indeed, everything for Algernon except the one thing that Algernon unconsciously—or perhaps consciously, if we but knew—demanded of him. He did not, because he could not, accept him as a substitute for the absent Willy. And on the day he learned that Willy had been killed at the front——
It was a sharp winter’s morning. Algernon, with the evil message on his tongue, found Egg in the orchard tending a sick cow.
‘Bad news, Eggie,’ said Algernon.
Egg looked up idly. ‘Well?’
‘Bad news about our Willy,’ said Algernon, beginning to flush and stammer, poor fellow, as though he felt that he was to blame for everything.
Egg’s glance wavered, and he moved a step or two away from the cow. All the physical details of the world about him became shockingly vivid and strident, leaping one by one into startling prominence, then rushing together in his consciousness with the effect of sudden assault. He looked at nothing, but sights crowded importunately upon him—the bare orchard trees rigid and black, their limbs twisted into gestures of pain; the cloud of his own breath, solid like marble, tangible, cold; and that monstrous unsignifying shape, that bright pattern of colour, the mutely suffering cow. He noticed, too, with a kind of sick curiosity, that the frozen turf was soft, elastic, spongy, and that it crackled under his feet with the sound of torn satin. All these things, these objects and these perceptions, were blindingly, deafeningly, prodigiously real and urgent; they offered to a mind eager for distraction from its enemy a thousand minute and curious details each one of which, accorded its share of attention, would serve to postpone by one degree the dreadful, the inevitable moment—the moment when he must turn from this bright feverish little drama and look into the face of the fear that stood at his elbow, watching, leering, biding its time. When at last, after an instant crammed with experience, it became imperative that Algernon should be answered, Egg said quickly, his words following Algernon’s with no appreciable delay:
The Pandervils Page 4
