‘Willy’s wounded.’
He had the air—he was conscious of having it, he was conscious of everything in the universe—of offering this proposition, not as a question, but as a statement which he challenged Algernon to deny. And he knew himself to be gazing at Algernon in a fashion half-accusing, half-defiant, as if daring him to pretend that any news could be worse than that. In Algernon’s answering look he saw that his brother’s eyes were tortured with a compassion of which he, Egg, was the object. Algernon took a step towards him, mouth agape, hands pleadingly extended.
‘Willy’s wounded,’ repeated Egg woodenly.
‘Nay, my dear … ’ stammered Algernon. ‘Not wounded, Willy isn’t. Not wounded, boy. He’s … killed, poor butty!’ He tried to add: ‘Don’t hate me for it, Eggie!’ His voice broke on the words.
Algernon’s heart, in all its misery and loneliness, was naked to Egg’s sight, but the mind of Egg was filled with a vision in which Algernon had no part. Algernon was heartbroken for Egg’s sake, and Egg could feel only a dull resentment that the fellow valued Willy so little as to have emotion to spare on a merely vicarious sorrow. Tearlessly, coldly, he met his brother’s mournful, timid, solicitous scrutiny; but indeed he was now but vaguely aware of it. The objective world had ceased to be vivid. The orchard trees, the cow, Algernon himself— these were flat figures on the backcloth of a new series of images, visible and audible, that slid across the stage of his mind. A battlefield, sleek and glossy and full of bright bad colours like the picture of Waterloo in the kitchen, yet horrible with a horror of its own, a nightmare region. Snorting horses, thundering hoofs, the roar and smoke of cannonry, swords flashing, martial music; yes, drums beating, trumpets sounding, everything right and proper, except that above it all Egg could hear the voice of a man hideously screaming, and that in the foreground he could see human faces, scattered limbs, trodden into the mud. He saw, too, a goose hanging upside down, blood dripping from its beak, with children gazing and giggling; young Mr Fox, the auctioneer’s clerk, briskly licking the point of his pencil; Jinny Randall in church, singing psalms (seen with a sidelong glance) or reciting prayers (seen covertly between half-closed fingers); the Recruiting Sergeant munching his meat, a vein palpitating in his temple and his eyes growing big as blood alleys; Jinny Randall again—that fool bitch, said Egg bitterly. And always there was Willy himself: Willy digging a dog’s grave; Willy stamping cakes of mud from his boots; Willy in the hayfield tipping back his head to drink cider from a black horn cup; Willy leaning on a rake astride a loaded wagon; and Willy, red-coated, mutilated, misshapen, staring glassily at the moon, alone with his brother corpses. No, said Egg’s mind. No. NO. But on the face confronting him—for Algernon couldn’t for ever be ignored—the truth was clearly written, not to be argued or blustered away. And in that face, in those eyes already brimmed with compassion, dawned a new anxiety.
‘Steady, lad, steady!’ Algernon’s hands were still imploring his. ‘Don’t take it that way!’
Egg stepped back a pace, mutely declining to be touched. ‘Willy’s wounded,’ he said, for the third time. And, after a moment’s staring silence, he turned his back on Algernon and walked slowly woodenly away. …
And not for some weeks did Algernon dare to mention Willy again, although, as Egg couldn’t but be aware, there was nothing he wanted more than to talk the matter out. For a while, intimidated by Egg’s savage silent grief, he kept a strict guard on his speech, so that—in the consciousness of both brothers—whenever they were together it was as if the ghost of Willy stood between them. Yet finally, when what had to be said was said, the words fell naturally enough on ears that had forgotten to expect them.
‘’Twas just such another day as this,’ said Algernon, ‘when Willy came home in his regimentals. You ’member, Egg?’
‘Ay.’
‘Sort of far away, he was, like a stranger,’ said Algernon.
Egg gave no sign of being astonished. But astonished he was. It was a shock to him to discover that Algernon had perceived Willy’s absent-mindedness. Willy had listened and talked as of old; had eaten with his accustomed gestures; and had slipped back, after perhaps an hour of stiffness in his gait, into the slow swinging stride of one who has spent his life crossing ploughed fields. To all chaff he replied with his old grin; and once, when sharp-eyed Flisher had spoken the name of Jinny Randall, he had blushed. Yet in spite of these familiar manifestations Egg had been conscious that Willy was absent from them; that bull-necked Sergeant, or his like, had done something to change Willy, or rather to drive the real Willy into hiding; and while others admired and clapped their hands and said, ‘You do look a smart one!’ Egg held his peace, hating the red coat of servitude. He hated it still more in retrospect, believing that it had in part obscured his last sight of Willy. His mind set moving by what Algernon had said, what part, he asked himself, had Jinny played during that brief leave? The question lingered with him for some days, and at last, as if in answer to it, Jinny herself appeared. They met down the road, a few yards from the house: he in his working clothes, she in bonnet and crinoline.
‘Arfnoon, Miss Randall,’ said Egg. And was for passing on; but Jinny lingered, and he could not quite bring himself to snub her.
‘Oh, Egg, I wanted to speak to you.’
He waited for her to continue. He was ill at ease, for he was still nursing anger against her, the more resolutely because she had not died of grief. Moreover her dress made the occasion a formal one; she was no longer the familiar Jinny Randall, of Randall’s Stores, nor yet the Miss Randall he and Willy had watched in church: she was a call-paying lady.
‘I wanted … ’ faltered Jinny again, ‘to speak to you.’
‘Mother’s up at the house,’ suggested Egg. For it was impossible that Jinny should want him.
‘Yes, I’m paying a call on Mrs Pandervil. But … but you first, because …’ He noticed that her usually sallow face was flushed, and that there were dark rings under her dark eyes. She was, to his view, more definitely a woman than she had ever been before; he was aware of some force in her which, had it not faintly repelled, might have fascinated him; but being a few months short of eighteen against Jinny’s mature twenty-three, he was at a loss to understand why Willy had loved her. ‘Because,’ stumbled Jinny, ‘because Willy said …’
At the mention of that name Egg tried to harden his heart against her. ‘Never mind,’ said he shortly. ‘Mother’s up at the house if you’m wanting her.’
The rebuff made Jinny widen her eyes in wonder. ‘But won’t you do something for me?’ Her tone was humble, almost pleading. ‘Willy said you would. He thought a terrible lot of you, Willy did. It was always Egg this and Egg that,’ These last words carried a hint of weariness, even a hint of resentment; and Egg, seeing her to have been once jealous of him and feeling her to be no longer so, was conscious that in himself, too, anger had suddenly died. That Willy had loved this woman was still matter for astonishment, but that she had loved Willy brought her within range of Egg’s understanding. He could not, however, find any answer for her.
‘I was to come to you in any trouble,’ Jinny breathlessly added. ‘That was one of the very last things he said to me.’
‘Are you in trouble now?’
She nodded. ‘And I want you to take me to your mother, Egg, please. And stay in the room with us.’
‘Why?’ asked Egg, with a look as unsympathetic as his voice.
A blush began flooding her face; she put up her hands to hide it. Egg, thinking she was about to weep, at once repented of his harshness.
‘Won’t you tell me why?’ he said mildly.
She faced him again, saying: ‘It’s just a whim, Egg. I don’t want to be alone with your mother. I’m nervous of her, but if you’re there I shan’t mind so much, because you and Willy understood one another.’
‘Mother won’t eat you,’ said Egg.
‘Will you do this for me?’ she asked.
He shrugged his shoulde
rs. ‘Oh, all right. But if Mother asks me to go out of the room I shall have to, shan’t I?’ He was, indeed, acutely uncomfortable at the thought of overhearing a conversation the purport of which could already be guessed. But to refuse her request, in the face of all that had been said, would have made him more uncomfortable still. In his heart he said: Why am I so soft about things?
The visitor was received in what Mrs Pandervil called her parlour, a sunless intimidating room that was so seldom used as to have entirely escaped the beneficent infection of humanity. Two stuffed birds in glass cases stood one each side of the mantelpiece, with a clock, a pair of tall vases, and two glass lustres coming between them. These objects were reflected in the large overmantel mirror, but it might be urged in its defence that the reflection was not accurate. The walls with their dark blue pattern of which the recurring theme was a bunch of grapes twining round the stalk of a peony, were plentifully sprinkled with family records—a greatly enlarged photograph of Mr Pandervil at twenty-five, another of Mrs Pandervil nursing her first baby, silhouette portraits of Mrs Pandervil’s parents, and a sampler done by Sarah Pandervil at the age of eleven and a half—but these human evidences singularly failed to alleviate the spiritual deadness of the room.
‘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.
Chapter the Second
Monica
1
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.
The Pandervils Page 5
