The Pandervils by Gerald Bullet Read Free Book Online Page B

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 Pandervilscould 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.