The Pandervils by Gerald Bullet Page B

all that was high and difficult and eccentric. ‘Not in my line, poetry. Very nice, I’m sure. But I can’t understand it.’
    He was about to close the book, but she placed a finger on the page and cried: ‘There, that’s a lovely one. Some of them are very hard, but anybody can understand that one.’
    Wrinkling his brow, Egg read the sonnet through. It meant nothing to him. He read it again, silently forming the words with his lips, and he received a vaguely pleasant impression. A phrase in the fourth line, ‘heavy Saturn’, proved a stumbling block; for he read it as ‘heavy Satan’, and he felt that to mention Satan in the presence of a lady must surely amount to swearing.
    â€˜Do you like it?’ asked Monica.
    Being interested, Egg had forgotten his fear ofher superior intelligence. ‘Lemme read it once again,’ he said.
    This time he discovered, with something like excitement, that he was reading an avowal of love. And, by some miracle (or was it her pointing finger?) four lines of the fourteen leapt up at him and presented themselves as a poem separate, complete, and curiously personal. Their meaning was not immediately clear, but he felt them to be beautiful.
    Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight.
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those
.
    He liked these lines so much that he blushed in admitting the fact. ‘But what does “drawn after you” mean?’ he asked, with the image of a cart and horse in his mind.
    Monica explained: ‘Drawn like pictures, don’t you see? The way we had to copy things at school.’
    â€˜I see. And the pattern means …?’
    â€˜That’s what you have to copy.’
    Egg read the sonnet a fourth time, paying special attention to this chosen passage; and he began to see that there was ‘something in’ poetry, in spite of its superficial queerness. And a plan of incredible daring formed in his mind. ‘I see what it means,’ he said, looking at Monica. ‘It means you.’
    She turned from him with downcast eyes, and blushing. After a few minutes silence she said,‘I must go now.’ And Egg was miserable all day thinking that his boldness had frightened her away from him for ever.
2
    For seven more days Egg visited the orchard in search of her. She did not come. Nor did she come up to the house for milk. On Sunday he saw her distantly in church, but she seemed unaware of him. He made sure that he had irretrievably lost her.
    Meanwhile the work of the farm went on, and Egg could not afford to be idle. Ten acres or so must be ploughed for root-planting—mangolds, turnips, swedes—or there would be no food for the cattle; there were sixty five sheep to be shorn; and, of the lambs, the ‘singles’ were now more than fat enough to be profitably sold, and many of the others were coming on smartly. Then before many weeks were past it would be time to be thinking about mowing and tedding and hauling the hay; Flisher would be busy with her cheese making, and three of the cows would be due to calve. Then, with the corn harvest and the fruit picking, another season would have come full circle. Altogether there was plenty of work to occupy Egg and Algernon, Higlett the shepherd, Dan Oaks the cowman, and Potty Oaks who was reputed to be Dan’s son and to have been begotten shamefully, said the gossips, within the tables of consanguinity; plenty of work, this, leaving littletime, one might have supposed, for lovesick dreaming. Yet Egg, none the less, lived all that summer in a state of half-feverish, half-delightful melancholy, bearing on his twenty-year-old shoulders a burden of sorrow such as no one, he vowed, had ever borne before. With Algernon and Higlett— a small fellow, like a gipsy, with a squint eye and a mouth full of black teeth—he rounded up the ewes,