The Jervaise Comedy

XI

The Story

She still stood by the great oak table, her hands resting lightly on its dark polished surface. I could see the vague reflection of her fingers reaching up through the deep solidity of the oak to join hands with her. She produced, I thought, an impressive effect of fragility and power in her contrast with that massive table. The material of her flesh was so delicate compared to the inert, formidable mass before her. She could not have lifted or moved it by her own effort. And yet it seemed that she had absolute command over that ponderous obstacle, that in some way the mobility of her spirit must give her control of it, that she might, if she wished, plunge those relatively fragile hands of hers deep into the lake of that dark and adamant surface.

She had not looked at me since Jervaise left the room, and when she spoke again she gazed with a kind of concentrated abstraction out of the window at the quiet glory of the calm August evening. Nevertheless her speech showed that all her attention was being given to the human interests that had just been absorbing us.

“Are you really a friend of ours?” she asked, “or did you just come here faute de mieux?” The little French phrase came like an unexpected jewel, as if she had relapsed unconsciously into a more familiar language.

I was strangely confused by the fact of our being alone together. I had an entirely unwarranted feeling that we were about to make up a quarrel. And I wanted to do my utmost to produce the best possible impression upon her.

“I hope I may call myself your brother’s friend,” I began lamely. “All my sympathies are with him.”

“You don’t know the Jervaises particularly well?” she inquired. For one moment she glanced down at her poised hands, but almost instantly returned to her rather absent-minded gazing through the open window.

“Except for Frank and his brother, I never met one of them until last night,” I explained. “I was at school and Cambridge with Frank.”

“But they are your sort, your class,” she said. “Don’t you agree with them that it’s a dreadful thing for Arthur, their chauffeur—and he was in the stables once, years ago—to try to run away with their daughter?”

“All my sympathies are with Arthur,” I repeated.

“Not because the Jervaises were so rude to you?” she asked.

“I liked him before that; when we met on the hill, very early this morning,” I said. “But, perhaps, he didn’t tell you.”

“Yes, he told me,” she said. “And was that the beginning of all the trouble between you and the Jervaises?”

“In a way, it was,” I agreed. “But it’s an involved story and very silly. I admit that they had grounds for suspecting that I had interfered.”

“Mrs. Jervaise and Olive are always suspecting people,” she volunteered. “I’ve often wondered why?”

“Like that, by nature,” I suggested.

“Perhaps,” she said carelessly as if she did not care to pursue that speculation. “You know that my mother was governess to Olive and Frank before she married my father?” she continued, still with that same air of discussing some remote, detached topic.

“I heard that she had been a governess. I didn’t know that she had ever been with the Jervaises,” I said.

“She was there for over two years,” pursued Anne. “She is French, you know, though you’d probably never guess it, now, except for an occasional word here and there. She left years before Brenda was born. Brenda is so much younger than the others. There’s eight years between her and Robert, the next one. Olive’s the eldest, of course, and then Frank.”

I made some conventional acknowledgment for this information. I was wondering if she were merely talking to save the embarrassment of silence. We had drifted, apparently, a long way from any matter of personal interest and I was hesitating as to whether I should not attempt a new opening, when she began again with the least little frown of determination.

“I’m talking about them, because if you are to be Arthur’s friend you ought to know more or less how things are between us and the Jervaises, and I might just as well say right out at once that we don’t like them; we’ve never liked them. Mother, more particularly. She has got something against them that she has never told us, but it isn’t that.” Her frown was more pronounced as she went on, “They aren’t nice people, any of them, except Brenda, and she’s so absolutely different from the rest of them, and doesn’t like them either—in a way.”

“You don’t even except Frank?” I mumbled. I could not resist the opportunity she had offered to ask that too pointed question; but I looked down at the floor as I spoke; I wanted her to understand that I was not cross-examining her.

“I knew you saw us,” she returned in the same even tone that she had used all through this conversation of ours. She had not once raised or lowered her voice. She might have been speaking a part, just to test her memory.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “Quite by accident, of course. I had no idea that he had come up here. I hadn’t seen him since breakfast.”

“It was a mistake,” she said simply.

I looked up at her, hoping with no shadow of reason that I might have played some part in her discovery that that caress in the wood had been a mistake. But she had not changed colour nor moved her attitude, and her voice was still free from any emotion as she said,—

“We thought, Brenda and I thought, that we might trick him. It was a piece of chicane. She and I were rather silly this morning. We excite each other. In a sort of way she dared me. But I was sorry afterwards and so was Brenda, although she thought it might be better as I’d gone so far to keep it up until Arthur had got a promise or something out of Mr. Jervaise. I had meant to do that. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“But do you think that Frank Jervaise realises that you were only playing with him for your own ends, this morning?” I asked.

“Oh! yes,” she said with perfect assurance. “As a matter of fact, he was very suspicious this morning. He’s like his mother and sister in suspecting everybody.”

“Do you think he’ll make trouble?” I said. “Now? Up at the Hall?”

“Yes, I do. He’s vindictive,” she replied. “That’s one reason why I’m glad you are with us, now. It might help—though I don’t quite see how. Perhaps it’s just the feeling of having some one else on our side. Because I’m afraid that there’s going to be a lot of trouble when my father and mother come home. With my father, more particularly. He’ll be afraid of being turned out. It will be very difficult to make him take up a new idea. He’ll hate the thought of leaving here and starting all over again in Canada. He loves this place so.”

“And I suppose he likes, or at least respects, the Jervaises?” I said.

“Not much,” she replied. “They’ve made it very difficult for us in many ways.”

“Deliberately?” I suggested.

“They don’t care,” she said, warming a little for the first time. “They simply don’t think of any one but themselves. For instance, it mayn’t seem much to you, but it’s part of our agreement with Mr. Jervaise to provide the Hall with dairy when they’re at home—at market prices, of course. And then they’ll go to town for two or three months in the summer and take a lot of the servants with them, and we’re left to find a market for our dairy as best we can, just when milk is most plentiful.” She lifted her hands for a moment in a graceful French gesture as she added, “Often it means just giving milk away.”

“Does your father complain about that?” I asked.

She turned and looked at me with a complete change of expression. Her abstraction had vanished, giving place to an air that confessed a deliberate caprice.

“To us,” she said with a laugh that delightfully indulged her father’s weakness.

I needed nothing more to illuminate the relations of the Banks family. With that single gesture she had portrayed her father’s character, and her own and her mother’s smiling consideration for him. Nevertheless I was still interested in his attitude towards the Hall—with Anne as interpreter. I knew that I should get a version noticeably different from the one her brother had given me on the hill that morning.

“But you said that your father hadn’t much respect for the Jervaises?” I stipulated.

“Not for the Jervaises as individuals,” she amended, “but he has for the Family. And they aren’t so much a family to him as an Idea, an Institution, a sort of Religion. Nothing would break him of that, nothing the Jervaises themselves ever could do. He’d be much more likely to lose his faith in God than in the Rights of the Hall. That’s one of his sayings. He says they have rights, as if there was no getting over that. It’s just like people used to believe in the divine right of kings.”

I do not know whether I was more fascinated by her theme or by her exposition of it. “Then, how is it that the rest of you…?” I began, but she had not the patience to wait while I finished the question. She was suddenly eager, vivid, astonishingly alive; a different woman from the Anne who had spoken as if in her sleep, while plunged in some immense, engrossing meditation.

“My mother,” she broke in. “The Jervaises mean nothing to her, nothing of that sort. She wasn’t brought up on it. It isn’t in her blood. In a way she’s as good as they are. Her grandfather was an emigré from the Revolution—not titled except just for the ‘de’, you know—they had an estate near Rouen … but all this doesn’t interest you.”

“It does, profoundly,” I said.

She looked at me with a spice of mischief in her eyes. “Why?” she asked.

It was a tempting opening for a flirtation, but I could not flirt with her. When I had first heard the clear, soft tones of her voice at the window, I must have known that my meeting with her was a new and decisive experience. I had always idealised a certain type of woman, and perhaps for that reason I had always held back from the possible disillusions of an exploring intimacy. But my recognition of Anne had nothing in common with all my old deliberately romantic searchings for a theoretical affinity. If I had been asked at any time before two o’clock that morning to define my ideal, the definition would not have described Anne. Indeed, I could never have imagined her. She was altogether too individual, too positive, too independently real, to fit the mawkish vapourings of a man’s imaginary woman. There was something about her that conquered me. Already I was blushingly ashamed of my jealous suspicion that she could sell herself by a marriage with Jervaise. In all her moods, she appeared to me with an effect that I can only describe as “convincing.”

She was a perpetual revelation, and each new phase of her thrilled me with admiration, and a sense of long-sought satisfaction. I could be content to watch and to listen to her. The revelations of her personality were to me as a continual and glorious adventure. To flirt with her would be a confession on my part of a kind of superiority that I could never feel; a suggestion of the ridiculous assumption that I could afford to dally with and in certain circumstances flout her. I could sooner have dallied with and flouted a supreme work of art. Wherefore when she challenged me with her daring “Why?” I met her eyes with a look that if it in any way represented what I was feeling, must have expressed a grave and sincere humility.

“I can hardly tell you why,” I said. “I can only assure you that I am profoundly interested.”

She accepted that statement with a readiness that gave me another thrill of satisfaction. She understood my desire and gave way to it, instantly fulfilling my present need of her.

“My great-grandfather went back to Paris after things had settled down,” she went on, as if there had been no break in her narrative; “just as a common workman. He was about thirty-five, then, I believe; his first wife and his two children had died of small-pox in Holland, and he didn’t marry again until he was sixty. He had only one child afterwards; that was my grandmother. But I can’t tell you the story properly. You must get my mother to do that. She makes such a lovely romance out of it. And it is rather romantic, too, isn’t it? I like to feel that I’ve got that behind me rather than all the stodgy old ancestors the Jervaises have got. Wouldn’t you?”

“Rather,” I agreed warmly.

“If I didn’t miss all the important points you’d think so,” Anne replied with a little childish pucker of perplexity coming in her forehead. “But story-telling isn’t a bit in my line. I wish it were. I can listen to mother for hours, and I can never make out quite what it is she does to make her stories so interesting. Of course she generally tells them in French, which helps, but I’m no better in French than in English. Mother has a way of saying ‘Enfin’ or ‘En effet’ that in itself is quite thrilling.”

“You don’t know quite how well you do it yourself,” I said.

She shook her head. “Not like mother,” she asserted. With that childish pucker still wrinkling her forehead she looked like a little girl of fourteen. I could see her gazing up at her mother with some little halting perplexed question. I felt as if she were giving me some almost miraculous confidence, obliterating all the strangeness of new acquaintanceship by displaying the story of her girlhood.

“She puts mystery into it, too,” she went on, still intent on the difference between her own and her mother’s methods. “And, I think, there really is some mystery that she’s never told us,” she added as an afterthought. “After my grandfather died, her mother married again, a widower with one little girl, and when she grew up mother got her over here as a sort of finishing governess to Olive Jervaise. She came a year or two before Brenda was born. She was born in Italy. Did you know that? I always wonder whether that’s why she’s so absolutely different from all the others.”

“She certainly is. I don’t know whether that’s enough to explain it,” I commented. “And did your mother’s step-sister go abroad with them?”

“I believe so. She never came back here afterwards. She has been dead for ages, now. But mother’s always rather mysterious about her. That’s how I began, wasn’t it? I know that she was very beautiful, and sometimes I think I can just remember her. I must have been about four when she left here, because I’m rather more than four years older than Brenda.”

The thought of Anne at four was not less fascinating to me than the picture of her at fourteen. I was jealous of all her twenty-three years of life. I wanted to have an intimate knowledge of all her past being; of every least change and development that she had suffered since babyhood.

But I was to have no more confidences of that sort just then. The child disappeared from her face and speech as quickly as it had come. She appeared to be dreaming, again, as she continued almost without a pause,—

“But it isn’t my mother I’m sorry for in this affair. She’ll arrange herself. I think she’ll be glad, in a way. We all should if it weren’t for my father. We’re so ruled by the Jervaises here. And it’s worse than that. Their—their prestige sort of hangs over you everywhere. It’s like being at the court of Louis Quatorze. The estate is theirs and they are the estate. Mother often says we are still féodal down here. It seems to me sometimes that we’re little better than slaves.”

I smiled at the grotesqueness of the idea. It was impossible to conceive Anne as a slave.

She was still gazing out of the window with that appearance of abstraction, but she was evidently aware of my smile, for she said,—

“You think that’s absurd, do you?”

“In connection with you,” I replied. “I can’t see you as any one’s slave.”

She gave me her attention again. “No, I couldn’t be,” she threw at me with a hint of defiance; and before I had time to reply, continued, “I was angry with Arthur for coming back. To go into service! I almost quarrelled with mother over that. She was so weak about it. She hated his being so far away. She didn’t seem to mind anything as long as she could get him home again. But Arthur’s more like my father. He’s got a strain of Jervaise-worship in him, somewhere.”

“A very strong strain, just now,” I suggested.

She laughed. “Yes, he’s Brenda’s slave; always will be,” she said. “But I don’t count her as a Jervaise. She’s an insurgée like me—against her own family. She’d do anything to get away from them.”

“Well, she will now,” I said, “and your brother, too.”

That seemed to annoy her. “It may sound easy enough to you,” she said, “but it’s going to be anything but easy. You can’t possibly understand how difficult it’s going to be.”

“Can’t you tell me?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders as if she had suddenly become tired of my questions, perhaps of myself, also.

“You’re so outside it all,” she said.

“I know I am,” I admitted. “But—I don’t want to remain outside.”

“I don’t know why I’ve been telling you as much as I have,” she returned.

“I can only plead my profound interest,” I said.

“In Arthur? Or in us, generally?” she inquired and frowned as if she forbade me to say that my chief interest might be in herself.

“In all of you and in the situation,” I tried, hoping to please her. “I was prepared to dislike the Jervaises and all they stood for, before this talk with you. Now…”

“But you’re well off, aren’t you?” she said with a faint air of contempt. “You can’t be an insurgé. You’d be playing against your own side.”

“If you think that, why did you give me so much confidence to begin with?” I retaliated.

“Oh! I’m always doing silly things,” she said. “It was silly to play with that foolish Jervaise man this morning. It was silly to offend him this evening. I don’t—think. I ought to be whipped.” She had apparently forgotten her recent distrust of me, for she continued in the tone of one who makes an ultimate confession. “As a matter of fact, I suppose I’m chiefly responsible for the whole thing. I egged them on. Arthur would have gone on adoring Brenda as a kind of divinity for ever, if I hadn’t brought them together. He’s afraid to touch her, even now. I just didn’t think. I never do till it’s too late.”

“But you’re not sorry—about them, are you?” I put in.

“I’m sorry for my father,” she said. “Oh! I’m terribly sorry for him.” Her eyes were extraordinarily tender and compassionate as she spoke. I felt that if any lover of Anne’s could ever inspire such devotion as showed in her face at that moment, he would indeed be blest.

“He’s sixty,” she went on in a low, brooding voice, “and he’s—he’s so—rooted.”

“Is there no chance of their letting you stay on, if Arthur and Brenda went to Canada?” I asked.

Her face was suddenly hard again as she replied. “I don’t think there’s one chance in a million,” she said. “The Jervaise prestige couldn’t stand such relations as us, living at their very doors. Besides, I know I’ve upset that horrid Jervaise man. He’ll be revengeful. He’s so weak, and that sort are always vindictive. He’ll be mean and spiteful. Oh! no, it’s one of two things, either Arthur will have to go back to Canada without Brenda, or we’ll all have to go together.”

Her tone and attitude convinced me. If I had been able to consider the case logically and without prejudice, I should probably have scorned this presentation of rigid alternatives as the invention of a romantic mind; I might have recognised in it the familiar device of the dramatist. But I had so far surrendered myself to the charm of Anne’s individuality that I accepted her statement without the least shadow of criticism. It was the search to find some mechanical means of influencing the Jervaises’ decision that reminded me of Arthur Banks’s hint of an advantage that he might use in a last emergency.

“But your brother told me last night,” I said, “that there was some—‘pull’ or other he had, that might make a difference if it came to desperate measures.”

“He didn’t tell you what it was?” she asked, and I knew at once that she was, after all, in her brother’s confidence.

“No, he gave me no idea,” I replied.

“He couldn’t ever use that,” she said decidedly. “He told me about it this morning, before he went up to the Hall, and I—”

“Dissuaded him?” I suggested, as she paused.

“No! He saw it, himself,” she explained.

“It wasn’t like Arthur—to think of such a thing, even—at ordinary times. But after his quarrel with Brenda on the hill—if you could call it a quarrel, when, so far as I can make out, Arthur never said a word the whole time—after that, and Brenda being so eager to face them all out, this morning; he got a little beyond himself.”

“Does Brenda know about this—pull?” I asked.

“Of course not!” Anne replied indignantly. “How could we tell her that?”

“I haven’t the least notion what it is, you see,” I apologised.

“Oh! it’s about old Mr. Jervaise,” Anne explained without the least show of reluctance. “There’s some woman or other he goes to see in town. And once or twice Arthur took him in the car. They forget we’re human beings at all, sometimes, you know. They think we’re just servants and don’t notice things; or if we do notice them, that we shouldn’t be so disrespectful as to say anything. I don’t know what they think. Anyhow, he let Arthur drive him—twice, I believe it was—and the second time Arthur looked at him when he came out of the house, and Mr. Jervaise must have known that Arthur guessed. Nothing was said, of course, but he didn’t ever take Arthur again; but Arthur knows the woman’s name and address. It was in some flats, and the porter told him something, too.”

I realised that I had wasted my sympathy on old Jervaise. His air of a criminal awaiting arrest had been more truly indicative than I could have imagined possible. He had been expecting blackmail; had probably been willing to pay almost any price to avoid the scandal. I wondered how far the morning interview had relieved his mind?

“That explains Mr. Jervaise’s state of nerves this morning,” I remarked. “I could see that he was frightfully upset, but I thought it was about Brenda. I had an idea that he might be very devoted to her.”

Anne pushed that aside with a gesture, as quite unworthy of comment.

“But, surely, that really does give your brother some kind of advantage,” I went on thoughtlessly. I suppose that I was too intent on keeping Anne in England to understand exactly what my speech implied.

She looked at me with a superb scorn. “You don’t mean to say,” she said, “that you think we’d take advantage of a thing like that? Father—or any of us?”

I had almost the same sense of being unjustly in disgrace that I had had during the Hall luncheon party. I do not quite know what made me grasp at the hint of an omission from her bravely delivered “any of us.” I was probably snatching at any straw.

“Your mother would feel like that, too?” I dared in my extremity.

Any ordinary person would have parried that question by a semblance of indignation or by asking what I meant by it. Anne made no attempt to disguise the fact that the question had been justified. Her scorn gave way to a look of perplexity; and when she spoke she was staring out of the window again, as if she sought the spirit of ultimate truth on some, to me, invisible horizon.

“She isn’t practical,” was Anne’s excuse for her mother. “She’s so—so romantic.”

“I’m afraid I was being unpractical and romantic, too,” I apologised, rejoicing in my ability to make use of the precedent.

Anne just perceptibly pursed her lips, and her eyes turned towards me with the beginning of a smile.

“You little thought what a romance you were coming into when you accepted the invitation for that week-end—did you?” she asked.

“My goodness!” was all the comment I could find; but I put a world of feeling into it.

“And I very nearly refused,” I went on, with the excitement of one who makes a thrilling announcement.