The Jervaise Comedy

XII

Conversion

Anne had not once moved from her original place by the table in the course of that long conversation of ours, and she still stood there, her finger-tips resting on the oak with a powerful effect of poise when Brenda came into the room.

Brenda’s actions were far more vivacious than her friend’s. She came in with an air of youthful exuberance, looked at me with a shade of inquiry, and then sat down opposite Anne.

“I came back over the hill and through the wood,” she said, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. “It’s a topping evening. Poor Arthur; I wish I could have gone with him. I offered to, but he didn’t want me to come. I’m not sure he didn’t think they might kidnap me if I went too near.” She turned to me with a bright smile as she added, “Could they keep me, Mr. Melhuish; shut me up or something?”

“I’m not quite sure about that,” I said, “but they could arrest—Arthur”—(I could not call him anything else, I found)—“if he ran away with you. On a charge of abduction, you know.”

“They could make it pretty nasty for us all round, in fact,” Brenda concluded.

“I’m afraid they could,” I agreed.

She was looking extraordinarily pretty. The bizarre contrast between her dark eyelashes and her fair hair seemed to find some kind of echo in the combination of health and fragility that she expressed in her movements. She appeared at once vital and delicate without being too highly-strung. I could well understand how the bucolic strain in Arthur Banks was prostrate with admiration before such a rare and exciting beauty.

By the side of Brenda, Anne looked physically robust. The developed lines of her figure emphasised Brenda’s fragility. And yet Anne’s eyes, her whole pose, expressed a spirituality that Brenda lacked. Anne, with her amazing changes of mood, her rapid response to emotion, gave expression to some spirit not less feminine than Brenda’s, but infinitely deeper. Behind the moving shadows and sunlight of her impulses there lay always some reminder of a constant orientation. She might trifle brilliantly with the surface of life, but her soul was more steadfast than a star. Brenda might love passionately, but her love would be relatively personal, selfish. When Anne gave herself, she would love like a mother, with her whole being.

I came out of my day-dream to find that she was speaking of me.

“Mr. Melhuish is half asleep,” she was saying. “And I haven’t got his room ready after all this time.”

“He didn’t get much sleep last night,” Brenda replied. “We none of us did for that matter. We were wandering round the Park and just missing each other like the people in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“Come and help me to get that room ready,” Anne said. “Father and mother may be home any minute. They ought to have been back before.”

Brenda was on her feet in a moment. She appeared glad to have some excuse for action. She was, no doubt, nervous and excited as to the probable result of her lover’s mission to the Hall, and wanted to be alone with Anne in order that they might speculate upon those probabilities which Banks’s return would presently transform into certainties.

Anne turned to me before they left the room and indicated three shelves of books half hidden behind the settle. “You might find something to read there, unless you’d sooner have a nap,” she said. “We shan’t be having supper until eight.”

I preferred, however, to go out and make my own estimate of probabilities in the serenity of the August evening. My mind was too full to read. I wanted to examine my own ideas just then, not those of some other man or woman.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said to Anne. “I want to think.” And I looked at her with a greater boldness than I had dared hitherto. I claimed a further recognition of that understanding she had, as I believed, so recently admitted.

“To think out that play?” she returned lightly, but her expression did not accord with her tone. She had paused at the door, and as she looked back at me, there was a suggestion of sadness in her face, of regret, or it might even have been of remorse. She looked, I thought, as though she were sorry for me.

She was gone before I could speak again.

I found my way out by the back door through which Jervaise and I had entered all those incalculable hours ago; and I looked up at the window from which Anne’s beautiful voice had hailed me out of the night. I wanted to think about her, to recall how she had looked and spoken—at that window; in the course of her talk with Frank Jervaise; in the recent scene in the farm sitting-room when she had ambushed herself so persistently behind the ear of the settle; and, most of all, I desired to weigh every tone and expression I could remember in that last long conversation of ours; every least gesture or attention that might give me a hope of having won, in some degree, her regard or interest.

But the perplexing initiative of my intelligence would not, for some reason, permit me to concentrate my thoughts on her at that moment. My mind was bewilderingly full of Anne, but I could not think of her. When I fell into the pose of gazing up at her window, the association suggested not the memory I desired, but the picture of Frank Jervaise fumbling in the darkness of the porch, and the excruciating anguish of Racquet’s bark. From that I fell to wondering why I had not seen Racquet on this occasion of my second visit? I had not remembered him until then.

I pulled myself up with an effort, and finding the surroundings of the yard so ineffectual as a stimulus, I wandered down the hill towards the wood. I suggested to myself that I might meet Banks returning from the Hall, but my chief hope was that I might revive the romance of the night.

The sun was setting clear and red, a different portent from the veiled thing that had finally hidden itself in a huddle of purple and gray cloud the night before. I had seen it from my bedroom at the Hall as I dressed for dinner and had mildly regretted the threat of possible bad weather. I had been a little bored by the anticipations I had formed of my week-end. The Jervaises, from what I had seen of them, promised, I thought, to be uncommonly dull. I had not seen Brenda before dinner.

I roused myself again and made an effort to shift the depression that was settling upon me, but the mood was not to be exorcised by any deliberate attempt to revive the glow of adventure that had warmed my earlier excursions through the wood. The very stillness of the evening, the air of preparation for repose, the first faint suggestions of the passage from summer to autumn, all had some effect of pervading melancholy. I found myself speculating on the promise of change that my talk with Anne had foreshadowed; of the uprooting of Farmer Banks, of the family’s emigration, and the sadness of their farewells to this exquisitely peaceful country of England.

And then the thought that I had unconsciously feared and repressed since I had left the farm, broke through all these artificial abstractions and forced itself upon my attention. I struggled against it vainly for a few seconds and then braced myself to meet the realisation of my own failure. For it was that shadow which had been stalking me since Anne had so obliquely criticised my comedy. And it seemed to me now that her last strange expression as she left the room, that look of pity and regret, had all too surely indicated the certainty that she—I faced it with a kind of bitter despair—that she despised me. I was “well-off.” I belonged to the Jervaises’ class. She had flung those charges at me contemptuously before she had finally dismissed my one futile claim to distinction by classing me among the writers of that artificial English comedy which had not even the redeeming virtue of wit.

Not once in that long conversation with her had she shown the sudden spark of recognition that had so wonderfully lighted my parting with her in the night. She had given me her confidence about her family affairs because she counted me as a new ally, however ineffective, coming in unexpectedly to fight against the Jervaises. She had acknowledged my worship of her because she was too clear-sighted and too honest to shirk my inevitable declaration. But I could not doubt that she rated me as unworthy of her serious attention. Her whole attitude proclaimed that her one instant of reaching out towards me had been a mistake; one of the many impulses that continually blossomed and died in her close intercourse with the spirit of life.

And I could not blame her for her contempt of me. I despised myself. I was a man without a serious interest. I had escaped vice, but I had always lived among surface activities. My highest ambition after I left Cambridge had been to have one of my foolish plays mounted in a West-End theatre. I had wanted to be talked about, to be a social success. And I had achieved that ambition without much difficulty. I had had an independent income—left me by my father who had died when I was in my second year at Jesus—only three hundred a year, but enough for me to live upon without working. I had gone often to the theatre in those days, and had scraped up an acquaintance with a middle-aged actor, whose chief occupation had been the stage-managing of new productions. With his help I had studied stagecraft by attending rehearsals, the best possible school for a would-be dramatist. And my first accepted play had been written in collaboration with him. It had not been a great success, but I had gained invaluable experience, and, after that, success had come to me rapidly and easily. I found that I had the knack of writing pleasant little artificial comedies. None of them had run for longer than eight months, and I had only written five in all, but they had made me comparatively rich. At that time my investments alone were bringing me in nearly two thousand a year.

I was thirty-two, now, and it seemed to me looking back, that I had never had one worthy ambition in all those years. I had never even been seriously in love. Most deplorable of all I had never looked forward to a future that promised anything but repetitions of the same success.

What had I to live for? I saw before me a life of idleness with no decent occupation, no objects, but the amassing of more money, the seeking of a wider circle of acquaintances, dinner-parties at more select houses, an increasing reputation as a deviser of workmanlike, tolerably amusing plays. If I had had vices such as a promiscuous love of women, I might have found the anticipation of such a future more tolerable. There might, then, have been some incitement to new living, new experience. But I had nothing.

Yet until that evening in the wood I had hardly paused to consider what would presently become of me. The gradual increase in my scale of personal luxury had brought sufficient diversion and satisfaction. I had lived in the pleasures of the moment, and had only rarely been conscious that those pleasures were growing stale; that the crust of life upon which I had so diligently crawled, was everywhere and always the same.

Now it was as if that monotonous surface had amazingly split. My crawling was paralysed and changed to a terrified stillness. I had paused, horrified, at the mouth of a pit, and gazed down with a sick loathing at the foundations of my life that had been so miraculously revealed. I did, indeed, stand suddenly stock still in the wood, and staring down the darkening vista of the path, saw not the entranced twilight that was sinking the path in a pool of olive green shadows, but a kind of bioscopic presentation of my own futile, monotonous existence.

If Anne would have nothing to do with me, what, I asked myself, did the world hold that could conceivably make my life worth living?

I suppose most men and women have asked themselves the same question when they have been unexpectedly stirred by a great love. The sense of unworthiness comes with a shock of surprise that seems violently to tear open the comfortable cloak of self-satisfaction. I had been content with my life, even a little vain of my achievement, until that last conversation with Anne; now I loathed the thought of my own inefficiency and all my prospects of success appeared unendurably tame. I was in the spiritual state of a religious convert, suddenly convinced of sin.

And yet somehow in the depths of my consciousness there was a sensible stir of resentment. The artificial being I had created during my thirty-two years of life had an existence of its own and protested against this threat of instant annihilation. I wanted to defend myself, and I was petulantly irritable because I could find no defence.

For the strange Fate that had planned this astounding revelation to me, had apparently led up to it by the subtlest arrangement of properties and events. My disgrace at the Jervaises’ had prepared me for this moment. My responses to humiliation had been, as it were, tested and strained by that ordeal. And at the same time I had been powerfully influenced to despise the life of the Jervaises and all that they stood for, socially and ethically. Then, almost without a pause, a new ideal of life had been presented to me; and the contrast had been so vivid as to awaken even my dulled powers of apprehension. The Jervaise type was more or less familiar to me; their acceptance of security as an established right, their lack of anything like initiative, their general contentment with themselves, their standards of judgment and their surroundings, represented the attitude towards life with which I was most familiar. It had been my own attitude. I had even dreamed of re-establishing the half-ruined home of the elder branch of the Melhuish family in Derbyshire!

And the contrast afforded by the lives and ambitions of Anne and her brother had been so startling that I believe I must have been stirred by it to some kind of awakening even had I not fallen in love with Anne. I had been given so perfect an opportunity to enter into their feelings and views by my strange and intimate association with their antagonism to all that was typified by the rule of the Hall. By reason of my sympathy with the Banks I had been able to realise the virtue of struggle and the evils of the almost unlimited and quite indiscriminating power wielded by such landowners as old Jervaise. And in condemning him and his family, I must condemn myself also. We were all of us so smug and self-satisfied. We had blindly believed that it was our birthright to reap where we had not sown.

Nevertheless, though the truth was so plain to me in that moment, I accepted it grudgingly. The voice of my artificial self clamoured for a hearing. But these things were so, had always been so, it protested; what could I do to change them? And probably, if it had not been for the force of the thrilling passion of reverence and admiration for Anne that had suddenly illuminated my whole being, the cultivated inertia of a life-time would finally have conquered me. I should have thrust the problem away from me and returned with a sensual satisfaction to the familiar way of life I understood. I should have consoled myself with the reflection that mine was not the temperament to face the ardours and disappointments of struggle.

As it was, I longed so furiously to justify myself before Anne; to win, by some heroic measure, her good opinion, that the incentive of my passion bore me triumphantly over the first re-actions of inertia and protest. I could never return to my old complacency, although the mechanical, accustomed habit of my thought had for me, as yet, no suggestion other than some change in the ideal and manner of my writing. I thought vaguely of attempting some didactic drama to illustrate the tragic contrast between gentle and simple that had been so glaringly illuminated for me by recent experience. Yet, even as I played with that idea, I recognised it as a device of my old self to allay my discontent. I caught myself speculating on the promise of the play’s success, on the hope of winning new laurels as an earnest student of sociology. I thrust that temptation from me with a sneer at my own inherent hypocrisy.

“But what else can you do?” argued my old self and my only reply was to bluster. I bullied myself. I treated myself as a foolish child. The new spirit in me waved its feeble arms and shouted wildly of its splendid intentions. I could be immensely valiant in the presence of this single listener, but the thought of Anne humiliated and subdued even this bright new spirit that had so amazingly taken possession of me. I wondered if I might not submit my problem to her ask her what she would have me to do. Nevertheless, I knew that if I would win her esteem, I must act on my own initiative.

My conflict and realisation of new desires had had, however, one salutary effect. The depression of my earlier mood had fallen from me. When I looked round at the widening pool of darkness that flowed and deepened about the undergrowth, I found that it produced no longer any impression of melancholy.

I lifted my head and marched forward with the resolution of a conqueror.

I was nearly clear of the wood when I saw Banks coming towards me. He was carrying my suit-case, and behind him Racquet with a sprightly bearing of the tail that contradicted the droop of his head, followed with the body of a young rabbit.

“Loot from the Hall?” I asked when I came within speaking distance.

“Yes, he’s been poaching again,” Banks said, disregarding the application of my remark to the suit-case. “Well, he can, now, for all I care. He can have every blessed rabbit and pheasant in the Park if he likes. I’m done with ’em.”

“Things gone badly?” I asked, stretching out my hand for the suit-case.

“I’ll carry it,” he said, ignoring my question. “John had it ready packed when I got there.”

I remembered with a passing qualm that John had not been tipped, but put that thought away as a matter of no pressing importance. “Had he?” I commented. “Well, you’ve carried it half-way, now, I’ll carry it the other half.”

“I can do it,” he said.

“You can but you won’t,” I replied. “Hand it over.” I regarded the carrying of that suit-case as a symbol of my new way of life. I hoped that when we arrived at the Farm, Anne might see me carrying it, and realise that even a writer of foolish comedies, who was well off and belonged to the Jervaises’ class, might aspire to be the equal of her brother.

“It’s all right,” Banks said, and his manner struck a curious mean between respect and friendship.

I laid hold of the suit-case and took it from him almost by force.

“You see, it isn’t so much a suit-case as a parable,” I explained.

He looked at me, still reluctant, with an air of perplexity.

“A badge of my friendship for you and your family,” I enlarged. “You and I, my boy, are pals, now. I take it you’ve left the Jervaises’ service for good. Imagine that this is Canada, not an infernal Park with a label on every blade of grass warning you not to touch.”

“That’s all right,” he agreed. “But it’s extraordinary how it hangs about you. You know—the feeling that they’ve somehow got you, everywhere. Damn it, if I met the old man in the wood I don’t believe I could help touching my hat to him.”

“Just habit,” I suggested.

“A mighty strong one, though,” he said.

“Wait till you’re breathing the free air of Canada again,” I replied.

“Ah! that’s just it,” he said. “I may have to wait.”

I made sounds of encouragement.

“Or go alone,” he added.

“They’ve cut up rough, then?” I inquired.

“Young Frank has, anyway,” he said with a brave assumption of breaking away from servility.

“You didn’t see the old man?”

“Never a sight of him.”

“And young Frank…?”

“Shoved it home for all he was worth. Threatened me with the law and what not. Said if I tried to take Her with me they’d have us stopped and take an action against me for abduction. I suppose it’s all right that they can do that?”

“I’m afraid it is,” I said; “until she comes of age.”

“Glad I’d taken the car back, anyhow,” Banks muttered, and I guessed that young Frank’s vindictiveness had not been overestimated by Anne. No doubt, he would have been glad enough to complicate the issue by alleging Banks’s theft of that car.

“Well, what do you propose to do now?” I asked, after a short interval of silence.

“I don’t know,” Banks said desperately, and then added, “It depends chiefly on Her.”

“She’ll probably vote for an elopement,” I suggested.

“And if they come after us and I’m bagged?”

“Don’t let yourself get bagged. Escape them.”

“D’you think she’d agree to that? Sneaking off and hiding? Dodging about to get out of the country, somehow?” His tone left me uncertain whether he were asking a question or spurning the idea in disgust.

“Well, what’s the alternative?” I replied.

“We might wait,” he said. “She’ll be of age in thirteen months’ time.”

I had no fear but that Banks would wait thirteen months, or thirteen years, for Brenda. I was less certain about her. Just now she was head over ears in romance, and I believed that if she married him his sterling qualities would hold her. But I mistrusted the possible effect upon her of thirteen months’ absence. The Jervaises would know very well how to use their advantage. They would take her away from the Hall and its associations, and plunge her into the distractions of a society that could not yet have lost its glamour for her. I could picture Brenda looking back with wonder at the foolishness of the girl who had imagined herself to be in love with her father’s chauffeur. And even an hour earlier, so recent had been my true conversion, I should have questioned the advisability of a hasty, secret marriage between these two temporarily infatuated people. Now I was hot with the evangelising passion of a young disciple. I wanted to deliver Brenda from the thrall of society at any price. It seemed to me that the greatest tragedy for her would be a marriage with some one in her own class—young Turnbull, for instance.