The Jervaise Comedy

At the end of the pleasance we came to a high wall, and as Jervaise fumbled with the fastening of a, to me, invisible door, I was expecting that now we should come out into the open, into a paddock, perhaps, or a grass road through the Park. But beyond the wall was a kitchen garden. It was lighter there, and I could see dimly that we were passing down an aisle of old espaliers that stretched sturdy, rigid arms, locked finger to finger with each other in their solemn grotesque guardianship of the enciente they enclosed. No doubt in front of them was some kind of herbaceous border. I caught sight of the occasional spire of a hollyhock, and smelt the acid insurgence of marigolds.

None of this was at all the mischievous, taunting fairyland that I had anticipated, but rather the gaunt, intimidating home of ogres, rank and more than a trifle forbidding. It had an air of age that was not immortal, but stiffly declining into a stubborn resistance against the slow rigidity of death. These espaliers made me think of rheumatic veterans, obstinately faithful to ancient duties—veterans with knobbly arthritic joints.

At the end of the aisle we came to a high-arched opening in the ten-foot wall, barred by a pair of heavy iron gates.

“Hold on a minute, I’ve got the key,” Jervaise said. This was the first time he had spoken since we left the house. His tone seemed to suggest that he was afraid I should attempt to scale the wall or force my way through the bars of the gates.

He had the key but he could not in that darkness fit it into the padlock; and he asked me if I had any matches. I had a little silver box of wax vestas in my pocket, and struck one to help him in his search for the keyhole which he found to have been covered by the escutcheon. Before I threw the match away I held it up and glanced back across the garden. The shadows leaped and stiffened to attention, and I flung the match away, but it did not go out. It lay there on the path throwing out its tiny challenge to the darkness. It was still burning when I looked back after passing through the iron gates.

As we came out of the park, Jervaise took my arm.

“I’m afraid this is a pretty rotten business,” he said with what was for him an unusual cordiality.

Although I had never before that afternoon seen Jervaise’s home nor any of his people with the exception of the brother now in India, I had known Frank Jervaise for fifteen years. We had been at Oakstone together, and had gone up the school form by form in each other’s company. After we left Oakstone we were on the same landing at Jesus, and he rowed “two” and I rowed “bow” in the college boat. And since we had come down I had met him constantly in London, often as it seemed by accident. Yet we had never been friends. I had never really liked him.

Even at school he had had the beginning of the artificially bullying manner which now seemed natural to him. He had been unconvincingly blunt and insolent. His dominant chin, Roman nose, and black eyebrows were chiefly responsible, I think, for his assumption of arrogance. He must have been newly invigorated to carry on the part every time he scowled at himself in the glass. He could not conceivably have been anything but a barrister.

But, to-night, in the darkness, he seemed to have forgotten for once the perpetual mandate of his facial angle. He was suddenly intimate, almost humble.

“Of course, you don’t realise how cursedly awkward it all is,” he said with the evident desire of opening a confidence.

“Tell me as little or as much as you like,” I responded. “You know that I…”

“Yes, rather,” he agreed warmly, and added, “I’d sooner Hughes didn’t know.”

“He guesses a lot, though,” I put in. “I suppose they all do.”

“Oh! well, they’re bound to guess something,” he said, “but I’m hoping we’ll be able to put that right, now.”

“Who are we going to see?” I asked.

He did not reply at once, and then snapped out, “Anne Banks; friend er Brenda’s.”

My foolishly whimsical imagination translated that queer medley of sounds into the thought of a stable-pump. I heard the clank of the handle and then the musical rush of water into the pail.

“Sounds just like a pump,” I said thoughtlessly.

He half withdrew his arm from mine with an abrupt twitch that indicated temper.

“Oh! don’t for God’s sake play the fool,” he said brutally.

A spasm of resentment shook me for a moment. I felt annoyed, remembering how at school he would await his opportunity and then score off me with some insulting criticism. He had never had any kind of sympathy for the whimsical, and it is a manner that is apt to look inane and ridiculous under certain kinds of censure. I swallowed my annoyance, on this occasion. I remembered that Jervaise had a reasonable excuse, for once.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to play the fool. But you must admit that it had a queer sound.” I repeated the adjectival sentence under my breath. It really was a rather remarkable piece of onomatopœia. And then I reflected on the absurdity of our conversation. How could we achieve all this ordinary trivial talk of everyday in the gloom of this romantic adventure?

“Oh! all serene,” Jervaise returned, still with the sound of irritation in his voice, and continued as if the need for confidence had suddenly overborne his anger. “As a matter of fact she’s his sister.”

“Whose sister?” I asked, quite at a loss.

“Oh! Banks’s, of course,” he said.

“But who in the name of goodness is Banks?” I inquired irritably. The petulant tone was merely an artifice. I realised that if I were meek, he would lose more time in abusing my apparent imbecility. I know that the one way to beat a bully is by bullying, but I hate even the pretence of that method.

Jervaise grunted as if the endeavour to lift the weight of my ignorance required an almost intolerable physical effort.

“Why, this fellow—our chauffeur,” he said in a voice so threateningly restrained that he seemed on the point of bursting.

There was no help for it; I had to take the upper hand.

“Well, my good idiot,” I said, “you can’t expect me to know these things by intuition. I’ve never heard of the confounded fellow before. Haven’t even seen him, now. Nor his sister—Anne Banks, Frienderbrenda’s.”

Jervaise was calmed by this outburst. This was the sort of attitude he could understand and appreciate.

“All right, keep your shirt on,” he replied quite amicably.

“If you’d condescend to explain,” I returned as huffily as I could.

“You see, this chap, Banks,” he began, “isn’t quite the ordinary chauffeur Johnnie. He’s the son of one of our farmers. Decent enough old fellow, too, in his way—the father, I mean. Family’s been tenants of the Home Farm for centuries. And this chap, Banks, the son, has knocked about the world, no end. Been in Canada and the States and all kinds of weird places. He’s hard as nails; and keen. His mother was a Frenchwoman; been a governess.”

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“Lord, no. Why should she be?” Jervaise replied peevishly.

I thought of explaining that he had made the implication by his use of the past tense, but gave up the idea as involving a waste of energy. “How old is this chap, Banks; the son?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jervaise said. “About twenty-five.”

“And his sister?” I prodded him.

“Rather younger than that,” he said, after an evident hesitation, and added: “She’s frightfully pretty.”

I checked my natural desire to comment on the paradox; and tried the stimulation of an interested “Is she?”

“Rather.” He tacked that on in the tone of one who deplores the inevitable; and went on quickly, “You needn’t infer that I’ve made an ass of myself or that I’m going to. In our position…” He abandoned that as being, perhaps, too obvious. “What I mean to say is,” he continued, “that I can’t understand about Brenda. And it was such an infernally silly way of going about things. Admitted that there was no earthly chance of the pater giving his consent or anything like it; she needn’t in any case have made a damned spectacle of the affair. But that’s just like her. Probably did it all because she wanted to be dramatic or some rot.”

It was then that I expressed my appreciation of the dramatic quality of the incident, and was snubbed by his saying,—

“I suppose you realise just what this may mean, to all of us.”

I had a vivid impression, in the darkness, of that sudden scowl which made him look so absurdly like a youthful version of Sir Edward Carson.

I was wondering why it should mean so much to all of them? Frank Jervaise had admitted, for all intents and purposes, that he was in love with the chauffeur’s sister, so he, surely, need not have so great an objection. And, after all, why was the family of Jervaise so much better than the family of Banks?

“I suppose it would be very terrible for you all if she married this chap?” I said.

“Unthinkable,” Jervaise replied curtly.

“It would be worse in a way than your marrying the sister?”

“I should never be such an infernal fool as to do a thing like that,” he returned.

“Has she … have there been any tender passages between you and Miss Banks?” I asked.

“No,” he snapped viciously.

“You’ve been too careful?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t think she likes me,” he said.

“Oh!” was all my comment.

I needed no more explanations; and I liked Jervaise even less than I had before. I began to wish that he had not seen fit to confide in me. I had, thoughtlessly, been dramatising the incident in my mind, but, now, I was aware of the unpleasant reality of it all. Particularly Jervaise’s part in it.

“Can’t be absolutely certain, of course,” he continued.

“But if she did like you?” I suggested.

“I’ve got to be very careful who I marry,” he explained. “We aren’t particularly well off. All our property is in land, and you know what sort of an investment that is, these days.”

I tried another line. “And if you find your sister up at the Home Farm; and Banks; what are you going to do?”

“Kick him and bring her home,” he said decidedly.

“Nothing else for it, I suppose?” I replied.

“Obviously,” he snarled.

We had come into a wood and it was very dark under the trees. I wondered why I should restrain the impulse to strangle him and leave him there? He was no good, and, to me, quite peculiarly objectionable. It seemed, in what was then my rather fantastic state of mind, that it would be a triumph of whimsicality. I should certainly have resisted the impulse in any case, but my attention was diverted from it at that moment by a sudden pattering of feet along the leaves of the great trees under which we were walking—light, clean, sharp, little dancing feet, springing from leaf to leaf—dozens of them chasing each other, rattling ecstatically up and down the endless terraces of wide foliage.

“Damn it all, it’s beginning to rain like blazes,” remarked the foolish Jervaise.

“How much farther is it?” I asked.

He said we were “just there.”

I saw the Home Farm first as a little square haze of yellow light far up in the sky. I didn’t realise the sharp rise in the ground immediately in front of us, and that rectangular beacon, high in the air, seemed a fantastically impossible thing. I pointed it out to Jervaise who was holding his head down as if he were afraid the summer rain might do some serious injury to his face.

“Some one up, anyway,” was his comment.

“Very far up,” I murmured. I could not quite believe, even then, that it could be a window. I was disappointed when we had climbed the hill and stood only a few feet below the beacon, to discover that this too, was another instance of the all too credible commonplace. I suppose men like Frank Jervaise never long to believe in the impossible. I was, however, agreeably surprised to find that he could be nervous.

He hesitated, looking up at the prism of light that splayed out through the first floor window, and set a silver fire to the falling rain. “Suppose we’d better knock,” he grumbled.

“D’you know whose window it is?” I asked.

Apparently he didn’t. He made a dive into a deeper obscurity and I lost him until I heard his knock. I was glad that he should have knocked with such decent restraint, but all the effect of it was instantly shattered by the response. For at his first subdued rap, a dog with a penetratingly strident bark set up a perfectly detestable clamour within the house. It was just as if Jervaise’s touch on the door had liberated the spring of some awful rattle. Every lovely impulse of the night must have fled dismayed, back into the peace and beauty of the wood; and I was more than half inclined to follow.

Until that appalling racket was set loose I had been regarding this midnight visit to the farm as a natural and enticing adventure, altogether in keeping with the dramatic movement preluded by the chime of the stable-clock. That confounded terrier, whose voice so clearly proclaimed his breed, had dragged us down to the baldest realism. We were intruders upon the decencies of civilisation. That dog was not to be misled by any foolish whimsies of the imagination. He was a thorough-going realist, living in a tangible, smellable world of reality, and he knew us for what we were—marauders, disturbers of the proper respectable peace of twentieth century farms. He lashed himself into ecstasies of fury against our unconventionality; he rose to magnificent paroxysms of protest that passionately besought High Heaven and Farmer Banks to open the door and let him get at us.

But no one came. There may have been other sounds coming from the house besides that infuriated demand for vengeance, but all inferior noises—and surely all other noises must have been inferior to that clamour—were absorbed and flattened out of existence. We were in a world occupied by the bark of a single dog, and any addition to that occupation would have been superfluous.

The owner of the voice was doing his level best now to get the door down on his own account. I hoped he might succeed. I should have excuse then to fly to the woods and claim sanctuary. As it was, I retreated a couple of steps, holding my breath to ease the pain of my nerves, and some old instinct of prayer made me lift my face to the sky. I welcomed the cold, inquisitive touch of the silent rain.

Then I became aware through the torture of prolonged exasperation that my upturned face was lit from above; that a steady candle was now perched on the very sill of the one illuminated window; and that behind the candle the figure of a woman stood looking down at me.

She appeared to be speaking.

I held my hands to my ears and shook my head violently to intimate my temporary deafness; and the figure disappeared, leaving the placid candle to watch me as it seemed with a kind of indolent nonchalance.

I decided to pass on the news to Jervaise, and discovered that besotted fool in a little trellised porch, stimulating the execrations of the Irish terrier by a subdued inaudible knocking. I was beginning to scream my news into his ear when silence descended upon us with the suddenness of a catastrophe. It was as if the heavens had been rent and all the earth had fallen into a muffled chaos of mute despair.

I had actually began my shriek of announcement when all the world of sound about us so inexplicably ceased to be, and I shut off instantly on the word “Someone…,” a word that as I had uttered it sounded like a despairing yelp of mortal agony.

Out of the unearthly stillness, Jervaise’s voice replied in a frightened murmur, “Someone coming,” he said, as if he, alone, had knowledge of and responsibility for that supreme event.

And still no one came. The door remained steadfastly closed. Outside the porch, the earth had recovered from the recent disaster, and we could hear the exquisitely gentle murmur of the rain.

“Damned odd,” commented Jervaise. “That cursed dog made enough noise to wake the dead.”

I was inspired to go out and search the window where burned the indigent, just perceptibly, rakish candle.

She was there. She had returned to her eyrie after quelling the racket in the hall, and now she leaned a little forward so that I could see her face.

“Who’s there?” she asked quietly.

Her voice was low and clear as the reed of a flute, but all sounds had the quality of music at that instant of release.

I was nonplussed for the moment. I ought to have taken up the key of high romance. She deserved it. Instead of that I dropped to the awful commonplaces of a man in evening dress and a light overcoat standing in the rain talking to a stranger.

“I came up with Mr. Jervaise, Mr. Frank Jervaise,” I explained. “He—he wants to see you. Shall I tell him you’re there?”

“All serene, I’m here,” whispered the voice of Jervaise at my elbow, and then he cleared his throat and spoke up at the window.

“Rather an upset down at the Hall, Miss Banks; about Brenda,” he said. “Might we come in a minute?”

“It’s rather late, isn’t it?” the vision returned—it wasn’t only the ease of the silence, she had a delicious voice—and added rather mischievously, “It’s raining, isn’t it?”

“Like anything,” Jervaise said, and ducked his head and hunched his shoulders, as if he had suddenly remembered the possible susceptibility of his exposed face.

“Is it so very important?” the soft, clear voice asked, still, I thought, with a faint undercurrent of raillery.

“Really, Miss Banks, it is,” Jervaise implored, risking his delicate face again.

She hesitated a moment and then said, “Very well,” and disappeared, taking this time the dissipated candle with her. I heard her address a minatory remark within the room to “Racket”—most excellently described, I thought; though I discovered later that I had, in imagination, misspelt him, since he owed his name to the fact that his mother had sought her delivery on the bed of a stored tennis-net.

Jervaise and I hurried back to the front door as if we were afraid that Miss Banks might get there first; but she kept us waiting for something like ten minutes before she came downstairs. The silence of that interval was only broken by such nervous staccato comments as “Long time!” “Dressing, presumably,” and occasional throaty sounds of impatience from Jervaise that are beyond the representative scope of typography. I have heard much the same noises proceed from the throat of an unhopeful pig engaged in some minor investigation.

The rain was falling less heavily, and towards the west a pale blur of light was slowly melting its way through the darkness. I noted that spot as marking the probable position of the setting moon. I decided that as soon as this infernal inquisition was over, I would get rid of Jervaise and find some God-given place in which I might wait for the dawn. I knew that there must be any number of such places between the Farm and the Hall. I was peering westward towards the rolling obscurity of hills and woods that were just beginning to bulk out of the gloom, when I heard the click of the door latch.

I should not like to be put in the witness-box and cross-examined by Jervaise as to my reason for entering the house with him that night. All that part of me with which I have any sort of real friendship, wanted quite definitely to stay outside. That would have been the tactful thing to do. There was no reason why I should intrude further on the mystery of Brenda’s disappearance; and as a matter of fact I was no longer very keenly interested in that brilliant and fascinating young woman’s affairs. The plan that I had in mind when the door opened was to say politely to Jervaise, “I’ll wait for you here”—I had a premonition that he would raise no objection to that suggestion—and then when he and Miss Banks were safely inside, I meant to go and find rapture in solitude. The moon was certainly coming out; the dawn was due in three hours or so, and before me were unknown hills and woods. I had no sort of doubt that I should find my rapture. I may add that my plan did not include any further sight of Jervaise, his family, or their visitors, before breakfast next morning.

I had it all clear and settled. I was already thrilling with the first ecstasies of anticipation. But when the door was opened I turned my back on all that magical beauty of the night, and accompanied Jervaise into the house like a scurvy little mongrel with no will of its own.

I can’t account for that queer change of purpose. It was purely spontaneous, due to something quite outside the realm of reason. I was certainly not in love with Anne, then. My only sight of her had left an impression as of an amateur copy of a Rembrandt done in Indian ink with a wet brush. It is true that I had heard her voice like the low thrilling of a nightingale—following a full Handel chorus of corncrakes.

She had evidently spent an active ten minutes while we waited for her. She had done her hair, and she was, so far as I could judge from superficialities, completely dressed. Also she had lighted the lamp in what I took to be the chief sitting-room of the farm.

As a room it deserved attention, but it was not until I had been there for ten minutes or more, that I realised all that the furniture of that room was not. My first observations were solely directed to Miss Banks.

Jervaise had grossly maligned her by saying that she was “frightfully pretty.” No one but a fool would have called her “pretty.” Either she was beautiful or plain. I saw, even then, that if the light of her soul had been quenched, she might appear plain. Her features were good, her complexion, her colouring—she was something between dark and fair—but she did not rely on those things for her beauty. It was the glow of her individuality that was her surpassing charm. She had that supremely feminine vitality which sends a man crazy with worship. You had to adore or dislike her. There was no middle course.

And Jervaise quite obviously adored her. All that tactful confession of his in the park had been a piece of artifice. It had not, however, been framed to deceive me. I do not believe that he considered me worth bothering about. No, those admissions and denials of his had been addressed, without doubt, to a far more important person than myself. They had been in the nature of a remonstrance and assurance spoken to Frank Jervaise by the heir to the estate; which heir was determined with all the force of his ferocious nose and dominant chin to help him, that he would not make a fool of himself for the sake of the daughter of a tenant farmer. I had been nothing more than the register upon which he had tentatively engraved that resolve. But he should have chosen a more stable testament than this avowal made to a whimsically-minded playwright with an absurd weakness for the beauties of a midnight wood.

And if I had been a witness to his oath, I was, now, a witness to his foreswearing.

He began well enough on the note proper to the heir of Jervaise. He had the aplomb to carry that off. He stood on the hearthrug, austere and self-controlled, consciously aristocrat, heir and barrister.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Banks. Almost inexcusable to disturb you at this time of night.” He stopped after that beginning and searched his witness with a stare that ought to have set her trembling.

Anne had sat down and was resting her forearms on the table. She looked up at him with the most charming insouciance when he paused so portentously at the very opening of his address. Her encouraging “yes” was rather in the manner of a child waiting for the promised story.

Jervaise frowned and attempted the dramatic. “My sister, Brenda, has run away,” he said.

“When?”

“This evening at the end of the Cinderella. You knew we were giving a dance?”

“But where to?”

“Oh! Precisely!” Jervaise said.

“But how extraordinary!” replied Miss Banks.

“Is she here?” asked Jervaise. He ought to have snapped that out viciously, and I believe that was his intention. But Anne’s exquisitely innocent, absorbed gaze undid him; and his question had rather the sound of an apology.

“No, certainly not! Why ever should she come here?” Anne said with precisely the right nuance of surprise.

“Is your brother here?”

“No!”

It looks such an absurd little inexpressive word on paper, but Anne made a song of it on two notes, combining astonishment with a sincerity that was absolutely final. If, after that, Jervaise had dared to say, “Are you sure?” I believe I should have kicked him.