The Jervaise Comedy

III

Frank Jervaise

I should have preferred to maintain a thoughtful, experiencing silence throughout our walk home. I had plenty of material for reflection. I wanted, now, to look at all this disappearing Brenda business from a new angle. I had a sense of the weaving of plots, and of the texture of them; such a sense as I imagine a blind man may get through sensitive finger-tips. Two new characters had come into my play, and I knew them both for principals. That opening act without Brenda, Arthur Banks, or his sister was nothing more than a prologue. The whole affair had begun again to fascinate my interest. Moreover, I was becoming aware of a stern, half-tragic background that had not yet come into proper focus.

And the circumstances of our walk home were of a kind that I find peculiarly stimulating to the imagination. The sky was clearing. Above us, widening pools of deep sky, glinting here and there, with the weak radiance of half-drowned stars, opened and closed again behind dispersing wreaths of mist. While in the west, a heaped indigo gloom that might in that light have been mistaken for the silhouette of a vast impending forest, revealed at one edge a thin haze of yellow silver that stretched weak exploring arms of light towards the mysterious obscurity of the upper clouds. I knew precisely how that sky would look at sunset, but at moonset it had a completely different quality that was at once more ethereal and more primitive. It seemed to me that this night-sky had the original, eternal effect of all planetary space; that it might be found under the leaping rings of Saturn or in the perpetual gloom of banished Neptune. Compared to the comprehensible, reproducible effects of sunlight, it was as the wonder of the ineffable to the beauty of a magnificent picture.

But I was not left for many minutes to the rapture of contemplation. Even the primitive had to give place to the movement of our tiny, civilised drama. Jervaise and I were of the race that has been steadily creating a fiction of the earth since the first appearance of inductive science in the days of prehistoric man; and we could not live for long outside the artificial realism of the thing we were making. We were not the creatures of a process, but little gods in a world-pantheon.

I made no attempt to check him when he began to talk. I knew by the raised tone of his voice—he was speaking quite a third above his ordinary pitch—that he was pleasantly excited by our interview with Anne: an excitement that he now wished either to conceal, or, if that were impossible, to attribute to another cause.

“It occurs to me that there are one or two very puzzling points about that visit of ours, Melhuish,” he began.

“At least two,” I agreed.

“Which are?” he asked.

“I’d prefer to hear yours first,” I said, having no intention of displaying my own.

He was so eager to exhibit his cleverness that he did not press me for my probably worthless deductions.

“Well, in the first place,” he said, “did it strike you as a curious fact that Miss Banks, and she alone, was apparently disturbed by that dog’s infernal barking?”

“It hadn’t struck me,” I admitted; and just because I had not remarked that anomaly for myself, I was instantly prepared to treat it as unworthy of notice. “I suppose her father and mother and the servants, and so on, heard her let us in,” I said.

Jervaise jeered at that. “Oh! my good man,” he said.

“Well, why not?” I returned peevishly.

“I put it to you,” he said, “whether in those circumstances the family’s refusal to make an appearance admits of any ordinary explanation?”

I could see, now, that it did not; but having committed myself to a point of view, I determined to uphold it. “Why should they come down?” I asked.

“Common curiosity would be a sufficient inducement, I should imagine,” Jervaise replied with a snort of contempt, “to say nothing of a reasonable anxiety to know why any one should call at two o’clock in the morning. It isn’t usual, you know—outside the theatrical world, perhaps.”

I chose to ignore the sneer conveyed by his last sentence.

“They may be very heavy sleepers,” I tried, fully aware of the inanity of my suggestion.

Jervaise laughed unpleasantly, a nasty hoot of derision. “Don’t be a damned fool,” he said. “The human being isn’t born who could sleep through that hullabaloo.”

I relinquished that argument as hopeless, and having no other at the moment, essayed a weak reprisal. “Well, what’s your explanation?” I asked in the tone of one ready to discount any possible explanation he might have to make.

“It’s obvious,” he returned. “There can be only one. They were expecting us.”

“Do you mean that Miss Banks was deliberately lying to us all the time?” I challenged him with some heat.

“Why that?” he asked.

“Well, if she were expecting us…”

“Which she never denied.”

“And had warned all her people…”

“As she had a perfect right to do.”

“It makes her out a liar, in effect,” I protested. “I mean, she implied, if she didn’t actually state, that she knew nothing whatever of your sister’s movements.”

“Which may have been true,” he remarked in the complacent tone of one who waits to formulate an unimpeachable theory.

“Good Lord! How?” I asked.

“Brenda may have been expected and not have arrived,” he explained, condescending, at last, to point out all the obvious inferences I had missed. “In which case, my friend, Miss Banks’s suppressio veri was, in my judgment, quite venial. Indeed, she was, if the facts are, as I suppose, perfectly honest in her surprise. Let us assume that she had arranged to let Brenda in, at say twelve-thirty, and having her father and mother under her thumb, had warned them to take no notice if Racquet started his cursed shindy in the middle of the night. The servant may have been told that Mr. Arthur might be coming. You will notice, also, that Miss Banks had not, at one-thirty, gone to bed, although we may infer that she had undressed. Furthermore, it is a fair assumption that she saw us coming, and having, by then given up, it may be, any hope of seeing Brenda, she was, no doubt, considerably at a loss to account for our presence. Now, does that or does it not cover the facts, and does it acquit Miss Banks of the charge of perjury?”

I was forced, something reluctantly, to concede an element of probability in his inferences, although his argument following the legal tradition was based on a kind of average law of human motive and took no account of personal peculiarities. He did not try to consider what Anne would do in certain circumstances, but what would be done by that vaguely-conceived hermaphrodite who figures in the Law Courts and elsewhere as “Anyone.” I could hear Jervaise saying, “I ask you, gentlemen, what would you have done, what would Anyone have done in such a case as this?”

“Hm!” I commented, and added, “It still makes Miss Banks appear rather—double-faced.”

“Can’t see it,” Jervaise replied. “Put yourself in her place and see how it works!”

“Oh! Lord!” I murmured, struck by the grotesque idea of Jervaise attempting to see life through the eyes of Anne. Imagine a rhinoceros thinking itself into the experiences of a skylark!

Jervaise bored ahead, taking no notice of my interruption. “Assuming for the moment the general probability of my theory,” he said, “mayn’t we hazard the further assumption that Brenda was going to the farm in the first instance to meet Banks? His sister, we will suppose, being willing to sanction such a more or less chaperoned assignation. Then, when the pair didn’t turn up, she guesses that the meeting is off for some reason or another, but obviously her friendship for Brenda—to say nothing of loyalty to her brother—would make her conceal the fact of the proposed assignation from us. Would you call that being ‘double-faced’? I shouldn’t.”

“Oh! yes; it’s all very reasonable,” I agreed petulantly. “But how does it affect the immediate situation? Do you, for instance, expect to find your sister at home when we get back?”

“I do,” assented Jervaise definitely. “I believe that Miss Banks had some good reason for being so sure that we should find her there.”

I am not really pig-headed. I may not give way gracefully to such an opponent as Jervaise, but I do not stupidly persist in a personal opinion through sheer obstinacy. And up to Jervaise’s last statement, his general deductions were, I admitted to myself, not only within the bounds of probability but, also, within distance of affording a tolerable explanation of Anne’s diplomacy during our interview. But—and I secretly congratulated myself on having exercised a subtler intuition in this one particular, at least—I did not believe that Anne expected us to find Brenda at the Hall on our return. I remembered that anxious pucker of the brow and the pathetic insistence on the belief—or might it not better be described as a hope?—that Brenda had done nothing final.

“You haven’t made a bad case,” I conceded; “but I differ as to your last inference.”

“You don’t think we shall find Brenda at home?”

“I do not,” I replied aggressively.

I expected him to bear me down under a new weight of argument founded on the psychology of Anyone, and I was startled when he suddenly dropped the lawyer and let out a whole-hearted “Damnation,” that had a ring of fine sincerity.

I changed my tone instantly in response to that agreeably human note.

“I may be quite mistaken, of course,” I said. “I hope to goodness I am. By the way, do you know if she has taken any luggage with her?”

“Can’t be sure,” Jervaise said. “Olive’s been looking and there doesn’t seem to be anything missing, but we’ve no idea what things she brought down from town with her. If she’d been making plans beforehand…”

We came out of the wood at that point in our discussion, and almost at the same moment the last barrier of cloud slipped away from before the moon. She was in her second quarter, and seemed to be indolently rolling down towards the horizon, the whole pose of the scene giving her the effect of being half-recumbent.

I turned and looked at Jervaise and found him facing me with the full light of the moon on his face. He was frowning, not with the domineering scowl of the cross-examining counsel, but with a perplexed, inquiring frown that revealed all the boy in him.

Once at Oakstone he had got into a serious scrape that had begun in bravado and ended by a public thrashing. He had poached a trout from the waters of a neighbouring landowner, who had welcomed the opportunity to make himself more than usually objectionable. And on the morning before his thrashing, Jervaise had come into my study and confessed to me that he was dreading the coming ordeal. He was not afraid of the physical pain, he told me, but of the shame of the thing. We were near to becoming friends that morning. He confessed to no one but me. But when the affair was over—he bore himself very well—he resumed his usual airs of superiority, and snubbed me when I attempted to sympathise with him.

And I saw, now, just the same boyish dread and perplexity that I had seen when he made his confession to me at Oakstone. He looked to me, indeed, absurdly unchanged by the sixteen years that had separated the two experiences.

“You know, Melhuish,” he said; “I’m not altogether blaming Brenda in one way.”

“Do you think she’s really in love with Banks?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “How can any one know? But it has been going on a long time—weeks, anyhow. They were all getting nervous about it at home. The mater told me when I came down this afternoon. She wanted me to talk to B. about it. I was going to. She doesn’t take any notice of Olive. Never has.” He stopped and looked at me with an appeal in his face that begged contradiction.

We were standing still in the moonlight at the edge of the wood and the accident of our position made me wonder if Jervaise’s soul also hesitated between some gloomy prison of conventional success and the freedom of beautiful desires. I could find no words, however, to press that speculation and instead I attempted, rather nervously, to point the way towards what I regarded as the natural solution of the immediate problem. “Come,” I said, “the idea of a marriage between Banks and your sister doesn’t appear so unreasonable. The Bankses are evidently good old yeoman stock on the father’s side. It is a mere accident of luck that you should be the owners of the land and not they.”

“Theoretically, yes!” he said with a hint of impatience. “But we’ve got to consider the opinions—prejudices, if you like—of all my people—to say nothing of the neighbours.”

“Oh! put the neighbours first,” I exclaimed. “It’s what we think other people will think that counts with most of us.”

“It isn’t,” Jervaise returned gloomily. “You don’t understand what the idea of family means to people like my father and mother. They’ve been brought up in it. It has more influence with them than religion. They’d prefer any scandal to a mésalliance.”

“In your sister’s case?” I put in, a trifle shocked by the idea of the scandal, and then discovered that he had not been thinking of Brenda.

“Perhaps not in that case,” he said, “but…” he paused noticeably before adding, “The principle remains the same.”

“Isn’t it chiefly a matter of courage?” I asked. “It isn’t as if … the mésalliance were in any way disgraceful.”

I can’t absolve myself from the charge of hypocrisy in the making of that speech. I was thinking of Jervaise and Anne, and I did not for one moment believe that Anne would ever marry him. My purpose was, I think, well-intentioned. I honestly believed that it would be good for him to fall in love with Anne and challenge the world of his people’s opinion for her sake. But I blame myself, now, for a quite detestable lack of sincerity in pushing him on. I should not have done it if I had thought he had a real chance with her. Life is very difficult; especially for the well-intentioned.