The Jervaise Comedy Part 28

I was astonished to find that she knew I had written plays. "How did you know that I did that sort of thing?" I asked.

"I've seen one of them," she said. "'_The Mulberry Bush_'; when mother and I were in London last winter. And Arthur said you were the same Mr.

Melhuish. I suppose Frank Jervaise had told him."

"People who go to the theatre don't generally notice the name of the author," I commented.

"I do," she said. "I'm interested in the theatre. I've read dozens of plays, in French, mostly. I don't think the English comedies are nearly so well done. Of course, the French have only one subject, but they are so much more witty. Have you ever read _Les Hannetons_, for instance?"

"No. I've seen the English version on the stage," I said.

I was ashamed of having written _The Mulberry Bush_, of having presumed to write any comedy. I felt the justice of her implied criticism. Indeed, all my efforts seemed to me, just then, as being worthless and insincere. All my life, even. There was something definite and keen about this girl of twenty-three that suddenly illuminated my intellectual and moral flabbiness. She had already a definite att.i.tude towards social questions that I had never bothered to investigate. She had shown herself to have a final pride in the matter of blackmailing old Jervaise. And in half a dozen words she had exposed the lack of real wit in my attempts at playwriting. I was humbled before her superior intelligence. Her speech had still a faint flavour of the uneducated, but her judgments were brilliantly incisive; despite her inferentially limited experience, she had a clearer sight of humanity than I had.

"You needn't look so depressed," she remarked.

"I was thinking what a pity it is that you should go to Canada," I returned.

"I want to go," she said. "I want to feel free and independent; not a chattel of the Jervaises."

"But--Canada!" I remonstrated.

"You see," she said, "I could never leave my father and mother. Wherever they go, I must go, too. They've no one but me to look after them. And this does, at last, seem, in a way, a chance. Only, I can't trust myself.

I'm too impulsive about things like this. Oh! do you think it might kill my father if he were torn up by the roots? Sometimes I think it might be good for him, and at others I'm horribly afraid."

"Well, of course, I've never seen him..." I began.

"And in any case, you're prejudiced," she interrupted me. Her tone had changed again; it was suddenly light, almost coquettish, and she looked at me with a challenging lift of her eyebrows, as if, most astonishingly, she had read my secret adoration of her and defied me to acknowledge it.

"In what way am I prejudiced?" I asked.

"Hush! here's Brenda coming back," she said.

I regretted extremely that Brenda should have returned at that moment, but I was tremendously encouraged. Anne seemed in that one sentence to have sanctioned the understanding that I was in love with her. Her warning of the interruption seemed to carry some unspoken promise that I should be given another opportunity.

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 pa.s.sionately, 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 a.s.sociation 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 antic.i.p.ations 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 pa.s.sage 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' cla.s.s. She had flung those charges at me contemptuously before she had finally dismissed my one futile claim to distinction by cla.s.sing 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 att.i.tude 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.