The Jervaise Comedy Part 29

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 sc.r.a.ped 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 repet.i.tions 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 ama.s.sing 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 att.i.tude towards life with which I was most familiar. It had been my own att.i.tude.

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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 bl.u.s.ter. 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 pa.s.sing 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' cla.s.s, 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 gra.s.s 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. d.a.m.n 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 a.s.sumption 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."