The Jervaise Comedy Part 8

"Not in that way, Brenda's way," he said. "She's scatter-brained; you can't get round that. Going off after the dance in that idiotic way. It's maddening."

"Well, there are two questions that must be resolved before we can get any further," I commented. "The first is whether your sister has gone back--she may have been safe in bed for the last hour and a half for all we know. And the second is whether she is honestly in love with Banks.

From what I've heard of him, I should think it's very likely," I added thoughtfully.

Jervaise had his hands in his pockets and was staring up at the moon.

"He's not a bad chap in some ways," he remarked, "but there's no getting over the fact that he's our chauffeur."

I saw that. No badge could be quite so disgraceful in the eyes of the Jervaises as the badge of servitude. Our talk there, by the wood, had begun to create around us all the limitations of man's world. I was forgetting that we were moving in the free s.p.a.ces of a planetary republic.

And then I looked up and saw the leaning moon, whimsically balanced on the very crown of the topknot that gave a touch of impudence to the pudding-basin hill.

"What's the name of that hill?" I asked.

He looked at it absently for a moment before he said, "The people about here call it 'Jervaise Clump.' It's a landmark for miles."

There was no getting away from it. The Jervaises had conquered all this land and labelled it. I watched the sharp edge of the tree-clump slowly indenting the rounded back of the moon; and it seemed to me that Jervaise-Clump was the solid permanent thing; the moon a mere incident of the night.

"Oh! Lord! Lord! What bosh it all is!" I exclaimed.

"All what?" Jervaise asked sharply.

"This business of distinctions; of masters and servants; of families in possession and families in dependence," I enunciated.

"It isn't such dangerous bosh as socialism," Jervaise replied.

"I wasn't thinking of socialism," I said; "I was thinking of interplanetary s.p.a.ce."

Jervaise blew contemptuously. "Don't talk rot," he said, and I realised that we were back again on the old footing of our normal relations.

Nevertheless I made one more effort.

"It isn't rot," I said. "If it is, then every impulse towards beauty and freedom is rot, too." (I could not have said that to Jervaise in a house, but I drew confidence from the last tip of the moon beckoning farewell above the curve of the hill.) "Your, whatever it is you feel for Miss Banks--things like that ... all our little efforts to get away from these awful, clogging human rules."

I had given him his opportunity and he took it. He was absolutely ruthless. "No one but a fool tries to be superhuman," he said. "Come on!"

He had turned and was walking back in the direction of the Hall, and I followed him, humiliated and angry.

It was so impossible for me at that moment to avoid the suspicion that he had led me on by his appealing confidences solely in order to score off me when I responded. It is not, indeed, surprising that that should be my reaction while the hurt of his sneer still smarted. For he had p.r.i.c.ked me on a tender spot. I realised the weakness of what I had said; and it was a characteristic weakness. I had been absurdly unpractical, as usual, aiming like a fool, as Jervaise had said, at some "superhuman" ideal of freedom that perhaps existed solely in my own imagination; and would certainly be regarded by Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise and their circle of county friends as the vapourings of a weak mind. In short, Jervaise had made me aware of my own inept.i.tude, and it took me a full ten minutes before I could feel anything but resentment.

We had pa.s.sed back through the kitchen garden with its gouty espaliers, and come into the pleasance before I forgave him. According to his habit, he made no apology for his rudeness, but his explicit renewal of confidence in me more nearly approached an overt expression of desire for my friendship than anything I had ever known him to show hitherto.

"Look here, Melhuish," he said, stopping suddenly in the darkness of the garden. I could not "look" with much effect, but I replied, a trifle sulkily, "Well? What?"

"If she hasn't come back..." he said.

"I don't see that we can do anything more till to-morrow," I replied.

"No use trying to find her, of course," he agreed, irritably, "but we'd better talk things over with the governor."

"If I can be of any help..." I remarked elliptically.

"You won't be if you start that transcendental rot," he returned, as if he already regretted his condescension.

"What sort of rot do you want me to talk?" I asked.

"Common sense," he said.

I resisted the desire to say that I was glad he acknowledged the Jervaise version of common sense to be one kind of rot.

"All serene," I agreed.

He did not thank me.

And when I looked back on the happenings of the two hours that had elapsed since Jervaise had fetched me out of the improvised buffet, I was still greatly puzzled to account for his marked choice of me as a confidant. It was a choice that seemed to signify some weakness in him. I wondered if he had been afraid to trust himself alone with Anne at the Farm; if he were now suffering some kind of trepidation at the thought of the coming interview with his father? I found it so impossible to a.s.sociate any idea of weakness with that bullying mask which was the outward expression of Frank Jervaise.

IV

IN THE HALL

We found the family awaiting us in the Hall--Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise, Olive, and "Ronnie" Turnbull, whose desire to become one of the family by marrying its younger daughter was recognised and approved by every one except the young lady herself. Ronnie had evidently been received into the fullest confidence.

We had come in by the back door and made our way through the rather arid cleanliness of the houses' administrative departments, flavoured with a smell that combined more notably the odours of cooking and plate-polish.

The transition as we emerged through the red baize door under the majestic panoply of the staircase, was quite startling. It was like pa.s.sing from the desolate sanitation of a well-kept workhouse straight into the lighted auditorium of a theatre. That contrast dramatised, for me, the Jervaises'

tremendous ideal of the barrier between owner and servant; but it had, also, another effect which may have been due to the fact that it was, now, three o'clock in the morning.

For just at the moment of our transition I had the queerest sense not only of having pa.s.sed at some previous time through a precisely similar experience, but, also, of taking part in a ridiculous dream. At that instant Jervaise Hall, its owners, dependants and friends, had the air of being not realities but symbols pushed up into my thought by some prank of the fantastic psyche who dwells in the subconscious. I should not have been surprised at any incongruity in the brief pa.s.sing of that illusion.

The sensation flashed up and vanished; but it left me with the excited feeling of one who has had a vision of something transcendental, something more vivid and real than the common experiences of life--just such a feeling as I have had about some perfectly absurd dream of the night.

Mr. Jervaise was a man of nearly sixty, I suppose, with a clean-shaven face, a longish nose, and rather loose cheeks which fell, nevertheless, into firm folds and gave him a look of weak determination. I should have liked to model his face in clay; his lines were of the kind that give the amateur a splendid chance in modelling.

Mrs. Jervaise was taller and thinner than her husband, but lost something by always carrying her head with a slight droop as if she were for ever pa.s.sing through a low doorway. Her features were sharper than his--she had a high hawk nose and a thin line of a mouth--but either they were carelessly arranged or their relative proportions were bad, for I never felt the least desire to model her. Jervaise's face came out as a presentable whole, my memory of his wife delivers the hawk nose as the one salient object of what is otherwise a mere jumble.

Old Jervaise certainly looked the more aristocratic of the pair, but Mrs.

Jervaise was a woman of good family. She had been a Miss Norman before her marriage--one of the Shropshire Normans.

The four people in the Hall looked as if they had reached the stage of being dreadfully bored with each other when we arrived. They did not hear us immediately, and as my momentary dream dissolved I had an impression of them all as being on the verge of a heartrending yawn. They perked up instantly, however, when they saw us, turning towards us with a movement that looked concerted and was in itself a question.

Frank Jervaise, striding on ahead of me, answered at once, with a gloomy shake of his head.

"Isn't she there?" his mother asked. And "Hasn't she been there at all?"

she persisted when Frank returned a morose negative.