The Jervaise Comedy

I sheered away from that topic; chiefly, I think, because I wanted to avoid any suggestion of pumping him. When you have recently been branded as a spy, you go about for the next few days trying not to feel like one.

“Isn’t there any place in the village I could go to?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There’s one pub—a sort of beerhouse—but they don’t take people in,” he said.

“No lodgings?” I persisted.

“The Jervaises don’t encourage that sort of thing,” he replied. “Afraid of the place getting frippery. I’ve heard them talking about it in the car. And as they own every blessed cottage in the place….” He left the deduction to my imagination, and continued with the least touch of bashfulness, “You wouldn’t care to come to us, I suppose?”

“To the Home Farm?” I replied stupidly. I was absurdly embarrassed. If I had not chanced to see that grouping in the wood before lunch, I should have jumped at the offer. But I knew that it must have been Miss Banks who had seen me—spying. Jervaise had had his back to me. And she would probably, I thought, take his view of the confounded accident. She would be as anxious to avoid me as I was to avoid her. Coming so unexpectedly, this invitation to the Farm appeared to me as a perfectly impossible suggestion.

Banks, naturally, misinterpreted my embarrassment.

“I suppose it would put you in the wrong, as it were—up at the Hall,” he said. “Coming to us after that row, I mean, ’d look as if what they’d been saying was all true.”

“I don’t care a hang about that,” I said earnestly. In my relief at being able to speak candidly I forgot that I was committing myself to an explanation; and Banks inevitably wandered into still more shameful misconceptions of my implied refusal.

“Only a farm, of course…” he began.

“Oh! my dear chap,” I interposed quickly. “Do believe me, I’d far sooner stay at the Home Farm than at Jervaise Hall.”

He looked at me with rather a blank stare of inquiry.

“Well, then?” was all he found to say.

I could think of nothing whatever.

For a second or two we stared at one another like antagonists searching for an unexposed weakness. He was the first to try another opening.

“Fact is, I suppose,” he said tentatively, “that you’d like to be out of this affair altogether? Had enough of it, no doubt?”

I might have accepted that suggestion without hurting Banks’s self-respect. I saw the excuse as a possibility that provided an honourable way of escape. I had but to say, “Well, in a way, yes. I have, in all innocence, got most confoundedly entangled in an affair that hasn’t anything whatever to do with me, and it seems that the best thing I can do now is to clear out.” He would have believed that. He would have seen the justice of it. But the moment this easy way of escape was made clear to me, I knew that I did not want to take it; that in spite of everything, I wanted, almost passionately, to go to the Home Farm.

I was aware of a sudden clarity of vision. The choice that lay before me appeared suddenly vital; a climax in my career, a symbol of the essential choice that would determine my future.

On the one hand was the security of refusal. I could return, unaffected, to my familiar life. Presently, when the Jervaise nerves had become normal again, the Jervaises themselves would recognise the egregious blunder they had made in their treatment of me. They would apologise—through Frank. And I should go on, as I had begun. I was already decently successful. I should become more successful. I could look forward to increased financial security, to a measure of fame, to all that is said to make life worth living. And as I saw it, then, the whole prospect of that easy future, appeared to me as hopelessly boring, worthless, futile.

On the other hand…? I had no idea what awaited me on the other hand. I could see that I should have to accept the stigma that had been put upon me; that I should be thrown into the company of a young woman whose personality had extraordinarily attracted me, who probably detested me, and who might now be engaged to a man I very actively disliked; that I should involve myself in an affair that had not fully engaged my sympathy (I still retained my feeling of compassion for old Jervaise); that I should, in short, be choosing the path of greatest resistance and unpleasantness, with no possibility of getting any return other than scorn and disgrace.

I saw these alternatives in a flash, and no sane man would have hesitated between them for one moment.

“But look here, Banks,” I said. “What would your mother and—and your sister say to having an unknown visitor foisted upon them without notice?”

“Oh! that’d be all right,” he said with conviction.

“There’s nothing I should like better than to stay with you,” I continued, “if I thought that your—people would care to have me.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” he said, “my father and mother haven’t come home yet. They drove over to some relations of ours about twelve miles away, yesterday afternoon, and they won’t be back till about seven, probably. Last chance my father had before harvest, and my mother likes to get away now and again when she can manage it.”

“They don’t know yet, then, about you and…?” I said, momentarily diverted by the new aspect this news put on the doings of the night.

“Not yet. That’ll be all right, though,” Banks replied, and added as an afterthought, “The old man may be a bit upset. I want to persuade ’em all to come out to Canada, you see. There’s a chance there. Mother would come like a shot, but I’m afraid the old man’ll be a bit difficult.”

“But, then, look here, Banks,” I said. “You won’t want a stranger up there to-night of all nights—interfering with your—er—family council.”

Banks scratched his head with a professional air. “I dunno,” he said. “It might help.” He looked at me reflectively before adding, “You know She’s up there—of course?”

“I didn’t,” I replied. “Was she there last night when Jervaise and I went up?”

He shook his head. “We meant to go off together and chance it,” he said. “May as well tell you now. There’s no secret about it among ourselves. And then she came out to me on the hill without her things—just in a cloak. Came to tell me it was all off. Said she wouldn’t go, that way…. Well, we talked…. Best part of three hours. And the end of it was, she came back to the Farm.”

“And it isn’t all off?” I put in.

“The elopement is,” he said.

“But not the proposed marriage?”

He leaned against the door of the car with the air of one who is preparing for a long story. “You’re sure you want to hear all this?” he asked.

“Quite sure—that is, if you want to tell me,” I said. “And if I’m coming home with you, it might be as well if I knew exactly how things stand.”

“I felt somehow as if you and me were going to hit it off, last night,” he remarked shyly.

“So did I,” I rejoined, not less shy than he was.

Our friendship had been admitted and confirmed. No further word was needed. We understood each other. I felt warmed and comforted. It was good to be once more in the confidence of a fellowman. I have not the stuff in me that is needed to make a good spy.

“Well, the way things are at present,” Banks hurried on to cover our lapse into an un-British sentimentality, “is like this. We’d meant, as I told you, to run away….”

“And then she was afraid?”

“No, it was rather the other way round. It was me that was afraid. You see, I thought I should take all the blame off the old man by going off with her—him being away and all, I didn’t think as even the Jervaises could very well blame it on to him, overlooking what she pointed out, as once we’d gone they’d simply have to get rid of him, too, blame or no blame. They’d never stand having him and mother and Anne within a mile of the Hall, as sort of relations. I ought to have seen that, but one forgets these things at the time.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“So what it came to,” he continued, “was that we might as well face it out as not. She’s like that—likes to have things straight and honest. So do I, for the matter of that; but once you’ve been a gentleman’s servant it gets in your blood or something. I was three years as groom and so on up at the Hall before I went to Canada. Should have been there now if it hadn’t been for mother. I was only a lad of sixteen when I went into service, you see, and when I came back I got into the old habits again. I tell you it’s difficult once you’ve been in service to get out o’ the way of feeling that, well, old Jervaise, for instance, is a sort of little lord god almighty.”

“I can understand that,” I agreed, and added, “but I’m rather sorry for him, old Jervaise. He has been badly cut up, I think.”

Banks looked at me sharply, with one of his keen, rather challenging turns of expression. “Sorry for him? You needn’t be,” he said. “I could tell you something—at least, I can’t—but you can take it from me that you needn’t waste your pity on him.”

I realised that this was another reference to that “pull” I had heard of, which could not be used, and was not even to be spoken of to me after I had been admitted to Banks’s confidence. I realised, further, that my guessing must have gone hopelessly astray. Here was the suggestion of something far more sinister than a playing on the old man’s affection for his youngest child.

“Very well, I’ll take it from you,” I said. “On the other hand, you can take it from me that old Jervaise is very much upset.”

Banks smiled grimly. “He’s nervous at dangerous corners, like you said,” he returned. “However, we needn’t go into that—the point is as I began to tell you, that we’ve decided to face it out; and well, you saw me go up to the Hall this morning.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Banks said. “I saw the old man and Mr. Frank, and they were both polite in a sort of way—no shouting nor anything, though, of course, Mr. Frank tried to browbeat me—but very firm that nothing had got to happen; no engagement or running away or anything. She was to come home and I was to go back to Canada—they’d pay my fare and so on…”

“And you?”

“Me? I just stuck to it we were going to get married, and Mr. Frank tried to threaten me till the old man stopped him, and then I came out.”

“Did you wind up the stable-clock?” I put in.

“Yes. I forgot it last night,” he said. “And I hate to see a thing not working properly.”

Dear Banks! I did not know, then, how characteristic that was of him.

I returned to the subject in hand.

“What do you propose to do, then?” I asked. “To get their consent?”

“Just stick to it,” he said.

“You think they’ll give way?”

“They’ll have to, in the end,” he affirmed gravely, and continued in a colder voice that with him indicated a flash of temper. “It’s just their respectability they care about, that’s all. If they were fond of her, or she of them, it would be another thing altogether. But she’s different to all the others, and they’ve never hit it off, she and them, among themselves. Why, they treat her quite differently to the others; to Miss Olive, for instance.”

“Do they?” I said, in astonishment. I had been romantically picturing Brenda as the favourite child, and I could not, at once, see her in this new light.

“She never got on with ’em, somehow,” Banks said. “Anyway, not when they were alone. Always rows of one sort or another. They couldn’t understand her, of course, being so different to the others.”

I was not satisfied with this explanation, but I did not press him for further details. His insistence on Brenda’s difference from the rest of the Jervaises was evidently as far as he could get. The difference was obvious enough, certainly, but he would naturally exaggerate it. He was, as Miss Tattersall had said, “infatuated,” but I put a more kindly construction on the description than she had done—perhaps “enthralled” would have been a better word.

We had come to a pause. His confidences were exhausted for the present. He had told me all that it was necessary for me to know before I met Brenda and his sister; and I waited for him, now, to renew his invitation. I preferred that he should re-open that subject; but he came to it rather obliquely.

“Well!” he remarked. “Might as well be getting on, I suppose?”

I nodded and got out of the car.

“Can you find your way up?” he proceeded.

“Alone?” I asked.

“It’s only about half a mile,” he explained, “You can’t miss it. You see, I want to get the car back to the house. Don’t do it any good standing about here. Besides, it wouldn’t do for them to think as I was holding it over them.”

Even the picture of a herculean Banks holding that car over the Jervaises failed to divert me, just then. I was too much occupied with my new friend’s simple absence of tact. I would sooner have faced a return to the Hall than an unsupported appearance at the Farm.

“Oh! I’m not going up there alone,” I said.

Banks was honestly surprised. “Why not?” he asked. “You met Anne last night, didn’t you? That’ll be all right. You tell her I told you to come up. She’ll understand.”

I shook my head. “It won’t take you long to run up to the Hall and put the car in,” I said. “I’ll cut across the Park and meet you in that wood just below your house—the way that Jervaise and I went last night.”

He looked distressed. He could not understand my unwillingness to go alone, but his sense of what was due to me would not permit him to let me wait for him in the wood.

“But, I can’t see…” he began, and then apparently realising that he was failing either in respect or in hospitality, he continued, “Oh! well, I’ll just run up with you at once; it won’t take us ten minutes, and half an hour one way or the other won’t make any difference.”

I accepted his sacrifice without further protestation; and after he had carefully replaced the tarpaulin over the tonneau of the car, we set off briskly towards the Farm. About a third of a mile farther on we left the highroad for a side road, and another three or four minutes’ walk up the hill brought us to the main entrance to the Farm. I saw, now, that I had come with Jervaise to a side door last night. This front approach was more imposing—up a drive through an avenue of limes. The house seen from this aspect looked very sweet and charming. It was obviously of a date not later than the sixteenth century, and I guessed that the rough-cast probably concealed a half-timber work structure. In front of it was a good strip of carefully kept lawn and flower garden. The whole place had an air of dignity and beauty that I had not expected, and I think Banks must have noticed my surprise, for he said,—

“Not bad, is it? Used to be a kind of dower house once upon a time, they say.”

“Absolutely charming,” I replied. “Now, this is the sort of house I should like to live in.”

“I dare say it’ll be to let before long,” Banks said with a touch of grim humour.

“Not to me, though,” I said.

He laughed. “Perhaps not,” he agreed.

We had paused at the end of the little avenue for me to take in the effect of the house, and as we still stood there, the sound of a man’s voice came to us through the open window of one of the rooms on the ground floor.

“Your father’s home sooner than you expected,” I remarked.

“That’s not the old man,” Banks said in a tone that instantly diverted my gaze from the beauties of the Home Farm.

“Who is it, then?” I asked.

“Listen!” he said. He was suddenly keen, alert and suspicious. I saw him no longer as the gentleman’s servant, the product of the Jervaise estate, but as the man who had knocked about the world, who often preferred to sleep in the open.

“There are two of them there,” he said; “Frank Jervaise and that young fellow Turnbull, if I’m not mistaken.” And even as he spoke he began hurriedly to cross the little lawn with a look of cold anger and determination that I was glad was not directed against myself.

As I followed him, it came into my mind to wonder whether Frank Jervaise had taken me with him as a protection the night before? Had he been afraid of meeting Banks? I had hitherto failed to find any convincing reason for Jervaise’s queer mark of confidence in me.

X

The Home Farm

I must own that I was distinctly uncomfortable as I followed Banks into the same room in which I had sat on my previous visit to the Home Farm. The influence of tradition and habit would not let me alone. I cared nothing for the Jervaises’ opinion, but I resented the unfairness of it and had all the innocent man’s longing to prove his innocence—a feat that was now become for ever impossible. By accepting Banks’s invitation, I had confirmed the worst suspicions the Jervaises could possibly have harboured against me.

Indeed, it seems probable that I was now revealing more shameful depths of duplicity than their most depraved imaginings had been able to picture. As I entered the room, I looked first at Frank, and his dominant emotion, just then, appeared to be surprise. For a moment I had a sense of reprieve. I guessed that he had not been truly convinced of the truth of his own accusations against me. But any relief I may have felt was dissipated at once. I saw Jervaise’s look of surprise give place to a kind of perplexed anger, an expression that I could only read as conveying his amazement that any gentleman (I am sure his thought was playing about that word) could be such a blackguard as I was now proving myself to be.

Ronnie Turnbull, also, evidently shared that opinion. The boyish and rather theatrical movement with which he turned his back upon me, showed at once that he had been coached in the suspicions that were now so finally clinched.

“This fellow simply isn’t worth speaking to,” was the inarticulate message of his gesture.

And certainly I gave neither of them any occasion to speak to me. Banks’s opening plunged us into one of those chaotic dialogues which are only made more confused by any additional contribution.

“What have you come up here for?” Banks asked, displaying his immediate determination to treat the invaders without respect of class on this common ground of his father’s home.

“That’s our affair,” Frank snapped. He looked nervously vicious, I thought, like a timid-minded dog turned desperate.

“What the devil do you mean?” Turnbull asked at the same moment, and Brenda got up from her chair and tried to address some explanation to her lover through the ominous preparatory snarlings of the melée.

I heard her say, “Arthur! They’ve been trying to…” but lost the rest in the general shindy.

Turnbull, by virtue of his lung-power, was the most audible of the four.

“You’ve jolly well got to understand, my good man,” he was saying, “that the sooner you get out of this the better”; and went on with more foolishness about Banks having stolen the motor—all painfully tactless stuff, if he still had the least intention of influencing Brenda, but he was young and arrogant and not at all clever.

Banks and Jervaise were sparring at each other all the time that Turnbull fulminated, and Brenda’s soprano came in like a flageolet obbligato—a word or two here and there ringing out with a grateful clearness above the masculine accompaniment.

I dared, in the confusion, to glance at Anne, and she looked up at me at the same moment. She was slightly withdrawn from the tumult that drew together about the counter of the sturdy oak table in the centre of the room. She was sitting in the towering old settle by the fireplace, leaning a little forward as if she awaited her opportunity to spring in and determine the tumult when something of this grotesque male violence had been exhausted.

She looked at me, I thought, with just a touch of supplication, a look that I misinterpreted as a request to use my influence in stopping this din of angry voices that was so obviously serving no useful purpose. But I felt no inclination to respond to that appeal of hers. I had an idea that she might be going to announce her engagement to Jervaise, an announcement that would critically affect the whole situation; and I had no wish to help her in solving the immediate problem by those means.

Perhaps she read in my face something of the sullen resentment I was feeling, for she leaned back quickly into the corner of the settle, with a movement that seemed to indicate a temporary resignation to the inevitable. I saw her as taking cover from this foolish masculine din about the table; but I had no doubt that she was still awaiting her opportunity.

It was Jervaise who brought back the unintelligible disputants to reasonable speech. He stopped speaking, stepped back on to the hearth-rug, and then addressed the loudly vociferous Turnbull.

“Ronnie!” Jervaise said in a tone that arrested attention, and having got his man’s ear, added, “Half a minute!”

“But look here, you know,” Turnbull protested, still on the same note of aggressive violence. “What I mean to say is that this feller seems to confoundedly well imagine…”

“Do for God’s sake shut up!” Jervaise returned with a scowl.

“I suppose you think that I haven’t any right…” Turnbull began in a rather lower voice; and Brenda at last finding a chance to make herself heard, finished him by saying quickly,—

“Certainly you haven’t; no right whatever to come here—and brawl…” She spoke breathlessly, as though she were searching in the brief interlude of an exhausting struggle for some insult that would fatally wound and offend him. She tried to show him in a sentence that he was nothing more to her than a blundering, inessential fool, interfering in important business that was no concern of his. And although the hurry of her mind did not permit her to find the deadly phrase she desired, the sharpness of her anxiety to wound him was clear enough.

“Oh! of course, if you think that…” he said, paused as if seeking for some threat of retaliation, and then flung himself, the picture of dudgeon, into a chair by the wall. He turned his back towards Brenda and glared steadfastly at his rival. I received the impression that the poor deluded boy was trying to revenge himself on Brenda. At the back of his mind he seemed still to regard her escapade as a foolish piece of bravado, undertaken chiefly to torture himself. His attitude was meant to convey that the joke had gone far enough, and that he would not stand much more of it.

For a time at least he was, fortunately, out of the piece. Perhaps he thought the influence of his attitude must presently take effect; that Brenda, whom he so habitually adored with his eyes, would be intimidated by his threat of being finally offended?

The three other protagonists took no more notice of the sulky Ronnie, but they could not at once recover any approach to sequence.

“I want to know why you’ve come up here,” Banks persisted.

“That’s not the point,” Jervaise began in a tone that I thought was meant to be conciliatory.

“But it is—partly,” Brenda put in.

“My dear girl, do let’s have the thing clear,” her brother returned, but she diverted his apparent intention of making a plain statement by an impatient,—

“Oh! it’s all clear enough.”

“But it isn’t, by any means,” Jervaise said.

“To us it is,” Banks added, meaning, I presume, that he and Brenda had no doubts as to their intentions.

“You’re going to persist in the claim you made this morning?” Jervaise asked.

Banks smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t be silly, Frank,” Brenda interpreted. “You must know that we can’t do anything else.”

“It’s foolish to say you can’t,” he returned irritably, “when so obviously you can.”

“Well, anyway, we’re going to,” Banks affirmed with a slight inconsequence.

“And do you purpose to stay on here?” Jervaise said sharply, as if he were posing an insuperable objection.

“Not likely,” Banks replied. “We’re going to Canada, the whole lot of us.”

“Your father and mother, too?”

“Yes, if I can persuade ’em; and I can,” Banks said.

“You haven’t tried yet?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Don’t they know anything about this? Anything, I mean, before last night’s affair?”

“Practically nothing at all,” Banks said. “Of course, nothing whatever about last night.”

“And you honestly think…” began Jervaise.

“That’ll be all right, won’t it, Anne?” Banks replied.

But Anne, still leaning back in the corner of the settle, refused to answer.