The Jervaise Comedy. John Davys Beresford
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.
Jervaise shrugged his shoulders. “It’s all so infernally complicated by this affair of Brenda’s,” he said.
Yet it has seemed simple enough to him, I reflected, an hour before. “Kick him and bring her home,” had been his ready solution of the difficulties he thought were before us. Evidently Anne’s behaviour during our talk at the farm had had a considerable effect upon his opinions. That, and the moon. I feel strongly inclined to include the moon—lazily declining now towards the ambush of a tumulus-shaped hill, crowned, as is the manner of that country, with a pert little top-knot of trees.
“Complicated or simplified?” I suggested.
“Complicated; damnably complicated,” he replied irritably. “Brenda’s a little fool. It isn’t as if she were in earnest.”
“Then you don’t honestly believe that she’s in love with Banks?” I asked, remembering his “I don’t know. How can any one know,” of a few minutes earlier.
“She’s so utterly unreliable—in every way,” he equivocated. “She always has been. She isn’t the least like the rest of us.”
“Don’t you count yourself as another exception?” I asked.
“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 spaces 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 space.”
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 pricked 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 ineptitude, and it took me a full ten minutes before I could feel anything but resentment.
We had passed 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 associate 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.