The Jervaise Comedy

“What do you think, Melhuish?” he asked, and then they all turned to me as if I might be able in some miraculous way to save the situation. Even old Jervaise paused in his melancholy pacing and waited for my answer.

“There is so little real evidence, at present,” I said, feeling their need for some loophole and searching my mind to discover one for them.

“It really does seem almost impossible that Brenda should have—run away with that man,” Mrs. Jervaise pleaded with the beginning of a gesture that produced the effect of wanting to wring her hands.

“She’s under age, too,” Frank put in.

“Does that mean they can’t get married?” asked Ronnie.

“Not legally,” Frank said.

“It’s such madness, such utter madness,” his mother broke out in a tone between lament and denunciation. But she pulled herself up immediately and came back to my recent contribution as presenting the one possible straw that still floated in this drowning world. “But, as Mr. Melhuish says,” she went on with a little gasp of annoyance, “we really have very little evidence, as yet.”

“It has occurred to me to wonder,” I tried, “whether Miss Jervaise might not have been moved by a sudden desire to drive the car by moonlight…” I was going on to defend my suggestion by pleading that such an impulse would, so far as I could judge, be quite in character, but no further argument was needed. I had created a sensation. My feeble straw had suddenly taken the form of a practicable seaworthy raft, big enough to accommodate all the family—with the one exception of Frank, who, as it were, grasped the edge of this life-saving apparatus of mine, and tested it suspiciously. His preliminary and perfectly futile opening to the effect that the moon had already set, was, however, smothered in the general acclamation.

“Oh! of course! So she may!” Mrs. Jervaise exclaimed.

“Well, we might have thought of that, certainly,” Olive echoed. “It would be so like Brenda.”

While Ronnie hopefully murmured “That is possible, quite possible,” as a kind of running accompaniment.

Then Mr. Jervaise began to draw in to the family group, with what seemed to me quite an absurd air of meaning to find a place on the raft of the big rug by the fireplace. Indeed, they had all moved a little closer together. Only Frank maintained his depressing air of doubt.

“Been an infernally long time,” he said. “What’s it now? Half-past three?”

“She may have had an accident,” Olive suggested cheerfully.

“Or gone a lot farther than she originally meant to,” Ronnie substituted; the suggestion of an accident to Brenda obviously appearing less desirable to him than it apparently did to Brenda’s sister.

“It seems to me,” Mr. Jervaise said, taking the lead for the first time, “that there may very well be half a dozen reasons for her not having returned; but I can’t think of one that provides the semblance of an excuse for her going in the first instance. Brenda must be—severely reprimanded. It’s intolerable that she should be allowed to go on like this.”

“She has always been spoilt,” Olive said in what I thought was a slightly vindictive aside.

“She’s so impossibly headstrong,” deplored Mrs. Jervaise.

Her husband shook his head impatiently. “There is a limit to this kind of thing,” he said. “She must be made to understand—I will make her understand that we draw the line at midnight adventures of this kind.”

Mrs. Jervaise and Olive agreed warmly with that decision, and the three of them drew a little apart, discussing, I inferred, the means that were to be adopted for the limiting of the runaway, when she returned. But I was puzzled to know whether they were finally convinced of the truth of the theory they had so readily adopted. Were they deceiving, or trying very hard, indeed, to deceive themselves into the belief that the whole affair was nothing but a prank of Brenda’s? I saw that my casual suggestion had a general air of likelihood, but if I had been in their place, I should have demanded evidence before I drew much consolation from so unsupported a conclusion.

I joined young Turnbull.

“Good idea of yours, Melhuish,” Ronnie said.

Frank grunted.

“I’ve no sort of grounds for it, you know,” I explained. “It was only a casual suggestion.”

“Jolly convincing one, though,” Turnbull congratulated me. “So exactly the sort of thing she would do, isn’t it, Frank?”

“Shouldn’t have thought she’d have been gone so long,” Jervaise replied. He looked at me as he continued, “And how does it fit with that notion of ours about Miss Banks having expected her?”

“That was only a guess,” I argued.

“Better evidence for it than you had for your guess,” he returned, and we drifted into an indeterminate wrangle, each of us defending his own theory rather because he had had the glory of originating it than because either of us had, I think, the least faith in our explanations.

It was Ronnie who, picking up the thread of our deductions from the Home Farm interview in the course of our discussion, sought to reconcile us and our theories.

“She might have meant to go up to the Farm,” he suggested, “and changed her mind when she got outside. Nothing very unlikely in that.”

“But why the devil should she have made an appointment at the Home Farm in the first instance?” Frank replied with some cogency.

“If she ever did,” I put in unwisely, thereby provoking a repetition of the evidence afforded by Miss Banks’s behaviour, particularly the damning fact that she, alone, had responded to Racquet’s demand for our instant annihilation.

And while we went on with our pointless arguments and the other little group of three continued to lay plans for the re-education of Brenda, the depression of a deeper and deeper ennui weighed upon us all. The truth is, I think, that we were all waiting for the possibility of the runaway’s return, listening for the sound of the car, and growing momentarily more uneasy as no sound came. No doubt the Jervaises were all very sleepy and peevish, and the necessity of restraining themselves before Turnbull and myself added still another to their many sources of irritation.

I put the Jervaises apart in this connection, because Ronnie was certainly very wide awake and I had no inclination whatever to sleep. My one longing was to get back, alone, into the night. I was fretting with the fear that the dawn would have broken before I could get away. I had made up my mind to watch the sunrise from “Jervaise Clump.”

It was Mrs. Jervaise who started the break-up of the party. She was attacked by a craving to yawn that gradually became irresistible. I saw the incipient symptoms of the attack and watched her with a sympathetic fascination, as she clenched her jaw, put her hand up to her lips, and made little impatient movements of her head and body. I knew that it must come at last, and it did, catching her unawares in the middle of a sentence—undertaken, I fancy, solely as a defence against the insidious craving that was obsessing her.

“Oh, dear!” she said, with a mincing, apologetic gesture of her head; and then “Dear me!” Having committed the solecism, she found it necessary to draw attention to it. She may have been a Shropshire Norman, but at that relaxed hour of the night, she displayed all the signs of the orthodox genteel attitude.

“I don’t know when I’ve been so tired,” she apologised.

But, indeed, she did owe us an apology for her yawning fit affected us all like a virulent epidemic. In a moment we were every one of us trying to stifle the same desire, and each in our own way being overcome. I must do Frank the justice to say that he, at least, displayed no sign of gentility.

“Oh! Lord, mater, you’ve started us now,” he said, and gave away almost sensuously to his impulses, stretching and gaping in a way that positively racked us with the longing to imitate him.

“Really, my dear, no necessity for you,” began Mr. Jervaise, yawned more or less politely behind a very white, well-kept hand, and concluded, “no necessity for you or Olive to stay up; none whatever. We cannot, in any case, do anything until the morning.”

“Even if she comes in, now,” supplemented Olive.

“As I’m almost sure she will,” affirmed Mrs. Jervaise.

And she must have put something of genuine confidence into her statement, for automatically we all stopped talking for a few seconds and listened again with the ears of faith for the return of the car.

“But as I said,” Olive began again, abruptly ending the unhopeful suspense of our pause, “there’s nothing more we can do by sitting up. And there’s certainly no need for you to overtire yourself, mother.”

“No, really not,” urged Ronnie politely, “nor for you, either, sir,” he added, addressing his host. “What I mean is, Frank and I’ll do all that.”

“Rather, let’s get a drink,” Frank agreed.

We wanted passionately to get away from each other and indulge ourselves privately in a very orgie of gapes and stretchings. And yet, we stuck there, idiotically, making excuses and little polite recommendations for the others to retire, until Frank with a drastic quality of determination that he sometimes showed, took command.

“Go on, mater,” he said; “you go to bed.” And he went up to her, kissed her in the mechanical way of most grown-up sons, and gently urged her in the direction of the stairs. She submitted, still with faint protestations of apology.

Olive followed, and with a last feint of hospitality, her father brought up the tail of the procession.

“Coming for a drink?” Frank asked me with a jerk of his head towards the extemporised buffet.