The Jervaise Comedy

I looked round for Brenda, but could not see her anywhere.

“Won’t you come back into the drawing-room?” Mrs. Jervaise was saying to the Sturtons.

“Oh! thank you, it’s hardly worth while, is it?” Mrs. Sturton answered effusively, but she loosened the shawl that muffled her throat as if she were preparing for a longer wait. “I’m so sorry,” she apologised for the seventh time. “So very unfortunate after such a really delightful evening.”

They kept up that kind of conversation for quite a long time, while we listened eagerly for the sound of the motor-horn.

And no motor-horn came; instead, after endlessly tedious minutes, John returned bearing himself like a portent of disaster.

The confounded fellow whispered again.

“What, not anywhere?” Jervaise asked irritably. “Sure he hasn’t gone to bed?”

John said something in that too discreet voice of his, and then Jervaise scowled and looked round at the ascending humanity of the staircase. His son Frank detached himself from the swarm, politely picked his way down into the Hall, and began to put John under a severe cross-examination.

“What’s up now, do you suppose?” Miss Tattersall asked, with the least tremor of excitement sounding in her voice.

“Perhaps the chauffeur has followed the example of Carter, and afterwards hidden his shame,” I suggested.

I was surprised by the warmth of her contradiction. “Oh, no” she said. “He isn’t the least that sort of man.” She said it as if I had aspersed the character of one of her friends.

“He seems to have gone, disappeared, any-way,” I replied.

“It’s getting frightfully mysterious,” Miss Tattersall agreed, and added inconsequently, “He’s got a strong face, you know; keen—looks as if he’d get his own way about things, though, of course, he isn’t a gentleman.”

I had a suspicion that she had been flirting with the romantic chauffeur. She was the sort of young woman who would flirt with any one.

I wished they would open that Hall door again. The action of my play had become dispersed and confused. Frank Jervaise had gone off through the baize door with John, and the Sturtons and their host and hostess were moving reluctantly towards the drawing-room.

“We might almost as well go and sit down somewhere,” I suggested to Miss Tattersall, and noted three or four accessible blanks on the staircase.

“Almost,” she agreed after a glance at the closed door that shut out the night.

In the re-arrangement I managed to leave her on a lower step, and climbed to the throne of the gods, at present occupied only by Gordon Hughes, one of Frank Jervaise’s barrister friends from the Temple. Hughes was reputed “brilliantly clever.” He was a tallish fellow with ginger red hair and a long nose—the foxy type.

“Rum start!” I cried, by way of testing his intellectual quality, but before I could get on terms with him, the stage was taken by a dark, curly-haired, handsome boy of twenty-four or so, generally addressed as “Ronnie.” I had thought him very like a well-intentioned retriever pup. I could imagine him worrying an intellectual slipper to pieces with great gusto.

“I say, it’s all U.P. now,” he said, in a dominating voice. “What’s the time?” He was obviously too well turned out to wear a watch with evening dress.

Some one said it was “twenty-five to one.”

“Fifty to one against another dance, then,” Ronnie barked joyously.

“Unless you’ll offer yourself up as a martyr in a good cause,” suggested Nora Bailey.

“Offer myself up? How?” Ronnie asked.

“Take ’em home in your car,” Nora said in a penetrating whisper.

“Dead the other way,” was Ronnie’s too patent excuse.

“It’s only a couple of miles through the Park, you know,” Olive Jervaise put in. “You might easily run them over to the vicarage and be back again in twenty minutes.”

“By Jove; yes. So I might,” Ronnie acknowledged. “That is, if I may really come back, Miss Jervaise. Awfully good of you to suggest it. I didn’t bring my man with me, though. I’ll have to go and wind up the old buzz-wagon myself, if your fellow can’t be found. Do you think … could any one…”

He was looking round, searching for some one who was not there.

“Want any help?” Hughes asked.

“No, thanks. That’s all right. I know where the car is, I mean,” Ronnie said, and still hesitated as if he were going to finish the question he had begun in his previous speech.

Olive Jervaise anticipated, I think wrongly, his remark. “They’re in the drawing-room,” she said. “Will you tell them?”

“Better get the car round first, hadn’t I?” Ronnie asked.

The sandy Atkinson youth found an answer for that. He cleared his long, thin throat huskily and said, “Might save time to tell ’em first. They’d be ready, then, when you came round.” His two equally sandy sisters clucked their approval.

“All serene,” Ronnie agreed.

He was on the bottom step of the stairs when the Hall door was thrown wide open and Frank Jervaise returned.

He stood there a moment, posed for us, searching the ladder of our gallery; and the spirit of the night-stock drifted past him and lightly touched us all as it fled up the stairs. Then he came across the Hall, and addressing his sister, asked, in a voice that overstressed the effect of being casual, “I say, Olive, you don’t happen to know where Brenda is, do you?”

I suppose our over-soul knew everything in that minute. A tremor of dismay ran up our ranks like the sudden passing of a cold wind. Every one was looking at Ronnie.

Olive Jervaise’s reply furnished an almost superfluous corroboration. She could not control her voice. She tried to be as casual as her brother, and failed lamentably. “Brenda was here just now,” she said. “She—she must be somewhere about.”

Ronnie, still the cynosure of the swarm, turned himself about and stared at Frank Jervaise. But it was Gordon Hughes who demonstrated his power of quick inference and response, although in doing it he overstepped the bounds of decency by giving a voice to our suspicions.

“Is the car in the garage? Your own car?” he asked.

“Yes. Rather. Of course,” Jervaise replied uneasily.

“You’ve just looked?” Hughes insisted.

“I know the car’s there,” was Jervaise’s huffy evasion, and he took Ronnie by the arm and led him off into the drawing-room.

The Hall door stood wide open, and the tragedy of the night flowed unimpeded through the house.

Although the horror had not been named we all recognised its finality. We began to break up our formation immediately, gabbling tactful irrelevancies about the delightful evening, the delinquent Carter, and the foolishness of Sabbatarianism. Mrs. Atkinson appeared in the Hall, cloaked and muffled, and beckoned to her three replicas. She announced that their omnibus was “just coming round.”

In the general downward drift of dispersion I saw Grace Tattersall looking up at me with an expression that suggested a desire for the confidential discussion of scandal, and I hastily whispered to Hughes that we might go to the extemporised buffet in the supper-room and get a whisky and seltzer or something. He agreed with an alacrity that I welcomed at the time, but regret, now, because our retirement into duologue took us out of the important movement, and I missed one or two essentials of the development.

The truth is that we were all overcome at the moment by an irresistible desire to appear tactful. We wanted to show the Jervaises that we had not suspected anything, or that if we had, we didn’t mind in the least, and it certainly wasn’t their fault. Nevertheless, I saw no reason why in the privacy of the supper-room—we had the place to ourselves—I should not talk to Hughes. I had never before that afternoon met any of the Jervaise family except Frank, and on one or two occasions his younger brother who was in the army and, now, in India; and I thought that this was an appropriate occasion to improve my knowledge. I understood that Hughes was an old friend of the family.

He may have been, although the fact did not appear in his conversation; for I discovered almost immediately that he was, either by nature or by reason of his legal training, cursed with a procrastinating gift of diplomacy.

“Awkward affair!” I began as soon as we had got our whiskies and lighted cigarettes.