The Jervaise Comedy

“It will hardly help your brother,” he concluded.

“I made a mistake in trying to help him this morning,” she said. “I shan’t make the same mistake twice in one day.”

He evidently knew what she meant, although I did not. His heavy eyebrows twitched, and then, with a half-contemptuous shrug of his shoulders he strode out of the room with an air of leaving us to the doom we so justly deserved.

“The worst of it is that the second mistake doesn’t cancel the first,” Anne remarked thoughtfully.

XI

The Story

She still stood by the great oak table, her hands resting lightly on its dark polished surface. I could see the vague reflection of her fingers reaching up through the deep solidity of the oak to join hands with her. She produced, I thought, an impressive effect of fragility and power in her contrast with that massive table. The material of her flesh was so delicate compared to the inert, formidable mass before her. She could not have lifted or moved it by her own effort. And yet it seemed that she had absolute command over that ponderous obstacle, that in some way the mobility of her spirit must give her control of it, that she might, if she wished, plunge those relatively fragile hands of hers deep into the lake of that dark and adamant surface.

She had not looked at me since Jervaise left the room, and when she spoke again she gazed with a kind of concentrated abstraction out of the window at the quiet glory of the calm August evening. Nevertheless her speech showed that all her attention was being given to the human interests that had just been absorbing us.

“Are you really a friend of ours?” she asked, “or did you just come here faute de mieux?” The little French phrase came like an unexpected jewel, as if she had relapsed unconsciously into a more familiar language.

I was strangely confused by the fact of our being alone together. I had an entirely unwarranted feeling that we were about to make up a quarrel. And I wanted to do my utmost to produce the best possible impression upon her.

“I hope I may call myself your brother’s friend,” I began lamely. “All my sympathies are with him.”

“You don’t know the Jervaises particularly well?” she inquired. For one moment she glanced down at her poised hands, but almost instantly returned to her rather absent-minded gazing through the open window.

“Except for Frank and his brother, I never met one of them until last night,” I explained. “I was at school and Cambridge with Frank.”

“But they are your sort, your class,” she said. “Don’t you agree with them that it’s a dreadful thing for Arthur, their chauffeur—and he was in the stables once, years ago—to try to run away with their daughter?”

“All my sympathies are with Arthur,” I repeated.

“Not because the Jervaises were so rude to you?” she asked.

“I liked him before that; when we met on the hill, very early this morning,” I said. “But, perhaps, he didn’t tell you.”

“Yes, he told me,” she said. “And was that the beginning of all the trouble between you and the Jervaises?”

“In a way, it was,” I agreed. “But it’s an involved story and very silly. I admit that they had grounds for suspecting that I had interfered.”

“Mrs. Jervaise and Olive are always suspecting people,” she volunteered. “I’ve often wondered why?”

“Like that, by nature,” I suggested.

“Perhaps,” she said carelessly as if she did not care to pursue that speculation. “You know that my mother was governess to Olive and Frank before she married my father?” she continued, still with that same air of discussing some remote, detached topic.

“I heard that she had been a governess. I didn’t know that she had ever been with the Jervaises,” I said.

“She was there for over two years,” pursued Anne. “She is French, you know, though you’d probably never guess it, now, except for an occasional word here and there. She left years before Brenda was born. Brenda is so much younger than the others. There’s eight years between her and Robert, the next one. Olive’s the eldest, of course, and then Frank.”

I made some conventional acknowledgment for this information. I was wondering if she were merely talking to save the embarrassment of silence. We had drifted, apparently, a long way from any matter of personal interest and I was hesitating as to whether I should not attempt a new opening, when she began again with the least little frown of determination.

“I’m talking about them, because if you are to be Arthur’s friend you ought to know more or less how things are between us and the Jervaises, and I might just as well say right out at once that we don’t like them; we’ve never liked them. Mother, more particularly. She has got something against them that she has never told us, but it isn’t that.” Her frown was more pronounced as she went on, “They aren’t nice people, any of them, except Brenda, and she’s so absolutely different from the rest of them, and doesn’t like them either—in a way.”

“You don’t even except Frank?” I mumbled. I could not resist the opportunity she had offered to ask that too pointed question; but I looked down at the floor as I spoke; I wanted her to understand that I was not cross-examining her.

“I knew you saw us,” she returned in the same even tone that she had used all through this conversation of ours. She had not once raised or lowered her voice. She might have been speaking a part, just to test her memory.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “Quite by accident, of course. I had no idea that he had come up here. I hadn’t seen him since breakfast.”

“It was a mistake,” she said simply.

I looked up at her, hoping with no shadow of reason that I might have played some part in her discovery that that caress in the wood had been a mistake. But she had not changed colour nor moved her attitude, and her voice was still free from any emotion as she said,—

“We thought, Brenda and I thought, that we might trick him. It was a piece of chicane. She and I were rather silly this morning. We excite each other. In a sort of way she dared me. But I was sorry afterwards and so was Brenda, although she thought it might be better as I’d gone so far to keep it up until Arthur had got a promise or something out of Mr. Jervaise. I had meant to do that. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“But do you think that Frank Jervaise realises that you were only playing with him for your own ends, this morning?” I asked.

“Oh! yes,” she said with perfect assurance. “As a matter of fact, he was very suspicious this morning. He’s like his mother and sister in suspecting everybody.”

“Do you think he’ll make trouble?” I said. “Now? Up at the Hall?”

“Yes, I do. He’s vindictive,” she replied. “That’s one reason why I’m glad you are with us, now. It might help—though I don’t quite see how. Perhaps it’s just the feeling of having some one else on our side. Because I’m afraid that there’s going to be a lot of trouble when my father and mother come home. With my father, more particularly. He’ll be afraid of being turned out. It will be very difficult to make him take up a new idea. He’ll hate the thought of leaving here and starting all over again in Canada. He loves this place so.”

“And I suppose he likes, or at least respects, the Jervaises?” I said.

“Not much,” she replied. “They’ve made it very difficult for us in many ways.”

“Deliberately?” I suggested.

“They don’t care,” she said, warming a little for the first time. “They simply don’t think of any one but themselves. For instance, it mayn’t seem much to you, but it’s part of our agreement with Mr. Jervaise to provide the Hall with dairy when they’re at home—at market prices, of course. And then they’ll go to town for two or three months in the summer and take a lot of the servants with them, and we’re left to find a market for our dairy as best we can, just when milk is most plentiful.” She lifted her hands for a moment in a graceful French gesture as she added, “Often it means just giving milk away.”

“Does your father complain about that?” I asked.

She turned and looked at me with a complete change of expression. Her abstraction had vanished, giving place to an air that confessed a deliberate caprice.

“To us,” she said with a laugh that delightfully indulged her father’s weakness.

I needed nothing more to illuminate the relations of the Banks family. With that single gesture she had portrayed her father’s character, and her own and her mother’s smiling consideration for him. Nevertheless I was still interested in his attitude towards the Hall—with Anne as interpreter. I knew that I should get a version noticeably different from the one her brother had given me on the hill that morning.

“But you said that your father hadn’t much respect for the Jervaises?” I stipulated.

“Not for the Jervaises as individuals,” she amended, “but he has for the Family. And they aren’t so much a family to him as an Idea, an Institution, a sort of Religion. Nothing would break him of that, nothing the Jervaises themselves ever could do. He’d be much more likely to lose his faith in God than in the Rights of the Hall. That’s one of his sayings. He says they have rights, as if there was no getting over that. It’s just like people used to believe in the divine right of kings.”

I do not know whether I was more fascinated by her theme or by her exposition of it. “Then, how is it that the rest of you…?” I began, but she had not the patience to wait while I finished the question. She was suddenly eager, vivid, astonishingly alive; a different woman from the Anne who had spoken as if in her sleep, while plunged in some immense, engrossing meditation.

“My mother,” she broke in. “The Jervaises mean nothing to her, nothing of that sort. She wasn’t brought up on it. It isn’t in her blood. In a way she’s as good as they are. Her grandfather was an emigré from the Revolution—not titled except just for the ‘de’, you know—they had an estate near Rouen … but all this doesn’t interest you.”

“It does, profoundly,” I said.

She looked at me with a spice of mischief in her eyes. “Why?” she asked.