The Jervaise Comedy

“Young Frank has, anyway,” he said with a brave assumption of breaking away from servility.

“You didn’t see the old man?”

“Never a sight of him.”

“And young Frank…?”

“Shoved it home for all he was worth. Threatened me with the law and what not. Said if I tried to take Her with me they’d have us stopped and take an action against me for abduction. I suppose it’s all right that they can do that?”

“I’m afraid it is,” I said; “until she comes of age.”

“Glad I’d taken the car back, anyhow,” Banks muttered, and I guessed that young Frank’s vindictiveness had not been overestimated by Anne. No doubt, he would have been glad enough to complicate the issue by alleging Banks’s theft of that car.

“Well, what do you propose to do now?” I asked, after a short interval of silence.

“I don’t know,” Banks said desperately, and then added, “It depends chiefly on Her.”

“She’ll probably vote for an elopement,” I suggested.

“And if they come after us and I’m bagged?”

“Don’t let yourself get bagged. Escape them.”

“D’you think she’d agree to that? Sneaking off and hiding? Dodging about to get out of the country, somehow?” His tone left me uncertain whether he were asking a question or spurning the idea in disgust.

“Well, what’s the alternative?” I replied.

“We might wait,” he said. “She’ll be of age in thirteen months’ time.”

I had no fear but that Banks would wait thirteen months, or thirteen years, for Brenda. I was less certain about her. Just now she was head over ears in romance, and I believed that if she married him his sterling qualities would hold her. But I mistrusted the possible effect upon her of thirteen months’ absence. The Jervaises would know very well how to use their advantage. They would take her away from the Hall and its associations, and plunge her into the distractions of a society that could not yet have lost its glamour for her. I could picture Brenda looking back with wonder at the foolishness of the girl who had imagined herself to be in love with her father’s chauffeur. And even an hour earlier, so recent had been my true conversion, I should have questioned the advisability of a hasty, secret marriage between these two temporarily infatuated people. Now I was hot with the evangelising passion of a young disciple. I wanted to deliver Brenda from the thrall of society at any price. It seemed to me that the greatest tragedy for her would be a marriage with some one in her own class—young Turnbull, for instance.

“I shouldn’t wait,” I said decidedly.

“Why not?” he asked with a touch of resentment, as if he had guessed something of my mistrust of Brenda.

“All very well, in a way, for you,” I explained. “But think what an awful time she’d have, with all of them trying to nag her into a marriage with young Turnbull, or somebody of that kind.”

“He isn’t so bad as some of ’em,” Banks said, evading the main issue. “She’d never marry him though. She knows him too well, for one thing. He’s been scouring the county in a dog-cart all the morning—went to Hurley to make inquiries before breakfast, and all over the place afterwards. John’s been telling me. He heard ’em talking when young Turnbull turned up at tea-time. He’s got guts all right, that fellow. I believe he’d play the game fair enough if they tried to make her marry him. Besides, as I said, she’d never do it.”

“I don’t suppose she would,” I said, humouring him—it was no part of my plan to disturb his perfect faith in Brenda—“I only said that she’d have a rotten bad time during those thirteen months.”

“Well, we’ve got to leave that to her, haven’t we?” Banks returned.

I thought not, but I judged it more tactful to keep my opinion to myself.

“We shall be quite safe in doing that,” I said as we turned into the back premises of the Home Farm.

Banks had forgotten about my suit-case, and I bore the burden of it, flauntingly, up the hill. Racquet followed us with an air of conscious humility.

And it was Racquet that Anne first addressed when she met us at the door of the house.

“Whose rabbit is that?” she asked sternly.

Racquet instantly dropped his catch and slowly approached Anne with a mien of exaggerated abasement.

“If you were an out and out socialist, I shouldn’t mind,” Anne continued, “but you shouldn’t do these things if you’re ashamed of them afterwards.”

Racquet continued to supplicate her with bowed head, but he gave one surreptitious flick of his stumpy tail, that to me had the irresistible suggestion of a wink.

“Hypocrite!” Anne said, whereupon Racquet, correctly judging by her tone that his forgiveness was assured, made one splendid leap at her, returned with an altogether too patent eagerness to his rabbit, picked it up, and trotted away round the corner of the house.

“Isn’t he a humbug?” Anne asked looking at me, and continued without waiting for my confirmation of the epithet, “Why didn’t you let Arthur carry that?”

“He carried it half the way,” I said. “He and I are the out and out kind of socialist.”

She did not smile. “Father and mother are home,” she said, turning to her brother. “I can see by your face the sort of thing they’ve been saying to you at the Hall, so I suppose we’d better have the whole story on the carpet over supper. Father’s been asking already what Brenda’s here for.”

XIII

Farmer Banks

Anne showed me up to my room as soon as we entered the house, but her manner was that of the hostess to a strange guest. She was polite, formal, and, I thought, a trifle nervous. She left me hurriedly as soon as she had opened the door of the bedroom, with some apology about having to “see to the supper.” (The smell of frying bacon had pervaded the staircase and passages, and had helped me to realise that I was most uncommonly hungry. Except for a very light lunch I had eaten nothing since breakfast.)

I got my first real feeling of the strangeness of the whole affair while I was unpacking my suit-case in that rather stiff, unfriendly spare-room. Until then the sequence of events had followed a hot succession, in the current of which I had had no time to consider myself—my ordinary, daily self—in relation to them. But the associations of this familiar position and occupation, this adaptation of myself for a few hours to a strange household, evoked the habitual sensations of a hundred similar experiences. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been dressing for dinner at Jervaise Hall, and despite my earnest affirmations that in the interval my whole life and character had changed, I was very surely aware that I was precisely the same man I had always been—the man who washed, and changed his tie, and brushed his hair in just this same manner every day; who looked at himself in the glass with that same half-frowning, half-anxious expression, as if he were uncertain whether to resent or admire the familiar reflection. I was confronted by the image of the Graham Melhuish to whom I had become accustomed; the image of the rather well-groomed, rather successful young man that I had come to regard as the complete presentation of my individuality.

But now I saw that that image in the glass could never have done the things that I had done that day. I could not imagine that stereotyped creature wanting to fight Frank Jervaise, running away from the Hall, taking the side of a chauffeur in an intrigue with his master’s daughter, falling in love with a woman he had not known for twenty-four hours, and, culminating wonder, making extraordinary determinations to renounce the pleasures and comforts of life in order to … I could not quite define what, but the substitute was something very strenuous and difficult and self-sacrificing.

Nevertheless, some one had done all these things, and if it were not that conventional, self-satisfied impersonation now staring back at me with a look of perplexed inquiry, where was I to find his outward likeness? Had I looked a different man when I was talking to Anne in the Farm parlour or when I had communed with myself in the wood? Or if the real Graham Melhuish were something better and deeper than this fraudulent reflection of him, how could he get out, get through, in some way or other achieve a permanent expression to replace this deceptive mask? Also, which of us was doing the thinking at that moment? Did we take it turn and turn about? Five minutes before the old, familiar Melhuish had undoubtedly been unpacking his bag in his old familiar way, and wondering how he had come to do all the queer things he unquestionably had been doing in the course of this amazing weekend. Now, the new Melhuish was uppermost again, speculating about the validity of his soul—a subject that had certainly never concerned the other fellow, hitherto.

But it was the other fellow who was in the ascendant when I entered the farm sitting-room in answer to the summons of a falsetto bell. I was shy. I felt like an intruder. I was afraid that Farmer Banks would treat me as a distinguished visitor, and that my efforts to attain the happy freedom of an equal might—in the eyes of Anne—appear condescending. The new self I had so lately discovered was everybody’s equal, but, just then, I was out of touch with my new self.

Nor did Farmer Banks’s natural courtesy tend to put me at ease. He and Arthur were alone in the room when I came down and it was Arthur who, with an evident self-consciousness, introduced me.

“Mr. Melhuish, father,” was all he said, and I had no idea how much of the story the old man had, as yet, been told.

He made a kind of stiff bow and held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Melhuish,” he said, and his manner struck a mean between respectfulness and self-assertion. It was the kind of manner that he might have shown to a titled canvasser just before an election.

He was a notably handsome man, tall and broad, with regular, impassive features and blue eyes exactly the colour of Arthur’s. Save that his back was slightly rounded and that his closely-cropped hair was iron-gray, he showed little mark of his sixty years. He seemed to me the very type of an English yeoman, not markedly intelligent outside his own speciality, and conservative to the point of fanaticism. When I thought of trying to persuade him to forsake the usage of a lifetime and begin again in a foreign country under new conditions, my heart failed me. Upstairs, before the looking-glass, I had had my doubts of the possibility of ever ousting the old Graham Melhuish; but those doubts appeared the most childish exaggerations of difficulty when compared with my doubts of persuading the man before me to alter his habits and his whole way of life. It seemed to me that the spirit of Farmer Banks must be encrusted beyond all hope of release.

I mumbled some politeness in answer to his unanswerable opening, and started the one possible topic of the weather. I was grossly ignorant of the general requirements of agriculture in that or any other connection, but any one knows a farmer wants fine weather for harvest.

He took me up with a slightly exaggerated air of relief, and I dare say we could have kept the subject going for ten minutes if it had been necessary, but he had hardly begun his reply before the three women for whom we had been waiting came into the room together.

When I met Mr. Banks I felt, at once, that I might have inferred him with nice accuracy from what I already knew of him. Mrs. Banks was a surprise. I had pictured her as tall and slight, and inclined to be sombre. Anne’s hints of the romantic side of her mother’s temperament had, for some reason, suggested that image to me, and I was quite absurdly dumfounded for the moment when I saw this little, roundabout, dark-haired Frenchwoman, as typically exotic as her husband was home-grown, voluble, brisk despite the handicap of her figure, and with nothing English about her unless it were her accent.

Fortunately she gave me no time to display the awkwardness of my surprise. She came straight at me, talking from the instant she entered the door. “Discussing the crops already?” she said. “You must forgive us, Mr. Melhuish, for being so interested in the weather. When one’s fortune depends upon it, one naturally thinks of little else.” She gave me her small plump hand with an engaging but, as it were, a breathless smile. “And you must be starving,” she continued rapidly. “Anne tells me you had no tea at all anywhere, and that the people at the Hall have been treating you outrageously. So! will you sit there and Anne next to you, and those two dreadful children who won’t be separated, together on the other side.”

She was apparently intent only upon this business of getting us into our places about the supper-table, and not until I had sat down did I realise that her last sentence had been an announcement intended for her husband.