The Jervaise Comedy

Hughes drank with a careful slowness, put his glass down with superfluous accuracy, and then after another instant of tremendous deliberation, said, “What is?”

“Well, this,” I returned gravely.

“Meaning?” he asked judicially.

“Of course it may be too soon to draw an inference,” I said.

“Especially with no facts to draw them from,” he added.

“All the same,” I went on boldly, “it looks horribly suspicious.”

“What does?”

I began to lose patience with him. “I’m not suggesting that the Sturtons’ man from the Royal Oak has been murdered,” I said.

He weighed that remark as if it might cover a snare, before he scored a triumph of allusiveness by replying, “Fellow called Carter. He’s got a blue nose.”

Despite my exasperation I tried once more on a note of forced geniality, “What sort of man is this chauffeur of the Jervaises? Do you know him at all?”

“Wears brown leather gaiters,” Hughes answered after another solemn deliberation.

I could have kicked him with all the pleasure in life. His awful guardedness made me feel as if I were an inquisitive little journalist trying to ferret out some unsavoury scandal. And he had been the first person to point the general suspicion a few minutes earlier, by his inquiry about the motor. I decided to turn the tables on him, if I could manage it.

“I asked because you seemed to suggest just now that he had gone off with the Jervaises’ motor,” I remarked.

Hughes stroked his long thin nose with his thumb and forefinger. It seemed to take him about a minute from bridge to nostril. Then he inhaled a long draught of smoke from his cigarette, closed one eye as if it hurt him, and threw back his head to blow out the smoke again with a slow gasp of relief.

“One never knows,” was all the explanation he vouchsafed after this tedious performance.

“Whether a chauffeur will steal his master’s motor?” I asked.

“Incidentally,” he said.

“But, good heavens, if he’s that sort of man…” I suggested.

“I’m not saying that he is,” Hughes replied.

I realised then that his idea of our conversation was nothing more nor less than that of a game to be played as expertly as possible. He had all the makings of a cabinet minister, but as a companion he was, on this occasion, merely annoying. I felt that I could stand no more of him, and I was trying to frame a sentence that would convey my opinion of him without actual insult, when Frank Jervaise looked in at the door.

He stared at us suspiciously, but his expression commonly conveyed some aspect of threat or suspicion. “Been looking all over the place for you,” he said.

“For me?” Hughes asked.

Jervaise shook his head. “No, I want Melhuish,” he said, and stood scowling.

“Well, here I am,” I prompted him.

“If I’m in the way…” Hughes put in, but did not attempt to get himself out of it.

Jervaise ignored him. “Look here, Melhuish,” he said. “I wonder if you’d mind coming up with me to the Home Farm?”

“Oh! no; rather not,” I agreed gladly.

I felt that Hughes had been scored off; but I instantly forgot such small triumphs in the delight of being able to get out into the night. Out there was romance and the smell of night-stock, all kinds of wonderment and adventure. I was so eager to be in the midst of it that I never paused to consider the queerness of the expedition.

As we left the Hall, the theatrical stable-clock was just striking one.

II

Anne

The moon must have been nearly at the full, but I could not guess its position behind the even murk of cloud that muffled the whole face of the sky. Yet, it was not very dark. The broad masses of the garden through which Jervaise led me, were visible as a greater blackness superimposed on a fainter background. I believed that we were passing through some kind of formal pleasance. I could smell the pseudo-aromatic, slightly dirty odour of box, and made out here and there the clipped artificialities of a yew hedge. There were standard roses, too. One rose started up suddenly before my face, touching me as I passed with a limp, cool caress, like the careless, indifferent encouragement of a preoccupied courtesan.

At the end of the pleasance we came to a high wall, and as Jervaise fumbled with the fastening of a, to me, invisible door, I was expecting that now we should come out into the open, into a paddock, perhaps, or a grass road through the Park. But beyond the wall was a kitchen garden. It was lighter there, and I could see dimly that we were passing down an aisle of old espaliers that stretched sturdy, rigid arms, locked finger to finger with each other in their solemn grotesque guardianship of the enciente they enclosed. No doubt in front of them was some kind of herbaceous border. I caught sight of the occasional spire of a hollyhock, and smelt the acid insurgence of marigolds.

None of this was at all the mischievous, taunting fairyland that I had anticipated, but rather the gaunt, intimidating home of ogres, rank and more than a trifle forbidding. It had an air of age that was not immortal, but stiffly declining into a stubborn resistance against the slow rigidity of death. These espaliers made me think of rheumatic veterans, obstinately faithful to ancient duties—veterans with knobbly arthritic joints.

At the end of the aisle we came to a high-arched opening in the ten-foot wall, barred by a pair of heavy iron gates.

“Hold on a minute, I’ve got the key,” Jervaise said. This was the first time he had spoken since we left the house. His tone seemed to suggest that he was afraid I should attempt to scale the wall or force my way through the bars of the gates.

He had the key but he could not in that darkness fit it into the padlock; and he asked me if I had any matches. I had a little silver box of wax vestas in my pocket, and struck one to help him in his search for the keyhole which he found to have been covered by the escutcheon. Before I threw the match away I held it up and glanced back across the garden. The shadows leaped and stiffened to attention, and I flung the match away, but it did not go out. It lay there on the path throwing out its tiny challenge to the darkness. It was still burning when I looked back after passing through the iron gates.

As we came out of the park, Jervaise took my arm.

“I’m afraid this is a pretty rotten business,” he said with what was for him an unusual cordiality.

Although I had never before that afternoon seen Jervaise’s home nor any of his people with the exception of the brother now in India, I had known Frank Jervaise for fifteen years. We had been at Oakstone together, and had gone up the school form by form in each other’s company. After we left Oakstone we were on the same landing at Jesus, and he rowed “two” and I rowed “bow” in the college boat. And since we had come down I had met him constantly in London, often as it seemed by accident. Yet we had never been friends. I had never really liked him.

Even at school he had had the beginning of the artificially bullying manner which now seemed natural to him. He had been unconvincingly blunt and insolent. His dominant chin, Roman nose, and black eyebrows were chiefly responsible, I think, for his assumption of arrogance. He must have been newly invigorated to carry on the part every time he scowled at himself in the glass. He could not conceivably have been anything but a barrister.

But, to-night, in the darkness, he seemed to have forgotten for once the perpetual mandate of his facial angle. He was suddenly intimate, almost humble.

“Of course, you don’t realise how cursedly awkward it all is,” he said with the evident desire of opening a confidence.

“Tell me as little or as much as you like,” I responded. “You know that I…”

“Yes, rather,” he agreed warmly, and added, “I’d sooner Hughes didn’t know.”

“He guesses a lot, though,” I put in. “I suppose they all do.”

“Oh! well, they’re bound to guess something,” he said, “but I’m hoping we’ll be able to put that right, now.”

“Who are we going to see?” I asked.

He did not reply at once, and then snapped out, “Anne Banks; friend er Brenda’s.”

My foolishly whimsical imagination translated that queer medley of sounds into the thought of a stable-pump. I heard the clank of the handle and then the musical rush of water into the pail.