The Jervaise Comedy

“What did you say, Nancy?” he asked with a puzzled air. He was still standing at the head of the table and staring with obvious embarrassment at his wife.

She waved her hands at him. “Sit down, Alfred,” she commanded him, and in her pronunciation of his name I noticed for the first time the ripple of a French “r.” Possibly her manner of speaking his name was a form of endearment. “All in good time, you shall hear about it directly. Now, we are all very hungry and waiting for you.” And without the least hint of a pause she turned to me and glided over an apology for the nature of the meal. “We call it supper,” she said, “and it is just a farm-house supper, but better in its way, don’t you think, than a formal dinner?” She took me utterly into her confidence with her smile as she added, “Up at the Hall they make so much ceremony, all about nothing. I am not surprised that you ran away. But it was very original, all the same.” She introduced me to the first course without taking breath, “Eggs and bacon. So English. Isn’t there a story of a man who starved to death on a walking-tour because he could no longer endure to eat eggs and bacon? And when you have eaten something you must tell us what you have all four been doing while my husband and I were away. So far as I can understand you have turned the universe completely inside out. We came back believing that we return to the Farm, but I think it has become a Fortress….”

I ventured a glance at her husband. These flickering allusions of hers to the tragedy that was threatening him, seemed to me indiscreet and rather too frivolous. But when I saw his look of puzzled wonder and admiration, I began to appreciate the subtlety and wisdom of her method. Using me as a convenient intermediary, she was breaking the news by what were, to him, almost inappreciable degrees. He took in her hints so slowly. He was not sure from moment to moment whether or not she was in earnest. Nevertheless, I recognised, I thought, at least one cause for perturbation. He had been perceptibly ruffled and uneasy at the reference to an understanding between his son and Brenda. Probably the fear of that complication had been in his mind for some time past.

Mrs. Banks had slid away to the subject of local scenery.

“It is beautiful in its own way,” she was saying, “but I feel with Arthur that it has an air of being so—preserved. It is so proper, well-adjusted, I forget the English word …”

I suggested “trim” as a near translation of “propre” and “bien-ajusté.”

“Trim, yes,” she agreed enthusiastically. “My daughter tells me you are an author. There are three lime trees in the pasture and the cattle have eaten the branches as high as they can reach, so that now the trees have the precise shape of a bell. Even the trees in the Park, you see, are trim—not, it is true, like Versailles, where the poor things are made to grow according to plan—but all the county is one great landscape garden; all of England, nearly. Don’t you agree with me? One feels that there must always be a game-keeper or a policeman just round the corner.”

She waited for my answer this time, and something in the eagerness of her expression begged me to play up to her lead.

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said, intensely aware of Anne’s proximity. “I was thinking something of the same kind, only this evening, when I went to meet Arthur in the wood. He and I were discussing it, too, as we came back. That sense of everything belonging to some one else, of having no right, hardly the right to breathe without the Jervaises’ permission.”

Her gesture finally confirmed the fact that perfect confidence was established between us. I felt as if she had patted my shoulder. But she may have been afraid that I might blunder into too obvious a statement, if I were permitted to continue, for she abruptly changed her tactics by saying to Brenda,—

“So you ran away in the middle of the dance?”

“Well, we’d finished dancing, as a matter of fact,” Brenda explained.

Mr. Banks shifted uneasily in his chair. “Ran away, Miss Brenda?” he asked. “Did you say you’d run away?”

She flattered him with a look that besought his approval. “I simply couldn’t stand it any longer,” she said.

“But you’ll be going back?” he returned, after a moment’s pause.

She shook her head, still regarding him attentively with an air of appeal that implied submission to his judgment.

He had stopped eating, and now pushed his chair back a little from the table as though he needed more space to deal with this tremendous problem.

“You’ll be getting us into trouble, Miss Brenda,” he warned her gravely. “It wouldn’t do for us to keep you here, if they’re wanting you to go back home.”

“Well, Alfred, we’ve as much right to her as they have,” Mrs. Banks put in.

The effect upon him of that simple speech was quite remarkable. He opened his fine blue eyes and stared at his wife with a blank astonishment that somehow conveyed an impression of fear.

“Nancy! Nancy!” he expostulated in a tone that besought her to say no more.

She laughingly waved her hands at him, using the same gesture with which she had commanded him to sit down. “Oh! we’ve got to face it, Alfred,” she said. “Arthur and Brenda believe they’re in love with one another, and that’s all about it.”

Banks shook his head solemnly, but it seemed to me that his manner expressed relief rather than the added perturbation I had expected. “No, no, it won’t do. That’d never do,” he murmured. “I’ve been afraid of this, Miss Brenda,” he continued; “but you must see for yourself that it’d never do—our position being what it is. Your father’d never hear of such a thing; and you’d get us all into trouble with him if he thought we’d been encouraging you.”

He drew in his chair and returned to his supper as if he regarded the matter as being now definitely settled. “I don’t know what Mr. Melhuish will be thinking of us,” he added as an afterthought.

“Oh! Mr. Melhuish is on our side,” Mrs. Banks returned gaily.

“Nancy! Nancy!” he reproved her. “This is too serious a matter to make a joke about.”

I was watching Mrs. Banks, and saw the almost invisible lift of the eyebrows with which she passed on the conduct of the case to Anne.

“Mother isn’t joking, dear,” Anne said, accepting the signal without an instant’s hesitation. “Really serious things have been happening while you were away.”

Her father frowned and shook his head. “This isn’t the place to discuss them,” he replied.

“Well, father, I’m afraid we must discuss them very soon,” Anne returned; “because Mr. Jervaise might be coming up after supper.”

“Mr. Jervaise? Coming here?” Banks’s tone of dismay showed that he was beginning, however slowly, to appreciate the true significance of the situation.

“Well, we don’t know that he is,” Arthur put in. “I just thought it was possible he and Mr. Frank might come up this evening.”

“They will certainly come. Have no doubt of that,” Mrs. Banks remarked.

The old man turned to his son as if seeking a refuge from the intrigues of his adored but incomprehensible womenfolk.

“What for?” he asked brusquely.

“To take her back to the Hall,” Arthur said with the least possible inclination of his head towards Brenda.

Banks required a few seconds to ponder that, and his wife and daughter waited in silence for his reply. I had a sense of them as watching over, and at once sheltering and directing him. Nevertheless, though I admired their gentle deftness, I think that at that point of the discussion some forcible male element in me sided very strongly with old Banks. I was aware of the pressure that was so insensibly surrounding him as of a subtly entangling web that seemed to offer no resistance, and yet was slowly smothering him in a million intricate intangible folds. And, after all, why should he be torn away from his root-holds, exiled to some forlorn unknown country where his very methods of farming would be inapplicable? Brenda and Arthur were young and capable. Let them wait, at least until she came of age. Let her be tried by an ordeal of patient resistance. If she were worthy she could fight her family for those thirteen months and win her own triumph without injuring poor Banks.

And whether because I had communicated my thought to her by some change of attitude or because she intuitively shared my sympathy for her father, Anne turned to me just before she spoke, with a quick little, impatient gesture as if beseeching me not to interfere. I submitted myself to her wish with a distinct feeling of pleasure, but made no application of my own joy in serving her to the case of her father.

He was speaking again, now, with a solemn perplexity, as if he were confusedly challenging the soft opposition of his women’s influence.

“But, of course, she must go back to the Hall,” he said. “You wouldn’t like to get us into trouble, would you, Miss Brenda? You see,” he pushed his chair back once more, in the throes of his effort to explain himself, “your father would turn me out, if there was any fuss.”

He was going on, but his wife, with a sudden magnificent violence, scattered the web she and her daughter had been weaving.

“And that might be the best thing that could happen to us, Alfred,” she said. “Oh! I’m so sick and tired of these foolish Jervaises. They are like the green fly on the rose trees. They stick there and do nothing but suck the life out of us. You are a free man. You owe them nothing. Let us break with them and go out, all of us, to Canada with Arthur and Brenda. As for me, I would rejoice to go.”

“Nancy! Nancy!” he reproached her for the third time, with a humouring shake of his head. They were past the celebration of their silver wedding, but it was evident that he still saw in her the adorable foolishness of one who would never be able to appreciate the final infallibility of English standards. He loved her, he would make immense personal sacrifices for her, but in these matters she was still a child, a foreigner. Just so might he have reproached Anne at three years old for some infantile naughtiness.

“It may come to that,” Arthur interjected, gloomily.

“You’re talking like a fool, Arthur,” his father said. “What’d I do at my age—I’ll be sixty-one next month—trapesing off to Canada?” He felt on safer ground, more sure of his authority in addressing his son. He was English. He might be rebellious and need chastisement, but he would not be swayed by these whimsical notions that sometimes bewitched his mother and sister.

“But, father, we may have to go,” Anne softly reminded him.

“Have to? Have to?” he repeated, with a new note of irritability sounding in his voice. “He hasn’t been doing anything foolish, has he? Nothing as can’t be got over?”

It was his wife who replied to that. “We’ve had our time, Alfred,” she said. “We have to think of them now. We must not be selfish. They are young and deeply in love, as you and I were once. We cannot separate them because we are too lazy to move. And sixty? Yes, it is true that you are sixty, but you are strong and your heart is still young. It is not as if you were an old man.”

Arthur and Brenda looked acutely self-conscious. Brenda blushed and seemed inclined to giggle. Arthur’s face was set in the stern lines of one who hears his own banns called in church.

Banks leaned back in his chair and stared apprehensively at his wife. “D’ye mean it, Nancy…?” he asked, and something in his delivery of the phrase suggested that he had come down to a familiar test of decision. I could only infer that whenever she had confessed to “meaning it” in the past, her request had never so far been denied. I guessed, also, that until now she had never been outrageous in her demands.