The Jervaise Comedy

“I hope so; I hope so,” Jervaise responded, and then they most unnecessarily shook hands.

I thought that it was time to assert myself above the clatter of their farewells.

“We might add, Miss Banks,” I put in, “that we’ve been making a perfectly absurd fuss about nothing at all. But, no doubt, you’re used to that.”

She looked at me, then, for the first time since I had come into the house; and I saw the impulse to some tart response flicker in her face and die away unexpressed. We stood and stared at one another for a long half-second or so; and when she looked away I fancied that there was something like fear in her evasion. It seemed to me that I saw the true spirit of her in the way her glance refused me as some one with whom she did not care to sport. Her voice, too, dropped, so that I could not catch the murmur of her reply.

We had, indeed, recognised each other in that brief meeting of our eyes. Some kind of challenge had passed between us. I had dared her to drop that disguise of trickery and show herself as she was; and her response had been an admission that she acknowledged not me, but my recognition of her.

How far the fact that I had truly appraised her real worth might influence her, in time, to think gently of me, I could not guess; but I hoped, even a little vaingloriously, that she would respond to our mutual appreciation of truth. I had shown her, I believed, how greatly I admired the spirit she had been at such pains to conceal during that talk in the honest sitting-room of the Home Farm. And I felt that her failure to resent the impertinence of my “No doubt, you’re used to that,” had been due to an understanding of something she and I had in common against the whole solid, stolid, aristocratic family of Jervaise.

Moreover, she gave me what I counted as two more causes for hopefulness before we left the house. The first was her repetition, given, now, with a more vibrating sincerity, of the belief that we should find Brenda safely at home when we got back to the Hall.

“I feel sure you will, Mr. Jervaise,” she said, and the slight pucker of anxiety between her eyebrows was an earnest that even if her belief was a little tremulous, her hope, at least, was unquestionably genuine.

The second sign was the acceptance of a hackneyed commonplace; the proffer of a friendly message through the medium of a cliché which, however false in its general application, offered a short cut to the interpretation of feeling. Racquet who had maintained a well-bred silence from the first moment of his mistress’s reproof, had honoured me with his approval while we sat in the farm-house sitting-room, and sealed the agreement by a friendly thrust of his nose as we said “Goodnight.”

Anne did not look at me as she spoke, but her soft comment, “You are fond of dogs,” seemed to me a full acknowledgment of our recognition of each other’s quality.

I must admit, however, that at two o’clock in the morning one’s sense of values is not altogether normal.

III

Frank Jervaise

I should have preferred to maintain a thoughtful, experiencing silence throughout our walk home. I had plenty of material for reflection. I wanted, now, to look at all this disappearing Brenda business from a new angle. I had a sense of the weaving of plots, and of the texture of them; such a sense as I imagine a blind man may get through sensitive finger-tips. Two new characters had come into my play, and I knew them both for principals. That opening act without Brenda, Arthur Banks, or his sister was nothing more than a prologue. The whole affair had begun again to fascinate my interest. Moreover, I was becoming aware of a stern, half-tragic background that had not yet come into proper focus.

And the circumstances of our walk home were of a kind that I find peculiarly stimulating to the imagination. The sky was clearing. Above us, widening pools of deep sky, glinting here and there, with the weak radiance of half-drowned stars, opened and closed again behind dispersing wreaths of mist. While in the west, a heaped indigo gloom that might in that light have been mistaken for the silhouette of a vast impending forest, revealed at one edge a thin haze of yellow silver that stretched weak exploring arms of light towards the mysterious obscurity of the upper clouds. I knew precisely how that sky would look at sunset, but at moonset it had a completely different quality that was at once more ethereal and more primitive. It seemed to me that this night-sky had the original, eternal effect of all planetary space; that it might be found under the leaping rings of Saturn or in the perpetual gloom of banished Neptune. Compared to the comprehensible, reproducible effects of sunlight, it was as the wonder of the ineffable to the beauty of a magnificent picture.

But I was not left for many minutes to the rapture of contemplation. Even the primitive had to give place to the movement of our tiny, civilised drama. Jervaise and I were of the race that has been steadily creating a fiction of the earth since the first appearance of inductive science in the days of prehistoric man; and we could not live for long outside the artificial realism of the thing we were making. We were not the creatures of a process, but little gods in a world-pantheon.

I made no attempt to check him when he began to talk. I knew by the raised tone of his voice—he was speaking quite a third above his ordinary pitch—that he was pleasantly excited by our interview with Anne: an excitement that he now wished either to conceal, or, if that were impossible, to attribute to another cause.

“It occurs to me that there are one or two very puzzling points about that visit of ours, Melhuish,” he began.

“At least two,” I agreed.

“Which are?” he asked.

“I’d prefer to hear yours first,” I said, having no intention of displaying my own.

He was so eager to exhibit his cleverness that he did not press me for my probably worthless deductions.

“Well, in the first place,” he said, “did it strike you as a curious fact that Miss Banks, and she alone, was apparently disturbed by that dog’s infernal barking?”

“It hadn’t struck me,” I admitted; and just because I had not remarked that anomaly for myself, I was instantly prepared to treat it as unworthy of notice. “I suppose her father and mother and the servants, and so on, heard her let us in,” I said.

Jervaise jeered at that. “Oh! my good man,” he said.

“Well, why not?” I returned peevishly.

“I put it to you,” he said, “whether in those circumstances the family’s refusal to make an appearance admits of any ordinary explanation?”

I could see, now, that it did not; but having committed myself to a point of view, I determined to uphold it. “Why should they come down?” I asked.

“Common curiosity would be a sufficient inducement, I should imagine,” Jervaise replied with a snort of contempt, “to say nothing of a reasonable anxiety to know why any one should call at two o’clock in the morning. It isn’t usual, you know—outside the theatrical world, perhaps.”

I chose to ignore the sneer conveyed by his last sentence.

“They may be very heavy sleepers,” I tried, fully aware of the inanity of my suggestion.

Jervaise laughed unpleasantly, a nasty hoot of derision. “Don’t be a damned fool,” he said. “The human being isn’t born who could sleep through that hullabaloo.”

I relinquished that argument as hopeless, and having no other at the moment, essayed a weak reprisal. “Well, what’s your explanation?” I asked in the tone of one ready to discount any possible explanation he might have to make.

“It’s obvious,” he returned. “There can be only one. They were expecting us.”

“Do you mean that Miss Banks was deliberately lying to us all the time?” I challenged him with some heat.

“Why that?” he asked.

“Well, if she were expecting us…”

“Which she never denied.”

“And had warned all her people…”

“As she had a perfect right to do.”

“It makes her out a liar, in effect,” I protested. “I mean, she implied, if she didn’t actually state, that she knew nothing whatever of your sister’s movements.”

“Which may have been true,” he remarked in the complacent tone of one who waits to formulate an unimpeachable theory.

“Good Lord! How?” I asked.

“Brenda may have been expected and not have arrived,” he explained, condescending, at last, to point out all the obvious inferences I had missed. “In which case, my friend, Miss Banks’s suppressio veri was, in my judgment, quite venial. Indeed, she was, if the facts are, as I suppose, perfectly honest in her surprise. Let us assume that she had arranged to let Brenda in, at say twelve-thirty, and having her father and mother under her thumb, had warned them to take no notice if Racquet started his cursed shindy in the middle of the night. The servant may have been told that Mr. Arthur might be coming. You will notice, also, that Miss Banks had not, at one-thirty, gone to bed, although we may infer that she had undressed. Furthermore, it is a fair assumption that she saw us coming, and having, by then given up, it may be, any hope of seeing Brenda, she was, no doubt, considerably at a loss to account for our presence. Now, does that or does it not cover the facts, and does it acquit Miss Banks of the charge of perjury?”

I was forced, something reluctantly, to concede an element of probability in his inferences, although his argument following the legal tradition was based on a kind of average law of human motive and took no account of personal peculiarities. He did not try to consider what Anne would do in certain circumstances, but what would be done by that vaguely-conceived hermaphrodite who figures in the Law Courts and elsewhere as “Anyone.” I could hear Jervaise saying, “I ask you, gentlemen, what would you have done, what would Anyone have done in such a case as this?”

“Hm!” I commented, and added, “It still makes Miss Banks appear rather—double-faced.”

“Can’t see it,” Jervaise replied. “Put yourself in her place and see how it works!”

“Oh! Lord!” I murmured, struck by the grotesque idea of Jervaise attempting to see life through the eyes of Anne. Imagine a rhinoceros thinking itself into the experiences of a skylark!

Jervaise bored ahead, taking no notice of my interruption. “Assuming for the moment the general probability of my theory,” he said, “mayn’t we hazard the further assumption that Brenda was going to the farm in the first instance to meet Banks? His sister, we will suppose, being willing to sanction such a more or less chaperoned assignation. Then, when the pair didn’t turn up, she guesses that the meeting is off for some reason or another, but obviously her friendship for Brenda—to say nothing of loyalty to her brother—would make her conceal the fact of the proposed assignation from us. Would you call that being ‘double-faced’? I shouldn’t.”

“Oh! yes; it’s all very reasonable,” I agreed petulantly. “But how does it affect the immediate situation? Do you, for instance, expect to find your sister at home when we get back?”