The Jervaise Comedy

“I do,” assented Jervaise definitely. “I believe that Miss Banks had some good reason for being so sure that we should find her there.”

I am not really pig-headed. I may not give way gracefully to such an opponent as Jervaise, but I do not stupidly persist in a personal opinion through sheer obstinacy. And up to Jervaise’s last statement, his general deductions were, I admitted to myself, not only within the bounds of probability but, also, within distance of affording a tolerable explanation of Anne’s diplomacy during our interview. But—and I secretly congratulated myself on having exercised a subtler intuition in this one particular, at least—I did not believe that Anne expected us to find Brenda at the Hall on our return. I remembered that anxious pucker of the brow and the pathetic insistence on the belief—or might it not better be described as a hope?—that Brenda had done nothing final.

“You haven’t made a bad case,” I conceded; “but I differ as to your last inference.”

“You don’t think we shall find Brenda at home?”

“I do not,” I replied aggressively.

I expected him to bear me down under a new weight of argument founded on the psychology of Anyone, and I was startled when he suddenly dropped the lawyer and let out a whole-hearted “Damnation,” that had a ring of fine sincerity.

I changed my tone instantly in response to that agreeably human note.

“I may be quite mistaken, of course,” I said. “I hope to goodness I am. By the way, do you know if she has taken any luggage with her?”

“Can’t be sure,” Jervaise said. “Olive’s been looking and there doesn’t seem to be anything missing, but we’ve no idea what things she brought down from town with her. If she’d been making plans beforehand…”

We came out of the wood at that point in our discussion, and almost at the same moment the last barrier of cloud slipped away from before the moon. She was in her second quarter, and seemed to be indolently rolling down towards the horizon, the whole pose of the scene giving her the effect of being half-recumbent.

I turned and looked at Jervaise and found him facing me with the full light of the moon on his face. He was frowning, not with the domineering scowl of the cross-examining counsel, but with a perplexed, inquiring frown that revealed all the boy in him.

Once at Oakstone he had got into a serious scrape that had begun in bravado and ended by a public thrashing. He had poached a trout from the waters of a neighbouring landowner, who had welcomed the opportunity to make himself more than usually objectionable. And on the morning before his thrashing, Jervaise had come into my study and confessed to me that he was dreading the coming ordeal. He was not afraid of the physical pain, he told me, but of the shame of the thing. We were near to becoming friends that morning. He confessed to no one but me. But when the affair was over—he bore himself very well—he resumed his usual airs of superiority, and snubbed me when I attempted to sympathise with him.

And I saw, now, just the same boyish dread and perplexity that I had seen when he made his confession to me at Oakstone. He looked to me, indeed, absurdly unchanged by the sixteen years that had separated the two experiences.

“You know, Melhuish,” he said; “I’m not altogether blaming Brenda in one way.”

“Do you think she’s really in love with Banks?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “How can any one know? But it has been going on a long time—weeks, anyhow. They were all getting nervous about it at home. The mater told me when I came down this afternoon. She wanted me to talk to B. about it. I was going to. She doesn’t take any notice of Olive. Never has.” He stopped and looked at me with an appeal in his face that begged contradiction.

We were standing still in the moonlight at the edge of the wood and the accident of our position made me wonder if Jervaise’s soul also hesitated between some gloomy prison of conventional success and the freedom of beautiful desires. I could find no words, however, to press that speculation and instead I attempted, rather nervously, to point the way towards what I regarded as the natural solution of the immediate problem. “Come,” I said, “the idea of a marriage between Banks and your sister doesn’t appear so unreasonable. The Bankses are evidently good old yeoman stock on the father’s side. It is a mere accident of luck that you should be the owners of the land and not they.”

“Theoretically, yes!” he said with a hint of impatience. “But we’ve got to consider the opinions—prejudices, if you like—of all my people—to say nothing of the neighbours.”

“Oh! put the neighbours first,” I exclaimed. “It’s what we think other people will think that counts with most of us.”

“It isn’t,” Jervaise returned gloomily. “You don’t understand what the idea of family means to people like my father and mother. They’ve been brought up in it. It has more influence with them than religion. They’d prefer any scandal to a mésalliance.”

“In your sister’s case?” I put in, a trifle shocked by the idea of the scandal, and then discovered that he had not been thinking of Brenda.

“Perhaps not in that case,” he said, “but…” he paused noticeably before adding, “The principle remains the same.”

“Isn’t it chiefly a matter of courage?” I asked. “It isn’t as if … the mésalliance were in any way disgraceful.”

I can’t absolve myself from the charge of hypocrisy in the making of that speech. I was thinking of Jervaise and Anne, and I did not for one moment believe that Anne would ever marry him. My purpose was, I think, well-intentioned. I honestly believed that it would be good for him to fall in love with Anne and challenge the world of his people’s opinion for her sake. But I blame myself, now, for a quite detestable lack of sincerity in pushing him on. I should not have done it if I had thought he had a real chance with her. Life is very difficult; especially for the well-intentioned.

Jervaise shrugged his shoulders. “It’s all so infernally complicated by this affair of Brenda’s,” he said.

Yet it has seemed simple enough to him, I reflected, an hour before. “Kick him and bring her home,” had been his ready solution of the difficulties he thought were before us. Evidently Anne’s behaviour during our talk at the farm had had a considerable effect upon his opinions. That, and the moon. I feel strongly inclined to include the moon—lazily declining now towards the ambush of a tumulus-shaped hill, crowned, as is the manner of that country, with a pert little top-knot of trees.

“Complicated or simplified?” I suggested.

“Complicated; damnably complicated,” he replied irritably. “Brenda’s a little fool. It isn’t as if she were in earnest.”

“Then you don’t honestly believe that she’s in love with Banks?” I asked, remembering his “I don’t know. How can any one know,” of a few minutes earlier.

“She’s so utterly unreliable—in every way,” he equivocated. “She always has been. She isn’t the least like the rest of us.”

“Don’t you count yourself as another exception?” I asked.

“Not in that way, Brenda’s way,” he said. “She’s scatter-brained; you can’t get round that. Going off after the dance in that idiotic way. It’s maddening.”

“Well, there are two questions that must be resolved before we can get any further,” I commented. “The first is whether your sister has gone back—she may have been safe in bed for the last hour and a half for all we know. And the second is whether she is honestly in love with Banks. From what I’ve heard of him, I should think it’s very likely,” I added thoughtfully.

Jervaise had his hands in his pockets and was staring up at the moon. “He’s not a bad chap in some ways,” he remarked, “but there’s no getting over the fact that he’s our chauffeur.”

I saw that. No badge could be quite so disgraceful in the eyes of the Jervaises as the badge of servitude. Our talk there, by the wood, had begun to create around us all the limitations of man’s world. I was forgetting that we were moving in the free spaces of a planetary republic. And then I looked up and saw the leaning moon, whimsically balanced on the very crown of the topknot that gave a touch of impudence to the pudding-basin hill.

“What’s the name of that hill?” I asked.

He looked at it absently for a moment before he said, “The people about here call it ‘Jervaise Clump.’ It’s a landmark for miles.”

There was no getting away from it. The Jervaises had conquered all this land and labelled it. I watched the sharp edge of the tree-clump slowly indenting the rounded back of the moon; and it seemed to me that Jervaise-Clump was the solid permanent thing; the moon a mere incident of the night.

“Oh! Lord! Lord! What bosh it all is!” I exclaimed.

“All what?” Jervaise asked sharply.

“This business of distinctions; of masters and servants; of families in possession and families in dependence,” I enunciated.

“It isn’t such dangerous bosh as socialism,” Jervaise replied.

“I wasn’t thinking of socialism,” I said; “I was thinking of interplanetary space.”

Jervaise blew contemptuously. “Don’t talk rot,” he said, and I realised that we were back again on the old footing of our normal relations. Nevertheless I made one more effort.

“It isn’t rot,” I said. “If it is, then every impulse towards beauty and freedom is rot, too.” (I could not have said that to Jervaise in a house, but I drew confidence from the last tip of the moon beckoning farewell above the curve of the hill.) “Your, whatever it is you feel for Miss Banks—things like that … all our little efforts to get away from these awful, clogging human rules.”

I had given him his opportunity and he took it. He was absolutely ruthless. “No one but a fool tries to be superhuman,” he said. “Come on!”

He had turned and was walking back in the direction of the Hall, and I followed him, humiliated and angry.

It was so impossible for me at that moment to avoid the suspicion that he had led me on by his appealing confidences solely in order to score off me when I responded. It is not, indeed, surprising that that should be my reaction while the hurt of his sneer still smarted. For he had pricked me on a tender spot. I realised the weakness of what I had said; and it was a characteristic weakness. I had been absurdly unpractical, as usual, aiming like a fool, as Jervaise had said, at some “superhuman” ideal of freedom that perhaps existed solely in my own imagination; and would certainly be regarded by Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise and their circle of county friends as the vapourings of a weak mind. In short, Jervaise had made me aware of my own ineptitude, and it took me a full ten minutes before I could feel anything but resentment.

We had passed back through the kitchen garden with its gouty espaliers, and come into the pleasance before I forgave him. According to his habit, he made no apology for his rudeness, but his explicit renewal of confidence in me more nearly approached an overt expression of desire for my friendship than anything I had ever known him to show hitherto.

“Look here, Melhuish,” he said, stopping suddenly in the darkness of the garden. I could not “look” with much effect, but I replied, a trifle sulkily, “Well? What?”