The Jervaise Comedy

“If she hasn’t come back…” he said.

“I don’t see that we can do anything more till to-morrow,” I replied.

“No use trying to find her, of course,” he agreed, irritably, “but we’d better talk things over with the governor.”

“If I can be of any help…” I remarked elliptically.

“You won’t be if you start that transcendental rot,” he returned, as if he already regretted his condescension.

“What sort of rot do you want me to talk?” I asked.

“Common sense,” he said.

I resisted the desire to say that I was glad he acknowledged the Jervaise version of common sense to be one kind of rot.

“All serene,” I agreed.

He did not thank me.

And when I looked back on the happenings of the two hours that had elapsed since Jervaise had fetched me out of the improvised buffet, I was still greatly puzzled to account for his marked choice of me as a confidant. It was a choice that seemed to signify some weakness in him. I wondered if he had been afraid to trust himself alone with Anne at the Farm; if he were now suffering some kind of trepidation at the thought of the coming interview with his father? I found it so impossible to associate any idea of weakness with that bullying mask which was the outward expression of Frank Jervaise.

IV

In the Hall

We found the family awaiting us in the Hall—Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise, Olive, and “Ronnie” Turnbull, whose desire to become one of the family by marrying its younger daughter was recognised and approved by every one except the young lady herself. Ronnie had evidently been received into the fullest confidence.

We had come in by the back door and made our way through the rather arid cleanliness of the houses’ administrative departments, flavoured with a smell that combined more notably the odours of cooking and plate-polish. The transition as we emerged through the red baize door under the majestic panoply of the staircase, was quite startling. It was like passing from the desolate sanitation of a well-kept workhouse straight into the lighted auditorium of a theatre. That contrast dramatised, for me, the Jervaises’ tremendous ideal of the barrier between owner and servant; but it had, also, another effect which may have been due to the fact that it was, now, three o’clock in the morning.

For just at the moment of our transition I had the queerest sense not only of having passed at some previous time through a precisely similar experience, but, also, of taking part in a ridiculous dream. At that instant Jervaise Hall, its owners, dependants and friends, had the air of being not realities but symbols pushed up into my thought by some prank of the fantastic psyche who dwells in the subconscious. I should not have been surprised at any incongruity in the brief passing of that illusion.

The sensation flashed up and vanished; but it left me with the excited feeling of one who has had a vision of something transcendental, something more vivid and real than the common experiences of life—just such a feeling as I have had about some perfectly absurd dream of the night.

Mr. Jervaise was a man of nearly sixty, I suppose, with a clean-shaven face, a longish nose, and rather loose cheeks which fell, nevertheless, into firm folds and gave him a look of weak determination. I should have liked to model his face in clay; his lines were of the kind that give the amateur a splendid chance in modelling.

Mrs. Jervaise was taller and thinner than her husband, but lost something by always carrying her head with a slight droop as if she were for ever passing through a low doorway. Her features were sharper than his—she had a high hawk nose and a thin line of a mouth—but either they were carelessly arranged or their relative proportions were bad, for I never felt the least desire to model her. Jervaise’s face came out as a presentable whole, my memory of his wife delivers the hawk nose as the one salient object of what is otherwise a mere jumble.

Old Jervaise certainly looked the more aristocratic of the pair, but Mrs. Jervaise was a woman of good family. She had been a Miss Norman before her marriage—one of the Shropshire Normans.

The four people in the Hall looked as if they had reached the stage of being dreadfully bored with each other when we arrived. They did not hear us immediately, and as my momentary dream dissolved I had an impression of them all as being on the verge of a heartrending yawn. They perked up instantly, however, when they saw us, turning towards us with a movement that looked concerted and was in itself a question.

Frank Jervaise, striding on ahead of me, answered at once, with a gloomy shake of his head.

“Isn’t she there?” his mother asked. And “Hasn’t she been there at all?” she persisted when Frank returned a morose negative.

“Who did you see?” put in young Turnbull.

“Miss Banks,” Frank said.

“You are quite sure that Brenda hadn’t been there?” Olive Jervaise added by way of rounding up and completing the inquiry.

It was then Frank’s turn to begin an unnecessary interrogation by saying “She isn’t here, then?” He must have known that she was not, by their solicitude; but if he had not put that superfluous question, I believe I should; though I might not have added as he did, “You’re absolutely certain?”

Young Turnbull then exploded that phase of the situation by remarking, “I suppose you know that the car’s gone?”

Frank was manifestly shocked by that news.

“Good Lord! no, I didn’t. How do you know?” he said.

“I left my own car in the ditch, just outside the Park,” Ronnie explained. “Don’t know in the least how it happened. Suppose I was thinking of something else. Anyway, I’ve fairly piled her up, I’m afraid. I was coming back from the vicarage, you know. And then, of course, I walked up here, and Mr. Jervaise was good enough to offer me your car to get home in; and when we went out to the garage, it had gone.”

“But was it there when you went to get your own car?” Frank asked.

“I’m bothered if I know,” Ronnie confessed. “I’ve been trying hard to remember.”

Mr. Jervaise sighed heavily and took a little stroll across to the other side of the Hall. He seemed to me to be more perturbed and unhappy than any of the others.

Frank stood in a good central position and scowled enormously, while his mother, his sister, and Ronnie waited anxiously for the important decision that he was apparently about to deliver. And they still looked to him to find some expedient when his impending judgment had taken form in the obvious pronouncement, “Looks as if they’d gone off together, somewhere.”

“It’s very dreadful,” Mrs. Jervaise said; and then Olive slightly lifted the awful flatness of the dialogue by saying,—

“We ought to have guessed. It’s absurd that we let the thing go on.”

“One couldn’t be sure,” her mother protested.

“If you’re going to wait till you’re sure, of course…” Frank remarked brutally, with a shrug of his eyebrows that effectively completed his sentence.

“It was so impossible to believe that she would do a thing like that,” his mother complained.

“Point is, what’s to be done now,” Ronnie said. “By gad, if I catch that chap, I’ll wring his neck.”

Mr. Jervaise, who was taking a lonely promenade up and down the far side of the Hall, looked up more hopefully at this threat.

“Oh! we can catch him,” Frank commented. “He has stolen the car, for one thing…” his inflection implied that catching Banks might be only the beginning of the trouble.

“Well, once we’ve got him,” returned Ronnie hopefully.

“Don’t be an ass,” Frank snubbed him. “We can’t advertise it all over the county that he has gone off with Brenda.”

“I don’t see…” Ronnie began, but Mrs. Jervaise interrupted him.

“It was so unfortunate that the Atkinsons should have been here,” she remarked.

“Every one will know, in any case,” Olive added.

Those avowals of their real and altogether desperate cause for distress raised the emotional tone of the two Jervaise women, and for the first time since I had come into the Hall, they looked at me with a hint of suspicion. They made me feel that I was an outsider, who might very well take this opportunity to withdraw.

I was on the point of accepting the hint when Frank Jervaise dragged me into the conclave.