The Jervaise Comedy. J. D. Beresford
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see, this chap, Banks,” he began, “isn’t quite the ordinary chauffeur Johnnie. He’s the son of one of our farmers. Decent enough old fellow, too, in his way—the father, I mean. Family’s been tenants of the Home Farm for centuries. And this chap, Banks, the son, has knocked about the world, no end. Been in Canada and the States and all kinds of weird places. He’s hard as nails; and keen. His mother was a Frenchwoman; been a governess.”
“Is she dead?” I asked.
“Lord, no. Why should she be?” Jervaise replied peevishly.
I thought of explaining that he had made the implication by his use of the past tense, but gave up the idea as involving a waste of energy. “How old is this chap, Banks; the son?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Jervaise said. “About twenty-five.”
“And his sister?” I prodded him.
“Rather younger than that,” he said, after an evident hesitation, and added: “She’s frightfully pretty.”
I checked my natural desire to comment on the paradox; and tried the stimulation of an interested “Is she?”
“Rather.” He tacked that on in the tone of one who deplores the inevitable; and went on quickly, “You needn’t infer that I’ve made an ass of myself or that I’m going to. In our position …” He abandoned that as being, perhaps, too obvious. “What I mean to say is,” he continued, “that I can’t understand about Brenda. And it was such an infernally silly way of going about things. Admitted that there was no earthly chance of the pater giving his consent or anything like it; she needn’t in any case have made a damned spectacle of the affair. But that’s just like her. Probably did it all because she wanted to be dramatic or some rot.”
It was then that I expressed my appreciation of the dramatic quality of the incident, and was snubbed by his saying—
“I suppose you realise just what this may mean, to all of us.”
I had a vivid impression, in the darkness, of that sudden scowl which made him look so absurdly like a youthful version of Sir Edward Carson.
I was wondering why it should mean so much to all of them? Frank Jervaise had admitted, for all intents and purposes, that he was in love with the chauffeur’s sister, so he, surely, need not have so great an objection. And, after all, why was the family of Jervaise so much better than the family of Banks?
“I suppose it would be very terrible for you all if she married this chap?” I said.
“Unthinkable,” Jervaise replied curtly.
“It would be worse in a way than your marrying the sister?”
“I should never be such an infernal fool as to do a thing like that,” he returned.
“Has she … have there been any tender passages between you and Miss Banks?” I asked.
“No,” he snapped viciously.
“You’ve been too careful?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t think she likes me,” he said.
“Oh!” was all my comment.
I needed no more explanations; and I liked Jervaise even less than I had before. I began to wish that he had not seen fit to confide in me. I had, thoughtlessly, been dramatising the incident in my mind, but, now, I was aware of the unpleasant reality of it all. Particularly Jervaise’s part in it.
“Can’t be absolutely certain, of course,” he continued.
“But if she did like you?” I suggested.
“I’ve got to be very careful who I marry,” he explained. “We aren’t particularly well off. All our property is in land, and you know what sort of an investment that is, these days.”
I tried another line. “And if you find your sister up at the Home Farm; and Banks; what are you going to do?”
“Kick him and bring her home,” he said decidedly.
“Nothing else for it, I suppose?” I replied.
“Obviously,” he snarled.
We had come into a wood and it was very dark under the trees. I wondered why I should restrain the impulse to strangle him and leave him there? He was no good, and, to me, quite peculiarly objectionable. It seemed, in what was then my rather fantastic state of mind, that it would be a triumph of whimsicality. I should certainly have resisted the impulse in any case, but my attention was diverted from it at that moment by a sudden pattering of feet along the leaves of the great trees under which we were walking—light, clean, sharp, little dancing feet, springing from leaf to leaf—dozens of them chasing each other, rattling ecstatically up and down the endless terraces of wide foliage.
“Damn it all, it’s beginning to rain like blazes,” remarked the foolish Jervaise.
“How much farther is it?” I asked.
He said we were “just there.”
I saw the Home Farm first as a little square haze of yellow light far up in the sky. I didn’t realise the sharp rise in the ground immediately in front of us, and that rectangular beacon, high in the air, seemed a fantastically impossible thing. I pointed it out to Jervaise who was holding his head down as if he were afraid the summer rain might do some serious injury to his face.
“Some one up, anyway,” was his comment.
“Very far up,” I murmured. I could not quite believe, even then, that it could be a window. I was disappointed when we had climbed the hill and stood only a few feet below the beacon, to discover that this too, was another instance of the all too credible commonplace. I suppose men like Frank Jervaise never long to believe in the impossible. I was, however, agreeably surprised to find that he could be nervous.
He hesitated, looking up at the prism of light that splayed out through the first floor window, and set a silver fire to the falling rain. “Suppose we’d better knock,” he grumbled.
“D’you know whose window it is?” I asked.
Apparently he didn’t. He made a dive into a deeper obscurity and I lost him until I heard his knock. I was glad that he should have knocked with such decent restraint, but all the effect of it was instantly shattered by the response. For at his first subdued rap, a dog with a penetratingly strident bark set up a perfectly detestable clamour within the house. It was just as if Jervaise’s touch on the door had liberated the spring of some awful rattle. Every lovely impulse of the night must have fled dismayed, back into the peace and beauty of the wood; and I was more than half inclined to follow.
Until that appalling racket was set loose I had been regarding this midnight visit to the farm as a natural and enticing adventure, altogether in keeping with the dramatic movement preluded by the chime of the stable-clock. That confounded terrier, whose voice so clearly proclaimed his breed, had dragged us down to the baldest realism. We were intruders upon the decencies of civilisation. That dog was not to be misled by any foolish whimsies of the imagination. He was a thorough-going realist, living in a tangible, smellable world of reality, and he knew us for what we were—marauders, disturbers of the proper respectable peace of twentieth century farms. He lashed himself into ecstasies of fury against our unconventionality; he rose to magnificent paroxysms of protest that passionately besought High Heaven and Farmer Banks to open the door and let him get at us.
But no one came. There may have been other sounds coming from the house besides that infuriated demand for vengeance, but all inferior noises—and surely all other noises must have been inferior to that clamour—were absorbed and flattened out of existence. We were in a world occupied by the bark of a single dog, and any addition to that occupation would have been superfluous.
The owner of the voice was doing his level best now to get the door down on his own account. I hoped he might succeed.