"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?"
"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.