He was whistling Schubert's setting of "Who is Sylvia?" and as I climbed
slowly and as silently as I could towards him, I fitted the music to the
words of the second verse:--
Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness.
Only a man in love, I thought, could be whistling that air with such
attention and accuracy. He hit that unusual interval--is it an augmented
seventh?--with a delicacy that was quite thrilling.
He had the world to himself, as yet. The birds of the morning had not
begun their orisons, while the birds of the night, the owls and the
corncrakes had, happily, retired before the promise of that weakening
darkness which seemed nevertheless to have reached a moment of
suspense--indeed, I fancied that it was darker, now, than when I had come
out of the Hall a quarter of an hour before.
The whistler had stopped before I reached the crest of the hill, and after
trying vainly to locate his whereabouts in the gloom, I leaned up against
one of the outermost trunks of the perky little clump of trees, and facing
East awaited developments. A thin, cold wind had sprung up, and was
quietly stirring the leaves above me to an uneasy sibilance. I heard, now,
too, an occasional sleepy twitter as if a few members of the orchestra had
come into their places and were indolently testing the tune of their
pipes. It came into my mind that the cold stir of air was the spirit of
the dying night, fleeing westward before the sun. Also, I found myself
wondering what would be the effect on us all if one morning we waited in
vain for the sunrise? I tried to picture my own emotions as the truth was
slowly borne in upon me that some unprecedented calamity had silently and
without any premonition befallen the whole world of men. Would one crouch
in a terror of apprehension? I could not see it that way. I believed that
I should be trembling with a furious excitement, stirred to the very
depths by so inspiring and adventurous a miracle. I had forsaken my
speculation and was indulging in the philosophical reflection that a real
and quite unaccountable miracle, the more universal the better, would be
the most splendid justification of life I could possibly conceive, when
the whistler began again, only a few yards away from me.
I could just see him now, sitting propped against the trunk of another
tree, but I waited until he had finished what I chose to believe was the
third verse of his lyric before I hailed him. It came to me that I might
test his quality by continuing the play in proper form, so when he paused,
I went on with the speech of the "host" which immediately follows the song
in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona."
"How now?" I said. "Are you sadder than you were before?"
He did not move, not even to turn his head towards me, and I inferred that
he was aware of my presence before I spoke.
"You, one of the search party?" he asked.
I went over and sat down by him. I felt that the situation was
sufficiently fantastic to permit of free speech. I did not know who he was
and I did not care. I only knew that I wanted to deliver myself of the
dreams my lack of sleep had robbed from me.
"The only one," I said, "unless you also belong to the very small and
select party of searchers."
I fancy that he turned his head a little towards me, but I kept my gaze
fixed on the indigo masses of the obscure prospect before us.
"Who are you looking for?" he asked.
"Not so much who as what," I said. "And even then it isn't so easy to
define. I've heard men call it beauty and mystery, and things like that;
but just now it seemed to me that what I wanted most was a universal
miracle--some really inexplicable happening that would upset every law the
physicists have ever stated. I was thinking, for instance, how thrilling
it would be if the sun did not rise this morning. One would know, then,
that all our scientific guesses at laws were just so many baby
speculations founded on nothing more substantial than a few thousand years
of experience which had, by some chance given always more or less the same
results. Like a long run on the red, you know."
"I know," he said. "Well? Go on."
I was greatly stimulated by his encouragement. Here, at last, was the
listener I had been waiting for all through the night.
"One gets so infernally sick of everything happening according to fixed
rules," I continued. "And the more you learn the nearer you are to the
deadly ability of being able to foretell the future. If we ever do reach
that point in our intellectual evolution, I only hope that I shan't be
there to see it. Imagine the awful ennui of a world where the expected
always happened, and next year's happenings were always expected! And yet
we go on seeking after knowledge, when we ought surely to avoid it, as the
universal kill joy."
"Hm!" commented my new friend on what I felt to be a note of doubtful
agreement.
"You don't agree with that?" I asked.
"Well, I see what you're after, in a way," he acknowledged; "but it
doesn't seem to me that it amounts to very much--practically."
I was a trifle disappointed. I had not expected any insistence on the
practical from a man who could whistle Schubert and Shakespeare to the
dawn.
"Oh, practically! Perhaps not," I replied with a hint of contempt for
anything so common.
He gave a little self-conscious laugh. "You can't get away from the
practical in this life," he said. "Even in--" He seemed to bite off the
beginning of confidence with an effort. "You may dream half the night," he
began again, with a thin assumption of making an impersonal statement,
"but before the night's over you'll come up against the practical, or the
practicable, or the proper right thing, or something, that makes you see
what a fool you are. The way this world's run, you can't avoid it,
anyhow."
I knew that what he said was true, but I found it damping. It fitted all
too well with the coming realism of day. The contours of the landscape
were slowly resigning themselves to the formal attitudes imposed upon them
by expectation. The blood of colour was beginning to run weakly through
the monochrome. The nearer slopes of the hill and the leaves of the trees
were already professing a resolute green. Moment by moment the familiar
was taking prudent shape, preparing itself for the autocrat whose
outriders were multitudinously busy about their warnings of his approach.
Presently the scene would take on the natural beauty of our desire, but
the actual process of transformation rather depressed me that morning. I
had been so deeply in love with the night.
I took up my companion's last sentence--spoken, I fancied, with a
suggestion of brooding antagonism.
"You think the world might be 'run,' at least, more interestingly?" I put
in.
"More sensibly," he said in a voice that hinted a reserve of violence.
"There's no _sense_ in it, the way we look at things. Only we don't look
at 'em, most of us, not with any intelligence. We just take everything for
granted because we happen to be used to it, that's all."
"But would any form of socialism..." I tried tentatively.
"I don't know that I'm a socialist," he returned. "I don't belong to any
union, or anything of that kind." He stopped and looked at me with a
defiant stare that was quite visible now. "You know who I am, I suppose?"
he challenged me.
"No idea," I said.
"Banks, the chauffeur," he said, as if he were giving himself up as a
well-known criminal.
I was not entirely unprepared for that reply, but I had no tactful answer
to make. I rejected the spontaneous impulse that arose, as I thought quite
fantastically, to say "I believe I have met your sister;" and fell back on
an orthodox "Well?" I tried to convey the effect that I still waited to be
shocked.
"I suppose you're staying up at the Hall?" he said.
"For the week-end only," I admitted.
"Been a pretty fuss there, I take it?" he said.
"Some," I acknowledged.
He set his resolute-looking mouth and submitted me to cross-examination.
"Been looking for me?" he began.
"In a way. Frank Jervaise and I went up to your father's house."
"What time?"
"Between two and three."
"Not since?"
"No; we left about half-past two."
"Is she back?"
"Who?" I asked. I was thinking of his sister, and could find no
application for this question.
"Miss Jervaise."
"Oh--er--Miss Brenda? No. She hadn't come in when I left the house."
"What time was that?"
"About four. I came straight here."
"Not back, eh?" he commented with a soft, low whistle, that mingled, I
thought, something of gladness with its surprise.
"You don't know where she is, then?" I ventured.
He turned and looked at me suspiciously. "I don't see why I should help
your friends," he said.
I realised that my position was a difficult one. My sympathies were
entirely with Banks. I felt that if there was to be any question of making
allowances, I wanted to be on the side of Brenda and the Home Farm. But,
at the same time, I could not deny that I owed something--loyalty, was
it?--to the Jervaises. I pondered that for a few seconds before I spoke
again, and by then I had found what I believed to be a tolerable attitude,
though I was to learn later that it compromised me no less than if I had
frankly thrown in my lot with the Banks faction.
"You are quite right," I said. "And I would sooner you gave me no
confidences, now I come to think of it. But I should like you to know, all
the same, that I'm not taking sides in this affair. I have no intention,
for instance, of telling them at the Hall that I've seen you."
The daylight was flooding up from the North-West, now, in a great stream
that had flushed the whole landscape with colour; and I could see the full
significance of honest inquiry in my companion's face as he probed me with
his stare. But I could meet his gaze without confusion. My purpose was
single enough, and if I had had a moment's doubt of him when he failed to
respond to my mood of fantasy; I was now fully prepared to accept him
without qualification.
He was not like his sister in appearance. He favoured the paternal stock,
I inferred. He was blue-eyed and fairer than Anne, and the tan of his face
was red where hers was dusky. Nevertheless, I saw a likeness between them
deeper than some family trick of expression which, now and again, made me
feel their kinship. For Banks, too, gave me the impression of having a
soul that came something nearer the surface of life than is common in
average humanity--a look of vitality, zest, ardour--I fumbled for a more
significant superlative as I returned his stare. And yet behind that
ardour there was, in Arthur Banks, at least, a hint of determination and
shrewdness that I felt must be inherited from the sound yeoman stock of
his father.
Our pause of mutual investigation ended in a smile. He held out his hand
with a pleasant frankness that somehow proclaimed the added colonial
quality of him.
"That's all right," he said, "but anyway I couldn't give you any
confidences, yet. I don't know myself, you see."
"Are you going back to the Hall?" I asked.
"I don't know that, either," he said, and added, "I shan't go back as the
chauffeur, anyway."
And, indeed, there was little of the chauffeur in his appearance, just
then. He was wearing a light tweed suit and brown brogues, and his clothes
sat upon him with just that touch of familiarity, of negligence, that your
professional servant's mufti can never accomplish.
There was a new air of restlessness about him since he had put me under
cross-examination. He looked round him in the broadening day as if he were
in search of something, or some one, hopefully yet half-despairingly
expected.
"Look here--if you'd sooner I went..." I began.
He had risen to his feet after his last statement and was looking back
towards the Hall, but he faced me again when I spoke.
"Oh, no!" he said with a hint of weariness.
"It isn't likely that..." He broke off and threw himself moodily down on
the grass again before he continued, "It's not that I couldn't trust you.
But you can see for yourself that it's better I shouldn't. When you get
back to the Hall, you might be asked questions and for your own sake it'd
look better if you didn't know the answers."
"Oh, quite," I agreed, and added, "I'll stay and see the sun rise."
"You won't see the sun for some time," he remarked. "There'll be a lot of
cloud and mist for it to break through. It's going to be a scorcher
to-day."
"Good," I replied; and for a few minutes we discussed weather signs like
any other conventional Englishmen. A natural comparison led us presently
to the subject of Canada. But through it all he bore himself as a man with
a preoccupation he could not forget; and I was looking for a good opening
to make an excuse of fatigue and go back to the Hall, when something of
the thought that was intriguing him broke through the surface of his talk.
"I'm going back there as soon as I can," he said with a sudden impatience.
"There's room to turn round in Canada without hitting up against a notice
board and trespassing on the preserves of some landed proprietor. I'd
never have come home if it hadn't been for the old people. They thought
chauffering for Mr. Jervaise would be a chance for me! Anyhow my father
did. He's got the feeling of being dependent. It's in his bones like it is
with, all of 'em--on the estate. It's a tradition. Lord, the old man would
be horrified, if he knew! The Jervaises are a sort of superior creation to
him. We've been their tenants for God knows how many hundred years. And
serfs before that, I suppose. I get the feeling myself, sometimes. It's
infectious. When you see every one kow-towing to old Jervaise as if he
were the angel Gabriel, you begin to feel as if there must be something in
it."
The full day had come, and the cold draught of air that had preceded the
sunrise came now from behind me as if the spirits of the air had
discovered that their panic-stricken flight had been a mistake and were
tentatively returning to inquire into the new conditions. The birds were
fully awake now, and there was a tremendous gossiping and chattering going
on, that made me think of massed school-children in a railway station,
twittering with the excitement of their coming excursion. In the
North-East the gray wall of mist was losing the hardness of its edge, and
behind the cloud the sky was bleaching to an ever paler blue.
"And yet," I said, as my companion paused, "the Jervaises aren't anything
particular as a family. They haven't done anything, even in the usual way,
to earn ennoblement or fame."
"They've squatted," Banks said, "that's what they've done. Set themselves
down here in the reign of Henry II., and sat tight ever since--grabbing
commons and so on, now and again, in the usual way, of course. The village
is called after them, Thorp-Jervaise, and the woods and the hills, and
half the labourers in the neighbourhood have got names like Jarvey and
Jarvis. What I mean is that the Jervaises mayn't be of any account in
London, or even in the county, alongside of families like Lord
Garthorne's; but just round here they're the owners and always have been
since there have been any private owners. Their word's law. If you don't
like it, you can get out, and that's all there is about it." He gazed
thoughtfully in front of him and thrust out his lower lip. "I've got to
get out," he added, "unless..."
I hesitated to prompt him, fearing the possibly inquisitive sound of the
most indirect question, and after what I felt was a very pregnant silence,
he continued rather in the manner of one allusively submitting a case.
"But you get to a point where you feel as if no game's worth winning if
you can't play it fair and open."
"So long as the other side play fair with you," I commented.
"They can afford to," he returned. "They get every bit of pull there is to
have. I told you we've been tenants of the Home Farm ever since there's
been a Home Farm, but old Jervaise could turn my father out any time, at
six months' notice. Would, too. Probably have to, for the sake of public
opinion. Well, would you call that playing fair?"
"I shouldn't," I said with emphasis.
"Most people would," he replied gloomily. I was wondering what his own
"pull" might be, the pull he would not use because the use of it
conflicted with his ideal of playing the game. I was inclined, with a
foolish romanticism to toy with the notion of some old blood relationship
between the families of Jervaise and Banks--some carefully hidden scandal
that might even throw a doubt on the present owner's right of
proprietorship. I was still rebuilding that foolish, familiar story of the
lost heir, when my new friend put an end to further speculation by
saying,--
"But what's the good of thinking about that--yet? Why, I don't even
know..."
I could not resist a direct question this time. "Don't even know what?" I
asked.
"I was forgetting," he said. He got to his feet again, looked round for a
moment, and then gave a yawn which seemed to spring from a nervous rather
than a muscular origin.
"No good my compromising you, just now," he said with a friendly smile.
"You've probably guessed more, already, than'll be altogether convenient
for you when you see the family at breakfast. Perhaps, we'll meet again
some day."
"I'm staying here till Monday," I said.
"But I don't know if I am," he replied with a whimsical twist of his firm
mouth. "Well, so long," he went on quickly. "Glad to have met you,
anyway." He nodded with a repetition of that frank, engaging smile of his,
and turned away.
He did not take the road by which I had found Jervaise Clump, but
descended the hill on the opposite side; and, after he had gone for five
minutes or so, I got up and took a view of the prospect in that direction.
I had no thought of spying upon him. I just wished to see if the Home Farm
lay over there, as I guessed it must from my memory of the general lie of
the land during our moonlit return to the Hall.
I was right. The farm was clearly visible from the northern slope of the
hill--an L-shaped, low, white house with a high, red-tiled roof. It stood
on another little tumulus about a mile away, a small replica of Jervaise
Clump; and the whole house was visible above the valley wood that lay
between us.
At first I could not decide why the effect of the place gave me an
impression of being unusual, and finally decided that this apparent air of
individuality was due to the choice of site. In that country all the farms
were built in the lower lands, crouching under the lee of woods and hills,
humbly effacing themselves before the sovereignty of the Hall. The Home
Farm alone, as far as I could see, presented a composed and dignified face
to its overlord.
"There is a quality about these Bankses," I thought, and then corrected
the statement by adding, "about the children, at least." From what Arthur
Banks had said, I gathered that his father conformed to the faith of the
estate, both in act and spirit.
I stared at the Farm for a few minutes, wondering what that French wife
might be like. I found it difficult to picture the ci-devant governess in
those surroundings, and more particularly as the mother of these two
fascinating children. They, like their home, produced an effect of being
different from the common average....
I became aware that the green of woods and grass had leapt to attention,
and that sprawling shadows had suddenly come into being and were giving a
new solidity to the landscape. Also, I felt a touch of unexpected warmth
on my right cheek.
I returned to the place where Banks and I had talked, and sat down again
facing the glorious light of the delivered sun. And almost at once I was
overcome by an intense desire to sleep. My purpose of walking back to the
Hall, undressing and going to bed had become impossible. I stretched
myself full length on the turf, and surrendered myself, exquisitely, to
the care of the sunlight.