Anne showed me up to my room as soon as we entered the house, but her
manner was that of the hostess to a strange guest. She was polite, formal,
and, I thought, a trifle nervous. She left me hurriedly as soon as she had
opened the door of the bedroom, with some apology about having to "see to
the supper." (The smell of frying bacon had pervaded the staircase and
passages, and had helped me to realise that I was most uncommonly hungry.
Except for a very light lunch I had eaten nothing since breakfast.)
I got my first real feeling of the strangeness of the whole affair while I
was unpacking my suit-case in that rather stiff, unfriendly spare-room.
Until then the sequence of events had followed a hot succession, in the
current of which I had had no time to consider myself--my ordinary, daily
self--in relation to them. But the associations of this familiar position
and occupation, this adaptation of myself for a few hours to a strange
household, evoked the habitual sensations of a hundred similar
experiences. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been dressing for dinner at
Jervaise Hall, and despite my earnest affirmations that in the interval my
whole life and character had changed, I was very surely aware that I was
precisely the same man I had always been--the man who washed, and changed
his tie, and brushed his hair in just this same manner every day; who
looked at himself in the glass with that same half-frowning, half-anxious
expression, as if he were uncertain whether to resent or admire the
familiar reflection. I was confronted by the image of the Graham Melhuish
to whom I had become accustomed; the image of the rather well-groomed,
rather successful young man that I had come to regard as the complete
presentation of my individuality.
But now I saw that that image in the glass could never have done the
things that I had done that day. I could not imagine that stereotyped
creature wanting to fight Frank Jervaise, running away from the Hall,
taking the side of a chauffeur in an intrigue with his master's daughter,
falling in love with a woman he had not known for twenty-four hours, and,
culminating wonder, making extraordinary determinations to renounce the
pleasures and comforts of life in order to ... I could not quite define
what, but the substitute was something very strenuous and difficult and
self-sacrificing.
Nevertheless, some one had done all these things, and if it were not that
conventional, self-satisfied impersonation now staring back at me with a
look of perplexed inquiry, where was I to find his outward likeness? Had I
looked a different man when I was talking to Anne in the Farm parlour or
when I had communed with myself in the wood? Or if the real Graham
Melhuish were something better and deeper than this fraudulent reflection
of him, how could he get out, get through, in some way or other achieve a
permanent expression to replace this deceptive mask? Also, which of us was
doing the thinking at that moment? Did we take it turn and turn about?
Five minutes before the old, familiar Melhuish had undoubtedly been
unpacking his bag in his old familiar way, and wondering how he had come
to do all the queer things he unquestionably had been doing in the course
of this amazing weekend. Now, the new Melhuish was uppermost again,
speculating about the validity of his soul--a subject that had certainly
never concerned the other fellow, hitherto.
But it was the other fellow who was in the ascendant when I entered the
farm sitting-room in answer to the summons of a falsetto bell. I was shy.
I felt like an intruder. I was afraid that Farmer Banks would treat me as
a distinguished visitor, and that my efforts to attain the happy freedom
of an equal might--in the eyes of Anne--appear condescending. The new self
I had so lately discovered was everybody's equal, but, just then, I was
out of touch with my new self.
Nor did Farmer Banks's natural courtesy tend to put me at ease. He and
Arthur were alone in the room when I came down and it was Arthur who, with
an evident self-consciousness, introduced me.
"Mr. Melhuish, father," was all he said, and I had no idea how much of the
story the old man had, as yet, been told.
He made a kind of stiff bow and held out his hand. "Pleased to meet you,
Mr. Melhuish," he said, and his manner struck a mean between
respectfulness and self-assertion. It was the kind of manner that he might
have shown to a titled canvasser just before an election.
He was a notably handsome man, tall and broad, with regular, impassive
features and blue eyes exactly the colour of Arthur's. Save that his back
was slightly rounded and that his closely-cropped hair was iron-gray, he
showed little mark of his sixty years. He seemed to me the very type of an
English yeoman, not markedly intelligent outside his own speciality, and
conservative to the point of fanaticism. When I thought of trying to
persuade him to forsake the usage of a lifetime and begin again in a
foreign country under new conditions, my heart failed me. Upstairs, before
the looking-glass, I had had my doubts of the possibility of ever ousting
the old Graham Melhuish; but those doubts appeared the most childish
exaggerations of difficulty when compared with my doubts of persuading the
man before me to alter his habits and his whole way of life. It seemed to
me that the spirit of Farmer Banks must be encrusted beyond all hope of
release.
I mumbled some politeness in answer to his unanswerable opening, and
started the one possible topic of the weather. I was grossly ignorant of
the general requirements of agriculture in that or any other connection,
but any one knows a farmer wants fine weather for harvest.
He took me up with a slightly exaggerated air of relief, and I dare say we
could have kept the subject going for ten minutes if it had been
necessary, but he had hardly begun his reply before the three women for
whom we had been waiting came into the room together.
When I met Mr. Banks I felt, at once, that I might have inferred him with
nice accuracy from what I already knew of him. Mrs. Banks was a surprise.
I had pictured her as tall and slight, and inclined to be sombre. Anne's
hints of the romantic side of her mother's temperament had, for some
reason, suggested that image to me, and I was quite absurdly dumfounded
for the moment when I saw this little, roundabout, dark-haired
Frenchwoman, as typically exotic as her husband was home-grown, voluble,
brisk despite the handicap of her figure, and with nothing English about
her unless it were her accent.
Fortunately she gave me no time to display the awkwardness of my surprise.
She came straight at me, talking from the instant she entered the door.
"Discussing the crops already?" she said. "You must forgive us, Mr.
Melhuish, for being so interested in the weather. When one's fortune
depends upon it, one naturally thinks of little else." She gave me her
small plump hand with an engaging but, as it were, a breathless smile.
"And you must be starving," she continued rapidly. "Anne tells me you had
no tea at all anywhere, and that the people at the Hall have been treating
you outrageously. So! will you sit there and Anne next to you, and those
two dreadful children who won't be separated, together on the other side."
She was apparently intent only upon this business of getting us into our
places about the supper-table, and not until I had sat down did I realise
that her last sentence had been an announcement intended for her husband.
"What did you say, Nancy?" he asked with a puzzled air. He was still
standing at the head of the table and staring with obvious embarrassment
at his wife.
She waved her hands at him. "Sit down, Alfred," she commanded him, and in
her pronunciation of his name I noticed for the first time the ripple of a
French "r." Possibly her manner of speaking his name was a form of
endearment. "All in good time, you shall hear about it directly. Now, we
are all very hungry and waiting for you." And without the least hint of a
pause she turned to me and glided over an apology for the nature of the
meal. "We call it supper," she said, "and it is just a farm-house supper,
but better in its way, don't you think, than a formal dinner?" She took me
utterly into her confidence with her smile as she added, "Up at the Hall
they make so much ceremony, all about nothing. I am not surprised that you
ran away. But it was very original, all the same." She introduced me to
the first course without taking breath, "Eggs and bacon. So English. Isn't
there a story of a man who starved to death on a walking-tour because he
could no longer endure to eat eggs and bacon? And when you have eaten
something you must tell us what you have all four been doing while my
husband and I were away. So far as I can understand you have turned the
universe completely inside out. We came back believing that we return to
the Farm, but I think it has become a Fortress...."
I ventured a glance at her husband. These flickering allusions of hers to
the tragedy that was threatening him, seemed to me indiscreet and rather
too frivolous. But when I saw his look of puzzled wonder and admiration, I
began to appreciate the subtlety and wisdom of her method. Using me as a
convenient intermediary, she was breaking the news by what were, to him,
almost inappreciable degrees. He took in her hints so slowly. He was not
sure from moment to moment whether or not she was in earnest.
Nevertheless, I recognised, I thought, at least one cause for
perturbation. He had been perceptibly ruffled and uneasy at the reference
to an understanding between his son and Brenda. Probably the fear of that
complication had been in his mind for some time past.
Mrs. Banks had slid away to the subject of local scenery.
"It is beautiful in its own way," she was saying, "but I feel with Arthur
that it has an air of being so--preserved. It is so proper, well-adjusted,
I forget the English word ..."