Czytaj książkę: «The Jervaise Comedy»

I
The First Hour

When I was actually experiencing the thrill, it came delightfully, however, blended with a threat that proclaimed the imminent consequence of dismay. I appreciated the coming of the thrill, as a rare and unexpected “dramatic moment.” I savoured and enjoyed it as a real adventure suddenly presented in the midst of the common business of life. I imaginatively transplanted the scene from the Hall of Thorp-Jervaise to a West-End theatre; and in my instant part of unoccupied spectator I admired the art with which the affair had been staged. It is so seldom that we are given an opportunity to witness one of these “high moments,” and naturally enough I began instinctively to turn the scene into literature; admitting without hesitation, as I am often forced to admit, that the detail of reality is so much better and more typical than any I can invent.

But, having said that, I wonder how far one does invent in such an experience? The same night I hinted something of my appreciation of the dramatic quality of the stir at the Hall door to Frank Jervaise, Brenda’s brother, and he, quite obviously, had altogether missed that aspect of the affair. He scowled with that forensic, bullying air he is so successfully practising at the Junior Bar, as he said, “I suppose you realise just what this may mean, to all of us?”

Jervaise evidently had failed to appreciate the detail that I had relished with such delight. He had certainly not savoured the quality of it. And in one sense I may claim to have invented the business of the scene. I may have added to it by my imaginative participation. In any case my understanding as interpreter was the prime essential—a fact that shows how absurd it is to speak of “photographic detail” in literature, or indeed to attempt a proper differentiation between realism and romance.

We were all of us in the Hall, an inattentive, chattering audience of between twenty and thirty people. The last dance had been stopped at ten minutes to twelve, in order that the local parson and his wife—their name was Sturton—might be out of the house of entertainment before the first stroke of Sunday morning. Every one was wound up to a pitch of satisfied excitement. The Cinderella had been a success. The floor and the music and the supper had been good, Mrs. Jervaise had thrown off her air of pre-occupation with some distasteful suspicion, and we had all been entertained and happy. And yet these causes for satisfaction had been nothing more than a setting for Brenda Jervaise. It was she who had stimulated us, given us a lead and kept us dancing to the tune of her exciting personality. She had made all the difference between an ordinarily successful dance and what Mrs. Sturton at the open door continually described as “a really delightful evening.”

She had to repeat the phrase, because with the first stroke of midnight ringing out from the big clock over the stables, came also the first intimation of the new movement. Mrs. Sturton’s fly was mysteriously delayed; and I had a premonition even then, that the delay promised some diversion. The tone of the stable clock had its influence, perhaps. It was so precisely the tone of a stage clock—high and pretentious, and with a disturbing suggestion of being unmelodiously flawed.

Miss Tattersall, Olive Jervaise’s friend, a rather abundant fair young woman, warmed by excitement to the realisation that she must flirt with some one, also noticed the theatrical sound of that announcement of midnight. She giggled a little nervously as stroke succeeded stroke in an apparently unending succession.

“It seems as if it were going on all night,” she said to me, in a self-conscious voice, as if the sound of the bell had some emotional effect upon her.

“It’s because it’s out of place,” I said for the sake of saying something; “theatrical and artificial, you know. It ought to be…” I did not know quite what it ought to be and stopped in the middle of the sentence. I was aware of the wide open door, of the darkness beyond, and of the timid visiting of the brilliant, chattering crowd by the fragrance of scented night-stock—a delicate, wayward incursion that drifted past me like the spirit of some sweet, shabby fairy. What possible bell could be appropriate to that air? I began, stupidly, to recall the names of such flowers as bluebell, hare-bell, Canterbury-bell. In imagination I heard their chime as the distant tinkling of a fairy musical-box.

Miss Tattersall, however, took no notice of my failure to find the ideal. “Yes, isn’t it?” she said, and then the horrible striking ceased, and we heard little Nora Bailey across the Hall excitedly claiming that the clock had struck thirteen.

“I counted most carefully,” she was insisting.

“I can’t think why that man doesn’t come,” Mrs. Sturton repeated in a raised voice, as if she wanted to still the superstitious qualms that Miss Bailey had started. “I told him to come round at a quarter to twelve, so that there shouldn’t be any mistake. It’s very tiresome.” She paused on that and Jervaise was inspired to the statement that the fly came from the Royal Oak, didn’t it, a fact that Mrs. Sturton had already affirmed more than once.

“What makes it rather embarrassing for the dear Jervaises,” Miss Tattersall confided to me, “is that the other things aren’t ordered till one—the Atkinsons’ ’bus, you know, and the rest of ’em. Brenda persuaded Mrs. Jervaise that we might go on for a bit after the vicar had gone.”

I wished that I could get away from Miss Tattersall; she intruded on my thoughts. I was trying to listen to a little piece that was unfolding in my mind, a piece that began with the coming of the spirit of the night-stock into this material atmosphere of heated, excited men and women. I realised that invasion as the first effort of the wild romantic night to enter the house; after that…. After that I only knew that the consequences were intensely interesting and that if I could but let my thoughts guide me, they would finish the story and make it exquisite.

“Oh! did she?” I commented automatically, and cursed myself for having conveyed a warmth of interest I certainly did not feel.

“She’s so enthusiastic, isn’t she? Brenda, I mean,” Miss Tattersall went on, and as I listened I compared her to the stable-clock. She, too, was a persistent outrage, a hindrance to whatever it was that I was waiting for.

Mrs. Sturton and her husband were coming back, with an appearance of unwillingness, into the warmth and light of the Hall. The dear lady was still at her congratulations on the delightfulness of the evening, but they were tempered, now, by a hint of apology for “spoiling it—to a certain extent—I hope I haven’t—by this unfortunate contretemps.”

The Jervaises were uncomfortably warm in their reassurances. They felt, no doubt, the growing impatience of all their other visitors pressing forward with the reminder that if the Sturtons’ cab did not come at once, there would be no more dancing.

Half-way up the stairs little Nora Bailey’s high laughing voice was embroidering her statement with regard to the extra stroke of the stable-clock.

“I had a kind of premonition that it was going to, as soon as it began,” she was saying.

Gordon Hughes was telling the old story of the sentry who had saved his life by a similar counting of the strokes of midnight.

And at the back of my mind my dæmon was still thrusting out little spurts of enthralling allegory. The Sturtons and Jervaises had been driven in from the open. They were taking refuge in their house. Presently…

“Given it up?” I remarked with stupid politeness to Miss Tattersall.

“They’ve sent John round to the stables to inquire,” she told me.

I do not know how she knew. “John” was the only man-servant that the Jervaises employed in the house; butler, footman, valet and goodness knows what else.

“Mrs. Sturton seems to be afraid of the night-air,” Miss Tattersall remarked with a complacent giggle of self-congratulation on being too modern for such prejudices. “I simply love the night-air, don’t you?” she continued. “I often go out for a stroll in the garden the last thing.”

I guessed her intention, but I was not going to compromise myself by strolling about the Jervaise domain at midnight with Grace Tattersall.

“Do you? Yes,” I agreed, as if I were bound to admire her originality.

They are afraid of the night-air, my allegory went on, and having begun their retreat, they are now sending out their servant for help. I began to wonder if I were composing the plot of a grand opera?

John’s return convinced me that I was not to be disappointed in my expectation of drama.

He came out from under the staircase through the red baize door which discreetly warned the stranger that beyond this danger signal lay the sacred mysteries of the Hall’s service. And he came down to the central cluster of faintly irritated Sturtons and Jervaises, with an evident hesitation that marked the gravity of his message. Every one was watching that group under the electric-lighted chandelier—it was posed to hold the stage—but I fancy that most of the audience were solely interested in getting rid of the unhappy Sturtons.

We could not hear what John said, but we inferred the general nature of the disaster from the response accorded to his news. The vicar merely clicked his tongue with a frown of grave disapproval, but his wife advertised the disaster for us by saying,—

“It’s that man Carter, from the Oak, you know; not our own man. I’ve never liked Carter.”

“Quite hopelessly, eh?” Jervaise asked John, and John’s perturbed shake of the head answered that question beyond any doubt.

“In any case,” Mrs. Sturton began, and I hazarded a guess that she was going to refuse to drive behind Carter in any stage of intoxication; but she decided to abandon that line and went on with a splendid imitation of cheerfulness, “However, there’s nothing to be done, now, but walk. It’s quite a fine night, fortunately.” She looked at her husband for approval.

“Oh! quite, quite,” he said. “A beautiful night. Let us walk by all means.”

A general rustle of relief spread up the gallery of the staircase, and was followed at once by a fresh outburst of chatter. The waiting audience of would-be dancers had responded like one individual. It was as if their single over-soul had sighed its thankfulness and had then tried to cover the solecism. Their relief was short-lived. Mrs. Jervaise “couldn’t think” of the Sturtons walking. They must have the motor. She insisted. Really nothing at all. Their chauffeur was sure to be up, still.

“Of course, certainly, by all means,” Jervaise agreed warmly, and then, to John, “He hasn’t gone to bed yet, I suppose?”

“I saw him not half an hour ago, sir,” was John’s response.

“Tell him to bring the motor round,” Jervaise ordered, and added something in a lower voice, which, near as I was to them, I could not catch. I imagined that it might be an instruction to have the chauffeur out again if he had by any chance slunk off to bed within the last half-hour.

I think Miss Tattersall said “Damn!” Certainly the over-soul of the staircase group thought it.

“They’ll be here all night, at this rate,” was my companion’s translation of the general feeling.

“If they have to wake up the chauffeur,” I admitted.

“He’s a new man they’ve got,” Miss Tattersall replied. “They’ve only had him three months…” It seemed as if she were about to add some further comment, but nothing came.

“Oh!” was all that I found appropriate.

I felt that the action of my opera was hanging fire. Indeed, every one was beginning to feel it. The Hall door had been shut against the bane of the night-air. The stimulus of the fragrant night-stock had been excluded. Miss Tattersall pretended not to yawn. We all pretended that we did not feel a craving to yawn. The chatter rose and fell spasmodically in short devitalised bursts of polite effort.

I looked round for Brenda, but could not see her anywhere.

“Won’t you come back into the drawing-room?” Mrs. Jervaise was saying to the Sturtons.

“Oh! thank you, it’s hardly worth while, is it?” Mrs. Sturton answered effusively, but she loosened the shawl that muffled her throat as if she were preparing for a longer wait. “I’m so sorry,” she apologised for the seventh time. “So very unfortunate after such a really delightful evening.”

They kept up that kind of conversation for quite a long time, while we listened eagerly for the sound of the motor-horn.

And no motor-horn came; instead, after endlessly tedious minutes, John returned bearing himself like a portent of disaster.

The confounded fellow whispered again.

“What, not anywhere?” Jervaise asked irritably. “Sure he hasn’t gone to bed?”

John said something in that too discreet voice of his, and then Jervaise scowled and looked round at the ascending humanity of the staircase. His son Frank detached himself from the swarm, politely picked his way down into the Hall, and began to put John under a severe cross-examination.

“What’s up now, do you suppose?” Miss Tattersall asked, with the least tremor of excitement sounding in her voice.

“Perhaps the chauffeur has followed the example of Carter, and afterwards hidden his shame,” I suggested.

I was surprised by the warmth of her contradiction. “Oh, no” she said. “He isn’t the least that sort of man.” She said it as if I had aspersed the character of one of her friends.

“He seems to have gone, disappeared, any-way,” I replied.

“It’s getting frightfully mysterious,” Miss Tattersall agreed, and added inconsequently, “He’s got a strong face, you know; keen—looks as if he’d get his own way about things, though, of course, he isn’t a gentleman.”

I had a suspicion that she had been flirting with the romantic chauffeur. She was the sort of young woman who would flirt with any one.

I wished they would open that Hall door again. The action of my play had become dispersed and confused. Frank Jervaise had gone off through the baize door with John, and the Sturtons and their host and hostess were moving reluctantly towards the drawing-room.

“We might almost as well go and sit down somewhere,” I suggested to Miss Tattersall, and noted three or four accessible blanks on the staircase.

“Almost,” she agreed after a glance at the closed door that shut out the night.

In the re-arrangement I managed to leave her on a lower step, and climbed to the throne of the gods, at present occupied only by Gordon Hughes, one of Frank Jervaise’s barrister friends from the Temple. Hughes was reputed “brilliantly clever.” He was a tallish fellow with ginger red hair and a long nose—the foxy type.

“Rum start!” I cried, by way of testing his intellectual quality, but before I could get on terms with him, the stage was taken by a dark, curly-haired, handsome boy of twenty-four or so, generally addressed as “Ronnie.” I had thought him very like a well-intentioned retriever pup. I could imagine him worrying an intellectual slipper to pieces with great gusto.

“I say, it’s all U.P. now,” he said, in a dominating voice. “What’s the time?” He was obviously too well turned out to wear a watch with evening dress.

Some one said it was “twenty-five to one.”

“Fifty to one against another dance, then,” Ronnie barked joyously.

“Unless you’ll offer yourself up as a martyr in a good cause,” suggested Nora Bailey.

“Offer myself up? How?” Ronnie asked.

“Take ’em home in your car,” Nora said in a penetrating whisper.

“Dead the other way,” was Ronnie’s too patent excuse.

“It’s only a couple of miles through the Park, you know,” Olive Jervaise put in. “You might easily run them over to the vicarage and be back again in twenty minutes.”

“By Jove; yes. So I might,” Ronnie acknowledged. “That is, if I may really come back, Miss Jervaise. Awfully good of you to suggest it. I didn’t bring my man with me, though. I’ll have to go and wind up the old buzz-wagon myself, if your fellow can’t be found. Do you think … could any one…”

He was looking round, searching for some one who was not there.

“Want any help?” Hughes asked.

“No, thanks. That’s all right. I know where the car is, I mean,” Ronnie said, and still hesitated as if he were going to finish the question he had begun in his previous speech.

Olive Jervaise anticipated, I think wrongly, his remark. “They’re in the drawing-room,” she said. “Will you tell them?”

“Better get the car round first, hadn’t I?” Ronnie asked.

The sandy Atkinson youth found an answer for that. He cleared his long, thin throat huskily and said, “Might save time to tell ’em first. They’d be ready, then, when you came round.” His two equally sandy sisters clucked their approval.

“All serene,” Ronnie agreed.

He was on the bottom step of the stairs when the Hall door was thrown wide open and Frank Jervaise returned.

He stood there a moment, posed for us, searching the ladder of our gallery; and the spirit of the night-stock drifted past him and lightly touched us all as it fled up the stairs. Then he came across the Hall, and addressing his sister, asked, in a voice that overstressed the effect of being casual, “I say, Olive, you don’t happen to know where Brenda is, do you?”

I suppose our over-soul knew everything in that minute. A tremor of dismay ran up our ranks like the sudden passing of a cold wind. Every one was looking at Ronnie.

Olive Jervaise’s reply furnished an almost superfluous corroboration. She could not control her voice. She tried to be as casual as her brother, and failed lamentably. “Brenda was here just now,” she said. “She—she must be somewhere about.”

Ronnie, still the cynosure of the swarm, turned himself about and stared at Frank Jervaise. But it was Gordon Hughes who demonstrated his power of quick inference and response, although in doing it he overstepped the bounds of decency by giving a voice to our suspicions.

“Is the car in the garage? Your own car?” he asked.

“Yes. Rather. Of course,” Jervaise replied uneasily.

“You’ve just looked?” Hughes insisted.

“I know the car’s there,” was Jervaise’s huffy evasion, and he took Ronnie by the arm and led him off into the drawing-room.

The Hall door stood wide open, and the tragedy of the night flowed unimpeded through the house.

Although the horror had not been named we all recognised its finality. We began to break up our formation immediately, gabbling tactful irrelevancies about the delightful evening, the delinquent Carter, and the foolishness of Sabbatarianism. Mrs. Atkinson appeared in the Hall, cloaked and muffled, and beckoned to her three replicas. She announced that their omnibus was “just coming round.”

In the general downward drift of dispersion I saw Grace Tattersall looking up at me with an expression that suggested a desire for the confidential discussion of scandal, and I hastily whispered to Hughes that we might go to the extemporised buffet in the supper-room and get a whisky and seltzer or something. He agreed with an alacrity that I welcomed at the time, but regret, now, because our retirement into duologue took us out of the important movement, and I missed one or two essentials of the development.

The truth is that we were all overcome at the moment by an irresistible desire to appear tactful. We wanted to show the Jervaises that we had not suspected anything, or that if we had, we didn’t mind in the least, and it certainly wasn’t their fault. Nevertheless, I saw no reason why in the privacy of the supper-room—we had the place to ourselves—I should not talk to Hughes. I had never before that afternoon met any of the Jervaise family except Frank, and on one or two occasions his younger brother who was in the army and, now, in India; and I thought that this was an appropriate occasion to improve my knowledge. I understood that Hughes was an old friend of the family.

He may have been, although the fact did not appear in his conversation; for I discovered almost immediately that he was, either by nature or by reason of his legal training, cursed with a procrastinating gift of diplomacy.

“Awkward affair!” I began as soon as we had got our whiskies and lighted cigarettes.

Hughes drank with a careful slowness, put his glass down with superfluous accuracy, and then after another instant of tremendous deliberation, said, “What is?”

“Well, this,” I returned gravely.

“Meaning?” he asked judicially.

“Of course it may be too soon to draw an inference,” I said.

“Especially with no facts to draw them from,” he added.

“All the same,” I went on boldly, “it looks horribly suspicious.”

“What does?”

I began to lose patience with him. “I’m not suggesting that the Sturtons’ man from the Royal Oak has been murdered,” I said.

He weighed that remark as if it might cover a snare, before he scored a triumph of allusiveness by replying, “Fellow called Carter. He’s got a blue nose.”

Despite my exasperation I tried once more on a note of forced geniality, “What sort of man is this chauffeur of the Jervaises? Do you know him at all?”

“Wears brown leather gaiters,” Hughes answered after another solemn deliberation.

I could have kicked him with all the pleasure in life. His awful guardedness made me feel as if I were an inquisitive little journalist trying to ferret out some unsavoury scandal. And he had been the first person to point the general suspicion a few minutes earlier, by his inquiry about the motor. I decided to turn the tables on him, if I could manage it.

“I asked because you seemed to suggest just now that he had gone off with the Jervaises’ motor,” I remarked.

Hughes stroked his long thin nose with his thumb and forefinger. It seemed to take him about a minute from bridge to nostril. Then he inhaled a long draught of smoke from his cigarette, closed one eye as if it hurt him, and threw back his head to blow out the smoke again with a slow gasp of relief.

“One never knows,” was all the explanation he vouchsafed after this tedious performance.

“Whether a chauffeur will steal his master’s motor?” I asked.

“Incidentally,” he said.

“But, good heavens, if he’s that sort of man…” I suggested.

“I’m not saying that he is,” Hughes replied.

I realised then that his idea of our conversation was nothing more nor less than that of a game to be played as expertly as possible. He had all the makings of a cabinet minister, but as a companion he was, on this occasion, merely annoying. I felt that I could stand no more of him, and I was trying to frame a sentence that would convey my opinion of him without actual insult, when Frank Jervaise looked in at the door.

He stared at us suspiciously, but his expression commonly conveyed some aspect of threat or suspicion. “Been looking all over the place for you,” he said.

“For me?” Hughes asked.

Jervaise shook his head. “No, I want Melhuish,” he said, and stood scowling.

“Well, here I am,” I prompted him.

“If I’m in the way…” Hughes put in, but did not attempt to get himself out of it.

Jervaise ignored him. “Look here, Melhuish,” he said. “I wonder if you’d mind coming up with me to the Home Farm?”

“Oh! no; rather not,” I agreed gladly.

I felt that Hughes had been scored off; but I instantly forgot such small triumphs in the delight of being able to get out into the night. Out there was romance and the smell of night-stock, all kinds of wonderment and adventure. I was so eager to be in the midst of it that I never paused to consider the queerness of the expedition.

As we left the Hall, the theatrical stable-clock was just striking one.