Chapter 5

It was Mrs. Jervaise who started the break-up of the party. She was attacked by a craving to yawn that gradually became irresistible. I saw the incipient symptoms of the attack and watched her with a sympathetic fascination, as she clenched her jaw, put her hand up to her lips, and made little impatient movements of her head and body. I knew that it must come at last, and it did, catching her unawares in the middle of a sentence--undertaken, I fancy, solely as a defence against the insidious craving that was obsessing her.

"Oh, dear!" she said, with a mincing, apologetic gesture of her head; and then "Dear me!" Having committed the solecism, she found it necessary to draw attention to it. She may have been a Shropshire Norman, but at that relaxed hour of the night, she displayed all the signs of the orthodox genteel attitude.

"I don't know when I've been so tired," she apologised.

But, indeed, she did owe us an apology for her yawning fit affected us all like a virulent epidemic. In a moment we were every one of us trying to stifle the same desire, and each in our own way being overcome. I must do Frank the justice to say that he, at least, displayed no sign of gentility.

"Oh! Lord, mater, you've started us now," he said, and gave away almost sensuously to his impulses, stretching and gaping in a way that positively racked us with the longing to imitate him.

"Really, my dear, no necessity for you," began Mr. Jervaise, yawned more or less politely behind a very white, well-kept hand, and concluded, "no necessity for you or Olive to stay up; none whatever. We cannot, in any case, _do_ anything until the morning."

"Even if she comes in, now," supplemented Olive.

"As I'm almost sure she will," affirmed Mrs. Jervaise.

And she must have put something of genuine confidence into her statement, for automatically we all stopped talking for a few seconds and listened again with the ears of faith for the return of the car.

"But as I said," Olive began again, abruptly ending the unhopeful suspense of our pause, "there's nothing more we can do by sitting up. And there's certainly no need for you to overtire yourself, mother."

"No, really not," urged Ronnie politely, "nor for you, either, sir," he added, addressing his host. "What I mean is, Frank and I'll do all that."

"Rather, let's get a drink," Frank agreed.

We wanted passionately to get away from each other and indulge ourselves privately in a very orgie of gapes and stretchings. And yet, we stuck there, idiotically, making excuses and little polite recommendations for the others to retire, until Frank with a drastic quality of determination that he sometimes showed, took command.

"Go on, mater," he said; "you go to bed." And he went up to her, kissed her in the mechanical way of most grown-up sons, and gently urged her in the direction of the stairs. She submitted, still with faint protestations of apology.

Olive followed, and with a last feint of hospitality, her father brought up the tail of the procession.

"Coming for a drink?" Frank asked me with a jerk of his head towards the extemporised buffet.

"Well, no, thanks. I think not," I said, seeking the relief afforded by the women's absence; although, now, that I could indulge my desire without restraint, the longing to gape had surprisingly vanished.

"Going to bed?" Jervaise suggested.

"Yes. Bed's the best place, just now," I lied.

"Right oh! Good-night, old chap," Ronnie said effusively.

I pretended to be going upstairs and they did not wait for me to disappear. As soon as they had left the Hall, I sneaked down again, recovered from the cloak-room the light overcoat I had worn on our expedition to the Farm--I have no idea to whom that overcoat belonged--borrowed a cap, and let myself out stealthily by the front door.

As I quietly shut the door behind me, a delicious whiff of night-stock drifted by me, as if it had waited there for all those long hours seeking entrance to the stale, dry air of the Hall.

* * * * *

And it must have been, I think, that scent of night-stock which gave me the sense of a completed episode, or first act, as I stood alone, at last, on the gravel sweep before the Hall. Already the darkness was lifting. The dawn was coming high up in the sky, a sign of fair weather.

I have always had a sure sense of direction, and I turned instinctively towards the landmark of my promised destination, although it was invisible from that side of the Hall--screened by the avenue of tall forest trees, chiefly elms, that led up from the principal entrance to the Park. I had noticed one side road leading into this avenue as I had driven up from the station the previous afternoon, and I sought that turning now, with a feeling of certainty that it would take me in the right direction. As, indeed, it did; for it actually skirted the base of "Jervaise Clump," which touched the extreme edge of the Park on that side.

As I cautiously felt my way down the avenue--it was still black dark under the dark trees--and later up the tunnel of the side road which I hit upon by an instinct that made me feel for it at the precise moment when I reached the point of its junction with the avenue--I returned with a sense of satisfaction to the memory of the last four hours. I was conscious of some kind of plan in the way the comedy of Brenda's disappearance had been put before us. I realised that, as an art form, the plan was essentially undramatic, but the thought of it gave me, nevertheless, a distinct feeling of pleasure.

I saw the experience as a prelude to this lonely adventure of mine--a prelude full of movement and contrast; but I had no premonition of any equally diverting sequel.

The daylight was coming, and I believed, a trifle regretfully, that that great solvent of all mysteries would display these emotions of the night as the phantasmagoria of our imagination.

Before I had reached the end of the tunnel through the wood and had come out into the open whence I could, now, see the loom of Jervaise Clump swelling up before me in the deep, gray gloom of early dawn, I had decided that my suggestion had been prompted by an intuition of truth. Brenda had fallen under the spell of the moon, and gone for a long drive in the motor. She had taken Banks with her, obviously; but that action need not be presumed to have any romantic significance. And the Jervaises had accepted that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I had imagined. They would never have gone to bed, tired as they were, if they had not been satisfied that Brenda had committed no other indiscretion than that of indulging herself in the freak of a moonlight drive. It had, certainly, been unduly prolonged; but, as old Jervaise had said, there might be half a dozen reasons to account for that.

As I turned off the road and breasted the lower slopes of the hill, I was constructing the details of the Jervaises' explanatory visit to the Atkinsons. I had reached the point of making Mrs. Jervaise repeat the statement she had made in the Hall that "dear Brenda was so impossibly headstrong," when I heard the sweet, true notes of some one ahead of me, whistling, almost miraculously, in tune.

It isn't one man in a million who can whistle absolutely true.

V

DAYBREAK

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.