The Jervaise Comedy Part 11

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 ma.s.ses 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 a.s.sumption 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 att.i.tudes 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 mult.i.tudinously 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.