The Jervaise Comedy | Page 2

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 d?mon 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