The Jervaise Comedy | Page 9

out to Jervaise who was
holding his head down as if he were afraid the summer rain might do
some serious injury to his face.
"Some one up, anyway," was his comment.
"Very far up," I murmured. I could not quite believe, even then, that it
could be a window. I was disappointed when we had climbed the hill
and stood only a few feet below the beacon, to discover that this too,
was another instance of the all too credible commonplace. I suppose
men like Frank Jervaise never long to believe in the impossible. I was,
however, agreeably surprised to find that he could be nervous.
He hesitated, looking up at the prism of light that splayed out through
the first floor window, and set a silver fire to the falling rain. "Suppose
we'd better knock," he grumbled.
"D'you know whose window it is?" I asked.
Apparently he didn't. He made a dive into a deeper obscurity and I lost
him until I heard his knock. I was glad that he should have knocked
with such decent restraint, but all the effect of it was instantly shattered
by the response. For at his first subdued rap, a dog with a penetratingly

strident bark set up a perfectly detestable clamour within the house. It
was just as if Jervaise's touch on the door had liberated the spring of
some awful rattle. Every lovely impulse of the night must have fled
dismayed, back into the peace and beauty of the wood; and I was more
than half inclined to follow.
Until that appalling racket was set loose I had been regarding this
midnight visit to the farm as a natural and enticing adventure,
altogether in keeping with the dramatic movement preluded by the
chime of the stable-clock. That confounded terrier, whose voice so
clearly proclaimed his breed, had dragged us down to the baldest
realism. We were intruders upon the decencies of civilisation. That dog
was not to be misled by any foolish whimsies of the imagination. He
was a thorough-going realist, living in a tangible, smellable world of
reality, and he knew us for what we were--marauders, disturbers of the
proper respectable peace of twentieth century farms. He lashed himself
into ecstasies of fury against our unconventionality; he rose to
magnificent paroxysms of protest that passionately besought High
Heaven and Farmer Banks to open the door and let him get at us.
But no one came. There may have been other sounds coming from the
house besides that infuriated demand for vengeance, but all inferior
noises--and surely all other noises must have been inferior to that
clamour--were absorbed and flattened out of existence. We were in a
world occupied by the bark of a single dog, and any addition to that
occupation would have been superfluous.
The owner of the voice was doing his level best now to get the door
down on his own account. I hoped he might succeed. I should have
excuse then to fly to the woods and claim sanctuary. As it was, I
retreated a couple of steps, holding my breath to ease the pain of my
nerves, and some old instinct of prayer made me lift my face to the sky.
I welcomed the cold, inquisitive touch of the silent rain.
Then I became aware through the torture of prolonged exasperation that
my upturned face was lit from above; that a steady candle was now
perched on the very sill of the one illuminated window; and that behind
the candle the figure of a woman stood looking down at me.
She appeared to be speaking.
I held my hands to my ears and shook my head violently to intimate my
temporary deafness; and the figure disappeared, leaving the placid

candle to watch me as it seemed with a kind of indolent nonchalance.
I decided to pass on the news to Jervaise, and discovered that besotted
fool in a little trellised porch, stimulating the execrations of the Irish
terrier by a subdued inaudible knocking. I was beginning to scream my
news into his ear when silence descended upon us with the suddenness
of a catastrophe. It was as if the heavens had been rent and all the earth
had fallen into a muffled chaos of mute despair.
I had actually began my shriek of announcement when all the world of
sound about us so inexplicably ceased to be, and I shut off instantly on
the word "Someone...," a word that as I had uttered it sounded like a
despairing yelp of mortal agony.
Out of the unearthly stillness, Jervaise's voice replied in a frightened
murmur, "Someone coming," he said, as if he, alone, had knowledge of
and responsibility for that supreme event.
And still no one came. The door remained steadfastly closed. Outside
the porch, the earth