Nothing Venture (17 page)

“Won't you open the door and take the letters?”

Nan had wept until she could weep no more. Those scalding tears seemed to have washed everything away, like a flood that obliterates all landmarks and leaves behind it an even desolation. There had been a moment when she could have killed Jervis for that light kiss. The hot rage was gone. There had been a moment when she could have flung herself into his arms; and that too was gone. There had been shame, and shrinking, and terror, and the surge of something in her own nature which she had not known before. They were all gone. Her burning tears had carried them away. There remained a grey, desolate loneliness, and she was very tired.

She was not sure whether she had spoken when Jervis asked her to open the door. Bran pressed close to her in the dark, and when his warmth touched her she knew that she was cold.

Her silence and the darkness touched Jervis with a vague apprehension. He had come into his room without switching on the light. The windows stood wide and uncurtained, and there came from them a faint, dusky half light in which the accustomed furnishings of the room took on a strange aspect. The sky beyond the windows was pale with the rising moon.

All at once the strangeness was in his own thought. He had for an instant the sense that all this had happened before—in a dream—in some strange place. He and Nan, with darkness between them; and Nan weeping in the darkness. It touched a deep unknown spring and released a rush of some emotion which rose in him and then ebbed again. The whole thing passed between one breath and the next. It left him with the feeling that he had just waked up and did not quite know where he was. He said, in a changed voice.

“Are you all right?”

And this time he heard her say, “Yes”; and he heard Bran push against the door.

Nan straightened herself a little. They could not stand here like this. It would be better to open the door and take her letters—only she couldn't do it. If she opened the door, he would know that she had been crying. No—he had no light in his room; there was not the faintest thread of light at the foot of the door. Why were they standing like this in the dark with the door between them? She had no strength to go away. She leaned against the cold panel, and very faintly her lonely desolation felt the stir of a desire that he should speak, that he should go on speaking; because, when she heard his voice, she did not feel quite so dreadfully alone.

His voice came to her through the panel.

“What is the matter?”

She drew a breath that returned in a sigh.

“Nothing.”

“You've been crying.”

“No.”

“Then won't you open the door?”

A little warmth crept up in her. She had cried for such a long time. It would be nice to make friends. She was very tired. She put up her hand and slipped back the bolt, and at once she was afraid.

The door opened into Jervis' room. As he turned the handle, Bran threw all his weight against and plunged joyfully through the opening, mouthing Jervis and butting him with his head. Nan could see him, huge and black against the three pale windows on the far side of the room. She could see Jervis too, tall and black. Bran ran back to her, whining.

She stood quite still where she was, and Jervis took a step forward as far as the threshold and stretched out his hand with the letters in it. He did not cross the threshold, and when she had taken the letters he stepped back. Then he said in a constrained tone,

“I've read them. I'm sorry for what I said. I'd no business to say it.”

Nan put the hand with the letters to her breast. Her hand was cold, and the letters were cold. She did not speak.

All at once Jervis said,

“Good-night.”

He stepped back and shut the door.

XXII

Ferdinand Fazackerley came down next day, arriving in time for dinner with an extraordinary assortment of luggage, including the yellow Gladstone bag, a canvas holdall, a uniform-case scraped and battered down to the bare tin, a wash-basin with a leather top, and some assorted parcels. All except the parcels were plastered over with labels of every shape and colour.

When dinner was over, they had coffee on the terrace, with the heat dropping out of the day and a breeze blowing in from the sea. Mr Fazackerley's bright brown eyes looked appreciately from his coffee to a bed of flame-coloured snapdragons, from the snapdragons to Nan in a green frock, and from Nan to Jervis.

“This rural solitude,” he said, “is a very refreshing thing. I don't mind telling you that I find it very refreshing indeed. It reminds me forcibly of the Garden of Eden.”

Nan laughed at him.

“Are you the serpent?”

“No,” said F.F. “I take it this is the Garden of Eden before the serpent got there—and, as I said before, I find it mighty refreshing.”

He fished a lump of sugar out of his coffee and crunched it. Then, putting his cup down, he said,

“No more accidents?”

There was a little dragging silence before Jervis said in a casual tone,

“Only the old bridge.”

Ferdinand jerked round in his wicker chair.

“What do you mean, the old bridge?”

Jervis, sitting sideways on the balustrade, waved a hand in the direction of the ravine.

“Only the old wooden bridge above the fall.”

“Great Smith! Above the fall? And it fell? Is that what you're giving me?”

“What a dramatic mind you've got, F.F.! The timbers were rotten with the spray.”

“Rotten, were they—and with the spray?”

Jervis nodded.

“It's going to cost a lot to build another—more than I can afford.”

Ferdinand sent a dancing look at Nan, and received a definite impression. He went back to Jervis.

“The bridge fell. And was there anyone on it when it fell?”

Jervis got up and stood half turned away, looking down towards the ravine.

“Nan had a narrow escape,” he said. “She'll tell you about it if you want to know.”

Ferdinand certainly wanted to know. He looked at Nan, and found her changing colour.

“There's nothing to tell, Mr Fazackerley.”

“Oh, I guess there's something.”

“No, there isn't.” Then, as Jervis looked over his shoulder with a sardonic gleam in his eye, she coloured and said stumblingly, “I ran on to the bridge. It cracked, and then it fell. Jervis pulled me up.”

“Great Mississippi!” said Ferdinand. “Can't someone do better than that? That's the baldest thing in stories that I've struck since they taught me to read! The—bridge—broke. The—bridge—fell. He—pulled—me—up. Haven't you got a few extra syllables about you, Mrs Jervis? I just feel as if I could do with them if you have.”

Nan's head went up.

“Ask Jervis what happened.”

She had hardly seen him all day; he had been out and busy about the place; she had breakfasted and lunched alone. She had a sense of temerity when she saw how black a frown her words provoked.

“Nothing happened. The bridge was rotten, and it broke.”

“Bran wouldn't cross it,” said Nan only just above her breath. “I knew there was something wrong when Bran wouldn't cross it.”

“I'm not an inquisitive man,” said Ferdinand, “but I'm feeling the strain of this conversation pretty badly. If someone don't tell me what happened soon, I'm going to be a first-aid case.”

“Oh, Nan'll tell you—what happened, and a bit over. The bit over is the interesting part of course—it always is. And, being a pressman, you won't worry over its being fiction. The bigger the lie, the better the story. That's it, isn't it, F.F.?”

“That's where you're wrong. The Press wants facts, but it don't want plain facts. It wants facts viewed through the medium of imagination. You take a bit of dry stone. That's a fact—isn't it? You take a handful of dry stones. Well, you've got a handful of dry facts, and there's not a bit of interest in them—they're just dry—you're going to yawn your head off looking at them. But you take your handful of dry stones and put them at the bottom of a stream and let the water run over them, and what have you got? They're still facts—you're not going to deny that. They're just as much facts as they were when you'd got them dry in your hand—but you're not yawning over them any more—they're not dry any more—they're a handful of jewels—they've got light and colour, and movement—the water's made them come alive. Well, that's what imagination does to facts—it makes them come alive. And the Press wants live facts—not dead ones that are going to make people yawn their heads off.”

Jervis had been listening in a careless attitude, one knee on the balustrade. His sudden smile came and went again. It gave his face an extraordinary charm. He looked at Ferdinand with affection.

“Very nicely put, F.F. I'm afraid I only deal in dry facts—that's why I'm not competing. Nan will turn on all the imagination that's required.”

Nan's cheeks burned with a sudden scarlet. Everything in her was reacting violently from the moment when she had stood with the door between herself and Jervis and had not had a word to say. That was last night; but it might have happened in another world. She had felt drained and dumb, a sort of ghost in the dark. She did not feel in the least like that now. She wanted to convince Ferdinand, to get him on her side. She felt warm, and alive, and sure. She leaned toward him with her elbow on the arm of her chair.

“I'll tell you what happened.”

“That's better,” said F.F.

Jervis got up and strolled away.

“When the thrills are over you can wander down to the ravine and view the remains,” he said.

He went down the steps and on down the grassy slope.

“
Now
, Mrs Jervis,” said Ferdinand.

“Jervis doesn't believe—anything.”

“Well no—he wouldn't. Suppose you try me—I'm a whale at believing.”

“There's so little to tell. There's nothing that you can prove—there's only the feeling, the frightfully strong feeling.”

Ferdinand nodded.

“You mean you've got a hunch. Well, I take a good deal of stock in hunches myself. You go right on and tell me all about this bridge business.”

Nan went on. She told him about waking up in the night and looking out of her window and seeing Robert Leonard by a flash of lightning.

“And what does Jervis say to that?”

“He says I couldn't possibly have recognized him all that way off.”

“Well, there's something in that.”

“I saw him. First there was a moon, and then the clouds went over it and it was quite dark—and after that there was a flash of lightning, and I saw him.”

“Where?”

She turned and looked across the balustrade to the ravine.

“There—just where Jervis is now, where the path goes in amongst the trees.”

Ferdinand whistled through his teeth.

“It's a long way off.”

“I saw him,” said Nan.

“All right. Now what about the bridge?”

“Jervis took me down to see the fall, and when we came to the bridge Bran wouldn't cross it—he wouldn't go onto it at all. He
knew.
”

Ferdinand nodded.

“I've seen an elephant do that in Burma—it just stood there and trumpeted. Go on.”

“Jervis was angry with him. He tried to drag him on to the bridge—” She stopped abruptly.

Ferdinand laughed a little.

“Keep right on,” he said.

“Well, the bridge went—and I'd have gone too, only Jervis grabbed hold of me and pulled me up.”

His bright brown eyes mocked her a little.

“I never did care for an expurgated edition—it puts too much strain on the imagination.”

“That's all,” said Nan hastily.

“George Washington! All? And how did you come to be on the bridge? Bran wouldn't cross, and you
knew
there was something wrong,
and so
you went onto the bridge yourself just to see what would happen.”

He had the satisfaction of seeing her cheeks burn.

“Well—that is so, isn't it?” he said.

Nan jumped up.

“You'd better go down and look at the bridge.”

“If I'd got a hat on, I'd take it off to you, Mrs Jervis!” said Ferdinand Fazackerley.

XXIII

They lunched next day with the Tetterleys. Mabel Tetterley rang up and invited them in a casual, inconsequent manner. She said Basher was dying to meet Nan. She extended her original invitation to include Ferdinand, and finished up by hoping that they wouldn't be poisoned, because she had a new cook and Basher said she had a Lucrezia Borgia sort of look about her.

The heat held. After a time their road lay along the cliffs. The blue of the sky and the blue of the sea swam together in a trembling haze. The car was an open one. The sun flooded down upon them, and there was no breeze but what they made themselves.

Jervis drove at what seemed to Nan a break-neck pace. It made her giddy. She closed her eyes, and heard Ferdinand laugh behind her.

“Road hog! Isn't he? You should have seen him push the old Ford we had in Anatolia. We had the local brigand after us, and when I wasn't getting shell shock over the bullets that were flying, I was having a heart attack at what the speedometer was registering. After the needle had run twice round the dial it cashed in its checks, and I was wishing I'd cashed in mine and got it over.”

They skimmed down a steep hill and tore up the other side. Nan felt exactly as if she were in a lift; but there was something exhilarating about it too. She laughed as they raced at the hill, and Jervis looked sideways at her and smiled.

“Jolly view here.”

The road was on the edge of the cliff. The sea was blue beneath them; the water sparkled in the sun.

“Beastly bad bit of road on that hill, F.F. Quite like old times! I can't get anyone to do anything about it, and what it'll be like after another winter, Lord knows.” He turned to Nan. “That's your friend Leonard's chicken farm.”