IV

IN THE HALL


We found the family awaiting us in the Hall--Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise, Olive,
and "Ronnie" Turnbull, whose desire to become one of the family by
marrying its younger daughter was recognised and approved by every one
except the young lady herself. Ronnie had evidently been received into the
fullest confidence.

We had come in by the back door and made our way through the rather arid
cleanliness of the houses' administrative departments, flavoured with a
smell that combined more notably the odours of cooking and plate-polish.
The transition as we emerged through the red baize door under the majestic
panoply of the staircase, was quite startling. It was like passing from
the desolate sanitation of a well-kept workhouse straight into the lighted
auditorium of a theatre. That contrast dramatised, for me, the Jervaises'
tremendous ideal of the barrier between owner and servant; but it had,
also, another effect which may have been due to the fact that it was, now,
three o'clock in the morning.

For just at the moment of our transition I had the queerest sense not only
of having passed at some previous time through a precisely similar
experience, but, also, of taking part in a ridiculous dream. At that
instant Jervaise Hall, its owners, dependants and friends, had the air of
being not realities but symbols pushed up into my thought by some prank of
the fantastic psyche who dwells in the subconscious. I should not have