A Modern Tragedy

by Phyllis Bentley

  “About the price, Mr. Tasker,” began Walter. After the way the cloth had let him down, his ardour was diminished, but he was still determined to carry the negotiation through correctly to the end. “About the price?”

  “Yes, the price. Well, I was looking it up before you came,” said Tasker gruffly. He stood in front of Walter with his head forward and his hands hanging, not offering the young man a chair. “Five and six a yard.”

  “What!” exclaimed Walter, astounded. His jaw dropped; his honest brown eyes widened; he positively gaped at Tasker in amaze. “What!” he repeated. “But, surely, Mr. Tasker—really—I mean—surely, four and six——”

  “Five and six is the price of that cloth,” said Tasker, staring at him grimly.

  “But, Mr. Tasker,” protested Walter, hardly able to believe his ears: “Really, five and six! It’s preposterous! I mean,” he corrected himself hastily, as Tasker’s blue eyes flashed and his heavy brows contracted, “I should have thought four and ninepence—at the very outside——” he stammered on.

  “Now, look here, young man,” said Tasker suddenly in a kindly tone: “You just go back to Arnold Lumb, and tell him the price I say. You don’t know anything about cloth yet. How should you? I daresay it’s the first time you’ve had to do this sort of job.”

  Perceiving from Walter’s dejected young face that it was so indeed, Tasker smiled sardonically and continued: “I’m not blaming you. It takes years of experience before a man can tell the price of a cloth to a penny.” Walter reflected that the difference between his estimate and the manufacturer’s was a whole shilling, not a penny; but he could not decide whether this helped or hindered his case, quickly enough to interrupt, and Tasker went on.

  “If it had been your father now, he’d have known in a minute,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the table in an easy, friendly, casual attitude, with his hands thrust into his trouser-pockets, and in a tone of good-humoured patronage repeated everything that he had already uttered on the subject, while Walter shifted from foot to foot in silent misery. “I’m not blaming you,” concluded Tasker on an almost caressing note. “It’s a mistake a young man might easily make. But five and six is the price it was invoiced at to the merchant; there’s no getting away from that, you know.” He smiled again, with his head on one side, and looked benevolently at the young man in question.

  The wretched Walter muttered something about having to consult Mr. Arnold before deciding.

  “What?” demanded Tasker sharply, bending forward. “What?”

  Walter had opened his mouth to repeat his statement, in some doubt as to how it would be received, but determined to make it, for he was not without sense and courage, when there came an interruption. A clerk put his head in at the door, and announced abruptly that Mr. Crosland’s chauffeur had come for his master.

  At the name of Crosland, Tasker’s face changed, and he stood up.

  “Mr. Crosland left some minutes ago,” he said in a formal tone, as though Henry Clay Crosland might be within hearing. The clerk seemed puzzled, and muttered something about some mistake. “Here!” exclaimed Tasker impatiently, striding forward: “I’ll come.” He pushed the clerk aside, and they both disappeared into the outer office.

  Walter, left standing alone, involuntarily gave a long sigh of relief; then drew out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, for it was damp with sweat. He found his hand unsteady. Indeed he was in very real distress. He scarcely knew what to make of the situation; but in any case he could hardly, he thought, have conducted the negotiation worse. On the one hand, he had presumably exposed his ignorance to an important manufacturer, alienated him, given him a bad impression of the ability of the staff of Messrs. Lumb. On the other, he would have to report to Arnold Lumb that the damage was the finisher’s fault, that he had (perhaps too promptly) admitted it; and that the piece would have to be paid for at a big price. Surely, surely, Tasker’s price was excessive! But was it? Could it be? Walter was so hot and muddled and perplexed that he felt he had forgotten all he had ever learned about textiles, and surely a manufacturer must know the price of his own cloth! Perhaps there had been a sudden rise? But a rise in the price of yarn (and so of cloth) was what they were all longing for. Surely a thing like that couldn’t have happened without his knowledge? But, of course, it couldn’t! He remembered, and visualised now clearly, the price curves given in the Yorkshire Observer trade supplement last week. They were dropping, dropping. Dyson had shaken his head over them; Arnold Lumb had said there was no knowing when the downward trend would stop. No; there was no rise. In common with all the rest of the West Riding, Walter heartily wished there had been one. Then, how could Tasker …? It was really most confusing. And after the high hopes Walter had entertained of this interview! He now perceived that these hopes had been silly, boyish, laughable; but their failure was disappointing all the same. In fact, every fibre of his body throbbed with disappointment. He smarted all over with humiliation, and felt a ridiculous desire to shed tears. But this was feeble, childish! He must use this moment’s respite to pull himself together, make up his mind what it would be best for him to do. Perhaps he should apologise to Tasker, accept his price gracefully. After all, he was one of Messrs. Lumb’s largest customers. If he could feel sure that the price was fair, that Tasker was not making an error, a slip of the memory, Walter would apologise gladly. If he could feel sure.

  And just then he caught sight of a massive volume, which might well be the Victory Mills’ order book, lying open amid a welter of papers on Tasker’s desk. His heart leaped. Had not Tasker said that he had been looking up the price of the cloth before Walter came in? Walter looked at the book again, noted its ruled pages, read its headings upside down from where he was standing; yes, it was unmistakably Tasker’s order book, would show the price at which the piece had been invoiced to the merchant. He stepped quickly round to the other side of the desk, and pushing back Tasker’s chair, bent over the open folio. Yes, there was piece 28641, the one in question—Walter felt that when he died the number would be found engraved upon his heart. He traced its history across the columns with an eager finger: the yarn bought from Messrs. Crosland at such a price; woven at Victory Mills on such a date, in such a manner; dyed and finished by Messrs. Lumb to such a pattern; invoiced to Messrs. Butterworth, merchants, at 4/6 a yard.

  Walter’s eyes nearly leaped out of his head at the sight of these innocent, but fatal, figures. 4/6! Just the price he’d thought; just the price he’d said! He was right, then, after all! An immense relief, a jubilation lifted Walter’s heart—he even thought joyously of tennis—to be succeeded by an awful nightmare sinking. An incredulity, a horrible dismay. Good God! Tasker had looked up this price the minute before Walter came—he’d said so. He had sat on the table with the order book open beneath his eyes—and told Walter the price was five and sixpence. The man was a cheat and a liar, thought Walter, stepping back from the desk with scorn on his candid young face. He was a disgrace to the West Riding; he ought to be exposed. He was abominable!

  Just then Tasker appeared in the doorway. He seemed surprised to see Walter, as though he had forgotten his existence—or at any rate, thought Walter, angrily sceptical, wanted to convey that impression.

  “Well, Mr. Haigh,” said Tasker, apparently remembering Walter’s name with difficulty: “We concluded our business, I believe? I needn’t detain you any longer.” He seated himself in his desk chair, and gave the young man a nod of dismissal.

  “I don’t think we had quite concluded it,” said Walter, a trifle breathless.

  Tasker’s face changed, grew wary. “What do you mean?” he growled.

  “I mean that I think the price of that indigo serge is four and sixpence a yard,” panted Walter.

  Patches of crimson appeared on Tasker’s cheekbones. He glared interrogatively at Walter, but said nothing.

  “I saw the price in your order book!” cried Walter loudly, unable to contain his youthful indignation any more.r />
  “Oh!” shouted Tasker on an almost animal note of fury, springing to his feet: “You’ve been rummaging about in my private papers while my back was turned, have you?”

  “I didn’t look at your private papers,” cried Walter, furious. “The book was there, open. You told me yourself you’d looked up the price of the piece in it just before I came—”

  “You young scoundrel!” shouted Tasker.

  “—and it says four and sixpence!” Walter shouted him down.

  “I suppose you call it honest, prying into other people’s private affairs,” roared Tasker, thrusting his face into the young man’s.

  “Well, upon my word! The less you talk about honesty the better, I should think,” cried Walter, flushing angrily.

  Tasker suddenly drew back. “Of course, Mr. Haigh, if you’re going to take that line,” he said, “there’s nothing for it but for me to close my account with Messrs. Lumb.”

  He sat down again, opened a drawer, drew out a cheque book, picked up his fountain pen. “There’s plenty of other finishers in the West Riding who’ll be glad to do my work for me,” he sneered. “We’ll close the account. How much is there between us for the last half year, do you know?”

  In a hand that trembled with rage, he filled in the date at the top of the cheque, and made it payable to Messrs. Lumb. “We’ll close the account,” he repeated in a savage undertone.

  The words: “Close it and be damned!” rushed hotly to Walter’s lips. But he did not utter them. He longed passionately to utter them; all his essential decency and honesty, all his belief in truth and goodness, all his young energy, his manhood, everything that was fundamentally the proud honest unspoiled young Walter Haigh, rose in revolt against Tasker, and seemed to be exploding the words out of him. He had never wanted anything in his life so much as to utter them. But between the moment of conceiving them and that of uttering them, he thought of Messrs. Lumb’s half-empty finishing plant; he thought of himself telling Arnold Lumb that he had lost his biggest customer for him; he thought of the Haigh household—his ailing father, his elderly mother, Rosamond. And it was as if something clapped a hand across his lips. He simply could not speak the words which would throw Arnold Lumb’s biggest customer away. The blood rushed to his head, pounded thickly behind his ears; he stood heavily silent by Tasker’s chair, swaying a little on his feet, his eyes wide and glazed, his face crimson, drawing deep, slow breaths. “Say it! Say it!” urged the natural Walter: “Close it and be damned to you! Say it!” A sort of groan burst irrepressibly from his lips, but he choked it back in terror. If only the economic situation were different, thought Walter with sick longing; if only so much didn’t hang on this—the very livelihood of his ailing father, perhaps; could he throw that away for the mere pleasure of asserting his moral superiority? Ah, how he longed to say the words, to defy Tasker, to fling himself proudly, indignantly, out of this abominable room—his heart high, his head in the air! But he could not utter them. No; he could not utter them; he was afraid to utter them. There was a long, heavy pause, which seemed to last an eternity of anguish and indecision, while Walter choked and stifled, sick with impotent rage. Then, at last, the young man brought out in a weak, hoarse tone:

  “Don’t say that, Mr. Tasker.”

  Tasker, his pen poised above the cheque, glanced at him mockingly from beneath his thick brows, gave a little sneering smile, which, however, he immediately repressed, and looked down again, waiting.

  “He’s only bluffing,” thought Walter in an agony. “He doesn’t want to close the account any more than I do. But what can I do to make him say so?”

  “Mr. Tasker,” he began aloud. He gazed imploringly at the manufacturer, who remained silent and immobile, with averted eyes.

  Walter cleared his throat.

  “Mr. Tasker,” he repeated weakly.

  Tasker turned his mocking eyes on him, but said nothing.

  “I should be sorry to lose your account, Mr. Trasker,” pleaded Walter. “I should be sorry.…”

  His antagonist remained implacably mute.

  “Suppose we were to split the difference?” stammered Walter suddenly, trembling.

  At this Tasker stirred, and Walter knew that the crisis was over.

  “Well, that seems quite a good solution, Mr. Haigh,” said the manufacturer in his gruff, sardonic tones, which to Walter’s sensitive ear again held a note of mockery. “A compromise, eh? Well, considering what a long time Lumbs and I have done business together, and all that sort of thing, we’ll invoice it at five shillings a yard. Will that suit you?”

  It was not in the least a solution or a compromise, it involved the Lumbs in an extra expense which was entirely unwarranted, it was simply taking money out of the Lumbs’ pockets, and putting it into Tasker’s, it went contrary to the established customs of the trade, it was, in fact, a piece of barefaced roguery; but Walter perceived that he had somehow been led into making the offer himself, and would have to stand by it. “Very well, Mr. Tasker,” he muttered, hanging his head.

  “Good!” said Tasker cheerfully. “That’s all right then. Well, I’m a bit busy to-day, Mr. Haigh, so I won’t keep you any longer. Give my regards to your father, will you? And say I hope he’ll soon be about again; we’ve done a lot of business together, he and I.”

  He pulled open a drawer energetically, and began to ruffle papers, looked up to give Walter a brief dismissing nod, and concluded: “Good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon,” replied Walter in a choked tone.

  Somehow he got himself out of the office and down the stairs.

  Scene 2. A Young Man Oppressed

  WHEN WALTER emerged on to the outer steps of Victory Mills, he found he was drenched with sweat and trembling all over; he was obliged to lean against the green-painted railings to recover himself. Good God! How the fellow’s handled and cozened me, thought Walter, almost sobbing with rage; when I found that entry in the order book I had the game in my hands, I ought to have been able to do anything I liked with him—instead of that, he did anything he liked with me. What a fool I am! What a fool he must have thought me! A raw young fool, a fool! I never knew there were people in the world as bad as that, protested one part of Walter’s mind, astonished; really I’d no idea! No, you were a fool, a raw young fool, Walter answered himself bitterly; but I’m not a fool now, I’m ten years older than I was when I went in—and I shall have to tell Arnold Lumb the price of that serge is five shillings, he broke off in despair; he won’t believe me, he’ll think there’s something fishy about it, but I shall have to stick to it, because in fact I suggested it. How on earth did Tasker make me do that? He just sat still and said nothing, and left me to make the running; that’s the way it’s done, evidently, thought Walter, his jaw quivering with rage. The Lumbs will have to pay sixpence a yard more, they’ll really have to give Tasker sixpence a yard, because of my foolishness, my rawness. Why on earth was I in such a hurry to admit responsibility, he thought; and half a dozen excuses, protests, denials, which he might have made, flashed into his mind. God! How the man cozened me! And here I am making a fool of myself again on the top of these steps, thought Walter in a fury; hanging on the railings and crying like a girl! He stamped down the steps, banging his heels viciously on the stones. The summer sun still shone brightly, but everything now looked unreal, vile; as if it might be going to change suddenly into something horrible, like a transformation scene at a pantomime the wrong way round.

  At the bottom of the steps, dwarfing Walter’s rusty little two-seater, stood a handsome dark blue saloon, with an elderly chauffeur standing in a perplexed attitude by the bonnet. “That’s Henry Clay Crosland’s car, I suppose,” thought Walter bitterly, and was confirmed in this supposition by the man, who came up and asked if he chanced to have seen Mr. Crosland. “No, I haven’t since a quarter of an hour since,” said Walter in a loud sulky tone: “He was just on leaving then.”

  And just then the last drop of bitterness was added to the af
ternoon’s humiliation. For Walter saw that there was a girl sitting, still and aloof, in the rear seat of Mr. Crosland’s car; and by the expression of her face as she looked straight in front of her, away from him, he thought he guessed that she had heard his loud clumsy speech and despised him for its Yorkshire tones. She was a beautiful creature; very small and slender, and dazzingly fair, with grey eyes of almost liquid brilliance, and rich red lips. The pointed little profile she turned to him was exquisitely moulded; her lovely rounded cheek had a delicious bloom beneath the gleaming waves of her ash-blonde hair. There was a style, an air, a kind of classic inevitability in her dove-grey dress, touched with white at throat and wrist, her harmonising bag and gloves and hat; she seemed a picture by a master in clear pure colours, where most humans were coarse daubs by prentice hands. She belonged, in fact, to a luxurious and expensive type which life was not at all likely to present to Dyson Haigh’s son and Messrs. Lumb’s junior traveller. And Walter resented from the bottom of his soul that it should be so. (She was lovely, lovely; so delicately designed, so exquisitely finished.) Why should some people be rich and clever, go about in fine blue cars, be accompanied by elegant, lovely girls, know how to do things, how to speak and look and hold their own; while others, others were poor silly third-rate fools like himself? For that’s what he was, thought Walter bitterly. How could he ever have thought himself alert and smart? He knew now that his brown suit was shabby and shapeless, creased round the thighs and baggy at the knees, shiny at the elbows, and in any case badly cut from the start. A third-rate fool, that’s what he was, out of a dull, dreary lower-middle-class street. His mental eyes flashed over the crude appointments of his home in Moorside Place, and he detested them. His accent was all wrong, of course; he couldn’t touch a simple business matter without making a mess of it; and since his interview with Tasker, he wasn’t even very honest. “Oh, God!” thought Walter, almost weeping again: “Damn Tasker! And damn that girl! Damn the whole lot of them!”