A Modern Tragedy

by Phyllis Bentley

  He threw himself into his car and slammed the door viciously; then, ill-treating gears and engine in the fury of his exasperation, he drove in a series of angry jerks along the side of the hen-runs into the main road.

  Just beyond the corner he perceived the tall elegant figure of Henry Clay Crosland. The spinner was standing on the edge of the pavement, glancing anxiously up and down the busy road; his shoulders drooped more than ever, he looked tired and old. It would be a simple matter to draw up beside him for a moment, and enlighten him as to the whereabouts of his car. But Walter could not bring himself to perform this simple courtesy. “No,” he thought, pressing his foot passionately on the accelerator: “No! Why should I? Let him find his own car. No!”

  The little two-seater, over-driven but gallant, flew up the steep road; it topped the houses, and laid the sweeping green fields open to Walter’s view. But Walter suddenly knew that even his tennis club was naïve and foolish; it was a cheap little affair, and its members were young people of limited experience, like himself; the dress in which they played (he saw now) was incorrect, the play feeble; they practised an economy with balls which people like the girl in Henry Clay Crosland’s car would think absurd. His whole world seemed like that to him now: naïve, makeshift, lacking in savoir faire, cheap.

  It was in this same mood that, nearly two hours later, he let himself in with his latch-key to the house in Moorside Place. His anger had accompanied him as he rushed across the stretch of high country which separated Ashworth and Hudley, descended the long hill into the town, and sought Valley Mill, Messrs. Lumb’s appropriately named premises; and he had not received the mental jolt which he expected his explanation with Arnold Lumb to give him, for Mr. Arnold was not there. He had not come back from the bank yet, the cashier told Walter gloomily, and as it was already well after five o’clock, would probably go straight home thence; old Mr. Lumb, who with his increasing stoutness felt the heat badly, had gone home at four.

  This was at once a disappointment and a relief to Walter. It was a reprieve indeed to be allowed to postpone his account of the humiliating, the disastrous, interview with Tasker; yet, somehow, Walter would have liked to have got it off his chest—the recounting of it, though painful, might have eased him, the sight of Mr. Arnold’s plain, shrewd face, rather cross and harassed, might have done him good. However, he wasn’t there; and Walter certainly wasn’t going to hang round waiting for him. Standing at the old-fashioned high wall-desk in the little private office—which looked very shabby, very meagre, after the splendours of Victory Mills—he wrote his memoranda of the day’s visits on some stray scraps of paper, concluding savagely: “Tasker’s piece undoubtedly damaged by grease while tentering, price 5/—a yard. W. H.”; and left them there to catch his employer’s eye in the morning. Then he put the two-seater in the mill garage, walked up the steep side-street to the main road, and by means of two uncomfortably crowded buses crossed the slopes of Hudley, and thudded up the hill to his home.

  The house he entered was typical of a period whose standards were now passing, though what they were passing into was not as yet perhaps very clear. One of a sober row, whose hypothetical view of moorland had long been obscured by slightly smaller houses on the opposite side of the sedate little street, it was solidly built of good local stone, though without architectural pretensions; it boasted a bay window on the ground floor, and a gabled attic (where Rosamond slept by choice, as the Haighs kept no maid) as third storey. It was furnished throughout in the solid respectable style fashionable when Dyson Haigh was a young man; its large mahogany pieces, obscure oil paintings in scrolled gilt frames, heavily patterned carpets, thick curtains, and velvet upholstered chairs were all in good condition, washed and polished and shining in accordance with the best traditions of Yorkshire housewifery, and gave an impression of stability and comfort; but they struck Walter in his present mood in a fresh light, as pathetic, and irritating because pathetic, relics of a naïve past—the sort of thing Tasker would find comical.

  The young man hung up his hat on the branching stand with a deepened sense of thwarting, and could hardly force an agreeable word to his lips for his mother, who had heard the sound of his key in the door, and came into the hall to meet him. He did manage a mumbled greeting, however, for it was difficult for anyone, and certainly for such a kind and affectionate son as Walter, to be unkind to Mrs. Haigh. She was a stout, heavy, slow-moving, slow-thinking woman, with scanty dark hair, and large brown eyes which were beautiful by reason of their constant look of trusting affection. Simple and credulous and humble, a fond admirer of her children, a tireless housewife, mild in speech, limited in the number of her ideas but quite certain of the ones she knew, Mrs. Haigh was neither weak nor silly, though perhaps a little stupid. At present there were brown stains of fatigue beneath her eyes; a devoted nurse to her husband, his bad nights tried her more than she would admit. She was dressed as usual in an ill-fitting dark dress of good material; the old-fashioned edge of lace across her throat irritated Walter’s exacerbated nerves, and he was annoyed to observe that she carried in her hand a rough cloth with which she had evidently been handling some dish in the oven.

  “You’re late, love,” she said in heavy, wistful tones.

  “I know,” said Walter briefly.

  His mother intimated that the family meal was over, but food had been kept hot for him, and she would bring it at once. He strode into the living-room at the back of the house, and sat down irritably at the table.

  “You’re late, Walter,” said his father with a querulous air. Dyson was sitting hunched by the hearth in the armchair which was now so much too large for him, his shrunken shoulders bowed, his thin faded hair (which by the evidence of a drooping moustache had been of a fallow shade) unnaturally neat and smooth about his head, his light eyes pathetically large and staring in his drawn face. He had obviously been awaiting his son’s arrival with impatience for some time, for he began at once to pour out a host of questions as to Walter’s doings during the day.

  Walter suppressed the irritation often felt on such occasions by persons thus called on, while tired and hungry, to give an account of events which they have not yet sufficiently sifted in their minds; and began to describe his day’s work.

  Dyson listened with pathetic eagerness, leaning forward in his chair, and making occasional comments of sense and shrewdness.

  Presently Mrs. Haigh came slowly in, and set tea and food before her son. The Haighs’ table appointments were clean and solid, and the food provided fragrant and appetising, but Walter visualised the very different meal, the different service, which men like Tasker and Henry Clay Crosland doubtless enjoyed, and experienced a feeling of resentment that his mother should serve him herself, with her own work-roughened hands.

  “Where’s Rosamond?” he demanded curtly.

  “She’s gone to a rehearsal,” murmured Mrs. Haigh, seating herself in a chair near her husband, whence she could watch her son’s plate.

  Walter’s heart sank still lower at his sister’s absence.

  “That’s only a short round, Walter,” resumed Dyson with a dissatisfied air. “Why are you so late, then? Didn’t you see anybody else?”

  Walter, wincing, managed to bring out in a casual tone that he had been to Ashworth to see Leonard Tasker.

  “Ah! A tricky customer,” observed Dyson solemnly, shaking his head. “A tricky customer, indeed!”

  “He seems to do a lot of business, anyway,” muttered Walter. “His place was full of pieces, piled up high.”

  “They mightn’t all be sold, you know,” commented Dyson, “though I daresay they were. Tasker makes what he thinks, and then sells it, as well as making to order. A clever fellow, Tasker—though too fond of undercutting prices. There’s many a manufacturer hates him like poison to-day.”

  Walter perceived that he had exposed himself to the question he wished above all not to answer. In another minute his father would be asking what business he had transacted with T
asker, and that would be intolerable. To turn the conversation, he threw out hastily:

  “I met Henry Clay Crosland on Tasker’s stairs.”

  “Ah!” said Dyson, interested.

  “He had a girl with him, at least, waiting for him in his car,” continued Walter rapidly.

  “That would be his grand-daughter, Elaine,” mused Dyson. “Elaine and her brother, young Ralph, live with him. They’re Richard’s children—you know, the one who was killed in the War.”

  At this Mrs. Haigh started in her chair. “He was in Bob’s Company,” she began at once, turning towards the photograph of her elder son which, enlarged and tinted to show his sandy complexion and the keen blue eyes in his restless aquiline face (he had resembled Dyson physically rather than his mother), hung conspicuously in the centre of the wall above his service medals. “He was in Bob’s Company,” repeated Mrs. Haigh: “Not at first, but later on.”

  Walter waited in patient respect as his mother gave out, in her slow heavy tones, the rather inaccurate and naïve account of Robert’s war services, and the letter she had received after his death, which Mrs. Haigh’s surviving children had heard from her lips, in exactly the same words, so many times before. Walter was much too fond of his mother, and respected her grief too much, ever to offer to correct her on points of detail in this story, though he had sometimes suffered from her inaccuracies in the presence of strangers—he did not like, for example, to hear her say that Richard Clay Crosland had been “in” Bob’s Company; and usually took care to undeceive listeners as to the respective positions of Crosland and his brother; but he never did this when his mother was there. To-night, however, the story seemed longer, more tedious and more muddled than ever before; and Walter shifted restlessly in his chair as it proceeded. After the quick and exciting tempo, the high emotional tension, of his interview with Tasker, the old-fashioned, last-generation rhythm of his home, the slowness and naïveté and endless repetition of his parents, seemed stale to the point of nausea. And suddenly he felt that he could endure them no longer. He pushed his chair roughly back from the table, jarring across his mother’s slow narrative, so that she looked at him, large-eyed, in reproachful wonder; and rushed from the room.

  In a fever of exasperation he ran upstairs, and changed at top speed, though without any sense of pleasure—he knew now, too well, their poverty of style—into his best clothes, as preparation for an evening away from home.

  Mrs. Haigh accosted him in the hall, as he came down, and asked if he were going to play tennis. It was sufficiently obvious from his dresss that he was not, and this lack of perception, so characteristic, thought Walter crossly, of the previous generation, hardened his determination not to spend the evening with his parents, though he saw the disappointment in his mother’s face. Telling her abruptly that he should be late in returning, he flung out of the house, and without consciously deciding on this destination, sought Hudley’s largest cinema.

  A queue of people waiting for the cheaper seats stretched from its marble-pillared entrance round into a dismal side-street; Walter perforce joined this. He had never objected to form part of a queue before, but now he loathed it; he fingered the coins in his pocket reflectively, calculated their value over and over again, even drew them out surreptitiously at last and counted them; but it was no use, he simply could not afford to be one of those superior creatures who ran up the marble steps with a glance of supercilious amusement at the waiting queue, and entered the vacant heaven of the fauteuils. Almost Walter gave the whole thing up and went home, but to be thwarted in this, too, would be quite intolerable; scowling and angry, he held on grimly to his place in the line, and at length found himself in the desired refuge of warm, soothing darkness and veiled orange lights, with aphrodisiac music throbbing in his ears, and a tale of transatlantic violence glittering before him. At first he could not concentrate on the story of the film. His mind revolved pictures of its own, so strong and vivid that they ousted the pictures on the screen—pictures of Tasker, of Mr. and Mrs. Haigh, as he had left them, disconsolate; of Rosamond, Arnold Lumb, Henry Clay Crosland and the girl in his car, Tasker again; the Victory Mills order book, and the Schofields standing—Milner angry, Harry soberly vexed—beside the fatally greasy carrying-chain of the tentering machine. But soon the film exercised upon him its wonted fascination. If thoughts were visible, the interior of the cinema would have revealed hundreds of wishes, streaming out from its patrons’ minds, projecting themselves upon the hero and heroine of the picture, and finding fulfilment in their exaggerated triumphs. Walter, with the rest, experienced luxury, excitement, and the sense of power, thus vicariously.

  The awakening, presently, into the real world, where such things never happened to him, where the desires aroused by the sights and sounds of the cinema could have no fulfilment, where he was an obscure and foolish young man in a badly tailored suit, powerless, pressed upon by economic fears, and likely to remain so all his dreary little life, depressed his spirits to their nadir.

  Scene 3. An Old Man Perplexed

  MEANWHILE, in the chair at the monthly meeting of the Personal Service Committee of the Hudley Council of Social Welfare, Henry Clay Crosland fingered his watch and sighed. The secretary had a pile of case papers still before him; alas, there were only too many necessitous cases—tuberculous daughters, new dentures, prolonged convalescences, widows with four children—requiring help under the pressure of unemployment in Hudley just now. Henry Clay Crosland did not grudge the time spent on them in the least; but he felt old and tired, and wished the meeting could finish rapidly, so that he could get home and have a snatch of dinner before returning to Hudley to preside at a meeting of the Hospital Board.

  The delay was partly his own fault, of course, for arriving at the meeting late. It was rather tiresome of Elaine to have run off with the car like that, and left him stranded for a quarter of an hour outside Tasker’s mill, looking forlorn and in need of rescue. No, no, not tiresome; Henry Clay Crosland corrected himself rapidly, and from force of habit found an indulgent smile for the caprices of youth—not tiresome; a little thoughtless possibly. It wouldn’t have mattered in the least if the mill had belonged to anybody but Tasker. If he had been stranded on the steps of almost any other mill in the West Riding, he would have gone back to their office and waited, cheerfully enough. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that to Tasker; he couldn’t endure to solicit even a chair from that man. Tasker! Mr. Crosland, restless in his chair, wished with all his heart that he had never had dealings with Tasker; wished he had never sold him a single pound of yarn. But times were bad; even the great Crosland Spinning Company found them bad, “felt the draught” a little; and Tasker’s orders inspired confidence by their very size—he was in the habit of ordering enormous weights of yarn of one shade; a very tempting proposition. At first all had gone well, and Henry Clay Crosland had congratulated himself on having secured this magnificent customer; but then Tasker’s payments had become irregular; he had missed last month’s settling day altogether; and now it looked very much as if he were going to miss the next twenty-fifth as well. “The spinner’s at the wrong end of the stick,” grumbled Mr. Crosland to himself, “You sell a man yarn, and deliver it to him; and he takes it, and makes cloth out of it, and you never see it again. If all goes well, he pays you for it on the twenty-fifth of the month, it’s true. But if he doesn’t—well, you may just whistle for the money. Now the finishers,” he thought, “they may have to wait six months to be paid, but at least they have the man’s cloth under their roof, and can hold it as security.” There were only two things he could do with Tasker, mused Henry Clay Crosland (taking the vote on whether to provide milk for the delicate baby of a large family, whose father had been out of work for two years, for three weeks or six); he could either decline to supply Tasker with any more yarn, and insist on the manufacturer paying his previous accounts—in which case Tasker would simply go bankrupt, and Crosland would secure perhaps a shilling in the pound of wh
at was owed him—or he could trust him yet a few months longer, and hope that the slump would break and trade improve, and Tasker do so much business as to be able to pay his spinner in full.

  Mr. Crosland gave a sharp sigh as he reached these conclusions. It was easy enough to put the alternatives thus clearly, but not so easy to decide which course to choose; for the one meant losing for certain all that Tasker now owed him, and the other meant risking a much larger sum in the hope of getting some of it back. He hated risks nowadays; he was getting old, he wanted peace and security, he was afraid when it came to taking a chance. Ah! If only Richard were alive, mused Henry Clay Crosland sadly; then he would have somebody to take counsel with over the whole perplexing business. One missed a son at every turn. He thought wistfully of the lad he had met in Tasker’s hall—what a place, by the way, for all the world like an hotel lavatory! What did you want with marbled rubber and oak panels in a decent West Riding mill, good heavens? Henry Clay Crosland, remembering the decent dark passage, tiled and dadoed, dating from the 1850’s, which formed the entrance to Clay Mills, winced again to find himself doing business with such a man as Tasker. A nobody, a man who had come up with a rush from nowhere during the War, and made money while others of his borderline age were getting killed; a man with no ancestors and no relations. A clever fellow, of course; evasive, plausible—goodness knew even now what the outcome of their interview that afternoon had been, whether his remonstrances had been effective; Crosland had grown a little deaf of late, and Tasker knew it, and played on it. He always knew people’s infirmities, and had no scruples in using his knowledge. It was to be hoped that agreeable young fellow in the hall had not got mixed up with him. Now if he had had an opportunity to speak to him—chanced to meet him when the Crosland car was lost, or something of that kind—he could have dropped a word about Tasker into his ear. Oh, nothing definite, nothing libellous, of course; just a look, a movement of the head. A good-looking lad he was, thought Henry Clay Crosland, remembering the crisp dark hair, the serious brown eyes, the wide ingenuous forehead and fresh bright cheek; an honest, good-looking, decent lad. Don’t know him, but he’s a nice boy, a likely lad. Somebody’s got a good son in him, thought Henry Crosland. A son! Ah, if only Richard were alive, if only Richard were still there.