A Modern Tragedy

by Phyllis Bentley

  “Let’s go over there,” shouted Walter, pointing to a side show on the left.

  Rosamond agreed, and the pair made their way in that direction. Walter had boyishly chosen the stall they were making for, without being able to see what was going on there, because it was surrounded by a large and increasing crowd, from which bursts of laughter, of a heartiness remarkable even for Blackpool, frequently arose. Holiday-makers constantly ran up and joined the fringe of the crowd, crying “What is it? What’s up here?” and nosed their way in excitedly. The Haighs followed their example, and presently found themselves at the edge of a circular steel floor, on which half a hundred tiny motor cars were violently careering with a heavy grinding noise. The cars had a trolley which touched a metal roof, thus completing the circuit made by the contact of their wheels with the floor, and they were set in motion by electricity. They had steering wheels, and their occupants made frantic attempts to avoid clashes with other cars by this means; clashes, however, occurred every moment in unexpected directions. Some of the cars were for single occupants only, but most of them held a couple, and these were naturally the most popular, since the banging and jerking and clashing which the cars constantly sustained inevitably threw their occupants into each other’s arms, and made them hold tightly to each other in enjoyable panic. At every collision the couples laughed, and the crowd laughed with them.

  “Eh, look at yon woman in t’blue hat!”

  “She’ll lose it afore she’s done, she will that!”

  “Aye, I reckon that won’t stay on so long.”

  “If it were a bit bigger, it’d ’ave a better chance.”

  “Ah!” shouted the crowd suddenly in one delighted roar. “Look at your hat, missis! It’s on t’floor!”

  The lady with the large blue hat was fortunately the most amused of them all. She laughed loudly and heartily at her mishap, and in looking into her escort’s eyes for sympathy, lost her balance and fell across his bosom. Beneath her impact he very naturally lost his grip of the steering wheel, and the car careered hither and thither, cannoning off one car after another in a quite unprecedentedly comic series of collisions; the watching crowd doubled up, rolled, dug each other in the ribs in uncontrollable mirth, while the couple in the car were helpless with laughter. Rosamond laughed too, enjoying the scene as a complete, and therefore artistic, expression of the robust humour of the north. Turning to Walter to see how he was enjoying the rough but hearty horseplay, she found to her surprise that he was looking glum.

  “Let’s go back to the promenade,” he shouted.

  “Well—very well,” said Rosamond, disappointed, but yielding as she would have yielded to a child.

  They turned and began to battle their way from the crowd. This was not easy, for though the electric floor had now temporarily ceased to revolve, and the cars were changing their occupants, there was a confused movement both towards and away from the scene of the spectacle, which made it difficult to proceed in either direction. The attendant, a solid fellow in chauffeur’s uniform, had rescued the blue hat, which its flushed and panting owner was now replacing on her head, amid the friendly comments of the crowd, as she struggled outward. Her escort was wiping his crimson face and laughing.

  “You got your money’s worth that time, lad,” someone exhorted him cheerfully.

  “Aye, it seems so,” he agreed. “Good afternoon, Mester Walter. Fancy seeing you here!”

  “Afternoon, Harry,” said Walter in an uneasy tone. “You here for Wakes week?”

  “Aye,” said Harry Schofield. “There’s a lot from Hudley here this week, I reckon.

  “I daresay,” agreed Walter, nodding without enthusiasm. He plucked Rosamond’s sleeve sharply and drew her away in another direction, and the couples parted.

  “That was young Walter Haigh,” explained Harry to Jessie, when they at last emerged from the crowd. “He didn’t look so cheerful-like, did he?”

  “Happen he doesn’t like his new work,” suggested Jessie, who naturally knew all the Valley Mill gossip.

  “Happen not. Lumbs is pretty fair, as bosses go,” said Harry cheerfully. “I’ve allus heard Tasker’s a bit of a cufter to deal with.”

  “Was that his young lady with him?” enquired Jessie, still tucking wisps of hair beneath her regained hat.

  “No, I reckon that’ll be his sister, Rosamond. I remember Mrs. Haigh bringing her when she come to see mother after my father died,” explained Harry. “Aye, I didn’t own her at first, but that’ll be Rosamond. She’s got a look of Walter. But, come on, lass, let’s try this.”

  He pushed his wife towards a car painted to resemble a cotton reel, which took a zig-zag and revolving course round an alarming spiral at top speed. Milner was attending a political school in the south of England; Mrs. Schofield had been left at home in charge of Dorothy and the baby, who was now weaned; and Harry was determined that Jessie and he should make the most of their holiday together. “Aye, we’ll try this,” repeated Harry, watching the violent and unexpected jerks of the reel with great satisfaction. “Two, please, miss,” he said at the pay-box, and he and his wife passed the turnstile and entered.

  Meanwhile Walter and Rosamond had reached the comparative quiet of the sea-front.

  “Was that one of your new men, or one of the Lumbs’, Walter?” enquired Rosamond, troubled by the moody look on her brother’s face, and by his unusual curtness to Harry.

  “One of Lumbs’,” mumbled Walter. “One of old Isaiah Schofield’s sons.”

  “Oh, really?” said Rosamond. She spoke with interest, for Isaiah had been the Lumbs’ foreman for an almost legendary period, and Dyson still sometimes lamented his death, and told anecdotes of his humorous shrewdness. And she looked at Walter sympathetically, thinking: “One of Arnold’s men. Walter hasn’t liked leaving Valley Mill, really, though he hides it from us; and meeting Isaiah’s son has brought it all back to him.” She was sorry that her brother’s outing should have been thus spoiled; spoke to him very gently, and fell in with his wishes very promptly, all day, as if he were a child which had fallen and hurt itself.

  For Walter the incident was one of many; one of a series in which his secret was in danger, but escaped. Each time this happened he felt more secure for the future; each time it happened it put a securer lock on the past.

  Act Two

  Scene 1. Ordeal by Question

  “Light small pretty voice, accent and articulation distinctly good, blank verse weak, no dialect,” wrote the secretary of the Hudley Harlequins, reading the words aloud as he wrote them. The committee appointed for the purpose was conducting the first audition of the autumn season that evening, and these remarks, inscribed in the society’s casting records, were the collective wisdom of its members upon a young girl who had just undergone the ordeal and departed. “Experience: very slight, at school and in amateur theatrical type of show locally; no training; no idea of movement, but facial mobility promising,” continued the secretary: “Speaks French well, sings, plays the piano, modern dancing; prefers modern comedy. Anything else?”

  “She’s very small,” observed a member. “You ought to enter that; it’s important.”

  “And very beautiful,” said Rosamond Haigh.

  The secretary, sitting with fountain pen poised, cocked an eyebrow in gentlemanly perplexity. He rather drew the line at entering remarks on the personal appearances of young women in the society’s books, though he realised the usefulness and necessity of such records.

  “Put: small and slight, young, attractive personality,” suggested the chairman.

  “She didn’t attract me,” said someone grimly.

  “She was very nervous,” offered someone else in an apologetic tone.

  “I don’t think that quite does justice to her really remarkable loveliness,” said Rosamond. “However, let it pass.”

  “Lovely, but no intelligence,” remarked another member.

  “Oh, I don’t agree,” objected Rosamond. “She has plenty of
intelligence, but she doesn’t know how to use it.”

  “Same thing,” said the other member.

  “Oh, no” said Rosamond, turning to him; and they began a psychological argument, in which several other members joined.

  “Write: suitable for minor parts in drawing-room comedy,” urged the chairman in a loud tone, recalling them all to the business in hand.

  “Which she won’t accept,” said Rosamond’s neighbour with a cynical sigh.

  “With a view to ingénue leads later” concluded the chairman doggedly.

  “Are you all agreed on that?” demanded the secretary, scribbling.

  “Yes. Agreed!” said all the members in varying tones of fatigue. It was late, and they had spent an exhausting evening, trying to differentiate the pretentious from the ambitious, the merely imitative from the trained.

  “Well, that’s the lot,” said the secretary, using the blotting paper vigorously.

  “Thank goodness!” exclaimed all the members, standing up with an air of great relief. Once on their feet, however, they seemed to forget their former urgent desire to leave, and stood about the room in groups, arguing hotly on dramatic questions.

  A girl put her head in at the door and enquired: “Is Miss Rosamond Haigh here?” She knew Rosamond well, being her colleague at school, and spoke her name thus with jesting artificial emphasis.

  “Yes—what is it?” demanded Rosamond, bounding forward, at once alarmed about her father.

  “A gentleman with a car,” replied the girl, in capitals as before. Seeing Rosamond’s anxious look, however, and knowing its probable cause, she dropped at once into a serious tone, and explained quietly: “It’s nothing, Haigh. That is, I think it’s your Mr. Lumb.”

  “Oh,” said Rosamond, between vexation and relief. “Again! He’s always here.”

  It was a wild night in late September. Masses of heavy angry cloud flew tempestuously, in ragged but unceasing ranks, across the Pennines and over Yorkshire, driven by a powerful and relentless northwest wind. The wind howled down the West Riding valleys; laughed deep in its throat at the sturdy stone houses, cracked their chimney-pots, flipped off slates from their roofs, rattled their windows, tried to shake them, failed, and passed, roaring, by; it contemptuously overthrew advertisement boards, which fell with a hollow crack; tossed the bare branches of the gnarled trees, and whirled up the dead leaves in a tumultuous rustling; swung the electric signs alarmingly; slapped human beings who tried to breast it in the face, and soared up again over the hills in restless joy. Occasional swift showers of rain flung themselves fiercely to earth, blotting out the rare stars. It was the kind of night which Rosamond loved with passion; the chemistry of her blood was at one with that of the wild northern storm, and she had been anticipating eagerly the lonely walk home up the exposed slope.

  But as soon as she had spoken, she felt ashamed of her ungraciousness towards Arnold, and though there was no one there to hear—her colleague had returned to her interrupted rehearsal—she murmured: “It’s very kind of him, of course.” She sighed a little as she traversed the uneven passages—dimly lit now, for it was past closing hour, and all but the most enthusiastic Harlequins had long gone home—and found it in her heart to wish that she were on her way to meet a more exciting escort; but she greeted Arnold with the calm friendliness which was her custom.

  As usual he seemed to have little to say to her, and they drove up to Moorside Place in a comfortable silence. There were no lights visible in the Haigh house, and Rosamond took out her latch-key. “We’re a very early household nowadays,” she said in an explanatory tone.

  “I wonder Walter doesn’t wait up for you, Rosamond,” said Arnold, surveying the dark façade disapprovingly.

  “Walter may not be in yet,” Rosamond defended her brother, opening the car door. “Since he began to work at Heights Mill he’s often very late; and when he does come in he goes straight to bed—he’s very tired nowadays.”

  “Since he began to work where?” demanded Arnold in a startled tone.

  “At Heights Mill,” repeated Rosamond, descending. “Good night, Arnold.”

  “No, wait a minute, Rosamond!” exclaimed Arnold, leaning towards her urgently. “Let’s have this clear. Walter’s working for Leonard Tasker.”

  “Is he?” said Rosamond with indifference—the name of Tasker meant nothing to her. She added in a corroborating tone: “He’s working at Heights Mill.”

  “Please get into the car again, Rosamond,” commanded Arnold roughly. “It’s too cold for you to stand there, and I must get to the bottom of this.” As Rosamond, in surprise, obeyed, he went on: “I’ve heard several rumours lately that Heights Mill is being re-conditioned and started again; but nobody seems to know quite who is behind it. Now you say Walter’s working there. Walter’s working for Leonard Tasker. That seems to mean Tasker’s starting Heights Mill, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” agreed Rosamond doubtfully. “I’ve never heard Walter mention the name of Tasker. Does it matter, Arnold?” she asked, troubled, as Arnold Lumb gave an angry exclamation.

  “Yes, I should say it does matter,” said Arnold quickly in a loud harsh tone. “It may be the finish of W. H. Lumb & Co. altogether. And this is the way your brother repays us for teaching him his trade, and keeping your father on when he’s long past work.”

  “I’m sure Walter has done nothing wrong,” protested Rosamond, her pride provoked by Arnold’s tactless reference to Dyson. At the same time she recognised its justice, for her father was now a confirmed invalid, and had not left the house for months. “He’s young, and wants to strike out for himself and do something independent, that’s all.”

  “Dash it all, Rosamond!” exclaimed Arnold furiously, stung by every implication of this speech: “Can’t you see that we’ve taught Walter everything he knows, we’ve taught him how to finish Tasker’s cloth, I’ve taught him myself, and then he goes away and takes his knowledge with him, and sells it; works for Tasker at a place that’ll take the best part of our trade, and hasn’t even the decency to tell me a word about it! Of course Tasker can do what he likes with his own cloth,” he went on in a more reasonable tone. “If he likes to start a finishing department for himself, he can do it without asking my permission, I suppose; though how he got hold of Heights Mill to do it in, heaven knows! There’s been some dirty work there, I’ll be bound. He’s a twister, is that fellow. But that Walter should go off, and sell him all our methods, and never tell me a word about it—nay, dash it all!” cried Arnold, striking the palm of his hand in a fury against the steering wheel. “He had the cheek—the cool cheek—to offer me a week of his salary back in lieu of notice. The damned insolent young puppy!”

  “Don’t speak like that of Walter, Arnold!” cried Rosamond, her anger now thoroughly aroused. “You’ve no right to make accusations against people, without giving them a chance to defend themselves.”

  “Well, you tell Walter to come to me and defend himself, if he can,” retorted Arnold bitterly. “But he won’t; not he! He daren’t. He’ll keep out of my way, you’ll see—and, indeed, he’d better,” he concluded, flushing darkly. “And your father, too. The less I see of any Haigh just now the better it’ll be for all concerned.”

  Rosamond sprang from the car. “In that case I won’t detain you any longer,” she panted.

  “Rosamond!” cried Arnold in alarm. “Rosamond, look here!”

  He scrambled out on the opposite side, and intercepted her as she made for the Haigh’s gate. “You know I didn’t mean you, Rosamond,” he said warmly, and took her hand. “I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.”

  “Then why did you say such horrible things about Walter?” demanded Rosamond, her eyes suffused with tears. “Walter’s very dear to me.”

  She saw Walter suddenly as he had been when a little boy, chubby, innocent, rather scared, wearing home-knitted woollen gloves and clinging to his elder sister’s hand. Her voice broke, and she gave a small sob.

  �
�Rosamond! Rosamond, my dear,” said Arnold, very much moved. “Don’t cry, please. Don’t! But don’t you see that this may mean the end of our business, coming just now when trade’s so bad, and the end of any hopes of—any kind,” he concluded lamely, feeling that it would be singularly dishonourable to ask a woman to marry him at the precise moment when all hope of a separate establishment, or, indeed, any establishment at all, was vanishing from him.

  “I’m sure if Walter has done anything wrong, it’s because someone has tricked him into it,” said Rosamond, now frankly weeping. “He wouldn’t know how to begin to do anything wrong himself, Arnold, he wouldn’t indeed.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell me all about it openly?” demanded Arnold.

  “Perhaps he was afraid,” suggested Rosamond staunchly.

  “Rubbish!” said Arnold with disgust.

  Rosamond withdrew her hand from his. She was strongly aware that if any clash were to occur between Arnold and Walter, she should be obliged to side with Walter, because she loved him by far the more dearly of the two. She stepped round Arnold, and brushing aside the rhododendron which inevitably guarded the entrance to each house in Moorside Place, entered the tiny square of garden, and closed the gate firmly between herself and her suitor. At that moment Arnold appeared to her as an elderly, irate and rather stupidly conventional person, unwarrantably attacking her younger brother—younger, and, therefore, now, as always, in need of her protection. But she must try to be fair. “Goodnight, Arnold,” she said in a cool judicial tone, unusually conscious of crossing a barrier of years in her use of Arnold Lumb’s first name. “I shall try to make things well between you and Walter.”