A Modern Tragedy

by Phyllis Bentley

  “You are a devil!” exclaimed Walter hoarsely, glaring at him from bloodshot eyes.

  Tasker laughed. “Well, I’ve been a very good devil to you, anyway,” he observed in a tone of affectionate mockery. “If you mean by being a devil,” he went on more seriously; “that I don’t give in and throw up the sponge at the first sign of trouble, you’re right. That’s not my way. I don’t like anybody to lose by me, and I don’t mean them to, either. This slump can’t go on much longer.”

  “You said that in 1928,” said Walter, in a very good imitation of Tasker’s sardonic tone.

  “Well, it’s two years less to run now, however long it is,” Tasker pointed out, undaunted. “I’ve never seen things as bad as this,” he went on thoughtfully, and his face fell again into haggard lines. “Yarn steadied a bit last month, but now it’s off down again, and we know what that means. If you’d keep an eye on the price of tops in Bradford market, Walter, you’d show signs of becoming a business man.”

  (“I do,” thought Walter, irritated, forgetting how recently, and from whom, he had learned that study.)

  “The drop in prices since the end of 1924 is really past belief,” went on Tasker. “And this last year business has been worse than I thought possible. But it can’t go on. It can’t. The turn must come pretty soon now, and then we can make everything square again. That is,” he concluded savagely, with a sudden piercing look at Walter, “if you keep your head and don’t play the fool.”

  Walter sat silent and motionless, considering.

  “What do you want me to do?” he demanded at length hoarsely.

  Tasker jerked his chair nearer to his host’s, and began to tell him.

  “But that’s fraud,” said Walter presently, breathing very heavily. “It’s fraud pure and simple. You can’t call it anything else.”

  Tasker repressed the inclination to say that he wasn’t trying to call it anything else, and urged in a tone of scornful irritation: “It’s only for a time. We shall replace it as soon as trade mends. At any rate,” he concluded angrily, “I can’t see any other way out. If you can, speak up and let’s hear it.”

  Walter was silent for a long time, trying to do in earnest what Tasker had suggested in irony: find another way out.

  “I’d like to see the figures,” he said at length in a low tone.

  Tasker at once drew papers from his waistcoat pocket, and looking about him for something on which to rest them, spied a small Jacobean stool and drew it near. It was one often used by Elaine. Walter winced at this desecration of his household gods, but could say nothing, and the two men bent over the papers together in earnest consultation. Walter’s tacit consent to the scheme which Tasker proposed had been yielded when he asked to see the figures involved, and Tasker’s manner passed from the sardonic and domineering through the merely gruff, to the friendly, as this gradually became clear to Walter and to himself. “Of course, it’s a dangerous game,” he concluded at length thoughtfully, folding up the papers and replacing them in his pocket. “It’s a risk. But we can’t do anything else, it seems to me. But Walter,” he went on in a kindly tone: “If I were you—tell me, have you settled anything on your wife?”

  “No,” said Walter.

  “Well, if I were you I should,” advised Tasker. “I have, you know. And when I have a good year, I add to it. It’s been useful—” he was going to say: “many a time,” but decided that that was not diplomatic, and substituted: “It may be very useful some day.”

  Walter was so busy reflecting cynically that he now knew the reason of Marian’s calm demeanour on the day of the creditors’ meeting, that he did not notice the change of tense. “Thank you—I’ll remember,” he said. It was a nightmare to him to sit in the Clough End drawing-room, discussing with Tasker how to settle upon Elaine money not rightfully his. He felt that everything he cared for was irremediably soiled; nothing would ever be the same again. Among minor miseries was the fear lest Tasker should stay till Elaine returned; it was bad enough to know that his two lives were inextricably mingled, without having the fact brought physically home to him twice in one day. He was spared this, however, for Tasker soon rose and took his departure—it was a part of his skill which Walter admired, always to know when an incident was over.

  For the sake of the servants Walter acted the happy host, and stood beneath the arched front gate, shouting cheerful farewells, as Tasker swung his powerful car rapidly out of the little courtyard and down the lane. Then he returned to the drawing-room, and stood looking about him in a state of hopeless misery.

  “I’m in the toils,” he thought bitterly. “In the toils. Fancy him sitting here talking of Elaine. I wish I’d never met him. I wish I’d never met him. No! I can’t wish that, because of Elaine. If it weren’t for him, I shouldn’t be married to Elaine.”

  These mutually contradictory feelings, first felt by Walter that noon in the garden with his wife, and exacerbated by that evening’s revelation of the abyss whither Tasker’s designs had led him, were to be his constant companions during the next year. He could neither reconcile them, nor subdue one to the other; accordingly he carried them warring in his heart, and whenever either was touched upon—whenever Elaine referred to Tasker or Tasker to Elaine—it was the signal for a bitter internal conflict. And therefore everything he said to each person concerned on the subject of the other was marked by this internal dissension and sounded vacillating, peevish, weak. He was engaged in this terrible internecine warfare, where every blow struck strikes upon the same heart, when he heard the sound of his wife’s car, and went round to the side of the house to help her garage it for the night.

  Elaine had found her evening at Clay Hall dull, and altogether too reminiscent of her girlhood, when she was under her mother’s control. It was agreeable to remember that one was not after all now subject to authority any more, that one had a home and a husband of one’s own; and she returned to Clough End feeling fond of Walter, ready to discuss her grandfather and her mother and Ralph (whose departure on the morrow for his first term at his public school had occasioned her visit) with him with a spice of lively malice, and to make love. She felt disappointed and cross when Walter’s face, in the beam of light from the door, revealed him to be still in a harassed and nervous mood, and the pair had a slight wrangle over the disposition of the car in the converted stable, which resulted in Elaine’s grazing the left mudguard of her car against the right wing of Walter’s, which was already within. Feeling rather remorseful because Walter did not scold her for this—indeed it was one of the traits she admired in him that he never scolded her for using or wasting any of his property, seeming to regard all that was his as made for her—she spoke to him very sweetly when they were within the house, asking whether he and Mr. Tasker had settled all their business to their satisfaction.

  “Yes,” said Walter gloomily. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his back to the fire, while Elaine took a sandwich from the tray the maid had brought, and strolled about the room, nibbling delicately, and subconsciously enjoying the display of her young beauty to her husband.

  “Was it very worrying, Walter?” she asked, putting a caress into her utterance of his name.

  “Yes,” repeated Walter as before.

  “You should never worry about money, Walter,” said his wife in a tone of playful reproach: “I have enough to keep us in a barn, and that’s all we need.”

  Walter, who thought differently of Elaine’s needs, and was only too painfully conscious that if Tasker, Haigh & Co. crashed, the fortunes of the Croslands would crash also—the integrity of his grandfather-in-law, and Tasker’s huge commitments, would see to that—winced and said crossly, out of his pain:

  “You know nothing about it.”

  “Well, tell me then,” urged Elaine, standing in front of him and looking up into his face, her brilliant eyes sparkling a delicious invitation.

  But for poor Walter this was almost worse; to be invited to tell Henry Clay Crosland’s grand
-daughter of the increasing fraud in which her husband was involving him was a torment beyond his endurance.

  “Oh, don’t let us talk about it,” he said in a weary fretful tone, stepping aside. “Are you ready to go up? I’m frightfully tired.”

  Elaine felt rebuffed, humiliated. Her too-sensitive mechanism of defence moved her to strike back at once; she sat down perversely on the edge of the stool where Tasker’s papers had lain, and with her intuition for finding the weak joint in any armour, she remarked:

  “You’re afraid of Mr. Tasker, Walter.”

  “I am not!” exclaimed Walter hotly. He could not help adding gloomily: “I hate the fellow, that’s all.”

  “You hate him!” exclaimed Elaine. All the irritations of the day seemed suddenly to beat wild wings in her brain, and her lovely little face quivered with chagrin. “Upon my word, Walter!” she cried disdainfully, “you change your loves and hates very often. You must be a very fickle person. At lunch-time to-day you were threatening me with all sorts of awful penalties because I haven’t been to call on Mr. Tasker’s horrible wife, you said he was our benefactor and we ought to be grateful to him, you expect me to do all sorts of unreasonable things to please him, you break an engagement with me to talk to him—and then you say you hate him. It’s so inconsistent, Walter, it’s so illogical. Why should we have to entertain him here, if you hate him?”

  Walter, for whom the exaggerations and distortions of this speech were so many darts skilfully planted in the sore fibres of his quivering nerves, reflected that he might easily reply: “Because he’s my business partner, and I have to keep ’in’ with him.” But he was quite incapable of uttering even so tempered a version of the sordid and brutal truth to his wife; he might be engaged in dishonest conspiracy, he told himself, but he had not sunk to the level of trying to drag her in too, of trying to secure her help with Tasker. He therefore made no reply, but simply stared in front of him with a stupid inattentive air, and Elaine cried angrily, her grey eyes glittering:

  “I do despise people who don’t know their own minds!”

  It was the first time since their marriage that she had thus made Walter the object of one of her wounding implications; he started, stung unbearably, and exclaimed:

  “Do you mean you despise me?”

  Elaine slightly shrugged her shoulders. “If the cap fits,” she said.

  They quarrelled fiercely, and slept unreconciled.

  The quarrel was over, and they were lovers again, long before the end of the week; but the incident had made a rift within the lute of their accord. And it was a rift which steadily widened, because the elements which combined to widen it—the divided mind and forced reserve which sprang from Walter’s insecurity, Elaine’s need for a reassurance in which she could have faith—were constantly present. Tasker’s method of surmounting the present financial difficulties of Messrs. Tasker Haigh was one which involved himself and Walter in endless shifts, evasions, dangerous diplomatic interviews, and careerings about the county to different banks; but stated in a sentence, it consisted of using the money the public had subscribed, to pay the dividends and such of the firm’s running expenses as its receipts did not meet. The November dividend was thus paid, and the affair passed without question, while Walter went about his business in the day with a blithe and cheerful look to create confidence, and at night tossed sleepless at Elaine’s side in an agony of fear. The winter was a fearful one for industry; the price of yarn sank to unheard-of depths; the volume of work, at Victory Mills and Heights, dropped and dropped. None of Walter’s customers left him; indeed he even gained new ones, who were attracted, not so much by the sound quality of his work, though that was widely recognised, as by the cut prices he accepted. But the output of every customer he had was reduced and again reduced. Walter discharged nearly half his men—keeping Harry Schofield, however, for Harry was his mascot—and ran Heights only three days a week. Meanwhile Walter continued to draw the salary prescribed by his service agreement, and to live the life of a rich man. He and Elaine rushed hither and thither in their cars, danced in Harrogate, did theatres in Leeds, entertained and accepted hospitality all over the West Riding. Few were the evenings which they spent alone in their own home. Indeed Walter could no longer bear to sit quietly by his own fireside, or to sit quietly in the country, or to sit quietly anywhere; he was obliged to have constant and violent distraction for his mind. For the moment such distractions ceased and left him time to think, the financial situation of Messrs. Tasker Haigh recurred with dreadful force to him, and he drew out pencil and paper, became absorbed in figures, tried to compel them to his will. But they would not be compelled; he could not make them yield the dividends which Tasker had so confidently promised and the investors were (though perhaps less confidently) awaiting. Then Walter’s face grew harassed and his eyes afraid, and Elaine, watching him, felt distrust, irritation, anger, contempt, flowing in her heart. Elaine and Walter continued to love each other, but they had little satisfaction in their love. Increasingly hard and adroit at the mill and in society, Walter was increasingly ill at ease at home; the pressure of his present circumstances created both states of mind and each exacerbated the other. Elaine, vexed into scorn by his uneasiness, constantly made him suffer, despised him the more for suffering, and made him suffer the more again.

  And so it came about, as a result of Tasker’s visit to Clough End, that Elaine announced abruptly that she did not wish yet to have a child.

  Previously she had expressed no such reluctance, and Walter felt a shock of horrified surprise, a relic as he supposed (and as Elaine took pains to inform him) of his plebeian upbringing, at her announcement and the manner of it; but he yielded, and presently did not regret the decision. The quiet domestic joys were not for him—not, at any rate, until he could once more look honest men in the face and feel himself their equal.

  In February and March business seemed a little brisker, and Tasker said they would be fools to throw in their hand now, when the slump was surely going to break, and trade take an upward turn. Accordingly, by expedients similar to those of the previous autumn, they paid the May dividend out of the public’s capital, and falsified the stock at Victory Mills to arrange the balance sheet to their satisfaction. Naturally neither Henry Clay Crosland, whose deafness and look of age had increased noticeably of late, nor the company’s auditor, knew anything of this; Tasker “pulled wool over their eyes,” as he gleefully called it, with complete success. The fraud was not discovered, and the second annual meeting of Messrs. Tasker, Haigh and Co. passed off without a hitch.

  The following month brought the first anniversary of the young Haighs’ wedding. It found them still at Clough End (which was as yet by no means paid for); childless, leading a restless, pleasure-seeking life; outwardly happy, still in love, but mutually wounded and wounding by the psychological consequences of the falsity of Walter’s position.

  Scene 2. A Business Fails

  FATHER,” said Arnold Lumb in a hoarse strained tone: “It’s no good. We shall have to give up. We can’t go on any longer.”

  It was a cool summer evening in 1931. The Lumbs had finished their high tea, and sat about the empty dining-room hearth, with the exception of Reetha, who was doing her home-lessons in the kitchen. Arnold was pretending to smoke a pipe, Mrs. Lumb knitting; Mr. Lumb (who had not entered Valley Mill since the posting of the notice to the men two years ago) was reading the Hudley News. There was silence for a few moments after Arnold had spoken. Mrs. Lumb had been warned beforehand by her son of this announcement; when it came she merely gave an abrupt movement in her chair, then continued to knit, looking from beneath lowered lids at her husband. Mr. Lumb seemed not to have heard; he continued to read, the outstretched paper concealing his face. Arnold nerved himself to further speech.

  “Trade’s been so terribly bad,” he began. “Nobody’s making a quarter of the cloth they used to do. Then we’ve such serious competition to face in prices.” He went on in a slow, heavy t
one, outlining the causes which had effected the Lumbs’ ruin, quoting figures, making it clear that bankruptcy was inevitable. “I’m sorry, father,” he concluded sadly. “I’ve done my best, but it seems I can’t manage it.”

  Mr. Lumb, still keeping his face covered, mumbled: “It’s not your fault. I don’t blame you for it, Arnold.”

  “Thank you, father,” said Arnold. “I don’t think myself it’s my fault—but of course you never know,” he went on dejectedly. “At any rate,” he concluded: “I’ve arranged it with the bank this morning.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that without consulting me!” exclaimed Mr. Lumb. He lowered the newspaper, revealing a ravaged face, and repeated sharply: “You shouldn’t have done that without me. Do you hear what I say, Arnold? You shouldn’t have done that without me.”

  “I’m sorry, father,” said Arnold mildly. “Of course we shall need your signature to all the papers, later.”

  Mr. Lumb snorted, then raised the newspaper to his eyes again. He turned over the leaves from time to time, and read with seeming intentness. At last he came to the end of the paper, folded it up with care, replaced his glasses in their shabby case, rose and staggered from the room. His face was so distorted and wild as he did so that Arnold and Mrs. Lumb exchanged glances of alarm, and when presently there came the slurring sound which meant that he was taking down his coat from the row of hooks in the hall, Mrs. Lumb rose and went heavily out to him. In silence she helped him on with his summer coat, brushed his collar, handed him his bowler hat and his fine mahogany stick, then enquired mildly:

  “Where are you going, William?”

  “Never mind,” said the old man with an angry look. “I’m going out, that’s all.”

  “When will you be back, love?” demanded Mrs. Lumb in a calm soothing tone.

  “Expect me when you see me,” replied her husband.

  “Shall I come with you, father?” suggested Arnold, who was watching from the dining-room door.