Crescendo

by Phyllis Bentley

  CRESCENDO

  by

  PHYLLIS BENTLEY

  Contents

  Part One: IMPULSE

  Peter

  Part Two: CRESCENDO

  1. Ernest Armley, foreman

  2. A. A. J. Barraclough, millowner

  3. Richard Cressey, schoolmaster

  4. Dorothea Dean, shop assistant

  5. Ethel Eastwood, landlady

  6. Francis Freeman, stage designer

  Part Three: COUNTER-IMPULSE

  Gay

  Part Four: DIMINUENDO

  1. Ethel Eastwood

  2. Dorothea Dean

  3. Richard Cressey

  4. Arnold Barraclough

  5. Ernest Armley

  Part One

  Impulse

  Peter

  “Every moment of the world’s history is a product of all the previous moments,” said the old man.

  “I don’t altogether admit that as far as humanity is concerned,” said Peter Trahier, smiling.

  He spoke with deference, because there was nobody in the world he respected more than his father-in-law; his very love for his wife, which formed so great and deep a part of his existence, had begun in the look in her eyes, the spring in her step, the note in her voice, the nobility in her nature, which she derived from that powerful, experienced, rather terrifying, still handsome old man, her father. Peter had loved her for that before he had desired her for her beauty. “Every moment is a product of all the relevant previous moments,” suggested Peter courteously. Much, very much, that he knew and was, though not perhaps as much as he had once thought, reflected Peter, he owed to courteous discussion with his father-in-law.

  “All moments are relevant.”

  “No, sir. Excuse me. Suppose a man dying in a desert. Alone.”

  “Alone with himself.”

  “Well, yes. But he’s going to die before he makes contact with anyone else. Now suppose that man performs some base act.”

  “Such as what, for example?”

  “Well—suppose he gulps his last mouthful of water greedily, in an impolite and vulgar manner.”

  “Then he will die less well than if he had drunk politely.”

  “Granted. But nobody sees him.”

  “Possibly when his body is discovered, that last crude failure of decency shows in his bodily attitude.”

  “Certainly not,” said Peter, laughing. “He’s not found till he’s become a skeleton. Nothing is deducible from the posture of his bones. Nobody hears of his action, nobody ever knows. How then can his action affect any succeeding moment of the world’s history?”

  “The history of the world, viewed in its totality, is the blacker for his vulgar action.”

  “But who is to see that? Who is to know it?”

  “A man who believed in God would answer: God,” replied the old man. “But I am too doubtful of his existence to give you that answer. Instead I will say: it is worth while acting rightly, simply to make the sum of human activity nobler.”

  “You must excuse me, sir,” said Peter, smiling and moving his neat sandy head sideways with a cheerful, confident, slightly condescending air: “If I say I consider that farfetched.”

  “Not nearly as far-fetched as your man in the desert,” said his father-in-law, also smiling. “What a long way you had to go to find a human action which could not have a direct result! However, my dear Peter, I ask you to remember that men dying alone in deserts are very rare. Most of us are inextricably entangled with our fellow humans. Our every action has its consequences in their lives.”

  “Granted again,” said Peter. “But life is so complex nowadays, so many factors enter into every situation, that what you call a ‘good’ action can as easily have bad consequences for some persons, as a ‘bad’ action.”

  “True,” admitted the old man. “But in that case, if you have acted with all the knowledge, power and goodwill at your disposal, you are not morally responsible. If you have not acted to the best of your ability, and evil ensues, you are morally responsible. Suppose, for example, a fire-engine rushing to save your house in response to your call, encounters some accident and a man is killed. If your call was genuine, you have no moral responsibility for the man’s death; if your call was deliberately false, I think you have. It is a heavy responsibility. One sometimes finds it hard to bear.”

  A look of gentle derision crossed Peter’s face.

  The old man is growing perhaps a little too old, he reflected. Out of date. All these ethical categories have long since gone by the board. Still, they do him credit, of course. He wouldn’t be so lovable without them. “To return to the beginning of our argument,” he said aloud, with an air of returning to reality from illusion: “I still feel that one should subordinate one’s means to one’s ends. One must keep a sense of proportion. Minute scruples must be waived for the public good.”

  “There speaks the rising politician,” said the old man grimly.

  Peter coloured, not altogether with displeasure.

  “Let us state the problem in specific terms,” said he. (“I enjoy hearing myself talk,” he thought: “And why not? I talk well.”) “Will you grant that it is for the public good that I should be elected to the Hudley Town Council rather than my opponent in the ward, who is generally admitted to be a mean-minded, uninformed, outdated and not very honest person?”

  “I shall vote for you, certainly.”

  “On the afternoon of this day, Monday June 9th, I saw, through the windows of the Ashworth County Borough Treasurer’s Office, where I work, the Alderman who is the head of my party in the Hudley Town Council, passing along the street outside. It was useful to my candidature to see him.”

  “You mean you wanted the opportunity to ingratiate yourself with him.”

  “Put it that way if you like, I don’t mind. My motives for wishing to be on the Council are above reproach. What shall I get out of it anyway, except a lot of hard unpaid work?”

  “Power, perhaps,” murmured the old man.

  “I desire it only so as to serve the community.”

  “Well—I grant you that, Peter.”

  “To leave my work a few minutes early——”

  “—was a breach of trust.”

  “But it was more important for the welfare of the community that I should leave than that I should stay. There was nobody waiting to be attended to, at my counter. Therefore on an impulse I left, and had a most useful and helpful conversation with the Alderman. My contention is that the impulse was justified.”

  “You put your case well, Peter.”

  “It was you who taught me to do so, sir.”

  “But all the same you are wrong. The whole structure of society collapses unless it is supported by its members’ good faith.”

  “I must repeat and insist,” said Peter with a slight impatience: “That an action which a man performs alone, which nobody else ever knows or hears of, cannot affect the course of the world’s history.”

  “How is one to know?” said the old man thoughtfully. “In any case, my dear Peter, the action affects the man himself, and therefore affects all his subsequent actions.”

  Peter’s wife came into the room, carrying a loaded tray. Peter went up to her and took the tray from her. Moved, as always, by her radiant serenity, and especially moved now because she was bearing their first child, he kissed her lightly but tenderly on the mouth. He did not wish, now, to appear to be differing seriously from her father.

  “All this because I left the office three minutes before the clock struck this afternoon!” said Peter in a tone of affectionate raillery.

  “Exactly,” murmured the old man.

  Part Two

  Crescendo

  I

  Ernest Armley, Fo
reman

  1

  Ernest gave a careful, meticulously detailed account of all the defects he had noticed in the cropping-machine he and Mr. Arnold had just inspected together at the maker’s with a view to purchase.

  “Oh, come, Ernest,” said Mr. Arnold, turning the car into the main Ashworth road: “I think you take rather too serious a view, you know. Those are all minor points, mere matters of a screw here and there.”

  “The bed’s that inaccessible, it’ll take half an hour to change the cover every day, and half hours cost money,” said Ernest gloomily. “But of course that’s your affair, Mr. Arnold, not mine.”

  His tone was offended. He felt vexed because he thought his employer spoke too lightly, was not valuing his opinion at its true worth, and if Mr. Arnold thought he knew more about cropping cloth than Ernest did, he could think again, that’s all.

  Mr. Arnold began to describe the machine’s good points. Ernest listened, nodding gravely from time to time. But while he listened, he pondered. Perhaps he had been rather too earnest about that bed cover. Ernest by name and earnest by nature—that had always been Millie’s joke, ever since the day he asked her to marry him. But it had begun earlier than that, his earnestness. Ernest knew just when it had begun.

  It did not spring from anything in his childhood. True, his father, a large heavy man who drove a waggon for an Ashworth textile firm, was rather slow in speech and thought; but he was not bad-tempered or even glum—there was nothing the boy Ernest enjoyed more than a day out with his father. In those days the waggons—they were really long flat drays—were drawn by horses, and required a whole day for a journey from Ashworth to Leeds and back, a distance of some fifteen miles. Ernest’s father sat on the side of the dray holding the reins and Ernest sat beside him, and the big solid brown horse drew them slowly up and down the hills of the West Riding. The pieces of cloth lay on the waggon covered by a tarpaulin; if rain or snow fell heavily his father, silent but smiling, would lift the edge of the tarpaulin and Ernest would creep within; his father however remained outside, his cap well pulled down, a sack over his shoulders, heroically impervious to the weather. When they set out in the early morning the roads were full of exciting things to look at: people, horses, trams, railways in the valleys; Ernest’s father occasionally explained some of these sights to Ernest, slowly, in a few mumbled words but understandably to his son. Then as they climbed higher the air grew colder and the traffic rarer, and Ernest’s father would point his whip at distant landmarks and speak their name. The town again and busy traffic, and a mill with a boiler winking fiery eyes, and a crust to eat while Ernest’s father helped by one of the mill men carried the pieces in and took on a fresh load, and then back slowly over the hills, perhaps with dusk falling and lanterns swinging back and front, to the lighted streets of Ashworth and the mill, and home. Yes, Ernest loved a day out with his father; it was not his father who had made him over-earnest. Nor was it his mother, who though rather sardonic and trenchant in manner, was thoroughly warmhearted, nor his two younger sisters, of whom he was suitably fond in a mild way. Of course, being the eldest of the family and the only boy, Ernest always had a proper sense of responsibility—he could be trusted to take the two younger children into the park and bring them back dry and in one piece, keeping them from all dangers of pond and steps and mowing-machine—but it did not weigh him unduly down; they were a happy family and he took it in his stride. Trouble befell the Armley family early in Ernest’s life, when horse-drawn waggons were superseded by motor lorries, and his father, unable to learn this new technique, from being the all-powerful driver became merely the driver’s mate. His wages suffered a corresponding decrease and Ernest’s mother had a good deal to say about it, but though the child Ernest was saddened by all this, in his secret heart he admitted the justice of the demotion, and he saw that his father admitted it too. No—it was not this trouble, though of course it gave him much food for serious thought, which planted the chip on Ernest’s shoulder.

  The incident which really caused the iron to enter Ernest’s soul, as he preferred to describe it, took place in his teens, at the mill where his father was employed. Those were the good days in the wool textile trade, the post-first-world-war boom days, and Ernest’s father had had no difficulty in getting the boy taken on. The pride and joy with which Ernest set off to the mill beside his father on that Monday morning, his first day at his first job, would never be forgotten by Ernest; he could see yet the happiness which beamed back at him from his dark brown eyes as he combed his straight dark hair in front of the mirror by the sink in the living-room downstairs. Father and son took a tram together through the early morning dark; they met other workers from the mill in the crowded tram, Ernest was introduced and men nodded kindly to him. They entered the mill and clocked in, the buzzer sounded, the machinery stirred; Ernest felt that now he was indeed a man.

  Ernest was bidden to the warehouse, where the pieces of cloth were packed and despatched, and ordered to assist an old man who was stitching up bales of cloth with string threaded through a long thick crooked needle. At this time a tall, weedy youth with rather large feet and thin though muscular arms, Ernest heaved at the heavy bales and held the coarse sacking in position energetically. Presently a sudden silence, a sudden cessation of all chat, warned him that some boss or other was in the neighbourhood. Out of the corner of his eye he perceived such a one approach: a youngish man in a blue suit, boss’s son probably, with a collar and tie. He paused nearby and appeared to watch Ernest. Not unwilling to be commended, Ernest tugged at the heavy wrapper with especial zeal, then turned eagerly towards the next bale. As he had thought, the blue-suited boss was watching him.

  “Finding that a bit heavy, eh?” said the boss.

  His understanding, sympathetic tone was very agreeable to Ernest; it would be something to tell at home, that the boss had spoken to him so friendly like on his first morning. He felt himself colour with pleasure.

  “Aye, just a bit,” said Ernest truthfully, nodding.

  “You’d better get your cards, then,” said the boss, and turned away.

  Even now, more than thirty years later, Ernest, sitting at his present boss’s side, prosperous, respected, a foreman earning fourteen pounds a week with a television set and a threepiece upholstered suite and an electric washing-machine (all paid for, not bought on the never-never, mind you, Ernest would have none of that, except for Kenneth’s motor-bike)—even now he could not think of that awful moment without deep anguish. To be sacked like that on his first morning! Before breakfast! To say he was stunned was altogether below the mark; it almost killed him. His mouth dropped open, his eyes almost fell out of his head; he felt the blood drain away from his cheeks. (And indeed his complexion was never bright-coloured again; from that moment onward—the doctors mightn’t be able to explain it, thought Ernest grimly, they could pooh-pooh it as they liked, but it was a fact—his face was colourless.) He stood silent and motionless, swaying on his feet, till some of the men came up to him and with great kindness and sympathy urged him to go home right away. They clapped him on the shoulder, they handed him his cap and coat, they said they’d explain it all to his father when he came in—luckily the lorry had driven off before the incident, for if it had occurred in front of his father, Ernest thought, he would without any doubt have died of shame. He found himself in the open air with his insurance card in his hand; he thrust it into his coat pocket as if it burned him.

  His first impulse was to get home and hide himself as quick as he could, but he remembered in time that his two sisters would not have left for school yet, and he did not want to face them. So he walked home taking a long way round. He had sometimes thought since that this was a pity. If he had reached his mother while he was still in a blazing rage, so that he could have stamped and shouted and perhaps even—for he was only a boy after all—given out a sob or two, and received comfort from her, it might have been better for him. As it was, by the time he reached home it was too
late for that. His anger had turned cold and hard and lay like a bar of iron—yes, just like iron, the psalmist knew what he was talking about—heavy in his entrails; it would never melt again.

  His mother, energetic woman, was standing on tiptoe hanging out the weekly wash on the clothes line stretched across the street, when he arrived. She gazed at him aghast, a clothes peg in one hand, and came down slowly on her heels.

  “Ernest! What’s matter, love? Are you feeling poorly?”

  Ernest could not speak; he raised the sneck of the door-latch and went into the house. His mother followed him.

  “What’s wrong, love? It’s not your father happened an accident?” she said in terror.

  “No. I’ve lost my job.”

  “Lost your job! Why, you’ve hardly getten it.”

  Drily, Ernest related the incident.

  “Whatever will your father say!” exclaimed his mother.

  She had perceived at once, what Ernest only now understood, that his father’s position among his fellow-employees had been compromised by the dismissal of his son. His father would lose face, having a son to be ashamed of. It was an added misery.

  “Well, never mind, love,” said his mother warmly, putting her arm about Ernest’s shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault. Don’t take on, now.”

  “I won’t,” said Ernest grimly.

  “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” said his mother.

  He drank it sitting in his coat, with his elbows on the table, then took up his cap.

  “Where are you going, love?” said his mother. “Stay home a bit with me.”

  “I’m going to Labour Exchange,” said Ernest.

  “Well,” said his mother, reluctantly conceding the point.

  Luckily those were the good days of the wool textile trade, the post-first-world-war boom days, thought Ernest again—he hadn’t realised at the time just how lucky that was, but by God he had realised it later. He got another job by the end of the week, with a bigger firm which owned several mills in different locations around Ashworth, so that outwardly, you might say, the “sympathetic” incident, as Ernest always called it to himself, hadn’t done much harm. But inwardly it had made a lasting mark. The wound had never healed, but lay there always ready to suppurate. The bitter disappointment, even the in-justice, of the dismissal, might have been endured. The Armleys worked it out among themselves that probably the job given to Ernest was wanted for the son or nephew or friend’s son of some person more important to the firm than Ernest’s father, and this theory seemed strengthened if not absolutely confirmed by the identity of the lad who held it after Ernest. Then why could they not have said so straight out? (By they Ernest meant the boss class.) It would have been unjust to sack Ernest thus, but at least open and honest; it could have been endured. It was the pretence of sympathy which sick-ened Ernest. Sham! Cant! Humbug! Bunk! Never believe them again! Never let them take you in by pretending to understand, pretending to be on your side, for it was always lies! Never show a weakness, for they would always take advantage! Never! Never again! Never!