A Modern Tragedy Page 5

  The stage at the further end was in darkness save for one strong shaft of very blue moonlight, in which a group of strangely clad figures were posed in tragic attitudes. A young man in modern dress who was standing in the gangway facing the stage, his shape strongly outlined against the moonbeam, turned and scowled vaguely in Arnold’s direction; this, remembered Arnold from Rosamond’s previous explanations, was probably the producer.

  “A little to the right, Nest, please,” bawled this young man in a tone of great exasperation. “Your head is in darkness; you might as well not have a face at all. That’s better. Now take that speech again.”

  One of the figures withdrew from the rest, raised bare arms, finely moulded, which seemed to glow with incandescent whiteness in the artificial moonshine, and spoke:

  “Britain, dear land, my land, I am not one

  To mouth my passion for you in other ears;

  I have not crept to you for self’s mean ends,

  Base use, foul warmth, like fleas in a dog’s coat,

  Serfs in a Queen’s house: I am a child

  Of your beneficent spirit, O my earth;

  I have gone up from you like a still tree,

  In soaring contemplation looking down,

  At one with you by sap and breath-stirred thoughts …”

  The grave and lovely voice, laden with the anguished courage of the defeated princess’s last farewell, throbbed passionately through the hot darkness, and Arnold’s nerves throbbed responsively as he recognised it for Rosamond’s. As she stood there, draped in thin white, with a rough fur (the producer’s notion of the garb of an Ancient Briton) slung across her tall handsome body, she looked superb. Her pale face was turned upwards in a terrible intensity of yearning; her crisp dark hair seemed to flow back from her broad white brow as if her spirit pressed forward too eagerly for its bodily casement; her dark eyes, beneath the strong arches of her eyebrows, sometimes so merry, so full of laughter, now glowed with a sombre and passionate fire. Her rich lips quivered on the words as if indeed she were Nest of Britain, and hardly able to speak them for emotion.

  “That lighting won’t do!” shouted the producer suddenly, bounding forward.

  The moonshine promptly went out altogether, then turned abruptly amber; a brisk argument began on the stage, the groups of players dissolved; behind Arnold murmured comments became audible.

  “Just the part for her.”

  “Yes; she’s a handsome creature.”

  “She’d need to be, if that fur’s all she’s going to wear.”

  “Too late in the year for tragedy, though.”

  “I don’t agree. We want to wind up the season well.”

  “That’s what I mean. Why do Bottomley now?”

  “Why do Bottomley at any time?”

  “It certainly won’t be a box-office draw,” said one voice very gloomily.

  “Why should it?” demanded another in indignation.

  Arnold sighed. The members of the Hudley Harlequins—of whom he was emphatically not one—usually rather annoyed him. They seemed to him young and silly (especially silly), with no knowledge of what was really going on in the world. Slumps and banks and overdrafts and falling prices were all about them, and here they were dressing up in furs and chattering about still trees. He was essentially good-natured, however; and if Rosamond liked to play about with this sort of agreeable nonsense, well, why shouldn’t she? It kept the young people occupied. Rosamond looked fine, too, in that fur; and her voice was really beautiful. Yes; Rosamond was strong and noble, and all that was good in his nature turned to her; a man might make a good life at her side. He had no hot passion for her—all that was finished for him when his wife’s death ended his first rapturous wretched marriage—but he rather thought he loved her, and should ask her to be his wife. Marriage was a serious matter, however, in these days, he reflected; and instantly was back in all the worries of the afternoon.

  How had that nice young ass, Walter, gone on at Victory Mills, he wondered; he was not too eager to have Mr. and Mrs. Haigh as relations-in-law, but the boy was right enough. But none of them knew anything yet of his tentative courtship of Rosamond; Rosamond herself seemed too unconscious of it for him to risk letting his slow approach to her be seen by other eyes. That would come all in good time, hoped Arnold, but it was no use agitating either poor old Dyson, or his own people, who would be sure to dislike the match as a misalliance, too soon. There was the money question, too; this afternoon at the bank—but the producer was now satisfied with his moonlight, which had settled itself to a less ghastly shade; and Rosamond’s voice was throbbing on the air again.

  “Hear me again” came her noble pleading tones:

  “Hereafter hear me in your memories:

  Say that I might have slip’t past misery

  By delicate dishonour and loosening ease,

  But that I went alone to an unknown country,

  An unknown servitude, an unknown end,

  And that I once was Britain’s daughter; then

  You will bethink you that a state of Britain

  Has been unbuilt, that it had once been built,

  And can be built again. Remember. Britain …”

  “Yes, she’d put heart into a man,” thought Arnold soberly.

  But now Rosamond was fainting on the floor, and that, he thought, was rather a pity. Rosamond would never faint. Women didn’t go fainting about nowadays. The play, was, perhaps, a trifle affected and Harlequin-ish, after all. He didn’t pretend to understand these things, however; he began to revolve in his mind the terms of his arrangement with the bank, and forgot Nest of Britain and her griefs.

  The rehearsal ended; Arnold, sitting on solidly in his chair, exchanged a friendly nod or two with some of the officials of the society who had been present at the rehearsal, and were now eagerly discussing the prospects of success. Presently the players (clothed and in their right minds, thought Arnold) came down from the dressingrooms; Rosamond, in the thin dark dress she had worn at school all day, approached without observing him. Arnold stood up.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Rosamond in surprise. “It’s you, Arnold!” She arched her fine eyebrows quizzically, and regarded him smiling, with her head on one side.

  Arnold Lumb’s adventures among the Harlequins struck her as somehow rather wistful and pathetic; he so obviously did not understand in the least what they were trying to do. Art was to him something apart from life, and quite unnecessary; an escape, an interlude when it was successful, and something rather silly and useless when it wasn’t. Whereas she believed that art was the quintessence of life; she believed in the might of design, the mystery of colour, and the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting. It seemed sad to her that, while Arnold so obviously disapproved of the Harlequin atmosphere—the easy informality, the disregard of wealth as a standard of value—he should yet, equally obviously, find in it something he unconsciously enjoyed. (And probably the things he disapproved were the things which really made it agreeable to him.)

  “I thought you said you should leave me if I wasn’t out by ten,” she remarked to him in a tone of mischief, with sparkling eyes.

  “I don’t think I said that, Rosamond,” said Arnold mildly.

  Rosamond laughed a little, and they went out amicably together to Arnold’s car.

  As they drove away, with Arnold at the wheel, he enquired about Dyson’s health, and Rosamond gave her sad account of the previous night’s attack which had made her father incapable of business to-day. In her turn she asked after Reetha, Arnold’s lively and wilful little daughter, who had been sent rather early away to school.

  Arnold had made a hasty, and in his parents’ eyes unsuitable, love-match during the War; and their forebodings had been justified by his wife’s behaviour, for after giving birth to a girl child (“and calling her by such a preposterous name,” complained Mrs. Lumb) she ran away with another man while her husband was at the front. However, shortly after the conclusion of the War she
conveniently died—that, at least, was how Arnold’s mother regarded it; Arnold himself, Rosamond suspected, might feel differently. She sometimes wondered whether Arnold were not falling in love with her, but rather felt that such a rash act was beyond his scope. Time would reveal the truth of that, as of other things, however; and meanwhile Rosamond liked Arnold’s friendship, and was glad to make a little light relief in his rather heavy days.

  “How is business, Arnold?” she asked, on this.

  “Bad,” replied Arnold laconically. He sniffed as he drew up the car in response to a red light for the second time in two minutes: “These robots here make us the laughingstock of the West Riding,” he grumbled.

  Rosamond, who had heard the same remark from him a considerable number of times before, smiled at him in affectionate amusement. Something warm and loving in her glance made him blurt out suddenly: “I had to arrange an overdraft with the bank this afternoon.”

  “Arnold!” exclaimed Rosamond, alarmed. Then, thinking that perhaps her lack of business experience was magnifying the occurrence unduly, she added: “But perhaps you’ve had them before?”

  “Not of this size,” said Arnold grimly. The signals changed through yellow to green. He drove on, saying: “You’d best not tell your father anything about it.”

  “No,” said Rosamond dutifully.

  “Father’s a good deal upset, as you can imagine. He went home from the mill early—pretended it was the heat. I’ll tell you what, Rosamond,” continued Arnold, who seemed to find it a relief to float on the tide of confidence now he had taken the plunge: “If this depression goes on much longer, it’s going to be a stiff fight to pull us through.”

  “Is it really?” said Rosamond, troubled for his sake. “But do you think you’ll manage it, Arnold?”

  “Yes,” he said emphatically.

  They were now driving up the hill to Moorside Place. The cool night breeze blew deliciously in Rosamond’s uncovered hair. “I think I shall grow my hair again, Arnold,” she said, hoping to distract his attention from the cares of the day.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t do that, Rosamond,” said Arnold seriously.

  “Why not? You didn’t want me to cut it off, and now you don’t want me to grow it,” said Rosamond, laughing. “Such inconsistency!”

  “I’ve got used to it short,” objected Arnold.

  Rosamond’s smile died on her lips. The length of her hair was a small matter; Arnold’s preference for what existed, as opposed to what might be created by deliberate will, not so small. Arnold Lumb was a good and honest man of steady courage and determined tenacity, skilled in business, who had behaved kindly, even nobly, to her family; but his initiative was strictly limited; any capacity for evolving a new social order, she thought, for helping industry to modify itself to meet new market conditions, and at the same time provide acceptable conditions of life for those concerned in it, simply did not exist in him.

  Rosamond sighed, and excused herself from asking Arnold into the house on the ground of having school-work to correct. Arnold, who had no intention of entering Dyson’s house at this hour in any case, enquired when she would next be rehearsing in the Harlequins, smiled gravely, and drove away.

  Rosamond entered her home. It was quiet and dark; the household seemed to be abed upstairs. Seeing from the presence of Walter’s hat in the hall, and his dusty shoes in the kitchen, that her brother was in before her, she locked and barred the doors in accordance with Dyson’s wishes, laid out the breakfast things, cleaned Walter’s shoes and her own, and presently sat down at the dining-room table with a pile of children’s exercise books before her. She had done a hard day’s work at school, and rehearsed for several hours, but she was not by any means tired out yet, she decided, and she threw herself into her work joyously. She was excited, as often, by the poetry she had had to speak that night; her mind seemed to move swiftly, and with admirable lucidity. She wondered rather that Walter had forgotten to clean his shoes; to be wanting in domestic consideration was unlike him, and the tiny detail disturbed her. As her blue pencil moved decisively among the pages, her thoughts hovered about Walter, her father—for his cough was sounding persistently in the room above, and she felt tenderly towards his suffering—and Arnold Lumb; thence she passed on to the future of the textile industry in general, and the world at large. What sort of world would it be when the children, whose earnest and jejune reproductions of her teaching now lay before her, came of age? Well, it’s our generation’s trick at the wheel, she thought; Walter’s and mine. We’re old enough now to shoulder the responsibility. She sighed a little here, for Walter’s youth. What shall we make of it I wonder?

  In imagination she looked out over the teeming, seething world: lives rising to maturity, falling to decay, tossing up and down in unceasing tumultuous succession, like the waves of the unresting sea. Love, ecstasy, pain, struggle, perplexity, grief—ah, life was good, she thought; noble and beautiful, exciting, richly coloured, tragic and comic, fine; she hoped that she might live it to the full, and in so living, enrich the experience of her fellow men.

  “I have not crept to you for self’s mean ends,

  Base use, foul warmth. …”

  mused Rosamond.

  Her mother’s voice from above summoned her softly to prepare a hot drink for her father. She hastened to obey.

  Scene 6. Reverie of a Rogue

  ABOUT this hour Leonard Tasker was driving a powerful car very swiftly along the Leeds to Ashworth road.

  This part of the thoroughfare was broad and smooth, but unlighted; the great head-lamps seemed to create trees out of nothingness as they flew along, and this pleased Tasker; there was no breeze here in the valley, and the heavy foliage hung as though cut from velvet, the low, black walls seemed made of cardboard, like a scene on the stage. The car rushed on, up hills and down, beneath viaduct arches, round curves; it reached a main street where there were setts and tram-lines, blared once peremptorily, and flew across. Tasker’s chauffeur sat beside his employer with his arms folded, and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. He was a young man of iron nerve and independent manners, and liked a bit of speed, which was why Tasker employed him. He moved his feet involuntarily from time to time when the gears should be changed, though to do his employer justice, he reflected, he knew how to drive a car; Mr. Tasker would never make a mess of things through losing his head—not likely! Tasker himself, at the wheel, smiled grimly as the car gained speed after the crossing, and pressed his foot more strongly on the accelerator. If there was anybody in the way, let them get out of it, or take the consequences.

  Now they were rushing along a valley; on the other side, beyond the river and canal, loomed a high, sombre hill. Tasker involuntarily glanced at it, and his breathing grew heavy, almost panting; he knew that hill well, too well. Up on the top of it, on a little stone causeway, sheltered by a bluff from the bitterest winds, but exposed enough all the same, stood a couple of cottages; in one of them he had been born, and lived till he was a young man grown. His parents lived there still, but he had not been there for years, and probably would never go there again. He sent them money, of course. Ah! how well he remembered it, that rough little cottage up at Stone Green; with water to draw from the ice-cold beck which ran beside it, and four miles to walk to the nearest Board School. Not that he had attended that for long; he was a half-timer at nine years old; he had always hated school, wanted to be doing something active, getting on in the world.

  There was a corner up there in the darkness, at the turn of the little lane, whence one could see the lights of Ashworth by night, and its smoke by day. How often had he not stood there, as a lad, and longed passionately to be in the town, managing, directing—a figure of importance, a man of power. School had seemed a waste of time, then; a place of repression and thwarting; he had been an awkward, rough, countrified, poverty-stricken figure to the town-bred children, and they had laughed at him. He saw the value of education now, of course. One had to tread waril
y all one’s days for lack of it; be silent, and sheer off many and many a time because men were talking on subjects of which he had never heard. Some day, when he had time, he would learn it all up, and then they would be surprised—he, Leonard Tasker, would learn it all as easily as a cat laps milk. Of course he would—there was not much he couldn’t do if he gave his mind to it. Look how he had conquered his accent! Nobody would know him for a Yorkshireman now; yet once he had spoken as broadly as his father. He had learned table manners, too; and clothes, and all the silly stupid things behind which men of no originality hid their mental nakedness. Yes! He had gone up in the world steadily; he had conquered the West Riding; he was a figure of importance, a man of power, all right. From two hundred pounds as a starting point, he had worked himself up into the proud position of—well, of owing more than fifty thousand, thought Tasker, smiling to himself sardonically. But was it his fault that there had been a slump? A year or two ago he could have bought up the Crosland Spinning Company, lock stock and barrel; written a cheque for the purchase price straight out, and never noticed it. And in another year or two he’d be the same again; once let this depression lift, and they should see! But just because he was a bit pressed, and times were difficult, there was that damned Henry Clay Crosland, with his mincing accent and his lofty airs—a man with no more initiative than a rabbit, and about as much brain; a man who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who had had wealth and birth and power and all that made life good offered to him, as it were, on a plate; all Crosland had to do was to hold on to them, and he hadn’t the sense even to do that, seemingly—that damned Henry Clay Crosland, hum-ing and ha-ing and looking down his nose and putting his hand to his ear, was threatening to pull him up, stop his yarn supply, force him into bankruptcy!

  The car had run out of the valley now, and Stone Green was no longer in view; the road was rising; Tasker’s lungs expanded, and he felt less oppressed. “So they think they’ve got me down, do they!” he raged to himself, gritting his teeth, his hard blue eyes gleaming in the darkness. “Well, they haven’t! No, by God, they haven’t! It takes more than that to down Leonard Tasker. I’ve been in worse corners than this before, and turned them; and I shall turn this. I know the cloth trade better than anybody in the West Riding, and there isn’t a man in the whole damned lot of them can touch me when it comes to business. If only this slump would lift! What are those fools of politicians and bankers about?” thought Tasker in contemptuous disgust. “If I were in their place I could settle the whole thing in a month. They cling to the gold standard as though it were a life-buoy, when it’s really a lump of lead tied to their legs. The bankers lend millions of pounds all over the place, to countries with unpronounceable names, but if a decent little English business—like the Lumbs’, for example—needs a bit, they look down their noses, and want security for every ha’penny.”