A Modern Tragedy (3 page)

“I suppose you call it honest, prying into other people's private affairs,” roared Tasker, thrusting his face into the young man's.

“Well, upon my word! The less you talk about honesty the better, I should think,” cried Walter, flushing angrily.

Tasker suddenly drew back. “Of course, Mr. Haigh, if you're going to take that line,” he said, “there's nothing for it but for me to close my account with Messrs. Lumb.”

He sat down again, opened a drawer, drew out a cheque book, picked up his fountain pen. “There's plenty of other finishers in the West Riding who'll be glad to do my work for me,” he sneered. “We'll close the account. How much is there between us for the last half year, do you know?”

In a hand that trembled with rage, he filled in the date at the top of the cheque, and made it payable to Messrs. Lumb. “We'll close the account,” he repeated in a savage undertone.

The words: “Close it and be damned!” rushed hotly to Walter's lips. But he did not utter them. He longed passionately to utter them; all his essential decency and honesty, all his belief in truth and goodness, all his young energy, his manhood, everything that was fundamentally the proud honest unspoiled young Walter Haigh, rose in revolt against Tasker, and seemed to be exploding the words out of him. He had never wanted anything in his life so much as to utter them. But between the moment of conceiving them and that of uttering them, he thought of Messrs. Lumb's half-empty finishing plant; he thought of himself telling Arnold Lumb that he had lost his biggest customer for him; he thought of the Haigh household—his ailing father, his elderly mother, Rosamond. And it was as if something clapped a hand across his lips. He simply could not speak the words
which would throw Arnold Lumb's biggest customer away. The blood rushed to his head, pounded thickly behind his ears; he stood heavily silent by Tasker's chair, swaying a little on his feet, his eyes wide and glazed, his face crimson, drawing deep, slow breaths. “Say it! Say it!” urged the natural Walter:
“Close it and be damned to you!
Say it!” A sort of groan burst irrepressibly from his lips, but he choked it back in terror. If only the economic situation were different, thought Walter with sick longing; if only so much didn't hang on this—the very livelihood of his ailing father, perhaps; could he throw that away for the mere pleasure of asserting his moral superiority? Ah, how he longed to say the words, to defy Tasker, to fling himself proudly, indignantly, out of this abominable room—his heart high, his head in the air! But he could not utter them. No; he could not utter them; he was afraid to utter them. There was a long, heavy pause, which seemed to last an eternity of anguish and indecision, while Walter choked and stifled, sick with impotent rage. Then, at last, the young man brought out in a weak, hoarse tone:

“Don't say that, Mr. Tasker.”

Tasker, his pen poised above the cheque, glanced at him mockingly from beneath his thick brows, gave a little sneering smile, which, however, he immediately repressed, and looked down again, waiting.

“He's only bluffing,” thought Walter in an agony. “He doesn't want to close the account any more than I do. But what can I do to make him say so?”

“Mr. Tasker,” he began aloud. He gazed imploringly at the manufacturer, who remained silent and immobile, with averted eyes.

Walter cleared his throat.

“Mr. Tasker,” he repeated weakly.

Tasker turned his mocking eyes on him, but said nothing.

“I should be sorry to lose your account, Mr. Trasker,” pleaded Walter. “I should be sorry.…”

His antagonist remained implacably mute.

“Suppose we were to split the difference?” stammered Walter suddenly, trembling.

At this Tasker stirred, and Walter knew that the crisis was over.

“Well, that seems quite a good solution, Mr. Haigh,” said the manufacturer in his gruff, sardonic tones, which to Walter's sensitive ear again held a note of mockery. “A compromise, eh? Well, considering what a long time Lumbs and I have done business together, and all that sort of thing, we'll invoice it at five shillings a yard. Will that suit you?”

It was not in the least a solution or a compromise, it involved the Lumbs in an extra expense which was entirely unwarranted, it was simply taking money out of the Lumbs' pockets, and putting it into Tasker's, it went contrary to the established customs of the trade, it was, in fact, a piece of barefaced roguery; but Walter perceived that he had somehow been led into making the offer himself, and would have to stand by it. “Very well, Mr. Tasker,” he muttered, hanging his head.

“Good!” said Tasker cheerfully. “That's all right then. Well, I'm a bit busy to-day, Mr. Haigh, so I won't keep you any longer. Give my regards to your father, will you? And say I hope he'll soon be about again; we've done a lot of business together, he and I.”

He pulled open a drawer energetically, and began to ruffle papers, looked up to give Walter a brief dismissing nod, and concluded: “Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon,” replied Walter in a choked tone.

Somehow he got himself out of the office and down the stairs.

WHEN WALTER emerged on to the outer steps of Victory Mills, he found he was drenched with sweat and trembling all over; he was obliged to lean against the green-painted railings to recover himself. Good God! How the fellow's handled and cozened me, thought Walter, almost sobbing with rage; when I found that entry in the order book I had the game in my hands, I ought to have been able to do anything I liked with him—instead of that, he did anything he liked with me. What a fool I am! What a fool he must have thought me! A raw young fool, a fool! I never knew there were people in the world as bad as that, protested one part of Walter's mind, astonished; really I'd no idea! No, you were a fool, a raw young fool, Walter answered himself bitterly; but I'm not a fool now, I'm ten years older than I was when I went in—and I shall have to tell Arnold Lumb the price of that serge is five shillings, he broke off in despair; he won't believe me, he'll think there's something fishy about it, but I shall have to stick to it, because in fact I suggested it. How on earth did Tasker make me do that? He just sat still and said nothing, and left me to make the running; that's the way it's done, evidently, thought Walter, his jaw quivering with rage. The Lumbs will have to pay sixpence a yard more, they'll really have to
give
Tasker sixpence a yard, because of my foolishness, my rawness. Why on earth was I in such a hurry to admit responsibility, he thought; and half a dozen excuses, protests, denials, which he might have made, flashed into his mind. God! How the man cozened me!
And here I am making a fool of myself again on the top of these steps, thought Walter in a fury; hanging on the railings and crying like a girl! He stamped down the steps, banging his heels viciously on the stones. The summer sun still shone brightly, but everything now looked unreal, vile; as if it might be going to change suddenly into something horrible, like a transformation scene at a pantomime the wrong way round.

At the bottom of the steps, dwarfing Walter's rusty little two-seater, stood a handsome dark blue saloon, with an elderly chauffeur standing in a perplexed attitude by the bonnet. “That's Henry Clay Crosland's car, I suppose,” thought Walter bitterly, and was confirmed in this supposition by the man, who came up and asked if he chanced to have seen Mr. Crosland. “No, I haven't since a quarter of an hour since,” said Walter in a loud sulky tone: “He was just on leaving then.”

And just then the last drop of bitterness was added to the afternoon's humiliation. For Walter saw that there was a girl sitting, still and aloof, in the rear seat of Mr. Crosland's car; and by the expression of her face as she looked straight in front of her, away from him, he thought he guessed that she had heard his loud clumsy speech and despised him for its Yorkshire tones. She was a beautiful creature; very small and slender, and dazzingly fair, with grey eyes of almost liquid brilliance, and rich red lips. The pointed little profile she turned to him was exquisitely moulded; her lovely rounded cheek had a delicious bloom beneath the gleaming waves of her ash-blonde hair. There was a style, an air, a kind of classic inevitability in her dove-grey dress, touched with white at throat and wrist, her harmonising bag and gloves and hat; she seemed a picture by a master in clear pure colours, where most humans were coarse daubs by prentice hands. She belonged, in fact, to a luxurious and
expensive type which life was not at all likely to present to Dyson Haigh's son and Messrs. Lumb's junior traveller. And Walter resented from the bottom of his soul that it should be so. (She was lovely, lovely; so delicately designed, so exquisitely finished.) Why should some people be rich and clever, go about in fine blue cars, be accompanied by elegant, lovely girls, know how to do things, how to speak and look and hold their own; while others, others were poor silly third-rate fools like himself? For that's what he was, thought Walter bitterly. How could he ever have thought himself alert and smart? He knew now that his brown suit was shabby and shapeless, creased round the thighs and baggy at the knees, shiny at the elbows, and in any case badly cut from the start. A third-rate fool, that's what he was, out of a dull, dreary lower-middle-class street. His mental eyes flashed over the crude appointments of his home in Moorside Place, and he detested them. His accent was all wrong, of course; he couldn't touch a simple business matter without making a mess of it; and since his interview with Tasker, he wasn't even very honest. “Oh, God!” thought Walter, almost weeping again: “Damn Tasker! And damn that girl! Damn the whole lot of them!”

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.