A Modern Tragedy (38 page)

“No, no!” said Walter, irritated into remonstrance at last. “Don't be so unreasonable, Elaine. It's only a business affair—we've some business to talk over.”

“Grandfather never brought business people to Clay Hall,” said Elaine haughtily, nevertheless somewhat mollified.

“Oh, rubbish!” snapped Walter.

His emphasis calmed Elaine's uneasy nerves, and as their gong just then sounded and they had to make their way into the house for lunch, she gave him her gardening basket and her gloves to carry, with an air of restoring him to favour. Every object which belonged to her was dear to Walter, and he played with the dirty little gloves with a lover's fondness. Elaine smiled at him, well pleased; Walter's kind brown eyes smiled back at her; she took his arm, and they passed beneath the arched porchway, glowing with red Virginia creeper, with peace for the time restored.

Accordingly that afternoon Elaine, feeling very wifely, took considerable pains to ensure that Tasker's entertainment should be appropriate. Although her knowledge of housework, as Mrs. Haigh regarded housework, was almost nil, was confined indeed to the frying of bacon and eggs as breakfast for a previous night's party—she had never prepared a meal or dusted a room in her life—yet as housewifery was understood at Clay Hall, she had considerable skill in the art; she was a born hostess, and understood how to give orders which resulted in admirable meals, charmingly served. She arranged the flowers for that night's dinner-table with care, and saw to it that the Taskers' china, and the best glass
and silver, should be used. It was not by any means the first dinner party which the young Haighs had given at Clough End, but deep in Elaine's heart was a core of resentment that her lovely house, her ménage of which she was so proud, should be used so soon for a mere business associate whom she despised. She persuaded herself loyally, however, that she liked being a help to Walter, and put on a very busy, grown-up air with the members of her afternoon's tennis party. Owing to her preoccupation with the dinner arrangements, one or two of these arrived before she was dressed to receive them, and this indication of her responsibilities as a wife was rather flattering and enjoyable.

She was disappointed when Walter returned from the mill in a gloomy and nervous mood, and showed only a negligent and artificial interest in her preparations. He wandered about the house, too, while they were waiting for their guest, in a manner very trying to a young wife's nerves and upsetting to the maids; it was only the merest chance, as Elaine told herself with a sigh of exasperation, that he was at hand to receive Tasker when he appeared. In reality the moment when Tasker entered his home and took Elaine's hand was a moment of bitter anguish to Walter, and his trouble showed itself on his too candid face. “What children men are!” thought Elaine, observing him; and feeling very wise and experienced, she at once took the whole entertainment of Tasker on her own shoulders, sat down near him and began to talk to him in her most charming and fashionable style. Tasker, however, as Walter saw, surveyed her with a grim and reserved eye; he spoke little, did not give himself away, and to Walter's mind had an infuriating air of being in complete command of the situation—as well he might have, reflected the young husband bitterly, considering that the very cushions owed their existence, one might say, to him. Elaine had dreaded the actual meal, but when they were
summoned to the table she was agreeably surprised by her guest's casual manners—Tasker had eaten too many dinners in public places, under too many agitating circumstances, to be upset by anything in the Clough End service—while Tasker, on his side, showed, in a quick flash of his blue eyes, that he had observed the compliment of the table china, and became rather more affable in consequence. He and Walter had scarcely exchanged a word, however, when Elaine, having settled them in the drawing-room and given them coffee, excused herself on the score of a previous engagement and slipped away to Clay Hall.

The silence between the two men continued till the sound of Elaine's car had died away in the distance, while Tasker puffed thoughtfully at the admirable cigar which Walter had driven into Hudley that afternoon to secure for him; then he said, looking about him at the cream-coloured walls, the dark oak pieces, the cushions in soft pastel blue, the graceful groups of wine-red chrysanthemums:

“You've a nice little place here, Walter.”

“I'm glad you like it,” said Walter from a dry throat. He forced himself to add: “I hope you'll bring Mrs. Tasker and come and see us properly, before long.”

He was conscious that this was not very tactfully expressed; but Tasker waved it negligently away, and went on:

“But I should think it costs you a pretty penny to keep up.”

“Does he mean to suggest reducing my salary?” thought Walter swiftly. He nerved himself for a battle—for life as Elaine lived it was expensive, and there were the payments on Clough End to keep up—and remained deliberately silent, waiting to see what inference Tasker meant to draw from his remark.

“I wish to God this slump would take a turn!” burst out Tasker suddenly. “I do indeed. It's been awful lately. I've
never known business so bad as it's been this last year. If it goes on like this I don't know what's going to happen to the West Riding.” His voice was really troubled. Walter looked at him in surprise, and saw that his partner's hard face had fallen into haggard lines, and that there were marks of fatigue beneath his eyes. Walter's heart quickened its beat, and he knew alarm. “What we're going to do about this November dividend I'm sure I don't know,” went on Tasker with an air of lassitude. “I had the dickens of a job finding the money for the May one, I can tell you. The annual balance-sheet, you know—I didn't worry you about it, you were so busy getting married, but it would have looked pretty sick as it really stood. I had to doctor things up a bit to make them fit for publication.”

“You had to
what?”
cried Walter, sitting erect, scarlet and gasping.

“I overrated the Victory Mills stock a bit,” said Tasker, speaking with more zest.

“But—but the auditor?” gasped Walter.

“What a young ignorant you are, Walter,” said Tasker cheerfully: “Don't you know the auditor never values the stock? He hasn't the technical knowledge. Haven't you seen the sort of certificate an auditor gives?” He read his answer in Walter's face, and went on: “You haven't. Didn't read your own balance sheet, I suppose. Well—that's how I managed it. But where we're going to find the November dividend from, heaven knows. I don't. Perhaps you've some ideas?” he suggested on his customary sardonic note. At the look of consternation on Walter's face he added, with real reproach: “I think you ought to take your share a bit more now, Walter, you know; not leave it all to me.”

“We shall have to pass the November dividend if we can't pay one,” gasped Walter, mentally visualising all the bills he was relying on that November dividend to pay.

“Pass it? Within eighteen months of flotation? No fear!” exclaimed Tasker energetically, throwing himself forward in his chair. “It would bring the whole thing down on our heads. There'd be no end of a fuss next annual meeting—shareholders proposing investigations and goodness knows what else. We can't do with them getting on the track of the stock business last May, you know—and then there's the Heights affairs too. Not to mention,” he went on with a sly look: “What your respected grandfather-in-law would have to say about it.”

Walter groaned, and buried his face in his hands.

“Still,” he said presently, looking up: “I don't see what else we can do but miss the dividend.”

“You'll put this place on the market at once, then?” said Tasker in a mild conversational tone, looking about him again at the charming and gracious interior. “Pity.”

“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.