A Modern Tragedy (6 page)

“Did she wakken?” demanded Jessie.

“No,” lied Milner.

“I thought I heard her voice,” said Jessie, mildly sceptical.

“She did just stir; but she's off again now,” said Milner apologetically.

Jessie gave him the inscrutable pitying look of the mother for the unmarried male, and smiled. “Your brother's come,” she said.

There was no need to ask which brother, though all the Schofields lived in Hudley, and with their children and grandchildren were constant visitors at their former home. It was sure to be the eldest, who had been out of work for some time, and was in difficulties about his rates. The Thwaite Street household, with two men's wages and Mrs. Schofield's old-age pension coming in, was considered well off, and had to make contributions to less fortunate members of the family rather frequently. Milner did not mind making the contributions, but he detested the long solemn embarrassed family discussions which always preceded them; he therefore followed Jessie into the room reluctantly.

It was, as he had thought, his eldest brother, Arthur, who had come; a man of middle age, with several rather delicate children, and an ailing wife, who had accompanied him tonight on this serious errand. Milner exchanged a nod of greeting with his brother, and a word with his wife; then sat down behind the table, and opened his book.

The conversation, which he heard without listening to it, was jerky and full of pauses, as the family skirmished round the awkward subject of the rates, but presently old Mrs. Schofield took the plunge, and soon the matter was in full discussion.

“I can't understand it,” complained Mrs. Arthur shrilly: “There's a woman in our street—she goes out dressed up as fine as any manufacturer's wife in the town, and she's working, and yet she says, she doesn't pay any rates, she says, she's
got let off them. And yet we can't get let off them! And he isn't working, and I haven't worked for long enough, and yet we can't get let off. I'm sure we always paid when we could. But how can we pay when he isn't working? And yet there's this woman at the end of our street—she goes out donned up as fine as any manufacturer's wife in Hudley. …”

Her pinched face was damp with sweat, as she thus tried to cover the shame of her need by virtuous indignation against another.

Milner turned a page in restless misery, and read:
The world should be managed primarily for those who work, not for those who own.

“That's right! That's true! The cause of the common people is always righteous,” whispered Milner to himself, his dark eyes gleaming.

THE HEADQUARTERS of the Hudley Harlequin Dramatic Society consisted of a couple of adapted cellars in a side street. To reach the tiny theatre one stumbled down a few steps into a place of high stools, glasses, bottles and conviviality; then turned along a passage hung with American cloth in vivid blue and orange, and lighted by rows of globes concealed behind opaque pictured screens fitted to the wall. A man of middle years, with a solid square body, an agreeable plain tired face, and sandy hair beginning to turn grey, was making this journey now. After waiting outside the premises for half an hour in his car, he had come in and enquired at the bar when the rehearsal for
Britain's Daughter
was likely to be over, and been directed to the theatre with the emphatic assurance that the rehearsal would continue for hours. In recesses along the passage games of dominoes, committee meetings, and the beginnings of young courtships were being conducted with an enthusiastic liveliness which seemed to lead to a good deal of noise, so that when Arnold Lumb pushed open the door leading to the auditorium, he was not surprised to hear several voices exclaim “Hush!” out of the darkness, with great severity. The door swung to behind him; he groped for the rows of conventional red velvet seats which he knew were there—for he had been to the Harlequin premises in search of Rosamond Haigh before—and sat down in a place by the gangway.

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.”