A Modern Tragedy (7 page)

“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.

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 warily 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.”

By a natural transition Tasker here remembered Walter; and his thoughts sank down to a less conscious level, a level where he admitted every idea that came, without attempting to make it consistent or respectable. On this level he was able to feel at almost the same moment that Walter's high moral tone was intensely offensive, and he detested the silly lad: that morality of that sort was a luxury which Leonard Tasker, self-made man that he was, had never been able to afford: that if he could get out of this hole he'd enjoy the luxury of running straight always, never “wangle” anything again: that wangling was the spice of his life: that with his early history, his difficulties, his talents, his success, he was an exception to the general run of people, and ordinary morality, such as Walter's, was not required of him: that, indeed, he despised it: that he would like to take Walter down a peg: that Walter was a nice boy, a good lad, rather like Tasker himself at that age, and he was sorry he'd had that impulse (under the exasperation of his interview with Crosland) to raise the price of the damaged indigo on him: that it was smart of Walter to catch him out on it: that he was Dyson Haigh's son, and obviously knew what was what about cloth: that, indeed, he was just the sort of lad who might be very useful.

At this point Tasker took his foot off the accelerator, braked the car, and brought it neatly to a standstill.

“Take the wheel,” he commanded briefly.

The man obeyed, dismounting and walking round the car.

Tasker slid into his seat, and drew out paper and pencil. His whirling thoughts had fused into an idea, a notion, a scheme; he thought he saw how the thing might be worked, how he might get round the difficulty of his creditors by means of Walter. A grim smile curled along his mouth as he bent eagerly over his notes, jotting down figures and names and dates. By the time the car had drawn up in the drive of Grey Garth, his large, new, solitary house in a suburb of Ashworth, the scheme was more or less complete.

Tasker ordered the car for eight-thirty in the morning; nodded dismissal to the man, and let himself quietly into his home. Lights had been left on for him, as always; drinks in cut glass decanters, and several kinds of sandwiches, stood on a silver tray in the large drawing-room.

He looked round at the thick pale carpets, the numerous elaborate lamps, the vivid cushions and richly upholstered chairs, in grim satisfaction, nodding his head slightly; did they think he was going to give up all that without a fight? If they did, they were wrong! Then it struck him how new the room looked, how unused; indeed society did not come to Grey Garth very often. His wife was ailing, of course, but that wasn't the whole reason; you wouldn't catch Henry Clay Crosland entering this drawing-room, for example. Tasker's eyes hardened, his nostrils slightly dilated; well, he'd show them!

He turned off the light and went upstairs. As he passed the door of his wife's room, her voice called thinly: “Leonard!”

He grimaced, but went in. Marian Tasker was lying on her back in the luxuriously appointed bed, with her arms stretched out at her sides, in the attitude of the habitual invalid. A vivid-shaded lamp, and her rich silken night-gear, only made the pinched face beneath her greying hair look
more haggard, the thin throat and arms more wrinkled. She was older than her husband, and had never had much physical attraction for him; indeed the proposal that they should marry had come from her side. The daughter of a little suburban shop-keeper in Ashworth, whom Tasker had met during one of his early commercial enterprises, as organiser of a thrift club, she had brought him the two hundred pounds—the result of the sale of her deceased father's shop—which formed the foundation of his fortune. Therefore, he kept faith with her; that is to say, his body sometimes roved, but his mind did not; and though he often wished, in a terrible rage of exasperation and thwarting, that he was rid of her, the thought of forcing her to divorce him or separate from him never entered his head. He would indeed have been shocked at such an idea. Moreover, with Marian he was completely at his ease, because she knew his antecedents. He could relax his accent, utter his views of men and things with the robust cynicism natural to him, sure of not shocking her. What she thought of him Tasker had never been altogether able to make out, which was, perhaps, the secret of her power over him; he knew, however, that in her way she loved him. They had no children. In earlier days this had been a disappointment, a deep hurt, to Tasker, but now he was glad; children tied you up, limited your activities, and he wanted to be free, he could not bear any restrictions on his power to do as he chose. Marian was a meticulous housewife, of the type which prefers to see a thing unused rather than soiled; the emptiness of her drawing-room did not trouble her. She had called him in now to complain, in her rather nagging high tones (unchanged since the days when he first knew her), that one of the taps in the magnificent white and silver bathroom had begun to drip.