A Modern Tragedy

by Phyllis Bentley

  Tasker withdrew his snake’s stare, and smiled at the young man kindly.

  Within five minutes it was plain that the proposed flotation was favourably viewed by the meeting; within half an hour it was decided. The principal creditors of the present company were to be recompensed by blocks of the new shares. The properties of Messrs. Tasker 1925, which was to go into voluntary liquidation, were to become the property of the new firm, Tasker taking in exchange a large (very large, Walter thought) block of the new shares. Tasker was to be governing director, Walter and Henry Clay Crosland on the board of the new company, which was to bear the title of Tasker, Haigh and Company.

  All this needed confirmation by a formal meeting, and depended, naturally, upon the public response to the flotation; but with Henry Clay Crosland’s backing, his name on the prospectus, success was almost sure.

  Walter listened to all this with a madly beating heart, while his subconscious mind rapidly pumped up phrases, pictures, emotions, justifying his deed. His future was assured, thought the young man, almost sobbing with relief; the slump would end, Messrs. Tasker, Haigh and Company would be a highly profitable investment; he could soon replace the worthless 1925 Tasker shares at present in his father’s safe-deposit with the valuable new ones; he would, of course, remain at the head of Heights. What did it matter, after all, that the assets of the new company were over-valued, thought Walter—for the process of justification was now complete. Those who invested in it would get their dividends, just the same; it was a mere error in book-keeping, as it were, which made no difference to anybody in the world so long as Messrs. Tasker, Haigh kept solvent. Besides, he mused on a deeper level of his mind: “nobody could prove anything against us.”

  Presently they were all drinking to the success of the new company. Tasker, who mixed the drinks, offered Walter a stiff one with a hand as steady as a rock, and Walter, imitating him, controlled his nerves and received it in a firm grasp. The two men exchanged a tiny smile of congratulation. Tasker’s eyes were gleeful and caressing; Walter’s earnest faith in him, backed as it was in the minds of those present by Dyson’s well-known textile reputation, had served him well that afternoon. And the boy had been sensible about the Heights figures, as Tasker had guessed he would when it came to the point. It had been a bit of a risk certainly, a bit of a gamble; but then Tasker liked risks, liked gambles—when their outcome depended on his own skill. They fed his sense of power. He murmured kindly in the young man’s ear:

  “You might drive Mr. Crosland home?”

  Walter, thanking him with a look, nodded emphatically, and crossed the room to make his offer.

  Mr. Crosland accepted with gratitude, and proposed they should leave at once. He was feeling exhausted by the strain of the afternoon, though he did not confess this to Walter; and now that the business was over and the tension generally relaxed, the meeting had broken up into groups of men holding glasses, recounting experiences and laughing hilariously, in none of which activities Mr. Crosland had any desire to join. He felt that in consenting to the company flotation he had taken the right but the disagreeable course; he should go firmly through every piece of business necessary to its success, but surveyed the prospect without enthusiasm.

  Tasker, with that skill which he always displayed in handling men, showed Mr. Crosland out ceremoniously through the front door, though Walter’s car stood only a few yards away from the window, and inclined his head slightly in farewell to him, again without offering his hand. This time Mr. Crosland offered his, however, and Tasker’s blue eyes gleamed in triumph as he quietly shook it.

  Henry Clay Crosland, looking bowed and old, lines of fatigue harrowing his parchment face, fitted himself with a little difficulty into Walter’s small car, and the pair drove away.

  It was a delicious evening, clear, cool and bright; the sky, pale blue at the zenith, melted into a diffused red on the western horizon; the Ashworth slopes were still green, but the distant hills, towards Hudley, were beginning to fade into a misty purple. Presently the sound of distant church bells began to float softly on the calm air. Walter drove on slowly and competently, feeling at peace with all the world. There was to be no catastrophe, no cataclysmic change in his bright life of promise; his father’s investments were safe—and here Walter made a vow to sell out five hundred of his new Tasker shares secretly as soon as he got them, buy War Loan, and put the certificates into his father’s deed box at the bank—his own new happy way of life was safe. Elaine was nearer to him than ever before. Everything in the garden, in fact, thought Walter, with joyous relief, was lovely; and he would work like a Trojan at Heights to make it show large profits and help to provide the new shareholders with dividends.

  He had no idea how much the stress of the afternoon had set its mark upon him till Henry Clay Crosland observed kindly:

  “I’m afraid this has been a very trying time for you, lately?”

  “Well, sir,” admitted Walter, colouring: “It has, rather. It would have been a great trouble to me if I’d had to leave Heights.”

  “It must be an attractive place, well equipped,” suggested Henry Clay Crosland mildly.

  Walter began to describe some of the Heights arrangements with joyous gusto. In the midst of this a lurid flash of recollection suddenly showed him that he was on dangerous ground. He faltered a little, but almost immediately recovered himself, implied in a quick sentence that the machines he had mentioned were but a few amongst many, and turned the conversation skilfully to the cloth itself, and so to yarn. The technical discussion into which he had thus guided his companion—who like many deaf persons heard better amid mechanical noise—lasted till they drew up in front of Clay Hall.

  A tennis party was in progress on the hard court at the side of the house. Hands were waved and greetings called to Walter as he descended to open the door for his passenger, and he thought himself justified in walking beside Henry Clay Crosland towards the group who were watching the game—between pale wallflowers and dark tulips beneath the fragile scented blossoms of a mountain ash, although he had not been specifically invited to do so. Ralph came running out to meet them, and with the naïveté of the young asked at once if Walter were going to stay to supper.

  “We shall be very glad if he will,” said Mr. Crosland smiling. “But,” he added in a graver tone, turning to Walter, “don’t let us keep you if—you probably want to tell your father your news?”

  Walter fell into some confusion, between disappointment for the lost chance of supping with Elaine, and shame at having to be reminded by Henry Clay Crosland of his father. Dyson’s health had not altered startlingly enough to call his son urgently to his side of late, and Walter had not visited him for months; not, indeed, since the Haighs had received Arnold Lumb’s letter of dismissal, and a family council had been called to decide that Dyson should not be told of it, and that Walter should make up part of the lost salary. But remembering Tasker’s coolness and skill in the afternoon, Walter felt ashamed of his embarrassment, rallied himself, and answered firmly: “I should like to stay a little first if I may, sir—” thus respecting Mr. Crosland’s notions of filial duty, while making a bid for a few minutes with Elaine.

  Mr. Crosland bowed his head in amiable acquiescence, and Walter felt pleased with the success of his first attempt at steering other people in the way he wished them to go.

  Soon he was standing before his love, who greeted him in a cool, indifferent little tone, scarcely looking in his direction, while the same kind of anguished hostility seemed to breathe from her personality as Walter had noticed when she was unsuccessfully received on the stage of the Clay Green Village Hall.

  Indeed, Elaine’s nerves quivered painfully at his unexpected appearance. She was still in a state of anguished resentment against Walter for his recoil (as she thought it) from her—he had not been near her, she thought in a fury, for more than a week; it was too bad; poor Ralph was so disappointed.

  Entirely ignorant of her grandfather’s business p
reoccupations, she had no notion of the circumstances which had led to Walter’s appearance at Clay Hall that night with Mr. Crosland, and referring it, as she unconsciously referred everything, to herself, wondered what it might portend of good or evil towards her affairs. The wildest ideas of what Walter might have been saying to her grandfather about her shot fiercely and luridly through her excitable little head; she could not bear to look at Walter when he addressed her, yet followed his every movement with her brilliant eyes whenever he spoke to someone else. Her agitation showed itself in the frequency of her high soft laugh, the quick rise and fall of her breast, the daring bitterness of her comments, the lovely rose which coloured her usually clear cheek; and her friends, who all thought that there had been a quarrel between Elaine and Walter, and that Walter had now come to make it up, showed their calm friendliness and social tact by removing themselves rapidly.

  As Henry Clay Crosland had already excused himself to his grand-daughter’s guests and strolled across the garden to the church, accompanied by his daughter-in-law, it seemed likely that Walter would have the unusual privilege of exchanging a few words with Elaine alone if he stayed long enough. The light began to fail, the wallflowers poured their rich sweetness into the evening air; Walter was intoxicated by their heavy perfume, by the relief of danger past, by the presence of his love. He stayed on and on, with rising hope, till every guest but himself had left. Ralph, however, remained; and Ralph was not easily got rid of.

  Elaine, who passionately desired an interview with Walter to give him a chance of explaining his recent behaviour, and at the same time dreaded it above all things, lest he should humiliate her permanently by again scorning her, announced that it was growing chilly and the gnats might begin to bite, and therefore she was going indoors.

  In spite of herself, she looked at Walter questioningly as she said this, to see whether he would make it an excuse for taking his leave; but he followed her eagerly into the house, and a little smile of triumph curved Elaine’s lovely lips. Ralph, however, hung about them disconsolate, begging Walter to play tennis with him, asserting untruthfully that the light was still quite good. Walter excused himself on the score of not being dressed for tennis, but Ralph (who had spent a bored and neglected afternoon) was not to be put off, and began to suggest loans of shoes and flannels, which he alleged were perfectly adapted to Walter’s size. Walter continued to excuse himself in negatives which were, perhaps, a little too fervent; his nerves were overwrought with the strain of the afternoon, and he could not view calmly the loss of his chance of speaking to his love alone.

  “Don’t be so tiresome, Ralph,” commanded Elaine angrily at length. “Go away—don’t you see Mr. Haigh doesn’t want to be bothered with you.”

  This was merely a (very characteristic) shifting of the responsibility for something she herself desired to the shoulders of another; but neither Ralph nor Walter could be expected to realise this.

  “Oh, I say!” protested Walter in dismay, as Ralph, his fair face flushed, turned on his heel at once and flung out of the room, banging the door behind him. “I didn’t mean it quite like that, you know. I’m very fond of Ralph.”

  “Are you?” said Elaine, pleased, but determined not to show it. With her instinct for haughtily depreciating everything which belonged to her, lest some other voice should depreciate it first, she added: “Grandfather’s very worried about him.”

  “Why?” said Walter, startled.

  “Oh, he never gets a decent report from school; he can’t add a column of figures, or write a decent letter. I suppose it’s this new way of teaching them or something,” threw out Elaine with an air of indifference.

  “But probably he’ll turn out all right when he grows up—suddenly, you know,” said Walter. “I was rather like that myself at one time, and then, all of a sudden, I came round, pulled myself together, and began to be all there. Ralph’s all right. I’d rather have Ralph as a companion than a lot of grown-up people,” he concluded loyally.

  “Indeed? Perhaps you’d rather have Ralph than me?” said Elaine at once, panting.

  This suggestion was to Walter so completely preposterous that it never occurred to him that his love could mean it, and he merely gave an embarrassed laugh in reply. But Elaine was serious enough, and his laughter stung her excited nerves to frenzy. Colouring with humiliation, she cried sharply:

  “I’ll call him for you. Ralph!”

  She went to the window, whence her brother was to be seen mournfully striking the bushes with a racquet in pretended search for a lost ball, and repeated in her high unhappy little tones: “Ralph! Ralph!”

  “Really, Elaine!” protested Walter in distress, following her. “How can you? You know I didn’t go with Ralph because I wanted to stay with you.” In his agitation he laid a hand on her arm beseechingly, and at once the hearts of both began to race.

  “Then why did you say that?” cried Elaine, turning on him, her lovely lips quivering angrily. “Why did you say you liked Ralph better?”

  “I didn’t,” objected Walter. “I simply said—”

  “You did, you did!” cried Elaine, her eyes gleaming with unshed tears.

  “I simply said I liked Ralph better than a lot of grown-up people,” repeated Walter tactlessly.

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious what you meant by that!” Elaine stormed at him. “It was a cruel, vile, sarcastic thing to say. You’re always saying things like that to me; you’re always hinting at me, saying contemptuous things indirectly.”

  “I assure you such an idea never enters my head,” protested the bewildered Walter.

  “You’re always hinting how much you dislike me,” cried Elaine in an agony.

  “I?” exclaimed Walter, dumbfounded.

  “I can’t think why you come here at all!” concluded Elaine wildly; her voice broke, and tears of anger rolled from her beautiful eyes down her exquisite cheeks.

  “I come because I love you,” cried Walter, losing his head completely.

  “Nonsense!” cried Elaine in a fury, weeping bitterly. “You know you don’t do anything of the kind.” She pushed him away with a force lent her by her anger, and flew across the room. “It’s cruel, cruel of you, Walter!” she sobbed suddenly, standing still with her back to him, and rubbing her handkerchief feverishly across her eyes, like a child, “You make me fond of you, and you don’t care anything for me at all.”

  This astonishing accusation drove Walter nearly mad. “But, Elaine, Elaine!” he cried protestingly, his young face haggard with anguish: “How can you say that? How can you?”

  He rushed after her; she moved away round the corner of an ottoman, crying: “Leave me alone!”

  “Oh, God, how can you say that, Elaine?” repeated Walter, pursuing her. “You know I love you, you know. I’ve loved you ever since the first moment I saw you.”

  “At the bazaar, do you mean?” enquired Elaine. Her head was still bent, her lovely young breast still heaved with sobs, but her tone betrayed her interest.

  “No, no! Long before that,” cried Walter.

  He was standing close to her now, breathing in the delicate perfume of her young body, loving the delicious line of the back of her neck, shaded by silky curls. “Long before that. You don’t remember, I expect,” he went on hotly, the words pouring from his heart: “You don’t remember, but I do. I shall never forget it—never! You were sitting in your grandfather’s car outside Tasker’s place, and I came down the steps and saw you. You had a grey frock, with bits of white. I shall never forget, never.”

  “But when was that?” enquired Elaine, raising her head, really astonished. “I don’t remember.”

  “It was in June last year. I shall never forget,” panted Walter. “I’ve loved you every minute since. I’ve done it all for you,” he cried out wildly. “All for you!”

  “All what?” said Elaine, turning to him. He looked so white, so wretched, so upset! She was impressed, perplexed, astounded; her heart began to wonder whether it mig
ht not, after all, know the assurance it desired.

  “Everything!” gasped Walter. He seized her arm. In instinctive coquetry Elaine sank down on the ottoman away from him; the infatuated young man threw himself on his knees beside her, gathered her lovely hands in his own hot ones, and poured a torrent of hoarse, excited words into her delicious ear.

  “When I first saw you I was only an office boy,” he gabbled wildly. “That’s all you could call me really—an office boy. And now I’m manager of Heights and going to be a co-director with your grandfather. And I did it all for you—all. Do you suppose I care for anything else in the world but you? If you do, you’re wrong.”

  “Oh, Walter!” murmured Elaine, sobbing a little from sheer happiness. “I’d no idea you wanted me as much as that.”

  Completely captivated, she turned to him in lovely confidence; her eyes, brilliant with joy, gazed up into his in grateful admiration. He seized her in his arms, and drew her strongly to him; she yielded; Walter put passionate kisses on her lips, her cheek, her throat. He felt that till this moment he had never been alive. Elaine, in his arms, was completely happy, because completely reassured. That anyone should love her like this proved her worth, she felt; proved that she was indeed the beautiful, the adorable, the desired, the noble creature she thought herself to be. Dear Walter! She gazed into his kind brown eyes—now flashing with desire—and loved them; she loved his crisp, dark hair; she loved his hands, clasping her body so surely, with such power. Dear Walter! She had thought him a timid, uncertain lad, but he was a man—a man who had achieved things for her, a man who had set his mind on a goal and reached it; a man who knew his mind, was sure of himself, and loved her steadily. Smiling sweetly, tenderly, upon him, Elaine raised her right hand and gently caressed his cheek. Each shuddered with ecstasy at the touch of the other. Walter drew her fair head down to his shoulder, and poured burning words of love into her willing ear.