Crescendo

by Phyllis Bentley

  “No, no—put the money in the bank and let me live on it. I’ll earn more long before it’s finished,” said Freeman cheerfully.

  The solicitor did all in his power to persuade his client against this course, but was eventually obliged to comply, shaking his head and uttering mournful prophecies as he did so.

  Freeman enjoyed himself immensely moving into High Royd. He did a great many of the repairs and all the painting himself, so that the old house looked really charming—just like a Freeman stage-set for a romantic play, in fact, when his few treasured pieces—furniture, pictures, glass—were installed. (Few—Freeman had rolled too far and too fast round the world to gather much of the moss of possessions.) And he was happy there. He felt at home. He and Gay settled in and became domestic; they discussed curtains and acquired a cat. The superb view was a continual inspiration; he painted the landscape from all angles, and felt his understanding of life clarified by its wide vision of human activity against the background of the uncaring hills.

  On the material side, too, in spite of its remote situation the little farmstead was not too uncomfortable. Pure water from the Blackstalls reservoir gushed from the kitchen tap and the Hudley Corporation gas which lighted the sparse lamps in the road below had been brought up the slope to High Royd at some past time—the pressure was apt to be fitful, but the convenience for lighting and cooking great. A bus ran along the road up to Blackstalls once an hour and thence returned down to Blackstalls Bridge, where one could catch a bus either to Ashworth or Hudley. In the winter the Blackstalls bus sometimes stopped its journey much lower down the hill, daunted by the snow and ice above, and this was inconvenient; but then where in the West Riding were buses not sometimes in the winter daunted by ice and snow? In a word, as Freeman and Gay often said to each other in congratulatory tones, High Royd had all the advantages of the top of the hill and lacked few of those at the foot. A telephone would have been a boon, and a supply of electricity an improvement, of course. But the Hudley Corporation was adamant about the possibility of a telephone—the nearest wires were a couple of miles away down the hillside—and Freeman’s lawyer was adamant about the impossibility of installing an electric plant, producing such huge estimates of the expenditure necessary that even Freeman was convinced and abandoned the scheme.

  Not that money was in short supply at first. The articles Freeman had previously scorned to write for lack of time, he now gladly composed—or rather, he talked about the selected subject to Gay, who put down a draft which he then corrected and illustrated. He was also invited to give a course of lectures at the Hudley Technical College; the fees were amusingly meagre, of course, but when one was living so very quietly, really they were quite astonishingly useful.

  It was during these lectures that he came to know Peter Trahier—an event of which he was never certain whether it was more boon or bane.

  The course was entitled Art and Civilisation. It was not within Freeman’s power to give a formal, logically constructed lecture on some well-defined aspect of any subject; his method was to stand up and, beginning with some well-known characterisation of the period he was supposed to be discussing, roam up and down the centuries saying whatever came into his head. He did not care in the least whether he “stuck” or not, and freed from this inhibiting anxiety he never seemed to lack material; he strode up and down with his hands in his pockets, enjoying himself immensely, while his deep strong voice rolled along, discoursing of the theatre, the arts, and life in general. His anecdotes were always spicy and often highly contemporary, introducing familiarly great figures whose names were a source of awe to his young hearers. His generalisations were stimulating, and he was always on the side of the anarchic against the authoritative, the free as against the established. In a word, he was just what the more intelligent and public-spirited of the Hudley Technical College students wanted, and his lectures, after the first, were crowded. Peter was studying economics, civics, statistics, the law of meetings and such dull matters in preparation for the political career he hoped to make, and (as he admitted frankly later) he dropped into old man Freeman’s art course rather contemptuously—it would probably have little to offer to a keen, well-informed young Marxist like himself, but it was free, extracurricular, had caused a lot of talk; one might as well see what was going on.

  Freeman noticed him at once. The lad was good-looking, almost striking indeed in appearance; tallish, with thick well-brushed sandy hair, and very lively grey eyes. The eyes were full of intelligence, decided Freeman as he strolled up and down the dais and observed Peter’s quick response to his jokes and provocative paradoxes—Peter laughed always just a second before any other student, his reactions were just so much quicker than those of anyone else in the room. At the close of the lecture the lad asked some really admirable questions, well worded and spoken in a pleasant voice, and when the chairman closed the meeting, Peter came up to Freeman and continued the discussion ardently, admiration beaming from every feature of his agreeable young face. This admiration, this understanding, this ease of expression, were very warming to Freeman, who discovered that the provincialism of his native town had been really rather chilling to his heart. Peter had to be driven away from Freeman almost by force by the chairman, and it was only natural that Freeman, laughing heartily, had called out to Peter over the intervening heads as they parted:

  “Gome and see me, my boy!”

  “When?” shouted Peter.

  “Oh, any time—Sunday afternoon.”

  Sure enough on Sunday afternoon Peter turned up, though the rain was pouring and the wind blowing as only on Black-stalls Brow could rain pour and wind blow. The young man’s cheap raincoat was extremely wet, his sandy hair dark and ruffled, his cheeks bright red, when after a struggle with the elements and the criss-crossing lanes he eventually reached High Royd; it seemed he had walked from Hudley. He declined the offer of dry clothes from Freeman—probably, thought Freeman shrewdly, because clothes tailored for the burly Freeman would make the slender Peter Trahier look foolish—but accepted the kitchen towel from Gay to dry his face and hair.

  Before the towel was handed back they were in love. Freeman could see them now, the bright rough stripes in blue and white tumbled between them, Gay’s eyes downcast, Peter’s wide, filled with surprised yearning. Less than six months later they married, and now their first child was on its way.

  Yes, it was difficult to decide whether Peter was boon or bane. It was good that Gay should marry. But Freeman could not rid himself of the uncomfortable certainty that her chosen husband was inferior, to, unworthy of, his daughter. Since Freeman himself had come up from the gutter, naturally—though he laughed at himself for saying this: jealousy and pride were more natural than tolerance, he knew well—naturally he had no objection to Peter’s birth, which was modest, to his education, which was elementary, or to his resources, which were meagre. Peter belonged to the “lower middle class”; he had lived before his marriage in a small house in a respectable little terrace in Hudley with a widowed mother and an elder sister, both in Freeman’s opinion persons of stubborn dreariness; he earned his living as some kind of clerk in Ashworth Town Hall—Ashworth, not Hudley, because Peter wished to be elected to the Hudley Town Council and therefore must not be one of its employees lest he make himself ineligible. The Hudley Town Council was to be merely a stepping-stone towards Peter’s political career, of course; he meant to enter Parliament and end up as a Cabinet Minister. And he might well do so, thought Freeman, laughing again ruefully; Peter was just the kind of man one met in high, though usually not the highest, political place. He had fixed plans of sociological reform, to which he was able to devote a quick intelligence, a good memory, a considerable fluency and a great capacity for work; he was conscientious in detail, and studied the relevant subjects with care and attention. But there was a soft spot somewhere in his character, a spot of decay, which would spread under the pressure of a political career. Was it conceit? Partly. The lad was young, of cou
rse, jejune indeed, with that kind of naïveté which consists in aping sophistication; but he would grow out of that. Self-interest? To be fair: not quite. No: the soft spot—or perhaps it was a hard spot, a calloused spot; at any rate it was diseased tissue, a centre of corruption—consisted in Peter’s belief that the end justified the means. (He had said as much in that argument they had had yesterday evening.) Peter believed in the deliberate acquisition of power, he admired the use of “clever” tactics to acquire it, and to further its acquisition thought a certain lack of scruple justifiable—thus, though genuinely dedicated to serving humanity in the mass, he was apt in the process to override individual human rights and think this proper.

  At the time of the marriage Freeman and the young couple had agreed, on Freeman’s suggestion, to divide High Royd between them. Freeman had made the proposal partly to keep Gay at his side, partly to keep her from the dreary little house in Hudley, belonging to Peter’s mother who disapproved the match, which was all Peter had as yet to offer his wife, and partly because Freeman thought the pooling of household expenses would prove an advantage to Gay and Peter. The gable arrangement made the division of the house easy, and both parties promised to keep scrupulously to their own rooms unless invited, merely eating their meals together in the kitchen. But in practice, of course, among people anxious not to hurt each other’s feelings, it did not work out quite like that, and the three saw a good deal of each other.

  Fortunately Peter was out all day on weekdays, and often in the evenings too, pursuing his studies or attending political meetings. (Tonight, for instance, the day being Tuesday, he had gone straight from work to the Hudley Technical College, so that Gay and Freeman had eaten their evening meal alone together.) But even so, the frequent contacts with his son-in-law were often a trial to Freeman. On Peter’s glib fluency, his resonant voice, his naively expressed “advanced” views, his cocky, sandy crest, Freeman felt he could have managed to look with fatherly tenderness; as for Peter’s sensual love for Gay, Freeman knew his Freud and was on his guard against his own sexual jealousy. But the blemish in Peter’s character, his cheerful casuistry, angered him. He hated to think that Peter would guide his daughter’s life; hated too to think that on Peter and his like would rest the responsibility of steering the world through the problems created by nuclear fission. A fine mess they’d make of it! Moreover, Freeman had been humiliated recently to discover that the advantage of the pooled household expenses was mutual; it seemed his lawyer was right and he was really temporarily hard up.

  With characteristic honesty he had at once imparted this discovery to Peter. At this Peter, his fresh face colouring, exclaimed that it was an honour to be of any—any—for once he stumbled amongst words, rejecting assistance and advantage and not immediately finding a less patronising substitute.

  “It is an honour to live under the same roof with you, sir,” he finished at length emphatically.

  “Perhaps he’s a good lad at heart, after all,” thought Freeman.

  But all the same Freeman did not feel he was as much master of his house as when the conferring of benefits had been all on his side, and he thought he discerned on Peter’s part a continually diminishing deference to Freeman’s views, an increasing stubbornness in upholding his own.

  So it would be idle to deny that since Freeman’s retirement, and especially since Gay’s marriage, Freeman had experienced some moments of deep and bitter depression. But that was only to be expected. The right behaviour towards such depressions was to use them in one’s art, and Freeman was using them thus at present; he was designing—solely for his own pleasure, he told himself, though secretly he believed his designs would be used some day and used with triumph—some magnificent stormy sets for King Lear. He cheered up now at the thought of them; whistled in a preoccupied style; jingled the coins in the pocket of his handsome loose brown suit; winked at the cat Simon which passed him in a cool but not unfriendly fashion on its way to the last ray of sunshine on the wall; and regarded once more the vast wild prospect which he had grown to love.

  “How fearful,

  And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!”

  The wind was rising; clouds in the west were beginning to obscure the setting sun. Rain might be on its way. It was perhaps appropriate, thought Freeman with a smile, that at this rather chilling moment when the golden glory of the sky was sinking to grey, he should see his landlady laboriously climbing the curve of Brow Lane, a stout, cross figure. Yes, even at this distance, decided Freeman, who did not like Mrs. Eastwood, she looked cross.

  “O fat white woman whom nobody loves,

  Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?”

  A vulgar, disagreeable, narrow-minded woman. She had twice sprung upon him like a tigress, just because he was a few days late in sending his monthly cheque for the rent, and her behaviour at High Royd, though perhaps meant to be civil, had been as disagreeable as her errand. She had a way of setting her mouth, the heavy lips slightly awry, which gave her a contemptuous, sardonic look, as a prelude to the utterance of some piece of coarse disparagement in the guise of praise. (For example, on seeing Gay in her flowered red skirt, she set her lips and gibed: “A lot of people like those bright clothes nowadays.”) But what had she come for this time? She was out of sight now, but had reached the side of the house no doubt, for Simon with a look of disgust in every limb came leaping round the corner to avoid her. Yes, here she was, exuding Philistinism from every fleshy pore. With a sigh Freeman stepped up the little flagged path to meet her.

  2

  “Have a drink, Mrs. Eastwood?” said Freeman after she was seated, turning towards his rather “amusing” little bar—a scarlet and white painted trolley.

  “No, thank you,” said Mrs. Eastwood in her gibing tone. “A cellarette on a tea trolley; that’s a new idea.”

  “What can I do for you, then?” said Freeman.

  He turned a chair round, seated himself astride and leaned against the back; he also put on the kindliest smile he could manage and tried to feel in charity with all men. It was a difficult exercise to include Mrs. Eastwood, but for a moment he managed it by considering the tones of her hair and coat as a problem of the palette.

  “Well—I’ve come about the rent, you see,” said Mrs. Eastwood.

  “The rent! I paid you three months’ rent last week,” exclaimed Freeman, surprised.

  “Three months!” exclaimed Mrs. Eastwood, surprised in her turn. “Well, that’s not the point,” she added. “You didn’t really pay at all, now did you, Mr. Freeman?”

  “I don’t understand you,” said Freeman stiffly. “I gave you the equivalent of three months’ rent at least.”

  “I don’t want any equivalent,” said Mrs. Eastwood, setting her lips. “I want my money. I’ve brought that back, what you gave me I mean.”

  She fumbled in her shopping bag and drew out a small white-framed painting. It was in fact one of the most famous of Freeman’s designs: a superbly dramatic backcloth for a play of northern industrial life, showing mill chimneys soaring black behind mean streets, against a deep blue evening sky. Fiammetta had had it framed because it was such a treasured possession, and Freeman had parted from it with great reluctance. But at the time of Mrs. Eastwood’s last call to demand the rent he had really very little money handy, and not much immediate hope of gaining more. (The idea of an appeal to his son-in-law just crossed his mind but was of course at once dismissed: Peter might imagine Freeman was really embarrassed for money; he would tell Gay and she would be distressed.) So, as the local subject of the Northern Night picture would make it particularly acceptable, he took it down from the wall and gave it to his landlady in lieu of rent. He now saw this cherished sketch, unglazed as it was, drawn carelessly, unwrapped, from a shopping bag. Mrs. Eastwood held it out to him.

  “I don’t really care for it, not really,” she said. “Those ugly mill chimneys and that. Besides, the blue’s not right, you see—it doesn’t go with the eiderdown i
n my bedroom.”

  Freeman perforce took the picture from her outstretched hand. He made a great effort, perhaps the greatest in his life, to keep his temper, though the blood beat in his temples.

  “Will you have another picture instead? One with the right blue this time?” he said, smiling.

  “I’m not bothered,” said Mrs. Eastwood.

  Freeman was well aware that in the West Riding nowadays this form of words indicated a blunt refusal. Suddenly and completely he lost his temper; it swirled away on a wild blast of rage. He sprang to his feet.

  “Damn your mean ignorant little soul!” he shouted. “You know nothing of art, and what you don’t know you despise. It’s such people as you who destroy all that’s good and beautiful.”

  “There’s no call for you to shout at me, Mr. Freeman,” said Mrs. Eastwood, her heavy jowls flushing crimson. “I just want what’s owing to me, that’s all. I want my rent.”

  “The picture was worth a year of your rent.”

  “That’s what you say,” returned Mrs. Eastwood coarsely. “I’d rather have the money.”

  Freeman began to tremble.

  ‘This extract has been removed due to copyright issues’.

  “That’s you, Mrs. Eastwood, except that you wouldn’t know an angel if you saw one.”

  “I know I don’t want a twopenny-ha’penny picture when I see one,” cried Mrs. Eastwood. “I want my rent.”

  “Very well. You’ll lose by it. I’ll send you a cheque.”

  “I’d rather have the money if you don’t mind,” said Mrs. Eastwood smugly. “If you’d money in the bank to pay me with you’d have sent a cheque before.”

  Freeman with a violent movement threw down the picture on the settee and flung out of the room. Outside the door, with angry fingers he plucked out his wallet and counted the notes it contained. They were not enough to satisfy Mrs. Eastwood. Exclaiming with rage, he ran up the stairs to his painting room, and crossing to a chest of drawers which stood there, began to ruffle up their contents—he knew he had a small cache of money somewhere. He was well aware that the imperfect old floor would betray every movement of his heavy frame to Mrs. Eastwood below, but would not demean himself by trying to act quietly. Ah, here was the money! He counted it. There was still not quite enough. By raking all the silver out of his pockets Freeman at length made up the exact sum. He descended.