A Modern Tragedy (5 page)

“Do we agree, then, ladies and gentlemen, that we provide a pound a week as stand-by for this case?” demanded Mr. Crosland.

There was a show of hands.

“Unanimous, I think,” he said.

“Subject to review next month, of course,” mumbled the secretary.

Henry Clay Crosland curved his thin hand round his ear. The secretary, shouting, repeated the remark.

“Of course, of course,” said Mr. Crosland rather testily. “That's understood. Of course. Who shall we approach to act as stand-by in the case, gentlemen?” he continued, searching the faces round the table.

They all looked bleak; the secretary shuffled his papers and drew out a list despairingly. Henry Clay Crosland sighed a little. The case was certainly very sad. He bent to the secretary at his side: “Have I been stand-by lately?” he murmured. The secretary, brightening, announced that a month or two had elapsed since Mr. Crosland's last appearance in that capacity.

“Well, that's settled then,” said Henry Clay Crosland, nodding. “Put me down for three months, at any rate.” And suddenly he decided that he would stand by Tasker, too; give him, too, three months at any rate, and then review the matter again. He felt an immense relief at this postponement of his difficulties, and of the disagreeable task of threatening to bankrupt a fellow-man; and asked for the details of the next case, briskly.

IN THE square below, Milner Schofield was haranguing a small crowd from the top of a lorry drawn up against the plinth of a statue of one of the early Croslands. At the back of the lorry the organizer sent down from head-quarters moved circumspectly, handing out leaflets; and a red banner, urging that unity is strength, and that everyone ought therefore to support the T.U.C., was posted against the statue, supplying a vivid background for the speaker's tall restless figure.

Milner's sallow features quivered with emotion, his round dark eyes flashed; he bent forward and threw out his long arms in appeal, struck himself on the chest, brought his fist crashing down in the palm of his other hand, to emphasise his points; he argued indignantly, resentfully, with fire and passion; he cared more for this cause he was advocating than for anything else on earth.

On the fringe of the crowd, leaning against a lamp-post, smoking a cigarette and listening with approving interest, stood his elder brother. Harry had the short, square figure and slightly bowed legs so often seen in the West Riding textile worker; he was of fair complexion, with humorous grey eyes, and a broad, blunt nose.

“We must have no more war!” shouted Milner at the top of his voice, hoarsely; his large, full mouth—an orator's mouth—working convulsively. “Do you know what the last war cost in human lives? Seven million men. Seven million men! To give you some idea of what seven million men are, suppose you placed men head to toe, head to toe, from here to Liverpool, from Liverpool across the Atlantic, from the Atlantic
across America, and so on, right round the world, back to Crosland Square in Hudley, where I am standing now, you would still have—”

“What size men are you using, mester?” demanded a voice from the audience, with humorous intent.

The crowd laughed, and craned their necks in the direction of the speaker; and Milner, who felt an interruption of this kind to be an insult to the sacred cause of labour, glared at them wrathfully, at a loss how to proceed.

“Thee go home and measure thysen, lad!” a woman's voice exhorted the jester shrilly.

At this the crowd roared with delight, and Harry Schofield was moved to take a hand. “Aye,” he shouted, enjoying his own joke: “And then add on a foot, lad, and tha'll be reet.”

But Milner had now recovered his presence of mind, and with the quick intuition of the born orator, shifted from the ground where he had been laughed at, and introduced a topic of burning importance, sure to regain his hearers' attention.

“Or take the economic situation,” he shouted, flashing his brilliant and compelling glance eagerly round the crowd: “Look at unemployment. The unemployment figures are up again this week; they're up again here, in this very town of Hudley. Last week's
Hudley News
admits that they're up. They're two hundred and sixteen more than they were a year ago at this time, and fifty-two more than they were last week. And they'll keep on going up till we get a different Government, a Government of our own. Two thousand, two hundred and thirteen of our fellow workers in this town alone are unemployed at the present moment. Unemployment keeps on going up—yes, and wages keeps on going down. My friends, I tell you, though I daresay I've no need to tell you, you know it only too well already, that the middle classes
of this country are making a bitter and brutal attack on the workers' standard of living. They fought a capitalist war, and they made a capitalist peace, and now they're trying to pass all the loss down on to us; they're trying to make us pay for their mistakes. But why should we pay for their mistakes? As soon as they get our living standards forced down to a point where they can make a big enough profit, the banks'll let trade be good again, the slump will be over. But is it fair, is it right, that they should do what they like with our standard of living, just because they've got the means of production in their hands?” And at this unintended revelation of the impotence of his class, their present powerlessness to compel circumstances to their will, suddenly his whole nature flamed. In a paroxysm of anger, revolt, defiance, he cried out passionately: “The cause of the common people is always righteous …”

Half an hour later the brothers were walking home. They had not far to go; the two of them, with their mother and Harry's wife and children, lived together in a short street jutting at right angles from one of Hudley's main long-distance roads. They walked in silence at first; then Milner, who was longing to know what his brother thought of his speech, approached the subject obliquely by a reference to the meeting. Immediately Harry began to laugh.

“That were a bit of fun, that chap wanting to know what size men you was using,” he said with a chuckle. “A right bit of fun, that were! And that woman telling him to go measure hissen! But I capped her; I capped her proper. Aye, that were a right bit of fun.”

He laughed again heartily. Milner felt rebuffed, and said nothing till they had turned into Thwaite Street. Then, looking away from his brother, he asked in a would-be careless manner: “How did
I
sound, then?”

“You did very well, lad,” said Harry. “I quite enjoyed it.”

To a stranger neither his words nor his tone would seem to display any great enthusiasm, but for a Yorkshireman and a brother he had said a great deal, and Milner coloured and felt deeply content.

The houses in Thwaite Street had one room and a scullery on the ground floor; four stone steps (usually scoured yellow) led up to the doors, which were set back in the walls a foot or so from the street frontage. The Schofields' door stood ajar to-night, revealing a short flight of steep oil-cloth covered stairs, of which the open door just swung clear of the lowest; on the left an inner door, also open to-night to admit the summer air, led into the living-room of the family. In Milner's childhood this room had been furnished with a solid dresser, deal chairs and a horsehair sofa; but at the time of Harry's marriage a few years ago it had been considerably renovated, and now had a wallpaper with a black ground and a pattern of gold fruit, a sideboard with a mirror and gilded china ornaments, and a settee and armchairs upholstered in patterned green. In the window they no longer displayed an aspidistra, but a black and pink bowl holding tulips of coloured glass. The solid centre table with its scrubbed white top (which was rarely clear of preparations for, or the remains of, a meal) remained, however, and so did old Mrs. Schofield's horsehair rocking-chair, and the white china poodles with crinkly manes which stood on either side of the kitchen range.

The room was hot, and a delicious smell filled the air, for Harry's wife had been doing a little extra baking while the men were out. A row of golden loaves stood on the table, with rich brown tea-cakes leaning against them to cool, and Jessie was stooping to the oven door, a cloth of rough brown harden in her hand, as the brothers came in. She raised a flushed face to greet them, and smiled, but said nothing. Jessie was a fine large ripe girl, with long thick wavy hair of warm yellow,
big features, and kind brown eyes; she was also good-tempered, firm, kind, and clever in the house, though she had worked in the mill before her marriage. Milner—though she had no attraction for him at all, he was not interested in women, had no time for them—thought Harry lucky to get her. She withdrew the last loaf of the batch from the oven, lifted it from its brown pot, and listening attentively, knocked the bottom gently with her knuckles to test its baking.

“It's enough,” said old Mrs. Schofield with decision.

She was sitting in her rocking-chair near the warm range, her big arms, bare to the elbow, folded, a little shawl over her massive rounded shoulders. She sat there in the complete immobility of one who has done a hard day's work every day for fifty years, and intends to do another on the morrow. Her figure was heavy and shapeless with a lifetime of work and numerous pregnancies, and she had lost many of her teeth; but her complexion was still as fresh as a girl's in spite of her wrinkles, and her grey eyes (like Harry's) still held verve and sparkle. Her scanty grey hair was drawn tightly back from her face and screwed into a very neat tight knot at the back of her head. Altogether she looked fresh, neat and clean, full of vigour and distinctly formidable, in spite of her sixty-five years. Harry and Milner were the youngest two of her family of nine; but Milner came five years after his brother—he was born, indeed, at a time when Mrs. Schofield hoped to have done with child-bearing, and she had resented his coming heartily. But when the child was born he was ailing and fretful, needing, as she said, “a lot of tewing over,” and this delicacy, calling upon her reserves of maternal feeling, had endeared him to his mother's heart. Milner always seemed to her different from the others, however; and she was never sure whether she loved him the most or the least of her children.

The two men sat down. A small black dog of Schipperke
breed, which lay on the cloth hearthrug watching Jessie's movements anxiously from its prominent brown eyes, now scrambled out from beneath her feet and went to Harry. He began to fondle it; the little animal trembled with ecstasy.

“That dog!” said Mrs. Schofield, with a cheerful cackle. “She thinks you're God Almighty, Harry.”

“So I am,” said Harry, with a wink, “to her. Aren't I, Nance?” (He had bought her as a tiny panting barrel of a puppy from the Sunday morning newspaper man, whose pitch was at the end of the street, and trained her himself throughout.)

“Well, how did you get on at meeting?” demanded Mrs. Schofield in her lively grating tones. “Did you speak, Milner?”

“Aye, and he framed well,” said Harry approvingly. “I could hear every word he said, every word.”

Milner blushed and fidgeted.

“What did you talk about, Milner?” asked his mother. “Tell us a bit o' summat, lad.”

“I spoke about unemployment, and against capitalist wars,” said Milner from a tight throat.

Harry began to laugh, and embarked on the anecdote about the measurement of men. He imitated his brother's fervid tones—“head to toe, head to toe”—with amusing accuracy; and Milner, colouring, observed rather hotly that his figures were right; he'd got them from the paper.

“Oh, I daresay,” said Harry with sincerity, fondling the dog's smooth ears. “But it were funny-like.”

He began the anecdote again. Milner felt he could not bear another repetition; he decided to fetch down the book he was reading, rose and went towards the stairs.

“If you're going upstairs, Milner,” said his sister-in-law over her shoulder from the scullery, in her full slow tones: “Mind you don't wakken our Dorothy. Baby's right off; but Dorothy's as clever as a monkey to-night.”

“She doesn't like bed on these light evenings,” said Mrs. Schofield in a forgiving tone.

“It's the Daylight Saving,” began Harry.

“I can't make head nor tail on it,” said Mrs. Schofield, dismissing the subject contemptuously.

Milner nodded to Jessie, and went upstairs to his room over the front door on tip-toe. When he had secured the volume, however, he fell to thinking about its contents, forgot his precautions, and trod heavily on the top stair, which creaked. At once a little voice said: “Uncle Milner!”

Milner remained silent and motionless, and hoped his niece would drop off to sleep again. The little voice went on relentlessly, however: “I heard you, Uncle Milner.”

As he still did not answer, the voice grew louder: “Uncle Milner!”

Milner perforce stepped into his brother's room, where the flaxen-haired child lay deep in her parents' bed, one fat little arm curved over the coverlet. Dorothy's cheeks were flushed, her eyes swimming, with sleep, but she blinked at him determinedly, and repeated firmly, as though the remark were of great importance: “Uncle Milner.”

“Hush up, lovey,” urged Milner in dismay, casting an anxious look at the baby, who, however, slept peacefully in the wooden cot Harry had made for him. “If your Mammy hears you, she'll be on my track proper.”

A look of impish glee appeared on Dorothy's solid little face, and her lips parted as though she were about to utter something quite portentously naughty. But sleep caught her before she could speak; the flaxen eyelashes sank on to the rosy cheeks, and a deep, soft breath was expelled from the sturdy little nostrils. She did not stir when Milner cautiously stepped towards the door; with a sigh of relief, he crept away. His sister-in-law met him at the foot of the stairs.