Read Online A Modern Tragedy by Phyllis Bentley - Free Book Online

and now you don’t want me to grow it,” said Rosamond, laughing. “Such inconsistency!”
    â€œI’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 tomeet 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 littlehere, 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.
    â€œ
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.

Scene 6. Reverie of a Rogue
    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;