A Modern Tragedy by Phyllis Bentley

blue and orange, and lighted by rows of globes concealed behind opaque pictured screens fitted to the wall. A man of middle years, with a solid square body, an agreeable plain tired face, and sandy hair beginning to turn grey, was making this journey now. After waiting outside the premises for half an hour in his car, he had come in and enquired at the bar when the rehearsal for
Britain’s Daughter
was likely to be over, and been directed to the theatre with the emphatic assurance that the rehearsal would continue for hours. In recesses along the passage games of dominoes, committee meetings, and the beginnings of young courtships were being conducted with an enthusiastic liveliness which seemed to lead to a good deal of noise, so that when Arnold Lumb pushed open the door leading to the auditorium, he was not surprised to hear several voices exclaim “Hush!” out of the darkness, with great severity. The door swung to behind him; he groped for the rows of conventional red velvet seats which he knew were there—for he had been to the Harlequin premises in search of Rosamond Haigh before—and sat down in a place by the gangway.
    The stage at the further end was in darkness save for one strong shaft of very blue moonlight, in which a group of strangely clad figures were posed in tragic attitudes. Ayoung man in modern dress who was standing in the gangway facing the stage, his shape strongly outlined against the moonbeam, turned and scowled vaguely in Arnold’s direction; this, remembered Arnold from Rosamond’s previous explanations, was probably the producer.
    â€œA little to the right, Nest,
please,”
bawled this young man in a tone of great exasperation. “Your head is in darkness; you might as well not have a face at all. That’s better. Now take that speech again.”
    One of the figures withdrew from the rest, raised bare arms, finely moulded, which seemed to glow with incandescent whiteness in the artificial moonshine, and spoke:
    â€œBritain, dear land, my land, I am not one
    To mouth my passion for you in other ears;
    I have not crept to you for self’s mean ends,
    Base use, foul warmth, like fleas in a dog’s coat,
    Serfs in a Queen’s house: I am a child
    Of your beneficent spirit, O my earth;
    I have gone up from you like a still tree,
    In soaring contemplation looking down,
    At one with you by sap and breath-stirred thoughts …”
    The grave and lovely voice, laden with the anguished courage of the defeated princess’s last farewell, throbbed passionately through the hot darkness, and Arnold’s nerves throbbed responsively as he recognised it for Rosamond’s. As she stood there, draped in thin white, with a rough fur (the producer’s notion of the garb of an Ancient Briton) slung across her tall handsome body, she looked superb. Her pale face was turned upwards in a terrible intensity of yearning; her crisp dark hair seemed to flow back from her broad white brow as if her spirit pressed forward too eagerly for its bodily casement; her dark eyes, beneath the strong arches of her eyebrows, sometimes so merry, so full of laughter, nowglowed with a sombre and passionate fire. Her rich lips quivered on the words as if indeed she were Nest of Britain, and hardly able to speak them for emotion.
    â€œThat lighting won’t
do!”
shouted the producer suddenly, bounding forward.
    The moonshine promptly went out altogether, then turned abruptly amber; a brisk argument began on the stage, the groups of players dissolved; behind Arnold murmured comments became audible.
    â€œJust the part for her.”
    â€œYes; she’s a handsome creature.”
    â€œShe’d need to be, if that fur’s all she’s going to wear.”
    â€œToo late in the year for tragedy, though.”
    â€œI don’t agree. We want to wind up the season well.”
    â€œThat’s what I mean. Why do Bottomley now?”
    â€œWhy do Bottomley