A Modern Tragedy by Phyllis Bentley Page A

at any time?”
    â€œIt certainly won’t be a box-office draw,” said one voice very gloomily.
    â€œWhy should it?” demanded another in indignation.
    Arnold sighed. The members of the Hudley Harlequins—of whom he was emphatically not one—usually rather annoyed him. They seemed to him young and silly (especially silly), with no knowledge of what was really going on in the world. Slumps and banks and overdrafts and falling prices were all about them, and here they were dressing up in furs and chattering about still trees. He was essentially good-natured, however; and if Rosamond liked to play about with this sort of agreeable nonsense, well, why shouldn’t she? It kept the young people occupied. Rosamond looked fine, too, in that fur; and her voice was really beautiful. Yes; Rosamond was strong and noble, and all that was good in his nature turned to her; a man might make a good life at her side. He had no hot passion for her—all that was finished for him when his wife’s death ended his first rapturous wretched marriage—but he rather thought he loved her, and should ask her to be his wife. Marriage was a serious matter, however, in these days, he reflected; and instantly was back in all the worries of the afternoon.
    How had that nice young ass, Walter, gone on at Victory Mills, he wondered; he was not too eager to have Mr. and Mrs. Haigh as relations-in-law, but the boy was right enough. But none of them knew anything yet of his tentative courtship of Rosamond; Rosamond herself seemed too unconscious of it for him to risk letting his slow approach to her be seen by other eyes. That would come all in good time, hoped Arnold, but it was no use agitating either poor old Dyson, or his own people, who would be sure to dislike the match as a misalliance, too soon. There was the money question, too; this afternoon at the bank—but the producer was now satisfied with his moonlight, which had settled itself to a less ghastly shade; and Rosamond’s voice was throbbing on the air again.
    â€œHear me again”
came her noble pleading tones:
    â€œHereafter hear me in your memories:
    Say that I might have slip’t past misery
    By delicate dishonour and loosening ease,
    But that I went alone to an unknown country,
    An unknown servitude, an unknown end,
    And that I once was Britain’s daughter; then
    You will bethink you that a state of Britain
    Has been unbuilt, that it had once been built,
    And can be built again. Remember. Britain …”
    â€œYes, she’d put heart into a man,” thought Arnold soberly.
    But now Rosamond was fainting on the floor, and that, he thought, was rather a pity. Rosamond would never faint. Women didn’t go fainting about nowadays. The play, was, perhaps, a trifle affected and Harlequin-ish, after all. Hedidn’t pretend to understand these things, however; he began to revolve in his mind the terms of his arrangement with the bank, and forgot Nest of Britain and her griefs.
    The rehearsal ended; Arnold, sitting on solidly in his chair, exchanged a friendly nod or two with some of the officials of the society who had been present at the rehearsal, and were now eagerly discussing the prospects of success. Presently the players (clothed and in their right minds, thought Arnold) came down from the dressingrooms; Rosamond, in the thin dark dress she had worn at school all day, approached without observing him. Arnold stood up.
    â€œOh!” exclaimed Rosamond in surprise. “It’s you, Arnold!” She arched her fine eyebrows quizzically, and regarded him smiling, with her head on one side.
    Arnold Lumb’s adventures among the Harlequins struck her as somehow rather wistful and pathetic; he so obviously did not understand in the least what they were trying to do. Art was to him something apart from life, and quite unnecessary; an escape, an interlude when it was successful, and something rather silly and useless