The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  Before the visitor had got very far, Maggie came in with a lacquered tea-caddy and the silver teapot and a silver spoon on a lacquered tray. Mrs Baines, while continuing to talk, chose a key from her bunch, unlocked the tea-caddy, and transferred four teaspoonfuls of tea from it to the teapot and relocked the caddy.

  “Strawberry,” she mysteriously whispered to Maggie; and Maggie disappeared, bearing the tray and its contents.

  “And how is your sister? It is quite a long time since she was down here,” Mrs Baines went on to Miss Chetwynd, after whispering “strawberry.”

  The remark was merely in the way of small-talk—for the hostess felt a certain unwilling hesitation to approach the topic of daughters—but it happened to suit the social purpose of Miss Chetwynd to a nicety. Miss Chetwynd was a vessel brimming with great tidings.

  “She is very well, thank you,” said Miss Chetwynd, and her expression grew exceedingly vivacious. Her face glowed with pride as she added, “Of course everything is changed now.”

  “Indeed?” murmured Mrs Baines, with polite curiosity.

  “Yes,” said Miss Chetwynd. “You’ve not heard?”

  “No,” said Mrs Baines. Miss Chetwynd knew that she had not heard.

  “About Elizabeth’s engagement? To the Reverend Archibald Jones?”

  It is the fact that Mrs Baines was taken aback. She did nothing indiscreet; she did not give vent to her excusable amazement that the elder Miss Chetwynd should be engaged to anyone at all, as some women would have done in the stress of the moment. She kept her presence of mind.

  “This is really most interesting!” said she.

  It was. For Archibald Jones was one of the idols of the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion, a special preacher famous throughout England. At “Anniversaries” and “Trust sermons,” Archibald Jones had probably no rival. His Christian name helped him; it was a luscious, resounding mouthful for admirers. He was not an itinerant minister, migrating every three years. His function was to direct the affairs of the “Book Room,” the publishing department of the Connexion. He lived in London, and shot out into the provinces at week-ends, preaching on Sundays and giving a lecture, tinctured with bookishness, “in the chapel” on Monday evenings. In every town he visited there was competition for the privilege of entertaining him. He had zeal, indefatigable energy, and a breezy wit. He was a widower of fifty, and his wife had been dead for twenty years. It had seemed as if women were not for this bright star. And here Elizabeth Chetwynd, who had left the Five Towns a quarter of a century before at the age of twenty, had caught him! Austere, moustached, formidable, desiccated, she must have done it with her powerful intellect! It must be a union of intellects! He had been impressed by hers, and she by his, and then their intellects had kissed. Within a week fifty thousand women in forty counties had pictured to themselves this osculation of intellects, and shrugged their shoulders, and decided once more that men were incomprehensible. These great ones in London, falling in love like the rest! But no! Love was a ribald and voluptuous word to use in such a matter as this. It was generally felt that the Reverend Archibald Jones and Miss Chetwynd the elder would lift marriage to what would now be termed an astral plane.

  After tea had been served, Mrs Baines gradually recovered her position, both in her own private esteem and in the deference of Miss Aline Chetwynd.

  “Yes,” said she. “You can talk about your sister, and you can call him Archibald, and you can mince up your words. But have you got a tea-service like this? Can you conceive more perfect strawberry jam than this? Did not my dress cost more than you spend on your clothes in a year? Has a man ever looked at you? After all, is there not something about my situation . . . in short, something . . . ?”

  She did not say this aloud. She in no way deviated from the scrupulous politeness of a hostess. There was nothing in even her tone to indicate that Mrs John Baines was a personage. Yet it suddenly occurred to Miss Chetwynd that her pride in being the prospective sister-in-law of the Rev. Archibald Jones would be better for a while in her pocket. And she inquired after Mr Baines. After this the conversation limped somewhat.

  “I suppose you weren’t surprised by my letter?” said Mrs Baines.

  “I was and I wasn’t,” answered Miss Chetwynd, in her professional manner and not her manner of a prospective sister-in-law. “Of course I am naturally sorry to lose two such good pupils, but we can’t keep our pupils for ever.” She smiled; she was not without fortitude—it is easier to lose pupils than to replace them. “Still”—a pause—“what you say of Sophia is perfectly true, perfectly. She is quite as advanced as Constance. Still”—another pause and a more rapid enunciation—“Sophia is by no means an ordinary girl.”

  “I hope she hasn’t been a very great trouble to you?”

  “Oh no!” exclaimed Miss Chetwynd. “Sophia and I have got on very well together. I have always tried to appeal to her reason. I have never forced her . . . Now, with some girls . . . In some ways I look on Sophia as the most remarkable girl—not pupil—but the most remarkable—what shall I say?—individuality, that I have ever met with.” And her demeanour added, “And, mind you, this is something—from me!”

  “Indeed!” said Mrs Baines. She told herself, “I am not your common foolish parent. I see my children impartially. I am incapable of being flattered concerning them.”

  Nevertheless she was flattered, and the thought shaped itself that really Sophia was no ordinary girl.

  “I suppose she has talked to you about becoming a teacher?” asked Miss Chetwynd, taking a morsel of the unparalleled jam.

  She held the spoon with her thumb and three fingers. Her fourth finger, in matters of honest labour, would never associate with the other three; delicately curved, it always drew proudly away from them.

  “Has she mentioned that to you?” Mrs Baines demanded, startled.

  “Oh yes!” said Miss Chetwynd. “Several times. Sophia is a very secretive girl, very—but I think I may say I have always had her confidence. There have been times when Sophia and I have been very near each other. Elizabeth was much struck with her. Indeed, I may tell you that in one of her last letters to me she spoke of Sophia and said she had mentioned her to Mr Jones, and Mr Jones remembered her quite well.”

  Impossible for even a wise, uncommon parent not to be affected by such an announcement!

  “I dare say your sister will give up her school now,” observed Mrs Baines, to divert attention from her self-consciousness.

  “Oh no!” And this time Mrs Baines had genuinely shocked Miss Chetwynd. “Nothing would induce Elizabeth to give up the cause of education. Archibald takes the keenest interest in the school. Oh no! Not for worlds!”

  “Then you think Sophia would make a good teacher?” asked Mrs Baines with apparent inconsequence, and with a smile. But the words marked an epoch in her mind. All was over.

  “I think she is very much set on it and—”

  “That wouldn’t affect her father—or me,” said Mrs Baines quickly.

  “Certainly not! I merely say that she is very much set on it. Yes, she would, at any rate, make a teacher far superior to the average.” (“That girl has got the better of her mother without me!” she reflected.) “Ah! Here is dear Constance!”

  Constance, tempted beyond her strength by the sounds of the visit and the colloquy, had slipped into the room.

  “I’ve left both doors open, mother,” she excused herself for quitting her father, and kissed Miss Chetwynd.

  She blushed, but she blushed happily, and really made a most creditable début as a young lady. Her mother rewarded her by taking her into the conversation. And history was soon made.

  So Sophia was apprenticed to Miss Aline Chetwynd. Mrs Baines bore herself greatly. It was Miss Chetwynd who had urged, and her respect for Miss Chetwynd . . . Also somehow the Reverend Archibald Jones came into the cause . . . Of course the idea of Sophia ever going to London was ridiculous, ridiculous! (Mrs Baines secretly feared that the ridiculous might happen
; but, with the Reverend Archibald Jones on the spot, the worst could be faced.) Sophia must understand that even the apprenticeship in Bursley was merely a trial. They would see how things went on. She had to thank Miss Chetwynd . . .

  “I made Miss Chetwynd come and talk to mother,” said Sophia magnificently one night to simple Constance, as if to imply, “Your Miss Chetwynd is my washpot.”

  To Constance, Sophia’s mere enterprise was just as staggering as her success. Fancy her deliberately going out that Saturday morning, after her mother’s definite decision, to enlist Miss Chetwynd in her aid!

  There is no need to insist on the tragic grandeur of Mrs Baines’s renunciation—a renunciation which implied her acceptance of a change in the balance of power in her realm. Part of its tragedy was that none, not even Constance, could divine the intensity of Mrs Baines’s suffering. She had no confidant; she was incapable of showing a wound. But when she lay awake at night by the organism which had once been her husband, she dwelt long and deeply on the martyrdom of her life. What had she done to deserve it? Always had she conscientiously endeavoured to be kind, just, patient. And she knew herself to be sagacious and prudent. In the frightful and unguessed trials of her existence as a wife, surely she might have been granted consolations as a mother! Yet no; it had not been! And she felt all the bitterness of age against youth—youth egotistic, harsh, cruel, uncompromising; youth that is so crude, so ignorant of life, so slow to understand! She had Constance. Yes, but it would be twenty years before Constance could appreciate the sacrifice of judgement and of pride which her mother had made, in a sudden decision, during that rambling, starched, simpering interview with Miss Aline Chetwynd. Probably Constance thought that she had yielded to Sophia’s passionate temper! Impossible to explain to Constance that she had yielded to nothing but a perception of Sophia’s complete inability to hear reason and wisdom. Ah! Sometimes as she lay in the dark, she would, in fancy, snatch her heart from her bosom and fling it down before Sophia, bleeding, and cry: “See what I carry about with me, on your account!” Then she would take it back and hide it again, and sweeten her bitterness with wise admonitions to herself.

  All this because Sophia, aware that if she stayed in the house she would be compelled to help in the shop, chose an honourable activity which freed her from the danger. Heart, how absurd of you to bleed!

  CHAPTER IV

  ELEPHANT

  I

  “Sophia, will you come and see the elephant? Do come!” Constance entered the drawing-room with this request on her eager lips.

  “No,” said Sophia, with a touch of condescension. “I’m far too busy for elephants.”

  Only two years had passed; but both girls were grown up now; long sleeves, long skirts, hair that had settled down in life; and a demeanour immensely serious, as though existence were terrific in its responsibilities; yet sometimes childhood surprisingly broke through the crust of gravity, as now in Constance, aroused by such things as elephants, and proclaimed with vivacious gestures that it was not dead after all. The sisters were sharply differentiated. Constance wore the black alpaca apron and the scissors at the end of long black elastic, which indicated her vocation in the shop. She was proving a considerable success in the millinery department. She had learnt how to talk to people, and was, in her modest way, very self-possessed. She was getting a little stouter. Everybody liked her. Sophia had developed into the student. Time had accentuated her reserve. Her sole friend was Miss Chetwynd, with whom she was, having regard to the disparity of their ages, very intimate. At home she spoke little. She lacked amiability; as her mother said, she was “touchy.” She required diplomacy from others, but did not render it again. Her attitude, indeed, was one of half-hidden disdain, now gentle, now coldly bitter. She would not wear an apron, in an age when aprons were almost essential to decency. No! She would not wear an apron, and there was an end of it. She was not so tidy as Constance, and if Constance’s hands had taken on the coarse texture which comes from commerce with needles, pins, artificial flowers, and stuffs, Sophia’s fine hands were seldom innocent of ink. But Sophia was splendidly beautiful. And even her mother and Constance had an instinctive idea that that face was, at any rate, a partial excuse for her asperity.

  “Well,” said Constance, “if you won’t, I do believe I shall ask mother if she will.”

  Sophia, bending over her books, made no answer. But the top of her head said: “This has no interest for me whatever.”

  Constance left the room, and in a moment returned with her mother.

  “Sophia,” said her mother, with gay excitement, “you might go and sit with your father for a bit while Constance and I just run up to the playground to see the elephant. You can work just as well in there as here. Your father’s asleep.”

  “Oh, very well!” Sophia agreed haughtily. “Whatever is all this fuss about an elephant? Anyhow, it’ll be quieter in your room. The noise here is splitting.” She gave a supercilious glance into the Square as she languidly rose.

  It was the morning of the third day of Bursley Wakes; not the mod ern finicking and respectable, but an orgiastic carnival, gross in all its manifestations of joy. The whole centre of the town was given over to the furious pleasures of the people. Most of the Square was occupied by Wombwell’s Menagerie, in a vast oblong tent, whose raging beasts roared and growled day and night. And spreading away from this supreme attraction, right up through the market-place past the Town Hall to Duck Bank, Duck Square and the waste land called the “playground” were hundreds of booths with banners displaying all the delights of the horrible. You could see the atrocities of the French Revolution, and of the Fiji Islands, and the ravages of unspeakable diseases, and the living flesh of a nearly nude human female guaranteed to turn the scale at twenty-two stone, and the skeletons of the mysterious phantoscope, and the bloody contests of champions naked to the waist (with the chance of picking up a red tooth as a relic). You could try your strength by hitting an image of a fellow-creature in the stomach, and test your aim by knocking off the heads of other images with a wooden ball. You could also shoot with rifles at various targets. All the streets were lined with stalls loaded with food in heaps, chiefly dried fish, the entrails of animals and gingerbread. All the public-houses were crammed and frenzied jolly drunkards, men and women, lounged along the pavements everywhere, their shouts vying with the trumpets, horns, and drums of the booths, and the shrieking, rattling toys that the children carried.

  It was a glorious spectacle, but not a spectacle for the leading families. Miss Chetwynd’s school was closed, so that the daughters of leading families might remain in seclusion till the worst was over. The Baineses ignored the Wakes in every possible way, choosing that week to have a show of mourning goods in the left-hand window, and refusing to let Maggie outside on any pretext. Therefore the dazzling social success of the elephant, which was quite easily drawing Mrs Baines into the vortex, cannot imaginably be overestimated.

  On the previous night one of the three Wombwell elephants had suddenly knelt on a man in the tent; he had then walked out of the tent and picked up another man at haphazard from the crowd which was staring at the great pictures in front, and tried to put this second man into his mouth. Being stopped by his Indian attendant with a pitchfork, he placed the man on the ground and stuck his tusk through an artery of the victim’s arm. He then, amid unexampled excitement, suffered himself to be led away. He was conducted to the rear of the tent, just in front of Baines’s shuttered windows, and by means of stakes, pulleys, and ropes forced to his knees. His head was whitewashed, and six men of the Rifle Corps were engaged to shoot at him at a distance of five yards, while constables kept the crowd off with truncheons. He died instantly, rolling over with a soft thud. The crowd cheered, and intoxicated by their importance, the Volunteers fired three more volleys into the carcase, and were then borne off as heroes to different inns. The elephant, by the help of his two companions, was got on to a railway lorry and disappeared into the night. Such was
the greatest sensation that has ever occurred, or perhaps will ever occur, in Bursley. The excitement about the repeal of the Corn Laws, or about Inkerman, was feeble compared to that excitement. Mr Critchlow, who had been called on to put a hasty tourniquet round the arm of the second victim, had popped in afterwards to tell John Baines all about it. Mr Baines’s interest, however, had been slight. Mr Critchlow succeeded better with the ladies, who, though they had witnessed the shooting from the drawing-room, were thirsty for the most trifling details.

  The next day it was known that the elephant lay near the playground, pending the decision of the Chief Bailiff and the Medical Officer as to his burial. And everybody had to visit the corpse. No social exclusiveness could withstand the seduction of that dead elephant. Pilgrims travelled from all the Five Towns to see him.

  “We’re going now,” said Mrs Baines, after she had assumed her bonnet and shawl.

  “All right,” said Sophia, pretending to be absorbed in study, as she sat on the sofa at the foot of her father’s bed.

  And Constance, having put her head in at the door, drew her mother after her like a magnet.

  Then Sophia heard a remarkable conversation in the passage.

  “Are you going up to see the elephant, Mrs Baines?” asked the voice of Mr Povey.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I think I had better come with you. The crowd is sure to be very rough.” Mr Povey’s tone was firm; he had a position.

  “But the shop?”

  “We shall not be long,” said Mr Povey.

  “Oh yes, mother,” Constance added appealingly.

  Sophia felt the house thrill as the side-door banged. She sprang up and watched the three cross King Street diagonally, and so plunge into the Wakes. This triple departure was surely the crowning tribute to the dead elephant! It was simply astonishing. It caused Sophia to perceive that she had miscalculated the importance of the elephant. It made her regret her scorn of the elephant as an attraction. She was left behind; and the joy of life was calling her. She could see down into the Vaults on the opposite side of the street, where working men—potters and colliers—in their best clothes, some with high hats, were drinking, gesticulating, and laughing in a row at a long counter.