She noticed, while she was thus at the bedroom window, a young man ascending King Street, followed by a porter trundling a flat barrow of luggage. He passed slowly under the very window. She flushed. She had evidently been startled by the sight of this young man into no ordinary state of commotion. She glanced at the books on the sofa, and then at her father. Mr Baines, thin and gaunt, and acutely pitiable, still slept. His brain had almost ceased to be active now; he had to be fed and tended like a bearded baby, and he would sleep for hours at a stretch even in the daytime. Sophia left the room. A moment later she ran into the shop, an apparition that amazed the three young lady assistants. At the corner near the window on the fancy side a little nook had been formed by screening off a portion of the counter with large flower-boxes placed end-up. This corner had come to be known as “Miss Baines’s corner.” Sophia hastened to it, squeezing past a young lady assistant in the narrow space between the back of the counter and the shelf-lined wall. She sat down in Constance’s chair and pretended to look for something. She had examined herself in the cheval-glass in the showroom, on her way from the sick-chamber. When she heard a voice near the door of the shop asking first for Mr Povey and then for Mrs Baines, she rose, and seizing the object nearest to her, which happened to be a pair of scissors, she hurried towards the showroom stairs as though the scissors had been a grail, passionately sought and to be jealously hidden away. She wanted to stop and turn round, but something prevented her. She was at the end of the counter, under the curving stairs, when one of the assistants said:
“I suppose you don’t know when Mr Povey or your mother are likely to be back, Miss Sophia? Here’s—”
It was a divine release for Sophia.
“They’re—I—” she stammered, turning round abruptly. Luckily she was still sheltered behind the counter.
The young man whom she had seen in the street came boldly forward.
“Good morning, Miss Sophia,” said he, hat in hand. “It is a long time since I had the pleasure of seeing you.”
Never had she blushed as she blushed then. She scarcely knew what she was doing as she moved slowly towards her sister’s corner again, the young man following her on the customers’ side of the counter.
II
She knew that he was a traveller for the most renowned and gigantic of all Manchester wholesale firms—Birkinshaws. But she did not know his name, which was Gerald Scales. He was a rather short, but extremely well-proportioned man of thirty, with fair hair, and a distinguished appearance, as became a representative of Birkinshaw’s. His broad, tight necktie, with an edge of white collar showing above it, was particularly elegant. He had been on the road for Birkinshaws for several years; but Sophia had only seen him once before in her life, when she was a little girl, three years ago. The relations between the travellers of the great firms and their solid, sure clients in small towns were in those days often cordially intimate. The traveller came with the lustre of a historic reputation around him; there was no need to fawn for orders; and the client’s immense and immaculate respectability made him the equal of no matter what ambassador. It was a case of mutual esteem, and of that confidence-generating phenomenon, “an old account.” The tone in which a commercial traveller of middle age would utter the phrase “an old account” revealed in a flash all that was romantic, prim, and stately in mid-Victorian commerce. In the days of Baines, after one of the elaborately engraved advice-circulars had arrived (“Our Mr———will have the pleasure of waiting upon you on——day next, the———inst.”) John might in certain cases be expected to say, on the morning of——day, “Missis, what have ye gotten for supper tonight?”
Mr Gerald Scales had never been asked to supper; he had never even seen John Baines; but, as the youthful successor of an aged traveller who had had the pleasure of St Luke’s Square, on behalf of Birkinshaws, since before railways, Mrs Baines had treated him with a faint agreeable touch of maternal familiarity; and, both her daughters being once in the shop during his visit, she had on that occasion commanded the gawky girls to shake hands with him.
Sophia had never forgotten that glimpse. The young man without a name had lived in her mind, brightly glowing, as the very symbol and incarnation of the masculine and the elegant.
The renewed sight of him seemed to have wakened her out of a sleep. Assuredly she was not the same Sophia. As she sat in her sister’s chair in the corner, entrenched behind the perpendicular boxes, playing nervously with the scissors, her beautiful face was transfigured into the ravishingly angelic. It would have been impossible for Mr Gerald Scales, or anybody else, to credit, as he gazed at those lovely, sensitive, vivacious, responsive features, that Sophia was not a character of heavenly sweetness and perfection. She did not know what she was doing; she was nothing but the exquisite expression of a deep instinct to attract and charm. Her soul itself emanated from her in an atmosphere of allurement and acquiescence. Could those laughing lips hang in a heavy pout? Could that delicate and mild voice be harsh? Could those burning eyes be coldly inimical? Never! The idea was inconceivable! And Mr Gerald Scales, with his head over the top of the boxes, yielded to the spell. Remarkable that Mr Gerald Scales, with all his experience, should have had to come to Bursley to find the pearl, the paragon, the ideal! But so it was. They met in an equal abandonment; the only difference between them was that Mr Scales, by force of habit, kept his head.
“I see it’s your wakes here,” said he.
He was polite to the wakes; but now, with the least inflection in the world, he put the wakes at its proper level in the scheme of things as a local unimportance! She adored him for this; she was athirst for sympathy in the task of scorning everything local.
“I expect you didn’t know,” she said, implying that there was every reason why a man of his mundane interests should not know.
“I should have remembered if I had thought,” said he. “But I didn’t think. What’s this about an elephant?”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Have you heard of that?”
“My porter was full of it.”
“Well,” she said, “of course it’s a very big thing in Bursley.”
As she smiled in gentle pity of poor Bursley, he naturally did the same. And he thought how much more advanced and broad the younger generation was than the old! He would never have dared to express his real feelings about Bursley to Mrs Baines, or even to Mr Povey (who was, however, of no generation); yet here was a young woman actually sharing them.
She told him all the history of the elephant.
“Must have been very exciting,” he commented, despite himself.
“Do you know,” she replied, “it was.”
After all, Bursley was climbing in their opinion.
“And mother and my sister and Mr Povey have all gone to see it. That’s why they’re not here.”
That the elephant should have caused both Mr Povey and Mrs Baines to forget that the representative of Birkinshaws was due to call was indeed a final victory for the elephant.
“But not you!” he exclaimed.
“No,” she said. “Not me.”
“Why didn’t you go too?” He continued his flattering investigations with a generous smile.
“I simply didn’t care to,” said she, proudly nonchalant.
“And I suppose you are in charge here?”
“No,” she answered. “I just happened to have run down here for these scissors. That’s all.”
“I often see your sister,” said he. “ ‘Often’ do I say?—that is, generally, when I come; but never you.”
“I’m never in the shop,” she said. “It’s just an accident today.”
“Oh! So you leave the shop to your sister?”
“Yes.” She said nothing of her teaching.
Then there was a silence. Sophia was very thankful to be hidden from the curiosity of the shop. The shop could see nothing of her, and only the back of the young man; and the conversation had been conducted in low voices. She tapped her foot
, stared at the worn, polished surface of the counter, with the brass yard-measure nailed along its edge, and then she uneasily turned her gaze to the left and seemed to be examining the backs of the black bonnets which were perched on high stands in the great window. Then her eyes caught his for an important moment.
“Yes,” she breathed. Somebody had to say something. If the shop missed the murmur of their voices the shop would wonder what had happened to them.
Mr Scales looked at his watch. “I dare say if I come in again about two—” he began.
“Oh yes, they’re sure to be in then,” she burst out before he could finish his sentence.
He left abruptly, queerly, without shaking hands (but then it would have been difficult—she argued—for him to have put his arm over the boxes), and without expressing the hope of seeing her again. She peeped through the black bonnets, and saw the porter put the leather strap over his shoulders, raise the rear of the barrow, and trundle off; but she did not see Mr Scales. She was drunk; thoughts were tumbling about in her brain like cargo loose in a rolling ship. Her entire conception of herself was being altered; her attitude towards life was being altered. The thought which knocked hardest against its fellows was, “Only in these moments have I begun to live!”
And as she flitted upstairs to resume watch over her father she sought to devise an innocent-looking method by which she might see Mr Scales when he next called. And she speculated as to what his name was.
III
When Sophia arrived in the bedroom, she was startled because her father’s head and beard were not in their accustomed place on the pillow. She could only make out something vaguely unusual sloping off the side of the bed. A few seconds passed—not to be measured in time—and she saw that the upper part of his body had slipped down, and his head was hanging, inverted, near the floor between the bed and the ottoman. His face, neck, and hands were dark and congested; his mouth was open, and the tongue protruded between the black, swollen, mucous lips; his eyes were prominent and coldly staring. The fact was that Mr Baines had wakened up, and, being restless, had slid out partially from his bed and died of asphyxia. After having been unceasingly watched for fourteen years, he had, with an invalid’s natural perverseness, taken advantage of Sophia’s brief dereliction to expire. Say what you will, amid Sophia’s horror, and her terrible grief and shame, she had visitings of the idea: he did it on purpose!
She ran out of the room, knowing by intuition that he was dead, and shrieked out, “Maggie,” at the top of her voice; the house echoed.
“Yes, miss,” said Maggie, quite close, coming out of Mr Povey’s chamber with a slop-pail.
“Fetch Mr Critchlow at once. Be quick. Just as you are. It’s father—”
Maggie, perceiving darkly that disaster was in the air, and instantly filled with importance and a sort of black joy, dropped her pail in the exact middle of the passage, and almost fell down the crooked stairs. One of Maggie’s deepest instincts, always held in check by the stern dominance of Mrs Baines, was to leave pails prominent on the main routes of the house; and now, divining what was at hand, it flamed into insurrection.
No sleepless night had ever been so long to Sophia as the three minutes which elapsed before Mr Critchlow came. As she stood on the mat outside the bedroom door she tried to draw her mother and Constance and Mr Povey by magnetic force out of the wakes into the house, and her muscles were contracted in the strange effort. She felt that it was impossible to continue living if the secret of the bedroom remained unknown one instant longer, so intense was her torture, and yet that the torture which could not be borne must be borne. Not a sound in the house! Not a sound from the shop! Only the distant murmur of the wakes!
“Why did I forget father?” she asked herself with awe. “I only meant to tell him that they were all out, and run back. Why did I forget father?” She would never be able to persuade anybody that she had literally forgotten her father’s existence for quite ten minutes; but it was true, though shocking.
Then there were noises downstairs.
“Bless us! Bless us!” came the unpleasant voice of Mr Critchlow as he bounded up the stairs on his long legs; he strode over the pail. “What’s amiss?” He was wearing his white apron, and he carried his spectacles in his bony hand.
“It’s father—he’s—” Sophia faltered.
She stood away so that he should enter the room first. He glanced at her keenly, and as it were resentfully, and went in. She followed, timidly, remaining near the door while Mr Critchlow inspected her handiwork. He put on his spectacles with strange deliberation, and then, bending his knees outwards, thus lowered his body so that he could examine John Baines point-blank. He remained staring like this, his hands on his sharp apron-covered knees, for a little space; and then he seized the inert mass and restored it to the bed, and wiped those clotted lips with his apron.
Sophia heard loud breathing behind her. It was Maggie. She heard a huge, snorting sob; Maggie was showing her emotion.
“Go fetch doctor!” Mr Critchlow rasped. “And don’t stand gaping there!”
“Run for the doctor, Maggie,” said Sophia.
“How came ye to let him fall?” Mr Critchlow demanded.
“I was out of the room. I just ran down into the shop—”
“Gallivanting with that young Scales!” said Mr Critchlow, with devilish ferocity. “Well, you’ve killed yer father; that’s all!”
He must have been at his shop door and seen the entry of the traveller! And it was precisely characteristic of Mr Critchlow to jump in the dark at a horrible conclusion, and to be right after all. For Sophia Mr Critchlow had always been the personification of malignity and malevolence, and now these qualities in him made him, to her, almost obscene. Her pride brought up tremendous reinforcements, and she approached the bed.
“Is he dead?” she asked in a quiet tone. (Somewhere within a voice was whispering, “So his name is Scales.”)
“Don’t I tell you he’s dead?”
“Pail on the stairs!”
This mild exclamation came from the passage. Mrs Baines, misliking the crowds abroad, had returned alone; she had left Constance in charge of Mr Povey. Coming into her house by the shop and showroom, she had first noted the phenomenon of the pail—proof of her theory of Maggie’s incurable untidiness.
“Been to see the elephant, I reckon!” said Mr Critchlow, in fierce sarcasm, as he recognized Mrs Baines’s voice.
Sophia leaped towards the door, as though to bar her mother’s entrance. But Mrs Baines was already opening the door.
“Well, my pet—” she was beginning cheerfully.
Mr Critchlow confronted her. And he had no more pity for the wife than for the daughter. He was furiously angry because his precious property had been irretrievably damaged by the momentary carelessness of a silly girl. Yes, John Baines was his property, his dearest toy! He was convinced that he alone had kept John Baines alive for fourteen years, that he alone had fully understood the case and sympathized with the sufferer, that none but he had been capable of displaying ordinary common sense in the sick-room. He had learned to regard John Baines as, in some sort, his creation. And now, with their stupidity, their neglect, their elephants, between them they had done for John Baines. He had always known it would come to that, and it had come to that.
“She let him fall out o’bed, and ye’re a widow now, missus!” he announced with a virulence hardly conceivable. His angular features and dark eyes expressed a murderous hate for every woman named Baines.
“Mother!” cried Sophia, “I only ran down into the shop to—to—”
She seized her mother’s arm in frenzied agony.
“My child!” said Mrs Baines, rising miraculously to the situation with a calm benevolence of tone and gesture that remained for ever sublime in the stormy heart of Sophia, “do not hold me.” With infinite gentleness she loosed herself from these clasping hands. “Have you sent for the doctor?” she questioned Mr Critchlow.
The
fate of her husband presented no mysteries to Mrs Baines. Everybody had been warned a thousand times of the danger of leaving the paralytic, whose life depended on his position, and whose fidgetiness was thereby a constant menace of death to him. For five thousand nights she had wakened infallibly every time he stirred, and rearranged him by the flicker of a little oil lamp. But Sophia, unhappy creature, had merely left him. That was all.
Mr Critchlow and the widow gazed, helplessly waiting, at the pitiable corpse, of which the salient part was the white beard. They knew not that they were gazing at a vanished era. John Baines had belonged to the past, to the age when men really did think of their souls, when orators by phrases could move crowds to fury or to pity, when no one had learnt to hurry, when Demos was only turning in his sleep, when the sole beauty of life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when hell really had no bottom, and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the secret of England’s greatness. Mid-Victorian England lay on that mahogany bed. Ideals had passed away with John Baines. It is thus that ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly, while one’s head is turned—
And Mr Povey and Constance, very self-conscious, went and saw the dead elephant, and came back; and at the corner of King Street, Constance exclaimed brightly—
“Why! who’s gone out and left the side-door open?”
For the doctor had at length arrived, and Maggie, in showing him upstairs with pious haste, had forgotten to shut the door.
And they took advantage of the side-door, rather guiltily, to avoid the eyes of the shop. They feared that in the parlour they would be the centre of a curiosity half ironical and half reproving; for had they not accomplished an escapade? So they walked slowly.
The Old Wives' Tale Page 12