The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  She was reassured to learn that he was not neglecting his duties. To be philandering with a commercial traveller who has finished a good day’s work seemed less shocking than dalliance with a neglecter of business; it seemed indeed, by comparison, respectable.

  “It must be very interesting,” she said primly.

  “What, my trade?”

  “Yes. Always seeing new places and so on.”

  “In a way it is,” he admitted judicially. “But I can tell you it was much more agreeable being in Paris.”

  “Oh! Have you been in Paris?”

  “Lived there for nearly two years,” he said carelessly. Then, looking at her, “Didn’t you notice I never came for a long time?”

  “I didn’t know you were in Paris,” she evaded him.

  “I went to start a sort of agency for Birkinshaws,” he said.

  “I suppose you talk French like anything.”

  “Of course one has to talk French,” said he. “I learnt French when I was a child from a governess—my uncle made me—but I forgot most of it at school, and at the Varsity you never learn anything—precious little, anyhow! Certainly not French!”

  She was deeply impressed. He was a much greater personage than she had guessed. It had never occurred to her that commercial travellers had to go to a university to finish their complex education. And then, Paris! Paris meant absolutely nothing to her but pure, impossible unattainable romance. And he had been there! The clouds of glory were around him. He was a hero, dazzling. He had come to her out of another world. He was her miracle. He was almost too miraculous to be true.

  She, living her humdrum life at the shop! And he, elegant, brilliant, coming from far cities! They together, side by side, strolling up the road towards the Moorthorn ridge! There was nothing quite like this in the stories of Miss Sewell.

  “Your uncle . . . ?” she questioned vaguely.

  “Yes, Mr Boldero. He’s a partner in Birkinshaws.”

  “Oh!”

  “You’ve heard of him? He’s a great Wesleyan.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “When we had the Wesleyan Conference here, he—”

  “He’s always very great at Conferences,” said Gerald Scales.

  “I didn’t know he had anything to do with Birkinshaws.”

  “He isn’t a working partner of course,” Mr Scales explained. “But he means me to be one. I have to learn the business from the bottom. So now you understand why I’m a traveller.”

  “I see,” she said, still more deeply impressed.

  “I’m an orphan,” said Gerald. “And Uncle Boldero took me in hand when I was three.”

  “I see!” she repeated.

  It seemed strange to her that Mr Scales should be a Wesleyan—just like herself. She would have been sure that he was “Church.” Her notions of Wesleyanism, with her notions of various other things, were sharply modified.

  “Now tell me about you,” Mr Scales suggested.

  “Oh! I’m nothing!” she burst out.

  The exclamation was perfectly sincere. Mr Scales’s disclosures concerning himself, while they excited her, discouraged her.

  “You’re the finest girl I’ve ever met, anyhow,” said Mr Scales with gallant emphasis, and he dug his stick into the soft ground.

  She blushed and made no answer.

  They walked on in silence, each wondering apprehensively what might happen next.

  Suddenly Mr Scales stopped at a dilapidated low brick wall, built in a circle, close to the side of the road.

  “I expect that’s an old pit-shaft,” said he.

  “Yes, I expect it is.”

  He picked up a rather large stone and approached the wall.

  “Be careful!” she enjoined him.

  “Oh! It’s all right,” he said lightly. “Let’s listen. Come near and listen.”

  She reluctantly obeyed, and he threw the stone over the dirty ruined wall, the top of which was about level with his hat. For two or three seconds there was no sound. Then a faint reverberation echoed from the depths of the shaft And on Sophia’s brain arose dreadful images of the ghosts of miners wandering for ever in subterranean passages, far, far beneath. The noise of the falling stone had awakened for her the secret terrors of the earth. She could scarcely even look at the wall without a spasm of fear.

  “How strange,” said Mr Scales, a little awe in his voice, too, “that that should be left there like that! I suppose it’s very deep.”

  “Some of them are,” she trembled.

  “I must just have a look,” he said, and put his hands on the top of the wall.

  “Come away!” she cried.

  “Oh! It’s all right!” he said again, soothingly. “The wall’s as firm as a rock.” And he took a slight spring and looked over.

  She shrieked loudly. She saw him at the distant bottom of the shaft, mangled, drowning. The ground seemed to quake under her feet. A horrible sickness seized her. And she shrieked again. Never had she guessed that existence could be such a pain.

  He slid down from the wall and turned to her. “No bottom to be seen!” he said. Then, observing her transformed face, he came close to her, with a superior masculine smile. “Silly little thing!” he said coaxingly, endearingly, putting forth all his power to charm.

  He perceived at once that he had miscalculated the effects of his action. Her alarm changed swiftly to angry offence. She drew back with a haughty gesture, as if he had intended actually to touch her. Did he suppose, because she chanced to be walking with him, that he had the right to address her familiarly, to tease her, to call her “silly little thing” and to put his face against hers? She resented his freedom with quick and passionate indignation.

  She showed him her proud back and nodding head and wrathful skirts; and hurried off without a word, almost running. As for him, he was so startled by unexpected phenomena that he did nothing for a moment—merely stood looking and feeling foolish.

  Then she heard him in pursuit. She was too proud to stop or even to reduce her speed.

  “I didn’t mean to—” he muttered behind her.

  No recognition from her.

  “I suppose I ought to apologize,” he said.

  “I should just think you ought,” she answered, furious.

  “Well, I do!” said he. “Do stop a minute.”

  “I’ll thank you not to follow me, Mr Scales.” She paused and scorched him with her displeasure. Then she went forward. And her heart was in torture because it could not persuade her to remain with him, and smile and forgive, and win his smile.

  “I shall write to you,” he shouted down the slope.

  She kept on, the ridiculous child. But the agony she had suffered as he clung to the frail wall was not ridiculous, nor her dark vision of the mine, nor her tremendous indignation when, after disobeying her, he forgot that she was a queen. To her the scene was sublimely tragic. Soon she had recrossed the bridge, but not the same she! So this was the end of the incredible adventure!

  When she reached the turnpike she thought of her mother and of Constance. She had completely forgotten them; for a space they had utterly ceased to exist for her.

  IV

  “You’ve been out, Sophia?” said Mrs Baines in the parlour, questioningly. Sophia had taken off her hat and mantle hurriedly in the cutting-out room, for she was in danger of being late for tea; but her hair and face showed traces of the March breeze. Mrs Baines, whose stoutness seemed to increase, sat in the rocking-chair with a number of The Sunday at Home in her hand. Tea was set.

  “Yes, mother. I called to see Miss Chetwynd.”

  “I wish you’d tell me when you are going out.”

  “I looked all over for you before I started.”

  “No, you didn’t, for I haven’t stirred from this room since four o’clock . . . You should not say things like that,” Mrs Baines added in a gentler tone.

  Mrs Baines had suffered much that day. She knew that she was in an irritable, nervous state, and therefore she
said to herself, in her quality of wise woman, “I must watch myself. I mustn’t let myself go.” And she thought how reasonable she was. She did not guess that all her gestures betrayed her; nor did it occur to her that few things are more galling than the spectacle of a person, actuated by lofty motives, obviously trying to be kind and patient under what he considers to be extreme provocation.

  Maggie blundered up the kitchen stairs with the teapot and hot toast; and so Sophia had an excuse for silence. Sophia too had suffered much, suffered excruciatingly; she carried at that moment a whole tragedy in her young soul, unaccustomed to such burdens. Her attitude towards her mother was half fearful and half defiant; it might be summed up in the phrase which she had repeated again and again under her breath on the way home, “Well, mother can’t kill me!”

  Mrs Baines put down the blue-covered magazine and twisted her rocking-chair towards the table.

  “You can pour out the tea,” said Mrs Baines.

  “Where’s Constance?”

  “She’s not very well. She’s lying down.”

  “Anything the matter with her?”

  “No.”

  This was inaccurate. Nearly everything was the matter with Constance, who had never been less Constance than during that afternoon. But Mrs Baines had no intention of discussing Constance’s love-affairs with Sophia. The less said to Sophia about love, the better! Sophia was excitable enough already!

  They sat opposite to each other, on either side of the fire—the monumental matron whose black bodice heavily overhung the table, whose large rounded face was creased and wrinkled by what seemed countless years of joy and disillusion; and the young, slim girl, so fresh, so virginal, so ignorant, with all the pathos of an unsuspecting victim about to be sacrificed to the minotaur of Time. They both ate hot toast, with careless haste, in silence, preoccupied, worried, and outwardly nonchalant.

  “And what has Miss Chetwynd got to say?” Mrs Baines inquired.

  “She wasn’t in.”

  Here was a blow for Mrs Baines, whose suspicions about Sophia, driven off by her certainties regarding Constance, suddenly sprang forward in her mind, and prowled to and fro like a band of tigers.

  Still, Mrs Baines was determined to be calm and careful. “Oh! What time did you call?”

  “I don’t know. About half-past four.” Sophia finished her tea quickly, and rose. “Shall I tell Mr Povey he can come?”

  (Mr Povey had his tea after the ladies of the house.)

  “Yes, if you will stay in the shop till I come. Light me the gas before you go.”

  Sophia took the wax taper from a vase on the mantelpiece, stuck it in the fire and lit the gas, which exploded in its crystal cloister with a mild report.

  “What’s all that clay on your boots, child?” asked Mrs Baines.

  “Clay?” repeated Sophia, staring foolishly at her boots.

  “Yes,” said Mrs Baines. “It looks like marl. Where on earth have you been?”

  She interrogated her daughter with an upward gaze, frigid and unconsciously hostile, through her gold-rimmed glasses.

  “I must have picked it up on the roads,” said Sophia, and hastened to the door.

  “Sophia!”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “Shut the door.”

  Sophia unwillingly shut the door which she had half opened.

  “Come here.”

  Sophia obeyed, with falling lip.

  “You are deceiving me, Sophia,” said Mrs Baines, with fierce solemnity. “Where have you been this afternoon?”

  Sophia’s foot was restless on the carpet behind the table. “I haven’t been anywhere,” she murmured glumly.

  “Have you seen young Scales?”

  “Yes,” said Sophia with grimness, glancing audaciously for an instant at her mother. (“She can’t kill me: She can’t kill me,” her heart muttered. And she had youth and beauty in her favour, while her mother was only a fat middle-aged woman. “She can’t kill me,” said her heart, with the trembling, cruel insolence of the mirror-flattered child.)

  “How came you to meet him?”

  No answer.

  “Sophia, you heard what I said!”

  Still no answer. Sophia looked down at the table. (“She can’t kill me.”)

  “If you are going to be sullen, I shall have to suppose the worst,” said Mrs Baines.

  Sophia kept her silence.

  “Of course,” Mrs Baines resumed, “if you choose to be wicked, neither your mother nor any one else can stop you. There are certain things I can do, and these I shall do . . . Let me warn you that young Scales is a thoroughly bad lot. I know all about him. He has been living a wild life abroad, and if it hadn’t been that his uncle is a partner in Birkinshaws, they would never have taken him on again.” A pause. “I hope that one day you will be a happy wife, but you are much too young yet to be meeting young men, and nothing would ever induce me to let you have anything to do with this Scales. I won’t have it. In future you are not to go out alone. You understand me?”

  Sophia kept silence.

  “I hope you will be in a better frame of mind tomorrow. I can only hope so. But if you aren’t, I shall take very severe measures. You think you can defy me. But you never were more mistaken in your life. I don’t want to see any more of you now. Go and tell Mr Povey; and call Maggie for the fresh tea. You make me almost glad that your father died even as he did. He has, at any rate, been spared this.”

  Those words “died even as he did” achieved the intimidation of Sophia. They seemed to indicate that Mrs Baines, though she had magnanimously never mentioned the subject to Sophia, knew exactly how the old man had died. Sophia escaped from the room in fear, cowed. Nevertheless, her thought was, “She hasn’t killed me. I made up my mind I wouldn’t talk, and I didn’t.”

  In the evening, as she sat in the shop primly and sternly sewing at hats—while her mother wept in secret on the first floor, and Constance remained hidden on the second—Sophia lived over again the scene at the old shaft; but she lived it differently, admitting that she had been wrong, guessing by instinct that she had shown a foolish mistrust of love. As she sat in the shop, she adopted just the right attitude and said just the right things. Instead of being a silly baby she was an accomplished and dazzling woman, then. When customers came in, and the young lady assistants unobtrusively turned higher the central gas, according to the régime of the shop, it was really extraordinary that they could not read in the heart of the beautiful Miss Baines the words which blazed there: “You’re the finest girl I ever met,” and “I shall write to you.” The young lady assistants had their notions as to both Constance and Sophia, but the truth, at least as regarded Sophia, was beyond the flight of their imaginations. When eight o’clock struck and she gave the formal order for dust-sheets, the shop being empty, they never supposed that she was dreaming about posts and plotting how to get hold of the morning’s letters before Mr Povey.

  CHAPTER VII

  A DEFEAT

  I

  It was during the month of June that Aunt Harriet came over from Axe to spend a few days with her little sister, Mrs Baines. The railway between Axe and the Five Towns had not yet been opened; but even if it had been opened Aunt Harriet would probably not have used it. She had always travelled from Axe to Bursley in the same vehicle, a small waggonette which she hired from Bratt’s livery stables at Axe, driven by a coachman who thoroughly understood the importance, and the peculiarities, of Aunt Harriet.

  Mrs Baines had increased in stoutness, so that now Aunt Harriet had very little advantage over her, physically. But the moral ascendancy of the elder still persisted. The two vast widows shared Mrs Baines’s bedroom, spending much of their time there in long, hushed conversations—interviews from which Mrs Baines emerged with the air of one who had received enlightenment and Aunt Harriet with the air of one who has rendered it. The pair went about together, in the shop, the showroom, the parlour, the kitchen, and also into the town, addressing each other as “
Sister,” “Sister.” Everywhere it was “sister,” “sister,” “my sister,” “your dear mother,” “your Aunt Harriet.” They referred to each other as oracular sources of wisdom and good taste. Respectability stalked abroad when they were afoot. The whole Square wriggled uneasily as though God’s eye were peculiarly upon it. The meals in the parlour became solemn collations, at which shone the best silver and the finest diaper, but from which gaiety and naturalness seemed to be banished. (I say “seemed” because it cannot be doubted that Aunt Harriet was natural, and there were moments when she possibly considered herself to be practising gaiety—a gaiety more desolating than her severity.) The younger generation was extinguished, pressed flat and lifeless under the ponderosity of the widows.

  Mr Povey was not the man to be easily flattened by ponderosity of any kind, and his suppression was a striking proof of the prowess of the widows; who, indeed, went over Mr Povey like traction-engines, with the sublime unconsciousness of traction-engines, leaving an inanimate object in the road behind them, and scarce aware even of the jolt. Mr Povey hated Aunt Harriet, but, lying crushed there in the road, how could he rebel? He felt all the time that Aunt Harriet was adding him up, and reporting the result at frequent intervals to Mrs Baines in the bedroom. He felt that she knew everything about him—even to those tears which had been in his eyes. He felt that he could hope to do nothing right for Aunt Harriet, that absolute perfection in the performance of duty would make no more impression on her than a caress on the fly-wheel of a traction-engine. Constance, the dear Constance, was also looked at askance. There was nothing in Aunt Harriet’s demeanour to her that you could take hold of, but there was emphatically something that you could not take hold of—a hint, an inkling, that insinuated to Constance, “Have a care, lest peradventure you become the second cousin of the scarlet woman.”

  Sophia was petted. Sophia was liable to be playfully tapped by Aunt Harriet’s thimble when Aunt Harriet was hemming dusters (for the elderly lady could lift a duster to her own dignity). Sophia was called on two separate occasions, “My little butterfly.” And Sophia was entrusted with the trimming of Aunt Harriet’s new summer bonnet. Aunt Harriet deemed that Sophia was looking pale. As the days passed, Sophia’s pallor was emphasized by Aunt Harriet until it developed into an article of faith, to which you were compelled to subscribe on pain of excommunication. Then dawned the day when Aunt Harriet said, staring at Sophia as an affectionate aunt may: “That child would do with a change.” And then there dawned another day when Aunt Harriet, staring at Sophia compassionately, as a devoted aunt may, said: “It’s a pity that child can’t have a change.” And Mrs Baines also stared and said: “It is.”