The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “Save me!” exclaimed Madame Foucault, sinking to the ground.

  The feeble theatricality of the gesture offended Sophia’s taste. She asked sternly what Madame Foucault expected her to do. Had not Madame Foucault knowingly exposed her, without the least warning, to the extreme annoyance of this visit of the law, a visit which meant practically that Sophia was put into the street?

  “You must not be hard!” Madame Foucault sobbed.

  Sophia learnt the complete history of the woman’s efforts to pay for the furniture: a farrago of folly and deceptions. Madame Foucault confessed too much. Sophia scorned confession for the sake of confession. She scorned the impulse which forces a weak creature to insist on its weakness, to revel in remorse, and to find an excuse for its conduct in the very fact that there is no excuse. She gathered that Madame Foucault had in fact gone away in the hope that Sophia, trapped, would pay; and that in the end, she had not even had the courage of her own trickery, and had run back, driven by panic into audacity, to fall at Sophia’s feet, lest Sophia might not have yielded and the furniture have been seized. From beginning to end the conduct of Madame Foucault had been fatuous and despicable and wicked. Sophia coldly condemned Madame Foucault for having allowed herself to be brought into the world with such a weak and maudlin character, and for having allowed herself to grow old and ugly. As a sight the woman was positively disgraceful.

  “Save me!” she exclaimed again. “I did what I could for you!”

  Sophia hated her. But the logic of the appeal was irresistible.

  “But what can I do?” she asked reluctantly.

  “Lend me the money. You can. If you don’t, this will be the end for me.”

  “And a good thing, too!” thought Sophia’s hard sense.

  “How much is it?” Sophia glumly asked.

  “It isn’t a thousand francs!” said Madame Foucault with eagerness. “All my beautiful furniture will go for less than a thousand francs! Save me!”

  She was nauseating Sophia.

  “Please rise,” said Sophia, her hands fidgeting undecidedly.

  “I shall repay you, surely!” Madame Foucault asseverated. “I swear!”

  “Does she take me for a fool?” thought Sophia, “with her oaths!”

  “No!” said Sophia. “I won’t lend you the money. But I tell you what I will do. I will buy the furniture at that price; and I will promise to resell it to you as soon as you can pay me. Like that, you can be tranquil. But I have very little money. I must have a guarantee. The furniture must be mine till you pay me.”

  “You are an angel of charity!” cried Madame Foucault, embracing Sophia’s skirts. “I will do whatever you wish. Ah! You Englishwomen are astonishing.”

  Sophia was not an angel of charity. What she had promised to do involved sacrifice and anxiety without the prospect of reward. But it was not charity. It was part of the price Sophia paid for the exercise of her logical faculty; she paid it unwillingly. “I did what I could for you!” Sophia would have died sooner than remind anyone of a benefit conferred, and Madame Foucault had committed precisely that enormity. The appeal was inexcusable to a fine mind; but it was effective.

  The men were behind the door, listening. Sophia paid out of her stock of notes. Needless to say, the total was more and not less than a thousand francs. Madame Foucault grew rapidly confidential with the man. Without consulting Sophia, she asked the bailiff to draw up a receipt transferring the ownership of all the furniture to Sophia; and the bailiff, struck into obligingness by glimpses of Sophia’s beauty, consented to do so. There was much conferring upon forms of words, and flourishing of pens between thick vile fingers, and scattering of ink.

  Before the men left Madame Foucault uncorked a bottle of wine for them, and helped them to drink it. Throughout the evening she was insupportably deferential to Sophia, who was driven to bed. Madame Foucault contentedly went up to the sixth floor to occupy the servant’s bedroom. She was glad to get so far away from the sulphur, of which a few faint fumes had penetrated into the corridor.

  The next morning, after a stifling night of bad dreams, Sophia was too ill to get up. She looked round at the furniture in the little room, and she imagined the furniture in the other rooms, and dismally thought: “All this furniture is mine. She will never pay me! I am saddled with it.”

  It was cheaply bought, but she probably could not sell it for even what she had paid. Still, the sense of ownership was reassuring.

  The charwoman brought her coffee, and Chirac’s newspaper; from which she learnt that the news of the victory which had sent the city mad on the previous day was utterly false. Tears came into her eyes as she gazed absently at all the curtained windows of the courtyard. She had youth and loveliness; according to the rules she ought to have been irresponsible, gay, and indulgently watched over by the wisdom of admiring age. But she felt towards the French nation as a mother might feel towards adorable, wilful children suffering through their own charming foolishness. She saw France personified in Chirac. How easily, despite his special knowledge, he had yielded to the fever! Her heart bled for France and Chirac on that morning of reaction and of truth. She could not bear to recall the scene in the Place de la Concorde. Madame Foucault had not descended.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE SIEGE

  I

  Madame Foucault came into Sophia’s room one afternoon with a peculiar guilty expression on her large face, and she held her peignoir close to her exuberant body in folds consciously majestic, as though endeavouring to prove to Sophia by her carriage that despite her shifting eyes she was the most righteous and sincere woman that ever lived.

  It was Saturday, the third of September, a beautiful day. Sophia, suffering from an unimportant relapse, had remained in a state of inactivity, and had scarcely gone out at all. She loathed the flat, but lacked the energy to leave it every day. There was no sufficiently definite object in leaving it. She could not go out and look for health as she might have looked for flowers. So she remained in the flat, and stared at the courtyard and the continual mystery of lives hidden behind curtains that occasionally moved. And the painted yellow walls of the house, and the papered walls of her room pressed upon her and crushed her. For a few days Chirac had called daily, animated by the most adorable solicitude. Then he had ceased to call. She had tired of reading the journals; they lay unopened. The relations between Madame Foucault and herself, and her status in the flat of which she now legally owned the furniture—these things were left unsettled. But the question of her board was arranged on the terms that she halved the cost of food and service with Madame Foucault; her expenses were thus reduced to the lowest possible—about eighteen francs a week. An idea hung in the air—like a scientific discovery on the point of being made by several independent investigators simultaneously—that she and Madame Foucault should co-operate in order to let furnished rooms at a remunerative profit. Sophia felt the nearness of the idea and she wanted to be shocked at the notion of any avowed association between herself and Madame Foucault; but she could not be.

  “Here are a lady and a gentleman who want a bedroom,” began Madame Foucault, “a nice large bedroom, furnished.”

  “Oh!” said Sophia; “who are they?”

  “They will pay a hundred and thirty francs a month, in advance, for the middle bedroom.”

  “You’ve shown it to them already?” said Sophia. And her tone implied that somehow she was conscious of a right to overlook the affairs of Madame Foucault.

  “No,” said the other. “I said to myself that first I would ask you for a counsel.”

  “Then will they pay all that for a room they haven’t seen?”

  “The fact is,” said Madame Foucault, sheepishly, “the lady has seen the room before. I know her a little. It is a former tenant. She lived here some weeks.”

  “In that room?”

  “Oh no! She was poor enough then.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In the corridor. She is very well
, the lady. Naturally one must live, she like all the world; but she is veritably well. Quite respectable! One would never say . . . Then there would be the meals. We could demand one franc for the café au lait, two and a half francs for the lunch, and three francs for the dinner. Without counting other things. That would mean over five hundred francs a month, at least. And what would they cost us? Almost nothing! By what appears, he is a plutocrat . . . I could thus quickly repay you.”

  “Is it a married couple?”

  “Ah! You know, one cannot demand the marriage certificate.” Madame Foucault indicated by a gesture that the Rue Bréda was not the paradise of saints.

  “When she came before, this lady, was it with the same man?” Sophia asked coldly.

  “Ah, my faith, no!” exclaimed Madame Foucault, bridling. “It was a bad sort, the other, a . . . ! Ah, no.”

  “Why do you ask my advice?” Sophia abruptly questioned, in a hard, inimical voice. “Is it that it concerns me?”

  Tears came at once into the eyes of Madame Foucault. “Do not be unkind,” she implored.

  “I’m not unkind,” said Sophia, in the same tone.

  “Shall you leave me if I accept this offer?”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes,” said Sophia, bluntly. She tried to be large-hearted, large-minded, and sympathetic; but there was no sign of these qualities in her speech.

  “And if you take with you the furniture which is yours . . . !”

  Sophia kept silence.

  “How am I to live, I demand of you?” Madame Foucault asked weakly.

  “By being respectable and dealing with respectable people!” said Sophia, uncompromisingly, in tones of steel.

  “I am unhappy!” murmured the elder woman. “However, you are more strong than I!”

  She brusquely dabbed her eyes, gave a little sob, and ran out of the room. Sophia listened at the door, and heard her dismiss the would-be tenants of the best bedroom. She wondered that she should possess such moral ascendancy over the woman, she so young and ingenuous! For, of course, she had not meant to remove the furniture. She could hear Madame Foucault sobbing quietly in one of the other rooms; and her lips curled.

  Before evening a truly astonishing event happened. Perceiving that Madame Foucault showed no signs of bestirring herself, Sophia, with good nature in her heart but not on her tongue, went to her, and said:

  “Shall I occupy myself with the dinner?”

  Madame Foucault sobbed more loudly.

  “That would be very amiable on your part,” Madame Foucault managed at last to reply, not very articulately.

  Sophia put a hat on and went to the grocer’s. The grocer, who kept a busy establishment at the corner of the Rue Clausel, was a middle-aged and wealthy man. He had sent his young wife and two children to Normandy until victory over the Prussians should be more assured, and he asked Sophia whether it was true that there was a good bedroom to let in the flat where she lived. His servant was ill of smallpox; he was attacked by anxieties and fears on all sides; he would not enter his own flat on account of possible infection; he liked Sophia, and Madame Foucault had been a customer of his, with intervals, for twenty years. Within an hour he had arranged to rent the middle bedroom at eighty francs a month, and to take his meals there. The terms were modest, but the respectability was prodigious. All the glory of this tenancy fell upon Sophia.

  Madame Foucault was deeply impressed. Characteristically she began at once to construct a theory that Sophia had only to walk out of the house in order to discover ideal tenants for the rooms. Also she regarded the advent of the grocer as a reward from Providence for her self-denial in refusing the profits of sinfulness. Sophia felt personally responsible to the grocer for his comfort, and so she herself undertook the preparation of the room. Madame Foucault was amazed at the thoroughness of her housewifery, and at the ingenuity of her ideas for the arrangement of furniture. She sat and watched with admiration sycophantic but real.

  That night, when Sophia was in bed, Madame Foucault came into the room, and dropped down by the side of the bed, and begged Sophia to be her moral support for ever. She confessed herself generally. She explained how she had always hated the negation of respectability; how respectability was the one thing that she had all her life passionately desired. She said that if Sophia would be her partner in the letting of furnished rooms to respectable persons, she would obey her in everything. She gave Sophia a list of all the traits in Sophia’s character which she admired. She asked Sophia to influence her, to stand by her. She insisted that she would sleep on the sixth floor in the servant’s tiny room; and she had a vision of three bedrooms let to successful tradesmen. She was in an ecstasy of repentance and good intentions.

  Sophia consented to the business proposition; for she had nothing else whatever in prospect, and she shared Madame Foucault’s rosy view about the remunerativeness of the bedrooms. With three tenants who took meals the two women would be able to feed themselves for nothing and still make a profit on the food; and the rents would be clear gain.

  And she felt very sorry for the ageing, feckless Madame Foucault, whose sincerity was obvious. The association between them would be strange; it would have been impossible to explain it to St Luke’s Square . . . And yet, if there was anything at all in the virtue of Christian charity, what could properly be urged against the association?

  “Ah!” murmured Madame Foucault, kissing Sophia’s hands, “it is today, then, that I recommence my life. You will see—you will see! You have saved me!”

  It was a strange sight, the time-worn, disfigured courtesan, half prostrate before the beautiful young creature proud and unassailable in the instinctive force of her own character. It was almost a didactic tableau, fraught with lessons for the vicious. Sophia was happier than she had been for years. She had a purpose in existence; she had a fluid soul to mould to her will according to her wisdom; and there was a large compassion to her credit. Public opinion could not intimidate her, for in her case there was no public opinion; she knew nobody; nobody had the right to question her doings.

  The next day, Sunday, they both worked hard at the bedrooms from early morning. The grocer was installed in his chamber, and the two other rooms were cleansed as they had never been cleansed. At four o’clock, the weather being more magnificent than ever, Madame Foucault said:

  “If we took a promenade on the boulevard?”

  Sophia reflected. They were partners. “Very well,” she agreed.

  The boulevard was crammed with gay, laughing crowds. All the cafés were full. None, who did not know, could have guessed that the news of Sedan was scarcely a day old in the capital. Delirious joy reigned in the glittering sunshine. As the two women strolled along, content with their industry and their resolves, they came to a National Guard, who, perched on a ladder, was chipping away the “N” from the official sign of a court-tradesman. He was exchanging jokes with a circle of open mouths. It was in this way that Madame Foucault and Sophia learnt of the establishment of a republic.

  “Vive la république!” cried Madame Foucault, incontinently, and then apologized to Sophia for the lapse.

  They listened a long while to a man who was telling strange histories of the Empress.

  Suddenly Sophia noticed that Madame Foucault was no longer at her elbow. She glanced about, and saw her in earnest conversation with a young man whose face seemed familiar. She remembered it was the young man with whom Madame Foucault had quarrelled on the night when Sophia found her prone in the corridor; the last remaining worshipper of the courtesan.

  The woman’s face was quite changed by her agitation. Sophia drew away, offended. She watched the pair from a distance for a few moments, and then, furious in disillusion, she escaped from the fever of the boulevards and walked quietly home. Madame Foucault did not return. Apparently Madame Foucault was doomed to be the toy of chance. Two days later Sophia received a scrawled letter from her, with the information that her lover had required that she should accom
pany him to Brussels, as Paris would soon be getting dangerous. “He adores me always. He is the most delicious boy. As I have always said, this is the grand passion of my life. I am happy. He would not permit me to come to you. He has spent two thousand francs on clothes for me, since naturally I had nothing.” And so on. No word of apology. Sophia, in reading the letter, allowed for a certain exaggeration and twisting of the truth.

  “Young fool! Fool!” she burst out angrily. She did not mean herself; she meant the fatuous adorer of that dilapidated, horrible woman. She never saw her again. Doubtless Madame Foucault fulfilled her own prediction as to her ultimate destiny, but in Brussels.

  II

  Sophia still possessed about a hundred pounds, and had she chosen to leave Paris and France, there was nothing to prevent her from doing so. Perhaps if she had chanced to visit the Gare St Lazare or the Gare du Nord, the sight of tens of thousands of people flying seawards might have stirred in her the desire to flee also from the vague coming danger. But she did not visit those termini; she was too busy looking after M. Niepce, her grocer. Moreover, she would not quit her furniture, which seemed to her to be a sort of rock. With a flat full of furniture she considered that she ought to be able to devise a livelihood; the enterprise of becoming independent was already indeed begun. She ardently wished to be independent, to utilize in her own behalf the gifts of organization, foresight, common sense, and tenacity which she knew she possessed and which had lain idle. And she hated the idea of flight.

  Chirac returned as unexpectedly as he had gone; an expedition for his paper had occupied him. With his lips he urged her to go, but his eyes spoke differently. He had, one afternoon, a mood of candid despair, such as he would have dared to show only to one in whom he felt great confidence. “They will come to Paris,” he said; “nothing can stop them. And . . . then . . . !” He gave a cynical laugh. But when he urged her to go she said: