The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “Yes,” said Sophia. “You haven’t seen him for a long time, your sister told me?” Mr Boldero murmured, sympathetically.

  “Not since ’seventy,” said Sophia.

  “Eh, dear! Eh, dear!” ejaculated Mr Boldero. “I fear it’s been a sad business for ye, Mrs Scales. Not since ‘seventy!” He sighed. “You must take it as well as you can. I’m not one as talks much, but I sympathize with you. I do that! I wish my wife had been here to receive you.”

  Tears came into Sophia’s eyes.

  “Nay, nay!” he said. “You must bear up now!”

  “It’s you that make me cry,” said Sophia, gratefully. “You were very good to take him in. It must have been exceedingly trying for you.”

  “Oh,” he protested, “you mustn’t talk like that. I couldn’t leave a Boldero on the pavement, and an old man at that! . . . Oh, to think that if he’d only managed to please his uncle he might ha’ been one of the richest men in Lancashire. But then there’d ha’ been no Boldero Institute at Strangeways!” he added.

  They both sat silent a moment.

  “Will you come now? Or will you wait a bit?” asked Mr Boldero, gently. “Just as you wish. I’m sorry as my wife’s away, that I am!”

  “I’ll come now,” said Sophia, firmly. But she was stricken.

  He conducted her up a short, dark flight of stairs which gave on a passage, and at the end of the passage was a door ajar. He pushed the door open.

  “I’ll leave you for a moment,” he said, always in the same very restrained tone. “You’ll find me downstairs, there, if you want me.” And he moved away with hushed, deliberate tread.

  Sophia went into the room, of which the white blind was drawn. She appreciated Mr Boldero’s consideration in leaving her. She was trembling. But when she saw, in the pale gloom, the face of an aged man peeping out from under a white sheet on a naked mattress, she started back, trembling no more—rather transfixed into an absolute rigidity. That was no conventional, expected shock that she had received. It was a genuine unforeseen shock, the most violent that she had ever had. In her mind she had not pictured Gerald as a very old man. She knew that he was old; she had said to herself that he must be very old, well over seventy. But she had not pictured him. This face on the bed was painfully, pitiably old. A withered face, with the shiny skin all drawn into wrinkles! The stretched skin under the jaw was like the skin of a plucked fowl. The cheek-bones stood up, and below them were deep hollows, almost like egg-cups. A short, scraggy white beard covered the lower part of the face. The hair was scanty, irregular, and quite white; a little white hair grew in the ears. The shut mouth obviously hid toothless gums, for the lips were sucked in. The eyelids were as if pasted down over the eyes, fitting them like kid. All the skin was extremely pallid; it seemed brittle. The body, whose outlines were clear under the sheet, was very small, thin, shrunk, pitiable as the face. And on the face was a general expression of final fatigue, of tragic and acute exhaustion; such as made Sophia pleased that the fatigue and exhaustion had been assuaged in rest, while all the time she kept thinking to herself horribly: “Oh! how tired he must have been!”

  Sophia then experienced a pure and primitive emotion, uncoloured by any moral or religious quality. She was not sorry that Gerald had wasted his life, nor that he was a shame to his years and to her. The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young, and that he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that. Everything came to that. He had ill-treated her; he had abandoned her; he had been a devious rascal; but how trivial were such accusations against him! The whole of her huge and bitter grievance against him fell to pieces and crumbled. She saw him young, and proud, and strong, as for instance when he had kissed her lying on the bed in that London hotel—she forgot the name—in 1866; and now he was old, and worn, and horrible, and dead. It was the riddle of life that was puzzling and killing her. By the corner of her eye, reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe near the bed, she glimpsed a tall, forlorn woman, who had once been young and now was old; who had once exulted in abundant strength, and trodden proudly on the neck of circumstance, and now was old. He and she had once loved and burned and quarrelled in the glittering and scornful pride of youth. But time had worn them out. “Yet a little while,” she thought, “and I shall be lying on a bed like that! And what shall I have lived for? What is the meaning of it?” The riddle of life itself was killing her, and she seemed to drown in a sea of inexpressible sorrow.

  Her memory wandered hopelessly among those past years. She saw Chirac with his wistful smile. She saw him whipped over the roof of the Gare du Nord at the tail of a balloon. She saw old Niepce. She felt his lecherous arm round her. She was as old now as Niepce had been then. Could she excite lust now? Ah! the irony of such a question! To be young and seductive, to be able to kindle a man’s eye—that seemed to her the sole thing desirable. Once she had been so! . . . Niepce must certainly have been dead for years. Niepce, the obstinate and hopeful voluptuary, was nothing but a few bones in a coffin now!

  She was acquainted with affliction in that hour. All that she had previously suffered sank into insignificance by the side of that suffering.

  She turned to the veiled window and idly pulled the blind and looked out. Huge red and yellow cars were swimming in thunder along Deansgate; lorries jolted and rattled; the people of Manchester hurried along the pavements, apparently unconscious that all their doings were vain. Yesterday he too had been in Deansgate, hungry for life, hating the idea of death! What a figure he must have made! Her heart dissolved in pity for him. She dropped the blind.

  “My life has been too terrible!” she thought. “I wish I was dead. I have been through too much. It is monstrous, and I cannot stand it. I do not want to die, but I wish I was dead.”

  There was a discreet knock on the door.

  “Come in,” she said, in a calm, resigned, cheerful voice. The sound had recalled her with the swiftness of a miracle to the unconquerable dignity of human pride.

  Mr Till Boldero entered.

  “I should like you to come downstairs and drink a cup of tea,” he said. He was a marvel of tact and good nature. “My wife is unfortunately not here, and the house is rather at sixes and sevens; but I have sent out for some tea.”

  She followed him downstairs into the parlour. He poured out a cup of tea.

  “I was forgetting,” she said. “I am forbidden tea. I mustn’t drink it.”

  She looked at the cup, tremendously tempted. She longed for tea. An occasional transgression could not harm her. But no! She would not drink it

  “Then what can I get you?”

  “If I could have just milk and water,” she said meekly.

  Mr Boldero emptied the cup into the slop basin, and began to fill it again.

  “Did he tell you anything?” she asked, after a considerable silence.

  “Nothing,” said Mr Boldero in his low, soothing tones. “Nothing except that he had come from Liverpool. Judging from his shoes I should say he must have walked a good bit of the way.”

  “At his age!” murmured Sophia, touched.

  “Yes,” sighed Mr Boldero. “He must have been in great straits. You know, he could scarcely talk at all. By the way, here are his clothes. I have had them put aside.”

  Sophia saw a small pile of clothes on a chair. She examined the suit; which was still damp, and its woeful shabbiness pained her. The linen collar was nearly black, its stud of bone. As for the boots, she had noticed such boots on the feet of tramps. She wept now. These were the clothes of him who had once been a dandy living at the rate of fifty pounds a week.

  “No luggage or anything, of course?” she muttered.

  “No,” said Mr Boldero. “In the pockets there was nothing whatever but this.”

  He went to the mantelpiece and picked up a cheap, cracked letter case, which Sophia opened. In it were a visiting card—“Senorita Clemenzia Bo
rja”—and a bill-head of the Hotel of the Holy Spirit, Concepcion del Uruguay, on the back of which a lot of figures had been scrawled.

  “One would suppose,” said Mr Boldero, “that he had come from South America.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing.”

  Gerald’s soul had not been compelled to abandon much in the haste of its flight.

  A servant announced that Mrs Scales’s friends were waiting for her outside in the motor-car. Sophia glanced at Mr Till Boldero with an exacerbated anxiety on her face.

  “Surely they don’t expect me to go back with them tonight!” she said. “And look at all there is to be done!”

  Mr Till Boldero’s kindness was then redoubled. “You can do nothing for him now,” he said. “Tell me your wishes about the funeral. I will arrange everything. Go back to your sister tonight. She will be nervous about you. And return tomorrow or the day after . . . No! it’s no trouble, I assure you!”

  She yielded.

  Thus towards eight o’clock, when Sophia had eaten a little under Mr Boldero’s superintendence, and the pawnshop was shut up, the motor-car started again for Bursley, Lily Holl being beside her lover and Sophia alone in the body of the car. Sophia had told them nothing of the nature of her mission. She was incapable of talking to them. They saw that she was in a condition of serious mental disturbance. Under cover of the noise of the car, Lily said to Dick that she was sure Mrs Scales was ill, and Dick, putting his lips together, replied that he meant to be in King Street at nine-thirty at the latest. From time to time Lily surreptitiously glanced at Sophia—a glance of apprehensive inspection—or smiled at her silently; and Sophia vaguely responded to the smile.

  In half an hour they had escaped from the ring of Manchester and were on the county roads of Cheshire, polished, flat, sinuous. It was the season of the year when there is no night—only daylight and twilight; when the last silver of dusk remains obstinately visible for hours. And in the open country, under the melancholy arch of evening, the sadness of the earth seemed to possess Sophia anew. Only then did she realize the intensity of the ordeal through which she was passing.

  To the south of Congleton one of the tyres softened, immediately after Dick had lighted his lamps. He stopped the car and got down again. They were two miles from Astbury, the nearest village. He had just, with the resignation of experience, reached for the tool-bag, when Lily exclaimed: “Is she asleep, or what?” Sophia was not asleep, but she was apparently not conscious.

  It was a difficult and a trying situation for two lovers. Their voices changed momentarily to the tone of alarm and consternation, and then grew firm again. Sophia showed life but not reason. Lily could feel the poor old lady’s heart.

  “Well, there’s nothing for it!” said Dick, briefly, when all their efforts failed to rouse her.

  “What—shall you do?”

  “Go straight home as quick as I can on three tyres. We must get her over to this side, and you must hold her. Like that we shall keep the weight off the other side.”

  He pitched back the tool-bag into its box. Lily admired his decision.

  It was in this order, no longer under the spell of the changing beauty of nocturnal landscapes, that they finished the journey. Constance had opened the door before the car came to a stop in the gloom of King Street. The young people considered that she bore the shock well, though the carrying into the house of Sophia’s inert, twitching body, with its hat forlornly awry, was a sight to harrow a soul sturdier than Constance.

  When that was done, Dick said curtly: “I’m off. You stay here, of course.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Lily.

  “Doctor!” snapped Dick, hobbling rapidly down the steps.

  IV

  The extraordinary violence of the turn in affairs was what chiefly struck Constance, though it did not overwhelm her. Less than twelve hours before—nay, scarcely six hours before—she and Sophia had been living their placid and monotonous existence, undisturbed by anything worse then the indisposition or death of dogs, or the perversity of a servant. And now, the menacing Gerald Scales having reappeared, Sophia’s form lay mysterious and affrightening on the sofa; and she and Lily Holl, a girl whom she had not met till that day, were staring at Sophia side by side, intimately sharing the same alarm. Constance rose to the crisis. She no longer had Sophia’s energy and decisive peremptoriness to depend on, and the Baines in her was awakened. All her daily troubles sank away to their proper scale of unimportance. Neither the young woman nor the old one knew what to do. They could loosen clothes, vainly offer restoratives to the smitten mouth: that was all. Sophia was not unconscious, as could be judged from her eyes; but she could not speak, nor make signs; her body was frequently convulsed. So the two women waited, and the servant waited in the background. The sight of Sophia had effected an astonishing transformation in Maud. Maud was a changed girl. Constance could not recognize, in her eager deferential anxiety to be of use, the pert naughtiness of the minx. She was altered as a wanton of the middle ages would have been altered by some miraculous visitation. It might have been the turning point in Maud’s career!

  Dr Stirling arrived in less than ten minutes. Dick Povey had had the wit to look for him at the Federation meeting in the Town Hall. And the advent of the doctor and Dick, noisily, at break-neck speed in the car, provided a second sensation. The doctor inquired quickly what had occurred. Nobody could tell him anything. Constance had already confided to Lily Holl the reason of the visit to Manchester; but that was the extent of her knowledge. Not a single person in Bursley, except Sophia, knew what had happened in Manchester. But Constance conjectured that Gerald Scales was dead—or Sophia would never have returned so soon. Then the doctor suggested that on the contrary Gerald Scales might be out of danger. And all then pictured to themselves this troubling Gerald Scales, this dark and sinister husband that had caused such a violent upheaval.

  Meanwhile the doctor was at work. He sent Dick Povey to knock up Critchlow’s, if the shop should be closed, and obtain a drug. Then, after a time, he lifted Sophia, just as she was, like a bundle on his shoulder, and carried her single-handed upstairs to the second floor. He had recently been giving a course of instruction to enthusiasts of the St John Ambulance Association in Bursley. The feat had an air of the superhuman. Above all else it remained printed on Constance’s mind: the burly doctor treading delicately and carefully on the crooked, creaking stairs, his precautions against damaging Sophia by brusque contacts, his stumble at the two steps in the middle of the corridor; Sophia’s horribly limp head and loosened hair; and then the tender placing of her on the bed, and the doctor’s long breath and flourish of his large handkerchief—all that under the crude lights and shadows of gas-jets! The doctor was nonplussed. Constance gave a second-hand account of Sophia’s original attack in Paris, roughly as she had heard it from Sophia. He at once said that it could not have been what the French doctor had said it was. Constance shrugged her shoulders. She was not surprised. For her there was necessarily something of the charlatan about a French doctor. She said she only knew what Sophia had told her. After a time Dr Stirling determined to try electricity, and Dick Povey drove him up to the surgery to fetch his apparatus. The women were left alone again. Constance was very deeply impressed by Lily Holl’s sensible, sympathetic attitude. “Whatever I should have done without Miss Lily I don’t know!” she used to exclaim afterwards. Even Maud was beyond praise. It seemed to be the middle of the night when Dr Stirling came back, but it was barely eleven o’clock, and people were only just returning from Hanbridge Theatre and Hanbridge Music Hall. The use of the electrical apparatus was a dead spectacle. Sophia’s inertness under it was agonizing. They waited, as it were, breathless for the result. And there was no result. Both injections and electricity had entirely failed to influence the paralysis of Sophia’s mouth and throat. Everything had failed. “Nothing to do but wait a bit!” said the doctor quietly. They waited in the chamber. Sophia seemed to be in a kind o
f coma. The distortion of her handsome face was more marked as time passed. The doctor spoke now and then in a low voice. He said that the attack had ultimately been determined by cold produced by rapid motion in the automobile. Dick Povey whispered that he must run over to Hanbridge and let Lily’s parents know that there was no cause for alarm on her account, and that he would return at once. He was very devoted. On the landing outside the bed-room, the doctor murmured to him: “U.P.” And Dick nodded. They were great friends.

  At intervals the doctor, who never knew when he was beaten, essayed new methods of dealing with Sophia’s case. New symptoms followed. It was half-past twelve when, after gazing with prolonged intensity at the patient, and after having tested her mouth and heart, he rose slowly and looked at Constance.

  “It’s over?” said Constance.

  And he very slightly moved his head. “Come downstairs, please,” he enjoined her, in a pause that ensued. Constance was amazingly courageous. The doctor was very solemn and very kind; Constance had never before seen him to such heroic advantage. He led her with infinite gentleness out of the room. There was nothing to stay for; Sophia had gone. Constance wanted to stay by Sophia’s body; but it was the rule that the stricken should be led away, the doctor observed this classic rule, and Constance felt that he was right and that she must obey. Lily Holl followed. The servant, learning the truth by the intuition accorded to primitive natures, burst into loud sobs, yelling that Sophia had been the most excellent mistress that servant ever had. The doctor angrily told her not to stand blubbering there, but to go into her kitchen and shut the door if she couldn’t control herself. All his accumulated nervous agitation was discharged on Maud like a thunderclap. Constance continued to behave wonderfully. She was the admiration of the doctor and Lily Holl. Then Dick Povey came back. It was settled that Lily should pass the night with Constance. At last the doctor and Dick departed together, the doctor undertaking the mortuary arrangements. Maud was hunted to bed.