“Sophia, you’ll take your death of cold standing there like that!”
She jumped. The voice was her mother’s. That vigorous woman, after a calm night by the side of the paralytic, was already up and neatly dressed. She carried a bottle and an egg-cup, and a small quantity of jam in a table-spoon.
“Get into bed again, do! There’s a dear! You’re shivering.”
White Sophia obeyed. It was true; she was shivering. Constance awoke. Mrs Baines went to the dressing-table and filled the egg-cup out of the bottle.
“Who’s that for, mother?” Constance asked sleepily.
“It’s for Sophia,” said Mrs Baines, with good cheer. “Now, Sophia!” and she advanced with the egg-cup in one hand and the table-spoon in the other.
“What is it, mother?” asked Sophia, who well knew what it was.
“Castor-oil, my dear,” said Mrs Baines, winningly.
The ludicrousness of attempting to cure obstinacy and yearnings for a freer life by means of castor-oil is perhaps less real than apparent. The strange interdependence of spirit and body, though only understood intelligently in these intelligent days, was guessed at by sensible medieval mothers. And certainly, at the period when Mrs Baines represented modernity, castor-oil was still the remedy of remedies. It had supplanted cupping. And, if part of its vogue was due to its extreme unpleasantness, it had at least proved its qualities in many a contest with disease. Less than two years previously old Dr Harrop (father of him who told Mrs Baines about Mrs Povey), being then aged eighty-six, had fallen from top to bottom of his staircase. He had scrambled up, taken a dose of castor-oil at once, and on the morrow was as well as if he had never seen a staircase. This episode was town property and had sunk deep into all hearts.
“I don’t want any, mother,” said Sophia, in dejection. “I’m quite well.”
“You simply ate nothing all day yesterday,” said Mrs Baines. And she added, “Come!” As if to say, “There’s always this silly fuss with castor-oil. Don’t keep me waiting.”
“I don’t want any,” said Sophia, irritated and captious.
The two girls lay side by side, on their backs. They seemed very thin and fragile in comparison with the solidity of their mother. Constance wisely held her peace.
Mrs Baines put her lips together, meaning: “This is becoming tedious. I shall have to be angry in another moment!”
“Come!” said she again.
The girls could hear her foot tapping on the floor.
“I really don’t want it, mamma,” Sophia fought. “I suppose I ought to know whether I need it or not!” This was insolence.
“Sophia, will you take this medicine, or won’t you?”
In conflicts with her children, the mother’s ultimatum always took the formula in which this phrase was cast. The girls knew, when things had arrived at the pitch of “or won’t you,” spoken in Mrs Baines’s firmest tone, that the end was upon them. Never had the ultimatum failed.
There was a silence.
“And I’ll thank you to mind your manners,” Mrs Baines added.
“I won’t take it,” said Sophia, sullenly and flatly; and she hid her face in the pillow.
It was a historic moment in the family life. Mrs Baines thought the last day had come. But still she held herself in dignity while the apocalypse roared in her ears.
“Of course I can’t force you to take it,” she said with superb evenness, masking anger by compassionate grief. “You’re a big girl and a naughty girl. And if you will be ill you must.”
Upon this immense admission, Mrs Baines departed.
Constance trembled.
Nor was that all. In the middle of the morning, when Mrs Baines was pricing new potatoes at a stall at the top end of the Square, and Constance choosing threepennyworth of flowers at the same stall, whom should they both see, walking all alone across the empty corner by the Bank, but Sophia Baines! The Square was busy and populous, and Sophia was only visible behind a foreground of restless, chattering figures. But she was unmistakably seen. She had been beyond the Square and was returning. Constance could scarcely believe her eyes. Mrs Baines’s heart jumped. For let it be said that the girls never under any circumstances went forth without permission, and scarcely ever alone. That Sophia should be at large in the town, without leave, without notice, exactly as if she were her own mistress, was a proposition which a day earlier had been inconceivable. Yet there she was, and moving with a leisureliness that must be described as effrontery!
Red with apprehension, Constance wondered what would happen. Mrs Baines said nought of her feelings, did not even indicate that she had seen the scandalous, the breath-taking sight. And they descended the Square laden with the lighter portions of what they had bought during an hour of buying. They went into the house by the King Street door; and the first thing they heard was the sound of the piano upstairs. Nothing happened. Mr Povey had his dinner alone; then the table was laid for them, and the bell rung, and Sophia came insolently downstairs to join her mother and sister. And nothing happened. The dinner was silently eaten, and Constance having rendered thanks to God, Sophia rose abruptly to go.
“Sophia!”
“Yes, mother.”
“Constance, stay where you are,” said Mrs Baines suddenly to Constance, who had meant to flee. Constance was therefore destined to be present at the happening, doubtless in order to emphasize its importance and seriousness.
“Sophia,” Mrs Baines resumed to her younger daughter in an ominous voice. “No, please shut the door. There is no reason why everybody in the house should hear. Come right into the room—right in! That’s it. Now, what were you doing out in the town this morning?”
Sophia was fidgeting nervously with the edge of her little black apron, and worrying a seam of the carpet with her toes. She bent her head towards her left shoulder, at first smiling vaguely. She said nothing, but every limb, every glance, every curve was speaking. Mrs Baines sat firmly in her own rocking-chair, full of the sensation that she had Sophia, as it were, writhing on the end of a skewer. Constance was braced into a moveless anguish.
“I will have an answer,” pursued Mrs Baines. “What were you doing out in the town this morning?”
“I just went out,” answered Sophia at length, still with eyes downcast, and in a rather simpering tone.
“Why did you go out? You said nothing to me about going out. I heard Constance ask you if you were coming with us to the market, and you said, very rudely, that you weren’t.”
“I didn’t say it rudely,” Sophia objected.
“Yes you did. And I’ll thank you not to answer back.”
“I didn’t mean to say it rudely, did I, Constance?” Sophia’s head turned sharply to her sister. Constance knew not where to look.
“Don’t answer back,” Mrs Baines repeated sternly. “And don’t try to drag Constance into this, for I won’t have it.”
“Oh, of course Constance is always right!” observed Sophia, with an irony whose unparalleled impudence shook Mrs Baines to her massive foundations.
“Do you want me to have to smack you, child?”
Her temper flashed out and you could see ringlets vibrating under the provocation of Sophia’s sauciness. Then Sophia’s lower lip began to fall and to bulge outwards, and all the muscles of her face seemed to slacken.
“You are a very naughty girl,” said Mrs Baines, with restraint. (“I’ve got her,” said Mrs Baines to herself. “I may just as well keep my temper.”)
And a sob broke out of Sophia. She was behaving like a little child. She bore no trace of the young maiden sedately crossing the Square without leave and without an escort.
(“I knew she was going to cry,” said Mrs Baines, breathing relief.)
“I’m waiting,” said Mrs Baines aloud.
A second sob. Mrs Baines manufactured patience to meet the demand.
“You tell me not to answer back, and then you say you’re waiting,” Sophia blubbered thickly.
“Wh
at’s that you say? How can I tell what you say if you talk like that?” (But Mrs Baines failed to hear out of discretion, which is better than valour.)
“It’s of no consequence,” Sophia blurted forth in a sob. She was weeping now, and tears were ricocheting off her lovely crimson cheeks on to the carpet; her whole body was trembling.
“Don’t be a great baby,” Mrs Baines enjoined, with a touch of rough persuasiveness in her voice.
“It’s you who make me cry,” said Sophia, bitterly. “You make me cry and then you call me a great baby!” And sobs ran through her frame like waves one after another. She spoke so indistinctly that her mother now really had some difficulty in catching her words.
“Sophia,” said Mrs Baines, with god-like calm, “it is not I who make you cry. It is your guilty conscience makes you cry. I have merely asked you a question, and I intend to have an answer.”
“I’ve told you.” Here Sophia checked the sobs with an immense effort.
“What have you told me?”
“I just went out.”
“I will have no trifling,” said Mrs Baines. “What did you go out for, and without telling me? If you had told me afterwards, when I came in, of your own accord, it might have been different. But no, not a word! It is I who have to ask! Now, quick! I can’t wait any longer.”
(“I gave way over the castor-oil, my girl,” Mrs Baines said in her own breast. “But not again! Not again!”)
“I don’t know,” Sophia murmured.
“What do you mean—you don’t know?”
The sobbing recommenced tempestuously. “I mean I don’t know. I just went out.” Her voice rose; it was noisy, but scarcely articulate. “What if I did go out?”
“Sophia, I am not going to be talked to like this. If you think because you’re leaving school you can do exactly as you like—”
“Do I want to leave school?” yelled Sophia, stamping. In a moment a hurricane of emotion overwhelmed her, as though that stamping of the foot had released the demons of the storm. Her face was transfigured by uncontrollable passion. “You all want to make me miserable!” she shrieked with terrible violence. “And now I can’t even go out! You are a horrid, cruel woman, and I hate you! And you can do what you like! Put me in prison if you like! I know you’d be glad if I was dead!”
She dashed from the room, banging the door with a shock that made the house rattle. And she had shouted so loud that she might have been heard in the shop, and even in the kitchen. It was a startling experience for Mrs Baines. Mrs Baines, why did you saddle yourself with a witness? Why did you so positively say that you had intended to have an answer?
“Really,” she stammered, pulling her dignity about her shoulders like a garment that the wind had snatched off, “I never dreamed that poor girl had such a dreadful temper! What a pity it is, for her own sake!” It was the best she could do.
Constance, who could not bear to witness her mother’s humiliation, vanished very quietly from the room. She got half-way upstairs to the second floor, and then, hearing the loud, rapid, painful, regular intake of sobbing breaths, she hesitated and crept down again.
This was Mrs Baines’s first costly experience of the child thankless for having been brought into the world. It robbed her of her profound, absolute belief in herself. She had thought she knew everything in her house and could do everything there. And lo! she had suddenly stumbled against an unsuspected personality at large in her house, a sort of hard marble affair that informed her by means of bumps that if she did not want to be hurt she must keep out of the way.
V
On the Sunday afternoon Mrs Baines was trying to repose a little in the drawing-room, where she had caused a fire to be lighted. Constance was in the adjacent bedroom with her father. Sophia lay between blankets in the room overhead with a feverish cold. This cold and her new dress were Mrs Baines’s sole consolation at the moment. She had prophesied a cold for Sophia, refuser of castor-oil, and it had come. Sophia had received, for standing in her nightdress at a draughty window of a May morning, what Mrs Baines called “nature’s slap in the face.” As for the dress, she had worshipped God in it, and prayed for Sophia in it, before dinner; and its four double rows of gimp on the skirt had been accounted a great success. With her lace-bordered mantle and her low, stringed bonnet she had assuredly given a unique lustre to the congregation at chapel. She was stout; but the fashions, prescribing vague outlines, broad downward slopes, and vast amplitudes, were favourable to her shape. It must not be supposed that stout women of a certain age never seek to seduce the eye and trouble the meditations of man by other than moral charms. Mrs Baines knew that she was comely, natty, imposing, and elegant; and the knowledge gave her real pleasure. She would look over her shoulder in the glass as anxious as a girl: make no mistake.
She did not repose; she could not. She sat thinking in exactly the same posture as Sophia’s two afternoons previously. She would have been surprised to hear that her attitude, bearing, and expression powerfully recalled those of her reprehensible daughter. But it was so. A good angel made her restless, and she went idly to the window and glanced upon the empty, shuttered Square. She too, majestic matron, had strange, brief yearnings for an existence more romantic than this; shootings across her spirit’s firmament of tailed comets; soft, inexplicable melancholies. The good angel, withdrawing her from such a mood, directed her gaze to a particular spot at the top of the Square.
She passed at once out of the room—not precisely in a hurry, yet without wasting time. In a recess under the stairs, immediately outside the door, was a box about a foot square and eighteen inches deep covered with black American cloth. She bent down and unlocked this box, which was padded within and contained the Baines silver tea-service. She drew from the box teapot, sugar-bowl, milk-jug, sugar-tongs, hot-water jug, and cake-stand (a flattish dish with an arching semicircular handle)—chased vessels, silver without and silver-gilt within; glittering heirlooms that shone in the dark corner like the secret pride of respectable families. These she put on a tray that always stood on end in the recess. Then she looked upwards through the banisters to the second floor.
“Maggie!” she piercingly whispered.
“Yes, mum,” came a voice.
“Are you dressed?”
“Yes, mum. I’m just coming.”
“Well, put on your muslin.” “Apron,” Mrs Baines implied.
Maggie understood.
“Take these for tea,” said Mrs Baines when Maggie descended. “Better rub them over. You know where the cake is—that new one. The best cups. And the silver spoons.”
They both heard a knock at the side door, far off, below.
“There!” exclaimed Mrs Baines. “Now take these right down into the kitchen before you open.”
“Yes, mum,” said Maggie, departing.
Mrs Baines was wearing a black alpaca apron. She removed it and put on another one of black satin embroidered with yellow flowers, which, by merely inserting her arm into the chamber, she had taken from off the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Then she fixed herself in the drawing-room.
Maggie returned, rather short of breath, convoying the visitor.
“Ah! Miss Chetwynd,” said Mrs Baines, rising to welcome. “I’m sure I’m delighted to see you. I saw you coming down the Square, and I said to myself, ‘Now, I do hope Miss Chetwynd isn’t going to forget us.’ ”
Miss Chetwynd, simpering momentarily, came forward with that self-conscious, slightly histrionic air, which is one of the penalties of pedagogy. She lived under the eyes of her pupils. Her life was one ceaseless effort to avoid doing anything which might influence her charges for evil or shock the natural sensitiveness of their parents. She had to wind her earthly way through a forest of the most delicate susceptibilities—fern-fronds that stretched across the path, and that she must not even accidentally disturb with her skirt as she passed. No wonder she walked mincingly! No wonder she had a habit of keeping her elbows close to her sides, and drawing her m
antle tight in the streets! Her prospectus talked about “a sound and religious course of training,” “study embracing the usual branches of English, with music by a talented master, drawing, dancing, and calisthenics.” Also “needlework plain and ornamental”; also “moral influence”; and finally about terms, “which are very moderate, and every particular, with reference to parents and others, furnished on application.” (Sometimes, too, without application.) As an illustration of the delicacy of fern-fronds, that single word “dancing” had nearly lost her Constance and Sophia seven years before!
She was a pinched virgin, aged forty, and not “well off”; in her family the gift of success had been monopolized by her elder sister. For these characteristics Mrs Baines, as a matron in easy circumstances, pitied Miss Chetwynd. On the other hand, Miss Chetwynd could choose ground from which to look down upon Mrs Baines, who after all was in trade. Miss Chetwynd had no trace of the local accent; she spoke with a southern refinement which the Five Towns, while making fun of it, envied. All her O’s had a genteel leaning towards “ow,” as ritualism leans towards Romanism. And she was the fount of etiquette, a wonder of correctness; in the eyes of her pupils’ parents not so much “a perfect lady” as “a perfect lady.” So that it was an extremely nice question whether, upon the whole, Mrs Baines secretly condescended to Miss Chetwynd or Miss Chetwynd to Mrs Baines. Perhaps Mrs Baines, by virtue of her wifehood, carried the day.
Miss Chetwynd, carefully and precisely seated, opened the conversation by explaining that even if Mrs Baines had not written she would have called in any case, as she made a practice of calling at the home of her pupils in vacation time: which was true. Mrs Baines, it should be stated, had on Friday afternoon sent to Miss Chetwynd one of her most luxurious notes—lavender-coloured paper with scalloped edges, the selectest mode of the day—to announce, in her Italian hand, that Constance and Sophia would both leave school at the end of next term, and giving reasons in regard to Sophia.
The Old Wives' Tale Page 10
