The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  The stairs-door opened, and Mrs Baines appeared, in bonnet and furs and gloves, all clad for going out. She had abandoned the cocoon of crape, but still wore weeds. She was stouter than ever.

  “What!” she cried. “Not ready! Now really!”

  “Oh, mother! How you made me jump!” Constance protested. “What time is it? It surely isn’t time to go yet!”

  “Look at the clock!” said Mrs Baines, dryly.

  “Well, I never!” Constance murmured, confused.

  “Come, put your things together, and don’t keep me waiting,” said Mrs Baines, going past the table to the window, and lifting the blind to peep out. “Still snowing,” she observed. “Oh, the band’s going away at last! I wonder how they can play at all in this weather. By the way, what was that tune they gave us just now? I couldn’t make out whether it was ‘Redhead,’ or—”

  “Band?” questioned Constance—the simpleton!

  Neither she nor Mr Povey had heard the strains of the Bursley Town Silver Prize Band which had been enlivening the season according to its usual custom. These two practical, duteous, commonsense young and youngish persons had been so absorbed in their efforts for the welfare of the shop that they had positively not only forgotten the time, but had also failed to notice the band! But if Constance had had her wits about her she would at least have pretended that she had heard it.

  “What’s this?” asked Mrs Baines, bringing her vast form to the table and picking up a ticket.

  Mr Povey said nothing. Constance said: “Mr Povey thought of it today. Don’t you think it’s very good, mother?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” Mrs Baines coldly replied.

  She had mildly objected already to certain words; but “exquisite” seemed to her silly; it seemed out of place; she considered that it would merely bring ridicule on her shop. “Exquisite” written upon a window-ticket! No! What would John Baines have thought of “exquisite”?

  “ ‘Exquisite’!” She repeated the word with a sarcastic inflection, putting the accent, as every one put it, on the second syllable. “I don’t think that will quite do.”

  “But why not, mother?”

  “It’s not suitable, my dear.”

  She dropped the ticket from her gloved hand. Mr Povey had darkly flushed. Though he spoke little, he was as sensitive as he was obstinate. On this occasion he said nothing. He expressed his feelings by seizing the ticket and throwing it into the fire.

  The situation was extremely delicate. Priceless employees like Mr Povey cannot be treated as machines, and Mrs Baines of course instantly saw that tact was needed.

  “Go along to my bedroom and get ready, my pet,” said she to Constance. “Sophia is there. There’s a good fire. I must just speak to Maggie.” She tactfully left the room.

  Mr Povey glanced at the fire and the curling red remains of the ticket. Trade was bad; owing to weather and war, destitution was abroad; and he had been doing his utmost for the welfare of the shop; and here was the reward!

  Constance’s eyes were full of tears. “Never mind!” she murmured, and went upstairs.

  It was all over in a moment.

  II

  In the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel on Duck Bank there was a full and influential congregation. For in those days influential people were not merely content to live in the town where their fathers had lived, without dreaming of country residences and smokeless air—they were content also to believe what their fathers had believed about the beginning and end of all. There was no such thing as the unknowable in those days. The eternal mysteries were as simple as an addition sum; a child could tell you with absolute certainty where you would be and what you would be doing a million years hence, and exactly what God thought of you. Accordingly, every one being of the same mind, every one met on certain occasions in certain places in order to express the universal mind. And in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, for example, instead of a sparse handful of persons disturbingly conscious of being in a minority, as now, a magnificent and proud majority had collected, deeply aware of its rightness and its correctness.

  And the minister, backed by minor ministers, knelt and covered his face in the superb mahogany rostrum; and behind him, in what was then still called the “orchestra” (though no musical instruments except the grand organ had sounded in it for decades), the choir knelt and covered their faces; and all around, in the richly painted gallery and on the ground-floor, multitudinous rows of people, in easy circumstances of body and soul, knelt in high pews and covered their faces. And there floated before them, in the intense and prolonged silence, the clear vision of Jehovah on a throne, a God of sixty or so with a moustache and a beard, and a non-committal expression which declined to say whether or not he would require more bloodshed; and this God, destitute of pinions, was surrounded by white-winged creatures that wafted themselves to and fro while chanting; and afar off was an obscene monstrosity, with cloven hoofs and a tail, very dangerous and rude and interfering, who could exist comfortably in the middle of a coal-fire, and who took a malignant and exhaustless pleasure in coaxing you by false pretences into the same fire; but of course you had too much sense to swallow his wicked absurdities. Once a year, for ten minutes by the clock, you knelt thus, in mass, and by meditation convinced yourself that you had too much sense to swallow his wicked absurdities. And the hour was very solemn, the most solemn of all the hours.

  Strange that immortal souls should be found with the temerity to reflect upon mundane affairs in that hour! Yet there were undoubtedly such in the congregation; there were perhaps many to whom the vision, if clear, was spasmodic and fleeting. And among them the inhabitants of the Baines family pew! Who would have supposed that Mr Povey, a recent convert from Primitive Methodism in King Street to Wesleyan Methodism on Duck Bank, was dwelling upon window-tickets and the injustice of women, instead of upon his relations with Jehovah and the tailed one? Who would have supposed that the gentle-eyed Constance, pattern of daughters, was risking her eternal welfare by smiling at the tailed one, who, concealing his tail, had assumed the image of Mr Povey? Who would have supposed that Mrs Baines, instead of resolving that Jehovah and not the tailed one should have ultimate rule over her, was resolving that she and not Mr Povey should have ultimate rule over her house and shop? It was a pew-ful that belied its highly satisfactory appearance. (And possibly there were other pew-fuls equally deceptive.)

  Sophia alone, in the corner next to the wall, with her beautiful stern face pressed convulsively against her hands, was truly busy with immortal things. Turbulent heart, the violence of her spiritual life had made her older! Never was a passionate, proud girl in a harder case than Sophia! In the splendour of her remorse for a fatal forgetfulness, she had renounced that which she loved and thrown herself into that which she loathed. It was her nature so to do. She had done it haughtily, and not with kindness, but she had done it with the whole force of her will. Constance had been compelled to yield up to her the millinery department, for Sophia’s fingers had a gift of manipulating ribbons and feathers that was beyond Constance. Sophia had accomplished miracles in the millinery. Yes, and she would be utterly polite to customers; but afterwards, when the customers were gone, let mothers, sisters, and Mr Poveys beware of her fiery darts!

  But why, when nearly three months had elapsed after her father’s death, had she spent more and more time in the shop, secretly aflame with expectancy? Why, when one day a strange traveller entered the shop and announced himself the new representative of Birkinshaws—why had her very soul died away within her and an awful sickness seized her? She knew then that she had been her own deceiver. She recognized and admitted, abasing herself lower than the lowest, that her motive in leaving Miss Chetwynd’s and joining the shop had been, at the best, very mixed, very impure. Engaged at Miss Chetwynd’s, she might easily have never set eyes on Gerald Scales again. Employed in the shop, she could not fail to meet him. In this light was to be seen the true complexion of the splendour of her remorse. A terrible though
t for her! And she could not dismiss it. It contaminated her existence, this thought! And she could confide in no one. She was incapable of showing a wound. Quarter had succeeded quarter, and Gerald Scales was no more heard of. She had sacrificed her life for worse than nothing. She had made her own tragedy. She had killed her father, cheated and shamed herself with a remorse horribly spurious, exchanged content for misery and pride for humiliation—and with it all, Gerald Scales had vanished! She was ruined.

  She took to religion, and her conscientious Christian virtues, practised with stern inclemency, were the canker of the family. Thus a year and a half had passed.

  And then, on this last day of the year, the second year of her shame and of her heart’s widowhood, Mr Scales had reappeared. She had gone casually into the shop and found him talking to her mother and Mr Povey. He had come back to the provincial round and to her. She shook his hand and fled, because she could not have stayed. None had noticed her agitation, for she had held her body as in a vice. She knew the reason neither of his absence nor of his return. She knew nothing. And not a word had been said at meals. And the day had gone and the night come; and now she was in chapel, with Constance by her side and Gerald Scales in her soul! Happy beyond previous conception of happiness! Wretched beyond an unutterable woe! And none knew! What was she to pray for? To what purpose and end ought she to steel herself? Ought she to hope, or ought she to despair? “O God, help me!” she kept whispering to Jehovah whenever the heavenly vision shone through the wrack of her meditation. “O God, help me!” She had a conscience that, when it was in the mood for severity, could be unspeakably cruel to her.

  And whenever she looked, with dry, hot eyes, through her gloved fingers, she saw in front of her on the wall a marble tablet inscribed in gilt letters, the cenotaph! She knew all the lines by heart, in their spacious grandiloquence; lines such as:

  EVER READY WITH HIS TONGUE HIS PEN AND HIS PURSE

  TO HELP THE CHURCH OF HIS FATHERS

  IN HER HE LIVED AND IN HER HE DIED

  CHERISHING A DEEP AND ARDENT AFFECTION

  FOR HIS BELOVED FAITH AND CREED

  And again:

  HIS SYMPATHIES

  EXTENDED BEYOND HIS OWN COMMUNITY

  HE WAS ALWAYS TO THE FORE IN GOOD WORKS

  AND HE SERVED THE CIRCUIT THE TOWN AND THE

  DISTRICT WITH GREAT ACCEPTANCE AND USEFULNESS

  Thus had Mr Critchlow’s vanity been duly appeased.

  As the minutes sped in the breathing silence of the chapel the emotional tension grew tighter; worshippers sighed heavily, or called upon Jehovah for a sign, or merely coughed an invocation. And then at last the clock in the middle of the balcony gave forth the single stroke to which it was limited; the ministers rose, and the congregation after them; and everybody smiled as though it was the millennium, and not simply the new year, that had set in. Then, faintly, through walls and shut windows, came the sound of bells and of steam sirens and whistles. The superintendent minister opened his hymn-book, and the hymn was sung which had been sung in Wesleyan Chapels on New Year’s morn since the era of John Wesley himself. The organ finished with a clangour of all its pipes; the minister had a few last words with Jehovah, and nothing was left to do except to persevere in well-doing. The people leaned towards each other across the high backs of the pews.

  “A happy New Year!”

  “Eh, thank ye! The same to you!”

  “Another Watch-Night service over!”

  “Eh, yes!” And a sigh.

  Then the aisles were suddenly crowded, and there was a good-humoured, optimistic pushing towards the door. In the Corinthian porch occurred a great putting-on of cloaks, ulsters, goloshes, and even pattens, and a great putting-up of umbrellas. And the congregation went out into the whirling snow, dividing into several black, silent-footed processions, down Trafalgar Road, up towards the playground, along the marketplace, and across Duck Square in the direction of St Luke’s Square.

  Mr Povey was between Mrs Baines and Constance.

  “You must take my arm, my pet,” said Mrs Baines to Sophia.

  Then Mr Povey and Constance waded on in front through the drifts. Sophia balanced that enormous swaying mass, her mother. Owing to their hoops, she had much difficulty in keeping close to her. Mrs Baines laughed with the complacent ease of obesity, yet a fall would have been almost irremediable for her; and so Sophia had to laugh too. But, though she laughed, God had not helped her. She did not know where she was going, nor what might happen to her next.

  “Why, bless us!” exclaimed Mrs Baines, as they turned the corner into King Street. “There’s someone sitting on our doorstep!”

  There was: a figure swathed in an ulster, a maud over the ulster, and a high hat on the top of all. It could not have been there very long, because it was only speckled with snow. Mr Povey plunged forward.

  “It’s Mr Scales, of all people!” said Mr Povey.

  “Mr Scales!” cried Mrs Baines.

  And, “Mr Scales!” murmured Sophia, terribly afraid.

  Perhaps she was afraid of miracles. Mr Scales sitting on her mother’s doorstep in the middle of the snowy night had assuredly the air of a miracle, of something dreamed in a dream, of something pathetically and impossibly appropriate—“pat,” as they say in the Five Towns. But he was a tangible fact there. And years afterwards, in the light of further knowledge of Mr Scales, Sophia came to regard his being on the doorstep as the most natural and characteristic thing in the world. Real miracles never seem to be miracles, and that which at the first blush resembles one usually proves to be an instance of the extremely prosaic.

  III

  “Is that you, Mrs Baines?” asked Gerald Scales, in a half-witted voice, looking up, and then getting to his feet. “Is this your house? So it is! Well, I’d no idea I was sitting on your doorstep.”

  He smiled timidly, nay, sheepishly, while the women and Mr Povey surrounded him with their astonished faces under the light of the gas-lamp. Certainly he was very pale.

  “But whatever is the matter, Mr Scales?” Mrs Baines demanded in an anxious tone. “Are you ill? Have you been suddenly—”

  “Oh no,” said the young man lightly. “It’s nothing. Only I was set on just now, down there”—he pointed to the depths of King Street.

  “Set on!” Mrs Baines repeated, alarmed.

  “That makes the fourth case in a week, that we know of!” said Mr Povey. “It really is becoming a scandal.”

  The fact was that, owing to depression of trade, lack of employment, and rigorous weather, public security in the Five Towns was at that period not as perfect as it ought to have been. In the stress of hunger the lower classes were forgetting their manners—and this in spite of the altruistic and noble efforts of their social superiors to relieve the destitution due, of course, to short-sighted improvidence. When (the social superiors were asking in despair) will the lower classes learn to put by for a rainy day? (They might have said a snowy and a frosty day.) It was “really too bad” of the lower classes, when everything that could be done was being done for them, to kill, or even attempt to kill, the goose that lays the golden eggs! And especially in a respectable town! What, indeed, were things coming to? Well, here was Mr Gerald Scales, gentleman from Manchester, a witness and victim to the deplorable moral condition of the Five Towns. What would he think of the Five Towns? The evil and the danger had been a topic of discussion in the shop for a week past, and now it was brought home to them.

  “I hope you weren’t—” said Mrs Baines, apologetically and sympathetically.

  “Oh no!” Mr Scales interrupted her quite gaily. “I managed to beat them off. Only my elbow—”

  Meanwhile it was continuing to snow.

  “Do come in!” said Mrs Baines.

  “I couldn’t think of troubling you,” said Mr Scales. “I’m all right now, and I can find my way to the Tiger.”

  “You must come in, if it’s only for a minute,” said Mrs Baines, with decision. She had to think of
the honour of the town.

  “You’re very kind,” said Mr Scales.

  The door was suddenly opened from within, and Maggie surveyed them from the height of the two steps.

  “A happy New Year, mum, to all of you.”

  “Thank you, Maggie,” said Mrs Baines, and primly added: “The same to you!” And in her own mind she said that Maggie could best prove her desire for a happy new year by contriving in future not to “scamp her corners,” and not to break so much crockery.

  Sophia, scarce knowing what she did, mounted the steps.

  “Mr Scales ought to let our New Year in, my pet,” Mrs Baines stopped her.

  “Oh, of course, mother!” Sophia concurred with a gasp, springing back nervously.

  Mr Scales raised his hat, and duly let the new year, and much snow, into the Baines parlour. And there was a vast deal of stamping of feet, agitating of umbrellas, and shaking of cloaks and ulsters on the doormat in the corner by the harmonium. And Maggie took away an armful of everything snowy, including goloshes, and received instructions to boil milk and to bring “mince.” Mr Povey said “B-r-r-r!” and shut the door (which was bordered with felt to stop ventilation); Mrs Baines turned up the gas till it sang, and told Sophia to poke the fire, and actually told Constance to light the second gas.

  Excitement prevailed.

  The placidity of existence had been agreeably disturbed (yes, agreeably, in spite of horror at the attack on Mr Scales’s elbow) by an adventure. Moreover, Mr Scales proved to be in evening-dress. And nobody had ever worn evening-dress in that house before.

  Sophia’s blood was in her face, and it remained there, enhancing the vivid richness of her beauty. She was dizzy with a strange and disconcerting intoxication. She seemed to be in a world of unrealities and incredibilities. Her ears heard with indistinctness, and the edges of things and people had a prismatic colouring. She was in a state of ecstatic, unreasonable, inexplicable happiness. All her misery, doubts, despair, rancour, churlishness, had disappeared. She was as softly gentle as Constance. Her eyes were the eyes of a fawn, and her gestures delicious in their modest and sensitive grace. Constance was sitting on the sofa, and, after glancing about as if for shelter, she sat down on the sofa by Constance’s side. She tried not to stare at Mr Scales, but her gaze would not leave him. She was sure that he was the most perfect man in the world. A shortish man, perhaps, but a perfect. That such perfection could be was almost past her belief. He excelled all her dreams of the ideal man. His smile, his voice, his hand, his hair—never were such! Why, when he spoke—it was positively music! When he smiled—it was heaven! His smile, to Sophia, was one of those natural phenomena which are so lovely that they make you want to shed tears. There is no hyperbole in this description of Sophia’s sensation, but rather an understatement of them. She was utterly obsessed by the unique qualities of Mr Scales. Nothing would have persuaded her that the peer of Mr Scales existed among men, or could possibly exist. And it was her intense and profound conviction of his complete preeminence that gave him, as he sat there in the rocking-chair in her mother’s parlour, that air of the unreal and the incredible.