The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “I stayed in the town on purpose to go to a New Year’s party at Mr Lawton’s,” Mr Scales was saying.

  “Ah! So you know Lawyer Lawton!” observed Mrs Baines, impressed, for Lawyer Lawton did not consort with tradespeople. He was jolly with them, and he did their legal business for them, but he was not of them. His friends came from afar.

  “My people are old acquaintances of his,” said Mr Scales, sipping the milk which Maggie had brought.

  “Now, Mr Scales, you must taste my mince. A happy month for every tart you eat, you know,” Mrs Baines reminded him.

  He bowed. “And it was as I was coming away from there that I got into difficulties.” He laughed.

  Then he recounted the struggle, which had, however, been brief, as the assailants lacked pluck. He had slipped and fallen on his elbow on the kerb, and his elbow might have been broken, had not the snow been so thick. No, it did not hurt him now; doubtless a mere bruise. It was fortunate that the miscreants had not got the better of him, for he had in his pocket-book a considerable sum of money in notes—accounts paid! He had often thought what an excellent thing it would be if commercials could travel with dogs, particularly in winter. There was nothing like a dog.

  “You are fond of dogs?” asked Mr Povey, who had always had a secret but impracticable ambition to keep a dog.

  “Yes,” said Mr Scales, turning now to Mr Povey.

  “Keep one?” asked Mr Povey, in a sporting tone.

  “I have a fox-terrier bitch,” said Mr Scales, “that took a first at Knutsford; but she’s getting old now.”

  The sexual epithet fell queerly on the room. Mr Povey, being a man of the world, behaved as if nothing had happened; but Mrs Baines’s curls protested against this unnecessary coarseness. Constance pretended not to hear. Sophia did not understandingly hear. Mr Scales had no suspicion that he was transgressing a convention by virtue of which dogs have no sex. Further, he had no suspicion of the local fame of Mrs Baines’s mince-tarts. He had already eaten more mince-tarts than he could enjoy, before beginning upon hers, and Mrs Baines missed the enthusiasm to which she was habituated from consumers of her pastry.

  Mr Povey, fascinated, proceeded in the direction of dogs, and it grew more and more evident that Mr Scales, who went out to parties in evening dress, instead of going in respectable broad-cloth to watch-night services, who knew the great ones of the land, and who kept dogs of an inconvenient sex, was neither an ordinary commercial traveller nor the kind of man to which the Square was accustomed. He came from a different world.

  “Lawyer Lawton’s party broke up early—at least I mean, considering—” Mrs Baines hesitated.

  After a pause Mr Scales replied, “Yes, I left immediately the clock struck twelve. I’ve a heavy day tomorrow—I mean today.”

  It was not an hour for a prolonged visit, and in a few minutes Mr Scales was ready again to depart. He admitted a certain feebleness (“wankiness,” he playfully called it, being proud of his skill in the dialect), and a burning in his elbow; but otherwise he was quite well—thanks to Mrs Baines’s most kind hospitality . . . He really didn’t know how he came to be sitting on her doorstep. Mrs Baines urged him, if he met a policeman on his road to the Tiger, to furnish all particulars about the attempted highway robbery, and he said he decidedly would.

  He took his leave with distinguished courtliness.

  “If I have a moment I shall run in tomorrow morning just to let you know I’m all right,” said he, in the white street.

  “Oh, do!” said Constance. Constance’s perfect innocence made her strangely forward at times.

  “A happy New Year and many of them!”

  “Thanks! Same to you! Don’t get lost.”

  “Straight up the Square and first on the right,” called the commonsense of Mr Povey.

  Nothing else remained to say, and the visitor disappeared silently in the whirling snow. “Brrr!” murmured Mr Povey, shutting the door. Everybody felt: “What a funny ending of the old year!”

  “Sophia, my pet,” Mrs Baines began.

  But Sophia had vanished to bed.

  “Tell her about her new night-dress,” said Mrs Baines to Constance.

  “Yes, mother.”

  “I don’t know that I’m so set up with that young man, after all,” Mrs Baines reflected aloud.

  “Oh, mother!” Constance protested. “I think he’s just lovely.”

  “He never looks you straight in the face,” said Mrs Baines.

  “Don’t tell me!” laughed Constance, kissing her mother good night. “You’re only on your high horse because he didn’t praise your mince. I noticed it.”

  IV

  “If anybody thinks I’m going to stand the cold in this showroom any longer, they’re mistaken,” said Sophia the next morning loudly, and in her mother’s hearing. And she went down into the shop carrying bonnets.

  She pretended to be angry, but she was not. She felt, on the contrary, extremely joyous, and charitable to all the world. Usually she would take pains to keep out of the shop; usually she was preoccupied and stern. Hence her presence on the ground-floor, and her demeanour, excited interest among the three young lady assistants who sat sewing round the stove in the middle of the shop, sheltered by the great piles of shirtings and linseys that fronted the entrance.

  Sophia shared Constance’s corner. They had hot bricks under their feet, and fine-knitted wraps on their shoulders. They would have been more comfortable near the stove, but greatness has its penalties. The weather was exceptionally severe. The windows were thickly frosted over, so that Mr Povey’s art in dressing them was quite wasted. And—rare phenomenon!—the doors of the shop were shut. In the ordinary way they were not merely open, but hidden by a display of “cheap lines.” Mr Povey, after consulting Mrs Baines, had decided to close them, foregoing the customary display. Mr Povey had also, in order to get a little warmth into his limbs, personally assisted two casual labourers to scrape the thick frozen snow off the pavement; and he wore his kid mittens. All these things together proved better than the evidence of barometers how the weather nipped.

  Mr Scales came about ten o’clock. Instead of going to Mr Povey’s counter, he walked boldly to Constance’s corner, and looked over the boxes, smiling and saluting. Both the girls candidly delighted in his visit. Both blushed; both laughed—without knowing why they laughed. Mr Scales said he was just departing and had slipped in for a moment to thank all of them for their kindness of last night—“or rather this morning.” The girls laughed again at this witticism. Nothing could have been more simple than this speech. Yet it appeared to them magically attractive. A customer entered, a lady; one of the assistants rose from the neighbourhood of the stove, but the daughters of the house ignored the customer; it was part of the etiquette of the shop that customers, at any rate chance customers, should not exist for the daughters of the house, until an assistant had formally drawn attention to them. Otherwise every one who wanted a pennyworth of tape would be expecting to be served by Miss Baines, or Miss Sophia, if Miss Sophia were there. Which would have been ridiculous.

  Sophia, glancing sidelong, saw the assistant parleying with the customer; and then the assistant came softly behind the counter and approached the corner.

  “Miss Constance, can you spare a minute?” the assistant whispered discreetly.

  Constance extinguished her smile for Mr Scales, and, turning away, lighted an entirely different and inferior smile for the customer.

  “Good morning, Miss Baines. Very cold, isn’t it?”

  “Good morning, Mrs Chatterley. Yes, it is. I suppose you’re getting anxious about those—” Constance stopped.

  Sophia was now alone with Mr Scales, for in order to discuss the unnameable freely with Mrs Chatterley her sister was edging up the counter. Sophia had dreamed of a private conversation as something delicious and impossible. But chance had favoured her. She was alone with him. And his neat fair hair and his blue eyes and his delicate mouth were as wonderful to her as
ever. He was gentlemanly to a degree that impressed her more than anything had impressed her in her life. And all the proud and aristocratic instinct that was at the base of her character sprang up and seized on his gentlemanliness like a famished animal seizing on food.

  “The last time I saw you,” said Mr Scales, in a new tone, “you said you were never in the shop.”

  “What? Yesterday? Did I?”

  “No, I mean the last time I saw you alone,” said he.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “It’s just an accident.”

  “That’s exactly what you said last time.”

  “Is it?”

  Was it his manner, or what he said, that flattered her, that intensified her beautiful vivacity?

  “I suppose you don’t often go out?” he went on.

  “What? In this weather?”

  “Any time.”

  “I go to chapel,” said she, “and marketing with mother.” There was a little pause. “And to the Free Library.”

  “Oh yes. You’ve got a Free Library here now, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. We’ve had it over a year.”

  “And you belong to it? What do you read?”

  “Oh, stories, you know. I get a fresh book out once a week.”

  “Saturdays, I suppose?”

  “No,” she said. “Wednesdays.” And she smiled. “Usually.”

  “It’s Wednesday today,” said he. “Not been already?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think I shall go today. It’s too cold. I don’t think I shall venture out today.”

  “You must be very fond of reading,” said he.

  Then Mr Povey appeared, rubbing his mittened hands. And Mrs Chatterley went.

  “I’ll run and fetch mother,” said Constance.

  Mrs Baines was very polite to the young man. He related his interview with the police, whose opinion was that he had been attacked by stray members of a gang from Hanbridge. The young lady assistants, with ears cocked, gathered the nature of Mr Scales’s adventure, and were thrilled to the point of questioning Mr Povey about it after Mr Scales had gone. His farewell was marked by much handshaking, and finally Mr Povey ran after him into the Square to mention something about dogs.

  At half past one, while Mrs Baines was dozing after dinner, Sophia wrapped herself up, and with a book under her arm went forth into the world, through the shop. She returned in less than twenty minutes. But her mother had already awakened, and was hovering about the back of the shop. Mothers have supernatural gifts.

  Sophia nonchalantly passed her and hurried into the parlour, where she threw down her muff and a book and knelt before the fire to warm herself.

  Mrs Baines followed her. “Been, to the Library?” questioned Mrs Baines.

  “Yes, mother. And it’s simply perishing.”

  “I wonder at your going on a day like today. I thought you always went on Thursdays?”

  “So I do. But I’d finished my book.”

  “What is this?” Mrs Baines picked up the volume, which was covered with black oil-cloth.

  She picked it up with a hostile air. For her attitude towards the Free Library was obscurely inimical. She never read anything herself except The Sunday at Home, and Constance never read anything except The Sunday at Home. There were scriptural commentaries, Dugdale’s Gazetteer, Culpeper’s Herbal, and work by Bunyan and Flavius Josephus in the drawing-room bookcase; also Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And Mrs Baines, in considering the welfare of her daughters, looked askance at the whole remainder of printed literature. If the Free Library had not formed part of the Famous Wedgwood Institution, which had been opened with immense éclat by the semi-divine Gladstone; if the first book had not been ceremoniously “taken out” of the Free Library by the Chief Bailiff in person—a grandfather of stainless renown—Mrs Baines would probably have risked her authority in forbidding the Free Library.

  “You needn’t be afraid,” said Sophia, laughing. “It’s Miss Sewell’s Experience of Life.”

  “A novel, I see,” observed Mrs Baines, dropping the book.

  Gold and jewels would probably not tempt a Sophia of these days to read Experience of Life; but to Sophia Baines the bland story had the piquancy of the disapproved.

  The next day Mrs Baines summoned Sophia into her bedroom.

  “Sophia,” she said, trembling, “I shall be glad if you will not walk about the streets with young men until you have my permission.”

  The girl blushed violently. “I—I—”

  “You were seen in Wedgwood Street,” said Mrs Baines.

  “Who’s been gossiping—Mr Critchlow, I suppose?” Sophia exclaimed scornfully.

  “No one has been ‘gossiping,’ ” said Mrs Baines.

  “Well, if I meet someone by accident in the street, I can’t help it, can I?” Sophia’s voice shook.

  “You know what I mean, my child,” said Mrs Baines, with careful calm.

  Sophia dashed angrily from the room.

  “I like the idea of him having ‘a heavy day’!” Mrs Baines reflected ironically, recalling a phrase which had lodged in her mind. And very vaguely, with an uneasiness scarcely perceptible, she remembered that “he,” and no other, had been in the shop on the day her husband died.

  CHAPTER VI

  ESCAPADE

  I

  The uneasiness of Mrs Baines flowed and ebbed, during the next three months, influenced by Sophia’s moods. There were days when Sophia was the old Sophia—the forbidding, difficult, waspish, and even hedgehog Sophia. But there were other days on which Sophia seemed to be drawing joy and gaiety and good-will from some secret source, from some fount whose nature and origin none could divine. It was on these days that the uneasiness of Mrs Baines waxed. She had the wildest suspicions; she was almost capable of accusing Sophia of carrying on a clandestine correspondence; she saw Sophia and Gerald Scales deeply and wickedly in love; she saw them with their arms round each other’s necks . . . And then she called herself a middle-aged fool, to base such a structure of suspicion on a brief encounter in the street and on an idea, a fancy, a curious and irrational notion! Sophia had a certain streak of pure nobility in that exceedingly heterogeneous thing, her character. Moreover, Mrs Baines watched the posts, and she also watched Sophia—she was not the woman to trust to a streak of pure nobility—and she came to be sure that Sophia’s sinfulness, if any, was not such as could be weighed in a balance, or collected together by stealth and then suddenly placed before the girl on a charger.

  Still, she would have given much to see inside Sophia’s lovely head. Ah! Could she have done so, what sleep-destroying wonders she would have witnessed! By what bright lamps burning in what mysterious grottoes and caverns of the brain would her mature eyes have been dazzled! Sophia was living for months on the exhaustless ardent vitality absorbed during a magical two minutes in Wedgwood Street. She was living chiefly on the flaming fire struck in her soul by the shock of seeing Gerald Scales in the porch of the Wedgwood Institution as she came out of the Free Library with Experience of Life tucked into her large astrakhan muff. He had stayed to meet her, then: she knew it! “After all,” her heart said, “I must be very beautiful, for I have attracted the pearl of men!” And she remembered her face in the glass. The value and the power of beauty were tremendously proved to her. He, the great man of the world, the handsome and elegant man with a thousand strange friends and a thousand interests far remote from her, had remained in Bursley on the mere chance of meeting her! She was proud, but her pride was drowned in bliss. “I was just looking at this inscription about Mr Gladstone.” “So you decided to come out as usual!” “And may I ask what book you have chosen?” These were the phrases she heard, and to which she responded with similar phrases. And meanwhile a miracle of ecstasy had opened—opened like a flower. She was walking along Wedgwood Street, by his side slowly, on the scraped pavements, where marble bulbs of snow had defied the spade and remained. She and he were exactly of the same height, and she kept looking into his face an
d he into hers. This was all the miracle. Except that she was not walking on the pavement—she was walking on the intangible sward of paradise! Except that the houses had receded and faded, and the passers-by were subtilized into unnoticeable ghosts! Except that her mother and Constance had become phantasmal beings existing at an immense distance!

  What had happened? Nothing! The most commonplace occurrence! The eternal cause had picked up a commercial traveller (it might have been a clerk or curate, but it in fact was a commercial traveller), and endowed him with all the glorious, unique, incredible attributes of a god, and planted him down before Sophia in order to produce the eternal effect. A miracle performed specially for Sophia’s benefit! No one else in Wedgwood Street saw the god walking along by her side. No one else saw anything but a simple commercial traveller. Yes, the most commonplace occurrence!