The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “Of course Maggie is at the top of the house!” she muttered sarcastically.

  She unchained, unbolted, and unlocked the side-door.

  “At last!” It was Aunt Harriet’s voice, exacerbated. “What! You, sister? You’re soon up. What a blessing!”

  The two majestic and imposing creatures met on the mat, craning forward so that their lips might meet above their terrific bosoms.

  “What’s the matter?” Mrs Baines asked, fearfully.

  “Well, I do declare!” said Mrs Maddack. “And I’ve driven specially over to ask you!”

  “Where’s Sophia?” demanded Mrs Baines.

  “You don’t mean to say she’s not come, sister?” Mrs Maddack sank down on to the sofa.

  “Come?” Mrs Baines repeated. “Of course she’s not come! What do you mean, sister?”

  “The very moment she got Constance’s letter yesterday, saying you were ill in bed and she’d better come over to help in the shop, she started. I got Bratt’s dog-cart for her.”

  Mrs Baines in her turn also sank down on to the sofa.

  “I’ve not been ill,” she said. “And Constance hasn’t written for a week! Only yesterday I was telling her—”

  “Sister—it can’t be! Sophia had letters from Constance every morning. At least she said they were from Constance. I told her to be sure and write me how you were last night, and she promised faithfully she would. And it was because I got nothing by this morning’s post that I decided to come over myself, to see if it was anything serious.”

  “Serious it is!” murmured Mrs Baines.

  “What—”

  “Sophia’s run off. That’s the plain English of it!” said Mrs Baines with frigid calm.

  “Nay! That I’ll never believe. I’ve looked after Sophia night and day as if she was my own, and—”

  “If she hasn’t run off, where is she?”

  Mrs Maddack opened the door with a tragic gesture.

  “Bladen,” she called in a loud voice to the driver of the waggonette, who was standing on the pavement.

  “Yes’m.”

  “It was Pember drove Miss Sophia yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes’m.’

  She hesitated. A clumsy question might enlighten a member of the class which ought never to be enlightened about one’s private affairs.

  “He didn’t come all the way here?”

  “No’m. He happened to say last night when he got back as Miss Sophia had told him to set her down at Knype Station.”

  “I thought so!” said Mrs Maddack, courageously.

  “Yes’m.”

  “Sister!” she moaned, after carefully shutting the door. They clung to each other.

  The horror of what had occurred did not instantly take full possession of them, because the power of credence, of imaginatively realizing a supreme event, whether of great grief or of great happiness, is ridiculously finite. But every minute the horror grew more clear, more intense, more tragically dominant over them. There were many things that they could not say to each other—from pride, from shame, from the inadequacy of words. Neither could utter the name of Gerald Scales. And Aunt Harriet could not stoop to defend herself from a possible charge of neglect; nor could Mrs Baines stoop to assure her sister that she was incapable of preferring such a charge. And the sheer, immense criminal folly of Sophia could not even be referred to: it was unspeakable. So the interview proceeded, lamely, clumsily, inconsequently, leading to naught.

  Sophia was gone. She was gone with Gerald Scales. That beautiful child, that incalculable, untamable, impossible creature, had committed the final folly; without pretext or excuse, and with what elaborate deceit! Yes, without excuse! She had not been treated harshly; she had had a degree of liberty which would have astounded and shocked her grandmothers; she had been petted, humoured, spoilt. And her answer was to disgrace the family by an act as irrevocable as it was utterly vicious. If among her desires was the desire to humiliate those majesties, her mother and Aunt Harriet, she would have been content could she have seen them on the sofa there, humbled, shamed, mortally wounded! Ah, the monstrous Chinese cruelty of youth!

  What was to be done? Tell dear Constance? No, this was not, at the moment, an affair for the younger generation. It was too new and raw for the younger generation. Moreover, capable, proud, and experienced as they were, they felt the need of a man’s voice, and a man’s hard, callous ideas. It was a case for Mr Critchlow. Maggie was sent to fetch him, with a particular request that he should come to the side-door. He came expectant, with the pleasurable anticipation of disaster, and he was not disappointed. He passed with the sisters the happiest hour that had fallen to him for years. Quickly he arranged the alternatives for them. Would they tell the police, or would they take the risks of waiting? They shied away, but with fierce brutality he brought them again and again to the immediate point of decision . . . Well, they could not tell the police! They simply could not . . . Then they must face another danger . . . He had no mercy for them. And while he was torturing them there arrived a telegram, despatched from Charing Cross, “I am all right, Sophia.” That proved, at any rate, that the child was not heartless, not merely careless.

  Only yesterday, it seemed to Mrs Baines, she had borne Sophia; only yesterday she was a baby, a schoolgirl to be smacked. The years rolled up in a few hours. And now she was sending telegrams from a place called Charing Cross! How unlike was the hand of the telegram to Sophia’s hand! How mysteriously curt and inhuman was that official hand, as Mrs Baines stared at it through red, wet eyes!

  Mr Critchlow said someone should go to Manchester, to ascertain about Scales. He went himself, that afternoon, and returned with the news that an aunt of Scales had recently died, leaving him twelve thousand pounds, and that he had, after quarrelling with his uncle Boldero, abandoned Birkinshaws at an hour’s notice and vanished with his inheritance.

  “It’s as plain as a pikestaff,” said Mr Critchlow. “I could ha’ warned ye o’ all this years ago, ever since she killed her father!”

  Mr Critchlow left nothing unsaid.

  During the night Mrs Baines lived through all Sophia’s life, lived through it more intensely than ever Sophia had done.

  The next day people began to know. A whisper almost inaudible went across the Square, and into the town: and in the stillness everyone heard it. “Sophia Baines run off with a commercial!”

  In another fortnight a note came, also dated from London.

  “Dear Mother, I am married to Gerald Scales. Please don’t worry about me. We are going abroad. Your affectionate Sophia. Love to Constance.” No tear-stains on that pale blue sheet! No sign of agitation!

  And Mrs Baines said: “My life is over.” It was, though she was scarcely fifty. She felt old, old and beaten. She had fought and been vanquished. The everlasting purpose had been too much for her. Virtue had gone out of her—the virtue to hold up her head and look the Square in the face. She, the wife of John Baines! She, a Syme of Axe!

  Old houses, in the course of their history, see sad sights, and never forget them! And ever since, in the solemn physiognomy of the triple house of John Baines at the corner of St Luke’s Square and King Street, have remained the traces of the sight it saw on the morning of the afternoon when Mr and Mrs Povey returned from their honeymoon—the sight of Mrs Baines getting into the waggonette for Axe; Mrs Baines, encumbered with trunks and parcels, leaving the scene of her struggles and her defeat, whither she had once come as slim as a wand, to return stout and heavy, and heavy-hearted, to her childhood; content to live with her grandiose sister until such time as she should be ready for burial! The grimy and impassive old house perhaps heard her heart saying: “Only yesterday they were little girls, ever so tiny, and now—” The driving-off of a waggonette can be a dreadful thing.

  BOOK TWO

  CONSTANCE

  CHAPTER I

  REVOLUTION

  I

  “Well,” said Mr Povey, rising from the rocking-chair tha
t in a previous age had been John Baines’s, “I’ve got to make a start some time, so I may as well begin now!”

  And he went from the parlour into the shop. Constance’s eye followed him as far as the door, where their glances met for an instant in the transient gaze which expresses the tenderness of people who feel more than they kiss.

  It was on the morning of this day that Mrs Baines, relinquishing the sovereignty of St Luke’s Square, had gone to live as a younger sister in the house of Harriet Maddack at Axe. Constance guessed little of the secret anguish of that departure. She only knew that it was just like her mother, having perfectly arranged the entire house for the arrival of the honeymoon couple from Buxton, to flit early away so as to spare the natural blushing diffidence of the said couple. It was like her mother’s common sense and her mother’s sympathetic comprehension. Further, Constance did not pursue her mother’s feelings, being far too busy with her own. She sat there full of new knowledge and new importance, brimming with experience and strange, unexpected aspirations, purposes, yes—and cunnings! And yet, though the very curves of her cheeks seemed to be mysteriously altering, the old Constance still lingered in that frame, an innocent soul hesitating to spread its wings and quit for ever the body which had been its home; you could see the timid thing peeping wistfully out of the eyes of the married woman.

  Constance rang the bell for Maggie to clear the table; and as she did so she had the illusion that she was not really a married woman and a house mistress, but only a kind of counterfeit. She did most fervently hope that all would go right in the house—at any rate until she had grown more accustomed to her situation.

  The hope was to be disappointed. Maggie’s rather silly, obsequious smile concealed but for a moment the ineffable tragedy that had lain in wait for unarmed Constance.

  “If you please, Mrs Povey,” said Maggie, as she crushed cups together on the tin tray with her great, red hands, which always looked like something out of a butcher’s shop; then a pause, “Will you please accept of this?”

  Now, before the wedding Maggie had already, with tears of affection, given Constance a pair of blue glass vases (in order to purchase which she had been obliged to ask for special permission to go out), and Constance wondered what was coming now from Maggie’s pocket. A small piece of folded paper came from Maggie’s pocket. Constance accepted of it, and read: “I begs to give one month’s notice to leave. Signed Maggie. June 10, 1867.”

  “Maggie!” exclaimed the old Constance, terrified by this incredible occurrence, ere the married woman could strangle her.

  “I never give notice before, Mrs Povey,” said Maggie, “so I don’t know as I know how it ought for be done—not rightly. But I hope as you’ll accept of it, Mrs Povey.”

  “Oh! of course,” said Mrs Povey, primly, just as if Maggie was not the central supporting pillar of the house, just as if Maggie had not assisted at her birth, just as if the end of the world had not abruptly been announced, just as if St Luke’s Square were not inconceivable without Maggie. “But why—”

  “Well, Mrs Povey, I’ve been a-thinking it over in my kitchen, and I said to myself: ‘If there’s going to be one change there’d better be two,’ I says. Not but what I wouldn’t work my fingers to the bone for ye, Miss Constance.”

  Here Maggie began to cry into the tray.

  Constance looked at her. Despite the special muslin of that day she had traces of the slatternliness of which Mrs Baines had never been able to cure her. She was over forty, big, gawky. She had no figure, no charms of any kind. She was what was left of a woman after twenty-two years in the cave of a philanthropic family. And in her cave she had actually been thinking things over! Constance detected for the first time, beneath the dehumanized drudge, the stirrings of a separate and perhaps capricious individuality. Maggie’s engagements had never been real to her employers. Within the house she had never been, in practice, anything but “Maggie”—an organism. And now she was permitting herself ideas about changes!

  “You’ll soon be suited with another, Mrs Povey,” said Maggie. “There’s many a—many a—” She burst into sobs.

  “But if you really want to leave, what are you crying for, Maggie?” asked Mrs Povey, at her wisest. “Have you told mother?”

  “No, miss,” Maggie whimpered, absently wiping her wrinkled cheeks with ineffectual muslin. “I couldn’t seem to fancy telling your mother. And as you’re the mistress now, I thought as I’d save if for you when you come home. I hope you’ll excuse me, Mrs Povey.”

  “Of course I’m very sorry. You’ve been a very good servant. And in these days—”

  The child had acquired this turn of speech from her mother. It did not appear to occur to either of them that they were living in the sixties.

  “Thank ye, miss.”

  “And what are you thinking of doing, Maggie? You know you won’t get many places like this.”

  “To tell ye the truth, Mrs Povey, I’m going to get married mysen.”

  “Indeed!” murmured Constance, with the perfunctoriness of habit in replying to these tidings.

  “Oh! but I am, mum,” Maggie insisted. “It’s all settled. Mr Hollins, mum.”

  “Not Hollins, the fish-hawker!”

  “Yes, mum. I seem to fancy him. You don’t remember as him and me was engaged in ’48. He was my first, like. I broke it off because he was in that Chartist lot, and I knew as Mr Baines would never stand that. Now he’s asked me again. He’s been a widower this long time.”

  “I’m sure I hope you’ll be happy, Maggie. But what about his habits?”

  “He won’t have no habits with me, Mrs Povey.”

  A woman was definitely emerging from the drudge.

  When Maggie, having entirely ceased sobbing, had put the folded cloth in the table-drawer and departed with the tray, her mistress became frankly the girl again. No primness about her as she stood alone there in the parlour; no pretence that Maggie’s notice to leave was an everyday document, to be casually glanced at as one glances at an unpaid bill! She would be compelled to find a new servant, making solemn inquiries into character, and to train the new servant, and to talk to her from heights from which she had never addressed Maggie. At that moment she had an illusion that there were no other available, suitable servants in the whole world. And the arranged marriage? She felt that this time—the thirteenth or fourteenth time—the engagement was serious and would only end at the altar. The vision of Maggie and Hollins at the altar shocked her. Marriage was a series of phenomena, and a general state, very holy and wonderful—too sacred, somehow, for such creatures as Maggie and Hollins. Her vague, instinctive revolt against such a usage of matrimony centred round the idea of a strong, eternal smell of fish. However, the projected outrage on a hallowed institution troubled her much less than the imminent problem of domestic service.

  She ran into the shop—or she would have run if she had not checked her girlishness betimes—and on her lips, ready to be whispered importantly into a husband’s astounded ear, were the words, “Maggie has given notice! Yes! Truly!” But Samuel Povey was engaged. He was leaning over the counter and staring at an outspread paper upon which a certain Mr Yardley was making strokes with a thick pencil. Mr Yardley, who had a long red beard, painted houses and rooms. She knew him only by sight. In her mind she always associated him with the sign over his premises in Trafalgar Road, “Yardley Bros, Authorized plumbers. Painters. Decorators. Paper-hangers. Facia writers.” For years, in childhood, she had passed that sign without knowing what sort of thing “Bros” and “Facia” were, and what was the mysterious similarity between a plumber and a version of the Bible. She could not interrupt her husband, he was wholly absorbed; nor could she stay in the shop (which appeared just a little smaller than usual), for that would have meant an unsuccessful endeavour to front the young lady-assistants as though nothing in particular had happened to her. So she went sedately up the showroom stairs and thus to the bedroom floors of the house—her house! Mrs Povey’s house
! She even climbed to Constance’s old bedroom; her mother had stripped the bed—that was all, except a slight diminution of this room, corresponding to that of the shop! Then to the drawing-room. In the recess outside the drawing-room door the black box of silver plate still lay. She had expected her mother to take it; but no! Assuredly her mother was one to do things handsomely—when she did them. In the drawing-room, not a tassel of an antimacassar touched! Yes, the fire-screen, the luscious bunch of roses on an expanse of mustard, which Constance had worked for her mother years ago, was gone! That her mother should have clung to just that one souvenir, out of all the heavy opulence of the drawing-room, touched Constance intimately. She perceived that if she could not talk to her husband she must write to her mother. And she sat down at the oval table and wrote, “Darling mother, I am sure you will be very surprised to hear . . . She means it . . . I think she is making a serious mistake. Ought I to put an advertisement in the Signal, or will it do if . . . Please write by return. We are back, and have enjoyed ourselves very much. Sam says he enjoys getting up late . . .” And so On to the last inch of the fourth scolloped page.

  She was obliged to revisit the shop for a stamp, stamps being kept in Mr Povey’s desk in the corner—a high desk, at which you stood. Mr Povey was now in earnest converse with Mr Yardley at the door, and twilight, which began a full hour earlier in the shop than in the Square, had cast faint shadows in corners behind counters.

  “Will you just run out with this to the pillar, Miss Dadd?”