The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “Haven’t you mentioned it in one of your letters?”

  “Oh no!”

  “If that’s all,” said he, with bravado, “I’ll write and tell her myself.”

  IV

  So that Mrs Baines was duly apprised of the signboard before her arrival. The letter written by her to Constance after receiving Samuel’s letter, which was merely the amiable epistle of a son-in-law anxious to be a little more than correct, contained no reference to the signboard. This silence, however, did not in the least allay Constance’s apprehensions as to what might occur when her mother and Samuel met beneath the signboard itself. It was therefore with a fearful as well as an eager, loving heart that Constance opened her side-door and ran down the steps when the waggonette stopped in King Street on the Thursday morning of the great visit of the sisters. But a surprise awaited her. Aunt Harriet had not come. Mrs Baines explained, as she soundly kissed her daughter, that at the last moment Aunt Harriet had not felt well enough to undertake the journey. She sent her fondest love, and cake. Her pains had recurred. It was these mysterious pains which had prevented the sisters from coming to Bursley earlier. The word “cancer”—the continual terror of stout women—had been on their lips, without having been actually uttered; then there was a surcease, and each was glad that she had refrained from the dread syllables. In view of the recurrence, it was not unnatural that Mrs Baines’s vigorous cheerfulness should be somewhat forced.

  “What is it, do you think?” Constance inquired.

  Mrs Baines pushed her lips out and raised her eyebrows—a gesture which meant that the pains might mean God knew what.

  “I hope she’ll be all right alone,” observed Constance.

  “Of course,” said Mrs Baines quickly. “But you don’t suppose I was going to disappoint you, do you?” she added, looking round as if to defy the fates in general.

  This speech, and its tone, gave intense pleasure to Constance; and, laden with parcels, they mounted the stairs together, very content with each other, very happy in the discovery that they were still mother and daughter, very intimate in an inarticulate way.

  Constance had imagined long, detailed, absorbing, and highly novel conversations between herself and her mother upon this their first meeting after her marriage. But alone in the bedroom, and with a clear half-hour to dinner, they neither of them seemed to have a great deal to impart.

  Mrs Baines slowly removed her light mantle and laid it with precautions on the white damask counterpane. Then, fingering her weeds, she glanced about the chamber. Nothing was changed. Though Constance had, previous to her marriage, envisaged certain alterations, she had determined to postpone them, feeling that one revolutionist in a house was enough.

  “Well, my chick, you all right?” said Mrs Baines, with hearty and direct energy, gazing straight into her daughter’s eyes.

  Constance perceived that the question was universal in its comprehensiveness, the one unique expression that the mother would give to her maternal concern and curiosity, and that condensed into six words as much interest as would have overflowed into a whole day of the chatter of some mothers. She met the candid glance, flushing.

  “Oh yes!” she answered with ecstatic fervour. “Perfectly!”

  And Mrs Baines nodded, as if dismissing that. “You’re stouter,” said she, curtly. “If you aren’t careful you’ll be as big as any of us.”

  “Oh, mother.”

  The interview fell to a lower plane of emotion. It even fell as far as Maggie. What chiefly preoccupied Constance was a subtle change in her mother. She found her mother fussy in trifles. Her manner of laying down her mantle, of smoothing out her gloves, and her anxiety that her bonnet should not come to harm, were rather trying, were perhaps, in the very slightest degree, pitiable. It was nothing; it was barely perceptible, and yet it was enough to alter Constance’s mental attitude to her mother. “Poor dear!” thought Constance. “I’m afraid she’s not what she was.” Incredible that her mother could have aged in less than six weeks! Constance did not allow for the chemistry that had been going on in herself.

  The encounter between Mrs Baines and her son-in-law was of the most satisfactory nature. He was waiting in the parlour for her to descend. He made himself exceedingly agreeable, kissing her, and flattering her by his evidently sincere desire to please. He explained that he had kept an eye open for the waggonette, but had been called away. His “Dear me!” on learning about Aunt Harriet lacked nothing in conviction, though both women knew that his affection for Aunt Harriet would never get the better of his reason. To Constance, her husband’s behaviour was marvellously perfect. She had not suspected him to be such a man of the world. And her eyes said to her mother, quite unconsciously: “You see, after all, you didn’t rate Sam as high as you ought to have done. Now you see your mistake.”

  As they sat waiting for dinner, Constance and Mrs Baines on the sofa, and Samuel on the edge of the nearest rocking-chair, a small scuffling noise was heard outside the door which gave on the kitchen steps, the door yielded to pressure and Fan rushed importantly in, deranging mats. Fan’s nose had been hinting to her that she was behind the times, not up-to-date in the affairs of the household, and she had hurried from the kitchen to make inquiries. It occurred to her en route that she had been washed that morning. The spectacle of Mrs Baines stopped her. She stood, with her legs slightly outstretched, her nose lifted, her ears raking forward, her bright eyes blinking, and her tail undecided. “I was sure I’d never smelt anything like that before,” she was saying to herself, as she stared at Mrs Baines.

  And Mrs Baines, staring at Fan, had a similar though not the same sentiment. The silence was terrible. Constance took on the mien of a culprit, and Sam had obviously lost his easy bearing of a man of the world. Mrs Baines was merely thunderstruck.

  A dog!

  Suddenly Fan’s tail began to wag more quickly; and then, having looked in vain for encouragement to her master and mistress, she gave one mighty spring and alighted in Mrs Baines’s lap. It was an aim she could not have missed. Constance emitted an “Oh, Fan!” of shocked terror, and Samuel betrayed his nervous tension by an involuntary movement. But Fan had settled down into that titanic lap as into heaven. It was a greater flattery than Mr Povey’s.

  “So your name’s Fan!” murmured Mrs Baines, stroking the animal. “You are a dear!”

  “Yes, isn’t she?” said Constance, with inconceivable rapidity.

  The danger was past. Thus, without any explanation, Fan became an accepted fact.

  The next moment Maggie served the Yorkshire pudding.

  “Well, Maggie,” said Mrs Baines. “So you are going to get married this time? When is it?”

  “Sunday, ma’am.”

  “And you leave here on Saturday?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, I must have a talk with you before I go.”

  During the dinner, not a word as to the signboard! Several times the conversation curved towards that signboard in the most alarming fashion, but invariably it curved away again, like a train from another train when two trains are simultaneously leaving a station. Constance had frights, so serious as to destroy her anxiety about the cookery. In the end she comprehended that her mother had adopted a silently disapproving attitude. Fan was socially very useful throughout the repast.

  After dinner Constance was on pins lest Samuel should light a cigar. She had not requested him not to do so, for though she was entirely sure of his affection, she had already learned that a husband is possessed by a demon of contrariety which often forces him to violate his higher feelings. However, Samuel did not light a cigar. He went off to superintend the shutting-up of the shop, while Mrs Baines chatted with Maggie and gave her £5 for a wedding present. Then Mr Critchlow called to offer his salutations.

  A little before tea Mrs Baines announced that she would go out for a short walk by herself.

  “Where has she gone to?” smiled Samuel, superiorly, as with Constance at the window he w
atched her turn down King Street towards the church.

  “I expect she has gone to look at father’s grave,” said Constance.

  “Oh!” muttered Samuel apologetically.

  Constance was mistaken. Before reaching the church, Mrs Baines deviated to the right, got into Brougham Street and thence, by Acre Lane, into Oldcastle Street, whose steep she climbed. Now, Oldcastle Street ends at the top of St Luke’s Square, and from the corner Mrs Baines had an excellent view of the signboard. It being Thursday afternoon, scarce a soul was about. She returned to her daughter’s by the same extraordinary route, and said not a word on entering. But she was markedly cheerful.

  The waggonette came after tea, and Mrs Baines made her final preparations to depart. The visit had proved a wonderful success; it would have been utterly perfect if Samuel had not marred it at the very door of the waggonette. Somehow, he contrived to be talking of Christmas. Only a person of Samuel’s native clumsiness would have mentioned Christmas in July.

  “You know you’ll spend Christmas with us!” said he into the waggonette.

  “Indeed I shan’t!” replied Mrs Baines. “Aunt Harriet and I will expect you at Axe. We’ve already settled that.”

  Mr Povey bridled. “Oh no!” he protested, hurt by this summariness.

  Having had no relatives, except his cousin the confectioner, for many years, he had dreamt of at last establishing a family Christmas under his own roof, and the dream was dear to him.

  Mrs Baines said nothing. “We couldn’t possibly leave the shop,” said Mr Povey.

  “Nonsense!” Mrs Baines retorted, putting her lips together. “Christmas Day is on a Monday.”

  The waggonette in starting jerked her head towards the door and set all her curls shaking. No white in those curls yet, scarcely a touch of grey!

  “I shall take good care we don’t go there anyway,” Mr Povey mumbled, in his heat, half to himself and half to Constance.

  He had stained the brightness of the day.

  CHAPTER II

  CHRISTMAS AND THE FUTURE

  I

  Mr Povey was playing a hymn tune on the harmonium, it having been decided that no one should go to chapel. Constance, in mourning, with a white apron over her dress, sat on a hassock in front of the fire; and near her, in a rocking-chair, Mrs Baines swayed very gently to and fro. The weather was extremely cold. Mr Povey’s mittened hands were blue and red; but, like many shopkeepers, he had apparently grown almost insensible to vagaries of temperature. Although the fire was immense and furious, its influence, owing to the fact that the medieval grate was designed to heat the flue rather than the room, seemed to die away at the borders of the fender. Constance could not have been much closer to it without being a salamander. The era of good old-fashioned Christmases, so agreeably picturesque for the poor, was not yet at an end.

  Yes, Samuel Povey had won the battle concerning the locus of the family Christmas. But he had received the help of a formidable ally, death. Mrs Harriet Maddack had passed away, after an operation, leaving her house and her money to her sister. The solemn rite of her interment had deeply affected all the respectability of the town of Axe, where the late Mr Maddack had been a figure of consequence; it had even shut up the shop in St Luke’s Square for a whole day. It was such a funeral as Aunt Harriet herself would have approved, a tremendous ceremonial which left on the crushed mind an ineffaceable, intricate impression of shiny cloth, crape, horses with arching necks and long manes, the drawl of parsons, cake, port, sighs, and Christian submission to the inscrutable decrees of Providence. Mrs Baines had borne herself with unnatural calmness until the funeral was over: and then Constance perceived that the remembered mother of her girlhood existed no longer. For the majority of human souls it would have been easier to love a virtuous principle, or a mountain, than to love Aunt Harriet, who was assuredly less a woman than an institution. But Mrs Baines had loved her, and she had been the one person to whom Mrs Baines looked for support and guidance. When she died, Mrs Baines paid the tribute of respect with the last hoarded remains of her proud fortitude, and weepingly confessed that the unconquerable had been conquered, the inexhaustible exhausted; and became old with whitening hair.

  She had persisted in her refusal to spend Christmas in Bursley, but both Constance and Samuel knew that the resistance was only formal. She soon yielded. When Constance’s second new servant took it into her head to leave a week before Christmas, Mrs Baines might have pointed the finger of Providence at work again, and this time in her favour. But no! With amazing pliancy she suggested that she should bring one of her own servants to “tide Constance over” Christmas. She was met with all the forms of loving solicitude, and she found that her daughter and son-in-law had “turned out of” the state bedroom in her favour. Intensely flattered by this attention (which was Mr Povey’s magnanimous idea), she nevertheless protested strongly. Indeed she “would not hear of it.”

  “Now, mother, don’t be silly,” Constance had said firmly. “You don’t expect us to be at all the trouble of moving back again, do you?” And Mrs Baines had surrendered in tears.

  Thus had come Christmas. Perhaps it was fortunate that, the Axe servant being not quite the ordinary servant, but a benefactor where a benefactor was needed, both Constance and her mother thought it well to occupy themselves in household work, “sparing” the benefactor as much as possible. Hence Constance’s white apron.

  “There he is!” said Mr Povey, still playing, but with his eye on the street.

  Constance sprang up eagerly. Then there was a knock on the door. Constance opened, and an icy blast swept into the room. The postman stood on the steps, his instrument for knocking (like a drumstick) in one hand, a large bundle of letters in the other, and a yawning bag across the pit of his stomach.

  “Merry Christmas, ma’am!” cried the postman, trying to keep warm by cheerfulness.

  Constance, taking the letters, responded, while Mr Povey, playing the harmonium with his right hand, drew half a crown from his pocket with the left.

  “Here you are!” he said, giving it to Constance, who gave it to the postman.

  Fan, who had been keeping her muzzle warm with the extremity of her tail on the sofa, jumped down to superintend the transaction.

  “Brrr!” vibrated Mr Povey as Constance shut the door.

  “What lots!” Constance exclaimed, rushing to the fire. “Here, mother! Here, Sam!”

  The girl had resumed possession of the woman’s body.

  Though the Baines family had few friends (sustained hospitality being little practised in those days) they had, of course, many acquaintances, and, like other families, they counted their Christmas cards as an Indian counts scalps. The tale was satisfactory. There were between thirty and forty envelopes. Constance extracted Christmas cards rapidly, reading their contents aloud, and then propping them up on the mantelpiece. Mrs Baines assisted. Fan dealt with the envelopes on the floor. Mr Povey, to prove that his soul was above toys and gew-gaws, continued to play the harmonium.

  “Oh, mother!” Constance murmured in a startled, hesitant voice, holding an envelope.

  “What is it, my chuck?”

  “It’s—”

  The envelope was addressed to “Mrs and Miss Baines” in large, perpendicular, dashing characters which Constance instantly recognized as Sophia’s. The stamps were strange, the postmark “Paris.” Mrs Baines leaned forward and looked.

  “Open it, child,” she said.

  The envelope contained an English Christmas card of a common type, a spray of holly with greetings, and on it was written, “I do hope this will reach you on Christmas morning. Fondest love.” No signature, nor address.

  Mrs Baines took it with a trembling hand, and adjusted her spectacles. She gazed at it a long time.

  “And it has done!” she said, and wept.

  She tried to speak again, but not being able to command herself, held forth the card to Constance and jerked her head in the direction of Mr Povey. Constance rose and
put the card on the keyboard of the harmonium.

  “Sophia!” she whispered.

  Mr Povey stopped playing. “Dear, dear!” he muttered.

  Fan, perceiving that nobody was interested in her feats, suddenly stood still.

  Mrs Baines tried once more to speak, but could not. Then, her ringlets shaking beneath the band of her weeds, she found her feet, stepped to the harmonium, and, with a movement almost convulsive, snatched the card from Mr Povey, and returned to her chair.

  Mr Povey abruptly left the room, followed by Fan. Both the women were in tears, and he was tremendously surprised to discover a dangerous lump in his own throat. The beautiful and imperious vision of Sophia, Sophia as she had left them, innocent, wayward, had swiftly risen up before him and made even him a woman too! Yet he had never liked Sophia. The awful secret wound in the family pride revealed itself to him as never before, and he felt intensely the mother’s tragedy, which she carried in her breast as Aunt Harriet had carried a cancer.

  At dinner he said suddenly to Mrs Baines, who still wept: “Now, mother, you must cheer up, you know.”

  “Yes, I must,” she said quickly. And she did so.

  Neither Samuel nor Constance saw the card again. Little was said. There was nothing to say. As Sophia had given no address she must be still ashamed of her situation. But she had thought of her mother and sister. She . . . she did not even know that Constance was married . . . What sort of a place was Paris? To Bursley, Paris was nothing but the site of a great exhibition which had recently closed.

  Through the influence of Mrs Baines a new servant was found for Constance in a village near Axe—a raw, comely girl who had never been in a “place.” And through the post it was arranged that this innocent should come to the cave on the thirty-first of December. In obedience to the safe rule that servants should never be allowed to meet for the interchange of opinions, Mrs Baines decided to leave with her own servant on the thirtieth. She would not be persuaded to spend the New Year in the Square. On the twenty-ninth poor Aunt Maria died all of a sudden in her cottage in Brougham Street. Everybody was duly distressed, and in particular Mrs Baines’s demeanour under this affliction showed the perfection of correctness. But she caused it to be understood that she should not remain for the funeral. Her nerves would be unequal to the ordeal; and, moreover, her servant must not stay to corrupt the new girl, nor could Mrs Baines think of sending her servant to Axe in advance, to spend several days in idle gossip with her colleague.