The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  For months before the birth, she had glimpsed at nights and in other silent hours the tremendous upset. She had not allowed herself to be silly in advance; by temperament she was too sagacious, too well balanced for that; but she had had fitful instants of terror, when solid ground seemed to sink away from her, and imagination shook at what faced her. Instants only! Usually she could play the comedy of sensible calmness to almost perfection. Then the appointed time drew nigh. And still she smiled, and Samuel smiled. But the preparations, meticulous, intricate, revolutionary, belied their smiles. The intense resolve to keep Mrs Baines, by methods scrupulous or unscrupulous, away from Bursley until all was over, belied their smiles. And then the first pains, sharp, shocking, cruel, heralds of torture! But when they had withdrawn, she smiled again, palely. Then she was in bed, full of the sensation that the whole house was inverted and disorganized, hopelessly. And the doctor came into the room. She smiled at the doctor apologetically, foolishly, as if saying: “We all come to it. Here I am.” She was calm without. Oh, but what a prey of abject fear within! “I am at the edge of the precipice,” her thought ran; “in a moment I shall be over.” And then the pains—not the heralds but the shattering army, endless, increasing in terror as they thundered across her. Yet she could think quite clearly: “Now I’m in the middle of it. This is it, the horror that I have not dared to look at. My life’s in the balance. I may never get up again. All has at last come to pass. It seemed as if it would never come, as if this thing could not happen to me. But at last it has come to pass!”

  Ah! Someone put the twisted end of a towel into her hand again—she had loosed it; and she pulled, pulled, enough to break cables. And then she shrieked. It was for pity. It was for someone to help her, at any rate to take notice of her. She was dying. Her soul was leaving her. And she was alone, panic-stricken, in the midst of a cataclysm a thousand times surpassing all that she had imagined of sickening horror. “I cannot endure this,” she thought passionately. “It is impossible that I should be asked to endure this!” And then she wept; beaten, terrorized, smashed and riven. No common sense now! No wise calmness now! No self-respect now! Why, not even a woman now! Nothing but a kind of animalized victim! And then the supreme endless spasm, during which she gave up the ghost and bade good-bye to her very self . . .

  She was lying quite comfortable in the soft bed; idle, silly; happiness forming like a thin crust over the lava of her anguish and her fright. And by her side was the soul that had fought its way out of her, ruthlessly; the secret disturber revealed to the light of morning. Curious to look at! Not like any baby that she had ever seen; red, creased, brutish! But—for some reason that she did not examine—she folded it in an immense tenderness.

  Sam was by the bed, away from her eyes. She was so comfortable and silly that she could not move her head nor even ask him to come round to her eyes. She had to wait till he came.

  In the afternoon the doctor returned, and astounded her by saying that hers had been an ideal confinement. She was too weary to rebuke him for a senseless, blind, callous old man. But she knew what she knew. “No one will ever guess,” she thought, “no one ever can guess, what I’ve been through! Talk as you like. I know, now.”

  Gradually she had resumed cognizance of her household, perceiving that it was demoralized from top to bottom, and that when the time came to begin upon it she would not be able to settle where to begin, even supposing that the baby were not there to monopolize her attention. The task appalled her. Then she wanted to get up. Then she got up. What a blow to self-confidence! She went back to bed like a little scared rabbit to its hole, glad, glad to be on the soft pillows again. She said: “Yet the time must come when I shall be downstairs, and walking about and meeting people, and cooking and superintending the millinery.” Well, it did come—except that she had to renounce the millinery to Miss Insull—but it was not the same. No, different! The baby pushed everything else on to another plane. He was a terrific intruder; not one minute of her old daily life was left; he made no compromise whatever. If she turned away her gaze from him he might pop off into eternity and leave her.

  And now she was calmly and sensibly giving him suck in presence of Miss Insull. She was used to his importance, to the fragility of his organism, to waking twice every night, to being fat. She was strong again. The convulsive twitching that for six months had worried her repose, had quite disappeared. The state of being a mother was normal, and the baby was so normal that she could not conceive the house without him.

  All in ten months!

  When the baby was installed in his cot for the night, she came downstairs and found Miss Insull and Samuel still working, and harder than ever, but at addition sums now. She sat down, leaving the door open at the foot of the stairs. She had embroidery in hand: a cap. And while Miss Insull and Samuel combined pounds, shillings, and pence, whispering at great speed, she bent over the delicate, intimate, wasteful handiwork, drawing the needle with slow exactitude. Then she would raise her head and listen.

  “Excuse me,” said Miss Insull, “I think I hear baby crying.”

  “And two are eight and three are eleven. He must cry,” said Mr Povey, rapidly, without looking up.

  The baby’s parents did not make a practice of discussing their domestic existence even with Miss Insull; but Constance had to justify herself as a mother.

  “I’ve made perfectly sure he’s comfortable,” said Constance. “He’s only crying because he fancies he’s neglected. And we think he can’t begin too early to learn.”

  “How right you are!” said Miss Insull. “Two and carry three.”

  That distant, feeble, querulous, pitiful cry continued obstinately. It continued for thirty minutes. Constance could not proceed with her work. The cry disintegrated her will, dissolved her hard sagacity.

  Without a word she crept upstairs, having carefully deposed the cap on her rocking-chair.

  Mr Povey hesitated a moment and then bounded up after her, startling Fan. He shut the door on Miss Insull, but Fan was too quick for him. He saw Constance with her hand on the bedroom door.

  “My dear girl,” he protested, holding himself in. “Now what are you going to do?”

  “I’m just listening,” said Constance.

  “Do be reasonable and come downstairs.”

  He spoke in a low voice, scarcely masking his nervous irritation, and tiptoed along the corridor towards her and up the two steps past the gas-burner. Fan followed, wagging her tail expectantly.

  “Suppose he’s not well?” Constance suggested.

  “Pshaw!” Mr Povey exclaimed contemptuously. “You remember what happened last night and what you said!”

  They argued, subduing their tones to the false semblance of goodwill, there in the closeness of the corridor. Fan, deceived, ceased to wag her tail and then trotted away. The baby’s cry, behind the door, rose to a mysterious despairing howl, which had such an effect on Constance’s heart that she could have walked through fire to reach the baby. But Mr Povey’s will held her. And he rebelled, angry, hurt, resentful. Common sense, the ideal of mutual forbearance, had winged away from the excited pair. It would have assuredly ended in a quarrel with Samuel glaring at her in black fury from the other side of a bottomless chasm, had not Miss Insull most surprisingly burst up the stairs.

  Mr Povey turned to face her, swallowing his emotion.

  “A telegram!” said Miss Insull. “The postmaster brought it down himself—”

  “What? Mr Derry?” asked Samuel, opening the telegram with an affectation of majesty.

  “Yes. He said it was too late for delivery by rights. But as it seemed very important . . .”

  Samuel scanned it and nodded gravely; then gave it to his wife, Tears came into her eyes.

  “I’ll get Cousin Daniel to drive me over at once,” said Samuel, master of himself and of the situation.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to hire?” Constance suggested. She had a prejudice against Daniel.

  Mr Povey shoo
k his head. “He offered,” he replied. “I can’t refuse his offer.”

  “Put your thick overcoat on, dear,” said Constance, in a dream, descending with him.

  “I hope it isn’t—” Miss Insull stopped.

  “Yes, it is, Miss Insull,” said Samuel deliberately.

  In less than a minute he was gone.

  Constance ran upstairs. But the cry had ceased. She turned the door-knob softly, slowly, and crept into the chamber. A nightlight made large shadows among the heavy mahogany and the crimson, tasselled rep in the close-curtained room. And between the bed and the ottoman (on which lay Samuel’s newly-bought family Bible) the cot loomed in the shadows. She picked up the night-light and stole round the bed. Yes, he had decided to fall asleep. The hazard of death afar off had just defeated his devilish obstinacy. Fate had bested him. How marvellously soft and delicate that tear-stained cheek; how frail that tiny, tiny clenched hand! In Constance grief and joy were mystically united.

  II

  The drawing-room was full of visitors, in frocks of ceremony. The old drawing-room, but newly and massively arranged with the finest Victorian furniture from dead Aunt Harriet’s house at Axe; two “Canterburys,” a large bookcase, a splendid scintillant table solid beyond lifting, intricately tortured chairs and armchairs! The original furniture of the drawing-room was now down in the parlour, making it grand. All the house breathed opulence; it was gorged with quiet, restrained expensiveness; the least considerable objects, in the most modest corners, were what Mrs Baines would have termed “good.” Constance and Samuel had half of all Aunt Harriet’s money and half of Mrs Baines’s; the other half was accumulating for a hypothetical Sophia, Mr Critchlow being the trustee. The business continued to flourish. People knew that Samuel Povey was buying houses. Yet Samuel and Constance had not made friends; they had not, in the Five Towns phrase, “branched out socially,” though they had very meetly branched out on subscription lists. They kept themselves to themselves (emphasizing the preposition). These guests were not their guests; they were the guests of Cyril.

  He had been named Samuel because Constance would have him named after his father, and Cyril because his father secretly despised the name of Samuel; and he was called Cyril; “Master Cyril,” by Amy, definite successor to Maggie. His mother’s thoughts were on Cyril as long as she was awake. His father, when not planning Cyril’s welfare, was earning money whose unique object could be nothing but Cyril’s welfare. Cyril was the pivot of the house; every desire ended somewhere in Cyril. The shop existed now solely for him. And those houses that Samuel bought by private treaty, or with a shamefaced air at auctions—somehow they were aimed at Cyril. Samuel and Constance had ceased to be self-justifying beings; they never thought of themselves save as the parents of Cyril.

  They realized this by no means fully. Had they been accused of monomania they would have smiled the smile of people confident in their common sense and their mental balance. Nevertheless, they were monomaniacs. Instinctively they concealed the fact as much as possible. They never admitted it even to themselves. Samuel, indeed, would often say: “That child is not everybody. That child must be kept in his place.” Constance was always teaching him consideration for his father as the most important person in the household. Samuel was always teaching him consideration for his mother as the most important person in the household. Nothing was left undone to convince him that he was a cipher, a nonentity, who ought to be very glad to be alive. But he knew all about his importance. He knew that the entire town was his. He knew that his parents were deceiving themselves. Even when he was punished he well knew that it was because he was so important. He never imparted any portion of this knowledge to his parents; a primeval wisdom prompted him to retain it strictly in his own bosom.

  He was four and a half years old, dark, like his father; handsome like his aunt, and tall for his age; not one of his features resembled a feature of his mother’s, but sometimes he “had her look.” From the capricious production of inarticulate sounds, and then a few monosyllables that described concrete things and obvious desires, he had gradually acquired an astonishing idiomatic command over the most difficult of Teutonic languages; there was nothing that he could not say. He could walk and run, was full of exact knowledge about God, and entertained no doubt concerning the special partiality of a minor deity called Jesus towards himself.

  Now, this party was his mother’s invention and scheme. His father, after flouting it, had said that if it was to be done at all, it should be done well, and had brought to the doing all his organizing skill. Cyril had accepted it at first—merely accepted it; but, as the day approached and the preparations increased in magnitude, he had come to look on it with favour, then with enthusiasm. His father having taken him to Daniel Povey’s opposite, to choose cakes, he had shown, by his solemn and fastidious waverings, how seriously he regarded the affair.

  Of course it had to occur on a Thursday afternoon. The season was summer, suitable for pale and fragile toilettes. And the eight children who sat round Aunt Harriet’s great table glittered like the sun. Not Constance’s specially provided napkins could hide that wealth and profusion of white lace and stitchery. Never in after-life are the genteel children of the Five Towns so richly clad as at the age of four or five years. Weeks of labour, thousands of cubic feet of gas, whole nights stolen from repose, eyesight, and general health, will disappear into the manufacture of a single frock that accidental jam may ruin in ten seconds. Thus it was in those old days; and thus it is today. Cyril’s guests ranged in years from four to six; they were chiefly older than their host; this was a pity, it impaired his importance; but up to four years a child’s sense of propriety, even of common decency, is altogether too unreliable for a respectable party.

  Round about the outskirts of the table were the elders, ladies the majority; they also in their best, for they had to meet each other. Constance displayed a new dress, of crimson silk; after having mourned for her mother she had definitely abandoned the black which, by reason of her duties in the shop, she had constantly worn from the age of sixteen to within a few months of Cyril’s birth; she never went into the shop now, except casually, on brief visits of inspection. She was still fat; the destroyer of her figure sat at the head of the table. Samuel kept close to her; he was the only male, until Mr Critchlow astonishingly arrived; among the company Mr Critchlow had a grand-niece. Samuel, if not in his best, was certainly not in his everyday suit. With his large frilled shirt-front, and small black tie, and his little black beard and dark face over that, he looked very nervous and self-conscious. He had not the habit of entertaining. Nor had Constance; but her benevolence ever bubbling up to the calm surface of her personality made self-consciousness impossible for her. Miss Insull was also present, in shopblack, “to help.” Lastly there was Amy, now as the years passed slowly assuming the character of a faithful retainer, though she was only twenty-three. An ugly, abrupt, downright girl, with convenient notions of pleasure! For she would rise early and retire late in order to contrive an hour to go out with Master Cyril; and to be allowed to put Master Cyril to bed was, really, her highest bliss.

  All these elders were continually inserting arms into the fringe of fluffy children that surrounded the heaped table; removing dangerous spoons out of cups into saucers, replacing plates, passing cakes, spreading jam, whispering consolations, explanations, and sage counsel. Mr Critchlow, snow-white now but unbent, remarked that there was “a pretty cackle,” and he sniffed. Although the window was slightly open, the air was heavy with the natural human odour which young children transpire. More than one mother, pressing her nose into a lacy mass, to whisper, inhaled that pleasant perfume with a voluptuous thrill.

  Cyril, while attending steadily to the demands of his body, was in a mood which approached the ideal. Proud and radiant, he combined urbanity with a certain fine condescension. His bright eyes, and his manner of scraping up jam with a spoon, said: “I am the king of this party. This party is solely in my honour. I
know that. We all know it. Still, I will pretend that we are equals, you and I.” He talked about his picture-books to a young woman on his right named Jennie, aged four, pale, pretty, the belle in fact, and Mr Critchlow’s grand-niece. The boy’s attractiveness was indisputable; he could put on quite an aristocratic air. It was the most delicious sight to see them, Cyril and Jennie, so soft and delicate, so infantile on their piles of cushions and books, with their white socks and black shoes dangling far distant from the carpet; and yet so old, so self-contained! And they were merely an epitome of the whole table. The whole table was bathed in the charm and mystery of young years, of helpless fragility, gentle forms, timid elegance, unashamed instincts, and waking souls. Constance and Samuel were very satisfied; full of praise for other people’s children, but with the reserve that of course Cyril was hors concours. They both really did believe, at that moment, that Cyril was, in some subtle way which they felt but could not define, superior to all other infants.

  Someone, some officious relative of a visitor, began to pass a certain cake which had brown walls, a roof of coco-nut icing, and a yellow body studded with crimson globules. Not a conspicuously gorgeous cake, not a cake to which a catholic child would be likely to attach particular importance; a good, average cake! Who could have guessed that it stood, in Cyril’s esteem, as the cake of cakes? He had insisted on his father buying it at Cousin Daniel’s, and perhaps Samuel ought to have divined that for Cyril that cake was the gleam that an ardent spirit would follow through the wilderness. Samuel, however, was not a careful observer, and seriously lacked imagination. Constance knew only that Cyril had mentioned the cake once or twice. Now by the hazard of destiny that cake found much favour, helped into popularity as it was by the blundering officious relative who, not dreaming what volcano she was treading on, urged its merits with simpering enthusiasm. One boy took two slices, a slice in each hand; he happened to be the visitor of whom the cake distributor was a relative, and she protested; she expressed the shock she suffered. Whereupon both Constance and Samuel sprang forward and swore with angelic smiles that nothing could be more perfect than the propriety of that dear little fellow taking two slices of that cake. It was this hullaballoo that drew Cyril’s attention to the evanescence of the cake of cakes. His face at once changed from calm pride to a dreadful anxiety. His eyes bulged out. His tiny mouth grew and grew, like a mouth in a nightmare. He was no longer human; he was a cake-eating tiger being balked of his prey. Nobody noticed him. The officious fool of a woman persuaded Jennie to take the last slice of the cake, which was quite a thin slice.