The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “Good night, officer! Brrr!” said Mr Povey, gathering his dignity about him and holding himself as though it was part of his normal habit to take exercise bareheaded and collarless in St Luke’s Square on cold November nights. He behaved so because, if Daniel had desired the services of a policeman, Daniel would of course have spoken to this one.

  “Goo’ night, sir,” said the policeman, after recognizing him.

  “What time is it?” asked Samuel, bold.

  “A quarter-past one, sir.”

  The policeman, leaving Samuel at the little open door, went forward across the lamplit Square, and Samuel entered his cousin’s shop.

  Daniel Povey was standing behind the door, and as Samuel came in he shut the door with a startling sudden movement. Save for the twinkle of gas, the shop was in darkness. It had the empty appearance which a well-managed confectioner’s and baker’s always has at night. The large brass scales near the flour-bins glinted; and the glass cake-stands, with scarce a tart among them, also caught the faint flare of the gas.

  “What’s the matter, Daniel? Anything wrong?” Samuel asked, feeling boyish as he usually did in the presence of Daniel.

  The well-favoured white-haired man seized him with one hand by the shoulder in a grip that convicted Samuel of frailty.

  “Look here, Sam’l,” said he in his low, pleasant voice, somewhat altered by excitement. “You know as my wife drinks?”

  He stared defiantly at Samuel.

  “N—no,” said Samuel. “That is—no one’s ever said—”

  This was true. He did not know that Mrs Daniel Povey, at the age of fifty, had definitely taken to drink. There had been rumours that she enjoyed a glass with too much gusto; but “drinks” meant more than that.

  “She drinks,” Daniel Povey continued. “And has done this last two year!”

  “I’m very sorry to hear it,” said Samuel, tremendously shocked by this brutal rending of the cloak of decency.

  Always, everybody had feigned to Daniel, and Daniel had feigned to everybody, that his wife was as other wives. And now the man himself had torn to pieces in a moment the veil of thirty years’ weaving.

  “And if that was the worst!” Daniel murmured reflectively, loosening his grip.

  Samuel was excessively disturbed. His cousin was hinting at matters which he himself, at any rate, had never hinted at even to Constance, so abhorrent were they; matters unutterable, which hung like clouds in the social atmosphere of the town, and of which at rare intervals one conveyed one’s cognizance, not by words, but by something scarce perceptible in a glance, an accent. Not often is a town such as Bursley starred with such a woman as Mrs Daniel Povey.

  “But what’s wrong?” Samuel asked, trying to be firm.

  And, “What is wrong?” he asked himself. “what does all this mean, at after one o’clock in the morning?”

  “Look here, Sam’l,” Daniel recommenced, seizing his shoulder again. “I went to Liverpool corn market today, and missed the last train, so I came by mail from Crewe. And what do I find? I find Dick sitting on the stairs in the dark pretty nigh naked.”

  “Sitting on the stairs? Dick?”

  “Ay! This is what I come home to!”

  “But—”

  “Hold on! He’s been in bed a couple of days with a feverish cold, caught through lying in damp sheets as his mother had forgot to air. She brings him no supper tonight. He calls out. No answer. Then he gets up to go downstairs and see what’s happened, and he slips on th’ stairs and breaks his knee, or puts it out or summat. Sat there hours, seemingly! Couldn’t walk neither up nor down.”

  “And was your—wife—was Mrs—?”

  “Dead drunk in the parlour, Sam’l.”

  “But the servant?”

  “Servant!” Daniel Povey laughed. “We can’t keep our servants. They won’t stay. You know that.”

  He did. Mrs Daniel Povey’s domestic methods and idiosyncracies could at any rate be freely discussed, and they were.

  “And what have you done?”

  “Done? Why, I picked him up in my arms and carried him upstairs again. And a fine job I had too! Here! Come here!”

  Daniel strode impulsively across the shop—the counterflap was up—and opened a door at the back. Samuel followed. Never before had he penetrated so far into his cousin’s secrets. On the left, within the doorway, were the stairs, dark; on the right a shut door; and in front an open door giving on to a yard. At the extremity of the yard he discerned a building, vaguely lit, and naked figures strangely moving in it.

  “What’s that? Who’s there?” he asked sharply.

  “That’s the bakehouse,” Daniel replied, as if surprised at such a question. “It’s one of their long nights.”

  Never, during the brief remainder of his life, did Samuel eat a mouthful of common bread without recalling that midnight apparition. He had lived for half a century, and thoughtlessly eaten bread as though loaves grew ready-made on trees.

  “Listen!” Daniel commanded him.

  He cocked his ear, and caught a feeble, complaining wail from an upper floor.

  “That’s Dick! That is!” said Daniel Povey.

  It sounded more like the distress of a child than of an adventurous young man of twenty-four or so.

  “But is he in pain? Haven’t you fetched the doctor?”

  “Not yet,” answered Daniel, with a vacant stare.

  Samuel gazed at him closely for a second. And Daniel seemed to him very old and helpless and pathetic, a man unequal to the situation in which he found himself; and yet, despite the dignified snow of his age, wistfully boyish. Samuel thought swiftly: “This has been too much for him. He’s almost out of his mind. That’s the explanation. Someone’s got to take charge, and I must.” And all the courageous resolution of his character braced itself to the crisis. Being without a collar, being in slippers, and his suspenders imperfectly fastened anyhow—these things seemed to be a part of the crisis.

  “I’ll just run upstairs and have a look at him,” said Samuel, in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Daniel did not reply.

  There was a glimmer at the top of the stairs. Samuel mounted, found the gas-jet, and turned it on full. A dingy, dirty, untidy passage was revealed, the very antechamber of discomfort. Guided by the moans, Samuel entered a bedroom, which was in a shameful condition of neglect, and lighted only by a nearly expired candle. Was it possible that a house-mistress could so lose her self-respect? Samuel thought of his own abode, meticulously and impeccably “kept,” and a hard bitterness against Mrs Daniel surged up in his soul.

  “Is that you, doctor?” said a voice from the bed; the moans ceased.

  Samuel raised the candle.

  Dick lay there, his face, on which was a beard of several days’ growth, distorted by anguish, sweating; his tousled brown hair was limp with sweat.

  “Where the hell’s the doctor?” the young man demanded brusquely. Evidently he had no curiosity about Samuel’s presence; the one thing that struck him was that Samuel was not the doctor.

  “He’s coming, he’s coming,” said Samuel, soothingly.

  “Well, if he isn’t here soon I shall be damn well dead,” said Dick, in feeble resentful anger. “I can tell you that.”

  Samuel deposited the candle and ran downstairs. “I say, Daniel,” he said, roused and hot, “this is really ridiculous. Why on earth didn’t you fetch the doctor while you were waiting for me? Where’s the missis?”

  Daniel Povey was slowly emptying grains of Indian corn out of his jacket-pocket into one of the big receptacles behind the counter on the baker’s side of the shop. He had provisioned himself with Indian corn as ammunition for Samuel’s bedroom window; he was now returning the surplus.

  “Are you going for Harrop?” he questioned hesitatingly.

  “Why, of course!” Samuel exclaimed. “Where’s the missis?”

  “Happen you’d better go and have a look at her,” said Daniel Povey. “She’s in th’ parlour.”<
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  He preceded Samuel to the shut door on the right. When he opened it the parlour appeared in full illumination.

  “Here! Go in!” said Daniel.

  Samuel went in, afraid. In a room as dishevelled and filthy as the bedroom, Mrs Daniel Povey lay stretched awkwardly on a worn horse-hair sofa, her head thrown back, her face discoloured, her eyes bulging, her mouth wet and yawning: a sight horribly offensive. Samuel was frightened; he was struck with fear and with disgust. The singing gas beat down ruthlessly on that dreadful figure. A wife and mother! The lady of a house! The centre of order! The fount of healing! The balm for worry, and the refuge of distress! She was vile. Her scanty yellow-grey hair was dirty, her hollowed neck all grime, her hands abominable, her black dress in decay. She was the dishonour of her sex, her situation, and her years. She was a fouler obscenity than the inexperienced Samuel had ever conceived. And by the door stood her husband, neat, spotless, almost stately, the man who for thirty years had marshalled all his immense pride to suffer this woman, the jolly man who had laughed through thick and thin! Samuel remembered when they were married. And he remembered when, years after their marriage, she was still as pretty, artificial, coquettish, and adamantine in her caprices as a young harlot with a fool at her feet. Time and the slow wrath of God had changed her.

  He remained master of himself and approached her; then stopped.

  “But—” he stammered.

  “Ay, Sam’l, lad!” said the old man from the door. “I doubt I’ve killed her! I doubt I’ve killed her! I took and shook her. I got her by the neck. And before I knew where I was, I’d done it. She’ll never drink brandy again. This is what it’s come to!”

  He moved away.

  All Samuel’s flesh tingled as a heavy wave of emotion rolled through his being. It was just as if someone had dealt him a blow unimaginably tremendous. His heart shivered, as a ship shivers at the mountainous crash of the waters. He was numbed. He wanted to weep, to vomit, to die, to sink away. But a voice was whispering to him: “You will have to go through with this. You are in charge of this.” He thought of his wife and child, innocently asleep in the cleanly pureness of his home. And he felt the roughness of his coat-collar round his neck and the insecurity of his trousers. He passed out of the room, shutting the door. And across the yard he had a momentary glimpse of those nude nocturnal forms, unconsciously attitudinizing in the bakehouse. And down the stairs came the protests of Dick, driven by pain into a monotonous silly blasphemy.

  “I’ll fetch Harrop,” he said, melancholily, to his cousin.

  The doctor’s house was less than fifty yards off, and the doctor had a night-bell, which, though he was a much older man than his father had been at his age, he still answered promptly. No need to bombard the doctor’s premises with Indian corn! While Samuel was parleying with the doctor through a window, the question ran incessantly through his mind: “What about telling the police?”

  But when, in advance of old Harrop, he returned to Daniel’s shop, lo! the policeman previously encountered had returned upon his beat, and Daniel was talking to him in the little doorway. No other soul was about. Down King Street, along Wedgwood Street, up the Square, towards Brougham Street, nothing but gas-lamps burning with their everlasting patience, and the blind façades of shops. Only in the second storey of the Bank Building at the top of the Square a light showed mysteriously through a blind. Somebody ill there!

  The policeman was in a high state of nervous excitement. That had happened to him which had never happened to him before. Of the sixty policemen in Bursley, just he had been chosen by fate to fit the socket of destiny. He was startled.

  “What’s this, what’s this, Mr Povey?” he turned hastily to Samuel. “What’s this as Mr Councillor Povey is a-telling me?”

  “You come in, sergeant,” said Daniel.

  “If I come in,” said the policeman to Samuel, “you mun’ go along Wedgwood Street, Mr Povey, and bring my mate. He should be on Duck Bank, by rights.”

  It was astonishing, when once the stone had begun to roll, how quickly it ran. In half an hour Samuel had actually parted from Daniel at the police-office behind the Shambles, and was hurrying to rouse his wife so that she could look after Dick Povey until he might be taken off to Pirehill Infirmary, as old Harrop had instantly, on seeing him, decreed.

  “Ah!” he reflected in the turmoil of his soul: “God is not mocked!” That was his basic idea: God is not mocked! Daniel was a good fellow, honourable, brilliant; a figure in the world. But what of his licentious tongue? What of his frequenting of bars? (How had he come to miss that train from Liverpool? How?) For many years he, Samuel, had seen in Daniel a living refutation of the authenticity of the old Hebrew menaces. But he had been wrong, after all! God is not mocked! And Samuel was aware of a revulsion in himself towards that strict codified godliness from which, in thought, he had perhaps been slipping away.

  And with it all he felt, too, a certain officious self-importance, as he woke his wife and essayed to break the news to her in a manner tactfully calm. He had assisted at the most overwhelming event ever known in the history of the town.

  II

  “Your muffler—I’ll get it,” said Constance. “Cyril, run upstairs and get father’s muffler. You know the drawer.”

  Cyril ran. It behoved everybody, that morning, to be prompt and efficient.

  “I don’t need any muffler, thank you,” said Samuel, coughing and smothering the cough.

  “Oh! But, Sam—” Constance protested.

  “Now please don’t worry me!” said Samuel with frigid finality. “I’ve got quite enough—” He did not finish.

  Constance sighed as her husband stepped, nervous and self-important, out of the side-door into the street. It was early, not yet eight o’clock, and the shop still unopened.

  “Your father couldn’t wait,” Constance said to Cyril when he had thundered down the stairs in his heavy schoolboy boots. “Give it to me.” She went to restore the muffler to its place.

  The whole house was upset, and Amy still an invalid! Existence was disturbed; there vaguely seemed to be a thousand novel things to be done, and yet she could think of nothing whatever that she needed to do at that moment; so she occupied herself with the muffler. Before she reappeared Cyril had gone to school, he who was usually a laggard. The truth was that he could no longer contain within himself a recital of the night, and in particular of the fact that he had been the first to hear the summons of the murderer on the window-pane. This imperious news had to be imparted to somebody, as a preliminary to the thrilling of the whole school; and Cyril had issued forth in search of an appreciative and worthy confidant. He was scarcely five minutes after his father.

  In St Luke’s Square was a crowd of quite two hundred persons, standing moveless in the November mud. The body of Mrs Daniel Povey had already been taken to the Tiger Hotel, and young Dick Povey was on his way in a covered waggonette to Pirehill Infirmary on the other side of Knype. The shop of the crime was closed, and the blinds drawn at the upper windows of the house. There was absolutely nothing to be seen, not even a policeman. Nevertheless the crowd stared with an extraordinary obstinate attentiveness at the fatal building in Boulton Terrace. Hypnotized by this face of bricks and mortar, it had apparently forgotten all earthly ties, and, regardless of breakfast and a livelihood, was determined to stare at it till the house fell down or otherwise rendered up its secret. Most of its component individuals wore neither overcoats nor collars, but were kept warm by a scarf round the neck and by dint of forcing their fingers into the farthest inch of their pockets. Then they would slowly lift one leg after the other. Starers of infirm purpose would occasionally detach themselves from the throng and sidle away, ashamed of their fickleness. But reinforcements were continually arriving. And to these new-comers all that had been said in gossip had to be repeated and repeated: the same questions, the same answers, the same exclamations, the same proverbial philosophy, the same prophecies recurred in all parts of the Squa
re with an uncanny iterance. Well-dressed men spoke to mere professional loiterers; for this unparalleled and glorious sensation, whose uniqueness grew every instant more impressive, brought out the essential brotherhood of mankind. All had a peculiar feeling that the day was neither Sunday nor week-day, but some eighth day of the week. Yet in the St Luke’s Covered Market close by, the stallkeepers were preparing their stalls just as though it were Saturday, just as though a Town Councillor had not murdered his wife—at last! It was stated, and restated infinitely, that the Povey baking had been taken over by Brindley, the second-best baker and confectioner, who had a stall in the market. And it was asserted, as a philosophical truth, and reasserted infinitely, that there would have been no sense in wasting good food.

  Samuel’s emergence stirred the multitude. But Samuel passed up the Square with a rapt expression; he might have been under an illusion, caused by the extreme gravity of his preoccupations, that he was crossing a deserted Square. He hurried past the Bank and down the Turnhill Road, to the private residence of “Young Lawton,” son of the deceased “Lawyer Lawton.” Young Lawton followed his father’s profession; he was, as his father had been, the most successful solicitor in the town (though reputed by his learned rivals to be a fool), but the custom of calling men by their occupations had died out with horse-cars. Samuel caught young Lawton at his breakfast, and presently drove with him, in the Lawton buggy, to the police-station, where their arrival electrified a crowd as large as that in St Luke’s Square. Later, they drove together to Hanbridge, informally to brief a barrister; and Samuel, not permitted to be present at the first part of the interview between the solicitor and the barrister, was humbled before the pomposity of legal etiquette.

  It seemed to Samuel a game. The whole rigmarole of police and police-cells and formalities seemed insincere. His cousin’s case was not like any other case, and, though formalities might be necessary, it was rather absurd to pretend that it was like any other case. In what manner it differed from other cases Samuel did not analytically inquire. He thought young Lawton was self-important, and Daniel too humble, in the colloquy of these two, and he endeavoured to indicate, by the dignity of his own demeanour, that in his opinion the proper relative tones had not been set. He could not understand Daniel’s attitude, for he lacked imagination to realize what Daniel had been through. After all, Daniel was not a murderer; his wife’s death was due to accident, was simply a mishap.