The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “And what about the shop?” cried Constance.

  “Ye can sell us th’ stock at a valuation.”

  Constance suddenly comprehended the scheme. Mr Critchlow would remain the chemist, while Mrs Critchlow became the head of the chief drapery business in the town. Doubtless they would knock a hole through the separating wall on the other side, to balance the bricking-up on this side. They must have thought it all out in detail. Constance revolted.

  “Yes!” she said, a little disdainfully. “And my goodwill? Shall you take that at a valuation too?”

  Mr Critchlow glanced at the creature for whom he was ready to scatter thousands of pounds. She might have been a Phryne and he the infatuated fool. He glanced at her as if to say: “We expected this, and this is where we agreed it was to stop.”

  “Ay!” he said to Constance. “Show me your goodwill. Lap it up in a bit of paper and hand it over, and I’ll take it at a valuation. But not afore, missis! Not afore! I’m making ye a very good offer. Twenty pound a year, I’ll let ye th’ house for. And take th’ stock at a valuation. Think it over, my lass.”

  Having said what he had to say, Charles Critchlow departed according to his custom. He unceremoniously let himself out by the side door, and passed with wavy apron round the corner of King Street into the Square and so to his own shop, which ignored the Thursday half-holiday. Miss Insull left soon afterwards.

  III

  Constance’s pride urged her to refuse the offer. But in truth her sole objection to it was that she had not thought of the scheme herself. For the scheme really reconciled her wish to remain where she was with her wish to be free of the shop.

  “I shall make him put me in a new window in the parlour—one that will open!” she said positively to Cyril, who accepted Mr Critchlow’s idea with fatalistic indifference.

  After stipulating for the new window, she closed with the offer. Then there was the stock-taking, which endured for weeks. And then the carpenter came and measured for the window. And a builder and a mason came and inspected doorways, and Constance felt that the end was upon her. She took up the carpet in the parlour and protected the furniture by dust-sheets. She and Cyril lived between bare boards and dust-sheets for twenty days, and neither carpenter nor mason reappeared. Then one surprising day the old window was removed by the carpenter’s two journeymen, and late in the afternoon the carpenter brought the new window, and the three men worked till ten o’clock at night, fixing it. Cyril wore his cap and went to bed in his cap, and Constance wore a Paisley shawl. A painter had bound himself beyond all possibility of failure to paint the window on the morrow. He was to begin at six A.M., and Amy’s alarm-clock was altered so that she might be up and dressed to admit him. He came a week later, administered one coat, and vanished for another ten days.

  Then two masons suddenly came with heavy tools, and were shocked to find that all was not prepared for them. (After three carpetless weeks Constance had relaid her floors.) They tore off wall-paper, sent cascades of plaster down the kitchen steps, withdrew alternate courses of bricks from the walls, and, sated with destruction, hastened away. After four days new red bricks began to arrive, carried by a quite guiltless hodman who had not visited the house before. The hodman met the full storm of Constance’s wrath. It was not a vicious wrath, rather a good-humoured wrath; but it impressed the hodman. “My house hasn’t been fit to live in for a month,” she said in fine. “If these walls aren’t built tomorrow, upstairs and down—tomorrow, mind!—don’t let any of you dare to show your noses here again, for I won’t have you. Now you’ve brought your bricks. Off with you, and tell your master what I say!”

  It was effective. The next day subdued and plausible workmen of all sorts awoke the house with knocking at six-thirty precisely, and the two doorways were slowly bricked up. The curious thing was that, when the barrier was already a foot high on the ground floor Constance remembered small possessions of her own which she had omitted to remove from the cutting-out room. Picking up her skirts, she stepped over into the region that was no more hers, and stepped back with the goods. She had a bandanna round her head to keep the thick dust out of her hair. She was very busy, very preoccupied with nothings. She had no time for sentimentalities. Yet when the men arrived at the topmost course and were at last hidden behind their own erection, and she could see only rough bricks and mortar, she was disconcertingly overtaken by a misty blindness and could not even see bricks and mortar. Cyril found her, with her absurd bandanna, weeping in a sheet-covered rocking-chair in the sacked parlour. He whistled uneasily, remarked: “I say, mother, what about tea?” and then, hearing the heavy voices of workmen above, ran with relief upstairs. Tea had been set in the drawing-room, he was glad to learn that from Amy, who informed him also that she should “never get used to them there new walls,” not as long as she lived.

  He went to the School of Art that night. Constance, alone, could find nothing to do. She had willed that the walls should be built, and they had been built; but days must elapse before they could be plastered, and after the plaster still more days before the papering. Not for another month, perhaps, would her house be free of workmen and ripe for her own labours. She could only sit in the dust-drifts and contemplate the havoc of change, and keep her eyes as dry as she could. The legal transactions were all but complete; little bills announcing the transfer of the business lay on the counters in the shop at the disposal of customers. In two days Charles Critchlow would pay the price of a desire realized. The sign was painted out and new letters sketched thereon in chalk. In future she would be Compelled, if she wished to enter the shop, to enter it as a customer and from the front. Yes, she saw that, though the house remained hers, the root of her life had been wrenched up.

  And the mess! It seemed inconceivable that the material mess could ever be straightened away!

  Yet, ere the fields of the county were first covered with snow that season, only one sign survived of the devastating revolution, and that was a loose sheet of wall-paper that had been too soon pasted on the new plaster and would not stick. Maria Insull was Maria Critchlow. Constance had been out into the Square and seen the altered sign, and seen Mrs Critchlow’s taste in window-curtains, and seen—most impressive sight of all—that the grimy window of the abandoned room at the top of the abandoned staircase next to the bedroom of her girlhood had been cleaned and a table put in front of it. She knew that the chamber, which she herself had never entered, was to be employed as a storeroom, but the visible proof of its conversion so strangely affected her that she had not felt able to go boldly into the shop, as she had meant to do, and make a few purchases in the way of friendliness. “I’m a silly woman!” she muttered. Later, she did venture, timidly abrupt, into the shop, and was received with fitting state by Mrs Critchlow (as desiccated as ever), who insisted on allowing her the special trade discount. And she carried her little friendly purchases round to her own door in King Street. Trivial, trivial event! Constance, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, did both. She accused herself of developing a hysterical faculty in tears, and strove sagely against it.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE PROUDEST MOTHER

  I

  In the year 1893 there was a new and strange man living at No. 4, St Luke’s Square. Many people remarked on the phenomenon. Very few of his like had ever been seen in Bursley before. One of the striking things about him was the complex way in which he secured himself by means of glittering chains. A chain stretched across his waistcoat, passing through a special button-hole, without a button, in the middle. To this cable were firmly linked a watch at one end and a pencil-case at the other; the chain also served as a protection against a thief who might attempt to snatch the fancy waistcoat entire. Then there were longer chains, beneath the waistcoat, partly designed, no doubt, to deflect bullets, but serving mainly to enable the owner to haul up penknives, cigarette-cases, match-boxes, and key-rings from the profundities of hip-pockets. An essential portion of the man’s braces, visible sometimes wh
en he played at tennis, consisted of chain, and the upper and nether halves of his cuff-links were connected by chains. Occasionally he was to be seen chained to a dog.

  A reversion, conceivably, to a medieval type! Yes, but also the exemplar of the excessively modern! Externally he was a consequence of the fact that, years previously, the leading tailor in Bursley had permitted his son to be apprenticed in London. The father died; the son had the wit to return and make a fortune while creating a new type in the town, a type of which multiple chains were but one feature, and that the least expensive if the most salient. For instance, up to the historic year in which the young tailor created the type, any cap was a cap in Bursley, and any collar was a collar. But thenceforward no cap was a cap, and no collar was a collar, which did not exactly conform in shape and material to certain sacred caps and collars guarded by the young tailor in his back shop. None knew why these sacred caps and collars were sacred, but they were; their sacredness endured for about six months, and then suddenly—again none knew why—they fell from their estate and became lower than offal for dogs, and were supplanted on the altar. The type brought into existence by the young tailor was to be recognized by its caps and collars, and in a similar manner by every other article of attire, except its boots. Unfortunately the tailor did not sell boots, and so imposed on his creatures no mystical creed as to boots. This was a pity, for the boot-makers of the town happened not to be inflamed by the type-creating passion as the tailor was, and thus the new type finished abruptly at the edges of the tailor’s trousers.

  The man at No. 4, St Luke’s Square had comparatively small and narrow feet, which gave him an advantage; and as he was endowed with a certain vague general physical distinction he managed, despite the eternal untidiness of his hair, to be eminent among the type. Assuredly the frequent sight of him in her house flattered the pride of Constance’s eye, which rested on him almost always with pleasure. He had come into the house with startling abruptness soon after Cyril left school and was indentured to the head designer at “Peel’s,” that classic earthenware manufactory. The presence of a man in her abode disconcerted Constance at the beginning; but she soon grew accustomed to it, perceiving that a man would behave as a man, and must be expected to do so. This man, in truth, did what he liked in all things. Cyril having always been regarded by both his parents as enormous, one would have anticipated a giant in the new man; but, queerly, he was slim, and little above the average height. Neither in enormity nor in many other particulars did he resemble the Cyril whom he had supplanted. His gestures were lighter and quicker; he had nothing of Cyril’s ungainliness; he had not Cyril’s limitless taste for sweets, nor Cyril’s terrific hatred of gloves, barbers, and soap. He was much more dreamy than Cyril, and much busier. In fact, Constance only saw him at meal-times. He was at Peel’s in the day and at the School of Art every night. He would dream during a meal, even; and, without actually saying so, he gave the impression that he was the busiest man in Bursley, wrapped in occupations and preoccupations as in a blanket—a blanket which Constance had difficulty in penetrating.

  Constance wanted to please him; she lived for nothing but to please him; he was, however, exceedingly difficult to please, not in the least because he was hypercritical and exacting, but because he was indifferent. Constance, in order to satisfy her desire of pleasing, had to make fifty efforts, in the hope that he might chance to notice one. He was a good man, amazingly industrious—when once Constance had got him out of bed in the morning; with no vices; kind, save when Constance mistakenly tried to thwart him; charming, with a curious strain of humour that Constance only half understood. Constance was unquestionably vain about him, and she could honestly find in him little to blame. But whereas he was the whole of her universe, she was merely a dim figure in the background of his. Every now and then, with his gentle, elegant raillery, he would apparently rediscover her, as though saying: “Ah! You’re still there, are you?” Constance could not meet him on the plane where his interests lay, and he never knew the passionate intensity of her absorption in that minor part of his life which moved on her plane. He never worried about her solitude, or guessed that in throwing her a smile and a word at supper he was paying her meagrely for three hours of lone rocking in a rocking-chair.

  The worst of it was that she was quite incurable. No experience would suffice to cure her trick of continually expecting him to notice things which he never did notice. One day he said, in the midst of a silence: “By the way, didn’t father leave any boxes of cigars?” She had the steps up into her bedroom and reached down from the dusty top of the wardrobe the box which she had put there after Samuel’s funeral. In handing him the box she was doing a great deed. His age was nineteen, and she was ratifying his precocious habit of smoking by this solemn gift. He entirely ignored the box for several days. She said timidly: “Have you tried those cigars?” “Not yet,” he replied. “I’ll try ‘em one of these days.” Ten days later, on a Sunday when he chanced not to have gone out with his aristocratic friend Matthew Peel-Swynnerton, he did at length open the box and take out a cigar. “Now,” he observed roguishly, cutting the cigar, “we shall see, Mrs Plover!” He often called her Mrs Plover, for fun. Though she liked him to be sufficiently interested in her to tease her, she did not like being called Mrs Plover, and she never failed to say: “I’m not Mrs Plover.” He smoked the cigar slowly, in the rocking-chair, throwing his head back and sending clouds to the ceiling. And afterwards he remarked: “The old man’s cigars weren’t so bad.” “Indeed!” she answered tartly, as if maternally resenting this easy patronage. But in secret she was delighted. There was something in her son’s favourable verdict on her husband’s cigars that thrilled her.

  And she looked at him. Impossible to see in him any resemblance to his father! Oh! He was a far more brilliant, more advanced, more complicated, more seductive being than his homely father! She wondered where he had come from. And yet . . . ! If his father had lived, what would have occurred between them? Would the boy have been openly smoking cigars in the house at nineteen?

  She laboriously interested herself, so far as he would allow, in his artistic studies and productions. A back attic on the second floor was now transformed into a studio—a naked apartment which smelt of oil and of damp clay. Often there were traces of clay on the stairs. For working in clay he demanded of his mother a smock, and she made a smock, on the model of a genuine smock which she obtained from a country-woman who sold eggs and butter in the Covered Market. Into the shoulders of the smock she put a week’s fancy-stitching, taking the pattern from an old book of embroidery. One day when he had seen her stitching morn, noon, and afternoon, at the smock, he said, as she rocked idly after supper: “I suppose you haven’t forgotten all about the smock I asked you for, have you, mater?” She knew that he was teasing her; but, while perfectly realizing how foolish she was, she nearly always acted as though his teasing was serious; she picked up the smock again from the sofa. When the smock was finished he examined it intently; then exclaimed with an air of surprise: “By Jove! That’s beautiful! Where did you get this pattern?” He continued to stare at it, smiling in pleasure. He turned over the tattered leaves of the embroidery-book with the same naïve, charmed astonishment, and carried the book away to the studio. “I must show that to Swynnerton,” he said. As for her, the epithet “beautiful” seemed a strange epithet to apply to a mere piece of honest stitchery done in a pattern, and a stitch with which she had been familiar all her life. The fact was she understood his “art” less and less. The sole wall decoration of his studio was a Japanese print, which struck her as being entirely preposterous, considered as a picture. She much preferred his own early drawings of moss-roses and picturesque castles—things that he now mercilessly condemned. Later, he discovered her cutting out another smock. “What’s that for?” he inquired. “Well,” she said, “you can’t manage with one smock. What shall you do when that one has to go to the wash?” “Wash!” he repeated vaguely. “There’s no need for
it to go to the wash.” “Cyril,” she replied, “don’t try my patience! I was thinking of making you half a dozen.” He whistled. “With all that stitching?” he questioned, amazed at the undertaking. “Why not?” she said. In her young days, no sempstress ever made fewer than half a dozen of anything, and it was usually a dozen; it was sometimes half a dozen. “Well,” he murmured, “you have got a nerve! I’ll say that”

  Similar things happened whenever he showed that he was pleased. If he said of a dish, in the local tongue: “I could do a bit of that!” or if he simply smacked his lips over it, she would surfeit him with that dish.

  II

  On a hot day in August, just before they were to leave Bursley for a month in the Isle of Man, Cyril came home, pale and perspiring, and dropped on to the sofa. He wore a grey alpaca suit, and, except his hair, which in addition to being very untidy was damp with sweat, he was a masterpiece of slim elegance, despite the heat. He blew out great sighs, and rested his head on the antimacassared arm of the sofa.

  “Well, mater,” he said, in a voice of factitious calm, “I’ve got it.” He was looking up at the ceiling.

  “Got what?”

  “The National Scholarship. Swynnerton says it’s a sheer fluke. But I’ve got it. Great glory for the Bursley School of Art!”

  “National Scholarship?” she said. “What’s that? What is it?”

  “Now, mother!” he admonished her, not without testiness. “Don’t go and say I’ve never breathed a word about it!”

  He lit a cigarette, to cover his self-consciousness, for he perceived that she was moved far beyond the ordinary.

  Never, in fact, not even by the death of her husband, had she received such a frightful blow as that which the dreamy Cyril had just dealt her.