The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “Are you ready?” he asked, placing his hands on her shoulders and holding her away from him.

  “Yes,” she said, nerving herself. Their faces were still very near together.

  “Well, would you like to go and see the Doré pictures?”

  A simple enough question! A proposal felicitous enough! Doré was becoming known even in the Five Towns, not, assuredly, by his illustrations to the Contes Drolatiques of Balzac, but by his shuddering Biblical conceits. In pious circles Doré was saving art from the reproach of futility and frivolity. It was indubitably a tasteful idea on Gerald’s part to take his love of a summer’s afternoon to gaze at the originals of those prints which had so deeply impressed the Five Towns. It was an idea that sanctified the profane adventure.

  Yet Sophia showed signs of affliction. Her colour went and came; her throat made the motion of swallowing; there was a muscular contraction over her whole body. And she drew herself from him. Her glance, however, did not leave him, and his eyes fell before hers.

  “But what about the—wedding?” she breathed.

  That sentence seemed to cost all her pride; but she was obliged to utter it, and to pay for it.

  “Oh,” he said lightly and quickly, just as though she had reminded him of a detail that might have been forgotten, “I was just going to tell you. It can’t be done here. There’s been some change in the rules. I only found out for certain late last night. But I’ve ascertained that it’ll be as simple as A B C before the English Consul in Paris; and as I’ve got the tickets for us to go over tonight, as we arranged . . .” He stopped.

  She sat down on the towel-covered chair, staggered. She believed what he said. She did not suspect that he was using the classic device of the seducer. It was his casualness that staggered her. Had it really been his intention to set off on an excursion and remark as an afterthought: “By the way, we can’t be married as I told you at half-past two today”? Despite her extreme ignorance and innocence, Sophia held a high opinion of her own common sense and capacity for looking after herself, and she could scarcely believe that he was expecting her to go to Paris, and at night, without being married. She looked pitiably young, virgin, raw, unsophisticated; helpless in the midst of dreadful dangers. Yet her head was full of a blank astonishment at being mistaken for a simpleton! The sole explanation could be that Gerald, in some matters, must himself be a confiding simpleton. He had not reflected. He had not sufficiently realized the immensity of her sacrifice in flying with him even to London. She felt sorry for him. She had the woman’s first glimpse of the necessity for some adjustment of outlook as an essential preliminary to uninterrupted happiness.

  “It’ll be all right!” Gerald persuasively continued.

  He looked at her, as she was not looking at him. She was nineteen. But she seemed to him utterly mature and mysterious. Her face baffled him; her mind was a foreign land. Helpless in one sense she might be; yet she, and not he, stood for destiny; the future lay in the secret and capricious workings of that mind.

  “Oh no!” she exclaimed curtly. “Oh no!”

  “Oh no what?”

  “We can’t possibly go like that,” she said.

  “But don’t I tell you it’ll be all right?” he protested. “If we stay here and they come after you . . . ! Besides, I’ve got the tickets and all.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she demanded.

  “But how could I?” he grumbled. “Have we had a single minute alone?”

  This was nearly true. They could not have discussed the formalities of marriage in the crowded train, nor during the hurried lunch with a dozen cocked ears at the same table. He saw himself on sure ground here.

  “Now, could we?” he pressed.

  “And you talk about going to see pictures!” was her reply.

  Undoubtedly this had been a grave error of tact. He recognized that it was a stupidity. And so he resented it, as though she had committed it and not he.

  “My dear girl,” he said, hurt, “I acted for the best. It isn’t my fault if rules are altered and officials silly.”

  “You ought to have told me before,” she persisted sullenly.

  “But how could I?”

  He almost believed in that moment that he had really intended to marry her, and that the ineptitudes of red-tape had prevented him from achieving his honourable purpose; whereas he had done nothing whatever towards the marriage.

  “Oh no! Oh no!” she repeated, with heavy lip and liquid eye. “Oh no!”

  He gathered that she was flouting his suggestion of Paris.

  Slowly and nervously he approached her. She did not stir or look up. Her glance was fixed on the washstand. He bent down and murmured:

  “Come, now. It’ll be all right. You’ll travel in the ladies’ saloon on the steam-packet.”

  She did not stir. He bent lower and touched the back of her neck with his lips. And she sprang up, sobbing and angry. Because she was mad for him she hated him furiously. All tenderness had vanished.

  “I’ll thank you not to touch me!” she said fiercely. She had given him her lips a moment ago, but now to graze her neck was an insult.

  He smiled sheepishly. “But really you must be reasonable,” he argued. “What have I done?”

  “It’s what you haven’t done, I think!” she cried. “Why didn’t you tell me while we were in the cab?”

  “I didn’t care to begin worrying you just then,” he replied: which was exactly true.

  The fact was, he had of course shirked telling her that no marriage would occur that day. Not being a professional seducer of young girls, he lacked skill to do a difficult thing simply.

  “Now come along, little girl,” he went on, with just a trifle of impatience. “Let’s go out and enjoy ourselves. I assure you that everything will be all right in Paris.”

  “That’s what you said about coming to London,” she retorted sarcastically through her sobs. “And look at you!”

  Did he imagine for a single instant that she would have come to London with him save on the understanding that she was to be married immediately upon arrival? This attitude of an indignant question was not to be reconciled with her belief that his excuses for himself were truthful. But she did not remark the discrepancy.

  Her sarcasm wounded his vanity.

  “Oh, very well!” he muttered. “If you don’t choose to believe what I say!” He shrugged his shoulders.

  She said nothing, but the sobs swept at intervals through her frame, shaking it.

  Reading hesitation in her face, he tried again. “Come along, little girl. And wipe your eyes.” And he approached her. She stepped back.

  “No, no!” she denied him, passionately. He had esteemed her too cheaply. And she did not care to be called “little girl.”

  “Then what shall you do?” he inquired, in a tone which blended mockery and bullying. She was making a fool of him.

  “I can tell you what I shan’t do,” she said. “I shan’t go to Paris.” Her sobs were less frequent.

  “That’s not my question,” he said icily. “I want to know what you will do.”

  There was now no pretence of affectionateness either on her part or on his. They might, to judge from their attitudes, have been nourished from infancy on mutual hatred.

  “What’s that got to do with you?” she demanded.

  “It’s got everything to do with me,” he said.

  “Well, you can go and find out!” she said.

  It was girlish;it was childish;it was scarcely according to the canons for conducting a final rupture; but it was not the less tragically serious. Indeed, the spectacle of this young girl absurdly behaving like one in a serious crisis increased the tragicalness of the situation even if it did not heighten it. The idea that ran through Gerald’s brain was the ridiculous folly of having anything to do with young girls. He was quite blind to her beauty.

  “ ‘Go’?” he repeated her word. “You mean that?”

  “Of course I mean
it,” she answered promptly.

  The coward in him urged him to take advantage of her ignorant, helpless pride, and leave her at her word. He remembered the scene she had made at the pit shaft, and he said to himself that her charm was not worth her temper, and that he was a fool ever to have dreamed that it was, and that he would be doubly a fool now not to seize the opportunity of withdrawing from an insane enterprise.

  “I am to go?” he asked, with a sneer.

  She nodded.

  “Of course if you order me to leave you, I must. Can I do anything for you?”

  She signified that he could not.

  “Nothing? You’re sure?”

  She frowned.

  “Well, then, good-bye.” He turned towards the door.

  “I suppose you’d leave me here without money or anything?” she said in a cold, cutting voice. And her sneer was far more destructive than his. It destroyed in him the last trace of compassion for her.

  “Oh, I beg pardon!” he said, and swaggeringly counted out five sovereigns on to a chest of drawers.

  She rushed at them. “Do you think I’ll take your odious money?” she snarled, gathering the coins in her gloved hand.

  Her first impulse was to throw them in his face; but she paused and then flung them into a corner of the room.

  “Pick them up!” she commanded him.

  “No, thanks,” he said briefly; and left, shutting the door.

  Only a very little while, and they had been lovers, exuding tenderness with every gesture, like a perfume! Only a very little while, and she had been deciding to telegraph condescendingly to her mother that she was “all right”! And now the dream was utterly dissolved. And the voice of that hard common sense which spake to her in her wildest moods grew loud in asserting that the enterprise could never have come to any good, that it was from its inception an impossible enterprise, unredeemed by the slightest justification. An enormous folly! Yes, an elopement; but not like a real elopement; always unreal! She had always known that it was only an imitation of an elopement, and must end in some awful disappointment. She had never truly wanted to run away; but something within her had pricked her forward in spite of her protests. The strict notions of her elderly relatives were right after all. It was she who had been wrong. And it was she who would have to pay.

  “I’ve been a wicked girl,” she said to herself grimly, in the midst of her ruin.

  She faced the fact. But she would not repent; at any rate she would never sit on that stool. She would not exchange the remains of her pride for the means of escape from the worst misery that life could offer. On that point she knew herself. And she set to work to repair and renew her pride.

  Whatever happened she would not return to the Five Towns. She could not, because she had stolen money from her Aunt Harriet. As much as she had thrown back at Gerald, she had filched from her aunt, but in the form of a note. A prudent, mysterious instinct had moved her to take this precaution. And she was glad. She would never have been able to dart that sneer at Gerald about money if she had really needed money. So she rejoiced in her crime; though since Aunt Harriet would assuredly discover the loss at once, the crime eternally prevented her from going back to her family. Never, never would she look at her mother with the eyes of a thief!

  (In truth Aunt Harriet did discover the loss, and very creditably said naught about it to anybody. The knowledge of it would have twisted the knife in the maternal heart.)

  Sophia was also glad that she had refused to proceed to Paris. The recollection of her firmness in refusing flattered her vanity as a girl convinced that she could take care of herself. To go to Paris unmarried would have been an inconceivable madness. The mere thought of the enormity did outrage to her moral susceptibilities. No, Gerald had most perfectly mistaken her for another sort of girl; as, for instance, a shop-assistant or a barmaid!

  With this the catalogue of her satisfactions ended. She had no idea at all as to what she ought to do, or could do. The mere prospect of venturing out of the room intimidated her. Had Gerald left her trunk in the hall? Of course he had. What a question! But what would happen to her? London . . . London had merely dazed her. She could do nothing for herself. She was as helpless as a rabbit in London. She drew aside the window-curtain and had a glimpse of the river. It was inevitable that she should think of suicide; for she could not suppose that any girl had ever got herself into a plight more desperate than hers. “I could slip out at night and drown myself,” she thought seriously. “A nice thing that would be for Gerald!”

  Then loneliness, like a black midnight, overwhelmed her, swiftly wasting her strength, disintegrating her pride in its horrid flood. She glanced about for support, as a woman in the open street who feels she is going to faint, and went blindly to the bed, falling on it with the upper part of her body, in an attitude of abandonment. She wept, but without sobbing.

  II

  Gerald Scales walked about the Strand, staring up at its high narrow houses, crushed one against another as though they had been packed, unsorted, by a packer who thought of nothing but economy of space. Except by Somerset House, King’s College, and one or two theatres and banks, the monotony of mean shops, with several storeys unevenly perched over them, was unbroken. Then Gerald encountered Exeter Hall, and examined its prominent façade with a provincial’s eye; for despite his travels he was not very familiar with London. Exeter Hall naturally took his mind back to his Uncle Boldero, that great and ardent Nonconformist, and his own godly youth. It was laughable to muse upon what his uncle would say and think, did the old man know that his nephew had run away with a girl, meaning to seduce her in Paris? It was enormously funny!

  However, he had done with all that. He was well out of it. She had told him to go, and he had gone. She had money to get home; she had nothing to do but use the tongue in her head. The rest was her affair. He would go to Paris alone, and find another amusement. It was absurd to have supposed that Sophia would ever have suited him. Not in such a family as the Baineses could one reasonably expect to discover an ideal mistress. No! there had been a mistake. The whole business was wrong. She had nearly made a fool of him. But he was not the man to be made a fool of. He had kept his dignity intact.

  So he said to himself. Yet all the time his dignity, and his pride also, were bleeding, dropping invisible blood along the length of the Strand pavements.

  He was at Salisbury Street again. He pictured her in the bedroom. Damn her! He wanted her. He wanted her with an excessive desire. He hated to think that he had been baulked. He hated to think that she would remain immaculate. And he continued to picture her in the exciting privacy of that cursed bedroom.

  Now he was walking down Salisbury Street. He did not wish to be walking down Salisbury Street; but there he was!

  “Oh, hell!” he murmured. “I suppose I must go through with it.”

  He felt desperate. He was ready to pay any price in order to be able to say to himself that he had accomplished what he had set his heart on.

  “My wife hasn’t gone out, has she?” he asked of the hall-porter.

  “I’m not sure, sir; I think not,” said the hall-porter.

  The fear that Sophia had already departed made him sick. When he noticed her trunk still there, he took hope and ran upstairs.

  He saw her, a dark, crumpled, sinuous piece of humanity, half on and half off the bed, silhouetted against the bluish-white counterpane; her hat was on the floor, with the spotted veil trailing away from it. This sight seemed to him to be the most touching that he had ever seen, though her face was hidden. He forgot everything except the deep and strange emotion which affected him. He approached the bed. She did not stir.

  Having heard the entry and knowing that it must be Gerald who had entered, Sophia forced herself to remain still. A wild, splendid hope shot up in her. Constrained by all the power of her will not to move, she could not stifle a sob that had lain in ambush in her throat.

  The sound of the sob fetched tears to the eyes of Ger
ald.

  “Sophia!” he appealed to her.

  But she did not stir. Another sob shook her.

  “Very well, then,” said Gerald. “We’ll stay in London till we can be married. I’ll arrange it. I’ll find a nice boarding-house for you, and I’ll tell the people you’re my cousin. I shall stay on at this hotel, and I’ll come and see you every day.”

  A silence.

  “Thank you!” she blubbered. “Thank you!”

  He saw that her little gloved hand was stretching out towards him, like a feeler; and he seized it, and knelt down and took her clumsily by the waist. Somehow he dared not kiss her yet.

  An immense relief surged very slowly through them both.

  “I—I—really—” She began to say something, but the articulation was lost in her sobs.

  “What? What do you say, dearest?” he questioned eagerly.

  And she made another effort. “I really couldn’t have gone to Paris with you without being married,” she succeeded at last. “I really couldn’t.”

  “No, no!” he soothed her. “Of course you couldn’t. It was I who was wrong. But you didn’t know how I felt . . . Sophia, it’s all right now, isn’t it?”

  She sat up and kissed him fairly.

  It was so wonderful and startling that he burst openly into tears. She saw in the facile intensity of his emotion a guarantee of their future happiness. And as he had soothed her, so now she soothed him. They clung together, equally surprised at the sweet, exquisite, blissful melancholy which drenched them through and through. It was remorse for having quarrelled, for having lacked faith in the supreme rightness of the high adventure. Everything was right, and would be right; and they had been criminally absurd. It was remorse; but it was pure bliss, and worth the quarrel! Gerald resumed his perfection again in her eyes! He was the soul of goodness and honour! And for him she was again the ideal mistress, who would, however, be also a wife. As in his mind he rapidly ran over the steps necessary to their marriage, he kept saying to himself, far off in some remote cavern of the brain: “I shall have her! I shall have her!” He did not reflect that this fragile slip of the Baines stock, unconsciously drawing upon the accumulated strength of generations of honest living, had put a defeat upon him.