The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  On the south side of the boulevard, Gerald proceeded down the Rue Montmartre, and then turned suddenly into the Rue Croissant. Sophia stopped and asked the price of some combs which were exposed outside a little shop. Then she went on, boldly passing the end of the Rue Croissant. No shadow of Gerald! She saw the signs of newspapers all along the street, Le Bien Public, La Presse Libre, La Patrie. There was a creamery at the corner. She entered it, asked for a cup of chocolate, and sat down. She wanted to drink coffee, but every doctor had forbidden coffee to her, on account of her attacks of dizziness. Then, having ordered chocolate, she felt that, on this occasion, when she had need of strength in her great fatigue, only coffee could suffice her, and she changed the order. She was close to the door, and Gerald could not escape her vigilance if he emerged at that end of the street. She drank the coffee with greedy satisfaction, and waited in the creamery till she began to feel conspicuous there. And then Gerald went by the door, within six feet of her. He turned the corner and continued his descent of the Rue Montmartre. She paid for her coffee and followed the chase. Her blood seemed to be up. Her lips were tightened, and her thought was: “Wherever he goes, I’ll go, and I don’t care what happens.” She despised him. She felt herself above him. She felt that somehow, since quitting the hotel, he had been gradually growing more and more vile and meet to be exterminated. She imagined infamies as to the Rue Croissant. There was no obvious ground for this intensifying of her attitude towards him; it was merely the result of the chase. All that could be definitely charged against him was the smoking of a cigar.

  He stepped into a tobacco-shop, and came out with a longer cigar than the first one, a more expensive article, stripped off its collar, and lighted it as a millionaire might have lighted it. This was the man who swore that he did not possess five francs.

  She tracked him as far as the Rue de Rivoli, and then lost him. There were vast surging crowds in the Rue de Rivoli, and much bunting, and soldiers and gesticulatory policemen. The general effect of the street was that all things were brightly waving in the breeze. She was caught in the crowd as in the current of a stream, and when she tried to sidle out of it into a square, a row of smiling policemen barred her passage; she was a part of the traffic that they had to regulate. She drifted till the Louvre came into view. After all, Gerald had only strolled forth to see the sight of the day, whatever it might be! She knew not what it was. She had no curiosity about it. In the middle of all that thickening mass of humanity, staring with one accord at the vast monument of royal and imperial vanities, she thought, with her characteristic grimness, of the sacrifice of her whole career as a school-teacher for the chance of seeing Gerald once a quarter in the shop. She gloated over that, as a sick appetite will gloat over tainted food. And she saw the shop, and the curve of the stairs up to the showroom, and the pier-glass in the showroom.

  Then the guns began to boom again, and splendid carriages swept one after another from under a majestic archway and glittered westward down a lane of spotless splendid uniforms. The carriages were laden with still more splendid uniforms, and with enchanting toilettes. Sophia, in her modestly stylish black, mechanically noticed how much easier it was for attired women to sit in a carriage now that crinolines had gone. That was the sole impression made upon her by this glimpse of the last fête of the Napoleonic Empire. She knew not that the supreme pillars of imperialism were exhibiting themselves before her; and that the eyes of those uniforms and those toilettes were full of the legendary beauty of Eugénie, and their ears echoing to the long phrases of Napoleon the Third about his gratitude to his people for their confidence in him as shown by the plebiscite, and about the ratification of constitutional reforms guaranteeing order, and about the empire having been strengthened at its base, and about showing force by moderation and envisaging the future without fear, and about the bosom of peace and liberty, and the eternal continuance of his dynasty.

  She just wondered vaguely what was afoot.

  When the last carriage had rolled away, and the guns and acclamations had ceased, the crowd at length began to scatter. She was carried by it into the Place du Palais Royal, and in a few moments she managed to withdraw into the Rue des Bons Enfants and was free.

  The coins in her purse amounted to three sous, and therefore, though she felt exhausted to the point of illness, she had to return to the hotel on foot. Very slowly she crawled upwards in the direction of the Boulevard, through the expiring gaiety of the city. Near the Bourse a fiacre overtook her, and in the fiacre were Gerald and a woman. Gerald had not seen her; he was talking eagerly to his ornate companion. All his body was alive. The fiacre was out of sight in a moment, but Sophia judged instantly the grade of the woman, who was evidently of the discreet class that frequented the big shops of an afternoon with something of their own to sell.

  Sophia’s grimness increased. The pace of the fiacre, her fatigued body, Gerald’s delightful, careless vivacity, the attractive streaming veil of the nice, modest courtesan—everything conspired to increase it.

  III

  Gerald returned to the bedroom which contained his wife and all else that he owned in the world at about nine o’clock that evening. Sophia was in bed. She had been driven to bed by weariness. She would have preferred to sit up to receive her husband, even if it had meant sitting up all night, but her body was too heavy for her spirit. She lay in the dark. She had eaten nothing. Gerald came straight into the room. He struck a match, which burned blue, with a stench, for several seconds, and then gave a clear, yellow flame. He lit a candle; and saw his wife.

  “Oh!” he said; “you’re there, are you?”

  She offered no reply.

  “Won’t speak, eh?” he said. “Agreeable sort of wife! Well, have you made up your mind to do what I told you? I’ve come back especially to know.”

  She still did not speak.

  He sat down, with his hat on, and stuck out his feet, wagging them to and fro on the heels.

  “I’m quite without money,” he went on. “And I’m sure your people will be glad to lend us a bit till I get some. Especially as it’s a question of you starving as well as me. If I had enough to pay your fares to Bursley I’d pack you off. But I haven’t.”

  She could only hear his exasperating voice. The end of the bed was between her eyes and his.

  “Liar!” she said, with uncompromising distinctness. The word reached him barbed with all the poison of her contempt and disgust.

  There was a pause.

  “Oh! I’m a liar, am I? Thanks. I lied enough to get you, I’ll admit. But you never complained of that. I remember beginning the New Year well with a thumping lie just to have a sight of you, my vixen. But you didn’t complain then. I took you with only the clothes on your back. And I’ve spent every cent I had on you. And now I’m spun, you call me a liar.”

  She said nothing.

  “However,” he went on, “this is going to come to an end, this is!”

  He rose, changed the position of the candle, putting it on a chest of drawers, and then drew his trunk from the wall, and knelt in front of it.

  She gathered that he was packing his clothes. At first she did not comprehend his reference to beginning the New Year. Then his meaning revealed itself. That story to her mother about having been attacked by ruffians at the bottom of King Street had been an invention, a ruse to account plausibly for his presence on her mother’s doorstep! And she had never suspected that the story was not true. In spite of her experience of his lying, she had never suspected that that particular statement was a lie. What a simpleton she was!

  There was a continual movement in the room for about a quarter of an hour. Then a key turned in the lock of the trunk.

  His head popped up over the foot of the bed. “This isn’t a joke, you know,” he said.

  She kept silence.

  “I give you one more chance. Will you write to your mother—or Constance if you like—or won’t you?”

  She scorned to reply in any way.

&n
bsp; “I’m your husband,” he said. “And it’s your duty to obey me, particularly in an affair like this. I order you to write to your mother.”

  The corners of her lips turned downwards.

  Angered by her mute obstinacy, he broke away from the bed with a sudden gesture.

  “You do as you like,” he cried, putting on his overcoat, “and I shall do as I like. You can’t say I haven’t warned you. It’s your own deliberate choice, mind you! Whatever happens to you you’ve brought on yourself.” He lifted and shrugged his shoulders, to get the overcoat exactly into place on his shoulders.

  She would not speak a word, not even to insist that she was indisposed.

  He pushed his trunk outside the door, and returned to the bed.

  “You understand,” he said menacingly: “I’m off.”

  She looked up at the foul ceiling.

  “Hm!” he sniffed, bringing his reserves of pride to combat the persistent silence that was damaging his dignity. And he went off, sticking his head forward like a pugilist.

  “Here!” she muttered. “You’re forgetting this.”

  He turned.

  She stretched her hand to the night-table and held up a red circlet.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the bit of paper off the cigar you bought in the Rue Montmartre this afternoon,” she answered, in a significant tone.

  He hesitated, then swore violently, and bounced out of the room. He had made her suffer, but she was almost repaid for everything by that moment of cruel triumph. She exulted in it, and never forgot it.

  Five minutes later, the gloomy menial in felt slippers and alpaca jacket, who seemed to pass the whole of his life flitting in and out of bedrooms like a rabbit in a warren, carried Gerald’s trunk downstairs. She recognized the peculiar tread of his slippers.

  Then there was a knock at the door. The landlady entered, actuated by a legitimate curiosity.

  “Madame is suffering?” the landlady began.

  Sophia refused offers of food and nursing.

  “Madame knows without doubt that monsieur has gone away?”

  “Has he paid the bill?” Sophia asked bluntly.

  “But yes, madame, till tomorrow. Then madame has want of nothing?”

  “If you will extinguish the candle,” said Sophia.

  He had deserted her, then!

  “All this,” she reflected, listening in the dark to the ceaseless rattle of the street, “because mother and Constance wanted to see the elephant, and I had to go into father’s room! I should never have caught sight of him from the drawing-room window!”

  IV

  She passed a night of physical misery, exasperated by the tireless rattling vitality of the street. She kept saying to herself: “I’m all alone now, and I’m going to be ill. I am ill.” She saw herself dying in Paris, and heard the expressions of facile sympathy and idle curiosity drawn forth by the sight of the dead body of this foreign woman in a little Paris hotel. She reached the stage, in the gradual excruciation of her nerves, when she was obliged to concentrate her agonized mind on an intense and painful expectancy of the next new noise, which when it came increased her torture and decreased her strength to support it. She went through all the interminable dilatoriness of the dawn, from the moment when she could scarcely discern the window to the moment when she could read the word “Bock” on the red circlet of paper which had tossed all night on the sea of the counterpane. She knew she would never sleep again. She could not imagine herself asleep; and then she was startled by a sound that seemed to clash with the rest of her impressions. It was a knocking at the door. With a start she perceived that she must have been asleep.

  “Enter,” she murmured.

  There entered the menial in alpaca. His waxen face showed a morose commiseration. He noiselessly approached the bed—he seemed to have none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature infinitely mysterious and aloof from humanity—and held out to Sophia a visiting card in his grey hand.

  It was Chirac’s card.

  “Monsieur asked for monsieur,” said the waiter. “And then, as monsieur had gone away, he demanded to see madame. He says it is very important.”

  Her heart jumped, partly in vague alarm, and partly with a sense of relief at this chance of speaking to someone whom she knew. She tried to reflect rationally.

  “What time is it?” she inquired.

  “Eleven o’clock, madame.”

  This was surprising. The fact that it was eleven o’clock destroyed the remains of her self-confidence. How could it be eleven o’clock, with the dawn scarcely finished?

  “He says it is very important,” repeated the waiter, imperturbably and solemnly. “Will madame see him an instant?”

  Between resignation and anticipation she said: “Yes.”

  “It is well, madame,” said the waiter, disappearing without a sound.

  She sat up and managed to drag her matinée from a chair and put it around her shoulders. Then she sank back from weakness, physical and spiritual. She hated to receive Chirac in a bedroom, and particularly in that bedroom. But the hotel had no public room except the dining-room, which began to be occupied after eleven o’clock. Moreover, she could not possibly get up. Yes, on the whole she was pleased to see Chirac. He was almost her only acquaintance, assuredly the only being whom she could by any stretch of meaning call a friend, in the whole of Europe. Gerald and she had wandered to and fro, skimming always over the real life of nations, and never penetrating into it. There was no place for them, because they had made none. With the exception of Chirac, whom an accident of business had thrown into Gerald’s company years before, they had no social relations. Gerald was not a man to make friends; he did not seem to need friends, or at any rate to feel the want of them. But as chance had given him Chirac, he maintained the connexion whenever they came to Paris. Sophia, of course, had not been able to escape from the solitude imposed by existence in hotels. Since her marriage she had never spoken to a woman in the way of intimacy. But once or twice she had approached intimacy with Chirac, whose wistful admiration of her always aroused into activity her desire to charm.

  Preceded by the menial, he came into the room hurriedly, apologetically, with an air of acute anxiety. And as he saw her lying on her back, with flushed features, her hair disarranged, and only the grace of the silk ribbons of her matinée to mitigate the melancholy repulsiveness of her surroundings, that anxiety seemed to deepen.

  “Dear madame,” he stammered, “all my excuses!” He hastened to the bedside and kissed her hand—a little peck, according to his custom. “You are ill?”

  “I have my migraine,” she said. “You want Gerald?”

  “Yes,” he said diffidently. “He had promised—”

  “He has left me,” Sophia interrupted him in her weak and fatigued voice. She closed her eyes as she uttered the words.

  “Left you?” He glanced round to be sure that the waiter had retired.

  “Quitted me! Abandoned me. Last night!”

  “Not possible!” he breathed.

  She nodded. She felt intimate with him. Like all secretive persons, she could be suddenly expansive at times.

  “It is serious?” he questioned.

  “All that is most serious,” she replied.

  “And you ill! Ah, the wretch! Ah, the wretch! That, for example!” He waved his hat about.

  “What is it you want, Chirac?” she demanded, in a confidential tone.

  “Eh, well,” said Chirac. “You do not know where he has gone?”

  “No. What do you want?” she insisted.

  He was nervous. He fidgeted. She guessed that, though warm with sympathy for her plight, he was preoccupied by interests and apprehensions of his own. He did not refuse her request temporarily to leave the astonishing matter of her situation in order to discuss the matter of his visit.

  “Eh, well! He came to me yesterday afternoon in the Rue Croissant to borrow some money.”

  She understo
od then the object of Gerald’s stroll on the previous afternoon.

  “I hope you didn’t lend him any,” she said.

  “Eh, well! It was like this. He said he ought to have received five thousand francs yesterday morning, but that he had had a telegram that it would not arrive till today. And he had need of five hundred francs at once. I had not five hundred francs”—he smiled sadly, as if to insinuate that he did not handle such sums—“but I borrowed it from the cash-box of the journal. It is necessary, absolutely, that I should return it this morning.” He spoke with increased seriousness. “Your husband said he would take a cab and bring me the money immediately on the arrival of the post this morning—about nine o’clock. Pardon me for deranging you with such a—”

  He stopped. She could see that he really was grieved to “derange” her, but that circumstances pressed.

  “At my paper,” he murmured, “it is not so easy as that to—in fine—!”

  Gerald had genuinely been at his last francs. He had not lied when she thought he had lied. The nakedness of his character showed now. Instantly upon the final and definite cessation of the lawful supply of money, he had set his wits to obtain money unlawfully. He had, in fact, simply stolen it from Chirac, with the ornamental addition of endangering Chirac’s reputation and situation—as a sort of reward to Chirac for the kindness! And, further, no sooner had he got hold of the money than it had intoxicated him, and he had yielded to the first fatuous temptation. He had no sense of responsibility, no scruple. And as for common prudence—had he not risked permanent disgrace and even prison for a paltry sum which he would certainly squander in two or three days? Yes, it was indubitable that he would stop at nothing, at nothing whatever.

  “You did not know that he was coming to me?” asked Chirac, pulling his short, silky brown beard.

  “No,” Sophia answered.

  “But he said that you had charged him with your friendlinesses to me!” He nodded his head once or twice, sadly but candidly accepting, in his quality of a Latin, the plain facts of human nature—reconciling himself to them at once.