The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  In the harsh vanity of her conscious capableness and young strength she thought thus, half forgetting her own follies, and half excusing them on the ground of inexperience.

  Sophia wanted to go round the flat and destroy every crimson lamp-shade in it. She wanted to shake Madame Foucault into self-respect and sagacity. Moral reprehension, though present in her mind, was only faint. Certainly she felt the immense gulf between the honest woman and the wanton, but she did not feel it as she would have expected to feel it. “What a fool you have been!” she thought; not “What a sinner!” With her precocious cynicism, which was somewhat unsuited to the lovely northern youthfulness of that face, she said to herself that the whole situation and their relative attitudes would have been different if only Madame Foucault had had the wit to amass a fortune, as (according to Gerald) some of her rivals had succeeded in doing.

  And all the time she was thinking, in another part of her mind: “I ought not to be here. It’s no use arguing. I ought not to be here. Chirac did the only thing for me there was to do. But I must go now.”

  Madame Foucault continued to recite her woes, chiefly financial, in a weak voice damp with tears; she also continued to apologize for mentioning herself. She had finished sobbing, and lay looking at the wall, away from Sophia, who stood irresolute near the bed, ashamed for her companion’s weakness and incapacity.

  “You must not forget,” said Sophia, irritated by the unrelieved darkness of the picture drawn by Madame Foucault, “that at least I owe you a considerable sum, and that I am only waiting for you to tell me how much it is. I have asked you twice already, I think.”

  “Oh, you are still suffering!” said Madame Foucault.

  “I am quite well enough to pay my debts,” said Sophia.

  “I do not like to accept money from you,” said Madame Foucault.

  “But why not?”

  “You will have the doctor to pay.”

  “Please do not talk in that way,” said Sophia. “I have money, and I can pay for everything, and I shall pay for everything.”

  She was annoyed because she was sure that Madame Foucault was only making a pretence of delicacy, and that in any case her delicacy was preposterous. Sophia had remarked this on the two previous occasions when she had mentioned the subject of bills. Madame Foucault would not treat her as an ordinary lodger, now that the illness was past. She wanted, as it were, to complete brilliantly what she had begun, and to live in Sophia’s memory as a unique figure of lavish philanthropy. This was a sentiment, a luxury that she desired to offer herself: the thought that she had played providence to a respectable married lady in distress; she frequently hinted at Sophia’s misfortunes and helplessness. But she could not afford the luxury. She gazed at it as a poor woman gazes at costly stuffs through the glass of a shop-window. The truth was, she wanted the luxury for nothing. For a double reason Sophia was exasperated: by Madame Foucault’s absurd desire, and by a natural objection to the rôle of a subject for philanthropy. She would not admit that Madame Foucault’s devotion as a nurse entitled her to the satisfaction of being a philanthropist when there was no necessity for philanthropy.

  “How long have I been here?” asked Sophia.

  “I don’t know,” murmured Madame Foucault. “Eight weeks—or is it nine?”

  “Suppose we say nine,” said Sophia.

  “Very well,” agreed Madame Foucault, apparently reluctant.

  “Now, how much must I pay you per week?”

  “I don’t want anything—I don’t want anything! You are a friend of Chirac’s. You—”

  “Not at all!” Sophia interrupted, tapping her foot and biting her lip. “Naturally I must pay.”

  Madame Foucault wept quietly.

  “Shall I pay you seventy-five francs a week?” said Sophia, anxious to end the matter.

  “It is too much!” Madame Foucault protested, insincerely.

  “What? For all you have done for me?”

  “I speak not of that,” Madame Foucault modestly replied.

  If the devotion was not to be paid for, then seventy-five francs a week was assuredly too much, as during more than half the time Sophia had had almost no food. Madame Foucault was therefore within the truth when she again protested, at sight of the banknotes which Sophia brought from her trunk:

  “I am sure that it is too much.”

  “Not at all!” Sophia repeated. “Nine weeks at seventy-five. That makes six hundred and seventy-five. Here are seven hundreds.”

  “I have no change,” said Madame Foucault. “I have nothing.”

  “That will pay for the hire of the bath,” said Sophia.

  She laid the notes on the pillow. Madame Foucault looked at them gluttonously, as any other person would have done in her place. She did not touch them. After an instant she burst into wild tears.

  “But why do you cry?” Sophia asked, softened.

  “I—I don’t know!” spluttered Madame Foucault. “You are so beautiful. I am so content that we saved you.” Her great wet eyes rested on Sophia.

  It was sentimentality. Sophia ruthlessly set it down as sentimentality. But she was touched. She was suddenly moved. Those women, such as they were in their foolishness, probably had saved her life—and she a stranger! Flaccid as they were, they had been capable of resolute perseverance there. It was possible to say that chance had thrown them upon an enterprise which they could not have abandoned till they or death had won. It was possible to say that they hoped vaguely to derive advantage from their labours. But even then? Judged by an ordinary standard, those women had been angels of mercy. And Sophia was despising them, cruelly taking their motives to pieces, accusing them of incapacity when she herself stood a supreme proof of their capacity in, at any rate, one direction! In a rush of emotion she saw her hardness and her injustice.

  She bent down. “Never can I forget how kind you have been to me. It is incredible! Incredible!” She spoke softly, in tones loaded with genuine feeling. It was all she said. She could not embroider on the theme. She had no talent for thanksgiving.

  Madame Foucault made the beginning of a gesture, as if she meant to kiss Sophia with those thick, marred lips; but refrained. Her head sank back, and then she had a recurrence of the fit of nervous sobbing. Immediately afterwards there was the sound of a latchkey in the front-door of the flat; the bedroom door was open. Still sobbing very violently, she cocked her ear, and pushed the bank-notes under the pillow.

  Madame Laurence—as she was called: Sophia had never heard her surname—came straight into the bedroom, and beheld the scene with astonishment in her dark twinkling eyes. She was usually dressed in black, because people said that black suited her, and because black was never out of fashion; black was an expression of her idiosyncrasy. She showed a certain elegance, and by comparison with the extreme disorder of Madame Foucault and the deshabille of Sophia her appearance, all fresh from a modish restaurant, was brilliant; it gave her an advantage over the other two—that moral advantage which ceremonial raiment always gives.

  “What is it that passes?” she demanded.

  “He has chucked me, Laurence!” exclaimed Madame Foucault, in a sort of hysteric scream which seemed to force its way through her sobs. From the extraordinary freshness of Madame Foucault’s woe, it might have been supposed that her young man had only that instant strode out.

  Laurence and Sophia exchanged a swift glance; and Laurence, of course, perceived that Sophia’s relations with her landlady and nurse were now of a different, a more candid order. She indicated her perception of the change by a single slight movement of the eyebrows.

  “But listen, Aimée,” she said authoritatively. “You must not let yourself go like that. He will return.”

  “Never!” cried Madame Foucault. “It is finished. And he is the last!”

  Laurence, ignoring Madame Foucault, approached Sophia. “You have an air very fatigued,” she said, caressing Sophia’s shoulder with her gloved hand. “You are pale like everything. All this
not for you. It is not reasonable to remain here, you still suffering! At this hour! Truly not reasonable!”

  Her hands persuaded Sophia towards the corridor. And, in fact, Sophia did then notice her own exhaustion. She departed from the room with the ready obedience of physical weakness, and shut her door.

  After about half an hour, during which she heard confused noises and murmurings, her door half opened.

  “May I enter, since you are not asleep?” It was Laurence’s voice. Twice, now, she had addressed Sophia without adding the formal “madame.”

  “Enter, I beg you,” Sophia called from the bed. “I am reading.”

  Laurence came in. Sophia was both glad and sorry to see her. She was eager to hear gossip which, however, she felt she ought to despise. Moreover, she knew that if they talked that night they would talk as friends, and that Laurence would ever afterwards treat her with the familiarity of a friend. This she dreaded. Still, she knew that she would yield, at any rate, to the temptation to listen to gossip.

  “I have put her to bed,” said Laurence, in a whisper, as she cautiously closed the door. “The poor woman! Oh, what a charming bracelet! It is a true pearl, naturally?”

  Her roving eye had immediately, with an infallible instinct, caught sight of a bracelet which, in taking stock of her possessions, Sophia had accidentally left on the piano. She picked it up, and then put it down again.

  “Yes,” said Sophia. She was about to add: “It’s nearly all the jewellery I possess”; but she stopped.

  Laurence moved towards Sophia’s bed, and stood over it as she had often done in her quality of nurse. She had taken off her gloves, and she made a piquant, pretty show, with her thirty years, and her agreeable, slightly roguish face, in which were mingled the knowinguess of a street boy and the confidence of a woman who has ceased to be surprised at the influence of her snub nose on a highly intelligent man.

  “Did she tell you what they had quarrelled about?” Laurence inquired abruptly. And not only the phrasing of the question, but the assured tone in which it was uttered, showed that Laurence meant to be the familiar of Sophia.

  “Not a word!” said Sophia.

  In this brief question and reply, all was crudely implied that had previously been supposed not to exist. The relations between the two women were altered irretrievably in a moment.

  “It must have been her fault!” said Laurence. “With men she is insupportable. I have never understood how that poor woman has made her way. With women she is charming. But she seems to be incapable of not treating men like dogs. Some men adore that, but they are few. Is it not?”

  Sophia smiled.

  “I have told her! How many times have I told her! But it is useless. It is stronger than she is, and if she finishes on straw one will be able to say that it was because of that. But truly she ought not to have asked him here! Truly that was too much! If he knew . . . !”

  “Why not?” asked Sophia, awkwardly. The answer startled her.

  “Because her room has not been disinfected.”

  “But I thought all the flat had been disinfected?”

  “All except her room.”

  “But why not her room?”

  Laurence shrugged her shoulders. “She did not want to disturb her things! Is it that I know, I? She is like that. She takes an idea—and then, there you are!”

  “She told me every room had been disinfected.”

  “She told the same to the police and the doctor.”

  “Then all the disinfection is useless?”

  “Perfectly! But she is like that. This flat might be very remunerative; but with her, never! She has not even paid for the furniture—after two years!”

  “But what will become of her?” Sophia asked.

  “Ah—that!” Another shrug of the shoulders. “All that I know is that it will be necessary for me to leave here. The last time I brought Monsieur Cerf here, she was excessively rude to him. She has doubtless told you about Monsieur Cerf?”

  “No. Who is Monsieur Cerf?”

  “Ah! She has not told you? That astonishes me. Monsieur Cerf, that is my friend, you know.”

  “Oh!” murmured Sophia.

  “Yes,” Laurence proceeded, impelled by a desire to impress Sophia and to gossip at large. “That is my friend. I knew him at the hospital. It was to please him that I left the hospital. After that we quarrelled for two years; but at the end he gave me right. I did not budge. Two years! It is long. And I had left the hospital. I could have gone back. But I would not. That is not a life, to be nurse in a Paris hospital! No, I drew myself out as well as I could . . . He is the most charming boy you can imagine! And rich now; that is to say, relatively. He has a cousin infinitely more rich than he. I dined with them both tonight at the Maison Dorée. For a luxurious boy, he is a luxurious boy—the cousin I mean. It appears that he has made a fortune in Canada.”

  “Truly!” said Sophia, with politeness. Laurence’s hand was playing on the edge of the bed, and Sophia observed for the first time that it bore a wedding-ring.

  “You remark my ring?” Laurence laughed. “That is he—the cousin. ‘What!’ he said, ‘you do not wear an alliance? An alliance is more proper. We are going to arrange that after dinner.’ I said that all the jewellers’ shops would be closed. ‘That is all the same to me,’ he said. ‘We will open one.’ And in effect . . . it passed like that. He succeeded! Is it not beautiful?” She held forth her hand.

  “Yes,” said Sophia. “It is very beautiful.”

  “Yours also is beautiful,” said Laurence, with an extremely puzzling intonation.

  “It is just the ordinary English wedding-ring,” said Sophia. In spite of herself she blushed.

  “ ‘Now I have married you. It is I, the curé,’ said he—the cousin—when he put the ring on my finger. Oh, he is excessively amusing! He pleases me much. And he is all alone. He asked me whether I knew among my friends a sympathetic, pretty girl, to make four with us three for a picnic. I said I was not sure, but I thought not. Whom do I know? Nobody. I’m not a woman like the rest. I am always discreet. I do not like casual relations . . . But he is very well, the cousin. Brown eyes . . . It is an idea—will you come, one day? He speaks English. He loves the English. He is all that is most correct, the perfect gentleman. He would arrange a dazzling fête. I am sure he would be enchanted to make your acquaintance. Enchanted! . . . As for my Charles, happily he is completely mad about me—otherwise I should have fear.”

  She smiled, and in her smile was a genuine respect for Sophia’s face.

  “I fear I cannot come,” said Sophia. She honestly endeavoured to keep out of her reply any accent of moral superiority, but she did not quite succeed. She was not at all horrified by Laurence’s suggestion. She meant simply to refuse it; but she could not do so in a natural voice.

  “It is true you are not yet strong enough,” said the imperturbable Laurence, quickly, and with a perfect imitation of naturalness. “But soon you must make a little promenade.” She stared at her ring. “After all, it is more proper,” she observed judicially. “With a wedding-ring one is less likely to be annoyed. What is curious is that the idea never before came to me. Yet . . .”

  “You like jewellery?” said Sophia.

  “If I like jewellery!”—with a gesture of the hands.

  “Will you pass me that bracelet?”

  Laurence obeyed, and Sophia clasped it round the girl’s wrist.

  “Keep it,” Sophia said.

  “For me?” Laurence exclaimed, ravished. “It is too much.”

  “It is not enough,” said Sophia. “And when you look at it, you must remember how kind you were to me, and how grateful I am.”

  “How nicely you say that!” Laurence said ecstatically.

  And Sophia felt that she had indeed said it rather nicely. This giving of the bracelet, souvenir of one of the few capricious follies that Gerald had committed for her and not for himself, pleased Sophia very much.

  “I am afraid you
r nursing of me forced you to neglect Monsieur Cerf,” she added.

  “Yes, a little!” said Laurence, impartially, with a small pout of haughtiness. “It is true that he used to complain. But I soon put him straight. What an idea! He knows there are things upon which I do not joke. It is not he who will quarrel a second time! Believe me!”

  Laurence’s absolute conviction of her power was what impressed Sophia. To Sophia she seemed to be a vulgar little piece of goods, with dubious charm and a glance that was far too brazen. Her movements were vulgar. And Sophia wondered how she had established her empire and upon what it rested.

  “I shall not show this to Aimée,” whispered Laurence, indicating the bracelet.

  “As you wish,” said Sophia.

  “By the way, have I told you that war is declared?” Laurence casually remarked.

  “No,” said Sophia. “What war?”

  “The scene with Aimée made me forget it . . . With Germany. The city is quite excited. An immense crowd in front of the New Opéra. They say we shall be at Berlin in a month—or at most two months.”

  “Oh!” Sophia muttered. “Why is there a war?”

  “Ah! It is I who asked that. Nobody knows. It is those Prussians.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to begin again with the disinfecting?” Sophia asked anxiously. “I must speak to Madame Foucault.”

  Laurence told her not to worry, and went off to show the bracelet to Madame Foucault. She had privately decided that this was a pleasure which, after all, she could not deny herself.