The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  IV

  About a fortnight later—it was a fine Saturday in early August—Sophia, with a large pinafore over her dress, was finishing the portentous preparations for disinfecting the flat. Part of the affair was already accomplished, her own room and the corridor having been fumigated on the previous day, in spite of the opposition of Madame Foucault, who had taken amiss Laurence’s tale-bearing to Sophia. Laurence had left the flat—under exactly what circumstances Sophia knew not, but she guessed that it must have been in consequence of a scene elaborating the tiff caused by Madame Foucault’s resentment against Laurence. The brief, factitious friendliness between Laurence and Sophia had gone like a dream, and Laurence had gone like a dream. The servant had been dismissed; in her place Madame Foucault employed a charwoman each morning for two hours. Finally, Madame Foucault had been suddenly called away that morning by a letter to her sick father at St Mammès-sur-Seine. Sophia was delighted at the chance. The disinfecting of the flat had become an obsession with Sophia—the obsession of a convalescent whose perspective unconsciously twists things to the most wry shapes. She had had trouble on the day before with Madame Foucault, and she was expecting more serious trouble when the moment arrived for ejecting Madame Foucault as well as all her movable belongings from Madame Foucault’s own room. Nevertheless, Sophia had been determined, whatever should happen, to complete an honest fumigation of the entire flat. Hence the eagerness with which, urging Madame Foucault to go to her father, Sophia had protested that she was perfectly strong and could manage by herself for a couple of days. Owing to the partial suppression of the ordinary railway services in favour of military needs, Madame Foucault could not hope to go and return on the same day. Sophia had lent her a louis.

  Pans of sulphur were mysteriously burning in each of the three front rooms, and two pairs of doors had been pasted over with paper, to prevent the fumes from escaping. The charwoman had departed. Sophia, with brush, scissors, flour-paste, and newssheets, was sealing the third pair of doors, when there was a ring at the front door.

  She had only to cross the corridor in order to open.

  It was Chirac. She was not surprised to see him. The outbreak of the war had induced even Sophia and her landlady to look through at least one newspaper during the day, and she had in this way learnt, from an article signed by Chirac, that he had returned to Paris after a mission into the Vosges country for his paper.

  He started on seeing her. “Ah!” He breathed out the exclamation slowly. And then smiled, seized her hand, and kissed it.

  The sight of his obvious extreme pleasure in meeting her again was the sweetest experience that had fallen to Sophia for years.

  “Then you are cured?”

  “Quite.”

  He sighed. “You know, this is an enormous relief to me, to know, veritably, that you are no longer in danger. You gave me a fright . . . but a fright, my dear madame!”

  She smiled in silence.

  As he glanced inquiringly up and down the corridor, she said:

  “I’m all alone in the flat. I’m disinfecting it.”

  “Then that is sulphur that I smell?”

  She nodded. “Excuse me while I finish this door,” she said.

  He closed the front-door. “But you seem to be quite at home here!” he observed.

  “I ought to be,” said she.

  He glanced again inquiringly up and down the corridor. “And you are really all alone now?” he asked, as though to be doubly sure.

  She explained the circumstances.

  “I owe you my most sincere excuses for bringing you here,” he said confidentially.

  “But why?” she replied, looking intently at her door. “They have been most kind to me. Nobody could have been kinder. And Madame Laurence being such a good nurse—”

  “It is true,” said he. “That was a reason. In effect they are both very good-natured little women . . . You comprehend, as journalist it arrives to me to know all kinds of people . . .” He snapped his fingers . . . “And as we were opposite the house. In fine, I pray you to excuse me . . .”

  “Hold me this paper,” she said. “It is necessary that every crack should be covered; also between the floor and the door.”

  “You English are wonderful,” he murmured, as he took the paper. “Imagine you doing that! Then,” he added, resuming the confidential tone, “I suppose you will leave the Foucault now, hein?”

  “I suppose so,” she said carelessly.

  “You go to England?”

  She turned to him, as she patted the creases out of a strip of paper with a duster, and shook her head.

  “Not to England?”

  “No.”

  “If it is not indiscreet, where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” she said candidly.

  And she did not know. She was without a plan. Her brain told her that she ought to return to Bursley, or, at the least, write. But her pride would not hear of such a surrender. Her situation would have to be far more desperate than it was before she could confess her defeat to her family even in a letter. A thousand times no! That was a point which she had for ever decided. She would face any disaster, and any other shame, rather than the shame of her family’s forgiving reception of her.

  “And you?” she asked. “How does it go? This war?”

  He told her, in a few words, a few leading facts about himself. “It must not be said,” he added of the war, “but that will turn out ill! I—know, you comprehend.”

  “Truly?” she answered with casualness.

  “You have heard nothing of him?” Chirac asked.

  “Who? Gerald?”

  He gave a gesture.

  “Nothing! Not a word! Nothing!”

  “He will have gone back to England!”

  “Never!” she said positively.

  “But why not?”

  “Because he prefers France. He really does like France. I think it is the only real passion he ever had.”

  “It is astonishing,” reflected Chirac, “how France is loved! And yet . . . ! But to live, what will he do? Must live!”

  Sophia merely shrugged her shoulders.

  “Then it is finished between you two?” he muttered awkwardly.

  She nodded. She was on her knees, at the lower crack of the doors.

  “There!” she said, rising. “It’s well done, isn’t it? That is all.”

  She smiled at him, facing him squarely, in the obscurity of the untidy and shabby corridor. Both felt that they had become very intimate. He was intensely flattered by her attitude, and she knew it.

  “Now,” she said, “I will take off my pinafore. Where can I niche you? There is only my bedroom, and I want that. What are we to do?”

  “Listen,” he suggested diffidently. “Will you do me the honour to come for a drive? That will do you good. There is sunshine. And you are always very pale.”

  “With pleasure,” she agreed cordially.

  While dressing, she heard him walking up and down the corridor; occasionally they exchanged a few words. Before leaving, Sophia pulled off the paper from one of the key-holes of the sealed suite of rooms, and they peered through, one after the other, and saw the green glow of the sulphur, and were troubled by its uncanniness. And then Sophia refixed the paper.

  In descending the stairs of the house she felt the infirmity of her knees; but in other respects, though she had been out only once before since her illness, she was conscious of a sufficient strength. A disinclination for any enterprise had prevented her from taking the air as she ought to have done, but within the flat she had exercised her limbs in many small tasks. The little Chirac, nervously active and restless, wanted to take her arm, but she would not allow it.

  The concierge and part of her family stared curiously at Sophia as she passed under the archway, for the course of her illness had excited the interest of the whole house. Just as the carriage was driving off, the concierge came across the pavement and paid her compliments, and then said:
r />   “You do not know by hazard why Madame Foucault has not returned for lunch, madame?”

  “Returned for lunch!” said Sophia. “She will not come back till tomorrow.”

  The concierge made a face. “Ah! How curious it is! She told my husband that she would return in two hours, it is very grave! Question of business.”

  “I know nothing, madame,” said Sophia. She and Chirac looked at each other. The concierge murmured thanks and went off muttering indistinctly.

  The fiacre turned down the Rue Laferrière, the horse slipping and sliding as usual over the cobblestones. Soon they were on the boulevard, making for the Champs Elysées and the Bois de Boulogne.

  The fresh breeze and bright sunshine and the large freedom of the streets quickly intoxicated Sophia—intoxicated her, that is to say, in quite a physical sense. She was almost drunk, with the heady savour of life itself. A mild ecstasy of well-being overcame her. She saw the flat as a horrible, vile prison, and blamed herself for not leaving it sooner and oftener. The air was medicine, for body and mind too. Her perspective was instantly corrected. She was happy, living neither in the past nor in the future, but in and for that hour. And beneath her happiness moved a wistful melancholy for the Sophia who had suffered such a captivity and such woes. She yearned for more and yet more delight, for careless orgies of passionate pleasure, in the midst of which she would forget all trouble. Why had she refused the offer of Laurence? Why had she not rushed at once into the splendid fire of joyous indulgence, ignoring everything but the crude, sensuous instinct? Acutely aware as she was of her youth, her beauty, and her charm, she wondered at her refusal. She did not regret her refusal. She placidly observed it as the result of some tremendously powerful motive in herself, which could not be questioned or reasoned with—which was, in fact, the essential her.

  “Do I look like an invalid?” she asked, leaning back luxuriously in the carriage among the crowd of other vehicles.

  Chirac hesitated. “My faith! Yes!” he said at length. “But it becomes you. If I did not know that you have little love for compliments, I—”

  “But I adore compliments!” she exclaimed. “What made you think that?”

  “Well, then,” he youthfully burst out, “you are more ravishing than ever.”

  She gave herself up deliciously to his admiration.

  After a silence, he said: “Ah! if you knew how disquieted I was about you, away there . . . ! I should not know how to tell you. Veritably disquieted, you comprehend! What could I do? Tell me a little about your illness.”

  She recounted details.

  As the fiacre entered the Rue Royale, they noticed a crowd of people in front of the Madeleine shouting and cheering.

  The cabman turned towards them. “It appears there has been a victory!” he said.

  “A victory! If only it was true!” murmured Chirac, cynically.

  In the Rue Royale people were running frantically to and fro, laughing and gesticulating in glee. The customers in the cafés stood on their chairs, and even on tables, to watch, and occasionally to join in, the sudden fever. The fiacre was slowed to a walking pace. Flags and carpets began to show from the upper storeys of houses. The crowd grew thicker and more febrile. “Victory! Victory!” rang hoarsely, shrilly, and hoarsely again in the air.

  “My God!” said Chirac trembling. “It must be a true victory! We are saved! We are saved! . . . Oh yes, it is true!”

  “But naturally it is true! What are you saying?” demanded the driver.

  At the Place de la Concorde the fiacre had to stop altogether. The immense square was a sea of white hats and flowers and happy faces, with carriages anchored like boats on its surface. Flag after flag waved out from neighbouring roofs in the breeze that tempered the August sun. Then hats began to go up, and cheers rolled across the square like echoes of firing in an enclosed valley. Chirac’s driver jumped madly on to his seat, and cracked his whip.

  “Vive la France!” he bawled with all the force of his lungs.

  A thousand throats answered him.

  Then there was a stir behind them. Another carriage was being slowly forced to the front. The crowd was pushing it, and crying, “Marseillaise! Marseillaise!” In the carriage was a woman alone; not beautiful, but distinguished, and with the assured gaze of one who is accustomed to homage and multitudinous applause.

  “It is Gueymard!” said Chirac to Sophia. He was very pale. And he too shouted, “Marseillaise!” All his features were distorted.

  The woman rose and spoke to her coachman, who offered his hand, and she climbed to the box seat, and stood on it and bowed several times.

  “Marseillaise!” The cry continued. Then a roar of cheers, and then silence spread round the square like an inundation. And amid this silence the woman began to sing the Marseillaise. As she sang, the tears ran down her cheeks. Everybody in the vicinity was weeping or sternly frowning. In the pauses of the first verse could be heard the rattle of horses’ bits, or a whistle of a tug on the river. The refrain, signalled by a proud challenging toss of Gueymard’s head, leapt up like a tropical tempest, formidable, overpowering. Sophia, who had had no warning of the emotion gathering within her, sobbed violently. At the close of the hymn Gueymard’s carriage was assaulted by worshippers. All around, in the tumult of shouting, men were kissing and embracing each other; and hats went up continually in fountains. Chirac leaned over the side of the carriage and wrung the hand of a man who was standing by the wheel.

  “Who is that?” Sophia asked, in an unsteady voice, to break the inexplicable tension within her.

  “I don’t know,” said Chirac. He was weeping like a child. And he sang out: “Victory! To Berlin! Victory!”

  V

  Sophia walked alone, with tired limbs, up the damaged oak stairs to the flat. Chirac had decided that, in the circumstances of the victory, he would do well to go to the offices of his paper rather earlier than usual. He had brought her back to the Rue Bréda. They had taken leave of each other in a sort of dream or general enchantment due to their participation in the vast national delirium which somehow dominated individual feelings. They did not define their relations. They had been conscious only of emotion.

  The stairs, which smelt of damp even in summer, disgusted Sophia. She thought of the flat with horror and longed for green places and luxury. On the landing were two stoutish, ill-dressed men, of middle age, apparently waiting. Sophia found her key and opened the door.

  “Pardon, madame!” said one of the men, raising his hat, and they both pushed into the flat after her. They stared, puzzled, at the strips of paper pasted on the doors.

  “What do you want?” she asked haughtily. She was very frightened. The extraordinary irruption brought her down with a shock to the scale of the individual.

  “I am the concierge,” said the man who had addressed her. He had the air of a superior artisan. “It was my wife who spoke to you this afternoon. This,” pointing to his companion, “this is the law. I regret it, but . . .”

  The law saluted and shut the door. Like the concierge the law emitted an odour—the odour of uncleanliness on a hot August day.

  “The rent?” exclaimed Sophia.

  “No, madame, not the rent: the furniture!”

  Then she learnt the history of the furniture. It had belonged to the concierge, who had acquired it from a previous tenant and sold it on credit to Madame Foucault. Madame Foucault had signed bills and had not met them. She had made promises and broken them. She had done everything except discharge her liabilities. She had been warned and warned again. That day had been fixed as the last limit, and she had solemnly assured her creditor that on that day she would pay. On leaving the house she had stated precisely and clearly that she would return before lunch with all the money. She had made no mention of a sick father.

  Sophia slowly perceived the extent of Madame Foucault’s duplicity and moral cowardice. No doubt the sick father was an invention. The woman, at the end of a tether which no ingenuity of li
es could further lengthen, had probably absented herself solely to avoid the pain of witnessing the seizure. She would do anything, however silly, to avoid an immediate unpleasantness. Or perhaps she had absented herself without any particular aim, but simply in the hope that something fortunate might occur. Perhaps she had hoped that Sophia, taken unawares, would generously pay. Sophia smiled grimly.

  “Well,” she said. “I can’t do anything. I suppose you must do what you have to do. You will let me pack up my own affairs?”

  “Perfectly, madame!”

  She warned them as to the danger of opening the sealed rooms. The man of the law seemed prepared to stay in the corridor indefinitely. No prospect of delay disturbed him.

  Strange and disturbing, the triumph of the concierge! He was a locksmith by trade. He and his wife and their children lived in two little dark rooms by the archway—an insignificant fragment of the house. He was away from home about fourteen hours every day, except Sundays, when he washed the courtyard. All the other duties of the concierge were performed by the wife. The pair always looked poor, untidy, dirty, and rather forlorn. But they were steadily levying toll on everybody in the big house. They amassed money in forty ways. They lived for money, and all men have what they live for. With what arrogant gestures Madame Foucault would descend from a carriage at the great door! What respectful attitudes and tones the ageing courtesan would receive from the wife and children of the concierge! But beneath these conventional fictions the truth was that the concierge held the whip. At last he was using it. And he had given himself a half-holiday in order to celebrate his second acquirement of the ostentatious furniture and the crimson lampshades. This was one of the dramatic crises in his career as a man of substance. The national thrill of victory had not penetrated into the flat with the concierge and the law. The emotions of the concierge were entirely independent of the Napoleonic foreign policy.

  As Sophia, sick with a sudden disillusion, was putting her things together, and wondering where she was to go, and whether it would be politic to consult Chirac, she heard a fluster at the front door: cries, protestations, implorings. Her own door was thrust open, and Madame Foucault burst in.