The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  “So you have decided to sell yourself to him!” Chirac whispered.

  She drew away instinctively, and she could feel herself blushing. She was at a loss. She saw that Chirac was in a furious rage, tremendously moved. He crept towards her, half crouching. She had never seen anything so theatrical as his movement, and the twitching of his face. She felt that she too ought to be theatrical, that she ought nobly to scorn his infamous suggestion, his unwarrantable attack. Even supposing that she had decided to sell herself to the old pasha, did that concern him? A dignified silence, an annihilating glance, were all that he deserved. But she was not capable of this heroic behaviour.

  “What time is it?” she added weakly.

  “Three o’clock,” Chirac sneered.

  “I forgot to wind up my watch,” she said. “And so I came down to see.”

  “In effect!” He spoke sarcastically, as if saying: “I’ve waited for you, and here you are.”

  She said to herself that she owed him nothing, but all the time she felt that he and she were the only young people in that flat, and that she did owe to him the proof that she was guiltless of the supreme dishonour of youth. She collected her forces and looked at him.

  “You should be ashamed,” she said. “You will wake the others.”

  “And M. Niepce—will he need to be wakened?”

  “M. Niepce is not here,” she said.

  Niepce’s door was unlatched. She pushed it open and went into the room, which was empty and bore no sign of having been used.

  “Come and satisfy yourself!” she insisted.

  Chirac did so. His face fell.

  She took her watch from her pocket.

  “And now wind my watch, and set it, please.”

  She saw that he was in anguish. He could not take the watch. Tears came into his eyes. Then he hid his face, and dashed away. She heard a sob-impeded murmur that sounded like, “Forgive me!” and the banging of a door. And in the stillness she heard the regular snoring of M. Carlier. She too cried. Her vision was blurred by a mist, and she stumbled into the kitchen and seized the clock, and carried it with her upstairs, and shivered in the intense cold of the night. She wept gently for a very long time. “What a shame! What a shame!” she said to herself. Yet she did not quite blame Chirac. The frost drove her into bed, but not to sleep. She continued to cry. At dawn her eyes were inflamed with weeping. She was back in the kitchen then. Chirac’s door was wide open. He had left the flat. On the slate was written, “I shall not take meals today.”

  III

  Their relations were permanently changed. For several days they did not meet at all; and when at the end of the week Chirac was obliged at last to face Sophia in order to pay his bill, he had a most grievous expression. It was obvious that he considered himself a criminal without any defence to offer for his crime. He seemed to make no attempt to hide his state of mind. But he said nothing. As for Sophia, she preserved a mien of amiable cheerfulness. She exerted herself to convince him by her attitude that she bore no resentment, that she had determined to forget the incident, that in short she was the forgiving angel of his dreams. She did not, however, succeed entirely in being quite natural. Confronted by his misery, it would have been impossible for her to be quite natural, and at the same time quite cheerful!

  A little later the social atmosphere of the flat began to grow querulous, disputatious, and perverse. The nerves of everybody were seriously strained. This applied to the whole city. Days of heavy rains followed the sharp frosts, and the town was, as it were, sodden with woe. The gates were closed. And though nine-tenths of the inhabitants never went outside the gates, the definite and absolute closing of them demoralized all hearts. Gas was no longer supplied. Rats, cats, and thorough-bred horses were being eaten and pronounced “not bad.” The siege had ceased to be a novelty. Friends did not invite one another to a “siege-dinner” as to a picnic. Sophia, fatigued by regular overwork, became weary of the situation. She was angry with the Prussians for dilatoriness, and with the French for inaction, and she poured out her English spleen on her boarders. The boarders told each other in secret that the patronne was growing formidable. Chiefly she bore a grudge against the shopkeepers; and when, upon a rumour of peace, the shop-windows one day suddenly blossomed with prodigious quantities of all edibles, at highest prices, thus proving that the famine was artificially created, Sophia was furious. M. Niepce in particular, though he sold goods to her at a special discount, suffered indignities. A few days later that benign and fatherly man put himself lamentably in the wrong by attempting to introduce into his room a charming young creature who knew how to be sympathetic. Sophia, by an accident unfortunate for the grocer, caught them in the corridor. She was beside herself, but the only outward symptoms were a white face and a cold, steely voice that grated like a rasp on the susceptibilities of the adherents of Aphrodite. At this period Sophia had certainly developed into a termagant—without knowing it!

  She would often insist now on talking about the siege and hearing everything that the men could tell her. Her comments, made without the least regard for the justifiable delicacy of their feelings as Frenchmen, sometimes led to heated exchanges. When all Montmartre and the Quartier Bréda was impassioned by the appearance from outside of the Thirty-second battalion, she took the side of the populace, and would not credit the solemn statement of the journalists, proved by documents, that these maltreated soldiers were not cowards in flight. She supported the women who had spit in the faces of the Thirty-second. She actually said that if she had met them, she would have spit too. Really she was convinced of the innocence of the Thirty-second, but something prevented her from admitting it. The dispute ended with high words between herself and Chirac.

  The next day Chirac came home at an unusual hour, knocked at the kitchen door, and said:

  “I must give notice to leave you.”

  “Why?” she demanded curtly.

  She was kneading flour and water for a potato-cake. Her potato-cakes were the joy of the household.

  “My paper has stopped!” said Chirac.

  “Oh!” she added thoughtfully, but not looking at him. “That is no reason why you should leave.”

  “Yes,” he said. “This place is beyond my means. I do not need to tell you that in ceasing to appear the paper has omitted to pay its debts. The house owes me a month’s salary. So I must leave.”

  “No!” said Sophia. “You can pay me when you have money.”

  He shook his head. “I have no intention of accepting your kindness.”

  “Haven’t you got any money?” she abruptly asked.

  “None,” said he. “It is the disaster—quite simply!”

  “Then you will be forced to get into debt somewhere.”

  “Yes, but not here! Not to you!”

  “Truly, Chirac,” she exclaimed, with a cajoling voice, “you are not reasonable.”

  “Nevertheless it is like that!” he said with decision.

  “Eh, well!” she turned on him menacingly. “It will not be like that! You understand me? You will stay. And you will pay me when you can. Otherwise we shall quarrel. Do you imagine I shall tolerate your childishness?Just because you were angry last night—”

  “It is not that,” he protested. “You ought to know it is not that.” (She did.) “It is solely that I cannot permit myself to—”

  “Enough!” she cried peremptorily, stopping him. And then in a quieter tone, “And what about Carlier? Is he also in the ditch?”

  “Ah, he has money,” said Chirac, with sad envy.

  “You also, one day,” said she. “You stop—in any case until after Christmas, or we quarrel. Is it agreed?” Her accent had softened.

  “You are too good!” he yielded. “I cannot quarrel with you. But it pains me to accept—”

  “Oh!” she snapped, dropping into the vulgar idiom, “you make me sweat with your stupid pride. Is it that that you call friendship? Go away now. How do you wish that I should succeed with this ca
ke while you station yourself there to distract me?”

  IV

  But in three days Chirac, with amazing luck, fell into another situation, and on the Journal des Débâts. It was the Prussians who had found him a place. The celebrated Payenneville, second greatest chroniqueur of his time, had caught a cold while doing his duty as a national guard, and had died of pneumonia. The weather was severe again; soldiers were being frozen to death at Aubervilliers. Payenneville’s position was taken by another man, whose post was offered to Chirac. He told Sophia of his good fortune with unconcealed vanity.

  “You with your smile!” she said impatiently. “One can refuse you nothing!”

  She behaved just as though Chirac had disgusted her. She humbled him. But with his fellow-lodgers his airs of importance as a member of the editorial staff of the Débâts were comical in their ingenuousness. On the very same day Carlier gave notice to leave Sophia. He was comparatively rich; but the habits which had enabled him to arrive at independence in the uncertain vocation of a journalist would not allow him, while he was earning nothing, to spend a sou more than was absolutely necessary. He had decided to join forces with a widowed sister, who was accustomed to parsimony as parsimony is understood in France, and who was living on hoarded potatoes and wine.

  “There!” said Sophia, “you have lost me a tenant!”

  And she insisted, half jocularly and half seriously, that Carlier was leaving because he could not stand Chirac’s infantile conceit. The flat was full of acrimonious words.

  On Christmas morning Chirac lay in bed rather late; the newspapers did not appear that day. Paris seemed to be in a sort of stupor. About eleven o’clock he came to the kitchen door.

  “I must speak with you,” he said. His tone impressed Sophia.

  “Enter,” said she.

  He went in, and closed the door like a conspirator. “We must have a little fête,” he said. “You and I.”

  “Fête!” she repeated. “What an idea! How can I leave?”

  If the idea had not appealed to the secrecies of her heart, stirring desires and souvenirs upon which the dust of time lay thick, she would not have begun by suggesting difficulties; she would have begun by a flat refusal.

  “That is nothing,” he said vigorously. “It is Christmas, and I must have a chat with you. We cannot chat here. I have not had a true little chat with you since you were ill. You will come with me to a restaurant for lunch.”

  She laughed. “And the lunch of my lodgers?”

  “You will serve it a little earlier. We will go out immediately afterwards, and we will return in time for you to prepare dinner. It is quite simple.”

  She shook her head. “You are mad,” she said crossly.

  “It is necessary that I should offer you something,” he went on scowling. “You comprehend me? I wish you to lunch with me today. I demand it, and you are not going to refuse me.”

  He was very close to her in the little kitchen, and he spoke fiercely, bullyingly, exactly as she had spoken to him when insisting that he should live on credit with her for a while.

  “You are very rude,” she parried.

  “If I am rude, it is all the same to me,” he held out uncompromisingly. “You will lunch with me; I hold to it.”

  “How can I be dressed?” she protested.

  “That does not concern me. Arrange that as you can.”

  It was the most curious invitation to a Christmas dinner imaginable.

  At a quarter past twelve they issued forth side by side, heavily clad, into the mournful streets. The sky, slate-coloured, presaged snow. The air was bitterly cold, and yet damp. There were no fiacres in the little three-cornered place which forms the mouth of the Rue Clausel. In the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, a single empty omnibus was toiling up the steep glassy slope, the horses slipping and recovering themselves in response to the whipcracking, which sounded in the streets as in an empty vault. Higher up, in the Rue Fontaine, one of the few shops that were open displayed this announcement: “A large selection of cheeses for New Year’s gifts.” They laughed.

  “Last year at this moment,” said Chirac, “I was thinking of only one thing—the masked ball at the opera. I could not sleep after it. This year even the churches are not open. And you?”

  She put her lips together. “Do not ask me,” she said.

  They proceeded in silence.

  “We are triste, we others,” he said. “But the Prussians, in their trenches, they cannot be so gay, either! Their families and their Christmas trees must be lacking to them. Let us laugh!”

  The Place Blanche and the Boulevard de Clichy were no more lively than the lesser streets and squares. There was no life anywhere, scarcely a sound; not even the sound of cannon. Nobody knew anything; Christ mas had put the city into a lugubrious trance of hopelessness. Chirac took Sophia’s arm across the Place Blanche, and a few yards up the Rue Lepic he stopped at a small restaurant, famous among the initiated, and known as “The Little Louis.” They entered, descending by two steps into a confined and sombrely picturesque interior.

  Sophia saw that they were expected. Chirac must have paid a previous visit to the restaurant that morning. Several disordered tables showed that people had already lunched, and left; but in the corner was a table for two, freshly laid in the best manner of such restaurants; that is to say, with a red-and-white checked cloth, and two other red-and-white cloths, almost as large as the table-cloth, folded as serviettes and arranged flat on two thick plates between solid steel cutlery; a salt-cellar, out of which one ground rock-salt by turning a handle, a pepper-castor, two knife-rests, and two common tumblers. The phenomena which differentiated this table from the ordinary table were a champagne bottle and a couple of champagne glasses. Champagne was one of the few items which had not increased in price during the siege.

  The landlord and his wife were eating in another corner, a fat, slatternly pair, whom no privations of a siege could have emaciated. The landlord rose. He was dressed as a chef, all in white, with the sacred cap; but a soiled white. Everything in the place was untidy, unkempt and more or less unclean, except just the table upon which champagne was waiting. And yet the restaurant was agreeable, reassuring. The landlord greeted his customers as honest friends. His greasy face was honest, and so was the pale, weary, humorous face of his wife. Chirac saluted her.

  “You see,” said she, across from the other corner, indicating a bone on her plate. “This is Diane!”

  “Ah! the poor animal!” exclaimed Chirac, sympathetically.

  “What would you?” said the landlady. “It cost too dear to feed her. And she was so mignonne! One could not watch her grow thin!”

  “I was saying to my wife,” the landlord put in, “how she would have enjoyed that bone—Diane!” He roared with laughter.

  Sophia and the landlady exchanged a curious sad smile at this pleasantry, which had been re-discovered by the landlord for perhaps the thousandth time during the siege, but which he evidently regarded as quite new and original.

  “Eh, well!” he continued confidentially to Chirac. “I have found for you something very good—half a duck.” And in a still lower tone: “And it will not cost you too dear.”

  No attempt to realize more than a modest profit was ever made in that restaurant. It possessed a regular clientèle who knew the value of the little money they had, and who knew also how to appreciate sincere and accomplished cookery. The landlord was the chef, and he was always referred to as the chef, even by his wife.

  “How did you get that?” Chirac asked.

  “Ah!” said the landlord, mysteriously. “I have one of my friends, who comes from Villeneuve St Georges—refugee, you know. In fine . . .” A wave of the fat hands, suggesting that Chirac should not inquire too closely.

  “In effect!” Chirac commented. “But it is very chic, that!”

  “I believe you that it is chic!” said the landlady, sturdily.

  “It is charming,” Sophia murmured politely.

 
; “And then a quite little salad!” said the landlord.

  “But that—that is still more striking!” said Chirac.

  The landlord winked. The fact was that the commerce which resulted in fresh green vegetables in the heart of a beleaguered town was notorious.

  “And then also a quite little cheese!” said Sophia, slightly imitating the tone of the landlord, as she drew from the inwardness of her cloak a small round parcel. It contained a Brie cheese, in fairly good condition. It was worth at least fifty francs, and it had cost Sophia less than two francs. The landlady joined the landlord in inspecting this wondrous jewel. Sophia seized a knife and cut a slice for the landlady’s table.

  “Madame is too good!” said the landlady, confused by this noble generosity, and bearing the gift off to her table as a fox-terrier will hurriedly seek solitude with a sumptuous morsel. The landlord beamed. Chirac was enchanted. In the intimate and unaffected cosiness of that interior the vast, stupefied melancholy of the city seemed to be forgotten, to have lost its sway.

  Then the landlord brought a hot brick for the feet of madame. It was more an acknowledgement of the slice of cheese than a necessity, for the restaurant was very warm; the tiny kitchen opened directly into it, and the door between the two was open; there was no ventilation whatever.

  “It is a friend of mine,” said the landlord, proudly, in the way of gossip, as he served an undescribed soup, “a butcher in the Faubourg St Honoré, who has bought the three elephants of the Jardin des Plantes for twenty-seven thousand francs.”

  Eyebrows were lifted. He uncorked the champagne.

  As she drank the first mouthful (she had long lost her youthful aversion for wine), Sophia had a glimpse of herself in a tilted mirror hung rather high on the opposite wall. It was several months since she had attired herself with ceremoniousness. The sudden unexpected vision of elegance and pallid beauty pleased her. And the instant effect of the champagne was to renew in her mind a forgotten conception of the goodness of life and of the joys which she had so long missed.