The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

  Constance merely shook her head. She was very depressed. Sophia’s cheerfulness died out. As she hated to be insincerely optimistic, she said nothing. Otherwise she might have remarked: “Perhaps the afternoon post will bring it.” Gloom reigned. To Constance particularly, as Amy had given notice and as Cyril was “remiss,” it seemed really that the time was out of joint and life unworth living. Even the presence of Sophia did not bring her much comfort. Immediately Sophia left the room Constance’s sciatica began to return, and in a severe form. She had regretted this, less for the pain than because she had just assured Sophia, quite honestly, that she was not suffering; Sophia had been sceptical. After that it was of course imperative that Constance should get up as usual. She had said that she would get up as usual. Besides, there was the immense enterprise of obtaining a new servant! Worries loomed mountainous. Suppose Cyril was dangerously ill, and unable to write! Suppose something had happened to him! Supposing she never did obtain a new servant!

  Sophia, up in her room, was endeavouring to be philosophical, and to see the world brightly. She was saying to herself that she must take Constance in hand, that what Constance lacked was energy, that Constance must be stirred out of her groove. And in the cavernous kitchen Amy, preparing the nine o’clock breakfast, was meditating upon the ingratitude of employers and wondering what the future held for her. She had a widowed mother in the picturesque village of Sneyd, where the mortal and immortal welfare of every inhabitant was watched over by God’s vicegerent, the busy Countess of Chell; she possessed about two hundred pounds of her own; her mother for years had been begging Amy to share her home free of expense. But nevertheless Amy’s mind was black with foreboding and vague dejection. The house was a house of sorrow, and these three women, each solitary, the devotees of sorrow. And the two dogs wandered disconsolate up and down, aware of the necessity for circumspection, never guessing that the highly peculiar state of the atmosphere had been brought about by nothing but a half-shut door and an incorrect tone.

  As Sophia, fully dressed this time, was descending to breakfast, she heard Constance’s voice, feebly calling her, and found the convalescent still in bed. The truth could not be concealed. Constance was once more in great pain, and her moral condition was not favourable to fortitude.

  “I wish you had told me, to begin with,” Sophia could not help saying, “then I should have known what to do.”

  Constance did not defend herself by saying that the pain bad only recurred since their first interview that morning. She just wept.

  “I’m very low!” she blubbered.

  Sophia was surprised. She felt that this was not “being a Baines.”

  During the progress of that interminable April morning, her acquaintance with the possibilities of sciatica as an agent destructive of moral fibre was further increased. Constance had no force at all to resist its activity. The sweetness of her resignation seemed to melt into nullity. She held to it that the doctor could do nothing for her.

  About noon, when Sophia was moving anxiously around her, she suddenly screamed.

  “I feel as if my leg was going to burst!” she cried.

  That decided Sophia. As soon as Constance was a little easier she went downstairs to Amy.

  “Amy,” she said, “it’s a Doctor Stirling that your mistress has when she’s ill, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, m’m.”

  “Where is his surgery?”

  “Well, m’m, he did live just opposite, with Dr Harrop, but latterly he’s gone to live at Bleakridge.”

  “I wish you would put your things on, and run up there and ask him to call as soon as he can.”

  “I will, m’m,” said Amy, with the greatest willingness. “I thought I heard missis cry out.” She was not effusive. She was better than effusive: kindly and helpful with a certain reserve.

  “There’s something about that woman I like,” said Sophia to herself. For a proved fool, Amy was indeed holding her own rather well.

  Dr Stirling drove down about two o’clock. He had now been established in the Five Towns for more than a decade, and the stamp of success was on his brow and on the proud forehead of his trotting horse. He had, in the phrase of the Signal, “identified himself with the local life of the district.” He was liked, being a man of broad sympathies. In his rich Scotch accent he could discuss with equal ability the flavour of whisky or of a sermon, and he had more than sufficient tact never to discuss either whiskies or sermons in the wrong place. He had made a speech (responding for the learned professions) at the annual dinner of the Society for the Prosecution of Felons, and this speech (in which praise of red wine was rendered innocuous by praise of books—his fine library was notorious) had classed him as a wit with the American consul, whose post-prandial manner was modelled on Mark Twain’s. He was thirty-five years of age, tall and stoutish, with a chubby boyish face that the razor left chiefly blue every morning.

  The immediate effect of his arrival on Constance was miraculous. His presence almost cured her for a moment, just as though her malady had been toothache and he a dentist. Then, when he had finished his examination, the pain resumed its sway over her.

  In talking to her and to Sophia, he listened very seriously to all that they said; he seemed to regard the case as the one case that had ever aroused his genuine professional interest; but as it unfolded itself, in all its difficulty and urgency, so he seemed, in his mind, to be discovering wondrous ways of dealing with it; these mysterious discoveries seemed to give him confidence, and his confidence was communicated to the patient by means of faint sallies of humour. He was a highly skilled doctor. This fact, however, had no share in his popularity; which was due solely to his rare gift of taking a case very seriously while remaining cheerful.

  He said he would return in a quarter of an hour, and he returned in thirteen minutes with a hypodermic syringe, with which he attacked the pain in its central strongholds.

  “What is it?” asked Constance, breathing gratitude for the relief.

  He paused, looking at her roguishly from under lowered eyelids.

  “I’d better not tell ye,” he said. “It might lead ye into mischief.”

  “Oh, but you must tell me doctor,” Constance insisted, anxious that he should live up to his reputation for Sophia’s benefit.

  “It’s hydrochloride of cocaine,” he said, and lifted a finger. “Beware of the cocaine habit. It’s mined many a respectable family. But if I hadn’t a certain amount of confidence in yer strength of character, Mrs Povey, I wouldn’t have risked it.”

  “He will have his joke, will the doctor!” Constance smiled, in a brighter world.

  He said he should come again about half-past five, and he arrived about half-past six, and injected more cocaine. The special importance of the case was thereby established. On this second visit, he and Sophia soon grew rather friendly. When she conducted him downstairs again he stopped chatting with her in the parlour for a long time, as though he had nothing else on earth to do, while his coachman walked the horse to and fro in front of the door.

  His attitude to her flattered Sophia, for it showed that he took her for no ordinary woman. It implied a continual assumption that she must be a mine of interest for anyone who was privileged to delve into her memory. So far, among Constance’s acquaintance, Sophia had met no one who showed more than a perfunctory curiosity as to her life. Her return was accepted with indifference. Her escapade of thirty years ago had entirely lost its dramatic quality. Many people indeed had never heard that she had run away from home to marry a commercial traveller; and to those who remembered, or had been told, it seemed a sufficiently banal exploit—after thirty years! Her fear, and Constance’s, that the town would be murmurous with gossip was ludicrously unfounded. The effect of time was such that even Mr Critchlow appeared to have forgotten even that she had been indirectly responsible for her father’s death. She had nearly forgotten it herself; when she happened to think of it she felt no shame, no remorse, seeing the death as pur
ely accidental, and not altogether unfortunate. On two points only was the town inquisitive: as to her husband, and as to the precise figure at which she had sold the Pension. The town knew that she was probably not a widow, for she had been obliged to tell Mr Critchlow, and Mr Critchlow in some hour of tenderness had told Maria. But nobody had dared to mention the name of Gerald Scales to her. With her fashionable clothes, her striking mien of command, and the legend of her wealth, she inspired respect, if not awe, in the townsfolk. In the doctor’s attitude there was something of amaze; she felt it. Though the dull apathy of the people she had hitherto met was assuredly not without its advantageous side for her tranquillity of mind, it had touched her vanity, and the gaze of the doctor soothed the smart. He had so obviously divined her interestingness; he so obviously wanted to enjoy it.

  “I’ve just been reading Zola’s Downfall,” he said.

  Her mind searched backwards, and recalled a poster.

  “Oh!” she replied. “La Débâcle?”

  “Yes. What do ye think of it?” His eyes lighted at the prospect of a talk. He was even pleased to hear her give him the title in French.

  “I haven’t read it,” she said, and she was momentarily sorry that she had not read it, for she could see that he was dashed. The doctor had supposed that residence in a foreign country involved a knowledge of the literature of that country. Yet he had never supposed that residence in England involved a knowledge of English literature. Sophia had read practically nothing since 1870; for her the latest author was Cherbuliez. Moreover, her impression of Zola was that he was not at all nice, and that he was the enemy of his race, though at that date the world had scarcely heard of Dreyfus. Dr Stirling had too hastily assumed that the opinions of the bourgeois upon art differ in different countries.

  “And ye actually were in the siege of Paris?” he questioned, trying again.

  “Yes.”

  “And the commune?”

  “Yes, the commune too.”

  “Well!” he exclaimed. “It’s incredible! When I was reading the Downfall the night before last, I said to myself that you must have been through a lot of all that. I didn’t know I was going to have the pleasure of a chat with ye so soon.”

  She smiled. “But how did you know I was in the siege of Paris?” she asked, curious.

  “How do I know? I know because I’ve seen that birthday card ye sent to Mrs Povey in 1871, after it was over. It’s one of her possessions, that card is. She showed it me one day when she told me ye were coming.”

  Sophia started. She had quite forgotten that card. It had not occurred to her that Constance would have treasured all those cards that she had despatched during the early years of her exile. She responded as well as she could to his eagerness for personal details concerning the siege and the commune. He might have been disappointed at the prose of her answers, had he not been determined not to be disappointed.

  “Ye seem to have taken it all very quietly,” he observed.

  “Eh yes!” she agreed, not without pride. “But it’s a long time since.”

  Those events, as they existed in her memory, scarcely warranted the tremendous fuss subsequently made about them. What were they, after all? Such was her secret thought. Chirac himself was now nothing but a faint shadow. Still, were the estimate of those events true or false, she was a woman who had been through them, and Dr Stirling’s high appreciation of that fact was very pleasant to her. Their friendliness approached intimacy. Night had fallen. Outside could be heard the champing of a bit.

  “I must be getting on,” he said at last; but he did not move.

  “Then there is nothing else I am to do for my sister?” Sophia inquired.

  “I don’t think so,” said he. “It isn’t a question of medicine.”

  “Then what is it a question of?” Sophia demanded bluntly.

  “Nerves,” he said. “It’s nearly all nerves. I know something about Mrs Povey’s constitution now, and I was hoping that your visit would do her good.”

  “She’s been quite well—I mean what you may call quite well—until the day before yesterday, when she sat in that draught. She was better last night, and then this morning I find her ever so much worse.”

  “No worries?” The doctor looked at her confidentially.

  “What can she have in the way of worries?” exclaimed Sophia. “That’s to say—real worries.”

  “Exactly!” the doctor agreed.

  “I tell her she doesn’t know what worry is,” said Sophia.

  “So do I!” said the doctor, his eyes twinkling.

  “She was a little upset because she didn’t receive her usual Sunday letter from Cyril yesterday. But then she was weak and low.”

  “Clever youth, Cyril!” mused the doctor.

  “I think he’s a particularly nice boy,” said Sophia, eagerly.

  “So you’ve seen him?”

  “Of course,” said Sophia, rather stiffly. Did the doctor suppose that she did not know her own nephew? She went back to the subject of her sister. “She is also a little bothered, I think, because the servant is going to leave.”

  “Oh! So Amy is going to leave, is she?” He spoke still lower. “Between you and me, it’s no bad thing.”

  “I’m so glad you think so.”

  “In another few years the servant would have been the mistress here. One can see these things coming on, but it’s so difficult to do anything. In fact ye can’t do anything.”

  “I did something,” said Sophia, sharply. “I told the woman straight that it shouldn’t go on while I was in the house. I didn’t suspect it at first—but when I found it out . . . I can tell you!” She let the doctor imagine what she could tell him.

  He smiled. “No,” he said. “I can easily understand that ye didn’t suspect anything at first. When she’s well and bright Mrs Povey could hold her own—so I’m told. But it was certainly slowly getting worse.”

  “Then people talk about it?” said Sophia, shocked.

  “As a native of Bursley, Mrs Scales,” said the doctor, “ye ought to know what people in Bursley do!” Sophia put her lips together. The doctor rose, smoothing his waistcoat. “What does she bother with servants at all for?” he burst out. “She’s perfectly free. She hasn’t got a care in the world, if she only knew it. Why doesn’t she go out and about, and enjoy herself? She wants stirring up, that’s what your sister wants.”

  “You’re quite right,” Sophia burst out in her turn. “That’s precisely what I say to myself, precisely! I was thinking it over only this morning. She wants stirring up. She’s got into a rut.”

  “She needs to be jolly. Why doesn’t she go to some seaside place, and live in a hotel, and enjoy herself? Is there anything to prevent her?”

  “Nothing whatever.”

  “Instead of being dependent on a servant! I believe in enjoying one’s self—when ye’ve got the money to do it with! Can ye imagine anybody living in Bursley for pleasure? And especially in St Luke’s Square, right in the thick of it all! Smoke! Dirt! No air! No light! No scenery! No amusements! What does she do it for? She’s in a rut.”

  “Yes, she’s in a rut,” Sophia repeated her own phrase, which he had copied.

  “My word!” said the doctor. “Wouldn’t I clear out and enjoy myself if I could! Your sister’s a young woman.”

  “Of course she is!” Sophia concurred, feeling that she herself was even younger. “Of course she is!”

  “And except that she’s nervously organized, and has certain predispositions, there’s nothing the matter with her. This sciatica—I don’t say it would be cured, but it might be, by a complete change and throwing off all these ridiculous worries. Not only does she live in the most depressing conditions, but she suffers tortures for it, and there’s absolutely no need for her to be here at all.”

  “Doctor,” said Sophia, solemnly, impressed, “you are quite right. I agree with every word you say.”

  “Naturally she’s attached to the place,” he continue
d, glancing round the room. “I know all about that. After living here all her life! But she’s got to break herself of her attachment. It’s her duty to do so. She ought to show a little energy. I’m deeply attached to my bed in the morning, but I have to leave it.”

  “Of course,” said Sophia, in an impatient tone, as though disgusted with every person who could not perceive, or would not subscribe to, these obvious truths that the doctor was uttering. “Of course!”

  “What she needs is the bustle of life in a good hotel, a good hydro, for instance. Among jolly people. Parties! Games! Excursions! She wouldn’t be the same woman. You’d see. Wouldn’t I do it, if I could? Strathpeffer. She’d soon forget her sciatica. I don’t know what Mrs Povey’s annual income is, but I expect that if she took it into her head to live in the dearest hotel in England, there would be no reason why she shouldn’t.”

  Sophia lifted her head and smiled in calm amusement. “I expect so,” she said superiorly.

  “A hotel—that’s the life. No worries. If ye want anything ye ring a bell. If a waiter gives notice, it’s someone else who has the worry, not you. But you know all about that, Mrs Scales.”

  “No one better,” murmured Sophia.

  “Good evening,” he said abruptly, sticking out his hand. “I’ll be down in the morning.”

  “Did you ever mention this to my sister?” Sophia asked him, rising.

  “Yes,” said he. “But it’s no use. Oh yes, I’ve told her. But she does really think it’s quite impossible. She wouldn’t even hear of going to live in London with her beloved son. She won’t listen.”

  “I never thought of that,” said Sophia. “Good night.”

  Their hand-grasp was very intimate and mutually comprehending. He was pleased by the quick responsiveness of her temperament, and the masterful vigour which occasionally flashed out in her replies. He noticed the hardly perceptible distortion of her handsome, worn face, and he said to himself: “She’s been through a thing or two,” and: “She’ll have to mind her p’s and q’s.” Sophia was pleased because he admired her, and because with her he dropped his bedside jocularities, and talked plainly as a sensible man will talk when he meets an uncommonly wise woman, and because he echoed and amplified her own thoughts. She honoured him by standing at the door till he had driven off.