The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett (carter reed txt) 📕

“You are a very naughty girl,” said Mrs. Baines, with restraint. (“I’ve got her,” said Mrs. Baines to herself. “I may just as well keep my temper.”)

And a sob broke out of Sophia. She was behaving like a little child. She bore no trace of the young maiden sedately crossing the Square without leave and without an escort.

(“I knew she was going to cry,” said Mrs. Baines, breathing relief.)

“I’m waiting,” said Mrs. Baines aloud.

A second sob. Mrs. Baines manufactured patience to meet the demand.

“You tell me not to answer back, and then you say you’re waiting,” Sophia blubbered thickly.

“What’s that you say? How can I tell what you say if you talk like that?” (But Mrs. Baines failed to hear out of discretion, which is better than valour.)

“It’s of no consequence,” Sophia blurted forth in a sob. She was weeping now, and tears were ricocheting off her lovely crimson cheeks on to the carpet; her whole body was trembling.

“Don’t be a great baby,” Mrs. Baines enjoined, with a touch of rough persuasiveness in her voice.

“It’s you who make me cry,” said Sophia, bitterly. “You make me cry and then you call me a great baby!” And sobs ran through her frame like waves one after another. She spoke so indistinctly that her mother now really had some difficulty in catching her words.

“Sophia,” said Mrs. Baines, with godlike calm, “it is not I who make you cry. It is your guilty conscience makes you cry. I have merely asked you a question, and I intend to have an answer.”

“I’ve told you.” Here Sophia checked the sobs with an immense effort.

“What have you told me?”

“I just went out.”

“I will have no trifling,” said Mrs. Baines.” What did you go out for, and without telling me? If you had told me afterwards, when I came in, of your own accord, it might have been different. But no, not a word! It is I who have to ask! Now, quick! I can’t wait any longer.”

(“I gave way over the castor-oil, my girl,” Mrs. Baines said in her own breast. “But not again! Not again.!”)

“I don’t know,” Sophia murmured.

“What do you mean—you don’t know?”

The sobbing recommenced tempestuously. “I mean I don’t know. I just went out.” Her voice rose; it was noisy, but scarcely articulate. “What if I did go out?”

“Sophia, I am not going to be talked to like this. If you think because you’re leaving school you can do exactly as you like—”

“Do I want to leave school?” yelled Sophia, stamping. In a moment a hurricane of emotion overwhelmed her, as though that stamping of the foot had released the demons of the storm. Her face was transfigured by uncontrollable passion. “You all want to make me miserable!” she shrieked with terrible violence. “And now I can’t even go out! You are a horrid, cruel woman, and I hate you! And you can do what you like! Put me in prison if you like! I know you’d be glad if I was dead!”

She dashed from the room, banging the door with a shock that made the house rattle. And she had shouted so loud that she might have been heard in the shop, and even in the kitchen. It was a startling experience for Mrs. Baines. Mrs. Baines, why did you saddle yourself with a witness? Why did you so positively say that you intended to have an answer?

“Really,” she stammered, pulling her dignity about her shoulders like a garment that the wind has snatched off. “I never dreamed that poor girl had such a dreadful temper! What a pity it is, for her OWN sake!” It was the best she could do.

Constance, who could not bear to witness her mother’s humiliation, vanished very quietly from the room. She got halfway upstairs to the second floor, and then, hearing the loud, rapid, painful, regular intake of sobbing breaths, she hesitated and crept down again.

This was Mrs. Baines’s first costly experience of the child thankless for having been brought into the world. It robbed her of her profound, absolute belief in herself. She had thought she knew everything in her house and could do everything there. And lo! she had suddenly stumbled against an unsuspected personality at large in her house, a sort of hard marble affair that informed her by means of bumps that if she did not want to be hurt she must keep out of the way.

V

On the Sunday afternoon Mrs. Baines was trying to repose a little in the drawingroom, where she had caused a fire to be lighted. Constance was in the adjacent bedroom with her father. Sophia lay between blankets in the room overhead with a feverish cold. This cold and her new dress were Mrs. Baines’s sole consolation at the moment. She had prophesied a cold for Sophia, refuser of castor-oil, and it had come. Sophia had received, for standing in her nightdress at a draughty window of a May morning, what Mrs. Baines called ‘nature’s slap in the face.’ As for the dress, she had worshipped God in it, and prayed for Sophia in it, before dinner; and its four double rows of gimp on the skirt had been accounted a great success. With her lace-bordered mantle and her low, stringed bonnet she had assuredly given a unique lustre to the congregation at chapel. She was stout; but the fashions, prescribing vague outlines, broad downward slopes, and vast amplitudes, were favourable to her shape. It must not be supposed that stout women of a certain age never seek to seduce the eye and trouble the meditations of man by other than moral charms. Mrs. Baines knew that she was comely, natty, imposing, and elegant; and the knowledge gave her real pleasure. She would look over her shoulder in the glass as anxious as a girl: make no mistake.

She did not repose; she could not. She sat thinking, in exactly the same posture as Sophia’s two afternoons previously. She would have been surprised to hear that her attitude, bearing, and expression powerfully recalled those of her reprehensible daughter. But it was so. A good angel made her restless, and she went idly to the window and glanced upon the empty, shuttered Square. She too, majestic matron, had strange, brief yearnings for an existence more romantic than this; shootings across her spirit’s firmament of tailed comets; soft, inexplicable melancholies. The good angel, withdrawing her from such a mood, directed her gaze to a particular spot at the top of the square.

She passed at once out of the room—not precisely in a hurry, yet without wasting time. In a recess under the stairs, immediately outside the door, was a box about a foot square and eighteen inches deep covered with black American cloth. She bent down and unlocked this box, which was padded within and contained the Baines silver tea-service. She drew from the box teapot, sugar-bowl, milk-jug, sugar-tongs, hot-water jug, and cake-stand (a flattish dish with an arching semicircular handle)—chased vessels, silver without and silver-gilt within; glittering heirlooms that shone in the dark corner like the secret pride of respectable families. These she put on a tray that always stood on end in the recess. Then she looked upwards through the banisters to the second floor.

“Maggie!” she piercingly whispered.

“Yes, mum,” came a voice.

“Are you dressed?”

“Yes, mum. I’m just coming.”

“Well, put on your muslin.” “Apron,” Mrs. Baines implied.

Maggie understood.

“Take these for tea,” said Mrs. Baines when Maggie descended. “Better rub them over. You know where the cake is—that new one. The best cups. And the silver spoons.”

They both heard a knock at the side-door, far off, below.

“There!” exclaimed Mrs. Baines. “Now take these right down into the kitchen before you open.”

“Yes, mum,” said Maggie, departing.

Mrs. Baines was wearing a black alpaca apron. She removed it and put on another one of black satin embroidered with yellow flowers, which, by merely inserting her arm into the chamber, she had taken from off the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Then she fixed herself in the drawingroom.

Maggie returned, rather short of breath, convoying the visitor.

“Ah! Miss Chetwynd,” said Mrs. Baines, rising to welcome. “I’m sure I’m delighted to see you. I saw you coming down the Square, and I said to myself, ‘Now, I do hope Miss Chetwynd isn’t going to forget us.’”

Miss Chetwynd, simpering momentarily, came forward with that self-conscious, slightly histrionic air, which is one of the penalties of pedagogy. She lived under the eyes of her pupils. Her life was one ceaseless effort to avoid doing anything which might influence her charges for evil or shock the natural sensitiveness of their parents. She had to wind her earthly way through a forest of the most delicate susceptibilities—fern-fronds that stretched across the path, and that she must not even accidentally disturb with her skirt as she passed. No wonder she walked mincingly! No wonder she had a habit of keeping her elbows close to her sides, and drawing her mantle tight in the streets! Her prospectus talked about ‘a sound and religious course of training,’ ‘study embracing the usual branches of English, with music by a talented master, drawing, dancing, and calisthenics.’ Also ‘needlework plain and ornamental;’ also ‘moral influence;’ and finally about terms, ‘which are very moderate, and every particular, with references to parents and others, furnished on application.’ (Sometimes, too, without application.) As an illustration of the delicacy of fern-fronds, that single word ‘dancing’ had nearly lost her Constance and Sophia seven years before!

She was a pinched virgin, aged forty, and not ‘well off;’ in her family the gift of success had been monopolized by her elder sister. For these characteristics Mrs. Baines, as a matron in easy circumstances, pitied Miss Chetwynd. On the other hand, Miss Chetwynd could choose ground from which to look down upon Mrs. Baines, who after all was in trade. Miss Chetwynd had no trace of the local accent; she spoke with a southern refinement which the Five Towns, while making fun of it, envied. All her O’s had a genteel leaning towards ‘ow,’ as ritualism leans towards Romanism. And she was the fount of etiquette, a wonder of correctness; in the eyes of her pupils’ parents not so much ‘a perfect LADY’ as ‘a PERFECT lady.’ So that it was an extremely nice question whether, upon the whole, Mrs. Baines secretly condescended to Miss Chetwynd or Miss Chetwynd to Mrs. Baines. Perhaps Mrs. Baines, by virtue of her wifehood, carried the day.

Miss Chetwynd, carefully and precisely seated, opened the conversation by explaining that even if Mrs. Baines had not written she should have called in any case, as she made a practice of calling at the home of her pupils in vacation time: which was true. Mrs. Baines, it should be stated, had on Friday afternoon sent to Miss Chetwynd one of her most luxurious notes—lavender-coloured paper with scalloped edges, the selectest mode of the day—to announce, in her Italian hand, that Constance and Sophia would both leave school at the end of the next term, and giving reasons in regard to Sophia.

Before the visitor had got very far, Maggie came in with a lacquered tea-caddy and the silver teapot and a silver spoon on a lacquered tray. Mrs. Baines, while continuing to talk, chose a key from her bunch, unlocked the tea-caddy, and transferred four teaspoonfuls of tea from it to the teapot and relocked the caddy.

“Strawberry,” she mysteriously whispered to Maggie; and Maggie disappeared, bearing the tray and its contents.

“And how is your sister? It is quite a long time since she was down here,” Mrs. Baines went on to Miss Chetwynd, after whispering “strawberry.”

The remark was merely in the way of small-talk—for the hostess