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

III

“Is that you, Mrs. Baines?” asked Gerald Scales, in a half-witted voice, looking up, and then getting to his feet. “Is this your house? So it is! Well, I’d no idea I was sitting on your doorstep.”

He smiled timidly, nay, sheepishly, while the women and Mr. Povey surrounded him with their astonished faces under the light of the gaslamp. Certainly he was very pale.

“But whatever is the matter, Mr. Scales?” Mrs. Baines demanded in an anxious tone. “Are you ill? Have you been suddenly—”

“Oh no,” said the young man lightly. “It’s nothing. Only I was set on just now, down there,”—he pointed to the depths of King Street.

“Set on!” Mrs. Baines repeated, alarmed.

“That makes the fourth case in a week, that we KNOW of!” said Mr. Povey. “It really is becoming a scandal.”

The fact was that, owing to depression of trade, lack of employment, and rigorous weather, public security in the Five Towns was at that period not as perfect as it ought to have been. In the stress of hunger the lower classes were forgetting their manners—and this in spite of the altruistic and noble efforts of their social superiors to relieve the destitution due, of course, to short-sighted improvidence. When (the social superiors were asking in despair) will the lower classes learn to put by for a rainy day? (They might have said a snowy and a frosty day.) It was ‘really too bad’ of the lower classes, when everything that could be done was being done for them, to kill, or even attempt to kill, the goose that lays the golden eggs! And especially in a respectable town! What, indeed, were things coming to? Well, here was Mr. Gerald Scales, gentleman from Manchester, a witness and victim to the deplorable moral condition of the Five Towns. What would he think of the Five Towns? The evil and the danger had been a topic of discussion in the shop for a week past, and now it was brought home to them.

“I hope you weren’t—” said Mrs. Baines, apologetically and sympathetically.

“Oh no!” Mr. Scales interrupted her quite gaily. “I managed to beat them off. Only my elbow—”

Meanwhile it was continuing to snow.

“Do come in!” said Mrs. Baines.

“I couldn’t think of troubling you,” said Mr. Scales. “I’m all right now, and I can find my way to the Tiger.”

“You must come in, if it’s only for a minute,” said Mrs. Baines, with decision. She had to think of the honour of the town.

“You’re very kind,” said Mr. Scales.

The door was suddenly opened from within, and Maggie surveyed them from the height of the two steps.

“A happy New Year, mum, to all of you.”

“Thank you, Maggie,” said Mrs. Baines, and primly added:

“The same to you!” And in her own mind she said that Maggie could best prove her desire for a happy new year by contriving in future not to ‘scamp her corners,’ and not to break so much crockery.

Sophia, scarce knowing what she did, mounted the steps.

“Mr. Scales ought to let our New Year in, my pet,” Mrs. Baines stopped her.

“Oh, of course, mother!” Sophia concurred with, a gasp, springing back nervously.

Mr. Scales raised his hat, and duly let the new year, and much snow, into the Baines parlour. And there was a vast deal of stamping of feet, agitating of umbrellas, and shaking of cloaks and ulsters on the doormat in the corner by the harmonium. And Maggie took away an armful of everything snowy, including goloshes, and received instructions to boil milk and to bring ‘mince.’ Mr. Povey said “B-r-r-r!” and shut the door (which was bordered with felt to stop ventilation); Mrs. Baines turned up the gas till it sang, and told Sophia to poke the fire, and actually told Constance to light the second gas.

Excitement prevailed.

The placidity of existence had been agreeably disturbed (yes, agreeably, in spite of horror at the attack on Mr. Scales’s elbow) by an adventure. Moreover, Mr. Scales proved to be in evening-dress. And nobody had ever worn evening-dress in that house before.

Sophia’s blood was in her face, and it remained there, enhancing the vivid richness of her beauty. She was dizzy with a strange and disconcerting intoxication. She seemed to be in a world of unrealities and incredibilities. Her ears heard with indistinctness, and the edges of things and people had a prismatic colouring. She was in a state of ecstatic, unreasonable, inexplicable happiness. All her misery, doubts, despair, rancour, churlishness, had disappeared. She was as softly gentle as Constance. Her eyes were the eyes of a fawn, and her gestures delicious in their modest and sensitive grace. Constance was sitting on the sofa, and, after glancing about as if for shelter, she sat down on the sofa by Constance’s side. She tried not to stare at Mr. Scales, but her gaze would not leave him. She was sure that he was the most perfect man in the world. A shortish man, perhaps, but a perfect. That such perfection could be was almost past her belief. He excelled all her dreams of the ideal man. His smile, his voice, his hand, his hair—never were such! Why, when he spoke—it was positively music! When he smiled—it was heaven! His smile, to Sophia, was one of those natural phenomena which are so lovely that they make you want to shed tears. There is no hyperbole in this description of Sophia’s sensations, but rather an under-statement of them. She was utterly obsessed by the unique qualities of Mr. Scales. Nothing would have persuaded her that the peer of Mr. Scales existed among men, or could possibly exist. And it was her intense and profound conviction of his complete pre-eminence that gave him, as he sat there in the rocking-chair in her mother’s parlour, that air of the unreal and the incredible.

“I stayed in the town on purpose to go to a New Year’s party at Mr. Lawton’s,” Mr. Scales was saying.

“Ah! So you know Lawyer Lawton!” observed Mrs. Baines, impressed, for Lawyer Lawton did not consort with tradespeople. He was jolly with them, and he did their legal business for them, but he was not of them. His friends came from afar.

“My people are old acquaintances of his,” said Mr. Scales, sipping the milk which Maggie had brought.

“Now, Mr. Scales, you must taste my mince. A happy month for every tart you eat, you know,” Mrs. Baines reminded him.

He bowed. “And it was as I was coming away from there that I got into difficulties.” He laughed.

Then he recounted the struggle, which had, however, been brief, as the assailants lacked pluck. He had slipped and fallen on his elbow on the kerb, and his elbow might have been broken, had not the snow been so thick. No, it did not hurt him now; doubtless a mere bruise. It was fortunate that the miscreants had not got the better of him, for he had in his pocket-book a considerable sum of money in notes—accounts paid! He had often thought what an excellent thing it would be if commercials could travel with dogs, particularly in winter. There was nothing like a dog.

“You are fond of dogs?” asked Mr. Povey, who had always had a secret but impracticable ambition to keep a dog.

“Yes,” said Mr. Scales, turning now to Mr. Povey.

“Keep one?” asked Mr. Povey, in a sporting tone.

“I have a fox-terrier bitch,” said Mr. Scales, “that took a first at Knutsford; but she’s getting old now.”

The sexual epithet fell queerly on the room. Mr. Povey, being a man of the world, behaved as if nothing had happened; but Mrs. Baines’s curls protested against this unnecessary coarseness. Constance pretended not to hear. Sophia did not understandingly hear. Mr. Scales had no suspicion that he was transgressing a convention by virtue of which dogs have no sex. Further, he had no suspicion of the local fame of Mrs. Baines’s mince-tarts. He had already eaten more mince-tarts than he could enjoy, before beginning upon hers, and Mrs. Baines missed the enthusiasm to which she was habituated from consumers of her pastry.

Mr. Povey, fascinated, proceeded in the direction of dogs, and it grew more and more evident that Mr. Scales, who went out to parties in evening dress, instead of going in respectable broad-cloth to watch-night services, who knew the great ones of the land, and who kept dogs of an inconvenient sex, was neither an ordinary commercial traveller nor the kind of man to which the Square was accustomed. He came from a different world.

“Lawyer Lawton’s party broke up early—at least I mean, considering—” Mrs. Baines hesitated.

After a pause Mr. Scales replied, “Yes, I left immediately the clock struck twelve. I’ve a heavy day tomorrow—I mean to-day.”

It was not an hour for a prolonged visit, and in a few minutes Mr. Scales was ready again to depart. He admitted a certain feebleness (‘wankiness,’ he playfully called it, being proud of his skill in the dialect), and a burning in his elbow; but otherwise he was quite well—thanks to Mrs. Baines’s most kind hospitality … He really didn’t know how he came to be sitting on her doorstep. Mrs. Baines urged him, if he met a policeman on his road to the Tiger, to furnish all particulars about the attempted highway robbery, and he said he decidedly would.

He took his leave with distinguished courtliness.

“If I have a moment I shall run in tomorrow morning just to let you know I’m all right,” said he, in the white street.

“Oh, do!” said Constance. Constance’s perfect innocence made her strangely forward at times.

“A happy New Year and many of them!”

“Thanks! Same to you! Don’t get lost.”

“Straight up the Square and first on the right,” called the commonsense of Mr. Povey.

Nothing else remained to say, and the visitor disappeared silently in the whirling snow. “Brrr!” murmured Mr. Povey, shutting the door. Everybody felt: “What a funny ending of the old year!”

“Sophia, my pet,” Mrs. Baines began.

But Sophia had vanished to bed.

“Tell her about her new nightdress,” said Mrs. Baines to Constance.

“Yes, mother.”

“I don’t know that I’m so set up with that young man, after all,” Mrs. Baines reflected aloud.

“Oh, mother!” Constance protested. “I think he’s just lovely.”

“He never looks you straight in the face,” said Mrs. Baines.

“Don’t tell ME!” laughed Constance, kissing her mother good night. “You’re only on your high horse because he didn’t praise your mince. I noticed it.”

IV

“If anybody thinks I’m going to stand the cold in this showroom any longer, they’re mistaken,” said Sophia the next morning loudly, and in her mother’s hearing. And she went down into the shop carrying bonnets.

She pretended to be angry, but she was not. She felt, on the contrary, extremely joyous, and charitable to all the world. Usually she would take pains to keep out of the shop; usually she was preoccupied and stern. Hence her presence on the ground-floor, and her demeanour, excited interest among the three young lady assistants who sat sewing round the stove in the middle of the shop, sheltered by the great pile of shirtings and linseys that fronted the entrance.

Sophia shared Constance’s corner. They had hot bricks under their feet, and fine-knitted wraps on their shoulders. They would have been more comfortable near the stove, but greatness has its penalties. The weather was exceptionally severe. The windows were thickly frosted over, so that Mr. Povey’s art in dressing them was quite wasted. And—rare phenomenon!—the doors of the shop were shut. In the ordinary way they were not merely open, but hidden by a display of ‘cheap lines.’ Mr. Povey, after consulting Mrs. Baines, had decided to close them,