The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett (carter reed txt) 📕
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Mr. Scales came about ten o’clock. Instead of going to Mr. Povey’s counter, he walked boldly to Constance’s corner, and looked over the boxes, smiling and saluting. Both the girls candidly delighted in his visit. Both blushed; both laughed—without knowing why they laughed. Mr. Scales said he was just departing and had slipped in for a moment to thank all of them for their kindness of last night—‘or rather this morning.’ The girls laughed again at this witticism. Nothing could have been more simple than his speech. Yet it appeared to them magically attractive. A customer entered, a lady; one of the assistants rose from the neighbourhood of the stove, but the daughters of the house ignored the customer; it was part of the etiquette of the shop that customers, at any rate chance customers, should not exist for the daughters of the house, until an assistant had formally drawn attention to them. Otherwise every one who wanted a pennyworth of tape would be expecting to be served by Miss Baines, or Miss Sophia, if Miss Sophia were there. Which would have been ridiculous.
Sophia, glancing sidelong, saw the assistant parleying with the customer; and then the assistant came softly behind the counter and approached the corner.
“Miss Constance, can you spare a minute?” the assistant whispered discreetly.
Constance extinguished her smile for Mr. Scales, and, turning away, lighted an entirely different and inferior smile for the customer.
“Good morning, Miss Baines. Very cold, isn’t it?”
“Good morning, Mrs. Chatterley. Yes, it is. I suppose you’re getting anxious about those—” Constance stopped.
Sophia was now alone with Mr. Scales, for in order to discuss the unnameable freely with Mrs. Chatterley her sister was edging up the counter. Sophia had dreamed of a private conversation as something delicious and impossible. But chance had favoured her. She was alone with him. And his neat fair hair and his blue eyes and his delicate mouth were as wonderful to her as ever. He was gentlemanly to a degree that impressed her more than anything had impressed her in her life. And all the proud and aristocratic instinct that was at the base of her character sprang up and seized on his gentlemanliness like a famished animal seizing on food.
“The last time I saw you,” said Mr. Scales, in a new tone, “you said you were never in the shop.”
“What? Yesterday? Did I?”
“No, I mean the last time I saw you alone,” said he.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “It’s just an accident.”
“That’s exactly what you said last time.”
“Is it?”
Was it his manner, or what he said, that flattered her, that intensified her beautiful vivacity?
“I suppose you don’t often go out?” he went on.
“What? In this weather?”
“Any time.”
“I go to chapel,” said she, “and marketing with mother.” There was a little pause. “And to the Free Library.”
“Oh yes. You’ve got a Free Library here now, haven’t you?”
“Yes. We’ve had it over a year.”
“And you belong to it? What do you read?”
“Oh, stories, you know. I get a fresh book out once a week.”
“Saturdays, I suppose?”
“No,” she said. “Wednesdays.” And she smiled. “Usually.”
“It’s Wednesday to-day,” said he. “Not been already?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I shall go to-day. It’s too cold. I don’t think I shall venture out to-day.”
“You must be very fond of reading,” said he.
Then Mr. Povey appeared, rubbing his mittened hands. And Mrs. Chatterley went.
“I’ll run and fetch mother,” said Constance.
Mrs. Baines was very polite to the young man. He related his interview with the police, whose opinion was that he had been attacked by stray members of a gang from Hanbridge. The young lady assistants, with ears cocked, gathered the nature of Mr. Scales’s adventure, and were thrilled to the point of questioning Mr. Povey about it after Mr. Scales had gone. His farewell was marked by much handshaking, and finally Mr. Povey ran after him into the Square to mention something about dogs.
At half-past one, while Mrs. Baines was dozing after dinner, Sophia wrapped herself up, and with a book under her arm went forth into the world, through the shop. She returned in less than twenty minutes. But her mother had already awakened, and was hovering about the back of the shop. Mothers have supernatural gifts.
Sophia nonchalantly passed her and hurried into the parlour where she threw down her muff and a book and knelt before the fire to warm herself.
Mrs. Baines followed her. “Been to the Library?” questioned Mrs. Baines.
“Yes, mother. And it’s simply perishing.”
“I wonder at your going on a day like to-day. I thought you always went on Thursdays?”
“So I do. But I’d finished my book.”
“What is this?” Mrs. Baines picked up the volume, which was covered with black oilcloth.
She picked it up with a hostile air. For her attitude towards the Free Library was obscurely inimical. She never read anything herself except The Sunday at Home, and Constance never read anything except The Sunday at Home. There were scriptural commentaries, Dugdale’s Gazetteer, Culpepper’s Herbal, and works by Bunyan and Flavius Josephus in the drawingroom bookcase; also Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And Mrs. Baines, in considering the welfare of her daughters, looked askance at the whole remainder of printed literature. If the Free Library had not formed part of the Famous Wedgwood Institution, which had been opened with immense eclat by the semi-divine Gladstone; if the first book had not been ceremoniously ‘taken out’ of the Free Library by the Chief Bailiff in person—a grandfather of stainless renown—Mrs. Baines would probably have risked her authority in forbidding the Free Library.
“You needn’t be afraid,” said Sophia, laughing. “It’s Miss Sewell’s Experience of Life.”
“A novel, I see,” observed Mrs. Baines, dropping the book.
Gold and jewels would probably not tempt a Sophia of these days to read Experience of Life; but to Sophia Baines the bland story had the piquancy of the disapproved.
The next day Mrs. Baines summoned Sophia into her bedroom.
“Sophia,” said she, trembling, “I shall be glad if you will not walk about the streets with young men until you have my permission.”
The girl blushed violently. “I—I—”
“You were seen in Wedgwood Street,” said Mrs. Baines.
“Who’s been gossiping—Mr. Critchlow, I suppose?” Sophia exclaimed scornfully.
“No one has been ‘gossiping,’” said Mrs Baines. “Well, if I meet some one by accident in the street I can’t help it, can I?” Sophia’s voice shook.
“You know what I mean, my child,” said Mrs. Baines, with careful calm.
Sophia dashed angrily from the room.
“I like the idea of him having ‘a heavy day’!” Mrs. Baines reflected ironically, recalling a phrase which had lodged in her mind. And very vaguely, with an uneasiness scarcely perceptible, she remembered that ‘he,’ and no other, had been in the shop on the day her husband died.
I
The uneasiness of Mrs. Baines flowed and ebbed, during the next three months, influenced by Sophia’s moods. There were days when Sophia was the old Sophia—the forbidding, difficult, waspish, and even hedgehog Sophia. But there were other days on which Sophia seemed to be drawing joy and gaiety and goodwill from some secret source, from some fount whose nature and origin none could divine. It was on these days that the uneasiness of Mrs. Baines waxed. She had the wildest suspicions; she was almost capable of accusing Sophia of carrying on a clandestine correspondence; she saw Sophia and Gerald Scales deeply and wickedly in love; she saw them with their arms round each other’s necks. … And then she called herself a middle-aged fool, to base such a structure of suspicion on a brief encounter in the street and on an idea, a fancy, a curious and irrational notion! Sophia had a certain streak of pure nobility in that exceedingly heterogeneous thing, her character. Moreover, Mrs. Baines watched the posts, and she also watched Sophia—she was not the woman to trust to a streak of pure nobility—and she came to be sure that Sophia’s sinfulness, if any, was not such as could be weighed in a balance, or collected together by stealth and then suddenly placed before the girl on a charger.
Still, she would have given much to see inside Sophia’s lovely head. Ah! Could she have done so, what sleep-destroying wonders she would have witnessed! By what bright lamps burning in what mysterious grottoes and caverns of the brain would her mature eyes have been dazzled! Sophia was living for months on the exhaustless ardent vitality absorbed during a magical two minutes in Wedgwood Street. She was living chiefly on the flaming fire struck in her soul by the shock of seeing Gerald Scales in the porch of the Wedgwood Institution as she came out of the Free Library with Experience Of Life tucked into her large astrakhan muff. He had stayed to meet her, then: she knew it! “After all,” her heart said, “I must be very beautiful, for I have attracted the pearl of men!” And she remembered her face in the glass. The value and the power of beauty were tremendously proved to her. He, the great man of the world, the handsome and elegant man with a thousand strange friends and a thousand interests far remote from her, had remained in Bursley on the mere chance of meeting her! She was proud, but her pride was drowned in bliss. “I was just looking at this inscription about Mr. Gladstone.” “So you decided to come out as usual!” “And may I ask what book you have chosen?” These were the phrases she heard, and to which she responded with similar phrases. And meanwhile a miracle of ecstasy had opened—opened like a flower. She was walking along Wedgwood Street by his side, slowly, on the scraped pavements, where marble bulbs of snow had defied the spade and remained. She and he were exactly of the same height, and she kept looking into his face and he into hers. This was all the miracle. Except that she was not walking on the pavement—she was walking on the intangible sward of paradise! Except that the houses had receded and faded, and the passers-by were subtilized into unnoticeable ghosts! Except that her mother and Constance had become phantasmal beings existing at an immense distance!
What had happened? Nothing! The most commonplace occurrence! The eternal cause had picked up a commercial traveller (it might have been a clerk or curate, but it in fact was a commercial traveller), and endowed him with all the glorious, unique, incredible attributes of a god, and planted him down before Sophia in order to produce the eternal effect. A miracle performed specially for Sophia’s benefit! No one else in Wedgwood Street saw the god walking along by her side. No one else saw anything but a simple commercial traveller. Yes, the most commonplace occurrence!
Of course at the corner of the street he had to go. “Till next time!” he murmured. And fire came out of his eyes and lighted in Sophia’s lovely head those lamps which Mrs. Baines was mercifully spared from seeing. And he had shaken hands and raised his hat. Imagine a god raising his hat! And he went off on two legs, precisely like a dashing little commercial traveller.
And, escorted by the equivocal Angel of Eclipses, she had turned into King Street, and arranged her face, and courageously met her mother. Her mother had not at first perceived the unusual; for mothers, despite their reputation to the contrary, really
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