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The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett · English · Gutenberg #5247 · 1,264,328 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Old Wives' Tale

Author: Arnold Bennett


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #5247]
                Most recently updated: January 30, 2026

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD WIVES' TALE ***




The Old Wives' Tale

Arnold Bennett




To W. W. K.




PREFACE TO THIS EDITION

In the autumn of 1903 I used to dine frequently in a restaurant in the
Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others, two waitresses that
attracted my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to whom I
never spoke, for she was employed far away from the table which I
affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged managing Breton woman, had
sole command over my table and me, and gradually she began to assume
such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should be compelled to
leave that restaurant. If I was absent for a couple of nights running
she would reproach me sharply: "What! you are unfaithful to me?" Once,
when I complained about some French beans, she informed me roundly that
French beans were a subject which I did not understand. I then decided
to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I abandoned the restaurant. A
few nights before the final parting an old woman came into the
restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She
had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see
that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had
developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the
thoughtless. She was burdened with a lot of small parcels, which she
kept dropping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose
another; and then another. In a few moments she had the whole
restaurant laughing at her. That my middle-aged Breton should laugh was
indifferent to me, but I was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling
on the pale face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I had never
spoken.

I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: "This woman was once
young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous
mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her
case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel
out of the history of a woman such as she." Every stout, ageing woman
is not grotesque--far from it!--but there is an extreme pathos in the
mere fact that every stout ageing woman was once a young girl with the
unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. And
the fact that the change from the young girl to the stout ageing woman
is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each
unperceived by her, only intensifies the pathos.

It was at this instant that I was visited by the idea of writing the
book which ultimately became "The Old Wives' Tale." Of course I felt
that the woman who caused the ignoble mirth in the restaurant would not
serve me as a type of heroine. For she was much too old and obviously
unsympathetic. It is an absolute rule that the principal character of a
novel must not be unsympathetic, and the whole modern tendency of
realistic fiction is against oddness in a prominent figure. I knew that
I must choose the sort of woman who would pass unnoticed in a crowd.

I put the idea aside for a long time, but it was never very distant
from me. For several reasons it made a special appeal to me. I had
always been a convinced admirer of Mrs. W. K. Clifford's most precious
novel, "Aunt Anne," but I wanted to see in the story of an old woman
many things that Mrs. W. K. Clifford had omitted from "Aunt Anne."
Moreover, I had always revolted against the absurd youthfulness, the
unfading youthfulness of the average heroine. And as a protest against
this fashion, I was already, in 1903, planning a novel ("Leonora") of
which the heroine was aged forty, and had daughters old enough to be in
love. The reviewers, by the way, were staggered by my hardihood in
offering a woman of forty as a subject of serious interest to the
public. But I meant to go much farther than forty! Finally as a supreme
reason, I had the example and the challenge of Guy de Maupassant's "Une
Vie." In the nineties we used to regard "Une Vie" with mute awe, as
being the summit of achievement in fiction. And I remember being very
cross with Mr. Bernard Shaw because, having read "Une Vie" at the
suggestion (I think) of Mr. William Archer, he failed to see in it
anything very remarkable. Here I must confess that, in 1908, I read
"Une Vie" again, and in spite of a natural anxiety to differ from Mr.
Bernard Shaw, I was gravely disappointed with it. It is a fine novel,
but decidedly inferior to "Pierre et Jean" or even "Fort Comme la
Mort." To return to the year 1903. "Une Vie" relates the entire life
history of a woman. I settled in the privacy of my own head that my
book about the development of a young girl into a stout old lady must
be the English "Une Vie." I have been accused of every fault except a
lack of self-confidence, and in a few weeks I settled a further point,
namely, that my book must "go one better" than "Une Vie," and that to
this end it must be the life-history of two women instead of only one.
Hence, "The Old Wives' Tale" has two heroines. Constance was the
original; Sophia was created out of bravado, just to indicate that I
declined to consider Guy de Maupassant as the last forerunner of the
deluge. I was intimidated by the audacity of my project, but I had
sworn to carry it out. For several years I looked it squarely in the
face at intervals, and then walked away to write novels of smaller
scope, of which I produced five or six. But I could not dally forever,
and in the autumn of 1907 I actually began to write it, in a village
near Fontainebleau, where I rented half a house from a retired railway
servant. I calculated that it would be 200,000 words long (which it
exactly proved to be), and I had a vague notion that no novel of such
dimensions (except Richardson's) had ever been written before. So I
counted the words in several famous Victorian novels, and discovered to
my relief that the famous Victorian novels average 400,000 words
apiece. I wrote the first part of the novel in six weeks. It was fairly
easy to me, because, in the seventies, in the first decade of my life,
I had lived in the actual draper's shop of the Baines's, and knew it as
only a child could know it. Then I went to London on a visit. I tried
to continue the book in a London hotel, but London was too distracting,
and I put the thing away, and during January and February of 1908, I
wrote "Buried Alive," which was published immediately, and was received
with majestic indifference by the English public, an indifference which
has persisted to this day.

I then returned to the Fontainebleau region and gave "The Old Wives'
Tale" no rest till I finished it at the end of July, 1908. It was
published in the autumn of the same year, and for six weeks afterward
the English public steadily confirmed an opinion expressed by a certain
person in whose judgment I had confidence, to the effect that the work
was honest but dull, and that when it was not dull it had a regrettable
tendency to facetiousness. My publishers, though brave fellows, were
somewhat disheartened; however, the reception of the book gradually
became less and less frigid.

With regard to the French portion of the story, it was not until I had
written the first part that I saw from a study of my chronological
basis that the Siege of Paris might be brought into the tale. The idea
was seductive; but I hated, and still hate, the awful business of
research; and I only knew the Paris of the Twentieth Century. Now I was
aware that my railway servant and his wife had been living in Paris at
the time of the war. I said to the old man, "By the way, you went
through the Siege of Paris, didn't you?" He turned to his old wife and
said, uncertainly, "The Siege of Paris? Yes, we did, didn't we?" The
Siege of Paris had been only one incident among many in their lives. Of
course, they remembered it well, though not vividly, and I gained much
information from them. But the most useful thing which I gained from
them was the perception, startling at first, that ordinary people went
on living very ordinary lives in Paris during the siege, and that to
the vast mass of the population the siege was not the dramatic,
spectacular, thrilling, ecstatic affair that is described in history.
Encouraged by this perception, I decided to include the siege in my
scheme. I read Sarcey's diary of the siege aloud to my wife, and I
looked at the pictures in Jules Claretie's popular work on the siege
and the commune, and I glanced at the printed collection of official
documents, and there my research ended.

It has been asserted that unless I had actually been present at a
public execution, I could not have written the chapter in which Sophia
was at the Auxerre solemnity. I have not been present at a public
execution, as the whole of my information about public executions was
derived from a series of articles on them which I read in the Paris
Matin. Mr. Frank Harris, discussing my book in "Vanity Fair," said it
was clear that I had not seen an execution, (or words to that effect),
and he proceeded to give his own description of an execution. It was a
brief but terribly convincing bit of writing, quite characteristic and
quite worthy of the author of "Montes the Matador" and of a man who has
been almost everywhere and seen almost everything. I comprehended how
far short I had fallen of the truth! I wrote to Mr. Frank Harris,
regretting that his description had not been printed before I wrote
mine, as I should assuredly have utilized it, and, of course, I
admitted that I had never witnessed an execution. He simply replied:
"Neither have I." This detail is worth preserving, for it is a reproof
to that large body of readers, who, when a novelist has really carried
conviction to them, assert off hand: "O, that must be autobiography!"

ARNOLD BENNETT.






CONTENTS


BOOK I.

MRS. BAINES

   I. THE SQUARE

  II. THE TOOTH

 III. A BATTLE

  IV. ELEPHANT

   V. THE TRAVELLER

  VI. ESCAPADE

 VII. A DEFEAT



BOOK II.

CONSTANCE

   I. REVOLUTION

  II. CHRISTMAS AND THE FUTURE

 III. CYRIL

  IV. CRIME

   V. ANOTHER CRIME

  VI. THE WIDOW

 VII. BRICKS AND MORTAR

VIII. THE PROUDEST MOTHER



BOOK III.

SOPHIA

   I. THE ELOPEMENT

  II. SUPPER

 III. AN AMBITION SATISFIED

  IV. A CRISIS FOR GERALD

   V. FEVER

  VI. THE SIEGE

 VII. SUCCESS



BOOK IV.

WHAT LIFE IS

   I. FRENSHAM'S

  II. THE MEETING

 III. TOWARDS HOTEL LIFE

  IV. END OF SOPHIA

   V. END OF CONSTANCE






BOOK I

MRS. BAINES




CHAPTER I

THE SQUARE

I


Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no heed to the
manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never
been conscious. They were, for example, established almost precisely on
the fifty-third parallel of latitude. A little way to the north of
them, in the creases of a hill famous for its religious orgies, rose
the river Trent, the calm and characteristic stream of middle England.
Somewhat further northwards, in the near neighbourhood of the highest
public-house in the realm, rose two lesser rivers, the Dane and the
Dove, which, quarrelling in early infancy, turned their backs on each
other, and, the one by favour of the Weaver and the other by favour of
the Trent, watered between them the whole width of England, and poured
themselves respectively into the Irish Sea and the German Ocean. What a
county of modest, unnoticed rivers! What a natural, simple county,
content to fix its boundaries by these tortuous island brooks, with
their comfortable names--Trent, Mease, Dove, Tern, Dane, Mees, Stour,
Tame, and even hasty Severn! Not that the Severn is suitable to the
county! In the county excess is deprecated. The county is happy in not
exciting remark. It is content that Shropshire should possess that
swollen bump, the Wrekin, and that the exaggerated wildness of the Peak
should lie over its border. It does not desire to be a pancake like
Cheshire. It has everything that England has, including thirty miles of
Watling Street; and England can show nothing more beautiful and nothing
uglier than the works of nature and the works of man to be seen within
the limits of the county. It is England in little, lost in the midst of
England, unsung by searchers after the extreme; perhaps occasionally
somewhat sore at this neglect, but how proud in the instinctive
cognizance of its representative features and traits!

Constance and Sophia, busy with the intense preoccupations of youth,
recked not of such matters. They were surrounded by the county. On
every side the fields and moors of Staffordshire, intersected by roads
and lanes, railways, watercourses and telegraph-lines, patterned by
hedges, ornamented and made respectable by halls and genteel parks,
enlivened by villages at the intersections, and warmly surveyed by the
sun, spread out undulating. And trains were rushing round curves in
deep cuttings, and carts and waggons trotting and jingling on the
yellow roads, and long, narrow boats passing in a leisure majestic and
infinite over the surface of the stolid canals; the rivers had only
themselves to support, for Staffordshire rivers have remained virgin of
keels to this day. One could imagine the messages concerning prices,
sudden death, and horses, in their flight through the wires under the
feet of birds. In the inns Utopians were shouting the universe into
order over beer, and in the halls and parks the dignity of England was
being preserved in a fitting manner. The villages were full of women
who did nothing but fight against dirt and hunger, and repair the
effects of friction on clothes. Thousands of labourers were in the
fields, but the fields were so broad and numerous that this scattered
multitude was totally lost therein. The cuckoo was much more
perceptible than man, dominating whole square miles with his resounding
call. And on the airy moors heath-larks played in the ineffaceable
mule-tracks that had served centuries before even the Romans thought of
Watling Street. In short, the usual daily life of the county was
proceeding with all its immense variety and importance; but though
Constance and Sophia were in it they were not of it.

The fact is, that while in the county they were also in the district;
and no person who lives in the district, even if he should be old and
have nothing to do but reflect upon things in general, ever thinks
about the county. So far as the county goes, the district might almost
as well be in the middle of the Sahara. It ignores the county, save
that it uses it nonchalantly sometimes as leg-stretcher on holiday
afternoons, as a man may use his back garden. It has nothing in common
with the county; it is richly sufficient to itself. Nevertheless, its
self-sufficiency and the true salt savour of its life can only be
appreciated by picturing it hemmed in by county. It lies on the face of
the county like an insignificant stain, like a dark Pleiades in a green
and empty sky. And Hanbridge has the shape of a horse and its rider,
Bursley of half a donkey, Knype of a pair of trousers, Longshaw of an
octopus, and little Turnhill of a beetle. The Five Towns seem to cling
together for safety. Yet the idea of clinging together for safety would
make them laugh. They are unique and indispensable. From the north of
the county right down to the south they alone stand for civilization,
applied science, organized manufacture, and the century--until you come
to Wolverhampton. They are unique and indispensable because you cannot
drink tea out of a teacup without the aid of the Five Towns; because
you cannot eat a meal in decency without the aid of the Five Towns. For
this the architecture of the Five Towns is an architecture of ovens and
chimneys; for this its atmosphere is as black as its mud; for this it
burns and smokes all night, so that Longshaw has been compared to hell;
for this it is unlearned in the ways of agriculture, never having seen
corn except as packing straw and in quartern loaves; for this, on the
other hand, it comprehends the mysterious habits of fire and pure,
sterile earth; for this it lives crammed together in slippery streets
where the housewife must change white window-curtains at least once a
fortnight if she wishes to remain respectable; for this it gets up in
the mass at six a.m., winter and summer, and goes to bed when the
public-houses close; for this it exists--that you may drink tea out of
a teacup and toy with a chop on a plate. All the everyday crockery used
in the kingdom is made in the Five Towns--all, and much besides. A
district capable of such gigantic manufacture, of such a perfect
monopoly--and which finds energy also to produce coal and iron and
great men--may be an insignificant stain on a county, considered
geographically, but it is surely well justified in treating the county
as its back garden once a week, and in blindly ignoring it the rest of
the time.

Even the majestic thought that whenever and wherever in all England a
woman washes up, she washes up the product of the district; that
whenever and wherever in all England a plate is broken the fracture
means new business for the district--even this majestic thought had
probably never occurred to either of the girls. The fact is, that while
in the Five Towns they were also in the Square, Bursley and the Square
ignored the staple manufacture as perfectly as the district ignored the
county. Bursley has the honours of antiquity in the Five Towns. No
industrial development can ever rob it of its superiority in age, which
makes it absolutely sure in its conceit. And the time will never come
when the other towns--let them swell and bluster as they may--will not
pronounce the name of Bursley as one pronounces the name of one's
mother. Add to this that the Square was the centre of Bursley's retail
trade (which scorned the staple as something wholesale, vulgar, and
assuredly filthy), and you will comprehend the importance and the
self-isolation of the Square in the scheme of the created universe.
There you have it, embedded in the district, and the district embedded
in the county, and the county lost and dreaming in the heart of England!

The Square was named after St. Luke. The Evangelist might have been
startled by certain phenomena in his square, but, except in Wakes Week,
when the shocking always happened, St. Luke's Square lived in a manner
passably saintly--though it contained five public-houses. It contained
five public-houses, a bank, a barber's, a confectioner's, three
grocers', two chemists', an ironmonger's, a clothier's, and five
drapers'. These were all the catalogue. St. Luke's Square had no room
for minor establishments. The aristocracy of the Square undoubtedly
consisted of the drapers (for the bank was impersonal); and among the
five the shop of Baines stood supreme. No business establishment could
possibly be more respected than that of Mr. Baines was respected. And
though John Baines had been bedridden for a dozen years, he still lived
on the lips of admiring, ceremonious burgesses as 'our honoured
fellow-townsman.' He deserved his reputation.

The Baines's shop, to make which three dwellings had at intervals been
thrown into one, lay at the bottom of the Square. It formed about
one-third of the south side of the Square, the remainder being made up
of Critchlow's (chemist), the clothier's, and the Hanover Spirit
Vaults. ("Vaults" was a favourite synonym of the public-house in the
Square. Only two of the public-houses were crude public-houses: the
rest were "vaults.") It was a composite building of three storeys, in
blackish-crimson brick, with a projecting shop-front and, above and
behind that, two rows of little windows. On the sash of each window was
a red cloth roll stuffed with sawdust, to prevent draughts; plain white
blinds descended about six inches from the top of each window. There
were no curtains to any of the windows save one; this was the window of
the drawing-room, on the first floor at the corner of the Square and
King Street. Another window, on the second storey, was peculiar, in
that it had neither blind nor pad, and was very dirty; this was the
window of an unused room that had a separate staircase to itself, the
staircase being barred by a door always locked. Constance and Sophia
had lived in continual expectation of the abnormal issuing from that
mysterious room, which was next to their own. But they were
disappointed. The room had no shameful secret except the incompetence
of the architect who had made one house out of three; it was just an
empty, unemployable room. The building had also a considerable frontage
on King Street, where, behind the shop, was sheltered the parlour, with
a large window and a door that led directly by two steps into the
street. A strange peculiarity of the shop was that it bore no
signboard. Once it had had a large signboard which a memorable gale had
blown into the Square. Mr. Baines had decided not to replace it. He had
always objected to what he called "puffing," and for this reason would
never hear of such a thing as a clearance sale. The hatred of "puffing"
grew on him until he came to regard even a sign as "puffing."
Uninformed persons who wished to find Baines's must ask and learn. For
Mr. Baines, to have replaced the sign would have been to condone, yea,
to participate in, the modern craze for unscrupulous
self-advertisement. This abstention of Mr. Baines's from indulgence in
signboards was somehow accepted by the more thoughtful members of the
community as evidence that the height of Mr. Baines's principles was
greater even than they had imagined.

Constance and Sophia were the daughters of this credit to human nature.
He had no other children.

II

They pressed their noses against the window of the show-room, and gazed
down into the Square as perpendicularly as the projecting front of the
shop would allow. The show-room was over the millinery and silken half
of the shop. Over the woollen and shirting half were the drawing-room
and the chief bedroom. When in quest of articles of coquetry, you
mounted from the shop by a curving stair, and your head gradually rose
level with a large apartment having a mahogany counter in front of the
window and along one side, yellow linoleum on the floor, many cardboard
boxes, a magnificent hinged cheval glass, and two chairs. The
window-sill being lower than the counter, there was a gulf between the
panes and the back of the counter, into which important articles such
as scissors, pencils, chalk, and artificial flowers were continually
disappearing: another proof of the architect's incompetence.

The girls could only press their noses against the window by kneeling
on the counter, and this they were doing. Constance's nose was snub,
but agreeably so. Sophia had a fine Roman nose; she was a beautiful
creature, beautiful and handsome at the same time. They were both of
them rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and
luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the
blood; innocent, artful, roguish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and
miraculously wise. Their ages were sixteen and fifteen; it is an epoch
when, if one is frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn:
one has learnt simply everything in the previous six months.

"There she goes!" exclaimed Sophia.

Up the Square, from the corner of King Street, passed a woman in a new
bonnet with pink strings, and a new blue dress that sloped at the
shoulders and grew to a vast circumference at the hem. Through the
silent sunlit solitude of the Square (for it was Thursday afternoon,
and all the shops shut except the confectioner's and one chemist's)
this bonnet and this dress floated northwards in search of romance,
under the relentless eyes of Constance and Sophia. Within them,
somewhere, was the soul of Maggie, domestic servant at Baines's. Maggie
had been at the shop since before the creation of Constance and Sophia.
She lived seventeen hours of each day in an underground kitchen and
larder, and the other seven in an attic, never going out except to
chapel on Sunday evenings, and once a month on Thursday afternoons.
"Followers" were most strictly forbidden to her; but on rare occasions
an aunt from Longshaw was permitted as a tremendous favour to see her
in the subterranean den. Everybody, including herself, considered that
she had a good "place," and was well treated. It was undeniable, for
instance, that she was allowed to fall in love exactly as she chose,
provided she did not "carry on" in the kitchen or the yard. And as a
fact, Maggie had fallen in love. In seventeen years she had been
engaged eleven times. No one could conceive how that ugly and powerful
organism could softly languish to the undoing of even a butty-collier,
nor why, having caught a man in her sweet toils, she could ever be
imbecile enough to set him free. There are, however, mysteries in the
souls of Maggies. The drudge had probably been affianced oftener than
any woman in Bursley. Her employers were so accustomed to an
interesting announcement that for years they had taken to saying naught
in reply but 'Really, Maggie!' Engagements and tragic partings were
Maggie's pastime. Fixed otherwise, she might have studied the piano
instead.

"No gloves, of course!" Sophia criticized.

"Well, you can't expect her to have gloves," said Constance.

Then a pause, as the bonnet and dress neared the top of the Square.

"Supposing she turns round and sees us?" Constance suggested.

"I don't care if she does," said Sophia, with a haughtiness almost
impassioned; and her head trembled slightly.

There were, as usual, several loafers at the top of the Square, in the
corner between the bank and the "Marquis of Granby." And one of these
loafers stepped forward and shook hands with an obviously willing
Maggie. Clearly it was a rendezvous, open, unashamed. The twelfth
victim had been selected by the virgin of forty, whose kiss would not
have melted lard! The couple disappeared together down Oldcastle Street.

"WELL!" cried Constance. "Did you ever see such a thing?"

While Sophia, short of adequate words, flushed and bit her lip.

With the profound, instinctive cruelty of youth, Constance and Sophia
had assembled in their favourite haunt, the show-room, expressly to
deride Maggie in her new clothes. They obscurely thought that a woman
so ugly and soiled as Maggie was had no right to possess new clothes.
Even her desire to take the air of a Thursday afternoon seemed to them
unnatural and somewhat reprehensible. Why should she want to stir out
of her kitchen? As for her tender yearnings, they positively grudged
these to Maggie. That Maggie should give rein to chaste passion was
more than grotesque; it was offensive and wicked. But let it not for an
instant be doubted that they were nice, kind-hearted, well-behaved, and
delightful girls! Because they were. They were not angels.

"It's too ridiculous!" said Sophia, severely. She had youth, beauty,
and rank in her favour. And to her it really was ridiculous.

"Poor old Maggie!" Constance murmured. Constance was foolishly
good-natured, a perfect manufactory of excuses for other people; and
her benevolence was eternally rising up and overpowering her reason.

"What time did mother say she should be back?" Sophia asked.

"Not until supper."

"Oh! Hallelujah!" Sophia burst out, clasping her hands in joy. And they
both slid down from the counter just as if they had been little boys,
and not, as their mother called them, "great girls."

"Let's go and play the Osborne quadrilles," Sophia suggested (the
Osborne quadrilles being a series of dances arranged to be performed on
drawing-room pianos by four jewelled hands).

"I couldn't think of it," said Constance, with a precocious gesture of
seriousness. In that gesture, and in her tone, was something which
conveyed to Sophia: "Sophia, how can you be so utterly blind to the
gravity of our fleeting existence as to ask me to go and strum the
piano with you?" Yet a moment before she had been a little boy.

"Why not?" Sophia demanded.

"I shall never have another chance like to-day for getting on with
this," said Constance, picking up a bag from the counter.

She sat down and took from the bag a piece of loosely woven canvas, on
which she was embroidering a bunch of roses in coloured wools. The
canvas had once been stretched on a frame, but now, as the delicate
labour of the petals and leaves was done, and nothing remained to do
but the monotonous background, Constance was content to pin the stuff
to her knee. With the long needle and several skeins of mustard-tinted
wool, she bent over the canvas and resumed the filling-in of the tiny
squares. The whole design was in squares--the gradations of red and
greens, the curves of the smallest buds--all was contrived in squares,
with a result that mimicked a fragment of uncompromising Axminster
carpet. Still, the fine texture of the wool, the regular and rapid
grace of those fingers moving incessantly at back and front of the
canvas, the gentle sound of the wool as it passed through the holes,
and the intent, youthful earnestness of that lowered gaze, excused and
invested with charm an activity which, on artistic grounds, could not
possibly be justified. The canvas was destined to adorn a gilt
firescreen in the drawing-room, and also to form a birthday gift to
Mrs. Baines from her elder daughter. But whether the enterprise was as
secret from Mrs. Baines as Constance hoped, none save Mrs. Baines knew.

"Con," murmured Sophia, "you're too sickening sometimes."

"Well," said Constance, blandly, "it's no use pretending that this
hasn't got to be finished before we go back to school, because it has."
Sophia wandered about, a prey ripe for the Evil One. "Oh," she
exclaimed joyously--even ecstatically--looking behind the cheval glass,
"here's mother's new skirt! Miss Dunn's been putting the gimp on it!
Oh, mother, what a proud thing you will be!" Constance heard swishings
behind the glass. "What are you doing, Sophia?"

"Nothing."

"You surely aren't putting that skirt on?"

"Why not?"

"You'll catch it finely, I can tell you!"

Without further defence, Sophia sprang out from behind the immense
glass. She had already shed a notable part of her own costume, and the
flush of mischief was in her face. She ran across to the other side of
the room and examined carefully a large coloured print that was affixed
to the wall.

This print represented fifteen sisters, all of the same height and
slimness of figure, all of the same age--about twenty-five or so, and
all with exactly the same haughty and bored beauty. That they were in
truth sisters was clear from the facial resemblance between them; their
demeanour indicated that they were princesses, offspring of some
impossibly prolific king and queen. Those hands had never toiled, nor
had those features ever relaxed from the smile of courts. The
princesses moved in a landscape of marble steps and verandahs, with a
bandstand and strange trees in the distance. One was in a riding-habit,
another in evening attire, another dressed for tea, another for the
theatre; another seemed to be ready to go to bed. One held a little
girl by the hand; it could not have been her own little girl, for these
princesses were far beyond human passions. Where had she obtained the
little girl? Why was one sister going to the theatre, another to tea,
another to the stable, and another to bed? Why was one in a heavy
mantle, and another sheltering from the sun's rays under a parasol? The
picture was drenched in mystery, and the strangest thing about it was
that all these highnesses were apparently content with the most
ridiculous and out-moded fashions. Absurd hats, with veils flying
behind; absurd bonnets, fitting close to the head, and spotted; absurd
coiffures that nearly lay on the nape; absurd, clumsy sleeves; absurd
waists, almost above the elbow's level; absurd scolloped jackets! And
the skirts! What a sight were those skirts! They were nothing but vast
decorated pyramids; on the summit of each was stuck the upper half of a
princess. It was astounding that princesses should consent to be so
preposterous and so uncomfortable. But Sophia perceived nothing uncanny
in the picture, which bore the legend: "Newest summer fashions from
Paris. Gratis supplement to Myra's Journal." Sophia had never imagined
anything more stylish, lovely, and dashing than the raiment of the
fifteen princesses.

For Constance and Sophia had the disadvantage of living in the middle
ages. The crinoline had not quite reached its full circumference, and
the dress-improver had not even been thought of. In all the Five Towns
there was not a public bath, nor a free library, nor a municipal park,
nor a telephone, nor yet a board-school. People had not understood the
vital necessity of going away to the seaside every year. Bishop Colenso
had just staggered Christianity by his shameless notions on the
Pentateuch. Half Lancashire was starving on account of the American
war. Garroting was the chief amusement of the homicidal classes.
Incredible as it may appear, there was nothing but a horse-tram running
between Bursley and Hanbridge--and that only twice an hour; and between
the other towns no stage of any kind! One went to Longshaw as one now
goes to Pekin. It was an era so dark and backward that one might wonder
how people could sleep in their beds at night for thinking about their
sad state.

Happily the inhabitants of the Five Towns in that era were passably
pleased with themselves, and they never even suspected that they were
not quite modern and quite awake. They thought that the intellectual,
the industrial, and the social movements had gone about as far as these
movements could go, and they were amazed at their own progress. Instead
of being humble and ashamed, they actually showed pride in their
pitiful achievements. They ought to have looked forward meekly to the
prodigious feats of posterity; but, having too little faith and too
much conceit, they were content to look behind and make comparisons
with the past. They did not foresee the miraculous generation which is
us. A poor, blind, complacent people! The ludicrous horse-car was
typical of them. The driver rang a huge bell, five minutes before
starting, that could be heard from the Wesleyan Chapel to the Cock
Yard, and then after deliberations and hesitations the vehicle rolled
off on its rails into unknown dangers while passengers shouted
good-bye. At Bleakridge it had to stop for the turnpike, and it was
assisted up the mountains of Leveson Place and Sutherland Street
(towards Hanbridge) by a third horse, on whose back was perched a tiny,
whip-cracking boy; that boy lived like a shuttle on the road between
Leveson Place and Sutherland Street, and even in wet weather he was the
envy of all other boys. After half an hour's perilous transit the car
drew up solemnly in a narrow street by the Signal office in Hanbridge,
and the ruddy driver, having revolved many times the polished iron
handle of his sole brake, turned his attention to his passengers in
calm triumph, dismissing them with a sort of unsung doxology.

And this was regarded as the last word of traction! A whip-cracking boy
on a tip horse! Oh, blind, blind! You could not foresee the hundred and
twenty electric cars that now rush madly bumping and thundering at
twenty miles an hour through all the main streets of the district!

So that naturally Sophia, infected with the pride of her period, had no
misgivings whatever concerning the final elegance of the princesses.
She studied them as the fifteen apostles of the ne plus ultra; then,
having taken some flowers and plumes out of a box, amid warnings from
Constance, she retreated behind the glass, and presently emerged as a
great lady in the style of the princesses. Her mother's tremendous new
gown ballooned about her in all its fantastic richness and
expensiveness. And with the gown she had put on her mother's
importance--that mien of assured authority, of capacity tested in many
a crisis, which characterized Mrs. Baines, and which Mrs. Baines seemed
to impart to her dresses even before she had regularly worn them. For
it was a fact that Mrs. Baines's empty garments inspired respect, as
though some essence had escaped from her and remained in them.

"Sophia!"

Constance stayed her needle, and, without lifting her head, gazed, with
eyes raised from the wool-work, motionless at the posturing figure of
her sister. It was sacrilege that she was witnessing, a prodigious
irreverence. She was conscious of an expectation that punishment would
instantly fall on this daring, impious child. But she, who never felt
these mad, amazing impulses, could nevertheless only smile fearfully.

"Sophia!" she breathed, with an intensity of alarm that merged into
condoning admiration. "Whatever will you do next?"

Sophia's lovely flushed face crowned the extraordinary structure like a
blossom, scarcely controlling its laughter. She was as tall as her
mother, and as imperious, as crested, and proud; and in spite of the
pigtail, the girlish semi-circular comb, and the loose foal-like limbs,
she could support as well as her mother the majesty of the
gimp-embroidered dress. Her eyes sparkled with all the challenges of
the untried virgin as she minced about the showroom. Abounding life
inspired her movements. The confident and fierce joy of youth shone on
her brow. "What thing on earth equals me?" she seemed to demand with
enchanting and yet ruthless arrogance. She was the daughter of a
respected, bedridden draper in an insignificant town, lost in the
central labyrinth of England, if you like; yet what manner of man,
confronted with her, would or could have denied her naive claim to
dominion? She stood, in her mother's hoops, for the desire of the
world. And in the innocence of her soul she knew it! The heart of a
young girl mysteriously speaks and tells her of her power long ere she
can use her power. If she can find nothing else to subdue, you may
catch her in the early years subduing a gate-post or drawing homage
from an empty chair. Sophia's experimental victim was Constance, with
suspended needle and soft glance that shot out from the lowered face.

Then Sophia fell, in stepping backwards; the pyramid was overbalanced;
great distended rings of silk trembled and swayed gigantically on the
floor, and Sophia's small feet lay like the feet of a doll on the rim
of the largest circle, which curved and arched above them like a
cavern's mouth. The abrupt transition of her features from assured
pride to ludicrous astonishment and alarm was comical enough to have
sent into wild uncharitable laughter any creature less humane than
Constance. But Constance sprang to her, a single embodied instinct of
benevolence, with her snub nose, and tried to raise her.

"Oh, Sophia!" she cried compassionately--that voice seemed not to know
the tones of reproof--"I do hope you've not messed it, because mother
would be so--"

The words were interrupted by the sound of groans beyond the door
leading to the bedrooms. The groans, indicating direst physical
torment, grew louder. The two girls stared, wonder-struck and afraid,
at the door, Sophia with her dark head raised, and Constance with her
arms round Sophia's waist. The door opened, letting in a much-magnified
sound of groans, and there entered a youngish, undersized man, who was
frantically clutching his head in his hands and contorting all the
muscles of his face. On perceiving the sculptural group of two prone,
interlocked girls, one enveloped in a crinoline, and the other with a
wool-work bunch of flowers pinned to her knee, he jumped back, ceased
groaning, arranged his face, and seriously tried to pretend that it was
not he who had been vocal in anguish, that, indeed, he was just passing
as a casual, ordinary wayfarer through the showroom to the shop below.
He blushed darkly; and the girls also blushed.

"Oh, I beg pardon, I'm sure!" said this youngish man suddenly; and with
a swift turn he disappeared whence he had come.

He was Mr. Povey, a person universally esteemed, both within and
without the shop, the surrogate of bedridden Mr. Baines, the unfailing
comfort and stand-by of Mrs. Baines, the fount and radiating centre of
order and discipline in the shop; a quiet, diffident, secretive,
tedious, and obstinate youngish man, absolutely faithful, absolutely
efficient in his sphere; without brilliance, without distinction;
perhaps rather little-minded, certainly narrow-minded; but what a force
in the shop! The shop was inconceivable without Mr. Povey. He was under
twenty and not out of his apprenticeship when Mr. Baines had been
struck down, and he had at once proved his worth. Of the assistants, he
alone slept in the house. His bedroom was next to that of his employer;
there was a door between the two chambers, and the two steps led down
from the larger to the less.

The girls regained their feet, Sophia with Constance's help. It was not
easy to right a capsized crinoline. They both began to laugh nervously,
with a trace of hysteria.

"I thought he'd gone to the dentist's," whispered Constance.

Mr. Povey's toothache had been causing anxiety in the microcosm for two
days, and it had been clearly understood at dinner that Thursday
morning that Mr. Povey was to set forth to Oulsnam Bros., the dentists
at Hillport, without any delay. Only on Thursdays and Sundays did Mr.
Povey dine with the family. On other days he dined later, by himself,
but at the family table, when Mrs. Baines or one of the assistants
could "relieve" him in the shop. Before starting out to visit her elder
sister at Axe, Mrs. Baines had insisted to Mr. Povey that he had eaten
practically nothing but "slops" for twenty-four hours, and that if he
was not careful she would have him on her hands. He had replied in his
quietest, most sagacious, matter-of-fact tone--the tone that carried
weight with all who heard it--that he had only been waiting for
Thursday afternoon, and should of course go instantly to Oulsnams' and
have the thing attended to in a proper manner. He had even added that
persons who put off going to the dentist's were simply sowing trouble
for themselves.

None could possibly have guessed that Mr. Povey was afraid of going to
the dentist's. But such was the case. He had not dared to set forth.
The paragon of commonsense, pictured by most people as being somehow
unliable to human frailties, could not yet screw himself up to the
point of ringing a dentist's door-bell.

"He did look funny," said Sophia. "I wonder what he thought. I couldn't
help laughing!"

Constance made no answer; but when Sophia had resumed her own clothes,
and it was ascertained beyond doubt that the new dress had not
suffered, and Constance herself was calmly stitching again, she said,
poising her needle as she had poised it to watch Sophia:

"I was just wondering whether something oughtn't to be done for Mr.
Povey."

"What?" Sophia demanded.

"Has he gone back to his bedroom?"

"Let's go and listen," said Sophia the adventuress.

They went, through the showroom door, past the foot of the stairs
leading to the second storey, down the long corridor broken in the
middle by two steps and carpeted with a narrow bordered carpet whose
parallel lines increased its apparent length. They went on tiptoe,
sticking close to one another. Mr. Povey's door was slightly ajar. They
listened; not a sound.

"Mr. Povey!" Constance coughed discreetly.

No reply. It was Sophia who pushed the door open. Constance made an
elderly prim plucking gesture at Sophia's bare arm, but she followed
Sophia gingerly into the forbidden room, which was, however, empty. The
bed had been ruffled, and on it lay a book, "The Harvest of a Quiet
Eye."

"Harvest of a quiet tooth!" Sophia whispered, giggling very low.

"Hsh!" Constance put her lips forward.

From the next room came a regular, muffled, oratorical sound, as though
some one had begun many years ago to address a meeting and had
forgotten to leave off and never would leave off. They were familiar
with the sound, and they quitted Mr. Povey's chamber in fear of
disturbing it. At the same moment Mr. Povey reappeared, this time in
the drawing-room doorway at the other extremity of the long corridor.
He seemed to be trying ineffectually to flee from his tooth as a
murderer tries to flee from his conscience.

"Oh, Mr. Povey!" said Constance quickly--for he had surprised them
coming out of his bedroom; "we were just looking for you."

"To see if we could do anything for you," Sophia added.

"Oh no, thanks!" said Mr. Povey.

Then he began to come down the corridor, slowly.

"You haven't been to the dentist's," said Constance sympathetically.

"No, I haven't," said Mr. Povey, as if Constance was indicating a fact
which had escaped his attention. "The truth is, I thought it looked
like rain, and if I'd got wet--you see--"

Miserable Mr. Povey!

"Yes," said Constance, "you certainly ought to keep out of draughts.
Don't you think it would be a good thing if you went and sat in the
parlour? There's a fire there."

"I shall be all right, thank you," said Mr. Povey. And after a pause:
"Well, thanks, I will."

III

The girls made way for him to pass them at the head of the twisting
stairs which led down to the parlour. Constance followed, and Sophia
followed Constance.

"Have father's chair," said Constance.

There were two rocking-chairs with fluted backs covered by
antimacassars, one on either side of the hearth. That to the left was
still entitled "father's chair," though its owner had not sat in it
since long before the Crimean war, and would never sit in it again.

"I think I'd sooner have the other one," said Mr. Povey, "because it's
on the right side, you see." And he touched his right cheek.

Having taken Mrs. Baines's chair, he bent his face down to the fire,
seeking comfort from its warmth. Sophia poked the fire, whereupon Mr.
Povey abruptly withdrew his face. He then felt something light on his
shoulders. Constance had taken the antimacassar from the back of the
chair, and protected him with it from the draughts. He did not
instantly rebel, and therefore was permanently barred from rebellion.
He was entrapped by the antimacassar. It formally constituted him an
invalid, and Constance and Sophia his nurses. Constance drew the
curtain across the street door. No draught could come from the window,
for the window was not 'made to open.' The age of ventilation had not
arrived. Sophia shut the other two doors. And, each near a door, the
girls gazed at Mr. Povey behind his back, irresolute, but filled with a
delicious sense of responsibility.

The situation was on a different plane now. The seriousness of Mr.
Povey's toothache, which became more and more manifest, had already
wiped out the ludicrous memory of the encounter in the showroom.
Looking at these two big girls, with their short-sleeved black frocks
and black aprons, and their smooth hair, and their composed serious
faces, one would have judged them incapable of the least lapse from an
archangelic primness; Sophia especially presented a marvellous
imitation of saintly innocence. As for the toothache, its action on Mr.
Povey was apparently periodic; it gathered to a crisis like a wave,
gradually, the torture increasing till the wave broke and left Mr.
Povey exhausted, but free for a moment from pain. These crises recurred
about once a minute. And now, accustomed to the presence of the young
virgins, and having tacitly acknowledged by his acceptance of the
antimacassar that his state was abnormal, he gave himself up frankly to
affliction. He concealed nothing of his agony, which was fully
displayed by sudden contortions of his frame, and frantic oscillations
of the rocking-chair. Presently, as he lay back enfeebled in the wash
of a spent wave, he murmured with a sick man's voice:

"I suppose you haven't got any laudanum?"

The girls started into life. "Laudanum, Mr. Povey?"

"Yes, to hold in my mouth."

He sat up, tense; another wave was forming. The excellent fellow was
lost to all self-respect, all decency.

"There's sure to be some in mother's cupboard," said Sophia.

Constance, who bore Mrs. Baines's bunch of keys at her girdle, a solemn
trust, moved a little fearfully to a corner cupboard which was hung in
the angle to the right of the projecting fireplace, over a shelf on
which stood a large copper tea-urn. That corner cupboard, of oak inlaid
with maple and ebony in a simple border pattern, was typical of the
room. It was of a piece with the deep green "flock" wall paper, and the
tea-urn, and the rocking-chairs with their antimacassars, and the
harmonium in rosewood with a Chinese paper-mache tea-caddy on the top
of it; even with the carpet, certainly the most curious parlour carpet
that ever was, being made of lengths of the stair-carpet sewn together
side by side. That corner cupboard was already old in service; it had
held the medicines of generations. It gleamed darkly with the grave and
genuine polish which comes from ancient use alone. The key which
Constance chose from her bunch was like the cupboard, smooth and
shining with years; it fitted and turned very easily, yet with a firm
snap. The single wide door opened sedately as a portal.

The girls examined the sacred interior, which had the air of being
inhabited by an army of diminutive prisoners, each crying aloud with
the full strength of its label to be set free on a mission.

"There it is!" said Sophia eagerly.

And there it was: a blue bottle, with a saffron label, "Caution.
POISON. Laudanum. Charles Critchlow, M.P.S. Dispensing Chemist. St.
Luke's Square, Bursley."

Those large capitals frightened the girls. Constance took the bottle as
she might have taken a loaded revolver, and she glanced at Sophia.
Their omnipotent, all-wise mother was not present to tell them what to
do. They, who had never decided, had to decide now. And Constance was
the elder. Must this fearsome stuff, whose very name was a name of
fear, be introduced in spite of printed warnings into Mr. Povey's
mouth? The responsibility was terrifying.

"Perhaps I'd just better ask Mr. Critchlow," Constance faltered.

The expectation of beneficent laudanum had enlivened Mr. Povey, had
already, indeed, by a sort of suggestion, half cured his toothache.

"Oh no!" he said. "No need to ask Mr. Critchlow ... Two or three drops
in a little water." He showed impatience to be at the laudanum.

The girls knew that an antipathy existed between the chemist and Mr.
Povey.

"It's sure to be all right," said Sophia. "I'll get the water."

With youthful cries and alarms they succeeded in pouring four mortal
dark drops (one more than Constance intended) into a cup containing a
little water. And as they handed the cup to Mr. Povey their faces were
the faces of affrighted comical conspirators. They felt so old and they
looked so young.

Mr. Povey imbibed eagerly of the potion, put the cup on the
mantelpiece, and then tilted his head to the right so as to submerge
the affected tooth. In this posture he remained, awaiting the sweet
influence of the remedy. The girls, out of a nice modesty, turned away,
for Mr. Povey must not swallow the medicine, and they preferred to
leave him unhampered in the solution of a delicate problem. When next
they examined him, he was leaning back in the rocking-chair with his
mouth open and his eyes shut.

"Has it done you any good, Mr. Povey?"

"I think I'll lie down on the sofa for a minute," was Mr. Povey's
strange reply; and forthwith he sprang up and flung himself on to the
horse-hair sofa between the fireplace and the window, where he lay
stripped of all his dignity, a mere beaten animal in a grey suit with
peculiar coat-tails, and a very creased waistcoat, and a lapel that was
planted with pins, and a paper collar and close-fitting paper cuffs.

Constance ran after him with the antimacassar, which she spread softly
on his shoulders; and Sophia put another one over his thin little legs,
all drawn up.

They then gazed at their handiwork, with secret self-accusations and
the most dreadful misgivings.

"He surely never swallowed it!" Constance whispered.

"He's asleep, anyhow," said Sophia, more loudly.

Mr. Povey was certainly asleep, and his mouth was very wide open--like
a shop-door. The only question was whether his sleep was not an eternal
sleep; the only question was whether he was not out of his pain for
ever.

Then he snored--horribly; his snore seemed a portent of disaster.

Sophia approached him as though he were a bomb, and stared, growing
bolder, into his mouth.

"Oh, Con," she summoned her sister, "do come and look! It's too droll!"

In an instant all their four eyes were exploring the singular landscape
of Mr. Povey's mouth. In a corner, to the right of that interior, was
one sizeable fragment of a tooth, that was attached to Mr. Povey by the
slenderest tie, so that at each respiration of Mr. Povey, when his body
slightly heaved and the gale moaned in the cavern, this tooth moved
separately, showing that its long connection with Mr. Povey was drawing
to a close.

"That's the one," said Sophia, pointing. "And it's as loose as
anything. Did you ever see such a funny thing?"

The extreme funniness of the thing had lulled in Sophia the fear of Mr.
Povey's sudden death.

"I'll see how much he's taken," said Constance, preoccupied, going to
the mantelpiece.

"Why, I do believe--" Sophia began, and then stopped, glancing at the
sewing-machine, which stood next to the sofa.

It was a Howe sewing-machine. It had a little tool-drawer, and in the
tool-drawer was a small pair of pliers. Constance, engaged in sniffing
at the lees of the potion in order to estimate its probable deadliness,
heard the well-known click of the little tool-drawer, and then she saw
Sophia nearing Mr. Povey's mouth with the pliers.

"Sophia!" she exclaimed, aghast. "What in the name of goodness are you
doing?"

"Nothing," said Sophia.

The next instant Mr. Povey sprang up out of his laudanum dream.

"It jumps!" he muttered; and, after a reflective pause, "but it's much
better." He had at any rate escaped death.

Sophia's right hand was behind her back.

Just then a hawker passed down King Street, crying mussels and cockles.

"Oh!" Sophia almost shrieked. "Do let's have mussels and cockles for
tea!" And she rushed to the door, and unlocked and opened it,
regardless of the risk of draughts to Mr. Povey.

In those days people often depended upon the caprices of hawkers for
the tastiness of their teas; but it was an adventurous age, when errant
knights of commerce were numerous and enterprising. You went on to your
doorstep, caught your meal as it passed, withdrew, cooked it and ate
it, quite in the manner of the early Briton.

Constance was obliged to join her sister on the top step. Sophia
descended to the second step.

"Fresh mussels and cockles all alive oh!" bawled the hawker, looking
across the road in the April breeze. He was the celebrated Hollins, a
professional Irish drunkard, aged in iniquity, who cheerfully saluted
magistrates in the street, and referred to the workhouse, which he
occasionally visited, as the Bastile.

Sophia was trembling from head to foot.

"What ARE you laughing at, you silly thing?" Constance demanded.

Sophia surreptitiously showed the pliers, which she had partly thrust
into her pocket. Between their points was a most perceptible, and even
recognizable, fragment of Mr. Povey.

This was the crown of Sophia's career as a perpetrator of the
unutterable.

"What!" Constance's face showed the final contortions of that horrified
incredulity which is forced to believe.

Sophia nudged her violently to remind her that they were in the street,
and also quite close to Mr. Povey.

"Now, my little missies," said the vile Hollins. "Three pence a pint,
and how's your honoured mother to-day? Yes, fresh, so help me God!"




CHAPTER II

THE TOOTH

I


The two girls came up the unlighted stone staircase which led from
Maggie's cave to the door of the parlour. Sophia, foremost, was
carrying a large tray, and Constance a small one. Constance, who had
nothing on her tray but a teapot, a bowl of steaming and balmy-scented
mussels and cockles, and a plate of hot buttered toast, went directly
into the parlour on the left. Sophia had in her arms the entire
material and apparatus of a high tea for two, including eggs, jam, and
toast (covered with the slop-basin turned upside down), but not
including mussels and cockles. She turned to the right, passed along
the corridor by the cutting-out room, up two steps into the sheeted and
shuttered gloom of the closed shop, up the showroom stairs, through the
showroom, and so into the bedroom corridor. Experience had proved it
easier to make this long detour than to round the difficult corner of
the parlour stairs with a large loaded tray. Sophia knocked with the
edge of the tray at the door of the principal bedroom. The muffled
oratorical sound from within suddenly ceased, and the door was opened
by a very tall, very thin, black-bearded man, who looked down at Sophia
as if to demand what she meant by such an interruption.

"I've brought the tea, Mr. Critchlow," said Sophia.

And Mr. Critchlow carefully accepted the tray.

"Is that my little Sophia?" asked a faint voice from the depths of the
bedroom.

"Yes, father," said Sophia.

But she did not attempt to enter the room. Mr. Critchlow put the tray
on a white-clad chest of drawers near the door, and then he shut the
door, with no ceremony. Mr. Critchlow was John Baines's oldest and
closest friend, though decidedly younger than the draper. He frequently
"popped in" to have a word with the invalid; but Thursday afternoon was
his special afternoon, consecrated by him to the service of the sick.
From two o'clock precisely till eight o'clock precisely he took charge
of John Baines, reigning autocratically over the bedroom. It was known
that he would not tolerate invasions, nor even ambassadorial visits.
No! He gave up his weekly holiday to this business of friendship, and
he must be allowed to conduct the business in his own way. Mrs. Baines
herself avoided disturbing Mr. Critchlow's ministrations on her
husband. She was glad to do so; for Mr. Baines was never to be left
alone under any circumstances, and the convenience of being able to
rely upon the presence of a staid member of the Pharmaceutical Society
for six hours of a given day every week outweighed the slight affront
to her prerogatives as wife and house-mistress. Mr. Critchlow was an
extremely peculiar man, but when he was in the bedroom she could leave
the house with an easy mind. Moreover, John Baines enjoyed these
Thursday afternoons. For him, there was 'none like Charles Critchlow.'
The two old friends experienced a sort of grim, desiccated happiness,
cooped up together in the bedroom, secure from women and fools
generally. How they spent the time did not seem to be certainly known,
but the impression was that politics occupied them. Undoubtedly Mr.
Critchlow was an extremely peculiar man. He was a man of habits. He
must always have the same things for his tea. Black-currant jam, for
instance. (He called it "preserve.") The idea of offering Mr. Critchlow
a tea which did not comprise black-currant jam was inconceivable by the
intelligence of St. Luke's Square. Thus for years past, in the
fruit-preserving season, when all the house and all the shop smelt
richly of fruit boiling in sugar, Mrs. Baines had filled an extra
number of jars with black-currant jam, 'because Mr. Critchlow wouldn't
TOUCH any other sort.'

So Sophia, faced with the shut door of the bedroom, went down to the
parlour by the shorter route. She knew that on going up again, after
tea, she would find the devastated tray on the doormat.

Constance was helping Mr. Povey to mussels and cockles. And Mr. Povey
still wore one of the antimacassars. It must have stuck to his
shoulders when he sprang up from the sofa, woollen antimacassars being
notoriously parasitic things. Sophia sat down, somewhat
self-consciously. The serious Constance was also perturbed. Mr. Povey
did not usually take tea in the house on Thursday afternoons; his
practice was to go out into the great, mysterious world. Never before
had he shared a meal with the girls alone. The situation was
indubitably unexpected, unforeseen; it was, too, piquant, and what
added to its piquancy was the fact that Constance and Sophia were,
somehow, responsible for Mr. Povey. They felt that they were
responsible for him. They had offered the practical sympathy of two
intelligent and well-trained young women, born nurses by reason of
their sex, and Mr. Povey had accepted; he was now on their hands.
Sophia's monstrous, sly operation in Mr. Povey's mouth did not cause
either of them much alarm, Constance having apparently recovered from
the first shock of it. They had discussed it in the kitchen while
preparing the teas; Constance's extraordinarily severe and dictatorial
tone in condemning it had led to a certain heat. But the success of the
impudent wrench justified it despite any irrefutable argument to the
contrary. Mr. Povey was better already, and he evidently remained in
ignorance of his loss.

"Have some?" Constance asked of Sophia, with a large spoon hovering
over the bowl of shells.

"Yes, PLEASE," said Sophia, positively.

Constance well knew that she would have some, and had only asked from
sheer nervousness.

"Pass your plate, then."

Now when everybody was served with mussels, cockles, tea, and toast,
and Mr. Povey had been persuaded to cut the crust off his toast, and
Constance had, quite unnecessarily, warned Sophia against the deadly
green stuff in the mussels, and Constance had further pointed out that
the evenings were getting longer, and Mr. Povey had agreed that they
were, there remained nothing to say. An irksome silence fell on them
all, and no one could lift it off. Tiny clashes of shell and crockery
sounded with the terrible clearness of noises heard in the night. Each
person avoided the eyes of the others. And both Constance and Sophia
kept straightening their bodies at intervals, and expanding their
chests, and then looking at their plates; occasionally a prim cough was
discharged. It was a sad example of the difference between young
women's dreams of social brilliance and the reality of life. These
girls got more and more girlish, until, from being women at the
administering of laudanum, they sank back to about eight years of
age--perfect children--at the tea-table.

The tension was snapped by Mr. Povey. "My God!" he muttered, moved by a
startling discovery to this impious and disgraceful oath (he, the
pattern and exemplar--and in the presence of innocent girlhood too!).
"I've swallowed it!"

"Swallowed what, Mr. Povey?" Constance inquired.

The tip of Mr. Povey's tongue made a careful voyage of inspection all
round the right side of his mouth.

"Oh yes!" he said, as if solemnly accepting the inevitable. "I've
swallowed it!"

Sophia's face was now scarlet; she seemed to be looking for some place
to hide it. Constance could not think of anything to say.

"That tooth has been loose for two years," said Mr. Povey, "and now
I've swallowed it with a mussel."

"Oh, Mr. Povey!" Constance cried in confusion, and added, "There's one
good thing, it can't hurt you any more now."

"Oh!" said Mr. Povey. "It wasn't THAT tooth that was hurting me. It's
an old stump at the back that's upset me so this last day or two. I
wish it had been."

Sophia had her teacup close to her red face. At these words of Mr.
Povey her cheeks seemed to fill out like plump apples. She dashed the
cup into its saucer, spilling tea recklessly, and then ran from the
room with stifled snorts.

"Sophia!" Constance protested.

"I must just--" Sophia incoherently spluttered in the doorway. "I
shall be all right. Don't----"

Constance, who had risen, sat down again.

II

Sophia fled along the passage leading to the shop and took refuge in
the cutting-out room, a room which the astonishing architect had
devised upon what must have been a backyard of one of the three
constituent houses. It was lighted from its roof, and only a wooden
partition, eight feet high, separated it from the passage. Here Sophia
gave rein to her feelings; she laughed and cried together, weeping
generously into her handkerchief and wildly giggling, in a hysteria
which she could not control. The spectacle of Mr. Povey mourning for a
tooth which he thought he had swallowed, but which in fact lay all the
time in her pocket, seemed to her to be by far the most ridiculous,
side-splitting thing that had ever happened or could happen on earth.
It utterly overcame her. And when she fancied that she had exhausted
and conquered its surpassing ridiculousness, this ridiculousness seized
her again and rolled her anew in depths of mad, trembling laughter.

Gradually she grew calmer. She heard the parlour door open, and
Constance descend the kitchen steps with a rattling tray of tea-things.
Tea, then, was finished, without her! Constance did not remain in the
kitchen, because the cups and saucers were left for Maggie to wash up
as a fitting coda to Maggie's monthly holiday. The parlour door closed.
And the vision of Mr. Povey in his antimacassar swept Sophia off into
another convulsion of laughter and tears. Upon this the parlour door
opened again, and Sophia choked herself into silence while Constance
hastened along the passage. In a minute Constance returned with her
woolwork, which she had got from the showroom, and the parlour received
her. Not the least curiosity on the part of Constance as to what had
become of Sophia!

At length Sophia, a faint meditative smile being all that was left of
the storm in her, ascended slowly to the showroom, through the shop.
Nothing there of interest! Thence she wandered towards the
drawing-room, and encountered Mr. Critchlow's tray on the mat. She
picked it up and carried it by way of the showroom and shop down to the
kitchen, where she dreamily munched two pieces of toast that had cooled
to the consistency of leather. She mounted the stone steps and listened
at the door of the parlour. No sound! This seclusion of Mr. Povey and
Constance was really very strange. She roved right round the house, and
descended creepingly by the twisted house-stairs, and listened intently
at the other door of the parlour. She now detected a faint regular
snore. Mr. Povey, a prey to laudanum and mussels, was sleeping while
Constance worked at her fire-screen! It was now in the highest degree
odd, this seclusion of Mr. Povey and Constance; unlike anything in
Sophia's experience! She wanted to go into the parlour, but she could
not bring herself to do so. She crept away again, forlorn and puzzled,
and next discovered herself in the bedroom which she shared with
Constance at the top of the house; she lay down in the dusk on the bed
and began to read "The Days of Bruce;" but she read only with her eyes.

Later, she heard movements on the house-stairs, and the familiar
whining creak of the door at the foot thereof. She skipped lightly to
the door of the bedroom.

"Good-night, Mr. Povey. I hope you'll be able to sleep."

Constance's voice!

"It will probably come on again."

Mr. Povey's voice, pessimistic!

Then the shutting of doors. It was almost dark. She went back to the
bed, expecting a visit from Constance. But a clock struck eight, and
all the various phenomena connected with the departure of Mr. Critchlow
occurred one after another. At the same time Maggie came home from the
land of romance. Then long silences! Constance was now immured with her
father, it being her "turn" to nurse; Maggie was washing up in her
cave, and Mr. Povey was lost to sight in his bedroom. Then Sophia heard
her mother's lively, commanding knock on the King Street door. Dusk had
definitely yielded to black night in the bedroom. Sophia dozed and
dreamed. When she awoke, her ear caught the sound of knocking. She
jumped up, tiptoed to the landing, and looked over the balustrade,
whence she had a view of all the first-floor corridor. The gas had been
lighted; through the round aperture at the top of the porcelain globe
she could see the wavering flame. It was her mother, still bonneted,
who was knocking at the door of Mr. Povey's room. Constance stood in
the doorway of her parents' room. Mrs. Baines knocked twice with an
interval, and then said to Constance, in a resonant whisper that
vibrated up the corridor----

"He seems to be fast asleep. I'd better not disturb him."

"But suppose he wants something in the night?"

"Well, child, I should hear him moving. Sleep's the best thing for him."

Mrs. Baines left Mr. Povey to the effects of laudanum, and came along
the corridor. She was a stout woman, all black stuff and gold chain,
and her skirt more than filled the width of the corridor. Sophia
watched her habitual heavy mounting gesture as she climbed the two
steps that gave variety to the corridor. At the gas-jet she paused,
and, putting her hand to the tap, gazed up into the globe.

"Where's Sophia?" she demanded, her eyes fixed on the gas as she
lowered the flame.

"I think she must be in bed, mother," said Constance, nonchalantly.

The returned mistress was point by point resuming knowledge and control
of that complicated machine--her household.

Then Constance and her mother disappeared into the bedroom, and the
door was shut with a gentle, decisive bang that to the silent watcher
on the floor above seemed to create a special excluding intimacy round
about the figures of Constance and her father and mother. The watcher
wondered, with a little prick of jealousy, what they would be
discussing in the large bedroom, her father's beard wagging feebly and
his long arms on the counterpane, Constance perched at the foot of the
bed, and her mother walking to and fro, putting her cameo brooch on the
dressing-table or stretching creases out of her gloves. Certainly, in
some subtle way, Constance had a standing with her parents which was
more confidential than Sophia's.

III

When Constance came to bed, half an hour later, Sophia was already in
bed. The room was fairly spacious. It had been the girls' retreat and
fortress since their earliest years. Its features seemed to them as
natural and unalterable as the features of a cave to a cave-dweller. It
had been repapered twice in their lives, and each papering stood out in
their memories like an epoch; a third epoch was due to the replacing of
a drugget by a resplendent old carpet degraded from the drawing-room.
There was only one bed, the bedstead being of painted iron; they never
interfered with each other in that bed, sleeping with a detachment as
perfect as if they had slept on opposite sides of St. Luke's Square;
yet if Constance had one night lain down on the half near the window
instead of on the half near the door, the secret nature of the universe
would have seemed to be altered. The small fire-grate was filled with a
mass of shavings of silver paper; now the rare illnesses which they had
suffered were recalled chiefly as periods when that silver paper was
crammed into a large slipper-case which hung by the mantelpiece, and a
fire of coals unnaturally reigned in its place--the silver paper was
part of the order of the world. The sash of the window would not work
quite properly, owing to a slight subsidence in the wall, and even when
the window was fastened there was always a narrow slit to the left hand
between the window and its frame; through this slit came draughts, and
thus very keen frosts were remembered by the nights when Mrs. Baines
caused the sash to be forced and kept at its full height by means of
wedges--the slit of exposure was part of the order of the world.

They possessed only one bed, one washstand, and one dressing-table; but
in some other respects they were rather fortunate girls, for they had
two mahogany wardrobes; this mutual independence as regards wardrobes
was due partly to Mrs. Baines's strong commonsense, and partly to their
father's tendency to spoil them a little. They had, moreover, a chest
of drawers with a curved front, of which structure Constance occupied
two short drawers and one long one, and Sophia two long drawers. On it
stood two fancy work-boxes, in which each sister kept jewellery, a
savings-bank book, and other treasures, and these boxes were absolutely
sacred to their respective owners. They were different, but one was not
more magnificent than the other. Indeed, a rigid equality was the rule
in the chamber, the single exception being that behind the door were
three hooks, of which Constance commanded two.

"Well," Sophia began, when Constance appeared. "How's darling Mr.
Povey?" She was lying on her back, and smiling at her two hands, which
she held up in front of her.

"Asleep," said Constance. "At least mother thinks so. She says sleep is
the best thing for him."

"'It will probably come on again,'" said Sophia.

"What's that you say?" Constance asked, undressing.

"'It will probably come on again.'"

These words were a quotation from the utterances of darling Mr. Povey
on the stairs, and Sophia delivered them with an exact imitation of Mr.
Povey's vocal mannerism.

"Sophia," said Constance, firmly, approaching the bed, "I wish you
wouldn't be so silly!" She had benevolently ignored the satirical note
in Sophia's first remark, but a strong instinct in her rose up and
objected to further derision. "Surely you've done enough for one day!"
she added.

For answer Sophia exploded into violent laughter, which she made no
attempt to control. She laughed too long and too freely while Constance
stared at her.

"_I_ don't know what's come over you!" said Constance.

"It's only because I can't look at it without simply going off into
fits!" Sophia gasped out. And she held up a tiny object in her left
hand.

Constance started, flushing. "You don't mean to say you've kept it!"
she protested earnestly. "How horrid you are, Sophia! Give it me at
once and let me throw it away. I never heard of such doings. Now give
it me!"

"No," Sophia objected, still laughing. "I wouldn't part with it for
worlds. It's too lovely."

She had laughed away all her secret resentment against Constance for
having ignored her during the whole evening and for being on such
intimate terms with their parents. And she was ready to be candidly
jolly with Constance.

"Give it me," said Constance, doggedly.

Sophia hid her hand under the clothes. "You can have his old stump,
when it comes out, if you like. But not this. What a pity it's the
wrong one!"

"Sophia, I'm ashamed of you! Give it me."

Then it was that Sophia first perceived Constance's extreme
seriousness. She was surprised and a little intimidated by it. For the
expression of Constance's face, usually so benign and calm, was harsh,
almost fierce. However, Sophia had a great deal of what is called
"spirit," and not even ferocity on the face of mild Constance could
intimidate her for more than a few seconds. Her gaiety expired and her
teeth were hidden.

"I've said nothing to mother----" Constance proceeded.

"I should hope you haven't," Sophia put in tersely.

"But I certainly shall if you don't throw that away," Constance
finished.

"You can say what you like," Sophia retorted, adding contemptuously a
term of opprobrium which has long since passed out of use: "Cant!"

"Will you give it me or won't you?"

"No!"

It was a battle suddenly engaged in the bedroom. The atmosphere had
altered completely with the swiftness of magic. The beauty of Sophia,
the angelic tenderness of Constance, and the youthful, naive, innocent
charm of both of them, were transformed into something sinister and
cruel. Sophia lay back on the pillow amid her dark-brown hair, and
gazed with relentless defiance into the angry eyes of Constance, who
stood threatening by the bed. They could hear the gas singing over the
dressing-table, and their hearts beating the blood wildly in their
veins. They ceased to be young without growing old; the eternal had
leapt up in them from its sleep.

Constance walked away from the bed to the dressing-table and began to
loose her hair and brush it, holding back her head, shaking it, and
bending forward, in the changeless gesture of that rite. She was so
disturbed that she had unconsciously reversed the customary order of
the toilette. After a moment Sophia slipped out of bed and, stepping
with her bare feet to the chest of drawers, opened her work-box and
deposited the fragment of Mr. Povey therein; she dropped the lid with
an uncompromising bang, as if to say, "We shall see if I am to be trod
upon, miss!" Their eyes met again in the looking-glass. Then Sophia got
back into bed.

Five minutes later, when her hair was quite finished, Constance knelt
down and said her prayers. Having said her prayers, she went straight
to Sophia's work-box, opened it, seized the fragment of Mr. Povey, ran
to the window, and frantically pushed the fragment through the slit
into the Square.

"There!" she exclaimed nervously.

She had accomplished this inconceivable transgression of the code of
honour, beyond all undoing, before Sophia could recover from the
stupefaction of seeing her sacred work-box impudently violated. In a
single moment one of Sophia's chief ideals had been smashed utterly,
and that by the sweetest, gentlest creature she had ever known. It was
a revealing experience for Sophia--and also for Constance. And it
frightened them equally. Sophia, staring at the text, "Thou God seest
me," framed in straw over the chest of drawers, did not stir. She was
defeated, and so profoundly moved in her defeat that she did not even
reflect upon the obvious inefficacy of illuminated texts as a deterrent
from evil-doing. Not that she cared a fig for the fragment of Mr.
Povey! It was the moral aspect of the affair, and the astounding,
inexplicable development in Constance's character, that staggered her
into silent acceptance of the inevitable.

Constance, trembling, took pains to finish undressing with dignified
deliberation. Sophia's behaviour under the blow seemed too good to be
true; but it gave her courage. At length she turned out the gas and lay
down by Sophia. And there was a little shuffling, and then stillness
for a while.

"And if you want to know," said Constance in a tone that mingled
amicableness with righteousness, "mother's decided with Aunt Harriet
that we are BOTH to leave school next term."




CHAPTER III

A BATTLE

I


The day sanctioned by custom in the Five Towns for the making of pastry
is Saturday. But Mrs. Baines made her pastry on Friday, because
Saturday afternoon was, of course, a busy time in the shop. It is true
that Mrs. Baines made her pastry in the morning, and that Saturday
morning in the shop was scarcely different from any other morning.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Baines made her pastry on Friday morning instead of
Saturday morning because Saturday afternoon was a busy time in the
shop. She was thus free to do her marketing without breath-taking
flurry on Saturday morning.

On the morning after Sophia's first essay in dentistry, therefore, Mrs.
Baines was making her pastry in the underground kitchen. This kitchen,
Maggie's cavern-home, had the mystery of a church, and on dark days it
had the mystery of a crypt. The stone steps leading down to it from the
level of earth were quite unlighted. You felt for them with the feet of
faith, and when you arrived in the kitchen, the kitchen, by contrast,
seemed luminous and gay; the architect may have considered and intended
this effect of the staircase. The kitchen saw day through a wide,
shallow window whose top touched the ceiling and whose bottom had been
out of the girls' reach until long after they had begun to go to
school. Its panes were small, and about half of them were of the "knot"
kind, through which no object could be distinguished; the other half
were of a later date, and stood for the march of civilization. The view
from the window consisted of the vast plate-glass windows of the newly
built Sun vaults, and of passing legs and skirts. A strong wire grating
prevented any excess of illumination, and also protected the glass from
the caprices of wayfarers in King Street. Boys had a habit of stopping
to kick with their full strength at the grating.

Forget-me-nots on a brown field ornamented the walls of the kitchen.
Its ceiling was irregular and grimy, and a beam ran across it; in this
beam were two hooks; from these hooks had once depended the ropes of a
swing, much used by Constance and Sophia in the old days before they
were grown up. A large range stood out from the wall between the stairs
and the window. The rest of the furniture comprised a table--against
the wall opposite the range--a cupboard, and two Windsor chairs.
Opposite the foot of the steps was a doorway, without a door, leading
to two larders, dimmer even than the kitchen, vague retreats made
visible by whitewash, where bowls of milk, dishes of cold bones, and
remainders of fruit-pies, reposed on stillages; in the corner nearest
the kitchen was a great steen in which the bread was kept. Another
doorway on the other side of the kitchen led to the first coal-cellar,
where was also the slopstone and tap, and thence a tunnel took you to
the second coal-cellar, where coke and ashes were stored; the tunnel
proceeded to a distant, infinitesimal yard, and from the yard, by ways
behind Mr. Critchlow's shop, you could finally emerge, astonished, upon
Brougham Street. The sense of the vast-obscure of those regions which
began at the top of the kitchen steps and ended in black corners of
larders or abruptly in the common dailiness of Brougham Street, a sense
which Constance and Sophia had acquired in infancy, remained with them
almost unimpaired as they grew old.

Mrs. Baines wore black alpaca, shielded by a white apron whose string
drew attention to the amplitude of her waist. Her sleeves were turned
up, and her hands, as far as the knuckles, covered with damp flour. Her
ageless smooth paste-board occupied a corner of the table, and near it
were her paste-roller, butter, some pie-dishes, shredded apples, sugar,
and other things. Those rosy hands were at work among a sticky
substance in a large white bowl.

"Mother, are you there?" she heard a voice from above.

"Yes, my chuck."

Footsteps apparently reluctant and hesitating clinked on the stairs,
and Sophia entered the kitchen.

"Put this curl straight," said Mrs. Baines, lowering her head slightly
and holding up her floured hands, which might not touch anything but
flour. "Thank you. It bothered me. And now stand out of my light. I'm
in a hurry. I must get into the shop so that I can send Mr. Povey off
to the dentist's. What is Constance doing?"

"Helping Maggie to make Mr. Povey's bed."

"Oh!"

Though fat, Mrs. Baines was a comely woman, with fine brown hair, and
confidently calm eyes that indicated her belief in her own capacity to
accomplish whatever she could be called on to accomplish. She looked
neither more nor less than her age, which was forty-five. She was not a
native of the district, having been culled by her husband from the
moorland town of Axe, twelve miles off. Like nearly all women who
settle in a strange land upon marriage, at the bottom of her heart she
had considered herself just a trifle superior to the strange land and
its ways. This feeling, confirmed by long experience, had never left
her. It was this feeling which induced her to continue making her own
pastry--with two thoroughly trained "great girls" in the house!
Constance could make good pastry, but it was not her mother's pastry.
In pastry-making everything can be taught except the "hand," light and
firm, which wields the roller. One is born with this hand, or without
it. And if one is born without it, the highest flights of pastry are
impossible. Constance was born without it. There were days when Sophia
seemed to possess it; but there were other days when Sophia's pastry
was uneatable by any one except Maggie. Thus Mrs. Baines, though
intensely proud and fond of her daughters, had justifiably preserved a
certain condescension towards them. She honestly doubted whether either
of them would develop into the equal of their mother.

"Now you little vixen!" she exclaimed. Sophia was stealing and eating
slices of half-cooked apple. "This comes of having no breakfast! And
why didn't you come down to supper last night?"

"I don't know. I forgot."

Mrs. Baines scrutinized the child's eyes, which met hers with a sort of
diffident boldness. She knew everything that a mother can know of a
daughter, and she was sure that Sophia had no cause to be indisposed.
Therefore she scrutinized those eyes with a faint apprehension.

"If you can't find anything better to do," said she, "butter me the
inside of this dish. Are your hands clean? No, better not touch it."

Mrs. Baines was now at the stage of depositing little pats of butter in
rows on a large plain of paste. The best fresh butter! Cooking butter,
to say naught of lard, was unknown in that kitchen on Friday mornings.
She doubled the expanse of paste on itself and rolled the butter
in--supreme operation!

"Constance has told you--about leaving school?" said Mrs. Baines, in
the vein of small-talk, as she trimmed the paste to the shape of a
pie-dish.

"Yes," Sophia replied shortly. Then she moved away from the table to
the range. There was a toasting-fork on the rack, and she began to play
with it.

"Well, are you glad? Your aunt Harriet thinks you are quite old enough
to leave. And as we'd decided in any case that Constance was to leave,
it's really much simpler that you should both leave together."

"Mother," said Sophia, rattling the toasting-fork, "what am I going to
do after I've left school?"

"I hope," Mrs. Baines answered with that sententiousness which even the
cleverest of parents are not always clever enough to deny themselves,
"I hope that both of you will do what you can to help your mother--and
father," she added.

"Yes," said Sophia, irritated. "But what am I going to DO?"

"That must be considered. As Constance is to learn the millinery, I've
been thinking that you might begin to make yourself useful in the
underwear, gloves, silks, and so on. Then between you, you would one
day be able to manage quite nicely all that side of the shop, and I
should be--"

"I don't want to go into the shop, mother."

This interruption was made in a voice apparently cold and inimical. But
Sophia trembled with nervous excitement as she uttered the words. Mrs.
Baines gave a brief glance at her, unobserved by the child, whose face
was towards the fire. She deemed herself a finished expert in the
reading of Sophia's moods; nevertheless, as she looked at that straight
back and proud head, she had no suspicion that the whole essence and
being of Sophia was silently but intensely imploring sympathy.

"I wish you would be quiet with that fork," said Mrs. Baines, with the
curious, grim politeness which often characterized her relations with
her daughters.

The toasting-fork fell on the brick floor, after having rebounded from
the ash-tin. Sophia hurriedly replaced it on the rack.

"Then what SHALL you do?" Mrs. Baines proceeded, conquering the
annoyance caused by the toasting-fork. "I think it's me that should ask
you instead of you asking me. What shall you do? Your father and I were
both hoping you would take kindly to the shop and try to repay us for
all the--"

Mrs. Baines was unfortunate in her phrasing that morning. She happened
to be, in truth, rather an exceptional parent, but that morning she
seemed unable to avoid the absurd pretensions which parents of those
days assumed quite sincerely and which every good child with meekness
accepted.

Sophia was not a good child, and she obstinately denied in her heart
the cardinal principle of family life, namely, that the parent has
conferred on the offspring a supreme favour by bringing it into the
world. She interrupted her mother again, rudely.

"I don't want to leave school at all," she said passionately.

"But you will have to leave school sooner or later," argued Mrs.
Baines, with an air of quiet reasoning, of putting herself on a level
with Sophia. "You can't stay at school for ever, my pet, can you? Out
of my way!"

She hurried across the kitchen with a pie, which she whipped into the
oven, shutting the iron door with a careful gesture.

"Yes," said Sophia. "I should like to be a teacher. That's what I want
to be."

The tap in the coal-cellar, out of repair, could be heard distinctly
and systematically dropping water into a jar on the slopstone.

"A school-teacher?" inquired Mrs. Baines.

"Of course. What other kind is there?" said Sophia, sharply. "With Miss
Chetwynd."

"I don't think your father would like that," Mrs. Baines replied. "I'm
sure he wouldn't like it."

"Why not?"

"It wouldn't be quite suitable."

"Why not, mother?" the girl demanded with a sort of ferocity. She had
now quitted the range. A man's feet twinkled past the window.

Mrs. Baines was startled and surprised. Sophia's attitude was really
very trying; her manners deserved correction. But it was not these
phenomena which seriously affected Mrs. Baines; she was used to them
and had come to regard them as somehow the inevitable accompaniment of
Sophia's beauty, as the penalty of that surpassing charm which
occasionally emanated from the girl like a radiance. What startled and
surprised Mrs. Baines was the perfect and unthinkable madness of
Sophia's infantile scheme. It was a revelation to Mrs. Baines. Why in
the name of heaven had the girl taken such a notion into her head?
Orphans, widows, and spinsters of a certain age suddenly thrown on the
world--these were the women who, naturally, became teachers, because
they had to become something. But that the daughter of comfortable
parents, surrounded by love and the pleasures of an excellent home,
should wish to teach in a school was beyond the horizons of Mrs.
Baines's common sense. Comfortable parents of to-day who have a
difficulty in sympathizing with Mrs. Baines, should picture what their
feelings would be if their Sophias showed a rude desire to adopt the
vocation of chauffeur.

"It would take you too much away from home," said Mrs. Baines,
achieving a second pie.

She spoke softly. The experience of being Sophia's mother for nearly
sixteen years had not been lost on Mrs. Baines, and though she was now
discovering undreamt-of dangers in Sophia's erratic temperament, she
kept her presence of mind sufficiently well to behave with diplomatic
smoothness. It was undoubtedly humiliating to a mother to be forced to
use diplomacy in dealing with a girl in short sleeves. In HER day
mothers had been autocrats. But Sophia was Sophia.

"What if it did?" Sophia curtly demanded.

"And there's no opening in Bursley," said Mrs. Baines.

"Miss Chetwynd would have me, and then after a time I could go to her
sister."

"Her sister? What sister?"

"Her sister that has a big school in London somewhere."

Mrs. Baines covered her unprecedented emotions by gazing into the oven
at the first pie. The pie was doing well, under all the circumstances.
In those few seconds she reflected rapidly and decided that to a
desperate disease a desperate remedy must be applied.

London! She herself had never been further than Manchester. London,
'after a time'! No, diplomacy would be misplaced in this crisis of
Sophia's development!

"Sophia," she said, in a changed and solemn voice, fronting her
daughter, and holding away from her apron those floured, ringed hands,
"I don't know what has come over you. Truly I don't! Your father and I
are prepared to put up with a certain amount, but the line must be
drawn. The fact is, we've spoilt you, and instead of getting better as
you grow up, you're getting worse. Now let me hear no more of this,
please. I wish you would imitate your sister a little more. Of course
if you won't do your share in the shop, no one can make you. If you
choose to be an idler about the house, we shall have to endure it. We
can only advise you for your own good. But as for this ..." She
stopped, and let silence speak, and then finished: "Let me hear no more
of it."

It was a powerful and impressive speech, enunciated clearly in such a
tone as Mrs. Baines had not employed since dismissing a young lady
assistant five years ago for light conduct.

"But, mother--"

A commotion of pails resounded at the top of the stone steps. It was
Maggie in descent from the bedrooms. Now, the Baines family passed its
life in doing its best to keep its affairs to itself, the assumption
being that Maggie and all the shop-staff (Mr. Povey possibly excepted)
were obsessed by a ravening appetite for that which did not concern
them. Therefore the voices of the Baineses always died away, or fell to
a hushed, mysterious whisper, whenever the foot of the eavesdropper was
heard.

Mrs. Baines put a floured finger to her double chin. "That will do,"
said she, with finality.

Maggie appeared, and Sophia, with a brusque precipitation of herself,
vanished upstairs.

II

"Now, really, Mr. Povey, this is not like you," said Mrs. Baines, who,
on her way into the shop, had discovered the Indispensable in the
cutting-out room.

It is true that the cutting-out room was almost Mr. Povey's sanctum,
whither he retired from time to time to cut out suits of clothes and
odd garments for the tailoring department. It is true that the
tailoring department flourished with orders, employing several tailors
who crossed legs in their own homes, and that appointments were
continually being made with customers for trying-on in that room. But
these considerations did not affect Mrs. Baines's attitude of
disapproval.

"I'm just cutting out that suit for the minister," said Mr. Povey.

The Reverend Mr. Murley, superintendent of the Wesleyan Methodist
circuit, called on Mr. Baines every week. On a recent visit Mr. Baines
had remarked that the parson's coat was ageing into green, and had
commanded that a new suit should be built and presented to Mr. Murley.
Mr. Murley, who had a genuine mediaeval passion for souls, and who
spent his money and health freely in gratifying the passion, had
accepted the offer strictly on behalf of Christ, and had carefully
explained to Mr. Povey Christ's use for multifarious pockets.

"I see you are," said Mrs. Baines tartly. "But that's no reason why you
should be without a coat--and in this cold room too. You with
toothache!"

The fact was that Mr. Povey always doffed his coat when cutting out.
Instead of a coat he wore a tape-measure.

"My tooth doesn't hurt me," said he, sheepishly, dropping the great
scissors and picking up a cake of chalk.

"Fiddlesticks!" said Mrs. Baines.

This exclamation shocked Mr. Povey. It was not unknown on the lips of
Mrs. Baines, but she usually reserved it for members of her own sex.
Mr. Povey could not recall that she had ever applied it to any
statement of his. "What's the matter with the woman?" he thought. The
redness of her face did not help him to answer the question, for her
face was always red after the operations of Friday in the kitchen.

"You men are all alike," Mrs. Baines continued. "The very thought of
the dentist's cures you. Why don't you go in at once to Mr. Critchlow
and have it out--like a man?"

Mr. Critchlow extracted teeth, and his shop sign said "Bone-setter and
chemist." But Mr. Povey had his views.

"I make no account of Mr. Critchlow as a dentist," said he.

"Then for goodness' sake go up to Oulsnam's."

"When? I can't very well go now, and to-morrow is Saturday."

"Why can't you go now?"

"Well, of course, I COULD go now," he admitted.

"Let me advise you to go, then, and don't come back with that tooth in
your head. I shall be having you laid up next. Show some pluck, do!"

"Oh! pluck--!" he protested, hurt.

At that moment Constance came down the passage singing.

"Constance, my pet!" Mrs. Baines called.

"Yes, mother." She put her head into the room. "Oh!" Mr. Povey was
assuming his coat.

"Mr. Povey is going to the dentist's."

"Yes, I'm going at once," Mr. Povey confirmed.

"Oh! I'm so GLAD!" Constance exclaimed. Her face expressed a pure
sympathy, uncomplicated by critical sentiments. Mr. Povey rapidly
bathed in that sympathy, and then decided that he must show himself a
man of oak and iron.

"It's always best to get these things done with," said he, with stern
detachment. "I'll just slip my overcoat on."

"Here it is," said Constance, quickly. Mr. Povey's overcoat and hat
were hung on a hook immediately outside the room, in the passage. She
gave him the overcoat, anxious to be of service.

"I didn't call you in here to be Mr. Povey's valet," said Mrs. Baines
to herself with mild grimness; and aloud: "I can't stay in the shop
long, Constance, but you can be there, can't you, till Mr. Povey comes
back? And if anything happens run upstairs and tell me."

"Yes, mother," Constance eagerly consented. She hesitated and then
turned to obey at once.

"I want to speak to you first, my pet," Mrs. Baines stopped her. And
her tone was peculiar, charged with import, confidential, and therefore
very flattering to Constance.

"I think I'll go out by the side-door," said Mr. Povey. "It'll be
nearer."

This was truth. He would save about ten yards, in two miles, by going
out through the side-door instead of through the shop. Who could have
guessed that he was ashamed to be seen going to the dentist's, afraid
lest, if he went through the shop, Mrs. Baines might follow him and
utter some remark prejudicial to his dignity before the assistants?
(Mrs. Baines could have guessed, and did.)

"You won't want that tape-measure," said Mrs. Baines, dryly, as Mr.
Povey dragged open the side-door. The ends of the forgotten
tape-measure were dangling beneath coat and overcoat.

"Oh!" Mr. Povey scowled at his forgetfulness.

"I'll put it in its place," said Constance, offering to receive the
tape-measure.

"Thank you," said Mr. Povey, gravely. "I don't suppose they'll be long
over my bit of a job," he added, with a difficult, miserable smile.

Then he went off down King Street, with an exterior of gay briskness
and dignified joy in the fine May morning. But there was no May morning
in his cowardly human heart.

"Hi! Povey!" cried a voice from the Square.

But Mr. Povey disregarded all appeals. He had put his hand to the
plough, and he would not look back.

"Hi! Povey!"

Useless!

Mrs. Baines and Constance were both at the door. A middle-aged man was
crossing the road from Boulton Terrace, the lofty erection of new shops
which the envious rest of the Square had decided to call "showy." He
waved a hand to Mrs. Baines, who kept the door open.

"It's Dr. Harrop," she said to Constance. "I shouldn't be surprised if
that baby's come at last, and he wanted to tell Mr. Povey."

Constance blushed, full of pride. Mrs. Povey, wife of "our Mr. Povey's"
renowned cousin, the high-class confectioner and baker in Boulton
Terrace, was a frequent subject of discussion in the Baines family,
but this was absolutely the first time that Mrs. Baines had
acknowledged, in presence of Constance, the marked and growing change
which had characterized Mrs. Povey's condition during recent months.
Such frankness on the part of her mother, coming after the decision
about leaving school, proved indeed that Constance had ceased to be a
mere girl.

"Good morning, doctor."

The doctor, who carried a little bag and wore riding-breeches (he was
the last doctor in Bursley to abandon the saddle for the dog-cart),
saluted and straightened his high, black stock.

"Morning! Morning, missy! Well, it's a boy."

"What? Yonder?" asked Mrs. Baines, indicating the confectioner's.

Dr. Harrop nodded. "I wanted to inform him," said he, jerking his
shoulder in the direction of the swaggering coward.

"What did I tell you, Constance?" said Mrs. Baines, turning to her
daughter.

Constance's confusion was equal to her pleasure. The alert doctor had
halted at the foot of the two steps, and with one hand in the pocket of
his "full-fall" breeches, he gazed up, smiling out of little eyes, at
the ample matron and the slender virgin.

"Yes," he said. "Been up most of th' night. Difficult! Difficult!"

"It's all RIGHT, I hope?"

"Oh yes. Fine child! Fine child! But he put his mother to some trouble,
for all that. Nothing fresh?" This time he lifted his eyes to indicate
Mr. Baines's bedroom.

"No," said Mrs. Baines, with a different expression.

"Keeps cheerful?"

"Yes."

"Good! A very good morning to you."

He strode off towards his house, which was lower down the street.

"I hope she'll turn over a new leaf now," observed Mrs. Baines to
Constance as she closed the door. Constance knew that her mother was
referring to the confectioner's wife; she gathered that the hope was
slight in the extreme.

"What did you want to speak to me about, mother?" she asked, as a way
out of her delicious confusion.

"Shut that door," Mrs. Baines replied, pointing to the door which led
to the passage; and while Constance obeyed, Mrs. Baines herself shut
the staircase-door. She then said, in a low, guarded voice--

"What's all this about Sophia wanting to be a school-teacher?"

"Wanting to be a school-teacher?" Constance repeated, in tones of
amazement.

"Yes. Hasn't she said anything to you?"

"Not a word!"

"Well, I never! She wants to keep on with Miss Chetwynd and be a
teacher." Mrs. Baines had half a mind to add that Sophia had mentioned
London. But she restrained herself. There are some things which one
cannot bring one's self to say. She added, "Instead of going into the
shop!"

"I never heard of such a thing!" Constance murmured brokenly, in the
excess of her astonishment. She was rolling up Mr. Povey's tape-measure.

"Neither did I!" said Mrs. Baines.

"And shall you let her, mother?"

"Neither your father nor I would ever dream of it!" Mrs. Baines
replied, with calm and yet terrible decision. "I only mentioned it to
you because I thought Sophia would have told you something."

"No, mother!"

As Constance put Mr. Povey's tape-measure neatly away in its drawer
under the cutting-out counter, she thought how serious life was--what
with babies and Sophias. She was very proud of her mother's confidence
in her; this simple pride filled her ardent breast with a most
agreeable commotion. And she wanted to help everybody, to show in some
way how much she sympathized with and loved everybody. Even the madness
of Sophia did not weaken her longing to comfort Sophia.

III

That afternoon there was a search for Sophia, whom no one had seen
since dinner. She was discovered by her mother, sitting alone and
unoccupied in the drawing-room. The circumstance was in itself
sufficiently peculiar, for on weekdays the drawing-room was never used,
even by the girls during their holidays, except for the purpose of
playing the piano. However, Mrs. Baines offered no comment on Sophia's
geographical situation, nor on her idleness.

"My dear," she said, standing at the door, with a self-conscious effort
to behave as though nothing had happened, "will you come and sit with
your father a bit?"

"Yes, mother," answered Sophia, with a sort of cold alacrity.

"Sophia is coming, father," said Mrs. Baines at the open door of the
bedroom, which was at right-angles with, and close to, the drawing-room
door. Then she surged swishing along the corridor and went into the
showroom, whither she had been called.

Sophia passed to the bedroom, the eternal prison of John Baines.
Although, on account of his nervous restlessness, Mr. Baines was never
left alone, it was not a part of the usual duty of the girls to sit
with him. The person who undertook the main portion of the vigils was a
certain Aunt Maria--whom the girls knew to be not a real aunt, not a
powerful, effective aunt like Aunt Harriet of Axe--but a poor second
cousin of John Baines; one of those necessitous, pitiful relatives who
so often make life difficult for a great family in a small town. The
existence of Aunt Maria, after being rather a "trial" to the Baineses,
had for twelve years past developed into something absolutely
"providential" for them. (It is to be remembered that in those days
Providence was still busying himself with everybody's affairs, and
foreseeing the future in the most extraordinary manner. Thus, having
foreseen that John Baines would have a "stroke" and need a faithful,
tireless nurse, he had begun fifty years in advance by creating Aunt
Maria, and had kept her carefully in misfortune's way, so that at the
proper moment she would be ready to cope with the stroke. Such at least
is the only theory which will explain the use by the Baineses, and
indeed by all thinking Bursley, of the word "providential" in
connection with Aunt Maria.) She was a shrivelled little woman, capable
of sitting twelve hours a day in a bedroom and thriving on the regime.
At nights she went home to her little cottage in Brougham Street; she
had her Thursday afternoons and generally her Sundays, and during the
school vacations she was supposed to come only when she felt inclined,
or when the cleaning of her cottage permitted her to come. Hence, in
holiday seasons, Mr. Baines weighed more heavily on his household than
at other times, and his nurses relieved each other according to the
contingencies of the moment rather than by a set programme of hours.

The tragedy in ten thousand acts of which that bedroom was the scene,
almost entirely escaped Sophia's perception, as it did Constance's.
Sophia went into the bedroom as though it were a mere bedroom, with its
majestic mahogany furniture, its crimson rep curtains (edged with
gold), and its white, heavily tasselled counterpane. She was aged four
when John Baines had suddenly been seized with giddiness on the steps
of his shop, and had fallen, and, without losing consciousness, had
been transformed from John Baines into a curious and pathetic survival
of John Baines. She had no notion of the thrill which ran through the
town on that night when it was known that John Baines had had a stroke,
and that his left arm and left leg and his right eyelid were paralyzed,
and that the active member of the Local Board, the orator, the
religious worker, the very life of the town's life, was permanently
done for. She had never heard of the crisis through which her mother,
assisted by Aunt Harriet, had passed, and out of which she had
triumphantly emerged. She was not yet old enough even to suspect it.
She possessed only the vaguest memory of her father before he had
finished with the world. She knew him simply as an organism on a bed,
whose left side was wasted, whose eyes were often inflamed, whose mouth
was crooked, who had no creases from the nose to the corners of the
mouth like other people, who experienced difficulty in eating because
the food would somehow get between his gums and his cheek, who slept a
great deal but was excessively fidgety while awake, who seemed to hear
what was said to him a long time after it was uttered, as if the sense
had to travel miles by labyrinthine passages to his brain, and who
talked very, very slowly in a weak, trembling voice.

And she had an image of that remote brain as something with a red spot
on it, for once Constance had said: "Mother, why did father have a
stroke?" and Mrs. Baines had replied: "It was a haemorrhage of the
brain, my dear, here"--putting a thimbled finger on a particular part
of Sophia's head.

Not merely had Constance and Sophia never really felt their father's
tragedy; Mrs. Baines herself had largely lost the sense of it--such is
the effect of use. Even the ruined organism only remembered fitfully
and partially that it had once been John Baines. And if Mrs. Baines had
not, by the habit of years, gradually built up a gigantic fiction that
the organism remained ever the supreme consultative head of the family;
if Mr. Critchlow had not obstinately continued to treat it as a crony,
the mass of living and dead nerves on the rich Victorian bedstead would
have been of no more account than some Aunt Maria in similar case.
These two persons, his wife and his friend, just managed to keep him
morally alive by indefatigably feeding his importance and his dignity.
The feat was a miracle of stubborn self-deceiving, splendidly blind
devotion, and incorrigible pride.

When Sophia entered the room, the paralytic followed her with his
nervous gaze until she had sat down on the end of the sofa at the foot
of the bed. He seemed to study her for a long time, and then he
murmured in his slow, enfeebled, irregular voice:

"Is that Sophia?"

"Yes, father," she answered cheerfully.

And after another pause, the old man said: "Ay! It's Sophia."

And later: "Your mother said she should send ye."

Sophia saw that this was one of his bad, dull days. He had,
occasionally, days of comparative nimbleness, when his wits seized
almost easily the meanings of external phenomena.

Presently his sallow face and long white beard began to slip down the
steep slant of the pillows, and a troubled look came into his left eye.
Sophia rose and, putting her hands under his armpits, lifted him higher
in the bed. He was not heavy, but only a strong girl of her years could
have done it.

"Ay!" he muttered. "That's it. That's it."

And, with his controllable right hand, he took her hand as she stood by
the bed. She was so young and fresh, such an incarnation of the spirit
of health, and he was so far gone in decay and corruption, that there
seemed in this contact of body with body something unnatural and
repulsive. But Sophia did not so feel it.

"Sophia," he addressed her, and made preparatory noises in his throat
while she waited.

He continued after an interval, now clutching her arm, "Your mother's
been telling me you don't want to go in the shop."

She turned her eyes on him, and his anxious, dim gaze met hers. She
nodded.

"Nay, Sophia," he mumbled, with the extreme of slowness. "I'm surprised
at ye...  Trade's bad, bad! Ye know trade's bad?" He was still
clutching her arm.

She nodded. She was, in fact, aware of the badness of trade, caused by
a vague war in the United States. The words "North" and "South" had a
habit of recurring in the conversation of adult persons. That was all
she knew, though people were starving in the Five Towns as they were
starving in Manchester.

"There's your mother," his thought struggled on, like an aged horse
over a hilly road. "There's your mother!" he repeated, as if wishful to
direct Sophia's attention to the spectacle of her mother. "Working
hard! Con--Constance and you must help her.... Trade's bad! What can I
do ... lying here?"

The heat from his dry fingers was warming her arm. She wanted to move,
but she could not have withdrawn her arm without appearing impatient.
For a similar reason she would not avert her glance. A deepening flush
increased the lustre of her immature loveliness as she bent over him.
But though it was so close he did not feel that radiance. He had long
outlived a susceptibility to the strange influences of youth and beauty.

"Teaching!" he muttered. "Nay, nay! I canna' allow that."

Then his white beard rose at the tip as he looked up at the ceiling
above his head, reflectively.

"You understand me?" he questioned finally.

She nodded again; he loosed her arm, and she turned away. She could not
have spoken. Glittering tears enriched her eyes. She was saddened into
a profound and sudden grief by the ridiculousness of the scene. She had
youth, physical perfection; she brimmed with energy, with the sense of
vital power; all existence lay before her; when she put her lips
together she felt capable of outvying no matter whom in fortitude of
resolution. She had always hated the shop. She did not understand how
her mother and Constance could bring themselves to be deferential and
flattering to every customer that entered. No, she did not understand
it; but her mother (though a proud woman) and Constance seemed to
practise such behaviour so naturally, so unquestioningly, that she had
never imparted to either of them her feelings; she guessed that she
would not be comprehended. But long ago she had decided that she would
never "go into the shop." She knew that she would be expected to do
something, and she had fixed on teaching as the one possibility. These
decisions had formed part of her inner life for years past. She had not
mentioned them, being secretive and scarcely anxious for
unpleasantness. But she had been slowly preparing herself to mention
them. The extraordinary announcement that she was to leave school at
the same time as Constance had taken her unawares, before the
preparations ripening in her mind were complete--before, as it were,
she had girded up her loins for the fray. She had been caught unready,
and the opposing forces had obtained the advantage of her. But did they
suppose she was beaten?

No argument from her mother! No hearing, even! Just a curt and haughty
'Let me hear no more of this'! And so the great desire of her life,
nourished year after year in her inmost bosom, was to be flouted and
sacrificed with a word! Her mother did not appear ridiculous in the
affair, for her mother was a genuine power, commanding by turns genuine
love and genuine hate, and always, till then, obedience and the respect
of reason. It was her father who appeared tragically ridiculous; and,
in turn, the whole movement against her grew grotesque in its
absurdity. Here was this antique wreck, helpless, useless,
powerless--merely pathetic--actually thinking that he had only to
mumble in order to make her 'understand'! He knew nothing; he perceived
nothing; he was a ferocious egoist, like most bedridden invalids, out
of touch with life,--and he thought himself justified in making
destinies, and capable of making them! Sophia could not, perhaps,
define the feelings which overwhelmed her; but she was conscious of
their tendency. They aged her, by years. They aged her so that, in a
kind of momentary ecstasy of insight, she felt older than her father
himself.

"You will be a good girl," he said. "I'm sure o' that."

It was too painful. The grotesqueness of her father's complacency
humiliated her past bearing. She was humiliated, not for herself, but
for him. Singular creature! She ran out of the room.

Fortunately Constance was passing in the corridor, otherwise Sophia had
been found guilty of a great breach of duty.

"Go to father," she whispered hysterically to Constance, and fled
upwards to the second floor.

IV

At supper, with her red, downcast eyes, she had returned to sheer
girlishness again, overawed by her mother. The meal had an unusual
aspect. Mr. Povey, safe from the dentist's, but having lost two teeth
in two days, was being fed on 'slops'--bread and milk, to wit; he sat
near the fire. The others had cold pork, half a cold apple-pie, and
cheese; but Sophia only pretended to eat; each time she tried to
swallow, the tears came into her eyes, and her throat shut itself up.
Mrs. Baines and Constance had a too careful air of eating just as
usual. Mrs. Baines's handsome ringlets dominated the table under the
gas.

"I'm not so set up with my pastry to-day," observed Mrs. Baines,
critically munching a fragment of pie-crust.

She rang a little hand-bell. Maggie appeared from the cave. She wore a
plain white bib-less apron, but no cap.

"Maggie, will you have some pie?"

"Yes, if you can spare it, ma'am."

This was Maggie's customary answer to offers of food.

"We can always spare it, Maggie," said her mistress, as usual. "Sophia,
if you aren't going to use that plate, give it to me."

Maggie disappeared with liberal pie.

Mrs. Baines then talked to Mr. Povey about his condition, and in
particular as to the need for precautions against taking cold in the
bereaved gum. She was a brave and determined woman; from start to
finish she behaved as though nothing whatever in the household except
her pastry and Mr. Povey had deviated that day from the normal. She
kissed Constance and Sophia with the most exact equality, and called
them 'my chucks' when they went up to bed.

Constance, excellent kind heart, tried to imitate her mother's tactics
as the girls undressed in their room. She thought she could not do
better than ignore Sophia's deplorable state.

"Mother's new dress is quite finished, and she's going to wear it on
Sunday," said she, blandly.

"If you say another word I'll scratch your eyes out!" Sophia turned on
her viciously, with a catch in her voice, and then began to sob at
intervals. She did not mean this threat, but its utterance gave her
relief. Constance, faced with the fact that her mother's shoes were too
big for her, decided to preserve her eyesight.

Long after the gas was out, rare sobs from Sophia shook the bed, and
they both lay awake in silence.

"I suppose you and mother have been talking me over finely to-day?"
Sophia burst forth, to Constance's surprise, in a wet voice.

"No," said Constance soothingly. "Mother only told me."

"Told you what?"

"That you wanted to be a teacher."

"And I will be, too!" said Sophia, bitterly.

"You don't know mother," thought Constance; but she made no audible
comment.

There was another detached, hard sob. And then, such is the astonishing
talent of youth, they both fell asleep.

The next morning, early, Sophia stood gazing out of the window at the
Square. It was Saturday, and all over the Square little stalls, with
yellow linen roofs, were being erected for the principal market of the
week. In those barbaric days Bursley had a majestic edifice, black as
basalt, for the sale of dead animals by the limb and rib--it was
entitled 'the Shambles'--but vegetables, fruit, cheese, eggs, and
pikelets were still sold under canvas. Eggs are now offered at five
farthings apiece in a palace that cost twenty-five thousand pounds. Yet
you will find people in Bursley ready to assert that things generally
are not what they were, and that in particular the romance of life has
gone. But until it has gone it is never romance. To Sophia, though she
was in a mood which usually stimulates the sense of the romantic, there
was nothing of romance in this picturesque tented field. It was just
the market. Holl's, the leading grocer's, was already open, at the
extremity of the Square, and a boy apprentice was sweeping the pavement
in front of it. The public-houses were open, several of them
specializing in hot rum at 5.30 a.m. The town-crier, in his blue coat
with red facings, crossed the Square, carrying his big bell by the
tongue. There was the same shocking hole in one of Mrs. Povey's
(confectioner's) window-curtains--a hole which even her recent travail
could scarcely excuse. Such matters it was that Sophia noticed with
dull, smarting eyes.

"Sophia, you'll take your death of cold standing there like that!"

She jumped. The voice was her mother's. That vigorous woman, after a
calm night by the side of the paralytic, was already up and neatly
dressed. She carried a bottle and an egg-cup, and a small quantity of
jam in a table-spoon.

"Get into bed again, do! There's a dear! You're shivering."

White Sophia obeyed. It was true; she was shivering. Constance awoke.
Mrs. Baines went to the dressing-table and filled the egg-cup out of
the bottle.

"Who's that for, mother?" Constance asked sleepily.

"It's for Sophia," said Mrs. Baines, with good cheer. "Now, Sophia!"
and she advanced with the egg-cup in one hand and the table-spoon in
the other.

"What is it, mother?" asked Sophia, who well knew what it was.

"Castor-oil, my dear," said Mrs. Baines, winningly.

The ludicrousness of attempting to cure obstinacy and yearnings for a
freer life by means of castor-oil is perhaps less real than apparent.
The strange interdependence of spirit and body, though only understood
intelligently in these intelligent days, was guessed at by sensible
mediaeval mothers. And certainly, at the period when Mrs. Baines
represented modernity, castor-oil was still the remedy of remedies. It
had supplanted cupping. And, if part of its vogue was due to its
extreme unpleasantness, it had at least proved its qualities in many a
contest with disease. Less than two years previously old Dr. Harrop
(father of him who told Mrs. Baines about Mrs. Povey), being then aged
eighty-six, had fallen from top to bottom of his staircase. He had
scrambled up, taken a dose of castor-oil at once, and on the morrow was
as well as if he had never seen a staircase. This episode was town
property and had sunk deep into all hearts.

"I don't want any, mother," said Sophia, in dejection. "I'm quite well."

"You simply ate nothing all day yesterday," said Mrs. Baines. And she
added, "Come!" As if to say, "There's always this silly fuss with
castor-oil. Don't keep me waiting."

"I don't WANT any," said Sophia, irritated and captious.

The two girls lay side by side, on their backs. They seemed very thin
and fragile in comparison with the solidity of their mother. Constance
wisely held her peace.

Mrs. Baines put her lips together, meaning: "This is becoming tedious.
I shall have to be angry in another moment!"

"Come!" said she again.

The girls could hear her foot tapping on the floor.

"I really don't want it, mamma," Sophia fought. "I suppose I ought to
know whether I need it or not!" This was insolence.

"Sophia, will you take this medicine, or won't you?"

In conflicts with her children, the mother's ultimatum always took the
formula in which this phrase was cast. The girls knew, when things had
arrived at the pitch of 'or won't you' spoken in Mrs. Baines's firmest
tone, that the end was upon them. Never had the ultimatum failed.

There was a silence.

"And I'll thank you to mind your manners," Mrs. Baines added.

"I won't take it," said Sophia, sullenly and flatly; and she hid her
face in the pillow.

It was a historic moment in the family life. Mrs. Baines thought the
last day had come. But still she held herself in dignity while the
apocalypse roared in her ears.

"OF COURSE I CAN'T FORCE YOU TO TAKE IT," she said with superb
evenness, masking anger by compassionate grief. "You're a big girl and
a naughty girl. And if you will be ill you must."

Upon this immense admission, Mrs. Baines departed.

Constance trembled.

Nor was that all. In the middle of the morning, when Mrs. Baines was
pricing new potatoes at a stall at the top end of the Square, and
Constance choosing threepennyworth of flowers at the same stall, whom
should they both see, walking all alone across the empty corner by the
Bank, but Sophia Baines! The Square was busy and populous, and Sophia
was only visible behind a foreground of restless, chattering figures.
But she was unmistakably seen. She had been beyond the Square and was
returning. Constance could scarcely believe her eyes. Mrs. Baines's
heart jumped. For let it be said that the girls never under any
circumstances went forth without permission, and scarcely ever alone.
That Sophia should be at large in the town, without leave, without
notice, exactly as if she were her own mistress, was a proposition
which a day earlier had been inconceivable. Yet there she was, and
moving with a leisureliness that must be described as effrontery!

Red with apprehension, Constance wondered what would happen. Mrs.
Baines said nought of her feelings, did not even indicate that she had
seen the scandalous, the breath-taking sight. And they descended the
Square laden with the lighter portions of what they had bought during
an hour of buying. They went into the house by the King Street door;
and the first thing they heard was the sound of the piano upstairs.
Nothing happened. Mr. Povey had his dinner alone; then the table was
laid for them, and the bell rung, and Sophia came insolently downstairs
to join her mother and sister. And nothing happened. The dinner was
silently eaten, and Constance having rendered thanks to God, Sophia
rose abruptly to go.

"Sophia!"

"Yes, mother."

"Constance, stay where you are," said Mrs. Baines suddenly to
Constance, who had meant to flee. Constance was therefore destined to
be present at the happening, doubtless in order to emphasize its
importance and seriousness.

"Sophia," Mrs. Baines resumed to her younger daughter in an ominous
voice. "No, please shut the door. There is no reason why everybody in
the house should hear. Come right into the room--right in! That's it.
Now, what were you doing out in the town this morning?"

Sophia was fidgeting nervously with the edge of her little black apron,
and worrying a seam of the carpet with her toes. She bent her head
towards her left shoulder, at first smiling vaguely. She said nothing,
but every limb, every glance, every curve, was speaking. Mrs. Baines
sat firmly in her own rocking-chair, full of the sensation that she had
Sophia, as it were, writhing on the end of a skewer. Constance was
braced into a moveless anguish.

"I will have an answer," pursued Mrs. Baines. "What were you doing out
in the town this morning?"

"I just went out," answered Sophia at length, still with eyes downcast,
and in a rather simpering tone.

"Why did you go out? You said nothing to me about going out. I heard
Constance ask you if you were coming with us to the market, and you
said, very rudely, that you weren't."

"I didn't say it rudely," Sophia objected.

"Yes you did. And I'll thank you not to answer back."

"I didn't mean to say it rudely, did I, Constance?" Sophia's head
turned sharply to her sister. Constance knew not where to look.

"Don't answer back," Mrs. Baines repeated sternly. "And don't try to
drag Constance into this, for I won't have it."

"Oh, of course Constance is always right!" observed Sophia, with an
irony whose unparalleled impudence shook Mrs. Baines to her massive
foundations.

"Do you want me to have to smack you, child?"

Her temper flashed out and you could see ringlets vibrating under the
provocation of Sophia's sauciness. Then Sophia's lower lip began to
fall and to bulge outwards, and all the muscles of her face seemed to
slacken.

"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 god-like 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 drawing-room, 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
drawing-room.

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 felt a
certain unwilling hesitation to approach the topic of daughters--but it
happened to suit the social purpose of Miss Chetwynd to a nicety. Miss
Chetwynd was a vessel brimming with great tidings.

"She is very well, thank you," said Miss Chetwynd, and her expression
grew exceedingly vivacious. Her face glowed with pride as she added,
"Of course everything is changed now."

"Indeed?" murmured Mrs. Baines, with polite curiosity.

"Yes," said Miss Chetwynd. "You've not heard?"

"No," said Mrs. Baines. Miss Chetwynd knew that she had not heard.

"About Elizabeth's engagement? To the Reverend Archibald Jones?"

It is the fact that Mrs. Baines was taken aback. She did nothing
indiscreet; she did not give vent to her excusable amazement that the
elder Miss Chetwynd should be engaged to any one at all, as some women
would have done in the stress of the moment. She kept her presence of
mind.

"This is really MOST interesting!" said she.

It was. For Archibald Jones was one of the idols of the Wesleyan
Methodist Connexion, a special preacher famous throughout England. At
'Anniversaries' and 'Trust sermons,' Archibald Jones had probably no
rival. His Christian name helped him; it was a luscious, resounding
mouthful for admirers. He was not an itinerant minister, migrating
every three years. His function was to direct the affairs of the 'Book
Room,' the publishing department of the Connexion. He lived in London,
and shot out into the provinces at week-ends, preaching on Sundays and
giving a lecture, tinctured with bookishness, 'in the chapel' on Monday
evenings. In every town he visited there was competition for the
privilege of entertaining him. He had zeal, indefatigable energy, and a
breezy wit. He was a widower of fifty, and his wife had been dead for
twenty years. It had seemed as if women were not for this bright star.
And here Elizabeth Chetwynd, who had left the Five Towns a quarter of a
century before at the age of twenty, had caught him! Austere,
moustached, formidable, desiccated, she must have done it with her
powerful intellect! It must be a union of intellects! He had been
impressed by hers, and she by his, and then their intellects had
kissed. Within a week fifty thousand women in forty counties had
pictured to themselves this osculation of intellects, and shrugged
their shoulders, and decided once more that men were incomprehensible.
These great ones in London, falling in love like the rest! But no! Love
was a ribald and voluptuous word to use in such a matter as this. It
was generally felt that the Reverend Archibald Jones and Miss Chetwynd
the elder would lift marriage to what would now be termed an astral
plane.

After tea had been served, Mrs. Baines gradually recovered her
position, both in her own private esteem and in the deference of Miss
Aline Chetwynd.

"Yes," said she. "You can talk about your sister, and you can call HIM
Archibald, and you can mince up your words. But have you got a
tea-service like this? Can you conceive more perfect strawberry jam
than this? Did not my dress cost more than you spend on your clothes in
a year? Has a man ever looked at you? After all, is there not something
about my situation ... in short, something...?"

She did not say this aloud. She in no way deviated from the scrupulous
politeness of a hostess. There was nothing in even her tone to indicate
that Mrs. John Baines was a personage. Yet it suddenly occurred to Miss
Chetwynd that her pride in being the prospective sister-in-law of the
Rev. Archibald Jones would be better for a while in her pocket. And she
inquired after Mr. Baines. After this the conversation limped somewhat.

"I suppose you weren't surprised by my letter?" said Mrs. Baines.

"I was and I wasn't," answered Miss Chetwynd, in her professional
manner and not her manner of a prospective sister-in-law. "Of course I
am naturally sorry to lose two such good pupils, but we can't keep our
pupils for ever." She smiled; she was not without fortitude--it is
easier to lose pupils than to replace them. "Still"--a pause--"what you
say of Sophia is perfectly true, perfectly. She is quite as advanced as
Constance. Still"--another pause and a more rapid enunciation--"Sophia
is by no means an ordinary girl."

"I hope she hasn't been a very great trouble to you?"

"Oh NO!" exclaimed Miss Chetwynd. "Sophia and I have got on very well
together. I have always tried to appeal to her reason. I have never
FORCED her ... Now, with some girls ... In some ways I look on Sophia
as the most remarkable girl--not pupil--but the most remarkable--what
shall I say?--individuality, that I have ever met with." And her
demeanour added, "And, mind you, this is something--from me!"

"Indeed!" said Mrs. Baines. She told herself, "I am not your common
foolish parent. I see my children impartially. I am incapable of being
flattered concerning them."

Nevertheless she was flattered, and the thought shaped itself that
really Sophia was no ordinary girl.

"I suppose she has talked to you about becoming a teacher?" asked Miss
Chetwynd, taking a morsel of the unparalleled jam.

She held the spoon with her thumb and three fingers. Her fourth finger,
in matters of honest labour, would never associate with the other
three; delicately curved, it always drew proudly away from them.

"Has she mentioned that to you?" Mrs. Baines demanded, startled.

"Oh yes!" said Miss Chetwynd. "Several times. Sophia is a very
secretive girl, very--but I think I may say I have always had her
confidence. There have been times when Sophia and I have been very near
each other. Elizabeth was much struck with her. Indeed, I may tell you
that in one of her last letters to me she spoke of Sophia and said she
had mentioned her to Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones remembered her quite
well."

Impossible for even a wise, uncommon parent not to be affected by such
an announcement!

"I dare say your sister will give up her school now," observed Mrs.
Baines, to divert attention from her self-consciousness.

"Oh NO!" And this time Mrs. Baines had genuinely shocked Miss Chetwynd.
"Nothing would induce Elizabeth to give up the cause of education.
Archibald takes the keenest interest in the school. Oh no! Not for
worlds!"

"THEN YOU THINK SOPHIA WOULD MAKE A GOOD TEACHER?" asked Mrs. Baines
with apparent inconsequence, and with a smile. But the words marked an
epoch in her mind. All was over.

"I think she is very much set on it and--"

"That wouldn't affect her father--or me," said Mrs. Baines quickly.

"Certainly not! I merely say that she is very much set on it. Yes, she
would, at any rate, make a teacher far superior to the average." ("That
girl has got the better of her mother without me!" she reflected.) "Ah!
Here is dear Constance!"

Constance, tempted beyond her strength by the sounds of the visit and
the colloquy, had slipped into the room.

"I've left both doors open, mother," she excused herself for quitting
her father, and kissed Miss Chetwynd.

She blushed, but she blushed happily, and really made a most creditable
debut as a young lady. Her mother rewarded her by taking her into the
conversation. And history was soon made.

So Sophia was apprenticed to Miss Aline Chetwynd. Mrs. Baines bore
herself greatly. It was Miss Chetwynd who had urged, and her respect
for Miss Chetwynd ... Also somehow the Reverend Archibald Jones came
into the cause.

Of course the idea of Sophia ever going to London was ridiculous,
ridiculous! (Mrs. Baines secretly feared that the ridiculous might
happen; but, with the Reverend Archibald Jones on the spot, the worst
could be faced.) Sophia must understand that even the apprenticeship in
Bursley was merely a trial. They would see how things went on. She had
to thank Miss Chetwynd.

"I made Miss Chetwynd come and talk to mother," said Sophia
magnificently one night to simple Constance, as if to imply, 'Your Miss
Chetwynd is my washpot.'

To Constance, Sophia's mere enterprise was just as staggering as her
success. Fancy her deliberately going out that Saturday morning, after
her mother's definite decision, to enlist Miss Chetwynd in her aid!

There is no need to insist on the tragic grandeur of Mrs. Baines's
renunciation--a renunciation which implied her acceptance of a change
in the balance of power in her realm. Part of its tragedy was that
none, not even Constance, could divine the intensity of Mrs. Baines's
suffering. She had no confidant; she was incapable of showing a wound.
But when she lay awake at night by the organism which had once been her
husband, she dwelt long and deeply on the martyrdom of her life. What
had she done to deserve it? Always had she conscientiously endeavoured
to be kind, just, patient. And she knew herself to be sagacious and
prudent. In the frightful and unguessed trials of her existence as a
wife, surely she might have been granted consolations as a mother! Yet
no; it had not been! And she felt all the bitterness of age against
youth--youth egotistic, harsh, cruel, uncompromising; youth that is so
crude, so ignorant of life, so slow to understand! She had Constance.
Yes, but it would be twenty years before Constance could appreciate the
sacrifice of judgment and of pride which her mother had made, in a
sudden decision, during that rambling, starched, simpering interview
with Miss Aline Chetwynd. Probably Constance thought that she had
yielded to Sophia's passionate temper! Impossible to explain to
Constance that she had yielded to nothing but a perception of Sophia's
complete inability to hear reason and wisdom. Ah! Sometimes as she lay
in the dark, she would, in fancy, snatch her heart from her bosom and
fling it down before Sophia, bleeding, and cry: "See what I carry about
with me, on your account!" Then she would take it back and hide it
again, and sweeten her bitterness with wise admonitions to herself.

All this because Sophia, aware that if she stayed in the house she
would be compelled to help in the shop, chose an honourable activity
which freed her from the danger. Heart, how absurd of you to bleed!




CHAPTER IV

ELEPHANT

I


"Sophia, will you come and see the elephant? Do come!" Constance
entered the drawing-room with this request on her eager lips.

"No," said Sophia, with a touch of condescension. "I'm far too busy for
elephants."

Only two years had passed; but both girls were grown up now; long
sleeves, long skirts, hair that had settled down in life; and a
demeanour immensely serious, as though existence were terrific in its
responsibilities; yet sometimes childhood surprisingly broke through
the crust of gravity, as now in Constance, aroused by such things as
elephants, and proclaimed with vivacious gestures that it was not dead
after all. The sisters were sharply differentiated. Constance wore the
black alpaca apron and the scissors at the end of a long black elastic,
which indicated her vocation in the shop. She was proving a
considerable success in the millinery department. She had learnt how to
talk to people, and was, in her modest way, very self-possessed. She
was getting a little stouter. Everybody liked her. Sophia had developed
into the student. Time had accentuated her reserve. Her sole friend was
Miss Chetwynd, with whom she was, having regard to the disparity of
their ages, very intimate. At home she spoke little. She lacked
amiability; as her mother said, she was 'touchy.' She required
diplomacy from others, but did not render it again. Her attitude,
indeed, was one of half-hidden disdain, now gentle, now coldly bitter.
She would not wear an apron, in an age when aprons were almost
essential to decency. No! She would not wear an apron, and there was an
end of it. She was not so tidy as Constance, and if Constance's hands
had taken on the coarse texture which comes from commerce with needles,
pins, artificial flowers, and stuffs, Sophia's fine hands were seldom
innocent of ink. But Sophia was splendidly beautiful. And even her
mother and Constance had an instinctive idea that that face was, at any
rate, a partial excuse for her asperity.

"Well," said Constance, "if you won't, I do believe I shall ask mother
if she will."

Sophia, bending over her books, made no answer. But the top of her head
said: "This has no interest for me whatever."

Constance left the room, and in a moment returned with her mother.

"Sophia," said her mother, with gay excitement, "you might go and sit
with your father for a bit while Constance and I just run up to the
playground to see the elephant. You can work just as well in there as
here. Your father's asleep."

"Oh, very, well!" Sophia agreed haughtily. "Whatever is all this fuss
about an elephant? Anyhow, it'll be quieter in your room. The noise
here is splitting." She gave a supercilious glance into the Square as
she languidly rose.

It was the morning of the third day of Bursley Wakes; not the modern
finicking and respectable, but an orgiastic carnival, gross in all its
manifestations of joy. The whole centre of the town was given over to
the furious pleasures of the people. Most of the Square was occupied by
Wombwell's Menagerie, in a vast oblong tent, whose raging beasts roared
and growled day and night. And spreading away from this supreme
attraction, right up through the market-place past the Town Hall to
Duck Bank, Duck Square and the waste land called the 'playground' were
hundreds of booths with banners displaying all the delights of the
horrible. You could see the atrocities of the French Revolution, and of
the Fiji Islands, and the ravages of unspeakable diseases, and the
living flesh of a nearly nude human female guaranteed to turn the scale
at twenty-two stone, and the skeletons of the mysterious phantoscope,
and the bloody contests of champions naked to the waist (with the
chance of picking up a red tooth as a relic). You could try your
strength by hitting an image of a fellow-creature in the stomach, and
test your aim by knocking off the heads of other images with a wooden
ball. You could also shoot with rifles at various targets. All the
streets were lined with stalls loaded with food in heaps, chiefly dried
fish, the entrails of animals, and gingerbread. All the public-houses
were crammed, and frenzied jolly drunkards, men and women, lunged along
the pavements everywhere, their shouts vying with the trumpets, horns,
and drums of the booths, and the shrieking, rattling toys that the
children carried.

It was a glorious spectacle, but not a spectacle for the leading
families. Miss Chetwynd's school was closed, so that the daughters of
leading families might remain in seclusion till the worst was over. The
Baineses ignored the Wakes in every possible way, choosing that week to
have a show of mourning goods in the left-hand window, and refusing to
let Maggie outside on any pretext. Therefore the dazzling social
success of the elephant, which was quite easily drawing Mrs. Baines
into the vortex, cannot imaginably be over-estimated.

On the previous night one of the three Wombwell elephants had suddenly
knelt on a man in the tent; he had then walked out of the tent and
picked up another man at haphazard from the crowd which was staring at
the great pictures in front, and tried to put this second man into his
mouth. Being stopped by his Indian attendant with a pitchfork, he
placed the man on the ground and stuck his tusk through an artery of
the victim's arm. He then, amid unexampled excitement, suffered himself
to be led away. He was conducted to the rear of the tent, just in front
of Baines's shuttered windows, and by means of stakes, pulleys, and
ropes forced to his knees. His head was whitewashed, and six men of the
Rifle Corps were engaged to shoot at him at a distance of five yards,
while constables kept the crowd off with truncheons. He died instantly,
rolling over with a soft thud. The crowd cheered, and, intoxicated by
their importance, the Volunteers fired three more volleys into the
carcase, and were then borne off as heroes to different inns. The
elephant, by the help of his two companions, was got on to a railway
lorry and disappeared into the night. Such was the greatest sensation
that has ever occurred, or perhaps will ever occur, in Bursley. The
excitement about the repeal of the Corn Laws, or about Inkerman, was
feeble compared to that excitement. Mr. Critchlow, who had been called
on to put a hasty tourniquet round the arm of the second victim, had
popped in afterwards to tell John Baines all about it. Mr. Baines's
interest, however, had been slight. Mr. Critchlow succeeded better with
the ladies, who, though they had witnessed the shooting from the
drawing-room, were thirsty for the most trifling details.

The next day it was known that the elephant lay near the playground,
pending the decision of the Chief Bailiff and the Medical Officer as to
his burial. And everybody had to visit the corpse. No social
exclusiveness could withstand the seduction of that dead elephant.
Pilgrims travelled from all the Five Towns to see him.

"We're going now," said Mrs. Baines, after she had assumed her bonnet
and shawl.

"All right," said Sophia, pretending to be absorbed in study, as she
sat on the sofa at the foot of her father's bed.

And Constance, having put her head in at the door, drew her mother
after her like a magnet.

Then Sophia heard a remarkable conversation in the passage.

"Are you going up to see the elephant, Mrs. Baines?" asked the voice of
Mr. Povey.

"Yes. Why?"

"I think I had better come with you. The crowd is sure to be very
rough." Mr. Povey's tone was firm; he had a position.

"But the shop?"

"We shall not be long," said Mr. Povey.

"Oh yes, mother," Constance added appealingly.

Sophia felt the house thrill as the side-door banged. She sprang up and
watched the three cross King Street diagonally, and so plunge into the
Wakes. This triple departure was surely the crowning tribute to the
dead elephant! It was simply astonishing. It caused Sophia to perceive
that she had miscalculated the importance of the elephant. It made her
regret her scorn of the elephant as an attraction. She was left behind;
and the joy of life was calling her. She could see down into the Vaults
on the opposite side of the street, where working men--potters and
colliers--in their best clothes, some with high hats, were drinking,
gesticulating, and laughing in a row at a long counter.

She noticed, while she was thus at the bedroom window, a young man
ascending King Street, followed by a porter trundling a flat barrow of
luggage. He passed slowly under the very window. She flushed. She had
evidently been startled by the sight of this young man into no ordinary
state of commotion. She glanced at the books on the sofa, and then at
her father. Mr. Baines, thin and gaunt, and acutely pitiable, still
slept. His brain had almost ceased to be active now; he had to be fed
and tended like a bearded baby, and he would sleep for hours at a
stretch even in the daytime. Sophia left the room. A moment later she
ran into the shop, an apparition that amazed the three young lady
assistants. At the corner near the window on the fancy side a little
nook had been formed by screening off a portion of the counter with
large flower-boxes placed end-up. This corner had come to be known as
"Miss Baines's corner." Sophia hastened to it, squeezing past a young
lady assistant in the narrow space between the back of the counter and
the shelf-lined wall. She sat down in Constance's chair and pretended
to look for something. She had examined herself in the cheval-glass in
the showroom, on her way from the sick-chamber. When she heard a voice
near the door of the shop asking first for Mr. Povey and then for Mrs.
Baines, she rose, and seizing the object nearest to her, which happened
to be a pair of scissors, she hurried towards the showroom stairs as
though the scissors had been a grail, passionately sought and to be
jealously hidden away. She wanted to stop and turn round, but something
prevented her. She was at the end of the counter, under the curving
stairs, when one of the assistants said:

"I suppose you don't know when Mr. Povey or your mother are likely to
be back, Miss Sophia? Here's--"

It was a divine release for Sophia.

"They're--I--" she stammered, turning round abruptly. Luckily she was
still sheltered behind the counter.

The young man whom she had seen in the street came boldly forward.

"Good morning, Miss Sophia," said he, hat in hand. "It is a long time
since I had the pleasure of seeing you."

Never had she blushed as she blushed then. She scarcely knew what she
was doing as she moved slowly towards her sister's corner again, the
young man following her on the customer's side of the counter.

II

She knew that he was a traveller for the most renowned and gigantic of
all Manchester wholesale firms--Birkinshaws. But she did not know his
name, which was Gerald Scales. He was a rather short but extremely
well-proportioned man of thirty, with fair hair, and a distinguished
appearance, as became a representative of Birkinshaws. His broad, tight
necktie, with an edge of white collar showing above it, was
particularly elegant. He had been on the road for Birkinshaws for
several years; but Sophia had only seen him once before in her life,
when she was a little girl, three years ago. The relations between the
travellers of the great firms and their solid, sure clients in small
towns were in those days often cordially intimate. The traveller came
with the lustre of a historic reputation around him; there was no need
to fawn for orders; and the client's immense and immaculate
respectability made him the equal of no matter what ambassador. It was
a case of mutual esteem, and of that confidence-generating phenomenon,
"an old account." The tone in which a commercial traveller of middle
age would utter the phrase "an old account" revealed in a flash all
that was romantic, prim, and stately in mid-Victorian commerce. In the
days of Baines, after one of the elaborately engraved advice-circulars
had arrived ('Our Mr. ---- will have the pleasure of waiting upon you
on ----day next, the ---- inst.') John might in certain cases be expected to
say, on the morning of ----day, 'Missis, what have ye gotten for supper
to-night?'

Mr. Gerald Scales had never been asked to supper; he had never even
seen John Baines; but, as the youthful successor of an aged traveller
who had had the pleasure of St. Luke's Square, on behalf of
Birkinshaws, since before railways, Mrs. Baines had treated him with a
faint agreeable touch of maternal familiarity; and, both her daughters
being once in the shop during his visit, she had on that occasion
commanded the gawky girls to shake hands with him.

Sophia had never forgotten that glimpse. The young man without a name
had lived in her mind, brightly glowing, as the very symbol and
incarnation of the masculine and the elegant.

The renewed sight of him seemed to have wakened her out of a sleep.
Assuredly she was not the same Sophia. As she sat in her sister's chair
in the corner, entrenched behind the perpendicular boxes, playing
nervously with the scissors, her beautiful face was transfigured into
the ravishingly angelic. It would have been impossible for Mr. Gerald
Scales, or anybody else, to credit, as he gazed at those lovely,
sensitive, vivacious, responsive features, that Sophia was not a
character of heavenly sweetness and perfection. She did not know what
she was doing; she was nothing but the exquisite expression of a deep
instinct to attract and charm. Her soul itself emanated from her in an
atmosphere of allurement and acquiescence. Could those laughing lips
hang in a heavy pout? Could that delicate and mild voice be harsh?
Could those burning eyes be coldly inimical? Never! The idea was
inconceivable! And Mr. Gerald Scales, with his head over the top of the
boxes, yielded to the spell. Remarkable that Mr. Gerald Scales, with
all his experience, should have had to come to Bursley to find the
pearl, the paragon, the ideal! But so it was. They met in an equal
abandonment; the only difference between them was that Mr. Scales, by
force of habit, kept his head.

"I see it's your wakes here," said he.

He was polite to the wakes; but now, with the least inflection in the
world, he put the wakes at its proper level in the scheme of things as
a local unimportance! She adored him for this; she was athirst for
sympathy in the task of scorning everything local.

"I expect you didn't know," she said, implying that there was every
reason why a man of his mundane interests should not know.

"I should have remembered if I had thought," said he. "But I didn't
think. What's this about an elephant?"

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "Have you heard of that?"

"My porter was full of it."

"Well," she said, "of course it's a very big thing in Bursley."

As she smiled in gentle pity of poor Bursley, he naturally did the
same. And he thought how much more advanced and broad the younger
generation was than the old! He would never have dared to express his
real feelings about Bursley to Mrs. Baines, or even to Mr. Povey (who
was, however, of no generation); yet here was a young woman actually
sharing them.

She told him all the history of the elephant.

"Must have been very exciting," he commented, despite himself.

"Do you know," she replied, "it WAS."

After all, Bursley was climbing in their opinion.

"And mother and my sister and Mr. Povey have all gone to see it. That's
why they're not here."

That the elephant should have caused both Mr. Povey and Mrs. Baines to
forget that the representative of Birkinshaws was due to call was
indeed a final victory for the elephant.

"But not you!" he exclaimed.

"No," she said. "Not me."

"Why didn't you go too?" He continued his flattering investigations
with a generous smile.

"I simply didn't care to," said she, proudly nonchalant.

"And I suppose you are in charge here?"

"No," she answered. "I just happened to have run down here for these
scissors. That's all."

"I often see your sister," said he. "'Often' do I say?--that is,
generally, when I come; but never you."

"I'm never in the shop," she said. "It's just an accident to-day."

"Oh! So you leave the shop to your sister?"

"Yes." She said nothing of her teaching.

Then there was a silence. Sophia was very thankful to be hidden from
the curiosity of the shop. The shop could see nothing of her, and only
the back of the young man; and the conversation had been conducted in
low voices. She tapped her foot, stared at the worn, polished surface
of the counter, with the brass yard-measure nailed along its edge, and
then she uneasily turned her gaze to the left and seemed to be
examining the backs of the black bonnets which were perched on high
stands in the great window. Then her eyes caught his for an important
moment.

"Yes," she breathed. Somebody had to say something. If the shop missed
the murmur of their voices the shop would wonder what had happened to
them.

Mr. Scales looked at his watch. '"I dare say if I come in again about
two--" he began.

"Oh yes, they're SURE to be in then," she burst out before he could
finish his sentence.

He left abruptly, queerly, without shaking hands (but then it would
have been difficult--she argued--for him to have put his arm over the
boxes), and without expressing the hope of seeing her again. She peeped
through the black bonnets, and saw the porter put the leather strap
over his shoulders, raise the rear of the barrow, and trundle off; but
she did not see Mr. Scales. She was drunk; thoughts were tumbling about
in her brain like cargo loose in a rolling ship. Her entire conception
of herself was being altered; her attitude towards life was being
altered. The thought which knocked hardest against its fellows was,
"Only in these moments have I begun to live!"

And as she flitted upstairs to resume watch over her father she sought
to devise an innocent-looking method by which she might see Mr. Scales
when he next called. And she speculated as to what his name was.

III

When Sophia arrived in the bedroom, she was startled because her
father's head and beard were not in their accustomed place on the
pillow. She could only make out something vaguely unusual sloping off
the side of the bed. A few seconds passed--not to be measured in
time--and she saw that the upper part of his body had slipped down, and
his head was hanging, inverted, near the floor between the bed and the
ottoman. His face, neck, and hands were dark and congested; his mouth
was open, and the tongue protruded between the black, swollen, mucous
lips; his eyes were prominent and coldly staring. The fact was that Mr.
Baines had wakened up, and, being restless, had slid out partially from
his bed and died of asphyxia. After having been unceasingly watched for
fourteen years, he had, with an invalid's natural perverseness, taken
advantage of Sophia's brief dereliction to expire. Say what you will,
amid Sophia's horror, and her terrible grief and shame, she had
visitings of the idea: he did it on purpose!

She ran out of the room, knowing by intuition that he was dead, and
shrieked out, "Maggie," at the top of her voice; the house echoed.

"Yes, miss," said Maggie, quite close, coming out of Mr. Povey's
chamber with a slop-pail.

"Fetch Mr. Critchlow at once. Be quick. Just as you are. It's father--"

Maggie, perceiving darkly that disaster was in the air, and instantly
filled with importance and a sort of black joy, dropped her pail in the
exact middle of the passage, and almost fell down the crooked stairs.
One of Maggie's deepest instincts, always held in check by the stern
dominance of Mrs. Baines, was to leave pails prominent on the main
routes of the house; and now, divining what was at hand, it flamed into
insurrection.

No sleepless night had ever been so long to Sophia as the three minutes
which elapsed before Mr. Critchlow came. As she stood on the mat
outside the bedroom door she tried to draw her mother and Constance and
Mr. Povey by magnetic force out of the wakes into the house, and her
muscles were contracted in this strange effort. She felt that it was
impossible to continue living if the secret of the bedroom remained
unknown one instant longer, so intense was her torture, and yet that
the torture which could not be borne must be borne. Not a sound in the
house! Not a sound from the shop! Only the distant murmur of the wakes!

"Why did I forget father?" she asked herself with awe. "I only meant to
tell him that they were all out, and run back. Why did I forget
father?" She would never be able to persuade anybody that she had
literally forgotten her father's existence for quite ten minutes; but
it was true, though shocking.

Then there were noises downstairs.

"Bless us! Bless us!" came the unpleasant voice of Mr. Critchlow as he
bounded up the stairs on his long legs; he strode over the pail.
"What's amiss?" He was wearing his white apron, and he carried his
spectacles in his bony hand.

"It's father--he's--" Sophia faltered.

She stood away so that he should enter the room first. He glanced at
her keenly, and as it were resentfully, and went in. She followed,
timidly, remaining near the door while Mr. Critchlow inspected her
handiwork. He put on his spectacles with strange deliberation, and
then, bending his knees outwards, thus lowered his body so that he
could examine John Baines point-blank. He remained staring like this,
his hands on his sharp apron-covered knees, for a little space; and
then he seized the inert mass and restored it to the bed, and wiped
those clotted lips with his apron.

Sophia heard loud breathing behind her. It was Maggie. She heard a
huge, snorting sob; Maggie was showing her emotion.

"Go fetch doctor!" Mr. Critchlow rasped. "And don't stand gaping there!"

"Run for the doctor, Maggie," said Sophia.

"How came ye to let him fall?" Mr. Critchlow demanded.

"I was out of the room. I just ran down into the shop--"

"Gallivanting with that young Scales!" said Mr. Critchlow, with
devilish ferocity. "Well, you've killed yer father; that's all!"

He must have been at his shop door and seen the entry of the traveller!
And it was precisely characteristic of Mr. Critchlow to jump in the
dark at a horrible conclusion, and to be right after all. For Sophia
Mr. Critchlow had always been the personification of malignity and
malevolence, and now these qualities in him made him, to her, almost
obscene. Her pride brought up tremendous reinforcements, and she
approached the bed.

"Is he dead?" she asked in a quiet tone. (Somewhere within a voice was
whispering, "So his name is Scales.")

"Don't I tell you he's dead?"

"Pail on the stairs!"

This mild exclamation came from the passage. Mrs. Baines, misliking the
crowds abroad, had returned alone; she had left Constance in charge of
Mr. Povey. Coming into her house by the shop and showroom, she had
first noted the phenomenon of the pail--proof of her theory of
Maggie's incurable untidiness.

"Been to see the elephant, I reckon!" said Mr. Critchlow, in fierce
sarcasm, as he recognized Mrs. Baines's voice.

Sophia leaped towards the door, as though to bar her mother's entrance.
But Mrs. Baines was already opening the door.

"Well, my pet--" she was beginning cheerfully.

Mr. Critchlow confronted her. And he had no more pity for the wife than
for the daughter. He was furiously angry because his precious property
had been irretrievably damaged by the momentary carelessness of a silly
girl. Yes, John Baines was his property, his dearest toy! He was
convinced that he alone had kept John Baines alive for fourteen years,
that he alone had fully understood the case and sympathized with the
sufferer, that none but he had been capable of displaying ordinary
common sense in the sick-room. He had learned to regard John Baines as,
in some sort, his creation. And now, with their stupidity, their
neglect, their elephants, between them they had done for John Baines.
He had always known it would come to that, and it had come to that.

"She let him fall out o' bed, and ye're a widow now, missis!" he
announced with a virulence hardly conceivable. His angular features and
dark eyes expressed a murderous hate for every woman named Baines.

"Mother!" cried Sophia, "I only ran down into the shop to--to--"

She seized her mother's arm in frenzied agony.

"My child!" said Mrs. Baines, rising miraculously to the situation with
a calm benevolence of tone and gesture that remained for ever sublime
in the stormy heart of Sophia, "do not hold me." With infinite
gentleness she loosed herself from those clasping hands. "Have you sent
for the doctor?" she questioned Mr. Critchlow.

The fate of her husband presented no mysteries to Mrs. Baines.
Everybody had been warned a thousand times of the danger of leaving the
paralytic, whose life depended on his position, and whose fidgetiness
was thereby a constant menace of death to him. For five thousand nights
she had wakened infallibly every time he stirred, and rearranged him by
the flicker of a little oil lamp. But Sophia, unhappy creature, had
merely left him. That was all.

Mr. Critchlow and the widow gazed, helplessly waiting, at the pitiable
corpse, of which the salient part was the white beard. They knew not
that they were gazing at a vanished era. John Baines had belonged to
the past, to the age when men really did think of their souls, when
orators by phrases could move crowds to fury or to pity, when no one
had learnt to hurry, when Demos was only turning in his sleep, when the
sole beauty of life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when
hell really had no bottom, and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the
secret of England's greatness. Mid-Victorian England lay on that
mahogany bed. Ideals had passed away with John Baines. It is thus that
ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of honoured death, but
sorrily, ignobly, while one's head is turned--

And Mr. Povey and Constance, very self-conscious, went and saw the dead
elephant, and came back; and at the corner of King Street, Constance
exclaimed brightly--

"Why! who's gone out and left the side-door open?"

For the doctor had at length arrived, and Maggie, in showing him
upstairs with pious haste, had forgotten to shut the door.

And they took advantage of the side-door, rather guiltily, to avoid the
eyes of the shop. They feared that in the parlour they would be the
centre of a curiosity half ironical and half reproving; for had they
not accomplished an escapade? So they walked slowly.

The real murderer was having his dinner in the commercial room up at
the Tiger, opposite the Town Hall.

IV

Several shutters were put up in the windows of the shop, to indicate a
death, and the news instantly became known in trading circles
throughout the town. Many people simultaneously remarked upon the
coincidence that Mr. Baines should have died while there was a show of
mourning goods in his establishment. This coincidence was regarded as
extremely sinister, and it was apparently felt that, for the sake of
the mind's peace, one ought not to inquire into such things too
closely. From the moment of putting up the prescribed shutters, John
Baines and his funeral began to acquire importance in Bursley, and
their importance grew rapidly almost from hour to hour. The wakes
continued as usual, except that the Chief Constable, upon
representations being made to him by Mr. Critchlow and other citizens,
descended upon St. Luke's Square and forbade the activities of
Wombwell's orchestra. Wombwell and the Chief Constable differed as to
the justice of the decree, but every well-minded person praised the
Chief Constable, and he himself considered that he had enhanced the
town's reputation for a decent propriety. It was noticed, too, not
without a shiver of the uncanny, that that night the lions and tigers
behaved like lambs, whereas on the previous night they had roared the
whole Square out of its sleep.

The Chief Constable was not the only individual enlisted by Mr.
Critchlow in the service of his friend's fame. Mr. Critchlow spent
hours in recalling the principal citizens to a due sense of John
Baines's past greatness. He was determined that his treasured toy
should vanish underground with due pomp, and he left nothing undone to
that end. He went over to Hanbridge on the still wonderful horse-car,
and saw the editor-proprietor of the Staffordshire Signal (then a
two-penny weekly with no thought of Football editions), and on the very
day of the funeral the Signal came out with a long and eloquent
biography of John Baines. This biography, giving details of his public
life, definitely restored him to his legitimate position in the civic
memory as an ex-chief bailiff, an ex-chairman of the Burial Board, and
of the Five Towns Association for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge,
and also as a "prime mover" in the local Turnpike Act, in the
negotiations for the new Town Hall, and in the Corinthian facade of the
Wesleyan Chapel; it narrated the anecdote of his courageous speech from
the portico of the Shambles during the riots of 1848, and it did not
omit a eulogy of his steady adherence to the wise old English maxims of
commerce and his avoidance of dangerous modern methods. Even in the
sixties the modern had reared its shameless head. The panegyric closed
with an appreciation of the dead man's fortitude in the terrible
affliction with which a divine providence had seen fit to try him; and
finally the Signal uttered its absolute conviction that his native town
would raise a cenotaph to his honour. Mr. Critchlow, being unfamiliar
with the word "cenotaph," consulted Worcester's Dictionary, and when he
found that it meant "a sepulchral monument to one who is buried
elsewhere," he was as pleased with the Signal's language as with the
idea, and decided that a cenotaph should come to pass.

The house and shop were transformed into a hive of preparation for the
funeral. All was changed. Mr. Povey kindly slept for three nights on
the parlour sofa, in order that Mrs. Baines might have his room. The
funeral grew into an obsession, for multitudinous things had to be
performed and done sumptuously and in strict accordance with precedent.
There were the family mourning, the funeral repast, the choice of the
text on the memorial card, the composition of the legend on the coffin,
the legal arrangements, the letters to relations, the selection of
guests, and the questions of bell-ringing, hearse, plumes, number of
horses, and grave-digging. Nobody had leisure for the indulgence of
grief except Aunt Maria, who, after she had helped in the laying-out,
simply sat down and bemoaned unceasingly for hours her absence on the
fatal morning. "If I hadn't been so fixed on polishing my
candle-sticks," she weepingly repeated, "he mit ha' been alive and well
now." Not that Aunt Maria had been informed of the precise
circumstances of the death; she was not clearly aware that Mr. Baines
had died through a piece of neglect. But, like Mr. Critchlow, she was
convinced that there had been only one person in the world truly
capable of nursing Mr. Baines. Beyond the family, no one save Mr.
Critchlow and Dr. Harrop knew just how the martyr had finished his
career. Dr. Harrop, having been asked bluntly if an inquest would be
necessary, had reflected a moment and had then replied: "No." And he
added, "Least said soonest mended--mark me!" They had marked him. He
was commonsense in breeches.

As for Aunt Maria, she was sent about her snivelling business by Aunt
Harriet. The arrival in the house of this genuine aunt from Axe, of
this majestic and enormous widow whom even the imperial Mrs. Baines
regarded with a certain awe, set a seal of ultimate solemnity on the
whole event. In Mr. Povey's bedroom Mrs. Baines fell like a child into
Aunt Harriet's arms and sobbed:

"If it had been anything else but that elephant!"

Such was Mrs. Baines's sole weakness from first to last.

Aunt Harriet was an exhaustless fountain of authority upon every detail
concerning interments. And, to a series of questions ending with the
word "sister," and answers ending with the word "sister," the
prodigious travail incident to the funeral was gradually and
successfully accomplished. Dress and the repast exceeded all other
matters in complexity and difficulty. But on the morning of the funeral
Aunt Harriet had the satisfaction of beholding her younger sister the
centre of a tremendous cocoon of crape, whose slightest pleat was
perfect. Aunt Harriet seemed to welcome her then, like a veteran,
formally into the august army of relicts. As they stood side by side
surveying the special table which was being laid in the showroom for
the repast, it appeared inconceivable that they had reposed together in
Mr. Povey's limited bed. They descended from the showroom to the
kitchen, where the last delicate dishes were inspected. The shop was,
of course, closed for the day, but Mr. Povey was busy there, and in
Aunt Harriet's all-seeing glance he came next after the dishes. She
rose from the kitchen to speak with him.

"You've got your boxes of gloves all ready?" she questioned him.

"Yes, Mrs. Maddack."

"You'll not forget to have a measure handy?"

"No, Mrs. Maddack."

"You'll find you'll want more of seven-and-three-quarters and eights
than anything."

"Yes. I have allowed for that."

"If you place yourself behind the side-door and put your boxes on the
harmonium, you'll be able to catch every one as they come in."

"That is what I had thought of, Mrs. Maddack."

She went upstairs. Mrs. Baines had reached the showroom again, and was
smoothing out creases in the white damask cloth and arranging glass
dishes of jam at equal distances from each other.

"Come, sister," said Mrs. Maddack. "A last look."

And they passed into the mortuary bedroom to gaze at Mr. Baines before
he should be everlastingly nailed down. In death he had recovered some
of his earlier dignity; but even so he was a startling sight. The two
widows bent over him, one on either side, and gravely stared at that
twisted, worn white face all neatly tucked up in linen.

"I shall fetch Constance and Sophia," said Mrs. Maddack, with tears in
her voice. "Do you go into the drawing-room, sister."

But Mrs. Maddack only succeeded in fetching Constance.

Then there was the sound of wheels in King Street. The long rite of the
funeral was about to begin. Every guest, after having been measured and
presented with a pair of the finest black kid gloves by Mr. Povey, had
to mount the crooked stairs and gaze upon the carcase of John Baines,
going afterwards to the drawing-room to condole briefly with the widow.
And every guest, while conscious of the enormity of so thinking,
thought what an excellent thing it was that John Baines should be at
last dead and gone. The tramping on the stairs was continual, and
finally Mr. Baines himself went downstairs, bumping against corners,
and led a cortege of twenty vehicles.

The funeral tea was not over at seven o'clock, five hours after the
commencement of the rite. It was a gigantic and faultless meal, worthy
of John Baines's distant past. Only two persons were absent from
it--John Baines and Sophia. The emptiness of Sophia's chair was much
noticed; Mrs. Maddack explained that Sophia was very high-strung and
could not trust herself. Great efforts were put forth by the company to
be lugubrious and inconsolable, but the secret relief resulting from
the death would not be entirely hidden. The vast pretence of acute
sorrow could not stand intact against that secret relief and the lavish
richness of the food.

To the offending of sundry important relatives from a distance, Mr.
Critchlow informally presided over that assemblage of grave men in high
stocks and crinolined women. He had closed his shop, which had never
before been closed on a weekday, and he had a great deal to say about
this extraordinary closure. It was due as much to the elephant as to
the funeral. The elephant had become a victim to the craze for
souvenirs. Already in the night his tusks had been stolen; then his
feet disappeared for umbrella-stands, and most of his flesh had
departed in little hunks. Everybody in Bursley had resolved to
participate in the elephant. One consequence was that all the chemists'
shops in the town were assaulted by strings of boys. 'Please a pennorth
o' alum to tak' smell out o' a bit o' elephant.' Mr. Critchlow hated
boys.

"'I'll alum ye!' says I, and I did. I alummed him out o' my shop with a
pestle. If there'd been one there'd been twenty between opening and
nine o'clock. 'George,' I says to my apprentice, 'shut shop up. My old
friend John Baines is going to his long home to-day, and I'll close.
I've had enough o' alum for one day.'"

The elephant fed the conversation until after the second relay of hot
muffins. When Mr. Critchlow had eaten to his capacity, he took the
Signal importantly from his pocket, posed his spectacles, and read the
obituary all through in slow, impressive accents. Before he reached the
end Mrs. Baines began to perceive that familiarity had blinded her to
the heroic qualities of her late husband. The fourteen years of
ceaseless care were quite genuinely forgotten, and she saw him in his
strength and in his glory. When Mr. Critchlow arrived at the eulogy of
the husband and father, Mrs. Baines rose and left the showroom. The
guests looked at each other in sympathy for her. Mr. Critchlow shot a
glance at her over his spectacles and continued steadily reading. After
he had finished he approached the question of the cenotaph.

Mrs. Baines, driven from the banquet by her feelings, went into the
drawing-room. Sophia was there, and Sophia, seeing tears in her
mother's eyes, gave a sob, and flung herself bodily against her mother,
clutching her, and hiding her face in that broad crape, which abraded
her soft skin.

"Mother," she wept passionately, "I want to leave the school now. I
want to please you. I'll do anything in the world to please you. I'll
go into the shop if you'd like me to!" Her voice lost itself in tears.

"Calm yourself, my pet," said Mrs. Baines, tenderly, caressing her. It
was a triumph for the mother in the very hour when she needed a triumph.




CHAPTER V

THE TRAVELLER

I


'Equisite, 1s. 11d.'

These singular signs were being painted in shiny black on an
unrectangular parallelogram of white cardboard by Constance one evening
in the parlour. She was seated, with her left side to the fire and to
the fizzing gas, at the dining-table, which was covered with a checked
cloth in red and white. Her dress was of dark crimson; she wore a cameo
brooch and a gold chain round her neck; over her shoulders was thrown a
white knitted shawl, for the weather was extremely cold, the English
climate being much more serious and downright at that day than it is
now. She bent low to the task, holding her head slightly askew, putting
the tip of her tongue between her lips, and expending all the energy of
her soul and body in an intense effort to do what she was doing as well
as it could be done.

"Splendid!" said Mr. Povey.

Mr. Povey was fronting her at the table; he had his elbows on the
table, and watched her carefully, with the breathless and divine
anxiety of a dreamer who is witnessing the realization of his dream.
And Constance, without moving any part of her frame except her head,
looked up at him and smiled for a moment, and he could see her
delicious little nostrils at the end of her snub nose.

Those two, without knowing or guessing it, were making history--the
history of commerce. They had no suspicion that they were the forces of
the future insidiously at work to destroy what the forces of the past
had created, but such was the case. They were conscious merely of a
desire to do their duty in the shop and to the shop; probably it had
not even occurred to them that this desire, which each stimulated in
the breast of the other, had assumed the dimensions of a passion. It
was ageing Mr. Povey, and it had made of Constance a young lady
tremendously industrious and preoccupied.

Mr. Povey had recently been giving attention to the question of
tickets. It is not too much to say that Mr. Povey, to whom heaven had
granted a minimum share of imagination, had nevertheless discovered his
little parcel of imagination in the recesses of being, and brought it
effectively to bear on tickets. Tickets ran in conventional grooves.
There were heavy oblong tickets for flannels, shirting, and other
stuffs in the piece; there were smaller and lighter tickets for
intermediate goods; and there were diamond-shaped tickets (containing
nothing but the price) for bonnets, gloves, and flimflams generally.
The legends on the tickets gave no sort of original invention. The
words 'lasting,' 'durable,' 'unshrinkable,' 'latest,' 'cheap,'
'stylish,' 'novelty,' 'choice' (as an adjective), 'new,' and
'tasteful,' exhausted the entire vocabulary of tickets. Now Mr. Povey
attached importance to tickets, and since he was acknowledged to be the
best window-dresser in Bursley, his views were entitled to respect. He
dreamed of other tickets, in original shapes, with original legends. In
brief, he achieved, in regard to tickets, the rare feat of ridding
himself of preconceived notions, and of approaching a subject with
fresh, virginal eyes. When he indicated the nature of his wishes to Mr.
Chawner, the wholesale stationer who supplied all the Five Towns with
shop-tickets, Mr. Chawner grew uneasy and worried; Mr. Chawner was
indeed shocked. For Mr. Chawner there had always been certain
well-defined genera of tickets, and he could not conceive the existence
of other genera. When Mr. Povey suggested circular tickets--tickets
with a blue and a red line round them, tickets with legends such as
'unsurpassable,' 'very dainty,' or 'please note,' Mr. Chawner hummed
and hawed, and finally stated that it would be impossible to
manufacture these preposterous tickets, these tickets which would
outrage the decency of trade.

If Mr. Povey had not happened to be an exceedingly obstinate man, he
might have been defeated by the crass Toryism of Mr. Chawner. But Mr.
Povey was obstinate, and he had resources of ingenuity which Mr.
Chawner little suspected. The great, tramping march of progress was not
to be impeded by Mr. Chawner. Mr. Povey began to make his own tickets.
At first he suffered as all reformers and inventors suffer. He used the
internal surface of collar-boxes and ordinary ink and pens, and the
result was such as to give customers the idea that Baineses were too
poor or too mean to buy tickets like other shops. For bought tickets
had an ivory-tinted gloss, and the ink was black and glossy, and the
edges were very straight and did not show yellow between two layers of
white. Whereas Mr. Povey's tickets were of a bluish-white, without
gloss; the ink was neither black nor shiny, and the edges were
amateurishly rough: the tickets had an unmistakable air of having been
'made out of something else'; moreover, the lettering had not the free,
dashing style of Mr. Chawner's tickets.

And did Mrs. Baines encourage him in his single-minded enterprise on
behalf of HER business? Not a bit! Mrs. Baines's attitude, when not
disdainful, was inimical! So curious is human nature, so blind is man
to his own advantage! Life was very complex for Mr. Povey. It might
have been less complex had Bristol board and Chinese ink been less
expensive; with these materials he could have achieved marvels to
silence all prejudice and stupidity; but they were too costly. Still,
he persevered, and Constance morally supported him; he drew his
inspiration and his courage from Constance. Instead of the internal
surface of collar-boxes, he tried the external surface, which was at
any rate shiny. But the ink would not 'take' on it. He made as many
experiments as Edison was to make, and as many failures. Then Constance
was visited by a notion for mixing sugar with ink. Simple, innocent
creature--why should providence have chosen her to be the vessel of
such a sublime notion? Puzzling enigma, which, however, did not
exercise Mr. Povey! He found it quite natural that she should save him.
Save him she did. Sugar and ink would 'take' on anything, and it shone
like a 'patent leather' boot. Further, Constance developed a 'hand' for
lettering which outdid Mr. Povey's. Between them they manufactured
tickets by the dozen and by the score--tickets which, while possessing
nearly all the smartness and finish of Mr. Chawner's tickets, were much
superior to these in originality and strikingness. Constance and Mr.
Povey were delighted and fascinated by them. As for Mrs. Baines, she
said little, but the modern spirit was too elated by its success to
care whether she said little or much. And every few days Mr. Povey
thought of some new and wonderful word to put on a ticket.

His last miracle was the word 'exquisite.' 'Exquisite,' pinned on a
piece of broad tartan ribbon, appeared to Constance and Mr. Povey as
the finality of appropriateness. A climax worthy to close the year! Mr.
Povey had cut the card and sketched the word and figures in pencil, and
Constance was doing her executive portion of the undertaking. They were
very happy, very absorbed, in this strictly business matter. The clock
showed five minutes past ten. Stern duty, a pure desire for the
prosperity of the shop, had kept them at hard labour since before eight
o'clock that morning!

The stairs-door opened, and Mrs. Baines appeared, in bonnet and furs
and gloves, all clad for going out. She had abandoned the cocoon of
crape, but still wore weeds. She was stouter than ever.

"What!" she cried. "Not ready! Now really!"

"Oh, mother! How you made me jump!" Constance protested. "What time is
it? It surely isn't time to go yet!"

"Look at the clock!" said Mrs. Baines, drily.

"Well, I never!" Constance murmured, confused.

"Come, put your things together, and don't keep me waiting," said Mrs.
Baines, going past the table to the window, and lifting the blind to
peep out. "Still snowing," she observed. "Oh, the band's going away at
last! I wonder how they can play at all in this weather. By the way,
what was that tune they gave us just now? I couldn't make out whether
it was 'Redhead,' or--"

"Band?" questioned Constance--the simpleton!

Neither she nor Mr. Povey had heard the strains of the Bursley Town
Silver Prize Band which had been enlivening the season according to its
usual custom. These two practical, duteous, commonsense young and
youngish persons had been so absorbed in their efforts for the welfare
of the shop that they had positively not only forgotten the time, but
had also failed to notice the band! But if Constance had had her wits
about her she would at least have pretended that she had heard it.

"What's this?" asked Mrs. Baines, bringing her vast form to the table
and picking up a ticket.

Mr. Povey said nothing. Constance said: "Mr. Povey thought of it
to-day. Don't you think it's very good, mother?"

"I'm afraid I don't," Mrs. Baines coldly replied.

She had mildly objected already to certain words; but 'exquisite'
seemed to her silly; it seemed out of place; she considered that it
would merely bring ridicule on her shop. 'Exquisite' written upon a
window-ticket! No! What would John Baines have thought of 'exquisite'?

"'Exquisite!'" She repeated the word with a sarcastic inflection,
putting the accent, as every one put it, on the second syllable. "I
don't think that will quite do."

"But why not, mother?"

"It's not suitable, my dear."

She dropped the ticket from her gloved hand. Mr. Povey had darkly
flashed. Though he spoke little, he was as sensitive as he was
obstinate. On this occasion he said nothing. He expressed his feelings
by seizing the ticket and throwing it into the fire.

The situation was extremely delicate. Priceless employes like Mr. Povey
cannot be treated as machines, and Mrs. Baines of course instantly saw
that tact was needed.

"Go along to my bedroom and get ready, my pet," said she to Constance.
"Sophia is there. There's a good fire. I must just speak to Maggie."
She tactfully left the room.

Mr. Povey glanced at the fire and the curling red remains of the
ticket. Trade was bad; owing to weather and war, destitution was
abroad; and he had been doing his utmost for the welfare of the shop;
and here was the reward!

Constance's eyes were full of tears. "Never mind!" she murmured, and
went upstairs.

It was all over in a moment.

II

In the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel on Duck Bank there was a full and
influential congregation. For in those days influential people were not
merely content to live in the town where their fathers had lived,
without dreaming of country residences and smokeless air--they were
content also to believe what their fathers had believed about the
beginning and the end of all. There was no such thing as the unknowable
in those days. The eternal mysteries were as simple as an addition sum;
a child could tell you with absolute certainty where you would be and
what you would be doing a million years hence, and exactly what God
thought of you. Accordingly, every one being of the same mind, every
one met on certain occasions in certain places in order to express the
universal mind. And in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, for example,
instead of a sparse handful of persons disturbingly conscious of being
in a minority, as now, a magnificent and proud majority had collected,
deeply aware of its rightness and its correctness.

And the minister, backed by minor ministers, knelt and covered his face
in the superb mahogany rostrum; and behind him, in what was then still
called the 'orchestra' (though no musical instruments except the grand
organ had sounded in it for decades), the choir knelt and covered their
faces; and all around in the richly painted gallery and on the
ground-floor, multitudinous rows of people, in easy circumstances of
body and soul, knelt in high pews and covered their faces. And there
floated before them, in the intense and prolonged silence, the clear
vision of Jehovah on a throne, a God of sixty or so with a moustache
and a beard, and a non-committal expression which declined to say
whether or not he would require more bloodshed; and this God, destitute
of pinions, was surrounded by white-winged creatures that wafted
themselves to and fro while chanting; and afar off was an obscene
monstrosity, with cloven hoofs and a tail very dangerous and rude and
interfering, who could exist comfortably in the middle of a coal-fire,
and who took a malignant and exhaustless pleasure in coaxing you by
false pretences into the same fire; but of course you had too much
sense to swallow his wicked absurdities. Once a year, for ten minutes
by the clock, you knelt thus, in mass, and by meditation convinced
yourself that you had too much sense to swallow his wicked absurdities.
And the hour was very solemn, the most solemn of all the hours.

Strange that immortal souls should be found with the temerity to
reflect upon mundane affairs in that hour! Yet there were undoubtedly
such in the congregation; there were perhaps many to whom the vision,
if clear, was spasmodic and fleeting. And among them the inhabitants of
the Baines family pew! Who would have supposed that Mr. Povey, a recent
convert from Primitive Methodism in King Street to Wesleyan Methodism
on Duck Bank, was dwelling upon window-tickets and the injustice of
women, instead of upon his relations with Jehov

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