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.
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.
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.
“Idon’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.”
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.
“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.
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.