老妇人的故事 英文版The Old Wives' Tale
阿诺德.本涅特 Arnold Bennett
I
Constance stood at the large, many-paned window in the parlour.She was stouter. Although always plump, her figure had beencomely, with a neat, well-marked waist. But now the shapelinesshad gone; the waist-line no longer existed, and there were no morecrinolines to create it artificially. An observer not under thecharm of her face might have been excused for calling her fat andlumpy. The face, grave, kind, and expectant, with its radiant,fresh cheeks, and the rounded softness of its curves, atoned forthe figure. She was nearly twenty-nine years of age.
It was late in October. In Wedgwood Street, next to BoultonTerrace, all the little brown houses had been pulled down to makeroom for a palatial covered market, whose foundations were thenbeing dug. This destruction exposed a vast area of sky to thenorth-east. A great dark cloud with an untidy edge rose massivelyout of the depths and curtained off the tender blue of approachingdusk; while in the west, behind Constance, the sun was setting incalm and gorgeous melancholy on the Thursday hush of the town. Itwas one of those afternoons which gather up all the sadness of themoving earth and transform it into beauty.
Samuel Povey turned the corner from Wedgwood Street, and crossedKing Street obliquely to the front-door, which Constance opened.He seemed tired and anxious.
"Well?" demanded Constance, as he entered.
"She's no better. There's no getting away from it, she's worse. Ishould have stayed, only I knew you'd be worrying. So I caught thethree-fifty."
"How is that Mrs. Gilchrist shaping as a nurse?"
"She's very good," said Samuel, with conviction. "Very good!"
"What a blessing! I suppose you didn't happen to see the doctor?"
"Yes, I did."
"What did he say to you?"
Samuel gave a deprecating gesture. "Didn't say anythingparticular. With dropsy, at that stage, you know ..."
Constance had returned to the window, her expectancy apparentlyunappeased.
"I don't like the look of that cloud," she murmured.
"What! Are they out still?" Samuel inquired, taking off hisovercoat.
"Here they are!" cried Constance. Her features suddenlytransfigured, she sprang to the door, pulled it open, anddescended the steps.
A perambulator was being rapidly pushed up the slope by abreathless girl.
nodded without speaking.shapelinesshad gone; the waist-line no longer existed!
"Amy," Constance gently protested, "I told you not to venturefar."
"I hurried all I could, mum, soon as I seed that cloud," the girlpuffed, with the air of one who is seriously thankful to haveescaped a great disaster.
Constance dived into the recesses of the perambulator andextricated from its cocoon the centre of the universe, andscrutinized him with quiet passion, and then rushed with him intothe house, though not a drop of rain had yet fallen.
"Precious!" exclaimed Amy, in ecstasy, her young virginal eyesfollowing him till he disappeared. Then she wheeled away theperambulator, which now had no more value nor interest than anegg-shell. It was necessary to take it right round to the BroughamStreet yard entrance, past the front of the closed shop.
Constance sat down on the horsehair sofa and hugged and kissed herprize before removing his bonnet.
"Here's Daddy!" she said to him, as if imparting strange andrapturous tidings. "Here's Daddy come back from hanging up hiscoat in the passage! Daddy rubbing his hands!" And then, with aswift transition of voice and features: "Do look at him, Sam!"
anxious.of a towel into her hand again--she had loosed it; and!
Samuel, preoccupied, stooped forward. "Oh, you little scoundrel!Oh, you little scoundrel!" he greeted the baby, advancing hisfinger towards the baby's nose.
The baby, who had hitherto maintained a passive indifference toexternal phenomena, lifted elbows and toes, blew bubbles from histiny mouth, and stared at the finger with the most ravishing,roguish smile, as though saying: "I know that great sticking-outlimb, and there is a joke about it which no one but me can see,and which is my secret joy that you shall never share."
"Tea ready?" Samuel asked, resuming his gravity and his ordinarypose.
"You must give the girl time to take her things off," saidConstance. "We'll have the table drawn, away from the fire, andbaby can lie on his shawl on the hearthrug while we're havingtea." Then to the baby, in rapture: "And play with his toys; allhis nice, nice toys!"
"You know Miss Insull is staying for tea?"
Constance, her head bent over the baby, who formed a white patchon her comfortable brown frock, nodded without speaking.
Samuel Povey, walking to and fro, began to enter into details ofhis hasty journey to Axe. Old Mrs. Baines, having beheld hergrandson, was preparing to quit this world. Never again would sheexclaim, in her brusque tone of genial ruthlessness:'Fiddlesticks!' The situation was very difficult and distressing,for Constance could not leave her baby, and she would not, untilthe last urgency, run the risks of a journey with him to Axe. Hewas being weaned. In any case Constance could not have undertakenthe nursing of her mother. A nurse had to be found. Mr. Povey haddiscovered one in the person of Mrs. Gilchrist, the second wife ofa farmer at Malpas in Cheshire, whose first wife had been a sisterof the late John Baines. All the credit of Mrs. Gilchrist was dueto Samuel Povey. Mrs. Baines fretted seriously about Sophia, whohad given no sign of life for a very long time. Mr. Povey went toManchester and ascertained definitely from the relatives of Scalesthat nothing was known of the pair. He did not go to Manchesterespecially on this errand. About once in three weeks, on Tuesdays,he had to visit the Manchester warehouses; but the tracking ofScales's relative cost him so much trouble and time that,curiously, he came to believe that he had gone to Manchester oneTuesday for no other end. Although he was very busy indeed in theshop, he flew over to Axe and back whenever he possibly could, tothe neglect of his affairs. He was glad to do all that was in hispower; even if he had not done it graciously his sensitive,tyrannic conscience would have forced him to do it. Butnevertheless he felt rather virtuous, and worry and fatigue andloss of sleep intensified this sense of virtue.
"So that if there is any sudden change they will telegraph," hefinished, to Constance.
She raised her head. The words, clinching what had led up to them,drew her from her dream and she saw, for a moment, her mother inan agony.
"But you don't surely mean--?" she began, trying to disperse thepainful vision as unjustified by the facts.
"My dear girl," said Samuel, with head singing, and hot eyes, anda consciousness of high tension in every nerve of his body, "Isimply mean that if there's any sudden change they willtelegraph."
While they had tea, Samuel sitting opposite to his wife, and MissInsull nearly against the wall (owing to the moving of the table),the baby rolled about on the hearthrug, which had been coveredwith a large soft woollen shawl, originally the property of hisgreat-grandmother. He had no cares, no responsibilities. The shawlwas so vast that he could not clearly distinguish objects beyondits confines. On it lay an indiarubber ball, an indiarubber doll,a rattle, and fan. He vaguely recollected all four items, withtheir respective properties. The fire also was an old friend. Hehad occasionally tried to touch it, but a high bright fence alwayscame in between. For ten months he had never spent a day withoutmaking experiments on this shifting universe in which he aloneremained firm and stationary. The experiments were chieflyconducted out of idle amusement, but he was serious on the subjectof food. Lately the behaviour of the universe in regard to hisfood had somewhat perplexed him, had indeed annoyed him. However,he was of a forgetful, happy disposition, and so long as theuniverse continued to fulfil its sole end as a machinery for thesatisfaction, somehow, of his imperious desires, he was notinclined to remonstrate. He gazed at the flames and laughed, andlaughed because he had laughed. He pushed the ball away andwriggled after it, and captured it with the assurance of practice.He tried to swallow the doll, and it was not until he had triedseveral times to swallow it that he remembered the failure ofprevious efforts and philosophically desisted. He rolled with afearful shock, arms and legs in air, against the mountainous flankof that mammoth Fan, and clutched at Fan's ear. The whole mass ofFan upheaved and vanished from his view, and was instantlyforgotten by him. He seized the doll and tried to swallow it, andrepeated the exhibition of his skill with the ball. Then he sawthe fire again and laughed. And so he existed for centuries: noresponsibilities, no appetites; and the shawl was vast. Terrificoperations went on over his head. Giants moved to and fro. Greatvessels were carried off and great books were brought and deepvoices rumbled regularly in the spaces beyond the shawl. But heremained oblivious. At last he became aware that a face waslooking down at his. He recognized it, and immediately anuncomfortable sensation in his stomach disturbed him; he toleratedit for fifty years or so, and then he gave a little cry. Life hadresumed its seriousness.
"Black alpaca. B quality. Width 20, t.a. 22 yards," Miss Insullread out of a great book. She and Mr. Povey were checking stock.
And Mr. Povey responded, "Black alpaca B quality. Width 20, t.a.22 yards. It wants ten minutes yet." He had glanced at the clock.
"Does it?" said Constance, well knowing that it wanted tenminutes.
Mr. Povey exclaimed contemptuously. "You remember whathappened last night.
The baby did not guess that a high invisible god named SamuelPovey, whom nothing escaped, and who could do everything at once,was controlling his universe from an inconceivable distance. Onthe contrary, the baby was crying to himself, There is no God.
His weaning had reached the stage at which a baby really does notknow what will happen next. The annoyance had begun exactly threemonths after his first tooth, such being the rule of the gods, andit had grown more and more disconcerting. No sooner did heaccustom himself to a new phenomenon than it mysteriously ceased,and an old one took its place which he had utterly forgotten. Thisafternoon his mother nursed him, but not until she had foolishlyattempted to divert him from the seriousness of life by means ofgewgaws of which he was sick. Still; once at her rich breast, heforgave and forgot all. He preferred her simple natural breast tomore modern inventions. And he had no shame, no modesty. Nor hadhis mother. It was an indecent carouse at which his father andMiss Insull had to assist. But his father had shame. His fatherwould have preferred that, as Miss Insull had kindly offered tostop and work on Thursday afternoon, and as the shop was chilly,the due rotation should have brought the bottle round at half-pastfive o'clock, and not the mother's breast. He was a self-consciousparent, rather apologetic to the world, rather apt to stand offand pretend that he had nothing to do with the affair; and hegenuinely disliked that anybody should witness the intimate sceneof HIS wife feeding HIS baby. Especially Miss Insull, that prim,dark, moustached spinster! He would not have called it an outrageon Miss Insull, to force her to witness the scene, but his ideaapproached within sight of the word.
Constance blandly offered herself to the child, with theunconscious primitive savagery of a young mother, and as the babyfed, thoughts of her own mother flitted to and fro ceaselesslylike vague shapes over the deep sea of content which filled hermind. This illness of her mother's was abnormal, and the baby wasnow, for the first time perhaps, entirely normal in herconsciousness. The baby was something which could be disturbed,not something which did disturb. What a change! What a change thathad seemed impossible until its full accomplishment!
For months before the birth, she had glimpsed at nights and inother silent hours the tremendous upset. She had not allowedherself to be silly in advance; by temperament she was toosagacious, too well balanced for that; but she had had fitfulinstants of terror, when solid ground seemed to sink away fromher, and imagination shook at what faced her. Instants only!Usually she could play the comedy of sensible calmness to almostperfection. Then the appointed time drew nigh. And still shesmiled, and Samuel smiled. But the preparations, meticulous,intricate, revolutionary, belied their smiles. The intense resolveto keep Mrs. Baines, by methods scrupulous or unscrupulous, awayfrom Bursley until all was over, belied their smiles. And then thefirst pains, sharp, shocking, cruel, heralds of torture! But whenthey had withdrawn, she smiled, again, palely. Then she was inbed, full of the sensation that the whole house was inverted anddisorganized, hopelessly. And the doctor came into the room. Shesmiled at the doctor apologetically, foolishly, as if saying: "Weall come to it. Here I am." She was calm without. Oh, but what aprey of abject fear within! "I am at the edge of the precipice,"her thought ran; "in a moment I shall be over." And then thepains--not the heralds but the shattering army, endless,increasing in terror as they thundered across her. Yet she couldthink, quite clearly: "Now I'm in the middle of it. This is it,the horror that I have not dared to look at. My life's in thebalance. I may never get up again. All has at last come to pass.It seemed as if it would never come, as if this thing could nothappen to me. But at last it has come to pass!"
Ah! Some one put the twisted end of a towel into her hand again--she had loosed it; and she pulled, pulled, enough to break cables.And then she shrieked. It was for pity. It was for some one tohelp her, at any rate to take notice of her. She was dying. Hersoul was leaving her. And she was alone, panic-stricken, in themidst of a cataclysm a thousand times surpassing all that she hadimagined of sickening horror. "I cannot endure this," she thoughtpassionately. "It is impossible that I should be asked to endurethis!" And then she wept; beaten, terrorized, smashed and riven.No commonsense now! No wise calmness now! No self-respect now!Why, not even a woman now! Nothing but a kind of animalizedvictim! And then the supreme endless spasm, during which she gaveup the ghost and bade good-bye to her very self.
She was lying quite comfortable in the soft bed; idle, silly:happiness forming like a thin crust over the lava of her anguishand her fright. And by her side was the soul that had fought itsway out of her, ruthlessly; the secret disturber revealed to thelight of morning. Curious to look at! Not like any baby that shehad ever seen; red, creased, brutish! But--for some reason thatshe did not examine--she folded it in an immense tenderness.
Sam was by the bed, away from her eyes. She was so comfortable andsilly that she could not move her head nor even ask him to comeround to her eyes. She had to wait till he came.
In the afternoon the doctor returned, and astounded her by sayingthat hers had been an ideal confinement. She was too weary torebuke him for a senseless, blind, callous old man. But she knewwhat she knew. "No one will ever guess," she thought, "no one evercan guess, what I've been through! Talk as you like. I KNOW, now."
Gradually she had resumed cognizance of her household, perceivingthat it was demoralized from top to bottom, and that when the timecame to begin upon it she would not be able to settle where tobegin, even supposing that the baby were not there to monopolizeher attention. The task appalled her. Then she wanted to get up.Then she got up. What a blow to self-confidence! She went back tobed like a little scared rabbit to its hole, glad, glad to be onthe soft pillows again. She said: "Yet the time must come when Ishall be downstairs, and walking about and meeting people, andcooking and superintending the millinery." Well, it did come--except that she had to renounce the millinery to Miss Insull--butit was not the same. No, different! The baby pushed everythingelse on to another plane. He was a terrific intruder; not oneminute of her old daily life was left; he made no compromisewhatever. If she turned away her gaze from him he might pop offinto eternity and leave her.
And now she was calmly and sensibly giving him suck in presence ofMiss Insull. She was used to his importance, to the fragility ofhis organism, to waking twice every night, to being fat. She wasstrong again. The convulsive twitching that for six months hadworried her repose, had quite disappeared. The state of being amother was normal, and the baby was so normal that she could notconceive the house without him.
All in ten months!
When the baby was installed in his cot for the night, she camedownstairs and found Miss Insull and Samuel still working, andLarder than ever, but at addition sums now. She sat down, leavingthe door open at the foot of the stairs. She had embroidery inhand: a cap. And while Miss Insull and Samuel combined pounds,shillings, and pence, whispering at great speed, she bent over thedelicate, intimate, wasteful handiwork, drawing the needle withslow exactitude. Then she would raise her head and listen.
"Excuse me," said Miss Insull, "I think I hear baby crying."
"And two are eight and three are eleven. He must cry," said Mr.Povey, rapidly, without looking up.
The baby's parents did not make a practice of discussing theirdomestic existence even with Miss Insull; but Constance had tojustify herself as a mother.
"I've made perfectly sure he's comfortable," said Constance. "He'sonly crying because he fancies he's neglected. And we think hecan't begin too early to learn."
"How right you are!" said Miss Insull. "Two and carry three."
That distant, feeble, querulous, pitiful cry continuedobstinately. It continued for thirty minutes. Constance could notproceed with her work. The cry disintegrated her will, dissolvedher hard sagacity.
Without a word she crept upstairs, having carefully deposed thecap on her rocking-chair.
Mr. Povey hesitated a moment and then bounded up after her,startling Fan. He shut the door on Miss Insull, but Fan was tooquick for him. He saw Constance with her hand on the bedroom door.
"My dear girl," he protested, holding himself in. "Now what AREyou going to do?"
"I'm just listening," said Constance.
"Do be reasonable and come downstairs."
He spoke in a low voice, scarcely masking his nervous irritation,and tiptoed along the corridor towards her and up the two stepspast the gas-burner. Fan followed, wagging her tail expectant.
"Suppose he's not well?" Constance suggested.
"Pshaw!" Mr. Povey exclaimed contemptuously. "You remember whathappened last night and what you said!"
They argued, subduing their tones to the false semblance of good-will, there in the closeness of the corridor. Fan, deceived,ceased to wag her tail and then trotted away. The baby's cry,behind the door, rose to a mysterious despairing howl, which hadsuch an effect on Constance's heart that she could have walkedthrough fire to reach the baby. But Mr. Povey's will held her. Andshe rebelled, angry, hurt, resentful. Commonsense, the ideal ofmutual forbearance, had winged away from that excited pair. Itwould have assuredly ended in a quarrel, with Samuel glaring ather in black fury from the other side of a bottomless chasm, hadnot Miss Insull most surprisingly burst up the stairs.
Mr. Povey turned to face her, swallowing his emotion.
"A telegram!" said Miss Insull. "The postmaster brought it downhimself--"
he entered.Miss Insullread out of a great book. She and Mr. Povey.
"What? Mr. Derry?" asked Samuel, opening the telegram with anaffectation of majesty.
"Yes. He said it was too late for delivery by rights. But as itseemed very important ..."
Samuel scanned it and nodded gravely; then gave it to his wife.Tears came into her eyes.
"I'll get Cousin Daniel to drive me over at once," said Samuel,master of himself and of the situation.
"Wouldn't it be better to hire?" Constance suggested. She had aprejudice against Daniel.
Mr. Povey shook his head. "He offered," he replied. "I can'trefuse his offer."
"Put your thick overcoat on, dear," said Constance, in a dream,descending with him.
"I hope it isn't--" Miss Insull stopped.
"Yes it is, Miss Insull," said Samuel, deliberately.
In less than a minute he was gone.
Constance ran upstairs. But the cry had ceased. She turned thedoor-knob softly, slowly, and crept into the chamber. A night-light made large shadows among the heavy mahogany and the crimson,tasselled rep in the close-curtained room. And between the bed andthe ottoman (on which lay Samuel's newly-bought family Bible) thecot loomed in the shadows. She picked up the night-light and stoleround the bed. Yes, he had decided to fall asleep. The hazard ofdeath afar off had just defeated his devilish obstinacy. Fate hadbested him. How marvellously soft and delicate that tear-stainedcheek! How frail that tiny, tiny clenched hand! In Constance griefand joy were mystically united.