The Old Wives' Tale. Bennett Arnold
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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