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_ "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. _
Read next: BOOK I MRS. BAINES: CHAPTER IV - ELEPHANT: PART II
Read previous: Book 1. Mrs. Baines: Chapter 3. A Battle: Part 5
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