________________________________________________
_ The next morning, after a night which she could not have
described, Constance found herself lying flat in bed, with all her
limbs stretched out straight. She was conscious that her face was
covered with perspiration. The bell-rope hung within a foot of her
head, but she had decided that, rather than move in order to pull
it, she would prefer to wait for assistance until Mary came of her
own accord. Her experiences of the night had given her a dread of
the slightest movement; anything was better than movement. She
felt vaguely ill, with a kind of subdued pain, and she was very
thirsty and somewhat cold. She knew that her left arm and leg were
extraordinarily tender to the touch. When Mary at length entered,
clean and fresh and pale in all her mildness, she found the
mistress the colour of a duck's egg, with puffed features, and a
strangely anxious expression.
"Mary," said Constance, "I feel so queer. Perhaps you'd better run
up and tell Miss Holl, and ask her to telephone for Dr. Stirling."
This was the beginning of Constance's last illness. Mary most
impressively informed Miss Holl that her mistress had been out on
the previous afternoon in spite of her sciatica, and Lily
telephoned the fact to the Doctor. Lily then came down to take
charge of Constance. But she dared not upbraid the invalid.
"Is the result out?" Constance murmured.
"Oh yes," said Lily, lightly. "There's a majority of over twelve
hundred against Federation. Great excitement last night! I told
you yesterday morning that Federation was bound to be beaten."
Lily spoke as though the result throughout had been a certainty;
her tone to Constance indicated: "Surely you don't imagine that I
should have told you untruths yesterday morning merely to cheer
you up!" The truth was, however, that towards the end of the day
nearly every one had believed Federation to be carried. The result
had caused great surprise. Only the profoundest philosophers had
not been surprised to see that the mere blind, deaf, inert forces
of reaction, with faulty organization, and quite deprived of the
aid of logic, had proved far stronger than all the alert
enthusiasm arrayed against them. It was a notable lesson to
reformers.
"Oh!" murmured Constance, startled. She was relieved; but she
would have liked the majority to be smaller. Moreover, her
interest in the question had lessened. It was her limbs that pre-
occupied her now.
"You look tired," she said feebly to Lily.
"Do I?" said Lily, shortly, hiding the fact that she had spent
half the night in tending Dick Povey, who, in a sensational
descent near Macclesfield, had been dragged through the tops of a
row of elm trees to the detriment of an elbow-joint; the
professional aeronaut had broken a leg.
Then Dr. Stirling came.
"I'm afraid my sciatica's worse, Doctor," said Constance,
apologetically.
"Did you expect it to be better?" said he, gazing at her sternly.
She knew then that some one had saved her the trouble of
confessing her escapade.
However, her sciatica was not worse. Her sciatica had not behaved
basely. What she was suffering from was the preliminary advances
of an attack of acute rheumatism. She had indeed selected the
right month and weather for her escapade! Fatigued by pain, by
nervous agitation, and by the immense moral and physical effort
needed to carry her to the Town Hall and back, she had caught a
chill, and had got her feet damp. In such a subject as herself it
was enough. The doctor used only the phrase 'acute rheumatism.'
Constance did not know that acute rheumatism was precisely the
same thing as that dread disease, rheumatic fever, and she was not
informed. She did not surmise for a considerable period that her
case was desperately serious. The doctor explained the summoning
of two nurses, and the frequency of his own visits, by saying that
his chief anxiety was to minimise the fearful pain as much as
possible, and that this end could only be secured by incessant
watchfulness. The pain was certainly formidable. But then
Constance was well habituated to formidable pain. Sciatica, at its
most active, cannot be surpassed even by rheumatic fever.
Constance had been in nearly continuous pain for years. Her
friends, however sympathetic, could not appreciate the intensity
of her torture. They were just as used to it as she was. And the
monotony and particularity of her complaints (slight though the
complaints were in comparison with their cause) necessarily
blunted the edge of compassion. "Mrs. Povey and her sciatica
again! Poor thing, she really is a little tedious!" They were apt
not to realise that sciatica is even more tedious than complaints
about sciatica.
She asked one day that Dick should come to see her. He came with
his arm in a sling, and told her charily that he had hurt his
elbow through dropping his stick and slipping downstairs.
"Lily never told me," said Constance, suspiciously.
"Oh, it's simply nothing!" said Dick. Not even the sick room could
chasten him of his joy in the magnificent balloon adventure.
"I do hope you won't go running any risks!" said Constance.
"Never you fear!" said he. "I shall die in my bed."
And he was absolutely convinced that he would, and not as the
result of any accident, either! The nurse would not allow him to
remain in the room.
Lily suggested that Constance might like her to write to Cyril. It
was only in order to make sure of Cyril's correct address. He had
gone on a tour through Italy with some friends of whom Constance
knew nothing. The address appeared to be very uncertain; there
were several addresses, poste restante in various towns. Cyril had
sent postcards to his mother. Dick and Lily went to the post-
office and telegraphed to foreign parts. Though Constance was too
ill to know how ill she was, though she had no conception of the
domestic confusion caused by her illness, her brain was often
remarkably clear, and she could reflect in long, sane meditations
above the uneasy sea of her pain. In the earlier hours of the
night, after the nurses had been changed, and Mary had gone to bed
exhausted with stair-climbing, and Lily Holl was recounting the
day to Dick up at the grocer's, and the day-nurse was already
asleep, and the night-nurse had arranged the night, then, in the
faintly-lit silence of the chamber, Constance would argue with
herself for an hour at a time. She frequently thought of Sophia.
In spite of the fact that Sophia was dead she still pitied Sophia
as a woman whose life had been wasted. This idea of Sophia's
wasted and sterile life, and of the far-reaching importance of
adhering to principles, recurred to her again and again. "Why did
she run away with him? If only she had not run away!" she would
repeat. And yet there had been something so fine about Sophia!
Which made Sophia's case all the more pitiable! Constance never
pitied herself. She did not consider that Fate had treated her
very badly. She was not very discontented with herself. The
invincible commonsense of a sound nature prevented her, in her
best moments, from feebly dissolving in self-pity. She had lived
in honesty and kindliness for a fair number of years, and she had
tasted triumphant hours. She was justly respected, she had a
position, she had dignity, she was well-off. She possessed, after
all, a certain amount of quiet self-conceit. There existed nobody
to whom she would 'knuckle down,' or could be asked to 'knuckle
down.' True, she was old! So were thousands of other people in
Bursley. She was in pain. So there were thousands of other people.
With whom would she be willing to exchange lots? She had many
dissatisfactions. But she rose superior to them. When she surveyed
her life, and life in general, she would think, with a sort of
tart but not sour cheerfulness: "Well, that is what life is!"
Despite her habit of complaining about domestic trifles, she was,
in the essence of her character, 'a great body for making the best
of things.' Thus she did not unduly bewail her excursion to the
Town Hall to vote, which the sequel had proved to be ludicrously
supererogatory. "How was I to know?" she said.
The one matter in which she had gravely to reproach herself was
her indulgent spoiling of Cyril after the death of Samuel Povey.
But the end of her reproaches always was: "I expect I should do
the same again! And probably it wouldn't have made any difference
if I hadn't spoiled him!" And she had paid tenfold for the
weakness. She loved Cyril, but she had no illusions about him; she
saw both sides of him. She remembered all the sadness and all the
humiliations which he had caused her. Still, her affection was
unimpaired. A son might be worse than Cyril was; he had admirable
qualities. She did not resent his being away from England while
she lay ill. "If it was serious," she said, "he would not lose a
moment." And Lily and Dick were a treasure to her. In those two
she really had been lucky. She took great pleasure in
contemplating the splendour of the gift with which she would mark
her appreciation of them at their approaching wedding. The secret
attitude of both of them towards her was one of good-natured
condescension, expressed in the tone in which they would say to
each other, 'the old lady.' Perhaps they would have been startled
to know that Constance lovingly looked down on both of them. She
had unbounded admiration for their hearts; but she thought that
Dick was a little too brusque, a little too clownish, to be quite
a gentleman. And though Lily was perfectly ladylike, in
Constance's opinion she lacked backbone, or grit, or independence
of spirit. Further, Constance considered that the disparity of age
between them was excessive. It is to be doubted whether, when all
was said, Constance had such a very great deal to learn from the
self-confident wisdom of these young things.
After a period of self-communion, she would sometimes fall into a
shallow delirium. In all her delirium she was invariably wandering
to and fro, lost, in the long underground passage leading from the
scullery past the coal-cellar and the cinder-cellar to the
backyard. And she was afraid of the vast-obscure of those regions,
as she had been in her infancy.
It was not acute rheumatism, but a supervening pericarditis that
in a few days killed her. She died in the night, alone with the
night-nurse. By a curious chance the Wesleyan minister, hearing
that she was seriously ill, had called on the previous day. She
had not asked for him; and this pastoral visit, from a man who had
always said that the heavy duties of the circuit rendered pastoral
visits almost impossible, made her think. In the evening she had
requested that Fossette should be brought upstairs.
Thus she was turned out of her house, but not by the Midland
Clothiers Company. Old people said to one another: "Have you heard
that Mrs. Povey is dead? Eh, dear me! There'll be no one left
soon." These old people were bad prophets. Her friends genuinely
regretted her, and forgot the tediousness of her sciatica. They
tried, in their sympathetic grief, to picture to themselves all
that she had been through in her life. Possibly they imagined that
they succeeded in this imaginative attempt. But they did not
succeed. No one but Constance could realize all that Constance had
been through, and all that life had meant to her.
Cyril was not at the funeral. He arrived three days later. (As he
had no interest in the love affairs of Dick and Lily, the couple
were robbed of their wedding-present. The will, fifteen years old,
was in Cyril's favour.) But the immortal Charles Critchlow came to
the funeral, full of calm, sardonic glee, and without being asked.
Though fabulously senile, he had preserved and even improved his
faculty for enjoying a catastrophe. He now went to funerals with
gusto, contentedly absorbed in the task of burying his friends one
by one. It was he who said, in his high, trembling, rasping,
deliberate voice: "It's a pity her didn't live long enough to hear
as Federation is going on after all! That would ha' worritted
her." (For the unscrupulous advocates of Federation had discovered
a method of setting at naught the decisive result of the
referendum, and that day's Signal was fuller than ever of
Federation.)
When the short funeral procession started, Mary and the infirm
Fossette (sole relic of the connection between the Baines family
and Paris) were left alone in the house. The tearful servant
prepared the dog's dinner and laid it before her in the customary
soup-plate in the customary corner. Fossette sniffed at it, and
then walked away and lay down with a dog's sigh in front of the
kitchen fire. She had been deranged in her habits that day; she
was conscious of neglect, due to events which passed her
comprehension. And she did not like it. She was hurt, and her
appetite was hurt. However, after a few minutes, she began to
reconsider the matter. She glanced at the soup-plate, and, on the
chance that it might after all contain something worth inspection,
she awkwardly balanced herself on her old legs and went to it
again.
THE END.
The Old Wives' Tale, by Arnold Bennett _
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