The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett (red novels .TXT) 📗

The auction commenced.

Seizing the hammer, the auctioneer gave a short biography of William Clews Mericarp, and, this pious duty accomplished, called upon a solicitor to read the conditions of sale. The solicitor complied and made a distressing exhibition of self-consciousness. The conditions of sale were very lengthy, and apparently composed in a foreign tongue; and the audience listened to this elocution with a stoical pretence of breathless interest.

Then the auctioneer put up all that extensive and commodious messuage and shop situate and being No. 4, St. Luke’s Square. Constance and Cyril moved their limbs surreptitiously, as though being at last found out. The auctioneer referred to John Baines and to Samuel Povey, with a sense of personal loss, and then expressed his pleasure in the presence of ‘the ladies;’ he meant Constance, who once more had to blush.

“Now, gentlemen,” said the auctioneer, “what do you say for these famous premises? I think I do not exaggerate when I use the word ‘famous.’”

Some one said a thousand pounds, in the terrorized voice of a delinquent.

“A thousand pounds,” repeated the auctioneer, paused, sipped, and smacked.

“Guineas,” said another voice self-accused of iniquity.

“A thousand and fifty,” said the auctioneer.

Then there was a long interval, an interval that tightened the nerves of the assembly.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” the auctioneer adjured.

The first voice said sulkily: “Eleven hundred.”

And thus the bids rose to fifteen hundred, lifted bit by bit, as it were, by the magnetic force of the auctioneer’s personality. The man was now standing up, in domination. He bent down to the solicitor’s head; they whispered together.

“Gentlemen,” said the auctioneer, “I am happy to inform you that the sale is now open.” His tone translated better than words his calm professional beatitude. Suddenly in a voice of wrath he hissed at the waiter: “Waiter, why don’t you serve these gentlemen?”

“Yes, sir; yes, sir.”

The auctioneer sat down and sipped at leisure, chatting with his clerk and the solicitor and the solicitor’s clerk.

When he rose it was as a conqueror. “Gentlemen, fifteen hundred is bid. Now, Mr. Critchlow.”

Mr. Critchlow shook his head. The auctioneer threw a courteous glance at Constance, who avoided it.

After many adjurations, he reluctantly raised his hammer, pretended to let it fall, and saved it several times.

And then Mr. Critchlow said: “And fifty.”

“Fifteen hundred and fifty is bid,” the auctioneer informed the company, electrifying the waiter once more. And when he had sipped he said, with feigned sadness: “Come, gentlemen, you surely don’t mean to let this magnificent lot go for fifteen hundred and fifty pounds?”

But they did mean that.

The hammer fell, and the auctioneer’s clerk and the solicitor’s clerk took Mr. Critchlow aside and wrote with him.

Nobody was surprised when Mr. Critchlow bought Lot No. 2, his own shop.

Constance whispered then to Cyril that she wished to leave. They left, with unnatural precautions, but instantly regained their natural demeanour in the dark street.

“Well, I never! Well, I never!” she murmured outside, astonished and disturbed.

She hated the prospect of Mr. Critchlow as a landlord. And yet she could not persuade herself to leave the place, in spite of decisions.

The sale demonstrated that football had not entirely undermined the commercial basis of society in Bursley; only two Lots had to be withdrawn.

II

On Thursday afternoon of the same week the youth whom Constance had ended by hiring for the manipulation of shutters and other jobs unsuitable for fragile women, was closing the shop. The clock had struck two. All the shutters were up except the last one, in the midst of the doorway. Miss Insull and her mistress were walking about the darkened interior, putting dustsheets well over the edges of exposed goods; the other assistants had just left. The bull-terrier had wandered into the shop as he almost invariably did at closing time—for he slept there, an efficient guard—and had lain down by the dying stove; though not venerable, he was stiffening into age.

“You can shut,” said Miss Insull to the youth.

But as the final shutter was ascending to its position, Mr. Critchlow appeared on the pavement.

“Hold on, young fellow!” Mr. Critchlow commanded, and stepped slowly, lifting up his long apron, over the horizontal shutter on which the perpendicular shutters rested in the doorway.

“Shall you be long, Mr. Critchlow?” the youth asked, posing the shutter. “Or am I to shut?”

“Shut, lad,” said Mr. Critchlow, briefly. “I’ll go out by th’ side door.”

“Here’s Mr. Critchlow!” Miss Insull called out to Constance, in a peculiar tone. And a flush, scarcely perceptible, crept very slowly over her dark features. In the twilight of the shop, lit only by a few starry holes in the shutters, and by the small side-window, not the keenest eye could have detected that flush.

“Mr. Critchlow!” Constance murmured the exclamation. She resented his future ownership of her shop. She thought he was come to play the landlord, and she determined to let him see that her mood was independent and free, that she would as lief give up the business as keep it. In particular she meant to accuse him of having deliberately deceived her as to his intentions on his previous visit.

“Well, missis!” the aged man greeted her. “We’ve made it up between us. Happen some folk’ll think we’ve taken our time, but I don’t know as that’s their affair.”

His little blinking eyes had a red border. The skin of his pale small face was wrinkled in millions of minute creases. His arms and legs were marvellously thin and sharply angular. The corners of his heliotrope lips were turned down, as usual, in a mysterious comment on the world; and his smile, as he fronted Constance with his excessive height, crowned the mystery.

Constance stared, at a loss. It surely could not after all be true, the substance of the rumours that had floated like vapours in the Square for eight years and more!

“What …?” she began.

“Me, and her!” He jerked his head in the direction of Miss Insull.

The dog had leisurely strolled forward to inspect the edges of the fiance’s trousers. Miss Insull summoned the animal with a noise of fingers, and then bent down and caressed it. A strange gesture proving the validity of Charles Critchlow’s discovery that in Maria Insull a human being was buried!

Miss Insull was, as near as any one could guess, forty years of age. For twenty-five years she had served in the shop, passing about twelve hours a day in the shop; attending regularly at least three religious services at the Wesleyan Chapel or School on Sundays, and sleeping with her mother, whom she kept. She had never earned more than thirty shillings a week, and yet her situation was considered to be exceptionally good. In the eternal fusty dusk of the shop she had gradually lost such sexual characteristics and charms as she had once possessed. She was as thin and flat as Charles Critchlow himself. It was as though her bosom had suffered from a prolonged drought at a susceptible period of development, and had never recovered. The one proof that blood ran in her veins was the pimply quality of her ruined complexion, and the pimples of that brickish expanse proved that the blood was thin and bad. Her hands and feet were large and ungainly; the skin of the fingers was roughened by coarse contacts to the texture of emery-paper. On six days a week she wore black; on the seventh a kind of discreet half-mourning. She was honest, capable, and industrious; and beyond the confines of her occupation she had no curiosity, no intelligence, no ideas. Superstitions and prejudices, deep and violent, served her for ideas; but she could incomparably sell silks and bonnets, braces and oilcloth; in widths, lengths, and prices she never erred; she never annoyed a customer, nor foolishly promised what could not be performed, nor was late nor negligent, nor disrespectful. No one knew anything about her, because there was nothing to know. Subtract the shop-assistant from her, and naught remained. Benighted and spiritually dead, she existed by habit.

But for Charles Critchlow she happened to be an illusion. He had cast eyes on her and had seen youth, innocence, virginity. During eight years the moth Charles had flitted round the lamp of her brilliance, and was now singed past escape. He might treat her with what casualness he chose; he might ignore her in public; he might talk brutally about women; he might leave her to wonder dully what he meant, for months at a stretch: but there emerged indisputable from the sum of his conduct the fact that he wanted her. He desired her; she charmed him; she was something ornamental and luxurious for which he was ready to pay—and to commit follies. He had been a widower since before she was born; to him she was a slip of a girl. All is relative in this world. As for her, she was too indifferent to refuse him. Why refuse him? Oysters do not refuse.

“I’m sure I congratulate you both,” Constance breathed, realizing the import of Mr. Critchlow’s laconic words. “I’m sure I hope you’ll be happy.”

“That’ll be all right,” said Mr. Critchlow.

“Thank you, Mrs. Povey,” said Maria Insull.

Nobody seemed to know what to say next. “It’s rather sudden,” was on Constance’s tongue, but did not achieve utterance, being patently absurd.

“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Critchlow, as though himself contemplating anew the situation.

Miss Insull gave the dog a final pat.

“So that’s settled,” said Mr. Critchlow. “Now, missis, ye want to give up this shop, don’t ye?”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Constance answered uneasily.

“Don’t tell me!” he protested. “Of course ye want to give up the shop.”

“I’ve lived here all my life,” said Constance.

“Ye’ve not lived in th’ shop all ye’re life. I said th’ shop. Listen here!” he continued. “I’ve got a proposal to make to you. You can keep on the house, and I’ll take the shop off ye’re hands. Now?” He looked at her inquiringly.

Constance was taken aback by the brusqueness of the suggestion, which, moreover, she did not understand.

“But how—” she faltered.

“Come here,” said Mr. Critchlow, impatiently, and he moved towards the house-door of the shop, behind the till.

“Come where? What do you want?” Constance demanded in a maze.

“Here!” said Mr. Critchlow, with increasing impatience. “Follow me, will ye?”

Constance obeyed. Miss Insull sidled after Constance, and the dog after Miss Insull. Mr. Critchlow went through the doorway and down the corridor, past the cutting-out room to his right. The corridor then turned at a right-angle to the left and ended at the parlour door, the kitchen steps being to the left.

Mr. Critchlow stopped short of the kitchen steps, and extended his arms, touching the walls on either side.

“Here!” he said, tapping the walls with his bony knuckles. “Here! Suppose I brick ye this up, and th’ same upstairs between th’ showroom and th’ bedroom passage, ye’ve got your house to yourself. Ye say ye’ve lived here all your life. Well, what’s to prevent ye finishing up here? The fact is,” he added, “it would only be making into two houses again what was two houses to start with, afore your time, missis.”

“And what about the shop?” cried Constance.

“Ye can sell us th’ stock at a valuation.”

Constance suddenly comprehended the scheme. Mr. Critchlow would remain the chemist, while Mrs. Critchlow became the head of the chief drapery business in the town. Doubtless they would knock a hole through the separating wall on the other side, to balance the bricking-up on this side. They must have thought it all out in detail. Constance revolted.

“Yes!” she said, a little disdainfully. “And my