The day sanctioned by custom in the Five Towns for the making of
pastry is Saturday. But Mrs. Baines made her pastry on Friday,
because Saturday afternoon was, of course, a busy time in the
shop. It is true that Mrs. Baines made her pastry in the morning,
and that Saturday morning in the shop was scarcely different from
any other morning. Nevertheless, Mrs. Baines made her pastry on
Friday morning instead of Saturday morning because Saturday
afternoon was a busy time in the shop. She was thus free to do her
marketing without breath-taking flurry on Saturday morning.
On the morning after Sophia's first essay in dentistry, therefore,
Mrs. Baines was making her pastry in the underground kitchen. This
kitchen, Maggie's cavern-home, had the mystery of a church, and on
dark days it had the mystery of a crypt. The stone steps leading
down to it from the level of earth were quite unlighted. You felt
for them with the feet of faith, and when you arrived in the
kitchen, the kitchen, by contrast, seemed luminous and gay; the
architect may have considered and intended this effect of the
staircase. The kitchen saw day through a wide, shallow window
whose top touched the ceiling and whose bottom had been out of the
girls' reach until long after they had begun to go to school. Its
panes were small, and about half of them were of the "knot" kind,
through which no object could be distinguished; the other half
were of a later date, and stood for the march of civilization. The
view from the window consisted of the vast plate-glass windows of
the newly built Sun vaults, and of passing legs and skirts. A
strong wire grating prevented any excess of illumination, and also
protected the glass from the caprices of wayfarers in King Street.
Boys had a habit of stopping to kick with their full strength at
the grating.
Forget-me-nots on a brown field ornamented the walls of the
kitchen. Its ceiling was irregular and grimy, and a beam ran
across it; in this beam were two hooks; from these hooks had once
depended the ropes of a swing, much used by Constance and Sophia
in the old days before they were grown up. A large range stood out
from the wall between the stairs and the window. The rest of the
furniture comprised a table--against the wall opposite the range--
a cupboard, and two Windsor chairs. Opposite the foot of the steps
was a doorway, without a door, leading to two larders, dimmer even
than the kitchen, vague retreats made visible by whitewash, where
bowls of milk, dishes of cold bones, and remainders of fruit-pies,
reposed on stillages; in the corner nearest the kitchen was a
great steen in which the bread was kept. Another doorway on the
other side of the kitchen led to the first coal-cellar, where was
also the slopstone and tap, and thence a tunnel took you to the
second coal-cellar, where coke and ashes were stored; the tunnel
proceeded to a distant, infinitesimal yard, and from the yard, by
ways behind Mr. Critchlow's shop, you could finally emerge,
astonished, upon Brougham Street. The sense of the vast-obscure of
those regions which began at the top of the kitchen steps and
ended in black corners of larders or abruptly in the common
dailiness of Brougham Street, a sense which Constance and Sophia
had acquired in infancy, remained with them almost unimpaired as
they grew old.
Mrs. Baines wore black alpaca, shielded by a white apron whose
string drew attention to the amplitude of her waist. Her sleeves
were turned up, and her hands, as far as the knuckles, covered
with damp flour. Her ageless smooth paste-board occupied a corner
of the table, and near it were her paste-roller, butter, some pie-
dishes, shredded apples, sugar, and other things. Those rosy hands
were at work among a sticky substance in a large white bowl.
"Mother, are you there?" she heard a voice from above.
"Yes, my chuck."
Footsteps apparently reluctant and hesitating clinked on the
stairs, and Sophia entered the kitchen.
"Put this curl straight," said Mrs. Baines, lowering her head
slightly and holding up her floured hands, which might not touch
anything but flour. "Thank you. It bothered me. And now stand out
of my light. I'm in a hurry. I must get into the shop so that I
can send Mr. Povey off to the dentist's. What is Constance doing?"
"Helping Maggie to make Mr. Povey's bed."
"Oh!"
Though fat, Mrs. Baines was a comely woman, with fine brown hair,
and confidently calm eyes that indicated her belief in her own
capacity to accomplish whatever she could be called on to
accomplish. She looked neither more nor less than her age, which
was forty-five. She was not a native of the district, having been
culled by her husband from the moorland town of Axe, twelve miles
off. Like nearly all women who settle in a strange land upon
marriage, at the bottom of her heart she had considered herself
just a trifle superior to the strange land and its ways. This
feeling, confirmed by long experience, had never left her. It was
this feeling which induced her to continue making her own pastry--
with two thoroughly trained "great girls" in the house! Constance
could make good pastry, but it was not her mother's pastry. In
pastry-making everything can be taught except the "hand," light
and firm, which wields the roller. One is born with this hand, or
without it. And if one is born without it, the highest flights of
pastry are impossible. Constance was born without it. There were
days when Sophia seemed to possess it; but there were other days
when Sophia's pastry was uneatable by any one except Maggie. Thus
Mrs. Baines, though intensely proud and fond of her daughters, had
justifiably preserved a certain condescension towards them. She
honestly doubted whether 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 spoilt you, and instead of
getting better as you grow up, you're getting worse. Now let me
hear no more of this, please. I wish you would imitate your sister
a little more. Of course if you won't do your share in the shop,
no one can make you. If you choose to be an idler about the house,
we shall have to endure it. We can only advise you for your own
good. But as for this ..." She stopped, and let silence speak,
and then finished: "Let me hear no more of it."
It was a powerful and impressive speech, enunciated clearly in
such a tone as Mrs. Baines had not employed since dismissing a
young lady assistant five years ago for light conduct.
"But, mother--"
A commotion of pails resounded at the top of the stone steps. It
was Maggie in descent from the bedrooms. Now, the Baines family
passed its life in doing its best to keep its affairs to itself,
the assumption being that Maggie and all the shop-staff (Mr. Povey
possibly excepted) were obsessed by a ravening appetite for that
which did not concern them. Therefore the voices of the Baineses
always died away, or fell to a hushed, mysterious whisper,
whenever the foot of the eavesdropper was heard.
Mrs. Baines put a floured finger to her double chin. "That will
do," said she, with finality.
Maggie appeared, and Sophia, with a brusque precipitation of
herself, vanished upstairs.
Read next: BOOK I MRS. BAINES#CHAPTER III - A BATTLE#PART II
Read previous: BOOK I MRS. BAINES#CHAPTER II - THE TOOTH#PART III
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