The Old Wives' Tale

Samuel and Constance are at home for Christmas, and Mrs. Baines is visiting. While they’re enjoying the holiday together, a letter arrives from Paris—a Christmas card from Sophia—but it lacks any details about her life and has no return address. The story then shifts to the future, after the Poveys have been married for six years. Life has settled into a predictable routine for Constance:

Gradually she had gained skill and use in the management of her household […]. Gradually she had constructed a chart of [Mr. Povey’s] individuality, with the submerged rocks and perilous currents all marked, so that she could now voyage unalarmed on those seas. But nothing happened (195).

Samuel has a cousin, Daniel, who owns a confectioner’s shop in the town square, and Samuel falls more and more into his cousin’s company. Daniel is widely liked for his jolly and gregarious nature, but Samuel (and others) regard him somewhat warily because he too habitually frequents pubs and bars. Daniel’s influence begins to rub off on Samuel, though not to a worrisome extent. Then, Samuel and Constance discover that she’s pregnant, and although they hadn’t shown much interest in having children, the prospect brings them joy: “There it was, the incredible, incomprehensible future—coming!” (203).

The narrative resumes after the baby’s birth. Constance now nearly 29. Mrs. Baines’s health has been deteriorating, and Samuel must travel back and forth to Axe to attend to her needs. Eventually, word comes that Mrs. Baines has passed away, and Constance experiences the sad news in the context of her delight in her baby boy, Cyril, who has now become the center of her universe: “In Constance grief and joy were mystically united” (214).

The narrative skips ahead to a party that Constance throws for Cyril, who’s now four and a half years old. While Cyril is a typical boy in many ways, he’s already showing a strain of self-centeredness. At the party, Cyril assaults a young girl who takes the last piece of cake, which alarms and embarrasses Constance. Rather than accept his punishment, Cyril runs away, and his parents mount a frantic search to find him. Samuel asserts that he must handle the child’s discipline, but Constance feels caught between the other two:

Always she would be between them, to reconcile them, and to be crushed by their impact. Always she would have to bear the burden of both of them. There could be no ease for her, no surcease from a tremendous preoccupation and responsibility (223).

The narrative moves ahead again. Cyril is nine, and some of the troubling aspects of his character continue to show, though his parents are often oblivious. They view their son in terms of his virtues and possibilities. Cyril is a promising student in many ways, excelling in art and sports. By the time he’s 13, however, the contradictions of his character are becoming unmistakable: “And his parents, who despite their notion of themselves as wide-awake parents were a simple pair, never suspected that his heart, conceived to be still pure, had become a crawling, horrible mass of corruption” (235).

The tensions in Cyril’s character come to a head when Samuel is visited by the schoolmaster. Some of the boys at the school have been observed smoking, apparently having bought pipes and cigars for themselves. Samuel knows that this can be true of Cyril only if he has obtained money somewhere, so Samuel plants some marked silver coins in the family till and then confronts Cyril when the money goes missing. Samuel rebukes him harshly—“So Cyril is a liar and a thief” (240)—but knows that he’s partly to blame himself, having set a poor example by exposing the family to his cousin Daniel’s habits.