The day sanctioned by custom in the Five Towns for the making of pastry1 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 marketing2 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 luminous3 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 panes4 were small, and about half of them were of the "knot" kind, through which no object could be distinguished5; 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 vaults6, and of passing legs and skirts. A strong wire grating prevented any excess of illumination, and also protected the glass from the caprices of wayfarers7 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 ornamented8 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 doorway9, without a door, leading to two larders10, dimmer even than the kitchen, vague retreats made visible by whitewash11, where bowls of milk, dishes of cold bones, and remainders of fruit-pies, reposed12 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 abruptly13 in the common dailiness of Brougham Street, a sense which Constance and Sophia had acquired in infancy14, remained with them almost unimpaired as they grew old.
Mrs. Baines wore black alpaca, shielded by a white apron15 whose string drew attention to the amplitude16 of her waist. Her sleeves were turned up, and her hands, as far as the knuckles17, 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, shredded18 apples, sugar, and other things. Those rosy19 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 apparently20 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?"
"Helping21 Maggie to make Mr. Povey's bed."
"Oh!"
Though fat, Mrs. Baines was a comely22 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 culled23 by her husband from the moorland town of Axe24, 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 thoroughly25 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 wields26 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 justifiably27 preserved a certain condescension28 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 scrutinized29 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 apprehension30.
"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 naught31 of lard, was unknown in that kitchen on Friday mornings. She doubled the expanse of paste on itself and rolled the butter in--supreme32 operation!
"Constance has told you--about leaving school?" said Mrs. Baines, in the vein33 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 decided34 in any case that Constance was to leave, it's really much simpler that you should both leave together."
"Mother," said Sophia, rattling35 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 imploring36 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 rebounded37 from the ash-tin. Sophia hurriedly replaced it on the rack.
"Then what SHALL you do?" Mrs. Baines proceeded, conquering the annoyance38 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 kindly39 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 pretensions40 which parents of those days assumed quite sincerely and which every good child with meekness41 accepted.
Sophia was not a good child, and she obstinately42 denied in her heart the cardinal43 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 passionately44.
"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 systematically45 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 phenomena46 which seriously affected47 Mrs. Baines; she was used to them and had come to regard them as somehow the inevitable48 accompaniment of Sophia's beauty, as the penalty of that surpassing charm which occasionally emanated49 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? Orphans50, 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 vocation51 of chauffeur52.
"It would take you too much away from home," said Mrs. Baines, achieving a second pie.
She spoke53 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 erratic54 temperament55, she kept her presence of mind sufficiently56 well to behave with diplomatic smoothness. It was undoubtedly57 humiliating to a mother to be forced to use diplomacy58 in dealing59 with a girl in short sleeves. In HER day mothers had been autocrats60. But Sophia was Sophia.
"What if it did?" Sophia curtly61 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 unprecedented62 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 applied63.
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 drawn64. 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, enunciated65 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 commotion66 of pails resounded67 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 obsessed68 by a ravening69 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 eavesdropper70 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.
收听单词发音 |
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pastry
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| n.油酥面团，酥皮糕点 | |
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marketing
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| n.行销，在市场的买卖，买东西 | |
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luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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panes
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| 窗玻璃( pane的名词复数 ) | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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vaults
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| n.拱顶( vault的名词复数 )；地下室；撑物跳高；墓穴 | |
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wayfarers
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| n.旅人，（尤指）徒步旅行者( wayfarer的名词复数 ) | |
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ornamented
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| adj.花式字体的v.装饰，点缀，美化( ornament的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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larders
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| n.（家中的）食物贮藏室，食物橱( larder的名词复数 ) | |
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whitewash
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| v.粉刷，掩饰；n.石灰水，粉刷，掩饰 | |
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reposed
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| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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infancy
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| n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期 | |
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apron
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| n.围裙；工作裙 | |
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amplitude
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| n.广大；充足；振幅 | |
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knuckles
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| n.（指人）指关节( knuckle的名词复数 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝v.（指人）指关节( knuckle的第三人称单数 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝 | |
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shredded
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| shred的过去式和过去分词 | |
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rosy
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| adj.美好的，乐观的，玫瑰色的 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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comely
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| adj.漂亮的，合宜的 | |
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culled
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| v.挑选，剔除( cull的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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axe
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| n.斧子；v.用斧头砍，削减 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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wields
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| 手持着使用（武器、工具等）( wield的第三人称单数 )； 具有； 运用（权力）； 施加（影响） | |
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justifiably
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| adv.无可非议地 | |
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condescension
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| n.自以为高人一等，贬低(别人) | |
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scrutinized
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| v.仔细检查，详审( scrutinize的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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naught
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| n.无，零 [=nought] | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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vein
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| n.血管，静脉；叶脉，纹理；情绪；vt.使成脉络 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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rattling
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| adj. 格格作响的, 活泼的, 很好的 adv. 极其, 很, 非常 动词rattle的现在分词 | |
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imploring
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| 恳求的，哀求的 | |
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rebounded
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| 弹回( rebound的过去式和过去分词 )； 反弹； 产生反作用； 未能奏效 | |
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annoyance
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| n.恼怒，生气，烦恼 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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pretensions
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| 自称( pretension的名词复数 )； 自命不凡； 要求； 权力 | |
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meekness
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| n.温顺，柔和 | |
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obstinately
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| ad.固执地，顽固地 | |
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cardinal
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| n.(天主教的)红衣主教；adj.首要的，基本的 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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systematically
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| adv.有系统地 | |
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phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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emanated
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| v.从…处传出，传出( emanate的过去式和过去分词 )；产生，表现，显示 | |
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orphans
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| 孤儿( orphan的名词复数 ) | |
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vocation
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| n.职业，行业 | |
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chauffeur
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| n.(受雇于私人或公司的)司机；v.为…开车 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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erratic
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| adj.古怪的，反复无常的，不稳定的 | |
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temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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diplomacy
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| n.外交；外交手腕，交际手腕 | |
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dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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autocrats
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| n.独裁统治者( autocrat的名词复数 )；独断专行的人 | |
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curtly
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| adv.简短地 | |
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unprecedented
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| adj.无前例的，新奇的 | |
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applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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enunciated
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| v.（清晰地）发音( enunciate的过去式和过去分词 )；确切地说明 | |
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commotion
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| n.骚动，动乱 | |
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resounded
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| v.（指声音等）回荡于某处( resound的过去式和过去分词 )；产生回响；（指某处）回荡着声音 | |
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obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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ravening
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| a.贪婪而饥饿的 | |
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eavesdropper
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| 偷听者 | |
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