Arnold Bennett Fullscreen A Tale of Old Women (1908)

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What interested her was that she had three men to feed wholly or partially, and that the price of eatables was rising.

She bought eatables.

She bought fifty pecks of potatoes at a franc a peck, and another fifty pecks at a franc and a quarter--double the normal price; ten hams at two and a half francs a pound; a large quantity of tinned vegetables and fruits, a sack of flour, rice, biscuits, coffee, Lyons sausage, dried prunes, dried figs, and much wood and charcoal.

But the chief of her purchases was cheese, of which her mother used to say that bread and cheese and water made a complete diet.

Many of these articles she obtained from her grocer.

All of them, except the flour and the biscuits, she stored in the cellar belonging to the flat; after several days' delay, for the Parisian workmen were too elated by the advent of a republic to stoop to labour, she caused a new lock to be fixed on the cellar-door.

Her activities were the sensation of the house. Everybody admired, but no one imitated.

One morning, on going to do her marketing, she found a notice across the shuttered windows of her creamery in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette:

"Closed for want of milk."

The siege had begun.

It was in the closing of the creamery that the siege was figured for her; in this, and in eggs at five sous a piece.

She went elsewhere for her milk and paid a franc a litre for it.

That evening she told her lodgers that the price of meals would be doubled, and that if any gentleman thought that he could get equally good meals elsewhere, he was at liberty to get them elsewhere.

Her position was strengthened by the appearance of another candidate for a room, a friend of Niepce.

She at once offered him her own room, at a hundred and fifty francs a month.

"You see," she said, "there is a piano in it."

"But I don't play the piano," the man protested, shocked at the price.

"That is not my fault," she said.

He agreed to pay the price demanded for the room because of the opportunity of getting good meals much cheaper than in the restaurants.

Like M. Niepce, he was a 'siege-widower,' his wife having been put under shelter in Brittany.

Sophia took to the servant's bedroom on the sixth floor.

It measured nine feet by seven, and had no window save a skylight; but Sophia was in a fair way to realize a profit of at least four pounds a week, after paying for everything.

On the night when she installed herself in that chamber, amid a world of domestics and poor people, she worked very late, and the rays of her candles shot up intermittently through the skylight into a black heaven; at intervals she flitted up and down the stairs with a candle.

Unknown to her a crowd gradually formed opposite the house in the street, and at about one o'clock in the morning a file of soldiers woke the concierge and invaded the courtyard, and every window was suddenly populated with heads.

Sophia was called upon to prove that she was not a spy signalling to the Prussians.

Three quarters of an hour passed before her innocence was established and the staircases cleared of uniforms and dishevelled curiosity.

The childish, impossible unreason of the suspicion against her completed in Sophia's mind the ruin of the reputation of the French people as a sensible race.

She was extremely caustic the next day to her boarders.

Except for this episode, the frequency of military uniforms in the streets, the price of food, and the fact that at least one house in four was flying either the ambulance flag or the flag of a foreign embassy (in an absurd hope of immunity from the impending bombardment) the siege did not exist for Sophia.

The men often talked about their guard-duty, and disappeared for a day or two to the ramparts, but she was too busy to listen to them.

She thought of nothing but her enterprise, which absorbed all her powers.

She arose at six a.m., in the dark, and by seven-thirty M. Niepce and his friend had been served with breakfast, and much general work was already done.

At eight o'clock she went out to market.

When asked why she continued to buy at a high price, articles of which she had a store, she would reply:

"I am keeping all that till things are much dearer."

This was regarded as astounding astuteness.

On the fifteenth of October she paid the quarter's rent of the flat, four hundred francs, and was accepted as tenant.

Her ears were soon quite accustomed to the sound of cannon, and she felt that she had always been a citizeness of Paris, and that Paris had always been besieged.

She did not speculate about the end of the siege; she lived from day to day.

Occasionally she had a qualm of fear, when the firing grew momentarily louder, or when she heard that battles had been fought in such and such a suburb.

But then she said it was absurd to be afraid when you were with a couple of million people, all in the same plight as yourself.

She grew reconciled to everything.

She even began to like her tiny bedroom, partly because it was so easy to keep warm (the question of artificial heat was growing acute in Paris), and partly because it ensured her privacy.

Down in the flat, whatever was done or said in one room could be more or less heard in all the others, owing to the prevalence of doors.

Her existence, in the first half of November, had become regular with a monotony almost absolute.

Only the number of meals served to her boarders varied slightly from day to day.

All these repasts, save now and then one in the evening, were carried into the bedrooms by the charwoman.

Sophia did not allow herself to be seen much, except in the afternoons.

Though Sophia continued to increase her prices, and was now selling her stores at an immense profit, she never approached the prices current outside.

She was very indignant against the exploitation of Paris by its shopkeepers, who had vast supplies of provender, and were hoarding for the rise.