Ford Madox Ford - A Man Could Stand Up

A certain amount of blood came into the lady's pinkish features. She had certainly been ruffled when Valentine had permitted her voice to sound so long alongside her own; for, although Valentine knew next to nothing about the Head's likes or dislikes she had once or twice before seen her evince marked distaste on being interrupted in one of her formal sentences.

Miss Wanostrocht said with a certain coldness:

'I'm speaking at present...I'm allowing myself the liberty--as a much older woman--in the capacity of a friend of your father. I have been, in short, trying to recall to you all that you owe to yourself as being an example of his training!'

Involuntarily Valentine's lips formed themselves for a low whistle of incredulity. She said to herself:

'By Jove! I am in the middle of a nasty affair...This is a sort of professional cross-examination.'

'I am in a way glad,' the lady was now continuing, 'that you take that line...I mean of defending Mrs Tietjens with such heat against Lady Macmaster. Lady Macmaster appears to dislike Mrs Tietjens, but I am bound to say that she appears to be in the right of it. I mean of her dislike. Lady Macmaster is a serious personality, and even on her public record Mrs Tietjens appears to be very much the reverse. No doubt you wish to be loyal to your...friends, but...'

'We appear,' Valentine said, 'to be getting into an extraordinary muddle.'

She added:

'I haven't, as you seem to think, been defending Mrs Tietjens. I would have. I would at any time. I have always thought of her as beautiful and kind. But I heard you say the words: " has been behaving very badly ," and I thought you meant that Captain Tietjens had. I denied it. If you meant that his wife has, I deny it, too. She's an admirable wife...and mother...that sort of thing, for all I know...

She said to herself:

'Now why do I say that? What's Hecuba to me?' and then:

'It's to defend his honour, of course...I'm trying to present Captain Tietjens as English Country Gentleman complete with admirably arranged establishment, stables, kennels, spouse, offspring...That's a queer thing to want to do!'

Miss Wanostrocht who had breathed deeply said now:

'I'm extremely glad to hear that. Lady Macmaster certainly said that Mrs Tietjens was--let us say--at least a neglectful wife...Vain, you know; idle; overdressed...All that...And you appeared to defend Mrs Tietjens.'

'She's a smart woman in smart Society,' Valentine said, 'but it's with her husband's concurrence. She has a right to be...

'We shouldn't,' Miss Wanostrocht said, 'be in the extraordinary muddle to which you referred if you did not so continually interrupt me. I was trying to say that, for you, an inexperienced girl, brought up in a sheltered home, no pitfall could be more dangerous than a man with a wife who neglected her duties!'

Valentine said:

'You will have to excuse my interrupting you. It is, you know, rather more my funeral than yours.'

Miss Wanostrocht said quickly:

'You can't say that. You don't know how ardently...Valentine said:

'Yes, yes...Your schwärm for my father's memory and all...But my father couldn't bring it about that I should lead a sheltered life...I'm about as experienced as any girl of the lower classes...No doubt it was his doing, but don't make any mistakes.'

She added:

'Still, it's I that's the corpse. You're conducting the inquest. So it's more fun for you.'

Miss Wanostrocht had grown slightly pale:

'If; if ...' she stammered slightly, 'by "experience" you mean...'

'I don't,' Valentine exclaimed, 'and you have no right to infer that I do on the strength of a conversation you've had, but shouldn't have had, with one of the worst tongues in London...I mean that my father left us so that I had to earn my and my mother's living as a servant for some months after his death. That was what his training came to. But I can look after myself...In consequence...

Miss Wanostrocht had thrown herself back in her chair.

'But...' she exclaimed: she had grown completely pale--like discoloured wax. 'There was a subscription...We...' She began again: 'We knew that he hadn't...'

'You subscribed,' Valentine said, 'to purchase his library and presented it to his wife...who had nothing to eat but what my wages as a tweeny maid got for her.' But before the pallor of the other lady she tried to add a touch of generosity: 'Of course the subscribers wanted, very naturally, to preserve as much as they could of his personality. A man's books are very much himself. That was all right.' She added: 'All the same I had that training: in a suburban basement. So you cannot teach me a great deal about the shady in life. I was in the family of a Middlesex County Councillor. In Ealing.'

Miss Wanostrocht said faintly:

'This is very dreadful!'

'It isn't really!' Valentine said. 'I wasn't badly treated as tweeny maids go. It would have been better if the Mistress hadn't been a constant invalid and the cook constantly drunk...After that I did a little office work. For the suffragettes. That was after old Mr Tietjens came back from abroad and gave mother some work on a paper he owned. We scrambled along then, somehow. Old Mr Tietjens was father's greatest friend, so father's side, as you might say, turned up trumps--If you like to think that to console you...

Miss Wanostrocht was bending her face down over her table, presumably to hide a little of it from Valentine or to avoid the girl's eyes.

Valentine went on:

'One knows all about the conflict between a man's private duties and his public achievements. But with a very little less of the flamboyant in his life my father might have left us very much better off. It isn't what I want --to be a cross between a sergeant in the army and an upper housemaid. Any more than I wanted to be an under one.'

Miss Wanostrocht uttered an 'Oh!' of pain. She exclaimed rapidly:

'It was your moral rather than your mere athletic influence that made me so glad to have you here...It was because I felt that you did not set such a high value on the physical...'

'Well, you aren't going to have me here much longer,' Valentine said. 'Not an instant more than I can in decency help. I'm going to...

She said to herself:

'What on earth am I going to do?...What do I want?'

She wanted to lie in a hammock beside a blue, tideless sea and think about Tibullus...There was no nonsense about her. She did not want to engage in intellectual pursuits herself. She had not the training. But she intended to enjoy the more luxurious forms of the intellectual products of others...That appeared to be the moral of the day!

And, looking rather minutely at Miss Wanostrocht's inclined face, she wondered if, in the history of the world, there had ever been such another day. Had Miss Wanostrocht, for instance, ever known what it was to have a man come back? Ah, but amid the tumult of a million other men coming back! A collective impulse to slacken off! Immense! Softening!

Miss Wanostrocht had apparently loved her father. No doubt in company with fifty damsels. Did they even get a collective kick out of that affair? It was even possible that she had spoken as she had... pour cause . Warning her, Valentine, against the deleterious effect of being connected with a man whose wife was unsatisfactory...Because the fifty damsels had all, in duty bound, thought that her mother was an unsatisfactory wife for the brilliant, greyblack-haired Eminence with the figure of a stripling that her father had been...They had probably thought that, without the untidy figure of Mrs Wannop as a weight upon him, he might have become...Well, with one of them !...Anything! Any sort of figure in the councils of the nation. Why not Prime Minister? For along with his pedagogic theories he had had political occupations. He had certainly had the friendship of Disraeli. He supplied--it was historic!--materials for eternally famous, meretricious speeches. He would have been head-trainer of the Empire's pro-consuls if the other fellow, at Balliol, had not got in first...As it was he had had to specialize in the Education of Women. Building up Primrose Dames...