Ford Madox Ford - A Man Could Stand Up

It was absurd to think that she could be wanted for that! An absurd business...There she was, bursting with health, strength, good-humour, perfectly full of beans--there she was, ready in the cause of order to give Leah Heldenstamm, the large girl, no end of a clump on the side of the jaw or, alternatively, for the sake of all the beanfeastishnesses in the world to assist in the amiable discomfiture of the police. There she was in a sort of nonconformist cloister. Nunlike! Positively nunlike! At the parting of the ways of the universe!

She whistled slightly to herself.

'By Jove,' she exclaimed coolly, 'I hope it does not mean an omen that I'm to be--oh, nunlike--for the rest of my career in the reconstructed world!'

She began for a moment seriously to take stock of her position--of her whole position in life. It had certainly been hitherto rather nunlike. She was twenty-threeish: rising twenty-four. As fit as a fiddle; as clean as a whistle. Five foot four in her gym shoes. And no one had ever wanted to marry her. No doubt that was because she was so clean and fit. No one even had ever tried to seduce her. That was certainly because she was so clean-run. She didn't obviously offer--What was it the fellow called it?--promise of pneumatic bliss to the gentlemen with sergeant-majors' horse-shoe moustaches and gurglish voices! She never would. Then perhaps she would never marry. And never be seduced!

Nunlike! She would have to stand at an attitude of attention beside a telephone all her life; in an empty schoolroom with the world shouting from the playground. Or not even shouting from the playground any more. Gone to Piccadilly!

...But, hang it all, she wanted some fun! Now!

For years now she had been--oh, yes, nunlike!--looking after the lungs and limbs of the girls of the adenoidy, nonconformistish--really undenominational or so little Established as made no difference!--Great Public Girls' School. She had had to worry about impossible but not repulsive little Cockney creatures' breathing when they had their arms extended...You mustn't breathe rhythmically with your movements. No. No. No! ... Don't breathe out with the first movement and in with the second! Breathe naturally! Look at me!...She breathed perfectly!

Well, for years that! War-work for a b----y Pro-German. Or Pacifist. Yes, that too she had been for years. She hadn't liked being it because it was the attitude of the superior and she did not like being superior. Like Edith Ethel!

But now! Wasn't it manifest? She could put her hand whole-heartedly into the hand of any Tom, Dick, or Harry. And wish him luck! Whole-heartedly! Luck for himself and for his enterprise. She came back: into the fold: into the Nation even. She could open her mouth! She could let out the good little Cockney yelps that were her birthright! She could be free, independent!

Even her dear, blessed, muddle-headed, tremendously eminent mother by now had a depressed looking Secretary. She, Valentine Wannop, didn't have to sit up all night typing after all day enjoining perfection of breathing in the playground...By Jove, they could go all, brother, mother in untidy black and mauve, secretary in untidy black without mauve, and she, Valentine, out of her imitation Girl Scout's uniform and in--oh, white muslin or Harris tweeds--and with Cockney yawps discuss the cooking under the stone-pines of Amalfi. By the Mediterranean...No one, then, would be able to say that she had never seen the sea of Penelope, the Mother of the Gracchi, Delia, Lesbia, Nausicaa, Sappho...

' Saepe te in somnis vidi! '

She said:

'Good... God! '

Not in the least with a Cockney intonation but like a good Tory English gentleman confronted by an unspeakable proposition. Well: it was an unspeakable proposition. For the voice from the telephone had been saying to her inattention, rather crawlingly, after no end of details as to the financial position of the house of Macmaster:

'So I thought, my dear Val, in remembrance of old times; that...If in short I were the means of bringing you together again...For I believe you have not been corresponding...You might in return...You can see for yourself that at this moment the sum would be absolutely crushing ...

Ten minutes later she was putting to Miss Wanostrocht, firmly if without ferocity, the question:

'Look here, Head, what did that woman say to you? I don't like her; I don't approve of her and I didn't really listen to her. But I want to hear!'

Miss Wanostrocht, who had been taking her thin, black cloth coat from its peg behind the highly varnished pitch-pine door of her own private cell, flushed, hung up her garment again and turned from the door. She stood, thin, a little rigid, a little flushed, faded and a little as it were at bay.

'You must remember,' she began, 'that I am a schoolmistress.' She pressed, with a gesture she constantly had, the noticeably golden plait of her dun-coloured hair with the palm of her thin left hand. None of the gentlewomen of that school had had quite enough to eat--for years now. 'It's,' she continued, 'an instinct to accept any means of knowledge. I like you so much, Valentine--if in private you'll let me call you that. And it seemed to me that if you were in ..

'In what?' Valentine asked. 'Danger?...Trouble?'

'You understand,' Miss Wanostrocht replied, 'that...person seemed as anxious to communicate to me facts about yourself as to give you--that was her ostensible reason for ringing you up--news. About a...another person. With whom you once had...relations. And who has reappeared.'

'Ah,' Valentine heard herself exclaim. 'He has reappeared, has he? I gathered as much.' She was glad to be able to keep her under control to that extent.

Perhaps she did not have to trouble. She could not say that she felt changed from what she had been--just before ten minutes ago, by the reappearance of a man she hoped she had put out of her mind. A man who had 'insulted' her. In one way or the other he had insulted her!

But probably all her circumstances had changed. Before Edith Ethel had uttered her impossible sentence in that instrument her complete prospects had consisted of no more than the family picnic, under fig-trees, beside an unusually blue sea--and the prospect had seemed as near--as near as kiss your finger! Mother in black and purple; mother's secretary in black without adornments. Brother? Oh, a romantic figure; slight, muscular, in white flannels with a Leghorn hat and--well, why not be romantic over one's brother--with a broad scarlet sash. One foot on shore and one...in a light skiff that gently bobbed in the lapping tide. Nice boy; nice little brother. Lately employed nautically, so up to managing a light skiff. They were going to-morrow...but why not that very afternoon by the 4.20?

'They'd got the ships, they'd got the men,

They'd got the money too!'

Thank goodness they'd got the money!

The ships, Charing Cross to Vallombrosa, would no doubt run in a fortnight. The men--the porters--would also be released. You can't travel in any comfort with mother, mother's secretary and brother--with your whole world and its baggage--without lots of porters...Talk about rationed butter! What was that to trying to get on without porters?

Once having begun it her mind went on singing the old eighteen-fiftyish, or seventyish, martial, British, anti-Russian patriotic song that one of her little friends had unearthed lately--to prove the historic ferocity of his countrymen:

'We've fought the Bear before,

And so we will again!

The Russians shall not have Constantino...'

She exclaimed suddenly: ' Oh! '

She had been about to say: 'Oh, Hell! ' but the sudden recollection that the War had been over a quarter of an hour made her leave it at ' Oh! ' You would have to drop war-time phraseology! You became again a Young Lady. Peace, too, has its Defence of the Realm Acts. Nevertheless, she has been thinking of the man who had once insulted her as the Bear, whom she would have to fight again! But with warm generosity she said: