Ford Madox Ford - A Man Could Stand Up

'It's a shame to call him the Bear!' Nevertheless he was--the man who was said to have 'reappeared'--with his problems and all, something devouring...Overwhelming, with rolling grey shoulders that with their intolerable problems pushed you and your own problems out of the road...

She had been thinking all that while still in the School Hall, before she had gone to see the Head: immediately after Edith Ethel, Lady Macmaster had uttered the intolerable sentence.

She had gone on thinking there for a long time...Ten minutes!

She formulated for herself summarily the first item of a period of nasty worries of a time she flattered herself she had nearly forgotten. Years ago, Edith Ethel, out of a clear sky, had accused her of having had a child by that man. But she hardly thought of him as a man. She thought of him as a ponderous, grey, intellectual mass who now, presumably, was mooning, obviously dotty, since he did not recognize the porter, behind the closed shutters of an empty house in Lincoln's Inn...Nothing less, I assure you! She had never been in that house, but she figured him, with cracks of light coming between the shutters, looking back over his shoulder at you in the doorway, grey, superursine...Ready to envelop you in suffocating bothers!

She wondered how long it had been since the egregious Edith Ethel had made that assertion...with, naturally, every appearance of indignation for the sake of the man's Wife with whom, equally naturally, Edith Ethel had 'sided'. (Now she was trying to 'bring you together again'...The Wife, presumably, did not go to Edith Ethel's tea-parties often enough, or was too brilliantly conspicuous when there. Probably the latter!)...How many years ago? Two? Not so much! Eighteen months, then? Surely more!...surely, surely more!...When you thought of Time in those days your mind wavered impotently like eyes tired by reading too small print...He went out surely in the autumn of...No, it had been the first time he went that he went in the autumn. It was her brother's friend, Ted, that went in '16. Or the other...Malachi. So many goings out and returnings: and goings out and perhaps not returning. Or only in bits: the nose gone...or both eyes. Or--or, Hell! oh, Hell! and she clenched her fists, her nails into her palms--no mind!

You'd think it must be that from what Edith Ethel had said. He hadn't recognized the porter: he was reported to have no furniture. Then...She remembered...

She was then--ten minutes before she interviewed Miss Wanostrocht; ten seconds after she had been blown out of the mouth of the telephone--sitting on a varnished pitch-pine bench that had black iron-clamped legs against the plaster wall, non-conformistically distempered in torpedo grey; and she had thought all that in ten seconds...But that had been really how it had been!

The minute Edith Ethel had finished saying the words:

'The sum would be absolutely crushing ...' Valentine had realized that she had been talking about a debt owed by her miserable husband to the one human being she, Valentine, could bear to think about. It had naturally at the same moment flashed upon her that Edith Ethel had been giving her his news. He was in new troubles: broken down, broken up, broke to the wide...Anything in the world but broken in...But broken...And alone...And calling for her!

She could not afford--she could not bear!--to recall even his name or to so much as bring up before her mind, into which, nevertheless, they were continually forcing themselves, his grey-blond face, his clumsy, square, reliable feet; his humpish bulk; his calculatedly wooden expression; his perfectly overwhelming, but authentic omniscience...His masculinity. His...his Frightfulness!

Now, through Edith Ethel--you would have thought that even he would have found someone more appropriate--he was calling to her again to enter into the suffocating web of his imbroglios. Not even Edith Ethel would have dared to speak to her again of him without his having taken the first step...

It was unthinkable; it was intolerable; and it had been as if she had been lifted off her feet and deposited on that bench against the wall by the mere sound of the offer...What was the offer?

'I thought that you might, if I were the means of bringing you together...' She might...what?

Intercede with that man, that grey mass, not to enforce the pecuniary claim that it had against Sir Vincent Mac-master. No doubt she and...the grey mass!...would then be allowed the Macmaster drawing-room to...to discuss the ethics of the day in! Just like that!

She was still breathless; the telephone continued to quack. She wished it would stop but she felt too weak to get up and hang the receiver on its hook. She wished it would stop; it gave her the feeling that a strand of Edith Ethel's hair, say, was penetrating nauseously to her torpedo grey cloister. Something like that!

The grey mass never would enforce its pecuniary claim...Those people had sponged mercilessly on him for years and years without ever knowing the kind of object upon which they sponged. It made them the more pitiful. For it was pitiful to clamour to be allowed to become a pimp in order to evade debts that would never be reclaimed...

Now, in the empty rooms at Lincoln's Inn--for that was probably what it came to!--that man was a grey ball of mist; a grey bear rolling tenebrously about an empty room with closed shutters. A grey problem! Calling to her!

A hell of a lot...Beg pardon, she meant a remarkably great deal!...to have thought of in ten seconds! Eleven, by now, probably. Later she realized that that was what thought was. In ten minutes after large impassive arms had carried you away from a telephone and deposited you on a clamped bench against a wall of the peculiar coldness of torpedo-grey distempered plaster, the sort of thing rejoiced in by Great Public (Girls') Schools...in those ten minutes you found you thought out more than in two years. Or it was not as long ago as that.

Perhaps that was not astonishing. If you had not thought about, say, washable distemper for two years and then thought about it for ten minutes you could think a hell of a lot about it in those ten minutes. Probably all there was to think. Still, of course, washable distemper was not like the poor--always with you. At least it always was in those cloisters, but not spiritually. On the other hand you always were with yourself!

But perhaps you were not always with yourself spiritually; you went on explaining how to breathe without thinking of how the life you were leading was influencing your...What? Immortal soul? Aura? Personality?...Something!

Well, for two years...Oh, call it two years, for goodness' sake, and get it over!...she must have been in ...well, call that a 'state of suspended animation' and get that over too! A sort of what they called inhibition. She had been inhibiting-- pro hibiting--herself from thinking about herself. Well, hadn't she been right? What had a b----y Pro-German to think about in an embattled, engrossed, clamouring nation: especially when she had not much liked her brother-Pro's! A solitary state, only to be dissolved by...maroons! In suspension!

But...Be conscientious with yourself, my good girl! When that telephone blew you out of its mouth you knew really that for two years you had been avoiding wondering whether you had not been insulted! Avoiding wondering that. And nothing else! No other qualified thing.

She had, of course, been, not in suspension, but in suspense. Because, if he made a sign--I understand,' Edith Ethel had said, 'that you have not been in correspondence'...or had it been 'in communication' that she had said?...Well, they hadn't been either...

Anyhow, if that grey Problem, that ravelled ball of grey knitting worsted, had made a sign she would have known that she had not been insulted. Or was there any sense in that?