Ford Madox Ford - A Man Could Stand Up

That was the quality of his entanglements, their very essence. He got into appalling messes, unending and unravellable--no, she meant ununravellable!--messes and other people suffered for him whilst he mooned on--into more messes! The General charging the dog-cart was symbolical of him. He was perfectly on his right side and all, but it was like him to be in a dog-cart when flagitious automobiles carrying Generals were running amuck! Then...the Woman Paid!...She really did, in this case. It had been her mother's horse they had been driving and, although they had got damages out of the General, the costs were twice that...And her, Valentine's, reputation had suffered from being in a dog-cart at dawn, alone with a man...It made no odds that he had--or was it hadn't?--'insulted' her in any way all through that--oh, that delicious delirious night...She had to be said to have a baby by him, and then she had to be dreadfully worried about his poor old reputation...Of course it would have been pretty rotten of him--she so young and innocent, daughter of so preposterously eminent, if so impoverished a man, his father's best friend and all. 'He hadn't oughter'er done it!' He hadn't really oughter...She heard them all saying it, still!

Well, he hadn't!...But she?

That magic night. It was just before dawn, the mists nearly up to their necks as they drove; the sky going pale in a sort of twilight. And one immense star! She remembered only one immense star, though, historically, there had been also a dilapidated sort of moon. But the star was her best boy--what her wagon was hitched on to...And they had been quoting--quarrelling over, she remembered:

Flebis et arsuro me, Delia, lecto

Tristibus et...

She exclaimed suddenly:

Sunset and evening star

And one clear call for me

And may there be no moaning at the bar

When I...'

She said:

'Oh, but you oughtn't to, my dear! That's Tennyson! ' Tennyson, with a difference!

She said:

'All the same, that would have been an inexperienced school-girl's prank...-But if I let him kiss me now I should be....' She would be a what was it...a fornicatress?... trix ! Fornicatrix is preferable! Very preferable. Then why not adultrix? You couldn't: you had to be a 'cold-blooded adultress!' or morality was not avenged.

Oh; but surely not cold-blooded!...Deliberate, then!...That wasn't, either, the word for the process. Of osculation!...Comic things, words, as applied to states of feelings!

But if she went now to Lincoln's Inn and the Problem held out its arms...That would be 'Deliberate'. It would be asking for it in the fullest sense of the term.

She said to herself quickly:

'This way madness lies!' And then:

'What an imbecile thing to say!'

She had had an Affair with a man, she made her mind say to her, two years ago. That was all right. There could not be a, say, a schoolmistress rising twenty-four or twenty-five, in the world who hadn't had some affair, even if it were no more than a gentleman in a tea-shop who every afternoon for a week had gazed at her disrespectfully over a slice of plum-cake...And then disappeared...But you had to have had at least a might-have-been or you couldn't go on being a schoolmistress or a girl in a ministry or a dactylographer of respectability. You packed that away in the bottom of your mind and on Sunday mornings before the perfectly insufficient Sunday dinner, you took it out and built castles in Spain in which you were a castanetted heroine turning on wonderful hips, but casting behind you inflaming glances...Something like that!

Well, she had had an affair with this honest, simple creature! So good! So unspeakably GOOD...Like the late Albert, prince consort! The very, helpless, immobile sort of creature that she ought not to have tempted. It had been like shooting tame pigeons! Because he had had a Society wife always in the illustrated papers whilst he sat at home and evolved Statistics or came to tea with her dear, tremendous, distracted mother, whom he helped to get her articles accurate. So a woman tempted him and he did...No; he didn't quite eat!

But why?...Because he was GOOD?

Very likely!

Or was it--that was the intolerable thought that she shut up within her along with the material for castles in the air!--was it because he had been really indifferent?

They had revolved round each other at tea-parties--or rather he had revolved around her, because at Edith Ethel's affairs she always sat, a fixed starlet, behind the tea-urn and dispensed cups. But he would moon round the room, looking at the backs of books; occasionally laying down the law to some guest; and always drifting in the end to her side where he would say a trifle or two...And the beautiful--the quite excruciatingly beautiful wife--striding along the Row with the second son of the Earl of someone at her side...Asking for it...

So it had been from the 1/7/12, say to the 4/8/14!

After that, things had become more rubbled--mixed up with alarums. Excursions on his part to unapproved places. And trouble. He was quite damnably in trouble. With his Superiors; with, so unnecessarily, Hun projectiles, wire, mud; over Money; politics; mooning on without a good word from anyone...Unravellable muddles that never got unravelled but that somehow got you caught up in them...

Because he needed her moral support! When, during the late Hostilities, he hadn't been out there, he had drifted to the tea-table much earlier of an afternoon and stayed beside it much longer: till after everyone else had gone and they could go and sit on the tall fender side by side, and argue...about the rights and wrongs of the War!

Because she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk...They had the same sort of good, bread-and-butter brains; without much of the romantic...No doubt a touch...in him. Otherwise he would not have always been in these muddles. He gave all he possessed to anyone who asked for it. That was all right. But that those who sponged on him should also involve him in intolerable messes...That was not proper. One ought to defend oneself against that!

Because...if you do not defend yourself against that, look how you let in your nearest and dearest--those who have to sympathise with you in your confounded troubles whilst you moon on, giving away more and more and getting into more troubles! In this case it was she who was his Nearest and Dearest...Or had been!

At that her nerves suddenly got the better of her and her mind went mad...Supposing that that fellow, from whom she had not heard for two years, hadn't now communicated with her...Like an ass she had taken it for granted that he had asked Lady...Blast her!...to 'bring them together again' But she imagined that even Edith Ethel would not have had the cheek to ring her up if he hadn't asked her to!

But she had nothing to go on...Feeble, over-sexed ass that she was, she had let her mind jump at once to the conclusion, the moment the mere mention of him seemed implied--jump to the conclusion that he was asking her again to come and be his mistress...Or nurse him through his present muddle till he should be fit to...

Mind, she did not say that she would have succumbed. But if she had not jumped at the idea that it was he, really, speaking through Edith Ethel, she would never have permitted her mind to dwell on...on his blasted, complacent perfections!

Because she had taken it for granted that if he had had her rung up he would not have been monkeying with other girls during the two years he hadn't written to her...Ah, but hadn't he?

Look here! Was it reasonable? Here was a fellow who had all but...all BUT...'taken advantage of her' one night just before going out to France, say, two years ago...And not another word from him after that!...It was all very well to say that he was portentous, looming, luminous, loony: John Peel with his coat so grey, the English Country Gentleman pur sang and then some; saintly; Godlike, Jesus-Christ-like...He was all that. But you don't seduce, as near as can be, a young woman and then go off to Hell, leaving her, God knows, in Hell, and not so much as send her, in two years, a picture-postcard with MIZPAH on it. You don't. You don't!