Ford Madox Ford - A Man Could Stand Up

Or if you do you have to have your character revised. You have to have it taken for granted that you were only monkeying with her and that you've been monkeying ever since with WAACS in Rouen or some other Base...

Of course, if you ring your young woman up when you come back...or have her rung up by a titled lady...That might restore you in the eyes of the world, or at least in the eyes of the young woman if she was a bit of a softie...

But had he? Had he? It was absurd to think that Edith Ethel hadn't had the face to do it unasked! To save three thousand two hundred pounds, not to mention interest--which was what Vincent owed him !--Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying...She was quite right. She had to save her man. You go to any depths of ignominy to save your man.

But that did not help her, Valentine Wannop!

She sprang off the bench; she clenched her nails into her palms; she stamped her thin-soled shoes into the coke-brize floor that was singularly unresilient. She exclaimed:

'Damn it all, he didn't ask her to ring me up. He didn't ask her. He didn't ask her to!' still stamping about.

She marched straight at the telephone that was by now uttering long, tinny, night-jar's calls and, with one snap, pulled up the receiver right off the twisted green-blue cord...Broke it! With incidental satisfaction!

Then she said:

'Steady the Buffs!' not out of repentence for having damaged School Property, but because she was accustomed to call her thoughts The Buffs because of their practical unromantic character as a rule...A fine regiment, the Buffs!

Of course, if she had not broken the telephone she could have rung up Edith Ethel and have asked her whether he had or hadn't asked to...to be brought together again...It was like her, Valentine Wannop, to smash the only means of resolving a torturing doubt...

It wasn't, really, in the least like her. She was practical enough: none of the 'under the ban of fatality' business about her. She had smashed the telephone because it had been like smashing a connection with Edith Ethel; or because she hated tinny night-jars; or because she had smashed it. For nothing in the world; for nothing, nothing, nothing in the world would she ever ring up Edith Ethel and ask her:

Did he put you up to ringing me up?'

That would be to let Edith Ethel come between their intimacy.

A subconscious volition was directing her feet towards the great doors at the end of the Hall, varnished, pitch-pine doors of Gothic architecture; economically decorated as if with straps and tin-lids of Brunswick-blacked cast iron.

She said:

'Of course if it's the wife who has removed his furniture that would be a reason for his wanting to get into communication. They would have split...But he does not hold with a man divorcing a woman, and she won't divorce.'

As she went through the sticky postern--all that woodwork seemed sticky on account of its varnish!--beside the great doors she said:

'Who cares!'

The great thing was...but she could not formulate what the great thing was. You had to settle the preliminaries.

She said eventually to Miss Wanostrocht who had sat down at her table behind two pink carnations:

'I didn't consciously want to bother you but a spirit in my feet has led me who knows how...That's Shelley, isn't it?'

And indeed a quite unconscious but shrewd mind had pointed out to her whilst still in the School Hall and even before she had broken the telephone, that Miss Wanostrocht very probably would be able to tell her what she wanted to know and that if she didn't hurry she might miss her, since the Head would probably go now the girls were gone. So she had hurried through gauntish corridors whose Decorated Gothic windows positively had bits of pink glass here and there interspersed in their lattices. Nevertheless a nearly deserted, darkish, locker-lined dressing-room being a short cut, she had paused in it before the figure of a clumsyish girl, freckled, in black and, on a stool, desultorily lacing a dull black boot, an ankle on her knee. She felt an impulse to say: 'Good-bye, Pettigul!' she didn't know why.

The clumsy, fifteenish, bumpy-faced girl was a symbol of that place--healthyish, but not over healthy; honestish but with no craving for intellectual honesty; big-boned in unexpected places...and uncomelily blubbering so that her face appeared dirtyish...It was in fact all 'ishes' about that Institution. They were all healthyish, honestish, clumsyish, twelve-to-eighteenish and big-boned in unexpected places because of the late insufficient feeding...Emotionalish, too; apt to blubber rather than to go into hysterics.

Instead of saying good-bye to the girl she said:

'Here!' and roughly, since she was exhibiting too much leg, pulled down the girl's shortish skirt and set to work to lace the unyielding boot on the unyielding shin-bone...After a period of youthful bloom, which would certainly come and as certainly go, this girl would, normally, find herself one of the Mothers of Europe, marriage being due to the period of youthful bloom...Normally that is to say according to a normality that that day might restore. Of course it mightn't!

A tepid drop of moisture fell on Valentine's right knuckle.

'My cousin Bob was killed the day before yesterday,' the girl's voice said above her head. Valentine bent her head still lower over the boot with the patience that, in educational establishments, you must, if you want to be businesslike and shrewd, acquire and display in face of unusual mental vagaries...This girl had never had a cousin Bob, or anything else. Pettigul and her two sisters, Pettiguls Two and Three, were all in that Institution at extremely reduced rates precisely because they had not got, apart from their widowed mother, a discoverable relative. The father, a half-pay major, had been killed early in the war. All the mistresses had had to hand in reports on the moral qualities of the Pettiguls, so all the mistresses had this information.

'He gave me his puppy to keep for him before he went out,' the girl said. 'It doesn't seem just!'

Valentine, straightening herself, said:

'I should wash my face if I were you, before I went out. Or you might get yourself taken for a German!' She pulled the girl's clumsyish blouse straight on her shoulders.

'Try,' she added, 'to imagine that you've got someone just come back! It's just as easy and it will make you look more attractive!'

Scurrying along the corridors she said to herself: 'Heaven help me, does it make me look more attractive?'

She caught the Head, as she had anticipated, just on the point of going to her home in Fulham, an unattractive suburb but near a bishop's palace nevertheless. It seemed somehow appropriate. The lady was episcopally-minded but experienced in the vicissitudes of suburban children: very astonishing some of them unless you took them very much in the lump.

The Head had stood behind her table for the first three questions and answers, in an attitude of someone who is a little at bay, but she had sat down just before Valentine had quoted Shelley at her, and she had now the air of one who is ready to make a night of it. Valentine continued to stand.

'This,' Miss Wanostrocht said very gently, 'is a day on which one might...take steps...that might influence one's whole life.'

'That's,' Valentine answered, 'exactly why I've come to you. I want to know what that woman said to you so as to know where I stand before I take a step.'

The Head said:

'I had to let the girls go. I don't mind saying that you are very valuable to me. The Governors--I had an express from Lord Boulnois--ordered them to be given a holiday to-morrow. It's very inconsistent. But that makes it all the...