Ford Madox Ford - A Man Could Stand Up

She stopped. Valentine said to herself:

'By Jove, I don't know anything about men; but how little I know about women. What's she getting at?' She added:

'She's nervous. She must be wanting to do something she thinks I won't like!'

She said chivalrously:

'I don't believe anybody could have kept those girls in to-day. It's a thing one has no experience of. There's never been a day like this before.'

Out there in Piccadilly there would be seething mobs shoulder to shoulder: she had never seen the Nelson column stand out of a solid mass. They might roast oxen whole in the Strand: Whitechapel would be seething, enamelled iron advertisements looking down on millions of bowler hats. All sordid and immense London stretched out under her gaze. She felt herself of London as the grouse feels itself of the heather, and there she was in an emptied suburb looking at two pink carnations. Dyed probably: offering of Lord Boulnois to Miss Wanostrocht! You never saw a natural-grown carnation that shade!

She said:

'I'd be glad to know what that woman--Lady Macmaster--told you.'

Miss Wanostrocht looked down at her hands. She had the little-fingers hooked together, the hands back to back; it was a demoded gesture...Girton of 1897, Valentine thought. Indulged in by the thoughtfully blonde...Fair girl graduates the sympathetic comic papers of those days had called them. It pointed to a long sitting. Well, she, Valentine, was not going to brusque the issue!...French-derived expression that. But how would you put it otherwise?

Miss Wanostrocht said:

'I sat at the feet of your father!'

'You see!' Valentine said to herself. 'But she must then have gone to Oxford, not Newnham!' She could not remember whether there had been women's colleges at Oxford as early as 1895 or 1897. There must have been.

'The greatest Teacher...The greatest influence in the world,' Miss Wanostrocht said.

It was queer, Valentine thought: this woman had known all about her--at any rate all about her distinguished descent all the time she, Valentine, had been Physical Instructress at that Great Public School (Girls'). Yet except for an invariable courtesy such as she imagined Generals might show to non-commissioned officers, Miss Wanostrocht had hitherto taken no more notice of her than she might have taken of a superior parlourmaid. On the other hand she had let Valentine arrange her physical training exactly as she liked: without any interference.

'We used to hear,' Miss Wanostrocht, said, 'how he spoke Latin with you and your brother from the day of your births...He used to be regarded as eccentric, but how right !...Miss Hall says that you are the most remarkable Latinist she has ever so much as imagined.'

'It's not true,' Valentine said, 'I can't think in Latin. You cannot be a real Latinist unless you do that. He did of course.'

'It was the last thing you would think of him as doing,' the Head answered with a pale gleam of youth. 'He was such a thorough man of the world. So awake!'

'We ought to be a queer lot, my brother and I,' Valentine said. 'With such a father...And mother of course!' Miss Wanostrocht said:

'Oh...your mother ...

And immediately Valentine conjured up the little, adoring female clique of Miss Wanostrocht's youth, all spying on her father and mother in their walks under the Oxford Sunday trees, the father so jaunty and awake, the mother so trailing, large, generous, unobservant. And all the little clique saying: If only he had us to look after him...She said with a little malice:

'You don't read my mother's novels, I suppose...It was she who did all my father's writing for him. He couldn't write, he was too impatient!'

Miss Wanostrocht exclaimed:

'Oh, you shouldn't say that!' with almost the pain of someone defending her own personal reputation.

'I don't see why I shouldn't,' Valentine said. 'He was the first person to say it about himself.'

'He shouldn't have said it either,' Miss Wanostrocht answered with a sort of soft unction. 'He should have taken care more of his own reputation for the sake of his Work!'

Valentine considered this thin, ecstatic spinster with ironic curiosity.

'Of course, if you've sat...if you're still sitting at father's feet as much as all that,' she conceded, 'it gives you a certain right to be careful about his reputation...All the same I wish you would tell me what that person said on the phone!'

The bust of Miss Wanostrocht moved with a sudden eagerness towards the edge of her table.

'It's precisely because of that,' she said, 'that I want to speak to you first...That I want you to consider...Valentine said:

'Because of my father's reputation...Look here, did that person--Lady Macmaster!--speak to you as if you were me? Our names are near enough to make it possible.'

'You're,' Miss Wanostrocht said, 'as one might say, the fine fruit of the product of his views on the education of women. And if you...It's been such a satisfaction to me to observe in you such a...a sound, instructed head on such a...oh, you know, sane body...And then...An earning capacity. A commercial value. Your father, of course, never minced words...' She added:

'I'm bound to say that my interview with Lady Mac-master...Who surely isn't a lady of whom you could say that you disapprove. I've read her husband's work. It surely--you'd say, wouldn't you?--conserves some of the ancient fire.'

'He,' Valentine said, 'hasn't a word of Latin to his tail. He makes his quotations out, if he uses them, by means of school-cribs...I know his method of work, you know.'

It occurred to Valentine to think that if Edith Ethel really had at first taken Miss Wanostrocht for herself there might pretty obviously be some cause for Miss Wanostrocht's concern for her father's reputation as an intimate trainer of young women. She figured Edith Ethel suddenly bursting into a description of the circumstances of that man who was without furniture and did not appear to recognize the porter. The relations she might have described as having existed between her and him might well worry the Head of a Great Public School for Middle Class Girls. She had no doubt been described as having had a baby. A disagreeable and outraged current invaded her feelings...

It was suddenly obscured by a recrudescence of the thought that had come to her only incidentally in the hall. It rushed over her with extraordinary vividness now, like a wave of warm liquid...If it had really been that fellow's wife who had removed his furniture what was there to keep them apart? He couldn't have pawned or sold or burnt his furniture whilst he had been with the British Expeditionary Force in the Low Countries! He couldn't have without extraordinary difficulty! Then...What should keep them apart?...Middle Class Morality? A pretty gory carnival that had been for the last four years! Was this then Lent, pressing hard on the heels of Saturnalia? Not so hard as that, surely! So that if one hurried...What on earth did she want, unknown to herself?

She heard herself saying, almost with a sob, so that she was evidently in a state of emotion:

'Look here: I disapprove of this whole thing: of what my father has brought me to! Those people...the brilliant Victorians talked all the time through their hats. They evolved a theory from anywhere and then went brilliantly mad over it. Perfectly recklessly...Have you noticed Pettigul One?...Hasn't it occurred to you that you can't carry on violent physical jerks and mental work side by side? I ought not to be in this school and I ought not to be what I am!'

At Miss Wanostrocht's perturbed expression she said to herself:

'What on earth am I saying all this for? You'd think I was trying to cut loose from this school! Am I?'