Ford Madox Ford - The Parade's End Tetralogy - Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up & Last Post

Mrs Duchemin, beginning to advance towards the girl impulsively, exclaimed:

‘You darling!’

Miss Wannop said:

‘Wait a minute. I haven’t finished. I want to say this: I never talk about that stage of my career because I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed because I think I did the wrong thing, not for any other reason. I did it on impulse and I stuck to it out of obstinacy. I mean it would probably have been more sensible to go round with the hat to benevolent people, for the keep of mother and to complete my education. But if we’ve inherited the Wannop ill-luck, we’ve inherited the Wannop pride. And I couldn’t do it. Besides I was only seventeen, and I gave out we were going into the country after the sale. I’m not educated at all, as you know, or only half, because father, being a brilliant man, had ideas. And one of them was that I was to be an athlete, not a classical don at Cambridge, or I might have been, I believe. I don’t know why he had that tic . . . But I’d like you to understand two things. One I’ve said already: what I hear in this house won’t ever shock or corrupt me; that it’s said in Latin is neither here nor there. I understand Latin almost as well as English because father used to talk it to me and Gilbert as soon as we talked at all . . . And, oh yes: I’m a suffragette because I’ve been a slavey. But I’d like you to understand that, though I was a slavey and am a suffragette—you’re an old-fashioned woman and queer things are thought about these two things—then I’d like you to understand that in spite of it all I’m pure! Chaste, you know . . . Perfectly virtuous.’

Mrs Duchemin said:

‘Oh, Valentine! Did you wear a cap and apron? You! In a cap and apron.’

Miss Wannop replied:

‘Yes! I wore a cap and apron and sniffled “M’m” to the mistress; and slept under the stairs, too. Because I woud not sleep with the beast of a cook.’

Mrs Duchemin now ran forward and, catching Miss Wannop by both hands, kissed her first on the left and then on the right cheek.

‘Oh, Valentine,’ she said, ‘you’re a heroine. And you only twenty-two! . . . Isn’t that the motor coining?’ But it wasn’t the motor coming and Miss Wannop said: ‘Oh, no! I’m not a heroine. When I tried to speak to that Minister yesterday, I just couldn’t. It was Gertie who went for him. As for me, I just hopped from one leg to the other and stuttered: “V . . . V . . . Votes for W . . . W . . . W . . . omen!” If I’d been decently brave I shouldn’t have been too shy to speak to a strange man . . . For that was what it really came to.’

‘But that surely,’ Mrs Duchemin said—she continued to hold both the girl’s hands—‘makes you all the braver . . . It’s the person who does the thing he’s afraid of who’s the real hero, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, we used to argue that old thing over with father when we were ten. You can’t tell. You’ve got to define the term brave. I was just abject . . . I could harangue the whole crowd when I got them together. But speak to one man in cold blood I couldn’t . . . Of course I did speak to a fat golfing idiot with bulging eyes, to get him to save Gertie. But that was different.’

Mrs Duchemin moved both the girl’s hands up and down in her own.

‘As you know, Valentine,’ she said, ‘I’m an old-fashioned woman. I believe that woman’s true place is at her husband’s side. At the same time . . . ’

Miss Wannop moved away.

‘Now, don’t, Edie, don’t!’ she said. ‘If you believe that, you’re an anti. Don’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It’s your defect really . . . I tell you I’m not a heroine. I dread prison: I hate rows. I’m thankful to goodness that it’s my duty to stop and housemaid-typewrite for mother, so that I can’t really do things . . . Look at that miserable, adenoidy little Gertie, hiding upstairs in our garret. She was crying all last night—but that’s just nerves. Yet she’s been in prison five times, stomach-pumped and all. Not a moment of funk about her! . . . But as for me, a girl as hard as a rock that prison wouldn’t touch . . . Why, I’m all of a jump now. That’s why I’m talking nonsense like a pert schoolgirl. I just dread that every sound may be the police coming for me.’

Mrs Duchemin stroked the girl’s fair hair and tucked a loose strand behind her ear.

‘I wish you’d let me show you how to do your hair,’ she said. ‘The right man might come along at any moment.’

‘Oh, the right man!’ Miss Wannop said. ‘Thanks for tactfully changing the subject. The right man for me, when he comes along, will be a married man. That’s the Wannop luck!’

Mrs Duchemin said, with deep concern:

‘Don’t talk like that . . . Why should you regard yourself as being less lucky than other people? Surely your mother’s done well. She has a position; she makes money . . . ’

‘Ah, but mother isn’t a Wannop,’ the girl said, ‘only by marriage. The real Wannops . . . they’ve been executed, and attaindered, and falsely accused and killed in carriage accidents and married adventurers or died penniless like father. Ever since the dawn of history. And then, mother’s got her mascot . . . ’

‘Oh, what’s that?’ Mrs Duchemin asked, almost with animation, ‘a relic . . .?

‘Don’t you know mother’s mascot?’ the girl asked. ‘She tells everybody . . . Don’t you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting-room and there came in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and asks us to remember him as such in our prayers . . . He was a man who’d been at a German university with father years before and loved him very dearly; but had not kept touch with him. And he’d been out of England for nine months when father died and round about it. And he said: “Now, Mrs Wannop, what’s this?” And she told him. And he said, “What you want is champagne!” And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood over her while she drank half the bottle out of her toothglass. And he took her out to lunch . . . o . . . o . . . oh, it’s cold! . . . And lectured her . . . And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had shares in . . . ’

Mrs Duchemin said:

‘You’re shivering!’

‘I know I am,’ the girl said. She went on very fast. ‘And of course, mother always wrote father’s articles for him. He found the ideas, but couldn’t write, and she’s a splendid style . . . And, since then, he—the mascot—Teatray—has always turned up when she’s been in tight places. Then the paper blew her up and threatened to dismiss her for inaccuracies! She’s frightfully inaccurate. And he wrote her out a table of things every leader-writer must know, such as that “A. Ebor” is the Archbishop of York, and that the Government is Liberal. And one day he turned up and said: “Why don’t you write a novel on that story you told me?” And he lent her the money to buy the cottage we’re in now, to be quiet and write in . . . Oh, I can’t go on!’

Miss Wannop burst into tears.