A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [11]
It couldn't be done, of course, but she remembered still how she had shivered...Ph...Ph...Ph...Shivering.
She shivered.
Afterwards they had been run into by the car of General Lord Edward Campion, V.C., P.G., Heaven knows what! Godfather of the man's Society Wife, then taking the waters in Germany...Or perhaps not her Godfather. The man's rather; but her especial champion, in shining armour. In these days they had worn broad red stripes down the outsides of their trousers, Generals. What a change! How significant of the times!
That had been in 1912...Say the first of July; she could not remember exactly. Summer weather, anyhow, before haymaking or just about. The grass had been long in Hogg's Forty Acre, when they had walked through it, discussing Woman's Suffrage. She had brushed the seed-tops of the heavy grass with her hands as they walked...Say the 1/7/12.
Now it was Eleven Eleven...What? Oh, Eighteen, of course!
Six years ago! What changes in the world! What cataclysms! What Revolutions!...She heard all the newspapers, all the halfpenny-paper journalists in creation crying in chorus!
But hang it: it was true! If, six years ago, she had kissed the...the greyish lacuna of her mind then sitting beside her on the dog-cart seat it would have been the larkish freak of a school-girl: if she did it to-day--as per invitation presumably of Lady Macmaster, bringing them together, for, of course, it could not be performed from a distance or without correspondence--No, communication!...If, then, she did it to-day...to-day...to-day--the Eleven Eleven!--Oh, what a day to-day would be...Not her sentiments those; quotations from Christina, sister of Lady Macmaster's favourite poet...Or, perhaps, since she had had a title she would have found poets more...more chic! The poet who was killed at Gallipoli...Gerald Osborne, was it? Couldn't remember the name!
But for six years then she had been a member of that...triangle. You couldn't call it a ménage a trois, even if you didn't know French. They hadn't lived together!...They had d----d near died together when the general's car hit their dog-cart! D----d near! (You must not use those Wartime idioms. Do break yourself of it! Remember the maroons!)
An oafish thing to do! To take a school-girl, just...oh, just past the age of consent, out all night in a dog-cart and then get yourself run into by the car of the V.C., P.G., champion-in-red-trouser-stripe of your Legitimate! You'd think any man who was a man would have avoided that!
Most men knew enough to know that the Woman Pays...the school-girl too!
But they get it both ways...Look here: when Edith Ethel Duchemin, then, just--or perhaps not quite, Lady Macmaster! At any rate, her husband was dead and she had just married that miserable little...(Mustn't use that word!) She, Valentine Wannop, had been the only witness of the marriage--as of the previous, discreet, but so praiseworthy adultery!...When, then, Edith Ethel had...It must have been on the very day of the knighthood, because Edith Ethel made it an excuse not to ask her to the resultant Party...Edith Ethel had accused her of having had a baby by...oh, Mr So and So...And heaven was her, Valentine Wannop's, witness that, although Mr So and So was her mother's constant adviser, she, Valentine Wannop, was still in such a state of acquaintance with him that she still called him by his surname...When Lady Macmaster, spitting like the South American beast of burden called a llama, had accused her of having had a baby by her mother's adviser--to her natural astonishment, but, of course, it had been the result of the dog-cart and the motor and the General, and the general's sister, Lady Pauline Something--or perhaps it was Claudine? Yes, Lady Claudine!--who had been in the car and the Society Wife, who was always striding along the railings of the Row...When she had been so accused out of the blue, her first thought--and, confound it, her enduring thought!--had not been concern for her own reputation but for his...
That was the quality