A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [7]
II
Ten minutes later she was putting to Miss Wanostrocht, firmly if without ferocity, the question:
'Look here, Head, what did that woman say to you? I don't like her; I don't approve of her and I didn't really listen to her. But I want to hear!'
Miss Wanostrocht, who had been taking her thin, black cloth coat from its peg behind the highly varnished pitch-pine door of her own private cell, flushed, hung up her garment again and turned from the door. She stood, thin, a little rigid, a little flushed, faded and a little as it were at bay.
'You must remember,' she began, 'that I am a schoolmistress.' She pressed, with a gesture she constantly had, the noticeably golden plait of her dun-coloured hair with the palm of her thin left hand. None of the gentlewomen of that school had had quite enough to eat--for years now. 'It's,' she continued, 'an instinct to accept any means of knowledge. I like you so much, Valentine--if in private you'll let me call you that. And it seemed to me that if you were in ..
'In what?' Valentine asked. 'Danger?...Trouble?'
'You understand,' Miss Wanostrocht replied, 'that...person seemed as anxious to communicate to me facts about yourself as to give you--that was her ostensible reason for ringing you up--news. About a...another person. With whom you once had...relations. And who has reappeared.'
'Ah,' Valentine heard herself exclaim. 'He has reappeared, has he? I gathered as much.' She was glad to be able to keep her under control to that extent.
Perhaps she did not have to trouble. She could not say that she felt changed from what she had been--just before ten minutes ago, by the reappearance of a man she hoped she had put out of her mind. A man who had 'insulted' her. In one way or the other he had insulted her!
But probably all her circumstances had changed. Before Edith Ethel had uttered her impossible sentence in that instrument her complete prospects had consisted of no more than the family picnic, under fig-trees, beside an unusually blue sea--and the prospect had seemed as near--as near as kiss your finger! Mother in black and purple; mother's secretary in black without adornments. Brother? Oh, a romantic figure; slight, muscular, in white flannels with a Leghorn hat and--well, why not be romantic over one's brother--with a broad scarlet sash. One foot on shore and one...in a light skiff that gently bobbed in the lapping tide. Nice boy; nice little brother. Lately employed nautically, so up to managing a light skiff. They were going to-morrow...but why not that very afternoon by the 4.20?
'They'd got the ships, they'd got the men,
They'd got the money too!'
Thank goodness they'd got the money!
The ships, Charing Cross to Vallombrosa, would no doubt run in a fortnight. The men--the porters--would also be released. You can't travel in any comfort with mother, mother's secretary and brother--with your whole world and its baggage--without lots of porters...Talk about rationed butter! What was that to trying to get on without porters?
Once having begun it her mind went on singing the old eighteen-fiftyish, or seventyish, martial, British, anti-Russian patriotic song that one of her little friends had unearthed lately--to prove the historic ferocity of his countrymen:
'We've fought the Bear before,
And so we will again!
The Russians shall not have Constantino...'
She exclaimed suddenly: 'Oh!'
She had been about to say: 'Oh, Hell!' but the sudden recollection that the War had been over a quarter of an hour made her leave it at 'Oh!' You would have to drop war-time phraseology! You became again a Young Lady. Peace, too, has its Defence of the Realm Acts. Nevertheless, she has been thinking of the man who had once insulted her as the Bear, whom she would have to fight again! But with warm generosity she said:
'It's a shame to call him the Bear!' Nevertheless he was--the man who was said to have 'reappeared'--with his problems and all, something devouring...Overwhelming, with rolling grey shoulders