A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [9]
Intercede with that man, that grey mass, not to enforce the pecuniary claim that it had against Sir Vincent Mac-master. No doubt she and...the grey mass!...would then be allowed the Macmaster drawing-room to...to discuss the ethics of the day in! Just like that!
She was still breathless; the telephone continued to quack. She wished it would stop but she felt too weak to get up and hang the receiver on its hook. She wished it would stop; it gave her the feeling that a strand of Edith Ethel's hair, say, was penetrating nauseously to her torpedo grey cloister. Something like that!
The grey mass never would enforce its pecuniary claim...Those people had sponged mercilessly on him for years and years without ever knowing the kind of object upon which they sponged. It made them the more pitiful. For it was pitiful to clamour to be allowed to become a pimp in order to evade debts that would never be reclaimed...
Now, in the empty rooms at Lincoln's Inn--for that was probably what it came to!--that man was a grey ball of mist; a grey bear rolling tenebrously about an empty room with closed shutters. A grey problem! Calling to her!
A hell of a lot...Beg pardon, she meant a remarkably great deal!...to have thought of in ten seconds! Eleven, by now, probably. Later she realized that that was what thought was. In ten minutes after large impassive arms had carried you away from a telephone and deposited you on a clamped bench against a wall of the peculiar coldness of torpedo-grey distempered plaster, the sort of thing rejoiced in by Great Public (Girls') Schools...in those ten minutes you found you thought out more than in two years. Or it was not as long ago as that.
Perhaps that was not astonishing. If you had not thought about, say, washable distemper for two years and then thought about it for ten minutes you could think a hell of a lot about it in those ten minutes. Probably all there was to think. Still, of course, washable distemper was not like the poor--always with you. At least it always was in those cloisters, but not spiritually. On the other hand you always were with yourself!
But perhaps you were not always with yourself spiritually; you went on explaining how to breathe without thinking of how the life you were leading was influencing your...What? Immortal soul? Aura? Personality?...Something!
Well, for two years...Oh, call it two years, for goodness' sake, and get it over!...she must have been in ...well, call that a 'state of suspended animation' and get that over too! A sort of what they called inhibition. She had been inhibiting--prohibiting--herself from thinking about herself. Well, hadn't she been right? What had a b----y Pro-German to think about in an embattled, engrossed, clamouring nation: especially when she had not much liked her brother-Pro's! A solitary state, only to be dissolved by...maroons! In suspension!
But...Be conscientious with yourself, my good girl! When that telephone blew you out of its mouth you knew really that for two years you had been avoiding wondering whether you had not been insulted! Avoiding wondering that. And nothing else! No other qualified thing.
She had, of course, been, not in suspension, but in suspense. Because, if he made a sign--I understand,' Edith Ethel had said, 'that you have not been in correspondence'...or had it been 'in communication' that she had said?...Well, they hadn't been either...
Anyhow, if that grey Problem, that ravelled ball of grey knitting worsted, had made a sign she would have known that she had not been insulted. Or was there any sense in that?
Was it really true that if a male and female of the same species were alone in a room together' and the male didn't...then it was an insult? That was an idea that did not exist in a girl's head without someone to put it there, but once it had been put there it became a luminous veracity! It had been put into her, Valentine Wannop's, head, naturally by Edith Ethel, who equally naturally said that she did not believe it, but that it was a tenet of...oh, the man's wife! Of the idle,