Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [44]
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.
'It's thinking of those beastly days,' she said. 'And that beastly, beastly yesterday!' She ran the knuckles of both her hands fiercely into her eyes, and determinedly eluded Mrs Duchemin's handkerchief and embraces. She said almost contemptuously:
'A nice, considerate person I am. And you with this ordeal hanging over you! Do you suppose I don't appreciate all your silent heroism of the home, while we're marching about with flags and shouting? But it's just to stop women like you being tortured, body and soul, week in, week