But had he? Had he? It was absurd to think that Edith Ethel hadn’t had the face to do it unasked! To save three thousand, two hundred pounds, not to mention interest – which was what Vincent owed him! – Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying… . She was quite right. She had to save her man. You go to any depths of ignominy to save your man.
But that did not help her, Valentine Wannop!
She sprang off the bench; she clenched her nails into her palms; she stamped her thin-soled shoes into the coke-brise floor that was singularly unresilient. She exclaimed:
‘Damn it all, he didn’t ask her to ring me up. He didn’t ask her to. He didn’t ask her to!’ still stamping about.
She marched straight at the telephone that was by now uttering long, tinny, night-jar’s calls and, with one snap, pulled the receiver right off the twisted, green-blue cord… . Broke it! With incidental satisfaction.
Then she said:
‘Steady the Buffs!’ not out of repentance for having damaged School Property, but because she was accustomed to call her thoughts The Buffs because of their practical, unromantic character as a rule… . A fine regiment, the Buffs!
Of course, if she had not broken the telephone she could have rung up Edith Ethel and have asked her whether he had or hadn’t asked to … to be brought together again… . It was like her, Valentine Wannop, to smash the only means of resolving a torturing doubt… .
It wasn’t, really, in the least like her. She was practical enough; none of the ‘under the ban of fatality’ business about her. She had smashed the telephone because it had been like smashing a connection with Edith Ethel; or because she hated tinny night-jars; or because she had smashed it. For nothing in the world; for nothing, nothing, nothing in the world would she ever ring up Edith Ethel and ask her:
‘Did he put you up to ringing me up?’
That would be to let Edith Ethel come between their intimacy.
A subconscious volition was directing her feet towards the great doors at the end of the Hall, varnished, pitch-pine doors of Gothic architecture; economically decorated as if with straps and tin-lids of Brunswick-blacked cast iron.
She said:
‘Of course if it’s his wife who has removed his furniture that would be a reason for his wanting to get into communication. They would have split… . But he does not hold with a man divorcing a woman, and she won’t divorce.’
As she went through the sticky postern – all that woodwork seemed sticky on account of its varnish! – beside the great doors she said:
‘Who cares!’
The great thing was … but she could not formulate what the great thing was. You had to settle the preliminaries.
III
SHE SAID EVENTUALLY to Miss Wanostrocht who had sat down at her table behind two pink carnations:
‘I didn’t consciously want to bother you but a spirit in my feet has led me who knows how… . That’s Shelley, isn’t it?’
And indeed a quite unconscious but shrewd mind had pointed out to her whilst still in the School Hall and even before she had broken the telephone, that Miss Wanostrocht very probably would be able to tell her what she wanted to know and that if she didn’t hurry she might miss her, since the Head would probably go now the girls were gone. So she had hurried through gauntish corridors whose Decorated Gothic windows positively had bits of pink glass here and there interspersed in their lattices. Nevertheless a nearly deserted, darkish, locker-lined dressing-room being a short cut, she had paused in it before the figure of a clumsyish girl, freckled, in black and, on a stool, desultorily lacing a dull black boot, an ankle on her knee. She felt an impulse to say: ‘Goodbye, Pettigul!’ she didn’t know why.
The clumsy, fifteenish, bumpy-faced girl was a symbol of that place – healthyish, but not over healthy; honestish but with no craving for intellectual honesty; big-boned in unexpected places … and uncomelily blubbering so that her face appeared dirtyish… . It was in fact all ‘ishes’ about that Institution. They were all healthyish, honestish, clumsyish, twelve-to-eighteenish, and big-boned in unexpected places because of the late insufficient feeding… . Emotionalish, too; apt to blubber rather than to go into hysterics.
Instead of saying good-bye to the girl she said:
‘Here!’ and roughly, since she was exhibiting too much leg, pulled down the girl’s shortish skirt and set to work to lace the unyielding boot on the unyielding shin-bone… . After a period of youthful bloom, which would certainly come and as certainly go, this girl would, normally, find herself one of the Mothers of Europe, marriage being due to the period of youthful bloom… . Normally that is to say according to a normality that that day might restore. Of course it mightn’t!
A tepid drop of moisture fell on Valentine’s right knuckle.
‘My cousin Bob was killed the day before yesterday,’ the girl’s voice said above her head. Valentine bent her head still lower over the boot with the patience that, in educational establishments, you must, if you want to be businesslike and shrewd, acquire and display in face of unusual mental vagaries… . This girl had never had a cousin Bob, or anything else. Pettigul and her two sisters, Pettiguls Two and Three, were all in that Institution at extremely reduced rates precisely because they had not got, apart from their widowed mother, a discoverable relative. The father, a half-pay major, had been killed early in the war. All the mistresses had had to hand in reports on the moral qualities of the Pettiguls, so all the mistresses had this information.
‘He gave me his puppy to keep for him before he went out,’ the girl said. ‘It doesn’t seem just!’
Valentine, straightening herself, said:
‘I should wash my face if I were you, before I went out. Or you might get yourself taken for a German!’ She pulled the girl’s clumsyish blouse straight on her shoulders.
‘Try,’ she added, ‘to imagine that you’ve got someone just come back! It’s just as easy and it will make you look more attractive!’
Scurrying along the corridors she said to herself:
‘Heaven help me, does it make me look more attractive?’
She caught the Head, as she had anticipated, just on the point of going to her home in Fulham, an unattractive suburb but near a bishop’s palace nevertheless. It seemed somehow appropriate. The lady was episcopally minded, but experienced in the vicissitudes of suburban children: very astonishing some of them unless you took them very much in the lump.
Miss Head had stood behind her table for the first three questions and answers in an attitude of someone who is a little at bay, but she had sat down just before Valentine had quoted her Shelley at her, and she had now the air of one who is ready to make a night of it. Valentine continued to stand.
‘This,’ Miss Wanostrocht said very gently, ‘is a day on which one might … take steps … that might influence one’s whole life.’
‘That’s,’ Valentine answered, ‘exactly why I’ve come to you. I want to know what that woman said to you so as to know where I stand before I take a step.’
The Head said:
‘I had to let the girls go. I don’t mind saying that you are very valuable to me. The Governors – I had an express from Lord Boulnois – ordered them to be given a holiday to-morrow. It’s very inconsistent. But that makes it all the …’
She stopped. Valentine said to herself:
‘By Jove, I don’t know anything about men; but how little I know about women. What’s she getting at?’
She added:
‘She’s nervous. She must be wanting to say something she thinks I won’t like!’
She said chivalrously:
‘I don’t believe anybody could have kept those girls in to-day. It’s a thing one has no experience of. There’s never been a day like this before.’
Out there in Piccadilly there would be mobs shoulder to shoulder; she had never seen the Nelson column stand out of a solid mass. They might roast oxen whole in the Strand. W
hitechapel would be seething, enamelled iron advertisements looking down on millions of bowler hats. All sordid and immense London stretched out under her gaze. She felt herself of London as the grouse feels itself of the heather, and there she was in an emptied suburb looking at two pink carnations. Dyed probably: offering of Lord Boulnois to Miss Wanostrocht! You never saw a natural-grown carnation that shade!
She said:
‘I’d be glad to know what that woman – Lady Macmaster – told you.’
Miss Wanostrocht looked down at her hands. She had the little-fingers hooked together, the hands back to back; it was a demoded gesture… . Girton of 1897, Valentine thought; indulged in by the thoughtfully blonde… . Fair girl graduates the sympathetic comic papers of those days had called them. It pointed to a long sitting. Well, she, Valentine, was not going to brusque the issue! … French-derived expression that. But how would you put it otherwise?
Miss Wanostrocht said:
‘I sat at the feet of your father!’
‘You see!’ Valentine said to herself. ‘But she must then have gone to Oxford, not Newnham!’ She could not remember whether there had been women’s colleges at Oxford as early as 1895 or 1897. There must have been.
‘The greatest Teacher … The greatest influence in the world,’ Miss Wanostrocht said.
It was queer, Valentine thought: This woman had known all about her – at any rate all about her distinguished descent all the time she, Valentine, had been Physical Instructress at that Great Public School (Girls’). Yet except for an invariable courtesy such as she imagined Generals might show to non-commissioned officers, Miss Wanostrocht had hitherto taken no more notice of her than she might have taken of a superior parlourmaid. On the other hand she had let Valentine arrange her physical training exactly as she liked, without any interference.
‘We used to hear,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘how he spoke Latin with you and your brother from the day of your births… . He used to be regarded as eccentric, but how right! … Miss Hall says that you are the most remarkable Latinist she has ever so much as imagined.’
‘It’s not true,’ Valentine said, ‘I can’t think in Latin. You cannot be a real Latinist unless you do that. He did of course.’
‘It was the last thing you would think of him as doing,’ the Head answered with a pale gleam of youth. ‘He was such a thorough man of the world. So awake!’
‘We ought to be a queer lot, my brother and I,’ Valentine said. ‘With such a father … And mother of course!’
Miss Wanostrocht said:
‘Oh … your mother …’
And immediately Valentine conjured up the little, adoring female clique of Miss Wanostrocht’s youth, all spying on her father and mother in their walks under the Oxford Sunday trees, the father so jaunty and awake, the mother so trailing, large, generous, unobservant. And all the little clique saying: If only he had us to look after him… . She said with a little malice:
‘You don’t read my mother’s novels, I suppose… . It was she who did all my father’s writing for him. He couldn’t write, he was too impatient!’
Miss Wanostrocht exclaimed:
‘Oh, you shouldn’t say that!’ with almost the pain of someone defending her own personal reputation.
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t,’ Valentine said. ‘He was the first person to say it about himself.’
‘He shouldn’t have said it either,’ Miss Wanostrocht answered with a sort of soft unction. ‘He should have taken care more of his own reputation for the sake of his Work!’
Valentine considered this thin, ecstatic spinster with ironic curiosity.
‘Of course, if you’ve sat … if you’re still sitting at father’s feet as much as all that,’ she conceded, ‘it gives you a certain right to be careful about his reputation… . All the same I wish you would tell me what that person said on the phone!’
The bust of Miss Wanostrocht moved with a sudden eagerness further towards the edge of her table.
‘It’s precisely because of that,’ she said, ‘that I want to speak to you first… . That I want you to consider… .’
Valentine said:
‘Because of my father’s reputation… . Look here, did that person – Lady Macmaster! – speak to you as if you were me? Our names are near enough to make it possible.’
‘You’re,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘as one might say, the fine fruit of the product of his views on the education of women. And if you … It’s been such a satisfaction to me to observe in you such a … a sound, instructed head on such a … oh, you know, sane body… . And then … An earning capacity. A commercial value. Your father, of course, never minced words… .’ She added:
‘I’m bound to say that my interview with Lady Macmaster … who surely isn’t a lady of whom you could say that you disapprove. I’ve read her husband’s work. It surely – you’d say, wouldn’t you? – conserves some of the ancient fire.’
‘He,’ Valentine said, ‘hasn’t a word of Latin to his tail. He makes his quotations out, if he uses them, by means of school-cribs… . I know his methods of work, you know.’
It occurred to Valentine to think that if Edith Ethel really had at first taken Miss Wanostrocht for herself there might pretty obviously be some cause for Miss Wanostrocht’s concern for her father’s reputation as an intimate trainer of young women. She figured Edith Ethel suddenly bursting into a description of the circumstances of that man who was without furniture and did not appear to recognise the porter. The relations she might have described as having existed between her and him might well worry the Head of a Great Public School for Middle Class Girls. She had no doubt been described as having had a baby. A disagreeable and outraged current invaded her feelings… .
It was suddenly obscured by a recrudescence of the thought that had come to her only incidentally in the hall. It rushed over her with extraordinary vividness now, like a wave of warm liquid… . If it had really been that fellow’s wife who had removed his furniture what was there to keep them apart? He couldn’t have pawned or sold or burnt his furniture whilst he had been with the British Expeditionary Force in the Low Countries! He couldn’t have without extraordinary difficulty! Then … What should keep them apart? … Middle Class Morality? A pretty gory carnival that had been for the last four years! Was this then Lent, pressing hard on the heels of Saturnalia? Not so hard as that, surely! So that if one hurried… . What on earth did she want, unknown to herself?
She heard herself saying, almost with a sob, so that she was evidently in a state of emotion:
‘Look here, I disapprove of this whole thing: of what my father has brought me to! Those people … the brilliant Victorians talked all the time through their hats. They evolved a theory from anywhere and then went brilliantly mad over it. Perfectly recklessly… . Have you noticed Pettigul One? … Hasn’t it occurred to you that you can’t carry on violent physical jerks and mental work side by side? I ought not to be in this school and I ought not to be what I am!’
At Miss Wanostrocht’s perturbed expression she said to herself:
‘What on earth am I saying all this for? You’d think I was trying to cut loose from this school! Am I?’
Nevertheless her voice was going on:
‘There’s too much oxygenation of the lungs, here. It’s unnatural. It affects the brain, deleteriously. Pettigul One is an example of it. She’s earnest with me and earnest with her books. Now she’s gone dotty. Most of them it only stupefies.’
It was incredible to her that the mere imagination that that fellow’s wife had left him should make her spout out like this – for all the world like her father spouting out one of his ingenious theories! … It had really occurred to her once or twice to think that you could not run a dual physical and mental existence without some risk. The military physical developments of the last four years had been responsible for a real exaggeration of physical values. She was aware that in that Institution, for the last four years, she had been regarded as suppleme
nting if not as actually replacing both the doctor and the priest… . But from that to evolving a complete theory that the Pettigul’s lie was the product of an overoxygenated brain was going pretty far… .
Still, she was prevented from taking part in national rejoicings; pretty certainly Edith Ethel had been talking scandal about her to Miss Wanostrocht. She had the right to take it out in some sort of exaggerated declamation!
‘It appears,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘for we can’t now go into the question of the whole curriculum of the school, though I am inclined to agree with you. What by the by is the matter with Pettigul One? I thought her rather a solid sort of girl. But it appears that the wife of a friend … perhaps it’s only a former friend of yours, is in a nursing home.’
Valentine exclaimed:
‘Oh, he … But that’s too ghastly!’
‘It appears,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘to be rather a mess.’ She added: ‘That appears to be the only expression to use.’
For Valentine, that piece of news threw a blinding light upon herself. She was overwhelmingly appalled because that woman was in a nursing home. Because in that case it would not be sporting to go and see the husband!
Miss Wanostrocht went on:
‘Lady Macmaster was anxious for your advice… . It appears that the only other person that could look after the interests of … of your friend: his brother …’
Valentine missed something out of that sentence. Miss Wanostrocht talked too fluently. If people wanted you to appreciate items of sledge-hammering news they should not use long sentences. They should say:
‘He’s mad and penniless. His brother’s dying, his wife’s just been operated on.’ Like that! Then you could take it in; even if your mind was rioting about like a cat in a barrel.
‘The brother’s … female companion,’ Miss Wanostrocht was wandering on, ‘though it appears that she would have been willing is therefore not available… . The theory is that he – he himself, your friend, has been considerably unhinged by his experiences in the war. Then … Who in your opinion should take the responsibility of looking after his interests?’