Well, for years, that! War-work for a b—y Pro-German. Or Pacifist. Yes, that too she had been for years. She hadn’t liked being it because it was the attitude of the superior and she did not like being superior. Like Edith Ethel!
But now! Wasn’t it manifest? She could put her hand whole-heartedly into the hand of any Tom, Dick or Harry. And wish him luck! Whole-heartedly! Luck for himself and for his enterprise. She came back, into the fold, into the Nation even. She could open her mouth! She could let out the good little Cockney yelps that were her birthright. She could be free, independent!
Even her dear, blessed, muddle-headed, tremendously eminent mother by now had a depressed-looking Secretary. She, Valentine Wannop, didn’t have to sit up all night typing after all day enjoining perfection of breathing in the playground…. By Jove they could go all, brother, mother in untidy black and mauve, secretary in untidy black without mauve, and she, Valentine, out of her imitation Girl Scout’s uniform and in — oh, white muslin or Harris tweeds — and with Cockney yawps discuss the cooking under the stone-pines of Amalfi. By the Mediterranean…. No one, then, would be able to say that she had never seen the sea of Penelope, the Mother of the Gracchi, Delia, Lesbia, Nausicaa, Sappho…
“
She said:
“Good…
Not in the least with a Cockney intonation but like a good Tory English gentleman confronted by an unspeakable proposition. Well, it was an unspeakable proposition. For the voice from the telephone had been saying to her inattention, rather crawlingly, after no end of details as to the financial position of the house of Macmaster:
“So I thought, my dear Val, in remembrance of old times, that… If in short I were the means of bringing you together again…. For I believe you have not been corresponding…. You might in return…. You can see for yourself that at this moment the sum would be absolutely
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 herself 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
“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 Vallambrosa, 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, and 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: “
She had been about to say: “Oh,
“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 that with their intolerable problems pushed you and your own problems out of the road….
She had been thinking all that whilst still in the School Hall, before she had gone to see the Head, immediately after Edith Ethel, Lady Macmaster had uttered the
She had gone on thinking there for a long time…. Ten minutes!
She formulated for herself summarily the first item of a period of nasty worries of a time she flattered herself she had nearly forgotten. Years ago, Edith Ethel, out of a clear sky, had accused her of having had a child by that man. But she hardly thought of him as a man. She thought of him as a ponderous, grey, intellectual mass who now, presumably, was mooning, obviously dotty, since he did not recognise the porter, behind the closed shutters of an empty house in Lincoln’s Inn…. Nothing less, I assure you! She had never been in that house, but she figured him, with cracks of light coming between the shutters, looking back over his shoulder at you in the doorway, grey, super-ursine…. Ready to envelop you in suffocating bothers!
She wondered how long it had been since the egregious Edith Ethel had made that assertion… with, naturally, every appearance of indignation for the sake of the man’s Wife with whom, equally naturally, Edith Ethel had “sided.” (Now she was trying to “bring you together again.”… The Wife, presumably, did not go to Edith Ethel’s tea-parties often enough, or was too brilliantly conspicuous when there. Probably the latter!). How many years ago? Two? Not so much! Eighteen months, then? Surely more!… surely, surely more!… When you thought of Time in those days your mind wavered impotently like eyes tired by reading too small print…. He went out surely in the autumn of… No, it had been the first time he went that he went in the autumn. It was her brother’s friend, Ted, that went in ’16. Or the other… Malachi. So many going out and returning, and going out and perhaps not returning. Or only bits: the nose gone… or both eyes. Or — or Hell! oh, Hell! and she clenched her fists, her nails into her
