Mind, she did not say that she would have succumbed. But if she had not jumped at the idea that it was he, really, speaking through Edith Ethel, she would never have permitted her mind to dwell on … on his blasted, complacent perfections!
Because she had taken it for granted that if he had had her rung up he would not have been monkeying with other girls during the two years he hadn’t written to her. … Ah, but hadn’t he?
Look here! Was it reasonable? Here was a fellow who had all but … all but … “taken advantage of her” one night just before going out to France, say, two years ago. … And not another word from him after that! … It was all very well to say that he was portentous, looming, luminous, loony: John Peel with his coat so grey, the English Country Gentleman pur sang and then some; saintly; Godlike, Jesus-Christ-like. … He was all that. But you don’t seduce, as near as can be, a young woman and then go off to Hell, leaving her, God knows, in Hell, and not so much as send her, in two years, a picture-postcard with mizpah on it. You don’t. You don’t!
Or if you do you have to have your character revised. You have to have it taken for granted that you were only monkeying with her and that you’ve been monkeying ever since with WAACS in Rouen or some other Base. …
Of course, if you ring your young woman up when you come back … or have her rung up by a titled lady. … That might restore you in the eyes of the world, or at least in the eyes of the young woman if she was a bit of a softie. …
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, nightjar’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 nightjars; 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 shortcut, 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
