Miss Wanostrocht was bending her face down over her table, presumably to hide a little of it from Valentine or to avoid the girl’s eyes.
Valentine went on:
“One knows all about the conflict between a man’s private duties and his public achievements. But with a very little less of the flamboyant in his life my father might have left us very much better off. It isn’t what I want—to be a cross between a sergeant in the army and an upper housemaid. Any more than I wanted to be an under one.”
Miss Wanostrocht uttered an “Oh!” of pain. She exclaimed rapidly:
“It was your moral rather than your mere athletic influence that made me so glad to have you here. … It was because I felt that you did not set such a high value on the physical. …”
“Well, you aren’t going to have me here much longer,” Valentine said. “Not an instant more than I can in decency help. I’m going to. …”
She said to herself:
“What on earth am I going to do? … What do I want?”
She wanted to lie in a hammock beside a blue, tideless sea and think about Tibullus … There was no nonsense about her. She did not want to engage in intellectual pursuits herself. She had not the training. But she intended to enjoy the more luxurious forms of the intellectual products of others. … That appeared to be the moral of the day!
And, looking rather minutely at Miss Wanostrocht’s inclined face, she wondered if, in the history of the world, there had ever been such another day. Had Miss Wanostrocht, for instance, ever known what it was to have a man come back. Ah, but amid the tumult of a million other men coming back! A collective impulse to slacken off! Immense! Softening!
Miss Wanostrocht had apparently loved her father. No doubt in company with fifty damsels. Did they ever get a collective kick out of that affair? It was even possible that she had spoken as she had … pour cause. Warning her, Valentine, against the deleterious effect of being connected with a man whose wife was unsatisfactory. … Because the fifty damsels had all, in duty bound, thought that her mother was an unsatisfactory wife for the brilliant, grey-black haired Eminence with the figure of a stripling that her father had been. … They had probably thought that, without the untidy figure of Mrs. Wannop as a weight upon him, he might have become. … Well, with one of them! … Anything! Any sort of figure in the councils of the nation. Why not Prime Minister? For along with his pedagogic theories he had had political occupations. He had certainly had the friendship of Disraeli. He supplied—it was historic!—materials for eternally famous, meretricious speeches. He would have been head-trainer of the Empire’s proconsuls if the other fellow, at Balliol, had not got in first. … As it was he had had to specialise in the Education of Women. Building up Primrose Dames. …
So Miss Wanostrocht warned her against the deleterious effect of neglected wives upon young, attached virgins! It probably was deleterious. Where would she, Valentine Wannop have been by now if she had thought that Sylvia Tietjens was really a bad one?
Miss Wanostrocht said, as if with sudden anxiety:
“You are going to do what? You propose to do what?”
Valentine said:
“Obviously after your conversation with Edith Ethel you won’t be so glad to have me here. My moral influence has not been brightened in aspect!” A wave of passionate resentment swept over her.
“Look here,” she said, “if you think that I am prepared to. …”
She stopped however. “No,” she said, “I am not going to introduce the housemaid note. But you will probably see that this is irritating.” She added: “I would have the case of Pettigul One looked into, if I were you. It might become epidemic in a big school like this. And we’ve no means of knowing where we stand nowadays!”
Part II
I
Months and months before Christopher Tietjens had stood extremely wishing that his head were level with a particular splash of purposeless whitewash. Something behind his mind forced him to the conviction that, if his head—and of course the rest of his trunk and lower limbs—were suspended by a process of levitation to that distance above the duckboard on which, now, his feet were, he would be in an inviolable sphere. These waves of conviction recurred continually: he was constantly glancing aside and upwards at that splash: it was in the shape of the comb of a healthy rooster; it gleamed, with five serrations, in the just-beginning light that shone along the thin, unroofed channel in the gravel slope. Wet half-light, just filtering; more visible there than in the surrounding desolation because the deep, narrow channel framed a section of just-illuminated rift in the watery eastwards!
Twice he had stood up on a rifleman’s step enforced by a bully-beef case to look over—in the last few minutes. Each time, on stepping down again, he had been struck by that phenomenon: the light seen from the trench seemed if not brighter, then more definite. So, from the bottom of a pit-shaft in broad day you can see the stars. The wind was light, but from the North West. They had there the weariness of a beaten army: the weariness of having to begin always new days again. …
He glanced aside and upwards: that cockscomb of phosphorescence. … He felt waves of some X force propelling his temples towards it. He wondered if perhaps the night before he had not observed that that
