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 wholeheartedly into the hand of any Tom, Dick or Harry. And wish him luck! Wholeheartedly! 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, muddleheaded, 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. …
“Saepe te in somnis vidi!”
She said:
“Good … God!”
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 crushing. …”
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 not be romantic over one’s brother—with a broad scarlet sash. One foot on shore and one … in a light skiff that gently bobbed in the lapping tide. Nice boy; nice little brother. Lately employed nautically, so up to managing a light skiff. They were going tomorrow … but why not that very afternoon by the 4:20?
“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 seventy-ish, martial, British, 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: “Oh!”
She had been about to say: “Oh, Hell!” but the sudden recollection that the War had been over a quarter of an hour made her leave it at “Oh!” You would have to drop wartime phraseology! You became again a Young Lady. Peace, too, has its Defence of the Realm
