A Man Could Stand Up—, Ford Madox Ford [ebook reader macos .txt] 📗

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