A Man Could Stand Up—, Ford Madox Ford [ebook reader macos .txt] 📗
- Author: Ford Madox Ford
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But wait a minute. … Where did they just stand?
He. … But she could not go on calling him just “he” like a schoolgirl of eighteen, thinking of her favourite actor … in the purity of her young thoughts. What was she to call him? She had never—even when they had known each other—called him anything other than Mr. So-and-So. … She could not bring herself to let her mental lips frame his name. … She had never used anything but his surname to this grey thing, familiar object of her mother’s study, seen frequently at tea-parties. … Once she had been out with it for a whole night in a dog cart! Think of that! … And they had spouted Tibullus one to another in moonlit mist. And she had certainly wanted it to kiss her—in the moonlit mists a practically, a really completely strange bear!
It couldn’t be done, of course, but she remembered still how she had shivered. … Ph … Ph … Ph. … Shivering.
She shivered.
Afterwards they had been run into by the car of General Lord Edward Campion, V.C., P.G. Heaven knows what! Godfather of the man’s Society Wife, then taking the waters in Germany. … Or perhaps not her Godfather. The man’s rather; but her especial champion, in shining armour. In these days they had worn broad red stripes down the outsides of their trousers, Generals. What a change! How significant of the times!
That had been in 1912. … Say the first of July; she could not remember exactly. Summer weather, anyhow, before haymaking or just about. The grass had been long in Hoggs’s Forty Acre, when they had walked through it, discussing Woman’s Suffrage. She had brushed the seed-tops of the heavy grass with her hands as they walked. … Say the 1/7/12.
Now it was Eleven Eleven. … What? Oh, Eighteen, of course!
Six years ago! What changes in the world! What cataclysms! What Revolutions! … She heard all the newspapers, all the halfpenny paper journalists in creation crying in chorus!
But hang it: it was true! If, six years ago she had kissed the … the greyish lacuna of her mind then sitting beside her on the dogcart seat it would have been the larkish freak of a schoolgirl: if she did it today—as per invitation presumably of Lady Macmaster, bringing them together, for, of course, it could not be performed from a distance or without correspondence—No, communication! … If, then, she did it today … today … today—the Eleven Eleven!—Oh, what a day today would be. … Not her sentiments those; quotation from Christina, sister of Lady Macmaster’s favourite poet. … Or, perhaps, since she had had a title she would have found poets more … more chic! The poet who was killed at Gallipoli … Gerald Osborne, was it? Couldn’t remember the name!
But for six years then she had been a member of that … triangle. You couldn’t call it a ménage à trois, even if you didn’t know French. They hadn’t lived together! … They had d⸺d near died together when the general’s car hit their dogcart! D⸺d near! (You must not use those Wartime idioms. Do break yourself of it! Remember the maroons!)
An oafish thing to do! To take a schoolgirl, just … oh, just past the age of consent, out all night in a dogcart and then get yourself run into by the car of the V.C., P.G., champion-in-red-trouser-stripe of your Legitimate! You’d think any man who was a man would have avoided that!
Most men knew enough to know that the Woman Pays … the schoolgirl too!
But they get it both ways. … Look here: when Edith Ethel Duchemin, then, just—or perhaps not quite, Lady Macmaster! At any rate, her husband was dead and she had just married that miserable little. … (Mustn’t use that word!) She, Valentine Wannop, had been the only witness of the marriage—as of the previous, discreet, but so praiseworthy adultery! … When, then, Edith Ethel had. … It must have been on the very day of the knighthood, because Edith Ethel made it an excuse not to ask her to the resultant Party. … Edith Ethel had accused her of having had a baby by … oh, Mr. So-and-So. … And heaven was her, Valentine Wannop’s, witness that, although Mr. So-and-So was her mother’s constant adviser, she, Valentine Wannop, was still in such a state of acquaintance with him that she still called him by his surname. … When Lady Macmaster, spitting like the South American beast of burden called a llama, had accused her of having had a baby by her mother’s adviser—to her natural astonishment, but, of course, it had been the result of the dogcart and the motor and the General, and the general’s sister, Lady Pauline Something—or perhaps it was Claudine? Yes, Lady Claudine!—who had been in the car and the Society Wife, who was always striding along the railings of the Row. … When she had been so accused out of the blue, her first thought—and, confound it, her enduring thought!—had not been concern for her own reputation but for his. …
That was the quality of his entanglements, their very essence. He got into appalling messes, unending and unravellable—no, she meant ununravellable!—messes and other people suffered for him whilst he mooned on—into more messes! The General charging the dogcart was symbolical of him. He was perfectly on his right side and all, but it was like him to be in a dogcart when flagitious automobiles carrying Generals were running amuck! Then … the Woman Paid! … She really did, in this case. It had been her mother’s horse they had been driving and, although they had got damages out of the General, the costs were twice that. … And her, Valentine’s reputation had suffered from being in a dogcart at dawn, alone with a man. … It made no odds that he had—or was it hadn’t?—“insulted” her in any way all through that—oh, that delicious, delirious night. … She had to be said to have a baby by him, and then she had to be dreadfully worried about his poor old reputation. … Of course it would have been pretty rotten of
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