Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 603
The Husband of the Wife then? Once he had been allowed in Edith Ethel’s drawing room: now he wasn’t!...Must have deteriorated!
She said to herself sharply, in her ‘No nonsense, there’ mood:
‘Chuck it. You’re in love with a married man who’s a Society wife and you’re upset because the Titled Lady has put into your head the idea that you might “come together again”. After ten years!’
But immediately she protested:
‘No. NO. No! It isn’t that. It’s all right the habit of putting things incisively, but it’s misleading to put things too crudely.’
What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing, on the face of it, but being dragged again into that man’s intolerable worries as unfortunate machinists are dragged into wheels by belts — and all the flesh torn off their bones! Upon her word that had been her first thought. She was afraid, afraid, afraid! She suddenly appreciated the advantages of nunlike seclusion. Besides she wanted to be bashing policemen with bladders in celebration of Eleven Eleven!
That fellow — he had no furniture; he did not appear to recognize the hall porter...Dotty. Dotty and too morally deteriorated to be admitted to drawing-room of titled lady, the frequenters of which could be trusted not to make love to you on insufficient provocation, if left alone with you...
Her generous mind reacted painfully.
‘Oh, that’s not fair!’ she said.
There were all sorts of sides to the unfairness. Before this War, and, of course, before he had lent all his money to Vincent Macmaster that — that grey grizzly had been perfectly fit for the country-parsonage drawing-room of Edith Ethel Duchemin: he had been welcomed there with effusion!...After the War and when his money was — presumably exhausted, and his mind exhausted, for he had no furniture and did not know the porter...After the War, then, and when his money was exhausted he was not fit for the Salon of Lady Macmaster — the only Lady to have a Salon in London.
It was what you called kicking down your ladder!
Obviously it had to be done. There were such a lot of these bothering War heroes that if you let them all into your Salon it would cease to be a Salon, particularly if you were under an obligation to them!...That was already a pressing national problem: it was going to become an overwhelming one now — in twenty minutes’ time; after those maroons. The impoverished War Heroes would all be coming back. Innumerable. You would have to tell your parlourmaid that you weren’t at home to...about seven million!
But wait a minute...Where did they just stand?
He...But she could not go on calling him just He like a school-girl 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 Hogg’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 dog-cart seat it would have been the larkish freak of a school-girl: if she did it to-day — 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 to-day...to-day...to-day — the Eleven Eleven! — Oh, what a day to-day would be...Not her sentiments those; quotations 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 a 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 dog-cart! 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 school-girl, just...oh, just past the age of consent, out all night in a dog-cart 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 school-girl 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 dog-cart 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 dog-cart was symbolical of him. He was perfectly on his right side and all, but it was like him to be in a dog-cart 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 dog-cart 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 him — she so young and innocent, daughter of so preposterously eminent, if so impoverished a man, his father’s best friend and all. ‘He hadn’t oughter’er done it!’ He hadn’t really oughter...She heard them all saying it, still!
Well, he hadn’t!...But she?
That magic night. It was just before dawn, the mists nearly up to their necks as they drove; the sky going pale in a sort of twilight. And one immense star! She remembered only one immense star, though, historically, there had been also a dilapidated sort of moon. But the star was her best boy — what her wagon was hitched on to...And they had been quoting — quarrelling over, she remembered:
Flebis et arsuro me, Delia, lecto
Tristibus et...
She exclaimed suddenly:
Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me
And may there be no moaning at the bar
When I...’
She said:
‘Oh, but you oughtn’t to, my dear! That’s Tennyson!’ Tennyson, with a difference!
She said:
‘All the same, that would have been an inexperienced school-girl’s prank...-But if I let him kiss me now I should be....’ She would be a what was it...a fornicatress?...trix! Fornicatrix is preferable! Very preferable. Then why not adultrix? You couldn’t: you had to be a ‘cold-blooded adultress!’ or morality was not avenged.
Oh; but surely not cold-blooded!...Deliberate, then!...That wasn’t, either, the word for the process. Of osculation!...Comic things, words, as applied to states of feelings!
But if she went now to Lincoln’s Inn and the Problem held out its arms...That would be ‘Deliberate’. It would be asking for it in the fullest sense of the term.
She said to herself quickly:
‘This way madness lies!’ And then:
‘What an imbecile thing to say!’
She had had an Affair with a man, she made her mind say to her, two years ago. That was all right. There could not be a, say, a schoolmistress rising twenty-four or twenty-five, in the world who hadn’t had some affair, even if it were no more than a gentleman in a tea-shop who every afternoon for a week had gazed at her disrespectfully over a slice of plum-cake...And then disappeared...But you had to have had at least a might-have-been or you couldn’t go on being a schoolmistress or a girl in a ministry or a dactylographer of respectability. You packed that away in the bottom of your mind and on Sunday mornings before the perfectly insufficient Sunday dinner, you took it out and built castles in Spain in which you were a castanetted heroine turning on wonderful hips, but casting behind you inflaming glances...Something like that!
Well, she had had an affair with this honest, simple creature! So good! So unspeakably GOOD...Like the late Albert, prince consort! The very, helpless, immobile sort of creature that she ought not to have tempted. It had been like shooting tame pigeons! Because he had had a Society wife always in the illustrated papers whilst he sat at home and evolved Statistics or came to tea with her dear, tremendous, distracted mother, whom he helped to get her articles accurate. So a woman tempted him and he did...No; he didn’t quite eat!
But why?...Because he was GOOD?
Very likely!
Or was it — that was the intolerable thought that she shut up within her along with the material for castles in the air! — was it because he had been really indifferent?
They had revolved round each other at tea-parties — or rather he had revolved around her, because at Edith Ethel’s affairs she always sat, a fixed starlet, behind the tea-urn and dispensed cups. But he would moon round the room, looking at the backs of books; occasionally laying down the law to some guest; and always drifting in the end to her side where he would say a trifle or two...And the beautiful — the quite excruciatingly beautiful wife — striding along the Row with the second son of the Earl of someone at her side...Asking for it...
So it had been from the 1/7/12, say to the 4/8/14!
After that, things had become more rubbled — mixed up with alarums. Excursions on his part to unapproved places. And trouble. He was quite damnably in trouble. With his Superiors; with, so unnecessarily, Hun projectiles, wire, mud; over Money; politics; mooning on without a good word from anyone...Unravellable muddles that never got unravelled but that somehow got you caught up in them...
Because he needed her moral support! When, during the late Hostilities, he hadn’t been out there, he had drifted to the tea-table much earlier of an afternoon and stayed beside it much longer: till after everyone else had gone and they could go and sit on the tall fender side by side, and argue...about the rights and wrongs of the War!
Because she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk...They had the same sort of good, bread-and-butter brains; without much of the romantic...No doubt a touch...in him. Otherwise he would not have always been in these muddles. He gave all he possessed to anyone who asked for it. That was all right. But that those who sponged on him should also involve him in intolerable messes...That was not proper. One ought to defend oneself against that!
Because...if you do not defend yourself against that, look how you let in your nearest and dearest — those who have to sympathise with you in your confounded troubles whilst you moon on, giving away more and more and getting into more troubles! In this case it was she who was his Nearest and Dearest...Or had been!
At that her nerves suddenly got the better of her and her mind went mad...Supposing that that fellow, from whom she had not heard for two years, hadn’t now communicated with her...Like an ass she had taken it for granted that he had asked Lady...Blast her!...to ‘bring them together again’ But she imagined that even Edith Ethel would not have had the cheek to ring her up if he hadn’t asked her to!
But she had nothing to go on...Feeble, over-sexed ass that she was, she had let her mind jump at once to the conclusion, the moment the mere mention of him seemed implied — jump to the conclusion that he was asking her again to come and be his mistress...Or nurse him through his present muddle till he should be fit to...
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-brize floor that was singularly unresilient. She exclaimed:
‘Damn it all, he didn’t ask her to ring me up. He didn’t ask her. He didn’t ask her to!’ still stamping about.
She marched straight at the telephone that was by now uttering long, tinny, night-jar’s calls and, with one snap, pulled up the receiver right off the twisted green-blue cord...Broke it! With incidental satisfaction!
Then she said:
‘Steady the Buffs!’ not out of repentence 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 night-jars; 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:
