No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [71]
She explained to the dead priest that she could not go all the world over to see if it contained a presentable man, but she could not bear to be in a convent for ever, and have the thought that there wasn't, for other women, one presentable man in the world...For Christopher would be no good to them. He would be mooning for ever over the Wannop girl. Or her memory. That was all one...He was content with LOVE...If he knew that the Wannop girl was loving him in Bedford Park, and he in the Khyber States with the Himalayas between them, he would be quite content...That would be correct in its way, but not very helpful for other women...Besides, if he were the only presentable man in the world, half the women would be in love with him...And that would be disastrous, because he was no more responsive than a bullock in a fatting pen.
'So, father,' she said, 'work a miracle...It's not very much of a little miracle...Even if a presentable man doesn't exist you could put him there...I'll give you ten minutes before I look...'
She thought it was pretty sporting of her, for, she said to herself, she was perfectly in earnest. If in that long, dim, green-lamp-shaded, and of course be-palm-leaved, badly-proportioned, glazed, ignoble public room, there appeared one decentish man, as decentish men went before this beanfeast began, she would go into retreat for the rest of her life...
She fell into a sort of dim trance after she had looked at her watch. Often she went into these dim trances...ever since she had been a girl at school with Father Consett for her spiritual adviser!...She seemed to be aware of the father moving about the room, lifting up a book and putting it down...Her ghostly friend!...Goodness, he was unpresentable enough, with his broad, open face that always looked dirtyish, his great dark eyes, and his great mouth...But a saint and a martyr...She felt him there...What had they murdered him for? Hanged at the word of a half-mad, half-drunk subaltern, because he had heard the confession of some of the rebels the night before they were taken...He was over in the far corner of the room...She heard him say: they had not understood, the men that had hanged him. That is what you would say, father...Have mercy on them, for they know not what they do...
Then have mercy on me, for half the time I don't know what I'm doing!...It was like a spell you put on me. At Lobscheid. Where my mother was, when I came back from that place without my clothes...You said, didn't you, to mother, but she told me afterwards: The real hell for that poor boy, meaning Christopher, will come when he falls in love with some young girl--as, mark me, he will...For she, meaning me, will tear the world down to get at him...And when mother said she was certain I would never do anything vulgar you obstinately did not agree...You knew me...
She tried to rouse herself and said: He knew me...Damn it he knew me!...What's vulgarity to me, Sylvia Tietjens, born Satterthwaite? I do what I want and that's good enough for anyone. Except a priest. Vulgarity! I wonder mother could be so obtuse. If I am vulgar I'm vulgar with a purpose. Then it's not vulgarity. It may be vice. Or viciousness...But if you commit a mortal sin with your eyes open it's not vulgarity...You chance hell fire for ever...Good enough!
The weariness sank over her again and the sense of the father's presence...She was back again in Lobscheid, thirty-six hours free of Perowne with the father and her mother in the dim sitting-room,