No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [65]
Father Consett was very much in her mind, for she was very much in the midst of the British military authorities who had hanged him...She had never seemed before to be so in the midst of these negligible, odious, unpresentable, horse-laughing schoolboys. It antagonized her, and it was a weight upon her, for hitherto she had completely ignored them: in this place they seemed to have a coherence, a mass...almost a life...They rushed in and out of rooms occupied, as incomprehensibly, as unpresentably, with things like boots, washing, vaccination certificates...Even with old tins!...A man with prematurely white hair and a pasty face, with a tunic that bulged both above and below his belt, would walk into the drawing-room of a lady who superintended all the acid-drop and cigarette stalls of that city and remark to a thin-haired, deaf man with an amazingly red nose--a nose that had a perfectly definite purple and scarlet diagonal demarcation running from the bridge to the upper side of the nostrils--that he had got his old tins off his hands at last. He would have to repeat it in a shout because the red-nosed man, his head hanging down, would have heard nothing at all. The deaf man would say Humph! Humph! Snuffle. The woman giving the tea--a Mrs Hemmerdine, of Tarbolton, whom you might have met at home, would be saying that at last she had got twelve reams of notepaper with forget-me-nots in the top corners when the deaf-faced man would begin, gruffly and uninterruptedly, a monologue on his urgent need for twenty thousand tons of sawdust for the new slow-burning stoves in the men's huts...
It was undeniably like something moving...All these things going in one direction...A disagreeable force set in motion by gawky schoolboys--but schoolboys of the Sixth Form, sinister, hobbledehoy, waiting in the corners of playgrounds to torture someone, weak and unfortunate...In one or other corner of their world-wide playground they had come upon Father Consett and hanged him. No doubt they tortured him first. And, if he made an offering of his sufferings, then and there to Heaven, no doubt he was already in paradise...Or, if he was not yet in heaven, certain of these souls in purgatory were yet listened to in the midst of their torments...
So she said:
'Blessed and martyred father, I know that you loved Christopher and wish to save him from trouble. I will make this pact with you. Since I have been in this room I have kept my eyes in the boat--almost in my lap. I will agree to leave off torturing Christopher and I will go into retreat in a convent of Ursuline Dames Nobles--for I can't stand the nuns of that other convent--for the rest of my life...And I know that will please you, too, for you were always anxious for the good of my soul...' She was going to do that if when she raised her eyes and really looked round the room she saw in it one man that looked presentable. She did not ask that he should more than look presentable, for she wanted nothing to do with the creature. He was to be a sign: not a prey!
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...