No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [66]
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, all antlers, candle-lit, with the father's shadow waving over the pitchpine walls and ceilings...It was a bewitched place, in the deep forest of Germany. The father himself said it was the last place in Europe to be Christianized. Or perhaps it was never Christianized...That was perhaps why those people, the Germans, coming from those deep, devil-infested woods, did all these wickednesses. Or maybe they were not wicked...One would never know properly...But maybe the father had put a spell on her...His words had never been out of her mind, much...At the back of her brain, as the saying was...
Some man drifted near her and said:
'How do you do, Mrs Tietjens? Who would have thought of seeing you here?'
She answered:
'I have to look after Christopher now and then.' He remained hanging over her with a schoolboy grin for a minute, then he drifted away as an object sinks into deep water...Father Consett again hovered near her. She exclaimed:
'But the real point is, father...Is it sporting?...Sporting or whatever it is?' And Father Consett breathed: 'Ah!...' with his terrible power of arousing doubts...She said:
'When I saw Christopher...Last night?...Yes, it was last night...Turning back to go up that hill...And I had been talking about him to a lot of grinning private soldiers...To madden him...You mustn't make scenes before the servants...A heavy man, tired...come down the hill and lumbering up again...There was a searchlight turned on him just as he turned...I remembered the white bulldog I thrashed on the night before it died...A tired, silent beast...with a fat white behind...Tired out...You couldn't see its tail because it was turned down, the stump...A great, silent beast...The vet said it had been poisoned with red lead by burglars...It's beastly to die of red lead...It eats up the liver...And you think you're getting better for a fortnight. And you're always cold...freezing in the blood-vessels...And the poor beast had left its kennel to try and be let in to the fire...And I found it at the door when I came in from a dance without Christopher...And got the rhinoceros whip and lashed into it...There's a pleasure in lashing into a naked white beast...Obese and silent...Like Christopher...I thought Christopher might...That night...It went through my head...It hung down its head...A great head, room for a whole British encyclopaedia of mis-information, as Christopher used to put it...It said: "What a hope!"...As I hope to be saved, though I never shall be, the dog said: "What a hope!"...Snow-white in quite black bushes...And it went under a bush...They found it dead there in the morning...You can't imagine what it looked like, with its head over its shoulder, as it looked back and said: What a hope to me...Under a dark bush. An eu...eu...euonymus, isn't it?...In thirty degrees of frost with all the blood-vessels exposed on the naked surface of the skin...It's the seventh circle of hell, isn't it? the frozen one...The last stud-white bulldog of that breed...As Christopher is the last stud-white hope of the Groby Tory breed...Modelling himself on our Lord...But our Lord was never married. He never touched on topics of sex. Good for Him...