No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford [best ereader for pdf TXT] 📗
- Author: Ford Madox Ford
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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 forever … 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 pitch-pine 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 misinformation, 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
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