Father Consett was very much in her mind, for she was very much in the midst of the British military authorities who had hung 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 some-one, 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 the 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….
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? Hung 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 pitch-pine walls and ceilings…. It was a bewitched place, in the deep forests of Germany. The father himself said it was the last place in Europe to be Christianised. Or perhaps it was never Christianised…. 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….