The Parson

4

OSWALD felt better when he woke in the morning; most of his blurred impressions of the previous night seemed sheer imagination. Dressing quickly, he left the house before breakfast, and, munching an apple picked up on the way, went out to the car.

His main concern was to elude his mother and sister, who had lately begun to complain of his continual absence, and had already protested against the Bannenberg trip. Last night his headache had come in useful, enabling him to avoid argument by going to bed. Now he could but hope to slip away unobserved.

However, he had no chance to do so before his mother rushed out of the house in her dressing-gown — a distraught, dishevelled figure, pathetic and slightly absurd — imploring him not to go to Bannenberg. She’d had ‘a warning’ dining the night, a dream or a premonition. He could hardly understand what she was saying, as, incoherent with agitation, she came stumbling up to him, tripping over the long dressing-gown.

Oswald frowned disapprovingly. He always discouraged her psychic tendencies, both because he considered them undignified and because they reminded him of certain imaginative traits he’d inherited which were unsuited to a cavalryman. As a rule, she was easily crushed. Now, by ignoring his severity, as he steered her back into the house, she forced him to realize how strong her conviction of coming disaster must be. He couldn’t possibly leave her in this state. Common humanity required him to stay with her, at least for a few minutes, especially after the way he’d been neglecting her lately.

Feeling exasperated and victimized, he tried to calm her by saying he was far too experienced a driver to get into difficulties, whatever the road was like. But her fears were of a less concrete nature, she refused to be pacified, continuing to pour out a flood of confused pleading and protest; which he didn’t even attempt to understand now, merely uttering random reassurances at intervals.

In the course of these futile exchanges, time was slipping past. He saw that he would inevitably be late in getting to the hotel; and the idea of Rejane waiting for him, doubtless becoming indignant because he didn’t turn up, drove him nearly frantic. Unconsciously he fixed his eyes on the door; and his mother, noticing this, suddenly clutched his sleeve, as if afraid he might make a dash for it.

At her touch, his extreme impatience turned into anger: he almost hated her for delaying him with this absurd rigmarole. And where was Vera? Why didn’t she come to his rescue?

As if answering him, his sister hurried into the room, glanced nervously from one of them to the other, and stopped just inside the door.

I must go, Mother.’ Oswald shook off the hand clutching his arm, strode across to the door, and, as he passed Vera, muttered furiously, ‘Why can’t you look after her properly? It’s your job.’

A kind of hiatus ensued in his mind, he seemed to gape incredulously at the sound of his own angry voice. Never before in his life had he spoken to any woman in that enraged brutal tone. It was horrifying that his mother and sister should be the first to hear it. Appalled by his own behaviour, he thought, Nobody would be likely to call me The Parson now, wondering what had become of his former gentleness and consideration.

He raced all the way to the hotel, to find Rejane, as he’d expected, in a very bad temper because, after asking her specially to be ready, he’d kept her waiting so long. She wouldn’t listen to his apologies or explanations, forcing him to endure her reproaches, as he’d endured his mother’s, as they started off on the long trip, which seemed to him to have begun under the worst possible auspices.

*

Though he sat bolt upright behind the wheel, the athletic young man gave the impression of supporting with difficulty some tremendous weight. Vaguely, he supposed it was knowing he must sustain the effort of driving fast the whole way on this bad road which was oppressing him, like his headache of the previous evening, though less as a physical pain than an obscure sort of unease at the back of his thoughts.

Even when Rejane recovered her usual good humour, which she soon did, sulking not being one of her faults, Oswald couldn’t throw off this weight of uneasiness, which made it hard for him to respond. Her smiles were, in fact, rather painful to him. How could she be so gay when tomorrow they had to part? They stopped to eat their picnic lunch by the roadside; and he couldn’t help thinking that she looked heartless, basking there in the sun, her fur coat thrown back, calmly eating a devilled egg. Though she didn’t want to move, he refused to linger, and, as soon as they’d finished, insisted on setting off again, aware all the time of the miles still to be driven.

Helplessly, he felt her displeasure. He could do nothing about it. He knew he was a dull companion but found nothing to say, overwhelmed by an accumulation of pressures. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling of having too much to carry — the entire responsibility for the trip as well as his distress over their coming separation, his guilt feeling about his mother, and the unacknowledged effect of her superstitious fears.

Clouds appeared, quickly covering the sky. It became evident to him that, before the end of the day, there would be a storm. What infernal luck that the weather should change exactly now. He was seized by a violent sense of the injustice of life, the hostility of the whole world. He’d always tried all his life to do what was right and fair, yet even the weather now had to add to his difficulties. It was too much. All at once, war seemed to have been declared between him and the entire world, where everything was leagued against him.

The cliff road could be really dangerous in a storm — they ought to go back. But to say so would make Rejane only more determined to go on. It was no use arguing, she would always defeat him. Glancing at her face, he seemed to detect there signs of self-will not noticed before.

With sudden horror, he realized that he was including her with the alien hostile world, organized against him. And the idea already seemed to have destroyed his former uncritical respect and love, so that he continued, half against his will, to identify her with the general hostility that was piling up great fire-edged fortresses of cloud in the sky. His face grew more and more sombre as he drove on, in almost complete silence, in the slowly darkening light, which gradually assumed a coppery tinge, ominous-seeming after the weeks of sunshine.

*

Since the last little grim stony village they’d passed not a house, not a soul. There was only the everlasting grey moor with its lumpish tors stretching in every direction, an occasional sunbeam pointing a long, thin finger at it, ending in a spotlight of lurid brilliance. Or, from time to time, several rays would pierce the dense cloud, emerging like fansticks from one point, or coming from different parts of the sky to pass stealthily to and fro like the stilt-legs of luminous giants whose heads were hidden above the sky. Now, belts of forest began to alternate with the moorland, black, bristling fir-woods and dense huddles of bare, deciduous trees that seemed to be strangling each other, drowning in their own debris of dead leaves and entanglements of smashed limbs.

Rejane stared out at all this in silence, bored and disdainful, till a sudden nerve-shattering clatter of loose stones flying up made her comment indignantly on the state of the road.

‘What else can you expect?’ Back came Oswald’s muted musical melancholic voice. ‘It’s only made up once a year for the summer tourists. Nobody comes in the winter. There won’t be another car along here till next spring.’

‘We’ll actually be the last people to come this year?’

For some reason her original sense of northern strangeness revived at this thought and she gave him a wondering glance, which he, occupied with avoiding the ruts and potholes, failed to observe. It was all so uncivilized, so alien, so inexpressibly strange, to her: and Oswald himself was so much a part of the strangeness. His wintry blue eyes were related to the desolate landscape, filled with the weird mystic gloom she imagined as the gloom of the endless winters, when the sun went stooping across the sky, following its low arc, like a runner who must not be seen, mysteriously diffusing its tender rose through the falling snow — unexpectedly the spell of the north worked again.

Suddenly she was startled by a tremendous snapping and crackling under the wheels, as they crushed a tangle of branches blown down into the road. And now, all at once, winter seemed very near, waiting, just out of sight, like a threat in the air. Just for a second she felt a childish fear that winter would overtake her before she could get away — that she’d be caught and held her against her will in the hostile, alien north. It lasted only the barest moment; just long enough for her to recall the headland she’d seen on the map, pointing straight to the Pole, and to wish she hadn’t insisted on this expedition. Last night Oswald had been desperately anxious to dissuade her from coming — why didn’t he now suggest turning back? Before, he’d always been so quick to catch her mood and fulfil her least wish, almost before she herself had become aware of it.

Glancing at his set profile, she had the idea he kept silent now out of spite, trying to force her to say she’d had enough — which, of course, she never would. Indignantly she turned away, to look out of the window again; only to be flung against him as the car lurched, skidding wildly on what seemed the loose stones of a river-bed, rushing the steep bank on the other side. She opened her mouth in exasperated complaint. But, before she could get a word out, they reached the top, and her breath was snatched away by the wind that came charging at them, straight off the open sea.

She could only grasp, everything else forgotten, astonished by the sight of this vast, heaving mass of angry-looking water, appearing so unexpectedly, right under her nose. The road ran along the very edge of the cliff; there was nothing at all in front of her but the ocean of foam-capped rollers, dotted with rocky islets, each in its collar of foam — indomitable, even though drowned, the moorland tors kept their heads above water. Coloured like anthracite far out, the sea changed nearer the shore to peculiar acid shades of yellow and green, the waves rearing up, racing landwards, like the arched necks of horses, their wild white manes blowing back. The road was high above them most of the time. But periodically the cliff subsided, they sank to sea-level and drove on the hard white sand of the beaches which interspersed the jagged, stark, brutal rocks, where the waves towered high above them. Most extraordinary, it seemed to Rejane, to be looking up at those huge greengage-coloured monsters, pounding in like wild horses, crashing down their hoofs on the rocks with a noise like thunder, filling the air with their savage neighing and the misty fume of their breath. All her bored apprehension was blown away instantly, and replaced by exhilaration.

The waves exploded in tremendous thunder, the wind slammed and banged and battered the car, as if trying to blow it into the sea or smash it to smithereens on the rocks. While, like some magic snowstorm, thickening the misted air, pale sea-birds of many varieties rose and fell, or hung almost motionless on barely quivering wings, their fierce-looking beaks opening and shutting in ghostly screams, no sound of which pierced the louder tumult of wind and water.

All this she found most exciting after the dreary, desolate monotony of the moor. This tumultuous wildness of the elements appealed to her witch-self. Unaware of the cold, she let down her window to feel the salty wind on her skin; and now caught a thin, eerie thread of sound woven into the turmoil, a high, unearthly screeching from the crowd of escorting birds, drifting along with them effortlessly, as if drawn by the draught of the car. Listening entranced to this uncanny other-world accompaniment to the sea’s vociferous clamour and the bellowing of the wind, she forgot Oswald’s existence. She’d already left him in spirit, and didn’t even attempt to hide her rapt demonic expression — the man saw it, and was aghast.

*

Her lovely face, in its luminous pure pallor, with all its planes and outlines emphasized by the wind, the hair flowing back from it like dark water, had a pure unearthliness, like the face of a water-maiden, an ethereal quality the heavy, clodlike earth and its clod-hopping inhabitants could never know. But it also had the inhuman smile of a water-witch, chilling his blood, as if the woman he loved had revealed herself as this lovely but soulless and evil thing.

He shivered, in spite of his thick overcoat, not only because of the cold, though he felt it after his years near the equator, and had meant to ask her to shut the window. He left the words unspoken now, silenced by his glimpse of that undisguised demon-look, which chilled him to the bone.

It was the unawareness of her rapt face that was most hurtful and insulting to him, showing so clearly her obliviousness of him, her indifference to him and to their coming separation. He remembered how she’d told him he could hope, and was forced to acknowledge openly what he already suspected in secret — that she’d said it only to keep him quiet. Suddenly he was stung into acute resentment. What a fool she must have thought him. How she must have been laughing at him all the time, sneering at his credulity, his innocence. He was ashamed — his love had been degraded into something shameful, something he wanted to throw away. He looked at her again, intentionally filling his eyes with her cruel indifference. So she really was part of the general conspiracy against him. He hadn’t quite believed it before; now he let the idea take possession of him. He couldn’t endure his love any longer — he must get rid of it somehow. So he kept glancing at her, whenever he could take his eyes off the road, as if her heartless nonchalance, at which he’d been unable to look a minute ago, had become a magnet, irresistibly attracting his eyes.

But nothing was clear in his head. All his feelings and thoughts were confused by a stony sort of despair, which threw everything out of focus and made him feel hopeless and almost dazed. Curving continually, never leaving the sea, the road closely followed the indentations of the rugged coastline, always enveloped in the salt spray of the breakers blowing inland, with which his obscured ideas seemed to mingle. He couldn’t tell where the confusion in his head ended and the haze outside began, he drove by instinct only, in the metallic light of the storm he was racing, pressing his foot on the accelerator, taking the dangerous curves much too fast, and hearing, above all the confused, tumultuous weather noises, the tiny chatter of stones showering over the edge of the cliff, as the wheels spun dizzily, almost over.

He wasn’t exactly taking the risk on purpose. His vague impression was that centrifugal force carried the car too far out, and that his curious daze prevented him from correcting the swing until the last possible moment, with the help of the wind. If, at the next bend, the wind failed to catch the car’s body and throw it back, by himself he wouldn’t be able to check the tendency outwards and over the edge… He came suddenly upon this thought, as if unawares, and it roused him briefly, an outrage to his whole nature as well as his disciplined training. He felt for a moment as though he must be drunk or delirious. He wanted to stop the car, get out and walk about until he’d recovered.

But down came the weight of pressure on him, there was no time to stop, he had to keep going. The situation had got beyond him, beyond his control, so he left the driving to a kind of mechanical intelligence and lapsed into a queer, indeterminate state, in which he felt cut off from his own consciousness, altogether separate from his normal self, as if dreaming.

His eyes gazed out, not really seeing. But when the old castle fortress appeared ahead, and he pointed it out to Rejane, he seemed to come back a little towards himself, feeling that he’d been detailed for some operation beyond his endurance, which nevertheless must be endured and brought to a successful conclusion. He could only rely on the years of self-imposed discipline to see him through. He was still in that darkened confused state; his real consciousness still remained somewhere apart, and dissociated.

*

Rejane could hardly distinguish between the place they’d come to see and the rocky promontory of which it was part. Medieval incantations seemed to have conjured it from the cliff. She had to tilt her head far back before she saw, among the fantastic cloud fortifications of the approaching storm, the no less fantastic battlements hewn by men, with primitive implements and indomitable will, out of the living rock. The grim old place looked impregnable and undamaged, until they came nearer and saw a black gaping mouth where the structure fell in a frozen cascade of stone, down into the waves, which came charging over the debris, leaping up savagely at those fragments that hung suspended and out of reach, petrified in the act of their mass-suicidal plunge into the wild water.

The car passed over a narrow drawbridge and stopped; and Rejane stepped out on to a platform of flat grey rock like a natural forecourt. Already in an exalted mood, lifted above herself, she ignored an instantaneous impression of danger, which repeated the warning she’d previously received from this hostile country. Now it was repeated much more emphatically, though with no more result, by the wind, which swooped down upon her, viciously tearing at her hair and clothes, trying to sweep her off her feet; while the sea, with a ferocious roar, in which barbaric battle-cries seemed to mingle, hurled itself at her, hundreds of tons of solid water shattering on the rocky foundations of the place, shaking it, flinging up sheets of spray high above her head. Booming and bellowing, the wave rushed on through the dungeons and drowned cavern-like chambers under her feet, before it withdrew, hissing like a million serpents, to meet the oncoming roar of the next explosion.

Instead of warning her, this combined onslaught of wind and sea merely increased her exhilaration. She gave the sea a half-smiling look of triumph, as if it really had tried, and failed, to carry her off; and, made audacious by her imagined victory, she at once resolved to break into the stronghold itself. She would force it to give up its secrets, revive, by the power of her imagination, the grisly dramas once played out there. She had heard how a ghostly messenger warned the old kings who were about to die; who then retired to this remote peninsula near the northern cap of the world, where the last rites were performed — the ghoulish sacrifices and blood spells which, even in those barbaric times, were too infamous to be known; they had always to be kept secret.

The whole place had a curious horror fascination for her, shut away here in this awful desolation, close to the deathly white frozen Pole. Living so much in imaginary melodramas, she now felt an urge to identify herself with the murderous spells of the dim past and the blood-smeared primitive magic of those dead wolfish men, as if, like one of the great snakes, she could ingurgitate their powers into her own being. It was the same fascination of evil — of the mysterious northern evil — that had first attracted her to the tors.

Most strangely now, just when the spell of the north had seemed extinct, it again enthralled her. The mysterious, dangerous effluence she’d originally found so alluring seemed deliberately to have brought her here to its climax, which only Bannenberg could bring forth. She looked up at the great rugged mass of stone, closed and secretive, its tremendous doors, iron-studded, impossible to open. But they must open for her. Suddenly she remembered Oswald and looked around for him — he was peering into the entrails of the car, just behind her.

‘How can we get in?’ she demanded peremptorily, impatient because he hadn’t opened the way already — what else was he there for?

He straightened up, letting the cover fall. Its metallic clang was lost in the thunderous crash of another wave, fountains of spray burst up, from which Rejane had to jump forward, nearer to him. His deep-blue eyes stared with a peculiar blank brilliance in the grey thunder light, gazing at her with a strange fixity, which she didn’t notice.

‘There’s nothing to see inside. Let’s go back before the storm.’ His voice had a queer flat sound of reasonableness, perhaps not entirely sane.

‘But I want to go in.’

Not quite sane either in her obstinacy, she overrode reason, arrogantly asserting her will over his, refusing to tolerate even the least opposition. At the moment she looked upon him as a sort of tool, existing solely for the purpose of opening the door for her — a role which he, with strange, mad passivity, accepted as if there were no alternative in all creation.

It seemed nothing to do with him, really. Detached, like a robot, he went, without wasting any more time or words, to a side door she hadn’t noticed, and, after struggling with it, got it open so that she could pass.

Dropping him from her thoughts as though he had ceased to be, Rejane went in, not even noticing whether he followed or stayed outside, as she stepped into what at first seemed total darkness.

Her eyes quickly became accommodated to such light as entered where the roof had caved in, and she saw that windows were non-existent. There were only narrow slits through which arrows could pass. It was a really frightening place in the near-darkness. Untold atrocities, perpetrated in the distant past, had left a legacy of abomination all the intervening years had been unable to obliterate. An aura of sadism and terror clung to the walls, much as shreds of threadbare fabric clung to the doorless archways. The walls themselves were damp and clammy to the touch, always sweating from the salt spume: and the paving-stones too had a slimy surface, uneven, broken or missing, so that to take a step in any direction was dangerous.

If not the actual danger, then that worse thing, the exudation of ancient evil, would have sent most people hurrying out into the fight of day. To Rejane, however, the malevolence in the air was the appropriate atmosphere of the past, already starting to come alive again for her. The magic of the north demonstrated its power by reclaiming her in this way from the civilized world, which, until such a short time ago, had been her only reality. The world of cities was obliterated again by the other more potent, more ancient spell, here about to be consummated. Entranced, she gave herself up as to an unseen presence leading her on, moving with curious sleep-walking sureness, unperturbed by the many pitfalls through which she might have been precipitated into the submerged torture chambers and oubliettes lower down, or by the awful cold blight that was in the atmosphere.

Spellbound, she had become a queen in her dreaming, crowned, feeling the weight of trailing velvet, ermine white at her wrists and throat, as she approached the inner funerary chamber, the core of the place, for which, unconsciously, she was making. A flurry of misshapen ghosts greeted her entrance, shooting up to the groined ceiling, and crouching down, gnome-like, in the folds of the arras — for an instant she saw it all quite distinctly: the sable, gold-emblazoned hangings of the catafalque, lit by many tall candles, which, guttering in the draught of her trailing robes, sent flying in all directions the shadows of the fierce, bearded men standing with drawn swords, on guard.

Then, abruptly, her fantasy fled, swift as the shadows. Water sounds, which it had reduced to the droning of incantations, rose suddenly to a loud imperious shouting. All of a sudden the sea sounded frighteningly near.

She had gone so far in her dream that it took her another second to come back. To her amazement and horror, she saw then, in the daylight that entered as if through the mouth of a cave, a shocking precipice, right at her feet, where the floor collapsed into the seething water — from out there came the ominous rumbling boom of an approaching wave.

And, before she had time to think even, a terrifying great wall of water was rushing at her, bearing down upon her like an avalanche, yelling triumphantly as it came, and gurgling with sadistic glee. Her heart plunged in sudden terror, instinctively she jumped back, and felt a sickening movement beneath her, as the stone rocked under her weight, covered with slippery weed on which she could get no foothold. Wildly swaying, she struggled and struggled to get her balance, while the mountainous surge of water raced towards her, a ghostly, pale, impossible bird floating above, its reflected wings writhing like snakes on the monstrously swollen bulk of grey water.

With the ghastly sickness of nightmare she struggled in vain, her hands helplessly clutching and clawing the bare, slimy walls, finding nothing to grip, the rock always tilting further under her feet, and the wave towering up hideously, filling the world with its hugeness, its crashing thunder and icy cold flying spray.

In a blind, unconscious frenzy she bent herself back until her spine seemed to break; hearing, above all that insane water noise her own short, horrible, unnatural scream; seeing, at this moment of ultimate horror, the pitiless, pale bird-eye indifferently watching; as, in an agonized slither, she started lurching, sliding and slipping, helpless, down to the sea. With an icy shock as though death had already claimed her, she felt the cold spray on her face.

Instantly then, another shock shook right through her, she felt herself grasped and dragged back. A pair of arms went round her like iron bands, holding her, pulling her back somehow, away from the charging mountain of water and its fatal, freezing breath. She was barely conscious, shuddering so convulsively that she was almost sick. But the arms remained locked round her, and, gradually, she was dragged back, limply sliding and hardly conscious, over the unsteady stones: until the floor became solid again, the daylight dimmed; the sea’s thunder receded, there was no more impossible great floating bird-ghost.

*

Rejane felt the floor steady under her feet, heard the sea noise much diminished, and slowly began to understand she was safe. But she could not easily return to the living world. She had died, her life had been violated by the death-kiss of the sea. She was still shuddering so horribly from the shock, which had shaken her to the very last fibre, that the solid stone too seemed to be shaking round her, as if the whole place were about to come down.

How could she believe she’d escaped from the sea, when she still heard the waves thudding against the stone, shaking the ruin with their explosions? She seemed to see all the time that awful great gap tearing her dream of the past, the horrible wall of water charging at her, the spectral, snake-winged bird with its fierce, evil, slashing beak. She could not come back to life while she saw these things, she could not speak or stop shivering.

She still belonged to that ghastly unstable world where there was nothing to hold to, everything swirling round her, the rock slipping under her feet. Only if she could make the moment of her slithering, sickening plunge seem unreal, would she be able to return to her own existence. This knowledge came, not from her shocked, non-functioning brain, but from a far deeper instinctual source, productive only of absolute certainties.

Without almost believing that she was a superior being, she could not live. So she couldn’t allow herself to know she had looked in the eye of extinction, or felt the sea’s icy kiss. She must convince herself that this had not happened, and she must do it now — unless, in these first few moments after the event, she could isolate it, cut it off from her consciousness, she was done for; she wouldn’t be able to go on living at all.

With all the power of her will, she set about trying to transform the memory of what had just happened into fearful but absurd nightmare that couldn’t possibly have been real; struggling as desperately now with her will as her body had struggled then to obliterate all but a confused dreamlike impression, as of something imaginary. She didn’t know whether she would ever be able to do it. She was still so cold, shivering, freezing cold, everything wavering round her. The iron grip holding her seemed the one stable point in the universe.

Suddenly, then, she became aware of Oswald, who had saved her and was still holding her in his encircling arms, through which she could feel pulsing, like an electric current, the vibration of his desire. And, like a reflex, at this first instant of recognition, the part of her that always resented a man’s touch stiffened, and she heard her unsteady voice say, ‘Let me go…’ Although, as she realized immediately afterwards, this was the very last thing she really wanted. She was really in desperate need of him at that moment. Alone, she couldn’t recover from her terrifying experience. She needed the help of another person to overcome it and re-establish her in her life. The warmth of a living body was needed to counteract that other coldly inhuman touch. She needed to be identified with the life force throbbing in Oswald’s passion in order to prove that she was also alive and a part of life.

In spite of her protest, Oswald was what she needed, and Oswald she must have. Let him take her and warm her back to her life — let him exorcize the spell of the sea. His arms around her were hard and unyielding like bonds, but they were burning, pulsing with the urgency of his passion, to which she gave herself up, relaxing thankfully in their ungentle grasp.

*

It was to escape the load of his responsibilities and unhappiness, of which he was aware only as an undefined threat or weight, that the young man had followed her into the ruined castle. Inside, his blank state intensified by the dark and the sleep-walking motions of his companion, he’d drifted after her without a thought, as though being pulled by a magnet.

His action in catching her when she fell had been mechanical, purely. But the effort involved had brought him partially out of his daze, to which he now wished to return.

Why was he here in this horrible, dungeonlike place? Suddenly becoming more objectively conscious of Rejane, he remembered that she’d forced him to come, resenting this almost as much as he resented the pressure of her body, forcing him to be aware of the physical, when he wanted to exist only in the abstract. He wanted nothing to do with her, so why was she still in his arms?

Seeing her leaning against him, limp and trembling and almost unconscious, incapable, obviously, of standing alone, in a sort of panic-resentment, he dragged her a few steps nearer the door. But he gave up the attempt at once. He’d never be able to get her outside, to drag her along all those black tunnels he vaguely recalled.

Panic subsiding, he felt a remote surprise at the change in his own feelings. It was such a short time, hours rather than days, since to be holding her in his arms would have seemed like heaven. In this short time she’d become a stranger to him, a woman he neither knew nor wanted to know — least of all in the carnal sense. What could have put that thought into his head? The very notion of sensuality at such a time was repulsive to him.

This was the moment when he felt Rejane’s slight stiffening and heard her voice murmur unsteadily, ‘Let me go…’

An instantaneous flash went through him, like the lurid flashes and sparks from an electric train. ‘No — why should I?’ he said; or rather, his voice said it for him, in the brutal, embittered tone his mother and sister had been the first to hear. All the resentment he had accumulated during his whole life seemed released now, as by a breaking dam, in this violent electric discharge, directed against the unjust world in general, and Rejane in particular, who had destroyed his dream and debased the love that should have been pure and perfect.

It was as though, during his dazed absence from himself, the evil influences of the place had taken possession of him, filling him with a sort of madness The Parson could never have known. A strong, savage excitement was working in him, unmistakably pleasurable, though it was perverse and sadistic — The Parson could never have harboured any such cruel sensation.

Some small remnant of his everyday self was disgusted and shocked; but this was immediately submerged by a new self which, in cynical rebellion against The Parson and all his works, swept his ideals into the dustbin as so much rubbish. To hell with The Parson!

Now he was going to take what he wanted. The sinister flash again, as the knowledge of his intention exploded into his nerves and blood. Now he was going to take his revenge.

The fierce excitement went on raging through him, while, with a sensation of something malign breaking out, full of destructive power, he clasped Rejane tightly to him and crushed his lips down on hers. At this moment he derived a peculiar satisfaction from knowing that he was outraging his most fundamental beliefs by performing an illicit cruel act, abhorrent to everybody. The sadism that had replaced his tender love rejoiced at the prospect of humiliating the lovely body he’d hitherto regarded as unattainable and almost holy. Really she was no better than the army wives, on whom he also seemed to be revenging himself by embracing her so fiercely.

Still holding her firmly gripped by one arm, without lifting his mouth from hers, in a single sweeping movement he tore down and flung on the floor an armful of the tattered hangings, rotten and almost transparent with age, which adhered to the wall just behind him.

*

And Rejane, who normally couldn’t stand any form of coercion or crudity, actually encouraged his ruthless excitement, because it was almost like the blind destructive force of the sea, and she seemed to be substituting this situation for her other awful ordeal, which was thus rendered harmless. Her thoughts were still all confused; but she felt obscurely that she was making the disaster unreal, by repeating it now in this way, because her ravisher was a mere man who, basically, couldn’t harm her.

Oswald’s warmth was an instant relief to her trembling body, which had been frozen almost to ice. His ungentle grasp restored stability to the world and anchored her firmly in it; his hard hands pulled her back to life. The violence with which he held her clenched stopped her shivering. The mortal cold melted out of her, and the blood, which had seemed static in her veins, circulated again. As warmth came back to her and her shuddering ceased, what had happened began to seem less and less possible: till presently, just as she wished, all that had taken place since she arrived in the north assumed the aspect of an incoherent dream, culminating in the nightmare just over — that it should have taken the form of the falling nightmares of her childhood confirmed this.

Since each grotesque, incredible detail was a fresh proof that she must be dreaming, she could accept a sadistic lover who, as if with the intention of inflicting pain, crushed her much-cherished body against the rock, which the pile of rags, damp, mildewed, disintegrating, softened no more than a heap of cobwebs.

Her heart was beating fast with triumphant relief — the sea had no more power over her! It had all been a nightmare, simply. Now she listened to the waves with a kind of gloating, as to the cries of a vanquished enemy she humiliated deliberately by this performance of the sexual act — which was the act of life — so soon after her victory, so near to the scene of the struggle.

Safely back in her life, she felt stronger than ever before; herself again, but with this triumph added, that she’d conquered the power of the sea. She could now positively enjoy her sensations, the very strangeness of which stimulated her somewhat cold eroticism.

Lying in Oswald’s arms she exulted because danger and death had been put far from her and had no more reality — nor had he, incidentally. All the same, she was glad to have taken him as her lover, which, to her sense of theatre, had always seemed the only appropriate climax and end to their relationship. It was quite true that she despised him rather for making no advances to her — a deficiency he’d corrected at the last moment with the rough violence to be expected of the barbaric north. She didn’t hold it against him, complacent and well disposed towards all the world as she could afford to be.