The Parson

7

NO more conscious of where he was going than of the distress he had caused his sister, Oswald drove for a time in a curious, neutral, blank state. When he suddenly noticed the moor, all very bare and grey, stripped to the bone for winter, under the leaden and lowering sky, it was with a shock like surprise. Why was he on this road — the road to The Hope Deferred?

While he slept, that part of him which was concerned with his adjustment to life had decided he must not see Rejane again; and, consciously, he’d made up his mind to telephone an excuse for not coming to say goodbye in person. Now, at first, he thought merely that he’d had to escape from his home, where there was no peace, no security for him. Yet, even as he felt the appropriate bitterness, he knew that his was not the real explanation — his thoughts seemed not to be what he was really thinking.

Having perceived this, he went on to perceive that the same principle applied to everything, outside as well as within him. Even the moor he’d known and loved all his life appeared changed and unreal. Even his army career, which had been more important than anything to him, had become an illusion; and what was left of his world he couldn’t imagine. His vague impression was that it had collapsed, and that he was lost in the debris, the general debacle.

When he saw the familiar double drive and the hotel ahead, he realized all at once that he’d been drawn here helplessly, with no say in the matter. He had, simply, to see Rejane. Nobody, nothing else really existed; it was her absence that made his world seem unreal, for she was his only reality.

Pulling up sharply a little way from the entrance, he sat for a moment, motionless, while this sank in. In all the world, she alone was real and had definition. Everything else was illusion. And she was about to leave him. He sat as if stunned. Then, collecting himself quickly, glancing about to see if he’d been observed, he hurriedly left the car and went into the building.

His thoughts and emotions were all in chaos. He couldn’t tell whether love or hate was making his hand shake so that he could hardly open the door of her room, though his training in discipline kept him very correct and calm outwardly, his magnificent soldier’s figure almost at attention, as he stood before her.

After his conduct, and the general nightmare of yesterday, she had neither wished nor expected to see him again. But now she was in such high spirits because she was going back to her own world that nothing mattered; nothing could affect her happiness. She gave him a radiant smile of pure joy because she was leaving him and all this gloomy northern interlude for ever. She even said, ‘I’m glad you came over to say goodbye.’

She seemed even more beautiful than he’d remembered. In spite of his disillusionment and the efforts he’d made to destroy his love, her beauty still held him enthralled. The sound of the word goodbye caused him an anguish so acute that it wrung from him the exclamation, ‘How could I possibly not have come?’ His eyes burned fever bright, and, as he spoke, he extended his arms curiously in a tortured movement, as if he were on the rack, of which he knew nothing, only amazed by the note of open avowal he heard in his own voice — so it was love, not hate, in the end.

He watched her, bemused; he was as though mesmerized by her loveliness, which her happy excitement increased by the faintest flush, so that she had the perfection of a pale rose. The very air about her seemed scented and full of light. He took deep breaths of the perfume he loved; and, as though it were intoxicating, or possessed magic powers, a remarkable change came over him. His splendid body seemed to come more alive, the expression more animated on his handsome young face. All of a sudden, he really had that officer-in-a-crack-regiment’s air of light-hearted assurance and of carrying all before him, which had always belonged to his aura but previously been in abeyance. Suddenly smiling and debonair, he proposed to drive her to catch the boat-train, sweeping aside arrangements already made with such smiling confidence that she looked at him in surprise.

Emerging briefly from her dream of departure, she coolly and shrewdly surveyed the young man who was directing the hotel staff with this new sort of aplomb, as if he expected to be obeyed by everyone to the end of time. This was as he should always have been. Yet to her at least there was something faintly unnatural about the performance; it was not quite convincing. He was giving orders about her things, smiling and irresistible, as if to the manner bom. But his brilliant blue eyes had a crazy sparkle, and, with the lock of whitish hair falling between them, in spite of all his correctness, he looked strange — wild and reckless, feverish; almost a bit demented. She could see through this reckless wildness to the helpless despair beneath. At the back of his crazily glittering eyes was the pathos of a blank lost look, which told her she had nothing to fear from him. As far as she was concerned he was finished — his day was done. He was only a sort of phantom to her from the past; no need to believe he was real for an instant. Back she slipped into her happy dreaming again, already far distant from him, as, with queer, smiling, unnatural ease he escorted her from The Hope Deferred for the very last time.

Oswald himself was rather puzzled by this access of unexpected assurance. Where could it have come from? But he was glad to accept it and to let it sweep him along. As long as it lasted, he felt bound to get his own way, as if he had made a pact with the devil; or as if the black threat of loss hanging over him brought this strange compensation of confidence which was almost a touch of madness.

In the car he continued to be animated, refusing to think of either the past or the future, cutting off his perceptions deliberately, trying to limit them to each moment as it came, and to the small, familiar, moving enclosure where he was alone with the woman he loved. The attempt was only partly successful: though he wouldn’t admit it, some part of him never ceased being aware of what each passing moment was bringing nearer. Darkness and loss were advancing, implacable as the night.

At the station he would not see beyond Rejane’s beauty, which, like a lighted lamp, illuminated the grey, bitter day and the drab platform. Nevertheless at the back of his mind he was aware that the darkness was closing in. The train was due to leave immediately, and, having installed her in it, he got out and stood stiffly, as if on guard, gazing up at her window.

She was wearing her fur coat, and, though he hadn’t noticed it specially so far, he now saw how the dusky, soft, luxurious coat, made of the skins of many little dead animals, accentuated her living beauty. Its bulk made her seem smaller and frailer, almost like a fragile little girl. A pang went through him, unendurable — how could he be parted from her and live? Again he unconsciously stretched his arms in that peculiar tortured gesture. While the train suddenly shuddered along all its length, all the hairs of the small dead animals trembled, as if with returning life; and the man also trembled, and his life seemed to pause. Darkness was upon him.

With that night descending, he heard his voice speak again, but most strangely, out of the dark, stricken depths: ‘I can’t bear to see you go.’ It was against all his inherited instincts as well as his disciplined training to say such a thing; but nothing mattered now in the darkness where his life hung in suspense.

She called, ‘Then come with me — come and see me on to the boat’, smiling, not making the suggestion quite seriously, but with a sort of gay challenge, as if saying, ‘I dare you to come.’

He had no time to answer before, with a strong heave, the train pulled her away, starting to slide past him, curving and gliding out of the station. Already the engine was out of sight, the bare rails, nakedly gleaming, stretching out longer and longer, while people waved or turned already towards the exits.

Without a thought in his head, the young man watched the last compartment glide past, then, at the very end of the train came the luggage-van, its big sliding doors still open wide as if to welcome him in; as all his splendid muscles effortlessly combined, with perfect co-ordination and timing, to swing him on board.

Two men in uniform, stacking trunks at the back of the van, stared, astounded, as at an angel fallen from heaven, before they began to protest and approach him. As if they were paper men, Oswald pushed them aside, with a strange inhuman assurance, pressing money into their hands, a fixed uncanny grin on his face. Not knowing what to make of it, they stood speechlessly staring, while he crossed the iron connecting-plates, clashing and jerking under his feet, and came to the corridor of the train beyond.

He was still possessed of that unnatural confidence, against which no obstruction could stand. The meaningless shapes and noises fell back and were instantly lost, swallowed up by the roar and rush of the train. Everything clattering and rocking round him, with mad immutable calm he walked down the swaying corridor until he found Rejane’s compartment and entered. Light came back to him then, and to the world, his life went on again. At the last moment, he had been reprieved.

The reprieve was only temporary, a poor depreciating investment to set against the bankruptcy of total loss he would still soon have to face. But for the moment he was beyond fate’s reach, safe in his charmed assurance, laughing and talking with an animation that was not his own, his eyes brilliant and distracted, feeling unlike himself, rather as though he were slightly drunk.

Rejane glanced at him dubiously now and then, not at all sure that she wanted him with her. She hadn’t expected him to come, really. But his spectacular leap on to the moving train had pleased her vanity; and a handsome man was always a desirable appendage, an accessory to her elegance, and an insurance against any momentary lack of self-confidence. So she accepted him, with certain provisos, for the time being.

*

The short journey was soon over. Masts appeared, like a forest of bare saplings, clustered against the sullen gleam of grey water. Then they were at the station, which was part of the docks, and in the harbour itself.

As Oswald heard the harsh cries of gulls, his assurance abruptly vanished, leaving him unprotected. By the sudden chill that gripped him, he knew he should never have come. Yet he must go through with it now; he was committed.

With automatic efficiency he dealt with porters and luggage. Then, emerging beside Rejane from the echoing station, he was startled by the portentous sight of the liner’s great hull just in front of them, looming like the ominous, enormous symbol of inexorable fate, high over their heads.

He felt a sudden hatred for the ship; which increased as he followed Rejane through its warm, lighted interior, hating the comfort which placed it so unmistakably in her world of wealth, where he didn’t belong.

The luxury of her stateroom made it seem quite unreal, like a film star’s bedroom, softly yet brightly lit. It felt like a hothouse to him, coming straight from the frigid greyness outside, and it was filled like a hothouse with flowers and with their scent — roses, violets, carnations, lilies, camellias, tuberoses, incredibly exotic in the grim north — sent by the lover to welcome her home.

Without knowing where they had come from, Oswald felt an instinctive antipathy to the massed flowers crowding everywhere. There were too many of them, and their scent was too strong, an overpowering sweetness in the warm air.

Noticing how Rejane immediately seemed at home in this atmosphere, which he found merely oppressive, blooming into a new elegance and sophistication, he belatedly began to realize how far her world was removed from his own. For the first time, the power of her money began to dawn on him, as he watched her the centre of a coming and going of immaculate uniforms, a person of importance, while he stood in the background, unnoticed. He’d never really considered the matter till now, when he felt her money pushing him further and further away from her. Suddenly it had come to divide them, like one of the bottomless fiords, with no way of getting across.

She seemed to have forgotten about him already. Unnoticed he stood there, his heart heavy and cold like a stone in his breast, an unwanted onlooker, knowing he ought to leave but unable to drag himself away. His life depended on seeing her, so how could he go?

If only she would ask him to come with her on the boat, as he had on the train! With just the money he happened to have in his pocket, without even a toothbrush, he would follow her gladly to the ends of the earth; and to hell with his family and with the regiment.

When, presently, she merely asked him to come to one of the bars for a parting drink, everything seemed to go dark in a fearful premonition of loneliness, for without her only darkness was left in the world. She walked ahead of him along a softly carpeted corridor, and he had the cruel illusion that she was diminishing in the distance while he was left far behind.

He felt quite alone in the crowded bar, where there were too many smiling faces, as there had been too many flowers. He was so close to her that his hand touched her dress. But the Rejane he knew and loved had already left him. A stranger seemed to inhabit her flawless beauty.

He willed her desperately to come back, staring fixedly at her with spellbound eyes. But she kept her head turned away, talking to the steward behind the bar, and refused to look at him. It was her voice he heard. But she was not speaking. She had left him and gone away.

Yet those were her hands; the hands that had lately picked berries and mushrooms with him, held the reins, patted the pony’s neck, fed it with lumps of sugar. It seemed incredible now that they should have done these things. With a certain horror he watched them, flashing with many rings, darting in alien, airy gestures. They were hers — and they were not hers. He had a sensation of nightmare.

She was not coming back to him. Now he had to know it. She had gone too far away. He had lost her — this was the end. Out of the darkness rushing in on all sides, struggling to hold it off, despairingly, he spoke her name, ‘Rejane’, pleading with her for his life.

She glanced at him then with faint artificial surprise, as if she hadn’t expected him still to be there. For the last few minutes she had, in fact, been waiting more and more impatiently for him to go. Why couldn’t he see that he wasn’t wanted and take himself off?

She looked again, and with indignation, at the fine, soldierly man whose glittering eyes were all the time fixed on her in an Ancient Mariner stare. He was a weight upon her. She longed to be relieved of the burden of his presence, which, though she didn’t know it, represented the cruel and frightening north, of which she’d so nearly become the victim. She had thrust the terrifying experience out of her thoughts. But she couldn’t relax fully, she couldn’t be reabsorbed into her own world, while he was there, as its symbol. She wouldn’t feel really safe from the power of the north until she’d got rid of him.

She told herself she could stand no more of his silent gloom. Yesterday, circumstances had forced her to endure it — how dare he try to inflict it on her today as well! She wasn’t going to put up with it any longer. He had absolutely no right to be here in her world. He was only a ghost, a shadow, a relic of her finished interlude. Let him go back to the north, where he belonged.

‘Don’t wait,’ she told him brightly, with her malevolent little smile. ‘I like my goodbyes short and sweet.’ Relieved because she’d dismissed him at last, to make sure there was no misunderstanding, she held out her hand.

*

The man’s heart beat once in a heavy down-stroke, then seemed to stop beating. Everything seemed to stop. It grew dark, as if the lights had gone out.

Then, with an emerald flash, as from an evil green eye, her hand, sparkling with rings, came towards him. And, to his surprise, he saw his surroundings unchanged, the lights still shining brightly, the people laughing and talking. Only he was cut off from them now as by the glass wall of an aquarium. They had the remoteness and the slight distortion of things seen through thick glass.

They didn’t concern him. But, with a distant anxiety, he watched the hand coming towards him, knowing he wouldn’t be able to take it, but not knowing what to do. All contact was ended for him, he could not now bear to touch anyone. He had left all that. He felt a slight horror of the approaching hand: it was coming too close — no one must touch him now.

Suddenly, at the last moment, as if obeying an order only he could hear, he lifted his own hand sharply in a formal salute, bringing his heels together, the other hand stiff at his side; directly afterwards swinging round to make his way out of the room, oblivious of the curious faces that turned to watch him.

People stared, following him with their eyes, but he didn’t notice. He had no more to do with them. He had left their bright world, which claimed reality through the illusion of daylight. His love, too, had been an illusion, and he left it behind him with all the rest. All he wanted now was to be quiet.

The lights were too bright here, there were too many people, and they made too much noise. He had to be alone somewhere, undisturbed.