The Parson

8

TAKING no notice of anyone, Oswald left the ship, leaving his life behind there, as he might have left a dropped glove, and, knowing nothing about it, returned to the station and got into the waiting train. Alone like a dreamer, neither feeling nor thinking anything, he sat in the cold, empty carriage, staring straight in front of him. When bells rang presently and there was the low, lugubrious hoot of a siren, these noises meant nothing to him, had no associations.

Then people began to trickle, to pour into the station, talking cheerfully, walking briskly in the cold air, entering and filling the train. The sight of them roused him a little, making him aware again of being cut off and alone, separated from everyone else. All these others were in the big bright unreal place he’d left. He could not possibly communicate with them, or have anything to do with them.

Nevertheless he wished they would go away. Their presence caused him a distant uneasiness. He didn’t look at them, but, with a faint shadowing of anxiety, simply sat waiting till they should have gone. And, though the train was full, nobody came to sit near him.

People looked into his compartment and then hurried on, frightened off by some emanation of loneliness enclosing him like a capsule — the loneliness of one who has gone beyond time and reality — which made them nervous, without knowing why, so that they kept away.

The train started. Sitting quite still and passive, unthinking, Oswald let it carry him back to the small town where he had left the car, got out here, and went into the streets.

It was lunch-time, there were few people about. Those he saw were like dream people, utterly disconnected from him. Yet it was he who felt shadowy beside them — they were solid with life. He vaguely wondered if they could see him, feeling he passed like a shadow, outside their world, and alone. Where was he? What had happened to him? He’d never been like this before. But he was getting used to it and didn’t mind. He thought no more about his feelings, or about anything. His consciousness seemed to have left him and gone on somewhere else.

His body, however, continued in its old way, from force of habit. Coming to a restaurant that was almost empty, it went in, ordered and ate a meal, drank some whisky, his real self remaining the whole time aloof. Such things as eating and drinking no longer concerned him, unconcerned as he was with life. But his healthy young body acted out of its own impulse, and, in the same mechanical fashion, began to drive home.

He was like a zombie, a body only, moving about the world, its inner essence already gone. The small part of his brain that still functioned normally was occupied with driving the car. He knew nothing about it when, at a certain crossroads, he swung the wheel right over and drove in a different direction, away from the place where he lived.

*

Now he was on a narrow, neglected by-road, unmarked except on large-scale ordinance maps, and used only by a few adventurous campers and rock climbers, even in summer. Here he passed neither traffic nor houses, driving through country always wilder and more desolate, more given over to water; until he reached a region where the land was reduced to a handful of skeleton fingers pointing between the lochs, treeless, without vegetation of any sort, bare bones of rock reaching out into the blackish water.

On one of these narrow spines running out into the ultimate desolation of sea and rock, he drove for some time, with a certain fixity of the unconscious will, as to an appointment he had to keep at a given hour, glancing occasionally at his watch, although he’d ceased to register time long ago.

As the short afternoon faded into dusk, one by one the other ridges of land faded out of sight, until he seemed to drive between worlds in a sort of nowhere, no sky, no earth to be seen, only brute crags suddenly looming, and the endless, unstable heave and gleam of the complaining water. The narrow spit of rock was in places little wider than the track, and, though it now and then threw up weird black pinnacles and escarpments, the deep water always pressed close on both sides, as if lying in wait.

With the gathering twilight, snow, which had been in the air all day, started to fall in a sprinkling of frozen grains, like salt out of a shaker. The driver turned a switch so that the windscreen was cleared, but otherwise took no notice — sunshine, wind, rain and snow were alike illusion to him where he was, cut off from himself and from the living world.

Yet, at a point indistinguishable from the rest of this grim solitude, he stopped the car with certainty and precision, though still absent, blank, and sat motionless, letting the windscreen-wipers go on clearing the glass after he’d switched off the engine. He had evidently almost reached the end of the land and the open sea, for, as the engine noise died, the thump of waves rose from the foot of the precipitous drop on the other side of the road. His forgotten sense of responsibility had made him pull up under a mass of rock, which partially shielded the car from the driving snow, already collecting in small drifts and pockets among the boulders.

Nowhere on the way had there been any sign of life, no animal, no sea-bird, even. In this loneliness that was frightening, unutterable, he sat as if waiting for someone, with the outward aspect of having come to an assignation, but blank inwardly, no thought taking shape in his mind.

The sea was turning a more solid black with the approach of night, only the spray of the breaking waves showing pale through the other whiteness falling out of the sky, which evaporated as it touched them. A strong, erratic wind intermittently sent the snow fuming upwards like smoke, or whirling in crazy spirals along the track. And, with this uncanny luminousness in the air smoking and swirling, the freezing desolate place, seemingly in the void, black fangs of rock jutting sheer out of groaning water, might have represented a northern hell; with the man as one of the damned, on whom everlasting night was descending.

His eyes, always turned to the sea, were still the eyes of a zombie more than a human being. But then there was a change in the static figure. The abnormal blank look left the face, which recovered, in consequence, some of its lost humanity. The eyes focused again.

Not knowing what had alerted him, or what he expected to see, the watcher stared out into the snowy dusk. He had a curious sense of something happening, or about to happen out there which concerned himself; and this, after his prolonged state of absence, seemed strange and almost alarming. He didn’t want to return, even in such a limited way, to his conscious self. It was painful, he tried to hold back. But, at the same time, he was aware that an obscure conflict had developed in him where nothing had been, as though he were under an obligation to become conscious.

All at once, leaning forward, he peered more intently through the thin, slanting curtain of snow: in the distance, beyond it, a mirage was forming. In the waste of black waters, mysterious glimmers, like marsh-lights, traced a pattern he half recognized. This was why he had come here — the cluster of small bright stars was what he’d driven so far to see. Startlingly positive and precise, the knowledge burst like a shout in his interior vacuum, which all this time had contained no definite thought.

The sparkling, mysterious, distant stars almost seemed familiar; he almost knew what they were. But not quite. They belonged to his life in the world, to which he no longer had access. He had left it, and now he could not, he didn’t even want to go back — it would be too painful. Out of the locked box of his memory nothing came forth.

The twinkling stars were so far away — what could they have to do with him? Yet he felt there was some connection… Slowly, reluctantly, as if compelled, he got out of the car and went to stand at the extreme edge of the precipice, trying to see them more clearly, searching confusedly for something lost, which he must make conscious.

He was so handsome, so young. His magnificent healthy body had hardly been used; it moved with its own spontaneous ease and vigorous youth. But something was missing from the man as a whole which cancelled the fine physique, so that, in spite of his splendid athletic body, he seemed not quite real, not quite there; his expression peculiarly at a loss, a bit deadened, dazed like that of a prisoner in a foreign country, locked in dumb helplessness. Oblivious of the icy wind stinging his skin and tearing at his blond hair, he stood there, imprisoned in his confusion and inner conflict, groping unwillingly after what was lost.

Suddenly he knew he was going to remember. His life seemed to be all around him in the swirling snow. In a moment he would see the stars as they really were, recognize their pattern. No, no — he could not! An agony of resistance sprang up in him instantly. The pain of recognition could not be borne. He could not go back to all that. There had been life and love and failure and disappointment; but it was all gone from him now. He was already outside the world — let it remain shut away!

Making no further attempt to recognize or remember, he let his consciousness lapse. As if to abet him, dusk was now deepening into night, blotting out everything. The car, which had been his last link with reality, had already been swallowed up with the rocks beyond. The thud of the unseen waves, rising more ominously in the darkness, was loud in his ears, though it didn’t reach his attention, fixed on another sound from far away out there across the water — a sort of mournful low bellowing, a leviathan lamentation.

What could it be? Why should it make him tremble? Though he couldn’t prevent these questions from forming, he refused to attend to them, or to associate them with himself. Staring into the falling snow, not in search of the answer to any question, all he saw was the snow-grains ceaselessly swooping at him out of the empty black and, in the distance, the sparkling design of stars.

After all, they were bringing back something from his life in the world… a dim recollection of street-lights… leading his eyes to where a door seemed to be opening on all his life might have been of nobility and fulfilment. All the love and happiness and success he had never known in his life seemed to shine there, for a moment, against the dark, in the magic light of the resplendent stars.

But then the starry pattern immediately started to change, the stars were changing. Mysteriously dimmed and diminished, they were moving away from him now, with ever-increasing speed, towards the fiord’s mouth and the open sea. Already reduced to bright pinpoints, almost out of his sight, they were only a faint, far gleam in the furthest distance. A few more seconds and they would have vanished. He would be alone in the dark.

Profound desolation descended on him as he watched the receding stars. He felt desolate and forlorn, like a child shut out of a bright room, left out of everything. And he longed, with a sudden nostalgic yearning, to be included in life again — in the human family circle. He couldn’t bear this exclusion, being shut out in the lonely dark.

But nor could he bear to go back to his life in the world. No, that was not the way. He had come too far already, and could now only go on, further still, away from all he had been.

He would follow the stars before they vanished completely.

The sudden impulse struck with a force that carried him with it… onwards… forwards… away from all the old ache and isolation of consciousness. Parting the snow with his hands like a diver, he pushed the white curtain aside.

And the wave of his destiny, swelling towards a climax, swept him on its forward rush to the climax of breaking; all the elements of his being caught up by the irresistible surge, racing towards dissolution. As he’d plunged into the abyss of sleep, he now abandoned himself to this torrential flood, boundless, impersonal, indistinguishable from the military power to which he was dedicated; hurtling on, in obedience to fate’s higher command, further and further from everything, into the unknown.